Hong Kong: SJ visits GZ courts

Secretary for Justice Paul Lam headed a Hong Kong legal sector delegation on a visit to Guangzhou today.

Mr Lam first called on the Peoples Government of Guangdong Province in the morning and met Guangdong Province Vice-Governor Wang Zhizhong.

Apart from discussing matters on enhancing the work of the working group on Guangdong-Hong Kong co-operation on legal and dispute resolution services and on the preparation for the fifth Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) Legal Departments Joint Conference, both sides also exchanged views on ways to take forward the GBA Legal Professional Examinations trial measures.

The Department of Justice will promote the alignment of rules, harmonisation of mechanisms and exchange of talent in the GBA and also encourage the Hong Kong legal sector to anchor to the principle of learning, sharing, and exploring in order to further contribute to the bay area's high-quality development, Mr Lam said.

In the afternoon, Mr Lam visited the Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court where he joined a roundtable meeting with the courts President Hong Shiquan, Vice President Li Chisen and other officials.

During the session, Deputy Director of Intellectual Property Thomas Tsang shared the latest developments of Hong Kongs legal regime on intellectual property rights, while representatives from the Hong Kong legal sector shared practical experience in handling intellectual property cases, such as the difficulties in verifying expert evidence.

Representatives from the Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court also told the participants about the latest development on the legal protection of intellectual property rights in the Mainland and in the adjudication of foreign-related intellectual property rights cases.

Moreover, Mr Lam agreed to further promote the use of mediation to resolve disputes on intellectual property rights and strengthen stakeholders collaboration on the proof of Hong Kong law and Mainland law, thereby facilitating the handling of legal matters relating to intellectual property rights in the bay area in a more efficient manner.

Separately, at the Guangzhou Internet Court, Mr Lam was briefed by the courts Vice President Tian Hui on the courts organisation, scope of cases, notable decisions, and online mediation and litigation.

He then met President of the High Peoples Court of Guangdong Province Zhang Haibo. The two sides agreed to deepen collaboration, explore different modes of co-operation and exchanges, and jointly contribute to strengthening the rule of law in the bay area.

The delegation will continue its visit in Shenzhen tomorrow.

This story has been published on: 2023-06-09. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Ha Giang authorities investigate tourist sitting on border marker

The Ha Giang Provincial Department of Culture, Sports, and Tourism is investigating a photo which showed a tourist sitting on an engraved stone marking Vietnams northern border at Lung Cu Flag Tower.













The photo shows a tourist sitting on an engraved stone marking Vietnams northern border at Lung Cu Flag Tower.

The photo which featured a group of tourists posing beside the Lung Cu Flag Tower and one of them sitting on an engraved marker was criticised by some people on social media.



On June 8, a representative from the Department of Culture, Sports, and Tourism said that they were going to have a meeting with the tourist.

Speaking with Dantri/Dtinews, Ha Giang Provincial Association of Tourism chairman Lai Quoc Tinh said that it looked like the visitor hadn't known much about the site while the tour guide didn't notice the pictures being taken.



"We'll set up a team to work with all travel companies that are providing tours to the Lung Cu Flag Tower to give guidance and instructions when visiting this site to prevent repeats of situations," he said.

Located in Dong Van District's Lung Cu Commune, the north pole of Vietnam, Lung Cu Flag Tower is built in the peak of Rong (Dragon) Mountain at 1,468 metres above the sea level. The site is also a favourite destination for tourists to Ha Giang.
President Droupadi Murmu on Friday successfully concluded her two-nation visits to Suriname and Serbia, the Ministry of External Affairs informed in a statement. President Murmu visited Suriname and Serbia from June 4 to 9. This was her maiden visit to Suriname, at the invitation of Suriname President Chandrikapersad Santokhi, and also her first state visit since assuming office in July 2022. Murmu also received an invitation from Serbian President Aleksander Vucic to visit his country. "President Droupadi Murmu @rashtrapatibhvn successfully concludes her visit to Suriname & Serbia. The visit has set new milestones in India's ties with the two countries," tweeted MEA Spokesperson Arindam Bagchi on Friday. President Droupadi Murmu and Serbian counterpart Aleksandar Vucic on Thursday agreed to set a target for bilateral trade from the present 32 crore Euros to one billion euros by the end of the decade, the Ministry of External Affairs said. During the business event, both leaders agreed to set a target for bilateral trade from the present 32 crores to a billion euros by the end of the decade, Ministry of External Affairs Secretary-West Sanjay Verma said in a media briefing. MEA Secretary said President Droupadi Murmu had a packed day of official engagements, which started with a guard of honour at the Serbia Palace, followed by restricted-level talks, delegation-level talks, a joint address to the media and a business event. "During the interactions on Thursday morning, both presidents reiterated old commitments and resolved to explore new areas of cooperation for further strengthening bilateral relations," MEA Secretary West Sanjay Verma said. The Speaker of the National Assembly of Serbia, Dr Vladimir Orlic, also called on President Murmu. Later, President Droupadi Murmu laid a wreath on the memorial of the unknown warrior atop Mountain Avala in Belgrade. During delegation-level talks, President Vucic was joined by the Ministers of Defense, Agriculture, Culture, Health, mining and energy, construction, transport and infrastructure, trade and tourism, and youth, which means eight members of the Cabinet were present today for the delegation-level talks. Each participating minister was briefed about the potential in their respective sectors, Sanjay added. At the outset, President Vucic expressed his condolences for the loss of lives in the triple train accident in Odisha. During the bilateral interactions, both leaders reiterated their principle stand on the rule of law, respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations. President Butcheck described Serbia's relationship with India as a fraternity. He termed India as a time-tested, friendly country and told the Indian president to consider Serbia as a second motherland. President Vucic identified six major areas of cooperation. "These included defence and military tech cooperation pharmaceuticals, agriculture, industrial cooperation, information technology, AI cultural cooperation, including film production and cemetery graphics". Both sides discussed "cooperation in the field of culture, particularly in cinema films, and tourism came up repeatedly". Serbia sees the potential of attracting Indian filmmakers for shooting post-production and during the visit, there is a high-profile Indian film crew shooting in this country. Murmu reached Suriname on June 4 and towards the end of her visit, she said that a mini India resides in Suriname and highlighted the significant contributions made by Indians in various aspects of Suriname's development, including the economy, society, and culture. President Droupadi Murmu was also conferred with the highest civilian award of Suriname -- Grand Order of the Chain of the Yellow Star.Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated her on the honour saying that this special gesture from the government and the people of Suriname symbolizes the enduring friendship between the two countries. "Congratulations to Rashtrapati Ji on being conferred the highest civilian award of Suriname - Grand Order of the Chain of the Yellow Star. This special gesture from the Government and people of Suriname symbolizes the enduring friendship between our countries", the Prime Minister said in a tweet. During her visit, she also met people of Indian origin living in Suriname at a community reception which was also attended by Suriname President Chandikaprasad Santokhi. Addressing the people present on the occasion, President Draupadi Murmu said, "It is a matter of pride for us that Indians have reached the highest positions in Suriname." "My first state visit after assuming office is to Suriname. It is a privilege for me to be part of the celebration of 150 years of the arrival of Indians in Suriname. It is a matter of pride for us that Indians have reached the highest positions in Suriname. Indians have been contributing significantly to the development of Suriname economically, socially and culturally," President Murmu said. She further said the Centre's policy is to build permanent relations with all its friendly countries. "Today India is moving fast towards development, India has always been ahead in helping its friendly countries regarding vaccines and medicines," she added. Suriname President Chandrikapersad Santoki, while addressing the event, said that Suriname will further strengthen the 47 years of relationship with India. "We are celebrating 150 years of Indian coming to Suriname, we are overwhelmed to wholeheartedly welcome the President of India on this occasion. We will further strengthen the 47 years of relationship between Suriname and India, and will further strengthen cultural and social-religious ties. Despite the distance of thousands of kilometres, a mini India resides in Suriname. Our relations have become stronger after Draupadi Murmu ji's visit. I say thanks on behalf of the people of Suriname," he said. Earlier, President Murmu paid floral tributes at Mahatma Gandhi's statue along with her Suriname counterpart Chandrikapersad Santokhi in Knuffelsgracht of capital Paramaribo on Tuesday. "Remembering the lasting legacy of Mahatma. President Droupadi Murmu @rashtrapatibhvn & President @CSantokhi of Suriname paid tributes to Mahatma Gandhi in Paramaribo," Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Arindam Bagchi tweeted. (ANI)
The Afghanistan embassy in Islamabad has appealed to the Pakistani government to stop the arrest of Afghan refugees "as it can adversely impact bilateral relations between the two countries, reported Tolo News. Taking to Twitter, the Afghanistan embassy in Islamabad said on Thursday that the POR, ACC, and passport holders were among the Afghan citizens detained by the CTD-ISB and other Pakistani agencies. Some Afghan immigrants, who now reside in Pakistan, have criticised the Pakistani government for taking this action saying that the Pakistani police abuse them regardless of the fact that they have valid documentation, as per a report published in Tolo News. Tolo News is an Afghan news channel broadcasting from Kabul, Afghanistan. An Afghan immigrant in Pakistan said, "The apprehension of Afghans is being continued in the cities. They are being harassed and detained, even those who have legal documents." An activist for the rights of Afghan immigrants in Pakistan, Sediq Kargar, said, "Those who lack visas are facing major fines. Those who want their visas extended should pay heavy fines." Afghan nationals are being detained in Pakistan under the guise of participating in recent anti-Pakistan protests, claimed Hafiz Zia Ahmad Takal, the deputy spokesman for the foreign ministry. The deputy spokesman requested that the Pakistani government stop the practice of detaining Afghan immigrants there and permit them to continue living there normally, according to Tolo News. Takal said, "Some Afghans were detained due to excuses that they were involved in recent protests. We call on the Pakistani government to not make problems for the Afghans." According to the Afghan consulate in Karachi, 2,367 immigrants, including women and children, have already been released from Sindh province's jails. 274 Afghans are detained in Sindh state prisons, according to Abdul Jabar Takhari, the general consul of Afghanistan in Karachi, who also indicated that efforts are being undertaken to liberate them. Takhari noted, "274 inmates remained in the prisons. Efforts are underway to release them soon. Women are among them." Nearly 8 million Afghans live in Pakistan and Iran, according to some figures, and there have occasionally been allegations of Afghan immigrants being abused by the forces of these two countries, Tolo News reported. (ANI)
A Chinese man, who was detained for entering Sri Lanka with a fraudulent passport, acted aggressively and declared that he could not go back to China when he was taken to the airport to be deported, Sri Lanka Mirror reported citing the airport sources. Apparently, he was transported to the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) where he was deported to China under Sri Lankan Police Security. Sri Lanka Mirror is a Sri Lankan news website. According to sources, when he was escorted to the final gate to board the plane, he started acting violently, saying he could not go back to China. According to Sri Lanka Mirror, three police officers and an immigration officer also went to China along with the suspect. Two Chinese nationals and an Egyptian arrived in Sri Lanka on May 18, this year via Dubai. One of the Chinese men showed a passport from Guinea at the Katunayake Airport. The Chinese national's entry had been refused by Immigration and Emigration agents at the BIA when they realised the passport he had presented was a fake one. He was eventually released, nevertheless, in response to a request from State Minister Arundika Fernando. State Minister of Urban Development and Housing in Sri Lanka, Arundika Fernando, issued a letter on May 19, 2023, to the Immigration Emigration Controller General, requesting the release of the Chinese man who arrived with a fake passport. This incident has raised concerns about the level of corruption and disregard for law and order displayed by politicians who hold power over the country's public servants, True Ceylon reported. In a shocking incident, an alleged Chinese investor managed to enter Sri Lanka using a fake Guinean passport, highlighting the extent of influence exerted by Chinese individuals over Sri Lankan politicians. Sri Lanka's undisclosed relationship with China involves secretive methods employed by the Chinese, including resorting to force and providing kickbacks to Sri Lankan officials, in order to achieve their objectives. China's Belt and Road Initiative is known for its aggressive approach, raising concerns about debt sustainability, lack of transparency, environmental impacts, and strategic motives, True Ceylon reported. The initiative is often viewed as a means for China to expand its influence and gain geopolitical advantages in the regions where its projects are implemented. In another incident in March, Sri Lankan officials arrested over 30 Chinese nationals involved in online fraud based on an Interpol alert. These individuals had entered the country on tourist visas and had defrauded people for more than two months. The arrests were made in the Western province of Sri Lanka, True Ceylon reported. Prior to arriving in Sri Lanka, the group had been involved in a global fraud operation, swindling approximately SLR 300 million from victims worldwide. The Chinese Embassy responded to the fake passport incident, urging Chinese citizens visiting Sri Lanka to strictly abide by local laws and regulations while respecting religious and cultural customs. The embassy acknowledged the reports and stated that an investigation was underway, without confirming or denying any involvement in securing the release of the Chinese man. The misuse of power by politicians in Sri Lanka, however, has drawn severe criticism. (ANI)
The Diplomatic Mission of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan has demanded "immediate attention" and "resolution" on the arrest of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. An appeal has been made to the United Nations Higher Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other relevant international organisations to provide support in effectively managing the Afghan refugee situation. "The Diplomatic and Consular Missions of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan express grave concern regarding recent reports of the arrest of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Afghanistan has faced significant political, security, and economic challenges over the past decades including recently as a result of the forced takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, leading many Afghan citizens to seek refuge in neighboring countries like Pakistan, in search of safety and stability," read a statement of the Diplomatic and Consular Missions of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. These refugees have endured immense hardships, leaving their homes, families, and livelihoods behind, and have relied on the hospitality of their neighboring nations for support, the statement added. "We commend Pakistan for hosting a large number of Afghan refugees over the years. We recognize the burden this has placed on Pakistan and express our gratitude for their generosity. However, we are deeply troubled by reports of Afghan refugees being detained and arrested in Pakistan. These actions violate international human rights standards and are against the principles of compassion and solidarity that have characterized the relationship between our countries," said Farid Mamundzay, Afghanistan's ambassador to India. He also urged the Pakistani authorities to ensure the protection of the rights and dignity of Afghan refugees, in line with international law and humanitarian principles. Mamundzay added that he firmly believes that a cooperative approach, guided by international law, human rights, and compassion, is crucial "in resolving the challenges faced by Afghan refugees and strengthening the bonds between our nations". "We remain committed to collaborating with the Government of Pakistan, international organizations, and the broader international community to ensure the safety, dignity, and well-being of Afghan refugees and to achieve a sustainable solution to the ongoing refugee crisis," the statement quoted him as saying. (ANI)
Work on new $1 billion runway at CLT airport will help with flight demands and growth

Politicians and airline leaders joined Charlotte Douglas International Airport officials Friday for groundbreaking ceremonies on the fourth parallel runway, the last phase of a 10-year, $3.1 billion capital project at the airport.

The $1 billion runway, the final part of the project called Destination CLT, will be 10,000 feet long and 150 feet wide to accommodate the airports increasing traffic.

After its completion in 2027, the additional runway will allow for a 20% to 25% increased capacity for arrivals and departures, said Jack Christine, the airports chief infrastructure officer.

Charlotte Douglas recently was named seventh busiest airport in the world for arrivals and departures, and is on track to return to pre-pandemic traffic numbers this year, Mayor Vi Lyles said.

CLT isnt just one of busiest US airports. See where new report puts Charlotte worldwide

Were going to see Charlotte emerge as one of the premier hubs on the eastern seaboard, and this is a piece of that puzzle, said U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-NC.

U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis and Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles at the airport runway groundbreaking. Both spoke of the importance of the project and the airport.

The new runway will require changes around the tarmac to accommodate the increased capacity, the mayor said. That includes new taxiways on the north and south ends, relocating de-icing pads, relocating of West Boulevard between Piney Top Road and Bryum Drive, and a new Aircraft Rescue and firefighting station.

The project was supposed to launch in 2020, but due to the pandemic and delays for environmental requirements needed for runway projects, groundbreaking was pushed back until this year, Christine said. Construction is already underway.

The new runway now under construction at Charlotte Douglas International Airport will be 10,000 feet long and 150 feet wide, and is meant to help with the airport's growth.

American Airlines in Charlotte

Charlotte Douglas also is a major hub for American Airlines. Chief Operating Officer David Seymour spoke at the event, expressing a vested interest in the airport, as American Airlines is responsible for 90% of CLT traffic. He said the company invested significantly in the multi-billion dollar Destination CLT project.

Seymour said American Airlines will hire more people, invest in new technology and grow its network out of the Charlotte hub. The airline also just increased its summer schedule out of Charlotte.

We continue to bet on Charlotte, and as the team tells me thats really not much of a gamble, he said.

U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, Mayor Vi Lyles and other officials participated in groundbreaking for a fourth parallel runway at Charlotte Douglas International Airport Friday.

American Airlines is currently dealing with a pilot shortage, but expects a comeback, Seymour said. Weve got to build for the future, and so our plan is to continue to grow this operation, he said.

As the first part of the Charlotte airports Master Plan, Destination CLT began in 2019. The master plan will develop the airport through 2035 to ensure it can keep up with projected growth.

Charlotte Douglas International Airports Fourth Parallel Runway broke ground on Friday. The $1 billion runway is part of over $3.1 billion of capital improvements.

More improvements at the Charlotte airport

Other Destination CLT projects include:
Residents in a Chester County neighborhood are expressing their frustrations after a second deadly shooting occurred within weeks of one another.

The shooting, which killed one person, occurred around noon on Back Gate Street, in the Gayle Community

Channel 9s Tina Terry spoke with the residents about what can be done to keep the neighborhood safe.

Its awful. Theres always people getting killed around here. Makes me scared to even live here, resident Emma Dixon said.

A mother, who did not want to be on camera, said she was fed up with the recent crime.

We cant let our kids out here to do anything. They cant play they cant do anything, the mother said. We need to solve all these crimes and give them justice.

ALSO READ: Police investigating shooting into Lyft SUV on I-85 in north Charlotte

This shooting is the second deadly shooting in the Gayle community. The previous one occurred on Pinnkey Street in mid-April.

A spokesperson with the Chester County Sheriffs Office siad there has been four murder investigations so far this year.

However, only two of them have been solved.

The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division is assisting with this case.

(WATCH BELOW: Second arrest made after man walking to job interview killed in drive-by shooting)
An 11-year-old Perth Amboy student who assaulted another 11-year-old boy with a knife on their way home from middle school earlier this year has pleaded guilty and been sentenced to three years probation.

The boy, who pleaded guilty to juvenile statutes for aggravated assault and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, must successfully complete a residential treatment program as a condition of probation, Middlesex County Prosecutor Yolanda Ciccone said.

The probation and residential treatment program sentence was imposed May 24 by a Middlesex County Family Court judge, according to the prosecutor's office.

Around 2:37 p.m. on Feb. 22, the sixth grade student assaulted another boy, who was a fifth grade student, with a household knife on Johnstone Street between Sutton and Ridgeley streets as they were walking home from Shull Middle School, the prosecutor said.

The fifth grade student suffered serious injuries in the attack and was hospitalized. The attack stemmed from a dispute between the students earlier in the day, city officials have said.

The sixth grader was taken into custody following an investigation by the Perth Amboy Police Department's Special Victims Bureau. During a preliminary hearing held on Feb. 23, it was determined the juvenile would remain detained.

On April 19, the juvenile pled guilty before Middlesex County Family Court Judge Deborah Venezia to offenses which if committed by an adult would constitute second-degree aggravated assault and third-degree possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, the prosecutor's office said.

At the time of the incident, the city's teacher's union said it was the latest example of student behavior "out of control," particularly at the Shull School.

In a joint statement, city and school board officials said they condemned and will not tolerate acts of violence against anyone, especially children. Shortly after the stabbing, the school district announced steps to improve school safety, including stationing armed security guards at all school buildings for several months, installing metal detectors and revising a policy for backpack searches.

Email: srussell@gannettnj.com

Suzanne Russell is a breaking news reporter for MyCentralJersey.com covering crime, courts and other mayhem. To get unlimited access, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: Perth Amboy NJ student sentenced to probation in after-school stabbing
The Instagram account was only active for one day, but its long-gone posts may have come back to bite two Beaufort County teens.

Raven Benjamin, 19, of Ladys Island, was arrested Wednesday afternoon on two charges of libel and slander, followed by the Friday morning arrest of 19-year-old Yemassee resident Zachary Chandler on the same charges. Beaufort County investigators allege the teens created an Instagram page impersonating their former high school teacher, using the public profile to falsely accuse the teacher and a school counselor of serious crimes.

The last time someone in the county was arrested for the same charge was 28 years ago  15 years before Instagram was launched.

The Instagram account was created on Jan. 21 before being removed by the platform the next day, said Sheriffs Office spokesperson Maj. Angela Viens. But in the profiles one-day lifespan, Benjamin and Chandler made posts accusing both school employees of crimes that would grossly impact their reputation as professionals working with children, Viens said. Screenshots of the online allegations eventually made their way to police.

Benjamin and Chandler graduated in 2022 from Lowcountry Montessori School, public charter school utilizing the child-centered Montessori Method in Port Royal. Both employees who were targeted by the account are no longer affiliated with the school, said director Amy Horn.

Viens would not specify what kind of accusations the former students made or how many libelous posts were on the now-deleted account.

The pair of arrests marked Beaufort Countys first criminal charges for libel and slander since 1995, Viens told The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette. Libel and slander cases are almost always handled in civil court, but police brought criminal charges against the two teens because their alleged false statements involved public accusations of highly serious crimes.

Libel and slander is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison or a $5,000 fine, according to South Carolina law.

Both teens were later released from the Beaufort County Detention Center on $5,000 recognizance bonds.
Officers detained Richard Randy Cox on June 19, 2022, for criminal possession of a handgun and disturbing the peace, placing him in the back of a police van without seat belts.

Two Connecticut officers are off the job after a Black man suffered injuries that left him paralyzed while in police custody.

According to ABC News, four of six members of the New Haven Board of Police Commissioners voted to terminate officers Jocelyn Lavandier and Luis Rivera on Wednesday for their conduct during the encounter with Richard Randy Cox on June 19, 2022.

Jack ODonnell, Coxs attorney, stated that although his client is pleased with the commissions decision to terminate the officers, its been a long time coming.

Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump takes part in a demonstration last July in New Haven, Connecticut, urging justice for Richard Randy Cox. The crowd marched from the Stetson Library to the New Haven Police Department. On Wednesday, the citys Board of Police Commissioners voted to fire two of the five police officers charged after Coxs arrest left him paralyzed from the chest down. (Arnold Gold/New Haven Register via AP, File)

It seems like far too long for [Randys] liking, ODonnell said, ABC reported, but were grateful for the outcome.

Misdemeanor charges of second-degree reckless endangerment and cruelty to persons were brought against Lavandier, Rivera, Oscar Diaz, Betsy Segui, and Ronald Pressley on Nov. 28, 2022, for their part in Coxs arrest.

New Haven Police Chief Karl Jacobson recommended firing the officers involved, excluding Pressley, who has since retired from the police department.

In March, Jacobson stated that his recommendation came from an internal inquiry and hearings that produced sufficient evidence to pursue termination.

Seguis and Diazs counsel werent available Wednesday, so the boards vote on Jacobsons recommendation was tabled until June 28. Seguis lawyer, Gregory Cerittelli, believes the police commission will vote to terminate his client.

On June 19, 2022, officers detained Cox for criminal possession of a handgun and disturbing the peace, placing him in the back of a police van without seat belts. Cox was propelled headfirst against the back wall of the van during a sudden stop.

Surveillance footage shows that the officers did not immediately provide Cox with medical attention. They presumed he was intoxicated when they got to the police station, despite his repeated requests for assistance and claims he could not move.

Video shows the officers dragging Cox by his feet and shoving him into a wheelchair, which his attorneys said could have worsened his life-threatening injuries.

The five officers involved were put on paid administrative leave in June 2022. The New Haven Superior Court clerks office announced the dismissal of all charges against Cox in October.

The police officers entered a not-guilty plea on Jan. 11 during their arraignment and were each released on a $25,000 bond. All defendants have denied misconduct in court documents.

NBC Connecticut reported that the court case served as the impetus for legislation that the Senate and the House approved. It calls for the police officer standards and training council to create regulations mandating seatbelt use for everyone riding in a city vehicle.

In September 2022, Cox sued the city of New Haven and several members of the New Haven Police Department for $100 million, ABC reported.

In a statement released on Wednesday, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker stated that what happened to Cox was unacceptable and that the boards decision to fire the officers is another significant step in the citys effort to offer accountability, transparency, and action to Coxs family.

When an individual enters the custody of the New Haven Police Department, there is an obligation to treat them with dignity and respect and in a manner that ensures their safety and well-being, Elicker said, ABC reported.

The mayor added that he believes the officers conduct fell well short of their duty to protect and serve residents and maintain the communitys safety, and does not reflect the high standards to which I know our police officers hold themselves to every day as they put their lives on the line to protect and serve.

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Two of Donald Trumps top attorneys, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, announced Friday morning theyre resigning from his legal team.

In a joint statement, the day after the Justice Department indicted Trump over his handling of classified documents at his Florida residence, Trusty and Rowley cited the case being filed in Miami as the reason for their departure.

It has been an honor to have spent the last year defending him, and we know he will be vindicated in his battle against the Biden Administrations partisan weaponization of the American justice system, their statement read. Now that the case has been filed in Miami, this is a logical moment for us to step aside and let others carry the cases through to completion.

But on Thursday night following the indictment, Trusty appeared on CNN to defend Trump and accused one of the prosecutors, Jay Bratt, of extorting an attorney to force a witnesss cooperation. He also called Espionage Act charges against Trump ludicrous.

And on Friday, before announcing his resignation, Trusty appeared on Good Morning America to defend Trump again.

The whole country knows the basic notion of unequal treatment and fairness, and thats whats at issue with this prosecution, he said.

Trump thanked Trusty and Rowley on his Truth Social site for their services.

I want to thank Jim Trusty and John Rowley for their work, but they were up against a very dishonest, corrupt, evil, and sick group of people, the likes of which has not been seen before, he wrote.

Trump said Todd Blanche will now represent him, along with additional lawyers to be announced in the coming days.

Trump is expected to surrender to authorities on Tuesday. He has said he will plead not guilty on all 37 felony federal charges detailed in the newly unsealed indictment.

Related...
Donald Trump said on Thursday that he's been indicted by the Justice Department. AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Two of Donald Trump's lawyers have stepped down.

They'll no longer represent him in the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the Jan. 6 investigation, per CBS.

Trump announced he's being indicted on federal charges over his handling of classified documents.

Two of Donald Trump's lawyers announced they've resigned, just hours after the former president said he's being indicted by the Justice Department in a classified documents case.

In a joint statement on Friday, the attorneys Jim Trusty and John Rowley said they've stepped down from representing him.

"This morning we tendered our resignations as counsel to President Trump, and we will no longer represent him on either the indicted case or the January 6 investigation," they wrote in a statement shared with Insider.

The lawyers wrote: "It has been an honor to have spent the last year defending him, and we know he will be vindicated in his battle against the Biden Administration's partisan weaponization of the American justice system."

"Now that the case has been filed in Miami, this is a logical moment for us to step aside and let others carry the cases through to completion," the lawyers added.

Trump confirmed the two lawyers had departed on his Truth Social page on Friday morning, thanking them for their work.

"They were up against a very dishonest, corrupt, evil, and 'sick' group of people, the likes of which has not been seen before," the former president wrote, adding that he'll announce which lawyers will take over the cases "in the coming days."

Todd Blanche, a lawyer who's helped Trump in his New York state criminal case, is one of the lawyers taking over the latest case.

On Thursday night, Trump announced he's being indicted on charges related to his handling of classified documents.

While the exact charges he faces aren't known yet, multiple outlets have reported he'll face seven counts once he's arraigned next week in federal court in Miami.

The indictment marks the first time a former president has faced federal charges.

The Justice Department has been investigating Trump over classified documents that were found at his Mar-a-Lago property during an FBI search last summer. The Feds were investigating whether Trump obstructed justice and broke federal law, including the Espionage Act, by keeping the documents and allegedly not returning them after he lost the 2020 election, according to an unsealed warrant.

Trump has insisted he's innocent and repeatedly called the investigation a "witch hunt" targeting him for political reasons at the behest of President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

Read the original article on Business Insider
A 2-year-old girl has died after being left in her family's vehicle for several hours in an Orlando, Florida, suburb, according to authorities.

The Volusia County Sheriff's Office said the child's parents discovered that their daughter had been left in the car Thursday in Orange City and rushed her to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead shortly before 6 p.m., local time.

The parents told investigators that they went out to lunch in DeLand, about 15 minutes north of Orange City, and returned home around 2:40 p.m. with their daughter and her two older brothers, ages 15 and 8.

Around 5 p.m., the girl's parents said they went out to the vehicle and found her "unresponsive" in the car, the Sheriff's Office said.

This latest incident marks the eighth hot car death nationwide this year and the fourth in Florida, according to the nonprofit group Kids and Car Safety. Last year, there were 36 vehicular heatstroke deaths.

In 2018 and 2019, a record 53 children died each year from being left in a hot car, according to the National Safety Council.

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Law enforcement officials and other experts warn that the inside of a vehicle can heat up very quickly, and children can die from heatstroke in a car even when the outside temperatures are as low as 60 degrees Fahrenheit, researchers have noted.

"It's important for families to understand that it doesn't have to be 90 degrees outside for a child to suffer from heatstroke inside a vehicle," Amber Rollins, the director of the national non-profit organization KidsandCar.org, previously told AccuWeather.

"Child hot car deaths and injuries are largely misunderstood by the general public, and the majority of parents believe this would never happen to them," Rollins said.

For more information, resources and safety tips, parents and caregivers can visit the Kids and Car Safety website.

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National Geographic Expeditions expands into coveted adventure destinations like Bhutan and Colombia.

National Geographic Expeditions Surrounded by both mountains and sea, travelers on the Colombia Signature Land itinerary with National Geographic Expeditions will explore Tayrona National Park as an expert naturalist teaches them about the surrounding environment.

If Bhutan, Colombia, or the Baltic countries are on your travel list, it's time for you to book your trip. National Geographic Expeditions just announced new Signature Land expeditions to all three destinations. Each of the itineraries will have multiple departures throughout 2024.

The Bhutan expedition is an 11-day trip through the mountainous kingdom, diving into its history, cultural traditions, and architecture. Highlights from the program include a private guided hike to the iconic Tiger's Nest monastery, archery lessons (it's Bhutan's national sport), and dinner with prominent Bhutanese dignitaries. Some of the departures will be led by medical anthropologist Caroll Dunham, who specializes in environmental conservation in sacred sites across Southeast Asia.

National Geographic Expeditions The Punakha Dzong was the second dzong (fortress-monastery) built in the country. This majestic structure plays a significant role in the community, and travelers on the National Geographic Expeditions Signature Land trip to Bhutan will visit the historic landmark.

In Colombia, travelers will spend nine days traveling from Bogota to Cartagena, visiting such destinations as the Cocora Valley, Tayrona National Park, and Barranquilla. Activities include coffee tastings, birdwatching, and visiting San Basilio de Palenque, the first free town for enslaved people in the Americas. National Geographic explorer and conservationist Rosa Vasquez Espinoza will be leading some of the departures.

The Baltic expedition is an 11-day journey across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Stops include the three countries' respective capital cities, as well as Gauja National Park and the Curonian Spit. Along the way, travelers will visit historic sites like a medieval castle, a 19th-century palace, and a 20th-century fortress, as well as natural sites like the Gusmanas Caves. This trip will be of particular interest to photographers; some departures will be led by photographer and naturalist Jeff Mauritzen, who has been published numerous times in National Geographic publications.

Bookings for these new expeditions open on June 13 and can be reserved at nationalgeographicexpeditions.com. The Bhutan trip starts at $10,995 per person; the Colombia trip at $5,995 per person; and the Baltics trip at $7,795 per person.

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Former President Trumps Thursday evening announcement that he was indicted on federal charges quickly scrambled the 2024 GOP presidential race, putting his various challengers on the spot to respond to the news.

Trump is due in court in Miami on Tuesday after a Justice Department special counsel indicted him in an investigation into his handling of classified documents.

Those seeking to overtake Trump in the polls and win the nomination next year face a difficult balancing act of arguing that it may be time to move on from the former president while also not openly attacking him and alienating is loyal base of supporters.

Heres how other 2024 Republican candidates have responded so far.

The Hill Elections 2024 coverage

Ron DeSantis

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at the final of three presidential campaign stops in South Carolina on Friday, June 2, 2023, in Greenville, S.C. DeSantis has been visiting early voting states since kicking off his bid for the GOP 2024 nomination. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, widely seen as Trumps chief rival in the 2024 race, weighed in on the indictment by slamming the Justice Department (DOJ) while carefully avoiding completely defending the former president.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation, DeSantis tweeted.

Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all, he added.

DeSantiss remarks were released just hours as Trump said he had been indicted by the DOJ  notably a much quicker response in comparison to earlier this year, when the Florida Republican waited several days before publicly weighing in on the potential of Trump receiving a separate indictment in relation to a probe overseen by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), which was eventually filed.

His response also illustrates the delicate balance other 2024 Republican contenders will have to grapple with amid Trumps swirling legal controversies: criticizing legal probes targeting a Republican while trying to avoid elevating Trump himself in the process.

Asa Hutchinson

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson formally announced his Republican campaign for president Wednesday, April 26, 2023, in Bentonville, Ark. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson has been one of the few Republicans running for the partys presidential nomination who has been willing to say Trumps legal issues should be disqualifying, a position he reiterated Thursday night.

With the news that Donald Trump has been indicted for the second time, our country finds itself in a position that weakens our democracy, Hutchinson said in a statement, adding that Donald Trumps actionsfrom his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of lawshould not define our nation or the Republican Party.

This is a sad day for our country. While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction, he continued This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.

Tim Scott

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) takes photos with attendees after speaking during a town hall for his presidential campaign Sunday, May 28, 2023, in Goose Creek, S.C. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard)

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who officially launched his bid for the White House several weeks ago, denounced the federal indictment against Trump during an interview with Fox News on Thursday.

What weve seen over the last several years is the weaponization of the Department [of] Justice against a former president, Scott said. You dont have to be a Republican to see injustice and want to fix it. You dont have to be a Democrat to see injustice and want to fix it. You just have to be an American and stand up for the right thing.

Today, what we see is a justice system where the scales are weighted. That seems to be the outcome of where we are today, the South Carolina Republican added, noting that if he were elected president, he would purge all of the injustices and impurities in the judicial system.

Vivek Ramaswamy

Republican presidential candidate and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during U.S. Sen. Joni Ernsts Roast and Ride, Saturday, June 3, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who is running for the GOP nomination, went perhaps farther than any other Trump rival was willing to Thursday night, saying he would pardon Trump if elected in 2024.

It would be much easier for me to win this election if Trump werent in the race, but I stand for principles over politics, Ramaswamy wrote on Twitter shortly after news of Trumps indictment broke. I commit to pardon Trump promptly on January 20, 2025 and to restore the rule of law in our country.

Ramaswamy echoed other Republicans in claiming the charges against Trump amounted to a Banana Republic situation.

This is an affront to every citizen: we cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents, Ramaswamy wrote. Its hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden.

A DOJ special counsel is still investigating Bidens handling of classified documents after sensitive materials were found at his Delaware home and an old Washington, D.C., office from his time as vice president. But unlike Trump, Bidens team promptly notified the DOJ of the discovery and has cooperated with the investigation.

Chris Christie

FILE  Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie addresses a gathering during a town hall style meeting at New England College, Thursday, April 20, 2023, in Henniker, N.H. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)

The former New Jersey governor has made clear he will confront Trump directly in the primary battle, but his response to the indictment was fairly subdued Thursday.

We dont get our news from Trumps Truth Social account. Lets see what the facts are when any possible indictment is released, Christie said in a Twitter post. As I have said before, no one is above the law, no matter how much they wish they were. We will have more to say when the facts are revealed.

Mike Pence

Republican presidential candidate former Vice President Mike Pence speaks at a campaign event, Wednesday, June 7, 2023, in Ankeny, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

The former vice president, who declared his candidacy this week, told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday morning that he was deeply troubled by the indictment, but said it would be important to see all the facts in the case.

Im deeply troubled to see this indictment move forward, Pence said. Yesterday on the road in Iowam I had said that I had hoped that the DOJ would see its way clear not to move forward here. But let me be very clear: No one is above the law.

Pence himself was investigated by the DOJ for his handling of classified information after aides found a small number of sensitive government documents at his Indiana home. The DOJ last week cleared Pence of any wrongdoing.

The former vice president called the handling of classified materials a very serious matter Friday.

We have to protect our nations secrets, and my only hope is as we learn about the facts of this indictment next week, that the American people will see in this case that it would meet a high standard necessary to justify the unprecedented federal indictment of a former president of the United States by the current president of the United Statess Justice Department and by a potential rival, Pence said.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley had yet to weigh in as of Friday morning.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Lexus

In the 14 years since the Lexus GX 460 debuted, the overland and off-road communities have boomed. These once-niche players in the enthusiast space have grown to become mainstays, with OEMs producing trim levels, packages, and entire vehicles catering to the mud-splattered mania. The all-new GX 550 is here to capitalize on that momentum. It looks great.

Lexus

The previous model is old enough to predate the Lexus spindle grille, which the brand committed to back in 2014. That new grille design was adapted to the GX, but clearly wasn't designed for it, with a gaping mouth wrapping an otherwise tame body. The new GX is designed around the grille, however, with a blocky, tall body mimicking the grille's severe angles. The GX also gets a new Overtrail trim designed for off-road duty, whichin addition to the two-tone paint color and bright skid platealso gets 33-inch tires and a locking rear differential.

The GX also offers Lexus' Electronic-Kinetic Dynamic Suspension System (E-KDSS) system. It's an electronic version of the hydraulic system in the previous GX, which allows the truck to effectively disengage its sway bar under articulation. This keeps road manners in check while providing increased maximum articulation. Adaptive variable suspension is also available, but thankfully not standard, which should make swapping out the suspension simpler than on the complex LX 600. The swing-out rear door is gone, replaced by a standard power liftgate. The liftgate glass can open separately, allowing for easier access.

Lexus

Lexus

This new GX shares its platform with its big brother, though. That also makes it a close sibling to the Toyota Sequoia and 300-Series Land Cruiser. A redesigned Land Cruiser Pradothe GX's international-market, utilitarian siblingis inbound, with at least one rumor suggesting it could make it to the U.S.

Lexus

Across this lineup of trucks, Toyota is downsizing and turbocharging engines, and the GX is no different. It trades the old 4.6-liter naturally aspirated V-8 for a 3.4-liter twin-turbo V-6. Note that though it is advertised as 3.4 liters in this application and 3.5 in the LX600 and Tundra, the engine is physically the same across the lineup. It's just a rounding difference.

Power climbs significantly from 301 horses in the GX 460 to 349 hp here. The torque gain is even larger: 479 lb-ft vs 329 lb-ft in the old model. This, combined with wheelbase and overall length increases of 2.36 and 2.75 inches, respectively, makes the GX a stronger tow rig, too. The 550 can lug 8000 lbs around on its hitch, up 1500 lbs from the last model. Full fuel economy figures aren't out yet, but the gain seems to be minor. Lexus says the new model will have a combined rating of 17 mpg, up from 16 mpg in the 460.

Lexus

But the increased size has paid off in terms of hauling. Regardless of how many seats are folded or in place, you get more cargo room in the 550. The second row is easier to fold (or you can option captain's chairs), the door pockets are bigger, there are 12 cupholders, up to 6 usb ports, and an available 120-v power inverter. The center console is larger, too, and now offers a "Cool Box." It gets cold enough to keep meat and other perishables at the right temperature, the GX's chief engineer told Road & Track. The ancient infotainment system has been replaced by the new-generation version from the RXa giant leapand the latest suite of driver-assistance systems, including the semi-autonomous Lane Tracing Assist system for easy highway cruising.



Lexus

The maximum approach, breakover, and departure angle are 26, 24, and 22 degrees on the GX 550 Overtrail, respectively, up from 21/23/1 in the previous model. The Premium trim has a slightly higher departure angle of 23 degrees, due to the larger spare tire that's mounted below the rear bumper of the Overtrail. The figures represent a marked improvement over the last GX, but it's still far behind competitors like the Land Rover Discovery. The Rover can handle 34-degree approaches, 30-degree breakovers, and 27-degree departures. Wranglers and Broncos trounce even those numbers.

A saving grace, however, is that the bumpers and supporting structure of the Overtrail feature multi-piece construction. That means that if you damage one part, you won't have to replace the whole front end, as is the case with many luxury off-roaders.

"We're using ladder frame construction. For us, we believe true off-roaders should be built on those kind of structures. With that, we get the off-road performance, reliability, and the durability that is required," GX Chief Engineer Koji Tsukasaki told Road & Track, through a translator.

That durability is the core of the GX appeal. It didn't earn a reputation by beating Wranglers out on the rocks, it built one by being the truck you want to take on 1000-mile overland journeys when it's 20 years old. Let's hope the new one lives up to that reputation.

Deliveries should start early next year. Pricing has not been announced.

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A 23-year-old who was killed in Detroit, Michigan, is being remembered for his legacy of generosity, his loved ones say.

Samuel Gartley was found Monday, June 5, after he was shot near the Russell Industrial Center, Detroit Police Cpl. Dan Donakowski told the Macomb Daily.

Gartley was at work at the industrial center when someone tried to rob him, according to WXYZ. He was then fatally shot.

Family members told the news outlet that Gartley was an entrepreneur and had worked at the center for about a year.

The Detroit Police Department told McClatchy News that it has a suspect in custody and it is continuing to investigate the incident.

Loved ones shared tributes to Gartley on social media.

Sam we love forever. Our son we grieve your life taken too soon and the future that we wont have with you as part of our family, Aimy Burgess wrote in a Facebook post. I will try to model your legacy of generosity, kindness and super chill attitude.

Your kindness, your wit, your wonderfully intelligent mind. There are no words to describe how beautiful your soul is, nothing could do it justice, Hope Rusk wrote in a Facebook post. You had so many plans, so much excitement for the beautiful future ahead of you. I will never be the same again not having you by my side...I dont know how to go on without you, but I have to.

You were a humble man, Zach Atkinson wrote on Facebook. Ill forever miss our laughs sitting in a parking lot at 3am some nights just having fun! I am in complete shock..I love you man..you left us too soon and a lot of us are hurting we will forever miss you and cherish all of the memories along the way.

Police said anyone with information about the shooting can contact the departments homicide unit at 313-596-2260 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-Speak-Up.

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A 3-week trip from Sacramento to Ukraine became a year. How to see what she brought back

The smell of smoke still wafts from the war-torn Ukrainian flags hanging above Alina Tyulyu, a Ukrainian photographer who lives in Sacramento, as she describes one of the first photographs she made after arriving at the border her native country shares with Poland.

This is one of the first photographs that I took, said Tyulyu, 30, holding up a stark black-and-white exhibition print of a refugee child about the same age as she was when she immigrated to the United States in 1999.

The picture changed her life.

Thats when I realized I couldnt leave  I was completely and so deeply moved by the amount of children, families, mothers, wives, just children fleeing, she said.

Tyulyu started posting her photographs from the war and sharing the emotional stories behind them on social media, and her followers and her friends sent donations to support her work.

Alina Tyulyu sifts through more than 1,000 photos, including one of a Ukrainian woman with a bandaged face, in her home in Sacramento on Tuesday.

What was supposed to be a three week trip  it ended up being almost a whole year, she said.

Her photographs and artifacts she collected from the front lines will will be on display in a two-day pop-up show at the Clara Auditorium in Sacramento on Saturday, June 10, and Sunday, June 11. Tickets are $15.

Bullets and detonated mines will be on display along with a gas mask found in one of their bunkers.

These are things that Russia bought onto the Ukraine territory, she said, pointing to items that include helmets, clothing and food packaging. All of these items you will be able to touch, and see in the images as well.

Alina Tyulyu holds a beer can on Tuesday that she says was left by Russian soldiers, and her photograph documenting it from the year she spent in the country that started in March 2022. These images start at the Polish Ukrainian border then I take you on a journey pretty much thorough all of Ukraine, she said. We go from the Polish-Ukrainian border to Lviv to Kyiv and all the way to Eastern border.

Her finds included magazines and newspapers left behind by Russians. Its been interesting to read them  just to see how drastic and insane the propaganda is.

Tyulyu said she used the money she collected so far to pay for medicine and supplies for victims of the war, and she plans to use the proceeds from the exhibit to provide more help for Ukrainians.

Ukrainian soldiers who have received prosthetics for their war injuries will also attend the event for a Q&A, according to Tyulyu.

Its going to be a really powerful few days of seeing, feeling, smelling and actually hearing real experiences.

Alina Tyulyu holds a flak jacket on Tuesday that she wore while ducking for cover and in hiding while helping Ukrainian refugees during the war. She tells stories of friends killed and buildings, including a church, collapsing.
The majority of judges at the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) have approved a decision whereby 32 states will join a lawsuit Ukraine has filed against Russia on the grounds of its violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Source: European Pravda with reference to a statement released by the press service of the UN International Court of Justice on 9 June

Fourteen of the judges voted for and one against. 26 EU member states - all except Hungary - have joined Ukraines lawsuit at the preliminary objection stage, along with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Lichtenstein and the UK.

However, the court unanimously rejected the USs request to join Ukraines lawsuit against Russia at the preliminary objection stage.

The hearing of the first case brought by Ukraine against Russia, wherein Russia is accused of violating two UN conventions, started on 6 June and will end on 14 June. Consequently, the judgment may potentially be delivered in late 2023 or early 2024.

The proceedings concern the case Application of the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism and of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Ukraine v. Russian Federation). Ukraine filed this lawsuit back in 2017.

In this lawsuit, Ukraine intends to prove that Russia has violated the aforementioned conventions by arming military groups of its puppet "republics" [the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples Republics  ed.] in the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and implementing its policies regarding non-Russian ethnic groups in the occupied peninsula of Crimea.

In April 2017, the ICJ issued a provisional order obliging Russia not to restrict the rights of Crimean Tatars to preserve their representative institutions, including the Mejlis, and to ensure the accessibility of education in the Ukrainian language.

In November 2019 the ICJ rejected all Russias arguments concerning the jurisdiction of the court and the admissibility of the case, resulting in a full victory for Ukraine at that stage of consideration of the lawsuit.

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The building of the International Court of Justice in The Hague

The admissibility of the declarations was achieved with a vote of 14 to one, the court noted.

Read also: Kremlin refuses to comply with ICJ ruling to end hostilities in Ukraine

The nations, intervening on Ukraines side, include 26 members of the European Union (save Hungary), as well as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Lichtenstein, and the UK.

The court also unanimously decided that a similar declaration, filed by the United States, was not admissible at this stage of proceedings.

Read also: Animal genocide  animals have no chance of survival as 55,000 hectares of forest flooded in Kherson Oblast

Hearings on a different lawsuit filed by Ukraine against Russia at the ICJ  this time involving the violation of two separate conventions, namely the Terrorist Financing Convention and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination  started on June 6 and will continue until June 14, with a decision expected at the end of 2023 or in early 2024.

According to Ukrainian authorities, this lawsuit is intended to prove that Russia both discriminates against Crimean Tatars, and has financed the Donbas puppet authorities, which are seen by the Ukrainian government as terrorist organizations.

Read also: Russia changes names and birthdates of kidnapped children to hide the genocide, Vereshchuk

In April 2017, the ICJ enacted a preliminary injunction obliging Russia to allow Crimean Tatars to maintain their representative body, the Mejlis, though Russia instead designated the group to be a terrorist organization and has continued racial and political discrimination of Crimean Tatars in the occupied Crimean peninsula.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
A Juneteenth celebration in Prospect Park in New York City in 2022. Michael Nagle/Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images

After decades of being celebrated at mostly the local level, Juneteenth  the long-standing holiday that commemorates the arrival of news of emancipation and freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, in 1865  became a federal holiday in 2021. In honor of this years Juneteenth, The Conversation reached out to Wake Forest University humanities professor Corey D. B. Walker for a list of readings that can help people better understand the history and meaning of the observance. Below, Walker recommends six books.

On Juneteenth

Combining history and memoir, Annette Gordon-Reeds On Juneteenth offers a moving history of African American life and culture through the prism of Juneteenth. The award-winning Harvard historian presents an intimate portrait of the experiences of her family and her memories of life as an African American girl growing up in segregated Texas. The essays in her book invite readers to enter a world shaped by the forces of freedom and slavery.

Reeds exploration of the history and legacy of Juneteenth is a poignant reminder of the hard history all Americans face.

O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebrations

William H. Wiggins Jr.s O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebrations is the historical standard for African American emancipation celebrations. It offers an accessible and well-researched account of the emergence and evolution of Juneteenth.

Wiggins brings together oral history with archival research to share the stories of how African Americans celebrated emancipation. It explains how Juneteenth is part of the tapestry of emancipation celebrations. These celebrations included such dates as January 1, in North Carolina, April 3, in Richmond, Virginia, and April 16, in Washington, D.C.

A Juneteenth celebration in 2022 in San Francisco. Liu Yilin/Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images

What began as a local holiday has evolved into a national celebration.

Juneteenth celebrations are known for the variety of programs and events that highlight African American history and culture. In the 1960s, students at Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, Texas, informed faculty that classes would not be held on Juneteenth. In Milwaukee, the local Juneteenth parade includes a group known as the Black Cowboys riding their horses along Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Juneteenth celebrations also feature cultural fairs and exhibitions, artistic performances and historical reenactments. Lectures and public conversations, community feasts and religious services are also part of the celebrations.

'Juneteenth

Ralph Ellison, perhaps best known for his novel Invisible Man, offers multiple meanings of Juneteenth in African American and American life in his posthumously published novel Juneteenth.

Ralph Ellisons novel Juneteenth was released posthumously. United States Information Agency/PhotoQuest via Getty Images

The ambivalence of Juneteenth is of a freedom delayed but not denied. Ellisons spiraling novel captures this in the entangled and tragic lives of the racist Senator Sunraider  previously known as Bliss  and the minister who raised him, the Reverend A. Z. Hickman. For Ellison, Juneteenth represents more than just a celebration of emancipation. It also represents the shared fate of white Americans and African Americans in the quest to create a just and equal society. The promise and peril of Juneteenth is elegantly captured in Hickmans words, Theres been a heap of Juneteenths before this one and I tell you therell be a heap more before were truly free!

Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning of African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915

Mitch Kachuns book, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning of African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915, traces the history of emancipation celebrations and their influence on African American identity and community. Juneteenth joined a longer tradition of emancipation celebrations. Those celebrations included ones at the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the United States on Jan. 1, 1808. They also included the August First Day/West India Day celebrations that marked the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire on Aug. 1, 1834.

With an eye for historical detail, Kachun narrates a complex history of how Juneteenth and other freedom festivals shaped African American identity and political culture. The celebrations also displayed competing meanings of African American identity. In Washington, D.C. in the late 19th century, different groups of African Americans held distinct celebrations. These variations underscored tensions around political ideals, status and identity. Kachuns book reminds us that Juneteenth served as a crucible for forging a collective and contested sense of African American community.

An Emancipation Day celebration from 1900 in Austin, Texas. The Austin History Center

Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World

Similar to Kachuns book, Howard University historian Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchies Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World reminds readers of a broader history and geography of emancipation celebrations.

Kerr-Ritchie focuses on how various African American communities adopted and adapted West India Day celebrations. He also explores how they created meaning and culture in celebrating the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. Kerr-Ritchies book details how these celebrations moved across political borders and boundaries.

Juneteenth: The Story Behind the Celebration

Contemporary invocations of Juneteenth often overlook its military history.

Edward T. Cotham, Jr.s Juneteenth: The Story Behind the Celebration fills the void by exploring the Civil War origins of Juneteenth.

Cotham renders explicit the military context leading up to the events on June 19, 1865, in Galveston. This is when enslaved Black people there finally got word that they had been freed more than two years prior. Cotham reminds readers that the history of Juneteenth involves ordinary actions of many individual people whose names may not be widely known.

Collectively, these books about Juneteenth offer fresh perspectives on the history and culture of African Americans on a quest to fully express their freedom. Juneteenth is also an invitation for all Americans to continue to learn about and strive for freedom for all people.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. The Conversation is trustworthy news from experts, from an independent nonprofit. Try our free newsletters.

It was written by: Corey D. B. Walker, Wake Forest University.

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Corey D. B. Walker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
6-year-old Detroit boy shoots 1-year-old twice with gun he found, police say

6-year-old Detroit boy shoots 1-year-old twice with gun he found, police say

A 6-year-old boy found a gun and shot his 1-year-old sibling twice Wednesday, Detroit police said, in what an official said is a too-common occurrence.

The younger child, who was shot in the cheek and the shoulder, survived, Assistant Police Chief Charles Fitzgerald told reporters.

Here we are again, Fitzgerald said, adding, Were here far too often talking about securing your weapons.

Police investigated a shooting on June 7, 2023, involving a 6-year-old and his 1-year-old sibling, in Detroit, Mich. (WDIV)

The 1-year-old was jumping in a bouncy when the 6-year-old found a semi-automatic firearm and shot his sibling around 7:40 p.m., Fitzgerald said.

Their mother was down the street at a family members house, and their father was in the backyard with other children and an uncle working on a fence when the shooting occurred, Fitzgerald said.

Police said Wednesday that no one was under arrest and that investigators would present anything they discovered to the Wayne County Prosecutors Office for consideration.

"We're very, very fortunate that child is still with us," Fitzgerald said.

In April, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law a bill that requires guns stored or left unattended to be locked if it is reasonable to believe a child will be present.

She signed the bill two months after a gunman killed three people at Michigan State University and around 16 months after a 15-year-old high school student fatally shot four people at Oxford High School. Whitmer's office referred to both shootings when she signed that bill and others dealing with guns.

There have been at least 128 unintentional shootings by children in the U.S. this year, according to a database by Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group that calls for stricter laws about gun, and 54 people died.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
These 6 open California state jobs might let you work remotely. How much do they pay?

The state of California is hiring in the departments of motor vehicles, insurance, managed health care and more.

State jobs are known for offering competitive benefits and enrollment in the nations largest state public pension plan. Many of the following jobs have specific requirements, which are linked.

Sift through some of Californias latest state jobs offering remote work available on the CalCareers website, posted in the last seven days, as of June 9:

Senior telecommunications engineer | Permanent full-time

Locations : Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles counties

Department : Public Utilities Commission

Salary: $10,569 to $13,228 per month

The senior telecommunications engineer uses their technical knowledge of communications engineering to determine if facilities are operating within the parameters of infrastructure programs.

Positions within the department may be eligible for remote work depending on the jobs needs, according to CalCareers.

The application closes on June 17.

Want to stand out when applying for California state jobs? Your guide to these departments

Senior staff counsel | Permanent full-time

Location : Sacramento County

Department : Motor Vehicles

Salary: $10,225 to $13,118 per month

The attorney collects intake of petitions and protests and then creates resolutions for procedural issues.

Remote work is offered but applicants must reside in California, according to CalCareers.

The application closes on June 22.





Product architect | Permanent full-time

Location : Sacramento County

Department : Motor Vehicles

Salary: $8,700 to $11,659 per month

The product architect is responsible for enhancing the experience and access to the California Department of Motor Vehicles technology products.

Remote work is available but applicants must reside in California, according to CalCareers.

The application closes on June 22.

Health equity & quality attorney | Permanent full-time

Location : Sacramento County

Department : Managed Health Care

Salary: $11,296 to $14,503 per month

The health equity & quality attorney advises on the most complex and sensitive legal matters for the California Department of Managed Health Care.

The position is eligible for full-time remote work for those who reside in California, according to CalCareers.

The application closes on June 19.

Associate governmental program analyst | Permanent full-time

Location : United States

Department : Insurance

Salary: $5,518 to $6,907 per month

The associate governmental program analyst performs the complex analytical staff assignments, program planning and evaluations and policy analysis.

Remote work is available but employees may be required to work in person on designated telework days, according to Calcareers.

The application closes on June 21.

Associate governmental program analyst | Permanent full-time

Location : Sacramento County

Department : Inspector Generals Office

Salary: $5,684 to $7,116 per month

The associate governmental program prepares data analysis reports and visualizations. Some in-office work might be required.

The application closes on June 20.

Want to stand out when applying for California state jobs? Your guide to these departments

What do you want to know about life in Sacramento? Ask our service journalism team your top-of-mind questions in the module below or email servicejournalists@sacbee.com.
Abduction, rape and murder: Should Kentucky pay up when prosecutors get it wrong?

Edwin Chandler was wrongly convicted in 1995 of manslaughter and robbery and spent nine years in prison and another seven on parole while still branded as a felon.

Since 1983, 27 Kentuckians have been exonerated after spending a combined 250 years behind bars  an average of nine years each  for crimes they did not commit.

The longest was locked up for 28 years.

Seven were from Jefferson County.

On Thursday, three exonerees urged the General Assemblys Interim Judiciary Committee to join 38 states that by law offer compensation to people who are wrongfully convicted.

The three, all from Louisville, testified about the pain they suffered while in prison and the hardships they suffered searching for jobs after they were released and even after they were exonerated.

Mike Von Allmen told how he was locked up 13 years after he was wrongly convicted in 1983 in the abduction and rape of a woman because of mistaken identity.

He held up a photograph of the actual rapist as he told the committee how he was unable to find his trade as a plumber after he we was paroled after serving 11 years of his 30-year sentence because of his conviction.

This is not a bill that should have any opposition, he said. Ask your constituents if they were wrongly jailed for one day, wouldnt they expect compensation?

More: Slap on the hand: How LMPD officers involved in egregious misconduct remain on the force

Edwin Chandler, who was wrongly convicted in 1995 of manslaughter and robbery and spent nine years in prison and another seven on parole while still branded as a felon, told how he suffers from post-stress disorder and had a panic attack  while mowing his lawn  in which he imagined prison walls closing in around him.

Chandler was cleared after new technology identified fingerprints on a beer bottle left at the scene as belonging to another man, and new evidence showed that corrupt Detective Mark Handy coerced a statement from Chandler and taped over a surveillance video that could have pointed to the real killer. Handy pleaded guilty to perjury and was sentenced to one year in prison.

A third witness, Johnetta Carr, told the committee how she was 16 years old when she was interrogated by police for 11 hours until they coerced a false confession from her that she had killed a boyfriend. She was convicted in 2008 and freed and exonerated after four years in custody.

Under HB 571, exonerees who could show they were actually innocent would be eligible for damages from the state of $65,000 for each year they were wrongly incarcerated or $75,000 for every year on death row. The bill would pay $25,000 for every year they were on parole as well as $25,000 for legal expenses and costs.

The compensation would be available if their conviction was reversed or vacated or if they were pardoned, but Rep. Jason Nemes,R-33rd, the bills chief sponsor, said the pardon would have to be based on their innocence, rather than other factors.

Under the bill, exonerees would still be able to sue local or state police for violations of their civil rights, but if they recovered a verdict or settlement greater than their state compensation they would be required to reimburse the state for the difference.

Suzanne Hopf, a staff attorney in the Department of Public Advocacy and director of the Kentucky Innocence Project, said compensation is a part of making exonerees feel whole again."

In an email, Nemes noted that if the compensation bill passes, compensation would be available even if there was no proof of misconduct or wrongdoing by law enforcement. That contrasts with a civil suit, in which the plaintiff would have to prove misconduct.

Chandler received an $8.5 million settlement from Louisville Metro to settle his wrongful arrest lawsuit, and the estate of William Virgil, who served 28 years before he was exonerated in Campbell County, got $28 million.

Committee members seemed to support the legislation and asked only procedural questions about it.

Addressing the witnesses and other exonerees in the audience, Rep. Daniel Elliott, a Republican who represents Boyle and Casey counties and who chaired the hearing, said, I dont dont know what to say to you other than Im sorry.

Also read: 'What in the world is going on'? See video of crazy long TSA lines at Louisville's airport

Reporter Andrew Wolfson can be reached at (502) 396-5853 or awolfson@courier-journal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky urged to pass HB 571, compensation for wrongful convictions
Legal experts on Thursday responded to the indictment of former President Donald Trump over his mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House, declaring it a good day for the rule of law, historic and a sad moment.

Trump, who faces seven counts, said hes to appear in court in Miami on Tuesday. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN! he wrote in a Truth Social screed reacting to the latest big development in just one of his multiple legal woes.

Its absolutely historic, conservative attorney George Conway, a fierce Trump critic who is divorcing former top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, told CNN. It is stunning to see. It is breathtaking to see. But its not surprising at all.

Trump will argue that he was mistreated and he is being singled out and hes being abused, but hes gotten the benefit of the doubt, Conway said. If any of us had taken this volume of documents home, and we jerked around the National Archives and Records Administration for a year and a half-plus, and then forced the government to get a search warrant, it wouldnt have taken a year and a half for them to get that search warrant ... These charges could have been brought long ago.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who earlier this week predicted an indictment of the former president was just days away, told MSNBC the development was a defining moment for this country in understanding the rule of law.

Obama White House acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal called it a sad moment  not because Trump was being targeted or treated unfairly, but because it underscores extreme damage he has done to the institution of the presidency & country as a whole.

Katyal said he expected Trump to spew a whole lot of lies about prosecutors and these charges in the days and weeks to come and noted the judicial process will be extremely long and complex.

Trump will cry foul and claim the courts and the government are rigged against him, he added in a Twitter thread. But make no mistake, he will be afforded ... the very same presumption of innocence as any other defendant in this country.

My views on United States v. Trump, the 1st indictment of a former President ever:

1. Its a sad momentnot sad because Trump is being targeted or treated unfairly  but sad b/c it underscores the extreme damage he has done to the institution of the presidency&country as a whole  Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) June 9, 2023

Civil rights attorney Andrew Laufer simply tweeted: Someone let Trump know the following: Youre going to prison, traitor.

Someone let Trump know the following: Youre going to prison, traitor. https://t.co/2tC60HcLMa  Andrew C Laufer, Esq (@lauferlaw) June 9, 2023

Former Defence Department special counsel Ryan Goodman said the reported charges fit the alleged conduct, a perfect match.

* Espionage Act *



ABC News: The charges include "willful retention of national defense information."



(As I have long predicted.)



That offense fits the alleged conduct, a perfect match.@KFaulders reportinghttps://t.co/QKPCuW7XOK  Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) June 9, 2023

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe tweeted: History is being made.

Seven-count federal indictment of former President Trump in Florida tonight. History is being made. Accountability will follow more swiftly because venue squabbles were taken off the table by not charging in DC.  Laurence Tribe   (@tribelaw) June 9, 2023

Former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner called it: A good day for the rule of law, a good day for all Americans who respect the rule of law and expect our high government officials to obey the law.

And Alabama University Law School professor Joyce White Vance called for cameras to be allowed in the courtroom.

Chief Justice Roberts should immediately amend the rules to permit cameras in federal courts, she tweeted. The American public is entitled to watch the proceedings against Trump in their entirety. Anything less would be an injustice.

Chief Justice Roberts should immediately amend the rules to permit cameras in federal courts. The American public is entitled to watch the proceedings against Trump in their entirety. Anything less would be an injustice.  Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) June 9, 2023

Related...
Acer continues shipping hardware to Russia despite its claims to the contrary, Reuters

Acer continues to supply equipment to the Russian Federation

Acer Sales International SA is an intermediary company which supplies Acer computer equipment to Russia. It belongs to Acer and is registered in Switzerland. The delivery chain included a range of custom delivery services.

Read also: 90 companies that helped Russia evade restrictions to face EU sanctions

In this way, hardware was supplied outside Taiwan and didn't breach the countrys sanctions against Russia.

Acer said it strictly adheres to all imposed international exports sanctions against Russia, adding that the subsidiary "had not shipped any laptops or desktops to Russia since April 8 last year", but supplied a "limited number of displays and accessories to the Russian market for civilian daily use while ensuring compliance with international sanctions".

Read also: Over 2,000 companies wait for approval to exit Russian market  KSE

An anonymous source told Reuters that Acer shipment included PC monitors and laptops even after April 2022.

Swiss sanctions allowed the export of laptops and their components to Russia until Dec. 16, 2022. Acer stopped exports from Switzerland to Russia after the date.

Russia could have purchased Acer hardware from third countries, the company said.

Acer's Russian division said nothing has changed since April 2022, answering a media query.

Acer officially suspended operations in Russia on March 8, 2022 "due to the latest events."

Russia announced on June 2, 2023 that it is prepared to ban hardware imports to the country, including such brands as Acer, IBM, and Dell.

Were bringing the voice of Ukraine to the world. Support us with a one-time donation, or become a Patron!

Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Brussels is using circus performers in an innovative project to help draw attention to its Art Nouveau heritage (Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD)

Belgium's capital Brussels is a treasure trove of Art Nouveau gems and now the city is trying to attract new audiences to its rich heritage, with the help of acrobats and trapeze artists.

The Belgian capital's decorative deights are thanks in large part to feted architect Victor Horta (1861-1947).

To mark the 130th anniversary of Horta's first landmark masterpiece, Tassel House, the authorities have designated 2023 the year of Art Nouveau.

The aim is to stake Brussels' claim as the capital of a style that for many captures the essence of the Belle Epoque's languid beauty before the horrors of World War I.

Born at the end of the 19th century, the Art Nouveau movement was based around the aesthetics of curves, combined with intense craftsmanship centred in particular on sgraffito wall decorations and stained glass.

Among the initiatives aimed at shining a spotlight on the Art Nouveau riches is the eye-catching decision to invite acrobats into these museum-like spaces.

"It's an architecture inspired by life, the body and plants," Michael Hottier, co-director of the Brussels-based acrobatic company behind the project, told AFP.

"You very quickly get the natural connection with grace, the organic side."

A trapeze artist dangled down the middle of a sweeping staircase and acrobats perched in front of an intricate window at another house designed by Horta.

The students from Brussels' Higher School of Circus Arts were being captured for a visual project "Arabesque" that will go on display to draw attention to the masterpieces.

Staging shows for lots of people in the protected buildings is not feasible, so the photo and video displays should help bring it to a broader audience.

But it wasn't always the case that these architectural jewels were treated with such reverence.

As Brussels went through the upheavals of the 20th century, they were often left abandoned, damaged by war or denigrated by city planners.

Horta's piece de resistance -- the grand People's House -- was torn down in the 1960s to be replaced by a high-rise office block.

Those that did survive have now been restored to their former glory and are being showcased to the public.

That is the case for the magnificent Solvay House, which was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Monument in 2000 and opened as a museum in 2021.

Hottier hopes the acrobatic exhibition will tour beyond Brussels and spread knowledge of the city's Art Nouveau wealth outside of Belgium.

"These are buildings where you feel good, where the light is beautiful," he said.

jca/jug/pvh
Activist sues Rep. Lauren Boebert for defamation, alleging she slandered him on Fox News when he revealed her alleged drug use, abortions, and escort work

Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado. Alex Wong/Getty Images

David Wheeler previously made allegations about Rep. Lauren Boebert's personal life.

Now he's suing her for defamation, alleging she defamed and disparaged him on Fox News.

Boebert has not responded to the activist's suit or Insider's request for comment.

An activist has sued Rep. Lauren Boebert for defamation, alleging she lied about him and his nonprofit on Fox News and in other media outlets after he made a series of allegations about her personal life as she mounted a bid for reelection.

David Wheeler, president of the American Muckrakers Political Action Committee, sued the Colorado Republican in federal court in Colorado on June 8, alleging Boebert appeared on "The Sean Hannity Show" last year among other media outlets to deny Wheeler's allegations that she'd used meth, had two abortions, and worked as a paid escort  and threatened to sue him and his PAC.

"Defendant Boebert admitted during that broadcast that her motive was to thwart Plaintiffs' first amendment rights to public participation in matters of public concern, stating, 'We're going to make sure this political hack never has the opportunity to do this to anyone else again,'" the suit, obtained by Insider, says.

American Muckrakers, which bills itself as a political action committee that reports on candidates seeking reelection, said in court papers that sources who knew Boebert, including an alleged witness who was purported to work at Boebert's now-shuttered "Shooter's Grill," substantiated its claims.

"When faced with Plaintiffs' well-corroborated scoops, reporting that Congresswoman Boebert served as a paid escort, had twice aborted pregnancies and had used illegal drugs including methamphetamine, Defendant went on the offensive by threatening litigation and making the news-story about Plaintiffs' character, funding, and alleged mendacity," the legal complaint says.

Boebert did not follow through with her threat to sue Wheeler or American Muckrakers, the lawsuit says. She did say the allegations weren't true on Twitter and in interviews.

Fact Check: Not true.

Fake News. Four Pinocchios.



Also

Yall need Jesus!  Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) June 15, 2022

Wheeler alleged Boebert's legal threats and interviews with media outlets damaged both his and American Muckracker's reputation and violated his First Amendment rights. He said he'd received death threats and that donations to American Muckrackers tanked following Boebert's media appearances.

Wheeler is seeking money damages, any money Boebert earned from her purported defamation of him, and for the media entities to retract the alleged defamatory statements, according to the lawsuit.

A representative of Boebert did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on Friday.

In a statement to Fox News after her attorney sent a letter to the PAC threatening legal action, Boebert said she would not "stand by and pretend this is normal behavior."

"Partisan organizations putting out blatantly false and disgusting accusations won't stop me from advancing freedom and conservative values," Boebert told Fox News in June 2022.

Read the legal complaint here.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Crystal Wilson, whom authorities arrested and extradited in connection to the disappearance and death of her 10-year-old adoptive son Jesse Wilson, was recently released from a Maricopa County jail on her own recognizance after her attorney successfully convinced a judge to modify her release conditions.

Jesse was last seen alive in 2016 in his Buckeye home. His remains were found six miles from his home about two years after his disappearance.

Authorities arrested Crystal in Gainesville, Georgia, back in December 2022 on one count of abandonment or concealment of a dead body after being indicted by a Maricopa County grand jury. She remained incarcerated at the Hall County Jail before being extradited to Phoenix on March 4 where she was booked into a Maricopa County jail.

Court documents obtained by The Arizona Republic show Crystals public defender, Denae Suchy, filed a motion on May 18 requesting the court grant her client supervised release.

Suchy argued that the evidence against Crystal was weak and circumstantial and noted that prosecutors brought the charges before a grand jury just before the statute of limitations ran out. She added that the $50,000 cash-only bond placed on Crystal was excessive given the nature of the charge against her along with her clean record.

Maintaining Ms. Wilsons current incarceration simply due to the inability to post a high bond while other individuals are released because they have greater financial resources but who have more significant criminal records or facing more serious charges does not serve any societal interest, the motion reads.

Joseph Hinrichsen, the prosecutor handling Crystals case, filed a response on May 31 opposing the request, arguing Crystal Wilson no longer had any ties to Arizona and that Jesses brother strongly opposed Crystals release believing she was responsible for Jesses death and that she posed a threat to his own safety.

Hinrichsen also argued that Jesses surviving siblings claimed Crystal physically abused them and left them malnourished, but conceded that a Department of Child Safety investigation found the claims to be unsubstantiated but would not comment as to why.

Lastly, Hinrichsen suggested it remained possible Crystal murdered or injured Jesse despite not being criminally charged for doing so.

Either the victim died as an accident and Defendant did not want the authorities to know perhaps believing if the victim died in a runaway attempt she would be held responsible, or Defendant caused the victims death, the motion states.

Suchy filed a response on June 2 arguing the prosecution suggesting Crystal may have abused her adoptive children was irrelevant and improper as they relate to the charged offense, and that prosecutors likely wouldnt be able to include the abuse accusations at trial given DCS findings.

Suchy also stressed that Crystal isnt considered a violent offender in the eyes of the court and doesnt intend on contacting Jesses siblings  much less harming them.

Superior Court Judge Joseph Kreamer signed an order on Tuesday releasing Crystal from jail on her own recognizance on the condition she undergoes electronic monitoring and not contact victims, complainants, witnesses or arresting officers.

A Maricopa County Sheriff's Office spokesperson confirmed to The Republic that Crystal was released on Wednesday.

Her next scheduled court appearance is on July 26 in Maricopa County Superior Court.

Reach the reporter Perry Vandell at 602-444-2474 or perry.vandell@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @PerryVandell.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Adoptive mother of Jesse Wilson released from jail on own recognizance
A man arrested in the fatal shooting of a woman outside a Cedar Park gas station last week called her a gay slur before firing three shots at her, according to an arrest affidavit released Friday.

Bradley Stanford, 23, has been charged with murder in the death of 24-year-old Akira Ross. Officials say he did not know her.

Ross's death caused a member of the Cedar Park Pride group to ask the City Council on Thursday night to hold a vigil for Ross.

"We are livid to hear a beautiful young person was shot down in cold blood on June 2 simply for being gay," said Kelley Holiday, a secretary for Cedar Park Pride, which is a LGBTQ+ nonprofit. "We are also outraged that the city and the Police Department have not made it is evident that this was a hate crime."

Anthony Hill is hugged after being presented flowers with a pride flag attached to them at the Cedar Park City Council meeting Thursday. Hill's daughter, Akira Ross, was killed last week in Cedar Park by a stranger gas station who yelled gay slurs at her, according to an arrest affidavit.

In Texas, prosecutors can add a sentencing enhancement to crimes if they can prove that the offender acted because of the victims' race, color, national origin, religion, disability, age, gender or sexual orientation.

Holiday also asked for the City Council to form a committee to look into the quality of life for LGBTQ+ residents and for the city to support the Queer EmPower festival on July 15 in Cedar Park.

More: Akira Ross' partner, father say she was killed by stranger in Cedar Park because she was gay

Council members could not respond at the meeting to Holiday's requests because they were not listed as an agenda item.

Mayor Jim Penniman-Morin said Friday that he plans to review the requests with Cedar Park Pride and then to discuss them with the city's staff to understand which are feasible. "I think we're all interested in making sure our city is safe and welcoming to all," he said.

The council on Thursday passed a resolution for the second year in a row proclaiming June 2023 as LGBTQIA+ Pride Month in the city.

During the meeting, Police Chief Mike Harmon said officers worked 43 hours nonstop after Ross was killed and even traveled to South Texas to help arrest Stanford.

"I want to say to Akiras family I hope this guy is brought to the most extreme justice as possible," Harmon said. "Let's stick to the facts and evidence in this case and not try this in the court of public opinion. It doesn't do the family any good."

More: Woman gets life in prison for 2019 murder of Air Force man in Cedar Park

Harmon said investigators have an "overwhelming" amount of evidence in the case, but he did not give any details.

Bradley Stanford, 23, has been charged with murder in the shooting death of Akira Ross.

Ross' father, Anthony Hill, and her partner have said the shooting was a hate crime.

Hill spoke to the council on Thursday, saying that Ross was a loving person who cared for everyone she met.

"It's a hurting time, and I hope we can fix this so that no one else has to go through this tragedy," he said. "I don't hate anyone of any color, creed or kind, and I teach my kids that."

Cedar Park Mayor Jim Penniman-Morin, left, presents Anthony Hill, center, and Carolyn Hartman, right, with the proclamation recognizing June as Pride Month at Thursday's Cedar Park City Council meeting.

The affidavit said surveillance video showed Stanford arriving at 9:42 p.m. June 2 at the Circle K gas station at 12020 RM 620 North and parking near a gas pump. Stanford entered the store and then came out of it walking toward his car where he retrieved an object that he tucked into the front waistband of his shorts, the affidavit said.

Ross arrived at 9:44 p.m., parking her car two gas islands away from Stanford's Nissan, according to the affidavit. It said that five minutes later, the surveillance video showed that Stanford walked toward Ross, who was standing outside the driver's door of her car, "and the two appear to have an exchange of words."

The affidavit said Stanford then walked toward the rear of the Nissan and that Ross fell down, according to the store's surveillance video. Stanford then drove away, the document said.

Akira Ross .

Police later interviewed a friend who was in the car with Ross and Tanya, Ross' partner. Tanya has previously requested that her last name not be printed because of fears of retaliation.

The friend told police that Ross and Tanya were having a "small verbal argument" when they arrived at the gas station, the affidavit said. It said the friend believed the argument caught the attention of Stanford. Tanya got out of the car and walked into the store, the affidavit said. Stanford then began to speak to Ross, who was still sitting in the vehicle, according to the affidavit. The friend who was in the back passenger seat could not hear what was said but told police that "Ross began to get agitated," the document said.

After Ross got out of the car and walked into the store, the friend said, Stanford began digging around in his car as if he was getting a gun, according to the affidavit. The friend sent a text message to Tanya that read, "Yo tell the cash person this man got a gun and trying to get KB (Ross)," according to the affidavit.

Ross came out of the store a few minutes later and was standing by the front of her car when Stanford walked over to her, police said. Stanford then acted like he was going to return to his car but instead walked to the back of Ross' car, the affidavit said.

It said the friend heard Stanford yell a gay slur at Ross and fire three rounds.

When police talked to Tanya, she said that she and Ross were having a small argument about a pizza order when they pulled up to the gas station, according to the affidavit. She said she walked into the store, and Ross came in it shortly after her, police said. Ross told Tanya that Stanford was waving his gun around outside, the affidavit said.

Tanya told the cashier to call the police and then walked outside and began to record on video a verbal altercation between Ross, who had left the store, and Stanford, according to the document.

"Ross can be heard in the video telling the male to leave," the affidavit said. Tanya told police that Stanford "retrieved a black handgun from his waistband," and shot Ross, according to the affidavit.

Police later that day found Stanford's car at his apartment complex about 2 miles away in the 9500 block of RM 620, the affidavit said. Stanford was arrested Sunday in Ingleside, near Corpus Christi. He was being held Friday at the Williamson County Jail with bail set at $1 million.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Cedar Park police say man yelled gay slur at Akira Ross before killing
Aileen Cannon, a U.S. district judge appointed by former President Donald Trump to the federal bench, will initially oversee the federal case against the man who elevated her to the role, according to ABC News and the New York Times.

The assignment of the case to the Trump-appointed judge comes after a federal grand jury indicted the former president on Thursday on charges related to the recovery of more than 300 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago.

Former president Donald Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday on charges related to the mishandling of classified documents at his Florida resort.

This isn't the first time Cannon has been involved in the federal investigation into Trump's mishandling of classified documents that were seized from Mar-a-Lago in summer 2022. She approved Trump's request for a special master to review the documents seized by investigators for potential claims of attorney-client privilege or executive privilege.

Thursday marked the second time Trump was indicted on criminal charges, but the first time in American history that a former president has faced federal charges. Cannon's involvement will add additional scrutiny to a case caught up in political tensions as Trump seeks the Republican nominations in the 2024 presidential election.

Here is what we know about the judge who will preside over Trump's case during his court appearance on Tuesday in Miami:

Her previous involvement in the case

Cannon's decision to appoint a special master temporarily halted a criminal investigation by the Justice Department into the classified documents that were recovered from Mar-a-Lago.

The DOJ opposed Trump's request for a special master at the time, arguing that the documents were already reviewed for attorney and executive privilege and opposed halting the use of the documents for investigating potential crimes.

Pages from the order by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon naming Raymond Dearie as special master to serve as an independent arbiter and to review records seized during the FBI search of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, is photographed Thursday, Sept. 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick) ORG XMIT: DCJE393

The appointment of a special master was appealed by the Justice Department and overturned by a federal appeals panel in December. In their ruling, the judges criticized Cannon's decision, saying that the traditional way to challenge evidence in an investigation is after charges are filed.

"The law is clear," the three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled. "We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so."

Additionally, several of Cannon's rulings related to the investigation into the documents recovered at Mar-a-Lago drew scrutiny for being perceived as unusually favorable for Trump.

Her appointment caused controversy

As a Trump-appointed judge, Cannon's role presiding over the case will bring additional controversy to a historical case against a former president, but she might also receive attention for her past affiliations with Republican politicians.

Cannon and her husband both donated $100 to the campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to the New York Times.

Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama, said the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered the reassignment of judges who lean so heavily for a defendant that it calls into question their objectivity.

This is persuasive authority that Judge Cannon must step aside if the case falls to her as a permanent assignment, Vance said in a series of tweets.

But Nancy DePodesta, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Illinois now practicing white-collar and government law at Saul Ewing, said she doesn't think Trump's appointment is necessarily a conflict forcing her to recuse herself. The Justice Department may review whether there is a conflict based on her involvement in the investigation before the indictment, she said.

I dont think there is necessarily a conflict, DePodesta said.

From journalism to the judiciary

Cannon was born in Cali, Colombia in 1981, but grew up in Florida where she graduated high school from Ransom Everglades, a private preparatory school.

She attended college at Duke University and wrote for a Spanish-language newspaper, before graduating with her bachelor's degree in 2003. She later attended law school at the University of Michigan.

Before becoming a federal judge, Cannon spent time clerking for a conservative federal judge and working for the major law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. She left the firm in 2012 to become a federal attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

She was appointed to her current role on the federal bench by Trump in 2020. She was later confirmed by the U.S. Senate in a 56-21 vote in November 2020.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Donald Trump's federal case will be overseen by a judge he appointed
Washington  A federal district judge in South Florida appointed by former President Donald Trump appears to have been assigned for now to oversee his criminal case involving his handling of sensitive government documents, CBS News confirmed.

The summons sent to Trump on Thursday notifying him of the indictment lists U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, whose chambers are in Fort Pierce, Florida, as the judge assigned to preside over at least the initial proceeding, a source familiar with the matter told CBS News. Trump is slated to appear in federal district court in Miami on June 13 for his arraignment.

It's unclear whether Cannon will remain the presiding judge for later stages in the case. ABC News was first to report her assignment.

Appointed to the federal bench by Trump in 2020, Cannon was involved in stages of the legal wrangling last year that stemmed from the FBI's execution of a court-authorized search warrant at Trump's South Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago. In that search, federal investigators seized 33 boxes of material from the property, 13 of which contained roughly 100 documents bearing classification markings.

Trump filed a lawsuit in federal court requesting the appointment of a special master, or independent third party, to review the records recovered by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago, and Cannon presided over the dispute.

The judge granted Trump's request for a special master and ordered the Justice Department to temporarily stop using the seized materials for its investigation pending completion of the special master's review.

But her ruling was widely criticized by legal experts and upon appeal by the Justice Department, reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in a unanimous ruling. The three-judge panel that reviewed Cannon's decision included two appointed by Trump, Judges Britt Grant and Andrew Beshear.

In an earlier stage of the fight over the special master, during which federal prosecutors sought access only to the batch of 103 documents marked classified, the Supreme Court rejected a request by Trump for the special master to have access to the sensitive records.

Trump was indicted Thursday on charges involving the retention of national defense information, conspiracy and obstruction.

The former president has denied wrongdoing, claiming he is being unfairly targeted by the Biden administration in an effort to thwart his bid for the White House in 2024. He announced changes to his legal team on Friday and will now be represented by Todd Blanche, a former federal prosecutor. Lawyers Jim Trusty and John Rowley said in a joint statement that they resigned.

"It has been an honor to have spent the last year defending him, and we know he will be vindicated in his battle against the Biden Administration's partisan weaponization of the American justice system," Trusty and Rowley said. "Now that the case has been filed in Miami, this is a logical moment for us to step aside and let others carry the cases through to completion."

Trusty, Rowley and Lindsey Halligan, also on Trump's legal team, met with Justice Department officials on Monday to discuss the investigation into the former president. Halligan told CBS News she is still representing Trump.

Arden Farhi contributed to this report

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Air quality over the US and Canada is slowly getting better. But the threat of more wildfires sending smoke across the border looms

Major US cities trapped under a thick, orange blanket of smog this week will soon get a reprieve, as the Canadian wildfires spewing noxious fumes across the border are easing up.

Fire activity in the province of Quebec has improved, and the area covered by smoke is now just 7% of what it was last week. Slightly cooler temperatures and higher humidity in Canada mean less smoke billowing across the border.

But there are two big caveats: Its still early in the Canadian fire season, meaning more wildfires could flare up this summer. And several US states are still suffering poor air quality, which could cause health problems.

Smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to be transported south by winds into the U.S. resulting in moderate to unhealthy air quality across parts of the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, Ohio Valley, and Midwest on Friday, the National Weather Service said. Some improvement is expected this weekend.

While the worst has passed for most of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, potentially harmful air pollutants in New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC, are expected to linger Friday before slowly clearing over the next several days.

Philadelphias air quality index exceeded 150 early Friday, making it unhealthy, according to the monitoring website AirNow. New York Citys air quality index was below 150 early Friday and deemed unhealthy for sensitive groups.

The oppressive smoke this week has postponed professional sports games, grounded flights due to poor visibility, shuttered zoos and beaches and forced many to mask up outdoors. Climate experts have warned such events are becoming more frequent due to human-induced climate change.

About 50 million people across several Midwest and East Coast states were under air quality alerts early Friday, but the number could change as conditions improve in some areas.

Heres what to expect:

 Entire states air quality is compromised: All of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Indiana are under air quality alerts, as well as parts of Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina.

The US Capitol in Washington, DC, was shrouded in smoke Thursday. - Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images

 Schools go remote: Public schools in New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC, have remote learning Friday to help reduce exposure to air toxins.

 New York City will improve: After having the worlds worst air quality multiple times this week, according to IQAir, the Big Apple could see some significant improvement, Mayor Eric Adams said Thursday. As of right now, the smoke models are not indicating another large plume over the city, Adams said, though he urged people to mask well when outside.

 Evacuated Canadians can go home: Most of the Halifax residents evacuated because of the wildfires will be allowed to return home Friday, Mayor Mike Savage said. About 16,000 people fled their homes during the height of the wildfire evacuations, and about 4,100 remain evacuated.

 Firefighters will get help: New York state plans to send forest rangers to help fight the wildfires in Quebec Friday, Gov. Kathy Hochul said. Federal resources have also been deployed, the White House has said.

Scientists warn such routine-altering weather events are more likely to continue disrupting daily life as the planet warms, creating the ideal environment for more severe and frequent wildfires.

When flames burn, the smoke can travel thousands of miles, which puts millions more people in harms way.

Wildfire smoke is particularly dangerous because it contains tiny particulate matter, or PM2.5, the tiniest of pollutants. When inhaled, it can move deep into lung tissue and enter the bloodstream.

It comes from sources including the combustion of fossil fuels, dust storms and wildfires. Such smoke has been linked to several health complications including asthma, heart disease and other respiratory illnesses.

CNNs Jennifer Gray, Brandon Miller, Robert Shackelford, Andrea Cambron, Laura Ly, Caroll Alvarado, Kristina Sgueglia, Sara Smart and Jen Christensen contributed to this report.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
Akron store clerk who shot bystander during dispute with customer is acquitted in trial

An Akron convenience store clerk who police say shot a bystander inside a Lovers Lane store while in a dispute with another customer recently was acquitted.

A jury in Akron Municipal Court Judge Davis Hamiltons courtroom found Gurninder Banvait not guilty of negligent homicide, a first-degree misdemeanor.

Banvait, 56, was arrested in the death of Torres Bruster, 48, who was shot on Sept. 1, 2022.

Bruster was a bystander in the East Akron neighborhood store when Banvait drew a gun during a dispute with another male customer that apparently started over incorrect change, police said. The gun discharged and struck Bruster in the head.

Bystander killed in store shooting: Akron store clerk charged in Sept. 1 shooting that led to bystander's death

Bruster was in a coma and died Oct. 19.

Banvait said the other customer threatened to kill her, tried to grab her through an opening in the Plexiglass divider and had damaged the store.

Attorney Jon Sinn represented Banvait.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Akron store clerk acquitted of negligent homicide in shooting
PORT ST. LUCIE  A man accused in the fatal shooting last month of a 20-year-old man in Port St. Lucie was apprehended Friday in Fort Myers, police said.

Alan Dale Williams III, 21, was taken into custody in connection with a May 24 shooting that Port St. Lucie Police said happened off Southwest Gatlin Boulevard just east of Interstate 95. Williams III is in the Lee County Jail.

Officers shortly before 7 p.m. went to Southwest Aledo Lane and Brigantine Place for a reported shooting, and found the man, a Port St. Lucie resident, dead in a 2022 red BMW 330i, police officials said.

Video surveillance shows the victim and a ... female passenger in his vehicle meeting up with two other individuals in a separate vehicle we believe to be a red Jeep Cherokee, Acting Police Chief Richard Del Toro said at the time. Suspect exited the red Jeep Cherokee, got into the back of the victim's vehicle. After a short drive through the parking lot, we believe he discharged a firearm at which time the victim was shot in the back of the head.

Police on May 25 announced theyd gotten a warrant for the arrest of Williams III with help from social media, law enforcement partners and the public after releasing a still capture from surveillance video. The warrant charges him with murder and possession of a firearm by a felon.

A red Jeep suspected to have been used in the incident also was recovered.

Police didnt identity the deceased 20-year-old man, citing Marsys law.

Introduced in memory of a young woman murdered by her ex-boyfriend, Marsys Law was created to offer crime victims a slate of rights, including protecting them and their families from harassment by their attackers. Some law enforcement officials have interpreted the statute as applying to any victim, as well as to law enforcement officers being entitled to privacy and having their identity protected.

We believe the suspect and victim knew each other, Del Toro said at the time. Don't know what the motive was behind the meeting to begin with, but we're going to follow up on that and get some answers for the family.

Williams III in 2022 pleaded no contest and was adjudicated guilty of robbery with a deadly weapon and third degree grand theft charges in connection with a 2018 incident in Port St. Lucie, records show. He was sentenced to just over four years in prison, but was given credit for almost three years of time served.

Del Toro said investigators were interviewing witnesses and the passenger in the BMW, an 18-year-old woman who wasnt hurt.

What, if any, relationship between the 18-year-old woman and the 20-year-old man who was fatally shot wasnt clear.

'Got caught up in wrong crowd.': Port St. Lucie teen turns life around, from defendant to youth ambassador

Babies dying in hot cars: Cases on Treasure Coast rare, but have happened

Will Greenlee is a breaking news reporter for TCPalm. Follow Will on Twitter @OffTheBeatTweet or reach him by phone at 772-267-7926. E-mail him at will.greenlee@tcpalm.com

This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: Port St. Lucie fatal shooting suspect caught in Fort Myers
In the face of delays and air advisory alerts, some airlines are allowing customers to change flights with no additional fees.

Several major airlines have waived change fees for those flying to or from airports in the Northeast, Midwest and Canada due to dangerous air quality conditions from the Canada wildfires.

American Airlines customers flying today can reschedule by the end of the day for a flight to the same destination on or before June 13 without paying the change fees.

United Airlines will waive rescheduling fees for tickets purchased before June 7 if flights are rescheduled by June 13 in the same cabin and to the same destination.

Southwest Airlines will allow customers flying today to rebook their flights for a date within the next 14 days with no additional fees.

These announcements follow forecasted delays and cancellations from the Federal Aviation Administration in 9 major airports across the Northeast, including Newark, LaGuardia, JFK, Boston Logan, Philadelphia, and Ronald Reagan Washington National.

The smoke from over 400 wildfires in Canada has created hazy skies across the Eastern United States. Wildfire smoke poses health threats and over 100 million Americans are affected by air quality alerts.

US air quality map

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Airlines waiving change fees for passengers due to wildfire smoke
Supporters of former President Donald Trump gather at an intersection to protest his potential arrest, in Warwick, Rhode Island, on March 21.

Supporters of former President Donald Trump gather at an intersection to protest his potential arrest, in Warwick, Rhode Island, on March 21.

I dont need to do research, only need to see the obvious.



So wrote a friend, one of several in a group text where we banter about politics. My friend is staunchly conservative and often makes unsubstantiated assertions.

His message reminded me of a campaign button I had purchased years ago as a kid. It was the only one I ever bought. I wish I still had it, but Ive never forgotten it. The button, brown with white letters, read, Question Authority.

Youll find that phrase now on not only buttons, but T-shirts, hats and various tchotchkes. It has been attributed to everyone, from founding father Benjamin Franklin to 60s counterculture figure Timothy Leary to Greek philosopher Socrates. Youll even find a recent novel, The Question Authority, about the decadeslong impact on several female characters who were victimized by their male teacher, a sexual predator.

Regardless of the phrases purported origins  which remain unsubstantiated, by the way  my childhood self was a defiantly independent little SOB, and the saying resonated with me.

It has served as a kind of North Star, albeit with caveats, as I eventually amended the phrase to where it has now stood for most of my life: Trust no one. Question everyone. Including yourself. Especially yourself.



Ive always thought it wise to ask questions, seek answers and then seek them again, especially when wondering whether I might be wrong. Most would agree, I hope, that it takes a certain courage to admit when youre wrong. But I would argue that it takes even greater courage to be willing to find out if you are.

I bring all this up as a prologue because I believe it to be at the heart of whats dividing our nation. We seem to have retreated to corners that are not only ideologically defined, but also characterized by an intractable refusal to admit we might be wrong  or even worse, an unwillingness to find out.



Imagine if time travel were possible, and Jesus Christ himself came through a portal to announce: You know, everything I peddled back then was just a bunch of BS. I was a lousy carpenter but a good bullshitter, so I made my living doing that. Dont believe a word I ever said.



Its a silly flight of imagination, to be sure, but if such a thing happened, how would Christians react? Theyd probably vilify him, call him the product of Satan and tell him to go back to making furniture.



Or imagine if he came through that time portal and told the right-wing Christian faithful: Youre doing it wrong. Youre not following my teachings. He might even feel that hed have to start the whole damned thing over again. And it would be the Christians rather than the Romans wanting to nail him to a cross this time, at least figuratively.



So where am I going with all this? Lets start with these three claims:

Former President Barack Obama is not a United States citizen. Survivors of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, were crisis actors. COVID-19 vaccines were 98 times worse for people than the coronavirus itself.

Not one of those statements is true, of course, but imbecilic websites have repeated them regardless. And in keeping with the truism about a sucker being born every minute, some people still believe those claims.

If a website made those assertions  all of them demonstrably false  and continued to make untrue claims thereafter, why would anyone ever trust it again?

The Gateway Pundit is such a website, a far-right extremist waste of bandwidth that has spread those lies and other gibberish for the entirety of its existence. In 2022, it started writing about the the Electronic Registration Information Center, leading to results that threaten our democratic processes and show how gullible  or stupid, if you prefer  people can be.

ERIC is a nonpartisan organization comprising election officials from states that have opted into the voluntary partnership, which helps members maintain election integrity and prevent voter fraud. Its not necessarily about intentional fraud, but inadvertent fraud  like someone who moved to a new state and registers to vote there without canceling a previous registration record elsewhere. Joining the ERIC collaborative helps states share information, correcting mistakes on voter lists when they occur.

ERICs origins can be traced to the 2000 presidential election, which was so chaotic that Congress required states to start keeping voter registration lists. But with their limited resources, state governments struggled to keep voter rolls current, let alone accurate.

Why? People move. On average, Americans move over 11 times during their lives, or approximately once every five years. And people die. Having worked at the U.S. Postal Service, I can tell you that letters regularly arrive at almost every post office addressed to people who either have died or no longer live at the intended address. (For what its worth, DMVs and hospital groups are often among the worst offenders, especially in states not part of the ERIC partnership.) The current resident typically returns the letter, catalog or magazine, writing on it hasnt lived here for six years or died 11 years ago. It rarely matters if you return the mail to the sender. Eventually, another letter goes out, only to be returned once more.

The same happens with voter rolls, which makes life difficult for officials trying to track voters in their precincts based on wrong or outdated addresses. Inaccurate voter rolls have a downstream effect. Voter guides, registration information and mail-in ballots, all funded by taxpayers, can get sent to the wrong places. Voters end up standing in line at election time to verify their correct address. Provisional ballots become the fallback, delaying final election tallies.

ERIC cuts through that by pulling data from many government sources and cross-referencing it with each states voter rolls, with software sifting through it all to provide an updated list of registered voters. It proved accurate to the point of being able to tell if a John Doe in one state was the same John Doe in another.

Voting officials, in red and blue states alike, saw the value: The system cut down on voter fraud, which Republicans liked, but it also required states to reach out to eligible voters who hadnt registered yet, which Democrats liked.

In its first year, 2013, with only seven states on board, ERIC correctly identified 92,000 voters who had moved to different states. Over time, more joined the partnership. By 2021, with 28 states and Washington, D.C., sharing data, that number of identified voters rose to almost 3.5 million.

The bottom line? ERIC has been a bipartisan success story in election administration, restoration and accuracy. It was lauded by officials in every state that joined the partnership  32 at its peak, almost evenly divided between red and blue.

Then came the lies. The Gateway Pundit began posting articles that falsely described ERIC as essentially a left wing voter registration drive bankrolled by billionaire George Soros and aimed at getting Democrats to win elections.

The site had some help. Cleta Mitchell, a zealous adherent to the lies about a supposedly stolen 2020 election, began targeting ERIC on her voting podcast, Whos Counting. She called it an insidious organization. This is the same woman who was on the phone call in January 2021 when then-President Donald Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find him nearly 12,000 more votes.

An election denial infrastructure has since emerged, repeating lies about voting and ERIC while instructing people to pressure state lawmakers and election officials to end their partnerships. In just the space of a year, eight Republican-led states abruptly pulled out of ERIC.

They all listened to a lie, despite:

countless election experts, administrators and scholars  from across the country and from both parties  touting ERIC as a bipartisan institution that can catch and eliminate voter fraud, whether by neer-do-wells or outdated voter rolls.

high-ranking officials in those states (like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) initially praising ERIC, or even calling it one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have.

Why would Republicans, who have been screaming about voter fraud for years, try to dismantle perhaps the best mechanism we have to protect against it?

According to Charlotte Hill, the interim director of the Democracy Policy Initiative at UC Berkeleys Goldman School of Public Policy, the flip-flopping lawmakers typically cite two flimsy excuses for bailing on the partnership (with typically meaning they all seemed to get the same memo on how to explain their exit).

First is ERICs refusal to remove founder David Becker from its board of directors. The lawmakers apparently think hes some sort of Democratic operative, despite a letter signed by two dozen current and former Republican state and local officials praising Beckers long history of working with leaders in both parties to improve election integrity.

Second is ERICs requirement that all members conduct outreach to offer residents the chance to register if eligible. Well, of course! Many studies have shown that those most likely to register in voter outreach efforts are poor people, young adults and people of color. You guessed it: Those people are more likely to vote for Democrats. Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft has described the voter outreach requirement as harassing people. You guessed it again: Ashcroft is a Republican.

In all eight states, every lawmaker who flip-flopped and decided to exit the ERIC collective is either up for reelection in 2024 or positioning themselves to run for a higher office. (Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, for example, is posturing for a U.S. Senate run.)

How ironic is it that many of those stop the steal Republicans complaining about voter fraud (which is extremely rare) turn out to be the ones committingnearly all of the rampant fraud, then and since?

Its as embarrassing an irony as pushing for policies in the name of election integrity that are actually hurting election integrity.

Its no different from the people who call voting a civic responsibility and patriotic duty, yet take issue with registering Americans they loathe.

Its no different from people screaming the loudest about the federal deficit  the very same people trying to defund the IRS, which is responsible for collecting the monies that fund the federal government and help pay off the countrys debt.

Its no different from those who scream about freedom, yet are the ones using the government to curtail freedoms they dont like.

Its no different from the people who say they love America but refuse to acknowledge the entirety of its history, warts and all, and who trumpet their allegiance to the Bill of Rights but violate its tenets time and time again.

An NPR investigation into the ERIC story suggested that such an exodus can be seen as a policy blueprint for an election denial movement that would change virtually every aspect of how Americans vote. Abandoning a system that provides the comfort of accountability in the nations voting process is more than disturbing; its a terrifying threat to the very foundations of our democracy.

The question isnt whether this is a frightening development. The question is something far more troubling and foreboding: Why?

Why would anyone believe a website that has repeated debunked lies in the past and is now doing it again? Why would anyone think the 2020 election was stolen, let alone give credence to liars like Mitchell?

Id hate to call these people stupid, but when somebody says, I dont need to do research, I have to wonder why. Why dont they feel the need to ask questions? Why do they refuse to examine any evidence? Are they really that damned dumb?

Or are they just terrified of the possibility that they might actually be wrong?

It is a sad and reprehensible political reality that the election officials in those eight states who flipped on ERIC did so because their prime directive is job security, so they bow to pressure from the constituents who determine their future employment.

The irony of leaving ERIC, and the tragedy, is that it will likely cause an increase in the kind of voter fraud that constituents believe ERIC is responsible for  and that ERIC would help prevent if those states remained in the partnership.

If voter fraud occurs in those states now, and voter rolls turn into a convoluted jumble, what then? Who will these people blame? Or will those states allow fraudulent votes to stand as legitimate, especially if the ballots favor their preferred candidate?

This is not about the lie. Its not about the cost of believing the lie. Its about the cost of refusing to question whether its a lie in the first place.



The failure of democracy that many seem to fear comes from the failure of people to question themselves and challenge their own beliefs. This doesnt seem to be in our nature, or at least not in the nature of many, and I dont know of any path or method that can compel them to do so. Do you?
Three Brodsky didnt know a lot of bisexual people growing up. So when she came out as a 37-year-old, she wondered, Where are all the bi people?

And then she realized they were everywhere, living around her. She just didn't know they were bisexual. Now eight years later, she runs Bconnected, a bisexual and queer social group in Colorado with about 2,400 members.

The bisexual community makes up 58% of LGBTQ-identifying adults, but theyre far less likely to be out to people in their lives than gay or lesbian adults. So when they do come out, where do they find community?

'Biphobia' and combatting stereotypes

Brodsky began on Meetup, a social platform where many bisexual community groups get their start with a mission: Get bisexual people in a room and see what happens. Excited for conversation and bonding about the experience of being bisexual, she was discouraged when she tried to book a bar space and an employee told her it sounded like a sketchy vibe.

This view comes from a long line of stereotypes about bisexual people  that theyre distrustful, greedy, or sexually promiscuous.

Stereotypes, discrimination, or whats known as biphobia is what makes these community spaces for bisexual-identifying folks so crucial, Brodsky says. Theres no one way, of being bisexual. The umbrella term bi+, which includes bisexual, pansexual, queer, fluid, or other, unlabeled identities, can include a variety of sexual and romantic expressions that even change over the course of an individuals life.

To create culture and to connect with each others stories and say, Heres how Im being bi. How are you being bi?  versus trying to blend in with straight culture or trying to blend in with gay culture, Brodsky says.

Bconnected spans most of the area around Denver and just several cities outside of it. The group hosts sit-down conversations, but they also do hikes, game nights, arts and crafts, skiing, brunches and even blacksmith classes.

The group has also facilitated lasting friendships and relationships. Sam and Brie Tynen met at a Bconnected game night in 2017  they got married last year.

Brie and Sam Tynen's wedding, officiated by Bconnected founder Three Brodsky, right.

To disclose or not to disclose: Inside the push for bisexual-affirming medical care

Creating community out of need

Bisexual Resource Center, the oldest nationally-focused bisexual organization in the U.S., has become a de facto hub for bi culture.

According to Jessica Podkalicki, Bisexual Resource Centers program and operations coordinator, part of the group's mission is to offer advice to those who dont know where to start. Team members are open to workshopping community-building initiatives on the phone or via email, and they have a Find a Bi+ Group page where they promote local groups.

The Bi Resource Center connects the bi+ community through resource, support and celebration.

Ian Lawrence-Tourinho, the head of amBi network, originally joined the Los Angeles chapter of the social group after moving from San Diego and leaving behind the thriving bisexual community he found there.

In Los Angeles, he eventually discovered the floundering amBi group on the brink of disbanding. So he took over the group in 2010 and built it up. Today, amBi is an international network with 24 chapters across five continents.

I see so many friendships come together out of amBi groups, and then people wind up doing other things outside of what the chapter does, Lawrence-Tourinho says, Im just so happy because thats one of the things that biphobia, bi invisibility robs us of  that kind of connection and affirmation and networking.

amBi members gather together during an event.

Bisexual groups are also born out of niche  when Casey Abbott read Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much, she was at first disappointed she didnt have anyone to talk to about it. Then she realized as a librarian at the Boston Public Library, she had the power to create that space and she started Book Bi Book, which meets monthly.

Ive had both straight and queer people tell me that bi people dont exist and that being bi is just a stepping stone to being a lesbian, Abbott says. Thats exhausting."

Free from 'unicorn hunters' and being sexualized

Bisexual groups also offer a refuge from oversexualizing bisexuality  both amBi and Bconnected specify that their groups are not for dating or hookups. Some of the most persistent stereotypes about bisexuals are that they're sexually promiscuous, incapable of monogamy, or more likely to cheat on their partners. Bisexual women, in particular, are also often fetishized, with their sexuality being seen as a "party girl phase" or existing for the pleasure of straight men.

Bconnected member Bethany Sprague told USA TODAY she appreciates having a space that's free from unicorn hunters  couples looking to experiment sexually with a bisexual person.

"There's plenty of dating that goes on, but that isn't the focus," Sprague says. "I'm not going to some sort of meat market where it's like 'Ooh, there's new bisexuals to hook up with.'"

It just feels like home

In addition to being a place to meet other bisexual people, bisexual community groups offer a rare chance for bisexual-identifying to be completely themselves. When Kristin Robbins first found Bconnected six years ago, she said it felt like the first time she had ever been seen as a queer person.

This group gave me the courage to be out, she says. It just feels like home.

Brodsky says shes designed Bconnected to be accepting of the flowy energy of being under the bisexual-plus umbrella  an acknowledgment of the fluidity of sexuality, but also gender expression.

I always describe it as a safe place to be creative with my own expression, with my own exploration of my own gender, my own sexuality, says Brie Tynen, who is trans. A lot of people have changed their names, changed their pronouns  you can be creative with this group and you change your name and everybodys immediately got it.

Bconnected members at a group event.

How can the bisexual community grow?

Part of AmBis mission is creating a community space not centered around activism. Lawrence-Tourinho says thats a distinction all bisexual community spaces should make, and that folks should come to terms with what their bisexuality means to them before diving into activism. There is joy to be found in your bi identity outside of the outward-facing disparities, he says.

Even if officially were not activists, I think were directly taking on the disparities head-on, Lawrence-Tourinho says.

In Brodskys eyes, the bisexual community is responsible for its own visibility.

In the past seven years, Bconnected has taken on a degree of mentorship as a place for people in all stages of their bi journey  folks who have been out for 20 years and folks who have been out for 20 days.

So many bis I meet have this insecurity, like imposter syndrome, like Im not queer enough, I have couple privilege, Im married to a straight male, Brodsky says. Youve got to shake those feelings off and own it.

It's Pride Month!: Stay up to date with USA TODAY's latest LGBTQ coverage

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Bisexual people are sexualized, stereotyped: How these groups can help
Cassian looks out into a sterile white room where prisoners make widgets.

Prisoners arent supposed to enjoy their time in prison. You would think actors who play prisoners, however, would get a bit more of a break. But the stars of the wonderful Star Wars series Andor, including Diego Luna and Andy Serkis, felt like their on-screen prison scenes were a bit too authentic.



If youll recall, Lunas Andor was sent to a prison factory on the ocean planet of Narkina V after being arrested, where he and his fellow workers were forced to make very specific widgets. The prisoners, and thus the actors, were forced to wear uncomfortable paper clothes and work in a white, distressingly sterile space. So when you see the characters absolutely miserable in the scenes, that misery was quite real.

Read more

Speaking with the Hollywood Reporter, Serkis revealed he and the other actors felt like they were imprisoned themselves:

The desensitization of wearing a paper suit and walking in bare feet was the most strange thing about the process. Week in, week out, everybody looking like a carbon copy of yourself, you feel like youve lost your identity. And everything about that set was hostile in its clinicalness. It did strange things to your head, like it was designed to do.

Luna concurred. Every day, going into those white walls, dressed in that uniform, made you feel like just another number. The prison metaphorically became a different thing for each actoreveryone found a way to hate the prison.

Once you remember that Andors costume designer specifically designed their prison outfits to be too uncomfortable to cosplay in at conventions, it all sounds quite horribleand made for some of the best scenes in the series. It also helped, according to THR, the prison scenes were the last ones filmed after a grueling 10-month shoot, so the weariness you see on the actors faces is quite real. In fact, it sounds like Andors production designer Luke Hull only has one regret about Narkina V:

One final design element, however, didnt quite meet Hulls high standards: Cassians cell toilet. The Star Wars toilet still keeps me up at night, Hull sighs. We probably could have done a bit more work to make it more interesting.

The entire article is well worth a read if you have time, as it goes into the prison scenes and the heist on Aldhani in detail. Theres some great concept art as well.





Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel and Star Wars releases, whats next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.



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Anne Diamond presented Good Morning with Anne and Nick, and TV Weekly, as well as appearing on Celebrity Big Brother and Loose Women

Presenter Anne Diamond has revealed she has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Diamond, 68, well known for hosting shows such as the original Good Morning Britain on TV-AM, said she received the diagnosis on the same day that she found out she was to be made an OBE.

The presenter, who currently works for GB News, explained she had undergone a double mastectomy in what she described as her "fight against breast cancer".

She said it had been "a long journey" and the reason for her recent absence.

"I haven't been on a world cruise, which is what I know social media has been saying... because I'm well known now for loving cruises," she said in an interview with her GB News colleague Dan Wootton.

'Back to work'

"It's been a fight against breast cancer. That's what it's been. It's been a long journey. And five months later, I'm still not at the end of the journey, but I'm through it enough to come back to work."

Diamond began her career in regional news before going on to become a star of daytime telly, in the 1980s and 1990s, for both the BBC and ITV.

The British journalist, broadcaster, and children's health campaigner hosted shows such as Good Morning with Anne and Nick, alongside Nick Owen, as well as TV Weekly.

Diamond alongside fellow broadcaster Nick Owen in 1987

A familiar face to viewers of shows like Loose Women, Channel 5's The Wright Stuff and its replacement Jeremy Vine, Diamond appeared on Celebrity Big Brother in 2002.

Diamond lives in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, also presented on BBC Radio Oxford and BBC Radio Berkshire.

She joined GB News last year to front its weekend breakfast show with Stephen Dixon, but the past six months have seen her step back from her duties on health grounds.

She explained she had received her cancer diagnosis on the same morning that she received an email saying she was to be made an OBE in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to public health and charity due to her campaigning on cot death.

After her son Sebastian died from sudden infant death syndrome [Sids] in 1991, Diamond joined forces with the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths (FSID), now the Lullaby Trust, and health authorities to launch the Back to Sleep campaign.

Recalling the day she heard about her OBE, she said: "It was a wonderful moment and that was like 9:30 in the morning.

"But I knew then, because I'd already seen my GP, that I had to go to a breast cancer screening thing later in the morning. I thought I would just go for a mammogram, and a couple of tests and I'd be free in an hour.

"I spent the entire morning at my local hospital where they did everything, biopsies, X-rays, CT scans, a couple of mammograms, everything, and by lunchtime I was still there.

"And a lovely lady came with a lanyard around her neck that said MacMillan Cancer Care and I knew then it was serious."

Graphic showing how to check your breasts for cancer

Diamond went on to say she was "still going through it", with reference to her cancer treatment, and that she had found radiotherapy "very hard". The first operation she had, she noted, was nine hours long.

But she said she was now "well enough" to return to work on her current show from this Saturday.

"So it's been a journey, but I'm not pretending for a minute that I am extraordinary, because I am fully aware that a quarter of women in this country are going through what I've just gone through and I don't have any advice to give," she said.

"I only have empathy."

If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this story, support and advice is available via the BBC Action Line.
Apple and Amazon failed to win a dismissal of an iPhone price-fixing lawsuit against them

Apple allegedly tried to prevent the growth of a secondary market for its high-priced products.

A federal judge in Seattle rejected the proposed dismissal of a lawsuit targeting Apple and Amazon for inflating the prices of iPhones and iPads on Thursday (June 9).

Originally filed in November, the lawsuit targets a 2019 agreement between the two companies in which Amazon agreed to restrict the number of Apple resellers on its platform, in exchange for Apple giving Amazon a discount of up to 10% on its products.

Read more

In a motion to dismiss, lawyers for Apple argued that the agreement was meant to prevent the sale of counterfeit knockoffs of its products on Amazon.

The plaintiffs in the case are all US customers who purchased Apple products on Amazon after 2019.

There were as many as 600 Apple resellers on the site before the 2019 agreement, according to the initial complaint. Afterward, prices rose more than 10% on the Amazon marketplace, and discounts, which had been offered frequently, were discontinued.

Apple and Amazon were fined for a similar agreement by Italys antitrust authority in 2021, although the fine was overturned on appeal.

The two companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the judges decision.

Quotable: An anti-competitive agreement

Erecting barriers to entry to keep competitors out and raising prices in the wake of their elimination is precisely the kind of conduct that Congress enacted antitrust laws to prevent.  Plaintiffs original complaint in November.

How big are Amazon and Apple? By the digits

$2.85 trillion: Apples market capitalization, making it the most valuable company in the world by that metric. Amazons is a little less than half that, at $1.27 trillion.

1,541,000: Number of Amazon employees, both part-time and full-time, making it the second-largest employer in the world.

2 billion: Number of worldwide active Apple devices, including MacBooks, iPhones, and iPads.

60%: Percentage of American households that subscribe to Amazon Prime. Thats about 147 million Prime accounts.

Related stories:

Apples Vision Pro announcement at WWDC didnt mention the word metaverse

Apple is investing billions in US-made 5G components as it looks to move manufacturing out of China

Apple is making another bet on an emerging market in Asia

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How is AQI calculated? Heres how you can monitor your local air quality in Washington

As fire season lengthens and excessive heat plagues Washington state more frequently during the summer months, checking the air quality goes hand-in-hand with checking the local weather forecast.

External everyday factors such as vehicle fuel emissions, gas from industrial facilities and wildfires affect daily pollution. To measure this, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calculates a daily air quality index, known as the AQI, on a scale of zero to 500.

The AQI measures anything from zero to 50 as healthy, while anything at 301 and higher is considered hazardous.

To calculate accurate AQI specifically representative of Washington states cities and rural communities, distributed sensor networks are put into place to gather data.

What contributes to poor air quality?

The EPA monitors ground-level ozone pollution, particle pollution, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, lead and nitrogen dioxide. The agency is required to monitor these criteria pollutants under the Clean Air Protection Act.

Each criterion pollutant can uniquely contribute to harmful health effects and negative environmental consequences.

According to AirNow, a federal partnership with the EPA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other government entities, ozone is naturally present in the Earths atmosphere. However, pollutants such as ground-level ozone, which are emitted through vehicles, contribute to poor air quality and can irritate the respiratory system.

Good ozone occurs naturally in the upper atmosphere and protects us from harmful sun rays, according to the EPA. Its counterpart, ground-level ozone, is the toxic pollutant that is the main ingredient in smog. Ozone is typically more prevalent in the heat when air is stagnant.

Particle pollution is often a result of wildfires. A study published in the AirNow discovered that wildfires contribute 15 to 30% of atmospheric primary fine particulate matter emissions in the United States.

PM2.5, also known as particle pollution, can be spotted in the air. The small floating particles can sometimes create a foggy appearance.

Emissions of fire pollution is the biggest concern, said University of California Davis professor Qi Zhang, who teaches in the Department of Environmental Toxicology and conducts research on air pollution.

What is the AQI chart?

The AQI chart is used to classify air quality levels using a formula and the criteria pollutant numbers. A number is calculated daily unless there is an extreme condition, such as a wildfire, which results in it being updated more often.

Air quality is reported using the Air Quality Index (AQI). Do you know what these numbers and their corresponding levels mean? View the chart below to find out. To see the current air quality in your area, visit https://t.co/CVx9g8Hm1q pic.twitter.com/ntlmHoPXq7  National Weather Service (@NWS) July 26, 2022

Zhang said when air quality is stable, the EPA uses 12-hour averages to calculate an AQI.

During fire season, air quality is calculated in real-time. Zhang said ozone levels are calculated hourly, and PM2.5 is calculated every three hours.

The AQI chart is broken into six colors: green, yellow, orange, red, purple and maroon. Each color represents a range on the AQI chart from zero to 500, with zero being satisfactory air quality and 500 indicating health warning and emergency conditions.

How to protect yourself from bad air quality

One of the most harmful pollutants to humans is ozone. While ozone is great in the upper atmosphere and protects those below from the suns harmful ultraviolet rays, in the lower atmosphere it can be poisonous to humans. Ozone is a gas compound made up of three oxygen atoms, which differs from the two oxygen atoms that living things typically inhale as regular air.

Long-term exposure to ozone can damage airways, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and ultimately is linked to higher rates of mortality.

The first step to staying protected from poor air quality is to keep informed with the most up-to-date AQI in your neighborhood. AQI scores are posted daily on AirNow or can be found on your smartphones weather app. If you dont have access to either, news outlets also inform the public when poor air quality scores are underway.

Cities throughout Washington state like Olympia, Tacoma, Bellingham and the Tri-Cities areas all have air quality monitors to track AQI and inform the community of air quality.

If the air quality in your neighborhood is unsafe, try to avoid going outdoors as much as possible. In your house, shut all your windows and if you have access to an air purifier, use it. Another quick fix would be to switch your air filters in your home.

Staying home is not feasible for everyone, so if you are required to be outdoors during unhealthy air conditions it is strongly advised to wear an N95 mask.

How do you check the AQI?

Here are some resources to compare air quality indexes across the United States:
How is AQI calculated? Heres how you can monitor your local air quality index in Idaho

As fire season lengthens and excessive heat plagues Idaho more frequently during the summer months, checking the air quality goes hand-in-hand with checking the local weather forecast.

External everyday factors such as vehicle fuel emissions, gas from industrial facilities and wildfires affect daily pollution. To measure this, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calculates a daily air quality index, known as the AQI, on a scale of zero to 500.

The AQI measures anything from zero to 50 as healthy, while anything at 301 and higher is considered hazardous.

To calculate accurate AQI specifically representative of Idahos cities and rural communities, distributed sensor networks are put into place to gather data.

What contributes to poor air quality?

The EPA monitors ground-level ozone pollution, particle pollution, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, lead and nitrogen dioxide. The agency is required to monitor these criteria pollutants under the Clean Air Protection Act.

Each criterion pollutant can uniquely contribute to harmful health effects and negative environmental consequences.

According to AirNow, a federal partnership with the EPA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other government entities, ozone is naturally present in the Earths atmosphere. However, pollutants such as ground-level ozone, which are emitted through vehicles, contribute to poor air quality and can irritate the respiratory system.

Good ozone occurs naturally in the upper atmosphere and protects us from harmful sun rays, according to the EPA. Its counterpart, ground-level ozone, is the toxic pollutant that is the main ingredient in smog. Ozone is typically more prevalent in the heat when air is stagnant.

Particle pollution is often a result of wildfires. A study published in the AirNow discovered that wildfires contribute 15 to 30% of atmospheric primary fine particulate matter emissions in the United States.

PM2.5, also known as particle pollution, can be spotted in the air. The small floating particles can sometimes create a foggy appearance.

Emissions of fire pollution is the biggest concern, said University of California Davis professor Qi Zhang, who teaches in the Department of Environmental Toxicology and conducts research on air pollution.

What is the AQI chart?

The AQI chart is used to classify air quality levels using a formula and the criteria pollutant numbers. A number is calculated daily unless there is an extreme condition, such as a wildfire, which results in it being updated more often.

Air quality is reported using the Air Quality Index (AQI). Do you know what these numbers and their corresponding levels mean? View the chart below to find out. To see the current air quality in your area, visit https://t.co/CVx9g8Hm1q pic.twitter.com/ntlmHoPXq7  National Weather Service (@NWS) July 26, 2022

Zhang said when air quality is stable, the EPA uses 12-hour averages to calculate an AQI.

During fire season, air quality is calculated in real-time. Zhang said ozone levels are calculated hourly, and PM2.5 is calculated every three hours.

The AQI chart is broken into six colors: green, yellow, orange, red, purple and maroon. Each color represents a range on the AQI chart from zero to 500, with zero being satisfactory air quality and 500 indicating health warning and emergency conditions.

The Treasure Valley can often creep into the second category, yellow for moderate, whenever an inversion occurs. The thick layer of clouds that hangs low over the Treasure Valley will trap in any pollutants, particularly carbon dioxide from cars. The pollutants grow worse in the winter and spring, which is before plants and vegetation have begun removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at high levels, according to NASA.

How to protect yourself from bad air quality

One of the most harmful pollutants to humans is ozone. While ozone is great in the upper atmosphere and protects those below from the suns harmful ultraviolet rays, in the lower atmosphere it can be poisonous to humans. Ozone is a gas compound made up of three oxygen atoms, which differs from the two oxygen atoms that living things typically inhale as regular air.

Long-term exposure to ozone can damage airways, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and ultimately is linked to higher rates of mortality.

The first step to staying protected from poor air quality is to keep informed with the most up-to-date AQI in your neighborhood. AQI scores are posted daily on AirNow or can be found on your smartphones weather app. If you dont have access to either, news outlets also inform the public when poor air quality scores are underway.

Cities throughout Idaho have air quality monitors to track AQI and inform the community of air quality, including Boise.

If the air quality in your neighborhood is unsafe, try to avoid going outdoors as much as possible. In your house, shut all your windows and if you have access to an air purifier, use it. Another quick fix would be to switch your air filters in your home.

Staying home is not feasible for everyone, so if you are required to be outdoors during unhealthy air conditions it is strongly advised to wear an N95 mask.

How do you check the AQI?

Air quality for the Gem State is measured by the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality. The department runs a real-time map on its website that updates the air quality every 15 minutes at 24 locations in Idaho, including four locations in the Treasure Valley.

Here are some resources to compare air quality indexes across the United States:
Demonstrators shout slogans as they protest against the killing of five Arab Israelis in the village of Yafia, west of Nazareth (AHMAD GHARABLI)

Thousands of Arab Israelis protested Friday in the country's north following the funerals of five killed in one of the worst crime waves to hit the minority in recent years.

The five Arab Israelis, including a 15-year-old, were shot dead on Thursday at a car wash in Yafia, an Arab town near the city of Nazareth, police said.

Since the start of the year, close to 100 people have been killed in crime-related violence in Arab Israeli communities, according to NGOs.

At the protest near the city of Nazareth, demonstrators raised banners reading "it is my right to live in safety" and "Yafia has lots her sons".

Mourners attended the burial of two of the five victims at the Catholic Church in Yafia on Friday.

The other three are to be buried according to Muslim traditions.

Arabs in Israel have long complained of discrimination and police inaction against violence and crime that disproportionately affects their communities.

Experts say Arab gangs have amassed large quantities of illegal weapons over the past two decades and are involved in drugs, arms and human trafficking, prostitution, extortion and money laundering.

On May 30, elected officials and representatives of the Arab minority protested in Jerusalem and called on the government to increase security.

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a decision to form a steering committee following a meeting with Arab lawmakers to discuss "solutions to the wave of murders in the Arab society".

On Thursday, he said he was "determined to stop this chain of murders" and would see that happen by not only reinforcing police but also "with the help of the Shin Bet".

The internal security agency does not normally investigate criminal activity.

Around 20 percent of Israel's population are Arabs, largely descendants of Palestinians who stayed on their land after Israel's creation in 1948. Many of them identify as Palestinians.

The figures include the population of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, both annexed by Israel in a move not recognised by the UN.

bur-mab-gb/jsa
Photo composite by The Daily Beast/Arizona Department of Education

An outspoken Arizona superintendents anti-woke crusade appears to be falling apart, with his snitch hotline overrun by crank calls and his claims of inappropriate classroom teachings refuted by teachers and education officials who say its total BS.

On Thursday, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne held a press conference to outline the progress of an Empower Hotline that the state Department of Education launched in March, local outlet 12 News NBC Phoenix reported. The hotline was established so parents and teachers could flag inappropriate content being taught that detracts from teaching academic standards including content about race, gender ideology or inappropriate sexual content, a March press release said.

But Horne conceded Thursday that the hotline had instead been inundated with nearly 30,000 prank phone calls and emails, and there was just one part-time DoE staffer tasked with going through them all. He wouldnt go into detail about how many calls received on the hotline were of legitimate concern, 12 News reported.

Horne claimed he received tips through the hotline that alerted him of Critical Race Theory being taught during professional development courses for teachers, that students were being called different names and pronouns without their parents consent, and that children were given emancipation papers during LGBTQ+ group meetings, CBS 5 Phoenix reported.

As it turns out, wegot some communication from [Mesa Unified District] teachers who observed things they think we should know about, Horne said.

Teachers Call BS on DeSantis Bonkers Attempt to Outlaw Critical Race Theory

He showed a large powerpoint presentation with text from a book that he said was part of teachers professional development. Black, Indigenous, people of color are most vulnerable due to living under a system of white supremacy, the excerpt said.

Now, to say that the United States is a system of white supremacy is an outrageous statement, Horne said.

However, a Mesa teacher told CBS 5 that neither they nor their colleagues had ever seen the textbook passage Horne referenced during the press conference.

Horne also placed blame on Catalina Foothills schools for keeping an alleged list of students pronouns, but the districts spokesperson told AZ Central that the whole concept was news to them.

Horne also referenced an LGBTQ+ club in Chandler Public Schools that broke an unspecified state law, but the districts communications spokesperson basically said they had no idea what the superintendent was talking about.

The district has not received information nor communication on this matter from the Arizona Department of Education, Chandler Unified School District Executive Director for Marketing and Communications Stephanie Ingersoll told 12 News.

Meanwhile, Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia said the superintendent continues to be an embarrassment to the state of Arizona.

Instead of making any actual effort to promote and elevate our public schools, his office is keeping busy fielding prank calls (thirty thousand, at last count!) and pursuing random allegations and complaints, some of them years old. Arizona deserves so much better, she said, CBS 5 reported.

The Arizona Department of Education did not immediately return The Daily Beasts requests for comment Friday.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Army veteran who disarmed Club Q attacker to lead first Pride parade since the shooting

Organizers in Colorado Springs, Colorado, are preparing for the citys first Pride parade since a November 2022 shooting at an LGBTQ club in the city that left five people dead and 17 others injured.

Richard Fierro, a decorated Army veteran who was one of two individuals who tackled and subdued the gunman inside Club Q, will lead the Colorado Springs Pikes Peak Pride in remembrance of the five people killed in the shooting.

Im humbled beyond belief to be accepted into the community and asked as a straight dude to grand marshal their parade, Fierro told NBC News. And to me, thats a signal of something that we all need to take, take light in.

The parades theme is The Power of Pride, a spokesperson said, emphasizing the communitys resilience and ability to stand strong in the face of tragedy.

Colorado Springs 2022 Pride. (Mermaid Jade Photography)

Fierro, 45, who served in the military for 15 years, was at Club Q on Nov. 19, 2022, celebrating a birthday with his wife, their daughter and her friends when he disarmed the shooter, who had an AR-15-style rifle.

I just know I got into mode, and I needed to save my family  and my family was at that time everybody in that room, Fierro said in a news conference days after the shooting.

Fierro emphasized the importance of remembering those who died, including his daughters boyfriend, 22-year-old Raymond Green Vance, and the impact the tragedy had on their families.

Those families are going to be hurting for forever and always changed. And thats important for us to continue to acknowledge, Fierro said this week.

Pikes Peak Pride expects a turnout of around 15,000 attendees for the weekendlong celebration. The shooting victims will be honored Saturday in a special ceremony and tribute, featuring speeches by local politicians, survivors and victims families.

Colorado Springs 2022 Pride. (Mermaid Jade Photography)

Sabrina Aston, the mother of Daniel Aston, 28, who died in the shooting, will also be walking in the parade.

Its so hard for us. We miss Daniel. Thats our biggest thing is, we want him back and so do the other five families, Aston told NBC News.

After leaving his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Daniel Aston, a transgender man, relocated to Colorado Springs, where he began working as a bartender and entertainer at Club Q.

His mother, also a Colorado Springs resident, recalled how liberated he seemed when performing at the club, sliding across the stage on his knees and delighting the crowd.

Aston added that we need to get out and let people know that parents who support their trans or queer children exist.

Security fears loom

The community is still experiencing the effects of a shooting that took place only seven months ago, and Fierros concerns for the safety of the upcoming parade are a stark reminder of the lingering trauma.

Listen, Im not gonna lie to you, Im worried about our parade. Its not that its something that I should be worried about. But again, I think most folks in any parade now, whatever parade that is, theres a fear there, Fierro said.

To ensure the safety of attendees, Pikes Peak Pride is working closely with the Colorado Springs Police Department and private security entities. The event, which will be held outdoors, will have a significant security presence, including security guards and an open plan that allows for more exit strategies in case of an emergency.

The Colorado Springs Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Fierro is sending a message to individuals who may be uncertain about backing Pride celebrations this month.

You dont have to do anything crazy, just show up or shake your neighbors hand.  It has nothing to do with whether theyre gay or straight, or whatever. It has everything to do with just being kind.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
Arrested while on vacation in Myrtle Beach SC? Heres what you should do next

Visitors to the Grand Strand come from all over to see everything Myrtle Beach has to offer, including the Carolina Country Music Festival which happens this weekend.

The Carolina Country Music Festival, which began Thursday, is known for three days of partying and music.

But when the partying goes wrong, vacationers could find themselves in trouble with the law quickly.

The week of CCMF is one of the busiest weeks of the year for local defense attorney Stephen Grooms.

Without question, the week of CCMF is our biggest week of the summer in terms of municipal court and magistrate court level offenses, he said.

The most common charges for vacationers are usually drug or alcohol related. That includes public intoxication and possession of drugs. Another common charge is unlawful carry, because South Carolina requires a handgun to be in a secured compartment.

The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) often works festivals such as CCMF to look out for underage drinking as well.

The best thing you can do for yourself, even if you get charged, is to be polite and respectful to law enforcement, according to Grooms.

The cities are not here to ruin your good time, he said.

But it can still be a shock to be charged when you are out of state. There are several different agencies and court systems within Horry County, from the Sheriffs Department to each citys own police force.

For example, an Horry County police officer could be standing five feet away from a Myrtle Beach police officer arresting someone, Grooms said.

But which agency and which court to go to will be listed on your charging documents. The Myrtle Beach Municipal Court and North Myrtle Beach Municipal Court are going to be the busiest this weekend for the Carolina Country Music Festival, Grooms said.

You got charged while on vacation. What next?

If you do get charged, the Horry County Solicitors Office offers programs that can be completed from anywhere in the country and can result in getting your charges dismissed, depending on what the offense was.

Tiffany Lee, the director of the Solicitors Intervention Programs, said that the Solicitors Office works alongside SLED agents to give people the information they need during CCMF.

We help them to find places, wherever they are, to accomplish the program requirements and successfully complete, she said. Completion from a diversion program result in a dismissal of a ticket.

But entrance into a diversion program is not an admission of guilt nor is it considered a plea.

While participating in a diversion program, the active case remains pending.

Its also always a good rule to know your surroundings and know the law where you are vacationing.

South Carolina has liquor laws that are different from other vacation hot-spots in the U.S. Its also a state where use of marijuana is still widely illegal.

Knowing your surroundings is key, Grooms said.
Replika logo SOPA Images / Getty Images

Last month, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released an advisory sounding the alarm about an epidemic of loneliness causing a potential health crisis. Some people see possible solutions in the expanding world of generative AI chatbots, but experts argue it could cause more harm than good.

With anti-social behavior on the rise, Muthy compared the adverse effects of loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and said the crisis deserved the same level of attention as "tobacco use, obesity and the addiction crisis." If we don't, it could cost the country millions, and "we will pay an ever-increasing price in the form of our individual and collective health and well-being," Murthy urged in the advisory.

With the advent of AI companion apps like Replika, the so-called "AI companion who cares," finding a short-term digital fix to fill the void is more possible than ever. But will AI technology only drive us further apart?

AI companions can't replace real human connections

It's already clear that overdependence on technology can harm our mental health, and "now chatbots and other AI programs could further replace the critical social interactions that help us build community," Daniel Cox wrote for Insider. While it may seem like a convenient solution, "making things easier is not always an improvement," and it ultimately can't replace genuine human interaction. Using AI to replace human interactions "would deprive people of their mental and social benefits," Cox added.

In a separate post on the American Storylines substack, Cox noted that the most significant issue with AI companions like Replika is that "it asks nothing of us" and promises to always be on the user's side. "A relationship that requires us to make no sacrifice or accommodation, that never challenges our beliefs or admonishes our behavior, is simply an illusion," he concluded.

It could benefit some, but we should be wary of "an easy fix"

Ina Fried, Axios' chief technology correspondent, said that, like most technologies, she sees the potential to help and to harm. "For people for whom what's really missing is purely interaction, I think there are ways that AI is gonna be able to help," she said on the "Axios Today" podcast. The difficult part is "to do it in a way that augments whatever human contact people have and that doesn't ignore the limitations." She could see the potential for someone with dementia "who really just needs that talking to and might repeat the same stories over and over." Fried was still worried about the potential to become too reliant on "an easy fix to humans that has become challenging or inconvenient."

Relying on AI could set "a dangerous precedent"

Depending on artificial intelligence to combat mental health issues and widespread loneliness "sets a dangerous precedent," Dr. Sai Balasubramanian wrote in Forbes. So far, no AI systems can effectively "replicate the intricacies of human nature, interaction, emotion and feeling." Health care industry leaders and regulators should keep that in mind and "prioritize viable and sustainable measures to resolve the mental health crisis, such as training more mental health professionals and increasing patient access to care."

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ASEAN to hold first joint military exercise in the South China Sea

The Southeast Asian bloc ASEAN will hold its first-ever joint military exercise in the South China Sea, its chair Indonesia said on Thursday, the latest multilateral security drills at a time of rising tension and uncertainty in the region.

The decision was taken at a meeting of military commanders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Indonesia, which will host the exercise in the North Natuna Sea, the southernmost waters of the South China Sea.

Indonesias military chief, Admiral Yudo Margono, told state-run news agency Antara the exercise would be in September and would not include any combat operations training. The purpose, Margono said, was strengthening ASEAN centrality.

ASEANs unity has for years been tested by a rivalry between the United States and China that is being played out in the South China Sea. ASEAN members Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia have competing claims with Beijing, which asserts sovereignty over vast stretches of ocean that include parts of Indonesias exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

Indonesian military spokesperson Julius Widjojono said the exercise was related to the high risk of disaster in Asia, especially Southeast Asia.

A conduit for about $3.5 trillion of annual ship-borne trade, the South China Sea has seen constant tension of late as China presses its claims with a huge deployment of coast guard and fishing boats as far as 1,500 km (932 miles) off its coastline.

China claims sovereignty via an expansive nine-dash line based on its historic maps, which an international arbitration court in 2016 ruled had no legal basis.

ASEAN has been pushing for a long-awaited maritime code of conduct with China to be completed and several of its members have had run-ins with Beijing in recent months.

Vietnam criticized Chinas deployment of a research vessel near several gas blocs in its EEZ, while Beijing was accused of sending suspected maritime militia into waters where navies of India and ASEAN countries held an exercise.

The Philippines chided Chinas coast guard for dangerous manoeuvres and aggressive tactics and plans to hold joint patrols with the United States, on top of an inaugural trilateral coast guard exercise they held with Japan this week.

China maintains its coast guard is performing regular operations in what is Chinese sovereign territory.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
When asked if grass should be ignored in heat of summer, pro gives his classic reply

The Kansas City region has been dry. Checking the United States drought monitor map for the last year, the area has been classified as abnormally dry and, at times, in a moderate drought. With the arrival of summer and the hottest, driest time of the year, many of us begin to water our lawns to prolong that vibrant spring green.

Area lawns are mainly cool-season species: tall fescue and bluegrass. Cool-season lawns thrive in the spring and fall. Summer stress causes the lawns to go dormant and turn brown unless ample water tricks them keep them green. Do lawns need to be watered, or can they be allowed to go dormant? The answer gets one of my patented responses: it depends. It depends on your level of inputs and desired look.

Cool-season lawns can recover from summer dormancy. They dont need to be watered on a regular basis. Once cooler conditions and rainfall arrive, the lawn awakens and starts to green up. The concern with dormancy is that there is a fine line between dormant and dead.

Several factors go into the lawns ability to survive prolonged drought: soil type, compaction, depth of rooting and culture, to name a few. The best recommendation for dormancy is to water occasionally, every two to three weeks. This will help ensure that the actively growing part of the lawn, known as the crown, stays hydrated. This reduces stress and keeps more turf alive.

Watering the lawn does retain the color. However, watering is expensive, and many question the use of the resource. If you do water, use the resource wisely. Properly watering means knowing how much water is being applied in the correct way.

Typically, lawns will require one to one and one-half inches of water per week. This amount of water soaks the soil to a depth of around six inches, which keeps the roots hydrated. The amount of water applied is measured in inches, not in minutes the sprinklers run. Length of time is not a measure of water output.

Proper lawn watering starts with knowing how much water your system puts out in a specific amount of time. This holds true whether you have an in-ground system or drag a hose. Set a rain gauge inside the sprinkler pattern and determine output. From there, you know how long it takes to run the system to achieve the needed amount of water.

When scheduling your sprinkler system to replace lost moisture, attempt to apply the inch of water in as few applications as possible. A three-time per-week schedule is common. Avoid the common Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Instead, opt for Tuesday, Thursday, and the weekend. Everyone watering on the same day puts pressure on the treatment process.

Hose draggers lack the convenience of an automated system. The goal is to apply the needed water in one weekly application. Deeply soaking the soil means the water runs for hours in one spot. Again, you must know your sprinkler output to know how long to run.

Whether you water or not is a personal choice customized to fit your budget, needs, and schedule. If you do water, water wisely. Water is our most precious resource: one we cannot live without.

Dennis Patton is a horticulture agent with Kansas State University Research and Extension. Need help? Contact the Johnson County Extension gardening hotline at 913-715-7050 or email garden.help@jocogov.org.
Aspiring state trooper is denied dream job because of his HIV status, Alaska suit says

A man who dreamed of becoming a state trooper since he was a child says he was denied a job in Alaska because of his HIV status, according to a lawsuit.

The man, who is identified only as John Doe in the complaint, accuses the Alaska State Troopers of discriminating against him.

He beat out hundreds of other applicants and was given a conditional job offer from the Alaska State Troopers in October 2020, according to a news release from Shortell Law, the law firm representing him.

As part of the application process, he underwent medical testing with Beacon Occupational Health and Safety Services, which is based in Anchorage, and his status as HIV positive was disclosed, the lawsuit says.

Beacon, which is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, said he would need accommodation because he is HIV positive and had reservations as to his ability to do the job, the lawsuit says.

The Alaska State Troopers then rescinded his offer, according to the lawsuit, which was filed June 8,.

In a statement to McClatchy News, a spokesman for the Alaska State Troopers said the agency denied discriminating against the man.

The public places immense trust in their law enforcement officers, and we review a large amount of information, including an individuals criminal history, work history, psychological fitness, physical fitness, medical fitness, and truthfulness, as we select men and women to become Alaska State Troopers to ensure that they can maintain the publics trust, the statement says. Due to the threat of litigation by this individual and Alaska privacy laws related to personnel information confidentiality, we cannot go into specifics regarding our decision specific to this situation.

Beacon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from McClatchy News on June 9.

The man lives with HIV that is undetectable and non-transmissible and would not require accommodation to fulfill the position of state trooper, the release says.

For years, the State of Alaska has been in the middle of a recruitment and retention crisis, especially in public safety, Caitlin Shortell, a lawyer with the firm, said in a statement. Given this reality, it is nonsensical that the Alaska State Troopers turned away John Doe, a healthy, fit, and fully capable applicant, just because he has HIV.

He wanted to become a law enforcement officer since he was a child and took many steps to prepare himself, including going on ride-alongs, volunteering at the California Highway Patrol Academy and completing an undergraduate thesis on a topic related to law enforcement, the lawsuit says. He also worked as a flight attendant, which helped train him in emergency preparedness and public safety.

(His) education and work experience made him highly qualified as an applicant for the position of Alaska State Trooper, the lawsuit says.

On Nov. 10, 2020, a lieutenant told him he was not selected to be a state trooper because he was not as qualified as other applicants, the lawsuit says. The Alaska State Troopers told him his job offer was rescinded in part because he was not a resident of Alaska and did not have prior military experience, according to the lawsuit.

But the agency routinely hires non-Alaska residents and people without military experience, the lawsuit says.

The agency acted on incorrect and discriminatory assumptions about people living with HIV, Shortell said in a statement.

It does not interfere with his ability to perform the duties of the job, the statement says. People living with HIV want to serve in law enforcement. Even having faced discrimination, Doe is still committed to serving as an Alaska State Trooper.

The agencys actions caused him to suffer lost wages and benefits, lost earning capacity and humiliation, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit asks that he be hired as an Alaska state trooper; be compensated for lost back wages, bonuses and benefits; and that the Alaska State Troopers refrain from discriminating against applicants with HIV, among other damages.

Restaurant manager touched young female workers, asked them to sleep over, CA suit says

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Austin developer Nate Paul, at center of Ken Paxton scandal, to be arraigned at 11 a.m. Friday

9:30 a.m. Friday update: Austin real estate developer Nate Paul, who is at the center of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's impeachment, will be arraigned on federal charges at 11 a.m. Friday in Austin, according to the court clerk's office.

The arraignment, scheduled before Magistrate Judge Dustin Howell, will shed light on what charges Paul is facing after his arrest Thursday afternoon. After the arraignment, the clerk's office says it will make public the indictment that lays out the FBI's case against Paul.

UPDATE: Austin developer, Ken Paxton associate Nate Paul charged with eight federal financial crimes

Nate Paul

Paul, 36, is a Paxton associate who has been accused of providing benefits to Paxton in exchange for the attorney general intervening in numerous legal issues Paul was facing. However, it's unclear if this indictment touches on the Paul-Paxton relationship or relates to a separate investigation that federal investigators launched in 2019 into Paul and his company.

Austin lawyer Gerry Morris said he will be in court with Paul on Friday but does not know who will represent Paul going forward.

Thursday: Nate Paul, the Austin real estate developer at the center of a federal investigation into Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is being held at the Travis County jail and facing federal criminal charges.

According to jail records, Paul, 36, was booked at 4:25 p.m. Thursday. The arresting agency is listed as the FBI. The charges he faces were not immediately known.

Paul and his World Class company have been under investigation since 2019, a year before federal investigators opened an investigation into Paxton in connection with his relationship with Paul. The basis for the initial Paul investigation is unclear. The Paxton investigation was triggered by a complaint from former lawyers in the attorney generals office who alleged Paxton misused his office to intervene in legal matters involving Paul.

The Paxton-Paul connection was a partial basis for a Texas House investigation that led to Paxtons impeachment on May 27. Paxton, suspended from office without pay, now awaits a trial in the Senate, where Paul has the potential to be a witness.

Nate Paul, bribery & whistleblowers: Breaking down the investigation into Texas AG Ken Paxton

Paul has been entangled in numerous bankruptcy proceedings and legal battles with his debtholders in recent years, and he has lost a number of high-profile properties  including the 3M campus in far Northwest Austin  as a result.

Earlier this year, a Travis County judge found Paul in contempt of court and ordered him to serve 10 days. Judge Jan Soifer fined him $181,760 for violating court orders, including making illegal transfers from bank accounts  allegations that Paul denies. However, two appeals courts temporarily stayed the ruling and Paul avoided going to jail.

This is a developing story; check back for details.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Ken Paxton associate Nate Paul to be arraigned at 11 a.m. Friday
empty airplane

The aviation industry is confronting a critical issue as the dimensions and weights of passengers continue to evolve. Ensuring the safety of airplanes relies on safeguarding the delicate balance of weight load and distribution. With peoples average heights and weights undergoing changes over time, it becomes imperative to closely monitor this situation.

In a recent development, two United States senators have raised concerns about the ever-shrinking space within airline cabins. With passenger comfort and safety in mind, they are calling for new cabin evacuation tests to be conducted, emphasizing their belief that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has overlooked the reality of flying in America today. These senators argue that the safety testing carried out in 2019 is no longer adequate given the current circumstances.

The senators have joined forces to address the issue of cramped conditions on flights, which have become a growing concern among travelers. They highlight that the reduced legroom and narrower seat widths pose potential risks during emergencies, particularly during rapid evacuation scenarios.

Photo Credit: Air New Zealand

Air New Zealand, hailed as one of the top airlines of 2023, has taken bold steps to tackle this issue head-on. The airline has implemented a passenger weight survey, requiring all international travelers to step on scales as part of the procedure. Rest assured, privacy is a top priority as the survey results are anonymized, guaranteeing confidentiality.

Photo Credit: Asiana Airlines

In addition to these concerns surrounding passenger safety, South Koreas Asiana Airlines has implemented a significant change in its policies. This decision comes in response to a recent incident where a passenger allegedly attempted to open an exit door mid-flight. As a precautionary measure, the airline has ceased selling seats near the emergency exits on Airbus A321s.

The aviation industry recognizes the challenges of larger passengers and cramped seating. Airlines and regulators are actively working to adapt and ensure safety and comfort in air travel, contributing to the industrys efforts toward passenger well-being and enhancing the overall travel experience.
Topeka High biology teacher Rosalina Nitollama opens the doors to her classroom as she has for the past 16 years teaching biology.

Rosalina Nitollama is for Topeka, and Topeka is for her.

The teacher never would have thought that just 16 years ago. She hadn't even heard of Kansas when she had been teaching in the Philippines and she was recruited by Topeka USD 501 to come to the U.S. as a biology teacher.

Nitollama jumped at that chance.

More: Topeka USD 501 cultural innovation focused on Ukrainian students, bilingualism this year

And as the veteran educator prepares to retire and head back home to the Philippines, she said she found a home in Topeka, and it's one she'll miss.

"I found so many helpful and appreciative and welcoming people," Nitollama said. "When I had a few medical emergencies, I had a lot of love from my co-workers and (Principal Rebecca) Morrisey. Even though I was a minority, I felt welcome. They made me feel like this could be my home. I felt so accepted."

Rosalind Nitollama was recruited from the Philippines to Topeka High

Topeka High biology teacher Rosalina Nitollama looks over a selection of leftover plants Tuesday as she wraps up her time at the school she's taught at for the past 16 years.

It was pretty much by accident that Nitollama even became a teacher in the first place.

She had been studying science at a university in the Philippines when she too a temporary job as a substitute teacher during a break in classes. But it turned out she loved teaching, and she made a career out of that position for two decades.

When Topeka USD 501 officials came to the Philippines, though, Nitollama was willing to give the Sunflower State a shot, even if she had never heard of Kansas and had looked at jobs elsewhere in the country.

More: After 40 years in education, Topeka High principal Rebecca Morrisey to retire

When she got here, though, she and her fellow Filipino teachers were amazed by the support they found among other Filipino emigres, as well as the school district.

Although much of her family and children live thousands of miles away elsewhere in the U.S. and the world, those people are why Nitollama never felt alone.

A stem from a cucumber catches the attention of Topeka High biology teacher Rosalina Nitollama as she combs through the selection of plants left over from her last semester's class this past Tuesday.

"It was a struggle at first," Nitollama said. "One thing was the language, and the communication. I understand English, but I still have to speak and listen to it slowly. But other teachers were a big help to my transition. The students were also a big help to learning the different cultural norms of the U.S."

Even if she never worked elsewhere, Nitollama took advantage of her time in the U.S. to visit 44 of its states, with only Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Washington, Oregon and Alaska remaining.

Nitollama is excited to see family back in Philippines

After 16 years teaching biology and physical science classes, Nitollama decided she is finally in a position in her career where she's ready to retire.

After teaching her last class, Nitollama is preparing to move back to the Philippines to see family, including her husband, whom she has not seen since 2019.

Family was a big reason why she moved to the U.S. in the first place, in trying to make sure her children had better opportunities in the country.

"It's been wonderful for them here, and they had the chance to have a good life here," she said. "And even though I have a good life here, Im excited to go back to the Philippines."

More: She put books into the hand of every Topeka USD 501 child over a five-decade career

"Ms. Nitollama left her country to serve our students," said Morrisey, the Topeka High principal who is also retiring. "I cant imagine being gone so long from her family, but she has done that with excellence while shes served our students. Shes always been present for the people she cares about, and Topeka High will miss her."

When she does leave, though, she said she'll be sure to tell the rest of the world about what she found in Topeka.

Rosalina Nitollama describes the impact her students have given her over the years teaching biology at Topeka High on Tuesday.

"When I go around the world, I will tell everyone about how much I love Topeka. Its the perfect sized place. Its an easy, affordable life. And theres so much culture and history to explore. I never understood students who didnt see that. Thats why I never moved. I felt love here, even though my actual family lived several hours away. That's not something you find everywhere.

"And I would know  Ive been to more than 40 states."

Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at rgarcia@cjonline.com or by phone at 785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Topeka High teacher Rosalina Nitollama retiring back to Philippines
In some areas of the Bakhmut front, the Defence Forces of Ukraine pushed the Russians back by 1.2 kilometres over the last day (8 June).

Source: Serhii Cherevatyi, spokesman for the eastern group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, on air during the national joint 24/7 newscast

Quote: "Taking advantage of the fact that the enemy is conducting rotational operations and that those units that are entering do not yet fully know the area and have not conducted appropriate reconnaissance and coordination, we struck and have been conducting assault operations for several days.

Over the previous day, our units advanced up to 1,200 metres in some areas. We are conducting all this within the framework of the defensive operation, which has been going on for many months."

   

Situation in Bakhmut

deepstatemap.live

Details: Cherevatyi said that the Defence Forces of Ukraine are trying to knock out the combat potential of the Russians as much as possible; they used to do it with the Wagner group and now with motorised rifles and airborne units of Russia.

The invaders are resisting, trying to cover the Ukrainian units with artillery fire. During this day, on the Bakhmut front, they hit the positions of the Armed Forces with tubed and rocket artillery 368 times; there were 15 combat clashes and five air raids. At the same time, 120 occupiers were killed there, 163 were wounded, and 11 were captured, Cherevatyi added.

In addition, three howitzers, a Nona mortar-artillery system, a Gvozdika self-propelled gun, a Rapira anti-tank gun, an anti-tank missile complex, a Grad anti-aircraft missile system, and three field ammunition depots were destroyed on the Bakhmut front.

On the Lyman and Kupiansk fronts, the Russians struck the positions of the Armed Forces 612 times; there were six combat clashes and six air raids. 72 occupiers were killed, 109 invaders were wounded, and two Russian armoured personnel carriers, three mortars, two Kornet anti-tank guided missile systems, a Rapira anti-tank gun, two field ammunition depots and two drones were destroyed.

Background: On the evening of 8 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that fierce fighting was taking place in Donetsk Oblast, but there were results.

Earlier, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reported that "heavy fighting for every square metre of land" was taking place on the Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Marinka fronts.

Western media quoted unnamed Ukrainian officials as saying that Ukraine had launched a long-awaited counteroffensive against Russia on its territory. A few days earlier, American officials had suggested that a counteroffensive had begun.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin is urging the U.S. Army to reconsider its decision to award AM General an $8.7 billion contract to build the military's Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.

In a letter sent to the Army on Wednesday, Baldwin said she has multiple concerns about the decision to end Oshkosh Corp.'s seven years of building the troop transport truck, including the potential for a gap in new truck deliveries between the end of the current contract next year and the start of production at a plant that AM General is building in Indiana.

Baldwin also urged the Army to take a closer look at the South Bend, Indiana company's finances in light of a Jan. 19 Moody's analysis that gave AM General a "negative" credit rating outlook.

The report cited the company's "very high financial leverage and weak liquidity," and its "limited capacity to absorb unanticipated operating or financial setbacks."

A 2020 acquisition of the company by New York-based private equity investors KPS Capital Partners left AM General with $675 million in debt.

While it gave the company a negative rating, Moody's also cited some strengths, including AM General's production of the Humvee military truck, although it pointed out that the current contracts expire in 2024 and its unclear what the terms will be of a new contract currently being negotiated.

"In addition to the high start-up costs and a weak financial position, AM Generals reported low bid on JLTV and the historically low-margin nature of (tactical vehicle) manufacturing contracts could create a scenario in which the JLTV award lowers the companys profitability and actually worsens its finances," Baldwin wrote.

Oshkosh Corp. President and CEO John Pfeifer previously said Oshkosh Corp. would lose money building JLTVs at the price AM General submitted, even with an up and running plant in Oshkosh that has produced 20,000 JLTVs since 2016.

More: CEO says Army truck contract awarded to AM General would be financial loser for Oshkosh Defense

The U.S. Government Accountability Office is expected to rule by June 14 on Oshkosh Corp.'s protest of AM General's contract. If the GAO sustains the protest, its decision would only be advisory; the Army would be able to stick with AM General, award the contract to Oshkosh Corp. or seek an alternative solution.

AM General declined to comment on Baldwin's letter, the contract or how far along it is in preparing for JLTV production. The South Bend Tribune last month reported that work is underway on a 74,000-square-foot manufacturing plant expansion with an estimated cost of $68.3 million.

The Army's five-year, $8.7 billion contract with AM General calls for the company to make more than 20,000 JLTVs and nearly 10,000 trailers. The contract includes a five-year renewal option.

In the letter, Baldwin said AM General's low bid, coupled with its lack of financial resources "could create a scenario in which the JLTV award lowers the companys profitability and actually worsens its finances. There seems to be sufficient evidence to justify further inquiry into how the company will bear these startup costs given its credit situation."

I am concerned that the Army overlooked critical company information during the award process  specifically AM Generals 'very high credit risk' as a result of the leveraged buyout its private equity ownership group used to acquire the company  and the impact of high leverage on the companys ability to stand up a new production line in a timely fashion, Baldwin said in a statement.

Our subscribers make this reporting possible. Please consider supporting local journalism by subscribing to the Journal Sentinel at jsonline.com/deal.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin Senator urges Army to reconsider AM General's JLTV contract
Vienna was one of Europes great musical centers long before that city gave us classical era composers like Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. In fact, there was a tremendous flowering of music in Vienna and other cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the baroque era of the 18th century.

Kansas City Baroque Consortium, led by its founder, cellist Trilla Ray-Carter, will celebrate this musical legacy with All Roads Lead to Vienna: Music of the Hapsburg Empire, a series of three concerts: The Italians in Vienna June 23 at Village Presbyterian Church, Phantasticus! Music for the Austrian Emperors July 21 at St. Pauls Episcopal Church and A Bohemian Rhapsody Aug. 18 at Visitation Catholic Church.

As Kansas City Baroque Consortium has grown, Ive become more and more committed to lifting the veil of obscurity from so many baroque composers that simply dont get air time these days, Ray-Carter said. We know the high baroque composers, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel and Corelli, but there are hundreds of composers that led up to this high baroque that are the pioneers of that musical era.

The series will begin June 23 with The Italians in Vienna. Even in the early years of the baroque era, Italian composers were dominant. Ray-Carter quotes a letter written by Maria Theresa, who ruled the Hapsburg empire from 1740 until her death in 1780:

I prefer the least of the Italians to any Austrian composer. Here and there they are able to make one good piece or another, but on the whole, I prefer the Italians.

The concert will feature many lesser-known but very fine composers like Antonio Cesti, Giovanni Valentini, Francesco Rognoni, Antonio Bononcini, Francesco Bonporti and Tarquino Merula. There will also be a concerto for three violins by Vivaldi.

All of the composers we chose have some connection to Vienna, Ray-Carter said. They either served in the court or had been invited to the court. Vivaldi had been invited to the court, but it had been quite late in his life. Shortly after he arrived, the emperor died, and, without a patron, Vivaldi died as a pauper within a year.

This concert and all the concerts on the series will feature recorder player Trevor Stewart.

Hes kind of our new star, Ray-Carter said.

The next concert on July 21 is Phantasticus! Music for the Austrian Emperors.

This is the one Im really excited about, Ray-Carter said. Phantasticus celebrates this style of pure fantasy that we see from a number of composers in the early to mid-1600s. This is where theyre exploring all the possibilities with no rules. Everything is open to exploration.

Athanasius Kircher, the 17th century German Jesuit polymath, described the stylus phantasticus as the most free and unrestrained method of composing, it is bound to nothing, neither to any words nor to a melodic subject, it was instituted to display genius and to teach the hidden design of harmony.

The concert will feature music by Heinrich Ignaz von Biber, Johann Schmelzer and Georg Muffat. An unusual work on the program is Turcaria by Johann Joseph Fux.

Its full of Turkish influence, Ray-Carter said. Its absolutely charming and fun. There will be some tambourines and drums and other fun things to hear.

Bohemia in the baroque era had a flourishing musical culture, and the final concert of the series on Aug. 18, A Bohemian Rhapsody, will offer an opportunity to hear some extraordinary but lesser-known composers. Muffat and Biber make another appearance, but there will also be music by Gottfried Finger, Frantisek Ignac Antonin Tuma and a piece by Jan Dismas Zelenka called Hipochondrie a 7.

It goes through a description of different physical ailments that he writes about in a musical way, Ray-Carter said. Its so clever and so creative.

The concert will conclude with Bibers Battalia a 10.

Its a fascinating musical description of a battle, Ray-Carter said. Well have percussion join us for this piece. There are all sorts of effects that are used by the string instruments to create the sound of a battle, snapping strings, tapping the bows on the strings for rat-a-tat-tat, tapping on the wood of the instruments for sounds of gunshots. Its really quite charming.

Kansas City Baroque Consortium is an authentic period instrument group. Not many cities have the musicians, instruments or talent to put together such an ensemble, so Kansas City is quite lucky to have Ray-Carter and her group, especially since she puts together such intriguing programs.

Im growing as I create this series, Ray-Carter said. This series is a reflection of my path of exploration. All Roads Lead to Vienna will give a chance to hear remarkable yet rarely heard voices that were so important in laying the groundwork for the great composers of the late baroque.

The summer season

Kansas City Baroque Consortiums summer season, All Roads Lead to Vienna: For season tickets, $60-$105, and single tickets, $25-$40, see kcbaroque.org.

7:30 p.m. June 23: The Italians in Vienna. Village Presbyterian Church, 6641 Mission Road, Prairie Village.

7:30 p.m. July 21: Phantasticus! Music for the Austrian Emperors. St. Pauls Episcopal Church, 11 E. 40th St.

7:30 p.m. Aug. 18: A Bohemian Rhapsody. Visitation Catholic Church, 5141 Main St.

You can reach Patrick Neas at patrickneas@kcartsbeat.com and follow his Facebook page, KC Arts Beat, at www.facebook.com/kcartsbeat.
The Marine Corps has promised Marines barracks that meet basic livability standards, as leaders are emphasizing quality of life in an effort to retain more Marines.

The Corps laid out a formal list of guarantees about the livability of barracks, reminiscent of a tenants bill of rights, in a Marine administrative message Tuesday.

Marines have the right to safe barracks that meet health, environmental and safety standards, the message pledges. Their barracks must have functional fixtures, furnishings, appliances, and utilities and common areas and amenities that are enjoyable.

When issues arise in barracks rooms, Marines have the right to timely repair and maintenance, the message states.

The Marine Corps wants to offer troops a better dining experience

Officially, at least, Marines have the right to refuse to live in a barracks room that isnt habitable, according to the message. If they do so, they are officially shielded from retaliation, harassment or a decrease in services, the Corps says.

The message said habitability would be defined by Marine Corps Order 11000.22, though the order doesnt yet contain a definition.

The Marine Corps order referenced in the MARADMIN is currently being reworked and is in draft form, Marine spokesman Maj. Jim Stenger said in a written statement to Marine Corps Times on Thursday. The DRAFT update to the MCO, spells out clearly the definitions of uninhabitable and unsuitable and is related to unaccompanied housing, and the MCO will be published later this year.

A Defense Department housing manual notes that housing is not necessarily uninhabitable unless it has a serious health or safety deficiency.

Wednesdays Marine administrative message also lists the responsibilities of barracks residents, including reporting repair issues in a timely fashion, being accountable for visitors behavior, conserving energy, and reporting incidents of vandalism or neglect.

Installation commands are required to post the list of guarantees and responsibilities throughout barracks and onto installation websites, per the administrative message.

The list of guarantees comes a month after the Navy released a bill of rights for residents of its barracks, with similar stipulations.

The Marine Corps guarantees also fit into a broader effort to keep more Marines in the service. Providing a better quality of life is a big aspect of that initiative.

The Corps Installations Command in February committed itself to studying how to improve barracks, and to providing recommendations, by July.

Marine Corps leadership doesnt deny that conditions in the barracks can be subpar. On a trip to Californias Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in February, Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Troy Black, the top enlisted Marine, criticized the state of the barracks he toured.

Some of the things I saw today in these barracks were the same things I saw in the same barracks from 2004 to 2007, Black said in an official Marine Corps press release at the time. We must do better.

He said in a statement to Marine Corps Times on Thursday, We fully recognize that in order to recruit and retain the best people our Nation has to offer, we must always focus on our people. This (Marine administrative message) is a commitment to our most important asset: our Marines.

Barracks residents typically are the most junior Marines in the service, mostly unmarried young people of the rank of sergeant and below.

Horror stories of barracks life crop up regularly across the military services.

Marines at Camp Hansen, Okinawa, Japan, and Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, provided pictures to Task & Purpose of extensive mold in their barracks in 2020 and 2021.

Mold at the Army base Fort Stewart, Georgia, attracted media attention in fall 2022 and prompted the bases leaders to call for more barracks inspections. The news from the Georgia base came as approximately 1,200 soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina  now called Fort Liberty  were being relocated because of mold and other issues with the barracks.

At Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Maryland, hundreds of sailors and soldiers went years without hot water, and some were left without functioning air conditioning or locking doors, a 2022 Military Times investigation found.
Ohio BCI headquarters near London.

CANTON  Investigators are releasing few details about the fatal shooting of Jeffrey Neff by Canton police.

A spokesperson with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation said Friday the case remains under investigation and had no additional details to share.

Canton police asked BCI to step in after an officer or officers shot the 41-year-old Neff when they went to his home in the 300 block of 25th Street SW on Wednesday night.

Police were responding to a report of a domestic dispute just after 10 p.m. A neighbor called 911 asking for police to ensure that everyone was OK after she heard a man and a woman yelling loudly inside and outside.

It is unclear how the events unfolded but Police Chief John Gabbard said shortly after police arrived, they were fired upon and returned fire, wounding the suspect.

Neff was taken to Cleveland Clinic Mercy Hospital where he died. An officer was grazed in the leg by a shot fired by Neff but was not hurt, Gabbard said.

Neff's body was taken to Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's Office for an autopsy. The medical examiner referred questions about the case to Stark County Coroner's Office. The Stark coroner's office was unsure if the autopsy had been completed but expected it to be completed as soon as possible.

Investigators have released little information about the shooting, including who fired the fatal shot as well as how many times Neff was hit by bullets.

It is also unclear where Neff was shot. Investigators were seen combing the grassy area between the Interstate 77 ramps connecting to Cleveland Avenue SW. Neff's home abutted the off-ramp.

The Canton Repository has made a public records request seeking more information, including police body camera video, witness statements and the name of any officer involved in the shooting. The city responded that they would respond to the request soon.

A Cash App has been set up to collect donations for Neff's widow.

A woman identifying herself as Neff's sister posted on Facebook the funding would help pay for his funeral.

"My sister and nieces was his life and anyone that truly knows Jeff knows that," she wrote. "Making arrangements is hard enough on them, and they need all the support they can get!"

Reach Amy at 330-775-1135 or amy.knapp@indeonline.com.

On Twitter: @aknappINDE

This article originally appeared on The Independent: BCI investigation ongoing in fatal shooting of Canton man
Elizabeth Gass is 8 years old and ecstatic she and her sister are now zoned for Providence High School.

Even better, the third-grade student at Olde Providence Elementary will be able to see her sister play sports because the school is close. Its closer than where the family wouldve gone without the newly approved south Charlotte student reassignment plan.

Elizabeth was so excited she emailed Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools officials with her thoughts last week and became the youngest person to share feedback, board chair Elyse Dashew says.

Albeit a short and sweet note, Elizabeths letter was one of thousands CMS staff and board members received related to changed school attendance lines in south Charlotte. The district shifted around students from dozens of communities because of a new high and middle school being built to relieve overcrowding. The sheer volume of community input helped drive the districts work.

Parents hold signs up as Dennis LaCaria, a CMS official, speaks during a board of education meeting on Tuesday, April 23, 2023 at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Government Center.

Much of the input was negative, coming from parents who didnt want a change in their feeder patterns or said they were blindsided by changes they werent expecting, school board members told The Charlotte Observer. But some feedback remained positive, thanking CMS for its willingness to listen to residents.

The best solution was found thanks to a remarkable level of dedication and collaboration from parents, CMS staff, (Superintendent Crystal) Hill, and the board, Dashew said.

Staff members first started looking at south Charlotte boundaries in February 2022. But work on those boundaries began in earnest early this year with a reset that included meetings held in person and virtually amid complaints about failed transparency.

It required the school boards OK, but they were a sounding board for opinions from affected families and the judges for maps. Staffers and Superintendent Crystal Hill owned the task of drawing lines.

Hill estimates staff spent thousands of hours coming up with a plan that she, in turn, presented to the school board for approval. All of the time and energy was done knowing one fact: it would be impossible to make everyone happy.

And it ended with a lesson: next time needs to be even better.

The perfect process, even if it exists, still does not guarantee each individuals perfect outcome, said Dennis LaCaria, the executive director of facilities and real estate planning for CMS. We are charged with making the best possible decisions for the greatest number of students for the longest possible time.

How did CMS judge maps?

Parents and students listen as members of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education vote on an amendment to the south Charlotte boundaries on Tuesday, June 6, 2023.

Summer Nunn stopped counting in late December.

The CMS board member received more than 4,000 emails about the student assignment plan in less than a month from when she took office. Lisa Cline, also a new board member, received more than 200 emails from parents a day at one point this spring.

Angry or not, LaCaria said the district is thankful for the active participation from thousands of people. One part of that feedback: a parent work group.

Throughout the process, drafts and Hills final recommendation got presented to a parent work group with representatives from affected schools and the community. That meant more than 85 parents meeting to talk about every draft in addition to meetings for the general public.

When CMS decided on the reset, where staff basically started fresh, LaCaria says they began with a single map of the southern part of the district. They used three primary data scientists, and their work was managed, reviewed, analyzed or revised by nearly every CMS department, including principals and members of the magnet and transportation departments.

They used factors like home-to-school distance, keeping in one feeder pattern instead of splitting them off at the middle or high school level and balancing diversity at each school.

Legacy enrollment

Parents and students form a human chain along Colony Road, between Alexander Graham Middle School and Myers Park High School, to demonstrate they are one campus on Tuesday, May 30, 2023..

Another place where input made a difference: letting students stick with their current path if theyll be a junior or senior in the 2024-2025 school year.

Bo King, who can walk to Providence High from his house, said nearly all parents agreed on legacy enrollment for juniors and seniors in high school and eighth graders. For example, students who will be freshmen in 2023-24 whose high school assignment will change from Myers Park High to South Mecklenburg or Providence High in 2024-25 are eligible to start at their newly assigned school this fall.

There will also be a transfer process.

Junior year is tough. Youre applying to colleges. You need those teacher recommendations, Cline told the Observer during a live-streamed interview on Wednesday. Let us stay at our school. Also for the ninth-graders who are being moved. CMS has done something totally radical and allowing ninth-graders and providing transportation for them if they want to go to their newly assigned school. Thats amazing.

Parents and students gather at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center in Charlotte before the BOE vote on the south Charlotte boundaries plan Tuesday night June 6, 2023

Another topic that simmered to the surface of parent concerns: diversity.

Heidi Carney has been an engaged CMS parent for 17 years while living in south Charlotte. Shes worked in CMS for five years in various capacities, including as a tutor, teachers aide and substitute teacher.

Throughout the reassignment process, Carney, whose youngest daughter will be a junior when the new high school opens, followed all notifications, figures and maps the district offered. Carney says she became increasingly aware that balanced socioeconomic diversity needed to be the priority.

I was skeptical that this was even possible in south Charlotte, she said. My work in both low and high SES schools instilled in me that every student deserves an equal opportunity at a great education. The passed proposal achieves what I thought was impossible  equitable SES distribution throughout all the south Charlotte high schools.

Carney says the redistricting process was like no other.

I am grateful to the board and their staff for their tireless efforts, Carney said. The level of engagement has given me hope. I pray our south Charlotte community can heal, unite and open our new schools with the zeal weve shown this past year.

A better process

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education member Lenora Shipp uses the book Who Moved My Cheese? during her explanation of her vote on the south Charlotte boundaries on Tuesday, June 6, 2023.

But LaCaria and school board members say the districts student reassignment process could be better.

For starters, LaCaria says, officials want to debrief with the community and get feedback from parents.

Maybe three drafts before the superintendents recommendation? he wondered in an interview with the Observer.

Nunn says she hopes CMS learned enough about what worked with the community and what didnt. That will likely include putting procedures in place for equal amounts of time between drafts for feedback.

We learned quite a bit, including that focusing on one map at a time really helps to hone the conversation, LaCaria said.  While the expanded workgroup was of tremendous benefit, we want to make sure that we are maximizing their contribution and participation, including helping us communicate with each of their school communities.

Still, there are people left feeling content.

This plan will enhance the schools directly by relieving overcrowding, King said. The indirect enhancements could be even more powerful. The conversation around the plan really galvanized the community. It also laid bare some of the ways that our county is broken.
Belgium wont stop supplying Ukraine while waiting for investigation into use of its weapons in Russia

The head of the Ministry of Defense of Belgium Ludivine Dedonder

Suspending the supply of equipment to Ukraine is not on the agenda as various things can happen in a war zone, she said.

Dedonder emphasized that there is no confirmation of the information that the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) used Belgian-made weapons on the territory of Russia during the raids.

FN Scar rifles could be seen in the photos, she said. However, it is unknown whether they belong to the weapons that Belgium supplied to Ukraine, or those other countries bought from FN, or whether they are weapons that were seized at the scene.

Read also: Belgium to send 240 Volvo military trucks to Ukrainian Armed Forces

Dedonder added that she had sent a letter to Ukraines Defense Ministry to clarify the situation.

Belgium supplies weapons according to the needs of Ukrainians, while the main attention has recently been paid to anti-tank missiles, air defense and artillery, she added.

In total, Belgium has already provided aid to Ukraine worth EUR 274 million.

Brussels has launched an investigation into reports that Russian volunteers conducting raids in Russia allegedly used Belgian-made weapons provided to Ukraine, Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said on Belgiums Radio 1 on June 5.

Read also:

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
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Racing will resume at Belmont Park, home of this years Belmont Stakes, on Friday after the New York Racing Association (NYRA) cited a significant improvement in air quality conditions.

There were fears the iconic race, which is due to be held on Saturday in Elmont, New York, might be impacted by the smoke originating from Canada which continues to shroud US cities.

The NYRA postponed Thursdays schedule at Belmont Park and said racing would only be authorised if conditions improved.

Fridays announcement that the days race schedule will go ahead boosts the likelihood that the Belmont Stakes will take place as planned.

Following significant improvement in air quality conditions throughout New York State, and in consultation with the New York State Gaming Commission (NYSGC), the New York Racing Association announced that live racing will resume at Belmont Park today at 12:50 p.m, a NYRA statement said.

It added: Moving forward, NYRA will continue to actively monitor air quality conditions and forecasts to ensure the environment remains safe for racing participants and fans this weekend.

Millions across the US and Canada remain at risk of inhaling potentially harmful air as wildfire smoke continues to wreak havoc. Parts of the East Coast are expected to continue to suffer poor air quality until at least the weekend.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)  one of the largest animal rights organizations in the world  called for the race to be postponed earlier this week due to smoke and the dangerous particulate level.

If the air in New York is unsafe for humans, it will be worse for horses running at top speed, PETA said in a statement.

The safety of the horses must come before profit and tradition, even if it means postponing the Belmont Stakes.

A decision about this year's race going ahead will likely be a last minute one. - Brad Penner/USA TODAY Sports/Reuters

Horse safety

On Thursday, New Yorks governor Kathy Hochul told reporters that the race could be cancelled if the air quality index exceeds 200.

It was explained that if the air quality index was between 150-200, only horses that have passed a medical examination would be permitted to race.

People come from all over the country. Its huge for the local economy. And so we can hopefully can get this going, Hochul said.

But theres no assurance of what the weathers going to be. So its going to be a last-minute decision, Im sure.

Should the event go ahead as planned, all eyes will be on Belmont Park for the final leg of the coveted Triple Crown  a series which includes the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes.

This years races have already been marred by multiple horse deaths and questions about animal welfare in the sport but there are still nine horses set to compete for the prestigious prize.

How to watch

The Belmont Stakes will take place on Saturday at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York.

For the first time, Fox will broadcast all of Saturdays races instead of its usual home on NBC.

The big race will start at 7.02 p.m. ET.

The lineup and odds

The odds are from the Belmont Stakes official website and are correct as of June 9 at 7 a.m ET

Tapit Shoes: 20-1

Tapit Trice: 3-1

Arcangelo: 8-1

National Treasure: 5-1

Il Miracolo: 30-1

Forte: 5-2

Hit Show: 10-1

Angel of Empire: 7-2

Red Route One: 15-1

Ones to watch

The Belmont will offer an opportunity of redemption for Forte, who was scratched from this years Kentucky Derby at the last minute.

The horse was forced to miss the first leg of the Triple Crown by the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission state veterinarian due to a bruised right front foot but he heads into the Belmont as the heavy favourite.

His biggest competition will likely come from the likes of Tapit Trice, Angel of Empire and Bob Bafferts National Treasure  which won the Preakness Stakes last month.

The win made Baffert the winningest trainer in Preakness Stakes history, having now had eight horses win the race.

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Gmail is a powerful and intuitive email client when its open and running inside a browser tabbut you can access your Gmail through a desktop app, too, and you might be better served doing it. Desktop Gmail frees up space inside your web browser, can mean a more distraction-free email experience, and might even benefit you in terms of managing incoming messages.

Youll find several desktop clients out there for Windows and macOS that are designed with Gmail in mind, as well as others that are just generally very good at managing emails from any provider. Making use of one of them doesnt mean youre abandoning the web interface for Gmail, by the wayitll still be there if you need to go back to it.

Read more

To make sure third-party email clients can get at your Gmail messages, open Gmail on the web, then click the cog icon (top right) and See all settings. On the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, make sure the Enable IMAP option is selected, then set the other options as you prefer (you can limit how many messages get synced to the desktop, for example).

1) Kiwi

Screenshot: Kiwi

Kiwi has a lot of cool Gmail tricks to make use of, not least the clever way that it lets you access emails from several Google accounts inside the same interface. Its well worth a look if you have both personal and work-related Gmail inboxes, for example, and you can switch between them with a click.

While the core Kiwi experience is more or less the same as Gmail on the web, it makes a real difference being freed from the browser: Notifications can be handled by the operating system for example, and you can send files to Gmail straight from File Explorer or Finder. Keyboard shortcuts are supported as well.

Icons around the edges of the interface give you access to other Google apps (including Google Calendar and Google Docs), as well as additional Gmail accounts. You cant try out Kiwi for free, just dirt cheappersonal plans start at $2.75 a month, with more features and options available as you go higher.

Download Kiwi for Windows or macOS, from $2.75 a month.

2) Mimestream

Screenshot: Mimestream

Mimestream is a desktop email client thats been built specifically with Gmail in mindthough its only available on macOS for now. You get the same labels, filters, and keyboard shortcuts as you do in the web app, all wrapped in a clean and clutter-free interface that puts the focus on your conversation threads.

If theres a feature that Gmail offers, from marking emails as less important to bringing back sent messages, chances are that Mimestream offers it. You can manage multiple Gmail accounts through the software, and there are some smart integrations with Google Contacts and Google Calendar as well.

Among the extras offered by Mimestream, youll find automatic email tracking protection, as well as the option to see profile pictures from your Apple Contacts app rather than the Google Contacts app, if you prefer. You can try the app for free for 14 days, but after that youll need to sign up for one of the subscription plans.

Download Mimestream for macOS, from $4.99 a month after a free trial.

3) eM Client

Screenshot: eM Client

This isnt a program thats been specifically designed for Gmail, like Kiwi or Mimestream, but its an excellent, all-round program that will capably handle your Gmail inbox and any of the other inboxes you want to plug into it. Its available for Windows and macOS, and its free for personal use for up to two email accounts.

Youve got options covering everything from encryption, to the color scheme of the interface, to whether or not you want emails synced for offline access (handy if you know youre going to be traveling). Getting your Gmail account connected is really straightforward, too, and only takes a few seconds.

Key Gmail features from the web interface are carried over, including the option to snooze emails and bring back messages that youve just sent, plus support for labels (which are called tags inside the eM Client interface)and you can integrate the app with your calendars and contacts as well if you need to.

Download eM Client for Windows or macOS. Theres a free version, a $59.95 Pro version, and a $250 Business Pro option, both one-time payments.



4) WunderMail

Screenshot: WunderMail

WunderMail interfaces tightly with Gmail to bring you just about everything thats available on the web into the desktop client, including the labels that youve set up and the categories that Googles algorithms automatically sort your messages into. Its nicely designed and speedy in use, but only available for Windows right now.

The interface that WunderMail uses manages to be both straightforward to use and stuffed with functionality: Getting messages starred or archived only takes a single click, for example, while quick actions via swipes are supported toomeaning you can power through your inbox even faster if youre using a touchscreen laptop or tablet.

Youre able to customize the look of the desktop client in a variety of ways, and theres a dark mode available too. Youre also able to see an unread email count on the Windows taskbar if you likeperhaps one advantage over using the web interface. The program is supported by ads, though you can pay a yearly subscription to remove them.

Download WunderMail for Windows, free or $9.99 a year for WunderMail Premium.

5) Mailbird

Screenshot: Mailbird

Mailbird is a bit more of a conventional email client, but it works very well with Gmail accounts. Your labels get pulled in as folders inside Mailbird, theres support for the same keyboard shortcuts as Gmail on the web, and email threads can be read as conversations, so youre able to keep up with everything thats happening.

The idea behind Mailbird is that it makes emailing as simple and as quick as possible so you can spend your time on something more important. All the key features you need, from composing to searching, are easily accessible, and it wont take you long at all to learn how the software works and how to make best use of it.

Its worth noting the sheer number of customization options here as well, from the colors and the backgrounds of the interface, to how the reading pane is displayed and when notifications are permitted to be displayed. You do have to pay to use of Mailbird, but youre able to try it out for free first to see if its useful.

Download Mailbird for Windows, from $3.25 per month after a free trial.

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man standing in front of pride flag mural art

Transgender individuals face distinct challenges in their pursuit of freedom and safety, amidst the ongoing global fight for LGBTQ+ rights. In addition to Asher Fergussons annual LGBTQ+ Travel Safety Index, this new study focuses specifically on trans issues. Asher Fergusson has examined individual laws of various countries and collected data from international sources to create the Global Trans Rights Index for 2023, which helps identify the safest and least safe countries.

According to the study, Malta claims the top spot in the Trans Rights Index and ranks third in the LGBTQ+ index, making it one of the leading countries in terms of trans rights. It offers legal protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as constitutional safeguards against discrimination for all LGBTQ+ individuals. Hate crimes targeting trans people are outlawed, and changing legal gender identity does not require a medical transition. Following Malta, Portugal, Canada, Sweden, and Bolivia are among the countries that excel in trans rights. They provide social protections for LGBTQ+ individuals and allow legal gender identity changes without mandating medical transition.

Guyana ranks as the worst country for trans people due to its lack of worker protections, discrimination, and criminalization of violence. Cross-dressing was criminalized until 2018, and attacks against trans people are common. Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Malawi, and the United Arab Emirates are the next worst countries for trans people without any worker, discrimination, or criminalization protections.

Severe Discrimination Still Remains

The study reveals, however, that even in the top-ranking countries, many trans individuals continue to face severe discrimination, violence, and other challenges. Finland, for instance, previously required transgender individuals to undergo sterilization for a legal gender change until the law was amended in February 2023. Five out of the top ten countries in the study still reported cases of trans murders according to the Trans Murder Map project. Clearly, the global community has a long way to go in safeguarding the rights of its most vulnerable populations.

The studys scores, which assess countries ability to protect trans people from discrimination, hold paramount importance. These scores range from 50 for comprehensive sexual orientation and gender protection to 25 for limited sexual orientation protection only. Additionally, if a country has only limited LGBTQ+ worker protections, it receives 10 points, and the same applies if it only recognizes limited anti-discrimination measures. Furthermore, countries receive 10 points if they have only limited criminalization of hate-based violence. The score related to trans murders carries double weight due to its significance in reflecting the lived experiences and safety of trans individuals.

To ensure the most accurate and up-to-date information on trans rights, Asher Fergusson has fact-checked and cross-referenced the data with individual country legislation.

Top 10 Best Countries For Trans People

Malta Portugal Canada Sweden Bolivia Belgium Croatia Denmark Norway Greece

Top 10 Worst Countries For Trans People

Guyana Malaysia Saudi Arabia Malawi Brunei Gambia Kuwait Nigeria Oman Sudan

RELATED: Here Are The Most LGBTQ+ Friendly Destinations According To Expats Around The World
A new computer and camera system being installed by the Bibb County Sheriffs Office will scan the license plate of every car on busy roads  and alert deputies if the car was involved in a crime locally or in other Georgia counties.

The sheriffs office will install about 150 cameras with a $1.6 million grant, Sheriff David Davis said Thursday. The money will cover the program for three years.

The cameras from technology company Flock Safety read license plates and take photos of cars, then scan databases to check if a vehicle has been involved with crimes. Deputies are alerted only if the plate matches with a crime report in the database, a Flock spokesperson told the Telegraph earlier this year.

The cameras raised privacy concerns in other communities when they were installed. Davis, much like other agencies using Flock, said the cameras are used only for pre-existing crimes.

Hardly anybody now, no matter where they are, is not on some type of camera or surveillance system, Davis said of privacy concerns. This will only be used in cases where we have a drive-by shooting, an armed robbery, where you have an Alzheimers patient who is missing.

The cameras are prevalent in multiple nearby Middle Georgia areas, including Monroe and Houston counties. Monroe Sheriff Brad Freeman told the Telegraph earlier this year that Flock cameras had been effective for their office.

A display of probable locations at the Bibb sheriffs office estimated a heavy concentration along busy roads such as Eisenhower Parkway, as well as a few cameras likely scattered on the outskirts of Macon in south Bibb.

It was unclear how soon the cameras might be installed.

While there is no official contract between Flock and the sheriffs office yet, Flock operates on a subscription basis with other counties and has details in their contracts saying when data must be deleted, who can access data and other information.

The $1.6 milllion grant for the cameras, part of $83 million distributed Thursday by Gov. Brian Kemps office, comes in addition to the Bibb sheriffs office receiving over $55 million of the Macon-Bibb consolidated budget this year. It is projected to receive more than $56 million next year in Mayor Lester Millers proposed 2024 budget.

Quite honestly, we were going to get the cameras regardless... The county officials said they would help us if we did not get the grant, but now that weve got the grant that puts a plus-plus on it, Davis said. He said potential camera money from the county can now be used elsewhere.

Money for other counties

More state grant money also went towards funding for several other Middle Georgia cities, including:

Perry receiving roughly $1.5 million for new technology and equipment

Baldwin Countys board of commissioners receiving more than $500,000 for officer training and sheriffs office equipment

Gray Police Department receiving more than $500,000 for equipment and patrol vehicles

Dublin receiving more than $1.2 million for new equipment, including new tasers

The full list of grants can be found online at the governors office website.
Biden admin near deal to preserve preventive care coverage, for now

U.S. President Biden delivers remarks on the 13th anniversary of passage of the Affordable Care Act at the White House in Washington

By Brendan Pierson

(Reuters) - A mandate that U.S. health insurers cover preventive care like cancer screenings and HIV-preventing medication at no extra cost to patients could remain in place while the Biden administration appeals a court order striking it down, following a tentative agreement announced on Friday.

The agreement between the administration and conservative businesses and individuals that sued to challenge the mandate is not yet final, according to a filing with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The deal would preserve the mandate nationwide while appeals play out, but allow the employer challenging the mandate, Texas-based Braidwood Management, to stop covering pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) against HIV and other preventive services without co-pays for its employees for now.

The company, which operates an alternative health center, would be shielded from any retroactive enforcement if the mandate is restored on appeal.

The preventive care mandate, part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) often referred to as Obamacare, covers services recommended by a federal task force.

Braidwood and the other plaintiffs sued specifically over PrEP for HIV, which they said violated their religious beliefs by encouraging homosexuality and drug use.

U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor in Fort Worth, Texas in March blocked the federal government from enforcing the mandate for a much wider range of services, finding that the task force's role under the ACA violates the U.S. Constitution.

If the task force's recommendations automatically trigger coverage, he said, then it has enough power that its members must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

The ruling does not apply to services the task force recommended before the ACA was enacted in 2010, including breast cancer screening.

More than 150 million people were eligible for preventive care free of charge as of 2020 under the ACA, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

If O'Connor's ruling is not overturned on appeal, insurers will be able to charge patients co-pays and deductibles for such services in new insurance plans, most of which will begin next calendar year.

The Biden administration has said O'Connor's ruling threatens public health. Major U.S. medical associations have also weighed in against the decision.

O'Connor drew national notice in 2018 when he struck down the entire ACA, a decision that was later overturned.

(Reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Bill Berkrot)
The White House said Friday that President Biden found out that his political rival, former President Trump, had been indicted through news reports.

The president, senior staff found out just like everybody else last night. No advance knowledge that this was coming. Found out from news reports just like everybody else across America, principal deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton told reporters.

Dalton wouldnt share if the Biden administration has been in touch with local authorities in Miami about preparations to respond to potential demonstrations, but Dalton said, were always prepared.

Trump and his attorneys said he was summoned to appear in court at 3 p.m. Tuesday in Miami. He is expected to turn himself in and he intends to pleased not guilty.

The indictment is a result of special counsel Jack Smiths investigation into Trumps handling of classified documents, which led to the former president facing seven counts, including for violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice.

The White House has declined to comment on the case but has stressed the importance of an independent Department of Justice (DOJ).

This is a president who respects the rule of law and hes said that since day one  thats precisely why were not commenting here. He believes in respecting the independence of the DOJ and protecting the integrity of their processes, Dalton said.

The rule of law is a bedrock principal of our democracy, and were going to respect that, she added.

The indictment Thursday evening, which Trump announced on social media, would set up a second time this year that he appears in court to face charges after pleading not guilty in New York related to 2016 hush money payments to adult film performer Stormy Daniels.

A New York jury also found Trump liable last month for sexual assault and defamation in the case of E. Jean Carroll, who says he raped her at a department store in the 1990s.

Trump is the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination, which would create a Biden versus Trump rematch next November.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden dismissed suggestions that a potential indictment of his predecessor and top 2024 rival Donald Trump by the Justice Department would be politically motivated, telling reporters he was honest.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Youll notice I have never once, one single time suggested the Justice Department what they should do or not do relative to bring in a charge or not bring a charge. Im honest, Biden said Thursday during a press conference with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the White House.

The former presidents legal team has been notified by federal prosecutors that Trump is the target of a federal investigation into his handling of classified documents  in what could be a signal that the special counsel investigating the matter is readying charges.

Investigators have been examining whether Trump improperly removed classified documents from the White House at the end of his term, and if he deliberately thwarted efforts by the government to secure their return.

The FBI executed a search warrant last year at Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, yielding dozens of documents with classification markings. A parade of Trump aides, including former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and staffers working in his post-presidential office, have appeared in recent weeks before grand juries in Washington and Miami.

Earlier: Trump Gets Target Letter in Special Counsel Documents Probe

Trump posted on his Truth Social platform earlier Wednesday that no one has told me Im being indicted, and I shouldnt be because Ive done NOTHING wrong.

An indictment would come as Trump has emerged as the frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary to challenge Biden in 2024. Trump has held a substantial lead over other challengers since declaring his intention to run, and that advantage grew after prosecutors in New York indicted him in a separate case involving alleged hush money payments to an adult film actress during the 2016 presidential campaign.

A separate special counsel was also appointed to investigate Bidens own handling of classified material after documents were found at a Washington office he used after his time as vice president. Federal agents subsequently seized additional materials from Bidens home in Wilmington, Delaware, after being invited to search the property by the presidents lawyers.

Biden has previously downplayed those documents as stray papers inadvertently packed by his staffers and sought to draw contrast with Trump by noting he voluntarily agreed to the searches.

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
WASHINGTON  President Joe Biden on Friday declined to weigh in on the federal indictment of Donald Trump, Biden's predecessor and the front runner for the GOP nomination to challenge his re-election bid.

I have no comment," Biden told reporters while visiting a community college in North Carolina.

Biden also said he hasnt spoken with Attorney General Merrick Garland about the case.

And Im not going to speak with him, Biden added.

On the flight to the state, principal deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton said the White House won't comment out of respect for the independence of the Justice Department and to protect "the integrity of their processes."

"Look, the rule of law is a bedrock principle of our democracy, and we're going to respect that," she said.

Dalton said Biden and his top aides had no advance notice of the indictment and found out about it from news reports.

President Joe Biden listens as Bryce Lewis, Industrial Systems Student at Nash Community College, demonstrates how a yellow robot arm can move during a visit to Nash Community College in Rocky Mount, N.C., Friday, June 9, 2023.

Trump, himself, announced Thursday night he'd been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges related to the hundreds of classified documents seized from his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

Trump declared his innocence in a video statement and in posts on social media.

More than 300 classified documents were recovered more than a year after Trump left the White House, most under subpoena in June 2022 or during an FBI search in August 2022. Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has been investigating the potential mishandling of national defense records.

A special counsel is still investigating the handling of classified documents found at a former office space used by Biden and at his home in Wilmington, Delaware.

In Biden's case, the White House has maintained that the documents, numbering about 10, were returned to the archives the day after they were discovered by the president's lawyers.

By contrast, Trump repeatedly resisted efforts by the National Archives to recover his material, including failing to fully respond to a subpoena issued for the records by federal law enforcement authorities. That prompted the FBI to lead an unprecedented search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, resulting in the seizure of the classified documents and thousands of other government records.

The indictment steps up the extraordinary situation of the Justice Department of a president seeking re-election trying to convict the current front-runner for the GOP nomination.

Biden was asked at a news conference Thursday how he would convince Americans they can trust the independence of the Justice Department when Trump repeatedly attacks it.

Because you notice I have never once  not one single time  suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do, relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge, Biden said. I'm honest.

Contributing: Bart Jansen

US President Joe Biden walks to board Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on May 17, 2023. Biden will cut short a major trip to Asia, returning May 21, 2023, to Washington for high-stakes negotiations with Republicans to avert a debt default, according to two people familiar with his plans. Biden has cancelled planned stops in Australia and Papua New Guinea, but still intends to attend the upcoming G7 meeting in Japan. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images) ORIG FILE ID: AFP_33FE2AU.jpg

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden not commenting on Trump indictment over classified documents
President Biden sought to offer a contrast in normality Friday, visiting a community college in North Carolina to tout U.S. manufacturing gains even as revelations about his predecessors criminal indictment poured in.

A manufacturing innovation boom is happening all across America, not just in North Carolina, Biden said at Nash Community College in Rocky Mount.

He took a tour of the Programmable Logic Controlling Lab in the Advanced Manufacturing Building of the college. In his remarks, he said that the students are working on advanced manufacturing, machining and robotics to do everything from cell phones to rocket ships.

Electric systems so you can build everything form electric vehicle parts to the assembly lines theyre carried on. Automotive packaging to ship goods quickly and safely around the world, he added.

Even as the president praised the community college students, the specific charges against Donald Trump were released, outlining that the former president and Bidens political rival is facing 37 counts in relation to the mishandling of records. Of the 37, 31 of them are related to the Espionage Act.

The Hill Elections 2024 coverage

Biden maintained throughout the day Friday that he would not be commenting on Trumps legal perils.

Following his remarks, he was asked if he had spoken to Attorney General Merrick Garland, prompting him to reiterate that he will not be weighing in on the case.

I have not spoken to him at all, and Im not going to speak with him. And I have no comment on that, Biden said.

The White House said earlier Friday that Biden and his senior staff found out that Trump would be indicted through news reports Thursday evening.

Trump is the front-runner in the Republican presidential primary, which could set up a Biden vs. Trump rematch in 2024.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
US President Joe Biden

Three men serving at the very top of the US government - Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Mike Pence - appear to have mishandled classified documents. How do their cases differ?

Mr Trump seems to be in the deepest trouble. He is being indicted on seven charges related to files found at his Florida home.

Aides to Joe Biden discovered classified documents as they were moving boxes out of the president's offices at a Washington think-tank, then a second batch was found in a garage at his Delaware home.

Former vice-president Mike Pence also made headlines when documents were found unsecured at his home in Indiana.

This is how the three cases compare.

Who is leading the investigations?

Both former presidents have a special counsel looking deeper into what they did wrong.

Under the Presidential Records Act, White House records are supposed to go to the National Archives once an administration ends. Regulations require such files to be stored securely.

Jack Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor, has brought an indictment against the former president, who faces seven charges including mishandling classified documents and obstructing efforts to investigate.

And a Trump-appointed prosecutor Robert Hur is looking into the Biden case, which is still ongoing.

In Mr Pence's case, he had the US Justice Department investigating why those files were misplaced. He was told last week that they are not pursuing charges.

What missing documents have been found?

According to news reports, Mr Biden's personal lawyers found 10 classified documents - some marked Top Secret - included in a box of other material in a storage closet at the University of Pennsylvania's Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

A "small number" of classified documents were found in a second discovery inside the president's garage at his Delaware home.

That contrasts with the more than 325 classified files - including some marked with Secret and Top Secret designations - discovered over the course of last year at Mr Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate.

The documents discovered in Mr Biden's office were marked "sensitive compartmented information", according to CNN, indicating the material could involve intelligence-gathering methods and sources. They reportedly included information about Ukraine, Iran and the UK.

Of the 300 Trump documents recovered at Mar-a-Lago, one set had a similar SCI designation.

Mr Pence's lawyers said a "small number" of classified documents were found at his Indiana home in January. The following month, FBI agents conducted a search and found new official papers including one marked classified.

The origins of the investigations

Mr Biden's personal lawyers discovered the classified documents as they were moving out of the Biden Center's Washington offices on 2 November. The following day, they turned the material over to the National Archives.

The second trove was found on 20 November as part of a search of all Mr Biden's properties by his lawyers.

The two-month gap between the first Biden discovery - days before the midterm elections - and the news being made public in January raises awkward questions for the president about transparency.

The discovery at Mr Pence's home was also made by his lawyers, who initiated the search as a precaution after learning about the Biden case.

In Mr Trump's case, the National Archives initiated contact with Mr Trump's office after determining that it did not have possession of some notable records from his presidential term - such as correspondence with North Korea's Kim Jong-un.

The former president's team provided the government with some material, including classified documents, but archivists did not believe the president's team had been fully co-operative.

That set in motion the FBI inquiry that led to the August raid of the Mar-a-Lago estate and the discovery of more than 100 additional documents.

How have Biden, Trump and Pence responded?

In the days after the Mar-a-Lago raid, Mr Trump accused the FBI and the Justice Department of pursuing a politically motivated investigation in an effort to prevent him from running for the White House again (a campaign he would subsequently launch in November).

Mr Biden, for his part, said Mr Trump's handling was "totally irresponsible".

Now that the president himself is being accused of mishandling classified information, Mr Trump has quickly gone on the offensive.

"When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?" he posted on his social media site.

Mr Biden has said that he was "surprised" there were sensitive documents at his former office and that he is co-operating fully with the review.

After the second find he was defensive under questioning.

When a reporter asked him why classified documents were kept alongside his prized Corvette, Mr Biden replied: "My Corvette is in a locked garage. OK? So it's not like they're sitting out in the street."

He added: "People know I take classified documents and classified material seriously. I also said we're cooperating fully and completely with the Justice Department's review."

Mr Pence always maintained the documents had ended up at his home "inadvertently" but he had taken full responsibility for the mistake.
(Bloomberg) -- Progressive lawmakers and activists are again imploring President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency, citing the thick blanket of smoke from Canadian wildfires now shrouding the US Capitol and swaths of the Eastern seaboard.

Most Read from Bloomberg

As much of the Northeast and our nations capital experience the suffocating conditions that have become a regular occurrence in the West, we are faced with yet another stark reminder that the climate crisis is here, said Representative Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat. We ought to treat it like the emergency it is. Those sentiments were echoed by Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, who urged Biden on Twitter to declare a climate emergency.

Scientists say human-caused global warming makes wildfires more likely and more destructive.

Read More: What Science Tells Us About the Dangers of Wildfire Smoke

An emergency declaration by President Joe Biden would unlock sweeping executive powers, including blocking crude oil exports and placing other limits on fossil fuels. Biden considered the move  which would also enable him to shift funds to propel clean energy construction  last summer, when it appeared his massive climate law was going to falter in the Senate. Ultimately, he decided against it.

But with more than 100 million people under air quality alerts Thursday as toxic smoke from record-setting wildfires pours into the eastern US, threatening flights and leading people to mask up or stay inside, progressives are renewing their call for Biden to marshal sweeping powers to fight global warming.

Climate change is playing an oversized role in the wildfires being experienced across the continent, Jeffery Rupert, director of the Interior Departments Office of Wildland Fire, testified before a Senate panel Thursday. A drier and hotter climate results in lower moisture and often leads to extreme conditions that can produce megafires, he said.

New York City looks like its on fire, kids are choking on dirty air, and the AQI is a serious health threat equivalent to breathing in smoke from cigarettes, Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement activist group, said in a statement. We are in a climate emergency, and its absurd that our government isnt acting like it.

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
Image: JOCA_PH (Shutterstock)

Cryptocurrency exchange Binances U.S. arm has indefinitely paused deposits and withdrawals of American dollar deposits and withdrawals. The company announced it would be freezing these assets after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against the exchange and CEO Changpeng Zhao.



The U.S. affiliate of the popular cryptocurrency exchange announced the freeze in a lengthy tweet posted Thursday night. Binance.US said in the tweet that deposits of U.S. dollars are now suspended. The exchange is also notifying its customers and banking partners that it is readying to pause all fiat withdrawals as early as June 13. As part of the pause in USD banking, Binance.US says that it will be pivoting to a crypto-only exchange and will be operating as that for a time.

Read more

Our priority is, and has always been, our customers. We are taking these proactive steps as wefor a timetransition to a crypto-only exchange, Binance.US tweeted last night, along with a notice to customers. While we remain open to a productive compromise that enables a thriving digital asset marketplace in America, Binance.US will continue to vigorously defend ourselves, our customers, and industry against the meritless attacks of the SEC.

The SEC has taken to using extremely aggressive and intimidating tactics in its pursuit of an ideological campaign against the American digital asset industry. https://t.co/AZwoBOgsqS and our business partners have not been spared in the use of these tactics, which has created pic.twitter.com/rlIe6swIoY  Binance.US  (@BinanceUS) June 9, 2023

On Monday, Binance was hit with a lawsuit from the SEC, that included 13 charges against the exchange and CEO Zhao. The lawsuit alleges that Zhao and Binance committed violations of U.S. securities law and accused the company of operating an illegal exchange. Charges also include operating unregistered exchanges, broker-dealers, and clearing agencies; misrepresenting trading controls and oversight on the Binance US platform; and the unregistered offer and sale of securities.

Binances SEC woes appear to be the last few gasps of breath as a once booming industry continues to wither away. In related crypto news, Twitter CEO and proclaimed Dogefather has been accused of insider trading in a $258 billion lawsuit. At the same time, the SEC is also investigating Do Kwon, the recently arrested Terra USD Bitcoin founder, after the commission alleges that Kwon and his company transferred 10,000 Bitcoin out of the Terra project before it collapsed last Maythat 10,000 Bitcoin was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

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Blinken plans trip to Beijing as soon as next week - Politico

(Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is planning to travel to Beijing as soon as next week, Politico reported on Thursday, citing two people familiar with the scheduling.

Washington's top diplomat scrapped a planned trip earlier this year over a suspected Chinese spy balloon that flew across the United States.

Reuters reported on Wednesday Blinken will travel to China for talks in the coming weeks, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

(Reporting by Costas Pitas in Los Angeles; editing by Kanishka Singh)
Blinken to be in Beijing for talks on June 18 -U.S. official

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Secretary of State Blinken holds videoconference with government leaders in Kenya from the State Department in Washington

By Humeyra Pamuk and David Brunnstrom

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China next week for long-delayed talks aimed at stabilizing tense relations, and a U.S. official said he is expected to be there on June 18.

Reuters reported on Wednesday that Blinken would travel to China in the coming weeks, citing an official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

An official on Friday said Blinken would be in Beijing on June 18, but gave no other details.

In February, Washington's top diplomat scrapped a planned trip to Beijing, which would have been the first by a U.S. secretary of state in five years, over a suspected Chinese spy balloon that flew over the United States.

Washington has been keen to reschedule the trip, and the timing emerged after the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that China has reached a secret deal with Cuba to establish an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island roughly 100 miles (160 km) from Florida.

The spokesperson for the White House National Security Council on Thursday said the report was not accurate, while saying that Washington has had "real concerns" about Chinas relationship with Cuba and was closely monitoring it.

The State Department, White House and Pentagon did not, however, immediately respond to requests for comment on a subsequent New York Times report that said China was planning to build a facility in Cuba that U.S. officials were concerned could be capable of spying on the United States by intercepting signals from nearby U.S. military and commercial facilities.

In Havana on Thursday, Cuban Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio dismissed the Journal report as "totally mendacious and unfounded," calling it a U.S. fabrication meant to justify Washington's decades-old economic embargo against the island nation. He said Cuba rejects all foreign military presence in Latin America and the Caribbean.

China's foreign ministry said on Friday that "spreading rumors and slander" was a common tactic of "hacker empire" the United States.

The Cuba issue could raise questions about Blinken's planned trip, intended by Washington to be a major step toward what President Joe Biden has called a "thaw" in relations between the world's two largest economies.

Ties have deteriorated over disputes ranging from military activity in the South China Sea and near Taiwan, Beijing's human rights record, and technology competition.

U.S. Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, and Senator Marco Rubio, the panel's vice chair, said on Thursday they were "deeply disturbed" by the Journal report and urged the Biden administration "to take steps to prevent this serious threat to our national security and sovereignty."

A spokesperson for China's Washington Embassy said it had no information about Blinken's trip, but referred to Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping's last meeting in November, and added: "China is open to having dialogue with the United States. We hope the U.S. will work in the same direction with China, and jointly implement the important common understandings between the two Presidents in their Bali meeting."

(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk, Jasper Ward, David Brunnstrom, Jeff Mason and Phil Stewart; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Blue the baby buffalo died being stepped on at PA preserve. His herd held a wake

A baby buffalo suffered a tragic death at a Pennsylvania animal preserve, leading to an emotional buffalo wake among the herd.

Friends of the South Park Buffalo Preserve, located in Allegheny County, said the baby buffalo named Blue died Tuesday, June 6.

Blue was accidentally stepped on and quickly died from his injuries, the group said. It called his death unspeakable and tragic.

This type of accident is an unfortunate reality with the buffalo or their cattle relatives but just not now, and not to our little Boy Blue, the group said on Facebook. We were with him for two hours today. He was fine, being his own independent self but interacting, drinking water, feeding, walking around, headed down to his normal hiding spot.

The group honored Blue by placing a wreath over a fence in the preserve. As the wreath was hung, they witnessed a buffalo wake that lasted nearly two hours.

Blues mom, Lily, also took part in the wake.

They all took turns coming over to the spot Blue passed, taking long breaths to breathe in what remained of Blues aroma, the group said. It was especially heartbreaking to witness Blues mom Lily return to the spot, sniff and then grunt very loudly for her special boy Blue.

It was unusual for the buffalo to all gather in the same spot, the group said, but it called it heartwarming to see them remember their special buddy Blue.

The people who watched the wake were tearful as they watched Lily continue to look for her son, who she may not have realized had died.

Lilys search encompassed the entire hill of their land, as well as the feeding area and later Blues favorite hiding spot.

Finally, apparently dejected, she slowly headed back up the hill, according to the Facebook post. We thought she was finally headed to bed, but turned halfway up to stop, turn around and search again. Its going to be a long night for our first time mom after such a tragic day.

Blue was remembered by Friends of the South Park Buffalo Preserve for his unique, one-of-a-kind personality.

May our Baby Boy Blue live in our hearts and memories forever, the group said. He was truly a special gift that brought the community together, made us laugh and made us smile.

The South Park Game Preserve encompasses more than 2,000 acres, KDKA reported. Bison have roamed the land for 100 years.

South Park Township is a southern suburb of Pittsburgh.
Blue Jays' Anthony Bass says he doesn't think his anti-LGBTQ+ post was hateful

Toronto Blue Jays relief pitcher Anthony Bass works against the Milwaukee Brewers during the ninth inning of a baseball game Wednesday, May 31, 2023, in Toronto. (Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press via AP)

TORONTO (AP)  Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Anthony Bass said Thursday he doesnt believe an anti-LGBTQ+ social media post he shared last month was hateful.

The right-handed reliever also said he is working hard to educate himself, including meeting with the executive director of activist group Pride Toronto.

Bass is scheduled to catch the ceremonial first pitch from Toronto LGBTQ+ activist leZlie Lee Kam before Fridays game against Minnesota as the Blue Jays begin their fourth annual Pride Weekend celebration.

Bass apologized before a May 30 game against Milwaukee, one day after sharing a post on his Instagram stories calling for anti-LGBTQ+ boycotts of Target and Bud Light over support they showed for the LGBTQ+ community. Both companies are dealing with fallout from those campaigns, which have included hostile and homophobic criticisms and calls from LGBTQ+ activists not to cave to anti-LGBTQ+ groups.

Bass has been booed by Toronto fans in his two home appearances since the apology.

I totally get that, Bass said. I just want them to know that Im working hard on myself, a lot of self-reflection.

However, Bass later said he didnt believe the post, which described the sale of LGBTQ+ merchandise as evil and demonic, should be considered hateful.

I do not, Bass said. Thats why I posted it originally. When I look back at it, I can see how people would view it that way and thats why I was apologetic.

Bass said he chose to delete the post because it was the right thing to do, and because he didnt want it to be a distraction to the team.

But I stand by my personal beliefs, Bass said, and everyone is entitled to their personal beliefs, right? Also, I mean no harm towards any groups of people.

My focus from the get-go should have been doing my job and being accepting of everyones decisions and views in life, Bass added. Through this process, Ive learned that. Moving forward, I will definitely know better than to post my personal beliefs on my social media platforms.

Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins addressed the subject for the first time Thursday, shortly before Bass spoke.

While acknowledging that he was personally hurt by Basss post, Atkins said he accepted the apology the pitcher offered to him and manager John Schneider last month.

I felt his apology and his accountability to be authentic or we would be talking about a different outcome, quite frankly, Atkins said. That was absolutely necessary for us to be together with how strongly we feel about the progress that has been made by the Toronto Blue Jays in this community.

It needs to continue, Atkins added. I dont think you can ever do enough. Well stay true to that commitment to make this environment as inclusive as we possibly can.

Workers were hanging rainbow flags inside Rogers Centre after Thursdays win over Houston, preparing the stadium for Fridays celebrations.

___

AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
FILE -Toronto Blue Jays relief pitcher Anthony Bass throws to a Minnesota Twins batter during the ninth inning of a baseball game Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022, in Minneapolis. Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Anthony Bass apologized Tuesday, May 30, 2023 for sharing a homophobic social media post on his Instagram account. (AP Photo/Bruce Kluckhohn, File)

TORONTO (AP)  The Toronto Blue Jays cut pitcher Anthony Bass on Friday, one day after the right-handed reliever said he didnt think an anti-LGBTQ+ social media post he shared last month was hateful.

The team now has seven days to trade Bass or put him on waivers.

The move came hours before Bass was set to catch a ceremonial first pitch from Toronto LGBTQ+ activist leZlie Lee Kam before Fridays game against Minnesota as the Blue Jays begin their fourth annual Pride Weekend celebration.

The Blue Jays said pitcher Kevin Gausman would catch the first pitch instead of Bass.

Bass apologized before a May 30 game against Milwaukee, one day after sharing a post on his Instagram calling for boycotts of Target and Bud Light over support they showed for the LGBTQ+ community. Both companies are dealing with fallout from those campaigns, which have included hostile and homophobic criticisms and calls from LGBTQ+ activists not to cave to the pressure.

Bass, who was booed by Toronto fans in his two home appearances since the apology, spoke to a group of media before Thursdays win over Houston, saying he stood by his personal beliefs.

He also said he is working hard to educate himself, including meeting with the executive director of activist group Pride Toronto.

Before Friday's game, Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins said the decision to cut Bass was primarily motivated by performance and not by the pitcher's off-the-field circumstances.

There's a myriad of variables," Atkins said. Performance is usually the driving one and performance was a large aspect of this decision. Distraction was a small part of it and something we had to factor in.

Atkins refused to say whether Bass would still be on the team if his performance had been better.

We're trying to build the best possible team we can build, Atkins said. This was a baseball decision to make our team better.

Atkins also said it was not a realistic option for Bass to land in Toronto's minor league system.

We won't stand in his way to be with another organization, Atkins said.

Bass, 35, is a 12-year veteran who has also played in Japan. He was 0-0 with a 4.95 ERA in 22 games.

To replace Bass, Toronto activated right-hander Mitch White (right elbow) from the 60-day injured list.

___

AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
Boater dies after bystanders rush to get his head above water in Georgia lake, cops say

A boater drowned after bystanders raced to get his head above the surface of a Georgia lake, officials said.

The man, who is from Texas, was in the Peach State when he was seen struggling in the water on Wednesday, June 7, according to the Troup County Sheriffs Office.

Deputies in a news release said the man fell from a boat at R. Shaefer Heard Park, a gateway to recreational activities on West Point Lake. The lake stretches across the Georgia-Alabama border, roughly 80 miles southwest of Atlanta.

Deputies responded at about noon to a report of a man having trouble near a dock.

Bystanders heard the male calling for help and called 911 along with trying to keep the males head above water until they could move him closer to the boat ramp, deputies wrote.

First responders also helped the man before he was rushed to a hospital in LaGrange. He was listed in stable condition at the ICU but later died, according to the sheriffs office.

Deputies in their release didnt identify the man but said he was from Ovilla, Texas, roughly 20 miles south of Dallas.

Drowning

At least 4,000 people die from drowning every year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and drowning is a leading cause of death for children.

Some factors can make drowning more likely, including not knowing how to swim, a lack of close supervision, not wearing a life jacket and drinking alcohol while recreating near or in water.

The National Drowning Prevention Alliance said there are tips to help keep you safe in the water, including checking local weather conditions, never swimming alone and choosing the right equipment.

Dont hesitate to get out of the water if something doesnt feel right, the group said on its website. Whether its that the current is getting rough, rain has started to fall, or your body is just not responding like you would like it to due to fatigue or muscle cramps, then just leave and return to the water another day. Its always a good thing to trust your instincts.

Missing mans body pulled from lake after he vanished near boat dock, Georgia cops say

Beloved deputy and dad dies when lawn mower flips and pins him in creek, GA cops say
Bond set at $154,000 for Florida woman arrested in the shooting death of a Black mother who knocked on her door

Bond for the Florida woman charged with manslaughter in the shooting death of her neighbor, a Black mother who confronted her during a dispute over children playing outside, was set at $154,000 on Friday.

A judge set bond at $150,000 for the felony charge and another $4,000 for four misdemeanor counts for Susan Louise Lorincz, who earlier told the court she could only afford a bond of $1,700.

She also said she is unemployed and owns about $3,000 worth of furniture.

The state requested a $200,000 bond.

The owner of the apartment where Lorincz lives told detectives she was being evicted, according to a prosecutor  and the judge recommended Lorincz not return there.

Lorincz was arrested Tuesday, four days after investigators say she fatally shot Ajike AJ Owens through the front door of Lorinczs home near Ocala, Florida, as Owens repeatedly knocked on her door, the Marion County Sheriffs Office said.

Owens was demanding that Lorincz come out of her apartment after the 58-year-old White woman had yelled at Owens children and thrown a roller skate at her 10-year-old son, hitting him, the sheriffs office said.

In addition to manslaughter with a firearm, Lorincz is facing charges of culpable negligence, battery and two counts of assault, the sheriffs office said early Wednesday.

If Lorincz posts bond, she will not be allowed to possess a firearm or any other weapon, nor is she allowed to have any contact with the victims family. If she returns to her apartment to gather belongings, she will have to have someone accompany her. She is allowed to live in her apartment as long as she isnt evicted. Lorincz will also have to wear an ankle monitor.

Lorincz made an initial court appearance via video call on Thursday. She told the court she has no savings, is making payments on a car, and had filed for disability after working at United Healthcare. She said she last worked two weeks ago and that she supports her 55-year-old sister.

She was represented by the Marion County Public Defenders Office. Judge Lori Cotton appointed the public defenders office to represent Lorincz going forward.

Lorincz claimed to investigators that she was acting in self defense, saying she thought Owens was trying to break down her door and that she heard the victim threatening to kill her, according to an arrest affidavit. Lorincz said she discharged her firearm because she felt like she was in mortal danger, the document says.

Detectives, however, determined Lorinczs actions were not justifiable under Florida law, the sheriffs office said.

In the days since the killing, Owens family had repeatedly called for the arrest and charging of the shooter, insisting the incident was unprovoked and unjustified.

They also accused Lorincz of harassing the children and calling them racial slurs.

When investigators asked Lorincz about allegations of her calling children in the neighborhood racial slurs, Lorincz admitted to having used the n-word toward children out of anger in the past and also to calling children other derogatory terms, the affidavit says.

Susan Louise Lorincz faces charges of manslaughter with a firearm, culpable negligence, battery and two counts of assault, according to the Marion County Sheriff's Office. - Marion County Sheriff's Office

Ben Crump, one of Owens family attorneys, said he is confident Lorincz will be convicted.

This is not a difficult case, Crump said at a Wednesday news conference. The reality is  if the roles were reversed, and you have a Black woman shoot a White woman through a locked metal door  nobody would say its a difficult case. The only question is, are we going give AJ the same respect, the same dignity?

Though the arrest has brought Owens family some relief, one of her sons is grappling with remorse because he was the one who told his mother about Lorinczs confrontation with the children, the family said.

He witnessed his mother shot and killed. In his soul, and his heart, its his fault that his older brother, his baby sister, and his baby brother, as well as himself, will never see their mother again, Pamela Dias, Owens mother, said of the young boy.

Another child also blamed himself because he was unable to perform CPR on his mother, Dias said.

Grandma, grandma. I couldnt save her, Dias recalled the 12-year-old boy telling her.

A funeral service will be held for Owens on Monday, Crump said.

Neighbors said shooter often harassed kids

As investigators interviewed witnesses and neighbors, some explained that Lorincz often yells at children, including Owens, and becomes angry at them when they play outside near her residence, according to the affidavit.

One neighbor said Lorincz is known to harass the children by video recording them with her phone as they play in the open field between the apartment buildings, the document states.

The neighbor said Lorincz believes the field where the children play belongs to her and that she allegedly calls 911 to make false reports against the kids, the affidavit says.

When investigators examined past 911 calls made by Lorincz, they found she had been calling for more than a year to report children trespassing on her property, but responding deputies always determined the children had been playing in a common area, the affidavit says.

Lorincz told investigators in an interview after the shooting that she had had a problem with neighborhood children for about two years due to their lack of respect for her peace and privacy, according to the arrest affidavit.

How the shooting unfolded

Investigators determined the shooting came after a confrontation between Lorincz and Owens children, who had been playing in the field near Lorinczs home that evening, the sheriffs office said.

When describing what led up to the shooting, one of Owens children told deputies that Lorincz had picked up an electronic tablet that he left on the ground while playing, according to the affidavit. The child said he then told Lorincz to give the tablet back, the document says.

During this argument, Lorincz threw a roller skate at Owens 10-year-old son, striking the child in the toe. After this, when the child and his 12-year-old brother went to speak to Lorincz, she opened her door and swung at them with an umbrella, the Marion County Sheriffs Office said in a release.

One of the children sent his sibling to get their mother, Owens, the affidavit says.

Shortly after, the victim approached (Lorinczs) front door and banged on the door, yelling for Lorincz to throw something at her if she wanted to throw something, the affidavit says.

Sheriffs deputies initially responded to the scene because Lorincz had called to report that children were trespassing on her property, saying one had threatened to beat her up, according to the affidavit.

Just minutes after Lorinczs first 911 call, she called back to report that she had shot through her door after a woman, later identified as Owens, tried to break down her door while yelling, the affidavit says.

Owens 12-year-old son also called 911 to report his mother had been shot, the document says.

The child told dispatchers Owens had only been knocking on the neighbors door, according to the document.

CNNs Ray Sanchez, Denise Royal, Carlos Suarez and Tina Burnside contributed to this report.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
Actress Nicole Beharie developed a reputation for being problematic after her time on the hit TV series, Sleepy Hollow. But that reputation might be based on systemic racism in the television industry. Thats according to Maureen Ryans book Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood. The book details where things went wrong.

The spooky drama garnered over 10 million views during its premiere, and the network quickly ordered a second season. Black audiences especially gravitated to the series because it had a Black-female lead and several other Black characters. Therefore, everyone was shocked when Beharies character, Abbie Mills, was killed off in the third season.

Sometimes patterns of ignorance morph into systematic contempt, and while intent does matter, intent is not magic, Ryan writes.

Problems On Set

One chapter, Horror Story: Sleepy Hollow and the Myth of Post-racial Industry, details what happened on set. It includes evidence of some of the worst and most demoralizing things the industry can dish out. Ryan spoke to multiple sources from the show that acknowledged both the series leads struggled. However, Beharie didnt receive the same privileges or grace as her white male co-star, Tom Mison.

When a bunch of white guys say a person of color is difficult, I tend to assume that theres a lot more to that story, one source stated to Ryan.

The source also said he didnt find Beharie to be problematic. The only discrepancy he viewed was how their growing pains were viewed and handled.

Nicole Beharie Pushed Through

A past LA Times interview with Beharie also serves as proof of the biases on set. In the piece, the Juneteenth actress remembered when she and Mison fell sick at the beginning of 2020. The creators requested Nicole Beharie continue filming while Mison flew home and rested.

So I pushed through it, and then by the end of that episode, I was in urgent care, she said.



In the same interview, she recalled gaining the problematic nickname.

Unfortunately, According to Ryans research, Beharie faced other microaggressions directed toward her. For instance, her wig didnt fit properly, and when she showcased a more natural wig in season three, the write-male writers and producers debated if it looked professional. Shernold Edwards, who worked on Sleepy Hollow, mentioned witnessing multiple insensitive situations occurring on set to Ryan. Edwards also claimed that Clifton Campbell, the third seasons showrunner, broke down in front of her several times.

The problems behind the scene eventually impacted what was happening on camera. Ryan wrote that the shows creators did not seem to care about Abbies emotional life, her interiority, her dreams, her complexities. Yet Misons character was able to develop correctly.

If you think that has nothing to do with the fact that most of the people with power over the showat the studio, at the network, and at the drama itselfwere white, well, I just dont agree, Ryan writes.

Furthermore, Beharies character wasnt the only Black character written off. Orlando Jones character, Frank Irving, was also killed off per Jones request.

The post New Book Claims Sleepy Hollow Shortchanged Actress Nicole Beharie appeared first on 21Ninety.
Photo: The Canadian Press

A realtor is in trouble with her industry watchdog after lending her client $50,000 to help her buy a property in Richmond.

Wei (Vicky) Wang, a realtor at Sutton Group West Coast Realty, had, according to the watchdog, created a conflict of interest and committed professional misconduct.

Wang, a disciplinary hearing was told, had provided a bank draft of $50,000 to pay her clients purchase deposit in June of 2016.

The brokerages records stated the money was for loaning to the (client) temporarily.

However, Wangs client filed a complaint in October of 2017 to the former Real Estate Council of British Columbia, claiming Wang failed to provide her with a 55 per cent commission rebate for the purchase of two properties and failed to deposit rental cheques on time.

An investigation into Wangs dealings revealed she had provided the $50,000 to the client when the client did not have enough money for the deposit and was hesitant on the purchase.

When an investigator asked Wang for comment in 2018, she said the client had asked to borrow money from her and she agreed without hesitation just because of eight years (of) friendship with the client.

Wang sent the client WeChat messages asking to be repaid and the clients husband later wire-transferred $49,982.50 to Wang in June of 2016.

Wangs disciplinary hearing by the B.C. Financial Services Authority (BCFSA) started on Jan. 25 this year, but it was adjourned due to an error in the notice of hearing.

Wang tried to adjourn the hearing again in February, first claiming she would be too busy tending to clients and later claiming she needed to seek legal advice. Her applications were denied.

I am of the view that Ms. Wang is simply seeking to delay the hearing of this matter, wrote BCFSA chief hearing officer Andrew Pendray in the February decision.

During the disciplinary hearing, Wang told Pendray she felt the client took advantage of her by requesting the $50,000 from her.

She testified she used the word loan incorrectly and she did not consider the $50,000 to have been a loan since there was no written agreement and no interest was collected.

Wang further told Pendray she didnt tell the client the $50,000 loan was a conflict of interest because she did not consider it to be one. She added the loan was not related to the commission she ended up earning from the purchase.

Ms. Wang stated that she had not had an intention of making a commission, she was simply providing the money to the client due to their friendship, wrote Pendray.

Wang also claimed she subsequently agreed to a commission rebate because she was afraid the client would not pay her back otherwise.

Friendship does not change nature of transaction

Pendray ultimately determined the $50,000 was a loan to pay the deposit for the Richmond property and Wangs note in the brokerages records back in 2016 that she was loaning to the (client) temporarily was the most compelling evidence.

He added that the friendship between Wang and the client does not change the nature of the transaction, and Wangs note along with her WeChat messages requesting repayment showed she expected to be repaid.

It was more likely than not, wrote Pendray, that Wang loaned the client $50,000 to secure her commission upon completion of the purchase, which would not have gone forward without the loan for the deposit.

Pendray also found Wang committed professional misconduct by creating a conflict of interest and failing to inform the client of the conflict.

 the reality of the situation is that once Ms. Wangs own money became part of the transaction for the purchase of (the Richmond property), she had a personal financial interest in the transaction beyond that which a licensee would normally have, he wrote.

Wangs penalty will be determined at a later date.
This month, Black women writers are set to release a slew of exciting titles. These books are spread across various genres including fiction, young adult, and nonfiction. If you missed the May recommendations, you can catch up here.

The 272, June 6

The 272: by Rachel L. Swarms

$28.00

Buy Now

The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church by Rachel L. Swarns is a critical and well-considered history of the catholic church and its role in slavery. The book follows a group of Jesuit priests in America who bought and sold 272 enslaved people from Africa in 1838. The book focuses on how those enslaved people were used to save what is now known as Georgetown University.

Everythings Fine, June 6

Everythings Fine

$19.84

Buy Now

In Everythings Fine, Cecilia Rabess delivers a love story defined by tough choices. The story follows Jess, the only Black woman working on her floor at Goldman Sachs and her unlikely romance with longtime college nemesis, Josh. Their love story develops in the backdrop of a shifting political landscape, prompting questions of identity and how much of it can be given up for love.

You Were Always Mine, June 13

You Were Always Mine: A Novel

$25.20

Buy Now

Christine Pride and Jo Piazza authored a stirring novel that looks at the nuances of race, motherhood and existentialism. The book follows Cinnanon, a Black woman living a seemingly idyllic life. Her life, however, is shaken after she takes in a white child abandoned at the park. Cinnamons decision threatens her well-hidden past and draws judgement from neighbors.

Nightbloom, June 13

Nightbloom by Peace Adzo Medie

$22.99

Buy Now

Peace Adzo Medies Nightbloom is a book about female friendships and seemingly unbreakable bonds. Set in Ghana and America, Nightbloom follows the friendship of two young girls and how class and family shape their individual lives.

Wannabe, June 13

Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me

$29.99

Buy Now

Wannabe by Former New York Times editor Aisha Harris is an insightful study of how pop culture interacts with identity. The book is anchored by Harris smart, sharp exploration of topics like the origin myth of her own name via a meeting with Chance The Rapper or the evolution of the Black Friend.

Sing Me To Sleep, June 27

Sing Me to Sleep by Gabi Burton

$19.99

Buy Now

Gabi Burtons Sing Me To Sleep is the authors YA debut. The book follows a siren whose existence is illegal. Shes forced to choose between protecting her family or following her heart in a world that is dangerous for her. The book explores the nuances of difficult choices and the unexpected moments we find in them.

Good As Gold, June 6

Good as Gold: Novel

$18.99

Buy Now

In this book, Candace Buford explores what lengths a young girl will go to find a sunken treasure. Shes doing so to clear her familys name. Even if it means disrupting her perfectly curated life.

The post Books by Black Women to Read in June appeared first on 21Ninety.
(Bloomberg) -- Boris Johnson secured prestigious titles for several key allies, including MPs Jacob Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel and aides who worked in Downing Street during the partygate scandal, as the UK government published the former prime ministers so-called resignation honors list.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Rees-Mogg and Patel  both pro-Brexit former Cabinet ministers under Johnson  received a knighthood and a damehood, respectively. Other MPs handed knighthoods included former ministers Simon Clarke and Conor Burns.

Still, the list was noteworthy as much for what was left out, after months of media reports detailing how Johnson was considering a controversial peerage for his father, Stanley Johnson. Newspapers said MPs Nadine Dorries and Alok Sharma would also sit in the House of Lords, triggering elections in their districts at a time Prime Minister Rishi Sunaks Conservatives trail in polls.

Ultimately they were not on the list  though Dorries announced before it was published she is standing down anyway, giving no reason. The Liberal Democrats said immediately they will target her Mid Bedfordshire seat.

It was not immediately clear whether their names had been removed by the government, or if they had ever been included. The Reading West seat of Sharma, president of the United Nations COP 26 climate summit, would be at clear risk of going to Labour in a vote.

Any sense that Sunak or the government had intervened would be controversial and would inevitably exacerbate the ill-feeling between Sunak and Johnson. Both were fined by police for rule-breaking during the pandemic, but Johnson blames Sunak for his ultimate downfall as the scandals piled up.

Read More: Boris Johnson Could Be Ousted as an MP If Suspended for Lying

Johnsons list still triggered criticism. Peerages were awarded to Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen, a close ally, and his former chief of staff during the partygate era, Dan Rosenfield. Martin Reynolds, Johnsons former principal private secretary who infamously sent staff an email inviting staff to bring their own bottle to a drinks event during the pandemic, also got an award.

Its shameful that Rishi Sunak has failed to stand up to his former bosss outrageous demands and agreed to hand out prizes to this carousel of cronies, Labours deputy leader Angela Rayner said in a statement. He promised integrity, but this weak prime minister is once again showing his appalling judgment by doing Boris Johnsons bidding.

Dorriess Mid Bedfordshire seat would typically be regarded as safe for the Tories, with a majority of nearly 25,000. Sunak wont be complacent, though, because his Conservatives have trailed the main opposition Labour Party by a double-digit margin in national polling for months, and are also under pressure in their rural heartlands from the Liberal Democrats, Englands third party.

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
Members of the "Warriors of the Forest," a vigilante group from the Kanamari ethnic group, patrol along the Javari river in the northwest Amazonas state of Brazil (Siegfried)

In a remote pocket of the Brazilian Amazon under siege from illegal fishermen, poachers, loggers and drug traffickers, Indigenous people have taken it upon themselves to defend the land and its resources.

With bows, arrows and spears, young men of the Sao Luis village patrol the Javari River by motorboat in the valley of the same name.

They call themselves the "Warriors of the Forest," the self-styled heirs of Indigenous rights defender Bruno Pereira, who was murdered in the Javari Valley one year ago along with British journalist Dom Phillips.

"We must always be prepared for the worst. But we do not want violence," said Lucinho Kanamari, his face painted red, insisting the traditional weapons are merely a "precaution."

"When we spot intruders, one of us will talk to them. The others stay back, ready to react if things go wrong," he told AFP.

"We are there to teach, to act as a peaceful deterrent. We talk, we explain."

Lucinho is a member of the Kanamari Indigenous group, one of six in the Javari Valley which holds Brazil's second largest protected Indigenous reservation.

Like many others who live here, he takes his surname from his tribe which lives in a part of the rainforest the size of Portugal that contains many of the world's last uncontacted Indigenous groups.

- 'Invasions exploded' -

The patrolling warriors particularly fear the illegal fishermen in search of pirarucu -- one of the world's largest freshwater fish, its flesh considered a delicacy worth a small fortune.

Such poachers are believed to have killed Pereira and Phillips on June 5, 2022, hacking up their bodies and hiding the remains in the jungle.

For a while, the crime brought international attention to this threatened corner of the planet long-abandoned under former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and his pro-industrial agenda.

"With Bolsonaro, and then Covid, the invasions exploded," said Varney Todah da Silva Kanamari, vice president of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (Univaja).

"As the state abandoned us, we had to assume our responsibilities... We defend what belongs to us: our lakes and forests," he said.

It is not only fishermen the watchmen fear.

There are also narco groups growing coca crops on the Peruvian side of the river, and in April, loggers threatened to kill a Kanamari chief, forcing him into exile.

The warriors have built two floating wooden observation posts on the river near their village of Sao Luis. One of the structures has come under fire.

Their task is immense and dangerous, their means lacking. The team has only two motorboats and little fuel.

The "warriors" avoid violent conflict, and in tense situations, withdraw back into the forest.

- 'Under threat of death' 

With government forces absent from the area, the Sao Luis warriors work with another Indigenous group known by its acronym EVU -- a sort of commando unit attached to Univaja.

Pereira helped set up the EVU before his death.

EVU members -- about 30 in total -- are equipped with motorized barges, GPS, drones, phones and satellite internet, much of it made possible by private donors. They carry no weapons.

EVU volunteers from different Javari Valley communities undergo training by NGOs and security specialists in "how to intervene, make surveys, confiscate equipment or boats," explained EVU co-founder Cristobal Negredo Espisango, known as Tatako.

According to Univaja coordinator Bushe Matis, the EVU does not "replace the state."

"We monitor, we collect information and evidence, and we pass it on to the relevant authorities. Then let the state do its job."

EVU leader Orlando de Moraes Possuelo said a key goal is "to occupy terrain" in areas with an abundance of sought-after fish and animals.

"We arrive as soon as possible to catch the intruders in the act, before they disappear or return to Peru." Legally, they cannot detain anyone.

Many of the group's members have received threats.

"I am under threat of death. I am afraid of course, but there is no other option," said Tatako.

"The EVU is the only organization that really fights organized crime in the Javari Valley," he added.

With the return of leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to the presidency, many in the Amazon hope help will soon be coming.

This week, as Brazil marked the anniversary of the murders of Pereira and Phillips, Lula vowed that "we will not abandon this struggle for the planet."

"We are fighting to revive policies to protect Indigenous peoples and the Amazon," he said in a statement to The Guardian newspaper, to which Phillips was a contributor.

But just last week, Brazil's Congress passed bills cutting the powers of Lula's environment and Indigenous affairs ministries and dramatically curbing the protection of Indigenous lands.

Univaja's Matis fears for the future.

"There can be a tragedy at any moment. The invaders will never back down: they will always want to lay claim to the Javari," he said.

hba/mlr/mlm/sco
Boy shoots 3-year-old sister when search for candy leads to gun, Mississippi cops say

A 3-year-old is in critical condition after she was accidentally shot by her older brother, deputies in Mississippi say.

It happened around 8 p.m. on Thursday, June 8, at a home in Marion County, according to the sheriffs office. Deputies arrived to find a young girl who had been shot in the head.

Investigators said the girls 6-year-old brother was in their grandmothers room looking for candy when he found a loaded gun. It went off while he was playing with it, hitting his sister.

The children were at home with their grandma while their mother was at work, deputies said.

Tragic examples like this remind us the importance to secure firearms in the home and out of reach of children, Marion County Sheriff Berkley Hall said in a statement.

The girl was flown to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson and placed in the ICU, deputies said. Her condition wasnt known as of June 9.

Authorities didnt release additional information, and its unclear if the grandmother could face charges.

Marion County is about 90 miles southeast of Jackson.

6-year-old shoots baby brother in the face while in bouncy chair, Michigan cops say

Child calls 911 after mom is shot in chest during fight over loud music, Texas cops say

Ongoing feud over kids ends with neighbor killing single mom of 4, Florida sheriff says
Britain's Labour Party to return donation to Algebris CEO following harassment claim - official

FILE PHOTO: Davide Serra, Founder and CEO of Algebris Investments, speaks during the Sohn Investment Conference in New York

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's opposition Labour Party plans to return 100,000 pounds ($125,830.00) in donations from Algebris Group founder and CEO Davide Serra following a harassment claim, a party official said on Friday.

A London employment tribunal last month awarded a former Algebris employee about 32,000 pounds in a sex harassment claim against the asset management company.

Serra did not immediately return phone calls, messages and email requests for comment.

Algebris declined to comment.

The tribunal found that two comments made by Serra were offensive, Algebris said in a statement on May 26. Those two comments related to the fact that the claimant was a woman and were found to amount to harassment, but no other findings of harassment were upheld, Algebris said.

A lawyer for the claimant was contacted by phone and email and did not immediately respond.

The Times of London earlier reported Labour's decision.

Founded in 2006, Algebris oversaw 19 billion euros ($20.43 billion) at the end of May 2023, the company told Reuters through a spokesperson.

Initially the firm was focused on investing in the stocks and bonds of financial firms and has since expanded into assets including global credit and Italian real estate.

The firm is authorised and regulated by Britain's Financial Conduct Authority, according to its website.

($1 = 0.9303 euro)

(Reporting by Andrew MacAskill and Nell Mackenzie; Writing by Dhara Ranasinghe; Editing by Elisa Martinuzzi and Daniel Wallis)
Ukrainian troops undergoing training with British Challenger II Tanks

As a former tank commander, I can say one thing for certain: Putins demoralised conscripts are utterly unprepared for the shock action now hitting their lines. Ukrainian armoured formations are beginning to meet Russian forces in battle, and they are going to pulverise Russias defensive lines. I am confident for one simple reason: Ukraine will follow the Western ideology of manoeuvre warfare in a combined arms context, while the Russians will follow Soviet doctrine, relying on attrition and numbers. The Russians will find that the armour of Western tanks is far more resilient than flesh and bone, they will die in great numbers, and they will lose.

The core idea of manoeuvre warfare is mission command. Commanders at all levels understand the top-level end state, and are given the flexibility to conduct the battle as they see fit to achieve victory. The Ukrainians are well-versed in this style of warfare, which allows them to be agile and adapt their plan to the situation on the battlefield as it unfolds and changes. The Russians do not follow this doctrine. They are given strict roles in the execution of plans drawn up at the top, and cannot change them even when things are going badly wrong. This has been made evident time and time again in Ukraine, where Moscows tanks have all too often been blown to pieces without firing a round.

On top of this, we can add the simple fact that Kyivs forces have proved far superior in their adoption of combined arms warfare. This means using tanks, infantry, artillery and air power in harmony to achieve their objectives. Each element brings its own capabilities, and together they are far greater than the sum of their parts. The effect is devastating. Nearly 4,000 Russian tanks have been destroyed because they were not properly protected by infantry and air defence. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have died because they were not properly supported by artillery and tanks.

Getting this form of warfare right takes intelligence and training. You need the right equipment, and effective doctrine. The Ukrainians have this. I estimate that their tank brigades have had around eight weeks to perfect combined arms warfare, around the same time I would have allocated to train the Royal Tank Regiment under my command to be an effective combined arms fighting force. And they certainly have the right equipment. The Challenger and Leopard tanks leading the spearhead vastly outmatch whats left of Russias heavy armour, while sophisticated precision artillery is providing withering fire for the advance.

Conversely, Russian recruits appear to be given a few days of training, a little ammunition and are then thrown into the meat-grinder with a life expectancy surely measured in days. They might as well be gunning them down on the training fields; it would be faster, cheaper and about as combat effective.

There will certainly be no rescue from the air. The Russian air force should be a massive operational threat, but it seems that its pilots have opted to hide in the confines of the officers mess rather than face the excellent Ukrainian air defences. Sometimes, cowardice is the most sensible option.

The final and perhaps the most important element of an effective armoured fighting force is morale. The Ukrainians have this in spades. The Russian conscripts have virtually none. From personal experience, having fought a number of battles, I know you need to really want to get out of the trench to fight the enemy. Its certainly not an easy or natural act.

With Ukrainian canniness, Western intelligence and equipment and a smattering of good fortune, I expect whats left of the Russian army to be nothing more than a speed bump on the way to liberating Crimea, pushing to the Russian border and chucking Putins war criminals out of Ukraine once and for all.

Much like Adolf Hitler at the end of his war, Putin appears to be holed up in his bunker, being fed lies, making the wrong decisions while the sharks circle. Whats unfolding in Ukraine now could go down in history as one of the great tank actions, alongside Cambrai, Kursk and the Arras counterattack. It will certainly go down as the end of Moscows illegal invasion  and perhaps the beginning of the end of Putin

Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon is former Commanding Officer of the 1st Royal Tank Regiment

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Shipping containers are seen at a terminal inside the Port of Oakland, California

Business group urges Biden to intervene in West Coast ports labor dispute Shipping containers are seen at a terminal inside the Port of Oakland, California

By David Shepardson and Lisa Baertlein

(Reuters) -The largest U.S. business group on Friday urged President Joe Biden him to intervene immediately and appoint an independent mediator to address a protracted West Coast ports labor dispute.

West Coast ports stretching from California to Washington state are critical to U.S. supply chains and the nation's economy. More than 22,000 dockworkers at those trade gateways have been working without a contract since July. U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Suzanne Clark in a letter to Biden cited "continued and potentially expanded service disruptions at these ports heading into peak shipping season."

Tensions remain high as negotiators for the employers' Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) and workers' International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) tussle over wages and retroactive pay in the last leg of talks that have stretched into their 13th month.

The PMA on Friday said the ports of Seattle and Tacoma "continue to suffer significant slowdowns as a result of targeted ILWU work actions." Representatives from those ports were not immediately available for comment.

Unions are seeking a pay increase that reflects workers' contribution to the ocean shipping industry's record profits from the pandemic cargo boom. They also want added compensation for the hours worked since their contract expired.

Operations at the nation's busiest ocean trade gateways at Los Angeles and Long Beach have "generally improved" after nearly a week of sporadic labor slowdowns and stoppage, PMA said on Friday. The employer group said vessel loading and unloading was delayed due to a shortage of "lashers" who secure cargo containers on ships.

ILWU declined to comment.

Workers reported for duty on Thursday and Friday at the Port of Los Angeles, officials said.

"Operations going into the weekend seem to be the most normal they've been" since labor disruptions started late last week, Los Angeles port spokesman Phillip Sanfield said, adding that the port has limited weekend hours.

Terminal operations in Oakland, near San Francisco, have also returned to normal, a spokesperson said.

Port executives are eager for a resolution since some shipping customers have rerouted goods to facilities on the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico, denting business.

Retailers, manufacturers, farmers and other West Coast port customers also are lobbying Biden as the peak shipping season approaches and routes between Asia and rival U.S. ports get more expensive due to a drought that is lowering water levels in the Panama Canal.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Mark Potter)
Some CA politicians actually work with the other party instead of smearing it | Opinion

Is your legislator working for you  or for his or her party?

California voters may put politicians in office, but they only have to face voters every two or four years, while pressure from party forces is an everyday burden.

Its refreshing to see one thoughtful group of legislators in Sacramento make a real effort to keep priorities straight. The California Problem Solvers Caucus deserves attention for seeking real-life solutions without caring who gets credit.

Opinion

The 21 members of the Problem Solvers Caucus  from both parties, and both sides of the legislative house  say they ignore the D or R behind each of their names when they meet every week or so to respectfully dine, discover and discuss, always looking for common ground instead of a fight.

Its where I can be my most authentic self, said Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil, a Jackson Democrat. Its just raw, honest work. Thats what Im here for.

Assemblyman Juan Alanis, a Modesto Republican, said, Joining the Problem Solvers Caucus was an easy choice for me. I believe in getting the work done.

Modeled on a group of the same name at the US Capitol and supported by a nonprofit foundation, the California Problem Solvers Caucus is rather exclusive, its members (12 Democrats, nine Republicans) reflecting less than 18% of the entire state Legislature. Members pledge not to actively work against each others bills, fostering trust.

That can lead to contention with party leadership focused on steering the conversation to either left or right, said former Democratic Assemblyman Adam Gray of Merced, while Problem Solvers steer the conversation to the center. Gray helped found the group two years ago with Chad Mayes, a Yucca Valley independent, and Jordan Cunningham, a San Luis Obispo Republican. All three left office late last year.

Common ground is where the best policy gets made, said Assemblyman Josh Hoover, a Folsom Republican and caucus member. We live in an era of hyperpartisanship, with everyone going to the fringes. I dont think thats what most Californians are looking for.

Other members include Sen. Melissa Hurtado, whose district covers south San Joaquin Valley, and Sen. Roger Niello, representing part of Sacramento County.

Do the Problem Solvers actually solve problems?

Last years budget allocated $40 million, not yet spent, for floodplain restoration along the San Joaquin River west of Modesto. Facing a revenue shortfall this year, Gov. Gavin Newsom clawed back the money in his January budget plan.

But floodplains is a policy unicorn. All sides  Republican, Democrat, farmer, environmentalist, sport fisher  agree that letting river water spread out over uninhabited property and seep down into aquifers is a good thing. Floodplains take pressure off levies, reducing flood risks, replenishing groundwater and creating wildlife habitat.

Money is needed to buy property near rivers and revert it to marshland.

Big win for Problem Solvers Caucus

The Problem Solvers Caucus went to work on Newsom. Its worth noting that caucus members from the coast and Southern California expected nothing for their areas, but got behind floodplains because theyre just plain good for California.

Soon, non-caucus legislators up and down the Golden State got behind it as well. Things get done by building pressure, Gray said, and Newsom in May changed his mind, restoring all $40 million.

A huge win, declared Lodi Republican Assemblyman Heath Flora, a caucus co-chairman.

Success like that gets me energized and hopeful, Alvarado-Gil said.

Look for the Problem Solvers Caucus to sponsor common-sense solutions for clean energy as California moves toward less reliance on carbon fuels, Flora said.

Each effort to minimize in-your-face, win-at-all-costs politics in favor of cooperation and respect deserves broad support. It may be less vocal than either fringe, but the political middle is where most people are.
By Laura Sanicola

(Reuters) - A San Francisco Bay Area health officer on Thursday lifted an advisory warning neighbors of a refinery not to eat produce grown in potentially contaminated soil in the area, after a toxicologist found public health was not at risk.

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the PBF Energy Inc unit in Martinez, California, over a November emissions release of a "powdery substance" later determined to be spent catalysts used in refining.

Contra Costa county officials are also probing the root cause of the incident and the District Attorney is considering legal action against PBF for not properly notifying the county of the release.

A county-hired toxicologist TRC said on Thursday the release did not increase the public health risk of exposure to heavy metals in the soil.

The metals detected in 14 soil samples were within an expected range of levels typically found in the state, the toxicologist said. County health officials had advised caution in March until soil testing could be complete.

"Now that we have these results, I personally would have no issue eating fruits and vegetables grown in ground soil from one of the affected areas," said Dr. Ori Tzvieli, the county's health officer.

A sample collected last year by Contra Costa Health Services showed above-normal levels of aluminum, barium, chromium, nickel, vanadium, and zinc.

In February, an analysis report by the refiner said the catalyst overflowed after valves to keep pressure rising in the refinery's reactor and regenerator were not adjusted properly.

(Reporting by Laura Sanicola; Editing by Richard Chang)
They call The Jungle home. Soon theyll be forced to move out of the Tacoma encampment

Outside a 7-Eleven deep in Tacomas South End, Bouviea Aaron leaned over an empty yellow newspaper stand and recalled a childhood camping trip to a site with designated parking for RVs and showers  nothing like how it is down the block.

For the past four months, Aaron, 65, has navigated a new world outdoors a quarter-mile away from the convenience store, sleeping in an old Ford F-150 topped with a slightly ill-fitting truck canopy she bought for $100 from a neighbor in The Jungle  an oft-used nickname for the homeless encampment on private land where Aaron now lives.

An estimated 30 people experiencing homelessness call the makeshift community near Charlton Lake home on any given day  some whove lived there for years, according to Aaron. Its a patchwork of RVs, worn-down vehicles, plywood boards, tents, tarps and scattered debris that peek behind layers of thin trees in a shallow wooded area close enough to Steele Street that one can hear the swooshing of traffic.

In the encampment, adjacent to a senior-living facility, Aaron has donned various hats: kitchen staff when others want cereal; the fire department when flames require extinguishing; and a medic when someone asks for bandages or needs an injection of life-saving Narcan to reverse an opioid overdose.

Shes been anointed a celestial mother by one dweller, and shes the real mother to a 43-year-old son, who regularly visits from just across the lake, where he lives in a homeless congregation on a mini-island that Aaron is afraid to go to.

Most of us, including myself, we dont see a positive end in sight, she said.

Their dire situation is likely to be further complicated come Tuesday when the camp is slated for removal, marking the second abatement of the encampment in the past year, following one last June and raising fears among campers that theyll have nowhere else to go.

The city of Tacoma has received 24 citizen requests through its 311 reporting system in the past year regarding the encampment, according to city spokesperson Maria Lee. Those include requests related to code compliance, police assistance, debris, garbage removal and outreach.

After a citizens complaint about The Jungle in March, the city inspected the site the same day and soon after notified the property owner, Steele Street Holdings LLC, that it was in violation of Tacomas nuisance code, city code enforcement officer Ken Ketter said in a recent interview.

Steele Street Holdings, which Pierce County property records show bought the 2.8-acre plot in February, has since authorized the city to assist in the upcoming abatement, according to Lee. The city has completed 22 camp abatements already this year, nine of which were on private property, she said.

Steele Street Holdings did not return messages seeking comment for this story.

In an emailed response to several questions from The News Tribune, Lee said that encampment members have been offered all available shelter options and city-contracted outreach teams have visited the site twice weekly on average over the last year.

Bouviea Aaron, 65, sits on the back of her truck, where she also sleeps, while talking about some of the issues that persist at the homeless camp she lives in on the 9700 block of Steele Street South on Thursday, May 25, 2023, in Tacoma. Known as The Jungle, the camp is home to roughly 30-40 people at any given time. Aaron has lived there for the past three months while she attempts to sort out a permanent living situation.

Residents of the camp, including Aaron, feel as though theyre being cheated out of housing opportunities, specifically motel rooms that they say were offered to members of recently swept encampments nearby.

If we get out of here, where we gonna go? said Kelsi Springs, 34, who arrived at the encampment a year ago due to what she referred to as a bad relationship. Were just gonna be on the sidewalk?

Lee said that Tacoma has consistently offered the same resources to members of all encampments within the citys jurisdiction. She noted that the state Department of Commerce has provided funding, including for hotel rooms in some instances, for people whose abated encampments were close to The Jungle but fell within the Washington Department of Transportations right of way.

In late May, when The News Tribune toured Aarons encampment just north of the unincorporated Pierce County border, some appeared resigned to the fact that they could soon be pushed out elsewhere. Where? was a question, however, without an immediate answer.

Im just not thinking about me, J.R. Marquez said. Im thinking about everybody else, too. And its kind of hard.

Homelessness rising

In Pierce County and in many places across the United States, the homelessness problem is exacerbated by an affordable housing crisis for the lowest-income residents. Lack of housing supply is driving up costs, and government funding is inadequate to meet demands.

Rob Huff, a spokesperson for Tacoma Pierce County Coalition to End Homelessness, said that people are falling into homelessness at a quicker rate than people are getting off the streets or out of shelters despite local efforts to address the issue.

Ultimately, housing is at the heart of homelessness, Huff said in an interview. If we dont have places that people can move into, it makes it really hard to make a dent in the number of people who are living outside.

This years annual Point-in-Time operation  a one-day, volunteer-driven and inexact calculation of people experiencing homelessness in the county  provides a glimpse into how hard progress can be. There were more people tallied than during any other count in the past 15 years, according to data from the county and Department of Housing and Urban Development.

There are certain caveats to comparing historical figures in the annual tally, including the need to take into account changing methodologies or shifting numbers of volunteers from year to year. Still, its pretty clear that theres been an upward trend, Huff said.

Some 2,100 people were counted in shelters and on the streets during the Jan. 26 operation, but roughly 6,500 people are connected to county homeless services, according to the county. The significant undercount reflects the difficulty of reaching every unsheltered individual spread out across a large county.

Compounding issues

Springs came to The Jungle because of relationship issues. Marquez, 48, said he contracted COVID-19, ended up in the hospital for eight months and lost a job. Elaine Martin, 43, was fired from a housekeeper- and nanny-type position, lived out of her car for a few months and turned to the wooded refuge four years ago.

For Aaron, it was a recent turn in her life.

She was raised in Bonney Lake as the only girl of four children. One brother died in a house fire. A marriage to a man in the military didnt last. She worked a variety of odd jobs, such as truck driver, care provider and factory worker.

In 2010, Aaron was electrocuted while on the clock as a contractor at a shipyard, she said. Electricity coursed through her body as she held a piece of metal pipe at the request of a colleague who wanted to weld a bracket onto it.

It just zapped me pretty darn good, she said.

Forced into an early retirement, she went on welfare and now collects slightly more than $900 monthly in Social Security. Until late last year, she lived at a mobile home park in Roy, a rural community south of Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

When a new owner bought the park, evictions soon followed over alleged violations of rental agreements, including with regard to rent, unauthorized pets and property junk. Aarons case was just one of 10 initiated by Little Lake LLC when The News Tribune reported on the mass exodus in September.

Brandon Jermaine Lee Booker, also known as Bullet, stands inside the sleeping area of his tent inside the homeless encampment just east of the 9700 block of Steele Street South in Tacoma on Thursday, May 25, 2023. Booker could remember a time 10 years ago when only three people lived in the privately-owned wooded area on the far south end of Tacoma.

Aaron, who is a federal housing voucher recipient, disputed shed violated her agreement. A pro-bono attorney fought for her in a case that court records show is still ongoing. Aaron left the trailer. A November legal filing on her behalf indicated that she had been forced since October to stay with friends and family because the home had become condemned.

When interviewed about her precarious housing situation late last summer, Aaron predicted her fate: Im going to be in a tent on the side of the street in just a matter of a few days.

Aarons premonition about the prospect of finding affordable housing rang true. Aaron said shes diligently searching for options, and organizations have stepped in to help, but nothing has come to fruition and shes unwilling to move into something she deems less safe than her current circumstances.

Bouviea Aaron, 65, stands along the eastern edge of a homeless encampment in the 9700 block of Steele Street South in Tacoma on Thursday, May 25, 2023. The encampment, informally known as The Jungle, is located around Charlton Lake on the far south side of Tacoma.

Her situation has been made more complex by a move she thought shed be making prior to relocating into The Jungle. After departing her home in the Roy, she briefly stayed with a neighbor in the mobile home park and then got a bead on a trailer in King County. So she transferred her Section 8 voucher from a housing authority in Pierce County to King County, a process she said took roughly a month.

That trailer move-in fell through. Now Aaron faces a quick-approaching deadline.

In general terms, whenever a voucher isnt being used, a countdown clock begins. A recipient has 120 days  with a 30-day extension granted in some instances  to find a new place before they lose the voucher. They arent easy to come by. The Pierce County Housing Authority has 3,000 vouchers and an estimated 10,000 people on a waiting list hoping to win one in a lottery, according to executive director Jim Stretz.

The demand is so high that the waiting list hasnt been opened since 2018, Stretz told The News Tribune.

Aaron said she was granted a 30-day extension. It means she has until the end of this month to find a place to stay or else shell lose her voucher.

Im in the woods right now, she said. Of course, I want some place to live.

Kelsi Springs, 34, carries a bouquet of fake flowers that was given to her by a friend as she walks past a broken RV at a homeless encampment in the 9700 block of Steele Street South in Tacoma on Thursday, May 25, 2023.

Dangers but camaraderie, too

Aaron never envisioned that her home would be where it is now, but the location wasnt unfamiliar to her. When moving out of the Roy mobile home park, she said she hired a man off the street to help her pack. He lived in The Jungle, and Aaron said she visited to bring soups, sandwiches and other food.

She has come to learn that the place, which can smell like campfire from either cooking or the burning of trash or wood, is one where its smart to be mindful. Neighbors have peeked through the windows of her pick-up truck, with their hands around their eyes to get a better view of whats inside.

It is what it is, she said. Its the weirdest situation in the world. Its really odd. You worry about the mass marauders.

Springs said people who can afford service often have cell phones stolen or broken. Those whove lived in the camp longer have faced grave dangers: Brandon Jermaine Lee Booker, also known as Bullet, recalled being hospitalized after being attacked in his sleep; Martin said she was choked unconscious, dragged down a hill and assaulted.

Bob Chapman, executive director of Charlton Place, the adjacent assisted-living home, said that there have been issues with people from The Jungle walking onto Charlton Places property or starting fires in the encampment.

Its just a nuisance, he told The News Tribune. Its just unsightly.

Others have taken notice.

A citizen complaint to the city in May noted that the encampment was causing a health-and-safety issue, with garbage, junk, abandoned vehicles and tents being constructed on public sidewalks, according to details of the complaint shared by the city.

Make-shift shacks and RVs are scattered around the wooded area along the 9700 block of Steele Street South where a medium-sized homeless encampment has existed on-and-off for over five years in Tacoma.

Two months earlier, a resident was far more aggressive when they called the city and delivered an ultimatum about the encampment, according to the citys note of the complaint.

Caller stated that the neighbor(hood) will gather together and will take care of this homeless and you will find bodies laying around, the note said. Caller hung up and could not take a name.

Residents of the camp acknowledged that there were underlying issues that complicated the situations of people living in the encampment: mental and physical health, substance abuse and more.

Lee said the city commonly refers people to options for behavioral and substance-use disorder treatment and connects them to peer counseling. But Aaron, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and low blood pressure, claimed that nobodys getting any help.

Encampment members also say theyre often unfairly vilified and dehumanized, yet theyve found a certain camaraderie that will be hard to replace.

Just like any neighborhood or group of people, not everyone in it is the same, not everyone in it is bad, said Springs, who noted that she began using drugs as a coping mechanism after becoming homeless.

She was among a few camp members seen raking the grounds late last month. She and others said they try to keep their slice of territory clean, but outsiders will haul and dump trash there, including to the bank of the lake, and there are no dumpsters for locals to dispose of their own waste.

J.R. Marquez, 48, pauses for a moment while talking about the situations that brought him to be living in a homeless encampment in the 9700 block of Steele Street South on far south end of Tacoma on Thursday, May 25, 2023.

Living here is totally different (than) on the outside. Because the outside always about money, always about how (something) looks, always about how you acting, Marquez said. In here, we like family.

In The Jungle, family means sharing resources such as food, policing each others behavior and believing that those around you will do you no harm.

Weve got a lot of people here, Aaron says, before a brief pause, who are just trying to make it.
Photo: JohndeRuiter.com John de Ruiter

Edmonton police have laid multiple new charges of sexual assault against controversial Edmonton spiritual leader John de Ruiter and his wife, Leigh Ann.

Edmonton police spokeswoman Cheryl Voordenhout confirmed on Thursday that Mr. de Ruiter, 63, faces three new charges of sexual assault against three different women between the years of 2012 and 2019.

Mr. de Ruiters wife  who is also known by her maiden name, Leigh Ann Angermann  is charged with two counts of sexual assault in relation to the same allegations. She is 64.

Mr. de Ruiter was first arrested in January and charged with four counts of sexual assault against women in his community of followers. His wife was then arrested in March, and charged with three counts of sexual assault related to the same incidents, which are alleged to have occurred between 2017 and 2020.

Mr. de Ruiter commands a dedicated community of hundreds  and potentially thousands  of followers from around the world, who believe him to be a highly evolved spiritual being and the living embodiment of truth.

In 2017, The Globe and Mail reported on questions in the community around Mr. de Ruiters sexual relationships with followers. In the past three years, Mr. de Ruiter and his followers have been in the process of moving from Edmonton to an isolated area of rural Alberta, a Globe investigation showed earlier this year.

At the time of his arrest in January, police said Mr. de Ruiter had informed certain female group members that he was directed by a spirit to engage in sexual activity with them, and that engaging in sexual activity with him will provide them an opportunity to achieve a state of higher being or spiritual enlightenment.

Mr. de Ruiter and Ms. de Ruiter have been married since 2009, after Mr. de Ruiter separated from two sisters, Benita and Katrina von Sass, with whom he had been engaged in a common-law marriage. Those sisters later launched lawsuits against him.

During Mr. de Ruiters bail hearing in January, court heard that Katrina von Sass now lives with Mr. de Ruiter and his wife.

Mr. and Ms. de Ruiter are not in custody, and remain out on bail on a number of conditions. Under his conditions, Mr. de Ruiter  whose legal first name is Johannes  cannot be alone with women other than Ms. de Ruiter, his daughter, and Ms. von Sass.

Other details of his bail hearing cannot be published because of a court-ordered publication ban. The de Ruiters next court date is June 21. No trial dates have been set.

Police previously said investigators believed there may be other complainants, and spokeswoman Ms. Voordenhout said police are still urging people who believe they have been victimized to come forward.

Mr. de Ruiters lawyer, Dino Bottos, declined to comment on the new allegations.
Canadas favorite Asian grocery chain T&T Supermarket is coming to the US

[Source]

T&T Supermarket, Canadas leading Asian grocery chain, is finally opening a branch in the U.S.

The location: Announced on Thursday, the first-ever T&T store in the U.S. will open in Bellevue, Washington, in the summer of 2024.

T&T Supermarkets is marking 30 years as Canadas favourite Asian grocery store with the announcement that it will soon open a store in the United States, the grocery chains website states.

After 30 successful years in Canada, we couldnt be more excited to bring our unique offering closer to home for customers in the United States, CEO Tina Lee said in a recent press release.

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Key details: The Bellevue store, located at the Marketplace at Factoria, will offer more than 300 of T&Ts private label products as well as a sushi counter, hot food bar and noodle station," according to the press release.

The 76,000-square-foot branch will also serve as a flagship store and will purportedly become the largest Asian supermarket in the state."

In the press release, Bellevue Mayor Lynne Robinson said they are thrilled as the new T&T branch will add to the citys rich food scene and the vibrant culture.

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Other plans: T&T is notably planning on establishing its regional office in the greater Los Angeles area.

About the chain: T&T was founded in 1993 by Cindy Lee, an immigrant from Taiwan. The mother-of-three opened her first grocery store in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, with the help of her husband Jack Lee.

The grocery chain's name is a reference to her two daughters, Tina and Tiffany, as well as two initial investors.

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FILE PHOTO: David Johnston, special rapporteur on foreign interference, holds a press conference about his findings and recommendations in Ottawa

Canada investigator into alleged election meddling by China to quit FILE PHOTO: David Johnston, special rapporteur on foreign interference, holds a press conference about his findings and recommendations in Ottawa

By David Ljunggren

OTTAWA (Reuters) -A special investigator named by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to probe alleged election interference by China on Friday said he would quit, citing widespread opposition to his appointment and work.

David Johnston, 81, said he would leave his post by the end of June, or as soon as he has delivered a brief final report. Last month he said Trudeau's government had not ignored evidence of Chinese meddling and recommended against an official public inquest.

Johnston was appointed in March after media reports based on leaked intelligence said that Beijing had sought to influence elections and policy. China has denied any interference.

Last month the House of Commons, the lower chamber of parliament, approved a non-binding motion to demand Johnston's resignation. Some critics said he had ignored a real issue while others, noting his long friendship with Trudeau, said the appointment had been a mistake.

"My objective was to help build trust in our democratic institutions. I have concluded that, given the highly partisan atmosphere around my appointment and work, my leadership has had the opposite effect," Johnston said in a letter to Trudeau.

In response, government minister Dominic LeBlanc thanked Johnston and said the attacks on his position and work had been unwarranted and unacceptable.

In a statement, LeBlanc said he would consult experts as to how to continue probing foreign election interference and who would be best placed to lead that work.

Following Johnston's appointment, three opposition legislators said Canada's spy agency told them they had been the target of Chinese interference. Last month Trudeau's government expelled a Chinese official after it emerged that he had sought information about the family of one of the legislators.

China-Canada relations turned icy in late 2018 when Canadian police detained a Chinese telecommunications executive. Shortly afterwards, Beijing arrested two Canadians on spying charges.

All three were freed in 2021.

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Canada's most populous city, Toronto, has won some respite from wildfire smoke, along with major US east coast cities as the haze heads south.

Air quality in New York and Washington DC also improved from hazardous levels for the first time in two days.

But unhealthy air quality is forecast to hit several southern metropolitan cities, including St Louis, Missouri and Louisville, Kentucky.

Canada wildfire smoke has left millions under health alerts this week.

The wildfires brought some of the worst levels of air pollution in decades, cancelling outdoor activities and flights in both the US and Canada.

As of Friday, more than 400 wildfires continued to rage in Canada, including over 200 that are considered out of control, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.

Officials have urged residents to avoid going outside as much as possible and to wear masks when venturing outdoors, especially for vulnerable populations.

Experts say exposure to wildfire smoke can cause a host of health issues, such as an elevated pulse, chest pain and inflammation in the eyes, nose and throat.

Canadian forecasters said on Friday that air quality would continue to improve over the weekend in southern Ontario, although it remains poor in northern Ontario and western Quebec.

Weather over the next few days might bring showers to the eastern part of the country, but could also come with lightning.

"As long as the fires are burning, there is a chance the smoke could come back," Environment and Climate Change Canada meteorologist Gerald Cheng told a news briefing.

The US National Weather Service on Friday said smoke from the wildfires would continue to be "transported south by winds into the US resulting in moderate to unhealthy air quality across parts of the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Ohio Valley, and Midwest".

"Some improvement is expected this weekend," the service added.

The winds will bring relief for several cities including Washington DC, Philadelphia and New York, which had significantly worse air quality this week than cities abroad such as Lahore, Pakistan; Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Hanoi, Vietnam.

Mr Biden said this week that he was in contact with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and that the US had deployed more than 600 firefighters to help battle the blazes in Canada since May.

Canadian officials say the country is shaping up for its worst wildfire season on record.

Climate change increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires.
By Sam Jabri-Pickett

TORONTO (Reuters) - Ruling conservatives in the Canadian province of New Brunswick this week made changes to rules for schools as they sought to "recognize the role of parents" in questions around gender identity, but have faced pushback from within their own party.

The former policy, which dated from 2020, said teachers must respect all children's chosen names and pronouns, regardless of age, and that it should be up to the student whether their parents were informed.

On Thursday, provincial Education Minister Bill Hogan announced changes to that policy. From July 1, children under 16 must have parental consent to alter their names and pronouns at school.

Another change to the policy removes a reference to students being allowed to participate in activities "consistent with their gender identity". There is also a new requirement that gender-neutral washrooms be private.

New Brunswick's Progressive Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs said the policy change "recognized the role of parents," but he immediately ran into opposition from within his own party as eight lawmakers - including six Cabinet members - boycotted parliamentary business on Thursday.

In a joint statement, the eight lawmakers said they were expressing their "extreme disappointment in a lack of process and transparency".

Should those lawmakers pull their support for him, Higgs said it was possible there could be an early election.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, attending an LGBTQ+ event in Toronto on Thursday, spoke out against the move.

"Right now trans kids in New Brunswick are being told they don't have the right to be their true selves, that they need to ask permission," he said. "Trans kids need to feel safe, not targeted by politicians."

The New Brunswick debate reflects similar ones being held in the United States, where it has become a cultural wedge issue between the two main parties heading toward the 2024 presidential elections.

Indiana has enacted a law requiring teachers to tell parents when students ask to be called by a new name or different pronoun. North Dakota has approved a law that lets public school teachers and state employees ignore a request to use a transgender person's preferred pronoun.

(Reporting by Sam Jabri-Pickett in Toronto; editing by Steve Scherer and Rosalba O'Brien)
The thick smoke and haze that turned the New York City skyline orange and brought some of the worst air quality levels the Northeast has seen in decades was spawned by a series of wildfires burning in Canada.

The fires, which began in early June and have affected Ontario and Quebec, have impacted Canadians and Americans alike. Canadian media reported that 14,000 people in Quebec were evacuated earlier in June. In Canada, the fires caused thick smoke that led to air quality warnings. In the Northeast, there was a similar effect: Cities like New York and Philadelphia were blanketed in a thick haze that eventually traveled south to Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

The smoke is expected to gradually blow away from the U.S. East Coast over the weekend, but the fires in Canada are still burning. Here's what to know about the ongoing wildfires.

Are the Canadian wildfires under control?

According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, there are currently 417 active fires in the country. According to a map updated by the CIFFC daily, these fires are on both coasts of the country.

Of those fires, 218 are labeled as "out of control." Just 108 are marked as "under control," while another 91 are "being held." A fire being held means it is not moving but still not considered under control, and its status can fluctuate.

According to Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, there are 34 active fires burning. Half of them were not yet under control as of Friday evening, the agency said. Seven are being held, one is being observed and nine are under control.

In this image released by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, the Sudbury 17 wildfire burns east of Mississagi Provincial Park near Elliot Lake, Ontario, on June 4, 2023. / Credit: / AP

According to Societe De Protection Des Forets, an agency in Quebec, there are 134 active fires in the province. The site does not provide statistics on how many fires are out of control, but does have an interactive map that updates every five minutes with updated statuses.

Why are the Canadian wildfires out of control?

As CBS News previously reported, harsh weather conditions in Canada are fueling the fires and making it harder for firefighters to combat the flames.

This isn't likely to go away. The Canadian government recently issued an updated outlook for the country's wildfire season, which usually stretches from May through October. The most recent outlook, published this week, said that the wildfire season this year is already "severe" and warned that current predictions "indicate the potential for continued higher-than-normal fire activity across most of the country throughout the 2023 wildland fire season due to ongoing drought and long-range forecasts for warm temperatures."

The country is currently at "national preparedness level 5," meaning Canada has committed all national resources to fight wildfires across the country. International firefighters are also flying in: Chris Stockdale, a wildland fire research officer with the Canadian Forest Officer, told CBS News that when smoke from earlier fires affected some central and western states, that "international liaison officers" from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa would be flying in to help fight the fires.

President Joe Biden also said earlier this week that American firefighters would be heading north.

"We've deployed more than 600 U.S. firefighters, support personnel, and equipment to support Canada as they respond to record wildfires  events that are intensifying because of the climate crisis," he said in a tweet.

Will ongoing wildfires cause the smoke to return?

The air quality in the U.S. East Coast is expected to improve over the weekend. Even as the fires continue to burn, air quality in New York and other northern areas has begun to return to normal levels.

Jen Carfango, a Weather Channel meteorologist, told CBS News earlier this week that the lingering smoke has more to do with a weather pattern.

"We have been in a blocked pattern across North America all week long," Carfango said in an email. "That kept an area of upper level low pressure stuck over the Northeast. The flow around the low pressure has been guiding wildfire smoke from Quebec into the Northeast, Great Lakes, and even Ohio Valley and down in the mid-Atlantic."

Smoke rises from a wildfire in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada, in this screen grab taken from a video, June 8, 2023. / Credit: BC Wildlife Service/Handout via REUTERS

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A Caldwell woman who shot and killed her 81-year-old step-grandfather after he sexually assaulted her throughout her childhood could spend up to 22 years in prison.

Third District Judge Thomas Whitney sentenced Esmeralda Ahumada, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, to at least 12 years in prison, with an additional 10 years that the 35-year-old woman could spend in prison, on probation or both, according to a news release from the Canyon County Prosecutors Office.

In August 2022, Ahumada was arrested by the Caldwell Police Department after she fatally shot Filiberto Juarez-Reyes in the chest at a Caldwell home, according to an affidavit of probable cause obtained by the Idaho Statesman.

Ahumada admitted to shooting Juarez-Reyes, indicating that it was to end the sexual abuse she had been enduring since childhood, according to the release.

Ahumada texted a family member admitting that she killed him because he had recently tried to sexually assault her again. She later said that hed hurt her from infancy to 12 years old, according to the affidavit.

I hate him, I hate him, I hate him, he f----- me up so bad and nobody believed me, Ahumada told police following her arrest, according to the affidavit.

Ahumada pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in February as part of a plea agreement, online court records showed. She was initially charged with first-degree murder.

The Canyon County Prosecutors Office requested a longer sentence, asking that Ahumada spend at least 20 years in prison, followed by an indeterminate life sentence, which would have meant that she would have spent the rest of her life on probation. Ahumadas public defender asked for her to spend up to 23 years in prison, with the possibility of parole after seven years.

The sentence she received means that she could be eligible for parole after serving 12 years.

Whitney acknowledged in court the difficult nature of the case because of Ahumadas upbringing, mental health issues and the sexual abuse she sustained at the hands of Juarez-Reyes, according to the release. Whitney also commended Ahumada on her willingness to accept responsibility from start to finish.

We encourage anyone who is suffering or has suffered from sexual abuse to report it to law enforcement and allow the justice system to intervene, Canyon County Prosecutor Bryan Taylor said in the release. This case is tragic in more ways than one, and it did not need to end this way.

The judge also ordered Ahumada to pay a $1,000 fine and court costs, and she will have to partially reimburse the Canyon County public defenders office.
FLORENCE  An Alabama prisoner received a life sentence on Thursday for escaping with the help of a jail official who ultimately took her own life as police closed in following a manhunt across three states.

Casey White, 39, told those gathered in the Lauderdale County courtroom that he felt like the most hated man in the world but that he wouldn't drag 56-year-old corrections officer Vicky White's name through the dirt, news outlets reported. He said Vicky White, who was not related to him, was the first person who cared about him in six years.

He apologized for the escape, saying Vicky Whites only regret was leaving behind her family.

Casey White arrives at the Lauderdale County Courthouse for a sentence hearing in Florence, Ala., Thursday, June 8 2023. Casey Cole White is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday following his guilty plea last month to escape charges related to his 11 days on the run last year with jailer Vicky White. (Dan Busey/The TimesDaily via AP)

We just wanted a new life together because she knew the truth. I can handle the truth because I know who I am, White said. I chose this road. Its cost me my life and freedom.

White was serving a 75-year prison term for an array of charges from 2015, including attempted murder, and he was awaiting a capital murder trial when he escaped in April 2022. The pair was on the run for 11 days until Casey White was recaptured in Evansville, Indiana. Vicky White died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

White pleaded guilty to escape in exchange for prosecutors dropping a felony murder charge involving Vicky White's death, and agreed to the maximum sentence of life without parole.

Mark McDaniel, attorney for Casey White, center, looks to Casey White's mother, Connie Moore, during a press conference following the sentence hearing for White, Thursday, June 8, 2023, in Florence, Ala. White, who escaped with help from a jail official who ultimately ended up taking her own life as cops closed in, was sentenced Thursday to life in prison. (Dan Busey/The TimesDaily via AP)

Casey White was also told to notify the state if he, his family or attorneys receive opportunities for books, movies or other financial opportunities related to the escape, which made national headlines, as any proceeds should be used to pay for his defense.

Meanwhile, he still faces an Aug. 14 capital murder trial for the 2015 slaying of Connie Ridgeway in Rogersville. That trial was delayed in the aftermath of the escape and White retaining a new team of attorneys.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Casey White receives life sentence after escape from jail, manhunt
Casey White sentenced to life in prison after escape from jail, capture in Evansville

EVANSVILLE  More than a year after he was captured in Evansville, former escaped fugitive Casey White was sentenced to life in prison Thursday after escaping an Alabama jail and sparking a nationwide manhunt.

White, 39, pleaded guilty last month to charges stemming from his escape from Lauderdale County Jail alongside jailer Vicky White in 2022.

The two, who were not related despite the shared last name, evaded authorities for 11 days: a week of which they reportedly spent in Evansville, holed up in a motel along U.S. 41. On May 9, 2022, authorities eventually ran them down after a short car chase.

Vicky White reportedly shot herself in the head after police rammed their gray Cadillac, knocking it on its side. She later died at Deaconess Hospital. She was 56 years old.

Vanderburgh Sheriff Dave Wedding displays a booking shot of Casey White during a press conference to discuss the capture of fugitives Casey White and Vicky White, no relation, during a vehicle chase along Hwy 41 the day before at the Vanderburgh County Sheriff's Office Tuesday morning, May 10, 2022. Vicky White reportedly died after shooting herself after their Cadillac sedan was stopped near Anchor Industries.

The Whites had been heavily armed, and reportedly had been prepared for a "shootout" with police, former Vanderburgh County Sheriff Dave Wedding said. They never got the chance.

Before pleading guilty, Casey White had faced a felony murder charge in her death. According to WHNT, White pleaded guilty in order for the murder charge being dropped.

"I loved Vicky and I wouldn't drag her name through the mud for anyone in this courtroom," White reportedly said in court on Thursday. "Vicky took me out because she said, 'right was right. Wrong is wrong.' First person to show me affection. First person to give me a hug in six years."

A seven-part series by the Courier & Press' Thomas Langhorne laid out how Casey and Vicky struck up a friendship and eventual romance, and how they spent their time in Evansville.

Vicky White had recognized Casey's name when he showed up at the jail in August 2020, Casey told FBI Special Agent David Gorman and deputy sheriff Nathan Sugarman, an FBI task force member. She and her ex-husband had known Casey's brother. Casey said he first saw Vicky at a party 20 years before.

They eventually began sharing letters, and then phone calls. And on April 28, they vanished from Lauderdale County's jail.

The pair eventually landed in Williamson County, Tennessee, where they purchased a $6,000 Ford F-150 in cash from a man selling cars out of his front yard. On May 3, the truck was found abandoned in a wash bay at Weinbach Car Wash.

U.S. marshals say this truck was driven by escaped Alabama inmate Casey White, left, and was abandoned at Weinbach Car Wash in Evansville, Ind. White escaped from an Alabama prison with former correctional officer Vicky White.

Surveillance footage showed 6-foot-9 Casey White loitering behind it, and driving away in a used gray Cadillac with Vicky at his side.

Evansville Police auto theft Detective Darren Richardson eventually spotted the Cadillac at Motel 41 while driving home from work. EPD, U.S. Marshals and the Vanderburgh County Sheriff's Office, among other authorities, set up surveillance and waited until the Whites eventually emerged from their makeshift home inside Room 150.

When they finally did, the short chase occurred, leading to Vicky's death and Casey's return to court  and prison.

According to AL.com, Casey White will also stand trial for capital murder trial on Aug. 14 for the 2015 killing of Connie Ridgeway in Rogersville, Alabama. White was being held for the trial when he escaped. And he was already serving a 75-year sentence for a 2015 attempted murder conviction, among other charges.

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Casey White, fugitive caught in Evansville, given life in prison
A cat that fell 11 stories off a deck in Seattle survived the fall, even after breaking 3 legs, according to Jessica Tonani, the cats owner.

Tonani says Mr. Banks fell Wednesday around 9 to 9:30 a.m. Tonani had just gotten off a conference call and was about to leave the house when she quickly searched for him and couldnt find the cat.

By 10 a.m. she still couldnt find him and she texted her neighbor to let them know Mr. Banks was missing.

Tonani says she went outside to look for him and when she called him, she heard him crying.

After getting down to the 5th floor, she found him on an awning above the entrance of the building. The cat was very hurt.

The building manager got a ladder, and Tonani returned to her apartment to get her keys, wallet, and carrier.

Mr. Banks was put inside the carrier. The building manager told Tonani that he is really hurt.

Tonani quickly went to a vet who told her they were surprised Mr. Banks was still alive.

Mr. Banks was taken to a hospital vet, who had never seen a cat fall from that height and survive.

The vet said Mr. Banks could live a great life in about 4 weeks, but he will lose one leg and will need surgery on the other two legs.

Tonani says the cost of the surgeries will be between $20,000 and $26,000, which, Tonani said, is so much money she considered putting Mr. Banks down.

But after she heard her other cat, George, crying, she thought it was a miracle Mr. Banks survived, then maybe asking for help could be another miracle.

Tonani has set up a GoFundMe to help with Mr. Banks surgeries and treatments. As of 4 p.m. Thursday, it has raised over $15,000.

On Thursday, Tonani provided an update that he was getting his surgery today. She visited him at the hospital and he was purring away.




Champions League final: Want to get to Istanbul to see Manchester City vs Inter? You still can

City magic: Manchester City fans outside the Dubliner Irish Pub in Istanbul on Thursday (PA Wire)

As fans of Manchester City and the Italian side Inter converge on Istanbul for Saturdays Champions League final, there are still flights available at fares way below the usual peak pricing for key sporting events.

Pegasus Airlines has a one-way overnight flight on Friday night from Manchester, arriving at 8.35am, for just 263  comparable with normal fares for very short-notice bookings.

The final kicks off at 10pm local time (8pm UK time) at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium on the west side of the city.

Compared with the prices paid by West Ham United fans who went to Prague for the Europa Conference final on Wednesday, Manchester City supporters have plenty of choice at lower fares  even though Istanbul is twice as far.

Heres our guide to booking a last-minute Turkey trip to see the final.

How much are air fares to the host city?

Manchester to Istanbul is almost 1,700 miles, and a four-hour flight. The demand for seats has pushed up fares. But the aviation analyst Cirium has identified 13 extra scheduled flights between Manchester and Istanbul, with additional charter flights. The extra flights add around 2,500 extra seats to normal capacity.

The Turkish carrier Pegasus is scheduled to be the largest airline between the two cities this week, followed by Turkish Airlines and easyJet. Pegasus has a departure at 2.35am on Saturday that arrives at 8.35am for 263.

Passengers who are prepared to travel overnight via Dalaman will pay even less: 151 one-way.

There is even a flight for 111 that arrives in Istanbul at 7.55pm, two hours before kick off. But those flights touch down at Sabiha Gokcen airport on the Asian side of the city, with difficult transport direct to the stadium.

Flying into Istanbuls vast new airport on the European side of the Bosphorus, fares are generally much higher. But there is one Turkish Airlines flight from Manchester at 209 on Saturday that arrives three hours before the final begins.

Returning home?

While some Manchester City fans have been in the city for days, it appears that everyone wants to come home on Sunday. Turkish Airlines has just a few seats available at 858 one way, with some flights offering business-class only at 1,536.

But anyone who waits until Monday will find much cheaper deals  especially if they are prepared to fly to one of the London airports. Seats at below 300 one way are widely available.

This compares with over 1,000 return for West Ham fans flying from London to Prague this week.

What about accommodation?

Rates are surging in the city centre, especially for Saturday night. One quote for an upmarket hotel is 3,835 for Saturday night, and city-centre three-star hotels are selling for around 300 for a double. But Istanbul is vast, with tens of thousands of hotel rooms. Staying on the Asian side and taking the ferry across should work out at around 100 a night for a double room.

What about safety?

The UK government is saying: Plan your movement around the city to arrive at the Manchester City dedicated fanzone or stadium well in advance of the match kick-off, follow the instructions of the local authorities, take care of your personal possessions including passports, especially in crowds and on public transport.

There are warnings of terrorism from the Foreign Office, which says: There is a potential that citizens from western countries may be targets or caught up in attacks.

Should I stay longer?

Yes. Istanbul is one of the greatest cities in the world, and extending a stay by 48 hours to make the most of the history, gastronomy and atmosphere in Istanbul would be an excellent move.

Read our latest 48 Hours guide to Istanbul
Australia, Vietnam strengthen parliamentary cooperation

Australian Ambassador Andrew Goledzinowski has just hosted a working dinner with members of the Australia-Vietnam Parliamentary Friendship Group at the Australian Embassy in Vietnam, marking the collaboration between the two parliaments on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Australia-Vietnam diplomatic relations.





Hoang Thanh Tung, Head of the Australia-Vietnam Parliamentary Friendship Group and Chair of the National Assembly Committee for Legal Affairs, with Australia's Ambassador Andrew Goledzinowski and Agriculture Counsellor, Tony Harman. The event took place during an intense period of high-level exchanges between both countries, including visits by Australias PM Anthony Albanese MP to Vietnam on June 3-4 and by Australias Governor-General David Hurley AC DSC (Retd) in April. The event took place during an intense period of high-level exchanges between both countries, including visits by Australias PM Anthony Albanese MP to Vietnam on June 3-4 and by Australias Governor-General David Hurley AC DSC (Retd) in April.

Ambassador Goledzinowski said the high-level visits reflected the significant strategic trust and close friendship between the two countries, which had been fostered over the last 50 years.

Head of the Australia-Vietnam Parliamentary Friendship Group and Chair of the National Assembly Committee for Legal Affairs, Hoang Thanh Tung, highlighted the strategic trust and affinity between two countries strategic vision and actions. He appreciated the increasing cooperation with Australia in delegation exchanges, technical assistance provided to National Assembly deputies and officials and mutual support at international fora and events.

Australias Aus4Reform Program has been assisting the National Assembly Economic Committee since 2015, to enhance the analytical and reporting capacity of the Committee in overseeing and developing Vietnams economic development agenda. Further assistance programs to various committees are scheduled to start this year.

The Australia-Vietnam Parliamentary Friendship Group, consisting of 11 National Assembly deputies, plays a key role in fostering the parliamentary relations and cooperation between the two countries. A cooperation agreement between Australia and Vietnams legislative institutions was signed in 2013, and again renewed in 2022 during National Assembly Chairman, Vuong Dinh Hues Guest of Parliament visit to Australia.

The agreement aims to promote cooperation in high-level exchanges, climate change, digital transformation, digital economy, fair energy transition, human rights and exchanging views on regional issues and providing mutual support at international fora.
Photo: The Canadian Press

Hamid Ahmadpanah and his wife have spent nearly a decade in Canada, working, learning English and raising two young daughters who were born here.

But lately, the Ottawa family has been living a life in limbo.

The Iranian couple's work permits have expired as they wait for their permanent residency applications to be processed, and a new work permit promised by the government to Ahmadpanah never arrived, he says.

The situation has left the pair unable to work and fearful of being sent back to Iran, where Ahmadpanah says his family would be at risk because he and his wife have taken part in protests against the Iranian government while in Canada.

"I studied here, worked here with my wife  my children were born here, raised here, now after nine years not only we have no citizenship rights, but also we dont have the right to work and live (like) a normal family," Ahmadpanah says.

"My life has been ruined."

Ahmadpanah, 42, says he's speaking out in a desperate attempt for help as his savings run out and his family worries they may have to leave the life they've built in Canada.

"We are losing hope every day," he says. "But we have to hide our stress, sadness and sorrow, because we have two children."

The couple came from Iran to Montreal in 2015  Ahmadpanah had a student visa and his wife had a work visa. Ahmadpanah later got a post-graduation work permit. The family now lives in Ottawa.

Ahmadpanah and his wife applied for permanent residency in May 2021, when their work permits were still valid.

As their work permits neared expiry, they contacted their local MP and asked if she could advocate on their behalf with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. Ahmadpanah says the MP's office told them their case was going through a security background check, a process that could take a long time.

Ahmadpanah then received a letter from the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada in August, saying his work permit  which was expiring in December 2022  would be extended until December 2024 while his permanent residency application was being processed.

"We will vary the conditions on your existing work permit to allow you to work until December 21, 2024, while we finalize your permanent resident application," IRCC wrote in the letter that was shared with The Canadian Press. "In most cases, we'll mail you a new work permit."

But that work permit never came, Ahmadpanah says.

In December last year, the family stopped receiving child benefit payments from Ontario for their five-year-old and one-year-old daughters, with the province saying they were no longer eligible due to their immigration status. A month later, the couple lost their provincial health insurance.

"If I or my wife gets sick or something happens to us, we dont have money to go to the hospital," Ahmadpanah says.

In February, Ahmadpanah says he received a letter from IRCC saying he was eligible for an exemption allowing him to work in Canada until the end of May while he waited for a new work permit. He says he's still waiting for the new permit and his wife's work permit is no longer valid.

Ahmadpanah says he's made several calls to the IRCC, begging them to expedite his permanent residency application. He's also asked repeatedly to be issued the extended work permit IRCC said he was eligible for.

He alleges an agent once told him that there was no "timeframe" for his permanent residency application, and another suggested the family should leave Canada if he and his wife don't get their work permits or permanent resident cards by the end of May.

"We are really tired, Ahmadpanah says in Farsi.

The IRCC says it will not comment on specific cases.

Speaking generally, it says temporary residents whose work permits expire can try to restore their status if they apply within 90 days.

"If a foreign nationals temporary status ended more than 90 days ago, they are no longer eligible to restore their status and would be expected to leave Canada," IRCC wrote in a statement.

Michael Battista, an immigration and refugee law expert who is a professor at the University of Toronto, says the family has a few options, though none would resolve their problems right away.

One is for Ahmadpanah to apply for refugee status given the situation in Iran, another is to apply for permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, Battista says.

Battista says the family could also ask a federal court to order the IRCC to expedite the process of the couples permanent residency application.

But any of those potential solutions would take time, he says, calling the family's current situation "brutal."

Ahmadpanah says his family is now at risk of losing their apartment because neither he nor his wife can earn enough for rent.

The family has been using their savings but those are dwindling. They've also been selling their belongings and raised over $11,000 through a GoFundMe campaign but that covers just two months of expenses, Ahmadpanah says.

"I really dont know what to do," he says.

"Some suggest I leave my apartment and live in my car with my children ... What should we do with two innocent children?"
What are the charges against Donald Trump and what happens next?

Donald Trump indictment US former president White House classified documents - Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

What are the charges?

Donald Trump faces 37 felony charges related to the mishandling of classified documents.

The 76-year-old is accused of breaking seven different laws. The charges relate to 31 counts of willful retention of national defence information as well as single charges for making false statements and representations, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document, concealing a document in a federal investigation and a scheme to conceal.

The indictment accused him of having improperly removed scores of boxes from the White House and storing them at his Florida estate in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

Some contained information about defence and weapons capabilities of both the US and foreign countries along with nuclear programmes.

Mr Trump has maintained his innocence, claiming that the investigation is a hoax and a witch hunt, and has accused Joe Biden and the Democrats of election interference.

Walt Nauta, Mr Trumps former aide, has also been charged.

What are the possible sentences?

Only two of the charges that Mr Trump faces carry a possible prison sentence of less than 10 years.

The 31 charges under the Espionage Act  the wilful retention of documents  carry a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

To convict Mr Trump, prosecutors would have to prove that he or his team knowingly mishandled materials to impede, obstruct or influence the investigation.

Prosecutors would need to prove the documents related to national defence and their disclosure could harm the US or aid a foreign adversary.

Charges for obstruction of justice, witholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record and concealing a document in a federal investigation all carry a possible prison sentence of up to 20 years.

The charges for scheming to conceal and making false statements and representations carry a maximum jail term of five years.

All charges are listed with a maximum fine of up to $250,000 (198,000).

We are at the preliminary stage of the process and it is unlikely to be concluded before the 2024 election.

Can he run for president from prison?

Yes, Mr Trump can still run while indicted or convicted. The Constitution sets out only three requirements for candidates. They must be a natural-born citizen, aged 35 or above, and a resident of the US for at least 14 years.

At least two people have previously run for president with criminal convictions: socialist Eugene Debs in 1920 after he was convicted of the Espionage Act over a 1918 anti-war speech, and Lyndon LaRouche also ran for office several times after being convicted of fraud in 1988. His 1992 bid was conducted from a federal prison in Minnesota.

But if convicted, Mr Trump would be barred from voting in his adoptive home state of Florida until he had served his sentence.

Could he serve from prison?

If Mr Trump is elected president, he could technically pardon himself on federal charges. However, experts have said this would be unconstitutional because it violates the basic principle that nobody should be the judge in their own case.

He could also pre-emptively pardon himself from any pending federal charges.

Robert Ray, an attorney who defended Mr Trump in his impeachment, said if he is elected he would control the Justice Department if its still pending, he just dismisses the case.

What other charges does he face?

Capitol attack 6 Jan

Jack Smith, the special counsel, is also investigating Mr Trumps role in the attack on the US Capitol on Jan 6 2021. Mr Trump had sought to prevent top aides, including Mike Pence, from testifying.

Mr Pence appeared before the grand jury in April after Mr Trump lost his legal challenge.

Attempt to overturn the Georgia vote

Mr Trump is being investigated over whether he illegally tried to overturn his narrow defeat in the state during the 2020 presidential election. A charging decision is expected in September.

New York hush money case

In April, Mr Trump was indicted by a New York grand jury. He pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records relating to hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, the porn star, before the 2016 election.

Sexual abuse and defamation

Last month, a civil federal grand jury in Manhattan found Mr Trump liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of E Jean Carroll, a magazine columnist. He was ordered to pay $5 million (3.9 million) in damages.

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The charges facing Donald Trump and what happens next

Former US president Donald Trump is facing seven federal criminal charges, according to one of his attorneys (SAUL LOEB)

Obstruction. Retaining classified records. Conspiracy. False statements. Donald Trump is the first former US president to face federal criminal charges.

Here is what we know about the charges facing the 76-year-old Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and what happens next:

- The charges -

The legally and politically explosive case stems from Trump's retention of classified documents after he left the White House in January 2021.

Hundreds of documents were recovered by the FBI in a raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida after he failed to comply with a subpoena to hand them over.

The twice-impeached Trump was indicted by a grand jury in Florida following an investigation by special counsel Jack Smith.

The indictment has not been unsealed yet -- Trump is to appear in a Miami court on Tuesday -- but according to one of his lawyers, Trump faces seven charges.

Jim Trusty, in an interview with CNN, said that while Trump is not accused of spying, some of the charges involve alleged violations of the Espionage Act.

These include unlawful retention of "national defense information" and concealing records with the intent to obstruct or impede a federal investigation.

Other charges include conspiracy, making false statements to the FBI and witness tampering, Trusty said without providing further details.

According to The New York Times, Trump may also be charged with mishandling official documents and contempt of court for failing to heed the subpoena to hand over the records to the National Archives.

A conviction for retaining classified documents carries a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison while obstruction is punishable by up to 20 years in jail.

Conspiracy and making false statements each carry sentences of up to five years while mishandling official documents is punishable by up to three years in prison and contempt of court by six months.

- What happens next -

Trump is to appear in federal court in Miami at 3:00 pm (1900 GMT) on Tuesday, when the indictment will be unsealed unless it is released earlier.

Trusty, Trump's lawyer, said the logistics of the former president's appearance in court were being worked out with the US Marshals Service and the Secret Service to "make this as smooth as possible."

"He's going to show up," Trusty said. "He knows he's innocent. He knows this is garbage."

Trump is likely to enter a plea of not guilty at Tuesday's hearing before a federal judge.

The judge would then come up with a schedule for pretrial hearings and the process known as discovery, in which prosecutors turn over evidence to the defense.

The discovery process could be particularly complicated in the case, legal analysts said, because it involves documents which allegedly involve some of the country's most tightly held secrets.

According to The New York Times and Washington Post, the case will initially be handled by Aileen Cannon, 42, a Trump-appointed judge who made rulings favorable to the former president during a court review of documents seized in the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

An actual trial is not expected to begin for several months and there is nothing to prevent Trump from pursuing a second term in the White House while under indictment.

- Trump's other legal woes -

The documents case is not the only legal challenge facing Trump.

The real estate tycoon was indicted in New York in March on charges of falsifying business records related to hush money payments to a former porn star.

Smith, the special counsel, is also looking at whether Trump should face charges over the January 2021 assault on the US Capitol by his supporters.

Prosecutors in Georgia are also investigating whether Trump illegally attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election outcome in the southern state.

cl/md
WASHINGTON  Donald Trumps lawyers werent immediately given the seven-count indictment Thursday when the former president was summoned to federal court in Florida, but one of his lawyers outlined a summary of the charges.

James Trusty told CNN the charges allege violations under the Espionage Act, which applies to documents relating to national defense, the willful retention of documents, making false statements and several obstruction counts, including conspiracy to obstruct justice. Trusty wasn't given the actual indictment, but a summary of the charges with a summons for Trump to appear in court.

It doesnt perfectly mirror an indictment but it does have some language in it that suggests what the seven charges would be, Trusty said.

Trump declared his innocence in a video statement and in posts on social media. Trusty called the Espionage Act charge ludicrous under the facts of this case. He argued the false statement and obstruction charges are kind of a crazy stretch just from the facts as we know it.

So theres a lot to pick at eventually from the defense side, but that appears to be the charges and it appears to be something that will get off the ground on Tuesday, Trusty said. Everything about this case is absolutely rotten.

Former President Donald Trump arrives at Trump Tower in New York on April 12.

Trump was indicted after federal authorities retrieved more than 300 classified documents that he took with him to Mar-a-Lago when he left the White House in January 2021.

After a year of exchanging letters with the National Archives and Records Administration, Trump returned 15 boxes in January 2022 that featured some classified documents including letters exchanged with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un. Prosecutors visited the estate in June with a subpoena and were given more classified documents, with a certification from Trump's lawyers that those were all of them. But FBI agents seized more classified records during an August search.

The documents at stake had labels suggesting they held some of the country's most closely guarded secrets about national defense and the identities of spies overseas. Federal officials have an audio recording from July 2021 of Trump discussing a classified Pentagon document about a possible attack on Iran, CNN reported, citing multiple unidentified sources.

Trump has argued repeatedly that he could take records with him after leaving the White House, despite the Presidential Records Act giving ownership to the National Archives and Records Administration, and that he had declassified them, despite the lack of documentation for his assertion.

"I have the absolute right to do whatever I want with them," Trump said at a recent CNN town hall.

Timeline of documents investigation: Timeline: The journey of Trumps classified documents

What was found during FBI search?: 'Astounding': Trump documents reveal casual disregard for long-standing security protocols

A conspiracy charge suggests other people could be indicted. Trusty said Trumps team wasnt notified of anyone else being indicted.

Trusty said he expects to receive the formal indictment sometime before the court appearance.

If they want to continue to play games, theyll give it to us at 3:01 p.m. Tuesday, he said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What charges are Trump facing? Lawyer details, disputes allegations
The Chicago Bears wrapped up their third week of organized team activities ahead of mandatory minicamp next week. What matchups should we be watching? And will the Bears finally sign an edge rusher? Brad Biggs addresses concerns in his weekly mailbag.

What are some key matchups we should be paying attention to in minicamp and training camp?  @just_acy

I dont know that there are a lot of matchups that are super intriguing at training camp. Obviously you want to see how wide receiver DJ Moore performs when the pads come on and hes competing against cornerbacks. I am talking specifically about work where it is starters versus starters. Moore facing the second-team cornerbacks doesnt generate a ton of intrigue for me. It would be concerning (from an offensive standpoint, anyway) if the current group of edge rushers had a ton of success against the starting offensive tackles.

Maybe more interesting will be the few battles for starting spots. I dont know if its surprising how many first-team spots appear to be up for grabs for a team coming off a 3-14 season. Obviously general manager Ryan Poles and his staff did a nice job filling some glaring holes early in the offseason. A couple of spots warrant attention.

Cornerback: Everyone figures Jaylon Johnson and Kyler Gordon will be in the top two. Who is the third cornerback? Will that player start full-time on the outside and is Gordon strictly a slot cornerback? It will be interesting to see how rookies Tyrique Stevenson and Terrel Smith perform as well as holdover Kindle Vildor.

Running back: It looks as if the Bears will go back to by-committee, but you never know. Someone has to be tops on the depth chart in first-down situations and someone has to be viewed as the top back in passing situations. Who emerges from the group of Khalil Herbert, DOnta Foreman, Roschon Johnson and Travis Homer? Those questions likely will play out in preseason action.

Defensive tackle: How quickly will rookies Geron Dexter and Zacch Pickens emerge as consistent players in the rotation? Answers will not come until the team is in full pads.

Strong-side linebacker: Can fourth-round pick Noah Sewell push Jack Sanborn at this position? Sanborn performed well as a rookie. Hes coming off an injury and the team clearly likes Sewells upside.

Those are a few spots to pay attention to as the summer unfolds.

Will the Buffalo Bills signing of Leonard Floyd get things moving for the market of available edge rushers? I am thinking Ryan Poles and the Bears finally signing one.  Ezra, Joliet

It cant hurt, that is for sure. Floyd signed a one-year, $7 million contract with the Bills this week, and Frank Clark was taken off the board Thursday when the Denver Broncos reached agreement with him on a one-year contract worth $5.5 million. So weve at least got a little momentum here. Floyd has the opportunity to earn another $2 million in his deal, and Clarks contract includes another $2 million in upside.

Floyds contract might have established a ceiling for free-agent defensive ends as Clark came in a little below him. Chances are at this point the remaining players are staring at one-year contracts. I say that because if the money hasnt been there for them on a multiyear deal  and that is why they are still on the street  its probably not going to magically appear at this point. Well see what shakes out. Yannick Ngakoue is probably the best option right now who doesnt have too much tread on his tires. Can he do better than Floyds deal? I suppose that is possible, but the former Bears first-round draft pick was probably the most complete edge defender on the market before this week.

Seems like there have been some positive reports about Velus Jones this spring. Can he become a consistent producer in the offense?  Mitchell G., Tulsa, Okla.

It would open up some more possibilities for offensive coordinator Luke Getsy if Jones can be more consistent, and that word you used is the key. The fastest way for Jones to earn more opportunities is to prove he can be consistent with assignments and production. The Bears certainly believed he could help on offense when they invested a third-round pick in him. I still view him as a gadget player but I also wouldnt put a ceiling on him.

He has a chance to grow in Year 2. He probably should be a lot more comfortable and confident. The Bears couldnt wait around to see if its going to happen for Jones, though, and that is why they invested in Tyler Scott in the draft this year. Competition should raise the level of play for the wide receiver room.

If the Bears are considering Naperville, then why not at an alternative site in Chicago?  @shufflincrew85

Its probably more likely that the Bears are attempting to leverage Arlington Heights and its surrounding communities to get measures in place the team deems necessary to continue with the project than anything else. Maybe the Bears will have exploratory discussions  in the most basic form  with other municipalities in the weeks and months to come.

During the extended period of time that the Bears were closing on the Arlington Heights property, there was a clause in the deal that prevented them from negotiating with other possible sites  Chicago and Soldier Field included. Now that the Bears own the former race-track land in Arlington Heights, they are free to do as they please.

Its just my opinion, but this strikes me as negotiating 101. Whether Arlington Heights and the surrounding communities budge, well have to see.

Can the Bears recent meeting with new Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson be viewed as a positive that the team could remain in the city?  Brett P., Chicago

I dont know how you would spin that (or really anything) out of the joint statement the city and franchise released Wednesday.

Today we met and discussed our shared values and commitment to the City of Chicago, the importance of deep roots and the need for equitable community investment throughout the city, the statement read. We are both committed to the idea that the city and its major civic institutions must grow and evolve together to meet the needs of the future. We look forward to continuing the dialogue around these shared values.

Odds of the Bears finding a viable site in the city that they could purchase and develop  with the terms they desire  seem miniscule to me. Im talking fourth-and-42 miniscule. Maybe I am wrong, but there would have to be a major change in the way the winds are blowing for a project in the city to get traction.

The Chicago Park District has done a poor job of managing Soldier Field on behalf of the Bears. Just look at the renovation debacle. Staying in Chicago is increasingly unlikely. Is there a chance the park district would/could sell the property to the Bears?  @tkevinh1965

For starters, the park district manages the stadium for the city. The Bears are a tenant. Second, I dont see how the Bears could potentially buy Soldier Field. In 1987, Soldier Field was designated as a national historic landmark. I suppose it is possible but that option seems really remote to me.

Being that the Bears are No. 1 for waiver claims, what position group do you think Ryan Poles/Matt Eberflus will target to maybe add depth or look for a starter if possible?  @dabearszach

Certainly if the Bears have a clear need for depth at a position, they will look at that. But the waiver wire is more about players than positions. You should look at the names that come available and consider what your scouting reports (before this season) and what the reports generated during preseason actions say. If there is a player the team likes, then you weigh that players skill against what you have at the bottom of your depth chart. The Bears should be looking more for talent than positional needs. Sure, edge rusher likely would be a need even if they add a veteran between now and the start of training camp. But its highly unlikely a proven pass rusher eligible for waivers is cut loose.
BIRMINGHAM  Joran van der Sloot, the chief suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway, pleaded not guilty Friday to federal charges that he tried to extort money from the missing teens mother in exchange for revealing the location of her body.

Van der Sloot, 35, was extradited to the United States on Thursday from Peru, where he is serving a 28-year prison sentence after confessing to killing a Peruvian woman. He was arraigned in Birmingham, not far from the suburb where Holloway grew up, in his first court appearance in the case.

Natalees mother, Beth Holloway, watched the brief proceeding from the third row of the courtroom. She stared occasionally at van der Sloot but showed no obvious emotion.

Dutch citizen Joran van der Sloot is driven in a police vehicle from the Ancon I maximum-security prison, outskirts of Lima, Peru, Thursday, June 8, 2023. The main suspect in the unsolved 2005 disappearance of American student Natalee Holloway on the Caribbean island of Aruba is expected to be extradited Thursday from Peru to the United States. (AP Photo/Martin Mejia)

For 18 years, I have lived with the unbearable pain of Natalees loss, she said in a statement Thursday. Each day has been filled with unanswered questions and a longing for justice that has eluded us at every turn. But today ... I am hopeful that some small semblance of justice may finally be realized.

Afterward, she hugged friends who had come to offer their support along with Natalees father and brother. She declined to comment to reporters outside the courthouse.

Shackled and wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, van der Sloot declined to use a Dutch interpreter offered to him at Fridays arraignment. He sat beside his court-appointed attorney, Kevin Butler, who entered the not guilty pleas on his behalf.

Van der Sloot is charged with one count each of extortion and wire fraud  the only charges to have ever linked the Dutch citizen to Holloways disappearance on the Caribbean island of Aruba.

Natalee Holloway, 18, was on a high school graduation trip with classmates in Aruba when she vanished in 2005. She was last seen leaving a bar with van der Sloot, who was a student at an international school on the island. Van der Sloot was identified as a main suspect and detained weeks later for questioning, along with two Surinamese brothers, but no charges were filed in the case.

A judge declared Holloway dead, but her body has never been found.

The mysterious disappearance sparked years of news coverage and countless true-crime podcasts.

U.S. prosecutors say that in 2010, van der Sloot reached out to Beth Holloway, seeking $250,000 to lead her to the young woman's body and reveal the circumstances of her death. A grand jury indicted him that year.

In 2012, van der Sloot pleaded guilty in Peru to killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores, a business student from a prominent Peruvian family. She was killed in 2010  five years to the day after Holloways disappearance.

Dutch citizen Joran van der Sloot, back left, is driven in a police vehicle from the Ancon I maximum-security prison, outskirts of Lima, Peru, Thursday, June 8, 2023. The main suspect in the unsolved 2005 disappearance of American student Natalee Holloway on the Caribbean island of Aruba is expected to be extradited Thursday from Peru to the United States. .(AP Photo/Martin Mejia)

Van der Sloot married a Peruvian woman in July 2014 in a ceremony at a maximum-security prison. He was shuffled between prisons in response to reports he enjoyed privileges like television, internet access and a cellphone, and accusations he threatened to kill a warden.

A 2001 treaty between Peru and the U.S. allows a suspect to be temporarily extradited to face trial in the other country. Van der Sloots attorney, Maximo Altez, initially indicated his client would not challenge his extradition but that changed Monday when he filed a writ of habeas corpus. A judge ruled against van der Sloot the following day.

FILE - A sign of Natalee Holloway, an Alabama high school graduate who disappeared while on a graduation trip to Aruba, is seen on Palm Beach, in front of her hotel in Aruba, Friday, June 10, 2005, as a ribbon in her memory blows in the breeze. The government of Peru on Wednesday, May 10, 2023, issued an executive order allowing the temporary extradition to the United States of Joran van der Sloot, the prime suspect in the unsolved 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway. (AP Photo/Leslie Mazoch, File)

Peru has agreed to let van der Sloot remain in U.S. custody until the Alabama case is concluded, including any appeal if he is convicted, according to a resolution published in Perus federal register. U.S. authorities agree to return him to Peru's custody after that, the resolution states.

Van der Sloot's arrival at the Birmingham courthouse, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from Mountain Brook High School, was something of a day of reckoning for a state and a city that blames him for Holloways disappearance.

It made me sick. I gasped, but Im so grateful that hes here, said Cindy Rysedorph, a friend of the Holloway family, as she described her first glimpse of van der Sloot in the courtroom.

Were not trying him for murder  which we know he committed, she said. Were trying him for the extortion. But yeah, its progress.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Joran van der Sloot pleads not guilty to extortion in Alabama
South Korea and China's flags flutter next to Tiananmen Gate in Beijing

By Hyonhee Shin and Soo-hyang Choi

SEOUL (Reuters) -South Korea summoned China's ambassador on Friday to issue a protest, describing comments made by the envoy warning Seoul against making "wrong bets" in the Sino-U.S. rivalry as "provocative" and a possible interference in internal affairs.

Xing Haiming made the remarks during a meeting late on Thursday with Lee Jae-myung, head of South Korea's main opposition party, where he also urged Seoul to stop "decoupling" from China and restore economic and diplomatic ties.

Xing blamed Seoul for creating "difficulties" in bilateral ties by failing to respect Beijing's core interests, including over Taiwan, while being influenced by the United States.

"China-South Korea relations face many difficulties. Frankly, the blame does not lie with China," he said, according to a statement released by the embassy. "We hope that the South Korean side will faithfully keep its promise and clearly respect China's core concerns, such as the Taiwan issue."

Xing warned against making the "wrong judgment" on China because of the "interference of external factors" such as U.S. pressure.

"I can assure you, those who bet on China's defeat will definitely regret it," he said.

South Korea's first vice foreign minister Chang Ho-jin summoned Xing to warn about the "provocative" remarks and to express "strong regret," South Korea's foreign ministry said.

Openly criticising Seoul's policy with "untrue content and intolerable expressions" could constitute an act of interfering in domestic politics, Chang said.

When asked about the criticism, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said the current challenges in the Chinese-South Korean relations are "not caused by China."

"It is part of Ambassador Xings job to have extensive engagement with the ROK government, political parties and people from all walks of life, exchange views on bilateral relations and issues of mutual interest and share Chinas position and concerns," he said at a regular news briefing in Beijing.

Wang also urged Seoul to adhere to the one-China principle and handle Taiwan-related issues in a "prudent" way, adding the Taiwan question is purely Chinas "internal affair."

Lee's opposition party has criticised President Yoon Suk Yeol for what it says is the administration's lopsided diplomacy toward the U.S. alliance at the expense of ties with China, its top trading partner.

"Vice minister Chang clearly warned Ambassador Xing ... that he will be responsible for all the consequences," the ministry said in a statement.

Yoon has sought to tread cautiously amid intensifying U.S.-China competition, but Seoul and Beijing exchanged heated words in April over his comments on Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory.

In an interview with Reuters, Yoon said that flaring tensions around Taiwan were due to attempts to change the status quo by force, and said that he opposed such a change.

Xing also brought up economic ties and said South Korea's trade deficits had worsened because of its efforts to "decouple" from China, but it could "enjoy the bonus" from Chinese economic growth if its confidence in bilateral ties are restored.

"The two countries have built an inextricable economic structure in which their industrial and supply chains are closely connected," he said.

(Reporting by Hyonhee Shin and Soo-hyang Choi; Editing by Gerry Doyle, Ed Davies, Editing by William Maclean)
(Bloomberg) -- South Korea summoned Chinas ambassador to express concern over the envoys warning that Seouls embrace of pro-US policies could bring it harm.

Most Read from Bloomberg

First Vice Foreign Minister Chang Ho-jin issued a stern warning to Chinese Ambassador Xing Haiming in a meeting Friday over what Seoul saw as provocative remarks, the ministry said in a statement. Chang called Xings language unacceptable and an interference in the domestic politics of South Korea.

Xing said in a Thursday night meeting with South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung that he would be grateful if Seoul freed itself from external factors when dealing with China and that the country has much to gain economically through friendly ties with Beijing. The comments were likely aimed at the deepening of economic and security links between Seoul and Washington that are posing challenges to Beijing.

In a situation where the US is pressuring China with all its might, some are betting the US will win and China will lose, Xing said in a video clip shared by a YouTube channel for the main opposition Democratic Party. But this judgment is clearly wrong and a failure to assess the flow of history properly.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has been trying to walk a fine line between the US, his countrys main security ally, and China, its biggest trading partner. Hes shown support for Biden administration calls to restructure global supply chains to reduce dependence on China, drawing criticism from Beijing.

Chinese President Xi Jinping late last year met Yoon and called for boosting cooperation in high-tech manufacturing and working together to maintain a global free-trade system that ensures the security of supply chains.

The remarks were likely directed at the pressure the US has applied to security partners including South Korea, the Netherlands, Taiwan and Japan to comply with its sweeping curbs on the sale of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to China, where major South Korean semiconductor makers such as SK Hynix Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. and have facilities.

China will continue to seek various measures to help Korean companies investing in China to keep growing, Xing said in his meeting.

The envoy also advised South Korea to tread carefully over Taiwan, the self-ruled island Chinas Communist Party has pledged to bring under its control someday, by force if necessary.

The Taiwan issue is central to China, and its the foundation of China-South Korea relationship. So there was a solemn promise made by South Korea to China when we established diplomatic relations, Xing said, referring to the establishment of official ties between Seoul and Beijing about three decades ago.

Read: Six Takeaways from White House Visit by South Koreas Yoon

In an April meeting with Biden in Washington, Yoon made South Koreas strongest statement yet on the Taiwan Strait by expressing strong opposition to any unilateral actions in the region.

Yoon, a security hawk, has stepped up military cooperation with the US since taking office a little more than a year ago and has pledged to take a tough line on China. Foreign Minister Park Jin called on Russia and China, the main benefactor for North Korea, to play a more constructive role at the United Nations Security Council, which he said has become virtually paralyzed when it comes to curbing Pyongyangs atomic ambitions.

Park said in an exclusive interview with Yonhap News that Seoul would use its status as a newly elected non-permanent member of the council to push the two powers. China and Russia have used their veto power at the council to prevent new punishments on Kim Jong Un for ballistic missiles tests that violate previous resolutions.

The Chinese envoy also mentioned regional issues in his talks with the South Korean lawmaker, saying he was opposed to Japans plans to release treated waste water from the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant. The matter has raised concern in South Korea and Yoon dispatched a delegation of experts last month to gather information.

It seems that Japan is using the Pacific Ocean as its sewer for economic gain, Xing said. This is extremely irresponsible.

--With assistance from Sangmi Cha.

(Updates and recasts with South Korea summoning envoy.)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
A Chinese startup says its electric-car battery can charge in 6 minutes  even in extreme cold

Cold weather can decrease a batteries range and slow down charging. Getty Images

Slow charging is one of the biggest drawbacks to owning an electric vehicle.

One Chinese startup says it has found a breakthrough to aid wider adoption of EVs.

Greater Bay says its new battery can charge 0-80% in just 6 minutes.

Cold weather is an enemy to electric cars, and one company says it has found a fix.

Chinese startup Greater Bay Technology says its new "phoenix" cell can charge from 0% to 80% in six minutes regardless of the outside temperature thanks to its ability to heat the battery pack, according to a Bloomberg report.

That's a massive potential breakthrough, given the wear-and-tear temperature differences can have on batteries and their charging times. Cold weather can slow charging and drain battery range  meaning drivers have to charge up more often, and it takes longer to get to a full charge.

While most EV manufacturers have some form of battery conditioning built in to aid in charging times and battery health, that's not always the case.

Insider found Toyota's newest bZ4X EV, for instance, charged particularly slowly during a test drive. The company said the slow charging was designed to increase battery longevity.

Frequent fast charging  versus hours-long charging at home  can degrade battery life over the long term. Of course, battery swapping is more popular in China and hasn't yet caught on in the US. The practice could help solve battery degradation by moving slow charging outside of the vehicle and letting a driver replace it with a fresh battery within minutes.

"We all know the range of EVs is greatly affected in cold regions, making it a terrible user experience," Greater Bay's cofounder, Huang Xiangdong, said in a press release. "The Phoenix battery not only addresses the long charging time for EVs, but other pain points. It doesn't matter if it's a hot day or a cold day, the Phoenix battery's range won't be affected."

That's one feather in the cap for mass EV adoption  at least if the battery can make it from lab testing to the real world.

Read the original article on Business Insider
[Source]

A federal jury has convicted the woman who set the historic First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, ablaze in 2021.

Recent development: Xiaoqin Yan, 29, was found guilty of "arson and possession of a firearm by an illegal alien" on Wednesday, U.S. Attorney Sandra J. Stewarts office announced.

Yan, a Chinese national who was staying in the U.S. on a student visa, is expected to serve up to 20 years in jail once her sentencing is handed to her at a later date.

Key details: Court records and evidence presented at the trial found Yan to be the main suspect behind the fire that was ignited inside the Montgomery church on the morning of Sept. 30, 2021.

More from NextShark: Man accused of fatally shooting Asian senior, 76, in the back of the head held without bail in Philadelphia

Surveillance footage reportedly showed a woman visiting the church a day before the fire. Around 2 a.m. on the day of the crime, she was filmed igniting multiple fires inside the church.

The aftermath: During the investigation, detectives learned that a person matching Yans description was reportedly spotted on the churchs grounds, while another witness, a church staff member, told authorities that they had escorted her out because of her odd behavior.

More from NextShark: Houston woman says a family trespassed into her home, locked her out and squatted for weeks

Arrested: During her initial arrest on Oct. 4, 2021, investigators said they found several items matching the ones carried by the woman in the surveillance footage, including two blue duffel bags with white writing and a red gas container.

They also said they found a handgun, which Yan was in illegal possession of since she had overstayed her non-immigrant visa, thereby making her ineligible to lawfully own any firearms.

Other details: Yan was initially charged on Oct. 8, 2021.

More from NextShark: Woman arrested for fatally stabbing her parents in South Korea says a ghost told me to do it

Court documents reportedly revealed she had caused $25,000 worth of damages, forcing the churchs members to conduct their first service after the arson at a parking lot across the street. They were able to hold services in the church again in July 2022.

More from NextShark: Purdue student who confessed to killing his roommate apologizes, says he was blackmailed
With the future of her Hollywood career uncertain, Christina Applegate took a moment to reflect on some of her most beloved roles this week during a rare public appearance.

Applegate was honored Wednesday for her achievements as both an actor and producer during Varietys 2023 TV FYC Fest in Los Angeles. The moment was particularly emotional as the Dead to Me star has said shes unsure if shell be able to commit to acting projects following her recent multiple sclerosis diagnosis.

Thank you so much for being supportive and understanding as I journey through this new part of my life, not knowing if Im going to continue on to act anymore, Applegate told the crowd. I dont know if I can. Id love to, I do miss it. I miss it so much.

She went on to note: Its a daily struggle to walk and to move and stuff, but Im so happy I ended it with a show like Dead to Me.

"I don't know if I can, I'd love to, I do miss it." Christina Applegate reflects on whether she'll continue to act as she accepts the TV Fest Legacy Award at #VarietyTVFYCFest. pic.twitter.com/gmICq93IPo  Variety (@Variety) June 7, 2023

Fellow actor Jean Smart presented Applegate with the award. The two women co-starred as mother and daughter on the ABC sitcom Samantha Who? from 2007 to 2009.

Applegate concluded her speech on an appreciative note. After expressing her gratitude to her Dead to Me co-stars, including Linda Cardellini and James Marsden, she told the audience, Ive had a lot of fun, so thank you.

Christina Applegate (left) and Jean Smart on Wednesday at Varietys 2023 TV FYC Fest in Los Angeles.

Christina Applegate (left) and Jean Smart on Wednesday at Varietys 2023 TV FYC Fest in Los Angeles.

Applegate first went public about her multiple sclerosis, or MS, diagnosis in 2021. The chronic autoimmune condition impairs communication between the body and the brain. Symptoms include tremors, fatigue, vision loss, slurred speech and weakness in limbs.

Since her diagnosis, Applegate has become one of Hollywoods most outspoken advocates for people with MS and has won praise for making bold statements about the disease through fashion.

There are just certain things that people take for granted in their lives that I took for granted, she told Vanity Fair last month. Going down the stairs, carrying things  you cant do that anymore. It fucking sucks. I can still drive my car short distances. I can bring up food to my kid. Up, never down.

Though she noted that she couldnt even imagine returning to a film or television show set in the foreseeable future, she added, I can do voiceover stuff because I have to support my family and keep my brain working.

Applegate and Smart co-starred on ABC's

Applegate and Smart co-starred on ABC's "Samantha Who?" from 2007 to 2009.

Related...
Photo: Richmond News/file Paul Oei and Loretta Lai were often seen in luxury vehicles.

A B.C. couple has been ordered to pay $5 million to a Chinese citizen after committing fraud against him in relation to an immigration-related investment connected to a former Liberal member of Parliament.



Richmond resident Paul Oei and his wife Loretta Lai were found liable for fraudulent misrepresentation against prospective immigrant Yicheng Jiang, according to a June 1 ruling by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Kevin D. Loo.



Oei was already found to have defrauded Jiang and his associates of just over $5 million, according to a B.C. Securities Commission panel ruling in December 2017.



The high-profile case saw Oei and his companies raise approximately $13.3 million for two startup companies, but not direct all of the investors funds toward startup costs, as investors were told, according to the commission.



While Lai was not party to the commissions proceedings, the judge ruled her liable for false or misleading representations together with Mr. Oei.



Lai remains actively licensed by the Insurance Council of BC.



In 2008, Jiang endeavoured to emigrate from China to B.C. through the British Columbia Provincial Nominee Program, which essentially requires a monetary investment in exchange for Canadian citizenship.



Through a friend, Jiang became connected to Oei, who proposed investments in his purported composting company Cascade Renewable Carbon Corp.



By May 2010, Jiang and various other investors had transferred approximately $3.7 million to Peschisolido & Company, the law firm of former Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido.



By 2013, the company declared bankruptcy and Jiangs immigration application eventually failed to qualify, according to the court ruling.



Jiang launched the civil lawsuit against Oei, Lai, Peschisolido, Desjardins Financial Securities Investments Inc. and Desjardins Financial Security Life Assurance of Canada, in November 2015, and reached a settlement with all parties aside from Oei and Lai, the judge noted. (Desjardins was a designated company to the federal immigration program and the Quebec immigration program, the judgment noted.)



The saga led to Peschisolidos colleague Yvonne Hsu being suspended for three months by the Law Society of BC for professional misconduct. In this case, Hsu had claimed Jiang had no case, claiming his money transfers were part of an international money laundering arrangement.



Jiang told the court transferring more than the permitted $50,000 out of China could be done by request for approval to the Chinese provincial government, which would pass it on to a department in Beijing.



However, Jiang told the court the investment needed to be processed more quickly, so he used a private currency exchange service, the ruling stated.



Jiang sent his money to China-based entities that had affiliates in outside jurisdictions in Hong Kong and Singapore, for example, that then transferred equivalent funds to Peschisolidos firm, the court heard.



In their self-represented defence, Oei and Lai proposed Jiangs alleged illegal transfers discredited his claim but the judge found no authority that circumventing Chinese currency controls as the investors did is contrary to Canadian or British Columbia law, or to Canadian or British Columbia public policy.



Since Oei was fined $4.5 million by the commission, the judge ruled there was no need for punitive damages.



In 2019, Jiang applied for asylum status with the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada on grounds that he is being persecuted for political reasons in China. No decision has been posted on that application, to date.



Meanwhile, last year the BCSC filed an application to ICBC  the first of its kind  to prevent Oei from renewing his driver's licence for failing to have a repayment plan for his penalties.



Oei unsuccessfully appealed the application. In April, the commission announced almost $70,000 had been repaid to Oeis repayment account by a third-party it has not disclosed. Investors such as Jiang are entitled to apply for those funds, the commission said.



Glacier Media asked the commission who paid the money on behalf of Oei but commission spokesperson Brian Kladko said the commission has no plans to disclose that information.
Citizens wants its rates to go up by double digits. Will insurance regulators agree?

Florida insurance regulators heard arguments for a double-digit rate hike on customers of Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state's "insurer of last resort," whose policies are still expected to soar through the end of the year.

The state-backed company asked Thursday for a statewide average increase of 13.1% for primary residences with multiperil policies. The average increase specific to homeowners for this type of coverage would be 12.6%, and 10.8% for condo owners.

But if you live in your Citizens-insured domicile less than nine months out of the year, your rate increase is likely to be a lot higher.

Thats because a bill passed during a special session in December allowed Citizens to raise rates for non-primary residences by up to 50%. The bill also said that new or renewed non-primary policies written after November cannot be lower than the previous year.

For subscribers: I almost had a heart attack: Florida homeowners rattled by property insurance costs

One key is whether your residence is primary

The public, I think, just needs to understand all these parts of the filing, that the end result  that theres quite a bit of range of effect, said Robert Lee, an actuary with the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. Not everybody gets 12%. Some get more, some get less. And not everybody gets 50% on the nonprimary.

Citizens will rely on its agents to determine whether a residence is primary or non-primary. Policyholders will be notified during the renewal process.

When asked whether policyholders would be able to appeal a residence that was misclassified as non-primary, Citizens Chief Operating Officer Kelly Booten said, Were erring on the side of proving your primary residence. Types of proof could include a homestead exemption, a driver's license or a lease agreement, she said.

A Citizens Property Insurance Corporation billing document that Vinnette Williams received for her home in Boynton Beach, Fla, on April 4, 2023.

Citizens officials laud parts of bill passed in December

Officials with Citizens lauded some immediate impacts they saw with the passage of Senate Bill 2A, the December special session bill. It eliminated one-way attorneys fees and prevented homeowners from signing over insurance benefits to a third party, among other things.

Citizens projected costs were reduced by $900 million due to the bill, said Tim Cerio, the companys president and CEO. Even so, the company has an estimated shortfall of $1.3 billion.

Citizens rates on average are 58.6% below actuarially sound levels. But, had the bill not passed, that percentage would be 88.3%.

Citizens cannot raise its rates like private insurers can. For just over a decade, state law prevented Citizens from increasing its rates by more than 10% each year. The cap went into effect in 2010, after then-Gov. Charlie Crist signed it into law following a three-year rate freeze for Citizens.

More: Dropped by your property insurance provider? A premium spike? Heres what you can do.

In a sweeping property insurance bill that passed in 2021, lawmakers allowed the cap to increase by 1% each year through 2026, where the largest increase Citizens could request is 15%.

Number of those insured by Citizens doubles in 2 years

Florida lawmakers have stepped in repeatedly over the past year with legislation trying to attract more private carriers to the state known for its costly storms, as well as to help Citizens shed policies.

Citizens soared to 1.3 million customers at the end of May, more than double what it was two years earlier as more Floridians unable to obtain private property insurance seek coverage from the government-backed company. Cerio said it could reach 1.7 million policyholders by the end of the year.

During two special sessions in the past year, the Republican-controlled Legislature steered $3 billion in taxpayer money into reinsurance accounts the industry could tap. Lawmakers also have added barriers preventing customers from suing their insurance companies when unsatisfied with claim outcomes.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican leaders in the Legislature were quick to embrace claims by industry officials that lawsuit abuse is driving rates and keeping many companies out of the Florida market.

DeSantis drew heat from outnumbered Democrats in Florida for his approach.

Trump vs. DeSantis on property insurance

But even former President Donald Trump, who polls show clearly leads the field for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination DeSantis also is seeking, blasted the Florida governor for what he called on social media, the biggest industry BAILOUT to Globalist Insurance Companies, in HISTORY.

Such attacks caught the governors attention, and helped prompt Republican leaders in the Legislature this spring to approve an insurer accountability bill that would increase fines for poor claims-handling by companies and add some consumer safeguards. DeSantis signed the measure last month.

Your Turn: Public adjusters aren't the problem in Florida's property insurance crisis

Steps also have been taken by lawmakers to force customers out of Citizens and into private coverage if they get an offer less than 20% more expensive. Citizens policyholders are now required to get flood insurance, regardless of whether they live in a FEMA-designated flood zone.

The best way, and the most long-term successful way for Citizens to wind up depopulating, is through what I would call the organic or natural growth of the recovery of the private market, said Florida Insurance Commissioner Michael Yaworsky. That will take time.

Hannah Morse covers consumer issues for The Palm Beach Post. Drop a line at hmorse@pbpost.com, call 561-820-4833 or follow her on Twitter @mannahhorse.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Citizens could raise insurance rates by 50% for part-time residents
CLEARWATER  Smoking and vaping is now banned within the citys parks and on the sand at Clearwater Beach in an effort to protect public health and curb one of the most toxic forms of litter: cigarette butts.

The City Council unanimously passed the ordinance on Thursday with the caveat that it will focus on education and avoid punishing violators of the civil infraction.

Interim police Chief Michael Walek said his department will erect signs explaining the rule, pass out educational literature for visitors at hotels and restaurants and launch a social media campaign.

The priority is that education, addressing the quality-of-life issues and getting to that level (of writing citations) if we dont get that cooperation from someone, Walek said. But it will take some time to get that message across to everybody by using our various platforms.

The ban is one of several emerging around Florida following a change in state law last year that allowed cities and counties to regulate smoking on beaches and parks, with the exception of cigars.

St. Petersburg passed a smoking ban in October. The Pinellas County Commission is expected to consider a ban for its beaches and parks in July, according to Parks and Conservation Resources director Paul Cozzie.

Some City Council members struggled with the idea of a ban for the unwelcoming connotation it could bring to the nations top-rated beach, which attracts international tourists. During a work session discussion on Monday, Mayor Brian Aungst Sr. and council member Lina Teixeira asked whether the city could create designated smoking areas.

If were just going to ban, I dont see how its going to change behavior, Teixeira said on Thursday.

But Walek explained designated areas would be logistically too difficult for an expansive beach. Because smoking will still be allowed beyond the sand, like on sidewalks and the Beach Walk promenade, Walek said cigarette receptacles will be added to help with disposal.

Cigarette butts are among the most common form of ocean litter, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Because the fibers in cigarette filters dont degrade, one filter can account for thousands of microplastics.

Keep Pinellas Beautiful executive director Patricia DePlasco said while she supports a ban, its success will depend on the quality of the education campaign that comes with it. She said many might not know the impact they are having on wildlife or the waterways when they toss a cigarette butt on the sand.

Her organization hands out pocket ashtrays and educates about the toxicity of the litter.

Theres a ban on liquor on the beach, but does that stop it? DePlasco said. Its complicated because its a behavior that people need to change.

St. Petersburgs ban went into effect in January. Community enrichment administrator Mike Jefferis, who oversees the citys parks, said his team, the police department and Keep Pinellas Beautiful have distributed hundreds of flyers and handouts to spread awareness about the ban.

He said the city is still in the process of changing over 400 park signs to reflect the new rule. Jefferis did not have a tally of how many warnings or violations have been issued.

Sheri Heilman, a Clearwater Beach restaurateur and founder of Ocean Allies, a nonprofit that helps businesses make environmental changes, said Clearwaters educational effort must be about stopping cigarette butt litter everywhere, not just on the sand.

If people cant smoke on the beach and more cigarette butts are tossed on sidewalks instead, they will still ultimately end up in the sand or water, she said.

We have to change everybodys behavior, we have to change their attitude, Heilman said. But were not going to do that by saying no, no, no, we have a ban.

Staff writer Colleen Wright contributed to this report.
Greta Thunberg at this Friday's climate 'school strike' outside the Swedish parliament. She says it will be her last

Greta Thunberg has said she has taken part in her final Friday climate "school strike" after graduating, but vowed to keep protesting.

"Today, I graduate from school, which means I'll no longer be able to school strike for the climate," Thunberg, 20, said on Twitter.

Swedish students usually complete their upper secondary studies at 19 but Greta took a year off to campaign.

She was 15 when she began protesting outside Sweden's parliament in 2018.

Carrying a "school strike for climate change" sign, she said she would only attend when politicians took action.

School strike week 251. Today, I graduate from school, which means Ill no longer be able to school strike for the climate. This is then the last school strike for me, so I guess I have to write something on this day.

Thread pic.twitter.com/KX8hHFDyNG  Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) June 9, 2023

Her solo protest led to various movements across Europe, the US and Australia, known as Fridays for Future or School Strike for Climate.

Greta at a 'school strike' in 2018. She was 15 when she began the protests

Greta has come to symbolise young people's fight for the world to wean itself of the fossil fuels that are warming the planet.

Referring to herself simply as an "Autistic climate justice activist" on her Twitter bio, she's frequently berated world leaders on the international stage and sparred with them on Twitter, and was once nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Earlier this year she was briefly detained at a protest against coal in Germany and she made it clear in a Twitter feed on Friday she had no intention of stopping protesting.

"We who can speak up have a duty to do so. In order to change everything, we need everyone," she said.

"I'll continue to protest on Fridays, even though it's not technically "school striking". We simply have no other option than to do everything we possibly can. The fight has only just begun."
A cluster of ancient neolithic standing stones in France were bulldozed to make way for a DIY store

File image of standing stones in Menec, Carnac, western France. Galivel F/Andia/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

39 ancient monoliths were swept away from a site in France to make room for a DIY store.

The stones, thought to date back 7,000 years, are in a region famed for its standing stones.

Amid an uproar, local officials attributed the decision to a mix-up in zoning rules.

There is uproar in western France after what are believed to be 39 ancient standing stones were removed from a site to make way for a DIY store.

Local archaeologist Christian Obeltz estimated the stones, at the rural site of Montaubin, go back at least 7,000 years, making them some of the oldest in the region, Ouest-France reported.

Despite this, a planning application for a store from the Mr Bricolage chain  a nationwide outlet selling DIY products  was approved, according to local officials. The stones have now been moved.

Montaubin is on the edge of the Carnac region of France famed for its menhirs, or ancient standing stones. They are thought to have been put up by neolithic people for purposes that remain a mystery.

The nearby tourist sites of Menec, Kermario, and Kerlescan, which collectively hold around 3,000 ancient stones, are carefully managed.

But at Montaubin, an apparent lack of coordination between municipal authorities over the status of the site led to the stones being swept away.

The site had been listed as part of a UNESCO world heritage application, The Local reported. However, local planning regulations were not updated to reflect that, per the outlet.

A statement released by the Brittany Cultural Affairs Office said that studies had been conducted there and the land had been designated for commercial use.

A building permit was granted in August last year, Agence France-Presse reported. Mayor Olivier Lepick told the outlet that he had "followed the law" and that the site had low archaeological value.

Louise Chaulin, a spokesperson for Mr Bricolage, told Insider that the company "sincerely regrets" the situation but pointed to the permit it received to build its store.

A promotional image inside a Mr Bricolage store. Mr Bricolage

The UNESCO application, if it goes through, will see the sites more closely regulated.

While Lepick attributed the decision to a mistake with the region's complex zoning situation, Obeltz told The Local that he believed it had been fudged in order to allow the development to go ahead before the UNESCO application is formalized.

"Elected officials in the area and the departement are in a hurry to build up anything [there] because once it is classified with UNESCO, it won't be possible anymore," he told the outlet.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Colombia, ELN rebels declare ceasefire as latest cycle of talks ends FILE PHOTO: Cuba hosts talks between Colombia's government and ELN rebel group

By Nelson Acosta

HAVANA (Reuters) -Colombia's government and the left-wing ELN guerrilla group declared a bilateral ceasefire on Friday, as a third cycle of peace talks closed in Havana.

Preparations for the ceasefire, which will come into full force on Aug. 3 and last 180 days, are due to begin immediately, said Cubas foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez, speaking on behalf of the participants.

"On Aug. 3, 2023, the full implementation ... of the national and temporary bilateral ceasefire will begin with the full application of the protocols and the full operation of the monitoring and verification mechanism," Rodriguez said.

A fourth cycle of peace talks will take place in Venezuela between Aug. 14 and Sept. 4, Rodriguez said.

The ceasefire announcement is good news for the embattled Colombian president Gustavo Petro, who is facing allegations at home of financial irregularities in his election campaign, threatening other aspects of his planned political and social reforms.

"Here ends a phase of armed insurgency in Latin America," Petro told participants at the closing ceremony in Havana. "The world of arms, and of killing one another ... must cease."

Colombia's conflict, which has run for nearly six decades, has killed at least 450,000 people.

The leftist Petro, who flew from Colombia to attend the ceasefire announcement, early in his tenure promised an ambitious plan for total peace in the South American nation long plagued by domestic conflict.

The Havana negotiations stalled in mid-May after Petro questioned the groups unity of leadership, prompting a rebuke from the ELN, which at the time said talks had entered into "crisis."

The ELN is Colombia's oldest remaining rebel group, and the talks are the cornerstone of efforts by Petro - himself once a member of the now-demobilized M-19 insurgents - to negotiate peace or surrender deals with remaining rebels and crime gangs, as well as to fully implement a 2016 accord with the FARC rebel group.

Mexico, Norway, Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil and Chile are guarantor nations for the negotiations.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, who also spoke at the ceremony, said Cuba had persevered in the peace process and had obtained results, he said, despite paying a "high price" for its participation.

The United States in 2021 designated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism in part, it said, because Havana, citing peace process protocols, had refused to extradite ELN leaders on the island following a January 2019 bombing in Bogota.

"The price we have paid is high, but we do not regret it," Diaz-Canel said.

(Reporting by Nelson Acosta in Havana; Additional reporting by Oliver Griffin and Nelson Bocanegra in Bogota; Editing by Dave Sherwood, Nick Zieminski and Daniel Wallis)
A ceasefire pact was signed in the presence of Colombian President Gustavo Petro (L) and ELN leader Antonio Garcia (R), here with Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel (YAMIL LAGE)

Colombia's government and ELN guerrilla group on Friday signed a six-month ceasefire pact in Havana as they work towards ending decades of conflict in the South American country.

The deal for a "bilateral, national and temporary ceasefire," according to Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, was signed in the presence of Colombian President Gustavo Petro and ELN leader Antonio Garcia.

Rodriguez said the ceasefire -- sealed to conclude a third round of peace talks in the Cuban capital -- would enter into force on August 3.

Founded in 1964, the ELN had more than 5,800 combatants in 2022, according to authorities.

It has taken part in failed negotiations with Colombia's last five governments.

On Wednesday, Petro had said he would travel to the Cuban capital to "sign a document that could mean the beginning... of an era of peace in this country."

Dialogue with the ELN started in 2018 under then president Juan Manuel Santos, who had signed a peace treaty two years earlier with the larger Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebel group.

The FARC subsequently disarmed and transformed itself into a political party.

But talks with the ELN were called off in 2019 by conservative then-president Ivan Duque following a car bomb attack on a police academy in Bogota that left 22 people dead.

Duque had arrest warrants issued for ELN negotiators and asked Cuba to extradite them, which Havana refused. This caused then US-president Donald Trump to add Cuba to a list of countries deemed as sponsors of terrorism.

- 'Total peace' -

Petro, a former guerrilla who last August became Colombia's first-ever leftist leader, reached out to the ELN shortly after coming to power in pursuit of his "total peace" policy.

The two sides resumed formal peace talks in Venezuela in November for the first time since 2019. A second round was held in Mexico, followed by a third now in Cuba.

The ELN had refuted a ceasefire announcement made by Petro on New Year's Eve, and an ELN ambush of a military convoy in March, which left nine soldiers dead, had cast doubt over the future of the talks.

Friday's signing came just days after Colombia's top prosecutor scrapped an arrest warrant, at Petro's request, for ELN leader Garcia.

The ELN is primarily active in the Pacific region and along the 2,200-kilometer (1,370-mile) border with Venezuela.

Colombia has continued to be gripped by violence despite the 2016 peace deal, as fighting continues over territory and resources between dissident FARC guerrillas, the ELN, paramilitary forces and drug cartels.

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Former President Trump has been indicted on federal charges related to his retention of classified documents. (Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

In one sense, it was breathtaking: the first ever indictment of a former president by the Department of Justice he once oversaw  and therefore the most important federal charges in U.S. history.

In another, it was expected. Once Donald Trump had received a formal target letter from the department, his fate was effectively sealed.

But that was only the latest in a series of recent signs that charges were inevitable. The months and years of questions about whether the Biden administration should or would indict the 45th and would-be next president  and whether the department would stay its hand for politics, the good of the republic or some other reason  were settled when Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel.

From that point on, the investigation of the former president's retention of classified documents has followed the well-worn path that the federal government would tread for any defendant accused of behavior anywhere close to as brazen as Trump's over the last two years. Smith pursued the case as he would have any other, and that led ineluctably to the indictment unsealed Friday.

Almost as unavoidably, it will also lead to the department urging a court to impose significant prison time on the former president if he is convicted. Trump's last chance to bargain for less grave charges came and went in his lawyers last meeting with Justice officials on Monday. Now he is in the unenviable position of any other defendant charged with such serious crimes.

Indeed, the 37-count indictment includes 31 counts of the almost astonishingly serious charge of violating the Espionage Act, compounding the severity of the case and the sense of national betrayal. The government alleges that Trump willfully kept sensitive information about U.S. and foreign defense capabilities and shared classified information with people who did not have security clearances.

It also charges a conspiracy to obstruct justice involving Trump and his valet Walt Nauta, who reportedly lied to FBI agents about the presence of sensitive documents, only to fess up during subsequent questioning. Nauta, who was also charged, is likely to be an important government witness  and, given his long-standing loyalty to Trump, a very credible one.

The indictment also confirms that former Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran will be another important government witness, perhaps the most important. He is the source of a series of incendiary and incriminating statements that the indictment attributes to Trump, including I dont want anybody looking through my boxes" and "Wouldn't it be better if we just told them we didn't have anything here?"

The relocation of the unprecedented case from Washington, D.C., to Florida is likely to make the case that much stronger. Although it may sound like a procedural detail, a defendant has a constitutionally guaranteed right to be tried where a crime was allegedly committed. A venue mistake could result in consequences as serious as a case being thrown out with no opportunity for retrial. So the department made the strategic call that the case should proceed in the Southern District of Florida, which includes Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate and the scene of his allegedly illegal record retention.

The location also has the effect of underscoring the most damning aspect of the case for Trump. His knowingly taking documents from the White House was almost certainly criminal; his brazen and quintessentially Trumpian refusal to return them, even to the point of lying to the government and involving others in the concealment, was worse.

The venue does heighten the risk that an ardently pro-Trump juror will simply refuse to convict him on any grounds, which given the mind-boggling strength of the evidence might be the defendant's only hope. But the justice system has already proved resilient, having produced another indictment of the ex-president, in New York, and an unfavorable civil verdict in the E. Jean Carroll case.

With the venue issue put to rest, and with courts in the Florida district known for moving fairly quickly, a trial is likely to unfold sooner if the Trump-appointed judge initially assigned to the case doesn't cause unforeseen delays. Its even possible that Trump will be convicted by a federal jury before the 2024 election, for which he remains the overwhelmingly favored front-runner for the Republican nomination, though his appeals would probably continue.

The Department of Justice has shown the necessary steeliness and dedication to make history in undertaking this prosecution of a former president. And with Smith still investigating Trump's even more outrageous misconduct on and before Jan. 6, 2021, this first such prosecution may well not be the last.

Next week, meanwhile, Smith's deputies are expected to take their places at the table near the jury box in a federal courtroom and announce their appearance on behalf of the people in United States vs. Trump. Whatever else happens in the coming months, it's a proud moment and a banner achievement for the rule of law in this country.

Harry Litman is the host of the Talking Feds podcast. @harrylitman

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Kids across America are experiencing a mental health crisis, according to Congress. Lawmakers are hearing from experts in order help our children.

Thursday on Capitol Hill, there was a heart-breaking moment as the superintendent of Tacoma schools recounted the challenges his students are facing.

In the last year, our students Tony, Angel, Brielle, Isaiah, Marco, DJ, Wyatt, Xavier, Larry and Iona have been shot in our community, Dr. Joshua Garcia said. Our students have to survive human trafficking, battle homelessness, drug abuse, physical and mental abuse and social media harassment and bullying.

These are also the challenges of students across the country.

Like you and I are, students are being bombarded with images of news events, daily experiences of trauma and hate and stress, Garcia said. Unlike us, they are doing this without fully developed brains.

This hearing comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says two out of five American teens felt persistently sad or hopeless, and one out of five has seriously considered suicide.

The U.S. surgeon general told lawmakers the main drivers here are social media and the increase in loneliness and isolation.

Our kids cant afford to wait longer for us to address the youth mental health crisis, Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy said. We have to expand our efforts to ensure every child has access to high quality, affordable, culturally competent mental health care.

While Democrats and Republicans might disagree on the specifics of how Congress can help, both parties agree everyone has to work together to solve this.

We know that its not easy, Dr. Garcia added. There are egos, turf battles and frustrations, however, we are truly better together. We may not be united on everything, but our future is with us now and we must be united in our commitment to serving youth first.
Kids across America are experiencing a mental health crisis, according to Congress. Lawmakers are hearing from experts in order help our children.

Thursday on Capitol Hill, there was a heart-breaking moment as the superintendent of Tacoma, Washington, schools recounted the challenges his students are facing.

In the last year, our students Tony, Angel, Brielle, Isaiah, Marco, DJ, Wyatt, Xavier, Larry and Iona have been shot in our community, Dr. Joshua Garcia said. Our students have to survive human trafficking, battle homelessness, drug abuse, physical and mental abuse and social media harassment and bullying.

These are also the challenges of students across the country.

Like you and I are, students are being bombarded with images of news events, daily experiences of trauma and hate and stress, Garcia said. Unlike us, they are doing this without fully developed brains.

This hearing comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says two out of five American teens felt persistently sad or hopeless, and one out of five has seriously considered suicide.

The U.S. surgeon general told lawmakers the main drivers here are social media and the increase in loneliness and isolation.

Our kids cant afford to wait longer for us to address the youth mental health crisis, Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy said. We have to expand our efforts to ensure every child has access to high quality, affordable, culturally competent mental health care.

While Democrats and Republicans might disagree on the specifics of how Congress can help, both parties agree everyone has to work together to solve this.

We know that its not easy, Dr. Garcia added. There are egos, turf battles and frustrations, however, we are truly better together. We may not be united on everything, but our future is with us now and we must be united in our commitment to serving youth first.
Donald Trump faces 37 counts in a federal indictment stemming from the US Department of Justice investigation into his possession of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago property.

Federal prosecutors will charge the former president with willful retention of national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, conspiracy to obstruct justice, corruptly concealing documents, concealing documents in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and making false statements.

Thirty-one counts relate to each document alleged in his possession, five counts relate to Mr Trump concealing them, and two counts relate to false statements.

Mr Trump will surrender, face arrest, and be formally charged in US District Court in Miami, as soon as next week, after a federal grand jury believed there was enough evidence to bring charges against him. A potential sentence, if convicted, could include decades in prison.

A federal indictment was unsealed on 9 June. Mr Trump said he was due in federal court in Miami at 3pm ET on 13 June.

He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and declared the investigations against him a witch hunt.

An investigation from special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed to lead the Justice Departments probe into the former presidents alleged mishandling of documents after leaving the White House, is looking into whether Mr Trump and his lawyers falsely certified that he returned classified records to the government, or whether he concealed them, illegally, and lied to his legal team.

Federal prosecutors are expected to present compelling evidence that the former president knowingly and deliberately misled his attorneys about his retention of sensitive documents after leaving the White House in January 2021 after losing his re-election bid.

Among the mounds of documents in his possession when they were collected by FBI agents were 102 classified documents  27 were in his office, 75 were in storage, and 17 top secret-designated documents were among them, according to prosecutors.

Several included nuclear weapons capabilities of the US and foreign nations, potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack, according to the indictment.

The indictment states that Mr Trumps possession could put at risk the national security of the United States.

Willful retention of national security information

The frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is charged with violations under the Espionage Act, which the Justice Department invoked against now-former National Security Agency translator Reality Winner while Mr Trump was president in 2018. Julian Assange and Daniel Hale also were charged under the Espionage Act in 2019.

Mr Trump now faces 31 counts under that same charge.

One of the six sections under the Espionage Act, Section 793, prohibits gathering, transmitting or losing any information respecting the national defence.

Counts one through 31 in Mr Trumps federal indictment include individual documents in his possession from 20 January 2021 until 6 August 2022 or 3 June 2022.

The documents include documents designated secret and top secret, related to White House intelligence briefings, foreign military activity, communication with foreign leaders, foreign military impacts on US interests, and communications with a foreign leader.

At least one document concerns US nuclear weaponry

Another involves nuclear capabilities for a foreign government.

The use of Section 793, which does not make reference to classified information, is understood to be a strategic decision by prosecutors that has been made to short-circuit the former presidents ability to claim that he used his authority as president to declassify documents he removed from the White House and kept at his Florida property long after his term expired on 20 January 2021.

That section of US criminal law is written in a way that could encompass Mr Trumps conduct even if he was authorised to possess the information as president. It states that anyone who lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with any document  relating to the national defence and willfully transmits such information in any way can face a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

Conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding records and witness tampering

The former president and Walt Nauta did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate and agree to withhold documents under Section 1512 under Title 18 of US code, according to the indictment.

The statute includes a broad prohibition against tampering with a witness, victim or informant involved in a federal investigation.

According to prosecutors, Mr Trump conspired to conceal documents from a grand jury and federal officials, by suggesting that his attorneys make false statements to authorities, by moving boxes of documents to hide from attorneys, by suggesting that documents be hidden or destroyed, and falsely certifying that classified documents were produced to authorities when, in fact, they had not.

The statute applies to matters before Congress as well as federal agencies and civil and criminal judicial proceedings, including grand jury proceedings. A conviction includes a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

In a case before a jury, federal prosecutors must prove whether Mr Trump knowingly retained documents under the National Archives and Records Administrations custody, and willfully defied the Justice Departments subpoena for classified documents in his possession. A conviction includes a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.

An additional charge of conspiracy, which would need to include another person in order to commit a crime, could carry a sentence of five years.

False statements and representations

Mr Trump faces additional charges for making false statements, or allowing his legal team to make false statements, for allegedly lying to law enforcement about the documents in his possession. That could include an additional five-year sentence, if convicted.

According to the indictment, the former president made a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement when he swore to a grand jury investigation and federal law enforcement probe that he provided all documents as requested.

A federal indictment against Mr Trump arrives days after a last-ditch attempt by his legal team to convince Justice Department officials against charging him.

Investigators launched a probe early last year after officials with the National Archives and Records Administration discovered more than 100 documents bearing classification markings while reviewing 15 boxes retrieved from Mr Trumps Mar-a-Lago home. US Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Mr Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor at The Hague, as special counsel to lead the probe.

An indictment serves as a formal accusation, among a prosecutors first steps before a case can be brought to trial.

Grand jurors heard evidence and testimony brought forward from prosecutors and witnesses they chose to present. In a trial, a jury will hear from defence attorneys.

Following Mr Trumps formal indictment, prosecutors will share evidence with his legal team and likely begin motions to dismiss the case.

Andrew Feinberg contributed reporting
Photo: The Canadian Press A passenger boards a WestJet Encore Bombardier Q400 twin-engined turboprop aircraft in Kamloops, Saturday, June 3, 2023. WestJet and Swoop pilots ratified their collective agreement after a bargaining process that saw the threat of a strike snarl many Canadians' long weekend plans. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

WestJet says it will wind down its Swoop brand by late October as it integrates the budget carrier's operations into its main banner.

The move comes after ratification of a new collective agreement that brings pilots of both carriers onto a level pay scale.

In a phone interview from its Calgary headquarters, WestJet CEO Alexis von Hoensbroech said keeping Swoop separate would make little sense financially given the higher labour costs, but said each WestJet flight will offer a portion of ultra-low-cost tickets.

Pilots of WestJet and Swoop secured a 24 per cent hour pay bump over four years under a deal agreed on tentatively last month that narrowly averted a strike.

Bargaining came down to the wire, with WestJet cancelling more than 230 flights in preparation for job action before a deal was reached hours ahead of the strike deadline on May 19.

Competition for budget airfares has grown in recent years, particularly in Western Canada, as upstarts Flair Airlines and Lynx Air challenged Swoop for market share on key routes.
The coronavirus has made itself at home in animals. Why that ramps up the risk for people

A deer crosses a road in Highlands, N.J. Researchers have detected the highly infectious COVID-19 Omicron variant in white-tailed deer population on New York's Staten Island. (Julio Cortez / Associated Press)

The COVID-19 pandemic is receding fast into our collective memory. But the virus that caused it lives on in our sewers, our backyards, and maybe even curled up in a sunny spot on the living room floor.

The coronavirus that prompted more than 750 million infections in humans and nearly 7 million deaths has also spread to creatures great and small. Lions and tigers have caught it. So have pet dogs and cats. Scientists have even found SARS-CoV-2 in armadillos, anteaters, otters and manatees, among others.

At least 32 animal species in 39 countries have had confirmed coronavirus infections. For the most part, the animals do not become very ill. Still, some are capable of transmitting the virus to other members of their species, just like the asymptomatic humans who became "silent spreaders."

The coronavirus' ability to infect so many different animals, and to spread within some of those populations, is worrying news: It means there's virtually no chance the world will ever be rid of this particularly destructive coronavirus, scientists said.

And that's not even the worst of it: As long as SARS-CoV-2 is spreading in animals, the virus has the opportunity to acquire new mutations that could make it more dangerous to people. If circumstances align, the result would be Pandemic 2.0.

Scientists aren't saying this scenario is likely. But it's not so far-fetched.

In fact, this sequence of events  a virus that jumps from animals to humans and capitalizes on gaps in our immunity  is just how most zoonotic outbreaks begin. It remains the most likely explanation for how a coronavirus circulating in horseshoe bats in China came to infect humans in the first place.

When a virus that has made humans sick recedes but continues to circulate within a population of animals, those creatures become what scientists call a reservoir. Within a herd, flock, clowder, pack or pod, it quietly preserves its potential to reinfect humans and rekindle outbreaks.

The virus may adapt to its animal host by flipping a few genetic switches. The result could be a pathogen that the human immune system no longer recognizes, or that causes more severe illness than the last time around.

To do real damage, animal reservoirs must be in regular contact with people. They may be livestock on farms, family pets, or wildlife neighbors who leave their saliva or droppings in our yards or on hiking trails.

Whether any particular species can be said to serve as a reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 is a hotly debated question among scientists right now, said Dr. Angela Bosco-Lauth, a Colorado State University veterinarian who studies zoonotic diseases.

So far, no single species has checked off all the boxes, which isnt to say we should call it over and stop looking, she said. Its hard to predict. But we know that if we dont look, we wont find it.

A wildlife team restrains a young buck before testing the deer for the coronavirus in Grand Portage, Minn., last winter. (Laura Ungar / Associated Press)

E.J. Isaac, a Minnesota fish and wildlife biologist, places a sample swab into a vial while performing a coronavirus test on a deer. (Laura Ungar / Associated Press)

Virologists, immunologists and wildlife scientists have shown that a few species have some of the capabilities necessary to become a reservoir.

One animal population  white-tailed deer  continues to pass SARS-CoV-2 amongst itself. Another  American mink  can not only be infected but reinfected with the pandemic virus, raising the prospect that it could live on indefinitely. In both cases, studies have shown that the coronavirus is actively mutating to adapt to a new host species.

Theres also the documented phenomenon of farmed mink in Denmark and pet shop hamsters in Hong Kong passing the virus back to humans.

The number of wildlife species that might harbor the virus is substantial. A group led by UC Davis geneticists found that, in addition to humans, 46 species of mammals have receptors on their cells that suggest they are vulnerable to infection with SARS-CoV-2.

The World Health Organization is so concerned that animals will become sanctuaries for the pandemic virus that it called on all member countries to conduct active surveillance of their wildlife. Cervids  the family of animals that includes deer  exist in various forms all over the world, and are considered prime candidates for providing a coronavirus reservoir. Other leading contenders are apes and Old World primates  macaques, baboons, gorillas and chimpanzees  whose genetic similarity to humans makes them susceptible to infection, and whose exposure to humans around the world is substantial.

A visitor with a mask observes an orangutan in an enclosure at the Schoenbrunn Zoo in Vienna, Austria. (Ronald Zak / Associated Press)

The only species in which scientists have documented continued spread of the pandemic virus is white-tailed deer, the most abundant large mammal in North America and a denizen of backyards and wooded areas across much of the country. In places in the U.S. where the animals are densely concentrated, at least a third are believed to have been infected with the virus at some point during the pandemic. (Mule deer, which are more common across the West, have been shown to sustain and transmit coronavirus infections as well.)

A study published in January found that white-tail deer continued to harbor the Alpha, Delta and Gamma coronavirus variants long after they had stopped circulating in the U.S. population. The fact that deer populations could keep these variants alive and flourishing even after they had left humans is seen as a strong sign that deer might well serve as reservoirs for the pandemic virus.

Deer harvested by hunters across New York state yielded other surprises: As the virus passed through herds, it took on new mutations, including several in the spike protein that it uses as a key to enter and infect cells.

Jeff Bowman, a wildlife scientist for the province of Ontario, Canada, is the senior author of research that documented the discovery in wild deer not only of a virus with a record 76 mutations, but also a "spillback" transmission of another strain from a deer to a human. Still, he acknowledged that whether deer have become a reservoir for the SARS-CoV-2 virus remains an open question at the moment.

In human populations, the pandemic virus flipped genetic switches often, mostly in ways that were neutral or that made it less threatening. But as it settles in among new host populations, it may well evolve in different ways.

When they get in, theyre not subtle, said Washington State University molecular virologist Michael Letko, who has studied how members of the coronavirus family adapt to new hosts. Theyre evading immune responses and trying to survive.

That puts enormous pressure on the virus latching mechanism  its spike protein  to embrace any mutations that help it get the job done. Whether those mutations also make the virus more virulent is just the luck of the draw, Letko said. Its the unknown that makes it kind of tricky.

The Canadian government has kept tabs on the virus in its deer and other wildlife populations by piggybacking its surveillance on an existing program to detect chronic wasting disease and rabies. Hunters and trappers have been enlisted to bring their harvests to researchers for testing, and wildlife crews collect animal carcasses in woods and scrape up roadkill to round out the picture.

In the United States, the Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services has been sampling white-tailed deer in the wild since November 2021 and is expected to release new findings soon.

So far, theres no evidence that the mutations detected after the virus sojourn among white-tailed deer in New York made it more dangerous in any way. But the effect of any changes might not become evident until an infected deer passed it on to a human.

Finlay Maguire, an infectious disease genomic epidemiologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is one of the Canadian researchers monitoring the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in white-tailed deer there, and he has not detected worrying genetic changes  so far.

We havent seen signs of strong selective pressure that would make [the virus] better suited to humans, he said.

Theres other reassuring research as well: Researchers have found no reason to believe birds can catch the coronavirus. Thats important because birds flock, fly and migrate, and are raised as livestock as well. All those attributes make them exceptionally prolific spreaders of pathogens capable of infecting humans. (Case in point: influenza.)

Researchers have also ruled out the ability of pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, alpacas, rabbits and horses to sustain a SARS-CoV-2 infection  a relief considering that these livestock animals are in routine contact with human caregivers.

Bosco-Lauth of Colorado State said the animals that live closest to humans  dogs and cats  can become infected but are unlikely to serve as effective reservoirs for the virus. Dogs may lick our faces and cats will gladly sneeze in them. But neither has shown it is capable of efficiently transmitting the virus, either to their human housemates or others of their species.

She added that researchers have yet to find a species that, when infected, excretes much live virus in its feces. Much has been made of the discovery of infected rats living near New York sewers. But if they cant transmit the pathogen through their droppings, rats and other wildlife aren't likely to infect humans very efficiently.

There arent a whole lot of wildlife species Im really worried about, Bosco-Lauth said.

Theres one species, however, that continues to raise concerns among scientists: homo sapiens.

COVID-19 is still circulating in the human population, and people are getting infected and reinfected repeatedly, said Graham Belsham, a Copenhagen University virologist who studied the spread of the pandemic virus in farmed mink in Denmark. The virus hasnt gone away, so people are probably the biggest threat to other people for years to come.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Dear Prince Harry,

We want you to know that we stand beside you. If the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains you, we will defend you. Unfortunately, like tens of thousands of immigrants in this country, your admission to minor drug offenses could be a deportable offense that separates you indefinitely from your wife and two children.

But we want you to know that we will fight for you.

Even though President Joe Biden pardoned U.S. citizens last year for certain possession offenses, he did not pardon you, a noncitizen. Most drug offenses mean mandatory detention for noncitizens in this country, with no opportunity to leave a prison-like environment. If you are detained and ask to be transferred to a detention center closer to your wife and children, you will likely not prevail. You could be forced to decide between permanently living with your family in the United Kingdom or from the confines of a detention center pending deportation.

Harry, we want you to know that you are not alone.

Prince Harry leaves a court appearance on June 7, 2023, in London. Phone hacking is central to his case against Mirror Group and two related lawsuits against other British tabloid publishers that he claims invaded his privacy.

Most immigrants in your situation would likely be locked in detention. In fact, in the U.S. capital region, thousands of mixed-status families like yours face separation every year. Our data at Capital Area Immigrants Rights Coalition shows that just around Washington, D.C., an average of 1,000 fathers a year are separated from their children because of ICE detention. Unfortunately, these detention numbers continue to rise.

Sharing difficult moments in your memoir could result in your deportation. But Harry, this is not unusual.

Thank you, Prince Harry, for having the courage to speak your truth

Prince Harry can be a voice for immigrants who are silenced

The government puts countless resources into surveilling immigrant communities  the Department of Homeland Security and ICE probe immigrants social media accounts. Photos and posts are wielded against them to deny bond, accuse them of drug use and other crimes, and allege they are in criminal organizations and gangs.

In contrast to your experience, what can become damning in their cases can be as simple as the color of the clothes they wore in a photograph or revealing a new tattoo. Yes, that is often enough to keep immigrants behind bars.

Biden unveils 'get-tough' asylum policy: What if Trump and Republicans were right on Title 42 and immigration?

Harry, you might face deportation, but at least you can afford an attorney.

Most noncitizens in the United States aren't entitled to court-appointed legal counsel, and 70% of those with deportation cases have to face prosecution alone. Without the right to an attorney, people are forced to fight their own cases in a language often not their own, gather their own evidence, examine witnesses and defend themselves against highly-trained government lawyers and judges.

An immigrant with legal representation is over 10 times more likely to prevail in their case than someone without.

Those without the benefit of counsel disproportionally face not just family separation but returning to persecution and death.

Eric Lopez is an immigration attorney and advocate at CAIR Coalition.

Harry, please use your voice for others who do not have a platform to advocate. Millions of immigrants face removal without an attorney, but there are bills such as the Fairness to Freedom Act that would guarantee counsel to immigrants in removal proceedings. You can uplift and support these bills that would provide attorneys for immigrants in deportation cases like yours.

Until then, we will continue to defend one another.

Eric Lopez is a deputy program director at the Capital Area Immigrants' Rights Coalition based in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. He earned a juris doctorate from the University of Illinois College of Law.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Will Prince Harry be deported? How his immigration experience differs
Couple files lawsuit against TruGreen after receiving racist texts from employee, attorney says

A local couple is suing TruGreen after they say a salesman went on a racist tirade when they refused service.

Channel 9s Glenn Counts spoke with the couples attorney who said the incident began with the company trying to solicit their business.

It shocked my conscious. And to be transparent, it upset me to my core, attorney William Harding said.

Harding, who represents the homeowners, said when they turned down TruGreens offer, an employee responded with a torrent of hatred.

He kept texting him and making, as you can see from the lawsuit, making references of slavery. We filed this lawsuit because its about shining a light on racism. Its about accountability, Harding explained

ALSO READ: 6 former employees sue Charlotte company alleging racist practices

Harding said one of the many messages sent by the employee read:

I see why yall got whipped and chained and beat and strung up on trees. Now I used to think it was...up, but you just showed me my grandma was right. You all dont deserve the air you breathe.

Channel 9 has reached out to TruGreen for comment about this incident. The company responded with the following statement.

We are aware of the lawsuit and want to be clear that our company condemns such appalling actions. And will not tolerate behavior of this kind.

The company also said they conducted an investigation and based on the outcome of that investigation, promptly terminated the employee.

Harding said he will be conducting his own investigation into whether or not this was a pattern of behavior for the employee in question.

VIDEO: 6 former employees sue Charlotte company alleging racist practices












A court has seized Ukrainian assets worth more than UAH 180 million [approx. US$4.9 million  ed.] belonging to Vladimir Zotov, deputy chairman of the Belgorod Oblast Duma in Russia and owner of the Agro-Belogorye group of companies.

Source: an announcement by the Security Service of Ukraine; Office of the Prosecutor General

Quote: "This official is involved in financing Russian armed aggression against Ukraine. The total value of the assets of the deputy of the Russian Federation being blocked is more than UAH 180 million.

First and foremost, this is the seizure of assets belonging to an agricultural holding controlled by Zotov which is located on the territory of Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson oblasts. These are production and storage facilities covering an area of more than 13,000 square metres, 16 cars, and almost UAH 4 million [approx. USD $108,372  ed.] in bank accounts."

Details: The investigation by the Security Service of Ukraine showed that Zotov had been directing part of his profits to support occupation groups fighting against Ukraine.

He also launched an information campaign in Russia that gave extensive coverage of his businesses provision of "humanitarian food aid" to the Russian military at the front.

Information about the aid can be found on his Telegram channel and his page on Vkontakte, a social media site that is banned in Ukraine. Information about assistance to the invaders has also been posted on his corporations official website.

Zotov was served with a notice of suspicion in absentia under Art. 110-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (Financing of actions committed with the aim of changing the borders of the territory or state border of Ukraine in violation of the procedure established by the Constitution of Ukraine).

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
This is our biweekly briefing on the pandemic, vetted by John Bailey. See the full archive.

This Weeks Top Story

Worldwide, Learning Loss and Pandemic School Closures Were Directly Connected

Via Jeff Murray at Fordham, based on a new working paper from Harry Patrinos at the World Bank

Patrinos looks at 11 factors potentially increasing or mitigating learning loss, which is defined using test score data via country-specific instruments that were standardized for comparison.

There is a clear link between school closure duration and learning loss. Closures as part of government-imposed lockdowns averaged 21 weeks duration and resulted in an average learning loss of 0.23 standard deviations across the countries studied (representing two-thirds of the worlds population). Testing for mitigating factors or other means to explain learning loss produced no significant findings, meaning that school closures appear to be directly responsible for student learning loss.

Patrinos finds that each additional week of school closure increased learning loss by a further 1% of a standard deviation.

In short: The longer schools stayed closed, the less students learned, no matter what else was done to blunt the losses.

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The Big Three

More than 70% of Household COVID Spread Started With a Child

Via CIDRAP: A study published [June 1] in JAMA Network Open suggests that 70.4% of nearly 850,000 U.S. household COVID-19 transmissions originated with a child.

Of all household transmissions, 70.4% began with a child, with the proportion fluctuating weekly between 36.9% and 87.5%.

Once U.S. schools reopened in fall 2020, children contributed more to inferred within-household transmission when they were in school, and less during summer and winter breaks, a pattern consistent for two consecutive school years.

Schools Received Billions in Stimulus Funds. It May Not Be Doing Enough

Via The New York Times: While most schools have since deployed various forms of interventions and some have spent more on academic recovery than others, there are ample signs that the money has not been spent in a way that has substantially helped all of the nations students lagging behind.

Robin Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, said the impact of the funding has been a bit of a black box, and she expected to see different recovery rates across districts.

Early reports show that schools have had difficulty setting up academic recovery programs.

The Programs Most Likely to Go Away When Stimulus Funding Ends

Via EdWeek

Areas high on the list for reduction are much more classroom-focused: summer learning programs (30%), computing devices, such as Chromebooks (29%) and tutoring (26%).

Relatively large districts, meaning those with 10,000 or more students, are relatively likely to scale back tutoring (33% said they would), as were those with enrollments of between 2,500 and 9,999 students (34%), as opposed to those from systems with fewer than 2,500 students (20%).

The survey also reveals that K-12 officials from suburban districts are much less likely to scale back stimulus-funded programs focused on student mental health/wellness resources (9% indicated they would) compared to those from districts in rural areas or towns (20%) and urban areas (28%).

Relatively few of those surveyed see core academic subjects as likely to receive cuts, such as elementary English/language arts (just 17%), science (13%), elementary math (12%) and social-studies (11%).

Federal Updates

Institute for Education Statistics: Director Mark Schneider on education research and the future of schools.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Dr. Deborah L. Birx: Now that the COVID-19 national public health emergency is over, its time to fix the CDC.

Debt Ceiling: Education spared from severe cuts with the signing of debt ceiling deal.

Education Department: New Office of Educational Technology and Digital Promise report: U.S. Department of Education Shares Insights and Recommendations for Artificial Intelligence.

City & State News

California: Thousands of California families are still homeschooling their children. Whats keeping them from the classroom?

Colorado: The state Board of Education voted unanimously to select Susana Cordova as the sole finalist for the position of commissioner of education.

Missouri: Pandemic led to drop in special education services for young kids in Missouri and nationwide.

New Jersey: 10,000 Newark public school students need summer school this year, district says.

Pennsylvania: Teachers are leaving their jobs at an accelerating rate in Pennsylvania, new study finds.

COVID-19 Research

Pfizer Vaccine Tracking Confirms Safety in Kids, With Myocarditis, Pericarditis Rare

Via CIDRAP: Monitoring of Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine safety among more than 3 million U.S. children aged 5 to 17 years flagged just 2 of 20 health outcomes among 12- to 17-year-olds  myocarditis and pericarditis, which were rare.

 Myocarditis or pericarditis is a rare event, with an average incidence of 39.4 cases per million doses administered in children aged 5 to 17 years within seven days after BNT162b2 [Pfizer] COVID-19 vaccination, the authors wrote. Previous studies have noted that the incidence of the two conditions is much higher after COVID-19 infection.

COVID-19 Catch Up

Via Katelyn Jetelina: SARS-CoV-2 is nosediving across all metrics in all regions of the U.S.: hospitalizations, deaths, emergency room departments, and wastewater. Wastewater is still higher than in 2020 and 2021, though.

Weve been hitting new lows in death counts, too. In fact, excess deaths are hovering at only ~1% above pre-pandemic rates (at the height of the pandemic we were at 47%). In other words, things are looking good right now.

Up until now, the CDC recommended that we improve ventilation to reduce transmission. But by how much? Well, for the first time, CDC set minimum ventilation targets for indoor spaces: five air changes per hour. This may sound like boring news, but its huge for public health. Not just for viruses but health overall. While this standard isnt mandatory, you should follow up with your business, school, place of worship, etc., to ensure its being met now.

Viewpoints and Analyses

Moving from Reform to Rethinking

Via Rick Hess: The COVID-19 pandemic stressed and stretched schooling in unprecedented ways. Routines that had been in place for generations came to a crashing halt.

During the pandemic, new routines took hold. Parents expressed frustration and an appetite for new options. The visibility into the curriculum and students work that came with remote learning led many parents to become newly engaged.  The pandemic fueled an explosion in homeschooling, greater familiarity with virtual learning and unprecedented declines in district enrollments.

From my research and work with educators, Ive learned that leaders who want to  meet this moment as open-minded rethinkers rather than self-assured reformers, should take to heart five habits. Ask why  a lot! Be precise and specific. Be deliberate. Know that new problems may call for new solutions. Reject change for changes sake.



5 Steps Districts Can Take to Prepare for a Big Financial Reckoning:

Noah Wepman, the former chief financial officer for the District of Columbia Public Schools, shares five things districts should consider doing to keep students and their successes at the center of discussions about budget reductions: Inventory district-funded programs, then examine student data. Engage in strategic abandonment discussions. Set your districts priorities and create (or update) your five-year financial plan. Budget for equity. Innovate and experiment with new school models or staffing approaches.





The Pandemic Is Over, But the Education Emergency Continues

Via Bruno Manno

There is a divide between the reality of student learning loss and parents perceptions of learning loss.

Learning loss is related not only to what happened in schools, but also to what happened in communities.

Learning loss will become permanent unless learning time  student time on task  is increased.





And on a Lighter Note

The Oscar for Best Drama Goes to: This flying squirrel faked his own death and created a whole crime scenefor attention. Make sure to wait until the end.

This flying squirrel faked his own death, and created a whole crime scenefor attention. I think Im in love. pic.twitter.com/SZfrtNlDI0  Sarah Bee (@BirrelleBee) June 3, 2023

For even more COVID policy and education news, subscribe to John Baileys briefing via Substack.

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to The 74.
Cracker Barrel saluted Pride Month, and some people are losing it

Cracker Barrel saluted Pride Month, and some people are losing it

Cracker Barrel posted a "Happy Pride Month" salute on social media with a rainbow rocking chair.

Conservative groups accused Cracker Barrel of going "woke," while supporters defended the chain.

The post has generated tens of thousands of comments and shares on Facebook.

Supporters are rallying behind Cracker Barrel Old Country Store  and poking fun at its critics  after the restaurant chain posted a salute to Pride Month on social media. The post has sparked outrage from some conservatives.

The restaurant chain posted a photo on its Facebook page Thursday showing a rainbow-themed rocking chair on the porch of a Cracker Barrel restaurant.

The post said: "We are excited to celebrate Pride Month with our employees and guests. Everyone is always welcome at our table (and our rocker). Happy Pride!" The company posted the same message on its Instagram page.

As of Friday afternoon, the Facebook post had generated 36,000 comments and had been shared 25,000 times. Supporters flooded the page with praise and thank-yous, with many users pledging to stop by for a meal.

Facebook user Scarlett Wells wrote: "I've literally avoided Cracker Barrel because I was pretty sure y'all weren't inclusive. That'll change. This is awesome. Also, I need that chair."

Critics also took to social media, with some accusing the restaurant chain of abandoning its values and its customer base and going "woke." One conservative group, Texas Family Project, tweeted: "We take no pleasure in reporting that @CrackerBarrel has fallen. A once family friendly establishment has caved to the mob."

Texas Family Project (@FamilyProjectTX) June 8, 2023

Others vowed to boycott the chain, including Texas Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson, who tweeted: "BYE BYE CRACKER BARREL! I will NEVER eat there again!!"

Some supporters mocked the outrage. "All these people triggered by a chair is pure comedy gold," Instagram user @phillyd_art wrote.

Some other examples:

Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) June 9, 2023

Cracker Barrel also responded to supporters, saying in one tweet: "Thanks for sharing! Our teams take pride in creating a welcoming, safe atmosphere where people can enjoy time with family and friends the moment they walk through our doors."

The backlash against Cracker Barrel is the latest in a wave of anti-LGBTQ protests and boycotts against major businesses, including Target, Bud Light, and Disney.

Other businesses, such as Chick-fil-A, have come under fire for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Cracker Barrel also sparked criticism and boycott threats last year when it added vegan sausage to its menu.

The Pride salute marks something of a shift from Cracker Barrel's earlier days. In the early 1990s, the chain came under fire for a policy that barred gay people from being hired. It also was accused of dismissing several gay employees, the New York Times wrote. But in 2019, the company banned an anti-gay pastor from holding an event at a Tennessee restaurant and said it had a "zero-tolerance" policy for discrimination.

The company now has a DEI page on its website with the headline "Everyone Feels at Home."

Read the original article on Business Insider
A crash involving a tanker truck closed one side of Independence Boulevard in east Charlotte Friday morning. It reopened about five hours later.

UPDATE: A look at the crash involving a tanker that has IB Independence Blvd. still CLOSED prio r to #Uptown #clt #clttraffic #cltraffic pic.twitter.com/jMQp69nrlb  Traffic Team 9 (@TrafficTeam9) June 9, 2023

The inbound lanes of Independence Boulevard were blocked starting at 3:30 a.m. after a car and tanker truck crashed near Pecan Avenue.

ALSO READ: Train plows into truck stuck on tracks in Wingate

MEDIC said they didnt respond to the crash.

>> Channel 9s LIVE traffic map

Police told drivers to expect significant delays for the morning commute. The highway reopened around 8:45 a.m.

Theres no word on what caused the crash.

(WATCH BELOW: Troopers: Man on lawnmower, 13-year-old killed in York County crash; 2 others hurt)
Crime Stoppers are looking for information on a cold case murder out of Washington County and anyone with information could receive a $5,000 cash reward.

Betty Pieczynski, 63, was found in her home in Cecil Township on June 24, 1983. She was shot with a .25 caliber automatic.

Anyone with information is asked to contact State Police in Washington at 724-223-5200 and speak to Trooper Harding or contact the Pennsylvania Crime Stoppers at 1-800-4PA-TIPS (8477) or online at https://www.p3tips.com/tipform.aspx?ID=107. All callers remain anonymous and could be eligible for a $5,000 cash reward.

Download the FREE WPXI News app for breaking news alerts.

Follow Channel 11 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch WPXI NOW

TRENDING NOW:

Federal student loan payment restart date announced 2 suspects in custody after police pursuit following shooting in McKees Rocks Arrest warrant issued for 14-year-old after fatal Uniontown shooting VIDEO: Woman charged after man hit by car, severely injured in Monaca DOWNLOAD the Channel 11 News app for breaking news alerts
What's in the Trump indictment: US nuclear secrets and files kept in shower

Former President Donald Trump has been charged with mishandling hundreds of classified documents, including about US nuclear secrets and military plans.

The 37-count indictment accuses him of keeping the files at his Florida estate, including in a ballroom and a shower, and lying to investigators.

It alleges he then tried to obstruct the investigation into the handling of the documents.

Mr Trump, who is running for president again in 2024, denies any wrongdoing.

But legal experts say that the criminal charges against Mr Trump could lead to substantial prison time if he is convicted.

Charges have also been filed against Walt Nauta, a personal aide to Mr Trump. The former White House military valet is accused of moving files to hide them from the FBI.

The 49-page indictment contains the first-ever federal charges against a former US president. It says the classified documents Mr Trump stored in his boxes contained information about:

United States nuclear programmes

Defence and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries

Potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack

Plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack

Prosecutors say that when Mr Trump left office, he took about 300 classified files to Mar-a-Lago - his oceanfront home in Palm Beach, which is also an expansive private members' club.

The charge sheet notes that Mar-a-Lago hosted events for tens of thousands of members and guests, including in a ballroom where documents were found.

Prosecutors say Mr Trump tried to obstruct the FBI inquiry into the missing documents by suggesting that his lawyer "hide or destroy" them, or tell investigators he did not have them.

"Wouldn't it be better if we just told them we don't have anything here?" Mr Trump said to one of his attorneys, according to the indictment.

Mr Trump's first court appearance in the case will be in Miami, Florida, on Tuesday - the eve of his 77th birthday.

Files were allegedly stored in a ballroom at Donald Trump's Florida property, Mar-a-Lago

Mar-a-Lago "was not an authorised location" for classified documents to be kept or discussed, the indictment says.

Some files were allegedly stored on stage in the ballroom, where events and gatherings took place - and later in a bathroom and a shower, an office space, and in Mr Trump's bedroom.

On two occasions in 2021, the former president allegedly showed classified documents to people without security clearance, including a writer and two members of staff.

At his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, which was also an "unauthorised location", he is said to have displayed and described a "plan of attack" that he told others had been prepared for him by the Department of Defense.

"As president I could have declassified it. Now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret," Mr Trump allegedly said, according to an audio recording.

Prosecutors say Mr Trump then showed off classified documents again in August or September 2021 at the Bedminster club.

The former US president allegedly "showed a representative of his political action committee who did not possess a security clearance a classified map".

This map "related to a military operation" and Mr Trump told the person "he should not be showing it" to them and they "should not get too close", the indictment says.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the investigation, said on Friday that laws protecting national defence information were critical and must be enforced.

"We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone," he said in a brief statement in Washington.

The indictment included images of files allegedly stored in a shower

In a social media post, Mr Trump blasted Mr Smith as a "deranged lunatic".

"He is a Trump hater - a deranged 'psycho' that shouldn't be involved in any case having to do with 'Justice,'" he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Mr Trump pointed out that classified files were also found in President Joe Biden's former office and Delaware home, including in his garage.

The White House has previously said it immediately co-operated with officials as soon as those files were discovered, contrasting with Mr Trump's alleged efforts to obstruct investigators.

A federal investigation into Mr Biden's handling of classified documents is being led by Special Counsel Robert Hur and is still under way.

Shortly before the Department of Justice made the criminal charges public, two of Mr Trump's lawyers suddenly quit the case without much explanation, saying this was a "logical moment" to resign.

This is the second criminal case for Mr Trump, who is due to go on trial in New York next year in a state case involving a hush-money payment to a porn star.
When Henry Fonda, the great nice-guy leading man of 20th century American cinema, stepped out as villainous Frank in Sergio Leones Once Upon a Time in the West, audiences were enthralled. Squeaky clean, whiter than white Fonda, gunning people down in cold blood. It was a subversion of casting norms that would become typical  from Bryan Cranston following Malcolm in the Middle with Breaking Bad, to Robin Williams going full psycho in One Hour Photo  which captivated Fondas fans. The Crowded Room, a new Apple TV+ 10-parter, is but the latest instalment of this trend, with baby-faced Tom Holland playing a man accused of a series of heinous crimes.

But did he do it? The Crowded Room, which opens with a sequence in which Hollands Danny and the mysterious Ariana (Sasha Lane) shoot up the Rockefeller Centre, is about something. If you have even the mildest curiosity about the show  or its source material, Daniel Keyes acclaimed 1981 non-fiction novel The Minds of Billy Milligan  youll know what that something is. But the show seems determined to give as little away as possible in the first few episodes, even as the title hints at whats in store. Viewers, therefore, are thrown into the personal history of Danny Sullivan, a quiet, lank-haired artist, currently in the custody of the New York Police Department. Which is where he encounters psychologist Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried), whos been tasked with unriddling Dannys complex life. Im just here to talk, she tells her young charge, and talk he does.

Holland  best known on the small screen for Wolf Hall; best known on the big screen for, you know, Spider-Man  is an accomplished actor. He has the doe-eyed naif routine down pat, even as it becomes increasingly disconcerting to see a 27-year-old man playing a highschooler. The role of Danny is a tricky one, straddling the line of being plausibly attractive to the hot girls (I liked that you were different, says Isabel (Emma Laird), it made me anxious but it was exciting), while also being an easy target for roving gangs of jock bullies. As his interrogative foil, Seyfried offers little that ChatGPT wouldnt, especially as The Crowded Rooms cards remain resolutely close to its chest.

The chronology of The Crowded Room creates two different shows: one a procedural two-hander, the other a fairly lavish 1970s coming-of-age story. Reconciling these threads is rather like trying to square an episode of Line of Duty with a volume of Stranger Things. The intended genre remains elliptical. At times The Crowded Room flirts with horror, though, generally, it stays in the bildungsroman lane, hinting, at some point in most scenes, at something more cryptic. Getting high, getting paid, getting laid: all the beats of teenage life are here, just with a few more ominous pronouncements. What exactly are you accusing me of? Danny asks Rya, and, at times, its hard to know.

The generic muddle is abetted by a script that struggles with cliche, both in the plot and the dialogue. I wasnt a very popular kid at school, Dannys voiceover announces. Turns out sad and moody didnt do me any favours at home either. Scenes that involve drug dealers, gay clubs and international paternity searches all feel like they couldve been ripped from any modern Young Adult story. Meanwhile imagery like fireflies, dancing kites and eclipses add a visual triteness. Much has been made, in the press, of the casting of Emmy Rossum (just nine years Hollands senior) as Dannys mother, but it is not even the most perplexing of The Crowded Rooms decisions. It feels like a story that creator Akiva Goldsman (who, if you want a hint at the shows something, previously won an Oscar writing A Beautiful Mind) wanted to tell, without knowing precisely how.

The Crowded Room doesnt work (other than an exquisite title sequence), which is a shame because, individually, the elements are good. From Holland to Lane, Rossum to Jason Isaacs (who appears as an implausible, urbane Englishman), the cast is strong. The basis of the story  which has been dramatised before, usually more explicitly in the horror genre  is compelling. But The Crowded Room is an unsatisfying blend of these components, which takes, at best, a curates egg, and scrambles it.
Frank Schneider spoke to the BBC for "The Missing Cryptoqueen" podcast

An FBI-wanted former spy and trusted adviser to the fugitive "Missing Cryptoqueen" has disappeared.

Frank Schneider, 53, was under house arrest in France awaiting extradition to the US.

But like his former boss Ruja Ignatova, he has gone missing before facing US justice.

He faces a maximum of 40 years in prison on fraud and money laundering charges for his alleged role in a $4bn (3.2bn) cryptocurrency scam.

French authorities confirmed to the BBC that Mr Schneider, who was fitted with an ankle tag, had evaded his electronic surveillance.

Nancy's Court of Appeal issued a fresh warrant for his arrest on 16 May, meaning his whereabouts have been unknown for more than three weeks.

Neither Mr Schneider, his wife, or his lawyers could be reached by the BBC.

He worked as a troubleshooter for Miss Ignatova, architect of the OneCoin crypto scam. As investigators closed in on her, she boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens in 2017, never to be seen again. The FBI is offering a $250,000 (200,000) reward for information leading to her arrest.

Speaking to the BBC while under house arrest in August 2022, Mr Schneider said he doubted he would get a fair trial in the US.

"I fear that I have not got access to a legal system in which I can defend myself properly," he told The Missing Cryptoqueen podcast.

"The system is very much based on so-called plea bargaining. Now, for me, that already is a problem, because I profoundly believe that I'm not guilty.

"A trial in the US is a phenomenally expensive thing for a defendant. It will cost millions - between five and eight million is the estimate in my case. Those are amounts that I don't have.

"So I'm a bit stuck as to what would happen in the United States, if I get there."

Mr Schneider was first arrested by French police in April 2021 while driving with his family near the Luxembourg border. He spent seven months in prison before being released under house arrest.

From his home in a quiet French village he gave a number of interviews to journalists while working with lawyers to challenge his extradition.

A Luxembourg national, Mr Schneider was the head of operations for the country's intelligence service before starting up his own private firm, Sandstone.

His work for the "Cryptoqueen" included coordinating the London-based lawyers and PR advisers who helped prolong her scam.

US prosecutors have alleged he also provided her with confidential police information. It is a claim he has denied but he did provide the BBC with confidential police files leaked from Europol meetings, which he claimed were obtained by her. They appeared to show how she stayed one step ahead of investigators before disappearing.

In December 2022 the BBC interviewed Mr Schneider again for an upcoming podcast episode and film. Despite losing an appeal against his extradition two months earlier, he dismissed suggestions he had ever thought about absconding.

"Running away doesn't deal with anything. This battle is not finished yet."

His extradition to the US was signed off by France's Prime Minister on 15 February 2023, Nancy's Court of Appeal confirmed.

Speculation has increased in recent months that Miss Ignatova may have been murdered, following a report by Bulgarian investigative journalists. They tweeted that the source for their story was the Interpol-wanted Krasimir Kamenov.

Mr Kamenov was shot dead in his Cape Town home last month, prompting journalists to link the murder to Miss Ignatova's disappearance. Miss Ignatova's brother, also under house arrest, was ordered by a US judge to have "mental health evaluation/treatment" the day after the murder.

Konstanin Ignatov is cooperating with the FBI after pleading guilty in 2019 to his role in the OneCoin scam.

Around the BBC - Sounds

Listen to The Missing Cryptoqueen podcast on BBC Sounds - the search for Dr Ruja Ignatova continues.
The "missing endangered" 6-year-old girl the Cudahy Police Department had asked for the public's help in locating "was found and is safe," according to Cudahy Police Chief Tom Poellot.

Around 9 a.m. Friday, Cudahy Police responded to the 3600 block of E. Whitaker Avenue for a report of a missing 6-year-old girl, Poellot said in an email.

Madelyn Chitwood's mom was notified by her other daughter that Chitwood wasn't anywhere in their home, according to an alert from the Wisconsin Department of Justice's Wisconsin Crime Alert Network.

Chitwood had last been seen by her family at bedtime at home Thursday, the alert said. It was unknown what time Chitwood left or where she would have gone.

Cudahy Police coordinated a search for Chitwood with assistance from local law enforcement agencies, the state's Division of Criminal Investigation and the FBI.

Later Friday, Poellot confirmed Chitwood "was found and is safe," and the alert was canceled. Chitwood had been located at a residence in the neighborhood around 12:40 p.m., Poellot said.

The incident remains under investigation. Anyone with information is asked to contact Cudahy Police at 414-769-2260.

Erik Hanley of the Now News Group staff contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Missing 6-year-old Cudahy girl found safe
FILE - Athens District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez is being accused of withholding documents in court proceedings.

A legal proceeding was filed recently in Clarke County Superior Court seeking to have Western Circuit District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez held in contempt of court due to her alleged failure to release documents under the open records law.

Watkinsville attorney Kevin Epps continues to file motions in Superior Court to obtain evidence that he says will show a dereliction of duty by the district attorney.

Epps also contends in the motion that Gonzalez committed a felony by violating the open records law and has asked that an arrest warrant be issued for the violation or at a minimum the court should find her negligent and impose civil penalties.

As of Friday, judges have not scheduled hearings on the issues.

Related: Lawyer files motion seeking discovery in case against DA Gonzalez

More: DA Deborah Gonzalez offers apology; Athens police seek warrants in Marsy's Law case

Gonzalez, in her first term in office, sent word to the Athens Banner-Herald that she will have a response to Epps motions on Monday.

The new motions are attached to two legal filings already heard by Superior Court judges. A writ of mandamus was filed by Athens businessman Jarred Miller and a violation of the Georgia Crime Victims Rights known as Marsys Law was filed in connection with the dismissal of alleged sex crime charges against a defendant.

Hearings on both issues were held in May.

Gonzalez confessed to the writ of mandamus, a motion that orders her to comply with the statutory duties of her office. However, she appealed the writ and when it was denied in Superior Court, she filed an appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court.

During the Marsys Law hearing, Gonazlez admitted to the violation and issued a written apology to the victim. At that hearing, Norris ordered that documents sought by Epps through a subpoena be turned over to him. However, Epps says all of those documents have not been delivered, which violates the judges order.

The latest allegations against Gonzalez

In the new litigation, Epps contends that Gonzalez committed a felony crime regarding the documents.

A former assistant prosecutor, June Teasley, was told by Gonzalez to delete certain text messages between them, according to Eppss motion. The DA told Teasley she didnt want medical leave information in the newspapers in the event of an open records request, according to the document.

Rather than redact the records or claim an exemption, DA Gonzalez ordered the destruction of the records, the motion reads.

We believe it is evidence that needs to be presented to a judge showing that Ms. Gonzalez committed a felony offense under the open records act, Epps said when contacted by the Banner-Herald.

The suit cites a law where an arrest warrant could be issued similar to one issued against a peace office. The document also says that at a minimum Gonzalez should be found negligent and civil penalties, such as a fine, imposed.

The suit is seeking documents for Miller that Epps contends will show the district attorney's failures in office, including the severe staff shortages, the staggering case load and a disregard for state law.

Athens businessman Jarrod Miller, right, has filed a writ of mandamus against District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez, seen at far left.

Epps said he requested documents from her office in two methods, through the subpoenas and open records.

We wanted to make sure we had two shots at getting the information, he said. Among the documents sought are interoffice correspondence, texts, letters and e-mails

Gonzalez will have 30 days to respond to the motion for contempt, which was filed on June 7.

Both filings are a big deal, and the reason why, is both show a dereliction of duties of a public official and in this case, it is Ms. Gonzalez, Epps said.

What led to the Marsy's Law violation

The Marsys Law issue involves a dismissal of rape and child molestation charges against Michael Lareco Daniel, 42, of Lawrenceville. Currently, Daniel faces additional criminal charges, but the DAs office has recused itself from prosecuting those charges.

Epps, who has been paying for documents already released under the open records, is also seeking attorneys fee and expenses.

Gonzalez has fought back on Epps' litigation.

I fail to see how the request for the documents from our office, including email and text message correspondence containing the words and phrases 'Selma, Alabama, and Fair and Just Prosecution' are relevant to the case outcome, she said earlier in a statement about the documents sought by the writ of mandamus.

This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Lawyer charges DA Gonzalez with violating open records law
Danny Mastersons ex-lawyers are sanctioned for sharing info with a lawyer for the Church of Scientology

Two lawyers who used to represent That 70s Show actor Danny Masterson have been hit with fines after a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled they leaked confidential information about Mastersons rape victims to the Church of Scientologys lawyer.

Thomas Mesereau and his co-counsel, Sharon Applebaum, were sanctioned Wednesday, a week after Masterson was convicted of raping two women he met through the church, to which he still belongs.

Judge Charlaine Olmedo, who presided over both of Mastersons criminal trials, hit Mesereau and Applebaum with fines for sharing discovery materials from the criminal case with Vicki Podberesky, an attorney who was defending the church in a separate civil suit filed by Mastersons accusers, according to court documents. The court says the lawyers were aware of the courts repeated directives and orders to refrain from providing criminal discovery to litigants and attorneys in the civil case.

Danny Masterson with his lawyers Thomas Mesereau and Sharon Appelbaum as he is arraigned on three rape charges in separate incidents in 2001 and 2003, at Los Angeles Superior Court on Sept. 18, 2020. (Lucy Nicholson / AFP via Getty Images pool file)

Neither Mesereau nor Applebaum represented Masterson at either of his criminal trials  the first of which ended in November in a mistrial and the second of which ended in May with his being convicted of raping two of the three women he was charged with sexually assaulting decades ago.

Mesereau and Applebaum represented Masterson when he was first arrested and accused in 2020 of raping three women at his home in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles from 2001 to 2003. Mesereau and Applebaum had sole possession of the criminal discovery from at least September 2020 through November 2021, after which they continued to represent him, along with additional counsel, through May 2022, according to court documents.

Later, Mesereau and Applebaum were replaced by attorneys Philip Cohen, Shawn Holley and Karen Goldstein, who have denied sharing information with Podberesky. The court said it did not find any violations of its orders by Cohen, Holley and Goldstein, according to the court documents.

Among other things, Olmedo ruled that Mesereau and Applebaum gave Podberesky and church officials the addresses of the women Masterson was later convicted of raping, along with confidential police reports.

The women claimed in their testimony in the criminal case that the Church of Scientology harassed them after they went to the police with rape allegations about Masterson.

Podberesky used the information to lodge a complaint that the lead prosecutors in Mastersons rape trial were soliciting false testimony to convict him.

Deputy District Attorney Reinhold Mueller said at Wednesdays hearing that most of the discovery Podberesky obtained was produced by investigators from March to December 2021, when Mesereau was Mastersons lead counsel.

Mesereau, who is famous for successfully defending Michael Jackson and other celebrities, and Applebaum issued no statements after Olmedo slapped them with $950 in fines Wednesday. Both have been asked by email for comment.

Podberesky said that no one on the Masterson defense team or myself did anything wrong.

There was never an order prohibiting the sharing of discovery, a protective order, nor any clear statement by the court to that affect that I am aware of, Podberesky said in an email. None of the citations to the record set forth in the courts order support the conclusion that there was a prohibition on the sharing of information between civil and criminal counsel.

Asked in a follow-up question whether she was still representing the Church of Scientology in the civil case, Podberesky did not immediately respond.

Mastersons accusers have complained that church officials repeatedly harassed them, going as far as poisoning their dogs. Olmedo insisted repeatedly that the Church of Scientology was not on trial.

Church spokeswoman Karin Pouw has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and insisted that church doctrine requires members to abide by all the laws of the land.

Asked about the latest development, Pouw referred a reporter to the final paragraph of a statement the church released the same day Masterson was convicted. It states:

"There is not a scintilla of evidence supporting the scandalous allegations that the Church harassed the accusers. Every single instance of supposed harassment by the Church is FALSE, and has been debunked."

Masterson, 47, faces 30 years to life in prison when he is sentenced Aug. 4.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
The Minnesota Department of Education says some personal information of 95,000 students was accessed as part of a data breach from a global cyber-security attack.

The breach involved computer file transfer software called MOVEit that is used to encrypt and transfer data and is used by companies and government agencies. State officials learned on May 31 the software was vulnerable and had been accessed by an outside group so they moved the same day to protect the files.

The states investigation found 24 files from the state departments of education and human services were affected. They contained data from children in foster care, the Minneapolis and Perham school districts and Hennepin Technical College.

Data from about 95,000 students placed in foster care across the state were access including information about demographics, dates of birth and the counties where they are placed.

The students affected include 124 in the Perham district who qualified for pandemic electronic benefit transfers and 29 high school students taking classes at Hennepin Technical College. The student data access included names, addresses, dates of birth and other information.

Additionally, the names of five students on a particular Minneapolis bus route were disclosed.

State education officials say they are working to notify the people who had their data accessed. No financial information was included in the breach.

Education officials say theyve added data security and notified state and federal law enforcement. They encourage anyone impacted by the breach to monitor their credit through free annual reports.

We understand that third parties illegally accessing private data can have negative consequences for those whose data was accessed, the department said in a statement.

More information is available on the education department website at: education.mn.gov/MDE/about/breach/

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David Davis says secret unit that targeted lockdown dissent should be shut down

David Davis himself was targeted by the Counter Disinformation Unit - JULIAN SIMMONDS FOR THE TELEGRAPH

David Davis is used to being spied on. When he was Brexit secretary, he used to carry around his Brexit papers in a steel suitcase with a built-in Faraday cage to stop cameras taking X-ray photos of the contents.

But the revelations in the Telegraph about Whitehalls secretive Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU) which has been used to suppress dissent from lockdown sceptics during the pandemic have really shocked him.

What we have at the moment is a proliferation of things where the most paranoid wing of government is interfering in the democratic process, he told me on this weeks Choppers Politics podcast.

There would be a limit to what they could do 25 years ago... The trouble today is we dont know what the algorithms do. We have no idea what deal theyve struck with Google or Twitter or whoever.

And thats a really serious influence on debate, not just in Britain, but across the entire world.

Alarmingly, Mr Davis himself was targeted by the unit. A report from the Big Brother Watch campaign group found that Mr Davis was monitored by the CDU. A subject access request by Mr Davis, Conservative MP for Haltemprice and Howden, found that the MPs tweets questioning the modelling put forward at the start of the pandemic were monitored and recorded.

The entry does not cite which specific statements from Mr Davis warranted attention but mentions him as critical of the government, Big Brother Watch said.

The timing of that entry came just weeks after Mr Davis had co-written a Telegraph article questioning the mathematical reasoning underpinning the Imperial College model that had influenced the Governments early Covid-19 decision-making on the lockdowns. Mr Davis was not alone. Big Brother Watch found that other MPs, including Labours Bell Ribeiro-Addy, had come to the CDUs attention.

Mr Davis said he thinks he was targeted by the CDU because he had challenged the use of polling data to justify ministers authoritarian policies using Freedom of Information requests and Parliamentary Questions.

Early on, during the early part of the Covid pandemic, I began to worry that we werent really making decisions on science, he says.

I started FoI-ing and putting questions in about the polling data because I thought it looked more like the Government was making judgements on focus groups and polls than it was on any science.

Bear in mind the science was very primitive at that point and I started asking about that and getting absolutely blanked out.

A lot of the arguments at the time were not really between science and non-science. They were between authority and non-authority.

Mr Davis pointed out that some quite well qualified people were worried that this virus had come from a laboratory. They were absolutely crushed on social media  they were cancelled.

Absolute outrage

Ministers were lucky that the existence of the CDU had not been revealed during the pandemic, he said.

We didnt really know that we were actually being monitored. I think if wed known at the time there would have been absolute outrage, he said.

The CDU appears to move far away from its original purpose to stop foreign governments interfering in UK elections.

It moved from the then Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology as part of the machinery of government changes in February.

Michelle Donelan, who was culture secretary before the change, moved to the Science Department, and remains in charge of the CDU, although she is currently on maternity leave. Mr Davis said that Ms Donelan was of a mind to shut it down but was talked out of it. Asked if the Government should wind it up he replied: Basically, yes, I think it should.

[The CDUs] genesis was in the concern that foreign nations might meddle in our electoral system. Now, thats a legitimate concern.

But then why be so cagey about it? You know, we still, to this day, cant find out how much the Government spends on the CDU.

If the state wants to do something to protect elections, which is important, against foreign influence, then they should do so explicitly.

That requires one unit, one reaction system, one understanding of policy, which the whole House [of Commons], both sides, should be in favour of.

Unit should be investigated

The Public Accounts Committee  Parliaments most powerful committee  should investigate its work and how it was funded, he said.

A parliamentary inquiry is probably the best thing, the biggest combination of power and access and speed, because we want to get rid of this thing, either replace it with something weve got a very specific aim or limit its scope, one or the other.

For Mr Davis, the warning signs about the CDU are there for all to see in its name. You have to ask why. It is not called the Disinformation Monitoring Unit. Its called the Counter Disinformation Unit.

Mr Davis asked about links between social media companies and the Government. He said: Were they asking them to change the algorithm? Because, bear in mind, in this day and age you can get away with reducing somebodys effectiveness, not by cancelling them, which is high profile, but by changing the algorithms and nobody sees it.

Mr Davis said he was also cancelled by YouTube after a video emerged of him making a speech against vaccine passports.

I was doing that because the claim the Government made with the vaccine stops transmission has been proven to be untrue, he said.

Very pro-Establishment algorithms

So the perpetrators of disinformation was the Government on that occasion. And you have to wonder how many of these algorithms are agreed with Government because theyre very pro-Establishment algorithms.

On Friday night a Government spokesman said ministers would be happy to appear in front of Commons committees to discuss the CDU, which had a purpose to track narratives and trends using publicly available information online to protect public health and national security.

It does not monitor political debate and does not refer any content from journalists, politicians or political parties to social media companies.

The CDU was currently focused on disinformation related to Russias illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Whitehall sources said it was categorically untrue that Ms Donelan was talked out of closing the CDU.

I asked Mr Davis why Governments become more authoritarian. Partly its the natural tendency of organisations, he said. Organisations dont like being monitored

Whitehall is all about control of information. Information is power. They know that so they tend to hoard it for themselves. But the second reason, and this is understandable... is they didnt know what else to do.

Theyd never faced something like this before. The same is true with a disease, a pandemic.

Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month, then enjoy 1 year for just $9 with our US-exclusive offer.
Good morning, Chicago.

The Chicago Water Taxi, once a mainstay of the citys downtown commuting options, is working to figure out a new schedule for the third summer in a row as the number of office workers remains low.

Though warm weather has arrived, the taxis bright yellow boats arent yet up and running. Parent company Wendella Tours and Cruises hopes to operate the boats once again on weekdays  a departure from the past two years, when they have run only on weekends, catering to tourists  but the date service will begin and the schedule remain to be seen, taxi executive Andrew Sargis said.

Behind the taxis schedule dilemma is the post-pandemic reality for downtown Chicago: Tourists have returned in force, but office workers havent, Sargis said.

Read the full story from the Tribunes Sarah Freishtat.

Here are the top stories you need to know to start your day.

Subscribe to more newsletters | Puzzles & Games | Todays eNewspaper edition

Donald Trump said Thursday that he was indicted for mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate, a remarkable development that makes him the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges by the federal government that he once oversaw.

The indictment carries unmistakably grave legal consequences, including the possibility of prison if hes convicted.

Federal prosecutors want to get their hands on state pension contributions made by disgraced former Crestwood Mayor Lou Presta, who pleaded guilty to bribery charges as part of a wide-ranging investigation into red-light cameras.

Prestas attorney, Burt Odelson, said that he will contest the governments right to claw back the former mayors pension payments.

More than a half centurys worth of toxic coal ash will be excavated from the flood plain of Illinois only national scenic river as part of a deal that could establish a precedent for other hazardous waste dumps throughout the state.

In 1996, a new Chicago theater named Remy Bumppo Theatre Company made its entrance by declaring it intended to cast the citys best actors in the most literate works it could find. In that first show, playing the neurotic Ruth, whose subconscious thoughts fuel Tom Stoppards Night and Day, was Lia Mortensen.

Her presence, and her luminous performance, was a signal that Remy Bumppo had its act together, writes Chris Jones.

The Chicago Bears wrapped up their third week of organized team activities ahead of mandatory minicamp next week. What matchups should we be watching? And will the Bears finally sign an edge rusher? Brad Biggs addresses concerns in his weekly mailbag.

Take this with a grain of salt and a whole lot of pepper: TV cliffhangers dont work in the streaming era, writes critic Nina Metz.

Maybe they do once in a while. I cant think of any off the top of my head. My colleague Michael Phillips recently singled out the ending of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse as an exception to the rule, and movie audiences can be fairly certain another installment will turn up in theaters. When it comes to streaming originals, that expectation is less assured.
Defence Forces conducted counteroffensive actions on at least three areas of the front

Specialists from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) note that the Defence Forces of Ukraine conducted counteroffensive actions in at least three areas of the front over the past day.

Source: ISW

Details: The review notes that Ukraine has conducted counteroffensive actions with varying results on at least three areas of the front as part of the counteroffensive, which has been unfolding since Sunday, 4 June.

Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian troops switched from defensive to offensive actions on the Bakhmut front and advanced on the city's flanks over a distance of between 200 metres to almost two kilometres.

The analysts say that the defence forces carried out a limited, but still significant offensive in the west of Zaporizhzhia Oblast on the night of 7-8 June.

Russian forces apparently defended themselves against this attack on a sound doctrinal basis and were reported to have resumed their positions as of 8 June.

It is also reported that on 8 June, Ukrainian troops lost vehicles provided by the West.

The Russian Ministry of Defence reacted to the Ukrainian attack with an uncharacteristic degree of coherence and praised the units of the Southern Military District for repelling the attack and recovering lost ground.

The report notes that the Ukrainian attacks in western Zaporizhzhia on 8 June do not reflect the full extent of Ukrainian capabilities in this counteroffensive.

They also suggest that Ukraine's counteroffensive is likely to consist of many activities of varying scale, including more localised attacks, as was seen in this sector on 8 June, and that smaller efforts do not reflect the maximum potential of Ukrainian numbers or effectiveness.

According to reports, Ukraine has formed 12 special counteroffensive brigades. Experts write that Ukraine appears to have deployed only a fraction of the large pool of forces available for counteroffensive operations, and observers should avoid counting reports that Ukrainian brigades have destroyed or damaged Western weapons as a measure of the remaining effective combat capability of Ukrainian forces.

In addition, it should be noted that the forces of Russia's Southern Military District deployed in this particular area are likely to be a higher quality group than Russian groups in other areas of hostilities, and their defensive capabilities are unlikely to reflect the defensive capabilities of Russian groups elsewhere in the front.

It is also indicated that the Russian troops and the occupation authorities continue to aggravate the humanitarian consequences of the flood caused by the blowing up of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant dam.

Experts note that Russian President Vladimir Putin has moved his annual press conference from June 2023 to November or December 2023.

According to the ISW, Putin would most likely conduct a "Direct Line" in early June 2023 after Russian forces capture Bakhmut, and the postponement of the event indicates that the Kremlin may perceive the capture of Bakhmut as not enough of a victory to compensate for the overall unstable Russian military situation in Ukraine.

Experts conclude that delaying the "Direct Line" forum further illustrates Putins decline from being seen as a strong leader and is more often portrayed as being minutely involved in small infrastructure projects.

To quote the key takeaways from ISW report for 8 June:

Ukraine has conducted counteroffensive operations with differential outcomes in at least three sectors of the front as part of wider counteroffensive efforts that have been unfolding since Sunday, June 4.

Ukrainian forces conducted a limited but still significant attack in western Zaporizhia Oblast on the night of June 7 to 8. Russian forces apparently defended against this attack in a doctrinally sound manner and had reportedly regained their initial positions as of June 8.

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) responded to the Ukrainian attack with an uncharacteristic degree of coherency and praised Southern Military District elements for repelling the attack and regaining lost positions.

Russian sources provided explanations for claimed Russian successes during the June 8 attacks, praising Russian forces effective use of electronic warfare (EW) systems, air support, and landmines against Ukrainian forces.

Russian forces appear to have executed their formal tactical defensive doctrine in response to the Ukrainian attacks southwest of Orikhiv.

Ukrainian attacks in western Zaporizhia on June 8 do not represent the full extent of Ukrainian capabilities in the current counteroffensive.

It is additionally noteworthy that the Russian Southern Military District Forces deployed in this particular area are likely to be a higher quality force grouping than Russia has elsewhere in theatre, and their defensive performance is unlikely to be reflective of defensive capabilities of Russian groupings elsewhere on the front.

Russian forces and occupation authorities continue to exacerbate the humanitarian ramifications of the flooding resulting from the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam break.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly postponed his annual press conference from June 2023 until November or December 2023.

Russian forces continued to conduct limited ground attacks on the Kupyansk-Svatove line and around Kreminna.

Ukrainian forces made limited gains around Bakhmut, and Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.

Ukrainian forces continued to conduct limited ground attacks on the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts.

The Russian MoD continues to posture itself as a firm authority over the defence industrial base (DIB) through emphasising its ability to transport new equipment to the front.

Russian occupation authorities are reportedly resorting to punitive measures against civilian populations in occupied Ukraine due to Russian occupation authorities decreasing influence over civilians.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
The Delaware Court of Chancery is essential to the First State. Here's why | Opinion

Regarding "This is how chancery court corruption threatens Delawares economic future," DelawareOnline.com and The News Journal, May 14:

The May 14 guest column carrying the byline of Keandra McDole, claiming that there is corruption throughout the Delaware Court of Chancery, is wrong. The op-ed claims, without any support, that the corruption is causing corporations to abandon Delaware as their site of incorporation, therefore depriving Delaware of tax revenue. This slander on the court, its hardworking and fair judges, its dedicated employees, and by inference the rest of Delawares judicial system, does a disservice to readers and the state.

All Delawareans, not just the legal community, are justifiably proud of the states entire, highly respected court system. That admiration extends beyond Delaware. For decades, Delawares judiciary, especially its Court of Chancery, has enjoyed a stellar national reputation as a venue for business litigation. For example, in its most recent Lawsuit Climate Survey, issued in 2019, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce rated Delawares court system No. 1 among all states for how fair and reasonable the states liability systems are perceived by U.S. businesses. (That same survey ranked Nevada No. 29.)

The op-ed claims, inaccurately, that the Court of Chancery is not transparent. In fact, the court publishes its rules and docket, conducts its trials and hearings in open court, and strictly limits the type of sensitive, non-public information that may be filed privately under seal. Its decisions are carefully written and thorough and are promptly posted on the courts public website. Its decisions are ultimately reviewable by the Delaware Supreme Court.

For decades, Delawares judiciary, especially its Court of Chancery, has enjoyed a stellar national reputation as a venue for business litigation.

The op-ed goes on to claim, without evidence, that the court is not impartial. The author refers to the much litigated and widely discussed TransPerfect case, in which the court acted in accordance with Delaware law and longstanding precedent. TransPerfect was a company owned effectively in equal parts by Philip Shawe and Elizabeth Elting. Their contentious relationship, lasting more than a decade, eventually led Elting to file a lawsuit in the Court of Chancery seeking appointment of a custodian to sell the company for the benefit of its stockholders. This remedy is available under the Delaware General Corporation Law and longstanding precedent.

After a lengthy public trial at which the parties admitted they were deadlocked, former Chancellor Andre Bouchard issued an opinion detailing how the impasse threatened the health of the company. In a remedy authorized by the Delaware General Corporation Law, he appointed a custodian, directing him to try to sell the company to maximize the stockholders value. Shawe bitterly opposed that decision, but it was affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court.

Following a long process involving bids from each stockholder and outsider bidders, the custodian negotiated a transaction by which Shawe would purchase Eltings stock. The court approved the sale.

Despite achieving the result he favored (he bought Eltings shares), Shawe and his allies have continued to wage a bilious campaign against the Court of Chancery and the former chancellor, even after he retired from the bench. Part of this campaign is a persistent, but baseless, claim that major corporations are leaving Delaware and taking major revenue with them. It is true that Shawe moved TransPerfects corporate domicile to Nevada, but that change cost Delaware less than $200 per year in franchise tax because TransPerfect had so few authorized shares of stock that it was likely subject to pay only the minimum franchise tax. Shawes decision to move TransPerfects state of incorporation had a minimal effect on Delawares tax revenue.

The op-ed similarly misrepresents the impact on Delaware caused by Twitters migration to Nevada. Once Elon Musk acquired all shares of Twitter stock, he merged Twitter into his new holding company and retired the stock. His new company, X Corp, has a nominal number of shares. If the company had remained in Delaware, it would also likely have been subject to the minimum franchise tax rate, less than $200.

Because TransPerfect and Twitter have relocated, the op-ed seeks to persuade readers that vast numbers of corporations are leaving Delaware and threatening Delawares tax revenue. Statistics from the Delaware Secretary of State show otherwise for the last three years:

In 2020, 67.6% of the Fortune 500 companies were incorporated in Delaware and there were 1.6 million business entities incorporated under Delaware law;

In 2021, 66.8% of the Fortune 500 companies were incorporated in Delaware and there were 1.8 million business entities incorporated under Delaware law;

In 2022, 68.2% of the Fortune 500 companies were incorporated in Delaware and there were 1.9 million business entities incorporated under Delaware law.

These figures continue long-term growth trends. Delaware is simply not losing major corporations or major revenue.

Delaware is deservedly proud of the integrity, competence and national stature of its Court of Chancery. Delawareans may also be reassured that the prestige of this Court continues to attract corporations and other businesses, in ever-increasing numbers annually, to form under Delaware law.

Mary F. Dugan and Richard D. Kirk are co-chairs of the Delaware State Bar Associations Committee on Response to Public Comment.

This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Delaware Court of Chancery remains essential to Delaware
DOVER  Delawares Supreme Court has upheld a judges decision in favor of Tesla CEO Elon Musk in a lawsuit challenging the electric car makers $2.4 billion acquisition of a solar panel company founded by two of his cousins.

The court on Tuesday rejected arguments from a group of Tesla shareholders that a Chancery Court judge erred in finding that Teslas deal to acquire SolarCity in 2016 was entirely fair. The judge made that determination even while finding that the process by which Teslas board of directors negotiated and recommended the deal to shareholders was far from perfect.

Elon Musk walks from the justice center in Wilmington on Monday, July 12, 2021. Musk took to a witness stand to defend his company's 2016 acquisition of a troubled company called SolarCity against a shareholder lawsuit that claims he's to blame for a deal that was rife with conflicts of interest and never delivered the profits he had promised.

While noting errors in the trial courts fair price analysis, and agreeing that the deal process was not pitch perfect, the justices said the record is replete with factual findings and credibility determinations indicating that the acquisition was entirely fair.

We are convinced, after a thorough review of the extensive trial record, that the trial courts decision is supported by the evidence and that the court committed no reversible error in applying the entire fairness test, Justice Karen Valihura wrote in the courts 106-page opinion.

Typically, under Delawares business judgment rule, courts give deference to a corporate boards decision-making unless there is evidence that directors had conflicts or acted in bad faith. If a plaintiff can overcome the business judgment rules presumption because the deal involved a controlling shareholder or because directors might have been conflicted, the boards action is subject to an entire fairness analysis. That shifts the burden to the corporation to show that the deal involved both fair dealing and fair price.

At the time of the acquisition, Musk owned about 22% of Teslas common stock and was the largest stockholder of SolarCity, as well as chairman of its board of directors.

Musk trial: Elon Musk's Tesla pay package, possibly worth $55 billion, under scrutiny in Delaware court

Court hearing: Delaware loses Supreme Court case with millions at stake over unclaimed property

The justices concluded that the findings by former Vice Chancellor Joseph Slights III, which were not challenged by the shareholders, support the conclusion that the overall deal process was the product of fair dealing. The Supreme Court also said that, while Slights failed to explain why and how he relied on Solar Citys stock price on the day the deal was announced, rather than the lower price on the day the deal closed, his fair price analysis did not amount to reversible error.

The Court of Chancery, after examining all of the expert testimony and fair price evidence, found that the fair price case was not even close, Valihiura noted.

An attorney for the shareholders argued in March that the Chancery Court judge put too much emphasis on the price Tesla paid for SolarCity, and not enough on the deal process, which the plaintiffs contend was tainted by the failure to appoint an independent committee to negotiate the deal. He also argued that the judges analysis of the deal price was flawed and that shareholders who voted to approve the deal were not properly informed, even though the vote was not required under Delaware law.

A lawyer for Musk noted that the SolarCity acquisition had been a strategic objective for Tesla for 10 years before the deal was completed, belying the argument that it was a last-minute bailout to save an insolvent SolarCity from bankruptcy.

The Chancery Courts decision last year followed a July 2021 court appearance in which a defiant Musk defended the deal and sparred with attorneys for the plaintiffs, calling one lawyer a bad human being. Musk chose to fight the lawsuit in court even after other directors on Teslas board reached a $60 million settlement, without admitting fault.

Police reform: The Delaware police reform bills have bipartisan support. Yet advocates feel left out

This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Delaware Supreme Court upholds decision favoring Tesla CEO Elon Musk
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) obliterated Sen. Josh Hawleys wild accusation against President Joe Biden after Donald Trump was indicted again on Thursday.

The Missouri GOP senator joined the Republican outcry after Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges related to his stashing of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and his refusal to return them. Hawley blamed Biden.

If the president in power can just jail his political opponents  which is what Joe Biden is trying to do tonight  we dont have a republic anymore, Hawley told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. Joe Biden and his cronies are trying to take out their chief political opponent.

Hawley: If the president in power can jail his political opponents, which is what Joe Biden is trying to do tonight, we don't have a republic anymore. We don't have the rule of law or constitution. pic.twitter.com/kORIHivlVg  Acyn (@Acyn) June 9, 2023

Lieu linked to the exchange and delivered a surgical strike of a rebuttal:

The below assertions on Fox are incorrect. Some facts: 1. Presidents dont jail or indict anyone. Grand juries indict. 2. The Trump Indictment is just that, an indictment. Trump is entitled to presumption of innocence. A jury would decide if Trump is guilty and goes to prison.

The below assertions on Fox are incorrect. Some facts:



1. Presidents dont jail or indict anyone. Grand juries indict.



2. The Trump Indictment is just that, an indictment. Trump is entitled to presumption of innocence. A jury would decide if Trump is guilty and goes to prison. https://t.co/XYdgT5NDqf  Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) June 9, 2023

Boom.

Trump was arrested in New York last month on charges that he falsified business records to cover up a hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 election.

Hes also under investigation by the Justice Department for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, and by Georgia prosecutors for his attempt to reverse his 2020 election defeat in the state.

Related...
Democrats overall welcomed the unprecedented federal indictment of Donald Trump over his handling of classified documents, but some also warned of dangers.

Trump reportedly faces seven charges stemming from his removal of top-secret documents from the White House and his refusal to give them back, even after being served with a subpoena. The charges include conspiracy to obstruct and willfully retaining national secrets in violation of the Espionage Act. The former president, set to be arraigned in Miami on Tuesday, has denied wrongdoing and maintained he will of course plead not guilty.

For four years, he acted like he was above the law, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said of Trump. But he should be treated like any other lawbreaker. And today, he has been.

Trumps apparent indictment on multiple charges arising from his retention of classified materials is another affirmation of the rule of law.



For four years, he acted like he was above the law. But he should be treated like any other lawbreaker. And today, he has been.  Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) June 8, 2023

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said the indictment signals the former president put our national security in grave danger as he pursued yet another lawless personal agenda by pilfering and hoarding government documents, according to NBC News.

But Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman (Ohio) warned that the chaos Trump inspires is unlikely to end with this indictment.

What hes doing to this country, the extremism and danger he and his allies present, has to end, Landsman said. Only when those who support and enable him decide to be done with this toxic behavior will this all be behind us.

The chaos of Trump continues.



What hes doing to this country, the extremism and danger he and his allies present, has to end.



Only when those who support and enable him decide to be done with this toxic behavior will this all be behind us.  Congressman Greg Landsman (@RepGregLandsman) June 8, 2023

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), echoed concerns over how Trumps supporters will react and whether they will threaten the safety of lawmakers, law enforcement and everyday Americans.

Its the right thing to do, but theres danger involved, Quigley, who sat on the Intelligence Committee during Trumps first impeachment trial, told Axios.

Quigley appears wary of violence akin to the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, when a mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol.

The former president, who thrives on controversy, is already fundraising off of his indictment and remains the front-runner in the 2024 GOP presidential nomination contest.

Polls show his supporters continue to back him, even as he faces a trial next year on New York charges of falsifying business records in relation to a hush money payment scheme prior to the 2016 presidential election.

He is also under scrutiny in the separate Justice Department investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, and in Georgia for his efforts to undo his 2020 election defeat in the state.

Despite the mounting criminal charges, Republicans rushed to Trumps defense Thursday, with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) calling out President Joe Biden for the indictment. The White House declined to weigh in on the news.

I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice, McCarthy wrote on Twitter. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.

Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America.



It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him. Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades.



I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump  Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) June 9, 2023

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) said that while Trump has long-standing constitutional rights to a trial by jury, to confront his accusers, and to legal counsel, congressional lawmakers shouldnt be the ones to fight his case.

But this case should be litigated in the court of law, not the court of public opinion and most definitely not the halls of Congress, Goldman said.

My statement on the the indictment of former president Donald Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith. pic.twitter.com/4UHzybyXm6  Rep. Dan Goldman (@RepDanGoldman) June 9, 2023

Related...
Dermatologists say you may be forgetting these spots with your sunscreen

As weather warms and we spend more time outdoors, wearing sunscreen with an SPF of 30 or higher is vital in helping protect skin from the sun's harmful rays. But experts say you could be forgetting some important steps and neglecting some often overlooked spots that need protection.

"The tops and back of the ears are commonly overlooked but susceptible to sunburn. This is also a common area for skin cancer in men," said Dr. Michelle Henry, founder of Skin & Aesthetic Surgery of Manhattan and clinical instructor of dermatology at Weill Cornell Medical College.

The delicate skin of the lips and around the eyes is also easily neglected and prone to sun damage, Henry said.

"Using an SPF-infused lip balm is crucial for protection," she said. "Consider using an eye cream or wearing sunglasses with UV protection to shield (the eye) area from the sun."

Henry also advises putting sunscreen on the upper neck and chest "for comprehensive coverage," as these exposed areas are frequently forgotten.

Another spot you might miss? Your head, including skin that may be exposed in your hair part or by thinning and balding patches.

"Powder sunscreens can be a convenient option for the hair part, preventing liquid sunscreen from getting in your hair. While they provide some sun protection and reduce greasiness, it's important to note that their coverage is not as full coverage as liquid or lotion sunscreens," Henry said. "Consider additional protective measures like wearing a hat to shield your scalp and hair when spending prolonged periods in the sun."

There's one spot away from the face that's also frequently exposed but tends to get overlooked: hands. Henry suggested protecting them by applying sunscreen or using UV-protective gloves when necessary.

Other things to remember about sun protection

"Sunscreen is the most common and one of the easiest ways to (protect our skin), we just have to remember to use our sunscreens," Dr. Susan Massick, a dermatologist, recently told CBS News Philadelphia, noting it matters not only where but also when and how you apply.

"(People) assume they can just apply it when they're already at their activity or they're already at the pool or the beach, but you actually have to apply it about 10-15 minutes beforehand. You also have to remember to reapply every two to three hours," Massick said.

Reapplication is also important when swimming or sweating, according to the American Academy of Dermatology, as no sunscreen is fully waterproof or sweatproof.

Besides using sunscreen, Henry said it's essential to adopt other sun-safe habits like wearing protective clothing and seeking shade when needed.

Some Americans are reaching for sunscreens made outside the U.S. Here's what skincare experts think about it.

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Boston Red Sox's Matt Dermody pitches during the third inning of the team's baseball game against the Cleveland Guardians, Thursday, June 8, 2023, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

NEW YORK (AP)  Pitcher Matt Dermody was cut by the Boston Red Sox on Friday, a day after he made his first major league start and said he regretted making a homophobic tweet two years ago.

The 32-year-old left-hander was designated for assignment as part of a flurry of roster moves. Boston has seven days to trade him or place him on waivers.

Toronto Blue cut pitcher Anthony Bass earlier Friday, one day after the right-handed reliever said he didnt think an anti-LGBTQ+ social media post he shared last month was hateful.

Boston also activated outfielder Adam Duvall from the 60-day injured list after he recovered from a broken left wrist, transferred left-hander Chris Sale (left shoulder inflammation) to the 60-day IL and selected the contract of left-hander Joe Jacques Triple-A Worcester. The Red Sox said infielder Enmanuel Valdez was optioned to Worcester after Thursday night's game against Cleveland.

Dermody allowed three runs over four innings against the Guardians, giving up two of Jose Ramirezs three home runs and taking the loss in a 10-3 defeat. He was 2-2 with a 4.50 ERA in eight starts and one relief appearance for Worcester.

Dermody made the social media post in 2021. It has since been deleted, but captured screenshots continue to circulate.

The Red Sox said they were unaware of Dermodys tweet when he signed with the club in January. Once they learned of it, team officials met with Dermody, who went through mandatory anti-discrimination and harassment training in March.

Afterward, Dermody expressed some remorse for his actions.

I do regret the tweet in the sense that it came out hurtful and it hurt a lot of people, he said. Thats the last thing I want to do is hurt people. A lot of people think that Im against a certain group of people or whatnot. But Im for everybody making it to heaven.

___

AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
Jacqui Thurlow-Lippisch was as surprised as anyone when she was first appointed to the governing board of the South Florida Water Management District.

It was February 2019. Gov. Ron DeSantis was one month into his first term. He was busy after his inauguration, making decisions to bolster his commitment to clean-water policy in the Sunshine State.

His appointment of Thurlow-Lippisch, a longtime clean-water advocate from Martin County, was a win for the St. Lucie River, Indian River Lagoon and the Treasure Coast. She rolled up her sleeves and learned much more than she previously knew about the complex, convoluted and unfair plumbing system managed by her new agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

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South Florida Water Management District Board Member Jacqui Thurlow-Lippisch (center) speaks with St. Lucie County Commissioner Frannie Hutchinson at a ceremony to celebrate the groundbreaking of the C/23-C/24 Stormwater Treatment Area on Friday, Feb. 18th, 2022.

Thurlow-Lippisch built and improved relationships. She spent countless hours communicating complicated water policy issues to clean-water advocacy groups, farmers, Native Americans and elected officials. She alerted community leaders and water managers when human health risks like toxic algae appeared. She built a camaraderie with clean-water advocates from the Keys to Orlando.

All while serving as a volunteer. Governing board members are not paid.

When DeSantis re-appointed her to a second four-year term in June 2022, no one raised an eyebrow. Having Thurlow-Lippisch continue to represent the 16-county, 8-million resident territory was a no-brainer.

Apparently to all except some Florida senators with a different  as of now, mysterious  agenda.

Thurlow-Lippisch was summoned to Tallahassee for required confirmation hearings and a vote. She met with key senators and two Senate subcommittees  only to be told there was no need for her to be there for a vote by all 40 senators. There wouldn't be a confirmation vote after all.

On May 5, the record shows, the Senate failed to confirm her by taking no action. Thurlow-Lippisch returned to the Treasure Coast with lots of unanswered questions.

There's one person who certainly could tell the public why Thurlow-Lippisch was not confirmed: Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, the second most powerful person in state politics under Florida's Constitution. She did not reply to our editorial writer's email.

Thurlow-Lippisch told TCPalm columnist Ed Killer she knew something was amiss when Passidomo refused to meet with her one-on-one. A former high school teacher and Sewall's Point mayor, Thurlow-Lippisch, now a Realtor, compared the awkward process to "an arranged marriage."

Surely, someone would explain to Thurlow-Lippisch why she wasn't confirmed? Nope. No one has had the decency to tell her in person, by phone call, email or even text. She was simply ghosted by the state's senior legislative body.

Thurlow-Lippisch suspects her treatment had something to do with comments she made in 2022 about Senate Bill 2508, a last-minute power grab by the Senate. Thurlow-Lippisch and several fellow governing board members spoke out loudly about the Senate's attempt to wrest water control power from water management districts, among other things.

Wisely, DeSantis vetoed the bill. Still, Passidomo; Wilton Simpson, then Senate president and current agriculture commissioner; and Ben Albritton, R-Bartow, the next Senate president; might have been stung.

How many people don't get reconfirmed? In the 2023 legislative session that recently ended, the Senate confirmed 317 of 329 DeSantis appointees, including 14 of 16 water management district board appointees.

Here's why this should matter to you. Not confirming Thurlow-Lippisch sets in motion a series of problems:

The governing board seat could be left vacant for the next three years. That would be a disservice to Treasure Coast constituents who care about the Indian River Lagoon ecosystem.

The seat could be filled by someone who does not understand the damages of Lake Okeechobee discharges or St. Lucie County canals like C-23 and C-24 to the St. Lucie River.

The seat could be filled by someone who does not even live in Martin or St. Lucie counties.

Such Star Chamber-like treatment of a public servant like Thurlow-Lippisch is unprofessional  at best. The lack of transparency in the Senate is an affront to all Floridians and might dissuade good people from offering to serve the state in the future.

Although details are unclear, Thurlow-Lippisch thinks her appointment can be resurrected only by DeSantis. Even she admits, though, he might be a little busy with his presidential campaign.

Thurlow-Lippisch's term expires June 19. DeSantis should do what's right. Treasure Coast residents deserve her clear-minded leadership on clean water.

Editorials published by TCPalm/Treasure Coast Newspapers are decided collectively by its editorial board. To respond to this editorial with a letter to the editor, email up to 300 words to TCNLetters@TCPalm.com.

This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: Thurlow-Lippisch not reconfirmed, showing Florida Senate's disrespect
Gov. Ron DeSantis approved a bill Friday that awards $1.85 million to Robert DuBoise, a Tampa man who spent 37 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

The bill passed both the Florida House and Senate in this years legislative session with nearly unanimous support. The governors signature means that DuBoise will receive compensation representing $50,000 for each year that he spent wrongfully incarcerated.

Im very grateful that the governor took time to read the bill and consider it, and sign it especially, so I can move forward with my life, DuBoise told the Tampa Bay Times.

He said he got the good news in a call Friday morning from Mark Delegal of Delegal Aubuchon Consulting, the Tallahassee public policy firm that represented him in his efforts to obtain compensation.

It will still be a few weeks before the funds are processed. But the governors signature means his compensation is now part of state law.

DuBoise was 18 when Tampa police falsely accused him of the August 1983 murder of Barbara Grams.

Grams, 19, was attacked as she walked home from her job at a Tampa shopping mall. She was found the next morning, having been raped and beaten to death. Detectives sought bite samples from numerous people, hoping to match a suspects teeth to what they believed was a bite mark on Grams cheek.

Richard Souviron, a renowned forensic dentist, opined that DuBoises teeth matched the mark on Grams. A jailhouse informant later provided testimony of a supposed confession that bolstered the states case.

DuBoise was convicted at trial in 1985. Judge Harry Lee Coe, a longtime Tampa jurist who was known as Hangin Harry for his harsh sentences, condemned him to die.

He spent three years on Floridas death row before his sentence was reduced to life in prison.

He continued to contest his conviction. In the decades since, bite mark evidence has come to be widely regarded as scientifically unreliable. Jailhouse informants have also been identified as a frequent factor in wrongful convictions.

DuBoises case came to the attention of the Innocence Project, the New York-based legal organization that helps exonerate the innocent. They filed a petition with the conviction review unit of the Hillsborough State Attorneys Office.

The unit was established by former Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren in 2018 with the aim of rooting out cases of people wrongfully imprisoned.

Much of the evidence in DuBoises case was destroyed in 1990. But conviction review attorney Teresa Hall located a set of slides that contained biological evidence from a rape exam conducted after Grams was found dead.

DNA tests of that evidence, which were not available in 1983, excluded DuBoise and yielded a match to two other men, who had no connection to him. The jailhouse informant in his case also later recanted his trial testimony.

DuBoise was set free in 2020.

Last year, Hillsborough prosecutors obtained an indictment against Amos Robinson and Abron Scott in connection with Grams murder. Both men are already serving life sentences for a 1983 Pinellas County murder. They have also been charged with the July 1983 murder of Linda Lansen, a Tampa freelance photographer whose killing was unsolved for nearly 40 years.

Since his exoneration, DuBoise has worked as a truck driver and maintenance man for a country club. He made repeated trips to Tallahassee this spring to share his story with lawmakers.

State Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, was one of those who shepherded his claims bill through the Legislature. When it came for a vote on the Senate floor, she spoke of it as an act of legislative grace.

I think that we should be asking Mr. DuBoise for the grace, Grall said. Because we got it wrong. And sometimes we get it wrong. And when we do, we should always strive to do better and we should strive to make it right.
As DeSantis eyes the White House, how is abortion helping and hurting him?

When he kicked off his presidential campaign in socially conservative Iowa, Gov. Ron DeSantis bragged about the six-week abortion ban he signed into law.

Just a couple days later, while campaigning in live free or die New Hampshire, DeSantis avoided talking about the issue.

If the early days of his presidential campaign are any indication, DeSantis must walk a difficult line on abortion. Access to the procedure remains popular with most Americans, exposing DeSantis to some general election risk if he focuses too much on the issue. Polling shows that more than 60% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center.

Donors gathered for DeSantis May campaign launch in Miami expressed worry that DeSantis stance would be too extreme for more moderate voters, according to audio obtained by Florida Politics.

But DeSantis might also need to point to his abortion record to distinguish himself from former President Donald Trump, who suggested the six-week law DeSantis signed was too harsh. A super PAC supporting DeSantis blasted Trump  who is DeSantis main rival for the Republican presidential primary  for that remark.

DeSantis isnt new to straddling the line between anti-abortion parts of his base and the recognition that hard limits on abortion access could cause public backlash. Floridians generally support access to legal abortions at a higher rate than neighboring southern states, polling finds. When he signed the six-week ban into place, he did so in a private, late-night gathering in his office. And the next day, DeSantis made no mention of it during a speech at Liberty University, a private Baptist school in Virginia.

During his 2022 campaign for reelection, DeSantis often focused on other issues than abortion despite Democratic opponent Charlie Crist attempting to hammer him on it. DeSantis handily won that race.

Patrick Miller, a professor of political science at the University of Kansas, said the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade  the landmark Supreme Court case that created a constitutional right to an abortion  has fundamentally changed the political conversation.

For years before the case was overturned, Republicans could speak in broad language condemning abortion without having to deal with the reality of what limited abortion access would look like, he said. Now, Miller said Republicans are struggling to figure out how to handle the anti-abortion movement they helped grow while trying not to lose the support of moderate voters.

They cant all of a sudden become moderate on abortion, Miller said. They cant disown the pro-life movement now, that in some ways, the pro-life movement is an albatross around the neck of Republicans.

Kelsey Pritchard, the director of State Public Affairs at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said the real political liability is when Republicans retreat from talking about abortion and let Democrats define the issue.

In order to win, Republicans must be clear about their position on protections for the unborn and contrast it with the extremism of Democrats agenda for abortion up until birth, paid for by the taxpayer, and no parental consent, Pritchard said in an email.

The organization said it wants candidates who support a federal limit on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. So far, both DeSantis and Trump have declined to endorse that.

We want to protect the rights of states to be able to make those judgments, particularly states that are protecting life, DeSantis said when asked about a federal limit by a reporter in New Hampshire.

Other GOP contenders have also discussed abortion as they pitch themselves for president. Former Vice President Mike Pence has perhaps the most conservative view on abortion, saying he thinks it should be outlawed in every state. U.S. Sen. Tim Scott has said he supports a 20-week federal ban, while former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has said a federal ban is not realistic. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who jumped into the presidential race this week, in April signed into law a bill allowing abortions only in cases of rape or incest and only during the first six weeks of pregnancy.

Its unclear exactly how much abortion will sway voters in 2024 in either the primary or general election. But Democratic groups and groups in favor of abortion access are already using the issue against DeSantis, and political observers have pointed to abortion as a possible factor in Democrats securing midterm wins in many parts of the country.

Voters in Florida dont support his anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ agenda, and DeSantis will soon learn that the rest of the country doesnt, either, Jenny Lawson, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes, said in a statement when DeSantis announced his campaign. Everyone will see him for the dangerous, out-of-touch, overzealous politician he is.

During the 2022 election cycle, voters in reliably red Kansas rejected a constitutional amendment that would have severely limited abortion access. Counties that never vote for any Democrat, on any level, rejected that amendment, Miller said.

But the same voters that cycle who rejected the amendment voted in candidates who were anti-abortion. Miller cautioned that it will take time to see how things play out on a broad national level.

Claire McKinney, a government professor at William & Mary University, said in prior statewide elections around the U.S., groups would put anti-abortion referendums on the ballot in order to motivate more conservative voters to show up. Polling showed that about two to three percent of the electorate were motivated to turn out primarily because of abortion in those instances, McKinney said.

Though theres still not great information about how voter behavior has shifted after Roes reversal, McKinney said that the kind of primary voter motivated to turn out primarily because of abortion has likely flipped in favor of someone who supports abortion access.

McKinney said its likely Democrats see abortion as a winning issue and will continue to press DeSantis and other Republicans about it.

So many elections these days are decided in that very narrow margin, McKinney said. It doesnt take a lot for people who are primarily motivated by abortion access to swing an election.
ORLANDO, Fla.  Given the chance to pounce, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is instead backing his rival Donald Trump, accusing the U.S. Department of Justice of partisan bias in charging the former president.

For political analysts, DeSantis unwillingness to attack Trump over his legal problems showcases the influence Trump retains with Republican voters, who are siding with him as he faces criminal charges in two different jurisdictions.

DeSantis must challenge Trump for the GOP presidential nomination but not in a way that will alienate Republicans who voted for him for president, said Gregory Koger, a political scientist at the University of Miami.

From his point of view, it doesnt necessarily make sense to come out swinging at Trump but rather let the sheer fact of the news itself and the attacks of other candidates do the work he does not want to do, Koger said.

DeSantis joined other Republicans in criticizing the federal indictment over Trumps handling of classified records as a partisan witch hunt, rather than going after a candidate who now faces criminal charges in two jurisdictions and could be politically wounded in a general election.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, DeSantis tweeted just hours after news of the federal criminal charges broke Thursday night. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.

DeSantis, who is reportedly on a Texas fundraising trip, did not address in his tweet accusations from prosecutors that Trump hid sensitive documents and misled investigators.

The classified materials involved military secrets and issues of national security, such as a document detailing the nuclear capabilities of a foreign country, according to the indictment unsealed Friday.

The former president says he has done nothing wrong.

Koger expects Trump will see a short-term benefit from his latest legal troubles as supporters rally behind him and donations pour in.

But as time passes, Republican voters may start to question whether Trump can defeat President Joe Biden as a twice-indicted candidate, although a sizable base will stick with him no matter what happens, Koger said.

Privately, DeSantis told donors last month that he is the only candidate who can beat Biden, according to a report by The New York Times.

They just want a vehicle they can get behind ... but ... theres just too many voters that dont view Trump as that vehicle, DeSantis said on a call that a Times reporter listened in on.

Defying conventional political thinking, getting indicted is actually helping Trump with Republican voters who see the charges as political and without merit, said Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida.

I think DeSantis is aware that is where the Republican base is. ... If he were to attack Trump over this, it would probably hurt him, not help him, Jewett said.

Trump widened his lead over DeSantis after he was charged in March in Manhattan with falsifying business records, he said. That case involves accusations that Trump paid $130,000 in hush money to an adult film actress before the 2016 election.

DeSantis took a similar approach to those charges, attacking Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. But DeSantis also said he couldnt speak to paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair, a comment perceived as a slight by some Trump supporters for which DeSantis took some heat.

Trump also is facing an investigation into potential election interference in Georgia.

Even if he is convicted, no legal obstacles would stop Trump from continuing his campaign, Jewett said.

Theoretically, he could even be in jail and be elected president, Jewett said.

The socialist Eugene V. Debs received nearly 1 million votes for president while he was in prison in 1920 for urging people to resist the military draft.

The 14th Amendment does disqualify any person from serving as president who previously held public office, swore an oath to the U.S. Constitution and engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

That provision was applied in the aftermath of the Civil War to former Confederate officials and can be lifted by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress.

As a leading candidate facing criminal charges, Trump is taking the country into undiscovered territory, Koger said.

Can you be president from a New York state jail? Id like to think wed never find out  that the Republican Party would not nominate someone in that situation, Koger said.

Other GOP contenders took a different approach than DeSantis. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson called on Trump to end his campaign, saying the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Trump ally-turned-critic, said he would reserve judgment until more facts are revealed while adding no one is above the law.

Other candidates, such as former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, took a strategy similar to DeSantis.

Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence also had classified documents at their homes, but their representatives say the documents were promptly turned over to the authorities when they were discovered. The Justice Department informed Pence it wont charge Pence, while a special counsel is investigating Bidens handling of classified documents.

Pence, who is seeking the presidential nomination in 2024, said he didnt want to see his former boss charged over the records.


DeSantis knocks political bias but there are examples of him exercising it himself

Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed that if he wins the presidency, he would excise political bias and end weaponization of the U.S. Department of Justice once and for all.

We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation, he wrote on Twitter Thursday night in response to news that former President Donald Trump has been federally indicted on charges related to mishandling classified documents.

The tone was consistent with DeSantis portrayal of himself as fighting against liberal takeovers of powerful institutions. But as governor, DeSantis has been unafraid to use law enforcement, the courts or the expansion of his own executive powers to pursue his own agenda.

Here are three examples of DeSantis pushing the legal envelope to accomplish what he wants:

Prosecuting felons for voting

Hours before DeSantis held an afternoon news conference last August surrounded by uniformed law enforcement officers, nearly 20 people with felony records were arrested across Florida as part of a planned operation by state police.

DeSantis warned others that if they, too, improperly cast a vote: Were coming.

The arrests were a display of the powers of the newly formed Office of Election Crimes and Security, which DeSantis pushed for amid pressure from the GOP base to do more to investigate Trumps baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

The people arrested had voted in elections despite being convicted of disqualifying felonies including sex offenses and murder. Many expressed confusion about the charges, saying they had been issued voter ID cards and thought they were eligible to vote.

READ MORE: Cases against arrested voters on shaky legal ground. Florida issued them voter IDs

Of the 19 people arrested initially, 12 were registered as Democrats and at least 13 are Black, the Herald/Times found.

Attorneys who represented the former felons argued in court that the prosecutions were a waste of time and done to make a political point.

The arrests represented a more aggressive approach to voter fraud cases than some other prosecutors had taken in the past. In Lake County, for example, the Republican state attorney declined to bring charges against six convicted sex offenders who voted in 2020 because they did not willfully commit the crime, as was required by law.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement was tasked with carrying out the arrests, and some of the agents were almost apologetic as they did so, body camera footage showed. Several former agents recently told the Washington Post they believe that DeSantis has politicized the department.

Ousting a Florida prosecutor

Also in August, flanked by Tampa Bay law enforcement, DeSantis announced he was suspending Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren from office for what he said was the prosecutors disregard for his duty to enforce state laws.

Warren, a Democrat who had been elected twice to his position, had signed pledges saying he would not enforce laws prohibiting gender-affirming care for minors or laws limiting abortion, examples of actions that DeSantis said showed how Warren put himself publicly above the law.

The suspension essentially amounted to a firing, which Warren has fought in court. Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle ruled that DeSantis actions were unconstitutional and wrote that DeSantis was largely motivated by the political benefit of removing a prosecutor whose performance did not match the Governors law-and-order agenda. However, Hinkle also found that he did not have the authority to reinstate Warren.

The move marked a significant expansion of DeSantis executive powers. While governors have the authority to suspend duly elected local officials, it was historically reserved mostly for instances when the officials had been charged with crimes.

DeSantis commonly references his ousting of Warren during his presidential stump speeches.

Florida has fought back against the plague of [George] Soros-backed district attorneys, he told the crowd during his 2024 campaign kickoff speech in Iowa, to applause. When we had one of those prosecutors ... I removed him from his post.

COVID-19 vaccine grand jury

DeSantis political stock rose in 2020 and 2021 as he became one of the nations most vocal governors pushing back on COVID-19 restrictions. Although he at first encouraged people in Florida to get the COVID-19 vaccine, he has since amplified the voices of individuals who have pushed vaccine misinformation, and his administration has recommended against the vaccine for some groups.

In December, he took his battle to the courts and requested a statewide grand jury to investigate criminal or wrongful activity related to how vaccines were developed, promoted and distributed.

He announced his request at the end of a 90-minute roundtable with the Florida surgeon general that focused on alleged harms from the vaccine. In that panel, DeSantis included several medical professionals who have critiqued vaccines. The majority of public health experts say that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, beneficial and that serious side effects are rare.

Shortly after his petition was filed, the Florida Supreme Court granted the request for a grand jury. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is the designated head of the investigation.

It is the third statewide grand jury DeSantis has convened. The other two focused on migrants being brought to Florida and school safety after the Parkland massacre.

Statewide grand juries have only been impaneled about 20 times in more than 40 years. Before DeSantis 2019 request to look into school safety, the last statewide grand jury had been impaneled in 2009, when former Gov. Charlie Crist asked to investigate crimes like bribery and fraud committed by local and state public officials.
DeSantis responds to 2nd Trump indictment by promising to 'end weaponization' of DOJ if elected president

Former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Alon Skuy/AFP via Getty Images and Scott Olson/Getty Images

DeSantis came to the defense of Trump, his top 2024 rival, after news of the federal indictment.

The Florida governor and 2024 alleged it was politically motivated.

He promised to overhaul the Department of Justice if elected.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis promised Thursday evening that if elected president he would overhaul the US Department of Justice in response to news that former President Donald Trump was indicted.

In a statement released to Twitter, DeSantis accused the Biden administration's law enforcement agency of "weaponization," saying it "represents a mortal threat to a free society." With the indictment, Trump became the first former president in US history to face federal criminal charges.

"We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation," DeSantis wrote. "Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias, and end weaponization once and for all."

DeSantis, who is Trump's top rival for the 2024 presidential nomination, has otherwise become more vocal about criticizing Trump ever since making his White House run official on May 24.

While in recent months DeSantis has loosely referred to the "drama" that surrounds Trump, he has focused his attacks on bashing the ex-president's record on immigration, on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and on his losing electoral record.

Unlike 2024 candidate Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas, he did not call for Trump to pull out of the race over the indictment.

He instead in his statement echoed comments made by many Trump supporters that openly pondered about former 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for official communication, as well as a Fox News story that broke Thursday alleging that President Joe Biden was paid $5 million by an executive of the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, where his son Hunter Biden sat on the board.

DeSantis didn't say whether he would pardon Trump if elected, as 2024 challenger and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy did.

Federal prosecutors are charging Trump with seven criminal counts, according to numerous reports. Among them are obstruction of justice and false statements. Such charges could carry decades of prison time.

The public first became aware of the documents investigation in August 2022, when the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida. They seized several boxes of documents Trump took from the White House, some of which were marked "top secret."

Trump will be reporting to a federal court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon, he said on Truth Social, his social media platform. He told Fox News Digital that he would enter a plea of "not guilty."

Read the original article on Business Insider
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A man with a potential flamethrower stands atop a building in the 4100 block of West Chicago Avenue on June 2, 2023, which prompted a response from ATF and Chicago's SWAT. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

John Litsiardakis died last weekend just a mile from where he grew up in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, according to his brother.

His death  ruled a suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot wound  came about 16 hours after the 67-year-old, armed with at least one gun, took to the roof of a building he previously owned on West Chicago Avenue.

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A Chicago Police Department SWAT team was called to 4140 W. Chicago Ave. around 9:30 a.m. on June 2. Litsiardakis had other weapons, too, but how many and where he got them remains unclear, according to police officials.

With a decades-old felony drug conviction, Litsiardakis couldnt legally own or possess a firearm.

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Litsiardakis was a fixture in the area. He bought the building in the mid-1980s and used it to house his auto repair business, his brother said. However, court records show, the building was put up for sale 19 years ago because of Litsiardakis not paying taxes.

Using a drone camera, a Tribune journalist captured photos that showed debris  tables, chairs, patio tents  strewn across the roof of 4140 W. Chicago. Also visible were five flags, including an American flag hung upside down, as well as a yellow poster board, roughly 3-feet by 3-feet in size, emblazoned with a red swastika.

Emergency teams respond to reports of a man with a flamethrower on the roof of a building on the 4100 block of west Chicago Ave. on June 2, 2023. John Litsiardakis had debris  tables, chairs, patio tents  strewn across the roof the building, center, were five flags, including an American flag hung upside down, as well as a yellow poster board, roughly 3-feet by 3-feet in size, emblazoned with a red swastika, hung from a make-shift tower. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

Litsiardakis erratic behavior was a top-of-mind concern for neighbors. He also was active on social media in the weeks before his death. A Twitter account bearing his name made several posts threatening President Joe Biden and the Chicago administration. On May 12, Litsiardakis posted a video to Twitter that he apparently recorded while on the roof, showing the red swastika sign.

A day before the SWAT team was called to the building, community leaders in West Humboldt Park held a news conference to voice their concerns. Though the swastika sign had gone up and down after police responded to the building several weeks ago, the man also loudly broadcast hateful diatribes, as well as a variety of music, from on top of the roof throughout the day and night.

This is not safe, Farrah Walker, secretary of the West Humboldt Park Community Coalition, said before the final incident. People are outraged. People are shocked. People are scared.

Born John Lichard in February 1956, he legally changed his last name to Litsiardakis two years ago, according to Cook County court records. Litsiardakis was his grandfathers surname when he immigrated to Chicago from Greece in the early 1900s, according to Glen Lichard, Litsiardakis younger brother.

Lichard said he and his brother grew up on North Christiana Avenue in Humboldt Park, the same block where their grandfather lived. He insisted that Litsiardakis did not harbor any racial animus.

We grew up and our neighborhood was totally Black and we were like the only white people in the neighborhood or on our block for a while, Lichard said. Some of our best friends were Black. So, as far as him being prejudiced or something like that, no, thats not the way we were brought up.

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The brothers lost contact after their mother died in 2009. No official entity has yet identified Litsiardakis.

We didnt keep in touch but we didnt have anger toward each other or anything like that. We just didnt keep in touch, Lichard said. Things just went a little south when my ma died and things just, you know  we just kind of, like, went our own way.

Despite years of not speaking, Lichard said his brother was a kind and generous person, always willing to help however he could. After Lichard and his wife got married 35 years ago, Litsiardakis paid for their honeymoon trip to Lake Tahoe.

His heart was so big, Lichard said.

Court records suggest Litsiardakis faced money problems over the last two decades. He filed an appeal after the buildings tax deed was sold in 2004, but the city later placed two liens on the property, one in 2007 and the other in 2009, because of Litsiardakis failure to pay $2,300 in water bills.

In 2008, Litsiardakis was also ordered to pay more than $17,000 in a breach of contract lawsuit that was brought against him two years earlier.

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Lichard believes that financial hardships contributed to his brothers decline.

I did not know he was broke and I just think he wanted it to end, Lichard said. He was a very proud person, he didnt want to be a burden on anybody, as far as (asking) family members, Give me a handout, or something. I figure he just wanted it to end. I know he wasnt going to hurt anybody or shoot people off the roof. ThatI mean, no. I cant see that happening.

Cook County sheriff's police officers are positioned on and behind a vehicle during a barricade situation in the 4100 block of West Chicago Avenue on June 2, 2023, in Chicago. Police closed off Chicago between Pulaski and Kostner during the incident and CTA bus service was rerouted. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

Friday, June 2, was graduation day at Orr Academy High School, the West Side campus that sits one block southeast of the building on Chicago Avenue where Litsiardakis assumed his perch. The ceremony was set to start at 10 a.m., less than an hour after the SWAT situation began.

As the morning turned to afternoon, police closed off Chicago Avenue between Pulaski and Kostner. CTA bus service was rerouted. Traffic on Pulaski, a one-lane thoroughfare, lurched along.

It was a steady afternoon in the CPDs Harrison District too. Rarely did more than an hour pass without a police car or ambulance weaving through traffic and speeding through the intersection, lights and siren activated. One of those ambulances was for a man who suffered a drug overdose outside Orr.

News reporters and photographers set up a few feet away, attempting to interview passersby. One man, Eric McNair, told reporters that the man on the roof was a growing concern for neighbors over the last three months.

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Hes on a loudspeaker, you know, speaking antisemitic things. Hes always playing antisemitic music. This is something they have to deal with on a daily basis, McNair said.

He is not engaging with anybody, I dont think, personally but over the loudspeaker he is saying, you know, racial things, something I wont repeat. But they are worried, he added. I was speaking to one of the workers in the school and they said he has weapons and grenades, and Im like, How was he able to get it? [Did he] Amazon it? How did he get it?

John Litsiardakis on a rooftop in Humboldt Park, surrounded by emergency responders, in the 4100 block of west Chicago Ave. on June 2, 2023. Glen Lichard said he and his brother grew up in Humboldt Park. He insisted that Litsiardakis did not harbor any racial animus. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

As news cameras focused on McNair, a teen boy walked up behind him making faces and hand gestures. A reporter with WLS-CH. 7 tried to shoo him away, and the boy lifted his T-shirt to reveal a green plastic toy gun tucked into the waistband of his shorts. Nearby CPD tactical officers scolded him to keep moving.

Around the corner, a group of about 20 people, mostly strangers, waited for a bus to take them south on Pulaski. The street closures translated to longer wait times for buses, and the approaching rush hour didnt help matters. After more than 20 minutes, three buses arrived at the same time, but only two stopped to pick up passengers.

Though Chicago Avenue was closed off, several side streets near the building remained open as negotiators sought to coax out Litsiardakis. In the 800 block of North Kedvale Avenue, a well-kept block filled with bungalows and two-flats guarded by wrought iron fences, about a dozen residents used the situation as a social opportunity.

A Chicago police SWAT officer jogs to a position during a barricade situation at a building in the 4100 block of West Chicago Avenue on June 2, 2023, in Chicago. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

As a police helicopter circled, occasionally leaving to refuel at Midway Airport, some residents set up folding chairs on the sidewalk to watch as SWAT officers darted up and down the block with guns in hand. A man who lived on the east side of Kedvale yelled to neighbors across the street that John would go out with a bang like Al Pacinos character in the 1983 film Scarface.

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Another man was briefly detained after he walked past the officers and tried to speak with Litsiardakis, telling the police that the two were friends and that he could help resolve the situation peacefully.

Sixteen hours after police were called to the building, the CPD released a statement saying that SWAT officers discovered a man dead inside. The Cook County medical examiners office said the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head, and the death was ruled a suicide.

The CPD held a news conference the following Monday. Larry Snelling, chief of the bureau of counterterrorism, said it wasnt yet clear how many weapons Litsiardakis had access to. The building he was in, Snelling added, would likely need to be demolished.

We know he had multiple weapons, but a final count we dont have at this time, Snelling said. The location was very chaotic, there were a lot of things in there.

Court records show he had a felony conviction in the mid-1980s for possession of a controlled substance, so he couldnt legally buy a gun. Photos taken the day of the standoff show Litsiardakis aiming a rifle, and police radio dispatches suggested he pointed a gun at a police helicopter.

Snelling acknowledged that police had previously received several calls about the building, and said the mass of garbage contributed to the hourslong police response. He added that no CPD officers fired their weapons during the standoff.

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So it took a while for us to decide to go in because, if you saw the apparatus that he had built on top of the building, there was no reason for us not to believe that he had set something up inside of that building also, Snelling added.

A Chicago police SWAT vehicle uses a battering ram on a building in the 4100 block of West Chicago Avenue, on June 2, 2023, in Chicago. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

His brother said he didnt learn of the standoff until the following day, hours after Litsiardakis died.

I wish the SWAT (team) wouldve at least (contacted me). Im easy to look up. They probably were going with the wrong last name, Lichard said. But I wouldve gave him a call and I wouldve tried to even talk (to) him, just try to, you know, find out whats going on with him.

The world feels a little stranger now knowing hes not there for me, Lichard added.

Wednesday morning, demolition workers cleared debris from the roof where Litsiardakis stood during the standoff. Wood pallets had been taken down from the building, along with a red ceramic furnace. Records from the citys Department of Buildings show that inspectors were back at the property on June 6 and ordered that it be repaired or demolished.

In the auto body shop next door, Amado Alvarez said he hadnt had any serious issues with Litsiardakis before the neighbor killed himself. Police had stationed themselves around his shop during the standoff, he said.

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He and other mechanics wondered if there was a way Litsiardakis could have been safely arrested.

Why dont you wait one day outside, when he comes, Alvarez said. Take him to jail or whatever, but the way the guys did it, that was no good.

Farrah Walker, one of the West Humboldt Park Community Coalition activists who had shared concerns about Litsiardakis the day before the standoff, said her neighborhood group was saddened by news of his suicide.

We never wanted this to be the outcome of what happened with John. We wanted him to get help, she said Tuesday.

The group rang the bell for weeks, flagging concerns that Litsiardakis was unwell and had access to guns as he prominently displayed a swastika, Walker said. She felt the activists concerns werent taken seriously, suggesting that they wouldve been addressed more quickly in a wealthier neighborhood.

Police were aware of Litsiardakis because he was the focus of two SWAT responses in the last year, she added. Officers didnt arrest him after a SWAT team responded to the building in May 2022, police said last week.

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He walked around the community and could have been arrested, she said. This is just an incident that highlights the unchecked and untreated mental health issues that are ongoing, not just in our community, but in the greater Chicago area.
Ron DeSantis on Thursday criticized the federal indictment of former President Donald Trump  his chief rival for the GOP presidential nomination  as an uneven application of the law, tweeting that the weaponization of the justice system represents a mortal threat to a free society.

Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? the Florida Republican said, referencing former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden.

He went on to say that, if elected president, his administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.

Trump announced Thursday that he has been indicted by federal prosecutors on charges stemming from his storing classified documents at his Palm Beach residence after taking them from the White House. He is expected to appear at a Miami federal court next week, when the charges will be formally unveiled.

DeSantis did not say whether he thought Trump was innocent of the alleged crimes, choosing instead to focus on what he called a biased justice system. The governor also did not say whether, if elected president, he would pardon Trump should the former president be convicted.

At least one other GOP presidential candidate, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, pledged to pardon Trump if elected president.

Trump now faces two separate indictments as he attempts to reclaim the presidency. In March, he was indicted by a grand jury in Manhattan on charges related to hush-money payments sent to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

Trump has denied the allegations in both incidents, calling each a politically motivated witch hunt.

The March indictment, however, appeared to help his standing within the Republican Party as he ran for president, with many surveys showing him gaining support among rank-and-file GOP voters.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis must be awfully tired from all that tap-dancing. Were talking, of course, about his reaction Thursday to Donald Trumps indictment in Miami.

DeSantis talked on Twitter about a lot of things. He talked about the weaponization of federal law enforcement. He talked about an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. He threw in Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden.

And then he twisted himself into even more of a pretzel by trying to turn it all into a campaign ad to benefit  surprise!  him: The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.

Uh-huh. Missing from the rhetoric was any real semblance of a defense of Trump. But also missing? Any real shot at Trump. DeSantis, it seems, is conflicted.

You didnt hear DeSantis call Trump an innocent man. And that was before the indictment was unsealed on Friday, with 38 charges against Trump and a key aide related to their handling of classified documents after he left office. Federal prosecutors accused him of violating the Espionage Act and conspiring to obstruct justice. They allege Trump showed classified information to other people on two occasions in 2021: a plan of attack prepared by the Defense Department and a classified map related to a military operation. He told a representative of his political action committee that he should not be showing it to the representative and that the representative should not get too close, the indictment says, as reported by CNN.

These are allegations that, if proven in court, would show that Trump put national security at risk.

Deep down, DeSantis must be gloating and hoping that Trumps legal and moral problems finally catch up with him, and that DeSantis will benefit. So far, that hasnt happened. So DeSantis has continued to tap-dance.

No doubt he wants to keep attacking Trump. How else to get out from under the shadow of his old mentor, who continues to dominate in the polls? But he clearly also wants to court Trumps MAGA base. The result is a mish-mash of fiery-sounding words that dont mean a lot but, he likely hopes, wont offend a lot people, either.

DeSantis comments are markedly different from the last time Trump was indicted (at this rate, we may have to start numbering the cases.) Back then, in March, Trump was about to be indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on business fraud charges related to his alleged payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels to cover up an affair.

DeSantis, who had not yet declared he was running for the Republican nomination for the presidency, didnt even try to resist the urge to needle Trump.

Look, I dont know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair, DeSantis said at a news conference in Panama City, as some in the audience laughed. I cant speak to that.

DeSantis most recent remarks speak to the gravitational pull a man twice impeached and twice indicted continues to exert on the Republican Party. The assumption that voters would grow tired of the former president after the GOPs lackluster results in last years midterms, or that Never Trumpers exist in big enough numbers to sway the 2024 primaries, turned out to be an illusion. Not only has Trumps support among GOP voters grown, the only way DeSantis has found to attack him is by painting the former president as not being far enough right. In other words, not being Trumpy enough. DeSantis even said in a recent interview that Trump is a different guy than 2015, 2016.

Contrast DeSantis words with how former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie described Trump this week, as a lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog. Christie also is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, but he is running in a Republican Party that no longer exists.

Republicans who want to remain relevant in Trumpland know better. Its a lot easier to echo Trumps accusations of a witch-hunt or of a corrupt deep state than it is to allow the facts about this case to emerge.

There is no limit to what these people will do to protect their power & destroy those who threaten it, even if it means ripping our country apart & shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together, Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio wrote on Twitter Thursday.

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, a longtime Trump ally, tweeted: Biden is single-handedly destroying the justice system in America. After tonight, Biden will go down as the most corrupt and despotic president in our nations history.

Funny, the senators could have been describing Trump and his inner circle. Unfortunately, they werent.

Neither Rubio nor Scott is running for president. They dont have to worry about walking the tightrope DeSantis hopes will convey him to the White House. DeSantis knows that, as much as he wants to dethrone Trump, this is still Trumps party.
Hes only been a presidential candidate for two weeks, but Ron DeSantis is already finding himself defending his chief rival.

Several hours after news broke that former President Donald Trump was indicted over his handling of classified documents, DeSantis lambasted the Department of Justice.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? DeSantis tweeted about two hours after the news. The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.

It was a remarkable statement from the second-place GOP candidate, who is considered the most viable alternative to Trump but has grappled with how to challenge the ex-president without alienating his most fervent supporters.

And it showed in clear terms the limits of how much DeSantis will take Trump on. While he eagerly highlights their differences over handling Covid-19 and takes constant, oft-veiled jabs at Trumps electability, DeSantis is making a calculated effort not to anger the political base that appears to grow emboldened in its support of Trump with each passing legal trouble.



Trump said Thursday that he was being charged in connection to his handling of classified documents  a move that comes 10 months after federal agents searched his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach and took back records that were kept there. Trump said he has been summoned to federal court in Miami next Tuesday.

DeSantis was previously sharply critical of the FBI search of Mar-A-Lago. At the time DeSantis called it a weaponization of federal agencies. Right after he jumped into the race for president, DeSantis said he would be aggressive in issuing pardons when he was asked whether he would pardon Trump or those who rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Many Florida Republicans reacted similarly to DeSantis, with some suggesting without proof that the timing of the indictment was designed to take away attention from allegations that President Joe Biden was involved in a bribery scheme while he was vice president. Biden called the allegations  which are mentioned in an unverified document that was shown to lawmakers on Thursday  malarkey.

We have completely lost trust in the DOJ, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said on social media. The DOJ needs to come out tonight & explain how this is somehow different than what Hillary (Clinton) did. What Biden did. And this all happens on the same day Bidens $5M bribe comes out. This is America & this sure looks like a Banana Republic.

Republican Party of Florida chair Christian Ziegler in a text message echoed Scott.





I am looking forward to the investigation and indictment of Joe Biden over the classified documents found in Joe Bidens garage and the $5 million payment to Joe Biden from a foreign national  Just kidding, Ziegler said in a text message. We do not have an equal application of the justice system in America.

At least 12 of Floridas 20 Florida Republicans in the U.S. House have endorsed Trump for another term in office while DeSantis has only picked up the endorsement of Rep. Laurel Lee. Florida's two senators have not endorsed in the race.

There is no limit to what these people will do to protect their power & destroy those who threaten it, even if it means ripping our country apart & shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together, Sen. Marco Rubio wrote on Twitter.
Despite no GOP support, Central Valley jurist is one step closer to Ninth Circuit Court seat

Federal District Court Judge Ana de Albas ascension to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is a full U.S. Senate vote away from placing the former Fresno County Superior Court judge into the countrys largest appeals court.

Unlike last year when de Alba sailed through the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on a bipartisan vote to win her seat in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, her nomination was forwarded Thursday morning to the full Senate along partisan lines.

The vote was 11-10, something that University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias says could portend a close vote when the Senate considers the nomination in about a month.

I dont think theres a problem, but the Democrats have to be sure everybodies there for the votes, said Tobias, who regularly follows the Senate consideration of judicial nominations.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who has missed time this Senate session, participated in Thursdays vote.

The only person Im worried about is (West Virginia Sen. Joe) Manchin, he said, because last week he voted, for the first time of any Democrat, against a Biden nominee.

Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-South Carolina, voted for de Alba for the district court.

This time, he said he could not support her because of two cases she ruled in which released a GPS monitor from a man who tried to help his brother escape after killing a Newman police officer in December 2018, and another case where a more lenient sentence was given to a man convicted of receiving and distributing child pornography.

In the first case, the monitor that de Alba removed was one of two such devices. In the second case, sentencing guidelines called for a sentence of 78 to 97 months. She handed down a 66-month sentence.

I voted for her for the district position, but I cannot support her for the Ninth Circuit, said Lindsay during a hearing that lasted less than 10 minutes.

Graham noted a case involving a suspect who murdered a police officer, was convicted, had an ankle bracelet bracelet, and she removed it without a hearing.

No one corrected him that it was the suspects brother and not the suspect who had the ankle bracelet released.

And one of the more egregious child sexual abuse cases Ive been made aware of. Her sentences were way below the guidelines, so Ill be a no on her, said Graham.

In her May 19 appearance before the committee, de Alba  who was not present at Thursdays hearing  said she is required to look at factors under 18 US Code Section 3553(a), the Ninth Circuit as well as Supreme Court precedent.

Tobias said he was troubled a little bit by the partisan vote.

It looked like the Republicans hadnt given a lot of thought and just did whatever Graham said, which is not unusual, said Tobias, who noted several Republicans voted by proxy.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, praised de Albas nomination by President Biden.

The ABA (American Bar Association) unanimously rated her qualified for the appellate court. She has a strong support of the California senators, said Durbin. Her judicial and litigation experience have prepared her well for the to serve on the Ninth Circuit.

De Alba, 44, was a Fresno County Superior Court Judge before moving into the district court bench.

She went into law after her mother and other women worked an entire summer without getting paid by a farmer who then declared bankruptcy. De Alba frequently talks about growing up poor, and using a sleeping bag until she got her own bed at age 15.
BRIAN SNYDER/Reuters

Nate Paul, the Austin real estate developer at the center of embattled Texas Attorney General Ken Paxtons impeachment scandal, was arrested Thursday on a federal warrant.

Paul was booked into the Travis County Jail Thursday at 4:25 p.m., Kristen Dark, spokesperson for the Travis County Sheriffs Office, told The Daily Beast. Dark said hes currently on federal hold in the jailbut would not disclose any further details.

Its unclear whether Pauls arrest is related to the allegations of misconduct dogging Paxton. The hard-right Texas official was hit with 20 articles of impeachment late last month by the Texas legislature, after a slew of misconduct allegations came to lightincluding covering up a possible sex scandal, retaliating against his aides and even leaking confidential FBI documents to a donor.

But the laundry list of accusations involving Paul are what raised eyebrows Thursday following his arrest. Paxton is accused of protecting Paul from foreclosure, targeting a charity that was suing Paul for fraud, and even at one point convincing Paul to hire his mistress.

Attorneys for Paul did not respond to requests for comment from the Associated Presswhile one of Paxtons lawyers declined comment.

Ken Paxton Impeachment Prosecutor: Weve Got a Slam Dunk Case

And those allegations might only be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the allegations that may surface during Paxtons impeachment proceedings, according to one of the lawyers handling the case.

Rusty Hardin, one of the two Texas attorneys presenting the Texas legislatures case for impeachment against Paxton, teased last month that there was more to come.

I promise you, its 10 times worse than has been public, Hardin said.

The other attorney on the case, Dick DeGuerin, told The Daily Beast Wednesday that the depth of corruption from Paxton is astounding.

Its just conduct that convinces anyone that looks at it fairly that the office of attorney general has been abused and used for personal gain, DeGuerin said, adding that the evidence against all 20 articles of impeachment is very strong.

Its still unknown exactly why Paul was arrested. Authorities first raided Pauls homes and businesses in 2019, before his ties with Paxton came under scrutiny. The next year, seven of Paxtons employees went to the FBI with allegations of bribery and claimed that Paxton had abused his office to help Paul.

Paul has repeatedly denied the allegations. Paxton has called the charges politically motivated, and said that he has not been given a chance to rebut the claims

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Paramount Pictures

It speaks volumes about our current creatively barren blockbuster landscape that Michael Bay, once the paragon of ugly, unbridled excess, now stands as a last bastion of auteurist style and invention.

Whither the directors wanton flash, sizzle, stereotypes, and jingoism, which seared the eyes, offended the ears, and pummeled the spirit into weary submission? In the face of todays Marvel-grade assembly line tentpoles, Bays egomaniacal odes to enormity resemble not only quaint relics of a bygone age (which, at the time, many were eager to see conclude), but exemplars of extravagant vision and skill, made by an artist whose gung-ho personality infused every frame of his juvenile, militaristic, sexualized spectaculars.

Confronted by the ludicrous prodigality of 2017s Transformers: The Last Knight (which remains, to date, the directors fifth and final franchise entry), I wrote, That Bay is capable of staging computerized pandemonium with this much rapid-fire scale, sound, and car-commercial sleekness is no small feat; good luck finding someone else who can take the reins of this Hasbro-based franchise. Travis Knights 2018 Bumblebee spin-off proved that point to a tee, opting for a more heartfelt and muted approach that drained the action of its crazed lifeblood, and its doubly confirmed by Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, which premieres June 9 in theaters.

Helmed by Steven Caple Jr. (Creed II), this prequel to Bays original 2007 Transformers aims for respectability via breezy comic pacing, progressive casting, and straightforward sound and fury. Its the safe and simplistic course-correction thatneutered of the very absurdist immensity that was this franchises calling card, if not its sole reason for existinglands with a crashing thud.

Paramount Pictures

In a distant past on an unidentified world, the MaximalsTransformers that take the shape of wild animalsbattle a planet-devouring entity known as Unicron (Colman Domingo) and his seemingly indestructible Terrorcon minion Scourge (Peter Dinklage). These villains covet the Transwarp Key, a magical device that opens a portal to alternate universes where Unicron might continue to feed his insatiable hunger. Unfortunately for them, theyre thwarted in their mission by Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), the Maximals gorilla leader, who takes off in a spaceship after watching his own mentor perish in what may be the most underwhelming opening skirmish in cinema history.

Then again, since Rise of the Beasts doesnt even bother explaining why alien robots on a far-off land look like Earth creatures, Joby Harold, Darnell Metayer, Josh Peters, Erich Hoeber, and Jon Hoebers script sets expectations at bottom-of-the-barrel levels from the outset, which is where they remain once the proceedings transition to Brooklyn circa 1994.

Following in the thankless footsteps of Shia LaBeouf and Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Ramos is Noah Diaz, a military veteran and tech whiz with a financially struggling single mom (Luna Lauren Velez) and a sick younger brother named Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez), as well as a side hustle earning cash by modding cable boxes for friends. When a job opportunity falls through because of his reputation as an irresponsible non-team player, Noah agrees to rob a car at a gala event. The Porsche he tries to boost, however, turns out to be Mirage (Pete Davidson), an Autobot whose wise-cracking is so awful that the film feels obligated to have him apologize for one particularly corny one-liner.

Brooklyn 45 Is the Eeriest Nazi-Tinged Seance Youll Ever Attend

At the same time that Noah becomes trapped in Mirage as he autonomously flees pursuing police cars, museum intern Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) fixates on a hawk statue with mysterious ancient markings. When Elena investigates this artifact further, she discovers that its the Transwarp Key, which by this point Noah has come to retrieve on behalf of Mirage and his cohorts Bumblebee, Arcee (Liza Koshy) and Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), the last of whom wants the Key in order to escape his Earth exile and return home, and who has no interest partnering with humans.

In case it wasnt obvious from the start that Optimus and Noah are both born protectors who must learn to work together, Elena soon articulates that sentimentone of innumerable instances in which characters bluntly state things so the film can get back to staging digital mayhem.

Whereas Bays installments were narratively gonzo, replete with moon landing conspiracies, King Arthur mythologizing, and Wahlbergs quasi-incestuous longing for his daughter, Rise of the Beasts story is a rote, one-note affair comprised of three separate fights between good guys and bad guys. Its rock em-sock em centerpieces are drab and crude, marked by everything that its predecessors were not: dim lighting; unimaginative combat choreography; and character designs whose intricately spiky bodies (chassis?) have been reimagined in unsophisticated terms.

Paramount Pictures

Caple Jr.s prequel strips the series every element down to its lackluster basics, thereby rendering it a live-action cartoon without the decency to at least attempt to bludgeon viewers into a sensorial stupor with the finest (i.e., most egregious) orgiastic robo-insanity that hundreds of millions of studio dollars can buy.

Rise of the Beasts nominal novelties are the Maximals, and yet only Optimus Primal receives any attention; blink and youll miss Cheetor (Tongayi Chirisa) and Rhinox (David Sobolov), whose names reflect the minimal imagination that went into their construction. Ramos and Fishback, meanwhile, emote with gusto and frantically scamper about their titanic extraterrestrial compatriots in NYC and Peru.

Despite the actors best efforts, their protagonists are as dull as the films 90s-era references (to various hip-hop legends, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and Sonic the Hedgehog) and wan stabs at generating pathos via Kris plight and Noah and Mirages fist-bumping friendship. Nothing, however, is as lame as Noahs climactic transformation into a cybernetic pseudo-superheroa wannabe wow moment that reeks of desperate Marvel mimicry, and makes one pine for Bays shiny, sleazy, uniquely unhinged immoderation.

Paramount Pictures

Voiced by Domingo with a bellowing growl thats considerably less captivating than Orson Welles senatorial baritone in 1986s animated Transformers: The Movie, Unicron proves a shadow of his former self, and an additional example of Rise of the Beasts discount quality. No matter the closing scenes tease of a future franchise crossover with another popular 80s toy property, its a reduction posing as an expansion, and the sort of flimsy contraption that, in a prior Bay effort, would have been terminated with extreme limb-ripping, head-decapitating prejudice.

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HARRISBURG  With three weeks until the June 30 deadline to pass a new spending plan, Pennsylvania lawmakers appear split over how much of the states multi-billion surplus to invest in public services  a fundamental divide that must be resolved to move forward on the budget.

The Democratic-controlled state House this week passed an expanded version of Gov. Josh Shapiros budget plan that adds hundreds of millions of dollars to the states education system. It faced immediate opposition from Republicans who control the state Senate.

This disconnect over spending isnt the only potential hurdle looming as budget talks heat up.

Its too early to tell if lawmakers will finish a deal by June 30, but some have noted that blowing the statutory deadline isnt a major issue in the short term.

The state has a legal obligation to pay its workers and continue their benefits during budget impasses, and is broadly able to keep the government running and delay payments if theres no deal. Schools and other state-funded social services would likely start to feel a pinch come August or September.

State Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, R-Indiana, downplayed the deadline in April, saying his priority was designing a responsible product.

School spending vs. rainy day savings

Earlier this year, Shapiro, a Democrat, proposed a $44.4 billion budget plan that includes $1 billion in new education spending. Democrats, newly in control of the state House, advanced legislation this week that adds $900 million to Shapiros proposal mostly on education spending  including $225 million for the states 100 poorest districts.

They have argued such an investment is necessary to respond to a Commonwealth Court ruling that found Pennsylvanias school funding system is unconstitutionally inequitable.

The bill advanced by state House Democrats also transfers $450 million in state tax revenue into two new restricted accounts or so-called special funds: $250 million for school building construction and $200 million for a year-old state program to help fund home repair projects.

Democrats justified the increased spending by pointing to this years slightly higher-than-expected tax revenue as well as the roughly $12 billion the state has stashed in cash reserves and its rainy day fund.

House Democrats show you what we got. We show you what we believe in. We show you what we think is important. We show you what we think we should be investing in, state House Appropriations Committee Chair Jordan Harris, D-Philadelphia, said during a debate on the chambers floor.

The plan passed the narrowly divided state House in a party-line, 102-101 vote and is now before the Republican-controlled state Senate.

In a statement, state Senate Republican spokesperson Kate Flessner said the Democrats proposal raises substantial concerns.

The Senate Republican Caucus is committed to working to put in place a responsible spending plan that will help strengthen Pennsylvania now and in future years, she added.

Both Shapiros and state House Democrats plans continue a number of pandemic-era social programs without raising new revenue. Republicans in both chambers have argued that the plans will drain the states cash reserves too quickly while the commonwealth faces an uncertain economic future.

On the federal level, they have said for some time that a recession was coming, state House Minority Leader Bryan Cutler, R-Lancaster, said during the Houses floor debate this week. At some point, they will be right. And if youve spent all the money before the recession gets here, youre gonna have tough discussions and tough decisions to make.

Republicans have also tried to play up a split between state House Democrats and their governor, saying in floor remarks and statements that Democrats had turned their back on Shapiro by passing their own plan.

After the plan passed, Shapiros office released a statement saying he commends the new House Democratic majority for taking this important step forward and adding to our shared priorities as we work to pass a commonsense budget.

The governor also appeared in a closed-door meeting with state House Democrats before the vote, multiple sources told Spotlight PA, giving a pep talk. He congratulated the caucus for advancing its agenda in recent weeks, highlighting bills that would implement LGBTQ non-discrimination protections and strengthen the states gun laws.

A perennial university debate looms

An early potential stumbling block is the fate of $606 million in aid for four state-related universities  an appropriation that slowed talks last year. This money has historically subsidized tuition for in-state students at Lincoln University, Penn State, Temple University, and the University of Pittsburgh.

In a recent press release, the Pennsylvania Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative state House lawmakers modeled after the Congressional Freedom Caucus, threatened to hold up the slice of money slated for Penn State for political reasons.

Members highlighted a passage on Penn State Healths website which notes its childrens hospital provides puberty-blocking medications, cares for people with differences of sexual development and cares for patients who are younger than 10 years old.

Its unclear if the Freedom Caucus has enough votes to hold up Penn States budget allocation.

Under the state constitution, funding for private or state-affiliated institutions, like Penn State, requires a two-thirds vote rather than a simple majority to be approved. That means just 68 nos could block their funding.

This relatively low bar means the so-called non-preferred appropriations often turn into a political bargaining chip during budget negotiations for dissident rank-and-filers.

The Freedom Caucus has at least 16 members listed on its website, but also asserts that total representation may not be shown as some members are anonymous.

A handful of conservative Republicans, many of whom have since joined the Freedom Caucus, threatened to vote against funding for Penn Medicine in 2021, mostly for a veterinary school, because of the medical systems COVID-19 vaccine policy.

Republican opposition to vaccine mandates also influenced Penn State Universitys decision to strongly recommend, rather than require, the vaccine. And last years budget was delayed partially over fetal tissue research at the University of Pittsburgh.

The Freedom Caucus claimed in its statement that Penn State Health prescribes puberty blockers to children under the age of 10  something the organization said is misleading.

In an emailed statement, Penn State Health said such medications are only prescribed to treat premature puberty in children under 10, not gender dysphoria.

Penn State Health adheres to the international guidelines that do not support irreversible changes to children as it relates to gender dysphoria care, and there are no plans to change this position, the statement added.

Penn State University and Penn State Health are separate entities; the former is a state-related university system, and the latter is a nonprofit hospital chain associated with Penn States medical school.

Not every state House Republican agrees with the Freedom Caucus effort. State Rep. Tom Mehaffie, R-Dauphin, whose district includes two Penn State Health hospitals, including the childrens hospital, said that while he doesnt agree with all of the systems decisions, he thought the connection between the school and hospital was strained.

Pitt, Penn State, whos next? Mehaffie told Spotlight PA. Its a witch hunt.

WHILE YOURE HERE... If you learned something from this story, pay it forward and become a member of Spotlight PA so someone else can in the future at spotlightpa.org/donate. Spotlight PA is funded by foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability journalism that gets results.
MARTIN COUNTY  A 20-year-old man from Utah died after a Friday freediving and spearfishing trip in the ocean off Martin County, according to the Sheriffs Office.

Maxwell Roberts and four others were in a boat about 2  miles off the St. Lucie Inlet when the incident occurred, Martin County Sheriffs Chief Deputy John Budensiek said.

He said just before 11 a.m. the sheriffs marine unit was notified of the missing diver, identified as Roberts, and that a massive search was launched.

Budensiek said the four said their friend had free dove into the water with a spear gun, fins and a mask and had not resurfaced in a timely manner.

They had all themselves jumped in the water, tried to find their friend and were unable to locate their friend, Budensiek said. So that precipitated the phone call to the Martin County Sheriff's Office.

A large contingent of sheriffs and Martin County Fire Rescue officials and vehicles remained Friday afternoon at Sandsprit Park where the center console boat the five men had been out on was docked.

Maxwell Roberts, 20, died while free diving and spearfishing with friends near Sandsprit Park on Friday, June 9, 2023, in Stuart. Martin County Sheriff's Office Chief Deputy John Budensiek said Roberts was on a boat Friday afternoon with four friends. When Roberts didn't resurface, friends called the Martin County Sheriff's Office. Roberts was visiting Vero Beach from Utah.

Budensiek, speaking at Sandsprit, said Roberts is from Utah but spends summers in Vero Beach.

He said a dive team with Martin County Fire Rescue found him in about 55 feet of water.

Our dive team described to us that the deceased was at the bottom, looked like he'd been spearfishing, the spear gun that he had been using was deployed  and he just had not made it back up to the surface, Budensiek said.

Men believed to have been on the boat or connected to the group declined comment.

Budensiek said the five were good friends and all appeared to be in good shape. They were free diving, as opposed to using scuba tanks.

Maxwell Roberts, 20, died while free diving and spearfishing with friends near Sandsprit Park on Friday, June 9, 2023, in Stuart. Martin County Sheriff's Office Chief Deputy John Budensiek said Roberts was on a boat Friday afternoon with four friends. When Roberts didn't resurface, friends called the Martin County Sheriff's Office. Roberts was visiting Vero Beach from Utah.

They had been out since the earlier hours of the morning and it's my understanding that collectively they had about 20 dives between them today, he said.

He said its not clear why Roberts didnt make it back to the surface.

One thing that we are looking at is the fact that that spear gun was shot, he said. Our investigators here are thinking maybe he just got caught up in the moment of trying to track down his fish that he had shot, but we'll never know the answer to that question, unfortunately.

The incident appears to be an accident, but an autopsy will be done, he said.

This is a 20-year-old, young, fit male, he said. It was not his time to die.

Defendant to youth ambassador: 'Got caught up in wrong crowd.' Florida teen turns life around

Best Beaches: Stuart Beach grabs spot in Top 10

Will Greenlee is a breaking news reporter for TCPalm. Follow Will on Twitter @OffTheBeatTweet or reach him by phone at 772-267-7926. E-mail him at will.greenlee@tcpalm.com

This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: Man in his 20s was freediving offshore on Treasure Coast
BALTIMORE -- While obtaining her two degrees from Penn State Harrisburg, Atika Syed says she often struggled to feel seen.

Syed, a Muslim woman, immigrated to Hershey, Pennsylvania, from Pakistan in 2010 because of her husbands job and started school as a mother of two, eventually obtaining a bachelors degree in sociology and a masters in community psychology and social change.

I would often feel like I had to actually, actively explain to people at the university what certain religious requirements were, what was deemed important in my religion and culture. And that was a very tedious process, Syed said. It made me feel like an outsider. And thats the last thing you need when youre in a place that you spend most of your waking hours.

In an attempt to ensure that other students dont have the same experience, Syed works as the Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern and Desi American (APIMEDA) coordinator at Towson Universitys Center for Student Diversity. Shes the first person to hold the position. (Desi describes people of the Indian subcontinent, including those from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.)

The Center for Student Diversity was established in 1969 as the Office of Minority Affairs to integrate Black students into Towson, according to the centers website. The center has changed names several times since then.

According to a university spokesperson, in spring 2023, there were about 1,180 students in the APIMEDA community out of 18,306 students across the undergraduate and graduate populations.

Syed, 46, capped off her inaugural year in the role by overseeing a first-of-its-kind graduation ceremony for APIMEDA students May 19. Over 50 graduates received navy blue and gold stoles while surrounded by dishes piled high with vegetable biryani, tandoori chicken and samosas.

Ava Askandarian, 22, was one of those students. She said it was eye-opening to sit in a room surrounded by other students in the APIMEDA community, and that it made her feel proud.

Askandarian, who studied psychology and theater arts, immigrated from Iran while in elementary school. At Towson, she was constantly looking for a place she belonged. She started working as a student office assistant at the Center for Student Diversity in September 2021, a little less than a year before Syed started. Askandarian said Syed being in the office was a catalyst for the APIMEDA communitys growth.

All the students who identify as APIMEDA are slowly starting to find a place where they feel like they belong, Askandarian said. APIMEDA ... is a huge umbrella term with so many different backgrounds and cultures. I feel like having a coordinator who understands that is so important, so the students feel as though they are at home.

At the beginning of the year, Syed focused on building relationships with individual students and student organizations, she said. Students often offer to help her with events such as the graduation ceremony. And theyve come to see Syeds office as a safe space where she helps them prioritize their mental and physical health while managing course loads.

The relationship has blossomed so much so that they actually, when they dont have classes, they often hang out in my office all the time, Syed said. Theres hardly any time when Im by myself in my office.

Askandarian said shes grateful that Syeds door is always open. While grappling with watching her country undergo a woman-led revolution from afar, Askandarian found comfort in being able to go to Syed for support.

In addition to the graduation ceremony, Syed has hosted other events for APIMEDA students, such as two welcome events at the beginning of the fall semester, an author talk and book signing with a Pakistani writer and a stop Asian hate panel discussion. She has collaborated with offices such as the Asian Arts & Culture Center and the Office of Civic Engagement and Social Responsibility.

Before Syed started at the Center for Student Diversity, she worked as a social justice coordinator at the YWCA of Greater Harrisburg in Pennsylvania and as a homicide survivor advocate at Robertas House, a family grief support center, in Baltimore.

At the Center for Student Diversity, Syed is one of several employees who connect with students from traditionally underserved communities, such as the Latine, African American and LGBTQ+ communities.

By providing the services of the center, we are able to ensure that the students are also retaining and graduating because they have identified a sense of community on campus, said Rhea Roper Nedd, the centers director. Being on campus away from home can be challenging, but knowing that you have a community, a support system, and a ... faculty member that can serve as your mentor and your advocate and your ally certainly changes or shifts the experience that youre having on a college campus.

When she was a Penn State Harrisburg student, Syed didnt know she could bring her children to class if she couldnt find a babysitter or that she could ask professors to let her eat to break her Ramadan fast during class. Even though she had understanding professors, Syed said she didnt feel comfortable asking for help.

Syeds daughter, Adeena, graduated from both Penn State and Temple universities. Like her mother, Adeena struggled to find someone she could relate to in the administration, Syed said.

When this opportunity came my way, my daughter was the first one to say, Please, do not pass it up, Syed said. She was like, I wish I had someone like that. You have no idea how much your students are going to appreciate having someone like you in that position and youre going to establish some great relationships. And almost a year into it, I can see that she was right.
Senator Aisha Wahab authored and introduced the SB-403 bill in March

A bill introduced to make caste discrimination illegal in California is set to come up for discussion in the state assembly this week. Savita Patel, a California-based independent journalist, speaks to those supporting and opposing the bill becoming a law.

Sukhjinder Kaur*, a nurse at a hospital in California, works long and tiring hours serving patients. But whenever it's break time, things become oppressive.

She is a Dalit (a community that is placed at the bottom of India's deeply discriminatory caste hierarchy) and says she often faces casteist insults from her South Asian colleagues.

Dalit rights activists say scores of caste-oppressed Californians face housing, educational, professional, and social discrimination.

In March, Senator Aisha Wahab, a lawmaker from the Democratic Party, authored and introduced the SB-403 bill - legislation that seeks to add caste as a protected category in the state's anti-discrimination laws alongside gender, race, religion and disability.

The bill was passed by the state's senate in May with a 34-1 vote. If it goes through in the state assembly, California will become the first US state to ban caste discrimination.

"Nurses from upper castes pass slurs about chamars [a pejorative term for Dalits] being dirty and polluting," says Ms Kaur, who is among those who are in favour of the law.

In February, Seattle became the first city in the US - and outside South Asia - to outlaw caste discrimination, generating momentum for the legislation in California. It is being propelled by the same broad multi-faith, inter-caste, multi-racial coalition of over 40 American and international Dalit and human rights activists and organisations, led by California-based Equality Labs.

California has a large South Asian diaspora and is home to some of the world's biggest tech companies.

Renu Singh (left) has been advocating for the bill at the grassroots level

The state is home to more than half of the 500,000-plus Sikh population in the US and gurudwaras (Sikh temples) in California have been mobilising momentum to outlaw caste discrimination.

Two of the community's largest advocacy groups - The Sikh Coalition and Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund - support the bill. Among Sikhs, it is the Ravidasia community - the largest Dalit community in the state with approximately 15,000-20,000 members - which is advocating for the bill at grassroots level.

Renu Singh, who follows the Ravidasia tradition and is also a women's rights activist, has been urging women to speak about their own experiences of caste discrimination and those they see around them so that lawmakers understand the gravity of the issue.

Data from an Equality Lab study shows that one in four caste-oppressed people from the South Asian American diaspora have faced physical and verbal violence; one in three has faced discrimination in education, and two out of three have experienced workplace discrimination.

It was the first extensive study of caste distribution and its effects in the US and had over 1,500 respondents. The findings, published in 2018, say that those from "lower castes" fear retaliation and worry about being "outed" and hence "hide their caste".

However, a significant section of the Indian diaspora rejects caste discrimination claims.

Deepak Aldrin, a San Francisco-based Dalit activist is not in favour of the bill. "I've lived here for 35 years. No Hindu has ever asked me what caste I belong to," he says.

The bill is meeting strong opposition from many Indian-American individuals, religious and professional groups, who argue that even though it does not specifically name their religion, it will "discriminate against Hindus, their places of worship and even make them less hiring worthy".

They say the existing laws in California are sufficient to address any discrimination and are mobilising the community to urge their lawmakers to disallow the legislation to proceed.

Dalit rights activists say scores of caste-oppressed Californians face discrimination

Many businesses and Hindu temples under HinduPACT - an American Hindu grassroots advocacy initiative - have appealed to California lawmakers to reject the bill. Its convenor Ajay Shah says that the legislation is "deeply flawed, ill-intentioned and targets children and youth from the Indian subcontinent and those who follow the Hindu dharma [Hinduism]."

Suhag Shukla, co-founder and executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, says this bill is already creating an "undesirable" awareness about caste. She says she has been "hearing inappropriate queries from workers, especially in tech, who are being asked about their caste by non-South Asians". She says if this becomes a pattern, it can be grounds for ethnicity-based harassment.

The foundation has sued the state in a federal court for an "unconstitutional definition of caste" and has also challenged the addition of caste to its non-discrimination policy, saying that it "singles out one community for ethnic profiling and additional policing".

Those opposing the bill say they are also perplexed as to how the state plans to identify an individual's caste since it's a very complex issue, .

The bill, Ms Wahab explains, does not include details for identifying caste, similar to other protected categories.

"There is no language on how caste will be determined. This is simply an anti-discrimination bill. When somebody takes a matter up to the courts, that is usually when subject matter experts are engaged, the type of discrimination potentially that has taken place [is investigated]."

Ms Wahab says she has received "death threats" after proposing the bill. She now faces a recall campaign and a possible re-election. She adds that the "visceral reaction" to the bill is "disheartening" and has urged Californians to read the bill.

"Whether you're upper caste or lower caste, it does not matter, it will protect you as well," she says.

*Some names have been changed to protect identity.

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Good morning, Chicago.

The Chicago Water Taxi, once a mainstay of the citys downtown commuting options, is working to figure out a new schedule for the third summer in a row as the number of office workers remains low.

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Though warm weather has arrived, the taxis bright yellow boats arent yet up and running. Parent company Wendella Tours and Cruises hopes to operate the boats once again on weekdays  a departure from the past two years, when they have run only on weekends, catering to tourists  but the date service will begin and the schedule remain to be seen, taxi executive Andrew Sargis said.

Behind the taxis schedule dilemma is the post-pandemic reality for downtown Chicago: Tourists have returned in force, but office workers havent, Sargis said.

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Former President Donald Trump speaks with supporters at the Westside Conservative Breakfast, June 1, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. (Charlie Neibergall/AP)

Donald Trump said Thursday that he was indicted for mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate, a remarkable development that makes him the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges by the federal government that he once oversaw.

The indictment carries unmistakably grave legal consequences, including the possibility of prison if hes convicted.

Former Crestwood Mayor Louis Presta, center, arrives to the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in Chicago with attorneys, Robert Stanley, left, and Thomas Breen for Presta's sentencing in his bribery case April 25, 2022. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

Federal prosecutors want to get their hands on state pension contributions made by disgraced former Crestwood Mayor Lou Presta, who pleaded guilty to bribery charges as part of a wide-ranging investigation into red-light cameras.

Afternoon Briefing Daily Chicago Tribune editors' top story picks, delivered to your inbox each afternoon. By submitting your email to receive this newsletter, you agree to our Subscriber Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy >

Prestas attorney, Burt Odelson, said that he will contest the governments right to claw back the former mayors pension payments.

Andrew Rehn of Prairie Rivers Network looks at coal ash seepage on a bank of the Middle Fork of the Vermilion River in 2018. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)

More than a half centurys worth of toxic coal ash will be excavated from the flood plain of Illinois only national scenic river as part of a deal that could establish a precedent for other hazardous waste dumps throughout the state.

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Lia Mortensen in rehearsal as Lady Capulet for "Romeo and Juliet" at Chicago Shakespeare Theater in 2019, directed by Barbara Gaines. (joe mazza)

In 1996, a new Chicago theater named Remy Bumppo Theatre Company made its entrance by declaring it intended to cast the citys best actors in the most literate works it could find. In that first show, playing the neurotic Ruth, whose subconscious thoughts fuel Tom Stoppards Night and Day, was Lia Mortensen.

Her presence, and her luminous performance, was a signal that Remy Bumppo had its act together, writes Chris Jones.

Bears wide receiver DJ Moore makes a catch on May 23, 2023, during organized team activities at Halas Hall. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

The Chicago Bears wrapped up their third week of organized team activities ahead of mandatory minicamp next week. What matchups should we be watching? And will the Bears finally sign an edge rusher? Brad Biggs addresses concerns in his weekly mailbag.

A CBS Television advertisement that ran in the Nov. 15, 1980 issue of TV Guide magazine teasing a resolution to the previous season's cliffhanger: "Who shot J.R.?" (CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images)

Take this with a grain of salt and a whole lot of pepper: TV cliffhangers dont work in the streaming era, writes critic Nina Metz.

Maybe they do once in a while. I cant think of any off the top of my head. My colleague Michael Phillips recently singled out the ending of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse as an exception to the rule, and movie audiences can be fairly certain another installment will turn up in theaters. When it comes to streaming originals, that expectation is less assured.
With wildfire smoke blanketing much of the upper U.S., Americans searching for a way to avoid the toxic air can turn to a DIY air purifier with Cowtown roots.

Canadian wildfires have brought three days of smoke to the upper Midwest and the Northeast. Although North Texas is not experiencing smoke from wildfires, the region is still facing a summer with low air quality days.

Wildfire smoke contains tiny particles known as PM 2.5, which can cause a range of negative health effects when inhaled. PM 2.5 can also come from vehicle emotions or other industrial activity. So while Fort Worth isnt currently experiencing wildfire smoke, it still has elevated levels of PM 2.5.

To clean the air of any type of particulate matter, whether it be from wildfire smoke or traffic emissions, an air cleaner called the Corsi-Rosenthal box can filter the air in your home or workspace and make it safer to breathe. The box takes its name from its inventors: Dr. Richard Corsi, the dean of the engineering school at the University of California, Davis, and Jim Rosenthal, a Fort Worth resident and the CEO of Tex-Air Filters.

Coris and Rosenthal designed the box in 2020, as a growing body of research confirmed that SARS-CoV-2 particles can spread easily through the air. After Rosenthal and Corsi finalized the design and published instructions online, the invention took off. People throughout the world built Corsi-Rosenthal boxes for an extra layer of protection, posting pictures of the boxes everywhere from elementary schools in Brooklyn to classrooms at the Brown School of Public Health in Rhode Island.

Because the box is capable of trapping tiny particles of virus, its also able to trap the much larger particles that come with wildfire smoke and other types of pollution.

The box itself requires only a few things to assemble: A standard box fan; the box the fan comes in, to make a shroud; four air filters with a MERV 13 rating or higher; and duct tape. Any brand of air filter will work, although it should have a rating of MERV 13 or higher. Lower ratings will be less effective.

Rosenthal demonstrated how to build the box for the Star-Telegram in 2022.

Although the do-it-yourself box has largely been made by amateurs who find instructions online, a growing body of research has confirmed that the boxs design is effective at reducing particles in the air, whether its tiny respiratory particles that contain pieces of the SARS-CoV-2 virus or larger particles that make up wildfire smoke.

On Thursday afternoon, the Fort Worth area was experiencing moderate air quality, meaning that its OK for most people to be outside, but people with certain health conditions should take extra precautions. June and July are usually the most polluted months of the year in Fort Worth.
Doctor groped woman mid-flight while headed to propose to girlfriend, feds say

A Georgia doctor is accused of groping a womans butt and thighs as he slept on board a Delta Air Lines flight, federal investigators say.

Now, hes charged.

Dr. Jake Cho, of Peachtree City, faces a count of abusive sexual contact on an aircraft following the incident on a flight from Atlanta to Portland, Maine, according to court documents.

A woman sitting next to Cho said he appeared to be asleep but continuously leaned into her seat area during the March 17 flight, investigators said in a probable cause affidavit. At one point, she said he moved his hand into the space between them and touched her thigh and butt.

The male also moved his feet into (the womans) foot space and touched her feet with his feet, according to the affidavit.

Cho, a nephrologist with Peidmont Healthcare, has practiced medicine across metro Atlanta, according to the health systems website. He told investigators he was flying to Maine to propose to his girlfriend.

McClatchy News reached out to Piedmont Healthcare on June 9 and was awaiting a response. An attorney for Cho didnt return McClatchys request for comment.

Later when the flight hit rough air, the woman said Cho spasmed and reached past her leg and down into her crotch, court documents state.

She told investigators she had scooted as far as she could from the man before his turbulence-induced twitch, which wouldve required the males movements to be deliberate. She screamed excuse me, and Cho snatched his hand away, court documents state.

After arriving in Maine, the woman reported the incident to Portland Police, investigators said.

Cho was stopped by agents before his return flight to Atlanta on March 19 and questioned about the assault. He initially denied touching the woman but later acknowledged grabbing her upper thigh, according to the affidavit.

Peachtree City is about 30 miles southwest of downtown Atlanta.

If you have experienced sexual assault and need someone to talk to, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline for support at 1-800-656-4673 or visit the hotline's online chatroom.

Physical therapist accused of sexually assaulting at least one client, Nevada cops say

Woman refusing to get off phone on plane spits on passenger, slides down exit, feds say

Pastor drove to US from Canada to sexually assault 15-year-old he met online, feds say
Can a governor's veto be overridden in Wisconsin? Does it happen often?

It's no secret that Gov. Tony Evers and the Republican-controlled Legislature in Wisconsin don't see eye to eye on many issues, from how elections are run, to the state's educational system, marijuana, paid family leave and more.

That's why when bills come to Evers' desk to become law, vetoes are often the norm.

In fact, he set a record during the previous legislative period for the number of vetoes by a governor (126) in 2021. No governor had ever issued more than 90 vetoes in one session. And that was in 1927. The only time in the last 50 years that the number of vetoes was even above 50 for a session was in 2003 when it was the first of a four-year span in Wisconsin with a split government featuring a Democratic governor and Republican-led House and Senate.

So, what exactly goes into a veto and how does the process work?

Here are the basics on vetoes when you hear the term brought up in the coming weeks as the Legislature continues to go through the next two-year biennial budget.

Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, don't see eye to eye on much.

What is a veto?

A veto is essentially a vote by the governor in the legislative process when a bill comes to their desk from the state Assembly and Senate. It lets them have the final say on what is being brought through the two legislative bodies.

That's why when you have a split government like Wisconsin has had over the last five years you'll likely see more vetoes. If the governor doesn't agree with what the Legislature is doing he or she will likely cancel the bill and the stalemate continues.

How can a governor's veto be overridden in Wisconsin?

But the Legislature also has power since it can override a veto with a two-thirds supermajority vote. But an override of a veto has been extremely rare in Wisconsin.

According to a report by Richard A. Champagne and Madeline Kasper that outlines the veto process in Wisconsin through the Legislative Reference Bureau and was published earlier this year, it's been 34 years since the Legislature has overridden a governors veto or partial veto. That's the longest stretch in Wisconsin history, the report notes. It's not without trying, though. There have been 187 failed attempts at overriding full or partial vetoes during this period. However, it's been over a decade since Wisconsin's legislative bodies have even attempted to override a veto.

But could this change now in the Senate after the Republicans gained a supermajority following Dan Knodl's win this spring during a special election? It's unlikely because Republicans still don't have a supermajority in the state Assembly. In last fall's election, they had to flip five seats to take over two-thirds of the seats in the Assembly. Republicans flipped only three.

A governor doesn't have to veto an entire bill in Wisconsin

From the time Wisconsin became a state in 1848, governors have had the power to veto complete bills. And starting in 1930, there was an amendment to the constitution that gave governors the ability to enact a partial veto.

That means if there are parts of a bill that a governor likes it can be divided into separate propositions for the Assembly and Senate. Partial vetoes are often more popular than complete overrides in Wisconsin. Even when Republican Gov. Scott Walker was in charge with a Republican-controlled legislature during much of the 2010s, he issued hundreds of partial vetoes. In 2015 he made 104 partial vetoes and in 2017 he issued 98.

After a partial veto is made by a governor, it's then up to the state Assembly and state Senate to determine the next steps.

If the Senate doesn't override a governors veto, it's removed for the remainder of the biennial legislative session. However, in the Assembly, a veto can be reconsidered at any point during the legislative biennium. A successful veto override is then relayed to the other legislative body, which also needs a two-thirds vote.

There is a time limit for when a Wisconsin governor must issue a veto

A governor has six days (not counting Sunday) to veto a bill when it comes to their desk, according to the Wisconsin Constitution. If a bill is not returned to the Legislature within this period it becomes law.

How can I contact Gov. Evers or Wisconsin legislators to let them know what I think about bills being proposed?

Evers' Madison office can be reached at 608-266-1212, and his Milwaukee office is at 414-227-4344. Here's an email directory for every state senator, and an email directory for Assembly members.

You can also write to any state senator through this address: P.O. Box 7882, Madison, WI 53707-7882

And you can write to any member of the Assembly through these addresses:

Assembly members with last names beginning with A through L: PO Box 8952, Madison WI 53708

Assembly members with last names beginning with M through Z: PO Box 8953, Madison WI 53708

Wisconsin's budget: Gov. Tony Evers calls GOP bill to fund local governments inadequate, says he would veto it

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: How does the veto process work in Wisconsin?
What does Trump's indictment mean? Can he still run for president? Here's what to know

Former President Donald Trump was indicted on Thursday by a federal grand jury on charges linked to his handling of classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate.

More than 300 classified documents were recovered from Mar-a-Lago over a year after Trump left office, most in June and August 2022. In a separate case, Trump also faces 34 charges of falsifying business records in New York for hush money payments. He has pleaded not guilty, and his trial is set for March in the New York case.

Trump in on Truth Social on Thursday night said his attorneys were informed that he was indicted, alleging that the move is election interference and accusing President Joe Bidens administration of being corrupt.

But what is an indictment? Can Trump still run for president now that hes been indicted? Heres what you need to know.

Donald Trump indicted on seven charges in Mar-a-Lago classified documents case

What does indictment mean?

An indictment is a formal charging document thats used when its believed a person committed a crime. It includes charges against a person and should be filed before a case can move forward in a court, David Weinstein, a former federal and state prosecutor, previously told USA TODAY.

An indictment means a grand jury decided that theres more likely than not enough evidence  based on testimony  to move forward with charging a person, Weinstein said. In a federal court, all cases proceed via indictment.

Can Trump still run for president if hes indicted?

Yes, Trump can continue his 2024 presidential campaign, even after being indicted again.

"Legally speaking, there is nothing to bar a former president from being indicted for a state crime, running for office  even convicted," said Jessica Levinson, founding director of Loyola Law School's Public Service Institute, previously told USA TODAY. "It really just becomes an issue of, practically, how could you run the country behind bars, if ever came to something like that?"

The Constitution only lays out three requirements to serve as president. You must be:

A natural-born citizen

At least 35 years old

A resident of the U.S. for at least 14 years.

Has Trump been arrested?

No, Trump has not been arrested. If a person is indicted, they are not immediately arrested.

Trump in a statement on Truth Social on Thursday said he was summoned to appear Tuesday at a federal courthouse in Miami at 3 p.m.

What is a classified document?

A classified document includes information deemed sensitive by the government that may have a potential threat to national security if it is released in an unauthorized way. Most documents are classified for the purpose of national security.

There are different levels of classified information: Top secret, secret and confidential. Each level of classification ranks the severity of how leaked information could impact national security.

Contributing: Bart Jansen, USA TODAY

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump indicted: What does that mean? Can he still run for president?
Dog leaped over animal shelter wall to be with friend. Now theyre adopted together

Two pit bull terriers shared a kennel at a Minnesota animal shelter when one jumped over a wall to be with the other.

Now theyll share a home, too.

Friends of Minneapolis Animal Care & Control said in a Tuesday, June 6, Facebook post Linda and Brenda were adopted after their video went viral.

So happy TOGETHER! the animal care organization said. Brenda and Linda are now in their furever home!

#bestfriends  Happy Together @friendsofmacc Brenda and Linda found their furever home TOGETHER! Thank you to all of our frens who shared to make this pawsible for them #happytogether

The shelter shared video Saturday, June 3, of Brenda climbing the partition from her kennel, then jumping into the space occupied by her friend, Linda.

The two dogs arrived at the shelter together May 22, McClatchy News reported.

Me and another employee were walking through the kennels, and we walked by and we had to like triple take, like, whats going on, because two pitties came to the front of the kennel to greet us, and we were like, What? Madison Weissenborn told WCCO.

The dogs remained in the same kennel until they were adopted.

Man takes dying dog for final walk around PA neighborhood  and neighbors show out big

Dog showed up at shelter emaciated and frostbitten 5 years ago. Hes finally adopted
The Department of Justice on Friday unsealed charges against two Russian nationals accused of participating in a 2011 hack of cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox.

Authorities said the two Russians, Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner, were charged with conspiring to launder about 647,000 bitcoins from the Mt. Gox hack. Bilyuchenko is also charged with conspiring with another co-conspirator in operating BTC-e, an illicit cryptocurrency exchange that was shut down by U.S. law enforcement in 2017.

For years, Bilyuchenko and his co-conspirators allegedly operated a digital currency exchange that enabled criminals around the world  including computer hackers, ransomware actors, narcotics rings, and corrupt public officials  to launder billions of dollars, said Ismail J. Ramsey, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California.

In one of the indictments brought by the Southern District of New York, the defendants allegedly gained unauthorized access to a server holding crypto wallets of Mt. Gox, so they could illegally transfer digital assets to bitcoin addresses they controlled.

Mt. Gox ultimately shut down its operations in 2014 after the heist was uncovered.

When cybercriminals engage in fraudulent activity, such as hacking and illicitly operating cryptocurrency exchanges, it is critical that we impose cost on the bad actors and ensure they face justice, said Bryan Vorndran, assistant director of the FBIs Cyber Division.

In a second indictment brought by the Northern District of California, Bilyuchenko is alleged to have operated with his co-conspirators the BTC-e exchange. At the time, BTC-e was one of the worlds largest crypto exchanges and one of the primary ways by which cyber criminals around the world transferred, laundered, and stored the criminal proceeds of their illegal activities.

Cryptocurrency offers a new way for criminals to steal and launder money, but greed and deceit are nothing new, said Jim Lee, chief of the IRS Criminal Investigation unit.

The indictments follow the DOJs recent takedown of a darknet cryptocurrency mixer, which allowed cybercriminals to launder more than $3 million of digital assets.

The agency said it seized two domains that directed users to the mixing service.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Could Donald Trump go to prison over secret files?

Donald Trump says he is innocent, vowing to "Make America Great Again!"

Former US President Donald Trump has been criminally charged for the second time in months.

This time, the subject is his handling of classified files after he left the White House. Thousands of documents were seized in an FBI search at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago last year, including about 100 marked as classified.

A 37-count indictment made public on Friday accuses him of keeping highly sensitive documents - including files about US military plans and nuclear programmes - at the property, including in a ballroom, a bathroom and even a shower.

Legal experts say that the criminal charges against Mr Trump, who is running for president again in 2024, could lead to substantial prison time if he is convicted.

He has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and has said he "never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former president of the United States".

Here's what to know, and what to expect next.

Could Trump be jailed if convicted?

Court documents show that Mr Trump is facing 37 criminal counts of unauthorised possession of classified material, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to law enforcement.

The charges include 31 counts of wilful retention of national defence information under the Espionage Act.

The indictment notes that these charges carry a maximum term of imprisonment of 10 years.

Four other counts, related to conspiracy and withholding or concealing documents, each carry maximum sentences of 20 years.

The last two counts - scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations - carry sentences of five years each.

"These charges are extremely serious," Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, said. "There's an unbelievable amount of detail there, and much of it is very damning."

The level of detail and "very troubling" allegations about the mishandling of sensitive national security information constitute a "strong case for the government", he added.

"Of course, this all has to be proved," he said. "But there's so much information [in the indictment] that seems persuasive to me, and could well be to a jury. Apparently it already was for the grand jury."

When will Trump be arrested?

On his social media platform Truth Social, Mr Trump said he has been asked to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday 13 June.

The US Secret Service on Friday met with the former president's staff and the Secret Service officers assigned to him, a law enforcement official told the BBC's US partner CBS News.

It was confirmd on Friday that Mr Trump would travel to Miami the night before his day in court.

Thousands of documents were seized in an FBI search at Mr Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022

Will he be handcuffed and finger-printed?

Before news of the indictment broke, Mr Tobias told the BBC that Mr Trump's arrest would likely follow a similar pattern to his arrest in April on charges of falsifying business records in relation to alleged hush-money payments made to Stormy Daniels.

At the time, Mr Trump handed himself over to authorities in New York and appeared in court to plead not guilty. He was fingerprinted but he was not put in handcuffs and did not have a mugshot taken.

Mr Tobias said it was unlikely that Mr Trump would be handcuffed or have his mugshot taken this time.

"I think that is unlikely, given his stature as a former president and the slim likelihood that he's a flight risk," Mr Tobias said. "He's going to show up to at least negotiate or fight... but I don't think they need to use those types of procedures."

Once Mr Trump's arrest paperwork is completed, he will be considered under arrest and in custody. Once the paperwork is processed, he would be arraigned - meaning that he will hear the charges and enter a plea in court.

What is the case about?

When Mr Trump left office in January 2021, he was supposed to hand over all presidential records, which are considered federal property.

It is illegal for federal officials, including former presidents, to remove or keep classified documents at an unauthorised location.

But just months after Mr Trump left the White House, the US National Archives realised that some records were missing.

These included some of Mr Trump's correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un and a letter that former president Barack Obama left for Mr Trump when he left office.

The agency requested the records, and some were handed over.

In August 2022, the FBI searched Mr Trump's Mar-a-Lago property, seizing a further 11,000 documents, some of which were marked as classified or top secret, and some which were marked "TS/SCI", a designation for material that could cause "exceptionally grave" damage to US national security.

Other items included a binder of photos, a handwritten note, unspecified information about the president of France, and a clemency letter written on behalf of long-time Trump ally Roger Stone.

Prosecutors now believe that Mr Trump knowingly kept some of those documents - and worked to hinder the investigation and efforts to retrieve them.

What has Trump said about the case?

Mr Trump has reacted angrily to the indictment, calling it a politically-motivated "scam". He has also claimed he "had nothing to hide" and supplied the documents "openly".

In a series of Truth Social posts - as well as a video - Mr Trump repeatedly said he was innocent and characterised the indictment as "political warfare" against him before the 2024 election.

He has used a variety of arguments to defend his handling of the documents, including that he declassified the documents before they were discovered.

While presidents have previously declassified documents directly, there is no evidence that Mr Trump did so or followed any existing procedure.

Mr Trump has also argued that some of the documents were personal and protected by executive privilege. This would mean that there was no requirement to turn them over to the national archives when he left office - the very premise of the case.

"Nobody said I wasn't allowed to look at the personal records that I brought with me from the White House," he said. "There's nothing wrong with that".

The argument has largely been dismissed by legal experts.

David Super, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, told the BBC that he believes Mr Trump's lawyers are likely to argue that the former president was just a "really bad file clerk".

A key aspect of the case could be an audio recording in which Mr Trump reportedly said he knowingly kept documents and acknowledged he was limited in his ability to declassify them.

If this were true, Mr Super said that "it pretty much sinks him, because that shows that he knows the things he's been saying in public are not true".

How would charges affect Trump's presidential campaign?

Under US law, nothing prevents an individual from running for office if they are facing criminal charges.

"It could certainly be a problem for him politically if he's indicted, and certainly, if he's convicted. People may think twice about whether they want to vote for him," Carl Tobias said. "But I don't think that will necessarily prevent his participation."

At least two people have previously run for president with criminal convictions. In 1920, socialist candidate Eugene Debs ran for president despite having been convicted of the Espionage Act in connection with a 1918 anti-war speech.

Conspiracist Lyndon LaRouche also ran for the presidency on multiple occasions despite being convicted of fraud in 1988. One of his presidential bids, in 1992, took place while he was at a federal prison in Minnesota.

Both lost their elections.
The News

Federal prosecutors charged former U.S. President Donald Trump for allegedly holding on to classified documents after he left office, the former president announced on Truth Social.

Its the second time Trump  who is in the midst of a campaign to return to the White House  has been criminally charged, following an indictment in New York over his alleged role in giving "hush money" to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

The former president said that he has been ordered to appear at a Miami federal courthouse at 3 p.m. ET Friday.

"I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States," Trump posted. "I am an innocent man. This is indeed a dark day for the United States of America."

The exact charges have not yet been revealed, but multiple news outlets say there are 7 counts related to Trump's alleged mishandling classified documents he kept after leaving the White House. The New York Times reports that two of the counts include conspiracy to obstruct and willful retention of documents.

Know More

Last August, agents searched Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort and recovered thousands of government documents, some of which were marked as classified. In November, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed federal prosecutor Jack Smith as special counsel to oversee the federal investigation, and a grand jury in Washington began hearing testimony from witnesses.

Trump has denied wrongdoing, claiming that he had the power to declassify the documents that were at Mar-a-Lago. In early June, the former presidents attorneys met with the Justice Department and urged them not to file charges, The Washington Post reported. In an earlier letter, the lawyers asserted that Trump was being treated unfairly by Smith during the investigation.

Meanwhile, Trump has remained a leading contender for the 2024 GOP nomination for president.

Trumps charges in New York marked the first time in U.S. history that a former president was criminally indicted. He could still face additional charges in other probes. Smith is also investigating his efforts to subvert the 2020 election, and prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia are looking into Trumps attempts to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the state.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said the indictment marked a "dark day" for the country and that his party would be taking action in response to the escalation of events.

"I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice," he tweeted. "House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.

The View From The 2024 Field

At a campaign stop in Waukee, Iowa on Thursday, hours before the indictment, former Vice President Mike Pence said that any unprecedented DOJ action must meet the high threshold that would justify what would likely result in a divisive action in the country.

In some countries, he said, one individual comes to power and they immediately turn the criminal justice system on their predecessor. He was hopeful that wasnt the case here.

I believe in the rule of law, and I believe in equal treatment under the law, Pence said.

Entrepreneur and GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy pledged to pardon Trump should he be elected to the White House, adding that it was "hypocritical" for the DOJ to prosecute Trump but not Biden, NBC news reported.

"This is an affront to every citizen: we cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents," he said.

Echoing a common Republican theme, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said the country was witnessing the "weaponization of the Department of Justice" against Trump.

"Today what we see is a justice system where the scales are weighted," he told Fox News, adding he would "purge" the judicial systems of any "impurities" should he be elected.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, largely considered Trump's most challenging competitor for the nomination, likewise described the indictment as an example of judicial "weaponization."

But not all candidates were as sympathetic with Trump. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson slammed the former's president alleged "willful disrespect for the Constitution and disrespect for the rule of law," urging Trump to suspend his campaign.

"While Donald Trump is entitled to presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a distraction," Hutchinson said.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie offered a more restrained response, saying he would wait for the arraignment before offering more thoughts.

"As I have said before, no one is above the law no matter how much they wish they were," Christie said.
(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump has been indicted over his refusal to return classified documents found at his Florida home, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Most Read from Bloomberg

The indictment in Miami federal court is extraordinary, as a former president has never been charged with committing federal crimes.

It will almost certainly upend the race to be the Republican nominee for president in the 2024 election and means that Trump could be facing prison time or disqualification from holding public office depending on the charges if he is convicted.

The indictment was filed under seal and contains seven charges, including willful retention of national defense information, corruptly concealing documents, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and making false statements, according to a person familiar with the case who asked for anonymity to discuss confidential information. The document could be made public on Friday.

A conviction for willfully concealing or destroying government records carries a penalty of disqualification from office, however legal experts are in disagreement about whether that applies to the presidency. Violating the Espionage Act by retaining national defense information can carry up to 10 years in prison, and obstructing justice can carry up to 20 years behind bars, although Trump would be unlikely to face maximum penalties.

Trump maintained his innocence in a Thursday night post on his Truth Social platform and said that hes been summoned to appear at the federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday.

I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, he wrote.

The Trump campaign called the indictment an act of open legal warfare.

The White House declined to comment, as did the Justice Department.

Trumps indictment piles on legal and political pressure as he also has been charged in an unrelated New York case. It also comes during a week when three other potential rivals  his own former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum  have announced they are running against him for the GOP nomination in 2024.

Trump appears to be the front-runner for the nomination with a base of support thats been unwavering through his indictment by New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg related to hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, as well as a civil ruling in New York that held him liable for sexual battery against author E. Jean Carroll.

Read More: What Trumps Many Legal Perils Mean for His 2024 Bid: QuickTake

But with candidates like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott offering alternative platforms in an increasingly crowded field, Trump risks losing support from moderate Republicans, independents and suburban voters.

Trump also faces a civil lawsuit by New York Attorney General Letitia James over his companys asset valuations and ongoing probes by the Justice Department and the Atlanta-area district attorney over his efforts to overturn his 2020 electoral loss to President Joe Biden.

Trump has claimed that all the cases against him are political witch hunts designed to keep him from getting reelected to a second White House term.

The Justice Departments classified documents probe centered on a lengthy effort to get Trump to return government records taken from the White House when he left office in 2021 and stored at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Last August, the FBI obtained a warrant and conducted the unprecedented search of an ex-presidents home amid concerns Trump failed to return all top-secret materials to the National Archives, where they belong, even after receiving a federal subpoena requiring him to do so.

Prosecutors also subpoenaed an array of people who worked at Trumps Florida residence to testify and provide evidence to grand juries in Washington and Florida as part of the investigation.

The National Archives, which holds presidential and other records of the US government, also found that Pence and Biden took documents when they left office but both men invited authorities into their homes and offices to retrieve them. Pences legal case over the documents was closed without charges; Bidens, which is being led by another special counsel, is still pending.

Trump said he had issued a standing order to declassify all the documents, and at one point claimed he could declassify records simply by thinking about it. However, there is no known documentation to back up his declassification claim.

Read More: Trumps Stash at Mar-a-Lago Included Highly Classified Documents

Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November to lead the classified documents probe and a separate, ongoing investigation into efforts by Trump and others to overturn Bidens 2020 wins in battleground states.

Trump is facing serious crimes that carry with them significant prison time, according to former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade.

Trump is presumed innocent, like all defendants, but these are significant charges because they put the nations security at risk, she said.

--With assistance from John Harney and Joe Schneider.

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2023 Bloomberg L.P.
Photograph: Charlie Neibergall/AP

Federal prosecutors have charged Donald Trump over his retention of national security documents and obstructing the governments efforts to retrieve them, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, a historic development that poses the most significant legal peril yet for the former president.

The exact nature of the indictment, filed in federal district court in Miami, is unclear because it remains under seal and the justice department had no immediate comment.

Trump confirmed the indictment on his Truth Social social media platform on Thursday afternoon, shortly after his lawyers received an email from prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith that outlined the charges and summoned the former president to surrender himself to authorities in Miami next Tuesday.

Related: What is the Trump Mar-a-Lago case about and why is it significant?

The charges listed in the summons included: wilful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document, corruptly concealing a document, concealing a document in a federal investigation, engaging in a scheme to conceal and false statements, people familiar with the matter said.

Trumps lawyer Jim Trusty confirmed in an appearance on CNN that prosecutors had listed seven charges on the summons paper. Trusty said he had not seen a copy of the indictment but added he was hopeful that it might be unsealed before Trump makes his initial appearance in court.

From his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey, Trump lashed out at the indictment in a series of posts on Truth Social. I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, Trump said, adding: I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!

The former president was said to be resigned to the fact that he would probably be indicted after prosecutors impaneled a new grand jury in Florida to take evidence in the case last month, which his advisers saw as a sign that the case had been moved from Washington for its final stages.

But even though Trumps lawyers were told last week that the former president had been designated a target in the criminal investigation  the clearest indication that charges were forthcoming  the news of the indictment appears to have taken Trump and his inner circle by surprise.

Trump spent the early part of the evening calling allies on Capitol Hill to rally support and watching who was defending him on cable news, a person close to the former president said. He then went for dinner at the golf club and played DJ, selecting songs to play over its loudspeakers.

The former presidents team also later released a short video, recorded a day beforehand, in which he again proclaimed his innocence.

In Washington, the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, called the charges a dark day in a post on Twitter that falsely suggested the Biden administration, rather than a grand jury, had returned the indictment. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable, he added.

Criminal charges in the Mar-a-Lago documents case deepen the legal peril for Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination, after he was indicted earlier this year on state charges in New York by the Manhattan district attorney over his role in hush-money payments to an adult film star.

Trump also remains under criminal investigation for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

For more than a year, prosecutors have examined whether Trump knowingly retained classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after he left office and took steps to conceal the materials after the justice department issued a subpoena for their return.

The Mar-a-Lago Club, home of former US president Donald Trump. Photograph: Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images

The criminal investigation started last February when the National Archives issued a referral to the justice department after discovering more than 100 classified documents mixed with presidential records in 15 boxes that Trump returned.

When the justice department reviewed the classified documents, people familiar with the investigation said, top officials in the national security division were alarmed to find that some of the materials amounted to national defense information that is controlled by the Espionage Act.

The issue was the sheer volume and the sensitivity of classified materials in the boxes. According to an estimate provided to Trumps lawyers at the time, the 15 boxes included over 100 documents  more than 700 pages  that had the potential to implicate national security.

The discovery presented a problem for the department because Trump was no longer authorized to retain such documents once he left office and officials grew concerned that Trump might be in possession of further classified documents that were also national security materials.

Related: Jack Smith: veteran special counsel at the center of Trump investigations

The espionage investigation has been focused on whether Trump showed off national security materials in his office at Mar-a-Lago, and has questioned multiple witnesses about whether Trump waved around classified documents he had kept when no longer authorised to after he left office.

Prosecutors have also asked witnesses about documents concerning potential US military action against Iran, after Trump referenced such a document in a meeting at Bedminster in July 2021 where he said he could not show a certain document because he did not declassify it when president.

To that end, prosecutors have shown an Iran document to some witnesses who appeared before the Washington grand jury and asked whether they had ever been shown the material by Trump or anyone else. It was not clear whether any witness confirmed seeing the document, one of the people said.

The investigation into the obstruction, meanwhile, has focused on whether the failure by Trump to fully comply with the subpoena last year was a deliberate act of obstruction because he wanted to retain the classified documents even after he had left office, the people said.

Last June, the since-recused Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran found 38 classified documents in the storage room at Mar-a-Lago and told the justice department that no further materials remained there  which came into question when the FBI seized 101 more classified documents months later.



Corcoran later told associates he felt misled because he had asked whether he should search elsewhere at Mar-a-Lago, such as Trumps office, but was waved off, the Guardian first reported. Corcorans notes also showed he told Trump he had to return all classified documents in his possession.
Thank you for supporting our journalism. This article is available exclusively for our subscribers, who help fund our work at the Chicago Tribune.

Sand trap bags line the beach and the Lakefront Trail between North and Fullerton avenues, June 5, 2023. The large bags help to mitigate wave action. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

Three years after near-record high lake levels decimated parts of Chicagos shoreline, some beaches are making a comeback.

Robin Mattheus, a coastal geologist with the Illinois State Geological Survey, said that after the Chicago Park District closed a few beaches due to severe erosion, establishing dune fields to stabilize the sand and encouraging plant growth allowed beaches like Rainbow and 63rd Street to stabilize.

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Those were the areas that took the brunt of the impact of lake level rise, Mattheus said. Were actually seeing in our measurements, our sonar, our drone data, that the beaches are rebounding; theyre reforming. They seem to be doing so quickly in the areas that saw the most destruction.

[ Lake Michigan levels dropping, revealing how much work is needed to repair Chicagos eroded beaches ]

Sean Black lives not far from 63rd Street and has been going to the beach for years. He said he enjoys the weather, the music from a trio of elderly men who play the bongos and the whole lake vibe.

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Cameron, 6, and Addy, 5, of Chicago, play in the sand at 57th Street Beach, June 7, 2023. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

A tractor grooms sand at Montrose Beach Thursday morning, June 8, 2023. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

It seems like theyre trying to clean the beach up a little more, which is important. The more they keep it clean, the more appealing it is, Black said. The upkeep is important.

However, the outlook for some beaches isnt clear. For the stretch between Fullerton and North avenues, where large sand trap bags line the shore to mitigate wave action, city officials have not said when the barriers will be removed.

The trap bags are a temporary measure, said Heather Gleason, director of planning and development for the Park District. The Chicago Park District will continue to work closely with the Army Corps of Engineers, analyzing possible sustainable, cost-effective solutions, taking into account the current coastal conditions.

Cathy Breitenbach, director of natural and cultural resources with the Park District, said fluctuating lake levels historically have been cyclical, and maintenance needs and recreational uses have changed depending on these levels.

Ten years ago, we were at record low lake levels and worrying about dredging harbors, Breitenbach said. Twenty-five years ago, the Montrose Dog Beach was a boat ramp.

Historically, lake levels have risen and fallen over decades. Now, with climate change bringing more precipitation and more severe weather to the Midwest, those cycles are occurring over a shorter period of time, scientists say. Lake Michigan hit a record low in 2013. In 3  years, the lake rose 4 feet. By 2020, it had risen more than 6 feet, just shy of the record high.

Severe storms that year ripped up several North Side beaches. The city filled the beaches at Howard, Juneway and Rogers with rocks after they were damaged and threatened roadways.

[ How bitter cold winter blasts and a warming planet will chew up the Lake Michigan shoreline, faster and faster ]

Since 2020, water levels have dropped 2  feet.

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The city expects large crowds to descend on the 22 beaches along its 26 miles of shoreline now that beach season is underway. But the impact from beachgoers tends to be fairly minimal in terms of erosion, Mattheus said.

Maintaining the natural environment of the beaches is an effective way to control erosion, according to Mattheus. Techniques such as controlled burns, like one recently conducted at Rainbow Beach by the Park District, reduces weeds and staves off invasive species so the natural habitat can return.

Grasses also tend to help keep the sand in place. Now that lake levels have come down, Mattheus said, vegetation that was destroyed is able to naturally rebound.

Dune grasses grow at 63rd Street Beach, June 7, 2023. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

With lower lake levels, wave energies cant reach as high up the beach face and thats where were starting to see the sand building up again, he said. If it gets vegetated, thatll trap more sand and well see some really neat changes.

Just before dawn, Park District crews groom the Chicago beaches daily. Tractors pulling groomer machines collect garbage in combination with teams of people who pick up litter by hand during the busier summer months, according to Breitenbach.

Grooming the sand also helps slow erosion, Mattheus said, as it shifts the sand around, creating additional stability.

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Ezra Maille is a freelancer.
Donald Trump could be asked to wear an ankle monitor following his latest indictment, says former prosecutor

Former President Donald Trump during the Pro-Am prior to the LIV Golf Invitational - DC at Trump National Golf Club on May 25, 2023. Rob Carr/Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump was indicted for a second time on Thursday.

A former prosecutor said it could see him wearing an ankle monitor while he campaigns for president.

This follows a similar prediction made by James Comey, the former head of the FBI, late last week.

Former President Donald Trump could be asked to wear an ankle monitor while campaigning for the presidency following yet another indictment, one former prosecutor said on Thursday night.

The indictment against Trump on Thursday, which makes him the first former president to face federal charges, includes seven counts related to the handling of classified documents. Trump was previously indicted by a Manhattan grand jury in March over hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels.

Joyce Vance, a legal analyst who previously served as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, discussed the implication of the indictment on MSNBC's "The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle."

"He may be asked to wear an ankle monitor," Vance said, while also mentioning the possibility of other monitoring measures pending his trial.

The former prosecutor told MSNBC that Trump is unlikely to be detained because he's not seen as a flight risk or a danger to the community. But Trump will still have to talk with probation officers and ultimately "will not be able to make his own decisions about how this proceeds," she said.

Insider reported that Trump is unlikely to be held in jail because fleeing would be practically impossible considering he's running for president, can be easily recognized, and is followed everywhere by Secret Service agents.

Former FBI director James Comey made a similar prediction about an ankle monitor last week, days ahead of the indictment, suggesting the possibility of Trump wearing an ankle bracelet while accepting the Republican nomination at the party's convention.

He described the situation to MSNBC'S Jen Paski as being part of "this crazy world that Donald Trump has dragged this country into," adding that it would be possible that Trump could be elected president while being incarcerated.

There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents someone who has been charged or convicted of a crime from serving as president.

Insider outlined what could lie ahead for Trump with the latest indictment, which will start with the former president appearing in federal court in Miami on Tuesday.

A mugshot might be taken, but it won't be released, and he probably won't be handcuffed, the report said.

Breaking the news of his indictment on Truth Social on Thursday evening, Trump wrote: "I AM AN INNOCENT MAN."

Trump's post-presidency office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Donald Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury: What we know

A federal grand jury indicted former President Donald Trump Thursday on charges related to his handling of hundreds of classified documents that were seized from his Florida estate. The indictment is the first time in history a former U.S. president has faced federal charges.

Trump was indicted on seven counts, according to a person who has been briefed on the case. The charges related to the classified documents recovered at Mar-a-Lago come just over two months after Trump's first indictment in New York by a grand jury on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Here is what we know about Trump's second indictment as a former president:

Donald Trump indicted on seven charges in Mar-a-Lago classified documents case

What is in the documents?

More than 300 classified documents  found in several boxes at Trumps Florida resort  were recovered in June 2022 under subpoena and during a search by the FBI in August 2022, more than a year after Trump departed office.

The indictment comes nearly five months after Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith was enlisted to investigate Trump's potential mishandling of classified documents.

While we don't know the specific contents of the documents, the classified materials seized from Mar-a-Lago had labels suggesting that they contained some of the nations most closely guarded secrets and related to matters of national defense.

What did Trump say?

Trump announced his indictment on Truth Social and immediately protested his innocence in the case, calling it the "Boxes Hoax."

"The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted," Trump wrote in a statement. "I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!"

Trump also criticized President Joe Biden in the recovery of classified documents at Biden's homes, which is the subject of a separate investigation by the Justice Department.

In a video posted on Truth Social, Trump claimed without evidence that the indictment was related to his status as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

"It's election interference at the highest level," Trump said. "There's never been anything like what's happened."

What did the Justice Department say?

While Trump and his attorneys have spoken out about the Thursday indictment related to his handling of classified documents, the Department of Justice has remained silent.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment Thursday evening to USA TODAY on Trump's announcement about his indictment.

When will Trump appear in court?

Trump announced on Truth Social that he was ordered to appear in federal court in Miami at 3 p.m. on Tuesday.

Jim Trusty, an attorney representing Trump in the classified documents case, said during an interview on CNN that Trump's appearance in court on Tuesday "should be a fairly routine hearing."

"We have to have some conversations with DOJ to see if they'll be remotely reasonable about things like conditions of release and setting a timetable," Trusty said, adding that there will be no arrest when Trump appears in court.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What we know about Donald Trump's indictment by a federal grand jury
There are a lot of reasons Trump wants to reclaim the White House in 2024, but high on the list is the belief that as president, he will be able to sabotage the myriad criminal and civil investigations hanging over his head.

On Thursday, Trump revealed that the Department of Justice has indicted him in relation to the Mar-a-Lago documents probe. The DOJs indictment includes seven federal charges related to possession of documents, obstruction, and false statements, a source with knowledge confirmed to Rolling Stone on Thursday.

Trumps 2024 campaign will take place amongst a series of legal battles aimed at securing accountability for his conduct both in and out of office. This is the second indictment brought against Trump in the span of four months, the first being 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. More legal drama is likely headed his way.

Trump views the controversy surrounding his hush money payments to porn stars, classified documents, efforts to undermine the 2020 election, and allegations of corporate fraud are all part of a grand conspiracy to prevent him from retaking what he feels is his rightful place as head of government.

They are launching all of the many Fake Investigations against me RIGHT SMACK IN THE MIDDLE OF MY CAMPAIGN, something which is unheard of & not supposed to happen. DOJ, FBI, NEW YORK A.G., NEW YORK D.A., ATLANTA D.A. FASCISTS ALL! Trump wrote Wednesday on Truth Social.

The list of probes, prosecutors, and government bodies investigating the former president is long, and takes on a bewildering level of complexity when one factors in the nearly constant stream of subpoenas, letters, lawsuits, and insider reports emerging on a near daily basis.

To help make heads or tails of what exactly Trump is being investigated for, what hes been charged with, and when pending investigations are likely to move forward, weve prepared a guide to the six biggest cases against Trump, and the potential consequences they may bring.

Classified Documents at Mar-a-Lago

In August, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Trumps Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida. Authorities seized hundreds of classified documents retained by the former president following his departure from the White House. The raid was the culmination of a months-long effort by the National Archives and federal authorities to recover the missing materials. The effort included a subpoena and the DOJ visiting Mar-a-Lago to recover the documents  to no avail, precipitating the raid.

Trump and his legal team went to great pains  even petitioning, unsuccessfully, to the Supreme Court  to prevent investigators from actually seeing what was in the documents he was hoarding in his home. Special Counsel Jack Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped to oversee the case, has been gathering testimony ever since, and reports about his progress made it increasingly clear that an indictment was likely.

Trumps attorneys met with Special Counsel Jack Smith and members of his team at the Justice Department earlier this week, reportedly in an attempt to strike a last deal with prosecutors to avoid an indictment. On Wednesday, Rolling Stone confirmed reporting that Trump had received a letter from federal prosecutors informing him that he is the subject of a criminal investigation  a sign that Smith was making the final preparations for a full indictment.

Smith leveled seven federal charges against Trump on Thursday. A source with knowledge of the contents of the indictment previously told Rolling Stone that the charges related to possession of documents, obstruction, and false statements. The former president announced on Truth Social that the corrupt Biden Administration has informed his lawyers that hes been indicted seemingly over the Boxes Hoax.

I AM AN INNOCENT MAN, Trump added, THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION IS TOTALLY CORRUPT. THIS IS ELECTION INTERFERENCE & A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!

Trump wrote that he had been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.

Paying Off a Porn Star

Trump made history in April by becoming the first president to be arrested and charged in a criminal case. The former president pleaded not guilty to 34 separate felony counts of falsifying business records brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

The charges relate to a 2016 hush money payment made at Trumps direction to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Two weeks before the election, Trump allegedly instructed his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to provide Daniels with $130,000 in order to buy her silence regarding an alleged affair and stave off a scandal in the final days of his campaign. Prosecutors allege the payment  which was made through a personal loan taken out by Cohen and routed through a shell corporation with a promise from the Trump Organization that the funds would be reimbursed  constitutes an unreported campaign expense.

The former president took steps to ensure that his self-surrender in Manhattan could be exploited as a self-serving public spectacle. As previously reported by Rolling Stone, Trump insisted on a high-profile arrest in order to create, as one source put it, his own Jesus Christ moment and galvanize his supporters into viewing him as a martyr for their cause. In the days after his booking, Trump raised more than $7 million in a campaign cash grab.

Trump reacted to the charges with characteristic ire. The former presidents public attacks against prosecutors and the case itself have led Judge Juan Manuel Merchan to issue a not-a-gag-order against Trump that, while allowing him to publicly discuss the case, restricts his access to evidence and prevents him from publicly sharing materials disclosed to him or his legal team during the course of the trial.

Trumps trial is scheduled to begin on March 25, 2024.

Assaulting and Defaming E. Jean Carroll

Trump also made history in May when he became the first president to be found liable for sexual battery in a civil court case brought by author E. Jean Carroll, who alleged that the former president had raped her in the 90s.

While Trump will not serve any jail time in this case, a Manhattan jury ruled that Trump was liable for sexual battery and defamation against Carroll, ordering him to pay $5 million in damages. Case closed  or so we thought.

The day after the ruling, Trump appeared on CNN for a town hall event, during which he repeated many of the attacks against Carroll that had originally motivated her to sue him for defamation. The former president mocked Carroll and bragged that he was too famous to have been publicly shopping at the department store where the alleged assault took place.

In response, Carroll filed for additional damages from Trump, expanding the scope of a separate 2019 lawsuit against him. It makes a mockery of the jury verdict and our justice system if he can just keep on repeating the same defamatory statements over and over again, Roberta Kaplan, Carrolls attorney, said of the new filing.

On Thursday, Trumps attorneys requested a retrial for the former president, arguing that the damages granted to Carroll were grossly excessive under applicable case law.

Trumps arguments are frivolous, Roberta Kaplan, Carrolls attorney, said in a statement, the jury carefully considered the evidence that Ms. Carroll presented, and Trump did not put on a single witness of his own.

This time, Trump will not be able to escape the consequences of his actions, she added.

Election Meddling in Georgia

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump attempted to undermine the results of various key swing states in order to undermine the election. Georgia was one such state.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis empaneled a grand jury in May 2022 to investigate Trump and his allies efforts to interfere with the states outcome, including efforts to pressure Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to rig the election in his favor.

Theres nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that youve recalculated, Trump told Raffensperger during a January 2021 phone call, I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.

An indictment, which will likely include charges against Trump, could come as soon as August. Sources have told The Washington Post that Willis has expanded the probe into some of Trump and his allies activities in other states, and is considering invoking Georgias Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) laws to level racketeering charges against those involved.

Election Interference and Jan. 6

Special Counsel Jack Smith is also overseeing a probe into Trumps actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and his role in the events of Jan. 6. The investigation is not as close to a final outcome as the Mar-a-Lago probe, but Smith has been dishing out subpoenas left and right; everyone from former Vice President Mike Pence to ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon has been called to testify by the Justice Department. Trumps former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is also expected to be a key witness in both of Smiths investigations.

In April, The Washington Post reported that the DOJs investigation had expanded to include allegations that the former president and his allies defrauded donors by touting false claims of election fraud. Smith issued dozens of wide ranging subpoenas for records of fundraising emails  including drafts, and suggested edits from campaign staff  as well as records of any discussions about fundraising communications and campaign messaging strategy.

The investigation has also dug into Trumps efforts to meddle with election results in individual states, including Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania.

Corporate Fraud in New York

New York Attorney General Letitia James has brought a massive $250 million civil fraud case against the former president, his children, and members of the Trump Organization. In September, James alleged that the Trump Organization made over 200 false valuations of assets over the last decade. She also said she planned to make referrals to the IRS criminal division and the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York for possible federal crimes.

Trump has twice given testimony to prosecutors in the case. Once in August, where he invoked the 5th Amendment hundreds of times, and a second time in April.

James has already secured a conviction against a member of the former presidents inner circle. The attorney general brought a separate criminal, tax fraud case against former Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg in May 2021. Weisselberg was ultimately sentenced to five months in prison after pleading guilty to failing to declare and pay taxes on more than $1.7 million in company benefits provided by the Trump Organization. Weisselberg is named as a co-defendant in the civil case against Trump, the trial for which is slated to begin on Oct. 2, 2023.

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Former U.S. President Donald Trump Visits Scotland

Former President Donald Trump disembarks his plane at Aberdeen Airport on May 1, 2023 in Aberdeen, Scotland. Credit - Jeff J MitchellGetty Images

Former President Donald Trump has been indicted on federal charges for his handling of classified documents and told to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon, he said on his Truth Social account Thursday night. ABC News broke into regular TV programming shortly after 7 p.m. to report that a grand jury in Florida had voted to indict Trump on multiple federal charges.

It is the first time a former president has faced federal charges. In a separate case, Trump is facing local charges in a Manhattan court for hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels made during his 2016 campaign. Trump has been told he is facing seven charges in the federal case, according to a source in contact with him. The exact charges were unclear.

Trump, who is running for another term as president and remains the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, wrote on his social media site at 7:21 pm on Thursday that he has been summoned to appear at the federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday at 3 p.m.

More from TIME

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, Trump wrote on Truth Social. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel in November to oversee the investigation into whether Trump broke the law by taking sensitive national-security documents when he moved out of the White House in January 2020, or obstructed the governments efforts to retrieve them.

The FBI obtained a search warrant in August to enter Mar-a-Lago and found more than 100 classified documents. The discovery came after Trumps advisors had said they had already conducted a diligent search of the property and turned over any and all papers marked classified. Federal officials had been negotiating with Trump for more than a year by then over the return of government documents he had taken with him to his Mar-a-Lago Club.

The federal indictment is the latest addition to Trumps mounting legal troubles. Smith is also overseeing a separate investigation into Trumps role in trying to overturn the 2020 election results and encourage a violent mob of supporters to enter the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021, to interrupt the certification of the election results.

In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is moving forward with a case looking at Trumps effort to reverse his 2020 loss in Georgia by encouraging state election officials to find votes. New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Trump in November, alleging he fraudulently overvalued his properties to insurers and bank lenders. And in Manhattan court, District Attorney Alvin Bragg, has charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsification of business records that Bragg says were designed to hide payments intended to keep quiet his alleged affair with Daniels in the weeks before the 2016 election. Trump has called all of the investigations against him hoaxes designed to hurt him politically.

Trump has made claims that he is the victim of a politically-motivated conspiracy to keep him from returning to office an animating force of his political movement. Both while in office and in the years afterward, he used two impeachments and Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation into Russias effort to help Trump win the 2016 election to energize his supporters. The top of his social media feed on Truth Social reads: THEYRE NOT COMING AFTER ME, THEYRE COMING AFTER YOUIM JUST STANDING IN THEIR WAY! When he was indicted in Manhattan in April, Trump raised more than $1 million in campaign funds off the news.

Within minutes of the news breaking Thursday evening, Trumps campaign was fundraising off his latest indictment. This is nothing but a disgusting act of Election Interference by the ruling party to ELIMINATE its opposition and amass total control over our country, read one campaign email with the subject line BREAKING: INDICTED and paid for by Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee.

Trumps allies were quick to defend the former President, and claim that the federal indictment was a play by President Joe Biden to torpedo Trumps campaign. Earlier Thursday, Biden was asked at a press conference how he can restore Americans trust in the Department of Justice with Trump attacking it. Because youll notice, Ive never once, not one single time, suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do relative to bringing a charge or not bring a charge. Im honest. Biden tapped the podium twice for emphasis and walked out.

A trial date for the Manhattan case has been set for March 2024, right in the middle of the presidential campaign season. That means that Trump, who announced his intention to take back the White House in November, will be campaigning across the country while defending himself in court against two ongoing criminal cases.

Some legal experts have argued Trump is particularly vulnerable to prosecution in the documents case. I think this one is the most damaging because not only is there so much evidence, but it goes directly to the heart of his ability to be the leader of our country, Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School, recently told TIME. Its truly a complete undermining of his job if he really took government documents that dont belong to him, if he showed people government documents that could have put our country at risk, and if he obstructed justice by not complying with a subpoena.

Even if Trump is convicted by the special counsel, the charges against him wont disqualify him from the presidency, according to legal experts. Under the Constitution, all natural-born citizens who are at least 35 years old and have been a resident of the U.S. for 14 years can run for president. There is no legal impediment to Trump continuing his presidential campaign while facing criminal chargeseven if he were jailed.

Indictment is absolutely no legal bar to him running, says Levinson. And a conviction is not a legal bar to him serving.

At least two candidates with criminal convictions have run for president in the past, albeit unsuccessfully. In 1920 a candidate named Eugene Debs ran for president while in a federal prison in Atlanta as the nominee of the Socialist Party. Debs was convicted of violating the Espionage Act over an anti-war speech, and won more than 3% of the vote nationally. Lyndon LaRouche ran for president in every election between 1976 and 2004. LaRouche, a fringe candidate who embraced conspiracy theories, was convicted of tax and mail fraud in 1988 and ran his 1992 campaign from prison.

But the legalities become murkier if Trump were to win the presidency while facing impending charges or a conviction. Mishandling of classified government materials is a felony crime punishable up to 10 years in prison. Obstruction of justice is also a felony crime, with a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.

The general view among constitutional scholars is that the need for a duly elected president to fulfill the duties of their office would take precedence over a criminal conviction and require the prison sentence to at least be put on hold. Trump could even try to pardon himself immediately upon taking office. Trump is scheduled to appear at the Georgia Republican Convention in Columbus on Saturday. He is expected to still attend.

-With reporting from Eric Cortellessa and Nik Popli
Donald Trump privately praised a lawyer for deleting Hillary Clinton's emails, feds say: 'He did a great job'

Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event in Davenport, Iowa, on March 13, 2023. AP Photo/Ron Johnson

Donald Trump was a big fan of Hillary Clinton's lawyer, prosecutors say.

As prosecutors investigated his stashing of classified documents, Trump marveled how Clinton stayed out of trouble, the feds allege.

Trump praised the lawyer in private, saying he "did a good job" deleting her emails.

Donald Trump has publicly railed for years about how Hillary Clinton handled her emails.

But in private, it was a very different story, prosecutors allege.

Trump praised Clinton's lawyer last year for deleting some of her email messages, marveling at how she stayed out of trouble, according to a stunning indictment from federal prosecutors.

The unsealed indictment revealed that Trump met with two of his attorneys in May 2022 as investigators asked for him to turn over classified documents that were missing after he left the White House, according to prosecutors.

Trump grumbled that he didn't want anyone looking through his files, prosecutors allege.

"I don't want anyone looking through my boxes, I really don't, I don't want you looking through my boxes," he said, according to the indictment.

Trump later asked what would happen if "we don't respond at all or don't play ball with them" and floated suggesting there were "no documents."

He also praised Clinton's lawyer that day for deleting her messages, prosecutors say.

"He was great," Trump said, according to the indictment. "He did a great job... He was the one who deleted all of her emails, the 30,000 emails, because they basically dealt with her scheduling and her going to the gym and her having beauty appointments.

"And he was great... so she didn't get in any trouble," Trump said, according to the court filing.

Trump is facing 37 counts in connection with the classified document scandal, including conspiracy and violating the Espionage Act.

Federal prosecutors allege that he took classified documents  including some containing nuclear secrets  from the White House, showed them off at Mar-A-Lago and his resort at Bedminster, and then lied and tried to hide the files from investigators.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Former President Donald Trump listens as he speaks with reporters on his plane after a campaign rally at Waco Regional Airport, in Waco, Texas, March 25, 2023. Trump faces 37 counts in an indictment over his handling of classified documents. | Evan Vucci, Associated Press

The latest on the indictment of former President Donald Trump:

Can Trump run for president while being indicted?

Friday, June 9

Former President Donald Trump can run for president, even though he faces charges for mishandling classified documents. A presidential candidate needs to fulfill three eligibility requirements to run. The candidate must be:

A natural-born citizen of the United States. At least 35 years old. A resident of the United States for 14 years.

Chris Edelson, an assistant professor at American University who specializes in presidential power, told Axios that Trumps indictments, and possible convictions, do not disqualify him from running again.

Related

The clearest path to disqualifying Donald Trump running for office would have been if the Senate had convicted him in one or both of the impeachments, Edelson said.

For example, in 1920, Eugene V. Debs ran for president from prison after unlawfully protesting the draft in World War I.

More recently, Joe Exotic, famous for his docuseries Tiger King, announced he is running for president as a libertarian while serving a 21-year prison sentence, as reported by the Deseret News.

Special counsel unseals the indictment

Friday, June 9

Special counsel Jack Smith unsealed the indictment against Trump, who is set to be arraigned on Tuesday. The 49-page indictment hits Trump with 37 counts for willfully keeping classified documents after leaving office, according to ABC News.

Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced, Smith said at a news conference, defending the integrity of the investigation, per CNN. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.

The documents included nuclear secrets and the defense capabilities of the country, the indictment says. The indictment says that Trump stored the classified documents in various locations at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

In January 2021, as he was preparing to leave the White House, Trump and his White House staff, including Nauta, packed items, including some of Trumps boxes. Trump was personally involved in this process, the indictment states. Trump caused his boxes, containing hundreds of classified documents, to be transported from the White House to The Mar-a-Lago Club

It says that Trump showed these documents to others on two instances in 2021. It also notes a text exchange between two employees, where one employee asked another if Trumps boxes could be moved to make room in the staff office.

Woah !!Ok so potus specifically asked Walt for those boxes to be in the business center because they are his papers, the second employee said, later stating that the boxes could be moved to the lake room.

Trumps aide was also indicted

Friday, June 9

Walt Nauta, an aide to Trump, has also been indicted in special counsel Jack Smiths investigation surrounding the classified documents.

Trump responded to the charges on Truth Social, saying that Nauta is a member of the U.S. Navy, who served proudly with me in the White House, retired as Senior Chief, and then transitioned into private life as a personal aide.

He said that Nauta has done a fantastic job and that the Biden administration is trying to destroy his life.

The indictment says that Nauta moved the boxes of classified material to conceal them from Trumps attorney, the FBI, and the grand jury. He was labeled a co-conspirator in the indictment.

2024 GOP presidential candidates respond to Trumps indictment

Friday, June 9

Former Vice President Mike Pence said that he is deeply troubled by Trumps indictment in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, according to Politico.

Yesterday on the road in Iowa, I had said I had hoped that the DOJ would see its way clearer not to move forward here. But let me be very clear: No one is above the law, he said.

In January, Pences lawyers turned over dozens of classified documents found at his home in Indiana to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as the Deseret News reported.

Pence announced his bid for president on Wednesday.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trumps top rival for the presidential election, took to Twitter and said: The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society.

We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation, he said. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?

He promised that if elected, his administration would hold the Department of Justice accountable for exercising political bias.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society.



We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.



Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?



The DeSantis  Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) June 9, 2023

Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who is also in the running for president as a Republican candidate, took to Twitter to respond to Trumps indictment.

This is not how justice should be pursued in our country, she said. The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics. Its time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions.

Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, another GOP candidate for 2024, also criticized the DOJ for being hypocritical for choosing to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden in a tweet.

It would be much easier for me to win this election if Trump werent in the race, but I stand for principles over politics, he posted. I commit to pardon Trump promptly on January 20, 2025 and to restore the rule of law in our country.

We cant have two tiers of justice: one for Trump, another for Biden. One for Assange, another for Manning. One for BLM/Antifa, another for peaceful protesters on Jan 6.



I never thought wed see the day when the U.S. President deputizes the DOJ to arrest his lead rival in the  Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 9, 2023

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tweeted, no one is above the law, no matter how much they wish they were. He launched his bid for 2024 on Tuesday.

Trump makes changes to his legal team

Friday, June 9

On Friday morning, Trump made changes to his legal team. He said that he will now be represented by Todd Blanche, with a firm to be named later.

Trump was previously represented by Jim Trusty and John Rowley. They released a joint statement regarding the change, according to CNBC.

This morning we tendered our resignations as counsel to President Trump, and we will no longer represent him on either the indicted case or the January 6 investigation, the statement said.

They said that Trump will be vindicated in his battle against the Biden administrations partisan weaponization of the American justice system.

Now that the case has been filed in Miami, this is a logical moment for us to step aside and let others carry the cases through to completion, they wrote.

Trump said that additional lawyers will be added to his legal team in the coming days.

Trump social media post says hes been indicted

Thursday, June 8

Former President Donald Trump says hes been indicted over his handling of classified documents and that hes been summoned to appear next week at a Miami federal courthouse.

On the social media platform Truth Social, Trump said the Biden administration told his attorneys he will be indicted. Trump defended himself and said President Biden also had classified documents in his possession.

The New York Times reported that the Department of Justice has filed federal charges against Trump for holding onto classified documents and for obstructing the investigation into his handling of the documents.

Related

The AP reported Trumps lawyers met with DOJ officials on Monday, where they argued against charges being filed.

Trump is also facing charges in New York City for allegedly falsifying business records, and he was recently found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll and was ordered to pay her $5 million in damages.

Trumps legal woes come as he continues to hold the lead in the Republican 2024 presidential primary.
Former US President Donald Trump has been charged over his handling of classified documents after he left the White House.

Mr Trump, 76, faces seven counts, including mishandling classified documents and obstructing efforts to investigate the storage of the files at his Florida home, his lawyer said.

Both are federal crimes which can carry a prison sentence on conviction.

Mr Trump is campaigning to make a return to the White House in 2024.

Legal experts say the indictment does not prevent him running for the presidency again.

It is the second time Mr Trump has been charged with a crime, but now he is facing a federal case. These typically carry harsher sentences.

He is the first former president ever to be criminally prosecuted by the government he once headed.

In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, Mr Trump said he had been summoned to appear on Tuesday afternoon at a federal court in Miami, Florida, where the charges against him will be read.

"I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former president of the United States," Mr Trump wrote.

He added: "This is indeed a dark day for the United States of America. We are a country in serious and rapid decline, but together we will Make America Great Again!"

The charges have not yet been made public, but the details were laid out by his lawyer Jim Trusty. He told CNN they include conspiracy, false statements, obstruction of justice, and illegally retaining classified documents under the Espionage Act.

Mr Trump was at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Thursday when news of the indictment broke.

On Friday, the US Secret Service will meet Mr Trump's staff and security officers to plan his journey to the Miami court next week.

Prosecutors had also presented evidence in court in Washington DC, but a decision to file the indictment in southern Florida instead may offer some consolation for the Trump team.

Legal experts say the state - where the former Republican president is popular - is likely to produce a less Democratic-leaning jury pool than if the case had been prosecuted in the US capital.

The investigation into Mr Trump's handling of classified documents has been overseen by special prosecutor Jack Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November.

Mr Smith, a former war crimes investigator, is also overseeing a separate probe into Mr Trump's role in the storming of the US Capitol.

In the documents case, prosecutors have said that Mr Trump took about 300 classified files to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, after leaving the White House.

About 100 of those - some labelled top secret - were seized when the FBI searched the Palm Beach mansion last August.

Reports surfaced last week that prosecutors had obtained an audio recording of Mr Trump acknowledging he kept a classified document after leaving the White House in January 2021. Transcripts of that tape circulated in US media on Friday.

It is against US law for federal officials - including a president - to remove or keep classified documents at an unauthorised location.

Legal experts say Mr Trump will still be able to enter the White House race.

"He can be indicted any number of times and it won't stop his ability to stand for office," says David Super, a professor at Georgetown University Law Centre.

Opinion polls show Mr Trump is currently the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. He could continue running even if convicted in the documents case.

As Mr Trump issued a fundraising email with the subject line "BREAKING: INDICTED" on Thursday, several leading Republicans voiced their support for him.

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, said it was "unconscionable for a president to indict the leading candidate opposing him".

"House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponisation of power accountable," he wrote on Twitter.

An itemised list of property seized in the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago

Mr Trump's rival for the 2024 nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, said: "We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.

"The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponisation once and for all."

Mr Trump became the first former president to be charged with a crime in April, after he pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records over a hush-money payment to a porn star.

He faces a trial in that case in New York next year.

Adding to his legal jeopardy, a prosecutor in Georgia is expected to announce this summer whether Mr Trump will be charged over alleged efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in that state.

Additional reporting by Madeline Halpert
Former President Donald Trump has been indicted in the Justice Departments investigation over his handling of classified documents, he wrote on his Truth Social site on Thursday.

I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election, he wrote. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!

Within minutes Trump was already sending out fundraising emails, hoping to bring in money from the coming indictment.

Please make a contribution to peacefully stand with me today and prove that YOU will NEVER surrender our country to the radical Left  for 1,500% impact, he wrote in an email with the subject line: BREAKING: INDICTED.

Trump hinted in recent days he thought he might be close to an indictment, and three of his attorneys met with Justice Department officials earlier this week in an apparent attempt to voice their concerns about the investigation.

The former president has maintained he had the right to take any files he wanted from the White House under the Presidential Records Act, saying he had a standing order to declassify anything he removed from the Oval Office. He also said last month, in a CNN town hall-style event when his presidency ended, he had boxes of files lined up on the sidewalk, and everybody knew we were taking them.

I have the absolute right to do whatever I want with them. I have the right, he said at the time, refusing to give a definite answer about whether hed shown the documents to anybody. And, by the way, they become automatically declassified when I took them.

Those claims seemed to fall over amid reports federal prosecutors had obtained a recording in which Trump discussed a sensitive military document after he left Washington, D.C., indicating he knew it was secret.

Recently, however, Trump has posted agitated statements on his social media platform, some in all capital letters, complaining about the expected indictment, the Department of Justice, President Joe Bidens own handling of documents, Hillary Clintons digital communications while secretary of state and more.

HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENTS WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WONT BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on June 5.

CROOKED HILLARY DELETED 33,000 EMAILS ... AND WASNT EVEN CLOSE TO BEING CHARGED! ONLY TRUMP  THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!

The Justice Department began its investigation based on a referral from the National Archives in early 2022 after archivists finally got Trump to return numerous boxes and found classified material within them.

After months of negotiating, prosecutors sought and received a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, which they executed in early August, leading to the discovery of 103 classified documents on Trumps desk and a number of storage boxes intermingled with his personal papers.

Trump went to court to prevent the use of that material against him, but thus far, has not had success.

Trump said Thursday was a dark day for the United States of America but alluded those times would end should he be elected president again in 2024.

We are a Country in serious and rapid Decline, but together we will Make America Great Again! he wrote.

Trump is also under investigation by the Justice Department for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt, including the scheme to submit to the National Archives fraudulent slates of electors from states that voted for Biden as a way to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to award Trump a second term.

In addition to the federal criminal investigations, a Georgia prosecutor is looking at Trump and his allies attempts to coerce state officials into falsely declaring him the winner in that state in 2020.

And Trump this spring was indicted by the Manhattan district attorney on felony charges of falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment that he made to an adult film star just days before the 2016 election. Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges, and a trial is set for December.

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Down 2,000 Tanks, Russia Is Using Creative New Tactics to Keep Them Alive

YASUYOSHI CHIBA - Getty Images

When Russia launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it aggressively pushed its main battle tanks and lighter, but heavily-armed, BMP and BMD fighting vehicles forward on the offense. But in a classic tactical error, Russian armor lacked enough escorting infantry to detect and flush out ambushes in built-up areas.

This resulted in rapid, catastrophic lossesand contributed to Russia hitting the milestone of 2,001 main battle tanks visually confirmed destroyed, captured, or abandoned by May 30, 2023. That count only includes losses individually documented by the Oryx blogmeaning that the actual count is surely higher, considering the losses that didnt get photographed.

However, a May report by the UKs Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank clarifies that Russian tankers are now mostly using more cautious tactics supporting infantry, and employing technologies and techniques that implicitly reduce the effectiveness of even highly capable Javelin missiles supplied by the U.S.

This is part of a broader, ongoing process of adaptation by Russias military attempting to correct at least some of its least successful tactics from early in the war.

The reports authors Jack Watling and Nick Reynold arrived at their findings on Russian armor through interviews with various individuals, including two members of Ukraines general staff, the deputy commander of Ukraines northern command, deputy brigade and tank battalion commanders, and a Ukrainian tank crew.

Russias Staggering Tank Losses

Of the over-2,000 Russian tanks counted lost by Oryx, 62% were deemed permanently destroyed, another 27% were confirmed captured by Ukraine, and the remainder were labeled abandoned or heavily damaged. Attrition of valuable infantry fighting vehicles was similarly immense, with 2,372 Russian BMP, BMD, and BTR-82A vehicles lost.

John Moore - Getty Images

Ukrainian infantry armed with long-range anti-tank missilesnotably, heat-seeking Javelin missiles, shorter-ranged predictive-guidance NLOS missiles, and Ukrainian laser-guided Stugna-Psaccounted for many Russian armor losses early on. But Ukrainian sources later reported that indirect artillery fires guided by overwatching drones actually killed even more Russian tanks than anti-tank missiles.

Other contributors to losses include anti-tank mines, shorter-range anti-tank rockets, civilian quadcopter drones dropping anti-tank grenades, and Ukraines own tankswhich engaged Russian armor in battles around Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Volnovakha.

Wikimedia Commons

Russia is thought to have had an active fleet of roughly 3,000 tanks when it invaded Ukraine, meaning that it has lost the equivalent of 2/3 of what it started with. However, Russias fleet is receiving a trickle of newly produced T-90M tanks. The fleet is also receiving old Soviet tanks reactivated from storage, though Russia has only proven able to reactivate a small subset of that stockpile.

Tactical Adaptations: Infantry Support and Gunfire Raids

The RUSI report states that after the early war catastrophes, Russian armor is using significantly evolved tactics aimed at minimizing losses by keeping them in a supporting role. The primary mission is now observed to be direct fire support by tanks situated 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) from Ukrainian positions, outside the reach of shorter-range anti-tank weapons. At that distance, Russian tankists use their optics to spot enemy positions and destroy them with direct main gun fire.

The notable recent exception to that support-oriented role was Russias disastrous winter offensive targeting Vuhledar, where massed Russian armor assaults repeatedly smashed themselves to pieces against robust, prepared Ukrainian anti-tank defensesincluding pre-sighted artillery, mines, kamikaze FPV drones and anti-tank guided missilesleading to the effective destruction of Russias 155th Naval Infantry Brigades.

Currently, a favored Russian tactic is the gunfire raid, preferably made at night by agile 0020T-80BVM tanks equipped with superior passive thermal optics (many older Russian tanks rely on infrared searchlights, which expose their position when used.)

In such raids, a Russian tank rushes up to allow for direct fire on a Ukrainian position, fires off all their ammunition as rapidly as possible, and then hightails it back out of sight. Such attacks are often timed to hit Ukrainian forces changing shifts to cause maximum chaos. You can read a detailed analysis of a more risky gunfire raid recorded by a Separatist tank unit in the video below.

Russian tanks, especially old ones, are also being used as indirect fire artillery. The report observes that while this use is inefficient due to their low angle of fire, tanks are sufficiently protected to provide indirect support in higher-risk areas where artillery and munition supply convoys would be at grave risk of destruction, particularly from aerial attacks or counter-battery artillery salvoes.

Watling observes that even the antiquated T-54 and T-62 tanks that Russia has deployed to Ukraine pose a serious battlefield threat when there are a limited number of [long-range] anti-tank guided missiles Their big guns still leave them more effective in many fire support roles than most BMPs with smaller, shorter-range cannons.

Older, more expendable tanks are also often used in urban combat, where engagement range is short and flank ambushes are common enough that the advantages of modern tanks with superior optics and frontal armor are reduced.

The report notes that Russian tanks serve crucial support rolls in urban assaults through suppression of urban structures and rapid breaching of buildings to avoid entering through choke points and known avenues of advance. Less euphemistically, it implies that Russian tanks are being used to literally blast new corridors through buildings, through which infantry can ingress at reduced risk.

Close and Quick on the Draw: Tank Vs. Tank Battles

The occasional tank-vs-tank battles in Ukraine usually occur at short range, from one kilometer (.62 miles) down to just 50 meters. They are usually won by the tank that spots the other and shoots first, as has long been the case historically. Ukrainian gunners report that striking the point between the turret and glacis (frontal hull armor) is most likely to result in a one-shot-kill of a Russian tank.

A tank duel in the Luhansk region: a Ukrainian T-64 against a Russian T-72.

Another victory for the Ukrainian Armed Forces!



 by 92nd Mechanized Brigade. pic.twitter.com/ukuwhW1k91  Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) December 11, 2022

However, mobility kills aimed at tank tracks are also extremely effective, as immobilized tanks on the frontline that cant be promptly recovered are almost inevitably finished off by precision artillery or small drones dropping grenades through the hatches left open by the fleeing crew. That said, attempts to recover abandoned tanks often results in extended skirmishing by both sides.

Old and New Tricks

Watling writes that the characteristic bricks of explosive reactive armor (ERA) girding both Russian and Ukrainian tanks are actually highly effective against most anti-tank guided missiles, including gun-launched Kombat missile used by Ukrainian tanks. Multiple guided-missile hits sometimes fail to knockout Russian tanks.

But, more worryingly, Watling implies that Russia is having some success with counter-measures aimed at defeating U.S.-supplied Javelin heat-seeking top-attack missilesarguably the most expensive and capable of this type of missile given to Ukraine.

NurPhoto - Getty Images

One method is to operate around dusk and dawn (when thermal imagers struggle to distinguish vehicles) to significantly decrease.the probability of a kill as well as using special infrared signature-minimizing coverings that are highly effective in reducing the heat signatures of their vehicles.

Watling also notes that alterations to the engine decks on Russian tanks are effective in reducing their heat plume. This may refer to snorkel-like heat-venting pipes spotted before the war on some Russian tanks intended to divert IR-missiles.

As the vast majority of missiles used by and supplied to Ukraine employ optical or laser guidance, that implies that the missile being referred to is likely the IR-guided Javelin.

The RUSI reports findings may seem to contradict the huge outpouring of media showing the destruction of Russian tanks. But it also may simply mean that anti-tank methods not described in the report are responsible for a larger share of the killsparticularly mines and artillery fire.

Whether Russias more successful adaptations can stem the massive bleeding from this war remains to be seen. Theres a particular risk that Russian armor may again be subject to higher losses, as its employed for counter attacks in response to Ukraines forthcoming summer offensive.

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Sam Carter and his Architects bandmates are headlining Download for the first time

A lot has changed since Download Festival first launched in 2004.

But many of the headliners at the UK's biggest rock and metal festival have stayed the same - until this year.

Bring Me the Horizon and Architects are closing Friday's main stage - the first time both British bands have had top billing at Donington.

"It'll be a beautiful moment for the UK scene," Architects frontman Sam Carter tells BBC Newsbeat.

"When I think about where both our bands have come from to where we are now it's absolutely staggering."

Architects, from Brighton, and Bring Me the Horizon, from Sheffield, have slowly worked their way up the rock ladder, gathering new fans along the way.

Neither had headlined Download before, which traditionally opts for "legacy acts" - older bands seen as guaranteed ticket-sellers.

But some fans have long been calling for new artists to be given a chance.

Friends Jordan, 24, Alistair, 25, and Chloe, 21, told Newsbeat they'd come to this year's Download to see both UK acts.

"It's long overdue," says Jordan.

"They deserve it," says Chloe, who points out that both bands have "worked hard" to attract new fans.

Friends Jordan, Alistair and Chloe told Newsbeat they'd come to the festival to see the British bands' "overdue" moment on the main stage

Sam admits this makes the band feel like they've got a point to prove, but they're prepared to put on "one hell of a show".

"We have to go out there and really prove ourselves," he says, "really show you how much we care about what we do as a band and how much we care about our fans."

But Sam says Architects aren't taking anything for granted, and pushes back on describing more experienced bands as "legacy acts".

"You can see why they're headliners," he says.

"They're massive. They're ginormous. But we're now being given an opportunity to show that we can hopefully be some of those bands to replace them when they're not here any more."

Sam, pictured with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, says the veteran band were brilliant to tour with

Architects have been getting to spend a lot of time with one "ginormous" metal act - and a fellow Download headliner - Metallica.

They've been supporting the metal legends at stadiums around Europe - an experience Tom says has been "staggering".

And not for all the reasons you might think.

"The first day, they brought us flowers, and a cake and a card and welcomed us to the tour," he says.

"And they've invited us out for dinner every night after the shows, let us use the entire stage. They've just been so brilliant to us.

"You don't have to be that nice when you're that band, but they are that nice and it's very, very inspiring."

The Download show will be especially poignant for the Architects boys, who lost their guitarist and songwriter Tom Searle to cancer in 2016 when he was just 28.

He was with the band when they opened at Download ten years ago, so Sam says the return is "an important weekend".

Guitarist Tom Searle, pictured in 2013, performed with Architects at their early Download shows

"Life is a lot of ups and downs," he says.

"And just because we're now in a place where we can go on stage and have fun and enjoy ourselves doesn't mean that we're not not thinking about Tom.

"We're going up there and doing this for Tom, we're doing what he would want us to do.

"You get one shot at this life, and it can go very, very quickly.

"I hope that people that are going through tricky moments can see that you can come out the other side."

Newsbeat logo

Follow Newsbeat on Twitter and YouTube.

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.
Charlie Beck, center, then interim Chicago police superintendent, and Mayor Lori Lightfoot sit for photos with the newest members of the Chicago Police Department prior to the graduation ceremony at Navy Pier on Dec. 18, 2019. (Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune)

Its fitting that the citys new public safety commission must deliver a slate of three candidates for the job of Chicago police superintendent to Mayor Brandon Johnson by July 14.

By that date, the July Fourth weekend will have given Johnson a second key occasion to assess the citys needs when it comes to naming Chicagos next top cop. The first came over Memorial Day weekend  during which 11 people were killed and some 50 others wounded in shootings.

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Historically the two early-summer holidays are among the most violent weekends on the citys calendar. And as Johnson awaits a list of three candidates from the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, from which he can nominate one, the proximity to Memorial Day and July Fourth serves as a reminder of all thats at stake when naming the Chicago Police Departments next chief.

Johnson so far has focused mostly on the long-term factors that contribute to shootings and homicides. He says poverty, poor education, disinvestment and even mental health issues are root causes of the surge of violent crime that has bedeviled Chicago for years.

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The long-term factors are important, no doubt. And addressing them will take a lot more than just good police work. But the city needs strong leadership and smart tactics at the top of CPD to make the streets safer right now.

[ Kenneth Corey: The choice for police superintendent is critical. Chicago needs to get it right. ]

Leadership, strategy and tactics  and an urgent demand for reform  are key focuses that the public safety commission, and then the mayor, need to underscore when theyre choosing the next top cop.

Its a point worth making because so far, it seems, a different credential is emerging in public discussion that is getting more weight than it deserves. A view is developing in some circles that only candidates with CPD pedigrees should be considered for the top job.

People at forums held by the commission have called for a CPD veteran. Rank-and-file cops have said the same. The names of at least four such people have even begun to circulate as supposed leading candidates. Johnson during the campaign indicated he would favor a candidate who came from CPDs ranks, a position he has not amended since taking office.

The only-locals narrative has gained traction in part due to David Browns utter ineptitude as superintendent under Mayor Lori Lightfoot. The import from Dallas had other evident shortcomings, yet his outsider status has earned outsize blame for his failure.

True, Brown did come from somewhere else, and the scale of Chicagos problems dwarfed those he dealt with in Dallas. But Brown ultimately couldnt lead CPD not because he was an outsider but because he just was not a leader. He constantly shifted tactics. He developed little connection to rank-and-file cops, who retired in droves. He lost the support of his command staff  several of whom quit rather than continue working for him.

We should not let the recency bias of Brown color our view of outside leadership altogether. After all, outsiders can succeed at CPD, as recent history shows. Garry McCarthy and Charlie Beck are cases in point, each for different reasons.

McCarthy came from New Jersey in 2011, under appointment by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and within a year was lauded for his handling of the NATO summit  specifically, standing on the front lines with no protective equipment, pushing back protesters who tried to disrupt the meeting.

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McCarthy also had ample flaws: a traditionalist mindset that resisted reform and the mishandling of circumstances surrounding the police murder of Laquan McDonald. But the almost immediate embrace of him from the department discredits the notion that Chicago police wont respond to an outsiders command.

Beck came from Los Angeles after being named acting superintendent in 2019 to succeed Eddie Johnson  a CPD lifer who got fired for indiscretions with a subordinate and an impaired driving episode that disgraced the department. In just a few short months, Beck exhibited strategic thinking and a zest for change. He moved hundreds of detectives, narcotics and gangs officers to the districts to better fight crime in the neighborhoods, and Beck created a new office to carry out CPDs federal consent decree.

Beck did not have a CPD pedigree. What he did have was the experience of working within, then leading, the Los Angeles Police Department during a period in which corruption, racial bias and rogue policing were squarely addressed  in part as the result of the LAPDs push to comply with its federal consent decree.

[ Charlie Beck: Police reform is possible in Chicago, but it starts with officers ]

Becks brief tenure shows what an aptitude for strategy and a reformist mindset can bring to the job. Sometimes it takes an outsider see the solutions that insiders overlook  a circumstance that applies to CPD, which has made little progress on the reforms mandated by the consent decree, now 4 years old and counting. One clear sign that Brown was not the right pick was his decision to undo many of Becks reforms.

City Inspector General Deborah Witzburg, who previously was deputy inspector general for public safety, even has warned that experience in CPD could be a negative. Given the Chicago police forces troubled history, there are valid questions about whether someone from the ranks truly can be the agent of reform that CPD so urgently needs.

Experience at CPD should not be a disqualifying factor. Some of the known candidates who have spent years in a Chicago uniform could succeed in the role. But outsider status could also very well make an otherwise qualified candidate a very promising prospect.

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David Greising is president and CEO of the Better Government Association.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
Russian mass media write that the drone crashed into the house

Photos of the residential complex allegedly damaged during the attack appeared on Telegram. Preliminary information suggests the drone may have been flying towards the Baltimor airfield but collided with a window of a residential building, reported pro-Russian channel Baza.

Read also: Russians down own drone in Crimea, mistaking it for Ukrainian one

The governor reported three injuries.

Emergency services are currently working at the scene.

Baza

Baza

Read also: Amid strikes targeting Moscow, Kremlin's main hospital to urgently construct bomb shelter

Russia was quick to blame Ukraine, with Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, making the accusation, Russian propagandist media reported.

"The Kyiv regime continues to attack civilian infrastructure and residential buildings. The activities of the Kyiv regime persist, and we continue to fight against it," Peskov lied.

In the early morning of May 30, unidentified drones attacked Moscow. The UAVs struck at least three multi-story buildings, Russian media reported.

Read also: US will continue to provide Ukraine with weapons despite attack on Moscow  White House

More than ten drones were shot down in the suburbs, reported Baza, with the majority in the districts of Istra, Krasnogorsk, and Odintsovo.

Commenting on the drone strike in Moscow, Mykhailo Podoliak, an advisor to the Head of the Presidents Office, cryptically stated that the drones "want to return to their creators." He emphasized that Ukraine has no connection to the attack.

Read also: Ukraine can strike Russia in self-defense, says German government spokesperson

Were bringing the voice of Ukraine to the world. Support us with a one-time donation, or become a Patron!

Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Demonstrators gather outside Tuesday's meeting of the Glendale Unified School District board, where pro- and anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrators faced off over how schools teach gender and sexuality. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

It was supposed to be a routine vote. On the Tuesday agenda for the Glendale Unified School District Board of Education was an item designating June as Pride Month for the LGBTQ+ community, recognizing the month in which the 1969 Stonewall uprising began. Local boards and councils vote on ceremonial items like this all the time to recognize various communities in their districts.

But then the agents of hate showed up. Even before the meeting, dozens of people gathered outside to lodge their objection to a vote that they believe supported the rights of LGBTQ+ people. Among the protesters were members of the Proud Boys, a group advocating for white supremacist and anti-government ideologies that participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Soon, LGBTQ+ advocates showed up to protest the protesters, and before long the crowd became unruly and violent. Three people were arrested.

In the end, the Glendale school board voted to support the designation and, in so doing, took a courageous stand against an insidious strain of intolerance that has been creeping into public school districts across the nation.

Just the week before, a very similar scenario played out in North Hollywood over a school assembly featuring, The Great Big Book of Families at the Saticoy Elementary School. Protesters carried signs with statements such as, Parental Choice Matters. Ironically, Saticoy parents did have a choice about whether they wanted their kids to attend the assembly.

That protest didn't scare the Los Angeles Unified school board either. On Tuesday the board passed a resolution listing upcoming events it will recognize in addition to Pride Month, such as LGBTQ+ History Month in October and Transgender Day of Remembrance on Nov. 20. In addition, the resolution encourages all district schools to incorporate LGBTQ+ curriculum adopted by the state.

Troublingly, the protests in Glendale and North Hollywood are part of a growing political movement nationwide targeting LGBTQ+ communities, trying to silence and erase them, and even often falsely accusing them of crimes. Books that have been banned in districts nationwide, including in California, are often targeted solely because they include LGBTQ+ characters or topics.

On Tuesday, the Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. in light of more than 525 state bills in 2023 targeting them. It was the first time in its 43-year history that the civil rights organization made such a declaration. More than 70 of these bills have been signed into law so far this year.

These targeted campaigns arent just happening in states governed by primarily Republican legislators. At the Temecula Valley Unified School District in Riverside County, teachers protested on Tuesday after the school board rejected social studies textbooks and curriculum for elementary students that contained what school board members called morally objectionable material. School board President Joseph Komrosky called slain gay rights activist and former San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk a pedophile. Shame on that board for tolerating such hateful statements at a public meeting.

Too many school districts are giving into the intolerant bullies. Los Angeles and Glendale should be proud that their school boards did not.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Elise Stefanik Is Already Raising Money (For Herself) Off Of Trump's Indictment

The grift begins.

Within hours of former President Donald Trump being federally indicted, House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) was already fundraising off of the news  for Trump, but almost entirely for herself.

President Trump has been indicted on federal charges, reads the subject line of a Thursday-night email from Team Elise, Stefaniks joint fundraising committee.

Bidens weaponized federal government has handed President Trump BOGUS CHARGES over the Boxes Hoax, says the email. They are just trying to keep him out of the White House in 2024. President Trump needs ALL of his loyal supporters to stand with him at this crucial time.

RUSH A DONATION TO OUR OFFICIAL TRUMP DEFENSE FUND TO STAND WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP, the email shouts.

House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik wasted no time fundraising off of Trump's indictment  for herself. Here's a screenshot of her email.

House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik wasted no time fundraising off of Trump's indictment  for herself. Here's a screenshot of her email.

Its pretty tacky to raise money off of a former president being indicted, but thats not the worst of it. Stefanik uses a sneaky tactic in her fundraising email to try to get as much money from people as possible, even if they may not realize what theyre agreeing to.

Her email is set up so that if you click through to donate money to Trump, the website automatically checks a little box making your donation a monthly recurring donation. You have to be paying attention to notice this.

Stefanik's fundraising email automatically checks a box that signs people up to give recurring donations to her and Trump.

Stefanik's fundraising email automatically checks a box that signs people up to give recurring donations to her and Trump.

And even though Stefaniks fundraising email and landing page say these donations are for an official defense fund for Trump, when you read the fine print, you can see that virtually all of that money is set up to go to Stefanik.

Underneath brightly colored graphics of suggested donation amounts that you can directly click on  $100, $500 or even $3,300, the maximum donation allowed  is a tiny sentence that says to click on it for details about how your donation will be allocated. Its here that you can see where your money is automatically set up to go.

There's a tiny sentence in Elise Stefanik's fundraising email that, if you see it and click on it, will show you that most of the money you're giving to Trump is automatically set up to go to Stefanik.

There's a tiny sentence in Elise Stefanik's fundraising email that, if you see it and click on it, will show you that most of the money you're giving to Trump is automatically set up to go to Stefanik.

A $250 donation to the OFFICIAL TRUMP DEFENSE FUND, for example, breaks down to $247.50 for Stefanik and $2.50 for the Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee.

A $500 donation translates to $495 for Stefanik and $5 for Trump.

A $3,300 donation breaks down to $3,267 for Stefanik and $33 for Trump.

You can edit these allocations, of course. But you have to be paying attention to that little sentence in the first place, and to the fact that you can edit the preset allocations.



A $3,300 donation to the so-called Official Trump Defense Fund breaks down to $3,267 for Elise Stefanik and $33 for Trump.

A $3,300 donation to the so-called Official Trump Defense Fund breaks down to $3,267 for Elise Stefanik and $33 for Trump.

A Stefanik spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on why she is raising money off of Trumps indictment, or why she is raising money for a so-called official defense fund for Trump when most of that money is set to go directly to her campaign.

Democrats are hoping to make some money off of Trumps indictment, too.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who is running for Senate, sent out a fundraising email Thursday night warning that Trump is going to lash out at his enemies now that hes been indicted for a second time. Schiff said hes going to be at the top of his list for ugly attacks.

Rush $10 to my campaign right now to help us prepare for Trumps inevitable attacks  and ensure we defeat him and his MAGA movement in 2024, reads the email from the Schiff for Senate Campaign. Once and for all.

His email does not automatically sign people up for monthly recurring donations, though, and it directs all donations to his Senate campaign.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wasted little time fundraising off of Trump being indicted.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wasted little time fundraising off of Trump being indicted.

A Schiff spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on why hes fundraising off of the former presidents indictment.

The Democratic Governors Association on Friday also made a fundraising appeal, asking supporters in an email to take a survey about Trumps indictment that actually leads to asking for money.

Of course, Trump, who regularly sends out fundraising emails for himself, has already sent out three such emails since being indicted Thursday night.

The first one has the subject line MY FIRST TIME SPEAKING SINCE INDICTMENT, and it leads to a four-minute video of Trump saying hes innocent and a written plea for money. The second one decries the never-ending witch hunts facing Trump and leads to another video of the former president saying hes innocent. The third one offers to throw in a free T-shirt if you give Trump money before midnight on Friday.

None of his emails automatically signs people up for monthly recurring donations if they give him money, and all direct the full donation to his campaign.

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Elliot Page had a secret relationship with a closeted actor for almost 2 years: 'We never touched outside, we barely went to dinner'

Elliot Page had a secret relationship for almost two years with a closeted female actor. Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic/Getty Images

Elliot Page had a secret relationship for almost two years with a closeted female actor.

That's according to the Canadian-born actor's new memoir, "Pageboy."

"It was not a sustainable relationship," Page wrote. "I don't think she could handle the shame."

Elliot Page said that he and a closeted female actor had a secret relationship for almost two years.

In his memoir "Pageboy," which was published this week, the actor has shared many bombshell revelations about his personal life, including that he had a relationship with actor Kate Mara while she was dating Max Minghella, and that he was "groomed" by an unnamed male director while he was a teenager.

In a chapter dedicated to his relationship with the unknown female star  who he referred to as "Ryan," the pseudonym he had her listed as in his phone  Page wrote that they were "desperately in love" but ended up splitting because their relationship was "unsustainable."

According to the "Umbrella Academy" star, the pair "met making a film together" when he was 26, which is also when he came out as gay.

Describing the first moment he laid eyes on "Ryan," Page wrote: "She was radiant  her dress, her smile, how she pushed her hair from her face."

They "discussed books, activism, our collective consciousness, and the deep intelligence of nature," and "would hold hands under a blanket" while on set so as not to alert others to their clandestine romance, Page recalled.

Elliot Page has shared his story in a new memoir, which was released on June 6. Amazon

"We were together for almost two years, and even some of my closest friends were not aware I was in a relationship," Page wrote. "Her parents did not know. I was the friend that came for Christmas. Only her sister and two of her friends knew."

"We never touched outside, we barely went to dinner," he added.

Page, who announced that he was transgender in 2020, said that although "Ryan would "question queerness," something that made Page "angry at her," he put his concerns aside.

"I wanted to be with her, we loved each other, cared deeply, and had a meaningful time together. There was a lot of goodness there, healing even," he wrote.

Although there was a lot of secrecy surrounding their relationship, Page said they managed to have "a lot of fun" and described how they had "discreet adventurous sex," including behind a boulder at Joshua Tree National Park and on an airplane.

Page recalled that while lying in bed one night "Ryan" suggested that they should get boyfriends to "throw people off, as if that would mitigate the shame and vigilance."

Elliot Page, known for starring in the Oscar-winning film "Juno," came out as transgender in 2020. Rich Polk/Getty Images for IMDb

The couple eventually broke up because "it was not a sustainable relationship," Page wrote. "The lying, the anxiety, the disgust. People didn't 'think she was queer,' but they definitely assumed I was, and I don't think she could handle the shame."

"Ultimately, she had to do what was best for her, and unfortunately it resulted in my heart being shattered."

The Canadian-born actor wrote that not long after their separation, he saw "Ryan" again at a mutual friend's party with a "tall and handsome" man.

"I guess I should be happy for her, I tried to convince myself. I wanted to be, to be evolved, but it was too much. It unreservedly gutted me," Page wrote.

Page said he pretended to get food poisoning to excuse himself from the party, only to have "Ryan"'s date bring over some coconut water.

"He had no idea about our history of course," he wrote. "It was a kind gesture, but I wanted to take that coconut water and throw it."

"Pageboy" by Elliot Page is out now.

Read the original article on Insider
Elon Musk's SpaceX recently launched the biggest and most powerful rocket into flight, even though it did not make it into orbit. But the world's richest man isn't content on expanding his sci-fi inspired technology into just the cosmos.

Neuralink, the tech startup co-founded by Musk, also wants to embark on a fantastic voyage into the brain. Two weeks ago, the company announced it had gained approval from the Food and Drug Administration to begin trials to implant brain chips into humans.

We don't know when trials will begin, but there's plenty of buzz around Neuralink's development of a brain-computer interface. Neuralink's valuation has risen to about $5 billion from $2 billion two years ago, Reuters reported this week.

It will likely be years before many patients get the Neuralink treatment, but that isn't stopping investors. "The valuation has risen significantly the last few years in the private markets and as use cases and execution is proven out by Neuralink investors will take more notice," said Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. "Musk has had the historic golden touch with Tesla and SpaceX so Neuralink is on the radar of the tech world over the coming years."

"Neuralink is just in the early stages of massive innovation and laying the groundwork for another revolutionary technology coming out of the Musk ecosystem," he said.

What does the Neuralink brain chip actually do?

Neuralink's goal with its human trials is to eventually enable a person with paralysis to use a computer or phone with their brain activity alone. The Neuralink 1 implant actually includes multiple chips, a wireless battery and other electronics hermetically sealed within a device about the size of a large coin.

Several dozen ultra-thin threads protrude from the implant; those go directly into the brain. Signals from the implant are sent via Bluetooth to, and decoded by, a brain-computer interface (BCI), which would allow a person to, for instance, control an onscreen cursor or move a robotic limb.

Elon Musk shows the Neuralink disk implant in this video grab from an online presentation on August 28, 2020. Neuralink said FDA clearance for its first in-human clinical study is "an important first step" for its technology, which is intended to let brains interface directly with computers.

"The first thing that we're going after is a wireless implanted chip that would enable someone who is a  tetraplegic or quadriplegic to control a computer, or mouse, or their phone, or really any device  just by thinking. This obviously would be a massive enabler, make life way easier for them," Musk said in an online chat in 2021. "I'd say it's like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires that go to your brain."

Beyond helping paralyzed patients regain some mobility and communicate without typing, Neuralink's longer-term goals include helping restore full mobility and sight.

How is the Neuralink chip inserted into the body?

Neuralink has created a surgical robot, especially designed to embed the implant and its 64 ultra-thin flexible connected threads upon which are 1,024 electrodes that record neural activity.

The robot has five built-in camera systems and uses optical coherence tomography for non-invasive imaging of brain tissue. The robot uses a needle as thin as a human hair, which inserts the "threads exactly where they need to be," Neuralink's site says.

Elon Musk stands next to the Neuralink surgical robot in this video grab from an online presentation on August 28, 2020. Elon Musk's start-up Neuralink on May 25, 2023 said it has gotten approval from US regulators to test its brain implants in people.

Elon Musk's Neuralink: Tech billionaire wants people to control computers with their minds.

When will Neuralink begin testing the chips in humans?

Neuralink tweeted on May 25 about getting FDA approval to launch its first in-human clinical study. The achievement "represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people," the company said. "Recruitment is not yet open for our clinical trial. Well announce more information on this soon!"

During a presentation on Nov. 30, 2022, Musk said the company could begin implanting its chips in humans as part of a clinical trial in about six months.

But it could take a decade or so for Neuralink to make its brain implant available commercially. Kip Ludwig, the former program director for neural engineering at the National Institutes of Health, told Reuters he "optimistically" expected Neuralink to take at least 10 more years to commercialize its brain implant.

Neuralink also faces regulators' investigations into its research protocols, including the treatment of animals  rats, mice, sheep, pigs and monkeys have been used in research  and whether the company illegally and unsafely packed and shipped chips, removed from monkeys' brains and contaminated with infectious, dangerous pathogens, Reuters reported.

The FDA rejected Neuralink's application for human trials in 2022, citing several issues including the potential for the implants threads to migrate to other areas of the brain, Reuters reported.

The company is currently looking to hire a neurosurgeon, animal welfare and animal care specialists, an institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) administrator, a clinical trial manager, and fill a slew of other tech jobs.

Based on Musk's handling of Twitter, some experts were surprised at the FDA's granting Neuralink approval for human trials.

Laura Cabrera, a neuroethicist at Penn States Rock Ethics Institute, told The Guardian she was surprised in the agency's decision. Is he going to see a brain implant device as something that requires not just extra regulation, but also ethical consideration? she said. Or will he just treat this like another gadget?

The investigations may be a sign there's "sloppy work" happening at Neuralink, said L. Syd M Johnson, a neuroethicist at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities in SUNY Upstate Medical University, to The Guardian. There are some ethical concerns about privacy, anytime youre using a brain device, she saidzi. Things to look out for are: will Neuralink have access to the brain data of the people that they implant these devices in? What are they going to do with it? And how are they going to protect user privacy?

Here's a breakdown on Neuralink's research so far.

In August 2020, Musk demonstrated brain activity in a pig with the chip implanted and in April 2021, Neuralink demonstrated how a chip-implanted monkey could play Pong.

During November 2022 event, which was livestreamed, Musk said, I could have a Neuralink device implanted right now, and you wouldnt even know, CNBC reported.

Eventually, Neuralink would make it so Youll be able to save and replay memories.  The future is going to be weird, he said at a 2020 event.

Brain tech competition: Elon Musk's Neuralink approved for human trials, Austin's Paradromics close behind

Other companies are competing with Musk's Neuralink in brain technology

Neuralink may be the hot name, but many researchers have been studying interfacing brains with computers for decades, as a way to treat brain injuries and other applications.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have invested in Synchron, which is headquartered in Brooklyn with offices in Melbourne, Australia, and has already had its brain-computer interface (BCI) tested in humans. The journal JAMA Neurology published in January a one-year study of four patients who had the company's Stentrode inserted through the blood vessels into the brain's motor cortex. An antenna in the chest transmits brain data it collects.

The patients had no health issues and were able to send texts, emails, and shop online, according to the research. The technology can help patients with paralysis get "the return of things we take for granted, like texting loved ones or turning on a light, said Synchron founder Tom Oxley.

Blackrock Neurotech, in Salt Lake City, Utah, has been testing brain implants for nearly two decades, and says its device has helped people who are paralyzed control limbs, prosthetics and devices. The company is working to secure FDA approval, Reuters reported.In Austin, Texas, Paradromics hopes to begin in-human trials as early as the first half of next year with its own device, the Connexus Direct Data Interface. Tiny electrodes implanted in brain tissue capture and transmit neural signals which are then decoded and sent to external devices through a transmitter installed under the skin in the chest.

This technology may seem like something out of "Total Recall" but it's already happening. More than 150,000 people living in the United States have a type of brain implant called deep brain stimulators used to treat tremors caused by movement disorders such as Parkinson's, said Matt Angle, the CEO who founded Paradromics in 2015.

Those implants are more invasive than the types Paradromics and Neuralink are developing. "If you're getting it so you can play Nintendo Switch, I would say that's probably a bad choice. But if you're getting this because you have ALS and you're losing the ability to talk to your family, it's a really easy decision," Angle said.

Contributing: Bailey Schulz and Kara Carlson of the USA TODAY Network and The Associated Press.

Follow Mike Snider on Twitter: @mikesnider.

What's everyone talking about? Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Musk's Neuralink got FDA approval for brain chips in human trials
Escape to the Chateau stars Dick and Angel Strawbridge are reportedly set to shut down their French venture after being dropped by producers at Channel 4.

The married couple appeared on the programme, which follows their renovation of a 19th-century chateau in Martigne-sur-Mayenne, France, for nine series, beginning in 2016 and ending in December 2022.

However, the show ended after rumours emerged of a deteriorating relationship between [production company]Two Rivers and Dick and Angels Chateau TV for various reasons.

Deadline first reported that the broadcaster had ended its relationship with the Strawbridges earlier this month. According to the article, an independent HR investigation was ordered by Channel 4 after Two Rivers Media, the company that produces the Escape To The Chateau franchise, raised concerns about the couple.

Following a review, we have taken the decision not to work with Dick and Angel on any new productions in the future, a Channel 4 spokeswoman said.

The outlet then obtained a foul-mouthed audio recording, in which Angel can be heard calling a producer a f***ed up little c***.

It has now been reported that the couple have applied to close their castle company Chateau-de-la-Motte Husson Limited.

MailOnline reports that the application to Companies House was signed on 9 May, with the company allegedly set to be dissolved within the next six weeks.

All of the chateaus events are now marked unavailable, with the couple telling fans that they are endeavouring to catch up after completing their first international theatre and book-signing tour in Australia and New Zealand.

We are currently on a two year weddings 'catch-up, we will reopen enquiries as soon as we can! a message under the weddings section of their website states.

The Independent has contacted the Strawbridges for comment.

Angel and Dick Strawbridge on Lorraine' (ITV)

This development follows the Strawbridges annoucement of a UK tour on Thursday (8 June).

Its been nearly a year in the planning and we simply could not wait to tell you that we are hitting the road for our biggest ever theatre tour! the couple wrote, while vowing to set the record straight.

Escape to the Chateau came to an end in December 2022, with the couple saying they believed the show was going out on a high. They said in a statement last month: It was a Strawbridge Family decision early last year to conclude Escape To The Chateau.

The couple added in a statement via their joint Instagram page: We know there are lots of stories in the press right now. Its not worth us even trying to comment or give context, because anything can be made into a good headline. We understand.

They continued: There are two sides to every story and from the incredible support we have received, most of you know that. We are proud of who we are, and we feel we must do what we believe to be correct, that is in fact what kept Escape to the Chateau unique, and whilst we have indeed parted ways with Channel 4, we are hugely grateful to them and their teams for their support and creativity over the years.

The future truly could not look more exciting and we thank you for your continued love and support.

Dick and Angel Strawbridge vow to set record straight on tour (Instagram)

A Channel 4 spokesperson said: Channel 4 is taking an active role in challenging unacceptable behaviour in our industry. Following a review of our processes in 2021 we have made it easier to raise complaints both formally and informally.

We require all our production partners to follow our Supplier Code of Conduct and when concerns are raised with us, they will be taken seriously and action will happen to ensure they are investigated and addressed appropriately. There is always more to do and alongside our suppliers we are committed to building safe, inclusive and professional working environments.

You can read more about the Strawbridges here.
The Defence Forces of Ukraine are looking for a correct way to apply forces but so far it is too early to talk about whether they will repeat the success of last years offensive in Kharkiv Oblast.

Source: European Pravda and ERR with reference to Margo Grosberg, head of the Intelligence Centre of the Defence Forces of Estonia

Grosberg states that at the moment the fighting is ongoing mainly around the city of Bakhmut, but the intensity of fighting has especially increased in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

"Mainly near the settlement of Orikhiv in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, but also the fights in the direction from Velyka Novosilka towards Mariupol, which have been ongoing for a week," Grosberg reported.

Grosberg stressed that the main strike in the counteroffensive has not been launched yet but instead the formation operations are being carried out. The search for the possible points of breach of the Russian defence is ongoing, and from there it will be possible to advance, mobilising the reserves.

"But it is possible that we may not see such a large-scale and huge offensive, like we saw in Kharkiv Oblast last autumn. Frankly speaking, the Russian Federation also has had nine months to prepare. The search for places for such a breach may take a lot of time," he added.

Even though the campaign is not as successful as that of last autumn yet, there are no signs of any serious failures either.

"This offensive operation will certainly be more complex, more multifaceted than on the Kharkiv front in the autumn," he stressed.

It is still unknown on which front Ukraine plans to continue the counteroffensive.

Grosberg estimates that the intensity of combat action will most likely be progressively increasing but this will depend mainly on the level of preparation and combat spirit of the Russian forces.

"Of course, Ukrainians undoubtedly prevail in combat spirit because they are liberating their land," Grosberg concluded.

Earlier, the CNN channel with reference to American top officials reported that the Ukrainian forces had some success after breaching the Russian defence near the city of Bakhmut, but suffered significant losses.

At the same time, sources told CNN that the recent losses of the Ukrainian forces will not affect the planned Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Moreover, the Intelligence Centre of the Defence Forces of Estonia reported that the intensity of combat action in Ukraine has increased significantly, and the Ukrainian Armed Forces are attacking the Russians on several fronts at the same time.

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(Bloomberg) -- European Union countries are still struggling to agree on new sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, as member states continue to haggle over just how tough enforcement should be.

Most Read from Bloomberg

The main aim of the EUs 11th sanctions package, which the bloc originally hoped to adopt around last months Group of Seven summit in Japan, is to tighten loopholes and tackle circumvention. Envoys to the bloc didnt reach an agreement in the latest discussions this week.

That goal is particularly acute in terms of cracking down on Moscows ability to source banned technologies through third countries  such as the United Arab Emirates, Armenia, Kazakhstan and others in central Asia  that end up in Russian weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine. The European Commission, the EUs executive arm, proposed a new mechanism to target countries that arent doing enough to prevent Russia from evading export restrictions.

A spokesperson for the commission declined to comment.

The primary aim of the tool would be to deter governments from helping Russia. But if diplomatic pressure proves ineffective, the mechanism would give member states the power to adopt targeted export restrictions on key goods. It would feature two lists: one of restricted goods, and the other of countries which the listed items cant be sent to.

However, a group of countries, including France and Germany, have been seeking to weaken the proposals criteria by raising the bar on when it can target a country and limiting the scope of the trade sectors it covers, according to diplomats familiar with discussions over the past weeks and days.

Others would prefer targeting companies first rather than countries, despite arguments that new firms are easy to set up and such a move would mean the bloc having to constantly chase new entities that pop up.

Watering Down

The concern, one of the diplomats said, is that the mechanism could get so watered down that it would effectively be too hard to deploy and at the same time become weak as a deterrent. Some governments worry that targeting third countries could damage the EUs relations with those nations and push them even closer to Russia, the diplomats said.

The debate has exposed the challenge the EU faces in working to enforce its own sanctions in a manner that is tough and consistent across the bloc, with the lack of common tools often meaning that enforcement is patchy and comes down to the political will of individual member states to implement the rules.

Meanwhile, Hungary and Greece continue to want to see some of their companies removed from a Ukrainian blacklist of what Kyiv calls international sponsors of war and are holding off on giving the overall package their green light. Discussions on that issue are ongoing even though the Ukrainian list isnt a sanction and has no legal implications, several of the diplomats said.

An EU official said they were confident all the details could be solved next week.

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The chaos continued in southern Ukraine Friday as security forces, emergency workers and regular citizens risked life and limb to evacuate people from a vast area flooded by the destruction of a crucial dam in Russian held territory. At least several square miles along a southern stretch of the Dnipro river, lined by industry and farmland, have been inundated by floodwater that's swirling with debris, fuel and other contaminants.

Ukraine accused Russia of blowing up the Nova Kakhovka hydro-power plant and dam "from inside" early Tuesday morning, unleashing a torrent of water from the massive reservoir it held back onto the surrounding Kherson region.

The city of Kherson is less than 50 miles downstream from the broken dam. Ukraine's Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said Friday in a social media post that four people were confirmed dead and at least 13 more were missing amid the flooding. He said some 2,412 people had been evacuated. A Russian official in the region put the death toll at eight.

Volunteers help to evacuate residents from a flooded area after the Nova Kakhovka dam was destroyed amid Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, in Kherson, southern Ukraine, June 8, 2023. / Credit: ALINA SMUTKO/REUTERS

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on the Telegram messaging app that "hundreds of thousands of people" in towns and villages along the flooded Dnipro were struggling to find fresh drinking water.

"In more than 40 settlements, life is broken," said the president, who's top diplomat earlier this week accused Russia of blowing up the dam in a "heinous war crime."

Russia, whose forces had occupied the key piece of infrastructure for months, claimed it was Ukrainian troops that damaged the dam, but Moscow has offered no evidence to back up the claim. Military analysts have said Vladimir Putin's troops, who are facing a counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces, stood the most to gain with the dam's destruction.

An infographic shows the stretch of the Dnipro river, in southern Ukraine, south of the destroyed Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant and dam, left at risk of flooding. / Credit: Yasin Demirci/Anadolu Agency/Getty

The dam was also a key road across the Dnipro river, which in much of southern Ukraine serves as a geographic barrier between Ukrainian-held ground to the west, and Russian-held ground to the east. By flooding a wide stretch along the southern portion of the river, the border between the two sides has been enlarged by several times, which will complicate any concerted bid by Ukrainian troops to push Russia back in the parts of the Kherson region it still occupies.

Ukraine's long-awaited counteroffensive was underway, a U.S. official told CBS News on Friday, saying Ukrainian brigades trained by U.S. and NATO forces were making good progress as they engaged Russian troops in the Zaporzhzhia region, just north of Kherson.

In the city of Kherson, which Ukraine reclaimed from Russian forces last year, and the flooded areas around it, rescue efforts in the disaster zone have been severely hampered by the fact that it is also an active war zone.

A flooded area is seen after the Nova Kakhovka dam was breached amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in Kherson, Ukraine, June 8, 2023. / Credit: STRINGER/REUTERS

Evacuating residents is a deadly business. Boats move swiftly through the flood-stricken areas, ferrying people not only to dry land, but also away from the ongoing Russian bombardment.

News cameras rolled as one elderly man was rescued by volunteers from his submerged home, only to be hit moments later in the head by flying shrapnel as a shell landed nearby.

Asked what it was like operating under such conditions, one rescue worker just blurted out, "adrenaline!" before indicating that he needed to get moving because of incoming fire.

Ukraine's Chief Rabbi, Moshe Reuven Azman, was among those helping emergency crews bring residents to safety on Thursday when more shells landed nearby. He was recording a video for social media about the efforts when he and his fellow rescuers were forced to duck for cover as explosions rang out nearby.

We are now in Kherson, were trying to evacuate people ... miraculously survived. Details later pic.twitter.com/oHcKcTcw0h  Chief Rabbi Of Ukraine Moshe Azman (@RabbiUkraine) June 8, 2023

"We are now in Kherson, we're trying to evacuate people... miraculously survived," he said later in a tweet with the video.

North of Kherson, meanwhile, on the long front line that stretches up and down the full length of eastern Ukraine, the country's forces have stepped up offensive operations around the beleaguered city of Bakhmut, which was only recently taken by Russian troops.

Ukrainian officials have said they're making steady gains along the front line in recent days and weeks but, despite intense speculation, they have not declared a formal start to the long-awaited full-scale counteroffensive.

U.S. officials told CBS News this week that the counteroffensive appeared to be in its opening phases, and they've noted an increase in fighting in a key region along the southern front line.

All the cases and investigations Trump is facing

Trump could face up to 10 years in prison on federal charges, legal expert says

Trump changes lawyers amid indictment
Ever wondered why indictments are filed by a grand jury? Here's what grand juries do

The historic criminal charges brought against former President Donald Trump involving dozens of counts of allegedly violating eight federal statutes related to the handling of classified documents after he left the White House has put the federal legal system into the spotlight as many wonder what happens next.

Trump received an indictment over the charges from a grand jury on Thursday, with his arraignment set in federal court in Miami on Tuesday at 2 p.m. CDT.

The 44-page indictment was unsealed on Friday and details the former presidents alleged crimes. Trump was charged with suggesting his lawyer falsely tell the FBI and grand jury that he didn't have classified documents and directing his aide Walt Nauta to move boxes of documents to hide them from the lawyer, the FBI and the grand jury, according to USA Today.

Charges against Trump: 'This is secret': Donald Trump indictment details charges against former president

Before that indictment could be filed, prosecutors presented an outline of their case that included evidence and witness testimony to a federal grand jury in Miami. Once the case has been heard, the grand jury votes in secret to file the indictment.

Heres what the process looks like.

What is a grand jury?

A grand jury is an impartial group of 23 citizens who are tasked with determining whether or not there is probable cause to believe that someone has committed a federal offense within the venue of the district court, according to the Department of Justice.

The jury will meet once a week during its 12-month term. Attendance is critical for grand juries, which have a 16-member quorum if an emergency prevents a grand jurors attendance. A grand jury must stop if a grand jury does not have a quorum.

Once a case has been presented to a grand jury, they will vote in secret to determine whether they will file an indictment or return a no-bill, which simply means the jury concluded there was not enough evidence of guilt to support a criminal charge.

A jury needs 12 or more votes to indict a defendant.

How is a grand jury selected?

Federal law dictates that grand juries are selected from a fair pool of citizens randomly drawn from lists of registered voters, according to the Handbook for Federal Grand Jurors. Similar to jury selection for a trial jury, the remaining candidates not exempt or excused will appear before the court where the presiding judge will consider any further requests to be excused. A selection of 23 qualified citizens will then become members of the grand jury.

What happens after indictment? What happens now that Trump is indicted? His arraignment. Here's what to know

How is a grand jury different from a trial jury?

As described above, a grand jurys only duty is to determine whether there is probable cause to believe the accused has committed a crime and should be put on trial. This group of 23 impartial citizens hears an outline of the argument against the accused, including evidence and witness testimony. They will then vote in secret to determine whether an indictment is filed against the defendant or to return a no-bill.

Grand jury proceedings are secret and not open to the public, and documentation regarding an indictment is sealed so that only the people present in the room have knowledge of the case.

A trial jury, also known as a petit jury, is a group of 12 impartial citizens who determine whether the defendant committed the crime as charged. These trials are typically public, aside from jury deliberations, and they issue a verdict rather than a true bill (indictment) or a no-bill.

Unlike grand juries, where defendants and attorneys dont have the right to appear before it, defendants have the right to appear, testify and call witnesses on their behalf.

What happens if youre chosen to be on a grand jury?

If you go through the grand jury selection process and become a qualified member of the grand jury then you will be one of 23 members obligated to meet once a week for a certain period, typically 12 months for grand juries designated investigatory and six months for grand juries designated accusatory.

Here is a condensed outline of the process outlined in the Handbook for Federal Grand Jurors:

Organization, oath and officers

The court will select one person to be the foreperson, or presiding officer, of the grand jury and a deputy foreperson to serve in the forepersons absence.

The grand jury then takes an oath binding them to their diligence and objectivity throughout the process.

The charge of the grand jury is when the presiding judge goes over its obligations and how to perform them. Once the grand jury is charged, it will begin hearing the case.

Why Trump was indicted in Florida Will Trump's Florida indictment give him a home-turf advantage? Why it was filed in Miami

A quorum must be met

To meet the quorum, 16 of the 23 jurors must be present. If the grand jury has less than 16 members then it must stop.

Evidence is brought before the grand jury

The brunt of the grand jurys time will be spent hearing witness testimony and examining evidence to determine whether an indictment should be filed. Government attorneys are present throughout the process to present the evidence of allegations. The grand jury is also allowed to call additional witnesses.

Witnesses are called to testify

Witnesses will be called to testify before the grand jury. Witnesses will be sworn in by the foreperson and then be questioned first by the government attorney, then by the foreperson of the grand jury. Other members of the grand jury are allowed to question the witness afterward.

Attorneys are not permitted to be present, but witnesses maintain the right to consult with legal counsel and may ask to leave the room to talk with their attorney. Witnesses may also invoke their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to not answer questions.

The person being investigated can request to appear before the grand jury

People being investigated for crimes by a grand jury do not have the right to be present during the process, but they can send a request to appear before the grand jury.

The grand jury meets to deliberate

Finally, the grand jury will meet to deliberate after all of the evidence of a case has been presented. At this point, everyone except for the grand jury must leave the room as it deliberates whether or not to file an indictment. An indictment requires 12 votes from the grand jury.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: What is a grand jury? Here's what happens if you're selected
Thank you for supporting our journalism. This article is available exclusively for our subscribers, who help fund our work at the Chicago Tribune.

The head of special education at Chicago Public Schools has stepped down following pressure for her ouster over the use of physical restraint in schools and other criticism of how the district has treated students with disabilities.

Stephanie Jones, chief of the Office of Diverse Learner Supports and Services, or ODLSS, left her role Friday, according to a CPS spokesperson. Richard Smith, most recently an administrator within that office, will take over as interim chief as the district conducts a nationwide search for her replacement.

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We sincerely thank Dr. Jones for her commitment to serving students in Chicago with diverse learning needs, and we wish her well in her future endeavors, the spokesperson wrote in a statement that did not state why Jones resigned. CPS, just like other employers, does not share the details of personnel matters as we are committed to protecting the privacy and rights of our employees.

Last week, the Chicago Teachers Union demanded Jones resign for dismal failures to protect the districts most vulnerable students, alleging violation of special education laws, a toxic workplace that has left the department in shambles and failure to fulfill the legal requirements on supporting students with disabilities. The unions House of Delegates took a vote of no confidence in her.

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Tonight our members said, enough, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates wrote in a statement after the vote. Enough with the lack of services and support, enough with ignoring the needs of our students, and enough with violating state law.

Special education advocates and the CTU have criticized Jones for several years, including over the ongoing state oversight after CPS was found to have denied services to students with disabilities, and over recent disclosure that the district violated state laws on the use of physical restraint and isolation of students.

The Illinois State Board of Education has warned the district four times to comply with state law on physical restraint, most recently in April threatening to place CPS on probation if the violations are not remedied.

Violations alleged by the state agency range from CPS allowing untrained staff members to restrain students unnecessarily  sometimes for more than an hour or through the use of prohibited methods  to the districts failure to notify parents and review and report all incidents to ISBE.

Another ISBE official had written CPS in November to say that its complete disregard for the health and safety of its students and blatant violation of state law is unconscionable. The states investigation, sparked by violations made apparent in the districts own reporting of incidents, found issues jeopardizing the health and safety of CPS students and staff that remained ongoing at the time of the April 18 letter.

When asked earlier this week whether anyone in CPS would be accountable for the violations, CPS CEO Pedro Martinez did not answer and pivoted to talking about the districts commitment to special education students.

Following CTUs call for Jones dismissal, a CPS spokesperson said last week that significant strategic changes to the department have been in motion for some time and pre-date any public statements calling for personnel decisions, which are separate and distinct from the Districts review and work to improve services.

CPS use of restraint, isolation and timeout procedures is not limited to special education students, but Jones was the designated official responsible for being notified of, reviewing and maintaining records of every such incident.

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Ask me what the top priority for next years budget (is): diverse learners. Ask me where were putting the most resources? Diverse learners, Martinez said Tuesday at an unrelated news conference. So, not an excuse. But we will make sure that this is corrected.  This is a narrative thats been a challenge in our district for the last two decades, but were going to fix it.

CPS said in its Friday statement that the district continues to implement its Three-Year Blueprint on special education services and one of our top priority areas is reimagining how CPS can best serve students with diverse learning needs to ensure that all students access positive, inclusive, and rewarding academic and extracurricular experiences.

Jones was first tapped for the role as ODLSS chief in 2019 by former CPS CEO Janice Jackson. In an email to staff obtained by the Tribune, Jones told her now-former colleagues, Although much work is still needed, we applaud what has been accomplished in these short four years within such a large district, and listed accomplishments such as being the longest standing leader in ODLSS in over one decade and increasing the graduation rate of special education students.

In a Friday letter to CPS parents, Martinez thanked Jones for her commitment to serving students in Chicago with diverse learning needs.

Our central goal during this transitional period will be to equip our ODLSS teams and educators with the resources and support they need to provide a high-quality education for our diverse learners, Martinez wrote.

The start of ISBEs formal monitoring of CPS special education services predated Jones appointment four years ago and ended in fall 2022, but the district failed to exit state oversight completely under her leadership and remains under an enhanced general supervision plan, according to CPS records.

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The state monitoring began in 2018, two years after officials concluded the districts revamp of special education services had violated federal law and regulations, and was scheduled to last at least three years. Then-CEO Jackson opposed the independent oversight but later complied.

Among the policies the state found denied students services were requiring overly complicated forms that shut out many qualifying students simply because of paperwork problems, denying transportation while citing arbitrary reasons and failing to get struggling students into therapeutic schools during crises.
Everything we know about suspected France playground attacker after toddlers stabbed

A picturesque French town has been left reeling after four children were stabbed in a playground horror attack.

Two adults were also injured in the attack in Annecy in the French Alps on Thursday morning. All of the youngsters - who were aged between 22 months and three - were transferred to hospitals in the French Alps and across the Swiss border in Geneva.

One of the injured children is British, the UK foreign secretary James Cleverly confirmed and is believed to have been on holiday at the time.

The horrific attack was caught on camera (Twitter)

A 70-year-old man was also seriously injured  first by the knifeman and then by police fire during the attack which took place at around 7.45am local time in Le Paquier park in Annecy. A second adult was treated for injuries not believed to be life-threatening.

Have you been affected by this story? If so email tara.cobham@independent.co.uk

Horrifying footage posted on social media appeared to show a knifeman running around the area while being pursued by several onlookers.

French police said they later arrested a man in his early 30s over the attack. Below we look at everything we know about the suspect so far.

Four children were rushed to hospital following the attack (EPA)

What happened during the attack?

The suspect - wearing a blue-chequered headscarf and sunglasses - was allegedly seen shouting before he began attacking small children in the playground with a four-inch blade.

In horrifying footage, the assailant jumps over a low wall and repeatedly lunges at a child in a stroller, pushing aside a woman who tries to fend him off.

One bystander is later seen trying to stop him as other parents flee with their children.

Within minutes, the attacker was pursued by police. He then attacked an elderly man in a different part of the park. Police fired shots and detained the attacker, who was unharmed, and is now being questioned by police.

What do we know about the suspect?

French prime minister Elisabeth Borne said the suspected attacker, who was in police custody, was a 31-year-old Syrian national who was granted asylum in Sweden 10 years ago.

She confirmed that he had entered France legally and was carrying Swedish identity documents plus a Swedish driving license. Ms Borne also said he was homeless and an isolated individual.

He had asked for asylum in France, which had not been processed because he already had refugee status in Sweden. Because he had EU refugee status, he was free to travel legally to France, she said.

Police sources told the French Le Monde newspaper the man had declared himself to be a Syrian Christian in his French asylum application.

The publication also reported that he had been wearing a Christian cross on a chain around his neck when arrested.

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the suspected was an isolated individual (AFP via Getty Images)

What do we know about the possible motive behind the attack?

Annecy public prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said there was "no evidence" of a terrorist motive.

Instead, the prosecutor said an inquiry was underway for attempted murder. National police, rather than anti-terrorist investigators, are heading the investigation.

Ms Borne said French authorities had contacted international security and intelligence agencies and the man was unknown to any French, European or other foreign security service. He had no criminal record, and no apparent psychiatric record, she said.

What have the authorities said?

Ms Borne described the attack as savage and said the whole of France had been shaken by this hateful, indescribable act.

French president Emmanuel Macron tweeted that it was an act of absolute cowardice and that the nation was in shock.

"Nothing more abominable than to attack children," National Assembly speaker Yael Braun-Pivet said on Twitter. Parliament observed a minute of silence to mark the incident.

Mr Cleverly said the UKs thoughts are with the victims and their families and we stand ready to support in whichever way we can".

The attack took place in Annecy, a town in the east of the country (The Independent/Datawrapper)

He added: "We have already deployed British consular officials who are travelling to the area to make themselves available to support the family.

And, of course, we stand in strong solidarity with the people of France at this very terrible time."

Home secretary Suella Braverman said she was in touch with her French counterpart, Gerald Darmanin, adding that she was appalled by the attack.

Prime minster Rishi Sunak tweeted: My thoughts are with all of those affected by the shocking attack in Annecy this morning.

As @EmmanuelMacron has said, it was a truly cowardly act. The UK and France have always stood together against acts of violence, and we do so again today.
Ex-deputy will go to trial two years after fatal shooting of a Black man in Columbus, Ohio

Jason Meades murder trial will start on Oct. 30 for the 2020 death of Casey Goodson Jr., who allegedly pointed a gun at the now-former deputy just before the shooting.

A former deputy will soon stand trial for the shooting death of a Black man in Columbus, Ohio nearly three years ago.

The Franklin County prosecutors office confirmed that Jason Meades murder trial will start on Oct. 30, three days after jurors have their initial court appearance to prepare, according to WCMH NBC4. Meade pleaded not guilty to two charges of murder and one count of reckless homicide in the December 2020 shooting death of 23-year-old Casey Goodson Jr.

I mean, its a relief that were finally here, said Goodsons mother, Tamala Payne, WSYX ABC 6 reported. Were just happy that finally, accountability. What weve been waiting on. We relive it every day because we cant put an end to it because theres not an end to it.

Attorney Sean Walton speaks at a news conference Sept. 7 in Columbus, Ohio, on the shooting death of Casey Goodson Jr. Goodsons mother, Tamala Payne (right) and other family members listen. Former deputy Jason Meade will stand trial in the shooting starting Oct. 30. (Photo: Kantele Franko/AP)

Meade, also a U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force member, was leaving a shift with the team when Goodson allegedly drove by and waved a gun at him, WCMH reported. The former deputy said he then followed Goodson to his grandmothers house. There, Meade claimed, Goodson pointed his weapon at him, prompting him to shoot.

An autopsy report showed that Meade shot Goodson in the back six times as he attempted to enter the house. The latters grandmother, 72, said Goodson was coming home from the dentist with Subway sandwiches, noting that she and two young children standing by the door witnessed his killing.

Meades defense attorney said his client did not wear a body camera during the shooting. He also claimed that Goodsons weapon was recovered.

Payne said her son had no arrest record and was permitted to carry a concealed firearm publicly. She added that he even wanted to become a concealed-carry instructor, WCMH reported.

Meade retired on disability and left the Franklin County Sheriffs Office on July 2, 2021. His attorney tried to have the trial transferred to federal court, alleging media attention would make it hard to guarantee a fair trial locally. However, a court decided in February that the case would remain in Franklin County Common Pleas Court.

Goodsons family also brought a federal civil rights complaint against Meade and the sheriffs office towards the end of 2021, independent of the murder trial. The case is on hold in light of the ongoing criminal investigation.

Sean Walton, the attorney representing the Goodson family, noted that the past three years have been challenging as the case slowly moved through the legal system, WSYX reported.

Justice delayed is justice denied, said Walton, and thats where we are here.

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Ex-soldier pleaded guilty to raping children, including at JBLM. Now hes been sentenced

A former soldier who raped two children on military bases, including Joint Base Lewis-McChord, was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Thursday.

In July 2020, Lewis Patrick Thompson was arrested for raping two children at overseas bases and in the United States, according to a Friday news release from the U.S. Attorneys Office, Western District of Washington. Thompson, now 40, had been serving as the childrens caregivers when he committed the crimes.

The victims told other adults about the abuse when they were 11 years old. Investigators with the Army Criminal Investigation Division and the FBI then looked into the claims, the release states.

Thompson pleaded guilty in October 2022. Once released from prison, he will serve a lifetime of supervised release. He is currently being held at SeaTacs Federal Detention Center.

Thompson will be required to pay restitution for his victims counseling and care. U.S. District Judge Robert J. Bryan will determine the amount at a future hearing.

Under Washington law, rape of a child under age 12 is a class A felony. A person who commits this crime can face a maximum sentence of life in prison, according to Seattle-based law firm Black & Askerov, PLLC.
(Bloomberg) -- Boris Johnson quit his seat in the UK Parliament, denouncing as a kangaroo court the panel of lawmakers investigating his behavior and attacking the policies of the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak.

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The former premier  who blames Sunak for the role he played in his own downfall last year  said Parliaments Privileges Committee has mounted a political hit job and accused its chairwoman, Labours Harriet Harman, of egregious bias.

The committee didnt respond to a request for comment. The panel has been investigating whether Johnson misled lawmakers over his knowledge of Covid-19 rule breaches by officials.

The committees report is riddled with inaccuracies and reeks of prejudice, Johnson said in a statement issued late on Friday. He was privately informed this week of their findings, which are not yet public. I am now being forced out of parliament by a tiny handful of people, he said.

Johnsons resignation triggers a challenging special election for Sunak in a seat which the ruling Conservative Party held in 2019 with a relatively slim majority of about 7,000.

The departure also reopens the feud between the two men that has simmered since Sunak resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer in protest against Johnsons leadership last year. That move precipitated Johnsons departure as premier.

In his statement, Johnson pulled no punches in his diagnosis of the electoral ills of the Conservative Party, which has trailed the main opposition Labour Party in national polling by a double-digit margin for months.

On the day Sunak returned from a two-day visit to Washington, Johnson questioned why the government had so passively abandoned the prospect of a Free Trade Deal with the US. He said ministers needed to cut business and personal taxes and also asked why the government had junked measures to help people into home ownership.

We must not be afraid to be a properly Conservative government, Johnson said. When I left office last year the government was only a handful of points behind in the polls. That gap has now massively widened. Our party needs urgently to recapture its sense of momentum and its belief in what this country can do.

Johnsons resignation means Sunaks party now faces special elections this summer, threatening to derail his hopes of closing the gap in the opinion polls with the opposition Labour Party, ahead of a general election due by January 2025.

He quit after a rapid series of developments on Friday that plunged the Tories into more political chaos.

Nadine Dorries, a key Johnson ally, also resigned from her Mid Bedfordshire seat after she was denied a peerage in Johnsons resignation honor list. Bill Cash, the veteran Conservative MP and arch Eurosceptic, announced he would step down at the next election, after Johnson made him an Order of the Companions of Honour.

That list was published late on Friday afternoon, causing more controversy for the Tories as Johnson had recommended awards for a number of key supporters including former ministers Jacob Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel.

On Saturday, Nigel Adams announced he was standing down as a member of UK parliament with immediate effect, triggering a third by-election after Johnson and Dorries.

The privileges panel was seeking to establish whether Johnson deliberately misled lawmakers when he repeatedly denied rule-breaking had occurred during a series of gatherings in Downing Street  collectively known as Partygate  during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. He later apologized to the chamber after being fined for breaking the rules himself. Sunak was also fined.

Johnson claimed that his downfall was brought about by opponents of Brexit, launching angry attacks in his statement on the opposition Labour Party, as well as Sunak and Sue Gray, the civil servant whose investigation into Partygate also played a large role in his downfall.

There is a witch hunt underway, to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result, said Johnson, a key architect of the winning Leave campaign.

While Johnsons immediate political career is over, he hinted that he may attempt to return at some point. It is very sad to be leaving parliament - at least for now, he said.

--With assistance from Emily Ashton.

(Adds further developments regarding Bill Cash and Nigel Adams)

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Explainer-What are the charges against Donald Trump in the classified documents case?

By Jack Queen

(Reuters) - Here is a look at the charges former President Donald Trump faces and his possible defenses over what prosecutors say was his illegal retention of classified documents at his Florida estate after leaving the White House in 2021.

WHAT IS TRUMP ACCUSED OF DOING?

Trump was charged in an indictment unsealed Friday with 37 criminal counts for charges including violations of the Espionage Act, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and making false statements to investigators.

In January 2022, Trump agreed to return 15 boxes of records to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, and officials discovered in them more than 700 pages of records marked as classified.

The Justice Department issued a grand jury subpoena in May 2022 asking Trump to return any other classified records. Trump's attorneys later turned over 38 pages marked as classified and attested that all records with classified markings had been returned to the government - a claim that later proved to be false.

In August, the FBI conducted a search of Trump's Palm Beach home and seized approximately 13,000 more records, about 100 of which were marked as classified. Of those, some were marked as "top secret" - the classification level reserved for the country's most closely held secrets.

WHAT CHARGES DOES TRUMP FACE?

The most serious charges are 31 counts brought under the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the unauthorized possession of national defense information. It is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

The World War One era law predates classification of documents but makes it a crime to willfully retain national defense information that could be useful to foreign adversaries. Courts have ruled that the information must be "closely held."

Trump is also charged with several counts of obstruction of justice, which criminalizes any "intent to impede, obstruct, or influence" an investigation.

To prove those allegations, prosecutors will need to show that Trump's actions were intentional and that his goal was to hinder the probe, regardless of whether those efforts were successful.

Trump is also charged with making false statements to investigators.

WHAT ARE TRUMPS POSSIBLE LEGAL DEFENSES?

Trump has claimed that the investigation is a politically motivated "witch hunt." He will likely argue that he is being selectively prosecuted, citing the fact that President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence have not been charged after it was discovered that both men retained classified records after leaving office. The Biden documents stem from his time as a vice president and senator.

Trump's lawyers say the selective prosecution is part of a larger pattern of prosecutorial misconduct, though they have provided few details beyond claiming that investigators violated a legal doctrine that permits people to keep communications with their lawyers private.

The legal hurdles to proving selective prosecution are high.

Legal experts say such claims are usually doomed because defendants must prove that they were intentionally singled out for arbitrary reasons and that prosecutors declined to bring charges against others in similar circumstances.

Unlike Trump, Biden and Pence immediately returned the records and cooperated with efforts to search for additional documents. The Justice Department is investigating the Biden matter and dropped a separate probe of Pence on June 1.

Trump has claimed that he declassified the documents before removing them. Presidents have the ultimate authority to classify and declassify documents, though this is typically put in writing and done through established channels. Trump has yet to provide evidence that he declassified the documents.

Trump and his allies have said he had a standing order to declassify documents he took from the Oval Office to the White House residence, but Trump has failed to provide any evidence of this as well.

On obstruction, Trump could argue he was simply acting on what he thought was sound legal advice from his lawyers and therefore lacked criminal intent. He could also seek to shift blame to subordinates or accuse them of going rogue.

(Reporting by Jack Queen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Howard Goller and Alistair Bell)
Explainer-What happens next in the Trump documents case

By Jack Queen

(Reuters) - Former U.S. President Donald Trump has been indicted for illegally retaining classified government records at his Florida estate after leaving the White House in 2021 and obstruction of justice. Here is what to expect as the case proceeds.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Trump, who on Thursday proclaimed his innocence, is scheduled to make his first appearance in Florida federal court on Tuesday.

The indictment is under seal and it is unclear if it will made public before then.

Soon after Trump appears in court, prosecutors will begin handing over evidence to Trumps lawyers. That could include years of correspondence between Trumps lawyers, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and federal prosecutors as they haggled over the documents.

At some point, Trump's lawyers are expected to file a motion to dismiss the case for a variety of reasons, including his claim that he declassified the documents before taking them. They are also likely to argue that the case should be tossed for what they allege was misconduct by prosecutors, including alleged violations of a legal doctrine that permits people to keep communications with their lawyers private.

Motions to dismiss in criminal cases are standard but rarely succeed because defendants face a high burden convincing a judge that their case is too flawed to even go before a jury. Prosecutors are also entitled to the benefit of the doubt on their factual allegations at that stage.

WHAT IMPACT WILL THE CASE HAVE ON TRUMP'S CAMPAIGN?

The charges include violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice, making false statements to investigators and conspiracy, according ABC.

None of those would automatically prevent Trump from campaigning or taking office if he is convicted.

It is unclear the impact the case will have on Trump's standing with voters. Trump's numbers rose after he was indicted in a separate case in New York in April, and he is the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

He has used the cases and investigations he faces as fundraising tools, telling supporters that he is under attack and needs their help. Trump's campaign said in April that donations surged after he was indicted in New York.

WHEN WILL THE CASE GO TO TRIAL?

Any potential trial could be many months away.

Trump, who has denied wrongdoing and calls the case a politically motivated witch hunt, has a right to face trial within 100 days, but that rarely happens in complex cases. The parties will likely agree to extend deadlines as they pore over evidence and argue legal disputes before a judge.

WILL TRUMP TESTIFY?

That would be up to him. Criminal defendants are not required to testify and rarely do because subjecting themselves to cross-examination by prosecutors is risky.

Trump did not testify at a recent civil trial over sex abuse and defamation claims brought against him by writer E. Jean Carroll. A jury found Trump liable in that case in May.

WHAT HAPPENS IN THE CASE IF TRUMP WINS THE ELECTION?

It is unlikely the prosecution will proceed if Trump wins the 2024 presidential election.

The U.S. Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, and presidents are the top federal law enforcement officers in the country. Federal prosecutors generally serve at their pleasure.

The Justice Department has a decades-old policy that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. The department can deviate from policy in extraordinary circumstances with the approval of the U.S. attorney general, the countrys top law enforcement official.

A lame-duck attorney general serving under President Joe Biden, in this case Merrick Garland, could ignore that policy and forge ahead, but Trump, as president, could fire him and hire an acting replacement of his choice before naming a permanent successor subject to U.S. Senate confirmation.

(Reporting by Jack Queen; Editing by Howard Goller, Noeleen Walder and Lincoln Feast)
FILE PHOTO: Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends a campaign event in Manchester,

By Jack Queen

(Reuters) - Former President Donald Trump has been indicted for illegally retaining classified government documents after leaving office in 2021. Here is a rundown of what this means for his 2024 presidential campaign.

WILL THE INDICTMENT PREVENT TRUMP FROM CAMPAIGNING OR TAKING OFFICE?

The indictment is under seal, but Trump's lawyer said he is charged with seven criminal counts including violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and conspiracy. None of those would bar Trump from office if he is convicted.

A trial would take place many months from now, and Trump can freely campaign during this time.

The U.S. Constitution only requires that presidential candidates be natural-born U.S. citizens who are at least 35 years old and have lived in the country for 14 years.

Trump said on Thursday on his Truth Social platform that he is innocent. He would be free to campaign even if he is convicted and sent to prison, and legal experts say there would be no basis to block his swearing-in as president even if he is incarcerated, though this would pose extraordinary logistical and security questions.

WHAT IMPACT WILL THE CASE HAVE ON TRUMP'S CAMPAIGN?

It is unclear what the impact will be on Trump's standing with voters. Trump's poll numbers rose after his indictment in March in a separate case in New York, and he is the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

He has used the cases and investigations he faces as fundraising tools, telling supporters that he is under attack and needs their help. Trump's campaign said in April that donations surged after he was indicted in New York.

WHAT HAPPENS IF TRUMP TAKES OFFICE WHILE THE CASE IS PENDING?

It is unlikely that the prosecution would proceed if Trump won the November 2024 election.

The U.S. Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, and presidents are the top federal law enforcement officers in the country. Federal prosecutors generally serve at their pleasure.

The U.S. Justice Department has a decades-old policy that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. The department can deviate from policy in extraordinary circumstances with the approval of the U.S. attorney general.

A lame-duck attorney general serving under Democratic President Joe Biden, in this case Merrick Garland, could ignore that policy and forge ahead, but Trump, as president, could fire him and hire an acting replacement of his choice before naming a permanent successor subject to U.S. Senate confirmation.

COULD TRUMP PARDON HIMSELF?

Maybe.

Many scholars have said a self-pardon would be unconstitutional because it violates the basic principle that nobody should be the judge in his or her own case.

Others have argued that a self-pardon is constitutional because the pardon power is very broadly worded in the Constitution, which states that presidents shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

Trump could not pardon himself for a conviction in state court.

He is currently under indictment in New York state court for allegedly using falsified records to conceal hush money payments he paid to a porn star, and Georgia prosecutors are investigating his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in that state.

(Reporting by Jack Queen; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Howard Goller)
With eye on China, US and five allies condemn trade-related 'economic coercion'

Flags of U.S. and China are displayed at AICC's booth during China International Fair for Trade in Services in Beijing

By Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and five of its allies on Friday condemned the use of trade practices that amount to economic coercion in a joint declaration that did not single out other countries but appeared to be aimed at China.

Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan, and New Zealand jointly released the statement with the United States, emphasizing that "trade-related economic coercion and non-market-oriented policies and practices" threatened the multi-lateral trading system and "harms relations between countries."

The statement comes after the Group of Seven leaders last month agreed to a new initiative to counter economic coercion and pledged action to ensure that any actors attempting to weaponize economic dependence would fail and face consequences.

The United States, Britain, Japan and Canada are also members of the G7.

The countries expressed concern about "pervasive subsidization," anti-competitive practices by state-owned enterprises, forced technology transfer, and government interference with corporate decision-making.

Washington has regularly raised such concerns about trade practices by Beijing, and an official from the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, who spoke to reporters about the joint declaration, cited China for imposing a ban on imports from Lithuania after Lithuania allowed Taiwan to open a de facto embassy.

China, which regards the democratically-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory, suspended imports of beef, dairy and beer from Lithuania last year.

In May, Beijing protested the G7's declarations, including on economic coercion, saying the U.S. was "pushing hard to weave an anti-China net in the Western world."

In their joint statement on Friday, the U.S. and its five allies also raised concerns about forced labor.

"We are also seriously concerned about the use of forced labour, including state-sponsored forced labour, in global supply chains. All forms of forced labour are gross abuses of human rights, as well as economic issues, and it is a moral imperative to end these practices," they said.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Additional reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Sonali Paul)
Former President Donald Trump has made numerous false and unsupported claims about the federal investigation into his handling of government documents, a probe he announced Thursday has resulted in his indictment.

Here is a fact check of seven of the claims Trump has made about the investigation since the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in August 2022.

False claim: Trump was following the Presidential Records Act by refusing to immediately return documents

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Presidential Records Act, a 1978 law, says he was supposed to hold negotiations with the National Archives and Records Administration about the return of official documents after his presidency.

For example, he said in a March 2023 interview on Fox that the law is very specific: It says you are going to discuss the documents. You discuss everything  not only docu everything  about whats going in NARA, et cetera, et cetera. Youre gonna discuss it. You will talk, talk, talk. And if you cant come to an agreement, youre gonna continue to talk.

He made a similar claim at a CNN town hall in May, saying the law says you talk, you negotiate, you make a deal.

Facts First: Trumps claim is false. The Presidential Records Act says that, the moment a president leaves office, NARA gets custody and control of all presidential records from his administration. Nothing in the law says there should be a negotiation between a former president and NARA over a former presidents return of presidential documents  much less that there should have been a monthslong battle after NARA first contacted Trumps team in 2021 to try to get some of the records that had not been handed over at the end of his presidency.

The key sentence from the Presidential Records Act is unequivocal: Upon the conclusion of a Presidents term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.

Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at NARA, told CNN in a March 2023 email: The former President is simply wrong as a matter of law. As of noon on January 20, 2021, when President Biden took office, all presidential records of the Trump Administration came into the legal custody of the Archivist of the United States. Full stop. That means no presidential records ever should have been transferred to Mar-a-Lago, and there was no further talking or negotiating to be had.

Timothy Naftali, a CNN presidential historian, New York University professor and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, described Trumps claim as nonsense and said the former presidents description of the Presidential Records Act is a matter of fantasy, concocted to allow Trump to pretend that hes a victim.

The law, Naftali said in March 2023, makes clear that documents Trump had at Mar-a-Lago are presidential records that legally belong to the public and are legally required to be in NARAs custody. The law provides no room for debates and discussions between presidential advisers and the National Archives at the end a presidency about such records, Naftali said.

In April 2023, the Society of American Archivists, a professional association, published its own fact check of Trumps claim, saying it is patently false.

False claim: Obama, the Bushes and others took millions of documents home with them after leaving office

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he has been singled out by federal law enforcement even though his predecessors as president all took documents with them after leaving office.

For example, Trump claimed in the fall of 2022 that former presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush all took millions of documents; he repeated the claim that Obama took documents at the CNN town hall in May. He also claimed that George H.W. Bush took his documents to a poorly secured Chinese restaurant and bowling alley.

Facts First: This is all false, as NARA itself pointed out in a statement in 2022. In reality, NARA was granted custody of the presidential records of former presidents (beginning with Ronald Reagan as soon as these presidents left office) as soon as these presidents left office, as required by the Presidential Records Act, and it was NARA, not those presidents, that moved those documents out of the nations capital to NARA-managed temporary archival facilities near where their permanent presidential libraries would be built. The NARA-managed facility where records from the George H.W. Bush administration were stored was indeed a former restaurant and bowling alley, but it had been turned into a full-fledged archival facility, and professionally secured in various ways, by the time the documentswere moved in.

After Trump began making these false claims, NARA issued an October 2022 statement saying that it gained physical and legal custody of the records from Obama, Clinton, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush when those presidents left office. It said of the temporary facilities to which the documents were moved: All such temporary facilities met strict archival and security standards, and have been managed and staffed exclusively by NARA employees. Reports that indicate or imply that those Presidential records were in the possession of the former Presidents or their representatives, after they left office, or that the records were housed in substandard conditions, are false and misleading.

In other words, there is no equivalence between Trumps handling of presidential documents and those previous presidents. In Trumps case, the presidential documents found in haphazard amateur storage at Mar-a-Lago, including documents marked classified, were in Trumps possession despite numerous attempts by both NARA and the Justice Department to get them back.

You can read a longer fact check here with additional details about the facility where the George H.W. Bush records were stored.

False claim: The federal government could have simply asked for the documents back

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago was unnecessary because the federal government could have simply asked for the documentsback from him. For example, he posted on his social media platform days after the search: They could have had it anytime they wantedand that includes LONG ago. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK.

Facts First: It is not true that federal investigators could have easily obtained the government records in Trumps possession just by asking. By the time of the August 2022 search, the federal government had been asking Trump for more than a year to return official records from his presidency. Even when the Justice Department went beyond asking in May 2022 and served Trumps team with the subpoena for the return of all documents with classification markings, Trumps team returned only some of these documents  and then, in June 2022, Trump lawyer Christina Bobb signed a document certifying on behalf of Trumps office that all of the documents had been returned, though that was not true.

In other words: Trump claimed in August 2022 that the Justice Department could have just asked for the documents LONG ago even though his team inaccurately told the department in June 2022 that there were no documents left to ask for.

Unsupported claim: Trump declassified everything

The Justice Department said in a court filing in August 2022 that the search of Mar-a-Lago resulted in the seizure of more than 100 unique documents with classification markings. But in posts on his social media platform, Trump argued that he had declassified all of the documents in his possession. Number one, it was all declassified, he wrote in a post on August 12.

That same day, conservative writer John Solomon, one of the people Trump named as a representative in his dealings with NARA, read a statement on television, which he said came from Trumps office, that claimed Trump had a standing orderthat documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them. At the CNN town hall in May, Trump made a similar though vaguer claim, saying classified documents become automatically declassified when I took them.

Facts First: Trump and his team have not provided any proof that Trump actually conducted some sort of broad declassification of the documents that ended up at Mar-a-Lago  and, so far, his lawyers notably have not argued in their court filings that Trump did so. Eighteen former top Trump administration officials, including two former White House chiefs of staff who spoke on the record, told CNN in August that they never heard of a standing Trump declassification order when they were serving in the administration and that they now believe the claim is false. The former officials used words like ludicrous, ridiculous and bullsh*t.

Total nonsense, said one person who served as a senior White House official. If thats true, where is the order with his signature on it? If that were the case, there would have been tremendous pushback from the Intel Community and DoD, which would almost certainly have become known to Intel and Armed Services Committees on the Hill.

Its important to note that the laws under which the Justice Department said it was investigating possible crimes  statutes about the willful retention of national defense information, obstruction of a federal investigation, and the concealment or removal of government records  do not require documents to be classified for a crime to have been committed. Also, there would be major questions about the legal validity of any broad standing order to automatically declassify any document Trump carried out of a certain room.

But first things first: Trump has shown no corroboration for the claim that he did issue such an order.

The Justice Department said in the August 2022 court filing that Trumps representatives never asserted that documents had been declassified either when they voluntarily turned over 15 boxes that included 184 unique documents with classification markings in January (after an extended back-and-forth with NARA) or when responding to the subpoena in June 2022, when they returned another package of documents that included 38 additional unique documents with classification markings.

Unsupported claim: The FBI might be wrongly describing empty folders as actual documents

Trump claimed in January 2023 that the FBI might perhaps have inaccurately described empty folders that agents found at Mar-a-Lago with classification markings on them  perhaps wrongly describing these folders as actual documents, which they are not. (He said he saved the empty folders as a cool keepsake.)

Facts First: There is no evidence that the FBI has wrongly described empty folders. In fact, the Justice Departments detailed inventory of the items seized at Mar-a-Lago  an inventory submitted in court by a senior FBI agent under penalty of perjury  explicitly lists empty folders separately, distinguishing them from the government documents that were recovered. The inventory lists 103 government documents with classification markings, hundreds of government documents without classification markings, and 88 empty folders  including 46 empty folders that had CLASSIFIED banners on them. None of the government documents is just an empty folder, according to the inventory.

It is theoretically possible that there are errors in the inventory; the Justice Department filed a revised version in September that made minor changes to the original inventory that was filed in August, which the government explained it had needed to complete in a single business day. But the revised version and the original version listed the same number of government documents with classification markings, 103, and the revised version had only a small change to the number of empty folders with classified banners, putting it at 46 instead of the original claim of 48.

You can read a longer fact check here.

Unsupported claim: The feds might have planted evidence

Trump has repeatedly floated the idea the FBI or Justice Department might have planted evidence or might proceed to plant evidence.

He suggested on his social media platform in August 2022 that it was suspicious that the FBI would not allow witnesses, such as his lawyers, to be in the rooms being searched at Mar-a-Lago and see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, planting. In September 2022, Trump said in a television interview on Fox: Did they drop anything into those files, or did they do it later?

Facts First: Nobody has provided any evidence that anyone has planted anything at Mar-a-Lago or amid the items seized at Mar-a-Lago. Despite Trumps own claims, Trumps legal team has never argued in a court filing that the FBI or Justice Department planted evidence  even when it was given an explicit opportunity to do so. It is routine, not suspicious, for searches to be conducted without witnesses such as lawyers being in the room; lawyers dont have a right to watch.

The claim about items possibly having been planted is impossible to definitively debunk at this point, and it is obviously impossible to debunk a claim about what might happen in the future. But Trump and his team have provided zero evidence to support their insinuations on this subject. Before an appeals court stopped a special master review of the seized items in late 2022, Trumps lawyers resisted an effort by the special master to have them say in a sworn court declaration whether they believed the official inventory included items that were not actually seized from Mar-a-Lago  in other words, if they believed phony items were inserted into the evidence. A judge then ruled that they didnt have to make this declaration.

False claim: Biden has been totally uncooperative

Trump, arguing that he is being persecuted, claimed in a video statement in late April that it is President Joe Biden who is guilty of obstruction. He claimed that Biden has 1,850 boxes unchecked and that he has been totally uncooperative  wont show the documents under any circumstances. At a CNN town hall in May, Trump added of Bidens 1,800 boxes: And nobody even knows where they are.

Facts First: Its not true that Biden has been totally uncooperative with the federal probe into his own handling of government records  either in general or specifically with regard to the more than 1,850 boxes of records from his US Senate career that he donated to the University of Delaware, his alma mater. And its not true that nobody knows where these boxes are; it has been publicly known since 2012 that they are housed at the university.

The claim that Biden has been totally uncooperative with the investigation into his handling of official documents is transparently false. Bidens team quickly handed over classified documents to federal authorities upon finding them last year at one of his homes in Delaware and at his former think tank office in Washington. And Biden has consented to FBI searches of his two Delaware homes, the Washington office and the University of Delaware.

CNN reported in February that, according to a source familiar with the investigation, the FBI had conducted two searches at the university with the consent and cooperation of Bidens legal team. It is not clear if Biden permitted the FBI to look at each and every one of the 1,850-plus boxes of Senate papers at the university, or even if the FBI wanted to search all of those boxes; a spokesperson for Bidens personal lawyer did not respond in early June to a CNN request for more information. But even with few details publicly known at present, it is clearly inaccurate to say Biden has not cooperated at all with regard to these records.

Bidens Senate papers at the University of Delaware are not yet publicly available; the university website says the boxes were delivered in mid-2012 but will require Bidens consent to view until two years after Biden retires from public life. That restriction has frustrated some Biden critics, but it is certainly not a crime  and it is normal, as the Senates official website explains, for senators to donate papers to a home-state research institution with conditions about when they are to be released into the public realm.

CNNs Jamie Gangel, Elizabeth Stuart and Jeremy Herb contributed to this report.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
In the weeks before Donald Trump was indicted over his alleged mishandling of classified defense documents and alleged attempt to cover it up, the former president kept arguing that it would be unfair to prosecute him given that President Joe Biden took 1,850 boxes of documents to the University of Delaware.

Trump used the words 1,850 boxes three times at a CNN town hall in May, adding two references to 1,800 boxes for good measure. Trump made similar comments on Thursday after learning he was being indicted by a federal grand jury, posting on social media that Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware.

But Trumps vague insinuations that there is something improper about the existence of the Biden collection at the University of Delaware are baseless. The collection of donated documents is from Bidens 36-year tenure as a US senator for Delaware. Unlike presidents, who are subject to the Presidential Records Act, senators own their offices documents and can do whatever they want with them  donate them to colleges, keep them at their homes, give them to journalists, even throw them in the trash.

No statute governs their retention or disposition and there is no public right of access to congressional records, under FOIA or any other statute, Margaret Kwoka, a law professor at The Ohio State University and an expert on information law, said in a Friday email.

Trump has also made false specific claims about the boxes of Bidens Senate documents. It is not true that nobody even knows where they are. It is public knowledge that these documents are stored at his alma mater. It is also not true that Biden has been totally uncooperative and wont show the documents under any circumstances. Biden consented to two FBI searches at the university  searches that did not initially appear to turn up any documents with classified markings, a source familiar with the investigation told CNNs Paula Reid in February, though they were still being analyzed at the time.

Heres a more detailed look at the facts about the documents at the University of Delaware.

The presence of lots of Biden boxes at a university is normal and legal

The approximately 1,850 boxes of Biden documents at the University of Delaware are papers from the presidents Senate career, which ran from 1973 to 2009 (when Biden was sworn in as vice president). While the Presidential Records Act says that presidential records belong to the public and that the National Archives and Records Administration gets custody of them the moment the president leaves office, records that are created and maintained within a senators office are the property of the senator, the Senate website explains.

And it is standard, the Senate website notes, for senators to donate these records to research institutions. The National Archives and Records Administration even maintains a list of where the documents of former members of Congress are housed. The list is filled with universities.

Kwoka said Friday that any comparison between congressional records and presidential records is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The legal requirements are entirely different between the two.

There is nothing secret about the location of Bidens Senate collection

It has been public knowledge for more than a decade that Biden donated his Senate documents to the University of Delaware, from which he graduated in 1965. Biden announced the donation in a public appearance at the school in 2011, generating media coverage.

The school website published an article in June 2012 to announce that 1,875 boxes of documents had been delivered. Today, the websites section on its special collections has a page for the Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Senatorial Papers.

Biden did impose conditions on public access to the collection. According to the university website, the papers will only be made widely accessible two years after Biden retires from public life. Until then, they can only be accessed with Bidens express consent.

That restriction has frustrated Biden critics who want the documents to be made available publicly much sooner, but there is nothing illegal or even remarkable about it. It is common for senators to place timing conditions on the documents they have donated to universities.

President Biden had every right to donate his records from his time as a Senator to a university or other institution, and to impose restrictions on future access, Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, said in a Friday email.

Biden consented to FBI searches at the university

Trumps claim in late April that Biden has has been totally uncooperative  wont show the documents under any circumstances is not true. Reid reported in February that the FBI had conducted two searches at the university, with the consent and cooperation of Bidens legal team, in connection with the federal investigation into Bidens handling of classified documents.

It is not clear if Biden permitted the FBI to look at each and every one of the boxes stored at the university, or even if the FBI wanted to search all of the boxes. (A spokesperson for the university declined to provide more information to CNN, while a spokesperson for Bidens personal lawyer did not respond to a CNN email.) But even with few details publicly known at present, Trumps assertions that Biden has refused to cooperative with investigators and wont show the documents to anyone are clearly false.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
China, U.S. need to explore right way to get along in new era, says Chinese ambassador

Xinhua) 08:34, June 09, 2023

Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng delivers a keynote speech at an event hosted by the U.S.-China Business Council in Washington, D.C., the United States, on June 7, 2023. (Photo credit: Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the United States of America)

President Xi Jinping has proposed the three principles of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence and win-win cooperation. They represent the fundamental and right way for the two countries to get along in the new era. Among them, mutual respect comes first, peaceful co-existence is the red line and win-win cooperation is the goal, said Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng.

WASHINGTON, June 7 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng said here Wednesday that the two countries need to uphold the principles of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence and win-win cooperation and explore the right way to get along in the new era.

Xie gave those remarks when delivering a keynote speech at an event hosted by the U.S.-China Business Council to welcome him as China's new ambassador to the United States.

Noting that China-U.S. relations face challenges, Xie said Chinese President Xi Jinping has made it clear that getting the relationship right is not optional, but something the two countries must do and must do well. The world is big enough for the two countries to develop themselves and prosper together.

President Xi has proposed the three principles of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence and win-win cooperation. They represent the fundamental and right way for the two countries to get along in the new era. Among them, mutual respect comes first, peaceful co-existence is the red line and win-win cooperation is the goal, said Xie.

China has always placed importance on its relationship with the United States, said Xie, noting that China is ready to work with the U.S. side to follow the right direction, enhance dialogue and cooperation, defuse flashpoints and take concrete actions to deliver on the common understandings between the two presidents, so as to bring this relationship back to the right track at an early date.

Xie said that the U.S. should respect China's choice of development path and social system, the Chinese people's right to a better life, and China's core interests and major concerns. These are essential for this relationship to advance in the right direction, with no conflict, no confrontation or no new Cold War.

A pressing task is to bring the Taiwan question, the most significant risk, under control, said Xie. "No one wants peaceful reunification more than China does. We are also the last that wants tensions or warfare across the Taiwan Strait."

The Chinese side has not simulated war games, changed the status quo or stoked any crisis. The Taiwan authorities are seeking U.S. support for their independence agenda, while some in the United States propose using Taiwan to contain China. Xie said these are the biggest threats to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

At present, the most fundamental thing is to fully and faithfully adhere to the one-China principle; the most important is to abide by the three joint communiques with real actions; and the most pressing is to match words with deeds and oppose adventurism and provocation by the "Taiwan independence" forces, he noted.

Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng speaks at an event hosted by the U.S.-China Business Council in Washington, D.C., the United States, on June 7, 2023. (Photo credit: Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the United States of America)

Xie said the biggest concern of many Americans is that China and the United States slip into conflict and confrontation. Their greatest hope is for this relationship to stabilize. If the world is to become better, the China-U.S. relationship must stop getting worse.

"We are all stakeholders. None of us shall sit idly by. Every one of us needs to take actions, speak up for free trade and open market, as this serves our common interests and the stability of global industrial and supply chains," he said.

Xie called on the business community to stay fair and pragmatic, be committed to cooperation with China and avoid politicizing economic issues. Doing so will bring more positive energy to the bilateral relationship and help both peoples live better lives.

China and the United States have a lot to offer each other in terms of industrial strength. In the last five years, the return rate of foreign direct investment in China reached 9.1 percent. Of the over 70,000 American companies doing business in China, nearly 90 percent are earning profits, he said.

Today's China-U.S. relationship bears on not only the well-being of the 1.7 billion Chinese and American people but also the world's future. Forestalling conflict and confrontation and upholding a stable China-U.S. relationship will promote the common interests of both countries and contribute to world peace and prosperity, Xie said.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
Thank you for supporting our journalism. This article is available exclusively for our subscribers, who help fund our work at the Chicago Tribune.

Aurora is looking at a micro-TIF district tied to redevelopment of this building at Cross Street and Middle Avenue in the southwestern part of downtown. (Steve Lord / The Beacon-News)

Aurora is set to schedule public hearings for two proposed tax increment financing districts downtown.

Both districts are what the city calls micro-TIFs, and are tied to redevelopment agreements the city has entered into with potential developers.

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In TIF districts, assessed value is frozen for the purpose of tax collection, and as the value of the property rises, the taxes created by increasing property value goes into a special fund, known as an increment. That money is used for expenses related to the development.

If the City Council votes favorably at its June 13 regular meeting, it would set the public hearing dates for both TIF districts for the Aug. 8 regular City Council meeting.

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One of the micro-TIFs is called the River Vine Tax Increment Financing District, and is tied to the proposed 187-unit Pacifica Riverview apartment complex between the Fox River and North River Street in the citys downtown.

The other micro-TIF is called the Cross Street Tax Increment Financing District and is related to redevelopment of a former industrial warehouse at 100 Cross St. in the southwest corner of downtown.

The proposed district is at the corner of Cross Street and Middle Avenue, and runs along the whole block but stops short of the Company 251 property at Middle Avenue and Gale Street.

The proposed district is for one specific project, but does take in some other property that city officials have said could benefit from the TIF district at a later time.

That project is renovation of the upper floors of the building at 100 Cross St. into 15 apartments. The building is a former warehouse that has been empty for at least 20 years, according to city officials.

Foreign Exchange Brewery is already developing a brewpub in the first floor of the building. The 15,000-square-foot building was built in 1929.

Foreign Exchange Brewery is being developed by master brewer Ricky Cervantes, an Aurora native.

The apartment deal is a proposed $5.5 million project that would have JH Partners putting in $1.25 million in equity, getting a loan for $1.7 million and selling another $1.7 million in historic tax credits.

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The citys total commitment would be $375,000, with $300,000 going to the residential part of the development. The other $75,000 was committed to the Foreign Exchange part of the project.

The money would come in the form of a forgivable loan, and money raised from a tax increment financing district on the property.

The TIF district proposal is referred to as a micro-TIF, a concept pioneered by the city of Aurora for many other projects in town, particularly downtown.

The micro-TIF concept takes in a small amount of property and is tied to a specific development. The incentive to the developers would not take place, or even be created, until the developer does actual work that increases the value of the property.

The city hired Chicago-based Kane McKenna to study if the proposed Cross Street area qualifies for a TIF district, and, according to the qualification report, the area meets at least six of the 13 qualifying criteria for a TIF district. An area has to meet at least three of the qualifying criteria to consider establishing a TIF district.

According to the report, Kane McKenna officials said all the buildings in the area were built between 1921 and 1929, well before the city had its downtown plan, its 1957 Comprehensive Plan and its updated 1984 Comprehensive Plan.

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In approving the public hearing for the Cross Street TIF district, the council also would establish the time for the Joint Review Board to meet at 9 a.m. Friday, July 7. The Joint Review Board is made up of representatives of all the other taxing bodies in the proposed TIF area.

At this weeks council Committee of the Whole meeting, Ald. John Laesch, at large, suggested the council amend its ordinance to have the Joint Review Board meeting at 5 p.m., instead of 9 a.m.

He said that would be a time more people could attend. He said that none of the taxing bodies involved in the board normally meet at 9 a.m.

But Patrick Collins, assistant corporation counsel, said the 9 a.m. time is in accordance with the Open Meetings Act, and aldermen agreed to let it stay at 9 a.m.

For the River Vine TIF district, the Joint Review Board has already met and has given its blessing to the district. But the council still needs to hold the public hearing, which was delayed from its previous date.

While most TIF districts are for 23 years, the River Vine district is proposed for 20 years.

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Laesch, who has been on record as opposing TIF districts in the past, wanted to know how many developers had shown interest in the property, which currently is a city parking lot at River and Vine streets along the West Bank of the Fox River.

Trevor Dick, assistant director of the Mayors Office of Economic Development, said he recalled three or four developers asking about the property, but none submitting any proposals for it.

David Dibo, the citys Economic Development director, said the one developer he spoke to was Naperville-based Marquette Companies.

Laesch also asked if the developer considered using a federal incentive called an Opportunity Zone.

Opportunity Zones were created by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and allows investors in a zone to defer tax on capital gains for specific amounts of time.

Dibo said the developer, Windfall Properties, was aware of the Opportunity Zone but did not choose to use it. He added that a developer could use both the Opportunity Zone and a TIF district.

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We spoke about Opportunity Zones, Dibo said. We dont see if as a trade-off.

slord@tribpub.com
FILE PHOTO: Campaign event of former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Manchester

Factbox-Trump indictment puts Justice Department center stage in 2024 Republican race FILE PHOTO: Campaign event of former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Manchester

By Gram Slattery

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The indictment of former President Donald Trump on multiple charges related to his handling of classified documents on Thursday has thrust the Justice Department back into the center of the Republican presidential primary campaign.

Several candidates have called for major reforms at the department, and most have accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a constituent agency, of exhibiting bias against conservatives. The department says all investigative decisions are made without regard to partisan politics and President Joe Biden has also stressed its independence.

Here's what the top 2024 Republican contenders have said on the matter:

DONALD TRUMP

Trump, who was indicted in Florida on Thursday and faces a separate federal probe in Washington, has consistently accused the Justice Department of corruption, without offering any evidence to support his claims.

After he was indicted by local authorities in New York in March as part of a probe into his alleged role in concealing hush money payments to a porn star, he said the entire department should be defunded.

In a video posted on his Truth Social platform on Thursday, he reiterated previous assertions that the Justice Department has been weaponized for political ends.

RON DESANTIS

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump's most formidable challenger, says he would fire FBI Director Christopher Wray on his first day in office, and he has consistently decried what he calls the "weaponization" of the federal bureaucracy.

"The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all," he said in a statement following Trump's latest indictment.

MIKE PENCE

Former Vice President Mike Pence has expressed concern about what he says is bias by law enforcement against conservatives and has urged greater transparency with regard to the probes into Trump. But he has shied away from promoting more aggressive reforms at the Justice Department.

NIKKI HALEY

Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador under Trump, has said that, if elected, she would "clean house" at the FBI. She criticized the latest indictment of Trump, calling it "prosecutorial overreach."

TIM SCOTT

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott has said he would dismiss FBI Director Wray and other political appointees at the agency, though he has defended the agency's rank-and-file employees.

"What we've seen over the last several years is the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president," he told Fox News in an interview on Thursday night.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY

Venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy has called for the abolition of the FBI. In a statement on Thursday night, he lambasted the Justice Department, calling it part of a "federal police state."

ASA HUTCHINSON

Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a frequent Trump critic, has said the breadth of the FBI's jurisdiction should be reined in. However, he opposes calls to defund the law enforcement agency.

(Reporting by Gram Slattery; Editing by Alistair Bell)
FILE PHOTO: A member of the Red Cross assists a migrant after disembarking from a Spanish coast guard vessel, at the port of Arguineguin

By Gabriela Baczynska

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union ministers agreed this week on how to handle irregular arrivals of asylum-seekers and migrants, a deal hailed as a breakthrough after almost a decade of bitter feuds on the sensitive matter.

As the deal took shape, a stabbing in France by a Syrian man who was granted asylum in Sweden 10 years ago drew fresh attention to Europe's migration policies, highlighting political as well as practical challenges lying ahead of any EU migration scheme.

Here are details of the EU agreement, the main question marks and what comes next.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

EU states have been trading blame over providing for the new arrivals since more than a million people - mostly fleeing the war in Syria - caught the bloc by surprise by reaching it across the Mediterranean in 2015.

The bloc has since tightened external borders and its asylum laws, and struck deals in the Middle East and North Africa to have more people stay there. U.N. data shows fewer than 160,000 sea migrants made to it Europe last year.

The bloc hopes lower irregular immigration would allow EU countries to restart cooperation to spread more evenly the task of taking care of arriving refugees and migrants.

HOW DOES THE NEW PACT ADDRESS THAT?

Each EU country would be assigned a share of the 30,000 people overall the bloc is expected to accommodate in its joint migration system at any given time.

That will be calculated based on the size of the country's GDP and population, the number of irregular border crossings including via sea rescue operations, and more.

Countries unwilling to take in people would instead be able to help their hosting peers through cash - at least 20,000 euros per person a year - equipment or personnel.

WHAT ELSE IS NEW?

The agreement would introduce a new expedited border procedure for those deemed unlikely to win asylum to prevent them from lingering inside the bloc for years.

Instead, they should be sent away within six months if their asylum applications fails, one of several shortened deadlines in the deal.

That mechanism would apply to all those deemed dangerous, uncooperative or coming from countries with low asylum recognition rates in the EU like India or Serbia.

EU countries could also apply the speedy procedure to people picked up in the sea, caught while trying to get in illegally or filing for asylum at the border rather than in advance.

WILL IT WORK IN PRACTICE?

Before eventually endorsing it, Italy and Greece voiced concerns about whether the new system would prove workable given some states' refusal to host people.

The southern countries of arrival worry about being overwhelmed, while those further away from the bloc's external borders tend to drag their feet on admitting arrivals and complex solidarity schemes take time to kick in.

Another challenge is keeping close tabs on the movements of people once they get inside Europe's zone of free travel.

WHAT OTHER ISSUES ARE THERE, AND WHO'S AGAINST?

Rights groups said the scheme risked reviving tragic scenes that unfolded on the Greek islands several years ago by creating more overcrowded migration camps on the edges of the EU.

They said the new plan could lead to protracted detention of minors and criticised it as focusing on keeping people away rather than helping those in need.

Criticism also came from Poland and Hungary, the EU's loudest voices against immigration from the Middle East and Africa.

Warsaw "will not pay for migration policy mistakes" by others, said Mateusz Morawiecki, the premier of Poland, which refuses to host any of the mainly-Muslim arrivals, though it has given shelter to millions of Ukrainians fleeing Russia's war.

WHAT COMES NEXT?

Opposition from Warsaw and Budapest did not, however, scupper the majority deal among the 27 EU countries. Spain will now lead more negotiations on behalf of the member states with the European Parliament starting next month.

Green members of the EU legislative denounced the deal as falling short on human rights. They might be joined in opposing it by political rivals from Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, and Hungary's Fidesz.

But the deal is expected to eventually win enough backing, with the head of the chamber raising hopes for a final agreement before a bloc-wide election in 2024.

(Writing by Gabriela Baczynska, Editing by William Maclean)
31-year-old man killed in Interstate 75 crash near Bradenton exit ramp, FHP says

Courtesy of the Florida Department of Transportation

Courtesy of the Florida Department of Transportation

A fatal crash on Interstate 75 is causing major southbound delays in Bradenton on Friday, according to the Florida Department of Transportation.

Live video footage of the scene showed firefighters, EMS and the Florida Highway Patrol responded to the scene of the morning crash.

FHP says the crash caused a complete roadblock at State Road 64s southbound exit 220.

According to an FHP crash report released Friday afternoon, the crash happened when a 31-year-old Tampa man in a Dodge Ram pickup truck suddenly attempted to change lanes and struck the guard rail separating the southbound travel lanes and exit ramp.

Troopers say the pickup truck flipped over and landed on its roof in the exit ramp lanes around 9:10 a.m. According to investigators, the man was pronounced dead at the scene.

A 56-year-old Bradenton woman driving a Honda Civic ahead of the pickup truck had her vehicle struck by debris from the crash, but she was injured, according to the crash report.

As of 4:20 p.m., the exit ramp remains closed to southbound traffic, according to FDOT. Drivers are urged to avoid the area and expect southbound delays.

Bradenton police tweeted that the crash has many drivers diverting to the Green and DeSoto bridges. Please anticipate delays if youre traveling to Bradenton from the north.

 A fatal traffic crash on southbound I-75 at the SR-64 exit has many drivers diverting to the Green and DeSoto bridges. Please anticipate delays if you're traveling to Bradenton from the north. pic.twitter.com/ZFMNpZaO1S  Bradenton Police Department (@BradentonPD) June 9, 2023

Further information was not immediately available.
A 37-year-old Pensacola man is on trial for murder in a shooting that he claims was self-defense, but that prosecutors say was the result of an ongoing love triangle.

Brandian Darnell Lyons is charged with second-degree murder for fatally shooting Larry Gross on the doorstep of Lyons' home around 5:30 a.m. July 10, 2021.

Brandian Lyons contemplates his fate on the first day of a felony murder trial before Circuit Judge John Simon on June 8, 2023. Lyons is on trial for allegedly killing Larry Gross in July 2021.

According to attorneys, Gross had just returned to the home with Lyons' ex-girlfriend, Yvette Jones. Gross was shot and killed during the ensuing confrontation with Lyons.

"Ladies and gentlemen, at the conclusion of this case I'm confident that you will be equipped with the evidence that you need to strip Brandian Lyons of his presumption of innocence and find him guilty as charged," Assistant State Attorney Matt Gordon told the jury during his opening argument Thursday morning.

Lyons arrested: Pensacola man accused of shooting and killing a man Saturday outside Escambia County home

Forest Creek killer sentenced: Pensacola man who murdered Forest Creek teen sentenced to life in prison

Why does the State Attorney believe Brandian Lyons is guilty of murder?

During his opening statement, Gordon heavily relied on a string of text messages Lyons sent to Jones for the 10 days leading up to the killing. The prosecutor said Lyons and Jones had an on-again, off-again relationship and had recently broken up again.

Gordon read the texts to the jury and argued that Lyons seemed prepared to either kill himself or kill Gross.

"Don't bring that (obscenity) to the house tonight, I swear," Gordon read from the text messages. "I'm coming. I don't care. I'm about to war tonight.

"My pain runs so deep knowing you love that (obscenity) over me. I really gotta make peace with myself," the messages said. "I'll kill that boy, for real for real."

The prosecutor then outlined what happened the night Gross died, saying the deceased and Jones came to the house where Lyons was "creating a scene" by waking up Jones' two children.

"Then when Yvette shows up, Brandian confronts her in the yard and the conversation doesn't go the way he hopes it does," Gordon told the jury. "Then at about 5:25 a.m., Larry arrives at the house. He pulls up to the house, and before he can get inside Brandian Lyons shoots him dead."

Why does Brandian Lyons' attorney say this is a self-defense case?

David Sellers, Lyons' attorney, walked to the podium after Gordon finished his opening statement and told the jury that if they only focus on evidence presented by the state, then it will be an open and shut case.

"These texts sounds like a stone-cold killer was coming over here to kill this man," Sellers said. "What you're going to hear from Ms. Jones is that Brandian Lyons and her had this relationship where they're off and on again ... and he'd made these sorts of threats on previous occasions.

"Ms. Jones is going to tell you she never took those seriously," he added, "because it was him trying to sound like a bad dude."

Sellers went on to say that specific facts in the case demonstrate that Lyons was defending himself. The defense attorney said Lyons did not know Gross would be coming over and he made it clear he did not want Gross at the house.

He also said Lyons had seen Gross at the house before and did not shoot him, and Lyons had seen Gross possess and pull out guns prior to the incident, leading to him being "anxious in case this guy came."

There is video of some of the incident taken in 15-second increments. It does not show the actual shooting, but does show the events prior.

"What you're going to end up seeing is Mr. Gross run up to the house, gets out of his car, leaves the lights on, walks directly over to the front porch, walks by my client, talks to Ms. Jones and then turns," Sellers said. "What you're going to see is (Lyons) backing up off the porch because Mr. Gross is approaching.

Sellers also told the jury that Gross had a gun, and he said Jones will testify that Gross reached into his pants and turned toward Lyons, which is when the shooting began.

How did law enforcement find Brandian Lyons after the incident?

After Lyons shot Gross, he fled the home. Escambia County Sheriff's deputies setup a perimeter and began searching for Lyons.

According to both attorneys, bodycam footage shows Lyons walking toward deputies with his hands raised saying he killed Gross. He then turned himself in to authorities.

Lyons told authorities that he dropped the gun at some point while fleeing the home, and deputies and investigators never found the firearm or shell casings from the gun. The only weapon found belonged to Gross.

The trial is scheduled for two days and is expected to be handed over to the jury on Friday.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Florida man Brandian Lyons claims self-defense for killing Larry Gross
Father describes the moment he helplessly watched as his son was mauled to death by a tiger shark at a beach in Egypt, report says

A shark fin was seen above the water during the shark attack in Hurghada, Egypt, on June 8. Grigory Kataev via Reuters

A 23-year-old Russian man was killed by a shark in Egypt's Red Sea resort town of Hurghada.

His father said he watched helplessly as the "meat grinder" animal killed his son in 20 seconds.

A video of the attack shows the man shouting "papa" as the shark circles near a tourist beach.

The father of a 23-year-old man who was killed by a tiger shark in Egypt described the moment he helplessly watched his son being mauled to death.

"We went to the beach to relax," Yury Popov, a Russian national, told the Telegram news outlet 112. "My son was attacked by a shark. It all happened in seconds."

A video of the attack shows his son, Vladimir, flailing in the water and calling out "papa" as the shark circles him. People on the beach can be heard screaming in horror. Another video showed people swimming in the water, racing to escape the horrific scene.

Popov said that the situation was all the more shocking because it happened at what he thought was a safe beach.

"What kind of help can you give? This meat grinder happened in 20 seconds. He was just dragged under the water," Popov said.

Egypt's environment ministry confirmed that a man had been killed by a tiger shark in the Red Sea resort town of Hurghada on Thursday.

Vladimir had moved to Hurghada with his father and bought an apartment a few months prior, according to the Russian outlet Baza.

Some reports said that Vladimir's girlfriend escaped the waters and witnessed the attack from the beach  but this has not been confirmed.

Other videos show the animal being captured and taken to shore.

Tiger sharks commonly reach 10 to 14 feet in length and weigh from 850 to 1,400 pounds.

A tiger shark. Getty Images

Egypt's environment ministry said that the shark displayed "abnormal behavior" and would be studied to determine whether the animal was linked to previous shark attacks.

There were two deadly shark attacks in Hurghada last year: a Romanian woman and an Austrian woman were killed within days of each other near the area.

It's rare for sharks to attack humans. Only five of the 57 unprovoked shark bites that were reported last year were fatal, according to the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File.

Sharks have been known to attack humans when confused or curious, and scientists have said there is no objective evidence that sharks bite humans because they want to eat them.

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The plaintiffs in FBI v Fazaga stand in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 8, 2021.

From left, Yasser AbdelRahim, Sheikh Yassir Fazaga and Ali Malik, the plaintiffs in FBI v Fazaga, in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 8, 2021. Credit - Courtesy Gabriela Domenzain

Before Irvine, Calif. had its own mosque, Muslims would gather at Ali Maliks home for nightly prayers during Ramadan. But after an FBI informant pretended to be a convert and spied on Maliks lay congregationand more than half a dozen Southern California mosques, as well, in the mid-2000strust within the community eroded. Maliks family pulled back. The communal prayers came to an end. We became closed off and afraid of reaching out, he says.

Shocked by the experience, Malik and two other plaintiffs sued the FBI, accusing the agency of religious discrimination and unlawful government surveillance. But more than a decade later, the U.S. justice system is still wrestling with whether government secrecy trumps such claims of religious discrimination in domestic national security cases.

Maliks case, FBI v. Fazaga, came before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Thursday. The government argues that all the plaintiffs claims alleging religious discrimination need to be dismissed because it has secret evidence that would exonerate the FBI if made public. Since the court cannot hear evidence as to who the FBI investigated or why, it cannot adjudicate whether the government targeted Plaintiffs based on their religion, the FBI has said, in legal filings.

The plaintiffs argue that they dont need secret evidence to win their argument and that the case should proceed without this information; the religious discrimination claims should not be entirely dismissed, they say. The government has so far not invoked the state secrets privilege for allegations of unlawful surveillance. The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from the ACLU SoCal, the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law and the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Greater Los Angeles.

Mohammad Tajsar, senior staff attorney at ACLU SoCal, says that since 9/11, the government has repeatedly deployed the state secrets defense to kill cases. It has basically prevented judicial oversight over a whole bunch of desperately abusive national security related policiesthings like warrantless wiretapping and extrajudicial assassination, he says.

Since 9/11, the governments use of the state secrets privilege has increased dramatically. A 2008 congressional report found that the Bush administration raised the privilege in over 25% more cases per year than previous administrations had, and sought dismissal in over 90% more cases. There are serious consequences for litigants and for the American public when the privilege is used to terminate litigation alleging serious Government misconduct, the report stated. For the aggrieved parties, it means that the courthouse doors are closedforeverregardless of the severity of their injury.

A more recent analysis in The Supreme Court Review by Laura Donohue, a professor of law and national security at the Georgetown University Law Center, says that over the past 15 years, the government has increasingly begun to assert the state secrets privilege in overly broad ways to cover entire categories of information. This happens even in cases when information poses no real risk to national security and is already in the public domain, she writes. This is a radical departure from how the privilege has been understood for centuries, she says.

The FBI declined to comment on the case and allegations that they were misusing the state-secrets privilege to avoid judicial oversight.

Its a high bar to fight back against a state secrets defense, says Javed Ali, an associate professor of practice at Michigan University, who previously held senior roles at the FBI. Sometimes revealing classified information can cause unnecessary damage, he says: Theres a tension in our legal system. Thats unfortunately why a lot of these cases are not successful.

A lot of evidence about the FBIs surveillance of Malik and his co-plaintiffs is already publicly available. Much of it details the activities of the pretend convert, a longtime informant for the bureau named Craig Monteilh and is drawn from Monteilhs own sworn declarations, media reports and statements from FBI agents in other cases. Monteilh, who had served time for fraud, left his key fob and mobile phone in places to record conversations when he was not around. He recorded hundreds of hours of video inside mosques, homes and businesses. He told two other Muslims that we should bomb something. He says he was told by his FBI handlers to date Muslim women and have sex with them to get more information. The FBI dubbed the surveillance program Operation Flexa nod to Monteilhs strategy of using workout tips to befriend young Muslim men.

If the ACLU fails in its attempt to convince judges that the case should proceed without the secret information, they are arguing for at least judges to be able to review the evidence. That way theres some comfort that they are not just bullshitting us, Tajsar says. If that doesnt work, plaintiffs will fall back on a more procedural movearguing that the government invoked the state secrets privilege too early.

Congress and the federal government have previously acknowledged concerns related to the overbroad use of the state secrets privilege. Lawmakers began drafting legislation in the mid-2000s to restrict its use but it failed to become law.

There are a number of intermediate options between the case cant go forward and everyone gets to see everything, says David Pozen, a law professor at Columbia University and expert on government secrecy. The federal bill would have made it so only the judge could see evidence in some cases; in others, the plaintiffs counsel could see the evidence with a security clearance and the requirement that they could not take it home.

The Obama Administration issued guidance in 2009 saying that it would invoke the privilege in court only when genuine and significant harm to national defense or foreign relations is at stake and only to the extent necessary to safeguard those interests. Last September, after a Supreme Court ruling in FBI v. Fazaga sent the case back to lower courts, Attorney General Merrick Garland, re-issued this same guidance.

In court Thursday, at least one of the sitting appellate judges expressed skepticism of the FBIs defense after both sides made their arguments.

Peter Bibring, formerly senior counsel at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, argued Thursday before judges that what FBI agents told the informant should not be considered a state secretpointing out that the informant did not have security clearance and was hired based on his connections formed in prison. The government cannot disclose information in that context to somebody like this in Orange Countyand then turn around and say those are secrets that should justify throwing constitutional claims out of court.

The FBI stood firm on their need for certain information to stay private. There is no halfway solution. The state secrets privilege must prevail even if it means harsh medicine, said Joseph Busa, a lawyer representing the FBI.

Judges probed the FBI for a sensible solution. On the one hand the government should not be deprived of its defense; on the other hand, the plaintiffs should not be deprived of their case unless one really, really, really has to do that, said Judge Marsha Berzon.

The underlying problem here is that there is an inherent conflict of interest by the government: theyre both the defender and the protector of the interests and having no eyes on that is very troublesome, Berzon said. The notion that things are going to leak out that havent leaked out in the last 20 years is not very believable.

Meanwhile, the plaintiffs and their Muslim communities in Southern California, remain shaken by the informants breach of trust.

Yassir Fazaga is an imam who used to work at a mosque in Mission Viejo, Calif., which Monteilh spied on, and another plaintiff in the case. Now, he abides by a strict rule: If I cannot say it in public, I will not say it in private. Hes no longer as welcoming with converts as he would like to have been. Sometimes he wishes that he were less visible. He does not even talk to his wife about the case because of the stress it has causedeven when it went up to the Supreme Court. She did not hear it from me, he says.

As for Malik, he has started talking about the case with his three young sons. They want to be engaged and its forcing me to be engaged. He recalls meeting Monteilh at the mosque and gym and wanting to be as welcoming as possible.

He doesnt understand why they cant litigate the religious discrimination claims in court. What evidence did they have to come after meand if its really that serious, how come nothing has happened? Why am I walking free?, Malik says. They were targeting me because of my religious activity, because I was a practicing Muslim in post 9/11 America.
By Leroy Leo and Julie Steenhuysen

(Reuters) -A panel of expert advisers on Friday unanimously agreed that a late-stage trial of Eisai and Biogen's Alzheimer's drug Leqembi verified the benefit of the treatment for those at an early stage of the disease, clearing the way for traditional U.S. approval.

All six advisers on the panel voted in favor of Leqembi for treatment of the mind-wasting illness.

Regular approval by Food and Drug Administration - a decision expected by July 6 - is likely to expand Medicare payment for the treatment.

That approval would also make Leqembi the first disease-modifying drug ever to achieve the regulatory milestone. Current treatments only treat symptoms but do not change the course of the disease, which affects 6 million Americans, according to the Alzheimer's Association.

Leqembi won accelerated approval by the FDA in January based on its ability to remove sticky amyloid plaques from the brain. The panel on Friday considered Eisai's large confirmatory trial designed to show the drug benefited patients.

That study, published in November, showed the drug slowed cognitive decline by 27% in early Alzheimer's patients, but was also associated with some serious side effects for some patients, including brain swelling and bleeding or microhemorrhages.

"I believe the benefit versus risk are beneficial, acceptable and in line with this class of therapeutics, especially considering the burden of the disease and the progressive nature of the disease," said panel member Dr. Tanya Simuni, professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

"Overall, it demonstrated clearly that this is an effective treatment in the population as it was defined," said Dr. Robert Alexander, committee chair and an Alzheimer's expert at the Banner Alzheimer's Institute. He added that he thought the study "clearly demonstrated a clinical benefit," calling the results "robust."

SIDE EFFECTS

FDA also asked the panel to weigh in on Leqembi's side effects in certain patient populations.

Those included patients taking drugs that prevent blood clots, those who have a gene variant called APOE4 that increases the risk of Alzheimer's, and those with a rare condition called cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), in which the protein amyloid that the drug targets builds up in the walls of arteries in the brain and can cause bleeding.

Members of the panel generally said the risks for those with two copies of the APOE4 gene were balanced by the drug's benefits, although they urged the FDA to strengthen language in the drug's prescribing label recommending genetic testing for the risk gene.

Some on the panel raised concerns about giving Leqembi to patients taking anticoagulants. Others said patients should be given the option as long as they are made aware of the risks.

The panel also said it would not recommend excluding patients with CAA, which can be hard to diagnose, from taking the drug. It suggested limiting Leqembi's use in patients with the most severe cases of the condition, called cerebral amyloid angiopathy-related inflammation, because of the heightened risk of brain bleeding.

Under accelerated approval, Medicare restricted payment of the drug to those in a clinical trial, but no such trials are underway for Leqembi, resulting in negligible sales. Most U.S. Alzheimer's patients are Medicare-eligible.

The federal agency that runs Medicare has said it will pay for the treatment if doctors participate in a health agency database, known as a registry, but has yet to release details of its plan.

Wall Street analysts widely expect the FDA to grant traditional approval for the drug. Analysts have forecast Leqembi sales topping $1 billion in 2026 and reaching $5.7 billion by 2030.

Alzheimer's Association CEO Joanne Pike in a statement urged approval and expanded patient access "without barriers."

We are in full agreement with the FDA Advisory Committee that Leqembi provides clinical benefit and that this benefit outweighs the risks." she said.

(Reporting by Leroy Leo and Khushi Mandowara in Bengaluru and Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
This U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recently voted in favor of a RSV vaccine designed for babies. But will the FDA approve it? | Adobe.com

A U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recommended that Beyfortus, developed by Sanofi and AstraZeneca, be approved as an RSV vaccine for infants.

RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, is a common virus that causes mild, cold-like symptoms and is usually cured in about two weeks  but it can be deadly for infants or vulnerable adults, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Each year, 100 to 300 RSV deaths occur for children under age 5 and between 6,000 to 10,000 deaths for adults older than 65, per the CDC.

The New York Times said all 21 members of the panel voted in favor of allowing infants born during or entering their first RSV season to get the shot, while 19-2 voted in favor of giving the shot to children up to 2 years old who are vulnerable due to severe diseases.

One of the committee members who voted against the recommendation was Sally Hunsberger, a biostatistician at the National Institutes of Health, according to NBC News.

Hunsberger told NBC News, Its a bit of a weak no, but hopefully that will just emphasize that I feel like we do need more data.

Beyfortus would be more affordable and more widely available than the single existing preventive drug  a monoclonal antibody shot called palivizumab  which requires monthly administration and is reserved for babies at high medical risk, according to NPR.

Related

Trial details

U.S. News & World Report said, Sanofi and AstraZeneca gave more than 3,200 infants the antibody shot during studies of the vaccine. One of those studies found that the vaccines effectiveness against very severe RSV was 79% after six months.

In a study of more than 1,400 infants born prematurely  a group at particular risk  the injection was found to lower the risk of developing respiratory disease from RSV that required doctors visits by around 70% for at least five months, NBC News added.

Related

Beyfortus

NBC News said the antibody drug is already approved in Europe, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The Times predicted that Beyfortus will most likely be available this coming fall if the FDA approves it.

Dr. Lindsey Baden, an infectious diseases physician at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston and chair of the FDAs Antimicrobial Drugs Advisory Committee, told NPR, Overall, all committee members were impressed with the conduct of the study and the clean results that were presented.

A previous RSV shot for vulnerable adults was approved by the FDA in May, making history as the first vaccine made against the virus for adults older than 60, according to the Deseret News.
Artificial intelligence's ability to trick voters creates a significant threat for the 2024 elections, several senators told Fox News.

"On a scale of one to 10, I would put my fear at 10 so far as the potential abuses for impersonation, false visual images, deepfakes, voice cloning," Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, told Fox News. "Consumers deserve to know when the deepfakes and cloned voices occur."

Sen. Richard Blumenthal told Fox News he believes deepfake videos will impact the 2024 elections.

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who earlier this week released a set of "guiding principles" for future AI legislation, also rated his concern as a 10. AI already has the ability to create realistic deepfake videos, the Republican said, adding that he's "very, very concerned by it."

As AI applications proliferate across industries, the rapidly evolving technology has already proven to be a useful attack tool for some 2024 presidential campaigns. Lawmakers and analysts have also warned that AI could hurt political accountability and disrupt the upcoming elections.

WATCH MORE FOX NEWS DIGITAL ORIGINALS HERE

"The biggest concern I have with AI is the way that it's going to warp our political conversation," Sen. JD Vance told Fox News

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

"There are certainly going to be some viral videos of either Donald Trump or Joe Biden, and it's going to change votes, but it's not going to be them," the Ohio Republican continued. "It's going to be a complete figment of an AI creator's imagination."

AI-powered deepfakes of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for Ukrainian soldiers to lay down their weapons in March 2022.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn had similar worries.

"They can use AI and insert people into situations where they were not," the Tennessee Republican said. "This should concern all of us."

"It just shows that people are going to have to be very careful what they're seeing online, what is circulating online, what they're hearing, and then what they choose to believe," Blackburn continued.

AI VOICE-CLONING SCAMS ARE ON THE RISE, HERE'S HOW YOU CAN PROTECT YOURSELF

Whichever politician campaign can best employ AI will have an edge in the 2024 election, a political fundraiser wrote recently on Fox News. Internationally, China has already used AI to circulate propaganda, which, according to Sen. Pete Ricketts, indicates Beijing could influence the upcoming election.

The campaigns for former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have both used AI-generated content.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, however, thinks AI's rapid growth makes it difficult to precisely predict how the technology will impact the vote.

"If there are companies that seem to be cropping up with uses of AI that could disturb the integrity of the election, we need to be in a position to either access the courts to get temporary restraining orders or to use litigation to help us understand the extent of AI's capabilities," the Wyoming Republican told Fox News.

"We're going to have to monitor it carefully and be very familiar with its uses and its misuses," Lummis said.

To watch the full interviews with senators, click here.
Female flight attendants will no longer have to wear high heels and male crew can wear makeup after an airline updated its rules

Australia's Qantas has updated its guidelines for cabin crew. Qantas

Qantas Airways updated its uniform policy allowing female staff to abandon high heels.

The new rules allows anyone to wear makeup, but tattoos still need to be concealed.

A union official said the changes were a "big win for workers."

Another airline has given its presentation rules a makeover, letting female flight attendants abandon high heels and allowing anyone to wear makeup.

Australia's Qantas announced the changes Friday in an update that provides more clarity on other issues related to employees' appearances.

The airline said flat shoes can now be worn with all uniforms, as can diamond earrings. Anyone can wear makeup if they choose to, and have hair in a ponytail or bun.

Qantas told Insider: "Fashions change, and so have our style guidelines over the years.

"We're proud of our diversity and as well as bringing our guidelines up to date, these changes will make wearing our uniform more comfortable and practical for all of our people, including those with a wide range of body types and those from diverse cultural backgrounds."

Tattoos will still need to be concealed, and the Qantas uniform isn't being changed.

Qantas Airways uniform Qantas

It's the latest evolution of Qantas' style guide to reflect changing attitudes.

In the 1980s, sideburns had to stop mid-ear and hair couldn't be styled in "gelled spikes," per information provided by the airline. In the previous decade, skirts had to stop above the knee.

But in February last year, the Australian Services Union, a trade union, wrote to Qantas CEO Alan Joyce urging him to bring the uniform policy "into the 21st century." Recommendations included allowing anyone to decide whether to use makeup and approving low-heel shoes.

Imogen Sturni from the union told BBC News the changes were a "big win for workers" as "some of the dress code requirements were bordering on ridiculous."

The rules will also apply to Jetstar, the budget airline also owned by Qantas.

In March, Spanish airline Vueling was reportedly fined 30,000 euros (about $32,000) for enforcing a strict high heel and makeup policy in its female cabin crew.

Now, a mini-revolution is developing among airlines in relation to staff uniform. Compared to some other airlines, Qantas' updated guidance is still relatively modest.

In May last year, Virgin Atlantic said it was updating its rules to allow cabin crew to show tattoos as part of a wider recruitment drive. In September, the airline said employees could wear any uniform items regardless of gender.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Thank you for supporting our journalism. This article is available exclusively for our subscribers, who help fund our work at the Chicago Tribune.

Homicides were reported in Calumet City, Country Club Hills and South Holland in the past week, according to authorities.

Gabriel Jones, 26, of the 6300 block of South Bell in Chicago, was shot multiple times Tuesday and pronounced just before 9 a.m. in the 1200 block of Burnham Avenue in Calumet City, according to the Cook County medical examiners office.

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Also Tuesday, Country Club Hills police responded to a report of shots fired in the area of 169th Street and Glen Oaks Drive and found a man who had suffered multiple gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead at the scene.

He was identified by the Cook County medical examiners office as 21-year-old Jashawn Davison, of the 16900 block of Sunset Ridge Drive, Country Club Hills. The office ruled his death a homicide.

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On June 3, South Holland police were called to a disturbance at a family gathering at a home in the 600 block of 156th Street.

Police said the scene was cleared, but they were called back a short time later for a report of shots fired. No victim was found, but police said they recovered shell casings.

Later that evening, a vehicle was stopped for speeding in Markham, and there were three people including the gunshot victim from the family gathering, South Holland police said.

He was alive at the time but later died of his injuries, police said.

The medical examiners office identified him as 21-year-old Rayshaun Ruffin, of the 14700 block of South Central Avenue in Oak Forest. He was pronounced dead at 11:39 p.m. June 3 at Ingalls Memorial in Harvey from a gunshot wound to the back, according to the office.

South Holland police said they are investigating the case with assistance from the South Suburban Major Crimes Task Force. Police ask anyone with information to contact investigators at 708-331-3131, Ext. 2.

mnolan@tribpub.com
The Republican presidential field is growing by the week with candidates eager to push the party past Donald Trump. Yet few of the former presidents rivals sought to capitalize on the latest indictment against him Thursday.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and several lower-tier candidates turned their criticism on the Justice Department, castigating federal law enforcement for years of investigations involving the twice-impeached and now twice-indicted Trump, who still faces separate investigations on other matters.

Others, like Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; former Vice President Mike Pence; and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, remained silent or said they were waiting for more information to be released.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson was the only prominent Republican in the race to take a harder line against Trump, reiterating an earlier call for him to withdraw from the race.

A federal grand jury indicted Trump on Thursday on seven criminal charges in connection with his mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. He is the first former president to face federal criminal charges. Earlier this year, Manhattan prosecutors indicted him for his role in hush money payoffs to women, while a jury later found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll in a civil trial.

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, Trump said on his Truth Social platform in announcing news of the indictment Thursday, adding that he was asked to appear in U.S. District Court in Miami on Tuesday.

Two sources familiar with the matter confirmed the indictment, saying the charges include false statements and conspiracy to obstruct. The New York Times was first to report on the nature of the charges.

DeSantis  his closest competitor, according to polls  issued a tweet late Thursday that sympathized with Trump.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, DeSantis said. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.

Speaking with Fox News soon after news of the indictment broke, Scott, who announced his candidacy late last month, decried the weaponization of federal law enforcement against Trump.

We look at every case based on evidence in America, Scott said. Every person is presumed innocent, not guilty, and what weve seen over the last several years is the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president.

Trumps staunchest defenders expect, if not demand, such deference, even from those who want to defeat him in the race for the GOP nomination. Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist attuned to the Trump wing of the party, asserted on Twitter that other candidates should suspend their campaign and go to Miami as a show of support.

If you dont, you are part of the problem, Kirk added.

A Republican close with Trump world, who wasnt authorized to speak on the record, wondered how any other Republican candidate [can] effectively attack Trump right now, as Joe Bidens DOJ is quite literally trying to put him in a jail cell?

How, this source added, do you land a single blow without looking like youre linking arms with Biden and [special counsel] Jack Smith and cheering on what theyre doing?

Trumps rivals are becoming used to having to respond to his legal peril. After he was indicted in Manhattan in March, Trump also drew more sympathy than scorn from his rivals, many of whom framed the investigation as politically motivated. Last month, after a New York jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll, many GOP presidential prospects downplayed or dodged questions about the verdict. Christie, who at the time told Fox News that the case was part of an unacceptable pattern of conduct, was an exception.

The contours of the GOP race have changed somewhat since then. DeSantis  who offered a sharp rebuke about porn stars in the days before Trumps first indictment, only to swing the other way once the indictment came  launched his campaign with a not-so-subtle pitch that Republican voters should move on from the drama of the Trump years. Christie, once a close ally, made his candidacy official this week and signaled his intention to attack Trumps faults. Pence also entered the race this week and uncorked some of his harshest condemnations of Trump yet.

But except for Hutchinson, whose campaign has been pitched in large part to Trump-weary voters, no one jumped at the chance to pillory him. Pence, who kept quiet Thursday, refused to answer Wednesday when he was asked by NBC News in Ankeny, Iowa, whether Trump should end his campaign if a federal indictment came down.

Hutchinson didnt hold back on that question, blasting Trumps willful disregard for the Constitution and his disrespect for the rule of law.

Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, Hutchinson said in a statement. But the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.

Others promoted calls for Trump to be pardoned, either by Biden or by themselves should they win the presidency.

It would be much easier for me to win this election if Trump werent in the race, but I stand for principles over politics, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, a long-shot candidate, said in a statement. I commit to pardon Trump promptly on January 20, 2025 and to restore the rule of law in our country.

Pardon Trump now! tweeted Perry Johnson, a Michigan businessman who was disqualified from last years GOP primary for governor because he didnt collect enough valid signatures and is now running a long-shot presidential bid.

But Christie, who has lambasted Trump in his first few days of campaigning, said he wanted to wait for the indictment to be made public before he offered his thoughts on the matter.

As I have said before, no one is above the law, he tweeted, no matter how much they wish they were.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
Despite not having a physical space, chef Jan Parker has forged a fierce reputation for delicious, seasonal Filipino food at local farmers markets and festivals. By next year, she hopes to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant  where brunch flavors of the Philippines reign supreme in downtown Tacoma.

It will be called Reyna Filipina Kitchen, after the Tagalog word for queen. The name also honors her mother and all the women who have supported her culinary journey, which began as she grew up in an immigrant household and blossomed around 2015 when her husband was stationed with the Army in Europe.

Parker, who launched her food business Jan Parker Cookery in 2018, has signed a letter of intent to be an anchor tenant of a forthcoming destination in downtown Tacoma.

Its going to change a lot of things in Tacoma, she said. People need to see that someones doing it, so they can actually do it themselves  to get that inspiration. We need to bring more diversity to the downtown area.

Jan Parker envisions bringing Filipino food to new audiences. Her version of sinigang, a savory and sour soup, uses Oregon bay shrimp and okra, poured over rice and served with pickled daikon and longanisa.

The downtown corridor is undoubtedly experiencing a burst of interest from developers, from Old City Halls restoration to the former Key Tower at 1119 Pacific Ave. Next door, in the ground floor of the old Key Bank through heavy, tall brass doors, Interurban Development is planning a food hall featuring Tacoma-based eateries and a bar. A block north in another historic high-rise, apartments and officer are opening, anchored by Jin Jin Matcha, a new tea cafe, on the ground floor.

Parker is currently negotiating a formal lease for her downtown restaurant space, a process that also requires raising capital to support the build-out, especially equipment. For that reason, she is keeping the precise address under wraps for now, though you can catch a teaser on her Instagram page.

REYNA FILIPINA KITCHEN

At Reyna, a brunch-focused concept, she will serve the likes of her famous chili garlic noodles, crunchy adobo fried chicken, juicy short ribs and pork belly with homemade banana ketchup  a staple of Filipino cuisine. Also popular at her Proctor Farmers Market stand are pancakes griddled with ube  fresh-cut purple yam, not the canned stuff  stacked and drizzled with a rich coconut cream sauce, finished with black sesame and brown sugar. In the off-season, while offering takeout and delivery through DoorDash from her commissary kitchen, she added ube beignets and house-stuffed longanisa, a sweet-and-spicy pork sausage.

Her food reflects her familys history  one that highlights the complex tales of the Filipino diaspora  and the bounty of the Pacific Northwest. She was the first Filipino vendor at the Proctor market and now serves on its advisory board. If the brick-and-mortar comes to fruition, her restaurant would be the first Filipino destination in downtown Tacoma.

Jan Parker, owner of Jan Parker Cookery, in front of her booth at the Proctor Farmers Market in Tacoma, Wash. on Saturday, March 12, 2022.

I meet with so many Filipino people who get so emotional when we talk about this, she told me in a recent phone call. Weve been around since the 1580s in the U.S., and to think there are a limited number of places we can go is just wild to me.

There are more than 4 million Filipinos across the country, with more than 100,000 in the greater Seattle area. According to Pew Research Center data, of the 22 million people of Asian heritage living in the United States, almost 20 percent are Filipino  exceeded only by Indian and Chinese populations. There are fewer numbers of Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese, yet their cuisines are well-known in the restaurant world. Filipino food, full of sweet, salty and sour flavors, has only recently garnered similar attention: Three Filipino restaurants were nominated for James Beard awards this year, as The Seattle Times reported, including Archipelago in Seattle. Also to Tacomas north, Musang has drawn crowds since opening in 2019.

Jan Parker Cookery has been recognized, too, right here in The News Tribune: Last year, we featured Parker in our chef series, 6 women reshaping Tacomas restaurant scene. KUOW highlighted her familys holiday traditions, readers named her Best Chef in South Sound Magazines annual awards and Eater Seattle said her pop-up was one to try.

I think its time, said Parker of reaching the point of transitioning to a brick-and-mortar. Im also just super tired of moving stuff around!

She is particularly excited to be part of downtown Tacoma and a more permanent player in bringing diversity to the food scene of the South Sound.

At Reyna Filipina Kitchen, expect fresh Filipino food and modern brunch spins -- as in these beignets, fried to order and drizzled with ube sauce and powdered sugar.

Theres so much beauty here, theres so much going on  we have a lot to offer, she said. Thats one of the main reasons why: to represent the people, let them know they have a place to go and put Filipino food on the map.

To support Jan Parkers goal of opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant in downtown Tacoma, check out her Kickstarter campaign, going on now through June 17. She is also hosting fundraisers with partner restaurants, including Tibbitts Fern Hill on Friday, June 9  ube pancakes on the menu with calamansi lemonade and ube lattes.

JAN PARKER COOKERY

 Currently cooking most Saturdays at Proctor Farmers Market, 9 a.m.-2 p.m.

 Goal to open restaurant in downtown Tacoma, 2024; support the Kickstarter
CHICAGO  First time in Chicago! Celine Song says, grinning, in between talking about her superb feature film debut as writer-director, Past Lives. Were having coffee downtown, the morning after her film played the Chicago Critics Film Festival at the Music Box Theatre.

Also, first time at the Music Box! That theater is so magical! You can just feel the history. I know Chicago best through The Bear. Do Chicagoans love The Bear? Some do, some dont, I say. The geographical-accuracy police hate it most of all, I tell her. Ah, yes, I get a little like that with New York movies. And I suspect some New Yorkers will feel that way about mine. The train locations arent always correct.

Songs story in Past Lives spans 24 years in the life of Nora (Greta Lee), whose family leaves Seoul, South Korea, for Toronto when the girl was 12 and went by the name Na Young. Twelve years later, at the dawn of Skype, Nora reconnects online with her dear, distant Seoul childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who remains in South Korea.

Past Lives then takes another 12-year leap forward. Nora, now a writer, has married Arthur (John Magaro), also a writer. Now 36, Hae Sung visits New York with no stated reason, though to Nora, as well as Noras husband, the unstated reasons are clear enough, and stir within Nora questions of cultural dislocation and identity. The story came from a similar incident in Songs life five years ago.

She relocated from Toronto to New York in 2011 for graduate studies at Columbia University. Now 34, Songs playwriting career, she says, has been overtaken by a new love. I have fallen too hard with filmmaking, she says, to go back. Not quite six months into 2023, Past Lives is a lot of peoples favorite film of the year so far  not universally beloved, to be sure, and some who admire it also complain about its lack of friction.

Thats a quality the filmmaker acknowledges, though by another name. The story, she says, is about three people trying to treat each other like adults, with care and maturity. It happens all the time in life. The following has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Like Nora, your main character, you immigrated to Canada when you were 12?

A: Toronto, yeah.

Q: And your parents are both artists 

A: My dad is a screenwriter and film director (Neung-han Song), and my mom is an illustrator and graphic designer. I grew up when she was drawing childrens books. My dad is a really significant filmmaker in Korean cinema; different directors, including Bong Joon-ho (Parasite), talk about his influence on their own work. But for me, my dad is just my dad.

Q: In your play Endlings, theres a passage where one of the pearl divers says to her daughter: If you respect me at all, move away from me. Move to a different city. Different country. Different planet.

A: Thats my play! (laughs) I mean, there are so many different kinds of stories about how people immigrate, and how people feel about it. I can only speak about how Nora in the movie feels about it, and in a separate way how I feel about it. For me, it wasnt something I did against my will. I wanted to immigrate. And Im very happy to be here! And thats also true of Nora. But Im not speaking for everybodys immigrant experience. Everyone has a different way, just as everyone goes through a marriage differently. Or responding to their ex coming back to town differently.

(In Past Lives) Nora doesnt think she has anything to grieve until Hae Sung comes to visit her 24 years after the fact. His visit, its the first time it occurs to Nora that there is part of her she left behind. Through this evolving relationship to Hae Sung, who really only knows her as the little girl she was when they were 12, Nora has a chance to see the girl she left behind clearly. And then shes able to say goodbye to her properly.

In the scenes when the characters are in their early 20s I talked to the actors this way: This is a movie about three goodbyes, two bad ones and one good one. When theyre 12, these people dont know how to articulate what theyre feeling. The second time, at 24, theyre still too young. At 24, were quicker to feel things  quicker to be upset, quicker to feel moved, or sad, quicker to laugh. Its about the pacing of your emotion. Then, when theyre 36, the pace of their feelings changes again. Its tentative, and more thoughtful.

Q: I was so grateful for a movie showing a way to get through some difficult emotional churn, without a lot of contrived drama.

A: We all have our prejudices meeting people. And then people reveal themselves to you. These people are trying to treat each other like adults, with care and maturity.  I know many people who behave that way. And I know people who dont. But the heroic thing is not putting yourself first. Its letting people go through something on their own terms.
I finally visited Tarantos Seafood in Biloxi after you recommended it. Heres my review

It was time, anyway.

Located four miles from my house, Tarantos Crawfish, Poboys and Seafood has been calling me since I arrived in South Mississippi and I just havent been able to pick up the phone. Until now.

The Sun Herald ran a poll asking readers where our next food review should take place. You chose Tarantos and I was given purpose.

I made my journey across the bridge gliding over the Biloxi River and into the city limits. I parked in the gravel and placed my order, asking for something I dont normally get.

Poboys arent typically my thing and I love a healthy helping of crawfish dumped into a styrofoam plate. But I wanted to test the establishment. The reviews were strong and Ive only heard good things.

So I brought home a crawfish poboy and a cup of seafood gumbo.

Its the dryness of a poboy that isnt properly executed that prevents me from picking one up anywhere I go. And since I dont do mayo, I was playing behind the sticks with this order.

But I was surprised. The bread was soft and the delicate taste of crawfish fought through its fried encasement. Then I tried the gumbo and was equally impressed. It arrived with a hidden kick that perfectly complemented every flavor wrapped within the 16 oz. to-go cup.

I was halfway through my dont-call-it-a-sub sandwich when an idea hit. A thought at first vulgarly pervasive but then perfectly sensible.

What if I changed my world? What if I defied the mystical boundaries society has institutionalized around unwritten culinary laws? What if I dared to wade into swamps perhaps traveled but were nevertheless undocumented?

Would my actions be followed by the rippling effects of any far-stretching consequences? It didnt matter.

I poured my seafood gumbo into the poboy.

Galaxies collided. The very fabric of reality shifted. My vision cleared. I saw heaven and it was in that poboy.

The soup-soaked rice and shrimp transformed my breaded meal into more than just mere substance. It was a soulful experience that challenged my theories of what food can be.

It filled me with a warmth found only within the cypress-shaded waters inhabited by Gods gift to Southern Society.

I was stuffed, but it didnt matter. I marched through that sandwich like General Edward Pakenham at the Battle of New Orleans.

Like the men under Pakenhams command, I felt defeated. For in the end I had devoured my own beacon of light. But the battle was won. Glory was attained.

And I will be returning to Tarantos.
First baby jaguar born at Florida zoo in a decade  and mom cant get enough cuddles

A new jaguar cub at a Florida zoo is the first to be born there in 10 years.

The baby was born at the Jacksonville Zoo on April 7 to first-time mother and father, Babette and Harry, the zoo said in a Facebook post on June 8.

The cub and its mom are spending ample quality time behind-the-scenes in a private enclosure, according to the zoo.

Video shared by the zoo shows the mom cleaning her baby with her tongue as the cub rolls around playfully paws at her face.

Jaguar mothers sometimes reject their young, so zoo staff said they were happy to see Babette instinctively looking after her cub, according to a news release from the zoo.

We are ecstatic that Babette is doing an excellent job taking care of her cub who is active and healthy, David Hagan, chief life sciences officer for the zoo, said in a statement. This is an exciting time, and we are thrilled for the community to join us in celebration.

The cub will not be on public display until its a little older, the zoo said.

The cub has not yet been named, and its gender is yet to be determined, according to the release.

A male named Khan was the last jaguar to be born at the zoo, according to the release. He was born in July 2013.

Jaguars are big cats found in the rainforest and tropical wetlands of South and Central America, according to the World Wildlife Fund. They can also be found in deserts and grasslands, according to the Jacksonville Zoo.

About 173,000 jaguars exist in the world, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Their status is near threatened, and their population is declining.





The cats are the third largest in the world after lions and tigers, according to the Jacksonville Zoo. Males can grow to weigh between 125 and 250 pounds, and females can weigh between 100 and 200 pounds.

Unlike many other cats, jaguars actually enjoy swimming and catching fish, the release says. They have yellow or orange coats with dark spots, and each jaguar has a unique spot pattern similar to a fingerprint.

Visitors to the Jacksonville Zoo will be able to watch the new cub grow via a livestream viewable in the Lost Temple herp house, according to the Facebook post.

It is important for first-time moms to be able to bond with their cubs without outside disturbance, Sheryl Staaden, curator of mammals for the zoo, said in a statement. The cub reached an important milestone by opening its eyes to reveal a beautiful blue-gray color.

See young mountain lion use research equipment as fun new toy in New Mexico desert

Six red wolves are born at South Dakota zoo. Theyre as important as they are adorable

Tiny creature covered in spots found crawling on seafloor in Japan. Its a new species
Five pledges Labour has already backtracked on

Sir Keir Starmer confirmed last month he was set to U-turn on his pledge to abolish university tuition fees

Labours U-turn on its flagship green investment plan is the latest in a string of broken promises from Sir Keir Starmer.

It will undermine confidence in the Opposition leaders commitment to his principles as he seeks to capitalise on Tory turbulence and transform a double digit lead in the polls into success at the next election.

Here The Telegraph takes a look at some of the pledges Labour has thrown on the scrapheap.

Green investment

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has today ditched Labours flagship plan to spend 28 billion a year on new green jobs and technology, claiming the party can no longer commit to the figure because of economic uncertainty.

She said a Labour government would instead look to ramp up green investment every year with the aim of eventually hitting the promised sum.

Ms Reeves sought to blame the about-turn on the Tories and last Octobers mini-Budget as she said she didnt foresee what the Conservatives would do to our economy.

Tuition fees

Sir Keir Starmer confirmed last month he was set to U-turn on his pledge to abolish university tuition fees.

The Labour leader made 10 commitments when he stood to replace Jeremy Corbyn in early 2020.

His second pledge, titled social justice, contained plans to support the abolition of tuition fees and invest in lifelong learning.

But he admitted in May he was likely to move on from that commitment, arguing it was now unaffordable because of the economic situation.

Free movement

Sir Keir said when he ran for the Labour leadership that he would defend free movement as Britain left the EU.

But he confirmed he had abandoned this pledge last year, telling the Mail on Sunday: A Swiss deal simply wouldnt work for Britain. Freedom of movement is a red line for me.

It was part of the deal of being in the EU but since we left Ive been clear it wont come back under my government.

He added: Ripping up the Brexit deal would lead to years more wrangling and arguing when we should be facing the future.

Lets get on with what the country wants - face the future, seize the opportunities Britain has and make Brexit work.

Renationalisation

Ms Reeves confirmed last year that Labour had ditched its commitment to renationalisation.

She said the Corbyn-era pledge to bring rail, mail, energy and water back into public ownership - endorsed by Sir Keir during his own leadership campaign - was now unaffordable.

Confusion then reigned as a party spokesman contradicted the shadow chancellor, insisting there was a positive role for rail in public ownership.

But asked what he thought, Sir Keir said he agreed with Ms Reeves.

Whether it comes to rail or anything else, I want to be pragmatic about this rather than ideological, he said.

Having come through the pandemic its very important we have very, very clear priorities. Thats why we have set out fiscal rules.

The shadow chancellor went on to suggest in March this year that there is a role for nationalisation in the rail network.

I think with trains its a different point, because as those contracts come up for renewal I think the Government have got every right to bring those into national control given the mess that some of our train operators have made of our transport infrastructure, she said.

But we would not be looking to nationalise a whole swathe of industries.

Income tax

Sir Keir has suggested he will row back on his promise to increase income tax for the highest earners.

When he ran to replace Mr Corbyn, his first commitment was for economic justice, which would involve raising the levy for the top 5pc.

But he said last summer that all 10 of his old promises had been formally scrapped, along with the pledges in the partys disastrous 2019 manifesto.

He told the BBC: A lot has happened in the last two years. Weve been through Covid, we have debt on a scale weve not seen for a long, long time, if ever before.

We have to go into the next election making choices, where we have to say we will do X because we can afford it but we might not be able to do Y and to be open and transparent about it.

Asked if that meant his 10 leadership pledges were now dead in the water, he replied: Yes. The financial situation has changed, the debt situation has changed.

Pressed last month on why he did not want to increase income tax for the top 5 pc of earners, he said: We have the highest tax burden since the Second World War. What we have had from the Government is tax rise upon tax rise upon tax rise.

If they have proved one thing it is that their high tax, low growth economy doesnt work.

Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month, then enjoy 1 year for just $9 with our US-exclusive offer.
Richard (Jesse Garcia), Judy (Annie Gonzalez), and their son Lucky (Hunter Jones) in <em>Flamin' Hot</em>. Credit - Emily AragonesSearchlight Pictures

Flamin Hot, Eva Longorias feature directorial debut, is not a factual history of the Flamin Hot Cheetonor is it meant to be.

Instead, in diving into the story of Richard Montanezthe man who claims to have invented the cult favorite spicy snackFlamin Hot tells an acutely human story of a man trying to break generational cycles and start life anew.

Releasing June 9 on both Hulu and Disney+ (becoming the first new movie to do so), Flamin Hot is based on Montanezs first memoir, A Boy, a Burrito, and a Cookie: From Janitor to Executive. Jesse Garcia plays Montanez, unemployed and selling drugs before he was hired at Frito-Lay.

In Montanezs telling, he invented a chile slurry with his family that would become the spice base for the eventual Flamin Hot Cheeto. Frito-Lay has denied these claims, according to the Los Angeles Times, citing interviews with former employees and the companys archival record. But Flamin Hot worries less about these details and concentrates on the significance of Montanezs story: While working for a company that largely kept Latinos out of the C-suite, he broke through with tenacity, tailoring the flavor to his community. In both the movie and real life, he climbed the chain of command, eventually becoming the vice president of multicultural sales and community promotions for PepsiCo.

Flamin Hot is, however, authentic when it comes to what its director, Longoria, has said matters most: cultural specificity. Linda Yvette Chavez, the co-writer of the film, thoroughly revised a draft of a script written by Lewis Colick into Longorias vision, massaging in the Chicano culture of Southern California in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

How Flamin Hot nails cholo and Chicano culture

Montanez never graduated high schoolhe was not fluent in the corporate jargon of the Frito-Lay executive suite. In the movie, he translates what he imagines Roger Enrico, CEO of parent company PepsiCo, and the other bigwigs might be saying about an economic downturn into a language he does understand: cholo.

The corporate suite at Frito-Lay felt like gangsters throwing down in a drug den, Montanez narrates. Cause lets be real, thats pretty much what C-suiters are: gangsters with money. Enrico was pissed.

He was like, You pendejos are out here tellin me these little punks like Nabisco and Eagle Snacks are getting more feria than us? Montanez continues, pretending to be Enrico. Biting off our territory, and youse estupidos OK with that?

And this gabacho was all, Nah, big homie, Montanez says, as another executive. We still got the good stuff. Cheetos, Fritos, Doritos. People still dishin out lana for the classics, bro.

What? Montanez interjects, as himself again. You need a cholo translator? All right, I got you.

So sales are down? Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah, thats what it looks like right now.

PepsiCo CEO Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub) examines a Flamin' Hot Cheeto sample mock-up that Richard sent him. Anna KoorisSearchlight Pictures

Montanez would have been fluent in the language of gangs and hustling, Chavez tells TIME. These guys are hustlers, just like him, she says. From Richards perspective, this is probably how it went down in the room, and they probably threw down about everything. And letting them each be a different type of character from that cholo culture and world.

Montanez and his wife, Judy (played by Annie Gonzalez), were cholos: young Mexican Americans who belonged to an urban gang subculture. (Colloquially and on the street, chola and cholo culture is known for its trademark aesthetic: pencil-thin eyebrows, lips with a dark and defined liner, cruising lowriders, stylized tattoos.) But then Montanez got a job at Frito-Lays plant in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. and things started looking up.

I grew up with cholitos in my family, Chavez says. I see them in three dimensional ways, and so does Eva. When you create from a place of love, youre gonna get a nuanced representation of that. So thats where I write from in everything that I do, allowing us to be flawed and complex and also beautiful.

Chavez, perhaps best known for co-creating the series Gentefied, about three cousins fighting to keep their grandfathers Boyle Heights taco shop in business, is the daughter of two immigrants from Mexico, and grew up in Norwalk, Calif., a deeply Latino city in Los Angeles County. Longoria, for her part, was born in Corpus Christi, Texas to two Mexican parents. Montanez was born into a Mexican American family near San Bernardino and was raised in and around a migrant labor camp outside of Los Angeles.

When Chavez joined the project, she met first with Montanez, at his house in the Inland Empire, a region next to Southern California. His whole family was there, kids and grandkids, and theyd jump in to fill in any gaps in the story. Richard felt like her dad, she says: a working-class man who worked in factories and dealt with racism. Judy felt like her mom, her prima, the women in my community who are always holding it down.

She felt a sense of relief from them, to sit down with a Latina director and a Latina writer and say, OK, we can turn off the code-switching, and we can be us, and we can tell you truly what we went through, Chavez says. Because just looking at you, I know that you know my experience. Theyre right. I do.

Brice Gonzalez, Annie Gonzalez, Jesse Garcia and Hunter Jones in FLAMIN HOT Emily AragonesSearchlight Pictures

How Flamin Hot handles the muddled story of the spicy Cheeto

While Flamin Hot has been well-received (it won the headliner audience award at South by Southwest in March), the details of Montanezs story have raised eyebrows. In two memoirsA Boy, a Burrito, and a Cookie and Flamin Hot: The Incredible True Story of One Mans Rise from Janitor to Top Executiveand countless speeches, Montanez has said that he invented Flamin Hot Cheetos.

But in May 2021, while the film was in development, the Los Angeles Times published an investigation in which Frito-Lay denied that he invented the snack. According to the Times, a separate team within Frito-Lay came up with the creation. We value Richards many contributions to our company, especially his insights into Hispanic consumers, but we do not credit the creation of Flamin Hot Cheetos or any Flamin Hot products to him, the company said in a statement. He did, however, work on Sabrositas, a line of products pitched at the Latino market in the Los Angeles area.

Less than a week later, PepsiCo, Frito-Lays parent company, backtracked. The information we shared with the media has been misconstrued by some, the company said in a statement. We attribute the launch and success of Flamin Hot Cheetos and other products to several people who worked at PepsiCo, including Richard Montanez.

Longoria and Chavez agree: They didnt set out to tell the history of the Flamin Hot Cheeto. The film does, however, acknowledge a group in the Midwest that was designing a spicy snack to be sold in inner-city mini-marts at the same time, which aligns with the official record.

So much of his story, especially when you watch the film, is how do you get people to value your worth, give you your worth and your credit? Chavez says. And for BIPOC people, its been a journey for all of us. Sometimes history is skewed. And sometimes those people in positions of power have the privilege to skew that history.
FORT LAUDERDALE  Its tough enough to get five of the nine Broward County School Board members to agree on the time of day, and to bring cohesion to the community, their next big decision ought to require nearly unanimous agreement. Its that important.

But choosing a Broward school superintendent is fraught with peril. Its one more task of many that this system cant get right. Not so long ago, under a former superintendent, the board was marked by pro-Runcie and anti-Runcie factions.

After Robert Runcie resigned under pressure, the board appointed an interim replacement, Vickie Cartwright, fired her and un-fired her before a mutually agreed-upon separation, and named a new interim leader, Earlean Smiley. Thats three chiefs in less than two years. See how easy it is?

Next Thursday, following two long days of interviews, the board is scheduled to choose one of three finalists to run Americas sixth-largest school district. Nobody in his right mind should take this job on a 5-to-4 vote. At least seven of nine members, preferably all nine, should firmly reach a consensus.

But this search is already flawed.

The School Board hired a search firm, McPherson & Jacobson, and surrendered too much authority to the Omaha-based company, including logistics of the critical vote.

They have taken the lead on process. It was not our process. It was theirs, Smiley said on May 30.

If the School Board follows the search firms advice, the superintendent will be chosen through a consensus-building system known as ranked choice voting. Each board member will rank finalists as first, second or third choices (lowest score wins) before taking a final vote.

It is possible, if the board is closely divided over a top pick, that the candidate rated No. 2 among most board members will get this job. If the search ends in an unpopular choice, the public will never accept it, and some board members already dont like it.

Im actually very disappointed in this process, said board member Brenda Fam, objecting to ranked choice voting. She decried a lack of transparency in the search and said she learned relevant facts about finalists not from a $50,000 outside search but from social media or a newspaper article, for Gods sake.

Board member Sarah Leonardi described winnowing of the field as playing numbers games.

The search firm Google-searched the semi-finalists, left out vital information from background reports, and did not show up for a critical May 30 meeting where the field was narrowed to three: Peter Licata of Palm Beach County, Luis Solano of Detroit, and Sito Narcisse of East Baton Rouge, La. Its far, far short of a knockout field.

Narcisse, 47, has worked at four different districts in the past decade and is the only finalist whos currently a superintendent. For two-plus years, he has run a district of 41,000 students. (Broward is more than six times as large.)

Still, board member Allen Zeman calls Narcisse head and shoulders above his two rivals.

In Louisiana, Narcisse approved a Day of Hope career fair at a church that brought protests from parents and the ACLU and may yet trigger a lawsuit. The event has never been fully explained, and an internal report about it remains secret. Narcisse should face penetrating questions about the career fair during interviews next week

Browards next superintendent will encounter a circus atmosphere with endless talk of hidden political agendas, rumor and innuendo.

All three finalists will be interviewed publicly by board members, a group of principals and a panel of 18 community representatives.

Each board member asked two people to submit questions to the finalists. The group includes a student, a teacher, parent volunteers, teacher union representatives, a former board member (Lori Parrish), a lobbyist for the charter school industry (Ed Pozzuoli), a Plantation council member (Louis Reinstein) and two people who provide an outspoken presence at board meetings, Vicente Thrower of Pompano Beach and Deidre Ruth of Hollywood.

Ruth, a critic of COVID-19 testing in schools and Fam appointee, pleaded with the School Board on May 30 to stop the search because of its flaws. Shes now a part of it.

Politics plays a role here, as it always does. As many as five board members could face the voters in 2024. They are Vice Chair Debbie Hixon, whos elected countywide, and district board members Torey Alston, Daniel Foganholi, Jeff Holness and Leonardi (Alston and Foganholi were appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis).

If this hire goes off the rails, and history suggests it could, it will be a major political issue in the next election.

Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on Twitter @stevebousquet.
Florence, Italy

To curb the proliferation of Airbnb and similar short-term rental platforms, the picturesque city of Florence in Italy has joined a number of other European cities in implementing measures to ban residential properties in its historic center from being used for short-term rentals, Reuters reported on June 2. Mayor Dario Nardella recently made an announcement stating that no new permits for Airbnb and similar rentals will be issued. Its important to note that this policy does not apply retroactively, which means that existing short-term rentals will remain available for the time being.

As Florence continues to attract an increasing number of tourists and focuses on post-Covid recovery efforts, visitors who were planning to stay for only a few days will now have to seek alternative accommodations outside the city center.

The main objective of this policy is to address Florences persistent issue of a shortage of affordable housing. In recent decades, the city center has witnessed the conversion of numerous buildings into short-term rentals such as Airbnbs, making it increasingly challenging for locals to find housing they can afford.

Supporting the Decision To Ban Airbnbs

According to the Mayor EU, the decision to restrict short-term rentals has received support from the Italian hospitality industry trade group Federalberghi. Francesco Bechi, the president of the Florence branch, has expressed his appreciation for the policy, highlighting that it will not only alleviate the housing crisis but also contribute to the revitalization of a crucial aspect of the citys history: its community life.

Bechi hopes that this move will serve as a signal to the federal government, encouraging them to take similar action nationwide. He also remarked that the proposed national government measure, which suggests implementing a minimum two-night stay rule, may not yield the desired results.

Apart from Florence, other prominent European cities including Lisbon, Paris, and Barcelona have also implemented restrictions on short-term rentals to prioritize housing for local residents in need of permanent accommodations. These measures are part of a broader effort to balance the economic benefits of tourism with the preservation of affordable housing and the local communitys well-being.
From Florida to California, see what officials are saying after Trumps federal indictment

Former President Donald Trump says he has been indicted in connection to the classified documents the FBI found last year at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach.

The indictment, which is likely to charge Trump with illegally possessing classified records, among other accusations, was returned by a federal grand jury but remains sealed.

The one-time president said Thursday night on his social media platform Truth Social that he must make his first appearance in Miami federal court on Tuesday.

READ MORE: Trump says hes been indicted in documents case. Expected in Miami court Tuesday

From Florida to California, heres what officials are saying on Twitter.

Aug 30, 2022; Image contained in a court filing by the Department of Justice on Aug. 30, 2022 of a redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the 45 office seized during the Aug. 8 search by the FBI of former President Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. According to the filing the classification levels ranged from CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET information, and certain documents included additional sensitive compartments that signify very limited distribution. In some instances, even the FBI counterintelligence personnel and DOJ attorneys conducting the review required additional clearances before they were permitted to review certain documents. Mandatory Credit: Handout/Department of Justice via USA TODAY NETWORK

DeSantis, Rubio and Schiff speak out

A few hours after Trumps announcement, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis  who like Trump is a 2024 presidential candidate for the Republican Party  said that the weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society.

We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation, he said. The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society.



We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.



Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?



The DeSantis  Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) June 9, 2023

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida chimed in, too, accusing President Joe Bidens administration of ripping our country apart.

There is no limit to what these people will do to protect their power & destroy those who threaten it, even if it means ripping our country apart & shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together, he added.

There is no limit to what these people will do to protect their power & destroy those who threaten it, even if it means ripping our country apart & shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together  Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 9, 2023

U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, who represents a Southwest Florida congressional district that ranges from the Fort Myers area to Marco Island, called it another phony indictment.

This mob-like justice system is turning Lady Justice on its head and is the most significant threat to our democracy, he wrote.

On the day members of Congress learn from an FBI document linking then VP Joe Biden to receiving $5 MILLION from Burisma in a pay-for-play scheme, Bidens DOJ announces another phony indictment of the leading candidate for the GOP Presidential nomination, Bidens likely opponent, pic.twitter.com/PyP6f1kL7y  Byron Donalds (@ByronDonalds) June 9, 2023

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, whose congressional district includes Pensacola and portions of the Florida Panhandle, referred to the indictment a hoax.

This phony Boxes Hoax indictment against President Trump reflects the most severe election interference on the part of the federal government that we have EVER seen! he said.

This phony Boxes Hoax indictment against President Trump reflects the most severe election interference on the part of the federal government that we have EVER seen! pic.twitter.com/Rl9hiSjhO0  Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) June 9, 2023

Conversely, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff of California said Trumps apparent indictment is another affirmation of the rule of law.

For four years, he acted like he was above the law. But he should be treated like any other lawbreaker. And today, he has been, he said.

Donald Trump was just federally indicted. Lets break it down. pic.twitter.com/pjeDweh30v  Adam Schiff (@AdamSchiff) June 9, 2023

And then there was Trump, who was the first to break the news  calling it a witch hunt.

This is indeed a DARK DAY for the United States of America, he said.

This is a developing story.
Members of Floridas congressional delegation are responding to the new indictment of former President Donald Trump.

The charges stem from the investigation into classified documents taken from the White House and kept in his Mar-a-Lago home.

>>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<<

It seems to be uneven application of justice and the weaponization of our justice system, said US Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL 6th District).

Waltz, who has endorsed Trump in the 2024 race, points to recent discoveries of classified documents held onto by other elected officials, including President Joe Biden as evidence of unequal treatment.

For me, this is incredibly disturbing and damaging the American peoples trust, not just in our justice system, but all of our national security apparatus, said Waltz.

On the other side of the aisle, Florida Congresswoman Lois Frankel (D-FL 22nd District) urged the public to be patient and trust the judicial system.

I think its a very sad day when a former President gets indicted, but everyone needs to be held accountable to the law, said Frankel.

Florida Republican US Senator Rick Scott was in St. Augustine Friday.

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When asked about the indictment he called for transparency from the US Department of Justice.

Dont be a black hole. Give people good information. You work for the American public. We have a right to know exactly why you are doing what youre doing. I said that when they raided Mar-A-Lago. I said just tell people why you did that and you didnt raise other places, said Scott.

Its still unclear how the latest indictment will impact Trumps bid for a second term as President.

After the New York indictment dropped he skyrocketed in the polls.

The former President is expected to appear in federal court this coming Tuesday in Miami.

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Florida man accused of sexually abusing children he offered to babysit: police

Osceola County, Florida, law enforcement officials arrested a man this week on allegations that he victimized and sexually abused two boys he babysat, according to police.

The Osceola County Sheriffs Office arrested 18-year-old Vitor Camilo Coelho Pinto, a Brazilian national living in Kissimmee, Florida, since 2020.

On June 5, the sheriffs office responded to a report of capital sexual battery, after an 11-year-old boy disclosed he had been victimized by Pinto multiple times.

FLORIDA WOMAN ARRESTED FOR FATALLY SHOOTING NEIGHBOR AFTER ALLEGED THREATS

As the investigation unfolded, an 8-year-old boy allegedly told the sheriffs offices special victims unit he was the victim of several incidents involving lewd and lascivious conduct by Pinto.

Pinto, the sheriffs office said, has lived in the West Irlo Bronson Memorial Highway area of Kissimmee, Florida since 2020, and while living there, he befriended several Brazilian families in the area and offered to babysit and help with childcare.

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

Police car with blue lights on the crime scene in traffic urban environment.

On Tuesday, the sheriffs office executed a warrant against Pinto and arrested him on 10 counts each of capital sexual battery and lewd and lascivious molestation.

The investigation is ongoing, and detectives believe there may be other victims.

The department encourages anyone with information about the incident, or if their child has been in contact with Pinto, to contact the Osceola County Sheriffs Office at 407-348-2222.
Florida man nearly loses leg to flesh-eating disease after getting bitten in a family brawl

Florida man nearly loses leg to flesh-eating disease after getting bitten in a family brawl

A Florida man almost lost his leg  and could have died  from a rare flesh-eating bacterial infection, which developed after he was bitten in the thigh during a family fight.

Donnie Adams, a 53-year-old funeral assistant from the Tampa suburb of Riverview, went to the emergency room in mid-February to treat a bump the size of a dollar coin on his upper left thigh.

He was sent home with a tetanus shot and antibiotics, but the injury got worse over the next few days, becoming red, swollen and painful to the touch.

His thigh "almost looked like an orange peel because of the swelling that was underneath it," Dr. Fritz Brink, a wound care specialist at HCA Florida Healthcare who treated Adams, told NBC News.

"By day number three, the leg was swollen, it felt very warm and I had problems with mobility and everything," Adams said on Friday.

Donnie Adams survived a flesh-eating bacteria that had begun destroying part of his leg. (HCA Florida Pasadena Hospital)

Brink said Adams told him that he sustained the bite while breaking up a family altercation.

"He pulled them off of each other and, in the process, he got bit," Brink said.

The wound's appearance matched Adams' account, he added.

"When I saw him in the hospital, you could still see the bite marks on his thigh," Brink said. "It made teeth marks. I was very convinced that he was telling a true story."

He said he rushed Adams to the operating room at HCA Florida Northside Hospital in St. Petersburg on Feb. 19. Adams underwent a second surgery several days later, then was released from the hospital around the second week of March, Brink said.

"I knew it was serious then after I got the tetanus shot," Adams said, then added, "I had no imagination that it would be anything serious like this, that serious."

Adams declined to say what sparked the family dust-up or identify which relative bit him.

"Family is everything, and sometimes things go down in families," he said. "Im a man of faith. People can be forgiven and thats the way I feel about that. It was a family event that went sour between two people and even though I got in middle of it and I got injured, it doesnt mean Im going to hate my family over this."

Donnie Adams with Dr. Fritz Brink. (HCA Florida Pasadena Hospital)

Adams said he was likely only a day or two from needing an amputation.

"I would have lost my leg if I had waited to next day based on how the infection was growing in that region," he said. "It was a quiet storm."

Flesh-eating disease, or necrotizing fasciitis, is a life-threatening condition that can be caused by a variety of different strains of bacteria, including group A strep and other bacteria found in water, dirt or saliva.

The bacteria enter the body through a break in the skin, such as a cut, scrape, burn, insect bite or open wound. From there, it invades and kills the tissue under the skin that surrounds the muscles, nerves, fat and blood vessels. The bacteria spreads quickly, so an infection can develop within hours or a few days.

"More often than not, its a normal bacteria that lives on our skin and they utilized a weak point from an injury as an entryway," Brink said.

The human mouth contains hundreds of different bacteria, but its rare for doctors to see patients with a human bite, let alone one that develops into a life-threatening infection, Brink added.

He said he usually sees a case of necrotizing fasciitis once a month or every other month.

Brink's theory about Adams' case is that he likely developed a nonserious infection that traveled deeper into his soft tissue until it reached his muscle and "was able to just take off."

Brink estimated that he removed around 60% of the skin on the front of Adams' left thigh to stop the infection from spreading. From there, he said, he used a vacuum device to close the wound, which healed in about three months.

"I do expect him to make a full recovery," Brink said. "Hes still going to feel that scar tissue on his thigh for a while to come, but his skin has completely healed."

Adams said he used a walker to get around for about a month after his release from the hospital. He is now walking pain-free and without a limp.

"I don't think I could give you a 40 [-yard sprint] today, but maybe a 20," he said.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
(AFP via Getty Images)

It was anticipated that a federal investigation into Donald Trumps retention of top-secret documents months after he left the White House would result in charges in Washington DC.

But the damning 37-count indictment, with more than two dozen counts of illegally withholding classified documents under the Espionage Act, was filed on 8 June in US District Court in Florida, his primary residence and the location of his notorious Mar-a-Lago resort property, where mounds of boxes with sensitive government documents were discovered by federal law enforcement.

Photographs in an unsealed indictment released on 9 June showed stacks of them on a ballroom stage and gilded bathroom with a chandelier. Interviews with witnesses and transcripts of conversations in the sweeping indictment appear to show a depth of coordination among Mr Trump, his aides and attorneys to bring them to the property and, later, conceal them from law enforcement.

So it makes sense that prosecutors would charge him and his associate Walt Nauta in Florida. But determining the venue for a case against the former president, or any defendant, isnt necessarily a straightforward one.

It really could make a huge difference. The jury pool is different. The judges are different, according to former assistant US Attorney Andrew Weissmann, speaking to MSNBC.

Also, DC is a location where the court is very used to dealing with classified information. Theres an expertise there. So in terms of speed, getting this case to trial, the venue matters, he added.

The Republican former president also has repeatedly rejected charges and investigations against him in several jurisdiction as political witch hunts, pointing to the Democratic majorities in New York City  where was found liable for sexual abuse, hit with a $250m lawsuit from the state attorney general, and criminally charged with more than 30 counts of falsifying business records  and Atlanta, where his efforts to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential election are expected to result in charges this summer.

Mr Trump won the state of Florida in 2016 and 2020, though he lost the county of Miami-Dade, where he is facing a federal indictment.

A form attached to the indictment also noted that the case was filed in the West Palm Beach court division, suggesting that a prospective jury pool may be drawn from there.

Voters in Palm Beach County have reliably voted for Democratic presidential candidates, but Republican Governor Ron DeSantis won 51 per cent of the county vote last year.

Mr DeSantis  Mr Trumps rival for the 2024 Republican nomination for president  said in a statement after news of the indictment that he will bring accountability to the [US Department of Justice], excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all but stopped short of saying he would do anything to intervene.

The fact that this is being charged in Florida is enormously significant, according to CNN legal analyst Elie Honig. Legally, I think its the right move by [the Justice Department], because theyre going to avoid a messy question about venue.

Subpoenas may have been issued from Washington DC, but courts have upheld that the venue must be tied to where the unlawful conduct was committed.

Florida may ultimately be less advantageous for federal prosecutors and the Justice Department in a case dealing with classified documents and the aftermath of a presidential administration, typically the purview of Washington courts, but the state is a legally a less risky venue at this juncture, according to Mr Weissmann and Ryan Goodman.

An aerial view of Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate on 10 August, 2022, days after a federal law enforcement search of the property (AP)

Whatever legal and factual arguments might support venue in Washington DC, the consequences of getting that calculus wrong, is an unknown variable that will counsel in favor of caution on the part of the [Justice Department], they wrote.

Prosecutors also likely do not want to risk spending the first year fighting over venue, former federal prosecutor Randall D Eliason told The Washington Post.

For now, Mr Trumps case will be handled by a federal judge he appointed to the bench in 2020  and who already has delivered controversial rulings in the investigation that were rejected by an appeals court.

US District Judge Aileen Cannon is scheduled to preside over his federal court case in Miami.

Last year, Judge Cannon appointed a special master to review materials seized by federal law enforcement and restricted the FBI from using those documents as part of the investigation until she completed a review, effectively freezing the Justice Department probe.

News crews camp out in front of a federal court building in Miami anticipating Donald Trumps arrival after a federal indictment was unsealed on 9 June (Getty Images)

That order was ultimately thrown out entirely by a three-judge panel at a federal appeals court, which sharply criticised the judges actions and stressed that a court cannot simply write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant or write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.

If she does not recuse herself from the case and she remains a trial judge, she could play a potentially critical role in the cases development, including whether to set a trial before or after presidential primary elections and the general election in 2024, as Mr Trump seeks the Republican nomination for president.

He already is scheduled to return to Manhattan Criminal Court on 25 March  days after voting begins in primary states. A trial in a fraud lawsuit targeting Mr Trump, his adult children and his business entities is slated to begin in October.
After weeks of delays, Gov. Ron DeSantis administration on Thursday evening released heavily redacted procurement documents that offer virtually no detail on how three companies plan to carry out a controversial migrant relocation program that is already underway.

The documents  obtained from the Division of Emergency Management as part of a public records request after the Miami Herald threatened to file suit  show that GardaWorld Federal Services, Vertol Systems Company and ARS Global Emergency Management submitted their proposals in April and blacked out huge chunks of information from their proposals, claiming confidential trade secret information.

One of the few details that each company disclosed was how much they intended to charge the state for the development phase of the program, which is funded at $12 million.

GardaWorld Federal Services, an armored truck and logistics company that has been investigated for safety violations, said it would charge $100 per hour; ARS Global Emergency Management said its price was $150 per hour; and Vertol Systems said its price was a $487,000 lump sum.

READ MORE: Operatives linked to DeSantis promised to fly migrants to Delaware  but left them stranded

Vertol Systems  the company that was hand-picked by the DeSantis administration last fall to fly 49 migrants from San Antonio, Texas, to Marthas Vineyard, Massachusetts  is the only company that has been linked to the latest round of migrants flights that recently arrived in California.

California has initiated criminal and civil investigations into the handling of the flights, saying that migrants were deceived when they were recruited to board planes that landed in Sacramento.

DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate, on Thursday defended sending roughly 30 migrants to California, saying it has incentivized illegal immigration and should have no problem taking them in. DeSantis has made immigration a major theme in his campaign.

Since the relocation programs inception, DeSantis and his administration have been secretive about its inner workings and have refused to publicly disclose many aspects of its covert operation. The documents released on Thursday are a continuation of the lack of transparency surrounding the program.

For instance, the proposal ARS Global Emergency Management submitted to the Division of Emergency Management for consideration, was heavily redacted. Among the sections that have been shielded from the public are the companys experience, its references, how it plans to carry out the work, details about how reliable it would be and how it would provide customer service to the Division of Emergency Management.

Even the name of the person who submitted the proposal on behalf of the company was redacted, claiming a trade secret exemption.

In response to questions about the redactions, Alecia Collins, a spokeswoman for the Division of Emergency Management, said it is up to the vendors to determine which portions of the documents and information they submit they deem confidential, proprietary, trade secret, or otherwise not subject to disclosure pursuant to Floridas public records laws.

Marthas Vineyard flights execution cited in one proposal

Vertol Systems proposal, submitted by owner James Montgomerie, was also heavily redacted. Notably, it did not shield information about its past work for the state relocating migrants. In the proposal, Montgomerie said the company was paid $1.3 million for the Marthas Vineyard flights last September and used that as an example for why the company should be hired again.

Successfully contacted, selected, vetted, housed and transported migrants to a migration support center in Marthas Vineyard, Massachusetts. Conducted multiple additional site surveys and location developments, the proposal said.

It did not mention  or at least the redacted portions of the document did not show  that the companys handling of the Marthas Vineyard flights has led to several lawsuits, investigations and even a revision of state law, after the state was sued and accused of breaking laws.

READ MORE: DeSantis cracked down on migrant labor. Then one helped coordinate his migrant flights

At the time, Florida law gave the governor the authority to move migrants from Florida to other parts of the country. But Vertols flight originated from Texas. In the face of the lawsuit, the Legislature amended the state law to allow DeSantis to move migrants anywhere in the United States, and it moved the program from the Florida Department of Transportation to the Division of Emergency Management.

The documents released Thursday do not show how much the Division of Emergency Management paid Vertol Systems to execute the two flights to California this week.

Tactful diplomacy

The documents did show that seven other companies submitted proposals to help the state carry out the migrant relocation program. They include G.G. Procurement Solutions, Hagerty Consulting, Inc., Air Flight Charters, PAL Services, Quality 2 Transport, SLSCO LTD and Greenlight Group LLC.

Many of those proposals were also heavily redacted. Greenlights proposal was completely redacted.

Air Flight Charters wrote in its proposal that it would treat the program with the tactful diplomacy that will be required.

Dropping a bunch of passengers off all at once, in one or two locations, gives the impression of moving people like cattle  I promise you that this is not the best image to present, the proposal said.

When the Division of Emergency Management requested proposals, it said it was looking for vendors to abide by certain truths.

Among them that the migrant and refugee issues are not going away and that a small percentage of these migrants are criminals and malicious actors from foreign entities. They should be identified, apprehended and delivered to law enforcement.

The state agency added that human beings should be treated with compassion and dignity.
The big story: The stories of books being challenged and removed from Florida schools have become almost commonplace in recent months.

Whats been less well documented in the behind the scenes decisions that educators and administrators are making about books before they ever go into circulation. New state laws about selecting, reviewing and presenting materials have created an atmosphere that some consider self-censorship, as decisions get made about library collections, book sales and other related activities.

Thats the state of education, Marvin Dunn, historian and professor emeritus at Florida International University, told the Miami Herald. People are frightened. They arent sure and are being overly cautious. Read more from the Herald.

Some Alachua County parents said they fear childrens education will suffer because of book challenges and removals, WUFT reports.

The Biden Administration announced creation of a federal coordinator to counter school book bans, Florida Phoenix reports.

Hot topics

Race relations: The Miami-Dade County school district is investigating a students claim that a teacher and assistant principal made racially discriminatory remarks to her, the South Florida Times reports.

School security: The former principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High is part of a national group advocating for more school protection to prevent campus shootings, WPTV reports.

Student transportation: Central Florida school districts have more than 200 bus driver vacancies they need to fill over the summer, WMFE reports.

Superintendent contracts: Newly appointed Manatee County superintendent Jason Wysong has officially signed his contract to take over the job, WWSB reports.  A Collier County judge said he would rule as soon as he can on a complaint seeking to stop the school district from entering a contract with its newly selected superintendent, WCGU reports.

Vouchers: Private religious virtual schools are looking for ways to take advantage of Floridas new universal voucher program, which currently excludes their participation, reimaginED reports.

Other school news

A longtime Flagler County teacher and administrator was relieved of his post. He had been under investigation of complaints filed by employees, Flagler Live reports.

The Flagler County School Board has called for an audit of the Flagler Youth Orchestra. A School Board member raised concerns that the district had allowed a non-employee access to the orchestra account and had not reviewed it over 18 years, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reports.

Santa Fe College is launching a charter high school in the fall. The school, which will focus on health sciences and information technology, has drawn 75 students from across Alachua County, Main Street Daily News reports.

A viral video of a Palm Beach County school principal has cost him his position. At least one School Board member wants him fired, the Palm Beach Post reports. The video showed him yelling racial slurs at a woman in the school parking lot after a minor traffic crash.

The Mathematical Association of America is slated to hold its annual conference in Tampa. Its facing objections from LGBTQ+ members, Inside Higher Ed reports.

From the police blotter ... A Broward County teen was arrested on accusations of bringing a gun to school, the Sun-Sentinel reports.

Dont miss a story. Heres a link to yesterdays roundup.

Before you go ... Did you know only one instrumental song has ever been banned from radio play in the United States? Its Link Wrays Rumble from 1958. This year, Link Wray was inducted into the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame as an early influencer.

  

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As artificial intelligence becomes an increasingly high-profile topic in higher education, Florida universities are holding discussions about how to harness the technologys power  and stave off the potential for academic malfeasance.

The University of Florida Board of Trustees, for example, received an update Thursday from the schools Provost Joe Glover on artificial intelligence, or AI, initiatives at UF.

The states flagship university is home to a supercomputer known as HiPerGator, which was a $50 million gift to the school from NVIDIA, a Silicon Valley-based tech firm, and company co-founder Chris Malachowsky, a University of Florida graduate. Touted for its artificial intelligence capabilities, the supercomputer is being used by researchers from UF and other state universities to tackle pressing agricultural and environmental problems.

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But Glover said We need to pay attention to another very important development in AI  a technology thats known as generative AI. Generative AI has exploded into the tech world in recent months and has drawn widespread attention for its ability to generate things such as text and images.

This is an important new technology. It will totally disrupt higher education, Glover told the trustees.

The provost pointed to what he called an emerging research agenda in generative AI.

As everyone knows, generative AI hallucinates. ChatGPT makes mistakes, it doesnt give the right answers. It is subject to flights of fancy and depression, Glover said, referencing a widely used generative AI tool.

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company that developed ChatGPT, describes its text models as advanced language processing tools that can generate, classify, and summarize text with high levels of coherence and accuracy.

Human efforts are needed to safeguard against ChatGPTs raw capabilities, Glover said.

And so, it needs a validation ecosystem, which people are working on now. It needs development and collaboration with subject-matter experts. It needs ethics, security and policy built around it, he added.

Meanwhile, UF continues to pump significant resources into its AI initiatives. During a March 16 trustees meeting, Glover described efforts by the school as building an AI University and infusing AI into everything that UF is doing.

The school also has proposed a new degree, the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence Systems, which would be established within the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering.

Florida Gulf Coast Universitys Board of Trustees is also eyeing the issue. The board next week will hold a discussion on artificial intelligence and its threats and opportunities to teaching and learning.

Trustees are scheduled to hear a presentation on technology tools such as ChatGPT during a board meeting Tuesday. A discussion about students use of generative AI, particularly in assignments that involve writing, is part of the meetings agenda.

Following Spring Semester, 2023, FGCU saw no increase in cases of student misconduct overall or cases of Academic Integrity specifically compared to the previous year. However, anecdotal evidence from instructions of English Composition suggests that students are using ChatGPT specifically in writing assignments, a description of the planned discussion said.

The university has a license to use the plagiarism-detection software TurnItIn.com, which the school said includes an application to detect signatures of AI-generated prose. Professors currently are using it to screen students work.

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Moving forward, the Dean of Students office will begin tagging academic misconduct cases for instances of Generative AI usage, and an explicit syllabus statement will be generated for faculty use to prevent cases of unauthorized assistance, Tuesdays agenda item said.

FGCU professors have been using generative AI with excellent results, according to the meeting item.

On the positive side, Generative AI, whether used for writing, art, graphics, or other applications is likely to be a transformative innovation in higher education, the agenda said.

Glover also predicted that generative AI could reshape the internet as the technologys use becomes more widespread.

There is going to be so much content generated on these generative AIs, that it will flood the web, and it will become unreliable and untrustworthy. Youll have some generated by people on the right, and some generated by people on the left. Some promote vaccines, some by anti-vaxxers. And so, people will lose confidence in it, he said.

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Duane Owen, who in 1984 savagely slashed to death a 14-year-old babysitter and fatally bludgeoned a mother of two while children slept nearby, is facing his doom.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed the Palm Beach County killer's death warrant, and Owen's execution date is June 15.

Owen stabbed to death Karen Slattery, a Pope John Paul High freshman, and struck Georgianna Worden, 38, an executive secretary in an architectural firm and a mother of two, five times in the head with a hammer after breaking into the homes where they were.

Two of the drugs Florida will use to kill him are in short supply across the nation. The constant dearth of lethal injection drugs to replace expired supplies has many states scrambling to find them, substituting their usual cocktail with drugs such as fentanyl and even bringing back old execution methods, such as the firing squad, hanging and cyanide gas.

Several years ago, pharmaceutical companies, especially those in Europe where opposition to the death penalty is widespread, began to learn that the drugs are ending lives, not saving them. Every European Union country opposes the death penalty, so they enacted export laws barring the drugs going to the United States for executions.

Big Pharma in the U.S. also isn't too pleased with the ethics or the possible damage to their reputations by supplying drugs to execute people. In 2016, Pfizer was the last big drug company to block its products from exacting the death penalty.

More: Why did DeSantis terminate Florida killer Duane Owen's execution delay?

True Crime: Duane Owen murders babysitter Karen Slattery, 14, and woman, 38, as children slept

For subscribers: After witnessing execution of William Van Poyck, 'the world didn't seem safer. I was just numb'

So what's an executioner to do?

Many states have gone clandestine  getting them from overseas manufacturers illicitly or going to some shady compounding pharmacies. Compounded drugs are not reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration for safety, effectiveness or quality.

So how is Florida stocking up? No way to know. The legislature made it secret in 2022.

What can go wrong in lethal injection executions?

When it comes to the rate of botched executions, lethal injections far outrank other methods, including hanging, according to Austin Sarat, an Amherst College professor of jurisprudence and author of "Botched Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty.

Most of the execution problems center on the sedatives. It's all about pain. The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution bars cruel and unusual punishment by the criminal justice system.

Many inmates have felt excruciating pain in botched, lengthy executions. The longest ever was three hours.

For subscribers: Column: I witnessed the executions of serial killer Aileen Wuornos. UF killer Danny Rolling

More: Florida's death row: 305 people live there. Only 8 killed victims in Palm Beach County.

What are states resorting to for new execution methods?

About half of states employ the death penalty and almost all, as well as the federal government, use lethal injection as their primary method.

South Carolina offers the choice of the electric chair or the firing squad if lethal injection drugs can't be obtained. A Richland County judge, however, ruled last year that both secondary measures are cruel and unusual punishment. The governor has appealed.

In Florida, inmates also have a choice. They can die sitting on "Old Sparky," the electric chair, but only one inmate awaiting execution, Wayne Doty, has chosen it and he hasn't been executed yet. Besides, Old Sparky has had some issues in past executions, such as inmates' heads catching fire. That's why lethal injection became the primary method in 2000.

Some other states, including Arizona and California, have revived methods such as lethal cyanide gas.

New Hampshire, which abolished the death penalty in 2019 but can't apply it retroactively, has one inmate left on death row. Michael Addison was convicted in 2006 of killing Manchester police officer Michael Briggs.

Lethal injection was New Hampshire's primary method, but if it's "impractical," the state can hang him. No word yet on Addison's fate.

States with one- or two-drug methods tend to administer a lethal dose of a sedative, basically killing with an overdose of a painkiller. Nevada and Nebraska use fentanyl, the opioid killing tens of thousands of people overdosing in the U.S. each year.

How does lethal injection work in Florida? The 3-drug cocktail

Florida has a three-drug protocol when it executes by lethal injection. The first is an anesthetic to sedate. The second drug paralyzes the inmate and stops their breathing. The third, a concentrated form of potassium, stops the heart.

Even before the protocol begins, Florida offers inmates a dose of hydroxyzine, an antihistamine, to ease anxiety.

In step one, Florida uses the sedative, etomidate. The state introduced the use of this sedative in 2017, over the objections of manufacturer Johnson & Johnson. It has been in short supply since early May, according to ASHP, a association of 60,000 pharmaceutical professionals.

The drug is generally used to induce general anesthesia but can wear off in about 10 minutes, according to Darragh O'Carroll, M.D., an emergency doctor from Hawaii who has used it in surgery.

Any problem with poorly inserted IVs could be trouble. Florida requires two IVs be inserted ahead of the three drugs flowing. The execution team confirms that the inmate is unconscious before proceeding to the final two doses.

States have had trouble getting trained medical personnel to tap those veins. Medical workers aren't supposed to do harm. The American Medical Society has banned doctors from taking part in executions.

In Florida, the person on the execution team who purchases and maintains the drugs must be either a doctor or pharmacist. The state's secrecy law shields the identity of all team members any member of the team .

A gurney in an execution chamber at Florida State Prison in Starke where inmates receive lethal injection.

If the sedative wears off, the inmate can feel the devastating effects of the second drug, pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the inmate and stops his breathing. Some of its injectable forms have been in short supply since late May, according to ASHP.

If the inmate feels the effects of this drug, it's like drowning or being suffocated. And because he's paralyzed, he can't tell anyone what's happening.

The final drug, a concentrated form of potassium called potassium chloride, stops the heart. It works within a minute, but it's excruciating without anesthesia. As it makes its way to the heart, it literally burns the veins carrying it in the bloodstream headed there. Though the other two drugs are usually given in lethal doses, they can take much more time, like 30 minutes, to kill.

Death row: How many Florida inmates are facing execution?

Florida's death row is host to 296 inmates, the second-largest number in the nation behind California, which has 663. Trailing is Texas, which has 184, and Alabama, with 167. Owen's would be the fourth execution carried out by Florida this year.

Eight inmates who reside on Florida's death row were sent there by Palm Beach County judges. Only two inmates from Palm Beach County cases have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

Nollie Lee Martin was executed in 1992.

Nollie Lee Martin was executed in 1992 for the 1977 murder of 19-year-old George Washington University student Patricia Greenfield, while she worked at a summer job as a Delray Beach convenience store clerk. Martin stabbed her to death at the Lantana dump where he left her body.

William Van Poyk was executed in 2013 for the murder of 40-year-old Glades Correctional Institution guard Fred Griffis, a Vietnam War veteran, in a botched escape attempt as his fellow inmate was being delivered to a dermatologist in downtown West Palm Beach.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Duane Owen Florida execution: Lethal injection drugs scarce
TEKNAF, Bangladesh  The wind had whipped the waves to nearly three times the womans height when her panicked voice crackled over the phone.

Our boat has sunk! Setera Begum shouted, as a storm threatened to spill her and around 180 others into the inky black sea south of Bangladesh. Only half of it is still afloat!

On the other end of the line, hundreds of miles away in Malaysia, was her husband, Muhammed Rashid, who picked up the phone at 10:59 p.m. his time on Dec. 7, 2022. He had not seen his family in 11 years. And he had only learned days earlier that Setera and two of their daughters had fled surging violence in Bangladeshs camps for ethnic Rohingya refugees.

Now, Rashid feared, his familys bid to escape would cost them the very thing they were trying to save  their lives. For despite Seteras pleas, no help would come, not for her or for the babies, the 3-year-old afraid of the sea or the pregnant women also on board.

Rashid listened to his wifes terrified voice with growing dread.

Oh Allah, its sunk by the waves! Setera cried. Its sunk by the storm!

The call disconnected.

Rashid tried to call back. He tried more than 100 times.

But no one answered.

Rohingya refugee (Mahmud Hossain Opu / AP)

The Rohingya: A forgotten people

The Rohingya are a people nobody wants.

This stateless Muslim minority has suffered decades of persecution in their homeland of Myanmar, where they have long been viewed as interlopers by the Buddhist majority. Around one million have fled across the border to Bangladesh, only to find themselves trapped for years in a squalid camp and held hostage by migration policies that have given them almost no way out.

And so, in a bid to get somewhere  anywhere  safe, they are taking to the sea.

It is a life-or-death gamble. Last year, more than 3,500 Rohingya attempted to cross the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea  a 360 percent increase over the previous year, according to United Nations figures that are almost certainly an undercount. At least 348 people died or went missing, the highest death toll since 2014.

Its impossible to know whether any of those lives could have been saved, because almost no one was looking to save them in the first place. Even when officials knew the boats locations in recent months, the United Nations refugee agency says its repeated pleas to maritime authorities to rescue some of them have gone ignored.

Governments ignore the Rohingya because they can. While multiple international laws mandate the rescue of vessels in distress, enforcement is difficult.

In the past, the regions coastal nations hunted for boats in trouble  only to push them into other countries search and rescue zones, says Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project, which monitors the Rohingya crisis. But now, they rarely even bother to look.

The lucky ones are towed to shore in Indonesia by local fishermen. Yet even rescue can be perilous  a Vietnamese oil company saved one boat, then promptly handed the Rohingya over to the same deadly regime in Myanmar from which theyd fled.

There is no reason why regional governments could not rescue these people, says John Quinley, director of human rights group Fortify Rights.

It was a total lack of political will and extremely heartless, he says.

Several countries in the region did not respond to requests for comment.

Rohingya dying at sea (Mahmud Hossain Opu / AP)

The camps: Haunted eyes, lost hope

The reasons the Rohingya escape are written on face after gaunt face, in haunted eyes and across slumped shoulders. Any hope that once existed in the Bangladesh camps has long since died, replaced by a stoic sadness and a palpable fear. These are a people who have come to expect nothing, and often get that or worse.

Most of the Rohingya in these camps fled what the United States has declared a genocide in Myanmar in 2017. In recent years, brutal killings by gangs and warring militant groups have become commonplace.

Fires are frequent. A blaze that investigators say was set by criminals tore through thousands of shelters in March, leaving 15,000 homeless.

Beyond fear is hunger. The Rohingya are banned from working and rely on food rations, which have been slashed due to a drop in global donations. A military coup in 2021 in Myanmar has made any safe return home a distant dream.

And so, out of options, they do again what they have done before: They flee.

Rohingya refugee (Mahmud Hossain Opu / AP)

They put their trust in the captain

Virtually everyone in Block H of Nayapara camp in Bangladesh is connected to the boat somehow. Many residents have spent most, or all, of their lives here, after fleeing violence in Myanmar.

This tight-knit warren is home to Setera and 64 other passengers, including the boats captain, Jamal Hussein.

Jamal was afraid for his life, says his sister, Bulbul. She weeps at the memories of her brother. He was my heart, she says.

Back in Myanmar, Jamal was a rice farmer. After his dad died, he became a father figure to his younger siblings, including Bulbul, 15 years his junior.

Their life in the camps was difficult, she says, but they managed. More recently, though, Jamal had received death threats, Bulbul says. He started making plans to get out.

He bought a boat and took a video of it to share with prospective passengers. In the video, obtained by the Associated Press, the wooden vessel sits in murky brown water. It appears old and shabby, and clearly too small to safely carry 180 people 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) to Indonesia, Jamals target.

Rohingya dying at sea (AP Illustration)

From there, most passengers planned to make their way to their ultimate destination, Malaysia.

Though Bulbul denies it, residents of Block H say Jamal was a seasoned captain who had successfully guided several other boats of Rohingya refugees. It was his experience, they say, along with his willingness to put 16 of his own relatives on the boat  including his wife, six children, five grandchildren and two pregnant daughters-in-law that prompted so many to trust him.

In a shelter a short walk from Jamals, Seteras father holds up a photo of his daughter, with her full lips and wide-set eyes so much like her mothers.

She was the most beautiful person in our family, says Abdu Shukkur.

Setera, a warm and doting mother, rarely complained, despite raising her girls on her own in the misery of the camps. Her husband, Rashid, fled to Malaysia in 2012 to support his family with wages from his restaurant job.

The money made the family targets of kidnappers, Shukkur says, and Setera had begun to fear for their lives.

Two years ago, a gang snatched Seteras 4-year-old nephew, Shukkur says. They held him in the mountains for six days, drugging him to keep him quiet. The family paid a ransom of 300,000 taka ($2,800) to get him back  a fortune in the camps.

Setera went to her father and asked his permission to go on Jamals boat, along with her two younger daughters.

Shukkur forbade her to go.

If you want to go to Malaysia by boat, just divorce your husband, he told her. Its too dangerous.

His wife, Gul Faraz, intervened. Shes been living without her husband here for 11 years now, Faraz said. Let her go.

Shukkur relented.

Grief steals his breath as he recounts his goodbye with his granddaughters. They had a habit of stealing Shukkurs unripe guavas, plums and mangoes whenever they visited, prompting scoldings from their grandfather.

Grandpa, you will not need to scold us anymore, one of the girls told Shukkur. Everything will be all right.

Setera, angry that her father had tried to stop her, did not come to say goodbye.

In a nearby shelter, Jamals cousin, Muhammed Ayub, was fighting to stop his daughter, Samira, and her children, aged 6 and nine months old, from getting on the boat. But his son-in-law, Kabir Ahmed, was resolute. Villagers outside the camps had beaten him with an iron rod, and he was afraid.

It is not safe here. People are getting killed every day, Ahmed told his father-in-law. If you stop me from leaving, I will not visit you anymore.

And so, powerless, Ayub hugged his daughter and son-in-law goodbye. Riddled with anxiety, he wrapped his grandsons in an embrace. His entire body ached as he watched them leave.

They were my lovely ones, he says.

Rohingya refugee (Mahmud Hossain Opu / AP)

The boat departs

A boat carrying 180 Rohingya refugees set out from Bangladesh on December 1, 2022. One week later, the boat vanished. The AP has reconstructed their journey based on interviews with 28 relatives of those on board, audio recordings of calls from the boat, interviews with three eyewitnesses, and photos and videos.

At the southernmost tip of mainland Bangladesh lies a wild, wind-swept beach, fringed to the east by forest and mountains and to the west by the Bay of Bengal. It was from here that a small fishing boat began ferrying passengers to Jamals vessel.

Late on the night of Dec. 1, many of those on Jamals boat called their anxious families.

Setera told her husband for the first time that she and two daughters were headed his way.

Rashid had told them countless times never to get on a boat. But this time, Setera would not be stopped. She told him shed sold her jewelry to help pay for their passage, a total of 360,000 taka ($3,400).

Rashid was stunned. He apologized to Setera for any mistakes hed made in their 20 years of marriage. And then, he says, he heard Jamal tell Setera to get off the phone. She hung up.

Rashid began to cry with excitement and fear. He couldnt believe he might soon see his girls.

Rohingya dying at sea (Mahmud Hossain Opu / AP)

Meanwhile, Jamals daughter-in-law, Bibi Ayesha, called her parents to say she and her family had also made it on board. Alongside Bibi was her 17-year-old brother, her husband, and her 3-year-old son, Abu.

The little boy was frightened of the water. Bibi and her husband passed him back and forth, trying to comfort him, as they spoke with her parents. Pray for us, they said.

Jamal got on the phone with the parents to reassure them. The boat is big, Jamal said, according to the couple. We have enough food for 15 days.

Asma Bibi, who was married to another of Jamals sons, called her mother, Hasina Khatun. Eighteen-year-old Asma was 9 months pregnant, and excited to meet her child after a stillbirth one year earlier.

Asma hadnt wanted to go on the boat, says Hasina, but her husband did.

How can I stay here without my husband? Asma had told her nervous mother days earlier. How can my child survive without a father?

And so, Hasina gave her daughter two sets of baby clothes  one pink, and one white, since they didnt know the babys gender. She also gave her medicine, towels and a green blanket to wrap the newborn in after birth.

Asma reluctantly followed her husband onto Jamals boat, along with her 13-year-old brother.

At 4:04 a.m., back in Block H, Jannat Aras phone rang. It was her aunt, Kurshida Begum, who said shed boarded with her husband and two sons, aged 3 and 4.

In the recorded call, shared with the AP, Kurshida recites a prayer, then asks her niece to do the same.

The journey has begun, Kurshida told her niece.

Rohingya dying at sea (AP)

Another boat spots them

News of the call quickly reached Kurshidas mother-in-law, Momina Begum, who became hysterical. She had no idea Kurshida and the boys were on the boat.

Where are you going with these children? Momina screamed. Why are you crossing the dangerous sea with these children?

But it was too late. Jamals boat was headed into the Bay of Bengal.

What happened next is best told through the eyes of the refugees on another boat that set out for Indonesia one day later.

On board were 104 people, including a man named Kafayet Ullah. According to Kafayet, he was merely a passenger. According to others, he was the captain.

Not long into the journey, Kafayet spotted a boat in the distance. As they moved closer, they realized the boat was Jamals. And it was in trouble.

Jamal called out that his engine was having problems. He borrowed some electrical wire from Kafayets boat.

Kafayet was worried. His own niece and nephew were aboard Jamals vessel, which looked old and overloaded, the passengers packed in tight like animals.

But unlike Kafayet, Jamal had experience and a satellite phone. So when Jamal finished fixing the engine, he set off again, and Kafayet followed.

Four days later, the sky cracked open.

A powerful storm descended upon them. Kafayets terrified passengers sobbed as the rain pounded down and the tempest washed their supplies overboard.

The water in Kafayets boat began to rise, and a man on board spotted sharks. The passengers prepared themselves to die.

Through the darkness, they could see a light shining on Jamals boat. It was still above water.

But not for long.

'Our boat has sunk!'

The recording of Seteras call to Rashid lasts 44 seconds.

Oh Allah, our boat has sunk! Setera shouts into the satellite phone. Only half of it is still afloat! Please pray for us and tell my parents!

Where are you? Rashid asks.

We are about to reach Indonesia.

Indonesia? Rashid repeats.

Please tell me the name of the place, Setera says to someone else on board, before replying to her husband: Yes, it is India. Please try to send

Are you in India? Rashid asks, bewildered.

Our boat has sunk! Our boat has sunk!

Who? Rashid replies in a panic.

Oh Allah, its sunk by the waves, its sunk by the storm!

Oh, is it sunk by the storm? Rashid repeats. Oh Allah...

The call cut out.

Rashid began to pray.

Rohingya refugee (Mahmud Hossain Opu / AP)

Not even the shrieking wind could drown out the screams of Jamals passengers.

Kafayet could just make out the shape of Jamals boat as it made a sharp turn in the waves, and then flipped over. Kafayet threw empty water drums overboard in case his niece or nephew or any of the others could grab onto them.

He says he couldnt see anyone in the water. But he could hear them screaming.

Then the screams stopped. The light on Jamals boat blinked out.

I saw with my own eyes, Kafayet says. The boat sank.

They drowned in the dark, screaming for help from a world gone deaf

Within hours, the recording of Seteras call spread through Block H. In shelter after shelter came the wails of families cracking apart.

As Jamals cousin, Muhammed Ayub, listened, he began to howl in agony.

All he has left now of the grandsons he called his lovely ones are their clothing and his memories. He stares at a pair of little brown shoes with Velcro straps that 6-year-old Tasin once wore, and weeps.

His wife, Minara Begum, inhales the scent from their daughter Samiras yellow dress. Then she presses a pair of 9-month-old Samirs tiny blue shorts to her face, the fabric growing damp with her tears.

Oh, my grandson, why did you leave? she moans. Where have you gone?

Families already pushed to breaking point are now broken. One man who lost four relatives tried to kill himself.

Momina Begum, whose young grandsons were on board, feels she is burning in a fire or sinking under water. She sits next to a plastic basket of her 4-year-old grandsons toys.

It would be better to kill us by poison instead of taking away my family, she says.

Hasina Khatun, whose pregnant daughter, Asma, and 13-year-old son were on the boat, now finds herself begging to hold other peoples babies.

Hasina, like some others, still holds out hope her loved ones are alive.

One man, Muhammed Rashid, believes he sees his teenage son, Saiful, in an online photo of Rohingya refugees in Indonesia. He had it laminated.

Muhammed pulls down a sack of his boys belongings and dumps it on the bed, a strangled sob erupting from his throat. Then he kisses his sons English book, on which Saiful had scrawled: I love you.

My son is everything, Muhammed murmurs. We believe he is alive.

But the only known survivors from that night were Kafayet and his passengers.

After Jamals boat sank, they drifted for 10 days, their engine damaged, their food and water gone.

Delirious with thirst and hunger, they spotted a speed boat in the distance and frantically waved their clothes in the air. The Sri Lankan navy towed Kafayets boat to shore.

His brother, Muhammed, knows how close they came to death. He hopes no one else will attempt to do what they did.

Yet back in the camps, such plans are already underway. In early March, Jamals sister, Bulbul, listened in horror as her 20-year-old son told her he was preparing to leave by boat.

I will never allow you to go on this dangerous journey, she told him. My brother died on a boat.

So he agreed to stay  for now. If he flees, she says, she will die of worry.

Rashids eyes are ringed with black, a result, he says, of crying for months for Setera and their daughters.

He accepts now that they drowned in the dark, screaming for help from a world gone deaf.

I spent a long time here for my family. But now Ive lost them, he says.

I feel I am dead.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com
Forgotten toddler dies in hot car after family returns from outing, Florida cops say

A Florida familys outing turned tragic when it was discovered a child had been left sitting in the car in 90-degree temperatures, according to the Volusia Sheriffs Office.

It happened Thursday, June 8, at a home in Orange City, about 30 miles north of Orlando.

Investigators believe the 2-year-old girl was left in the car for about two hours and 20 minutes, the sheriffs office said in a news release.

The ... family told detectives they left their ... home and went to lunch in DeLand. They returned home about 2:40 p.m. with the child and two older brothers, ages 15 and 8, the sheriffs office said.

Around 5 p.m., the girls parents found her unresponsive still in the car and drove her to the hospital where she was pronounced deceased just before 6 p.m.

A cause of death was not released. An investigation into the circumstances of the childs death is underway, officials said.

Temperatures in Orange City reached 91 degrees Thursday, according to AccuWeather.com.

That means temperatures inside the car could have reached about 135 degrees over two hours, experts calculate.

The rapid increase of temperatures in cars is due to the suns shortwave radiation, which heats the objects it strikes, according to the National Weather Service.

A dark dashboard or seat can easily reach temperatures in the range of 180 to more than 200 degrees, the NWS says.

These objects (e.g., dashboard, steering wheel, childseat) heat the adjacent air by conduction and convection and also give off longwave radiation (red) which is very efficient at warming the air trapped inside a vehicle.

Woman follows screaming after dark and finds abandoned baby in woods, Florida cops say

Little hand reaching from flipped van leads deputy to trapped child, Florida video shows

Watch as deputy helps deliver baby along Florida highway  and has parents laughing
Former employees to get more than $100K in settlement with State College restaurant

Former delivery drivers of local eatery Wings Over Happy Valley will receive a $106,338 settlement nearly six years after a class-action lawsuit was first filed in federal court.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court, Middle District of Pennsylvania, in May 2017, alleged that wages were taken from the plaintiffs via an illegal, illegitimate, unlawful, and unapproved, tipping pool. The claim used the Fair Labor Standards Act, Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act and Pennsylvania Wage Payment and Collection Law, asking for wages and overtime.

In July 2017, the defendants, Wings Over Happy Valley and former restaurant manager Steven Moreira, filed a counterclaim, also in the U.S. District Court, Middle District of Pennsylvania, alleging that the tip pool was voluntary.

According to the settlement agreement filed Thursday, the wing shop and Moreira have continued to deny any wrongdoing. Their attorney, Philip Miles of McQuaid Blasko Law Offices, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The former delivery drivers maintained throughout the case that they were entitled to all of their tips individually, not via a tipping pool. They also claimed, in a retort to the defense filed in August 2017, that the pool gave 8% of tips to the kitchen staff  not the drivers who earned the tips.

The plaintiffs are, of course, happy with the results, the plaintiffs lawyer, David Gaines, told the Centre Daily Times.

The suit also represented up to 50 delivery drivers employed by Wings Over Happy Valley in the three years before the suit was filed, although only the 11 named plaintiffs who joined the case will receive payouts from the settlement. The total payments  with wages and liquidated damages  range from $878 to $15,696 for each former delivery driver.
Former JBLM soldier sentenced for raping two young children

A former soldier was sentenced Thursday for raping two young children, according to the Department of Justice.

Lewis Patrick Thompson, 40, was sentenced to thirty years in prison.

Thompson was arrested in July 2020 and pleaded guilty in Oct. 2020.

He will be on lifetime supervised release after his prison term.

According to the DOJ, the sexual assaults occurred on military bases overseas and in the United States, including Joint Base Lewis-McChord, while Thompson served as a caregiver for the children.

The children spoke up about the assaults when they were 11 years old.

Thompson has been held at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac since the arrest in 2020.

A future hearing will determine how much restitution Thompson must pay to the victims for counseling and care.




A former Mesquite Independent School District substitute teacher was indicted by a Dallas County grand jury Tuesday on four separate counts of endangering a child after she was accused of encouraging students to fight.

Natally Garcia was fired and arrested in April after video showed she arranged fights between students in her classroom at Kimbrough Middle School, according to police and school officials.

Garcia had only been employed for a month, WFAA-TV reported, and according to a student, moved desks to give more students room to fight.

School administrators called the parents of each student in the classroom to notify them of the incident.

District officials also sent a letter to parents, saying, As educators, our hearts are heavy knowing that an individual entrusted with the supervision and care of our students could behave in this manner, and we share the disgust that the families of students in this class must feel.

Investigators determined that Garcias actions placed four students in danger of bodily injury, Mesquite police said.
Former Ostroms site in Lacey is under contract to be sold, official says

The former Ostroms mushroom farm in Lacey, recently in the news because of a fire, is under contract to be sold, an official with the commercial real estate company Cushman & Wakefield said this week.

The economics and deal structure have been agreed to for some time, said senior director Greg Millerd, who also is representing the seller in the transaction.

The 40-acre property at Steilacoom Road Southeast and Marvin Road Southeast was put up for sale after Ostroms relocated its operations to Sunnyside, Washington, which is near Yakima.

The sale is expected to fetch a seven-figure price, Millerd said.

The potential buyer was not disclosed, although Millerd described them as an out-of-state, recognized residential real estate developer that has done business in the state before.

The property is zoned low-density residential, according to Thurston County information. Millerd said Ostroms, which has been in business in the area since the mid-to-late 1960s, was able to operate in Lacey as a non-conforming use.

I look forward to the future for this site and believe the redevelopment plans will contribute to the community fabric of Lacey, said Millerd. The buyer weve been negotiating with in the disposition of the property is a leader in their market and has plans to get to work on redeveloping the site as soon as they can once the sale closes.

Other business happenings

Great Wolf Lodge in Grand Mound is undergoing some changes, a spokesman for Great Wolf Resorts said.

The 398-room hotel is getting a complete room renovation and so is the toddler-focused area of the water park, said Jason Lasecki, vice president of corporate communications.

The room renovation is expected to be done during the first half of July, followed by the changes to the water park by the end of the month.

The new look of the family suite at Great Wolf Lodge in Grand Mound.

Sofies Scoops, well known for its gelato business at downtown Olympias 222 Market, is about to reopen its second location at 510 State Ave., the business has announced.

It is set to reopen Sunday, June 11.

The second location closed over the winter due to illness and staffing issues, according to its website.







People news

Washington Business Bank has welcomed two new members to its board of directors, the bank announced.

Gwen Gill is a founder of Trouves Health Care Corp. in Pierce County. Darragh Buckley is CEO of Increase Technologies Inc.

The board is thrilled to have two entrepreneurs of Gwen and Darraghs caliber join our board, said Chief Executive Jon Jones in a statement.

Gwens local knowledge and contacts will be invaluable as we plan an expansion into Pierce County. Darraghs technology expertise will help us to keep up and excel in the fast-changing technology aspects of community banking, Jones said.

If you know of a retailer, restaurant, coffee shop or other business that is opening, closing, expanding, remodeling, or changing its focus, send an email to reporter Rolf Boone at rboone@theolympian.com.
A former Penn State undergraduate who assaulted a fellow student was sentenced Friday to a minimum of five years in state prison on a charge of felony strangulation.

Preston J. Brindle, 19, of Chester County, also received a consecutive five years for a first degree misdemeanor for unlawful restraint and another five years for misdemeanor terroristic threats. The deal reached with prosecutors means he will serve a minimum of five years behind bars, with the possibility of up to 10 years in prison, and will spend a total of 20 years under legal supervision, according to Assistant District Attorney Joshua Andrews.

Last July, police wrote in an affidavit that Brindle assaulted a woman and followed her back to her residence hall after he became angry with her. In a statement to police, the woman said that Brindle threatened to kill her and digitally penetrated her.

Lisa Powers, a Penn State spokesperson, said that Brindle had not been enrolled at the university since August 2022.

Should he wish to return, she wrote, the matter would first need to be addressed by the Office of Student Accountability and Response.

Brindles defense lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Former Pres. Trumps indictment and what it may mean for Fulton Co. special grand jury investigation

Former President Donald Trump announced on Thursday evening that he had been indicted in a federal probe into possible mishandling of classified documents.

This marks the second indictment for the former president.

The federal investigation is separate from a special purpose grand jury investigation in Fulton County into possible election interference in the 2020 presidential election.

In Fulton County, the grand jurors investigated everything from the now-infamous phone call from former President Donald Trump to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to the false allegations of voter fraud made by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in a state Senate subcommittee, to the meeting of false electors inside the state capitol.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis launched the investigation in 2021, but convened a special grand jury with the ability to subpoena reluctant witnesses like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, Giuliani and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

Willis says she will make her charging decisions by the end of August.

[TIMELINE: Fulton County grand jury investigation into potential interference in Georgia elections]

The former presidents attorneys recently filed a motion to have Willis and her office removed from the case and have all the evidence uncovered by the special grand jury thrown out.

Former Pres. Trump himself attacked Willis and her investigation.

Theyve got a local racist Democratic district attorney in Atlanta who is doing everything in her power to indict me over an absolutely perfect phone call, he said.

In an exclusive interview with Channel 2 Action News, Willis dismissed the attack.

The comment does not concern me at all. Its ridiculous in nature, but I support his right to be protected by the First Amendment and say what he likes, she said.

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Her office released a statement on Thursday night that said this indictment will have no impact on their investigation.

Former President Trump is scheduled to appear at the Georgia Republican Convention in Columbus on Saturday. It is unclear if he will address the indictment.

IN RELATED NEWS:
A former candidate for the Sangamon County Board pled not guilty Thursday to charges that he allegedly delivered forged campaign petitions to the Sangamon County Clerk's Office in the lead-up to the 2022 election.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said that Donald Anderson, 44, of Springfield was charged with four counts of perjury for his role in allegedly delivering a pair of candidate petition pages with fake signatures to the clerk's office before the 2022 general election for the board.

The attorney general said that Anderson had signed an affidavit as he sent in the forged petitions saying that he observed each of the voters sign the petition with their real signatures. A grand jury indicted Anderson on May 24, with Anderson delivering his initial plea in Sangamon County Circuit Court Thursday.

Anderson was the appointed Republican candidate in District 18 on the county board last year and would have faced Democrat Sam Cahnman in the general election in November. He withdrew two days after objections were filed against the petitions in August, which stated that the petitions contained the names of people either not registered to vote or weren't registered at their current residence, didn't have signatures for some names and had incomplete addresses for some people.

More: Sangamon County Board candidate withdraws after nominating papers challenged

Cahnman won the seat unopposed in November.

"Any candidate for public office in Illinois must follow election law, which starts with obtaining genuine signatures from members of your community," Raoul said. "Individuals who aspire to serve the public in elected office cannot violate the publics trust from the outset, and I appreciate the work of the Springfield Police Department in investigating this case."

Andeson was unable to be reached for comment.

Springfield Police Chief Ken Scarlette said that Anderson had attempted to defraud the public through his petitions and that the department was committed to seeking justice for those affected.

"Those who seek election must demonstrate moral turpitude, both during elections and once in office," Scarlette said. "Mr. Anderson violated this sacred tradition in an attempt to defraud the constituents. As demonstrated in this investigation, the Springfield Police Department remains committed to thorough investigations which result in justice being fairly administered."

Anderson is next scheduled to appear in court July 31.

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Former Sangamon County Board candidate charged with perjury
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Friday his resignation as a member of Parliament effective immediately, as the House of Commons privileges committee concludes an investigation into whether Johnson knowingly misled Parliament.

Johnson was under investigation for misleading Parliament during an inquiry into whether he violated Covid-19 restrictions during his tenure as prime minister, which ended in September 2022.

Johnson said in a statement announcing his resignation that the investigation has not "produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons."

In the statement, Johnson took aim at the committee investigating him and said it is "determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of Parliament."

"Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts," he wrote. "This is the very definition of a kangaroo court."

Reports first emerged in December 2021 that Johnson broke Covid-19 restrictions in the U.K. while serving as prime minister. The scandal, dubbed "Partygate," has followed Johnson even after he resigned from his role as prime minister last year.

His resignation will trigger a special election to replace him. By resigning, Johnson is free to run for Parliament again.

"I am very sorry to leave my wonderful constituency," Johnson said in the statement. "It has been a huge honour to serve them, both as Mayor and MP."

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in London on Nov. 27, 2021, speaking about COVID-19 variant omicron.

Johnson, who has served in Parliament since 2001, wrote in a statement that he is proud of his accomplishments as mayor and prime minister, and expressed regret at resigning from his role as MP.

"It is very sad to be leaving Parliament - at least for now - but above all I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out, anti-democratically," Johnson said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Boris Johnson resigns from UK Parliament over Covid-19 investigation
Host Sean Hannity as Conor McGregor visits "Hannity" at Fox News Channel Studios on March 15, 2023 in New York City. Roy Rochlin/Getty Images

Fox News' coverage of the historic federal indictment of Donald Trump leaned hard into his defense.

On Fox News, hosts and guests questioned the documents found in Joe Biden's office and garage.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was indicted in relation to an investigation into mishandling documents.

Fox News, without hesitation, leaned into defending former President Donald Trump, following the news that the former president was indicted on seven counts related to an investigation into mishandling government documents.

This was all despite tension earlier this year between the GOP frontrunner and the conservative network. Trump's relationship with Fox News took a big blow when text messages sent by hosts, now-former hosts, and executives mocking Trump and pro-Trump conspiracy theories were uncovered in Dominion Voting System's defamation suit against the network.

In April, Fox News ultimately settled the suit with Dominion for a record $787.5 million dollars, regarding Trump's false claims of election interference in 2020, echoed by guests and hosts on the network and Fox Business. The network said the settlement "reflects FOX's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards."

Yet, like most of his GOP challengers in 2024, rather than move on from the now twice-indicted former president, Fox News followed Trump's own tactics: Deflect, attack your accuser, and say you are the target of political opponents.

"Hannity" was initially going to host Trump's former Vice President Mike Pence, who just entered the 2024 race. However, the candidate, per what a Pence spokesperson called a mutual agreement, did not appear.

Instead, the host and guests went from asking about Hillary Clinton's emails and documents found in President Joe Biden's possession  the probe for which is still ongoing  and pivoted to a new alleged Biden bribery story, reported by Fox News.

But nothing competed with a nearly nine-minute rant from Mark Levin claiming without evidence that this was a political hit job by the US attorney general.

The catch? The charges have yet to be unsealed. Everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty, including former presidents, and in terms of the facts, there's just not a lot that we know thus far. What we do find out will be in the hands of a jury.

What we do know now is that Trump said he has been ordered to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday at 3 p.m. ET, where he will be arraigned and appear before a judge.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Free Blue Line rides, new ferry service, other travel options when Sumner Tunnel closes for summer

Travel in and around Boston will likely be a nightmare when the Sumner Tunnel is completely shut down for the summer for repair work.

MassDOT has come up with a plan of alternative travel options to address travel impacts and provide cost-effective alternative transportation options for residents and visitors.

On July 5, the day after Independence Day, the tunnel will be closed 24/7 to traffic through Aug. 31, according to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT).

How will you be affected? Summer traffic nightmare looms as full closure of Boston tunnel approaches

The plan includes free trips on the MBTA Blue Line during the tunnels closure, free and reduced-cost water ferry options, reduced Commuter Rail fares for riders, reduced parking costs at MBTA and Commuter Rail parking lots and garages, discounted tolls for residents; and additional options for travelers to and from Logan Airport.

The MBTA is also adding ferry service between Lynn and Central Wharf in Boston.

We know the closure of the Sumner Tunnel will be a daily impact to those living, working, and traveling in this region, said Transportation Secretary and CEO Gina Fiandaca. The Sumner Tunnel Restoration Project is a crucial investment in transportation infrastructure in the Commonwealth, and we are working hard to provide as many mitigation measures as possible to those impacted. I want to thank our partners for their efforts in creating mitigation options while this work is ongoing, and our residents and travelers for their willingness to explore alternative travel options over the next two months.

Details on transportation alternatives are:

MBTA Blue Line and Parking

The entire Blue Line in both directions will be free to riders. Gates will be open at all Blue Line stations from Wonderland to Bowdoin.

An additional train will be added to the Blue Line in the midday period to help support more riders riding the line.

All MBTA parking lots and garages on the Blue Line will be reduced to $2/day. Additional free parking is available near Wood Island Station.

Visit mbta.com/Sumner for additional information.

Discounted Tolls

Discounted tolls will be provided for the Tobin Bridge and Ted Williams Tunnel for those registered in the Resident Discount Program.

Real-Time Traffic monitoring will be available at 13 local intersections.

East Boston Ferry

The East Boston ferry will be free during the tunnels closure.

The East Boston ferry service project operates between East Boston at Lewis Mall and the downtown Boston area at Long Wharf. East Boston ferry service schedules are available online with all ferry service schedules available at mbta.com/ferry.

TRAVEL TO/FROM THE NORTH SHORE

Commuter Rail and Parking

Zone 1A ($2.40) fares from Salem and Swampscott Commuter Rail. Parking at Salem and Swampscott is just $2 per day.

Free parking at lots north of Salem, including Beverly, Gloucester, Hamilton/Wenham, Newburyport, North Beverly, Monserrat, Rowley, and West Gloucester.

Blue Line benefits also apply. Travelers are encouraged to utilize the Wonderland Station parking lot if coming from the North Shore.

Lynn Ferry

The Lynn Ferry will operate between the Blossom St. dock in Lynn to Central Wharf in Boston (near Aquarium).

Free parking at the City of Lynn-owned lot will be available near the Blossom St. dock. Bicycles are allowed on the ferry.

Riders may use a Zone 1A fare ($2.40).

The Lynn Ferry will operate five days/week on weekdays only, with 10 trips per day. Schedules are being finalized and will be released as soon as theyre available.

TRAVEL TO/FROM LOGAN AIRPORT

Logan Express

There will be a 25% discount when you buy tickets online, and children under 17 ride free.

Adding additional parking capacity at Braintree Logan Express.

MBTA Silver Line (SL1 & SL3) buses can use the I-90 EB Emergency Ramp.

Skip the Security Line at Logan will be available for all water transportation users (must show ticket).

Added stop at Logan Airport by the Winthrop Ferry.

Im pleased that together with MassDOT, the MBTA is able to offer free Blue Line service to those impacted by the Sumner Tunnel closure this summer, said MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng. The MBTA has been working hard to reduce travel times on the Blue Line in anticipation of this project. We have the capacity needed on the Blue Line to serve our existing and new customers on this line, and I encourage those who can to take advantage of this free service in July and August.

MassDOT is also working with public safety agencies and Boston EMS to support safety during the closure. There will be two dedicated ambulances for East Boston, two rotating ambulances to support the day shift, two rotating ambulances to support the evening shift, and one rotating ambulance to support the overnight shift.

The period between July 5 and Labor Day historically has the lowest volume of traffic. A second full closure of the Sumner Tunnel will then occur in the summer of 2024, for approximately two months during a similar period between July and August.

For additional details on the Sumner Tunnel, and all alternative travel options, click here.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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A contestant performs during the "Chinese Bridge" language proficiency competition for Israeli university students in Haifa, Israel, on June 8, 2023. The 22nd "Chinese Bridge" language proficiency competition for Israeli university students concluded on Thursday in the country's northern city of Haifa. (Xinhua/Chen Junqing)

The 22nd "Chinese Bridge" language proficiency competition for Israeli university students concluded on Thursday in the country's northern city of Haifa.



Seven students from five Israeli universities took part in the contest, hosted by the Chinese Embassy in Israel and the University of Haifa, which featured Chinese speeches, Chinese knowledge quizzes and talent shows.

In addition to delivering speeches themed "One World, One Family," the contestants expressed their enthusiasm for Chinese culture by showcasing their talents in poetry recitation, guitar playing of Chinese folk songs, Chinese style of stand-up comedy, Chinese movie dubbing, as well as Tai Chi performances.

Amit Portman, a student from the Israeli campus of China's University of International Business and Economics, won the contest and will represent Israeli university students to compete in the annual international Chinese language contest to be held in China.

"My dream is to use my Chinese language to bring Israeli-Chinese relations closer," said Portman, who majors in business management.

"Learning Chinese not only enabled me to have a deeper understanding of Chinese civilization but also widened my perspectives of China and the world. Only through exchanges among different cultures can human civilization continue," Portman said in his speech during the contest.

Yahel Davidian from the University of Haifa took the second place, winning a ticket to China to view the finals of the annual international Chinese language contest.

Addressing the competition, Liu Song, minister-counselor of the Chinese Embassy in Israel, said the theme of the contest this year fully reflects the Chinese traditional philosophy of pursuing a dream of peace and harmony among nations.

The Chinese diplomat expressed his hope that the contest would continue to serve as a real bridge between the Chinese and Israeli peoples by enriching the Israeli young people's knowledge about China.

"Not far from today, you will become messengers and builders for Chinese and Israeli cultural exchanges, for friendly cooperation, and make a greater contribution to the development of your own country, as well as China," Liu said.
French Alps attack exposes Macron's challenges on immigration French President Macron in Annecy the day after knife attack

By Michel Rose

PARIS (Reuters) - The knife attack on toddlers in a French Alpine town, suspected to have been carried out by a Syrian refugee, has thrown a spotlight on President Emmanuel Macron's struggles to find support for a new immigration bill in a fragmented parliament.

France was still in shock a day after four children - aged between 22 and 36 months - and two pensioners were stabbed in the tranquil lakeside town of Annecy.

The suspect in police custody is a 31-year-old Syrian national who was granted refugee status in Sweden 10 years ago and thanks to European free movement rules was legally in France where he had filed another asylum request.

French authorities rejected that request last week.

The case has exposed the tensions between Europe's free movement rights and the pressure governments in countries like France, Germany and Italy are feeling from voters to toughen immigration laws as societies shift rightwards politically.

Macron's government this year drafted new legislation that would have accelerated the expulsions of illegal migrants and fast-tracked applications of migrants working in parts of the economy with labour shortages.

But it was forced back to the drawing board after failing to strike a deal with the centre-right lawmakers it depends on for a working majority in parliament.

"We are swamped by asylum requests," Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right who pushed Macron hard in last year's presidential run-off vote, told Europe 1 radio.

Le Pen alleged that the suspect's asylum claim should have been fastracked since he already had refugee status in another EU country.

Asylum expert Philippe Fontana urged caution, citing unknowns around the suspect's circumstances.

"But this puts the spotlight on the asylum application process in France," he added.

EU VS FRANCE

In 2022, France received the second-highest proportion of first-time asylum applications in the EU, with 16% of the EU total, after Germany's 25%, according to EU data.

A Senate report showed only 7% of individuals handed an expulsion order following failed asylum bids left the country in the second half of 2022.

Le Pen blames the level of asylum requests on France's compliance with EU rules. She wants a referendum on immigration that would give French law supremacy over European court decisions.

That position on overriding EU rules, once marginal inside the French political mainstream, has started to spread. Setting out their position on a new immigration law, the centre-right Les Republicains last month proposed breaking with EU rules when "the fundamental interests of the nation are at risk."

An Elabe opinion poll shortly after showed some 70% of the French support the idea.

"Out of control mass immigration kills," Olivier Marleix, a senior LR lawmakers tweeted after the Annecy attack. "Instead of lamenting every new crime, let's put a stop to mass immigration!"

But such a proposition is unpalatable for Macron's pro-EU government, which has focused its efforts on reforming asylum rules at the EU level.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin had to leave negotiations in Luxembourg to fly to Annecy just as his European counterparts sealed a historic deal to reform EU immigration rules.

The deal was criticised by Le Pen, who said demanding countries unwilling to take in people pay cash to peers hosting more than their share amounted to a "fine".

(Reporting by Michel Rose; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Fresnos Bitwise saga ended shockingly bad. But the hope the company created must not die | Opinion

Bitwise Industries was the Fresno tech firm that taught people how to write computer code and find careers in the digital world.

That noble purpose has come to a shocking end, as reflected in these headlines in The Bee in recent weeks:

 Bitwise Industries furloughs its entire workforce. CEOs cite unexpected financial duress

 Bitwise Industries hasnt paid Fresno business taxes in more than a year, mayor says

 Bitwise Industries faced another breach of contract suit in 2022 over building ownership

 Fresno tech darling Bitwise showed signs of financial distress. Whats next isnt clear

The news of Bitwise furloughing its entire work force  300 in Fresno, 600 more in various offices across the country  broke on Memorial Day.

The rapid fall of Fresnos high-tech darling has been breathtaking and sad. The impact has been felt across downtown, where Bitwise built four buildings and was leading the charge of revitalization, and City Hall, which partnered with the firm for tech-skills development.

The co-CEOs, once seen as rock stars in Fresnos economy, have been fired. A breach-of-contract lawsuit has been filed, as has a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the out-of-work employees. City officials are trying to claw back some of a $1 million grant that was awarded to Bitwise for creation of a Digital Empowerment Center and training programs aimed to help small business owners.

Since an initial interview with Bee staff writer Tim Sheehan to announce the furloughs, Soberal and Olguin have been silent, which only adds to the disquiet.

Furloughed employees

The blow to Bitwise employees, understandably, has been painful.

City officials extended offers of help and the Fresno Regional Workforce Development Board was to host two in-person sessions for impacted employees.

Still, the shock of losing a job with no warning stings deeply.

Chris Ramos was a Bitwise community revitilization specialist. His belief in the company extended to his husband and mother, as both were employed there. She recently gave up a job of 10 years to become a Bitwise worker.

We wanted to work at Bitwise as a family until we all retired and believed in the work Bitwise was doing in the world, Ramos said in a social media posting. Were devastated by all of this.

Started in 2013, Bitwise Industries was a three-pronged business. It trained tech workers (more than 5,000 to date), developed software through Shift3 Technologies and invested in tech-friendly real estate in communities like Fresno, as a means of creating opportunities for like-minded tech start-ups.

Besides Fresno, Bitwise had operations in Merced, Bakersfield, Oakland, Chicago and cities in New York, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas, and Ohio.

Training must not end

However the Bitwise story gets concluded, Fresno leaders cannot miss two lessons:

First, Bitwise brought fresh, needed energy to downtown with its projects. Downtown continues to badly need such vitality. All one has to do is look at boarded-up storefronts on Fulton Street for proof that Fresnos downtown remains lacking in vibrancy.

Second, Bitwise offered a dream, a priceless commodity to young people and residents of color. As Bee columnist Marek Warszawski outlined, by teaching computer coding and other technical skills, Bitwise gave its students the hope that they could find their place in the digital world.

That purpose must not be allowed to die, even if Bitwise has closed shop for good.
Fresno passes law limiting where homeless can camp. Will the ruling be challenged?

Fresno City Council has approved stricter limitations on where the homeless can set up camp, despite strong public opposition.

Introduced by Councilmembers Garry Bredefeld of District 6 and Miguel Arias of District 3, the ordinance prohibits impeding sidewalks, streets or other public-right-of-way within 500 feet of sensitive areas such as schools, childcare facilities, public parks and public libraries, as well as the citys warming centers, cooling centers, and city-permitted shelters for the unhoused. While there are no explicit fines or penalties associated with the ordinance, city leaders and staff have discretion to enforce the rule.

The ordinance is about making our streets and community safe, Bredefeld said May 25, while Arias said the ordinance is meant to protect children and the areas where they visit most of the time when accompanied, such as libraries, school sites and childcare facilities. He also said it would also help unhoused individuals that are disabled when they try to access the citys warming centers, cooling centers, and shelters.

The ordinance passed in the consent agenda 5-1. Councilmembers Arias, Bredefeld, Luis Chavez, Nelson Esparza, and Mike Karbassi voted in favor, while Council Vice President Annalisa Perea cast the sole no vote. President Tyler Maxwell was absent during the vote.

More than a dozen people, including Fresno residents, LGBTQ groups, homeless advocates and faith leaders, commented in opposition to what they call the sit, lie, sleep ordinance.

Kat Fobear, a professor at Fresno State, said the ordinance is a direct attack against the LGBTQ community. She said the ordinance would criminalize homelessness, which disproportionately impacts trans people.

Homelessness is fundamentally an LGBTQ rights issue, she said.

Some homeless and community advocates read Bible passages as they urged the council to reconsider the ordinance, which they say is overly broad and criminalizes homelessness. Others asked for more funding for mental health services, affordable housing, rent control, and an update on the tiny home village project.

Rev. Tim Kutzmark, a minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Fresno, urged the council to remember your compassion.

Every time I walk into City Hall, I see the words In God We Trust (above the dais), he said. We forget that God trusts that were going to do the right thing and my faith teaches me that were called to protect and prioritize the most vulnerable among us.

Homeless advocate Bob McCloskey said the city would likely face a lawsuit over the measure and reminded the council that last year, a judge blocked an ordinance that would have restricted the public from homeless encampment cleanups.

Fresno civil rights activist Gloria Hernandez also raised concerns about the possibility of a lawsuit and said shes sick and tired of spending my taxpayer money defending the city on frivolous ordinance(s).

ACLU has serious concerns with ordinance

In a June 7 letter addressed to city council members, the ACLU of Northern Californias senior counsel William Freeman urged the council to reject the ordinance, saying it further criminalizes homelessness and is in violation of numerous provisions of the U.S. and California Constitutions.

The seven-page letter details nine separate areas where the ACLU thinks the ordinance is unlawful, and where a legal attack on it would be successful. Freeman says the ordinance violates the 14th Amendment equal protection claim, and right to free movement, for example.

2023.06.07 ACLU NorCal Letter to Fresno City Council by Melissa Montalvo on Scribd

The language of the Ordinance and Fresnos history demonstrate that the Ordinance is based on animus toward unhoused people, he wrote, and therefore denies unhoused people equal protection under the law.

He also said the vagueness of the ordinance invites arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement, enabling police officers to target only unhoused people.

City leaders said last month that the ordinance is a forward-thinking measure to limit the citys liability by making sure that these sidewalks are accessible under the Americans with Disability Act. But Freeman said the ordinance could violate ADA rules by placing an undue burden on people with disability-related needs.

People with a variety of disabilities have a disability-related need to sit, lie, or sleep in proximity to various locations throughout the City, such as near public amenities and places of recreation, doctors offices, stores, and other sources of support, the letter says.

In a text message to The Bee on Thursday, Bredefeld said he disagreed with the ACLU. He said the ordinance in no way criminalizes the homeless as the ACLU falsely claims.

What it does do, he said, is ensure the safety and security of all citizens who want to use sidewalks to enter schools, libraries, child care centers without having to walk over or around someone who is lying on the sidewalk and blocking it.

He said homeless advocates and the ACLU should focus on getting homeless off the streets, not fight to keep them on the streets.

Its not immediately clear whether the ACLU plans to pursue litigation over the ordinance.

Freeman said the ACLU welcomes the opportunity to discuss the matters in the letter as an alternative to legal action.
Fugitive arrested in California in 1984 killing of Bradenton mother of 3, officials say

A man who has been on the run for nearly 40 years was arrested in San Diego on Wednesday in connection with the slaying of a woman whose body was found in Hillsborough County in 1984, according to authorities.

Donald Michael Santini called 33-year-old Cynthia Cindy Ruth Wood, promising to provide information about her husband that could help her win custody of her children, according to previous reporting from the Bradenton Herald. Wood met with Santini on June 6, 1984.

Wood wasnt seen again until June 9, 1984, when her body was found in a water-filled ditch in Riverview, according to Hillsborough court documents. An autopsy determined the mother of three from Bradenton had been strangled.

Witness Pamela Lynn Kincaid told Hillsborough County Sheriffs Office detectives that Charles Michael Stevens, an alias used by Santini, had confessed to her he killed Wood, the records said. Stevens was one of three aliases authorities determined Santini had used prior to Woods death.

Santinis trouble with the law began in 1978, when he was convicted of rape while serving in the U.S. Army in Frankfurt, Germany, according to a 1985 Herald article. Upon returning to his home state of Texas, he was charged with aggravated robbery in connection to a convenience store robbery in 1983. He confessed, then disappeared from the state just days later. The next time he resurfaced, he was working as a janitor in Longboat Key under the Stevens alias.

He became friends with Kincaid while living in Florida, eventually moving in with her, the Herald reported. Kincaids children attended a day care center just a few blocks away called Cape Vista Child Care Center  where Wood worked as a manager.

Wood had a complicated history of her own. She filed charges against her estranged husband, Barry Wood, accusing him of physically abusing her and her son from a previous marriage. She had two children with Barry Wood, and the two were involved in a contentious custody battle at the time of her death, the Herald reported. The charges against Barry Wood were dropped after she died and the court records were sealed.







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By Kendall-Jackson

After Woods death, Santini pulled a disappearing act once again  this time for almost 40 years. He evaded law enforcement using at least 13 different aliases, according to an arrest warrant from the Hillsborough Sheriffs Office.

A fugitive task force arrested Santini on Wednesday, according to jail records from the San Diego County Sheriffs Department. He is being held in San Diego Central Jail.

According to KGTV, an ABC affiliate in San Diego, a tip from the Florida/Caribbean Regional Fugitive Task Force led U.S. marshals to Campo, located in southeastern San Diego County, where they arrested Santini.

In an email to the Tampa Bay Times, the Hillsborough Sheriffs Office said it has sent detectives to California to interview Santini while he is awaiting extradition.

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This arrest allows us to reexamine evidence collected in 1984 using the technology of today, as the case is now considered open once again, said Amanda Granit, a spokesperson for the Hillsborough Sheriffs Office.

Times staff writers Dan Sullivan and Tony Marrero contributed to this report.
The Southside Park Pool will remain closed through the end of this summer, but officials announced on Thursday they secured state funding to finish its needed repairs and reopen it by next summer.

Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, said he was able to find $500,000 in Californias budget to fund renovations and reopen the pool next year. He said the funding was initially designated for an educational after-school program in North Sacramento. He said that project fell through, the funding was no longer needed and that money wouldve gone back to the state.

This is a place where families and community members, adults and kids alike, come to cool off, meet their neighbors, have some fun, McCarty said said at a news conference. Not everybody has the opportunity to have a pool in their backyard.

The assemblyman spoke about the recent death of a Sacramento teen who died in a drowning in the Sacramento River while trying to save his younger brother. McCarty emphasized the need for community pools  not only as a place where children can learn how to swim but as a way to deter children from jumping into nearby rivers.

So many families take their kids there to literally learn how to swim and stay alive. McCarty said about community pools. It gets really hot; nowhere to go. People go to this river.

Southside Park Neighborhood Association member Marni Leger helps Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, hold a replica check Wednesday for $500,000 from the state to help reopen the closed Southside Park pool. Recreation manager Jackie Beecham and Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela, right, join in the announcement. The pool will reopen next summer under the current plan.

Southside pool closed in early summer 2022

In April, Sacramento City Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela reluctantly announced that the Southside pool at 2107 Sixth St. would remain closed for a second consecutive summer while repairs were being done. She said at the time that the city had the money for the first step of repairs, but funding hadnt been earmarked for subsequent phases.

City officials closed the pool early in the summer of 2022 to replace the fiberglass lining, which had caused swimmers to break out in rashes. With construction costs on other projects higher than anticipated, though, it wasnt immediately refurbished.

What we thought would be a quick fix ended up being a much more significant fix, said Valenzuela, who joined McCarty at Thursdays news conference.

She said city staff moved mountains to find the initial money for planning, and her office found additional funding to help offset some of the costs. But the project to renovate a 70-year-old swimming pool still had a $500,000 funding gap.

We were even honestly looking at cutting funding from other community priorities to try to bring money over, which obviously wouldve had other impacts, Valenzuela said. So, for the assembly member and his team to come in with this gift of $500,000 is really amazing.

The centralized location of the Southside pool allows it to serve many residents from nearby underprivileged neighborhoods, said Sarah Cox, president of the Southside Park Neighborhood Association. She said the pool is a safe alternative that keep children away from Northern Californias dangerous waterways.

She said the nearest community pool is 3 miles away, which can be a 45-minute bus ride from Southside Park. Cox said her neighborhood group will look into getting water guns for the children or other feasible alternatives to keep them cool this summer.

Its been pretty mild so far this year, and Im really appreciative of that, Cox said about the summer weather, so far. And hopefully it doesnt get too, too hot. It would take a lot of effort in order to find (another pool) somewhere else.

A view of the closed Southside Park pool on Wednesday after Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, and Sacramento City Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela announced $500,000 of state funding to help reopen it. A plan is in the works to transport its neighbors to other pools in the city.

Seeking other options for neighborhood children

But summer and triple-digit heat will come.

Thats why Valenzuela is trying to secure passes for children to ensure they can cool off at other community pools in the city. The councilwoman said she would also continue looking into the possibility of busing kids to nearby community pools.

Valenzuela said her staff went out to the surrounding community, inviting residents to come down to Southside Park for free pool days as the summer 2022 season began. And they did, plenty of families grateful for the free events, she said. Then, they were forced to close the pool indefinitely the following weekend.

I know folks are a little nervous about how were gonna make sure the kids stay cool, Valenzuela said, which is why our office is trying to work really proactively with different community leaders to see if theres other options we can provide while we wait to get this beautiful facility back up and running.

Sacramento has 17 municipal swimming pools, and almost all of them have some sort of critical need or are on the citys deferred maintenance list, said Jackie Beecham, the citys director of Youth, Parks and Community Enrichment. The pools offer spots for swimming lessons, water safety classes, swim teams, fitness classes, family nights and special events.

She said they have to get creative and strategic with these repair projects as funding becomes available, and theyre prioritizing Southside Park to ensure equitable access to safe swimming locations.

Beecham said Southside Park residents this summer will have affordable access nearby pools, such as Clunie Pool in East Sacramentos McKinley Park, McClatchy Park Pool in Central Oak Park or the new North Natomas Aquatics Complex.

Our swimming pools really provide a safe space, as youve heard, for our youth and families to gather during the hot summer months, Beecham told reporters. Well continue to make sure that we are prioritizing safety as number one to ensure that were able to keep all of our facilities open with the least amount of impact as we do complete some of these repairs.
Turkmenistan's 'Hero Protector' Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov (Igor SASIN)

From a disastrous leadership election to some not very smart AI... Your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world.

- You can count on us -

Austrian politician Hans Peter Doskozil was convinced he was just one step from becoming the country's next chancellor when he was elected leader of the opposition Social Democrats last week with 53 percent of the vote.

He spent the weekend celebrating, telling journalists what he would do in power.

It took until Monday for party apparatchiks to realise that someone had made a mistake on the vote's Excel sheet and that Doskozil had actually lost.

No one knows how they broke it to him, but the 53-year-old took it so well that he immediately quit national politics.

"It wasn't a great day," he later admitted.

The reputation of the Social Democrats -- who were already trailing the country's far right -- has gone down the pan with Doskozil's dreams. "They will never live this down," one political commentator declared.

- Hi ho, hi ho -

You can love your job too much. Take the French supermarket worker who was suspended for singing too loudly as he restocked beer and wine aisles. This being France, unions and customers rallied to his aid to protest, gathering to sing as loudly and as badly as they could in the store at Louvroil near the border with Belgium.

- No butts in Ashgabat -

Another glorious new dawn for Turkmenistan, which basks in the enlightened leadership of "Hero Protector" Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the world's only singing dentist turned dictator.

The fitness fanatic -- who made his son Serdar president last year so he could devote more time to writing songs about "how wonderful and dazzling is my splendid Turkmenistan!" -- wants to ban smoking completely in the closed and deeply repressive Central Asian country.

Cynics might see this great leap forward as a smokescreen to hide the colossal methane emissions from its poorly run gas fields, which scientists say are having an outsized effect on heating up the planet. But thankfully critics do not exist in Turkmenistan.

- It was ChatGPT, stupid -

Artificial intelligence can make you look pretty dumb. Just ask New York lawyer Steven Schwartz who used ChatGPT to find precedents for a court case he was fighting. But six of the cases he submitted "appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes", a judge found before ordering Schwartz and his partner to appear before him to explain themselves.

- 27th time lucky -

A self-made millionaire determined to finally get into university is taking China's gruelling "gaokao" entrance exam for the 27th time.

Despite his riches, Liang Shi, 56, dreams of going to the top-tier Sichuan University and "becoming an intellectual".

And he's so desperate to get in this time that he has given up drink and playing mahjong to get up at dawn to study for 12 hours a day.

Asked if he was doing it for publicity, Liang replied, "No one in their right mind would spend decades taking the gaokao for a stunt."

Liang is planning to make up for lost fun after he sits the exams this weekend. "I'm going to play mahjong with my friends for three days and three nights," he told AFP.

burs-fg/ach
An Alabama judge sentenced a Rome, Ga. woman to 25 years in prison followed by 20 years of supervised release for sex trafficking children.

Marlette Laishell Lala Smith pleaded guilty to two counts of sex trafficking a minor and two counts of transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.

A release from the U.S. Dept. of Justice said she recruited two children, ages 15 and 16, into becoming prostitutes, according to court documents.

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As cited by the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of Alabama, Smith recruited two minor females (15 and 16 years of age) into prostitution for her own financial gain.

Smith reportedly found the two minors stranded in Memphis, Tenn. while they were trying to get back home to California. She met them on a stairwell at a Motel 6.

The minor victims were hungry, had no money, no place to stay, no mode of transportation, only the clothes on their back, and an uncharged cell phone, the U.S. Attorney said in a statement.

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Smith told them that she would help them get back home if they would go with her to Alabama and make $200 each. Smith drove the minors to Georgia then to Alabama where she sexually trafficked them, the USAO continued.

Smith pleaded guilty on March 23, and was sentenced on June 2.

The commercial sexual exploitation of children causes long-lasting harm to child victims and the entire community, said U.S. Attorney Prim F. Escalona. The fight to prevent and disrupt exploitation would be impossible without the support of our federal, state, and local law enforcement partners. We are especially grateful for the work of FBI Birmingham in apprehending the defendant in this case.

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OTHER NEWS:
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) fired back at House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) after the GOP leader criticized his proposal for a constitutional 28th Amendment to address gun violence.

McCarthy ripped Newsoms suggestion for raising the minimum age for gun buyers to 21, universal background checks, a reasonable waiting period for gun purchases and a ban on civilians buying assault weapons.

Hey Governor Newsom, The 2nd Amendment already exists  we dont need a 28th, McCarthy wrote on Twitter. But what we do need is for Presidential aspirants to stop pushing their extreme positions nationally.

Hey Governor Newsom,



The 2nd Amendment already existswe dont need a 28th.



But what we do need is for Presidential aspirants to stop pushing their extreme positions nationally. https://t.co/h4nB2F5oqU  Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) June 8, 2023

Newsom, in response to McCarthys criticism, slammed the House speaker for doing nothing to address crime in his hometown of Bakersfield, California.

Hey Kevin, What we need is you to own up to the fact that you represent a district with the highest murder rate in our state  and youre doing nothing to address it, wrote Newsom.

Bakersfields 2021 murder rate is more than double that of cities like New York and San Francisco, The Daily Beast reported.

Hey Kevin,



What we need is you to own up to the fact that you represent a district with the highest murder rate in our state -- and youre doing nothing to address it. https://t.co/2I77M2HAgY  Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 9, 2023

So far, 2023 has logged 280 mass shootings and 18,649 deaths due to gun violence, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

Newsom has taken shots at McCarthy in the past for his unwavering support of guns amid the mounting violence.

McCarthy declined to answer questions as he walked through the Capitol in the wake of the Nashville, Tennessee, school shooting that left six people, including three children, dead in March.

Coward, Newsom said then.

Related...
Gen Z likes shopping in stores just as much as they do online, survey finds

Gen Z still likes shopping in stores, a new survey found. Luis Alvarez

Gen Z are a tech-savvy generation but they like shopping in physical stores just as much as online.

A new survey found that Gen Z like being able to see, touch and try a product before buying it.

Social media is also a big factor in Gen Z's purchasing decisions, especially TikTok and Instagram.

Gen Z are digital natives and have grown up being able to buy anything at the click of a button, but it appears that the tech-savvy generation still likes shopping in physical stores just as much as they do online.

A new report by the ICSC surveyed 1,008 people aged 16 to 26 about their shopping habits and preferences.

It found that although 95% of Gen Z like shopping online, just as many (97%) also enjoy going to the mall. About 30% cited the ability to get products immediately, 28% said they liked being able to see, touch and try products, while 11% enjoyed not having to pay for shipping.

However, respondents did say that shopping online meant they could compare prices more easily (30%) and get better deals and prices (20%).

Almost half of Gen Z said they shopped most frequently at discount retailers like T.J. Maxx, Walmart, Marshalls, and Target, while a quarter said they preferred chains such as Dollar General and Family Dollar.

One in five most frequently bought from fast-fashion retailers like Shein or Zara, while only 13% said thrift or second-hand stores.

Social media plays a major factor in Gen Z's shopping habits with 85% of respondents saying it's influenced their purchasing decisions, with almost half citing Instagram and TikTok.

Gen Z are voracious shoppers with social media encouraging young people to buy new clothes regularly. Although they're a more socially conscious generation, this isn't translating into their buying habits, Insider recently reported.

Researchers from Sheffield Hallam University in England found that although almost half of Gen Z are concerned about the environmental implications of the fast-fashion industry, 90% still buy from fast-fashion brands, per Insider.

Read the original article on Business Insider
A former manager for a West Palm Beach pain clinic owned by one of the biggest pill mill kingpins in the country was resentenced to time served this week after a successful appeal of his guilty plea to second-degree murder in the overdose death of a patient.

Theodore Obermeyer had served 11 years of a 15-year sentence in the February 2009 overdose death of Joseph "Joey" Bartolucci from highly potent doses of a painkiller prescribed by a doctor at East Coast Pain on Okeechobee Boulevard, owned by Jeff George.

Bartolucci was days shy of his 25th birthday when he was found dead in his West Palm Beach home. Partially filled prescription bottles of Dilaudid and Xanax were nearby. The day before Bartolucci died, Dr. Gerald Klein had prescribed him 150 Dilaudid pills. Bartolucci filled the prescription at a Walgreens, according to court documents.

From 2016: Selling Xanax to Trumps ex-chef gets former pill-mill doctor probation

Obermeyer pleaded guilty to felony second-degree murder, which in Florida is a charge against a person who did not directly cause the death of another but contributed to it while committing another felony. Obermeyer's felony was conspiracy to traffic hydromorphone. He testified in Klein's murder trial that pill sales were meant only to enrich the clinic's owners and disregarded the well-being of the patient.

How Florida ignited the Heroin epidemic: Meet the George brothers, the oxy kingpins from Wellington

Obermeyer appealed his conviction to the Fourth District Court of Appeal, saying that prosecutors could not prove the conspiracy charge with the evidence they had and that his attorney did not give him the correct advice about taking the plea deal. The appeals court judges sent the case back to the lower court, pointing out potential flaws in the evidence and suggesting Obermeyer's claims might be credible.

They said the amount of the drug prescribed only to Bartolucci and only for a single day, as prosecutors charged, was not enough for the conspiracy charge. And while the clinic dispensed that drug, it didn't have in stock the dosage prescribed to Bartolucci, so he had to fill the prescription at a drug store.

From the archives: Pill mill manager admits falsifying numbers in doctors murder trial

Ted Obermeyer, former manager at East Coast Pain clinic, leaves court in 2012 after pleading guilty to second degree murder in the overdose death of Joey Bartolucci, 24. The clinic was owned by Jeffrey George. With his twin Chris, both of whom grew up in Wellington, Jeffrey George on the largest pill mill empires in the country.

Circuit Judge Caroline Shepherd on Monday sentenced Obermeyer to time served. Obermeyer had pleaded guilty in 2012 and was sentenced in 2016. Famed defense attorney Michael Salnick represented him. Shepherd never talked about whether there was ineffective counsel, said Glenn Herbert Mitchell, Obermeyer's attorney. The defense and prosecution had agreed to a "correction of his sentence," he said.

"The parties reached a fair resolution," he said.

Jeff George (right) sits in court with his attorney David Roth in 2013 during his sentencing in the death of Joseph "Joey" Bartolucci on charges related to his operation of a pain clinic.

Jeff George with his brother Chris ran what federal agents described as the most sophisticated painkiller trafficking ring in the U.S. They made an estimated $43 million from several clinics in Palm Beach and Broward counties. Jeffrey George and Obermeyer had been friends since preschool.

Jeff George also pleaded guilty to felony murder in Bartolucci's death and was sentenced to 20 years. His release date is scheduled for 2030. He, too, testified against Klein, who ended up being acquitted of Bartolucci's death.

More: George pill mill ran as usual after patients death, ex-manager says

Obermeyer testified in Klein's trial that his childhood friend asked him to run the clinic and later showed him how to order high quantities of prescription drugs for an in-house pharmacy.

Klein, Obermeyer and Jeff George were all arrested in a sweeping state and federal indictment of dozens of doctors, clinic workers and George family members in 2011. But the three men were the only ones charged in state court in a murder and drug trafficking case tied to Bartoluccis death.

Chris George, who was released from federal prison last year, said Monday that in light of the DCA ruling, his brother will file an appeal soon.

The Palm Beach Post won awards for its extensive coverage and investigations into the George Brothers' pain empire and how the pill mills in Florida fueled the heroin epidemic.

Holly Baltz is the investigations editor at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hbaltz@pbpost.com. Support local investigative journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Jeff George's pill mill manager gets time served, will leave prison
More than 20 Chinese cultural events and activities will be held at several venues across Bulgarian between early June and early August, Chinese Ambassador to Bulgaria Dong Xiaojun said in Sofia on Thursday.

The series of events to be held under the umbrella title "Summer with Chinese Culture in Bulgaria" aims to further deepen bilateral exchanges, Dong said at a press conference.

Combining tradition with creativity and innovation, these will offer the local public a comprehensive introduction to Chinese culture, Dong said.

The series was kicked off by a masterclass hosted by renowned Chinese filmmaker Xie Fei and the screening of his films on Monday through Wednesday. The agenda also includes a dragon boat festival, tea ceremonies and a meeting of Bulgarian and Chinese representatives active in the cultural and creative industries.

The folk dance ensemble of the Beijing Dance Academy is to give several performances across the country. Bulgarian and Chinese performers will exchange dance practices, and dancers will a joint performance under the title "We Talk About Love."

Other activities will include a Chinese Cinema Week, a training session in traditional Chinese Dragon Dance, and an exhibition of Chinese embroidery on silk and paper cutting.
(Bloomberg) -- George Santoss $500,000 bail package in his criminal fraud case was guaranteed by family members, not political figures, the Republican congressmans lawyer said in a court filing.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Santos asked a federal judge Friday to overturn an order to release the names of his three bail guarantors at the request of media organizations, including Bloomberg News. The congressman has previously argued that those individuals could lose their jobs or even be physically harmed if their identities were known.

Defendant has essentially publicly revealed that the suretors are family members and not lobbyists, donors or others seeking to exert influence over the defendant, Santoss lawyer, Joseph Murray, said in the motion to US District Court Judge Joanna Seybert.

Santos, 34, is facing a 13-count federal indictment accusing him of diverting political campaign donations to pay for personal expenses, claiming fraudulent unemployment benefits and making false financial disclosures to Congress.

The freshman Republican congressman from Long Island came under scrutiny shortly after he was elected last year, when the New York Times reported that large parts of his life story  including stints at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup  were made up.

Read more: Santos Secures Three Mystery Guarantors for $500,000 Bond

The media organizations seeking the names unsealing have cited the need for public transparency on whether they violate congressional ethics rules banning most gifts.

Those rules make an exception for relatives, a term is broadly defined to include grandparents, cousins, step-siblings, in-laws and fiances.

Santoss attorney previously suggested to the House Ethics Committee that Santoss bond was proper because it fit within an exception to the gift ban rule. His filing in federal court made that claim more explicit.

Murray said he would not object to the court releasing the nature of the relationship as long as they were not named, citing the media frenzy and hateful attacks against the congressman, his staff and his lawyer.

These attacks have been extremely angry, anti-gay, anti-Republican and all around antisocial, he said.

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
The Georgia Professional Standards Commission voted unanimously Thursday to delete woke words including equity and inclusion from the states teacher preparation rules.

Along with diversity, a word the commission voted last month to delete from the preparation standards, the changes were requested by the University System of Georgia to clarify expectations for incoming teachers, commission Chairman Brian Sirmans said. Such words have come to mean different things to different people in recent years and have made interpreting them difficult, Sirmans said he was told by university system officials.

The changes are not aimed at reducing educational opportunities for minority students in Georgia, Sirmans said before Thursdays vote.

We still expect to prepare educators who are well prepared to meet the needs of all of the students they encounter, he said.

But teachers, parents and civil rights activists who spoke during a public comment period said deleting those words will leave incoming teachers unprepared for the diverse mix of students they will see in their classrooms.

To blatantly remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion is just horrible, said Aireane Montgomery, president and CEO of Georgia Educators for Equity & Justice. To erase diversity, equity and inclusion is to ignore and minimize marginalized communities.

Jonathan Campos with the Intercultural Development Research Association compared the rules changes to some of the darkest periods in history when Hispanic children were not allowed to speak Spanish in school and it was illegal to teach enslaved children to read.

Other speakers argued the rules changes will strike a blow at the morale of minority teachers in Georgia and prompt many to leave the profession.
Germany could provide its airfields for training Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets.

Source: Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, the head of the Bundestag Committee for Defence, in an interview with Bild

Quote: "We have never had an F-16 in our portfolio, but we can make German airports available as a hub or offer basic training for pilots who have only flown MiGs until now. The actual F-16 training should be provided by countries that also fly this aircraft."

Details: Commenting on Ukraine's possible membership in NATO, Strack-Zimmermann has said that it is not possible yet.

"Ukraine cannot become a NATO member at this time. This is prohibited by the charter, as Ukraine, although not to blame, is in a state of war. The requirements to become a NATO member are complex and diverse. They must always be fulfilled," she said.

Quote: "Nevertheless, it would be wise for Ukraine to participate in the meeting in Vilnius, especially since it will also be very important how NATO will provide Ukraine with security guarantees after the end of this war."

Background: Over the past week, Germany has handed over another batch of military aid to Ukraine, including eight Bandvagn 206 all-terrain tracked vehicles.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) testified Thursday before a federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to CNN.

The former House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 riot alleged last September that Gingrich had provided feedback to the Trump campaign about advertisements promoting the former presidents unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and discussed coordinating state electors.

In a letter to the former Speaker requesting a voluntary interview, the committee said that Gingrich communicated with former Trump senior advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Miller on campaign ads about the election, after it had been declared for Joe Biden.

The ads Gingrich advised on had encouraged members of the public to contact their state officials and pressure them to challenge and overturn the result of the election in the days before state electors would cast their votes, the letter said.

The committee also suggested Gingrich was involved in the fake elector scheme, pointing to a November 2020 message to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

Is someone in charge of coordinating all the electors? the message read. Evans makes the point that all the contested electors must meet on [D]ecember 14 and send in ballots to force contests which the house would have to settle.

Gingrich had previously been ordered to testify before a special grand jury investigating election interference in Georgia. However, the former Speakers case to block the testimony was ultimately dismissed in February after the Fulton County grand jury concluded its work.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
GOP lawmakers fall in line behind Trump over Florida indictment; Asa Hutchinson says he should cancel reelection campaign

As former President Donald Trump lashed out at his stunning new indictment in Florida, many fellow Republicans fell in line behind him, with some marked exceptions.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy voiced support for the ex-president.

I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice, the California Republican tweeted.

House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable, he added.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who lost the GOP presidential nomination to Trump in 2016, also voiced solidarity.

There is no limit to what these people will do to protect their power & destroy those who threaten it, even if it means ripping our country apart & shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together, he tweeted, though it was not clear whom he was referring to.

Trump announced he had been indicted by a Florida grand jury on Thursday on charges related to taking classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort when he left office. He was charged with illegal retention of government secrets, obstruction of justice and conspiracy, the Washington Post reported, citing unnamed sources.

Republican presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson called on Trump to end his reelection campaign.

With the news that Donald Trump has been indicted for the second time, our country finds itself in a position that weakens our democracy. Donald Trumps actions  from his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of law  should not define our nation or the Republican Party, the former Arkansas governor said in a statement Thursday night.

This is a sad day for our country, he continued. While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.

Long-shot GOP presidential contender Steve Laffey said Trump continues make a mockery of the electoral process.

Its time the RNC and (voters) take a closer look at the candidates and realize that Donald Trump cannot with the 2024 Presidential Election, he tweeted.

But Vivek Ramaswamy, who is also seeking the Republican presidential nomination, called the indictment an affront.

We cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents, he said in a statement. Its hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden.

Dems were quick to condemn Trump.

Trumps apparent indictment on multiple charges arising from his retention of classified materials is another affirmation of the rule of law, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., wrote on Twitter.

For four years, he acted like he was above the law. But he should be treated like any other lawbreaker. And today, he has been.

Diehard Trump supporters closed ranks.

Sad day for America. God Bless President Trump, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, tweeted.

Democrats must literally shake with sweats when they see amazing packed out Trump rallies and overwhelming winning poll numbers week after week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., tweeted. We must win in 2024.

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Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) said Friday he will not run to challenge Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) in 2024.

As the representative of Northeast Wisconsin and Chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, I have a rare, bipartisan opportunity in the 118th Congress to help restore American strength, prevent war in the Pacific, and defend our basic freedoms from communist aggression, Gallagher said in a statement on Twitter.

Accomplishing this mission and serving Wisconsins 8th District deserve my undivided attention, he added. Therefore, I will not run for the Senate in 2024 and will pursue re-election to the House.

Republicans had been pushing for Gallagher to jump in the race against the three-term Democratic senator, and his decision leaves the field wide open. No Republican has officially jumped into the race in the battleground state.

Mike Gallagher would be a great candidate, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), previously told Politico. Hes the kind of candidate that, with his distinguished service and then time in Congress, could win both the primary and general election.

The Hill Elections 2024 coverage

However, the congressman said Friday he is focused on his role in helping to confront the Chinese Communist Party threat.

I believe that when we look back in 50 years, the American people will ask: Did our elected leaders rally as a country and confront the Chinese Communist Party threat before it was too late? Continuing to lead this fight in the House of Representatives is the best way for me to help answer that question affirmatively, he added.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
The Athens-Clarke County Police Department is among numerous law enforcement agencies across the state to receive a grant from the $83 million awarded by Gov. Brian Kemps office.

The state awarded Athens-Clarke police more than $1.6 million for recruitment incentives for current employees and the hiring of new employees, according to the governors office.

The department applied for the grant through the Governors Office of Planning and Budget.

We are working with that office to continue the grant process, a police spokesman said Friday.

Police training: Athens-Clarke police to conduct class teaching public how to handle active shooter, more

The grant money will be directed at initiatives to enhance recruiting and the retention of employees in the department, according to police.

Public safety has always been a top priority of my administration and will continue to be, Kemp said in a statement released with the announcement.

A few other agencies in northeast Georgia are earmarked for grants:

The Barrow County Sheriffs Office will receive $83,778 for the purchase of a Leica Geosystems Scene scan unit and $20,253 for additional technology.

The Commerce Police Department will receive $79,310 to implement 21 st century policing intelligence.

The Danielsville Police Department will receive $22,770 for a violence reduction program.

The Stephens County Sheriffs Office will receive $1,185,156 to hire more deputies and jailers.

This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Athens-Clarke police to receive $1.6 million grant from governor
Stormy Daniels attends a movie premiere in Los Angeles, California in May 2022 (Phillip Faraone)

Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he was indicted in a probe over his handling of classified documents, in a case that would make him the first US president to face federal criminal charges.

But the matter is far from the only legal peril dogging Trump as he seeks a return to the White House in 2024.

Here are the key investigations underway against the 76-year-old one-term president:

- Secret documents at home -

Special counsel Jack Smith is leading the ongoing investigation into classified documents found at Trump's Florida home -- and into the possible obstruction of the probe.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence last August turned up boxes of classified documents taken when he left office in early 2021.

The raid was triggered by a review of records that Trump surrendered to authorities in January 2022.

The Justice Department began investigating after the 15 boxes were found to contain national defense information, including 184 documents marked as confidential, secret, or top secret.

It was not yet clear what the exact charges might be.

One of Trump's attorneys, Jim Trusty, told CNN that his client has been indicted on seven charges, including the willful retention of documents in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements, obstruction of justice and a count of conspiracy.

People familiar with the matter told The New York Times the conspiracy charge was related to obstruction of justice.

Trump said on Truth Social that he was "summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM."

- Stormy hush money? -

A New York grand jury indicted Trump in March over hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Prosecutors say the money was paid prior to the 2016 election to silence Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, over claims she had a relationship with Trump in 2006 -- a year after he married Melania Trump.

Late in the campaign, Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen arranged a payment of $130,000 to Daniels in exchange for her pledge of confidentiality.

After US media broke the story, Cohen cooperated with prosecutors and pleaded guilty in 2018 to charges of tax and bank fraud, as well as violating federal campaign financing laws.

Cohen testified that the Trump Organization reimbursed Cohen for his payment to Daniels, which prosecutors said amounted to an undeclared campaign gift in violation of election financing laws.

That case, in which he faces 34 felony counts, is due to go to trial next March, in the middle of primary election season.

- Incited Capitol attack? -

The independent prosecutor Smith will also decide whether to charge anyone alleged to have "unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power" after the 2020 election or during certification by Congress of the results.

On January 6, 2021, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol seeking to stop that certification.

Before the assault, Trump delivered a fiery speech nearby urging the crowd to "fight like hell".

In explosive hearings separate from the Justice probe, lawmakers argued that Trump knew he lost the election yet pressed fake claims of fraud.

They also presented evidence of alleged misconduct by Trump leading up to the insurrection, including accusations that he attempted to co-opt government departments into his bid to overturn the election results.

Federal prosecutors have obtained convictions of or guilty pleas from more than 500 people for participating in the uprising, but it remains unclear if Trump will face charges for any plotting or fomenting of the Capitol attack.

- Other probes -

Trump was found liable in a civil case last month for sexually abusing and defaming an American former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996, and ordered the ex-president to pay her $5 million in damages.

It marked the first time Trump faced legal consequences over a string of sexual assault allegations dating back decades.

The former leader immediately rejected the verdict as a "disgrace".

Separately, Trump is being investigated for pressuring officials in the southern swing state of Georgia to overturn Biden's 2020 victory, including a taped phone call in which he asked the then-secretary of state to "find" enough votes to reverse the result.

The top prosecutor in Georgia's Fulton County, Fani Willis, has assembled a special grand jury that could see Trump facing conspiracy charges connected to election fraud and interference.

This year, the grand jury forewoman said the 23-member panel had recommended indictments of multiple people, including "certainly names that you would recognize". She did not confirm whether Trump was among them.

In New York, meanwhile, the state attorney general Letitia James filed a civil suit against Trump and three of his children, accusing them of fraud by over-valuing assets to secure loans and then under-valuing them to minimize taxes.

James is seeking $250 million in penalties as well as banning Trump and his children from serving as executives at companies in New York.

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Gainesville Regional Utilities no longer has the highest bills in the state of Florida, according to the latest report released by the Florida Municipal Electric Association.

The monthly report compares electric bills between municipal and investor-owned utilities. Typically, the reports are delayed by about a month or two.

The latest ranking places GRU at No. 7 in the state with an average electric bill of around $167 per 1,000 kWh. The average is lower than Florida Public Utilities, Duke Energy, Florida- Power and Light Northwest, Leesburg, Bushnell and Havana. In March, GRU ranked first in the state with electric bills teetering around $185.

Despite vast criticism over GRU's bills, the municipal utility now has comparable pricing to neighboring Newberry and Ocala electric providers, as well as Tampa Electric, all of which are within a $10 difference.

An employee for Gainesvilel Regional Utilities installs an AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) device on the side of a building.

More: Gainesville places 1st in national water conservation competition

More: Gov. DeSantis awaits controversial GRU takeover bill. Here's what to know

City leaders previously signaled that their recent decisions  mixed with increasing rates from other utilities, like Duke and FPL  would soon put GRU in a more competitive bracket for power after years of consistently placing among the highest bills in the state.

Cost of cutting back

Gainesville officials and the utility have been under increased scrutiny over the past year following a 2022 audit that pointed out the utility's $1.7 billion debt. Additionally, lawmakers have demanded city leaders drastically cut services, programs, and proposed raising property taxes to mitigate the issue.

Since then, city leaders have vowed to cut its budget by almost $20 million, most of which comes from what's commonly referred to as the general fund transfer  a pot of money that moves from the utility to help pay for city services, such as fire rescue, police and parks.

That hasn't been enough for some City Hall critics.

State Rep. Chuck Clemons, R-Newberry, and Sen. Keith Perry, R-Gainesville, helped through an unprecedented bill that would remove the City Commission's control over the municipal utility, placing all decision-making powers with a five-member "authority" appointed by presidential hopeful and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The bill has yet to be sent to DeSantis' office, despite passing the Legislature.

Moodys Investors Service has signaled that the change of governance could result in a credit downgrade, something lawmakers previously said was a concern and reason to remove the commission's voting ability.

This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: GRU bills drop in state rankings, comparable to Newberry, Ocala, Tampa
FILE - Former army officers Benedicto Lucas Garcia, left, and Edilberto Letona Linares, sit in a cell at a courtroom in Guatemala City, Thursday, March 2, 2017. A Guatemalan appeals chamber disobeyed a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on Friday, June 9, 2023, by ordering the release of three high-ranking ex-military officers convicted of crimes against humanity; among the three is Lucas Garcia. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

GUATEMALA CITY (AP)  A Guatemalan appeals court on Friday disobeyed a ruling from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights by ordering the release of three former high-ranking military officers convicted of crimes against humanity.

In March, the regional human rights court halted the release of the prisoners to prevent irreparable damage to the right of access to justice for the victims.

It's not the first time that Guatemala authorities have disregarded rulings by the court - they've been condemned for it 14 times before. The original 2018 sentencing of the men actually came about as a result of a 2004 condemnation by the rights court, which rebuked decades of impunity in a case centered around the forced disappearance and aggravated rape of members of the Molina Theissen family.

But it's the first case Guatemala authorities have done so in a situation that involves releasing prisoners already convicted of serious crimes. It also comes as watchdogs warn of deteriorating democracy and a growing embrace of authoritarian tendencies in Central America. In Guatemala, critics have gone as far as accusing elites of trying to hijack Guatemala's justice system" for political benefit.

The military officials winning out from the appeals court decision are Francisco Luis Gordillo Martinez, Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas and Manuel Benedicto Lucas Garcia.

In 2018, the men were sentenced to between 33 and 58 years in prison for crimes against humanity, the forced disappearance of a 14-year-old boy and the violent rape of his sister.

Despite Friday's decision, the men still haven't been released from prison because they still await rulings in two other trials against them for crimes of genocide and forced disappearance.

Still, Jovita Tzul, lawyer for the Molina Thiessen family, rejected the final decision of the appeals court as a regrettable resolution, which generates serious setbacks in terms of human rights.
Gyumey Tsultrim (1st L) and his colleagues collect ancient books before making an inventory of them in Lhasa, southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, April 19, 2023. (Xinhua/Jigme Dorje)

At Truzing Palace of Norbulingka, a world heritage site in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, thousands of ancient books featuring various themes are stored on shelves. All the old books are preserved by a unique binding technique using two wooden clamping planks wrapped in pieces of cloth.



Gyumey Tsultrim, 56, with Norbulingka's management office, was busy carefully carrying the unregistered books to the studio of his ancient book survey team nearby. For now, the team's priority is to make an inventory of the ancient books, both manually and digitally, for the specific identification of the documents.

Some of the books are even made of palm leaves.

Gyumey Tsultrim has been engaged in the region's ancient book preservation cause for 25 years and was deeply impressed by the great difficulty of collecting and restoring palm-leaf manuscripts of Buddhist sutras.

The Buddhist sutras written on tailored palm leaves are a primary source for the study of ancient Tibetan culture. Seeming fragile, they are well-preserved in Tibet thanks to the region's dry climate and unique preservation methods.

At present, there are over 1,000 Sanskrit palm-leaf Buddhist sutras, totaling nearly 60,000 leaves in Tibet, which account for 60 to 80 percent of the total surviving palm-leaf manuscripts of Buddhist sutras.

Gyumey Tsultrim, who graduated from the High-level Tibetan Buddhism College of China, has studied Sanskrit for years. He began participating specifically in the collection, restoration and protection work of the palm-leaf Buddhist sutras as early as 2006.

In the following six years, the region's palm-leaf Buddhist sutras preservation team traveled a total of 17,000 km across the region, visiting temples, ruins and households for the collection of such ancient books.

Tsewang Junmen, office director of the regional leading group on palm-leaf Buddhist sutras protection, recalled that many temples were tucked away in deep mountains, with bumpy roads that also became muddy when it rained, making their collecting work extremely hard. Once, the survey team ran into a power outage at a temple and the staff could only record the texts by relying on natural light in the daytime.

"The palm-leaf Buddhist sutras, mostly written in Sanskrit, are quite illegible and need cross-reference via other documents to further identify their contents. I have to recognize the characters one by one. One single mistake in characters can totally change the meaning, so it takes a long time to sort out the relics of the texts," said Gyumey Tsultrim.

"Some palm-leaf Buddhist sutras have already become moldy, worm-eaten or even rotten due to considerable age, multiplying the difficulty of their restoration," he added.

The patient craftsman would boil local sesame and flour into a natural adhesive to repair the Buddhist sutras instead of merely relying on sewing. The palm-leaf pages, thus, can be opened again, with some clean water applied to their surfaces, and become less prone to damage after his repair.

Previously, none of Tibet's cultural heritage protection units had any equipment for cultural relics protection and scientific research worth more than 100,000 yuan (about 14,280 U.S. dollars). All the protection units in the whole region shared one tech laboratory and one relics restoration room.

However, in 2013, Tibet launched a project, adopting scientific and technological means, to better preserve its cultural relics. Tibet's majestic Potala Palace, Norbulingka, the regional museum and the like thus began to use tailored storage cabinets and environment monitoring equipment to protect the old texts.

Gyumey Tsultrim now also teaches Tibetan calligraphy and knowledge of the ancient texts for free to more than 600 students across the region. Some of his students have become teachers and new inheritors of local cultures in Tibet.

"Cultural heritages preserved by our ancestors through wisdom, diligence and hard work should be inherited, protected and carried forward in our modern, civilized society," he explained.

Gyumey Tsultrim checks a reference book in Sanskrit and Tibetan in Lhasa, southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, April 19, 2023.(Xinhua/Jigme Dorje)
Carlos Barria/Reuters

The same Donald Trump-appointed federal judge who went out of her way to slow down the federal investigation into the former presidents mishandling of classified records has been selected to initially oversee the criminal case filed against him this week, according to a source briefed on the situation.

The summons sent to Trumps lawyers on Thursday night indicated that U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has been assigned to the case, this person told The Daily Beast. That places her in a unique position to deal with an indictment that charges Trump with seven counts related to the way he hoarded national defense information at his Florida oceanside estate of Mar-a-Lago and then repeatedly refused to return them to the National Archives when requested.

The development is a stark and sobering turn for the Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors because Cannon is a MAGA-friendly judge who has already shown a conspicuous tendency to issue orders that violate judicial normsall to appease the president who appointed her in his final months in office.

The Incredible Mystery of How Trump Got Judge Cannon in the Mar-a-Lago Case

Cannon is already intimately familiar with the investigation, given that she issued bizarre rulings that needlessly put in place a special master to review the files seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago last year. Her decision significantly slowed down the investigation because it totally halted special agents from reviewing evidence that was already in their possession.

Her comments in court and subsequent rulings during the early stages of the investigation prompted legal scholars to raise questions about her participation in the case.

Cannon inserted herself in the FBIs investigation only after Trump filed a lawsuit challenging the seizure of documents at Mar-a-Lago. A review of court logs by The Daily Beast indicated that Trumps lawyers managed to overcome the local court districts random judicial assignment wheel and engaged in whats known as forum shopping by timing the lawsuit in order to get her on the casea fact that was later confirmed by a person familiar with the situation. Her dubious plan to slow down the investigation with a special master review was struck down by an appeals court in December.

And Trump seems well aware of his judges loyalties, evidenced by the way his lawyers previously tried to file a mind-boggling lawsuit against Hillary Clinton in Cannons satellite courthouse at the far northern edge of the judicial districtwhere shes the only judge around. The misadventure failed when the districts assignment program kicked the case to another judge, who later called out Trumps team on their brazen attempt to game the judicial system.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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I had 'The White Lotus' experience in Sicily at a hotel with a private beach and infinity pool. At $261 per night, it was far less expensive than the hotel from the show and had many of the same perks.

Mikhaila Friel stayed at UnaHotels Capotaormina in Sicily in April. Mikhaila Friel/Insider

I stayed at two luxury hotels during my stay in Taormina, Sicily, in Italy.

I kicked off my trip at the real "White Lotus" hotel where the cast lived and filmed season two.

Then, I stayed at UnaHotels Capotaormina, which was more affordable with many of the same perks.

Back in April, I spent one night at San Domenico Palace, a Four Seasons Hotel, where "The White Lotus" was filmed in Sicily, Italy.

Mikhaila Friel is seated for breakfast at "The White Lotus" hotel. Mikhaila Friel/Insider

I traveled from my home in the UK to spend one night at San Domenico Palace, a Four Seasons Hotel, in Taormina, Sicily, where the second season of "The White Lotus" was filmed.

I stayed in a sea-view room with a terrace, which cost $2,248, or around 2,047, for one night and the price included breakfast.

The 5-star resort is the most luxurious hotel I've ever stayed in due to the excellent customer service, the delicious food, and the decor. I especially enjoyed visiting locations that were shown in "The White Lotus," including the iconic piano bar and infinity pool.

That being said, I didn't think the hotel was worth the money. The highlights of my stay were the beautiful scenery and the hotel's restaurants, two things that I could have experienced without paying $2,248, especially as the restaurants and bar are available for non-hotel guests to book.

After checking out of San Domenico Palace, I spent two nights at UnaHotels Capotaormina, a 4-star hotel that was far more affordable.

Mikhaila pictured at UnaHotels Capotaormina. Mikhaila Friel/Insider

My stay at San Domenico Palace was part of a reporting trip to Sicily, and I was lucky enough to be able to take a couple of vacation days while there.

During my time off, I stayed at UnaHotels, an Italian four-star hotel chain that has 27 locations, according to its website. UnaHotels Capotaormina is around a 10-minute drive from San Domenico Palace.

I first discovered the hotel on TikTok, as someone had posted a video showing its gorgeous private beach. After doing some research, I discovered that the hotel had many of the same amenities as San Domenico Palace, including an infinity pool, and several restaurants and bars.

The room was also more affordable  I stayed in a superior double room for two nights, and it cost 242.90, or around $261.65, per night.

Here's how the two hotels compared, from the rooms I stayed in to the scenery.

The rooms were pretty similar, although San Domenico Palace had a couple more luxurious features.

Mikhaila's room at UnaHotels Capotaormina, left, and at San Domenico Palace, right. Mikhaila Friel/Insider

Both rooms had a queen-sized double bed, a TV, chairs to sit on, a bathroom, and a terrace with outdoor seating.

The only major difference I noticed was that my room in San Domenico Palace had a couple of extra touches that made it appear more luxurious, such as extra pillows and complimentary snacks which included a bowl of fruit and some chocolate. The decor was also a little more fancy, as there was a painting on the wall and flowers on the table.

At UnaHotels, there were no freebies in my room but I did receive some freebies at the hotel's bar. One evening after ordering a cup of tea, a server brought me a selection of cookies, which I thought was a lovely touch.

Both rooms had a terrace balcony with stunning views of the ocean.

The view from Mikhaila's hotel room at UnaHotels Capotaormina, left, and at San Domenico Palace, right. Mikhaila Friel/Insider

From my terrace in San Domenico Palace, I could see palm trees and gorgeous views of the ocean below.

When I arrived at UnaHotels, I didn't expect the room to also have a balcony and terrace, so it was a lovely surprise. There were magnificent views of the sea from my room, and a couple of times I woke up in the early hours of the morning to watch the sunrise, which was a remarkable experience.

The bathrooms were completely different.

The bathroom in Mikhaila's room at UnaHotels Capotaormina, left, and at San Domenico Palace, right. Mikhaila Friel/Insider

One of the major differences I noticed was the bathrooms in each room.

At San Domenico Palace, there were marble walls and a sink, a mirror, a shower, a toilet, and a bidet. There were also complimentary shower products including shampoo, a hair dryer, and two robes hanging on the door.

At UnaHotels, the bathroom in my room had green and blue tiles and there was a sink, a mirror, a toilet, a bidet, and a bathtub. While there were plenty of towels and shower products, there were no robes, which I didn't mind as I wasn't planning to spend a lot of time in my room.

In my opinion, one of the most impressive aspects of San Domenico Palace was the infinity pool, so I was overjoyed that there was also one at UnaHotels.

The infinity pool at UnaHotels Capotaormina, left, and at San Domenico Palace, right. Mikhaila Friel/Insider

The infinity pool at San Domenico Palace was shown in "The White Lotus," so I was particularly excited to visit it in real life. It overlooks the sea, and there are sun loungers scattered directly across from the pool. A member of staff informed me that the pool was heated, but it was pretty chilly when I took a dip.

I was impressed with the service at the pool area, as a member of staff brought me a cool bag with a bottle of water and a towel and also asked if I wanted to order a drink.

Meanwhile, the infinity pool at UnaHotels was just as aesthetically pleasing to look at, as it also overlooked the sea. The pool wasn't heated, but I didn't see this as a big deal seeing as most people are more likely to visit in the summer when it's hot.

There was also a bar across from the UnaHotels pool, in addition to Le Grand Bleu, a restaurant that was used to film scenes at the beach club in the fourth episode of season two of "The White Lotus," according to the film travel website Atlas of Wonders.

Breakfast was included in the price of both rooms.

The restaurant and bar at UnaHotels Capotaormina, left, and at San Domenico Palace, right. Mikhaila Friel/Insider

Both hotels had multiple restaurants and bars to choose from, and breakfast was included in the price of each of my stays.

Both restaurants had sea views, and a buffet was served at breakfast. Similar food was served, such as cannolis, pastries, fruit, and orange juice.

The only major difference I noticed was the quality of service. Where the staff at UnaHotels was friendly, the staff at San Domenico Palace went above and beyond to make sure I was comfortable. They brought out an extra stool for me to place my bag and asked if I required a pashmina because it was a tad chilly.

Unlike San Domenico Palace, UnaHotels Capotaormina has a private beach.

The private beach at UnaHotels Capotaormina. Mikhaila Friel/Insider

The second season of "The White Lotus" opens with guests arriving at the hotel's private beach via boat. But if you're expecting to find a private beach at San Domenico Palace, you'll be disappointed as it doesn't exist in real life.

Therefore, I was particularly excited when I found out that UnaHotels Capotaormina has a private beach. Guests of the hotel can take an elevator down to the ground floor, or "sea level," and there is a long tunnel that leads to the beach.

Like all beaches in Taormina, the private beach was pretty rocky, but there were plenty of sun loungers.

While I loved both hotels, UnaHotels Capotaormina is the one I'd recommend to those traveling to Sicily.

Le Grand Bleu, the restaurant at UnaHotels Capotaormina's private pool. Mikhaila Friel/Insider

I thoroughly enjoyed my time at San Domenico Palace, and there's no doubt about the fact that the 5-star hotel had some luxury aspects that weren't available at UnaHotels, including the customer service and the decor.

However, if you are looking for "The White Lotus" experience without breaking your budget, I'd definitely suggest UnaHotels. In my opinion, the hotel had many of the same perks as San Domenico Palace, making it better value for money.

Representatives for San Domenico Palace and UnaHotels did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Read the original article on Insider
New Hampshire Students May See More Civics Education Next Year

This article was originally published in New Hampshire Bulletin.

A new state civics textbook is one step closer to reaching the desks of New Hampshire students after the Senate Finance Committee approved a budget provision of $1 million last week for its creation.

The provision would fund the Commission on New Hampshire Civics, which would contract with outside experts to develop the textbook content. The initiative was initially introduced by Gov. Chris Sununu in February as part of his proposed budget and is one of two efforts the legislature has made to bolster civics education this year. In May, the House passed a bill which could expand civics education to K-8 classrooms.

New Hampshire Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut said during a Senate Finance Committee meeting that the funding would allow the commission to update civics materials for a new generation of students.

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Students today are used to engaging in video content, multimedia content, he said. So what will happen is well take the rich content from our history and be able to bring it into a pedagogy that will be more effective in our current environment.

Sen. Lou DAllesandro, a Manchester Democrat and former public high school teacher, was skeptical regarding the necessity of the funding. He quipped that he would even advise on new materials for free if the Senate scrapped the provision.

I just dont believe we need to spend a million dollars to get a new book, he said. We can save a million dollars  a million dollars we can spend someplace else.

DAllesandro suggested the work of non-profit NH Civics already adequately supports civics education with free classroom materials. The nonpartisan organization leads programs for educators and students, as well as providing free civics curriculum resources.

Related How Texas Lawmakers Gutted Civics

However, it was a NH Civics trustee, former state Supreme Court justice and congressman Chuck Douglas, who helped the budget amendment move forward.

[Chuck Douglas] approached me maybe three weeks ago and said that if we funded it for a million dollars we would be able to create a new civics textbook, said Senate President and Wolfeboro Republican Jeb Bradley during the Senate Finance Committee meeting.

In a May opinion column in the Concord Monitor, Douglas expressed concern over U.S. Department of Education data released earlier this month that placed eighth grade U.S. history and civics scores at record lows.

Maria Painchaud, interim executive director of NH Civics, agreed that more priority must be given to civics education. She described the cause of its decline as complex, but highlighted the unintended consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act. Painchaud sees the act as having pressured teachers to teach to the test, which assesses students knowledge in English and math.

Something had to go, she said. So any extra focus that was put on what was perceived as non-core, got the backseat, and now were experiencing the pitfall of that decision.

NH Civics has played a significant role in greater engagement by the Legislature on civics education. The non-profit advocated for Senate Bill 216, which passed the Legislature in early May. The bill, which is heading to Gov. Chris Sununus desk, would make changes to the states civics education, outlining requirements for both public and nonpublic schools.

The bill requires civics education for New Hampshire students beginning in elementary school, and continuing through middle and high school. Previously, civics education requirements only applied to high school students. The bill defines civics as nonpartisan educational programming that covers civic knowledge of the state and national government, understanding of founding documents, and the acquisition of analytical skills.

Under SB 216, high school graduation requirements would remain the same: a half-year of instruction in civics and a full year of instruction in history and government. Students would also need to obtain a passing grade on a competency exam developed by their institution and a grade of 70 percent or better on the 128-question naturalization examination developed in 2020 by United States Citizen and Immigration Services.

If the bill is signed, schools will be expected to meet the new curriculum requirements by fall of 2024 with no additional funding from the state.

For some teachers, the first reaction is okay, how am I going to fit this in? Painchaud said.

She emphasized that as a proponent of the bill, NH Civics has committed to providing free professional development programs and curriculum materials over the next year to ease the transition process.

New Hampshire Bulletin is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on Facebook and Twitter.
What happens now that Trump is indicted? His arraignment. Here's what to know

Former President Donald Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury on Thursday related to charges involving classified documents that were seized from his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago last year.

This indictment marks the second time the ex-president has been indicted after criminal charges were filed against him in March surrounding his hush-money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign.

The trial for that case is set in New York on March 25, 2024.

Trump's arraignment for the latest charges are set for June 12. Here is what happens next.

What does indictment mean?

An indictment is a formal charging document thats used when its believed a person committed a crime. It includes charges against a person and should be filed before a case can move forward in a court, David Weinstein, a former federal and state prosecutor, previously told USA TODAY.

An indictment means a grand jury decided that theres more likely than not enough evidence  based on testimony  to move forward with charging a person, Weinstein said. In a federal court, all cases proceed via indictment.

What charges are Trump facing? His lawyer outlines Espionage Act, obstruction, conspiracy

What is the difference between being charged or indicted?

The terms indicted and charged are often used interchangeably to describe a formal accusation of a crime against a person, but each can have slightly different meanings depending on the legal system and the jurisdiction.

The Department of Justice describes an indictment as a formal notice filed by a grand jury against a person who is believed to have committed a crime. The indictment contains basic information about the charges against the person. Indictments are primarily used for felonies.

A charge isnt quite as specific and simply describes the law believed to have been broken by the defendant.

What is the indictment process?

Prosecutors may choose to present a case to a grand jury based on information regarding a crime presented to them by investigators. For potential felony charges, prosecutors will present evidence to a grand jury, which is an impartial group of citizens, along with an outline of the case. Witnesses may be called to testify during this process.

Once the grand jury hears the evidence, they will vote in secret on whether they believe the evidence presented to them is strong enough to charge the individual. If they decide not to charge a person then no indictment is filed.

All proceedings and statements presented to a grand jury are sealed, which means that the only people present during the process know the evidence presented to the grand jury.

The DOJ states that grand juries are a constitutional requirement for some crimes so that the citizens involved dont know the defendant and can therefore make an unbiased decision based solely on the evidence presented to them.

Why Trump indicted was filed in Florida Will Trump's Florida indictment give him a home-turf advantage? Why it was filed in Miami

What happens after an indictment?

Defendants have the right to legal representation and can choose to hire a lawyer or be represented by a public defender. The next step in the legal process is the arraignment and initial hearing.

On or around the time the defendant is arrested, they are brought before a magistrate judge for an initial hearing where they will learn more about their rights, the charges brought against them, asked to plead guilty or not guilty and when the judge decides whether or not they will be jailed or released until the trial, according to the DOJ.

What determines whether someone will be jailed or released?

There are several factors that a judge will use before deciding whether to grant bail. They will account for how long a defendant has lived in an area, if they have nearby family, if they have a prior criminal record, if they have threatened any witnesses in the case and if they pose a potential danger to the community.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Trump's indictment has many asking what's next? Here's what to know
NEW YORK  The large number of drug-related programs in Harlem has emerged as a major theme in the neighborhoods City Council race between two sitting state lawmakers and a member of the wrongly convicted Central Park Five.

District 9s Democratic primary is the most competitive City Council race this year. The major candidates are state Assemblymembers Al Taylor and Inez Dickens and exonerated Central Park Five member Yusef Salaam. All three recently received significant public matching funds, boosting the total amount of donor dollars raised led by Salaams $64,00, Dickens $50,000 and Taylors $38,000. In the final weeks of the campaign, Dickens has the most cash on hand with $127,000 while Taylor has $103,000. Salaam, who loaned himself $10,000 for the race, is in the red by $23,000, according to city records.

The candidates frequently field voter concerns about the so-called oversaturation of social services in Harlem from drug treatment centers to a supervised injection site and a possible marijuana dispensary. While the contenders are united in their opposition to the sites, theyre trying to use the issue to motivate voters in an off-year election that could be decided by a few hundred votes.

The race has no incumbent after Council Member Kristen Richard Jordan cut short her campaign last month citing the Harlem Machine and unfavorable media coverage.

The neighborhood houses opioid treatment programs that are responsible for 12 percent of the total capacity of New York City's services, but it is only home to 2.6 percent of the overdose deaths in New York City, according to an analysis by the Greater Harlem Coalition, an advocacy group aimed at reducing the number of local drug centers. Further, 75.4 percent of patients admitted to treatment programs in Harlem are not actually residents of the neighborhood, the coalition found.

The District 9 candidates argue that Harlem has been a longtime target of programs that critics say disrupt the areas quality of life.

Harlem is used as what could be considered a dumping ground, Salaam said. A place where people throw their trash and their rubbish and all of that other bad stuff.



Taylor also said the neighborhood has become overburdened with services. He credited persistent stigmas about Harlem as a haven for drug use.

There's addiction across our country, Taylor said. Why are all the sites only in Harlem? You want me to believe that everybody else in the universe of New York City does not have an opioid problem, does not have an alcohol problem, does not have any other type of drug problems and it only exists on the east side? Hell to the no.

The New York City Health Department said in a January 2023 report that it plans to expand supervised injection site locations to other neighborhoods, but additional locations have yet to be announced.

Supervised injection sites are controversial facilities that allow open illegal drug use under the care of workers trained to prevent overdose deaths.

The East Harlem site, OnPoint NYC, is just across the street from a child care center.

Gretchen Buchenholz, executive director of the Association to Benefit Children, told POLITICO in an interview that parents have expressed concerns about the center. Buchenholz has heard their complaints about needles being on the street next to ABCs building and worries about walking with small children past the site.

However, Buchenholz said that she believes the center has done more good than harm.

I think that the community has been really unfair with regard to welcoming OnPoint, Buchenholz said. I think that they're very open to discussing solutions. For making whatever changes are smart, feasible and compassionate so that the community embraces what they're doing."

Salaam said that while there is a local need for drug addiction programs, there should be more done to counteract the negative effects programs may have on the rest of the neighborhood.

In particular, Salaam said that theres room for more help from the Sanitation Department.

We need Sanitation to work with us so that they clean up the needles, Salaam said.

Dickens said that an initiative to provide job training at drug addiction programs would improve the impact on the community.

Instead of being released onto the streets [after treatment], patients will be kept and be taught a trade so that when they graduate out of the program, they're able to be self-sustaining and get a job, Dickens told POLITICO in an interview.



Beyond the injection site and other overdose programs, the candidates have also all opposed the establishment of a cannabis dispensary in the neighborhood.

All three candidates contend the dispensary itself isnt the problem, but rather the fact that the neighborhood has too many drug-related services. The dispensary is supposed to be taking over a vacant storefront on 125th Street, but an ongoing lawsuit led by a local business group has delayed its opening. The 125th Street Business District Management Association argues that the chosen location is problematic due to already present crime, congestion and drug use in the area.

Taylor faulted state officials for not consulting local leaders about the new dispensary.

It was insulting and they did not talk to any other stakeholders, Taylor said. When you have that backdrop and put that out there, no, it doesn't belong there. It's in the wrong space and wrong time.

Dickens said the dispensary should go to another neighborhood that doesnt have as many drug-related services.

This is not about [being] anti-programs because there's a need, Dickens said. But the programs should be distributed equitably, amongst the five boroughs and in all communities of the five boroughs, not just in one community.

Despite vocal concern about the issue from both the candidates and the voters, its unclear if the problem is pressing enough to actually drive voters to the polls in an off-year election where turnout is expected to be low.

Early voting begins June 17, and Election Day is June 27.
Emissions of harmful substances into the atmosphere occurred in the Bohodukhiv district of Kharkiv Oblasts as a result of the Russian night attack.

Source: Krasnokytsk village council of the Bohodukhiv district

Quote: "Tonight, the enemy struck the oil and gas infrastructure of our hromada [an administrative unit designating a town, village or several villages and their adjacent territories]. Due to the fire that broke out at the enterprise, harmful emissions were released into the air.

In connection with the deterioration of air quality, the Kharkiv Oblast Centre for Disease Control and Prevention of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine calls on the population of Krasnokutsk hromada, and especially residents of the villages of Krasnokutsk, Kachalovka and Liubovka, not to open windows, to wet-clean their homes and limit their time outdoors this weekend (especially for children)."

Earlier, the Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration reported that a gas pipeline was damaged at night as a result of strikes by Shahed-type drones on the territory of a gas extraction enterprise in the village of Stary Merchik, Bohodukhiv district, and a fire occurred on the premises. An employee of the enterprise was injured.

Another fire broke out at night in the village of Kachalovka in Bohodukhiv district on the territory of the oil and gas condensate field as a result of strikes by three Shahed-type drones, there were no casualties.

As a result of shelling of Vovchansk, windows of a house, doors, a garage and outbuildings were damaged at night. A 63-year-old man and a 69-year-old woman were injured.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
The Colombian government and the National Liberation Army guerrilla group, known by its initials in Spanish as ELN, have agreed to a bilateral ceasefire, representatives said Friday from Havana at the closing ceremony of the third round of peace talks, in what has been described as the most concrete step taken so far in the slow-going process.

The parties  headed by Colombian President Gustavo Petro and top ELN Commander Eliecer Herlinto Chamorro Acosta, also known as Antonio Garcia  also agreed to meet again in Venezuela in August to initiate the next phase of the talks, which aim to put an end to the half-century long armed conflict.

Signed on Friday by Petro and Garcia, the ceasefire is set to be implemented gradually, starting Aug. 3, and is scheduled to last for 180 days. Its adoption seeks to achieve a humanitarian purpose, to lower the intensity of the conflict to establish in Colombia a better climate for the participation of society in the peace process, chief ELN negotiator Israel Ramirez, also known as Pablo Beltran, said.

Set to be monitored by the United Nations and the Catholic Church, the agreement was immediately hailed as a positive sign that the parties were finally advancing.

These are important steps forward that send hope to the Colombian people, especially the communities which are most affected by conflict, a spokesperson for the UN Secretary General said in a press release. The participation of the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and the First Commander of the ELN, Antonio Garcia, at the signing ceremony in Havana confirms the political will of the parties.

Petro flew to Cuba for the signing ceremony despite facing a new scandal at home, following leaked conversations of one of his top advisors suggesting that dirty money was used to finance his presidential campaign.

Aside from the ceasefire, the different rounds of talks had so far failed to provide substantial achievements, a situation that was acknowledged on Friday by Garcia, who told reporters that parties have yet to sign agreements of substance, having spent most of their time discussing terms of procedure.

Representatives decided to meet again on Aug. 14 in Venezuela for the next round of talks that is expected to last three weeks.

Founded in 1964, the guerrilla group, inspired by the Cuban revolution, currently has between 2,000 and 4,000 fighters operating out of 200 Colombian municipalities and out of Venezuelan bordering states. It had previously attempted to reach a peace agreement with the Colombian government without much success. The ceasefire is the longest ever agreed to by both parties.

In 2016, the government reached a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, that ended the hostilities with that rebel group, which had also been fighting the Colombian government since the 1960s.
Hawaiis governor, a former ER doctor, helps man injured in car accident  for the second time in three weeks

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green assisted a man who was injured after falling from the bed of a pickup truck Thursday, marking the second time in three weeks the former emergency room physician responded to a roadside emergency.

The most recent incident happened as Green was traveling in Kauai and a man sitting on a chair in the back of a pickup truck in front of the governors vehicle was thrown from the truck, the governors spokesperson, Makana McClellan, said in a statement.

The 25-year-old man hit his head on the pavement and was unconscious, McClellan said.

The Governor and his team called 911 and helped to carry the man safely from the road. Governor Green preformed a neurological assessment, assessed the mans respiratory status, and calmed him and his family until EMS arrived about 10 minutes later, McClellan said in a statement.

The man appeared to have a concussion and possible rib injuries, the governors office said.

Young people should never be in the back of a pickup truck, Green said in the statement. I would prefer that nobody ride in a truck bed, because people need to be belted in.

Green also touted the use of seat belts after helping rescue a man who was trapped in an overturned vehicle last month.

The governor and others helped pull a man from an overturned vehicle on the Big Island on May 18. - Hawaii Governor's Office

The governor was headed to an event on the Big Island when his group came upon a car that had flipped into an inactive lava field, Green told CNNs Paula Reid.

This gentleman was suspended upside down in his seat, Green said. Thank God he had his seat belt on.

Green and his entourage joined a good Samaritan who was also at the scene to help evaluate the driver and pull him out of the crushed vehicle.

The governor, right, helped evaluate the driver at the scene. - Hawaii Governor's Office

Video from the governors office showed the driver was able to walk with assistance to an ambulance.

There was a lot of gasoline (that spilled) there in the field, so I give credit to the other guys who dove right in there, said Green. Everyone really deserves credit for that more than me. Its a small state, so we jump to.

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Republicans from Missouri and Kansas rushed to defend former President Donald Trump after his federal indictment on allegations he mishandled classified documents and obstructed justice, deploying a familiar playbook to portray charges brought by an independent special prosecutor as political persecution.

Shortly after Trump wrote Thursday that hed been indicted on social media, Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, appeared on Fox News to denounce the charges against the former president, casting the indictment through the political lens of the 2024 presidential election.

This is not about Donald Trump ultimately, this is about the United States of America, Hawley told host Laura Ingraham. This is about whether the constitution is still real in this country. This is about if any American can expect the due process of law.

Their comments came before the indictment, which was returned by a grand jury in Miami, had been unsealed.

The indictment, unsealed Friday afternoon, accused Trump of possessing documents regarding United States nuclear programs, the defense capabilities of the United States and foreign countries and the potential vulnerabilities of the United States. A picture in the indictment showed that Trump at times stored the boxes of documents on a stage in a ballroom where events were hosted.

But Republicans quickly circled the wagons around the 2024 GOP presidential frontrunner, casting the charges as a political effort by Democratic President Joe Biden to take down his likely opponent, even though Biden played no direct role in the investigation. While Biden oversees the executive branch, the investigation was triggered when the National Archives found that several boxes of documents had been taken to Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, rather than left with the Archives.

Prosecutors at the Department of Justice have alleged Trump took 300 classified documents to his resort after he left office, including around 100 documents found after the FBI searched his resort last August. Instead of condemning Trumps handling of government secrets, the political right reacted with outrage. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who was nominated to lead the Department of Justice by Biden, appointed Jack Smith as special counsel in an attempt to avoid the appearance of political influence.

The move did little to satisfy many Republicans, who appear galvanized by Trumps legal issues. An earlier New York indictment by a Manhattan grand jury over alleged hush money payments made to a former adult performer during Trumps 2016 presidential campaign did little to affect Trumps standing in early primary polls.

Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, claimed the new federal indictment was part of a concerted effort by the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation to take down the former president.

Every American should be alarmed by tonights indictment, Marshall said in a statement posted to Twitter. Sadly, once again, Lady Justice has taken off her blindfold.

The continued persecution of the Presidents likely 2024 political opponent has revealed the alarming level of coordination and corruption within our justice department, he said.

Others went farther, falsely claiming Biden himself brought the charges against Trump.

Sen. Eric Schmitt, a former Republican Missouri attorney general, called Biden the most compromised President in modern American history and claimed Trumps indictment was intended as a distraction. Schmitt has endorsed Trump for president in 2024.

Joe Biden has now indicted his top political opponent, Schmitt wrote on Twitter. Full on Banana Republic stuff.

Biden had no role in determining whether Smith would seek an indictment. In a press conference Thursday before the indictment, he said Americans should trust the independence of the Department of Justice.

I have never once  not one single time  suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do, relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge, Biden said. Im honest.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Missouri Democrat, said the indictment is an example of the Department of Justice treating every citizen equally under law, adding that he believed everyone is innocent until proven guilty, including the former president.

Democracy is under no obligation to only provide this nation with patriotic euphoria, Cleaver said. This indictment is not a moment for frenzied eruptions of partisan glee. Such a shameful moment in our history deserves no celebration, but rather, demands self-reflection and introspection.

Republicans have long been aware of Trumps legal troubles heading into the 2024 presidential election. Along with the indictments in New York and Miami, prosecutors in Atlanta are looking into whether Trump attempted to interfere with the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.

Trumps attorney said on CNN Thursday that the former president faces charges of willful retention of national defense information, obstruction, false statements and conspiracy.

Earlier this year it was revealed that both former Vice President Mike Pence and Biden had some classified documents in their possession after they left office. Both alerted federal officials that they had found the documents and allowed them to perform a larger search of locations where documents may be kept.

Republicans were quick to use Pence and Biden to downplay the allegations against Trump, even as evidence was revealed that Trump withheld documents from the National Archives and falsely claimed he had declassified them as president.

Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Parson claimed the Justice Department was unfairly going after Trump and not Biden. A special prosecutor is also looking into Bidens handling of classified documents after his term in the Obama administration.

We know these aggressive investigations are only taking place because President Trump dares to challenge Joe Bidens disastrous presidency, and I am deeply concerned for the direction of our country, Parson wrote on Twitter. These political prosecutions must end.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, also implied the charges were political.

Never before has a sitting President weaponized the security apparatus of our great nation to take out a political opponent, Bailey said. This is not the America our Founders knew.

Rep. Mark Alford, a Missouri Republican, claimed the charges were only brought because Trump has launched a campaign for president.

The political persecution and witch hunt continues for Donald Trump, Alford wrote. I guarantee that if he werent running for President this would NOT be happening.

The response among Democrats varied, with some like Rep. Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat, calling Trump the former white supremacist-in-chief and saying he should be held accountable, and others calling for the legal process to run its course.

Rep. Sharice Davids, a Kansas Democrat, believes no one is above the law, including elected officials, spokesman Zac Donley said. She has faith in the American justice system and will learn more, alongside the public, as more details are released.

Star reporters Katie Bernard and Kacen Bayless and the Associated Press contributed reporting.
Heres What Health Experts Want You to Know About This Weeks Wildfire Smoke

The sun rises behind the One World Trade Center, while the smoke from Canada wildfires covers the Manhattan borough as it is seen from Liberty State Park on June 8, 2023 in New Jersey.

There are hundreds of fires burning throughout Canada this week. The flames have burned millions of hectares, and the resulting smoke has polluted the air quality throughout the United States. Tens of millions of Americans were under air quality alerts this week as a blanket of smoke traveled south.

Red alerts were issued for air quality throughout the Midwest and the Northeast. Residents living in multiple states could smell smoke, and skylines in East Coast cities were colored bright orange. A lot of the Northwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest looked like Californias skies did in 2020. Public health professionals warned residents throughout the Northern U.S. to close their windows and avoid going outside.

Read more

Check out this almost unbelievable time-lapse of wildfire smoke consuming the World Trade Center and the New York City skyline.



Those vulnerable to poor air quality, including seniors and young children, should limit time outdoors if possible.



More: https://t.co/ChRuWv7X6E pic.twitter.com/mtKtLun8lN  NWS New York NY (@NWSNewYorkNY) June 7, 2023

Two days later, much of the smoke throughout the region has cleared up, but some health experts want residents to stay informed and prepare for future events.

Peter DeCarlo, an associate professor of environmental health at Johns Hopkins University, told Earther that this week was an extreme event. But as climate change fuels more wildfires, more of the U.S. may have to prepare for smoke exposure. And seeing as Canada is battling more than 400 fires, the Northern U.S. could see more wildfire-related air pollution this summer.

The question that Ive had a few times is, is this going to become more common, DeCarlo said. Its likely to become more common. Climate change is warming the planet and creating conditions that are more ripe for wildfires, this is a pretty early start to the wildfire season.

Kent Pinkerton, an air pollution expert and professor at the University of California Davis, told Earther that officials had cause for worry. Wildfire smoke contains particulate matter or PM2.5. Its tiny particles of pollution that come from different sources, including burning material. These particles are really small and can be inhaled into the lungs. Researchers have linked long-term exposure to lung problems, heart disease, and cancer.

The extremely high concentrations of smoke over the mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and Northeast arent just dangerous for people with already existing health issues, but for the general public. Pinkerton emphasized that anyone who may have been outside for several hours should monitor their health for the rest of this week.

The One World Trade Center and the New York skyline is seen in the background as a man jogs, while the smoke from Canada wildfires covers area on June 8, 2023 in New Jersey.

If youre short of breath, and youre not recovering from thatand any kind of chest pain or a rapid heartbeat should also be taken seriously, Pinkerton said. Check in with a medical emergency room or urgent care. I dont think we can be too cautious.

Even though the Northeast isnt experiencing the orange glow from Wednesday afternoon, the East Coast and Midwest are still seeing a lot of air pollution. According to the Environmental Protection Agencys AirNow website, the air quality in New York City, Philadelphia, and Jersey City was in the unhealthy range as of Thursday afternoon. A lot of the air pollution has thankfully cleared as of Friday morning, according to AirNow.

DeCarlo warned residents in areas with lingering smoke to avoid spending long periods outside until the air has cleared. At the end of the day you cant un-expose yourself, he said. If someone went out and took a long run, theyre going to be breathing a pretty large amount of particulate matter. Thats just not going to go away from their body anytime soon.

Want more climate and environment stories? Check out Earthers guides to decarbonizing your home, divesting from fossil fuels, packing a disaster go bag, and overcoming climate dread. And dont miss our coverage of the latest IPCC climate report, the future of carbon dioxide removal, and the un-greenwashed facts on bioplastics and plastic recycling.

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Ties between the financial sector and the real economy should be further strengthened to facilitate China's technological advancement and high-quality economic growth, said the country's top financial regulators at the 14th Lujiazui Forum in Shanghai on Thursday.

Li Yunze, head of the National Administration of Financial Regulation, said at the forum's opening ceremony on Thursday that more support will be provided to facilitate China's high-level technological self-reliance and independence by creating a wholesome circulation between technologies, industries and finance.

Financial support will be increased for advanced manufacturing, strategic emerging industries and traditional industries undergoing transformation and upgrading. In this way, China can build a modern industrial system at a faster pace, said Li.

Financing for the private sector should be further optimized to strengthen financial services provided to privately owned enterprises in order to nurture entrepreneurship. Inclusive finance should seek substantial development to consolidate market entities' confidence, he added.

More support will also be rendered to new types of consumption and service-based consumption, such as new energy vehicles and green home appliances. All these efforts are intended to help the financial sector more effectively serve the real economy, the NAFR chief said.

Yi Huiman, chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission  the country's top securities watchdog  also said at the opening ceremony that measures will be rolled out to support China's high-level technological self-reliance and independence when appropriate.

The capital market, in which both risks and profits are shared, can better meet demand from technologically innovative companies which evolve rapidly, entail higher risks and possess lighter assets. The capital market plays an important role in completing corporate governance, stimulating entrepreneurship and bringing about advantageous technological outcomes, Yi said.

Meanwhile, efforts will be made to study the differentiated institutional arrangements to complete China's multilevel capital market system. More innovative products and measures will be rolled out to increase the ratio of equity and bond financing, boost mergers and acquisitions, and facilitate the maturity of real estate investment trusts. All these are aimed at advancing the smart, green and integrated development of Chinese industries, he added.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index climbed 0.49 percent and the Shenzhen Component Index closed 0.13 percent higher on Thursday. The financial sector has led the market rally, with prices of A-share banks, insurers and brokerages finishing 1.78 percent, 1.3 percent and 1.03 percent higher, respectively, on average.

The Lujiazui Forum has reached its 14th edition this year, with the theme this time being: "Global financial opening-up and cooperation: New drivers of economic recovery".

Li said at the opening ceremony that China will firmly open up its financial market wider. Over the past few years, more than 50 financial opening-up policies have been rolled out in the country, including lifting foreign ownership restrictions in the financial sector.

The asset management joint venture set up by BNP Paribas Asset Management Holdings and the asset management subsidiary of Agricultural Bank of China will soon start operating in Shanghai, Li added.

Also launched at the opening ceremony was the international reinsurance board in Shanghai. Related implementation regulations were also announced on Thursday.
Defense Health Agency officials say they have found a way to fill personnel gaps at Naval Hospital Okinawa and have reversed course on a decision that would have forced pregnant women at Kadena Air Base to deliver their babies elsewhere.

The naval hospital, a 16 minute drive from the air base, is the only U.S. military medical option on the island. The women had been notified that, due to a staffing shortage, they would either have to deliver their babies at a Japanese hospital, where they wouldnt be guaranteed admittance, or return to the continental U.S. when they were 7 months pregnant.

Pregnant women at Kadena Air Base in Japan facing tough decisions

Additional military, civilian and contracted staffing is being actively worked to fill the gaps caused by personnel moves and to ensure the same level of care is readily available in support of our service members and families, DHA officials announced June 8, just hours after a Military Times report on the womens plight.

The hospital is not on divert, and there is no change in current capability, they stated.

The staffing constraints at the hospital were caused by the summer permanent change of station cycle and unanticipated early departure of civilian staff, officials stated.

Advocates welcomed the change.

Its what we were hoping for, that the pregnant mothers would be able to deliver on Okinawa, said Elayne Saejung, an Air Force wife who has been an advocate for families on Okinawa.

There are still questions that remain about the original staffing shortage, and whether they have resolved the staffing issue, she said. But this is definitely great news for the families on Okinawa.

The chief of medical staff at Kadenas 18th Medical Group had issued a detailed, two-page memo June 7 stating that pregnant women with an estimated due date from August through November would have to choose whether to deliver their babies at a local Japanese facility or be flown back to a military treatment facility in the the continental United States  no later than 34 weeks into their pregnancy. Medical personnel had already begun contacting patients about the requirement.

Advocates described this as a logistical nightmare for women.

The memo also included caveats regarding Japanese medical facilities, including that, unlike medical facilities in the U.S., Japanese law doesnt require hospitals to accept patients in labor or to provide health care in an emergency.

In response to Military Times questions earlier Thursday, DHA officials said they were fully aware of the situation at Naval Hospital Okinawa and were working with hospital leadership as well as the leadership of the DHA Region Indo-Pacific to determine the best next steps for those in need.

Military must find new ways to deal with medical personnel shortages

That included actively looking for expediting civilian hiring, contract solutions and temporary assignment of military personnel from across the Department of Defense to mitigate the acute shortage of obstetric support for the women in the Indo-Pacific area, a spokesman said.
The average annual price of flood insurance for a single family home in Knott County  where 18 people died last summer in catastrophic flooding  has likely doubled in cost.

According to price projections released by FEMA in fall of 2022, the average cost of flood insurance for a single family home in the county would jump from $1,347 annually to $2,675. Flood insurance is managed nationally by FEMA, and in April the agency finished implementing a new pricing methodology called Risk Rating 2.0: Equity in Action.

That new pricing method is the subject of a lawsuit filed against FEMA last week by 10 states and several local governments. Kentucky is part of the suit asking a federal court in Louisiana to declare the new pricing method unlawful, Attorney General Daniel Cameron announced Monday. FEMA said it does not comment on active or pending legislation.

The average cost of flood insurance for a single family home in Kentucky will jump from just over $1,000 annually to more than $2,200, FEMA data showed.

Its not cheap to begin with, Knott County Attorney Tim Bates told the Herald-Leader. Higher rates for flood insurance will discourage people from buying it, he said.

Those higher prices could be particularly troublesome for Kentuckians who accepted disaster aid from FEMA and are looking to rebuild their lives in flood-prone areas. FEMA requires those who receive post-flood disaster assistance from the agency to purchase flood insurance if they choose to build in a Special Flood Hazard Area.

Bates said he helped some people with their FEMA applications for flood assistance and in a couple of cases the applicants were denied assistance in 2022 because they received FEMA aid after flooding in 2002 but never bought flood insurance.

Unfortunately I think some of those people just gave up, rather than appeal, he said.

Members of the Lexington Fire Department look through the wreckage of a home while operating as search and rescue units along KY-476 along Troublesome Creek in Breathitt County, Ky., Sunday, July 31, 2022. Silas Walker/swalker@herald-leader.com

The vast majority of those impacted by last Julys deadly flooding did not have flood insurance. According to a report from the Ohio River Valley Institute, only 5% of the estimated 8,950 homes damaged were covered by flood insurance.

Whitney Bailey, a disaster resource attorney with AppalReD  which provides free legal service to those with low or fixed incomes across 37 different counties  said she has a good handful of clients who now are required to have flood insurance or risk not receiving aid in a future disaster. Many just simply cant afford the insurance.

Its really frustrating for my clients to find out, said Bailey, who specializes in helping clients with FEMA and other federal aid. You know, they already cant afford to pay for their groceries for the whole month or whatever else and now they have this flood insurance requirement.

One client received about $900 from FEMA after flooding in 2021 came into their basement and damaged a washer and dryer, Bailey said. In last years flood, their home was completely destroyed.

They didnt have flood insurance and because theyd already received aid the prior year, they were ineligible for the maximum $37,900 FEMA could provide in that situation, Bailey said.

Its heartbreaking to have to go through that process, Bailey said.

Bailey said shes pushing her clients who are ineligible for FEMA to apply for a disaster home repair grant from the USDA. Local long-term recovery groups and disaster case management agencies can also help. She encouraged any flood survivors still looking for help to keep trying.

Dont throw your hands up  keep pushing forward and let people help you shoulder the burden of your FEMA appeal or whatever other recovery issues you may have, Bailey said.

On its website, FEMA said it opted to undertake the new pricing model to better address rate disparities between flood insurance clients. The previous model, created in the 1970s, used static data that emphasized a propertys elevation within a flood zone. The new model utilizes more flood risk data like the frequency and type of flooding.

Kentucky had about 19,400 National Flood Insurance Program policies, said a FEMA document from March 2021 explaining how the pricing model would work in the state. Of those policies  which include more than just single family homes  29% were expected to see an immediate decrease.

FEMA recognizes and shares concerns about flood insurance affordability for those who need it, the agency said in a statement to the Herald-Leader. In 2018, FEMA delivered an Affordability Framework to Congress for consideration. Only Congress has the statutory authority to consider affordability in setting rates.

Increasing access to flood insurance is a priority for the Biden-Harris Administration, FEMA said.

The administration continues to include an affordability proposal for flood insurance in the proposed budgets submitted to Congress, FEMAs statement continued.

FEMA has done good work for some folks in Eastern Kentucky following the floods, Bailey said, but the new pricing policy may need to be reconsidered.

Im thankful for everything FEMA has done for some of our clients in the area, Bailey said. And I do believe that their heads are in the right place with wanting to rework the system. But as it stands I dont think a blanket application makes sense in this case. Because youre not factoring in a normal person who cant afford a lot of these extra luxuries. I feel like flood insurance is kind of a luxury.

In 11 of the 13 counties that were eligible to receive FEMA aid after the deadly July 2022 flooding, the average estimated flood insurance cost for a single family home would go above the state average of $2,200.

Martin County, which has some of the states highest poverty rates, would have the highest average costs in the state with insurance for a single family home coming in at just over $4,500 annually.

Herald-Leader reporter Bill Estep contributed reporting.
Here's what Kansas Republicans are saying about the latest indictment of Donald Trump

At least one top Kansas Republican official quickly condemned the indictment of former President Donald Trump on Thursday evening, with charges announced related to the hundreds of classified documents seized from his Florida estate at Mar-a-Lago.

At least one top Kansas Republican official quickly condemned the indictment of former President Donald Trump Thursday evening, with charges announced related to the hundreds of classified documents seized from his Florida estate at Mar-a-Lago.

More than 300 classified documents were recovered more than a year after Trump left the White House, most under subpoena in June 2022 or during an FBI search in August 2022. Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has been investigating the potential mishandling of national defense records.

More: Donald Trump indicted for allegedly mishandling classified documents seized at Mar-a-Lago: Live updates

Trump was indicted on seven charges, according to a person who has been briefed on the case.

U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., said in a statement posted to social media that "every American should be alarmed by tonight's indictment."

"The continued persecution of the President's likely 2024 political opponent has revealed the alarming level of coordination and corruption within our Justice Department," Marshall said. "President Trump warned us about the unprecedented abuse of power within the FBI/DOJ  it seems like they will do anything to stop him once and for all."

My statement on the unprecedented indictment of President Trump by Biden's DOJ: pic.twitter.com/NtSd8hwqqy  Dr. Roger Marshall (@RogerMarshallMD) June 9, 2023

Trump confirmed the indictment in a statement and protested his innocence in a post on Truth Social. He said that he was summoned to appear at 3 p.m. Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Miami.

Legal experts have argued charges alleging the mishandling of classified documents could be the most straightforward case against Trump because the records were seized at Mar-a-Lago.

But Trump has argued repeatedly that he could take records with him after leaving the White House, despite the Presidential Records Act giving ownership to the National Archives and Records Administration, and that he had declassified them, despite the lack of documentation for his assertion.

"The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted," Trump said in the statement, contrasting his treatment to the discovery of classified documents at President Joe Biden's former office and home. "I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!" Trump added.

The documents at stake had labels suggesting they held some of the country's most closely guarded secrets about national defense and the identities of spies overseas. Federal officials have an audio recording from July 2021 of Trump discussing a classified Pentagon document about a possible attack on Iran, CNN reported, citing multiple unidentified sources.

U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., U.S. Reps. Jake LaTurner and Tracey Mann, and Attorney General Kris Kobach didn't immediately return a request for comment.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Donald Trump Mar a Lago indictments draws Kansas Republican response
Anytime Ive wanted to be around other queer people, Ive had to make a concerted effort to do so. More often than not, that means spending money.

Anytime Ive wanted to be around other queer people, Ive had to make a concerted effort to do so. More often than not, that means spending money.

Thisstoryis part of The Power Of The Queer Dollar, a series about how LGBTQ+ people spend, save and navigate their financial lives.

Sometimes I think about how, in an ideal world, I would be surrounded by queer people at all times. The man behind the counter at my local deli, the neighbor who watches TV a little too loudly, or hell, anyone in my own family. Anytime Ive wanted to be around other queer people, even in a city like New York, Ive had to make a concerted effort to do so. More often than not, that means spending money  sometimes a lot of it  to go out to the club or bar.

Apparently, most American adults make their closest friends in the workplace. Queer people might not have the luxury of finding friends who share their identities in places like an office, where they go to school or even in their neighborhoods if they dont live in a city where queer people feel safe to live openly. And for some of us, the first step to finding that community might be as fundamental as leaving our hometowns and migrating to cities with bigger LGBTQIA+ communities like New York or San Francisco, a move that comes with its own set of wallet-shattering costs.

Once were in these seemingly gayer cities, for better or worse, many queer people like me find that the swiftest way to find community is in nightlife. And the costs of clubbing and bar hopping  from getting ready, to transportation, to buying drinks at city-inflated prices  can add up in a big way.

Solar Rodriguez, a 23-year-old who lives in New York City, tells me that as a trans woman, theres a long list of financial decisions she has to make just to be able to be around other people in the community. For one, she feels a pressure to look a certain way so that shes respected and not misgendered. This usually involves makeup, a pricey wig and an outfit that affirms her gender identity. For me, when I go into a community, I want to be seen and accepted, she tells me. When you look good, you feel good.

When Rodriguez was growing up in the Bronx, she often had to travel to Brooklyn, which is known for its more inclusive queer scene, in order to attend parties and events that were welcoming to trans people. Because those events often happened late at night, she would have to take Ubers to increase her own safety. This meant charges of upwards of $120 round trip  and thats not including any of the drinks or entrance fees shed have to pay at the parties themselves.

When Solar Rodriguez was growing up in the Bronx, she often had to travel to Brooklyn to attend parties and events that were welcoming to trans people.

When Solar Rodriguez was growing up in the Bronx, she often had to travel to Brooklyn to attend parties and events that were welcoming to trans people.

Although Rodriguez points out that the costs of going out are a huge burden for her, she also notes that the deeper problem lies in the fact that, as a trans person who works in the service industry, its often a challenge to find a stable job in the first place. And its not just a feeling she has  trans people are twice as likely to be unemployed than cisgender people, per the National LGBTQ Task Force. Rodriguez tells me that she was fired from her previous retail job in Manhattan earlier this year because the way she dressed was not on-brand, which she took as a jab at her transness.

We might sometimes feel guilty for spending so much of our money on things that might not be considered essential to some people. But theres nothing inherently wrong with wanting to spend money on outfits and a night out if it is, indeed, an important way for someone to find community and feel affirmed in their identities, says Jennifer Dazols, a queer financial planner based in San Francisco. Instead of telling people whats important to spend money on and whats not, Dazols prefers to ask queer clients to actively think about what they value in their lives and go from there.

When I work with clients, I try to help them make intentional choices around spending. Every dollar you spend is a tradeoff for the energy you spend to earn it, she says. If someone finds that their clothing and makeup is essential to their identity, then that must be a highly valued expense. I would suggest finding tradeoffs in other areas where they could cut costs or put energy towards increasing their income.

In other words, if spending money on clothes and makeup is an important way for you to affirm your identity, you should make sure that you have enough money set aside for that and bump other expenses that are not as life-affirming further down the list. Those priorities will look different for everyone, so make sure you establish yours.

For some people, its less clear-cut what to prioritize financially, or perhaps they have reservations about continuing to spend so much money on nightlife. Marz Turner, a 32-year-old who is from a small, religious town in North Carolina, is now a bar-back at a popular Brooklyn bar where a lot of young queer people hang out. They tell me that even before they lived in New York, nightlife had always been the main place where they found their community as a queer person of color.

Turner says that these days, they are starting to go out a lot less because of the costs involved and also because they want to cut back on drinking in general. It has, unfortunately, been more isolating.

Unfortunately, sometimes it feels like the only time I get to hang with friends and unwind is at an event or show because the nighttime is when a lot of people are available and things are happening, Turner says. Ive been finding cheaper and more creative ways to spend time with my friends and explore the community but if you dont know where to look, nightlife is usually the first and easiest place to check out.

This is exactly where Ive been struggling, too. Its hard not to feel like were cutting ourselves off from our people if were not actively spending money to go to the biggest queer party or hanging out at the local gay bar consistently. In that regard, I notice that I tend to have a lack of object permanence, believing that if I dont see queer people all the time, then my own queerness will somehow be gradually erased. And although going out once in a while might be no big deal, its easy to get sucked into nightlife and end up going out every weekend or sometimes several times a week, all because Im too afraid to get left behind.

While I understand that there are other, cheaper places to meet queer people outside of bars and clubs, I have been struggling to find them. In order to change that, maybe I need to start being less passive about how I move through the community and start being more active in suggesting and creating alternatives that are not only better for me financially, but physically and mentally, too.

Its best that we get real about our finances and talk to our friends about activities that we can afford, Dazlos tells me. It might mean picnics in the park instead of dinners out or hiking instead of a night of expensive clubbing. While it can feel socially awkward at times, leading a sustainable lifestyle is far more satisfying.
High school teacher posed as teen on Snapchat to get nude photos of girls, feds say

A high school teacher is accused of grooming teenage girls by creating fake online profiles to lure them into sending nude photos, feds say.

Jeremy Schobel, 31, who teaches English at Harriton High School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, was arrested Wednesday, June 7, according to the Lower Merion School District.

He faces charges of enticement of a minor to engage in illicit sexual conduct and manufacture and attempted manufacture of child pornography.

The investigation began in November when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a tip the Yubo account sophiavan423 was grooming minors, the FBI said. The account was later revealed to be used by Schobel, federal authorities said.

Yubo provided account information for the sophiavan423 account including that the user identified herself to be a 17-year-old girl and posted two photographs to her profile that depicted what appeared to be a girl of that age, an FBI agent said in a criminal complaint.

He also used a second account, jillmoreno, to talk to teenage girls, federal officials said. Its believed that Schobel talked to girls on Yubo before redirecting conversations to Snapchat, according to the FBI.

In one of the conversations in December, he received naked photos from a girl after three days of talking, according to court records.

Schobel admitted to created the profiles when an FBI task force executed a search warrant at his home June 7, authorities said.

He admitted he did so to obtain sexually explicit images, which he then used to masturbate, according to the criminal complaint. He advised agents that he had committed these crimes for years and communicated with many underaged girls, which he identified as between the ages of 16 and 18 years.

Schobel was suspended by the Lower Merion School District pending the investigation, the school district said in a letter to families. The school district said it is not aware of any inappropriate interactions between Schobel and students in the district.

Mr. Schobel joined the Lower Merion School District prior to the 2021-2022 school year, the district said. He had no prior record that would have precluded his hiring.

Bryn Mawr is a northwest suburb of Philadelphia.

Police chief paid for sex acts with underage girl while wearing his uniform, feds say

Man created deepfake porn of former classmates using their old photos, prosecutor says

Coachs 5-year sexual encounters with student began when boy was 16, OK cops say
The highlight of the party: Rapper Rick Ross to meet man who parachuted into his car show

The man who crashed rapper Rick Ross Car and Bike show at his mansion on a Paraglider said he almost killed himself getting there.

Kris Jeter was kicked off the property as soon as he got there.

Jeter told Channel 2s Tom Jones he got the idea to fly there the morning of the event.

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Jeter told Channel 2 Action News he saw Ross on social media flying remote control planes and the planes kept crashing. Jeter then decided to fly his motorized Paraglider into Ross Car and Bike show to meet him. Jeter didnt expect the winds to be so fierce.

I was pretty lucky to make it make it to Rick Ross house, he said. It was honestly one of the scariest flights Ive ever taken.

Jeter lives in South Carolina. He drove to a field about a mile from the rappers mansion,

And hes off, a friend of his said in a video they recorded.

As soon as Jeter got in the air, he said he quickly ran into a problem - wind gusts. Jeter said 25-mile-per-hour winds kept knocking him around, sending him too close to trees.

As soon as I got turned around by the wind I had to fight my way to turn back around, he recalled.

Security was waiting as soon as he landed.

They were just like well you cant land here, he pointed out.

Jeter was quickly escorted off the property. He got thrills when Ross posted a picture on social media of him landing and asked people to send him videos of Jeter paragliding onto his property.

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Oh that was awesome. Yeah. I kind of felt like the highlight of the party, he said.

Jeter urges anyone to get training before doing what he did. He didnt follow his own advice.

I did not get training. So I just kind of learned through YouTube and Ive just been winging it, he confessed.

Jeter owns a flooring business and wanted to talk to Ross about installing new floors at the rappers mansion.

He may still get that chance. Ross attorney told Channel 2s Tom Jones the rapper found what Jeter did hilarious and wants him to fly in next week to meet with him.

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IN OTHER NEWS:
Vincent Bouchard recently took a backpacking trip with his two daughters in Albertas Jasper National Park.

When the trio made it back to their car around 3 p.m. to make the long journey back home to Edmonton, they were tired but very happy, Bouchard wrote in a June 5 Facebook post. Thats when something peculiar happened.

I start driving, all kinds of lights start flashing on my dashboard. Transmission, ABS, hand brake, oil temp, check engine, its all flashing, he wrote.

Bouchard said he kept driving to a better stopping place before checking on the car. He wanted to make sure he could get off the gravel road onto a more accessible road and where he would hopefully have better cell service.

Once he made it onto the 93A highway, Bouchard stopped his car and got out to look around. He didnt notice anything suspicious  until he opened his cars hood.

Im just shocked, Bouchard told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. There was a big marmot right there on my engine just looking at me. Seemed perfectly happy.

Bouchard said he immediately started laughing, according to his Facebook post.

I just drove 8km down the road with a marmot in my engine compartment, he wrote. I couldnt stop laughing.

Marmots are giant ground squirrels found mostly in North America and Eurasia, according to Britannica. They can grow to be between about 12 to 24 inches long and can weigh between around 6 and 15 pounds.

The rodents thrive in cold environments, and they whistle and burrow when they feel threatened.

After discovering the sneaky intruder, Bouchard said he tried to find a way to get the creature out of his car. He started by grabbing a nearby stick and trying to poke the marmot off his engine.

That only made matters worse: the critter went into defense mode and burrowed beneath the cars engine, according to Bouchard.

It doesnt want to move, Bouchard wrote. I poke it from all directions, above, sideways, under the hood, nothing makes it move, it just keeps whistling, making it clear that its not very happy with my poking.

As Bouchard worked to get the marmot out of his car, passing cars began stopping to help him, including a park warden, he said. The warden got to work, pouring cool water on the critter before trying to poke him out from under the engine.

One passerby offered a sandwich to try to bribe the marmot out, but even that was a failed attempt, according to Bouchard. After an hour of trying to remove the marmot, the warden called in backup from Parks Canada.

Using a collar attached to a long pole, park officials were able to get the marmot out of the vehicle and into a container, Bouchard wrote.

Apparently this is not the first time it happens, [the official] said it happened once last year, and also a few years ago as well. Entertaining for sure, Bouchard said.

After removing the critter though, Bouchard noticed that some dashboard warnings were still on, he wrote. A quick visit to the mechanic revealed that the marmot had chewed through a wire that impacted the transmission, but luckily it was easily fixed with a patch.

We made it back to Edmonton around 11pm....with an epic story to tell, Bouchard wrote. I had told Malika and Manu that the weekend would be an adventure...it certainly was!!

Jasper National Park is about 500 miles northeast of Vancouver.

Watch sneaky, green passenger emerge from couples car hood on Australia highway

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Extremely rare creature spotted by Canadian photographer. Once in a lifetime
Bullets flew into a crowd spending Memorial Day at the beach in Hollywood, shattering any illusion of safety along the family-friendly Broadwalk.

Nine people, including a 16-month-old boy, were hit. Somehow, all survived. But the damage was done.

Hollywood has now joined the long list of American cities where innocents have been struck by gunfire.

In the days following the May 29 shooting, residents appealed to the city to do something to make things safer at the beach for both locals and tourists.

Citing that concern, Commissioner Caryl Shuham suggested moving this years Fourth of July fireworks show from the beach to another spot.

This event only brings more people to the beach, she said. I think we should talk to the businesses in the area. Is this something they still want? Its just out of control. I think going forward this is an event we need to think long and hard about.

But the idea, presented during a recent City Hall meeting, was quickly rejected by Mayor Josh Levy and the rest of the commission.

Weve had July Fourth on the beach for I dont know how many decades, Levy said. People are going to come to the beach whether we have fireworks or not. I dont think taking away the national holiday is the answer.

Commissioner Traci Callari also urged against making decisions based on fear.

We are better than that, she said. We can be anywhere and be victims of gun violence. It can happen anywhere. To stop something thats become a tradition in Hollywood would be sending the wrong message.

In light of the recent shooting, Hollywood is already making changes to address concerns about beach safety.

At the end of Wednesdays public meeting, commissioners held a special closed meeting with the police chief, fire chief, city manager and beach safety chief to discuss what can be done to tighten security at the Broadwalk.

The next day, Police Chief Chris OBrien posted a tweet sharing the steps being taken to secure the publics safety.

We are committed to doing everything we can to make sure the shooting that occurred on Memorial Day is something that people will never experience again on our beach, OBrien wrote.

To that end, the Hollywood Police Department is taking the following measures:

Additional officers are being deployed on the beach.

Officers will use utility terrain vehicles, patrol cars, electric bicycles and foot patrols to cover larger areas of the beach and Broadwalk.

A modified staffing schedule of police officers, together with an additional team of security guards, will provide greater coverage for peak crowd times.

The Parking Division and Code Enforcement will join a central beach command post at the beach.

Enhanced surveillance technologies, including additional CCTV cameras and License Plate Readers, will be expanded on the beach and citywide to bolster crime prevention, detection and investigation.

Daniel Kennedy, a longtime resident who lives along the Broadwalk, says he welcomes the beefed up security.

Light them up. The more cameras the better, he said. We have too much bad stuff going on right now.

Kennedy was out of the country when the shooting took place, but says his phone started blowing up with text messages from friends sharing the bad news.

Kennedy says he gets the idea of moving fireworks off the beach but isnt sure it would do much good.

Were going to have people come here with or without fireworks because were the beach, he said. Theyre coming here anyway. Every weekend were packed and theres no fireworks. I do believe the crowds coming now are looking for trouble. The more cameras, the better.

One business owner on the Broadwalk bristled at the mention of moving the Fourth of July fireworks off the beach.

That would cost the businesses a lot of money if they canceled the fireworks on the beach, said Bob Ferro, owner of Nicks Bar & Grill. I think its a stupid idea.

Ferro says hes not at all worried about bullets flying.

Theyre not going to start shooting people again at the beach, he said. That shooting was an isolated incident that will never happen again. That was a gang. It was a freak thing. If they were at Young Circle, it would have happened there.

Susannah Bryan can be reached at sbryan@sunsentinel.com or on Twitter @Susannah_Bryan
On the floor in Charlotte Smiths hotel room are terracotta pots of cactus near the door. More plants fill the top of the dresser by the TV.

When her Fort Worth apartment evicted her last year, these were the only plants from her vast collection she could bring to her new home, the Red Roof Inn in White Settlement. She cried while dumping the others in the trash.

These days, though, its not her plants that keep her up at night. Smith worries most about being robbed, shot or worse by criminals who menace the hotel property.

White Settlement has a problem with crime clustered around several aging hotels and motels  crime that often spills out into surrounding neighborhoods and west Fort Worth. Data shows that eight lodging properties near Interstate 30 and West Loop 820 South have had nearly 3,000 calls to police since January 2021.

Charlotte Smith talks from the hotel room she calls home at White Settlements Red Roof Inn on May 4, 2023. Smith and her daughter have struggled to find housing after being evicted.

The assaults, rapes, burglaries, drug deals, stabbings, overdoses and shootings not only make it dangerous for visitors staying at the hotels. They make it dangerous for the increasing number of families who live at these low-budget hotels, because its the only option they have other than the streets.

Police in White Settlement are trying to do something about it. The department began a crackdown on hotels, motels and extended stays this spring, even as some of the properties managers dont entirely agree that the problem is as bad as police say. The crackdown includes a task force that will target everything from police patrols to code enforcement.

Police Chief Christopher Cook describes one incident about his officers trying to bust drug deals at a Motel 6. The confrontation led to a 100-mph chase down the interstate and a blast through a red light.

A perfect example, Cook says, of why the city needs to clean up these properties.

White Settlement police chief Christopher Cook shows one of the motels that generate a high amount of service calls during on Monday, April 10, 2023. A task force has been created to reduce crime at hotels and motels along Interstate 30 and West Loop 820 South.

Smith hopes the crackdown will work.

She watches ambulances come and go. Shell often see police cars sitting in the Red Roof Inn parking lot. Her daughters boyfriend will walk into their room sometimes and say he thinks he saw a drug deal as he was coming in.

When youre in a situation like Smiths, you try your best to make the current roof over your head a home.

But she stops before she gets to the finishing touches.

She cant lay out her welcome mat outside for fear it might be stolen. She cant hang plants on the balcony for the same reason. She hears fights in the rooms next door.

Ask her how often she feels unsafe.

All the time, she says.

Charlotte Smith talks from the hotel room she calls home at White Settlements Red Roof Inn on May 4, 2023. Smith and her daughter have struggled to find housing after being evicted.

Hotels with the most calls to police

The police chief knew some of these hotels were crime hot spots. But he didnt know the extent of the problem until he pulled the numbers.

I was like, Holy crap, Cook said.

Three of those hotels pose the biggest problem, he said, and theyre all down Cherry Lane: the Studio Six extended stay, the Motel 6 and the Red Roof Inn.

But the Red Roof is by far the worst, Cook said. Here is where White Settlement police have picked up dozens of stolen cars, responded to overdoses, including one fentanyl death, Cook said.

These hotels are places where people on work trips usually stay. Cook will also tell you theyre places where people come to commit crimes.

He guesses the draw could be the low price. Some on Cooks team have said they have made arrests on people renting rooms by the hour, a violation of city codes.

Those that rent by the hour are often the ones prostituting, committing credit card crimes or selling guns, stolen property and drugs, Cook said.

White Settlement police chief Christopher Cook shows one of the motels that generate a high amount of service calls during on Monday, April 10, 2023. A task force has been created to reduce crime at hotels and motels along Interstate 30 and West Loop 820 South.

Mike Gerard, a hotel security expert with Pennsylvania-based Robson Forensics, says that tracks.

Gerard spent 26 years in law enforcement. During that time, he worked with a unit in Chicago similar to the one in White Settlement.

What Gerard sees most often through his work now is people taking advantage of motels price and ability to be anonymous. Hotels and motels often cater to a transient population, and when you check in, sometimes they might not require you to pay with a credit card or encourage cash payments.

Then comes the problem of hotel and motel owners not reporting crime.

Those are all things that make it more attractive to people, Gerard said.

The problem can only be solved with proper oversight and a willingness to address the issue on the hotels end. Gerard said lodging management will often make calls to police only when people wont pay for their rooms or if they steal or break something.

What are hotels doing about crime?

When you tell Sam Patel his Studio 6 extended stay ranks among the highest in calls to police, he says he wants to see the numbers.

Do the police mean calls directly to the hotel? Do they mean traffic stops that happen to be near the hotel?

Patel doesnt see a problem like police do, he told the Star-Telegram. He said police have not shown him the numbers or met with hotel owners, though he knows staff at the Studio 6 and neighboring Motel 6 have met to discuss security.

Patel has been manager at Studio 6 on Cherry Lane since December, and in that time hes seen few incidents he thinks would warrant the extended stay being high on the list of police calls.

The Studio 6 attracts people who work at Lockheed Martin, and some who work at nearby restaurants. Utilities come with the room, so he understands why some would choose to live there instead of finding a permanent apartment.

There have been a few stolen cars recovered here, he said. Occasionally there is some drug use. But when that happens, the person doing it doesnt stay much longer.

Hotel staff do spot checks to make sure whoever rented out the room is the only one inside. If Patel or another staff member sees something awry on one of their 36 security cameras, they put that customer on a DNR list  they wont be able to extend their stay.

But he sees a greater need for teamwork among police and hotel owners. Patel wishes the police would have met with him personally.

Danny Patel, the manager at Motel 6, said his staff were working to alleviate the factors bringing law enforcement to the hotel. He said he does not know whos making the high numbers of calls to police. Law enforcement will make stops at the hotel about once a week, he says.

Gida Patel, who helps run the Executive Inn, says the property has few problems mostly because its a non-smoking property. And when they do have issues, the police are always quick to respond.

The extended stay of Red Roof Inn on Monday, April 10, 2023. The White Settlement Police Department has created a task force to reduce crime at hotels and motels along Interstate 30 and West Loop 820 South. The department has received 2,860 calls for service across eight of these properties over the past two years.

Bhumi Jariwala has run Red Roof, the hotel with the most calls, for four to five months. She thinks their numbers are so high is because they will call for help when people wont check out.

The hotel does not rent rooms to anyone on foot anymore. Jariwala said they often see someone experiencing homelessness renting a room and letting friends stop by to shower. She would watch as people came in by foot rolling suitcases.

The Red Roof is a family operation, Jariwala said. She said her father and brother met with White Settlement police and looked through the calls for service to the hotel.

When people say they feel unsafe at the Red Roof, Jariwala said, staff accommodates. They might offer to move that persons room closer to the front of the building.

She feels bad about Red Roof having the most calls  she doesnt want to overburden the White Settlement police. But Jariwala also doesnt know how else to address the issue when problems come, and the hotels budget doesnt have room to hire security.

She finds herself calling the police less.

More people living in Tarrant hotels

White Settlement is among the oldest cities in Tarrant County, and its a military contractor town where people come and go.

By the Red Roof, developers have tried to remove blight. A Kentucky Fried Chicken went up, as well as a McDonalds prototype with a conveyor belt drive-thru.

Those who are staying at the Red Roof for the long haul are placed in the back of the building. Those who are there for short periods tend to stay toward the front.

On the side where long-term residents stay, grills sit outside doors. One late morning, fruit flies danced against the curtains and windows in one room.

Between Smiths daughters job and her Social Security check, the pair make just enough to pay the bill to stay: $1,400 a month.

Thats about $130 more than the fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Tarrant County, according to the National Low Income Housing Association.

It makes it impossible to save. The familys past eviction history fastens the padlock.

Belongings are stored in Charlotte Smiths hotel room at White Settlements Red Roof Inn on May 4, 2023. Smith and her daughter have struggled to find housing after being evicted.

When you make just enough to live in a hotel but not enough to get out on your own, the system deems you not poor enough. Smith receives around $23 in food stamps each month and $1,400 for Social Security.

She considers her situation homelessness, though the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development disagrees.

If someone lives in a hotel or motel and can pay for it themselves, HUD wont consider them homeless, said Donald Whitehead, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C.

It is a fabric of homelessness in America, Whitehead said.

Whitehead said people will flock to hotels because housing has gotten too expensive. He said theyll also head there because they know staying in a shelter might split up the family.

The only agency that tracks who lives in hotels is the schools, which consider students with that type of living situation homeless. White Settlement schools did not provide the Star-Telegram with a number of students who lived in hotels in their district, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

When the Star-Telegram asked the same question in 2022, a representative with White Settlement schools said there were 72 students living in hotels.

Whitehead worked with homeless families during the COVID-19 pandemic to place them in hotels to alleviate stress on shelters. He found that families there were crime targets since they were more isolated from law enforcement.

Getting out

Name a form of housing assistance and Smith has probably applied for it. But she has no mailbox, and even if she got an answer about assistance, she wouldnt know where to look for it.

If there were a permanent home, it would be in Weatherford. Smith craves the land and space. She craves her flowers.

The only things standing in the way are being able to save enough cash for a deposit and her eviction record.

And maybe someday shell get out. Home to her, after all, is digging your hands in the soil.

It is planting roots deep in somewhere thats hers. It is watching her flowers grow.
These are the 'hot spots' in California for seal, sea lion harassment

A California sea lion yearling walks toward the water after being released back into the wild by volunteers with the Marine Mammal Center on a beach at Point Lobos State Reserve in 2019 in Carmel, Calif. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

Juicebox, a northern fur seal pup, had been attacked by an off-leash dog in San Franciscos Ocean Beach when marine mammal rescuers found him in October.

A starving harbor seal pup named Sionna was found last April at Bolinas Beach in Marin County after she was separated from her mother and placed on a surfboard.

Snowcone, a harbor seal pup that was likely still nursing, was separated from its mother by two beachgoers at Shell Beach in Sonoma County last April. He did not survive.

The Marine Mammal Center, a nonprofit animal research hospital that oversees 600 miles of the California coast, recently released a report listing hot spots where numerous marine mammals were harassed by people last year.

More than 25% of its animal patients were admitted due to negative interactions with people and dogs  highlighting the impacts of human interference in wildlife, according to researchers.

Put simply: We're getting too close, said Giancarlo Rulli, a spokesperson for the Marine Mammal Center. In some circumstances, we are literally loving these marine mammals to death.

The Sausalito-based center covers the coast from Mendocino to San Luis Obispo counties. California sea lions, Northern Elephant Seals, and Pacific harbor seals are the centers most common patients.

Seals and sea lions are protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which prohibits the harassment, hunting, capturing and killing of these animals.

Taking that once-in-a-lifetime shot or selfie may seem cute or innocent, but it creates challenges for marine mammals, especially young seals and sea lions, Rulli said.

The areas with the highest recorded cases of human wildlife interference were Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, which accounted for about 40% of the centers admitted patients last year, Rulli said. But thats not too surprising, he added.

Monterey Bay is like a sea cafeteria, Rulli said. Theres ecological bounty in the area for numerous marine mammal species, but its also a very busy tourist area along our coast.

Other hotspots along the coast included San Luis Obispo with 18% of harassment incidents, San Mateo with 13%, and San Francisco with 8% of the recorded cases last year.

Crowding was the most common type of harassment followed by touching and picking up, which made up about 35% of all cases. Incidents were equally common during the spring pupping season and in summer, researchers said.

Although the overall number of cases were fewer in the Bay Area than in the Central Coast, incidents up north were found to be more more severe, according to the report. In Marin County, researchers noted more cases of illegal pickups of harbor seal pups. Human and dog interactions with young seals and sea lions were recorded in high numbers in San Francisco and San Mateo counties.

Rulli said it's the first time the center has collected this kind of data, and researchers plan to use it as a baseline to track marine mammal health and address behavioral issues related to human wildlife interaction.

We are very lucky that we can go to many places along the California coast and view wildlife up close. But with that comes increased responsibility on our part to share the shore with these animals, Rulli said.

In Los Angeles County, the Marine Mammal Care Center rescues, rehabilitates and releases injured animals along the coast and on Catalina Island. Though they have not collected data like their colleagues up north, CEO John Warner said they intend to start.

For us, 25% would probably be an under report of what the numbers really are, Warner said.

In sunny Los Angeles County, beaches are more populated with people and marine mammals are unable to comfortably rest on the shore, Warner said. He remembered incidents in which animals were dragged by the flippers, covered under blankets, or had sand thrown at them.

Biologists advise people to keep a safe distance from marine mammals on beaches and in the waters. If an animal reacts to you, then you are too close. Photography is fine, but seal-fies are not.

People who see a marine mammal in distress are asked to not approach them, but instead call the Marine Mammal Centers hotline at 415-289-SEAL or in Los Angeles County call 800-39-WHALE.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Chinese authorities Thursday announced plans to launch a three-year campaign to crack down on crimes involving guns and explosives.

Running through to the end of 2025, the campaign aims to root out such crimes and their breeding grounds, removing hidden dangers to public security and social stability, said the Ministry of Public Security.

The ministry and relevant government departments urged relentless efforts to take strict action against gun and explosive-related crimes, calling for eradicating the crimes at the source.

Since 2020, local authorities across China have carried out campaigns against such offenses, leading to a notable decrease in major gun and explosive-related criminal cases. The number of gun and explosive-related criminal cases hit a record low in the country in 2022, said the ministry.
'Our house was carried away' - flood survivors in Russian-held Ukraine speak of their escape

'Our house was carried away' - flood survivors in Russian-held Ukraine speak of their escape Flooded town of Hola Prystan following Nova Kakhovka dam collapse

HOLA PRYSTAN, Russian-controlled Ukraine (Reuters) - Pensioner Maria Mikhailovna says she was woken by her husband in the middle of the night to find their belongings underwater after the collapse of Ukraine's giant Nova Kakhovka Dam.

"The water in the house was at waist level. At midnight everything had been dry - both inside and outside," said the 73-year-old, who walks slowly with the help of a stick.

"We can hardly walk. We went outside and were lucky that there were passers-by. They helped us to get to the 'Vostok' shop. Then we limped on to our friends," she told Reuters.

With water snapping at their heels, she and her husband then moved on from place to place, she said in the town of Hola Prystan in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, adding that she was grateful to her rescuers.

They were brought to safety with other pensioners on Thursday in a rubber boat crewed by rescuers from Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry.

Russian forces took control of Hola Prystan, a town where around 13,000 people once lived, last year as part of what Moscow calls its "special military operation".

After the vast Soviet-era Kakhovka Dam crumbled on Tuesday - a human and ecological disaster which Russia and Ukraine have blamed on each other - rubber dinghies have replaced cars in the town's streets.

Animals and people sheltered on roofs on Thursday: in one surreal scene a small group of goats and hens stood on what looked like part of a roof surrounded by floodwater as rescuers in dinghies passed by.

The first one or two storeys of houses and people's yards were underwater and an emerald green church was semi-submerged, with the tops of trees poking out from the water in places.

Rescuers in boats scoured the town for survivors, shouting out the addresses they had checked to one another.

Many of those rescued appeared elderly but small children and their mothers were also among those helped to safety.

One woman had her pet cat in their bag and one elderly lady clutched a birdcage as she was ferried to dry land.

A woman who gave her name as Oksana held back tears as she and her daughter were evacuated in a boat with their two pet dogs.

"We ended up at the kindergarten because our house was carried away by a torrent of water," said Oksana, as her daughter turned her head away to sob.

(Reporting by Reuters in Hola Prystan; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Philippa Fletcher)
Hundreds of family, friends and loved ones of Ajike "AJ" Shantrell Owens openly sobbed, even though they were consoled by others.

Minutes earlier, the group walked from the parking lot at Immerse Church of Ocala, 5105 N. US 441, to a concrete slab with chairs reserved for them.

Thursday's gathering in the church yard was a prayer vigil by War Cry 4 Peace, a local organization that for nearly a decade has been comforting families whose loved ones have died due to gun violence.

"We're here to serve this family," said the group's executive director, Kimberly Pompey Wilkerson, told the crowd.

Since the organization's creation, they've tallied more than 160 deaths, she added.

Isaac Owens, 12, left, is comforted by a family member during a remembrance for his late mother. About 300 people attended a remembrance for Ajike "AJ" Shantrell Owens Thursday evening, June 8, 2023 at the Immerse Church of Ocala in Ocala, FL. People spoke about serious and funny stories about A.J. and prayers were given by a number of people and pastors. A balloon release was held at the end of the remembrance. Owens was shot while standing outside her neighbor's door the night of June 2 in Quail Run, located off County Road 475A in Ocala. Quail Run consist of single story duplex and quadraplex. Susan Louise Lorincz, 58, now faces charges of manslaughter with a firearm, culpable negligence, two counts of assault and battery. [Doug Engle/Ocala Star Banner]2023

Court: Neighbor charged with killing Ocala mother of 4 makes first appearance

About Stand Your Ground: What is Florida's 'stand your ground' law and when is it legal to shoot another person?

The shooting

Owens, 35, was shot outside her neighbor's Ocala residence on June 2 after a dispute with her neighbor, Susan Lousie Lorincz.

Law enforcement said that Owens' children told her that the neighbor, Lorincz, had thrown an iPad that hit one of them and swung an umbrella at another on June 2. When Owens went to confront Lorincz at her house, she was shot at through a closed door. Lorincz argues it was in self-defense and feared for her life.

Donna Coleman told the story about how A.J. came up to her one day asking her if she would be the God Mother to her children. About 300 people attended a remembrance for Ajike "AJ" Shantrell Owens Thursday evening, June 8, 2023 at the Immerse Church of Ocala in Ocala, FL. People spoke about serious and funny stories about A.J. and prayers were given by a number of people and pastors. A balloon release was held at the end of the remembrance. Owens was shot while standing outside her neighbor's door the night of June 2 in Quail Run, located off County Road 475A in Ocala. Quail Run consist of single story duplex and quadraplex. Susan Louise Lorincz, 58, now faces charges of manslaughter with a firearm, culpable negligence, two counts of assault and battery. [Doug Engle/Ocala Star Banner]2023

Owens' 9-year-old son witnessed the shooting. Owens was taken to a local hospital and pronounced dead shortly after.

Lorincz, 58, was arrested Tuesday and charged with manslaughter with a firearm, culpable negligence, two counts of assault and battery. Her bond is set at $150,000.

Vigil

At Thursday's vigil was the second since Owens' death. There were songs, tributes, tears and laughter from various people remembering the single mother of three boys and a girl, whose ages range from 3 to 12.

People who spoke said they'll remember Owens' beautiful hair, how respectful her children were and how she always showed up to their games.

Family members and people attending the remembrance, released balloons in memory of Ajike "AJ" Shantrell Owens Thursday evening, June 8, 2023 at the Immerse Church of Ocala in Ocala, FL. About 300 people attended the event and spoke about serious and funny stories about A.J. and prayers were given by a number of people and pastors. A balloon release was held at the end of the remembrance. Owens was shot while standing outside her neighbor's door the night of June 2 in Quail Run, located off County Road 475A in Ocala. Quail Run consist of single story duplex and quadraplex. Susan Louise Lorincz, 58, now faces charges of manslaughter with a firearm, culpable negligence, two counts of assault and battery. [Doug Engle/Ocala Star Banner]2023

A high school teacher, who taught the 35-year-old mother, said they kept in contact well after she graduated. She wanted to repay her kindness by offering free tutoring to Owens' children.

Owens mother, Pamela Dias, said although it's first time she's left speechless, she wants the community to know how much she appreciates the outpouring love, support and encouragement from everyone.

At the end of the service, the crowd moved to an open area where balloons were released into the sky.

Funeral services for Owens is scheduled for June 12 at the church, with the Rev. Al Sharpton delivering the eulogy. A GoFundMe campaign has been set up for the Owens family and as of Friday morning, raised nearly $275,000.

Contact Austin L. Miller at austin.miller@starbanner.com or @almillerosb.

Contact Austin L. Miller at austin.miller@starbanner.com or @almillerosb.

This article originally appeared on Ocala Star-Banner: Hundreds gather at Ocala church for prayer vigil for Ajike Owens
National flag of Iceland

The Russian Ambassador was summoned to the ministry to be informed of Iceland's decision.

"This is not an easy decision as Iceland has enjoyed rich relations with the people of Russia since our independence in 1944. However, the current situation simply does not make it viable for the small foreign service of Iceland to operate an embassy in Russia. I hope that conditions will someday allow for us to have normal and fruitful relations with Russia, but that depends on decisions taken by the Kremlin," Gylfadottir said.

Read also: Iceland recognizes Holodomor as genocide against Ukrainian people

Commercial, cultural, and political ties with Russia are at a historically low level, so there is no point in maintaining diplomatic ties as well, the message reads.

Ukraine's FA Minister Dmytro Kuleba praised the decision in a Twitter post.

"I thank (Foreign Affair Minister) Thordis Kolbrun for Icelands decision to suspend operations of its embassy in Moscow and request Russia to limit the operations of its embassy in Reykjavik. Russia must see that barbarism leads to complete isolation. I encourage other states to follow Icelands example," he wrote.

Iceland currently has 18 embassies which it places in countries with strong economic, political, and cultural ties or for development of cooperation.

Read also:

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Two workers were rushed to the hospital after suspected carbon monoxide and refrigerant leaks at a gas station in Waltham on Friday morning, officials said.

Emergency crews responding to a medical call at the Speedway on Prospect Street just after 6 a.m. found the workers suffering from an oxygen deficiency, according to the Waltham Fire Department.

Both workers were taken to Newton-Wellesley Hospital. They have since been treated and released.

Video from the scene showed multiple fire trucks and ambulances outside the business and a ladder leading up to the roof.

A subsequent investigation revealed that the carbon monoxide leak was likely from soda machines. Elevated levels of refrigerant were also detected in the gas station.

Crews shut down the systems in question and ventilated the building before clearing the scene shortly before 10 a.m.

The incident remains under investigation.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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WASHINGTON - It's indictment redux for Donald Trump and his 2024 political opponents, and everyone is trying to figure out how it will play politically in next year's primaries.

As it happened in late March after a New York grand jury indicted him over hush money payments, Trump is playing the victim card while most of his 2024 rivals - but not all - stay mum or even defend him.

Announcing the indictment on his Truth Social website, Trump - who actually gained ground in Republican polls after the New York indictment - claimed without evidence that the Biden administration and Democrats are targeting him via the legal system; he made the same complaint in a fundraising solicitation sent out shortly after his indictment post.

Prosecutors have "INDICTED me in yet another witch hunt regarding documents that I had the RIGHT to declassify as President of the United States," Trump told potential donors.

Timeline: The journey of Trumps classified documents

Rivals defend Trump, hit prosecutors

Trump's closest Republican competitor, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, criticized "the weaponization of federal law enforcement," but not Trump.

"We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation," DeSantis tweeted. "Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?"

Other top opponents, including Nikki Haley and Mike Pence, defended Trump against what they called an unfair indictment.

Haley criticized the indictment of the front runner but did not mention Trump by name. In a tweet, Haley said this is not how justice should be pursued in our country. The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics.

She also said, in a possible poke at Trump, that its time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions.

Sen Tim Scott, R-S.C., told Fox News that he will continue to pray for our nation and hopes that justice prevails. He also stuck up for Trump, saying the nation has seen "weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president" and "you dont have to be a Republican to see injustice and want to fix it."

Pence, the former vice president who officially entered the race just this week, said Friday I think the Justice Department should immediately move to unseal the indictment."

I think the sooner we bring the facts forward to the American people, the better," he said.

Republican congressional leaders also spoke up for Trump (and attacked Biden).

"It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him," tweeted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. "Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades. I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice."

'Self-inflicted wounds'

Donald Trump

Some long-shot candidates, meanwhile, have said that Trump's legal problems should be a disqualifier for him, and that this indictment is a reason for him to exit the race.

"While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction," said former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson. "This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign."

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, another recent campaign entrant, said the documents case and other troubles speak to Trump's irresponsibility and lack of fitness for the office of presidency.

"These are all self-inflicted wounds," Christie told Fox News on Thursday. "Return the documents and stop doing this. Why do you have to be the center of negative attention all the time? Why do you have to be angry all the time? And that's what Donald Trump has done."

Trump is also under investigation over the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, and efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to Biden in the state of Georgia.

Another long-shot Republican candidate, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy did defend Trump, accusing the Biden administration of targeting its opponents even as Biden is undergoing a documents investigation of his own.

"We cannot have two tiers of justice," Ramaswamy said. "One for Trump on government document retention, another for Biden."

Still too early

It's too early to say how this indictment might affect the race - the specific charges haven't been made public yet - but some analysts said the results may be similar to the New York case: Trump may gain with Republicans and suffer with other voters.

Pollster Frank Luntz said Trump has benefitted among Republicans from previous legal actions against him, such as the search of his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Fla.; the New York indictment; and the civil jury that found Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll.

"Every legal action has only made his numbers go up," Luntz said.

Saying he has never seen a politician play "the victim card" better than Trump, Luntz said that supporters see him "not as a criminal, but as a victim, a victim of persecution."

How long this lasts remains to be seen; Republicans could actually hold primaries next year with a leading candidate on trial in two states, at least; no one knows how voters might react to that.

"It's unprecedented," Luntz said. "This has never happened before."

Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump political strategist who has conducted numerous focus groups of Republican voters, predicted that indictment will help Trump with GOP primary voters and "hurt him with moderate voters in the general" election.

Perhaps a bigger question, Longwell said, is how his 2024 Republican challengers handle it: "Does anyone have the political talent to seize this as opportunity or will they all line up behind Trump?"

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Indictment reaction: Trump plays victim card while rivals defend him
Indictment alleges Trump hoarded classified documents on 'vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack'

Prosecutors allege Donald Trump retained secret documents about the US's vulnerability to foreign attack after his presidency. Justin Sullivan

Trump pledged to follow and "enforce" procedures to protect America's secrets.

He kept records about "potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack," per the indictment.

Their disclosure could expose weaknesses in America's collective defenses.

Donald Trump, who as the GOP presidential nominee pledged to follow and "enforce" procedures to protect America's secrets, had some extremely damaging ones allegedly laying around his estate and private club, according to federal prosecutors.

Their indictment unsealed Friday alleges that the former president had kept government records at Mar-a-Lago that pertained to "defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack."

These kinds of documents, produced by the Defense Department and members of the US intelligence community, are likely to be among the most closely held secrets of the US government. Their disclosure, whether intentional or accidental to, say, one of the tens of thousands of visitors at Trump's club, could expose weaknesses in America's collective defenses, or foretell US responses to conflict  vital information to a potential adversary.

The records about nuclear programs are likely to also be highly sensitive files  especially if they describe nuclear weapon capabilities, plans or launch protocols. US security and that of the NATO alliance is underpinned by its massive nuclear arsenal, with grave concerns that information about individual weapons or plans could prove a windfall for American adversaries or terror groups looking to steal a weapon.

At one point in late 2021, some records spilled in a Mar-a-Lago storage room. A Trump employee snapped a photo of the mess, which includes a secret document that was only to be disclosed to members of the Five Eyes intelligence network with appropriate clearances.

It's unclear what motivation Trump may have had for keeping these records. But Trump apparently didn't keep it a secret that he'd kept these secret files; the FBI recovered 17 documents with top-secret markings, according to the indictment.

In one meeting with a writer and a publisher in July 2021, Trump brought out a record he described as a "war plan" that's believed to relate to Iran (the indictment labels it "Country A"); Trump had brought the US to the brink of war with Iran after assassinating its top general on Jan. 3, 2020, and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was reportedly concerned Trump could escalate with Iran in his administration's final days.

In that July 2021 meeting, the indictment alleges, the former president told the group: "Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this."

In announcing his indictment Thursday on his Truth Social network, Trump declared: "I AM AN INNOCENT MAN."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Traditional Baduy tribal houses in the Indonesian village of Kanekes, Banten province (GUS NAD)

An Indigenous community in Indonesia has requested an internet blackout in their area to minimise the "negative impact" of the online world, officials said Friday.

The Baduy, a community of 26,000 people in Banten province on Java island, divide themselves into an outer group that partly adopts technology, and a sacred inner group that shuns the trappings of contemporary life.

The inner group asked authorities to shut down internet reception or divert nearby telecom towers so the signal would not reach them, according to a letter seen by AFP.

"This request is a part of our efforts to minimise the negative impact of smartphones on our people," Baduy representatives wrote.

They argued telecommunication towers built near their area could threaten their way of life and the morals of young people who may be tempted to use the internet.

Officials in the district of Lebak told AFP they received the letter on Monday, and had agreed to talk with Indonesia's information ministry to try and comply with the request.

"Essentially we want to always accommodate what the Baduy people want, and need to maintain their traditions and local wisdom," Lebak official Budi Santoso told AFP Friday.

He said the internet was needed by the outer Baduy, who have started online businesses, but also that officials were concerned visitors or tourists could access the web and show content they view as inappropriate to Baduy people.

Internet freedom in conservative, Muslim-majority Indonesia is a controversial issue. The government has banned gambling and pornography, and requires internet providers to filter out content they deem inappropriate.

Despite the censorship, illegal websites hosting such content are rampant.

The reclusive inner Baduy -- dubbed the Amish of Asia by Western media -- have chosen to live in the forest and reject technology, money and traditional schooling.

They reside in three villages across a 4,000-hectare (9,900-acre) area that is several hours' drive from the capital Jakarta.

The government declared the area a cultural conservation site in 1990.

Indonesia is a vastly diverse country with more than 1,300 ethnic groups spread across the archipelago.

str-dsa/jfx/dva
Preliminary findings from the Brevard County medical examiner's office reveal that an 11-month-old girl died from overheating as a result of being left in a vehicle for three hours while her mother officiated a church service in Palm Bay last month, court records show.

Palm Bay police detectives said that the infant had an internal temperature of 108.5 degrees less than an hour after she was pulled out of her mothers vehicle, which was parked at the storefront church, and rushed to the hospital.

Less than a week later, police charged Bulain Molme, 37, co-pastor at Mount of Olives Evangelical Baptist Church, with one count of aggravated manslaughter of a child in connection with the May 28 death of Fendra Molme. The arrest came after detectives worked with prosecutors to determine culpability in the case. Molme was booked into the Brevard County Jail Complex. Her bond was set at $15,000, jail records show. She was ordered to surrender her passport and released June 2.

An autopsy was conducted on May 30. The medical examiner's preliminary report indicated that the child had no sign of trauma or older injuries and that she likely died of hyperthermia, or overheating, as a result of being left in the vehicle, court records show.

The mother told detectives that in the rush to get to services, she had believed the baby was with a church member during the service that followed, Detective Thomas Danti wrote in the arrest affidavit.

Mount of Olives Evangelical Baptist Church

Court documents show the Molmes were devoted to their family and were readying for church as usual that Sunday morning. Molme told authorities she was running a little late but turned up about 10:20 a.m. The Mount of Olives Evangelical Baptist Church  a predominantly Haitian congregation  was celebrating Haitian Mothers Day, with Molme speaking, when the tragedy unfolded.

Palm Bay Police were called to the site at about 1:10 p.m. and found the father, church co-pastor Jn Molme, and others attempting to revive the unresponsive infant. The baby was rushed to Palm Bay Hospital, where doctors were unable to revive her, police said.

More: Palm Bay mother charged in infant daughter's death after leaving her in hot car, police say

Nearly 40 minutes Fendra  just two days shy of her first birthday  was pulled from the back seat of the Ford Expedition. After 911 was called, the childs internal temperature hovered at 108.5 degrees, court records show.

I was unable to speak with the defendant, who was on scene because she was inconsolable and hysterical, Detective Danti wrote.

The infant had a "good breakfast," the mother told officers, then fell asleep in the vehicle.

Detectives talked to witnesses and pulled surveillance video from a nearby liquor store in the same plaza.

The video shows Bulain Molme pulling into the Babcock Street plaza at 10:21 a.m. The couples three older children can be seen going into the storefront church. Molme went to the trunk to pull out her Bible and laptop, records show. She also removed a blanket from the front of the vehicle.

Despite Molmes statement to police that she thought a church member came out to help, no other adult approached the vehicle to help the mother of four, police said.

Minutes later, Molme took to the stage to lead the church in prayer and song as her husband played piano and her 8-year-old son played drums while two other children were in a side room, court records show. Her husband told police he saw his older children and from a distance, a woman with a child that he thought was Fendra.

After services, Molme was greeting members when one of them asked about Fendra, court records show. Molme then ran for the Expedition and found the infant, hot, limp and still strapped in the vehicle.

"Would I be able to sit down behind this piano again? Please we need your prayer more than ever," Jn Molme, wrote on a Facebook page populated with pictures of Fendra, his youngest child.

During the course of the investigation, DCF talked to the parents and asked for a drug test. There were no records indicating the family had been in contact with the social service agency or had any criminal history, police reported. The parents were also cooperative with police, answering questions and sitting for interviews. Witnesses described the pastors as "caring," court records show.

The Molme family did not immediately return calls to FLORIDA TODAY.

No trial date has been set.

A funeral for Fendra will be held at 9 a.m. June 10 at the First Baptist Church of Melbourne.

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.

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Brevard medical examiner says infant died of overheating in Palm Bay case
Injured at work? Know your rights and how to report workplace hazards in Kansas City

Federal labor laws entitle you to a safe workplace  but injuries can still occur if these standards arent followed.

The two main ways you can seek retribution for a workplace injury are through accessing workers compensation and reporting your workplace for unsafe conditions.

The former can get you money to cover medical expenses and possible disability payments, while the latter can hold your employer accountable for creating a safe work environment.

Heres what to know about workers compensation and workplace safety in Missouri.

What should I do if I get injured at work in Missouri?

If you are injured at work, notify your employer in writing immediately. If you dont do so within 30 days of the injury, it may be harder to access workers compensation payments.

These payments are the only remedy Missourians have access to when injured on the job, Kansas City labor lawyer and former U.S. attorney for Kansas Barry Grissom told The Star.

Your written notice must state the date, time and place of the injury, the nature of the injury and the name and address of the person injured. Heres an example of what this report should look like. Keep a copy for your records, and note who you gave the notice to and when.

If you want to, you can also inform the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) about an injury you experienced at work. This wont get you any sort of monetary settlement, but it may force your employer to fix the safety hazards at your workplace.

Youre free to make a complaint to OSHA if you think you were placed in an unsafe position that caused your injury, said Grissom, who specializes in working with victims of workplace injuries.

If I want to report this to OSHA, because I dont want anyone else in my group to suffer my same fate, you can go ahead and report it (to them) as well.

What does my employer have to do when I report a workplace injury?

Once you report your injury, your employer must report it to the state unless it is a minor injury that can be resolved with first aid. Employers also need to inform OSHA about serious injuries like hospitalizations, amputations, the loss of an eye or a fatality.

In Missouri, your employer or their insurance company is required to pay for the medical expenses needed to resolve your injury. The employer gets to choose the healthcare provider for this care, but may let you see your own doctor.

After your injury has been treated, your employer may be required to give you additional benefits like lost wages or disability payments. Learn more about these benefits here. However, they are unlikely to equal the full amount you were making on the job.

As I tell my clients (throughout) my representation, workers compensation does not adequately compensate workers, Grisson said. The purpose of workers compensation is to get you mended and back at the job.

Does my employer have to offer workmans comp?

Employers in Missouri with more than five employees need to have workers compensation insurance  and those in the construction industry need it if they have one or more employees. However, workers compensation laws dont apply to farm workers, domestic workers, real estate agents, volunteers, and a few other types of workers.

If your employer doesnt have proper workers compensation insurance in place, you can report them using this form. You can stay anonymous if you want to.

According to Missouri law, employers cannot fire or discriminate against employees for exercising their workers compensation rights.

How do I report an unsafe work environment?

If you work for a private company, the safety of your workplace is regulated by OSHA. To report an unsafe workplace, you can call the Kansas City area OSHA office at 816-483-9531. You can also fill out a complaint form online here.

Its illegal for your employer to fire, demote or retaliate against you for reporting an unsafe working environment to OSHA. If you feel youve been retaliated against, you can file a whistleblower complaint here.

If you work for a government entity in Missouri, your workplace safety is governed by the states Department of Labor. If youre concerned about the health or safety conditions at your workplace, you can fill out a Workplace Safety Complaint Form here.

You are allowed to remain anonymous when making a safety complaint to the state, and your employer cannot retaliate against you for doing so.

Missouri and Kansas both have labor laws that protect employees from retaliation for bringing unsafe conditions to the attention of the employer or to the attention of the state, Grissom said.

Do you have more questions about workplace safety laws in Missouri or Kansas? Ask the Service Journalism team at kcq@kcstar.com.
This Insane Robotic Chef Could Soon Be Cooking Up Meals on Your Flight

One Emirati company is hoping to take plane food to bold new technological heights.

Air and travel services provider Dnata unveiled an innovative cooking robot at the World Travel Catering & Onboard Services Expo (WTCE) in Germany this week that could soon churn out top-notch fare from a plane galley or an airline lounge.

More from Robb Report

The new AI-powered bot is able to serve up identical dishes at scale, according to developers at Moley. With advanced machine learning capabilities, it can recreate recipes by following pre-recorded chef instructions. It is also equipped with multiple sensors that enable it to precisely measure ingredients and execute complex cooking techniques. On top of that, the robot ensures consistent quality and good food hygiene. It can also quickly adapt to changes in real time.

The design is essentially one robotic arm with an articulating hand that can mimic the movements of professional chefs. (The actions have actually been uploaded into its memory.) It also has the power to clean up after itself once its done.

The robot on display at WTCE in Germany.

In addition to the robotic chef, dnata had Bella on display at WTCE. This nifty hospitality robot is engineered to serve meals and refreshments to guests. In fact, Bellas twin bot is already attending to travelers at Sharjah Airports (SHJ) lounge, along with her partner, Kitty.

We are constantly looking for ways to further improve quality and efficiency by leveraging the latest technologies, including artificial intelligence and automation, across our global network, CEO of dnata Catering and Retail Robin Padgett said in a statement.

Moley launched its first robotic kitchen in 2015 and has since delivered a number of different iterations. The UK outfit even unveiled a Moley Chefs Table at WTCE. (Stay tuned for more information on that design.) The world has also welcomed a couple of robotic dogs, a few eery humanoid robots, a robotic bartender, and a mobile robot that charge EVs.

Is a robotic flight attendant next? Stay tuned.

Sign up for Robb Report's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.
CARACAS (Reuters) - The International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened an office in Venezuela, prosecutor Karim Khan said on Friday following a meeting with the country's President Nicolas Maduro.

The ICC is investigating Venezuela for possible crimes against humanity.

With the agreement, the ICC hopes to work "more closely" with Venezuela, and to help in the implementation of judicial reforms, guaranteeing "more justice" in the South American country, Khan said at an opening event.

"I am sure that this office will add positive practices (...) It will surely have a very favorable impact," Maduro said.

The official gave no further details about the operation and the number of staff the office will have.

Khan said in March 2022 the ICC would open an office in Venezuela's capital Caracas. The body announced in November 2021 a preliminary investigation into possible crimes against humanity allegedly committed since 2017 by officials in Maduro's government.

Maduro said at the time he respected the decision but did not share it.

A team of United Nations investigators said that Venezuela's judicial system has perpetuated human rights violations as part of a state policy to quash opposition to Maduro.

(Reporting by Vivian Sequera; Writing by Carolina Pulice; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
Iran is sending materials to Russia to help Moscow build a drone manufacturing plant that could be operational next year, part of a deepening military partnership between the two countries, the Biden administration said Friday. Officials also said that Tehran provided hundreds of armed drones to Russia last month for Moscows war in Ukraine.

Warning of growing defense ties between Iran and Russia, the Biden administration released a satellite photo of what it believes is the planned location of a drone production plant in the Alabuga special economic zone in the Russian republic of Tatarstan.

The White House also described how Iranian-made drones are transported to Russia, releasing a graphic to illustrate the route. The drones are shipped across the Caspian Sea, from Amirabad, Iran, to Makhachkala, Russia, and then used operationally by Russian forces against Ukraine, John Kirby, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, said in a statement.

A graphic made by the White House illustrates the route the Iranian-made drones travel, as they are shipped across the Caspian Sea, from Amirabad, Iran, to Makhachkala, Russia. They are then used operationally to attack Ukraine from Russian military bases. (White House)

As of May, Russia received hundreds of one-way attack UAVs, as well as UAV production-related equipment, from Iran, added Kirby, using a military acronym for drones, unmanned aerial vehicles.

Kirby said that Russia had used Iranian drones in recent weeks to strike Kyiv, which has experienced a vast uptick in aerial attacks. He said that Moscow has been offering Iran unprecedented defense cooperation, including on missiles, electronics, and air defense in return for Irans supplying kamikaze drones to Russia.

Iran has denied that it has provided Russia with drones for the war in Ukraine but has announced plans to bolster its defense cooperation with Moscow, including purchasing Russian fighter jets and other military hardware. Russias embassy in Washington and Irans mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In March, Iran announced a deal to buy Russian Su-35 fighter jets to replace its aging fleet of military aircraft. Iran also has expressed interest in purchasing Russian attack helicopters, radars and YAK-130 combat trainer aircraft.

A satellite photo and graphic showing where U.S. intel indicates Moscow and Tehran are planning to build a drone production facility in Russias Alabuga Special Economic Zone. (White House)

In total, Iran is seeking billions of dollars worth of military equipment from Russia, Kirby said, calling the terms a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful to Ukraine, to Irans neighbors, and to the international community.

The statement was the latest example of the Biden administration releasing intelligence information publicly to try to undermine Russias invasion of Ukraine. The United States has imposed a series of sanctions on organizations or individuals allegedly involved in the transfer of Iranian drones to Russia and issued export controls to try to prevent Russia from obtaining electronic components needed to operate Iranian drones.

The administration also issued an advisory to help governments and businesses put in place measures to ensure they are not inadvertently contributing to Irans UAV program. Officials also said the U.S. is working to provide Ukraine with air defense systems needed to counter Russian drone and missile attacks.

Henry Rome, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank, said Irans provision of drones to Russia presents a "hard problem set for Western powers, given the direct air and sea routes between Iran and Russia.

We can try to expose and deter this activity, and over the long run complicate the relationship by restricting flows of technology," Rome said. "But these steps may take time to bear fruit.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank were not an obstacle to peace with the Palestinians in an interview published Friday, testing ties between Washington and its main Middle East ally.

The expansion of settlements in the West Bank has been among the most contentious issues between Israel, the Palestinians and the international community for decades. It has continued despite repeated calls for construction to stop from allies, including the United States.

Most countries deem such construction as illegal under international law, and the Palestinians say the expansion of Jewish settlements on occupied land undermines their bid for a viable state.

In an interview with Sky News released on Friday, Netanyahu said it was "not true" that settlements were a hurdle to peace, adding that the recent return of settlers to an evacuated settlement did not violate any commitments to the Biden administration.

"The idea that the presence of Jews in their ancestral homeland, which has been our homeland for the last 3,000 years, that Jews should not live there... I think that's the obstacle to peace," said Netanyahu.

The West Bank is among territories Israel occupied in a 1967 Middle East war where Palestinians exercise limited self-governance under decades of Israeli military rule.

According to a report by the U.N. Human Rights Committee, just under 700,000 settlers live in 279 settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, up from 520,000 in 2012.

Since entering office in January, Netanyahu's religious-nationalist coalition has approved the promotion of more than 7,000 new housing units, most deep in the West Bank, and amended a law that cleared the way for settlers to return to four settlements that had been evacuated.

"Israel attempts to mislead and deceive the public, as if the settlements are not established on Palestinian land belonging to the Palestinian people," Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, told Reuters.

"If this government seeks a lasting peace, it must recognise international resolutions that are based on the two-state solution."

In the Sky News interview, Netanyahu also said that establishing diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia would "change history".

On Iran, he said diplomatic efforts to stop Tehran from developing nuclear capabilities can only work when coupled with a credible military threat, and that Israel will do "whatever we need to defend ourselves".

(Reporting by Henriette Chacar; Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Campi Flegrei, an Italian volcano that last erupted nearly 500 years ago, is becoming more restless and could erupt once again, according to a new study.

Located in Southern Italy, Campi Flegrei's last recorded eruption was in 1538. According to NASA, the Campi Flegrei caldera cluster or "fiery fields" is built from overlapping volcanic features, including calderas, domes, and cinder cones.

Geologists with the University of College London and Italys National Research Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology published a study on Friday using modeling of recent earthquake activity and ground uplift to show the volcano is "stretched nearly to a breaking point" and could rupture.

Predicting when a volcano will erupt is not a perfect science.

Scientists use techniques including looking at a volcano's eruptive history, seismographic detections of earthquakes, and monitoring ground deformation and changes in gas emissions to predict when an eruption is impending. According to the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program, earthquakes and tremors almost always happen before an eruption.

And the study authors say Campi Flegrei has those ingredients for an eruption. The volcano has been "restless" for more than 70 years, and tens of thousands of small earthquakes have occurred, along with ground lifting in Pozzuoli, Italy stretching the volcano's crust.

The team used a model based on the physics of how rocks break to begin predicting the volcano's behavior.

"Our first use of the model was in 2017, and since then, Campi Flegrei has behaved as we predicted, with an increasing number of small earthquakes indicating pressure from below," said study author Christopher Kilburn with UCL Earth Sciences. "We will now have to adjust our procedures for estimating the chances of new routes being opened for magma or gas to reach the surface."

WHAT MAKES 'PELE'S HAIR' DURING A VOLCANIC ERUPTION

One of the biggest clues is watching the pattern of earthquakes, which suggests the rocks on Campi Flegrei are breaking, instead of stretching. According to the study, Campi Flegreis maximum stress it can bear before breaking when it is stretched is about a third of what it was in 1984.

"We cannot see what is happening underground," Stefania Danesi from INGV Bologna said. "Instead, we have to decipher the clues the volcano gives us, such as earthquakes and uplift of the ground."

The study shows parts of the volcano are becoming weaker and earthquakes are causing fluids, like magma or molten rock and gas, to move beneath Campi Flegrei.

Even with all the clues of a rupture in the future, the team said it doesn't mean it will happen.

HAWAII'S KILAUEA VOLCANO BEGINS ERUPTING AGAIN

"Campi Flegrei may settle into a new routine of gently rising and subsiding, as seen at similar volcanoes around the world, or simply return to rest," Danesi said. "We cant yet say for sure what will happen. The important point is to be prepared for all outcomes."

The scientists say this modeling is the first of its kind in an attempt to forecast the rupture of an active volcano. The team plans to apply this model to other volcanoes.

"It marks a step change in our goal to improve forecasts of eruptions worldwide," Kilburn said.
Jack Smith defends Trump indictment: We have one set of laws and they apply to everyone

In brief remarks after the release of a searing federal indictment against Donald Trump, the man appointed to lead the investigation into the former presidents alleged mishandling of national security documents after he left the White House has defended the charges against him, and urged Americans to read the historic filing in full.

Special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by US Attorney General Merrick Garland as an independent investigator with the US Department of Justice, stressed that laws intended to protect national defence information are critical to the safety and security of the United States.

And they must be enforced, he said in remarks on 9 June.

Violations of those laws put our country at risk. Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice and our nations commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world, he added. We have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everyone applying those laws.

The collection of facts is what determines the outcome of an investigation  nothing more nothing less, he said.

Federal prosecutors have charged the former president in a 38-count, 49-page indictment that includes 31 counts of illegally retaining national defence secrets in violation of the Espionage Act.

He also faces several counts of conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements to federal law enforcement and a grand jury.

Mr Trump will surrender, face arrest, and be formally charged in US District Court in Miami, as soon as next week. Under maximum federal sentences, if convicted, he could face decades in prison.

Mr Smith also stressed the impartiality of his office and prosecutors involved in the investigation, as high-ranking Republican officials continue to repeatedly and falsely assert that President Joe Biden was involved or had pressed for charges against his political rival.

A grand jury in Florida ultimately voted to recommend charges.

This indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida and I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged, Mr Smith said.

The prosecutors working with Mr Smith have investigated this case hewing to the highest ethical standards, and they will continue to do so as this case proceeds, Mr Smith said.

Its very important for me to note that the defendants in this case must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law, he added. To that end, my office will seek a speedy trial on this matter consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused.

Mr Trump has denied wrongdoing and lashed out at the multiple investigations involving his administration and family as a hoax and a witch hunt. Before Mr Smiths remarks, he called Mr Smith  a former war crimes prosecutor at The Hague  a deranged lunatic and a psycho.
Who is Jack Smith, the special counsel behind the Trump classified documents indictment?

Special counsel Jack Smiths monthslong investigation into Donald Trumps alleged mishandling of classified documents has entered a new chapter with the indictment of the former president.

Trump faces 37 felony counts, which include charges relating to the willful retention of national defense information, according to the indictment unsealed Friday. Walt Nauta, an aide to the former president, has also been indicted in the investigation, according to the document released Friday.

The Justice Departments move marks the first time a former president has faced federal charges.

Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced, Smith said at a news conference Friday. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.

Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice and our nations commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world, he added. We have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everyone.

Jim Trusty  the former presidents attorney who was removed from the case Friday morning and subsequently resigned from the legal team entirely  had told CNN Thursday evening that Trump is facing a charge under the Espionage Act, along with charges of obstruction of justice, destruction or falsification of records, conspiracy and false statements.

The former president has been ordered to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday. Smith said Friday that his office will seek a speedy trial.

Appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, Smith was tasked in November to look into whether Trump or his aides committed crimes by taking classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort after he left the White House and whether they obstructed the investigation. The probe had escalated in recent weeks with several high-profile interviews and a former White House official telling prosecutors that Trump knew the proper process for declassifying documents and followed it correctly at times while in office, undercutting Trumps claims that he automatically declassified everything he took with him to Mar-a-Lago. Earlier this week, CNN reported that the Justice Department informed the former presidents legal team that he is a target in the probe  such notification is often a strong sign that an indictment could follow.

Trump has denied wrongdoing. He and his right-wing allies have slammed the probe as partisan and a weaponization of the federal government.

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Smith, who is also overseeing the DOJs investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, however, has investigated members of both parties, handling some of the most high-profile political corruption cases in recent memory  to mixed outcomes.

The special counsels experience ranges from prosecuting a sitting US senator to bringing cases against gang members who were ultimately convicted of murdering New York City police officers. His career spans multiple stints in the Justice Department and international courts, which until his appointment had allowed him to keep a relatively low-profile in the oftentimes brassy legal industry.

After serving as a prosecutor at the local and federal levels as well as a stint at the International Criminal Court, Smith oversaw corruption cases as chief of the Justice Departments public integrity unit from 2010 to 2015.

Smith was the head of the section when the department failed to convict former senator and vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, a Democrat, in a corruption case in 2012 and when then-Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, was indicted in 2014. He also oversaw the investigation into former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Republican, closing the probe in 2010 without bringing charges.

Smith would go on to serve as an assistant US attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, taking over as acting US attorney in early 2017. He became vice president of litigation for the Hospital Corporation of America later that year.

In recent years, Smith lived outside of the United States as the chief prosecutor for the special court in The Hague, a role he assumed in 2018 in which he investigated war crimes in Kosovo.

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNNs Zachary Cohen, Kara Scannell, Jeremy Herb, Katelyn Polantz, Chandelis Duster, Marshall Cohen, Kaitlan Collins, Paula Reid, Sara Murray, Kristen Holmes, Tierney Sneed, and Evan Perez contributed to this report.

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Special counsel Jack Smith - JERRY LAMPEN/AFP

Jack Smith, the bearded, avid triathlon-racer leading the prosecution of Donald Trumps classified documents case, burnished his reputation taking on war criminals in The Hague.

The 54-year-olds career has included prosecuting drug gang leaders and mob bosses in Manhattan, and complex corruption cases against US politicians of all stripes.

He left his role as chief prosecutor for a special court in The Hague investigating war crimes in Kosovo to become the special counsel overseeing Mr Trumps case last November.

Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, chose to appoint a special counsel given the particularly sensitive circumstances involved in investigating a former US president.

As a special counsel, Mr Smith has an extra layer of independence from the Department of Justice (DOJ) than one of its own prosecutors would.

Probe into Capitol attack

In addition to investigating Mr Trumps retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, Mr Smith is looking in to the former presidents efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and his role in the January 6 2021 Capitol attack.

Mr Smith was an obvious choice. A registered independent, he has expressed few political beliefs that might indicate any bias. And he has garnered a reputation as a dogged investigator, reportedly just as determined in seeking to have criminal charges dropped for the innocent as he is in pursuing convictions against the guilty.

If I were the sort of person who could be cowed  [if I thought:] I know the person did it, but we could lose, and that will look bad  I would find another line of work, he once told the New York Times.

I cant imagine how someone who does what I do or has worked with me could think that.

Mr Smiths tenacity is often referenced by his former colleagues. If the case is prosecutable, he will do it, said Mark Lesko, who worked alongside Mr Smith at the US Attorneys Office in New York. He is fearless.

When Mr Smith is not pursuing cases, he spends his time participating in gruelling fitness competitions.

Ironman triathlete

He has completed more than 100 triathlons and at least nine Ironman competitions - including in Germany, Brazil and Canada.

He has a daughter with wife Katy Chevigny, an award-winning documentary filmmaker.

Mr Smith attended the State University of New York at Oneonta before graduating from Harvard Law School.

He started his career as a prosecutor in 1994 at the Manhattan District Attorneys Office under Robert Morgenthau, who was best known for prosecuting mob bosses. A few years later he moved to the Brooklyn District Attorneys Office, where he worked on a high-profile police brutality case.

From 2008 to 2010 he supervised war crimes investigations in The Hague.

He returned to the DOJ to head up its Public Integrity Section until 2015, working complex cases against public officials.

Under his leadership the department brought a corruption case against John Edwards, a Democratic former senator and vice presidential candidate and Bob McDonnell, at the time Virginias Republican governor.

He oversaw another investigation into a former Republican congressman but decided against bringing charges.

While he has received distinguished service awards, having spent the past four years overseas, Mr Smith has a relatively low profile at home and has been shielded from the hyper partisan legal battles of the Trump and Biden administrations.

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The singer says she feels more "free" to express herself since coming out in 2018

Janelle Monae says her sensuous, hedonistic new album is a riposte to conservatives who want to suppress expressions of black, queer pleasure.

The record arrives amidst a spate of US bills targeting LGBTQ rights, and others that outlaw the teaching of African American history.

"They want us to not enjoy life, they want us to be miserable, to feel like we don't belong," Monae, who identifies as non-binary, told BBC 6 Music.

"We have to fight this every way."

The 37-year-old says her latest album, The Age Of Pleasure, is just one way to resist the tide of anti-LGBTQ sentiment.

"With this project I am making it very known that, even in the midst of these heavy times, we're going to celebrate ourselves, we're going to create a safe space for ourselves and we're going to enjoy this life."

The star is also taking practical action with her Fem The Future charity, which provides grants to under-resourced girls and non-binary youth in music, the arts and education.

A record number of anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the US since the start of the year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Along with a renewed push to ban access to gender-affirming health care for transgender youth, there has been a heavy focus on education.

A total of 283 proposed bills target schools, including bills that aim to limit discussions about sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom, and "forced outing" bills, which would require teachers to alert parents when a student begins going by a different name or pronouns, even without the student's consent.

Several states have also proposed bills that would ban drag performances.

Monae started releasing music in 2003, carving out a niche as one of America's most forward-thinking, genre-bending soul and pop artists.

With hits like Make Me Feel, Tightrope and Q.U.E.E.N, she's earned eight Grammy nominations, while building a parallel career on the big screen, with roles in award-winning dramas Hidden Figures and Moonlight, and last year's murder-mystery Glass Onion, in which she co-starred with Daniel Craig.

The star worked on her album while filming the Knives Out sequel Glass Onion

The Age Of Pleasure is her first album since 2018's Dirty Computer, a project that saw her acknowledge and embrace her sexuality in public for the first time.

"That was super nerve wracking," she told Matt Everitt. "To have to deal with [everything] that comes with that. The pressures of constantly talking about it."

But "understanding that I'm now non-binary freed me up," she continued.

"It makes the music better, it makes the art better, it makes you feel more fluid, more free."

As a consequence, her new album focuses almost entirely on the pleasures of the flesh.

Naked skin is a big theme - and Monae even appears bare-chested in the video for Lipstick Lover, a song inspired by a real-life liaison.

"I ended up with lipstick on my neck, red lip gloss on my neck. I went to the bathroom and saw it and just thought it was sexy, you know?"

"And I was like, 'Yep, this deserves a song'. As simple as that."

Monae was named "trailblazer of the year" at the 2018 Billboard Women In Music Awards

The album took shape over the last few years, at events she hosted in her "Wondaland West" campus in Los Angeles.

The property is a hub of creativity and community, with a party-ready courtyard that Rolling Stone magazine described as "magnificent, with its tranquil pool in the centre and troves of nooks, crannies, outdoor baths, and citrus trees".

During the pandemic, Monae opened up her property to the organisers of Everyday People - a globe-trotting event that celebrates Black and African culture - allowing them to host gatherings, under strict Covid-testing regulations.

Her new music reflects those bacchanalian nights, where people found freedom to be themselves "free from police, free from judgement", said Monae.

"I tried my best to capture the beauty I saw and that's what we ended up with - The Age Of Pleasure," she said.

After lockdown restrictions eased, the parties continued, acting as a testing ground for Monae's material.

"If I knew we had a party on a Friday or Saturday, we would write the songs on a Monday or Tuesday," she explained.

"I told my DJ, 'Play the songs. Don't say it's me, and let's see how people move to them.'

"And when I saw people Shazam-ing them from the dancefloor, I was like, 'This is done. That's going on the album.'"

The record recalls the free-wheeling parties the star holds on her Los Angeles estate

The musician has described the record as a love letter to the African diaspora, with grooves that move smoothly between R&B, hip-hop, Afrobeat, Amapiano, funk and reggae.

Released this week, it has already received positive reviews.

"Janelle Monae sounds more self-possessed and confident than ever," wrote Slate magazine's Charles Lyons-Burt. "There's no question that her unapologetic embrace of queer pleasure is sincere, bold, and subversive."

"It really is non-stop sauce," added Joe Muggs on The Arts Desk. "Even a list of swimming strokes is so charged it'll make steam come out of your ears.

"It may well make you blush, but it is her best album, and is an extraordinary transformation."

The Line Of Best Fit's Sam Franzini was less enthusiastic, saying the record was "slim on ideas" and a poor reflection of Monae's "genius". Not true, said David Smith in the Evening Standard, The Age Of Pleasure's "sweltering style" is destined to become "the sound of the summer".

For Monae, whose previous records have deeply conceptual, multi-layered artistic statements, The Art Of Pleasure was simply about the chance to "have fun".

"I feel like I'm owning all of me, not explaining everything, and just enjoying it.

"I'm feeling much lighter now. I float."
Japanese gender equality proposal aims to have 30% of executive positions filled by women

[Source]

The Japanese government recently unveiled a draft proposal aimed at increasing gender equality in the country's labor force.

Promoting gender equality: The draft policy, prepared by Japan's Gender Equality Council to be incorporated into the Basic Policy on Economic and Fiscal Management and Reform, proposes that large Japanese companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's (TSE) Prime Market should have women occupying 30% of the available executive positions by 2030.

Set to be adopted by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's Cabinet by the end of the month, the "Priority Policies for Womens Empowerment and Gender Equality" proposal specifically calls for such companies to appoint at least one female board member by 2025.

Aligning with international standards: The council aims to incorporate these objectives into TSE regulations by the end of 2023 in a bid to align Japan with international corporate governance standards in greater accountability and transparency.

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It is urgent for these firms to accelerate the promotion of women to executive posts for the growth of the Japanese economy, the draft stated, noting that the country has been lagging far behind internationally in women landing executive positions.

Addressing other gender-related issues: To address pay disparities, the draft suggests expanding the mandatory disclosure of gender-based wage gap information from companies with 301 or more regular employees to those with 101 to 300 employees.

The council also outlines proposals to increase the number of men taking childcare leave and to promote the concept of dual-income couples sharing parenting responsibilities to alleviate the burden of child-rearing primarily placed on women.

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It also mandates the establishment of a benefits system that ensures parents with children under the age of two, regardless of gender, can work shorter hours without experiencing a reduction in take-home pay.

Driving change: The proposed measures aim to drive substantial progress in promoting gender equality and representation in executive positions within companies in the TSEs Prime Market, which currently lists 1,835 companies.

Reserved for large companies with an international presence, the Prime Market has the strictest listing criteria among the TSE's three segments, requiring companies to have a tradable share market capitalization of at least 10 billion Japanese Yen (approximately $71.8 million).

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Jennifer Lawrence steps in to clarify theory about her Cannes footwear

Jennifer Lawrence has stepped in to clarify speculation surrounding her choice of footwear at Cannes.

The Silver Linings Playbook Oscar winner walked the film festivals red carpet last month in a red Dior gown and a pair of casual black flip-flops, sparking a frenzy from observers who wondered if she was making a statement of some kind.

Many fashion experts believed it was a stand against the festivals strict dress code, which allegedly requires all female guests to wear heels.

However, according to Lawrence, she was not making a statement and had no idea of the rules.

I was not making a political statement  not that I wouldnt, she told Entertainment Tonight this week, adding: I had no idea until it like, came out that there was a whole controversy with people wearing flats, or like, walking down the red carpet barefoot.

I had no clue. My shoes were a size too big.

Lawrence, who was attending her premiere of Justine Triets Palme dOr winner Anatomy of a Fall, said she wanted to avoid tripping.

I knew I would eat s*** if I went down in the shoes that were a size too big, the Hunger Games actor said. I put on the flip-flops, and then everybodys like, What a statement! Wow. Im all for making a statement; I just would want it to be on purpose.

Jennifer Lawrence wore flip-flops on Cannes red carpet (2023 Invision)

In 2015, there was an uproar after it was claimed that women were being turned away from red carpet events at Cannes for wearing flat shoes. English actor Emily Blunt led criticism of the organisers behaviour: I think everyone should wear flats, to be honest, she said. I just prefer wearing Converse sneakers.

Three years later, Kristen Stewart appeared to protest the same rule by removing her shoes while walking the Cannes red carpet.

Theres definitely a distinct dress code right, people get very upset at you if you dont wear heels or something, whatever, she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018.

But I feel like you cant ask people that anymore, its just kind of a given, like if youre not asking guys to wear heels and a dress you cannot ask me either.

Jennifer Lawrences new film, the comedy No Hard Feelings, will be released later this month.

The film follows a woman who accepts a Craigslist posting, in which parents of a 19-year-old with no interest in having sex want somebody to date their son in exchange for a new car.

It is scheduled for released in the UK on 21 June.
Annual college entrance exam concludes in some parts of China

Xinhua) 08:41, June 09, 2023

An examinee talks with his mother at an exam site in Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Hu Xingyu)

An examinee hugs her mother at an exam site in Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Hu Xingyu)

Relatives of examinees wait outside an exam site in Suiyang County, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Yang Ying)

Examinees pose for photos outside an exam site in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

Examinees run out of an exam site in Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Hu Xingyu)

Examinees pose for photos outside an exam site in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

An examinee poses for a photo with her relatives at an exam site in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)

Examinees and their relatives pose for photos at an exam site in Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Hu Xingyu)

An examinee is presented with flowers by his mother at an exam site in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)

Relatives of examinees wait outside an exam site in Yinchuan, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Li Xulun)

Examinees celebrate outside an exam site in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

Examinees walk out of an exam site in Changchun, northeast China's Jilin Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Zhang Nan)

A teacher greets his students outside an exam site in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

Examinees walk out of an exam site in Changchun, northeast China's Jilin Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Zhang Nan)

A teacher takes selfies with her students at an exam site in Changchun, northeast China's Jilin Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Zhang Nan)

In this aerial photo, examinees walk out of an exam site in Suiyang County, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Yang Ying)

An examinee claps hands with her father at an exam site in Xi'an, northwest China's Shaanxi Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Li Yibo)

Examinees celebrate outside an exam site in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

An examinee runs out of an exam site in Hefei, east China's Anhui Province, June 8, 2023. China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Huang Bohan)

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
Fox News

Jesse Watters was in the middle of his primetime Fox News show when news broke of Donald Trumps second indictment in two monthsthis one over the former presidents alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving officeand he wasted very little time making the news, somehow, about President Joe Biden.

During Jesse Watters Primetime, Watters began by reading the first in a series of Truth Social posts from Trump saying that he had been indictedthe first such instance of a former president facing federal criminal charges.

The new case comes in addition to the 34 felony counts of falsifying business records he is already facing in a case brought by the Manhattan District Attorney.

In his post, Trump naturally brought up the documents investigation into Biden. Watters then kept that theme going while discussing the news with network contributor Charlie Hurt.

So Charlie, we were hearing rumors that this was going to happen, he said. The former president calls it the boxes hoax. What does this tell you on the same day we are learning that the Bidens took $10 million in bribes, supposedly, from Ukraine?

Watters is referring to a series of unverified allegations the House Oversight Committee has leveled in a report, which claims that some members of the Biden family and their associates received that amount from foreign entities. The allegations were released in May, and it was not immediately clear what news from Thursday Watters was referring to.

Nevertheless, Hurt replied that the indictment of Trump is no coincidenceimplying without evidence that the charges against Trump and the Biden investigation are in some way related.

Watters would go on to say of Biden, It is pretty aggressive to go after your political opponent on something youre probably five times more guilty of.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Former Washington State Sen. John McCoy, a Tulalip tribal leader, died Tuesday of natural causes. He was 79.

McCoy, a Democrat, served in the state Legislature representing the 38th District covering Marysville, Tulalip, and parts of Everett for 17 years. He served as a Washington House Representative from 2003-2013, and as a state Senator from 2013-2020 before retiring.

Prior to his time in office, McCoy served in the U.S. Air Force for 20 years. After his service, McCoy returned to Tulalip where he took over as the executive director of governmental affairs and managed the tribes business. He was instrumental in the founding of the Tulalip Resort Casino.

He also served as an adjunct faculty member at The Evergreen State College for 10 years starting in 2013.

On Wednesday, the Washington state Department of Commerce released a statement about McCoy.

It is with heavy hearts that the Department of Commerce sends condolences to the Tulalip Tribes and the family of Senator John McCoy, the departments statement reads. We credit the late Senator John McCoy with being the first tribal leader that recognized the value of a strong partnership between the tribes and the Department of Commerce.

He was described as being incredibly patient and caring while working with Commerce staff and carefully leading them down a path of learning how to be a good partner to tribal communities. He routinely went out of his way to be personally available to anyone at Commerce who had a question or needed guidance.

The Department of Commerce also noted that McCoy was one of the first Tribal members elected to the state Legislature.

His list of accomplishments is long and ranges from passing groundbreaking legislation to holding positions of leadership within the state legislature, but we argue his true impact is his legacy; a legacy of strong yet gentle leadership and embracing the value of partnership, the statement says. Through our grief and sorrow we find comfort in knowing that the best way to honor his life and legacy is to carry on his work and strengthen communities through thoughtful partnerships.

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, also acknowledged McCoys passing at a U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs hearing Wednesday.

And if I could just take a moment to recognize the passing of one of our tribal leaders, John McCoy from the Tulalip Reservation, Cantwell said. Not only was he a 20-year member of the United States Air Force and a tribal leader at Tulalip, but he served our state legislature both as a representative and a senator, and we will miss him dearly.

U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen also expressed his condolences.

As a citizen and as a member of the State Legislature, John was a formidable advocate for tribal rights  for the Tulalip Tribes and for all tribes, Larsen said in a statement. He focused on expanding access to education through new technologies and by ensuring that Washington state education included knowledge of Native peoples.

McCoy is survived by his wife, Jeannie, of 58 years, three daughters, 10 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

The Everett Herald reports that the McCoy family is hosting memorial services at 6 p.m. Sunday at the Tulalip Gathering Hall and 9 a.m. Monday in the Tulalip Resort Casino. Family members also hope to hold a memorial in Olympia in the future.
A not guilty plea was entered in US federal court on Friday on behalf of Joran van der Sloot, the Dutch national accused in the alleged extortion of the mother of Natalee Holloway, the American teenager whose disappearance during a high school graduation trip to Aruba in 2005 became an international mystery.

In the less than five-minute-long hearing in Birmingham, Alabama, US Magistrate Judge Gray Borden said he would only accept a not guilty plea at this time, and if van der Sloot were to enter any other plea it would be before a different judge at a different time.

Borden also advised him of his US Constitutional rights and appointed the Federal Public Defenders office to represent him. An interpreter was provided for van der Sloot, 35, but he told the court he did not need one.

My English is actually perfect, he said shortly before the start of the proceeding.

US Public Defender for the Northern District of Alabama Kevin Butler was in court with van der Sloot, who was one of the last people seen with the 18-year-old Holloway before she vanished, never to be found. He will remain in custody until his trial.

Holloways parents, Beth and Dave, her brother Matt and supporters of the family attended the hearing. Beth Holloway at times looked at the defendant, who wore jeans and a white t-shirt.

Its going to be the closest thing that we can have to justice, just to have some kind of justice in our country, said George Patriot Seymore, a spokesman for the Holloway family.

Dave Holloway said in a statement Friday that van der Sloots arraignment was an important step toward accountability and hopefully, justice.

These particular charges do not involve me directly, but I am trusting that this prosecution will lead us to the truth about Natalee, Holloway said.

I remain thankful for everything done by the U.S. Attorneys office, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals office here in Birmingham. We are also deeply appreciative for the support of people all over the world who share in common belief that good must always prevail over evil.

Carol Standifer, a close friend of Beth Holloway, said outside court the family is just happy that this day has finally arrived.

We just wanted to be here to support Beth, and were just very happy to see Joran on Alabama soil and it just gives us a bit of closure, and weve been looking for this day for many years, Standifer said.

Van der Sloot, who was transferred Thursday from Peru to Birmingham in the company of a team of FBI special agents, was indicted in 2010 on federal charges of extortion and wire fraud in connection with a plot to sell information about the whereabouts of Holloways remains in exchange for $250,000, according to an indictment filed in the Northern District of Alabama.

Beth Holloway wired $15,000 to a bank account van der Sloot held in the Netherlands and through an attorney gave him another $10,000 in person, the indictment states. Once he had the initial $25,000, van der Sloot showed the attorney, John Q. Kelly, where Natalee Holloways remains allegedly were hidden, but later admitted by email the information was worthless, the indictment states.

Holloway was last seen with van der Sloot and two other men leaving a nightclub on the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba 18 years ago. Police in Aruba arrested and released the three men  van der Sloot and brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe  multiple times in 2005 and 2007 in connection with Holloways disappearance. Attorneys for the men maintained their innocence throughout the investigation.

In December 2007, the Aruban Public Prosecutors Office said none of the three would be charged and dropped the cases against them, citing insufficient evidence.

Five years later, a judge in Alabama signed an order declaring Holloway legally dead.

Beth Holloway is ecstatic and overwhelmed van der Sloot is on U. soil, Kelly said on NBCs Today Show Friday.

Shes basically overwhelmed by the whole situation, she had a full spectrum of emotion, Kelly said. On the one hand, she was ecstatic that van der Sloot was on US soil, U.S. authority, US justice system  but its still like pulling a scab off an old wound, theres always a pain there and hes a painful reminder of what shes been through.

Kelly expects to testify in the case, though he has yet to prepare with the attorneys.

Van der Sloot has been held at a prison in Peru after he was convicted in 2012 of murdering Stephany Flores, 21, in his Lima hotel room on the fifth anniversary of Holloways disappearance. He was sentenced to 28 years in prison.

At the time of his trial, authorities said van der Sloot had used the money from Holloways mother to travel to Peru for a poker tournament, where he met Flores.

Peru initially agreed to transfer van der Sloot to the US to face the two charges only after he serves his murder sentence. But last month, the country changed course and agreed to temporarily transfer him to face the US charges, after which he would be returned to Peru, the countrys judiciary said.

An FBI-operated plane carrying Joran van der Sloot arrives at the Birmingham International Airport, Thursday, June 8, 2023, in Birmingham, Alabama. - Butch Dill/AP

Peru agreed to van der Sloots temporary relocation to the United States, because he is condemned here and he must serve his sentence here, Justice Minister Daniel Maurate said. But since the US needs him in order to face trial, and the authorities told us that if he didnt get there sooner, the case against him could be dropped because the witnesses are elderly.

On Thursday, van der Sloot took a six-and-a-half-hour flight on an FBI jet in what the bureau calls a foreign transfer of custody operation. Typically, the team comprises two FBI special agent pilots, at least one additional auxiliary crew member, and several agents providing security for the prisoner. In many long-haul flights, a medic also accompanies the team.

Prisoners are watched the entire time and wear restraints.

Van der Sloot was taken in a caravan of black SUVs to a jail in Birmingham, not far from Holloways hometown of Mountain Brook.

CNNs Ray Sanchez, Ben Finley, Josh Campbell and Liam Reilly contributed to this report.

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Joran van der Sloot will be arraigned on Friday morning at 11 a.m. in a Birmingham, Alabama, federal courthouse on extortion charges related to the disappearance of Natalee Holloway.

Van der Sloot arrived in Birmingham on Thursday afternoon after being flown on a Department of Justice jet with agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which left from Lima, Peru.

Van der Sloot is the prime suspect in the May 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba during a Mountain Brook High School, Alabama, senior trip.

The Dutch national will now face charges of extortion and wire fraud in the U.S. after allegedly attempting to sell Beth Holloway, Natalee's mother, information regarding the location of her daughter's body.

NATALEE HOLLOWAY SUSPECT JORAN VAN DER SLOOT ARRIVES IN US TO FACE EXTORTION, WIRE FRAUD CHARGES

The Hugo L. Black United States Courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama on Thursday, May 11, 2023. Joran van der Sloot, the Dutch man suspected in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway, will be extradited from Peru to face extortion and wire fraud charges here in connection with a quarter-million dollar plot targeting Holloway's mother.

Federal prosecutors say van der Sloot asked for $250,000  $25,000 upfront for the information, and the rest to be paid out when the body of Natalee Holloway was positively identified.

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

However, van der Sloot lied to Beth Holloway's lawyer, John Q. Kelly, about where her daughter's remains were located, according to American prosecutors.

FBI agents board the plane carrying Joran van der Sloot in Birmingham, Alabama, Thursday, June 8, 2023. The Dutch native has been extradited from Peru to the US to face charges of extortion in relation the disappearance of Natalee Holloway in 2005.

The alleged extortion scheme took place between March 29, 2010, and May 17, 2010.

JORAN VAN DER SLOOT CASE: FBI LEAVES PERU WITH NATALEE HOLLOWAY SUSPECT TO FACE CHARGES IN US: SOURCE

Van der Sloot then traveled to Peru and met Stephany Flores, 21, at a Lima casino owned by her father. Van der Sloot admitted to killing Flores, claiming he murdered her May 30, 2010, in a fit of anger after the 21-year-old found out he was connected to Natalee Holloway's disappearance.

JORAN VAN DER SLOOT WILL LIKELY BE TRANSFERRED TO US DESPITE LAST-MINUTE EFFORTS: INTERPOL OFFICIAL

Joran van der Sloot prepares to leave the airport in Lima, Peru on Thursday, June 8, 2023.

The charges were filed by federal prosecutors in 2010, but Peruvian officials didn't agree to release van der Sloot into American custody until this May.

He was originally sentenced to 28 years in prison for the killing of Flores, but more time was added because of a drug smuggling scandal he was involved in while in jail.

The plane carrying Joran van der Sloot lands in Birmingham, Alabama, Thursday, June 8, 2023. The Dutch native has been extradited from Peru to the US to face charges of extortion in relation the disappearance of Natalee Holloway in 2005.

Once van der Sloot's federal case concludes, he will head back to Peru to finish his sentence for murdering Flores. After finishing his sentence in Peru, van der Sloot will then come to an American prison, if convicted.
Joran van der Sloot pleaded not guilty in federal court during a Friday morning arraignment hearing on extortion charges, entering court with a smile as he faces extortion and wire fraud charges in connection with the 2005 disappearance of Alabama 18-year-old Natalee Holloway.

Van der Sloot, 35, is the prime suspect in the May 2005 disappearance of Holloway, who was last seen leaving a bar with him in Aruba during a trip for graduating seniors from Mountain Brook High School.

The court was prepared to provide a translator for him, but van der Sloot said, "Its really not necessary" because he speaks English well.

Beth Holloway, Natalee's mother, sat in one of the first three rows and appeared to keep her eyes on van der Sloot almost the entire time.

JORAN VAN DER SLOOT CASE: PRIME NATALEE HOLLOWAY SUSPECT TO BE ARRAIGNED ON EXTORTION CHARGES

Holloway family and friends walk to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Birmingham, Alabama, on Friday. Dutch national Joran van der Sloot pleaded not guilty in federal court to charges of extorting the family of American student Natalee Holloway.

Magistrate Judge Gray Borden told van der Sloot he would only accept a not guilty plea in the extortion and wire fraud case  and that if the Dutch national decided to plead guilty, he could do so at a later date.

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

Although the charges involve allegations that van der Sloot tried to extort and defraud Holloways mother, it marked the first time that she had seen van der Sloot face-to-face, said George Seymore, of Patriot Strategies, who represents the Holloway family.

Natalee Holloway was last seen alive in Aruba while on a Mountain Brook High School senior trip.

The Dutch national, who was convicted of murder in connection with a Peruvian business student's death in 2010, landed in Birmingham, Alabama, on Thursday afternoon after being taken from Lima, Peru, with agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Van der Sloot is being charged with extortion and wire fraud in the U.S. after allegedly attempting to sell Beth Holloway fake information regarding the location of her daughter's body.

Matt Holloway, brother of the late Natalee Holloway, is spotted arriving to court in Birmingham, Alabama, on Friday.

A 2010 federal indictment alleges van der Sloot extorted Beth Holloway, seeking $250,000 in exchange for the location of her daughter's remains.

After deposits of $25,000 were paid, van der Sloot allegedly lied to Beth Holloway's lawyer, John Q. Kelly, about where her daughter's remains were located, according to American prosecutors.

Joran van der Sloot prepares to leave the airport in Lima, Peru, on Thursday.

While van der Sloot was charged in 2010, the Peruvian government wouldn't agree to allow him to face charges in America until recently, when the government approved the temporary transfer of custody, arguing in part that he should go to trial before witnesses got too old.

Federal prosecutors say the alleged extortion scheme happened between March 29, 2010, and May 17, 2010.

NATALEE HOLLOWAY SUSPECT JORAN VAN DER SLOOT ARRIVES IN US TO FACE EXTORTION, WIRE FRAUD CHARGES

After receiving the money, van der Sloot then traveled to Peru and met Stephany Flores, 21, at a Lima casino owned by her father.

He killed her five years to the day after Holloway's disappearance, fled the country and was eventually captured.

A video still released June 9, 2010, shows Joran van der Sloot and Stephany Flores playing at a casino before her murder on May 30, 2010, in Lima, Peru.

He was initially sentenced to 28 years in prison for the murder, but saw more time added to his sentence because of a drug-smuggling operation he ran from behind bars.

Van der Sloot will remain in America while the federal case against him is ongoing.

Under an agreement with the government of Peru, he will go back there to finish his prison sentence after his trial in the Northern District of Alabama.

If convicted on the U.S. charges, van der Sloot would return to a federal prison after his Peruvian sentence ends in 2038 to serve up to 40 more years.

Natalee Hollway, center, went missing during a spring break trip in 2005 and was never found.

In an earlier statement provided to Fox News Digital when the Peruvian court announced the transfer of van der Sloot, Beth Holloway said this gives her family a chance at justice.

Fox News Claudia Kelly-Bazan contributed to this report.
Judge Aileen Cannon may initially preside over Trump court appearance. Who is she?

Judge Aileen Cannon, an appointee of former President Trump who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, may initially preside over his court appearance set for Tuesday, according to reporting from multiple outlets.

Trump has been indicted by the Justice Department (DOJ) on potential charges related to whether he mishandled classified documents.

Cannons name appeared on the summons for Trumps Tuesday appearance in Miami, as did Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the warrant to search the former presidents Florida home, ABC News first reported Friday.

Cannons presence as a judge in the case  even if it is limited to Trumps initial appearance  is likely to provoke scrutiny.

Rulings from Cannon substantially slowed the DOJs investigation into Trump, in one instance barring prosecutors from using the classified documents they seized from the home.

She later appointed a special master in the case tasked with assessing whether documents aligned with Trumps claims that documents might be covered by executive privilege  an argument the special master himself later expressed skepticism over.

Here are five things to know about Cannon.

Trump-appointed, bipartisan-approved

Trump nominated Cannon to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in April 2020. At the time, she was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Office for the Southern District of Florida, working in the criminal division of the appellate section.

The Senate confirmed Cannon on Nov. 12, 2020, five days after major networks called the 2020 election for President Biden, in a bipartisan 56-21 vote. Twelve Democrats supported her appointment, and 23 senators did not vote.

During her confirmation process, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked if Cannon had any discussions with anyone  including, but not limited to, individuals at the White House, at the Justice Department, or any outside groups  about loyalty to President Trump.

Cannon responded no in writing.

Member of the Federalist Society

Cannon has been a member of the Federalist Society since 2005, according to a judicial nominee questionnaire she submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee in April 2020. The group is made up of conservative and libertarian lawyers, law students and scholars.

Cannon said she joined the Federalist Society when she was a student at the University of Michigan Law School. She was asked during her confirmation process about why she joined the group.

I did so because I enjoyed the diversity of legal viewpoints discussed at Federalist Society meetings and events, Cannon responded in writing.

I also found interesting the organizations discussions about the constitutional separation of powers, the rule of law, and the limited role of the judiciary to say what the law isnot to make the law, she added.

Six of the nine justices sitting on the Supreme Court  all of whom were nominated by Republican presidents  are members of the Federalist Society, in addition to a number of GOP senators.

Appointed Trump cases special master

In September, Cannon shot into the spotlight after granting former Trumps request for an independent mediator to examine materials the FBI recovered during a search the month prior at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

Cannon made the divisive decision after hearing arguments from the ex-presidents lawyers, who pushed for the special master, and attorneys from the Department of Justice (DOJ), who said the former presidents claims of privilege were unwarranted. She appointed Judge Raymond Dearie to the post.

She ultimately ordered that a special master be appointed to determine what seized materials are protected by attorney-client and executive privilege.

The Justice Department appealed the ruling, and ultimately an appeals court ruled Dec. 1 that the appointment was improper, determining that a lower court could not limit the Justice Department investigation into the mishandling of White House records at Mar-a-Lago.

The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so, a three-judge panel wrote for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Trumps attorneys failed to meet multiple tests required to show that the government abused its authority by searching his home. The court rejected the former presidents claims to the documents as he argues they could be protected by personal or executive privilege.

Cannon ruled in the Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez threats case

Cannon is not new to presiding over high-profile litigation. In April 2022, the federal judge sentenced a man to 18 months in prison for making threats against Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Paul Hoeffer, 60, pleaded guilty in February to interstate transmission of threats to injure and admitted to threatening to kill the two congresswomen in March 2019 and November 2020. He also threatened a district attorney in Illinois.

But the 18-month sentence from Cannon was significantly shorter than the three-and-a-half years of prison time prosecutors had asked for. And it was more than a year shorter than the minimum punishment under federal sentencing guidelines, according to The Palm Beach Post.

Hoeffers legal team requested a shorter sentence because their client was diagnosed with cancer.

From Colombia to southern Florida

Cannon  who was born in 1981 in Colombia  made a number of stops in the legal world before landing at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

After receiving a bachelor of arts degree from Duke University in 2003 and earning her juris doctor from the University of Michigan Law School in 2007, Cannon clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in Des Moines, Iowa, where she worked for a year. The bench was Republican-appointed, according to the Times.

She then moved to Washington, D.C., to be an associate attorney at the corporate law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, where she worked for three years, before taking a job as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

Rebecca Beitsch contributed.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education violated the states open meetings law in 2021-22 and has been ordered by a judge to take steps to protect the publics right to know.

While Superior Court Judge Nathaniel Poovey described the violations in 2021-2022 as unintentional and partially caused by the pandemic, he ordered the board to better advertise its meetings and to follow the law in how it handles closed sessions.

The ruling came in response to a WBTV lawsuit accusing the board of multiple sunshine violations, including blocking the public from attending open, in-person sessions. The complaint also claimed that the board mishandled closed meetings  from not properly advertising them or keeping adequate minutes to failing to make the required public motion before going behind closed doors.

Title IX task force not in violation

At the same time, Poovey, the senior resident Superior Court judge in Catawba County, said the school board had not violated the open meetings law by excluding the press and the public from meetings of its Title IX Task Force, which was made up of mostly students.

That group, which was formed to help improve the school districts handling of sexual assaults in the schools, is not a public body, and so is exempt from the law, according to Pooveys order. The judge also denied WBTVs request that the board pay the stations legal fees.

In a statement, school board Chair Elyse Dashew welcomed the ruling.

We are very pleased that Judge Poovey recognized that we acted in good faith, she said. The crux of this lawsuit was about the Title IX Task Force.

After making repeated demands that the Title IX groups meetings should be open, WBTV sued CMS in 2021 seeking an injunction granting public access, which Superior Court Judge Eric Levinson denied.

In response, WBTV amended its complaint in 2022 to include claims where the board allegedly violated the open meetings law.

Specifically, Pooveys May 17 order requires the board to:

 Permit the public to attend in-person board meetings unless one or more board members is participating virtually during certain declarations of emergency.

 Give clear online notice of the time and place of all regularly scheduled board meetings as well as any changes to the times and locations of closed sessions.

 Start executive sessions only after making and approving a motion during the open meeting to go behind closed doors.

 Provide minutes for closed sessions so that a person not in attendance would have a reasonable understanding of what transpired, as the law requires.

In a story this week, WBTV said the board changed how it advertised its open and closed sessions after the lawsuit was filed.

Charles Jeter, CMSs executive director of government affairs, policy and board services, said the alleged violations occurred while the school board and other elected bodies in North Carolina were transitioning from exclusive in-person meetings to virtual sessions during the pandemic, and that the board was following guidance from the UNC School of Government and executive orders from Gov. Roy Cooper.
Bryan Kohberger enters the courtroom for a motion hearing regarding a gag order, Friday, June 9, 2023, in Latah County District Court in Moscow, Idaho. A judge overseeing the case against Kohberger, charged with killing four University of Idaho students last fall, is set to hear arguments over a gag order that largely bars attorneys and other parties in the case from speaking with news reporters. (Zach Wilkinson/Moscow-Pullman Daily News via AP, Pool) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

A judge overseeing the case against Bryan Kohberger, charged with killing four University of Idaho students last fall, heard arguments Friday over a gag order that largely bars attorneys and other parties in the case from speaking with news reporters.

A coalition of more than 30 media organizations has challenged the order, saying it violates the Constitutions guarantees of free speech and a free press, as has a lawyer for one of the victim's families. But prosecutors and the defendant's lawyers insist it's needed to prevent prejudicial news coverage that could damage Kohberger's right to a fair trial.

It remains appropriate to have an Order reminding lawyers and their agents of the rules of engagement in this country and that we try cases in court, not in the press, one of Kohberger's attorneys, Jay Weston Logsdon, wrote in a memo to the court this week.

Second District Judge John C. Judge indicated he would rule later on the gag order and on a separate issue of whether to allow cameras in the courtroom during further proceedings.

Kohberger, 28, is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and burglary in connection with the stabbing deaths in Moscow, Idaho, on Nov. 13, 2022. Judge entered not guilty pleas on his behalf last month. Prosecutors have not said if they will seek the death penalty.

The bodies of Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were found at a rental home across the street from the University of Idaho campus. The slayings shocked the rural Idaho community and neighboring Pullman, Washington, where Kohberger was a graduate student studying criminology at Washington State University.

The case has garnered widespread publicity, and in January Latah County Magistrate Judge Megan Marshall issued a nondissemination order barring attorneys, law enforcement agencies and others associated with the case from talking with the press or issuing statements unless they are quoting directly from a court document.

The Idaho Supreme Court in April declined to vacate the gag order, saying the news organizations, including The Associated Press, should have first asked the lower court to lift the order. The justices did not weigh in on whether the gag order violates First Amendment rights.

The news organizations subsequently did ask the lower court to revoke the order, and Judge scheduled arguments for Friday. The media coalition says that while it respects the defendant's right to a fair trial under the Sixth Amendment, the court should not have issued a gag order without evidence that right would be infringed by their ability to speak with attorneys involved in the case.

Intervenors agree that there has been, and will continue to be, great publicity surrounding this case, the coalition's attorneys wrote. But publicity alone is not prejudicial. ... The States and Mr. Kohbergers failure to present any evidence of prejudicial news coverage, and the Courts failure to consider alternative measures, means the competing constitutional rights here were improperly balanced and the Gag Order should be vacated."

Gag orders that prohibit journalists from writing about certain cases are considered to be severely problematic under the First Amendment. But the U.S. Supreme Court and other appeals courts have upheld some that prohibit attorneys, police or others involved in a case  those with privileged information about it  from speaking with reporters to begin with, as a way to avoid influencing potential jurors or otherwise jeopardizing a defendants right to a fair trial.

Shanon Gray, an attorney for the Goncalves family, has also asked the judge to lift the gag order, saying he should be allowed to speak on the familys behalf.

During Friday's arguments, Wendy Olson, an attorney for the media group, argued that even if the gag order is vacated, ethical rules for lawyers will remain in place that prohibit them from making public statements that have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing the case.

Olson suggested that allowing prosecutors and defense attorneys to speak with reporters  if they want to  to explain legal proceedings or terms, for example, would improve coverage of the case to the benefit of the public.

Logsdon disagreed, denigrating the press at length and insisting reporters are merely interested in attracting clicks online.

The reality is that if they spoke to us, they will pick and choose from our statements, they will twist what we said into things we never meant, and they will continue to put on the same narrative that gets them clicks, he said.
A High Court judge in London has denied Julian Assange permission to appeal an order to extradite him to the United States, where he faces criminal charges under the Espionage Act.

The decision was dated Tuesday and is the latest in a years-long legal saga. His camp told CNN on Thursday that they will lodge a new appeal next week.

In a ruling dated June 6, 2023 and seen by CNN, Mr. Justice Swift said Assanges application had been refused stating that none of the four grounds of appeal raises any properly arguable point.

In a separate ruling, the High Court judge also denied Assange permission to appeal and challenge the dismissal of other parts of his case during a ruling by district judge Vanessa Baraitser in January 2021. After revising eight proposed grounds of appeal the judge argued he did not consider the proposed appeals raised any properly arguable case.

The 51-year-old is wanted by US authorities on 18 criminal counts after WikiLeaks, the organization he founded, published thousands of classified documents and diplomatic cables in 2010 and 2011.

A London court issued a formal extradition order to send the Australian to the US in April last year; it was rubber-stamped by the UK government two months later. The Home Office stressed at the time that the UK courts have not found his extradition to be incompatible with his human rights.

The UK courts have not found that it would be oppressive, unjust or an abuse of process to extradite Mr. Assange. Nor have they found that extradition would be incompatible with his human rights, including his right to a fair trial and to freedom of expression, and that whilst in the US he will be treated appropriately, including in relation to his health, it said in a statement announcing the order almost a year ago.

In response to the latest ruling, Assanges wife, Stella, said her husbands legal team would make a renewed application for appeal to the same court next Tuesday.

The matter will then proceed to a public hearing before two new judges at the High Court and we remain optimistic that we will prevail, and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the U.S. government, she wrote in a post on Twitter.

Reaction to decision

Assange is currently being held at Belmarsh Prison in southeast London. He has been at the high-security facility since he was forcibly removed from Ecuadors central London embassy and arrested by Londons Metropolitan Police in April 2019.

Since then, he has completed a British jail sentence for breaching bail conditions when he entered the diplomatic haven back in 2012 but has remained at Belmarsh as he has engaged in the lengthy fight against his deportation.

Assange faces an 18-count indictment handed down by the Eastern District of Virginia which alleges that the WikiLeaks founder actively solicited classified information, pushing former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain thousands of pages of classified material and providing Assange with diplomatic State Department cables, Iraq war-related significant activity reports and information related to Guantanamo Bay detainees. If convicted, Assange could be sentenced to up to 175 years in prison.

In January 2021, a UK judge rejected a request from the US to extradite Assange, ruling that such a move would be oppressive to his mental health.

That decision was overturned by the High Court in December 2021 on the basis of assurances from the US government over how he was likely to be treated if extradited.

Supporters of Assange and human rights groups have long expressed concerns over the US indictment of the WikiLeaks founder, arguing the extradition order undermines freedom of the press.

Amnesty Internationals European Institutions Office described the latest court decision as disappointing. It said allowing the extradition would set a dangerous precedent, threatening all our rights to freedom of expression in a Twitter post.

The reaction was similar from Reporters Without Borders (RSF) which said it was deeply concerned by the High Court decision against Assange which brings him dangerously close to being extradited.

It is absurd that a single judge can issue a three-page decision that could land Julian Assange in prison for the rest of his life and permanently impact the climate for journalism around the world, said Rebecca Vincent, RSFs Director of Campaigns.

The historical weight of what happens next cannot be overstated; it is time to put a stop to this relentless targeting of Assange and act instead to protect journalism and press freedom. Our call on President Biden is now more urgent than ever: drop these charges, close the case against Assange, and allow for his release without further delay.

Meanwhile, the International and the European Federations of Journalists (IFJ-EFJ) said it was appalled by the decision. IFJ President Dominique Pradalie called on the British and US governments to end its grotesque persecution of the embattled Australian. She added: If Assange goes to jail, no journalist on earth will be safe.

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Julian Assange loses latest bid to stop extradition to the U.S. on spying charges

FILE - Buildings are reflected in the window as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is taken from court, where he appeared on charges of jumping British bail seven years ago, in London, on May 1, 2019. A British judge has rejected the latest attempt by Assange to fight extradition to the United States to face spying charges. High Court justice Jonathan Swift said a new appeal would simply re-run arguments that Assanges lawyers had already made and lost. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

LONDON (AP)  A British judge has rejected the latest attempt by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to fight extradition to the United States to face spying charges.

High Court justice Jonathan Swift said a new appeal would simply re-run arguments that Assanges lawyers had already made and lost.

Assange has battled in British courts for years to avoid being sent to the U.S., where he faces 17 charges of espionage and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks publication of classified diplomatic and military documents more than a decade ago.

In 2021, a British district judge ruled that Assange should not be extradited because he was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions. U.S. authorities later provided assurances that the Australia-born Assange wouldnt face the severe treatment that his lawyers said would put his physical and mental health at risk.

Those assurances led Britains High Court and Supreme Court to overturn the lower courts ruling, and the British government authorized extradition in June 2022.

Assange is seeking to halt extradition by obtaining a new court hearing on parts of his case that were dismissed by the first judge.

But in a ruling made public on Friday, Swift said all eight parts of Assanges potential appeal were not arguable and should not be heard.

The proposed appeal comes to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made to and rejected by the district judge, he said.

Assanges wife, Stella Assange, said the WikiLeaks founder would make a new appeal attempt at a High Court hearing on Tuesday. He has almost exhausted his avenues of appeal in the U.K. but could still try to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

We remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States, where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the US government, Stella Assange said on Twitter.

Assanges supporters and lawyers maintain he was acting as a journalist and is entitled to First Amendment protections of freedom of speech. They argue that the case is politically motivated, that he would face inhumane treatment and be unable to get a fair trial in the U.S.

Assange, 51, remains in Londons high-security Belmarsh Prison, where he has been since he was arrested in 2019 for skipping bail during a separate legal battle. Before that, he spent seven years inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.

Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed, but British judges have kept Assange in prison pending the outcome of the U.S. extradition case.
Photo: Jack Taylor (Getty Images)

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and notorious whistleblower, lost another appeal challenging his extradition to face legal charges in the United States Friday. Now his lawyers say Assange, who previously spent seven years seeking refuge in an Ecuadorian embassy, is dangerously close to spending the rest of his life in an American cell.

Assange faces 18 criminal charges in the US including an alleged violation of the 1917 Espionage Act and computer hacking. WikiLeaks published thousands of classified documents and cables, some of which showed US soldiers killing civilians in Iraq.

Read more

This weeks appeal rejection by a UK High Court judge was the latest in a years-long legal battle to bring the WikiLeaks founder back to the US. The judge, according to a ruling seen by CNN, said none of Assanges four grounds for appeal raises any properly arguable point. Assanges legal team, according to The Guardian, has tried to convince courts that the US reasoning for extraditing him is politically motivated.

Its been a dramatic few years for Assange. The WikiLeaks founder was forced out of Ecuadors central London embassy and arrested by local police in 2019. Since then, hes resided in Londons Belmarsh Prison fighting efforts to extradite him. Assanges supporters, as well as a psychiatrist who has interviewed him over a dozen times in prison, warn hes at a very high risk for committing suicide if extradited and subjected to long stretches of solitary confinement. A UK judge actually cited those concerns and previously rejected an extradition request under the grounds it would be oppressive to Assanges health. Another UK appeals court disagreed with that assessment, though, and overturned the ruling in late 2021.

That risk [of suicide] is in our judgment excluded by the assurances which are offered, Chief Justice Lord Burnett previously said.

What happens now?

Assanges wife Stella Assange said her husband will make a renewed appeal to a High Court in the UK next week. After that, Assanges case will be discussed in a public hearing with two new judges.

We remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the U.S. government, Stella Assange said.

Statement:



On Tuesday next week my husband Julian Assange will make a renewed application for appeal to the High Court. The matter will then proceed to a public hearing before two new judges at the High Court and we remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not  Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW (@Stella_Assange) June 8, 2023

Supporters of Assange warn his prosecution and imprisonment in the US would deal a blow to journalistic protections and freedom of expression. The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), which released a statement condemning the UK High Courts recent extradition refusal, say Assanges prosecution would make it more difficult for reporters to discuss or share classified information on consequential information in the public interest.

The idea of Assange or anyone being tried in a U.S. court for obtaining and publishing confidential documents the same way investigative reporters do every day should be terrifying to all Americans, FPF Director of Advocacy Seth Stern said.

Though Assange still has several legal avenues he can pursue, the FPF said it seems increasingly likely the final call on his freedom could come down to a pardon from US President Joe Biden.

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Gov. Laura Kelly on Friday named a Department of Justice drug enforcement official to be the next superintendent of the Kansas Highway Patrol as the agencys current controversial leader retires.

The Democratic governor announced Erik Smith, the assistant administrator and chief of the Inspection Division within the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, will become superintendent on July 7. He will take over for Col. Herman Jones, whose last day with the Highway Patrol was Friday.

Smith has worked in law enforcement for 30 years, starting in the Sedgwick County Sheriffs Office in 1993.

I appreciate Colonel Jones tenure at KHP and his over 45 years of service to our state, Kelly said in a statement. I also welcome Erik Smith back to Kansas. I am confident he will draw upon his experience in law enforcement in Sedgwick County, in Kansas City, and at the national level to strengthen the Kansas Highway Patrol and keep Kansans safe.

Until Smith begins, the patrols assistant superintendent, Jason DeVore, will serve as acting superintendent. While Smith can begin leading the agency as an acting superintendent, the Kansas Senate will need to confirm Smith before he can take on the role permanently.

I am extremely grateful for Governor Kellys confidence and am humbled by the responsibility to carry on KHPs storied tradition of service, courtesy, and protection, Smith said in a statement. I am honored to serve beside these brave men and women and am absolutely committed to leading this organization as they deliver quality law enforcement and public safety services to all Kansans.

Smith steps into an agency that has been embroiled in controversy for years.

Jones announced plans to retire in February as Republican lawmakers were threatening to move the patrol out of Kellys leadership over allegations of sexual harassment against Jones and a shrinking patrol work force. Jones has been the subject of multiple lawsuits filed against the agency including a federal lawsuit from female troopers who claim the former superintendent touched employees on the back or shoulder and sent them texts of a sexual nature.

Jones testified in defense of the Highway Patrol last month as part of an ongoing civil case over the Kansas two step  when an officer takes a couple steps toward their vehicle in order to return and engage in a voluntary interaction with a driver. The tactic is often used to keep drivers talking and buy time for drug-sniffing dogs to arrive.

The lawsuit was filed before Jones took over as superintendent of the patrol but the American Civil Liberties Union alleged that Jones did not stop the practice.

Despite the allegations of misconduct, Kelly stood by Jones throughout his tenure. A news release announcing Smiths appointment did not mention the allegations.

On Friday, Smiths nomination earned bipartisan support from Kansas lawmakers who expressed appreciation that Kelly opted to hire a new leader from outside the agency.

Rep. John Carmichael, a Wichita Democrat, said he was pleased with the choice and had worried that, given controversy in the patrol in recent years, Kelly would struggle to find a qualified professional willing to take on the job. Smith, Carmichael noted, will face a significant professional challenge stepping into the agency.

I certainly hope and I think that he will be up to the task but its also going to take a willingness on the part of the rank and file to accept new leadership from outside the organization, Carmichael said. Theres a lot of healing that needs to be done, theres a lot of restoration of faith and trust if you will.

Sen. J.R. Claeys, a Salina Republican, and Rep. Stephen Owens, a Hesston Republican, who jointly spearheaded an effort to threaten to move the patrol under the control of the Kansas attorney general if Jones did not leave, both said they were happy with the choice.

I look forward to working with Mr. Smith and seeing his leadership bring back the honor and dignity that was once a mainstay in the KHP, Owens said in a text.

Claeys, who is also an advisor to Republican Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, said Smith was vetted as a potential candidate to lead the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, a post that ultimately went to Tony Mattivi, a former federal prosecutor who ran unsuccessfully for state attorney general.

While Claeys said he still wanted to explore the possibility of reorganizing the Highway Patrol and Kansas Bureau of Investigation, there was no longer any urgency to restructure the agency.

I believe hell make a great addition to the Highway Patrol and will be trusted by Legislators, Claeys said. I dont think youre going to find fault with this pick.

The Stars Jonathan Shorman contributed to this report.
ASTANA (Reuters) -Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev will not attend the annual economic forum in Russia's St Petersburg next week, the government said on Friday, after refusing to toe the Kremlin's line over the Russian invasion of Ukraine at last year's event.

The Kazakh government said only two officials will represent the Central Asian nation at this year's forum.

Until its invasion of Ukraine, Russia regularly hosted world leaders and business titans at the forum, but Western officials and business figures now shun it, and last year Tokayev stole the limelight by rejecting the Kremlin claims on Ukraine.

Sharing the stage with Russian President Putin - who will address the forum this year as well - Tokayev said then that Kazakhstan would not recognise the independence of pro-Russian statelets in eastern Ukraine or other ex-Soviet republics.

His comments raised eyebrows because Kazakhstan, which shares the world's longest continuous land border with Russia, has for decades been a member of Moscow-led security and trade blocs, and calls Russia its strategic partner.

Asked who would attend the conference this year, a Kazakh government spokeswoman said only Deputy Prime Minister Roman Sklyar and Deputy Economy Minister Timur Zhaksylykov would go.

Tokayev's office declined to comment on the reasons why he was not attending.

Russia's RIA news agency reported last month that Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, invited by Putin, said would not be able to attend this year's forum. Russian media have not announced plans by any other world leaders to attend.

The forum in St Petersburg, the former imperial capital of the Russian Empire, has been held since 1997 and is cast by Russian officials as Moscow's answer to the annual World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland.

(Reporting by Tamara Vaal; writing by Olzhas Auyezov; editing by Mark Heinrich)
Kentucky coal company fined $200,000 in case of cheating on tests to protect miners

An Eastern Kentucky coal company that pleaded guilty in connection with cheating on tests designed to protect miners from deadly black lung disease was sentenced to pay a $200,000 fine.

U.S. District Judge Robert E. Wier sentenced Black Diamond Coal LLC in federal court in Pikeville Thursday.

The judge sentenced Walter Perkins, who was in charge of the testing at Black Diamond, to six months in jail and six months on home detention for his role in the cheating.

Black Diamond operated an underground mine in Floyd County from August 2018 to April 2021, according to a court document.

When employees of the Mine Safety and Health Administration arrived at the mine on Oct. 8, 2020, they found a dust monitor sitting on a table in the first-aid trailer, when a machine operator was supposed to be wearing it underground, according to the court record.

The monitors are used to measure the concentration of respirable dust in coal mines, meaning dust that can be inhaled into the lungs. Machines that dig coal churn out dust from coal and rocks.

Coal companies are required to use ventilation and other measures to hold down dust in mines, and can be fined over unsafe levels.

Leaving the dust monitor in an office meant it would record clean air, not the level of dust inside the mine.

Coal dust causes black lung, an incurable disease that slowly chokes off a miners lung function, often leading to premature death.

Perkins told inspectors he had given the monitor to the operator of a continuous mining machine to wear, but that the operator returned it because it hadnt worked properly, according to Perkins plea agreement.

However, MSHA was able to determine the monitor had not malfunctioned and hadnt been underground because sensors in it hadnt recorded any movement and the temperatures the unit recorded were warmer than in the mine.

The continuous mining machine operator told authorities Perkins had not given him the dust monitor during the time he was supposed to wear it.

The purpose of these safety regulations is to prevent a progressive and irreversible disease, said U.S. Attorney Carlton S. Shier IV. Shier said that companies that falsify the dust sampling arent just violating the law, they are dramatically reducing the safety of their employees. That is simply unacceptable, and compelled us to prosecute this case.

A display case at NIOSH shows a normal lung and a diseased black lung, caused by inhaling coal dust and other harmful particles while coal mining.

Black Diamond pleaded guilty to a charge of willfully violating a mandatory health and safety standard and a charge of making false statements.

Perkins, 45, of Harlan County, pleaded guilty to a charge that he authorized, ordered or carried out a violation of a health and safety standard and to a charge of making false statements.

Prosecutors said his actions cut out the heart of that system designed to protect his fellow coal miners.

In addition to the fine, Black Diamond is to pay $400 to any miner who worked at the mine during the violation but isnt employed in the industry anymore  meaning they dont get free screening for black lung  so they can get screened.

That payment to former miners is the first of its kind, according to a news release from Shier.

Perkins attorney, Michael B. Fox, argued in memorandum that a sentence of probation would be appropriate for him.

A supervisor told Perkins to lie to MSHA about the dust data, and his need to keep his job was a significant factor in his crime, the memo said.

Walter was dependent upon his employer to maintain his livelihood and believed refusing to follow his employers directive to provide false information would result in his dismissal as an employee, Fox wrote.

The attorney for Black Diamond, Brandon W. Marshall, said in a memo that the company closed not long after the inspection that led to the criminal charges.

In a situation in which some mine operators might have raised insolvency as a shield against a significant fine, Black Diamond instead wanted to make amends and worked out a cooperative, meaningful, punitive deal with the government, Marshall wrote.

After dropping for decades, the prevalence of black lung rose beginning around 2000, particularly in Central Appalachia, which includes Eastern Kentucky.

One study published in 2018 said that 20.6% of miners in Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia had black lung, four times the rate among miners elsewhere in the country.

Researchers have pointed to several possible reasons, including increased dust from mining in thinner coal seams, but cheating on dust sampling was also identified as a factor.

A 2020 paper quoted miners and others as saying negligent dust practices and fraudulent dust sampling have become commonplace in many Appalachian mines.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration can only protect miners from the risk of developing black lung disease if it has accurate sampling results, Chris Williamson, an official with the agency, said in a news release. Given the troubling spike in black lung cases in Appalachia, we must hold accountable those who choose not to comply with the law and put miners health and lives at risk.
The deep division which affects the United States feels much like a long sickness. Our collective temperature has spiked. Heated disagreement on everything from public safety, public health, human rights, and terrible inequality have driven us further apart, even when bleak tragedy could have brought us closer together.

Kentucky is no exception to this distressing trend. This division, between those on the political left and right, between the rural and urban regions of our state, threatens to kill all possibility of progress; such division separates friends, neighbors, and even family. Many now wonder what can be done to bind up these wounds, others still believe that we are too late to see a great healing that will move us toward a better day.

I have found myself wondering much the same thing, as I am sure many of you have as well. It makes sense that we have been wrestling with such anxieties; just in the past three years, we have endured a global pandemic, political unrest the likes of which has not been experienced in decades, and a reckoning over questions of great inequality in our nation. All of this has left many of us, in some form or another, frozen in fear. Fear breeds division.

The divide between those in rural and urban communities is felt all across the country, not only in our state, and it manifests in different ways. Someone in my home of Harlan County likely has a fairly different existence than someone in Lexington or Louisville, for instance. Nevertheless, these differences are often greatly exaggerated, and often for political purposes.

The concerns and the difficulties of a poor worker in eastern Kentucky are not so different from a poor worker in Louisvilles West End. The struggle of the urban poor is the same as the rural poor. Daily, it seems, we are all forced to pay more for the basic necessities of life, food, housing, healthcare, education. At the same time, the wages of workers across our state remain stuck at a level which only perpetuates poverty, rather than ensuring that the immense wealth of our country is shared in a way that creates a dignified and happy life for all people.

All the while, our political, social, and economic reality is continuously influenced by the very wealthy and elite, to the benefit of the wealthy and elite. Billions upon billions are spent every election cycle, while income and wealth inequality in the United States is worse than any other industrialized country in the world. And each time a change to our reality is offered, be it free universal healthcare, expanded affordable housing, actions to protect our environment, or provide clean drinking water, these solutions are condemned as socialist or communist, and such labels are often attached by those who could not even define the words they intend as insults.

Such tactics are simply another tool of creating fear. What is needed in Kentucky, and across the country, is a form of society where no person should fear another, and where no one, regardless of where they live or how much money they have, be afraid of sickness, hunger, or despair. We have the potential to disregard the division which is often forced upon us. There is no need for the workers and the poor of eastern Kentucky, or other rural places, to fear workers and the poor of Lexington or Louisville or other urban places. We all are in need of a new reality, one defined by true equality, and true freedom. In recognizing that we are engaged in the same struggle to achieve the same dignified life, by coming to see ourselves in one another, only then can we begin the work of creating a better reality for all people in our state.

TJ Hensley is a recent graduate of Georgetown College, and the host of the Appalachian Firesides Podcast on Apple and Spotify. His opinions are his own.
Kevin McCarthy says Trump indictment will disrupt the nation: Were not going to stand for it

Kevin McCarthy launched an aggressive defence of Donald Trump after his indictment on 37 counts of mishandling top secret documents.

This is going to disrupt this nation because it goes to the core of equal justice for all which is not being seen today, the Republican House Speaker told Fox News on Friday.

And we're not going to stand for it.

Mr McCarthys comments came after the Department of Justice unsealed a 49-page indictment which laid out in extraordinary detail Special Counsel Jack Smiths 15-month investigation into Mr Trumps willful defiance of efforts to retrieve the materials.

The indictment painted a damning picture of Mr Trumps reckless storage of top secret material he took to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, and his efforts to obstruct investigators.

The classified material included nuclear secrets, war plans, and vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies.

Mr Trump told lawyers tasked with complying with a DOJ subpoena that he didnt want anyone going through my boxes, according to the indictment.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy aggressively defended the former president on Friday (Associated Press)

Mr McCarthy, who is struggling to hold on to the House leadership, called the indictment a dark day for America.

You've got a sitting president right now in the exact same situation. You have a former first lady, senator, secretary of state, that had the same situation that nothing was done to, he told Fox News.

Republicans also rushed to defend Mr Trump despite the seemingly overwhelming evidence presented in the 49-page indictment.

We have now reached a war phase. Eye for an eye, Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs wrote on Twitter.

Elise Stefanik, the number three House Republican, tweeted that she was committed to holding government officials accountable for their endless illegal witch hunt against President Trump.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley wrote: If the people in power can jail their political opponents at will, we dont have a republic.

And Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, said: There is no limit to what these people will do to protect their power & destroy those who threaten it, even if it means ripping our country apart & shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together.

However, the indictment comes not from political rivals or even from prosecutors but from a grand jury.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was investigated by the FBI in 2016 for her handling of classified material, who opted not to charge her after saying she had been extremely careless.

President Joe Biden and Trumps vice president Mike Pence were found to have retained classified materials, but complied with efforts by the National Archive to return them.
Kevin McCarthys tweet on Trump indictment is either a bluff or really dangerous | Opinion

The indictment news had hardly broken before House Speaker Kevin McCarthy rushed to defend former President Donald Trump:

Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America.



It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him. Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades.



I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump  Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) June 9, 2023

McCarthy pinned a tweet to the top of his Twitter feed that said President Joe Biden was the one indicting Trump in the Mar-a-Lago missing documents case.

He called the indictment a grave injustice and offered this pledge: House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.

The tweet is a gross mischaracterization, of course. Biden did not indict anyone. The Justice Department brought the case against the former president. Yes, it is a part of the executive branch, but to claim Biden, a Democrat, was in charge is simply not true  presidents dont indict anyone. McCarthy knows it.

Beyond that basic fact, there are two ways to look at McCarthys reaction:

 The tweet is a bluff that McCarthy had to put on social media given the happenings of this past week in his Republican caucus.

In case one missed it, the Bakersfield Republican has been trying to manage an insurrection among his GOP ranks. Members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus joined Democrats on Tuesday in voting against a procedural measure to keep legislation moving forward. Without that measure passing, bills could not be taken up. So action in the House ground to a halt.

McCarthy decided to scrap votes for the rest of the week so he could work on the impasse with the Freedom Caucus members. They are upset with the compromise bill McCarthy struck with Biden to raise the national debt ceiling.

Seen in this way, McCarthy had no choice but to strike an antagonistic tone over the Trump indictment.

 That said, the other possibility is that McCarthy really believes what he put in the social media posting. He thinks the Justice Department has committed a grave injustice, and he intends to somehow hold the nations top law-enforcement agency accountable, whatever that means.

That would be a dangerous move. As CNN reported, President Donald Trump acknowledged in 2021 that he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran.

Imagine what other records could be among the trove found at Mar-a-Lago.

To suggest the Justice Department is weaponized  a term that loses all meaning when it is nothing but a GOP talking point  without first knowing the facts of the case is irresponsible. It becomes dangerous if the investigation gets called off prematurely.

The flip side to McCarthys weaponization claim is that, in fact, Trump is guilty of violating the rules regarding presidential records. There has been ample evidence already made public of the volumes of documents found at Trumps Mar-a-Lago home.

There is also the obstructive behavior Trump engaged in when national archive officials tried to get those documents returned. That obstruction is what makes Trumps case different from all the presidents and vice presidents who came before him  Biden included.

Taking presidential records, which belong to the American people, home like a prize or trophy is a violation of law. If Trump did that, he should be found guilty and be sentenced. That is how the law works.

McCarthys tweet includes this: I, and every American who believes in the rule of law ... If that is so, it is time for McCarthy to prove he means it.
Erling Haaland has scored 12 times in this year's Champions League (Glyn KIRK)

Manchester City are heavy favourites to win their first ever Champions League as the super-rich club take on one of Europe's old guard in resurgent Inter Milan.

Here AFP looks at the battles which could define Saturday's final in Istanbul:

Erling Haaland v Francesco Acerbi

Monster striker Haaland gives City a whole new dimension of attacking threat and if Inter are to have any chance of stopping Pep Guardiola's team they need to stay right on top of the Norwegian.

Inter have been without former captain and star centre-back Milan Skriniar, who is off to Paris Saint-Germain in the summer, for months due to a back injury and in theory there should be no match between Haaland and Acerbi.

Veteran Italy international Acerbi has been a capable replacement for Skriniar but he has not had to deal with this sort of striker, who will top the Champions League scoring charts for the second time in his career aged just 22.

The difficulty of Acerbi's task was summed up by a young fan outside Inter's training ground who gave the 35-year-old a fishing net with which to try and catch Haaland.

Kevin De Bruyne v Henrikh Mkhitaryan

Haaland might be the killer but De Bruyne is the man who loads the bullets for City and all-action midfielder Mkhitaryan will be crucial to stopping him from running riot.

De Bruyne has set up seven goals in 11 matches since the last international break, including two in City's 4-0 destruction of Real Madrid in the second leg of their semi-final which confirmed their passage to Istanbul.

Inter's midfield is a unit which attacks and defends as one but former Manchester United man Mkhitaryan, assuming he is fit to play, will be the lucky one from a three-man central trio who will most have to deal with De Bruyne's forays.

Federico Dimarco v Kyle Walker

Milanese born and raised and a lifelong Inter fan, wing-back Dimarco has become a key player for his boyhood club in his mid-20s after spending years away on a series of loans.

The 25-year-old provides width and dynamism on the left flank and delivers mean crosses and set-pieces, and his battle with pacy England full-back Walker will be key to how Inter build attacks and break on City, who are likely to dominate the ball.

A fixture this season in Inzaghi's side following the departure of Ivan Perisic to Tottenham, Dimarco has played in 10 of Inter's 12 Champions League match and set up five goals during their European campaign.

Lautaro Martinez v Manuel Akanji

Argentina forward Martinez is on another one of his characteristic goalscoring streaks and the latest has come just at the right time to do some damage to City.

Martinez has netted 11 times in his last 12 matches in all competitions and is perfectly happy linking up with either Edin Dzeko or similarly on-form Romelu Lukaku.

With one of Dzeko and Lukaku occupying Ruben Dias as more traditional centre-forwards, Lautaro will be buzzing around the City backline and targeting the area occupied by Akanji.

Ilkay Gundogan v Hakan Calhanoglu

Gundogan tends to step up when it counts for City, providing the midfield thrust with Rodri and the occasional important goal, such as winning his double in the FA Cup final against Manchester United.

Calhanoglu meanwhile has found a new lease of life since switching from one side of Milan to the other two years ago, and has the added incentive of trying to win the Champions League in his home country.

td/nr
The collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine is one of the biggest industrial and ecological disasters in Europe for decades. The catastrophe has destroyed entire villages, flooded farmland, deprived tens of thousands of people of power and clean water, and caused massive environmental damage.

Its still impossible to say whether the dam collapsed because it was deliberately targeted or if the breach could have been caused by structural failure. The dam and hydroelectric power plant are under Russian control and therefore inaccessible to independent investigators, leaving experts around the world trying to piece together what happened based on limited visual evidence.

Several Western officials have blamed Russia for the disaster, either directly accusing Moscow of targeting the dam or saying that Russia is responsible simply because it is the aggressor in the war on Ukraine.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the destruction as another devastating consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but added that the UN doesnt have access to information to independently verify the cause.

A NATO military official told CNN that, while it will take some time before they know for certain who was responsible for the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, they believe Russia was likely behind it. The official added that Russia stood the most to gain by the move, which could potentially slow down an anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive, if it were to take place in that part of the country.

Satellite images of the Nova Kakhovka dam before its collapse (left, on June 5) and after the disaster (right, on June 7). - Maxar Technologies/Reuters

A number of civil engineering experts have suggested that an explosion inside the structure is the most likely cause of the dam breach, although its not the only possible explanation.

Here are the three main theories on what caused the collapse  and what experts and officials say about each:

Did Russia do it?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his government and the countrys military were quick to blame Moscow for the disaster. They said Russian forces blew up the reservoir from inside, with Zelensky quoting a report by Ukrainian intelligence last year that claimed occupying troops had mined the dam.

The Ukrainians point out that the facility has been under Russian control for the past year, making it easy for Russian forces to plant explosives.

Social media posts indicate that people in the area heard the sound of explosions around the time the dam was thought to have been damaged.

The wider timing of the incident is not insignificant. While Moscow and Kyiv have previously accused each other of plotting to blow up the Soviet-era dam, this collapse coincided with Ukrainian forces gearing up for their widely expected summer counter-offensive.

The dam spans the Dnipro River, a major waterway that has become a front line in the conflict and the scene of heavy fighting in this part of southern Ukraine. The city of Kherson, which sits on the west bank of the Dnipro river, was liberated by the Ukrainian military in November after eight months of Russian occupation. But much of the east bank of the river south of the Nova Kakhovka dam remains under Russian control.

Ukraines forces have increasingly taken the battle to Russias entrenched front lines in the south and east, and Kyiv has accused Russia of blowing up the dam in panic.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior aide to Zelensky, said the terrorists goal is obvious  to create obstacles for the offensive actions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

This once again confirms that the Kremlin is not thinking strategically, but rather in terms of short-term situational advantages. But the consequences are already catastrophic, he told CNN.

The damage is also affecting the area north of the reservoir, where water levels are falling. The collapse has left 94% of irrigation systems in Kherson, 74% in Zaporizhzhia and 30% in Dnipro regions without a source of water, according to the Ukrainian Agricultural Ministry.

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant also lies upstream from the destroyed dam. The reservoir supplies cooling water to the plant, Europes largest nuclear power station, and is crucial for its safety. The plant is under Russian control, which has been a major source of anxiety for the Ukrainians, still scared by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Could it have been a missile attack by Ukraine?

Russia has denied any involvement in the disaster and in turn accused Ukraine of destroying the dam, without providing evidence.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed the attack was planned and carried out by order received from Kyiv, from the Kyiv regime, aiming to deprive Crimea of water and to distract from the battlefield. Ukraine has denied the accusations.

The reservoir supplies water to large swaths of southern Ukraine, including to the Crimean peninsula which Russia illegally annexed in 2014.

Crimea has experienced water issues ever since Ukraine cut its supply shortly after the annexation. Russian forces captured the North Crimea Canal  which is fed by the Kakhovka reservoir  and began restoring the water supply in the first days of their invasion in 2022.

While the flooding will likely affect any counteroffensive by Ukraine, its also impacting Russian forces. Some of the areas worst hit by the disaster are under Russias control and have in the past served as staging grounds for Moscows military.

The Ukrainian city of Korsunka seen in a satellite image on June 7 after flooding caused by the collapsed dam. - Maxar Technologies/AP

There are also suggestions that the dam collapse took at least some Russian forces by surprise.

An officer in Ukraines armed forces told CNN that his men witnessed Russian soldiers being swept up in flood waters and fleeing the east bank of the Dnipro River. Capt. Andrei Pidlisnyi told CNN in a telephone interview that when the dam burst in the early hours of Tuesday morning, no one on the Russian side was able to get away. All the regiments the Russians had on that side were flooded. CNN cannot independently verify his account.

Russia has accused Ukraine of launching mass artillery attacks on the dam, but some experts question whether it would even be possible to cause destruction on this scale from the outside.

Several experts said an internal explosion was a more likely explanation.

Shelling by Ukraine is highly unlikely as it would need to get massive explosives close to the foundations, Chris Binnie, a visiting professor at University of Exeter and the chair of Tidal Engineering and Environmental Services, told the UK Science Media Centre.

Craig Goff, the technical director and lead of the Dams and Reservoirs team at HR Wallingford, a civil engineering and environmental hydraulics consultancy, said inflicting enough damage on the dam would require a very precise strike.

Back in the Second World War, there were the [Royal Air Force] Dambusters attacks on German dams and they had to spend a lot of time working out exactly where to place explosives on the dam in order to cause enough damage to cause it to breach, he told CNN.

It wasnt a simple thing. You had to get the explosives right down on the upstream side of the dam at a deep depth. If it was just the top off the dam then it would probably still survive. Youd lose a bit of water but it would survive, Goff said.

Structural failure?

The Nova Kakhovka dam  the largest reservoir in Ukraine in terms of volume  is also the furthest downstream of a cascade of six Soviet-era dams on the Dnipro River. The fact that the facility has been operating for many decades has prompted speculation around a possible technical failure.

The section of dam that were looking at is a concrete gravity dam, 35 meters high and 85 meters long (115 feet high and 279 feet long). This is a very common type of dam all around the world. Theyve been built for hundreds of years and if they were designed and built well and are maintained adequately, then the chance of a failure is very, very low. It would be extremely unusual for this type of dam to fail with no warning, Goff said.

However it is unclear how well the dam has been maintained under Russian occupation. The surrounding area has been one of the most heavily contested regions since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the dam has sustained some prior damage.

Sections of the northern part of the dam and some sluice gates were also impacted in an explosion in November as the Russian military retreated from the west bank of the Dnipro and Kherson was liberated by Ukrainian troops.

A CNN analysis of satellite imagery from Maxar shows the road above the dam was damaged just days before the structural collapse. The satellite images show the bridge was intact on May 28 but imagery from June 5 shows a section of the same bridge missing. Analysis of lower resolution satellite imagery suggests the loss of the bridge section took place between June 1 and 2.

Meanwhile, data shows water levels in the reservoir behind the dam were at record highs last month, according to the Hydroweb information service.

The images I have seen show two breaches, either side of a structure. Were the breach to be caused by excess upstream water level there would only be one. Thus natural causes are highly unlikely, Binnie said.

The design of the dam will take into account these very high water levels, even extreme, biblical type flooding and there will be spillways to allow the water to go over. So again, the dam shouldnt fail just because of high water levels, Goff added.

NORSAR, an independent Norwegian foundation for the detection of earthquakes and nuclear explosions, spotted an explosion at the dam around the time of the first reports of its collapse on June 6, the foundations CEO Anne Lycke told CNN.

We saw this news that the dam burst, she said in a phone interview. And then I thought, Lets go into the data and see if it was an explosion or just an incremental downgrading of the dam that made it burst. And then we saw in the data that there had been an explosion close to the dam or at the dam.

Social media posts indicate that people in the area heard the sound of explosions around 2:18 to 2:20 a.m. local time.

A video of the scene, geolocated by CNN, shows a small explosion at the dam, which appears to be already breached, supposedly at 2:46 a.m. The seismic signals picked up by NORSAR show an explosion, recorded at 2:54am local time, was of magnitude close to 2  significant but not big, according to Lycke. It remains uncertain whether the event NORSAR detected was the same that caused the dam to collapse. However, Lycke said it was clear the explosion that NORSAR detected was a man-made event and not an earthquake.

Experts are also considering whether a failure inside the power plant could have caused the collapse. Goff pointed to the 2009 explosion at the Sayano-Shushenskaya station, the largest hydroelectric plant in Russia. In that particular case, there was a problem with one of the turbines. It vibrated and eventually the turbine exploded. And that killed people inside the power house, but it didnt affect the dam on that in that instance, because of the way the dam was built, he said.

It is possible that if the hydropower station was at a critical point inside the dam and that something bad happened in that power house that possibly could have caused an explosion inside that would damage the dam, Goff said. He added, however, that it would be extremely unlikely for such an accident to happen without advance warning.

You would know how to operate the dam safely and you would know that the turbines shouldnt be vibrating that much so if it was being looked after properly, you can probably rule that one out, he said.

But as the plant had been under Russian control for over a year, no one can be sure what was happening inside during that time, and its far from certain if those who operated it knew what they were doing.

CNNs Vasco Cotovio, Allegra Goodwin, Sebastian Shukla, Sam Kiley, Natasha Bertrand, Alex Marquardt, Jim Sciutto and Jennifer Hansler contributed reporting.

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Kim Jong Un orders North Koreans to stop killing themselves after number of suicides skyrocketed

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File

Kim Jong Un banned suicide and called it an "act of treason against socialism," per Radio Free Asia.

The number of suicides in North Korea is believed to be skyrocketing, the publication said.

Kim told local authorities to try to prevent people from killing themselves, per Radio Free Asia.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has issued a secret order to local authorities that would ban suicides after data showed numbers skyrocketing, according to government officials who spoke to Radio Free Asia.

The exact number of suicides in North Korea is difficult to ascertain as the regime rarely offers insight into the country's shortcomings. However, the South Korean National Intelligence Service estimated in May that suicides had increased by about 40% from the previous year, per WION.

Kim called suicide an "act of treason against socialism" in the directive and stated that local government officials would be held jointly accountable for failing to prevent people from killing themselves in their jurisdiction, according to Radio Free Asia.

The secret order was mentioned in a series of emergency meetings in North Korean provinces, an official from the northeastern province of North Hamgyong  who remained anonymous to protect their safety  told Radio Free Asia.

Data on the number of suicides was provided as well as examples of entire families killing themselves, the official told Radio Free Asia.

The official added that those who attended the meeting were "shocked by the disclosure of suicide notes that criticized the country and the social system," per Radio Free Asia.

Another official from the neighboring province of Ryanggang  who also withheld their identity to protect their safety  told Radio Free Asia that suicide was effecting the community more than starvation.

"Despite the suicide-prevention policy ratified by the General Secretary, the officials were not able to come up with an appropriate solution," the official told Radio Free Asia.

"Most of the suicides were caused by severe poverty and starvation, so no one can come up with a countermeasure right now," they added, according to the news service.

During the meeting, there were discussions involving graphic descriptions of suicide cases, which included further instances of entire families taking their lives.

According to 2019 data from the World Health Organization, there were 8.2 suicides for every 100,000 people in North Korea, placing the country 45th in the world ranking of suicide rates.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Kim Kardashian may have graced magazine covers in the buff, but according to the reality star, shes a lot more bashful in the bedroom.

On Thursdays episode of The Kardashians, the Skims founder told Scott Disick that shes a lights off kind of woman when it comes to fooling around.

While chatting with her former brother-in-law, after the pals met up for dinner, about how theyre both currently single, Disick said hed like to see the 42-year-old date an older Italian businessman, to which she replied: I dont like the old thing, but I dont like the really young thing either.

The pair then brought up the 40-year age gap between Cher and her former beau Alexander A.E. Edwards, which Scott called the best thing Ive ever seen.

Kardashian then admitted, I would just be insecure about such a big age gap.

Well, maybe shes just secure or has the lights off, Disick suggested, before the mom of four confessed, I pretty much have the lights off now.

Kim Kardashian.

Kim Kardashian.

In a confessional during the reality show episode, a producer asked Kardashian, whos also a law student, if shes a lights-off kind of girl.

Its so weird, she explained of her preferences in the bedroom. I can walk out of a photo shoot with 100 people working on set... I can walk out in a thong. But if its like, youre there with me, Im like, Wait, dont look at me! Turn the lights off!

On the topic of romantic connections, Disick mentioned that he cant imagine what a first date with the star would look like, to which she declared it would need to be behind doors and that she couldnt go out.

Its kind of awkward. Im like, Hurry, get in! Hurry, hurry, so no one in the hallway sees you, she added.

Kardashians last public relationship was with comedian Pete Davidson. The lovebirds called it quits in August after nine months of dating. Their relationship came shortly after Kardashians messy divorce from Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West.

The reality TV star filed for divorce in February 2021 after more than seven years of marriage to Ye. She shares four children with him: North, 9, Saint, 7, Chicago, 5, and Psalm, 4.

Related...
What kinds of government documents was Trump holding at Mar-a-Lago?

Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends a campaign event in Manchester, New Hampshire, U.S., April 27, 2023.

Former US president Donald Trump was indicted on 37 counts in a classified documents probe, including a charge under the Espionage Act.



The documents that Trump held in his Mar-a-Lago Florida resort included briefings on other countries policies and reports regarding the US nuclear weaponry.

Read more

Heres how the documents in question break down:



Six reports contain White House intelligence briefings on various foreign countries

Eight reports reference other countries military capabilities. Some of these reports also related to the military capabilities of the US.

Six reports concern the military activity of a foreign country

A June 2020 document discusses the nuclear capabilities of a foreign country

One report details a communication with a leader of another country, dated October 2018

There is an undated report concerning military attacks by a foreign country

Another undated document concerns US military contingency planning

A January 2020 document concerns the military options of a foreign country and its potential effects on US interests

A February 2020 document discusses policies in a foreign country

A December 2019 report concerns foreign country support of terrorist acts against US interests

A March 2020 document concerns military operations against US forces and other forces

An undated document concerns nuclear weaponry of the US

An undated document concerns the timeline and details of an attack in a foreign country

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Heres what to know about GOP claims of a Biden scandal

Defenders of former President Donald Trump have responded to news of his indictment by the US Department of Justice with deflection: Why is Trump being charged but not President Joe Bidens son Hunter?

The two standards of justice under Bidens DOJ is appalling. When will Hunter Biden be charged? tweeted Rep. Steve Daines of Montana, who has already endorsed Trumps 2024 campaign and who is in charge of coordinating Republicans strategy for keeping control of the House of Representatives.

The facts, however, are much less clear.

Fueling Republicans frustration this week is a standoff on Capitol Hill over a document detailing an interview conducted years ago based on a tip given to the DOJ by former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani, you might recall, had been tasked with digging up dirt on the Bidens. House Republicans are convinced the interview with the confidential informant, based on Giulianis allegations, implicates both the president and his son.

Theres an awkward circularity in there. Republicans are alleging the FBI under the Biden administration tried to cover up an investigation of a tip given to the FBI by Giuliani during the Trump administration, and which even Trumps attorney general, William Barr, treated with extreme care.

Heres what to know:

What do Republicans allege?

That the FBI has been hiding evidence of a bribery allegation that could involve the president and his son receiving $5 million from someone with ties to Ukraine.

Republicans say the evidence comes from an internal law enforcement document, known as an FD-1023, which details an interview conducted with a confidential informant.

It is the one and only allegation that the president has been involved in something illegal. However, it is based on a tip the FBI has not been able to verify.

Whats their basis for this allegation?

A suspended FBI agent, who Republicans view as a whistleblower, told lawmakers on Capitol Hill in May about the form detailing the interview and has alleged the FBI tried to bury it.

Why didnt the FBI want to hand over the document?

It contains what the FBI calls unverified information.

Essentially, anything could lead to an FD-1023 form, which does nothing more than acknowledge an interview took place.

While Republicans are assuming there is a coverup, it does make some sense that if the FBI had gotten a wild claim that it could in no way substantiate, it would not want to give oxygen to that information.

After all, much of Republicans gripe with the Russia investigation is that it stemmed from allegations about Trump that could not be verified. For more on that, read about the recently released report from special counsel John Durham, a Trump-administration appointee.

Will lawmakers get to see the document?

Yes. After House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer threatened to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress, the FBI agreed to let all lawmakers on the committee view the FD-1023 form.

Comer and the ranking Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin, had already been given access.

After being given that access, Raskin said this whole affair is part of the effort to smear President Biden and help Mr. Trumps reelection campaign.

What are Republicans saying after seeing the document?

After viewing the document, lawmakers confirmed the allegations have to do with Hunter Bidens business dealings with Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, and the document details conversations over a few years about the allegations and payments made.

Members who viewed the document said the alleged payments to the Bidens are intentionally difficult to be traced.

If the information contained in this document is true, then there will be absolutely bank records to back it up. And that should be the next phase of the Oversight Committee is to go find and extract those bank records, go back and look at the suspicious activity reports, said Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina.

Republicans have an ongoing investigation into the finances of Hunter Biden and other Biden relatives. Read more about that.

How long has the FBI had this document?

For years. In fact, it dates back to the Trump administration.

CNNs Evan Perez has reported that the document has origins in a tranche of documents that Giuliani provided to the Justice Department in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.

What has the FBI been doing with the information from the informant?

Barr, when he was Trumps attorney general, directed then-Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady to oversee the FBI investigation of the Giuliani claims.

According to Perezs reporting, Barr was worried the unsubstantiated claim could taint the work being done by the US attorney in Delaware who is overseeing a longtime and ongoing investigation of Hunter Biden on numerous fronts.

Bradys team interviewed the confidential informant on June 30, 2020, which generated the FD-1023. Barr recently told The Federalist the information was ultimately forwarded to the US attorney in Delaware.

Republicans have questioned whether the US attorney there followed up on the allegations made in the interview.

Will Hunter Biden be charged with a crime?

It is definitely possible. Investigations into his business dealings with foreign clients, his failure to pay taxes on time and his purchase of a gun when he was addicted to drugs have all been ongoing. His attorneys met with officials in the Justice Departments tax division in Washington, DC, in April.

From CNNs report at the time: According to sources familiar with the investigation, prosecutors are still weighing whether to bring two misdemeanor charges for failure to file taxes, one count of felony tax evasion related to the overreporting of expenses, and a false statement charge regarding a gun purchase.

About Hunter Biden

He has been a top target for Republican investigations for years on multiple fronts. His lifestyle as a drug addict trading on his fathers name to do business overseas is not a good reflection on his father. The money he and other Bidens made from foreign companies is just as uncomfortable for the president.

There are other Hunter Biden-related threads. He has been ordered to appear next month in an Arkansas courtroom to explain why he should not be held in contempt for stonewalling attempts to obtain his financial data. He denies wrongdoing. The court proceedings are underway because his attorneys say he can no longer afford to pay $20,000 in monthly child support.

But theres a false equivalence between comparing his affairs, which still ultimately rely on unverified claims forwarded to the FBI by Giuliani, and Trumps treatment of classified data, which the Department of Justice apparently feels confident it can prosecute.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
Heres What You Need To Know About The Travel Advisory For The Dominican Republic

Santo Domino street in Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic has been a hotspot for Black travelers for a long time. Whether for medical tourism, business, or pleasure, the DR has become one of the cultures favorite international, tropical destinations. However, the US State Department is warning travelers planning on visiting anytime soon.

On Tuesday, June 6, the agency issued a level 2 travel advisory for the Caribbean country. According to its website, the department warns of violent crime, including armed robbery, homicide, and sexual assault is a concern throughout the Dominican Republic.

Photo Credit: Aleksandar Pasaric

Regional Efforts To Address Crime

Despite being a prime destination for American travelers, the DR has been a hotspot for crime for quite some time. According to Dialago Americas, leaders from Central America, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic came together in April to strategize against crime in the countries.

These criminal phenomena are not new. What is new is that we are confronting them regionally, Guatemalas Minister of the Interior David Napoleon Barrientos told Guatemalan Daily Prensa Libre. Each of the countries has its own strategies. Weve discussed and shared them []; the idea is to generate regional plans and protocols. This will be done by each countrys specialists at the roundtables.

While the meeting in April centered more around organized crime and drug and human trafficking, the new US travel advisory focuses on the numerous accounts of sexual assault from American tourists visiting the DR.

According to USA Today, one American woman claims she was drugged and sexually assaulted while in the Dominican Republic. The tourist says she ordered a drink at a bar and lost recollection of what happened after she received it. Unfortunately, the travel advisory warns Americans that rape prosecution in the Dominican Republic varies greatly from legalities in the States.

Sexual assault victims in the Dominican Republic should not expect the totality of assistance offered in the United States, the travel advisory said. The advisory also tells travelers not to resist robbery attempts and to follow all local rules and regulations to avoid harm.

Safety Tips For Travel To The Dominican Republic

Areas near resorts and tourist attractions are safer than urban areas like Santo Domingo, the advisory states. The advisory does state that since the creation of the countrys 911 hotline, some areas of the Dominican Republic are safer than others. However, travelers should still avoid dark, secluded areas, and beaches at night.

Travelers should also take precautionary measures when using local taxi services and utilize rideshare apps like Uber instead.
Kristin Davis knows that women in Hollywood face an impossible standard when it comes to aging.

Its hard to be confronted with your younger self at all times, Davis told The Telegraph in an article published on Friday, a reference to her decades on TV.

And its a challenge to remember that you dont have to look like that, she said. The internet wants you to  but they also dont want you to. Theyre very conflicted ...

The Sex and the City actor told the outlet she started by trying out Botox and then didnt do anything else for a long time before she moved to fillers.

Davis attends the premiere of Netflix's

Davis attends the premiere of Netflix's "AJ and the Queen" on Jan. 9, 2020 in Hollywood, California.

I have done fillers and its been good and Ive done fillers and its been bad, the entertainer continued.  Ive had to get them dissolved and Ive been ridiculed relentlessly. And I have shed tears about it. Its very stressful.

Davis said that while the work is done by doctors, people personally blame us when it goes wrong.

Davis also spoke about work she had done on her lips.

No one told me it didnt look good for the longest time, she said, according to The Telegraph.

But luckily I do have good friends who did say eventually, Davis added. The thing is you dont smile at yourself in the mirror. Who smiles at themselves in the mirror? Crazy people.

Davis and Sarah Jessica Parker on location for

Davis and Sarah Jessica Parker on location for "And Just Like That" on Sept. 20, 2021 in New York City.

Recently, Davis SATC co-star Kim Cattrall made headlines for walking back an old declaration on plastic surgery. Cattrall told the Daily Mail in 2011 that she wanted to embrace aging because I think thats whats interesting.

That was then. I probably said that in my forties! Im in my sixties now and Im all about battling aging in every way I can, she said in an interview with the U.K.s Sunday Times published over the weekend. There are so many other alternatives now, treatments that stimulate your own body to fight aging.

There are fillers, Botox, theres so many different things that you can investigate and try and see if its for you, she continued. But yes, if you have the money and, more importantly, the right surgeon. It cant be emphasized enough. You want to look like you.

Related...
A Kentucky State Police sergeant is suing her own agency, alleging she reported KSP for misuse of federal grant money and was retaliated against because of it, according to a lawsuit filed in Franklin County Circuit Court.

The lawsuit, filed in April by Sgt. Vicki Day, alleges that members of KSPs command staff and four civilian employees used federal grant money to fund a $26,000 trip to El Paso, Texas, from June 5 to June 8 in 2022. Day claimed the trip had no legitimate law enforcement purposes. KSP denied wrongdoing in a legal reply filed last month.

The trip and expenses from it were approved by KSP Commissioner Phillip Burnett Jr. and the governors office, according to the lawsuit.

Day tried to raise concerns about the trip, and KSP retaliated against her by proposing two class C violations to discipline her, according to the lawsuit. The discipline against Day was pending when the lawsuit was filed, though the lawsuit doesnt clarify what the discipline is.

Day also alleged that a civilian employee for KSP had been paid federally-funded overtime for a lunch break, according to the lawsuit. She also alleged the KSP command staff is illegally withholding money for the Drivers Training Branch of the agency.

Day alleges KSP violated the Kentucky Whistleblower Act, discriminated on the basis of sex, and conspired to retaliate or discriminate against her, according to the lawsuit. In addition to suing KSP, the lawsuit is also filed against the state and the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet.

KSP asks for lawsuit to be dismissed

KSPs reply to the lawsuit says Day has not suffered damages or any injury in fact. KSP also says the lawsuit does not allege any adverse employment action and says the agency acted legally and in good faith. KSPs attorneys have asked that the lawsuit be dismissed.

Court documents indicate that Burnett, KSPs commissioner, will be deposed in the case next week.

This is the second discrimination lawsuit filed against KSP by female officers since August. Capt. Jennifer Sandlin, the commander at KSP Post 13 in Hazard and the highest-ranking woman in the agency, filed a complaint in Franklin County court claiming she was passed over for multiple promotions because higher-ups didnt want to take her away from her family

A year after becoming the commander at Post 13, Sandlin sought two different open positions at the rank of major  which are appointed by KSPs commissioner  but men were selected to fill each of the positions, the lawsuit stated. Last July, Sandlin sought another position at the rank of major, but again a man was selected to fill the job.

The selection of men instead of Sandlin established a pattern of discrimination on the basis of sex, the lawsuit stated.

Thomas Clay, the attorney representing both Sandlin and Day, previously said there is further evidence that the agencys work environment is hostile to women.

In a statement, KSP denied the allegations of discrimination.

Days lawsuit says shes been forbidden from talking to Sandlin about her lawsuit. It also says Day has firsthand knowledge of KSPs culture of sexual discrimination and sexual harassment.
Head of the UOC-MP, Metropolitan Onufriy, at the Kyiv Cave Monastery on June 4, 2023

We believe that a religious organization that is practically under the control of the aggressor state and supports its crimes cannot operate on Ukrainian territory, Tatyana Semenova, the deputy head of the council, said in a comment on the announcement.

Read also: Ukraines SBU exposes two Russian spies trying to recruit agent at Kyiv defense plant

The Kyiv Oblast Council asks the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to immediately consider legislation to ban the activities of the (ROC).

Read also: Ukraine exchanged Russian ROC agents in POW swaps, official says

The ROC has already been banned in a number of oblasts, including Zakarpattya, Chernivtsi, Zhytomyr, Volyn, Rivne, and Khmelnytskyi.

Earlier, Ukraines border service reported that it had stopped a cleric of the ROC at a border crossing and discovered during a routine check that he could be guilty of participating in sabotage activities against Ukraine.

Read also: ROC believes God punishing Ukraine through Kakhovka dam explosion for Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra eviction

The border service announced that Russian phone numbers were discovered on his phone, as well as Russian propaganda literature and a 2023 commendation from the head of the Russian Tver diocese.

The SBU has taken over further investigation of the case.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
(Sofie Birkin / For The Times)

I met him during my freshman year of college. We were at a nightclub near West Hollywood that was frequented by underage kids who wanted to feel cool.

Griffin was leaning over a table beside a dozen of his fraternity brothers. There were clear glass bottles in buckets of ice below them. The female friend I came with introduced me to Griffin and a few of the brothers. She was a Kappa at USC, and he was a Lambda.

"Isn't he hot?" she shouted in my ear. "I tried to hook up with him at a frat party a few months ago, but he started twerking, if you know what I mean! I knew exactly what she meant.

I wasnt out of the closet yet. Although I had been aroused by men since I was 13, I told myself that I would only come out when I had deep feelings for another man. Back then, I had never experienced the feeling of having a crush before  the sense of being unable to get someone out of your head and constantly fantasizing about a future life together. Without that feeling, I realized that I couldn't admit that I was gay to myself or to everyone else.

That night I met Griffin, I experienced those feelings for the first time. I couldn't stop looking at him from across the dance floor. Not only was he physically perfect, with a sharp jawline and gorgeous eyelashes, he also embodied the person I wanted to be  openly gay and accepted into a large group of male friends. That was something I had never had before. I wanted him and immediately wanted to be him.

At the time, I was living in my sister's apartment, sleeping in her guest bedroom. She was traveling with her boyfriend. Thankfully her apartment was a short distance from the nightclub. I found Griffin later, and we ended up spending the night together.

After that, I knew I was gay, and it was time to come out of the closet. I fantasized about dating him, but there was just one problem: He was leaving for the summer and going home to Texas. However, that didn't stop me from being completely into him.

I was already planning to transfer from Santa Monica College to USC in the fall. I had always set my sights on USC, but now there was an even bigger reason to enroll. I wanted Griffin's life  to be popular and openly gay in a top-tier college fraternity. And, of course, I wanted him. He was all I could think about that summer.

In August, I walked up the steps of his fraternity house for the first day of rush. My hands were shaking as I thought about how our second interaction would go. I found him standing in Lambda Chi Alpha's stained, beer-smelling party atrium and chatting with some of the other rushees.

"Hi, Griffin," I said, hands in my pockets to hide my nervousness.

"Tanner!" he replied as if he hadnt seen me in ages. "How are you?"

We engaged in small talk until the small talk became too trivial. Well, it was good seeing you, I said.

At the end of rush, I joined another fraternity, one that fit my personality better. Considered the first openly gay brother in Tau Kappa Epsilon at USC, I finally felt accepted by a large group of men  something I had always wanted but never experienced during adolescence.

I obsessed over Griffin throughout sophomore year. We would run into each other at parties and off-campus bars. A few times we ended up going home together, but I was always too nervous to ask for anything more.

Looking back, he probably could tell that I was infatuated with him. I could hardly get words out when speaking to him unless I was incredibly drunk, at which point I would not so subtly follow him around whatever venue I found him in.

During junior year, I hardly saw him. Our paths rarely crossed. He had a boyfriend and went abroad, and I took a step back from Greek life to recover from the bad habits I had picked up during my previous year as a fraternity degenerate. (Let's just say that I needed therapy more than I needed a man.)

Fast-forward to senior year. One night during first semester, I slept over at my Delta Gamma friend's house where she lived with six other women. I woke up beside her in the middle of the night and then went downstairs to get a glass of water only to find Griffin there in the kitchen. He was fresh out of his relationship, and he was with a female friend of his who lived in the house.

It was 1 in the morning, and they had just returned from a night out. As much as I told myself it wasn't worth getting involved with him again, I couldn't resist when he asked me to come home with him.

"Where are you going?" my friend asked when I went back upstairs to grab my belongings from her bedside.

"Can't sleep," I said. "Gonna walk home." I lived up the street, and I didn't want to admit to a hookup that even she knew would stir up feelings. And it did.

Griffin and I shared a few more nights together that semester. At the start of the second semester, I finally told him how I felt. If he wasn't ready to at least take me on a date, I needed to move on.

We went on that date and had wine on my roof while we asked each other questions about life. Both of us smiled between each answer. That was three years ago, and we've been happily together ever since.

The author is writing his debut novel, "Tales of a Gay Frat Star." Follow his book journey on Instagram and TikTok: @tanneraiello

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $300 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez, left, Eunisses Hernandez and Nithya Raman announcing the "sanctuary city" measure in March. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

The Los Angeles City Council on Friday voted to toughen policies around the use of city resources for federal immigration enforcement.

On a 12 to 0 vote, the council asked city attorneys to write a new law that would bar city personnel or resources from being used for immigration enforcement. The law would also bar federal immigration authorities or other entities connected to immigration enforcement from accessing city databases or anyones personal data.

City Council members Bob Blumenfield and John Lee were absent from Friday's vote.

L.A.'s proposal, referred by council members as a "sanctuary city" law, would essentially codify existing policies, including a 2017 executive directive issued by then-Mayor Eric Garcetti.

If passed, the law would be similar to one in San Francisco. That law prohibits city employees from using city funds or resources to assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, officers in the enforcement of federal immigration laws unless such assistance is required by federal or state law.

The council on Friday also asked for a report back that details any "current gaps" between LAPD Special Order No. 40, a department policy that prohibits police officers from initiating contact with anyone for the sole purpose of learning their immigration status, and Garcetti's 2017 directive. The council also asked for a report on instances when city departments have assisted ICE.

Those reports are intended to answer outstanding questions about the city's existing policies.

The motion voted on Friday by the council says that policies allow ICE officers to access city jails to interrogate people in LAPD custody. The motion also states that LAPD officers are permitted to transfer individuals to ICE custody, even when judicial warrants are not issued.

On Friday, however, the LAPD disputed such claims.

LAPD Capt. Anthony Otero, assistant commanding officer of the department's Custody Services Division, said the LAPD doesn't allow ICE to enter LAPD jails to interrogate people. Otero also said that the LAPD doesn't transfer people into ICE custody without a judicial warrant.

Describing the LAPD's relationship with ICE, Otero said ICE will "fax us holds on occasion for persons we have in custody, at which point we follow our polices."

Asked to describe its "policies," the LAPD didn't immediately provide The Times an answer.

ICE declined to comment Friday on the sanctuary city proposal. The spokesperson said the agency doesnt comment on pending legislation.

The "sanctuary city" motion was brought forward earlier this year by Councilmembers Nithya Raman, Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto-Martinez. It was seconded by Councilmembers Curren Price and Heather Hutt.

Some of their colleagues asked for more clarity about the city's policies at a March City Council committee hearing on the motion.

Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley, said at that meeting she was "confused" by suggestions that local government is cooperating with ICE.

"But more importantly, the suggestion that the city hasn't already adopted these principles," she said.

Rodriguez also said at that meeting there had been "unintended consequences" because of the city's policies around immigration.

She said that when President Biden came into office, the city attempted to participate in the reunification of children who had been separated from their immigrant families, but had to leave that work to Los Angeles County.

"We were unable to participate because of the policies that we had adopted," Rodriguez said.

Senate Bill 54, Californias so-called sanctuary state law, passed in 2017. In 2019, the L.A. City Council passed a resolution declaring L.A. a "city of sanctuary" but the move had no legal teeth.

After L.A. city attorneys draft the ordinance supported by council members at Friday's meeting, it will return to the council for a vote.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
A historic icon on Tacomas skyline could soon be a heap of rubble.

Holy Rosary Church, a 103-year-old Catholic church described as Tacomas Notre Dame by a former mayor, will no longer be a place of Catholic worship and will be sold, the Archdiocese of Seattle announced this week.

The decision to sell the property at Our Lady of the Holy Rosary was not easy and was grounded in months of discernment, prayer, analysis and discussion, Pope St. John XXIII Parish leaders said in a statement. The parish includes the former Holy Rosary Parish.

Meanwhile, the group that organized to save the church from the wrecking ball is digging in its heels in its years-long attempt to save the historic church.

To just get kicked in the teeth like this has shaken a lot of peoples faith, said Jon Carp, a leader with Save Tacomas Landmark Church which formed in 2019.

The church, with its 210-foot-tall steeple, is an icon for Tacomans and those passing through the city on nearby Interstate 5. Despite its age, its the newer version of a predecessor where famed crooner Bing Crosbys parents were married.

The Gothic Revival architecture features pointed arches, intricate stained glass windows and ornate details.

Decaying

A series of blows brought the church at 424 S. 30th St. and its parish to its knees in an already tough climate for the Catholic religion with declining membership and a deficit of priests.

Holy Rosary had six pastors since 2000 until it finally merged with other parishes in 2021. That number includes the Rev. Michael Wagner, who collapsed from a cerebral aneurysm while celebrating Mass in April 2018. He died three weeks later.

Later that same year, a 5-by-5 foot piece of plaster ceiling fell into the choir loft. After an inspection revealed dangerous conditions inside and outside the building, a fence was erected around the church. The building has since been unoccupied.

When the parishs church with its robin egg blue interior closed, parishioners were forced to hold Mass in the adjacent school buildings gymnasium. Holy Rosarys congregation began declining after that.

Process

In August 2019, then-Archbishop J. Peter Sartain said the building would be demolished.

In 2020, new Seattle Archbishop Paul Etienne declared that Our Lady of the Holy Rosary parish was unviable. It was later merged into what would become Pope St. John XXIII Parish. Its bilingual school was relocated to St. Martin of Tours in Fife that same year.

This week, the Archdiocese said that months of discussion by the parishs finance and pastoral councils made their recommendation to Father Tuan Nguyen who then made his recommendation to Etienne.

Etienne issued a decree which will relegate the building to profane but not sordid use on June 15. That means that the building may no longer be used as a Catholic worship space.

This decision by your parish leadership teams was not easy, especially with the mounting public pressure, Etienne wrote to Pope St. John XXIII parishioners on Sunday.

Opposition

Were going to be gearing right up again, Carp said Wednesday. Like we were in the fall of 2019.

Save Tacomas Landmark Church is not giving up its fight and is directly opposing Etienne, Carp said.

Our position on this is unchanged, Carp told The News Tribune Wednesday. That church belongs legally to the Archdiocese, but spiritually, morally, belongs to the Catholic community of Tacoma and more broadly, the people of Tacoma.

Carp said the group has $300,000 in cash donations and pledges of $1.7 million more. His group alleges that the Archdiocese has inflated the estimated costs to repair the building.

One former parish member, who wished to remain anonymous, said many of the Holy Rosary parish members declined to join the new parish.

It has caused some people to have left the church, theyve been so disgusted, Carp said.

To raze or not to raze?

in 2019, the Archdiocese said the building needed $2.5 million in repairs in order to occupy it and a total of $18 million to completely renovate it.

Carp disputes these figures as highly inflated.

This whole effort, I believe, is a money grab, Carp said. That real estate has great views of Commencement Bay. You could sell that for a lot of money.

All of the proceeds of the Holy Rosary property sale would go to the Pope St. John XXIII Parish, the Archdiocese said.

Only the Archdiocese can demolish the building, a virtual necessity if it wants to sell the property at market value. If its sold with the buildings intact, historic preservation laws kick in.

Archdiocese spokesperson Helen McClenahan said the Archdiocese has not yet made a decision if the property will be sold with the buildings intact or demolished. The intent, she said, was to sell the full property but planning could not happen until Etiennes decree was issued. She also could not provide a timeline for a sale.

It is a sad moment when a beautiful church building comes to an end, Etienne said.

A great tragedy

Former Tacoma mayor Bill Baarsma said Thursday that the destruction of Holy Rosary would be one more sad chapter for the city of Tacoma.

The building, he said, should be number one on the list of buildings marked for historic preservation.

Its part of Tacomas history, he said. Its a beautiful building.

Baarsma called the Seattle Archdiocese attitude toward city troubling.

Were just kind of a second city, he said. (The Archdiocese is) not really too concerned about the feelings of the people here. Everything seems kind of Seattle centric.

Appeal

Our appeal is getting pulled together right now, Carp said. And it will be on the Archbishops desk this week. And if he rejects it, we are retaining the services of a Canon lawyer in Rome, as well as consulting civil attorneys about options.

The group isnt the only Tacoma Catholic church seeking Canon law help in Rome. A group of parishioners from the now closed St. Rita of Cascia on Tacomas Hilltop has hired an Italian Canon lawyer to appeal that parishs merger into Pope St. John XXIII Parish.

Archbishop Etienne is good for Canon lawyers bottom line, I guess, Carp said.

Etienne was the subject of an opinion piece in The Seattle Times after the Archdiocese spent $2.4 million to purchase a residence for him in the city.

City support

In 2019, the city supported the effort to save the church.

Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards told supporters in 2019, Im standing with you to make sure this church goes absolutely nowhere.

Its truly an iconic building in the city of Tacoma, historic preservation officer Reuben McKnight said at the time.

The building is on the citys register of historic landmarks and cannot be demolished without the approval of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, McKnight said in 2019. That process includes a public hearing.

As of Thursday, Tacoma had not received applications for permits relating to Holy Rosary Church, McKnight said in a statement to The News Tribune.

The demolition review process in the Tacoma Municipal Code has not changed; however, there are unique considerations around the regulation of churches for historic preservation purposes, he said. In general, the right of a religious organization to control and dispose of its property is considered part of the free exercise of religion guaranteed under both the United States and Washington state constitutions.

In case a permit application is received, the city is now reviewing the legal status of churches and historic requirements, McKnight added.

Baarsma likens the situation to that of Union Station, which nearly faced the wrecking ball until it was saved at the last minute in the 1980s. Today, that Beaux-Arts style domed building is a federal courthouse and the crown jewel of downtown Tacoma.

Its an important part of our city, not only for the Roman Catholics, but for others whove admired the building, whove known people who have been members of that church, married at that church, Baarsma said. It transcends Catholicism to be a much broader issue.
LAPD officers stand outside department headquarters as a crowd blocks Main and 1st streets in downtown Los Angeles. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Several Los Angeles police officers were justified when they shot at and killed a man who brandished a handgun, but six of their colleagues broke department policy by joining in the barrage of gunfire last July, according to a police oversight panel.

The civilian Police Commission found late last month that four of the 10 officers  Luis Avalos, Garrett Vanhooser, Christopher Gonzalez and Chad Heistermann  who opened fire on Rudolfo Torres were within policy. The commission voted at that time to approve a report by Police Chief Michel Moore, summarizing an internal investigation of the incident.

But the chief's report found that the deadly force used by the rest of the officers who opened fire during the confrontation a year ago  Christopher Burke, Jose Rodriguez, Kyle Bender, James Stea, Israel Florez and Chad Fillinger  "was not proportional, objectively reasonable, or necessary."

In fact, the report on Torres' death weighed whether the incident might have been a case of "contagious fire"  a phenomenon in which an officer mistakes colleagues' shots as coming from a suspect, prompting them to open fire.

In all, 31 shots were discharged, with officers firing between one and five shots each, the report said. Some officers who were present did not fire.

While acknowledging that the shooting unfolded amid "a difficult situation," Moore wrote in a report that the designated cover officers at the scene were "better positioned to address the lethal threat" than some of the officers who ultimately fired. During such encounters, only certain officers are assigned the role of cover officers.

Moore also agreed with the majority of an internal review board that concluded a supervisor at the scene, Sgt. Burke, didn't need to fire his service weapon and would have been better served by staying back and assigning clear roles to the other officers.

Though it concluded that the four officers' shots were in policy, the board took into account the "number of officers that discharged their service pistols, as well as the number of rounds fired," according to Moore's report.

The shooting occurred on the night of July 2, 2022, when Newton Division gang officers encountered Torres in the area of 37th Street and Maple Avenue.

While speaking to Torres, who appeared to be under the influence of drugs, officers became convinced he was armed and ordered him to take his hands out of his pockets, police said. Further raising their suspicions, officers said, Torres was acting fidgety and was wearing an oversized, baggy sweatshirt on a warm night.

According to the chief's report, one of the officers recognized Torres from a previous run-in as a member of the 36th Street gang who went by the nickname Marbles. The decades-old gang operates in the surrounding area, which is sometimes called the "Low Bottoms," police said.

When they ordered him to stop, Torres ignored the command and started walking away, prompting a surreal, slow-motion pursuit through nearby streets, with officers trailing several feet behind and using a patrol vehicle as cover.

After following Torres on foot for several blocks, officers tried to apprehend him. Edited police body camera video shows that officers shot him once with a hard foam projectile, sending him tumbling. As he fell, a gun he had apparently been holding under his coat clattered to the ground, according to the report. When he picked it back up, the officers opened fire, the report says.

Officers involved gave differing accounts of whether they saw Torres point the gun in their direction or simply raise it.

The 30-year-old was pronounced dead at a hospital.

"Regardless of whether Torres was raising the handgun or pointing it, the board opined that it was reasonable for the officers to believe that he had the present ability, opportunity, and apparent intent to immediately cause death or serious bodily injury to them and that his action had to be instantly confronted and addressed," Moore wrote in his report.

According to the report, police recovered a loaded .40-caliber pistol with no serial number and an extended magazine with 31 bullets. They also recovered another extended magazine, a .9mm, AR-style pistol and a 50-round drum magazine inside a backpack Torres was carrying.

Though the chief's report concluded that some officers were justified in using deadly force against an armed suspect, it disapproved of some of the tactics employed leading up to the shooting.

Some of the officers who fired should have sought cover behind the patrol vehicle's bulletproof doors, the report said. Other officers were cited for occasionally placing their fingers on the trigger of their guns  in violation of department policy that dictates officers should do so only when prepared to fire.

Echoing the review board, the report also faulted Burke for failing to take an "active leadership role." Instead, the report said, the sergeant seemed "overly involved in Torres actions, which seemed to limit his ability to effectively manage his personnel."

Toxicology results from an autopsy found the presence of alcohol, amphetamine and methamphetamine in Torres blood, according to the report.

Since the shooting, relatives of Torres have continued to question the officers' motive for the stop.

Since the shooting, Torres' brother, Javier, said he has heard from neighborhood residents who said his brother's death was part of a larger pattern of profiling and harassment by Newton Division officers.

"There's been a continuous targeting of Latino and African Americans in this community," said Javier Torres, a high school teacher in Oakland. "It has been nonstop and I think since my brother's killing, his murder by LAPD, we have seen many, many murders" by police.

Even though his brother was armed, Javier Torres said police could have done more to defuse the situation. His brother should have been arrested and "put through the process" rather than killed, he said.

He also questioned why officers fired so many shots in the encounter.

LAPD officials said during a presentation in April before the Police Commission that they have tried to address high-volume gunfire incidents by restricting the number of officers who can have their guns drawn during an encounter with a suspect.

Deputy Chief Marc Reina told commissioners at the time that the department is developing a new virtual reality training course for officers intended to re-create the stress levels of firing their weapons in a fast-changing environment where they have to account for countless factors.

In a separate investigation, the department late last month also cleared two officers who shot and killed an armed man in Pacoima last June after he allegedly tried to force someone out of a car at gunpoint.

Officers Christopher Kliebert and Andrew Mejia were justified in using deadly force against 24-year-old Oscar Santiago, who brandished a gun at police a short time after the attempted carjacking. Police released video from the encounter.

A review board concluded that another officer in Kliebert's and Mejia's shoes would have also considered Santiago a threat, after he raised a gun in their direction. Police initially said that Santiago fired first, but a subsequent investigation revealed that officers were the first to shoot, according to a report.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Last reactor at ZNPP to be placed in cold shutdown after Russian destruction of Kakhovka Dam

ZNPP

This decision was made due to the impossibility of establishing the safety status of the reactor, due to its ongoing occupation by Russian forces.

Read also: Russia planning provocation at ZNPP, Ukrainian intelligence warns

The regulator noted that similar restrictions exist for all of ZNPPs other regulators.

Read also: IAEA inspectors find explosives at Russia-occupied ZNPP

Earlier, Energoatom reported that despite the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam by Russian forces, the ZNPP is not at risk of a nuclear accident, and has enough water for the plants currently limited operations.

Rafael Grossi, the general director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, stated that the destruction of the dam raises risks for the ZNPP  Europes largest nuclear power plant  due to a possible lack of water in the cooling pond feeding the plant.

Read also: Workers at ZNPP forced to sign contracts with Rosatom under duress, Ukraine says

Ukrainian military intelligence has warned that the dams destruction by Russian soldiers raises the risks of a nuclear catastrophe at the ZNPP.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Laura Kelly will be the first Democrat to negotiate KanCare contracts. Why does that matter?

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, an early critic of the states privatized Medicaid system, will be the first Democrat to negotiate new contracts for the program since it was first privatized under former Gov. Sam Brownback in 2012.

The Democratic governor cannot use the $3.9 billion contracts to expand Medicaid eligibility, a goal that has eluded her for five years.

But the contracts present a key opportunity for her to dramatically alter the social safety net in Kansas and resolve long running concerns about the health coverage for more than 400,000 people. Currently three companies hold contracts but state law does not mandate three, granting the administration purview to hire more or less.

Last year, Republicans blocked Kelly from negotiating her contracts in her first term in hopes her GOP challenger Derek Schmidt could oversee the process if he won. But after narrowly winning reelection last year, Kelly will be the third governor to shape the contracts, which are some of the largest in the state.

This fall the Kelly administration is scheduled to release its request for proposals detailing what it wants from potential Medicaid contractors.

The states current contractors, Aetna, United HealthCare and Sunflower Health Plan are expected to submit new bids alongside several newcomers who provide care in other states.

We see the procurement process as being a really, really measure and important step toward a more equitable Medicaid system and really being able to optimize the services we provide in Kansas to people in KanCare, said April Holman, executive director of the Alliance for a Healthy Kansans which advocates for Medicaid Expansion.

The significance of the process was underscored Wednesday when an Ohio-based nonprofit joined a collection of Kansas organizations in a news conference announcing plans to put in a joint bid for a piece of Medicaid administration in Kansas. They pledged to improve the way Medicaid is administered in Kansas.

CareSource, a nonprofit that manages Medicaid plans in Ohio, Georgia and Indiana, formed an alliance for its bid with Interhab, the Childrens Alliance of Kansas and the Association of Community Mental Health Centers.

We believe that we can significantly build on the good work that Kansas medicaid has done and really help it move into the next generation, said Erhardt Preitauer, CEO of CareSource.

Opportunities for change

Through the request for proposal the administration can request that contractors provide certain services or meet specific performance benchmarks.

Were hoping to improve the experience of KanCare members, said Sarah Fertig, Kansas director of Medicaid. She said the request for proposal will go out this fall and new contracts will begin in 2025.

Advocates see a clear opportunity to resolve issues with waiting lists for services, slow credentialing and insufficient data as well as expand the network of providers in Kansas.

This is their first chance to make their mark in terms of incorporating any lessons learned or requirements into these new contracts, said Sheena Schmidt an analyst at the Kansas Health Institute, a nonpartisan research organization.

Cindy Samuelson, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Hospital Association, said hospitals are looking for a more standardized system for Medicaid credentialing so they can gain approval and get care to patients more efficiently.

In a privatized system, contractors can also offer value added benefits in their bids. This means additional services they can provide to Medicaid recipients using their plans.

Holman, with the Alliance for a Healthy Kansas, and Sonja Bachus, CEO of the Community Care Network of Kansas, both highlighted a need for services that address the social determinants of health  factors within an individuals life that influence health outcomes outside of healthcare.

Bachus said shed like to see Medicaid contractors do more to ensure clients have transportation to non-emergency health care appointments, access to nutritious food and stable housing.

She said this could mean connecting clients with existing services or committing funds to directly help with access.

This is an opportunity for us to have some real legs behind and financial support behind addressing social determinants, Bachus said.

The move has some bipartisan support. Rep. Brenda Landwehr, the Wichita Republican who chairs the Kansas House Health and Human Services Committee, said shed like to see contractors do more to address transportation concerns. She referenced an existing program for United Health Care members in Johnson County.

But she cautioned against duplication of efforts on issues like housing and nutrition.

Fragmentation is a big problem in anything in government runs, its just rampant, Landwehr said. You gotta get the coordination of all those people who are providing services.

When CareSource announced its bid Wednesday they placed a high premium on addressing the social determinants of health. Preitauer said this has been a key priority for CareSource in other states.

We are nonprofit and thats meaningful because, without being beholden to shareholders, we can use our resources differently, he said. The combination of their history addressing those determinants plus the expertise of the Kansas based groups, he said, would drive an approach to the issues tailored for Kansas.

Original contracts struck under Brownback

Matt Fletcher, the executive director of Interhab, said he sees an opportunity in procurement under the Kelly administration that was missed under Brownback.

During the time that we engaged Gov. Brownback we found him to be compassionate and interested in the needs of the IDD population in Kansas. I dont think that there was very good execution in carrying that out, he said.

What I see that is different in the Kelly administration  there is a desire and ability to operationalize the elements that need to be done to improve the lives of Kansans with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

The first round of contracts, awarded under Brownback, were embroiled with controversy.

In 2014, former state Sen. Dick Kelsey, a Goddard Republican, said he had been interviewed by the FBI for an investigation that scrutinized how the KanCare contracts were awarded. No indictments came from the probe.

Former Gov. Jeff Colyer, a Republican who served for one year, opted to retain two of the states existing contractors and replace one in 2018.

The content of the RFP definitely has very important implications for the health of the population, for the provider infrastructure in the state and for how effective Medicaid is as a health insurance program for the people enrolled, said Andy Schneider, a professor at the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families.

Republican lawmakers are cautious of Kellys leadership.

When lawmakers delayed procurement last year they expressed a broad distrust in the Kelly administrations ability to write a fair request for proposals and negotiate good contracts.

Landwehr said the process so far has not reassured her. Shes frustrated that, after raising alarms about the forced delay, the administration will not issue new contracts until 2025. And she is concerned the administration will tailor its request for proposals to one specific company.

Were gonna take a hard look at what they do come in and do, Landwehr said.

Rep. Barbara Ballard, a Lawrence Democrat who is on the Legislatures KanCare oversight committee, said she believes Kelly will draw on her experience in the Legislature to ensure contractors address issues that have been raised by providers and consumers.

These issues, Ballard said, include a need for better mental health coverage and better compensation for home-based and care.

We look at the areas that need to be strengthened, areas where people complain and that is where I believe the governor should be addressing, Ballard said.

As the state prepares to begin formally seeking bids, Fertig said shes hoping for a very competitive process and does not have specific companies in mind.

All we care about is who is best equipped to give the state the best possible services at the best price, she said.

Senate President Ty Masterson, an Andover Republican, said he hopes Kelly will prioritize services for Kansas elderly and disabled residents.

Elections have consequences and the governor now has full authority to carry out the RFP process. I would hope she does so with the best interests of our most vulnerable Kansans in mind, he said.
Lawmakers were quick to react following the news that former President Donald Trump had been indicted on charges connected to his handling of classified documents.

The reaction largely fell along party lines, with Republicans flocking to support the former president and denounce the investigation as partisan, and Democrats using the news to criticize the 2024 GOP presidential candidate.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, posting a statement on Twitter, called it a dark day for the country and promised to hold President Joe Biden accountable.

It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him, he wrote. Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades. I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a senior member of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, quickly responded to McCarthys comments.





Kevin McCarthy is threatening to use Congress to interfere in the federal prosecution of Donald Trump. I will be doing everything I can in the Judiciary Committee to resist that, Schiff tweeted. Trump has plenty of criminal defense lawyers. Thats not the job of Congress.

A former Trump impeachment manager and a member of the high-profile Jan. 6 committee, Schiff called the indictment an affirmation of the rule of law.

Trumps apparent indictment on multiple charges arising from his retention of classified materials is another affirmation of the rule of law, he wrote on Twitter. For four years, he acted like he was above the law. But he should be treated like any other lawbreaker. And today, he has been, Schiff added.



The criminal prosecution of political adversaries is something that Third World countries do, and its the sort of thing that the United States of America used to be against, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) said in a statement sent out minutes after Trump broke the news of his indictment on Truth Social.

Sad day for America. God Bless President Trump, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tweeted.

No one is above the law, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) posted.

The chaos of Trump continues, Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) said on Twitter. What hes doing to this country, the extremism and danger he and his allies present, has to end. Only when those who support and enable him decide to be done with this toxic behavior, will this all be behind us.

Multiple GOP lawmakers accused the Justice Department of attempting to interfere in the 2024 election, in which Trump is currently the Republican frontrunner.

Democrats must literally shake with sweats when they see amazing packed out Trump rallies and overwhelming winning poll numbers week after week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wrote in a lengthy tweet. We must win in 2024.

But to do that, the party must band together, she added in a later tweet.

Republicans need to stop being the party of every man for himself and need to stop fighting each other. Democrats are arresting their political enemies and they work together in their corrupt ways to get it done. Its time for Republicans to unify. No more non-sense, she wrote, following a week of division among House Republicans that prevented the caucus from passing party priorities.



This phony Boxes Hoax indictment against President Trump reflects the most severe election interference on the part of the federal government that we have EVER seen! Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) wrote on Twitter.

Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) called the charges bogus, accusing the Biden administration of attempting to undermine Bidens chief political opponent, President Trump.

But Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), another Trump impeachment manager and Jan. 6 committee member, cautioned Republicans against what he called the dangerous rhetoric about a two-tiered system of justice.

Instead of trying to divide the country and undercut our legal system, Congressional Republicans should respect the outcome of the Special Counsels comprehensive investigation and the decisions of the citizens serving on the grand jury, Raskin said in a statement, warning that attacking federal prosecutors not only undermines the Department of Justice but betrays the essential principle of justice that no one is above the commands of law, not even a former President or a self-proclaimed billionaire.
At least 100,000 tons of crops lost in Kakhovka Dam explosion; several million could be lost

Taras Vysotskyi

On the Ukrainian-controlled right bank, over 100,000 tons of crops have been lost, Taras Vysotskyi, the First Deputy Minister of Agricultural Policy and Food of Ukraine, revealed on Ukraines national television on June 9.

Read also: 28,000 fish found dead, Ukraines fishing industry faces $100+ million hit after Russias dam explosion

Several million tons of Ukrainian harvest could be lost due to flooding caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka HPP.

The flooded lands will require a comprehensive agroecological assessment of the soil conditions once the water recedes. In most cases, special soil restoration methods will be needed.

On the lands affected by the destruction of the Kakhovka HPP, two main categories of crops were grown. One of them includes vegetable and horticultural crops. The second category consists of grain and oil crops such as soybeans, corn, sunflower, and wheat. Without a water supply source, it is impossible to talk about vegetable production. The cultivation of grain and oil crops will follow an extensive model with low yields, noted Vysotskyi.

Read also: Drone footage shows ruins of Kakhovka dam, flooded areas two days after Russian attack

He said that the inability to irrigate and cultivate millions of tons of grain and oil crops poses the greatest threat to international food security.

Explosion at Kakhovka HPP  what is known

Russias troops have occupied Nova Kakhovka for more than a year. On the night of June 6, the dam was blown from the inside. The water flow from the reservoir, which was close to its highest recorded water level, has endangered over 80 towns and settlements, including the regional capital of Kherson, downstream on the Dnipro River.

The left (eastern) bank of the Dnipro River, which is under Russian occupation, is affected the most.

Read also: Ukraine and UN agree on evacuation from occupied Kherson after Kakhovka Dam explosion

The Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant was completely destroyed and cannot be repaired, state hydroelectric company Ukrhydroenergo said. The dam wasnt destroyed completely, but significantly damaged, the Ukrainian militarys South Operational Command said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordered an evacuation from the endangered areas and supply of safe drinking water to people who were reliant on water from the Kakhovka reservoir.

Read also: Animal genocide  animals have no chance of survival as 55,000 hectares of forest flooded in Kherson Oblast

The evacuation from the right bank of Kherson Oblast continued even during the night, while the left bank, which suffered greater flooding and is currently under occupation, is facing a catastrophe.

The Prosecutor Generals Office opened an investigation on the incident under article of the Criminal Code on ecocide.

President Zelenskyy has called Russias attack on the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant the largest man-made environmental disaster in Europe in decades.

Ukraines Defense Intelligence has said that the Russian demolition of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant increases the threat of a nuclear disaster.

Read also: Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant at risk from Kakhovka dam breach, but situation currently stable  Energoatom

The temporary mayor of the occupied town of Oleshky, Yevhen Ryshchuk, reported at least eight deaths as a result of the flooding.

Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson Oblast Military Administration, announced that in Kherson, as of the morning of June 9, there is a trend of decreasing water levels. Overnight, the water level dropped by 20 centimeters.

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At least 20 people injured when Texas walkway collapses

At least 20 people injured when Texas walkway collapses

At least 20 people were injured Thursday afternoon when an elevated walkway at a Texas beach collapsed, officials in Surfside Beach said.

There were no life-threatening injuries, officials in Brazoria County said.

A group from a faith-based summer camp was visiting the beach, which is about 65 miles south of Houston, when the structure collapsed.

More than 20 people were injured during a possible deck collapse at Stahlman Park in Surfside Beach, Texas on Thursday afternoon. (KPRC)

Five people were taken by air to a Houston hospital, and 16 others went to a local hospital. The victims are 14 to 48 years old, officials said.

The cause of the collapse is unclear and under investigation.

NBC affiliate KPRC of Houston reported that part of the collapsed deck was tapped off, while other parts remained intact.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
He was an immigrant who ended up fighting in the bloodiest American battle of the Second World War and was one of the few members of his unit to survive. A man short in stature but large in personality, he lived a long, happy life with his family after retiring from his much-decorated service.

John Paul Bellefontaine, of Leesburg, died on May 28, just one day before Memorial Day. He was 98 years old and believed to be one of the last two living members of his unit.

Ive never seen anybody like him, said his daughter, Deborah Fike.

Hes a little bitty guy and very, very tough, she added. But gentle too, at the same time, you know, and he is very much a perfectionist. Like everything has to be done, right. He couldnt take anything out of place.

Born Jean Paul Louis LeBlanc Bellefontaine on March 2, 1925, he was a native of Montreal, Canada. His family immigrated to America in 1942 when he was 17. According to Fike, the family left Canada for Florida simply because it was too cold, ultimately making St. Petersburg their new home.

Disagreements with his father led Bellefontaine to enlist in the military in 1943, only one year after arriving in America.

Bellefontaine wanted to be a pilot but, at around five feet tall, he was disqualified from pilot training. He instead enlisted in the U.S. Army, training to become a paratrooper, and was assigned to the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion.

On April 21st, 1944, Bellefontaine began a 33-day voyage to Italy aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which came under assault from German bomber planes.

That August, the 551st participated in Operation Dragoon, the Allied landing in southeastern France, eventually liberating the city of Nice. Due to his upbringing in Montreal, French was Bellefontaines first language, and so he was made a translator for American forces while in France and Belgium.

In December, Bellefontaine would become embroiled in the bloodiest battle the United States was involved in during the war  the Battle of the Bulge, Germanys desperate last-ditch surprise counteroffensive through the Ardennes Forest between Belgium and Luxembourg meant to stave off defeat on the Western Front.

The 551st were sent to capture the German-held Belgian village of Rochelinval without any support, a mission they successfully completed at the cost of most of the units remaining lives.

Although Bellefontaine was one of the lucky men to survive the battle, he suffered lifelong health complications to his feet due to the deep snow, resulting in him developing gangrene toward the end of his life.

In early 1945, the remaining members of the 551st were absorbed into the 82nd Airborne Division. John remained in the Army, serving a total of 20 years, ultimately achieving the rank of Chief Warrant Officer.

He was very gentle, but he was very much a bossy person, Fike said. Like hes used to ordering everybody around. So being a Chief Warrant Officer, he likes to tell us all orders. He wouldnt wait for me to take the trash out. I said, Dad, five minutes, give me. He wouldnt wait five minutes. He would start to do it on his own.

He received numerous accolades, including the Bronze Star of Valor and the Presidential Unit Citation, the latter of which was awarded to all members of the 551st in 2001.

Bellefontaine was waiting to receive the Legion of Honor medal from France when he passed.

His eldest son and child, Yannick Bellefontaine, says his father didnt like to talk about his service at first.

He was proud of what he accomplished, Yannick said. But at first when I talked to him about wanting to be honored now he said, because he was humble, I dont know why they want to honor me. You know, I was just over there. Its not like my choice really. But I said, Well, Dad, you know, you sacrificed a lot for the rest of us here.

After the war, while still stationed in France, John Bellefontaine met his first wife, Henriette, a native of France. Bellefontaine and a friend were driving down a road when they noticed two women: Henriette and a friend, who had missed a train they intended to catch. Bellefontaine and his friend offered to take the two women to their destination.

The two married and had three children: sons Yannick and Steve and daughter Deborah.

After his retirement, Bellefontaine became an electronic communications engineer in the Army Civil Service, with his education being provided for under the G.I. Bill of Rights. One of his posts was at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey.

Bellefontaine had multiple health problems in his later years, including multiple forms of cancer.

The guy couldnt walk for the past 10 years, Fike said. Hes been driving around a little scooter. He had prostate cancer, bladder cancer and had three hip replacements. The last hip exploded. He had MRSA, he had sepsis. I said, Dad, youre a cat with nine lives. I mean, this man was such a fighter.

John ultimately passed away due to prostate cancer.

Despite his many ailments, Bellefontaine persevered through them with his signature stubbornness.

That contributed to a long life, said his second son, Steve Bellefontaine . He never really stopped moving. He never took naps, even in his 80s, he rarely took a nap. So he was constantly moving. That constant desire to keep moving and a very sharp mind, he remembered a lot of things from even in his 80s, early 90s, things from when we were younger. So he kind of had the brain power, the will, the desire to live and a little bit of a stubborn streak.

Steve Bellefontaine fulfilled his fathers dream of becoming a pilot, serving in the Air Force. After he retired, he became a pilot for American Airlines.

In 2018, American Airlines partnered with the Gary Sinise Foundation, established by actor and veterans advocate Gary Sinise, who portrayed Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, in the Soaring Valor program, meant to transport World War II veterans to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.

Steve Bellefontaine volunteered to serve as a pilot in the program so he could personally transport his father to go to the museum alongside 39 other veterans.

I told the Foundation and American that I wanted to be the guy that flew them over and have them, you know, bring my dad. So its officially 39 veterans and my dad, which you know, he was invited only because I was flying them over there. So, yeah, its an opportunity that I kind of took to be able to not only take those guys, but take my dad over there. It was one of those bucket lists that I felt like that opportunity I couldnt pass by so Im glad I did it.

John Bellefontaine was able to meet Sinise at the event. Sinise wrote a letter to Johns family after his passing.

With his typical stubbornness, the elder Bellefontaine initially didnt want to go on the trip. But after he went, he asked his pilot son if he could go again.

Yannick Bellefontaine described his father as a simple, hardworking man.

After the experiences that he had as a child, the facts of the war, going through all that, I think he was looking to live, enjoy more out of life, just simple things, he said. He was a dad who worked very hard to provide for his family. Somebody who just didnt have a bad bone in his body, you know, never, never judged people, never gossiped about people, anything like that.

Yannick Bellefontaine spoke about one of his favorite family traditions with his father.

When he was in his 80s and early 90s, I lived in South Carolina and Tennessee and he lived in Florida, he recalled. We would meet halfway like in Pooler or Savannah. He would drive three-and-a-half hours at 90 years old, meet us for lunch for an hour or two, and then he turned around, go back home.

John Bellefontaine loved animals, especially dogs, and cars. He purchased a new car every year, usually after trading the previous one in. Fike believes he bought around 60 during his lifetime. He also loved to make art.

Bellefontaine is survived by Henriette and his second wife, Patricia; his three children; his stepdaughter Anne Marie; his ten grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

The funeral is to take place at Allen J. Harden Funeral Home in Mount Dora on the morning of June 23. Bellefontaine will be buried with honors at the Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell that afternoon.
Legal battle continues over sanity of Florida inmate scheduled to be executed next week

With the scheduled execution a week away, a battle about the sanity of convicted murderer Duane Owen continued Thursday.

>>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<<

Owens attorneys filed a brief at the Florida Supreme Court reiterating arguments that Owen should not be executed because of insanity. The brief came a day after Attorney General Ashley Moodys office disputed the insanity arguments.

Owens attorneys pointed to the Eighth Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment, and legal precedents that prevent executing people who are not mentally competent.

The fact remains that Owen is insane to be executed and if this [Supreme] Court does not take action, Owens execution will be in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Thursdays brief said.

[DOWNLOAD: Free Action News Jax app for alerts as news breaks]

In a brief Wednesday, Moodys office contended that the overwhelming weight of the evidence in this case demonstrates that Owen is sane to be executed for the 1984 murder of a Palm Beach County woman.

He is aware of the fact of his execution, and that he will die, the brief filed by Moodys office said. He also understands why he is being executed.

Gov. Ron DeSantis on May 9 signed a death warrant for Owen, 62, in the murder of Georgianna Worden, who was bludgeoned with a hammer and sexually assaulted in her Boca Raton home in May 1984, according to the death warrant and court records.

Owen also was sentenced to death in the March 1984 murder of 14-year-old Karen Slattery, who was babysitting at a Delray Beach home, according to state and federal court documents. Slattery was stabbed to death.

Read: Signal 34 Foundation holding raffle for injured JSO officer

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to block the execution in a separate appeal dealing with Owens competence. The subsequent flurry of arguments stemmed from a legal rule about holding hearings on whether prisoners would be insane at the time of execution.

Owen is scheduled to be put to death June 15.

Read: Sen. Rick Scott to speak in St. Augustine about hurricane preparedness

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"The Estrela de Fura", meaning "Star of Fura", was cut from a 101-carat rough stone and is the world's largest ruby

The biggest ruby ever to come to auction has been sold in New York for a record sum of $34.8m (28m).

Sotheby's, which auctioned the 55.22-carat gem, described it as a "once-in-a-lifetime" jewel.

The original rough stone weighed a staggering 101 carats when it was found last year in a mine in Mozambique, where there are vast ruby deposits in the north of the country.

Polished rubies of more than five carats are extremely uncommon.

The rare gem has been called "Estrela de Fura", meaning "Star of Fura" in Portuguese, named after the mine in which it was found.

Quig Bruning, head of Sotheby's Jewellery in New York, said when he first saw the stone he was entranced, the Press Association reports.

"With its unprecedented size, piercing colour and rare degree of optical transparency and clarity, it truly deserved the record-breaking price today, as it now joins the ranks of the world's most legendary gemstones."

Fura's Mozambique ruby mine is in Montepeuz district in the province of Cabo Delgado, where an Islamist militant insurgency has raged for the last few years.

Cabo Delgado is one of Mozambique's poorest regions, but it is rich in untapped mineral resources.

Analysts suggest the insurgency, which began in 2017, was fuelled by frustration about the lack of local jobs.

Troops belonging to the regional bloc Sadc deployed to the region in 2021 to fight the jihadists, notorious for their brutal attacks. Their power had grown to the extent that they controlled key towns in the province.

The regional force has helped the Mozambican army regain control of the towns and the violence has reduced, but the militants are known to still operate at a low level.

Sotheby's says a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the Estrela de Fura is being allocated by Fura to set up an academy to provide technical training in the fields of mining, engineering, carpentry and agriculture.
Letters to the Editor: 'All are welcome' is a Christian idea, Gov. Ron DeSantis

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg joins local church and nonprofit leaders at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral to speak about the needs of migrants who were flown to that city. (Mackenzie Mays / Los Angeles Times)

To the editor: The message to the community from St. Pauls Episcopal Church in Ventura is, "All are welcome here." The rector, the Rev. Susan Bek, offers that message weekly from the pulpit, verbally and in American Sign Language. ("DeSantis picks an immigration fight with Newsom because hes scared to attack Trump," Opinion, June 7)

One glance around the sanctuary reveals an attendance of a wide range of people of various ages, gender identities, economic levels and ethnic groups. Its one of the reasons I'm a parishioner there.

So, it really is no surprise to me that Sacramento's Trinity Episcopal Cathedral has welcomed and cared for the migrants sent there through no choice of their own. These are examples of what columnist Robin Abcarian refers to as what weve always believed is best about us  accepting and caring for those poor, tired and huddled masses yearning to be free.

Karen Scott Browdy, Fillmore

..

To the editor: It strains any kind of common sense for Abcarian to think that sending 16 asylum seekers to Sacramento is cruel and inhuman. California is a sanctuary state, so what's the problem with taking in 16 additional people?

It didn't seem to bother any Democratic-controlled cities when Texas was overloaded with people who had just crossed the border. People on the island of Martha's Vineyard got very upset when 50 asylum seekers were flown in; those immigrants were sent away after about 36 hours.

It's amazing that the people upset by these migrant flights don't get similarly mad when criminals cross the border or when fentanyl comes into the country.

I think all the people who are very upset by Texas and Florida sending asylum seekers to Democratic cities should offer to take these people into their own homes.

Barbara Kimelman, Tarzana

..

To the editor: When I read that the migrants sent here from Florida "reached into their pockets to offer a dollar for the collection plate," I had to read it again. Then I read it out loud to my husband. These people barely had a dollar to their name, yet they know the meaning of charity.

I thought to myself that Florida doesn't deserve people like this. I hope that all of these people find a job and a home in California. They are the people who will keep our state strong.

Thank you to the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral of Sacramento for showing all of us how to act as human beings. Republicans, are you reading this?

Judith Braun, Woodland Hills

..

To the editor: What if our governor rounded up California's homeless people and provided transportation for them to be delivered to Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida?

Alison Agins, San Juan Capistrano

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Visual deterioration

Everyone knows that allowing neighborhoods to visually deteriorate leads to more crime. The broken windows in north Lexington include burned out, vacant buildings covered in graffiti. In my opinion, this would never be allowed in the south part of Lexington.

I would like Mayor Linda Gorton and the Lexington Fayette Urban County Council to explain why the open city position to remediate graffiti has not been filled. Graffiti is everywhere in north Lexington, and it appears as if the city isnt doing anything to remove it. It is dragging down our North Limestone neighborhood, and it is an invitation to more crime because it looks like no one cares. Some of us are trying hard to make our neighborhood safer, but we need the citys help.

If we want to reduce crime and violence in north Lexington, we must address the visual blight and the abandoned buildings.

Dave Cooper, Lexington

Pity Calloway

I disagree with Linda Blackfords opinion that Ky. Rep. Josh Calloway, R-Irvington, should resign. Ms. Blackford shouldnt condemn Mr. Calloway but pity him. His remarks toward the LGBTQ community stating they are diseased and unfit for his society are coming from a mindset of fear. Like all of his kind, he is scared of the unknown.

I think Josh imagines himself as St. Michael slaying demons.

Children must be protected, I imagine him screaming to an empty room. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of dollars we waste, like Bill 150, our insignificant program will succeed! We must wipe out the 10 transgender people and the drag shows in prisons. We must burn any book which might encourage thinking. We must concentrate on the trivial and disregard good roads, good schools and teachers pay. We must protect Kentuckians from words like woke.

State Rep. Josh Calloway, R-Irvington

We have a Christian mandate, Calloway might say.

(Sorry, Josh. In the four gospels, Jesus never mentions drag queens or transgender people. He never condemns homosexuals. But in Luke 7:1-10, he does cure a Roman soldiers young male lover.)

Damian Beach, Frankfort

Transgender treatment

The state legislatures who passed laws against medical treatment for transgender youth seem to be focused on matters which are not in their area of expertise. For example, those laws are not protecting the youth as much as they are taking parental rights away by those who are neither doctors nor involved in the day-to-day lives of these children. Also, the denial of puberty blockers and hormones which they believe causes harm do not cause permanent bodily changes.

Most of these same states have very restrictive abortion laws. Consider a 12-year-old girl who is pregnant and would be denied an abortion. Are there hormonal changes? Are there physical and emotional changes which are not reversible? Under the guise of protecting children these lawmakers are interfering in these familys personal matters by imposing their own personal moral beliefs. It is a clear overreach of government over the rights and freedoms of individuals.

Cheryl Keenan, Lexington

Beautiful community

This Memorial Day Weekend I had the privilege to be at the Kentucky Aviation Museum while touring with the Commemorative Air Forces C-47 Thats All Brother. We fly this airplane around the country to accomplish our mission to Honor, Educate, and Inspire by telling the stories of World War II and to providing the public with an opportunity to experience this historic airplane in several ways up to and including flying aboard it.

While I have flown to Lexington many times, this was the first time I was off the airport and it is a wonderful community. Yours is a beautiful community and I look forward to returning.

The Museum is a real treasure for Lexington and the volunteers were great. The public who came out to see our airplane and ride in it were polite and respectful of our historic aircraft.

On behalf of the Thats All Brother crew, and the entire membership of the Commemorative Air Force, thank you to the Museum and the community for providing us the opportunity to share the important history of WWII with your community.

Doug Rozendaal, Clear Lake, Iowa

Ensign Lincoln Kilgore, middle, talks with camp goer Joel Desmennu before Desmennu and others go up in a plane during the Aviation Summer Camp on Friday, June 24, 2022, at the Aviation Museum at Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky.

Guthrie applauded

I applaud U.S. Rep. Brett Guthries efforts to ensure that patients have total clarity when it comes to the price of healthcare. Health systems are committed to price transparency for patients, but that is not possible if we make rules more confusing.

There are many issues to address around the high cost of healthcare. The original intent of the 340B Pharmacy program, for example, makes sense, but there is really no transparency around the costs, cost savings or expenditures. I understand there are U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration audits to rightly identify eligibility compliance of covered entities. And there are federal rules for reporting health care costs. But how do those translate to information that hospitals and patients can use? A standardized data collection system of claims paid would provide a clear and consistent audit of all healthcare systems, better informed funding of programs and policy initiatives, and be a useful tool for patients.

Government should prioritize enhancing and enforcing existing price transparency laws, so patients have access to the latest and most accurate pricing information. When patients are empowered, the market works itself out. More red tape does the opposite.

Thanks to Congressman Guthrie for everything he does for his constituents in Congress.

State Rep. Kim Moser, Frankfort

Real men

I will gladly respond to the concerned writer questioning if we could amass enough men to save us from the next Hitler? The answer is- we already have.

In November 2020, millions of my fellow American men voted for President Biden and removed the disgraced former executive from our government.

The writer offers a suitable case of American bravery and selflessness, demonstrated during the liberation of Europe, as an exemplar of real manhood. However, it shouldnt be lost on educated Americans that among the heroes of D-Day and other World War II battles were men who were neither white, Christian, straight, or even U.S. citizens.

I agree with the writer; that model, at least within the culture of the far-right, HAS been replaced. We saw the replacement on shameful display on Jan. 6, 2021. The men of Operation Overlord were replaced by those of Operation TrumpOurLord: resentful, self-important criminals attempting to subvert the peaceful transition of government those men were defending nearly 80 years ago.

It really is obvious: if you must, as the writer exclaimed, insist on being a real man, well then you already know, dont you?

Steven Lombardo, Lexington

Compiled by Liz Carey
Lexus just made things a little easier for all of the American off-roading enthusiasts who still miss the Land Cruiser.

Following weeks of enticing previews, Toyotas luxury brand finally unveiled the next-generation GX on Thursday. The mid-size SUV will receive a major makeover that puts it more in line with the LX, Lexuss still-in-production Land Cruiser equivalent, for 2024, as well as a new powertrain and two trim levels designed for off-roading.

More from Robb Report

Toyota hasnt reversed its decision to discontinue the Land Cruiser in the USat least not yetbut the Lexus lineup now includes two models that look awfully similar to the beloved SUV. The new GX 550 is built on the same platform as the larger LX, because of which its been stretched out so that it now has the same wheelbase as its bigger sibling. Its also been completely restyled. Whereas the last generations GX had a somewhat generic look, the new version is brash and bold. It shares a blocky, boxy shape with the current Land Cruiser being sold in other parts of the world, but it has sharper, more angular lines that give it an attitude all its own. Upon launch, itll be one of the better-looking SUVs available stateside.

2024 Lexus GX 550 Premium

The interior has also been thoroughly redesigned. The new streamlined dashboard has two different displaysa 12.3-inch digital gauge cluster for the driver and a 14.0-inch touchscreen infotainment system. Despite this, there are still physical knobs and switches for controlling the HVAC system and different drive modes, as well as a shifter for the four-wheel-drive system. The vehicle has room for up to seven adults thanks to three rows of seats, the last of which has a power-folding function when you need extra cargo room.

Under the hood, youll find a twin-turbocharged 3.4-liter V-6 in place of the last generations 4.6-liter V-8. The new mill is connected to a 10-speed automatic gearbox that sends power to all four wheels and is more potent than its predecessor. It produces 349 hp and 479 ft-lbs of torque compared to 301 hp and 329 ft lbs of torque. Its 17 mpg fuel-economy rating is 1 mpg better than the V-8s as well, according to Car and Driver. You can expect that number to increase when a hybrid powertrain arrives later in the generation. The GX shares a suspension with the LX, including its Kinetic Dynamic Suspension System and adaptive dampers.

Inside the new GX

As is often the case, multiple trim levels will be available when the GX 550 launches. Its currently unclear what differentiates the Premium, Premium+, Luxury and Luxury + from one another, but we know that two Overtrail trims were designed for off-roading. Both packages include a number of rugged upgradesskid plates, a rear locking differential and 18-inch wheels wrapped in chunky all-terrain tireswhile the Overtrail+ comes with luxe extras.

The new GX will launch as part of Lexuss 2024 model year lineup. Deliveries of the SUV, which will be built in Japan, are expected to begin early next year. Pricing has yet to be announced, but expect it to cost more than the current model, which starts at $59,275.

Click here for more photos of the 2024 Lexus GX 550.

The Next-Generation Lexus GX in Photos

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'All life should be valued': Volunteers rush to save animals after Ukraine dam collapse

An animal rescue team on a boat with a rescued dog in the flooded area after the dam collapse in Kherson, Ukraine, Thursday, June 8, 2023. (AP Photo/Vasilisa Stepanenko)

KHERSON, Ukraine (AP)  The rescue volunteer holds out his hand, but the dog, stranded on a floating island of debris in a southern Ukrainian city inundated by flooding, is too traumatized to approach. Volodymyr Holubnichii offers the scared animal some food; the dog sniffs and relaxes.

Dont be scared, Holubnichii soothingly tells the animal, which eventually accepts a leash and being carried to safety.

Holubnichii, a volunteer with Animal Rescue Kharkiv, spent days cruising the flooded streets of Kherson city after the Kakhovka dam collapsed on Tuesday and submerged entire towns. He is one among the organization's 70 volunteers determined to rescue as many animals as possible, plucking them from the rooftops and garages of flooded homes before they die of dehydration and hunger.

The flooding has killed civilians, ruined crops, displaced landmines, and caused widespread environmental damage. Kyiv accused Moscow of blowing up the Dnieper River dam and its hydropower plant, which the Kremlins forces controlled. Russia in turn blamed Ukraine for the catastrophe.

Bisected by the river, southern Ukraine's Kherson province is an important fault line in the war that started with Russia's invasion of the neighboring country more than 15 months ago. Russian forces withdrew from the western bank, including the regional capital also named Kherson, but part of the eastern side remain under Russian occupation..

Ukrainian authorities scrambled to evacuate stranded residents officials on both sides said at least 14 people died in the flooding and thousands others were homeless, while tens of thousands were without drinking water.

Upon hearing news of the flooding, Holubnichii immediately thought of the animals. All life should be valued, he said. It doesnt matter if its an animal or a person or something else.

Animal Rescue Kharkiv's volunteers, based in northern Ukraine's Kharkiv province, began packing their gear. By Wednesday morning, they were in the Kherson region looking for animals

So far, they have saved 107 animals since the dams collapse: 45 dogs, 36 cats, five kittens, 18 chickens and three goats that will go to shelters across Ukraine. Many were pets of evacuated civilians, according to Yaryna Vintoniuk, a spokesperson for the non-governmental organization.

From rescue boats, the team reached remote areas of Kherson and extract animals from rooftops, apartments and garages of submerged homes. On Thursday, the volunteers came under Russian shelling as they worked.

The animals, unwillingly abandoned by their panicked owners, were terrified. Some barely had the strength to get up.

Holubnichii picked up a small dog that was trapped under the floating rubble and nearly unconscious. He heard the barking of another dog and made his way to the animal, stuck on a rooftop of a flooded home.

Dont be afraid, giant, Holubnichii said in a soft voice.

The NGO founded eight years ago is 90-year-old Valentyna Timofeevnas best hope for being reunited with her dog and cat. Timofeevna had to leave her pets behind when she was evacuated from her home. Weeping, she wonders if they will be found alive.

Maybe they are already dead, the woman wailed. A volunteer tried to comfort her, telling her not to rush to conclusions.
FILE - In this photo released by Saudi Press Agency, a Saudi custom officer opens imported pomegranates, as customs foiled an attempt to smuggle over 5 million pills of an amphetamine drug known as Captagon, which they said came from Lebanon, at Jiddah Islamic Port, Saudi Arabia, Friday, April 23, 2021. A little white pill has given Syrian President Bashar Assad powerful leverage with his Arab neighbors, who have been willing to bring him out of pariah status in hopes he will stop the flow of highly addictive Captagon amphetamines out of Syria. (Saudi Press Agency via AP, File)

BEIRUT (AP)  A little white pill has given Syrian President Bashar Assad powerful leverage with his Arab neighbors, who have been willing to bring him out of pariah status in hopes he will stop the flow of highly addictive Captagon amphetamines out of Syria.

Western governments have been frustrated by the red-carpet treatment Arab countries have given Assad, fearing that their reconciliation will undermine the push for an end to Syria's long-running civil war.

But for Arab states, halting the Captagon trade is a high priority. Hundreds of millions of pills have been smuggled over the years into Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries, where the drug is used recreationally and by people with physically demanding jobs to keep them alert.

Saudi Arabia has intercepted large shipments of pills hidden in crates of fake plastic oranges and in hollowed out pomegranates  even pills crushed and molded to look like traditional clay bowls.

Analysts say Assad likely hopes that by making even limited gestures against the drug he can gain reconstruction money, further integration in the region and even pressure for an end to Western sanctions.

The vast majority of the worlds Captagon is produced in Syria, with smaller production in neighboring Lebanon. Western governments estimate the illegal trade in the pills generates billions of dollars.

The United States, Britain and European Union accuse Assad, his family and allies, including Lebanons militant Hezbollah group, of facilitating and profiting from the trade. That has given Assad's rule a massive financial lifeline at a time when the Syrian economy is crumbling, they say. The Syrian government and Hezbollah deny the accusations.

Syrias neighbors have been the biggest and most lucrative market for the drug. As the industry flourished, experts say Damascus in recent years saw Captagon as more than just a cash cow.

The Assad regime realized that this is something they can weaponize for political gain ... and thats when production started being on a large scale, said Karam Shaar, a senior fellow at Washington-based New Lines Institute.

Stopping the trade has been a top demand of Arab countries in their talks with Syria on ending its political isolation. Syria was readmitted last month from the Arab League, from which it was suspended in 2011 because of Assads brutal crackdown on protesters. On May 20, Assad received a warm welcome at the Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

A possible sign of the behind-the-scenes trade-offs came on May 8, when airstrikes in southern Syria reduced the home of a well-known drug kingpin to rubble. Merhi al-Ramthan, his wife and six children were killed. Another strike destroyed a suspected Captagon factory outside the city of Daraa, near the Jordanian border.

Jordan was likely behind the strike, with Assads consent, say activists and experts. The strike came one day after the Arab League formally re-admitted Syria, a step Jordan helped broker.

Assad gave assurances that he would stop the regime from supporting and protecting smuggling networks, a former brigadier general of Jordans intelligence service, Saud Al-Sharafat, told The Associated Press. For example, he facilitated the disposal of al-Ramthan.

Jordan, he said, sees the Captagon trade as a threat to both security and communal peace.

In public comments, Jordans foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, refused to confirm or deny whether his country was behind the airstrikes but said it was willing to take military action to curb drug smuggling.

Arab states, many of which had backed the rebels trying to oust Assad, say they share the goal of pushing him to make peace. Ahead of the Jeddah summit, Jordan hosted a meeting of top diplomats from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt, and the long agenda included setting a roadmap for peace talks and the return of millions of Syrian refugees.

But it was on Captagon where the gathering made the most progress. Syria pledged to clamp down on smuggling, and a regional security coordination committee was agreed on. Days later, Syrian state media reported that police quashed a Captagon smuggling operation in the city of Aleppo, discovering 1 million pills hiding in a pickup truck.

Jordan has intensified surveillance along the Syrian border in recent years and has raided drug dealers. Jordanian troops killed 27 suspected smugglers in a fierce gun battle in January.

Smuggling routes have made untangling drug networks more difficult. A member of an Iraqi militia told the AP that militias in Iraqs desert Anbar province, which borders Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, have been crucial for Captagon smuggling. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Syrian lawmaker Abboud al-Shawakh denied the government profits from the drug trade and insisted authorities are trying vigorously to crack down on smuggling.

Our country is used as a regional transit route as there are border crossings out of the states control, al-Shawakh told the AP. He alleged that only armed opposition groups are involved in Captagon dealing.

Syrian opposition groups are believed by many observers to have some involvement in drug smuggling. Western governments, however, accuse Assads relatives and allies of a direct role in Captagon production and trade and have imposed sanctions on a string of individuals close to Assad.

While Assad may be willing to move against some parts of the drug trade, he has little incentive to crush it completely without winning something in return from Arab states, al-Sharafat said.

A Saudi official denied reports that Riyadh had offered billions of dollars to Damascus in exchange for a crackdown. But he added that whatever the kingdom might offer Syria would be less costly than the damage that Captagon has caused among Saudi youth. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

The U.S. and other Western governments fear that the Arab states normalization with Syria undermines attempts to push Assad to make concessions to end Syrias conflict. They want Assad to follow a peace roadmap outlined in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254, passed unanimously in 2015, which calls for talks with the opposition, rewriting the constitution and U.N.-monitored elections.

So far, the resolution has gone nowhere. Since it passed, Assad regained control over previously lost territory, confining the opposition to a small corner of the northwest. His grip on power now seems solid, though much of the north and east remains out of his hands, held by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters.

Shaar said Assad might use the Captagon card to try to get the U.N. resolution shelved.

Other concessions, like the lifting of Western-led sanctions, would be harder for him to win. While Gulf Arab states wont be able to directly inject cash into Assad's government with the sanctions in place, Shaar said they could funnel money through U.N.-led projects in government-held Syria to get action from Assad against Captagon.

He will be politicking with Gulf states, Shaar said.

___

Associated Press writers Bassem Mroue in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad, contributed to this report.
In 2006, Craig Twohey and his son Ryan, an Eagle Scout, hiked at the Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico, a great experience that inspired them to talk about hiking the Appalachian Trail together after Craig and his wife Jean sold the King Phillip Restaurant.

Craig put the restaurant up for sale in 2018 after 36 years of operation, and it was time to make out a bucket list with the Appalachian Trail hike at the top. He and Ryan would have 2,198 miles together -- hiking, talking, eating, sleeping, living close to nature, meeting people from all around the world. There could be no better father/son bonding time. Then tragically, the plan was shattered when Ryan was killed in an automobile accident in 2019.

There is no loss harder to bear than the loss of a child, Ryan was their only child. How does one begin to heal?

Catering for state function in Gardner. L-R: Craig, Gov. Charlie Baker, Jean, and Ryan Twohey

The Appalachian Trail

Six months later an important answer came to Craig  the Appalachian Trail. He and his friend Jeff LaFrenier spent the next two years preparing for the challenging undertaking. They took five-day hikes on the 54-mile Monadnock to Sunapee Greenway Trail, also they took a helpful 5-day course in Tennessee from a man who hiked the Appalachian Trail 18 times.

"The instructor stressed keeping the backpack as light as possible. We purchased ultralight tents, backpacks, and sleeping bags  and the right shoes," Craig said. "The most important equipment you have are your feet so you must have the right shoes."

With their backpacks down to about 30 pounds and many hiking miles of preparation, they were ready. They would begin on the summit of Springer Mountain in Georgia on March 16, 2022, Ryan's birthday, the day he would have been 31. Craig was 67. Before they began the trek, Craig spread some of his son's ashes there. Ryan would be with his dad right from the start. This was a father/son expedition.

Craig and Jeff hiked together for 30 days when Craig felt weak and tired and had to fly home. It turned out that he had a vitamin deficiency that was quickly resolved with supplements, and after 13 days he returned to continue the trail. He hiked alone for 16 days then decided to return home. He said, "I'd gone 555 miles and wanted to be with my wife. I'd been with her for 40 plus years." It was May 2022 and he had accomplished one-fourth of the trail.

Craig said, "I was thinking about quitting. Someone told me the trail talks to you and by the time I got off the plane in Massachusetts, the trail did talk to me. It called me back and I decided to finish." He returned to the trail 13 days later.

Ryan Twohey at his Eagle Scout ceremony

Trail companions making a difference

All the hikers take a trail name. Craig took his son's initials "RP" for Ryan Patrick, later "Calculator" was added to Craig's name because he was accurate in predicting when they'd arrive at their destinations. Jeff was called "Mule," because mules carry heavy loads, another friend was "Bear Hang" because of having to hang food from trees so bears couldn't get it, "Trash" took that name because he worked in waste management in Illinois, "Cowboy" came from Arkansas. Other fellow hikers were "Husky," "Pushup," and "Asset." Craig hiked with some for a day, some longer. He said, "I met a lot of great people."

He and Trash made a close connection and hiked 610 miles together in 5 1/2 weeks, usually making about 22-23 miles a day. They took a pleasant break from hiking on Easter weekend when Jean and Trash's wife met their husbands in Virginia for a visit.

Craig told an interesting story about Trash's hat that shows how hikers help each other. Trash lost his hat and a hiker put the loss on social media. A hiker who saw the message found the hat, carried it and passed it forward. The hat went from hiker to hiker, and after 300-400 miles of passing, it got returned to Trash. In the meantime, his wife had sent him a new hat so Trash mailed the adventurous one home with its memorable story.

More: Local view: A conversation with an unlikely hero as we celebrate Memorial Day

More: Local view: A garden full of memories is especially sweet at Mother's Day

Ryan's 5K run/walk scholarship fundraiser

This year Craig, now 68, hiked 740 miles from March to May and came home to participate with Jean who was organizing Ryan's 5K run/walk, a scholarship fundraiser that will take place in Phillipston on June 10. Both Craig and Jean will be in the run/walk.

Three $500 scholarships will be given to Narragansett students this year, and the awards will go to people who share Ryan's loves. History. It was a subject he had a passion for since he was very young. He had a phenomenal memory for dates and events. His mother always told him he'd make a great history professor. Music. Like his grandfather, playing an instrument was an ability that came to Ryan naturally. Cross country. It was the sport he enjoyed, and the sport where his compassion showed for those who struggled; he would often go back after he finished the race to run with them to give them encouragement.

More: Ramos, Marion first recipients of new award at Gansett outdoor track and field banquet

RP (Craig) on Appalachian Trail with Pushup and Mule

Craig will resume his hike on June 11, the day after Ryan's 5K race. 300 miles to go to the finish! He will meet up with Trash and Cowboy in Gorham, New Hampshire and hike together through Maine, the toughest segment of the trail which ends at the summit of Mount Kahtadin. Craig said to Trash, "You want to help me get ashes to the top of Kahtadin." Trash answered, "Yep, that's what I want to do."

Craig said, "The hike has been tough, no shower for five to seven days, you hurt all the time, it's the hardest thing I ever tried to do. I thought of Ryan every day. Sometimes I got emotional. There were others who had losses and we shared stories. There's a bond between hikers. It's been therapeutic. I need to complete it."

The Appalachian Trail has been a father/son journey of love, one that hurts as it heals. Many hearts will be with Craig as he aspires to complete his goal.

You can follow Craig on Trailjournals.com. Bring up Appalachian Trail 2023 and enter RP Calculator.

Carole Gariepy is a Phillipston resident and author of Dragging Gerry around the World and Why Go There?

This article originally appeared on Gardner News: Local view Phillipston man hikes Appalachian Trail Ryan's 5K run/walk
Longtime Belleville-based business plans to open new store at former Weekends Only site

The former Weekends Only site at 51 Commerce Lane in Fairview Heights may soon have a new tenant.

Mueller Furniture, LLC, wants to open a retail furniture store in the 90,000-square-foot facility, according to a Business Assistance Program application submitted by Lynwood Mueller to the city government.

Dallas Alley, Fairview Heights land use and development director, said in a brief phone interview that Mueller Furniture still needs formal approval from the citys financing committee and city council before the project can begin.

We will be opening a retail furniture store, Mueller wrote in the application. This will avoid having a large empty retail building in that area. This is a much larger building than we planned on and we require assistance for this to be possible. Initially only cosmetic changes like exterior painting will [be] done.

Alley wrote in a May 22 memo that Mueller Furniture, LLC, requested the following:

An amount not to exceed $300,000 in assistance from the City for remodeling the existing building from the Lincoln Trail Tax Increment Financing District;

An amount not to exceed $550,000 in sales tax rebate over no more than 10 years;

A sales tax waiver as permitted under Illinois state law as it applies within the Fairview Heights Enterprise Zone.

He said that the application will be recommended for approval.

When Weekends Only was open, said Alley, it averaged around $10 million in sales annually.

He said that Mueller Furniture coming to Fairview will be good for the city and good for the business.

Itll be a good fit for them, said Alley.

In a separate phone interview, Lynwood Mueller said the plan is to consolidate their warehouses to one location.

For the last year and a half, the business searched for a new location for a warehouse.

Mueller said potential sites included the former Kmart on Westfield Plaza Drive, former Schnucks on Carlyle Avenue and the Belle-Clair Fairgrounds, all in Belleville, but none of those panned out.

Current owner and president Mark Mueller, Lynwoods son, said in a separate interview that they explored many properties, including the three Belleville sites.

They had agreements on price with the owners of each of the three properties, he said, but were unable to get any of them under contract.

We frankly never expected the [Weekends Only] building to come up for sale, said Mark Mueller.

Lynwood Mueller said that the site will take care of our warehouse needs and offers an opportunity to have another showroom.

Theres enough space to provide a more centralized location for the companys office, said Mark Mueller, allowing them to improve everything about the company.

He said theyre thrilled to move into a turnkey type of situation.

Provided all goes smoothly, they will close on the property the first week of July. Mueller Furniture and Mattress Warehouse Showroom will be open by Labor Day, if not sooner, according to Lynwood Mueller.

All three of Muellers other stores, including their longtime Belleville site, will not be affected by the opening of the new place.

Were not closing the Belleville store, said Lynwood Mueller. In fact, improvements are currently being made to the original store.

Mark Mueller said a three-phase improvement project is in progress.

The first phase consisted of new signage and paint to the stores exterior.

Phases two and three include removing the pegboard walls on the inside, painting walls and installing new flooring, according to Mark Mueller.

Showroom two, which sustained more damage in a 1978 fire, will also be opened up a bit to reveal more if its historic style.

The two Missouri locations, in Lake St. Louis and Ellisville, will also remain open.

Lynwood Mueller said the City of Fairview Heights, particularly Alley, Mayor Mark Kupsky and former Economic Development Director Paul Ellis, who retired last month, were just so accommodating getting the project to come to fruition.

They made the decision to move to Fairview Heights an easy one, he said.

About Mueller Furniture

Located at 1004 E. Main St. in Belleville, Mueller Furniture was founded by John Mueller in 1927, who ran the business until his death in 1952.

The business was taken over by his sons Roland and Les Mueller.

Roland Mueller died in 1960. Les Mueller retired in the 1970s.

A second store opened in March 2017 in Lake St. Louis, Missouri. By then, the business was under the leadership of Lynwood Mueller, who retired in January 2022.

He is still involved as an owner of the business and its buildings.

A third location opened in Ellisville, Missouri, in May 2021.

Mark Mueller currently serves as the business fourth generation owner and president.

For more information, visit muellerfurniture.com. Call 618-233-0667 for the Belleville store, or 636-234-3361 for either Missouri store.
What to look out for when Mississippi candidates submit next campaign finance forms Friday

Candidates for state office in Mississippi will submit their second financial filing of the year Friday evening, showing donations their campaigns received for the month of May.

The previous report for governor and lieutenant governor candidates was not without controversy, and featured some prominent names, from bestselling authors and film directors to well-connected politicos.

When the next campaign filings are posted on the Secretary of State website, here are some names to look out for, based on what was in the previous filing earlier this year:

Friends of Mississippi Hospitals PAC

Following the Pledge of Allegiance, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann heads to the podium to introduce Gov. Tate Reeves and wife Elle Reeves during the State of the State program on the south steps of the Mississippi State Capitol Monday, Jan. 30, 2023.

Friends of Mississippi Hospitals, a Political Action Committee associated with the Mississippi Hospital Association, was the largest single donor in the last filing, and could possibly take that crown again this time.

The MHA PAC gave $250,000 to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley, a decision which was followed by a number of MHA members pulling out of the organization. The member hospitals that left were some of the largest in the state. They cited a lack of faith in leadership, but none directly referenced the donation.

In addition to possible further donations to Presley, observers should look to the PAC's possible donations to Republican candidates. MHA Director Tim Moore has said that the PAC gave $100,000 to Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, but that contribution was not on Hosemann's January-April filing. If the donation has been received, it should appear on this latest filing.

The PAC has also given to a number of down-ballot candidates.

Reeves appointments

Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves addresses supporters at a rally at Stribling Equipment in Richland on Wednesday, May 3, 2023. Reeves is seeking reelection to a second term.

In the previous filing, Gov. Tate Reeves received a number of donations from individuals he has appointed to various state agencies, boards and commissions.

Francis "Franc" Lee was appointed by Reeves to chair the state Gaming Commission in 2021. Lee, president and CEO of consumer financial services company First Tower, LLC, was one of Reeves' largest donors in the January-April filing, giving the governor's campaign $25,000. Since his appointment, Lee has given Reeves $55,000. Lee was confirmed unanimously by the Mississippi Senate.

Reeves reappointed businessman Johnny McRight to the state community college board in 2021. McRight gave Reeves $25,000 in the January-April period, after giving $50,000 in the four years leading up to his appointment. McRight was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2022.

Gregg Rader, an engineer and business executive, was appointed by Reeves to the state Institutions of Higher Learning board in 2021. Rader gave Reeves $25,000 in the January-April filing, after giving $30,000 in 2022. Rader was unanimously approved by the Senate in 2022.

Reeves appointed Gulfport Memorial Hospital CEO Kent Nicaud to the Gaming Commission earlier this year. Nicaud also gave the governor $25,000. Nicaud was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. That stood in contrast to his predecessor, the late Al Hopkins, who had to overcome opposition from some senators during his last reappointment.

Gerard Gibert, a SuperTalk Mississippi radio host and former technology solutions executive, was appointed by Reeves to the Mississippi Lottery Corporation Board in 2019. Gibert gave Reeves $500 in the January-April filing, and has given $8,000 since his appointment. Gibert received one no-vote in the Senate, from Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory.

When Reeves created the Restart Mississippi taskforce in 2020 to advise the state on how to bring businesses back from the COVID-19 pandemic, he appointed Joe Sanderson, a previous donor, to lead it. Also appointed to the committee was Monica Harrigill. Harrigill gave Reeves $5,000 in the January-April period.

PAC and corporate donations

Northern District Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, says that greater monitoring of lobbyist influences on elected officials is one of his goals, at a news conference Tuesday, May 16, 2023, at the Mississippi Capitol in Jackson.

Presley has proposed a ban on direct campaign contributions from corporations and a limit on those from PACs, yet his campaign is currently accepting both forms of donations. In a news conference last month, Presley said "the rules of the road are what the rules of the road are today. They're wrong and they should be fixed."

In addition to the $250,000 from the MHA PAC during the January-April filing, Presley also received $45,000 from MS Sierra Club PAC, $10,000 from NexGen Crane & Rigging LLC, $10,000 from Sowell Place LLC DBA Movietown, $5,000 from Allendale Farms LLC and $5,000 from Carpenter Construction Company.

Reeves also received significant funding from corporations and PACs, though he has not called for the types of restrictions on those donors that Presley has.

Prominent Mississippians

Mississippi State Sen. Chris McDaniel, R-Ellisville, announces his bid to run for lieutenant governor at the state GOP headquarters in Jackson on Monday, Jan. 30, 2023.

There were a number of prominent Mississippians whose names popped up in the January-April filing.

Real estate developer and former Democratic Mayor of Jackson J. Kane Ditto gave $1,000 to Reeves. Tate Taylor, Los Angeles-based but Jackson-born director of films including "The Help" and "Get On Up," gave Reeves $2,500.

Presley garnered financial support from the state's most recent Democratic governor, Ronnie Musgrove, to the tune of $5,000. Also donating $5,000 to Presley was bestselling author John Grisham, who now lives in Virginia but was once a Democratic member of the Mississippi House of Representatives.

In the lieutenant governor's race, Hosemann received a $5,000 donation from former Republican Gov. Haley Barbour and his wife. His opponent in the Republican primary, state Sen. Chris McDaniel, received a $25 donation from Shane Quick, who was also a candidate that filed to challenge Hosemann in the Republican primary before dropping out of the race on Thursday.

Other significant names may find their way onto the May reports.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: PAC donations, money from appointments and more in MS finance filings
At the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Bobby Stuckey and Carlin Karr cover how to rethink what you know about Italian wine.

Getty Images

When it comes to finding a bottle of Italian wine for dinner, varietals like Sangiovese, Montepulciano, and Pinot Grigio are likely among the first to come to mind  and for good reason. Sangiovese happens to be the most widely planted red grape in the country, and thrives in Tuscanys Mediterranean climate (which famously has hot, dry summers), while Pinot Grigio hits its comfort zone in northern Italy, and is regularly found in both mass-produced and single variety wines.

Despite the proven track record those grapes have across Italy, Bobby Stuckey, co-founder of Denvers Frasca Food and Wine, Pizzeria Locale, Sunday Vinyl, and Scarpetta Wine Company, and Carlin Karr, director of wine and beverage, have succeeded in convincing patrons to think outside the box when it comes to ordering wine at their restaurants. We love an indigenous Italian varietal, we love Sangiovese, but theres so much incredible merit to the great French varieties [grown in] Italy that make such profound wines, says Karr. As a wine community, we have to first think of what is delicious and what is great wine.

For Stuckey, one of the most overlooked ways to reframe the normative conversation about wine has to do with using terms like historical instead of international. Most French varieties entered Italy back in the Napoleonic era, he explains. That applies to all Bordeaux varieties, basically, as well as Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Bianco. One variety that Italy claims as its own is Friulano, and it was actually part of the original white Bordeaux blend, so it is a French variety.

Unsurprisingly, if you ask Karr, the best Cabernet Franc in the world comes not from the Loire Valley or Bordeaux, but from Le Macchiole, a producer based on the Tuscan coast, in Bolgheri. It just has this great weight and richness  its so expressive, she adds. Similarly, most people dont know that in the Loire Valley, most Sauvignon Blanc vines have been replanted with clones from a nursery in Friuli. Its all interchanged and mixed up in a way that theres been more Italian influence in France than most people would like to know, Stuckey says. The winemaking has been so incredible over the past 15 years, and Italy has so much to offer.

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Read the original article on Food & Wine.
Looking for a job in Bellingham? These entry-level jobs pay above minimum and living wage

Finding a job that pays enough to support for you and your family without a long list of requirements can be difficult.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculated the living wage by county by evaluating typical expenses to find how much an individual must make hourly to support themselves, or multiple children or dependents in a full-time job.

MIT records living wages for individuals, couples and families that vary based on the number of dependents, number of children and the number of adults who are working. The living wages have increased compared to Januarys calculations, according to previous reporting in The Bellingham Herald:

 Whatcom Countys living wage for an individual with no dependents is $17.47 per hour, working full time.

 For a household with two adults, no children, and only one individual working, a living wage in Whatcom County is $27.62 per hour.

 For a household with two adults, no children and both adults working, the living wage is $13.81 per hour.

 For a household with two adults, one child, and only one adult working, the living wage is $34.53 per hour. If this household had two children the living wage would be $39.51 an hour.

 For a household with two adults and two children and both adults working, the living wage is $25.98 per hour. If the family had three children, both individuals would need to make $32.10 per hour.

As Washington states minimum wage is $15.74 per hour, this amount is not considered a living wage in Whatcom County unless you have multiple adults working in a household with no dependents.

The Bellingham Herald has searched the job website Indeed and local Craiglist listings to find positions with minimal requirements that are available as of Wednesday, June 7, that advertise wages at or above living wages:

Housekeeper at Vacasa

 $22 per hour

 Full-time

 Reliable transportation and weekend availability are required, but no experience is necessary

Mail carrier for United States Postal Service

 $19-$33 per hour

 Full-time

 No requirements listed

Overnight crew member at McDonalds

 $19 per hour

 Full-time

 No requirements listed

Painter/laborer at Kennedy Painting

 $18.50-$24 per hour

 Full-time

 No requirements listed

Customer service-account associate at T-Mobile

 $20 per hour

 Full-time

 Requirements: high school diploma or equivalent
Getty - Chesnot

Louisiana is close to implementing a new law that would ban the creation of a social media account by anyone under the age of 18 without the approval of a parent.

According to the New York Times, the measure, which was introduced by Louisiana State Rep. Laurie Schlegel, was unanimously approved in both chambers and will be sent to the desk of Gov. Jon Bel Edwards for his signature. The bill also allows for parents to cancel the terms-of-service contracts of their children's existing accounts on everything from TikTok to YouTube to Roblox.

More on this

Schlegel, per the Times, argued in April that there needed to be protections for online use, similar to those that exist in day-to-day life. "We have agreed as a society not to let a 15-year-old go to a bar or a strip club, Ms. Schlegel said. The same protections should be in place online so that you know a 10-year-old is not looking at hardcore pornography."

Schlegel said the motivation behind spearheading the bill came after hearing Billie Eilish discuss on The Howard Stern Show how viewing porn when she was 11 "destroyed my brain."

Schlegel maintained the bill would expand upon the Louisiana state code, which gives a parent the permission to rescind a contract associated with their child.

The measure comes after Utah and Arkansas signed similar bills into law earlier this year.
Louisville man gets prison term for fatal wrong-way crash on U.S. Route 30

CANTON  A 31-year-old Louisville man will spend four to six years in prison for the death of a motorist last year during a wrong-way traffic crash on U.S. Route 30.

Franco Guidone pleaded no contest in April to two counts of felony aggravated vehicular homicide and a misdemeanor charge of driving while under the influence of alcohol.

Douglas Fahrni, 65, of Apple Creek, was killed in the collision.

Stark County Common Pleas Judge Taryn Heath on Tuesday sentenced Guidone to four to six years in prison with a chance for judicial release in three years. The sentence was part of a negotiated plea agreement.

County prosecutors did not oppose the chance for early release as long as Guidone keeps out of trouble while incarcerated and completes programming such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Men's Challenge and any other recommended offerings.

Guidone was driving his 2019 Chevrolet Trax the wrong way on the divided highway when he hit a 2021 Chevrolet Malibu head-on around 10:45 p.m. July 16 in the westbound lanes of U.S. Route 30 in Tuscarawas Township.

Guidone was seriously injured and taken to Aultman Hospital by the Brewster Fire Department. The initial police report indicated he broke his leg.

Reach Amy at 330-775-1135 or amy.knapp@indeonline.com

On Twitter: @aknappINDE

This article originally appeared on The Independent: Franco Guidone sentenced to prison in death of motorist Douglas Fahrni
Love those Houston lawyers. But its time for impeached Texas AG Ken Paxton to quit | Opinion

Why does everything in Texas politics turn into a Houston mud-wrestling show?

The governor is from Houston. He cant get along with the lieutenant governor from Houston. The Texas House speaker chimes in from Beaumont.

Both the House impeachment investigators and the accused, Attorney General Ken Paxton of Collin County, hired high-powered famous Houston lawyers for the upcoming August battle royale.

When America was having another National Indictment Day last Thursday, Paxton campaign donor Nate Paul of Austin got in on the show. He was pitched into the Travis County jail to hold for the FBI on yet-unlisted felony charges. Perhaps he can advise the deputies on upgrading their countertops.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, left, greeting President Donald Trump at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in November 2019.

Honestly, it was a dizzying day of legal bluster.

Former President Donald Trump said he is being called before a Florida federal court. As we all know, anyone accused of espionage immediately reaches for the phone to shout to readers of an obscure social media site, I AM AN INNOCENT MAN.

Meanwhile, in Arlington, police are investigating a convent.

Usually when we get this much court activity all at once, it involves the Dallas Cowboys.

The most fascinating case continues to unfold in Austin, where both the prosecution and defense rolled out their celebrity lawyers for Paxtons August impeachment trial on 20 articles accusing him of bribery, abuse of power and meddling in former employees legal complaints against him.

Its not a criminal trial. The Senate is simply deciding whether Paxton failed to uphold the law and is no longer worthy of the public trust.

Attorney Dick DeGuerin helped defend Fort Worth police officer Brian Edward Franklin in 2016.

So far, the first conclusion we can draw about Houston prosecutors Dick DeGuerin and Rusty Hardin and defense attorneys Tony Buzbee and Dan Cogdell is:

Theyre all better lawyers than Paxton.

But DeGuerin and Hardin were at an advantage, arguing from a laundry list of accusations a Texas House committee has compiled for months.

Buzbee is new to Paxtons case, and relied on his clients arguments.

It showed.

Attorney Rusty Hardin speaks to the media after Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson, right, pleaded no contest to an assault charge Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2014, in Conroe, Texas. Adrian Peterson avoided jail time on Tuesday in a plea agreement reached with prosecutors to resolve his child abuse case. (AP Photo/ The Courier, Michael Minasi)

At one point, Buzbee displayed photos of Paxtons kitchen countertops at home, shouting about the impeachment article that accuses Paul of paying for renovations at Paxtons house.

The committee alleged that renovations included granite countertops! Buzbee said, citing one of the more colorful moments in hours-long of committee hearing. Do you remember that article? The granite countertops article?

At a press conference, Paxton's new lawyer Tony Buzbee produces a picture of one of Paxton's countertops. Not granite, he says! pic.twitter.com/QrV4E0ARiC  Christopher Hooks (@cd_hooks) June 7, 2023

He pointed at the kitchen photos.

Do you see the countertops? he demanded. Does that look like any granite youve ever seen?

Uh  no. Because the claim isnt that the countertops are granite.

The claim is that Paxtons wife, Sen. Angela Paxton  a potential juror  wanted something better.

So basically, Buzbee showed evidence supporting the prosecution.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry and lawyer Tony Buzbee appeared for a hearing on felony abuse of power charges Thursday, Nov. 6, 2014, in Austin, Texas.

It wasnt the only time in a day that may turn out to be one of the most embarrassing of his career.

Then he shouted, Receipts! Put up the other one!

A slide of a receipt flashed on the screen, purportedly to show that Paxton paid for the remodeling.

But The Wall Street Journal reported that the receipt showed the payment went to a flimsy company connected to Paul, linking Paul to the renovations.

So thats more evidence helping the prosecution.

Paxton, Buzbee and his lawyers also claim that state lawyer Chris Hilton tried to present evidence to a May 24 meeting of the Texas House General Investigating Committee, but was turned away.

But reporters supported by video say that Hilton came to the hearing and tried to hold an impromptu news conference. He was shooed off.

Look, maybe Buzbee is one of the best litigators in Houston.

Cogdell is definitely one of the best criminal defense attorneys, and hes kept Paxton free on $35,000 bond in connection with a yet-untried 2015 felony criminal fraud charge.

Attorney Dan Cogdell of Houston was hired in 2015 to defend Attorney General Ken Paxton.

They can run roughshod through the Harris County courthouse all day.

But for now, theyre stuck presenting Paxtons case.

That only amounts to, Theyre not impeaching me the right way.

Sooner or later, somebody will have to give the states chief lawyer the legal advice he doesnt want to hear.

Quit.
The Lubbock County Courthouse.

A Lubbock judge on Tuesday sentenced to 25 years in prison a 37-year-old man whom prosecutors argued showed an increasing pattern of criminal behavior against women.

District judge William Eichman handed down the sentence to Jackie Parker after a two-day bench trial in the 364th District Court.

Jackie Parker is escorted out of the 364th District Court where he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for breaking into the home of four women more than a year ago.

Parker pleaded guilty in August to a count of burglary of a habitation and asked Eichman to assess his punishment.

Burglary of a habitation is a second-degree felony that carries a punishment of two to 20 years in prison. However, his punishment was increased to five years to life in prison because of a prior conviction for robbery in 2014.

Eichman could have also placed Parker on deferred adjudication.

The charge against Parker, who has been held at the Lubbock County Detention Center since his Aug. 6, 2021 arrest, stems from a Lubbock police investigation that began in the early morning hours of Aug. 5, 2021, when officers responded to a burglary at a home in the 2700 block of 28th Street.

Jackie Parker

Responding officers spoke with four women who said they returned home to find their home was ransacked and some of their property, mostly electronics, was missing. The women were Texas Tech students who belonged to the same sorority.

They believed the burglar entered the home through an unlocked backdoor. A doorbell camera caught the burglar, who was naked from the waist down, leaving through the front door.

One of the women told the court that before leaving they had left on a television and lights to make it appear the home was occupied to deter burglars.

Among the items stolen that night was one of the women's planner that contained her phone number. The woman told the court that later that day, a man called her claiming to be an ex-boyfriend and during the conversation began referencing notes she'd written on the planner.

The woman reported the call to the police, who traced the phone number to Parker as it was listed in a case involving his ex-girlfriend.

Detectives arrived at Parker's residence in the 2400 block of 29th Street, less than a mile east of the burglary, and spoke with him. Shortly after the interview began, Parker tried to run away from the detectives who caught him and arrested him on a municipal warrant.

Investigators obtained a search warrant for the home and found the stolen electronics and three pairs of underwear belonging to two of the women. Two pairs were found in a dresser drawer in Parker's room, while the third pair was found in a detached garage near what appeared to be a smoking area.

"I think it's pretty clear what he was doing," said prosecutor Chris Schulte after the trial.

During the investigation into the burglary, detectives also came across a report of an indecent exposure three weeks before in the same neighborhood.

In that case, a woman, who was also a Texas Tech student and a sorority member, told the court she went to her Jeep and found a man leaning against her vehicle, with his pants around his ankles, masturbating.

The woman said she ran away and the man chased after her, telling her to come back.

The woman filed a report but no arrests were immediately made.

The similarities in the cases led detectives to call the woman to potentially identify the suspect in a photo line up. The woman identified Parker as the man she saw that day.

Parker told the court he couldn't remember much about either case because he said he was drunk at the time.

However, Parker apologized for his actions.

He told the court that he'd been drinking most of the day before the burglary, became sick and vomited on his pants. He said he went to a backyard to find a hose to clean them. He said he couldn't remember at what point he took off his pants and said he entered the women's home but didn't remember taking the items he stole.

He also told the court he didn't remember calling the woman hours after the burglary.

Parker also claimed not to remember exposing himself to the other woman weeks before the burglary.

He said it was a coincidence that his victims in both cases were sorority members who attended Texas Tech.

Prosecutor Chris Schulte asked the court for a significant punishment, saying the evidence against Parker showed an escalating behavior against women.

"Within a short period, a three-week period in time, he's escalating from exposing himself, which is still disgusting, but to breaking in to a house ... I don't want to know what he was going to do next," he said after the trial.

Parker's defense attorney, Michael Montoya, argued for a sentence on the lower end of the range, saying his client's actions the night of the burglary weren't sexual in nature but stem from his client's alcoholism. He also argued there wasn't enough evidence to show that his client was a future danger to the community.

Schulte said the punishment Eichman handed down reflected the seriousness of the case.

"I think the punishment he got assessed was more or less in line with what I was thinking," he said.

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Lubbock man in Tech Terrace burglary case gets 25-year sentence
Lukashenko and Putin meet in Sochi: announce when nuclear weapons will be deployed in Belarus

Self-proclaimed Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has once again arrived in Russia to meet with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

Source: Belta, a Belarusian pro-government information agency; Kremlin-aligned Russian news outlet TASS; Pul Pervogo, a Telegram channel of the Belarusian Presidents Administration

Details: The Belarusian and Russian dictators meet in Sochi in an informal setting.

At the meeting, Putin announces that the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus will begin immediately after the preparation of facilities for them is completed on 7-8 July.

Quote from Putin: "With regard to the most sensitive issues that we agreed on, everything is going according to plan. You know, on 7-8 July, we will finish preparing the relevant facilities. And we will immediately begin activities related to the deployment of the relevant types of weapons on your territory. So everything is according to plan; everything is stable."

Background: On the eve of Lukashenko's visit, at a meeting with the secretaries of the security councils of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) member states, Lukashenko once again called for negotiations to achieve "peace" in the war against Ukraine.

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Police near the scene of the stabbing in Annecy, France (OLIVIER CHASSIGNOLE)

French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday said the health of the preschool children badly wounded in a mass knife attack by a Syrian refugee was "heading in the right direction", as police questioned the attacker.

Four children -- aged between 22 months and three years old -- were stabbed Thursday in a playground in the Alpine town of Annecy, a normally idyllic lakeside spot popular with tourists.

While France was in shock over the blood-curdling attack, there was a deluge of praise on social media for rescue workers and a man hailed as a hero for chasing the attacker out of the area.

Prosecutors insisted they did not see a terror motive, but the rampage intensified tensions in France over immigration, with right-wing politicians seizing on the suspect's origins.

Macron and his wife Brigitte arrived in the southeastern city of Grenoble, where three of the children are being treated, and are to visit those who have "contributed in helping and supporting them", the presidency said.

"Everything that I was told is heading in the right direction," he said in Annecy after visiting the wounded toddlers in hospital, adding that news on their condition was positive.

He added after the visit: "Attacking children is the most barbaric act there is" but also made clear his "pride" over the work of rescuers.

The fourth child, a Dutch citizen, is in a Swiss hospital over the border in Geneva. She is "out of danger", the Netherlands' Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said.

One of the victims is British and the others French.

- 'Pray for the children' -

Macron was also to meet a man named Henri who is being hailed as a hero for chasing the attacker from the playground.

"Pray for the children, I am doing fine," he wrote on Instagram as the hashtag #MerciHenri trended on social media.

An impromptu shrine emerged overnight at the park with people placing candles, flowers and messages.

"We are not prepared for these kinds of events," said local Leo Ganassali, 21, as he laid flowers.

"I came as a child to play in this park and to see it in mourning is very, very tough."

The attacker, dressed in black and carrying a blade around 10 centimetres (four inches) long, could be heard shouting "in the name of Jesus Christ", according to a video taken by a bystander and seen by AFP.

Regional prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said the detention of the suspect, named as Abdalmasih H., who is under investigation for attempted murder, had been extended after a psychiatric examination.

Recently divorced from a Swedish national and in his early 30s, the suspect had previously lived for 10 years in Sweden where he was granted refugee status in April, security sources and his ex-wife told AFP.

"He called me around four months ago. He was living in a church," his ex-wife said, adding that he left Sweden because he had been unable to get Swedish nationality.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told broadcaster TF1 that "for reasons not well explained he had also sought asylum in Switzerland, Italy and France".

It emerged that his application in France was rejected last Sunday as he already enjoyed refugee status in Sweden.

Darmanin described the turning down of that application and the stabbings as a "troubling coincidence".

Witnesses described the assailant running around the park on the banks of Lake Annecy wearing a bandana and sunglasses, apparently attacking people at random. Armed police arrested him at the scene.

- 'Time of emotion' -

France has suffered a series of attacks in the last decade or so, most of them by Islamic extremists.

Most recently, the beheading of a teacher in broad daylight in 2020 near his school in a Paris suburb by a radicalised Chechen refugee led to a wave of shock and a national debate about the influence of radical Islam in deprived areas.

Thursday's attack spurred fresh debate of France's immigration and asylum policy.

"It seems like the culprit has the same profile that you see often in these attacks," the head of the right-wing Republicans party, Eric Ciotti, told reporters at parliament.

Far-right National Rally (RN) figurehead Marine Le Pen meanwhile told French radio that France should "regain sovereignty" on immigration.

But government spokesman Olivier Veran said such debates were premature "when we are in the time of emotion, when the kids are on the operating table."

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne invited "everyone to show dignity in these circumstances".

bur-sjw/imm
President Joe Biden, left, and former President Donald Trump, right, in a composite image. Getty Images

The MAGA faithful rallied around a twice-indicted Trump, and pointed fingers at Joe Biden.

They claim the indictment distracts people from a $5 million bribe that Biden received.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert were some of the first to speak out.

After former President Donald Trump broke the news himself that he's getting indicted for a second time, the MAGA faithful rallied around him and directed their ire at President Joe Biden.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Matt Gaetz, and Rep. Lauren Boebert were some of many Trumpworld figures who quickly claimed, without substantiation, that Biden is responsible for the Trump indictment. In several posts on Twitter, they made the argument that Trump's indictment is just a ploy to distract Americans from another controversy  rumors that Biden and his family took $5 million worth of bribes from foreign nationals.

Greene tweeted on Thursday: "This is what Joe Biden got paid $5 million to do. And the FBI knew about it before the 2020 election."

"While we have solid proof Joe Biden got paid $5 million for a quid pro quo scheme, the DOJ is planning to indict President Trump tomorrow for the classified document hoax," she added.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) June 8, 2023

Gaetz tweeted shortly after: "The phony Boxes Hoax indictment is an attempt to distract the American public from the millions of dollars in bribes that the Biden Crime Family received from foreign nationals."

"This scheme won't succeed. President Donald Trump will be back in the White House and Joe Biden will be Hunter's cellmate," he wrote.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) June 9, 2023

Boebert chimed in as well through a video on Twitter on Thursday night, claiming that she had seen documents that proved that "Joe Biden was involved in a $5 million bribery scheme to sell out the American people."

"Thanks a lot, big guy," Boebert said.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (@RepBoebert) June 9, 2023

Maryland Rep. Andy Harris jumped on the Biden-bashing bandwagon, tweeting: "It's no coincidence the Biden DOJ is now planning to indict a political opponent right after the FBI was forced to turn over documents detailing bribery and corruption by the Biden family."

Sen. Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee tweeted: "Now that President Biden is reportedly involved in a $5 million bribery scheme with a foreign nation, what does the DOJ do? Attempt to interfere with a congressional investigation into Biden and go after Trump instead."

The GOP's renewed attack on Biden stems from an unsubstantiated allegation that Biden was given a $5 million bribe from the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings. Biden's son, Hunter Biden, was a Burisma board member from 2014 to 2019.

When asked why he posted a tweet accusing Biden of crimes, a spokesperson for Harris said: "An alleged international bribery scheme involving a sitting Vice President is far more newsworthy than a politicized prosecutor attempting to influence a Presidential election through an indictment for something done after leaving office."

Representatives for the GOP members did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider sent outside regular business hours.

Read the original article on Business Insider
People for millennia have used what grows around them as medicine. LorenzoT81/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.

Title of course:

From Magic Mushrooms to Big Pharma

What prompted the idea for the course?

Im from the foothills of the Appalachians in southern Ohio, where my Grandma Mildred would go out into the woods, which she called her medicine cabinet, to find herbs to use as medicine. I grew up to be an anthropologist, interested in how people around the world heal themselves. In the 1990s, I did my dissertation research in Ecuador and learned how Indigenous people in the Choco region used ayahuasca and other medicines from the forest to assist in the grieving process.

With the legalization of cannabis in many states and increased research on how nontraditional drugs can assist people with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and addiction issues, it seemed like an opportune time to create this course. Its part of a new interdisciplinary minor at Western Illinois University called Cannabis & Culture that offers students a foundation for understanding the social and cultural context, history and politics of nature-based medicine use in the United States and around the globe.

What does the course explore?

The course looks at how different peoples and cultures use nature-based medicines to heal themselves. First we establish that there are many ways of knowing the world around us, just as there are many ways to heal ourselves. Some of us rely on Western medicine, others pray, yet others turn to Indigenous or traditional ways of healing that are rooted in nature.

We talk about the ways Western medicine now seeks to validate substances that have been used for healing for centuries, like research into how ginger and turmeric can alleviate inflammation, or the ways cannabis can reduce or even eliminate some epileptic seizures.

Kambo frog medicine is a shamanic medicinal ritual that originates among Amazonian tribes who use the poisonous excretion from the Phyllomedusa bicolor tree frog to cure illness. GummyBone/iStock via Getty Images Plus

We also examine how the pharmaceutical industry has exploited Indigenous peoples ethnobotanical knowledge and landscapes for monetary gain.

Using the Amazonian giant leaf frog, or kambo (Phyllomedusa bicolor), as a case study, students learn that at least 15 Indigenous groups have long histories of using the frogs secretion for its analgesic, antibiotic and wound-healing properties. Eleven patents related to P. bicolor have been granted  all of them in rich countries. Indigenous people have not been compensated for their knowledge.

Why is this course relevant now?

The current generation of young people are open about mental health issues, and many people are looking for new ways to deal with anxiety, grief, PTSD and depression. My students can discuss their health concerns and learn about alternatives to what they may be accustomed to.

At this politically and racially polarized moment in the U.S., the course also provides the opportunity to discuss how racism, misogyny and discrimination against people of color have influenced scientific research.

Whats a critical lesson from the course?

Over the course of the semester, students begin to recognize that there is no one right way of healing. More importantly, there is no one right way of being human. It is my hope that students leave seeing that everything is connected, integrally linked to humanitys relationship to nature.

In some parts of the U.S., cannabis is now just another agricultural crop. Mark Abramson/The Washington Post via Getty Images

What materials does the course feature?

What will the course prepare students to do?

Studying how different cultures approach problems that plague all humans, like being sick and healing our ill, demonstrates to students that there are many ways the world over to solve problems. This course views different approaches not as a problem to be overcome but as a resource that can yield new ways of thinking and new opportunities  a definite advantage in the professional world. I hope students also learn to become advocates for their own health and well-being.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. The Conversation is trustworthy news from experts, from an independent nonprofit. Try our free newsletters.

It was written by: Heather McIlvaine-Newsad, Western Illinois University.

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Heather McIlvaine-Newsad does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Maine expansion of abortion laws, which would be among the country's broadest, passes committee

FILE - Maine Gov. Janet Mills speaks at a news conference, Jan. 17, 2023, in Augusta, Maine. A committee of the Maine Legislature signed off Friday, June 9, on a proposal from Mills that would give the state one of the least restrictive abortion laws in the country.(AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

AUGUSTA, Maine (AP)  A committee of the Maine Legislature signed off Friday on a proposal from Democratic Gov. Janet Mills that would give the state one of the least restrictive abortion laws in the country.

Maines current laws allow abortions until a fetus becomes viable, which is generally considered to be about 24 weeks. The governor's proposal would change state law to allow abortion after fetal viability if its deemed necessary by a physician.

The Democrats control the state Legislature and its committees, and used that advantage to pass the bill through a judiciary committee. The measure could make it to the Maine House of Representatives as soon as next week.

The measure is likely to pass the full Maine Legislature, but has encountered heavy resistance from conservative lawmakers and residents, and Christian groups in the state.

The Maine Medical Association testified in support of the law change, and said in its testimony that it is extremely unlikely that the bill as written will result in terminations of late pregnancies that are viable.

The potential law change in Maine is playing out against a broader backdrop of efforts to expand or restriction abortion access in states around the country.
Maine South to be led by interim principals Isoye and Pressler this school year

Mike Pressler and Steven Isoye will work as interim co-principals of Maine South High School during the 2023-2024 school year, starting in a couple of weeks, Maine Township High School District 207 announced.

Pressler and Isoye will fill in while the district searches for a permanent replacement for Ben Collins, who will begin as Park Ridge-Niles School District 64s superintendent July 1.

Pressler, who retired in 2022, was principal of Maine East High School for 12 years and succeeded Isoye, who was the principal of Maine East until 2010, according to district information.

Isoye most recently served as the superintendent of Niles Township High School District 219, retiring in 2022.

Isoye has also served as the chair of the Illinois State Board of Education since September 2022, according to previous reporting.

Isoye and Pressler will split principal duties over the coming school year and a search for a permanent principal will begin in fall 2023, according to District 207.

Each of them are allowed to work 120 days per year in order to retain their retirement status with the Teachers Retirement System of Illinois, and they will split the 238 school work days between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024, according to Brett Clark, director of communications for the district.

Each will be paid $1,100 per day they work, he added.

Isoye will continue as chair of the Illinois State Board of Education and received approval to take on the Maine South duties from Gov. J.B. Pritzkers office and the State Board of Education prior to accepting the position, Clark said.
Male in critical condition after overnight shooting in Pittsburgh

A male is in critical condition after being shot in Pittsburghs Bedford Dwellings overnight.

Officers responded to a 16-round ShotSpotter alert in the 2400 block of Chauncey Drive just before 1:15 a.m., according to Pittsburgh Public Safety.

A male victim who reportedly ran from the area arrived at a local hospital in critical condition with multiple gunshot wounds.

Channel 11 saw officers surrounding a vehicle at UPMC Mercy Hospital that appeared to have broken out windows.

The investigation is ongoing.

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A visitor talks with an exhibitor at the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) in Budapest, Hungary, on June 8, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua]

After a three-year hiatus, the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) has once more opened in Budapest, showcasing the expanding economic and trade ties between China and Hungary.

The recurring three-day event, the sixth edition of this fair, has evolved into a significant platform for fostering business relations and facilitating commercial and economic cooperation thanks to the presence of over 230 Chinese exhibitors.

Wu Zhengping, director general of the Trade Development Bureau of the Ministry of Commerce of China, acknowledged the steady growth in bilateral economic and trade relations.

"The fair sends a signal throughout Europe, providing a comprehensive platform for exhibitions, trade negotiations, investment cooperation and cultural exchange," he said.

He highlighted Hungary's strategic geographical position among the countries participating in China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and urged enterprises to make use of the available international supply routes and logistics services, such as the China-Europe freight trains.

Wu also encouraged Hungarian companies to explore investment opportunities in China, fostering two-way investment and a balanced trade relationship. He expressed his hope that entrepreneurs and friends could "foster friendship, engage in cooperative discussions, and jointly plan for the future" via this platform.

Liu Bo, minister-counsellor of the Chinese embassy in Hungary, said that "Hungary has become China's largest investment destination in Central and Eastern Europe."

He emphasized the significance of the BRI in fostering developments, noting that the current fair, the first after the COVID-19 pandemic, will further enhance bilateral economic and trade cooperation.

Szabolcs Szolnoki, deputy state secretary for technology of the Ministry of Economic Development of Hungary, expressed his gratitude for the event, noting that China is Hungary's top trading partner outside the European Union.

He assured attendees that Chinese goods not only offer an excellent price-per-performance ratio but also boast the highest quality.

Erno Peto, president of the Chinese Hungarian Chamber of Economy, praised the event, highlighting its purpose of connecting companies and helping them to establish mutually beneficial collaborations. "The China Brand Fair has become the biggest and most important exhibition of Chinese brands in Central and Eastern Europe."

Local entrepreneurs also view the fair as a useful platform for harmonious exchange and mutually beneficial trade between China and the Central and Eastern European countries.

"We are looking for new opportunities, we want to find new markets, and that's why we have come to this exhibition," Kristof Horvath, a 26-year-old entrepreneur in energy sector told Xinhua, following the opening ceremony.

"I am impressed by the variety of products on show, and on such a big area," he said.

"It is really worth coming here because we can touch and try the products with our hands, it is much better than just scrolling pics on the web," Mate Kovacs, his 27-year-old friend, interested in the catering business, said.
A 15-year-old boy accused of shooting a woman to death over a gun he was trying to steal screamed for his mom as he was being led out of the courtroom Thursday, according to the Columbus Ledger-Inquirer.

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Police say Jabori Baptiste was with a group of teens who gather on March 24 outside a Mystic Mart in Columbus.

Baptiste, who was wearing a pink mask, tried to steal a gun from Eugene Bell, according to the newspaper. Bells sister, Natalie Bell, tried to break up the fight, but the gun went off, killing her. She was 39.

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Baptiste was arrested based on surveillance video from the gas station.

On Thursday, Baptiste was in court for a hearing. His mother was in the audience.

As officers started to lead him out after the hearing was over, he screamed Mama! and tried to get back into the courtroom. His mother screamed and wailed in response as officers rushed his other relatives outside.

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The commotion continued as officers tried to get Baptiste into a patrol car as family members screamed at officers, WRBL reports.

Baptiste was taken back to the Aaron Cohn Regional Youth Detention Center. Hes being held without bond on charges of murder and armed robbery. He was charged as an adult.
Man accused of trafficking caught when woman he met on Facebook flees motel, feds say

A 20-year-old woman agreed to travel with a man she met over Facebook and was forced into prostitution, according to court documents.

Hes accused of sex trafficking her for his own selfish gain  until she escaped by fleeing a motel room in Louisiana where he beat her in December 2020, court documents show.

Now the man, of Bastrop, Louisiana, is going to prison, federal prosecutors said on June 8.

A judge sentenced Deray Montrez Richard to 19 years in prison after he was accused of human trafficking the 20-year-old and another woman, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Western District of Louisiana announced in a June 8 news release.

Hes also been ordered to pay $9,000 in restitution, according to prosecutors.

This is another case of a defendant taking advantage of vulnerable individuals in our society for selfish reasons, U.S. Attorney Brandon B. Brown said in a statement.

McClatchy News contacted Richards defense attorney for comment on June 9 and didnt receive an immediate response.

Woman picked up for prostitution

Richard and the woman began messaging each other over Facebook in the fall of 2020, according to prosecutors.

He persuaded her to travel with him and picked her up in Kentucky in December 2020, prosecutors said.

Richard wanted to pick the woman up so she could prostitute for him, his plea agreement says. Another woman, a 19-year-old victim, was in the car with him when he did, according to his plea agreement.

Afterward, Richard drove both women to a hotel in Mesquite, Texas, where he forced the 20-year-old to see several johns  a person who pays for sex  and engage in prostitution, prosecutors said.

Richard physically assaulted the woman and kept the money she was paid in exchange for sex acts, according to prosecutors.

Richard and the women left Texas and arrived in Bossier City, Louisiana, where they rented two hotel rooms at a Red Roof Inn on Dec. 12, 2020, the plea agreement says.

There, Richard told the 20-year-old to post an online advertisement for sex services, according to the plea agreement.

After she had trouble posting the ad, an argument with Richard ensued and he beat her, the plea agreement says.

The woman would eventually escape him after a second beating the next day, according to prosecutors.

On Dec. 13, 2020, Richard and the two women arrived at a Super 7 motel in Bossier City where he directed them to engage in sex acts with other individuals, the plea agreement says.

At the motel, Richard physically assaulted both women  prompting the 20-year-old to flee the room and report the violence to a motel employee, according to prosecutors.

Then, she raced over to a convenience store across the street and told a store clerk, who ultimately called 911 and said the woman told him a pimp was beating up her girlfriend, the plea agreement says.

Bossier City officers arrived and arrested Richard as a result, prosecutors said.

After the FBI began investigating, human trafficking charges were brought against him, according to prosecutors.

Richard has additional charges pending against him, including two counts related to sex trafficking of children, court records show.

Bossier City is just outside of Shreveport and is about 315 miles northwest of New Orleans.

Woman sex trafficked 2 stranded teens she promised to help get back home, feds say

Police chief paid for sex acts with underage girl while wearing his uniform, feds say

Man controlled every move of his sex trafficking victims, feds say. He gets prison
Man arrested for $275K worth of drugs during Georgia traffic stop

A Gainesville man has been arrested on drug trafficking charges after deputies responded to reports of a suspicious person wandering outside of a Williams Road home.

Deputies arrived on Williams Road around 9:50 p.m. and found a man getting out of an SUV and running away on foot.

Despite their commands to stop, he kept running, deputies said

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An HCSO K9 unit was brought in to track him down, and he was captured at about 11:15 p.m. near the original service call location.

Deputies identified him as Michael Gonzalez-Powell, a 30-year-old Gainesville man.

Gonzalez-Powell had a warrant out for his arrest due to a felony probation violation. Deputies say they performed an inventory on the SUV before towing it.

Inside the vehicle, the sheriffs office said deputies found hundreds of thousands of dollars in drugs.

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Investigators with the Special Investigation Unit found what they believed to be fentanyl and methamphetamine, and obtained warrants for Gonzalez-Powells arrest, charging him with trafficking each drug.

Deputies seized 800 grams of fentanyl and 500 grams of meth, worth $275,000 in street value, according to HCSO.

The case is still under investigation by the SIU. The sheriffs office says more charges are pending.

Gonzalez-Powell remains in custody without bond, according to deputies.

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Man arrested after chase with Dallas deputies; had thoughts of suicide by cop, police say

A man who a caller said had thoughts of suicide by cop led Dallas County deputies on a chase to Arlington before he was arrested near AT&T Stadium, authorities said.

The Dallas Police Department received the call around 4:40 p.m. Thursday about a person in a black Lexus who had a handgun in his lap and was suicidal, according to the Dallas County Sheriffs Office.

Dallas County sheriffs deputies responded and found the vehicle at 5 p.m in a parking lot across from 111 Commerce Street. As deputies began to check on the driver, he drove from the parking lot as the deputies followed, the sheriffs office said in a news release Thursday.

The pursuit went around several service roads of Interstate 30 and Interstate 35E in Dallas.

The chase continued westbound on I-30 until about 5:20 p.m., when rush hour traffic became congested. The driver continued to speed up and exited the highway.

Deputies ended their chase, but could still see the driver ahead of them and said that the vehicle was now traveling on a flat tire.

As deputies exited at Randol Mill Road in Arlington to turn around, they saw the driver pull into the parking lot of AT&T Stadium and ran on foot into the stadium while holding his waistband, according to the sheriffs office.

Arlington police were notified and responded to the scene.

Soon after, the subject was seen running away from the stadium on Randol Mill Road. Deputies and Arlington officers quickly approached the subject, including an Arlington police negotiator and K9 officers, the sheriffs office said in the release.

After a few minutes, the man was taken into custody without incident.

The man, who authorities did not identify, had an active probation violation warrant for possession of a controlled substance, issued by the Dallas County Sheriffs Office.

The drivers handgun was located at AT&T Stadium by Arlington police., according to the news release.
A suspect, 36-year-old Billy Abril Jameson, was arrested on Thursday for fatally shooting 49-year-old Jose Estrada under the Interstate-17 Maricopa Freeway at an encampment on May 21.

Around 6 p.m. on May 21, Phoenix police officers responded to the area of Third Street and the I-17 freeway access road regarding a suspect with a gun. When officers arrived, they did not locate anyone, but did hear gunshots.

Shortly before 6 p.m., Jameson was spotted in a residential area near Third and Durango Streets in an alleyway. A man said that Jameson pointed a handgun at him outside of his home in the alley. Court documents did not indicate what led to this incident. The man then safely went inside his home and heard several gunshots emanate from beneath the I-17 freeway a short time after, according to court documents.

Jameson then approached an encampment of tents and tarp structures underneath the Interstate 17 freeway overpass near Third Street, documents said. Another witness said Jameson walked south after entering the encampment by climbing over a cement barrier at the north side. The witness said Jameson yelled out "where are you, old man," according to police documents.

The witness said Jameson shot at the witness' tent and continued walking south.

Estrada was in a temporary structure that was set up with a blue tarp. Jameson approached Estrada and he exited from the west side of his structure, stood up and raised his hands, according to the witness. The police report did not state whether any confrontation occurred between Estrada and Jameson, nor why Estrada chose to get out of his tent.

Jameson pointed the gun at Estrada and continued to walk toward him. Jameson then shot Estrada from close range and fled the encampment on a bicycle, according to police records.

When officers found Estrada, he was partially covered with a mattress pad, and he was shot in the head. The Phoenix Fire Department arrived and pronounced him deceased at the scene. A total of four bullet casings were recovered from the scene, according to police.

Video was collected from a business north of the shooting that showed a man, later identified as Jameson, riding a bicycle to and from the homicide scene. Responding officers also observed a man riding a black bicycle eastbound after the shooting, according to police records.

The day after the shooting, May 22, officers responded at a domestic violence call off Mineral Road and 14th Avenue in south Phoenix regarding Jameson. Jameson's father told officers that his son was "acting weird" and was arguing with his girlfriend and she wanted him to leave for the night.

Phoenix-area homicides in May 2023: Suspect arrested in shooting death of Curtis Haskins

A woman at the scene, identified as the mother to Jameson's children and his current girlfriend, told responding officers her handgun was possibly stolen and missing since May 21.

Detectives obtained video surveillance from the Easy Eight Hotel located off Seventh Street in Phoenix that showed Jameson leaving the property on a black bicycle.

On June 6, the witness who was approached by Jameson in the alley was shown a photograph of Jameson on the black bicycle and the man positively identified him.

A records check was conducted on Jameson and officers found he served prison time for multiple felony offenses and was prohibited to possess a firearm. He was taken into custody on June 8 and admitted to staying at the Easy Eight Hotel, located less than 1 mile from where the shooting occurred.

The photograph of Jameson riding the black bicycle was shown to Jameson during a police interview and he confirmed it was him in the photo, but denied being involved in the homicide and requested a lawyer.

Jameson was charged on one count of first-degree murder, one count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and one count of prohibited possession.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Man arrested in May I-17 encampment shooting that left one man dead
Man arrested on suspicion of murder after shooting at Idaho hot springs

A man has been arrested after police alleged that he shot and killed a 39-year-old woman at an Idaho hot springs.

Manuel Cabrera, 24, was arrested on suspicion of second-degree murder, according to a Facebook post from the Owyhee County Sheriffs Office.

At around 9:20 p.m. Thursday, the countys dispatch center received a 911 call that a woman had been fatally shot near Bruneau, about 20 miles south of Mountain Home.

Police said they initially detained two people, but after questioning, they arrested only Cabrera.

The woman hasnt been identified  that is typically done by the coroners office  but The Owyhee Avalanche reported that she was from Ada County. Owyhee County Chief Deputy Steve Crawford told the Idaho Statesman by phone that he couldnt confirm where she was from.

Idaho State Police investigators are taking the lead on the inquiry at Owyhee County Sheriff Larry Kendricks request. The Statesman has reached out to them for additional information.
Jermarcus Johnson, the man who officials say delivered money and helped two men believed to be involved in the killing of Memphis rapper Young Dolph, entered a plea deal in court Friday morning.

Johnson, 26, pleaded guilty to three counts of accessory after the fact and faces 6 to 12 years for all of the charges. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Aug. 10. He was the first of the four defendants to have their criminal case disposed.

Johnson was indicted on conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in November 2022 and turned himself in about a week later.

Additional charges came during a Wednesday court appearance when prosecutors filed to have three counts of accessory after the fact added to the list of charges. Accessory after the fact is a class E felony and each count carries between one to six years in prison.

His conspiracy charge carried a sentence of up to 60 years. That charge was dropped when Johnson entered the guilty plea.

Johnson's next court appearance is scheduled for Aug. 10, which could be when he is sentenced, though both prosecutors and his defense attorney indicated it could be pushed back based on the status of the other three defendants. If those cases go to trial, Johnson may be called to testify for the prosecution.

The plea deal also lowered his bail from $300,000 to $25,000. If he posts bail, he has to abide by a curfew that would have him home between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m., is subject to programs recommended by pretrial services  including random drug testing  and cannot have a gun.

Prosecutors have said Johnson helped one of the other men charged in connecting with the killing, his half-brother Justin Johnson, hide and escape after the shooting and that he facilitated the payments for Young Dolph's killing. They have also said his role was "much lesser" than the three other men indicted for the conspiracy.

That role, according to prosecutors, included Jermarcus Johnson receiving a phone and a car, though not the same one seen on security camera footage of the shooting, from Justin Johnson. Jermarcus Johnson is said to have helped his half-brother spoof his parole officer during regularly scheduled parole calls.

Jermarcus Johnson also pleaded guilty to facilitating phone calls between Justin Johnson and Cornelius Smith, the other alleged shooter.

Jermarcus Johnson, who is accused of aiding in the hide out and escape of Justin Johnson and Cornelius Smith after they shot rapper Young Dolph, answers a question from Assistant District Attorney Paul Hagerman on the stand at the Shelby County Criminal Court in Memphis, Tenn., on Friday, June 9, 2023.

"It's typical in conspiracy cases, as the litigation proceeds, that you'll figure out more and more, and get a clearer picture of what each individual did in this conspiracy," said Paul Hagerman, an assistant district attorney in the Shelby County District Attorney's Office. "With regards to Jermarcus Johnson, he had no role in the murder of Dolph before it happened. He had no role in the murder of Dolph when it happened. It was about a week or so after the murder of Dolph that he met with his brother, Justin Johnson."

Young Dolph: Looking back on the life and legacy of Memphis rapper a year after his death

Hagerman added that Jermarcus Johnson has "been 100% helpful" to investigators, including that he turned over the phone his brother gave him. Hagerman added the phone "has evidence in the case."

Johnson did not have a criminal record prior to his indictment in the Young Dolph investigation, according to statements from both defense attorneys and prosecutors inside the courtroom. His attorney, Josh Corman, said he thinks Johnson is "happy" to have the opportunity to be released prior to his sentencing.

"I think he's happy to the extent that this is a chance that he will be released now, and kind of put it behind him even though there's still a long way to go on this case. But at least for what's going on right now, certainly, that's a change," Corman told reporters after the court appearance. "Here's a kid who had never been in trouble before  he has no criminal record whatsoever. And then you get locked up, you're in protective custody, which is pretty much like being in isolation, for the last seven months...Certainly, he is glad to get back with his family, get out of protective custody."

Two men were initially arrested in connection to Young Dolph's killing. Justin Johnson and Smith are believed by officials to have been the two men to carry out the shooting on Nov. 17, 2021, outside Makeda's Homemade Butter Cookies on Airways Boulevard.

After Justin Johnson and Cornelius Smith's arrests, a fourth man  Hernandez Govan  was arrested and indicted for conspiracy. Conspiracy charges were also added to Johnson and Smith's indictments.

Govan is believed to have organized the killing, and asked Justin Johnson and Smith to take part, stemming back to June 1, 2021. A motive for the conspiracy has not been made public by prosecutors or investigators. Govan was given a lower bail amount in early May due to declining health, and he has been under "alternative restriction and supervision" until his trial.

Specifics of Govan's supervision outside of jail have been sealed "for security reasons."

Lucas Finton is a criminal justice reporter with The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached at Lucas.Finton@commercialappeal.com and followed on Twitter @LucasFinton.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Man accused of helping Young Dolph suspect escape enters plea deal
Man caused fatal overdose by selling fentanyl instead of cocaine. Hes going to prison.

A Lexington man accused of mistakenly selling fentanyl instead of cocaine to another man, causing his death, has been sentenced to 40 years in federal prison.

Keon Lamont Lee, 32, regularly sold cocaine to the victim, identified in court documents as F.E., the U.S. Attorneys Office said in a news release.

The news release states that Lee had gotten a bag of cocaine and a bag of fentanyl from the person who sold drugs to him.

Intending to distribute cocaine, Lee instead distributed fentanyl to the victim, who used the drug, overdosed, and died, the release stated. Text messages from both the victims and Lees phones confirmed these events, and Lee provided a full confession to law enforcement.

Lexington police officers found F.E. dead in his home in February 2021, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.

In January, during his jury trial, Lee pleaded guilty to distribution of a mixture or substance containing fentanyl resulting in an overdose death, which was one of six charges on which he had been indicted, court records show. The five remaining charges were dismissed.

Court records indicate that Lee later asked to withdraw his guilty plea, saying he did not understand at the time that he would be unable to appeal. Chief U.S. District Judge Danny Reeves denied that request and on Friday sentenced him to 480 months in prison.

Lee will be required to serve at least 85 percent of his sentence, and he will be on probation for four years after release.

This case illustrates the reasons why illicit drug trafficking remains such a threat to our community, U.S. Attorney Carlton S. Shier IV said in the release. It demonstrates just how dangerous fentanyl is  potentially lethal in the 2mg range  and highlights the common truth that drug users have no idea what they are buying.

Whether by mistake, dangerous mixtures with other drugs, or counterfeit pills, users are often seeking one drug but receiving others, with grave results.

He said the case also shows that those who illegally traffic in these dangerous drugs face prosecution and real consequences for their conduct.
Man painted swastikas on 14 homes and burned another house down, NJ officials say

A house mysteriously erupted in flames hours after swastikas were found spray-painted on nearby homes in a New Jersey neighborhood, officials said.

When authorities responded to the house fire at about 3:10 a.m. June 7, they learned a suspicious person was seen near the blaze in the Pine Lake Park community of Manchester Township, according to the state attorney generals office.

The person appeared to be the same individual officials said painted swastikas on 14 homes and was recorded on local surveillance cameras, officials said.

The suspect was located shortly after and arrested, Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin and Ocean County Prosecutor Bradley D. Billhimer announced June 9.

Ron Carr, 34, of Manchester, is facing charges including first- and third-degree bias intimidation, second-degree aggravated arson, third-degree arson and fourth-degree criminal mischief, according to a June 9 news release. Hes facing 36 counts total.

Hes accused of vandalizing homes and setting an additional house on fire to target Jewish community members, officials said.

This crime spree and the antisemitism that it expressed caused pain, destruction, shock and fear among the residents of Manchester Township, Platkin said in the news release. No community in the State of New Jersey should feel vulnerable or anxious in the face of acts of intolerance.

While no one was hurt in the fire, three other homes were scorched by flames, which spread to the nearby woods, according to the release.

Officials said Carr also vandalized neighborhood fences with Nazi symbolism. Potential motives werent specified.

I am thankful no one was injured in these senseless acts of bigotry and hate, Billhimer said in the release.

Manchester Township is about 75 miles south of Newark.

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Man pleads guilty to 2nd-degree murder in connection with beating death in 2020

Dakota Dylan Wensil has pled guilty to 2nd-degree murder in connection with the beating death of a man in 2020.

Just after midnight on Aug. 27, 2020, Locust police officers were dispatched to the scene on Griffin Hill Drive after someone reported that a man had been beaten up real bad.

When they got to the home, police said they found Eddie Wayne Love with severe head injuries on a makeshift porch. He was pronounced dead at the scene, according to police.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Man beaten to death in Locust; pair charged after fleeing to Tennessee, police say

An investigation revealed that Love and Wensil got into an altercation over the allegation of stolen property which resulted in Loves death. Wensil was identified as the primary suspect and charged with homicide, according to police.

Police said Wensil was arrested after fleeing to Tennessee and extradited to North Carolina.

On Thursday, in Stanly County Superior Court, Wensil pled guilty to 2nd-degree murder and was sentenced to 190 to 240 months in the North Carolina Department of Corrections.

VIDEO: Suspect accused of killing CATS bus driver extradited back to Charlotte on murder charge




 Flash

The recent attack on the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant in Ukraine has caused a catastrophic dam burst, which holds back the country's largest reservoir, releasing a torrent of contaminated water into cities and towns downstream.

As Russia and Ukraine have been trading accusations over the attack, the dam collapse continues to inflict humanitarian, environmental and agricultural costs upon the flooded zone, with a potential impact that is likely to ripple across the world in the years to come.

Humanitarian cost

A humanitarian crisis triggered by the disaster is already playing out. As water gushes out, more than 4,000 people had been evacuated from the flooded areas in the Kherson region, acting governor of the Kherson region Vladimir Saldo said on Wednesday.

Statements from the Ukrainian side said that "about 80 settlements in the flood zone" and more than 40,000 people have been affected, as homes and infrastructure have been destroyed.

Media reported that the flood is disturbing mines laid earlier, posing further dangers to the displaced people and those coming to help.

The United Nations has warned of "grave and far-reaching consequences" following the dam breach, as representatives from various UN agencies in Ukraine were in Kherson to assess the impact and coordinate the humanitarian response.

"They tell us that the disaster will likely get worse ... as water levels are still rising, and more villages and towns are being flooded. This will impact people's access to essential services and seriously raise health risks," said Stephane Dujarric, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres's spokesman.

Access to water is another concern. Hundreds of thousands of people depend on the reservoir formed by the dam for drinking water, and the levels are dropping rapidly.

Environmental disaster

Experts have been warning of the environmental cost of the dam failure, calling it an "ecological catastrophe."

Damaged equipment at the power plant could be leaking oil. According to the Ukrainian government, the river has been contaminated with 150 tonnes of industrial lubricant, and another 300 tonnes were at risk of leaking.

Environmentalists have said that pollutants from industries clustered along the banks of the Dnieper River, downstream from the dam, can be swept into the Black Sea, affecting the marine ecosystem.

"There are catastrophic consequences for the environment," Ukrainian Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources Ruslan Strilets told reporters Tuesday.

Video clips posted online showed that large quantities of beached fish lie on the depleted shoreline as the water level falls.

The summer temperatures worsen the health risks from the dam breach, with living matter breaking down faster and further contaminating water supplies, said Yevhen Korzhov, a hydrologist from Kherson State Agrarian and Economic University.

"In the coming months, we will observe the deterioration of the quality of drinking water and the infection of fish, birds, and aquatic animals," Korzhov told the media.

Agricultural consequence

The incident's rippling effect has been felt worldwide as Ukraine has long been the leading supplier of corn and wheat in the global market. Water from the Kakhovka reservoir irrigated the farming region of southern Ukraine, which produces much of the country's significant agricultural exports.

After the dam's breach, agricultural land in the region has been washed away. Agricultural fallout could far surpass the immediate destruction caused by flooding and is likely to be felt worldwide for years.

The Kakhovka disaster will stop the water supplies to about 30 irrigation systems, which irrigated about 1 million hectares of agricultural fields, according to Oleksii Kushch, an economist at "United Ukraine," a think-tank.

"Ukraine may lose 10-15 percent of its agricultural potential due to indirect or direct influence (of the Kakhovka incident). The damage is estimated to reach millions of tons of agricultural products," Kushch told Xinhua.

The Ukrainian government has warned that the country's grain fields "may turn into deserts as early as next year," and damage to the reservoir could affect global food supplies.

Due to fears that the dam attack could disrupt Ukraine's exports of agricultural products, global prices for wheat and corn have soared since Tuesday when the dam collapsed.

The attack on the dam is possibly the most significant damage to civilian infrastructure since the start of the Ukraine crisis in February 2022, according to UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths.

"The sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realized in the coming days. But it is already clear that it will have grave and far-reaching consequences for thousands of people in southern Ukraine," he said.
A Pierce County man is facing charges after reportedly firing a stolen gun at a pair of military helicopters above American Lake in Lakewood, all while posing as a police officer.

Witnesses say Andre Wright Jr. shot off two rounds at two Chinook helicopters from Joint Base Lewis-McChord on Wednesday evening. The choppers were performing low-level exercises over the lake at the time.

We heard a couple gunshots ring out like pow pow and I thought it was something wrong with the helicopter, Blake Patjens, who was out on the lake at the time, said. I thought it was the helicopter because it was hard to make the sound with the helicopter above our heads, we didnt realize it was gunshots until we got off the boat.

Police found a stolen Glock on Wright, as well as two metal security badges, and handcuffs that were in a holster.

The defendant had a detailed story about how he was a Lakewood police officer with the Special Operations Unit, charging documents said. He also claimed to be a Pierce County Sheriffs deputy, indicating that he was the air commander of their helicopter unit, and was also the commander of an airborne military unit.

Wright is a former convicted felon and isnt allowed to have a gun.

Hes now being charged with first-degree assault, unlawful possession of a firearm, and possession of a stolen firearm.

Its disappointing because these our are active members of our military branches and they cant even conduct training without being shot at in their own backyards, Patjens said.




Mass to be held in solidarity with LGBTQ Catholics at Duquesne canceled at request of Bishop Zubik

Catholics for Change in our Church (CCOC) is a Pittsburgh-based group that its president said scheduled a mass in solidarity with LGBTQ Catholics for this weekend on Duquesne Universitys campus.

It is now canceled at the request of Diocese of Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik.

It was absolutely going to be a typical Catholic mass. However, we did want LGBTQ Catholics to be a part of that mass, said Kevin Hayes, CCOC president.

Hayes said this group, whose members identify as practicing, lifelong Catholics who want the church to be more inclusive, has been holding social justice masses at Duquesnes Chapel of the Holy Spirit, partnering with other organizations in the Pittsburgh area to make them happen.

Unfortunately, a person in one of those organizations created their own flyer and used the phrase Pride Mass on the flyer. We had never used that phrase. It was always a mass in solidarity with LGBTQ Catholics. Thats when things went sideways or off the rails, Hayes said.

Both the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese and Duquesne University declined Channel 11s request for an interview but sent us the following statement from Zubik.

Thank you for your communication regarding the recently publicized Mass at the Duquesne University Chapel on June 11, 2023.

It should be noted that neither I, as Bishop of the diocese, nor President Ken Gormley of Duquesne University knew anything about the Mass until calls came in to our respective offices over the holiday weekend.

It was important for me to learn how this event was planned.

What we have learned is that independent sponsors, without the authorization of the pastors of the parishes listed, promoted the event with a flyer that confused some and enraged others. This event was billed as a Pride Mass organized to coincide with Pride Month, an annual secular observance that supports members of the LGBTQ community on every level, including lifestyle and behavior, which the Church cannot endorse.

Many of the responses to the flyer jumped to the conclusion that I gave approval to this event. I did not. Many of the responses also used condemning and threatening, and some might say hateful, language not in keeping with Christian charity, especially of the Lords command to love one another as I have loved you.

The Church has invested much energy in welcoming people who are dealing with sensitive issues in their lives. As Church, we all have the responsibility to love those who have same sex attraction. But at the same time, the Church cannot support behavior that goes against Gods law.

As Pope Francis has reminded us, the Church, and this diocese, have strongly encouraged welcoming, listening and accompanying those in LGBTQ communities with various ministries such as Courage and EnCourage. We need to and want to do more in our pastoral care. We welcome, listen and accompany but cannot endorse behavior contrary to what we know to be Gods law. At the same time, we must be willing to love and welcome each other as children of God.

My hope is that the Church of Pittsburgh is welcoming to the LGBTQ community and in turn that the LGBTQ community is welcoming of the Church and her teachings.

Given all that has transpired surrounding this event, I am asking that this gathering be canceled. It is my prayer we all, inclusive of the LGBTQ community, gather together on June 11th in our churches and chapels to celebrate the great Solemnity of Corpus Christi, and focus our attention on the Body of Christ in the Sacred Eucharist and the Body of Christ as the Church.

Might I also suggest that you review once again my pastoral letter The Church Welcoming.

May the Body of Christ enable us to embody Christ.

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This article was originally published in CommonWealth.

Massachusetts sexual health curriculum remains stuck, at least on paper, in the Wild West educational landscape of 1999. But after some 24 years, and with more than a decade of pressure from advocates and a cohort of legislators, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is getting ready to make some changes.

What those changes are remains a mystery. There are broad state standards for health education, promulgated through the department, but they were last updated decades ago and allow for a wide amount of leeway in school-by-school choice in what curriculum and materials to use.

A 2018 review from the Massachusetts Department of Public Healths Office of Sexual Health & Youth Development found 43 percent of high school students were not taught about condoms at school and 61 percent reported not talking with a parent about preventing HIV, sexually transmitted infections, or pregnancy. While the state teen birth rate declined along with the rest of the country, the 2018 report found that sexually transmitted infections rose across age groups and especially in the 15- to 24-year-old range.

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Governor Healey supports efforts to make sure that sex education offered in Massachusetts schools is comprehensive, inclusive, medically accurate, and age appropriate, spokesperson Karissa Hand said in a statement. Our administration is also working with DESE to put forward a health education framework that achieves these goals.

A DESE spokesperson confirmed the agency is at work on the framework, but did not say what the timeline is for the update. Efforts to revamp the state health standards were in progress before the global COVID-19 pandemic hit, which paused the process until recently.

Following stakeholder engagement, revisions are being reviewed by the new administration, said education department spokesperson Jacqueline Reis. These stakeholders included experts within particular topic areas, colleagues from other state agencies that focus on public health and mental health, and advisory councils to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, Reis said.

With little to no visible movement on the DESE side for years and frustration mounting, lawmakers have been pushing for a plan B: setting requirements for new standards through legislation and making sure that the education department moves more quickly in the future. But that effort has also been slow going on Beacon Hill.

For a dozen years, a consistently re-filed sex education bill requiring schools that offer sexual health programming to provide a medically accurate, age-appropriate, comprehensive sexual health education with an emphasis on consent and acknowledging LGBTQ+ identities stalled out on Beacon Hill. For the past four years, the Healthy Youth Act passed the Senate only to fizzle in the House. It would not require any school to offer such a course, just ensure a baseline for the content covered.

We would be saying that we believe in the right of young people to receive fact-based information in their sexual health education, said Jennifer Hart of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts. The erratic landscape of sex ed programs across the state currently leaves some young people getting incorrect information that is based in fear and stigma and shame in their public institutions, Hart said.

Supporters say the bill is common sense updating to reflect a healthy and informed approach to sex education.

Really, in my mind, I dont understand why its taken this long, said Sen. Sal DiDomenico, of Everett, who refiled the bill in the state Senate this term. Theres no mandate here. It just says if they are teaching sex education, it has to be appropriate, medically accurate, and inclusive. Im sometimes confused about where this controversy comes from.

Parents, he notes, would still have the choice to opt out as they do now, receiving a letter at the start of the year giving them notice.

Opponents of the bill and similar policies argue that exposure to these curricula will encourage sexual activity among young people and disempower parents from determining the best time and manner to educate their children about sex.

Parents could still opt out their children. But what good would it do? asked Mary Ellen Siegler in a post for the Massachusetts Family Institute, a non-partisan public policy organization that emphasizes Judeo-Christian values, during a prior attempt to pass the act. With the amount of sexually explicit (and gross) material included in the curriculum, children everywhere in school would still be exposed to Comprehensive Sexuality Education material. Conversations among students are bound to sink to the level the scenarios suggest.

The opt-out has become a friction point for LGBTQ+ advocates. Tanya Neslusan, executive director of MassEquality, said the organization is no longer part of the Healthy Youth Act coalition because the bill would allow individuals and schools to opt out.

Weve been dealing with anti-LGBTQ battles across the state and seen a real increase over these last few years in coordinated opt-out campaigns, she said. The campaigns have been focused on individual parents pulling their children out of programming that discusses LGBTQ+ identities in particular, she said.

We really are afraid that to push through the Healthy Youth Act legislation  even though its great legislation and its what we need  without a mandate in place to have sex education, that some districts will end up with no sex education at all, she said.

MassEquality is now backing a bill put forward by Rep. Marjorie Decker, of Cambridge, which mandates statewide age-appropriate and medically accurate sex education, though parents are still permitted to opt their children out of any portion of the curriculum. Though the Decker bills wording around health education is a bit vaguer and does not specifically touch on LGBTQ+ orientations or consent, it does require that sex education adhere to national standards, which covers much of the Healthy Youth Acts priorities, Neslusan said.

Of the opt-out provision, DiDomenico said, its just a matter of trying to get something passed in this space right now, and that option is important for some folks. He added, I would be okay with a mandate, but I have to get my colleagues to agree.

The act would make sure the state avoids 25-year gaps between updates, at least. It requires DESE to review and update its standards to be consistent with the Healthy Youth Act at the passage of the law and then at least every 10 years afterward.

Out-of-date standards are one thing to tackle, Healthy Youth Act supporters say, but current regulations also leave a lot of discretion up to the individual schools as to the content of the health curriculum. Under the act, DESE must collect information on the sexual health programs offered by schools across the state.

Jamie Klufts, a co-chair of the Healthy Youth Act Coalition, wrote in an opinion article that new data on youth risk behavior from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention underline the need for consistent and comprehensive sex education programming.

While reported sexual assault of young women is up to almost one in five nationally, condom usage among youths is down from 60 percent in 2011 to 52 percent in 2021. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual young people experience more sexual violence than their heterosexual peers and are nearly four times more likely to report suicide attempts.

Over the decade covered by the report, the Healthy Youth Act has not come to the Massachusetts House floor for a vote.

This means that an entire generation of young people has gone through our school system without the assurance of quality sex and relationship education that the Healthy Youth Act would provide, Klufts and her co-authors wrote.

The state of the Commonwealths sex ed standards is particularly disheartening, advocates say, because in a post-Roe United States, prominent Massachusetts politicians have taken a particular pride in codifying reproductive care protections into state law but left sexual health by the wayside.

Planned Parenthood reviewed all 50 states plus Washington D.C. and ranked their sexual health curriculum and their level of abortion protections. Massachusetts is somewhat of an outlier among states that are protective or very protective of abortion care, Hart said, because the state standards for sex ed do not require education to be medically accurate, cover birth control options, include LGBTQ+ identities, or affirm abortion access.

Sex education is comprehensive, Hart said, and still there is shame and stigma around sex ed, around abortion. In Massachusetts, we have such protections for sexual reproductive health, and this is just another area where Massachusetts can grow in being a leader.

DiDomenico said he is hopeful about the coalitions chances this year because of Healeys commitments to inclusive sex education, his conversations with House co-filers Rep. Jim ODay of West Boylston and Rep. Vanna Howard of Lowell, as well as recent state action taken to shore up access to medication abortion imperiled by recent Supreme Court rulings.

House Speaker Ron Mariano is going through the details and having conversations with members, a spokesperson said. Mariano stood outside the State House with other elected leaders and reproductive health organizations to express support for moves to protect access to medication abortion earlier this year.

Senate leadership has been enthusiastically on board with the act for years. Senate President Karen Spilka said in 2020, There has never been a more important time to teach our youth about the benefits of having healthy relationships  and that begins with inclusive and accurate sex education. Sadly, we know all too well the consequences of unhealthy relationships, which is why it is so important we prepare our students so that they can make informed decisions.

The Legislatures joint Education Committee has not yet scheduled hearings for the House and Senate versions of the Healthy Youth Act or Deckers bill.

This story was originally published at CommonWealth.
Mayor Adams thanked the two top Democrats in Congress Thursday  a day after they announced the city would receive $105 million in new federal aid for the citys migrant crisis  but he said the outlay isnt nearly enough to address the situation long-term.

One hundred million is the beginning of the acknowledgment of the problem, but this is a $4.2, $4.3 billion problem, Adams said. We are pleased with the acknowledgement that New York should receive the proportionate share of it, but we still have to deal with this long-term issue. This is not sustainable. Were still getting hundreds of people in that are coming each day.

The $105 million from the Federal Emergency Management Administration is the largest bundle of cash that agency has allocated to the city to address the migrant crisis so far, bringing the total up to about $143 million. Of the most recent federal dispersement, it is also the largest amount any municipality is getting in this round of funding  a decision Adams praised as appropriate given the outsized burden the city has shouldered since last April.

With about 75,000 migrants coming into the city over the past year  and nearly 45,000 still in the citys care  Adams has been beating the drum for months for more aid from wherever he can get it.

So far, the state has allocated $1 billion to the city in relief in Gov. Hochuls most recent budget deal, and then theres the $143 million in federal money. But city officials projected that the migrant price tag will balloon to more than $4 billion within the next year.

After the last FEMA allocation to the city of about $31 million, Adams groused at the time that more needed to come from the feds, but hes been consistent in his public praise of Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who have pushed for the city to receive more federal funding.

I just really want to thank Sen. Schumer and Congressman Jeffries. I spoke with them after the first allocation of dollars and really told them that we have a disproportionate number of asylum seekers, and we need more, he said. Sen. Schumer and Congressman Jeffries stated they were going to fight hard for us ... Were hoping that now we continue to move in the direction that New York City receives the resources they deserve.
Meet Emma Heming Willis, Bruce Willis' wife of 14 years who is caring for him after his dementia diagnosis

Emma Heming Willis and Bruce Willis in 2019. VCG/Getty Images

Bruce Willis' family shared in February 2023 that he'd been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.

His wife of 14 years, model and actress Emma Heming Willis, provides care for him.

Here's a look inside Heming Willis' life, career, and marriage.

Close to a year after his family announced that he would be stepping away from acting due to cognitive decline caused by aphasia, Bruce Willis' wife, Emma Heming Willis, provided her husband's fans with updates about his increasingly poor health.

In February 2023, Heming Willis announced that the actor had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. Symptoms of the incurable condition are similar to those of Alzheimer's  patients experience memory loss and difficulty understanding and producing language.

Heming Willis has commented on her experience becoming the caregiver of her husband of 14 years. "You know, I have my moments. It just depends. I'm hanging in there and doing the best that I can. And, turning my pain into purpose," she said in a 2023 interview with certified dementia practitioner Gertrude Jordan.

Here's a look inside the life of Emma Heming Willis, and her relationship with Bruce Willis.

Emma Heming, now 44, was born on the island of Malta before growing up in London and California.

Emma Heming Willis in 2008. Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images

On her personal website, she said she lived on the "small but beautiful" island of Malta, which lies south of Italy in the center of the Mediterranean Sea, until her parents got divorced when she was a child. Her mother is Guyanese and her father is English, she wrote.

After her parents split up, she moved to London and then Southern California with her mother.

"My mother has been the ultimate guide in my life  she is the rock that I cherish, respect and admire," she wrote on her website.

In her 20s, she worked as a model, walking catwalks around the world and fronting high-profile designer campaigns.

Emma Heming Willis and Bruce Willis at Paris Fashion Week in 2010. Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Heming Willis' modeling career went full force after she won a modeling competition in London, "The British Elle Supermodel," in the early 1990s.

"For the next 15 years I had the privilege of walking the runways in New York, Paris, and Milan for Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel, Valentino, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, Emanuel Ungaro, Dior, and Victoria's Secret," she wrote on her website, adding that she was also the face of a Dior campaign, and was featured in commercials for Clairol and Redken hair products.

She later began working as an actress and landed a role in the film "Perfect Stranger"  alongside her future husband  in 2007.

Emma Heming Willis in 2009. Ray Tamarra/Getty Images

In 2001, Heming Willis began her acting career. She played minor parts in "Perfume" and "Entourage," before landing a role in "Perfect Stranger," which starred Bruce Willis and Halle Berry. In 2013, she acted alongside her husband once more in "RED 2."

However, she first met Willis at the gym in 2007.

Emma Heming Willis and Bruce Willis in 2008. James Devaney/Getty Images

"In 2007, I met my husband-to-be, Bruce, at our mutual trainer's gym," Heming Willis wrote on her website.

In a joint interview with People in 2020, the couple discussed the day they met.

"When we first met, I was surprised at how charming and how funny he was  and extremely handsome," Heming Willis told the magazine. "That was my first thought of you."

"I was already in love with her," Bruce Willis added.

Emma Heming and Bruce Willis got married in 2009.

Emma Heming Willis and Bruce Willis in 2009. Jean Baptiste Lacroix/Getty Images

The two got married two years later, in 2009, at their shared home in Turks and Caicos, according to Emma's website.

On their 13th wedding anniversary, Heming Willis shared a photo on Instagram of the couple on their wedding crying as they listened to speeches made by their loved ones. "13 years ago, those wedding speeches really sent us over the edge," she wrote in the caption.

Bruce Willis was married to Demi Moore from 1987 to 2000. The two are still close friends, and have reportedly grown closer since Willis was diagnosed with dementia in March 2022.

The couple has two daughters together, in addition to Willis' three daughters from his previous marriage.

Emma Heming Willis and Bruce Willis in 2014. Jason LaVeris/Getty Images

The couple shares two daughters, 11-year-old Mabel Ray Willis and 9-year-old Evelyn Penn Willis. On her website, Heming Willis describes her daughters as a "source of inspiration."

Willis also has three older daughters  34-year-old Rumer Glenn, 31-year-old Scout LaRue, and 29-year-old Tallulah Belle  with his ex-wife, Demi Moore. Heming Willis has a good relationship with her husband's ex and their daughters, often sharing updates to Instagram showing them spending time together.

Willis is apparently over the moon about being the father of five daughters. For Father's Day in 2021, Heming Willis shared a photo on Instagram with the caption, "Bruce's response when asked if he'd like to have a son? "I'd have 5 more girls right now." Happy Father's Day to this proud #girldad."

"I can't imagine having five boys," Bruce Willis told People in 2020. "I can't imagine having one boy."

After becoming a mother, Heming Willis became an ambassador for Room to Grow, a charity that helps children in poverty, according to People.

The couple has collaborated on business endeavors and has developed three fragrances together.

Bruce Willis and Emma Heming Willis in 2019. Jim Spellman/Getty Images

Around the same time the couple tied the knot, the Willises began collaborating to create three fragrances, two of which were nominated for Duftstars Awards.

Their first fragrance, "Bruce Willis," was released in 2010 and nominated for the prestigious German award. Two years later, they created a women's fragrance, "Lovingly," which was "a declaration of [Bruce's] love to his wife" and "is intended for modern, style-conscious women who radiate a certain sensuousness," according to Business Wire.

She showed her support for her husband when he was diagnosed with aphasia in 2022.

Emma Heming-Willis and Bruce Willis in 2019. VCG/Getty Images

In March 2022, Bruce Willis was diagnosed with aphasia, which negatively impacts cognitive function. Loss of speech and difficulty with writing and understanding language are two symptoms of the condition, according to Insider.

One of his daughters, Rumer, shared the update on her father's health in an Instagram post and said he would be "stepping away" from acting.

"This is a really challenging time for our family and we are so appreciative of your continued love, compassion and support," she wrote in the caption, in a letter signed by Willis' entire family.

Heming Willis updated her followers on her husband's worsening condition in February 2023, announcing that he had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.

Bruce Willis and Emma Heming Willis in 2018. Steve Granitz/Getty Images

Heming Willis alerted her followers of her husband's updated diagnosis on Instagram.

"Our family wanted to start by expressing our deepest gratitude for the incredible outpouring of love, support and wonderful stories we have all received since sharing Bruce's original diagnosis," she wrote in the caption.

"Since we announced Bruce's diagnosis of aphasia in spring 2022, Bruce's condition has progressed and we now have a more specific diagnosis: frontotemporal dementia (known as FTD)," she continued.

"Unfortunately, challenges with communication are just one symptom of the disease Bruce faces. While this is painful, it is a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis," she said.

She continues to provide her Instagram followers with updates on her husband's health, while supporting causes that help fight his condition.

Emma Heming Willis at the AFTD Hope Rising Benefit in 2023. Sean Zanni

Heming Willis shared an Instagram post on her husband's 68th birthday, pleading with his fans to continue sending support.

"My birthday wish for Bruce is that you continue to keep him in your prayers and highest vibrations because his sensitive Pisces soul will feel it," she wrote alongside a video montage of clips of the happy couple.

Around the same time, in March 2023, she attended the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration (AFTD) Hope Rising Benefit, which helps fight frontotemporal dementia and provides support to those affected by the condition.

On May 26, 2023, Heming Willis shared another Instagram post, expressing her disappointment that trials for a potential treatment for frontotemporal dementia had been discontinued.

"Yesterday I read that Wave Life Sciences ended their clinical trial that could potentially treat frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS.)," she wrote in the caption. "Where I'm not sure it could have helped us over here, it doesn't really matter, it still feels like a gut punch."

She urged her followers to fight for a treatment for her husband's condition. "Please keep that momentum going, build on the learnings/findings and don't give up on this loving community," she continued. "Our family will continue to keep the faith and never lose hope."

In honor of the couple's most recent wedding anniversary, Heming Willis discussed the difficulties of being a caregiver to a romantic partner.

Emma Heming Willis and Bruce Willis in 2013. Dave J Hogan/Getty Images

On the couple's 14th anniversary, Heming Willis wrote on Instagram, "[My anniversary] got me thinking about how hard these types of 'special occasions' can be on caregivers," she wrote. "When usually our person would acknowledge the event, now their changing brains just can't."

She offered advice to those looking for ways to support people who provide care to loved ones.

"If you know someone that is looking after someone else, don't ask what you can do, just do," she added.

Read the original article on Insider
He was fired after dissing Obama. Now, his Trump bus sits at the Republican Convention in GA

Its official name is the Trucking the Truth America First Bus Tour.

Its also known as the Mega MAGA Bus or simply the Trump Bus, although other buses have claimed that name. But whatever you call it, John Fredericks just wants you to see it  and hear his message.

Were here to celebrate whats going to be the first total takeover of a major state party by the MAGA movement from top to bottom, Fredericks told the Ledger-Enquirer on Thursday. Georgia is going to be a launching pad to take over the whole country.  You cant get elected for president if you dont win Georgia.

His bus was parked at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Columbus, across Front Avenue from the Columbus Convention & Trade Center, where the Georgia Republican Partys 2023 State Convention.

Based in Richmond, Virginia, he runs the John Fredericks Media Network. Along with his wife, he owns 12 radio stations, spanning from Pittsburgh to Atlanta (WMLB AM 1690). For the past 11 years, hes been preaching conservative politics on the John Fredericks Radio Show, simulcast on Real Americas Voice TV and available on podcasts.

How John Fredericks started his Trump bus

Fredericks, 65, has worked in various media jobs for about 40 years. In 2012, he said was fired from his position as an editorial page editor for the Tribune Company in Newport News, Virginia, after writing an editorial sarcastically welcoming Barack Obama to town during the presidential campaign.

They didnt tell me that was the reason, Fredericks said. But it was like three days later.

He had been a guest commentator on political talk shows, so he figured he could host one himself and start his own network  from which nobody could fire him.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Fredericks realized he could better connect with his audience and be a more effective booster for Trump if he got closer to voters. So he rented a bus to take his show on the road.

If you stay in the studio and you dont go out and engage with people across the country, go to diners and things of that nature, go to restaurants, go to events, you really become isolated, he said.  The whole purpose of our bus tour is to get people involved, rally the troops, give them a point of contact and obviously spread our word as we go.  We want to be able to take our message to people and get them excited and fired up.

Fredericks was the Virginia chairman for the Trump campaign in 2016 and 2020 and the states delegation chairman for Trump in 2020. During the Trump presidency, he was a White House correspondent, representing his network.

How people react to this Trump bus

In 2021, Fredericks bought a 35-foot bus and remodeled it to accommodate a mobile studio. He also had a larger-than-life image of Trump emblazoned on a wrap around the bus.

Sometimes, passersby ask whether Trump is on the bus. Sure, theyre disappointed when Fredericks tells them it isnt really Trumps bus, but he lets them sign the outside nonetheless.

The Trucking the Truth America First Bus Tour, operated by John Fredericks who runs the John Fredericks Media Network, is in Columbus, Georgia for the Georgia GOP convention at the Columbus Convention & Trade Center. 06/08/2023

They want to be a part of it, he said. Thats why you see all the signatures.  This bus tour represents not the president, per se, but the movement that right now hes the head of.

So even when Trump isnt on the ballot, Fredericks said, his vision of Make America Great Again still can generate votes for candidates in other races.

We agree with his policies, and we want to drive them into more activities, he said. The first thing is voting.  Weve got to tell them theres an election, other than a presidential one. When you look at the turnout in 2018, it just wasnt there. Then you look at the turnout in 2022, it was equally as pathetic: 52% of Republicans turned out.

Fredericks didnt have an estimate for the number of trips, stops or miles his bus has driven, but he said, I can tell you that driving in the Northeast during the midterms tore my bus up. I had to get $8,000 worth of repairs.

The Northeast also is where his bus has received its worst reception.

We would stop at a light, and some people would give us the New Jersey salute, he said. But, mostly, the reaction is very, very positive. I mean, theres never been any vandalism.

John Fredericks runs the John Fredericks Media Network. Along with his wife, he owns 12 radio stations, spanning from Pittsburgh to Atlanta (WMLB AM 1690). For the past 11 years, hes been preaching conservative politics on the John Fredericks Radio Show, simulcast on Real Americas Voice TV and available on podcasts. 06/09/2023

Bipartisan lesson John Fredericks learned the from Trump bus

A typical trip through eight states in three weeks, Fredericks said, allows him to talk with thousands of folks.

Were the voice of working people, of the common man, and we get that through going out and talking to them, he said. Thats how we learn.

Fredericks explained the bipartisan lesson those folks have taught him.

Working people feel theyve been betrayed, theyve been sold out, theyve been kicked to the curb, nobody cares about them, and they feel theyre just basically political fodder, he said. The Republicans lie to them, the Democrats exploit them, the unions take their money, their wages go down, their earning power goes down, they get crap, and they get kicked in the teeth.

Trumps political genius, Fredericks said, taps into that sensibility and mindset.

The Trump movement is a working class, blue-collar movement, he said. When Trump won in 2016, it was a big F-you to the elites.

The Democrats are all tied up in what race you are, what gender you are or what gender you think you are, where you came from.  Nobody gave a rats a-- about the working stiff that lost his home and got kicked out to the street. Finally, some guy comes along and says, You know what? Ive got your back.  He leads a movement of working people rising up against elitists, globalists, Washington, swamp  everything that keeps working people down.

MAGA taking over the Georgia Republican Party?

Now, the MAGA movement is poised to take back political power from Gov. Brian Kemps wing of the Georgia Republican Party, Fredericks said. He noted Kemp and other prominent Georgia Republicans, such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Attorney General Chris Carr and Insurance Commissioner John King, arent scheduled to attend the convention.

Seventy percent of the delegates that are here at this convention have turned over since two years ago, he said. Think about that.  This is why Kemps not coming.

The shift among Georgia Republicans could spark similar changes in other states, Fredericks said.

The Trucking the Truth America First Bus Tour, operated by John Fredericks who runs the John Fredericks Media Network, is in Columbus, Georgia for the Georgia GOP convention at the Columbus Convention & Trade Center. 06/08/2023

The MAGA forces, from A to Z, are going to take it over, lock, stock and barrel, he said. This is unprecedented. You take on the (Georgia Republican) slate, from chair to assistant secretary, every single one is part of the MAGA movement.  This is going to be the blueprint for us to go out and get other state parties to get involved and see that it can be done.  You cant take the national party over until you take the state parties over.

Now, he insists America must rehire Trump. Fredericks used stark terms to describe what he thinks is at stake in this presidential election.

If Trump doesnt win, he said, theres no country.
Tesla may dominate the EV market, but Mercedes-Benz just scored a win that could prove to be crucial going forward.

On Thursday, the German luxury marque became the first automaker to receive certification from the state of California to sell vehicles with a conditional automated driving system, according to Reuters. The technology is expected to be available as an option on two upcoming models the company will sell in the state.

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The California Department of Motor Vehicles gave Mercedes approval to start selling vehicles with its Drive Pilot system. The SAE Level 3 advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) cant fully operate a vehicle on its own, but it does allow the person behind the wheel to legally take their eyes off the road, though they must be available to resume control if needed. The technology can only be used on certain roads during daylight hours and not at speeds exceeding 40 mph. Those roads include highways in the Bay Area, Central Valley, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego, as well as an interstate connecting the state to Nevada. Engadget notes that if all rules are followed, Mercedes and not the driver will be legally responsible for any accident that happens.

A Mercedes-Benz EQS equipped with Drive Pilot

Mercedes intends to make Drive Pilot available as an option on the 2024 S-Class saloon and its all-electric equivalent, the EQS sedan, according to Reuters. Deliveries of vehicles with the tech are expected to begin before the end of the year.

Drive Pilot is currently the most advanced ADAS system currently available in the US. Teslas Autopilot and General Motorss Super Cruise technologies are both classified as Level 2 systems, which can handle some driving tasks but require the driver to pay full attention to the road should they need to take over. Teslas system has been the subject of intense scrutiny over the last year and in February the company recalled 362,000 EVs after the NHTSA found that its Full Self-Driving Beta software could increase the risk of crash.

Thursdays approval isnt the first such win for Mercedes. In January, Nevada also granted the automaker approval to deploy vehicles equipped with Drive Pilot on state roads. Well see what state is next to follow the pairs lead.

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The Instagram logo is superimposed against white Twitter birds.

After months of brainstorming and scheming, Meta is getting closer to releasing a Twitter clone to the world, according to a new report from The Verge. The companys pitch is simple. Execs claim they will offer a platform that is sanely run.

On Thursday night, The Verge reported that Meta chief product officer Chris Cox showed employees a preview of Project 92, a code name for a project Cox called our response to Twitter in a company-wide meeting. As explained by The Verge, Project 92 is Metas new standalone text app that looks a lot like Instagrams comment section. Meta executives are purportedly considering naming the app Threads, the same name given to its dead Instagram messaging app, although the decision is not final.

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According to The Verge, Threads (or whatever it ends up being called) will integrate with the decentralized social media protocol ActivityPub, which aims to untether social content from specific apps and make it more widely accessible. It will use Instagrams account system to quickly generate users profiles.

Weve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution, Cox reportedly said at the meeting.

This is what Instagrams upcoming Twitter competitor looks like https://t.co/Qx9kuFnHm8 pic.twitter.com/AKMBNKeQoX  The Verge (@verge) June 8, 2023

Gizmodo reached out to Meta for comment on The Verges report on Friday morning but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

At the same all-hands meeting, Mark Zuckerberg mapped out how Meta would be using AI in the future. In summary: he said AI would come to all of the companys social media products, per Axios. He reportedly mentioned that generative chatbots would soon arrive on Whatsapp as conversational companions and that AI would allow Instagram users to write out how they wanted to modify their Instagram photos and then see a virtual assistant make the alterations.

Weve known for some time that Meta was working on a Twitter clone. In December, The New York Times reported that Meta employees held a virtual brainstorming session on creating a Twitter alternative in November, just weeks after Twitters hot mess owner officially bought the platform for $44 billion. At the time, one employee said, Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs its mojo back, later adding, LETS GO FOR THEIR BREAD AND BUTTER.

More recently, in March, Meta confirmed to Gizmodo that it was exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates. In a statement, the company said it believed there was an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests.

Of course, Meta isnt the only one trying to reel in the trove of aghast Twitter users that are unhappy with the platform under Musks rule, which has been prone to breaking, fueling misinformation, alienating media outlets and high-profile users, and hosting jaw-dropping drama like the blue check fiasco of 2023. There are Twitter alternatives left and right, including Mastodon, Post News, Hive, and Bluesky, to name a few. None of them appears to have taken off, though (Im personally still waiting for a Bluesky invite code).

Metas alternative has the potential to be very different, primarily because the company is very good at copying things. Although it may inspire annoyance or outage with its copied products at first, such as when it ripped off Stories from Snapchat and blatantly launched Reels to compete with TikTok, millions upon millions inevitably succumb and decide Metas versions arent so bad.

Whats notable here is that there are so many users fed up with Twitter that theyre actively looking for a new alternative thats easy to use and that has the potential to scale. We can criticize Meta all we want, but it has billions of usersusers who might very much be willing to try something new that works and not speak into an empty void. Meta may be making Threads available as soon as possible, per the Verge. Well be waiting.

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Some migrant students celebrate first  and last  days of school only weeks apart as Chicago scrambles to enroll them

CHICAGO -- Dressed in a red graduation gown and collared shirt, Adrian Davila grinned widely as his mom planted a kiss on his cheek at John A. Walsh Elementary School at Benito Juarez Community Academy last Friday as the family celebrated his graduation from eighth grade.

The Venezuelan migrant had been in the school for a month.

We are so proud. We are so thankful, said Davilas mother, Marisela Adames. The family is staying in a makeshift shelter in the area after spending days in a police station.

Davila is one of the countless migrant students who enrolled at Chicago Public Schools just weeks and days ahead of the end of the school year Wednesday. With the clock ticking, CPS had made a concentrated effort to enroll as many children of asylum-seekers as it could, even as the migrants face uncertain futures in Chicago.

Officials say that despite their temporary living situations in respite centers, shelters and police stations, enrolling the children in school provides immediate access to education, as well as summer programs in academics and sports. Higher enrollment in the neighborhood school could also ensure more funding and resources for neighborhood schools, said Ald. Michael Rodriguez, 22nd.

While CPS could not provide a total number of asylum-seeker children enrolled in its schools, the team is working to get the data, said Sylvia Barragan, a spokesperson for CPS.

We are well-equipped and committed to serving every new student, including those students who have arrived in recent months with their families from Central and South America, Asia and Europe, the school district said in a statement.

While the financial impact of the new students remains to be seen, the FY2023 budget had provided $3 million in new funding for more bilingual teachers and dual-language program coordinators, as well as the formation of bilingual advisory councils. As of February, CPS reported to have more licensed teachers than any time before, with 20,850. Of those, 2,255 are bilingual educators.

And the institution has been working with the city, Park District and school-level leaders to best accommodate new arrivals and ensure programming that supports our students continues uninterrupted.

Though the Chicago Teachers Union did not return emails for comment regarding CPS resources for the migrant children, the union in February denounced CPS for the lack of bilingual staff and resources for the new students, including mental health accessibility.

But in its recent statement, CPS said it is looking to recruit more bilingual staff to be able to respond to the increase in enrollment of bilingual students and to make resources in Spanish available for students.

This access to a quality education is especially crucial when migrant children are in a state of transition, said Yasmine Sherif, executive director of Education Cannot Wait, the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises. She emphasized that education is a key driver in building economic resilience and social cohesion.

Without the safety, protection and hope that quality education provides, innocent refugee children face incredible and unimaginable risks, she said. Governments must do all they can to ensure that children survive and develop to their full potential.

The asylum-seeking students living in temporary shelters are enlisted as Students in Temporary Living Situations (STLS) to qualify for all the benefits and resources available under STLS. The student can be immediately enrolled in school, even if he or she lacks health, immunization or school records, proof of guardianship, proof of residency, or any other documentation normally required for school enrollment.

In the Little Village area, nearly 60 migrant children staying temporarily at Piotrowski Parks respite center joined Zapata Academy and other grammar schools and Little Village Lawndale High School just days after the shelters opening.

Rodriguez said that it is unclear when the families will be moved into a city-run shelter, but in the meantime, the children should be in school, even if its a short period of time.

Once in the CPS system, even when theyre moved, itll be easier for the families to transfer the children and access more programming, he said.

Rodriguez said that Antonio Acevedo, chief of CPS Network 7, asked him to work together to make sure that CPS staff could access the families in the center to offer them to enroll them in nearby schools.

There is a social and emotional opportunity that school provides. The fact is I want these families to stay in my community. I want them to live here, I want them to make a choice to go to the schools that theyre in now, said Rodriguez.

The alderman said that the migrant children enrolling in the neighborhood schools could offset the recent enrollment declinel over the past years and the loss of population in the area the past 10 years.

I want to welcome these migrants, he said. Increased enrollment could mean more resources for each of the schools.

Rodriguez said that his team is working with Catholic Charities and other organizations in area, such as New Life Community, to support any effort or programming that can help the families at the center find a more permanent space to live in the area.

At Rogers Elementary School on the North Side, about two dozen children were enrolled at the West Ridge school, sources told the Tribune.

Victoria Rosario, who has been a teacher at Rogers for 16 years, recently led and organized a meeting for migrant families, where her husband, Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, translated in Spanish. The couple lives in the neighborhood.

Ginsberg-Jaeckle, part of the organizing committee of the 50th Ward United Working Families, gave out his WhatsApp number and promised to put together a group to coordinate more events in the future, including a meeting for community members to meet the new migrant enrollees.

Infrastructure of public services is so important, Ginsberg-Jaeckle told the Tribune. Several hot meals a day for the kids that are going there, the opportunity for summer school and the transportation benefit of having Ventra passes.  That will hopefully make a difference for this group.

Many of the migrant parents say they have found resilience through their children and they agree that even as the school year ends, enrolling the children in school is imperative to ensure the children can begin learning English and have access to other summer academic programs.

The first time Wiliagmy Benitez, walked her three children to Manuel Perez Public School in the Pilsen neighborhood just about a month ago, she was emotional, the mother recalled while sitting with her three children in the makeshift shelter that Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th, helped establish.

That single moment made their monthlong journey from Venezuela worth it, she said.

It makes me happy that the teachers treat them well, Benitez said.

Most children at the Pilsen shelter have enrolled in the neighborhood schools, including Joseph Jungman Public School, John A. Walsh Public School and Benito Juarez high school.

Benitez said that although it can help the children assimilate and cope with the traumatic journey they have and continue to endure, she worries about potential bullying and other emotional impact that her children could experience.

Her 10 year-old daughter has expressed feeling frustrated most days after school, she said.

I tell her that this wont be our situation forever, the mother said. I hope the other children are nice to her.

And though Victor Rangel is grateful that his 7-year-old Austin started school at Josefa Ortiz De Dominguez Elementary School, It worries him that they wont be transferred out of the respite center soon.

Gracias a dios ya entro a clase, Rangel said. Were thankful to God that he has started school.

At the graduation Friday, another migrant, Jonathan Robledo, also walked the stage with Davila. The two smiled as their parents, still in disbelief, hugged their children.

Adames, who has two other children, said that education is important to her and that is why she made sure to enroll her children in school even though the family has no permanent home.

Por ellos estamos aqui, Adames said. They left their country for a better future for their children.
Millions of women are working during menopause, but US law isn't clear on employees' rights or employers' obligations

Hot flashes can happen anywhere, including at work. Aleksei Morozov/iStock via Getty Images Plus

While she was interviewing Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler in March 2023, Drew Barrymore suddenly exclaimed: Im so hot  I think Im having my first hot flash!

She took off her blazer and fanned herself dramatically.

While most hot flashes arent televised, the entertainers experience was far from unique. Barrymore, age 48, is one of approximately 15 million U.S. women from 45 to 60 who work full time and may experience menopausal symptoms.

Unlike Barrymore, most women are silent about their menopausal symptoms. Yet their symptoms, even when concealed from employers and co-workers, are a burden on them, their workplaces and on the overall U.S. economy. Lost work productivity due to menopausal symptoms  measured by missed work hours, job losses and early retirement  add up to about $1.8 billion annually, the Mayo Clinic estimates.

The three of us write and teach about employment discrimination and feminism, and two of us have written a book about menstruation. Because of our shared interests, we are currently writing a book about menopause and the law. Weve observed that although Gwyneth Paltrow, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama and other celebrities are speaking out about their own menopausal transitions, work accommodations are rare and employers typically dont even acknowledge this stage of life.

Stigma and silence

In the lead-up to menopause, which typically begins between the ages of 45 and 55, levels of reproductive hormones change, and menstrual cycles become irregular and then eventually cease. This transition, called perimenopause, typically lasts for seven years.

Common symptoms of perimenopause include hot flashes, sleep disturbances, heart palpitations, excessive bleeding and irregular periods. Technically, menopause occurs after women dont have a period for an entire year, and postmenopause is the stage after that. Transgender men and nonbinary people assigned female at birth can experience menopause too.

Employees who experience menopausal symptoms are often reluctant to talk about them at all, let alone tell their bosses. They may feel stigma and shame, and they may worry that it could hurt their chances for a promotion, their co-workers will see them as less capable or that their status at work will be otherwise jeopardized. These concerns are not unfounded.

In a series of studies, researchers asked workers and college students to describe their initial impressions of potential co-workers, including a menopausal woman. The participants described her as less confident and less emotionally stable than the non-menopausal women.

No legal protections

Employees who do speak up and seek accommodations for their menopausal symptoms, which might include dress code adjustments to deal with hot flashes, are often out of luck.

No federal law requires employers to accommodate menopausal symptoms.

Although the Americans with Disabilities Act requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for workers with disabilities, U.S. courts have consistently held that menopause, by itself, is not a disability, even when its symptoms are seriously affecting someones ability to do their job.

Thats what happened to Georgia Sipple, a food product demonstrator who had a doctors note requesting permission to break a dress code by wearing short sleeves on the job. When Crossmark, her employer, refused, Sipple felt that she had no choice but to quit. She sued the company, but the Eastern District of California federal court dismissed her case.

Sometimes, employees even get punished for their menopausal symptoms or status.

When 911 operator Alisha Coleman experienced heavy perimenopausal bleeding that seeped through onto the office carpet, she was fired for failing to maintain high standards of personal hygiene. She sued, but the Middle District of Georgia dismissed her case, refusing to recognize her termination as a form of sex discrimination.

Instead, the judge drew a specious distinction, saying that Coleman had been fired for being unable to control the heavy menstruation. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, she appealed, later obtaining a confidential settlement.

Actors perform a scene from Menopause the Musical at the Shaw Theatre in London. Joel Ryan/PA Images via Getty Images

Pregnancy and breastfeeding accommodations

Employees have far fewer legal protections for menopause today than for pregnancy and breastfeeding.

Congress first directly addressed pregnancy discrimination in the workplace in 1978 with the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. That law made it clear that pregnancy discrimination is a form of sex discrimination. This means that an employee who was fired because her water broke and she went into labor at work would, unlike Coleman, have a winning sex discrimination claim.

Congress also passed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act in December 2022, which goes into effect on June 27, 2023. That law requires reasonable accommodations for pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions unless doing so would impose an undue hardship on employers.

Since 2010, Congress has required most employers to provide breastfeeding employees with reasonable break times to pump milk for one year after their childrens births, and also to provide them with a private place that isnt a bathroom to do so. Most recently, in December 2022, the Providing Urgent Maternal Protections for Nursing Mothers Act expanded those protections.

Why not menopause?

In our view, pregnancy and breastfeeding offer a potential model for protecting workers from menopause-related discrimination and providing reasonable accommodations. Until Congress is ready to pass such legislation, there are other possibilities.

First, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination laws, could issue best practices guidelines.

These guidelines can be modeled on practices in the United Kingdom, where many business have adopted menopause policies. Climate-controlled break spaces, dress codes that incorporate short-sleeve options and breathable fabrics, dedicated menopause support and the like can all make a positive difference. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could also issue guidance highlighting menopause-based discrimination as a form of sex or age discrimination.

Additionally, even if the commission does not act, companies can adopt these kinds of policies on their own. That is already starting to happen, as U.S. businesses like the tech company Nvidia and the drugmaker Bristol Myers Squibb begin to establish some accommodations for menopause, including help with finding treatments.

New York Mayor Eric Adams has promised more menopause-friendly workplaces, at least for city workers.

To be sure, it can be risky to discuss symptoms at work, as this can undercut perceptions about womens competence at work.

Given these symptoms prevalence, though, and the millions of workers experiencing them, we believe that breaking the silence can challenge and dispel these stereotypes  increasing the chances that theyll remain on the job for many more years.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. The Conversation is trustworthy news from experts, from an independent nonprofit. Try our free newsletters.

It was written by: Naomi Cahn, University of Virginia; Bridget J. Crawford, Pace University , and Emily Gold Waldman, Pace University .

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The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
 Flash

The U.S. forces on Thursday carried out a live fire exercise at a gas field it controls in Syria's eastern province of Deir al-Zour, a war monitor reported.

The military exercise was conducted in the Koniko gas field in the countryside of Deir al-Zour, involving helicopters and warplanes firing live ammunition and carrying out airstrikes in the vicinity of the field, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The UK-based watchdog group said the move comes as part of the U.S. forces' efforts to fortify its positions in eastern Syria, particularly after Iranian-backed pro-Syrian government fighters had carried out several drone attacks against U.S. positions in that part of Syria.

The current military exercise came in tandem with arrangements by the U.S. forces to fortify their positions inside the gas field, said the observatory.

The Syrian government has long regarded the presence of U.S. troops in Syria as illegal, demanding an immediate withdrawal of the U.S. from Syria and blaming it for the deteriorating living conditions in Syria given the fact that the U.S. and its allied Kurdish groups control key gas and oil fields in eastern Syria.
A Mississippi father and son were arrested on felony charges Thursday for their actions during the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the Department of Justice said.

Toney Sheldon Bray, 46, and his son Ethan Bray, 25, of Blue Springs, face multiple charges after they breached police barricades and joined a mob that stormed the Capitol after former President Donald Trumps defeat in the 2020 election.

Both are charged with obstruction of law enforcement during a civil disorder, a felony, knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly conduct in a Capitol building, and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building. Toney Bray is also charged with theft of government property.

Court documents say the Brays joined the first breach of police barricades, pushed and climbed over police barriers and were among the first to confront law enforcement on the staircase that leads from the Capitols West Plaza to the Lower West Terrace.

The DOJ said Capitol CCTV footage captured the Brays wearing gas masks and entering the Rotunda. They remained in the Capitol for 32 minutes and footage also shows Toney Bray carrying a Capitol Police riot shield as he exited the Rotunda and again after he left the Capitol building.

The case was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Columbia and the Department of Justice National Security Divisions Counterterrorism Section. The U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of Mississippi also provided assistance.

The two have made an initial appearance in the Northern District of Mississippi.

The Brays cases come after 1,000 people have been charged with crimes relating to the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

An investigation is ongoing.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Friday broke with his party by praising the Department of Justice for excercising due care in its investigation and indictment of former President Donald Trump over his alleged mishandling of classified documents.

By all appearances, the Justice Department and special counsel have exercised due care, affording Mr. Trump the time and opportunity to avoid charges that would not generally have been afforded to others, Romney said in a statement.

Mr. Trump brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities to do so, he added.

Romney called the allegations serious and said that if proven, they would be consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest, such as withholding defensive weapons from Ukraine for political reasons and failing to defend the Capitol from violent attack and insurrection.

The indictment is still under seal, but Trump announced the news on his social media website Truth Social, proclaiming himself innocent and divulging that he is to report to a federal courthouse in Miami next week. There are reportedly multiple federal counts against him, ranging from willful retention of national defense information to conspiracy.

Romney, a vocal Trump critic, previously criticized Trumps first indictment, which included charges that he falsified records regarding a $130,000 hush money payment to a porn star. He called that case political and the prosecutors case an overreach.

Top Republican lawmakers and even some 2024 presidential candidates rushed to the defense of Trump on Thursday, even though the Department of Justice has yet to unveil the charges and lay out the evidence against the former president, who is seeking the GOP nomination again.

It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him. Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades. I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in a statement, alleging that Biden had been involved in the decision, even though the charges were brought by an independent special counsel.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Morgan Radford explains how TODAY helped bring her and her now-husband together

Morgan Radfords long love story with her husband David Williams all started with a TODAY Show story and a McFlurry.

The NBC News Daily anchor reflected on how her romance with Williams began in a sweet Instagram post on June 8.

Radford and Williams, who recently welcomed their first child together in February, started off as friends before their relationship grew into something more.

Almost 7 years ago on August 10, 2016, Weekend @TodayShow sent me on a story in #Detroit about an organization rebuilding and decorating homes for people going through hard times, she wrote in her caption.

While in The Motor City, she decided to contact the only Detroit resident she knew, who happened to be Williams.

The two had met in college and lived in the same dorm. I only had 40 minutes before my flight, I explained, and the entire shoot was only 6 hours  but did he want to meet up and say hi? she recalled asking him.

She continued, Of course he did, he said, and told me there was a @McDonalds right beside the airport. We could grab a McFlurry.

She later explained to TODAY.com that they had "reconnected" in Detroit, which "set the stage" for one year later, when they saw each other again in London and things "turned romantic."

She concluded her June 8 post, Fast-forward 7 years and another chance meeting in #London: he gave me a McFlurry.

Now, they are married and have a daughter, Adelana Marcia Radford Williams, who they call Lana for short. At the end of the post, Radford gushed that Williams is a best friend, and the love of my life.

Beside the story, she included an adorable selfie of the family of three standing in front of a McDonalds. She also posted a throwback photo of her and Williams riding in a car together.

The NBC News correspondent and her husband tied the knot on Jan. 8, 2022 in Cartagena, Colombia, after previously postponing their ceremony in May 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

She has previously posted about their love story, writing in her 2019 engagement announcement post that they had bonded at school just before Williams graduated while taking part in an on-campus fashion show.

"We were randomly paired together," she wrote. "We met every week to practice our steps  and between busted dance moves and attempted runway walks  we giggled and became pretty good friends."

She added that Williams had headed to law school shortly after but stayed in touch over the years.

"We grabbed dinner while I was living in South Africa, drank boba tea once I moved to New York, and he even took me for an 'airport McFlurry' when I had a quick layover for a story in his hometown of Detroit," she wrote, alluding to the story she shared on June 8.

She wrote that they were both selected for a conference in London in 2017.

"That night, we danced, made new friends  but always came back to each other. He looked me in my eyes that evening and told me this was our shot to become more than friends," she wrote. "Two days later he saw his cousin, showed him our picture from that evening, and said, 'I just reconnected with the woman Im going to marry.'

"Turns out  he was right."

This article was originally published on TODAY.com
A mother spent years fighting for her son. Now he could be sent back to her abusive husband in Italy.

In a closely watched case that went to the Supreme Court and galvanized calls for legal reforms to better protect domestic violence victims, a federal judge is set to rule on whether a 6-year-old boy must be sent back to Italy to live with his father, who admitted in court to abusing the boys now deceased mother.

The decision about whether the son of the late Narkis Golan can continue living with his mothers family in Brooklyn, New York, or must return to his birthplace of Milan to live with his father, Isacco Jacky Saada, will follow a contentious court battle in which Golans family has alleged the boy has returned from recent visits with his father distressed and with bruises, among other claims included in recent court filings. Saada denies causing bruising or distress to the boy.

The case made it to the Supreme Court in March 2022  prior to Golan's death in October  where the justices unanimously sided with her by making it easier for judges to reject the request for a childs return to a country where they could face a grave risk of harm. The justices then sent the case back to a lower court in the Eastern District of New York, where it now awaits a ruling by Judge Ann Donnelly. Since the case was first brought in 2018, Donnelly has ordered the boys return to Italy three times, all of which Golans lawyers successfully appealed.

Donnelly has ordered a childhood autism specialist to evaluate the boys current condition before she issues her ruling, according to the public docket. It is unclear when she will rule.

Domestic violence experts and advocates who have followed the case say it is a window into a reality experienced by mothers around the world who flee abusive partners with their children for another country and then get accused of kidnapping under the child abduction clauses of the Hague Convention, an international treaty adopted by more than 100 countries, including the U.S., since its proposal in 1980. Mothers made up 73% of parents who took their children to another country in Hague cases filed in 2015, the most recent year for which data is available. While there are no definitive statistics, experts estimate that in the majority of such cases, mothers are fleeing domestic violence.

The whole thing, as is written, really does not understand the idea of mothers fleeing to protect children from physical and sexual and psychological abuse in the country of residence, Lynn Hecht Schafran, senior vice president at the womens legal defense organization Legal Momentum, said of the treatys child abduction clauses.

Narkis Golan with her son (via GoFundMe)

Golan fled Italy with her son for the U.S., where she was born, in 2018, after Saada physically and verbally abused her and threatened to kill her, with much of the abuse unfolding in front of her son, according court documents and the Supreme Courts opinion in Golan v. Saada. Saada subsequently asked a court to return the couples son to Italy under the Hagues child abduction clauses, setting in motion a yearslong legal battle. (Golan also alleged in court that Saada sexually assaulted her, which he denied.)

Golan was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment on Oct. 18 of last year, in what the New York City Medical Examiners Office ruled was a natural death caused by a brain bleed. Although Golans family raised questions about the circumstances of her death, the NYPD and the Brooklyn District Attorneys Office investigated and didnt find any evidence of foul play or criminality, according to spokespeople for the police and the DAs office.

Lawyers representing Golans family, the boy and Saada did not respond to emails and phone calls seeking comment.

Allegations of bruising, swearing and emotional turmoil

Morin Golan, Narkis sister, now has primary custody of the boy. According to recent court filings by lawyers for Golans family, after two recent visits with his father the boy returned to his aunt with bruises.

After a supervised visit in February, the boy returned home with two black-and-blue eyes, which the supervisor said he got while jumping on the bed and accidentally hitting his knee into his face, the filing states. Then, after the first unsupervised visit with his father in April, the boy returned home with bruises on his leg and arm, where the bruises appeared in the shape of three fingers, the filing states.

Saada lives in Italy but returns to New York on weekends for unsupervised overnight visits with his son.

Morin Golan said that when she asked her nephew about the source of the bruises, he said he did not remember or does not know how the bruises got there, the filing says, adding that his autism and trauma disorders mean that he is often not communicative and cannot advocate on his own behalf.

It is not clear to Ms. Golan if the bruises are due to an innocuous incident, a failure to properly supervise [the boy], or something more concerning, the filing states.

In a response filing, Saadas lawyers say the father is unaware of any recent bruising and denies having caused any bruising to [the boy]. The lawyers also reiterate the supervisors claim that the first bruise was caused when the boy was jumping on the bed.

The filing from Morin Golans lawyers also alleges that the boy says he is not permitted to speak about his mother when visiting his father and that he is afraid to bring a stuffed animal that plays a recording of his mothers voice to their visits because he is afraid he will get in trouble. They also claim Saada falsely told his son his mother hit him and dropped him on the floor as a baby; made disparaging remarks to the boy about Morin Golan and her family, including that they are a garbage family; and told the boy he will soon go back to Italy with him and will never see Ms. Golan or his maternal family again.

Saadas lawyers deny that the boy is forbidden to speak about his mother, adding that they frequently will have conversations about how [the boy] misses her, and deny that he is forbidden to bring the stuffed animal, according to their filing. They claim that the boy recently told his dad that his mother was abusive toward him and that Saada was surprised by those statements. The lawyers said Saada denied making disparaging remarks about the Golan family and said that he has told [his son] that he can keep in touch with whomever he wants if he goes back to Italy.

Morin Golans lawyers also allege that Saada uses inappropriate and vulgar terms during video calls, which they say the boy repeats after never using them previously. They also say the boy becomes defiant, aggressive, angry and disrespectful following visits with Saada, which they allege reflects a pattern of deterioration following extended visits with his father. The lawyers also allege the father told the boys trauma therapist that the boy does not have any mental health concerns and disputed any need for therapy, according to a court filing by Golans lawyers.

In response, Saadas lawyers concede Saada may have, at times, used inappropriate language around his son, but say that he has instructed the boy to refrain from using foul language, which, as a young child, [the boy] finds amusing. The lawyers also said that English is not Saadas first language and that he understood (perhaps mistakenly) from the trauma therapist that [his son] no longer needed her services, adding that Morin Golans suggestion that [Saada] is dismissive of his sons needs is made in bad faith and untrue.

Experts say the fact that Judge Donnelly  who previously led the Family Violence and Child Abuse Bureau at the Manhattan District Attorneys Office  could still order the boy sent back to Italy reflects a broader problem of how many judges fail to take a history or threat of domestic violence into account when ruling on such cases.

It is quite unbelievable that the judge might return the child despite all that has happened, including the loss of his mother and the reports about visitation, said Merle Weiner, a professor at the University of Oregons School of Law who is widely recognized as an expert on the Hague Conventions child abduction clauses.

Donnelly did not respond to questions from NBC News.

An uncertain potential future in Italy

If the boy is sent back to Italy, his final destination will be decided by the Chief Public Prosecutor at the Milan Juvenile Court, according to a letter from Italian judge Daniela Bacchetta filed last month.

In an opinion filed on behalf of Morin Golan, Laura Serra, a Rome-based attorney who specializes in family law, wrote that if Donnelly sends the boy to Italy, there is a very high likelihood he would be placed in a group home, where she claims he could stay for years while Italian authorities investigate the various family members who could potentially take custody of him, including his father. Serra wrote that the childs potential placement in such a setting would be especially risky given his autism, trauma history and his inability to speak Italian. It would also likely take at least six months for him to obtain an Italian autism certification, which he would need in order to access educational support, according to Serras opinion.

In an opinion filed on Saadas behalf, Zanetti Vitali and Romualdo Richichi, lawyers based in Milan with specialties in family law, said Serras opinion that the boy would very likely to end up in a group home is completely groundless because foster care is the last resource in Italy. They also say the father poses no risk to the boy because there was never any allegation of direct violence against him.

Donnelly has made a similar argument in the past, writing: As I have explained before at length, the grave risk of harm to [the boy] comes from a single source  the violence between his parents, according to the memorandum decision she wrote the third time she ruled to send him back to Italy, last August.

But Schafran and Weiner, the Hague experts, say those arguments reflect a misunderstanding of the links between intimate partner violence and child abuse. While data is limited, experts say many children who grow up in homes where intimate partner violence takes place also experience abuse themselves. And while Donnelly has written that there is no significant evidence that Mr. Saada was intentionally violent to his son, research has established that witnessing domestic violence negatively impacts a childs development and alters the structure of their brain, the Supreme Court opinion notes.

Its shocking that a judge as knowledgeable as this judge is, because of her own experience in the courts, would make this claim that once these parents live apart there will be no more violence, Schafran said.

Growing calls for reform

Prior to her death, Golan was part of a growing movement of advocates and experts calling for change in how the Hague Convention's child abduction clauses are implemented in order to better protect women and children fleeing domestic violence.

In an April report, Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, recommended the treaty be revised to better protect abused women and their children by allowing a stronger defense against return if there is family and domestic violence, and said that judges ruling on those cases should be required to consider family and domestic violence in their decisions.

In the U.S., the treaty is implemented through the International Child Abduction Remedies Act, according to the State Department. A bill drafted in 2014 by former Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., and others sought to amend the legislation to require judges to recognize the domestic abuse risk a child could face if ordered to return to their home country, and to require judges to complete training on the impacts of domestic violence on families and children. However, the bill failed to even be introduced in Congress due to a lack of interest among legislators, according to Weiner, who provided NBC News with the draft of the bill. Ros-Lehtinen declined to comment.

There have since been some efforts to spur change on the state level. Last month, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill that will require family courts to consider threats against ex-partners or spouses as a factor in decisions about child visitation and custody, NBC Miami reported. The law is named for Greyson Kessler, a 4-year-old Florida boy who was killed by his father in a 2021 murder-suicide in Fort Lauderdale, the local station reported.

But experts say such efforts dont go far enough.

When you have legislation and an international treaty that do not match the way things are playing out on the ground, in reality, you run into trouble, Schafran said.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence or the threat of domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline for help at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), or go to www.thehotline.org for anonymous, confidential online chats, available in English and Spanish. Individual states often have their own domestic violence hotlines as well.

Advocates at the National Domestic Violence Hotline field calls from both survivors of domestic violence as well as individuals who are concerned that they may be abusive toward their partners.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
They must return home, but burned Ukrainian children found new friends and support

Reporter Kristen Jordan Shamus and visual journalist Mandi Wright of the Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, visited Poland in May, near the border with Ukraine. They followed a group of U.S. doctors who traveled to Poland to treat Ukrainian children with burns and congenital abnormalities, the first such trip since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The doctors, from Michigan, Texas, Massachusetts and Missouri, operated on 20 children during their visit. Shamus and Wright had extraordinary access to the doctors and families, and in the hospital. To contribute to Doctors Collaborating to Help Children, go to dctohc.org/donations.

LECZNA, Poland  They began as strangers from such disparate parts of Ukraine as Mykolaiv in the south, Kharkiv in the east, Kyiv in the central region and Lviv in the west.

They shared a national identity and the trauma of war, along with one more commonality: children with untreated medical needs.

Together, these mostly mother-child pairs caravaned by bus and by train across a homeland pocked by shelling and missile attacks. The group picked up more and more women and children as they traveled over the border into Poland, where U.S. doctors waited.

There, the kids underwent complex plastic and reconstructive surgery  procedures that arent available in Ukraine because of the ongoing Russian invasion  for treatment of a bomb blast injury, to ease pain and deformities caused by constricting burn scars, and to repair congenital anomalies.

They all stayed at the Secession Hotel in this small Polish town, where, for more than a week in mid-May, they shared meals and laughter, doubts and fears, anguish and joy as they waited for each childs turn for surgery at the Independent Public Health Care Facility, one of the largest burn treatment centers in Poland.

The women became fast friends, leaning on one another.

The children did, too.

More: Ukrainian doctors working in extreme conditions count on US peers' help

'Their mood improved every minute'

They came here with visible signs of tension, increased anxiety and depressed mood, said Dr. Nataliya Yevchenko, a Ukrainian psychiatrist who traveled with the families and stayed with them to offer mental health support.

Not only were they leaving a country at war and had certain distress related with that aspect of their life  worried parents and relatives, bomb threats, moving away, e-schooling, limited contact with other children from their respective age groups  but they also had additional worries related to the surgery and treatment.

Dr. Nataliya Yevchenko, a psychiatrist who traveled with families from Ukraine goes between hospital rooms of Ukrainian children as they wait for surgery or are recovering at the Independent Public Heath Care Facility in Leczna, Poland on day five of a medical missionary Doctors Collaborating to Help Children on Thursday, May 18, 2023.

While staying here, in comfortable conditions in Poland, their mood improved with every minute. They were relaxing, calming down, started to play games with each other. They realized that they came as a group sharing similar experiences and problems  war, illness, upcoming surgery. They had a chance to make friends in an environment where people genuinely understood each other.

The environment became almost like a burn camp for Ukrainian kids and their moms, where they could bond, said said Dr. Gennadiy Fuzaylov, a Boston-based physician and philanthropist who organized the humanitarian medical mission through the nonprofit he founded, Doctors Collaborating to Help Children.

More: US doctors travel to edge of war zone to care for burned Ukrainian children

I think we impacted these kids plus their parents, said Fuzaylov, who has planned more than a dozen similar trips to Ukraine to provide medical help to burned children prior to the war. Some of the parents sent me text messages and said that was best time in their lives.

Winning a teenager's trust

Maksim Kondrashov, 13, of Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt and barely spoke when American doctors examined him for the first time outside the hotel on the evening before the surgeries began.

He seemed depressed and had been arguing with his mother.

Dr. Brian Kelley, a plastic surgeon from the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School, and Dr. David Brown, a plastic surgeon from the University of Michigan, suggested reconstructive and plastic surgery for Maksims face, which was severely scarred from burns he suffered two years ago in a hotel fire.

More: Even without war, Ukrainian children face daily risks that leave scars

Maksim refused.

He told us, Whatever she said she wants me to do, Im definitely not doing,  Brown said, referring to the boys mother.

Maksim Kondrashov, 13, is screened for surgery on his arms by Doctors Collaborating to Help Children at a hotel he is staying at in Leczna, Poland, Sunday, May 14, 2023. Kodrashov was severely burned in hotel fire.

Kelley added: To his surgeons credit, they saved his life. He has a face. But hes a teenager.  Imagine the stigma. Surgically, he's unique because you see those scars and you expect them to be firm and hard, but theyre soft, almost boggy. Because of his social situation, we were very concerned. We want to build trust in him.

Even though he has so many things that could (be improved with surgery), we do not want to betray his trust.

The doctors met repeatedly with Maksim over the course of several days, and, on May 19, finally operated on both of his hands to improve his ability to open and close them and fully straighten his fingers.

He is old enough. With kiddos, as soon as they're able to understand what you're talking about, they need to be invested in the plan, Kelley said.

More: 'Where is the music?' Quiet of Poland perplexes burned 4-year-old from war-torn Ukraine

Yevchenko accompanied him to surgery, and said it was incredibly important that mental health support was in place for the children and their parents on this mission.

It was organized with psychological help  because sharing their distress with other human beings affects their physical healing, she said. Everything is connected.

Especially when it comes to teenagers, it is important to work with their anxiety related to other peoples perception of how they look, how others judge their appearance, which is very normal in this age group, regardless of the condition. If they received any psychological help during their treatment here, we should perceive it as a seed  it will grow with time.

And it did.

On the last day he was in Poland, Maksim took down his hood for a while. He talked with other kids, and he even smiled once or twice.

When the American doctors return to Poland or Ukraine in a year for the next medical mission, Maksim told them hed consider a bigger operation, one that could help improve the scars on his face.

A parent's emotional scars

Tears spilled down Nina Nykanorovas cheeks on the morning of May 18 as she described the accident that burned her son, Artem, when he was just 13 months old.

I wanted to prepare tea for the family, she said, despair deepening the lines in her face. It was the same year his father died. I was down and confused and in distress due to his death at that time.  I looked away for a moment and my son pulled a kettle of water on himself.

The boiling water scalded his chest, left arm and hand.

Nina Nykanorova, wipes tears away as her son Artem Nykanorov, 13, recovers from surgery at the Independent Public Heath Care Facility in Leczna, Poland, on day five of a medical missionary Doctors Collaborating to Help Children on Thursday, May 18, 2023. Nykanorov was burned when he was one with a boiling kettle of water and needed surgery to improve movement in his arm and hand.

As Artem has grown, the burn scars have thickened and contracted, making it too hard for him to play on the horizontal bars at the playground or ride a bicycle. He is now 13, and needed surgery to help improve mobility in his left arm and hand.

More: She was badly burned taking a selfie, then became a war refugee. Now US doctors are helping her.

That morning, Nykanorova, 35, who lives in the Volyn Oblast, in the northwestern part of the country, near the border with Belarus, waited in an empty hospital room for her son to come out of surgery.

I am worried, she said, like any mothers heart would worry.

Her new friend, Olena Katasova, offered comfort in the form of a hug.

A reprieve from the worries of war

Katasovas child, Mariia Ovdiienko, also was in an operating room on the hospitals third floor.

Mariia, 16, was born with syndactyly, a congenital condition, and was undergoing surgery to separate and straighten fused fingers on her left hand and the toes on her right foot.

She wasnt approved for an operation in Kyiv, said Katasova, who lives near the capital city in a village called Borodyanka. So we made peace with her condition and accepted that she would live with her fingers like this. This opportunity was unexpected.

The trip to Poland, Katasova said, brought hope for improvement in Mariias hand and foot, but also a reprieve from the worries of war.

Olena Katasova, left, helps her daughter Mariia Ovdiienko, 16, hop from their bus from Poland to their connecting bus at the Ukraine border on Saturday, May 20, 2023. Ovdiienko had a surgery performed by Doctors Collaborating to Help Children earlier that helped separate her fingers and toes from a congenital abnormality that prohibited all of her digits to move Independent of one another.

When Russia invaded in February 2022, we were under occupation for a month, she said. We didnt have electricity for two months. There were tanks next to our windows. We stayed in our cellar for three weeks.

She considered fleeing the area, she said, moving west, but it was already too late. Russians were everywhere, walking the streets of our small village and bombing Borodyanka.

Kyiv was bombed from our area  so we couldnt leave. They entered Borodyanka on the second day of the war.

Since then, her town and nearby Kyiv have been reclaimed by Ukrainian forces, but the violence continues.

Today, Kyiv was bombed again, she said. And we are supposed to go back there? I am worried.

It was Katasovas turn for tears as she described the gratitude she feels for the American doctors who came to help her daughter, to the U.S. government for military support as well as to the Polish people for their solidarity with Ukraine.

'We decided we wouldnt wait around to have our house hit'

Since the Russian invasion, Poland has hosted more Ukrainian refugees than any other country, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. More than 1.6 million Ukrainians have registered for temporary protection or social services in Poland since February 2022.

Among them is Svietlana Yehorushkova, 47, who now works at the Polish hospital where the children were treated, helping with translations and logistical support.

Dr. Gennadiy Fuzaylov a pediatric anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and founder of Doctors Collaborating to Help Children, left, shares patient information with Svietlana Yehorushkova, a psychologist licensed in Ukraine,and currently works at the Independent Public Health Care Facility in Leczna, Poland, as support to staff, Dr. Nataliya Yevchenko, a psychiatrist who traveled with families from Ukraine, and Dr. Shawn Diamond, a plastic surgeon with Texas Tech Physicians of El Paso, at a patient screening on a hotel patio in Leczna, Poland, on Sunday, May 14, 2023.

She fled from her home in Irpin, Ukraine, on March 13, 2022, with her daughter, mother and dog.

We decided to leave after particularly strong shelling, Yehorushkova said. Our house wasnt damaged, but others were seriously damaged and missiles were flying right above our roof. We were between Ukrainian and Russian soldiers.

We decided we wouldnt wait around to have our house hit. So we left  and do not tempt fate.

Though shes trained as a psychologist, she doesnt yet have a license to practice in Poland. So she does other work at the hospital for now.

Her hope is to remain in the country for a few more years.

My daughter really would like to enroll in technical school here, Yehorushkova said. I like it here in Poland.

So does Ludmila Arshulik.

A nurse at the hospital, Arshulik, 40, moved to Poland three years ago, following her daughter, who came to study at one of the universities.

When the war started, I helped at the border, she said. I cooked some food for the refugees, invited them to my house, picked them up from the border and transported them.

During the medical mission in mid-May, she worked with many of the children from her native country, helping during their surgeries.

Ukrainian nurse Ludmila Arshulik helps escort Daria Yakovleva, 9, a refugee of Ukraine now living in the Netherlands, to surgery for burn scars on Tuesday, May 16, 2023, at the Independent Public Health Care Facility.

When I see them here, I think about how many such children are in Ukraine or in occupied territories, Arshulik said. My cousins live in an occupied territory, so more or less I am aware of what is going on there. It is difficult to leave these territories now.

Those who try, she said, might end up in Siberia, not Poland.

When she visited her mother and extended family last year, she tried to persuade them to return to Poland with her.

I didnt succeed, she said. My mothers mother wouldnt leave her home. My sisters husband is a soldier. He is fighting, so my sister doesnt want to abandon him. As a result, my mother also doesnt want to leave them behind. She said: I dont have a big enough suitcase to pack everyone in it. 

The return to Ukraine

On a sunny Saturday morning in late May, all of the childrens surgeries were complete. Only 16-year-old Karolina Petrenko, a Ukrainian refugee living in Warsaw, remained in the hospital, recovering from operations on her hands, arms and neck. Shed remain in hospitalized several more days.

More than a dozen families  those who were not living in Poland or other European countries with refugee status  gathered in the lobby of the Secession Hotel with their bags, waiting for the bus that would take them to the border.

Mariia Ovdiienkos left hand and right foot were bandaged and she struggled to get around on a crutch using just one hand.

She leaned on Egor Dikhtiaruk, 17, who in the span of a week had become her boyfriend. He wore a neck brace following his surgery. They posed together for a picture with other friends theyd made on the trip to Poland.

Artem Netreba, 12, left front, sits in the back of the bus with Danylo Tchaikovsky, left back, Egor Dikhtiaruk, 17, Mariia Ovdiienko, 16, and Oleksandr Leskiv, 9, on Saturday, May 20, 2023 as they travel with their families back to Ukraine after having surgeries in Poland. The teens made new friends after being brought together in Poland for their respective surgeries.

When the bus pulled up, Yevchenko helped 6-year-old Evheniia Ukhvatova climb the steps. Shed had surgery on the burn scars covering her feet and legs earlier in the week. Her 75-year-old great grandmother, Valentina Ukhvatova, got on board, too.

Though a few of the older kids piled in together at the back of the bus, many of the younger children sat beside their mothers.

What I see particularly distinctively in this group is that  the children are strong in spirit, and they help their parents, support them, Yevchenko said.

Part of my job is to prepare them to go back to Ukraine. What awaits them there despite ongoing war is a long recovery and further treatment. They are very happy they had operations here and didnt expect that in such a short time, they would be able to see the results. They have many questions and worry about whether it is possible to maintain the results.

Dr. Artem Posunko and Dr. Eduard Polianin, both physicians in Dnipro, Ukraine, accompanied them on the 24-hour journey home.

We have medicine, painkillers, dressings for the wounds, Polianin said. They must be stable before traveling. Thats why we had a specific schedule for the operations; those whose procedures were more complex were earlier in the week.

Posunko loaded luggage into a compartment beneath the massive white bus and then boarded himself.

I have a sense or a feeling that these kids are my kids, Posunko said.

A few minutes later, they were off.

Applause and cheers broke out as the bus passed the hospital where the children had surgery.

They continued on, past the rolling yellow rapeseed fields, toward the Ukrainian border and an uncertain future.

Ukrainian neurosurgeon Eduard Polianin, center, rests his eyes as he sits behind Irena Haleta, 37, from Kryvyi Rih, as Ukrainian children, their families and doctors depart Leczna, Poland, on Saturday, May 20, 2023 for their homes in Ukraine after receiving surgeries from Doctors Collaborating to Help Children.

When they arrived at the dividing line between their countries in Hrebenne, Poland, the entire group had to get off the bus, unload their bags and transfer to a purple bus headed for Lviv.

Yevchenko said support for these families wont end when they arrive home.

Ukraines future depends on the psychological state of Ukrainians, children in particular, she said. For now, there is a common enemy we fight, and we have no choice. But when the peace comes  hopefully sooner rather than later  many people may face stages of depression and apathy.

I feel it is my duty to support them in finding psychological professionals near their homes who they could turn to if they need help, she said.

Zuza Nikitorowicz translated interviews for this article.

Contact Kristen Shamus: kshamus@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @kristenshamus.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Burned Ukrainian kids go home, lifted by US docs' help and new friends
An illustration of the Myall Creek Massacre by English illustrator 'Phiz'

An Australian newspaper has offered a historic apology for its coverage of a massacre of Aboriginal people in 1838.

At least 28 people, mainly women and children, were brutally murdered in the New South Wales town of Myall Creek.

The massacre was the first - and only - time colonists were prosecuted for mass killings of Aboriginal people.

The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) admitted to spreading racist views and misinformation while campaigning for the killers to escape justice.

The masthead, which is one of the nation's oldest publications, also opposed the death sentence eventually handed down to seven of the 12 men involved.

"This was not due to a lack of evidence or genuine doubts over the integrity of any legal process, but because the perpetrators were white and the dead black," the paper said in an editorial on Friday.

"The Herald has a long and proud history of telling the Australian story. But on Myall Creek, the truth is we failed dismally."

It also apologised for other historic articles which had encouraged readers to kill Aboriginal people if they ever felt "threatened", acknowledging its editorial positions had helped support the proposition colonists were "entitled to impunity" for their violence.

The editorial added that the masthead's coverage at the time was out of step with other papers, quoting a historian who deemed it "as brutal as colonial journalism gets".

The SMH said it was apologising on the 185th anniversary of the Myall Creek - on 10 June - because it felt "truth is an essential force for reconciliation".

The mass killings at Myall Creek Station were carried out by a group of European stockmen - mostly ex-convicts - who rounded up and executed Wirrayaraay women, children, and elders, while the men in their families were working nearby.

The events unfolded during Australia's Frontier Wars - a period of genocidal violence throughout the first 140 years of British settlement, when Indigenous people fought to defend themselves and their land from colonists.

In 2022, research from the University of Newcastle Australia found there had been 19 recorded genocidal massacres - defined as a series of reprisal massacres carried out by the same perpetrators in an effort to kill every Aboriginal person in a region.

The violence inflicted in Myall Creek that day is only known because the perpetrators were tried and convicted, historians say. Countless other atrocities from the Frontier Wars remain untold, leaving a gaping hole in Australia's history.

The SMH's apology is part of a broader reckoning taking place globally, as nations and powerful institutions grapple with histories of racial violence.

The Guardian recently apologised for its British founders' links to transatlantic slavery, while mastheads across the US - including the Baltimore Sun and Los Angeles Times - have asked for forgiveness over past failings on race reporting.
A female member of Donald Trump's family was involved in decisions over how to handle classified US government documents that he took from the White House, prosecutors have said.

In a historic indictment unsealed on Friday, authorities alleged that an unnamed family member gave instructions to Mr Trump's aide Walt Nauta as he was preparing to squirrel away documents that the former president did not wish to give back.

The accusation widens the circle of people who may have had unauthorised influence over sensitive information about US nuclear weapons, military plans, foreign relations, and more.

Yet the identity of the family member remains a mystery, with the only clue being that Mr Nauta allegedly addressed her as "ma'am".

ABC News reported that the woman was likely to be Mr Trump's wife Melania, citing inside sources. Melania Trump's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr Trump is facing 37 criminal charges including willfully retaining national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, concealing a document in a federal investigation, and false statements and representations.

Prosecutors claim that Mr Trump schemed to keep hold of some documents in defiance of a legal order to give them back, while storing them insecurely at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida while tens of thousands of guests came and went.

Mr Trump contends that he is "an innocent man" and that the charges are "a hoax" contrived by his political enemies.

According to the indictment, Mr Trump's family member became involved on 30 May 2022, just day before a lawyer was due to search his storage room for classified documents demanded by the government.

Before that happened, Mr Trump allegedly asked Mr Nauta to remove 64 boxes from their storage room and bring them to his private residence, meaning they would not be present for the lawyer to search.

That day, the family member allegedly texted Mr Nauta: "Good afternoon, Walt. Happy Memorial Day! I saw you put boxes to POTUS' room.

"Just FYI, and I will tell him as well: not sure how many he wants to take on Friday on the plane. We will NOT have room for them. Plane will be full with luggage. Thank you!"

Mr Nauta replied with a smiley face emoji, saying: "Good afternoon ma'am. Thank you so much. I think he wanted to pick from them. I don't imagine him wanting to take the boxes.

"He told me to put them in the room and that he was going to talk to you about them."

The indictment says nothing more about who this family member might have been, how much she knew about the documents, and what her intentions were in texting Mr Nauta.

The most prominent women in Mr Trump's immediate family are his wife Melania, his daughter from his first marriage Ivanka, 41, and his daughter from his second marriage Tiffany, 29.

The indictment does not suggest that any of them had knowledge of any illegal behaviour.
Burbank Unified School District Supt. Matt Hill speaks at the annual state of the school breakfast in 2020. The superintendent was placed on administrative leave by the school board with no explanation. (Raul Roa / Los Angeles Times)

The Burbank Unified School District Board placed its superintendent on administrative leave with no explanation after a closed-session meeting to evaluate his performance, officials announced Thursday.

But school board officials have released few details about why Matt Hill, who took the superintendent job in 2015, was suddenly removed from his post.

In a letter sent to parents and teachers Thursday, school board President Steve Ferguson said Hill was placed on paid administrative leave effective immediately but offered no further details.

"Know that the Board did not take this action lightly," the letter said. "We also know that many of you will have questions. This action, however, is a confidential personnel matter."

Ferguson did not respond to questions about the board's decision, and referred The Times in an email to the letter sent to parents and teachers.

Emily Weisberg, vice president of the board, said school officials expected to address the district's future leadership in its next meeting. She said the board was not allowed to discuss personnel matters.

The decision was announced after the board of education met in closed session Wednesday night for a special meeting.

According to the meeting agenda, board members met to discuss a "Public Employee Performance Evaluation" of the superintendent.

Initially hired in 2015, Hill's contract was extended in 2019 and again in July 2022 by the board. Under that contract, Hill was set to remain as superintendent until June 30, 2025.

Under the terms of the contract, the board can fire the superintendent for cause, such as "unsatisfactory performance," misconduct or breach of contract. The superintendent would then be given an opportunity to dispute the accusations.

The superintendent can also be dismissed without cause, requiring the district to pay his salary for a year.

Hill did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Representatives for the district's Parent Teacher Assn., as well as the Burbank Teachers Assn., could not be immediately reached for comment.

According to Ferguson's letter, John Paramo, assistant superintendent of educational services, would take the role of acting superintendent.

The board plans to discuss the school district's leadership during its next meeting on June 15, according to the letter.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
A lawyer for the parents of Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale, who killed three adults and three elementary students at a Christian school in March, said at a hearing Thursday that the family owns the killer's manifesto.

The assertion came as part of a Tennessee lawsuit in which the National Police Association and private investigator Clata Brewer are asking the court to order the release of Hale's writings in response to their public records requests, said Doug Pierce, an attorney for the NPA.

"During the course of this hearing, a real kind of gratuitous thing happened, and that is one of the lawyers for the parents introduced a criminal defense lawyer who says that he represents the parents of the shooter," Pierce told Fox News Digital on Thursday. "He said that the shooter died without having a will and therefore has no other heirs, so whatever those writings, i.e., the manifesto, he says they belong to the parents, and the parents are going to assign their interest in those writings to the school."

On the other hand, that shouldn't change the fact that documents seized during an investigation become part of the public record, he said.

AUDREY HALE POLICE BODYCAMS RELEASED

Covenant School shooter Audrey Hale, 28, is pictured in a driver's license photo and on school surveillance video released by Nashville police.

"If public officials take them into custody as part of their duties, which is what happened here when police took them, they become part of the public record," he said.

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Hale, a 28-year-old trans artist, left behind a manifesto, artwork and numerous other writings, police said after the March 27 massacre.

The killer, who had attended the church-linked Covenant School as a child, barged into the school armed with three guns in what police have called a "calculated and planned" attack that was outlined in documents recovered from the killer's car.

Body camera footage shows Nashville Police Department officers responding to the Covenant School in Nashville after 28-year-old Audrey Hale opened fire.

The killer wrote a manifesto, kept journals and made hand-drawn maps and diagrams of the school, with possible entry points and illustrations that showed a shooter wearing the same outfit that Hale wore that day, police said.

Police previously released surveillance video that showed the heroics of responding officers as they stormed the building and neutralized Hale in front of a second-story window from which the killer was actively shooting at police outside.

A decision on the manifesto's release could come within days or weeks, Pierce said, as the court considers how to move forward amid an appeal over attempts from the school and students' parents to intervene in the lawsuit.

"We'll have to wait and see how that develops," Pierce said. "I think we already have got very strong case law in the state that says it doesnt matter who owns the paper or what's written on it. Its a public record. If its a public record, it's always a public record."

NASHVILLE SCHOOL SHOOTER MANIFESTO: POLICE GROUP SIDES WITH SCHOOL IN LAWSUIT OVER RELEASE

Bodycam footage shows Nashville Police Department officers responding to the Covenant School in Nashville after 28-year-old Audrey Hale opened fire.

NASHVILLE SCHOOL SHOOTER AUDREY HALE: WHO IS 28-YEAR-OLD TRANSGENDER FORMER STUDENT WHO OPENED FIRE AT SCHOOL?

According to its website, the Covenant School opened in 2001 as part of the Covenant Presbyterian Church and served children from pre-K through sixth grade.

The child victims included the pastor's daughter, Hallie Scruggs, as well as Evelyn Dieckhaus and William Kinney, all 9 years old. Police identified the adults as 60-year-old Head of School Katherine Koonce, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Mike Hill, 61.

Court records suggested Hale had no criminal history in Metro Nashville or Davidson County.

Investigators served a search warrant at Hale's home about three miles from the church and school.

Audrey Hale was identified by police as the shooter who opened fire at the Covenant School in March, killing six people.

NASHVILLE SCHOOL SHOOTING MANIFESTO: WHY KILLERS WRITE ABOUT MOTIVES

Hale lived in the family's home and slept with journals on other school shootings under the bed, according to unsealed search warrants.

Police seized the journals and a trove of documents and electronic devices, court filings reveal. Hale also left behind a suicide note on a desk under one of several laptops police recovered near a list of passwords in the bedroom.

Hale was an artist who attended the Nossi College of Art and Design.

Nashville police released this video of 28-year-old Audrey Hale carrying out a shooting at the Covenant School on March 27, 2023.

The killer had been seeing a doctor due to an emotional disorder and had legally purchased seven guns from five stores leading up to the attack, police said.

Hale's parents were unaware that the school shooter owned any guns after purportedly selling the single one they knew about, Police Chief John Drake said in March.

"They were under the impression that when she sold the weapon, she did not own any more," he said. "As it turned out, she was hiding several weapons inside the house."

When Hale burst into the school, the first victim, Hill, suffered fatal gunshot wounds. According to city officials, Koonce heard the first shots while on a Zoom call, hung up and confronted Hale. Police found her dead in the hallway outside her office.

Drake said investigators had not immediately determined a motive but that they believed Hale, a former student, had targeted the school and its affiliated church.
Joran van der Sloot, the prime suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway, pleaded not guilty on Friday to extortion and fraud charges in a Birmingham courtroom, CBS affiliate WIAT reports.

Van der Sloot, a Dutch national, was flown to Birmingham from Peru on Thursday where he is serving a 28-year sentence for the 2010 murder of 21-year-old Stephany Flores. He confessed to killing Flores, exactly five years after Holloway's disappearance, in his hotel room in Lima. The daughter of the wealthy Peruvian businessman Ricardo Flores was found stabbed, lying in a pool of blood.

Joran van der Sloot is seen being transferred in a police car from a jail in Lima, Peru, on June 8, 2023. / Credit: Ernesto Benavides/AFP via Getty Images

U.S. prosecutors say that more than a decade ago, van der Sloot reached attempted to extort $250,000 from Holloway's mother, Beth Holloway, to disclose the location of the young woman's body. A grand jury indicted him in 2010.

Van der Sloot is not charged with killing Holloway, who was declared dead several years ago. The 18-year-old disappeared during a high school graduation trip in Aruba. She was last seen leaving a bar with three men on May 30, 2005, hours before she was scheduled to board a plane home. In the years that followed, her case garnered international attention mostly due to the dogged determination of her mother.

In a statement released by his attorneys on Friday, Natalee's father, Dave Holloway said, "While filled with mixed emotions, I am confident that today was an important step toward accountability and hopefully, justice. These particular charges do not involve me directly, but I am trusting that this prosecution will lead us to the truth about Natalee."

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Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng delivers a keynote speech at an event hosted by the U.S.-China Business Council in Washington, D.C., the United States, on June 7, 2023. [Photo credit/Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the United States of America]

Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng said Wednesday that the two countries need to uphold the principles of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence and win-win cooperation and explore the right way to get along in the new era.

Xie gave those remarks when delivering a keynote speech at an event hosted by the U.S.-China Business Council to welcome him as China's new ambassador to the United States.

Noting that China-U.S. relations face challenges, Xie said Chinese President Xi Jinping has made it clear that getting the relationship right is not optional, but something the two countries must do and must do well. The world is big enough for the two countries to develop themselves and prosper together.

President Xi has proposed the three principles of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence and win-win cooperation. They represent the fundamental and right way for the two countries to get along in the new era. Among them, mutual respect comes first, peaceful co-existence is the red line and win-win cooperation is the goal, said Xie.

China has always placed importance on its relationship with the United States, said Xie, noting that China is ready to work with the U.S. side to follow the right direction, enhance dialogue and cooperation, defuse flashpoints and take concrete actions to deliver on the common understandings between the two presidents, so as to bring this relationship back to the right track at an early date.

Xie said that the U.S. should respect China's choice of development path and social system, the Chinese people's right to a better life, and China's core interests and major concerns. These are essential for this relationship to advance in the right direction, with no conflict, no confrontation or no new Cold War.

A pressing task is to bring the Taiwan question, the most significant risk, under control, said Xie. "No one wants peaceful reunification more than China does. We are also the last that wants tensions or warfare across the Taiwan Strait."

The Chinese side has not simulated war games, changed the status quo or stoked any crisis. The Taiwan authorities are seeking U.S. support for their independence agenda, while some in the United States propose using Taiwan to contain China. Xie said these are the biggest threats to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

At present, the most fundamental thing is to fully and faithfully adhere to the one-China principle; the most important is to abide by the three joint communiques with real actions; and the most pressing is to match words with deeds and oppose adventurism and provocation by the "Taiwan independence" forces, he noted.

Xie said the biggest concern of many Americans is that China and the United States slip into conflict and confrontation. Their greatest hope is for this relationship to stabilize. If the world is to become better, the China-U.S. relationship must stop getting worse.

"We are all stakeholders. None of us shall sit idly by. Every one of us needs to take actions, speak up for free trade and open market, as this serves our common interests and the stability of global industrial and supply chains," he said.

Xie called on the business community to stay fair and pragmatic, be committed to cooperation with China and avoid politicizing economic issues. Doing so will bring more positive energy to the bilateral relationship and help both peoples live better lives.

China and the United States have a lot to offer each other in terms of industrial strength. In the last five years, the return rate of foreign direct investment in China reached 9.1 percent. Of the over 70,000 American companies doing business in China, nearly 90 percent are earning profits, he said.

Today's China-U.S. relationship bears on not only the well-being of the 1.7 billion Chinese and American people but also the world's future. Forestalling conflict and confrontation and upholding a stable China-U.S. relationship will promote the common interests of both countries and contribute to world peace and prosperity, Xie said.
Jewelry of the kandake Amanishakheto from a pyramid at Meroe. Einsamer Schutze/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Jada Pinkett Smiths new Netflix documentary series on Cleopatra aims to spotlight powerful African queens. We dont often get to see or hear stories about Black queens, and that was really important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community to be able to know those stories because there are tons of them, the Hollywood star and producer told a Netflix interviewer.

The show casts a biracial Black British actress as the famed queen, whose race has stirred debate for decades. Cleopatra descended from an ancient Greek-Macedonian ruling dynasty known as the Ptolemies, but some speculate that her mother may have been an Indigenous Egyptian. In the trailer, Black classics scholar Shelley Haley recalls her grandmother telling her, I dont care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was Black.

These ideas provoked commentary and even outrage in Egypt, Cleopatras birthplace. Some of the reactions have been unabashedly racist, mocking the actresss curly hair and skin color.

Egyptian archaeologists like Monica Hanna have criticized this racism. Yet they also caution that projecting modern American racial categories onto Egypts ancient past is inaccurate. At worst, critics argue, U.S. discussions about Cleopatras identity overlook Egyptians entirely.

In Western media, she is commonly depicted as white  most famously, perhaps, by screen icon Elizabeth Taylor. Yet claims by American Afrocentrists that current-day Egyptians are descendants of Arab invaders also ignore the complicated histories that characterize this diverse part of the world.

A relief depicting the Nubian Kandake Amanitore in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. Sven-Steffen Arndt/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Some U.S. scholars counter that ultimately what matters is to recognize Cleopatra as culturally Black, representing a long history of oppressing Black women. Portraying Cleopatra with a Black actress was a political act, as the shows director put it.

Ironically, however, the show misses an opportunity to educate both American and Egyptian audiences about the unambiguously Black queens of ancient Nubia, a civilization whose history is intertwined with Egypts. As an anthropologist of Egypt who has Nubian heritage, I research how the stories of these queens continue to inspire Nubians, who creatively retell them for new generations today.

The one-eyed queen

Nubians in modern Egypt once lived mainly along the Nile but lost their villages when the Aswan High Dam was built in the 1960s. Today, members of the minority group live alongside other Egyptians all over the country, as well as in a resettlement district near the southern city of Aswan.

Growing up in Cairos Nubian community, we children didnt hear about Cleopatra, but about Amanirenas: a warrior queen who ruled the Kingdom of Kush during the first century B.C.E. Queens in that ancient kingdom, encompassing what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan, were referred to as kandake  the root of the English name Candace.

Like Cleopatra, Amanirenas knew Roman generals up close. But while Cleopatra romanced them  strategically  Amanirenas fought them. She led an army up the Nile about 25 B.C.E. to wage battle against Roman conquerors encroaching on her kingdom.

My own favorite part of this story of Indigenous struggle against foreign imperialism involves what can only be characterized as a power move. After beating back the invading Romans, Queen Amanirenas brought back the bronze head of a statue of the emperor Augustus and had it buried under a temple doorway. Each time they entered the temple, her people could literally walk over a symbol of Roman power.

That colorful tidbit illustrates those queens determination to defend their autonomy and territory. Amanirenas personally engaged in combat and earned the moniker the one-eyed queen, according to an ancient chronicler of the Roman Empire named Strabo. The kandakes were also spiritual leaders and patrons of the arts, and they supported the construction of grand monuments and temples, including pyramids.

A pyramid of Kandake Amanitore amid the Nubian pyramids of Meroe. mtcurado/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Interwoven cultures and histories

When people today say Nubia, they are often referring to the Kingdom of Kush, one of several empires that emerged in ancient Nubia. Archaeologists have recently started to bring Kush to broader public attention, arguing that its achievements deserve as much attention as ancient Egypts.

Indeed, those two civilizations are entwined. Kushite royals adapted many Egyptian cultural and religious practices to their own ends. Whats more, a Kushite dynasty ruled Egypt itself for close to a century.

Contemporary Nubian heritage reflects that historical complexity and richness. While their traditions and languages remain distinctive, Nubians have been intermarrying with other communities in Egypt for generations. Nubians like my mother are proudly Egyptian, yet hurtful stereotypes persist.

Hafsa Amberkab, right, and Fatma Addar, Nubian Egyptian women who compiled a dictionary, show off a Nubian lexical chart near Aswan in upper Egypt. Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty Images

Today, some Black Americans embrace Cleopatra as a powerful symbol of Black pride. But the idea of ancient Nubia as a powerful African civilization also plays a symbolic role in contemporary Black culture, inspiring images in everything from cosmetics to comics.

Egyptian voices

Researchers do argue about Cleopatras heritage. U.S. conversations about her, however, sometimes reveal more about Western racial politics than about Egyptian history.

In the 19th century, for example, Western interest in ancient Egypt took off amid colonization  a fascination called Egyptomania. Americans fixation with the ancient civilization reflected their own cultures anxieties about race in the decades after slavery was abolished, as scholar Scott Trafton has argued.

A century later, a 1990s advertisement for a pale-colored doll of queen Nefertiti sparked debate in the U.S. about how to represent her race.

Nefertitis bust  one of the most famous artifacts from ancient Egypt  is on display at a German museum. Egypt has called for the artifacts return for close to a hundred years, to no avail. Even Hitler took a personal interest in the bust, declaring that he will not renounce the queens head, according to archaeologist Joyce Tyldesley.

The famed and fought-over bust of Queen Nefertiti. Francis G. Mayer/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Even today, contemporary Egyptian perspectives are almost absent in Western depictions of ancient Egypt. Only one Egyptian scholar is interviewed in the new Netflix series four episodes, as he himself notes, and he is employed not by an Egyptian university, but by a British one.

For many Egyptians, this lack of representation rehashes troubling colonial dynamics about who is considered an expert about their past. The Netflix series was made and produced without the involvement of the owners of this history, argues the Egyptian journalist Sara Khorshed in a review of the series.

To be sure, there is anti-Black bias in Egyptian culture, and some of the social media reaction has been slur-filled and racist. Educating people about the stories of Nubian queens like Amarinenas might be a way to encourage a more inclusive understanding of who is Egyptian.

Yet I believe Egyptians frustrations about portrayals of Cleopatra also reflect long-standing concerns that their own understandings of their past are not taken seriously.

That includes Black Egyptians, like my mother. When I asked her if she planned to see the Cleopatra series, she shrugged. She already knows that queens story well from its many portrayals on screen, whether in Hollywood films or Egyptian ones.

I will wait for the series on Amanirenas, she said.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. The Conversation has a variety of fascinating free newsletters.

It was written by: Yasmin Moll, University of Michigan.

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Yasmin Moll does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The father of a missing Minnesota woman's two children has been arrested on suspicion of murder, police records show. Adam Fravel, 29, was in custody and booked for second-degree murder Wednesday, according to the Winona County Sheriff's Office.

Police on Wednesday found human remains near Mabel, Minnesota, "using information generated during the Madeline Kingsbury investigation," the Winona Police Department wrote on Facebook. "Because of this, law enforcement personnel have arrested Adam Fravel on probable cause in connection to her disappearance."

Kingsbury, 26, went missing on March 31 after she and Fravel dropped off their two kids, a 5-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy, at daycare, police said at the time.

Kingsbury was supposed to pick up the two kids from the daycare that same afternoon, but never showed up. Kingsbury didn't respond to numerous calls and messages from family and friends, which police described in early April as "extremely out of character for her."

Winona Police Chief Tom Williams said that Kingsbury's disappearance was believed to be "involuntary," and "suspicious," and said police were "concerned for her safety."

Fravel has denied being involved in Kingsbury's disappearance, telling police that on the day she went missing, he left their house in a blue minivan after they dropped the kids off at daycare and she was gone when he came back, CBS Minnesota reported.

Two weeks after Kingsbury's disappearance, Fravel issued a lengthy statement denying his involvement, CBS Minnesota reported.

"During these last 12 days I have cooperated with law enforcement at every turn, including sitting down for multiple interviews with Winona County law enforcement. I did not have anything to do with Maddi's disappearance. I want the mother of my 5-year-old and 2-year-old to be found and brought home safely. I want that more than anything," Fravel said in part in a statement through his attorney, according to CBS Minnesota.

The two children were initially put in the custody of the county before a court determined they should stay in "relative foster care," CBS Minnesota reported. They have since been living with their maternal grandparents, the station reported.

Fravel on Monday petitioned to take custody of the two children, but a judge denied the request Tuesday, according to CBS Minnesota.

 Cara Tabachnick contributed reporting.

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This Californian Democrat Might Be the Future of the Party

Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) was elected mayor of Redlands, his San Bernardino County hometown, at 31. He came to Congress at 36. Now, at 43, hes the third-ranking House Democrat.

And as his party attempts to reclaim the majority next year, hes embracing a new role: mentor, guide and, he hopes, eventually leader for the next generation of California Democrats emerging and arriving in Washington.

Aguilar is creating a new fundraising arm, the California House Majority Fund, to protect the Democratic-held seats in the state and flip the five California districts represented by Republicans which also voted for President Joe Biden in 2020. Aguilar will pool money from donors and then release the cash next year after it becomes clear who the Democratic standard bearer is in each of the seats.

Beyond financial help, he wants to play the role of sherpa for the candidates, helping them navigate policy and politics through the duration of the general election. Theyre going to know how to find me, Im going to go to these districts, Aguilar told me, joking that he was eager to play the role of congressional rabbi even if he was raised Catholic.

With Democrats needing to net just five seats to take back the House, the majority could effectively be determined when the votes are all counted in California, raising the stakes on Aguilars intervention.

His step forward, though, is about far more than just maximizing his partys House pick-ups in California.

After a generation of carrying outsized clout in Washington, California Democrats are waning. Their powerhouse senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, are no more, with Boxer retired and Feinstein suffering a painful, public decline on the way to her own retirement after next year. House fixtures like Henry Waxman, George Miller and Jane Harman long ago headed for the exits. And many of their contemporaries in the 70-and-up category  lawmakers like Maxine Waters, Zoe Lofgren and Mike Thompson  find themselves in the minority and without the committee gavels they understandably crave at this stage of their career.

Further, the Democratic leaders in both chambers of Congress are New Yorkers and the Democrat in the White House is also from the Northeast and lacks the affinity for California (or the Pacific broadly) of the partys other recent presidents.



Most significant to California, of course, was the decision last year by Nancy Pelosi to step down from the leadership after Democrats lost the majority. Its impossible to overstate the role she played in her home state in her two decades as leader or speaker, whether with fundraising, mentoring or perhaps her favorite role, appropriating money for California projects. There has not been any question who led the delegation from Americas largest state.

That may soon change, and particularly if Pelosi is joined out the door by her longtime lieutenants, lawmakers like Lofgren, Thompson and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.).

While remaining in Congress, at least through this term, Pelosis turn to emeritus status has raised the question of who will take her place when she retires, not as the Gentlelady from San Francisco but as Californias Boss in Washington.

Aguilars move toward taking command of next years House races back home makes clear hed like to step into that position. Affable and respectful of his seniors, and seniority, hes taking care to step gingerly, though.

I benefited from learning from her, spending time with her, watching her build relationships, Aguilar said of Pelosi, adding: Nobody is going to recreate that in four months.

Working in his favor is that Pelosi is thrilled by Aguilar rise, claiming pride of political parentage in his career.

The speaker emerita, as she now goes by, was eager to discuss his ascent.

Pelosi reminded me she had made sure Aguilar had visibility with some of our folks in Southern California when he first ran, and lost, for a House seat in 2012.

She nurtured his ambitions soon after he was elected to the House on his second try in 2014, helping him secure a seat on the Appropriations Committee in only his second term and then in 2021 naming him to the committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol, an appointment she called a real recognition of the value we placed on his leadership.

Pelosi doesnt directly answer when asked if shes passing the California baton on to Aguilar, but she lavishes praise on him.

He has all the talent, hes articulate and eloquent, he is values-based, he knows the subject matter, she said. (He also has some other skills that come in handy: Before Pelosi threw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals game this week, Aguilar gave her a few pointers on her delivery.)

Theres more, though.

Pelosi has a special affinity for Aguilar because, like her brother and father, he was once a mayor and because, like her and her father, hes an appropriator. He views appropriations with the reverence thats seemingly conferred on all members of a committee traditionally important enough thats it only semi-jokingly referred to as the third party in Congress.

When I was a little girl, my father was in Congress, when I was a baby, I could remember him saying when I was 2 or 3 years old, Im a member of the almighty powerful Appropriations Committee, she recalled. I loved being there myself and I love that Pete understands that its such an important committee.



Theres another reason, however, why Pelosi is so enamored with Aguilar  hes a House guy.

The top talent in both parties now increasingly leaves the fractious chamber, either out of frustration or ambition, rather than making a career there in the fashion of, well, Nancy Pelosi, who came to the House in 1987, built seniority and never left.

Look no further than the Democrats vaunted class of 2018, the group that put Pelosi back in the speakership: Some of the brightest lights are already running for the Senate (Colin Allred (D-Texas), Katie Porter (D-Calif.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.)) and others are eyeing governorships (Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) and Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.)).

House members, Pelosi said, either come and make a commitment to stay or they come and use it as a stepping stone for something else.

The issue hits close to home for her, quite literally, which is also why shes enthused about Aguilar, whos of Mexican descent.

Pelosi recalled California Democrats like Hilda Solis and Janice Hahn who left the House  theyre both now on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, itself an influential perch  despite her pleadings.

Ive had some where Id say, Oh, please dont go, whether it be a woman or a minority or something because we work hard to increase our diversity, she said.

Aguilar sees his future in the House. This is where I want to be, he said.

He doesnt deny designs on one day following Pelosis path all the way to the speakership  you never know what the future holds  but for now dutifully says he wants a front row seat for Hakeem to be speaker, alluding to House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

The road to a Jeffries speakership is through California and New York. Eleven of the 18 House Republicans in seats Biden carried hail from those two states, making the two coastal population hubs a crucial battleground for control of the chamber (And Jeffries, too, is intimately involved in his home state effort to flip seats).

For the moment, Aguilar is positioning himself in Washington and California alike.

He recalled a recent dinner with some of Pelosis California inner circle, Thompson, Eshoo and Doris Matsui (D-Calif.), who represents the Sacramento area.

Theyre intimidating as hell when you get to Congress, he said of the group, but now he said theyre an invaluable resource for institutional knowledge about California and Washington (to say nothing of tales about John Burton, the legendary former state party chair and lawmaker whose penchant for profanity came up over dinner).

Aguilar has also bonded with his own generation of 40-somethings in the California delegation. Hes able to manage everyones competing priorities, holding us together during often turbulent times, said Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.), a class of 2018 member whos not looking to leave the House.

All but salivating over the seats currently held by California Republicans John Duarte, David Valadao, Mike Garcia, Young Kim and Michelle Steel, whose districts Biden all carried, Aguilar recalled his own initial victory and the mindset Democrats will need to win the districts. I flipped a Republican-held seat, I know what theyre going through, he said.

Aguilar used a speech at last months California Democratic convention, during which he also introduced a video of Pelosi, to proclaim that the path to the House majority begins and ends in California.

Pelosi is more cautious about Californias role flipping the House, only allowing that the state alone can come very close to making the difference. She frets about losing Democratic-held seats in other states, recounting her own first rise to state power as a lawmaker. It was 2000 and she helped engineer a series of victories in California (including that of another protege, Adam Schiff) only to see House Democrats lose ground in other states and remain out of power another six years.

Pelosi has already introduced Aguilar, Jeffries and Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), the second-ranking House Democrat, to many of Californias top donors and theres plans for another swing through the state.

I take personal responsibility for our having what we need for California for the election, Pelosi told me.

But shell soon have company, a lawmaker who said he has jotted down some of Pelosi's maxims and witticisms.

Aguilars favorite: "Self-promotion is a terrible thing, but somebody has to do it."
Whats Next in Trumps Indictment: Can He Still Run? Will He Pardon Himself?

Leah Mills/Carlos Barria/Reuters

After Donald Trump on Thursday earned the less-than-honorable distinction of becoming the first-ever current or former U.S. president to be indicted on federal charges, one question hung conspicuously in the air: what now?

For the twice-impeached former president, who stands charged with 37 felony counts related to the unlawful retention and mishandling of reams of sensitive government documents, it was a page out of the old playbook hes relied on for years.

Trump on Friday morning jettisoned his lawyer James Trusty, along with co-counsel John Rowley, for Todd Blanche, a former federal prosecutor already representing Trump on state charges brought in April by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, and a firm to be named later. Hes slated to speak at a Republican confab on Saturday in Columbus, Georgia, and to speak again at the North Carolina GOP convention on Sunday. Then, on Tuesday, Trump will appear in Miami federal court to be arraigned on charges that include obstruction, conspiracy, false statements, and espionage.

A photo included in the federal indictment against Trump, showing a box of documents, including one classified document, spilled onto the floor of a storeroom at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. U.S. Justice Department via Reuters

With primary season now underway, and Trump having declared his intent to retake the White House in 2024, now is when the rubber hits the road for Special Counsel Jack Smith, the former war crimes prosecutor Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to oversee the unprecedented case. And the clock is now running for Smith and his team, according to legal experts.

What happens to the case if Trump wins in 2024?

If Trump manages to once again win the presidency in 2024or if a Trump-friendly Republican winds up in the Oval Officehe or she will be in a position to kill the case, attorney Adam Kamenstein, a former federal prosecutor in DOJs Government Fraud, Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section, told The Daily Beast. Thats because the sitting attorney general has the authority to fire or substitute the special counsel, and the president chooses the attorney general, Kamenstein explained.

Noah Bookbinder, who prosecuted public corruption cases for the DOJ before becoming president of D.C. watchdog nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) in 2015, said Trump did not hesitate to use his presidency to get the DOJ to help himself and his allies while going after his perceived enemies. And so, I certainly wouldnt put it past him to try to kill a prosecution of himself.

Damning Indictment Shows Trump Knewand Hid Docs in a Shower

I hope the system would hold, that somebody would hold the line and prevent Trump from doing it. But we did see with his presidency that he had a fair amount of success in kind of bending the system to his personal will," he said.

However, any such attempt would be met with procedural issues that might stand as a hindrance, if not simply a minor annoyance, according to Bookbinder. For example, the actual decision to fire a special counsel must be made by the attorney general, he said, noting that the attorney general is confirmed by the Senate.

To that end, getting rid of a special counsel like Smith is not an at-will situation, according to Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice.

Lets say Trump wins [the presidency in 2024], he wont be prosecutedperiod, Rahmani told The Daily Beast. Now, lets say DeSantis wins and he appoints a new attorney general. The new attorney general can remove the special counsel, but there generally has to be a specific reason. They need good cause Im sure that any DeSantis attorney general could come up with some reason to remove Jack Smith, but you do need good cause.

Special Counsel Jack Smith speaks on Friday to reporters about the 37 federal charges facing Trump. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

It is a well-established precedent that the Department of Justice will not prosecute a sitting president, and the feds are alsogenerallyloath to do anything during an election period that might tip the balance in any way. And although Rahmani expects Smith and the DOJ will get Trump to trial within the next year-and-a-half, he noted the DOJ will have to be mindful of prosecuting a presidential candidate during election season. (Some believe Trump announced his 2024 candidacy simply to try and stymie any attempt to try him criminally.)

The DOJ, therefore, will want to conclude this case before the 2024 election, and with it being about 17 months out, will be prepared to try the case long before then, Rahmani said. The issue will be how hard does the government push the court, and the court push the defendant, who presumably will be looking to delay. They will both have to balance the interests of justice with the defendant's right to adequately prepare for trial and be careful to avoid creating appellate issues.

So how quickly can the feds wrap things up?

Under the Speedy Trial Act of 1974, a federal defendant must be brought to trial within 70 days of an indictment being filed. Indeed, Smith said in a brief statement Friday that he intends to seek a speedy trial consistent with the public interests and the rights of the accused. However, Trump could turn the statute on its ear and argue that his right to a fair trial is being infringed by prosecutors rushing along for political reasons, denying him and his lawyers ample time to prepare. Thus, the government will have to be cautious and reasonable in moving things along while pushing back against any foot-dragging by Trump, creating what Kamenstein described as a bit of a balancing act.

To Bookbinder, the calculus is simple.

Our system should not work in a way that a president can kill an investigation for political reasons, he told The Daily Beast. I do not believe this prosecution was politically motivated, the investigation was conducted independently, and I think the evidence is there.

Photographic Proof: Feds Found Boxes of Classified Docs All Over Mar-a-Lago

Bookbinder also sees a need for DOJ to move swiftly and steadily in its unprecedented prosecution of Trump, who may make a concerted effort to slow things down. Yet, Bookbinder doesnt believe the department will have to move with extraordinary speed to get it done before the 2024 election.

He pointed out that Trump cronies Paul Manafort and Roger Stone were both tried within a year of their own federal indictments, noting that those were similarly high-profile cases. Secondly, Bookbinder views the Trump documents case as fairly straightforward, and actually not that complicated.

There are numerous ways for a defendant to toll, or pause, the 70-day window under the Speedy Trial Act, and it is unlikely a Trump trial will commence between his arraignment on Tuesday and August 22, said Richard Serafini, a former senior trial attorney in the DOJ Criminal Division. And depending on the timetable, prosecutors could bump up against DOJ guidelines if Trump manages to stretch things out into 2024s primary season.

Pro-Trump memorabilia on sale in Greensboro, North Carolina, where Trump is slated to appear at a GOP convention two days after his indictment. Jonathan Drake/Reuters

This, Serafini told The Daily Beast, would raise the question: Will the Department of Justice consider the primary election to be an election period?

Its unprecedented in all these different ways, Serafini said. How the [trial] schedule is done with the primaries, and potentially a run for president after that, we really dont know.

What if he wins the presidency after being convicted and sentenced?

It is impossible to predict, particularly in matters related to Trump, what will happen in the weeks and months ahead. At the same time, there are certain settled points of law we can rely on. One of them, with precedent stretching back to the early days of the 20th Century, holds that Trump is perfectly free to campaign for office from jail. In 1920, Socialist candidate Eugene Debs ran for president from a cell at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was two years into a 10-year bid on sedition charges for speaking out against World War I.

Debs lost, but managed an impressive 913,693 votes. Had he been victorious, Debs vowed to pardon himself upon taking office.

Photographic Proof: Feds Found Boxes of Classified Docs All Over Mar-a-Lago

Of course, this is a concept Trump himself first floated in 2018, when he was under scrutiny by Special Counsel Robert Mueller over alleged Russian election interference.

As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong? Trump bellyached on Twitter. In the meantime, the never ending Witch Hunt, led by 13 very Angry and Conflicted Democrats (& others) continues into the mid-terms!

Trump would be testing the boundaries of the Constitution and the very fabric of American jurisprudence, were he to try and excuse himself over the federal crimes for which is now charged. (A president has no ability to issue pardons for state crimes, such as the ones he is already facing in New York for making a hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.) And the idea that any U.S. president would self-pardon, has never been tested in real life.

Serafini pointed out that the Constitution gives presidents broad discretion to pardon whomever they see fit, without any qualifications.

If Trump won in 2024 and attempted to pardon himself in the documents case, Serafini suspects there would be litigation brought to try and stop him, but conceded, Unless there is some historical antecedent that somehow limited the sovereigns power to pardon, he may very well be able to pardon himself.

Graffiti across the street from the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. United States Courthouse in Miami, where Trump is set to be arraigned on Tuesday. Marco Bello/Reuters

The notion is far from settled, and constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum have spent countless hours debating the issue.

Its a tricky question, Serafini said. You wont find a prosecuting attorney who has run into that issue.

What will happen during Trumps first court appearance next week?

On Tuesday at 3 p.m., Trump is slated to be in a downtown Miami courtroom, arriving and departing via special private entrance points. A contingent of additional federal agents will be in town to bolster existing security, according to a source cited by the Associated Press.

Trumps now-former attorney, James Trusty, told CNN that Trump would not be arrested, but would appear pursuant to a summons.

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told ABC News that the agency is coordinating with its local law enforcement partners in advance of Trumps day in court, but that it will not seek any special accommodations outside of what would be required to ensure the former Presidents continued safety.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Donald Trump understood that he got power when he was elected, but didnt understand that he had obligations, presidential historian Timothy Naftali said Friday of Trumps indictment for mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House.

We live in a Constitutional democracy. Everybody, including the president, is bound by the Constitution and there are limits to their power, Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon presidential library, told CNN This Morning.

Trump not only had a hard time with limits, he didnt respect them, Naftali added. And this is a case where he was told repeatedly that there were limits on his ability to keep materials and he said, I dont care.

Watch the interview here:

Trump, charged with seven counts, is set to appear in court in Miami on Tuesday. In a screed on his Truth Social platform Thursday, Trump claimed he was an INNOCENT MAN.

The former president also faces trial next year in the Stormy Daniels hush money payment case. Last month, a civil jury found him liable for sexual abuse after advice columnist E. Jean Carroll accused him of raping her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s.

Related...
'Nobody is above the law': The world reacts to Trump being indicted for the second time

Donald Trump. AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Trump's allies and enemies took to Twitter en masse to weigh in on his second indictment.

His old enemies were nothing short of gleeful and vindicated.

Meanwhile, Trumpworld roiled with rage against the prosecutors pursuing Trump.

Donald Trump broke the news himself tonight on Truth Social: He is being indicted on charges related to his handling of classified documents.

Reaction across the Beltway and outside was swift. The common refrain from Democrats and Trump's opponents within the GOP was that nobody was above the law.

Today, Justice is being served. Nobody is above the law.



The former President will get a fair trial. The former President will be held accountable.  Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) June 8, 2023

No one is above the law.  Rep. Gerry Connolly (@GerryConnolly) June 8, 2023

Michael Cohen, Trump's one-time fixer turned nemesis, had some words for his ex-boss too.

The wheels of justice turn slowlybut they eventually come full circle! Trump notified that he is the target of an ongoing criminal investigation - @politico https://t.co/izsOqf04yc  Michael Cohen (@MichaelCohen212) June 7, 2023

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, a longtime critic of Trump, said the former president "brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities."

Romney: Mr. Trump brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities



These allegations are serious and consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest pic.twitter.com/BDklRUQIu9  Manu Raju (@mkraju) June 9, 2023

For some Trump's supporters, it was an example of double standards in the justice system.

The SAME DAY @GOPoversight is shown a document by the FBI showing evidence that Biden and his son were each paid $5 million dollars by a foreign national the DOJ indicts Trump. Coincidental? I think not. pic.twitter.com/YdmbbAo6fX  Anna Paulina Luna (@VoteAPL) June 8, 2023

Rep. Jim Jordan called it a "sad day for America."

Sad day for America. God Bless President Trump.  Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) June 8, 2023

House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy called it a "dark day" for the US, and said he stands with Trump in the face of these looming legal woes.

Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America.



It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him. Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades.



I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump  Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) June 9, 2023

Sen. Josh Hawley worried about the state of the republic.

If the people in power can jail their political opponents at will, we dont have a republic  Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) June 9, 2023

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene seemed to have faith that Trump will "win in the end."

Democrats must literally shake with sweats when they see amazing packed out Trump rallies and overwhelming winning poll numbers week after week.



They must awake in the night with panic at the thoughts of us winning in 2024.



Their heads must ache painfully from never ending pic.twitter.com/W8GallYAeH  Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) June 9, 2023

Rep. Matt Gaetz was also optimistic about Trump's chances of coming out on top in this second indictment.

The phony Boxes Hoax indictment is an attempt to distract the American public from the millions of dollars in bribes that the Biden Crime Family received from foreign nationals.



This scheme won't succeed. President Donald Trump will be back in the White House and Joe Biden will  Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) June 9, 2023

Charlie Kirk started rallying the Trump support squad for a jaunt to Miami in support of their man.

Every "Republican" running for President should suspend their campaign and go to Miami as a show of support. If you don't, you are part of the problem. Either we have an opposition party or we don't. GO to Miami Tuesday, and show solidarty or we will mark you as part of the  Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) June 8, 2023

Sen. Marco Rubio accused "these people"  presumably, Trump's political opponents  of being behind the charges.

There is no limit to what these people will do to protect their power & destroy those who threaten it, even if it means ripping our country apart & shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together  Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 9, 2023

And Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor turned Trump lawyer, popped into a livestream pronto.

 LIVE NOW: I'm reacting to the indictment of President Trump by Joe Biden's Department of Justice.



They are TERRIFIED President Trump will win in 2024 and expose the corruption of the permanent Washington political class. #AmericasMayorLive  https://t.co/HxT0w3sJhP  Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) June 9, 2023

Read the original article on Business Insider
Smoke rises from a wildfire in British Columbia, Canada,

Intense wildfires in Canada have sparked pollution alerts across swathes of North America as smoke is blown south along the continent's east coast.

Toronto, Ottawa, New York and Washington DC are among the cities that have already been badly affected and, although conditions have improved in some of those places, unhealthy air quality is forecast to hit several southern metropolitan cities.

Click here to see the BBC interactive

Where are the fires?

Much of the smoke is coming from Quebec, where more than 150 fires are burning, but there are more than 420 active fires across Canada.

The biggest wildfire complex in western Canada is the Donnie Creek fire in British Columbia which is now blazing over more than 3,000 square km.

Map showing location of fires across Canada with the biggest fire in British Columbia and another big cluster in Quebec

Where has the smoke travelled?

The Canadian government said nearly 100m people in the US and Canada would experience very poor air quality.

Toronto and Ottawa in the province of Ontario were badly hit earlier in the week - with views from Toronto's landmark CN Tower showing the density of the smoke there.

Before and after images showing the obscured view from Toronto's CN Tower

Environment Canada classified the air quality in Ontario as "very high risk" on Wednesday morning and, despite a brief respite later in the day, authorities warned they were likely to worsen again and remain at a high risk level until the weekend.

Across the border, cities including New York, Washington DC and Philadelphia have also been experiencing some of their worst air quality in years.

An orange haze blanketed the New York skyline and shrouded landmarks including the Empire State Building.

A view of Manhattan Bridge that has become popular with photographers and tourists over the years was given a distinctly sepia tint by the smoke.

Before and after images showing a view of Manhattan Bridge

And from the top of the Rockefeller Center, the Hudson River could no longer be seen through the skyscrapers that dominate Manhattan.

Before and after images of the view from the Rockefeller Center

As the haze descended on the US Capitol building in Washington DC, US President Joe Biden described the fires as a "stark reminder of the impacts of climate change".

Before and after images of the US Capitol building

The smoke has caused the cancellation of school outings and sporting events, and public health officials have cautioned people not to exercise outside and to minimise their exposure to the smoke as much as possible, as the air poses immediate and long-term health risks.

Why is the smoke causing such problems?

Nasa said winds usually carry smoke from wildfires in the Quebec area east and out to sea but a low pressure area over Prince Edward Island has driven the smoke southwards to the United States.

Satellite map showing smoke covering New York on 7 June

Atmospheric scientist Ryan Stauffer said the surface smoke pollution from New York to the DC region is the most significant since at least July 2002 when Quebec fires caused a similar problem - and could end up being worse.

Are there more wildfires than usual?

The short answer is yes. It is on course to be a record year with more than 3.5 million hectares - 12 times the 10-year average for this time of year - already burned this year, according to the Canadian Wildland Fire Information Service.

Chart showing total area burned in Canada wildfires at different times through the year - 3.5m hectares have already burned in 2023 more than in most other years since 2016 already and two months sooner than the figure was reached in 2021 and three months sooner than 2017.

Experts have pointed to a warmer and drier spring than normal as the reason behind the trend and these conditions are projected to continue throughout the summer.

Most of the 2,000 fires recorded this year are thought to have been started by humans but some, particularly in Quebec, were sparked by lightning strikes.

How bad is the air quality?

Data from the US Environmental Protection Agency's Air Quality Index (AQI) shows that cities in North America had the worst air quality in the world on Thursday morning.

Some parts of Janvier in Alberta, for example, had a peak AQI of 338, while areas of Washington DC reached 293 - a level above 200 is rated as very unhealthy and once it reaches 300 it is considered hazardous by the agency.

And looking at the daily averages you can see how air quality in some cities has been affected this year compared with last year.

Table showing how average air quality had got worse in five North American cities on 7 June 2023 compared with the same day in 2022, with Ottawa and New York going from good to very unhealthy, Toronto being unhealthy for sensitive groups from good, Pittsburgh remained moderate, while Michigan went from good to moderate

A similar table for a selection of other cities around the world shows that the daily averages have changed much less.

Table showing the average air quality in five global cities on 7 June 2023 compared with the same day in 2022, with Delhi rated unhealthy on both, London, Buenos Aires and Beijing going from good to moderate and Lagos remaining moderate

How long will it last?

A new area of low pressure is expected to move up from the south this weekend and will bring fresher conditions to the north-east and mid-Atlantic states.

However, at the same time a ridge of high pressure across eastern Canada could trap the smoke there and even make conditions worse until rain hits next week.

Reporting and graphics by Chris Clayton, Dominic Bailey, Kady Wardell, Tural Ahmedzade, Erwan Rivault and Kate Gaynor
A freight train plowed into a semi-truck stuck on a rail crossing Thursday and can be seen in a dramatic video captured by a North Carolina man.

The big rig had been stuck on the railroad crossing on the Main Street in Wingate North Carolina as the train approached at 5 p.m. on Thursday, June 8.

In a video recorded by Malik Jordan, the train can be heard blaring its horn before striking the truck.

A freight train slammed in a semi-trailer that was stuck in the railroad tracks on Thursday, June 8 at 5 p.m.

"Yo, yo, yo!" Jordan is heard yelling in the video as the truck's exterior is blasted to shreds by the fast moving train.

Despite the climatic crash, no injuries were reported, the Union County Sheriff's Office said. The department added that the semi-truck driver was able to exit the truck prior to the collision.

Police said that while the truck was destroyed in the crash, it was not carrying any hazardous materials at the time of the collision.

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

NORTHERN ARIZONA TRAIN DERAILMENT CAUSES SEVERE DAMAGE TO 23 FREIGHT CARS, NEW VEHICLES

The road was closed for several hours while crews worked to clean up the mess and make sure the tracks were in good condition.

In the comment section of the Union County Sheriff's Office Facebook post, residents complained that this wasn't the first time semi-trucks have gotten stuck on the railroad tracks. Earlier this year, in January, two semi trucks got stuck and hit at the same crossing within a week.

Train

VIRGINIA PLANE CRASH: US FIGHTER JETS SAW PILOT SLUMPED OVER DURING MIDAIR INTERCEPTION BEFORE DEADLY CRASH

Now, residents are calling for state and local government to provide clear road signs and fix the train tracks. People are also calling for out-of-state semi-truck drivers to "stop being lazy" and follow signs to avoid the train tracks.

"Why isnt the state fixing these crossings?" one resident said in a Facebook post. "There must be at least one place in town where tractor trailers can cross the tracks."

"Semis need to go around, nothing is wrong with the rail-road tracks," another said. "The driver is being lazy and not going around. Yes, I know time is money, but so is a crash."

"When are they going to fix that spot? The tracks need to be leveled down somehow," another said.
The 62-year-old Crowley man accused of trying to kidnap a 2-year-old from her front yard on Monday has a long history of mental health issues, police said.

The childs parents fought off the man and successfully got their daughter away from him. Then they provided law enforcement officials with the make, model and license number of the suspects vehicle.

Steven Bayse was arrested Monday evening after leading Tarrant County sheriffs deputies on a chase that ended when he ran into three patrol cars and nearly hit a deputy, according to the sheriffs office.

The attempted kidnapping was the latest in a long string of instances where police have been called about Bayse, including multiple welfare checks for mental health-related issues, according to Crowley Police Department records obtained by the Star-Telegram.

Neighbors have complained about him stealing their mail and members of Bayses family have made repeated calls to police reporting bizarre behavior.

The Crowley Police Departments policy on dealing with someone who is showing signs of mental illness is to make sure they dont harm themselves or others, according to a copy of the policy obtained by the Star-Telegram.

When an officer has probable cause to believe that an emotionally or mentally unstable person presents an immediate threat of harm to themselves or another person, that person shall be taken into protective custody and transported to a facility where trained professionals can evaluate the emotional and mental status of that person, the policy states.

In May 2012 a Crowley police officer arrived at Bayses home for a welfare check. Bayse, who lived alone, said the chief of police was tampering with his bank accounts and changing the names so he couldnt access them, according to the report. He said the police department was involved in the scam and kept repeating the same thing over and over again.

The officer took Bayse to John Peter Smith Hospital for observation and treatment, but the hospital released him after a few hours because there were no beds available, the report said. Bayses family members told police that Bayse had been in and out of mental hospitals over the past year, and that he wasnt taking his medication.

In February 2013 police were called to the home of one of Bayses neighbors after Bayse allegedly told the neighbor that a 3-year-old girl who was on the premises at the time belonged to him. The neighbor told police that Bayse refused to leave and at one point wanted to enter the house and take the girl, the report said.

Bayse was issued a criminal trespass warning and taken to JPS for emergency observation, according to the report. The officer noted in the report that Bayse had been transported to JPS several times in the past for various incidents.

In April 2015, members of Bayses family told police he was threatening to kick out the owners of a home that had belonged to him more than 20 years ago so he could remodel it.

The officers advised Bayse to stay away from the residence, according to the report. He said he understood and also told officers he had not been taking his medication.

Later the same day, Bayses family called police and said he was screaming that the police had tampered with his computer and 180 were going to die. Officers returned to Bayses home, according to the report.

When questioned by police, Bayse said he didnt remember saying anything about 180 people dying and told them he didnt want to hurt himself or anyone else. He seemed coherent, the record said, so the officers didnt take him for an evaluation.

The officer who made out the report noted that he followed up by contacting the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to report Bayse was not taking his medication. He was assured the report would be sent to the local Adult Protective Services.

In June 2015 police were sent to Bayses home again after he told family members there were dead body parts in his house, the report said. He also talked about seeing people who werent there. Family members said Bayse was still not taking his medication, and officers transported him to JPS for a mental evaluation.

In February of this year, Bayse faced mail theft charges in Crowley, according to Tarrant County court records. The charges were filed April 6 and he was convicted on April 19 of one misdemeanor count. Court records indicate that case was placed on the Enhanced Mental Health Services Docket and Bayse was sentenced to 10 days for stealing mail.

Bayse is currently in the Tarrant County Jail after being arrested Monday and faces charges of kidnapping, assault and evading arrest. His bond was set for $125,000, according to the sheriffs office.

Paige Ortiz, the mother of the 2-year-old who was nearly kidnapped on Monday, said she cant understand why something wasnt done about Bayse before.

It took my child nearly being kidnapped, my story going viral and people potentially calling us bad parents for people to see that this man is a genuine danger, Ortiz told the Star-Telegram.

Bayses family members who spoke to KXAS-TV on the condition of anonymity said they want him to pay the price for what hes done, but hope he gets help while in jail.
OSLO (Reuters) - Data collected from regional seismic stations show clear signals of an explosion occurring at the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine early on Tuesday morning, Norwegian seismic research foundation Norsar said.

The vast Soviet-era dam, under Russian control, burst in the early hours of Tuesday, unleashing floodwaters across a swathe of the war zone and endangering the lives and welfare of tens of thousands of people.

Norsar said in a statement that the data from one seismic station in Romania showed activity at 02:54 am local time, or 2354 GMT, indicating an explosion, and the timing coincides with media reports of the dam collapse.

Volker Oye, head of research at Norsar told Reuters on Friday that this was the strongest signal but that there were also indications of earlier activity at 02:35 am local time.

"The signal that we are analysing, the way the energy is recorded on the sensors at distance, clearly shows us that this is an explosive-type character compared to many other explosions that we monitored in the past," he added.

Both sides in the Ukraine war blame the other for the destruction of the dam, while some Russian-backed officials said that it might have collapsed from within.

(Reporting by Nora Buli; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
Tech firm financing to be prioritized

08:44, June 09, 2023 By SHI JING in Shanghai ( China Daily

Li Yunze, head of the National Administration of Financial Regulation, addresses the 14th Lujiazui Forum in Shanghai on Thursday. CHEN MENGZE/FOR CHINA DAILY

Funding to increase for advanced manufacturing, emerging industries

Ties between the financial sector and the real economy should be further strengthened to facilitate China's technological advancement and high-quality economic growth, said the country's top financial regulators at the 14th Lujiazui Forum in Shanghai on Thursday.

Li Yunze, head of the National Administration of Financial Regulation, said at the forum's opening ceremony on Thursday that more support will be provided to facilitate China's high-level technological self-reliance and independence by creating a wholesome circulation between technologies, industries and finance.

Financial support will be increased for advanced manufacturing, strategic emerging industries and traditional industries undergoing transformation and upgrading. In this way, China can build a modern industrial system at a faster pace, said Li.

Financing for the private sector should be further optimized to strengthen financial services provided to privately owned enterprises in order to nurture entrepreneurship. Inclusive finance should seek substantial development to consolidate market entities' confidence, he added.

More support will also be rendered to new types of consumption and service-based consumption, such as new energy vehicles and green home appliances. All these efforts are intended to help the financial sector more effectively serve the real economy, the NAFR chief said.

Yi Huiman, chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission  the country's top securities watchdog  also said at the opening ceremony that measures will be rolled out to support China's high-level technological self-reliance and independence when appropriate.

The capital market, in which both risks and profits are shared, can better meet demand from technologically innovative companies which evolve rapidly, entail higher risks and possess lighter assets. The capital market plays an important role in completing corporate governance, stimulating entrepreneurship and bringing about advantageous technological outcomes, Yi said.

Meanwhile, efforts will be made to study the differentiated institutional arrangements to complete China's multilevel capital market system. More innovative products and measures will be rolled out to increase the ratio of equity and bond financing, boost mergers and acquisitions, and facilitate the maturity of real estate investment trusts. All these are aimed at advancing the smart, green and integrated development of Chinese industries, he added.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index climbed 0.49 percent and the Shenzhen Component Index closed 0.13 percent higher on Thursday. The financial sector has led the market rally, with prices of A-share banks, insurers and brokerages finishing 1.78 percent, 1.3 percent and 1.03 percent higher, respectively, on average.

The Lujiazui Forum has reached its 14th edition this year, with the theme this time being: "Global financial opening-up and cooperation: New drivers of economic recovery".

Li said at the opening ceremony that China will firmly open up its financial market wider. Over the past few years, more than 50 financial opening-up policies have been rolled out in the country, including lifting foreign ownership restrictions in the financial sector.

The asset management joint venture set up by BNP Paribas Asset Management Holdings and the asset management subsidiary of Agricultural Bank of China will soon start operating in Shanghai, Li added.

Also launched at the opening ceremony was the international reinsurance board in Shanghai. Related implementation regulations were also announced on Thursday.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
 Flash

Chinese Vice President Han Zheng meets with Nicholas Lyons, Lord Mayor of the City of London, in Beijing, capital of China, June 8, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua]

Chinese Vice President Han Zheng met with Nicholas Lyons, Lord Mayor of the City of London, in Beijing on Thursday.

Noting that the economic and trade ties between China and Britain enjoy sound momentum and huge potential, Han said financial cooperation has increasingly become a new driving force for bilateral practical cooperation.

London is one of the most internationalized financial hubs in the world, and the City of London is not only the "heart" of London's economic development but also a world-renowned financial center, Han said.

At present, China is unswervingly expanding its high-level opening-up in various fields, including the financial industry, Han said, adding that China is willing to deepen mutually beneficial cooperation with the British financial community and promote the sustained and healthy development of bilateral economic and trade relations.

China has made massive achievements in economic and social development, and its future development goals will be achieved, Lyons said, adding that Britain and China share broad common interests and enjoy promising prospects for financial cooperation.

The City of London is willing to deepen cooperation with the Chinese government, enterprises, and financial institutions to achieve win-win development, Lyons said.
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

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Italy hasnt created a Family Pride Month in response to LGBTQ+ celebrations

CLAIM: Italys prime minister has launched Family Pride Month to promote traditional families as a counterpoint to events celebrating the LGBTQ+ community.

THE FACTS: Anti-gay groups and LGBTQ+ advocates in the southern European nation confirm the government has made no such announcement. A longstanding, conservative event known as Family Day was held last month in Rome, but it is not sponsored by the government and is mostly focused on opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and other right wing politicians have attended that daylong event over the years. But social media users are claiming Italys conservative government has come up with a new, monthlong celebration of the traditional concept of marriage between a man and a woman. Report: Italy PM Giorgia Meloni has decided to counter Pride Month by launching Family Pride Month which will instead promote traditional family, wrote one Twitter user in a widespread post. Melonis office did not respond to emails seeking comment, but LGBTQ+ advocates, opponents and other experts confirmed there is no truth to the claim. There has been no such announcement by the government and, as far as we know, there has been no proposal either, said Jacopo Coghe, a spokesperson for Pro Vita & Famiglia, a Rome-based group opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage. Proof that it is fake news can be found in the fact that no Italian media outlet has ever mentioned it. Vincenzo Brana, a spokesperson for Arcigay, a prominent LGBTQ+ advocacy group based in Bologna, concurred, adding that the group would strongly oppose such an idea if it ever came to fruition. Some posts making the false claim even include video clips from a longstanding anti-abortion march in Rome, noted Gabriele Magni, a political science professor and founding director of the LGBTQ+ Politics Research Initiative at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Manifestazione Nazionale per la Vita, or the National Demonstration for Life, was organized in part by the Family Day Association and took place May 20. Over the years, Magni said, Meloni and other prominent conservatives have participated in the event, which is akin to the anti-abortion March for Life that takes place annually in Washington, D.C.

 Associated Press writer Philip Marcelo in New York contributed this report.

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Video of helicopter conducting a planned burn doesnt show Canada wildfires are a set up

CLAIM: A video of a helicopter dropping flames on treetops in Canada shows wildfires in the country are a set up.

THE FACTS: The footage shows firefighters conducting a planned burn last weekend on the Donnie Creek wildfire in northeastern British Columbia. The ignition was being used to help contain the fire by taking away fuel, not to spread it. Yet social media users misrepresented footage of the containment efforts to baselessly claim it shows that the fires were deliberately lit. A video shared on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter shows a yellow helicopter flying above a forest filled with smoke, as a helitorch suspended from the chopper emits flames. The next shot shows a forest ablaze. Text overlaid on the footage reads: it was a set up. However, the footage was taken from a video shared by the British Columbia Wildfire service on June 4 on YouTube. In the video, members of the fire service explain how they are using planned ignitions to fight the Donnie Creek blaze. Mike Morrow, an ignition specialist with the service, says firefighters are stopping the conflagration from spreading by using planned burns to rob the fire of fuel. Were taking the fuels out on our terms rather than letting Mother Nature guide the project, he says. Sarah Budd, a spokesperson for the British Columbia Ministry of Forests, confirmed to the AP that the clip circulating online matches the video from the planned burn that took place last weekend, on June 1 and 2, on the Donnie Creek wildfire in northeastern British Columbia. When the decision is made to conduct such a burn operation, the wildfire is usually beyond the initial attack stage, Budd said in an email. The goal is to remove the majority of available fuel ahead of the wildfire so theres less fuel available for the wildfire to burn. Similar videos of planned burns have been shared in the past to spread conspiracy theories during major wildfires or to discredit climate change.

 Associated Press writer Karena Phan in Los Angeles contributed this report.

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AIDS medication didnt kill more people than the virus itself

CLAIM: The majority of AIDS patients died from medication developed when Dr. Anthony Fauci led the nations response to the emerging epidemic, not from the virus itself.

THE FACTS: While its true that Fauci had been a leading researcher when AIDS emerged in the 1980s, the claims that azidothymidine, commonly known as AZT, killed more people than the virus itself are baseless. Public health agencies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the World Health Organization, as well as prominent AIDS organizations and researchers, told the AP that the drug, while not perfect, remains in use today as its been shown to be effective at keeping HIV in check when used in combination with other medications. Still social media users are once again sharing the long debunked notion that Fauci, the face of the nations response to the coronavirus pandemic, advocated decades earlier for a drug to combat the emerging AIDS epidemic that turned out to be more deadly than the virus itself. Many are sharing a video clip from a newly released conspiracy theory film called Plandemic 3, a sequel to a 2020 video that spread misinformation about COVID-19 online. The clip features old footage of a young Fauci speaking about the safety and efficacy of AZT, which at the time was the first drug developed to treat HIV, the virus that causes the immune system-damaging disease AIDS. The caption of the clip includes the claim that hundreds of thousands of innocent people died as a result of the medication, which it said Fauci pushed on the American public. AZT is what killed a majority of the AIDS patients. Not the virus, wrote one user on Instagram who shared the video clip. But officials and experts say the claim that AZT was responsible for most AIDS deaths is not backed by scientific evidence. Kathy Donbeck, a spokesperson for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the false claim has long been trotted out by AIDS denialists and debunked repeatedly over the years. Chanapa Tantibanchachai, a spokesperson for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which approved the antiretroviral drug in 1987, concurred, adding that AZT remains an approved drug for the treatment of HIV. She noted that the FDA-approved package label for Retrovir, the brand name for the drug, which is also known as zidovudine, states that the drug was found to reduce the risk of HIV progression compared to a placebo. A New England Journal of Medicine study from 1987 also concluded that patients who received AZT died at a much lower rate compared to those who received placebo. Fauci, who served as director of NIAID from 1984 until his retirement last year, declined to comment. But health experts also acknowledged the development of better medications to treat HIV diminished AZTs use over the years. Longer-term research, such as a 1994 study published in Lancet, found that AZTs effectiveness waned when used as a standalone treatment, explained Marlene Bras, a director at the International AIDS Society based in Geneva, Switzerland. Many patients in the early years of its use ultimately developed AIDS and succumbed to the illnesses as the virus became resistant to AZT. Researchers eventually came to understand that a combination of medications  not just one  was needed to keep HIV in check, said WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic. Today, AZT is among some 40 drugs approved for HIV treatment, he said, though its generally reserved for patients for whom new medications fail. The drug is also used to prevent disease transmission in certain situations, such as from an HIV-positive mother to a developing fetus. Health experts werent able to provide any statistics or estimates for whether any people died as a result of AZT. Kristen Nordlund, a CDC spokesperson, said a number of factors contribute to AIDS-related deaths, including late diagnosis, limited access to healthcare and co-infections. "AZT was just one component of the evolving treatment strategies for HIV/AIDS, and its use has significantly evolved over time, she wrote in an email. GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Retrovir, similarly dismissed the claims as unsubstantiated. Did Fauci support the use of AZT? Yes, wrote Warren Gill, a spokesperson for AIDS United, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. in an email. Was that backed by science? Also, yes.

 Philip Marcelo

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No, Pfizer wasnt caught funneling millions to Anderson Cooper

CLAIM: Pfizer was caught funneling $12 million to CNN host Anderson Cooper to promote COVID-19 vaccines.

THE FACTS: There is no evidence to support that claim, which is an outgrowth of comments made by anti-vaccine activist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His campaign said the remarks were intended as a rhetorical comment about the pharmaceutical industrys influence through advertising. Social media users, however, shared his comments as literal. BREAKING: Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. claims Pfizer funneled $12 million dollars to CNN anchor Anderson Cooper as part of a deal to promote mRNA COVID jabs to the American public, one widely shared tweet reads. But there is no factual support for that claim, which a CNN spokesperson called completely false and fabricated." Kennedy said during an October 2022 video interview with podcaster Brian Rose that 75% of advertising revenues now in the mainstream media are now coming from pharma and that ratio is even higher for the evening news. Anderson Cooper has a $12 million a year annual salary, he continued. Well $10 million of that is coming from Pfizer. His boss is not CNN. His boss is Pfizer. Kennedy made similar comments in another 2022 interview with Dr. Drew Pinsky. While social media users shared his remarks as literal  suggesting Pfizer actually provided Cooper with millions of dollars  Kennedys campaign said the Democrats words were rhetorical. This was a rhetorical comment, based on the huge proportion of television advertising revenue that comes from pharmaceutical companies, the campaign said in a statement. Since they contribute as much as 80% of TV ad revenue, close to $10 million of Mr. Andersons salary originates in Big Pharma. To use Pfizer as a stand-in for Big Pharma was a rhetorical flourish and not technically accurate. The campaign, when asked, did not provide a citation for the statistic on TV advertising revenue from the pharmaceutical industry, but instead noted that the industry spends billions on TV advertising  and argued that Pfizer advertising on CNN helps to fund Coopers salary. CNN declined to comment on Coopers salary. The $12 million figure has been floated online without clear sourcing.

 Associated Press writer Angelo Fichera in New Jersey contributed this report.

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BELLINGHAM  Alleged members of an organized crime gang that has been known to arrange for smash-and-grab thefts from parked cars led Bellingham and Massachusetts State Police on a brief chase Thursday after trying to wipe out a victim's bank account, authorities said.

No one has been arrested, Bellingham police said in a press release. They did not say which bank was targeted.

At about 2:30 p.m. Thursday, an unnamed local bank called Bellingham police to report that they believed that two people inside the bank members of the so-called Felony Lane Gang.

"Felony Lane Gang is a large, organized group that has been running up and down the East Coast for the last several years," Bellingham police said in their press release. "They will target gyms, day care centers, schools and other parking lots where they break into multiple vehicles stealing purses and wallets."

'Spreading throughout the area': After rash of break-ins, Framingham police release videos in seeking help

After the car break-ins, police continued, gang members hand over any checks, credit cards or debit cards to other members of the gang within minutes. Those members then go to local banks and attempt to clear out the accounts.

According to the Felony Lane Gang Task Force Facebook page, which is comprised of several Florida law enforcement agencies, members will often wear wigs and other disguises in an effort to look like the people pictured in the stolen IDs.

Bank teller appeared to recognize gang's traits

Bellingham police, in their release, said the teller recognized the gang's method of operation and called police.

When officers arrived, two suspects ran from the bank. One ran away while another jumped into a vehicle.

"Officers pursued the fleeing vehicle for a short time until it led them up (Interstate) 495, where for safety reasons the shift supervisor terminated the pursuit," according to the release.

State Police also attempted to pull over the vehicle but lost it in traffic. The car was later found abandoned off Route 9 in Southborough, police said in the release.

'They were taking anything': Framingham police seek suspects after 48 cars are raided over a weekend

The suspect who ran away was witnessed getting picked up by a second vehicle near a local gas station; he also got away.

"At this time, detectives are following several solid leads on the ID of these suspects, and we are hopeful that arrest warrants will be obtained in the near future," police said in a statement.

Norman Miller can be reached at 508-626-3823 or nmiller@wickedlocal.com. For up-to-date public safety news, follow him on Twitter @Norman_MillerMW or on Facebook at facebook.com/NormanMillerCrime.

This article originally appeared on The Milford Daily News: Felony Lane Gang suspected in Bellingham bank robbery
A 40-year-old New York man has been charged for terroristic threats he allegedly made to the imam of the New Brunswick Islamic Center in North Brunswick.

Khaliyk Sellers, of the Bronx, was arrested without incident May 27 in Pennsylvania where he also is facing weapons charges, Middlesex County Prosecutor Yolanda Ciccone said.

The Islamic Centers website lists Shadee Elmasry as the spiritual director.

North Brunswick police on May 26 learned of multiple explicit and credible threats made via text message to the spiritual director, Ciccone said.

An investigation by North Brunswick police, the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office and the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness identified Sellers as the suspect, the prosecutor said.

More: NJ Muslim leader Sam Khan remembered: 'His legacy will continue to inspire us all'

"The cooperation and outstanding police work conducted by the aforementioned agencies allowed law enforcement to prevent further threats of violence to the members of our community," Ciccone said.

The investigation is active and continuing. Anyone with information is asked to contact North Brunswick Detective Christopher Trokovich at 732-545-3200.

Email: alewis@njpressmedia.com

Alexander Lewis is an award-winning reporter and photojournalist whose work spans many topics. This coverage is only possible with support from our readers. Sign up today for a digital subscription.

This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: NY man charged with terroristic threats against NJ Muslim leader
NEW YORK  With a screeching subway train bearing down on her, a gutsy high school seniors survival instincts instantly kicked in after she was pushed onto the tracks at a Queens station  she sprang to her feet, pulled herself to the platform, and took the next train home.

Later, she went to her prom.

Eighteen-year-old Sarah Arias was on her way home to Brooklyn Monday morning to get her hair done before her graduation party that night when she was shoved off the platform by a woman who had been arguing with someone else, cops said.

The victim was waiting on an elevated J-train platform at the 75th St-Elderts Lane station near Jamaica Ave. in Woodhaven at 10:30 a.m. when the suspect shoved her onto the tracks, according to police.

Police arrested Shakeema Wise, and said she had been arguing with an unidentified man when she stormed off and, without provocation, pushed Arias onto the tracks before she fled.

A dazed but determined Sarah pulled herself out of the filthy track bed, and as startled straphangers looked on, climbed back up to the platform.

It didnt feel real, Sarah said a day later. I just remember I fell and I was on the floor and I saw the train coming ahead because it was approaching the platform. I didnt spend any time on the floor, I fell, I looked up and then I got up. Adrenaline, everything. It felt fake, it felt like I was in a movie. Thinking about it I feel like it was like a movie.

If the train didnt kill her, the fall could have ended her life.

I fell onto my knees, and my arms, my elbows, she said. The tracks are elevated. If I wouldve fallen in a different spot I couldve been in the street.

Sarah said she is still trying to understand what happened.

I walked up the steps, she recalled. I was walking on the platform and when I passed the first bench the only woman sitting there, she just looked at me once real quick, I thought nothing of it and then as soon as I passed her she just grabbed me and she pushed me on the tracks.

As soon as I fell, she walked away, Sarah said. It was very split second; I looked up and she was looking back, she was trying to get out of there. I didnt talk to her but as she was running, I was like, Why did you do this? Theres no reason. She never said a word to me.

Sarah said some of the passengers on the platform were too shocked to help her.

But then as soon as I saw the train coming I couldnt wait for anyone to help me, she said. I just got up. I just grabbed on to the [platform], I jumped and I pulled myself up.

Sarah said she waited for another train, took it one more stop and called her parents.

I couldnt understand how that could just happen, said Sarahs mom, Jeanette Jiminez, 47. My daughter just came out of school. Someone just grabbed her and just pushes her? Shes such a quiet person. I know everybody says they have good kids, but I really have good kids. They dont look for trouble. They dont start any trouble, and if they can help in any situation they always do. So for this to happen to her its just not fair.

Wise was arrested near the station by officers responding to a 911 call. She was hit with several charges, including reckless endangerment, according to officials. Cops said Wise, 26, lives at a homeless shelter on Eldert Lane in Brooklyn.

Sarah, who had left school early and was on her way to a hair salon when she was attacked, was determined to make it to her prom in Howard Beach, Queens, Monday night despite bruised and scratched knees and pain throughout her body.

I made it to prom. This was my prom, Sarah said. I mean it was kind of hard walking in heels at the prom, but I had to adjust.

Even though in the beginning, it took a hard toll on me, I couldnt let it affect the rest of my day.

Sarah is scheduled to graduate from K659 Cypress Hills Collegiate Preparatory School on June 27, and has plans to study criminal justice surveillance at John Jay College.

But shes not sure how shes going to get to class.

I think Ill stick with the bus maybe, she said. Or walk.
Pittsburgh Public Schools Central Administration Building is closed today due to a water main break in Oakland that has left the facility without water.

Crews are working in the area of Winthrop and S. Dithridge streets to repair the 12-inch line.

The Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority estimates service will be restored around noon.

PPS staff will work remotely but may access the building if needed, a school spokeswoman said.

Visit www.pgh2o.com for updates on the break.

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Donald Trump is expected to face seven counts in a federal indictment stemming from the US Department of Justice investigation into his possession of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago property.

Federal prosecutors are expected to charge him with the willful retention of national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements, obstruction and witness tampering.

Mr Trump will surrender, face arrest, and be formally charged in US District Court in Miami, as soon as next week, after a federal grand jury believed there was enough evidence to bring charges against him. A potential sentence, if convicted, could include decades in prison.

The exact charges against Mr Trump have not been announced, and it is unclear whether an indictment against him will remain sealed until it is formally presented in federal court. Mr Trump said he was due in federal court in Miami at 3pm ET on Tuesday 13 June.

He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and declared the investigations against him a witch hunt.

An investigation from special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed to lead the Justice Departments probe into the former presidents alleged mishandling of documents after leaving the White House, reportedly is looking into whether his lawyers falsely certified that he returned classified records to the government, or whether he concealed them, illegally, and lied to his legal team.

Federal prosecutors are expected to present compelling evidence that the former president knowingly and deliberately misled his attorneys about his retention of sensitive documents after leaving the White House in January 2021 after losing his re-election bid.

Unauthorised retention of national security documents

The frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination will face charges under the Espionage Act, which the Justice Department invoked against now-former National Security Agency translator Reality Winner while Mr Trump was president in 2018. Julian Assange and Daniel Hale also were charged under the Espionage Act in 2019.

Mr Trump is now expected to face that same charge, according to his lawyer James Trusty.

One of the six sections under the Espionage Act, Section 793, prohibits gathering, transmitting or losing any information respecting the national defence.

The use of Section 793, which does not make reference to classified information, is understood to be a strategic decision by prosecutors that has been made to short-circuit the former presidents ability to claim that he used his authority as president to declassify documents he removed from the White House and kept at his Florida property long after his term expired on 20 January 2021.

That section of US criminal law is written in a way that could encompass Mr Trumps conduct even if he was authorised to possess the information as president. It states that anyone who lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with any document  relating to the national defence and willfully transmits such information in any way can face a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

Obstruction

A charge of obstruction in this case likely involves the destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations.

In a case before a jury, federal prosecutors must prove whether Mr Trump knowingly retained documents under the National Archives and Records Administrations custody, and willfully defied the Justice Departments subpoena for classified documents in his possession. A conviction includes a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.

An additional charge of conspiracy, which would need to include another person in order to commit a crime, could carry a sentence of five years.

Making false statements

Mr Trump could face additional charges for making false statements, or allowing his legal team to make false statements, if prosecutors determine that he lied to law enforcement about the documents in his possession at the subject of the subpoenas against him. That could include an additional five-year sentence, if convicted.

Witness tampering

Section 1512 under Title 18 includes a broad prohibition against tampering with a witness, victim or informant involved in a federal investigation.

It applies to matters before Congress as well as federal agencies and civil and criminal judicial proceedings, including grand jury proceedings. A conviction includes a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

A federal indictment against Mr Trump arrives days after a last-ditch attempt by his legal team to convince Justice Department officials against charging him.

Investigators launched a probe early last year after officials with the National Archives and Records Administration discovered more than 100 documents bearing classification markings while reviewing 15 boxes retrieved from Mr Trumps Mar-a-Lago home. US Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Mr Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor at The Hague, as special counsel to lead the probe.

An indictment serves as a formal accusation, among a prosecutors first steps before a case can be brought to trial.

Grand jurors heard evidence and testimony brought forward from prosecutors and witnesses they chose to present. In a trial, a jury will hear from defence attorneys.

Following Mr Trumps formal indictment, prosecutors will share evidence with his legal team and likely begin motions to dismiss the case.

Andrew Feinberg contributed reporting
The Security Service of Ukraine has intercepted a conversation between the occupiers, in which they said that the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant was blown up by a Russian sabotage group.

Source: press service of the Security Service of Ukraine

Quote from the Security Service: "The invaders wanted to blackmail Ukraine by blowing up the dam and caused a man-made disaster in our country's south."

Details: "It's not them [Ukraine  ed.] who have struck. Our sabotage group is there. They wanted to scare them with this dam. It didn't go according to plan, it was more than they planned," says the Russian military.

The occupier goes on to describe the consequences of this disaster, which Russia is trying to hide: rising water levels, flooding and destruction.

Background:

On the morning of 6 June, Ukraines Operational Command Pivden (South) reported that Russian occupation forces had blown up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP), completely destroying the dam and the power plant's turbine hall. The plant is beyond repair. The draining of the Kakhovka Reservoir threatens the safety of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

The destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant has caused an environmental disaster. The water from the reservoir has begun to flood towns and villages, and evacuations of local residents from dangerous areas have begun. It has caused problems with the water supply in the cities of Kryvyi Rih, Marhanets and Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy stressed that the disaster at the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station created by the Russians would not stop Ukraine from liberating its own territory and would not increase the chances of the occupiers staying on this land.

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Two people were killed and two others injured as a result of a Russian attack on a hospital in the town of Huliaipole, Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

Source: Andrii Yermak, the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, on Telegram

Quote from Yermak: "The Russians attacked a hospital in the town of Huliaipole. Two hospital staff members are known to have been killed."

Details: Yermak has clarified that a junior nurse and a plumber were killed.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
A Virginia man has been arrested and charged in an Ocean City stabbing that took place on June 7.

Jackson Turner Hopkins Perry, 18, turned himself into the Ocean City Police Department after being identified as a suspect in a stabbing that took place on Wednesday. Perry, from Haymarket, Virginia, was charged with first-degree assault, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, wear/carry a concealed weapon and wear/carry a concealed weapon with intent to cause injury.

According to the Ocean City Police Department, officers responded to the area of 81st street for a report of a stabbing at approximately 12:06 a.m. Wednesday. Officers located a male victim suffering from stab wounds to the forearm and hip area. Ocean City EMS responded and rendered medical care, and the victim was transported to TidalHealth Peninsula Regional with non-life threatening injuries.

During the investigation, it was determined that the suspect and victim engaged in a physical altercation on the sidewalk area of 80th street. The suspect, identified as Perry, left the area before police arrived.

After conducting interviews with witnesses and viewing surveillance footage of the area, social media posts were issued with photos asking for the public's assistance in identifying Perry. Perry turned himself into the Ocean City Police Department in the afternoon on June 7.

Perry was seen by a Maryland District Court Commissioner and held without bond. Detectives are asking any individuals with information regarding this incident to please contact the Ocean City Police Department Criminal Investigations Division at 410-723-6604

More: Everything you need to know about the 2023 Ocean City Air Show

More: How Ocean City's Beach Patrol copes with hiring struggles amid constant recruiting process

This article originally appeared on Salisbury Daily Times: Virginia man faces multiple charges in Ocean City stabbing
Officer who raced to Parkland massacre scene testifies against deputy who stayed outside

Former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School School Resource Officer Scot Peterson, left, and defense attorney Mark Eiglarsh watch a video of the shooting during his trial, Thursday, June 8, 2023, at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Peterson is charged with child neglect and other charges for failing to stop the Parkland school massacre five years ago. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP, Pool) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

PARKLAND, Fla. (AP)  A police officer who rushed into a high school building during the 2018 Parkland shooting testified Friday that a sheriff's deputy outside confirmed that the shooter was upstairs.

The former Broward County deputy, Scot Peterson, is on trial for failing to confront the shooter who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. He has insisted since he spoke to investigators two days after the massacre that he couldnt tell where the gunshots were coming from, and that he thought they may have been fired outside.

On the third day of Peterson's trial, Coral Springs officer Richard Best related what he says Peterson told him outside the classroom building, WPLG-TV reported.

I said, Hey brother, what do we got? Best told the jury. He said, Gunshots second or third floor.

Peterson, 60, could be sentenced to nearly a century in prison if convicted.

It is understood that the longer you wait, the more damage is being done, Best said. Every time you heard a gunshot, somebody might be dead.

Peterson is charged with failing to confront shooter Nikolas Cruz before the gunman reached the buildings third floor, where he killed six people. The deputy is not charged in connection with the 11 deaths on the first floor, before he reached the building.

Peterson arrived at the building with his gun drawn 73 seconds before Cruz reached the third floor. Peterson took cover 75 feet (23 meters) away in the alcove of a neighboring building, his gun drawn. He didnt leave his spot for about 40 minutes  around 35 minutes after the shooting had stopped.

Arman Borghei, who was a student on the building's third floor during the shootings, said he looked out of a window and spotted Peterson below with his gun drawn.

Borghei said he was "really scared, wondering when help would arrive, but never saw Peterson approach the building.

Best testified that he considered it his job to risk his life to stop a threat and render aid.

It is not that as one police officer I want to go inside by myself, Best said. "But that is our training  to go inside.

The most serious charges against Peterson are seven counts of felony child neglect.

For Peterson to be convicted of child neglect, prosecutors must first show he was legally a caregiver to the juvenile students  defined by Florida law as a parent, adult household member or other person responsible for a childs welfare.

If jurors find Peterson was a caregiver, they must determine whether he made a reasonable effort to protect the children or failed to provide necessary care.

Peterson is the first U.S. law enforcement officer ever charged for an alleged failure to act during a school shooting. Similarly, Texas authorities are investigating officers in the town of Uvalde who didnt confront the shooter who killed 19 elementary students and two teachers last year. None have been charged, however.

The trial began Wednesday and is expected to last up to two months.

Cruz, 24, pleaded guilty and last year received a life sentence.
 Flash

Japan's upper house of parliament on Friday passed a contentious bill to amend an immigration and refugee law allowing for authorities to deport foreign nationals who apply for refugee status multiple times.

Despite some opposition parties rejecting the the move, the law was enacted with the support of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its junior Komeito coalition ally, along with other smaller parties.

The controversial revision of the immigration and refugee law has been heavily criticized by organizations here established to support asylum seekers.

Such entities believe that now the revised law has been enacted it could lead to individuals being repatriated to their home countries.

The Japanese government believes the current system, which does not allow for foreign nationals to be deported while their application for refugee status is being processed, may be being abused by those applying for refugee status multiple times as a means to stay in the country.

It believes that foreign nationals have been applying for refugee status multiple times in the knowledge that while the status of their application is pending, they cannot be deported from Japan.

The amendment law will bring an end to the extended detention in immigration facilities for potential refugees, including foreign nationals who have overstayed their visas and not complied with deportation orders.

Under the new law, when applying for refugee status for the third time or later, those who fail the process for not being able to show why their status as a refugee should be granted will be repatriated by the Japanese government.

But opponents to the law have pointed out that in the past refugee statuses have in fact been granted to those after their third application has been made.

The amended law, however, will grant quasi-refugee status to individuals from conflict-affected regions, allowing them to stay in Japan even if they do not qualify for full refugee status.

Providing they have the requisite supervision of their supporters, those applying for refugee status will be allowed to live outside designated immigration facilities as a means for the Japanese government to deal with its heavily-criticized long-term detention of foreign nationals.

The main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan who has called for the system to be overseen by a third-party and not just immigration officials to ensure fairness, attempted to block passage of the bill in the eleventh hour by submitting a censure motion against Justice Minister Ken Saito, who is in charge of the legislation.

The motion was voted down in the upper chamber of Japan's bicameral parliament on Wednesday, however.

Refugee status was given to a record 202 people in Japan in 2022. But this was out of 3,772 applicants, with Japan falling far behind some European countries and the United States who take in tens of thousands of refugees annually.
Officials ruled his death suicide in 2016. Now man charged with murder, GA cops say

A Georgia man is accused of killing another man who officials originally said died by suicide in 2016, news outlets report.

Marshall Ralph Payne, 50, was arrested and faces a charge of malice murder in the 2016 death of Donald Fickey Jr., according to the Walker County Messenger.

In 2016, DJ Fickey, who was 28 at the time, was found dead with a gunshot wound in his Walker County home, WRBL reported.

A Georgia Bureau of Investigation medical examiner ruled the death a suicide, WRBL reported, but Fickeys family felt strongly that this conclusion was wrong.

Fickey was a father of three, and his sister, Amanda Shirley, told WSB-TV that his family told officials he loved his kids too much, loved his family too much, and that they believed his roommate, Payne, had killed him because the two men were in a love triangle with Fickeys wife, Brandy.

I tried to get the gun and it went off, Payne told the emergency dispatcher when he called 911 to report Fickey had been shot, WSB-TV reported.

For four years, Fickeys family tried to convince the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to reopen his case In 2020 officials took a second look at his autopsy report and updated Fickeys cause of death to undetermined, the Walker County Messenger reported.

His family decided they needed to take the investigation into their own hands and hired private investigator Eric Echols, known for his work on the Tonya Craft case more than a decade ago, WRBL reported.

Shirley ran a Justice for DJ Twitter page and regularly spoke to news outlets and true crime podcasts about her brothers death, hoping to bring enough attention that investigators would take a closer look.

Echols told WRBL in 2020 he believed law enforcement had gone about the investigation poorly and there was enough evidence to secure Paynes involvement in Fickeys death.

They talked to all of the witnesses together, they didnt separate them. They didnt take them to the police department and interview them properly. Those types of things  they didnt take enough crime scene photos, Echols told the outlet. Theres enough evidence to secure an indictment. Not to reopen the case, to get a conviction, theres enough.

At the time Echols was looking into the case in 2020, Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson was asked whether his office would reopen the case now that Fickeys cause of death had been updated.

The case will not be reopened simply because the medical examiner changed the manner of death from suicide to undetermined. Should new evidence be discovered the sheriffs office will evaluate the evidence and proceed accordingly, he told WRBL.

Despite this statement, the department did eventually reopen the investigation, and as a result of new evidence arrested Payne, WSB-TV reported.

7 long and hard years later my fight was not in (vain), Shirley said in a June 7 Facebook post. All my hard work and never giving up paid off and I upheld my promise to my brother that I wouldnt stop.

McClatchy News reached out to the Walker County Sheriffs Office for a statement and the indictment and is waiting for a response.

Walker County is in the northwest corner of the state, about 100 miles northwest of Atlanta.

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Manhattans hazy brown skyline this past week looked eerily similar to that in Sacramento during a bad August, when too much of the Sierra is on fire.

The ghastly smoke that recently plagued much of the Northeast started in eastern Canada. Californias mild spring is in stark contrast to a hot and dry pattern in Canada thats the root cause of an estimated 400 fires now burning. A full third of them are in Quebec.

The East Coast has endured plenty of other symptoms of climate change: Severe hurricane seasons have raised anxieties in the late summers, and in October of 2012, Hurricane Sandy surged into Manhattan, flooding the One World Trade Center basement with an estimated 200 million gallons of water.

Opinion

Eleven years ago, it might have been easier for some to dismiss the influence of climate change. But theres nothing like a June sky full of soot to bring that message home.

This is the worst wildfire summer in the history of Quebec. And its only the second week of June.

With each natural disaster comes an equal and opposite political reaction.

Were seeing more and more of these fires because of climate change, tweeted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

New York Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY), on the other hand, said that this is not the moment to start lecturing people about climate change.

Molinaro is absolutely right, in a way. That moment has long passed.

This is a moment of public safety and public health for two countries. Acreage consumed by wildfire in Canada so far is 10 times more than last year.

Canadas fire situation is so bad that even firefighters from California are heading to the country. While fires in Quebec and Ontario are choking up the eastern skies, lands farther to the west in Alberta are burning at record levels, nearly 2.5 million acres so far this year. By comparison, about 4.3 million acres burned in Californias worst fire year to date, 2020.

The moments for scholarly lectures about the potential dangers of climate change came and went years ago. Some states, like California, have stepped up to the challenge with concrete climate goals.

When the national monuments are under a pall of smoke in June, that smoke is a mere reminder of our climate reality. The globe is losing the battle against greenhouse gas emissions.

It is a reminder that change must happen in steps big and small: from a single commuter changing to a healthier pattern to societies the size of California converting to renewable energy sources as quickly as possible.

Now, 90 million Americans not accustomed to the inferno the West has endured can experience with all their senses what the future will bring if we dont act as a nation.
The Piqua and Wilmington posts of the Ohio State Highway Patrol will each hold an open house today to celebrate its 90th anniversary.

>>PREVIOUS COVERAGE: OSHP Springfield post to celebrate 90th anniversary

The Wilmington post open house will start at 10 a.m. at the 900 block of Rombach Avenue while the Piqua post begins at 1 p.m. on the 400 block of U.S. 36, an OSHP spokesperson said.

The open house will allow OSHP personnel to interact with the public.

A recruiter will be also on-site at both locations to assist with any recruitment questions and help with the application process.

As part of the anniversary activities, the patrol is also partnering with Dolly Partons Imagination Library of Ohio. The program mails children a free book each month until their fifth birthday.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol began on November 15, 1933, when the first 60 patrolmen earned their commissions following training at Camp Perry and began patrolling Ohios roads.
Ohio teen murdered in SC, and her alleged killer, had just graduated from high school

An Ohio teenager strangled in her Myrtle Beach area hotel room Tuesday had just graduated from high school last month.

Tributes to the 18-year-old have flooded social media.

Natalie Martin was in the Myrtle Beach area on a senior trip at the time, a friend told The Sun News through a Facebook message.

Another Ohio teen charged with her murder was also on the trip.

A GoFundMe account to help pay for her funeral has been set up by her friend, Brooklyn Ferrell. The account has raised more than $26,000 as of Friday afternoon.

Another Ohio teen charged with her murder

Martin, of Roseville, Ohio, was identified Friday by the Horry County Coroners Office.

Blake William Linkous, also 18, of Blue Rock, was arrested by Horry County Police Department and charged with murder in Martins death. He remained in the J. Reuben Long Detention Center Friday without bond.

Linkous strangled Martin Tuesday, the arrest warrant stated. The coroners office said Martin was found unresponsive in her hotel room on Maison Drive.

The two had been a couple for several years

Martin and Linkous had been a couple for several years until recently, according to Ferrell.

The couple had broken up at the beginning of this year, but the two had remained friends, Ferrell said.

Brooklyn Ferrell, left, is shown in a photo with her friend Natalie Martin. Ferrell has started a GoFundMe account to help pay for funeral costs of Martin, who was killed Tuesday in Myrtle Beach.

Both Martin and Linkous were students at Philo High School in Duncan Falls, Ohio. They graduated on May 26.

The two were in Myrtle Beach on a senior trip.

Ferrell was not with Martin on the trip. She instead was on another senior trip in Florida.

Efforts to find contact information for Martins family were unsuccessful.

School has offered counselors for students and community

The Myrtle Beach senior trip was not sanctioned by the school, according to Superintendent Kacey Cottrill of the Franklin Local School District.

However, its not uncommon for seniors in area schools to go to Myrtle Beach as a group, according to Philo High School Principal Troy Dawson.

Cottrill said Friday there will be counselors at Philo High School for students or those in the community. Counselors will be there Friday and Monday and Tuesday of next week, Dawson said.

We are looking for best ways to help our kids, Dawson said. There isnt a manual that tells you the best way to handle these things.

Dawson said the school had received confirmation about Martins death Thursday.

Its hard for us to wrap our head around, he said Friday.

The school district where the high school is located only has about 2,000 students, Cottrill said. He described the community as tight-knit, which made Martins death particularly tragic.

Its pretty much devastating for all of us, Cottrill said.

Editors Note: This story was updated to reflect that the hotel room is not in the city of Myrtle Beach. Updated 3:49 p.m.
Sangamon County Historical Society logo

In 1927, Illinois State Journal columnist A.L. Bowen lamented the disappearance of the saloon free lunch, which was a common feature of tavern life when he arrived in Springfield in 1899. Here is what Bowen wrote (with identification notes from SangamonLink):

The saloon free lunch played a leading role in the domestic affairs of our city. For a nickel, a foaming glass of beer was purchased which entitled the buyer to dive into an array of delicacies on the table in the rear of the room or, perhaps, it was on the end of the bar, where the caterer could keep close watch on it.

Saloon lunches ranged all the way from the elaborate and varied meals set out by the St. Nich (St. Nicholas) and Leland hotels for the aristocracy of drinkers who patronized their bars to proletariat soup on the levee, where the hack drivers bottle and the put back were institutions of respect.

The Leland bar was noted for its salads, the St. Nich served sliced chicken and exquisite cheese sandwiches. Today you buy these foods, no better prepared and serviced, and pay high prices for them. The St. Nich sandwich that went with a nickel glass of beer costs today twenty cents or even more.

About town the saloon lunch was highly specialized. Baldwig and Mockler (sic  Charles Ballweg and John P. Mockler) catered to the best trade but did not believe in tempting it into the house with a bait.

Cooney Byers (sic  Conrad Beyer), I am told, set the best free lunch. He bought fresh ingredients and had an artist in their preparation working as porter. Cooney himself superintended distribution and employed a cipher system in communicating to the keeper of the lunch how liberal he was to be with each customer, who had to show his good faith in buying substantially before he could hope to partake of the trimmings. John Zimmerman also set a lunch that was well known. One resort was favored for one thing and another for another, which stimulated circulation among the bibulous.

On the north side of the square was the only saloon that faced the courthouse. It was owned by a man named Mueller (apparently Carl Charles Mueller). On Thanksgiving he put out a square meal of which roast turkey was the foundation. The little place, you may imagine, was popular that day.

As the economic scale of saloon patrons descended, the quality and variety of free lunch deteriorated. Up on the levee, soup was the sole item on the menu. Some of it was atrocious. Some of it was most tasty.

It was not an uncommon thing to find a hostler, down-and-outer or human wreck, presiding over the soup kettle of an East Washington street saloon and brewing a concoction whose odor and flavor were fit for a king.

A.L. Bowen died in 1942 after a dual career as a newspaper editor and social justice reformer. As a newspaperman, he was managing editor of the Springfield News (later the News-Record), which went out of business in 1919, and editorial writer, columnist and editor of the Illinois State Journal, predecessor of the State Journal-Register. Between newspaper stints, Bowen held top positions in state government  as state superintendent of charities, as director of the Illinois Department of Public Welfare and even, briefly, as warden of the Joliet State Prison. He worked for five different governors.

In both public service and newspaper work, he has been recognized as a crusader, Bowens Journal obituary reported.

Excerpted from SangamonLink, online encyclopedia of the Sangamon County Historical Society.

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Old time saloon free lunches key to Springfield business dealings
One dead, three injured in latest Russian missile attack on Zviahel in Zhytomyr Oblast

Dozens of houses were damaged as a result of falling rocket debris during the Russian attack

The debris fell in the residential area, damaging over a dozen houses and causing casualties, he added.

Read also: Russian missile strike on Uman injures eight, two are fighting for their lives

The Interior Ministry reported that four houses had been destroyed and another 30 had been damaged because of the strike.

Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine

Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine

Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine

Russia attacked Ukraine with cruise missiles and drones overnight on June 9.

The Ukrainian air defense forces intercepted four Kh-101/Kh-55 missiles, as well as four reconnaissance and 10 strike drones.

Read also: Drone footage shows ruins of Kakhovka dam, flooded areas two days after Russian attack

Prior to that, late on June 8, the Russians hit an industrial facility and a car wash in Cherkasy Oblast with two Kalibr missiles.

Were bringing the voice of Ukraine to the world. Support us with a one-time donation, or become a Patron!

Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Metro ambassador Fabian Bolanos, 52, says he has administered the opioid-reversal drug naloxone four times since he started in fall. "It's pretty intense," he said. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Walking along a rail platform, a veteran transit worker spotted a package of the opioid overdose-reversing drug naloxone, picked it up and slipped it in his vest. He couldn't imagine that he would use the medicine less than two hours later.

But looking back on that evening in February 2022, it shouldnt have been a surprise.

The synthetic opioid fentanyl was killing about four people a day in the county. Its reach stretched from high school classrooms to Beverly Hills homes; it plagued Skid Row and upended families across the region.

Inside train stations, one of the few free indoor spaces for those living on the margins, paramedics rush past commuters to platforms and train cabs to try to revive drug users who pushed too close to the edge or past it.

The transit worker saw so many overdoses he began going to a clinic on his way to work to get more doses of naloxone, commonly known by the brand Narcan. Metro had no clear policy on whether its workers can administer the drug, he said. But he couldn't bear to watch people die needlessly.

In 15 months, he has revived 21 people. The Times verified most of the claims through time-stamped photographs and witnesses.

"I'm tired of seeing people dying right in front of me," said the worker, who has been with Metro for more than a decade and asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak with media.

Five months into the year, at least 35 people have died so far in the Metro system. The causes of deaths are under investigation, and most are suspected overdoses.

Naloxone, commonly known as Narcan, can revive a person who has overdosed on an opioid. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Metro policy prohibits workers from freely speaking with media or photographing conditions inside the trains. But half a dozen current and former workers, who include cleaning staff and security guards, spoke to The Times about the deaths and near deaths caused by drug use on the trains.

Some are angry about conditions; others feel resigned and numb. Their emotions are complicated by not only the brazen drug use, but also a rise in attacks on Metro personnel. Last year, 158 operators were assaulted.

"Unfortunately, when people with drug abuse issues come into our system from the communities we serve across L.A. County, our frontline employees bear the burden of discovering people whove overdosed, cleaning up after drug users or encountering their behavior while the drugs are in effect," Metro spokesperson Pamela Krebs said in an email. "The societal issues of drug abuse, crime, and homelessness across our county have made it much harder for them to do their jobs  and for Metro to provide the service it is intended to provide: safe, clean, efficient and reliable transportation."

A worker who was attacked a few years ago during her night shift said she was told not to record scenes she sees daily on her phone. Her photo feed is filled with pictures of men taking drugs, people half clothed, dead bodies, fights and blood-stained walls.

"I pray. I pray a lot because, Lord, only Jesus can change it," she said.

Complaints about drug use and sales reported on the Metro Transit Watch app soared nearly 100% last year, compared with the previous year. But the employee with Narcan in his pocket didn't need data to prove how bad things had gotten.

Fabian Bolanos carries a CPR mask kit, naloxone and other tools when he is at work as a a Metro Ambassador. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

That night in February last year, he arrived to see a limp body sprawled out inside a rail car, according to his photos of the event. Metro transit officers were standing over a young man with tussled hair and skin-tight white pants.

"This guy was turning purple. Not breathing, vomiting on himself," the worker said. "From what I can tell, he was very, very close to death."

The worker pulled the packet from his Metro vest and offered up the Narcan to the officers. None wanted to administer a drug they had yet been trained to use, he said.

In the past, the worker would have felt the same. He had had little sympathy for the riders he saw daily, strung out in bench seats.

"They did this to themselves," he recalled thinking. "To be honest, I didn't really give a s."

But the year before, he had befriended a 21-year-old struggling with fentanyl addiction. The young man was earnest, asking about how credit works and buying a home. He had a baby on the way, had gone through rehab and was seemingly starting a new chapter.

On Christmas Eve, just two months before, the friend died of an overdose.

"His baby was due like April," he said. "It was heart-wrenching."

The friendship gave him a new understanding.

"I had a different perspective on the overdoses that I would see" he said. "It was personal."

He clutched the tiny spray bottle and pumped a dose up the man's nose. Paramedics arrived. The man came to and walked off without acknowledgment. The worker was astonished at his recovery. That night, he searched online for training videos online.

"It was the push that I needed to look into it," he said. "To do something about it."

At that point, Metro employees had not been trained on how to use Narcan, although law enforcement officers who patrol the system carry the drug. Recently, transit safety officers and ambassadors have been trained.

CEO Stephanie Wiggins has said she hopes that training of its officers and 327 ambassadors  who are contracted to greet and help passengers  will have a "huge impact" on the system.

Fabian Bolanos, 52, says he has administered the drug four times since he started as an ambassador in fall.

"It's pretty intense," he said.

The first time, he spotted a man passed out on a bench at the Civic Center/Grand Park station with a needle in his arm, lips turning purple.

"I just immediately grabbed Narcan that I had, and I administered it," he said. "He wasn't coming back, and I started compressions. Then I gave him the second dose of Narcan, kept going on compressions, and finally he came back."

At the time, he had been on the job about two months, working for a Metro contractor, Strive Well-Being, Inc. The company "expressly prohibited" using the medicine, he said, but he wouldn't just watch people die.

Metro eventually changed the policy.

Bolanos, a former methamphetamine user and alcoholic who once overdosed, said the man fortified his own sobriety.

"It's a daily affirmation that I'm doing the right thing and that I need to maintain my sobriety," he said. "If I can hand it over and maybe give it to somebody else in need, maybe they go to a rehab, I'm doing my part."

When the revived man came to, Bolanos said, he got up and left on his scooter. He saw him later and asked, "You remember me?"

The man did. He appeared embarrassed.

"I told him try to get him to a rehab," Bolanos said. "I told him this is not going to end well. I have seen him around the train stations. He is still using."

Bolanos and the unidentified Metro worker have had days where they have to administer Narcan twice. Bolanos, who is leading a campaign to organize Strive Well-Being workers, said conditions have improved over recent months. In May, Metro reported a 17.8% reduction in complaints about drug use between Feb. 13 and May 8 as it cracked down on drug use on the system. It is still rampant.

Less than three months ago, he was exiting the platform at Westlake/MacArthur Park station when he saw a man in his 20s slumped over, lips turning blue. He had no pulse. Bolanos revived the man with Narcan and headed up the station's mezzanine to the break room when he saw a man in his 50s passed out near the ticket vending machine.

"This is unbelievable," he recalled thinking. "Another person right here right now."

"I was still trembling from giving compressions," he said. "I was still in this intense emotional feeling, and for me to look and see this other guy, I said, 'Nah, this can't be going back to back.'"

To stem the deaths, Los Angeles County helped distribute 112,000 boxes of Narcan last year as people left jail or through groups such as Community Health Project L.A.

The program is part of the county's expansion of what is known in treatment circles as harm-reduction services, strategies aimed at reducing the deadly effects of drug use. Since beginning in 2019, the program has reported 19,661 naloxone reversals, which is likely an undercount. Roughly half of those, or 9,790 reversals, were reported last year.

"It's everywhere in a way that it wasn't before," said Shoshanna Scholar, director of the county's Department of Health Services Harm Reduction Division. The agency helps train community workers, including staff at homeless shelters and other interim housing on how to use the medicine. "What we do know is without the naloxone on that and that trajectory of the overdose deaths would be much, much worse."

Ricky Blumenthal, the associate dean for social justice at the Keck School of Medicine at USC, sees the drug use on Metro against a wider backdrop of inequity in a region where homelessness has been growing as rents rise and there's few discrete spaces to use drugs on the streets. Many of those using drugs on the system don't have permanent homes, he said, but not all. Drug use can be a cause of homelessness or a symptom.

Whatever it is, overdoses take more homeless people than violence or car accidents.

In early 1990s, Blumenthal co-founded the Oakland California Syringe Exchange Program and was a founding board member of the national Harm Reduction Coalition, an advocacy and training organization devoted to improving the health of people who use drugs.

He started the program because he felt state, federal and local authorities weren't doing enough to stop the spread of HIV among drug users. People were left to die, much as they are now.

"Ultimately, we have to start caring for people who have become disadvantaged in our society," he said. "We're creating homelessness as a structural reality," he said. "We can make different choices. "

There's no one fix, he said, but providing better housing or providing overdose prevention sites, where people can safely use drugs.

Recently the Federal Drug Administration approved the use of Narcan for over-the-counter sales, a move that could allow for wider distribution of the drug and remove training barriers.

An overdose can happen in a few minutes of ingesting drugs, sometimes longer, depending the dose and whether it was smoked or injected, said Brian Hurley, the medical director for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health's Substance Abuse Prevention and Control. Once breathing stops, death arrives in minutes.

It's not unusual for the nearly 2,600 maintenance workers at Metro to find people who are using drugs, passed out or unresponsive.

"It's taken a great mental toll on our membership," said Art Aguilar, former president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1277, which represents those workers.

Maintenance staff regularly clean up needles, pipes and foil used to carry and cook drugs.

"We have seen an increase in usage of our therapy in our medical plan for our members," he said.

"I was hired in 33 years ago as a service attendant at RTD and you had issues with drugs then, but not to the level it is today," he said. "When I was hired in, I was brought to clean buses, not to find a body in it."

In one of the transit worker's videos, he is calling out to a thin man who is bent over, limbs tangled under a rail seat. He slowly pulls the unresponsive man out to the car floor. Three cigarettes and a piece of foil lie beside the seat where he passed out. The worker sprays the medicine in the man's nose and slaps his chest until he heaves a breath. Minutes later the man vomits and comes to. Dazed, he walks away.

"Do I think I'm saving their lives? Yes, absolutely," the worker said. "Do I think that's gonna help them in the long run? Probably not."

"I go home and I pray. I hope that this is like some sort of wake-up call for them or something," he said. "But I don't have my head in the sand thinking that it's going to be."

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
The Kannapolis Police Department is investigating a homicide after one person was fatally shot Wednesday afternoon.

Police said officers responded to Beaumont Avenue to assist EMS with an unresponsive patient shortly after 3:30 p.m. At the scene, 48-year-old Willie Johnson, Jr. was pronounced deceased. He suffered from gunshot wounds, according to police.

ALSO READ: Hickory homicide may be connected to other shootings across town, police say

On Friday, the Kannapolis Police Department announced that a suspect had been arrested and charged with murder in connection with the case. Derick De-Arlo Hinson Sr. was found in Lancaster, South Carolina, and he was taken into custody by sheriffs deputies in the county. Hes currently being held without bond and is awaiting extradition back to North Carolina.

Its not yet clear what led to the shooting.

Police said this investigation is being handled by Kannapolis Police Departments Criminal Investigations Division. Anyone with information about this incident is asked to contact Lieutenant James Livengood at 704-920-4082 or Investigator Arthur Reid at 704-920-4070.

VIDEO: Hickory homicide may be connected to other shootings across town, police say
One week after passing the debt deal, House Republicans say they may try to force through bigger budget cuts

The News

House Republicans are already floating a plan to cut federal spending lower than the levels outlined in their big debt ceiling deal with the Biden Administration, setting up Washingtons next high-stakes fiscal showdown just one week after passing the bill into law.

Faced with a furious conservative backlash over the legislation, GOP leaders are now suggesting they may let lawmakers write appropriations bills later this year that spend less than Congress approved under the borrowing limit agreement. The bargain with the White House put in place maximum spending caps for 2024, but Capitol Hill still needs to pass a specific budget in order to avoid an eventual government shutdown.

"The one thing you've got to realize, whenever you put a cap, that's the ceiling, Speaker Kevin McCarthy said this week. We can always spend less. I've always advocated for spending less money."

Democrats say Republicans are already attempting to renege on a carefully negotiated deal. But at least one key Senate Republican is raising an eyebrow as well, suggesting House conservatives could be headed for a broader clash with the upper chamber.

Sen. Susan Collins, ranking Republican on the Appropriations panel, said Thursday McCarthys spending comments caught her off guard. I was surprised to hear the speaker say that because this was always envisioned as a cap we would go up to, she said at a Punchbowl News live event.

Know More

McCarthys remarks came as he struggled to quell a revolt from the hard-right House Freedom Caucus that effectively shut down business on the chambers floor this week. Many conservatives are frustrated that Republicans settled for a deal with Biden that essentially held the non-defense portion of the annual budget flat next year after initially passing a party-line bill that would have slashed it by $130 billion.

Rep. Garret Graves, McCarthys top lieutenant throughout the debt ceiling talks, said that right-wing Republicans didnt want to redo the deal with the White House, but rather were looking to build upon it. He suggested that spending under the current caps would be consistent with the original deal.

We talked about a paradigm shift [in] how we budget in Washington, he told Semafor. This discussion is something that was entirely intended as part of the overall negotiations.

Unsurprisingly, Democrats feel differently. Speaker McCarthy and House Republican negotiators look like they're running away from commitments they made, Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told reporters this week. Some have already warned that a major fight could be waiting ahead.

I think we're at the beginning stages of a drama because the House Republican caucus has a very narrow margin, Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, who sits on the Appropriations panel, told Semafor. There are clearly demonstrably a number of them who were unhappy with the deal, voted against it, and are now trying to relitigate it.

Good for them, he added, sarcastically.

The View From Defense Hawks

While House conservatives have complained that the debt limit bill didnt cut spending enough, Collins and other influential Senate Republicans have criticized the debt agreement for skimping on the Pentagon. The law would increase the defense budget 3.3% in 2024, and 1% in 2024, which the senator from Maine described as completely inadequate. Some Senators have already begun talking about trying to get around the caps by passing supplemental defense spending. But any effort by the House to cut domestic spending more deeply could make such a deal harder.

Another reason for defense hawks to worry: If Congress cant approve its 12 separate appropriations bills by January 1, the debt limit law is set to impose an automatic 1% across the board cut on the annual budget, meaning the Pentagon and veterans benefits would get slashed instead of receiving a modest boost.

Joseph and Kadia's View

Another big spending battle is starting to look almost inevitable as Congress gears up for appropriations. But if House conservatives end up picking a fight with Senate Republicans here as well as Democrats, it would set up a very different dynamic than the debt ceiling conflict, where GOP lawmakers in both chambers united behind McCarthy.

So far, House Republican leaders say they arent worried about a staredown with the Senate. Graves said the House and Senate will be in touch throughout the appropriations process, but the reality is that the House gets to work its will and and we're not going to sit here and represent the Senate's position.

Rules Committee chair Tom Cole, R-Okla. told Semafor that the spending caps passed in the debt limit process were only opening positions of negotiations, and that he thinks theres a path forward with the Senate. Well go to a conference. If they can pass their bills, you know, we have our bills and we'll sit down together and well find a middle ground.

He was a bit more diplomatic than a GOP House aide Semafor spoke to, who said, I do think the House is done eating what the Senate feeds us.

Room for Disagreement

Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, who sits on the Appropriations Committee and tends to be something of an optimist, said the recent House drama hasnt affected his calculus and he still believes its possible to get 12 spending spending bills through Congress by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

I don't think it's changed my perspective. The House is going to do what the House is gonna do and I think we got to do our job, Tester told Semafor. If the House doesn't deal with it, then we're going to have problems but they'll have a lot of pressure to do it if we pass it.
Only 10% of Ukrainians ready to give up some territories for peace

Ukrainians are not ready to give up their land to achieve peace: only 10% of respondents believe that to achieve peace and preserve independence, it is possible to give up some territories.

Source: survey results from Kyiv International Institute of Sociology held from 26 May to 5 June

Quote from Kyiv International Institute of Sociology: "The absolute majority of respondents, 84%, continue to agree that no territorial concessions are permissible, even if the war lasts longer and there are other threats. Only 10% believe some territories can be abandoned to achieve peace and preserve independence."

Details: Sociologists note territorial concessions have been raised regularly since May 2022, and there have been practically no significant changes in public sentiment over the past year.

"Each time, the absolute majority of respondents (82-87%) opposed territorial concessions, and an absolute minority (8-10%) were ready for it," the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology stressed.

Sociologists note that most of the population in all regions of Ukraine stands against territorial concessions. Among residents of Ukraine's east, 75% oppose concessions (and only 13% are ready for concessions), and among residents of the South, 86% reject this idea (only 8% are ready to give up territories).

In addition, most citizens oppose any concessions, regardless of what language they mainly communicate in at home. So, among Ukrainian-speaking citizens, 85% stand against concessions (with 10 percent saying they're ready for concessions), and out of Russian-speaking citizens, 80% are not ready for any concessions, with 13 percent ready to give up territories.

Sociologists noted that the sample included only 19 respondents (out of 1,029) who continue to identify themselves as Russians. It is reported that this number is not enough for statistically reliable calculations. However, it is significant that among them, only two respondents accept certain concessions, and 15, on the contrary, reject such an idea.

The study was conducted from 26 May to 5 June. 1029 respondents living in all regions of Ukraine (except the Autonomous Republic of Crimea) were interviewed by telephone with the use of a random sample of mobile numbers. The survey was conducted with adults (aged 18 years and older) citizens of Ukraine who, at the time of the survey, lived on the territory of Ukraine (within the limits controlled by the Ukrainian authorities until 24 February 2022).

The sample did not include residents of territories that were temporarily not controlled by the Ukrainian authorities until 24 February 2022 (Crimea, Sevastopol, certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts), and the survey was not conducted with citizens who went abroad after 24 February 2022.

Formally, under normal circumstances, the margin error of such a sample (with a probability of 0.95 and taking into account the design effect of 1.1) did not exceed 3.4% for indicators close to 50%; 3.0% for indicators close to 25%; 2.1% for indicators close to 10%, and 1.5% for indicators close to 5%.

A certain systematic deviation is added to the specified formal error in war conditions. But sociologists believe that the results obtained are highly representative, allowing us to analyse the public mood of the population reliably.

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Only 26% of Meta employees are confident in Mark Zuckerberg and company leadership, according to a new report

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg Getty

Only 26% of Meta employees are confident in company leadership, The Washington Post reported.

The falling morale follows months of layoffs and spending cuts at the company.

Despite internal sentiment, Wall Street is hot on Meta: The stock is up 112% so far this year.

It's another not-so-great day of news for Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.

In a survey conducted between April 26 and May 10, only 26% of Meta employees who responded to an internal survey were confident in their company's leadership, according to a report from The Washington Post, which cited a personal familiar with internal company matters. That marked a drop of five percentage points from October 2022, according to the Post.

Only 43% of employees who responded said they felt valued, the Post reported, down from 58% in October.

Low employee morale at the tech giant follows months of tumult, which included multiple rounds of layoffs, spending cuts, and strategy changes as part of Zuckerberg's plans for a "year of efficiency."

"They're constantly wondering, 'Is there another round coming? Am I next?'" Kerry Sulkowicz, a corporate advisor and managing principal of the Boswell Group, told Insider of Meta employees in April.

Layoffs were first announced last November, when Meta said it would slash 11,000 jobs, or about 13% of its workforce. A hiring freeze and spending cuts were also announced.

In March, a second round of layoffs hit the social media giant, this time affecting 10,000 staffers. The last of that round of cuts took place at the end of May.

"You've shattered the morale and confidence in leadership of many high performers who work with intensity," one employee posted in an internal forum following the second round of cuts. "Why should we stay at Meta?"

Remaining employees are now left to take on more responsibilities and get accustomed to new managers, the Post reported, citing four current and former employees.

The company has pulled back on its Metaverse ambitions while embracing AI. The U-turn on the Metaverse has left employees doubting Zuckerberg's leadership abilities, The New York Times reported.

A Meta spokesperson challenged the idea that the company is backing away from the Metaverse, pointing to what Zuckerberg said during the company's most recent earnings call.

"Beyond AI, the other major technology wave we're focused on is the metaverse," Zuckerberg said. "A narrative has developed that we're somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse vision, so I just want to say upfront that that's not accurate. We've been focusing on both AI and the metaverse for years now, and we will continue to focus on both."

Wall Street disagrees. Meta stock is up 112% year-to-date. Some of the firm's AI bets are beginning to pay off, with advertisers flocking to the platform for its AI marketing tools.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Opinion: Im a former champion equestrian. It pains me to see so many horses dying on the racetrack

Im a lifelong horse person. My father was a horse trainer. I started riding when I was three and was competing by the time I was four. I was an eight-time world champion equestrian. Horses were my life.

Marty Irby - Marty Irby

After leaving the sport, I moved into animal protection and have worked in the field for much of the last decade. It has been devastating to watch the incredibly large number of horse deaths  especially this years spike at Louisville, Kentuckys Churchill Downs.

By the time the call to post came at last months running of the 149th Kentucky Derby, seven thoroughbred race horses had died in the space of a week at Churchill Downs. Two of the animals perished on Derby Day itself.

Animal activists estimate that some 2,000 race horses die at race tracks in the United States each year while running in, or being trained to race in, what some call the Sport of Kings.

More horses died this year ahead of the running of the Preakness Stakes, the second leg of the Triple Crown in thoroughbred horse racing. One horse was euthanized on the track during the race.

Sadly, its far from unusual for horses to be euthanized after being injured during a race or while training for one. A leg injury can lead to complications as the animals other legs try to carry its weight, which can sometimes exceed half a ton. And the bones often shatter during such injuries, making it extremely difficult to repair.

My hope is that things will be different at the running this weekend of the third race of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes. Horse lovers like me, as well as horse racing enthusiasts, are hoping that new anti-doping and medication control measures will lead to fewer of the animals dying on the track or needing to be euthanized.

In some sports, when we think of humans and doping, were talking about bulking up, adding muscle and additional heft to a lighter frame. But in the equine world, one particularly common form of doping works in an entirely different way.

The animals are often administered a diuretic in the hours leading up to a race, which can cause a horse to shed 20 to 30 pounds of water weight before a race. This gives these horses a huge advantage on the race track: The lighter these animals are, the faster they can run in the short term.

Once the animals cross the finish line, theyre rehydrated  jugged full of fluids to recover. Over long periods of time being repeatedly administered this diuretic, the horses bones may become brittle and susceptible to fractures and micro-fractures that some trainers try to cover up with pain-masking agents  forcing the horses to run on unsound legs so that the racing industry can make a quick buck.

These are sometimes the same horses whose legs snap mid-run and are euthanized on the field. Administering performance-enhancing drugs has led to untold misery for these animals, who run faster but suffer huge physical distress.

Administering diuretics to race horses is extremely common. About nine of 10 horses at the starting line will have been administered diuretics ahead of the race.

What other sport in the world would allow the athletes to be so dispensable, and die amidst the sports most high-profile events? Unlike humans, these equine athletes have no voice, and they have no choice in the matter of being administered harmful and deadly drugs.

Its not that there hasnt been oversight of the sport. But a balkanized system of state regulatory bodies has allowed trainers to move from one state to another and keep running horses once theyve seen a violation of the rules.

New rules restricting such practices are the fruit of years of effort by many of us who advocate for these wonderful animals. For the past seven years, I have worked to help enact and implement the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act that was signed into law in December of 2020. It was the first federal horse protection law enacted in half a century. And the new measures ban the use of drugs on race day at all thoroughbred tracks in the country.

In the fight to bring about the change, weve had good support from some of the leading entities in the sport: The Jockey Club, (which is the thoroughbred registry), the owners of the Preakness, the Derby and the Breeders Cup  almost all of the major legitimate entities in horse racing have been with us on this issue, in support of legislation that imposes more aggressive measures to protect thoroughbreds.

In March 2020, just weeks after I testified before Congress about the doping issues in the industry, horse racing was plagued by the arrest and indictments of 27 trainers, veterinarians, and others. The indictments were followed by a Washington Post editorial entitled Horse Racing Has Outlived its Time.

Many race horse deaths occur at small tracks most people have never heard of  and some of the most celebrated ones as well. The Kentucky Derby  the fastest two minutes in sports  is supposed to be American horse racings finest hour, attended by thousands of fans in fancy hats and seersucker suits sipping Mint Juleps. But this year, amid the spike in horse deaths at Churchill Downs, a dark cloud has hung over the sport.

By the time the Preakness Stakes was run two weeks after the Derby, another horse died at Pimlico in Baltimore, Maryland. Meanwhile, just down the road, 13 additional horses have died this year at its neighboring Laurel Park.

Its a sign that the sport may finally be changing that Churchill Downs released a remarkable statement late last week stating that it was shutting down horse racing operations at the track to examine safety measures. Its long past time for such extraordinary measures, especially in what has been a deadly season in the sport.

Only time will tell if the new anti-doping law is properly enforced and the bad actors are eradicated. In the meantime, the betting public and animal advocates alike remain hopeful that the running of the Belmont will see no new deaths.

I dont think its realistic to think that horse racing is going to go away anytime soon. But my goal is not to end it, but to improve the lives of the horses for however long horse racing is around.

Horses have been subject to all sorts of abuses that Im trying to change. That means ending the killing of retired race horses, many of which end up in the horse slaughter pipeline.

Im also fighting for an end to the whipping of horses during training and races. A new oversight body, the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, has implemented track safety rules that included a limit on the number of strikes and mandated the use of a light foam whip instead of a leather whip. It took years of lobbying for that change to be put in place.

So, change can happen. And more progress is possible in the future for these wonderful animals. I hope to see the end of doping that has caused so many thoroughbreds to needlessly lose their lives while racing.

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The details of Donald Trumps new criminal indictment have just emerged but already people wonder whether a trial on these federal charges could be finished before the November 2024 elections. The answer, for a number of reasons, is almost certainly not.

The former president will be arraigned Tuesday in Miami on 37 counts  including 31 counts of willfully retaining national defense information, much of it involving Top Secret documents, as well as several charges for obstructing justice and concealing or lying about sensitive documents. (The case has been assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump-appointed justice who last year ordered a special master to review documents seized in the search of Mar-a-Lago and was later reversed on appeal.)

If Trump were an ordinary person charged with a run-of-the-mill federal crime, like a bank robbery or a narcotics trafficking offense, it would be unlikely a trial would occur within a year of the arraignment. Criminal cases take a long time to wind their way through the system because defendants have the constitutional right to review discovery and make motions, there are often plea discussions with the government, and trials can be challenging to schedule given courts busy trial calendars.

But this is no ordinary case.



Some things about this case filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith could make a trial easier to schedule. For one thing, Trump is not going to concede anything so its unlikely there would be significant plea negotiations. And given the stature of the defendant and his unusually high public profile as a presidential candidate, a judge would almost certainly clear out their calendar to make time for a trial if the former president wanted to put this matter behind him before election season.

But the factors that make this case more difficult to schedule are far more significant.

Any national security case comes with additional obstacles that make a speedy trial difficult. Trumps attorneys will need to obtain clearance to review classified material, a special order will need to be entered to ensure that the material is properly protected, and there are likely going to be fights over classified material provided by the government in discovery.

There are many tools that the government typically uses in national security cases to protect classified material even though the defendant has a right to examine the evidence against him and there is a right to a public trial. Given that Smith has included charges involving 31 separate classified documents  an aggressive approach  he will likely make use of some of those tools.

And the discovery in this case will almost certainly involve classified material beyond the documents charged in the indictment. Under the Classified Information Procedures Act, Trump would be entitled to an interlocutory appeal (made in the middle of case rather than after the verdict) if he receives a ruling against him regarding that discovery. An appeal could take many weeks, if not months. The government also has a right to a mid-trial appeal if the judge rules against them.

Even if there is no appeal, and the government bends over backwards to speed this case along, it will proceed more slowly than the typical case. Judge Cannon doesnt have extensive experience dealing with national security cases that are often seen by judges in D.C. This raises unique issues, given that the discovery and evidence in the case involves national defense secrets.

So we should take Smiths claim that he intends to give Trump a speedy trial with a grain of salt. As a practical matter, Smith has laid out a case that is overwhelming and he has not held back. While Trump is entitled to a speedy trial, Smith did not streamline his case and it would take a herculean effort to bring this to trial next year.



Trump said on Thursday that he intends to prove his innocence very soundly and hopefully very quickly. If Trump wants a speedy trial, and the judge honors that desire, this case could be tried before election season. But practically speaking there is only a narrow window of time in which this could happen. Election Day is Nov. 5, 2024, but as a practical matter, its hard seeing Trump agreeing to a trial during the primary season in the early part of the year or between the Republican Convention in mid-July of 2024 and Election Day if he is in fact the Republican nominee for president. A criminal trial of a major party nominee in the weeks leading up to the election could create the impression that the judicial system is interfering in the electoral process. So any trial would need to occur in the roughly three to four-month window between the end of the primary season and the convention.

Pushing the trial date past the November election would not be hard for Trumps lawyers to do. For over 20 years, I have handled federal criminal cases as both a federal prosecutor and as a defense attorney. Criminal defense attorneys have many tools (both legitimate and ethically questionable) if they want to delay a trial. While not guilty verdicts cant be appealed by the government, guilty verdicts are always appealed and are often followed by other proceedings challenging the verdict, and judges dont like to try the same criminal case twice.

Defense attorneys can create potential issues for appeal by telling the judge that they are not prepared to proceed, have been unable to review discovery with their client, or have been unable to locate a crucial witness. Defendants can fire their attorneys shortly before trial and hire new attorneys, which creates a lengthy delay as the new attorneys get up to speed. Criminal defendants in cases I have handled have delayed their trials for several years by repeatedly firing attorneys.

Trump parted ways with two of his attorneys, James Trusty and John Rowley, just hours after news of the indictment broke. Trump said he planned to have the attorney handling his criminal case in state court in New York take over the federal case as well. That will definitely slow down the process of getting ready for trial.

The presence of a second defendant in the case, Trumps Mar-a-Lago employee Walt Nauta, who was videotaped moving boxes of documents, also complicates and potentially slows the trial calendar by introducing a second set of defense attorneys who can also work to slow down a joint trial of Trump and Nauta.

So the ball is in Trumps court. He could easily delay this trial past the election  and there is every reason why he would, from fundraising advantages to avoiding a distraction from the campaign trail to the very real risk that a conviction might present.

The end result is that the proceedings of this unprecedented case will hover over the electoral landscape through all of next year and potentially well into the administration of the next president, whoever that is.
When our homeless response outreach teams first met Curtis, he had been living on the streets for nearly 20 years. He was sleeping in a tent under a freeway near downtown Houston. Following the unexpected death of his mother, he had fallen into a deep depression. A lack of adequate mental health support had led him to self-medication, then drug-related incarceration, then homelessness.

Marc Eichenbaum - City of Houston

But one day last November, Curtis couldnt stop smiling. He was moving into permanent supportive housing  his own apartment with a bright blue door. These days, Curtis enjoys watching movies and reading books in his home, which he now shares with a new companion: a kitten named Bella.

In Houston, we believe our most difficult issues, including homelessness, are solvable. We know that people like Curtis are not beyond help, so long as we work collaboratively and strategically to assist them. Our approach to tackling this seemingly intractable problem can serve as a guide to other American cities seeking to address growing homeless populations.

Michael Nichols - 1133 Studios

We should note that homelessness got worse here before it got better. In 2011, the Houston area had one of the largest homeless populations in the country. With the threat of homelessness only increasing, and dismay over decades of substantial investments without results, our community was propelled into action.

Since 2012, more than 28,000 people who have experienced homelessness in the greater Houston area have been housed. This has resulted in a more than a 60% decrease in overall homelessness in just over a decade.

So, what changed? In 2012, we came together as a unified, regional, homeless response system called The Way Home and chose the nonprofit Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County as our lead agency.

Then we made three crucial decisions. First, we decided to work together as a collaborative system, aligned around a standardized set of goals, processes and strategies, rather than as individual organizations and government entities each trying to chip away at the problem. Today, more than 100 entities in the Houston area are working together and combining their efforts and resources to move the needle on reducing homelessness. Our collaboration includes using a centralized database to capture information and track the service needs of people experiencing homelessness and using a standardized assessment to determine which housing and/or service interventions best suit each household.

Second, we embraced the data-proven best practices of Housing First, a strategy focused on getting individuals and families out of homelessness and into permanent housing before helping them address any other problems. We do this via voluntary wraparound support services, e.g., mental health or substance abuse counseling, health care, job training and so on. The services help keep the person housed, and the housing is what makes the services effective.

Third, we housed the most vulnerable people first. When the average person sees someone experiencing homelessness and struggling with mental illness, they assume that individual is dangerous or needs hospitalization. Our experience is that most of these folks stabilize in housing with the appropriate level of services.

Moreover, we have found that most people fall into homelessness because of rapid and unexpected financial losses  those that neednt result in catastrophe, if only we had the right policies in place  and that homelessness often exacerbates mental health deterioration and the need to self-medicate. In other words, mental illness is not the driver of homelessness in most cases.

Thats why housing in our homeless response system has three components. First, we provide an actual home  most often an apartment  with a key, a lease in the persons name and everything needed to stay in that unit for the long haul. Second, we give them a subsidy for the rent. Depending on the program, residents may still contribute 30% of their income. Finally, we ensure support services to help the person move forward psychologically, emotionally and financially.

Our success is deeply intertwined with our collaborative approach  bringing together the city of Houston, Harris County, public housing authorities, major philanthropic foundations, faith groups, the private sector and more than 100 nonprofit agencies.

This became particularly critical during Covid-19, when homelessness became a present danger to many people who were already living on the brink. As challenging as it was, we reframed this crisis as an opportunity to do more to assist them. The city of Houston and Harris County strategically invested federal pandemic aid, alongside contributions from private philanthropy, allowing our system to house, or offer homelessness diversion services to, more than 12,000 people during the pandemic.

We have also found that housing with supportive services is the solution to encampments  sites where unhoused people set up groups of tents. We have holistically decommissioned dozens of encampments by placing close to 400 people on the path to housing.

We are doing this difficult work not just because it is the moral thing to do, but also because it is the fiscally responsible thing to do. It is less expensive to house an individual and provide services (we estimate about $18,000 per year) than the multiple of costs of putting people in jail or allowing them to suffer on the streets and being forced to make regular use of our emergency rooms (which national estimates range from $30,000 to $50,000 and up).

As communities focus on reducing homelessness, our experience is that often the last remaining people on our streets are those suffering from severe behavioral health issues who need a higher level of care. From the local mental health authority, the local Veterans Affairs office and law enforcement to the public health and homeless response systems, many organizations have responded and attempted to help with limited, sustained success.

Weve observed that, too often, each organization engaged in this work independently exhausts all the tools at their disposal and either succumbs to despair and accepts defeat, or absolves themselves of accountability, pointing to another system that should be responsible. Meanwhile, our neighbors are left to suffer and languish on our streets.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and county leaders have said we cannot become complacent and accept the streets as the ultimate destination for our most vulnerable neighbors. It is our collective responsibility to act. A diverse group of cross-system leaders now regularly meet to strategically develop, coordinate and implement tailored, client-based interventions to stabilize and house our most challenged individuals suffering from chronic and acute behavioral health issues.

Houston has not solved homelessness in its entirety. But by investing in proven, effective intervention  housing  we are making homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring for people. In fact, in our latest performance evaluation period, approximately 90% of people we helped house did not fall back into homelessness for at least two years.

As Curtis himself explained, his being on the street wasnt for lack of trying to get to a better place. But without our outreach teams, he believes he would not have found housing. They never gave up on me, he said.

Yes, we have ongoing challenges, yet our commitment to persistence, innovation and collaboration remains strong. Just as Houston learned effective strategies for addressing homelessness from other cities like Denver and Salt Lake City when we were creating The Way Home, other cities can learn from Houston. We are stronger when cities and counties across the nation unite and work together on the pressing challenges ahead.

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A teacher at El Dorado High School in Placentia, above, was placed on leave over a lesson on sexual anatomy in which she discussed prostate stimulation, anal penetration and sex toys. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

Prostate stimulation, anal penetration and sex toys: These were the topics discussed in an Orange County high school class that led to a teacher being put on leave.

Judy Rehburg, a teacher of physiology and AP Environmental Science at El Dorado High School in Placentia, was filmed by a student discussing sexual anatomy and related subjects with the class.

The minute-long video begins with Rehburg sitting on a desk in front of projections of male and female anatomical diagrams on a screen. She explains how the prostate gland can be stimulated through touch, both externally and through anal penetration.

"That's why, for male and male, anal sex is still very pleasurable," Rehburg said.

Later on in the same video, Rehburg explains the commercial availability of sex toys at big-box retailers such as Target and CVS.

The clip was first posted to Instagram in a now-deleted post that was quickly and widely circulated. The Orange County Register reported that the video led to parents filing complaints with the district, which resulted in Rehburg being placed on leave.

Alyssa Griffiths, the communications director of the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District, issued a statement that Rehburg was on paid administrative leave while an investigation was conducted, though the results of the investigation would be kept private due to personnel matters.

"District employees are trusted to exercise professional judgment when deciding whether or not a particular issue is suitable for study or discussion," the statement read. "In the classroom, employees act on behalf of the district and are expected to follow the adopted curriculum, and they should not advocate personal opinions or viewpoints."

In response to the backlash and Rehburg's suspension, students created an Instagram account under the handle "@FreeJudy." The account features a screenshot message attributed to a student in the video who said that the video was taken out of context and that Rehburg got on the subject after she was asked by a student about the prostate gland.

"From a student perspective, she never encouraged us to do anything bad and only spread information educationally," the message stated.

The incident is among the latest LGBTQ+ controversies in Southern California public schools generating backlash from parents, administrators and right-wing extremists. Last month, the Temecula Valley Unified School District rejected an elementary school social studies textbook that mentions Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, during a meeting in which school board president Joseph Komrosky baselessly labeled Milk a "pedophile."

Other incidents include a Pride Day celebration that resulted in protests outside Saticoy Elementary School in North Hollywood. On Tuesday, three people were arrested after fighting erupted during a protest outside a Glendale Unified School District board meeting where the discussion of LGBTQ+ Pride Month was on the agenda. Members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group whose associates were among those convicted of seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6 riot, were reportedly in attendance, with some leaving behind stickers promoting the organization.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
The man who assaulted FBI agents with an "Indiana Jones" style booby trap has been convicted.

Gregory Lee Rodvelt, 71, was found guilty of assaulting a federal officer and discharging a firearm in relation to a crime of violence last week by a federal jury.

Rodvelt injured an FBI agent in 2018 via a wheelchair rigged to fire ammunition at anyone who attempted to move it. The agent was shot in the leg and taken to the local hospital for medical attention.

FBI AGENT SHOT BY BOOBY TRAPPED WHEELCHAIR: 'MUCH LIKE A SCENE FROM... INDIANA JONES'

Police officers had gone to the home of 66-year-old Gregory Rodvelt in the small town of Williams on Sept. 7, 2018 at the request of a real estate lawyer who was selling the property.

While walking around the 15-acre property, officers slipped passed a minivan outfitted with spring-loaded jaws of animal snares and walked around a circular hot tub turned on its side that was rigged to roll over any trespasser who triggered a tripwire, the newspaper reported.

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"(It was) much like a scene from the movie Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark in which actor Harrison Ford is forced to outrun a giant stone boulder that he inadvertently triggered by a booby trap switch," the complaint said.

MINNESOTA MAN SHOT BY FBI AGENTS LIVESTREAMED HIS FINAL MOMENTS IN HAUNTING FOOTAGE

An FBI special agent and three state police bomb technicians then approached the manufactured house  blasting open the fortified front door  but never making it past an empty wheelchair that was outfitted to stop anyone who moved it.

FBI agent in a jacket brandishing the bureau's insignia.

According to officials, the wheelchair was outfitted with a fishing line, shotgun ammunition, and other items that, when pushed, triggered an explosion. An X-ray revealed that a .410-gauge shotgun pellet hit the agents leg.

U.S. District Court Judge Michael McShane will sentence Rodvelt at a later date, according to the US District Attorney's Office.

"Assaulting a federal officer with a deadly or dangerous weapon is punishable by up to 20 years in federal prison. Using and discharging a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence is punishable by up to life in federal prison," the office said in a statement Tuesday.

Fox News Digital's Lucia Suarez Sang contributed to this report.
Smoke From Canadian Wildfires Blankets US Cities

A pedestrian wears a face mask as smoke from Canadian wildfires blankets Philadelphia on June 8, 2023. Credit - Hannah Beier/Bloomberg Getty Images

It looked like 2020 on the streets of New York City this week, as many residents unearthed their pandemic masks to protect against air that smelled, tasted, and looked smoky due to raging wildfires in Canada.

Masking during periods of poor air quality is not a new concept, even in the U.Sbut it used to be a novelty when it happened. Everyone is staying indoors and the people who are outside are wearing masks of one kind or another. Its totally weird to see. This is a creepy feeling, a spokesperson from San Francisco General Hospital told NBC News when the 2018 Camp Fire compromised air quality there.

What felt different this time around was how quickly and seamlessly many people reached for their face coveringsa sign that three years of pandemic living have left a mark on the American public, turning masks from something very few people have on hand to a household necessity.

Dr. Thomas Dailey, a pulmonary and critical-care specialist at Kaiser Permanente in California, says that even prior to the pandemic, he routinely recommended that California residents wear N95 respirators during wildfires. But people were not used to having masks at home, Dailey says, and stores often sold out of their limited supplies due to panic buying.

Nowas has been the case in other countries since long before the pandemiceven people who dont mask every day probably have some in inventory, and theyre far easier to buy in stores. People already have their masks. They know how to use it, theyre used to it, theyve heard people [explain] the difference between a surgical mask and an N95 mask, Dailey says. Theres greater familiarity and less reluctance to put them on.

Contrast that with the early days of the pandemic, when medical masks were so infrequently used by the U.S. public that many people had to fashion their own using T-shirts, bandanas, or scraps of fabric. Masking quickly became habitual, though: by June 2020, around two-thirds of U.S. adults said they always or usually wore a mask in stores.

Masking has dropped off significantly since then. As of January, less than half of U.S. adults said they had worn a mask over the prior three months, according to Harris Poll data commissioned by TIME.

But you dont unlearn habitual behaviors, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who researches the U.S. publics scientific knowledge at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, in a May 2023 interview with TIME. Jamieson predicted that the muscle memory of masking would come back quickly in the face of a comparably serious health threat. She seems to have been right: Rite Aid reported a nearly 1,500% spike in mask sales in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut this week, according to Bloomberg.

Still, theres a key difference between a wildfire threat and a viral one. With a wildfire you can see the hazard. You can see it, you can smell it, you can taste it, says Raina MacIntyre, a professor at Australias University of New South Wales who has researched mask use during Australian wildfires. Thats not the case with a virus.

Mask use dropped off significantly as people grew tired of taking COVID-19 precautions, and even this past winters surge in respiratory viruses wasnt enough to get some people to cover up. The question is whether people will keep reaching for their mask when confronted with invisible health threats, like viruses, in the future.
(Bloomberg) -- Many of Donald Trumps rivals for the 2024 Republican nomination have found plenty to criticize the former president about, but are lining up to support him after his indictment on federal charges.

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Wary of alienating the frontrunner's loyal base, most of the challengers have turned their criticism on the Justice Department rather than capitalizing on Trump's second indictment, this time over his refusal to return classified documents. One longshot candidate has even pledged to pardon Trump if elected.

Heres what they had to say:

Ron DeSantisThe Florida governor, Trumps closest challenger, quickly condemned the indictment as political bias in a tweet.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation, DeSantis wrote.

He also promised to bring accountability to the DOJ.

Mike PenceTrumps former vice president, who escaped an attack by Trumps supporters during the Capitol insurrection, tried to thread the needle.

Im deeply troubled to see this indictment move forward, Pence said in an interview with conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt. I had said that I had hoped that the DOJ would see its way clear not to move forward here. But let me be very clear. No one is above the law.

Tim ScottThe South Carolina senator denounced the indictment in a Fox News interview on Thursday and echoed claims of the weaponization of the Justice Department.

You dont have to be a Republican to see injustice and want to fix it, Scott said. You dont have to be a Democrat to see injustice and want to fix it. You just have to be an American and stand up for the right thing.

If elected, Scott said, he would purge all of the injustices and impurities of the Justice Department.

Vivek RamaswamyThe Ohio biotech entrepreneur went the furthest in his defense of Trump, saying that he would pardon him promptly if he were elected in 2024. Echoing fellow Republicans, he accused President Joe Biden of instructing the Justice Department to target his political rival. Biden said he has had no contact with the department on this.

It would be much easier for me to win this election if Trump werent in the race, but I stand for principles over politics, he said in a lengthy Twitter statement Thursday.

Chris ChristieThe former New Jersey governor, who called Trump a self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog on Tuesday, described the charging document on Friday as "devastating" and "a very, very evidence-filled indictment.""The bigger issue for our country is: Is this the type of conduct that we want from someone who wants to be president of the United States?" Christie, a former US attorney, told CNN. "To take national security documents involving warfare and our nuclear program to keep them in their home when they're not allowed to do so? Exposing them to potentially being seen by the number of people and then actually showing them to people showing off? This is irresponsible conduct."

Asa HutchinsonThe former Arkansas governor was the most critical of Trump and reiterated his call for him to drop out of the race.

Donald Trumps actionsfrom his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of lawshould not define our nation or the Republican Party, Hutchinson said in a statement.

Nikki HaleyTrumps former United Nations ambassador, who has treaded very lightly in criticizing the partys two-time standard bearer, offered more of the same Friday.

This is not how justice should be pursued in our country, her campaign said in a statement. The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics. Its time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions.

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PARSIPPANY  Assistant Superintendent Robert Sutter has been elevated to acting superintendent of the township school district, where Barbara Sargent is leaving at the end of her contract on June 30.

Sutter, who has served the district as assistant superintendent in charge of human resources, will assume his new post on July 1. Sargent, hired in 2017, is moving to the same position in the West Morris Regional School District, which operates two high schools serving the Chesters, Mendhams and Washington.

The Parsippany district announced Sutter's appointment on Thursday. The largest school district in Morris County, Parsippany operates 14 schools serving 7,200 students, including 10 elementary schools, two middle schools, two high schools and an adult education center.

Assistant Superintendent Dr. Robert Sutter has been appointed acting superintendent of the Parsippany School District.

Im incredibly honored and humbled to be selected to serve as the next superintendent," Sutter wrote in a district statement. "I am excited and honored to continue the districts rich history of success.

When asked about a permanent replacement for Sargent, district public information officer Joan Benos responded "there is no superintendent search" but did not offer more details.

Applications sought to fill school board seat

The Parsippany Board of Education still has some pressing business to conclude before the end of the school year, including replacing board president Tim Berrios, who resigned last month. Applications to fill his seat are due by June 13. The board plans to make the appointment at its meeting on June 22.

Hopeful candidates who possess the qualifications for board members should submit a resume or contact board secretary Robin Tedesco at rctedesco@pthsd.net by 1 p.m. on June 13, the district said. Submissions also can be sent or delivered to the Calabria Education Center, 292 Parsippany Road, Parsippany, N.J. 07054.

Gender dispute: Hanover school district removes 'gender identity' from disputed parental notice policy

For subscribers: After 8 years, huge Parsippany housing and retail project underway. Here's what's coming

Acting superintendent's career

Parsippany Hills High School. 2012 File photo.

Sutter began his career as an elementary teacher in Paterson before arriving in Boonton, where he served as an assistant high school principal and elementary and middle school principal. He later worked as the chief school administrator of the Lebanon Borough School District before coming to Parsippany in 2016.

"The board looks forward to Dr. Sutters continued tenure in the district and a smooth transition into the 2023-2024 school year," the district wrote in its announcement.

William Westhoven is a local reporter for DailyRecord.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: wwesthoven@dailyrecord.com

Twitter: @wwesthoven

This article originally appeared on Morristown Daily Record: Parsippany NJ schools names Robert Sutter acting superintendent
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) heads to a meeting accompanied by Nancy Corinne Prowda, daughter of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), and staff members on May 18, her first day back at work. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

Along with speculation about Sen. Dianne Feinstein's health and ability to serve, the California Democrat's two-month absence from the Capitol this year exposed the deep partisan distrust that permeates the U.S. Senate and threatens to undercut an essential piece of President Biden's agenda.

Democrats remain skeptical about assurances from Republicans that, should Feinstein, 89, leave office before her term ends in early 2025, there would be no political gamesmanship when replacing her on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, the narrowly divided panel that votes on Biden's nominations to the federal judiciary.

Feinstein's return to Washington last month assuaged but did not eradicate those concerns, given her age, frail health and evident struggles to keep a busy schedule and maintain all the duties of a senator.

"One of the unknowns is whether the Republicans would agree to fill her seat. Thats the big unknown for me, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told The Times.

Earlier this spring when she was still absent, Republicans rejected a Democratic effort to replace Feinstein temporarily on the committee with Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.)  with some asserting there was no precedent for it and a senior GOP senator saying that Republicans weren't going to "help what we consider to be controversial or unqualified nominees to get confirmed.

The lack of confidence in Republicans  particularly if a Supreme Court seat were to open  stems from 2016, when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blocked consideration of President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court to fill a vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

McConnell's maneuver, which swayed the court further to the right, remains seared in the minds of Senate Democrats.

"Hes proved to be relentless in his cunning, Blumenthal said of McConnell.

While recovering from a case of shingles, Feinstein missed dozens of votes and, because of the Judiciary Committees tight voting margins, her absence slowed the process of approving judges even as certain nominees were able to get through with bipartisan support. Recent Times polling found that about 42% of voters wanted her to resign so Gov. Gavin Newsom could appoint a replacement to serve out the rest of her term. Two-thirds said her condition means shes not fit for office.

Newsom has promised to appoint a Black woman if either of Californias U.S. Senate seats opened up  a calculus made more difficult because the field vying to replace Feinstein when her current term ends includes just one formidable Black woman candidate: Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland.

If Feinstein were to step down, Newsoms appointee wouldnt automatically be placed on the committees where she serves  which would mean that the Judiciary Committee would have 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats.

In the event of sudden Senate vacancy, a vote to add a senator to a committee would be routine. As opposed to the move to temporarily switch her out this spring, some senior Republicans insist theres ample precedent for permanently replacing her on committees and suggested such a move wouldnt be controversial.

Senate historian emeritus Donald Ritchie said Feinstein's absence was far from the longest and her infirmities while still in office were far from the most severe in the chamber's history. It's a body that through the years has had a number old and sick members who needed to be accommodated.

There was, he said, Virginia Sen. Carter Glass, chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee in the 1940s, who didnt show up to work for four years after becoming incapacitated with heart trouble.

Then there was California Sen. Clair Engel, who had to be wheeled onto the Senate floor in 1964 to break an epic filibuster during debate of the Civil Rights Act. Stricken with a brain tumor, Engel couldnt speak, so instead of aye he pointed to his eye to signify his vote and cement the landmark legislations passage. He died six weeks later.

Ritchie said members are aware of that history, and in the past senators have always been very cooperative about their colleagues' health and replacing them if they were unable to serve out a term. This collegiality stemmed in part from the belief among senators that this could happen to me too, he said. McConnell, who is 81, missed about a month of work this year after a fall resulted in a concussion and some broken ribs.

But now the Judiciary is the Senates most polarized committee, he said. It's not clear someone else could get on the committee if Feinstein couldnt serve. Partisanship keeps that from happening. Its too bad. The institution suffers from that level of political partisanship.

Throughout her absence and in the first weeks she was back, Democrats mostly refrained from speculating about Feinstein's future in the Senate. Many said it was up to her to decide if she was fit to serve or not  while reiterating how important it was for her to be in the Capitol to cast crucial votes in the party's favor.

Then late last month, former Sen. Hillary Clinton opened up the conversation in an interview with Time magazine.

Heres the dilemma: The Republicans will not agree to add someone else to the Judiciary Committee if she retires, she said.

I dont know in her heart about whether she really would or wouldnt [resign], but right now, she cant. Because if were going to get judges confirmed, which is one of the most important continuing obligations that we have, then we cannot afford to have her seat vacant.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R-R.I.), who sits next to Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee, followed with a tweet. Hillary gets it: the same rule Republicans used to block replacing Dianne on Judiciary while she was ill can also be used if she fully resigns from committee or from Senate, he wrote.

McConnell, who would need to corral the necessary votes for a Feinstein replacement, declined to comment for this article.

Longtime Republican strategist Scott Jennings, who is based in McConnells home state of Kentucky, said his former boss is not an anti-institutionalist. He never has been, despite the hyperventilating of the Democrats.

There may be a routine vacancy, Jennings said. Therefore it should be governed by the norms and rules that we would normally operate by. I would just be stunned if somehow the majority party couldnt operate normally.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein attends a Judiciary Committee business meeting on May 18 after returning to the Senate. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who serves on the Judiciary Committee, said if Feinstein resigned he would be in the camp of following the precedent of the Senate, replacing the person, consistent with what we have done in the past.

In a recent interview, Graham told The Times he respected the Senates traditions and wouldnt want to see them undermined in this moment. He said this scenario was far different than Garlands nomination, when Democrats were trying to get somebody confirmed in an election year.

(In 2020, Judge Amy Coney Barrett was nominated by then-President Trump and confirmed to the Supreme Court days before the presidential election by a Republican majority, 52 to 48. It was the first time since the mid-1800s that a nominee didnt receive any votes from the opposing party).

Two top McConnell allies expressed views similar to Graham's but were far less committal than the South Carolina lawmaker. The second-ranking Senate Republican, John Thune of South Dakota, told The Times it was all speculation right now but acknowledged there is precedent for somebody who steps aside permanently for their replacement to get committee assignments.

Another Republican Judiciary Committee member, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who is close to McConnell, made a similar argument.

There would be a negotiation, but I think the biggest objection was trying to do this temporary, Cornyn said. I think if the seat was vacated, that would be very different.

Feinsteins return allowed the committee to take up and send on to the full Senate four judges who lacked Republican support. There are currently 74 judicial vacancies and 29 nominations that are either pending in committee or awaiting a vote of the full Senate. In his first two years in office, Biden was able to get more people lifetime appointments on the federal bench than Trump or President Obama.

Still, comments from elected officials such as Graham leave Democrats little comfort.

"Weve seen Republicans break all sorts of traditions," said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.). "I believe, a decade ago, her request for the consideration of a temporary reassignment off the committee would have easily been granted.





This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Passenger With COPD Sues Delta For Allegedly Giving Her An Empty Oxygen Tank

Delta aircraft mid-air

Delta Airlines is at the center of a lawsuit filed earlier this month. According to Business Insider, a passenger with a lung condition says the crew gave her an empty oxygen tank on a flight.

As a result, her condition allegedly worsened and required an expensive hospitalization. The passenger filed the complaint on June 2, 2023, in a Minnesota Court.

What Lung Condition Does The Passenger Have?

The passenger, Mattie Nash-Jackson, has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

This lung disease is life-long and incurable. The American Lung Association explains, This chronic lung disease causes airflow limitation, meaning theres less air going in and out of the airways.

Women are especially susceptible to COPD, due to having smaller lungs than men. The disease is exacerbated by smoking and exposure to various pollutants.

What Happened?

The passenger boarded Delta Flight 2606 on June 7, 2017. It was on its way to Chicago from Minneapolis.

According to the suit, Deltas crew didnt allow Nash-Jackson to use a personal oxygen tank, even though it had already been approved. The carrier gave her another oxygen tank, which wasnt suitable for her specific needs.

The Delta crew provided another oxygen tank that was allegedly empty. When the plane landed in Chicago, paramedics rushed Nash-Jackson to the hospital.

Paddle Your Own Kanoo reports, Ms. Nash-Jackson alleges that gate agents in MSP (Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport) were negligent for not letting her board with her oxygen concentrator. She managed to get the correct approval to use it from Delta, and had done just that on a connecting flight from Phoenix the same day.

The Medical Bills Were Sky High

Nash-Jacksons time in the hospital resulted in a staggering medical bill of nearly $90,000. Her attorney claims that insufficient access to oxygen resulted in severe and permanent bodily injuries.

Business Insider reports The woman is seeking damages in excess of $50,000  the jurisdictional limit of Minnesota district courts.

A Delta representative told the publication, While we, unfortunately, cannot comment on this specific matter, passenger safety is always Deltas top priority.

RELATED: Delta And JetBlue Are The Latest Airlines To Ban Emotional Support Animals
Paxtons trial must be impeccable, but right now, it looks like a playground fight | Opinion

So far, the pending impeachment trial of Ken Paxton is looking like something between a playground spat and the setup to a barroom brawl. The attorney generals trial in the Senate is a time when its critical to show that order, decorum and justice prevail.

Paxton hired a prominent, boisterous Houston-based attorney, Tony Buzbee, and hes already labeled the impeachment process baloney and a sham.

Just so were clear, the allegations are untrue, they are false, he said at a Wednesday news conference. When I read the 20 articles of impeachment, my first thought was, These are worthless and weak. And Im embarrassed: embarrassed that our House would send something like that out, and vote on something like that, and send it to the Senate with a suggestion that there should be some sort of trial.

Even if it were a sham  and the accusations of wrongdoing at several turns are anything but  there must be a fair and serious process to vet wrongdoing at the highest levels of Texas government. The House impeachment vote was 121-23, an overwhelming partisan indictment of Paxtons behavior and fitness for office.

Calling that an embarrassment says a lot more about Buzbees state of mind than it does the Houses work. As the kids say: Buzbees attitude is giving off vibes of imposter syndrome. So far, Buzbee really is all hat, no cattle.

Its part of a pattern from Paxton and his allies from the moment the House investigation was made clear. Theyve blustered, attempted to intimidate, made political threats and now, seem to be trying to sway the Senate jurors who will decide Paxtons fate.

Over 40 minutes, Buzbee and his partner, Dan Cogdell, presented little firm evidence and again spent most of their time talking about the process in the House rather than the serious charges against their client.

Paxton is welcome to hire whomever he deems is best, and Buzbees got a great track record. But if his lawyers first step is to talk smack, Paxton is either in really deep water or hell be cleared on day one, such will be the extraordinary evidence demonstrating his innocence.

Were not apt to label someone guilty before a trial, but if we really take at face value what Buzbee is telling reporters, then the entire thing thats gone on has been a huge lesson in gaslighting, not to mention a massive waste of taxpayer-funded time. What are the chances?

Its one thing to robustly believe in your clients innocence; its another to boldly claim, as Buzbee did, that Ken Paxton will never be convicted. That raises alarm bells of conspiracy at worst, arrogance at best.

During the news conference, Buzbee flashed a bank statement intended to disprove one of the many allegations, that Paxton donor Nate Paul, had paid for extensive renovations at the politicians Austin home in exchange for aid from Paxtons legal office. The bank statement showed a payment by Paxton to a construction company, Cupertino Builders, that is tied to Paul.

Cupertino Builders was formed in Texas the same month as the payment Buzbee cited was made, according to Texas corporation filings, and was dissolved less than two years later, in June 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported. article reads.

In other words, the timing suggests an effort to cover tracks on the renovation work.

Of course, theres swagger on the House prosecution side, too. The House  which is chock full of accomplished lawyers  nonetheless hired legendary attorneys Dick DeGuerin and Rusty Hardin.

DeGuerin couldnt resist calling the case a slam dunk and pronouncing: The depth of corruption is astonishing.

Need we stress again the importance of a fair trial for Paxton but also for Texans who put their faith in the attorney generals office to help maintain law and order on their behalf?

All of this is aimed at public opinion, but more so at the 31 senators who will serve as jurors. Sure, impeachment is a political process, and political consideration is inevitable. The House must put on a devastating case because there are too many outs for senators to vote no  the process was flawed, the voters have spoken, and impeachment is a punishment in and of itself. Its frustrating that these cases are being made before rules are even set for the trial.

The fact that four pretentious superlawyers are involved does not bode well for a solemn, dignified process based on facts and evidence. Senators must set rules that encourage decorum and seriousness and a real public airing of the facts and evidence. They must decide how to address potential conflicts among the senators, none bigger than Sen. Angela Paxtons. The AGs wife represents part of Collin County, the same seat Ken Paxton held before his statewide election. Other senators may be called as witnesses.

Paxtons defenders will be tempted to try to win a vote to immediately acquit or toss the charges. Senators must resist that. A full, public airing of the charges and evidence is important to the publics confidence in its government.

A serious process requires serious rules and serious participants. So far, weve seen too much game-playing instead.
PCOS and anxiety are often linked. An expert shares what to know

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is known as one of the most common causes of fertility issues in women (typically due to ovulation dysfunction). This can usually be overcome with appropriate treatment, such as ovulation induction or in vitro fertilization (IVF).

In addition to subfertility, PCOS often comes with other frustrating challenges like hirsutism (unwanted hair growth), weight gain (in some patients), insulin resistance and acne. But not all PCOS symptoms are obviousthe condition also increases the risk of mental health issues like anxiety and depression in both teen and adult PCOS patients.

As a reproductive endocrinologist who has worked with PCOS patients for over two decades, I have seen the physical and mental toll this condition can take. Lets explore the link between PCOS and anxiety, how and why PCOS can impact your mental health, and how you can reduce your anxiety and depression symptoms through practical self-care.

PCOS and anxiety: Whats the connection?

If you have PCOS and struggle with anxiety or depression, its not all in your head. Research has shown that women with PCOS have a significantly higher risk of depressive disorders (35%) than those without PCOS (10.7%), even after accounting for modifying factors such as age, race, education level, employment and marital status. Similarly, PCOS sufferers experience a higher level of anxiety than those without the condition.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) has recommended that those with PCOS should be routinely screened and adequately treated for depressive disorders, further validating the difficult experience that many PCOS patients share.

But how exactly does the condition lead to higher levels of anxiety and depression? There are a whole host of challenges that affect people with PCOS: body acceptance, navigating associated health risks and side effects, hormonal fluctuations and a higher chance of subfertility.

Understandably, those with PCOS often face social stigma around their appearance (including excessive hair growth in places like the arms and face alongside hair thinning and acne) and may also undergo mood changes associated with menstrual irregularities.

What causes anxiety and depression in PCOS patients?

Over the years, there has been speculation that a higher body mass index (BMI) might be one cause. However, the increased risk of depressive disorders in women with PCOS was found to be independent of weight, according to research like this 2007 study.

Fluctuations in hormone levels and menstrual cycle irregularities have also been considered as culprits for increased psychological distress in those with PCOS, and it is highly likely that they do play a key role.

Some studies have also highlighted the relationship between PCOS and higher levels of stress. In one instance, women with PCOS reported a significantly greater physiological reaction to stress in comparison to women without the condition and were more likely to be hospitalized with high levels of stress.

While researchers have not been able to pinpoint a single root cause of increased anxiety and depression in individuals with PCOS, the above factors (and others) are highly likely contributors to this phenomenon.

How to reduce anxiety and depression symptoms

Feeling anxious, depressed or overwhelmed by other PCOS symptoms? The first step is acknowledging that you deserve support and treatment for these challenges, and that professional help is available to you.

The second step is reaching out to a healthcare professional, such as your OB-GYN, primary care provider, or a reproductive endocrinologist, who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of endocrine disorders. Tell them what you are experiencing in detail and be honest and upfront about your day-to-day mental and physical health.

Once you have connected with a healthcare provider, they will likely order some diagnostic testing, which may include blood work (to assess your hormone levels) and a transvaginal ultrasound (to assess your ovaries and overall reproductive health).

What happens next?

As soon as your results are available, your doctor will discuss them with you and offer various treatment options to help lessen your symptoms, such as potentially helpful medications, lifestyle modifications, and tools you can use to improve your quality of life with PCOS.

Meeting with a licensed mental health professional can also be very beneficial for those experiencing anxiety and depression, as they will be able to offer specialized guidance to help lessen these invisible, yet distressing symptoms of PCOS.

Note: If you need immediate mental health support, call or text the National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or visit their website to chat with someone who can help locate available resources near you.

4 expert tips on PCOS self-care

In addition to reaching out to healthcare professionals to explore treatment options and get specialized support, here are four easy ways to practice self-care with PCOS:

1. Include movement in your daily routine

Whether you choose to dance around the kitchen while cooking dinner, take longer walks with your dog, join a group fitness class, go swimming, or try at-home yoga, increasing your daily level of physical activity has been shown to reduce anxiety and depression symptoms, increase self-confidence, and improve insulin resistance (a common challenge with PCOS).

2. Prioritize connection

Studies have shown that those who feel connected to others not only experience increased happiness and reduced stress, but even see lowered blood glucose levels and a reduced risk of PCOS-related conditions like type 2 diabetes.

3. Find your people

Educate yourself about PCOS and surround yourself with others who get what youre going through. Set up your team of PCOS experts, join online or in-person groups for people with PCOS for helpful information and encouragement.

4. Be proactive

Dont wait to take action and make changes to improve your physical and mental wellbeing. When youre struggling with anxiety or depression, it can be difficult to take steps to find the support you need. If you feel comfortable doing so, confide in family or friends about what youre experiencing and ask them for help. Ask them to make phone calls to different medical providers to gather information or help make appointments for you to cross some of the to-dos off your list.

A note on PCOS and anxiety

Your mental health matters: It can be easy to focus solely on the physical aspects of PCOS, but its essential to pay attention to your psychological and emotional well-being as well.

Whether youre experiencing increased anxiety, feeling depressed or hopeless, or simply want to find available resources to utilize should those issues arise, dont hesitate to seek out support and guidance to better understand PCOS and get empowered with tools and resources that can help you live your healthiest, happiest life.

Source(s)

1 Barry JA, Kuczmierczyk AR, Hardiman PJ. Anxiety and depression in polycystic ovary syndrome: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Human reproduction. 2011 Sep 1;26(9):2442-51.

2 Hollinrake E, Abreu A, Maifeld M, Van Voorhis BJ, Dokras A. Increased risk of depressive disorders in women with polycystic ovary syndrome. Fertility and sterility. 2007 Jun 1;87(6):1369-76.

3 Dybciak P, Humeniuk E, Raczkiewicz D, Krakowiak J, Wdowiak A, Bojar I. Anxiety and Depression in Women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. Medicina (Kaunas). 2022;58(7):942. Published 2022 Jul 16. doi:10.3390/medicina58070942

4 Dybciak P, Humeniuk E, Raczkiewicz D, Krakowiak J, Wdowiak A, Bojar I. Anxiety and Depression in Women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. Medicina (Kaunas). 2022;58(7):942. Published 2022 Jul 16. doi:10.3390/medicina58070942
The Scene

WAUKEE, Iowa  Mike Pence had said his piece about Donald Trump. He moved around a suburban Pizza Ranch, shaking hands, saying grace with a local Republican Party chair. He came over to a throng of reporters, declaring himself overwhelmed by the outpouring of support since his Wednesday campaign launch.

Then he took questions, all of them about Donald Trump, several about the possibility that hed be indicted over his handling of classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.

I dont know the facts of that case, and neither do you, Pence told reporters. I would hope the Department of Justice did not move forward.

Six hours later, it did. Trumps second post-presidency indictment, just 65 days after he pled not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in Manhattan, came right after Pence and Chris Christie entered the primary against him.

Both called Trump unfit for the White House, in harsher terms than any 2024 candidate except former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who said Thursday that Trump needed to respect the office and end his campaign.

Pence and Christie had attacked from different angles. In New Hampshire, Christie whacked the man hed voted for twice in personal terms, from the grift of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner making deals with Saudis to a 2010 phone call when the future president advised him not to pay New Jerseys bills.

In Iowa, Pence denounced Trumps effort to overturn the 2020 election, then said he was retreating from the cause of the unborn and giving up on entitlement reform. And then, there were his actions on Jan. 6.

Anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president again, Pence said.

David's view

All of Trumps rivals were expecting this indictment; Hutchinson had said for weeks that Trump should quit if he faced charges. The irony, for Pence and Christie, is that theyre trying to convince Republicans that Trumps unacceptable for mostly different, only somewhat overlapping reasons.

They get lost when Trump is in legal trouble, and when most Republicans are climbing over each other to pronounce him innocent and attack the weaponization of law enforcement. This is not why Pence or Christie consider him unfit. Its absolutely not what Pence wants to talk about.

For Christie, he doesn't need the law to validate his argument. Trump's incompetence, pettiness, sexual appetites, and especially his massive ego are the reason to kick him out  that he keeps getting into legal trouble is only a symptom of his broader character flaws. He is, as Christie put it in New Hampshire, a lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog.

For Pence, Trump was an effective leader right up until January 6th, when he betrayed his oath of office. Hes attacked Trump from the right, but not made a broader indictment that re-evaluates his record in office and his competence or character before the Capitol riot. The classified documents charges do not seem to interest him much in advancing that case.

Pence scrapped a Fox News interview after the indictment story broke, giving his take to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday morning. That interview ended with them grousing that the distraction pre-empted what was supposed to be a talk about China.

But before it was over, Pence had both promised to clean house at the weaponized Justice Department  including FBI Director Chris Wray, appointed by Trump  and noted that an investigation into classified documents hed taken home ended in no charges.

The Justice Department concluded that investigation last week and found it was an innocent mistake, he said. But it was a mistake. We have to protect our nations secrets.

At the same time, he also said that handling classified material was a very serious matter, that no one is above the law and that he hoped DOJ would meet a high standard in their indictment given the explosive political implications. It was a delicate balancing act: Mostly echoing Republican critiques of DOJ, but also citing the same DOJ to validate his own actions, and subtly reserving the right to revisit the issue later once the details of the case emerged.

Even Pences nod to the slight possibility of a legitimate prosecution separates him within the field, however. The vast majority of Republican voters, especially in Iowa, support Trump or one of his defenders. Its really just Pence, Christie, and Hutchinson who suggest that his legal problems  and, for Christie, his character faults  are real. Vivek Ramaswamy, the races most ardent Trump defender, pledged immediately to pardon him if he won the presidency. Pence and Christie didnt.

As a prosecutor, if I believe someone has gotten a full and fair trial in front of a jury of their peers, and especially someone in public life, who committed those crimes when they held a public trust, I cant imagine pardoning him, Christie said at his Tuesday night town hall, when the indictment was still looming.

But to the extent they are addressing it, both candidates are trying to fold Trumps latest crisis into a more substantive case. For Christi, its that Trumps blame-shifting creates problems for his party, turning Republicans into his hype squad, and causing them to lose elections on the way.

Pence gets less personal, and characterizes most of the investigations that dogged Trump during their administration as partisan time-wasters that distract from the policy issues hed like to talk about. In the brief time between his own launch, and the indictment in Florida, Pence said that Trump was retreating from the cause of the unborn and couldnt be trusted to govern as a conservative. Bidens refusal to reform entitlements risked insolvency, he said: You deserve to know, my fellow Republicans, that Donald Trump's position on entitlement reform is the same.

Room for Disagreement

Most conservatives with megaphones, from the Speaker of the House to the streamers on Rumble, condemned the indictment and demanded that their movement stand with Trump. Every Republican running for president should suspend their campaign and go to Miami as a show of support, said Charlie Kirk, the president of Turning Point USA. Fox Newss Pete Hegseth came up with the same plan, for every single Republican candidate to head south and start standing for justice in the country.

The View From Voters

Iowa Republicans I talked to this week were mostly hopeful that the primary could focus on something other than Jan. 6 and Trump investigations. John Nichols, 77, said that the arguments between Pence and Trump about Jan. 6 werent relevant to his vote.

Thats like white over French vanilla  you dont tear the house apart over that kind of stuff, said Nichols. Youve got to look at whats really at stake. Joe Biden cant talk, he cant walk. He reminds me of that old cartoon character, Mr. Magoo.

Notable
Former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence. Alex Brandon, File/AP Photo

Pence tweeted on Thursday evening that he would be appearing on Sean Hannity's program.

Then, the news of Trump's indictment hit, and Pence didn't appear on the program.

The tweet announcing Pence's Fox News appearance has been deleted.

Former Vice President Mike Pence didn't make a scheduled appearance with Fox News' Sean Hannity on Thursday, shortly after the US Department of Justice indicted former President Donald Trump.

As of Thursday evening, Pence had not yet released a statement about the indictment, which centers on classified documents Trump held at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, from his time as president. Pence almost certainly would've been asked about the charges in the Hannity interview, as the producers ended up devoting the entirety of the show to interviewing conservative legal experts and political observers about the indictment.

Devin O'Malley, a spokesman for the campaign, told Insider that the original purpose of the interview had been to discuss Pence's 2024 presidential-campaign announcement, but then the show ended up focusing on the breaking news about the indictment. The interview would be rescheduled, he said.

The indictment news broke 1  hours before Hannity's program began. Pence had previewed the Fox News appearance in the afternoon through a Twitter post that was later deleted.

Pence entered the 2024 presidential nomination for a long-shot bid on Wednesday, when he sharply rebuked his former boss for pressuring him to try to overturn the 2020 election results after Biden won the presidency. Trump, Pence said, "should never be president of the United States again."

It's unclear what stance Pence will take on the case. Pence, too, had classified documents at his home in Carmel, Indiana, but turned them over to federal authorities. He searched his home after it was discovered that President Joe Biden also had classified documents in his garage in Wilmington, Delaware, and in a Washington, DC, office, from his time as vice president.

Federal prosecutors are charging Trump with seven criminal counts, according to numerous reports. Among them are obstruction of justice and false statements. Such charges could carry decades of prison time.

The public first became aware of the documents investigation in August 2022, when the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. They seized several boxes of documents Trump took from the White House, some of which were marked "top secret."

Trump said on Truth Social, his social-media platform, that he would report to a federal court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon. At that time, he or his lawyers are expected to enter a plea of "not guilty."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Pensacola man sentenced to 15 years in prison for raping woman after Pensacola outing

The Office of the State Attorney announced Friday that Escambia Circuit Judge Linda Nobles sentenced a 29-year-old Pensacola man to 15 years in prison for raping a woman.

According to a press release, Demontra Mitchell was sentenced after a jury found him guilty of the sexual battery of a woman after "spending the evening in downtown Pensacola" on Oct. 8, 2020.

After leaving downtown Pensacola, "the victim and several others went to the defendant's house. In the early morning hours, the victim was sexually battered by an unidentified individual."

Charges dropped: State drops charges against Escambia Little League treasurer accused of stealing $17K

Fatal love triangle: Was Pensacola shooting self-defense or jealousy? Jury to decide.

Investigators discovered Mitchell was the perpetrator after a Florida Department of Law Enforcement DNA analysis confirmed the defendant's DNA.

Assistant State Attorney Frederick Longmire said, "The defendant's actions stripped the victim of all sense of personal security. His actions warrant the maximum sentence of 15 years in prison."

As part of the sentence, Mitchel was also designated as a sexual offender.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Florida man Demontra Mitchell gets 15 years for sexual battery charge
WASHINGTON  The Pentagon on Friday announced a $2.1 billion military aid package for Ukraine that focuses on the countrys need for air defense and ammunition to support the counteroffensive it launched this week against Russian invaders.

The Ukrainians' task will be formidable. A report issued Friday assesses the defenses Russia has erected to thwart the Ukrainian counteroffensive are the most extensive in Europe since World War II.

The military aid includes missiles for the Patriot air defense system, the most sophisticated in the Pentagons arsenal, that has been credited with shooting down Russian missile barrages on Ukrainian cities. There are also missiles for HAWK, shorter-range air defense systems. Artillery rounds and laser-guided rockets to attack Russian forces also round out the aid package.

Russia has dug trenches, created minefields, and erected barriers known as dragons teeth  concrete pyramids to keep out tanks, according to a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

"Russias goals in building these defenses are to solidify its territorial gains in Ukraine and to prevent Ukrainianforces from liberating additional territory," the report says.

A soldier stands in front of a PATRIOT (Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept on Target) surface-to-air missile system during a military exercise at Warsaw Babice Airport, Poland on February 7, 2023.

Ukraine has been preparing its counteroffensive for months, adding western tanks and armored personnel carriers to its arsenal. Ukrainian soldiers have been training in Germany to synchronize their attack with artillery and air support. Heavy fighting has been reported in recent days in southern Ukraine near Zaporizhzhya.

The fighting was described as back-and-forth by a senior U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly. It's too soon to say who has the upper hand.

Russia has fortified its defenses along more than 600 miles inside Ukraine, according to the report. The most heavily fortified is the province of Zaporizhzhya. Pushing through those defenses would allow Ukraine to threaten Russia's lines. The Russian military wants to funnel Ukrainian forces into areas where they can be attack with artillery and possibly warplanes.

The report notes that, while extensive, the fortifications are not insurmountable. In large part that is due to the poor performance of Russian forces in the war who have been badly led, equipped and supplied. Since December, 100,000 Russian troops had been wounded or killed in fighting, the White House said in May.

MORE COVERAGE: Read the latest Ukraine, Russia war coverage from USA TODAY

"Fortifications are only as good as the forces defending them," the report notes.

The Biden administration tapped funds from the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which pays contractors to produce the weapons. Most of the Pentagons aid has come under Presidential Drawdown Authority, which sends Ukraine military aid from existing Pentagon stocks.

In all, the Pentagon has provided nearly $40 billion in military assistance since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Billions in military aid for Ukraine announced by Biden administration
Pine-Richland School District

A Pittsburgh-area school district has launched an investigation into a completely inappropriate and offensive photo two students took while wearing racist blackface in school.

Two Pine-Richland Middle School studentsone in a gray shirt, and the other in blackposed in a bathroom for a photo that was captioned drip? on social media, local outlet CBS News Pittsburgh reported. Both students are seen with their faces covered in dark paint or makeup. A third student in a green shirt is also shown in blackface in a subsequent post.

Pine-Richland School District values a school culture that is safe, supportive and welcoming for all students, Pine-Richland School District Superintendent Brian Miller said Thursday in a statement to The Daily Beast. We are opposed to racism in any form and the actions of these students.

According to CBS Pittsburgh, the photo was taken Wednesday during field day activities when students learn about other cultures and countries, and paint their faces.

The district went into detail about how a welcoming environment is a necessity for students to learn.

Arizona Education Officials Anti-Woke Crusade Is a Disaster

It is our goal to strengthen a positive culture for every student at Pine-Richland, the district said. The building administrators are conducting an investigation and will take appropriate next steps.

The school district reportedly encountered another racial incident at the beginning of the school year in which a Pine-Richland High School student allegedly spread a racist message on social media in September. According to CBS Pittsburgh, the district said it would take the appropriate next steps. A statement issued to families at the time was nearly identical to the letter issued on Thursday.

In a request for comment, Pine-Richland School District did not provide any other details regarding the matter.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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A 17-year-old man was arrested following a shooting Friday in Daytona Beach, according to police.

Russell Antonio Rouson Jr., 17, was charged with attempted murder and possession of a firearm by a delinquent in the shooting, police stated late Friday afternoon.

Drive-by shooting arrest 'Person of interest' arrested in drive-by shooting in Daytona Beach that left man dead

A person suffered non-life-threatening injuries in the shooting in the 600 block of Roy Avenue, according to a tweet at 12:16 p.m. Friday from Daytona Beach Police. The person was transported to Halifax Health Medical Center prior to the arrival of police.

Detectives identified Rouson as the suspect and he was found in Bunnell, where he was arrested by the Flagler County Sheriff's Office, police said.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: 17-year-old charged with attempted murder in Daytona Beach shooting
Police arrest suspect they say wrapped GA mans body in plastic, dumped under bridge in 2022

Investigators in Florida say they have found the suspect they say is responsible for killing a man, who then wrapped the body in plastic and dumped it under a bridge in Brantley County.

The Jacksonville Sheriffs Office said it was called out for a missing persons case in Nov. 2022 involving possible foul play.

Just a day before that, the Brantley County Sheriffs Office said it was called out to a bridge for something suspicious seen under it, in the water.

Upon further investigation, it was revealed there was a body of a male wrapped in plastic, the Brantley County Sheriffs Office said at the time.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation was called in to help with the case and ultimately contacted the Jacksonville Sheriffs Office about the body.

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Investigators were able to positively ID the man.

On Tuesday, the Jacksonville Sheriffs Office arrested Timothy Peeples and charged him with murder. He is also facing charges of Abuse of a dead human body, false imprisonment - adult (2 counts), false imprisonment - child under 13 years of age, tampering with evidence, and possession of a firearm or concealed weapon by a convicted felon, our sister-station ActionNewsJax reported.

Peeples has been in the Duval County Jail since Feb. 9 on a charge of possession of a firearm or concealed weapon by a convicted felon, JSOs online Inmate Information Search shows.

His next court date is set for June 28.

IN OTHER NEWS:
A police officer brought an 'electro-sword' to stand guard outside an exam center as Chinese students took the tests of their lives

The giant, sword-like batons were issued several years ago to some special units. Xinhua Public Security Bureau

A police officer in China was seen bringing an "electro-sword" to stand guard at an exam center.

The 3.6-foot baton emits an electric current and features a cross-guard to catch melee weapons.

China's two-day college entrance exams were held this week, prompting deployment of special police units.

A Chinese police officer turned heads on social media this week for wielding a giant electric baton designed like a sword.

The special forces officer was on duty outside an exam center in Luoyang as she explained the features of the baton  or the "electro-sword" as one Twitter blogger called it  to a camera.

"The strength of its electric current is between 270 and 350. It won't do too much harm to a person's body," said the officer, holding up the nearly four-foot baton. It's not clear what unit of measurement she was referring to.

A special cross-guard on the baton lets her defend against strikes from other melee weapons, she said in a video posted on Weibo, China's version of Twitter.

The officer holds her "electro-sword" as she breaks down its features. Weibo/Screenshot/Fenglin Haitao

Chinese police, usually SWAT teams or special units, have been carrying these batons for several years. One unit in Shenzhen, called the "peacekeeping special force," was issued the baton in 2016.

State media reported that the stick is made of titanium, and was designed to help officers fight against adversaries carrying long sticks, machetes, or pipes. The report did not say if the batons could emit an electric shock like the one filmed this year.

The swords are sometimes paired with small shields that cover only the arm of the officer, as seen in this post by the Xingan Public Security Bureau.

The sword-like baton is sometimes paired with a shield that just covers the officer's arm. Xingan Public Security Bureau

Some units are also equipped with two-handed maces, and long steel forks that supposedly are useful for disabling errant martial artists, per the Sina Military blog.

Special police units equipped with "electro-swords" have been deployed to some exam centers in China this week, as high school seniors across the country take the biggest standardized test of their schooling lives.

National anxiety over the two days of exams, which are called "Gao Kao," is so prevalent that some cities roll out police squadrons and organize volunteer fleets of cars to escort students and make sure things run smoothly.

One student with an ankle injury was even carried to his exam hall by a SWAT team.

Read the original article on Insider
Henry County police said a missing 3-year-old boy has been found safe.

Police said 57-year-old David Burrell left his home in Ellenwood on Thursday around 11 a.m., possibly headed toward Walmart.

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Burrells wife was unable to get into contact with him after that.

His car, a white Cadillac SRX, was last seen in DeKalb County.

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Henry County Police said the child has been located. They did not indicate if Burrell was found with him.

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Police did not reveal the relationship between Burrell and Cameron.
Police searching for Georgia man they say slashed another across his neck and ran

Police are searching for a man they said slashed another across his neck and ran.

Statesboro police said they were called out to the Mulberry Court Apartments just before 7:30 p.m. Thursday for a man who had been assaulted.

When officers arrived, they found the 49-year-old man had been slashed across his neck and was rushed to a nearby hospital.

Detectives said after processing the scene, they determined that Wendell Johnson, 63, was the suspect they were looking for.

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Officers said he fled the scene before they got there and is still on the run.

Police said Johnson is about six feet tall and weighs about 215 pounds.

Arrest warrants have been taken out against Johnson on charges of aggravated assault.

Investigators said the victim in this case was treated at the hospital and has been released.

Anyone with information on Johnsons whereabouts is asked to call the Statesboro Police Department at 912-764-9911.

IN OTHER NEWS:
Police: Two teens arrested for breaking into Boston vape shop, stealing $1,000 worth of merch

Authorities arrested two teenage suspects Friday morning for allegedly breaking into a vape shop in downtown Boston and stealing merchandise.

A 12-year-old from South Boston and a 14-year-old from Dorchester were both charged with delinquent to wit; breaking and entering a building with intent to commit a felony.

According to Boston Police, the pair broke into the Blue Moon Smoke Shop on Tremont Street around 1:20 a.m. by using cement-like rocks to damage the front door of the business. Once inside, the two suspects allegedly began loading their backpacks with products and merchandise.

Officials say the stolen goods were worth around $1,000.

Both teens were arraigned in Boston Juvenile Court.

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Presumptive Akron Mayor Shammas Malik answers questions from the audience during an Akron Press Club luncheon on Monday at Quaker Station.

(This opinion article represents the collective viewpoint of the Akron Beacon Journals Editorial Board, which includes two editors and four community members.)

Theres been no shortage of opinions shared and demands made across Akron the past few years whether theyve been shouted on city streets, spoken before City Council, written on these pages or shared on social media.

But how do Akronites really feel about their city and its future? Are the loudest voices representative of the community?

A coalition of community groups, businesses and media  including the Akron Beacon Journal  have commissioned three scientific Akron Decides polls of the community this year to gain objective insights into numerous pressing issues. Together, they now paint a complete picture of a community ready for change and in need of growing civic engagement in a dramatic way.

The third poll of 500 registered voters released Monday shed light on why voters embraced Shammas Malik as the citys presumptive 2024 mayor and provided the first true look at community opinion on the 2022 Akron police shooting of Jayland Walker and recent grand jury decision.

Instead of guessing, we now know 60% of respondents disagree with a grand jury's decision to not charge the eight officers who killed Walker, while 57% simultaneously support significant reforms inside the Akron Police Department.

Importantly, some 83% support training officers to avoid confrontations and de-escalate situations, while 67% support stopping police chases for nonviolent crimes.

Those numbers tell us that even people who agree with the grand jury still see the need for changing police work. Thats significant, although neither reform mentioned here may have prevented the shooting of Walker, who investigators confirmed fired one shot early in a chase.

By the numbers: A visual look at Akron Decides poll on Malik, police and protests

Malik expertly addressed the subtleties of this issue Monday during an Akron Press Club forum, explaining that while it was unlikely prosecutors could get a conviction, Akron still faces an urgent need to change how it approaches policing.

... Ive also always said the grand jury process is not going to deliver justice, Malik said. Justice will come when we all change these systems.

Maliks landslide win over Marco Sommerville, a current deputy mayor, and five other candidates already told us that primary voters embraced the 32-year-old candidates vision for sweeping changes in Akron.

The poll showed Maliks support goes even further, with 73% saying they are satisfied with the election results and 63% believe Malik can put Akron on the right track to success. Nearly two-thirds believe Malik can accomplish the herculean task of significantly changing how the city operates while giving more people a voice in city government.

Those are lofty expectations.

In their own words: Akron Decides survey respondents explain stances on protests, police

Growing civic engagement was already one of Maliks priorities, but the data confirms its of utmost importance.

Those who voted May 2 and participated in Akrons democracy this spring were far more optimistic about our communitys future with 61% saying the city is on the right track, 16 points higher than nonvoters.

Those who did not vote reported they largely skipped campaign events and were less familiar with the facts of the Walker investigation. They also are somewhat more concerned about public safety and crime, although May 2 voters also listed that issue as their top concern.

Throughout Mondays forum, it became even more clear that Maliks ability to clearly and passionately discuss tough issues gives Akron an excellent chance of getting more people engaged in our civic affairs. We all benefit when more people can agree on facts even when they disagree on solutions.

Thats why objective polls play a vital role in showing where the community stands.

Its now up to Malik, the current administration, police leaders and citizens to turn this knowledge into thoughtful action.

No mayor can transform a community alone.

About the poll

Download results of 3rd poll: We're sharing the full results here

The Akron Decides Post-Election Survey of 500 voters, conducted by the Center for Marketing and Opinion Research, was commissioned by the Akron Press Club, Bliss Institute at the University of Akron, Akron NAACP, Ohio Debate Commission and Akron Beacon Journal.

The poll had a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.

Registered voters were surveyed May 4 through May 17 online and over the phone, including landlines and cellphones.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: 3 polls of Akronites guide path forward for Malik, Akron
Post misconstrues grant given to an Illinois county ahead of 2024 election | Fact check

The claim: Group with ties to Mark Zuckerberg has taken control of the 2024 election

A May 21 tweet (direct link, archive link) includes a link to an article from conservative commentator Steve Bannons website titled, Controversial Zuckerberg Group Purchases Storage Center For Voting Machines And Ballots For Election Offices Ahead Of 2024.

Part of the tweet reads, BREAKING NEWS: THIRD PARTY MOTHER ZUCKERS TAKE CONTROL OF 2024 ELECTION.

The tweet was retweeted more than 1,000 times in less than a week. Bannon shared a screenshot of the article on his Instagram, where it recieved over 3,000 likes in less than two weeks. The article was shared on Facebook over 100 times, according to social media insights tool CrowdTangle.

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Our rating: False

A nonprofit group awarded Macoupin County, Illinois, a grant, and some of it was used to purchase a building to serve as a voting center. But the nonprofit had no say in the purchase and it remains up to the county to run the election and determine how to use the grant money, according to both the county and the nonprofit. There is no evidence the nonprofit has taken control of the election process in the county.

Grant does not give third-party group control over 2024 election

In 2022, the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, an initiative launched by the nonprofit and nonpartisan Center for Tech and Civic Life, pledged to distribute $80 million over five years to election departments across the country to support election infrastructure.

Macoupin County was chosen to be part of the initiative and was awarded a $500,000 grant to be used exclusively for the public purpose of planning and operationalizing safe and secure election administration infrastructure.

County election officials used some of the grant money to buy an office building to store voting machines and serve as a voting center, according to a press release.

But contrary to the posts claim, none of this means the Center for Tech and Civic Life is taking control of the 2024 election, according to Dick Simpson, a political science professor at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Pete Duncan, the countys clerk and recorder, said the nonprofit has no say in how the county runs the 2024 election. He explained that Macoupin County made the decision to purchase the new office building after various independent reports found issues with the way the county had previously set up voting facilities.

He referenced a grant agreement that says the county has "full discretion and control" of the grant as long as they comply with certain terms and conditions, such as ensuring the funds are not used in any attempt to influence the outcome of any specific election or the appointment of any specific candidate.

Fact check: Trump can run in 2024 even if charged in classified documents case

The Center for Tech and Civic Life, which declined to provide a name for attribution, also told USA TODAY in an emailed statement the viral claim was false.

CTCL (Center for Tech and Civic Life) will not run in person or mail voting in Macoupin County as a result of the grant, the statement says. Local election offices that are part of the Alliance for Election Excellence make their own program and budget decisions and run their own election operations.

An alliance membership agreement with Macoupin County says alliance partners will never touch live ballots or ballot tabulating equipment, give legal advice or require a county to implement specific advice or recommendations.

The article also misrepresents the link between the Center for Tech and Civic Life and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In 2020, Zuckerberg and his wife donated at least $400 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life and to the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research to help local officials and election offices prepare for the presidential election at the time, the Associated Press reported.

But the money was not used to boost turnout for Democrats, as the article claims. It was used to fund materials and services, such as the processing of mail-in-ballots, drive-thru voting locations and equipment to limit the spread of COVID-19, the AP reported.

USA TODAY reached out to the social media users who shared the claim for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Disclosure: USA TODAY is partnered with Meta to provide third-party fact-checking services.

Our fact-check sources:

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or e-newspaper here.

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: False claim nonprofit group has control of elections | Fact check
President Biden taking steps to help military spouses get and keep jobs

WASHINGTON  President Joe Biden on Friday took steps to help military spouses overcome employment challenges, a significant reason military families give for considering leaving active duty service.

While visiting Fort Liberty in North Carolina, Biden signed an executive order directing federal agencies to take multiple actions to help spouses have stable careers despite frequent moves, time apart for training and needing to care for an injured service member or veteran.

Their partners in uniform question how long they can serve their country when their spouse is unhappy or feels unfulfilled, said first lady and military mom Jill Biden, who has made supporting military and veteran families a top initiative as it was when she was second lady in the Obama administration. We cant ask our servicemembers to choose between their love of country and their love of family.

Military families move, on average, every 2.5 years, according to the Military Family Advisory Network.

The executive order aims to help the more than 16,000 military, veteran and surviving spouses working in the federal government while also serving as a model for the private sector.

"Were calling on employers everywhere to do their part," Jill Biden said. Recruit military spouses. Offer flexible work opportunities so that you can retain their talent, no matter where in the world they are working.

There are 12.2 million spouses of veterans or those currently serving in the Armed Forces, according to the Military Spouse Chamber of Commerce.

President Joe Biden takes a photo with service members during a visit to Fort Liberty, N.C., Friday, June 9, 2023.

What will Biden's executive order do?

The executive order directs nearly 20 actions aimed at enhancing career stability and expanding employment resources. Those include:

Creating within 180 days a plan to improve the hiring and retention of military spouses working for the federal government.

Increasing use of federal agencies authority to hire certain military spouses without using traditional competitive procedures.

Making remote work options more accessible to spouses stationed overseas.

Requiring the Defense Department to implement by the end of the year flexible spending accounts service members can use to help defray the cost of child care. (The creation of tax advantage accounts as a new benefit was announced in March.)

Encouraging federal employees to grant up to five days of administrative leave for a permanent change of station.

Directing the Small Business Administration to develop resources for spouses needed to relocate a business.

Continuing employment support for military spouses transitioning out of the military.

Where did Biden sign the executive order?

The president signed the executive order at Fort Liberty, one of the largest military bases in the U.S. It has the biggest military spouse population among all military installations, according to the White House.

This support is so important to allow families like mine to thrive while our loved ones are serving in uniform, military spouse and federal employee Tiffany Zoeller said before introducing the president for the signing ceremony at the base's fitness center.

Called Fort Bragg until earlier this month, the base was renamed so it no longer honors a Confederate leader.

Before going to Fort Liberty, the Bidens visited Rocky Mount, N.C., to talk about workforce training programs. Thats part of the presidents emphasis on his investing in America agenda that will be central to his re-election campaign  as is North Carolina.

First lady Jill Biden speaks during a visit with President Joe Biden to Fort Bragg to mark the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday with a "friendsgiving" celebration, Nov. 22, 2021, in Fort Bragg, N.C.

Why does the executive order matter?

About one in five military spouses dont have a job, an unemployment rate that hasnt significantly changed over the past decade, according to the White House.

Also, nearly one in five military families cite spouse employment challenges as a reason for considering leaving the military, according to the military support group Blue Star Families.

And when they do leave, veteran families, caregivers and survivors continue to have employment challenges for years.

The ripple effects of service do not end, Jill Biden said, when uniforms are put away.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden signs executive order to boost employment for military spouses
A UTA bus wrapped to celebrate Pride month, diversity and inclusion is pictured on the UTAs Twitter page at the 2023 Pride Parade in downtown Salt Lake City on Sunday, June 4. | Twitter.com/RideUTA

Some legislative leaders are putting state entities on notice that they need to avoid straying from their true missions after the Utah Transit Authority was pressured to pull a bus with a pride wrap from the annual Utah Pride Parade in Salt Lake City.

I would say that if we have state agencies that continue to go into the areas that are controversial, then all things would be on the table, House Majority Leader Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, told the Deseret News.

Schultz said there are three or four different things being talked about by some House Republicans to deal with not just UTA, but other state entities including universities if they have engaged in what might be seen as controversial activities.

My hope is that UTA solves this on their own and it doesnt have to become as big of an issue for the Legislature, he said, declining to detail potential legislation that could be considered by the 2024 Legislature, where Republicans hold a supermajority.

UTA pulled the pride-wrapped bus from last Sundays parade amid criticism on social media, replacing it with an electric bus. UTA said in a statement Tuesday It was a challenging situation that presented competing community interests.

The wrap that featured messages like RIDE WITH PRIDE! was donated by two advertising companies, R&R Partners and Lamar Advertising, ahead of last years Pride celebration and was in the 2022 parade, UTA spokesman Carl Arky said.

The bus is not currently in service, Arky said. He said the bus had been used on a daily basis along multiple routes for the past year, but was pulled June 2 upon the Legislatures request.

Schultz said, We want our government entities to focus on what their true missions are. The majority leader said he is waiting to see what further action UTA takes.

I just dont ever want to go down this pathway again. I just want them focused on moving people. And thats moving people to and from the Pride parade along with every other event, he said. I think thats truly what the majority of Utahns want to see.

The controversy was apparently sparked by a UTA tweet May 31 that said the agency is grateful for our LGBTQ+ riders and employees and look forward to celebrating Pride with you all month long, including a picture of the bus.

A whole bunch of drama

Schultz included a copy of UTAs tweet in a text exchange that day with UTA Trustee Beth Holbrook, telling her, This is causing me a whole bunch of drama right now inside my caucus. Is it really necessary? Can you reevaluate this decision?

We are grateful for our LGBTQ+ riders and employees and look forward to celebrating Pride with you all month long. Keep an eye out for our pride-wrapped bus on our system, and check out our blog for other ways UTA can be your ride to pride at https://t.co/vLIA6QkpmF. pic.twitter.com/FtSEBkmzOQ  Utah Transit Authority - UTA (@RideUTA) May 31, 2023

According to the texts provided by UTA in response to a records request, Schultz said, Honestly this is the last thing I want to deal with right now. It seriously would be best if you made the change on your own.

Holbrook said she was having the agencys legal team look at the issue, saying, We have to be careful of 1st amendment issues. I will know more tomorrow. Last thing I want to do is inadvertently cause controversy.

That triggered a stern response from Schultz: Beth, you are a state owned entity. That bus is paid for using taxpayer dollars. This is not a first amendment issue. Whoever made the decision to move forward with this bus absolutely knew it would be controversial.

The majority leader included a statement he said came from House Speaker Brad Wilson, R-Kaysville. To quote the Speaker, we live in Utah, we shouldnt have to deal with this stuff and that there are a group of members wanting you to make a formal public apology.

He said he wanted the problem solved ASAP so we dont so we dont have to go down this road.

Three other GOP representatives texted UTA officials a day later to raise concerns about the agencys tweet, Reps. Kay Christofferson of Lehi, chairman of the House Transportation Committee; Candice Pierucci of Herriman; and Colin Jack of St. George.

Christofferson told Holbrook he was disappointed to see a wrap supporting a controversial social position that is very divisive. Why spend the funds and political capital on this effort? what other social issues have you not supported, but now are supporting this?

Pierucci, a member of the Transportation Interim Committee, said in a text to UTA Board Chairman Carlton Christensen this is not an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars and that she had reached out to leadership about this yesterday, a reference to House leaders.

Jack said in a text to UTA Government Relations Director Shule Bishop that he, too, was disappointed to see the bus wrap. I think public funds should never be used to promote private agendas, especially those that contradict our state ideals.

Both Schultz and Christofferson were part of Jacks text thread.

Christofferson said in a statement Thursday to the Deseret News, I voiced my concerns to UTA and encouraged them to responsibly utilize and maximize taxpayers dollars, while Pierucci said she was questioning whether this was the best use of taxpayer dollars.

Jack did not respond to requests for comment.

The House speaker was traveling and out of service for the remainder of the week, according to House spokeswoman Alexa Roberts, but Wilson said in a statement hes hopeful moving forward UTA will stick to its core mission of moving Utahns.

Inclusion and government

Brigham Young University political science professor Chris Karpowitz warned the tone and the content of at least some of these text messages runs a risk of further dividing Utahns, and making it more difficult for lawmakers to work with the LGBTQ+ community and others.

I dont want to weigh in on the specifics of whether a wrap paid for by another group was acceptable or not, Karpowitz said. But he stressed government does have a role to signal that all Utahns are welcome at the table as we work out our differences.

UTA trustees were not available for comment about what action the agency may take.

We want to make it clear that it was never our intention to offend or disappoint any member of the communities we serve, the agency said in the statement issued Tuesday that said UTAs goal is a transit environment that is safe, accessible, and welcoming to all.
Alexa Lariy, in blue, celebrates with members of the Trans Latin@ Coalition at the WeHo Pride parade Sunday in West Hollywood. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

When West Hollywood incorporated in 1984 and seated the nation's first city council with an openly gay majority, it grabbed the world's attention  and not in an entirely positive way.

One year, council members got so many threats that they wore ballistic vests on a float in the L.A. Pride Parade, said Councilman John Heilman, who was on the inaugural council.

They weren't intimidated  too much was at stake.

"Us being out and being visible  that in and of itself is a political statement," said Heilman, 65, who is gay and has been attending Pride events for four decades.

Since then, there have been tragedies and trials  and immense progress as LGBTQ+ people found broader acceptance in American society, won the right to same-sex marriage, could serve openly in the U.S. military.

DJ Honey Davenport lines up the music for the One Size make-up float during the WeHo Pride Parade in West Hollywood on Sunday. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

It seemed that, especially in liberal California, the LGBTQ+ movement had finally gone mainstream. To some, the colorful annual parades even became  of all things  kind of bland.

But this year, Pride Month comes amid a volatile national backlash against LGBTQ+ people, from conservative lawmakers' efforts to ban drag shows and restrict the rights of transgender people to outcry against brands such as Bud Light and Target for marketing to queer people.

In Southern California recently, protests erupted in North Hollywood and Glendale over the teaching of gender and sexuality in schools. The L.A. Dodgers invited, then booted, then re-invited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of satirical nuns in drag, to its Pride Night.

For queer people in and around West Hollywood, the internationally known haven for LGBTQ+ culture and longtime home of L.A. Pride, the vitriol has been met with sadness and anger, but little surprise.

Amid the backlash, they say, Pride feels more relevant than ever.

"It may be a little bit passe for some of us who've been around a long time, but I have to say, every Pride I feel a sense of renewal. ... I see all these young people out celebrating in a way I don't think I did at their age, and that gives me a lot of hope," Heilman said.

Bamby Salcedo, president and chief executive of the TransLatin@ Coalition, said that with right-wing politicians seemingly using transgender people "as political pawns" to "gain votes and to cater to extremist people," it feels especially important this year to be marching.

Members of Disney Pride in Concert cheer and wave to fans during the WeHo Pride Parade in West Hollywood on Sunday. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

"If we focus on the negativity, that will bring us down," said Salcedo, 53. "When we have these moments like Pride, we are ... able to show our joy to the world and our community so that they are able to understand that, regardless of the challenges we continue to experience, we find joy in whatever way possible."

As Pride grew into a social  and financial  behemoth, fissures emerged.

This month, L.A. Pride and the newer WeHo Pride are taking place on back-to-back weekends, two miles apart  the result of years of tension between L.A. Pride's parent organization, Christopher Street West, and the city of West Hollywood.

Critics said L.A. Pride, which at 53 is one of the nation's oldest Pride parades, had become too corporate, the festival tickets too expensive. And there were widespread complaints that the organization and city were unwelcoming of queer people of color and transgender people.

So West Hollywood, which hosted L.A. Pride for four decades, launched its own parade and festival last year.

This year's WeHo Pride wound along Santa Monica Boulevard last weekend. L.A. Pride will step off Sunday morning at Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue, about four blocks northeast of West Hollywood city limits.

Salcedo marched in WeHo Pride while dressed as a social justice warrior carrying a shield that read, "Invest in Trans Lives." And she will be at the L.A. Pride Parade this weekend.

For the TransLatin@ Coalition, she said, Pride isn't just a party. It's a critical venue for passing out information about resources for queer people, about combating hate and about the prevention of COVID-19 and other diseases.

People join attorney Gloria Allred during Sunday's parade in West Hollywood. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Gerald Garth, the board president for Christopher Street West, has been coming to L.A. Pride for a decade.

In 2013, Garth had just moved to Los Angeles from Louisiana. He hopped on a bus to West Hollywood alone, wearing a feather boa and a fedora with a rainbow-colored brim.

"In the body which I occupy, there has to be a great level of boldness to occupy it, as a tall, dark Black man," said Garth, 40. "There's a very prescribed experience which society has given him, and then you layer that with an LGBTQ+ experience."

By the time he finished walking down Santa Monica Boulevard, Garth felt lighter. More joyful. It felt, he said, like he was "initiated into the rainbow."

No matter what's going on politically, first-timers are transformed by the Pride parade each year, Garth said.

With thousands of people on the streets, security is a top priority, organizers for both L.A. Pride and WeHo Pride said.

Increasingly, there is debate about the presence of armed law enforcement officers at Pride.

The LGBTQ+ community has a fraught history with police, who, for decades, raided gay bars such as the famed Stonewall Inn in New York and the Black Cat tavern in Silver Lake.

At WeHo Pride last weekend, Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies arrested two volunteers at a booth for Equal Means Equal, a nonprofit that pushes for the adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

A video posted to Twitter shows at least six uniformed deputies wrestling LGBTQ+ activist Xodiac Rose and their friend Abby Thomas to the pavement.

"At Pride, oh, my God!" a bystander shouted.

"This is what we mean!" Rose, 25, screamed as they were being handcuffed. A deputy, Rose yelled, "was being homophobic" and laughing at signs at the booth.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Los Angeles participate in the WeHo Pride Parade in West Hollywood on Sunday. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

In a statement, the Sheriff's Department said Rose, who was in custody for four days, had an outstanding warrant on claims of battery, vandalism and robbing someone of a cellphone outside the West Hollywood Library in April.

Thomas, 28, was arrested on suspicion of "interfering and obstructing an arrest," according to the Sheriff's Department. She was released from custody hours later, and witnesses dispute the allegation.

Alice Crenshaw, a spokesperson for Equal Means Equal who witnessed the arrests and called them "extremely aggressive," said the warrant against Rose stemmed from a protest outside a Drag Queen Story Hour event at the West Hollywood Library.

Videos posted on Twitter show Rose voguing in front of a man filming outside the library. Rose then stomped on a cellphone. A far-right website called Right Now Views  which includes videos of protests outside LGBTQ+ events  created a wanted poster with photos of Rose, the words "Tweaker Antifa" and a phone number for the Sheriff's Department.

In an email, West Hollywood Mayor Sepi Shyne said it was "deeply disconcerting to see images of anyone being held on the pavement surrounded by deputies in gear" and "even more alarming when this takes place in our safe LGBTQ+ spaces."

"Pride celebrations are supposed to be places where we as queer people feel empowered, affirmed, and safe," she wrote. "We cant lose sight of the fact that this is emblematic of a larger division in our nation right now."

Shyne said she has heard from community members who want no law enforcement at Pride celebrations and from others who are grateful for added security during tense times. The city, she said, is working to "balance safety concerns, which is our responsibility during Pride, with the legitimate concerns of our LGBTQ community members who have had difficult relationships with law enforcement in the past."

Shyne, 46, who is Iranian American and the first queer woman of color elected to the City Council, said Pride is essential.

"In Iran, LGBTQ people are given the death sentence, so there are no Pride celebrations," she wrote.

"Pride events, with all their public displays of flair, flamboyance, and fun are vital  because someone somewhere, even in a City like West Hollywood, still may believe they would be better off dead than be LGBTQ. We can't let that happen."

On Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood this week, people were reveling in Pride Month, with all its rainbow flags and ribald humor.

L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna attends the WeHo Pride Parade in West Hollywood on Sunday. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

A banner on the window of Hugo's Restaurant read: #dragisnotacrime. A sign in the window of the West Hollywood Library promoting Drag Queen Story Hour advertised "Fake Eyelashes, Real News." Giant ads with muscular men wearing skimpy swim trunks and stethoscopes promoted an HIV-prevention drug with the words: "I Ho, You Ho, WeHo ... together on PrEP."

At the Gallery at Circus of Books, Jesus Clauss, 42, a studio manager for fashion designer Julia Clancey, adjusted displays for her Pride collection, arranging "budgie smugglers"  briefs-style swim bottoms  with colorful banana prints and shimmery kaftans.

Clauss, of Koreatown, went to WeHo Pride at his husband's urging. He initially resisted because, as a younger gay man, he felt a lot of pressure to "have a certain physique."

But his husband told him: "Let's make our own memories." He came away inspired, especially by younger queer people who "are not as concerned about appearance."

The same weekend, his niece came out as pansexual by posting on Instagram that she was "living my truth." She had faced some resistance from loved ones. He shared his own experiences as a queer person and told her he supported her.

The national backlash against LBGTQ+ people is frustrating, Clauss said. But ultimately, things are so much better than when he was discovering his sexuality, without access to the internet or much information at all.

"It seems like the rhetoric," he said, "is a result of all the progress we've made."

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Kai Shappley speaks at an October 2021 rally in Austin against a Texas bill to ban transgender girls from participating with other girls in school sports. (Jay Janner / Austin American-Statesman)

Kimberly Shappley tried for years to make Texas work for her bubbly transgender daughter, Kai.

Shappley reconsidered her fierce evangelical faith and how she could best show love. She sought fact-based answers in her medical coursework as she studied to become a nurse. She became a vocal LGBTQ+ advocate and moved with Kai, now 12, and her son, Kaleb, 10, from conservative Pearland, Texas, to more liberal Austin.

Still, about a year ago, Shappley decided that wasn't enough  that Kai simply wasn't safe in a state where right-wing politicians had turned misinformation about gender identity and healthcare into a legal framework that threatened her family, and Kai's existence.

So, with the help of a GoFundMe account and the generosity of strangers, Shappley moved with Kai and Kaleb about 10 months ago to Connecticut, where it's been harder to make ends meet but feels safer.

"We're refugees," Shappley said bluntly one recent afternoon. "We didn't have a choice."

Kimberly Shappley, Kai's mother, testifies on the Equality Act before the Education and Labor Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Human Services in Washington, D.C., in 2019. (Kevin Wolf / Associated Press)

Across the country this Pride month, LGBTQ+ people  and especially trans kids and their families  are struggling against a wave of conservative backlash to the progress they've made in recent decades. That backlash has largely come in the form of hundreds of new laws designed to erase queer identity and suppress forms of expression, such as drag, that buck traditional gender norms.

More than 20 states have now passed laws banning gender-affirming care for kids. In many of those states, proponents of the bills focused on surgical procedures and permanent medical interventions that aren't even part of the standard care for transgender adolescents.

At the same time, the legislation they backed targeted more common treatments  including reversible puberty blockers  that medical experts say are vital parts of care for children who suffer from a disconnect between their birth sex and their true identity, and who experience higher rates of depression and suicide when denied such care.

States have also passed and pursued laws and legal opinions threatening the parents of trans children who receive such care, alleging despite all medical consensus that it amounts to child abuse. They have pursued and passed bathroom laws demanding trans people use facilities aligned with their birth sex regardless of their identities; rules barring transgender kids from competing against their peers in sports; and laws precluding discussion of LGBTQ+ topics in schools while forcing teachers to out queer kids who confide in them.

They have pursued measures that bar drag queens from performing in public, ban books exploring queer themes and deny the very existence of transgender people in laws related to people's sexual rights.

The laws have created a patchwork of inequity for LGBTQ+ people in the U.S.  denying them healthcare and other basic rights in some states but not others, and forcing them to make devastating, financially difficult decisions about where to live and whom to trust.

"It is tough," Kai said one day after school, as she waited for neighborhood friends to come play. "I guess I try my best not to have to see these things and learn these things, but when I have to, it really hurts, and it makes everything difficult."

Fighting back

Leaders and lawmakers in the mostly conservative states passing such laws say they are simply looking out for American kids. They argue children and teens are too young to understand gender or their own identities and are essentially being brainwashed by "woke" adults into damaging their bodies before they're old enough to make such decisions.

Pushing back is a broad coalition of queer people, medical and legal experts, LGBTQ+ rights groups and liberal leaders  including President Biden.

Leading medical experts have lamented the politicization of trans healthcare and denounced the efforts of mostly Republican lawmakers to second-guess widely accepted standards of care using quack science. Liberal leaders and lawmakers have accused their conservative counterparts of fear mongering and misusing LGBTQ+ rights as a political wedge.

Legal rights organizations have flagged 2023 as a watershed year for LGBTQ+ discrimination  with the American Civil Liberties Union tracking nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills nationwide and the Human Rights Campaign last week declaring a "state of emergency" for LGBTQ+ Americans.

On Thursday, Biden denounced the wave of laws targeting LGBTQ+ people as "callous," "cruel," "hysterical" and "prejudiced," and announced new federal initiatives to protect the queer community  saying that his administration "has their back."

"LGBTQ Americans, especially children: You're loved, you're heard," Biden said.

In addition to speaking out, LGBTQ+ people and their allies are also pushing back, hard, in liberal-leaning statehouses and federal courts  and having some success.

Late in the evening of June 2, Micah Winter  aka drag queen Goldie Dee Collins  was at a big party for the start of Memphis Pride when one of the organizers made an announcement.

Drag artist Vidalia Anne Gentry speaks out against Tennessee's anti-drag bill during a news conference held by the Human Rights Campaign in Nashville in February. (John Amis / Associated Press)

This year, Tennessee passed a law that barred "male or female impersonators" from performing anywhere children might be able to see them. The law intentionally targeted drag queens, though it also raised fears for transgender people. Friends of George's, an LGBTQ+ theater troupe in Memphis that Winter is a part of, sued to block the law.

The news that Friday night was that U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker  an appointee of President Trump  had just issued a ruling tossing the law as unconstitutional. It was a major victory in one of the most closely watched battles over LGBTQ+ rights in the country, and "the crowd just went wild," Winter said.

The rest of Pride weekend, Winter said, he and other members of Friends of George's were toasted as "hometown heroes." Winter, 31, said he kept telling people the win was all of theirs.

"I'm a drag queen, so I love attention and spotlight, but I don't want Friends of George's to take all the attention here," Winter said. "We did it for the entire queer community."

Just days later, attorney Jennifer Levi was celebrating another LGBTQ+ victory.

This year, Florida passed a law banning gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents, including reversible treatments that temporarily delay puberty while young teens, in consultation with their parents, therapists and physicians, consider how they'd like their bodies to mature. Levi, who has defended LGBTQ+ rights in U.S. courts for three decades, helped a group of Florida parents with transgender kids sue.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle  an appointee of President Clinton  issued an order rejecting the state's rationale for the law as unscientific and misinformed, and granting the parents' request to block its enforcement on the grounds that it is likely unconstitutional.

Levi, 58, called it a "big decision"  one that rejected political bluster in favor of testimony from doctors "who have treated patients and have expertise in this area and who all agree on the essentials of the medical issues."

Dr. Meredithe McNamara, an assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine who treats trans youths, and Anne Alstott, a law professor at Yale Law School, are part of a multidisciplinary team tracking legal efforts to restrict gender-affirming care across the country. They agreed Hinkle's decision was important.

According to their research, proponents of gender-affirming care bans across the country have used the same five-step "disinformation playbook," McNamara said: They deny transgender people even exist; falsely claim children are being subjected to irreversible treatments such as surgeries; falsely allege treatments that are being provided to kids are unsafe or unproven; deny that care standards are backed by decades of research; and attack the legitimacy of medical authorities who say otherwise.

McNamara and Alstott said it is sad the strategy has worked in so many state legislatures, where politicians have intentionally ignored rebuttals based in science and medicine, but encouraging that courts are starting to reject such arguments as groundless.

"What we're seeing in these [gender-affirming care cases] is that when courts hear both sides, they are able to call out misinformation and render sound decisions," Alstott said. "It really has been heartwarming, as a law professor, to see the law work."

Alstott said that some cases will undoubtedly be appealed and that LGBTQ+ people are justified in worrying about conservative judges  including on the U.S. Supreme Court  upholding anti-LGBTQ+ laws.

But, she said, she's hopeful that the rule of law  the reliance on facts  will lead to more LGBTQ+ victories.

Bolstering community

Beyond the courts, LGBTQ+ people and their allies are also pushing back by further enshrining LGBTQ+ rights in bluer states and shoring up supportive communities there.

Leigh Finke, center, the first transgender person elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives, is sworn in during the first day of the 2023 legislative session in St. Paul, Minn. (Abbie Parr / Associated Press)

This year, Minnesota Rep. Leigh Finke, who is transgender, helped rally her colleagues to pass a Trans Refuge law that provides legal protections for individuals seeking or receiving gender-affirming care in the state. Finke said the bill was a necessary counterpoint to those banning such care in neighboring states.

Finke said she and her office were barraged with angry, vitriolic emails and calls from people who opposed the legislation, but also buoyed by an outpouring of love from supporters.

"The amount of uplift I have received has been amazing, and just being able to be a part of the movement that we are in right now  it makes me emotional just thinking about it," Finke said. "It's so important for our community right now to have a voice."

Dr. Angela Kade Goepferd, medical director of the gender health clinic at Children's Minnesota, helped advocate for Finke's bill, along with families and trans kids receiving care at the clinic.

Goepferd, 45, who is nonbinary, said they felt a duty to use the tremendous medical expertise at Children's to help explain to lawmakers what gender-affirming care actually looks like for kids, and why there is medical consensus around its efficacy.

Under established standards of care, kids are not getting surgeries. Adolescents reaching puberty may receive reversible puberty blockers, in consultation with their medical teams, to delay their development until they are a bit older. Older teens may elect to start hormone therapies to help align their bodies with their gender identities, but that too is only after intense consultation with medical teams.

Dr. Angela Kade Goepferd, medical director of Children's Minnesota's gender health clinic. (Agnes Bun / AFP/Getty Images)

"This is an area of medicine that's been around for a while, and that really prior to this kind of manufactured controversy around trans kids and their healthcare, was really not controversial in the fields of pediatrics and medicine," Goepferd said. "It really can be lifesaving."

For Hao and Gretchen Nguyen, whose 6-year-old daughter, Asher, is trans, having such support at Children's has been vital  and the idea of going without it is terrifying.

"It gives us the assurance and ease and confidence of knowing that we are having medical professionals guide our path," said Gretchen Nguyen, 36, who is an attorney.

"These are just basic human rights," said Hao Nguyen, 40, a prosecutor. "For states or the far right or whatever to take those basic human rights and then galvanize them and arm them into political weapons is really kind of disgusting, and it has real impacts on real families."

Andy, 43, and Andrea, 44, whose 14-year-old son, B., is transgender, feel the same. They asked to use just their first names, and B.'s first initial, to protect their family from hate.

Andy, a professor, said the idea that B.'s use of gender-affirming care is "somehow impulsive by [B.] or us or that we're pushing some sort of agenda" is ridiculous. In fact, he said, it has been a long, careful process in which B. has been surrounded at every step by a team of doctors.

"It's about allowing my child to express their identity," said Andrea, an attorney, "and not suffer mental health consequences needlessly."

B., who likes math and rock climbing and plays the cello, said on most days now, he wakes up feeling normal and happily heads off to school like any other kid. That would not be the case, he said, without the care he receives at the clinic.

B. is on puberty blockers, which he started after he and his medical team began noticing signs that his body was hitting puberty and about to start changing in feminine ways  which racked him with anxiety.

In the national debate around such care, critics argue that puberty blockers harm children by disrupting their natural development. B. said he sees it as quite the opposite.

"No one ever points out how much it would hurt me if I couldn't have gender-affirming care, what irreversible harm that would cause," he said.

"Before I stated puberty blockers, I was starting to get very distressed and anxious about how I looked," he said. "If I didn't have gender-affirming care, I would have to pretend to be someone else all day long. I would never feel like myself, and I wouldn't be happy about the person I would be pretending to be."

Goepferd said they see the benefits of gender-affirming care in the smiles of happy kids every day and were tremendously gratified to see the Trans Refuge law pass. But it was also bittersweet, they said, considering the wait to get into their clinic is now a year long and getting only longer as more kids from states banning such care come looking for help.

"It's a real hard position for all of us to be in," Goepferd said. "We can't be taking entire states' worth of young people who are transgender and shipping them to a different state to get healthcare."

In California

Among the hundreds of bills being tracked by the ACLU, only one was in California.

The bill, sponsored by Republican Assemblymen Bill Essayli of Corona and James Gallagher of Yuba City, would have required school employees to notify parents within three days if their child identified as transgender at school.

Critics blasted the bill as one that would out and potentially endanger trans children, while violating student privacy protections under California law. The bill died in committee.

Assemblyman Bill Essayli, a Republican in the Inland Empire, put forward a California bill that would have required schools to notify parents if their kids identified as transgender at school. (JC Olivera / Getty Images)

Essayli said he was disappointed the legislation was labeled "anti-LGBTQ+" and lumped together with other bills targeting queer people across the country. He said his intention was not to target LGBTQ+ kids but ensure that parents are kept in the loop if their kids are struggling with their gender identity.

"Is every parent going to be accepting immediately? I don't know. Probably not," Essayli said. "But the point is the parents need to be able to go through that journey with their kid."

Essayli said he figured the bill might not pass in Sacramento, where Republicans are vastly outnumbered by Democrats, but wanted to put it forward anyway to pressure state officials into providing more clarity around the issue.

"I know there's a lot of parents who are very interested in this," Essayli said, "and they're going to be going to their local school boards and asking for some clarity and some guidance."

Schools and school boards are already an LGBTQ+ battleground in the state.

In recent weeks, the idea of celebrating LGBTQ+ pride in schools has sparked violent protests outside an elementary school in North Hollywood and a school board meeting in Glendale. A school board in Temecula recently rejected a textbook because it mentioned gay rights activist and San Francisco politician Harvey Milk.

Still, far more California officials have spoken out in support of LGBTQ+ rights in the state, positioning the state as part of the resistance to queer hatred and discrimination.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has intentionally positioned himself as an ally willing to stand up to other leaders  including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican  who are threatening LGBTQ+ rights elsewhere in the country.

In a recent video celebrating Pride month, Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, lauded California's efforts to bolster LGBTQ+ rights  including around gender-affirming care  while criticizing states that are moving in the opposite direction.

"All across the United States, you're seeing other states that are targeting people simply, well, for existing, threatening their healthcare, their livelihood, and threatening their freedoms," Newsom said over an image of DeSantis.

"California, we're not going to let that happen," Newsom said. "We're doubling down on our pride in the LGBTQ+ community."

Looking ahead

How the culture war around gender-affirming care and other LGBTQ+ issues will play out in the long run is anyone's guess. But many LGBTQ+ people say they aren't taking any chances.

Eli, 29, and Lucas, 26, an engaged transgender couple who asked to be referred to only by their first names for safety reasons, were born and raised in Florida and still live there, close to many of their family and friends. But they are planning on uprooting their lives and moving to Minnesota this fall, Eli said.

The anti-LGBTQ+ laws DeSantis has signed in recent months  including one that makes it illegal for trans people to use public restrooms matching their identities  have gone too far, he said. Lucas' healthcare provider recently notified patients that it intended to stop providing gender-affirming care in the state, leaving the couple scrambling to find a new provider. They don't want to live anymore in a state where such threats loom around every corner, Eli said.

The move won't be easy. Eli will be able to keep his remote job as an internet repair and technical specialist, but Lucas will have to leave their job in financial aid. Still, the couple are hopeful.

"We're just looking to be ourselves," Eli said, "in a society that accepts us."

For Kimberly Shappley and 12-year-old Kai, the future evokes both hope and fear.

Kai  who likes drawing, knitting, acting and Dolly Parton and is the co-author of a published book about a transgender cheerleader in Texas  is in a public school in Connecticut that she likes, and said things have been going great.

Bubbling with confidence, she said she pictures a future in which she's famous  which seems possible, considering her charisma.

"What's there not to like?" she said, when asked what it's like to be her. "I mean, I'm fabulous."

Shappley is still working as a tele-medicine nurse with the same company she worked for in Texas, and is getting used to Connecticut too, she said. But she's also worried about the next presidential election and attacks on LGBTQ+ and transgender rights spreading, and is trying to save money  just in case the family has to move again.

"We can't settle," she said, clearly frustrated. "We can't just put an anchor down and say, 'This is home.'"

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Prince Archie received a special surprise on his fourth birthday in May, a thank you note from his parents the Duke and Duchess of Sussex has revealed.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markles son Archie turned four years old on 6 May, the same day of his grandfather King Charles IIIs coronation. In honour of Archies birthday, a local bike shop in Harry and Meghans hometown of Montecito, California, gifted the couples eldest child his very own bicycle.

The owners of Mad Dogs & Englishmen Bike Shop in Montecito shared the sweet thank you letter they received from the royals on Instagram. On behalf of Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, please accept their sincere thanks for the thoughtful gift you sent to Prince Archie for his fourth birthday, read the letter, which was printed on The Office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex letterhead.

The bike has brought much joy, and is most appreciated by the family. They asked that I convey their gratitude at the lovely surprise, it said. The note was signed by Harrison Colcord, who works for the duke and duchess.

Speaking to People, bike shop owner Jennifer Blevins explained how her British-born partner Martin wanted to give Archie one of their childrens bikes with training wheels for his fourth birthday. He went and got some birthday balloons, and he got some flowers for Meghan and a birthday card, and he said: Okay, Im gonna bike over and take it to their house, she recalled to the outlet.

When security outside Harry and Meghans home asked whether he had received an invitation from the couple, he replied: Im just a British business in town that wanted to give Archie a gift.

Security allowed him to leave the flowers, card, balloons, and bike for Archie after they performed a background check, according to People. One month later, a courier arrived at their shop in Montecito with the letter from Harry and Meghan.

I wasnt expecting that. I had no idea, Blevins said. It was so thoughtful because, you know, they took the time to write something personal and not just a generic thank you.

She added: Every celebrity in that town has bought bikes from us, and they all come through there. None of them sent a thank you letter.

Prince Archies fourth birthday took place on the same day as King Charles III and Queen Camillas coronation in the UK. His father, Prince Harry, attended the coronation at Westminster Abbey on 6 May while Meghan stayed home with the toddler and the couples younger daughter, Princess Lilibet.

The birthday celebration was reportedly a low-key party at the familys home in the coastal California town, with the couples friends and Meghans mother, Doria Ragland, in attendance.

The newly crowned King also toasted his absent grandson Prince Archie on his fourth birthday at Buckingham Palace after the coronation, the DailyMail reported. King Charles was said to have toasted those that werent there and wished his grandson a very happy birthday wherever he was.

Meanwhile, Meghan and Harrys daughter Lilibet Lili Diana turned two years old on 4 June. However, her birthday came and went without public birthday wishes from members of the royal family  which royal experts say reflects the strained relationship between King Charles and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Picking out a high school is usually the biggest life decision most 14-year-olds have to face. For Kairan Quazi, hell have far more on his plate when he starts his new job at SpaceX in Redmond as a software engineer.

At just 14 years old, Kairan will be Santa Clara Universitys youngest ever graduate come June 17 before he heads up to Washington to start his new job on SpaceXs Starlink team on July 31.

SpaceX literally feels like a dream and I cant wait, he told KIRO 7.

According to the Mercury News, Kairan officially qualifies as profoundly gifted, with an IQ over the 99.9th percentile.

After a pediatrician told his parents that he needed a more advanced academic experience, he started at a Livermore community college at the age of 10, before transferring to Santa Clara University. While at SCU, he even acted as a tutor for older students.

Kairans job search culminated in 95 rejections and three offers for full-time jobs, SpaceX among them.




A prominent Boston lawyer was found not guilty on two counts of rape in Suffolk Superior Court Friday.

Gary Zerola, once named one of People Magazines Top 50 Bachelors, was accused of raping a 23-year-old woman he spent a night with back in November 2016.

The current defense attorney was a former prosecutor in Suffolk and Essex Counties. His prominent status, the victim claims, was one of the reasons why she didnt go to the police right away.

Rape victim takes the stand: Trial begins for former Boston prosecutor and defense attorney

Zerola was 45 years old when he allegedly went with the victim and her friend for a night of drinking. Prosecutors said Zerola raped the victim at a friends apartment later in the night.

Im just thankful the jury had an open mind and listened to all the facts, said Zerola.

Mr. Zerola has been exonerated from all of these charges and at this point can try and put his life back together, said Zerolas attorney Rosemary Scapicchio. Its been a long six-and-a-half months for him.

From day one, the defense painted the victim as a liar, claiming that she kept changing her story and even kissed Zerola earlier in the night. The prosecution says the victim never consented to Zerolas advances and she acted as normal as possible because there was nothing she could do at that moment.

The victim testified she didnt report the incident to police until a few days later because she was too scared saying Zerola made it clear he was a well-known lawyer in Boston.

Suffolk DA spokesperson James Borghesani called the result disappointing but said they respected the jurys verdict.

We are grateful to the special prosecutor and victim advocate from Middlesex who guided this case from the start, the Boston detectives who investigated it, and especially the survivor who had the courage to come forward and the patience to stick with it. There is still a pending 2021 case against this defendant with similar allegations, and we will once again do our best to prove those charges.

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Following a recommendation from Pueblo School District 60 Superintendent Charlotte Macaluso, three school board directors changed their positions Thursday on a previous decision to turn down over $800,000 in state grant funds. However, all three remained opposed to creating a new administrative position, which Macaluso had also lobbied them to reconsider.

Board directors Kathy DeNiro, Anthony Perko and Sol Sandoval reconsidered their votes on Empowering Action for Student Improvement (EASI) grant funds during a Thursday board meeting, paving the way for the district to accept the state funding.

Superintendent's recommendation: Pueblo D60 superintendent asks board members to reconsider votes declining grant funding

On May 16, the three directors formed the majority in a 3-2 vote to decline EASI grant funding because it earmarked $300,000 over the course of two years for a middle school director position. Prior to that vote, the board majority expressed concerns about the creation of administrative positions and the middle school director position's salary relative to other employees in the district.

The middle school position would have provided direct support to three Pueblo D60 schools on the Colorado Department of Education's "accountability clock": Pueblo Academy of Arts, Risley International Academy of Innovation and Roncalli STEM Academy. About 80% of the annual $150,000 in grant funds initially earmarked for the middle school director would fund the position's salary, with the rest funding its benefits.

At Thursday's board meeting, Perko made a motion to reconsider the May 16 vote and accept EASI grant funds, given that acceptance of the funds would not mean the board was "contingent, required or mandated" to allocate funds for the middle school director position.

"This is something that I think is as close to a best-case scenario that this board is going to be able to reach," Perko said. "You have got five different people with five different opinions. This is a way where it's purposely crafted with staff and with our superintendent's office to make sure ... that we're not leaving any money on the table."

Tommy Farrell and Barb Clementi were the two board members to vote "yes" on approving the initial EASI grant resolution on May 16 and oppose Perko's amendment on Thursday. However, the amendment passed 3-2 before all five board members approved a final resolution to accept the EASI grant funding.

Pueblo D60 communications director Dalton Sprouse said the board's decision not to fund the middle school director position was an "unfortunate and detrimental" loss for the district that could impact student achievement in middle schools, which are the district's "highest need" schools.

While the board reconsidered the EASI grant funding, a motion was not put forth to reconsider DeNiro, Perko and Sandoval's other May 18 vote to decline federal funding for continuation of the executive director of continuous improvement and innovation position.

Pueblo Chieftain reporter James Bartolo can be reached at JBartolo@gannett.com.

Swimming pools in Pueblo: Make a splash this summer at these 7 public swimming pools in Pueblo

This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Pueblo D60 board votes to accept state funds but declines new position
Pueblo's population is growing. Here are 6 trends to know about

Spectators walk the length of Union Avenue in downtown Pueblo during the Chile and Frijoles Festival in 2022.

Pueblo Countys population dropped between 1960 and 1970, but the area has recorded a growing population in every census since.

At a work session Monday, Pueblo City Council heard from the Colorado state demographer, Elizabeth Garner, about the past, present and future trends of Pueblos growth.

Heres what you need to know.

How Pueblo has been growing in recent years

Between 2020 and 2022, Pueblo County recorded a net increase of 613 people  thats slower than the pace of growth in the past decade, but some other counties in Colorado recorded a declining population in that time.

Colorado has seen a significant population increase compared with other states in the past decade: The Centennial State grew by nearly 15% between 2010 and 2020, picking up a new seat in Congress as some other states saw a decline in population.

The vast majority of recent growth in Colorado has been concentrated along the Front Range, Garner said. Growth in Colorado peaked in 2015: Population is still increasing, but at a slower rate.

Garner said Pueblo County has continued to grow at a slow but steady, moderate pace. Some of the growth in Pueblo can be attributed to its proximity to El Paso County for people in the labor force, as the cost of living is significantly cheaper here.

Within the county, unincorporated areas  including Pueblo West  grew by 7.6% between 2010 and 2020, while the city of Pueblo grew by 4.7%.

COVID-19 affected Pueblo's demographics and economy

The death rate in Pueblo County grew significantly during the worst times of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is confirmed to have caused the deaths of 909 Puebloans, according to the Pueblo Department of Public Health and Environment.

People who passed away from COVID-19 in Pueblo were predominantly older: 40% were over the age of 80 and only 6% were under the age of 50. Fifty-four percent were male.

Epidemiologists say that the true count of people who lost their lives to COVID-19 is much higher than official counts, as some cases may not have been adequately reported.

Millions of people around the U.S. lost their jobs amid the first few months of the pandemic, but the economic shock to jobs in Pueblo was less debilitating than it was to other counties in Colorado. Pueblo County has largely recovered from the economic impact of the pandemic, Garner said.

More older adults move to Pueblo

Bucking the statewide average, Pueblo sees a large amount of older people moving to town.

Many people in their 20s move out of Pueblo, while net migration starts to pick back up when people are in their 30s. The rate dips slightly beyond that age bracket but picks up significantly for people in their 60s.

The age-based trends for net migration into Pueblo differ from the statewide average, where net migration peaks among people between the ages of 25 and 34.

Councilor Dennis Flores shared at Monday's work session that a few of his neighbors retired to Pueblo because of the relatively lower cost of housing.

Fewer children are expected

Overall population growth has been declining in the U.S. From 2010 to 2020, the second-slowest rate of growth ever was recorded, Garner said.

People are having fewer children as Baby Boomers age out of the workforce and older generations are passing away. Garner said this could have implications on school districts everywhere.

In Pueblo County, the number of residents under the age of 18 decreased by 4% between 2010 and 2020. Most other counties in southern Colorado also recorded a decrease in the youth population, while El Paso County recorded an increase.

Growth in Pueblo in the next decade is expected to be concentrated among older folks, as the Baby Boomer generation continues to age and people move into the area.

Councilor Larry Atencio said the city should try to continue attracting younger people to the area because it could be a drain on the community if the balance is too off-kilter.

Garner said a population of older adults is more stable during boom-or-bust economic cycles, when younger people are more susceptible to moving around. She added that some other states, such as Arizona and Florida, have managed to maintain an older population.

Net migration can balance birth slowdown, death increase

Garner said people moving into Pueblo will help balance the expected decline in the birth rate and increase in deaths.

The state demography office is forecasting positive net migration in Pueblo County over the next few decades because of sustained job growth as well as a retiring population.

Net migration is positive when more people are moving into an area than out of it.

Overall, Pueblo County's population is expected to increase from approximately 170,000 today to over 192,000 by 2050. Some uncertain factors that could affect the forecast include international migration, water and housing.

Pueblo's housing needs to grow with jobs

Crews work on the construction of multiple homes in the expansion of Pueblo's South Pointe neighborhood on Wednesday.

Pueblo will need to continue building housing to accommodate future economic and demographic growth.

Garner said that often people applaud job and economic growth but lament that too many people have moved to Colorado.

A job is a person.  Its really hard to have one without the other, Garner said.

Garner said the Great Recession did a doozy on housing markets in the U.S. and in Colorado, as construction of new units slowed down.

The number of new housing units in Pueblo County has been increasing over the past decade or so but is about half of the number of new units built between 1995 and 2005.

Anna Lynn Winfrey covers politics at the Pueblo Chieftain. She can be reached at awinfrey@gannett.com or on Twitter, @annalynnfrey.

This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Population trends in Pueblo: Here's what to know about demographics
Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Kremlin via REUTERS via third party

In a rare admission, Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged Friday that Russia is sustaining significant losses in the war on Ukraine.

In recent days, we have seen significant losses in Ukraine, they exceed the classical figure, he said, according to the Kremlin.

The Russian president also confessed that Russian forces were dealing with artillery problems, adding in his remarks that Yes, we still do not have enough of these modern weapons, but the defense industry, the country's military-industrial complex is developing rapidly.

The dispirited comments about Moscows prospects in the war come just as Ukraine has launched a series of counteroffensives to push Russian forces out of the country.

The acknowledgment is a stark departure from typical messaging from Moscow. Putin and other Kremlin officials have long sought to paint the invasion as a success throughout the war, despite a stinging slew of losses and failed war plans. In March of last year, Putin claimed the operations were going according to plan, regardless of the Russian militarys failure to seize Ukraines capital, Kyiv, in an embarrassing defeat.

The 2023 Blitz Most Feared by Putin May Have Finally Begun

It doesnt appear that Putin has completely thrown in the towel just yet, though. The Russian president attempted to throw cold water on the idea that Ukraine is fully succeeding in their counteroffensive. He added, however, that the Ukrainian military may yet achieve victory on the battlefield.

It can be stated that all counteroffensive attempts made so far have failed, but the offensive potential of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has still been preserved, Putin said.

The Kremlin has been working to right-size expectations within Russia about the outcome of the war. Moscow recently circulated a memo to propagandists suggesting that Russia hasnt underestimated Ukrainian forces, in an apparent effort to set the stage for a less humiliating defeat.

The Russian losses, according to an update shared Friday from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, are mounting. In the last 24 hours, Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Bilogorivka on the Lyman axis, the Ukrainian government said. Russians also conducted offensives near Bohdanivka on the Bakhmut axis, albeit without success, the update said, noting that Russia also conducted failed operations in Severne and Nevelske, in addition to losses in Marinka.

According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Russia has lost approximately 213,770 troops since launching the invasion in February of last year.

At the beginning of May, the White House National Security Council assessed that Russian forces sustained 100,000 casualties since December.

Russian efforts to boost manpower in the military in advance of Ukraines counteroffensive also appear to be faltering, according to a report from The Moscow Times. Despite reported goals of recruiting 400,000 soldiers this year, recruitment efforts are reportedly not meeting intended goals.

Putin Hiding Out After Panic Behind the Scenes of Moscow Drone Attack

Ukraine, however, still has some tough battles ahead.

In remarks addressed to soldiers Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged Ukrainian soldiers are in particularly difficult battles these days.

We see your heroism, and we are grateful to you for every minute of your life, Zelensky said Friday.

U.S. officials say Ukraine is suffering significant losses, according to CNN.

The Ukrainian governments messaging about the counteroffensive acknowledges there is room for failure still. Zelensky has admitted in recent weeks that a large number of Ukrainian soldiers will likely perish through the fighting.

Ukrainian officials say they are still in desperate need of more weapons and equipment from western allies.

The Biden administration will be sending an additional $2.1 billion worth of military assistance to Ukraine, including air defense and ammunition, the Pentagon announced Friday. The new package will include munitions for Patriot air defense systems and 105mm and 203mm artillery rounds, among other gear, training, and support.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during his meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko at the Bocharov Ruchei residence in the resort city of Sochi, Russia, Friday, June 9, 2023. (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

MOSCOW (AP)  Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Moscow will deploy some of its tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus next month, a move that the Belarusian opposition described as an attempt to blackmail the West.

Putin said during a meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that work on building facilities for the nuclear weapons will be completed by July 7-8, and they will be moved to the territory of Russia's neighbor and ally quickly after that.

The move comes as Ukraine has stepped up attacks in several sectors of the front line in what some observers see as the start of its long-expected counteroffensive.

Russia used Belarus territory to send its troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and has kept forces and weapons on the territory of its ally.

Everything is proceeding as planned, Putin said in televised remarks as he hosted Lukashenko at his residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. On July 7-8 the preparations of the relevant facilities will be completed and we will immediately start the activities linked to the deployment of those weapons on your territory.

Tactical nuclear weapons are intended to destroy enemy troops and weapons on the battlefield. They have a relatively short range and a much lower yield than nuclear warheads fitted to long-range strategic missiles that are capable of obliterating whole cities.

Putin announced the planned deployment of the short-range nuclear weapons in Belarus earlier this year in a move widely seen as a warning to the West as it stepped up military support for Ukraine. He has emphasized that Russia will retain control of them.

Russia didn't say how many nuclear weapons would be sent to Belarus. The U.S. government believes Russia has about 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, which include bombs that can be carried by aircraft, warheads for short-range missiles and artillery rounds.

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya strongly condemned the move.

Putin and his puppet Lukashenko are planning to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus immediately before NATO's summit in Vilnius in July, Tsikhanouskaya told The Associated Press. "This is a rude blackmail, an attempt to force Europe to back down, but we can't allow dictators to dodge punishment for the nuclear blackmail.

Lukashenko, who has been in power for 29 years, has relied on Russia's political and economic support to survive months of protests, mass arrests and Western sanctions following an election in 2020 that kept him in power but was widely seen at home and abroad as rigged.

___

Yuras Karmanau in Tallinn, Estonia contributed to this report.
QR code menus spark love-hate row in Rio, and beyond

Carlos Fionda, 59, manager of Amazem Sao Thiago bar, shows of the physical menu at the Lapa neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in May 2023. (MAURO PIMENTEL)

Leafing through the leather-bound menu at a classic Rio de Janeiro restaurant, the tile-floored, wood-paneled Armazem Sao Thiago, 28-year-old Paula Cardoso says something that amounts to heresy in this establishment: "I prefer QR code menus."

Founded in 1919 and owned by the same family for three generations, Armazem Sao Thiago is a place that frowns on QR codes, those newfangled hieroglyphs that surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, letting contact-wary diners access digital menus on their cell phones.

The bar and restaurant takes pride in its menu, which waiters in impeccably pressed white shirts deferentially hand customers.

"It's the introduction to the house," says Carlos Fionda, 59, a manager at the restaurant -- affectionately nicknamed "Bar do Gomes" -- in the picturesque hillside neighborhood of Santa Teresa.

"That's how the client's experience starts. You chat with them, help them make the best choice... Not a cold, impersonal thing."

Fionda is not alone in defending the good old-fashioned menu -- a subject that stirs passions worldwide.

Rio state adopted a law last week requiring restaurants and bars to offer physical menus for clients who lack smart-phones, have technological troubles or simply want to ignore their devices and enjoy a meal with family and friends.

Several other states are considering similar measures.

And the QR code kerfuffle goes far beyond Brazil.

A comparable bill is in the works in Miami, Florida. Colombia adopted a similar measure last year. Lawmakers in Mendoza province, in Argentine wine country, are meanwhile pushing the other way, with a bill that would require a digital menu option.

It's a touchy topic in a world suddenly dominated by digital dining.

With pandemic-era fears of surface-borne contagion now a receding memory, many diners voice frustration at the lingering omnipresence of digital menus and their drawbacks -- the agony of navigating on a tiny screen, the connection problems, the dead phone battery threat, the lack of human contact.

"QR code menus are the death of civilization," a Washington Post columnist opined last year.

"Fuck QR codes. I just want to hold a menu again," railed an article in Vice magazine.

"Can we finally say QR code menus are a gigantic pile of shit?" Brazilian influencer Felipe Neto asked in a Twitter post that went viral in May.

- 'Here to stay' -

But hold the hostility, please, say the digital menu's defenders.

They are "much more practical," says Cardoso, the trendy young marketing manager who found herself going vintage at Armazem Sao Thiago.

"You can access it on your phone, there are more pictures of the food. You can explore the menu better. (Traditional) menus get old."

Many restaurateurs love the technology -- and quietly hope clients will learn to love it, too, saying it facilitates innovation, seasonality and freshness.

"I just added Japanese food to my menu. If I had 50 physical menus, I'd have to change 50 copies. With digital, you can change it in a few minutes, with zero environmental impact," says Andre Delfino, 50, manager of elegant Santa Teresa restaurant Casa Nossa.

The technology "is here to stay," he predicts.

At Cafe do Alto, in a historic building near Santa Teresa's iconic tram-line, co-owner Francisco Dantas calls himself a traditionalist who prefers an intimate, tech-free dining experience.

But he loves his QR code menu when it comes to his constantly evolving selection of craft beers.

"It's super fluid. I can change it on my phone any time. Just go in, control C, control V, add the new ones," says Dantas, 43.

The Brazilian Association of Bars and Restaurants wants the government to leave the decision to owners.

"It's a matter for the market," says spokesman Jose Eduardo Camargo.

"Both systems have their advantages and fans."

The association found in a recent survey that 38 percent of Brazilian restaurants have adopted digital menus; another 25 percent plan to.

That accelerating ubiquity is what worries Rio state lawmaker Rodrigo Amorim, who introduced the new law.

"We're probably heading for a world of all-digital menus. But the change should be respectful and inclusive," he says.

In the meantime, "there's nothing more romantic than arriving in a restaurant, holding a menu in your hands and deciding what to eat," he told AFP.

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Queens of the desert: drag show is oasis of glamour in rural S. Africa

The show, which the organisers described as a rollercoaster of emotions, from outrageously funny to nostalgic, is "packed out every Saturday night" (Michele Spatari)

Deep in South Africa's semi-desert Karoo region, a glittery drag show in an old hilltop hotel brings a burst of weekly excitement to a sleepy conservative town.

Every Saturday night, Mark Hinds and Jacques Rabie, the owners of the Karoo Theatrical Hotel, amaze their guests with a night-long cabaret and drag show in the small town of Steytlerville in the Eastern Cape.

The show, called "The Steytlerville Follies", stars the couple in their flamboyant stage alter egos -- the desert diva Dame Leyla Lamborghini and the piano maestro Freddy Ferrari.

"If you tell somebody that there is a drag show happening in the middle of absolutely nowhere... every single Saturday night, that creates curiosity," Hinds told AFP as he added the final touches to the set.

A grand piano sat on the stage against the backdrop of bright pink party foil curtains, feathers and disco lights as around 20 guests took their seats in the dimly candle-lit hotel restaurant.

In his dressing room, minutes before the show began, Rabie recalled how "it was difficult" to begin with to put on the show in the region of mountains and wild expanses best known for ostrich farming.

"But after a while more people like us, more gay people... moved in and it became more acceptable in town," he said as he put on his make-up.

Welcomed by his partner on stage, Rabie, wearing a blonde bob wig, high heels and a glittery pink corset dress ripped off his pink feather tutu skirt as he broke into song and dance.

For show-goer Lara Engelbrecht-Wilbraham, the performance was "classy and beautiful". Celebrating her birthday, it was only the second time in her life that she had attended a drag show.

The 44-year-old who sells solar energy products brought her partner and two friends.

The show, which the organisers described as a rollercoaster of emotions, from outrageously funny to nostalgic, is "packed out every Saturday night", said Hinds.

"One of the biggest things that draws people here is curiosity, having heard about something that they have never heard before, that they would have never thought possible," he added.

vid-zam/sn/fg
RAF Typhoons intercept Russian planes flying near Nato airspace twice in 24 hours

The initial incident unfolded when the British jets took off from the Amari airbase in Estonia (RAF)

RAF Typhoons have intercepted Russian planes flying close to Nato member airspace twice in the past 24 hours.

The initial incident unfolded when the British jets took off from the Amari airbase in Estonia on Thursday evening.

They were accompanied by Swedish Air Force Gripens which scrambled to intercept a Russian Air Force IL-20 COOT A and Su-27 FLANKER B flying close to Nato and Swedish airspace, the RAF said.

The initial incident unfolded when the British jets took off from the Amari airbase in Estonia (RAF)

Russian aircraft were not complying with international norms by failing to communicate with the relevant flight information, a statement from the Royal Air Force continued.

However, the RAF confirmed the planes remained in international airspace and flew in a professional manner.

Typhoons were again scrambled to intercept one AN12 CUB and one AN72 COALER flying south from mainland Russia towards the Kaliningrad Oblast on Friday morning.

The RAF planes also intercepted two Tupolev Tu-22M BACKFIRES and two Su-30 SM FLANKER H, also flying south from mainland Russia over the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea.

Typhoons were again scrambled on Friday morning to intercept one AN12 CUB and one AN72 COALER flying south from mainland Russia towards the Kaliningrad Oblast (RAF)

One of the pilots involved in the scramble told the airforce how the incident unfolded.

Although there is an apparent increase in regional activity, these intercepts remain normal jogging for us and we are ready to respond to any task that may pose a threat to regional security, he said in a statement.

Both Swedish and British planes were involved in the incident on Thursday (RAF)

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the incidents were proof of how countries can work together to patrol each others regions.

These intercepts are a stark reminder that the RAF is always ready to defend our skies and those of our allies, he said.

The coordinated action by several air forces serves as a clear demonstration of the value of our international alliances.
Calling all train lovers and California State Parks enthusiasts: The California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento will be hosting a first-time ever event on the historic turntable.

As part of its celebration of California State Parks Week, the museum and foundation will offer free rides on the No. 2 locomotive Wednesday. It will be first come, first served from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

This is a way for the public to engage with the museum in a new, unique and rare opportunity, said California State Railroad Museum Foundation President and CEO Tim Schroepfer.

Schroepfer said that the museum had to close down a part of their excursion rail line, so this event will also serve as a way for visitors to still be able to hop on a train.

Why should you attend?

During the ride on the turntable, anyone who partakes in the activity will be able to see the museum, the levy, and the bridge on I St, said Ty Smith, the museum director.

People should attend, because [they] often think about California State Parks as streams, rivers and trees, Smith said. But theres also a history side of it as well, so were showcasing and highlighting the cultural history that we preserve.

What is the turntable?

The No. 2 locomotive will be used in this activity pulling an open-air gondola for 15-minute train rides. These rides will include a few spins on the turntable, according to the news release.

Built in 1911, the historic turntable was constructed by the American Bridge Company for the Union Pacific in Washington, according to a 2013 edition of the California State Railroad Museum Foundations newsletter. The turntable was later installed in Old Sacramento State Historic Park in 1980. It is currently located outside the Roundhouse at the west end of the museum and is still in use.

We use the turntable almost daily, moving things in and out of the museum, Schroepfer said. It also allows us to operate our excursion railroad to Sacs southern railroad.

The ride may affect those prone to dizziness and, due to limited aisle widths, it is not wheelchair or stroller accessible.

More events for California State Parks Week

Heres a list of more activities and adventures happening in-person and online within the Sacramento area and all throughout the state for June 14 through June 18.

These events and activities include:

 Sunset Kayak Tour

 Lake Natoma Explorations

 Family Bike Night

What do you want to know about life in Sacramento? Ask our service journalism team your top-of-mind questions in the module below or email servicejournalists@sacbee.com.
(Reuters) - Here are reactions after former President Donald Trump said he has been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice, apparently for mishandling sensitive government documents.

U.S. HOUSE SPEAKER KEVIN MCCARTHY:

"Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America."

"House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable."

DEMOCRAT CONGRESSMAN DAN GOLDMAN:

"This country was founded on the principle that we are a government of laws, not people, and that no person, not even a former President, is above the law."

"We are blessed with a legal system that is designed to vindicate the robust rights of all defendants, and just like any other criminal defendant, Donald Trump has long-standing constitutional rights to a trial by jury, to confront his accusers, and to legal counsel."

TESLA CEO ELON MUSK:"There does seem to be far higher interest in pursuing Trump compared to other people in politics. Very important that the justice system rebut what appears to be differential enforcement or they will lose public trust."

ASA HUTCHINSON, CANDIDATE FOR REPUBLICAN NOMINATION:

"Donald Trump's actions - from his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of law - should not define our nation or the Republican Party. This is a sad day for our country."

VIVEK RAMASWAMY, CANDIDATE FOR REPUBLICAN NOMINATION:

"It would be much easier for me to win this election if Trump werent in the race, but I stand for principles over politics. I commit to pardon Trump promptly on January 20, 2025, and to restore the rule of law in our country."

(Editing by Daniel Wallis and Lincoln Feast.)
Read the rainbow: LGBTQ+ books for all ages, recommended by Kansas Citys librarians

The freedom to read in Kansas City has faced political attacks in recent years  most recently in a new Missouri law threatening librarians who recommend obscene books to minors.

Both the active and proposed book bans at libraries and schools around the metro focus on those with LGBTQ+ themes  even if the material in them is deemed by library professionals to be suitable for children and teens.

The current movement to ban stories that contain LGBTQIA+ characters sends a very clear message that there is something wrong with being queer, Kansas City Public Library librarian Jamie Mayo told The Star. Seeing someone else trying to make sense of a feeling that we ourselves are experiencing helps us know we are not alone.

In honor of Pride Month, we asked librarians at the Kansas City Public Library (KCPL) for their LGBTQ+ book recommendations for readers of all ages. They sent us five LGBTQ+ reading lists  weve listed below just a few of the many titles included.

Browse the full lists here:

For even more Pride Month reads, check out the Mid-Continent Public Librarys LGBTQ+ reading lists here:

Books for kids

Adventures With My Daddies by Gareth Peter, illustrated by Garry Parsons

This book features a young, adopted narrator describing their life and adventures with their dog and their two dads, an interracial gay couple.

Julian Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love

This award-winning story features a young protagonist who spots three elaborately-dressed mermaids on the subway and decides to dress up just like them.

Maiden & Princess by Daniel Haack and Isabel Galupo, illustrated by Becca Human

Summary via KCPL: When a maiden reluctantly attends a ball for her friend, the prince, everyone considers her his perfect match until she surprises them  and herself by finding true love with someone else.

Mr. Watsons Chickens by Jarrett Dapier, illustrated by Andrea Tsurumi

Summary via KCPL: Mr. Watson loves his three chickens, and every morning he and Mr. Nelson count them; but when they start to multiply, his house and tiny yard are soon overrun, and the noise and mess are driving Mr. Nelson crazy  so the couple set out to find a new home for the chickens.

I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas

Summary via KCPL: The story of a transgender child who traces her early awareness that she is a girl in spite of male anatomy and the acceptance she finds through a wise doctor who explains her natural transgender status.

YA / teen titles

We Deserve Monuments by Jas Hammonds

Summary via KCPL: When seventeen-year-old Avery moves to rural Georgia to live with her ailing grandmother, she encounters decade-old family secrets and a mystery surrounding the towns racist past.

In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune

This queer retelling of the Tales of Pinocchio centers on a family of robots with one human member evading persecution in a dystopian future.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

A young sharecropper named Aster sows the seeds of civil war aboard a massive space vessel ruled by class divisions as it ferries the last of humanity to a mythical promised land.

A Queer History of the United States for Young People by Michael Bronski

Summary via KCPL: This book explores how LGBTQ people have always been a part of our national identity, contributing to the country and culture for over 400 years.

Heartstopper by Alice Oseman

A teen romance blooms between openly gay Charlie and rugby player Nick at an all-boys high school in England.

Fiction for adult readers

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

Summary via KCPL: A provocative and seductive debut of desire and doubleness that follows the life of a young Palestinian American woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities as she tries to lead an authentic life.

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Summary via KCPL: A dazzling debut novel about an Indian-American immigrant building a life for herself in the Midwest.

Manywhere by Thomas Morgan

Summary via KCPL: Stories about genderqueer characters in the American South.

Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi

Summary via KCPL: Spanning three continents, Butter Honey Pig Bread tells the interconnected stories of three Nigerian women: Kambirinachi and her twin daughters, Kehinde and Taiye.

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

Summary via KCPL: The Price of Salt tells the riveting story of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose salvation arrives one day in the form of Carol Aird, an alluring suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Recently the subject of a viral social media post, this story about agents in a time-travel war between rivaling factions was described by one KCPL librarian as a joy to read.

Nonfiction LGBTQ+ titles

A Queer and Pleasant Danger by Kate Bornstein

This memoir follows the life of a transgender woman who was raised in a conservative Jewish family that then joined the Church of Scientology.

Changing Times: an Almanac and Digest of Kansas Citys LGBTQIA History by David W. Jackson

Summary via KCPL: This expanded second edition marks the 50th anniversary of Kansas Citys pivotal role in the early struggle for equal rights for LGBTQIA individuals this volume contains the first-ever, comprehensive census of 175 Kansas City lesbian and gay bars from the 1930s to present.

Black on Both Sides: a Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton

Summary via KCPL: C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence.

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

This graphic memoir by a genderqueer author and illustrator explores their young adulthood and experiences with gender identity. It was also the most banned book in America last year according to PEN America, a nonprofit supporting freedom of expression through literature.

Real Queer America: LGBT Stories From Red States by Samantha Allen

Summary via KCPL: Making pit stops at drag shows, political rallies, and hubs of queer life across the heartland, (Allen) introduces us to scores of extraordinary LGBT people working for change, from the first openly transgender mayor in Texas history to the manager of the only queer night club in Bloomington, Indiana, and many more.

Do you have more questions about LGBTQ+ resources in Kansas City? Ask the Service Journalism team at kcq@kcstar.com.
NEW YORK  An attorney for indicted Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., asserted Friday his clients $500,000 bond on criminal charges was paid by relatives who are entitled to anonymity in his high-profile prosecution.

Defense attorney Joseph Murray laid out his concerns about publicly identifying the family members in a six-page federal court filing seeking to keep their names out of the public record.

To the extent that it may be possible to unredact a portion of the sealed judicial bond records or proceedings to reveal the existence of a family relationship ... without identifying the name or type of family member, defendant would have no objections, wrote Murray.

Santos, accused of lying repeatedly about his past and facing multiple federal charges, has essentially publicly revealed that the suretors are family members and not lobbyists, donors or other seeking to exert influence over the defendant, the court papers argued.

The politician believes if his benefactors were named it is very likely ... defendant and suretors will mutually agree they have to withdraw from putting up the money, court papers said.

One of his potential benefactors had already embraced a change of heart and backed off his commitment to help Santos, said Murray.

The order to name the suretors was handed down this past Tuesday, with Santos given three days to appeal. Murray said this past Monday that his client would rather go to jail than publicly identify the people who posted the bond on his behalf.

The legal showdown began after Federal Court Magistrate Anne Shields sided with media outlets calling for the public identification of the people who put up the money for his release following a federal court hearing last month.

New organizations filed motions asking for the identities of those who posted the bond after Santos appeared in court last month on charges of wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds and making false statements to Congress.


Republican donor class scrambles to boost alternatives to Trump as the 2024 field  and the ex-presidents legal troubles  grow

Even before former President Donald Trump was indicted this week over his alleged mishandling of classified documents, Bobbie Kilberg was in the Never Trump camp. And the veteran Republican fundraiser worries that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis  given his public feuding with Disney, one of his states largest employers  might prove too polarizing to capture the White House in the end.

So Kilberg  who has spent decades raising money for GOP presidential contenders  has thrown her support behind former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a longtime friend who entered the 2024 race this week. Although she said she would grudgingly vote for DeSantis should he win nomination, Kilberg believes Christie has a clear lane to distinguish himself as somebody who is willing to take Donald Trump on directly and forcefully.

Kilberg said dozens of other fundraisers and donors had reached out to her in recent weeks, eager to help Christies long-shot campaign. And five more called in the wake of Thursdays federal indictment of Trump, she added  a sign of donor appetite for an alternative.

There are many candidates to choose from. Christie  a onetime Trump ally who has sharply criticized the former president for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election  joined a field of candidates that grew even larger this week. Two more contenders kicked off their campaigns Wednesday: former Vice President Mike Pence and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.

Trump, DeSantis, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and talk radio host Larry Elder all have previously announced their candidacies for the GOP nomination.

Trumps critics in political fundraising circles fear that even with his looming legal troubles, the 2024 contest is shaping up as a repeat of 2016, when the brash then-celebrity real-estate developer seized on GOP divisions to bulldoze a path through 16 rivals  including Christie  to the nomination and then the White House.

Too big a Republican field is just handing Donald Trump the nomination on a silver platter, said Chicago executive William Kunkler, an avowed Never Trumper and a longtime GOP donor.

Some deep-pocketed groups, including one aligned with billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, also have pledged to elevate a Trump rival, although its not clear at this stage whether all the outside organizations that oppose Trump will coalesce around a single candidate.

Asked for comment Thursday before the indictment news broke, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung did not directly address the actions of the groups opposed to the former president but said that Trump was dominating in poll after poll  both nationally and statewide  because voters want someone who can beat Joe Biden and retake the White House.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing, and has cast the federal investigation and indictment as election interference. His campaign  which saw a surge in donations after his March indictment in a separate New York case connected to an alleged hush-money scheme  also quickly sought to raise political donations off the latest indictment news.

A CNN poll in May underscores the challenges Trumps rivals face. He was the first choice of 53% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters in the primary, even after his earlier indictment. Trumps support was roughly double the 26% who backed DeSantis as their first choice.

Further complicating the picture for his political adversaries: fundraising and polling thresholds recently announced by the Republican National Committee to participate in the first primary debate threaten to sideline newer entrants in the race.

Big pockets, big goals

A concerted effort by outside groups to elevate a Trump rival could help reshape the GOP field.

The Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that is one of the biggest independent spenders in GOP politics, hasnt yet endorsed a 2024 candidate yet. But it has made no secret of its disdain for Trump, pointedly excluding the former president from a gathering of high-dollar donors earlier this year and running ads that criticize his stance on Social Security.

Meanwhile, the influential conservative network aligned with Koch is pledging to back a single Republican it sees as likely to win the general election  and to unleash its grassroots army on that persons behalf. Doing so could imperil Trumps route to the nomination.

Americans for Prosperity, the flagship group in the sprawling network associated with Koch, has begun phone and in-person outreach to likely and potential GOP primary voters in four early nominating states  Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire and Nevada. Goals include expanding the primary electorate and uncovering issues that will resonate with these voters.

Any successful candidate will need to earn the support of those Americans  and when we have a sense of who that candidate is, AFP Action will bring the full force of its grassroots efforts to bear to coalesce voters behind that individual, Emily Seidel, CEO of Americans for Prosperity and senior adviser to AFP Action, the groups political arm, said in a statement to CNN

The group has not set a public timeline for its endorsement but expects to engage in the race before the first primaries and caucuses, according to an AFP official.

In the statement, Seidel said the early conversations with voters have shown that many, including those who say they support Trump, are receptive to arguments that he is a weak candidate, his focus on 2020 is a liability, and his lack of appeal with independent voters is a problem.

Many Republicans are ready to move on, she added, they just need to see another candidate step up and show they can lead and win.

AFP has not publicly announced a budget for its presidential activity, but the groups spending in past elections has, at times, rivaled that of the RNC.

In addition, super PACs  which can accept unlimited sums from ultra-rich donors and corporations  could help individual candidates stand out from the crowd.

Robert Bigelow, a hotel magnate and wealthy space entrepreneur, contributed $10 million of the $30 million initially raised by Never Back Down, a super PAC supporting DeSantis presidential ambitions, a source familiar with the donation told CNN. He had previously donated $10 million to DeSantis state political committee, which is expected to help fund Never Back Down.

Scott, the South Carolina senator, is polling in the single digits, well behind Trump and DeSantis. But he has had the backing of billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who donated $30 million to a pro-Scott super PAC in the 2022 cycle.

Ellison, with a net worth that Forbes pegs at more than $130 billion, was on hand for Scotts campaign kickoff last month in North Charleston, South Carolina  where the Republican praised him as one of my mentors.

Never Back Down and the pro-Scott super PAC Trust in the Mission have put $10.8 million and just shy of $5 million, respectively, into early advertising, according to a tally of spending collected by AdImpact.

The pro-Trump super PAC  MAGA Inc.  has spent even more, topping $18.7 million.

On Friday, following the news of Trumps indictment, a pro-Christie super PAC launched its first ad of the campaign. The digital spot by the Tell It Like It Is PAC features Christie attacking Trumps qualifications.

No smoke-filled rooms

Some of the GOPs big financiers have already publicly defected from Trump, including Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder. Others are still weighing their options.

Let the debates happen, John Catsimatidis, a New York billionaire who has supported Trump in the past and has a history of backing both Republicans and Democrats in national politics. Let the American people listen to all the candidates and make up their own minds.

Political observers, including some top donors, warn that big dollars alone will not determine the Republican primary outcome.

Sarah Longwell  a Trump critic and publisher of the Bulwark website who runs GOP focus groups around the country  said establishment Republican donors shouldnt underestimate how deeply GOP voters feel tied to Trump.

They have voted for him twice. They have defended him at Thanksgiving dinner tables, she said of Trump supporters. They have made their accommodations. They have made their rationalizations.

I think the people (running for the presidency) who appeal to Republican donors are no longer the same people who appeal to Republican voters, she added.

Art Pope, a North Carolina retail chain chief and veteran Republican activist and donor who is closely aligned with the Koch network, said the politician who wins AFP Actions support will benefit.

But Pope  who is backing Pences candidacy  said an important factor will be a candidates ability to attract the small-dollar donations needed to sustain a campaign.

There are no smoke-filled rooms, he told CNN. Its not like a bunch of donors can get into a backroom and decide  whos going to be the alternative to Donald Trump.

Debate stage obstacle

The RNCs decision to set fundraising and polling thresholds to qualify for the first GOP debate on August 23 in Milwaukee looms over the field.

To make the stage, candidates must hit at least 1% in several national polls recognized by the RNC  with some polling from early states counting as well. Qualifying candidates also will need a minimum of 40,000 unique donors  a requirement that already has set off alarms among some contenders just establishing their candidacies.

Trump has amassed a substantial small-donor base in his White House bids but has signaled he may skip the first debates. DeSantis, who announced raising a record $8.2 million in the first 24 hours of his candidacy, already has met the 40,000-donor RNC threshold, according to his campaign.

But others could be sidelined.

Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor, formally announced his bid in late April and has argued that the RNC should have set only minimal criteria for the early debate as newer entrants build their campaign infrastructure.

He has begun running Facebook ads that seek donations as small as $3 to help me get on the debate stage and move our nation forward.

CNNs David Wright, Steve Contorno and Kit Maher contributed to this report.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
FILE - Chairman Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., listens during a hearing of a special House committee dedicated to countering China, on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023, in Washington. Gallagher announced Friday, June 9, 2023, that he won't run for U.S. Senate in 2024 against Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, leaving an open GOP field with no declared candidates in the battleground state. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

MADISON, Wis. (AP)  Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher announced Friday that he won't run for U.S. Senate in 2024 against Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, leaving an open GOP field with no declared candidates in the battleground state.

Gallagher was the highest profile Republican said to be considering a run against Baldwin, who is seeking a third term after an 11-point win in 2018. Baldwin is viewed as a formidable opponent due to her strong showing six years ago, her high profile across the state and her ability to raise money.

Democrats, including Baldwin, are defending 23 seats in the U.S. Senate in 2024, including two held by independents who caucus with Democrats. Thats compared with just 10 seats that Republicans hope to keep in their column.

Wisconsin's other senator, Republican Ron Johnson, narrowly won reelection to a third term in November. Baldwin will be on the ballot in a presidential year in a state where four of the past six presidential elections have been decided by less than a percentage point.

Gallagher, in a statement, said that his position chairing a House committee on China gives him a rare, bipartisan opportunity in Congress to help restore American strength, prevent war in the Pacific, and defend our basic freedoms from communist aggression.

Gallagher, a fierce critic of Beijing, said his work on the China committee serving in Congress will be his focus. He said he will seek a fifth term representing northeast Wisconsin next year.

The announcement comes the day before Baldwin and Wisconsin Democrats were gathering in Green Bay for their state convention. Republicans are meeting starting June 16 in La Crosse.

Several other Republicans are considering taking on Baldwin, but none have officially announced.

Gallaghers decision to opt out of the race leave Republicans staring down another chaotic, messy, intra-party primary, said Wisconsin Democratic Party spokesperson Arik Wolk.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, representing northern Wisconsin in Congress since winning a special election in May 2020, has been traveling the state meeting with Republicans ahead of a potential Senate run.

Tiffany is a staunch backer of former President Donald Trump. Tiffany, as a member of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, voted not to certify election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania, the only two states where objections were taken. Tiffany also signed on to a Republican lawsuit filed in Texas with the U.S. Supreme Court that would have thrown out Wisconsins presidential votes and instead had the election decided by the states Republican-controlled Legislature.

Others considering a Senate run are Madison businessman Eric Hovde, who lost in a Republican primary for Senate in 2018, Franklin businessman Scott Mayer and former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a staunch Trump supporter who backed false claims of fraud after the 2020 election.

Clarke tweeted Friday in response to Gallagher's news that none of the Republicans considering a run energizes or excites the base voter like I do.
As details of Donald Trumps federal indictment trickle out, some lawmakers have been quick to comment while others have remained silent.

Trump was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury on charges related to the hundreds of classified documents seized from his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, which the former president confirmed in a Truth Social post.

Following the news of Trumps indictment, Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, quickly criticized the indictment, lambasting the Justice Department for the charges while Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., another member of the committee, commented with a brief tweet Thursday, stating that no one is above the law.

Several prominent lawmakers, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an ally of the former president, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, have not commented.

Heres what lawmakers have said so far:

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas

Cruz called the indictment an assault on democracy during the Friday episode of his podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.

I have to say today is a very sad day in American history. It is a shameful day in American history. It is a disgraceful day in American history, Cruz said.

The Texas lawmaker also criticized Attorney General Merrick Garland, stating he will go down in disgrace as the most partisan and political attorney general in our nation's history.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks during the America First Agenda Summit, at the Marriott Marquis hotel July 26, 2022 in Washington, D.C.

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del.

Sen. Chris Coons, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Friday that "no one is above the law."

And these federal charges arising from an investigation led by an independent special counsel remind us of that bedrock principle, said Coons. As with anybody facing criminal charges, the former president is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the opportunity to defend himself, and appropriate due process.

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., speaks during a Judiciary Subcommittee hearing with policy executives from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter about their use of algorithms on April 27, 2021.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.

The Minnesota Democrat kept her comments brief, simply tweeting Thursday "On Trump indictment: Obstruction. Conspiracy. Facts matter. And no one is above the law."

Amy Klobuchar

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.

Hawley denounced the charges against Trump while also attacking Garland during an interview Thursday night with FOX News.

This is not about Donald Trump ultimately; this is about the United States of America, Hawley said. "This is about whether the Constitution is still real in this country. This is about whether any American, any American can expect the due process of law.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., departs the chamber during the vote to confirm former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti as the next ambassador to India, more than a year and a half after he was initially selected for the post, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, March 15, 2023.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah

Sen. Mitt Romney struck a different tone from some of his Republican colleagues, not holding back in one of the sharpest Republican responses to the news of Trumps indictment.

Mr. Trump brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities to do so, Romney said in a statement Friday.

These allegations are serious and if proven, would be consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest, such as withholding defensive weapons from Ukraine for political reasons and failing to defend the Capitol from violent attack and insurrection, he added.

Unlike Cruz and Hawley, the Utah Republican did not go after the Justice Department or Garland, instead saying the Justice Department appears to have exercised "due care in investigating and charging Trump.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and his wife Ann Romney arrive for the State Dinner with President Joe Biden and the South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol at the White House, Wednesday, April 26, 2023, in Washington.

Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo.

Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the chair of the Senate Republican Conference, said in a Friday statement that the indictment "looks like an unequal application of justice," noting that despite the classified materials found at Biden's home, Biden faces no indictment.

"You can't help but ask why this is happening," Barrasso added. "It feels political, and it's rotten."

Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., on Jan. 31, 2023.

Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas

Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall also spoke out Thursday night following news of Trump's indictment, stating that "every American should be alarmed by tonight's indictment."

"President Trump warned us about the unprecedented abuse of power within the FBI/DOJ - it seems they will do anything to stop him once and for all," Marshall said in the statement posted to Twitter.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) asks questions during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing to discuss reopening schools during Covid-19 at Capitol Hill on Sept. 30, 2021 in Washington.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Republicans, Democrats react to Trump's indictment
A young fragment of coral harvested from a nursery is shown off the coast of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Thursday, May 25, 2023. Restoration efforts are underway in the United Arab Emirates as coral reefs face threats in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili).

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates (AP)  On a boat off the coast of an island near Abu Dhabi, marine scientist Hamad al-Jailani feels the corals, picked from the reef nursery and packed in a box of seawater, and studies them carefully, making sure they havent lost their color.

The corals were once bleached. Now they're big, healthy and ready to be moved back to their original reefs in the hope they'll thrive once more.

We try to grow them from very small fragments up to  now some of them have reached  the size of my fist, al-Jailani said, who's part of the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi's coral restoration program.

The nursery gives corals the ideal conditions to recover: clear waters with strong currents and the right amount of sunlight. Al-Jailani periodically checks the corals' growth, removes any potentially harmful seaweed and seagrass, and even lets the fish feed off the corals to clean them, until they're healthy enough to be relocated.

The Environment Agency Abu Dhabi, or EAD, has been rehabilitating and restoring corals since 2021, when reefs off the United Arab Emirates' coast faced their second bleaching event in just five years. EAD's project is one of many initiatives  both public and private  across the country to protect the reefs and the marine life that depend on them in a nation that has come under fire for its large-scale developments and polluting industries that cause harm to underwater ecosystems. There's been some progress, but experts remain concerned for the future of the reefs in a warming world.

Coral bleaching occurs when sea temperatures rise and sun glares flush out algae that give the corals their color, turning them white. Corals can survive bleaching events, but cant effectively support marine life, threatening the populations that depend on them.

The UAE lost up to 70% of their corals, especially around Abu Dhabi, in 2017 when water temperatures reached 37 degrees Celsius (99 degrees Fahrenheit), according to EAD. But al-Jailani said 40-50% of corals survived the second bleaching event in 2021.

Although the bleaching events did wipe out a good portion of our corals, he said, it did also prove that the corals that we have are actually resilient ... these corals can actually withstand these kind of conditions."

Bleaching events are happening more frequently around the world as waters warm due to human-made climate change, caused by the burning of oil, coal and gas that emits heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Other coral reef systems around the world have suffered mass bleaching events, most notably Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

How to limit global warming and its effects will be discussed at length at the United Nations climate conference, which will be held in Dubai later this year.

The UAE is one of the worlds largest oil producers and has some of the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions globally. The country has pledged to have net zero carbon emissions by 2050, which means all carbon dioxide emissions are either slashed or canceled out somehow, but the goal has been met with skepticism from analysts.

But bleaching due to warming weather is not the only threat to coral reefs around the gulf. High oil tanker traffic, fossil-fuel related activities, offshore installations, and the exploitation of marine resources are all putting marine life under intense stress, according to the U.N. Environment Programme, causing them to degrade.

Environmentalists have also long criticized the UAE, and Dubai in particular, for its large-scale buildings and huge coastal developments.

The building of the Palm Jebel Ali, which began more than a decade ago and has been on hold since 2008, caused an outcry among conservationists after it reportedly destroyed about 8 square kilometers (5 square miles) of reef.

"More than 90 million cubic meters (23.8 billion gallons) of sediments were dredged and dropped, more or less on top of one of the remaining reefs near Dubai, said John Henrik Stahl, the dean of the College of Marine Sciences at Khorfakkan University in Sharjah, UAE.

The project was meant to be similar to the Palm Jumeirah  a collection of small, artificial islands off the coast of Dubai in the shape of a palm tree.

Still, environmental projects persist across the coastline and throughout the emirates.

Development company URB has announced it wants to grow 1 billion artificial corals over a 200-square-kilometer area (124 square miles) and 100 million mangrove trees on an 80-kilometer (50-mile) strip of beaches in Dubai by 2040.

Still in the research and development phase, the project hopes to create 3D technology to print materials that can host algae, much like corals.

Members of Dubai's diving community are also encouraging coral protection efforts.

Diving course director Amr Anwar is in the process of creating a certified coral restoration course that teaches divers how to collect and re-plant corals that have fallen after being knocked off by divers fins or a boats anchor.

I dont want people to see broken corals and just leave them like that," said Anwar. Through the training we give people, they would be able to take these broken corals that they find and plant them elsewhere, and then see them grow and watch their progress.

But experts say that unless the threat of overheating seas caused by climate change is addressed, coral bleaching events will continue to occur, damaging reefs worldwide.

Countries have pledged to limit the global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, after which scientists say the effects of warming on the planet could be much worse, and some even potentially irreversible. But analysts say most nations  including the UAE  are still way off that target.

You have to make sure that the cause for the degradation of the coral reefs in the first place is no longer a threat," said Stahl, the Khorfakkan University scientist. Otherwise the restoration effort may be for nothing.

___

Associated Press reporter Nick El Hajj in Dubai, UAE contributed to this report.

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about APs climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Back when Donald Trump was still on Twitter, the former presidents tendency to post contradictory statements on the platform made the phrase theres always a tweet a mantra for many.

It also inspired the hashtag #ATweetForEverything.

Trump hasnt been on Twitter since he was permanently banned a few days after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection (despite having his account restored by Elon Musk).

Trumps indictment on Thursday over his handling of classified documents gave Twitter users yet another reason to reminisce about the former presidents habit of saying one thing and doing another.

On Friday morning, Mother Jones Washington bureau chief and MSNBC analyst David Corn resurrected a quote from Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign when he argued that the cavalier way his opponent Hillary Clinton handled sensitive information on a personal email server disqualifies her from the presidency.

In July 2016, then-FBI director James Comey concluded that, while there was evidence that Clinton had potentially violated the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.

Today is a good day to remember Donald Trump said this. pic.twitter.com/Kqx321cOkB  David Corn (@DavidCornDC) June 9, 2023

Of course, Twitter users were amused, but not surprised, at Trumps quote about classified information.

It will never stop being amazing. And hilarious.   Nicole L. Augenti, Esq. (@Nicole1515) June 9, 2023

There is so much tape of Donald Trump sticking his fake 10 carat gold plated foot in his mouth. https://t.co/Pt079xmO3k  Texas Paul Schroder (@Paultx890) June 9, 2023

There's always a #TraitorTrump post where he tells America EXACTLY how he should be handled in a situation he's created.



Of course, Drumpf plays the victim instead so he can whine to his minions while asking for more money. Some billionaire, eh?#Indicted pathological liar https://t.co/AKbMHH6ytY  Bob Botelho (@BobVipers) June 9, 2023

Drumpf really should talk to his former self that called for the rule of law and 'lock her up.' https://t.co/KbPW9gboiv  M J (@texson6886) June 9, 2023

I guess this means he'll be dropping out of the race now, right? https://t.co/KYxKovHVdk  Hil.i.am (@hilaryluros) June 9, 2023

Trumps quote condemning the mishandling of classified info wasnt the only bit of irony that resurfaced after his indictment.

Jeff Yarbro, a Tennessee state senator who is running for mayor of Nashville, pointed out last year that the DOJ only started treating the removal of classified documents as a felony after Trump made it law in 2018.

Q: So when did the DOJ start treating removal of classified documents like a felony anyway?

A: When President Trump signed a 2018 law making it a felony. pic.twitter.com/KA6RKYlQ8L  Jeff Yarbro (@yarbro) August 9, 2022

Related...
The review will work with farmers to review how special sites are managed

A review of the way protected sites on Dartmoor are managed has been announced by the government.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has appointed David Fursman as chair.

The review panel will "work with local farmers and stakeholders... to provide an independent perspective on the management of the protected sites".

Natural England said a joint approach needed to be "based on a shared understanding of the evidence".

Mr Fursdon said he was "delighted" to be chairing the review.

He is Lord Lieutenant of Devon, and a landowner, along with being chair of the institute for agricultural and horticulture.

A Defra statement said: "The government is committed to supporting farmers and those living and working on the moor to join together to safeguard the long term management of the moors, in particular the areas with greatest environmental value."

The review will work with farmers and stakeholders and look at the ways Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) across Dartmoor are managed ecologically.

David Fursdon, Lord Lieutenant of Devon, will chair the review

It will make recommendations "as to the most effective grazing and management regime(s) that would deliver improvements on the SSSI sites across Dartmoor so they can maintain or achieve favourable condition whilst also balancing the long-term and sustainable delivery of other priorities such as agricultural production, public access and cultural and natural heritage".

Farming Minister Mark Spencer said: "The review will help us identify how we can deliver much-needed environmental improvements on Dartmoor while supporting other priorities such as agricultural production, public access and cultural and natural heritage."

The review will be completed in the autumn.

Mr Fursdon said: "I am delighted to be chairing this independent review and I look forward to fully engaging with all stakeholders involved in the management of Dartmoor."

Dave Slater, South West regional director for Natural England, said: "Our long term joint approach with Dartmoor farmers to protect and enhance these habitats needs to be based on a shared understanding of the evidence that will inform how we can have a future where nature and farming can thrive together."

Follow BBC News South West on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to spotlight@bbc.co.uk.
Updated June 9

Despite overwhelming support from the Rhode Island Senate, free lunch and breakfast for all public school children will likely not be available, according to state legislators.

The Rhode Island Senate voted 31 to 4 on May 16 in favor of funding school meals the federal government doesnt already cover  with opposition coming from Senate Republicans.

Rhode Island Democratic senator Jonathan Acosta said momentum to offer the meals will likely end once the bill is presented to the House of Representatives.

Nobody wants to be the asshole to say no were not going to feed kids at school so my guess would be that the House will protect itself by avoiding a public vote, Acosta told The 74.

LeeAnn Sennick, communications director for the Rhode Island Senate minority office, declined The 74s request for comment on Acostas remarks.

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According to the Rhode Island Department of Education, of the states 137,452 public school students, more than 70,000 receive a free or reduced-price lunch; and around 29,000 receive a free or reduced-price breakfast.

During the pandemic, the federal government funded free school meal programs for children throughout the country. The program expired at the start of the 2022-23 school year, leaving state governments to decide whether to pick up the cost.

Related: A Pandemic Experiment in Universal Free School Meals Gains Traction in the U.S.

Rhode Island House of Representatives communications director Larry Berman told The 74 in an emailed statement there is no money in the budget that just passed the House Finance Committee in regards to free lunch and breakfast for all public school children.

The House of Representatives began to vote on the state budget Friday and will adjourn on June 30th.

Acosta said the House of Representatives has other spending priorities, such as funding housing.

According to the Center for American Progress, California, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota and New Mexico have funded universal school meals after federal funds ran out.

Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Nevada have passed temporary legislation in the absence of continued federal investment.

Hunger is one of the very first things that needs to be addressed. Its one of the biggest barriers to learning and one thats honestly pretty easy to solve, Allie Pearce, a K-12 education policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, told The 74.

Related: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz Signs Universal Free School Meals Into Law

Under federal guidelines set for the 2023-24 academic year, a student from a household of three is eligible for free lunch if they made $32,318 or less in annual income and for reduced-price lunch if they made $45,991 or less. A student from a household of six is eligible for free meals at $52,364 or less in annual income.

Those are just students that we know have filled out applications or that have been directly certified, Pearce said. There are probably so many more students that have not been able to fill out those applications or their families are in difficult or uncertain financial situations and may not qualify.

The bill, sponsored by Acosta, would require Rhode Island public schools to provide free lunch and breakfast to all students instead of requiring them to only provide meals for those covered by the federal government.

With the pandemic we saw a rise in economic and food insecurity across our state, Acosta said. Weve started moving back to this world where we saw the issue of lunch shamingso in light of that we picked up where some of these folks left off and introduced this legislation.

Pearce noted that deprioritizing free school meals will do a disservice to all Rhode Island public school students, especially those who receive reduced-price meals.

Those students will continue to have to pay a lesser amount but one that adds up for sure, Peace said. It also doesnt work to address the stigma a lot of students go through when it comes to the meal debt that they may accrue.

Rhode Island Republican senator Jessica de la Cruz has argued this bill is unnecessary because children from low-income families already receive free school meals.

What you are doing is financing free lunches for the affluent, Cruz told The Providence Journal. I would be in favor of widening the eligibility, but I cannot support the lunches of the affluent.

Rhode Island Republican senator Gordon Rogers agreed with Cruz.

Im not against feeding children and kids that need it in school, Rogers told The Providence Journal. This will cost the state of Rhode Island [up to] $40 million, not just one time, but continuing, escalating forward.

Related: Free School Meals Helped Kids for 2 Years. This Fall, Those Lunches Wont Return

In the meantime, Acosta is hopeful conversations around free school meals will be revived in the coming year.

The people in our state are our most valuable asset and the more that we develop them the better the returns are going to be for all of us, Acosta said.
RI courts expunge more than 23k pot cases under new legalization law

PROVIDENCE  Rhode Island court officials announced Thursday they had expunged more than 23,000 marijuana possession charges as required under the states new legalization law.

The automatic expungement of marijuana charges has been an organizational feat, said State Court Administrator Julie P. Hamil. There has been coordination at every level of the Judiciary to execute this process in a timely and holistic fashion.

The Rhode Island cannabis act, passed by the General Assembly last year, made possession of certain amounts of marijuana now legal.

The act provided for the automatic expungement of prior simple marijuana possession charges. The expungement provision does not apply to other marijuana convictions such as for selling, delivering, or manufacturing the drug.

Usually someone would have to file a request to have a record expunged. The act modified that process and required the courts to automatically expunge any eligible cases, free of charge.

In accordance with the act, Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul A. Suttell signed an executive order in January outlining the process for implementing the expungement provisions.

All criminal convictions for marijuana possession committed by individuals 18 and older, and all civil violations committed by anyone 21 and older would be expunged.

Judiciary-wide, more than 23,000 cases were expunged, the courts said: 3,015 individual cases were expunged in the Superior Court, 10,650 in the District Court, and 9,952 cases in the Rhode Island Traffic Tribunal.

Phase two of this expungement process will include cases where possession of marijuana was one of multiple charges or counts.

The process is still in the planning stages but will be more involved since each case will have to be manually updated.

Still the courts are on track to ensure that eligible charges will be expunged by July 1, 2024.

Individuals can search the Rhode Island Judiciary Public Portal to check the courts records to see if cases have been expunged. Once expunged the information will no longer appear in the courts computer systems.

Individuals can request an expedited expungement by contacting the court (see below) that heard the case.

Superior Court: SuperiorCourtHelpDesk@courts.ri.gov

District Court:

Murray Judicial Complex: 2ndDistrictCourtHelpDesk@courts.ri.gov

Noel District Court: 3rdDistrictCourtHelpDesk@courts.ri.gov

McGrath Judicial Complex: 4thDistrictCourtHelpDesk@courts.ri.gov

Garrahy Judicial Complex: 6thDistrictCourtHelpDesk@courts.ri.gov

Rhode Island Traffic Tribunal: TrafficTribunalHelpDesk@courts.ri.gov

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Expungements required under new law that legalized recreational pot
The mainstreaming of AI-generated imagery in political advertisements continues.

As reported by The Verge, the 2024 presidential campaign behind Florida governor Ron DeSantis has released a video advertisement featuring what strongly appear to be AI-generated images of former president Donald Trump kissing and embracing Anthony Fauci, the former White House chief medical advisor whose role in COVID-19 pandemic prevention and response has made him a target of right-wing conspiracy theories.

Anti-vaccine and anti-COVID restriction messaging has become a rallying cry on the right, although the vaccine was one of Trump's most concrete accomplishments during his term. DeSantis, who became a political star on the right in part because of Florida's lax COVID restrictions, has made Trump's alleged coziness to Fauci  the other main face behind pandemic lockdowns and vaccination efforts, which many far-righters have painted as tyrannical  central to his presidential bid.

The video in question  which was first shared to Twitter on June 5 by the "DeSantis War Room, a Twitter account created last August by DeSantis aide Christina Pushaw  plays on these themes, juxtaposing clips of Trump firing contestants on his reality show with soundbites of the former president refusing to fire Fauci as well as imagery of the two figures alongside one another. And importantly, the videos of Trump on his reality show are marked as "Reality TV Trump," while all other clips are marked as "Real Life Trump."

"Donald Trump became a household name by FIRING countless people *on television*," reads the video's accompanying caption. "But when it came to Fauci..."

But according to an AFP fact-check, some of those images marked "Real Life Trump"  three, to be exact  weren't "real" at all, and instead are overwhelmingly likely to have been AI-generated.

https://twitter.com/DeSantisWarRoom/status/1665799058303188992

On closer inspection, the telltale signs of AI generation become clearer. In the phony photos  in all of which Trump is seen either kissing Fauci's cheek, embracing the former medical advisor, or both  Trump's hair is suspiciously blurry, while both figures' skin is inhumanly smooth. And in one of the photos, the White House logo pictured in the background contains a bunch of scrambled nonsense letters (rather than, you know, words.)

But insidiously, the three fake images were not only pictured under text that said "Real Life Trump," but were also juxtaposed alongside three real and similar photos of Trump and Fauci together  a decision that makes the fake photos seem all the more plausible.

"It was sneaky to intermix what appears to be authentic photos with fake photos," Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told the AFP, "but these three images are almost certainly AI-generated."

Folks in DeSantis' camp have yet to confirm or deny the use of AI, and instead are hitting back with a heavy dose of Trump-targeted whataboutism.

"No campaign has pushed more misleading deepfakes, false photoshops, and outright fabrications than the Trump campaign," Matt Wolking, a spokesperson for the DeSantis-supporting Never Back Down PAC, told the Verge. "It is 100 percent true that Donald Trump empowered and embraced Fauci  he even gave him a presidential commendation."

When asked to confirm whether the images were in fact AI-generated, however, Wolking failed to answer, telling the Verge that they'd "have to ask the campaign."

Similarly, in what appears to be an attempt at a clap back, Pushaw took to Twitter on Wednesday to share a screenshot of a recent Trump post to Truth Social in which the former president is seen sharing an obviously fake photo of DeSantis riding a rhino. (The term "RINO" is a popular right-wing acronym meaning "Republican in name only.")

"I think this might be an AI-generated image," Pushaw captioned the screenshot. "Who knows?"

And, well, sure, Trump definitely hasn't been one to shy away from AI-generated imagery. Nor has the Republican National Convention (RNC), for that matter. But three wrongs don't make a "whatever, he did it too," and the concept of an image being plausible  as Wolking argues  versus the fact of an image being, uh, real are two very different things.

And besides, this isn't a Trump versus DeSantis ethics debate. This is a debate about the ethics of using AI-powered deepfake tech in political messaging at all, especially in instances like this one where synthetic content hasn't been overtly labeled as such.

Of course, whether deepfaked and otherwise AI-generated content will actually have much  if any  impact in the way of voter mobilization still remains to be seen. After all, most AI-made imagery is less than convincing.

But as a collective, we also seem to be moving closer to a world where deepfakes are more or less ubiquitous, and reality is simultaneously easier to manipulate and harder to parse. By DeSantis campaign rules, if you can't find an image of a former president smooching a controversial top aide on the White House press stage, you can apparently just whip one with an AI image generator. Is that really how we want any presidential campaign to behave?

More on AI and 2024: Donald Trump Shares Slightly Misfigured AI-Generated Image of Himself Praying
Rory Stewarts GiveDirectly charity defrauded of almost $1m by its own workers

Former Secretary of State for International Development Rory Stewart arrives for the weekly Cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street - WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto via Getty Images

A charity headed by Rory Stewart, which prides itself on wiring cash directly to the worlds poor, has been defrauded of nearly a million dollars.

GiveDirectly operates by sending aid directly to impoverished people across the world through mobile money transfers  a set-up which it says is designed to empower recipients and cut out middlemen.

The charity has been operating since 2009 and extended its operations to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the poorest countries on earth, in 2018.

It hoped that by wiring money directly to families it could help alleviate poverty, but the money started to go missing. By the time the fraud was uncovered, at least $900,000 had been stolen.

In late August 2022, we started sending cash transfers to the registered SIMs, many of which were actually in the possession of these GiveDirectly staff, the organisation wrote on its website.

Give Directly CEO Rory Stewart speaks to villagers from Mgandamwani in Kilifi County, Kenya - Patrick Meinhardt/The Telegraph

The DRC is a nation wracked by decades of conflict. It is among the five poorest nations in the world, with nearly 62 per cent people living on less than $2.15 a day.

According to GiveDirectly, its workers in the Congo  including field enrollment staff, call centre operators, administrative personal and internal auditors  conspired to steal the SIM cards on which monies were sent before they could go to the intended recipients.

More than 1,700 families in DRCs South Kivu province lost out, the New York-based NGO said.

Hundreds of would-be recipients complained about the issue, but were lied to by in-country about the missing funds, GiveDirectly revealed.

One of the devastating details of the case is that... the fraud required suppressing recipient complaints. We know hundreds of recipients called in to complain and ask about their next transfers and were told various types of lies, GiveDirectlys managing director, Joe Huston, told The New Humanitarian.

The charity said 75 workers in the DRC are no longer with the organisation, though mostly this is due to contracts expiring. According to Mr Huston some were terminated after disciplinary proceedings and some may face prosecution.

Were sorry... we let you down

GiveDirectly says its donors include individual donors, foundations, businesses and institutions.

The $900,000 fraud came out of a total of around $7 million that GiveDirectly intended to transfer to some 5,000 households in South Kivu. Households were meant to receive one-time transfers of $392, and then $40 per month for the following two years.

GiveDirectly said it was the largest sum of money it has ever lost to fraud.

All operations in the country have been paused since January.

Normally recipients register their SIMs with independent mobile money agents, but GiveDirectly said it made an exception for the South Kivu programme due to its isolation and fragile setting.

In this remote region, the closest agent is often a long distance away. We therefore allowed GiveDirectlys enrollment team to register these new SIMs for recipients instead of sending them to agents, GiveDirectly said in its public statement.

It added that a small portion of the lost funds have been recovered, but most are likely not recoverable.

To the people who should have received cash, were sorry. It is our job to design systems that protect the funds that are supposed to reach you, and ultimately, we let you down, said Mr Huston.

Give Directly CEO Rory Stewart speaks to residents from Mgandamwani village in Kilifi County, Kenya - Patrick Meinhardt/The Telegraph

Mr Huston said GiveDirectlys ongoing audits in the other African country  which it did not name  where its staff were registering SIMs for recipients have come back relatively clean.

It is, of course, impossible to know perfectly how much is lost each year, but we have no reason to believe there is significant fraud not yet uncovered, the NGO said in its public release.

It added that it is now reviewing its procedures across the organisation.

Our hope is that people dont learn the wrong lesson here, Mr Huston told The New Humanitarian. Fraud happens everywhere, including aid and cash transfers. And its important to talk about it.

The former head of counter-fraud for Oxfam has previously estimated that the scale of loss to fraud in global aid programmes is between 2-5 per cent of an organisations income.

The Telegraph interviewed Mr Stewart in September about his organisation, with the article title reading: This man wants to give $1,000 to every poor person on Earth  but could his plan really work?

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Georgia officials are reacting to the news that former President Donald Trump has been indicted on 37 counts related to classified documents seized from his Florida home.

Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Mark Winne spoke to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]

A fateful phone call about the 2020 presidential election in Georgia involving then-President Trmp and Raffensperger seems destined to go down in history, so when word of the indictment hit, Raffensperger was one of the key people Winne wanted to talk to.

In a recorded telephone conversation, Trump asked Raffensperger to find enough votes to help him win the presidential nomination in the state in after the race had already been called for Pres. Joe Biden.

RELATED STORIES:

Raffensperger refused and was unyielding in his position that Trump lost the election in the state. Those phone calls, as well as other accusations of election interference in Georgia, are the subject of a separate investigation by the Fulton County District Attorneys office.

On Saturday, Trump is expected to travel to Georgia to speak at the states Republican convention. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Raffensperger will not attend.

When you run for public office and then when you actually are elected to elected office, I believe that we should be called to a higher standard, Raffensperger said. And thats what were looking for. People that do the right thing regardless of the cost. But you also need to do it with some grace.

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Still, Raffensperger said that no matter what former Trump may feel about him, he takes no joy in the federal indictment.

I think that what we expect when people run for elected office is that they lead with integrity, Raffensperger said. They model their lives with character (and) honesty.

Trump released a statement Thursday night proclaiming his innocence.

Im an innocent man. We will prove that again, Trump said. Seven years of proving it. And here we go again. Very unfair.

According to the new indictment, as Trump left the White House, he caused scores of boxes, many of which contained classified documents, to be transported to the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, where he lives.

Trump was not authorized to possess or retain those classified documents.

Raffensperger said that while the substance of the new indictment is different than what a special purpose Fulton County Grand jury is investigating, there is a common thread in the allegations.

I believe that the rule of law applies to everyone. So let this process work itself out, Raffensperger said.

Raffensperger said his key guidepost in his time in office has come from sections of the Bible that apply to any leader, presidents included.

I think Ephesians 220, says it all: Christ is our cornerstone, Raffensperger said. And then when I became the City Council member, I printed out Pauls letter to Titus about how you appoint elders in every village and every town. A people should be beyond reproach with how their behavior should be.

The Secretary of State said he believes its time for the Republican party to heal and move forward.

Raffensperger said he doesnt know what to expect when Trump visits the state tomorrow.

I cant control what other people think, Raffensperger said. All I can do is control what I say and how I behave in public life.

A spokesperson for the Fulton County District Attorneys Office said the new federal indictment will not affect the case in Georgia.
One person was killed, even more wounded, and 6 houses were destroyed as a result of the Russian missile attack on Zhytomyr Oblast.

Source: Zviahel City Council; Vitalii Bunechko, Head of the Zhytomyr Oblast Military Administration, on Telegram

Quote: "As a result of another Russian missile attack on the night of 8-9 June, a residential area of the private sector of our hromada [an administrative unit designating a town, village or several villages and their adjacent territories  ed.] was hit.

As mayor Mykola Borovets reported, according to preliminary information, six buildings were destroyed, and dozens were damaged.

Details: The city council also reported that one person was killed, and there are also wounded people, doctors provide them with necessary assistance.

Bunechko reported that, according to preliminary information, air defence forces shot down one missile during an air-raid warning in Zhytomyr Oblast at night.

As a result of falling debris, a residential building was destroyed and 12 more damaged in the city of Zviahel.

As a result of the attack, one person was killed and 3 people were wounded.

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FILE - A German army Main battle tank Leopard 2A6 maneuvers during a visit by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to the Training Range in Pabrade, north of the capital Vilnius, Lithuania, May 30, 2023. Russia claimed it had "annihilated" eight tanks that NATO countries provided to Ukraine. But a visual analysis by The Associated Press shows a grainy black-and-white video Russia released prove it had blown up the German-made Leopard tanks actually documented the destruction of a tractor. (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis, File)

WASHINGTON (AP)  A grainy black-and-white gunsight video Russia released this week to bolster a claim its military blew up some of Ukraine's most fearsome tanks actually documented the destruction of a tractor, according to a visual analysis by The Associated Press.

The Russian Embassy in Washington announced Monday on Twitter its forces had annihilated eight German-made Leopard tanks, among the most advanced and powerful weapons NATO countries have provided to Ukraine. The Russian Ministry of Defense then posted a video Tuesday on the social media network Telegram with text saying it showed footage of the destruction of foreign armored vehicles, including Leopard tanks.

The video was shown extensively by Russian state-controlled broadcasters and news sites, which said it was recorded from the thermal imaging system of a KA-52 Alligator attack helicopter. Several black silhouettes of vehicles can be seen, before the helicopter launches a guided missile that strikes one, causing it to explode. Direct hit! says a voice on the recording, speaking in Russian.

Germany announced earlier this year it would provide 18 Leopard 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, which hopes to receive around 100 donated by various NATO countries over next year. The Leopard 2 is one of the most maneuverable and heavily armored battle tanks in the world, featuring a 120mm gun capable of slicing through Russia's Soviet-era tanks from more than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) away, according to its manufacturer, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann.

Ukrainian officials declined to comment this week on whether any of their Leopard tanks have been used in battle.

Almost immediately after the Russian video spread online, multiple weapons experts and military bloggers began casting doubt on social media that the helicopters missile struck a tank, much less a Leopard.

The visual analysis by the AP shows that the vehicles seen in the video, which was recorded at night, appear to be large pieces of stationary farm machinery parked in a field, specifically a self-propelled sprayer and two combines used to harvest corn and wheat.

The vehicle struck by the Russian missile has four large wheels and sits high off the ground. Leopard 2 tanks are low slung and have treads, like a bulldozer.

The Russian Embassy also claimed this week that its forces had destroyed three French-made AMX-10 light tanks, which do have wheels. But the AMX-10 has six wheels, not four.

The silhouette of the vehicle destroyed in the video appears to more closely match a self-propelled sprayer, a type of specialized tractor common on modern farms.

Thermal imaging systems like that on the Russian helicopter detect sources of heat to target enemy tanks and trucks in smoky or low light conditions. The stationary vehicles in the video appear black, meaning their engines were cold.

Tank crews operating at the front lines typically conceal themselves in vegetation or behind buildings, emerging only to move and shoot, two experts in military vehicles told the AP. It would be highly unusual for tanks to be parked in the open, where they make easy targets for enemy gunners, they said.

The two experts, who watched the Russian video, said the vehicle struck by the helicopter's missile was not a Leopard tank nor any other type of armored vehicle.

The silhouette of that particular vehicle or object did not look commensurate with what Id be expecting for a Leopard tank, said George Barros, who leads the Geospatial Intelligence Team for Russia and Ukraine at the Institute for the Study of War. I agree ... that it was probably a piece of heavy farm equipment.

Valentin Chatelet, a research associate at The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, also said the objects in the video were clearly not Leopard tanks.

They are pointing their thermal camera at three vehicles that appear to be harvesters, said Chatelet, who is based in Brussels. And the first target theyre hitting is most likely a sprayer.

Though both Ukraine and Russia have at various times sought to downplay their battlefield losses, the analysts said the Russian military was particularly notorious for making claims of great victories later proven to be false.

If you follow what they post and what they claim, you will find that theyve been outrageously wrong about a variety of different things, be it weapons systems hit that had never been delivered into the theater or official announcements of the Russians capturing particular villages or settlements multiple consecutive times without ever having gotten there in the first place, Barros said.

___

Associated Press writer Lynn Berry contributed.

___

Follow AP Global Investigative Reporter Michael Biesecker at twitter.com/mbieseck.
Ukrainian military personnel fire from a rocket launcher

The occupiers still positioned on the front lines would be abandoned to perish or to surrender as prisoners of war, she said.

Russian occupation forces will fortify defensive frontiers using the so-called dragons teeth on approaches to the territory of Ukrainian Crimea and deep within the temporarily occupied territory, situated at a considerable distance from the line of combat engagement.

Read also: Russia lost seven times as much as Ukraine in Bakhmut, says NSDC Secretary Danilov

Elaborating on the installation of dragons teeth, Malyar indicated that it signifies the Russian military leaderships consideration of retreating to more remote frontiers, particularly within the temporarily occupied Crimea.

Russian servicemen deployed on the front lines, with defensive frontiers being established behind them, are likely to face fatal consequences. Under such circumstances, voluntary surrender becomes the sole path to survival, she emphasized.

Previously, the Ukrainian Armed Forces announced that they are engaged in combat reconnaissance, actively searching for vulnerabilities in the Russian armys defense along the Zaporizhzhya direction.

Read also: The true scale of Russian combat losses

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
The UK Ministry of Defence predicts that Russia will continue to obstruct the work of the grain initiative on the eve of the next expiry of the grain deal.

Source: UK Defence Intelligence on 9 June, as reported by European Pravda

The Black Sea Grain Initiative was extended for 60 days on 17 May 2023. However, the UK analysts say, Russia is almost certainly continuing to impede grain exports by deliberately slowing down inspections and actively blocking some vessels.

Currently, only one to two vessels are inspected daily, compared to six to eight in autumn 2022.

"Russia is likely attempting to force concessions on the re-opening of the Togliatti-Odesa pipeline, which exports ammonia from Russia through Ukraine, via Odesa. To complicate the situation, in recent days, the pipeline was damaged and is not currently operational," UK Defence Intelligence stated.

The UK analysts predict that Russian rhetoric and obstruction of the Black Sea Grain Initiative will likely continue in the weeks leading up to the next contract extension deadline. Currently, the grain corridor is valid until 16 July 2023.

Background:

In mid-May, despite Russia's threats to withdraw from the agreement, the Black Sea Grain Initiative was extended for another two months.

Later, it became known that Kyiv could allow the transit of Russian ammonia through Ukrainian territory if it receives guarantees from Russia and the UN that the Black Sea Grain Initiative will work without obstacles.

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The first damaged Bradley Fighting Vehicles were seen on the battlefield.

As Ukraine continues its counteroffensive in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk oblasts, the first images of destroyed and damaged U.S.-donated M4A2-ODS Bradley Fighting Vehicles have emerged.

One image shows that Ukrainian forces apparently abandoned four M2 Bradleys as well as one Leopard 2A6 tank and one BMR-2 Mine-Clearing vehicle during an attack in the Zaporizhzia region, according to the open source intelligence group Oryx. The organization has been tabulating destroyed, damaged and captured vehicles from both sides, publishing information only about those it can visually confirm.

https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1667152804719337475?s=46&t=rDJhl_C_5AZkvIK8pGhEjA

An annotated view of the damaged Bradleys and other vehicles. (Warrior DV Telegram channel)

The vehicles were damaged during an attempt to break through the defenses of Russian troops south of the town of Malaya Tokmachka, according to the Russian Warrior DV Telegram channel.

Oliver Alexander, an independent open source investigator, said after reviewing video of the incident that it looks like after losing the four Bradleys, the Leopard and the BMR-2 armored demining vehicle in one location, "4 more M2A2 Bradley ODS-SA IFVs drove to the exact same position and started taking loses."

https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1667190618248847360

Analyst Rob Lee told The War Zone it appears some of those vehicles in that image could have been damaged by mines. The Pentagon declined to comment about the damage or destruction of the Bradleys or hypothesize about what issues could be raised should Russia capture any. Of course, given the nature of this conflict, that had to be a consideration before the Bradleys were provided.

"The Bradleys provided to Ukraine were the exportable variant, much like the other security assistance that was delivered," a Pentagon spokesman told The War Zone.

Additional video and images of damaged Bradleys in Ukraine is emerging as well. Russian Telegram channels have made unverified claims that at least six Bradleys were destroyed in fighting during this operation.

https://twitter.com/igs_stan/status/1667189010379296770?s=20

https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1667170442015121408?s=20

That we are seeing images of these vehicles damaged or destroyed should come as no shock. Ukraine is attacking without air support in an area that the Russians knew would be a likely vector and have prepared for such an advance for many months, including with mines and fortifications. While these vehicles are more capable than anything else in the Ukrainian arsenal, they are far from invincible, especially under those conditions. And regardless of accelerated training, mistakes will be made and lessons will be learned early on the hard way. The days ahead will prove if this trend becomes outright alarming or not.

https://twitter.com/Aviation_Intel/status/1667197400212205571?s=20

https://twitter.com/Aviation_Intel/status/1667199479941070848?s=20

It is unclear if the vehicles in this image were abandoned or recovered by Ukraine. However, once vehicles are left behind, they can either be taken off the battlefield by an adversary or destroyed.

Because of their firepower, maneuverability, and durability, the Bradleys were considered a key donation for Ukraine's push to recapture territory. You can read more about what they bring to the table in our deep dive here.

The U.S. has donated 109 M2A2-ODS Bradley variants and four B-FIST variants. The U.S. military has been training Ukrainian personnel to operate and maintain Bradleys at the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany since at least February of this year. That same month, a commercial cargo ship, the ARC Integrity, arrived in that country carrying more than 60 Bradleys ultimately bound for Ukraine. It is unknown how many are currently in Ukraine.

Given the nature of this operation - which as we predicted in December was designed to disrupt and eventually cut off the so-called land bridge to Crimea - is inevitable that we will see more destroyed and damaged Bradleys, as well as other advanced NATO combat vehicles.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com
Russia has received hundreds of Iranian drones to attack Ukraine White House Handout image shows evidence of new Russian-Iran cooperation

By Jeff Mason and Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The White House said on Friday that Russia appeared to be deepening its defense cooperation with Iran and had received hundreds of one-way attack drones that it is using to strike Ukraine.

Citing newly declassified information, the White House said the drones, or Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), were built in Iran, shipped across the Caspian Sea and then used by Russian forces against Ukraine.

"Russia has been using Iranian UAVs in recent weeks to strike Kyiv and terrorize the Ukrainian population, and the Russia-Iran military partnership appears to be deepening," White House spokesman John Kirby said in a statement.

"We are also concerned that Russia is working with Iran to produce Iranian UAVs from inside Russia."

Kirby said the U.S. had information that Russia was receiving materials from Iran required to build a drone manufacturing plant that could be fully operational early next year.

"We are releasing satellite imagery of the planned location of this UAV manufacturing plant in Russias Alabuga Special Economic Zone," he said.

The U.S. has previously sanctioned Iranian executives at a defense manufacturer over drone supplies to Russia. Iran has acknowledged sending drones to Russia but said in they past they were sent before Russia's February invasion. Moscow has denied its forces used Iranian drones in Ukraine. A White House official said Iran had transferred several hundred drones to Russia since August.

Support between Iran and Russia was flowing both ways, Kirby said, with Iran seeking billions of dollars worth of military equipment from Russia including helicopters and radars.

"Russia has been offering Iran unprecedented defense cooperation, including on missiles, electronics, and air defense," he said.

"This is a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful to Ukraine, to Irans neighbors, and to the international community. We are continuing to use all the tools at our disposal to expose and disrupt these activities including by sharing this with the public  and we are prepared to do more."

Kirby said the transfers of drones constituted a violation of United Nations rules and the United States would seek to hold the two countries accountable.

Britain, France, Germany, the U.S. and Ukraine say the supply of Iranian-made drones to Russia violates a 2015 U.N. Security Council resolution enshrining the Iran nuclear deal.

Under the 2015 U.N. resolution, a conventional arms embargo on Iran was in place until October 2020.

Ukraine and Western powers argue that the resolution includes restrictions on missiles and related technologies until October 2023 and can encompass the export and purchase of advanced military systems such as drones.

The Iranian and Russian missions to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the U.S. accusations.

"We will continue to impose sanctions on the actors involved in the transfer of Iranian military equipment to Russia for use in Ukraine," Kirby said.

He said a new U.S. advisory issued on Friday aimed "to help businesses and other governments better understand the risks posed by Irans UAV program and the illicit practices Iran uses to procure components for it."

The advisory highlighted key items sought by Iran for its development of drones, including electronics such as processors and controllers.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Steve Holland; additional reporting by Michelle Nichols and Daphne Psaledakis; Editing by Heather Timmons, Chizu Nomiyama and Marguerita Choy)
Ukraine reports 'heavy combat' after Putin says offensive has begun Aftermath of a Russian missile attack in Zhytomyr region

By Dan Peleschuk

KYIV (Reuters) -Moscow and Kyiv both reported heavy fighting in Ukraine on Friday, with bloggers describing the first sightings of German and U.S. armour, signalling that Ukraine's long-anticipated counterattack was under way.

With virtually no independent reporting from the front lines and Kyiv saying little, it was impossible to assess whether Ukraine was penetrating Russian defences in its bid to drive out occupying forces.

"We can state for sure that this offensive has begun," Russian President Vladimir Putin said in Sochi. "Ukrainian troops did not achieve their goals in any sector."

Ukraine's President Voldymyr Zelenskiy said he had discussed tactics and "achievements" with military leaders but gave little away.

"For our soldiers, for all those who at this time are engaged in particularly heavy combat. We see your heroism, and we are grateful for every moment of your lives," he said in his nightly video address. "Ukraine is as free as you are strong."

Ukrainian military analyst Oleksander Musiyenko, interviewed on Ukrainian NV Radio, said Ukraine was making gains but dismissed Russian reports of a major counter-offensive in south-central Zaporizhzhia region.

"This is simply not true. It is not the main phase of the counter-offensive. It is merely a phase and not the large drive from which we can expect a rapid breakthrough and hundreds of kilometres of liberated territory," Musiyenko said.

The counteroffensive is ultimately expected to involve thousands of Ukrainian troops trained and equipped by the West. The United States announced an extra $2.1 billion in security assistance on Friday, including air defence and ammunition.

Russia, which has had months to prepare its defensive lines, says it has repelled attacks since the start of the week. Kyiv has said its main effort has yet to begin.

Moscow and pro-war Russian bloggers reported intense battles on the Zaporizhzhia front near the city of Orikhiv, around the mid-point of the "land bridge" linking Russia to the Crimea peninsula, seen as one of Ukraine's likeliest targets.

Ben Barry, senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said reports from the Russian bloggers of German-made Leopard tanks and U.S. Bradley armoured vehicles near Tokmak south of Orikhiv, if confirmed, would provide the first evidence that Ukraine's new brigades of Western-armed troops had joined the battle.

In all, Kyiv has 12 brigades totalling 50,000-60,000 troops ready to unleash in the counteroffensive. Nine of the brigades have been armed and trained by the West.

"They've got a choice of how many they commit initially and how many they keep in reserve in case the battlefield dynamics change," Barry said, adding that Ukraine's initial priority would be trying to keep the Russians off balance and gain tactical surprise through deception and camouflage.

The Russian defence ministry said its troops had repelled two Ukrainian assaults south of Orikhiv and four near Velyka Novosilka further east, where it said Ukraine's attack force included two battalions of troops supported by tanks. Several battalions of up to 1,000 troops comprise a brigade.

The southern front is where Ukrainian forces are widely expected to attempt their main push, towards the coast. Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said only that battles were continuing for Velyka Novosilka and Russian troops were mounting "active defence" at Orikhiv.

In the east, Ukraine has reported advances around Bakhmut, which Russian forces captured last month after nearly a year of the deadliest ground combat in Europe since World War Two. Ukraine generally bars journalists from reaching its side of front lines during offensive operations.

Reuters could not independently verify the accounts by either side.

FLOOD DISASTER OVERSHADOWS FIGHTING

The initial days of the counteroffensive have been overshadowed this week by a huge humanitarian disaster after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam holding back the waters of the Dnipro River that bisects Ukraine.

Thousands of people have been forced to evacuate homes flooded in the war zone, vast nature preserves have been wiped out and the destruction to irrigation systems is likely to cripple agriculture across much of southern Ukraine for decades. Kyiv said at least four people had died and 13 were missing.

Ukraine's security service released a recording on Friday of what it described as an intercepted phone call in which a Russian soldier confides to another man that a Russian sabotage group had blown the dam up. Moscow says Ukraine sabotaged it.

Western countries say they are still gathering evidence but argue that Ukraine would have no reason to inflict such a devastating disaster on itself, especially right as its forces were shifting onto the attack.

In Hola Prystan on the Russian-occupied side of the river, rescuers evacuated residents in rubber dinghies. Villagers carried pets or small children to safety.

"Our house was carried away by a torrent of water," said a woman who gave her name as Oksana, being evacuated in a boat with her teenage daughter and their two dogs.

Some relatives of people in Russian-controlled flooded areas said their loved ones were still stuck on roofs with dwindling food supplies. The United Nations has no access to those areas, its Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine Denise Brown said, adding that some 17,000 people were affected in Ukrainian-controlled areas, with numbers changing "by the minute".

The river divides the two sides, which accuse each other of shelling across it, interfering with rescue efforts. The Kremlin said Ukrainian shelling had killed people including a pregnant woman. It provided no evidence.

Ukraine's general staff said on Friday evening there had been 27 armed engagements in the east over the past 24 hours.

It also reported 58 Russian air strikes and 31 incidents of Russian shelling. "Unfortunately, there are civilian deaths and injuries and damage to private homes, a hospital and other infrastructure," it said, without elaborating.

Ukraine launched 16 air strikes it said, giving no indication of whether the front line had moved.

Russian officials said Ukraine had struck the Russian city of Voronezh with a drone, wounding three people, and reported other drone attacks in Belgorod and Kursk. Kyiv withholds comment on reports of attacks inside Russia.

(Additional reporting by Mark Trevelyan, Olena Harmash, Ron Popeski and Reuters bureaux; Writing by Peter Graff and Diane Craft; Editing by Angus MacSwan, Nick Macfie, Andrew Heavens, Philippa Fletcher and Daniel Wallis)
Russia is shifting to a total war economy as its progress in Ukraine stalls

A pro-Russian man (not seen) holds a Russian flag behind an armed servicemen on top of a Russian army vehicle outside a Ukrainian border guard post in the Crimean town of Balaclava March 1, 2014. Baz Ratner/Reuters

Russia is shifting to a total war economy as its invasion of Ukraine drags on and progress stalls.

International relations expert Christoph Bluth pointed to toll of military spending on Russia's economy.

The effects of the war are now starting to be felt by ordinary Russian citizens, he said.

Russia is shifting to a total war economy as its invasion of Ukraine takes a toll on its economy.

Christoph Bluth, an international relations professor at the University of Bradford, noted that in addition to battling western sanctions, military spending is costing the Kremlin around $90 billion a year, per an estimate from the German Council on Foreign Relations, amounting to about 5% of Russia's GDP.

Meanwhile, it has ramped up its efforts to produce even more military goods, with the government and Russian banks offering large loans to arms manufacturers, the Economist reported.

But the effects of war are now starting to be felt by everyday citizens, Bluth said, as Russia has needed to substitute many goods in its economy that are normally supplied by western nations. Half of Russians polled by the research firm Romir have complained about the quality of substitute goods.

"The Kremlin is playing a delicate balancing act of redirecting significant resources to the military and related industries while trying to minimise the disruption of the general economy, which would risk losing support of large sections of the population," Bluth said in an op-ed for The Conversation on Wednesday.

"So ordinary Russians  those who haven't lost loved ones on the battlefield or to exile  remain relatively sanguine about everyday life. But a longer, more intense conflict, requiring a shift to a total war economy, could be a different matter altogether," he later added.

Experts have flagged pressures mounting on Moscow's financial state since Russia first began its "special military operation" in Ukraine last year. The invasion has deepened the nation's budget deficit and forced it to become more dependent on other countries as it attempts to side-step western trade restrictions.

Though some experts have predicted Russia's economy to in fact grow in 2023, those estimates are based off "cherry-picked" figures touted by Russia's central bank, researchers from Yale said in April, arguing that unreleased statistics, such as capital flows in and out of the country, paint a far bleaker picture of Russia's situation.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Russia strikes Kharkiv with daytime missile attack, says governor

Consequences of the Russian attack on Kharkiv on June 6

The Russian invaders used S-300 systems for the attack, he said.

Read also: Ukrainian Air Force intercept four missiles and 14 drones overnight

No casualties have been reported as a result of the strike.

Emergency services are still working at the scene, Synegubov added.

The last time Russian troops shelled Kharkiv was on June 5, when missiles hit the city center and the Slobidskyi district.

Read also: People injured in Russian attack on Kharkiv Oblast include pregnant woman and two children

Russia also continues to shell settlements in the region, especially the Kupyansk district.

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Russian forces shelled rescuers in Kherson during evacuations, damaging critical evacuation vehicle

Evacuated residents of flooded Kherson, June 9, 2023

The swamp buggy Bohun, medical vehicle Renault Trafic, and specialized emergency-rescue vehicle second class (CAPM-C) were all damaged, the service reported.



Read also: Ukraine and UN agree on evacuation from occupied Kherson after Kakhovka Dam explosion

Luckily, there are no victims among the staff.



According to the Prosecutor-Generals Office, three people were injured following the Russian shelling of Kherson during evacuations on June 9, including a young girl. Government facilities were also damaged during the attack.

Read also: Volunteers needed to help pets rescued from Kherson Oblast

Earlier, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that the Russian forces were knowingly shelling evacuation efforts in Kherson.



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Russian Foreign Ministry threatens Japan with "serious consequences" for providing weapons to Ukraine

Russias Ministry of Foreign Affairs has summoned the Japanese ambassador in connection with the Japanese government's decision to start supplying Ukraine with military equipment and has threatened Japan with "serious consequences".

Source: press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia

Details: Ambassador Toyohisa Kozuki was reportedly summoned to explain the Japanese governments decision to start supplying military equipment to Ukraine.

The Russian Foreign Ministry cynically claims the move will lead to "a further increase in the number of human casualties and an escalation of hostilities". The ministry also said that the administration of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida should be "ready to share responsibility for the deaths of civilians, particularly in the border regions of Russia".

In addition, the Russian Foreign Ministry is threatening Japan with "serious consequences".

Quote: "With this decision, Tokyo is driving bilateral relations deeper into a dangerous impasse. Such actions cannot remain without serious consequences."

Background:

On 9 June, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a telephone conversation. Japan plans to provide US$5 million worth of humanitarian aid through international organisations to the people affected by the explosion of the Kakhovka HPP.

At the end of May, Japan supplied Ukraine with 100 military vehicles, including trucks and SUVs.

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CAIRO (AP)  A Russian man died after being mauled by a shark on Thursday off one of Egypts Red Sea resorts, Egyptian and Russian authorities said.

Egypts Environment Ministry said the man was killed after being attacked by a tiger shark in the waters near the city of Hurghada. Authorities closed off a 74-kilometer (46-mile) stretch of the coastline, announcing it will remain off-limits until Sunday.

The ministry later said it had caught the shark and was examining it in a laboratory to try and determine the reasons for the rare attack.

The Russian Consulate in Hurghada identified the man as a Russian citizen but did not give his name.

Boats are docked at the Hurghada Marina in Egypt's southern Red Sea resort city, where a Russian national was mauled by a shark.

Boats are docked at the Hurghada Marina in Egypt's southern Red Sea resort city, where a Russian national was mauled by a shark.

A video circulating online, purportedly of the attack, shows a man thrashing about in the water before being repeatedly attacked by a shark circling around him, then being dragged under.

Shark attacks are rare in the Red Sea coastal regions. However, in 2022, two fatal attacks in Hughada within days, killing an Austrian and a Romanian tourist.

Egypts Red Sea resorts, including Hurghada and Sharm el-Sheikh, boast some of the countrys most renowned beach destinations and are popular with European tourists. Divers are attracted by the steep drop-offs of coral reefs just offshore, which offer a rich and colorful sea life.

Egypt has in recent years sought to revive the vital tourism sector, hurt by years of political instability, the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

Tiger sharks are large species that reside in tropical and temperate waters and are among sharks most cited by the International Shark Attack File for unprovoked attacks on humans.
Russia, as the aggressor state, has come up with another information operation to discredit Ukraine and its military and political leadership, namely the tragedy at the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station.

Source: press service of Ukraine's Defence Intelligence

Quote: "The joint efforts of Ukraine's intelligence community have provided information that a Russian social engineering agency has launched a new stage of a campaign to discredit the Ukrainian military command and Ukrainian statesmen.

As part of this campaign, a number of provocative materials have been prepared which, according to the authors, should shift responsibility for the explosion at the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station dam onto Ukraine and create the preconditions for a political crisis."

Details: According to Defence Intelligence, the prepared headlines are clickbait, containing direct accusations against the military and political leadership, particularly the President of Ukraine, such as:

- "If I cant have you, no one can! Desperate to succeed in a possible offensive, Zelenskyy turned to scorched earth tactics, but directed them against his own people."

- "The dam explosion should 'wash away' Zelenskyy";

- "Zelenskyy is doing everything to stop being 'our bastard'";

- "Blowing up the dam will drown Zelenskyy and Ukraine."

Comments from fake accounts will be posted under each story, supposedly on behalf of Ukrainian and foreign readers. They are supposed to create the impression of a "live" discussion and engage real users of the network in the discussion.

According to Defence Intelligence, the project's current budget is about US$6 million, and it could increase further.

Background:

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Flooded as a result of Russians undermining Kakhovka HPP Kherson

The audio intercept shows the Russians wanted to blackmail Ukraine by destroying the dam and staging a man-made disaster in the south.

Read also: Drone footage shows ruins of Kakhovka dam, flooded areas two days after Russian attack

One of the invaders blames Ukraine for destroying the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP), saying that now the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), which require water from the Kakhovka reservoir to cool its reactors, is done.

They (the Ukrainians) didnt blow it up, another invader answered.

It was our sabotage group. They (Russian military) wanted to use the dam to frighten them (the Ukrainians). It didnt go as planned, but more than they (had) planned.

The Kakhovka HPP was destroyed by the 205th motorized rifle brigade of the Russian occupation army, said Ukraines National Security and Defense Council secretary, Oleksiy Danilov. He is convinced the decision about the terrorist attack was made directly by Putin, himself.

Read also: Putin personally ordered the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, Ukrainian intelligence says  interview

The Russian invaders blew up the Kakhovka HPP to prevent the Armed Forces of Ukraine from launching a counter-offensive in the Kherson area, Danilov added.

I want to say that, first of all, the Russians did this for a military purpose so that we would not launch a counteroffensive in the Kherson area, the official told Ukrainian Radio on June 8.

Although, I think, today it is clear that we had completely different plans.

When the Russians were preparing this terrorist act, they did not calculate the consequences that would follow this destruction, Danilov stressed.

What they did, when a certain amount of time passes, when we can calculate everything that happened there, believe me, the consequences for our country will be terrible, but they will be simply catastrophic for the Russians, he said.

Danilov emphasized the Russians would be responsible for all this.

And those people in the Kremlin who gave the order to destroy the dam will be held responsible for it, he said.

Including performers.

Explosion at Kakhovka HPP  what is known

During the night of June 6, Russian forces blew up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Station dam, triggering widespread flooding and posing a grave threat to downstream cities and towns along the Dnipro River. The floodwaters were expected to peak around noon Kyiv time (GMT+3) on June 6, prompting the Kherson Oblast Military Administration to declare an urgent evacuation.

Read also: Political analyst says Kremlin may have sabotaged Kakhovka dam out of fear of Ukrainian counter-offensive

Ukraines state hydroelectric company Ukrhydroenergo said the Kakhovka HPP has been completely destroyed and cannot be repaired. The dam itself was only partially  but significantly  damaged, the South Military Command said.

At an urgent meeting of the National Security and Defense Council, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordered the evacuation of at-risk areas and the provision of drinking water to towns and villages served by the affected Kakhovka water reservoir.

The evacuation of citizens in the affected areas on the right (western) bank of the Dnipro River has been ongoing throughout the night. Meanwhile, a humanitarian disaster is underway on the left bank, which is under Russian occupation and suffered a great deal more due to its lower elevation.

Read also: Ukraine and UN agree on evacuation from occupied Kherson after Kakhovka Dam explosion

The Ukrainian Prosecutor Generals Office has opened an investigation on the incident under the charge of ecocide. Ukraine has applied to the International Criminal Court over the dam breach.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called Russias attack on the Kakhovka HPP the largest man-made environmental disaster in Europe in decades.

Ukraines Defense Intelligence has said that the Russian demolition of the Kakhovka HPP increases the threat of a nuclear disaster.

At least eight people have died because of the flood in the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky in Kherson Oblast, reported mayor Yevhen Ryshchyk.

As of early June 9, as many as 3,624 houses were flooded in 32 settlements of Kherson Oblast. A total of 2,352 civilians and 550 animals have been evacuated from the affected areas.

Read also:

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Oleh Syniehubov, Head of the Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration, has reported that the Russians are attacking the city with S-300 anti-aircraft missiles.

Source: Syniehubov on Telegram

Quote: "The occupiers launched a missile attack on the outskirts of Kharkiv. Reportedly from an S-300 system."

Details: According to Syniehubov, there are currently no casualties or injuries. Emergency services are working at the scene.

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Shortly before blowing up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP), the Russians intensified their looting in the occupied parts of Kherson Oblast.

Source: Press service of the National Resistance Center

Quote: "On the eve of the explosion on the hydroelectric plant, they [the Russians on the left bank of Dnipro - ed.] intensified their looting of local property and transferring it towards Crimea.

The Russians looted not only on the left bank, but they also looted hotels and recreational centres in resort towns and villages, in particular in the village of Strilkove."

Background:

On the morning of 6 June, Operational Command Pivden (South) reported that the Russian occupiers had blown up the Kakhovka HPP. Later, the Oblast Military Administration confirmed this information. The dam and turbine hall of the HPP have been completely destroyed. The water is moving in a big stream and very quickly. The HPP is beyond repair.

48 settlements have been flooded in Kherson Oblast, of which 34 (3,625 houses) are in Ukrainian-controlled territory and 14 are in temporarily occupied territory. As of 9 May, 2,412 people had been evacuated from the area.

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Russians kill 3 civilians in Kherson and Donetsk oblasts within 24 hours

At least 3 people were killed and 24 others injured in Kherson and Donetsk oblasts on 8 June.

Source: Pavlo Kyrylenko, Head of Donetsk Oblast Military Administration; Kherson Oblast Military Administration on Telegram

Details: Kherson Oblast Military Administration claims that 2 people were killed and 17 were wounded in the oblast yesterday as a result of the ongoing Russian aggression.

Russian invaders fired at civilian settlements in Kherson Oblast 44 times, launching 188 projectiles from artillery, mortars, aircraft, MRLS and drones.

The invaders attacked Kherson 7 times, firing 25 projectiles at the city, with the invaders striking residential areas.

In Donetsk Oblast, Russian invaders killed one civilian (in the settlement of Maksymiliianivka) and wounded 7 people (4 in Maksymiliianivka, 2 in Toretsk and 1 in Yasna Poliana).

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Russians launch up to 16 attack UAVs and 6 cruise missiles at night

On the night of 8-9 June, the Russians attacked Ukraine with six cruise missiles and launched up to 16 attack UAVs. Air defence forces destroyed four cruise missiles and 10 drones.

Source: Air Force of Ukraine

Quote: "On the night of 8-9 June 2023, between 22:00 and 04:00, the Russian invaders attacked Ukraine with Iranian-made Shahed-136/131 attack drones and Kh-101/Kh-55 air-launched cruise missiles against military and critical infrastructure facilities.

The Shahed drones were launched from the southern direction, cruise missiles  from the Caspian Sea, from four Tu-95MS strategic bombers."

Details: According to the Air Force, up to 16 attack UAVs and six air-launched cruise missiles were launched during the attack.

In the areas of responsibility of the Operational Commands Skhid (East), Zakhid (West) and Pivden (South), in cooperation with the air defence of other components of the Ukrainian Defence Forces, air defence assets and personnel of the Air Force destroyed 4 Kh-101/Kh-55 cruise missiles, 10 Shahed-136/131 and Lancet attack drones and four Orlan-10 and Supercam operational and tactical UAVs.

In addition, at around 20:00 on 8 June, the Russians fired two Kalibr cruise missiles from the Black Sea at a civilian facility in Cherkasy Oblast.

"Over the past and current days, the Air Force of Ukraine has landed up to 20 air strikes on air defence systems, logistics, military equipment and positions of the occupying forces," the Air Force added.

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Oleksandr Prokudin, Head of the Kherson Oblast Military Administration, has reported that the Russians have renewed their attacks on the city of Kherson.

Source: Prokudin on Telegram

Quote: "The Russians are attacking Kherson again. They are delivering strikes on coastal areas."

Details: Prokudin is calling on local residents to proceed to shelters.

Previously: The Russians are giving Kherson Oblast no opportunity to recover following their destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant. They carried out 44 attacks (188 strikes) in the oblast in 24 hours, including 7 attacks (25 strikes) on the city of Kherson. The Russian military hit the areas of 20 settlements of the oblast. In just one day, 2 people died due to Russian aggression, and 17 were injured.

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By Wendell Roelf

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South African prosecutors on Friday significantly increased the number of charges they are bringing against Rwandan ex-police officer Fulgence Kayishema, who is wanted internationally for suspected participation in Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

On the run for two decades, Kayishema was arrested on May 24 under a false name on a grape farm in South Africa where, according to a prosecutor, refugees working there gave him up.

He now faces 54 separate charges in South Africa relating to fraud and immigration offences, up from five previously, prosecutors spokesman Eric Ntabazalila said outside a Cape Town court.

Kayishema had been a fugitive from justice since 2001, when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) indicted him for genocide for allegedly ordering the massacre of 2,000 people hiding in the Nyange Catholic Church.

He denied any involvement during a court hearing on May 26, though said he was "sorry" for the 1994 killings.

South Africa's National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) alleges that Kayishema used a false identity to apply for asylum and refugee status in South Africa. Kayishema has not responded in court to the South African charges.

The case was adjourned to June 20 to allow Kayishema's defence team to consult, at which point he could apply for bail.

Some of the local charges could see Kayishema imprisoned for up to 15 years, said Ntabazalila.

Kayishema is also expected to face extradition to Rwanda to be tried over the ICTR genocide indictment, but those proceedings have yet to begin, Ntabazalila said.

An estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and Hutu moderates were killed during Rwanda's genocide, orchestrated by an extremist Hutu regime and meticulously executed by local officials and ordinary citizens in the rigidly hierarchical society.

Kayishema's arrest left only three fugitives indicted by the international tribunal whose whereabouts remain unknown.

(Reporting by Wendell Roelf; writing by Nellie Peyton; editing by Mark Heinrich)
The report follows 26 confirmed cases of Salmonella infection.

Allrecipes

On Wednesday, June 7, the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) announced it is investigating an outbreak of Salmonella infections that has been linked to ground beef. The IDPH is working with local health departments, the CDC, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) to identify the source of the ground beef causing the outbreak, but it has not been identified yet.

The announcement follows 26 confirmed cases of Salmonella infections that were reported between April 25 and May 18. All of the cases have been in Illinois so far, in Chicago as well as in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry, and Will counties.

While the investigation continues, the IDPH is urging Illinois residents to follow extra food safety precautions when handling ground beef. This includes:

Washing your hands, utensils, and surfaces often, and with hot water and soap.

Keeping any other foods that won't get cooked separate from raw meat and poultry.

Cooking ground beef to a minimum internal temperature of 160 degrees F. You can use a food thermometer to ensure it's cooked to a temperature high enough to kill germs like Salmonella.

Keeping perishable foods, including ground beef, in the refrigerator. If ground beef is exposed to room temperature for more than 2 hours, or temperatures above 90 degrees F for more than 1 hour, do not consume it. Always thaw ground beef in the refrigerator, not at room temperature on the counter.

Salmonella is the most common type of bacteria that causes food poisoning. Symptoms of a Salmonella infection typically start between six and 72 hours after consuming contaminated food. Symptoms of a salmonella infection include diarrhea, fever, and stomach cramps.

Most people recover within 4 to 7 days and don't require further medical attention, but Salmonella can cause more severe symptoms in at-risk populations. Infections in children under age 5, adults 65 and older, and those with weakened immune systems may result in hospitalization.

This investigation is ongoing, and we will update this article as soon as more details are shared.
French President Emmanuel Macron on left. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on right.



OpenAIs CEO met with French President Emmanuel Macron last month.

Scroll through Sam Altmans Twitter page, and youll see a feed filled with photos of the OpenAI CEO posing with world leaders.



Altman has exchanged words with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and sat down with South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol. Hes traveled to Israel, Jordan, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates. And thats all just this week.

Read more

Emerging and innovative technology companies are changing the reality of life, its trends and the economy every day. In the UAE, we are accustomed to being proactive in adopting new technologies to improve human life. In this regard, I explored with Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, pic.twitter.com/Vh2d8KUb11  Maktoum Bin Mohammed (@MaktoumMohammed) June 6, 2023

This morning I met with @sama, CEO of OpenAI and a world leader in this field. We spoke about the advantages and dangers of the new technology and also about issues of morality and ethics that it raises. pic.twitter.com/MiOIwEy7Od    Isaac Herzog (@Isaac_Herzog) June 5, 2023

great conversation with @narendramodi discussing india's incredible tech ecosystem and how the country can benefit from ai.



really enjoyed all my meetings with people in the @PMOIndia. pic.twitter.com/EzxVD0UMDM  Sam Altman (@sama) June 9, 2023

These meetings come on the heels of Altmans European world tour last month, during which he met with French president Emmanuel Macron and EU president Ursula von der Leyen.

Why all this schmoozing with world leaders? For one, the breadth of Altmans world tour illustrates that he is determined to shape the debate on regulating AI following the release of OpenAIs ChatGPT late last year. Theres also a real need to educate national leaders and lawmakers about AI. Altman, who holds the position of running a leading artificial intelligence companyone thats helping usher in a new era in AIis just the person to handle that task.

Of course, thats not to say hes the only CEO holding AI-related meetings with lawmakers. Sundar Pichai, Googles CEO, met with EU regulators in Brussels in May to discuss the technology. Meanwhile, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met with US president Joe Biden in May to discuss the potential dangers of AI. Clearly, AI CEO want to act.

Its a reversal of a previous era of Big Tech during which tech CEOssuch as Pichai and Metas Mark Zuckerberghad tended to remain on the sidelines rather than proactively engage with regulators.

The EU is at the forefront of AI regulation

During his meetings with regulators in Europe, Altman threatened to cease OpenAIs operations there in response to how lawmakers are handling AI regulation. He later backtracked.

The EUs legislation would be the first in the world to regulate the use of AI. The proposed AI Act would classify AI systems into categories of various levels of risk. High-risk candidates, which include recruitment tools and medical devices, would face compliance such as data requirements. Meanwhile, those classified under unacceptable risks, such as social scoringor risk profiles of individuals based on surveillancewould be prohibited. Even those considered to pose minimal or no risk must notify humans that they are interacting with an AI system unless it is evident, and labels must be applied to deepfakes.

The US, meanwhile, is largely relying on the tech industry to come up with its own safeguards, though regulators have acknowledged they might need to get involved in some cases.

Its a fine balance: Regulate the technology too narrowly and you might miss out on certain harms; regulate it too broadly and you could stifle innovation, as Johann Laux, who studies legal implications of AI at the Oxford Internet Institute, said to Euronews. Its a debate thats likely to grow louder, as AIs capabilities and influence grow. In the meantime, Altman is determined to shape regulation before it shapes him.

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"Law enforcement officers take an oath to uphold the law, not to break it," Dist. Atty. George Gascon, shown in 2021, said in a statement. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

A San Fernando police officer has been charged with stealing money from a domestic violence suspect who was being arrested, Los Angeles County prosecutors announced Thursday.

Officer Jeffrey King was responding to a domestic violence call at a San Fernando home on June 21, 2022, when he allegedly took a cellphone and cash from the man's pockets while he was restrained, according to prosecutors.

The man was ultimately arrested and booked into jail. He reported that he was missing money he had in his pocket during the arrest when he was released two days later.

King, 37, turned in the cellphone to a supervisor but the cash was never booked into evidence or returned to the suspect, prosecutors said. Authorities did not specify the amount of money involved.

San Fernando's police chief referred the matter to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department for a criminal investigation.

King is charged with one felony count each of second-degree robbery and extortion and one misdemeanor count of petty theft.

Law enforcement officers take an oath to uphold the law, not to break it. Maintaining integrity is a fundamental principle of law enforcement and stealing personal belongings during an arrest is a clear violation of that trust," Dist. Atty. George Gascon said in a statement. "No one should have their rights compromised, especially by those who are tasked with protecting them. "

King is set to be arraigned in the coming weeks, and a warrant was issued for him Tuesday. He was not in custody as of Thursday afternoon, according to sheriff's jail records.

When reached for comment Thursday, San Fernando police did not immediately clarify whether King was continuing to work as a police officer.





This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
San Joaquin Valley residents can get a free air purifier this wildfire season. Who qualifies?

Qualified residents of the San Joaquin Valley can receive a free single-room air purifier under a San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District program.

The Clean Air Rooms programs objective is to mitigate the adverse health effects of wildfire smoke on Valley residents, focusing on the most vulnerable populations, according to the Valley Air District.

Smoke from severe wildfires can inundate the Valley and make its way into homes, causing health impacts to our most vulnerable residents, Samir Sheikh, executive director of the Valley Air District, said in a news release. This program is designed to help families who may not otherwise be able to buy an in-home air purifier to protect their families during wildfires.

Heres who qualifies for the program, and what you can do if you dont qualify:

How to check if youre eligible for the program

Households within the Valley also must be in disadvantaged and low-income communities, according to the district. Residents can check their address for eligibility on the districts website.

Applicants must not have previously received an air purifier in past installments of the Clean Air Rooms program.

Proof of residency must be submitted with an application. Acceptable forms, according to the districts website, include an energy bill, public utility bill or cable/internet bill.

The statement should have been received in the last 30 to 45 days and must have the applicants name and address listed.

Once an application and supporting documents are submitted, air purifiers will be awarded on a first-come basis, based on the application-received date and limited available funding, according to the district.

The air purifier and one filter replacement will be sent directly to applicants homes once approved, the district said in a news release.

What air purifiers can do for wildfire smoke

Particulate matter from wildfires can trigger asthma attacks, aggravate chronic bronchitis and increase the risk of heart attack and stroke, according to the release.

The district said residents experiencing poor air quality due to wildfire smoke should move to a filtered, air-conditioned environment with windows closed.

The air purifiers distributed through the program are certified through the California Air Resources Board. They are also HEPA-rated and can reduce indoor particulate matter by more than 90% in well-sealed environments, according to the district.

If a resident does not qualify for a free air purifier through the program, or if supplies run out, the district encourages the purchase of home air purifiers or for residents to make their own.

What do you want to know about life in Modesto? Ask our service journalism team your top-of-mind questions in the module below or email servicejournalists@modbee.com.
Wildfire smoke darkens skies across the Eastern U.S., June 7, 2023. CIRA / NOAA

Satellite imagery shows the vast extent of wildfires in Canada and the lingering veil of smoke over the Eastern U.S.

A heavy haze grounded flights and spurred Code Purple air quality alerts in eastern cities this week as wildfires gave rise to record levels of air pollution. While air quality is slowly improving, smoky conditions persist, as shown in satellite images from Colorado State Universitys Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Smoke from wildfires in Canada lingers over the Eastern U.S., June 8, 2023. CIRA / NOAA

Close to 430 wildfires are burning across Canada, including more than 140 in Quebec, and most fires remain out of control. Satellite images show blazes erupting in Quebec this week, sending smoke south toward the U.S.

Large wildfires burn in Quebec, June 6, 2023. CIRA / NOAA

So far this year, wildfires have scorched more than 12 million acres in Canada. Along with hotspots in Quebec, more than 140 fires are burning in Alberta and British Columbia, shown below. Scientists expect that wildlife smoke will reach as far as Norway.

Wildfires burn in Alberta and British Columbia, June 7, 2023. CIRA / NOAA

The National Weather Service said that, heading into the weekend, smoke is expected to continue plaguing regions from the Great Lakes to the Mid-Atlantic with reduced air quality.

ALSO ON YALE E360

Our Burning Planet: Why We Must Learn to Live With Fire
China's populous Guangdong issues more favorable housing polices to support multi-child families

Global Times) 08:50, June 09, 2023

Doctor Liu Jianshi (left) performs auscultation screening on a child in Yuepuhu county on May 13, 2023. Photo:Li Hao/GT

Guangdong, the most populous province in China, has rolled out measures to provide household relief targeting childbirth, parenting and education so as to further promote the long-term balanced development of the province's population.

Guangdong will implement policies to incentivize families with multiple children according to guidelines released by the Guangdong provincial health commission on Wednesday.

In 2022, the number of permanent residents in Guangdong remained the highest in the country, with a birth rate 1.53 thousandths of a point higher than the national average during the same period. Guangdong has become the only province with more than 1 million births for three consecutive years, and the first province with the country's highest birth rate for five consecutive years.

The province's concessional housing policy will be tilted toward families with several children. For families with multiple children who do not own a house or who rent a house in the city, their housing provident fund can be withdrawn at a higher rate or according to actual rent expenditure.

For multi-child families seeking to purchase a first home, cities in Guangdong will offer appropriate support policies such as increasing the loan ratio available from an individual's housing provident fund.

Guangdong will reduce income tax for individuals with children aged 3 years old and under, and adopt an incentive mechanism to guarantee childcare subsidies are targeted to groups in need.

Medical expenses such as birthing costs and prenatal check-ups will be covered by medical insurance funds for urban and rural residents, according to the guidelines.

Guangdong will increase the supply of public kindergarten spaces year by year. It will build, renovate and expand 2,500 public kindergartens before 2025. Kindergartens located in new residential areas will be publicly operated. The province will encourage and support state-owned enterprises and institutions, colleges and universities, and community and village collectives to open and operate public kindergartens.

For childcare subsidies, local regulations adopted by the city of Shenzhen were published to solicit public commentin January.

Families with a first child are eligible to receive a one-time subsidy of 3,000 yuan ($420), in addition, a child care subsidy of 1,500 yuan which will be issued every year until the child reaches 3 years old. For families with a third child, a one-time birth subsidy of 10,000 yuan will be issued and an annual childcare subsidy of 3,000 yuan will be issued until the child reaches the age of 3 years old.

Besides, Guangdong is home to a significant migrant population, ranking No.1 in the country, data showed. The total number of the migrant population in Guangdong reached 29.622 million in 2022, accounting for 23.5 percent of the total population.

Various localities have introduced fertility support measures from the beginning of this year, such as issuing maternity allowances and childcare subsidies, and strengthening housing security support. Among them, Shenyang, Hangzhou, Jinan, Changsha, Harbin and other places are to provide childcare subsidies.

Most recently, Dehua county in East China's Fujian Province released a generous incentive to encourage larger families. Family units who have a third child can receive a one-time subsidy of 10,000 yuan and be eligible for parental leave no less than 10 days in length.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
Saudi Arabia and the United States announced a 24-hour ceasefire starting Saturday between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, the Saudi Foreign Ministry said in a statement Friday.

The ceasefire is effective starting 6:00AM Khartoum time [12:00a ET Friday], the statement said.

The two warring factions agreed to allow for the movement of humanitarian aid all throughout Sudan, the statement said.

Saudi Arabia and the US join the Sudanese people in their frustration over the non-commitment of the previous truces, the statement said.

On Thursday, Sudans foreign ministry which backs the countrys armed forces notified the United Nations that Volker Perthes, the special representative of the UN Secretary-General in Sudan, and head of the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS), had been declared persona non grata.

The Government of the Republic of Sudan has notified the Secretary-General of the United Nations on Thursday 8th June 2023 that it has declared Mr Volker Perthes, the head of UNITMAS, persona non grata as of today, the Sudanese foreign ministry said in a statement Thursday.

Sudans foreign ministry did not clarify in the statement the reason behind the declaration.

Last month, Sudans military ruler General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan wrote a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres asking that Perthes be removed from his post in the country, the Sudanese presidency said, according to Reuters.

Guterres was shocked by the letter he received from al-Burhan, his spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said at the time, adding that the Secretary-General is proud of the work that Perthes has done in Sudan.

Perthes, who was appointed to his role in 2021, has voiced strong concern over the conflict. In an address to the UN Security Council earlier this week, he criticized both leaders of Sudans warring parties and warned of a growing ethnicization of the conflict.

Neither side has yet shown the ability to decisively claim a military victory, Perthes said.

Last week, the UN Security Council voted to extend the UNITAMS mandate in Sudan for only six months, until 3 December 2023, the UN said in a statement.

UNITAMS, created in June 2020 to facilitate a renewed civilian-led transition to democracy in Sudan after the fall of Omar al-Bashir a year earlier, had since been renewed annually for a year.

Weeks of fierce fighting in Sudan between Burhans Sudanese Armed Forces and the countrys Rapid Support Forces led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo have left the country in turmoil and scrambled hopes for a peaceful transition to civilian rule.

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KHERSON  Since Russias full-scale war began, first came eight months of terror under occupation, then came seven months of intense shelling across the river, then came the river itself to Kherson.

Over 24 hours after Russian forces destroyed the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant and its massive dam over the Dnipro River on June 6, Korabelna Square in the center of Kherson was a hive of activity.

Still rising by the hour, floodwaters had covered the roundabout completely, creating a new riverbank on the sloped road leading to the city center, which sits on higher ground.

Boats of all types, from rubber dinghies to iron fishing boats, docked and departed at the waters edge in the space of minutes. Steering them were a mix of soldiers, emergency services workers, volunteers, and most of all, local residents with their own boats.

Also at work were marvels of modern Ukrainian engineering in the hands of the State Emergency Service: Bohun all-terrain vehicles, first released in 2020, with huge, ribbed rubber tires that allow them to drive straight into the water from dry land.

With the arriving watercraft came people of all ages, evacuated from areas under meters of water from low-lying districts of the city.

Many had issues with mobility, and were transferred directly to ambulances. Others just stood watching with their belongings, frozen in disbelief and unsure what to do next.

Some of our neighbors from the first floor didn't want to evacuate, they came up to our place to wait it out, said Iryna Tatochenko, 63, after climbing out of a boat.

A lot of people are climbing to higher floors, our people are kind, we help each other, everything will be ok.

According to the State Emergency Service, 2,339 people have been recorded as evacuated so far from flood-affected areas, though with the number of informal evacuation initiatives ongoing the number is likely higher.

With Russia having occupied the Kakhovka hydoelectric plant since the first days of the full-scale war, and been in full control of the side where the huge breach suddenly appeared, Moscows responsibility for the disaster is not under question, according to Ukrainian officials.

There can be no doubt at all that this was done by Russia, the president warned of the threat that they would do exactly this back in October last year already, Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said during a press briefing in Kherson.

Russias motivation, according to Kubrakov, was primarily a military one, made in desperation as a large-scale Ukrainian counteroffensive begins to gain momentum along the Zaporizhzhia Oblast front line.

They feel that our counteroffensive has begun, they see the situation is changing on the battlefield, they need all the forces they can, he said.

They understood that we could also attack from here (across the Dnipro in Kherson Oblast). They did this deliberately to make this impossible for a certain amount of time.

Flooded residential areas of Kherson, seen on June 7, 2023. (Francis Farrell/The Kyiv Independent)

At the briefing, Kubrakov described the scale of some of the other consequences of the dams destruction, beyond the immediate threat to human lives in flooded areas.

The flooding of the low-lying areas in and around the river, where both sides held front-line positions stretching over 80 kilometers, has led to the release of thousands of land mines into the water, with photos of the floating objects already emerging on social media. Kubrakov reported that demining would be the authorities first priority once the water receded.

The disaster also has an immense ecological dimension. According to the minister, the Nyzhnodniprovsk, Velykyi Luh and Kaminska Sich national parks in southern Ukraine could disappear forever.

The world must reply with action, not words, Kurbakov said in conclusion.

What are the consequences of the Kakhovka dams demolition? The destruction of the Kakhovka dam can lead to serious humanitarian, ecological, economic, military, and legal consequences. The demolition was carried out by Russian forces in southern Ukraine in the early hours of June 6. And its among the most dramatic violations of the Geneva Conventions in The Kyiv IndependentIgor Kossov

Saved from the waters

In Khersons western Shumenskyi district, residents stood and watched as water slowly but steadily trickled up the courtyard. Monitoring the speed of the inundation, a soldier at the scene was drawing lines on the pavement with timestamps, marking where the water would likely rise to with each passing half hour.

Around the corner of an apartment building, three men in full-body rubber suits emerged. With them was 36-year-old resident Oksana Starostina, and on the shoulders of one of the men, her nine-year-old son Kostiantyn.

Speaking briefly to the Kyiv Independent before being whisked off in a car, Starostina said she and her son would head to relatives in Uzhhorod in western Ukraine.

We are fine, its the people on the other (occupied) side, nobody is evacuating them, that's where people are on their roofs, she said.

My friend took her cats and her chickens to the roof and the last that I heard is that she was waiting there.

Walking through a flooded entrance to one nine-story building is rewarded with a view from the roof of how the water slowly began to swallow the outskirts of the city. While houses on the bank of a small tributary of the Dnipro are completely underwater, neighboring apartment buildings were standing tall but slowly surrounded.

With a flood like that in Kherson, evacuating is one thing, but whether one has a home to return to when the water recedes is another.

In a local city hospital, elderly evacuees from the flooded Ostriv district in the citys southwest are housed in well-lit rooms, with six beds side-by-side.

We were taken out by police in the morning, the water was already swirling all around us and it was clear that soon everything would be flooded, 67-year-old Liubov Bura said of her evacuation.

My house is underwater, all the way up to the roof, about three meters of water. There will be nowhere to return to. It might collapse, it might not, but it will be no place to live.

On the bed adjacent, Halyna Remezovska, 68, still had high-hopes she could return to her third-floor apartment.

The first floors will be flooded, maybe the second in some areas, but we live on the third, she said.

See, those people might still have something to go back to, but I dont know what I will do next, Bura said in response.

Travelling out on a rubber motor boat along a flooded street of houses just off Korabelna Square, the Kyiv Indepedent spoke to Bill Rigsby, 62, a volunteer from Texas who has conducted various humanitarian relief efforts since the very beginning of Russias full-scale invasion.

We were given the GPS coordinates of about 20 people that were down on one of those islands (in the Dnipro), and when we got there the coordinates were underwater, he said, scanning the streets, where only the roofs of many one-story houses were visible. You see how some of those houses have just tumbled, intact, just rolling like a dice.

According to the Interior Ministry, five people have been confirmed killed so far, with 13 missing, including from the Russian-occupied territories on the eastern bank, where locals report that little to no official evacuation operation is being carried out.

Though Rigsby doesnt speak Ukrainian, he has been surprised by the unpanicked temperament of evacuees.

Everybody's pretty calm and matter of fact about it, he said. I've been in a lot of conflict zones and I'm surprised at how confident everyone is here.

They are destroying us. People plea to escape flooded Russian-occupied areas Editors note: For this story, we spoke to people living or having family in the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. For their safety, they are identified by first name only. After destroying the Nova Kakhovka dam and stranding thousands of Ukrainians in the catastrophic flood zone, Russians prevent The Kyiv IndependentDaria Shulzhenko

Left to perish

Everywhere around Kherson where people are being evacuated, so are hundreds of peoples pets and smallhold livestock, some with their owners, but many left behind and rescued by volunteers.

While humans are able to understand that as a result of the terrorist attack upsteam, their homes will soon be underwater, the animals that also call the flooded houses and apartments of Kherson home can not.

Early images on June 6 of Ukrainian police officers saving a dog from the floodwaters warmed hearts around the world, but soon, the large-scale tragedy for housepets began to become clear.

Here again, volunteers have mobilized in large numbers, although some were more prepared than others.

Volunteers mind goats and dogs near Korabelna Square in Kherson on June 7, 2023. (Francis Farrell/The Kyiv Independent)

At Korabelna Square, dozens of dogs, some cats, and even goats were being minded by the roadside, waiting to be taken onward to shelters and foster homes. Volunteers from Kyiv supported by the foundation of Serhii Prytula tried to tempt some of the stressed animals into carriers with food, to little avail.

At another location on the western outskirts of Kherson, workers from neighboring Mykolaiv Oblasts animal control department have arrived with tranquiliser darts for dogs and other pets too aggressive to be carried into a boat awake.

Iryna Bukhonska, 32, spoke to the Kyiv Independent in between consulting with a vet from another organization about the right type of darts to be used. In her van, around 20 dogs have already been collected in cages, calmly waiting to be taken onwards to a shelter in Mykolaiv.

Last night some of our volunteers were working further in that direction to save animals but by now the water has risen and there is no way for us to get there, and probably not many animals to save there anymore, she said, pointing south towards the water.

Everyone is working to save dogs but it is almost impossible to do anything about cats, you rarely even see them out there, Bukhonska added.

They experience huge stress because of the water, they hide instead of coming out, and most of them will inevitably perish in the flood.

On the boat with Rigsby near Korabelna Square, the Kyiv Independent was witness to the grim reality of animal rescues in Kherson.

Stopping at the sound of barking from a raised verandah covered in grapevines, Rigsby rowed gingerly over the metal gate of a flooded two-story house. On closer inspection, the barking, cream-colored dog was simply too aggressive to take, showing every intention to attack anyone who came too close.

Leaving the dog some fresh water in a jar, Rigsby noticed another dog, perched on a flimsy airvent rising from the first floor. The animal was silent and still, shaking as the water lapped at its paws.

With difficulty, the dog was lifted into the boat, immediately relaxing once released from its perch.

The coordinates of the house were passed on to volunteers, in the hope that a team equipped with their own boat and tranquilizers could save the aggressive dog that remained.

The desire to save ones pets can also put human lives in danger. On the way back to the square with the dog on board, Rigsbys boat came across three locals in a rubber boat, one of them clinging desperately to a telephone pole.

Residents of the street, they had rowed downstream without a motor to save six cats that they presumed to be sheltering in the attic of their one-story home. Missing the mark and caught in the strong current, the trio now had to be rescued themselves.

Rigsby obliged, throwing them a rope and towing them slowly back upstream to the square. The locals said they would try again to reach the cats, but would have to use another approach.

NGO: Zoo in occupied Nova Kakhovka completely flooded, all animals but birds dead A zoological garden in occupied Nova Kakhovka, Kazkova Dibrova, is completely flooded due to the explosion at the Kakhovka dam, the animal rights organization UAnimals said on June 6. The Kyiv IndependentMartin Fornusek

Flooded city under shelling

In Ostriv district, the streets running between rivers had become canals, with little dry land in between nine-story blocks of flats.

The atmosphere an hour before sundown on June 7 was eerie, as most of the remaining residents were those who chose to stay in their apartments rather than evacuate and fewer boats were plying the waters.

Occasionally, shouted conversations between volunteers in the water and residents in their windows could be heard echoing around from another courtyard.

The silence was regularly broken by a sound not normally associated with a flood: artillery fire, first the dull outgoing boom from the opposite side of the river, then the inevitable crash of incoming nearby.

The area was already targeted on the evening of June 6, with shells landing close to journalists who had arrived late on the first day of the floods. This turned out only to be the prelude to Russias post-flood shelling campaign.

The next day, just a few hours after a surprise visit from President Volodymyr Zelensky to the city, Korabelna Square was targeted by heavy Russian artillery fire, sending locals, volunteers, and journalists alike to take cover throughout the city.

Reports quickly came in of casualties near Korabelna Square, where the evacuation had been continuing at full pace. Ukrainian photographer Stanislav Yurchenko, caught in the incoming fire, captured viral images of a column of water blasted into the air just a split second after impact.

Ukraine war latest: Zelensky visits Kherson Oblast following Kakhovka dam disaster; Russia shells flooded city Key Developments on June 8: * UN agrees to conduct evacuations from flooded Russian-occupied areas * 1 person killed, 10 injured by Russian shelling of Kherson Oblast during evacuation * More economic, environmental consequences of Kakhovka dam disaster revealed * Ukraine repels Russian attacks The Kyiv IndependentKate Tsurkan

In a lull in the shelling, the Kyiv Independent drove to the square to assess the situation. As volunteers hid close to the walls of buildings, the square had completely emptied but for soldiers and police who quickly turned the car away.

Having stopped further up the street, the shouts of soldiers and medics could be heard as more incoming shells landed several hundred meters away.

According to local authorities, nine people were injured in the shelling in total, including one police officer, two first responders, and a German volunteer.

After all that Kherson residents have been through, most of them seemed to be mentally pushing through what was just yet another round of suffering at the hands of Russia.

I haven't seen one person that's even frightened, Rigsby noted.

Most are disgusted more than anything... like all of us.

Note from the author:

Hi, this is Francis Farrell, who wrote this piece from on the ground and in the water of Kherson after what is not only an unprecedented humanitarian and environmental disaster, but one of the most heinous crimes of Russia's war against Ukraine so far. Whatever horrific new surprises Russia has in store for us, we will continue our work. Please consider supporting our reporting.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Polish President Andrzej Duda will arrive in Paris next Monday for talks with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Source: Politico with reference to French officials, as reported by European Pravda

Details: The dinner meeting is expected to focus on Ukraine's desire for NATO membership and security guarantees from allies ahead of the Alliance's summit in July.

Last week, Macron called for Ukraine to be given "strong, concrete and tangible" security guarantees and said that Ukraine should be offered "a path towards membership [in NATO  ed.]".

Scholz, however, is likely to be more cautious, saying last Thursday that the emphasis should be on "how we as individuals can support Ukraine" but not on membership.

Poland has repeatedly called for strong security guarantees for Ukraine. On Tuesday, 6 June, Duda met with a few NATO leaders in Eastern Europe to discuss the war in Ukraine and its desire to join the alliance.

While it is clearly understandable that Ukraine will not be able to join the Alliance while it is fighting against Russia, NATO members have different ideas on how they should respond to Ukraine's current desire for membership.

However, according to one French diplomat, a strong signal must be sent from NATO members to Russia at a time when Ukraine is beginning a counteroffensive.

"If we dont find a solution that satisfies everyone, the risk is that we wont reach a unified statement, and that would obviously be the greatest gift we could give to Russia," said the diplomat, who did not speak publicly.

The leaders are also expected to discuss other issues such as European sovereignty and defence.

Background: Ukraine is asking the West for mandatory security guarantees to ensure its long-term sustainability, but its allies are not yet ready to say yes.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
Scholz, Macron, Duda to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine in Paris this week, Politico

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron

The meeting over dinner is expected to focus on Ukraines push for NATO membership and security guarantees from allies ahead of the NATO Summit in July, reads the report.

Last week, Macron called for Ukraine to be given strong, concrete, and tangible security guarantees and argued that Ukraine should be offered a path towards (NATO) membership during a speech in Bratislava.

However, Scholz appeared to strike a more cautious note, saying on June 1 that the focus shouldnt be on membership, but on how we as individuals can support Ukraine.

Read also: Zelenskyy and Macron discuss training Ukrainian pilots

Poland has repeatedly called for Ukraine to be given strong security guarantees. Duda met with several leaders of NATO members in Eastern Europe on June 6 to discuss the war in Ukraine and its request to join the alliance.

While there is a broad understanding Ukraine will not be able to join while it is still at war with Russia, NATO members are divided on how they should respond to Ukraines current push for membership, Politico reported.

NATO members need to send a strong signal to Russia at a time when Ukraine is launching a counteroffensive, said one French diplomat.

If we dont find a solution that satisfies everyone, the risk is that we wont reach a unified statement, and that would obviously be the greatest gift we could give to Russia, said the diplomat, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Its also expected the leaders will discuss other topics such as European sovereignty and defense.

Read also: France to provide Ukraine with missiles to help it resist Russian aggression, says Macron

Security guarantees for Ukraine: What is known

The idea of security guarantees for Ukraine was first voiced during Russian-Ukrainian negotiations in Istanbul, Turkey, in late March 2022. At that time, the Ukrainian side offered an option under which Ukraine would receive security guarantees in exchange for refusing to join NATO. Moscow frequently cited a perceived threat of NATO expansion as the pretext for invading Ukraine in the first place.

Ukraines proposal provided for immediate military assistance from the UN Security Councils member states in case of aggression, in particular by establishing a no-fly zone over the country.

Russia rejected the proposal and continued its attempts to occupy Ukraine, while the allies, though they abandoned the idea of making bilateral commitments to Ukraine outside NATO, have increased military support for Kyiv and began to discuss concrete security guarantees.

In turn, Kyiv switched from security guarantees as an alternative to NATO to security guarantees as part of a broader process of joining the alliance.

On Sept. 13, 2022, the Presidents Office presented the Kyiv Security Treaty  the first draft of recommendations on security guarantees for Ukraine, which were developed by an expert group led by the head of the Presidents Office, Andriy Yermak, and former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Read also: German defense minister criticizes Hungary for blocking military aid to Ukraine

The recommendations call for resources to maintain a powerful Ukrainian army, investment in Ukraines defense industry, supply of weapons, and intelligence assistance from allies. They also include joint exercises and intensive training missions under the auspices of the European Union and NATO, as well as measures to prevent new aggression.

The document states that the main group of allies and guarantors of Ukraine may include the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Poland, Italy, Germany, France, Australia, Turkey, as well as Northern European, Baltic, and Central and Eastern European countries.

Yermak also emphasized that the agreement on security guarantees would not replace joining NATO and should ensure Ukraines security until it becomes a full member of the alliance.

Were bringing the voice of Ukraine to the world. Support us with a one-time donation, or become a Patron!

Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Scientists are searching for mystery patient with new type of Covid in Ohio

Scientists are trying to track down a man in Ohio who appears to be the only person carrying a particular "cryptic" strain of Covid.

Marc Johnson, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, captivated his Twitter followers earlier this year when he asked for help tracking down the provenance of the unique variant.

"Help me solve a COVID cryptic lineage mystery," he wrote at the time.

He discovered the new lineage of the virus while reviewing a database of Covid samples, he told Insider. More than that, he learned that all instances of the unique strain appeared to be coming from a single person in Ohio.

People suffering from infections shed viral material when they cough, sneeze, or through defecation. Mr Johnson found that the majority of the viral material detected has been found in Columbus, Ohio's capital, and the city of Washington Court House.

He believes the infected individual likely lives in one place and works in the other.

Mr Johnson said the rogue variant living in a single sick person in Ohio doesn't warrant immediate public health concerns, but did say that the infected individual is likely suffering from long Covid and could probably use help.

He and his Twitter followers used US Census Data to determine that approximately 1,600 people make a commute between Washington Court House and Columbus. Someone among those 1,600 is likely carrying the cryptic lineage.

The professor noted that whoever the mystery carrier is, they could be helpful to researchers seeking to better understand how the virus changes and how individuals become super-shedders of the virus.

Help me solve a COVID cryptic lineage mystery.



Cryptic lineages are distinct SARS-CoV-2 lineages that we detect in wastewater, but do not know their source. We believe they are from patients with very long COVID infections.



Here is more backstory.https://t.co/n9MdSLnVkI



1/  Marc Johnson (@SolidEvidence) April 24, 2023

He also assured readers that there was "no manhunt" for the infected individual, and that he was not trying to violate the individual's medical privacy. Mr Johnson said he wanted to make the search public in hopes someone who has been feeling bad for some time may recognize themselves as a potential candidate.

The professor told Insider that there are no tests for detecting Covid-19 in stool, so it is highly unlikely the infected person will figure out on their own that they have the virus. He said he hopes the sick individual sees the post and is able to connect the dots between their likely symptoms and their location.

He said the infected individual likely is experiencing some kind of gastrointestinal symptoms, and may be completely unaware they have long Covid.

"I would love to know the details, [but] mostly I want them to seek treatment," he said.

This isn't the first cryptic Covid strain Mr Johnson has identified; he has been studying viral lineages found in wastewater since 2021, and may hold clues to potential future variants of the virus.

That was the case during the pandemic, when researchers realized that the Omicron variant looked very similar to the cryptic lineages they had previously discovered in wastewater.
How the search for answers has unfolded since Natalee Holloway vanished in 2005

Its been almost 18 years since American teenager Natalee Holloway vanished during a high school graduation trip to Aruba.

Now, the prime suspect in her disappearance has arrived in the US to face justice in a related case after he was transferred from Peru to Birmingham, Alabama, in the company of a team of FBI special agents. He maintains his innocence, and no one has faced trial or is currently charged in her death.

Heres how the story has unfolded:

May 30, 2005: Natalee Holloway, 18, of suburban Birmingham, Alabama, is seen leaving a bar with three young men: two brothers and Joran van der Sloot, then 17.

June 9, 2005: Van der Sloot and brothers Satish and Depak Kalpoe are arrested in Aruba in connection with Holloways disappearance.

June 23, 2005: Van der Sloots father, an Aruban judge, is arrested.

June 26, 2005: A judge orders the release of van der Sloots father after finding no sufficient suspicion for guilt, his attorney said.

July 2005: The Kalpoes are released.

Joran van der Sloot, center, arrives for DNA testing on July 20, 2005, in Oranjestad, Aruba. - Dino Tromp/AP

August 26, 2005: With Joran van der Sloot still in custody, the Kalpoes are rearrested in Aruba on suspicion they acted together with other people in raping and killing Holloway, the prosecutors office says without elaborating on the evidence. Defense attorneys maintain the three are innocent.

September 3, 2005: Van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers are again released but remain under investigation.

November 21, 2007: Van der Sloot, at school in the Netherlands, and the Kalpoe brothers, in Aruba, are rearrested and charged based on new evidence for involvement in the voluntary manslaughter of Natalee Holloway or causing serious bodily harm to Natalee Holloway, resulting in her death, Aruban prosecutors say without describing the new evidence.

December 1, 2007: The Kalpoe brothers are released. Prosecutors cite the judges reasoning a day earlier that while the new evidence, together with the existing evidence in this case, produce serious grounds for the suspicion of some kind of aiding and abetting, of covering up the traces of a crime committed or of the disposing of a corpse, people accused of those crimes do not qualify for pretrial detention under Aruban law.

December 7, 2007: An Aruban judge orders van der Sloots release, pending any potential trial, with a prosecutor saying the judge cited a lack of evidence that Holloway died from a violent crime or that van der Sloot was involved in such a crime.

Joran van der Sloot walks in December 2007 to a supermarket near his parents' house in Aruba after he is released from prison. - Raul Henriquez/AFP/Getty Images/FILE

December 18, 2007: Charges are dropped against all three men for lack of sufficient evidence, Aruban prosecutors say.

March 29 to May 17, 2010: Van der Sloot offers to tell Holloways mother, Beth Holloway, where her daughters body is and the circumstances of her death in exchange for $25,000 up front and $225,000 later, a federal grand jury indictment later alleges.

May 10, 2010: Holloway wires $15,000 to a bank account of van der Sloots in the Netherlands and, through an attorney, gives him $10,000 in person, the indictment states. Van der Sloot shows the attorney, John Kelly, a location where he says are hidden  but the information is false, it states.

Beth Holloway speaks June 8, 2010, at the opening of the Natalee Holloway Resource Center at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment in Washington, DC. - Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

May 30, 2010: Van der Sloot kills Stephany Flores, 21, in his Lima hotel room after she finds something related to the Holloway case on his computer during a visit, investigators say. It was five years to the day after Holloway was last seen. Van der Sloot takes money and bank cards from Flores wallet and flees to Chile, police say.

June 3, 2010: Van der Sloot is arrested in Chile, where officials will send him back to Peru, Interpol confirms.

June 30, 2010: A federal grand jury in Alabama indicts van der Sloot on charges of extortion and wire fraud over the claims related to Beth Holloway and the location of her daughters remains.

Joran van der Sloot, center, is escorted by Peruvian police June 4, 2010, after Chilean authorities handed him over. - Sebastian Silva/AFP/Getty Images/FILE

January 11, 2012: Van der Sloot pleads guilty to the charges against him in Flores killing, including qualified murder and simple robbery, and says hes really sorry for what happened.

January 12, 2012: An Alabama judge signs an order declaring Natalee Holloway legally dead.

January 13, 2012: Van der Sloot is sentenced to 28 years in prison for Flores murder.

March 2014: Peru agrees to transfer van der Sloot to the United States to face the extortion and wire fraud charges after he serves the 28-year murder sentence, making him eligible for release in 2038, the Peruvian news agency Andina reports.

May 10, 2023: Peru changes course and agrees to transfer van der Sloot to the United States to face the extortion and wire fraud charges. He would be returned to Peru after legal proceedings against him conclude in the United States, Perus judiciary said.

May 11, 2023: Van der Sloot will appeal, his attorney Maximo Altez says, calling the decision announced by President Dina Boluartes government an attempt to divert public attention from the countrys migration, social and political problems.

June 5, 2023: Altez files a habeas corpus petition against his clients temporary transfer to the US after previously telling CNN en Espanol the defense did not expect to file the petition.

June 6, 2023: In a statement published on social media, the superior court in Lima announces van der Sloot will be handed over to FBI agents on June 8.

June 8, 2023: Van der Sloot leaves the Ancon 1 prison in Lima and, after a six-and-a-half-hour flight, arrives in Alabama on an FBI jet in what the bureau calls a foreign transfer of custody operation. He is taken to a jail in Birmingham, not far from Holloways hometown of Mountain Brook.

June 9, 2023: Van der Sloot is arraigned on extortion and wire fraud charges in federal court in Birmingham. US Magistrate Judge Gray Borden entered a not guilty plea on van der Sloots behalf.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
Gaston County police have made a second arrest in the death of a 20-year-old man who shot and killed while walking to a job interview in March.

Officers said they found Marqwon Nixon in Wisconsin. They believe he went to Milwaukee right after the shooting.

Nixon was indicted and had his first appearance in superior court. He is the suspected driver in the drive-by shooting.

PREVIOUS: Man shot, killed while walking to job interview in Gastonia, family says

Jontariyon Jackson was arrested and charged with murder in May.

Both Nixon and Jackson are suspected of killing Tyceria Alexander while he was walking to a job interview. Police didnt say what led to the shooting.

A painful place

Alexanders family is relieved. They waited for what felt like an eternity for suspects to be arrested in this case.

But the spot where Alexander was killed remains a painful place for his father.

Why? Charles Durham, Alexanders father, asked.

Its the small word thats a big roadblock right now for Durham. He spoke to Channel 9s Ken Lemon on Friday while wearing a shirt featuring a picture of him with his son.

I dont wish this pain on nobody, said his father Charles Durham. I done lost family members, but losing a kid -- its like somebody take their hand and take your heart out and just crush it.

Police said the suspected driver went to Wisconsin right after the shooting and was on the run before being arrested and indicted for murder this week.

About these getting caught, man its a big relief, Durham said, but he needs more than just an arrest.

I dont know why they did it.

Durham wants the suspects to know he is scarred by his sons murder.

He told Lemon about the impact of hearing of the shooting and driving from his workplace in Salisbury.

When I did pull up on the scene, I seen the crowd -- I couldnt even get out of the car. Man, I lost it, he said.

He said he avoids the stretch of Union Road because being there is still too painful.

Durham said his 20-year-old son had enrolled in classes at Gaston College and that his new life as a college student was probably what he was thinking about as he walked to his job interview.

The next day, his books came, Durham said.

He says having his sons dream cut short is hard, but the one question thats even harder, so far, has no answer.

Why?

(PREVIOUS: Man shot, killed while walking to job interview in Gastonia, family says)








The federal indictment of former President Donald Trump  his second time being charged in less than three months  has swept the 2024 presidential election into a new period of uncertainty, and made it even more likely that Trump will campaign while also facing trial.

For his rivals, though, the campaign has been frozen in place, with Trump again seizing the spotlight and relegating them to supporting roles.

Reactions from the campaigns came ahead of the unsealing of the indictment on Friday afternoon, allowing some to play for time and cast themselves as impartial observers. Others, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, immediately moved to condemn prosecutors and echo Trumps claims to being a victim of a Department of Justice weaponized by President Joe Biden and allied Democrats.

The tangle of early reaction underscores the unsure nature of the primary, with more than seven months of campaigning to go before the first votes are cast in Iowas caucuses, and three candidates formally entering the race this week alone. Unlike in the aftermath of a New York City district attorneys indictment of Trump in connection with a hush money case earlier this year, the former presidents primary opponents are, on balance, staking out more cautious terrain this time, with all but DeSantis suggesting they will withhold judgment until more details about the case are revealed by the government.

The Florida governor has ramped up his attacks on Trump over the last couple weeks, but his criticism has largely appealed to Republican voters concerns about electability and an argument that DeSantis is a better bet to deliver on his promises. So when word of the indictment broke, DeSantis sprinted to Trumps corner  along with the loyalists he is ultimately hoping will break for him.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, DeSantis tweeted late Thursday night. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.

He added, rhetorically: Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary (Clinton) or Hunter (Biden)?

DeSantis comments were a near copy-paste version of his reaction to Trumps first indictment, when the governor  not yet a candidate  accused prosecutors of systematized partisan bias.

The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head, DeSantis said in March. It is un-American.

That line of response, and attack, was near uniform across the Republican Party after charges were announced by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat and champion of progressive policies that already irked most conservatives.

The new case against Trump is a stickier political wicket. To start, the grand jury that voted to indict Trump was not based in New York City, where Trump is deeply unpopular, but in South Florida, where he now lives and enjoys a good deal of support.

And though the bulk of the evidence against Trump remains under seal, CNN on Friday first reported on a 2021 meeting in which Trump is on tape, according to a transcript, saying he had retained secret military information that he had not declassified  directly refuting his prior claims to having done just that before leaving office.

Per the transcript, he waved around a classified Pentagon document detailing a blueprint for a military attack on Iran.

All sorts of stuff  pages long, look, Trump says to others in the room. Wait a minute, lets see here. I just found, isnt that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.

Among the 2024 field, DeSantis and longshot primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy emerged overnight as Trumps most ardent defenders. Ramaswamy released a statement and a video, calling the indictment an affront to every citizen before comparing the US to a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, Trumps deputy in office and two-time running mate, has sought to straddle two worlds  at once urging against judgment before prosecutors unseal their case against Trump and, in the same radio interview on Friday morning with conservative host Hugh Hewitt, promising a purge of federal law enforcement officials.

Were going to clean house all across the top floors, whether its the Justice Department or whether its the FBI. I just think we need a whole new team, Pence said. I think theres been literally a collapse of confidence.

But in the same conversation, Pence also called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to unseal the indictment before the sun sets today in order to provide more transparency into the charges.

The American people should be able to judge for themselves whether this is just the latest incident of weaponization and politicization at the Justice Department or its something different, Pence said.

Another one-time close Trump ally, former US ambassador to the United Nations and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, tried a similar tack. After keeping mum Thursday night and for most of the morning, she accused the government of abusing its powers.

The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics, Haley wrote. Its time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions.

That second line, though, could be read two ways. What precisely Haley wants to move beyond is unclear: Trump and the accompanying circus or the vendetta politics that, she claims, is a driving force behind this latest firestorm.

In a Fox News interview on Thursday night, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott sought to strike a similar balance. He demurred when asked whether he had spoken to Trump, then added, somewhat ambiguously, that he would continue to pray for our nation and continue to pray that justice prevails.

What he meant by justice, in this context, was difficult to pin down, but it could allow him space to maneuver when the details of the indictment became public. Like Pence, though, he also used the occasion to attack federal law enforcement.

What we have seen over the past few years is the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president, Scott said, later adding that, if elected president, he would purge all of the injustices and impurities in our system.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, another onetime ally and close adviser to Trump who has emerged as his chief critic in the 2024 race, reacted to the indictment first by disparaging Trumps own response, delivered on the former presidents social media platform, before urging patience.

As I have said before, no one is above the law, no matter how much they wish they were, Christie said in a statement. We will have more to say when the facts are revealed.

After the indictment was unsealed, Christie described the details in the document as damning.

This is irresponsible conduct, Christie told CNNs Jake Tapper Friday evening, adding that the conduct that Donald Trump engaged in was completely self-inflicted.

His super PAC was also aggressive. Ahead of a new ad launch, its first of the 2024 primary, a senior adviser to the group said the new indictment furthered Christies political case against Trump.

The latest round of indictments serve as another reminder that the Republican Party needs a new direction, said Colin Reed of Christies Tell It Like It Is PAC. To turn the page on the Biden presidency, the GOP needs a qualified leader.

Though with less bombast, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson has been making a similar strategic argument since entering the race  in his case, that Trump should stand down, abandon his campaign, and take on his legal issues away in a different forum.

While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction, Hutchinson said. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

CNNs Kit Maher, Veronica Stracqualursi and Kate Sullivan contributed to this story.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
Security promises to be air tight ahead of former President Donald Trumps expected arraignment at downtown Miamis federal courthouse Tuesday afternoon  but police and federal agents are being tight-lipped about specifics.

This much is certain: Many of the roads around the Wilkie D. Ferguson U.S. Courthouse, at 400 N. Miami Ave., will be closed before his arrival to face a string of charges associated with the handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach. And its likely to lead to a commuting nightmare throughout downtown.

Other safety measures, as well as the law enforcement presences near the 14-floor glass tower are expected to be asphyxiating.

The Miami Police Department is ready to ensure the safety of the city, is all Miami Police Chief Manny Morales would say Friday about security issues.

The U.S. Marshal Service, which provides courthouse security and will coordinate with local law enforcement, also would not discuss preparations, but issued a statement: The U.S. Marshals are responsible for the protection of the federal judicial process, and we take that responsibility very seriously. Ensuring that judges can rule independently and free from harm or intimidation is paramount to the rule of law, and a fundamental mission of the USMS.

Still, the former presidents pending appearance has Miami bracing for a chaotic day downtown. Businesses and commuters always have to grapple with the intense security and logistical demands when a president visits  but a former president being hauled into criminal federal court will add layers of complexity. The number of reporters outside the courthouse has exploded in the last few days and potential demonstrations could pop up near the courthouse.

Although he announced on social media Thursday that he is being asked to appear in Miami federal court at 3 p.m. Tuesday, the specifics are unknown, at least publicly. Trump could, for instance, spend the night or morning before his court appearance at his Doral resort or at his Mar-A-Lago mansion in Palm Beach County. Cameras are not allowed in federal court and its unclear if he intends to make a statement before or after his appearance.

Other agencies like the larger Miami-Dade Police Department already have offered to help Miami Police if needed.

If the controversial, twice-impeached president, who still attracts crowds of loyal supporters, is driven downtown from Doral, expect delays along either State roads 836 or 112 and likely on parts of I-95. But if he is escorted to town from his Palm Beach County home, the more than one-hour drive south on I-95 south could turn into a parade-like procession or law enforcement could shutdown the interstate like the do for sitting presidents.

CNN reported Friday morning that the former Presidents Secret Service detail was still working on an appearance plan and that once he enters the federal courthouse he will be handed over to U.S. Marshals, who will arrest and fingerprint him electronically to avoid ink stains. In New York state court in April he did not have a mugshot taken. And CNN said any pictures taken by U.S. Marshals will stay out of public view.

Though Miamis Chief Morales said he has no plans for a press conference ahead of Tuesdays expected appearance by the former president, his position is unlikely to sway elected leaders from taking to a podium at some point  just as New York City Mayor Eric Adams did in the days leading to Trumps court arraignment in Lower Manhattan in early April.

After Adams warned the public that New York City was our home, not a playground, protests barely materialized. And with all of New York Citys 36,000 sworn officers in uniform, only a few dozen stragglers showed up at the Lower Manhattan courthouse and the city remained peaceful.

Miamis most recent large protests were fairly peaceful. Though there were outbreak early on during the civil rights protests in the summer of 2020, with the exception of the first night, they were well contained. The city also was quiet in the days around the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington D.C.

Rachel Johnson, deputy chief of staff for Miami-Dade Countys mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, said the county is working with Miami to prepare for the event. So far, she said, federal authorities havent been part of that process.

MDPD is collaborating with the City of Miami on a security plan, Johnson said, but we havent received any formal requests for support yet.

One possible mitigating factor is the quick round up and convictions of many of those who were responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington D.C. Former local Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio, for instance, was convicted last month of seditious conspiracy for his part in the Capitol attack. He could be imprisoned for two decades. Also behind bars, Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes, sentenced to 18 years in prison three weeks ago on similar charges.

Though those convictions and others could help keep possible troublemakers at bay on Tuesday, charging a former president with a federal crime is uncharted territory, said Chuck Wexler, executive director Washington D.C.s Police Executive Research Forum. Wexler said hes confident that with recent events in mind law enforcement will step up its game and keep the peace Tuesday.

Its just a rare situation where you have a [former] president protected by Secret Service and on the other hand, charged with a federal crime. But given the events of Jan. 6, police are attuned in preparing for events that may have larger impacts, he said. Theres an element out there thats larger than just the indictment and we learned that on Jan. 6. The element is worrisome and law enforcement is aware of it.
Evidence was mounting Friday to support the theory that the destruction of the Kakhovka dam  the cause of one of the biggest humanitarian and ecological crises since the start of Russia's 15-month invasion of Ukraine  was caused by explosive devices.

Seismic signals captured by geologists and testimony on social media suggest a huge ground-shaking noise was heard in the early hours of Tuesday, while structural engineering experts said it was highly unlikely that such an enormous structure could have spontaneously collapsed through negligence.

The dam has been under Russian control for months, but Moscow has rejected Kyivs accusation that it intentionally destroyed the dam and hydroelectric power plant and has instead accused Ukrainian artillery of causing the damage.

Researchers at the Norwegian seismological monitoring service NORSAR said in a statement Thursday that they detected multiple seismic events at the dam in the early hours of Tuesday, first at 2:35 a.m. local time (7:35 p.m. ET Monday) and then a much larger one at 2:54 a.m.

NORSAR said the data indicates the second event was an explosion equivalent to between 1 and 2 on the seismic chart for measuring earthquakes.

Social media groups apparently used by residents in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, where the dam is based, began to mention loud bangs slightly earlier than this.

Damn... such [loud] explosions... one person said in a Telegram group used by locals at 2:20 a.m. local time Tuesday (7:20 p.m. ET Monday). And I hear it continuing, someone replied 11 minutes later.

The dam had sustained damage at several points in the war  the Kherson region has been a focal point of a bitter struggle for territory in Ukraine's south. Ukraine retook the city of Kherson in November in jubilant scenes, but the left of the eastern bank of the Dnieper river, including the dam, has remained in Russian hands.

Ukraine and Russia accused each other of shelling in the flood-hit Kherson region on June 8, 2023 even as rescuers raced to save people stranded after the destruction of a Russian-held dam unleashed a torrent of water. (Genya Savilov / AFP - Getty Images)

Andrew Barr, an expert in effects of blast damage on structures at the University of Sheffield in northern England, said that while the true cause of the dam's destruction was uncertain, an explosion was the likeliest cause.

Its conceivable that prior damage to the dam combined with record high water levels could precipitate a failure, but my assessment continues to be that a failure initiated by a large explosion is much more likely, he said via email.

Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a British munitions expert and former army officer, also told British broadcaster Sky News that it was implausible for Ukraine to have destroyed the dam using artillery. (Sky News is owned by Comcast, the parent company of NBC News.)

If it is true that the Ukrainians fired a HIMAR [rocket artillery] in November and took out one gate, they would have needed to fire 20-30 HIMARs to cause the damage we see here. But nobody is reporting that, there is no evidence to suggest that happened, de Bretton-Gordon said.

In order to create this much devastation, it must have been a very sophisticated bunch of explosives put in the right places. It was enough, and calculated enough, to destroy the whole dam, he added.

Meanwhile, Ukraines domestic security service said Friday it had intercepted a telephone call proving a Russian sabotage group blew up the dam and hydroelectric station.

The Security Service of Ukraine posted 1 1/2-minute audio clip of the alleged conversation on its Telegram channel. It featured two men who appeared to be discussing the fallout from the disaster in Russian.

One says of the dam: That was our sabotage group. They wanted, kind of to scare [blackmail] by the dam, but it went unplanned, more than they planned.

NBC News could not independently verify the recording, and Russia did not comment on its content.

So far, 2,500 people, including 140 children, have been evacuated from flooded areas in Kherson, local Ukrainian officials said Friday afternoon. The threat of landmines, washed away from their marked positions, could pose a threat to communities for years to come, experts have warned.

Ukraine has begun criminal proceedings under the charge of ecocide against the perpetrators of the dam collapse.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
By Ivana Sekularac and Aleksandar Vasovic

BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbia's president urged Kosovo on Friday not to organise new elections for mayors in its north until more autonomy had been granted to ethnic Serbs who form a local majority and boycotted a previous vote.

"All Serbs in the north think of Serbia as their country, not Kosovo. That's the reality," Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said in an interview with Reuters in Belgrade. "Someone needs to get a grip and organise a (new) election there."

Violence flared in Kosovo's north last week after ethnic Albanian mayors were installed in office in several Serb-majority municipalities after April local elections that drew a mere 3.5% turnout.

In response to the unrest, in which Serb protesters clashed with NATO peacekeepers, leaving dozens injured on both sides, Serbia placed its armed forces on highest combat alert and NATO sent reinforcements to its mission in Kosovo.

The European Union and United States, Kosovo's strongest supporters, have urged Pristina to organise new elections in the Serb-majority area to defuse tensions, and Serbia to drop its combat alert and move troops away from the boundary with Kosovo.

But Vucic said the authorities in Kosovo - a former Serbian province that declared independence in 2008 after a 1990s uprising by majority ethnic Albanians - would need to make some concessions to ensure Serb participation in a new vote.

"We still don't have an association of Serb municipalities, there is still no withdrawal of (Kosovo Albanian) special police forces and mayors there," he said.

A decade-old, European Union-brokered deal provided for Serbs in the north to establish an association of self-governing municipalities in exchange for recognising Kosovo institutions, but the accord has never been implemented.

Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti has said that if given greater autonomy under an association of municipalities, the Serb majority area could organise a referendum to rejoin Serbia.

Vucic said: "Serbs (in the north) are always ready to talk, but you have to offer them something."

Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani told Reuters earlier this month that the country could hold fresh elections in the municipalities in question if 20% of voters signed a petition asking for them. She also accused Serbia of interference.

In response, Vucic said "it is terrifying what those people are talking about" and he accused Kurti of being unwilling to compromise. "I am sure (Kurti) will not invest a minute of his time nor a drop of his sweat to find a compromise solution."

He said Serbia was considering whether it to lower its combat readiness. "We will keep our troops on high alert, not the highest combat alert, because that costs a lot."

Vucic also told Reuters in the interview that Belgrade was in talks to purchase Rafale fighter jets from France and further bolster its military with Western weapons.

He said Serbia remains on the path to join the EU and had managed to balance its foreign policies to allow continued friendly relations with historical ally Russia and with China.

(Reporting by Ivana Sekularac and Aleksandar Vasovic; editing by Mark Heinrich)
LAFAYETTE, Ind.  Deputies from the Tippecanoe County Sheriffs Office responded to a report of shots fired in the 2600 block of Priest Drive, in the Benjamin Crossing subdivision, at 7:42 a.m. Friday.

When deputies arrived on the scene, they noticed that one housing unit had been hit by gunfire while a second unit was struck by a stray bullet, according to the sheriff's department.

Deputies determined that no one in either unit had sustained any injuries from the shooting.

When detectives investigated the scene, they also determined that the incident appeared to be isolated and not a random act, according to deputies.

The investigation of the shooting is still ongoing, according to deputies.

Anyone with information regarding the shooting is encouraged to contact the Sheriffs Office Detective Division at 765-423-9321 or leave the information on the WeTip line at 800-782-7463.

Noe Padilla is a reporter for the Journal & Courier. Email him at Npadilla@jconline.com and follow him on Twitter at 1NoePadilla.

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Sheriff's Office investigates shooting in Benjamin Crossing area
Singal 34 Foundation Inc., a nonprofit organization by police officers for police officers will be hosting a Benefit Dinner for Officer Smith on June 10.

The event will be held from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at the American Legion Post 283 at 9459 Fort Caroline Rd.

A donation of $25 will include an open bar, dinner, and live music by Double Down.

Officer Taylor Smith serves both the Jacksonville Sheriffs Office and the Marine Crops.

A silent auction and raffle will also be held at the event. To register, visit their Facebook page HERE.

Signal 34 Foundation is a nonprofit foundation to assist Law Enforcement Officers in North East Florida. They are not affiliated with any Sheriffs Office or Police Department.

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you can donate directly to their Venmo Account @signal34foundation or at any City and Police Credit Union. All donations will be handed over to Officer Smith and his family.

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In the wake of a "theft" of an undisclosed amount of money from an Eaton County nonprofit a staffer says a forensic accountant has been assigned.

CHARLOTTE  An official from an Eaton County nonprofit that provides domestic violence and homeless outreach services says the nonprofit will be transparent as forensic accountants investigate a "theft" of funds.

Tracie Socey, the outreach coordinator for the Charlotte-based SIREN/Eaton Shelter, said in an emailed statement Thursday that the nonprofit has "filed a claim with our insurance carrier and a forensic accountant has been assigned. We expect the investigation to take several months or longer, as a thorough and meticulous review of financial records is underway."

Socey first announced a theft of money from the nonprofit on June 3, initiating an online fundraiser seeking $300,000.

"We acknowledge that we are responsible for oversight of the funds that we are entrusted with, which is why the decision was made to go public with this information. Donors deserve to know the truth about the funds they contribute to any organization," the statement said.

When asked for an approximate amount of the missing funds Socey said in an email "...We do not have that information at this time, as the investigation is still ongoing. We will share that information once it is made available."

Staff first realized the money was missing in May and notified Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel's office, Socey said earlier this week.

"We cannot comment on any ongoing investigations," Kim Bush, a spokesperson for Nessel's office, said in a text message Wednesday without directly confirming an investigation is underway.

Socey said attorney general staff had been at the nonprofit's office investigating the case.

"Until the investigation is complete, we are unable to recover any funds, including from the insurance company, which is why we need support now," Socey said in her emailed statement Thursday.

SIREN, which in 2022 sheltered nearly 200 families, is required to undergo independent financial audits annually, Socey said Thursday.

The nonprofit "contracts with an independent CPA firm to complete its daily bookkeeping and monthly financial reports as an added level of financial accountability," she said. "Neither alerted the Board to any financial irregularities."

READ MORE:

Attorney General's Office won't confirm investigation into Lansing-area nonprofit 'theft'

Eaton County's SIREN shelter launches online fundraiser after 'theft' of money

Parents of slain students walk the stage in their honor at Eastern High School's graduation

The online fundraiser's goal of $300,000 is enough to ensure the nonprofit can avoid selling its domestic violence emergency shelter site and operate for the next several months, Socey said earlier this week. It had garnered just shy of $1,600 by Friday afternoon.

SIREN has been without an executive director for three weeks, Socey said. Former director Teri Looney left the position in May, she said. Looney now works as the executive director at Loaves and Fishes Ministries in Lansing. A message was left for her there Wednesday afternoon.

The agency had about $1.4 million in revenue in 2020, according to an online tax document.

"SIREN is the victim," Socey said in Thursday's statement. "Unfortunately, it is a natural reaction to blame the victim. We see this all too often, especially with the services that we offer in our community. We urge our supporters to refocus their lens."

Contact Reporter Rachel Greco at rgreco@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @GrecoatLSJ .

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: SIREN staffer says forensic accountant assigned in wake of 'theft' from nonprofit
People take photos of the sun as smoke from the wildfires in Canada cause hazy conditions in New York City on June 7, 2023 (ANGELA WEISS)

New York's Governors Ball kicked off Friday under clearer skies after days of wildfire-induced noxious smog blanketed the city and threatened to derail the annual music festival.

As of Wednesday afternoon air quality in New York was clocking in as the worst in the world, according to an international monitor, as levels of pollution hung at hazardous levels well into the night.

Even as the apocalyptic skies gave residents the illusion of living in a sepia filter, festival organizers took a wait-and-see approach in consultation with local officials.

"We are a go," they announced by Thursday evening, as the smoke began to dissipate due to the shifting direction of the winds over the Canadian province of Quebec, where the fires are raging.

It was welcome news for thousands of revelers planning to attend the festival in New York's Queens borough, among them Simrya Anand who traveled from Boston to see artists including headliners Lizzo, Odesza and Kendrick Lamar.

"I was really worried about the weather," the 20-year-old told AFP. "I was thinking about, like, wearing a mask here but thankfully it looks like things have cleared up."

"But I wasn't considering not coming," she added with a smile.

Hamza Hussein, 25, just wrapped a graduate degree at New York University and was looking forward to attending his first Gov Ball ever, in particular the set of famed rapper Pusha T.

He and his friend were concerned about the potentially "poisonous" air -- but "we predicted it was going to go on because it's really hard to rebook all these artists."

- Breathing easy -

By Friday evening as Diplo took the stage, the air quality level had dropped to a refreshing 38 on the 500-point scale -- earlier in the week it had jumped past a dangerous 400 -- and festival-goers along with artists were able to breathe easy once more.

It was a relief for New Yorkers Andy and Bonnie Goolcharan, both in their early 50s, who said they had been ready to skip.

"We weren't going to come," Andy Goolcharan told AFP. "We thought it would be canceled... but it worked out."

And unlike many of their fellow attendees in their 20s, the couple said if both the smog and the festival had persisted, they would have stayed home.

More than 111 million people in the United States had been under air quality alerts as of Thursday due to the fires. The wildfire smoke from Canada was also detected several thousand miles away in Norway.

The mayors of New York, Montreal, Toronto, Washington and Philadelphia issued a joint statement Friday saying "this alarming episode serves as a stark reminder of the harmful impacts that the climate crisis is having on cities around the world.

The three-day Governors Ball music festival is set to continue through Sunday, and along with the headliners will feature Lil Nas X, Haim, Lil Uzi Vert, Rina Sawayama, Omar Apollo and Ice Spice.

mdo/mlm
James Clear and Tamien Dystart at the Sioux Falls Leadership Summit in 2022.

Ten Rising in Excellence nominees were announced for the 2023 Sioux Falls Leadership Summit, which will take place June 27.

The Rising in Excellence award recognizes members of Sales and Marketing Executives, Inc. (SME) in their contribution to the South Dakota business community.

More: South Dakota brought in $4.7 billion from tourists in 2022. Here's where it was spent.

The 2023 nominees are:

Andrea Carstensen, Minnwest Bank

Olivia Essig, Sioux Empire United Way

Lexie Feterl, Boys & Girls Clubs of the Sioux Empire

Dana Fisher, Fisher & Co Real Estate

Melissa Heckel, Branch Creative Co.

Jamie Hegge, Lawrence & Schiller

Katie Herrmann, Profile Plan

Nichelle Lund, Holiday Inn City Centre

Janean Michalov, Furniture Mission

Ronnie Stovall, Vern Eide Motorcars

Tom Van Wyhe, former owner of JSI Trane, will also receive the South Dakota Sales and Marketing Executive of the Year award at the summit.

Jon Acuff is the keynote speaker for the 2023 Leadership Summit in Sioux Falls.

The Sioux Falls Leadership Summit will feature keynote speaker Jon Acuff as part of the day's events. Acuff is the bestselling author of eight books, the most recent being "Soundtracks, The Surprising Solution to Overthinking." A leadership discussion will follow his one-hour keynote.

South Dakota native Holly Hoffman will also speak during the Summit. In addition to being a motivational speaker and author, Hoffman was the last remaining member of the Espada Tribe and the last woman standing on Season 21 of the reality show "Survivor Nicaragua."

Holly Hoffman will speak at the 2023 Leadership Summit in Sioux Falls.

The event starts at 1 p.m. at the Sioux Falls Convention Center with doors opening at noon.

SME members can purchase tickets for $55. Individual tickets for the public are $99, and a reserved table for 10 people is $1,200. Tickets can be purchased online.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: SME announces 2023 Rising in Excellence nominees for Leadership Summit
Smoke and haze stunned the East Coast this week. Get used to it, experts warn.

When New York City's mayor stepped outside this week, he was shaken and confused by what he saw: "What the hell is this?"

"This" was a thick, glowing haze of smoke from fires hundreds of miles away in Canada. It made the air unhealthy to breathe, snarled air traffic and cast a surreal shadow over millions of residents.

Fire has always been a natural part of the ecosystem of Canadas forests and smoke from Canadian fires has at times been strong enough to drift down into the United States. But fire experts say whats happening this year is historic and unprecedented.

"There's no analog to what we're seeing now," said Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, Canada. "I've been watching fires since the 1970s and it's never been like this."

About 36% of Canada is covered by forest and over the last decade close to 6,000 forest fires burn a year, consuming about 6.6 million acres, said Flannigan.

This year almost 10 million acres have already burned and it's only early June.

Canada's fires are also growing. Those 6.6 million acres that burn on average each year are more than double what Canadians saw in the early 1970s, he said.

If you think its crazy now, just wait. This will seem pale compared to whats coming, Flannigan said.

It's not even right to use the phrase "the new normal," he said. "Because that sounds like it's a plateau. But we're on a trajectory for more and more fires  and smoke."

Smoky haze from wildfires in Canada diminishes the visibility of the Empire State Building on Wednesday in New York City. New York topped the list of most polluted major cities in the world on Tuesday night, as smoke from the fires continues to blanket the East Coast.

A fairly common wind pattern blew the smoke to US

The weather pattern that's bringing the Canadian smoke into the eastern U.S. isn't really all that unusual or out of the ordinary, meteorologists say. What's different is the sheer volume of smoke being produced due to the historic number of fires.

A large upper-level area of low pressure that's centered off the coast of Maine and Nova Scotia is causing winds to blow from the north and northwest, transporting the smoke into the region, meteorologist Zack Taylor of the National Weather Service told USA TODAY Thursday. The low has been very persistent and stubborn to move over the past several days, he said.

"This can happen at any time of year," he said, adding that these upper-level lows tend to be slow to break down and can get stuck there until another system comes along.

That's bad news for this current bout of smoke. "Not a whole lot is going to change" over the next couple of days, he said, adding that the northerly winds will continue to bring smoke into the East. However, by early next week, there will be a little change in the weather pattern, with westerly winds bringing some relief from the worst of the smoke.

But as long as the Canadian fires remain active and large, "the smoke will be there," Taylor said, and any time there's a northerly wind, there will be a chance of smoke across the eastern U.S.

Not every year is going to be a bad year for smoke, but it's going to be the overall reality going forward. "Were going to have to learn to live with fire," said Flannigan. "Your life is going to be impacted from smoke for weeks on end.

Is this the first time smoke from Canada has so broadly affected large swathes of US?

Both 2013 and 2001 saw smoke from Canadian fires drifting southward into the United States. What is different this year is the amount of smoke.

Why are forest fires increasing in Canada?

Three things are required for forest fires to happen:

 Fuel: Dry grass, brush and trees that can burn.

 Ignition: Something to light the fire. In Canada, usually, 50% of fires are started by lightning, 50% by humans. In the United States, its 90% by humans.

 Weather: Hot, windy weather conditions are the worst.

As climate change warms the planet and makes weather patterns increasingly unstable, hotter, drier periods are increasing in Canadas forests, making it more likely fires will start and grow into catastrophic blazes.

Canadas summers are becoming hotter and it is also experiencing more heat pulse events where there are extreme spikes in temperature.

In 2021, the town of Lytton on Canadas west coast recorded the highest temperature ever observed in the country: 121.3 degrees. On July 2, 2021, the town was destroyed by a wildfire.

Heat makes forests more tinder dry and more fire-prone.

As the temperature warms, the atmospheres ability to suck moisture out of fuels increases almost exponentially, said Flannigan.

Warmer weather also leads to more lightning strikes, which causes more fires.

Could Canada have done anything to prevent the fires?

Not really, say experts. Canada is covered in a massive boreal forest, a mix of deciduous trees and conifers, 90% of which are owned by federal and provincial governments.

"The boreal forest is largely unmanaged except where clear-cuts have occurred," said Robert Scheller, a professor of forestry at North Carolina State University. "Due to their crown shape and fuels profile, boreal forests can readily burn if the weather conditions are conducive. In addition, these areas are often very remote, limiting widespread fire suppression."

Canada has actually been relatively proactive about forest health, said Hugh Safford, a fire and vegetation ecologist at the University of California, Davis.

"Since the early 2000s the Boreal Forest Conservation Framework and the subsequent 2010 Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement have driven more ecologically sensitive logging practices and encouraged the use of fire as a management tool," he said.

While Canada's forests aren't heavily managed, they are logged. The country has a robust and sustainable timber industry that produces lumber and paper worth more than $475 billion a year. Canadas wood product exports are the second largest in the world after Brazil.

What can be done to stop the fires?

The only real answer is to lower the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which will eventually reduce temperatures overall.

Going forward, life will be a cascading series of such events, said Scheller. The consequences of climate change are becoming clear "everywhere  and sooner than people expect."

It's a bleak outlook for those who study  and love  forests.

"We are going to burn up a lot of the worlds forests over the next half-century," said Safford. "Wildfire smoke is even more unhealthy than vehicle emissions and it kills, directly and indirectly, thousands to millions of people every year. I dont see any sign of humans changing their practices at a rate that is going to avoid these outcomes."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Will smoke, haze from Canada wildfires affect US air again? Yes.
When Viktor Shevchenko was called forward to receive his medal from President Volodymyr Zelensky at a special ceremony in Kyiv earlier this year, his appearance seemed to come as a surprise to the Ukrainian leader.

It was not the neck gaiter Shevchenko was wearing, pulled up to cover his nose and mouth, though that certainly made him stand out from the rest of the two dozen men present. Instead, it was his darker skin tone, dark brown eyes and jet-black hair.

Are you really Viktor Shevchenko, or are you collecting a medal on behalf of someone else? Zelensky asked.

Shevchenko muttered his answer through the face scarf, but his voice was muffled, and the president failed to catch his reply.

Shevchenko tried again a bit louder.

This time, Zelensky understood.

He was the right soldier, but Viktor Shevchenko was not his real name.

Shevchenko laughed as he recalled the episode over lunch at a Crimean Tatar restaurant in Kyiv, and said the president was apologetic as soon as the penny dropped.

He could see I was Tatar, that I wasnt Slavic. I told him my parents are still in Crimea and he immediately understood, he told us over a meal of traditional lamb chebureki, or fried turnovers seasoned with pepper, and dumplings.

He chose the name Shevchenko carefully, he said, to sound as un-Tatar as possible.

His parents, still living in the Russian-occupied peninsula, could expect to receive a knock on the door in the middle of the night if he had given his real name. Even a different, Tatar-sounding, name could have caused trouble if another family had been harassed through mistaken identity.

Traditional dishes are served for lunch at a Crimean Tatar restaurant in Kyiv. - Andrew Carey/CNN

The history of the Crimean Tatars has taught them to tread carefully. Periods of persecution and exodus, mainly at Russian hands, have characterized the Muslim ethnic minoritys story from at least as far back as 1783, when Russian Empress Catherine the Great annexed Crimea after wresting it from the Ottoman empire. Many Tatars fled.

On May 18, 1944, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered their communitys mass expulsion following the Red Armys recapture of Crimea from Hitlers Wehrmacht. The Crimean Tatars were accused of collaborating with the Nazis and were taken off in cattle trucks to the Ural Mountains and to Uzbekistan, thousands of kilometers away.

The lucky ones were tipped off by friends, and had a few hours to grab their Qurans and a few other belongings; the rest were caught by surprise and bundled out of their homes in the middle of the night.

In all, historians and official Ukrainian figures put the number deported at more than 200,000, of whom roughly 40% are believed to have died  either during the forced journey east or within the first year of exile  mostly through disease, hunger or thirst.

It was only during the final years of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and then into the 1990s as Ukraine achieved independence that Crimean Tatars, Shevchenkos parents among them, were allowed to return. Within two decades, official census figures show, their number had reached almost a quarter of a million  about 10% of the territorys population.

Viktor Shevchenko, in combat uniform, shows patches on his arm bearing the flags of Ukraine and the Crimean Tatars. - Andrew Carey/CNN

In light of this history of persecution, the sight of Vladimir Putins little green men arriving in Crimea in the February and March of 2014 meant Shevchenko  by then a young man in his 20s  was in no doubt over what to expect.

Ive read a lot of history books, so I knew what was happening. And I knew nothing good would come of it.

The Tatars, he recalled, along with others on the peninsula opposed to Russias invasion, formed territorial defense groups, but without access to arms they were powerless. Russia swiftly announced the formal annexation of Crimea, an act declared illegal in a vote by the United Nations General Assembly.

Shevchenko left and went to Kyiv, where he had friends.

It is not known exactly how many like him fled Crimea in the aftermath of Russias takeover, though census figures suggest it could be upwards of 10,000 since 2014. A Human Rights Watch report in 2017 accused Russian authorities there of having intensified persecution of Crimean Tatars with the apparent goal of completely silencing dissent, while the European Union in February 2022 said the Crimean Tatars continued to be unacceptably persecuted, pressured and have their rights gravely violated.

Like many, Shevchenko found work in IT. Occasionally, he would make trips back home, most recently during the Covid pandemic, when both of his parents were sick.

And then came February 24, 2022, a date quickly seared into the Ukrainian consciousness  the day when Russias full-scale invasion of the country began.

Shevchenko, along with three Tatar friends also in Kyiv, signed up to fight the very next day.

I had fled Russia once, he said. I didnt want to flee a second time.

If Ukraine fell, he reasoned, then fleeing to Poland or the Baltic countries wouldnt provide much safety if Russia turned its attention there next. Fleeing again sounded absurd to me.

Viktor Shevchenko and other soldiers remember fallen comrades. - Office of the President of Ukraine

After initially seeing military service near Kyiv, Shevchenko and his friends were soon sent out east, where the fiercest fighting was taking place. One of the friends with whom he had enlisted was killed near Bilohorivka while serving as a combat medic. Shrapnel ripped off both his legs and one of his arms, Shevchenko explained, almost matter of fact.

Life is very short, he said when asked what the last year had taught him.

It is ridiculous wasting time on small things that dont matter. I was raised to be shy and timid towards other people. I see now how stupid it is to hold back on making new friends and acquaintances.

Crimean Tatar history books -- Viktor Shevchenko's reading during frontline deployments. - Andrew Carey/CNN

When we met, Shevchenko was waiting to be rotated back to the front line, quite possibly as part of Ukraines anticipated counteroffensive. As on other deployments, he would be sure to take with him his history books and his Quran.

He does not regard himself as a particularly observant Muslim, but it is nonetheless a key part of his identity as a Crimean Tatar, something he likes to discuss on his Twitter page. Under the name  (Combatant), he solicits questions from his 15,000 followers on Tatar traditions and their history and relations with neighbors, and answers them with audio recordings. The idea was borne in response to the tedium of trench life.

You see the same people day in, day out, you can go a bit crazy, he explained.

There is a lot of ignorance about Crimean Tatars, he said, much of it stemming from Russian- and Soviet-era propaganda, but what is encouraging to him is that people are keen to find out more.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky joins soldiers for an Iftar on April 7, 2023. - Office of the President of Ukraine

Zelensky, himself part of a minority as a Jewish Ukrainian, has also shown a willingness to reach out to the Tatars. The medal ceremony at which Victor received his award for military service to Ukraine was part of an Iftar  the meal with which Muslims break their daily fast during Ramadan.

The event was hosted by the president, who said it would be part of a new annual tradition which would see the presidents office hosting such a gathering each year.

Such an initiative would be a further signal of changing relationships, because even though most Tatars are unequivocal about how they regard Russia, their attitude towards Ukraine and Ukrainian identity has also been marked by a certain ambivalence.

According to Shevchenko, Crimean Tatars are grateful Ukraine allowed them to return in the 1990s. He said the two peoples have a tradition of living alongside one another and fighting alongside one another. But at the same time, Kyivs Berkut  the thuggish riot police disbanded in the wake of the 2013-2014 Euromaidan revolution  were frequently violent towards the Crimean Tatars, especially during rallies held to mark the annual day of mourning on May 18.

Ukraines politicians, too, were too often guilty of making empty pledges, Shevchenko said, promising greater freedoms for Crimean Tatars that never materialized. Indeed, it was only in 2015, a year after Ukraine lost control of Crimea to Moscow, that Kyiv granted the Tatars the status of indigenous people.

God has a very poor sense of humor towards the Crimean Tatars, he observed wryly, just as delicious pakhlava (pastries layered with nuts and sweetened with honey) and strong coffee arrived at our table, the last of the meals offerings.

Regaining Crimea through military means, or just removing it from Russian control in any peace negotiations, will not be easy, but Shevchenko is certain he will return some day to a peninsula that is free and Ukrainian. His soldiers sense of cause is unshakeable.

The best job in the world is the one I have now, he said. I have never felt so needed, and the sense I am in the right place, as I do now.

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South Carolina officer rescues woman in car mouthing 'help me'

A South Carolina police officer rescued a woman who repeatedly mouthed "help me" during a traffic stop as her alleged kidnapper sat beside her.

Officer Kayla Wallace stopped a white Jeep on 28 May after it went through a red light, and approached the woman behind the wheel.

The driver told the officer the man in the passenger seat had abducted her at gunpoint after a shooting.

The suspect, Collins Bates, 29, was arrested.

Ms Wallace, an officer with the North Myrtle Beach Police Department, did not know anything about the shooting before the traffic stop, Officer Pat Wilkinson told the BBC's US media partner CBS News.

There were only 30 minutes left on her shift when Ms Wallace encountered the vehicle.

After she pulled the car over, police said the driver opened the door and appeared distressed.

"I gave loud orders for her to close the door," Ms Wallace wrote in a police report. "The passenger also opened his door and stated that the windows don't roll down.

"The driver then told me that she felt like she was going to throw up."

The department posted on Facebook: "While the male passenger wasn't looking at the driver, the female silently mouthed 'Help Me' repeatedly."

Ms Wallace placed Mr Bates in the back of her patrol car.

She went back to speak with the driver, who told her that the man had just shot someone before forcing her to drive him away at gunpoint.

During the traffic stop, a "be on the lookout" alert was dispatched over Ms Wallace's radio. It said a white Jeep had been involved in a shooting in the county.

The dispatch also described a suspect matching Mr Bates' description.

County law enforcement were called to the scene and he was arrested.

He faces charges of attempted murder, kidnapping and possession of a weapon during a violent crime in connection with a shooting.

Police said a pistol was found under his seat in the car.

"Our department and our community is lucky to have Officer Wallace," the department said.
WASHINGTON  The U.S. Space Force now expects Raytheon to deliver the next phase of its GPS ground system overhaul at the end of this year  nine months later than the programs previous schedule estimate.

Increments 2 and 3 of the Next-Generation Operational Control System, dubbed OCX, were supposed to be delivered in January, but technical discoveries during testing delayed the effort and caused the program to re-evaluate its schedule.

According to a June 8 Government Accountability Office report, prime contractor Raytheons delivery delay will push the initial capability date to next spring. A spokeswoman for Space Systems Command, the Space Forces acquisition arm, told C4ISRNET in a June 8 email the service is awaiting approval of the new schedule.

Raytheon has incurred $123 million in additional costs as a result of the delays, SSC said, citing a Materiel Inspection and Receiving Report the company filed with the Defense Department.

The program is at risk of further delays due to funding challenges, GAO said. In fiscal 2023 Congress cut $75 million from OCX that was meant to be used to pay for more contractor support for Blocks 1 and 2. The services fiscal 2024 budget includes $200 million for the effort.

The Space Forces constellation of GPS satellites provides navigation support to military and civilian users. It features older spacecraft as well as newer ones, and the most recent version, GPS III, is more accurate and resistant to adversary jamming attempts.

OCX was designed to operate the entire GPS fleet  old and new. The first capability increment was delivered in 2017, and brought some hardware, software and cybersecurity improvements. The system, dubbed Block 0, can support GPS III launches, but doesnt have the ability to operate the in-orbit satellites. Blocks 2 and 3 will bring that ability along with better performance and protections against cyber threats.

Schedule uncertainty

Schedule uncertainty has been a persistent challenge for OCX, which was supposed to be fielded in 2016.

The programs 2012 cost estimate of $3.7 billion has been revised several times, growing to $4.3 billion in 2015 and $6.2 billion in 2018. The first cost increase triggered whats known as a Nunn-McCurdy unit cost breach, requiring the Defense Department to develop a new cost and schedule baseline in 2016.

Speaking earlier this year, Space Force acquisition executive Frank Calvelli called it one of the services long-standing troubled programs.

GAOs report sheds some light on its most recent challenges, caused largely by overlapping efforts to test various satellite capabilities and integrate software.

Because of the risk that not all requirements would be complete by delivery, the program modified the schedule to allow more time for software testing and addressing deficiencies, as well as developing technical manuals and training operators, the report states.

To mitigate that risk, the program is honing in on critical software deficiencies and plans to award Raytheon a contract modification to address continued deficiencies, according to GAO.

Beyond testing, SSC is concerned about the strain on GPS operators during the period between system delivery later this year and initial operations next spring.

During this time, the operators need to complete training and assist with transition activities, while controlling the GPS constellation using the existing system, GAO said. Space Force officials stated that they are training operators on the current system and are working with the program office to schedule events. But, they told us that they remain concerned about the ability of trained operators to support the OCX events as scheduled.
Two astronauts ventured outside the International Space Station Friday and installed the fifth of six roll-out solar array blankets -- iROSAs -- needed to offset age-related degradation and micrometeoroid damage to the lab's original solar wings.

Floating in the Quest airlock, veteran Stephen Bowen, making his ninth spacewalk, and crewmate Woody Hoburg, making his first, switched their spacesuits to battery power at 9:25 a.m. EDT, officially kicking off the 264th spacewalk devoted to ISS assembly and maintenance and the seventh so far this year.

Hoburg, center, holds onto a rolled-up 750-pound iROSA solar blanket while the space station's robot arm carried them both to the installation site at the base of a degraded original-equipment array. Crewmate Bowen, with red stripes around the legs of his spacesuit, is visible at top right. / Credit: NASA

NASA is in the process of upgrading the ISS's solar power system by adding six iROSAs to the lab's eight existing U.S. arrays. The first four roll-out blankets were installed during spacewalks in 2021 and 2022. Bowen and Hoburg installed the fifth during Friday's spacewalk and plan to deploy the sixth during another excursion next Thursday.

The two new iROSAs were delivered to the space station earlier this week in the unpressurized trunk section of a SpaceX cargo Dragon. The lab's robot arm pulled them out Wednesday and mounted them on the right side of the station's power truss just inboard the starboard wings.

The darker roll-out solar blanket unrolls as the space station was passing 260 miles above the Great Lakes. / Credit: NASA/CBS News

The astronauts had no problems removing the first 750-pound iROSA from its carrier pallet so Hoburg, anchored to the end of the robot arm, could carry it to the installation site. Bowen met him there and they attached it to an already-installed mounting fixture.

As the station sailed 260 miles above the Great Lakes, the 63-foot-long solar array slowly unwound like a window shade to its full length. Well ahead of schedule by that point, the spacewalkers carried out a variety of get-ahead tasks to save time next week when they float back outside to install the second new iROSA.

They returned to the airlock and began re-pressurization procedures at 3:28 p.m., bringing the 6-hour three-minute spacewalk to a close. With nine spacewalks totaling 60 hours and 22 minutes under his belt, Bowen now ranks fifth on the list of the world's most experienced spacewalkers.

"I want to say congratulations to the team on an exceptional EVA, you guys were fantastic today," radioed Canadian astronaut Jenni Sidey-Gibbons, the mission control CAPCOM, or communicator. "Congratulations to Woody on your first spacewalk and to Steve on your ninth. Finally, congratulations to all of Crew 6 on your 100th day on orbit. It's been a doozy."

The space station is equipped with four huge solar wings, two on each side of the lab's power truss. Each wing is made up of two 39-foot-wide blankets extending 112 feet in opposite directions. The first two-blanket wing was launched in December 2000 with additional sets delivered in 2006, 2007 and 2009.

The fully deployed iROSA array. / Credit: NASA

The arrays feed power into eight electrical circuits, two per wing. When the station is in daylight, the arrays charge batteries and deliver power to the lab's myriad systems. During night passes, the batteries feed stored power to the station.

Solar cells degrade over time and NASA is adding the iROSAs, at a cost of $103 million, to the existing power system to compensate for their reduced output. When fully extended at an angle from the base of an original solar panel, each one of the new 20-foot-wide roll-out arrays can generate more than 20 kilowatts of power.

Combined with the 95-kilowatt output of the original eight panels, the station's upgraded system will provide about 215,000 kilowatts of power. While the iROSAs cast shadows on the underlying original-equipment arrays, the combined output will exceed what the older wings generated when they were new.

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More than 150 years ago, a big celebration started with people filling the streets in the heart of downtown Spartanburg.

The celebration was held because Black families had received word that they were no longer enslaved because of the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln on Jan. 1, 1863.

And on Saturday, June 10, residents are going to honor the event by holding a Jubilee Parade in honor of Juneteenth. The parade will be held at 10 a.m. starting at the parking lot of Cornerstone Baptist Church, located at 700 S. Converse St., and will end at Barksdale Boulevard in Spartanburg. A picnic will follow the parade.

"We are going to have the parade in the area where they marched," said Brenda Lee Pryce, one of the event organizers. "We are trying to educate the community because many people don't know what happened in their communities."

This is the U.S. flag made by a Spartanburg woman who was celebrating Juneteenth on Sept. 22, 1865. The flag is owned and on display at the Spartanburg County Headquarters Library. The photo was taken on June 7, 2023.

Downtown Spartanburg Emancipation celebration filled streets more than 150 years ago

Information about Spartanburgs first celebration of Emancipation was uncovered by Andrew Myers, professor of American Studies at the University of South Carolina Upstate. He learned about the event while transcribing the handwritten diary and personal letters of Union Army Capt. Norris Crossman, commander of the first federal occupation forces. The letters and diary are at the S.C. Historical Society in Charleston.

Myers is writing a book about the end of the Civil War and the start of Reconstruction in the Upcountry.

The first Juneteenth Jubilee Parade started at what is now Morgan Square. Myers said the blue-coated soldiers marched through the streets behind a U.S. flag that had been pieced together by a local Freedwoman. It is said she cut red flannel from her petticoat to make the stripes. Myers said her husband, who led a group of Black Baptists, carried the banner as he walked beside Crossman at the head of the column. The parade took place on Sept. 22, 1865, and ended with a picnic.

Emancipation in South Carolina was done on a place-by-place basis, Myers said. The order was issued at Hilton Head during June, but no one reached Spartanburg to enforce it until August. That is why it took so long to have a parade.

The flag was given to Crossman. He handed it down to one of his daughters, who moved to California. It was then lost for almost 50 years. With the help of Crossmans great-grandson, Myers located it at the Whittier Museum and verified its identity.

Historic Black landmarks: Here's where to see historical Black landmarks in Spartanburg County

Opinion: Monier Abusaft: Juneteenth's lessons are important for the Spartanburg community

Flag from Spartanburg's first Emancipation celebration returns to the city

The flag was returned to Spartanburg in 2015 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the parade. It has undergone restoration and is on permanent display at the Spartanburg County Headquarters Public Library.

"This is such a window in time to put these pieces together," said Brad Steinecke, assistant director of Local History at Spartanburg County Public Libraries. "We first had the flag on loan from the museum, but when it arrived, (county librarian) Todd Stephens said, 'There is no way this flag is going back to California.' "

This is the U.S. flag made by a Spartanburg woman who was celebrating Juneteenth on Sept. 22, 1865. The story of the flag helped to put the pieces together of how Spartanburg first celebrated Juneteenth.

Steinecke said the library purchased the flag. He also was able to talk to Crossman's great-grandson who talked about the flag.

"He remembered his grandmother bringing this old flag to school and talking about it," Steinecke said. "He died a few years ago.

Pryce is honored to have the flag in Spartanburg and to learn about its history.

Hattie's House, Southside Scoop and Brown Girls Read along with other community members partnered together to commemorate this celebration with the community.

Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. The celebrations started when Union soldiers landed at Galveston, Texas with news on June 19, 1865, that the war had ended and the enslaved were now free.

The parade and picnic are among several local events to celebrate Juneteenth. Here are some other activities:

Spartanburg's Juneteenth events include revival, business expo, block party

Spartanburg Juneteenth starts its annual celebration at 4 p.m. Sunday, June 11, with The Official Juneteenth Revival, hosted at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, 502 S. Daniel Morgan Ave. Guest preacher will be Charles Goodman and musical guest Bishop Cortez Vaughn.

Also on Sunday, June 11 at 4 p.m., there will be a Black Business Expo at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church featuring various black businesses.

The Official Juneteenth Race Seminar will be held at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 14 at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church. This year the book "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together" by Heather McGhee will be discussed. Books will be given out and a buffet served.

The Official Juneteenth Black Excellence Community Gala honors black professional leaders in the business and nonprofit sectors. The gala will be held at 5 p.m. Saturday, June 17 at the Chapman Cultural Center, 200 E. St. John St. Spartanburg. Award winners will receive grants. The gala also will feature musical guest Avery Wilson.

The City of Spartanburg has a lineup of Juneteenth events, starting with Reclaiming Spartanburg's Black History Educational Panel at Wofford College. The event is from 6-8 p.m. Thursday, June 18 at the college at 429 N Church St. in the Olin Teaching Theater.

The next event from the City of Spartanburg is the Block Party from 6-10 p.m. on Friday, June 16 at the Love Where You Live Park on South Spring Street. The celebration includes music, food trucks, and a 360 photo booth.

On Saturday, June 17 from 4-10 p.m., the Celebration Festival will be held near the Love Where You Live Park. The celebration will include food, live performances, local vendors and a kid's zone.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Spartanburg's Juneteenth events celebrate emancipation
Special Counsel Avoided One Risk but Took on Another by Bringing Trump Case in Miami

Classified documents found at Donald Trumps Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, are at the heart of the case against him. (Josh Ritchie/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON  The decision to indict former President Donald Trump in Miami, rather than Washington, eliminated the risk of a potentially thorny fight over where the charges should have been filed but created a different risk entirely: that the case would end up before a Trump-friendly judge, Aileen Cannon.

Indeed, the unsealing of the indictment Friday showed that Cannon, who last fall issued a series of rulings unusually favorable to Trump in a lawsuit he brought at an earlier stage of the investigation, had been assigned the case.

For months, prosecutors had used a grand jury in the nations capital to question witnesses and hear evidence before abruptly bringing a still-sealed indictment in the Southern District of Florida that apparently includes at least one violation of the Espionage Act, obstruction and false statements.

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Because Trump was holding the documents at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, it was not clear that Washington would be the proper venue to charge crimes including unauthorized retention of national security documents and obstruction.

In federal law, venue refers to the proper place to hold a trial: Prosecutors cannot choose any federal courthouse in the country, but rather must charge a defendant in a district that has a sufficient connection with the events that gave rise to the matter.

There was some connection to Washington. The National Archives and Records Administration, the legal custodian of White House records after a president leaves office, is based there, as is the grand jury the Justice Department used to obtain a subpoena in 2022 requiring Trump to return all documents marked as classified in his possession.

And there would have been some advantages to prosecutors to bringing a case in Washington. For one thing, that is where the team working on the investigation lives and works. For another, it would have ensured that the case stayed away from Cannon.

Bringing the case in Washington would have given Trumps defense team an argument for having the charges thrown out for being in the improper venue. Dennis Fitzpatrick, a former prosecutor who handled national security cases in Virginia, noted that Trumps own actions under investigation appear to have happened in Florida rather than Washington.

Not only were the documents improperly stored at Mar-a-Lago, but investigators have also tried to determine whether Trump had sought to have the files at his estate moved or concealed after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for their return.

The known charges did not make clear where the false statements are suspected to have taken place, but if it was in Florida, that would also be the appropriate place to charge them, former prosecutors said.

When a prosecutor thinks he has a strong case, the objective becomes protecting the legal case by taking legal issues off the table, Fitzpatrick said. Venue in D.C. would have been a legal fight.

The decision to indict Trump in Florida also means prosecutors might lose the advantage of putting a case in front of a potentially more liberal Washington jury. (Trump received 4% of the vote in the District of Columbia in the presidential election of 2016, and 5% in 2020.)

Juries in Washington have swiftly convicted rioters egged on by Trump in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Although there were doubts about whether prosecutors would win complex cases charging members of the far-right groups the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys with seditious conspiracy, a law rarely tested, Washington juries have not acquitted a single Jan. 6 defendant.

In Florida, which is more conservative, the jury pool could be far different. To convict Trump of a crime, the 12-member panel must be unanimous.

Brandon Van Grack, a former federal prosecutor who also worked on complex cases involving national security and classified material, wrote in a legal publication last year that there were many reasons to bring the case to Washington, including the number of judges there who are more familiar with handling cases involving classified information and the Espionage Act, and a jury pool in Washington that appears to be less deferential toward Trump.

But in an interview before the assignment to Cannon became public, Van Grack said Jack Smith, the special counsel, must have believed that there was real legal risk in bringing a case in Washington and that bringing the case in Florida would be more prudent.

There is a constitutional right to be charged in the location where the crime occurred, and Jack Smith took a cold, hard look at the facts and determined that venue was appropriate in Florida, Van Grack said.

c.2023 The New York Times Company
President Biden Jacquelyn Martin, Pool

President Biden faces his own special counsel investigation over mishandled secret documents.

Like Trump, Biden has faced his own drip, drip, drip of revelations in the case, and questions about his role.

But so far there's no evidence of aggravating factors like willful retention that may lead to charges.

One president charged, another under investigation for wrongly keeping secrets.

News broke Thursday night that former President Donald Trump has been indicted by a Miami grand jury in connection with a similar type of investigation  the alleged mishandling of government secrets  that another special counsel is probing President Joe Biden over.

The Biden investigation appears to be far from over. It began in November after Biden's attorneys located and alerted the government to files found in a private office he had used after his vice presidency. Biden is prepared to sit with the investigators but hasn't been asked so far, NBC News reported Thursday, suggesting the probe led by special counsel Robert Hur may still be many steps from completion.

Like Trump, Biden has faced his own drip, drip, drip of revelations in the case, and questions about his role. After the files were found at the office he'd used, another batch of documents were discovered in his garage in Delaware; Biden claimed they were in the locked garage where he stores a Corvette. Then another file was found at his Delaware home.

The FBI undertook searches of these spaces associated with the sitting president, an unprecedented investigative step only matched by the search warrant executed at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in August that resulted in the recovery of 103 documents with markings that, despite Trump's claims, show no signs of having been declassified.

Trump allegedly bragged about having a classified document about US options to strike Iran. Biden allegedly kept intelligence memos, but no evidence has similarly emerged that he discussed having them with others; Biden has said he was "surprised" by the discovery that he'd had classified records, and is cooperating with the investigation.

As such, the legal cases facing these political opponents appear quite different. Trump is reportedly charged with false statements, illegal retention of national defense secrets, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Aides to Biden, by comparison, took the proper steps of alerting the National Archives and Records Administration that classified files had been found and oversaw their return.

It's unusual for the Justice Department to prosecute someone for mishandling classified records without evidence of so-called aggravating factors, such as obstruction of justice or willful violation, Insider's Sonam Sheth has reported. And in the unlikely event the special counsel does seek charges, Biden as the current president would be shielded from a criminal prosecution until when he's left office.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Newly appointed St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore announced Thursday that he was pulling a request to vacate the murder conviction of Christopher Dunn, who has spent 33 years in prison for a crime he says he did not commit.

The citys top prosecutor says more time is needed to review the case. He noted the motion to vacate Dunns sentence was made days before his predecessor Kim Gardner resigned from the St. Louis Circuit Attorneys Office.

We will conduct a full review of Mr. Dunns case and proceed as the law and facts dictate, Gore, appointed by Gov. Mike Parson last month, said in a statement Thursday. As Circuit Attorney that is my responsibility.

Arrested at 18 years old, Dunn was convicted of first-degree murder and other crimes during a two-day trial. He stood accused of fatally shooting a 15-year-old boy named Ricco Rogers in St. Louis on May 18, 1990.

At the time, Dunn previously told The Star, he was three blocks away with his mother, uncle and siblings when they all heard gunfire and went back inside their home.

But Dunn was ultimately convicted on the word of two boys, ages 12 and 14. Both witnesses later recanted and admitted they lied at Dunns trial.

In the years since, Dunn, now 51, has become wrapped up in the appeals process as lawyers, activists and one Missouri judge have concluded he should not be in prison.

In 2020, two years after lawyers for Dunn presented evidence seeking to exonerate him, Judge William Hickle said a jury would likely not find him guilty. But the judge declined to free Dunn, concluding it is unclear in Missouri if innocence alone is enough to exonerate prisoners.

Hickles decision was based on the fact that Dunn is not on death row. Legal precedent in Missouri restricts freestanding innocence claims  ones made without constitutional violations  to prisoners who have been sentenced to die.

Since then, Missouri lawmakers have given county prosecutors new tools to help exonerate wrongly convicted prisoners by allowing them to file petitions when they believe an innocent person is in prison. The law, which took effect in 2021, helped free Kevin Strickland, wrongly convicted of a 1978 triple murder in Kansas City, and Lamar Johnson, exonerated of a. 1994 murder in St. Louis.

Meanwhile, in Dunns case, lawyers and activists have long urged the St. Louis Circuit Attorneys Office to do the same for Dunn. A motion filed by the office last month said Dunn was innocent of the crime and he should not remain in custody a day longer.

Dunn is represented by the Midwest Innocence Project, a legal defense organization focused on exonerating the wrongly convicted. The latest development in his case was disappointing news, said Tricia Rojo Bushnell, the groups executive director.

Were disappointed with this development, and the delay that it entails, Rojo Bushnell said. But we believe that any independent review of the facts of Mr. Dunns case prove his innocence and will show his innocence. And we are looking forward to working with Circuit Attorney Gores office on Mr. Dunns case in the future.
Travelers are advised to exercise increased caution.

Massimo Borchi/Atlantide Phototravel/Getty Images

The Department of State is warning travelers who are going to the Dominican Republic to exercise increased caution due to crime and safety concerns.

The popular Caribbean country was placed under a Level 2 warning out of a total of four, according to the State Department. The department regularly updates and reissues travel advisories for countries all around the globe.

Violent crime, including armed robbery, homicide and sexual assault is a concern throughout the Dominican Republic, the State Department wrote in its warning. The wide availability of weapons, the use and trade of illicit drugs, and a weak criminal justice system contribute to the high level of criminality on the broader scale.

However, the department did note there was a lower risk in popular resort areas due to the development of a professional tourist police corps, institution of a 911 system in many parts of the country, and a concentration of resources in resort areas. These areas tend to therefore be better policed than urban areas like Santo Domingo.

Travelers who do go to the Dominican Republic should be aware of their surroundings, never physically resist any robbery attempt, and avoid displaying signs of wealth (like wearing expensive watches or jewelry).

Travelers can also enroll in the State Departments Smart Traveler Enrollment Program to receive alerts and make it easier to locate you in an emergency.

The State Department issues travel advisories and travel alerts to help you assess for yourself the risks of international travel and what steps to take to ensure your safety when you decide to go abroad. These advisories can be issued for an entire country or a specific area of the country and can vary by region based on the situation.

Recently, the State Department issued advisories for several popular vacation destinations, including certain areas of Mexico, Colombia, and Jamaica.

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Read the original article on Travel & Leisure.
The Office of the State Attorney decided they would not prosecute the Northwest Escambia Little League treasurer accused of stealing $17,000 from the organization.

Court records indicate the state attorney announced "no prosecution" of 48-year-old Paula Star Pugh's fraud and grand theft charges citing "jurisdiction reasons."

Escambia County Sheriff's spokesperson Morgan Lewis told the News Journal that due to jurisdictional issues, the department transferred "all case information" to a law enforcement agency in Alabama.

Lewis could not tell the News Journal which agency is handling the case.

Previously: Northwest Escambia Little League treasurer allegedly stole $17K from organization

In case you missed it: Escambia motorcycle deputy hospitalized after being struck by SUV during escort service

What were Paula Pugh's charges?

The state attorney charged Pugh with one third-degree felony count of fraud under $20,000 and one third-degree felony count of grand theft between $10,000 and $20,000.

Each third-degree felony is punishable up to five years in state prison, according to Florida Statutes.

What is Paula Pugh accused of doing?

Escambia County Sheriff's deputies arrested Pugh for allegedly stealing nearly $17,000 from the organization over a 17-month period.

As the elected treasurer and bookkeeper, Pugh allegedly made unauthorized transactions to her personal account between July 26, 2021, and Dec. 9, 2022.

"During this time, Pugh wrote checks on NWE's account which she cashed for personal use, completed unauthorized transactions for personal use and completed numerous ATM withdrawals for personal use," her arrest report states. "These amount totaled $16,977.87. Pugh completed these transactions without permission and without consent from the NWE Board of Directors."

NWE reported the discrepancies in funds on Dec. 20, 2022, to the Escambia County Sheriff's Office. The arrest report states that deputies met with NWE President John Maughon to discuss the unauthorized transactions, and during the meeting he said board members attempted to meet with Pugh between October 2022 and December 2022 to discuss transactions without receipts or explanations.

In a list of 43 unauthorized transactions in the arrest report, 25 of those transactions were ATM withdrawals in Atmore, Alabama, five were checks made out to Pugh and four included purchases at Dicks Sporting Goods. Other charges included Papa Johns, gas stations and Florida Drug Course purchases.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Escambia Florida Little League treasurer Paula Pugh theft case dropped
State reaches settlement over pandemic rent relief: What tenants and landlords need to know

Demonstrators protest against evictions in Valley Village in 2020. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Tenants' rights advocates and the California Department of Housing and Community Development reached a settlement this week to address processing delays and denials in rent relief applications for eligible tenants, meaning more renters could soon get financial aid.

During the pandemic, California tasked the department with administering more than $5 billion in state and federal funds to assist vulnerable tenants with rent relief through Californias COVID-19 Emergency Rental Assistance Program. The agency closed the application portal at the end of March 2022.

A surge in denials beginning after the closure propelled advocates to sue, alleging that eligible renters were rejected and left without financial aid. By July, around 30% of applicants had been denied assistance from the program, even though 93% were likely eligible for debt relief, according to the National Equity Atlas, an organization that reports on racial and economic equity.

The way the program was set up was not responsive to the population it was meant to serve, said Faizah Malik, senior staff attorney at Public Counsel, a nonprofit law firm that helped represent the community advocacy organizations that sued the state.

Tenant advocates sued the housing department in June 2022 for distributing funds through an application process they characterized as muddled with barriers for low-income and vulnerable individuals unfamiliar with navigating government bureaucracy. Tenants found long waits, language and technological barriers, and vague explanations if they were denied assistance, according to lawyers involved in the settlement. The settlement requires the department to make several changes to its system for pending relief applications and to provide tenants with the information they need to appeal.

More than 100,000 households are waiting to hear whether they will receive rent relief, according to a data analysis by Public Counsel.

"Ultimately, the petitioners and [the Department of Housing and Community Development] chose to settle the litigation to move the program forward with the shared goal of assisting Californians, department officials said in a statement to The Times. We are committed to working with our partners to bring resolution and support to those remaining in the application pipeline.

The settlement comes as the city of Los Angeles' first rent repayment period ends on Aug. 1  the deadline for tenants to pay rental debt accumulated between March 2020 and September 2021.

According to the complaint, tenants often received rent relief denials that amounted to a few words, such as nonresponsive, inconsistent or unverifiable information. Without more detailed explanations, tenants werent sure why they were denied or how to appeal successfully, the advocates suing the state said.

Applicants who did not speak English received little assistance, while others were denied for a single missing document from the long list of papers required for verification, Malik said. Many tenants do not have formal leases, she added, which also caused denials.

Low-income older adults who are not used to dealing with online technology similarly found the application process insurmountably difficult, said Cynthia Strathmann, executive director of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, one of the organizations that sued the state. These individuals often didnt have emails or laptops, struggled to remember their passwords and didnt know how to log in to their portals.

The housing department's call center provided little, if any, help, Malik said: Tenants would call dozens of times, and nobody would answer. People who did answer did not always have authority to enter the portal.

Whats more, many tenants were evicted after they applied for funding but before they received it, said Madeline Howard, senior attorney at Western Center on Law & Poverty, one of the law groups that helped file the lawsuit. The state had no mechanism to track people who were evicted while awaiting assistance, Howard added.

Valeria De La Luz said she accumulated over $30,000 in rent debt during the pandemic. The Los Angeles resident, who speaks only Spanish, applied for rental assistance in November 2021. She was approved, she said, but the next day the decision switched to a denial due to insufficient evidence that she qualified. De La Luz submitted an appeal in March 2022, but has yet to hear from the housing department.

I dont feel safe at home, De La Luz said in an interview with The Times.

On top of mounting debt and debacles with her landlord, De La Luz said she lost her job due to the pandemic and has been diagnosed with several health issues. She says she hesitates to receive the surgery she needs because she has no safe place to recover.

I do have some peace and quiet. I feel a little bit of a relief, but I am not calling this a win because I still have not gotten the funds that I was promised, De La Luz said. I know that Im not the only one.

Landlords, especially those who manage small properties and are eligible for the relief, are also celebrating the settlement after losing several years of rental income during the pandemic. Debra Carlton, executive vice president of the California Apartment Assn., said she still expects some landlord applicants will receive denials.

It's been much harder on the smaller owners who can't balance it out with other tenants, she said.

The settlement

Tenants who applied for the rental aid before the end of March 2022 and were denied by June 7 of that year or who have pending applications should expect to receive an update about their applications in the coming months, according to a news release. For many tenants , the housing department is required to issue new, more detailed denial notices. Applicants who are denied assistance will have 30 days to appeal.

Additionally, the settlement requires the state agency to make the appeals process easier, fix language barriers, and conduct an audit of denials from March to May 2022 due to "non-responsiveness." The department is also required under the legal agreement to fund local, community-based programs to help tenants navigate the appeals process.

Howard said that plaintiff lawyers and their clients will meet with the housing department every two weeks for three months, and then monthly to ensure that there is open communication in case problems arise.

In a February court filing, the housing department said it had some $300 million in state and federal funds left to administer.

Despite the settlement, rent debt left over from the pandemic will remain a source of stress, eviction and homelessness, Malik said, as renters have still been accruing debt after the application portal closed in March 2022.

This settlement doesn't mean that this issue is gone, she said.

Tenants and landlords with pending applications can access Public Counsel's FAQ at carentrelief.org or call Housing Is Key's call center at (833) 343-2122. To check your portal and update your information, visit hornellp-ca.neighborlysoftware.com/CaliforniaCovid19RentRelief/Participant.

Times staff writer Hannah Wiley contributed to this report.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
State secures over $670M for drug recovery efforts from drug maker, pharmacy settlements

Ohio has secured nearly $680 million from settlements involving two drug makers and pharmacies who are accused of playing a part in the opioid epidemic.

Ohio Attorney Dave Yost and 21 other attorney generals secured a combined $17.3 billion settlement from drug makers Teva and Allergan and pharmacies CVS and Walgreens.

Ohio is expected to receive $679.6 million over 15 years, according to a media release.

Too many companies chose not to recognize and take action to prevent the burgeoning opioid crisis that now continues to plague our streets, Yost said. We, and they, have a moral obligation to help not hinder those that need assistance and this money will be used statewide for just that  recovery and relief.

>> Dayton to opt into opioid settlement targeting drug stores

Ohios settlement money will be disrupted as follows: 55 percent will go to OneOhio Recovery Foundations, 30 percent to local governments and 15 percent to the state.

The companies involved in the settlement will also be asked to take additional steps.

Tevas opioid business is asked to prevent all opioid marketing and ensure systems are in place to prevent drug misuse.

Allergan will stop selling opioids for the next 10 years.

Drugstores CVS and Walgreens will have to monitor, report and share data bout suspicious activities related to opioid prescriptions.

The settlement money is expected to flow to the states and local governments by the end of 2023.








NEW YORK  Flowers are blooming for Stephen McKinley Henderson. For those in the know, the former Buffalo University professor is one of the greatest actors of his generation, but his career has been largely unsung until now.

With a role-rich career spanning five decades on and off stage, Henderson has finally achieved leading man recognition with a 2023 Tony Award nomination for his performance in the revival of Stephen Adly Guirgis Pulitzer Prize-winning play Between Riverside and Crazy. His sole nomination until now was a supporting actor nod in 2010.

The honor comes in a season rich with long overdue rewards. Henderson received the Harold Prince lifetime achievement award from the Drama Desk organization earlier this week, and last month he accepted a lifetime achievement award during the 2023 Lucille Lortel Awards. Being recognized later in his career has special significance for the star.

You know, its really meaningful because youve been doing it a while, Henderson told The Daily News of the honors. Its for all the time, its not for the one time that everybody thought you were a hit, when everybody said, Youre OK. Its all the times you tried to figure out what its about, where you were, and why you are doing this. Its for the whole journey. So I really, really absorb that.

Though the Julliard alum has reigned supreme on the stage, filmgoers know him from appearances in  Dune, Fences, Lincoln, and Lady Bird, and TV viewers have seen him in shows such as The Accidental Wolf, Wu-Tang: An American Saga, and Fear the Walking Dead.

The 73-year-old Kansas City, Missouri, native, currently appearing in the horror comedy Beau Is Afraid with Joaquin Phoenix and Patti Lupone, is now shooting The Madness in Toronto. The series, set in the Pocono Mountains, revolves around a media pundit defending his innocence and his life after he stumbles upon a murder.

Filming the new series affords him to be home in the Buffalo suburbs with his family. Last May, when the Tops supermarket mass shooting occurred, Henderson happened to be on break from filming the upcoming movie Civil War.

The tragedy hit home for Henderson, who used to frequent the area once a month, joining an old buddy to cash his check and eat Chinese food from the eatery next door.

Everybody knew somebody, the six degrees of separation is very true, he said.

Though being so close to the shooting was tough, Henderson was glad to be home with his wife. A lot of times youre away on work when things and events occur in the life of America that you say, Oh gosh, I wish I were home to be with the loved one to get through this.

McKinley also recognizes, 50 years into the start of his career, that hes lucky to be busier than hes ever been.

Im blessed and grateful, he reflected. And to have three grandkids and have a family to have been able to have a family you know thats still speaking to me, you know, and have a career that people acknowledge about your work, my cup runneth over.
Stephen Miller predicted that history will judge the federal indictment of former President Donald Trump, on charges linked to his handling of classified documents, as the day the United States ceased to be a democratic republic.

Miller, who was a senior adviser in the Trump White House, went on Fox News on Thursday night to bash news about his former boss, who reportedly faces seven federal criminal charges tied to the storage of government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

This is a sad day for me personally, as someone who has so much affection and admiration for President Trump, who has seen him, up close and personal and the heart he has for this country, Miller said.

I believe history will record today as the day that we cease to be a democratic republic and we became a people ruled by an unelected government bureaucracy.

Miller, elsewhere in his Fox News appearance, claimed the Justice Department decided who can and cant be president before he then jumped into Republican claims that President Joe Biden was involved in a bribery scheme prior to his administration.

He also said he hopes for Republicans, conservatives and the whole of the country that cares about the rule of law to coalesce around Trump.

Miller: I believe history will record today as the day that we ceased to be a democratic republic.. pic.twitter.com/Mol2F2ijlJ  Acyn (@Acyn) June 9, 2023

Twitter users criticized Miller, who had suggested that an alternate slate of electors could aid in Trumps 2020 election challenge, over his take now on the federal indictment news.

Holding former leaders legally accountable for their alleged crimes is the norm in most democratic republics across the world. Its good that the dumb American exceptionalism on this issue is now finally over. https://t.co/LWRSUhwB5G  Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) June 9, 2023

A functioning democracy would not be turning to people who supported an attempted coup to pontificate about the health of democracy https://t.co/PwFeXONnCY  Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) June 9, 2023

Sorry Steve but you cant have democracy without the rule of law.  Bob Messerschmidt (@bobme) June 9, 2023

this fucking guy lol https://t.co/WieRArEnjO  Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) June 9, 2023

I do believe the grand jury voted on those charges



So democracy is still alive and well  jimmy craig (@threepeaks74) June 9, 2023

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StockX is investing heavily in fighting fakes on its platform, opening three international authentication centers over the course of the past 12 months.

New Berlin, Tokyo and Mexico City facilities will add an additional 180,000 square feet to the companys global authentication footprint, which includes 13 centers and four retail drop-off locations worldwide across Europe, Asia, the North America and Australia, according to the streetwear and luxury goods marketplaces latest internal data. Dropped just in time for World Anticounterfeiting Day on June 9, StockXs Verification Report details the companys efforts to hit back at bad actors peddling luxury goods and streetwear dupes through the web-based platform.

More from Sourcing Journal

We physically inspected 12 million products in the last year, Paul Foley, StockX head of brand protection, told Sourcing Journal, and the brand stopped 300,000 of them from making their way onto the marketplace, consistent with the year prior. StockX rejected $90 million worth of products that did not meet its verification standards last year, $30 million of which were sneakers suspected to be fake.

StockXs authentication center in Detroit, Mich.

The market for counterfeit and illicit products has grown to $500 billion worldwide, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Developmentand criminals are becoming more prolific and more advanced each year, Foley said. The shift has necessitated an expansion of the companys use of machine learning technology, which helps StockX assess a products risk level. On the brand side, more labels are investing in embedded technologies that communicate data to consumers and authenticators.

The three categories that have come the furthest from a technology perspective are electronics, handbags and sneakers, Foley said, while streetwear, and apparel more broadly, lag behind. Many fashion firms have implemented RFID, primarily used for inventory tracking, and QR codes, which can be leveraged by verification services and consumers. Shoppers are well-versed in using these tools, the brand protection lead said. Weve all been trained going through the pandemic about scanning QR codes, which were used frequently in restaurants to direct patrons to digital menus. Now they can point them toward product information housed online.

The latest extension of that is tapping your phone on an NFC chip within a product or within the packaging, Foley said. Near-field communication chips are more costly for brands to leverage, ranging from about $0.10 to $0.20 per unit, compared to QR codes, which cost sometimes less than one cent. But the technology, which is employed in items like hotel key cards, is extremely secure and more difficult for fraudsters to replicate, he explained.

Most big brands are using some technology, but these embedded chips and codes arent the only tools the company is using to detect dupes and unsalable goods. All items that pass through StockX authentication centers are visually assessed for wear or damage. Machine learning helps employees quickly identify high-risk sellers based on their networks and selling behaviors, prompting them to take a closer look.

Adidas, Nike and Jordan Brand products are among the most commonly counterfeited.

Notably, manufacturing defects topped the companys list of reasons for rejection this past year, with 27 percent of products sent back to sellers based on quality issues, while 20 percent were blocked for being outright fakes. The defected goods could indeed be counterfeits, Foley said, or, they could have passed through a brands own quality control systems despite presenting flaws.

The most commonly counterfeited items that made their way to StockX authentication centers included footwear, streetwear and handbags. The Nike Dunk Low Retro in White-Black Panda topped the sneaker list for the second year in a row, followed by the Adidas Yeezy Slide in Onyx, Jordan 1 Retro Low OG SP Travis Scott Reverse in Mocha, Jordan 1 Retro High in Dark Mocha, and Adidas Yeezy Slide in Pure. In recent weeks, the marketplace has seen an uptick in the sale of Yeezy styles given Adidas decision to release the product to market following its split from creator Kanye West, Foley said. Notably, Air Jordan 1s did not appear on the list, though StockX is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with Nike, which claims that the web resale platform resold 38 fake pairs of the sneaker to the same consumer last spring and summer.

Telfar topped the list for duped handbags.

Fear of God hoodies ranked highest on the list of duped apparel, while a Juice Wrld x Vlone T-shirt was also commonly copied. Meanwhile, Telfars medium black shopping bag, Goyards Saint Sulpice Green in canvas and calfskin and Pradas Re-Edition black nylon shoulder bag rose to the top of the list for counterfeited handbags. The Telfar and Prada styles also took the No. 1 and No. 3 spots on last years list.

With certain brands and styles so consistently counterfeited, Foley believes Brands and marketplaces have to have to cooperate in this space. We have really good intelligence, they have really good intelligence, so if we want to share intelligence to go after bad actors that are trying to dupe consumers, thats what I look forward to in the future.

Click here to read the full article.
A string of new Ford F-150s stolen directly from holding lots in recent months has triggered a cascade of misfortune for customers, dealers, title companies and others across the western United States, the Free Press has learned.

The problems center on 14 such vehicles stolen late last year in metro Detroit, but a trove of police documents and court records, along with a private investigator, suggest the overall scheme could be bigger, ensnaring unwitting victims and prompting criminal probes and lawsuits.

It all began when an estimated $1 million in pickup trucks were stolen off lots from metro Detroit between mid-October and mid-December. How the trucks disappeared remains a mystery.

Thefts of Ford F-150s, like the 2023 model seen here, have ensnared unwitting victims and prompted criminal probes and lawsuits in several states.

However, police reports document a lack of surveillance video and vehicles parked with keys inside. Police in at least two states have learned that Ford or its partners running the lots have failed to report the vehicles stolen for weeks, months or ever.

The pickups were driven off the lots to the Phoenix metro area to be sold to unsuspecting buyers, according to fuel and toll receipts provided to the Free Press. Pickup odometers reflected miles traveled between Michigan and Arizona, according to police and court records.

Police reports in Michigan and Arizona chronicle a bizarre web of activity showing how a cache of blank vehicle titles stolen in Georgia in 2007 were used to get stolen pickups quickly sold with clean titles.

When stolen vehicles are not reported stolen, title companies, auction houses and car dealers are not alerted and have no idea. As protocol, they run security checks through a national computer system to verify legitimate transactions when buying, selling and titling vehicles.

How it all works

A thief takes a vehicle from a holding lot, which are managed by Ford or the automaker's partners, and drives it to the Phoenix metro area. Then someone submits a stolen Georgia title filled out with the Ford vehicle information and gets a new title from an actual title company. Then the vehicle has the apparent legitimacy to go into the consumer pipeline through sales to various car dealers or individuals. In some incidents the Free Press reviewed, the vehicle had changed hands four times prior to being discovered as stolen.

A Phoenix police investigation led to the seizure of the 14 Ford F-150 vehicles and a report to Ford that possible stolen vehicles had been recovered, but the automaker was asked to confirm. Police reports indicated that Ford was not alerted by any security or tracking system when its vehicles went missing.

One woman learned of the problem when her dealership was raided by armed police. An auto auction house found out when police came to collect stolen vehicles the auction house had processed with clean titles. A Ford customer was notified by law enforcement that the truck he purchased was stolen.

As a result of these thefts, small family-owned auto dealers and title companies, as well as national vehicle and financial entities, including AutoNation, say they've been swindled.

This Arizona title for a 2023 Ford F-150 pickup truck appears to be a typical title. Cascio Motors later found out the vehicle was stolen, though there was no record of theft in any paperwork related to the truck.

Who owns these new F-150 pickups?

The status of the vehicles today is murky, as many have been impounded by Phoenix police. Who owns them? It is unclear whether the thefts were an inside job or whether the scheme could involve more than the 14 trucks. Ford declined to provide theft data to the Detroit Free Press.

'Why?'

Addison Brown, co-owner of Cascio Motors in Scottsdale, Arizona, with her husband, Joey, said her family has been battered financially after working 15 years to build their business. They were raided Dec. 23 by armed police at the dealership in search of four F-150 pickups that police said were stolen. Cascio paid an average of $65,000 apiece for the trucks. Police had a warrant. Brown was assembling and wrapping Christmas gifts at her dealership for her young children with their grandparents at the time.

This search warrant was used to raid Cascio Motors in December 2022, after the family-owned car dealership had purchased Ford F-150 pickups with flawless titles.

"I'm supposed to lock up my cars and have security cameras. How can Ford leave trucks out with keys in them in 2023? Why don't they have better security?" Brown told the Free Press. "I'm out $300,000 and my trucks have been impounded. When you read through the police reports, you can see that this case was worked backwards. Ford did not initially report trucks stolen. And when people ask questions, Ford is nonresponsive."

She added Thursday, "If Ford would have done an inventory check once a week, let's say, and noticed cars were missing, they would've had to report them stolen, and those reports pop up everywhere  on a title search, on CARFAX. There's so many notifications that prevent you from buying a stolen car. No one would have gotten scammed. What about a surveillance? What about a wall and gate? What about taking the keys out of the cars? Any of these minor adjustments."

The 14 stolen pickups left the holding lots unscathed, unlike thefts from various dealer lots where vehicles smashed through gates or were sold for a few thousand and found on the streets of Detroit.

Addison Brown, seen here on May 31, 2023, at Cascio Motors in Scottsdale, Arizona, is fighting to regain custody of four Ford F-150 pickups she says she purchased legally with legitimate Arizona titles for an estimated $300,000. A car dealership that Brown co-owns with her husband was raided by armed police officers on Dec. 23. After Cascio purchased the pickup trucks, Ford reported them stolen. Now Brown has been banned from buying at auction houses or borrowing money for the company while also having to pay off all bonds that protected her dealership. She says she has been battered financially after unknowingly selling to an auction house a stolen vehicle that had not been reported stolen by Ford.

Again and again

Michael Lorette, owner of Prompt Titles & Registrations in Phoenix, said he has instructed staff not to title any 2022-23 Ford F-150s. His wife of 49 years ran the business with him until early 2021, when she died after having COVID-19.

Lorette, an authorized third party provider to the Arizona Department of Transportation, told the Free Press that title companies don't inspect vehicles but instead process state-validated paperwork. That's what he said his company did with an F-150 in November.

"Weeks later, we get notification that we're being sued by a dealer saying they bought the brand new pickup truck based on our information, that we're in cahoots with however this vehicle is stolen," Lorette said. "If it had come up stolen in the system, being reported stolen, the transaction would be stopped. We would be required to call the police and do whatever we can to hold the people in the office without using force until the police arrived."

After getting caught up in the fraud initially, he said, three additional F-150 trucks were brought to his office. In December, his company noticed the title listed a pickup as a model year 2022 but the VIN said model year 2023. Lorette's company declined to process the next three F-150 sellers. When a fourth seller with an F-150 came through the door, Lorette's team photocopied all the information, recorded the man on video and declined his transaction.

Ford dealerships tangled up in lawsuits

Even Ford dealers weren't immune from the scam, according to at least one lawsuit that named companies in New Mexico and Texas.

Rich Ford Sales in Albuquerque purchased an F-150 truck from Metro Auto Auction.

Pollard Friendly Ford in Lubbock bought a truck from Metro Auto Auction and then sold it to a retail buyer.

Both Ford dealers conducted transactions based on paperwork that appeared to be legitimate but the trucks turned out to be stolen. Metro Auto Auction is owned by Berkshire Hathaway and is suing to reclaim its losses.

Ford: 'Theft is a sad reality'

Meanwhile, Ford says the car theft problem is widespread and other automakers have also been targeted.

"Product theft is a sad reality for all manufacturers, including every carmaker, and retailers. When we become aware of robberies, we promptly report the losses to law enforcement agencies. ... In fact, along with unsuspecting people who purchase these vehicles, Ford and other companies are victims here," Ford spokesman Ian Thibodeau told the Free Press.

A CARFAX search, along with other standard review protocol prior to purchasing vehicles, appeared to be a typical document in 2022, despite the fact that Cascio Motors later found out this Ford F-150 and others were stolen.

Police documents show delays of weeks and months of Ford reporting thefts or, in some cases, never reporting at all.

Thibodeau declined to respond to questions submitted by the Free Press, including:

How many F-150 vehicles were stolen from Michigan lots this year and last?

What is Ford doing to prevent theft from its storage lots, specifically in Michigan?

Why would Ford not report some stolen vehicles as stolen, or wait months?

Thibodeau said, "We cant respond to your specific questions as several law enforcement agencies are investigating these thefts. Ford is fully cooperating with all authorities involved."

This is one of many Dearborn Police Department documents related to the theft of Ford F-150 pickup trucks taken from holding lots in Michigan.

'Unlocked with keys inside'

Police have documented that they were not immediately notified when Ford trucks went missing. It could not be determined from case files whether Ford even knew trucks went missing.

"On Jan. 12, 2023, I contacted (a) Ford Employee ... who is responsible for locating vehicles in their holdings lots in Michigan and reporting them stolen if necessary. (He) confirmed he is assisting the Phoenix Police Department on their case," a detective with the Arizona Department of Transportation, Office of Inspector General, wrote in a report on Jan. 27. "He said they are losing approximately seven vehicles a week due to theft."

More: Latest Ford Super Duty orders set 'insane' pace

In one situation, a person associated with a third party that stores Ford vehicles told Dearborn Police that a gold 2023 Ford F-150 had gone missing sometime between Nov. 24, 2022 and Dec. 17, 2022. The company knew when it was last there and someone just happened to notice it was gone after being "unlocked with the keys inside," according to the police report. The company had no video footage or suspect information but asked that the vehicle be entered into the system as stolen.

In early January, in another case, a security supervisor reported to police that a black 2022 F-150 had gone missing from the Dearborn Truck Plant sometime between Sept. 3, 2022 and Jan. 2, 2023. There were no suspect descriptions and, again, "it was believed the vehicle was taken with keys," according to the police report. It said the vehicle had been recovered in Arizona and Ford was in the process of taking possession. The security supervisor wanted the truck "documented as stolen for their recording purposes."

Victims suing other victims

Lawsuits involving more than a dozen parties have been filed over the sales of stolen vehicles that had clean titles and no record of theft. Victims are suing other victims.

Lawsuits have been filed in Maricopa County, Arizona, courts in February, March and April among title companies, car dealers and auction houses. One of the plaintiffs is VT Motors, which is also owned by Berkshire Hathaway. Another plaintiff is Metro Auto Auction, against Brown and others. They're all suing and countersuing because companies have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars after buying and reselling new Ford F-150s that turned out to be stolen.

This business card is one of many given to Addison Brown, co-owner of Cascio Motors in Phoenix, after she purchased stolen Ford F-150 trucks. She is now named in at least one lawsuit but says she was duped along with many others. (Credit: Provided by Cascio Motors)

'Eligible for felony stops at gunpoint'

Matthew DeLisio, a California-based private detective who specializes in financial crimes and fraud, usually works for major corporations with hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. But he is working with Addison Brown and Cascio Motors in Scottsdale, he said, because the family needs help battling an endless nightmare that is not of their doing.

Addison Brown, seen here on Wednesday, May 31, 2023, at Cascio Motors in Scottsdale, Arizona, is fighting to regain custody of four Ford F-150 pickups she purchased legally with legitimate Arizona titles for an estimated $300,000. A car dealership that Brown co-owns with her husband was raided by armed police officers on Dec. 23. After Cascio purchased the pickup trucks, Ford reported them stolen. Delay and inaction by Ford has tainted the reputations of businesses large and small in the Phoenix area. Now, Brown has been banned from buying at auction or borrowing money for the company while also having to pay off all bonds that protected her dealership. She has been battered financially after unknowingly selling to an auction house a stolen vehicle that had not been reported stolen by Ford.

"Through our investigation we have found Ford vehicles are not leaving the holding lots in a dramatic and obvious way," DeLisio told the Free Press. "They appear to almost be allowed to leave and be gone for months without being missed. And with multiple holding companies running these lots and claiming ownership of the vehicles, it is near impossible for a victim or investigator to trace what day, week or even month, a vehicle left a particular lot, and who allowed it to leave."

More: 20 Ford Mustang GTs stolen from lot near Flat Rock Assembly Plant

Ford's attorney consistently provided an on-the-record response of no comment to victims' investigators, he said.

Yet there's a public safety concern that Ford is not addressing, DeLisio said.

"Based on Ford's cavalier approach to file stolen vehicle reports months after the vehicles go missing, placing these vehicles into the National Stolen Vehicle Database and making them eligible for felony stops at gunpoint by law enforcement, this inaction to the ongoing problem places the unknowing public at risk and the officers tasked with pulling these cars over and taking them," he said.

More: Thieves steal nearly $1M worth of Ford F-150 Raptor pickups from Dearborn Truck Plant

More: Mustang GT500 theft suspect didn't know helicopter was watching, led MSP to stolen Raptor

Contact Phoebe Wall Howard: 313-618-1034 or phoward@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @phoebesaid

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Stolen Ford F-150s sold with clean titles in cross-country scheme
Kentucky has a drainage issue, a brain drain issue.

Brain drain is the emigration of highly educated or skilled people from one place to another. A 2019 report from the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee found that from 1970-2017 Kentucky had the worst brain drain of any state. The study found a 28.59% gap between highly educated people leaving the state compared to those entering. The trend cannot be ignored, Kentucky is losing educated people and skilled labor left and right, and state institutions are not helping the matter.

Back in March, the Kentucky State Legislature passed SB 150. It is one of the most draconian pieces of anti-trans legislation enacted in the country. While the immediate effects of the legislation will obviously harm transgender people and their families, the long-term impact on the state will be very damaging.

Approximately 20% of Gen-Z identifies as being part of the LGBTQIA+ community. If Kentucky continues to attack LGBTQIA+ rights, it will hinder its ability to attract and retain an educated populace. A new study by The Hill found that 25% of college applicants avoid states entirely based on political reasons. Now more than ever, college applicants are including access to gender-affirming care in their decision process. While state governments will not feel the bulk of the consequences of these college decisions until much later, colleges will be the first to brunt the cost. In order to thrive, let alone survive, colleges must begin changing institutional policies to better protect the LGBTQIA+ community and use their political agency to influence policy at the state level.

One college that must adapt to the current political climate is Centre College. Centre has been in the midst of an inflection point since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 Centre had a negative net income of $13.6 million, its first year of net income loss since 2012. While other colleges across the country faced similar financial straits, Centre has suffered a blow specifically at the hands of Kentuckys staggering brain drain. Centre currently offers three premier scholarship groups, but with the sunsetting of the Brown Fellows Program, that number will soon drop to two. The program founded by the James Graham Brown Foundation was designed to strengthen scholars connection to the state in order to elevate the quality of life in Kentucky. However, the foundation chose to end the program due to numerous scholars choosing to leave the state for better opportunities.

While COVID-19 and the end of the Brown Program were out of the colleges control, its next woes will come from its unwillingness to adapt and counteract actions and sentiments from Frankfort. Centre has not exactly been on the cutting edge of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, most notably seen in the previous administrations mishandling of the 2018 student sit-in against racial injustice. While amends and progress have been made, the college is still woefully inept in handling issues related to race, gender identity, and sexual orientation. The college continues to struggle with transphobia and homophobia in Greek life, lack of campus-wide gender-inclusive facilities, and lack of written protection against harassment and abuse based on gender identity and expression in the student handbook.

While progress has been made regarding the latter two concerns, it has resulted from student and faculty/staff activists. When the Kentucky state legislature began considering SB 150, it was student and faculty/staff activists who organized a campus response. While over 100 students, faculty, and staff members went to protest the bill in Frankfort, Centres administration was notably absent. In fact, the administration hampered protest efforts by refusing to grant excused absences to students who chose to protest for transgender lives.

The President of the college, Milton Moreland, and the Dean of the college, Ellen Goldey, sent out short statements claiming to support transgender students. However, they failed to take any action to condemn the actions in Frankfort and the rise in transphobic rhetoric on campus. Statements only go so far; when LGBTQIA+ students are risking more than upper-level administrators, it is time to look in the mirror. Centre and Kentucky as a whole will miss out on top-flight college applicants if this assault on our rights continues.

Arthur Jenkins (They/She) is a senior Politics and History major at Centre College. They are also the President of Centre Colleges Pride Alliance.
Harassment of seals and sea lions on the U.S. western coast has gotten way out of hand, officials say.

Its so prevalent, beaches along the coast are considered hotbeds for it  and wildlife officials are pleading with the public to stop, especially during pupping season.

In a new report, the Marine Mammal Center  the worlds largest marine mammal hospital  found more than 25% of its patients were rescued in 2022 after negative interactions with people and dogs. The center responds to 600 miles of Californias coastline, according to a June 5 news release.

And the harassment isnt limited to California. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has also had to ask beachgoers to stay far away from seals and sea lions lounging on the sand.

Its a busy time of year on the Oregon coast with visitors sharing the beaches with seals and sea lions, officials said. ODFW asks beachgoers to keep away from seals and sea lions resting on the beach or rocks.

Its important not to crowd around, touch, or otherwise harass pups that look like theyve been left alone, officials said.

Pacific harbor seal pupping season is in full swing. A harbor seal mother often leaves her pup alone on shoreline rocks or the beach while she feeds in the ocean, officials said. This is an important time for her to refuel and later feed her pup, but she is unlikely to rejoin her pup if there is activity nearby.

Other than seals, California sea lions also may stop to rest on Oregon beaches during their journey south to breed. Beachgoers are also likely to see molting elephant seals andhave been reminded that while it isnt pretty, these animals are not sick and should not be messed with, moved, or otherwise harassed.

Crowding is the most common form of harassment, Marine Mammal Center officials said.

While on the surface, taking a close-up selfie or having your dog off-leash near a marine mammal may seem cute and innocent, it can create real challenges, especially for young seals and sea lions, said Adam Ratner, the associate director of conservation education with the center.

The Marine Mammal Center highlighted the tragic case of a harbor seal named Snowcone, saying it illustrates the impact harassment can have on a marine mammals life.

Snowcone was young enough to still be nursing when he was rescued at Shell Beach in Sonoma County in April 2022. Two beachgoers had illegally picked him up and separated him from his mom, officials said.

Responders at the center noted he had suffered severe head trauma from what they believe was a dog attack, officials said. They suspect Snowcone had been attacked after the beachgoers moved him from the established rookery, or breeding area, to an area of the beach where several dogs roamed.

Snowcone died on the way to the centers hospital.

The tragic case of Snowcone highlights that we have a community that loves marine mammals and wants to help them, Ratner said in the release. But the only way to ensure the safety and well-being of these animals is to first call the experts and keep a safe distance until trained responders arrive.

Irresponsible. Couple poses for photos beside endangered Hawaii seal, officials say

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Dozens of worn, stone markers stood in the French countryside for millennia. Over time, these mysterious monolithic stones began to blend with their surroundings. Moss covered the slabs, bushes grew around them.

But not anymore.

Store construction destroyed the 7,000-year-old structures, leaving the rocks in a haphazard heap. What went wrong?

The Chemin de Montauban site in Carnac is near an iconic collection of 7,000-year-old megalithic stone monuments, according to Carnacs tourism officials. The area has almost 3,000 megaliths, also known as menhirs, stretching in rows across almost four miles.

The sites megaliths may have been sacred monuments or funeral grave markers, but no one knows for sure, tourism officials said.

Several large monoliths within a smaller stone wall, as seen at the Carnac site in 2015.

A commercial development company first eyed the now-controversial Chemin de Montauban site in 2015, The Regional Department of Cultural Affairs of Brittany said in a June 7 news release.

That same year, an archaeological excavation found conflicting results. Most of the Chemin de Montauban site had no ruins, according to the final report from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research.

But archaeologists eventually reported finding something unexpected: 38 stone markers from the Neolithic age.

Could this be another unprecedented megalithic site in Carnac? Archaeologists asked the question but could not determine its answer without further excavations.

A close-up photo of one of the ancient stones at the Carnac site as it looked in 2015.

The 2015 application for a building permit at the mysterious site was denied for reasons unrelated to archaeology, officials said in the June release.

The Chemin de Montauban site would remain as is  for a while. It was listed as a heritage location by French authorities and included in a preliminary UNESCO World Heritage application for megalithic sites in the Carnac area, the French news outlet West France reported.

The same commercial development company again applied for a building permit at the Chemin de Montauban site in 2022, officials said.

This time, the permit was approved and construction began on a DIY home goods store, Mr. Bricolage.

Photos shared by the organization Sites and Monuments on Twitter show the construction work at the Chemin de Montauban site.

The site has been destroyed, Christian Obeltz of the Sites and Monuments organization told AFP.

The standing stones have been lost, he said.

Google Street View images from April show a large pile of what appears to be the monolithic stones. The rocks are heaped together and sitting near the roadside.

Permis du "Mr Bricolage" de #Carnac depose au nom dune "SCI des menhirs" et dune "SAS bricodolmen" A lire ici https://t.co/Rd74Cl7cwi pic.twitter.com/HEk9P0me3c  Sites & Monuments (@SPPEF) June 8, 2023

Obeltz expressed his anger with the destruction and the towns approval of the construction project in a series of blog posts.

The town mayor, Olivier Lepick, told The Local, a French outlet, that he did not know the construction site was a heritage site nor that it had been included in the UNESCO application. The site was zoned as a commercial area, Lepick said, which must have been an error.

Cultural affairs officials also defended their decision to allow the DIY stores construction.

Given the uncertain and in any case non-major character of the remains, as revealed by checks, damage to a site of archaeological value has not been established, cultural affairs officials said, per AFPs translation.

The development company told AFP it sincerely regretted the situation but noted the construction project was approved.

Still, locals have expressed their anger at the destruction of an ancient site and the apparent mistakes that led up to it, The Local and West France reported.

The Chemin de Montauban site along the road ZA de Montauban is between the towns of Carnac and Montauban. This area is about 290 southwest of Paris and along the eastern coastline of France.

Google Translate was used to translate the news release from The Regional Department of Cultural Affairs of Brittany, report from French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap), Twitter and blog posts from Sites and Monuments and article from West France.

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Countless offerings to ancient Greek god unearthed from island temple. Take a look
The Sudanese government has declared United Nations envoy Volker Perthes (C) "persona non grata" (-)

The Sudanese government has declared United Nations envoy Volker Perthes "persona non grata", two weeks after the army chief accused him of stoking the country's civil conflict and sought to have him removed from his post.

Since late last year, Perthes and the UN mission he heads in war-torn Sudan have been targeted by military and Islamist-backed protests denouncing perceived foreign interference.

In a letter to the UN last month, Sudan's de facto leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan blamed the envoy for exacerbating fighting between his army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

UN chief Antonio Guterres has repeatedly defended Perthes, who earned ire after criticising both leaders of Sudan's warring parties as the two-month conflict evades efforts to broker a humanitarian ceasefire.

"The Government of the Republic of Sudan has notified the Secretary-General of the United Nations that it has declared Mr. Volker Perthes ... persona non grata as of today," the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Thursday.

Perthes was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Thursday for a series of diplomatic talks, according to the UN mission's Twitter feed.

Last week, the precarity of the UN's status in Sudan was highlighted when the Security Council voted to extend the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS) for only six months.

Created in June 2020 to support Sudan's democratic transition after the fall of Islamist-military ruler Omar al-Bashir a year earlier, UNITAMS's mandate had previously been renewed annually for a year.

Sudan's stuttering path to civilian rule was disrupted in 2021 when Burhan and Daglo together seized power in a coup before falling out.

- Spiraling humanitarian crisis -

Since April, fighting between the army and the RSF has gripped Khartoum and the western region of Darfur, defying a series of truces.

Upwards of 1,800 people have been killed, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, and the UN says 1.2 million have been displaced, with more than 425,000 fleeing abroad.

Those unable to leave have been forced to camp out for weeks as supplies of food and other vital goods have been depleted.

Entire districts of Khartoum no longer have running water, electricity is only available for a few hours a week and three-quarters of the hospitals in combat zones are not functioning.

The most recent truce was agreed to allow desperately needed humanitarian aid into areas of Sudan ravaged by the fighting, but like all those that preceded, the accord was routinely violated by both sides.

The UN estimates around 25 million people -- more than half of Sudan's population -- are now in need of aid and protection in what was already one of the world's poorest countries before the conflict.

Perthes, a former academic who has headed the Sudan mission since 2021, has staunchly defended the UN against accusations of inflaming the conflict, saying those responsible are "the two generals at war".

In his letter to Guterres, Burhan accused Perthes of bias and of not respecting "national sovereignty".

He said Perthes presented a misleading picture "of consensus" in his reports to the UN, and "without these signs of encouragement, the rebel leader Daglo would not have launched his military operations".

It has never been possible to verify who fired the first shots of the war.

- Deputy turned rival -

Daglo, an ambitious militia leader originally armed by Bashir to crush rebels in Darfur, was Burhan's second-in-command before the two fell out.

Islamist and pro-Bashir television channels in exile now accuse Burhan of giving too much leeway to Daglo, while pro-democracy voices accuse Burhan of being a Trojan horse for Islamists from Bashir's regime.

Several high-ranking officials from the Bashir era have found roles in Burhan's administration since the coup.

Burhan officially sacked Daglo as his deputy in the ruling Sovereign Council last month, replacing him with former rebel leader Malik Agar.

With the fighting intensifying, the army is now also seeking to reinforce its ranks, calling on "army pensioners" and reservists to head to command units.

bur-lb/qan
(Bloomberg) -- Sudan expelled the top United Nations envoy, raising fears the North African country is isolating itself from the international community amid efforts to broker an end to more than a month of deadly conflict.

Most Read from Bloomberg

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is controlled by the Sudanese army, declared Volker Perthes persona non grata on Friday, according to two UN officials who asked not to be identified because theyre not authorized to speak to the media.

Perthes, whos led the UN mission in Sudan since early 2021, had come under continuous pressure in Sudan to deliver a power-sharing deal between the army and civilian politicians in the wake of a 2021 coup that unseated the government.

The move came after Sudans military-dominated ruling council urged the UN in a letter last month to replace Perthes, accusing him of taking sides in the countrys disputes and disrespecting its sovereignty.

Africas third-largest country remains mired in a battle for power between the military led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces militia. Violence that erupted April 15 has left about 1,000 people dead and spurred about a million more to flee their homes, many to neighboring countries. The fighting has flared in recent days, killing civilians, doctors and blocking access to humanitarian workers.

Saudi Arabia and the US announced on Friday that theyd brokered another 24-hour cease-fire beginning at 6 a.m. on Saturday in the capital, Khartoum. Previous truces have brought only temporary respite to some regions.

Strained Relations

The army has long been at odds with Perthes, an Arabic-speaking German academic enlisted by the UNs secretary-general to usher Sudan toward a civilian government and democratic elections after the 2019 overthrow of dictator Omar al-Bashir.

In the months between an October 2021 coup and the current conflict, the UN envoy was the target of frequent criticism by Sudans military-led government as he tried to loosen the generals stranglehold on the economy and encourage the merging of the RSF, which had its own power structure, funding and allies, into the national army.

Perthes also had strained relations with Sudanese youth groups and pro-democracy protesters who objected to his insistence that the army play a pivotal role in the countrys democratic transition, despite its brutal crackdowns on demonstrations and serious doubts over its commitment to relinquishing power.

His departure raises questions about how the international community will be able to meaningfully influence any new peace initiative. It could also complicate arrangements to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to places hard-hit by the fighting such as Khartoum and the western region of Darfur.

Read More: US Hits Sudan Groups With Sanctions as Cease-Fire Collapses

--With assistance from Leen Al-Rashdan and Kateryna Kadabashy.

(Updates sixth paragraph with latest cease-fire.)

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DUBAI (Reuters) -Sudan's warring sides have agreed a nationwide, 24-hour ceasefire from Saturday morning, U.S. and Saudi Arabian mediators said, following a week of intensified fighting after a previous truce deal lapsed.

The mediators said the ceasefire was "an effort to break the cycle of violence" between Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which began battling each other eight weeks ago, sparking a major humanitarian crisis.

The conflict has displaced more than 1.9 million people, some 400,000 of whom have crossed into neighbouring countries. The urban area around Sudan's capital Khartoum, home to at least five million people, has been turned into a war zone, and unrest has also flared in the conflict-scarred western region of Darfur.

Fighting continued on Friday, with residents reporting artillery fire and clashes in the north of Omdurman, across the confluence of the River Nile from Khartoum, and air strikes in Bahri, a third adjoining city that makes up the wider capital.

"There are heavy strikes near us and bullets from every direction in Al-Thawra neighbourhood in Omdurman," said Sanaa Ahmed, a 24-year-old resident. "We are really afraid and we don't know what to do."

Medical charity MSF said fighting had intensified significantly in Khartoum since Tuesday, resulting in a surge of patients to a hospital where it is working.

Another city where the conflict has triggered clashes is El Obeid in North Kordofan State southwest of Khartoum, which lies on a main route between the capital and Darfur, the RSF's power base.

A doctors' group said in a statement that the city had been suffering from water outages for more than a month, shortages of food, medicine and fuel, and two weeks of power cuts. Twelve kidney dialysis patients had died due to the impact of the war and dozens more were at risk, it said.

'SENSELESS WAR'

The ceasefire is due to start at 6 a.m. (0400 GMT) local time on Saturday.

The two sides agreed to "refrain from prohibited movements, attacks, use of aircraft or drones, aerial bombardment, artillery strikes, reinforcement of positions and resupply of forces, and will refrain from seeking military advantage during the ceasefire," a Saudi-U.S. statement read.

They also agreed to allow delivery of humanitarian assistance, it said.

Both sides have broken a string of ceasefire agreements, including a 12-day truce deal that expired on June 3 and was brokered by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. at talks in Jeddah.

Fighting subsided slightly during the period of that truce deal and limited amounts of humanitarian relief were delivered, though aid agencies say their operations have been badly impeded by bureaucratic controls, fighting, and looting of aid supplies.

The army said last week that it was pulling out of the Jeddah talks, though both sides kept delegations in the Saudi city for consultations.

If the parties fail to observe the new ceasefire, "facilitators will be compelled to consider adjourning the Jeddah talks", the Saudi-U.S. statement said.

The army confirmed in a statement that it had agreed to the 24-hour ceasefire while asserting "its right to respond to any violations". The RSF said in a statement it was committed to respecting the truce.

The conflict in Sudan derailed the launch of a transition towards civilian rule four years after a popular uprising ousted strongman President Omar al-Bashir.

Sudan's army and the RSF fell out over the chain of command and military restructuring plans under the transition.

"We have provided both parties numerous opportunities to end this senseless war," the U.S. State Department's Bureau of African Affairs said on Twitter.

"We call on both sides to adhere to the commitment made today for a 24-hour ceasefire, which would allow Sudanese people to receive critical humanitarian assistance."

(Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz Ahmed Elimam and Jana Choukeir in Dubai; Adam Makary and Nafisa Eltahir in Cairo; Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Nick Zieminski, Andrew Heavens and Mark Potter)
Superman Legacy Could Be Close to Finding Its Clark and Lois

Image: DC Comics

Director Travis Knight teases Laikas epic battles for its adaptation of Wildwood. Get a look at the French remake of One Cut of the Dead. Plus, whats coming on Riverdale, and What We Do In the Shadows sets its season 5 premiere date. To me, my spoilers!



Superman Legacy

Deadline reports that casting for the lead roles of Clark Kent and Lois Lane has narrowed down to at least 3 potential candidates for each role ahead of more screen tests this month. Nicholas Hoult, David Corenswet, and Tom Brittney are allegedly in contention for Clark/Superman, while Emma Mackey, Rachel Brosnahan, and Phoebe Dynevor are in the running to play Lois.

Read more





The Purge 6

In conversation with Variety, The Purge creator James DeMonaco revealed hes finished a script for a sixth movie he admits isnt completely different from the first five.

Its not completely different than previous movies, but its a new America that were entering int. In The Forever Purge, America kind of collapsed, and its really kind of mapped itself according to different ideologies. The states are based on sexuality, religion and ideology. So weve broken apart and the state of discord is at its worst. We enter The Purge in that world.





Wildwood

During a recent interview with Empire, director Travis Knight discussed animating the huge stop-motion battle sequence in Laikas upcoming film adaptation of Wildwood, the 2011 fantasy novel by Decemberists frontman, Colin Meloy.

Its the single most difficult thing were tackling on this movie. Were starting to chip away and tentatively stepping into, like, Oh God, oh God, oh God, how are we gonna do this? But I think its going to work. And youll tell me when the films all done if it did. Stop-motion films tend to look like theyre shot on a table-top, because they are. Moving a physical object a frame at a time and trying to give it life, thats its own challenge. And then you bring all the kineticism you would have in a live-action action movieits so hard.





Suitable Flesh

Bloody-Disgusting has new images from Suitable Flesh, the upcoming film adaptation of H.P. Lovecrafts The Things on the Doorstep starring Heather Graham. Click through to see the rest.

Relatedly, co-star Barbara Crampton shared the films poster on Twitter.







Blue Beetle

DC has also released a motion poster for the Blue Beetle movie coming to theaters this August 18.





The Flash

Barry Allen introduces the Flash Ring to the other Barry Allen in a new clip.

Fit check.  THE FLASH - only in theaters June 16, tickets available now. #TheFlashMovie pic.twitter.com/GzkXDOR1QW  The Flash (@theFlash) June 7, 2023





Til Death Do Us Part

A runaway bride must fight for survival against her vengeful former fiance and his seven deadly groomsmen in the trailer for Til Death Do Us Part, a new film from the creator of the Final Destination franchise.



Til Death Do Us Part - Exclusive Official Trailer (2023) Cam Gigandet, Jason Patric





Final Cut

Kino Lorber has also released a new trailer for Final Cut, the French-language remake of One Cut of the Dead from Academy Award winner, Michel Hazanavicius.



Final Cut  Michel Hazanavicius  Official U.S. Teaser





Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

During a recent press junket attended by Screen Rant, Rebecca Romijn teased the very big swings taken in the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Weve taken some very big swings genre-wise in season 2we have a few episodes coming up that are really out there, so were very proud of them. Were very excited.



Anson Mount echoed her statement, adding:

We had a couple of episodes in that first season that [the network executives] werent too sure about. And both of those episodes are ones that popped for us. And so, they gave our showrunners a lot more freedom to play with, with genre. Akiva [Goldsmans] mantra continues to be Star Trek can be a lot of things. So were not just playing with the message that can be told, but within the episodic structure, we can play with how we get there. And genre has been a fun way of us talking with the writers about what we havent done that we would like to do. That makes everybody excited to be there.





Secret Invasion

Marvel also has a new Secret Invasion poster asking, who do you trust? amongst its star-studded cast.

Check out the new poster for Marvel Studios #SecretInvasion, streaming June 21 on @DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/eTQKoQgRwd  Secret Invasion (@SecretInvasion) June 7, 2023





What We Do in the Shadows

FX has additionally released a poster for the fifth season of What We Do in the Shadows premiering this July 13and features Guillermo with little bat wings!

Dig up your coffins and dust off your capes. FXs What We Do In The Shadows returns 7.13 on FX. Stream on Hulu. pic.twitter.com/7ltYIgNSQ6  What We Do In The Shadows (@theshadowsfx) June 8, 2023





Riverdale

Finally, Betty and Veronica host a sexy sleepover while the rest of the gang process their trauma in the trailer for After the Fall, the June 21 return episode of Riverdale.



Riverdale 7x12 Promo After the Fall (HD) Season 7 Episode 12 Promo





Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, whats next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

More from Gizmodo

Sign up for Gizmodo's Newsletter. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.
Black marchers in Selma, Ala., demonstrate for voting rights protections on March 6, 2022. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

In a surprising ruling on June 8, 2023, the conservative leaning U.S. Supreme Court threw out Republican-drawn congressional districts in Alabama that a lower court had ruled discriminated against Black voters and violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

At issue in the case that was before the court, Allen v. Milligan, was whether the power of Black voters in Alabama was diluted by dividing them into districts where white voters dominate. After the 2020 census, the Republican-controlled Alabama legislature redrew the states congressional districts to include only one out of seven in which Black voters would likely be able to elect a candidate of their choosing.

Black residents make up about 27% of the states population, and voting rights advocates argued that they deserved not one but two political districts.

Rodney Coates is a sociologist who studies race and ethnicity and has followed efforts by politicians throughout American history to use redistricting to disenfranchise Black voters. The Conversation asked him four questions about the ruling and its implications.

What does the decision mean for Black voters in Alabama?

The decision means that Black voters in Alabama, and across the country, will retain the last remaining voter rights protections. Specifically, Alabama lawmakers will need to redraw their legislative districts to include two districts that reflect the Black population.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted to prohibit racist practices by Southern states that were used to prevent Black people from voting. Those measures included literacy tests, poll taxes and voter intimidation.

Prior to the laws passage, less than a quarter of voting-age Blacks were registered to vote across the nation. In 1969, that figure had risen to 61%.

The ruling will also set an important precedent for redistricting cases alleging discrimination as voters and their representatives challenge state maps. Among Democrats there is the belief that the ruling will impact pending cases and require Alabama, as well as Louisiana and Georgia, to add new majority-minority districts prior to the next congressional elections.

Why was this decision considered a surprise?

The ruling in Allen vs. Milligan was a surprise because of the voting by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh with the three liberal justices.

In his opinion for the majority, Roberts traced the importance of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. He explained how racially motivated voter suppression after the Civil War led to the initial passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In order to avoid creating racially designated legislative districts, Congress established that the electoral process should allow for the equal participation of all racial groups, Roberts wrote in his opinion.

Roberts thinking in Allen vs. Milligan is radically different from the one he held when he was an attorney serving in the U.S. Department of Justice during the Reagan administration. Then, Roberts wrote 25 memos in opposition to the VRA, specifically in reference to section 2.

Only Roberts knows why his perspective has changed over time. But perhaps Alabama went too far, too fast and was too partisan.

States shouldnt let race be the primary factor in deciding how to draw boundaries but it should be a consideration, Roberts wrote. The line we have drawn is between consciousness and predominance.

Roberts went further by citing the repugnant racial history of Alabama.

Even as the Black population increased to over 27% of the states population over the past 30 years, the number of Black districts remained at one, largely because white conservatives have used their control of the state legislature to dilute the strength of Black voters.

Is the Voting Rights Act still under attack?

While a breath of fresh air for voting rights activists, this ruling does not mean that white conservatives will cease their attack.

GOP-controlled congressional maps diluting or eliminating Black districts have been drawn in multiple states, including Louisiana, Georgia, Ohio and Texas. These efforts could significantly alter the 2024 electoral map.

Several lawsuits are currently working their way through the courts across the country in states such as Florida, Arkansas, South Carolina and New York.

What are the remaining obstacles to full Black voting power?

Across the country, there has been a concerted effort to restrict voting and control the election machinery and even the outcome of these votes.

Dozens of Republican-controlled states have passed a series of laws that will curtail voting of Blacks and many other Americans.

These laws are in Florida, where registration is harder; in Nebraska, which has enacted more stringent voter identification measures; in Mississippi, which placed restrictions on absentee ballots; and in Georgia, which increased voter scrutiny by allowing anyone to challenge the qualifications of other voters.

Uncertainty prevails at the state and federal level, and according to Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Steven Horsford, only a national law aimed at eliminating the various suppression tactics that target Black voters will remedy the situation.

How do these laws typically affect Black people?

As many as 42 restrictive voting-rights laws in 21 states have been passed since 2021.

Among these, 33 contain at least one restrictive provision that will impact elections in 20 states. These restrictive provisions would make it harder for eligible Blacks to vote.

These laws are being vigorously challenged by groups such as the ACLU, NAACP, League of Women Voters, Fair Fight Action and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which are mobilizing protests, organizing voters and launching legal challenges.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. Like this article? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

It was written by: Rodney Coates, Miami University.

Read more:



Rodney Coates does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Supreme Court has ordered that congressional voting maps be redrawn in Alabama in order to allow a Black majority district.



The ruling came Thursday after an intense battle over the proposed Republican-drawn Alabama map  which would have limited the voting power of Black voters and largely favored Republicans.



The courts 5-4 vote means the map of the seven congressional districts must now be redrawn. Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the courts three liberal judges in the majority.



For voting rights supporters, the vote lessened concerns, for now, that the courts ruling would make it tougher for minorities to challenge maps under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.



Democratic Alabama senator Doug Jones, who has been outspoken on the maps issue, took to his Twitter to comment on the courts decision.

Black Women Voters in Alabama

The Supreme Court ruling ultimately reignited conversations around the work of Black women to get Jones into the Senate back in 2017  which was the first time in 25 years Alabama elected a Democrat to the Senate.



NBC News exit polls showed that 96 percent of black voters supported Jones, with 98 percent of black women and 93 percent of black men backing him.



Speaking to NBC following Jones win, DeJuana Thompson, co-founder of strategy firm Think Rubix, said that Black women stepped in to support Jones as an act of protection for their community.



When you have rhetoric coming out about possible pedophilia, and when youve got rhetoric coming out about slashing critical resources to education and the programs that help sustain homes in the African-American community, black women are always going to show up for their communities, Thompson said. When black women show up for their community, every other community is empowered.

Black women voting rights activist in Alabama have remained key in pushing Jones, the White House, and representatives to be vocal about the attempts to suppress Black voting power in Alabama and other states. Following the Supreme Court ruling, there is a continued call to address voter suppression, which has been especially routine the southern states.



Speaking on the ruling, Alabamas Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, the states first Black woman elected to Congress, stressed that the decision will allow for more equitable maps in Alabama.



Im so happy that the justices saw the truth in the fact that that represents voter dilution and its black voter dilution, Sewell said on CNNs News Central on Thursday.

Everyones looking at this decision and I think that it will have a ripple effect, a positive ripple effect. It means that minority dilution is not going to be tolerated by the Supreme Court or by any court in the land and that is a huge victory, Sewell added.

The post Supreme Courts Voting Maps Decision Delivers Win for Black Voters in Alabama appeared first on 21Ninety.
FILE - African Methodist Episcopal Church Bishop Reginald Jackson announces a boycott of Coca-Cola Co. products outside the Georgia Capitol on March 25, 2021 in Atlanta. The Supreme Court decision ordering Alabama to redraw its congressional maps is a surprise victory for Black and Latino voters across the country who say legislatures in a number of Republican-controlled states have drawn districts in a way that dilutes their political strength. (AP Photo/Jeff Amy, File)

WASHINGTON (AP)  This week's Supreme Court decision ordering Alabama to redraw its congressional districts was seen by many minority lawmakers and voting rights activists as a stunning victory with the potential to become a major stepping stone for undoing political maps that dilute the strength of communities of color.

Hank Sanders, a former Alabama state lawmaker who has long been politically active in the state, knew there would be a decision since the court heard arguments in the case last fall. He was not anticipating being happy with the outcome, given that previous rulings of the conservative-leaning court had essentially gutted some of its most important provisions.

I was afraid they were going to go ahead and wipe out section 2," he said, referring to the part of the Voting Rights Act at stake in the Alabama case.

He was at his law office Thursday in Selma, scene of one of the most pivotal moments in the Civil Rights Movement, when news of the 5-4 ruling in favor of Alabama's Black voters was announced.

"It was a surprise that was good for my day, he said.

How the decision will affect similar lawsuits against political maps drawn in other states is unclear, although voting rights groups say the ruling provides firm guidance for lower courts to follow.

The court majority found that Alabama concentrated Black voters in one district, while spreading them out among the others to make it much more difficult to elect more than one candidate of their choice. Alabamas Black population is large enough and geographically compact enough to create a second district, the judges found. Just one of its seven congressional districts is majority Black, in a state where more than one in four residents is Black.

Similar maps have been drawn in other states, primary by Republican-controlled legislatures.

Kareem Crayton, the Brennan Centers senior director for voting and representation, called the court's decision a welcome surprise and said challenges to the maps in Louisiana and Georgia were the most similar to the Alabama case.

While it was considering the Alabama case, the Supreme Court had placed a hold on a lower court ruling in Louisiana allowing creation of a second majority-Black district. Thats now likely to be lifted. A federal judge last year also ruled that some of Georgias U.S. House and state legislative districts likely violated the Voting Rights Act, but he had allowed the districts to be used in the 2022 elections because it was too close to the election to redraw them.

Maps in all three states could have to be redrawn for the 2024 elections.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said in a statement that the court's action reaffirmed his own belief that Louisiana's map, which was drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature, violated the law.

As I said when I vetoed it, Louisianas current congressional map violates the Voting Rights Act," he said. "Louisianas voting population is one-third Black. We know that in compliance with the principles of the Voting Rights Act, Louisiana can have a congressional map where two of our six districts are majority Black.

Rep. Troy Carter, a Black Democrat representing Louisianas lone district that is majority Black, said the Legislature should immediately convene to draw a second majority-minority district.

This Supreme Court ruling is a win not just for Alabamians but for Louisianans as well, Carter said in an emailed statement. Rarely do we get a second chance to get things right  now Louisiana can.

In Georgia, Bishop Reginald Jackson, a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits challenging the states congressional map, said he was ecstatic when he heard the news about the ruling and hopes it will boost their case.

He said he became involved in the lawsuit amid concerns that the states Black population had increased while the number of Black congressional representatives had decreased with the last round of redistricting.

So how could you have less Black representation when you have more Blacks moving into the state than before? said Jackson, who presides over 534 African Methodist Episcopal churches in Georgia with over 90,000 parishioners

The Alabama case, along with pending lawsuits in Georgia and Louisiana, means Black voters will likely have an opportunity to elect candidates in three additional districts, said Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, one of the organizations that has spearheaded voting rights challenges in the states.

She said litigation in Texas by other plaintiff groups could mean additional seats there where minority voters have the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice that don't exist now.

Texas state Rep. Victoria Neave Criado, a Democrat who chairs the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, said the case was a major win for voting rights.

She said following recent decisions by the current court in other areas she considers fundamental, such as last years overturning of the constitutional right to abortion, she was concerned about the direction the justices would take with voting rights and was relieved to see Thursdays outcome.

As we are seeing the Latino community rise in many ways, we want to ensure that Latino power is translated into Latino political power, Neave Criado said.

Latinos and whites share an equal proportion of the Texas population, about 40% each, according to 2022 Census figures.

Nina Perales, vice-president of litigation with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the ruling closes the door on Texas using arguments similar to those made by Alabama as the cases there go forward. Perales leads the litigation for a similar case out of Texas, which is based on the redistricting maps created in 2021.

In addition to the Voting Rights Act challenge to Texas' congressional districts, similar section 2 claims have been brought against numerous voting districts used for state legislatures and local governments around the country.

Attorney Mark Gaber argued a case this week alleging Washingtons state legislative districts diluted the voting strength of Hispanic residents and will be arguing a similar case next week involving Native Americans and North Dakotas state legislative districts. He thinks Thursday's ruling will strengthen the case.

In Alabama, the question is what happens next. Steve Marshall, the states Republican attorney general, said in a statement that he expects to continue defending the challenged map in federal court, including at a full trial.

The Rev. Murphy Green, a resident of Montgomery, said he is just glad to get to the first step with the court decision.

I was surprised, especially when I think of the makeup of the court, he said, praising God for sending the Legislature back to the drawing board and making it mandatory that they create a second Black congressional district."

He said the five Supreme Court justices in the majority must have looked at the map and the state's population and decided it looked ridiculous to those judges, as well.

Rep. Terri Sewell, the lone Democrat in Alabama's congressional delegation, said she expects the case will be sent back to the three lower court judges who unanimously agreed the lines drawn by the Legislature likely violated the federal law. Sewell, who is Black, fully expected the new districts to be in place in time for the 2024 elections.

Whatever the process for drawing the new lines, They're going to have to follow the ruling of the court, she said, noting that a revamped congressional map would also mean her district is redrawn.

It's a small price to pay to carve up my district in order to be able to have two majority minority districts," she said.

_____

Associated Press writers Ayanna Alexander in Washington; Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta; Sara Cline in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Acacia Coronado in Austin, Texas; David A. Lieb in Jefferson City, Missouri; and Kevin McGill in New Orleans contributed to this report.
How to survive a shark attack  or better yet, avoid one entirely

How to survive a shark attack  or better yet, avoid one entirely

First things first: Despite some truly terrifying tales of survival, you are incredibly unlikely to be duking it out with a shark any time soon.

But sharks do occasionally attack humans  and they certainly make news when they do:

 A Russian citizen was killed by a shark in the Red Sea in Egypt on June 8.

 A shark attacked a woman from Connecticut while she was snorkeling at a resort in Turks and Caicos on May 24.

 A New Jersey teenager was injured by an apparent shark bite while surfing on May 21.

 Two separate shark attacks happened in Florida earlier in May: One man was angling off a dock and the another while spearfishing in the water.

While these kinds of encounters understandably cause would-be ocean swimmers to worry, theres no need to panic about your upcoming beach vacation. The chances of being attacked by a shark are extremely low despite the headlines.

The Florida Museum of Natural Historys International Shark Attack File found only 57 confirmed, unprovoked shark bites on people and 32 confirmed, provoked bites in 2022 worldwide.

Think about it a minute  the world population is 8 billion people. Many of those live near or vacation at the coast. And only 89 bites were logged. Your chances of drowning are much, much higher.

In 2022, the United States led the way in unprovoked attacks at 41; Florida had the highest state total at 16.

That said, you can take steps to increase your chances of survival during a highly improbable attack, according to shark experts interviewed by CNN Travel.

Before you get in the water

Know your environment

Sharks are salt-water creatures. The ocean is their home; we are the visitors.

If youre going to the ocean, you have to assume you could encounter a shark regardless of when or where that is, said Neil Hammerschlag, director of the Shark Research and Conservation Program at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School.

Fortunately, humans arent on the menu, and also fortunately, sharks tend to avoid people.

Still, there are places youre more likely to encounter a shark.

River mouths are not the best place to swim

A bull shark gets up close to inspect divers during an ecotourism shark dive off of Jupiter, Florida, on May 5, 2022. - Joseph Prezioso/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

You should avoid estuaries, said Richard Peirce, an author, shark expert and former chair of the UK-based Shark Trust and Shark Conservation Society.

Their often-murky waters are a favorite with bull sharks, which are the most likely to attack humans along with great whites and tiger sharks.

An awful lot of attacks occur in river mouths, where there is silt and other material in suspension in the river  people washing their clothes, people washing themselves, said Peirce.

Hammerschlag pointed out another area where an encounter is more likely: deeper channels between the shoreline and sandbars farther out.

Avoid areas with fishing

Before you jump in the sea, have a look around the horizon: What do you see? If you see fishing boats, Peirce says forget it.

Whether the fishing activity is commercial or recreational, material will often be being discarded, and unwanted dead fish, fish parts and the action of gutting fish are all putting chum in the water and inviting attention from sharks, he said.

Before you go in, watch for unusual fish activity, such as a whole bunch of small- and medium-sized fish jumping out of the water, Hammerschlag said. Thats a possible sign a shark might be nearby.

He also advised to not swim within roughly 50 yards of where someone is fishing from shore.

Avoid dusk and dawn

Swimming early in the morning or late at night can be lovely, but its also the time when a shark attack is most likely.

A lot of shark attacks are cases of mistaken identity, Peirce says, due to reduced visibility and identification ability on the behalf of the shark.

Hang with lifeguards

A lifeguard watches swimmers at the Terre Sacree beach on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica. Lifeguards might be able to tell you a lot about shark activity on their beach, and more importantly, about rip currents and other drowning threats. - PASCAL POCHARD-CASABIANCA/AFP/AFP via Getty Images

Chris Lowe, professor in marine biology and director of the Shark Lab at California State University, Long Beach, advises to do your homework before you go into unfamiliar waters. Bone up a little bit on species you might encounter in different places.

If you have any questions, ask a local lifeguard. He said they are a great resource.

I always recommend people go to guarded beaches. Its a lot safer, he said.

Dont wear shiny objects in the water

Be careful with jewelry, anything that flashes because sharks are always looking for fish. Lowe said.

In murky water, a shark may think that flash is a sign of a meal. And you dont want your hand or foot to get confused with that.

Follow your instincts

Probably the most important thing is to follow your gut, Hammerschlag said. If you feel wary about getting in the water  just dont go in the water.

A lot of people who have been bitten actually said they had a weird sensation before that, like they had an inner voice telling them to get out of the water and they didnt listen to it, he said.

If a shark is nearby

A great white shark swims off Guadalupe Island in Baja California, Mexico. It hosts one of the most prolific populations of great white sharks in the world. - Kike Calvo/AP

Dont panic

So youre being circled by a shark. The worst thing you can do right now is panic.

Dont start splashing around  youre just going to excite, incite and encourage the sharks interest, said Peirce.

Humans, apes, dogs and cats all have paws and hands. If we want to explore something we pick it up and we touch it, we feel it, we put it to our nose.

A shark has got no paws or hands, so if it wants to explore something, the only capability its got to do that is to put it in its mouth, said Peirce.

Thats why we often get exploratory bites which dont result in death and sometimes dont even result in serious injury. If you go swimming and splashing away, youre almost inviting the shark to come give you an exploratory or an attack bite.

Maintain eye contact

As the shark swims around you, keep your head on a swivel and try to maintain eye contact.

Sharks are ambush predators, Peirce explained. If youre turning around and facing it the whole time while it circles you, its not going to be half as comfortable as if its able to sneak up from behind.

Hammerschlag concurred, saying you should posture your body toward the shark so it knows you see it and youre following it. Then slowly back up toward your exit to a boat or shore.

If youre surfing, track the shark with your board, Lowe said. Let the shark know its being watched.

Marine biologists and shark divers Adriana Fragola and Kayleigh Grant show how that eye contact method works with tiger sharks. In a viral TikTok video (see top of story), the shark is seen as Fragola splashes away, capturing its attention. She turns around, faces the approaching shark, remains still in the water and gently deflects the shark away with her hand.

Youre definitely never going to outswim or outrun a shark if it were actually chasing you, Fragola says in the video.

Stay big or get small

This is where it gets complicated. If a shark is clearly in attack mode, you need to make yourself as big as possible in the water, according to Peirce.

The bigger you are in the water, the more respect youll get, he said.

But if the shark seems to simply be passing through, Peirces advice is to roll up into a ball.

If a shark sees you as a competitor for its food source, that can be one reason it attacks you, he explained.

If I didnt want to be seen by a great white shark as a competitor  and if it wasnt showing massive interest in me  I would actually curl up so he shows even less interest in me.

If youre being attacked

Dont play dead

This isnt a bear, its a shark. If you find yourself in an aggressive encounter, give it hell: punch, kick and poke at sensitive spots  but be careful where you aim.

Theres all this talk about punching a shark in the nose. Thats OK, but remember that just underneath the nose is a mouth, said Peirce.

This is a moving object in the water and youre not staying still either, so what you dont want to do is end up effectively punching at the mouth or anywhere near it.

A great white shark surfaces off the coast of Victoria, Australia. If you're being attacked and fighting back, try to avoid the dangerous mouth and go for the gills behind the mouth near the pectoral fins. - Kelvin Aitken/VWPics/AP

A good shot to the gills can also do the job: The gills are very sensitive  giving a shark a whack in the gills isnt a bad idea.

Are you carrying anything with you? If so, turn it into a weapon.

If youre a diver with an underwater camera, use it, if youre a snorkeler, rip off your snorkel and use it to poke the shark, Peirce says.

Ive had a lot of sharks come at me, and its (been) enough to use a shark billy  a small metal rod between two and three feet long  and Ive just given them a little nudge on their nose.

Its a good idea to swim with other people, Lowe said. Not only does that decrease the chances of an attack, he said, but youve got someone to assist you to a boat or shore if you are bitten.

Cut off the angles

A white shark swims across a sand bar off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in August 2021. - Charles Krupa/AP

If youre a diver and you run into trouble, try to get into a position where the shark cant get behind you, says Peirce.

Keep your back to something like a coral reef. Then youve only got one direction to look. Youre protected from behind, for example, and that enables you to keep the shark in sight in front of you and maybe swim to the top of the reef slowly to where your boat is.

Slowly back away

Displace the least amount of water possible. Try not to thrash and splash around as you gradually swim backwards toward shore.

You must try and keep the animal in sight and very slowly and gently try and swim backwards and get into shallow water. Again, youve got to be careful  large sharks can attack in very shallow depths.

Doing the above may help to a degree, but Peirce says the likelihood of escaping without injury when a big shark attacks is slim.

If a white shark is in full attack mode, theres not much youre going to be able to do at that point, he says.

This article, first published in 2015, is updated periodically.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
Columbus police cruiser

A man accused of fatally shooting a woman during an argument on the Southeast Side earlier this week is being held on a $1 million bond after being arrested Thursday afternoon.

Miles O. Gibson, 28, of the Southeast Side, was arrested without incident Thursday afternoon by U.S. Marshals Task Force officers, according to the Columbus Division of Police.

Gibson was wanted on an arrest warrant in connection with the Monday shooting death of 20-year-old Kennedy Cowans.

Kennedy Cowans, 20, was shot and killed on June 5, 2023, following an argument outside an apartment on the city's Southeast Side.

Cowans was found shot around 12:45 p.m. Monday at an apartment complex located off of Refugee Road on the Southeast Side. Witnesses told police they heard Gibson and Cowans arguing shortly before hearing a single gunshot.

Cowans ran into the apartment complex and sought help. She was found by officers on the 3300 block of Brooke Colony Drive, police said. She was rushed to Mount Carmel East Hospital, but died from her injuries at 3:02 p.m. Monday.

Cowans' family and friends have started an online fundraiser to help cover the costs of her funeral.

Gibson had his first court hearing on Friday morning in Franklin County Municipal Court. Judge Gina Russo set Gibson's bond at $1 million and ordered him to have no contact with Cowans' family, to stay away from where the shooting took place and not have any firearms in his possession.

If Gibson were to post that bond, he would not be released from the Franklin County jail, however, because he is also being held in connection with an unrelated 2021 burglary case. Gibson, according to Franklin County Common Pleas Court records, had failed to appear for a trial date in April and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

In that case, Gibson had been released on a $10,000 recognizance bond that was set in November 2022. His indictment and bond in the burglary case, under Ohio law, did not allow Gibson to possess a firearm.

jsmola@dispatch.com

@jennsmola

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Suspect given $1M bond in fatal shooting of 20-year-old woman
A suspect has been charged in a home invasion that happened May 29 in Frenchtown Township.

Ryan Eighmey, a 30-year-old Frenchtown Township man, was arraigned Tuesday in Monroe County District Court before Judge Amanda L. Eicher on the charge of second-degree home invasion, a news release from the Monroe County Sheriff's Office said. Bond was set at $50,000, and a GPS tether was ordered upon release.

Sheriff's deputies were dispatched at about 7 p.m. May 29 to the 3600 block of Nelson Drive in Frenchtown Township after receiving a report of a home invasion, the release said. Deputies arrived and discovered the suspect forced entry into the residence and stole multiple pieces of jewelry. While there, deputies canvassed the surrounding homes and developed a person of interest through surveillance video. The investigation was turned over to detectives who identified the person of interest and conducted a search of their residence. During the search, detectives recovered property taken from the victims home.

On Monday, detectives secured an arrest warrant for the suspect. Detectives, with the assistance of the Michigan Department of Corrections, located and arrested the suspect in Brownstown Township. He was lodged in the Monroe County Jail on home invasion and parole absconding charges.

Sheriff Troy Goodnough said in the release he thanks the people who provided tips leading to the successful apprehension of Eighmey.

Anyone with additional information regarding this investigation is asked to call the Monroe County Sheriffs Office Detective Bureau at 734-240-7530.

This article originally appeared on The Monroe News: Suspect charged in Frenchtown Township home invasion
Sweden to allow NATO to base troops before official accession

NATO

"The government has decided that the Swedish Armed Forces may undertake preparations with NATO and NATO countries to enable future joint operations," the statement reads.

Russia will further threaten neighbouring countries in the foreseeable future, as they believe that Russian dictator Vladimir Putins territorial ambitions are unclear.

"The decision sends a clear signal to Russia and strengthens Sweden's defense," they said.

Read also: Ukraines Western allies still searching for security solidarity month before NATO Summit

Together with Finland, Sweden applied to join the North Atlantic Treaty amid the Russian full-scale war against Ukraine in May 2022.

Finland officially became the 31st NATO member on April 4.

Turkey and Hungary still need to ratify Sweden's application to NATO.

Turkey preconditioned Sweden accession with demands regarding Swedens Kurdish communities, including the extradition of 120 people Turkey deems terrorists.

Read also:

Were bringing the voice of Ukraine to the world. Support us with a one-time donation, or become a Patron!

Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Erie police quickly collected evidence that a drug-related dispute fueled a fatal shootout at a short-term rental house in early 2022.

A large Erie gang was also connected to the killing, according to a newly unsealed 58-defendant federal indictment aimed at dismantling the gang, known as 4-Nation.

Members and associates of 4-Nation triggered the events at the house in the 3900 block of McClelland Avenue on Jan. 27, 2022, according to the indictment, which was unsealed on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Erie.

The indictment alleges the members and associates "attempted to commit an armed robbery of the drug suppliers" of two high-level members of the gang, or criminal enterprise: Davante Q. Jones, also known as Smoov, and Marius L. Russell, also known as Gifted. Jones is the lead defendant in the federal case and Russell is listed as the eighth-highest defendant, according to the indictment.

The robbery attempt, the indictment alleges, resulted in "a target of the robbery sustaining gunshot wounds and the death of a member of the enterprise who was participating in the robbery."

Jones, Russell and the other 56 defendants named in the 30-count indictment are not charged directly in connection with the fatal shooting.

Twenty-two of the defendants, including Jones and Russell, are accused of trafficking in the synthetic opioid fentanyl as well as methamphetamine and cocaine as members of 4-Nation and also engaging in other illegal activity as 4-Nation members dating to around 2012, when the indictment alleges 4-Nation formed.

The 36 other defendants are accused of conspiring to deal drugs in other capacities starting in August 2021. Some defendants are also accused of gun-related offenses and other charges.

But the U.S. Attorney's Office in Erie is using the fatal shooting and other incidents of violence and drug dealing to try to prove that the 22 accused members of 4-Nation committed racketeering by operating the gang.

The 22 were all indicted on a charge that they violated the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO. It is the law the federal government uses to prosecute organized crime, including the mob.

The U.S. Attorney's Office is using RICO to try to bring down 4-Nation, an organization that the office characterizes in the indictment as Erie's "most prominent gang" on the city's east side. In the 4-Nation case, a conviction on the RICO count would carry a life sentence under certain circumstances, according to court records.

Indictment lists shootout on McClelland Avenue as 'overt act'

In the section of the indictment against the accused 4-Nation members, the U.S. Attorney's Office alleges that "it was part of the conspiracy that each defendant would commit at least two acts of racketeering activity in the conduct of the affairs of the enterprise." The indictment alleges the accused gang members committed 43 "overt acts" of racketeering activity between July 2015 and March 2023.

The list includes the shootout on McClelland Avenue as well as other acts of violence, such as a drive-by shooting at a house in Erie in February 2016. In that case, Jones  the lead defendant in the federal indictment  pleaded guilty to a second-degree misdemeanor count of reckless endangerment and was sentenced to 11 to 23 months in the Erie County Prison in January 2017, when he was 23.

One person was fatally shot and one person was injured in an early-morning shooting on Jan. 27, 2022. at this house in the 3900 block of McClelland Avenue, which police said was operating as a short-term rental property at the time. A newly unsealed federal indictment has linked the shooting to activity related to the Erie gang 4-Nation.

The other overt acts include drug deals, weapons offenses and the stabbing of rival gang members. The shooting in the 3900 block of McClelland Avenue is the only homicide.

Several of the overt acts correspond to older cases that led to convictions or guilty pleas in Erie County Common Pleas Court. Most of the overt acts alleged to have occurred from mid-2021 to the present led to new charges related to the federal case.

In the McClelland Avenue case, Erie police allege the fatal shooting occurred during the robbery of four Arizona men staying at the short-term rental house. Four defendants are charged with second-degree murder in the slaying of 30-year-old Shannon Crosby, who the indictment alleges was a member of 4-Nation. One of the Arizona men staying at the house was also shot during what police said was an exchange of gunfire.

The four defendants are Julia D. Gaerttner, Marsea S. Jones, Jamie D. Smith, Jr. and Derrick S. Wright. They are scheduled to go to trial in January in Erie County Common Pleas Court. Those defendants are not named in the federal case.

An unprecedented investigation targets 4-Nation

The defendants in the 4-Nation case are to be arraigned in U.S. District Court in Erie over the next several days. At 58, the total number of defendants makes the case the largest to be prosecuted in federal court in Erie.

The indictment also represents the most extensive effort of local, state and federal authorities to fight illegal gang activity in Erie through criminal prosecutions. The use of the RICO statute signals the extraordinary scope of the case. It is the first time law enforcement agencies have used the RICO statute to target an Erie gang, officials said at a news conference on Friday at Erie City Hall.

"This investigation, these arrests, are truly historic," said Mike Nordwall, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Pittsburgh office, which includes the FBI office.

The FBI and a number of other federal, local and state law enforcement agents cooperated in the year-long investigation that focused on 4-Nation, Nordwall said. He said investigators tapped the phones of the accused gang members and used search warrants and other investigative tools to gather evidence.

The indictment alleges that 4-Nation trafficked in more than 150,000 fentanyl pills, more than 100 pounds of methamphetamine and multiple kilograms of fentanyl and powder of fentanyl-related drugs known as fentanyl analogues.

The gang is accused of getting the drugs from California, Arizona and Mexico and distributing them in Erie and in Ohio and New York, officials said. They said 4-Nation used violence to protect its territory, intimidate rivals and damage Erie.

"This gang has plagued the east side of Erie for a decade by committing acts of violence and distributing fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine and other illegal drugs. But no more," Stephen Kaufman, executive assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, said at the news conference. "We are confident the federal charges set forth in the indictment will result in convictions and the entire dismantlement of the 4-Nation gang."

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Erie is a satellite office of the Pittsburgh-based U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The Erie office is prosecuting the case at the federal courthouse in Erie.

Kaufman acknowledged that others in Erie might attempt to fill the void created with the charges against the 22 accused 4-Nation members. He said officials are monitoring the situation.

"Any time there is a vacuum created by this number of arrests, obviously sometimes others see an opportunity there, unfortunately," Kaufman said. "We in law enforcement are going to stay on top of that as well, because we know that can happen. But, no, we are not predicting any violence due to that. I think the violence will be significantly reduced due to this operation."

Read the indictment here. Read the the news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office, which includes the defendants' names and ages, here.

Hundreds of law enforcement agents helped in arrests

A total of 47 of the defendants had been arrested as of Friday morning, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office said. Ten of those defendants were later released, and 11 defendants were still at large as of Friday morning, the office said.

As many as 250 law enforcement officials participated in the arrests, the FBI's Nordwall said. The Erie police alone arrested 31 of the defendants on Thursday, starting at 4:50 a.m., according to police records.

The Erie FBI's Erie Area Gang Law Enforcement task force, known as E.AG.L.E., conducted the investigation. The task force is made up of a number of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, including the Erie police, Millcreek Township police, Pennsylvania State Police, Erie School District police and federal Customs and Border Protection officers. Investigators with the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS also assisted in the investigation along with the Erie County District Attorney's Office and Erie County detectives, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

The 58 defendants indicted in a newly unsealed case will be prosecuted in U.S. District Court in Erie.

The prosecutor is Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Sellers. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter. The initial proceedings are before Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Richard A. Lanzillo.

As the case moves through the court system  a process that is expected to take months, if not years, for many of the defendants  details of what the U.S. Attorney's Office alleges were 4-Nation's illegal activities could be further exposed in open court. The indictment summarizes what the office alleges was the purpose of the gang under the 22 accused members.

Unprecedented in scope: Federal indictment targets Erie gang as 22 accused members, 36 others charged in drug case

The 22 defendants, the indictment alleges, belonged to "a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in criminal activity including but not limited to drug distribution and acts of violence in furtherance of drug trafficking."

Headed to trial: Prosecutors seek 2nd-degree murder convictions in 2022 fatal shooting at Erie rental house

The indictment also alleges: "4-Nation continued to operate as a criminal enterprise despite attrition occurring when members were incarcerated for criminal offenses, left the gang or were killed. 4-Nation also continued to operate as a criminal enterprise in spite of internal factions and rivalries occasionally occurring within the enterprise.

"Rival gang members and others were aware of the continued existence of the enterprise, protection of its territory and criminal operations despite this attrition."

Ed Palattella at epalattella@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNpalattella.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Erie, PA gang linked to fatal shooting at short-term rental, feds say
Taiwan is quickly approaching campaign season in the high-stakes election to replace its president, Tsai Ing-wen.

The outcome will determine how the islands government positions itself between Washington and Beijing as the two nuclear-armed powers are locked in an intense competition for global dominance, with Taiwan as a key flashpoint.

The main rival to Tsais Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is the opposition Kuomintang (KMT), which has had recent success in local elections, responding to criticisms against the DPP on kitchen-table issues.

But the KMT is criticized by opponents as subservient to the government in Beijing, and the contrast with the DPP was spotlighted during dueling diplomatic trips earlier this year.

Former KMT president Ma Ying-jeou took a high-profile trip to mainland China in April at the same time Tsai was drawing backlash from Beijing for meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in the U.S.

However, the leading candidates for both parties are relatively untested on the international stage. And both parties appear to be staking out a position in line with a majority of Taiwanese, who favor the island keeping its democratic autonomy while holding back from pursuing full-fledged independence, which is a red line for Beijing.

Regardless of the outcome, the election will mark the end of Tsais eight years in power. Experts credit her with showing a steel spine in facing down, without provoking, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his professed goal of overtaking the island.

However, the DPP is also battling blame for the slumping economy and lingering anger over its COVID-19 response.

The young people, they live in a time where DPP was already in power  and they did see some mistakes that the DPP made during our governance, Andrea Yi-Shan Yang, deputy secretary general of the DPP, said in an interview with The Hill in her offices in Taipei.

So theyre judgmental and criticize the DPPs capability of running the country.

In early June, the DPP became embroiled in allegations of sexual harassment that have triggered resignations and sparked public outcry over the problem of sexual harassment in other professions and industries, drawing comparisons to the #MeToo movement in the U.S.

The DPPs favorability rating has dropped by half, the Washington Post reported Wednesday, citing the Taiwan Public Opinion Center.

Its likely to become a key election talking point, with DPP lawmakers already framing the resignations as the party taking responsibility and criticizing its competitors as failing to acknowledge or confront such issues.

On Tuesday, a KMT lawmaker was found liable for sexually harassing a woman DPP lawmaker in 2020 and made to pay $80,000.

Its unclear how the KMT will address the growing #MeToo movement. But the partys main selling point is as a peacemaker with China, arguing they are the only party that will prevent a war from breaking out.

Taiwans Vice President William Lai (left), the presidential nominee for the DPP party is competing against Hou Yu-ih, a popular mayor of New Taipei City who represents the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party. A third candidate, Ko Wen-je, is running for the Taiwan Peoples Party.

The KMT announced New Taipei City Mayor Hou Yu-ih, 65, as its candidate for president on May 17  a choice viewed as putting forth a competitive and popular contender with strong Taiwanese roots to push back against critics that the party is too close to Beijing.

Given the very, very tense, very, very unpleasant, and very, very dangerous cross-Strait security situation, another DPP victory in January next year will send a message to Xi Jinping and then make the entire thing ugly, Alexander Huang, director of international affairs for the KMT, said in an interview with The Hill.

We should ask the DPP to rest for four years and give Taiwan a break. And give the United States a break. DPP can always win another election, but for our own security, for the peace and stability in the next four years, KMT would be a structurally better choice for the common good and common interest, Huang added.

The U.S. views its partnership with Taiwan as vital to global stability  a responsible, democratic partner in the middle of critical international waterways where energy, commerce and key technology transit.

The DPP under Tsai has laid out a clear path: Align closely with the U.S. to strengthen Taiwans diplomatic clout and military defense to deter a possible Chinese invasion  a position likely to be continued under the partys candidate for president, 63-year-old Vice President William Lai.

A little more than 14 percent of the Taiwanese population favors the KMT, compared to nearly 31 percent for the DPP, according to the most recent Election Study Center at Taiwans National Chengchi University published in January.

A poll by the Chinese-language United Daily News on May 24 gave Lai a slim lead (28 percent) over Hou (24 percent).

But even as the DPP and KMT are the most dominant political forces on the island, support is growing for a third party, the Taiwan Peoples Party (TPP). Its chairman and likely candidate, Ko Wen-je, 63, is viewed as a formidable opponent, a charismatic former mayor of Taipei and professional physician. He rated 22 percent in the UDN poll.

We have a very sharp opposition leader in the Taiwan Peoples Party. Hes a hilarious guy, said Yang of the DPP. Hes favored by the young people because they think hes funny and hes direct and honest. Thats the impression the young people have.

Ko visited the U.S. in April to introduce himself and the party in Washington and described the TPP as a new middle ground between the DPP and the KMT.

KMT has always been on the submissive side when working with mainland China, while DPP stop all the channels of communications with PRC. I personally think there is always a possibility to find a space in between the two extremes when handling the cross-Strait relations, Ko said in a talk with the Center for Strategic and International Studies during his visit.

But DPP officials see no space for ambiguity.

Across the government they espouse laser focus on maintaining what they say is the status quo, holding back from declaring independence even as the island beefs up its self-defense and deepens its relations abroad.

We dont talk about sovereignty, we dont talk about independence, we dont talk about unification, lets just stay how it is  thats status quo, said Yang.

But status quo is not unchanged. Status quo is a rolling process, Yang added. For example, China is deploying more missiles, thats change of status quo, change of physical threats on Taiwan.

Supporters of Taiwans opposition the Nationalist Party (Kuomingtang) shout slogans in front of the party headquarters where the current New Taipei City mayor Hou You-yi attends a press conference in Taipei, Taiwan, Wednesday, May 17, 2023. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)

Taiwan viewed as a wakeup call a 2019 speech by Xi calling for the complete reunification of the island with the mainland and under the one country, two systems policy, a warning that its democracy risked being destroyed just like Hong Kong. Yang credited that speech for bolstering support for the DPP in the 2020 presidential election.

And Chinas military response in August 2022 to a visit to Taiwan by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), when it carried out live-fire drills around the island, represented one of the most intense periods of tensions between Beijing and Taipei in recent memory.

U.S. officials have warned that China is preparing to invade Taiwan by at least 2027, though that timeline is hotly debated.

Among the key factors are how much support Taiwan receives from the U.S.; Chinas military capabilities and domestic political and economic landscape; and Beijings assessment of how Western-democratic unity against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine could be turned on China.

Taiwan officials also fear an economic blockade, which they view as an act of war. U.S. and Taiwanese officials warn that Chinese military actions would not only result in an enormous loss of life, it would also rupture the global economy, militarizing key waterways that transit between 40 and 50 percent of the worlds commerce.

If that happens, its not only the failure of Taiwan, its the failure of all the democratic world, Taiwan Deputy Foreign Minister Roy Chun Lee said in a briefing with international reporters in Taipei in mid-May.

Taiwan under Tsai and the DPP has pushed to strengthen its military capabilities  passing legislation to extend mandatory military service from four months to one year, open up reservist training to veteran women soldiers, and improve combat training.

Huang said the KMT is likely to maintain what the DPP has laid out in strengthening Taiwans defense and close ties with the U.S.

We are the same, that we defend Taiwan, we will keep our relationship with the United States very close, because without the United States, the Republic of China would not be able to survive for that long, he said, using the formal name for Taiwan.

Still, Huang said that the KMT is also likely to restart dialogue with Beijing.

DPP say we are open to talk, but that Chinas political preconditions make communication unacceptable, Huang described.

For that part, we are different because we believe that to deal with Beijing  we have to recognize that there is a certain degree of ambiguity  to agree to disagree, he continued.

Which means that we agree that there is but only one China, but oppose that the PRC represents the whole China. That is an ambiguous description.

Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific Program with the German Marshall Fund, said the U.S. is unlikely to view as a risk the KMTs openness to talks with Beijing.

I think there has always been concern about the absence of communication channels between the two sides of the Straits since 2016, she said. It has heightened the potential for miscalculation and misunderstanding. So just the fact that dialogue would take place is not a bad thing.

More concerning is whether the KMT would continue policies pursued by the DPP and Washington in recent years, in particular, building a munition stockpile in Taiwan, which China is worried about, she pointed out.

If the Chinese were to put pressure on the KMT and say, you know, we really dont like that, would the KMT back off of some of those things that the Chinese have a high level of sensitivity about? And I think thats an area where the U.S. probably has more concern, Glaser continued.

But she added that it will be important over the next months of campaigning to really dig into the positions and policies that the candidates are putting forward, with Lai and Hou relative unknowns to the U.S.

For Lai, even his term as Tsais vice president hasnt allowed for much insight into his priorities or leadership style.

Right now he is being very careful to echo [Tsais] stances. Its a safe place to be. But it is difficult to know whether ultimately his policies would be different, particularly over time, or how he would react in crisis, or how he might respond as the Chinese start displaying major demonstrations of military force.

The competition is likely to be tight.

I think that this is going to be a close race. The KMT is going to give the DPP a run for its money, she said.

Disclosure: The writer was on a press trip to Taiwan paid for by the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The majority of the interviews were conducted independently.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
That tape of Trump bragging about a classified document is 'great evidence' against him, says a federal prosecutor turned high-end defense attorney

This image contained in a court filing by the Department of Justice on Aug. 30, 2022, and redacted by in part by the FBI, shows a photo of documents seized during the Aug. 8 search by the FBI of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Department of Justice via AP

Trump was indicted Thursday night over allegations of hoarding government records.

A recording reported on by CNN and others looks like "great evidence," says a former prosecutor.

That's because it shows Trump's awareness of what he was doing.

As former President Donald Trump faces an unprecedented indictment over allegations of hoarding government records, a tape obtained by CNN is emerging as a potentially crucial piece of evidence.

Ken White, a former federal prosecutor turned high-end defense attorney, told Insider that he views this tape as "great evidence" against Trump.

The tape in question captures a 2021 conversation at Trump's Bedminster resort, where he discusses retaining a classified document. "As president, I could have declassified, but now I can't," Trump says, according to reports on the transcript.

Trump was speaking about a classified Pentagon document regarding potential military action against Iran, CNN reported. He was giving an interview to the ghostwriter working on an autobiography of Trump's former chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

The indictment, the first of its kind against a current or former president in U.S. history, could prove a landmark case for the Justice Department, challenging its capacity to navigate the politically charged inquiry into Trump's retention of classified documents post-presidency.

Critical to the case, according to White, is the element of "willfulness." This means that the prosecution must demonstrate that Trump knowingly and intentionally broke the law keeping so many classified documents from his presidency in boxes at Mar-A-Lago.

White believes that the tape could provide vital evidence of Trump's awareness of the document's classified status, directly contradicting his public claims of being able to declassify documents "by thinking about it."

White also talked about the tape during a Wednesday episode of his "Serious Trouble" podcast with Josh Barro.

"The reports are that the discussion on tape reflects him saying that these are still classified, I can't show them to people, things like that. It would tend to rebut Trump's belief stated in public that he can declassify things with his mind or that they automatically declassified when he walks away with them in his pocket," White said.

In a series of Tweets Friday morning, CBS News correspondent Robert Costa reported that Trump spent the early days of his post-presidency fuming about what he saw as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley's attempt to burnish his reputation at Trump's expense. To make his case to visitors at Mar-a-Lago, Costa wrote, Trump would dig into sheafs of documents that he claimed proved him right. "Sometimes aides & visitors weren't even sure if what Trump was talking about on national security or military matters was true or if docs Trump mentioned existed, sources recalled," Costa wrote. "But Trump seemed to talk a lot about Milley and his own view of what really happened on that front."

As Trump fumed in post-presidency period about Milley, in his view, being cast as a hero and himself as an insurrectionist, he began to talk regularly about Milley in 2021, dismissing him and bringing up stories that made Milley seem unintelligent and untrustworthy, per sources  Robert Costa (@costareports) June 9, 2023

The indictment comes as a major development in the ongoing investigations against Trump, which have put Attorney General Merrick Garland in the spotlight as he seeks to restore the Justice Department's independence. Trump, who has announced his intention to return to the White House, is scheduled to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon.

The charges against Trump also extend beyond the federal investigation, with a second pending criminal case from the Manhattan District Attorney's office alleging that he falsified business records related to payments to Stormy Daniels.

Read the original article on Insider
Tattoo being used to identify pedestrian killed in hit and run in Myrtle Beach SC area

The Horry County Coroners Office is asking for help in identifying a pedestrian who was struck and killed by a vehicle on May 27 on North Kings Highway.

The man is identified as in his late 40s, white, weighing 170 pounds and is between 5 foot, 9 inches to 5 feet, 11 inches tall, according to a release sent by Chief Deputy Coroner Tamara Willard.

The man has light brown or sandy blonde hair and his mustache and goatee are graying.

The coroners office sent a photo of the mans tattoo on his right bicep in hopes that it can help in his identification. He has no other tattoos, but does have some kind of skin sensitivity, the release said.

The Horry County Coroners Office is asking for help in identifying a pedestrian who was struck and killed by a vehicle on May 27 on North Kings Highway. A tattoo located on the mans right bicep was released by the coroner in the hopes of identifying him.

The man was killed about 10:22 p.m. May 27 by a vehicle at 9440 North Kings Highway, just south of the Lake Arrowhead Kroger, the coroners office said. South Carolina Highway Patrol said the accident happened near Cove Drive.

We have exhausted all avenues we have and the need the publics help in identifying this individual, Willard said in the release.

Anyone with any information should call the Coroners Office at 843-915-5110 or after hours and on weekends at 843-248-1520.

The South Carolina Highway Patrol had posted a flyer with a photo of the possible vehicle involved in the accident on its Twitter page.

Horry County 5-31-2023: Attached is the updated Hit-and-Run flyer from the fatal collision that occurred on US 17 in Horry County on 5-27-2023. pic.twitter.com/KTZ8vvzgkA  Trooper Lena SCHP (@SCHP_Troop5) May 31, 2023

The make and model is unknown. The vehicle will have damage on the front and on the hood, Lieutenant Sonny Collins said.

South Carolina Highway Patrol is asking anyone with information about the vehicle or the crash to call *HP.
A young girl who was stranded alone in the Washington state wilderness for more than a day has been praised for her courage and resourcefulness.

Ten-year-old Shunghla Mashwani went missing on 4 June while her family members walked back across the river to a parking area at the Cathedral Pass Trailhead in the Cle Elum River Valley, according to the Kittitas County Sheriff. When the group of around 20 adults realised theyd lost Shunghla, they immediately went back and started searching.

Shunghla told her family and rescuers she found herself suddenly separated and alone when the family was travelling back toward the footbridge and couldnt find the bridge on her own, a statement by the sheriffs office read.

The family, who like to spend time in the no-cell area because it reminds them of their native Afghanistan, looked for Shunghla for two hours before a passerby offered to use the Starlink phone at their neighbouring cabin to call 911.

Local authorities and search crews launched a massive search for Shunghla using drones, helicopters and K-9 units. According to CNN, Shunghlas father also recorded a message that was broadcasted over the wooded area, as concern grew over its steep and rugged conditions.

First responders from neighbouring counties joined the search and swift water teams also searched the river, fearing the worst.

On the evening of 5 June, roughly 25 hours after Shunghla went missing, two volunteers found her just one mile and a half from where she was last seen. Another team used an inflatable rescue watercraft to bring her to the other side of the river, where she arrived with only a few scrapes.

Shunghla was found by two volunteers who had been looking for her after she went missing in the Washington wilderness (Kittitas County Sheriffs Office)

Images shared by the Kittitas County Sheriffs Office show Shunghla and her father sharing an emotional embrace after being reunited (Kittitas County Sheriffs Office)

I was thinking, I will find my dad and keep walking in the forest to find my dad, Shunghla told local news station KING. ...I was thinking I would go to sleep and wake up and find my mom and dad in the forest.

Images shared by the Kittitas County Sheriffs Office show Shunghla and her father sharing an emotional embrace after being reunited. Authorities have praised Shunghla for being brave and for sleeping between two trees to protect herself from the cold night.

Shungla said she was thinking about reuniting with he rparents before beign rescued (Kittitas County Sheriffs Office)

The prospect of a little girl being out there alone in the woods is terrifying, Kittitas County inspector Chris Whitsett also told KING. She was a remarkably composed and resilient little girl. Were ecstatic that we were able to find the result that we did instead of the result that we feared.
People hold posters depicting Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, center, Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic, right, and pro-regime tabloid editor Dragan J. Vucicevic wearing a prison uniforms during a protest against violence in Belgrade, Serbia, Friday, June 9, 2023. Protesters have been demanding the resignations of senior government officials and the revocation of broadcasting licenses for two pro-government television networks. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP)  Tens of thousands of people rallied again in downtown Belgrade on Friday, demanding the resignation of Serbia's populist president and warned of radicalization of the peaceful protest if their demands aren't met  all in the wake of two mass shootings that stunned the nation.

The protesters carried posters of President Aleksandar Vucic and his close ally Prime Minister Ana Brnabic dressed in black-and-white striped prison uniforms.

They chanted slogans Vucic Go Away and protest leaders said their demands, which include the resignation of top security officials and the withdrawal of national broadcasting rights to pro-government TV stations that promote violence, must be met by the end of the next week.

They said that if their demands were not fulfilled by the deadline, the peaceful protests will assume a new, more radical form. They didn't reveal what the radicalization of the protests could include.

Belgrade and some other Serbian cities have seen mass demonstrations since two deadly shooting rampages in early May that killed 18 people and wounded 20 others, including elementary school pupils. The protest on Friday was the sixth in the Serbian capital since the killings.

We cannot return the lives to the victims, but we can make sure that this doesnt happen again, actor Milan Maric said while addressing the crowd. We want Serbia without violence, Serbia with hope.

The opposition has accused Vucic of fueling intolerance and hate speech against his opponents during his increasingly 11-year autocratic rule, while illegally seizing control of almost all state institutions. Vucic has denied this, saying that opposition groups want him toppled by force or even killed.

The Serbian president earlier this week promised an early parliamentary election, in an apparent attempt to defuse the growing public discontent with his rule. Most of the opposition parties, however, have rejected holding an election while Vucic maintains a firm grip on almost all leverages of power, including the mainstream media.

The two shootings on May 3 and 4 stunned the nation, especially because the first one happened in an elementary school in central Belgrade, when a 13-year-old boy took his fathers gun and opened fire on his fellow students. Eight students and a school guard were killed and seven other people were wounded. One more girl later died in hospital from head wounds.

A day later, a 20-year-old used an automatic weapon to randomly target people in two villages south of Belgrade, killing eight people and wounding 14.

A new protest is planned for next week in what is becoming an increasingly serious challenge to Vucic, perhaps the biggest one he has faced since coming to power.
Wildlife authorities are looking for two men seen in a video chasing a moose in a pickup truck in Idaho.

A video of the pursuit emerged online Monday, June 5, and quickly gained attention. It was filmed from the Coeur dAlene River and shows the moose racing down Old River Road in Kingston as the truck charges after it with its engine revving. The truck bed was filled with stacked logs.

Dude, what are they doing? one kayaker asked in the video.

If you know who the owner and driver of this vehicle is, Im sure Idaho Fish and Game Panhandle Region would like to talk to him, the caption on the video says, adding that the chase was filmed at about 2 p.m.

Officials with the Panhandle Regions Fish and Game office are investigating, a spokesperson told McClatchy News.

We are looking into it, TJ Ross said in a phone interview. We dont know all the details of what transpired, but regardless its a reminder to folks that harassing wildlife with a vehicle is against the law.

Thousands of people shared thoughts on the video. One called it heartless.

Thats what happens when you let the forest be aplay ground to people that dont care, someone said.

Hard to watch really, someone else agreed. Zero appreciation for beauty.

Shame on him for torturing and scaring that poor thing like that! another person said.

Some wondered if the moose might be pregnant or might have a newborn calf.

KHQ spoke with the man who filmed the video. He told the station he pointed the camera toward the road when he heard someone laying on the horn.

You want to give them their space, especially this time of the year when they have newborns and babies to take care of, he said. We need to show some respect for these beautiful creatures and be respectful citizens of the outdoors.

Kingston is about 390 miles north of Boise.

Baby moose gets startled and ends up swept away from mom. Then came the happy reunion

Stunning video shows moose and her baby cruising highway in empty Alaska national park

Moose chases snowboarders down slope after tourists crowded it, Colorado video shows
(Bloomberg) -- Austin real estate developer Nate Paul, an associate of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, was indicted on charges of making false statements to influence financial institutions over loan applications.

Most Read from Bloomberg

The charges come less than two weeks after the attorney general was impeached and suspended from office pending his trial in the state Senate. His name doesnt appear in the indictment.

Read More: Texas AG Ken Paxton Impeached by Republican-Led State House

According to the indictment, returned Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Austin and unsealed Friday, the affected lenders were based in Texas, New York, Connecticut and Ireland, and the alleged violations took place between March 2017 and April 2018. Prosecutors say that in one instance Paul sought a loan while falsely claiming one of his accounts had $31.6 million in cash, when in fact it held less than $500,000.

The law office of Gerry Morris, who represents Paul, said it had no comment on the charges.

Read the US Justice Department statement here

Paul is a central figure in the alleged misdeeds that resulted in Paxtons impeachment last month at the hands of fellow Republicans in the Texas House. Whistleblowers in his office claim they were fired for reporting bribery and other misconduct to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Among other claims, they say Paxton tried to use the powers of his office during the pandemic to help Paul by preventing real estate foreclosure sales and retained a lawyer to investigate the developers adversaries. The FBI has opened an investigation into the allegations, but no charges have been filed.

The charges against Paul complicate things for Paxton by highlighting that he was involved with an alleged grifter and raise the prospect that the developer could decide to provide evidence against Paxton as part of a plea deal, according to Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.

Its one more unknown that he and his legal team will have to contend with, Jones said, in reference to Paxton.

Read More: Texas AG Paxtons Impeachment Trial Draws Major Legal Minds

Paxton has denied wrongdoing. His office didnt immediately respond to an email and a call seeking comment on Pauls indictment.

Paul was indicted on eight counts. Each carries a maximum penalty of up to 30 years in prison if he is convicted, according to prosecutors, although under federal sentencing guidelines the term could be shorter. He made his initial court appearance on Friday in Austin and was released on bond.

The case is US v. Natin Paul, 23-cr-100, US District Court, Western District of Texas (Austin).

--With assistance from Brendan Walsh.

(Adds details from indictment in third paragraph.)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
Texas just modified the rules for In God We Trust signs hung in schools. What changed?

No one can bar a Texas teacher from displaying an In God We Trust sign donated to his or her classroom, according to a new state law.

Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill in a 27-second video shared on Twitter on Thursday evening. The policy comes after legislators in 2021 passed a law requiring public schools, universities and colleges to display donated signs containing the motto.

Some teachers complain that they are being denied the ability to display In God We Trust  our national motto  in their classroom. Well, Im going to fix that, Abbott said, signing House Bill 2012.

Just signed a law to prohibit school districts from denying teachers the right to display "In God We Trust" in their classrooms. pic.twitter.com/Aq7OT9Uy5D  Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) June 9, 2023

The 2021 law requires the donated posters or framed copies of the motto be displayed in a conspicuous place if they contain a representation of the United States flag centered under the national motto and a representation of the state flag. The signs cannot include additional words, images, or other information.

Soon after the law went into effect, the Carroll school district accepted In God We Trust signs from Patriot Mobile, the conservative-owned phone company. The district later rejected additional signs that included In God We Trust in Arabic and rainbow colors like the pride flag, because they already had signs that had been donated.

This In God We Trust poster with the rainbow pride flag in the background was rejected as a donation by the Carroll school district board Monday night.

This In God We Trust poster written in Arabic rejected as a donation by the Carroll school district board Monday night.

The rejection raised questions about how many signs schools had to display, whether the motto could be written in a language besides English, and whether the rainbow colors of the flag symbolizing LGBTQ pride fit within the parameters for the signs for required display.

The parameters as outlined in the 2021 bill remain intact with the 2023 update, which says a teacher may not be prohibited from displaying in a classroom a poster or framed copy of the national motto that meets the requirements for donated signs.

Lawmakers this year considered a proposal by Rep. Phil King, a Weatherford Republican, to require signs with the Ten Commandments in classrooms. The proposal didnt pass by the end of the regular session.

Senators continue to meet in the first of what is expected to be several special sessions. Abbott, who sets the policy topics for special sessions, has limited the agenda to border security and property tax relief.

The House has adjourned after passing two related bills May 30.

The Senate has also passed its related bills, but on Thursday referred a new version of the Ten Commandments legislation to a committee despite it falling outside of the sessions policy area.

Also sent to committee was a bill to affirm a school employees ability to engage in religious speech or prayer while on duty, and a bill that would allow districts to designate a period of prayer and religious text each school day.
Texas Pete trademark was born 70 years ago ... in North Carolina. How it got its name

Texas Pete hot sauce was trademarked 70 years ago ... in North Carolina.

So, how did a sauce with roots in Winston-Salem come to bear the name of the Lone Star State? Heres what historians say about the brands origins, including the milestone it reached June 9, 1953.

On that date, Texas Pete was registered as a trademark to the T.W. Garner Food Company, helping to cement its spot in cupboards across the nation. But the recipe got its humble start years earlier, during the Great Depression, according to the brand and the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Texas Petes origins date back almost a century to 1929, when 16-year-old Thad Garner used money that was meant for college to buy a restaurant.

Along with the restaurant came a special secret recipe for a delicious, so everybody told them, barbecue sauce, Texas Pete wrote on its website. The restaurant did not survive, but the barbecue sauce, made in the family kitchen, survived and prospered.

Garners dad, Sam, reportedly traveled the back roads of North Carolina to sell the sauce, which helped the family make ends meet.

There were people who said they should make this product hotter, and more spicy, Ann Riddle, president and CEO of Garner Foods, told Our State magazine in 2017. And the family said, Well, instead of doing that, why dont we just make another product?

Texas Pete  made from hot red peppers, vinegar and salt  got its commercial start in 1936, state officials wrote.

Origins of the name

But, as the brand phrased it, How is it that a tasty red pepper sauce made in North Carolina happens to be named Texas Pete anyway? Its believed to have come as Sam Garner joined his sons Thad, Harold and Ralph in trying to create an American name for their product.

The Texas Pete name was chosen to evoke the spicy Mexican inspired foods of Texas, experts said. Pete comes from Harolds nickname.

In the 1930s, cowboys were popular on-screen characters, and the brand became a symbol of self-reliance, historians said. But recently, the cowboy-inspired logo has sparked controversy.

North Carolina is responsible for making:

- @krispykreme

- @Bojangles

- @pepsi

- @TexasPete

- @DrinkCheerwine

- @MtOlivePickles

- @CookOut

- Over 50% of the US sweet potato supply

- Two different styles of BBQ



And SO much more. Our tastebuds are eternally grateful.  NC Museum of History (@NCmuseumhistory) June 1, 2021

In September, a class-action lawsuit accused Garner Foods of deception. The customer who filed the suit said Texas Petes original hot sauce bottles feature a lasso-holding character and a lone star symbol, leading him to think the product was made in Texas.

We are currently investigating these assertions with our legal counsel to find the clearest and most effective way to respond, the company wrote Oct. 10 in a statement to McClatchy News.

In addition to creating the name, Sam and his three sons  known collectively as the four Garners  opened a factory on the site of their familys Winston-Salem home, where it still stands today. Over the years, the brand expanded to more sauce flavors and was even included in World War II rations, officials said.

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Texas is set to deploy a buoy barrier in the Rio Grande as part of plans to deter migrant crossings, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday.

He shared the news after he signed six bills related to border security. Funding will come from $5.1 billion approved by the state legislature to secure the border.

"What we're doing right now, we're securing the border at the border," Abbott said. "What these buoys will allow us to do is to prevent people from even getting to the border."

The first 1,000 feet of buoys will be deployed at Eagle Pass, which Steve McCraw, director of the state's Department of Public Safety, called "the center of gravity for smuggling." The first deployment will cost under $1 million and will begin "pretty much immediately." Officials did not share a more specific number for the cost of the barrier.

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw points to an illustration of new border security implementation during a news conference on June 8, 2023, at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas. / Credit: Brandon Bell / Getty Images

A Texas National Guard member drowned last year in Eagle Pass while attempting to rescue migrants in the river.

"We don't want people to come across and continue to put their lives at risk when they come between the points of entry," McCraw said.

The buoys have been tested by special operators, tactical operators and specialists with Border Patrol, McCraw said. It can be quickly deployed and can be moved as needed.

Officials hope the buoys will act as a deterrent to prevent migrants from entering the water. While there are ways to overcome the buoys, which can range in size, it will take a lot of effort and specialized skills.

"You could sit there for a couple of days and hold onto it, but eventually you're going to get tired and want to go back. You'll get hungry," McCraw said.

There will also be webbing going down into the water and anchors to the bottom so people cannot swim underneath.

The Texas chapter of the League of United Latin Americans Citizens condemned Abbott's plan. State Director Rodolfo Rosales denounced it as an inhumane, barbaric and ill-conceived plan. Rosales said the organization stands against any measure that could lead to a loss of migrant life, but did not specify what dangers the organization felt the buoy barrier could pose.

"We view it as a chilling reminder of the extreme measures used throughout history by elected leaders against those they do not regard as human beings, seeking only to exterminate them, regardless of the means employed. It is with profound horror and shame that we bear witness to the consideration of these measures, which are evidently intended as political theatre but will undoubtedly result in the loss of innocent lives among the refugees seeking asylum in the United States.

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Lubbock police on Friday identified the man suspected of leading multiple law-enforcement agencies on a cross-county pursuit in a stolen vehicle after being shot by police Thursday afternoon.

Jeffrey Enriquez Jr., 34, is charged with aggravated assault against a public servant in connection with the event. Officials served the arrest warrant Friday morning following an investigation by the Lubbock Metropolitan Special Crimes Unit.

At 2:16 p.m. Thursday, the Lubbock Police Department was notified of a reported theft at a hardware store near 50th Street and University Avenue, according to a news release issued Friday. Police said the theft victim used her phone's tracking service, which led officers to a gas station in the 100 block of East Main Street in New Deal, about 17 miles north of the store.

Detectives with the department's crime suppression unit arrived at the gas station in separate unmarked police trucks and found the vehicle Enriquez was driving, a white Mustang convertible, parked by the gas pumps, according to a probable cause affidavit.

The detectives were in plain clothes but wore bulletproof vests that identified them as police officers, according to the affidavit.

The detectives boxed in the Mustang and activated their emergency lights before attempting to detain Enriquez, the affidavit states.

One of the detectives approached the Mustang's driver and sole occupant from behind and ordered him to get out. The driver, identified as Enriquez, refused and reversed the Mustang, which knocked the detective into the fuel pumps and also struck the police truck.

Enriquez then reportedly drove the vehicle toward the other detective, who fired his service pistol at the suspect.

Enriquez sped off, leading multiple law enforcement agencies on what police called a "lengthy pursuit" that ended in a crash just over an hour later. Officials found Enriquez and the crashed vehicle in a field miles from where the chase began, near FM 784 and FM 789 north of Petersburg, the release stated.

When officers took Enriquez into custody, they determined he had been shot and was seriously injured. Enriquez was airlifted from the scene to University Medical Center in Lubbock.

Police later determined the vehicle Enriquez drove was stolen out of Amarillo, the release stated.

Enriquez remained held at the Lubbock County Detention Center Friday afternoon.

Lubbock police said the officer who fired the shots, a 20-year law-enforcement veteran, was placed on administrative leave, a standard practice after an officer-involved shooting.

LPD's Office of Professional Standards is investigating the officer-involved shooting in conjunction with the Metro unit's investigation, police said. The LPD Major Crash Unit, Texas Department of Public Safety and Texas Rangers are also investigating.

The Lubbock Police Department, New Deal Police Department, Petersburg Police Department, Abernathy Police Department, Hale County Sheriffs Office, Hale Center Police Department, the Texas Department of Public Safety and Plainview Police Department were all involved in the pursuit, LPD said.

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Suspect ID'd in Lubbock theft, officer-involved shooting, high-speed chase
Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray points to a video display of an "unidentified aerial phenomenon" during a House subcommittee hearing on UAPs last month. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

Big, shiny eyes. Towering nearly 10 feet tall. 100% not human. Aliens.

Thats the 911 call that came into dispatchers last month from a Las Vegas area resident reporting extraterrestrial life in his backyard, just about an hour after local police witnessed an object falling from the sky.

The paranormal investigation by police did not turn up any answers.

On May 1, 2023, at approximately 12:29 a.m. LVMPD dispatch received a call about a suspicious situation, the Las Vegas Police Department said in an email statement. Officer conducted a preliminary investigation and closed the event as unfounded."

At around 11:50 p.m. on April 30, body camera footage from an officer with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police captured a bright, glowing object cutting through the sky, according to local TV channel 8 News Now.

About 40 minutes later, a local resident placed a 911 call to report that something 100% not human was staring at him from his backyard shortly after he and his family saw an object fall from the sky, the station reported.

Theres like an 8-foot person beside it, and another ones inside us, and it has big eyes and its looking at us  and its still there, the caller, who said that he and his family had seen something fall from the sky, told the dispatcher.

I swear to God this is not a joke, this is actually  were terrified, the caller said.

Local TV channel 8 News Now first reported the story and obtained the video and audio from that weird evening, including the 911 call and body camera footage.

The dispatcher clarified the situation with the caller, careful to choose the right words.

So, theres two people  theres two subjects in your backyard? the dispatcher asked.

Correct, and they're very large, the caller said. Theyre like 8 foot, 9 feet, 10 foot. They look like aliens to us. Big eyes. They have big eyes. Like, I cant explain it, and big mouth. Theyre shiny eyes and theyre human. Theyre 100% not human.

Two officers responded to the callers home, KLAS reported.

Im so nervous right now, one of the responding officers said while en route to the house. I have butterflies bro. He continues to say that people saw a shooting star, and now these people say theres aliens in their backyard.

Officers interviewed the family on their front lawn.

What did you see? one of the officers asks.

It was like a big creature, one witness said, adding it was around 10 feet tall.

The officer tells them about the incident his colleague saw just before the call came in.

Im not going to BS you guys. One of my partners said they saw something fall out of the sky, too, the officer said. So thats why Im kind of curious. Did you see anything land in your backyard?

A man in a robe said some of his family members saw a big something with light plummet from above.

Police continued to investigate that evening, asking neighbors if they too had witnessed any unusual objects fall from the sky. KLAS reported the investigation lasted for several days.

The Department of Defense is tracking more than 800 cases of "unidentified aerial phenomena," often called UFOs, from the past 27 years, according to government officials, who added that only 2% to 5% of cases can be explained.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Cercado de Lima, Peru

Lima, Perus capital, is a city rich in history and delectable cuisine. On the countrys stunning Pacific coast, Lima is an eclectic mix of colonial architecture, ancient ruins, and modern neighborhoods. Visitors from all over the world flock to the city to indulge in the citys mouthwatering cuisine and fascinating array of cultural activities. This lively Latin American metropolis extends a warm welcome to visitors thanks to its one-of-a-kind combination of traditional practices and contemporary conveniences.

Limas Historic District & Larco Museum

To begin, visit Limas historic district to see what its all about. Surrounded by impressive buildings such as the Government Palace, the Cathedral of Lima, and the Archbishops Palace, the Plaza de Armas is an excellent starting point.

The famous Larco Museum is a must-see for art and history enthusiasts alike. Explore the museums extensive pre-Columbian art collection, which includes ceramics, gold and silver artifacts, textiles, and more. Learn more about Perus fascinating ancient cultures and the art they produced.

Miraflores and Barranco

Miraflores and Barranco are two of Limas most exciting neighborhoods, and no visit would be complete unless you visited both. The famous Parque del Amor (Love Park) in Miraflores provides expansive views of the Pacific Ocean. Enjoy the chic boutiques and tasty cuisine of the Larcomar shopping center while taking in the energetic vibe of the district.

Barranco, on the other hand, is known for its bohemian vibe, which attracts visitors with its colorful streets lined with art galleries, charming houses, and active nightlife. Cross the Bridge of Sighs (Puente de los Suspiros) and take in the artistic and lively atmosphere of the neighborhood.

Peruvian Cuisine

You cant visit Lima without sampling some of the local cuisine. Lima is the gastronomic capital of South America, with some of the most taste-worthy cuisines in the world. Try some ceviche, causa limena, and anticuchos, which are all delicious and refreshing. Perus culinary heritage can be experienced by sampling traditional dishes at local restaurants and food markets. For a one-of-a-kind meal, try some of the inventive dishes served at Michelin three-star restaurants such as Central, Maido, and Astrid y Gaston.

History & Culture

To learn more about Peruvian culture and history, visit the Museo de la Nacion. This museum offers a fascinating journey through time, with exhibits on the Inca, Moche, and Chavn cultures, among others. Explore artifacts, learn about their significance, and gain a better understanding of Peruvian culture.

Pachacamac is an absolute must-see for anyone interested in Limas pre-Columbian history. This dig, located on the outskirts of the city, reveals the remains of an ancient ceremonial complex. Explore the ruins of this holy site to learn about the ancient Peruvians rituals and beliefs.

Before departing, stop by the Parque de la Reserva and experience the magic of the Magic Water Circuit. As dusk falls, the parks 13 ornamental fountains transform into a kaleidoscope of water, light, and color. Enjoy the spectacular performances and make some unforgettable memories while there.

Afro-Peruvian Experience

The Afro-Peruvian Museum in Limas El Carmen neighborhood celebrates Afro-Peruvian history and culture. It showcases the influence of Afro-Peruvians in music, dance, art, and literature through exhibits of artifacts and videos.

El Carmen itself is a vibrant community with African influences evident in local customs. Visitors can explore the area, enjoy the pulsating beats of Afro-Peruvian music, and admire colorful murals and street art. The Afro-Peruvian Cultural Center, located nearby, hosts events and performances highlighting Afro-Peruvian music and dance. Its a lively and enriching cultural experience in the heart of Lima.

Traveler Story: Sleeping In A Pod On The Side Of A Mountain In Peru
Thousands of UW students from 3 campuses graduating this weekend

A big weekend is ahead for thousands of University of Washington students who will receive their diplomas during graduation ceremonies.

More than 18,000 students are graduating from UWs three campuses in Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma.

Commencement ceremonies began Friday when students at the universitys Tacoma campus crowded the Tacoma Dome at 10 a.m.

Then on Saturday in Seattle, Husky Stadium will be packed with thousands of graduating students and their families for the 12:30 p.m. ceremony.

The university is expecting more than 40,000 spectators for the ceremony, with more than 7,000 students graduating.

That means roads near the stadium will be busy. Both Interstate 5 and State Route 520 will likely be backed up, affecting both the Ship Canal and Montlake bridges.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona will deliver the commencement speech.

On Friday, nerves and excitement clouded the minds of students who will be graduating.

It feels feels scary. It feels new. Like theres just new feelings every morning, said UW student Kenna Fojas.

Im definitely pretty anxious, I feel like Ive just been doing school my whole life, said UW student Duaa Zaheer.

The class of 2023 says the last four years have been a rollercoaster, especially with COVID interrupting their first year.

It was pretty unfortunate because I had to basically move out my belongings halfway through freshman year, they were like, You gotta go, go home, said Zaheer.

On Sunday, the graduation ceremony for UWs Bothell campus will be held at 11:45 a.m. at T-Mobile Park in Seattle.

Congratulations to the class of 2023!
Three people charged with murder in 2018 killing of man in College Hill, prosecutors say

Three people are facing murder charges more than four years after 58-year-old Raymond Heard was found shot in College Hill, the Hamilton County Prosecutor's Office confirmed.

Jamal Jewell, of Springfield Township, Alexis Hill, also of Springfield Township, and Michael Hill, of Mount Airy, were all indicted Thursday on charges of murder, kidnapping, felonious assault and tampering with evidence.

Jewell and Michael Hill are also facing weapons possession charges, court records show.

In November 2018, Cincinnati police officers responded to the 4700 block of Gray Road for a report of a person shot, officials said.

The officers found Heard had been shot, officials said, adding he was pronounced dead at the scene.

As of Thursday evening, jail records did not indicate that any of the suspects are in custody at the Hamilton County Justice Center and court records related to the case were unavailable.

The Enquirer will update this story as more information becomes available.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Three charged over 4 years after man was shot, killed in College Hill
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has accused Russia of causing the collapse of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, calling it an act of "ecocide".

The burst of the huge dam, under Russian control in southern Ukraine's Kherson region, unleashed large floods, forcing thousands of residents to flee and wreaking environmental havoc. Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other for its destruction.

"This ecocide as a continuation of Russia's unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine is yet another atrocity which leaves the world lost for words. Our eyes are once again on Russia who must be held accountable for their crimes," Thunberg, 20, said on Twitter on Thursday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy replied on Twitter: "Thank you for your position and for upholding the truth @GretaThunberg! (Russia) must be held accountable for all its evil against people, life and nature!".

Thunberg on Friday told Reuters during a weekly climate protest by the Swedish parliament that the aftermath of the dam burst was "absolutely horrifying and awful".

"Russia needs to be held accountable for their action and for their crimes. The eyes of the world are on them now," Thunberg, who graduates from high school on Friday, said.

The United States said on Tuesday it could not say conclusively what caused the dam's destruction but it was assessing reports that Russia, which has been occupying the dam since last year, was behind the blast.

(Reporting by Anna Ringstrom and Marie Mannes, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
Egyptian officials say they have captured the tiger shark

A Russian swimmer was eaten by a tiger shark in the Red Sea in an attack that his father, who was watching on helplessly, described as looking like a meat grinder.

Video footage online showed the entirety of Thursdays attack, in which 23-year-old Vladimir Popov repeatedly called out for his papa as he attempted to swim away from the shark.

At one point, he seemed to wrestle with the animal but was flipped upside down, his legs flailing in the air. Moments later, the shark dragged him under and he did not resurface.

What kind of help can you give? This meat grinder happened in 20 seconds, he was just dragged under the water, Yury Popov, the young mans father, told news outlet 112. We went to the beach to relax. My son was attacked by a shark, it all happened in seconds.

The Russian victim, Vladimir Popov, was a permanent resident in Egypt

A small boat reached the spot of water where Vladimir was attacked just a few seconds after he went under, but by then it was too late. Videos from the scene later showed a shark being beaten on shore by fishermen.

In a sign of the growing divisions created by the Ukraine-Russia war, users on Ukrainian Twitter and Telegram used the shark attack to taunt Russians. In one of the many Ukrainian cartoons shared online, a shark stands by a drowning Russian man giving a thumbs up.

Oleksiy Arestovych, a former adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, criticised his countrymen making fun of the killing. Judging by the number of jokes... about a Russian killed by a shark, dehumanisation is already here. And if you have it, then youve lost, he said.

Vladimir Popov was reportedly a permanent resident of Egypt and was living in the Red Sea resort of Hurghada, where he was spending time with his father and his girlfriend.

A fin is seen above the water during the shark attack in Hurghada, Egypt - GRIGORY KATAEV/REUTERS

The attack itself took place on the resorts Dream Beach, and tourists in the area have been told to remain vigilant and follow staff instructions.

The victims girlfriend is said to have been in the water at the time of the attack as well but managed to escape.

Egyptian officials say they have captured the tiger shark which attacked the swimmer and are conducting laboratory tests on the animal.

The animal had displayed abnormal behaviour and water activities would be suspended in the area until Sunday as a precaution, they added.

Viktor Voropayev, the Russian Consul-General, said the Egyptian authorities had confirmed the death of the Russian citizen, who was born in 1999.

The victim was not a tourist, but a permanent resident of Egypt, he told Russian reporters.

The Red Sea is a popular tourist destination, particularly among Russians. While sharks are common in the Red Sea it is rare for them to attack people. However, it is the third time in a year that a shark has fatally attacked a swimmer near Hurghada, following the deaths of one Austrian and one Romanian tourist in July 2022.

In 2018, a Czech tourist was also killed by a shark in the Red Sea, following an attack that killed a German in 2015. And in 2010, five attacks in five days that were unusually close to the shore of Sharm el-Sheikh killed a German and injured four others.

When Egyptian authorities investigated the 2010 deaths, they said that the illegal dumping of animal carcasses and other raw meat in the sea may have attracted predators which then turned their attention to human prey.

Rising temperatures in the region may also have caused the sharks to swim in shallower waters, increasing the risk of contact with humans.

Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month, then enjoy 1 year for just $9 with our US-exclusive offer.
Time to vote for Kansas Citys favorite ice cream  and see all our reader nominations

We asked, you answered: A whopping 113 readers responded to our calls for reader nominations in the newspaper and on social media for your favorite ice cream spot in Kansas City.

You nominated scoop shops and custard makers all around the metro  and five locations made our final showdown for the title of Kansas Citys favorite ice cream.

Here are the five finalists:

With an impressive 29 nominations, this local spot was our most-recommended ice cream shop of 2023. In addition to ice cream, Pops also makes homemade fudge, Italian cannolis, cotton candy and other sweet treats.

Its like you have gone back in time to an old cool ice cream parlor, said reader Gommy Gray of Spring Hill.

What really makes Pops the best is the staff. They are always friendly and welcoming, added Paola resident Valerie Wright.

Readers recommended trying Pops blackberry cobbler ice cream, their strawberry milkshake or a scoop in one of their homemade waffle cones.

J.T. Daniels mural at Betty Raes Ice Cream in the River Market features colorful creatures and drips inspired by the shops creative flavors.

This local favorite got 22 shoutouts from our readers. Well-known by Kansas City residents, this shop offers creative flavors like lavender honey, matcha and creme brulee year-round. Its menu also features ice cream flights, fresh-made ice cream sandwiches and a handful of dairy-free flavors.

I like the River Market location. Its always busy, but the outdoor seating is lovely, said reader Brandi Sahlfeld of the West Plaza neighborhood. Its a fun destination if you want to take a trip on the streetcar.

Readers recommended trying adventurous flavors like brown butter toasted pecan, Joes burnt ends barbecue ice cream and goat cheese, apricot and walnut as well as favorites like the smores sundae.

While its flagship scoop shop is located in Lawrence, this reader favorite has had a second location running in Olathe since 1999. The family-owned business got nominated 14 times by our readers, and offers scoops, sundaes, shakes and other drinks.

It was one of the first places my son and I visited when we first moved here on a blazing hot July day, said Lenexa reader Holly Heinzer. (It) hit the spot, and eased us into Kansas life. She added that she appreciates the shops great flavor combos (and) generous sprinkle policy.

Readers recommended trying its creatively named flavors like Da Bomb, Mahomes Magic, Gold Dust and Rock Choc(olate) Jayhawk.

High Hopes Ice Cream has a walk-up window.

Located just south of Rockhurst University and UMKC on Troost Avenue, this walk-up window got ten nominations from our readers. This local spot is known for its creative flavors like mango chamoy frozen yogurt and Mother Earth  a blue spirulina ice cream laced with crumbled matcha tiramisu.

Theres a richness and flavor to this ice cream thats unlike any other in this city, said Brookside reader Mike Jeffries. Plus, their variety of homemade toppings sets them apart (puff pastry, strawberry shortcake crumble and an Oreo/Smores mix thats legitimately addictive). Its a small place, but grabbing a cone in the summer and walking along Troost feels authentically Kansas City.

Readers suggested trying the bread pudding sundae as well as scoops of flavors like french silk pie, strawberry birthday cake, black sesame and campfire smores.

The newest scoop shop on our list, this Brookside spot garnered eight nominations from our readers. After spending two years as an online-order pop-up, owners Jessica and Alex Wood opened their retail location in late March. The minimalist shop offers a rotating selection of flavors.

Nestled in the heart of Brookside, this ice cream shop is so inviting right along the trolly trail, said Plaza resident Audrey Wood.

It is a cute spot with delicious ice cream and welcoming employees! added reader Abby Margolin of Prairie Village.

Readers recommended trying the salted caramel pretzel, cinnamon churro, Biscoff Blastoff and mint chip flavors.

Ice cream flavors at French Custard include cookies and cream, mocha mudslide, mint, butter pecan and French vanilla.

Time to pick the winner

Cast your vote below for your favorite ice cream spot in Kansas City. If you cant see the poll below, click here. Voting closes on Wednesday, June 14 at 11:59 p.m.

What other Kansas City ice cream shops did readers recommend?

While these other local spots didnt make it into the top five, readers still raved about their great flavors, staff and menu items. Here are all the other spots nominated.

One More Scoop  Belton and the Northland: This local shop was nominated by five readers, who recommended trying flavors like butter pecan, key lime and Mamas Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake.

The Golden Scoop  Overland Park: Nominated by four readers, this shop employs those with developmental disabilities and features classic flavors like chocolate, cookie dough and strawberry.

Summer Salt Ice Cream Company  Prairie Village and Leawood: This local spot just celebrated its third anniversary, and got four nominations from our readers. Flavors include butter pecan, birthday cake and salted caramel.

These ice cream shops got two nominations each:

These ice cream shops got one nomination each:

Readers also fondly remembered the permanently closed Murrays Ice Cream in Westport and Glace Artisan Ice Cream in South Plaza.

Do you have more questions about Kansas Citys local businesses? Ask the Service Journalism team at kcq@kcstar.com.
Twists and turns: The zig-zag journeys of Trumps classified documents at Mar-a-Lago

This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of records that had been stored in the Lake Room at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., after they were moved to a storage room on June 24, 2021. Trump is facing 37 felony charges related to the mishandling of classified documents according to an indictment unsealed Friday, June 9, 2023.

WASHINGTON  The Department of Justice's long-running investigation into the classified documents found at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home came to an end Thursday with an indictment filed in Federal District Court in Miami.

Trump and his long-time personal aide and former White House valet, Walt Nauta  informally known as Trump's "body man" because he is frequently at Trump's side to attend to his needs and requests  were charged with dozens of counts of allegedly violating eight federal statutes related to the handling of classified documents.

Federal agents had seized hundreds of classified records in August of last year from Trumps property in Palm Beach, Florida, following allegations that the former president took classified records from the White House after leaving office. Trump has denounced the investigation saying he was entitled to take the records.

According to the Presidential Records Act, all documents from the end of Trumps tenure in the White House  which are considered part of federal property  should be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration.

Heres a timeline of the movement of the classified documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago:

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Jan. 14, 2021 - Leaving the White House

People move boxes out of the Eisenhower Executive Office building inside the White House complex on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021.

Movers are photographed wheeling boxes outside of the White House and loading moving trucks six days before Trumps last day in office.

Jan. 18, 2021 - Moving trucks spotted in Florida

A moving truck is parked outside Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida on Jan. 18, 2021.

CBS Miami reports at least two moving trucks arrive at Trumps Mar-a-Lago home.

Jan. 20, 2021- Trump heads to Mar-a-Lago

This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of records being stored on the stage in the White and Gold Ballroom at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Trump is facing 37 felony charges related to the mishandling of classified documents according to an indictment unsealed Friday, June 9, 2023.

Trump leaves the White House and travels to Mar-a-Lago. White House aides are spotted carrying boxes onto Marine One before Trump departs the White House for the last time.

Boxes that arrived at Mar-a-Lago were were stored at one of the club's ballrooms and stacked on the ballroom's stage, according to the indictment.

March 2021 - Documents move to ballroom

Nauta and other employees move boxes from the ballroom to the business center at the Mar-a-Lago Club, according to the indictment.

April 5, 2021 - Boxes stored in shower

This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of records stored in a bathroom and shower in the Lake Room at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Trump is facing 37 felony charges related to the mishandling of classified documents according to an indictment unsealed Friday, June 9, 2023.

One Trump employee texts another employee about moving boxes out of the business center to make space for the business center, which was set to be used as an office for Trump's team.

Employees then move some boxes from the business center to a bathroom and shower in Mar-a-Lago Club's Lake Room, according to the indictment.

May 6, 2021 - Archives notices items missing

The National Archives discovers documents are missing from the items received from the Trump administration when he left office. It requests the records from Trump, writing in an email: There are also now certain paper/textual records that we cannot account for. We therefore need your immediate assistance to ensure that NARA receives all Presidential records as required by the Presidential Records Act.

The email, from the archives General Counsel Gary Stern, cites specific missing documents, including correspondence between Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un, the letter that former President Barack Obama left for Trump on his first day in office and two dozen boxes of original presidential records stored in the residence of the White House.

Around the same time, Trump directs employees to clear a storage room on the ground floor of the Mar-a-Lago Club to store boxes, according to the indictment. The storage room is located near a liquor supply closet and linen room and has multiple outside entrances.

June 24, 2021 - 80 boxes housed in storage room

This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of records in a storage room at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., that were photographed on Nov. 12, 2021. Trump is facing 37 felony charges related to the mishandling of classified documents according to an indictment unsealed Friday, June 9, 2023.

More than 80 boxes are moved to the storage room.

July 2021 - Trump shows off classified document

At the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump participates in an audio-recorded interview with a writer, a publisher and two members of his staff where he shows and describes a "plan of attack" prepared for him by the Defense Department and a senior military official, according to the indictment. Those in the room did not have security clearances.

Trump made comments like, "as president I could have declassified it" and "now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret."

August/September 2021 - Trump reveals document to PAC rep

Also at the Bedminster club in New Jersey, Trump shows off a classified map of a military operation to a representative from his political action committee who did not have security clearances, according to the indictment.

Dec. 7, 2021 - Documents spill on storage room floor

Nauta finds that several boxes had fallen in the storage room, their contents spilled onto the floor. One of these documents was marked with identification that it should only be released by the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Nauta photographs the spilled contests and texts the photo to another employee, according to the indictment.

January 2022 - Trump returns 15 boxes of records

This photo shows an aerial view of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla. on Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2022.

Trumps team returns 15 boxes of documents stored at the Mar-a-Lago estate to the National Archives for review. Nauta, along with another Trump employee, load the boxes into Nauta's car and he takes them to a commercial truck for delivery to archives.

The National Archives reviews and finds that 14 of the 15 boxes contain classified materials.

The documents include correspondence with the North Korean leader that Trump described as love letters and the letter from Obama.

The boxes also include 184 unique documents bearing classification markings including 67 documents marked confidential, 92 documents marked secret, and 25 documents marked top secret."

Jan. 31, 2022 - Archives finds torn-up records

Archives releases a statement saying some of the documents received had been torn up by the former president.

As has been reported in the press since 2018, White House records management officials during the Trump Administration recovered and taped together some of the torn-up records, according to the agencys statement. These were turned over to the National Archives at the end of the Trump Administration, along with a number of torn-up records that had not been reconstructed by the White House.

Feb. 7, 2022 - 15 boxes of records return to D.C.

People walk up the steps of the National Archives on Dec. 22, 2018 in Washington.

Archives releases a statement saying the administration arranged for the transport of 15 boxes of presidential records from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Feb. 9, 2022 - DOJ gets involved

The National Archives contacts the Department of Justice related to classified materials found in the 15 boxes.

David Ferriero, the national archivist, writes in a letter: Because NARA identified classified information in the boxes, NARA staff has been in communication with the Department of Justice.

March 30, 2022 - FBI opens investigation

The FBI opens a criminal investigation into the unlawful retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, according to the indictment.

April 26, 2022 - Federal grand jury opens investigation

A federal grand jury opens an investigation into the classified documents.

May 22, 2022 - Aide pulls a box out of storage

Nauta enters the storage room at Mar-a-Lago where boxes of documents were stored. He remains inside for 34 minutes before carrying out one of the boxes, according to the indictment.

May 24 - June 1, 2022 - Moving boxes around

Nauta on May 24 removes three boxes from the storage room. On May 30, he removes 50 boxes and on June 1, 11 more.

On the afternoon of May 30, a Trump family member texts Nauta about bringing boxes on a plane, writing: "Not sure how many he wants to take on Friday on the plane. We will NOT have a room for them. Plane will be full with luggage," according to the indictment.

Nauta writes back that Trump wanted to "pick from them," referencing the boxes he had moved.

June 2, 2022 - Trump attorney conducts search

A Trump attorney, who was not informed that boxes had bee moved from the storage room the day before, arrives at Mar-a-Lago to look for classified documents. Nauta escorts the attorney to the storage room.

The attorney locates 38 documents with classification markings and places them in a folder, then asks Nauta to bring him clear duct tape to seal the folder.

Nauta then escorts the attorney to a dining room to meet with Trump, who asks "Did you find anything? ... Is it bad? Good?" according to the indictment. Trump allegedly makes a plucking motion to the attorney who said he interpreted it to mean "pluck it out" if "there's anything really bad in there."

Later that evening, the attorney contacts another of Trump's attorneys, Christina Bobb, to ask her to serve as a custodian of records and sign a certification of the search for documents.

On the same day, a Mar-a-Lago worker, who has not been publicly identified, sees Nauta move boxes into a storage room, according to the The New York Times, which cited an unidentified source.

June 3, 2022 - Justice Department receives some records

Bobb, who did not herself perform a search of Trump's documents, signs a certification that a "diligent search" was conducted and "any and all responsive documents" accompany the certification and that no more classified documents were found at Mar-a-Lago.

The Justice Department receives an envelope from a Trump attorney at Mar-a-Lago with 38 documents  17 marked top secret, 16 secret and five confidential.

Earlier that day, Nauta and others load several boxes along on a plane that Trump boarded when leaving Mar-a-Lago, according to the indictment.

Trump records investigation: From early red flags to the search at Mar-a-Lago

Aug. 8, 2022 - DOJ searches Mar-a-Lago

Secret Service agents stand at the gate of Mar-a-Lago after the FBI issued warrants Aug. 8.

The Justice Department searches Mar-a-Lago for additional documents and find many more.

FBI agents log more than 100 classified documents and 20 boxes of items from the Palm Beach estate, including 11 sets of classified documents.

Some are marked top secret, including one set deemed Various classified/TS/SCI documents, an abbreviation for top secret/sensitive compartmented information.

Overall, agents seize more than 11,000 government documents and photographs in the Mar-a-Lago raid in addition to hundreds of classified records. Other items found in the search are later reported to have included:

31 confidential documents, 54 "secret" documents and 18 "top secret."

48 empty folders with classified banners

42 folders marked "return to staff secretary/military aide"

More than 11,000 government documents or pictures without classification markings

Nearly 1,700 magazines, newspapers or press clippings

19 articles of clothing or gift items

33 books

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Timeline of Trump documents: From the White House, around Mar-a-Lago
A big box clothing store is moving into Thibodaux.

TJX, the parent company of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, is renovating 357 N. Canal Blvd in preparation for opening a location. Known for purchasing overstocked items from other outlets at discounted prices, these "off price" stores can offer the same product at a lower price than many of their competitors.

TJX opening a store at 357 North Canal Blvd. Work should be complete in July.

Tenant Build Inc. is the contractor working on the building, and contractor Sam Hoover said his company should be completed by July.

"Our construction completion date is the seventh, and then we will be installing store fixtures up through the 21st, and then they bring in all the merchandise, and that takes about two weeks," he said.

More: La. Techs Jonathan Fincher joins LSU coach Kim Mulkey with honor

More: Supreme Court ruling could void Louisiana congressional map without second Black district

TJX operates 4,865 stores in nine countries and five online stores, including 1,304 T.J. Maxx, 1,189 Marshalls, 901 HomeGoods, 81 Sierra and 49 Homesense stores, as well as tjmaxx.com, marshalls.com, homegoods.com and sierra.com, in the United States.

The company's net sales for the first quarter of fiscal 2024 were $11.8 billion, an increase of 3% over last year, and total inventories as of April 29 were $6.4 billion, compared to $7.0 billion at the end of the first quarter of fiscal 2023.

This article originally appeared on Daily Comet: TJX opening Thibodaux 'off price' store
Tribute for victims the day after knife attack in French alpine town of Annecy

Toddlers stable after Annecy attack, Macron hails emergency responders Tribute for victims the day after knife attack in French alpine town of Annecy

By Antony Paone and Geert De Clercq

ANNECY, France (Reuters) -Two toddlers gravely wounded by a knifeman in the French mountain town of Annecy were in a stable condition on Friday and doctors are optimistic for their recovery, President Emmanuel Macron said.

Well-wishers laid flowers on Friday at the playground where the suspect, said by the government to be a 31-year-old Syrian refugee, struck on Thursday morning, apparently targetting young children.

A shocked nation paid tribute to a modern-day pilgrim on a walking tour of France's cathedrals who tried to block the assailant during his attack and then gave chase.

Four children in all - aged between 22 and 36 months - and two pensioners were wounded during the assault.

Macron, who has called the attack an "act of absolute cowardice", visited the hospital in Grenoble where three of the four children are being treated before heading to nearby Annecy.

"The doctors are very confident," Macron told the police and paramedics who responded to the aftermath of the attack. He also thnaked the emergency responders.

Among the children wounded in the attack were a British national and a Dutch national.

A video of the attack, taken by a bystander and verified by Reuters, showed the assailant jump a low wall into a children's playground and repeatedly lunge at a child in a stroller, pushing aside a woman who tried to fend him off.

France hailed the bravery of a young Catholic pilgrim who came face-to-face with the assailant and used his backpack as a shield as he sought to block the attack. French media dubbed the 24-year-old "the backpack hero".

The management and philosophy student has identified himself only as Henri.

"All I know is I was not there by chance," he told the CNews television network. "It was unthinkable to do nothing ... I followed my instincts and did what I could to protect the weak."

His Facebook and Instagram accounts were flooded with messages giving thanks for his bravery.

"May God bless you ... you did what you could at that moment, you did not give up, you did not run. You are an angel," Instagram user Mag Capone wrote on his site.

ASYLUM REQUEST

A Mass will be held in Annecy Cathedral in tribute to the victims and their families later on Friday, church authorities said.

Annecy Prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said she was extending the suspect's custody for further interrogation. She has said there was no indication that terrorism was the motivation and that the suspect was under investigation for attempted murder.

Police have arrested a 31-year old Syrian national who was granted asylum in Sweden 10 years ago, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said on Friday.

He had entered France legally, she said, and was carrying Swedish identity documents and a Swedish driving licence. Sweden and France are both members of the Schengen Area, the world's largest passport-free zone which allows the unrestricted movement of people between 26 European countries.

The attack has laid bare the tensions between Europe's free movement rights and the pressure governments in countries like France and Italy are coming under from voters to toughen immigration laws as societies shift rightwards politically.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said late on Thursday that the suspect had no police record in France, was homeless and had been questioned by police on Sunday as he was washing himself in the Annecy lake.

It was "a troubling coincidence" that just four days before the attack the assailant's demand for asylum in France had been rejected, the minister said.

One of the two pensioners caught up in the attack told Reuters he had been sitting on a park bench when the attacker approached on the run.

"He probably wanted to create one more victim," said Youssouf, who asked to withhold his family name.

(Reporting by Antony Paone in Annecy and Geert de Clercq in Paris; writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Nick Macfie and Angus MacSwan)
PETERSBURG  Both sides rested Thursday in the Toni Knight murder trial but not before the defendants took the stands to claim their focus was on self-defense, not on killing a bystander.

In sometimes muted, sometimes rambling and sometimes tense testimony, Devin Mitchell and Jesiah Flowers described the events that led up to the July 2, 2022 confrontation that ultimately took Knights life. Cross-examinations frequently became confrontational as each man claimed the other initiated the gunfight inside the ArtistSpace Lofts apartment complex on Perry Street.

Both are charged with second-degree murder in the death of Knight, a 19-year-old woman who was shot through the chest as she carried groceries into the building. Police say she was caught in crossfire in the buildings lobby, and the commonwealths attorneys office filed murder charges against both men because their actions were responsible for the young womans death.

What has made the trial interesting is the fact that both defendants were also charged with attempting to injure the other during the battle. Flowers is charged with malicious wounding for shooting Mitchell. That made for some contentious moments at the defense table during the two days of testimony.

More: Knight murder trial begins with differing accounts of what prompted the ArtistSpace gunfire

In their own defense

In back-to-back appearances on the stand  first Mitchell, then Flowers  both said they acted out of fear after noticing the other was armed. According to surveillance video from the building, Mitchell and Flowers passed each other on a stairwell when something sparked the shootout. Mitchell was by himself while Flowers was accompanied by his two sisters and 16-year-old Keshawn Hicks, a third suspect who made a plea agreement with prosecutors and will be sentenced in August.

Mitchell testified that as he passed the group, he heard one of them say, Motherf****r aint talking s***! He said he looked over his shoulder and saw Flowers and Hicks coming down the steps reaching for their weapons.

Mitchell, who was carrying a .40-caliber Glock in a holster, said he took out his gun and held it by his side. Flowers reportedly fired three .9mm bullets, one of which hit Mitchell in the side, and Mitchell began firing. He said Knight was never in his line of fire, despite the fact he was heading out the door as she was coming in, and he only saw her peripherally.

The video showed Knight falling face-down to the sidewalk as Mitchell left the building, his gun pointed back into the complex.

I thought she was just trying to get out of the way, Mitchell said.

Under cross-examination, Mitchell was asked why he did not just run outside when he saw the people coming after him because nothing was physically blocking the doorway. An avid gun enthusiast, Mitchell said the fight-or-die" impulse took over, so he drew his gun to defend himself.

It was the only option, he testified. I felt like if I turned my back and ran, I would have been gunned down.

Several times during the cross-examination from Flowers attorney James Bullard, Mitchell answered questions with questions of his own. When asked repeatedly why Flowers claimed Mitchell cursed and threatened him, Mitchell replied, Where are you hearing that I was cursing at him? Circuit Court Judge Dennis Martin had had enough.

You answer questions on the stand, you dont ask them, Martin admonished Mitchell.

Flowers time on the stand was not any easier. He and Stephen Sommers, Mitchells lawyer, had their own verbal thrust-and-parry after Flowers testified that he heard Mitchell threaten to kill me and my family as they passed on the stairs, but he later said he went after Mitchell because he did not hear what was said.

Sommers asked Flowers why he did not walk up to Mitchell and ask him to repeat what he said, but Flowers  who had a gun in the front pocket of his hoodie  said he saw Mitchells gun and got scared. He also claimed he did not know Hicks and one of his sisters who followed him down the steps had their own guns.

You went back down there looking for a fight, didnt you? Sommers said.

No, sir, Flowers replied.

You knew you had your man behind you and your sister behind him, didnt you? Sommers said. You went down those steps knowing you had fire back-up, didnt you?

Again, Flowers replied, No, sir. He claimed he never had his hand on the gun in his hoodie, but he pulled it out and fired two shots. A forensic investigator had testified earlier that three .9mm cartridges were recovered from the scene.

Flowers claimed he had a .45-caliber weapon, not a .9mm. When Sommers asked him then why investigators did not recover any spent .45 ammo, Flowers said, I dont know.

A long-standing feud

Earlier in the trial, lead prosecutor Thomas Chaffe said that Flowers and Mitchell had previously encountered each other in 2020 at Hopewell High School. He produced a video of the two confronting each other in a school hallway. Both dropped their bookbags and walked into another hallway where Chaffe claimed a fight broke out. However, Mitchell and Flowers said they only argued and never came to blows.

It was that bad blood, Chaffe claimed, that sparked the ArtistSpace confrontation. Mitchell was living in the complex, and Flowers sister had an apartment there. Surveillance video from the night before the shooting depicted Flowers getting on an elevator and seeing Mitchell walk by, but Flowers testified he never saw him before the shooting.

Bullard and Sommers lobbied Martin to not allow the video to be shown to the jury, claiming that too much time had passed between the high school and July 2. Martin denied their request, saying the video supports the prosecutions claim that the pair had a history.

Twice on Thursday, Martin denied the defenses request to dismiss all the charges against their clients, saying the evidence showed each acting in self-defense.

Prior to Flowers taking the stand, Martin ordered Flowers mother out of the courtroom for allegedly falling asleep during the trial. This aint no bedroom, the judge said, adding that he had warned her previously about her actions in the gallery.

Coroner testifies

The coroner who performed Knights autopsy took the stand to describe the fatal injury. Knight was shot in the upper chest, and the bullet exited through her back. As pictures of the autopsy were shown, Knights family members wept quietly.

Dr. Chrystal Van Dusen testified that burn marks around the entry wound indicated that the bullet hit Knight anywhere from close proximity with her skin to as far as three feet away. However, it has never been determined whether the bullet came from Mitchells or Flowers gun; therefore, both men are charged.

Flowers attorney believes Mitchells gun fired the fatal bullet because he was closer to Knight than Flowers. Van Dusen said her expertise is in determining the cause of death, not how far the shot went. Mitchells attorney claims a bullet from Flowers gun struck Knight.

The medical examiners office could not determine the caliber of the bullet that killed Knight. Van Dusen did testify, though, that Knights wound was fatal within minutes of being shot.

Following instructions from Martin and closing arguments by the attorneys, the jury will get the case sometime Friday morning. Court begins at 8:30 a.m.

Bill Atkinson (he/him/his) is an award-winning journalist who covers breaking news, government and politics. Reach him at batkinson@progress-index.com or on Twitter at @BAtkinson_PI.

This article originally appeared on The Progress-Index: Toni Knight murder case will go to Petersburg jury Friday
I took her boyfriend, woman gloated before love triangle turned deadly, MI cops say

A woman killed another woman she called her best friend after they were romantically involved with the same man, Michigan cops say.

The love triangle killing occurred around 4 a.m. Tuesday, June 6, in Capac, according to the St. Clair County Sheriffs Office.

A man who lives at the Capac home called authorities to report an assault, indicating a woman was not waking up, the sheriffs office said. Deputies found the 44-year-old female victim unconscious but still breathing in the home.

She was taken to a hospital with severe head trauma and died Thursday, according to the sheriff. Her identity has not been publicly disclosed.

Raquelle Casillas, also 44, was at the home at the time of the deadly assault, according to the sheriff.

She was arrested and later charged with open murder, authorities said. The sheriffs office said she is being denied bond.

The female parties had been reportedly disputing on and off for days about a shared relationship with the male, according to the sheriff.

A day before the killing, Casillas posted a photo on Facebook with another woman, who she called her best friend. Both women were smiling and had black eyes in the photo.

Asked in the comments why they had black eyes, Casillas responded, We were fighting. I took her boyfriend.

Capac is about 60 miles north of Detroit.

Man stabbed after he finds girlfriends ex-boyfriend hiding in closet, Texas cops say

30-year-old woman ambushed in fatal beating over love triangle, Georgia police say

Man hunted down exs boyfriend with shotgun, Georgia officials say. He got prison time
Beloved Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi's last episode sizzled with a flavorful record, as the long-running reality competition series crowned its first-ever back-to-back season winner on Thursday's Top Chef: World All-Stars finale.

After previously winning season 19, Brooklyn-based contestant Buddha Lo won the Emmy-winning Bravo program's 20th season, earning a $250,000 prize over Top Chef Mexico season 2 winner Gabriel "Gabri" Rodriguez and Top Chef season 16 champion Sara Bradley.

TOP CHEF -- Episode 2014

Fred Jagueneau/Bravo Padma Lakshmi's final episode of 'Top Chef'

Lo's record on season 20 included four Quickfire wins, four elimination challenge wins, and triumphing after the finale meal, which saw the trio of chefs preparing a dinner for several high-profile guests in Paris.

"I'm truly honored to be a part of this iconic season. Winning back-to-back seasons of Top Chef feels surreal," Lo, the executive chef at Marky's Caviar in New York City, said in a statement following his victory. "It's been an incredible journey from the moment I was called to Houston all the way to the finale in Paris. Being raised in Australia with parents from Hong Kong and Malaysia, my food represents different parts of the globe, and to compete against chefs at the top of their game from around the world was a dream come true. It was the ultimate competition."

Thursday's episode marked the last for Lakshmi, who has been nominated for 14 Emmys for her hosting and producing.

TOP CHEF -- Episode 2014

Fred Jagueneau/Bravo Finalists on 'Top Chef: World All-Stars' season finale.

"After much soul searching, I have made the difficult decision to leave Top Chef," Lakshmi wrote in a June 2 social media post announcing her exit. "Having completed a glorious 20th season as host and executive producer, I am extremely proud to have been part of building such a successful show and of the impact it has had in the worlds of television and food."

In addition to Top Chef, Lakshmi has written books and launched the Hulu food series Taste the Nation in 2020.

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Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher said Friday he will not challenge Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., in the 2024, dealing a blow to state and national Republicans who had signaled that the Green Bay congressman was their strongest recruit to help them take back the Senate majority.

In recent weeks, with pressure quietly mounting from party insiders, Gallagher had repeatedly said he wanted to maintain his focus as chairman of the House Select Committee on China  and in announcing his decision to not run, he said he would do just that.

As the representative of Northeast Wisconsin and Chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Community Party, I have a rare, bipartisan opportunity in the 118th Congress to help restore American strength, prevent war in the Pacific, and defend our basic freedoms from community aggression, Gallagher said in a statement. Accomplishing this mission and serving Wisconsins 8th District deserve my undivided attention. Therefore, I will not run for the Senate in 2024 and will pursue re-election to the House.

Many national Republicans had viewed Gallagher, a 39-year-old former U.S. Marine, as a promising up-and-comer who represented the best shot at taking on Baldwin, a two-term incumbent and a prolific fundraiser. Recruiting a strong candidate to run against Baldwin would help Republicans in their quest to win back the majority in the Senate.

In recent weeks, Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee  the group that runs GOP Senate campaign efforts  made no secret of his desire for Gallagher to run, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he would be "a very strong candidate."

In addition, an NRSC-commissioned poll showed Gallagher in a tight race with Baldwin in a hypothetical matchup.

Rep. Mike Gallagher listens during a hearing of a House Committee Hearing at the Capitol (Alex Brandon / AP)

In a statement Friday, committee spokesman Tate Mitchell said Gallaghers decision to not run was obviously disappointing.

But it would have been political malpractice not to try to recruit him, Mitchell said, adding, We will have a strong candidate in Wisconsin.

No Republican candidate has yet announced a challenge to Baldwin.

But with Gallagher, a noted critic of former President Donald Trump, no longer in the running, attention will now turn to Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., and businessmen Eric Hovde and Scott Mayer. All three have said theyre considering campaigns. Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke has also not ruled out a bid.

GOP strategists interview by NBC News said Republicans need to find, and unite around, a candidate quickly if they are to have a shot at defeating Baldwin.

"Wisconsin Republicans need to find a candidate that can compete politically and financially and do so soon," said Ben Voelkel, a Milwaukee-based Republican strategist not currently working for any of the prospective candidates.

Tiffany, who represents a rural district in northern Wisconsin, said in an interview this week that hed been in regular touch with Gallagher and other prospective candidates to gauge the likelihood of their bids, and signaled hed announce his own decision over the summer.

Ill make my decision independent of what anyone else does, though I am interested in what the others do, Tiffany said.

Republicans will see a favorable Senate map in 2024: Democrats must defend 23 seats next year (that includes three held by independents who caucus with Democrats), while Republicans will have to defend just 10.

While Wisconsin is among one of the strongest pickup opportunities for Republicans, defeating Baldwin is likely to remain a battle, even in a presidential year with a vulnerable incumbent president. A strong fundraiser, Baldwin consistently polls higher than Biden, who narrowly won Wisconsin in 2020, in the state. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race as Lean Democratic.

Democrats, however, say they wont take anything for granted.

This is Wisconsin, where both sides start with 48%, Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said in an interview. Republicans are going to target it to get their Senate Majority, especially given the overwhelming focus of the GOP in winning Wisconsin to grab the presidency.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
Top takeaways as Donald Trump makes more history: 'It all could have been avoided'

WASHINGTON  More history from Donald Trump: First former president to be indicted in federal court.

Already facing trial in New York state court over hush money payments, Trump's now-pending federal trial over allegedly hiding classified documents and lying about it generates a whole new list of unprecedented developments.

Among the takeaways (so far):

First federal case against a former president

There are two ways to look at this.

Trump's version: It's the first time that an administration controlled by one party has indicted a former president of another party who is also running for president again.

Its election interference at the highest level," Trump said in a video posted on Truth Social. "Theres never been anything like whats happened.

The other version: Trump is the first former president to be held to account for wrongdoing.

"The rule of law is alive and kicking," said Bradley P. Moss, an attorney who specializes in national security issues.

Former President Donald Trump greets supporters at a Team Trump volunteer leadership training event held at the Grimes Community Complex on June 01 in Grimes, Iowa.

Waiting for details

Trump faces seven counts, but we still don't know the details of what the government appears to claim are direct efforts by him to hide documents that had been subpoenaed by a grand jury, and then lie about it.

Those details could embolden opponents of Trump, or encourage defenders.

Trump attorney Jim Trusty, who has been briefed on the case, said the government's charges related to the Espionage Act, obstruction and false statements don't add up.

"So there's a lot to pick at eventually from the defense side," he told CNN.

This second indictment might not be Trumps last. He is also under investigation over the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021 , and efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to Biden in the state of Georgia .

Trump's Republican rivals are supportive (so far)

Long-shot Republican presidential candidates like Asa Hutchinson have called Trump's legal troubles disqualifying, but most are holding fire.

Candidates Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, and others have protested the so-called "weaponization" of federal law enforcement.

They have not called out Trump over his behavior, yet.

Trump follows an anti-government game plan

As he did after the New York indictment, Trump is trying to use the indictment to help himself politically, telling anti-government voters that it's all a plot by his enemies.

He is also trying to raise money off the charges.

Shortly after announcing the indictment on his Truth Social website, Trump signed off on a fundraising solicitation that urged voters to "make a contribution to peacefully stand" with him over the case.

This didn't have to happen

Attorneys and lawmakers marveled at how Trump managed to turn a document dispute into a federal indictment.

Had Trump been more cooperative and listened to his lawyers - some of whom provided evidence to Special Counsel Jack Smith  he would not be facing federal charges.

"It all could have been avoided," said Ty Cobb, the White House Special Counsel during the Trump administration.

Timeline: The journey of Trumps classified documents

Trump likely to be tried in Florida

Trump said he was told to report Tuesday to the federal courthouse in Miami, meaning he will likely be tried there rather than in Washington, D.C.

Analysts said most of the allegations against Trump stem from activity at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach; they also said that Trump's attorneys may have protested a trial in heavily Democratic Washington, D.C.

Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, said on Twitter: History is being made. Accountability will follow more swiftly because venue squabbles were taken off the table by not charging in DC.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump indictment takeaways: Documents lead to historic federal case
Hong Kong and U.S.-based supply chain technology platform Topo Solutions has joined the American Apparel and Footwear Association (AAFA).

The cloud-based Software-as-a-Service provider allows brands to track a products supply chain journey, from the sourcing of raw materials to product development, ordering and production. The end-to-end solution also allows stakeholders to monitor quality controls, compliance and sustainability processes throughout the value chain.

More from Sourcing Journal

With clients across categories like apparel, footwear, accessories, furniture, home goods, textiles, pet products and toys, Topo counts Puma, On Running and Zalando as clients. As the newest member of AAFA, it said it hopes to help advance the associations ESG goals and supply chain initiatives by leveraging the support and expert knowledge of AAFAs community of industry veterans.

The company is known for its low- or no-code app, dashboard and interface builder, which is designed to help users seamlessly develop personalized platforms that integrate all the tools necessary to manage their supply chains. It could be used to launch an app that manages product development, from design to sample management, as well as tracking and product testing, for example.

Joining the trade association will give the technology company access to exclusive insights on regulations and policy that impact the sector. Joining AAFA has been an important objective for us as a company as it represents the industry benchmark for driving ethical commitments and choices, a mission that ties in with the core of what we strive for at Topo, CEO Benjamin Eberle said.

As a political voice for the apparel and footwear industry, as well as its three-million-strong workforce, AAFA president Steve Lamar said the group is continually on the look-out for innovative companies that are leaders in technology for global supply chain and sourcing. The sector, which contributes $470 billion in annual U.S. retail sales, has become increasingly reliant on retail and supply chain technology as it seeks to evolve its market and supply chain strategies. We look forward to welcoming them as members and working towards our shared vision together, Lamar added.

Topo is among a number of supply chain technology providers on AAFAs roster, including intelligence, auditing, compliance and risk management firm BSI, supply chain management solution Bluecherry by CGS, SaaS manufacturing platform DXM Inc., apparel product lifecycle management software firm DeSL, software, equipment and data services provider Gerber Technology, supply chain management company Setlog Corp, and digital enterprise software provider Siemens.

Headquartered in Hong Kong, Topo expanded its operations to Los Angeles last fall, bringing Eberle and customer success lead Stefanie Valerio to the U.S. outpost to better serve its global customer base. The company also joined Amfori BSCI, an international supply chain transparency platform, to broaden its reach.

Click here to read the full article.
Britain's then Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak - JESSICA TAYLOR/AFP

When Rishi Sunak, in his former role as Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced he would be imposing a one-off windfall tax on oil and gas companies, it was implied this would answer many of the countrys problems.

It would tax extraordinary profits fairly and incentivise investment. It would help hard-pressed households with the cost of living, while avoiding having to increase our debt burden.

The 25pc levy initially planned was hiked up to 35pc in the 2022 Autumn Statement, yet yesterday we learned that the Government has been forced into a climbdown.

The windfall tax will be scrapped if oil and gas prices fall below a certain level for six months. It has, quite clearly, failed to deliver on its alleged potential.

Tory politicians are learning the hard way that Left-wing, virtue-signalling, anti-business policies wont win them any votes, but they will inflict harm on the economy. They ought to bear this in mind the next time they are tempted to try out punitive tax policies.

This Conservative Government has performed a number of U-turns, but the windfall tax is surely among the most embarrassing.

A little over a year ago, energy prices were soaring following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Households were facing punishing increases in their heating bills, and the Government was coming under immense pressure to create a money-go-round.

The logic was that a windfall tax on energy companies would fund subsidies that would support households through an acute cost of living crisis. Labour and the Liberal Democrats were baying for it, as were the Scottish Nationalists, environmentalists, and many others who fail to grasp the wider effects of tax hikes.

Demonstrating the strength of a dandelion in a hurricane, Sunak and then-prime minister Boris Johnson gave in, and imposed their energy profits levy.

They were warned about confiscating profits from those who had invested in the costly, high-risk business of drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea, but did not take heed.

To those who misunderstand economics  unintentionally or otherwise  a windfall tax makes sense. Gas prices were soaring as Vladimir Putins supplies into Europe were cut off, and the energy giants were perceived to be making bumper profits.

Was it not fair to ask them to pay a little more? The very idea of a windfall is something you get for free so, the argument went, why not spread some of that good fortune?

It didnt matter that these were huge, global companies whose profits were less remarkable when compared to turnover or capital employed. Nor that companies are legal entities and cannot bear the burden of taxation themselves. Firms dont pay these levies, people do  and many of them wont be wealthy shareholders.

Politicians didnt take account of the way that tax policy impacts behaviour. If you tax something, you get less of it. The more you tax, the less you get. That is why governments have placed significant levies on cigarettes and other activities deemed harmful.

And it turned out that all the people warning that it would be unwise to slay a golden goose were right. Investment in the North Sea has plummeted. The French energy giant Total became the first major company to pull out of the sector, followed by Chevron, and then Shell.

OEUK, the trade body for large and diversified energy companies, suggested 90pc of firms were looking to scale down investment. The largest energy producer in the North Sea, Harbour, has been shedding hundreds of jobs, after the company claimed its tax bill, which includes the levy, all but wiped out profits last year.

Even before the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer came up with the ill-conceived plan to ban any fresh licences, there were very few companies willing to spend the money in the sector anyway.

north sea oil rig - ANDY BUCHANAN/AFP

It is hard to blame them: they have long been subject to an unstable tax and regulatory regime. The energy profits levy raised the headline rate to 75pc. Twenty years of intervention in the energy market have left it scarcely resembling a market at all.

Despite promising greater energy independence, the Government has delivered the opposite. It has made us more reliant on imported oil and gas as investment in our own energy sources dwindled away.

And now we have the climbdown. Most likely, it wont make much difference. It is hard to imagine new investment pouring into a country where energy companies are treated with such disregard.

But the Tories must learn the lesson from this debacle. Socialist-style policies do not work, even when they are imposed by a government that is purportedly on the Right.

They might play well in focus groups, but that wont make any difference when projects are cancelled and jobs are lost. Perhaps this will mark the beginning of a change in attitude towards taxation among some within the Conservative Party.

The Tories have cribbed from the Labour playbook, for little gain and a great deal of political pain. This should give them cause to reconsider the recent hike in corporation tax.

Perhaps we can also hope that this will act as a warning to Labour, whose spending plans will have to be paid for somehow.

Even with Fridays abandonment of the 28bn a year Green Prosperity Plan, the spectre of wealth taxes and VAT on private schools looms large.

But individuals are just as sensitive to tax changes as businesses: the wealth tax which Keir Starmer is said to be considering will lead to capital and talent flight.

Taxes destroy wealth rather than create it. Its a simple lesson, but one our political class must quickly re-learn.

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Would tougher penalties stop porch pirates in Pennsylvania? Some lawmakers think so

Many residents know the common headache of so-called porch pirates as mail theft ramps up in tandem with the pandemic-driven online shopping boom.

In the Senate, Republicans see an obvious solution: increase penalties for those caught stealing packages delivered to residences.

Senate Bill 527, which would add specific penalties for mail theft, had its first consideration in the upper chamber on Tuesday.

The grading of this offense would increase if the person has prior convictions for theft of mail, Sen. Frank Farry, R-Langhorne, wrote in a legislative memo.

Porch piracy would become a third-degree felony if the theft is a third offense, or if the value of the stolen mail was at least $1,000.

The bill is similar to legislation proposed in the House in 2021, as The Center Square previously reported.

The financial toll can hurt many everyday Pennsylvanians but there is also the emotional distress of having your personal property violated by these pirates, Farry wrote. These issues continue to get worse since 2020 with the major increases and new accessibility to online/remote shopping.

Pennsylvania would join a trend thats unfolded across more than a dozen states in recent years, though opponents say the legislation is an overreaction to a problem.

Passing the legislation, however, could make package theft look like more of a problem, as a law would create a mechanism to keep track of it, as Ben Stickle of Middle Tennessee State University told Georgia Public Broadcasting after the state passed a similar law in 2021.

An estimated 260 million packages were stolen in America in 2022, up from 210 million in 2021. Some police departments, such as the Washington County, Oregon Sheriffs Office, have used bait package programs to catch porch pirates and argued it led to a 20% reduction in package thefts.

In Oklahoma, one criminal was convicted of 17 counts of porch piracy in April.

In Philadelphia, official mail theft complaints spiked by 10% from 2020 to 2022 and private mailbox rentals have seen a surge in business.

We must give constant attention to making sure that emerging forms of criminal activity can be prosecuted and penalized. With the growth in online shopping, the crime of porch pirating has quickly spread, Sen. Lisa Baker, R-Dallas, said in a press release.

Though the problem is real, new laws might not stop porch piracy.

Despite these new laws and initiatives by state legislatures, there is little evidence that these laws cause their desired deterrent effect, Drew McKay, a law student at the University of Houston, argued in a legal article. Porch piracy could be more effectively combatted if the law facilitated more private sector action rather than relying exclusively on public prosecutions. The private sector has stronger incentives and better resources to tackle a problem of its own doing.
A cyclist rides under a blanket of haze partially obscuring the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on June 8, 2023 (Mandel NGAN)

Residents of northeastern United States were breathing more easily Friday as smoke from Canadian fires gradually cleared after blanketing several cities in a noxious haze this week.

In New York and Washington air quality was classified as "moderate" by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

In the American capital, the sky was blue again Friday morning, but as a measure of precaution, children at city public schools were still prohibited from spending recess outdoors.

In New York, public schools were closed and operated remotely.

Air quality improved after winds blowing over the Canadian province of Quebec, where the fires are raging, changed direction, Ryan Stauffer, a NASA scientist specializing in air pollution, told AFP.

The concentration of fine particles in the air was up to twenty times lower Friday morning in Washington, compared to the same time on Thursday, Stauffer said.

Thick skies and an acrid smell hung over the region for days, with air pollution exceeding some of the most contaminated cities in the world in South Asia and China.

Flights were delayed at many airports due to reduced visibility, and masks reappeared on the streets.

On Friday, some 140 fires were still active in Quebec, including nearly 80 that were deemed to be out of control. More than 13,000 people have been evacuated since the beginning of June.

Hundreds of foreign firefighters were in Canada to assist with the gigantic fires, many of which are located in remote boreal forest areas.

With nearly 900,000 hectares affected, according to official figures, Quebec is experiencing an unprecedented fire season.

"Air quality conditions have improved in NYC, but may still be unhealthy for some people," said the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

"Air quality is expected to improve over the weekend, but may vary."

Shocked by the smog, the United Nations chief, environmental organizations as well as US politicians this week stressed the need to combat climate change, which increases the risk of fires.

The mayors of New York, Montreal, Toronto, Washington and Philadelphia issued a joint-statement Friday saying "this alarming episode serves as a stark reminder of the harmful impacts that the climate crisis is having on cities around the world.

"Without drastically reducing fossil fuel use in order to at least halve our emissions by 2030 we will likely be condemning ourselves to a future filled with weeks like these."

More than 111 million people in the United States had been under air quality alerts on Thursday due to the fires. The wildfire smoke from Canada was also detected thousands of miles away in Norway.

tib-la/md/bgs
Trader Joes United, a union representing Trader Joes workers, has accused the grocer of illegally firing an employee because he was an open union supporter trying to improve working conditions at his store.

The employee, Stephen Andrade, worked nearly 18 years for Trader Joes and made signs at the store in Hadley, Massachusetts, the companys first to organize. Trader Joes United filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board over his firing on Friday.

We believe this baseless firing is a blatant act of retaliation, and we call on Trader Joes to do the right thing: reinstate Steve immediately, said Maeg Yosef, a spokesperson for Trader Joes United and employee at the Hadley store.

A Trader Joes spokesperson did not immediately respond to HuffPosts request for comment on Friday.

I was the most vocal in pushing back and saying we need the time to do the work.Stephen Andrade, fired Trader Joe's worker and union member

In an interview, Andrade said his manager told him he was being fired because he never removed a jigsaw from the back of the store like he was told to do. Andrade said the tool actually belonged to the store and predated his transfer to the Hadley location nine years ago. He had been asked to remove it last October but said he forgot because it was during the stores busy season.

In the time between October and now, that saw had been used several times by managers, Andrade said.

Andrade is one of the store employees who make Trader Joes famous custom signage. The jigsaw was there because workers sometimes cut wood, he explained. But it had mostly fallen into disuse and sat in the back of the store.

The crew member incident report that detailed Andrades termination says he was fired because employees are not permitted to have power tools in the store and that he had demonstrated disregard for the companys safety practices by not removing it. This follows a continued pattern of you not taking direction, the incident report reads.

But Andrade said he did not buy the tool and didnt understand why it was his responsibility to get rid of it. He estimates it had been in the store for 15 years.

I dont know why I was the person designated to have possession of the saw, he said.

The signage in Trader Joe's stores is custom-made by the workers themselves.

The signage in Trader Joe's stores is custom-made by the workers themselves.

Andrade said he was a union supporter who expressed concern that Trader Joes had grown less invested in its custom signs. He said managers have been steering sign-makers toward other work, like product stocking, and made it harder for them to carve out time to design and build the signs.

Many of the workers who do signage have art backgrounds, including Andrade, who is an illustrator.

If youre going to make handmade signs, youve got to have the time to actually do it, said Andrade, whose wife also makes signs at the Trader Joes in Hadley. I feel like the fact that I was the most vocal in pushing back and saying we need the time to do the work, that was part of it. I also think part of it is union-related. I am one of the pro-union [employees].

It is illegal to fire a worker because of their union activity or because they were trying to improve working conditions for their co-workers. Labor board officials will now look into whether theres merit to the unions claims regarding Andrades firing, then potentially pursue a case against the company.

The store in Hadley is one of four that have unionized with Trader Joes United since last year, part of a wave of organizing thats hit name-brand companies like Starbucks, Amazon and Apple.

Late last month, prosecutors at the labor board filed a complaint against Trader Joes accusing the company of violating workers rights at a union store in Minneapolis. Officials said managers had illegally removed union literature from the break room and forbade employees from posting union fliers on the bulletin board.

The store in Hadley is one of four that have unionized with Trader Joes United since last year.

Trader Joes United was started by workers in Hadley and is not affiliated with an established labor group. The union is trying to negotiate first contracts for its organized stores.

Last year, the company abruptly closed the companys wine store in New York where workers were considering joining a different union, the United Food and Commercial Workers. Employees told HuffPost they believed the company shuttered the store because of their union activity, an allegation the company denied.

Trader Joes has actively opposed the union efforts, and Andrade said some workers in Hadley have circulated a decertification petition  an effort to have the union purged from the store. He said he suspected that could be another motivation for his firing since it would mean one less vote for the union if another election came to pass.

He said he has to find new health care coverage for him, his wife and their 8-year-old daughter since his wife does not carry enough hours at Trader Joes to qualify for the company plan.

Im trying to look at this as an opportunity. Ive been doing illustration work and gallery work, and this is a chance to do that more and see if I can do it full-time, he said of his firing. At the same time, Im very disappointed. They hurt my familys livelihood, and now we have to scramble and find health care.
Shannon Nourse cradles a photo of her mother.

Inside the tattered and thin gold frame, Chantal Harrison sports a grin in her red cap and gown as shes handed her high school diploma.

And Nourse, now in her own black graduation garb, looks the spitting image of her mother captured in that photo 40 years ago.

Im more or less graduating for my mom, Nourse said through tears. And for me, its going to be a downfall that shes not going to be there. Its not much of a celebration if the person you wanted to celebrate with isnt around.

Graduating high school was a longtime promise she gave to her mother, who died last year.

Now, shes keeping that promise.

Nourse graduates Friday, June 9, alongside 40 other Endeavor High School online academy seniors at a special commencement at Three Rivers Convention Center in Kennewick.

The road to graduation for the 19-year-old was lined with a series of seemingly insurmountable challenges: A shaky family history, homelessness, her mothers death, raising a younger brother on her own and juggling multiple jobs.

But shes here now.

And shes readying herself for the next steps.

Shannon Nourse, 19, holds a River View High School graduation photo from showing her mother, Chantal Harrison, at the 1982 commencement ceremony. She has overcome the death of her mother last year and other struggles to be one of about 40 graduates from the online Endeavor High School in 2023.

Chaotic, stressful and overwhelming

Chantal Harrison was the daughter of French Canadian immigrants who moved to the Tri-Cities in 1979.

Nourse  the second youngest of four children  remembers her mother spoke fluent French and loved animals more than people. She remembers she would often take in strays at their Kennewick home.

She crashed four or five cars just so that she didnt hit a squirrel, Nourse said. That woman had a heart of gold.

But Nourses tensions within her immediate family, especially with her stepfather, soured.

She says she was kicked out at 14 and has fended for herself ever since.

Even after leaving, though, she still tried to keep a relationship with her mother.

It got a little difficult when I got kicked out but, yeah, we were still close, she said.

Nourse and her older sister lived with a close neighbor who took them in. She was able to find some stability there.

She recalls she was not always a good student, calling it an off and on relationship with learning and bounced between different high schools in Kennewick.

She found attending comprehensive high schools to be too daunting. She felt lost, like she was a small fish in a big sea and could easily fall to the side among the nearly 2,000 students at Southridge High School.

In January 2022, she enrolled in Endeavor High School and found the convenience of online learning empowering, especially as she worked and dealt with her family.

Leading up to her super senior year, Nourse said, she began making serious academic strides.

But things changed forever on June 3, 2022.

She remembers it was the day after Nourse got her drivers license. She received a phone call from her little brother, who was still living at home with their mom.

Sick with pneumonia, her mom was trying to drive herself to see a doctor but crashed in Kennewick and suffered a medical emergency.

Im still trying to come to terms with the fact that this isnt just a joke, she said.

What came next was chaotic, stressful and overwhelming.

Shannon Nourse, 19, has overcome the death of her mother last year other struggles to be one of about 40 graduates from the online Endeavor High School in 2023.

One thing after another

The neighbors Nourse been living with also took in her 15-year-old brother after her mother died.

One thing after another, responsibilities began to pile on. She had to grow up and grow up quick  again.

It was definitely difficult. I was not prepared to take care of a 15-year-old boy, but I did my best. I got him into school and hes been doing it. ...., she said.

On top of school and caring for him, Nourse also was working two fast food jobs to make ends meet.

Betti Gregg, an English and social studies teacher at Endeavor High School, who has known Nourse since she was a sophomore, said she is one of the more mature and self-aware students.

Shes just an amazing kid. Just the fact that shes done all that she has, and in the face of everything shes gone through... Shes had one thing after another happen to her Gregg said. For those kids, online is a huge option. But it takes so much more than people think it takes to be successful.

Gregg, who has been an Endeavor teacher for two years and taught at Legacy High School before that, says alternative high schools provide instructors the ability to build relationships with more of their students.

And thats an important part of the job, she said.

The number of kids we have here who are on their own is astounding to me. Ive been teaching for 22 years, and Ive never seen more than a couple. I have six right now who are working on their own and paying their own bills, she said. So many of them dont know whats out there to help and some of them know and they dont want help.

After graduation

Three months ago, Nourse moved into a one-bedroom apartment with her boyfriend, and her older sister has taken over caring for their brother.

She recently quit one of her jobs  a management position at a pizza store  in order to focus on the next steps in her life.

Im just excited to get my high school diploma and fulfill my mothers promise, she said.

Nourse eventually wants to attend a four-year college to pursue a career as a forensic psychologist. She plans to save some money and look at scholarships before applying to colleges.

When she graduates June 9, Nourse will be the first among her siblings to earn her high school diploma.

She hopes her little brother follows in her footsteps.
A study is underway in South Florida to treat Alzheimers disease, and hospitals are looking for patients to participate.

Broward Health Medical Center, Baptist Health South Florida and Delray Medical Center, along with other hospitals in the country, are recruiting for the clinical trial patients ages 50 to 85 who have been diagnosed with likely having Alzheimers.

Researchers want to test whether they can safely and effectively use focused ultrasounds to temporarily open or disrupt the barrier that surrounds the brain in areas where theres an abnormal build-up of Alzheimer-causing proteins. They want to see if this will reduce the clustered proteins, and improve or slow progression of the disease.

Were looking at ways to open the blood-brain barrier temporarily, to allow these bad amyloid proteins to leach out of the brain into the bloodstream and then they get carried and washed away. And by doing so, you can reduce the amount of protein in peoples brains and we believe that by doing that, you can alter the course of the disease itself, said Dr. Shaye Moskowitz, medical director of neurosciences at Broward Health. Hes one of the studys principal investigators.

Heres what else to know in South Florida:

What causes Alzheimers disease? What is the brain-blood barrier?

 Doctors believe Alzheimers disease is caused by an abnormal build-up of proteins, known as amyloid and tau, in and around brain cells. The over production of these proteins disrupts communication between the cells, affecting memory, recall, language and other brain functions.

 The blood-brain barrier is a protective shield around the brain that separates it from the rest of our body. Think of it like a door. While the barrier lets water and oxygen pass into the brain, it keeps bacteria, viruses and drugs out, to help keep the brain safe.

How the trial works

 Procedures: Patients diagnosed with probable Alzheimers will undergo three low frequency focused ultrasound procedures at Broward Health Medical Center, Baptist Health South Florida or Delray Medical Center to temporarily open parts of their blood-brain barrier. Researchers will use MRIs to check if the barrier opens, and later closes.

 Measurement: The ultrasound will only be used in areas where doctors detect, through the use of MRI imaging, a high concentration of amyloid. Doctors say previous trials have shown that focused ultrasounds can open the blood-brain barrier. In this trial, researchers will be looking to measure the safety and efficacy of the procedure and will follow the patients over the course of five years to look for changes in their disease progression, according to Moskowitz.

 Funding: Doctors say the non-invasive clinical trial is funded by medical device company InSightec and is part of a collaboration with Floridas recently established Alzheimers Center for Excellence. The program was established last year as part of the states record funding for Alzheimers and related dementia. Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the record funding in a June 2022 Fort Lauderdale news conference.

Three South Florida hospitals are participating in a trial that seeks to test whether a patients blood-brain barrier can safely and effectively be opened or disrupted by focused ultrasounds.

Eligible patients

 Recruitment: All three South Florida hospitals are recruiting patients 50 to 85 who have been diagnosed with likely having Alzheimers disease and are able to communicate during the procedure.

 Requirements: The study has a list of requirements and exclusions. For example: Patients taking Alzheimers medication must be on the medication for at least two months with a stable dose for at least three months to be eligible. Patients cannot have a history of liver disease, a bleeding disorder or have a significant heart disease.

 Enroll: Patients interested in enrolling in the study, which is expected to involve up to 30 patients, should ask their doctor for a referral to one of the participating hospitals. For Baptist Health South Florida, for example, have your doctor email margarita.mederos@baptisthealth.net. For Broward Health, have your doctor call 954-786-6736.

READ NEXT: Why do some people get Alzheimers and others dont? How a new UM tool checks your risk

Alzheimers by the numbers

 About 6.7 million people in the U.S. are living with Alzheimers, a count that is expected to balloon to 12.7 million by 2050, according to the Alzheimers Association. The disease is the most common cause of dementia and is one of the top 10 leading causes of death in the country, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 580,000 people live with Alzheimers in Florida.

 While theres no cure for the disease, treatments are available to help treat the progression. Doctors hope the results of the blood-brain barrier study will lead to better treatment.

There are so few options for such a devastating disease. Many people say that the entire family suffers along with the patient, in many cases, more than the patient who may not even be aware of whats going on ... And so to have the opportunity to make even a small difference in that knowledge on the path towards maybe stopping or reversing the symptoms of Alzheimers is an honor, and a privilege. And so I think that, if were able to make even a small difference, then we build on each success, then go to the next level, and get one step closer to improvement, said Dr. Justin Sporrer, neurosurgeon and director of functional neurosurgery at Baptist Health Miami Neuroscience Institute, which is also participating in the study. Sporrer is one of the hospitals subinvestigators for the trial.

READ MORE: New study shows potential link between bad quality sleep and Alzheimers in Hispanics

What the study could mean for future Alzheimer treatment

 The goal: Medical device company InSightec, which is funding the trial and providing the ultrasound system, said it hopes the trial will give hospitals and researchers the ability to non-invasively and temporarily disrupt the blood brain barrier, with the ultimate aim of targeted drug delivery into the brain.

 The future: While the blood-brain barrier does a good job of keeping harmful substances away from the brain, it also locks most medications out, said Moskowitz and Sporrer. Temporarily opening the barrier could help doctors improve treatment.

Because we cant get medications in and if you cant get medications in, theres a lot of diseases that we have no ability to impact, Moskowitz said.

Dr. Shaye Moskowitz, medical director of neurosciences at Broward Health.

Hospitals, universities involved in the study

 Local experts: Broward Health Medical Center, in partnership with the University of Florida; Baptist Health South Florida, in partnership with Florida International University; and Delray Medical Center, in partnership with Florida Atlantic University are enrolled in the trial.

READ NEXT: FIU medical school to partner with Baptist what it means for patients, doctors, students

 Other hospitals: Also enrolled in the trial are UF Health Shands Hospital in Gainesville, Florida; Tampa General Hospital in Tampa, Florida; Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio; University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas; and West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Center in Morgantown, West Virginia. All of the hospitals, except Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, are recruiting patients.
A Tri-Cities doctor has agreed to surrender her license to practice medicine after complaints, including that she issued medical exemption letters to parents who did not want their children to receive COVID-19 vaccines.

It is one of several actions this spring related to Department of Health licenses for medical services and medical professionals, including a physical therapist, a massage therapist and a certified nursing assistant.

 Dr. Virgina Frazer of Kennewick has agreed to surrender her license, not resume practice in Washington and not reapply, according to the Department of Health.

She previously had her medical license suspended indefinitely after failing to cooperate after complaints were made, including that she issued medical exemption letters to parents who did not want their children to receive COVID-19 vaccines, according to the Department of Health.

She could have applied to have her license reinstated with some terms and conditions to be set by the Department of Health, but chose to surrender it instead.

Frazer, a naturopathic physician at Blue Heron Naturopathic Care in Kennewick, reached an agreement with the Department of Health after a complaint in February 2020 that she allegedly disclosed confidential medical records without authority.

However, she did not complete requirements, which included taking a continuing education ethics course.

The complaint about COVID-19 vaccine exemptions was made in November 2020. She never responded to the Department of Health on that complaint, it said.

The agency sent her a letter of cooperation and attempted to visit her at her clinic, but she did not provide an opportunity for an interview or the documents and records requested, according to the Department of Health.

She had other disciplinary actions within the last few years, all focused on her inattention to important department correspondence and orders, according to the order that suspended her medical license before her decision to surrender the license.

 The Department of Health is preparing a cease and desist order against Torre J. Swenson, who it accused of offering phlebotomy services, including drawing blood samples, in Benton County without a license,

From July to at least October 2022 Swenson ran a phlebotomy services company in Benton County even though Swensons phlebotomy license expired in September 2016, according to the Department of Health.

The company had a website and social media accounts that advertised services, prices and promotional discounts.

 The Department of Health has charged massage therapist Kristin Ann Kayfes of Benton County with unprofessional conduct.

In March 2021 police were called to a disturbance and said that Kayfes appeared extremely intoxicated and was slurring her words, according to the Department of Health. She was arrested due to her conduct during the interaction.

The next month she was accused of performing two massages at the Richland massage studio where she worked while under the influence of alcohol.

A co-worker told a manager that Kayfes appeared to be intoxicated. Kayfes said that she had two drinks before reporting to work at 2 p.m. and was out of it, according to the Department of Health.

In October 2021, she pleaded guilty to fourth-degree assault, a gross misdemeanor, for the March incident and was sentenced to 15 days in jail with 364 days suspended, according to Benton County Superior Court records.

 The Department of Health has suspended the physical therapy license of Amy Lynn Lewis, also known as Amy Lynn Stone, of Benton County.

She did not comply with an order she agreed to follow. The order included providing regular urine samples and abstaining from alcohol and nonprescribed drugs.

She was discharged from the Washington Recovery and Monitoring Program for health care professionals in 2021 but then signed a new five-year contract with the program in spring 2022.

But she tested positive for alcohol and methamphetamine less than a month later and then failed to provide urine samples for testing several subsequent times, according to the Department of Health.

She said at a Department of Health hearing that she had completed intensive outpatient treatment and was attending sober support groups.

She may apply to have her physical therapy license reinstated if she again participates in the Washington Recovery and Monitoring Program.

 The Department of Health charged certified nursing assistant Guadalupe Gutierrez of Benton County with unprofessional conduct.

When she applied to reactivate her license, she did not report that she previously pleaded guilt to driving under the influence in Oregon in 2020. She was subject to disciplinary action by the Oregon State Board of Nursing, which she also did not report to the Washington Department of Health, it said.

However, the Department of Health allowed her to enroll in the Washington Recovery and Monitoring Program for health care workers, including monitoring for alcohol and other substance use.

The department now lists her license as active with conditions as of May 23.
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The story of Richard Montanezs life sounds custom-made for Hollywood: a rags-to-riches tale of a poverty-stricken janitor who became a top marketing executive at Frito-Lay after inventing Flamin Hot Cheetos in his own home.

Eva Longoria, who has called Montanez the godfather of Hispanic marketing, tells this story with her directorial debut with Flamin Hot, a film based upon Montanezs 2013 memoir A Boy, A Burrito, and a Cookie: From Janitor to Executive. Its now streaming on Hulu and Disney+.

But not everyone agrees with Montanezs claims. Frito-Lay launched a company-wide investigation that found no proof Montanez invented the Flamin Hot brand. Others have accused him of lying about his involvement for personal gain, which Montanez adamantly denies.

So what is the true story behind this flaming hot controversy?

A PhD in Poor, Hungry, and Determined"

Getty Images

The son of a Mexican immigrant, Montanez grew up in a migrant labor camp in Southern California with 10 siblings living in a one-bedroom apartment. He got into gang trouble in his youth, according to his memoir, and credits those early challenges with helping shape his character.

I have a PhD: Ive been being poor, hungry, and determined, he told The Washington Post. I think when youve experienced those three things, theres a lot of wisdom. Because when youve been poor, theres so much innovation that comes out of that.

After getting a janitorial job at the Frito-Lay plant in Southern California, Montanez said a Cheeto machine broke down, resulting in a batch that wasnt dusted with flavoring. He claims to have brought the batch home and seasoned them with chili powder, creating a snack inspired by street vendors in his neighborhood who made Mexican grilled corn with lime and chili.

Montanez then claims to have pitched the product to the Frito-Lay CEO through the companys method-improvement program, which sought new ideas from employees. In his memoir, Montanez describes donning a $3 tie and pitching his idea during a 1991 meeting with more than 100 people, including the CEO and several company executives.

Flamin Hot Cheetos became a billion-dollar brand, and Montanez rose from janitor to marketing executive at Frito-Lay, from which he retired in 2019. He began publicly claiming credit for having invented the brand in the late 2000s, selling his story and participating in speaking engagements for fees of up to $50,000 per appearance.

A Dispute to Montanezs Story

At the prompting of Lynne Greenfeld, Montanezs public claims triggered a company-wide investigation of his claims in 2018. Also a Frito-Lay employee, Greenfeld received the assignment to develop the Flamin Hot Cheetos brand in 1989, and the company previously credited her for naming and helping bring the product to market.

It is disappointing that 20 years later, someone who played no role in this project would begin to claim our experience as his own and then personally profit from it, Greenfeld told the Los Angeles Times.

Frito-Lay interviewed dozens of employees and reviewed company records as part of its investigation, According to an investigative story released by the Times in May 2021, the company concluded that none of our records show that Richard was involved in any capacity in the Flamin Hot test market.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Flamin Hots were created by a team of snack food professionals based in the companys corporate headquarters in Texas, rather than the California plant where Montanez worked. Frito-Lay officials said they could find no proof that the pitch meeting described in Montanezs memoir ever happened.

The article also disputed Montanezs claim that he was partially inspired to pitch his product by a motivational video featuring Frito-Lay CEO Roger Enrico. The newspaper noted that Enrico didnt join the company until early 1991, nearly six months after the Flamin Hot products were already invented.

We value Richards many contributions to our company, especially his insights into Hispanic consumers, but we do not credit the creation of Flamin Hot Cheetos or any Flamin Hot products to him, Frito-Lay said in a statement . The company has also said it cant draw a clear link to a specific creator because the brands development was a team effort.

Montanez Responds

In response to the Los Angeles Times story, Montanez has said he never knew Greenfeld, nor was he aware of what other divisions in the company were doing. Montanez claimed that as a janitor outside of the executive team, there was little documentation about his role in developing the brand, which is why the companys investigation couldnt find definitive proof.

I dont care what room youre in, theres always somebody in the room thats going to try to steal your destiny, Montanez said in a video after the storys release. They may even say you never existed. I want you to do this: Write down your history, because if you dont, somebody else will. Remember that.

Frito-Lay officials said the Times story created confusion over Montanezs role with the company and put a strain on our valued friendship with Richard Montanez and the Latino community. Ex-CEO Al Carey said while Montanez didnt necessarily invent Flamin Hot Cheetos, his charismatic personality and support for the product aided its success.

Richard is an important part of PepsiCos history and the success of the company, Frito-Lay parent company PepsiCo said in a statement. He is an inspiration and his story cannot be belittled. [We] want Richard to know he is valued and cared for among PepsiCos employees, and we only wish him happiness and success.

Eva Longoria: A Film about Montanez

Getty Images

The conflicting statements about Montanezs involvement with the snack hasnt deterred the filmmakers behind Flamin Hot. The creators of the film were informed about the conflict in 2019 but proceeded with production anyway, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Longoria has said the film isnt about the history of the snack brand itself, which she said would not be a very interesting movie. Instead, she called it a story about Montanez, who happened to have a hand in creating the number one snack in the world.

Although the company still officially disputes Montanezs claims, Frito-Lay hasnt voiced opposition to the making of the film, describing it as Richard Montanezs story, told from his point of view.

His contributions to Frito-Lay are highlighted throughout the film, specifically his insights and ideas on how to better serve Hispanic consumers and engage the Hispanic community, a legacy PepsiCo continues today, the company stated. We are grateful to him for that and hope people enjoy the film.

Watch Flamin Hot on Hulu and Disney+

Flamin Hot, directed by Eva Longoria, is now streaming on Hulu and Disney+. The film stars Jesse Garcia, Annie Gonzalez, Dennis Haysbert, and Tony Shalhoub.

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Trump actually said 'Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this' on a recording that confirms he kept classified documents after leaving the White House: Report

Former President Donald Trump appears in court for his arraignment, Tuesday, April 4, 2023, in New York. (Steven Hirsch/New York Post via AP, Pool)

CNN obtained a transcript of a recording of Donald Trump talking about a classified document he kept after leaving the White House.

"Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this. This was done by the military and given to me."

Trump was discussing a classified Pentagon document about attacking Iran, per CNN.

CNN on Friday reported that it has a transcript of a recording of former President Donald Trump in 2021 discussing a secret military document that he'd kept after leaving office. "Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this," Trump actually said on the recording. "This was done by the military and given to me."

Trump was discussing a classified Pentagon document about attacking Iran, according to CNN.

Based on the transcript, Trump may have kept the document and shown it to an associate as a sort of insurance policy against anyone who might cross or criticize him. In this case, the antagonist was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, whose concerns about Trump attacking Iran had just been revealed in a New Yorker story.

"Well, with Milley  uh, let me see that, I'll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn't that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him," Trump said, according to the transcript. "They presented me this  this is off the record, but  they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn't done by me, this was him."

Trump was indicted by the Department of Justice Thursday night on seven counts related to his mishandling of classified documents. It's his second time being indicted this year. Both facing federal charges and being indicted twice are historic firsts for a former president.









Read the original article on Business Insider
Former President Trump admitted in a July 2021 recording that he had not declassified secret information that remained in his possession, CNN reported Friday.

As president, I could have declassified, but now I cant, Trump said, according to a transcript of the recording obtained by CNN.

Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, he reportedly added at another point. This was done by the military and given to me.

CNN had previously reported that federal prosecutors had obtained a recording of the July 2021 meeting, in which the former president appeared to acknowledge that a Pentagon document in his possession about a potential attack on Iran remained classified.

More Trump indictment coverage from The Hill

However, the transcript captures Trump explicitly saying that he had not declassified the document and could no longer do so, despite his later, public claims to the contrary.

In the meeting with two authors working on an autobiography for his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, Trump reportedly sought to counter an article from The New Yorker that suggested that Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had dissuaded him from attacking Iran.

He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isnt that amazing? Trump said, according to CNN. I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him. They presented me this  this is off the record, but  they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.

All sorts of stuff  pages long, look, he added. Wait a minute, lets see here. I just found, isnt that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.

Trump and his legal team said Thursday night that they had been informed of an indictment against the former president in the classified documents case.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Trump admitted on tape keeping a secret document that was never declassified, CNN reports, citing audio transcript

Donald Trump. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

CNN obtained a transcript of a tape in which Donald Trump said he didn't declassify "secret" information.

In a 2021 meeting, Trump discussed  and maybe showed  a classified Pentagon document about attacking Iran.

The former president was indicted on Thursday in relation to his mishandling of documents.

Former President Donald Trump admitted during a 2021 meeting at his Bedminster, New Jersey, resort that he did not declassify "secret" military intel that he had retained, according to a transcript of the audio recording obtained by CNN.

The tape, which CNN said was initially obtained by prosecutors, covers a part of the meeting in which Trump was discussing a classified Pentagon document about attacking Iran.

According to the transcript, the former president at one point said: "As president, I could have declassified, but now I can't."

The audio recording also appeared to suggest that Trump showed a document to others in the room, with sources describing the sound of paper rustling, CNN reported.

The media outlet said that two people working on an autobiography of his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, as well as his aides, were in the room at the time.

"Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this," Trump said in the recording, according to the transcript. "This was done by the military and given to me."

On another occasion, CNN said the transcript shows the former president referring to the document as "highly confidential" and "secret."

Prosecutors subpoenaed Trump for the document referenced in the record in March, with CNN noting that Trump's lawyers provided some related files but said they could not find the specific document in question.

Last week, CNN reported on the recording obtained by federal prosecutors in which Trump acknowledged that he had taken a classified document.

According to CNN, sources said that special prosecutor Jack Smith had been examining it as an "important" piece of evidence in his probe into Trump's handling of classified documents after he left the White House.

Trump was ultimately indicted on Thursday evening and charged with seven counts.

He has denied wrongdoing, while also using a baseless argument to suggest that he could declassify documents just by thinking about it.

Trump's post-presidency office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Allies of former president Donald Trump quickly came to his defence on Thursday after he revealed he was facing a federal indictment related to a Department of Justice investigation into his mishandling of classified documents.

The indictment comes after a months-long investigation into whether Mr Trump knowingly kept sensitive materials at his Mar-a-Lago home and / or misled investigators looking into the matter.

According to reports, Mr Trump will face seven charges related to the federal indictment.

On Twitter, allies of Mr Trump remained loyal to him and downplayed the severity of the indictment.

Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) claimed the indictment was a form of election interference on Twitter

This phony Boxes Hoax indictment against President Trump reflects the most severe election interference on the part of the federal government that we have EVER seen! he tweeted.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said the indictment came because Democrats fear Mr Trump will win re-election.

"Democrats must literally shake with sweats when they see amazing packed out Trump rallies and overwhelming winning poll numbers week after week," she tweeted. "They must awake in the night with panic at the thoughts of us winning in 2024."

Ms Greene added that the indictment was meant to distract from Mr Bidens supposed crimes, for which she provided debunked claims or those with little evidence. She also noted how Mr Biden currently faces an investigation from Special Counsel Robert Hur for having classified documents at multiple locations, including his private residence.

"Joe Biden has classified documents everywhere," she tweeted. "Literally on the garage floor next to the garage door that opens and closes, but the corrupt and complicit FBI and DOJ do nothing."

Democrats must literally shake with sweats when they see amazing packed out Trump rallies and overwhelming winning poll numbers week after week.



They must awake in the night with panic at the thoughts of us winning in 2024.



Their heads must ache painfully from never ending pic.twitter.com/W8GallYAeH  Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) June 9, 2023

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) tweeted: "There is no limit to what these people will do to protect their power & destroy those who threaten it, even if it means ripping our country apart & shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together.

In a statement posted to her Twitter, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) echoed other GOP congressional members statements, saying the indictment was an interference with Mr Trumps campaign.

The deep state killed JFK with bullets. Now they are using briefcases to assassinate those who stand in their way.  Cernovich (@Cernovich) June 9, 2023

Right-wing activist Mike Cernovich tweeted: This is the JFK assassination all over again - they are killing Trump by other means.

In another post he said: The deep state killed JFK with bullets. Now they are using briefcases to assassinate those who stand in their way.

The indictment comes as Mr Trump is seeking a third bid for the White House.

Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ), one of the leaders of the insurgent House Freedom Caucus, railed against the Justice Department for the indictment

"We ought to defund and dismantle the DOJ," he tweeted. "I stand with President Trump."

We ought to defund and dismantle the DOJ.



I stand with President Trump.  Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) June 9, 2023

Additional reporting by Eric Garcia
The federal judge who will initially preside over Donald Trumps criminal indictment in the classified documents case was appointed by the former president and delivered him a series of controversial and favourable rulings during the investigation.

US District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to the bench in 2020 during Mr Trumps final year in office, is scheduled to preside over his federal court case in Miami when he faces seven counts in an indictment involving his alleged mishandling of sensitive records removed from the White House and kept at his Mar-a-Lago property. ABC News first reported the development.

Last year, Judge Cannon appointed a special master to review materials seized by federal law enforcement and restricted the FBI from using those documents as part of the investigation until she completed a review, effectively freezing the US Department of Justice probe.

That order was ultimately thrown out entirely by a federal appeals court.

The three-judge panel sharply criticised Judge Cannons order, writing that it is extraordinary for a warrant to be executed at the home of a former president  but not in a way that affects our legal analysis or otherwise gives the judiciary license to interfere in an ongoing investigation.

The law is clear, the panel wrote. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.

Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who signed a warrant for federal authorities to search Mar-a-Lago in August 2021, will preside over Mr Trumps first court appearance in Miami on 13 June.

With a relatively brief career before her federal appointment, Judge Cannon, among a crowd of Federal Society acolytes that have reshaped the federal judiciary, was confirmed by the US Senate by a vote of 56-21.

She previously served as an assistant US attorney for the Justice Department in the Southern District of Florida.

If she does not recuse herself from the case and she remains a trial judge, she could play a potentially critical role in the cases development, including whether to set a trial before or after presidential primary elections and the general election in 2024. Mr Trump is seeking the Republican nomination for president.

She also could determine whether to admit certain evidence, decide on motions or dismiss arguments entirely. She also would preside over sentencing, if there is a conviction. Her decisions also would be subject to the review of a federal appellate court.

An investigation from special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed to lead the Justice Department probe into the former presidents alleged mishandling of documents after leaving the White House, reportedly is looking into whether his lawyers falsely certified that he returned classified records to the government, or whether he concealed them, illegally, and lied to his legal team

Mr Trump is expected to surrender, face arrest, and be formally charged as soon as next week, after a federal grand jury believed there was enough evidence to bring charges against him.

Federal prosecutors are expected to charge him with the willful retention of national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements, obstruction and witness tampering. A potential sentence, if convicted, could include decades in prison.

The exact charges against Mr Trump have not been announced, and it is unclear whether an indictment against him will remain sealed until it is formally presented in federal court.
Trump Attorney Says Shes Ashamed To Be A Lawyer And You Know What Happened

Alina Habba, an attorney for Donald Trump, on Thursday declared she was ashamed to be a lawyer following the indictment of the former president for mishandling top-secret documents after leaving the White House.

Habba, talking to Fox News Jesse Watters, suggested the indictment was nothing more than an attempt to distract voters from President Joe Biden.

What they do is they say, Oh, look at this shiny ball, Jesse. Look at the shiny ball. Lets go after Trump. Whatever you hear about the Bidens, dont worry about it. Trump, Trump, Trump. Its called Trump derangement syndrome and now its becoming so sick, Habba said.

She added:

Im embarrassed to be a lawyer at this moment, honestly. I am ashamed. Im ashamed to be a lawyer.

Critics, including conservative attorney George Conway, agreed:

I, too, am embarrassed that shes a lawyer. https://t.co/RRrXFk6eOa  George Conway  (@gtconway3d) June 9, 2023

You should be embarrassed. Youre fuckin embarrassing! https://t.co/0zFWCS4uGt  Tony Michaels  (@thetonymichaels) June 9, 2023

If I were a lawyer, I'd have been ashamed the very day I agreed to take on Trump as a client.  hmilne (@HMilne57) June 9, 2023

We are ashamed your a lawyer too https://t.co/E43or9L4Ym  John Cusack (@johncusack) June 9, 2023

Yes she should be both embarassed and ashamed, but not for the reasons she's thinking.  Elaine Broskie MD (@ebroskie1234) June 9, 2023

As you should. https://t.co/h9IMH9FCt7  Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) June 9, 2023

I think were all a little embarrassed and ashamed that youre a lawyer, too.  Ian Hague (@eugah) June 9, 2023

You should be https://t.co/DRaijL4aA5  Skittles is Not a Dude (@Skittles_Is6) June 8, 2023

She should be embarrassed to be a lawyer because shes not one. Shes a paid propagandist.   (@ChidiNwatu) June 8, 2023

Honestly we are all embarrassed that Habba is a lawyer. https://t.co/FEW7kiP1fq  Osborne Cox (@Osborne__Cox) June 9, 2023

I am also ashamed that she is a lawyer  Kaloyan (@kaloyanmm) June 9, 2023

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A federal grand jury in Miami indicted former President Donald Trump on Thursday, Trump and his lawyers announced, handing up seven charges related to Trump's retention of classified documents after leaving office and alleged efforts to hinder their return to the National Archives. "The indictment carries unmistakably grave legal consequences, including the possibility of prison if Trump's convicted," The Associated Press reported.

Trump proclaimed his innocence on social media. "I am innocent," he said in a video. "We will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly." He began fundraising off the indictment within minutes of announcing it.

The indictment itself is under seal, and it may not be released publicly before Trump's arraignment in Miami on Tuesday. But the Justice Department sent a summons with a summary of the charges to Trump's legal team on Thursday afternoon, Trump lawyer James Trusty told CNN Thursday night. He said the charges include conspiracy to obstruct justice, false statements, obstruction, unauthorized retention of national security documents and other Espionage Act violations.

The charge of unauthorized retention of national security documents, part of the alleged Espionage Act violations, theoretically could subject Trump "to 10 years in prison for each count, although defendants in other Espionage Act cases have received significantly less than the maximum," The New York Times reported. Although Trump "has claimed  without evidence  that he declassified all the files he took to Mar-a-Lago, prosecutors would not technically need to prove that they were still classified because the Espionage Act predates the classification system and does not refer to it as an element."

The conspiracy counts would require special counsel Jack Smith's team to charge at least one other person with helping Trump agree to and act toward committing a specific crime, the Times explained. It's not clear who that second defendant would be. The obstruction charges, tied to Trump's efforts to allegedly rebuff the subpoena for the classified files, carry a penalty of up to 20 years per offense.

"Since Smith has been using grand juries in Florida and Washington, D.C., in recent days, it's unclear whether the indictment Trump disclosed Thursday is the only set of charges he will face from the special prosecutor in connection with the classified documents probe," Politico reported.

"Trump is frustrated not just with the indictment but with people in his inner circle who reassured him for months that it was very unlikely to happen," CBS News reported. Trump advisers, on the other hand, told The Washington Post that "Trump's team so expected his indictment that they already had fundraising pitches, statements and videos ready."

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DOJ reportedly informs Trump he's a target of criminal investigation, suggesting indictment
FILE PHOTO: Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends a campaign event in Manchester,

By Sarah N. Lynch

(Reuters) -Donald Trump has been indicted by a federal grand jury for retaining classified government documents and obstruction of justice, according to a lawyer for the former U.S. president and another source familiar with the matter.

The criminal case, brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, amounts to another legal setback for Trump as he seeks to regain the U.S. presidency next year. He already faces a criminal case in New York that is due to go to trial in March.

Trump said on social media that he had been summoned to appear at the federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday. "I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!" he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

A spokesperson for Special Counsel Jack Smith, the Justice Department official who is handling the investigation, declined to comment. It is illegal for the government to comment publicly on any sealed grand jury matter.

Trump faces seven criminal counts in the federal case, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The indictment remains under seal, and even Trump himself has not yet seen what it says. His legal team was notified about the seven charges as part of a summons ordering Trump to appear in court, the source said.

Speaking on CNN, Trump lawyer Jim Trusty said those charges include conspiracy, false statements, obstruction of justice, and illegally retaining classified documents under the Espionage Act. He said he expects to see the indictment between now and Tuesday.

Reuters could not independently confirm what specific charges Trump is facing. In a sworn statement to a federal court last year, an FBI agent said there was probable cause to believe several crimes were committed, including obstruction and the illegal retention of sensitive defense records.

The Justice Department has been investigating whether Trump mishandled classified documents he retained after leaving the White House in 2021.

Investigators seized roughly 13,000 documents from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, nearly a year ago. One hundred were marked as classified, even though one of Trump's lawyers had previously said all records with classified markings had been returned to the government.

Trump has previously defended his retention of documents, suggesting he declassified them while president. However, Trump has not provided evidence of this and his attorneys have declined to make that argument in court filings.

It marks the second time that Trump, the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges, has been indicted.

In April, he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records relating to hush money paid to a porn star before the 2016 election.

President from 2017 to 2021, Trump is the front-runner in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Through the years Trump has shown an uncanny ability to weather controversies that might torpedo other politicians. He describes himself as the victim of a politically motivated witch hunt and accuses the Justice Department of partisan bias.

Trump's lead has grown over his rivals in the Republican nominating contest since he was indicted in the New York case, Reuters/Ipsos polling shows.

A SECOND INVESTIGATION

Special Counsel Smith, appointed last year by Attorney General Merrick Garland, is also leading a second criminal investigation into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

Although Garland is a Biden appointee, special counsels appointed to investigate politically sensitive cases do their jobs with a degree of independence from Justice Department leadership.

Smith convened grand juries in both Washington and Miami to hear evidence, but appears to have decided to bring the case in the politically competitive state of Florida, rather than the U.S. capital, where any jury would likely be heavily Democratic.

Legal experts say that could head off a drawn-out legal challenge from Trump's team over the proper venue. Under federal law, defendants have a right to be charged where the activity in question took place.

"The center of gravity is clearly Florida," said Robert Luskin, a Washington lawyer who has represented senior government figures.

In the current case, the Justice Department examined whether Trump unlawfully removed classified documents when he left office in January 2021. Part of the investigation has also looked into whether Trump or others sought to obstruct the government's investigation.

The classified documents investigation was first referred to prosecutors in 2022 after the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration tried for more than a year to retrieve presidential records from Trump.

Trump handed over 15 boxes of records in January 2022, a year after leaving office, but federal officials came to believe he had not returned all the government documents he had taken.

The Justice Department issued Trump a grand jury subpoena in May 2022 asking him to return any other records bearing classified markings, and top officials traveled to Mar-a-Lago to retrieve the materials.

Trump's attorneys turned over 38 pages marked as classified to FBI and Justice Department officials and showed them a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, but they did not permit the agents to open any of the boxes.

One of the Trump attorneys involved in searching Mar-a-Lago - Evan Corcoran - has since become a witness in the case.

Corcoran drafted a document signed by another Trump lawyer attesting that all records with classified markings had been returned to the government - a claim later proven false after the FBI searched Trump's home.

FBI agents in August 2022 searched Mar-a-Lago and recovered roughly 13,000 documents, 100 of which were marked as classified.

Trump's lawyers tried to block the Justice Department from accessing some of the records, claiming they were covered by the legal doctrine of executive privilege, which shields some White House communications from disclosure. A federal appeals court rejected that argument in December.

Trump is not the only top government official to draw scrutiny for retaining classified documents.

Attorneys for Biden and for Trump's then-vice president, Mike Pence, this year disclosed they were cooperating with the Justice Department after the discovery that both men had retained classified records after leaving office.

Biden's documents dated back to his tenure in the U.S. Senate and as vice president. The Justice Department in June closed its investigation into Pence without filing any charges.

Trump's legal woes are growing.

In May, a jury in federal court in Manhattan decided in a civil lawsuit that he must pay $5 million in damages for sexually abusing former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll and then defaming her by branding her a liar.

Trump also faces a criminal investigation by a county prosecutor in Georgia relating to his efforts to undo his 2020 election loss in that state.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta, Costas Pitas, Nathan Layne and Karen Freifeld; Editing by Andy Sullivan, Daniel Wallis and Lincoln Feast.)
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Getty

Donald Trump hasnt done himself any favors in loudly and publicly fighting accusations he illegally swiped classified documents from the White House, with the former presidents own words likely to foil his defense, legal experts say.

The short answer is, noits not a good idea, Daniel P. Meyer, a national security partner at Tully Rinckey PLLC's Washington, D.C. office, told The Daily Beast.

In a criminal case, Meyer said, You want to keep your mouth shut, for a very simple reason: the government bears the burden of proving youre a criminal.

Meyer, a former naval officer who went on to high-level positions within the Department of Defense Inspector Generals office before entering private practice, said the former president left so much evidence on the record by dint of his own statements.

Donald Trump should have stayed quiet, Meyer said. And thats what he has not done.

Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor, predicted Trump isnt likely to wiggle his way out of a conviction this timesaying he already dug his own grave even before he was indicted on Thursday.

I think of all the possible charges against Trump, the classified documents case was the easiest one to prove, Rahmani told The Daily Beast.

Thats because tape recordings, social posts, and a raid by the FBI have seemingly confirmed Trump knowingly possessed classified documents outside the White Houseand that he may have wrongly thought he was legally permitted to do so.

CNN reported on June 2 that the special prosecutor probing Trump, Jack Smith, uncovered a tape from 2021 in which Trump stated that he possessed a classified document related to a potential attack on Iran. The conversation, recorded by a Trump aide, reportedly came during a discussion with writers working on a memoir for his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

During the convo, Trump denied media reports that General Mark Milley, his Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, stopped him from attacking Iran in his final months in office. Instead, he said, he possessed a military document that proved Milley was in favor of an assault. He then acknowledged to the group he wasnt authorized to show them that document.

That reported admission could be a double-edged sword for Trump, as not only did he admit to possessing a classified document, but he also acknowledged he knew it couldnt be shown to just anyone.

Sources told CNN that Smith considered the recording an important piece of evidence.

His lawyers are going to argue that the documents were declassified, and that he did so before he left office and that he was authorized to do so, Rahmani said. But I dont think that arguments going to hold water, because theres a very specific procedure that youre supposed to follow.

Trump has been all over the place while discussing classified documentssometimes denying he had any, and other times claiming he was legally allowed to possess some. He bizarrely claimed last yearwholly incorrectlythat the president can declassify material even by thinking about it, later adding that a president is free to declassify anything they want.

If youre the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying its declassified, even by thinking about it, Trump asserted. Youre the president. You make that decision.

Trump said he declassified everything he took to Mar-a-Lago a seemingly clear admission he took documents to his South Florida estate, possibly unknowingly. He doubled down on this belief in posts to Truth Socialwhere hes repeatedly insisted hes innocent.

HOW CAN THE DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, he recently wrote.

Trump Case Isnt About Documents, Its About National Security

Rahmani said Trumps belief he had the unfettered discretion to declassify documents isnt true, adding that he lost all executive privilege the second he crashed out of office.

Joshua Ritter, a former Los Angeles County prosecutor, said he believes Trumps statements likely arent the linchpin to the prosecutions case, but they arent doing the former president any favors, either.

In any case where a defendant is very vocal and giving lots of statements about an ongoing investigation, it never seems to help them, and always seems to come back to haunt them, he told The Daily Beast, noting that the U.S. Attorneys Office will be keeping track of anything and everything Trump said that has any bearing on the prosecution.

National security lawyer Bradley Moss also believes Trumps actions have spoken louder than his words, and this is what will bury him at a potential trial. Yet, with all that in mind, Trumps public remarks, including press statements his office issued regarding return of records to NARA [National Archives and Records Administration], will be relevant and material to the factual foundation of any charges, Moss told The Daily Beast.

Questions have been raised about why it took so long to indict Trump despite seemingly hoards of evidence against himincluding the alleged discovery of top-secret documents during a raid at Mar-a-Lago.

Rahmani said the sheer magnitude of the ordealand the polarization surrounding itmeant the feds needed to have an air-tight case before they indicted Trump.

If you are Merrick Garland, and you are going to take on the most politically charged prosecution in American history, you want to make sure you come correct, and make sure there are no legal or procedural landmines that youre walking into, Rahmani said.

Rahmani isnt sure Trump, a firebrand uncontainable by even the most well-respected lawyers in the country, is through with the incriminating statements just yet.

This guy will not follow Lawyering 101just keep your mouth shut, Rahmani said. Look, I know hes doing it for PR and political reasons, but hes really screwing himself when it comes to these criminal casesIm sure his lawyers are incredibly frustrated having to clean up his messes.

Jamie White, a Michigan-based criminal defense lawyer, said Trump is the definition of a nightmare client for that reason. He said Trumps tendency to go rogue online can turn his attorneys into witnesses themselves, which has happened in the classified documents probe.

Trump, who has burned through numerous lawyers since leaving office, has also not always been steered in the right direction of late, according to Meyer.

Whoever is advising Trump, and I think of Roger Stone, there is an antique nature to the advice he seems to be getting, Meyer said. Trump is acting as if the Presidential Records Act, all of the post-Watergate [laws], were never passed. All of the legal arguments Im hearing from Trumps attorneys are 50 years old.

A voice memo recorded by Evan Corcoran, a Trump attorney, is expected to play a key role in Trumps prosecution. The recording, obtained by Smith this month, reportedly contains Corcorans detailed narration of his work on the classified docs probe beginning after he first met with Trump in May 2022, which reportedly provided investigators with an unusually intimate peek behind the curtain for nearly a month-long period.

Such materials are typically protected by attorney-client privilege. However, Corcoran lost the right of privacy to his memo because of something called the crime-fraud exception, a provision that allows prosecutors to work around attorney-client privilege if theres evidence to believe legal advice or legal services were used in furthering a crime.

I suspect his attorneys run into this ethical dilemma, White said, of their client doing the unthinkable and their advice not being taken, and then they become witnessesmost famously Mr. [Michael] Cohen, who arguably took instructions from Mr. Trump that was corroborated by the Mueller investigation, and he found himself in prison.

White says Americas political climate is so fractured, he doesnt expect Trumps indictment to have the same ramifications it would to a president in the 20th century. Instead, he fears the repercussions if Trump is able to skirt justice despite a stunning amount of evidence against him.

I think theyre probably looking at some of the practical considerations that are important to our country, important to our politics, but at the end of the day, when youre left with a guy on tape, so to speak, what do you do? White said. Does the rule of law still prevail in our country?

One of those concerns, obviously, will hinge upon whether or not Trump is convicted, and what happens after that.

Youre going to have to close down an entire prison to incarcerate this man, White said. At the same time, nobody is above the law. As soon as we agree that somebody is above the law, the entire system breaks down.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Donald Trump made the stunning admission that he held onto secret military information that he hadnt declassified in a bombshell tape believed to be at the heart of his indictment on federal charges.

A transcript of the 2021 tape was revealed by CNN on Friday morning, hours after news emerged that Mr Trump had been indicted on seven charges relating to the storage of classified national defence documents dating from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.

In the tape, first reported last week, the ex-president speaks about retaining information that he says as president, I could have declassified, but now I cant.

He specifically referenced a classified Department of Defense document regarding an attack on Iran, according to the transcript.

The new indictment against Mr Trump hasnt been made fully public, meaning its not clear if any of those charges relate to the recording from 2021.

But the recording does indicate that Mr Trump was aware that the documents he had brought with him from the White House after leaving office on 20 January that year were still classified.

In public, Mr Trump has argued that all of the files he took to Florida had been declassified and he has claimed that the investigation is a witch hunt and an attempt to hinder his 2024 campaign to return to the White House.

It was reported last week that prosecutors had procured the audio recording, which was made in 2021 at Mr Trumps Bedminster, New Jersey, resort with two individuals working on the autobiography of Mr Trumps final White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in addition to aides to the former president, such as Marco Martin, a communications staffer.

The transcript implies that Mr Trump is showing the document hes speaking about during the conversation.

CNN reported that several sources have said that the sound from the recording includes the rustling of papers, indicating that Mr Trump may have been moving the document around. But its not clear if it was the document regarding Iran.

Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, Mr Trump said. This was done by the military and given to me.

At the time, Mr Trump was complaining about the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley. The meeting took place not long after a story published by The New Yorker outlined how Gen Milley told the Joint Chiefs during the last days of Mr Trumps time in office to make sure that the then-president not give any illegal orders and that Gen Milley should be made aware if there were any concerns.

Well, with Milley  uh, let me see that, Ill show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isnt that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him, Mr Trump said, the transcript shows. They presented me this  this is off the record, but  they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasnt done by me, this was him.

All sorts of stuff  pages long, look. Wait a minute, lets see here. I just found, isnt that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, Mr Trump added.

Secret and confidential are both degrees of classified information.

Special Counsel Jack Smith has led the federal probe into Mr Trumps handling of classified information and his obstruction of the investigation. Mr Trumps attorney said the 45th president was summoned by the Department of Justice to appear in court on Tuesday in Miami.

Mr Smith is also investigating Mr Trumps attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Mr Smith was appointed in November to lead the Department of Justices documents and election probes by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Republican US Senator Mitt Romney said that former president Donald Trump had brought an indictment upon himself for his taking classified documents and refusing to return them.

Mr Romney released a statement on Friday after news that a grand jury indicted Mr Trump for his alleged unlawful of retention of national defence information at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Mr Trump said he must report to a court in Miami by Tuesday at 3pm ET.

Like all Americans, Mr Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence. The government has the burden of proving its charges beyond a reasonable doubt and securing a unanimous verdict by a South Florida jury, Mr Romney said.

By all appearances, the Justice Department and special counsel have exercised due care, affording Mr Trump the time and opportunity to avoid charges that would not generally have been afforded to others, he said. Mr Trump brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities to do so.

The 2012 Republican presidential nominee, whom Mr Trump endorsed in that election, has since emerged as one of the GOPs most outspoken critics of the former president. Mr Romney voted to convict Mr Trump in his first impeachment trial in 2020, the only Republican Senator to do so, for attempting to withhold aid for Ukraine in exchange for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky investigating Joe Bidens son when Mr Trump was running for re-election.

In 2021, six other Republicans joined Mr Romney to convict Mr Trump for his incitement of the January 6 riot. Mr Romney alluded to those cases in his statement.

These allegations are serious and if proven, would be consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest, such as withholding defensive weapons from Ukraine for political reasons and failing to defend the Capitol from violent attack and insurrection, he said.

The statement stands in contrast to Mr Romneys statement after a New York grand jury indicted Mr Trump in April, when Mr Romney expressed some scepticism. New York County District Attorney Alvin Braggs office charged Mr Trump on 34 counts related to his allegedly making hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

Even so, I believe the New York prosecutor has stretched to reach felony criminal charges in order to fit a political agenda, Mr Romney said at the time. No one is above the law, not even former presidents, but everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the law. The prosecutors overreach sets a dangerous precedent for criminalizing political opponents and damages the publics faith in our justice system.
Former President Donald Trump was on the campaign trail in early June 2023, as an investigation continued that led to his indictment on federal charges. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

Former President Donald Trumps indictment by a federal grand jury in Miami includes at least one charge under the Espionage Act of 1917, according to Trumps attorney and reports in The New York Times.

The Espionage Act has historically been employed most often by law-and-order conservatives. But the biggest uptick in its use occurred during the Obama administration, which used it as the hammer of choice for national security leakers and whistleblowers. Regardless of whom it is used to prosecute, it unfailingly prompts consternation and outrage.

We are both attorneys who specialize in and teach national security law. While navigating the sound and fury over the Trump indictment, here are a few things to note about the Espionage Act.

Espionage Act seldom pertains to espionage

When you hear espionage, you may think spies and international intrigue. One portion of the act  18 U.S.C. section 794  does relate to spying for foreign governments, for which the maximum sentence is life imprisonment.

That aspect of the law is best exemplified by the convictions of Jonathan Pollard in 1987, for spying for and providing top-secret classified information to Israel; former Central Intelligence Agency officer Aldrich Ames in 1994, for being a double agent for the Russian KGB; and, in 2002, former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was caught selling U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union and Russia over a span of more than 20 years. All three received life sentences.

But spy cases are rare. More typically, as in the Trump investigation, the act applies to the unauthorized gathering, possessing or transmitting of certain sensitive government information.

Transmitting can mean moving materials from an authorized to an unauthorized location  many types of sensitive government information must be maintained in secure facilities. It can also apply to refusing a government demand for a documents return. Trumps charges reportedly include an allegation of unauthorized retention of national security documents, which can include both possessing the documents and refusing to return them to the government. All of these prohibited activities fall under the separate and more commonly applied section of the act  18 U.S.C. section 793.

Chelsea Manning, in uniform, after being sentenced on Aug. 21, 2013, to 35 years in prison after being found guilty of several counts under the Espionage Act. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

A violation does not require an intention to aid a foreign power

Willful unauthorized possession of information that, if obtained by a foreign government, might harm U.S. interests is generally enough to trigger a possible sentence of 10 years.

Current claims by Trump supporters of the seemingly innocuous nature of the conduct at issue  simply possessing sensitive government documents  miss the point. The driver of the Department of Justices concern under Section 793 is the sensitive content and the connection to national defense information, known as NDI.

One of the most famous Espionage Act cases, known as Wikileaks, in which Julian Assange was indicted for obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents in 2010, is not about leaks to help foreign governments. It concerned the unauthorized soliciting, obtaining, possessing and publishing of sensitive information that might be of help to a foreign nation if disclosed.

Two recent senior Democratic administration officials  Sandy Berger, national security adviser during the Clinton administration, and David Petraeus, CIA director under during the Obama administration  each pleaded guilty to misdemeanors under the threat of Espionage Act prosecution.

Berger took home a classified document  in his sock  at the end of his tenure. Petraeus shared classified information with an unauthorized person for reasons having nothing to do with a foreign government.

The act is not just about classified information

Some of the documents the FBI sought and found in the Trump search were designated top secret or top secret-sensitive compartmented information.

Both classifications tip far to the serious end of the sensitivity spectrum.

Top secret-sensitive compartmented information is reserved for information that would truly be damaging to the U.S. if it fell into foreign hands.

One theory floated by Trump defenders is that by simply handling the materials as president, Trump could have effectively declassified them. It actually doesnt work that way  presidential declassification requires an override of Executive Order 13526, must be in writing, and must have occurred while Trump was still president  not after. If they had been declassified, they should have been marked as such.

And even assuming the documents were declassified, which does not appear to be the case, Trump is still in the criminal soup. The Espionage Act applies to all national defense information, or NDI, of which classified materials are only a portion. This kind of information includes a vast array of sensitive information including military, energy, scientific, technological, infrastructure and national disaster risks. By law and regulation, NDI materials may not be publicly released and must be handled as sensitive.

A judge unsealed a search warrant that shows that the FBI is investigating Donald Trump for a possible violation of the Espionage Act. AP Photo/Jon Elswick

The public cant judge a case based on classified information

Cases involving classified information or NDI are nearly impossible to referee from the cheap seats.

None of us will get to see the documents at issue, nor should we. Why?

Because they are classified.

Even if we did, we would not be able to make an informed judgment of their significance because what they relate to is likely itself classified  wed be making judgments in a void.

And even if a judge in an Espionage Act case had access to all the information needed to evaluate the nature and risks of the materials, it wouldnt matter. The fact that documents are classified or otherwise regulated as sensitive defense information is all that matters.

Historically, Espionage Act cases have been occasionally political and almost always politicized. Enacted at the beginning of U.S. involvement in World War I in 1917, the act was largely designed to make interference with the draft illegal and prevent Americans from supporting the enemy.

But it was immediately used to target immigrants, labor organizers and left-leaning radicals. It was a tool of Cold War anti-communist politicians like Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1940s and 1950s. The case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, is the most prominent prosecution of that era.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the act was used against peace activists, including Pentagon Paper whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Since Sept. 11, 2001, officials have used the act against whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. Because of this history, the act is often assailed for chilling First Amendment political speech and activities.

The Espionage Act is serious and politically loaded business. Its breadth, the potential grave national security risks involved and the lengthy potential prison term have long sparked political conflict. These cases are controversial and complicated in ways that counsel patience and caution before reaching conclusions.

This is an updated version of an article originally published Aug. 15, 2022.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. The Conversation is trustworthy news from experts, from an independent nonprofit. Try our free newsletters.

It was written by: Joseph Ferguson, Loyola University Chicago and Thomas A. Durkin, Loyola University Chicago.

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Thomas A. Durkin was an expert witness on behalf of Julian Assange in his UK proceeding.

Joseph Ferguson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Former President Donald Trump was indicted Thursday on charges related to violations of the Espionage Act and the mishandling of classified documents taken from the White House after he lost reelection. The Republican whining has already begun.

Despite running against Trump for next years GOP presidential nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ran to his defense and asked why the Department of Justice was so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary [Clinton] or Hunter [Biden]?

Republicans are sure to ramp up the comparisons between Trumps indictment and similar cases involving former Secretary of State Clinton, former Vice President Mike Pence and President Joe Biden, all of whom had some classified material in their possession as private citizens, as they rush to defend Trump.

The allegations against Trump, however, when paired with the available evidence of his state of mind, are dramatically different from the potential charges considered against Biden, Clinton or Pence.

The Trump Case

A federal grand jury has indicted Trump on allegations he willfully retained national defense information under the Espionage Act, making false statements, conspiracy and obstruction.

The former president has been under investigation for more than a year for taking classified documents after he left office and not returning them after requests. The investigation began after the National Archives discovered that a number of key documents from the Trump administration were missing in the files turned over at the end of his White House term. They asked the former president to return them if he had them.

After much foot-dragging, Trump complied and sent 15 boxes of documents to the archives. Upon inspection, the agency found 197 classified documents in those 15 boxes, including some with sensitive national security information.

The archives referred the matter to the Justice Department, which issued a subpoena for the return of any other documents. Trumps lawyers turned in 38 more documents, claiming it was all they had.

Former President Donald Trump, shown here in April campaigning for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination in Manchester, New Hampshire, is facing multiple investigations and has now been indicted in two cases.

Former President Donald Trump, shown here in April campaigning for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination in Manchester, New Hampshire, is facing multiple investigations and has now been indicted in two cases.

But Justice Department investigators had reason to believe otherwise. The FBI searched Trumps home at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 2022, recovering 102 more documents with classification markers that Trump had withheld from the prior requests and subpoena. Following the search, and as it became clear a Trump-Biden 2024 rematch was a real possibility, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith, a veteran prosecutor and political independent, as a special counsel to oversee a grand jury investigation into Trumps actions.

Since then, more information has come out to show that Trump actively sought to prevent the return of classified documents and knew he had taken classified documents that he had not declassified while president. Trump aides moved boxes containing the documents ahead of the FBI search. Trump also showed classified documentsto others on at least two occasions, according to the indictment.

In one instance, prosecutors obtained an audio recording from former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows ghostwriters in which Trump bragged about a classified document prepared for him by the Department of Defense, and he can be heard acknowledging that he knew he couldnt show it to them while he apparently was showing it to them.

Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this. This was done by the military and given to me, Trump says on the recording, first reported by CNN. As president, I could have declassified, but now I cant, he added.

Trump also showed a political aide a classified map related to a military operation and said he should not be showing it to the aide, according to the indictment.

The indictment charges Trump with 31 counts of retaining classified documents, including those covering U.S. military contingency plans, U.S. military operations in a foreign country, military and nuclear capabilities of the U.S. and foreign countries, and details about military actions and attacks in foreign countries.

Lets recap: Trump is accused of actively taking classified documents that he knew he had not declassified, refusing to hand them over despite receiving a subpoena for them, seeking to further hide them from investigators, telling investigators he didnt have any more documents and showing classified documents to people without security clearances on at least two occasions. And theres recorded audio evidence that points to his state of mind and understanding of the law.

This is all far different from what was alleged or found to be the case in regards to Biden, Clinton and Pence.

The Hillary Clinton Case

The obvious comparison that Republicans have, and will, make to Trumps predicament is Clintons use of a private email server while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. The email server became a public controversy during her 2016 presidential campaign against Trump, with his rally crowds chanting Lock her up, a sentiment Trump said he was starting to agree with in July 2016. Trump ally Alex Jones sold Hillary for prison T-shirts.

The initial investigation into Clintons private email server revealed classified information had been shared in upwards of 2,000 email chains stored on the server. In making the server a campaign issue, Trump promised to enforce the law.

Hillary Clinton's handling of classified emails was a major issue in her 2016 presidential campaign against Trump

Hillary Clinton's handling of classified emails was a major issue in her 2016 presidential campaign against Trump

In my administration, Im going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information, Trump said in August 2016. No one will be above the law.

Trumps repeated attacks on Clinton and promises of upholding the rule of law are cited in the indictment against him as evidence that he knew about the importance of enforcing the proper handling of classified information.

The investigation into Clintons private email server crescendoed when FBI Director James Comeys July 2016 statement that although Clinton and her aides were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information, no charges would be filed because our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.

Comey used such prosecutorial discretion because there was no evidence Clinton or her aides failed to turn over documents or that the server was set up to receive classified information and retain it and that there was little evidence that the documents deemed to be classified were properly marked as such when they were sent and received in her email.

A Justice Department inspector generals report on the investigation and the agencys handling of it was released in June 2018, revealing that none of the emails contained clear classification markers as required under executive rules.

Just three email chains contained any classification markings of any kind, according to the IG report. The classified documents in these three chains were call sheets marked with the lowest priority of classification, providing reminders and talking points on scheduled calls between Clinton and foreign leaders.

It was also difficult for prosecutors to determine if Clinton and her aides intended to receive and retain classified information because the State Departments email oversight and retention practices had been so poor for years that her actions were just normal practice.

Two State Department reviews conducted under Trumps secretaries of state, Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo, also found that Clinton bore no individual culpability for any spillage of classified information and there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.

Four investigations revealed that Clinton did not have forethought in her retention of classified information, just three of the emails on her server were even marked as classified when they were received and she complied with the Justice Departments investigation fully. This is almost the exact opposite of what Trump is alleged to have done.

The Joe Biden And Mike Pence Cases

After the FBI searched Trumps home at Mar-a-Lago, aides for Biden and Pence, in the process of sorting through documents held by the two former vice presidents, alerted the National Archives to the presence of classified documents found in their possession.

A special counsel has been appointed to investigate classified documents found at President Joe Biden's personal residence and at the office of a nonprofit from his time as vice president.

A special counsel has been appointed to investigate classified documents found at President Joe Biden's personal residence and at the office of a nonprofit from his time as vice president.

The classified documents held by Biden emerged after the presidents personal lawyers found them while moving boxes stored in a locked closet at a nonprofit affiliated with Biden in Washington called the Penn Biden Center. Subsequent searches revealed other documents at Bidens home in Wilmington, Delaware. A Department of Justice search of Bidens vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, turned up no additional documents.

Since the 20 or so documents were discovered, Biden has said he had no intention of taking any such documents and did not even know what was in them. Unlike Trump, his lawyers immediately alerted the National Archives when the documents were discovered and he has complied with all Justice Department activities since, including allowing broad searches of his personal residence, the Penn Biden Center and his vacation home.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed former U.S. Attorney Robert Hur as special counsel to investigate whether any further action is warranted in the case of Bidens documents.

Following the discovery of classified documents at Bidens locations, Pence ordered his lawyers to review the papers he took from his time as vice president for the inclusion of any classified materials. After finding about a dozen such documents, his lawyers alerted the archives and turned the documents over to the Justice Department. The FBI later conducted a search of his home in Indiana. The investigation ended on June 1 when the DOJ sent a letter to Pence telling him that no criminal charges will be sought.

In both cases, Biden and Pence immediately alerted the archives when documents were discovered. They both cooperated with investigators, allowing broad searches of their properties.

They, as far as we know, did not purposefully take classified documents, brag about their possession of them, lie to investigators about how many documents they had, order aides to lie about the number of documents or try to move and hide the documents from investigators.

According to the indictment, Trump did all of those things.

Related...
(Bloomberg) -- The indictment brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith against Donald Trump marks the culmination of a two-year effort to figure out what government documents went with the former president when he left the White House  and whether any crimes were committed.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Filed under seal in federal court in Miami, the indictment was announced by Trump in a post on his Truth Social platform Thursday evening and confirmed by people familiar with the matter.

The unprecedented FBI search of Trumps Mar-a-Lago home on Aug. 8, 2022, came after National Archives officials spent months trying to claw back records still in his possession. Trumps lawyers and the US Justice Department then wrangled in court over whether prosecutors could use the seized materials at all. A federal appeals court ended the fight in December, siding with the government.

Trumps campaign filing in November signaling a third White House run prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint Smith as special counsel that month. As Smith settled in, the first half of 2023 saw a procession of grand jury witnesses, sealed subpoena fights and shakeups on Trumps legal defense team.

Here are key milestones leading up to the indictment filed in federal court in Miami Thursday, as documented in public court filings and previous reports by Bloomberg News:

2021

Jan. 20

President Joe Biden is sworn in and Donald and Melania Trump depart Washington for their Mar-a-Lago resort home in Palm Beach, Florida.

May 6

The National Archives notifies former Trump White House lawyers of missing presidential records.

December

Trump representatives inform the National Archives that at least a dozen boxes of documents are ready to be picked up.

2022

Jan. 18

National Archives staff receives 15 boxes of White House records from Mar-a-Lago.

Feb. 9

A National Archives official alerts the Justice Department that documents marked as classified are mingled with other files in the boxes.

Feb. 18

The Archivist of the United States David Ferriero notifies the House Oversight Committee of the discovery of classified records.

April 12

The National Archives tells a Trump representative of its intent to share records with FBI.

April 29

Trump attorney Evan Corcoran requests the National Archives delay providing material to the FBI.

May 10

The National Archives rejects the request by Trumps counsel to postpone producing records to the FBI.

May 11

Trump, through his attorney Corcoran, accepts service of a federal grand jury subpoena seeking any classified material in his possession.

May 16-18

FBI agents conduct a preliminary review of the 15 boxes retrieved from Mar-a-Lago in January, identifying 184 documents with classified markings.

May 25

Trump lawyer Corcoran writes a letter to a DOJ official defending the former presidents good faith effort to work with National Archives and disputing the grounds for a criminal investigation.

June 3

Jay Bratt, the Justice Departments counterintelligence chief, arrives at Mar-a-Lago with three FBl agents to retrieve a folder containing 38 more classified documents. They also tour a storage room, but arent allowed to look in boxes.

June 8

Bratt sends a letter to Trumps counsel asking that the storage room holding the documents be secured.

June 24

The Trump Organization Inc., the former presidents company, receives a federal grand jury subpoena for surveillance camera footage from Mar-a-Lago.

Aug. 5

The Justice Department applies to US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart in Florida for a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago.

Aug. 8

FBI agents execute the warrant at Mar-a-Lago, removing 27 boxes and several other document collections containing 11 sets of classified materials

Aug. 22

Trump files a request in federal court in Florida for a third-party special master to review the seized materials.

Sept. 5

US District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida enters an order temporarily barring DOJ from using the seized materials and granting Trumps request for an outside review. US District Judge Raymond Dearie in New York is later named special master.

Sept. 21

The 11th Circuit partially lifts Cannons injunction, allowing federal investigators to regain access to the classified documents but not the rest of the seized material.

Nov. 15

Donald Trump formally announces he is running for president in the 2024 election.

Nov. 18

Attorney General Garland announces the appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel to lead the classified documents probe and a separate federal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Dec. 1

The 11th Circuit reverses Judge Cannons appointment of a special master and lifts the remaining injunction on DOJs use of the material seized from Mar-a-Lago.

December 2022/January 2023

Trump attorneys discover more documents with classified markings and turn them over to the Justice Department.

2023

January

Trump attorney Corcoran appears before a federal grand jury in Washington in connection with the classified documents probe.

Jan. 12

Following the discovery of classified records in Joe Bidens Washington office and Delaware home, Garland announces the appointment of Robert Hur as another special counsel.

March 22

The DC Circuit rejects efforts by Trump and Corcoran to block the special counsels requests for Corcorans testimony and written work product.

March 24

Corcoran appears again before a federal grand jury in Washington. He recuses himself from work for Trump related to the criminal probe of alleged mishandling of classified documents.

April 26

Trumps attorneys send a letter to the House Intelligence Committee requesting legislative intervention to halt the Justice Department investigation.

May 16

Trump attorney Tim Parlatore leaves the defense team.

May 23

Trump shares a letter on his Truth Social platform from his attorneys requesting a meeting with the attorney general.

June 5

Three of Trumps lawyers  James Trusty, John Rowley, and Lindsey Halligan  go to the Justice Department headquarters in Washington for a meeting with senior officials, including Special Counsel Jack Smith, to discuss the status of the classified documents probe. Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco arent present.

June 8

Trump maintained his innocence in a Thursday night post on his Truth Social platform and said that hes been summoned to appear at the federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday.

I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, he wrote.

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Donald Trump described a plan of attack devised by the Pentagon and shared a classified military map with a member of his political action committee who didnt have a security clearance, the 37-count indictment against the former president shows.

The indictment, unsealed on Friday afternoon, stems from Mr Trumps allegedly unlawful retention of hundreds of documents at his Florida residence Mar-a-Lago.

Trump aide Walt Nauta has also been charged after he was apparently spotted on surveillance footage moving boxes at the property. The ex-president stands accused of having moved classified documents from the White House at the end of his presidency despite not having the right to do so.

Mr Trump showed classified documents to others twice in 2021, the legal filing states.

According to the indictment, In July 2021, at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey (The Bedminster Club), during an audio-recorded meeting with a writer, a publisher, and two members of his staff, none of whom possessed a security clearance, TRUMP showed and described a plan of attack that TRUMP said was prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official.

TRUMP told the individuals that the plan was highly confidential and secret. TRUMP also said, as president I could have declassified it, and, Now I cant, you know, but this is still a secret, the filing says.

In August or September 2021, at The Bedminster Club, TRUMP showed a representative of his political action committee who did not possess a security clearance a classified map related to a military operation and told the representative that he should not be showing it to the representative and that the representative should not get too close, the indictment also states.

Photo of document boxes in Former President Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago residence released by US Justice Department as part of the indictment (US Justice Department)

The legal filing notes that Mar-a-Lago wasnt approved for the storage of classified documents but Mr Trump still stored his boxes containing classified documents in various locations at The Mar-a-Lago Club-including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

The 49-page indictment includes 37 counts against Mr Trump and Mr Nauta, a former US Navy noncommissioned officer who left his government job to work for Mr Trump at the end of his time in the White House.

A transcript of the 2021 tape was revealed by CNN on Friday morning, hours after news emerged that Mr Trump had been indicted.

In the tape, first reported last week, he specifically referenced a classified Department of Defense document regarding an attack on Iran, according to the transcript.

It was reported last week that prosecutors had procured the audio recording, which was made in 2021 at Mr Trumps Bedminster, New Jersey, resort with two individuals working on the autobiography of Mr Trumps final White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in addition to aides to the former president, such as Marco Martin, a communications staffer.

The transcript implies that Mr Trump is showing the document hes speaking about during the conversation.

Photo of document boxes in Former President Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago residence released by US Justice Department as part of the indictment (US Justice Department)

CNN reported that several sources have said that the sound from the recording includes the rustling of papers, indicating that Mr Trump may have been moving the document around. But its not clear if it was the document regarding Iran.

Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, Mr Trump said. This was done by the military and given to me.

At the time, Mr Trump was complaining about the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley. The meeting took place not long after a story published by The New Yorker outlined how Gen Milley told the Joint Chiefs during the last days of Mr Trumps time in office to make sure that the then-president not give any illegal orders and that Gen Milley should be made aware if there were any concerns.

Well, with Milley  uh, let me see that, Ill show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isnt that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him, Mr Trump said, the transcript shows. They presented me this  this is off the record, but  they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasnt done by me, this was him.

Photo of document boxes in Former President Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago residence released by US Justice Department as part of the indictment (US Justice Department)

All sorts of stuff  pages long, look. Wait a minute, lets see here. I just found, isnt that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, Mr Trump added.

Secret and confidential are both degrees of classified information.

Special Counsel Jack Smith has led the federal probe into Mr Trumps handling of classified information and his obstruction of the investigation. Mr Trumps attorney said the 45th president was summoned by the Department of Justice to appear in court on Tuesday in Miami.

Mr Smith is also investigating Mr Trumps attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Mr Smith was appointed in November to lead the Department of Justices documents and election probes by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Trump should end his campaign and drop out now, says at least one GOP presidential candidate

Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

As news of Donald Trump's indictment spreads, most GOP candidates have remained quiet.

GOP presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson, however, called on Trump to drop out of the race.

The indictment shows the need for Trump to "end his campaign" said Hutchinson in a press release.

As news broke that Donald Trump is facing a federal indictment, most GOP candidates have remained quiet. But former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who launched his campaign in April, has called on Trump to drop out of the race.

"With the news that Donald Trump has been indicted for the second time, our country finds itself in a position that weakens our democracy," said Hutchinson in a press release. "Donald Trump's actions  from his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of law  should not define our nation or the Republican Party. This is a sad day for our country. While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign."

The Justice Department indicted Donald Trump on Thursday over the former president's hoarding of government records, according to the New York Times, citing multiple people familiar with the matter. The precise charges weren't immediately known, but the Times reported that one person briefed on the matter said there were seven counts.

With the indictment, Trump became the first current or former president in American history to face federal criminal charges. The indictment sets the stage for an extraordinary prosecution pitting the Justice Department against a former president who is campaigning to return to the White House.

The indictment may also further radicalize Trump's MAGA base of supporters. Trump has alluded to the possibility of violence if he is arrested, as he did in the run-up to his indictment by a New York grand jury.

Hutchinson is currently polling at less than 1 percent in the 2024 GOP primary, compared to Trump at over 53 percent, according to average of polling from RealClearPolitics. Hutchinson is the first  and so far only  Republican candidate to call for Trump to end his campaign in light of the indictment.

Read the original article on Business Insider
US urged to stop wasting Chinas goodwill for dialogue, experts say

08:52, June 09, 2023 By Liu Xin ( Global Times

China-US Graphic: GT

The battle of words between China and the US continued Thursday with the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin refuting US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns' accusation of China failing stop production of fentanyl. Analysts said that the US should stop wasting China's goodwill in being open to dialogue and should become sincere in improving relations instead of flip-flopping.

The US is one country that benefits the most from China's decision on the scheduling of all fentanyl-class drugs, which played an important role in preventing the illegal production, trafficking and abuse. But the US government is ungrateful, and has unreasonably sanctioned Chinese institutions, companies and individuals to undermine the foundation of China-US anti-drug cooperation, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a press conference on Thursday.

Wang's remarks came after Burns accused China on Wednesday of failing to stop production of fentanyl when attending the US Global Leadership Coalition forum via video link from Beijing. He also criticized China for "targeting" American companies, including the memory chipmaker Micron Technology Inc, media reported.

This is the latest "verbal crossfire" between China and the US as Washington has talked up its intention to seek communication with China while not giving up provocation on China, especially on military.

Burns' remarks and the recent interactions between China and the US highlighted the duplicity and self-contradiction of the US policy toward China, Diao Daming, an associate professor at the Renmin University of China in Beijing, told the Global Times.

Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, said that Burns' remarks also fully expose one of American political elites' old problems - trying to open channels for dialogues via imposing pressure arrogantly. For the US, maintaining communication with China is intended to make it convenient for Washington to raise its demands and requests to China.

The China-US relations are crucial and we need not only stable relations but also stable and mature diplomacy, said Li, noting that as the US ambassador to China, Burns' understanding of China is neither enough nor objective and as an implementer of US government's China policy, Burns, a veteran diplomat, however, has demonstrated less elasticity in handling bilateral relations.

Burns came to China in March 2022 to succeed Terry Branstad as US ambassador to China. Before Burns' arrival, the post was vacant since October 2020 and the bilateral relations were at the lowest ebb in decades.

The US has never been able to correct its prominent old problem of saying one thing and doing another, which also makes it more challenging to remove obstacles to stabilize China-US relations, said Li.

While Chinese analysts are urging the US to take sincere and concrete actions in improving relations, the US side has beefed up efforts in shifting blame to China. For example, a Washington Post commentary on Wednesday criticized China for not "acting like it wants to improve relations with the US."

China's policy and attitude toward the US has never changed and it is the US that has flip-flopped. The international community will not be fooled by the US' attempt to shift blame to China for the current obstacle of bilateral relations, said Diao.

The expert said that the meeting between top leaders of China and the US in Bali November 2022 and the following interactions of senior officials had promoted stable and positive communication between the two sides. However, the US' hyping of the balloon incident in February has frozen the bilateral relations.

"The US should stop wasting the goodwill of China as a responsible country," said Diao, noting that China is willing to push cooperation with the US out of care for the interests of the people from the two countries and the international community, but it will not have dialogue for the sake of dialogue if the US does not take sincere action.

On Wednesday, Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng delivered a keynote speech at the welcome event hosted by the US-China Business Council, during which he said China is always open to dialogue but what is essential is whole-process management - fostering good atmosphere in advance, accumulating outcomes in the process, and delivering on them afterwards.

Xie's remarks aimed to help people in the US better understand China's views on bilateral relations, know the harm of US' current policy on China and enable the two sides to have more balanced and objective communication, said Li.

As the bilateral relations have entered a complicated phase of game, only by working together and meeting each other halfway can the two side prevent the relationship from further deteriorating and turn it back to the right track. But if the US is still obsessed with competition with China and continues to push "decoupling" or "de-risking," the prospects of the relationship are not optimistic, said Li.

The crux of the current China-US relationship lies in the fact that the US has fundamentally and absurdly misunderstood China's intentions and policy. Only when the US changes its erroneous China policy, can the relations improve, said Li.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
Extreme supporters of Donald Trump have met news of his federal indictment with visions of violence and retribution.

At The Donald, a forum for ultra-MAGA Trump supporters, users demanded public executions and other forms of lynching to avenge the federal prosecution of Trump, for the alleged mishandling of state secrets at Mar a Lago after he was no longer president.

The calls for violence appeared in comment threads, responding to posts on the front page of the forum Thursday night, after news broke of Trumps latest legal troubles. The most extreme comments were written in response to a fanciful post insisting the only solution to DOJs efforts to lock up Trump would be to vote him back into the presidency, so Trump could pardon himself and begin arresting those guilty of insurrection and sedition.

A user named Belac186 offered a far deadlier fix: The only way this country ever becomes anything like the Constitution says this country should be is if thousands of traitorous rats are publicly executed. Commenter DogFaceKilla quickly chimed in to offer supplies: I got some rope somewhere in the garage And Heavy_Metal_Patriot added: Hans says we can borrow the flammenwerfer  a reference to a battlefield flame thrower used to by German soldiers in World War II.

The proposal for mass killing struck user BlackPilledMAGA as going too far: Doesnt have to be thousands, just a few dozen would do. Shit would STOP immediately. But user Nerdrem1 insisted taking out a few elites wouldnt make the difference, suggesting the number of dead required was on a genocidal scale: Millions. The real problem is the people that vote for them, as long as they exist the problem cant be solved. A user named Heavy_Metal_Patriot concurred: Correct.

It might be tempting to dismiss these calls for mass murder as loose talk among angry MAGAdonians. Yet there is dark history here. In a previous iteration, The Donald was used to help plot and promote the violence at the Capitol in 2021, as detailed in the final report of the House Jan. 6 Committee, including by users who openly discussed surrounding and occupying the U.S. Capitol.

On The Donald, users can post a headline or a meme with hopes that others will upvote to the front page. Clicking on a post then brings up a comment section, where the most popular comments similarly rise to the top. The forum is rightly notorious as a place for bad Internet behavior. It began on Reddit, before getting banned for upvoting rule-breaking content and for moderators who refused to meet our most basic expectations. The forum then launched as a standalone site at TheDonald.win, but a top moderator pulled the plug on that site following the havoc of Jan. 6. Finally it was rebooted for third time at Patriots.win, where it continues to connect the Trump faithful  and offer the rest of us a disturbing window into the psyche of the MAGA fever swamps.

The Donald still bills itself as a high-energy rally for supporters of President Trump and the forums rules include exhortations to Follow the Law and to Be Vigilant because your posts and comments may become news. The forum did not respond to questions emailed to its press line about its moderation practices or how it handles open calls to violence.

As Rolling Stone has reported, The Donald has lately gravitated away from hero worship of the 45th president and toward noxious culture-war issues, particularly promoting hate toward LGBTQ people. (To wit: the top Hot post by Friday morning was a post bemoaning the endorsement of Pride month by a fast-casual restaurant chain: Cracker Barrel went woke.)

But big news events involving Trump still stoke the passions of extremist users. Katie McCarthy is an investigative researcher with the Anti-Defamation League who monitors The Donald closely. She recalls that users were also very angry about Trumps first indictment in New York, making posts that included calls for civil war, violence, and retribution.

In fact, the threat of civil war was on the minds of The Donald again on Thursday. Under a meme post showing Donald Trump with laser eyes and the text YUGE MISTAKE, forum posters wrote of preparing for violence.

User horsepaste420 wrote: I just feel like were going through the motions until all hell breaks loose. A commenter named Blackrider concurred: Same here dude. Stacking bags and loading mags. Just waiting for the calm to end, and the chaos to begin. A responding to another users prediction of civil war, a commenter named pushbackv2 called such a conflict inevitable and predicted its right around the corner.

Elsewhere in the same comments section, user vax_was_a_bioweapon posted about the indictment as though it were interference in the democratic process  a development that would demand a deadly response: If they steal the election again why are we talking about anything but dragging the political elite out of their homes and setting them on fire? User HawkTheSlayer suggested a somewhat different lynching strategy: I prefer tying them to vehicles and dragging them across concrete until they are ground down to nothing.

A user whose handle is -jjjjjjjjjj- then appeared to reference a famous revolutionary quote from Thomas Jefferson about the the tree of liberty needing to be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, suggesting that Trump could jumpstart hostilities with a single phrase:

The only thing thats going to change the course of this country from its present heading of a Marxist dictatorship, the commenter wrote, is if Trump stands up in Court and says to all of my supporters, the tree needs watering and now is the time.

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Donald Trump was hit with a sweeping 37-count indictment from the special counsel's office Thursday, alleging that he willfully retained documents containing the nation's most sensitive secrets, including nuclear programs, after he left office, showed some of them on at least two occasions and then tried to obstruct the investigation into their whereabouts.

Federal prosecutors unsealed the indictment Friday against the former president and his aide Walt Nauta in connection with his handling of government documents.

The court papers allege that the classified documents included "defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack."

Boxes of those documents were allegedly stored in various locations around Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, including a ballroom stage and a bathroom, according to federal prosecutors.

PHOTO: A photo contained in the indictment released on June 9, 2023, from the U.S. Southern District of Florida, shows boxes of potentially sensitive documents that were found at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. (DOJ via US Southern District of Florida)

"From January through March 15, 2021, some of TRUMP's boxes were stored in The Mar-a-Lago Club's White and Gold Ballroom, in which events and gatherings took place. TRUMP's boxes were for a time stacked on the ballroom's stage," the indictment, said.

The federal government also alleged that Trump directed an obstruction into the investigation, instructing attorneys and aides to move the boxes and block attempts from the federal government from retrieving them.

According to the indictment, Trump allegedly told his attorneys after he got a subpoena to return the documents, "I don't want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don't."

He also asked, "What happens if we just don't respond at all?"

PHOTO: A photo contained in the indictment released on June 9, 2023, from the U.S. Southern District of Florida, shows boxes of potentially sensitive documents that were found at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. (DOJ via US Southern District of Florida)

"Wouldn't it be better if we just told them we don't have anything here," the document says he asked.

Then, "Well look isn't it better if there are no documents?"

Read the full indictment here:

The United States of America vs. Donald Trump, and Waltine Nauta by ABC News Politics on Scribd

Trump is slated to be arraigned on Tuesday in a Florida federal court.

MORE: Trump indictment live updates

Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and criticized the Department of Justice and the U.S. attorney general's office of conducting a political "witch hunt."

PHOTO: A photo contained in the indictment released on June 9, 2023, from the U.S. Southern District of Florida, shows boxes of potentially sensitive documents that were found at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. (DOJ via US Southern District of Florida)

The 49-page indictment includes several transcripts, surveillance footage, notes from at least one of his lawyers, audio recordings and other evidence that federal prosecutors claim Trump knowingly kept top-secret documents and endangered national security.

Trump suggested the documents were declassified but later admitted that they were secret in a taped interview, according to the court documents.

Prosecutors described a text exchange between Nauta to a Trump employee wherein Nauta said that Trump was tracking several of the boxes of documents and planned to "go through" them  and asked for "new covers" on them.

PHOTO: A photo contained in the indictment released on June 9, 2023, from the U.S. Southern District of Florida, shows boxes of potentially sensitive documents that were found at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. (DOJ via US Southern District of Florida)

The indictment included a meeting between Trump and two attorneys after he was subpoenaed by investigators where the former president described one of his lawyers deleting 30,000 emails belonging to an unidentified woman.

"He was great," Trump said referring to the unidentified attorney, according to the indictment. "She didn't get in any trouble because he said that he was the one who deleted them."

PHOTO: Former President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference following his court appearance over an alleged 'hush-money' payment, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on April 4, 2023. (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images, FILE)

Trump repeatedly hammered his 2016 election opponent Hilary Clinton over accusations that she used a private email server as secretary of state. Clinton was never prosecuted over the claims.

Prosecutors also described an allegedly incriminating exchange between Nauta and an unnamed member of the Trump family  whom ABC News believes to be from sources is Melania Trump  shortly after Nauta removed dozens of boxes from their storage location inside Mar-a-Lago.

PHOTO: In this March 13, 2023, file photo, Walt Nauta, aid to former President Donald Trump, follows Trump as they board his airplane, known as Trump Force One, in route to Iowa, at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images, FILE)

The indictment reads, "On May 30, 2022, at 12:33 p.m., a Trump family member texted NAUTA: Good afternoon Walt, Happy Memorial Day! I saw you put boxes to Potus room. Just FYI and I will tell him as well: Not sure how many he wants to take on Friday on the plane. We will NOT have a room for them. Plane will be full with luggage. Thank you!"

PHOTO: Special Counsel Jack Smith speaks to the press at the US Department of Justice in Washington, DC, on June 9, 2023, announcing the unsealing of the indictment against former US President Donald Trump. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

"Our laws that protect National Defense Information are critical, the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced," Special Counsel Jack Smith told reporters after the indictment was unsealed.

"We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone applying those laws, collecting facts, that's what determines the outcome of an investigation. Nothing more, nothing less," he added.

ABC News' Alexander Malin and Lucien Bruggeman contributed to this report.

Sweeping 37-count indictment alleges Trump hoarded national secrets, orchestrated obstruction of investigation originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
(Jim Cooke / Los Angeles Times; photo by Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

Former President Trump was indicted on 37 charges, including 31 counts of violations of the Espionage Act, as part of special counsel Jack Smiths investigation into Trump's handling of classified documents from his time in the White House.

The 49-page indictment, released Friday by the Department of Justice, details accusations that Trump stored boxes containing classified documents in various locations at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, including a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, his office, his bedroom and a storage room.

According to the indictment, among the top-secret and other classified records were details on foreign nations' nuclear capabilities, as well as information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both U.S. and foreign countries, U.S. nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of the U.S. and its allies to military attack, and plans for possible retaliation in response to an attack.

The indictment includes several photos of the boxes in different locations around Mar-a-Lago, including on a ballroom stage, where they stayed for two months while the ballroom continued to be used for events, and a bathroom and shower. One of the photos shows a stack of boxes that had fallen over in a storage room. Visible in the photo are documents marked with a designation that the information can only be released to the closest allies of the U.S.: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Trump is charged with willful retention of national defense information; conspiracy to obstruct justice; withholding a document or record; corruptly concealing a document in a federal investigation; scheming to conceal; and false statements and representations.

In a brief televised statement, Smith urged the public to read the indictment in order to understand "the gravity of the crimes charged." He also said he was aiming for a speedy trial.

The men and women of the United States intelligence community and our armed forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people. Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced, Smith said. "We have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everyone."

The indictment details accusations that in two instances in 2021, Trump shared classified information with people who lacked security clearances. The indictment also confirms a CNN report on the existence of a recording in which Trump indicates understanding that he cannot declassify records after leaving office and acknowledges that he possesses a classified record.

The indictment against former President Trump included this image dated Nov. 12, 2021, of boxes stacked in a storage room at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. (Justice Department via Associated Press)

The investigation began after the National Archives found classified records in a batch of documents Trump returned in 2022, a year after leaving office. Justice Department officials then sought a subpoena demanding that he return any other classified material in his possession.

The indictment cites notes from a May 23, 2022, conversation between Trump and his lawyer Evan Corcoran in which the former president questioned whether he had to fully comply with the subpoena, including making the statements, "I don't want anybody looking through my boxes. I don't want you looking through my boxes," "Wouldn't it be better if we just told them we don't have anything here?" and, "Well look, isn't it better if there are no documents?"

cropped excerpt of Donald Trump's florida indictment on torn paper. Text transcript refers to document boxes.

Trumps legal team ultimately produced about three dozen additional documents and a letter stating that a diligent search had turned up nothing more. But the indictment says Trump's lawyers didn't have access to all of the records for their search.

The indictment states that between May 23 and June 2 of last year  during the window after the subpoena was issued but before Corcoran could review the documents  Trump had his personal aide Waltine "Walt" Nauta move 64 boxes out of the Mar-a-Lago storage room to Trump's residence so the former president could go through the contents, and that Nauta later returned only 30 boxes to the storage room. This was hidden from Corcoran, according to the indictment.

The indictment also included this photo of records boxes in a bathroom at the former president's personal residence at Mar-a-Lago. (Justice Department via Associated Press)

The Justice Department learned of the move and the possibility that classified documents remained at the estate, and gained judicial approval for a search warrant. More than 100 documents with classified markings were found during an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago that August. The indictment states that the recovered classified records came from the CIA, the Defense Department, the National Security Agency and the State Department, among other sources.

Nauta was indicted alongside Trump on charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheming to conceal and making false statements and representations.

Trump defended Nauta, a Navy veteran who was frequently by his side in the White House, in a Truth Social post before the indictment was made public.

"He has done a fantastic job! They are trying to destroy his life, like the lives of so many others, hoping that he will say bad things about 'Trump,' the former president said of Nauta.

The special counsel's investigation has focused in part on Nauta, who is reportedly seen on surveillance video helping a maintenance worker move boxes from the storage room before the FBI executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago.

According to the indictment, Nauta made multiple false statements, including saying he was not aware the boxes had been taken to Trumps residence for review before 15 of them were sent to the National Archives, and didn't know how boxes taken to a National Archives truck had come to be in the residence; and that he falsely denied knowing where the boxes had been stored before they were found in Trumps residence, saying, I wish I could tell you. I dont know. I dont  I honestly just dont know.

Excerpt from Donald Trump florida indictment with text transcript referring to classified documents.

Trump announced in a social media post Thursday that he had been indicted in connection with his handling of the records and had been ordered to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon. The indictment comes nearly a year after more than 100 documents with classified markings were found during the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago.

The case appears to have been initially directed toward U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who handled his lawsuit last year over the FBI search. Cannons decision to appoint a special master to review materials seized in the search delayed the investigation for several weeks.

Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, and claimed again late Thursday that he was innocent. On Friday he announced that he was shaking up his legal team, replacing attorneys Jim Trusty and John Rowley with New York-based Todd Blanche and a firm to be named later. Blanche is assisting with Trump's other indictment on 34 felony charges related to an alleged hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels in the final days of the 2016 campaign.

Trusty and Rowley said in a joint statement that they had resigned, calling it a logical moment to leave because the case had moved to Miami.

Trump and his allies quickly framed the new indictment as an attempt to diminish him as a political opponent, with some such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) misrepresenting the legal process.

"If the people in power can jail their political opponents at will, we dont have a republic," Hawley, a lawyer and former state attorney general, tweeted.

Such claims disregard that it was a grand jury that recommended the charges based on evidence presented to it, and that it will be a jury that decides Trump's guilt or innocence on the charges based on the evidence provided in court.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of records stored in a bathroom and shower in the Lake Room at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Trump is facing 37 felony charges related to the mishandling of classified documents according to an indictment unsealed Friday, June 9, 2023. (Justice Department via AP)

MIAMI (AP)  Donald Trump improperly stored in his Florida estate sensitive documents on nuclear capabilities, repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a Pentagon plan of attack and classified map, according to a sweeping felony indictment that paints a damning portrait of the former president's treatment of national security information.

The conduct alleged in the historic indictment  the first federal case against a former president  cuts to the heart of any president's responsibility to safeguard the government's most valuable secrets. Prosecutors say the documents he stowed, refused to return and in some cases showed to visitors risked jeopardizing not only relations with foreign nations but also the safety of troops and confidential sources.

Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced, Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case, said in his first public statements. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.

Trump, currently the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is due to make his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon in Miami. In a rare bit of welcome news for the former president, the judge initially assigned to the case is someone he appointed and who drew criticism for rulings in his favor during a dispute last year over a special master assigned to review the seized classified documents. Meanwhile, two lawyers who worked the case for months announced Friday that they had resigned from Trump's legal team.

All told, Trump faces 37 felony counts  31 pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information, the balance relating to alleged conspiracy, obstruction and false statements  that could result in a substantial prison sentence in the event of a conviction. A Trump aide who prosecutors said moved dozens of boxes at his Florida estate at his direction, and then lied to investigators about it, was charged in the same indictment with conspiracy and other crimes.

Trump responded to the indictment Friday by falsely conflating his case with a separate classified documents investigation concerning President Joe Biden. Though classified records were found in a Biden home and office, there has been no indication that the president, unlike Trump, sought to conceal them or knew they were there.

Nobody said I wasnt allowed to look at the personal records that I brought with me from the White House. Theres nothing wrong with that, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. But among the various investigations he has faced, legal experts  as well as Trumps own aides  had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution. Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trumps attorneys were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.

The indictment arrives at a time when Trump is continuing to dominate the Republican presidential primary. A Trump campaign official described the former presidents mood as defiant" and he is expected to deliver a full-throated rebuke of the filing during a speech before Republican Party officials in Georgia Saturday afternoon and will also speak in North Carolina in the evening

Aides were notably more reserved after the indictments unsealing as they reckoned with the gravity of the legal charges and the threat they pose to Trump beyond the potential short-term political gain.

The document's startling scope and breadth of allegations, including a reliance on surveillance video and an audio recording, will almost certainly make it harder for Republicans to rail against than an earlier New York criminal case that many legal analysts had derided as weak.

The documents case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years  as president and private citizen  but had never before charged him with a crime. The most notable investigation was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, but prosecutors in that probe cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Once he left office, though, he lost that protection.

The inquiry took a major step forward last November when Attorney General Merrick Garland, a soft-spoken former federal judge who has long stated that no person should be regarded as above the law, appointed Smith, a war crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation, to lead both the documents probe as well as a separate investigation into efforts to subvert the 2020 election. That investigation remains pending.

The 49-page indictment centers on hundreds of classified documents that Trump took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving office in January 2021. Even as tens of thousands of members and guests visited Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trumps presidency and August 2022, when the FBI obtained a search warrant, documents were recklessly stored in spaces including a "ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

The indictment claims that, for a two-month period between January and March 15, 2021, some of Trumps boxes were stored in one of Mar-a-Lagos gilded ballrooms. A picture included in the indictment shows boxes stacked in rows on the ballrooms stage.

Prosecutors allege that Trump, who claimed without evidence that he had declassified all the documents before leaving office, understood his duty to care for classified information but shirked it anyway. It details a July 2021 meeting in Bedminster in which he boasted about having held onto a classified document prepared by the military about a potential attack on another country.

Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, the indictment quotes him as saying, citing an audio recording. He also said he could have declassified the document but Now I cant, you know, but this is still a secret, according to the indictment.

Using Trump's own words and actions, as recounted to prosecutors by lawyers, aides and other witnesses, the indictment alleges both a refusal to return the documents despite more than a year's worth of government demands but also steps that he encouraged others around him to take to conceal the records.

For instance, prosecutors say, after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for the records in May 2022, Trump asked his own lawyers if he could defy the request and said words to the effect of, I don't want anybody looking through my boxes.

Wouldnt it be better if we just told them we dont have anything here? one of his lawyers described him as saying.

But before his own lawyer searched the property for classified records, the indictment says, Trump directed aides to remove from the Mar-a-Lago storage room boxes of documents so that they would not be found during the search and therefore handed over to the government.

Weeks later, when Justice Department officials arrived at Mar-a-Lago to collect the records, they were handed a folder with only 38 documents and an untrue letter attesting that all documents responsive to the subpoena had been turned over. That day, even as Trump assured investigators that he was an open book, aides loaded several of Trumps boxes onto a plane bound for Bedminster, the indictment alleges.

But suspecting that many more remained inside, the FBI obtained a search warrant and returned in August to recover more than 100 additional documents. The Justice Department says Trump held onto more than 300 classified documents, including some at the top secret level.

Walt Nauta, one of the personal aides alleged to have transported the boxes around the complex, lied to the FBI about the movement of the boxes and faces charges that he conspired to hide them, according to the indictment. His lawyer declined to comment.

____

Associated Press writers Bill Barrow in Atlanta, Michael R. Sisak in New York, Meg Kinnard in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Gary Fields and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report. Tucker and Whithurst reported from Washington. Colvin reported from Greensboro, North Carolina.
Donald Trump at a campaign event in Waco, Texas, March 25. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Former President Donald Trump announced on Thursday evening that his attorneys had been informed that he had been indicted by the federal government for alleged crimes stemming from his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House in early 2021.

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, Trump wrote on his social media website, Truth Social, adding, I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States.

Reuters, ABC News and the Associated Press confirmed that Trump had been indicted on seven criminal counts in relation to his handling of the documents, his second indictment in as many months. The National Archives and the FBI sought to retrieve the classified documents before issuing a subpoena last spring for their return.

Possible Espionage Act charge

Among the charges that will be made public Tuesday, Trump will be accused of violating the Espionage Act, according to reporting from the New York Times. The act prohibits the unauthorized possession of national defense-related documents and makes special mention of those that are "willfully retained" despite government efforts to retain them. If convicted on that charge alone, Trump, 76, could face a sentence of 10 years behind bars.

Justice Department stays mum

Attorney General Merrick Garland. (Nathan Howard/AP)

The Justice Department did not issue a statement about the latest indictment or the specific charges it would contain, the AP reported. Two people familiar with the case but who are not authorized to speak publicly about it, confirmed to the outlet that prosecutors had contacted Trump's lawyers on Thursday to inform them of the indictment.

Read more from Yahoo News: Who is Jack Smith, the special counsel Garland appointed to investigate

Investigation's climax

There were plenty of signs over the past few weeks that special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into Trump's handling of the documents was reaching its conclusion. In the last few days, Trump received a letter by Smith's office informing him that he was a target of a criminal investigation, a sign that an indictment was all but guaranteed. On Monday, Trumps lawyers were spotted in Washington prior to a meeting at the Department of Justice, where they sought to persuade officials not to charge the former president with any crimes stemming from the investigation.

Politically motivated?

President Biden at the White House on Thursday. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

While Trump sought to frame the indictments as politically motivated, President Biden was asked Thursday why Americans should have faith that the Justice Department was acting in accordance with the law.

Because youll notice I have never once, not one single time, suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do, relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge. Im honest, Biden responded.

What Trumps GOP rivals have said about another possible indictment

Prior to the indictment, some of Trump's Republican rivals for the GOP presidential nomination weighed in on the possibility of a second round of criminal charges against the former president.

Trump's former vice president, Mike Pence, who announced his own presidential candidacy on Wednesday, said in an interview that he hoped that the DOJ would not indict Trump.

"I would hope the Department of Justice did not move forward. Not because I know the facts, but simply because I think after years where weve seen a politicization of the Justice Department is to undermine confidence in equal treatment of the law, Pence said on the campaign trail in Iowa.

But Pence issued somewhat contradictory statements on a possible Trump indictment, stating that no ones above the law.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he would wait to see what the charges against Trump consisted of, but made clear that Trump had himself to blame if he was charged for his mishandling of the documents.

The problem with all of this is that its self-inflicted. In the end, I dont know that the government even knew that Joe Biden had those documents or not, Christie, a former U.S. attorney, told Fox News, drawing a distinction between a Justice Department investigation into classified documents found at Bidens home. They did know Donald Trump did and in fact asked voluntarily for them for over a year and a quarter and got them back in dribs and drabs.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson was more succinct, saying Trump should step aside if indicted in the documents case.

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said the DOJ was guilty of weaponizing its investigation and that the the determining factor for the 2024 election should be the voters, ABC News reported.

Will the indictment hurt Trump?

Former President Donald Trump at ta campaign event in Des Moines, Iowa, June 1. (Charlie Neibergall/AP)

While an April Yahoo News/YouGov poll taken after Trump's first indictment in New York on charges stemming form his alleged hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels show that Trump had solidified his support among Republican voters, it remains to be seen how a second indictment will play out with his party.

Trump wasted little time in using the news of his latest indictment to try to boost his standing.

"This is indeed a DARK DAY for the United States of America. We are a Country in serious and rapid Decline, but together we will Make America Great Again!" he wrote on Truth Social.

His campaign also jumped into action, seeking to fundraise off the latest news.
Former President Donald Trump. Scott Olson/Getty Images

The Department of Justice indicted former President Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago records case.

It's the first time a former president has been charged with a federal crime.

Trump is expected to appear in federal court in Miami next Tuesday.

The Justice Department brought an indictment against Donald Trump on Thursday over the former president's hoarding of government records, according to the New York Times, citing multiple people familiar with the matter.

The precise charges weren't immediately known, but multiple outlets have reported there are seven of them.

Trump's lawyer Jim Trusty told CNN Thursday night that he hasn't seen the indictment yet, but a summons he received from the DOJ via email referred to an Espionage Act charge, several obstruction charges, false statements charges, and a conspiracy charge. But in an interview with the New York Times in which he spoke of the same charges, he noted he wasn't exactly certain which charges his client faced.

"This is not biblically accurate, because I'm not looking at a charging document. I'm looking at a summary sheet. There's language in there that might actually be reflecting a single count instead of two, but I think there was a conspiracy count as well," he told the Times.

With the indictment, Trump became the first current or former president in American history to face federal criminal charges. The indictment sets the stage for an extraordinary prosecution pitting the Justice Department against a former president who is campaigning to return to the White House.

The indictment may also further radicalize Trump's MAGA base of supporters. Trump has alluded to the possibility of violence if he is arrested, as he did in the run-up to his indictment by a New York grand jury.

Trump said in a Truth Social post that he would appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon.

"I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States," he said on Truth Social, before falsely claiming he won the 2020 election.

Prior to Trump's indictment, federal prosecutors told his attorneys in early June that he was a target of the investigation. Some of Trump's close aides and allies, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and ex-spokesperson Taylor Budowich, testified before grand jurors who brought the indictment.

Smith's indictment is the second pending criminal case against Trump. In April, the Manhattan District Attorney's office brought a 34-count indictment against the former president, alleging he falsified business records in connection with payments to Stormy Daniels designed to keep her silent ahead of the 2016 election about an alleged affair she says she had with him.

Trump has pleaded not guilty in the Manhattan case, which is scheduled to go to trial in March of 2024.

The existence of the federal criminal investigation became public when the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in early August 2022, seizing boxes of documents Trump took from the White House when he left office. According to the unsealed warrant, the feds were investigating whether Trump broke three laws, including the Espionage Act, and whether he obstructed justice.

Earlier in 2022, Trump turned over 15 boxes of documents  including some marked as classified and "top secret"  at the request of the National Archives. But National Archives officials and federal investigators believed he held on to more  despite his attorneys promising otherwise  leading to the search on his Florida estate. Trump had reportedly held on to some classified documents with explosive national security ramifications, including one about a potential military attack on Iran.

Trump's lawyers have argued that the White House process for handling classified information differs from other parts of the government and that any case should be handled as a civil matter rather than a criminal one. Trump has claimed that as president, he had the power to declassify documents simply "by thinking about it."

The indictment is now a stress test on the Justice Department

For the Justice Department, Trump's November campaign announcement only intensified what was already a politically charged inquiry into the former president's retention of classified documents and other sensitive materials following his departure from the White House. Within days of the announcement, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to oversee the investigation, along with a separate inquiry related to efforts by Trump and his political allies to overturn the 2020 election.

Those dual investigations into the former president have tested Garland as he's striven to restore the Justice Department's independence on the heels of the politicization of the Trump era. In announcing his selection of Smith, Garland said the appointment underscored the Justice Department's "commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters."

That messaging did little to quell claims by Trump and his Republican allies that the Biden administration was waging a politically motivated investigation into a top contender for the GOP nomination. Trump quickly criticized the special counsel's appointment as "disgraceful."

President Joe Biden also faces a probe over classified records. After disclosures that classified records were found in spaces associated with Biden prior to his presidency, documents that were returned to the government, Garland named a separate special counsel in a move that blindsided the White House.

With Trump's indictment, the Justice Department and the judge overseeing the case must now navigate months of court proceedings related to the prosecution as the former president campaigns for a return to public office.

Trump has warned of a violent response to any indictment on criminal charges. In September, he said there would be "problems" like "we've never seen" before in the event of his criminal indictment.

Trump supporters cheered the former president along as he gave his campaign-style speech at Mar-a-Lago during his 2024 presidential campaign. Kimberly Leonard/Insider

Grand juries in Washington, DC and Miami have been hearing evidence in the government records case, with Smith reportedly preferring to bring charges in Florida if that is where the bulk of the alleged crimes were committed. According to the Washington Post, prosecutors have taken interest in a statement Trump drafted in 2022 claiming he'd given "everything" back to the government.

Trump faces other legal risks as well.

Aside from the case over government records, Smith is overseeing a separate grand jury investigation into Trump's role in trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power between himself and Biden.

Trump has maintained the falsehood that he was the true victor of the 2020 presidential election. In the months following his loss tried to overturn Biden's victory in court, pressured state officials falsely declare him the winner in states where voters chose Biden, and hosted a rally in Washington, DC, shortly before his supporters stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

In Atlanta, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is also overseeing a criminal investigation into Trump's efforts to overturn election results. Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" needed to snatch the state's vote total away from Biden's victory. His allies in the state's Republican party, also under investigation, plotted to send fake electors to Congress to vote for Trump even though he lost the state.

Willis convened a special grand jury panel to investigate Trump and the fake electors, and is currently weighing whether to recommend indictments to an ordinary grand jury.

On the civil litigation front, Trump faces numerous other challenges between now and election day.

A sprawling fraud case against him and the Trump Organization from the New York Attorney General's office is set to go to trial in October. Several live legal claims from E. Jean Carroll, Michael Cohen, a group of plaintiffs who alleged he scammed them with a multi-level marketing scheme back in his days on "The Apprentice" are all making their way through the courts.

Editor's note: Portions of this article were prepared in the weeks preceding Trump's indictment.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Donald Trump been indicted on criminal charges for the second time in less than four months, this time over his handling of classified documents from his time in the White House. The case  adding to the GOP frontrunners legal woes in New York and elsewhere  takes the nation further into uncharted territory, as the former president is now simultaneously campaigning to take control of the federal justice system while simultaneously facing charges from it.

The former president announced on Truth Social that the corrupt Biden Administration had informed his lawyers that hes been indicted seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, Trumps pet name for the federal investigation into his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.

Rolling Stone confirmed the news shortly after Trumps post. The Justice Departments indictment includes seven charges related to possession of documents, obstruction, and false statements, a source with knowledge tells Rolling Stone.

Trump wrote that he will appear in court next week: I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.

Two people with knowledge of the matter told Rolling Stone that Trumps lawyers and close allies were on high alert Thursday morning, roughly 12 hours before it was publicly announced that Trump had been indicted in the documents probe. Media surrogates and other higher-profile defenders of Trump were instructed to be on standby, in the event the former president was in fact indicted by the feds Thursday.

Talking points were drafted early. The requisite campaign fundraising appeals were discussed quietly. And some members of Trumps inner circle spent the day trying to figure out if the chatter of a Thursday indictment were even based in reality, or a rerun of the time earlier this year when Trump announced hed be arrested on the wrong date.

However, by the evening, the Trumpland rumor mill was vindicated this time. Trump was not happy.

I AM AN INNOCENT MAN, Trump wrote after his initial announcement, along with a video message. THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION IS TOTALLY CORRUPT. THIS IS ELECTION INTERFERENCE & A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!

Im an innocent man. We will prove that again. Seven years of proving it, and here we go again.



 Donald Trump reacts after he says he was indicted in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case pic.twitter.com/3FbnNK5Az6  The Recount (@therecount) June 9, 2023

Trump became the first former president to be indicted in April when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged him with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. Hes now the first to be indicted on federal charges, too, and more could be coming. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought the classified document charges, is still investigating Trumps role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Hes also under investigation in Georgia for meddling with the states election results.

Trump has been complaining incessantly about the investigations, alleging they are part of a vast conspiracy to prevent him from retaking the White House. The former presidents rantings on Truth Social became increasingly paranoid this week ahead of the indictment on Thursday. Wow, this is turning out to be the greatest & most vicious instance of ELECTION INTERFERENCE in the history of our Country, he wrote Wednesday in a typical post.

Trumps legal team met with Smith earlier in the week in a last-ditch effort to avoid charges. Rolling Stone confirmed on Wednesday, however, that Trump had been notified he was the target of an ongoing criminal probe, the latest in a string of signals that charges were imminent. Rolling Stone reported last month that Trumps lawyers had been preparing him to be brought up on federal charges related to the documents investigation.

In August, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Trumps Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida. Authorities seized hundreds of classified documents  some of them highly sensitive and pertaining to national security  that Trump took on his way out of the White House. The raid was the culmination of a months-long effort by the National Archives and federal authorities to recover the missing materials, one that included a DOJ subpoena for materials.

Trump has maintained he did nothing wrong, claiming that he declassified all of the material  even suggesting he did so just by thinking about it. The DOJ isnt convinced, and neither was Trump, apparently. CNN reported last week that investigators obtained a tape of Trump admitting he took a classified document detailing an attack plan on Iran while acknowledging he was aware he couldnt simply declassify it. Trump dismissed the recording during a Fox News town hall event with Sean Hannity. All I know is this: everything I did was right, he said.

Its unclear how the indictment will impact the race for the Republican nomination. The indictment in New York helped Trump in the polls, and he started fundraising off the latest charges almost immediately after he announced them on Thursday. The fact that most of the Republicans competing against Trump for the nomination  including former Vice President Mike Pence  have defended him against the investigations can only help his cause.

More from Rolling Stone

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The News

Powerful Republicans reacted in two ways to Donald Trumps indictment Tuesday: With strident defenses, or extremely careful avoidance.

Top party figures voiced immediate solidarity with a former president facing what Speaker Kevin McCarthy called a grave injustice. But Trumps most important rival to lead the party, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, walked a careful line, attacking federal prosecutors in a general sense while remaining silent on the presidents alleged felonies.

As Trump and his team dined at Bedminster and listened to Elvis Presley songs, according to a person present at the dinner, the rest of the country sought to understand the seven felony charges hell reportedly face, and the political consequences of this new, more serious indictment.

Five Big Questions

Will Republican voters care more about this than the last one? Trump surged in the primary polls after the Manhattan district attorney charged him over hush money payments. But his calls for mass protests also fizzled and the political conversation quickly moved on. Will these more serious charges generate a more sustained reaction in his defense, or finally exhaust Republican voters?

Can Trump avoid making this worse? Trump is using the same legal playbook he always has: Play to his base, attack the prosecutors. The tactics worked when he was president, but since then his public statements have left a long trail for state and federal prosecutors, and cost him $5 million (and counting) in a jury finding of defamation and sexual abuse.

Why did Donald Trump cling to the classified documents? For all the ink spilled on this case so far in the press and in court as well as the many thousands of words Trump has devoted to his defense, its still not entirely clear why he even wanted to keep the documents in the first place (and why he went to such lengths to do so when the National Archives came calling). Are we going to find out?

How soon could the case go to trial? This will depend in large part on the judge, who will be assigned after the indictment. The timing is right up against the line at which it is conceivable Trump could stand before a jury before the 2024 general election, former Trump lawyer Ty Cobb told CNN. Trump, if convicted, could seek bail pending appeal  but granting that would be up to the same judge.

Can he campaign while hes on trial  or after hes convicted? Federal prosecutions almost always end in conviction, and defending against them can be all-consuming. Defendants sometimes face travel restrictions. Can Trump really run for president at the same time? Would he continue to run from prison  as is now technically possible, if highly unlikely  a la Eugene V. Debs?

The View From Legal Experts

The charges against Trump haven't actually been unsealed yet, but he is said to face a seven-count indictment. Trumps attorney Jim Trusty said on CNN that his legal team received a summons from the DOJ that indicated charges include making false statements, obstruction-related charges like witness tampering, conspiracy, and an Espionage Act violation. Other outlets reported that one of the charges is willful retention of national defense information, which is part of the Espionage Act statute.

I have never seen [federal prosecutors] fail against a current or former government official when charging violations of the Espionage Act, said national security lawyer Brad Moss.

Its the first time a former president has been charged with federal crimes. Jack Sharman, a defense attorney who served as a special counsel to Congress for the Whitewater investigation, told Semafor the moment felt uncharted and a little bit chaotic in the way that Watergate in the latter days felt.

Taken together, the charges would carry a weighty sentence in the event of a conviction: a violation of the illegal retention statute, for instance, calls for a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail, while witness tampering carries a maximum of 20 years.

News of the conspiracy charge immediately raised questions in legal circles about whether someone else would be charged, or had agreed to cooperate in the investigation in order to lessen their exposure.

Im guessing there has to be another person or persons that are either cooperating or may be indicted with him, Sharman said.

The View From The 2024 Field

For the second time this year, Trumps opponents in the 2024 primary found themselves facing the tricky question of just how forcefully to defend the frontrunner they are ostensibly trying to beat. Some quickly rushed to his side: entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy promptly vowed to pardon Trump if elected. But others were comparatively cautious.

DeSantis tweeted that the weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society and asked why prosecutors were so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary [Clinton] or Hunter [Biden]? But he did not weigh in directly on Trumps guilt or innocence. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott similarly denounced the weaponization of the Justice Department against Trump over the last several years, without going so far as to promise a pardon.

Speaking at a campaign stop in Waukee, Iowa on Thursday, hours before the indictment, Vice President Mike Pence was more diplomatic toward prosecutors, saying that the unprecedented DOJ action must meet the high threshold that would justify what would likely result in a divisive action in the country.

In some countries, he said, one individual comes to power and they immediately turn the criminal justice system on their predecessor. He added that he hoped that wasnt the case here. I believe in the rule of law, and I believe in equal treatment under the law, Pence said. He hasnt said anything since, though, and dropped a planned appearance on Fox News host Sean Hannitys show last night.

The more stridently anti-Trump candidates held out the possibility that he might actually be guilty. We dont get our news from Trumps Truth Social account, tweeted former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Lets see what the facts are when any possible indictment is released. As I have said before, no one is above the law, no matter how much they wish they were. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchison said that while Trump entitled to the presumption of innocence, he should end his campaign to deal with the charges.

The View From Democrats

The White House, unsurprisingly, is not saying anything. They dont want to be within 10 miles of this prosecution (luckily for Joe Biden, the charges are being filed in Florida). A White House official told Semafor that West Wing aides received no heads up on the charges and instead learned from media reports with the rest of America.

Biden has been anxious throughout his presidency to maintain the perception of the Justice Department as independent from political influence.

I have never once  not one single time  suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do, relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge, Biden told reporters hours before news of the indictment broke when asked about Trumps repeated attacks on the DOJ.

That doesnt mean Biden wont be queried endlessly about developments in the case, which could prove awkward for him when he tries to keep the focus on things like semiconductor plants and electric vehicle charging stations. He also faces his own  so far much quieter  special counsel investigation into classified documents found at his Delaware home and former office. Democrats dont see a problem with the attention being on Trumps legal troubles, though.

In the primary its going to turn into even more of a MAGA ass-kissing contest as Republicans continue to keep holding him above the law and as the face of their party, said Democratic strategist Eddie Vale. For Biden, it lets him keep running as the normal person who is actually focused on helping people.
Trump supporters have largely stuck with him

Donald Trump has been indicted for the second time in as many months, this time over his handling of classified documents. But will these new charges change any voters' minds as the Republican runs for president?

After his first indictment in March, many speculated that Mr Trump would pay a political price.

He did not.

In the weeks after a New York City prosecutor brought charges of falsifying business records, Mr Trump surged in Republican polls.

He nearly doubled his lead in his party's race for the 2024 nomination, according to an aggregation of national polls of Republican voters by the website fivethirtyeight.

Mr Trump held his loyal base of supporters while other Republicans rallied around the embattled candidate.

In an April poll of Trump voters by USA Today/Suffolk, two-thirds said that the former president's legal situation did not make a difference. Twenty-seven percent said it would make them more likely to support him.

This time around, he faces seven charges including unauthorised retention of classified files and obstruction of justice.

There is also the possibility of his legal troubles deepening over his alleged interference into the counting of votes in the 2020 election. Prosecutors in Georgia are looking into that.

The weight of multiple indictments could begin to have an effect on Mr Trump's standing.

It could, for instance, allow the message of party rivals like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who pitches himself as having Mr Trump's policies without the former president's baggage, to resonate.

After Mr Trump was found liable for sexual assault in a civil trial last month, Republican Senator John Thune speculated that a tipping point could eventually be reached when it comes to the former president.

"It has a cumulative effect," he told CBS News. "People are going to have to decide whether they want to deal with the drama."

Even if that cumulative effect does not move public opinion, it is sure to be a distraction for the former president as he continues to campaign for the Republican nomination.

He already has one court case that make demands on his schedule. Now he has two. And the trial for these charges could come before the March 2023 date for the New York case.

For now though, his main Republican rivals have rallied to his defence since the latest charges were announced - Mr DeSantis and Mike Pence denounced the move as politically motivated.

This federal indictment also presents some challenges to Mr Trump that his previous indictment did not.

First, it arises from an investigation by a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, not from a partisan elected prosecutor in New York.

And while Mr Trump and his allies will attempt to tie the indictment to the Biden administration and allege that it is political prosecution of a presidential opponent, it will be harder to make a direct case of partisanship than it has been in the New York City case.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has previously prosecuted both Democrats and Republicans, is not New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

The charges involved here are also more serious - including conspiracy to obstruct justice and mishandling sensitive national security documents in violation of the federal Espionage Act.

Unlike New York, this is not about allegations of hush money payments to an adult film star and falsified internal business records requiring an unusual interpretation of state law. People have been convicted and sentenced to jail in recent years for the exact kinds of charges Mr Trump now faces.

Republican voters may be able to dismiss the New York case as a personal matter - the kind of drama they have waived off as they voted for the former president in two previous elections. But if more information comes out on the types of classified documents Mr Trump kept, and what he did with them, the matter could be viewed more seriously.

If Mr Trump put national security at risk with his behaviour, that could make a difference in a court of law. And it could matter in the court of public opinion, as well.

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Donald Trump has been indicted again, this time in connection with his handling of classified documents after he left the White House.

The case stems from the former presidents alleged retention of sensitive national-security documents at his residence in Florida and his alleged efforts to impede authorities attempts to retrieve them. The precise charges are not yet public.

Last year, the federal government recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate, including some materials labeled top secret that the FBI seized in a raid months after Trumps lawyers turned over 15 initial boxes of documents.



The new indictment comes two months after Trump was charged in New York state court for allegedly falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment to a porn star. But the federal indictment in the classified-documents probe will differ in many respects from the New York charges and may carry far more severe legal risks for Trump.

Heres what we know so far and what to expect in the coming days.

What crimes is Trump being charged with?

The indictment is under seal for now, but it is said to contain seven criminal counts. One of Trump's attorneys, Jim Trusty, said in television interviews Thursday night that he had seen a summons document from prosecutors that summarized the laws Trump is being charged under.

Those laws include:



The statutes suggest that prosecutors are bringing charges that arise both from Trump's handling of the classified documents themselves and from conduct that may have obstructed the government's attempt to retrieve the documents or impeded the government's investigation.

Where is Trump being charged?

Trump said on social media that he has been ordered to report to the federal courthouse in Miami next Tuesday. Miami is part of the federal district that includes Palm Beach, where Mar-a-Lago is located.

Its possible that Trump could face further charges in Washington, D.C., where the documents investigation, led by special counsel Jack Smith, has been based and where a grand jury heard from numerous witnesses and gathered evidence in the probe.

In recent weeks, Smiths team began calling some witnesses before a second grand jury in Miami, prompting some legal experts to suggest that prosecutors might be weighing the possibility of two indictments: one covering acts connected to D.C. and another based on acts in and around Mar-a-Lago.

In deciding where to file a case, prosecutors arent supposed to take into account the political views of the jury pool. But Trump may stand a better chance of finding sympathetic jurors in Palm Beach County. In the 2020 election, Trump lost there, but got 43 percent of the vote. In Washington, D.C., Trump got less than 6 percent of the vote.

Who at the Justice Department approved the Trump indictment?

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith last November to oversee the classified-documents investigation as well as a separate probe into Trumps attempts to derail the transfer of power after the 2020 election. DOJs special counsel regulations declare that Smith should not be subject to the day-to-day supervision of any official of the Department.

However, under the rules, Smith had to advise Garland in advance about any major action, and the attorney general can veto any action he deems so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued. Garland is supposed to give Smiths views great weight and must notify Congress if he turns the special counsel down.

Will Trump be arrested?

When he was indicted in New York in the hush money case, Trump made an extraordinary trip to a Manhattan courthouse to turn himself into authorities for booking as a criminal defendant. (He pleaded not guilty and was released a few hours later.) He may now need to go through a similar process in the federal system.

The former president said he's slated to report to federal court in Miami on Tuesday, though the details of any booking procedures prior to his arraignment remain unclear. Under federal law, collection of a DNA sample is mandatory in felony cases. A court hearing known as an initial appearance would usually be held before a federal magistrate judge, who would formally inform Trump of the charges and advise him of his rights. A second hearing before a district court judge typically follows to set a schedule for further action in the case. The courts could consolidate these hearings in order to limit disruption to other cases, but they would need to take place in each district where Trump is charged.

How long will it take for Trump to go on trial?

A state judge in New York set Trumps trial in his Manhattan criminal case for March 25, 2024  nearly a year from the date on which he was charged. A federal case might operate on a similar timeline. The lengthy pretrial process allows time for Trumps lawyers and prosecutors to exchange evidence, file motions and even discuss the unlikely prospect of a plea deal.

Its always hard to predict how long pretrial matters will take, even in run-of-the-mill criminal trials. Dozens of cases stemming from the Jan. 6 attack on Congress have reached the trial stage in recent months, some of them more than a year after charges were filed.

Trump, historically, has sought to drag out litigation, and hed have many tools in his arsenal to do so here  from seeking to change venue to fighting to dismiss the case altogether.



How will the judge be selected?

Federal district courts all have slightly different procedures for judge assignments, but they all ostensibly feature a degree of randomness to prevent judge shopping.

At the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, cases are assigned by chance to one of about 20 full-time judges, as well as a handful of judges who are on senior status and handle a lighter case load. The courts bench primarily consists of Democratic appointees, but four of the judges were picked by Trump himself: Trevor McFadden, Tim Kelly, Carl Nichols and Dabney Friedrich. None of the four have been particularly deferential to Trump in cases that have come before them in recent years, though it would create a notable dynamic if any criminal case landed before one of his own appointees.

In Florida, the situation is more complex because the Southern District of Florida  the venue where Trump says he has been ordered to report to  is split into five geographic divisions, and the division where a case is filed affects the eligible judges. Trump would stand a strong chance of drawing one of his own appointees, but itd be far from a sure thing.

Could Trump go to prison if convicted?

Yes. Convictions for violating the Espionage Act almost always lead to prison time. Likewise for obstruction of justice. If Trump were convicted only of a false statement charge, he might have a better chance to avoid prison.

Can he continue to run for president?

Sure. Hes already been indicted in New York and that hasnt stopped him from running, although the scheduled March 2024 trial in that case could prove to be a real headache for his campaign. A judge overseeing a Trump case, whether in the state or federal system, probably would allow him to continue to travel as he awaits trial, although how any trial would play out during the campaign season is uncharted territory.

There is no constitutional impediment to running for president from prison  or even being elected while behind bars. Some people have already tried, including Socialist candidate Eugene Debs in 1920, conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche in 1992, and Tiger King star Joe Exotic in the current election cycle.

Whats the role of a grand jury in blessing the charges against Trump?

The Constitution requires that federal felony charges be approved by a grand jury, which in the federal system consists of between 16 and 23 people. At least 16 must be present to hear evidence and vote on an indictment. At least 12 people must vote in favor of an indictment in order for felony charges to go forward. Prosecutors usually have significant sway in the process, and federal grand juries rarely turn down requests to approve charges.

Typically, the formal handing up of the indictment takes place in front of a magistrate judge and involves only a prosecutor and the foreperson of the grand jury. Its required to take place in public, but the defendant or defendants arent present and often their names arent even announced in court.

Will any hearings or trial for Trump be televised?

Almost certainly not. Federal court rules dont allow photography or video broadcasting of criminal cases. Its possible audio of some hearings might be available via phone, but the legal authority to allow that sort of remote public access is unclear now that the coronavirus public health emergency has ended.
KHARTOUM, June 9 (Xinhua) -- The Sudanese government has declared that the UN envoy to the country Volker Perthes not welcome anymore.

The declaration came in a statement issued by the Sudanese foreign ministry, just weeks after Commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan demanded the removal of Perthes from his post in a letter sent to the UN chief.

"The Government of the Republic of Sudan has officially notified the Secretary-General of the United Nations that Volker Perthes, special representative of the UN secretary-general and head of UN Integrated Transitional Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS), has been declared persona non grata as of today," the ministry said Thursday.

On the same day, Pethes, who has been outside Sudan since late May, held several meetings in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa, the UNITAMS said in a statement.

On May 26, Al-Burhan sent a letter to the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to ask him to replace Pethes.

On June 2, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2685 to extend the UNITAMS mandate until Dec. 3, 2023.

Sudan has been witnessing deadly armed clashes between the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces in the capital Khartoum and other areas since April 15, which has left 863 dead and 3,531 others injured, according to the Sudanese Doctors Union.

At least 1.6 million people have been displaced, fleeing to safer locations inside and outside Sudan, according to the UN figures. 
Trump indictment: What happens next with case, campaign plans

Trump indictment: What happens next with case, campaign plans

Former President Trump was indicted Thursday after an investigation into his handling of classified documents, setting up the second time this year the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination will go through the process of appearing in court and facing charges.

In the meantime, Trump is expected to appear at two separate state GOP events this weekend, more information about the indictment may be revealed and law enforcement will work through logistics of the former presidents high-profile court appearance Tuesday.

Here is what is expected to happen next following Trumps indictment.

More Trump indictment coverage from The Hill

Trump has a Tuesday court date

The former president posted on social media that he was summoned to appear in court at 3 p.m. Tuesday in Miami, something his attorneys have confirmed.

He is expected to turn himself in, and his attorney, Jim Trusty, signaled Trump will be released following Tuesdays proceedings.

Theres not going to be an arrest. This is coming in on a summons. That was appropriate, Trusty said on CNN on Thursday night. This is not somebody whos going to flee. This is not somebody that poses a danger to the community, which are the factors that you would normally consider when youre talking about release, so, again, no arrest, no warrant, none of that kind of nonsense. But we will go through the bureaucratic process we have to on Tuesday.

The former president may be asked to enter a formal plea in the case; Trump told Fox News on Thursday night that he intends to plead not guilty.

At Tuesdays hearing, a judge will likely lay out any travel restrictions or other parameters that Trump must abide by, and the judge may set a schedule for the case moving forward.

Secret Service and others will map out logistics

In the days leading up to Trumps court appearance, Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies will work out the logistics for what will be an extremely high-profile trip to the Miami courthouse.

Theres a lot to kind of figure out between the U.S. Marshals and the U.S. Secret Service to make this as smooth as possible, make it safe for the public, and make it efficient in the courthouse, Trusty said on CNN.

As a former president, Trump already receives around-the-clock Secret Service protection.

The situation will be similar to when Trump appeared in court in Manhattan in April, when Secret Service and local law enforcement scoped out the courthouse, worked through logistics and prepared for the possibility of demonstrations near the building.

Indictment details will become clearer

Trusty confirmed to CNN on Thursday night that his client is facing seven counts, including for violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice.

He said he also believes a conspiracy count is included among the charges, an indication others would face charges in the probe.

But the Justice Department has not commented on the case since Trump broke the news that he was informed of his indictment, meaning key information about the charges, including how many there are, will likely become clearer in the coming days.

Trusty told CNN that Trumps legal team will get a copy of the indictment sometime between now and Tuesday afternoon.

Trump still slated to speak this weekend

Even with the indictment hanging over him, Trump is scheduled to appear this weekend at two separate state Republican Party events in the South.

The Trump campaign sent out an advisory this week alerting that the former president is scheduled to arrive at 1 p.m. Saturday in Columbus, Ga. He will attend the Georgia GOP State Convention and deliver remarks there.

Trump will then travel to Greensboro, N.C., where he is set to arrive shortly after 5:30 p.m. and attend the North Carolina GOP convention, the campaign said.

Also attending Saturdays North Carolina convention are Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and former Vice President Mike Pence, two of Trumps rivals seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
GOP presidential hopefuls Tim Scott, Asa Hutchinson, Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy. (Nicholas Pfosi/Reuters, Charlie Neibergall/AP, Paul Hennessy/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images, Wade Vandervort/AFP via Getty Images, Paul Beaty/AP)

Several of Donald Trumps rivals in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination were quick to respond to the news that the former president has been indicted on charges stemming from the Justice Departments investigation into his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and his alleged efforts to obstruct the probe.

Trump, who in April became the first former U.S. president ever to be charged with a crime, in an alleged money case at the New York state level, is now the first to be indicted on federal charges. He is the current frontrunner in the GOP primary.

Here is what some of the other candidates in the race had to say about the indictment.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a press conference in Wildwood, Fla., on Tuesday. (Paul Hennessy/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, DeSantis tweeted. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie launches his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination in Manchester, N.H., on Tuesday. (Sophie Park/Reuters)

We dont get our news from Trumps Truth Social account, Christie tweeted. Lets see what the facts are when any possible indictment is released. As I have said before, no one is above the law, no matter how much they wish they were. We will have more to say when the facts are revealed.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson speaks at Sen. Joni Ernst's "Roast and Ride" event in Des Moines, Iowa, on June 3. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

With the news that Donald Trump has been indicted for the second time, our country finds itself in a position that weakens our democracy, Hutchinson said in a statement. Donald Trump's actions  from his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of law  should not define our nation or the Republican Party. This is a sad day for our country. While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.

Sen. Tim Scott at his campaign kickoff rally in Charleston, S.C., on May 22. (The Washington Post via Getty Images)

"One thing that makes America the city on the hill is confidence in our justice system," Scott said on Fox News Thursday night. "And today what we see is a justice system where the scales are weighted. That seems to be the outcome of where we are today. As president of the United States I would purge all the injustices and impurities in our system so that every American can have confidence that they will be seen by the Lady of Justice with a blindfold on. That is what we need in this nation."

Vivek Ramaswamy

Vivek Ramaswamy, chairman and co-founder of Strive Asset Management, speaks during the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami on May 20. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

We cant have two tiers of justice: one for Trump, another for Biden, the entrepreneur tweeted. There are also serious legal questions about the Presidents power to declassify documents and the potential illegality of the over-classification of federal documents in the first place. Thats for the courts to decide, but *we the people* decide who governs this nation. It would be much easier for me to win this election if Trump werent in the race, but I stand for principles over politics. I commit to pardon Trump promptly on January 20, 2025 and to restore the rule of law in our country.

Perry Johnson

Perry Johnson speaks to guests at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition Spring Kick-Off in Clive, Iowa, on April 22. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Punishment for Espionage can be quite severe! the Michigan businessman and longshot GOP candidate tweeted. Every GOP candidate for President must say whether they would pardon Donald Trump!

Absent from the discussion

Notably, former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, Trumps former ambassador to the United Nations and ex-South Carolina governor, have yet to weigh in publicly on the indictment.

Pence did say Wednesday of the then prospective indictment: I would just hope that there would be a way to move forward without the dramatic and drastic and divisive step of indicting a former president of the United States.
Donald Trump is now the first former president to be indicted on federal charges, having earlier this year become the first former president to be criminally indicted on state charges. Both cases charge felonies. The New York case could result in prison time if theres conviction. But in this federal case, incarceration will almost certainly result if theres a conviction.

Not only are the federal charges more serious than those in New York, the federal sentencing process leaves far less to the discretion of the trial judge. In one of many ironies, back in 1984, Republicans, so incensed by lenient sentencing from liberal judges, led a sweeping overhaul of federal sentencing to make sure criminals actually went to prison. Lol.

The federal indictment was unsealed on the afternoon of June 8th. There are 38 separate counts, 31 of which are related to the alleged unlawful retention of national defense secrets, with the remainder charging alleged false statements and cover-ups designed to thwart the investigation. The documents are described generally, for example: military plans of a foreign country. We are unlikely to find out any details because they are, well, national defense secrets.

Trump is not charged with violating any laws related to the handling of classified materials. While all national defense secrets are classified, their improper retention is a crime without regard to their classification status. Thus, Trumps claim of Dr. Stange-ish mind powers of declassification is of no relevance to his defense. Even if Trump did declassify them, he was not permitted to retain them after he left office, or to refuse to return them.

But the fact that this case deals with classified materials means that the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA  pronounced See-Pa  get used to it) will be used to close certain proceedings to the public  and impose limitations on what the parties and lawyers can say about the evidence. CIPA was designed to insure that federal prosecutions in cases that involved secret information could be conducted without fear that the trial itself would bare the very secrets the government was trying to protect. So many of the most important details of the case are unlikely to ever be made public.

The case will be tried in a federal court in the Southern District of Florida, chosen because most of the conduct alleged to be criminal took place at Mar-a-Lago, rather than Washington, D.C. The grand jury was drawn from the nine counties that make up the district. These include the Biden-voting districts of Broward, Dade, and Palm Beach counties, as well as deep-red counties such as Highlands County, which voted 2-1 for Trump in 2020. The trial jury will be selected from the same group, so it is likely to contain a mix of Democrats and Republicans.

In New York, the pesky liberals reformed the discovery process in criminal cases so the defendant gets access to almost all information in the hands of the prosecution, early in the case. The federal system remains largely trial-by-ambush, where the defendant may not even learn the names of the witnesses against him until shortly before trial. When we hear Trumps lawyers (and the man himself) bleating about how unfair this system is, keep in mind that they are right  but it is equally unfair to everyone. Republicans have consistently opposed legislation to force more transparency and disclosure in the federal criminal system. Trump himself showed no interest in such reform during his tenure.

The New York case is set for trial in March 2024, but multiple layers of time-consuming appeals are available to drag out final reckoning for years. By contrast, federal criminal proceedings tend to be really fast and appellate review is streamlined. The federal Speedy Trial Act is quite strict and often functions to impose a speedy trial on defendants who really dont want one. Thus, the federal trial could be concluded before the New York trial, and certainly before Inauguration Day 2025. A president has no power to pardon for convictions under state charges, but has almost unlimited power for federal ones. Can a President Trump pardon himself? Lets not find out.

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The top two Republican leaders in the Senate remain silent a day after former President Donald Trump, the current GOP 2024 presidential frontrunner, was indicted by the federal government.

While the charges have yet to be unsealed, the top two Republicans in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Whip John Thune have not put out statements, a stark contrast to the swift reaction among House GOP leaders who quickly rushed to Trumps defense.

Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America. It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him. Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted Thursday night. I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.

The third ranking GOP senator, John Barrasso of Wyoming, put out a statement Friday, saying, This indictment certainly looks like an unequal application of justice.

Nobody is above the law, Barrasso tweeted. Yet it seems like some are.

House and Senate Republican leaders have diverged for years on how and whether to even respond to Donald Trumps legal woes. During Trumps first indictment this spring, McConnell didnt jump in to defend Trump and when he returned in April after a fall and was asked at a news conference by CNNs Manu Raju about the indictment, he dodged.

I may have hit my head, but I didnt hit it that hard, McConnell said at the time. Good try.

For McConnell, who has not maintained a relationship with Trump since January 6, 2021, the former president could be viewed as a distraction from his ultimate goals of recapturing the Senate. But for McCarthy, an alliance to Trump is an important factor for assuaging those in his right flank, especially at a moment when the House speaker has come under fire for a deal he cut with President Joe Biden on the debt ceiling.

There are still a number of Senate Republicans who have come out backing Trump including Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and who is backing the former president. Daines has stayed in touch with Trump, as hes sought to recruit candidates in primaries across the country. He tweeted Friday, The two standards of justice under Bidens DOJ is appalling. When will Hunter Biden be charged?

Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, was asked multiple times during an interview on Fox News on Thursday night about the lack of response from Senate leadership. Hawleys only response was he did not know why leadership had not weighed in yet, and, I cant speak for anyone else.

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, also a member of the GOP Senate leadership team, tweeted Friday that the presumption of innocence in America should also apply to Trump and attacked Democrats who cheered the news.

It is sad to see some Democratic politicians cheering this indictment and presuming guilt for sheer political gain, despite the fact that President Biden himself is under federal investigation for mishandling classified documents, Tillis said in his statement.

Several Republican senators, many of whom have already endorsed Trump in the upcoming presidential election, were quick to jump to Trumps defense and attacked the Department of Justice.

But in stark contrast to the silence from Senate Republican leadership and staunch support from House GOP members, Republican Sens. Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski stressed the severity of the charges Friday.

Romney of Utah, who twice voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges, said, By all appearances, the Justice Department and special counsel have exercised due care, affording Mr. Trump the time and opportunity to avoid charges that would not generally have been afforded to others.

In a statement, Romney added, These allegations are serious and if proven, would be consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest, such as withholding defensive weapons from Ukraine for political reasons and failing to defend the Capitol from violent attack and insurrection.

Murkowski, who also voted to convict Trump in an impeachment trial after the insurrection, said Friday evening that the charges against the former president are quite serious.

Mishandling classified documents is a federal crime because it can expose national secrets, as well as the sources and methods they were obtained through. The unlawful retention and obstruction of justice related to classified documents are also criminal matters, she said on Twitter.

Anyone found guilty  whether an analyst, a former president, or another elected or appointed official  should face the same set of consequences, she added.

GOP Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, meanwhile, called the obstruction allegations against Trump inexcusable.

As a retired brigadier general who worked with classified materials my entire career, I am shocked at the callousness of how these documents were handled, Bacon told CNN on Friday. The congressman has long been critical of Trump and represents a swing state in Nebraska.

The alleged obstruction to the requests of the National Archives and FBI, if true, is inexcusable, he said in the statement, adding: No one is above the law, and we demand due process and expect equality under the law.

Meanwhile, top House Republicans took swift aim at the Department of Justice, special counsel Jack Smith, the FBI and Attorney General Merrick Garland in the wake of the indictment.

We ought to defund and dismantle the DOJ, ultra-conservative Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona tweeted shortly after Trump announced the news on Truth Social.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise immediately rushed to Trumps defense, attacking the Justice Department over his indictment and vowing to hold the administration accountable.

Lets be clear about whats happening: Joe Biden is weaponizing his Department of Justice against his own political rival. This sham indictment is the continuation of the endless political persecution of Donald Trump, Scalise tweeted.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer echoed that sentiment Friday morning, tweeting, This is the ultimate abuse of power, and they will be held accountable.

Some House Republicans, going much further than the speaker, called for the impeachment of Biden, Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray before seeing the details of the indictment.

It is time for Congress to rein in the FBI and DOJ, and impeach President Biden, Attorney General Garland, and Director Wray, Georgia Republican Rep. Mike Collins said in a statement.

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNNs Manu Raju contributed to this reporting.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

The orange air covering New York City from the Canadian wildfires must have been a premonition for Thursday's news that former President Donald Trump has been indicted on federal charges, including obstruction of justice and mishandling of classified documents, jokes co-host of The New Abnormal politics podcast Danielle Moodie.

Weve been waiting for this moment, for what feels like forever, and it doesnt feel real. I feel like were in some type of dreamscape right now, Danielle tells her co-host Andy Levy at the top of the latest episode of the show. But the fact is that Donald Trump, twice impeached, now twice indicted, you are, sir, No. 1, and we are exhausted by all the winning you're doing.

Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast.

Trump announced the indictment on his social network Truth Social, saying it was a dark day for the country, a statement which Danielle wasted no time picking apart.

Yes, this is a dark day for the United States of America, because we never thought that wed have a grifting, criminal-ass crook in the White House, let alone one that would then take documents and tell the world, by the way, in his own words at a CNN town hall, Yeah, I took the boxes. They were mine, she says.

The only thing Ill quibble with you on is I do think that indicting a former president is a good thing if theres evidence that they have committed crimes, adds Andy. So I would say that this maybe does make America great again.

Also on this episode: Andy and Danielle chat about a Supreme Court win, sort of, and the one good thing Chris Christie has done lately (and its not running for president.)

Then, Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, whos trying to become Sen. Ruben Gallego, tells Andy why people should vote for him and not Kyrsten Sinema, along with strong words against the senator and Republicansand how he feels about serving in Iraq, a war he believes was wrong.

Matt Gaetz Doesnt Want You to Know He Wears Unisex Blazers

Plus, Dr. Melissa Gonzales, a professor and the chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, tells Danielle what caused this tinderbox of wildfires that turned New York City into the most polluted major city in the world, what is really happening when youre standing outside directly in that air, and the likelihood of this happening again.

Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Donald Trump has been indicted for illegally retaining classified government documents after leaving office in 2021.

What happens next and what do the charges mean for the former president and the 2024 election campaign?

What is Trump accused of doing?

Trump is being charged with 37 criminal counts, including mishandling classified documents and obstruction of justice, according to an indictment unsealed on Friday afternoon.

He had proclaimed his innocence on Thursday evening.

According to the indictment, Trump stored classified documents in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

It also added that Trump directed Walt Nauta, his valet and aide, to deliberately move boxes of records to conceal them from Trumps attorney, the FBI, and the grand jury. Nauta also faces a count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, said the indictment.

Related: Jack Smith: veteran special counsel at the center of Trump investigations

In January 2022, Trump agreed to return 15 boxes of records to the US National Archives and Records Administration, and officials discovered in them more than 700 pages of records marked as classified.

In August last year, the FBI conducted a search of Trumps Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, and seized approximately 13,000 more records, about 100 of which were marked as classified, including some marked top secret.

What charges does Trump face?

The most serious charge is being brought under the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the unauthorized possession of national defense information. It is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

The first world war-era law predates classification of documents but makes it a crime to willfully retain national defense information that could be useful to foreign adversaries.

According to the indictment, documents possessed by Trump included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack, and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.

Trump is also charged with several counts of obstruction of justice, which criminalizes any intent to impede, obstruct, or influence an investigation and is also charged with making false statements to investigators.

The purpose of the conspiracy was for Trump to keep classified documents he has taken with him from the White House and to hide and conceal them from a federal grand jury, the indictment said.



What happens next?

Trump said he had been summoned to appear in court on Tuesday afternoon in Miami. It was not immediately clear what the procedure would look like. When he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney in the New York Stormy Daniels case (a state case rather than federal), Trump surrendered to authorities, where he was booked behind closed doors and appeared in the courtroom, sitting with his lawyers at the defense table.

In the Mar-a-Lago case, Trump is likely to surrender himself to the FBI, which has a field office in Miami some distance from the federal court. Normally, a defendant would be fingerprinted by prosecutors and have a mugshot taken. It is not known yet if Trump will have his picture taken and whether he will be processed in the FBI office or at the courthouse, before appearing before a judge to formally hear the charges against him read for the first time. He is expected to plead not guilty. After that arraignment, he would probably be released pending his next court appearance.

Does an indictment prevent a candidate from campaigning or taking office?

None of the charges expected to be unsealed would bar Trump from office if he became the Republican party nominee and then won the presidency at the 2024 election, even if convicted.

A trial would take place many months from now, and Trump can freely campaign during this time. The US constitution only requires that presidential candidates be natural-born US citizens who are at least 35 years old and have lived in the country for 14 years.

Trump said on Thursday on his Truth Social platform that he is innocent. He would be free to campaign even if he is convicted and sent to prison, and legal experts say there would be no basis to block his swearing-in as president even if he is incarcerated, though this would pose extraordinary logistical and security questions.

What would happen if Trump took office while the Mar-a-Lago case is pending?

It is unlikely that the prosecution would proceed if Trump won the November 2024 election.

The US Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, and presidents are the top federal law enforcement officers in the country. Federal prosecutors generally serve at their pleasure. The justice department has a decades-old policy that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. The department can deviate from policy in extraordinary circumstances with the approval of the US attorney general.

Could Joe Biden pardon Trump?

Yes.

Could Trump, as president, pardon himself?

Maybe. Many scholars have said a self-pardon would be unconstitutional because it violates the basic principle that nobody should be the judge in his or her own case. Others have argued that a self-pardon is constitutional because the pardon power is very broadly worded in the constitution. However, Trump could not pardon himself for a conviction in state court. He is currently under indictment in New York state court for allegedly using falsified records to conceal hush-money payments he paid to Stormy Daniels, and Georgia prosecutors are investigating his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in that state.

Reuters contributed reporting
Trump lawyer says shes ashamed and embarrassed as ex-president indicted over secret papers

(Getty Images)

Former president Donald Trumps attorney Alina Habba said on Fox News that she is ashamed and embarrassed to be a lawyer after the former president was indicted.

Ms Habba spoke on Jesse Watterss show amid news that a federal grand jury indicted Mr Trump on charges related to his allegedly unlawful retention of national defence information.

Mr Trumps attorney said the indictment was a distraction from supposed impropriety on behalf of President Joe Biden, pointing to the fact that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer was planning to hold FBI Director Christoper Wray, whom Mr Trump nominated to lead the bureau in 2017, in contempt of Congress for supposedly withholding documents.

But Mr Comer retracted the contempt vote after the FBI agreed to share documents, The New York Times reported.

Every single time there is a coordinated dance that is becoming obvious to the American people because they are smart, she said.

Ms Habba said that the indictments of the twice-impeached former president were the equivalent of a shiny ball meant to distract people.

I'm embarrassed to be a lawyer at this moment, she said. Honestly, I am ashamed. I'm ashamed to be a lawyer. I'm ashamed that this is the state of our country.

Ms Habba said the indictment showed the United States had a two-tiered system of justice.

And it is so obvious that there's this dual-system of justice, she said. This is selective prosecution, selective persecution. It is absolute persecution. It is Russia third world stuff, and it should not be happening.
Former president Donald Trumps attorney Alina Habba said on Fox News that she is ashamed and embarrassed to be a lawyer after the former president was indicted.

Ms Habba spoke on Jesse Watters show amid news that a federal grand jury indicted Mr Trump on charges related to his allegedly unlawful retention of national defence information.

Mr Trumps attorney said the indictment was a distraction from supposed impropriety on behalf of President Joe Biden, pointing to the fact that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer was planning to hold FBI Director Christoper Wray, whom Mr Trump nominated to lead the bureau in 2017, in contempt of Congress for supposedly withholding documents. House Republicans have so far come up short in their accusations against Mr Biden.

Mr Comer retracted the contempt vote after the FBI agreed to share documents, The New York Timesreported.

House Republicans have so far come up short in their accusations against Mr Biden.

Every single time there is a coordinated dance that is becoming obvious to the American people because they are smart, Ms Habba said.

The Trump attorney added that the indictments of the twice-impeached former president were the equivalent of a shiny ball meant to distract the American public.

I'm embarrassed to be a lawyer at this moment, she said. Honestly, I am ashamed. I'm ashamed to be a lawyer. I'm ashamed that this is the state of our country.

Ms Habba claimed the indictment showed the United States had a two-tiered system of justice.

And it is so obvious that there's this dual system of justice, she said. This is selective prosecution, selective persecution. It is absolute persecution. It is Russia third world stuff, and it should not be happening.

Mr Trump first broadcast the indictment on his Truth Social networking platform on Thursday, one day after The Independent had reported that federal prosecutors planned to ask a grand jury to indict Mr Trump.

I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election, Mr Trump said, denying his guilt and proclaiming he is an innocent man.

Mr Trump said he has been summoned to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday by 3 pm ET.
Two lawyers working for former President Donald Trump have quit his legal team just a day after the revelation that he has been indicted on seven charges in connection to his handling of classified information.

For purposes of fighting the Greatest Witch Hunt of all time, now moving to the Florida Courts, I will be represented by Todd Blanche, Esq., and a firm to be named later, Mr Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday.

I want to thank Jim Trusty and John Rowley for their work, but they were up against a very dishonest, corrupt, evil, and sick group of people, the likes of which has not been seen before. We will be announcing additional lawyers in the coming days, he added.

Mr Rowley and Mr Trusty issued a joint statement in which they said that they had tendered our resignations as counsel to President Trump, and we will no longer represent him on either the indicted case or the January 6 investigation.

They noted that the indictment against Mr Trump has been filed in Miami, saying that this is a logical moment for us to step aside and let others carry the cases through to completion.

They added that it had been an honor to have spent the last year defending him, and we know he will be vindicated in his battle against the Biden Administrations partisan weaponization of the American justice system.

Mr Trusty and Mr Rowley now join Timothy Parlatore in the growing ranks of lawyers who have departed Mr Trumps legal teams.

Shortly after leaving, Mr Parlatore spoke to CNN, sharing allegations that another lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, had created discord within the group of attorneys.

Mr Trusty appeared on cable news on Thursday evening and on Friday morning defending Mr Trump before issuing his resignation statement alongside Mr Rowley later on Friday.

Three days before Mr Trump was indicted, Mr Trusty and Mr Rowley were two out of the three Trump lawyers who met with Justice Department officials, including Special Counsel Jack Smith, as they attempted to evade further legal action against the former president.

Two sources told The New York Times that Mr Trusty and Mr Rowley complained on several occasions about working alongside Mr Epshteyn. One person said this was part of the reasoning behind the lawyers leaving the legal team, adding that Mr Trusty and Mr Rowley are still on good terms with Mr Trump.

We have no plans to hold media appearances that address our withdrawals or any other confidential communications weve had with the president or his legal team, Mr Trusty and Mr Rowley said.

Unlike Mr Trusty and Mr Rowley, Mr Parlatore appeared on CNN to blame Mr Epshteyn following his departure.
What is the Trump Mar-a-Lago case about and why is it significant?

Photograph: Marco Bello/Reuters

Donald Trump has been criminally charged over his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, one of the most significant legal developments for the former president since leaving the White House.

The case marks the first time the justice department has charged Trump and adds to the mounting legal troubles Trump faces as he seeks to return to the presidency. Heres a breakdown of where things stand:

What is this case about?

Related: Donald Trump charged with illegal retention of classified documents

When Donald Trump left the White House, he took documents related to his presidency with him to Mar-a-Lago, his residence in Florida. Federal law requires presidential documents to be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration (Nara). In May of 2021, Nara discovered it was missing records from Trumps presidency and began requesting that the former president return them. Trumps attorneys later turned over 15 boxes of records that included 184 documents that were classified in some way. Nara referred the matter to the justice department, and the FBI began investigating in February of 2022.

Over the next few months, the FBI and justice department went about trying to retrieve additional classified documents from Mar-a-Lago. In June of 2022, Trumps lawyers turned over 38 additional documents with classified markings. In August of 2022, the FBI conducted a raid on Mar-a-Lago and found more than 100 documents with classified markings.

The justice department has been investigating whether classified material was mishandled and whether there was obstruction of its investigation in the matter.

What is Trump charged with?

Trump is charged with wilful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document, corruptly concealing a document, concealing a document in a federal investigation, engaging in a scheme to conceal and false statements, people familiar with the matter told the Guardian.

Why are these charges significant?

This is the first time that Trump has faced federal criminal charges. The other criminal matters pending against Trump are in state courts.

The justice department is generally extremely careful when it chooses to bring cases and so the fact that prosecutors felt confident enough to indict Trump, knowing the political maelstrom that would result, is a signal of the strength of the case against him.

Where do the other criminal cases and investigations against Trump stand?

Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury in March and also faces criminal charges in New York over hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.

The district attorney in Fulton county, Georgia, is also investigating Trumps efforts to overturn the election there and has signaled charges could come this summer.

Whats some of the strongest evidence in the classified documents case?

Prosecutors obtained a 2021 recording of Trump in which he discusses a classified document in his possession dealing with a military confrontation with Iran, CNN reported earlier this month. On the recording, Trump reportedly acknowledges that the document is classified. That admission is significant because it could undercut a key defense from Trumps team  the idea that he declassified the documents while he was president.

Related: Jack Smith: veteran special counsel at the center of Trump investigations

Prosecutors have also obtained roughly 50 pages of dictated notes from Evan Corcoran, one of Trumps attorneys, that shed light on Trumps response to a justice department subpoena demanding the return of any classified documents. In one instance, Corcoran recounted warning Trump that he was obligated to return every classified document in his possession.

The notes also detail Corcorans attempt to locate the documents at Mar-a-Lago. As he recounted, Trump employees suggested that he search the storage room at the property. When Corcoran asked if he should look anywhere else, the Guardian has reported, he was told that should be sufficient  advice that turned out to be flawed when the FBI later found classified material also in Trumps office.

How has Trump responded?

Trump has decried the investigation as politically motivated and downplayed the significance of handling the documents. He has said he had the right to take some documents from office and did nothing different than Joe Biden and Mike Pence, both of whom had classified documents in their possession after leaving office. A separate special prosecutor is looking into Bidens handling of classified material and justice department officials have said they will not charge Pence.

Who is leading the investigation?

The attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to take over the investigation in November. Smith is a former chief prosecutor of the Hague. He is also the former head of the justice departments public integrity section and a former federal prosecutor with experience in public corruption cases.

Is this related to January 6?

No. Smith is separately overseeing an investigation into Trumps efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Does a federal indictment prevent Trump from running for president?

No. Neither the indictment itself nor a conviction would prevent Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

And as the New York case showed, criminal charges have historically been a boon to his fundraising. The campaign announced that it had raised over $4m in the 24 hours after that indictment became public, far smashing its previous record after the FBI search of Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort.

Associated Press contributed reporting
MOGADISHU, June 9 (Xinhua) -- The Somali government said Friday that it is ready to take over security responsibilities from the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS) as 2,000 troops will withdraw from the country by the end of June.

The Ministry of Defence lauded the sacrifices made by ATMIS over the past years in pursuit of peace in Somalia and in the region, noting that their sacrifices made to secure Somalia will forever be remembered.

"The Somalia National Armed Forces and the Somalia Security Forces are prepared as Somalia moves towards the next chapter of security ownership across the country," the ministry said in a statement issued in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.

The government said through its collaboration with bilateral partners, it has trained security forces in the past years that will take over security responsibilities of 2,000 ATMIS forces. The handover will be completed by the end of June in line with the UN Security Council Resolutions 2628 and 2670.

The government said it has also appointed a technical team with ATMIS and the UN Support Office in Somalia that will oversee the implementation of the ATMIS drawback of 2,000 troops.

The ministry said the smooth transfer of security responsibilities from ATMIS to Somalia will mark a turning towards the country's continued progress and self-reliance.

The AU peace mission is expected to fully exit Somalia by Dec. 31, 2024. 
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty

Donald Trump said the lawyer who will represent him in the Mar-a-Lago documents case is a former federal prosecutor who is already working on his Manhattan hush-money case.

We will be announcing additional lawyers in the coming days, Trump said in a Truth Social post announcing Todd Blanche will head his defense. He also indicated two of his attorneys, James Trusty and John Rowland, would no longer be involved. (Trusty and Rowley resigned Friday morning in a joint letter, CNN reported.)

Trump also mentioned that he would be hiring a firm to be named later.

The legal shakeup comes a day after Trump was informed he's been indicted on seven federal charges, including willful retention of documents, obstruction, and false statements in connection with the classified documents that were seized from his Palm Beach home after he left the White House.

He has been summoned to appear in court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon.

Blanche, who was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York before going into private practice as a white-collar criminal defense attorney, was tapped in April to join the Trump legal team defending the former president against fraud charges related to buying silence from porn star Stormy Daniels.

After much thought/consideration, I have decided it is the best thing for me to do and an opportunity I should not pass up, Blanche told Politico at the time.

Even before Trumps historic back-to-back indictments, Blanche circled MAGA land. He represented Paul Manafort, who chaired the Trump campaign in 2016, and Igor Fruman, a Rudy Giuliani crony charged in a campaign-finance scheme.

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US prosecutor Jack Smith, tapped by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigated cases related to former US president Donald Trump, has extensive experience investigating and adjudicating war crimes in Kosovo and elsewhere (Mandel NGAN)

Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor leading highly sensitive investigations into Donald Trump, is a seasoned American lawyer who has led Kosovo war crimes probes in The Hague.

In November 2022, shortly after Trump announced another White House bid, US Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped Smith to oversee two independent investigations into the former president, saying that he had "built a reputation as an impartial and determined prosecutor."

Smith has brought felony charges against Trump in one of those cases, alleging he criminally retained classified documents after leaving office and conspired to obstruct the probe.

Prior to his becoming the face of the fiercely divisive Trump case, Smith spent many years at the Department of Justice and more recently in international tribunals.

A Harvard Law School graduate, Smith began his prosecutorial career in the 1990s.

He boasts a resume that includes several years at the US Department of Justice in multiple positions including chief of the agency's Public Integrity Section, where he led a team handling corruption and election crimes cases, and later acting United States attorney for the middle district of Tennessee.

From 2008 to 2010 he served as an investigator for the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands, where he was charged with supervising sensitive probes of foreign government officials over war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.

His most high-profile work prior to the Trump probe has occurred at the special court on Kosovo in The Hague, where he led investigations and adjudications of war crimes committed in the Balkan republic during the 1990s wars that ripped apart Yugoslavia.

- 'Milestone' -

In 2018 Smith was named chief prosecutor of the court, the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. It opened its first trial last year against former rebel commander Salih Mustafa, who faces charges of murder and torture related to his time at a makeshift jail operated by the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

Smith described the case as a "milestone" for the court, whose activities remain highly sensitive given that former rebel commanders still dominate political life in Kosovo.

The court, which operates under Kosovo law but is based in Netherlands to shield witnesses from intimidation, has issued war crimes charges against several senior members of the KLA including Kosovar former president Hashim Thaci, who resigned after being indicted.

Smith presided during Thaci's first pre-trial appearance before the special court, in 2020, to face charges.

After being appointed special counsel by Garland, Smith pledged to work "independently" and to "move the investigations forward expeditiously and thoroughly to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate."

In his first public comments after Trump's indictment was unsealed, sparking outrage among Republicans, Smith underlined that the United States has "one set of laws... and they apply to everyone."

"Laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced," he added.

Smith's office has yet to reveal any charges in the second probe of Trump, over his involvement in the 2021 storming of the US Capitol by the then-president's supporters.

des/mlm
Carlos Barria/Reuters

Donald Trump admitted in a 2021 meeting that he had kept secret information that he hadnt declassified, according to CNN.

The bombshell disclosure comes the day after Trump became the first former president in U.S. history to face federal charges in relation to allegations of mishandling classified documents following his departure from the White House.

How Trumps Big Mouth Could Be His Undoing in Classified Docs Case

Trump has maintained that all of the documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago had been declassified, but CNN reports that he said of one file two years ago: As president, I could have declassified, but now I cant.

The file in question allegedly concerns a secret Pentagon document about attacking Iran. Audio of the recording from the 2021 meeting had already been obtained by prosecutors, but now CNN says it has seen a transcript of Trumps comments appearing to show that he was aware that he hadnt declassified the document.

The meeting at Trumps resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, allegedly included the former president and two people working on the autobiography of Trumps former chief of staff Mark Meadows, along with several others working for Trump, one of whom was communications specialist Margo Martin.

Sources cited by CNN say the audio recording of the meeting contains the sound of paper rustling, indicating that Trump was waving the document around, though theres no way of knowing if it was the document about Iran. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, the transcript records Trump as saying. This was done by the military and given to me.

The transcript also shows Trump complaining about an article in The New Yorker published a few days before the meeting that described how Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Joint Chiefs to make sure there were no unlawful orders from Trump in his last days in office.

Well, with Milleyuh, let me see that, Ill show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran, Trump says in the transcript, according to CNN. Isnt that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him.

They presented me thisthis is off the record, butthey presented me this, Trump continues. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasnt done by me, this was him. CNN reports that he later adds: I just found, isnt that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.

Its not clear if any of the seven charges brought Thursday from special counsel Jack Smiths investigation refer to the 2021 meeting, as details of the indictment have not yet been made publicly available. But prosecutors did subpoena Trump in March for the document discussed in the recording. In response, his lawyers handed over some files related to Iran and Milley, but they could not locate the document itself.

Two sources briefed on the charges against Trump told MSNBC they include conspiracy to obstruct false statements and conspiracy to obstruct. For his own part, Trump responded to news of the indictment by attacking President Joe Biden, dismissing the allegations against him as the Boxes Hoax, and insisting: I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!

He added that he would arraigned in federal court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon.

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Former President Donald Trump speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, July 11, 2021. (Cooper Neill/The New York Times)

Former President Donald Trump declared at a meeting in July 2021, six months after leaving the White House, that a document in front of him was classified and highly confidential, according to a person briefed on the matter.

That meeting, with people helping his former chief of staff with a book, has been previously reported, but new details of Trumps specific comments appear to demonstrate explicitly that he was aware that materials he had taken with him from the White House included classified information. The recording is expected to be a key piece of evidence in the case against him that special counsel Jack Smith brought this week, with seven counts related to his possession of reams of classified material.

Trump also indicated he couldnt show the document to the people in front of him  many if not all of whom didnt have security clearances that would allow them to see sensitive government material  and added, As president, I could have declassified them; now I cant, according to the person briefed on the matter, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

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Trump then said the document was classified, and a woman in the room replied, Now we have a problem, according to the person familiar with the recording.

Many details of what is said on the recording were reported earlier by CNN, which also first reported on the existence of the recording.

A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to an email about the new information.

The meeting took place in July 2021, by which time, officials at the National Archives had already spent at least two months pressing Trumps representatives on returning documents they believed he had in his possession.

The transcript demonstrates that Trump was not only aware he had sensitive material but also had it with him at his club at Bedminster, New Jersey, where the meeting took place, and that he knew he no longer had the power to declassify material.

Trumps meeting was with two people helping Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff, with a memoir about his tenure in the White House. Aides to Trump also attended.

At the time, Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Trump had appointed, had been a subject of multiple media portraits describing him as pressing back against an erratic president in the final months of the presidency.

Trump went on a tear about Milley.

Isnt it amazing, I have a big pile of papers, Trump said at one point. Papers could be heard rustling, and then Trump began appearing to point to a specific document, saying, Look, this was him. At another point he said, This was the Defense Department and him.

He described something in front of him as like, highly confidential, and maintained it was really Milley who wanted to attack Iran (in fact, Milley cautioned against such a move).

At one point, Trump was interrupted, and a woman in the room could be heard on the recording referencing Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state whose email server Trump used as an attack line during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump said Clinton would send material to Anthony Weiner, that pervert, referring to the former congressperson who was married to an aide to Clinton.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly asserted that, while still in office, he had declassified all the material he took with him from the White House (though the charges may not rely on whether anything was classified). But his assertion appeared to be undercut by the recording.

As president, I could have declassified them; now I cant, Trump was recorded saying, according to the person familiar with its contents. He then reiterated something was classified as he and one of the women in the room talked over each other, according to the person familiar with its contents.

Isnt that interesting? Its so cool, Trump said, adding, You probably almost didnt believe me, but now you believe me.

c.2023 The New York Times Company
US president Donald Trump said his personal aide has been indicted (MANDEL NGAN)

Donald Trump said Friday that a personal aide, who is believed to be a key witness in the classified documents case facing the former US president, is being indicted by prosecutors.

Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform, did not specify the alleged charges facing Walt Nauta, who was the president's military valet at the White House.

"I have just learned that the 'Thugs' from the Department of Injustice will be Indicting a wonderful man, Walt Nauta," Trump wrote.

"They are trying to destroy his life, like the lives of so many others, hoping that he will say bad things about 'Trump,'" he said. "He is strong, brave, and a Great Patriot."

ABC News said Nauta had been indicted by the same Florida grand jury that charged Trump in the classified documents case but the specific charges against him were not known.

Nauta, a US Navy veteran, served as Trump's military valet while he was president and has gone on to work as his personal aide since he left the White House.

Trump is facing charges related to his retention of classified documents after he left the presidency in January 2021.

Hundreds of documents were recovered by the FBI in a raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida after he failed to comply with a subpoena to hand them over.

The Washington Post reported recently that Nauta was a "critical witness" in the Justice Department investigation which led to Trump's indictment.

The newspaper said one of Nauta's responsibilities at Mar-a-Lago was to "to move and carry cardboard boxes in which Trump likes to keep mementos and papers."

The Post said Nauta, when first questioned by the FBI, denied any knowledge that sensitive documents were being stored at Mar-a-Lago.

"But when questioned a second time, he told investigators that he had moved boxes at Trump's direction after prosecutors sent a subpoena seeking the return of all documents marked classified and kept at Mar-a-Lago," the newspaper said.

Trump, the first former US president to face federal criminal charges, is to appear in court in Miami on Tuesday for a first hearing in the classified documents case.

cl/md
Former President Trump has been indicted in connection with his handling of classified records, he said on social media Thursday, making him the first U.S. president charged with a federal crime.

"The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax," he said on his Truth Social platform. "I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States... I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!"

Trump attorney John Rowley told NBC that his client was indicted on seven counts, but did not reveal the precise nature of the charges. Trump's legal team did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Times.

The former president said he has been summoned to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon.

Trump's presidential campaign issued a fundraising appeal to donors within minutes of his social media post claiming that "we are watching our Republic DIE before our very eyes."

The unprecedented decision to indict him comes after a more than yearlong investigation into whether Trump knowingly retained top-secret and other classified government records when he left office in 2021 and disregarded a subpoena to return all classified documents in his possession, and whether he and his staff obstructed FBI efforts to ensure all documents had been returned.

Presidential and other government records in the White House's possession must be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration by the day a president leaves office. Archives staff quickly questioned why some materials were not received from Trump in January 2021, prompting a months-long negotiation with the former president and his staff and resulting in the return of over 15 boxes of material in January 2022, including nearly 200 documents marked as classified.

Archives officials notified the Justice Department about the classified materials, and officials sought a subpoena demanding that Trump return any other classified material in his possession. Trump's legal team produced about three dozen additional documents and a letter stating that a diligent search had turned up nothing more.

The FBI had information indicating more classified records might be in the former president's possession and secured a warrant to search Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate last August. More than 100 additional documents labeled classified and top-secret were found.

Special counsel Jack Smith was appointed in November by U.S. Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland to oversee the classified documents investigation and another probe scrutinizing Trumps actions in his effort to remain in office after losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.

A spokesman for the special counsel declined to comment. It would be unusual for Smith, a tight-lipped adherent to protocol, to speak publicly before arraignment.

Federal grand juries have been meeting about the documents investigation in both Washington, D.C., and Florida, and it is unclear whether a second set of charges are coming as part of the inquiry. While bringing at least some of the charges in southern Florida is seen as an attempt to head off challenges over venue, it may increase the possibility that the case could land before a Trump-appointed judge.

Trump had luck in that regard early in the investigation, when he challenged the FBI search before Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed. Cannon's decision to appoint a special master to review materials taken in the search delayed the investigation for several weeks.

Reports in recent weeks fueled speculation that an indictment was imminent. According to news reports, Trump is heard acknowledging in an audio recording of a summer 2021 meeting that he retained a classified Pentagon document after leaving office. His lawyers have reportedly been unable to find that document, which related to military planning for confronting Iran.

Other reporting indicated that Trump and his aides may have obstructed efforts to retrieve security camera video, and that the special counsel's team has been asking witnesses about potential damage from the flooding of a room where computer servers containing video surveillance logs were stored.

Garland has adhered to precedent and not overruled Smith's charging decision.

Smith's decision adds to the mounting legal challenges Trump faces heading into the 2024 presidential election.

In March, he was indicted in New York City on 34 felony charges related to an alleged hush-money payment made to porn actor Stormy Daniels in the final days of the 2016 campaign. It marked the first time in history that a former U.S. president has been criminally prosecuted.

In addition to Smith's concurrent investigation into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election, Fulton County, Ga. Dist. Atty. Fani Willis is leading a criminal probe related to Trump's alleged efforts to convince Georgia officials to change results there.

In a four-minute video posted on Truth Social, Trump called the indictment "election interference" and an extension of previous probes, including the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Several prominent Republicans quickly echoed his language in statements of support.

"I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice," House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) said in a statement. "House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable."

Those efforts appear to have already begun. Earlier this week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) demanded that the Justice Department hand over documents detailing the scope of Smiths authority and investigations.

Burbank Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who played prominent roles in both of Trump's impeachments, tweeted that Thursday's indictment was an "affirmation of the rule of law." He also derided the GOP threat to have Congress interfere in an ongoing criminal case.

"For four years, he acted like he was above the law," Schiff tweeted, referring to Trump. "But he should be treated like any other lawbreaker. And today, he has been."

The legal challenges are expected to complicate Trump's campaign. The judge presiding over his New York criminal trial has ordered Trump to be present during the proceedings, which are scheduled to start in March 2024.

Last fall, the handling of classified documents became an unexpected flashpoint ahead of the 2024 presidential campaign with the news that President Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence  who joined the race on Monday  had both discovered they still possessed classified records from their time in the vice president's office. Those instances stand apart from the Trump case because both men voluntarily turned the documents over to the Justice Department upon their discovery.

On June 1, the Justice Department informed Pence it was closing its investigation into his handling of classified documents without filling charges. Garland appointed a special counsel in January to review Biden's handling of classified documents; that investigation is ongoing.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Police are pictured during an FBI raid on US President Donald Trump's residence in Palm Beach, Florida on August 8, 2022 (Giorgio VIERA)

Donald Trump said Thursday he has been indicted over his handling of classified documents after leaving office, the US ex-president's most serious legal threat yet as he pursues a second White House term.

"The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform as he broke the bombshell news of a historic moment for the United States: the first time a sitting or former commander-in-chief has faced federal charges.

There was no immediate confirmation from the Justice Department.

Trump attorney Jim Trusty told CNN that his client has been indicted on seven charges including the willful retention of documents in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements, obstruction of justice and a count of conspiracy.

Though the precise details of the charges were not immediately clear, people familiar with the matter told The New York Times the conspiracy charge was related to obstruction of justice.

In his post, Trump, who is running for president again, said he has been summoned to a federal courthouse in Miami next Tuesday -- the day before his 77th birthday.

His announcement came a day after US media said federal prosecutors had informed his lawyers that he is the target of the probe into his handling of classified documents.

Trump was already the first former or sitting president to be charged with a crime -- in his case over election-eve hush money payments to a porn star who said she had an affair with him.

That indictment was handed down by Manhattan's district attorney in March.

In a statement after his initial online posts, the Trump campaign lashed out at what it called an "unprecedented abuse of power," and called for the indictment to be thrown out.

- 'Dark day' -

In a defiant video released after he shared the news, Trump repeatedly declared his innocence and framed the indictment as a form of election interference by a Justice Department "weaponized" by the Biden administration.

"They come after me because now we're leading in the polls again by a lot against Biden," Trump said in the clip.

"Our country is going to hell and they come after Donald Trump... We can't let this continue."

Fellow Republicans swiftly stood by him, including Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy, who has had a rollercoaster relationship with Trump.

"Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America. It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him," McCarthy said in a statement.

"I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump."

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a rival for the GOP presidential nomination, echoed Trump's claims of a "weaponized" DOJ, adding on Twitter that he would "excise political bias" if elected president.

The Twitter account of Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee posted a repeated Trump slogan: "WITCH HUNT."

Special counsel Jack Smith, named by US Attorney General Merrick Garland, has been looking into a cache of classified documents that Trump had stored at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida after leaving the White House.

The FBI carted away some 11,000 papers after serving a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago in August, and obstruction-of-justice charges could be a result of his resisting efforts to recover the trove.

Trump eventually turned over 15 boxes containing almost 200 classified documents to the National Archives in January 2022 but was subpoenaed for any outstanding records in his possession.

When asked about the charges Thursday night, Smith's spokesman Peter Carr told AFP: "We are declining to comment."

The White House said it learned of the indictment from media coverage and a spokesperson declined to comment on the news, noting that the DOJ "conducts its criminal investigations independently," CNN reported.

- Mounting legal woes -

Some Democratic lawmakers spoke out following Thursday's revelation.

Trump's indictment "is another affirmation of the rule of law," House Democrat Adam Schiff said.

"For four years, he acted like he was above the law," he added. "But he should be treated like any other lawbreaker. And today, he has been."

Trump has repeatedly denied wrongdoing in the documents case, telling a Fox News town hall event on June 1 that "everything I did was right."

But he has openly acknowledged taking and storing the documents, undermining his lawyers' suggestion that he took the stash inadvertently in the confusion of a chaotic departure.

"This evidence just adds to the mound of stuff that already exists, and no one piece is the 'be all and end all,' but when you put them all together, the case is so strong," former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks told MSNBC.

"You cannot imagine his getting away with this."

The latest indictment comes with Trump facing numerous other probes as he bids to be the Republican nominee to challenge Joe Biden for the presidency in 2024.

Smith is also looking at whether Trump should face charges over the 2021 US Capitol riot, and Georgia prosecutors are investigating whether Trump illegally attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election outcome there.

Trump has already been charged with dozens of financial crimes as part of the alleged hush money scheme to silence the porn star, and is due to go on trial next March, in the middle of primary election season.

ft-mlm/sco
Donald Trump leaving Trump Tower in May James Devaney/GC Images

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday evening said he has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Trump, who is now the first former U.S. president to face federal charges, made the announcement on his Truth Social platform. The indictment was filed in U.S. District Court in Miami by the office of special counsel Jack Smith, people with knowledge of the matter told The New York Times, and Trump said he is expected to appear in court on Tuesday.

Two sources briefed on the matter told the Times the former president has been indicted on seven counts, including willful retention of documents, false statements and conspiracy to obstruct, which requires at least two people.

Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November, has been leading the mishandling of classified documents case as well as a second investigation looking at Trump's attempts to stay in power after losing the 2020 presidential election and how those efforts led to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. A spokesperson for Smith declined to comment on either matter.

Trump is facing other investigations, including a Georgia probe into his efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss in the state. In April, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records connected to alleged hush money payments. That trial is scheduled to begin next March.

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DOJ reportedly informs Trump he's a target of criminal investigation, suggesting indictment
Former President Donald Trump said Thursday that he has been indicted on charges connected to his handling of classified national security records, writing on social media that he has been summoned to federal court on Tuesday in Miami.

Prosecutors are charging the former president with seven criminal counts, according to a person familiar with the indictment granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The precise charges that federal prosecutors have obtained against Trump were not immediately clear. But one of Trumps attorneys indicated that a summons issued by prosecutors listed a provision of the Espionage Act and a federal statute criminalizing the obstruction of an official proceeding.

The Justice Department notified Trump's lawyers on Thursday that a grand jury had returned the indictment. Todd Blanche, an attorney whom Trump has tasked with helming his defense, called the former president to inform him of the news. Trump has been staying recently at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The documents investigation has been overseen by special counsel Jack Smith and appeared to be nearing the charging phase in recent days. Smiths team recently sent Trump a target letter and Trump's lawyers met with senior Justice Department officials in Washington in what now appears to have been an unsuccessful bid to head off criminal charges against the former president.



A Justice Department spokesperson referred questions about the indictment to Smith's spokesperson, who declined to comment Thursday evening. The White House also declined to comment.

Trump immediately began fundraising off the news, issuing an email appeal to donors under the heading BREAKING: INDICTED, even as he railed against the charges and rebuked the Justice Department.

I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States," Trump said in a statement. I am an innocent man."

Jim Trusty, a member of Trumps legal team, said in a CNN interview that, while he had not seen the actual indictment, the summons Trump received listed several laws Trump is likely to face charges under. They include the Espionage Act, which prohibits the retention of classified materials, obstruction of an official proceeding  a charge frequently lodged against those who disrupted Congress on Jan. 6, 2021  and falsifying or destroying records pertinent to a federal investigation. Trusty also said there were false statements charges listed on the summons, as well as a conspiracy count.



Since Smith has been using grand juries in Florida and Washington, D.C. in recent days, it's unclear whether the indictment Trump disclosed Thursday is the only set of charges he will face from the special prosecutor in connection with the classified documents probe.

Still, its a moment as fraught as it is historic: the first-ever federal charges against a former president, who also happens to be the Republican Partys frontrunner for the 2024 nomination. The charges ignite what is sure to be a protracted and intense period of pretrial litigation that will overlap with the GOP nominating contest and galvanize Republican voters who have so far been unfazed by Trumps legal entanglements.

Trump, who is already facing state felony charges in Manhattan related to alleged hush money payments to a porn star, has now been tagged with his second set of criminal charges, with more potentially looming. An Atlanta-based district attorney is gearing up to make a charging decision in a long-running probe of Trumps bid to subvert the 2020 election as soon as next month. And Smith is similarly investigating Trump for his effort to derail the transfer of power to Joe Biden.

Trump has spent months railing against Smith and other investigators, seeking to cast their probes as a politically motivated conspiracy against him  and he spent the days preceding the latest indictment attacking the Justice Department by making false comparisons to Bidens own handling of classified information.

The documents probe has its origins in a dispute between Trump and the National Archives, which began shortly after Trump left office in January 2021. Archives officials, who realized Trump had retained some presidential papers, began asking him to return the records because they were property of the federal government.

But Trump resisted, triggering a lengthy round of negotiation that stretched to January 2022, when he agreed to return 15 boxes of material to the Archives. Thats when Archives officials discovered several documents that were marked classified and alerted the Justice Department.

By April 2022, DOJ issued a subpoena to Trumps office for all remaining classified documents at his Mar-a-LAgo estate. They also subpoenaed for surveillance footage from Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate, which his company, the Trump Organization, monitored remotely. In early June 2022, top DOJ officials visited Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trumps lawyers Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, who handed over another sealed folder containing classified records. Accompanying the folder was a signed letter assuring DOJ that the folder represented all of the remaining classified material at Trumps property.

But that turned out to be false. In August, based on evidence that Trump had not fully turned over additional classified documents, the FBI raided Trumps estate and recovered additional boxes containing highly classified material mixed with Trumps personal items and other non-classified presidential records.

The raid galvanized public attention to the documents probe and drew Trumps fury in a way it hadnt before. Two weeks later, he sued to reclaim his property, igniting a legal fight that would briefly delay the Justice Departments investigation. That fight stretched into November, when Trump announced his latest bid for the White House.

That announcement also triggered Attorney General Merrick Garlands decision to appoint Smith as special counsel to oversee both the documents investigation and the probe of Trumps 2020 election gambit. Garland indicated that Smith, who returned to the United States from a stint as a war crimes prosecutor at the Hague, would maintain the rapid pace of the investigations, which had been ongoing for months by the time he arrived.

Although the election probe drew higher-profile witnesses, like former Vice President Mike Pence and other senior figures in Trumps White House, the documents probe always seemed poised to wrap first, and Smith brought in a steady stream of witnesses  employees of Trumps estates, advisers and even Corcoran, Trumps lawyer.

To secure Corcorans testimony, Smith fought a secret grand jury battle that was ultimately decided in his favor by U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell, who ruled that attorney-client privilege did not apply to Corcorans testimony and documents because they likely included evidence of a crime.

Even before he received news of the indictment on Thursday, Trump sought to mobilize his allies and prepared attacks on the Justice Department.

He spoke earlier in the day with, among other people, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) about GOP investigations and oversight, according to a person familiar with the calls who was not authorized to speak about them publicly. After the indictment came down, Trump made more calls to allies both on and off the Hill to discuss the developments. His political team was with him at his golf club in New Jersey.

Jessica Piper contributed to this report.
Former President Donald Trump said Thursday night that he has been indicted on charges of illegally storing classified documents at his residence in Palm Beach after removing them from the White House and that he must make his first appearance in Miami federal court on Tuesday.

Trump, 76, who made the announcement on his social media platform, condemned the Justice Department and Biden Administration for bringing the charges against him. The indictment, returned by a Miami federal grand jury, has not been unsealed.

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, Trump posted on Truth Social.

News of Trumps indictment capped days of increasing speculation on social media about whether special counsel Jack Smith would move to file such unprecedented charges against a former president. According to multiple news reports, Smiths team had been interviewing witnesses and reviewing evidence through two separate grand juries, one impaneled for months in the nations capital and another more recently in Miami.

READ MORE: As decision on Trump case neared, media swarms to Miamis federal courthouse

The indictment, which is likely to charge the former president with illegally possessing classified records, violating the Espionage Act and obstructing justice, was returned by grand jurors sitting in Miami. The historic indictment is sure to be a politically controversial and intensely covered prosecution in a federal courtroom not far from Trumps palatial home. In the days leading up the indictment, his lawyers had met with prosecutors and Trump had taken to his own social media network to repeat claims that he has been treated unfairly by federal investigators.

The case, however, stems from a drawn-out dispute over accusations that the former president had mishandled classified records. Months after his departure, Trump engaged in a confrontation with the National Archives and then the FBI over releasing the classified documents  including material about a foreign countrys nuclear capabilities and military defenses  leading to his arrest on charges of possessing the top secret papers at his private club and estate and withholding them from investigators.

Trump is expected to surrender to authorities for his first appearance in Miami federal court on Tuesday, when issues of his legal representation, bond and arraignment would be addressed before Magistrate Bruce Reinhart. He is the same judge who found probable cause of a crime authorizing the FBI to search Trumps residence at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 2022.

READ MORE: What to know after Trump says hes indicted  again. This time, in classified docs probe

In the run-up to the indictment, multiple news outlets reported that Trumps lawyers met with Justice Department officials on Monday, as the decision neared on whether to bring criminal charges. His lawyers had requested a meeting with Attorney General Merrick Garland to raise concerns alleging prosecutorial misconduct and overreach by the team led by the special counsel, who was appointed by Garland. It was not clear what was discussed during the meeting, which was attended by Smith but not Garland.

Afterward, Trump, in a social media post and talk radio interview, signaled that he was prepared for the possibility that he would be charged and reiterated his attacks on the investigation.

For Trump, who is running in the 2024 presidential election, the new indictment marks the first time that he has been charged in federal court but the second time he he has been charged with a crime. In April, the Manhattan District Attorneys Office charged the former president with a series of fraud-related offenses stemming from paying hush money totaling $130,000 to a porn actress at the height of the 2016 election to prevent her from going public about their alleged sexual encounter.

In the latest case, the Justice Department had already disclosed in a court filing that during last summers search of Trumps home, teams of agents seized 33 boxes, containers or other items of evidence containing more than 100 classified records, including classified information at the highest levels.

READ MORE: From Florida to California, see what officials are saying after Trumps federal indictment

In the Mar-a-Lagos storage room alone, FBI agents found 76 documents bearing classification markings. But in addition, three classified documents located in the desks of the former presidents home office were also seized, the filing said.

The FBI noted that its agents had recovered twice as many documents with classified markings as the former presidents lawyers and other representatives had produced that June in response to a grand jury subpoena, casting doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.

Before the FBI raid, Trump and his lawyers had turned over the following: 38 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 5 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 16 documents marked as SECRET, and 17 documents marked as TOP SECRET, according to the Justice Department prosecutors filing.

Prosecutors further said that the former president and his lawyers offered no explanation as to why boxes of government records, including 38 documents with classification markings, remained at [Mar-a-Lago] nearly five months after they had initially turned over 15 boxes with classified documents to the National Archives in January following months of inquiries about returning them.

Trump himself had voluntarily turned over those classified documents  mixed among magazines, newspapers, photos, letters, notes and other miscellaneous material  in the 15 boxes sent to the National Archives in January 2022 after the federal agency responsible for holding presidential and government documents demanded that the former president return his records to Washington.

In the days before the indictment was returned, a trio of Trump attorneys  James Trusty, John Rowley and Lindsey Halligan  met with the special prosecutor, Smith, at the Justice Department headquarters in Washington for almost two hours and upon their exit did not respond to reporters questions.

After the meeting ended, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform in capital letters: How can DOJ possibly charge me, who did nothing wrong when no other presidents have been charged. He referenced the investigation into his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton, which ended without criminal charges, and a separate ongoing probe into the presence of classified documents at an office and home of President Joe Biden.

Trump characterized it as a witch hunt.
LUSAKA, June 9 (Xinhua) -- The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the largest regional economic organization in Africa, on Friday urged its member states to remove all barriers that are hindering its integration.

While acknowledging efforts made toward achieving integration, a communique released after the 22nd COMESA Summit of Heads of State and Government said that more needed to be done if the program is to succeed.

According to the communique, member countries should remove all restrictions on the movement of people, labor, goods and services across the region.

Member countries have also been urged to remove visa requirements and mutual recognition of qualifications in order to foster intra-trade and investment for the full realization of the benefits of integration.

The communique added that the leaders recognized the importance of services in fostering production, employment generation and foreign direct investment and urged members to facilitate production and movement of goods and services across the region.

While acknowledging the progress made in the enhancement of transparency and efficiency in tackling non-tariff barriers to trade, the leaders urged member states to continue strengthening institutional reforms as well as to enforce protocols and regulations on the elimination of non-tariff barriers.

They also underscored the importance of peace, security and stability for creating an enabling environment for investment, sustained economic development and a viable integration for the region.

The summit was held in Lusaka, Zambia, Thursday under the theme, "Economic Integration for a Thriving COMESA Anchored on Green Investment, Value Addition and Tourism."

COMESA, with an estimated gross domestic product of 805 billion U.S. dollars, is Africa's largest trading bloc with 21 members and a population of 583 million. 
Washington  Former President Donald Trump has been indicted on charges stemming from the federal investigation into his handling of sensitive government documents after he left the White House, a historic move that is likely to roil the ongoing 2024 presidential race. Two U.S. officials confirmed the charges to CBS News, as did Trump's attorney.

In three posts to his account on Truth Social, Trump said attorneys with the Justice Department informed him he was indicted over the "boxes hoax" and he has been called to appear at the federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday. Two sources familiar with the matter confirmed the arraignment to CBS News.

"I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!" he claimed.

U.S. Secret Service officials will meet Friday with Trump's staff, security officers and Secret Service assigned to the former president's detail to develop a plan for his travel and appearance in federal court, a law enforcement official said.

Trump charged with seven counts

The exact nature of the charges, the first to arise from special counsel Jack Smith's investigations, was not immediately clear. But three sources familiar with the case said the former president has been charged in a seven-count indictment involving the retention of national defense information, conspiracy and obstruction.

Smith, appointed in November 2022 by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee the probes, is also examining efforts to thwart the transfer of presidential power after the 2020 presidential election and the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

An unprecedented step by the Justice Department

The decision to pursue an indictment of Trump is a remarkable and unprecedented step, marking the first time the Justice Department has brought federal charges against a former president. Trump's attorneys met with Justice Department officials, including Smith, on Monday and discussed concerns about prosecutors' efforts in the inquiry.

The charges sparked a fierce backlash from the former president's Republican allies, who accused Garland of targeting Trump ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Trump is currently the front-runner in the GOP primary contest to square off against President Biden. Shortly after revealing he had been charged, Trump made the indictment the center of a fundraising appeal to his supporters.

The indictment adds to the legal peril hanging over the former president amid his third bid for the White House. Trump is also facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in New York state court, and a trial in that case is set to begin March 25, 2024, in the thick of the presidential campaign. He pleaded not guilty to the charges brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

The chief prosecutor in Fulton County, Georgia, is also expected to announce this summer whether Trump or any of his allies will be charged following her investigation into efforts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

The former president has denied any wrongdoing in connection with all of the investigations.

Regarding his handling of government documents, he has claimed at times that he declassified the sensitive documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago. Trump has also asserted the materials he kept were "personal" and therefore didn't have to be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration when he left office, and were shielded by executive privilege.

Trump frustrated with what source says was "too much happy talk"

But Trump is frustrated not just with the indictment, but with people in his inner circle who reassured him for months that it was very unlikely to happen. There was "too much happy talk for way too long" about what could happen, according to a source close to Trump.

Trump's legal team strategizes

A second source close to the former president noted that one of his lawyers, Jim Trusty, "knows the special counsel" and is expected to try to work with attorneys John Rowley and Todd Blanche on the next step: a request to dismiss the charges and possibly a formal attempt to question Smith and the Justice Department's chief of counterintelligence, Jay Bratt, who was one of the government's key lawyers involved in the efforts to recover documents from Trump's team at Mar-a-Lago.

The Florida factor threw members of Trump's team for a loop, but they believed the Justice Department has been looking at potential jurisdictional challenges, since the documents at issue were found in Florida, rather than in Washington, D.C.

The records at Mar-a-Lago

The new criminal charges stem from a 15-month-long effort by the federal government to retrieve records Trump had at his South Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, after his presidency ended in January 2021. While wrangling between Trump and the National Archives initially took place behind the scenes with secret subpoenas for the records and security camera footage, the dispute burst into public view on Aug. 8, 2022, when the FBI conducted a court-authorized search of the property.

Federal investigators seized 33 boxes of material, 13 of which contained just over 100 documents marked classified. Records made public following the FBI's search, including the affidavit used to justify the search warrant and the warrant itself, indicated Trump was under investigation for the alleged removal or destruction of records, obstruction of justice and potentially violating a provision of the Espionage Act related to gathering, transmitting or losing defense information.

Before the batch of roughly 100 sensitive records was discovered, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes containing presidential records from Mar-a-Lago in January 2022. Those boxes included 184 documents with classification markings, totaling over 700 pages.

The National Archives first attempted to recover what it considered to be sensitive government records before referring the matter to the Justice Department, and informed Trump's lawyers at the outset that they were missing correspondence between Trump and both North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and former President Barack Obama. It is unclear if those missing items were recovered in any of the searches and collections.

Representatives for Trump also handed over to Justice Department investigators in early June 2022 a folder containing 38 records marked classified after receiving a subpoena for "any and all" documents bearing classification markings that were in Trump's possession at Mar-a-Lago.

In all, roughly 300 documents marked classified were recovered by federal investigators from the South Florida property after Trump left office. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said at the time her office was conducting a damage assessment to determine what national harm, if any, was incurred by the retention of the records.

The Justice Department's investigation

The FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago sparked a legal battle mounted by Trump against the Justice Department over investigators' access to the materials seized from his property, and the former president requested a special master, or independent third party, be named to review the documents.

That dispute limited the Justice Department's probe for months after a special master was named and federal prosecutors sought access only to the roughly 100 documents with classification markings retrieved from Mar-a-Lago. The court fight landed before the Supreme Court, which in October declined to intervene in the dispute. A federal appeals court ordered an end to the special master's review process in December.

The legal proceedings opened a normally secretive investigative process to the public, allowing prosecutors to detail the evidence they had collected in public court filings.

As part of the investigation into Trump's alleged mishandling of sensitive government records, a federal grand jury heard testimony from numerous people close to the former president, including his lawyers Evan Corcoran and Timothy Parlatore. Parlatore, who left Trump's legal team in May, ordered searches of the former president's other properties for government documents, which yielded a handful of additional records.

Attorneys for Trump told the Justice Department they were unable to locate a classified document related to Iran that was sought by investigators, two people with knowledge of the situation confirmed to CBS News in early June. The document was discussed during a recorded meeting.

Another key witness, Trump aide and former White House valet Walt Nauta, told investigators last year he moved boxes inside Mar-a-Lago at Trump's direction both before and after the subpoena was issued to hand over all documents with classification markings.

Multiple sources close to the investigation told CBS News that prosecutors focused on Nauta's interactions with the boxes, but talks between his legal team and the Justice Department stalled after prosecutors took a more aggressive approach.

Several former and current U.S. Secret Service officials, including security officials from the Mar-a-Lago resort, also answered questions before the grand jury.

The wide scope of people who were called by investigators in Smith's office to testify included numerous Trump aides and allies, current and former Mar-a-Lago employees, White House staffers and attorneys. Numerous grand juries convened in the federal courthouse in Washington collected evidence for months about Mar-a-Lago's structure, Trump's transition from the White House and conversations with his own lawyer, Corcoran, that a federal judge deemed were not covered by attorney-client privilege.

Amid the Justice Department's investigation into the records found at Mar-a-Lago, it was revealed that documents bearing classification markings had been found at President Joe Biden's former office and his Wilmington, Delaware, home.

The records dated back to Mr. Biden's time as vice president and in the Senate, and Garland appointed a special counsel, Robert Hur, to oversee an investigation into the handling of the documents. The number of the documents discovered in Mr. Biden's possession is far smaller than those recovered from Mar-a-Lago: the total number of known classified documents found since November is between 25 and 30. Additionally, the president's lawyers, who found the materials, immediately notified the Archives and Justice Department of their discovery.

Mr. Biden also consented to searches of his Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, homes.

A "small number" of documents marked classified were also discovered at the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence in January and turned over to the FBI. The Justice Department investigated the matter and spoke with several aides as part of its probe, as well as Pence. Officials closed the inquiry without bringing criminal charges.

 Graham Kates, Fin Gomez, and Jeff Pegues contributed to this report.

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Trump says on Truth Social that he has been indicted in classified documents investigation

Former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters at his rally in Waco, Texas, on March 25, 2023. AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Former President Donald Trump broke the news on Truth Social that he has been indicted.

The New York Times and other outlets have now confirmed Trump has been indicted.

Read Insider's full story on the historic indictment here.

Former President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social Thursday evening that he has been indicted in relation to the Department of Justice's investigation into the potential mishandling of classified documents. The New York Times and other outlets have since confirmed the indictment.

Read Insider's full story on the historic indictment here.

"I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM," Trump wrote. "I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!"

ABC and CNN report the former president has been indicted on 7 charges in relation to the investigation into his mishandling of classified documents.

This would be the first time a former president has faced federal charges. Trump was indicted by New York prosecutors earlier this year over hush money payments paid to the adult entertainer Stormy Daniels.

A spokesman for the DOJ declined to comment.

Read the original article on Business Insider
(Bloomberg) -- Special counsel Jack Smith pledged a speedy trial for Donald Trump, in brief remarks after the former president was indicted over his refusal to return classified documents.

Most Read from Bloomberg

My office will seek a speedy trial on this matter consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused, Smith said at a press conference Friday.

His team brought seven charges against Trump, including willful retention of national defense information, corruptly concealing documents, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and making false statements, according to the indictment, unsealed earlier the same day in federal court in Miami.

The charges center on Trumps refusal to return classified documents found at his Florida home, marking the first time a former president has faced federal allegations of criminal conduct.

One Set of Laws

Trump and his allies have criticized Smiths investigation, claiming the special counsel is biased against the 45th president.

We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone, Smith said. He defended his prosecutors against the criticism, saying they operated with the highest ethical standards and adding: They will continue to do so as this case proceeds.

Smith emphasized the need to safeguard the sensitive work done by the countrys defense and intelligence agencies.

The men and women of the United States intelligence community and our armed forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people, he said. Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced.

Two-Year Effort

Smith and his team gathered evidence for the charges from witnesses and other sources in a two-year effort to figure out which government documents Trump kept when he left the White House and whether any crimes were committed in the process.

He is also supervising a probe into whether Trump committed any crimes in connection with his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Trump, who denies wrongdoing, has said the investigations are part of a larger partisan effort to scuttle his campaign to regain the White House in 2024 and that they amount to election interference.

The case is US v. Trump, 23-cr-80101, US District Court, Southern District of Florida.

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
Classified documents were stored in the bathroom and shower of what appears to be a guest suite at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. Department of Justice

A federal grand jury brought criminal charges against former President Donald Trump.

The Justice Department brought the case over Trump taking government records to Mar-a-Lago.

Some of those documents were in a shower, the unsealed indictment says.

Former President Donald Trump stored boxes of classified documents in a shower at his Mar-a-Lago estate and private club in Palm Beach, Florida.

The revelations were contained in the 37-count indictment unsealed on Friday, which detailed the federal charges against the former president. Trump is set to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday over the charges, which could amount to decades of prison time and stem from a Department of Justice.



The boxes contained hundreds of classified documents, some of which had information about defense and weapons capabilities of the US and other countries, vulnerabilities the US had to military attacks, and US nuclear programs.

The Department of Justice has maintained that Trump didn't have the right to keep the documents, while Trump has claimed that as president, he had the power to declassify documents simply "by thinking about it."

"Mar-a-Lago Club was not an authorized location for the storage possession, review, display, or discussion of classified documents," the indictment reads. "Nevertheless, Trump stored his boxes containing classified documents in various locations at the Mar-a-Lago Club  including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room."

In one part of the indictment, investigators gathered a text message exchange from April 5, 2021, between employees at Mar-a-Lago. One of the employees asked another whether the boxes of classified material could be moved out of a business center so that staff could use it for an office.



The second employee initially pushed back, saying Trump specifically wanted the documents to be in the business center because they were "his 'papers.'"

Later in the day, the first employee said there was room in the shower "where his other stuff is."



"Is it only his papers he cares about? There's some other stuff in there that are not papers," the employee said. "Could that go to storage? Or does he want everything in there on property?"



Later that month, some of the boxes were moved from the business center to the bathroom in what was known as Mar-a-Lago Club's Lake Room. The indictment contains a photo of the room, which appears to be part of one of the club's guest suites.

Former President Donald Trump makes statements at his Mar-a-Lago estate after being arraigned in New York City, on April 04, 2023, in Palm Beach, Florida. Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The indictment then goes on to say that the boxes were moved to a storage room on June 24, 2021, on the club's ground floor. The storage space was accessible from numerous entrances, the indictment says, including one door that led outside to the club's pool and that was often left open.

The boxes apparently were moved around several times at Mar-a-Lago after they left the White House. Trump himself was involved in the packing process, the indictment says, and the boxes were initially stored in the club's White and Gold Ballroom, including on a stage, before being moved to the business center, the bathroom, and finally the storage unit.

The ballroom mentioned in the indictment was the same location where, two years later, Trump would announce his run for the 2024 Republican nomination, and where he would host supporters to rally around him after his first indictment, a pending case from the Manhattan District Attorney's office alleging he falsified business records through hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels.

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Another indictment? It's not a problem for Trump.

Another indictment? It's not a problem for Trump.

For a presidential candidate, how many indictments are too many indictments? For most candidates, the answer is almost certainly one. For Donald Trump, the limit does not exist.

The 45th president, already the presumed frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination, announced last night that hes facing a federal criminal indictment over his handling of classified documents at his Florida home. Trump, predictably, says hes innocent.

Its the first federal indictment lodged against a former president and Trumps second recent indictment, following the state charges he faces in Manhattan over alleged payments he made before the 2016 election to porn actor Stormy Daniels to stay silent about their affair.

For a swing voter in the general election, the legal drama dogging Trump might simply be too much after four years of a chaotic presidency that included two impeachments, the legislative equivalent of an indictment.

The GOP primary, however, is a much different story. Trump has sufficiently conditioned the MAGA diehards who dominate the GOPs electorate to disregard any attack as the plotting of his enemies and to respond by rallying to his side.

GOP strategist Sarah Longwell, who conducts focus groups of Republican voters, offered proof of this phenomenon on Friday: Weve been asking Trump voters in focus groups whether or not additional indictments would make them more or less likely to support Trump, she tweeted. Many people say more. Many say it doesnt change things one way or another. Almost no one says, less.

This type of knee-jerk MAGA conditioning creates problems for Trumps growing field of opponents: If any attack on Trump is the result of the liberal establishments plot against him, its their duty to rush to Trumps side and condemn the attack. Not only does that make Trump virtually untouchable in the primary, but it also forces his opponents to act as a guard for the guy beating them in the polls.

Trumps first indictment shows the pattern at work. As Trump himself often brags, his poll numbers shot up following the announcement of charges in the hush money case in early April, expanding his lead against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his closest rival. The trend has continued: Trump is beating DeSantis by about 30 points in FiveThirtyEights national average, with everyone else trailing in the single digits.

Polls taken since the first indictment tend to tell the same story. While most Americans believe it was the right decision to charge Trump in the hush money case, opinions diverge sharply across party lines. Nearly two-thirds of Republican primary voters said they stand behind Trump, regardless of his legal troubles, according to an NBC News poll from late April.

And there very well could be more legal trouble to come. Trump is still under federal investigation for the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, and an Atlanta prosecutor is expected to unveil the findings of a grand jury investigation into Trumps alleged interference in Georgias presidential election in 2020 later this summer.

Looking ahead to next year, the travails will continue: Trumps New York case is set to go to trial in March, and the appeals and other squabbling over his legal issues are likely to dominate the news cycle throughout an election year. With the trials will come more damning evidence that, even if Trump makes it through the primary, wont help him win a rematch against President Joe Biden.

It doesnt help that Trumps rivals havent figured out how to wield Trumps legal mess against him. Theyre sticking close to the sentiments of Republicans writ large by denouncing the charges as baseless and politically motivated.

Only one of his primary opponents  former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who has no real path to the nomination  has called on Trump to drop out of the race, lamenting his disrespect for the rule of law and calling his campaign a major distraction.

Former Vice President Mike Pence canceled a planned interview with Fox News Sean Hannity  normally a big opportunity for a GOP primary candidate  shortly after the news, presumably to avoid talking about his former boss.

Trumps biggest rival, DeSantis, blasted the charges as the product of a politicized administrative state while also subtly lumping Trump in with Democrat Hillary Clinton, demonized for her use of a private email server as secretary of state, and President Joe Bidens embattled son, Hunter Biden, whose ill-fated laptop has launched a thousand Fox News chyrons.

We have for years witnessed an even application of the law depending upon political affiliation, DeSantis tweeted at 10 p.m. Thursday, a good two hours after the indictment broke. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?

More than any other candidate, DeSantis is selling his candidacy as Trump minus the drama. Except, the cycle Trump creates makes it impossible for DeSantis to engage with the most glaring example of that drama. The result is that Trumps own self-martyring becomes the party line. On Thursday night, after everyone had a chance to digest the news and weigh in online, Trumps campaign sent out a press release with links to dozens of prominent Republicans coming to his defense, firmly establishing the former president as the center of the GOP universe, as hes always been.

Related...
Trump waved classified military documents in front of a writer and a member of his PAC, and said 'it is like, highly confidential', feds allege

President Donald Trump seen here reaching into his suit during a news conference in 2020  showed off classified documents after leaving the White House, prosecutors say. Evan Vucci/AP

Donald Trump knew he wasn't supposed to share classified docs, prosecutors allege in an indictment.

But he showed off a classified battle plan after he was president, saying "Look what I found," feds allege.

He also showed a classified map to a member of his political team at Mar-A-Lago, the indictment says.

Federal prosecutors allege Donald Trump showed off classified documents months after leaving the White House, flashing battle plans and a classified map in front of a writer and a member of his political action committee in two separate incidents.

Trump  who's now facing 37 counts over the classified documents scandal, including charges of conspiracy and violating the Espionage Act  kept boxes of classified material at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida, prosecutors say.

And he wasn't shy about showing them off, the court documents suggest.

'This is secret information. Look, look at this'

In July 2021, months after he left the White House, the former president met with a writer and a publisher at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, about an upcoming book, the indictment says.

The meeting was recorded with Trump's permission, the feds said.

Trump greeted the two visitors, then pulled out a classified document showing a senior military official's proposed plan of attack and said, "Look what I found," according to the criminal indictment.

The indictment shows Trump was eager to disprove reporting that he had wanted to attack a foreign country during his presidency.

The battle plans from the military leader  which were classified  were proof that "this wasn't done by me, this was him," Trump said, according to prosecutors.

"Except it is like, highly confidential," Trump said, according to prosecutors. "Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this."

Later on, Trump admitted he "could have declassified" the plans, but "now I can't," the indictment says.

Donald Trump answers questions from reporters after making a video call to the troops stationed worldwide at his private Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, on December 24, 2019. NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images

In a separate instance at Mar-A-Lago in August or September of 2021, prosecutors said, Trump met with a member of his PAC.

During the meeting, Trump commented that a military operation abroad wasn't going well at the time, then showed the PAC representative a classified map of the foreign country, according to the indictment.

Trump told the PAC representative that he wasn't supposed to share this, and warned him not to get too close to it, prosecutors said.

'I'm allowed to do all this'

Trump has vowed to fight the allegations and accused the Biden administration and the Justice Department of a politically motivated "witch hunt" by bringing the charges against him.

In a post online on Friday, Trump wrote a furious attack on Jack Smith, the special counsel bringing the criminal charges against him. Trump called Smith "a deranged 'psycho' that shouldn't be involved in any case having to do with 'Justice.'"

Trump also claimed  as his lawyers have in previous media interviews  that he always had the ability to declassify documents.

"Under the Presidential Records Act, I'm allowed to do all this," Trump wrote of the allegations.

Trump told Fox News' Sean Hannity last September that he merely needed to think about declassifying the documents in order to make it so.

That interpretation flies in the face of standard procedure used under previous presidents to declassify documents  including channels Trump himself used during his presidency.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Former President Donald Trump Indicted

Former President Donald Trump attends an event with supporters at the Westside Conservative Breakfast, in Des Moines, Iowa, Thursday, June 1, 2023 Credit - Charlie NeibergallAP

Under normal circumstances, Republican presidential candidates would pounce on a chief rival facing the prospect of prison time. But when news broke that the Justice Department indicted Donald Trump for allegedly hoarding national-security secrets and conspiring to obstruct the governments efforts to retrieve them, most of his primary opponents dutifully defended the former President instead.

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott all cast Trump as a victim of political persecution. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, currently Trumps top challenger in the 2024 GOP primary, took aim at the Biden Administration rather than the man blocking his path to the nomination. The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, DeSantis tweeted. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?

The decision to pull punches when it comes to the frontrunner in the field is a matter of deep frustration to Trumps critics. You have to drive the wedge now, says Reed Galen, a former Republican operative who co-founded the NeverTrump group The Lincoln Project. Every day that goes by that these people have lined up behind him, or at least not attacked him, they are saying to other Republican voters: Hes in charge of the party.

The 2024 candidates reaction to the indictment doesnt only reflect a calculation that Trump still has a grip on the partys base. It also suggests they believe that the greatest political threat to Trumps bid for a third presidential nomination may not be his opponents, but rather the mounting number of prosecutors bringing criminal charges against him in the middle of an election year.

Read More: What To Know About Donald Trumps Indictment in the Classified Documents Case.

On Tuesday at 3 p.m., Trump will appear in a federal courthouse in Miami to face a 38-count indictment on a range of charges: willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and making false statements and representations. The charges, brought by Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith, mark the second time in roughly two months that Trump has been criminally indicted. He faces trial in Manhattan in March 2024 for allegedly falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments to a porn star. The classified documents case could be a prelude to another indictment in a separate special counsel investigation by Smith into his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump may also face charges later this summer in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has empaneled a grand jury to probe Trumps attempts to overturn the 2020 election result in the state.

The upshot is that when Republican voters begin casting their ballots in early 2024, they are likely to do so with the knowledge that Trump is facing criminal trials in at least two and possibly four separate venues. The outcome of at least some of those cases may not be known until after the GOP has nominated its presidential candidate.

Read More: Trumps Indictment Showcased His Rivals Weakness.

Trump allies say they believe the second criminal indictment of the former President is likely to cause the partys voters to rally around him, just as many did after he was charged in New York. They see no reason why his diehard supporterswho make up roughly 30% to 35% of the partywould bail on him now. Its been seven years of these investigations and theres still no cold feet, says Alex Bruesewitz, a GOP consultant and CEO of the Trump-allied firm X Strategies. The people arent going to leave Trump.

More from TIME

For Trumps opponents, navigating that hold on the base has proven challenging. If youre a Republican candidate, and you try to make the case that he cant win because of all of this, youre essentially embracing the alleged conspiracy Trump is promoting that all of this is meant to stop him from running, David Axelrod, a former chief strategist to President Barack Obama, recently told TIME. Two of Trumps challengers, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, have confronted him on the trail over his legal challenges, and they are each polling at less than one percent.

But much of the field appears to have settled on a unique strategy: dont go full-throttle against Trump. Hope the legal system can take him out instead.
Trump's indictment has been unsealed: Here's what it says

The News

The indictment against former President Donald Trump and his aide Walt Nauta in relation to the classified documents probe has been unsealed.

The 37 counts against Trump include 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information.

The indictment details how Trump allegedly ordered his attorneys on multiple instances to conceal or destroy documents that had been requested by a grand jury subpoena.

Many of those documents contained information about things like weapons capabilities and military plans in response to a foreign attack, and some of these were unsafely stored in locations such as bathrooms and showers at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club.

The indictment also details another incident where Trump showed a non-authorized person classified documents while acknowledging he shouldn't be doing so.

In a press conference on Friday, Special Counsel Jack Smith who oversaw the investigation, told reporters that he would push for a "speedy trial."

"The men and women of the United States intelligence community and our Armed Forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people," Smith said. "Our laws that protect National Defense Information are critical to the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced. Violations of those laws put our country at risk."

Trump told Politico that he would "never leave" and would remain in the race even if convicted, and he dismissed pardoning himself if re-elected, asserting his innocence.

Here are some of the indictment's most critical allegations against Trump:

Know More

Classified documents in a bathroom

According to the indictment, boxes of documents were first kept at Mar-a-Lago's White and Gold Ballroom for several months. Trump later asked that his "papers" be moved to a business center, but when that didn't have enough space, some boxes were kept at one of the club's bathroom and shower.

Showing documents to non-authorized people

The filing details two alleged incidents in 2021 where Trump revealed documents to those without security clearances at his Bedminster Club in New Jersey. During one audio-recorded meeting with a writer, publisher, and two of Trump's staff members, Trump showed and described "a plan of attack" that he said was "highly confidential" and "secret."

As previously reported by CNN, he told the group, "As president, I could have declassified it," and "Now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret."

In a second incident, Trump allegedly showed a member of his political action committee a military operation map, telling the individual that he should not be showing the map to them and telling them to not get too close to the map.

Concealing boxes

When Trump's attorneys informed him that a grand jury had subpoenaed the documents taken to Mar-a-Lago, Trump allegedly told them that he didn't want "anybody looking through [his] boxes."

"Wouldn't it be better if we just told them we don't have anything here?" he told his attorneys, per the indictment.

Trump later asked Nauta to move boxes from the storage room to his personal residence without informing his attorneys who had been ordered to search the storage room for any classified documents. Nauta later told authorities he had not moved any boxes before the attorney search.

In another incident, a former Trump attorney described how Trump made a "plucking motion" when discussing the files, which they said was implied as: "Why dont you take them with you to your hotel room and if theres anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.

Spilled contents

In one 2021 incident detailed in the indictment, Nauta was moving boxes when he came across a box of materials which had been opened with its contents spilled onto the floor. Nauta allegedly took a photo of the scene and sent it to another employee with the photo showing a document labeled as "classified."

Step Back

Trump is set to be arraigned in a Miami federal court on Tuesday.

Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing his case, was appointed by Trump himself. She was randomly assigned to the case, a clerk for the court told the New York Times.

She faced criticism last year after she granted a Trump-request to appoint a special master who would review the seized documents before the Justice Department could continue its investigation.

That ruling was later overturned by a federal appeals court.
On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Trump indicted again

USA TODAY Justice Department Correspondent Bart Jansen puts former President Donald Trump's latest indictment in context. Plus, the Supreme Court rules unexpectedly against Alabama in a challenge to its recently redrawn congressional districts, air quality issues continue due to Canadian wildfires, USA TODAY Pentagon Correspondent Tom Vanden Brook looks at the high suicide rates on Alaskan Army bases, and how some solutions appear to be working, and President Joe Biden signs an executive order, helping military spouses find jobs.

Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Friday, the 9th of June 2023. Today, another indictment for former President Donald Trump. Plus, the Supreme Court rejects a congressional map that diluted the Black vote, and New Yorkers continue to breathe some of the worst air in the world this week.



Former President Donald Trump has been indicted again. I spoke with USA TODAY Justice Department Correspondent Bart Jansen to learn about his latest legal problems. Thanks for hopping on the podcast, Bart.

Bart Jansen:

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

Bart, which of the many investigations Trump is facing led to this indictment?

Bart Jansen:

This is a federal investigation having to do with the classified documents that were found at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, more than a year after he left the White House. By the beginning of 2022, the National Archives realized that there were documents they thought were missing from his collection. They were trying to retrieve them. And so over a series of months, federal authorities gained an increasing number of documents from him, and eventually it totaled more than 300 classified documents. So a special counsel has been investigating those documents, and that has apparently yielded an indictment which Trump himself announced.

Taylor Wilson:

Bart, which laws were allegedly violated here?

Bart Jansen:

Well, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August, they were searching for evidence of violations of three federal statutes. One was called the Espionage Act. Now that's sort of a scary-sounding title. What it really means is that the documents pertained or related to national defense. There have been reports since the search that some of the documents dealt with the Pentagon, perhaps nuclear weapons, perhaps Iran. We don't know what was in the documents. But when you hear Espionage Act, that just means that the documents related to defense issues.

Another law that the search was conducted under was called Section 2071, removing government records. You're not supposed to take official government records from where they are supposed to be filed or deposited. The interesting thing about this law, a person convicted under that statute would be disqualified from holding public office. A lot of Trump's critics have sought to prevent him from seeking the White House again. He, of course, is running for the Republican nomination now. And so if convicted under that statute, he could potentially be blocked from returning to the White House.

The third law that the search was conducted under was obstruction of justice. That would be because of reports that he might have misled investigators about whether he had classified documents stored there at Mar-a-Lago. His lawyers gave statements after a subpoena was served in June, saying that they had searched all the storage rooms that they thought that all classified documents had by that point been returned to federal authorities. And of course, we saw in the FBI search in August that more classified records were found. So the question is, did former President Trump direct his lawyers to say that? Was there a miscommunication? We don't know that obstruction has been a charge, but that is expected to be a potential charge. There are, we are told, seven charges in this indictment, but the Justice Department hasn't detailed what those are. Trump himself announced the indictment and he hasn't explained what the charges are against him.

Taylor Wilson:

As you mentioned, Trump himself announced this indictment. What else did he say? How is he responding to this, Bart, and what's next for him legally going forward?

Bart Jansen:

Trump has been harshly critical of the Justice Department calling this a political investigation. He says he's being treated differently than President Joe Biden, who had classified documents found in a former office in Washington, D.C. and at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. Of course, the contrast is that when Biden's personal lawyers discovered those documents, they immediately called federal authorities. They said, "They're here, come and get them." They were retrieved. And so there wasn't the kind of resistance that former President Trump put up with the records at Mar-a-Lago.

Nevertheless, Trump has proclaimed his innocence. He issued a statement saying in all caps, "I AM AN INNOCENT MAN," and he will fight these charges. He said his initial court appearance is slated for Tuesday at 3:00 PM in Florida. The investigation had been run out of the Washington office of the Justice Department, but we have legal experts explaining that it may be the federal charges were filed in Florida for the classified documents because that's where they were stored, that's where they were found, and that's where any other potential crimes, or the allegations of the crime, such as obstruction - maybe moving the documents, hiding the documents - would've actually happened. So he'll be facing the charges in Florida in federal court.

Taylor Wilson:

USA TODAY Justice Department Correspondent Bart Jansen. Thanks so much.

Bart Jansen:

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

For now, Trump can continue his 2024 presidential campaign even after being indicted again. Several of those laws allegedly violated by Trump, as outlined by our reporter, Bart, could carry lengthy prison sentences, though, many legal experts still feel actual prison time for the former president may be farfetched.



The Supreme Court yesterday ruled unexpectedly against Alabama in a challenge to its recently redrawn congressional districts. The decision strikes down an argument for so-called colorblind boundaries that voting rights advocates feared could have diluted the power of Black voters through much of the country. The 5-4 decision was a win for voting rights groups and a break with past decisions from the conservative court that have limited the scope of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law intended to ensure Black Americans are not discriminated against at the ballot box. The decision means Alabama will have to redraw the map it used in the 2022 midterm election, likely to include a second district made up of African-American voters. More broadly, states will have to remain mindful of the impact on race when drawing political boundaries. This is one of several major disputes the court is considering this term that deals with race and what efforts governments and other institutions must make to combat discrimination. Later this month, justices will hand down another major opinion, challenging the use of affirmative action in college admissions.



New Yorkers breathed the worst urban air quality in the world yesterday as smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to drift into American cities. The air quality monitoring website, iqair.com, had New York atop its global list yesterday with Detroit also as high as third at one point. Flights were temporarily halted at New York's LaGuardia Airport and in Philadelphia. And today will be a remote instruction day for the more than a million New York City public school students. President Joe Biden urged Americans to seek local guidance on air quality and pointed people to the website airnow.gov to keep up to date. AccuWeather reports that parts of the Northeast could see moderate air quality improvements today, but some of the most dense smoke may shift west toward Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit. More than 400 fires are burning north of the border, forcing tens of thousands of evacuations. A haze also hung over Canada's largest city, Toronto, yesterday.



Army bases in Alaska have seen a wave of high suicide rates in recent years, but there may be a glimmer of hope. I spoke with USA TODAY Pentagon Correspondent Tom Vanden Brook to learn more. Thanks for hopping on the podcast, Tom.

Tom Vanden Brook:

Sure thing, Taylor.

Taylor Wilson:

Tom, how many deaths are we talking about and how do these numbers compare with the rest of the military?

Tom Vanden Brook:

Taylor, the issue really popped up in Alaska in 2021 when there were 17 suicides among soldiers posted to Alaska, and that was way out of proportion to the force there. There are about 11,500 soldiers there. So the rate was well above that for the military at large, and it alarmed the military. They launched a study to see what was going on there and in some other bases around the world that were having problems as well. But the real problem was in Alaska.

Taylor Wilson:

And what are some of the reasons for these high suicide numbers in Alaska, specifically?

Tom Vanden Brook:

Alaska is a tough state in general for anybody to live in. Right now, it's got the third-highest rate of suicide across the country just for civilians and for the military. It ranks behind only Wyoming and Montana for suicide rate. It's a tough environment. People know about that. I mean, it can get down to 60 below in the interior and limited sunlight in the winter, and then in the summer, the sun really goes down and it can disrupt sleep patterns, and that can lead to lots of problems for people.

Taylor Wilson:

And, Tom, you wrote that things might be turning for the better in Alaska. What solutions have officials focused on there?

Tom Vanden Brook:

Well, after we went up there last year and did some reporting about how soldiers were not seeing counselors in a timely way, the army and the Pentagon sent dozens of counselors to the state and reduced the wait times that soldiers in crisis had to see somebody to talk about their problems. And that seems to have made a big difference. So the suicide numbers dropped from 17 in 2021 to six last year, and they only suspect one so far this year. So there seems to be a correlation there, senior defense officials tell us too early to say for sure, but it does seem to have made a difference.

Taylor Wilson:

And are any of these same solutions being implemented on other military bases outside of Alaska as well?

Tom Vanden Brook:

Well, that's why we traveled to Alaska with the Deputy Defense Secretary. She wanted to see what was going on there to see what lessons would be able to be extended across the force. So they're looking at that. They're looking at the data. No decisions yet, but obviously it does look like the fact that access to mental health care makes a big difference. They're also looking at improving just the quality of life at these bases so that people have better living conditions and also access to childcare, which seems to be an issue for lots of families. It really straps them.

Taylor Wilson:

Tom Vanden Brook, thanks so much.

Tom Vanden Brook:

Thanks, Taylor.



Taylor Wilson:

About one in five military spouses don't have a job. That's a rate that hasn't significantly changed over the past decade. But President Joe Biden today, while visiting Fort Liberty in North Carolina, will sign an executive order directing federal agencies to take a number of actions to help spouses have stable careers. That's despite frequent moves, time apart for training, and needing to care for an injured service member or veteran, all challenges that military spouses face. The order includes making remote work more accessible to spouses stationed overseas, and to help with the cost of childcare. It'll also direct a small business administration to develop resources for spouses who need to relocate a business.

Thanks for listening to 5 Things. We're produced by Shannon Rae Green, and our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Special thanks to Cherie Saunders, Alexis Gustin and Mark Sovel. I'm Taylor Wilson. Back tomorrow with another episode of 5 Things.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump's latest indictment, air quality issues linger: 5 Things podcast
Two Fayette school board members speak out against money budgeted for Central Office staff

Two Fayette County school board members are taking issue with a budget item for the upcoming school year that will be used on central office positions.

School board member Tom Jones cast the lone vote against the tentative 2023-24 budget two weeks ago where he and school board member Amanda Ferguson expressed similar concerns over the budget and had some sharp exchanges with Superintendent Demetrus Liggins. Fayette school board members will be asked to vote on a working budget in September.

I just dont think we need all that extra staff at Central Office all at once, Ferguson said.

Ferguson said Tuesday that despite her concerns about the spending on Central Office staff, she voted for the tentative budget because it does a lot of good things, especially giving teachers raises.

Fayette County will be the first district in Kentucky to bring starting teacher salaries above $50,000 since the board of education has approved a $677.4 million general fund budget for next school year.

While I fully supported the teachers salary increases, I did not believe all 30 new district office positions were justified, Jones told the Herald-Leader. I was also concerned about the imbalance between the $40-plus million increase in recurring expenses and only $18 million increase in annual revenue.

Liggins at the May 22 school board meeting described the budget as conservative and said it will leave the district in a comfortable position.

Even though he attended budget work sessions, Jones said he only learned of certain expenditures of hundreds of thousands of dollars, such as those for legal expenses and public engagement, when he was called upon to vote on the budget.

Ferguson also expressed concerns about school board members getting information late.

The three other board members  chairman Tyler Murphy, Marilyn Clark and Amy Green  said they thought they had received ample information. Clark said board members could continue to work on the budget through September.

District officials said they had presented a balanced budget that had taken hundreds of hours to prepare.

Ferguson said at the meeting that the budget puts too many staff in Central Office and not in the schools.

Thats how teachers feel, thats how principals feel, that they are not being supported, she said.

Liggins said 82% of the positions are going to the school campuses.

Ferguson said by state law, school board members have to examine the budget.

Some people resented the fact that I asked any questions about the budget, Ferguson said Wednesday. I feel like I was elected to ask questions.

District explanation

According to the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the average public school district in America had one official/administrator for every 278.4 students during the 2019-20 school year, district officials said this week.

Fayette County Public Schools currently has 72 officials and administrators in its district office, which is a ratio of one per 577 students. With the additional district office staff for the 2023-24 school year, the district ratio will become one official/administrator per 526 students  reflecting much leaner administrative staffing than districts across the nation and the state, district officials said.

As part of the development of the districts New Way Forward strategic plan, stakeholders from various groups spoke openly about the need to dismantle barriers, build structures that support higher student achievement, and improve district systems.

While helping schools implement these changes has required more district office staff, FCPS leaders maintain a commitment to fiscal conservatism and financial stewardship, district officials said.

Additional data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that during the 2020-21 school year, the average public school spending for district administration was $279 per student. The 2023-24 tentative budget approved by the Fayette County Board of Education last month calls for spending $233 per student on district administration. Nationally, the average spending for district administration is 1.95% of the total district spending per pupil, district officials said.

The budget recently adopted for the district allocates 1.3% to the district administration, officials said.

Half of the additional district office positions were recommended by external reviews of Fayette County Public Schools departments that found existing staff numbers to be inadequate to provide needed support to schools, officials said.

These new positions will expand opportunities for students in the arts, support students learning English, students with special needs, and preschool students, and strengthen the districts focus on key strategic areas like public engagement and fiscal transparency, a district statement said.

The approved 2023-24 tentative budget includes $47.2 million in new spending above and beyond current expenditures, district officials said.

Of that:
Maltese President George Vella (2nd R, Front) views a photo exhibition during a reception to mark the 60th anniversary of China dispatching its first Chinese medical team abroad as well as the 30th anniversary of dispatching the first Chinese medical team to Malta in Valletta, Malta, on June 9, 2023. (Photo by Jonathan Borg/Xinhua)

VALLETTA, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Celebrations were held here on Friday to mark the 60th anniversary of China dispatching its first Chinese medical team abroad as well as the 30th anniversary of dispatching the first Chinese medical team to Malta.

The Chinese Embassy in Malta hosted a reception attended by approximately 300 participants, including Maltese President George Vella and other Maltese officials, as well as diplomats from other countries.

In a video speech, Cao Xuetao, deputy head of the National Health Commission of China, said that China has sent around 30,000 medical team members to 76 countries and regions over the past 60 years, providing diagnoses and treatments to over 290 million local patients, aiding in the construction of over 130 medical and health facilities, and saving countless lives.

China is ready to work with all sectors of Maltese society to deepen cooperation and exchanges in the field of health and support the development of the Mediterranean Regional Center for Traditional Chinese Medicine (MRCTCM), Cao said.

Chinese medical team will "continue to benefit the Maltese people with benevolence and skill, and make new and greater contributions to promoting multi-cultural understanding and enhancing China-Malta friendship," he noted.

Speaking at the reception, Chinese Ambassador to Malta Yu Dunhai emphasized the deepening medical cooperation between China and Malta over the past 30 years.

He also said that China-Malta relations have enjoyed sound and steady development over the past half century, with increasing political mutual trust, fruitful economic cooperation and vibrant cultural exchanges.

"China-Malta relations have set a good example of relations between countries of different sizes, social systems, histories and cultures," he said, expressing his confidence in "an ever brighter future" of bilateral ties.

The successful collaboration between China and Malta is proof that diverse cultures have a lot to learn from each other and should continuously seek respect and common development, Joseph Chetcuti, permanent secretary of the Ministry for Health, said.

According to Chetcuti, the memorandum of understanding in the field of TCM between the two governments was renewed for another term just a few months ago. "I look forward to the first-class medical service offered by top Chinese doctors here in Malta, and to the continued friendly relations between Malta and China in the field of medicine," he said.

The satisfactory therapeutic effect has won a wide reputation not only for TCM but also for the medical teams, Dong Xiaoyan, head of the 18th Chinese medical team to Malta, said at the reception.

"We are dedicated to working for the health of the Maltese people and developing a deep friendship with them," she added.

During the reception, attendees viewed a photo exhibition and a special video showcasing medical cooperation between China and Malta, and highlighting dedicated efforts of Chinese medical teams to Malta over the past 30 years.

In 1993, the first Chinese medical team arrived in Malta. In the following year, China and Malta signed a cooperative agreement on traditional Chinese medicine and officially established the MRCTCM in Paola, Malta, opening a new chapter in China-Malta medical cooperation.

To date, a total of 18 Chinese medical teams, comprising over 100 physicians, have provided TCM treatments to approximately 250,000 Maltese patients. 
Two men are in custody following unrelated burglary and robbery crimes in Folsom this month.

Officers with the Folsom Police Department responded Wednesday to reports of a burglary on the 1100 block of Sibley Street. The suspect was a known gang member, according to a social media post by the department.

The post said the female victim knew the suspect and his identity was provided to detectives. He allegedly slashed the tires of a victims vehicle as he left the residence.

Folsom detectives located the suspect at an apartment complex on the 3000 block of Data Drive in Rancho Cordova after they were contacted by that citys officers regarding an additional assault with a deadly weapon investigation involving him, the department said.

Police said the suspect was taken into custody outside of his apartment. A search of the apartment located the gun used in the assault, police said.

The suspect was booked into the Sacramento County Main Jail downtown, is ineligible for bail in connection with a probation violation and is expected to appear in Sacramento Superior Court on Monday.

Folsom robbery suspect arrested in Stockton

On June 1, Folsom police officers were dispatched to Kay Jewelers in the Folsom Premium Outlets after a reported robbery. During the robbery, a man grabbed jewelry from a case and assaulted a store employee, according to a social media post by the Folsom Police Department.

As the suspect fled the store, police said he allegedly threatened to kill the employee. He left in a blue Honda Accord; a second witness provided officers with a license plate number, the department said.

Folsom detectives later located the suspect vehicle in Stockton, according to the department. Officers with the Stockton Police Department attempted to stop the vehicle for code violations, but the driver led the officers in a short pursuit and then fled on foot, authorities said.

The suspect also dropped a firearm as he ran from an officer, according to police.

Next, he allegedly barricaded himself in an apartment on the 1500 Block of Arriba Road in Stockton, according to Folsom police. After 2 hours, the suspect surrendered and was arrested by law enforcement.

Law enforcement said police searched the vehicle and the apartment, and found clothing that matched the items the suspect wore during the robbery at Kay Jewelers.

The suspect was arrested and booked into San Joaquin County Jail in connection with the Folsom and Stockton charges. He is expected to appear in San Joaquin Superior Court on Tuesday to face charges related to the vehicle pursuit. Police said he would be extradited to Sacramento County to face the robbery allegations.
Two shot dead outside strip club after robbery turns violent, Texas cops say

An early morning robbery outside of a strip club turned violent, leaving two dead and one injured, Texas police said.

Three men in their 30s drove to a strip club in Houston shortly before 2 a.m. on June 9, local police said in a news conference.

They were intoxicated trying to get into the establishment and they were denied entry, Chandra Hatcher, an assistant police chief, said.

As they walked back to their car, two men approached them, demanding money, police said.

When the trio refused, the two men opened fire, striking all three of them, before the gunmen fled the area, according to Hatcher.

Responding officers found the victims surrounded by bullet casings.

One of the men died at the scene, and another, who had sustained several gunshot wounds, later died in the hospital, police said.

The third victim was hospitalized and is in stable condition.

The investigation is ongoing, police said, adding that they are gathering evidence, including nearby surveillance footage and shell casings found at the scene.

The names of victims have not been released.

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The News

Two of former President Donald Trump's top lawyers have quit his legal team just hours after he was indicted in the classified documents probe.

In a joint statement, attorneys Jim Trusty and John Rowley said they would no longer represent Trump in both the documents case and the Jan. 6 investigation. They suggested that they stepped aside because the case was filed in Miami.

"It has been an honor to have spent the last year defending him, and we know he will be vindicated in his battle against the Biden administration's partisan weaponization of the American justice system," their statement said.

Trump meanwhile suggested on Truth Social that he had fired Trusty and Rowley.

I want to thank Jim Trusty and John Rowley for their work, but they were up against a very dishonest, corrupt, evil, and 'sick' group of people, the likes of which has not been seen before," he wrote.

Know More

The news of their resignation came as Trump also announced that his associate and former military valet Walt Nauta has also been charged in connection to the documents probe. Nauta allegedly helped move several boxes of classified documents at Trump's Mar-A-Lago estate, according to media reports, raising suspicion that he could have been involved in obstruction of justice.

The charges will remain sealed until Trump's arraignment on June 13, but reports say he is facing at least seven counts related to alleged mishandling of classified documents.

The New York Times reports that two of the counts include conspiracy to obstruct and willful retention of documents, and Trusty told CNN on Thursday that one of the charge is filed under the Espionage Act.

Part of the evidence used in the indictment included an audio file of Trump admitting in a meeting that he had not declassified a Pentagon document about attacking Iran, CNN reported.

As president, I could have declassified, but now I cant, Trump said, according to the transcript of the recording.

Trump-appointed District Judge Aileen Cannon has been assigned to oversee the case, at least initially, according to multiple reports. Cannon was criticized last year after granting a request from Trump's legal team to have a special master review the classified documents before allowing the DOJ to continue its investigation. Her decision was later overturned by a federal appeals court.

Step Back

The classified documents controversies were sparked after an FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago that turned up more than 13,000 files that Trump had refused to hand over to the National Archive after leaving office, as required by law.

Since then, he has pursued several legal attempt to stop investigators from reviewing the seized documents.

Classified documents were also found at properties owned by both President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence, but the two immediately admitted wrongdoing and surrendered the documents to authorities.

The DOJ has appointed Special Counsel Robert Hurt to oversee the probe into Biden's mishandling of documents. The investigation into Pence has ended without any charges, the department said last week.
Hawk air defense system

According to the Pentagon, this aid package falls under the purview of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which allows for the U.S. to purchase arms directly from manufacturers or partner countries. Its announcement indicates that Washington is beginning to sign the corresponding contracts for this deliveries.

Read also: Pentagon contracts SpaceX to supply Starlink terminals to Ukraine

In total, the package includes:

 Ammunition for Patriot air defense systems

 HAWK air defense systems and ammunition

 105mm and 203mm caliber shells

 Puma drones

 Ammunition and laser targeting systems for multiple launch rocket systems

 Support for training, maintenance, etc.

Read also: Ukraine to start training on US Abrams tanks in Germany in coming days  Pentagon

Earlier, on May 31, the Pentagon announced a $300 million aid package for Ukraine, containing ammunition for HIMARS systems, Stinger systems, Avenger surface-to-air air defense systems, and air-launched Zuni rockets. That package is the 39th military aid package that the U.S. has provided to Ukraine.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
By Karen Freifeld

(Reuters) -The U.S. on Friday banned imports from China-based printer maker Ninestar Corp and a Chinese chemical company over alleged human rights abuses.

Ninestar, whose website says it is the world's fourth-largest laser printer manufacturer, and Xingjang Zhongtai Chemical, are being kept out of the U.S. supply chain for participating in business practices that target China's Uyghurs and other persecuted groups, the U.S. Homeland Security Department (DHS) said.

The companies could not immediately be reached for comment.

U.N. experts and rights groups estimate that over a million people, mainly Uyghurs and Muslim minorities, have been detained in camps in China's western Xinjiang region in recent years, with many saying they were subject to ideological training and abuse.

China has denied all accusations of abuse.

The chairs of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China - Representative Chris Smith and Senator Jeff Merkley - said the action "is important because it offers clear guidance to American companies for supply-chain mapping" but said forced labor like "car parts, solar panels, rayon, and garments" continue to enter the U.S. market.

Senator Marco Rubio said "while todays announcement by DHS to punish more bad actors is welcomed, it is just a drop in the bucket and must go further."

He argued "the Biden administrations current case-by-case approach is giving a free pass to many companies still profiting from slave labor."

DHS said the actions were taken as part of the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act (UFLPA), which was signed into law in December 2021. The act prohibits imports into the U.S. that are either produced in Xinjiang or by companies identified on an UFLPA Entity List, unless the importer can prove the goods were not produced with forced labor.

Twenty-two companies are now on the list, and DHS said it has examined over $1.3 billion worth of goods likely manufactured with forced labor nearly a year after the UFLPA was implemented.

Ninestar and its eight Zhuhai-based subsidiaries, along with Xinjiang Zhongtai Chemical, were added to the list for working with the government of Xinjiang to recruit, transport, transfer, harbor or receive forced labor of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, or members of other persecuted groups, out of Xinjiang, according to the posting.

(Reporting by Karen Freifeld; additional reporting by David Shepardson Editing by Doina Chiacu, Sharon Singleton, Jonathan Oatis and Marguerita Choy)
The Biden administration is releasing intelligence showing the deepening defense relationship between Russia and Iran, releasing imagery on drone manufacturing and delivery to the battlefield in Ukraine.

A now-declassified government graphic shows the drones are built in Iran, shipped across the Caspian Sea to Russia  with a port Iran helped develop  and then transferred to two air bases.

Russian forces eventually use those weapons in Ukraine, where Moscow has for months terrorized the Ukrainian people with Iranian-made drones. As of May, Russia has received hundreds of one-way attack craft, as well as production-related equipment from Tehran, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said in a statement.

The Kremlin asked for more attack drone deliveries from Iran last month after depleting previous shipments, a development that the Biden administration announced in another attempt to name and shame the two nations.

U.S. officials also have information that Russia is receiving materials from Iran necessary to build a drone manufacturing facility inside Russia, which could be fully operational by early next year, Kirby said. Satellite imagery released on Friday showed the planned location of the plant in Russias Alabuga Special Economic Zone.



The intelligence confirms suspicions that have surfaced in open-source platforms about connections between Alabuga and Iran. The Wall Street Journal reported in February that the two countries had plans to build such a factory, which could make at least 6,000 drones for the war in Ukraine.

At the same time, Russia has offered Iran unprecedented defense cooperation, Kirby said. Tehran is seeking billions of dollars worth of military equipment from Moscow, including Su-35 fighter jets, attack helicopters, radars and Yak-130 combat trainer aircraft.

This is a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful to Ukraine, to Irans neighbors, and to the international community, Kirby said. We are continuing to use all the tools at our disposal to expose and disrupt these activities including by sharing this with the public  and we are prepared to do more.

A senior administration official said the U.S. is releasing the information in order to disrupt Irans plans.



Actors like Iran want this kind of behavior to be secret. We are shining a light on it publicly to let Iran know we are aware of exactly what theyre doing, and to build pressure on Iran internationally, having alerted other countries to Irans actions, said the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive internal thinking.

The news comes as Ukraine appeared to launch its long-anticipated counteroffensive this week, mounting a major attack in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia armed with advanced weapons from allies and Western-trained forces.

Kirby said the U.S. will continue to impose sanctions on the entities involved in the transfer of Iranian military equipment to Russia for use in Ukraine. This is in addition to new steps the Biden administration, along with the European Union and the United Kingdom, has already taken to restrict the transfer of electronic components found in Iranian drones to the battlefield in Ukraine.



On Friday, the administration plans to announce a new U.S. government advisory to help businesses and other governments better understand the risks posed by Irans [unmanned aerial vehicle] program and the illicit practices Iran uses to procure components for it, Kirby said. This will help governments and businesses put in place measures to ensure they are not inadvertently contributing to Irans UAV program.
Infrared satellites spot Ukraine dam blast

U.S. satellites with very high-fidelity infrared sensors detected what appears to have been an explosion at Ukraine's Nova Khakovka dam right before it failed earlier this week, according to a new report. You can read more about what else is known about this incident, over which Ukrainian and Russian authorities continue to trade accusations, in The War Zone's earlier reporting.

The New York Times first reported earlier today on the U.S. government's use of data from infrared sensors on its satellites to try to determine what exactly happened at Nova Khakovka, citing an anonymous official within U.S. President Joe Biden's administration. Though the specific satellites utilized here have not yet been confirmed, this sounds likely to be the work of the Space-Based Infrared System constellation, or SBIRS. These space-based sensors are primarily intended to watch for ballistic missile launches, but are understood to be sensitive enough to gather useful intelligence data in many other contexts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDTnl4E9FiY

"The official said that satellites equipped with infrared sensors detected a heat signature consistent with a major explosion just before the dam collapsed, unleashing massive floodwaters downstream," according to The Times. "But he added that U.S. spy agencies still do not have any solid evidence about who was responsible."

If true, the timing of the detection of this heat plume would lend credence to a growing consensus among independent experts and observers that Nova Khakovka was the victim of some kind of deliberate attack or sabotage. A blast might still have occurred as a byproduct of some kind of structural failure or other accident at the dam, which had already been damaged by Russian actions in the past. However, it would seem more likely for this to have happened after the dam broke, rather than right before. If that were to be the case, it would also raise questions about why significant quantities of explosive materials may have been at the site, which was under Russian control at the time, to begin with.

Regardless, this underscores the immense value of the satellites like SBIRS beyond the primary mission supporting U.S. military missile defense operations. U.S. Space Force now oversees the SBIRS constellation, which currently consists of nine known satellites, six in geosynchronous Earth orbits (GEO) and three in highly elliptical orbits (HEO), providing global coverage. Two additional SBIRS satellites were previously transferred to the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) for use as part of its Space Tracking and Surveillance System program and have since been retired. An additional SBIRS satellite is now used for various test work.

SBIRS was developed as the replacement for the 1970s-era Defense Support Program (DSP) constellation, also made up of satellites with powerful infrared sensors primarily intended to spot ballistic missile launches. The U.S. military is now in the process of acquiring successors to SBIRS, including new early warning satellites better able to spot and track new types of hypersonic weapons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_jFh-7xh2E

Details about the capabilities of the SBIRS or DSP constellations are highly classified, but sensors on the satellites used in both are understood to be capable of picking up very small infrared signatures. SBIRS, in particular, is said to be able to detect things like relatively small missiles (including ones used in air-to-air engagements), large explosions, and even howitzers and other artillery pieces firing.

Either SBIRS or DSP satellites were able to pick up the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in Ukrainian airspace and Metrojet Flight 9268 as it flew over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula in 2014 and 2015, respectively.

In 2019, The War Zone highlighted how information from satellites like SBIRS could be used to help confirm still contentious and conflicting details about a dogfight between Indian and Pakistani aircraft in 2019.

More recently SBIRS made headlines for its use in its primary role. The satellites provided critical early warning of an Iranian missile barrage aimed at U.S. forces in Iraq in 2020. No American service members were killed in those strikes, though 110 of them were later diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOLEPq40Kdg

Even before now, the value of space-based infrared sensors had already been shown in the context of the conflict in Ukraine. Experts and other open-source intelligence enthusiasts have often looked to unclassified data from NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) to try to confirm major strikes and other incidents, or to just track the fighting. FIRMS is designed to help monitor wildfires and other fire-related natural disasters (like volcanic eruptions), and the data from its satellites is of a much lower grade than what would be available via SBIRS.

https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1546405394041405440

Unclassified publicly available satellite imagery, in general, has been a valuable tool for tracking the aftermath of the failure of the Nova Khakovka dam, too, whatever might have happened to it. Cities and towns downriver are continuing to experience devastating flooding, which authorities in Ukraine say has killed citizens and sent many more fleeing from their homes.

https://twitter.com/wammezz/status/1666418716761026560

https://twitter.com/ErwanRivault/status/1666455670797881344

https://twitter.com/jgeach/status/1667235734330155032

All told, how long it may be until there is a definitive picture of what happened at Nova Khakovka this week and who might be responsible  if that ever happens  remains to be seen. Data from satellites like SBIRS, however, looks to already be playing a useful part in establishing some of the basic facts about the incident.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com
UK accuses Iran of supplying ammunition to Russia for the first time

On Friday, James Cleverly, the UK Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, accused Iran of supplying Russia with ammunition used to wage war against Ukraine.

Source: Sky News citing Cleverly

"Iran has provided Russia with a consistent stream of weapons and ammunition which is being used to kill civilians in Ukraine," the UK Foreign Secretary said. This is the first time he has officially accused Tehran of supplying military aid to Moscow.

Cleverly added that in exchange for the aid, Russia is providing Iran with "sophisticated military technology, financial support and advice which the regime could use to threaten our partners in the Middle East and suppress protests".

The UK and its partners have already imposed sanctions on many of those responsible for this deadly arms trade and will continue to hold this desperate alliance to account, the official stressed.

Background:

Earlier, the UK media gained access to an alleged arms contract that could be the first hard evidence that Iran has sold munitions to Russia for its war in Ukraine.

Cleverly's statement came after a satellite image released by the White House on Friday indicated that Iran is providing Russia with materials to build a kamikaze drone manufacturing plant in Tatarstan [a republic within the Russian Federation]. Russia uses these drones to destroy civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.

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Ukraine and its allies will be at the whim of American voters once again next year if the winner of the US election is not as enthusiastic about defending democracy on the European continent as President Joe Biden has been over the last fifteen months.

Former President Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner, has refused to say whether he believes Ukraine should win the war against Russia, and his main challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has hedged on the conflict, describing Russias unprovoked invasion as a territorial dispute.

Asked by CNNs Kaitlan Collins on Thursday about Trumps comments, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak highlighted strong support in the US for funding Ukraine, adding that his meetings with congressional leaders in both parties this week indicated a willingness to support the countrys ongoing efforts to defend itself amid Russian aggression.



Obviously, it wouldnt be right for me to comment on domestic politics here. But I did spend a good amount of time in Congress yesterday talking to leaders from both parties, and I think there is strong support for the efforts that America is putting in to support Ukraine, Sunak said in an exclusive interview at the presidential guest residence Blair House, moments after meeting with Biden.

CNN

I think theres an acknowledgment, as I said, that the values that were fighting for are universal. Theyre values that America has always stood up for, which is democracy, freedom and the rule of law, he added.

In apparent nod to Trump, who has bemoaned that NATO countries were not meeting the security alliances spending commitment of 2% of their GDP, Sunak added: I think its entirely reasonable for people to ask: is everybody doing their bit? Im proud to say the UK is. Behind the US, were the next largest contributor to the effort to support Ukraine. And more broadly, when it comes to defense spending, were one of the few countries that invests 2% of our GDP in defense.

It is a position he has spoken to other leaders about, he said. I think its reasonable and right that we expect other countries in the NATO alliance to increase defense spending up to those levels. And thats something that I speak to other leaders about as well, Sunak replied.

Asked what Sunaks relationship would Trump would look like, he said that the so-called special relationship between the two countries had endured regardless of almost who is sitting in these various jobs, and thats because the values between our two countries are so aligned that we see the world instinctively in the same way.

Shared perspective

The comments come after the British leader met with Biden at the White House, where both men spoke about the countrys close relationship and their shared perspective on Ukraine.

Ukraines military has been stepping up shaping operations in recent weeks, attacking Russian targets like fuel depots and weapons dumps far behind frontlines  which typically precede a major advance by ground forces. But the collapse of Nova Khakovka dam may complicate Ukraines planned counter-offensive, while also flooding Russian defenses on the frontline.

US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hold a joint-press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC. - Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

Both Ukraine and Russia have blamed the other for the dam burst. Sunak said it was too early to definitively say who caused the collapse. But if it does prove to be an intentional attack by the Russians, it would fit a pattern of behavior that weve seen throughout this war, which is Russias deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure.

The UK was the first country to give Ukraine long-range missiles, prompting Moscow to warn that NATO members could effectively become direct parties to the war.

When asked how Russian President Vladimir Putin would respond if UK missiles were used by Ukraine to strike targets in Russia, he said one has to remember that Ukraine, the West and NATO did not cause the war.

This war was just an act of unprovoked, illegal aggression on Russias part, he said.

At 43, Sunak is the youngest leader in the G7 club of industrial democracies while Biden is the oldest at 80. Sunak noted their age difference meant that Bidens foreign policy experience, especially around China, was particularly valuable to me as someone who is newer to this.

I find that President Bidens experience is incredibly helpful, particularly on issues like China. I think there are, you know, few leaders anywhere who have spent as much time talking to [Chinas] President Xi [Jinping], he said.

Despite two changes in its leadership in the past 12 months, the UK has remained at the forefront of nations supporting Ukraine, coming second in total financial support only to the United States.

Under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the UK pushed European and other Western allies to supply Ukraine with lethal defense systems and tanks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky repeatedly thanked Johnson for this, with Ukrainians going so far as to rename streets in Kyiv after the former British leader.

Sunak has continued with this policy, most recently pressing allies to push forward in supplying Ukraine with fighter jets.

His talks with Biden come at a turning point in the Russia-Ukraine war, following the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam and ahead of a widely expected counteroffensive meant to retake territory.

In his news conference on Thursday, Biden also said he was confident that Congress would continue providing support for Ukraine.

The fact of the matter is that I believe well have the funding necessary to support Ukraine as long as it takes, Biden said. I believe that were going to get that support, it will be real.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
(Bloomberg) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin said Ukraines counteroffensive has definitely begun, though he said its military hadnt achieved any breakthroughs during very intense battles in the past five days. All the counteroffensive attempts made so far have failed, Putin told reporters in Sochi on Friday in televised remarks. Ukraines offensive potential remains, he said, and Russian forces will proceed from these realities in developing our actions in the near future.

Most Read from Bloomberg

While the Russian army still doesnt have sufficient modern weapons, production is improving rapidly, according to Putin, who also said his country will begin moving tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus next month. Meanwhile, Moscow is importing supplies from Tehran in order to manufacture Iranian-designed drones, the White House said, citing intelligence findings.

Ukraine faced another missile and drone attack on Friday as its ground offensive picks up steam. At least one donated Leopard 2A4 tank has already been destroyed. Russian media reported what it called a Ukrainian missile strike on Arbatska Strilka along the western shore of Crimea. Evacuation efforts continue in Kherson, downstream from the Kakhovka dam breach.

Latest Coverage

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Bank of Russia Approaches Hawkish Turn

New EU Russia Sanctions Still Stuck Over Enforcement Resolve

Ukraines New Tanks See Action as Counteroffensive Underway

Russia Building Attack-Drone Plant With Iran Supplies, US Says

Assessing Food Impact from Ukraine Dams Explosion: Supply Lines

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UN atomic watchdog Rafael Mariano Grossi plans to visit Ukraines Zaporizhzhia power plant next week

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 8)  Organizers of the 2023 CONQuest Festival apologized and vowed to refund ticketholders who were not able to enter the venue and attend events lined up last weekend due to long lines and overcrowding, which trended on social media.

"Questers, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and discomfort that many of you experienced during CONQuest due to the long lines outside the convention," the organizers said in a statement.

They also opened a refund website for festival pass holders to input their details and process the return of their money.

The event was held at the SMX Convention Center from June 2 to 4. The first day ran smoothly but chaos hounded the next two days of the event, with reports of overselling of tickets that led to attendees flocking the venue.

One attendee has filed a request for urgent action before the Department of Trade and Industry regarding her "unsatisfactory experience" during the event.

"The overall experience left me deeply dissatisfied, as I believe the 800 I paid for the one-day pass did not match the level of service and organization provided," the letter read.

The organizers said they acknowledged the issues raised and committed to resolve them one by one in the coming days.

"One of our critical oversights was the overwhelming response to the event despite the tireless efforts made by the City of Pasay and our venue partners," they said. "Our objective is to do right by our community and enact sweeping changes and remedies to deliver the convention experience you deserve."

CONQuest co-founder and organizer Justin Banusing also took to Twitter to apologize about their mishaps and lapses in managing the event.

The festival was dubbed the biggest celebration of gaming, music, and pop culture in the country.
Ochakivska gate is at risk due to the explosion of Kakhovka HPP

Read also: Animal genocide  animals have no chance of survival as 55,000 hectares of forest flooded in Kherson Oblast

The dams explosion has caused a significant ecological and man-made catastrophe, the full extent of which is yet to be understood. In addition, cultural and historical landmarks, as well as tourist and recreational areas, have been submerged in the affected zones.

The majority of these landmarks are situated on the left bank of Kherson Oblast, which is currently under Russian occupation. As of the evening of June 6, 10 settlements on the right bank  Mykolaivka, Olhivka, Lvove, Tyahynka, Ivanivka, Tokarivka, Ponyativka, Prydniprovsk, Sadove, and partially the city of Kherson  have been fully or partially submerged.

It is estimated that 80% of the territory of the Nyzhnedniprovskyi National Nature Park, renowned among national and European biologists for its rare floodplain forests, swamps, and sandy steppes, may be submerged, the agency said.

This unique European ecosystem is likely to be irreversibly destroyed.

Additionally, the Ostap Vyshnia House-Museum in the village of Krynky, Oleshkivskyi district, has been submerged, and the Oleksiy Shovkunenko Kherson Art Museum is located within the affected zone.

Read also: Ukraine and UN agree on evacuation from occupied Kherson after Kakhovka Dam explosion

Meanwhile, the ancient Kyiv Rus port city of Oleshnia, a significant archaeological site in Kherson Oblast situated on the island of Velykyi Potiomkin, approximately 12 kilometers downstream from the center of Kherson, is under threat of submersion.

Read also: Russian soldiers confirm that Russian sabotage group intentionally destroyed Kakhovka dam  audio intercept

The Ochakiv Gate, part of Khersons defensive fortifications built in 1783 and considered a national architectural treasure, and the Zeleni Khutory Tavriyi complex, established on the sites of ancient homesteads, are also at risk, the agency writes. The Zeleni Khutory Tavriyi complex was home to an authentic museum depicting Ukrainian rural life from the 15th to the 20th centuries, as well as saline pink lakes.

The village of Tyahynka, where archaeological excavations and the discovery of Bronze Age and Scythian settlements, as well as a medieval fortress, are located, is also likely to be submerged, resulting in the loss of unique historical findings.

Read also: Whats happening to Ukrainians in the flooded occupied territories in Kherson Oblast  military interview

The Kinburn Spit, located within the territory of the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO-protected area with over a century of nature conservation traditions, is also facing partial flooding from the disaster. This location, home to over a hundred species of birds and more than seven hundred rare plant species, risks losing a portion of its unique flora and fauna.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Ukraine reports heavy fighting in east, gains near Bakhmut A view shows smoke rising as Ukrainian forces destroy Russian equipment near Bakhmut

KYIV (Reuters) - Ukraine reported heavy fighting in the eastern region of Donetsk on Friday and a military spokesperson said Ukrainian forces had gained more ground near the devastated city of Bakhmut.

"The situation is tense on all areas of the front," Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said on the Telegram messaging app.

Naming eastern areas where fighting has been fierce for months, she said: "The enemy continues to focus its main efforts on the Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivsky and Mariinka directions, heavy fighting continues."

She said Ukrainian troops were repelling the Russian attacks.

Reuters was unable to verify the situation on the battlefield.

Serhiy Cherevaty, spokesperson for Ukraine's East military command said Ukrainian forces had advanced 1.2 km (0.75 mile) near Bakhmut over the past 24 hours.

"We took advantage of the enemy's rotation measures and the fact that units which entered do not know the area fully, and failed to conduct appropriate reconnaissance and coordination. We struck," he told Ukrainian television. "We have been carrying out assaults for several days."

Over the past several days, Ukrainian forces have made their most rapid gains around the edges of Bakhmut, aiming to encircle the ruined eastern city which Russian forces seized control of last month.

Russia's Defence Ministry said it was continuing to repel Ukrainian attacks in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia, Russian news agencies reported.

Ukrainian officials made little mention of the situation in Zaporizhzhia but the head of the president's office said a junior nurse and a plumber had been killed by Russian shelling of a hospital in Huliai Pole in the Zaporizhzhia region.

(Reporting by Olena Harmash, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with his Belarus' counterpart Alexander Lukashenko in Sochi - GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/AFP

Vladimir Putin has set a date to deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus as he shared his plans over lunch with ally Alexander Lukashenko.

The Russian president said Moscow will move the weapons after special storage facilities are ready on July 7-8, in its first move of such bombs outside Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Preparation of the relevant facilities ends on July 7-8, and we will immediately begin activities related to the deployment of appropriate types of weapons on your territory, Mr Putin said, according to a Kremlin transcript of his remarks.

In March, Putin announced he wanted to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, an apparent warning to the US-led Nato military alliance over it support for Ukraine.

Everything is going according to plan, Putin told Belarusian President Lukashenko when discussing the planned nuclear deployment during talks at the Russian leaders Black Sea summer retreat in Sochi.

03:01 PM

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03:01 PM

Dam explosion could have been Russian sabotage gone wrong

Russian soldiers may have accidentally blown up the Kakhovka dam in a sabotage stunt gone wrong, according to intercepted transcripts.

Ukraine has released an audio recording of what it says is a conversation between two Russian soldiers that proves Russia blew up the dam.

In it one of the alleged soldiers said: They [Ukrainian artillery] didnt blow it up. Our sabotage group was there. They wanted to scare people with this dam. It didnt go according to plan.

Read more from James Kilner here

02:56 PM

Iceland to suspend embassy operations in Russia in August

Iceland said it would suspend work at its embassy in Russia as of August 1, the first country to do so, and asked Russia to limit its operations in Reykjavik.

The current situation simply does not make it viable for the small foreign service of Iceland to operate an embassy in Russia, Foreign Minister Thordis Gylfadottir said.

AFPs bureau in Moscow said Iceland was the first country to make such a move.

The foreign ministry stressed that the decision does not constitute a severance of diplomatic relations.

But since commercial, cultural and political ties with Russia were at an all-time low, maintaining embassy operations in Moscow was no longer justifiable, it said.

02:41 PM

Pictured: A man takes pictures inside a damaged multi-storey apartment block following a reported drone attack in Voronezh

A man takes pictures inside a damaged multi-storey apartment block following a reported drone attack in Voronezh, Russia - VLADIMIR LAVROV/REUTERS

02:25 PM

'Intense fighting' on key axis of counter offensive

Ukrainian ground forces have clashed with Russia in intense fighting in southern Ukraine on a key access aiming to divide Moscows army in two.

Kyiv said Russia was conducting defensive actions on a second day of heavy fighting around the town of Orikhiv, where Ukraine is trying to break through front lines.

At the moment, active combat is ongoing in the region between Orekhovo and Tokmak, Vladimir Rogov, an official with Russian occupation authorities, said, referring to a locality known in Ukrainian as Orikhiv.

Alexander Sladkov, a correspondent for Russian media, wrote on Telegram of intense fighting in the area.

01:39 PM

Top UN court allows Ukraine allies to join case against Russian invasion

The International Court of Justice on Friday allowed Ukraines western allies to back a case filed by Kyiv last year at the UNs top tribunal urging Moscow to stop its invasion.

The court concludes that the declarations of intervention filed in this case... are admissible, the court said, allowing 32 countries including France, Britain and Germany to support the case, but not the United States.

01:13 PM

Pictured: Rescue operation following the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam

Members of Russia's emergencies ministry use an inflatable boat in a flooded area during a rescue operation - ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/REUTERS

A member of Russia's emergencies ministry and a local resident carry an elderly woman during the evacuation of residents from a flooded area following the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam - ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/REUTERS

A woman who refuses to be evacuated from a flooded house gestures towards the rescuers following the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam - ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/REUTERS

01:10 PM

Japan to offer emergency aid to Ukraine,

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday that Japan will offer emergency humanitarian aid worth about $5 million after the bursting of the Nova Kakhovka dam, a Japanese government spokesperson said.

The two leaders spoke by phone as Russia and Ukraine trade blame for the collapse of the dam, which sent waters cascading across the war zone of southern Ukraine this week, forcing tens of thousands to flee.

Kishida also told Zelenskiy that Japan is ready to host a conference on Ukraines reconstruction early next year, according to the official website of the Ukrainian president.

Many Ukrainian citizens fell victim to the long-running Russian invasion, and civilian facilities including power plants were damaged, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told a regular news conference following the phone talks.

12:51 PM

East is 'epicentre of fighting', says Ukraine

The main centre of fighting is still in Ukraines east, Kyiv said Friday, as clashes in the south have prompted speculation that Ukrainian forces could have launched a long-awaited offensive.

The situation is tense in all areas of the front line. The east is the epicentre, Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister, Ganna Malyar, wrote on Telegram.

Ukrainian fighters destroy a Russian self-propelled mortar 2S9 Nona-S in a powerful explosion in Ukraine

The enemy continues to concentrate its main efforts on the Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Maryinka directions, she added, referring to eastern cities where fighting has been raging for months.

The deputy minister gave few details on the situation in southern Ukraine.

12:38 PM

Four dead as a result of flooding in Ukraine's Kherson

Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said four people have died and 13 are missing as a result of flooding in the southern region of Kherson following the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.

He said on the Telegram messaging app that a total of 2,412 people had been evacuated.

12:22 PM

Pictured: A man carries a child amidst the flooding

A man carries a child as members of Russia's emergencies ministry evacuate residents of a flooded area - ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/REUTERS

11:54 AM

'Everything indicates' Russia behind dam breach, says EU foreign policy chief

Everything indicates Russia is behind the Kakhovka dam breach, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrel has said.

The dam was not bombed. It was destroyed by explosives installed in the areas where the turbines are located. This area is under Russian control, Mr Borrell told Spanish public television.

I wasnt there to find out who did it. But everything seems to indicate that if it took place in an area under Russian control, it is difficult to believe it could have been someone else, he added.

In any case, the consequences for Ukraine are terrible, from the humanitarian point of view for the displaced people, and from the environmental point of view because the (dams) destruction will cause an ecological disaster.

11:41 AM

Zelensky hails 'results' amid heavy fighting in Donetsk

President Volodymyr Zelensky has hailed what he described as results in heavy fighting in Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.

There is very heavy fighting in Donetsk region, President Zelensky said in his daily video message, delivered in a train after visiting areas affected by the breach of the Kakhovka power dam.

President Zelensky commentson the shelling of the regions of Kherson, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk in this video from his Telegram account

But there are results and I am grateful to those who achieved these results. Well done in Bakhmut. Step by step, he said.

President Zelensky referred to other areas where fighting is going on, but said he would provide no details. Pictures posted on his Telegram account showed him meeting some of the countrys top generals in the field.

11:23 AM

Greta Thunberg criticises Russia over Ukraine dam 'ecocide'

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has accused Russia of causing the collapse of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, calling it an act of ecocide.

This ecocide as a continuation of Russias unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine is yet another atrocity which leaves the world lost for words. Our eyes are once again on Russia who must be held accountable for their crimes. https://t.co/GDWrJnMkmb  Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) June 8, 2023

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky replied: Thank you for your position and for upholding the truth Greta Thunberg! (Russia) must be held accountable for all its evil against people, life and nature!.

10:53 AM

Zelensky: 'Life is broken' in more than 40 settlements

Volodymr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, has tweeted about ongoing evacuation efforts.

We are working at all levels of state and local authorities to rescue as many people as possible from the flooded areas. The evacuation is ongoing. Wherever we can get people out of the flood zone, we do so. The State Emergency Service, police and military are doing a great job! pic.twitter.com/lTEHoReSY6    (@ZelenskyyUa) June 9, 2023

10:27 AM

Dispatch from Colin Freeman on the ground in Kherson

With its Soviet-era tower blocks besieged by oily waters from the blown-up Kakhovka dam, the Ukrainian city of Kherson is like a vision of Venice gone badly wrong.

The sound of shelling is never far away, and instead of gondolas ferrying tourists, flotillas of rescue boats cruise around rescuing those still stuck in their apartments.

On Thursday, though, even a humanitarian mission aimed mainly at rescuing pensioners and stranded pets found itself directly in the firing line of the war.

Read more from Colin Freeman here

09:53 AM

Ukraine in pictures:

Ukrainian soldiers works during a combat operation on the frontline near Kreminna - Roman Chop/AP

A Ukrainian serviceman fires a rocket launcher during a military training exercise not far from front line in Donetsk region - ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP

09:33 AM

Drone hits residential building in Russian city of Voronezh

A drone hit a residential building in Russias southern city of Voronezh Friday injuring two people, the local governor said.

Drone attacks have hit Russian cities - including Moscow - often in recent months as Kyiv says it is preparing for a major counteroffensive.

A drone crashed into the window of an apartment building in Voronezh - NEXTA

It is the first such incident in Voronezh, a city of around one million people, which lies in the next region deeper into Russia than Belgorod - which has been heavily shelled by Ukraine.

A drone fell on Belinsky Street in Voronezh, the governor of the region, Alexander Gusev, said on Telegram.

He added that at least two people were injured in the attack, some 124 miles from the Ukraine border.

Russian state media showed images of a building that had some shattered windows and part of its wall was blackened, where the drone had apparently hit.

08:58 AM

Nato may base troops in Sweden before Stockholm joins, government says

Sweden will allow Nato to base troops on its territory even before it formally joins the defence alliance, the prime minister and defence minister have said.

Sweden applied last year to join Nato as a result of Russias invasion of Ukraine. Objections from Turkey and Hungary have delayed the bid and Sweden now hopes to join by a Nato summit in Lithuania next month.

The government has decided that the Swedish Armed Forces may undertake preparations with Nato and Nato countries to enable future joint operations, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Defence Minister Pal Jonson said.

The preparations may consist of temporary basing of foreign equipment and personnel on Swedish territory. The decision sends a clear signal to Russia and strengthens Swedens defence, they said in an opinion piece in daily Dagens Nyheter.

08:56 AM

Nato Secretary General meets Finnish PM ahead of summit

Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato Secretary General, has said he looks forward to welcoming Sweden as a full Nato ally as soon as possible.

Great to meet PM @MarinSanna of our newest Ally #Finland to prepare #NATOSummit in Vilnius. We plan to step up for #Ukraine with a multi-year support package, and strengthen our defences. We also look forward to welcoming #Sweden as a full #NATO Ally as soon as possible. pic.twitter.com/fxE7aKRUWF  Jens Stoltenberg (@jensstoltenberg) June 9, 2023

08:23 AM

US Pentagon readies new $2 bln Ukraine air defence package

The US will announce a new arms package for Ukraine valued at more than $2 billion as soon as Friday, Bloomberg News has reported, citing administration officials.

The funds under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative will be heavy on air defence munitions and will help Ukraine purchase Hawk missile launchers and two types of advanced Patriot air defense missiles, the report said.

08:07 AM

Ukraine says it downs four cruise missiles and 10 attack drones during Russian air strike

Ukraines military shot down four cruise missiles and 10 attack drones during a Russian air strike overnight, the air force said.

It said Russian forces had launched 16 drones and six cruise missiles during the attack, and that two other cruise missiles had struck a civilian object in central Ukraine during an earlier attack on Thursday evening.

07:54 AM

Pictured: Firefighters work after a Russian missile strike in the town of Zviahel

Firefighters work at a site of residential area heavily damaged during a Russian missile strike in the town of Zviahel - STATE EMERGENCY SERVICE OF UKRAINE/via REUTERS

07:52 AM

One killed in latest Russian air strike on Ukraine, Kyiv says

Russia unleashed a new air strike on Ukraine overnight, killing at least one person in a combined assault of cruise missiles and attack drones, Ukrainian authorities said.

The Ukrainian military reported shooting down four out of six missiles launched during the attack, which the air force said lasted around six hours, and 10 out of 16 drones.

The interior ministry said one person had been killed, three were wounded, and four buildings were destroyed from falling debris.

It posted images on the Telegram messaging app of firefighters attending to the smouldering wreckage of what appeared to be residential homes.

The air force also said two cruise missiles had struck a civilian object in the central Ukrainian region of Cherkasy during an earlier attack on Thursday evening.

07:50 AM

Ukraines counter-offensive starts as Western tanks hit the front line

Ukraine sent Western tanks into battle for the first time in a major offensive on the southern front that marked the launch of its long-awaited counter-offensive.

Leopard II main battle tanks were seen in the Zaporizhzhia region, where a sudden surge in fighting appeared to mark the start of the assault.

Ukraines ministry of defence, which has a strict policy of operational silence around the offensive, denied reports that it had begun.

Read the full story here

07:46 AM

Good Morning

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A satellite image shows the Nova Kakhovka Dam and hydroelectric plant after its collapse

By Dan Peleschuk

KYIV (Reuters) -Evidence was growing on Friday that there was an explosion at the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine around the time it collapsed, according to Ukrainian and U.S. intelligence reports and seismic data from Norway.

Ukraine's security service said it had intercepted a telephone call proving a Russian "sabotage group" blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric station and dam early on Tuesday in the Kherson region.

Norway's research foundation Norsar said that data collected from regional seismic stations showed clear signals of an explosion.

And U.S. spy satellites detected an explosion at the dam, a U.S. official was quoted as saying by the New York Times.

The destruction early on Tuesday of the facility - which had been in Russian hands since shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 - unleashed mass flooding, forcing thousands of residents to flee and wreaking environmental havoc.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) posted a one-and-a-half minute audio clip on its Telegram channel of the alleged conversation, which featured two men who appeared to be discussing the fallout from the disaster in Russian.

Reuters could not independently verify the recording.

Russia has accused Kyiv of destroying the dam. The Russian foreign ministry did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment on the SBU statement.

"They (the Ukrainians) didn't strike it. That was our sabotage group," said one of the men on the recording, described by the SBU as a Russian soldier. "They wanted to, like, scare (people) with that dam."

"It didn't go according to plan, and (they did) more than what they planned for."

The man also said "thousands" of animals had been killed at a "safari park" downstream as a result.

The other man on the line expressed surprise at the soldier's assertion that Russian forces had destroyed the dam.

The SBU offered no further details of the conversation or its participants. It said it had opened a criminal investigation into war crimes and "ecocide".

"The interception by the SBU confirms that the Kakhovskaya HPP (Hydroelectric Power Plant) was blown up by a sabotage group of the occupiers," the SBU said in a statement. "The invaders wanted to blackmail Ukraine by blowing up the dam and staged a man-made disaster in the south of our country."

The U.S. official said that satellites equipped with infrared sensors detected a heat signature consistent with a major explosion.

Norsar said in a statement that the data from one seismic

station in Romania showed activity at 02:54 a.m. local time on Tuesday, indicating an explosion, and the timing coincides with media reports of the dam collapse.

Together with the power station, the dam helped provide electricity, irrigation and drinking water to southern Ukraine, including Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.

Water levels were high in the reservoir in the buildup to the explosion, media reported.

Hundreds of Ukrainians were rescued from rooftops in the flooded areas during the week. The governor of the southern region of Kherson said some 600 square kilometres, or 230 square miles, were under water.

"By blowing up the Kakhovskaya HPP dam, the Russian Federation definitively proved that it is a threat to the entire civilised world," SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk was quoted as saying in the statement.

"Our task is to bring to justice not only the leaders of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's regime, but also the ordinary perpetrators of crimes," he said.

(Additional reporting by Olena Harmash, Editing by Timothy Heritage, Andrew Heavens and Nick Macfie)
Ukraine sends Western tanks into battle for the first time to bolster counteroffensive

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine  Ukraine appears to have deployed Western battle tanks into combat for the first time, analysts tell NBC News, as Kyiv launches its long-awaited counteroffensive against Russian occupying forces.

The counteroffensive has been months in the planning and Ukraines military has been holding back fresh troops, as well as recently supplied Western weapons, for what may be its best opportunity to make significant gains on the battlefield.

Russian officials and military bloggers reported heavy fighting along the war's southeastern front lines on Friday. Ukraine has remained officially silent on the subject, but a senior officer and a soldier near the front lines said Thursday that the wave of attacks represented a significant new push to break through Russian defenses.

And that effort appears to be bolstered by heavy armor.

Image: UKRAINE-RUSSIA-CONFLICT-WAR (Anatolii Stepanov / AFP - Getty Images)

Two Western military analysts said that the opening stage of the counteroffensive has seen the combat debut of German-made Leopard 2 battle tanks, which were supplied to Kyiv after months of diplomatic wrangling with its NATO backers.

Russias military released drone footage of what it said was an attack by Ukrainian armored units in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region in the early hours of Thursday.

Michael Horowitz, head of intelligence at Le Beck International, a risk management consultancy, reviewed the footage and said he was confident that it showed Leopard tanks in action.

This would be the first time Ukraine deploys Western battle tanks, which is a sure sign that this is serious, Horowitz told NBC News.

Russias military claimed it destroyed three of the Ukrainian Leopards during the fighting, as well as 27 other tanks, using artillery and airstrikes. That claim could not be verified by NBC News.

Later President Vladimir Putin was quoted by the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti as saying that Ukrainian troops did not achieve their goals "thanks to the courage of Russian soldiers, the correct organization of the troops.

It can be said for sure that the Ukrainian offensive has begun, this is evidenced by the use of strategic reserves, Putin was quoted as saying. Russia still lacks modern weapons, but the defense industry is developing rapidly, he added.

A spokesman for Ukraines military declined to comment when asked about the Leopard tanks, in line with Kyivs policy of not officially commenting on the progress of the counteroffensive.

However, Ukraines deputy defense minister, Hanna Maliar, confirmed Ukrainian forces were attacking in the Zaporizhzhia region near the small city of Orikhiv. The enemy is actively on the defensive, she said in a statement.

The 60-ton Leopard 2 is made by Germany but widely used by European members of the NATO alliance. Armed with a 120-mm cannon, it can hit targets from a range of more than 3 miles and is significantly more powerful than the Soviet-era tanks previously used by Ukraines military.

Ukraine Sends Western Tanks Into Battle (Iryna Rybakova / AP)

Ukraine pleaded for Western tanks for months but was initially met with resistance from the U.S. and other NATO countries, who cited concerns about provoking Russia as well as fears of Western technology falling into Russian hands should the tanks be captured.

But in January, the U.S. and Germany struck a deal. Berlin gave its blessing for NATO partners to begin supplying Leopard tanks to Ukraine, as well as giving tanks of its own. Washington, in return, promised to give Ukraine American-made M1 Abrams tanks in the future.

The U.S. has also sent Ukraine Bradley armored fighting vehicles.

The first Leopard tanks reached Ukraine in February and were supplied by Poland, which has been one of Ukraines staunchest military supporters over the course of the war.

Ahead of the counteroffensive, Western nations have focused on training Ukrainian troops in combined arms  the use of tanks, artillery and infantry in concert on the battlefield. Ukraine hopes the heavy tanks will allow it to punch through fortified Russian lines in the East and South.

The outcome of the counteroffensive may shape the endgame for the war. U.S. officials have said they want Ukraine to be in the strongest possible position if it eventually enters into negotiations with the Kremlin.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said his nations ultimate goal is to expel Russian forces from Ukraines internationally recognized territory, including the Crimean Peninsula and other areas under occupation since 2014.

Speaking alongside British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the White House on Thursday, President Joe Biden vowed to continue supplying Ukraine with military aid.

The pair "discussed our unwavering support for the people of Ukraine, who are defending themselves against the most brutal aggression weve seen in a long time, at the hands of Russia and Putin, Biden said.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
ukraine Offensive

As a new day dawns in Ukraine, there are indications Kyiv is making progress in its counteroffensive attack after a bloody first day that saw limited gains.

Ukraine has launched an attack largely focused in Zaphorizhzhia Oblast. As we predicted in December, it is designed to disrupt and eventually cut off the so-called land bridge to Crimea. On Thursday, the first full day of intensified action, Ukraine hit at locations in and around the largely destroyed city of Orikhiv, suffering what some U.S. officials said were significant losses.

https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1666875088820371462

https://twitter.com/BowesChay/status/1666929594929127425

That should come as no great surprise for an attack in an expected area with no air support against an enemy that has had many months to prepare. Meanwhile, the Russians too are almost certainly taking significant losses in both personnel and equipment, but that's not being highlighted by the Russian military bloggers who are providing the bulk of information regarding the front lines at the moment. Biases everywhere you look mixed with the fog of war mean that getting a clear picture of what is going on is nearly impossible, but some trends are emerging.

https://twitter.com/ukikaski/status/1666926596639391750?s=12&t=BQRSNakUKt7_8ssZiGBW-A

And while images are emerging on social media of destroyed Ukrainian equipment, including donated Leopard 2 tanks and other armor in both Zaporizhzhia as well as southern Donetsk Oblast where fighting is also taking place, some Russian Telegram channels are reporting limited breakthroughs.

https://twitter.com/feher_junior/status/1666892068558364679?s=12&t=BQRSNakUKt7_8ssZiGBW-A

https://twitter.com/clashreport/status/1666880569198641173?s=12&t=BQRSNakUKt7_8ssZiGBW-A

The enemy is pushing through our defense line on the Zaporizhzhia front, Operation Z, a collective of Russian military commissars, journalists and volunteers, reported on its Telegram channel Thursday. Armored groups of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are hitting one point.

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1666940011474743298?s=20

The Armed Forces of Ukraine threw into battle up to 30 units of armored vehicles in a new assault near the town of Orikhiv, trying to break through our defenses in the Rabotino-Verbove area.

The positions of Russias 291st regiment have been under attack for more than a day, says Operation Z. According to the latest data, the enemy again managed to push through the defense line, ours retreated to reserve positions, the enemy is trying to gain a foothold.

Many more Ukrainian troops await, Operation Z reported.

In the near rear, the movement of columns of enemy equipment continues, according to Operation Z. The enemy has not yet thrown tank wedges into battle: a serious threat of a powerful offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine remains.

Much of the fighting has been centered in and around the town of Orikhiv in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. (Google Earth image)

I do not share the joyful reports about the defeat of the enemy, Dmitry Rogozin, who is at the front with a group of military advisers, Operation Z reported. Yes, we repulsed the first attack. Yes, well done. But the enemy has not yet introduced the main forces of the breakthrough, primarily large tank wedges, has not driven them into our forward positions. And they are only in the vicinity of Orikhiv in the most tank-dangerous direction - about 600 tanks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, not counting the infantry fighting vehicles. Therefore, it is too early to rejoice, gentlemen. First, let's win, and only then we will throw caps into the air, Rogozin said, according to Operation Z.

Though it has no air cover, Ukrainian forces are using drones and artillery to cover approaches to the battlezone, Russian propagandist Semyon Pegov said on his influential WarGonzo Telegram channel Thursday.

Despite the failure of the first attempt at a quick offensive by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, nothing has been completed on this sector of the front, WarGonzo reported. The boys are in for a tough night. We wish them good luck.

Ukrainian formations have been trying to break through the defense line of the Russian Armed Forces in the Orhikhiv sector, the Kremlin-connected Rybar Telegram channel reported. Thanks to the competent actions of the defenders and the advantage in the air, the units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine lost more than 40 armored vehicles, including at least four Leopard 2A4 tanks.

However, despite the failure of the Ukrainian offensive, it is too early to relax: the enemy is just beginning to seriously attack in the Zaporizhzhia direction. In addition, a blow should be expected in other sectors of the front.

The only area where the Armed Forces of Ukraine were able to advance is Lobkove, the Two Majors Telegram channel reported. The presence of the enemy remains there, from where the assault groups of the 128th Guards Brigade are trying to attack the positions of the [Russian] Armed Forces near the village of Zherebyanka.

All this, of course, is the Russian viewpoint, so take that as you will, but it is hardly glowing for Russian forces and seems to set up an ominous situation in the hours and days to come.

During a briefing at the Pentagon Thursday, the Pentagons top spokesman declined to categorize Ukraines actions or the overall status of the battlefield.

What I'm not going to do today is provide an operational update on ongoing developments on the battlefield, Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters. Clearly Russia for some time has been building its defenses in Ukraine and in anticipation of a Ukrainian counter-offensive and so that's about as far as I'll go right now.

Beyond seeing some Russian replacement forces, Ryder said that I'm not aware of any significant large number of additional Russian forces coming in but of course, that's something we'll continue to keep an eye on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYBvflKWjH8

As we noted earlier in the day, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said without proof that the Russians had defeated the counteroffensive, with huge losses in personnel and equipment imposed on Ukrainians. Ukraine, meanwhile, has been mostly quiet on the subject.

There is a very long way to go in this effort and it is far too early to make any assessments of its success or failure.

We will keep a close eye on developments as the counteroffensive continues.

Before we head into the latest news from Ukraine, The War Zone readers can catch up on our previous rolling coverage here.

The Latest

While Ukrainian troops are engaged in a tough counteroffensive fight for liberation, officials and residents in Kherson Oblast continue battling the fallout from Tuesdays destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam.

Thousands of residents have been evacuated as water continues to rise. Many more remain stranded, some waiting on rooftops for rescue in scenes eerily reminiscent of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005.

https://twitter.com/WorldNBC1/status/1666923394347204608

https://twitter.com/feher_junior/status/1666887216843350021?s=12&t=BQRSNakUKt7_8ssZiGBW-A

https://twitter.com/Feher_Junior/status/1666898651153588237

Those already dangerous rescue efforts are taking place even as Russian troops continue firing munitions from their side of the Dnipro River. One volley landed at an evacuation site in Kherson City a few hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the region on a fact-finding tour of the flood damage. Nine people were injured, "including two employees of the State Emergency Service, a policeman, a doctor and a volunteer from Germany," Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson regional military administration said Thursday on his Telegram channel.

https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1666781943587897345

https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1666782455158767618

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In addition to talking about the long-term implications of this disaster, Zelensky addressed the issue of Russians firing on rescuers in his evening address.

The man-made disaster at the Kakhovka HPP is not a natural disaster or a manifestation of the climate crisis. This disaster is Putin, Zelensky said in his evening address. I said this during an address to global eco-activists, opinion leaders and international experts.

The number of ecosystems that have been destroyed or pushed to the brink of extinction by this Russian terrorist act is already measured in thousands, he said. All this we have faced is a deliberate crime of the occupier. There are many questions about what happened. But it happened in the occupied territory. But last year we warned about the occupiers mining the dam and other structures of the plant. But Russian troops are now shelling the areas where the evacuation is underway. Obviously, it is Russia that is interested in the disaster.

In its latest update, the Ukrainian office tasked with handling the disaster aftermath said that more than 2,300 people, including 120 children, have been evacuated. More than 560 others, including 28 children, were rescued.

Overall, 32 settlements and 3,625 houses on the right bank of the Dnipro were flooded, the Ministry of Internal Affairs Offensive Guard said Thursday on its Telegram channel.

At least one rescuer, a soldier named Volodymyr Kavulich, died trying to save his fellow Ukrainians.

https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1666829498220724224

And in addition to rescuing people, a lot of effort was spent trying to rescue animals caught up in the flood waters as well.

https://twitter.com/NatalkaKyiv/status/1666901566517829653

On the Russian side, there are at least five dead and more than 60 injured residents are known, with about 20,000 people in the disaster zone, the Kremlin-connected Rybar Telegram channel reported.

"The Russian Emergencies Ministry continues to work in the flood zone - rescuers say more than 14,000 houses have been flooded and 4,000 residents have been evacuated," according to Rybar. "About 700 rescuers and two hundred pieces of equipment are involved in the work."

The dam destruction has raised anew concerns about the Zaphorizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe's largest.

Satellite imagery shows water has receded in the wake of the breach, which can create problems with the cooling pool, a new report says.

https://twitter.com/bradyafr/status/1666889764320993281

Without the reservoir on the other side to counteract it, the internal pressure of the water in the cooling pool could breach the dyke around it, a report by the Paris-based Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) said.

"The loss of the pool would not necessarily be catastrophic as other sources of water could be brought in, such as pumping trucks, to prevent a meltdown of the plants nuclear fuel, but a loss of the cooling pool would dramatically increase safety concerns at the plant," The Guardian reported.

The plant "is continuing to pump cooling water from the Kakhovka reservoir even though the water level has reached the point at which it was previously estimated that the pumps could no longer operate, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said today.

There are also concerns about pollution and disease that come with any flood situation. In addition, the Dnipro supplied Crimea with water and it remains to be seen what the long-term effect will be there.

With each side blaming the other for the dams destruction, the Pentagons top spokesman on Thursday was asked for an assessment of the cause.

While declining to speculate, Ryder said its very clear however, the reason we're in this situation is because Russia invaded Ukraine. And so it's obviously a terrible humanitarian tragedy. But in terms of how this dam could have been destroyed, it's something that we'll continue to look into.

As far as whether the Pentagon will provide any humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, as it routinely does across the globe, Ryder said there was nothing to announce today. The Pentagon is currently focused on providing security assistance to Ukraine, he said.

The U.S. will announce a tranche of military aid for Ukraine valued at more than $2 billion as soon as Friday, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing administration officials.

The funds under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative will be heavy on air defense munitions and will help Ukraine purchase Hawk missile launchers and two types of advanced Patriot air defense missiles, Bloomberg reported.

https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1666962131781054466?s=20

The self-described anti-Putin partisan groups say they are still operating inside Russia's Belgorod Oblast, where they have staged a number of incursions.

"We send greetings to Gladkov from the forests of the Belgorod region!," the Freedom For Russia Legion posted Thursday on its Telegram channel, referring to regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov. "Again, what are you in control of? The fight continues! Wait for us!"

Gladkov, meanwhile, complained of continuing Ukrainian artillery and drone strikes in his oblast, with no injuries but some property damage.

The Freedom For Russia Legion says it is still operating in Russia's Belgorod Oblast. (Freedom For Russia Legion photo)

The Russians have appeared to launch an incendiary attack against Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut. Last month, the Russians launched a similar attack though on a much larger scale, on that city.

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1666941355078176768?s=20

There was another attack on the occupied Azov Sea port city of Berdyansk in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, a Russian-installed official said.

"According to preliminary data, a fire occurred in the area of the gas station, at the gas control point near the bakery. Gas cut off in the area," Vladimir Rogov reported on his Telegram channel. "Fire crews are on the scene."

https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1666911007275380742

Russians are continuing to complain about their equipment, this time tires that do not last very long.

https://twitter.com/ralee85/status/1666935969562628096?s=12&t=BQRSNakUKt7_8ssZiGBW-A

And finally, while there continues to be fascination with Ukraine's U.S.-donated M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, one bicyclist seemed more interested in where he was heading than what was launching behind him.

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1666943836709371907?s=20

That's it for now. We'll update this story when there's more news to report about Ukraine.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com
Ukraines New Tanks Are Seen in Action as Counteroffensive Gets Underway

(Bloomberg) -- Ukraines new NATO-standard tanks and fighting vehicles are appearing in battlefield images as military analysts said Kyivs long-awaited counteroffensive is underway.

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German-made Leopard tanks and US Bradley Fighting Vehicles pushing toward the town of Tokmak, in Ukraines occupied south, showed up in photographs posted by Russian military bloggers that seem genuine, according to Osint Defender, an online open-source intelligence group that said it geolocated the images and checked for any signs theyd been manipulated.

The stills were taken from a Russian defense ministry video that showed a column of the vehicles moving into action and at least one being destroyed. Oryx, another online group that conservatively catalogues equipment losses on both sides added a first Leopard 2A4 tank to its list.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun, said Ben Barry, senior fellow for land warfare at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, in an emailed comment. Since 4 June Ukrainian forces have been attacking along the front line. This seeks to pin Russian forces in place and probe for weaknesses.

Ukraine is counting on the campaign to drive Russian forces from more of its territory, cementing support among its allies and heading off pressure from some other capitals for peace negotiations that would require it to give up ground. US and European governments have provided tens of billions of dollars in weapons and training for Ukrainian troops as they prepare to take on a Russian military thats spent months digging into defensive positions.

It remains unclear whether the Ukrainian operations are the spearhead of a main attack or efforts to expose weak spots in Russian defenses, according to a European official.

Ukrainian forces made some advances in the south this week, but equipment losses also have been significant, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. Kyiv is widely expected to seek to cut the zone currently occupied by Russia into two, severing vital supply and communication lines for Moscows troops in Crimea.

The counteroffensive wont likely unfold as a single grand operation, the Institute for the Study of War said Thursday. It will likely consist of many undertakings at numerous locations of varying size and intensity over many weeks. The Washington-based think tank said the initial phase may see the highest Ukrainian losses.

At least some Russian military bloggers continued to warn that Ukraines advances werent being recognized by officials in Moscow.

Russias Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov reported to President Vladimir Putin on Thursday that a Ukrainian force about a brigade strong had attacked during the night but failed to break through Russian defenses, according to a statement by Russias Defense Ministry. These claims couldnt be independently verified.

Earlier in the week, the ministry released a video it said showed Russian helicopters destroying a Leopard tank, but independent analysts later said the footage showed theyd hit tractors and other farm equipment.

Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said Thursday that fighting was underway in the south and around the eastern city of Bakhmut but gave no additional information.

Deployment in numbers of the Leopard and Challenger 2 tanks, or infantry fighting vehicles such as Bradleys and German Marders that Ukraine received since December, would clearly signal a counteroffensive underway, according to Barry of the IISS.

He said that Russian military blogger reports from around Tokmak also would, if confirmed, suggest that at least one of Ukraines newly formed and equipped assault brigades has now been committed to the fight.

Russia plans to fight linear defense battles from trench lines, exploiting obstacle belts, falling back on deeper defensive positions when pressed, Barry said. The key known unknown is the extent to which Russia has any credible reserve formations that can react to Ukrainian thrusts to block or counterattack.

Ukraine has formed about nine assault brigades for the counteroffensive.

Everything is just beginning, Ivan Popov, commander of Russias 58th army, said on the Ministry of Defense Telegram channel. We will prepare.

--With assistance from Alberto Nardelli.

(Adds first confirmed loss of Leopard tank in third paragraph)

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Ukraine is unlikely to get an invitation to NATO at Vilnius summit  US ambassador

Julianne Smith, the US Ambassador under NATO, believes that the members of the alliance consider it unlikely that Ukraine's invitation to NATO will be approved at the NATO summit in Vilnius next month.

Source: European Pravda with reference to Smiths interview for the Politico media outlet

Quote: "I think the allies now are in agreement that a proper invitation [of Ukraine to NATO  ed.] is unlikely while theyre [Ukrainians  ed.] engaged in a full-scale war," Smith believes.

At the same time she insists that NATO assures Ukraine of long-term support and tries to find a way to demonstrate it in Vilnius.

"We want to signal to President Zelenskyy  if he comes in person  we care deeply about having a longer-term relationship with Ukraine and looking for ways to acknowledge, you know, all theyve accomplished and that our support isnt going to fade away or that were not going to get distracted," she added.

Smith remarked that between the invitation of Ukraine to become a NATO member and the decision of the Bucharest NATO summit "there is an array of options" and added that the latest meeting of the foreign affairs ministers of the NATO member states in Oslo played an important role in the discussion of this issue.

"We are much closer to a landing zone than we were three or four months ago," Smith stated.

Ukraine wants to become a member of NATO shortly after achieving military victory over Russia and aims to receive guarantees of this at the NATO summit in Vilnius.

Earlier, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, stated that he understands that it is impossible for Ukraine to ascend to NATO during the war but sees no point in participating in the NATO summit in Vilnius if Ukraine will not receive specific signals about joining the alliance.

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On the night of June 9, 18 air targets were shot down over Ukraine

Read also: One dead, three injured in latest Russian missile attack on Zviahel in Zhytomyr Oblast

The occupiers used Iranian Shahed-136/131 kamikaze drones and air-launched Kh-101/Kh-55 missiles to attack military facilities and critical infrastructure from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. The drones were launched from the south, while the missiles were launched from four Tu-95MS strategic bombers in the Caspian Sea region.

The Ukrainian Air Force successfully neutralized the threat in the areas of responsibility of the Eastern, Western, and Southern Air Commands, destroying:

Four cruise missiles

Ten Shahed-136/131 drones (Lantset)

Four Orlan-10 (Supercam) unmanned aircraft

Read also: Russian missile strike on Uman injures eight, two are fighting for their lives

In a separate incident on the evening of June 8, Russian forces also launched two Kalibr missiles, targeting a civilian object in Cherkasy Oblast.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Ukrainian defenders have attacked a cluster of Russian military personnel in a training camp and killed 56 invaders in occupied Donetsk.

Source: General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

Quote: "The Akhmat unit was spotted in the southwestern part of the temporarily occupied city of Donetsk. The occupiers are engaged in robbing civilians in the area and filming staged videos of the fighting."

Details: The General Staff has noted that on 6 June, the Defence Forces inflicted an effective fire attack on the area where Russian soldiers were concentrated in a training camp. As a result, the occupiers suffered losses, with 56 killed.

"Temporary casualty numbers are being established," the General Staff added.

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 9)  The local government of Albay has placed the province under a state of calamity due to Mayon Volcano's increasing activity, the Albay Provincial Information Office said Friday afternoon.

The Albay PIO said a state of calamity was declared through the provincial government's Resolution No. 0607-2023.

Speaking to CNN Philippines The Source on Friday morning, Gov. Edcel Greco Lagman said that the state of calamity would allow the local government to tap quick response funds to be able to provide support to affected residents.

On Thursday noon, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) raised the alert status of Mayon Volcano to Level 3, meaning the volcano is currently at an increased tendency towards a hazardous eruption and potential explosive activity that can occur within weeks or even days.

Provincial disaster management officials have started preemptive evacuation of residents inside the 6-kilometer radius Permanent Danger Zone.

Lagman said on Friday morning around 3,000 residents from Camalig and Guinobatan have been evacuated. Those areas are the most vulnerable to the volcanic activity, he noted.

By evening, the Office of Civil Defense-Bicol reported that another 1,971 individuals had been evacuated. 490 people were from Camalig town, 196 hailed from Ligao town, and 1,285 residents of Daraga town.

Other areas affected are Legazpi, Tabaco, Ligao, Santo Domingo, Malilipot, Bacacay, and Daraga, he added.

Over 18,000 locals are eyed to be moved from their homes and into 115 identified evacuation centers.

Camalig Public Information Officer Tim Florece told CNN Philippines' Traffic Center that around 400 residents have been moved to safer grounds.

Local authorities target to evacuate some 1,400 families by Friday night or by Saturday, he added.

Florece appealed for cooperation and said they are also mobilizing police officers to maintain law and order.

In its previous report, Phivolcs said it recorded 199 rockfall events and six pyroclastic density currents on the volcano from 5 a.m. on Thursday to 5 a.m. on Friday.

At about 7 p.m. on Friday, seismologists detected another 28 relatively smaller rockfall events.

Meanwhile, no volcanic earthquakes have been recorded.

Pyroclastic density currents are mixtures of fragmented volcanic particles, hot gases, and ash that rush down the volcanic slopes or rapidly outward from a source vent at high speeds, state volcanologists explained.

Mayon also emitted plumes that reached 800 meters tall, Phivolcs said. The volcano edifice is also inflated, it added.

Lagman said residents have been reporting ashfall occurrences.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. also told reporters on Thursday that the national government is ready for a possible eruption of the volcano.

CNN Philippines correspondent Tristan Nodalo contributed reporting from Albay.
The Ministry of Defence of Ukraine has pointed out once again that the Russian aggressor state is trying to find out the information it needs, and one of the ways it does this is by using fake news of various kinds.

Source: Hanna Maliar, Deputy Defence Minister, on Telegram

Quote: "There is no war without losses. The most terrible but inevitable losses are people. And unfortunately, military equipment that cannot be destroyed has not yet been created.

But today's wars are taking place in two dimensions: the real one and the information dimension. Information battles are no less fierce. And they too have certain tasks, rules and laws.

For example, any party to an armed conflict seeks to demonstrate the enemy's losses and conceal its own losses during the active phase of hostilities.

Why? Because the more information is publicly available about the enemy, the easier it is to calculate its capabilities and plans.

In addition to intelligence operations, which are currently very difficult for the Russians on our territory, there are other ways to extract the information they need by filling the information space with provocations.

By doing this, you can force the other side to give out as much information about itself as possible. For example, by encouraging justifications and refutations."

Details: Maliar noted that, for instance, for this purpose, inflated casualty figures are being bandied about with the expectation that indignant Ukrainians will start refuting them and will provide some data or indirect references to data.

Or, for example, stories about the disappearance of the commander-in-chief or other commanders are planted to draw out comments and refutations with photos and videos showing where they really are.

"So we need to understand that we are also fighting with information, just like the enemy," Maliar added.

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Ukrainian Foreign Minister on UN's reaction to Kakhovka dam tragedy: Silent as if their mouths were filled with water

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba sharply criticised the United Nations' response to Russia's blowing up of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP) dam.

Source: European Pravda, citing Kuleba's speech on air of the national joint 24/7 newscast on Friday.

According to the minister, "The UN made a very specific mistake: on the day when we had a terrorist attack and a crime of genocide, they celebrated the day of the Russian language, they were silent about the event as if their mouths were filled with water."

"I think if they had taken water from Dnipro [River] into their mouths, mixed with engine oil, blood and the stench of dead animals, they might have behaved differently. But since New York is far away and there is different water, they managed to stay silent all day and do nothing," he said.

At the same time, the foreign minister noted the work of the UN office in Ukraine, which promptly mobilised a team of employees in Kherson, and after meeting with the minister, it formed two groups that are ready to help with the evacuation of people from the Russian-occupied left bank of Dnipro.

"Therefore, the anger of Ukrainians is fair, but there is a reality and we need to work with it in the interests of our country," he concluded.

On Thursday, Kuleba expressed the expectation that after working with representatives of the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross, members of these organisations will be deployed in the disaster zone after the Russians blew up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plan.

Earlier, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has stated that he is shocked by the reaction of the UN and the Red Cross to the blowing up of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP) by the Russian occupiers.

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FILE - Locals ride motorbike on a road while fallen trees lie near a mosque after Cyclone Mocha in Sittwe township, Rakhine State, Myanmar, Monday, May 15, 2023. A U.N. agency on Friday, June 9, 2023 says Myanmars military government has suspended travel authorizations for international humanitarian organizations and rescinded its initial approval for their distribution and delivery of essential food, shelter and medicinal assistance to thousands of residents in cyclone-hit areas in the western states of Rakhine and Chin. (AP Photo, file) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

BANGKOK (AP)  Myanmars military government has rescinded its approval for international organizations to distribute food, shelter and medicines to thousands of residents of cyclone-hit areas in the country's west, a U.N. agency said Friday.

Cyclone Mocha hit the coastline of Bangladesh and Myanmar in mid-May with winds of up to 209 kilometers (130 miles) per hour. The damage was worst around the coastal city of Sittwe, the capital of Myanmar's Rakhine state, but was also severe as the storm moved inland into Chin state.

The military authorities also suspended travel authorizations for international humanitarian organizations, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a situation report. It said the suspension of aid activities could not have come at a worse time because of the arrival of the annual monsoon season.

The report did not say why the military government's Disaster Management Committee suspended the travel authorizations.

Myanmars military has long kept access to many parts of the country under tight restrictions, especially areas seen as sensitive because of tensions with ethnic minorities, as is the case with Rakhine, where a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in 2017 drove more than 700,000 members of the Muslim Rohingya minority to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.

Despite a dire need for help, foreign aid and journalists were not allowed into Myanmar in the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in 2008, when more than 100,000 people were killed.

Cyclone Mocha killed at least 148 people in Rakhine. It brought flash floods and power outages, tore roofs off buildings and crumpled cellphone towers. Myanmar state media said more than 186,000 buildings were damaged.

UNOCHA said about 1.6 million people were heavily affected by the cyclone in Rakhine, Chin, and Kachin states, and in Sagaing and Magway regions. It said more than 113,200 people have received shelter and other relief from humanitarian organizations, while food assistance has reached more than 293,800 people in Rakhine alone.

There has been concern that many people whose houses were damaged by the cyclone might be without adequate shelter during the monsoon. The Meteorological Department said Thursday that the monsoon has advanced into central Myanmar.

Heavy rains and some flooding were observed in areas that were already heavily impacted, further hampering the recovery process for people whose coping capacities are already stretched to the limit, UNOCHA said.

An official with an international humanitarian organization operating in Rakhine told The Associated Press that his group received a letter announcing the suspension of travel authorizations from a Rakhine state government office on Thursday. He said the restriction was issued just a day after the same office had issued the first travel authorization to international aid agencies since the cyclone to deliver aid. He asked that he and his organization not be identified to avoid pressure from officials.

The letter refers to all international organizations in Rakhine state. I dont know why they suspended travel authorization. At a time when emergency aid is urgently needed, this ban prevents aid from reaching everyone in need in a timely manner, the official said.

The letter, seen by The Associated Press, was signed by Rakhine Security and Border Affairs Minister Col. Kyaw Thura.

Although international organizations are no longer allowed to travel, they say they will try to deliver supplies to affected areas with the help of local charity organizations that serve as their humanitarian partners and are still able to travel.

The members of three local charity groups told The Associated Press by phone that they have not received new instructions from the authorities but believe they must be more careful in transporting aid when they pass military checkpoints. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear reprisals from the authorities.

In Rakhine, some local relief organizations have run into problems when delivering assistance. Five people including Wai Hun Aung, a writer who is directing relief work in seven townships in northern Rakhine, and two rescue workers from Yangon were arrested at a military checkpoint in Sittwe on May 23 while traveling to deliver aid. They were released after a few days.

Myanmar navy and air force units, along with domestic charity groups, have delivered some rice and other assistance to victims, but only about 20% of the population in cyclone-hit areas has received full assistance, according to members of the charity organizations.
The University of Manchester has about 40,000 students and 12,000 staff

The University of Manchester has been targeted by a cyber attack.

The university's chief operating officer said data may have been copied after some systems were "accessed by an unauthorised party".

Patrick Hackett said staff were "working around the clock" to resolve the incident.

A university spokesman added there was "no known link" to the recent MOVEit hack that hit employers including the BBC, Boots and British Airways.

The university is working with the Information Commissioner's Office, the National Cyber Security Centre and National Crime Agency over their cyber attack.

"We know this will cause concern to members of our community and we are very sorry for this," Mr Hackett said.

"Our priority is to resolve this issue and provide information to those affected as soon as we are able to, and we are focusing all available resources."

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WASHINGTON (AP)  The Pentagon announced Friday that it will provide an additional $2.1 billion in long-term weapons aid for Ukraine. The new assistance package will include funding for more Patriot missile battery munitions, Hawk air defense systems and missiles, and small Puma drones that can be launched by hand.

The latest infusion of funding, one of the larger packages the U.S. has provided, comes as there are signs that Ukraine is beginning  or about to begin  the much anticipated counteroffensive to try to take back territory that has been seized by Russia.

Unlike the U.S. equipment, weapons and ammunition that are more frequently sent from Pentagon stocks and delivered quickly to Ukraine, this money would be provided under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and is meant to be spent over the coming months or even years to ensure Ukraines future security needs.

In a statement, the Pentagon said the package shows America's continued commitment to both Ukraines critical near-term capabilities as well as the enduring capacity of Ukraines Armed Forces to defend its territory and deter Russian aggression over the long term.

The aid also will include munitions for laser-guided rockets, an undisclosed amount of artillery rounds, and funding for training and maintenance support.

A number of administration officials have acknowledged that the fighting in Ukraine has intensified in recent days, but much of the focus turned early this week to the collapse of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River. The White House and the Pentagon insisted Thursday they are still working to determine who caused the damage, which set off a scramble to evacuate residents in dozens of flooded areas and get aid to those still there.

Although the U.S. has been willing to provide billions of dollars in military weapons and other aid, the Biden administration has been clear that there will be no U.S. combat forces inside Ukraine. In that vein, Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said Thursday the military had no plans to directly provide transportation or other support to the areas damaged by the dam collapse.

The Biden administration has provided more than $37.6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022.
The US has a child labor problem  recalling an embarrassing past that Americans may think they've left behind

Lewis Wickes Hine, 'A little spinner in a Georgia Cotton Mill, 1909.' Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 in. The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P545), CC BY-SA

At the University of Maryland, Baltimore Countys Special Collections, where I am head curator, weve recently completed a major digitization and rehousing project of our collection of over 5,400 photographs made by Lewis Wickes Hine in the early 20th century.

Traveling the country with his camera, Hine captured the often oppressive working conditions of thousands of children  some as young as 3 years old.

As Ive worked with this collection over the past two years, the social and political implications of Hines photographs have been very much on my mind. The patina of these black-and-white photographs suggests a bygone era  an embarrassing past that many Americans might imagine theyve left behind.

But with numerous reports of child labor violations, many involving immigrants, occurring in the U.S., along with an uptick in state legislation rolling back the legal working age, its clear that Hines work is as relevant today as it was a century ago.

An investigator with a camera

A sociologist by training, Hine began making photographs in 1903 while working as a teacher at the progressive Ethical Culture School in New York City.

Between 1903 and 1908, he and his students photographed migrants at Ellis Island. Hine believed that the future of the U.S. rested in its identity as an immigrant nation  a position that contrasted with escalating xenophobic fears.

Based on this work, the National Child Labor Committee, which advocated for child labor laws, hired Hine to document the living and working conditions of American children.

Lewis Wickes Hine, Trapper Boy, Turkey Knob Mine, MacDonald, West Virginia, 1908. Gelatin silver print. 5 x 7 in. The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P148), CC BY-SA

By the late 19th century, several states had passed laws limiting the age of child laborers and establishing maximum working hours. But at the turn of the century, the number of working kids soared  between 1890 and 1910, 18% of children ages 10 to 15 were employed.

In his work for the National Child Labor Committee, Hine journeyed to farms and mills in the industrializing South and the streets and factories of the Northeast. He used a Graflex camera with 5-by-7-inch glass plate negatives and employed flash powder for nighttime and interior shots, hauling upward of 50 pounds of equipment on his slight frame.

To gain entry into factories and other facilities, Hine sometimes disguised himself as a Bible, postcard or insurance salesman. Other times hed wait outside to catch workers arriving for or departing from their shifts.

Along with photographic records, Hine collected his subjects personal stories, including their ages and ethnicities. He documented their working lives, such as their typical hours and any injuries or ailments they incurred as a result of their labor.

Hine, who considered himself an investigator with a camera, used this information to create what he termed photo stories  combinations of images and text that could be used on posters, in public lectures and in published reports to help the organization advance its mission.

Lewis Wickes Hines photograph of three young fish cutters working at the Seacoast Canning Co. in Eastport, Maine. National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Legislation follows

Hines muckraking photographs exemplify the genre of documentary photography, which relies upon the perceived truthfulness of photography to make a case for social change.

The camera serves as an eyewitness to a societal ill, a problem that needs a solution. Hine portrayed his subjects in a direct manner, typically frontally and looking straight into the camera, against the backdrop of the very factories, farmland or cities where they worked.

By capturing details of his sitters bare feet, tattered clothes, soiled faces and hands, and diminutive stature against hulking industrial equipment, Hine made a direct statement about the poor conditions and precarity of these childrens lives.

Lewis Wickes Hine, Group of newsies selling on Capitol steps, April 11, 1912. The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P2904), CC BY-SA

Hines photographs made a successful case for child labor reform.

Notably, the National Child Labor Committees efforts resulted in Congress establishing the Childrens Bureau in 1912 and passing the Keating-Owen Act in 1916, which limited working hours for children and prohibited the interstate sale of goods produced by child labor.

Although the Supreme Court later ruled it and a subsequent Child Labor Tax Law of 1919 unconstitutional, momentum for enshrining protections for child workers had been created. In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established restrictions and protections on employing children.

The National Child Labor Committees project also included advocacy for the enforcement of existing child labor regulations, a regulatory problem reemerging today as the Department of Labor  the agency tasked with enforcing labor laws  comes under fire for failing to protect child workers.

A young picker carries a large sack of cotton on her back. Lewis Wickes Hine/Library of Congress via Getty Images

The ethics of picturing child labor

A recent surge of unaccompanied minors, primarily from Central America, has brought new attention to Americas old problem of child labor and has threatened the very laws Hine and the National Child Labor Committee worked to enact.

Some estimates suggest that one-third of migrants under 18 are working illegally, whether its laboring more hours than current laws permit, or working without the proper authorizations. Many of them perform hazardous jobs similar to those of Hines subjects: handling dangerous equipment and being exposed to noxious chemicals in factories, slaughterhouses and industrial farms.

While the content of Hines photographs remains pertinent to todays child labor crisis, a key distinction between the subject of Hines photographs and working children today is race.

Hine focused his camera almost exclusively on white children who arrived in the country during waves of immigration from Europe during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. As art historian Natalie Zelt argues, Hines pictorial treatment of Black children  either ignored or forced to the margins of his images  implied to viewers that the face of childhood in America was, by default, white.

The perceived racial hierarchies of Hines era reverberate into the present, where underage migrants of color live and work at the margins of society.

Workers protest outside a Popeyes restaurant in Oakland, Calif., on May 18, 2023, after reports emerged of the franchise exploiting child labor. Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images

Contemporary reports of child labor violations offer few images to accompany their texts, graphs and statistics. There are legitimate reasons for this. By not including identifying personal information or portraits, news outlets protect a vulnerable population. Ethical guidelines frown upon revealing private details of the lives of children interviewed. And, as Hines experience demonstrates, it can be difficult to infiltrate the sites of these labor violations, since they are typically kept secure.

Digital cameras and smartphones offer a workaround. Beginning in 2015, the International Labor Organization urged child laborers in Myanmar to become young activists and use their own images and words to create photo stories  echoing Hines use of the term  that the organization could then disseminate.

Photographs of child labor in foreign countries are far more common than those made in the U.S., which leaves the impression that child labor is someone elses problem, not ours. Perhaps its too hard for Americans to look at this domestic issue square in the eyes.

A similar effect is at work when viewing Hines photographs today. While they were originally valued for their immediacy, they can seem to belong to a distant past.

But if Hines photographic archive of child laborers is evidence of the power of photography to sway public opinion, does the lack of images in todays reporting  even if nobly intended  create a disconnect?

Is the public capable of understanding the harmful consequences of lack of labor enforcement when the faces of the people affected are missing from the picture?

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. Like this article? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

It was written by: Beth Saunders, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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Beth Saunders does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
On Friday, members of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs representing the Democratic and Republican parties announced a resolution calling on President Joe Biden's administration to hand over ATACMS long-range missiles to Ukraine.

Source: European Pravda.

According to Republican Michael McCall, the co-author of the Resolution, and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, if the United States does not provide Ukraine with all the necessary weapons, it will help prolong the war.

"The success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive is directly related to the military assistance provided by the United States and our allies. Therefore, it is extremely disappointing that the administration is delaying billions of dollars of military funding, which could be immediately transferred to Ukraine and in turn help its Armed Forces significantly change the situation on the battlefield," he said.

In the document, the decisions of the governments of the UK and France to transfer Storm Shadow and SCALP-EG long-range missiles, respectively, both with a range of 250 kilometres, are mentioned.

"The United States and its allies jointly own thousands of ATACMS missiles that could be transferred to Ukraine," the draft resolution said, stating that Russia's current dominance in long-range weapons "forces Ukrainian forces to fight at a much greater disadvantage".

If passed, the House of Representatives will call on the United States to "immediately transfer to Ukraine a sufficient number of ATACMS to accelerate Ukraine's victory in Russia's unprovoked aggressive war, while maintaining the combat readiness of the US military".

"The expeditious provision of this critical weapon system will provide the Ukrainian military with a critical deep-strike capability they currently lack, disrupt Russias warfighting ability, and could hasten Ukraines victory," the resolution says.

The army's ATACMS tactical missile systems are surface-to-surface missiles that can fly at a distance of about 300 kilometres, which is about four times more than the missiles used by the HIMARS mobile systems that the United States began sending to Ukraine last year.

Earlier, the media reported that the Biden administration explains the reluctance of the Ukrainian side to transfer longer-range ATACMS missiles so that in this case they may remain too small in the reserves of the US Army.

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(Bloomberg) -- The US expanded a ban on imports from Chinas Xinjiang region, placing two more companies on its so-called entity list, the first additions since a law targeting forced labor in the area took effect a year ago.

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Printing and imaging company Ninestar Corp. and eight of its subsidiaries, as well as Xinjiang Zhongtai Chemical Co. Ltd., were added to the list for working with the government of Xinjiang to recruit, transport, transfer, harbor or receive forced labor involving Uyghur and other ethnic minorities, the US Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Friday.

That widens the list to 22 companies, including solar material manufacturers Xinjiang Daqo New Energy Co. and Hoshine Silicon Industry (Shanshan) Co., Ltd., as well as the state-affiliated Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.

These enforcement actions send a clear message to the importing community, Robert Silvers, the DHS under secretary for strategy, policy and plans, said in an interview. Companies must know their supply chain.

The move is certain to anger China, just as the the US seeks to mend deteriorating ties. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is said to be planning an official trip to China in the coming weeks, possibly including a meeting with President Xi Jinping.

Ninestar and Zhongtai Chemical said on Sunday in separate filings that theyre looking into the potential impact of the US move. Ninestar said it complies with all applicable laws and regulations and abides by international labor protection standards, while Zhongtai Chemical said it doesnt expect a major impact on its operations as exports accounted for just 6.6% of revenues in 2022.

Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs didnt immediately respond to Bloomberg requests for comments sent outside normal business hours.

Read more: Forced Labor Dispute Is Completely Redefining US-China Relations

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which came into force last June, bars imported goods partly or wholly made in Chinas Xinjiang, unless companies can prove the products have no ties to forced labor.

More companies may be added to the list, Silvers said. Theres a pipeline of cases, he said.

Congress passed the law unanimously with support from labor unions and activists. It seeks to put pressure on Beijing for allegedly detaining minorities in Xinjiang, an autonomous region in northwestern China thats home to millions of Uyghurs.

Some $1.3 billion in shipments were subjected to special inspections since last summer because of indications that they might be the product of forced labor, Silvers said.

No exemptions have been granted because no entity has been able to provide clear and convincing evidence that the goods are free of forced labor, he said.

China has been accused of incarcerating more than 1 million Uyghurs in recent years, and for forcing Muslim citizens into forced labor, including the harvesting of cotton. Beijing has repeatedly denied that its committing such human-rights abuses.

A 2022 report by the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK mentioned state-owned Xinjiang Zhongtai, saying it had accepted more than 5,000 workers through state-sponsored transfers, more than any company the authors documented.

--With assistance from Amanda Wang.

(Adds company responses in sixth paragraph)

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US lawmakers ask Biden to provide ATACMS to Ukraine

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers is calling on President Joe Biden to provide Ukraine with the long-range Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), Politico reported on June 8.

The supply of missiles with a 300-kilometer reach to Kyiv has been a hotly debated topic among U.S. politicians for some time.

In July 2022, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that Washington is not ready to provide ATACMS, fearing this move could spiral into World War III.

The White House resolve may be weakening, as Biden said in May this year that ATACMS are "still in play."

The spring of 2023 saw the U.S. agree that its partners can provide Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets. The White House has previously opposed such a move.

Politico cited Jason Crow, the U.S. Representative leading the group, that American officials are growing less concerned that supplying Ukraine with weapons will lead to an escalation in the war.

Retired US General Petraeus: Now its inevitable  we should give the ATACMS The Kyiv Independent interviewed retired U.S. General David Petraeus on the sidelines of a security conference held by the Cipher Brief in Kyiv on May 31. Petraeus is a four-star U.S. general who has commanded two wars. He has headed multinational forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has The Kyiv IndependentOlga Rudenko

Crow has nevertheless acknowledged that the U.S. has a limited number of missiles but added that the Pentagon plans to eventually move to more advanced weaponry.

Ukraine has been asking the U.S. government to provide ATACMS, most recently when President Volodymyr Zelensky met U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham on May 27 in Kyiv.

Washington has so far refused, but Kyiv managed to acquire Storm Shadow long-range cruise missiles with a range of over 250 kilometers from the U.K.

Critics argue that allies reluctance to supply ATACMS missiles to Ukraine may prevent Kyiv from liberating the rest of Ukrainian territory. A shortage of long-range weapons may also prolong Russias war of aggression and result in thousands of deaths.
US satellites recorded explosion on Kakhovka HPP before it was destroyed  NYT

US satellites recorded an explosion at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP) shortly before its destruction.

Source: The New York Times, with reference to an official of the US presidential administration, as reported by European Pravda

Details: According to a representative of the presidential administration, satellites equipped with infrared sensors detected a thermal trace, which is characteristic of a powerful explosion, immediately before the hydroelectric dam collapsed.

According to the source of the publication, US intelligence analysts are inclined to believe that Russia was behind the explosion. At the same time, he added that US intelligence agencies still do not have convincing evidence of who exactly is responsible.

The administration official did not rule out that previous dam damage or increased water pressure could have contributed to the destruction, but US officials believe the explosion, whether intentional or accidental, was the most likely cause of the disaster.

Earlier, the European Commission stated that Russia should bear primary responsibility for the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP) since it started the war against Ukraine.

On the morning of 6 June, Operational Command Pivden (South) reported that the Russian occupiers had blown up the Kakhovka HPP. Later, the Oblast Military Administration confirmed this information. Oleksandr Prokudin, Head of Kherson Oblast Military Adminstration, said that the evacuation of the local population from dangerous areas had begun..

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraines Foreign Minister, called Russias blowing up of the Kakhovka HPP a terrible war crime and probably the largest man-made disaster in Europe in recent decades. The incident was condemned by a number of foreign leaders and European officials.

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 9)  Some Twitter users on Friday flagged the recent advertisement of motorcycle taxi application Angkas, which they said promotes incest and sexual power play.

In a Facebook post on Thursday that has since been deleted, the Angkas ad showed an illustration of a girl in a yellow sweater crying for being stuck in a car. It has a promo code written ANGKASDADDY with a caption, Stepdad, Im stuck (in traffic).

This is a bad ad. You're a male-led and male-dominated company promoting incest and unhealthy sexual power dynamics in an ad, Move As One Coalition Secretariat Reycel Bendana said.

Incest is sexual relations between family members. It is a form of sexual abuse committed against a child by a relative within fourth degree of affinity and who exercises influence, authority or moral ascendancy over the victim.

The transport advocate said she has relayed her concern to Angkas chief executive officer George Royeca.

Andaming pong case ng sexual abuse by step fathers in the PH, many of them unreported. This ad normalizes incest and makes it seem funny, Bendana's message to Royeca read.

She added that Angkas move harms safe spaces and sends a very dangerous message to men.

In a statement sent to the media on Friday, Royeca apologized for their recent ad that caused offense to people.

It was not our intention, nor will we ever support or permit even the slightest disregard of womens rights and human dignity, he said. We won't always get things done perfectly, but we in Angkas will always listen to our community.

He added that Angkas will always aim to serve with honesty, humility, and respect.

Filipina sociologist Ash Presto also said it is disgusting for a male-dominated company to not only normalize but even promote incest behavior, citing that there is a silent pandemic of incest rape in the country.

I feel sick to the core seeing how Angkas turned this into a marketing scheme, she tweeted. Which audience exactly was Angkas targeting in this ad? The fact that a company as big as Angkas can target audience that takes incest rape as an inside joke reflects how grave the problem is.

According to the Cameleon Philippines, a non-profit organization that fights against sexual abuse, about 7,000,000 children are sexually abused every year in the Philippines.

It added that rape remains the most frequent type of sexual abuse in the country followed by incest and fondling.
US says drone factory Russia is building with Irans help could be operational early next year

The US believes that an attack drone manufacturing plant Russia is building with Irans help could be fully operational by early next year, National Security Council official John Kirby said on Friday.

Iran is shipping equipment for the plant, as well as fully-built drones, to Russia via the Caspian Sea, US officials believe. Russia has purchased hundreds of drones from Iran since last summer and is using them extensively in the war in Ukraine.

Kirby confirmed previous CNN reporting that Iran is using the Caspian Sea route to move drones, bullets and mortar shells to Russia, often using vessels that are dark, or have turned off their tracking data to disguise their movements.

The US released a map on Friday showing the route Iran appears to be using to ship the equipment from Amirabad, Iran to Makhachkala, Russia.

The route Iran is using to send drones and other equipment to Russia, according to the US government. - US Government

Russia has been using Iranian UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) in recent weeks to strike Kyiv and terrorize the Ukrainian population, and the Russia-Iran military partnership appears to be deepening, Kirby said in a statement.

The US also believes that Iran has been shipping materials that Russia has been using to build its own drone factory inside Russias Alabuga Special Economic Zone, about 600 miles east of Moscow. The US released a satellite image of the planned location of the purported drone manufacturing plant, taken on April 3.

Satellite imagery of a facility where Russia is planning to build a factory to manufacture drones with Iran's help, according to the US government. - Maxar/US Government

CNN has asked the Russian embassy in Washington and the Iranian mission to the United Nations for comment.

The support is flowing both ways: from Iran to Russia, and from Russia to Iran, Kirby said.

Russia has been offering Iran unprecedented defense cooperation, including on missiles, electronics, and air defense, he added. Earlier this year, Iran announced that it had finalized a deal to buy Su-35 fighter jets from Russia. Iran is seeking to purchase additional military equipment from Russia, including attack helicopters, radars, and YAK-130 combat trainer aircraft. In total, Iran is seeking billions of dollars worth of military equipment from Russia.

Kirby said that the US is releasing this information to the public to expose and disrupt the countries full-scale defense partnership.

He also announced that the US will be issuing a new advisory on Friday to help businesses and governments better understand how Iran is illegally obtaining the components to build its drones, and how they can put in place measures to ensure they are not inadvertently contributing to Irans UAV program.

The US has imposed tough export control restrictions and sanctions to prevent Iran from obtaining the necessary materials for its drones, but evidence has emerged that suggests Iran is finding an abundance of commercially-available technologyincluding components manufactured by US companies, CNN has reported.

The Biden administration launched an expansive task force last year to investigate how US and western components, including American-made microelectronics, were ending up in Iranian-made drones being used in Russia.

Kirby said the US will continue to impose sanctions on Iranians, Russians, and other countries involved in the procurement of the equipment.

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By Daphne Psaledakis and Humeyra Pamuk

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States urged Nigerian authorities on Friday to investigate an air strike that Reuters reported killed dozens of cattle herders earlier this year and highlighted a pattern of deadly aerial assaults.

Dozens of ethnic Fulani herders died in a Jan. 24 aerial bombing in the central state of Nasarawa, according to a Reuters investigation published this week. The deaths raise awkward questions for allies such as the U.S., which arm Nigeria's military as part of ongoing efforts to quell Islamist insurgencies in West Africa.

"We urge Nigerian authorities to thoroughly investigate this and all other incidents of civilian harm in a timely and transparent manner," a State Department spokesperson said on Friday in an emailed response to questions about the reporting.

The spokesperson said senior U.S. officials and diplomats in Nigeria regularly engage with the Nigerian government on efforts to combat terrorism, discussing issues such as protecting civilians from harm. The spokesperson did not specify whether they had raised the January bombing with the Nigerians.

The spokesperson also said Washington is not aware of any information indicating weapons or aircraft supplied by the United States have been involved in any civilian harm incidents attributed to the Nigerian Air Force.

The deadly airstrike came amid renewed worries among U.S. lawmakers about weapons deals worth hundreds of millions to Nigeria, a country frequently criticized for its human rights record.

The State Department spokesperson said existing defense sales and security assistance to Nigeria include "robust components focused on human rights, preventing civilian harm, and promoting military justice and accountability."

"Reports of civilian harm should be thoroughly and transparently investigated," the spokesperson said.

In 2017, Nigeria's air force was criticized for bombing a camp for displaced people while on a mission targeting Islamist insurgents in Rann, near the Cameroonian border. The airstrike, which Nigerian officials admitted was a mistake, killed at least 90 people, the majority of them women and children, according to medical charity Medecins San Frontieres (MSF), which had teams in the camp at the time.

The State Department spokesperson said that since the 2017 bombing, the Nigerian military has taken corrective action to reduce civilian harm. The spokesperson added that as a result of U.S. training, Nigeria's Air Force is implementing targeting procedures to help avoid civilian casualties.

The U.S. State Department is also providing an embedded advisor to work with the Nigeria's military to develop a corps of military legal advisors focused on advising commanders during operations to prevent and mitigate harm to civilians, the spokesperson said.

(Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis and Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Tim Cocks and Daniel Wallis)
He used to wake up early to watch the Tony nominations. Now, this North Texan is a nominee

Before Jordan E. Cooper could properly hold a pen in his hand, he was already writing stories.

One of the earliest narratives crafted by the playwright from Hurst was a conversation between Santa Claus and Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. He told the Star-Telegram he wasnt even sure what he was doing, but he knew something felt right. Jordan was 6 years old.

Each one of us has some kind of light to make this world a little bit brighter, Cooper said. Some people dont discover that light and Im just so grateful that Ive discovered that light and now I get to show it to the world.

Coopers creativity has taken the 28-year-old far past Texas and landed him in a league that only few can say theyre a part of: being a Tony Award-nominated playwright and actor. Along with being the youngest Black playwright in Broadway history.

The 76th annual Tony Awards are Sunday where the best and brightest in Broadway will be celebrated for their work on stage. Coopers play Aint No Mo is nominated for six Tony awards, including two for himself.

Aint No Mo is a high-concept comedy that asks the question, What if the U.S. government offered Black Americans one-way plane tickets to Africa? The satirical play explores what it means to be Black in todays America.

The play was a major career breakthrough for Cooper, who is still trying to wrap his head around his nomination.

I have a habit of moving forward with blinders on, he said. Im doing my best to learn to allow myself to feel, because its real and its happening and Ive earned it.

Jordan Cooper was born and raised in Hurst, TX

Growing up in Hurst, Cooper knew from an early age he wanted to be an artist, which came as a bit of surprise to his parents.

Angela Cooper, 61, said that both she and her husband, Eley, have families that come from athletic backgrounds. When Jordan said he was interested in the arts, Angela and Ely werent sure what to make of it. But they accepted the young boys proclamation with open arms.

As parents thats something you need to do, Angela said. You need to nurture, you need to feed your children when you see that they are interested in something because you just never know where it goes.

From putting on shows in his parents living room, to entertaining the New Beginnings Baptist Church crowd on Sundays, Jordan discovered his creative spark early on.

Their church pastor even made adjustments around the sanctuary to allow Jordan to put on plays, including putting up curtain rods around the stage that are still there today.

Jordan joined a local production group while in his teens in search of his writers voice. At 15, he was cast in the 2012 movie Wolf.

Through most of it, Jordans family was right there with him  supporting him at every turn with emotional support to being his own personal taxi service.

[Jordan] didnt want to learn how to drive because he said he always knew at an early age that he wanted to live in New York, Angela joked. In New York, you didnt need to know how to drive, so he never wanted to do that. So we took him around everywhere.

Jordan took his first theater class at L.D. Bell High School, where he sharpened his art. A few weeks after graduation, Jordan led his own play at Fort Worths Jubilee Theater.

Jordan chose to attend college at The New School of Drama in New York, diving headfirst into his quest to be a playwright.

It was a daunting move for the young artist  making a big creative leap and living halfway across the country away from his family. But he really wasnt doing this alone.

When I walk into these rooms, Im not entering alone, he said. Im entering with everybody whos poured into me in some way, shape or form.

Jordan E. Cooper at 10-years-old dressed up as an old man at New Beginnings Baptist Church in North Richland Hills.

Jordan Cooper takes a bite of the Big Apple

Shortly after Jordan arrived in New York, he got his big break.

One day, between going to school and performances, his agent called letting him know that he was having lunch with Lee Daniels, the Academy Award-nominated filmmaker known for Precious and The Butler. His agent told him he would bring some of his work to the lunch to show Daniels.

Two long weeks later, Jordan receives an email from Daniels asking Jordan if he would share an early version of Aint No Mo. The young Texan obliged. Daniels was impressed, and came on board as a producer.

Flash forward a few years and Aint No Mo opened on Broadway in December 2022 at the Belasco Theatre.

The play was a creative juggernaut, receiving rave reviews and visits from celebrities such as Tyler Perry and RuPaul. The play closed a few weeks later, ending just before the New Year.

In total, the play ran for 28 performances and of those, Angela was there for six shows.

If I could have been there more times, I would have been there more times, she said.

Jordan Coopers childhood dream comes true

Angela always had a hard time getting Jordan up for school in the mornings, except on the day Tony Awards nominations were scheduled to be broadcast.

On those days, Jordan was dressed and ready to go so he could catch a glimpse of the show before heading to school. This years awards show was no different.

Jordan was back home in Hurst with his family for the May 2 broadcast. Between cooking breakfast and waiting for the broadcast to begin, the family gathered in the same living room in which Jordan used to perform.

And there it was: his name on the small screen.

We were up jumping and screaming and hugging and thanking God, Angela said. Afterwards we were like, Who else was in the category? We didnt get that far, we didnt hear anything else.

Aint No Mo received six nominations, including for Best Play and for Best Actor in a Feature Role.

Angela and the family are flying to New York this weekend for the awards show. Of course they want Jordan to win, but even if he doesnt, the ride has all been spectacular.

Its just an honor at this age for your first play to have six Tony nominations, she said.

Jordan E. Cooper as Peaches in his play Aint No Mo.

A musical and movie might be in Jordan Coopers future

The young man from Hurst lives a busy life in New York. Beyond the stage, Jordan helped create the BET+ series, The Ms. Pat Show. The series wrapped up its third season earlier this year and has already been renewed for a fourth.

He landed the gig on the small screen from his partnership with Daniels, who also serves as an executive producer on the television show.

Jordan is now writing a musical, and he just finished his first feature film script.

He is living his dream, but through it all he never forgets where he came from.

I remember wanting it so bad and now Im in it, he said. My younger self would be so enamored.

The 76th Annual Tony Awards will air at 7 p.m. Sunday on CBS and Paramount+.
Utah Sens. Mike Lee and Mitt Romney have different reactions to news of Trump indictment

This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of records stored in a bathroom and shower in the Lake Room at Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Trump is facing 37 felony charges related to the mishandling of classified documents, according to an indictment unsealed Friday, June 9, 2023. | Justice Department via Associated Press

According to a newly unsealed indictment, former President Donald Trump faces dozens of charges for his handling of classified documents after he left political office.

Federal prosecutors say Trump didnt just hold on to secret documents, but he tried to hide them, and failed to turn them over when asked. The indictment, unsealed Friday, says the classified documents contained information about the nations defense and weapons capabilities, including on the countrys nuclear programs.

But critics of the decision to charge Trump, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., say he has been treated differently than other politicians who have stored classified documents, including President Joe Biden. They also accuse the Department of Justice of engaging in a partisan political attack against Trump, who is a current Republican presidential candidate.

DOJ special counsel Jack Smith spoke about the 49-page indictment at a press conference Friday, where he defended the integrity of his investigation.

We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone, he said.

On Friday, Utahs two Republican senators had different reactions to the news of Trumps indictment.

Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee released a statement after the indictment was unsealed, where he criticized the Biden administration for charging Trump, saying it echoes despotism.

The Biden administrations actions can only be compared to the type of oppressive tactics routinely seen in nations such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, which are absolutely alien and unacceptable in America. It is an affront to our countrys glorious 246-year legacy of independence from tyranny, for the incumbent president of the United States to leverage the machinery of justice against a political rival. Such an act of absolute disrespect echoes despotism, making it fundamentally at odds with American democratic values, Lees full statement said.

This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of records on Dec. 7, 2021, in a storage room at Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., that had fallen over with contents spilling onto the floor. Trump is facing 37 felony charges related to the mishandling of classified documents according to an indictment unsealed Friday, June 9, 2023. | Justice Department via Associated Press

When news first broke of the coming indictment, Lee released a series of tweets and retweets that suggested the charges against Trump are politically motivated.

Sitting president indicts leading challenger. Totally normal, Lee wrote in a tweet.

Sen. Mitt Romney also released a statement Friday where he said Trump brought these charges upon himself by not responding to Department of Justice requests to return the classified documents.

His full statement reads:

Like all Americans, Mr. Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence. The government has the burden of proving its charges beyond a reasonable doubt and securing a unanimous verdict by a South Florida jury.

By all appearances, the Justice Department and special counsel have exercised due care, affording Mr. Trump the time and opportunity to avoid charges that would not generally have been afforded to others.

Mr. Trump brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities to do so.

These allegations are serious and if proven, would be consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest, such as withholding defensive weapons from Ukraine for political reasons and failing to defend the Capitol from violent attack and insurrection.

Romney voted twice to impeach Trump and has been a frequent critic of his actions.
Sprinklers water a lawn at a home Thursday, June 8, 2023, in Las Vegas. Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo signed a law this week, following passage by the Democratic-controlled Legislature, that would let the Southern Nevada Water Authority cap residential water flows in the future if the federal government dials back Nevada's share of water drawn from the drought-stricken Lake Mead reservoir. (AP Photo/John Locher) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

LAS VEGAS (AP)  Nevada has taken a dramatic, but not immediate, step toward limiting the amount of Colorado River water used in the most populous part of the nations most arid state, after lawmakers gave Las Vegas-area water managers the levers to limit flows to single-family homes.

Gov. Joe Lombardo signed a law passed by the Democratic-controlled Legislature to let the Southern Nevada Water Authority restrict the amount of water provided to homes  if the federal government further dials back Nevadas share of water drawn from the river.

This legislation builds on our efforts to protect sustainable growth on the county and state levels, the Republican governor said in a Tuesday signing statement that cited goals of balancing economic expansion with ensuring clean and stable water into the future.

In the Las Vegas area, ornamental lawns are already banned, swimming pool sizes are limited, almost all water inside homes is recycled, water cops patrol for leaks and fountains on the Las Vegas Strip use reclaimed water. Water agencies in Southern California, Phoenix and Salt Lake City joined last year in widening calls to rip out thirsty turf.

The new law pushes the region ahead of other places in the U.S. West in efforts to crack down on water wasters. But it's not a first. A water district serving homes in a celebrity enclave near Los Angeles threatened last year to slow deliveries to a trickle for wealthy customers who find monetary fines no deterrent to busting their water budgets.

In Arizona, Gov. Katie Hobbs announced last week that developers of projects in fast-growing Phoenix suburbs will have to show they can provide water to new homes from sources other than the depleted groundwater supply. The city of Scottsdale in January cut off water to homes in a neighboring unincorporated community, Rio Verde Foothills.

Southern Nevada Water Authority officials who sought the Nevada law insist they only intend to enact limits if necessary, and only after water authority board members approve a mechanism for limiting supply.

One method might be a device to restrict the flow to homes, Colby Pellegrino, water authority deputy general manager for resources, told the Legislature in testimony about the law.

The future of the Colorado River is uncertain, said Bronson Mack, spokesperson for the agency that delivers water from the Lake Mead reservoir to some 2.4 million Las Vegas-area residents and a tourism-dependent economy that attracts some 40 million visitors per year.

Mack said Friday that 80% of the nearly 580,000 single-family homes the authority serves would feel no effect if officials enforced the limit set in the law: 163,000 gallons (617,022 liters) of water per year. Apartment, hotel, commercial and industrial customers are exempt.

The average Las Vegas-area home uses about 122,000 gallons (461,820 liters), Mack said, well below the limit. The new law aims to curb excess water use by the top-most 20% of residential users, who the authority says draw 45% of the water.

We want to make sure we have tools in the toolbox so we can manage water demands and continue to ensure we meet the communitys water needs in the future, Mack said.

The law drew bipartisan support and backing from environmental groups including the Sierra Club and Great Basin Water Network. It comes amid increasingly aggressive efforts by federal, state, municipal and tribal officials in seven Western U.S. states that rely on the river to limit use.

In May, water administrators in Arizona, Nevada and California announced a breakthrough pact to cut their combined use of the dwindling Colorado River in exchange for funding from the U.S. government, and to avoid forced cuts by federal water administrators.

The Colorado River carries snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California in Mexico. Along the way it is tapped and dammed to provide some 40 million people with drinking water and hydropower, as well as crucial irrigation for farms that grow most of the nations winter vegetables. It has become threatened in recent years by climate change, rising demand and a multi-decade drought.
On Friday 9 June, the European Commission for Democracy through Law (the Venice Commission) recommended that Ukraine postpone the implementation of the so-called anti-oligarchy law, which the European Commission has identified as one of the criteria for Kyiv's further movement towards EU membership.

Source: Denys Maliuska, Ukraines Minister of Justice, reported by European Pravda

Details: Maliuska recalled that the European Commission had stipulated the adoption of anti-oligarchy legislation as a condition for Georgia, and the Venice Commission had criticised it because of the individual approach proposed in it.

Quote: "Ukrainian oligarchs expected that the same thing would happen with the Ukrainian law on oligarchs: there would be crushing criticism, which would lead to the law simply being buried and the start of negotiations on joining the EU being delayed. I will say right away: this did not happen," he added.

After discussions with Venice Commission experts, Maliuska added, the experts decided that the Ukrainian "anti-oligarchy" law does not violate the rights of oligarchs, as the Georgian one did. However, they recommended that Ukraine postpone the implementation of the law on oligarchs in view of the war.

"The fact is that the war significantly changes the balance of power in Ukraine and significantly reduces the influence of oligarchs, both due to the destruction of their businesses and the functioning of state authorities in wartime. Consequently, it is extremely difficult to properly assess the impact of the oligarch law on the political and legal systems," Maliuska explained.

The minister promised that the "pause" in the dialogue with the Venice Commission "will not last long".

The Venice Commission was supposed to issue an opinion on the Ukrainian anti-oligarchy law in March. However, at the last moment, at Ukraines request, the consideration of the law was postponed until at least the middle of the year.

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The vice presidents visit was accompanied by a string of announcements from the Biden-Harris administration, including more than $100 million in new assistance for the region.

Vice President Kamala Harris trip to the Bahamas marked a significant step in the United States relationship with the Caribbean as it was both historic and consequential.

She is the highest-ranking White House official to visit the Caribbean nation since John F. Kennedy in 1962, said a White House senior official during a press call on background for Harris daylong trip Thursday.

Vice President Kamala Harris (left), in Nassau, Bahamas, on Thursday, co-hosts the U.S.-Caribbean Leaders Meeting with Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis (right), chair of the Caribbean Community. Harris announced more than $100 million in new aid for the region. (Photo: Screenshot/YouTube.com/White House)

The vice presidents visit, which included a meeting with Caribbean leaders, was accompanied by a string of announcements from the Biden-Harris administration, including more than $100 million in new assistance for the region for needs like getting access to banking and combating the climate crisis.

The financial commitments are in direct response to needs communicated by Caribbean leaders to the U.S. in previous meetings hosted by Harris over the past year.

Strengthening the U.S.-Caribbean relationship is a priority for me, as it is for President Joe Biden, said Harris, who is of Jamaican descent, during Thursdays U.S.-Caribbean Leaders Meeting, co-hosted by Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis.

The Biden-Harris administration used Harris historic trip to announce $20 million toward the Caribbean Climate Investment Program to incentivize the private sector to develop clean energy technologies in the region. Additionally, the White House issued $15 million to support and strengthen emergency response efforts by the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency.

The vice president announced she is also working with the World Bank to help Caribbean nations get more access to increased banking services, including low-cost concessional financing. Harris met with the World Banks new president, Ajay Banga, this week and helped coordinate his virtual attendance at Thursdays meeting with Caribbean leaders.

Vice President Kamala Harris (second from left) addresses the U.S.-Caribbean Leaders Meeting aside other world leaders in Nassau, Bahamas, on June 8. (Photo: Screenshot/YouTube.com/White House)

Several other major announcements were made, such as the United States officially declaring its support of a multinational force to address the crisis in Haiti, the future establishment of two embassies in the Eastern Caribbean, along with an expanded diplomatic presence in the region, and a new role within the Department of Justice to tackle the trafficking of firearms to the Caribbean.

We are neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, said Harris, and the security and prosperity of this region requires the type of collaboration and partnership that we have developed and continued to grow.

U.S. Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett, a delegate representing the U.S. Virgin Islands, applauded the vice presidents trip to the Bahamas as a really important demonstration that the United States is going to further the designation that [President] George W. Bush made that the Caribbean is the United States third border.

Plaskett said as the 50th anniversary of the intergovernmental organization, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), nears in July, she would also like to see the administration and members of Congress have a presence in Trinidad to show support for the issues that are important in the Caribbean region, including climate, transportation, broadband and energy.

While the benefits for the Caribbean are clear, the congresswoman also noted the great potential for the U.S. as well.

Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett, the U.S. Virgin Islands delegate, delivers remarks in February at a congressional hearing. This week, she applauded Vice President Kamala Harris visit to the Caribbean, (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The Caribbean region, outside of oil and gas  are the fifth-largest importer of American goods, noted Plaskett. Because so few goods are actually created in those nations and having them rely on the United States than other players would significantly support us.

She said her office and members of the House Caribbean Caucus  such as Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) and Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.)  are trying to find ways in which we can show the benefits of the United States engagement in the region.

Last week, Plaskett introduced the DiasporaLink Act, which would request an assessment of the value, cost and feasibility of developing a trans-Atlantic submarine fiber optic cable that would provide high-speed internet connection to Africa and throughout the Caribbean from American soil.

Its going to provide not just national security for us in the United States and Africa, in terms of security, but economically as well, said Plaskett. Having direct links with the United States is going to really boost digital engagement  [especially] digital nomads, who are looking for new homes and new places to have their businesses.

The objective is also to connect the Black diaspora. Were looking to that as a means of also growing the economies of Africa and making a means for African Americans, people of the African diaspora, to be much more engaged as well, Plaskett said.

Joseph Tolton, a Pan-African advocate, told theGrio that he sees Harris trip to the Bahamas and the White Houses reengagement in the Caribbean as a signal that the administration wants to have an approach with nations of the global south and Black-led nations that are guided by a sense of equity and mutual respect.

President Joe Biden (center) poses with African leaders during the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit on Dec. 15, 2022, in Washington. Pan-African advocate Joseph Tolton called Harris trip this week to the Bahamas and White House reengagement in the Caribbean a sign the administration wants an approach with nations of the global south and Black-led nations that are guided by a sense of equity and mutual respect. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Tolton, who is the executive director of Interconnected Justice, says the Biden-Harris administrations announcements on Thursday showed that it takes seriously its relationship with CARICOM.

Biden really wants to lead, I think, a new, nuanced world order with a clear alignment of nations and regions that are assembled based on our common values and commitments to democracy, open markets and human rights, he said.

The announcements around providing support for Haiti amid economic and political instability were especially noteworthy to Tolton, who described it as huge and desperately needed.

Harris pronouncement that the U.S. supports a multinational force to intervene in the poor Caribbean nation is something that Prime Minister Ariel Henry has been asking for.

The multinational force is really important because it should not be the U.S. alone, as kind of an imperial power going in, said Tolton. It would be great to have some Black republics or Black nations, or even the [African Union] peacekeeping forces, as a part of this as well.

Gerren Keith Gaynor

Gerren Keith Gaynor is a White House Correspondent and the Managing Editor of Politics at theGrio. He is based in Washington, D.C.

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The post Vice President Harris historic trip to the Bahamas pivotal for US-Caribbean relations appeared first on TheGrio.
'Justice for my dad;' Vicki Shelton convicted of Topeka murder of decorated Vietnam vet

A Shawnee County District Court jury convicted Vicki Lee Shelton on Thursday of the reckless second-degree murder in Topeka of decorated Vietnam veteran Harvey Lee Baker, shown here, who lived with her.

A Shawnee County District Court jury convicted Vicki Lee Shelton Thursday of the reckless second-degree murder in May 2022 in Topeka of decorated Vietnam veteran Harvey Lee Baker, who lived with her.

Baker's daughter, Nicole Folger, said Friday she thought Shelton should have been convicted of first-degree murder, with which she had been charged.

"The verdict is not exactly what we wanted, but I'm very thankful that they did get some justice for my dad," Folger said.

Folger said of Shelton, "I'm glad that she's going to jail because we don't need people like that on the street."

How was Harvey Lee Baker killed?

Shelton lived with the 74-year-old Baker in a mobile home at 1900 N.W. Lyman Road, Lot 16, where he was killed on May 4, 2022, said Shawnee County District Attorney Mike Kagay.

Law enforcement officers were called the following day to the scene, where they found Baker deceased in the mobile home with severe blunt force trauma to his head, he said.

Officers then found Shelton at a downtown Topeka hotel and arrested her after confirming she did indeed live with Baker, Kagay said.

When will sentencing be?

Shawnee County District Court Judge Brett Watson scheduled Shelton to be sentenced Aug. 10.

Jurors convicted Shelton, 62, of the lesser charge of second-degree murder after Kagay's office charged her with with intentional and premeditated first-degree murder in Baker's death.

Kansas statute describes reckless second-degree murder as the killing of a human being committed unintentionally but recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.

Victim's daughter: Things the jurors saw were 'horrific'

Folger, who lives in Wichita and is one of Baker's four children, was present for the entire trial, which began Monday.

Two of Baker's other children were present for Thursday's verdict, she said.

Folger said she wanted to thank Topeka police detectives and the case's prosecutor, Assistant Shawnee County District Attorney Will Manly, for the excellent job they did.

Folger also thanked the jury.

"I know that the things that they saw were horrific," she said.

Folger said her father suffered numerous injuries, including blunt trauma wounds, lacerations, puncture wounds, throat injuries and bruises, with one of his eyes having been swollen shut.

How was Harvey Lee Baker honored for valor shown in Vietnam?

Baker received a Silver Star for valor displayed with the Marines in Vietnam on Feb. 26, 1969, when he saved the lives of two fellow Marines and killed an enemy soldier in hand-to-hand combat as he tried to attack one of them.

Baker, who was a private first class, was taking part at the time in a search-and-destroy operation in a dense jungle area, his citation said.

Heavy small arms fire and anti-personnel mines detonated by a North Vietnamese Army unit occupying a well-concealed position mortally wounded two Marines who were with Baker while seriously injuring two others, it said.

"Reacting instantly, Private First Class Baker boldly moved between the enemy and his fallen comrades and, taking advantage of the terrain, commenced delivering fire which enabled the remainder of his company to deploy into effective fighting positions," the citation said. "When a hostile soldier attacked one of the wounded Marines, Private First Class Baker fearlessly charged forward from his position and intercepted the attacker and killed the man in hand-to-hand combat."

Baker then returned to his covered location and continued firing at the North Vietnamese soldiers, who made a disorganized withdrawal, the citation said.

Contact Tim Hrenchir at threnchir@gannett.com or 785-213-5934.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Vicki Lee Shelton convicted of Topeka murder of Harvey Lee Baker
An online fundraiser has identified the victims of a shooting that led to a rollover crash in the Rural Estates. The GoFundMe has identified the victims as Scott McCandless and girlfriend Amy Chesser, an accomplished swamp buggy racer. Her father, Leonard Chesser, is known as "The Godfather of Swamp Buggy Racing" in the sport's community. He's won more swamp buggy races than any driver in the history of the sport, which started in Collier County in 1949.

An online fundraiser has identified the victims of a shooting that led to a rollover crash in the Rural Estates.

The GoFundMe has identified the victims as Scott McCandless and girlfriend, Amy Chesser, an accomplished swamp buggy racer.

Her father, Leonard Chesser, is known as "The Godfather of Swamp Buggy Racing" in the sport's community. He's won more swamp buggy races than any driver in the history of the sport, which started in Collier County in 1949.

The fundraiser says both suffered life-threatening injuries.

"While much remains unknown about the events that led to their injuries, it is certain that both have sustained brain trauma that will likely impact them for the rest of their lives," the fundraiser organized by Hunter Hoolihan reads in part. "A very long, challenging road to recovery lies ahead. Amy and Scotty were both airlifted to a trauma hospital where they continue to fight for the miraculous recoveries we are all praying for."

Human remains found: CCSO seeks answers after human remains found March 2022 launch homicide investigation

Hoolihan wrote that the fundraiser aims to secure the highest level of care and provide for them in challenges they may face during their recoveries.

A separate fundraiser is planned for Saturday at Whiskey Park, 3380 Mercantile Ave., Naples, during the Redfish Showdown Fishing Tournament.

Jessica Hoolihan, married to Chesser's nephew, said the family isn't yet ready to comment.

What happened on June 1?

According to an incident report from the Collier County Sheriff's Office, around 11 p.m. June 1, deputies were dispatched to the intersection of Immokalee Road and Twin Eagles Boulevard in the Rural Estates.

They saw a pickup had turned over east on Immokalee Road. Both were trapped, leading authorities to cut the seatbelts. They later airlifted both to Gulf Coast Medical Center in Fort Myers, the report indicates.

Investigators later found both had been shot.

Karie Partington, spokesperson for the sheriff's office, said no one had been arrested as of Friday afternoon.

The Collier County Sheriff's Office released Thursday afternoon the photo of the pickup Amy Chesser and McCandless were traveling in, aiming to generate new tips for their investigation. They hope someone will recognize the large distinct window decal and contact law enforcement with information.

Authorities hope newly-released footage of a pickup allegedly involved in a road rage shooting that led to a rollover crash will help them crack the case. The back window of the alleged pickup has three stickers that read "Lake & Bay," "SWC Audio" and "wet sounds." The pickup was carrying two people who were seriously injured in a shooting and rollover crash in Golden Gate Estates last week.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Collier County Sheriffs Office at (239) 252-9300 or to remain anonymous, call Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers at (800) 780-8477.

Tipsters may also be eligible for a cash reward of up to $3,000 if their tip leads to an arrest.

Tomas Rodriguez is a Breaking/Live News Reporter for the Naples Daily News and The News-Press. You can reach Tomas at TRodriguez@gannett.com or 772-333-5501. Connect with him on Twitter @TomasFRoBeltran, Instagram @tomasfrobeltran and Facebook @tomasrodrigueznews.

This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: Collier swamp buggy community rallies as search for shooter continues
Petr Popelka said his new job was a 'dream come true' (Eva MANHART)

The Vienna Symphony on Friday announced it had appointed Petr Popelka as its new chief conductor to replace Andres Orozco-Estrada, who walked out 14 months ago.

Orozco-Estrada had unexpectedly quit in April 2022 due to "unbridgeable differences", the symphony's PR manager Julia Brueggemann told AFP.

Popelka, 37, will take up his post as chief conductor designate to initially conduct over 20 performances with the orchestra in the 2023/2024 season starting in September.

He will then take up the position of chief conductor from September 2024 for an initial period of five years.

Born in Prague in 1986, Popelka trained as a double-bass player and later joined the Staatskapelle Dresden under principal conductor Christian Thielemann.

Popelka described his new job as "a dream come true" in a statement published on his website.

"Even as a teenager, I regularly drove from Prague to Vienna with my parents to listen to the greatest orchestras in the world in this city," he said.

"To me, the Wiener Symphoniker is the musical embodiment of Vienna, an orchestra that captures and evokes the spirit of the city, an ensemble with a great tradition but, above all, an orchestra that has always encapsulated a modern pioneering spirit".

Popelka is currently chief conductor of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra Oslo as well as the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra.

He is also a composer.

kym/ach
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 9)  The Commission on Audit (COA) has flagged the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) for not returning unutilized cash deposits to the parties in the election case filed by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in 2016.

In its 2022 report uploaded on its website on May 18, state auditors found the PET has a balance of over 13.3 million in cash deposits for the electoral protest filed by Marcos against then Vice President Leni Robredo.

They said the PET should return over 5.1 million to the president and 8.1 million to Robredo since the case had already been resolved two years ago.

The inability of management to return unutilized excess cash deposits of the protesting parties is not in conformity with Rule 33 of the 2010 Rules of PET, and places PET in unnecessary indebtedness from a private individual and the President of the Philippine Government, COA said.

The cash deposits were made to cover expenses for the electoral protest such as the bringing of ballot boxes and other election paraphernalia to the tribunal.

The PET is mandated as the sole judge of all contests relating to the election, returns, and qualifications of the president-elect and the vice-president-elect. It is composed of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, acting as its chairman, and the other associate justices as members.

Marcos questioned the results of the 2016 polls where he lost to Robredo for the VP post by 263,473 votes.

The court unanimously junked the protest following a recount in three provinces chosen by Marcos.

CNN Philippines has reached out to the camps of Marcos and Robredo for comment.

Auditors also questioned the PET for its failure to remit over 415,000 in collections from filing fees from 2005 to 2021 to the Judiciary Development Fund.

The amount covers filing fees from protestants and counter protestants including former presidential candidate and actor Fernando Poe Jr. and former president, now Pampanga Representative Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

COA said the bank account for filing fees has been dormant.
In the primaries, where mostly registered Republicans will choose their partys candidate, there can be upsets, but Trump presently holds a commanding lead among Republicans, and looks unstoppable (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Happy days. Donald Trump could be in jail for 100 years, if you tot up all the latest charges against him for unlawfully holding classified documents and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

No doubt his supporters will already be making preparations for the Trump 2124 presidential bid, such is his perceived immortality. Trump, even if he died in jail, could be cryogenically frozen, ready for a run a century or so, perhaps against some descendant of the Clinton, Obama or Biden families. But, snarking aside, this is a grim moment for Trump, and will prove troubling for America.

Most worryingly for Trump, things in this case are moving extremely fast. The special counsel, meaning the federal prosecuting lawyer, is Jack Smith, a former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, of all things.

Before that, he was in charge of public integrity unit at the US Department of Justice. His appointment is open-ended, but that doesnt of course mean that the prosecution will meander along at leisure.

The directive establishing his investigation into Trump and the missing official papers notes that Trump is a current candidate for president, and the clear inference of that is that Smith and his team will want to complete as much of the process before the campaigning for the 2024 contest begins.

All the wisecracks about Trump conducting his campaign from a jail cell, or even moving the Oval Office into a penitentiary have a serious point  the convention is that public prosecutors must avoid interference in the democratic process. Hence Smith wanting to get this out of the way rapidly. That sense of urgency doesnt seem to be quite the same for some of the parallel cases into Trumps alleged interference with the 2020 election results, the transition of power in 2021 and the attempted insurrection at the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Those would be even more protracted than the present one.

Hence the fast pace of developments now, and Trump will apparently surrender to the authorities to face charges as early as Tuesday, his second time in a court room since the beginning of April (though that time not on federal charges  this is another order of judicial first). In April, Trump was arraigned and pleaded not guilty to 34 New York State felony charges relating to falsifying business records, stemming from supposed hush money payments made to the adult actress Stormy Daniels at the time of the presidential campaign in 2016.

Now, in Miami, he faces a similar ritual. There may well be many more to come, given the array of legal actions against him, including a potentially explosive one in Georgia, where the district attorney in Fulton County is mulling charges around efforts by the former president and his allies to overturn the 2020 election there. And, only last Thursday, Trumps lawyers requested a federal court in New York to reduce the penalty awarded against him in the sexual assault and defamation civil case won by writer E Jean Carroll, from $5m down to $1m, or else grant him a new trial. Last month a jury found the ex-president liable for sexually abusing and defaming her.

Behind the arraignment in Miami on Tuesday  another media circus  its not clear how quickly things will proceed, but it may be that the latest case runs into the earliest stages of the Republican primaries, which begin voting in February. The pace of events is already picking up, with the declaration by former vice-president Mike Pence that he is going to run for the White House.

Will the welter of legal cases against him damage Trump? The short answer is that they wont within his own party, where the base think him innocent and the victim of conspiracies. But for the wider electorate, voters may think more carefully about whether they want such a volatile personality back in the White House  from where he pledges to enact retribution against his enemies.

In the primaries, where mostly registered Republicans will choose their partys candidate, there can be upsets, but Trump presently holds a commanding lead among Republicans, and looks unstoppable. Indeed, after the Manhattan indictment (related to the Stormy Daniels affair), Trumps popularity actually rose among Republicans.

It seems that the more and the worse the changes against Trump grow, the more he looks the victim, persecuted by a vindictive Establishment run by radical Democrats and RINOs (Republicans in name only). Trump denies all, and says that Im an innocent man. Im an innocent personthe corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been indicted. His supporters are inclined to believe him: eight in ten believe he is being victimised.

Of the many charges approved by a grand jury to be levelled against Trump, the ones that are the most grievous, politically dangerous, and intriguing, are the ones relating to him obstructing justice. Of course, no ones surprised that Trump has this one on his charge sheet, because weve become so inured to his unorthodox ways and his utter contempt for the law  that is not the least of the damage he has inflicted on American democracy. But its still a sobering, unprecedented moment, and an historic one for a former president to be faced with such a federal indictment. Just for the record, as they say, the full gamut of offences reportedly runs as follows: wilful retention of national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document, corruptly concealing a document, concealing a document in a federal investigation, and engaging in a scheme to conceal and false statements.

The conspiracy to obstruct justice is one that will surely offend many Americans the most. Any president or other official might end up with some official sensitive or even top secret documents at their home if they were granted sufficient clearance. Jo Biden infamously ended up with some such material form his time as vice president under Barack Obama dumped in his garage. In electronic form, funnily enough, Trump alway accused Hilary Clinton of doing much the same, via her notorious use of a private email account. Indeed, Trump approved a 2018 law to upgrade such offences from a misdemeanour to a felony, a move which has comeback to bite him.

But the question is - what was he doing with these documents concerning national defence and relations with North Korea, Russia and others. Why keep them, and refuse to hand them back? What possible us could they be? No doubt more will emerge during the legal proceedings. Even Trump might not survive such revelations.
Ukraine is going to keep coming for us with counter-attacks, acknowledges Putin

Ukrainian service members ride a BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicle near the front line city of Bakhmut - Reuters

Vladimir Putin said he expects Ukraine to keep attacking as he acknowledged that an offensive to push Russian troops out of the country had begun.

All counter-offensive efforts so far have failed, Putin said in comments to a Russian journalist, but the offensive potential of the Kyiv regime still remains.

The remarks came as he announced that he will deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus from July 6, marking the first time Moscow has deployed such weapons outside Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Ukraine has launched several large attacks against Russian forces in the south of the country since Monday in what appears to be the start of a major offensive push.

Zelensky in constant communication with military

Earlier on Friday Volodymyr Zelensky for the first time acknowledged the campaign developing in the south of the country, but said it was too early to talk about it.

I am in constant communication with our military. The commanders of Khortytsia, Tavria, all those involved in the hottest areas, the Ukrainian president said in a video message.

Volodymyr Zelensky

He added that there is progress in Donbas, but said: It is not time to talk about it yet.

The Khortytsia and Tavria operational-strategic groups are the major Ukrainian formations fighting in southern Ukraine.

A military spokesman said in an update on Friday that the enemy continues to conduct defensive actions on Zaporizhzhia and Kherson directions, but did not comment on Ukrainian actions there.

The Russian ministry of defence said on Friday that its forces had repelled two Ukrainian assaults south of Orikhiv in the Zaporizhzhia region and four near Velyka Novosilka, about 50 miles further east.

There were also reports of a Ukrainian attack on the village of Lobkove, 15 miles to the west.

The fightings progress is almost impossible to confirm because of the Ukrainian reporting blackout. Most reports came from pro-Russian war bloggers and cannot be independently confirmed.

Alexander Sladkov, a correspondent for Russian media, said the line was stable and Ukrainian attacks had so far failed to make progress despite intense fighting.

War Gonzo, a blog with close ties to the military and the Wagner mercenary group, said the situation was serious and the Ukrainians had succeeded in reaching Russian lines near the village of Robotino, southeast of Orikhiv, during a night attack.

None of the claims could be independently verified, and propagandists on both sides released drone footage to give the impression that they were winning.

One video published on a pro-Russian Telegram channel showed what appeared to be one Ukrainian Leopard 2 tank and at least four Bradley fighting vehicles disabled and abandoned in a field. The Western donated armour appeared to have hit mines.

Another, published by pro-Ukrainian sources, showed a number of Russian infantrymen abandoning trenches and fleeing on foot in the face of a Ukrainian attack.

Elsewhere, the Ukrainians claimed to have advanced 1,200 metres in 24 hours near Bakhmut in Donbas, a significant gain if confirmed.

Serhiy Cherevaty, a military spokesman, said the attack had taken advantage of Russian confusion during a troop rotation.

Ukrainian soldiers on the front line - Roman Chop/AP

A Ukrainian breakthrough in Zaporizhzhia region could threaten to cut the land corridor connecting Russia to Crimea, isolating Russian troops there.

Russia has built defensive lines several miles deep in anticipation of the offensive.

Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at the Centre for Naval Analysis, told The Economist: It is too early to judge the operation, as much of the fighting has only reached Russias initial lines. The indications are that Ukrainian forces have made gains, digging into Russian lines, but also that the fighting is heavy, resulting in losses.

Major General Ivan Popov, the commander of Russias 58th army, which is defending the area, said in a voice note shared by Russian military bloggers that attacking forces included Ukraines 47th separate assault brigade.

The 47th is one of several to have undergone training in Britain and be equipped with Western weapons in preparation for the counter offensive.

There was no confirmation from the brigade. The last message on its official Telegram account was posted on Sunday and says: Plans love silence. There will be no start announcement.

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People walk by a Walgreens, owned by the Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc., in Manhattan, New York City

By Brendan Pierson

(Reuters) -Walgreens Boots Alliance has agreed to pay $500 million to New Mexico to settle claims that its pharmacies helped fuel opioid addiction in the state by failing to stop illegal pill sales, lawyers for the state announced on Friday.

The settlement, the largest obtained by New Mexico against a single company over opioids, came after a non-jury trial last year in the state's lawsuit against the company. The judge overseeing that trial had not yet ruled on the state's claims.

"We are confident that this record settlement positions New Mexico to turn the tide on this deadly epidemic," Mark Pifko, a lawyer for the state, said in a statement.

New Mexico has now settled all of its major opioid-related lawsuits, recovering more than $1 billion including Friday's deal, Pifko said.

Walgreens did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement. A spokesperson for the company declined to comment.

More than half a million people died from drug overdoses in the United States from 1999 to 2020, with opioids playing an outsized role. Overdose deaths have risen further since then, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

New Mexico's lawsuit against Walgreens was one of more than 3,300 filed by state and local governments accusing pharmacies and distributors of ignoring red flags that opioids were being diverted to the black market, and drugmakers of downplaying the risks of the addictive pain drugs.

The litigation, now winding down, has resulted in more than $50 billion in settlements, including a $5.7 billion nationwide deal between states and Walgreens in which New Mexico did not take part.

(Reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York; Additional reporting by Dietrich Knauth; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Alexia Garamfalvi)
Walt Nauta (far left) travelling with Donald Trump on 13 March, 2023

A personal aide to Donald Trump has been indicted over the alleged mishandling of classified documents, alongside the former president.

The aide, navy veteran Walt Nauta, worked at the White House and later at Mr Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.

Mr Nauta now faces charges including conspiracy and making false statements.

Mr Trump is facing 37 counts, including wilful retention of national defence information and obstruction of justice.

According to the 49-page indictment against the two men, Mr Nauta played a key role in moving and concealing boxes that contained classified information, both before and after a May subpoena that ordered Mr Trump to return government documents kept at his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

Additionally, the indictment says he unlawfully retained some files that were clearly marked as secret.

When interviewed by FBI agents in May 2022, Mr Nauta also allegedly made false and misleading statements about his knowledge of the documents, the indictment shows.

The charges against Mr Nauta include conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document, and concealing a document in a federal investigation, all of which carry maximum prison sentences of 20 years.

Two other charges - scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations - carry maximum sentences of five years in prison.

Mr Nauta's lawyer, Stanley Woodward, declined to comment on the case.

Before the indictment making the charges public was unsealed, Mr Trump accused the US Justice Department of "trying to destroy" Mr Nauta's life, "like the lives of so many others, hoping that he will say bad things about Trump".

"He is strong, brave and a great patriot," Mr Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Mr Trump is expected to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami, Florida, on 13 June, where the charges will be read in court.

CBS has reported that the name on the summons was that of Aileen Cannon, a Trump-appointed judge. Ms Cannon will, at least initially, oversee the indictment. It is unclear whether she will be assigned to the case for its duration.

Last year, Ms Cannon ruled that prosecutors cannot use documents seized from Mar-a-Lago for any "investigative purpose", a victory for Mr Trump's legal team.

On Friday, two of Mr Trump's lawyers - Jim Trusty and John Rowley - announced that they would no longer be representing him.

Mr Trump confirmed the shake-up of his legal team on Truth Social.

"This morning we tendered our resignations as counsel to President Trump, and we will no longer represent him on either the indicted case or the 6 January investigation," the pair said in a statement.

They both said it was "an honour" to spend the last year defending Mr Trump, but said that due to the case being filed in Miami, the lawyers felt it was a "logical moment" to step aside.

The US Secret Service is meeting with Mr Trump's team on Friday to arrange his travel and court appearance, law enforcement officials told CBS, the BBC's US partner.
Who is Walt Nauta, the Trump aide charged in classified documents case?

Walt Nauta, seen here helping Mr Trump, served as an aide to the former president.

An aide to ex-President Donald Trump has been charged alongside him over the alleged mishandling of national security documents.

Walt Nauta, a US Navy veteran, was a White House military valet to Mr Trump and joined him as an assistant at his Florida mansion after he left office.

Mr Trump said on social media that Mr Nauta was a "wonderful man".

Mr Nauta faces six charges, including conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding records,concealing documents and making false statements.

On his social media platform, Truth Social, on Friday, the former president defend Mr Nauta and accused officials at the US Department of Justice of "trying to destroy" the aide's life.

Mr Nauta "served proudly with me in the White House, retired as Senior Chief, and then transitioned into private life as a personal aide", Mr Trump wrote.

According to the indictment, Mr Trump directed his aide to move boxes that were a focus of the investigation from a storage room and to conceal them from Trump's attorney, the FBI and the grand jury.

Mr Nauta, whose first name is Waltine, served as President Trump's military aide, a role similar to a personal valet and sometimes referred to as a "body-man". He has been described as a constant presence in the Trump White House.

Born in Agat, Guam, a US territory, Mr Nauta enlisted in the US Navy in 2001, according to the Washington Post. Navy records show he ascended through the ranks to become a Senior Chief Culinary Specialist, in 2021.

According to the indictment, Mr Nauta became an executive assistant to Donald Trump in August 2021. Unlike other aides who sought to remain in Washington DC after Mr Trump lost the 2020 election, Mr Nauta relocated to Florida.

He continued to serve there as an aide to the former president at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach.

Mr Nauta's proximity to Mr Trump placed him in the crosshairs of the justice department probe into documents with classification markings that the ex-president took with him to Florida after leaving the White House.

In an exclusive interview with the Washington Post before the Mr Nauta was charged, family members in Guam described Mr Nauta as a "good boy" who moved to the United States "to enjoy his life, not to cause problems".

Pauline Torre, his mother, said that fact that her son was selected to serve the president "says it all".

But his aunt said he did everything "at the direction of the former president."

"All he was instructed was to put the boxes where they were supposed to go," Elly Nauta, his aunt, told the Post.
[Source]

A Korean spa in Washington state that requires nudity in some areas was forced to wipe its biological women only policy by a Seattle court earlier this week.

What started it: Olympus Spa, which has branches in Lynnwood and Tacoma, was hit with a discrimination complaint by transgender woman customer Haven Wilvich after the business refused her membership application in January 2020. The basis for this denial was that she has not undergone gender reassignment surgery.

Notice served: Wilvich submitted her complaint in May 2020 to the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC), which then served Olympus with a Notice of Complaint of Discrimination in March 2021.

The spa, which features the experience of Koreas traditional, sex-segregated bath houses called jjimjilbang, responded by maintaining its women-only policy. In a statement, owner Myoon Woon Lee and President Sun Lee said they are unwilling to remake the jjimjilbang we have worked so hard over many years to build and preserve, simply for the sake of promoting gender neutrality. They also cited their Christian faith in their decision to keep the policy.

More from NextShark: NYPD investigating brutal beating of Asian man at subway station captured in viral video

Lawsuit filed: WSHRC ultimately ruled that Olympus had discriminated against Wilvich. In a pre-findings settlement agreement to avoid prosecution, the commission ordered the spa to remove the term biological women from its website. The business was also forced to make staff members attend an inclusivity training. However, in March 2022, the spa sued Andreta Armstrong, the commissions executive director, alleging violations against their First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of association.

Lawsuit rejected: Seattle District Court Judge Barbara Jacobs Rothstein rejected Olympus suit on Monday, upholding the WSHRCs ruling that the spa had committed discrimination. Rothstein noted how the WSHRC defines sexual orientation as including those whose gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior, or expression is different from that traditionally associated with the sex assigned to that person at birth." She gave the business 30 days to amend their complaint and refile.

About the complainant: Wilvich, identifies as a "non-binary transgender woman." She is reported to be involved with the HIV Vaccine Trials Network as a program coordinator. Prior to her transition, she reportedly sat on the board of the Seattle Nonbinary Collective and described herself as a tall, bearded, transfemme, King County native.

More from NextShark: Top female golfer in the world Lydia Ko ends 2022 by getting married

In a February 2021 Facebook post, she wrote, I realized something important today. Im more woman than any TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) will ever be because I am an intentional woman whereas they are only incidental.

The bigger picture: Olympus appears to be the third Korean spa in the last two years to come under fire over actions against trans customers. In 2021, Los Angeles-based Wi Spa went viral after a female customer filmed her confrontation with staff over a pre-op trans guest who had been allegedly exposing her penis in front of women and girls. That turned out to be registered sex offender Darren Agee Merager, who was arrested in December 2022. Earlier this year, trans customer Alexandra Allie Goebert sued King Spa & Sauna in New Jersey, for allegedly denying her access to the womens section.

More from NextShark: Chinese Woman Goes Viral After Hitting Boss With Mop for Alleged Harassment

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NASA astronaut and Expedition 69 Flight Engineer Steve Bowen is pictured outside the International Space Station during his eighth career spacewalk, during which he routed cables and installed insulation to ready the orbital outpost for its next set of roll-out solar arrays.



NASA astronaut Steve Bowen during his eighth spacewalk outside the ISS.



The International Space Station (ISS) is about to get outfitted with new solar arrays to increase its power, and two astronauts are ready to put in that orbital handy work.

NASA astronauts Steve Bowen and Woody Hoburg will embark on a six-and-a-half hour spacewalk outside the ISS to install the Space Station Rollout Solar Array (iRosa). The spacewalk is set to begin at 9:15 a.m. ET on Friday. The space agency will broadcast the action live through NASA TV, as well as its website, with coverage beginning at 7:45 a.m. ET. You can also tune in to the ISS livestream through the feed below.

Read more



NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV

The pair of astronauts will install a roll-out solar array on the 1A power channel on the stations starboard truss structure. This will be the fifth set of iRosa solar arrays installed on the ISS, which arrived to the space station on Tuesday courtesy of SpaceXs most recent Dragon cargo mission.

On June 15, the same astronauts will venture out of the ISS again to install the sixth set of solar arrays on the 1B power channel on the starboard truss. The iRosas are designed to increase the space stations power generation capability by 30%, increasing the stations total available power from 160 kilowatts to up to 215 kilowatts, according to NASA.

This will be Bowens ninth spacewalk. The astronaut recently embarked on a spacewalk outside the ISS alongside United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi to continue installing hardware to support future power system upgrades to the ISS.

For more spaceflight in your life, follow us on Twitter and bookmark Gizmodos dedicated Spaceflight page.

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Following the flooding caused by the destruction of the dam at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, the water level in occupied Nova Kakhovka has begun to fall, but the city remains without electricity.

Source: Volodymyr Kovalenko, Mayor of Nova Kakhovka, on Radio Svoboda (Liberty)

Quote from Kovalenko: "As for Nova Kakhovka, the water is receding. Now it only remains in the park area, in the lower part of the city, that was flooded in the first few hours, and where the biggest wave was, with the water reaching up to six metres: in the Kazkova Dibrova area. That part is still flooded, but there is no housing there."

Details: Kovalenko also noted that there are still Russian military personnel in Nova Kakhovka.

"According to eyewitnesses, they are occupying vacant apartments on Dniprovsky Avenue, and people have told me that on the last non-flooded street in [the village of] Dnipriany, there have been instances of something that was being done two or three months ago: forced eviction," Kovalenko said.

The situation in the village of Korsunka, which is part of Nova Kakhovka, is "much more difficult and terrible", the mayor reports.

"It [the village of Korsunka] is situated in a much lower-lying area. I just spoke with a woman who lives in Korsunka: no one informed the residents that there was flooding. No evacuation was organised at all, and the water level in this village reached three metres. Today, some of the flooded houses collapsed: they were made of clay. The secondary school, the monastery, the library and the club were flooded, and the cemetery was washed away. I don't want to believe this, but a woman said: I saw dead people and coffins floating around the town," the mayor of Nova Kakhovka said.

Kovalenko said most people left Korsunka on their own. Local residents organised it themselves and took people out by boat.

At the same time, according to Kovalenko, representatives of the occupation administration asked people if they had internal Russian passports and suggested they "go to Chelyabinsk".

Now, according to the mayor, the water in Korsunka has gradually begun to subside: "Of those 3 metres, 80 centimetres are already gone."

Background:

On the morning of 6 June, Ukraines Operational Command Pivden (South) reported that Russian occupation forces had blown up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP), completely destroying the dam and the power plant's turbine hall. The draining of the Kakhovka Reservoir threatens the safety of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

The destruction of the Kakhovka HPP has caused an ecological catastrophe. Water from the reservoir has begun to flood towns and villages, and evacuations of local residents from dangerous areas have begun. As a result of the explosion, there are also problems with the drinking water supply in the towns of Kryvyi Rih, Marhanets and Nikopol.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy emphasised that the recent disaster at the Kakhovka HPP created by the Russians will not stop Ukraine from liberating its own territory and has not increased the occupiers chances of staying on this land..

After the explosion at the Kakhovka HPP, the Kazkova Dibrova Zoo in Nova Kakhovka, where about 300 animals lived, was flooded. Most of the animals died.

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A flooded street in Mykolaiv, June 8, 2023

At the mouth of the river Southern Buh (near the city of Mykolaiv), the maximum water level peak occurred at midnight with an overall rise of one meter seven centimeters, the center said.

Read also: Russians retreat up to 15 km from Dnipro River after Kakhovka dam destruction

At 9:00 am, the water level had fallen by seven centimeters.

On the evening of June 9, Mykolaiv mayor Oleksandr Senkevych stated that as of 5:00 pm, the water levels had stabilized at 100 cm.

Read also: Russia shells civilians fleeing flooding in Kherson Oblast, injuring eight

The Hydrometeorological Center also reported that water levels at the mouth of the Dnipro River had also begun to show a tendency to fall, after stabilizing at about five meters 32 centimeters.

At the Dnipro-Buh Estuary near Ochakov, the overnight peak water level was recorded at 26 cm, and had stabilized by morning.



Read also: Water level rises by over five meters in Kherson, situation is critical, hydrologist says

Many of the floodplains around the destroyed dam remain completely flooded, and evacuation efforts in Ukrainian-controlled territory in Kherson Oblast are ongoing. Russian forces are reported to be shelling rescuers and evacuees in the city, while preventing evacuations in occupied territory, which has been significantly more affected than the Ukrainian-controlled areas.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Thick smoke from hundreds of wildfires in Canada blanketed New York City on Wednesday, leaving it with another-wordly orange glow (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File) (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

As wildfires rage in Canada and smoke blankets the eastern US, the climate crisis has moved ever-more-firmly into the present. The air quality in New York City became the worst on the planet. Schools across the eastern US cancelled outdoor activities, flights have been halted, and Broadway stages have gone quiet. Welcome to the apocalyptic haze of the new AbNormal.

One of us is haunted by an eerily similar experience during the 2019/2020 black summer of Australia, when that continent was set ablaze by an unprecedented combination of record heat and drought. And just as was the case then, and again during the western US wildfires of summer 2020, the fossil fuel industry-coddling conservative media  in particular the Murdoch media empire  engaged in a massive disinformation campaign to convince us that its natural. Or a result of forest management policies. Or arson. Anything to draw our attention from the real culprit  the incendiary combination of greater summer heat and worse summer drought that is a direct result of fossil fuel burning and the warming of our planet.

Now theyre at it again, offering up the very same canards and distractions, hoping to prevent people from connecting the dots and thereby deny us the teachable moment we so need to spur greater climate action. So lets clear the air, if youll forgive the unfortunate pun.

We know that a hotter climate has increased fire weather  hotter, drier conditions that lead to larger, more intense wildfires. But theres another more subtle and specific way that human-caused warming is implicated in the current Canadian fires. Theres an extreme, slow, wavy jet stream pattern now over North America, leading to an extended period of unusually dry weather over parts of Ontario and Quebec, which has favored the development of these wildfires. This wavy pattern dips far north and south, meandering like a river, with a huge dip from eastern Canada down into the eastern United States. This stuck jet stream pattern is responsible for both the dry conditions in eastern Canada and the wind patterns that are transporting the wildfire smoke toward us in the United States.

Research suggests that climate change is making these slow, wavy summer jet stream patterns more common. In addition, eastern North America is one of the locations where we expect the greatest future increase in the hot, dry, summer weather conducive to fires. So the current fires are a preview of far worse things to come if we dont rein in fossil fuel burning and the resulting carbon pollution that continues to heat up the planet.

The air smells smoky in Pennsylvania where one of us lives, and the haze has even reached western North Carolina, where the other of us resides. The smoke from wildfires contains hundreds of chemicals, many of which are harmful to our health. The poor air quality has serious health implications, particularly for the young, the elderly, and people with conditions like asthma and other lung and heart issues. We hear a lot about poor air quality in cities like Beijing owing to the high concentration of tiny particles from coal burning. But the air quality is even worse in New York City right now due to the thick wildfire smoke, which is also high in these fine particles. In fact, its historically bad, the worst by far since such data have been collected. A rapid analysis found that people in New York are being exposed to levels of air pollution more than five times above the national air quality standard.

Known as PM2.5 (particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in size), these particles are so tiny  one-twentieth to one-thirtieth the width of a human hair  that they can be inhaled deep into the lungs and from there enter the bloodstream, where they can harm the heart, lungs and other vital organs, increasing the risk of stroke, heart attacks, and respiratory problems. Research has shown that the fine particles in wildfire smoke are up to ten times as harmful to human health as fine particles from other sources of air pollution. Whats more, the proportion of fine particles coming from wildfires is increasing, accounting for a quarter of these particles in the US in recent years, and up to half in parts of the West.

More of us are now exposed to wildfire smoke than ever before. Over the past decade, there has been a 27-fold increase in the number of Americans experiencing at least one extreme smoke day, defined as air quality thats unhealthy for all age groups. In 2020 alone, nearly 25 million Americans were affected by dangerous smoke. The increase has essentially wiped out the air quality gains made by the Clean Air Act in the U.S. West. And no matter where you live, there is no escape from the impacts. While the majority of large wildfires occur in the U.S. West, the majority (about 75 per cent) of the illness and death attributable to wildfire smoke occurs in the more population-dense U.S. East.

Because the effects are so far flung, increased wildfire smoke may well be the climate change impact that more of us are now experiencing than any other. But its far from the only impact already affecting our lives. For many, the melting of far-off glaciers and ice sheets is bringing sea level rise to their doorsteps. For others, more intense hurricanes and typhoons carrying more flooding rains and storm surge are wreaking havoc with their lives. Climate change is a global problem that brings local impacts to all of us. Coal burned in India means impacts in Indiana. Methane leaked in North America contributes to crop failures and famine a world away.

Given our decades of work on climate change, people often ask us where they should go to be safe. But in the era of human-caused climate disruption, there is no place to hide. For better or for worse, this is our planetary home. Lets preserve it.

Susan Joy Hassol is the director of Climate Communication. She publishes Quick Facts on the links between extreme weather and climate change, and authored a feature article on the importance of language in communicating on climate.

Michael E. Mann is presidential distinguished professor and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at The University of Pennsylvania. He is author of The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 9)  The Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) has released new rules and regulations on the recruitment and employment of land-based FIlipino migrant workers, notably adding a list of serious offenses that may lead to the cancellation of a recruitment agency's license.

The serious offenses, dubbed 20 "cardinal sins" by the DMW, include deployment of minors or those below the minimum age requirement; negligence of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) experiencing abuse; acts of graft and corruption including attempts to bribe DMW officials and personnel; placement of workers in jobs that are harmful to life, health, morality and dignity; allowing a non-Filipino citizen to head or manage a licensed recruitment agency; and reprocessing workers for jobs that are non-existent or different from the actual work.

In a briefing on Friday, Migrant Workers Secretary Toots Ople highlighted the agency will implement a one-strike policy against recruitment agencies that will violate the new set of rules and regulations.

"Dati kasi, dahil 1st offense, 2nd offense, 3rd offense ang daling palusutan, pwede kang magtago sa dami ng papel, sa dami ng proseso, ito kasi 20 very specific offenses na ang kapalit pag ginawa ng agency, cancellation ng license," Ople told reporters.

[Translation: Before, since there is a 1st offense, 2nd offense, 3rd offense, you easily wriggle out of it because of many papers and processes needed, but the new rules have 20 very specific offenses that if committed, will mean the cancellation of an agency's license.]

The DMW said less serious offenses will result in suspension of six months to one year, while agencies with light offenses will face suspensions of one to six months.

Undersecretary Bernard Olalia explained the DMW will have a "derogatory list" to flag recruitment agencies, and even their set of officers, that can no longer operate and ban them to apply for a new license in another formed group.

Under the new set of regulations, the DMW extended the validity of provisional licenses from two years to three years, and from four years to six years for regular licenses. The agency will also fast-track the process of deployment of migrant workers.

It increased the escrow deposit of recruitment agencies from 1 million to 1.5 million to expand their coverage of claims of OFWs over contract violations.

One person corporations are now also allowed to engage in overseas recruitment and employment.

Ople said the rules on OFW recruitment also seek to regulate the accommodations of recruitment agencies for its workers. She said they are pushing for more "gender responsive" facilities and accommodations.

"We aim for a rights-based approach and ease of doing business mindset to labor migration and migration governance," the DMW chief said. "This new set of rights-based rules will ensure better protection and empowerment of our OFWs. Likewise, it will enable the industry to succeed and flourish."

The new set of rules is a revised version of the 2016 Philippine Overseas Employment Administration rules and regulations, the DMW said, that may take effect around July as the agency has yet to complete the formal requirements needed for the issuance.

Ople said the agency is also set to update the rules and regulations on recruitment and deployment of sea-based OFWs as it is "heavily influenced" by rules for land-based workers
Where to find trust again in a world being remade by AI fakery

Zoe Petersen, Deseret News

The race to regulate powerful new artificial intelligence tools is in full swing as a growing number of industry experts, scientists and policymakers warn that the rising capabilities of this advanced technology could be marching a path toward an epic, future cataclysm, up to and including an as-yet-undefined extinction event.

Just last week, hundreds of distinguished scientists, academics and tech developers including Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and leaders of the major AI labs, including Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, signed on in support of a single-sentence missive issued by the nonprofit Center for AI Safety.

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war, the statement reads.

But as lawmakers and regulatory bodies in the U.S. and around the world scramble to catch up with AI developments that have progressed by unexpected leaps in recent months in hopes of staving off some near-future calamity, AI-generated content has been fomenting concern for years and is only getting better.

And one of the definitions of better when it comes to work generated by AI systems is that its increasingly difficult to detect or differentiate from the output of fleshly creators.

Related

The technology behind deepfake videos has been under development for decades and many point to a series of 2017 postings on Reddit as the first widely distributed examples. These manipulations, done by a user operating under the name deepfake, used face-swapping technology to replace subjects in pornographic videos with celebrities. After garnering a massive response Reddit would counter with new rules banning explicit content. But, these postings turned out to be an unfortunate bellwether of what was to come. Deepfake detection firm DeepMedia reports the number of deepfake videos posted online has tripled so far in 2023 and estimates some 500,000 deepfake videos and voice recordings will be posted globally by the end of the year. And the vast majority of the synthesized videos fall into the pornography category.

But, alongside the torrent of manipulated porn imagery, the output of the now ultra-advanced, AI-driven tools is showing up across the content spectrum.

Last month, an image showing black smoke pouring out of a building purported to be the Pentagon circulate widely on Twitter. Users quickly pointed out inconsistencies in the image and the Department of Defense discounted it as a fake in its own Twitter posting, but it generated enough concern to impact the major stock indices which dipped briefly in response to the false reports.

Some spoofs related to the upcoming 2024 presidential election cycle have begun appearing. The Republican National Committee produced a political ad it released in April that used AI-generated video imagery to depict concocted post-election scenarios should President Joe Biden be reelected.

NIGHTMARE: What if Joe Biden, the weakest president weve ever had, is re-elected? pic.twitter.com/b5HvY9GEr0  GOP (@GOP) April 25, 2023

Along with the doom-and-gloom AI fakes are plenty of more lighthearted postings  including the work of Belgian visual effects specialist Chris Ume who has posted a series of AI-created videos on social media site TikTok featuring A-list film star Tom Cruise doing various silly and benign activities. Ume has said the work wasnt meant to fool anyone and he sees the spoofs as a way to raise awareness of how advanced deepfake technology has become. Experts are impressed at just how convincing the videos are.

My first thought was theyre incredibly well done, digital image forensics expert and University of California, Berkeley professor Hany Farid, who specializes in image analysis and misinformation, told NBC News. Theyre funny, theyre clever.

Just saw the #deepfakes of Tom Cruise and feel like a monkey looking at a spacecraft pic.twitter.com/CRO5NpEMFa  Angad Singh Chowdhry (@angadc) February 26, 2021

So how do average internet users effectively navigate this fast-evolving world of fakery? And, perhaps more importantly, is there anything individuals can do to protect themselves from one day ending up as an unwitting character in an AI-generated video?

Dozens of companies are currently focused on building tools that can quickly and accurately identify the AI-generated faux from the real-world factual and most are employing artificial intelligence technology to be the detectors of content produced by the very same engines.

But a Utah startup, launched by a trio of local tech veterans, is pursuing a different angle, aiming to develop a process that mediates the easy certification of video, images and audio files that can then be used as the foils to locate and identify fake, and unauthorized use, of that information.

And the company, Salt Lake City-based Bunked, just earned its way into an exclusive accelerator program hosted by Amazon Web Services thats working to give emerging companies in the artificial intelligence space a running start.

The system under development by Bunked aims to use what might be best described as a reverse search engine that can detect when and where content thats been certified by its customers has been repurposed. If the use has been authorized, the content earns a certification badge confirming legitimacy and also includes a path back to source. But if it hasnt, Bunkeds service will immediately identify it with a badge noting its falsehood.

Bunked co-founder and CEO Cameron Bell said the rate at which AI capabilities are advancing and the growing access to advanced generative AI tools that can be operated easily by non-technicians underscores the critical need for more robust detection tools.

I dont think anyone saw this coming as quickly as it did, Bell said. We can now be scrolling through a timeline of fake content that is completely generated by a GPU, not a person.

When everything is in doubt, real footage holds no credibility. We are fixing that.https://t.co/5lDP2ZyB5m  BunkedAI (@bunkedai) May 30, 2023

Bunkeds initial work is focused on protecting personhood. But founders say theyre aiming to build out the system to enable certification and detection of the re-use of protected content, like a musicians voice or audio recordings or the works of a visual artist or other original content.

Bunked is now several weeks into a generative AI accelerator program hosted by cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services. The Utah company was one of only 21 startups selected from over 1,200 applicants. Accelerator cohort participants get access to a wide range of technical support, mentorship and networking opportunities in a fast-growing sector.

The Amazon accelerator participants also get a dividend thats extremely valuable to newly launched companies that, like Bunked, are self-financing early development efforts. And thats $300,000 worth of AWS cloud computing time, a precious commodity for the processing-heavy tasks of AI-related businesses.

Kathryn Van Nuys, head of startup business development in North America for Amazon Web Services, said the generative AI accelerator effort grew out of the companys recognition of a new wave of startups that are the natural outgrowth of the advancement of foundational AI systems like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and others.

Where we saw a need was to work with and support the best and brightest startups in the generative AI space, Van Nuys said. AWS is uniquely positioned to do so with our deep experience in machine learning and AI.

Van Nuys said the interest in the program far outpaced expectations and the cohort represents a wide range of AI business ideas including animation, a program to customize childrens literacy programs and a company aiming to protect enterprise data sets.

On top of the developmental support, Bunked and its fellow cohort companies will wrap up the program with a demo day in July that will also include an opportunity to meet with potential investors. And, like the interest shown by program applicants, Van Nuys said there is an equally fervent buzz in an investment community thats keen to be a part of an explosion in AI startup ideas.

For now, Bell and his fellow Bunked co-founders Cody Maughan and Sam Tanner, are focused on embracing the positive potential of advanced AI tools while developing the next big thing when it comes to aiding individuals and businesses who are facing myriad new challenges when it comes to accountability and reliability in the realm of digital content.

Now that were all connected to everyone, you dont know where things come from, Bell said. Weve expanded our world and trust as become an increasingly scarce commodity in todays world. Reestablishing that trust is what were trying to provide.
Whipple launched his re-election campaign with faulty crime stats. How did that happen?

Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple and the Wichita Police Department are scrambling to scrub inaccurate violent crime stats from the internet after a Wichita Eagle analysis found the department promoted junk data that Whipple used to boost his re-election campaign.

Whipple said he made an honest mistake based on an official source  the FBIs Crime Data Explorer  and conversations with Wichita police data analysts, who he said assured him the crime stats provided to the FBI were accurate.

The Eagle first reported on the inaccuracies May 31. The bogus claims were removed from his campaign website on Monday. Police also removed a link to the inaccurate data from its web page this week and told The Eagle theyre working to fix the mistake.

Whipple claimed multiple times  in an on-camera public statement and in a campaign announcement news release  that violent crime had been cut in half during his term as mayor. His campaign website repeated the claim at least four times, once with an added flourish, saying the citys violent crime was sitting at the lowest point in over a decade.

The message reached thousands of potential voters, with Wichitas three major television news outlets repeating the talking point in their coverage of his campaign announcement.

It wasnt true.

Violent crime actually spiked in Wichita during Whipples term, mirroring national trends in 2020 and 2021  which saw the most homicides during a two-year stretch in Wichitas recorded history, an Eagle analysis of previous reporting and five different datasets found. Some crime categories have slightly decreased each of the past two years but remain above pre-pandemic levels, according to data  which The Eagle found is incomplete  provided by the Wichita Police Department.

The FBIs Crime Data Explorer includes a line graph showing Wichitas violent crime dropped to a new low in 2021. But a check of the underlying data shows it left out at least 24 killings, 275 rapes, 200 robberies and 2,400 aggravated assaults  more than half of all violent crimes for the year.

Wichita had 54 homicides in 2021. The police departments crime stats page listed 43 classified as criminal homicides on the citys web page, which is three fewer than the number reported by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. The FBI data shows only 22 criminal homicides for that year.

For rapes in 2021, the FBI showed 162, just over half of the 295 reported by the KBI and far less than the 423 rapes on the WPD web page. The FBI data showed 1,394 aggravated assaults while KBI data showed 3,518, compared with 2,877 listed by the WPD. For robberies, the number reported to the KBI was 367 but the FBI lists only 200 of them. The citys web page said 465. All of the data originates from the Wichita Police Department.

After The Eagle asked which numbers should have been on the FBI database, the WPD provided a different set of numbers for 2021: 47 homicides, 438 rapes and 4,278 aggravated assaults  all higher than those reported in 2020. The department did not include robberies in the new set of data.

The Wichita Police Department cant explain why fewer than half of Wichitas 2021 violent crimes appear on the FBI database, which is based on WPD data, or why all of the datasets are different.

Lt. Aaron Moses, executive information officer for the department, said the Kansas Bureau of Investigation pulls data from the citys records management system and then passes it along to the FBI.

Moses also suggested a transition to a new records management system  NicheRMS365  may have contributed to the mix up. The City Council approved a contract with Niche in 2018 and it went live in April 2021.

The deadline for the KBI is January 31, Moses said. The deadline for the FBI is March 31. Due to the RMS transition in 2021 KBI provided an extension to WPD until April 15.

This wouldnt be the first time Wichita police submitted incomplete data because of the switch to Niche. The transition to a new records-keeping system resulted in thousands of faulty and incomplete crash reports to the Kansas Department of Transportation in 2021 that severely under-counted the number of accidents in Wichita.

Moses confirmed that Whipple spoke to WPD crime analysts to review the FBI data. He did not directly answer whether the analysts told Whipple the data was accurate.

The Wichita Police Department initially refused to answer questions about the erroneous data, directing The Eagle to the KBI and the FBI. It took six days of questioning for the department to admit the FBI data for 2021 appears inconsistent with our complete internal data.

After further questions, the WPD removed its violent crime stats from its web page, re-ran the numbers for 2021 and provided stats to The Eagle for 2023. The department did not provide data for 2022. The numbers for 2023 appear to be incomplete, as they include only nine of the 11 homicide cases the department has opened this year, according to Eagle records, which it shared with the WPD.

Thank you for providing that information, Moses said in an email. Case classifications can change based on a variety of different factors. Thanks again for bringing this to our attention.

While reporting this story, The Eagle looked at five different sets of violent crime data for Wichita: the KBIs annual crime index, the FBIs Crime Data Explorer, the WPDs Crime Stats web page, the WPDs Community Crime Map and new data the department pulled in response to questions.

All five show significantly different violent crime numbers for the past several years, with the largest discrepancies starting in 2020 and getting worse in 2021. KBI and FBI data is not yet available for 2022 and 2023.

The WPD removed its Crime Stats table from its web page after The Eagle asked about the differences. But it kept a link to its Community Crime Map, which provides more up-to-date crime stats by location but significantly under-counts violent crime in Wichita, data shows.

For instance, only 2,293 aggravated assaults in 2021 appear on the map compared to the 4,278 the department now says should have been reported to the FBI. The KBI data shows there were at least 3,518 that year. It is also missing some homicides, including the 2021 death of 17-year-old Cedric Lofton, a foster child who was killed by juvenile corrections employees at the Sedgwick County Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center.

Moses said the WPD counts the number of incidents while the KBI and FBI count the number of victims. Under that methodology, the WPD would count a quadruple murder as one homicide while the KBI and FBI would count it as four homicides. That difference does not explain the inconsistencies in data reviewed by The Eagle.

After you pointed out the discrepancies in the data, we removed the information from the WPD website while we reviewed the information, Moses said in the statement. We are currently reviewing that data to ensure consistency.

The Wichita Police Department is committed to accuracy and transparency, Moses said. We are reviewing our internal processes and engaging our LEO partners to ensure the most accurate and consistent data is available to the public.

Smart policing?

Whipple has had a complicated relationship with the police department.

He took office as the darling of the Fraternal Order of Police, which has since called on him to resign.

During the 2019 campaign, he got a surprising endorsement from the FOP, which had not endorsed a mayoral candidate since 2003, after he promised to approve spending to hire more officers.

For his inauguration, the FOP donated $2,500 to Wichitas Future PAC, a political action committee established by Chelsea Whipple, the mayors wife who is also his campaign treasurer. The PAC accepted donations as part of his inaugural gala in 2020.

Whipple made good on his promise to push for more spending for the department and raises for officers.

Whipple voted to increase the police budget each year he has been in office, raising police spending by nearly 25%  or $22.6 million  since 2019. By 2021, 137 police officers made more than $100,000 a year, including 117 sergeants, lieutenants and detectives. Last year, Whipple voted to bump up the starting salary for police recruits to $24 an hour.

In turn, the WPD had more officers on the street during Whipples term than at any time in the citys history, growing from 634 the year before he took office to a record high 681 in 2021.

But the increases to spending and staffing have not translated to lower violent crime rates. The citys 2021 high-water mark for police staffing was also one of the most violent years in Wichitas history, with near-record numbers of aggravated assaults, rapes and murders.

Do more officers equal less crime? Its more complicated than that, Whipple said. Its about being smart on crime, rebuilding public trust and taking advantage of relationships developed between the city, our officers and the public. Thats what has been shown to cut crime, and thats what Im focused on.

Whipples relationship with the police union soured after he began criticizing the departments handling of officer discipline and threatened to file a complaint against an officer who blocked him from using the wrong entrance at a neighborhood cleanup event, an incident for which he was found to be in violation of the city councils ethics code.

Whipple saw his re-election launch as an opportunity to celebrate the success of our WPD.

What I was trying to do was show that policy is headed in the right direction, and we have to have data that we can depend on, Whipple said. I cited my source and was told that there were no issues with reporting to the FBI by our WPD, and therefore I drew the conclusion based on numbers.

Whipple said the fact that crime spiked during the first half of his term does not show that city policy is headed in the wrong direction.

Wichita hired a new police chief in 2022. It is working to implement recommendations to improve department culture after the city hired Jensen Hughes, a top national consultant, in response to an Eagle investigation that found a pattern of racism, sexism, homophobia and attitudes celebrating violence against civilians in text messages between SWAT team members.

The Jensen Hughes report criticized the citys contract with the FOP, which Whipple voted in favor of in 2021, in part because of its pay structure. It grants officers a conduct bonus of $4,160 on average for not violating city policies  at a cost of $2.7 million to taxpayers. It also allows officers to trade conduct pay to avoid suspensions and discipline.

Whipple said hes in favor of making changes outlined in the Jensen Hughes report.

As far as the crime stats go, Whipple said he does worry that the incorrect stats he cited could hurt the public trust, which is why he removed the claim from his website and has vowed not to repeat the mistake.

The campaign gaffe has resulted in the WPD taking a second look at its crime stats and how it reports them to outside agencies and the public.

I actually think the situation is positive because it shows a flaw in the data that was reported to the FBI, Whipple said. My silver lining on this is now the data thats wrong can be corrected so that Wichita is more accurately presented.

I am very surprised this was not accurate, Whipple said. I had no reason to question it, I guess, in this situation. I wanted to use the same data that compares cities across the country.

Whipple said he was aware that other crime stats published by the KBI and the WPD showed higher violent crime in 2021 but chose to cite the FBI data because its a published, third-party standard that clearly shows statistical trends, commonly used for analysis when compared to other cities and states.

As mayor, I cite my sources, Whipple said. Im always concerned when something comes out thats inaccurate, but I would push back on you. It wasnt a claim, it was a reading of the FBIs database, which for nine out of 10 years that I went back was accurate, so I was reading the data that was available.

I appreciate that this inquiry has resulted in a better understanding of whats being published right now, and will lead to a correction of that, Whipple said. That is more important to me than any talking point or anything that could be interpreted as political.
Image: Samuel Corum (Getty Images)

Following unconfirmed claims from a former intelligence officerwho says the U.S. government captured a crashed spaceship of non-human originthe House Oversight Committee is now planning a hearing to investigate the issue further.



According to ABC News, the committee is in the early stages of planning this meeting after the Pentagon called the whistleblowers claims unsubstantiated. Republican Representatives Tim Burchett from Tennessee and Anna Paulina Luna from Florida will lead the investigation, as Luna confirmed on Twitter.

Read more

In addition to recent claims by a whistleblower, reports continue to surface regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena, an Oversight Committee spokesperson told ABC. The House Oversight Committee is following these UAP reports and is in the early stages of planning a hearing.

Thank you @RepJamesComer ! Very happy to announce @RepTimBurchett and myself will be working with the @GOPoversight team to lead out the investigation into UAPs (UFOs). pic.twitter.com/OzEPo2vhk3  Anna Paulina Luna (@realannapaulina) June 7, 2023

The move to meet comes after The Debrief reported on the supposedly leaked info on Monday. According to the outlet, David Charles Grusch, a veteran of the National Reconnaissance Offices Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, shared the classified information with Congress and the Intelligence Community inspector general. Now, the Pentagon told ABC News that the leak in unsubstantiated.

To date, [the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office] has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently, Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough said in a statement to ABC News.

Republicans leading an investigation into what appears to be a conspiracy theory might be a biting piece of irony considering the GOPs tendency to rally around the likes of QAnon, for examplebut it could also be an attempt to deflect, as former president Donald Trump faces ongoing legal woes. That some Republicans want to bring the topic of UFOs further into the limelight is hardly surprising, but not any less disappointing.

But while Gruschs leak feels sensational and credible considering hes a veteran of the team tasked with tracking unidentified aerial phenomena (the Department of Defenses updated name for UFOs), there are clear issues with his account, as evidenced by this weeks news coverage.

The byline of The Debrief article includes a writer for The New York Times, Ralph Blumenthal, and a veteran science journalist, Leslie Kean, but as Vanity Fair describes, the story ran into issues prior to publication. Before taking the story to The Debriefitself a small outlet that covers science, tech, and national defense newsBlumenthal and Kean reportedly took the story to Politico, The New York Times, and The Washington Postand all three outlets opted not to publish it.

If my editors said, "We need more time, don't know how much, to vet and publish your story about literal alien spaceships based on the account of someone who heard and read about literal alien spaceships," I'd say, "Please, thank you," not, "See ya later." https://t.co/gLQgIxpTAr  Sarah Scoles (@ScolesSarah) June 8, 2023

According to Vanity Fairs article, a source close to The Washington Post said the story failed to describe whether or not the members of Congress thought Gruschs information was legitimate. Meanwhile, a Politico spokesperson told Vanity Fair that the authors wanted a guaranteed publication date, which didnt leave the outlet enough time to rigorously report on the leak. The New York Times didnt respond to Vanity Fairs request for comment on the decision to pass. Blumenthal told Vanity Fair that the rush to publish was due to concerns that Gruschs identity as the whistleblower would leak online.

So NASA started solving the mystery. UFOs = bad data, not aliens; but this is not what people want to hear.  https://t.co/pPh02JeGAa  Prof. Abel Mendez   (@ProfAbelMendez) June 9, 2023

As a topic, UFOs, or UAPs and theyre now known, has seen higher coverage than usual in recent weeks. Late last month, NASA held a public meeting on the subject in advance of a report due later this summer. Unsurprisingly, this meeting exposed a substantial lack of high-quality data, while not revealing the presence of little green men in chrome spaceships.

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The White House announced a new set of actions to protect youth members of the LGBTQ community from political attacks by Republicans across the country, including appointing a new coordinator to combat the national surge of school book bans and providing a $1.7 million grant for youth mental health services.

The joint Biden-Harris announcement comes as Republican-backed anti-LGBTQ legislation has overtaken the nation. In just 2023 alone, almost 500such bills have been introduced across various states  such as Louisiana, Florida and Montana. Many of the bills have targeted limiting gender-affirming care, transgender youth sport participation, drag shows and discussions of gender and sexuality in schools.

As part of the announcement, the Biden administration said that the Department of Education would be appointing a new coordinator that would address the uptick in schools banning books that focus on LGBTQ and civil rights issues.

The administration announced the multi-agency effort ahead of the White Houses official Pride Month event, which was originally slated to take place Thursday, but was rescheduled to Saturday due to poor air quality conditions driven by Canadas wildfires.

We have some hysterical and, I would argue prejudiced, people who are engaged in all that you see going on around the country, President Joe Biden said during a press conference on Thursday. Its an appeal to fear, and its an appeal that is totally, thoroughly, unjustified and ugly.

The announcement includes news that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), along with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), will form the LGBTQI+ Community Safety Partnership to aid community organizations with safety training, protecting health care workers and reporting and addressing hate crimes.

The administration has also committed to supporting the mental health of youth in the LGBTQ community by providing plans for federal funds going towards mental health services for LGBTQ youth. HHS also will provide the LGBTQI+ Family Support Grant of $1.7 million to support the mental health of LGBTQ youth.

On top of that, the administration says it will address LGBTQ youth homelessness with the help of a new initiative under the Department of Housing and Urban Development called the LGBTQI+ Youth Homelessness Initiative.

The statement also said it will require state child welfare agencies to provide LGBTQ youth in foster care to be around resources that affirm them.

These are our kids. These are our neighbors. Its cruel. Its callous. Not somebody elses kids. Theyre all our kids, Biden continued.

The upsurge of anti-LGBTQ bills has been likened to the Jim Crow era and referred to as a loss of decades of progress in civil rights protection for the LGBTQ community. As a direct result of the upsurge, the Human Rights Campaign, an organization that aims to end anti-LGBTQ legislation, declared a state of emergency for the LGBTQ community on Tuesday mentioning an unprecedented climate of fear, hostility, and discrimination.

HRCs statement acknowledged that LGBTQ youth had been hit hard by the legislation.

Roughly a third of LGBTQ youth attribute mental health issues to the uptick in transphobic and homophobic legislation, The Guardian reported citing a survey by the Trevor Project.

At Thursdays press conference, Biden had a message for LGBTQ youth: Youre loved, youre heard and this administration has your back. I mean it.

We are not relenting one single second to make sure that theyre protected, he added.

Related...
WASHINGTON  Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid response coordinator, is leaving the Biden administration this month for a top position at Brown University.

Jha, who has overseen the administration's pandemic strategy since early 2022, will return to Brown as dean of its School of Public Health on July 1, the school confirmed in a news release Thursday.

Jha said in a statement: We are in a world drastically altered by the COVID-19 pandemic. For all we have accomplished to reduce illness and save lives, COVID-19 has exposed the weaknesses in our public health and health care systems. I look forward to returning to Brown to continue our groundbreaking work transforming public health education, research and practice to convert these weaknesses to strengths."

Jhas departure, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, comes about a month after the Biden administration ended the national emergency and the public health emergency tied to the Covid pandemic. Earlier in May, the World Health Organization declared an end to the global health emergency.

President Joe Biden praised Jha in a statement, saying, "As one of the leading public health experts in America, he has effectively translated and communicated complex scientific challenges into concrete actions that helped save and improve the lives of millions of Americans."

Biden named Jha as the Covid response coordinator in March 2022. He took over the job from Jeff Zients, who became Bidens second White House chief of staff. At that point, the U.S. was still grappling with Covid cases from new strains of the coronavirus.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
White House to send $2 billion worth of air defense weapons to Ukraine for counteroffensive, Bloomberg

The US aid package will include, in particular, missiles for the Patriot air defense system

The White House plans to direct $2 billion for purchasing Hawk medium-range surface-to-air systems and missiles, as well as Patriot's GEM-T guided enhanced missiles and PAC-3 missiles with hit-to-kill technologies.

Read also: US will help Ukraine implement 'Peace Formula', White House says

The Pentagon will announce the package once Ukraines counteroffensive is reported.

The U.S. National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, John Kirby, confirmed on May 31 the country's intention to support Ukraine with new weapons, including Stinger anti-aircraft systems, Avenger air defence systems, and ammunition for HIMARS rocket launchers, artillery, and anti-armor systems.

Read also: US sending more Zuni rockets to Ukraine, and how Ukraine uses them

The previous U.S. military aid package of $1.2 billion was announced on May 9 and included air defence systems, artillery rounds, satellite service, and more.

A $300 million military aid package was announced on May 3 with howitzer, HIMARS munitiona, Hydra-70 rockets, and more included.

Read also: $300 million US aid package to include Avenger AA systems and Zuni rockets

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Who is Jack Smith, the special counsel who secured an indictment against Trump?

Nearly seven months after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith to investigate former President Donald Trump's handling of classified documents after leaving the White House, the independent special counsel presented his findings to a Florida grand jury.

"Today an indictment was unsealed charging Donald J. Trump with felony violations of our national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice," Smith said in a brief statement delivered Friday at the Justice Department in Washington, DC. "This indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens in the southern district of Florida and I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged."

Based on the strength of the evidence Smith laid out, the grand jury voted to indict Trump, though the details of the allegations have not been released. But Trump has already framed the case against him as politically motivated.

THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION IS TOTALLY CORRUPT, Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, his Twitter-like social platform.

When Garland appointed Smith to handle the documents investigation and a separate one into Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, he was doing so to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.

The Department of Justice has long recognized that in certain, extraordinary cases, it is in the public interest to appoint a special prosecutor to independently manage an investigation and prosecution, Garland said at the time.

Smith takes the reins

Garland handed Smith control of the two investigations just days after Trump announced he would seek a second term of office, challenging President Biden again.

Today, I signed an order appointing Jack Smith to serve as special counsel, Garland said during a news conference held at the Justice Department in Washington in 2022. The order authorizes him to continue the ongoing investigation into both of the matters that I have just described and to prosecute any federal crimes that may arise from those investigations.

In a statement, Smith, who did not attend Garland's press conference due to a bicycle accident that required knee surgery, according to the Washington Post, promised to use independent judgement in his handling of the two investigations and to complete them without delay.

Jack Smith was appointed by the Justice Department to serve as special counsel to investigate former President Donald Trump. (Jerry Lampen/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

The pace of the investigations will not pause or flag under my watch. I will exercise independent judgement and will move the investigations forward expeditiously and thoroughly to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate, Smith said.

Smith's background

Given the sensitivity of the decision on whether to charge Trump with crimes in the two matters, Garland spent much of his November 2022 news conference seeking to assure the nation about Smith's qualifications for the role of special counsel.

Mr. Smith is a veteran career prosecutor. He began his prosecutorial career in 1994 as an assistant district attorney with the New York County D.A.'s office. In 1999, he became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, where over the course of nine years he prosecuted matters ranging from gang murders of police officers to civil rights violations. From 2008 to 2010, he served with the International Criminal Court, where he supervised war crimes investigations, Garland said.

In 2010, Mr. Smith returned to the Justice Department to serve as chief of the public integrity section, where he led a team of more than 30 prosecutors who handled public corruption and election crimes cases across the United States. In 2015, he agreed to serve as the first assistant attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, later becoming the acting U.S. attorney. Most recently, Mr. Smith served as a chief prosecutor for the special court in the Hague, charged with investigating and adjudicating war crimes in Kosovo.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announces the appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel at the Justice Department in 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Smith, Garland said, would be returning from the Netherlands immediately to begin his work on the two Trump cases, portraying him as an impartial and determined prosecutor.

In the days and weeks ahead, the attorney general said, Smith will work on his own. He also promised that Smith's appointment would not result in the slow-walking of the investigations of the former president.

Although the special counsel will not be subject to the day-to-day supervision of any official of the department, he must comply with the regulations, procedures and policies of the department. I will ensure that the special counsel receives the resources to conduct this work quickly and completely, Garland said. Given the work done to date and Mr. Smiths prosecutorial experience, I am confident that this appointment will not slow the completion of these investigations.
U.S. 2024 Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks to the press at the State House in Concord, N.H., on June 1. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

Many Democrats (and even some Kennedys) wish Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would simply slink away and disappear, like an embarrassing party guest.

But instead, RFK Jr., who launched his Democratic presidential primary campaign in April, has gained traction, especially among a subset of contrarian figures such as Elon Musk, who have cast him as a free speech hero.

Recent polls have shown Kennedy with anywhere from 12% to 16% support in surveys of likely Democratic primary voters, including a Yahoo News/YouGov poll from late May. But another poll from CNN the same month showed Kennedy with 20% support.

That doesnt necessarily make him a serious contender for the Democratic nomination, but his famous last name has made him relevant so far. Kennedy is the son of slain former Attorney General and U.S. Senator Bobby Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 while running for president himself. He talks about himself as continuing the legacy of his father and his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963.

Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., left, with other members of the Kennedy family, at the gravesite of his brother President John Fitzgerald Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery, Nov. 22, 1996, the 33rd anniversary of JFK's assassination. From left to right, Kennedy, Sargent Shriver, his brother-in-law; Victoria Kennedy, the senator's wife; his brother Robert's wife, Ethel Kennedy; and his sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

Kennedy is also an avatar for a belief system that has become more popular in recent years: that the world is controlled by shadowy unseen forces who manipulate the public for money and power.

And Kennedy could potentially hamper Biden enough to help Republicans in the 2024 election.

Specifically, there is concern that in New Hampshire  which votes early in the process  Kennedy could perform well enough to embarrass Biden in next years primaries, which could ultimately help a Republican candidate for president win the state in the fall.

New Hampshire Democrats are fighting with the national Democratic Party, which has stripped the state of its coveted spot as the first primary contest in the nominating process. If New Hampshire defies the Democratic Partys decision and goes first anyway, as it seems intent on doing, it would render the contest noncompliant, the result would not count, and Bidens name would not be on the ballot there.

That would give Kennedy an opening to gain vote share there and claim a moral victory. And it would also probably divert voters, who could vote in either primary, toward the Republican primary, possibly influencing them to vote Republican again in the fall election.

Kennedy wont win, but he can hurt Biden, and thats the point, said Mary Anne Marsh, a Massachusetts Democrat who worked for Robert Kennedy Jr.s uncle, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

Kennedys stated rationale for his campaign is that the Democratic Party has forsaken the working class and poor, and that he is summoning it to return to their side.

But Kennedy is best known as a vaccine critic. He has devoted himself for years to questioning the safety and efficacy of numerous vaccines.

Deni Valenzuela, 2, held by her mother Xihuitl Mendoza, receives her first dose of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccination from a nurse, Deborah Sampson, at University of Washington Medical Center-Roosevelt in Seattle on June 21, 2022. (David Ryder/Getty Images)

Then COVID-19 made him into a folk hero to those who believe that social media companies were wrong to remove, or limit the spread, on their platforms of claims opposing the evolving medical consensus during the pandemic.

A 2021 Associated Press investigation into Kennedys claims about the COVID vaccine found that he had contributed to a disinformation echo chamber that reinforces false narratives that downplay the dangers of COVID-19 while exaggerating the risks of the vaccine.

Kennedys campaign centers on his claim that the government and big business are working together to benefit the rich and oppress working people.

My mission, Kennedy said during a nearly two-hour speech announcing his candidacy, will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power.
In a literary landscape where narratives of Africa have long been overlooked or distorted, award-winning British author Bernardine Evaristo is supporting emerging voices from the continent.

With a career spanning four decades, Evaristo garnered international acclaim in 2019 as the first Black woman to win the Booker Prize, for her novel Girl, Woman, Other.

As part of this years Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative, which nurtures artistic talent globally, she chose to mentor 39-year-old Ghanaian writer Ayesha Harruna Attah. I wanted an African woman who lives on the continent because there are already so many opportunities for writers in Europe and America, Evaristo told CNN in Athens, Greece, where she was attending last months Rolex Arts Festival.

Attah is based in Senegal and has published five books. Her novels, centered on African female narratives, resonated with Evaristo.

Born to a Nigerian father, Evaristo has deep ties to the continent and often explores themes related to the African diaspora in her work, embracing the complexities of identity, race, and gender.

Attah said that being selected personally by Evaristo is an honor of a lifetime.

I was overjoyed because I love Bernardines boldness as a writer. Shes experimental, playful, and yet shes talking about big issues, Attah added.

Confidence and connections

As a professor of creative writing at Brunel University London, Evaristo is no stranger to mentorship and championing the next generation of writers.

In 2012, she launched the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, now renamed the Evaristo African Poetry Prize, with the aim of providing a platform for emerging poets from Africa and the diaspora.

For Evaristo, mentorship is about more than just refining writing skills. She acknowledges the importance of networking in the literary world, a challenge for writers residing outside major creative hubs like London or New York.

We writers support each other face-to-face by going to events and book launches and hosting discussions. Thats something that has been missing from Ayeshas writing career, and so part of my role is to bring that to her, Evaristo said.

Six months into the mentorship initiative, they have been working on goal setting and confidence building. Together, they attended this years Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad, where Attah connected with other writers and participated in forums.

To have Bernardine say, Dont be afraid to dream of all the things you want to achieve, is affirming. Its a push I need to get out of that cultural restraint that says, stay in your corner, Attah said.

Ghanaian writer Ayesha Harruna Attah described being selected for mentorship by Bernardine Evaristo as an honor of a lifetime. - MARTIN BOURKE

Fresh perspectives

Attahs writing often intertwines historical contexts with personal narratives, shedding light on lesser-known aspects of African history.

In her second novel, 2015s Saturdays Shadows, Attah delved into the aftermath of political upheaval in postcolonial Ghana. The story follows four women as they navigate personal and societal challenges.

Her next book will explore the realms of history and mythology, transporting readers to a time preceding the Pharaohs.

Growing up, I would read things about Greece or England, and I loved reading them, but I could never quite center myself in these stories, Attah said.

Africa has suffered from a PR problem, she added. Weve been told for a long time that we didnt have a history or a writing culture. I feel like my job is to start resetting some of these traits, she said.

Both Evaristo and Attah share a commitment to challenging misconceptions and stereotypes surrounding Africa and its people through their work.

In Blonde Roots, Evaristo reimagines the transatlantic slave trade, shifting power dynamics by portraying Africans enslaving Europeans, prompting readers to reconsider their understanding of history.

People have said to me, Isnt writing about Africa or Black people limiting? Evaristo said. Nobody would think of saying that of White people. Africa is a field of infinite possibilities, and Im really excited by it.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
Why the Fayetteville Police Foundation is speaking out against the City Council

After a majority of the Fayetteville City Council indicated that without seeing the police body camera footage they would not be inclined to pay for legal representation for two officers being sued in a fatal shooting, a group supporting the Fayetteville Police Department condemned the decision Thursday.

In a statement, the Fayetteville Police Foundation, a nonprofit that provides support and resources to the Police Department, challenged the councils decision.

It is essential to uphold the principle that police officers, who put their lives on the line every day to protect our community, are entitled to adequate legal support and representation when faced with legal challenges, the statement said. The councils vote establishes a precedent that if you are a police officer, (firefighter), sanitation worker, parks and rec worker or an office personnel employee and you are involved in an accident or any other unfortunate situation, the council may not support you in your battles.

The debate

During the councils Monday work session, Councilwoman Kathy Jensen introduced a motion to hold a public vote on whether the city would fund the legal representation of Fayetteville Police Officer Zacharius Borom and Sgt. Timothy Rugg. Borom shot and killed Jada Johnson, 22, after Rugg tackled her during a mental health crisis. The autopsy revealed the young mother had been hit 17 times. Police were at the Colgate Drive home after Johnson and her grandparents repeatedly called 911, reporting her ex-boyfriend was trying to break into the house.

Though no criminal charges will be filed after a state investigation found the shooting was justified, Johnsons family filed a federal lawsuit April 7 against Borom, Rugg and the city of Fayetteville. According to a city ordinance, city employees can request legal representation and the city's governing body can pay for an employee's representation if the act leading to the lawsuit was within the scope of their job.

Previous reporting No charges to be filed in fatal shooting by police of Jada Johnson

Jensen said Monday that in the interest of transparency, she was requesting a public vote on whether the city would finance a defense for the officers in the civil case. The issue was timely because the officers needed to know if the city would pay for their representation before they could find alternative legal representation, she said.

They have respectfully requested that the city of Fayetteville provide legal representation to defend the alleged claims, Jensen said. I am asking for this to be put on the agenda for June 12.

City Attorney Karen McDonald told the council the lawsuit was in mediation, but she did not know if the mediation would be successful or when it might be completed.

The question of footage

Several council members, including Councilman D.J. Haire and Councilwoman Shakeyla Ingram, asked if they could view the body camera footage from Johnsons death. North Carolina law prohibits the release of body camera footage without a judge's order.

McDonald said Police Chief Kemberle Braden filed a petition asking a judge to release the footage. According to the petition, filed on May 26, Braden asks that the footage be released only to the City Council in closed session so council members can determine if they want to pay for the officers legal representation.

An earlier petition to the courts by the City Council requesting the release of the footage was denied, as was a December petition filed by attorneys for Rick Iwanski, the slain woman's grandfather, asking that the footage be released to the public. Cumberland County Superior Court Judge Jim Ammons ruled in October that the Iwanskis and their legal team could view the footage it would not be released publicly and that after the family viewed it they were not permitted to comment publicly on the content of the videos.

Last month, in announcing that the shooting was justified, Attorney General Josh Stein, whose office provide a special prosecutor to review the case, called for the body camera footage to be released to the public.

"I call for the body camera footage recorded at the scene to be released in the interest of transparency to the people," Stein said in a news release.

Councilman Johnny Dawkins said Monday he thought the council should pay for Borom and Ruggs representation.

Whether you saw the video or not, the attorney general said, Release the video, and he said no criminal charges, Dawkins said. Thats enough for me. ... They're our employees. We should pay for their legal representation."

Mayor Mitch Colvin said at the meeting that the number of times Johnson was shot sounds "horrific, but he would need the body camera footage to make a final decision.

This is a tough conversation, he said. As Ive said before, in order to make a true assessment of it, I need to have the context of it.

The motion to vote on paying for the officers' legal representation ultimately failed 5-4.

During discussion among council members after the motion failed, city attorney McDonald said her understanding was the city would not be paying for the officers representation.

Until otherwise directed, Colvin interjected.

Jensen said the council had discussed in closed session not paying for the officers legal representation.

So now its transparent. So when somebody asks, now they know, she said.

Public safety reporter Lexi Solomon can be reached at ABSolomon@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Fayetteville City Council not inclined to fund officers' legal help
Chinese vice president meets City of London mayor

Xinhua) 08:55, June 09, 2023

Chinese Vice President Han Zheng meets with Nicholas Lyons, Lord Mayor of the City of London, in Beijing, capital of China, June 8, 2023. (Xinhua/Zhang Ling)

BEIJING, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice President Han Zheng met with Nicholas Lyons, Lord Mayor of the City of London, in Beijing on Thursday.

Noting that the economic and trade ties between China and Britain enjoy sound momentum and huge potential, Han said financial cooperation has increasingly become a new driving force for bilateral practical cooperation.

London is one of the most internationalized financial hubs in the world, and the City of London is not only the "heart" of London's economic development but also a world-renowned financial center, Han said.

At present, China is unswervingly expanding its high-level opening-up in various fields, including the financial industry, Han said, adding that China is willing to deepen mutually beneficial cooperation with the British financial community and promote the sustained and healthy development of bilateral economic and trade relations.

China has made massive achievements in economic and social development, and its future development goals will be achieved, Lyons said, adding that Britain and China share broad common interests and enjoy promising prospects for financial cooperation.

The City of London is willing to deepen cooperation with the Chinese government, enterprises, and financial institutions to achieve win-win development, Lyons said.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 9)  The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) on Friday said the current activity being observed in Mayon Volcano is already considered an eruption, which could lead to two possible scenarios depending on how it will progress.

There is an eruption on the summit, Phivolcs Director Teresito Bacolcol told CNN Philippines.

Mayon is currently under Alert Level 3 due to "an increased tendency towards hazardous eruption." Glowing rockfall was also seen flowing from its crater Thursday evening.

Depending on how it will develop, Bacolcol said there are two possible events that may follow.

This heightened rock fall activity at Mayon could be interpreted as the initial signs of a possible magmatic eruption," he pointed out, "or it may also cease just like what happened in 2014 after rock fall events there was a minor lava flow and then the activity ceased.

He said that the first scenario is similar to the 2018 eruption wherein the rockfall activity progressed into magmatic eruptions.

If the alert level will be raised to 4, this would mean there is an imminent hazardous eruption that is about to happen, Bacolcol noted.

The local government of Albay has ordered the mandatory evacuation of residents within the permanent danger zone (PDZ) of the volcano.

Albay's public information office said around 2,400 families or 10,000 individuals are expected to be evacuated from the six-kilometer PDZ.

At least 4,600 families or 16,000 individuals will be affected if evacuation is ordered within the seven-kilometer radius, it noted.

Weather forecaster Ana Clauren-Jorda of the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration said generally fair weather, aside from isolated rain showers in the afternoon, is expected in Albay.

If the area is dumped with rains, acid rain may likely occur if Mayon will emit sulfur dioxide in large quantities, Bacolcol warned.

Phivolcs also reminded pilots to avoid flying near the volcano for now given the situation.
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty

Royalist is The Daily Beasts newsletter for all things royal and Royal Family. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Sunday.

In the late 90s and early 2000s an unfounded rumor set tongues wagging the length and breadth of British society. The explosive gossip alleged that Prince Harrys father was actually James Hewitt, a dashing, red-haired guardsman whom Princess Diana had admitted to having an affair with him in her Panorama interview with Martin Bashir.

The tide of gossip ebbed and flowed in the years that followed, with speculation spurred on by the astonishing resemblance that Harry bore to Hewitt (and still does to this day). Also critical in the minds of those who wanted to believe the tittle-tattle was the fact that, as Dianas lover for several years, from 1986 until 1991, Hewitt became close to the young Harry and his brother William, even going so far as to teach them polo and have replicas of his Household Cavalry Guards uniform made for each of the boys.

Prince Harry Opens Up in Court on Claim That King Charles Is Not His Real Dad

Such was the interest in the story that there were even wild rumors that Fleet Streets red top tabloids had run covert missions to obtain samples of Harry and Hewitts DNA, and it was owing to this sub-rumor that the James Hewitt paternity story found itself back in the headlines this week, after Harry tackled the issue in court as part of his action against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN).

Harry is suing MGN, alleging that their newspapers published stories on him using information obtained by illegal means, including voicemail hacking. One of the stories he cited was an article published in 2002 in the Sunday People headlined: Plot to rob the DNA of Harry.

Harry said the article reported a plot to steal a sample of my DNA to test my parentage.

In his statement Harry said: Numerous newspapers had reported a rumor that my biological father was James Hewitt, a man my mother had a relationship with after I was born. At the time of this article and others similar to it, I wasnt actually aware that my mother hadnt met Major Hewitt until after I was born. This timeline is something I only learnt of in around 2014, although I now understand this was common knowledge amongst the defendants journalists.

At the time, when I was 18 years old and had lost my mother just six years earlier, stories such as this felt very damaging and very real to me. They were hurtful, mean and cruel. I was always left questioning the motives behind the stories. Were the newspapers keen to put doubt into the minds of the public so I might be ousted from the royal family?

James Hewitt, former lover of Diana, Princess of Wales emerges from a discount shopping warehouse in Exeter, Devon December 6, 1995. Reuters

Harry also mentioned this episode in his memoir, Spare, writing of the Hewitt paternity rumors: There was even talk that some reporters were seeking my DNA to prove itmy first intimation that, after tormenting my mother and sending her into hiding, they would soon be coming for me.

James Hewitt now lives a quiet life in a small town in the West of England, where it is understood he spends his days caring for his elderly mother. He is understood to be in rather poor health himself.

Although he co-operated with writer Anna Pasternak on a tell-all book entitled Princess in Love about his relationship with Diana in the 90s, for which he was widely condemned as a cad by the British media, he has not spoken to reporters in years and The Daily Beast was not able to find a working phone number or verifiable email address for him and attempts to reach him via third parties were unsuccessful. One third party said there was absolutely no way he would speak.

However, he has always refuted claims he is Harrys father; most recently, in 2017 he gave an interview to an Australian news channel in which he flat-out denied he was Harrys dad.

The media have, as Harrys comments in court this week made clear, largely accepted that he is not Harrys father, largely on the basis of what Hewitt told Pasternak and others: that they only met in 1986 (Harry was born in 1984).

Pasternak told The Daily Beast: Its the boomerang story that just will not go away. But as the author of Princess in Love, which was the definitive account of Diana and James, I can firmly say that at no point did either of them hint at the merest thought of it. They met after he was born.

Like others, Pasternak attributes Harrys physical similarity to the Spencers coincidental physical resemblance to Hewitt.

Asked why she thought Harry would have mentioned the Hewitt rumors in his court case, she said: I think Harry bringing up that article in court shows these constant, scurrilous rumors are a nagging source of pain for him. Its another source of torment. The fact that he is saying he was worried it might lead to him being ousted from the family shows that it clearly fed into Harrys sense of un-belonging within the family, the feeling that he was a spare, that as long as William was there he did not matter, and that even the one thing that should have been rock solidhis birth rightwas questionable.

One former news executive at the Sun in the noughties told The Daily Beast: The dates didnt match up so it was never taken seriously when I was there. It was a joke based on the fact they were both ginger. I remember once we got a false tip that William had bought Kate an engagement ring, and virtually the whole staff was put on it and spent three days trying to stand it up. There was never anything like that for Hewitt, which there would have been if people at the paper took the rumor seriously.

Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, departs the Rolls Building of the High Court in London, Britain June 7, 2023. REUTERS/Toby Melville

The society author Lady Colin Campbell, who knew Diana and worked with her on a subsequently shelved co-writing project before producing a series of bestselling biographies of her, told The Daily Beast a similar thing. She said: I knew James, and James himself confirmed to me that he didnt meet Diana until 1986 at a drinks party thrown by [Dianas lady-in-waiting] Hazel West, as I wrote in my book Diana in Private. The affair started long after Harry was born, and Harry always knew full well James Hewitt was not his father.

In his book, Spare, he describes Charles joking to him about not being his dad. Charles would not joke about something that was true. Harry knows its not true and I doubt very much he only discovered in 2014, when he was 30, the date of his mother meeting James as he claimed in court.

So why does the story continue to exert such a strong pull on the global imagination? Campbell has her theories: Doubtful paternity is intriguing, and it is amazing how much he looks like him. But Harry also looks like his aunt Sarah McCorquodale and his uncle Charles Spencer. The real coincidence is that James Hewitt looks like Dianas sister.

One person who has spoken to Hewitt in recent years is the playwright Jon Conway, who authored a play in 2015 entitled Truth, Lies, Diana, in which Conway made the astonishing claim that Hewitt said he did in fact meet Diana before Harrys birth.

The play recreates a conversation Conway says he had with Hewitt, in which Hewitt says, Diana and I started our relationship more than a year before Harry was born. Now that doesnt prove that I am his father. Its just the inconvenient truth.

Conway told The Daily Beast: The fact is he told me that he met Diana a year before Harry was born. He agreed to say that he didnt meet Diana until after Harry was born for obvious reasons. He said to me once he would rather let sleeping dogs lie.

The fact that he met her a year before Harry was born does not mean to say he is Harrys father, its just that the truth is messier than the official narrative put forward. James Hewitt saw more of Harry and William than their father did. He had a very close and loving relationship with them. Those two kids saw him every other weekend and in the school holidays for years.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Kakhovka HPP

Read also: ICC team arrives in Kherson to document Russian war crimes

Logical: Having begun an illegal and unjust war against Ukraine, Russians are responsible for all the evils they have produced. The root cause of all Russian crimes in Ukraine is the crime of aggression, condemned by most countries worldwide. The Kakhovka dam disaster is another deadly fruit of a poisoned tree that Russia has grown with the support and silent consent of the overwhelming majority of its population.

Legal: The main structures of the destroyed hydroelectric power station were controlled by the Russian Federation, and Russian military and engineers had access to them, including the dam's interior. Therefore, according to international law, the occupying forces bear the lion's share of responsibility for preserving critical infrastructure facilities (as well as issues of civilian safety, preservation of cultural treasures, ecology, etc., in the occupied territories). Since they exercise effective control over the administrative and industrial facilities of the HPP, they should have taken care of its safety and protection from destruction.

If the Russians had not behaved as occupying barbarians, but instead followed the laws and customs of war

Ethical: , and also cared about civilians and nature, they would have transferred all the sites they captured by them that could lead to such a man-made disaster to independent international organizations. They would not deploy military equipment, soldiers, and ammunition with explosives at such locations. This also applies to the Zaporizhzhia NPP and chemical and energy facilities in the south and east of Ukraine. Obviously, if Russia had at least tried to behave civilized, objects of increased danger could have been demilitarized and provided with bilateral monitoring involving international mediators without additional risk to people and nature. Ukraine does not benefit from its people becoming victims or the destruction of its infrastructure, industry, and agriculture, so we are interested in making the war as undestructive for us as possible. Russia, as we see from its specific actions and inaction, deliberately increases the harm from the war, multiplies people's suffering, and does not even seek ways to minimize the evil from its wild aggression.

Read also: Russia shells civilians fleeing flooding in Kherson Oblast, injuring eight

The whole world sees that, unfortunately, Russia has chosen the tactic of "nothing will stand after us," so regardless of whether they directly undermined the dam of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station to hinder the Ukrainian counterattack in the south, or simply allowed their barbaric behavior to lead to a catastrophe, all responsibility for it lies with the occupiers.

Read also: Russia considering retreating deep inside Crimea, leaving frontline occupiers to die  Malyar

You do not need to be a genius or have a doctorate in probability theory to understand these points. It is enough to have the elementary ability to think and see cause-and-effect relationships between events.

Were bringing the voice of Ukraine to the world. Support us with a one-time donation, or become a Patron!

Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Will wildfire smoke damage your car in Charlotte? How to wash ash off your vehicle

Smoke from wildfires in Canada continues to move into North Carolina, leaving a gloomy gaze in places and affecting air quality.

And in addition to protecting your health, your pets and your home, experts say you need to exercise caution when cleaning your car. Failing to do so could do lasting damage to your vehicles paint job.

Some have already started to notice particles from the wildfires settling on their cars in the Carolinas, such as Charlotte meteorologist Brad Panovich, who shared a video on Instagram on Wednesday showing build-up on his vehicle.

Heres what to know about getting smoke and ash off your car:

Does wildfire ash damage car paint?

The minerals in wildfire ash that can settle on your car can cause chemical reactions that damage the paint job, especially if the car gets wet, the Speedy Sparkle Car Wash chain advises.

Chemical etching can happen, and it doesnt have to rain either, the group says. Sprinkler systems, morning dew, and even fog can create conditions ripe for chemical etching. If left untreated, etching can occur and cause significant damage to paint, clear coat, or both.

Additionally, the ash is abrasive, so it can scratch your cars paint if you try to wipe it off, per the chain.

How do you remove ash from car paint?

AAA of Southern California recommends getting ash and soot off your car as fast as possible amid wildfires.

If washing the vehicle at home, wet thoroughly and wash with warm water, a soft mitt, towel or sponge, and formulated car wash soap, the agency recommends. Start at the car roof and work your way down and around the panels. Rinse vehicle thoroughly and dry with a soft clean towel or chamois.

Pay special attention to your headlights and taillights to avoid visibility issues the next time you drive. You also shouldnt neglect the inside of your car, AAA notes, suggesting that you vacuum vehicle floor mats and cloth surfaces.

It may take more than one wash to remove ash since it will continue to fall for the next several days, the group adds.

And if possible, AAA suggests, you should store your car in a garage when wildfire smoke is potentially moving into your area to prevent a build-up in the first place.
Willi Ninja attends the Zang Toi show during the Olympus Fashion Week Spring 2005 (Getty Images)

Google Doodle has honoured the late Willi Ninja with an electrifying tribute to the iconic Black LGBT+ dancer and choreographer known as the godfather of voguing.

The 9 June doodle celebrated Ninja with a video that features several performers recreating his famous dancing style.

An acclaimed performer, Willi paved a path for Black LGBTQ+ representation and acceptance in the 1980s and 90s, Google said.

On this day in 1990, the documentary Paris is Burning  which features Willi and the Iconic House of Ninja  was released in the US at the NewFest New York LGBT Film Festival, said Googles tribute to the dancer.

Who was Willi Ninja and why was he an important figure?

Ninja, born William Roscoe Leake on 12 April 1961, was recognised as one of the pioneers and key figures in the voguing and ballroom scene in New York.

He grew up in Flushing and started dancing at the age of seven. In the early 1980s, he became involved in voguing, showcasing his skills at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village and various drag balls in Harlem. Known for his precise and agile dance style, he drew inspiration from martial arts, which led to his chosen name  Ninja.

He rose to gain prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s for his exceptional skills in voguing.

Voguing is a dance style named after Vogue magazine. Characterised by exaggerated poses, angular movements and fluid transitions, the dance style originated within the LGBT+ community, particularly among African American and Latino communities.

Ninjas lasting impact on queer and ballroom culture continues to be celebrated as the performer played a significant role in popularising voguing and bringing it into the mainstream through his performances, competitions and collaborations.

Jenni Livingstones acclaimed 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning elevated Ninjas position in the gay fashion scene.

He was best known for his work in the documentary that captured the voguing scene from 1987-89, showcasing its rebellious embrace of those who were marginalised by attempts to impose moral uniformity in the US on a deeper level.

In 1982, he went on to co-found his own community, the House of Ninja, which offered a sense of family and support to those who felt like social outcasts. The community remained a huge support system for its members even as he continued to rise to fame.

It is believed that Ninjas unique voguing moves were inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs and martial arts and influenced by celebrities like Madonna and Jean Paul Gaultier.

Beyond cementing his legacy as a performer, Ninja became an advocate for awareness on HIV AIDS prevention at drag balls and contributed to the destigmatisation of the disease in the community.

He died of AIDS-related heart failure on 2 September 2006, aged 45.

He was tall man, about 6-3, Sally Sommer, a professor of dance at Florida State University described him at the time of his death, and God gave him the biggest, broadest dance shoulders in the world, so when he would do those things with his arms it was just so impressive.
Now, unbelievably so, the third-most and largest Democratic state in the country is living its own Dont Say Gay moment.

With the launch of Pride Month, a vocal minority of Californians have taken Florida-style, hate-fueled conservative grievances to two school district boards, the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale and Temecula, Southern California wine country.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest system in the nation, a transgender teachers Pride flag was burned at an elementary school and a demonstration held to protest a Pride assembly.

Parents, including Mom for Liberty chapters, and school board conservatives are weaving the same parental rights vs gender-identity narrative that led to Floridas explosion of book and curriculum restrictions at all educational levels, anti-transgender laws  and the whitewashing of Black history, even at universities.

But despite a vote in Temecula in favor of erasing inclusive education in grades 1 to 5, thankfully, this isnt Gov. Ron DeSantis Florida.

Education leaders are speaking out and standing up to the gay-bashing.

This is not the time when silence is an option, Alberto Carvalho, the former Miami-Dade Schools superintendent, now in charge of Los Angeles Unified, told me. Because whats next, right? It starts with ostracizing, dehumanizing, humiliating the minority, whichever that minority is, and before you know it, the majority sees its rights gone, too.

Although gaining chapters in California, Moms for Liberty, founded in Florida  and recently labeled an extremist group by the civil-rights watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center  is still seen as fringe by the mainstream.

Politicians are not eagerly embraced them  or, as happened in Miami-Dade  recruited to the task of political censorship by elected officials, one of the reasons the group is able to claim that they successfully helped turn anti-gay and anti-Black history views into law and School Board action.

READ MORE: Miami censors Amanda Gormans luminous poem. Will they ban Jose Marti, too? | Opinion

Not happening in Los Angeles, says Carvalho, where the gay communitys place is not in a dark corner.

Its on stage with bright lights, and Im deeply passionate about this. Its part of our school system policy, our curriculum and our theory of action [to be inclusive at all grade levels], he said.

Treating immigrants as merchandise, as commodities that can be moved without consent or enacting policies against human beings because of who they are and who they love, that may be politically expedient for the short term, but for the long term it isnt, he added. Times have changed already. Thats not the America we all want.

This is why his leadership is sorely missed in Miami-Dade County Schools, unrecognizable under DeSantis anti-gay and anti-immigrant mandates.

It breaks my heart, Carvalho said. I read the future well. I would have been their biggest target. Good people are being pushed out and left. So many great people are fearful, tormented and left behind.

Newsom vs. DeSantis

In California, the anti-gay movement also has met with strong rejection from Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.

With hate on the rise nationally, we must rise together in California to affirm what both Pride month and immigrant heritage month represent  that in The Golden State, no matter who you are or what diverse community you are from, you belong, Newsom said in a statement, referring to the DeSantis migrant flights to Sacramento and clashes in the two school districts over LGBTQ+ curriculum and Pride celebrations.

READ MORE: By turning immigrants into crime victims for publicity, DeSantis guarantees their stay | Opinion

Like every other state, California may have problems, like the housing affordability crisis, that go unsolved, but how refreshing it is to hear a unifying message instead of DeSantis dribble of lies and divisiveness for political purposes.

Californians in Sacramento will hear a mouthful of them when DeSantis flies in next week for a roundtable breakfast fundraiser priced at $3,300 per ticket.

Florida  once a battleground state where, only five years ago, politicos had to earn votes courting minorities, not dissing them  serves as a lesson on how quickly and fearlessly the right can push its message and win.

Newsom has his work cut out for him.

Temecula & Glendale anti-gay acts

In the Temecula Unified District, the School Board president led a move to strike LGBTQ+ discussions from elementary school curriculum and ban a biographical supplement about civil rights activist and San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, calling him a pedophile.

Ignorant, Newsom called the baseless claims about the first openly gay man elected to office in California and assassinated in 1978 at San Franciscos City Hall.

An offensive statement from an ignorant person.



This isnt Texas or Florida. In the Golden State, our kids have the freedom to learn.



Congrats Mr. Komrosky you have our attention. Stay tuned. https://t.co/4HHLm3q57r  Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 3, 2023

And on Wednesday, his office issued a joint-statement with California Attorney General Rob Bonta urging the Temecula Valley Unified School District Board of Education to provide information about its decision to reject the Social Studies Alive program in elementary school, a possible violation of the states FAIR Act.

 . . . our kids have the freedom to learn  and there are consequences for denying that freedom, Newsom said, using the same freedom verbiage DeSantis manhandles to deny representation and civil rights.

California, Newsom added, is closely watching the actions of malicious actors seeking to ban books, whitewash history, and demonize the LGBTQ+ community in Temecula and across the state. If the law is violated, there will be repercussions.

Bravo.

It was about time somebody took on homophobia and prejudice without fear of political liability.

In Glendale, the fourth largest city in Los Angeles County, conservative groups wearing T-shirts that read Leave Our Kids Alone clashed with gay-rights defenders outside of a school board meeting in a brawl that led to three arrests after punches were thrown and pepper spray dispersed.

The issue: whether the school district would recognize June as Pride month.

Speakers debated how sex education and gender issues are handled under school policy. Some argued that LGBTQ+ children must feel safe and included. Some made the same arguments as Moms for Liberty in Florida, claiming that by discussing gender identity in classrooms educators are usurping parental rights.

Everyone was heard, but the school board voted in favor of a resolution designating June as LGBTQ+ Pride month for the fifth year in a row.

Thats because, unlike Florida  where only Democratic civil rights activists fought DeSantis and the rest of the people caved  in California, from the school board level to the governors office, elected officials and education leaders are eloquently verbalizing the obvious.

False dichotomy

Theres no question where the Los Angeles Unified Board of Education stands on gay issues, and following the burning of the teachers Pride flag at Saticoy Elementary in North Hollywood and a parents protest against a Pride school assembly, they took action.

All members not only voted in favor of, but also signed on as co-sponsors of board member Nick Melvoins resolution celebrating Pride Month and affirming support for the gay community.

Melvoin told local television station Fox 11 that he welcomes parental involvement and they should see how lessons are imparted on the ground. But he rejects the premise that sex and gender-identity education sexualizes and grooms students.

Similar cause-and-effect arguments were used in the 1960s and 70s to act against immigrant and Black families, he said.

He called the framing of issues as parent rights vs. inclusive education a false dichotomy.

We need to prepare kids for the world as it exists and as it will be when they leave the schools, Melvoin said.  . . . Talking about families and different types of families is an appropriate thing in our school communities. Its about making kids ready for the world as it exists.

Words  and a reality  DeSantis and Florida conservatives, with their heads stuck in sand, dont want to hear.
Snow geese gather on a flooded farm near Dunnigan, in Yolo County, in January. The farm was part of a project aimed at recharging underground aquifers. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

The historic winter storms that filled Californias reservoirs and covered the Sierra Nevada with snow have brought a major boost to water supplies across Central Valley watersheds  an increase that measurements from NASA satellites show is the largest year-over-year gain in more than two decades of records.

Satellite data analyzed by researchers at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory show that the series of atmospheric river storms this winter alleviated some of California's water deficit, but that groundwater levels remain depleted from years of drought and chronic overpumping in the Central Valley.

The two satellites, a joint U.S.-German mission called GRACE Follow-On, measure changes in the total volume of water contained in snowpack, soil, rivers, lakes and groundwater.

NASA scientists found that between October 2022 and March, the rain and snow increased the regions total water supplies substantially, equating to a rise of about 20 inches if that water were spread across the watersheds of the Central Valley.

That amounts to about 2.5 times the total storage capacity of Lake Mead, the countrys largest reservoir, or about 58% of the volume of Lake Tahoe.

The water gain was about double the annual average recorded in satellite data since 2002. Even with this influx of water, however, scientists said they dont yet know how much of it will make its way underground, and that it will likely only recoup a portion of the groundwater that has been extracted to supply agriculture during years of severe drought.

One good winter of rain and snow wont make up for years of extreme drought and extensive groundwater use, said Felix Landerer, a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

We have accumulated quite a bit of water debt, groundwater debt, over the last 20 years, Landerer said.

Plotted on a chart, the satellite measurements of the total amount of water in the region form a line that, through seasonal ups and downs, has declined dramatically during the droughts from 2012-2016 and 2019-2022, reflecting major losses in total water resources. In 2023, the line has risen sharply.

Even though we had a lot of water gain, much of that is in the surface, Landerer said. That means much of the water remains in rivers, lakes, reservoirs and the soil, as well as frozen in the snowpack. So far, he said, not much has percolated down to aquifers.

It's actually pretty dry still down below, Landerer said. The key point is now, how much groundwater recharge will there be?

He and other scientists plan to track that as the snow melts and runoff courses through the Central Valley over the next several months.

In other recent research, scientists have found that the pace of groundwater depletion accelerated in recent years during the drought.

Data for the last two decades  and earlier data going back to the 1960s  reveal successive drops in average water levels in a step-like pattern, with brief wet periods that have only temporarily slowed the declines.

Over the long term, groundwater is in a pretty steep decline, said J.T. Reager, a scientist at JPL.

In wet years, we get a little bit of a recovery, and then in dry years, when there's not a lot of surface water or snowmelt, we tend to hit the groundwater really hard, Reager said. We never get the recovery to replace what we're drawing down, what we're using during the dry years.

The Central Valley is one of the worlds major farming regions, producing almonds, pistachios, grapes, walnuts, tangerines, rice and other crops, as well as cattle and dairy products.

The research is based on data collected from two NASA satellite missions. The current pair of satellites, which launched into orbit in 2018, track changes in Earth's gravity field to measure shifts in the total amounts of water, above and below ground.

The big question for this year, with all of the snow and rain that we received, is really how much of that rain and snowmelt is going to recharge that groundwater? Reager said. How much of that water can infiltrate the soil?

If all the water could be channeled underground, it would bring a tremendous recovery, he said. But he said its possible a lot of the water may not reach the aquifer.

Part of the reason relates to the valleys geology. There are clay layers in many areas that hinder the downward movement of water, while in other areas, water passes swiftly through permeable layers of sediment.

The water streaming down from the Sierra Nevada has inundated vast farmlands in the southern San Joaquin Valley, re-forming Tulare Lake, which according to state officials now covers more than 113,000 acres, an area nearly as large as Lake Tahoe.

State water officials have sought to make it easier for local water districts and farms to use floodwaters to recharge depleted aquifers.

Since December, the State Water Resources Control Board has issued 10 temporary permits for agencies to divert water for groundwater recharge projects, all but one of them in the Central Valley. The board also approved a request by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to divert floodwaters from the San Joaquin River and send much of that water flowing to lands where it spreads out and soaks into the ground.

These approvals allow for the diversion of more than 1.2 million acre-feet of water  more supplies than Folsom Lake reservoir can hold  for groundwater recharge, wildlife refuges and other purposes. State officials say its the largest amount of water they have made available for groundwater replenishment in such a short period.

The state has taken unprecedented action to leverage the benefits of our recent wet weather by replenishing our groundwater resources, said Yana Garcia, secretary of Californias Environmental Protection Agency. She said its an example of how the state is taking steps to become more resilient as climate change makes extreme droughts and floods more intense and more frequent.

State water officials have also been conducting aerial surveys to map optimal areas for groundwater recharge, using helicopters equipped with electromagnetic imaging systems that peer underground to reveal fast pathways for replenishing aquifers.

Meanwhile, the effects of overpumping have continued to affect rural communities, where some residents whose wells have gone dry rely on trucked shipments of water to fill their household tanks. The state has received reports of 249 dry household wells this year. State regulators have told local groundwater management agencies in large portions of the San Joaquin Valley that their plans for combating overpumping are inadequate.

Researchers have said addressing the long-term groundwater deficit will likely require taking large portions of farmland out of production and that planning will be key in transitioning some agricultural land to other purposes, such as solar farms, crops that consume less water or habitat restoration areas.

This extremely wet year, and the historic levels of snowpack that remain, offer the conditions for a rare experiment to see how much the groundwater levels might rise in the Central Valley, Reager said.

This year, we've got this nearly infinite supply of recharge, he said. How much can you actually get in the ground? And that's what we're looking to see.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Woman in car mouths 'help me' to South Carolina officer, leads to arrest of passenger

A suspect connected to a shooting was detained and a woman in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina was rescued by police after mouthing "help me" during a traffic stop, authorities said.

In a Facebook post, the Myrtle Beach Police Department said Officer Kayla Wallace was patrolling North Myrtle Beach around 5:30 a.m. on May 28 when she saw a white Jeep run a red light at an intersection.

After pulling the car over, she noticed the male passenger "appeared distressed," and the female driver was silently and repeatedly mouthing "help me," according to the Facebook post.

Police said Wallace took the male passenger out of the car and into her patrol vehicle.

Wallace returned to the car, where the driver told her the male passenger had just shot someone. Moments later, police dispatch issued a message to "be on the lookout" for a vehicle that was involved in a shooting elsewhere in Horry County, South Carolina. The vehicle description and the suspect description matched the male passenger.

Yellowstone National Park: Yellowstone tourists put newborn elk calf in car, drive to police station

More: Las Vegas police investigate aliens-in-backyard report after officer spots flying object

WBTW News reported 29-year-old Collins Bates was arrested and remains detained. He is facing charges of attempted murder, kidnapping and possession of a weapon during a violent crime in connection with a shooting.

An unlawfully carried pistol was also found under his seat, police said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Man arrested in North Myrtle Beach, SC after woman mouths 'help me'
This woodland creature was once hunted to extinction in Kentucky, now it flourishes

Before European settlers arrived in Kentucky, elk were the most wide-ranging member of the deer family in all of North America.

Accounts from early Kentucky settlers suggest a plentiful elk population, and many place names across the state hint at their presence. Eventually, however, their numbers dwindled because of over-hunting.

By 1847, the naturalist and ornithologist John James Audubon wrote we believe there are none to be found within hundreds of miles.

The last wild elk of Kentuckys pioneer era was said to have been killed just before the Civil War, according to a history in Kentuckys Elk Management Plan.

But the states elk population has roared back to life over the last 20 years, and the herd now numbers in the thousands. Its largely due to the efforts of the Kentuckys wildlife conservation agency and a restocking project in the late 90s.

To help you appreciate these awe-inspiring animals, weve put together this guide answering some common questions, including where you can observe the largest elk herd east of the Rocky Mountains.

Where are elk located in Kentucky?

Kentuckys elk restoration zone spans 16 counties in the far eastern half of the state encompassing 4.3 million acres.

Current counties in the zone include Bell, Breathitt, Clay, Floyd, Harlan, Johnson, Knott, Knox, Leslie, Letcher, Magoffin, Martin, McCreary, Perry, Pike and Whitley counties. Originally, the area included 14 counties, but Whitley and McCreary counties were added in 2004 to bridge Kentucky and Tennessees respective restoration zones.

The area in the Cumberland Plateau is defined by its winding ridges and narrow valleys. Land use by humans in the zone has produced a landscape of mostly deciduous woodlands, followed by active or reclaimed surface mines and other cleared land.

Where can you see elk in Kentucky?

Head to the wildlands of Eastern Kentucky and you can see the largest elk herd east of the Rocky Mountains.

One viewing spot to checkout is Southfork Elk View in Breathitt County, where the facility allows visitors to observe the massive elk herd.

Surrounded by wetlands, ponds and an abundance of plant and animal life, you can also take in the panoramic views of Kentuckys Appalachian Mountains.

Southfork Elk View is located along Highway 1098 about 20 miles east of Jackson. If youre starting from Lexington, you can get there in less than two hours.

Whats the size of Kentuckys elk population?

The effort to restore Kentuckys depleted elk population began in 1997 and continued into 2002, when 1,541 elk were released in the restoration zone. Contributing states included Utah, Kansas, Oregon, North Dakota, Arizona and New Mexico.

The current population in Kentucky is estimated at more than 10,000, according to the latest publicly available 2021 Kentucky Elk Report.

The program got its start due to the advocacy of the late Tom Baker, who served two terms as Kentucky Fish and Wildlife commissioner between 1998 and 2006.

Baker displayed a gutsy determination when he convinced a federal judge and federal prosecutor to divert the fines of 27 people caught dove hunting over bait in Simpson County into funding for an elk study, an article from Kentucky Fish and Wildlife says of the effort. That seed money eventually led to the release of 29 elk into a 700-acre fenced area at Land Between the Lakes in western Kentucky in 1996.

Although the Western Kentucky elk were corralled within a fence, the success of the effort acted as a springboard for restoration in Eastern Kentucky, where elk could roam freely.

Can you hunt elk in Kentucky?

Yes, but you need a legal permit to hunt one.

In 2021, the latest year for which data are available, the state wildlife agency granted 594 permits.

Many different kinds of permits are available, but most are issued by a randomized drawing. Applicants have to apply online each year between Jan. 1 and April 30. They can apply for three permits, but no more than once for each permit type, according to rules laid out in the 2021 Kentucky Elk Report.

You dont have to be a Kentucky resident to apply, though most of the permits will go to state residents. Elk hunters may take only one elk per year.

In May, applicants names are drawn at random and randomly assigned a permit type based on their application choices. Once youre drawn for a permit, you cant apply again for three years.

How often are elk poached in Kentucky?

While poaching does occur, figures from the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife indicate it isnt a substantial threat to the health of the elk population.

In recent years, fewer than a handful of elk were poached, at least according to the cases the department has been able to investigate and confirm.

Kentucky Fish and Wildlife conservation officer John Fields told the Herald-Leader those who suspect poaching can report tips to 1-800-255-ALERT. Theres also the KFWLaw app available on the App Store.

According to Fields, most poaching violations happen because of irresponsible hunters who dont do their homework, rather than any malice for the animals.

He said regulators depend on the public to report illegal hunting, adding that with more eyes on the ground, the more secure Kentuckys elk population will be.

Do you have a question about wildlife in Kentucky for our service journalism team? Wed like to hear from you. Fill out our Know Your Kentucky form or email ask@herald-leader.com.
Worker seriously injured in fall at Norwood Hospital construction site

A worker was seriously injured in a fall at the Norwood Hospital construction site on Friday morning, officials said.

Emergency crews responding to multiple calls reporting a construction accident at 800 Washington Street learned a worker had fallen from the top of the second floor of the site around 10 a.m., according to the Norwood Fire Department.

Prior to firefighters and ambulance arriving at the scene, a Norwood police officer working a nearby detail rushed over and began administering aid to the worker, the department added.

The worker, whose name hasnt been released, was rushed to Boston Medical Center. They are said to be in serious condition.

Norwood Hospital is being rebuilt after flooding in June 2020 caused catastrophic damage.

There were no additional details immediately available.

An investigation is ongoing.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts.

Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW
X-Men star Liev Schreiber draws world's attention to flooded houses in Kherson

Schreiber is drawing the world's attention to the disaster caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam by the Russian troops.

"The Nova Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine, controlled by Russia, has been destroyed, he wrote.

One consequence is a humanitarian disaster that, had it not taken place within a war zone, would have already drawn enormous international assistance. Thousands of houses are flooded and tens of thousands of people are evacuating or waiting for rescue. Another consequence is ecological chaos, among other things the loss of wetland and other habitats. A third is the destruction of Ukrainian farmland and other elements of the Ukrainian economy," he said, quoting U.S. historian Timothy Snider.

His followers from all over the world expressed their support and compassion for Ukraine. Here is a sample of the comments left on his post:

 "This is heartbreaking beyond words. Putin must be stopped and the rest of Europe will help Ukrainians in any way we can"

 "My god.Ive never felt so helpless in my life. I wish I could go gather some families and bring them to my home and just let them live"

 "The largest ecological and humanitarian disaster of the 21st century, putting hundreds of thousands of people in danger"

 "It's awful. Russia is a terrorist state"

 "I'm almost 60 and Russia was a bad guy when I was a kid. Nothing has changed

Read also:

Were bringing the voice of Ukraine to the world. Support us with a one-time donation, or become a Patron!

Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 9)  A law is needed to allow the Department of National Defense (DND) to implement reforms that will allow it to provide better services to the public and its agencies, the department's newly-appointed head said on Friday.

We need a new law to recreate a new Department of National Defense, Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro told CNN Philippines The Source.

In an earlier interview Teodoro told CNN Philippines that he wants to reform the department and called for an increase in investments to enable the DND to do what it needs to as service providers of its agencies.

Agencies under the DND are the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the Office of Civil Defense, the Philippine Veterans Affairs Office, the National Defense College of the Philippines, and the Government Arsenal.

Teodoro said the new law should encompass the evolving definition of national security.

The DND chief said this will allow the creation of "an evolving structure where skill sets can be developed, we can grow our own capabilities in order to better serve the five agencies under us and serve the national interest.

Teodoro has said he will push for a bigger budget for the DND given the need to acquire more capital assets to boost military capabilities, add infrastructures, and improve overall national defense.
Yes, Trump has to show up in court again. Here's what happens now that federal prosecutors indicted him.

Former President Donald Trump appears in court for his arraignment on charges related to falsifying business records in a hush money investigation in Manhattan. Andrew Kelly/AP

Here we go again.

Donald Trump was indicted by federal prosecutors and has to show up in court.

This time, we probably won't get any pictures inside the courtroom.

Donald Trump was indicted.

Yes, again.

This time, it's much more serious.

In April, the Manhattan District Attorney's office accused him of falsifying business records in payments to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet ahead of the 2016 election about an affair she said she had with him.

This second case was brought by federal prosecutors, led by Special Counsel Jack Smith. His team investigated Trump's hoarding of government documents at his home in Mar-a-Lago after leaving the presidency.

No former president has ever been charged with a crime before, much less twice, much less by a branch of government he once led, and is campaigning to lead again.

We're in uncharted territory. Here are some questions you may have, and the best answers we have right now.

Will Trump be arrested again?

Yes. If you're criminally charged, you get taken into custody and need to appear in court. That's how it works.

With a high-profile defendant like Trump, where there's a low chance he'll react with violence against the people arresting him, it makes sense for prosecutors to give his lawyers a heads-up.

That's what happened on Thursday, when Justice Department attorneys told Trump's legal team he was indicted. Trump posted on Truth Social that he'll appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon, where he'll appear before a judge.

Trump is unlikely to flee, considering he's running for president, is extremely recognizable, and is followed everywhere by Secret Service agents, so don't expect him to be held in jail before trial. It's also unlikely he'll have any sort of bail requirement, though it's possible he'll need to get permission from a judge before traveling internationally.

What about a mugshot?

Maybe. The Justice Department generally takes mugshots of criminal defendants. But it's their policy to not release them. So we wouldn't see a mugshot if they do take one.

"They generally do a mugshot when you're taken into custody," Tamara Holder, a Florida-based attorney and legal commentator, told Insider. "There's no law that it's required, but it's certainly part of the process and procedure."

The department might opt not to take a mugshot at all. That's what happened in Trump's Manhattan case, where the district attorney's office chose not to take one.

Trump probably won't be handcuffed when he appears in court, considering he poses little security risk with the US Marshals Service and his Secret Service agents standing by. The US Secret Service and Trump's staff were reportedly scheduled to meet on Friday to discuss the arrangements.

The district attorney's office didn't have Trump handcuffed in the Manhattan case. New York Rep. George Santos  another politician indicted on federal charges  also wasn't cuffed when he made his first court appearance, last month.

OK fine  but will we get any pictures?

Sorry, but probably not.

Federal courts tend to be very strict about electronic devices and recordings, including photos.

The District Court of Southern Florida, where the arraignment will be taking place, in particular, requires even credentialed journalists to "agree in writing to not record or transmit in any way audio, still photography, or video from anywhere inside courthouses nor from inside courtrooms."

Trump's Manhattan case happened in state court, where photography is allowed at the judge's discretion. In that case, the judge allowed a small group of designated pool photographers to take pictures for about one minute after Trump was seated before him.

But, hey, we'll probably get some very cool court illustrations.

Will the Secret Service stay with him if he goes to prison?

Probably yes.

Why Florida?

We don't know. Smith had paneled a grand jury in Washington, DC, that appeared to be moving swiftly before witnesses were suddenly giving testimony before grand jurors in Miami instead.

Ultimately, such jurisdictional issues are up to prosecutors and judges, who may decide to move the cases elsewhere.

According to Holder, the fact that Smith brought the case in Trump's "safe haven" of Florida  a right-wing stronghold  may serve to undermine Trump's accusations that the Justice Department is conducting a politically motivated prosecution.

"So now all of a sudden the Biden administration is in Friendly Florida, where Mar-a-Lago rests, and Ron DeSantis is taking away the land rights of Disney," Holder said. "I mean, come on, you couldn't find a more friendly place than Florida for someone like Donald Trump."

How is this going to play out?

Great question.

The Justice Department will almost certainly push to have a trial wrapped up as quickly as possible before the 2024 election. If Trump wins in 2024, holding a criminal trial would get into even deeper uncharted territory and raise untested constitutional questions about the separation of powers and the ability for Trump to pardon himself.

But Trump's lawyers will have trouble scheduling this case. The Manhattan district attorney's trial is scheduled for March. A separate civil New York Attorney General case over the Trump Organization's finances is scheduled to go to trial in October. And he also has a civil trial over his involvement in an alleged multi-level marketing scheme scheduled for trial in Manhattan federal court in January. And that's not to mention the other criminal investigations and pending civil cases.

Judges typically loathe moving a trial date once it's already scheduled, but ultimately it'll be up to them to manage their dockets and court calendars.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Several childrens books that some York County residents say are sexually explicit will stay where they are in the childrens section of the public library.

The York County Library board met Thursday evening at the Fort Mill branch to hear an appeal from Linda Fisher of Rock Hill, who has previously asked the library to move four books from the childrens section to the adult section.

At Thursdays meeting, Fisher addressed the board before members voted to deny her appeal.

Fisher told the board the books are unclassified, which makes them invisible.

You shelve books about mammals, reptiles, ethnic cultures and even holidays by category on one shelf, she said. Why arent books about human sexuality shelved together, so we can avail ourselves of these resources in a logical manner on one shelf, in one place?

Julie Ward, director of the York County Library said two of the books are nonfiction and are shelved according to their Dewey subject matter number. The other two are picture books which get shelved by the author.

The four books include: It Feels Good to Be Yourself, by Theresa Thorn; Pink, Blue and You!, by Elise Gravel and Mykaell Blais; Twas the Night Before Pride, by Joanna McClintick; and The Rainbow Parade, by Emily Nielson.

The controversy about books came up in early May when York County Councilman Tom Audette said constituents had reached out to him regarding books in the childrens section of the library with content they considered sexually inappropriate.

Those who favor moving the books say that would put power in the hands of parents to decide what their children read. Those who want the books unmoved say the relocation is a form of censorship.

While the council has no say in where books are placed on library shelves, the council can cut funding to the library. Audette has not said he plans to propose cutting funds.

At Thursdays meeting, nearly 75 people, some on both sides of the issue, gathered outside the library, some holding signs that said bring back books and please relocate the books.

Some residents who want the books moved dressed in patriotic clothing and one held an American flag, while those who oppose moving the books wore LGBTQ+ colors.

Several people spoke to the board during the public forum.

Fort Mill resident Diane Simone, who addressed the county council in May and spoke to the library board Thursday, drew comparisons between the books at the York County library and pornography.

Its not a First Amendment right, its not censorship, its obscene material and its against the law, Simone said.

Tega Cay resident Heather Jones, formerly of Texas, said she believes parents have the right to see what their children view but that parents should have the choice.

She said it becomes disingenuous when one parent gets to dictate what another parent can have access to for their children.

If my child does pick up a book, no one is at the door forcing this book into my childs hands, Jones said. And no one has come here and had somebody sneak a book out of a trench coat into my childs bag and when I get home and suddenly theyve seen something I dont want them to see.
New Yorks state Assembly Chamber in Albany (AP)

The New York State Legislature has passed a bill clearing the way for the creation of a commission to consider the enduring legacy of slavery on the Black community, with a view to potentially pay reparations.

The bill passed through the Assembly Chamber in Albany after three hours of debate on Thursday, swiftly followed by the Senate a matter of hours later.

It now makes its way to the desk of New York Governor Kathy Hochul for her signature.

New York is following the example of California, which became the first state to form a reparations task force in 2020.

That group recommended that California issue a formal apology for the lasting legacy of racism and discriminatory policies  from over-policing to mass incarceration and redlining  and the creation of an agency to provide a wide range of services for Black residents.

It stopped short of recommending the precise value of reparations payments that might be made to citizens, however, although it did hear analysis from economists who suggested that the states Black residents could be owed as much as $800bn in compensation, a preliminary estimate more than 2.5 times larger than Californias annual budget of $300bn.

The commission created by New Yorks legislation would be tasked with examining the extent to which the federal and state government had supported the institution of slavery and address persistent economic, political and educational disparities experienced by the Black community in the state today.

It would be required to deliver a report one year on from its first meeting and any recommendations it might make regarding compensation payments would be non-binding, with the Legislature not compelled to take them to a vote.

The bill takes as its starting point the arrival of the first enslaved Africans arriving on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, then a Dutch settlement, in the 1620s, noting that they were thereafter deployed in helping build the infrastructure of what became New York City.

The state Legislature finally enacted a statute in 1827 to free New Yorks slaves, although it was not implemented until 1837.

Prior to Thursdays floor debate, New York Assembly speaker Carl Heastie, the first Black person to hold that position, took a moment to acknowledge how historic the legislation was and the gravity of the subject up for consideration.

Making the case for the bill, assemblywoman Michaelle Solages said: We want to make sure we are looking at slavery and its legacies.

This is about beginning the process of healing our communities. There still is generational trauma that people are experiencing. This is just one step forward.

On the other side of the debate and voicing opposition was assemblyman Andy Gooddell, who said: Im concerned were opening a door that was closed in New York State almost 200 years ago.

Mr Gooddell added that he believed in pursuing contemporary equal opportunities measures and said he preferred to continue on that path rather than focus on reparations.

Following its passage, Speaker Heasie, Senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Governor Hochul will each appoint three qualified members to the commission.

Other state legislatures that have considered examining the complex questions of reparations include New Jersey and Vermont but neither has yet passed legislation.

Nor, for that matter, has Congress, although the creation of an equivalent commission in DC has long been mooted.

A Chicago suburb in Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to effectively make reparations available to Black residents through a $10 million housing project in 2021.

While few would argue that the idea of paying compensation is well-intentioned, some critics have dismissed it as misguided.

William Darity, a professor of public policy and African and African American Studies at Duke University, has said that even calling proposed payouts reparations is presumptuous because it is virtually impossible for states to actually afford the huge costs involved.

Professor Darity believes only the federal government has the capacity to realise the money required.

My deeper fear with all of these piecemeal projects is that they actually will become a block against federal action because there will be a number of people who will say theres no need for a federal program, he said.

If you end up settling for state and local initiatives, you settle for much less than what is owed.

Additional reporting by agencies
New Yorks orange haze reminds Asians in the US of home

[Source]

Asians living in the U.S. are drawing comparisons between the orange smog that has covered New York City and the air pollution in their home countries.

Whats going on: New York and many parts of the East Coast have been breathing in smog for days now. The smoke originates from wildfires in Canada, which reportedly began in late April. On Wednesday afternoon, New York Citys PM2.5 levels peaked at 303.3 micrograms per cubic meter. The Big Apple also temporarily overtook New Delhi as the worlds most polluted city on Tuesday, according to Swiss air quality tracker IQAir.

What Asians are saying: The smoke has blanketed the East Coast in a characteristic orange haze, a sight familiar to residents of New Delhi and Beijing who have been struggling with air pollution for years. In response to the news of New York having the worlds worst air quality on Tuesday, one Twitter user wrote, Feels dangerously like home. Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, who lives in Harlem, also wrote in an Instagram post that people from China and India and those who have lived there have told her that such air quality is not surprising for them. Everyone needs clean air, she added.

Headlines everywhere, #NewYork is the most polluted city in the world. AQI breaches 300+ More from NextShark: NYPD cop of 18 years charged with hate crime over anti-Muslim attack All too familiar. Heart and lungs go out to New Yorkers. As a former Delhiite, and a clean air campaigner in 2016, I can vouch for the damage that dangerous levels of toxic air can do (2/n)  ruhie (@ruhie) June 8, 2023

More from NextShark: Father Dangles His Son Off a Cliff in China to Get the Perfect Photo

The surreal air quality in New York so resembles countless days in Beijing, occasionally making me doubt if I'm actually in Beijing. So, for the first time in four years, I dreamt of Beijing:  Menghang Wu () (@phdinsleeping) June 8, 2023

More from NextShark: Will it make it home?: An eagle from Asia has been lost traveling around North America for over a year

New York friends: worried about the air China friends: nostalgically remembering the IPA that only went on sale if the AQI was above 200 pic.twitter.com/3fWFYZWIgj  Cooper Lund (@cooperlund) June 7, 2023

Wow! Who wouldve thought that the air quality of New York City (334 Aqi) would surpass the air quality of New Delhi, India (218 AQI)? Phewwit surely feels like an average day in Delhi in NY. pic.twitter.com/BXtVXGs9Hj  Anita Rao Wholistic Express (@Wholistically) June 7, 2023

The bigger picture: Asian regions are suffering the most deaths from air pollution, according to German data platform Statista. In 2019, nearly 2.5 million in East Asia and the Pacific died due to the problem. A majority of the deaths reportedly occurred in China and India. By comparison, there were 64,600 deaths in North America in the same year.

The latest status: New York City found some relief Friday, as its AQI (air quality index) dropped to 46 (categorized as good) from yesterdays 72 (moderate). However, a health advisory reportedly remains in effect until midnight.
New Yorkers are asking Google how to 'sell my house fast' after the US Northeast was blanketed with orange smog

People cross 5th Avenue as heavy smoke fills the air on June 7, 2023, in New York City. Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

People in New York are searching for ways to "sell my house fast" as thick smog hits the Northeast.

Search interest for the term jumped 2,147% on Wednesday, according to FindStorageFast.

Air quality in NYC dropped to one of the world's worst levels that day due to Canadian wildfires.

Wildfire haze and red skies in New York City have residents searching for ways to get out of town  permanently.

Google searches for "sell my house fast" jumped 2,147% on Wednesday as air quality in the Big Apple became one of the worst in the world, according to an analysis by storage unit booking company FindStorageFast.

Publicly available data on Google Trends shows a spike in search interest for that phrase.

Google search data over time for "sell my house fast." Screenshot/Google Trends

New Yorkers' search interest for "sell my house" and "sell home" also quadrupled on Google on the same day, per FindStorageFast's analysis.

The term "air purifier" also saw a 2,418% surge in popularity in New York, according to the firm.

"As the housing market becomes a bigger challenge in America, it will be interesting to see if this spike translates into more listings and sales and what this may mean for the city's housing market long-term," said D'Arcy Hunter, CEO and founder of FindStorageFast, in the analysis.

Wildfires in Canada have covered the Northeast in hazardous smog that brought New York City's air quality index readings to nearly 400, making the air dangerous to breathe.

The smog became so intense that it was captured completely engulfing the Manhattan skyline in orange, giving residents a glimpse of what it's like to live in some of the most polluted cities in the world.

Cities such as New Jersey, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Boston were also hit by a sharp decrease in air quality.

The average price of a home in New York is $648,302, up 2.7% over the last year, according to Zillow. The median rent in June is $3,650 per month in the state, an increase of around $350 from the same month last year, per the company's statistics.

Read the original article on Insider
Young backpacker who tried to stop knife attack in southeast France hailed as hero

A 24-year-old man has been hailed as a hero for chasing a man suspected of launching a knife rampage in Annecy, which left six people injured including four toddlers.

Two young children are still in intensive care following Thursdays knife attack in southeast France, when screams rippled through a playground in the small Alpine town during the brutal assault.

A 31-year-old Syrian asylum-seeker was detained on suspicion of carrying out the attack, French media and CNN affiliate BFMTV reported Thursday. The suspect is being held in custody at a police station in Annecy, according to BFMTV.

The backpacker who attempted to stop the knife attack has been dubbed the backpack hero locally. He identified himself only as Henri to French media.

I tried to act as every Frenchman should act. Or how every Frenchmen would act, the young man told BFMTV on Friday, adding that he did not even think.

It was just impossible to leave defenseless people to be attacked like that by someone who seemed to me effectively to be a maniac, he said.

Videos filmed by bystanders show Henri confronting the perpetrator and swinging his bag to fight him off.

Our eyes met and I could feel that this was a guy who was not in a right state, that something evil was in him, Henri added.

People lay flowers near the scene at a lakeside park in Annecy, France, on Friday, after a knife attack left four children and two adults wounded. - Peter Byrne/AP

President Emmanuel Macron (center) and his wife Brigitte Macron (second left) arrive at a hospital in Grenoble on Friday to visit the victims the stabbing incident. - Benoit Lagneux/AFP/Getty Images

Members of the public on Friday wrote messages and laid floral tributes at the scene of the incident, Reuters reported. Passersby were seen wiping away tears as bouquets of flowers and balloons were strewn across the playground.

French government spokesperson Olivier Veran said on the radio station France Info that two of the children injured in the attack are in a vitally urgent state, after surgical intervention. The wounded were treated in hospitals in Geneva and Grenoble, according to Annecy mayor Francois Astorg.

French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte arrived in Annecy on Friday to meet victims, their families and those who intervened in the attack, Veran said.

The Elysee Palace released a statement saying Macron and his wife would also be meeting the people who helped and supported the victims and their loved ones in the aftermath of the incident.

Macron met and thanked Henri on Friday alongside other first aid responders, according to AFP and other French media.

Henri was walking towards the motorway to hitchhike to the Hautecombe Abbey when he came across the horrific scene.

Henri is on a nine-month journey across the country to visit the most beautiful cathedrals of France, he told BFMTV.

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An explosion on the North Stream

Zelenskyy commented on media reports regarding alleged plans by Ukrainian military personnel to undermine the Nord Stream pipelines.

Read also: German journalists investigate new Ukrainian connections to Nord Stream explosions

I am president and I give orders accordingly, Zelenskyy said.

Nothing of the sort has been done by Ukraine. I would never act that way.

Zelenskyy also called on those who accuse Ukraine of sabotage to present evidence.

Read also: Denmark confirms sighting of Russian vessel near Nord Stream explosion site

U.S. President Joe Bidens administration likely knew about the plan to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines involving Ukrainian military personnel, reported The Washington Post.

During the night of Sept. 26, 2022, three out of four strands of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines were destroyed by explosions in the neutral waters of the Baltic Sea. Both pipelines were not operational at the time but were filled with technical gas.

Poland and Ukraine accused Russia of the explosions, while the Kremlin regime, in turn, accused the Anglo-Saxons and denied involvement.

Earlier, media reports citing sources claimed that the yacht used by a group of suspected saboteurs belonged to Ukrainian citizens.

Read also: State actor likely behind Nord Stream sabotage, Sweden says

Ukraine had no connection to the pipeline sabotage, Mykhailo Podoliak, an advisor to the Head of the Presidents Office, stated at that time.

Minister of Defense Oleksiy Reznikov said, It is a rather strange story that has nothing to do with us.

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Zelenskyy convenes a meeting of the Supreme Commander-in-Chiefs Staff to discuss gains on the frontline

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has convened a meeting of the Supreme Commander-in-Chiefs Staff. Participants discussed inflicting losses on Russian forces and Ukraines gains on the frontlines.

Source: President Zelenskyys video address

Quote from Zelenskyy: "I just held a meeting of the Staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. The situation on the frontline was our main focus. Reports from task force commanders, the Commander-in-Chief, Defence Intelligence, the Defence Ministry, the Ministry of Strategic Industries, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

We are focusing our attention on all fronts that demand action and where we can defeat enemy forces. [We have discussed] our defensive and offensive operations and our gains on the frontlines. Weve discussed, in detail, the supply and distribution of ammunition, and how to strengthen our artillery and air defence forces."

Details: Zelenskyy also addressed the soldiers "who are in particularly tough battles these days".

"We see your heroism, and we are grateful to you for every minute of your lives  the lives that truly give life to Ukraine. Because Ukraine is as free as you, our soldiers, are strong. Ukraine is as protected as you are effective," Zelenskyy said.

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Zelenskyy spoke with Japanese Prime Minister, who promised help after Kakhovka HPP explosion

Prime Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida and President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a telephone conversation. Japan plans to provide humanitarian aid in the amount of US$5 million through international organisations to the people affected by the explosion of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP).

Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, quoted by Interfax-Ukraine; Office of the President of Ukraine

Details: On 9 June, Zelenskyy and Kishida held a 30-minute telephone conversation.

The president informed the Japanese Prime Minister about the consequences of Russia's blowing up of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant and his visit to the southern oblasts of Ukraine, which are in the disaster zone.

"The aggressor has caused a large-scale man-made, environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. This is a deliberate act of terrorism and another war crime of Russia," Zelenskyy stated.

It was also noted that the destruction of the hydroelectric power plant created threats to the safety of the Zaporizhzhia NPP due to the lowering of the water level in the Kakhovka Reservoir.

Kishida expressed his solidarity with the Ukrainian people in connection with the catastrophic consequences of the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant.

He said that the Japanese government is preparing a humanitarian aid package for Ukraine based on the list of priority needs submitted by the Ukrainian side.

Kishida said that Japan plans to quickly provide emergency humanitarian aid in the amount of US$5 million to residents affected by the flood through international organisations, the country's Foreign Ministry informed.

Zelenskyy informed Kishida about the situation on the contact line and Russia's latest resumption of missile terror against Ukraine. He stressed that Russian attacks target civilian infrastructure and peaceful cities.

The parties discussed further involvement of Japan's security support, cooperation in humanitarian mine clearance, ways to implement the Ukrainian Peace Formula and preparations for the Global Peace Summit.

"The latest crimes of the aggressor have confirmed that the Ukrainian Peace Formula is more relevant than ever. We must stop Russia's terror," the president stated.

The two leaders also discussed bilateral cooperation and the reconstruction of Ukraine.

Kishida confirmed his readiness to hold a conference on the restoration of Ukraine in Japan early next year.

Background: In May, Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Hiroshima, Japan, to participate in the G7 leaders' summit, while Fumio Kishida visited Kyiv in March.

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Zimbabwe's main opposition leader, Nelson Chamisa, left, greets a supporter after he had inspected the voters roll in Harare, on Tuesday, May, 30, 2023. Chamisa described the voters roll as "a perennial challenge" and alleged that irregularities include missing names of registered voters as the country prepares for elections to be held on Aug.23. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP)  Munyaradzi Mushawatu, an electrician in Zimbabwes capital, Harare, was both ecstatic and jittery after President Emmerson Mnangagwa announced recently that national elections would be held on Aug. 23.

I have voted in every election since 1990. I cant wait to make my voice heard. I am ready, said Mushawatu. But the bravado turned to chagrin as he recalled how the countrys skewed elections environment has remained intact for decades.

Its only the election date that is new. The usual old obstacles remain, said the 56year-old father of three.

Allegations of fraud, violence and harassment of opposition members have characterized elections held in Zimbabwe since independence from white minority rule in 1980.

The 2018 elections were the first following a coup that replaced Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's longtime autocratic ruler, with Mnangagwa, amid promises of reform.

But after a close-run contest, the Constitutional Court dismissed opposition leader Nelson Chamisas claims of vote-rigging.

Mnangagwa, an 80-year-old former enforcer and ally of Mugabe, is again expected to face a strong challenge from the 45-year-old Chamisa. The election will also decide the composition of the 350-seat parliament and close to 2,000 local council positions.

For many Zimbabweans, hope offered by the Aug. 23 elections is eclipsed by a realization that although Mnangagwa has tried to present himself as a reformer, prevailing conditions suggest that he is even more repressive than the man he helped remove from power.

The opposition and some human rights groups say the playing field has been tilted in the ruling partys favor. They cite oppressive laws, arrests and detentions of opposition figures, bans of meetings, alleged violence, biased state media coverage and alleged voters roll irregularities  just as in previous elections.

In the spotlight is a bill recently passed by parliament but which must still be signed by the president in order to become law. The legislation calls for harsh punishments of up to 20 years in jail for unpatriotic acts such as attending a meeting with foreign agents where issues such as sanctions or the overthrow of the government are discussed.

The government defends the bill as necessary to protect national interests.

Many are skeptical.

Since Mugabes time, Zimbabwes ruling party has used sanctions imposed by the United States two decades ago over human rights violations as election campaign fodder  often accusing the opposition of conspiring with the U.S to keep the measures in place.

The bill has had a chilling effect of silencing dissent, said Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, or ZLHR, an NGO.

Provisions such as penalizing people for merely attending a meeting where sanctions are considered are vague, lack certainty, are imprecise, and are thus prone to abuse by law enforcement, said ZLHR.

Criticizing the president or the ruling ZANU-PF party already appears to be hazardous locally. ZLHR says it is providing free legal representation to dozens of people arrested or detained for insulting the president or for tweeting, singing or marching.

Another recurring bone of contention is the voters roll, which Chamisa described as a perennial challenge. Alleged irregularities include missing names of registered voters.

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has repeatedly dismissed allegations of colluding with the ruling party, and recently said voters roll irregularities would be resolved by Election Day.

Despite the odds, Chamisa says he sees a real chance. Some say, are you to boycott the elections? We will not boycott  2023 is a big moment, an opportunity for Zimbabweans to realize change, he told reporters last week. Its the first real test for his party, the Citizens Coalition for Change, which he formed in January last year, making a break from the countrys longtime opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change.

Zimbabwean political commentator Alexander Rusero says Chamisa hopes that a strong showing in August will strengthen the new partys credentials.

The opposition genuinely believe they are being frog-marched into an election they are sure to lose, said Rusero. But remember it is a new political outfit. Elections will secure Chamisas party the legitimacy of being the most formidable opposition and get a seat at the table in case of any post-election political settlement, he said.

Tensions are rising in the Southern African nation of 15 million people as the economy implodes under the weight of a debilitating currency crisis, sharp price rises, crippling electricity shortages, unemployment, corruption allegations and collapsing public health infrastructure.

The ruling party blames U.S sanctions and also accuses businesspeople of conniving to increase prices and ignite anger ahead of elections.

Mnangagwa and the government also deny allegations of violence and intimidation by ruling party activists and security forces and are promising a credible election.

Nothing must be spared to ensure the environment is right and conducive for free, fair and peaceful elections in which the right to vote is available to all those eligible, Mnangagwa wrote in his weekly column in the state-controlled Sunday Mail newspaper.

But some, like Mushawatu, the electrician, are not too sure.

I will vote, but I am not convinced that we are in a new era, he said.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 9)  New Department of National Defense (DND) Secretary Gilbert Teodoro on Friday said he is looking into reducing the pension of entry-level military officers to be able to put more funds to other government programs.

There is no disagreement that for entry level officers, we need to change the pension scheme in order to cut the hemorrhage, Teodoro told CNN Philippines The Source, noting that it can be reduced to a manageable level.

Teodoro said during his first media briefing on June 7 that he will prioritize reforming the military and uniformed personnel (MUP) pension system as ordered by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

RELATED: Biting the bullet: The Marcos administration's push for MUP pension reform

In an earlier interview with CNN Philippines, he described the current military pension system as a big drain on the yearly budget.

For 2023 alone, the MUP pension system, which is fully funded by the government, has a budget of over 100 billion.

Teodoro said the reduction can be done annually, which will allow the government to devote the funds to other means.

He said military officers giving contributions for their pension is also on the table.

Consultations have to be completed first to determine who will contribute and how much, he added.

The DND chief, meanwhile, emphasized that nothing will change in the pension of those who have already retired.

I think to change their situation would be to breach the contract we have with them, simply put, which is not merely a contract, but a blood compact, Teodoro said.
Some local Democrats during a recent campaign event in Amherst expressed optimism in achieving a political feat this November that hasnt been done in nearly three decades: turning the county blue for representation in the Virginia Senate.

Not since the late Elliot Schewel, who formerly represented Amherst County when it was part of the 23rd Senate District, has the county had a Democratic state senator. Upon the election of Sen. Steve Newman in 1995 to that seat, the county has handily been Republican, including when the county later folded into the 22nd Senate District and received representation by Tom Garrett and current Sen. Mark Peake.

Bert Dodson Jr., a former Lynchburg City Council member of 12 years and Democrat who lost a bid for the 22nd Senate District in 2011 against Garrett, is confident Creigh Deeds, a Virginia senator running to represent Amherst and Nelson counties in the newly drawn 11th Senate District, will break that GOP streak for Amherst. At a May 21 meet-and-greet for Deeds at Second Stage Amherst, Dodson praised him for working on both sides of the political aisle in Richmond.

A lot of people talk about it. Creigh does it, Dodson said. Hes the most moderate Democratic state senator in the General Assembly.

Along with Amherst and Nelson counties, the district also includes Albemarle County, Charlottesville and a portion of Louisa County.

Deeds, D-Bath, has served as a state senator in the 25th District since 2001. Amherst County voters had a chance to elect him twice before in two failed bids for attorney general and governor in 2005 and 2009, respectively. Joining him in pushing for facetime with Amherst County voters is Del. Sally Hudson, D-Charlottesville, who also is vying for the Democratic nomination in the 11th Senate District, and Phil Hamilton, a Republican from Charlottesville.

Hudson is the first woman to represent the 57th District, which includes all of Charlottesville and part of Albemarle County, in the Virginia House of Delegates. She held a meet-and-greet with Amherst voters at Camp Trapezium on May 26.

Hamilton, who spoke with Amherst GOP voters at a May 22 mass meeting in Madison Heights, said he has been busy knocking on doors and getting to know residents in his campaign to keep the county, which has had staunch Republican turnout trend, in the red column.

Deeds, who prior to becoming a state senator spent 10 years as a state delegate, recently told Amherst voters his job as a legislator is to make the government work for them and solve problems for their betterment. Among his various roles in the legislature is chair of the judiciary committee, a role that puts him in the room when the budget is put together, he said at the recent campaign stop.

What Ive found in the legislature, as a delegate for 10 years and a senator for 22 years, to be effective you need seniority and relationships. I dont get to take time off when Im in the minority, Deeds said at the May 21 event in Amherst, adding 26 of his 38-sponored bills passed in this years session. I live by the notion that you catch more bees with honey than with vinegar. I worked very hard to develop relationships on both sides of the aisle and both the House and the Senate. Ive got friends I can work with on both sides. You have to if you want to get things done.

All 40 seats in the Virginia Senate and all 100 seats in the Virginia House are up for election in the Nov. 7 election.

Hamilton is doing his part to help Republicans win the Senate, where Democrats hold a slim margin, to turn both legislative and executive branches of state government in favor of the GOP. During his brief May 22 speech in Amherst County, he pushed his pro-life, pro-Second Amendment platform.

We have a lot of work to do ahead of us, Hamilton said.

At a recent GOP meeting in Nelson County, Hamilton said he was happy to spend his birthday with fellow voters. On his pro-life views, he said at the event to applause: We must put legislation on Gov. Glenn Youngkins desk thatll stop the murder of children in the commonwealth of Virginia. We have a golden opportunity to protect the unborn, and as a Christian, I will fight for those innocent lives.

At a recent forum in Nelson County, Deeds said he has always been pro-choice and believes that women have to control their own reproductive and economic health. Hudson at the same event said she has been a proactive champion for reproductive rights and passed legislation that expands insurance coverage for abortion care.

Speaking on the Second Amendment, Hamilton criticized Deeds and Hudson for their support of gun control measures.

Now were going to have to work hard to flip the Virginia Senate so that we can get these bad bills out and more of the Republican bills in, Hamilton said.

Deeds during his May 21 stop in Amherst said Americans dont have mature conversations about gun laws.

Were too tribal in the way we think about guns. Were either for them or against them, Deeds said. We have to get to the point, I think, where we acknowledge guns are part of our culture and people have a right to possess firearms, just like they have a right to free speech, but there are limits to that. We are just not at the point yet as a culture.

Hudson recently told Nelson County voters she was 11 years old when the Columbine High School shooting took place in April 1999 in Colorado and was in college when the Virginia Tech massacre occurred in April 2007. She said during the forum she didnt hesitate to vote to ban assault weapons and from her reading the plain text the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms, not to buy them in bulk.

Hamilton said another issue he supports is protecting Virginia heritage.

Weve seen since 2020 that the woke mob is destroying our national heritage, tearing down monuments, Hamilton said at the recent GOP event in Nelson County. Theyve been turning [James Madison birthplace] Montpelier, Thomas Jeffersons Monticello and these other presidential homes into woke institutions, supporting woke history, and I will fight against it if Im elected.

Deeds recently spoke with Amherst voters on his efforts to improve Virginias mental health system and invest in community-based services and described himself as progressive and focused in tackling those issues. He also spoke on the state budget and Youngkin and the Republican-controlled House trying to cut taxes by $1 billion.

Its just not fiscally responsible to cut taxes now, Deeds said.

He said half of that $1 billion has been invested in K-12 education and raising teacher pay above the national average for the first time,

Nobody in this room expects our kids to be average. We expect our kids to be the best, Deeds said at the May 21 event in Amherst on the investment into public education he feels is worthwhile.

Amherst and Nelson County voters are in the process of early voting in the June 20 primary for the Democratic nomination. Rodney Taylor, a Lynchburg business owner and former Amherst County administrator who helped organize Deeds recent meet-and-greet, said turnout for the primary is vital.

Hes the guy we need, Taylor said.

Amherst resident Suny Monk said she is supporting Deeds because she feels he would represent the county and its needs well.

He understands rural issues, Monk said. I followed his fight for mental health awareness for so long. I just think he is common sense progressive.

Dodson praised Deeds very moderate, very pro-business approach and he would be jealous of Amherst County to have him as a state senator.

Dodson lamented the recent change in Lynchburg City Council that saw Republicans take a majority, blasting stances and decisions he said would cripple the citys school system, hinder needed services through a real estate tax rate cut he feels was too drastic and dial back Lynchburg for a number of years. He said he doesnt want that similar situation in the Virginia Senate.

Moderate Democrats like Creigh are exactly what we need, Dodson said.

Hudson recently told Nelson County voters she is one of the Houses leading legislators on climate change and accountability among utility providers and also passed legislation to increase construction incentives for affordable housing in Charlottesville.

Theres a whole more that we can do to make it easier for working families to make ends meet in every corner of the commonwealth, Hudson said at the forum. Thats the work that gets me out of bed every day 

Reporter Emma Martin contributed to this article.
BEDFORD  Teachers in Bedford County can no longer initiate discussions with students about sexual orientation or gender identity, after a recent decision from the school board Thursday evening.

Additionally, according to adopted Policy INB, classroom discussions of political and other controversial issues shall be facilitated by teachers without violating the provisions outlined in this policy and utilizing an impartial and objective perspective of the subject matter.

This policy does not prohibit teachers from including in their instruction, as part of a course of study utilizing the textbooks and other instructional materials adopted in accordance with approved curriculum that includes the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on race, ethnicity, religion, disability status, or sex as well as based on class, nationality, geographic region and/or other differences, the policy states.

The board approved the policy in a 5-1 vote with District 5 board member Georgia Hairston not present. Susan Mele voted against the policy; Matthew Holbrook, Dwayne Nelms, Marcus Hill, Susan Kirby and Christopher Daniels voted in favor of it.

Policy INB was first presented at an April 6 meeting, and the board had a split vote on it at its last regular meeting May 11.

Similarly to the May 11 meeting, community members, students and parents spoke both in favor and against the policy Thursday evening.

Amy Snead, of Moms for Liberty, whose organizational motto is to educate and empower parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government, spoke in favor of the policy.

Snead said if an issue arises such as gender identity or sexual orientation, the parents should always be involved in the first conversation regardless of anything else.

This policy, as written, serves to support parental rights and it ensures that a parent is the person who discusses controversial issues, Snead said.

Mary Katherine Bennett, who is also in favor of the policy, said it is fantastic.

I hate that this has become almost a circus show, but the bottom line is, you have parents who are not going to stand down  we want whats best for all the children, and you can be kind and loving without putting forth any sort of agenda on either side to these children, she said.

Cindy Younghouse, parent and pediatric nurse who spoke against the policy, said everyone in the schools deserves to feel safe and that its non-negotiable.

Younghouse said Virginia schools arent currently safe for LGBTQ+ students.

We all know one teacher can make a tremendously positive difference in a young persons life. Policy INB will take that support away, creating a school environment where both students and teachers will fear for their safety, possibly exacerbating staff vacancies, Younghouse said.

Cindy Gillespie, a Bedford County teacher and parent who spoke against the policy, said not every student lives in a supportive, loving home environment.

She asked the board to take the paragraph out of the policy, which states that teachers shall not engage in discussion with students about sexual orientation or gender identity, which the board amended to not initiate.

These students get this love and support from their schools mom or dad, known to you as teachers, secretaries, counselors, custodians, cafeteria staff, bus drivers and other adults at the school, Gillespie said.

During discussion amongst the board on policy INB, Daniels made a motion to adopt it but amend engage in the second to last paragraph to initiate.

The policy will read as follows:

In addition, teachers shall not initiate discussions with students about sexual orientation or gender identity. Sexual orientation is defined as an individuals physical, romantic, and/or emotional attraction to people of the same and/or different gender. Gender identity is defined as an individuals personal conception of their gender.

Kirby, who voted against the policy on May 11, said she did not vote in favor of it because for some students, the teacher is the only one that a student feels safe going to talk to.

The changing of the word in the policy from engage to initiate was a factor in her change of voting.

I did not want that line of communication cut off completely, Kirby said.

Mele, who voted against the policy, asked if the board could review this policy again with parents, students and the committee to see if the group can make it less broad.

If we dont have clear expectations about reasonableness or controversial even, then that leaves it open to interpretation by each individual, she said.

Hill responded by saying, we are telling parents that we are putting this back on them to take care of the home.

Not for our teachers, our administrators or anybody in this school system to handle any type of gender identity or sexual orientation in the classroom, he said.

Superintendent Marc Bergin ended the discussion by addressing concerns of the adopted policy  stating the discussions portion of the policy pertains to classroom instruction and it does not prohibit a student from initiating a conversation with a trusted teacher or counselor about personal concerns.

In response to the concern that changes in this policy are going to create an environment of discrimination, I want to be very clear, we do not tolerate discrimination against any student or staff member with regards to characteristics. School is and must always remain a safe place for everyone, he added.
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Ethiopian soldiers are reported to have foiled on Wednesday June 7 a suicide attack by the armed group al-Shabab at a town of Dollo near its border with Somalia, while the US Agency for International Development (USAID) said a day later it was suspending food aid to the East African country because of the aid diversion away from people who need it.

The Ethiopian arm stopped the attackers before they could wreak havoc in the Ethiopia-Somalia border town by [neutralizing] suicide bombers and [destroying] weapons to be used by the terrorist group, the Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday. Al-Shabab, which has been linked to al-Qaeda, has been waging an armed rebellion against Somalias central government for about 15 years. The alleged incident in Dollo comes days after Uganda announced 54 of its soldiers were killed in an attack on a base housing African Union peacekeepers in Somalia. The terrorist group was driven out of Mogadishu in 2011 by an AU force, but it still controls swathes of countryside and regularly carries out deadly strikes on civilian, political and military targets.

Meanwhile, US top diplomat Antony Blinken on Thursday welcomed the Ethiopian governments commitment to investigate the diversion of American food aid away from people who needed it, the State Department said. This comes just hours after the USAID announced its finding, in coordination with the Ethiopian government, that a widespread and coordinated campaign is diverting food assistance from the people of Ethiopia. It did not, however, say who was behind the campaign or who the aid was being diverted to. The USAID added that it intended to resume food assistance as soon as it was confident in the integrity of the system.

Blinken met with Ethiopian leaders on the margins of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS (Islamic State) in Saudi Arabia.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has held a phone conversation with Senegals leader Macky Sall to discuss the political situation in the West African country after several days of unrest that ensued the condemnation of political figure Ousmane Sonko.

The conversation, Senegals State-run news agency APS notes, took place Wednesday. Senegal was rocked by several days of unrest in which at least 16 people were killed, according to a public count.

Authorities said 500 people have been arrested in connection to the protests. I spoke to President Macky Sall on the phone today. We discussed the political situation in Senegal, A. Blinken himself said on Twitter. The US top diplomat, according to the APS, offered his condolences for those killed during the recent unrest. He also reiterated his support for the Senegalese people and democratic values.

The protests erupted in several cities including the capital Dakar on June 1st after the condemnation of Sonko, a presidential candidate in February 2024 elections, to two years in prison on charges of corrupting youth in a rape case involving a young woman aged less than 21.

Sall, during a cabinet meeting held also Wednesday, ordered an investigation into the clashes. He, according to his administration, reiterated his openness to dialogue and consultation with all the living forces of the nation in respect of the rule of law and of our common interest to live together in peace, stability and solidarity.

The Senegalese leader launched on May 31 a national dialogue initiative supposed to appease the political tension in the country, but rejected by a chunk of the opposition, including Sonko.

The Presidents critics accuse him for the crisis owing to his plans to run for a third term in office. He is feared to be planning an amendment of the Constitution. He has not yet unveiled his intent.
The Government of Burkina Faso has reaffirmed steadfast support for Moroccos autonomy plan offered for the Sahara under its sovereignty and praised the tireless efforts made by King Mohammed VI for the development and peace in Africa.

The supportive stand comes in a joint statement issued Friday in the Moroccan Saharan city of Dakhla following the fourth meeting of the Moroccan-Burkinabe Committee, held under co-chairmanship of Moroccan Foreign minister Nasser Bourita and Burkinabe peer Mrs. Olivia Ragnaghnewende Rouamba.

In the joint statement, the Burkina Faso top diplomat said the Moroccan autonomy is the only credible and realistic solution to the Sahara regional conflict.

She also voiced her countrys strong support for Moroccos territorial integrity and the UN-exclusive role and process engaged for finding a realistic, practical, and lasting solution to the Sahara dispute.

In 2020, Burkina Faso opened a consulate in Dakhla, pearl of Moroccan Sahara, a move confirming the recognition of Moroccos sovereignty over its Saharan provinces.

In the joint statement, Ouagadogou commended the tireless efforts made by Morocco, under the far-sighted leadership of King Mohammed VI, for the development and peace in Africa.

Morocco and Burkina Faso voiced their readiness to support peace and stability across the African continent in general and in the Sahel region in particular.

The two countries foreign ministers praised the convergence of their views on the various issues of common interest and reaffirmed the commitment of Rabat and Ouagadougou to work together for lasting peace and economic development on the African continent with the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

Bourita expressed Moroccos full solidarity with Burkina Faso in its tireless efforts to combat the scourge of terrorism and violent extremism, saying that Burkina Faso will always find in Morocco a partner constantly committed to promoting and supporting its initiatives for stability and development.

For her part, Mrs. Rouamba thanked Morocco for its solidarity and unwavering support enabling her country to face up security and humanitarian challenges.

The two ministers agreed on strengthening coordination, consultations, and mutual support in continental and international meetings over issues of common interests.

The 4th meeting of the Moroccan-Burkinabe Committee was crowned with the signing of several agreements destined to bolster cooperation between the two countries in customs, technology, automotive testing, justice, water, tourism, sports, education, training
(CNN)  Cuba has agreed to allow China to build a spying facility on the island that could allow the Chinese to eavesdrop on electronic communications across the southeastern US, two sources familiar with the intelligence told CNN.

The US learned about the plan in the last several weeks, the first source said, and it is unclear whether China has already begun building the surveillance facility.

The second source familiar with the intelligence says it suggests that a deal has been struck in principle but there hasnt been any movement on building the facility.

It would not be the first time China has attempted to spy on the US electronic communications, known as signals intelligence. A suspected Chinese spy balloon that transited the US in February was capable of gathering signals intelligence and is believed to have transmitted back to Beijing in near-real time, sources told CNN at the time.

In that case, the US took steps to protect sensitive sites and censor intelligence signals before shooting down the balloon. But it is unclear what the US can do to stop the construction of a Chinese spying facility in Cuba.

This report is not accurate, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in a statement on Thursday afternoon. We have had real concerns about Chinas relationship with Cuba, and we have been concerned since day one of the Administration about Chinas activities in our hemisphere and around the world. We are closely monitoring it and taking steps to counter it. We remain confident that we are able to meet all our security commitments at home and in the region.

Kirby initially told the Journal on Thursday morning that he cannot speak to this specific report, but that US officials are well aware ofand have spoken many times tothe Peoples Republic of Chinas efforts to invest in infrastructure around the world that may have military purposes, including in this hemisphere.

Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio denied the reports.

At a press conference in Havana on Thursday, he called them totally untrue and slanders.

Slanders like these have been fabricated frequently by US officials, he said, alleging that the reported spy base was being used to legitimize US sanctions on Cuba.

Fallacies promoted with the malicious intention to justify the unprecedented reinforcement of the economic blockade, destabilization and the aggression against Cuba and deceive public opinion in the United States and around the world, de Cossio added.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the new intelligence about the facility.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, a Democrat, and Vice Chairman Marco Rubio, a Republican, released a statement expressing concern about the reports.

We are deeply disturbed by reports that Havana and Beijing are working together to target the United States and our people. The United States must respond to Chinas ongoing and brazen attacks on our nations security. We must be clear that it would be unacceptable for China to establish an intelligence facility within 100 miles of Florida and the United States, in an area also populated with key military installations and extensive maritime traffic. We urge the Biden administration to take steps to prevent this serious threat to our national security and sovereignty, Rubio and Warner said.

The CIA declined to comment. CNN has reached out to the Chinese and Cuban embassies in Washington, DC.

The first source familiar with the intelligence noted that while an eavesdropping base on Cuba would be concerning, China has already established footholds inside the US  namely, secret police stations that the Biden administration has begun to crack down on.

The US also conducts spying missions near China, using reconnaissance aircraft that routinely engage in electronic eavesdropping. One of those US planes was recently intercepted by a Chinese fighter jet, in what the US described as a dangerous and unprofessional maneuver.

But the revelation about the potential Chinese outpost in Cuba comes as US-China relations have reached a low point, following the spy balloon incident and several aggressive maneuvers by Chinese aircraft and ships against US assets in the South China Sea.

The US has been trying to mend the relationship, and dispatched CIA Director Bill Burns to Beijing last month for talks with Chinese officials. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is also expected to visit China in the coming weeks.

But last week, Chinas defense chief refused a meeting request by US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and warned the US to stop operating near Chinese waters and airspace.

The best way to prevent this from happening is that military vessels and aircraft not come close to our waters and airspace, Chinese defense minister Li Shangfu said in Singapore last week, referring to recent close calls between Chinese and US planes and ships. Watch out for your own territorial waters and airspace, then there will not be any problems.

The Biden administration has done little to try to improve relations with Cuba and has only resumed limited bilateral conversations on matters like migration. Following rapprochement efforts under the Obama administration, relations plummeted due to the so-called Havana Syndrome illness that impacted US diplomats posted in the Cuban capital and the Trump administrations decision  during the final days of that administration  to re-list Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Cuba gives China permission to build spying facility on island, US intel says"
The PAI Terra Ranka coalition of five opposition groups, led by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, has won Guinea-Bissaus parliamentary elections, securing a majority of seats in parliament.

The legislative elections were the first since President Umaro Sissoco Embalo dissolved the National Peoples Assembly more than a year ago. The five-party PAI Terra Ranka coalition took 54 of the 102 seats, ahead of President Embalos Movement for Democratic Alternation that came second with 29 seats, according to provisional results released by the National Electoral Commission on Thursday (8 June). The Party for Social Renewal (PRS) came third winning 12 seats, the Workers Party gleaned six seats and the Assembly of the People United got one seat. Some 900,000 voters were called to the polls to elect new members of parliament for a five-year term. The vote was conducted peacefully under the supervision of 230 international observers.

Under the current political system, the majority party or coalition appoints the government, but the president has the power to dismiss it in certain circumstances, which has led to political deadlock and infighting in the past. The tiny West African state has also faced chronic instability in the shape of repeated coups and contested election results. But the recent ballot was described by international monitors as free, transparent and calm.

The outcome is a blow for the outgoing president, who took office in 2020, because it spells the end of his plans to push through a constitutional change that would have allowed him to consolidate power by ridding the country of its semi-presidential system.
Nearly 500 western Nebraska Catholics will gather in North Platte Saturday for a special day-long celebration not done in the region in nearly half a century.

The Diocese of Grand Islands second Eucharistic Congress since its 1912 founding will start at 9 a.m. in the Sandhills Conference Center at Ramada by Wyndham, 2102 S. Jeffers St.

The event, a smaller version of national and international events held every few years, centers around the Catholic belief that Jesus becomes present, body, blood, soul and divinity, when a priest consecrates bread and wine during Mass for Holy Communion.

Eucharistic congresses, first held on the international level in Lille, France, in 1881, are infrequent but hardly new for Nebraskas Catholics.

The states first and largest took place in 1930 in Omaha, which hosted the sixth in a series of nine National Eucharistic Congresses dating to 1895 in Washington, D.C. The next  the first since 1941  will be in Indianapolis in July 2024.

Northeast Nebraskas Archdiocese of Omaha most recently held a separate Eucharistic Congress in April 2003. The Diocese of Lincoln held its own diocesan congress in September 1995.

The Grand Island Diocese, which covers the Panhandle and central Nebraska north of the South Platte and Platte rivers, held its inaugural Eucharistic Congress in Kearney on June 20, 1976.

Diocesan officials said that earlier congress served as a lead-in to the International Eucharistic Congress held in Philadelphia in August 1976. That event was attended by then-Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, Poland, who became Pope John Paul II in 1978.

Some 4,000 Grand Island Diocese Catholics attended the 1976 Kearney congress. Presiding was Archbishop Jean Jadot, then Pope Paul VIs apostolic delegate to the United States.

St. Patrick and Holy Spirit parishes in North Platte are part of the diocese. The citys third parish, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, is in the Lincoln Diocese south of the South Platte and Platte rivers.

Current Grand Island Bishop Joseph Hanefeldt said Saturdays North Platte congress fits into a three-year National Eucharistic Revival. It started in June 2022 and leads up to and beyond next years Indianapolis national congress.

A preparatory booklet on the diocesan website (gidiocese.org/diocesan-phase) notes a 2019 Pew study that found only 30% of Catholics believe in Jesus Real Presence in the Eucharist (Greek for thanksgiving).

The North Platte congress theme, Abide in Me, comes from Jesus words in John 6:56: He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him.

From his words, we believe that receiving the Eucharist unites us in a holy communion with our Lord, Hanefeldt said.

Three of the four New Testament Gospels  Matthew, Mark and Luke  and St. Pauls first letter to the Corinthians record that Jesus said This is my body and This is my blood at the first Lords Supper, the night before his death by crucifixion.

Catholic teaching holds that Jesus thus transformed the substance of bread and wine into his actual body and blood and empowered his apostles and their ordained priestly successors to do likewise.

Diocesan spokeswoman Angie Fisher said registration for Saturdays North Platte congress  which included the cost of lunch  was capped at 460 people.

Though registration has closed, she said, others are welcome to attend the congress though they wont have lunch provided.

Saturdays schedule begins with check-in at 9 a.m. and Hanefeldts welcome and opening prayer at 9:45 a.m. Keynote addresses are planned at 10:30 and 1:45 p.m., with a witness talk at 2:40 p.m.

The Eucharistic Congress will end with a 4 p.m. closing Mass, which coincides with the start of the weekends annual Corpus Christi (Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ) celebration in U.S. Catholic churches.

Attendees will be able during lunch to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession) from a priest and spend time in Eucharistic adoration before a consecrated Communion host, also called the Blessed Sacrament.

The keynote speaker, the Rev. Timothy Anastos, is a chaplain at the St. John Paul II Newman Center at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He hosts the 60-second Reel Homilies features on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok and serves as a Eucharistic preacher for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

After the congress closes, Catholic parishes throughout the Grand Island Diocese will hold Eucharistic Revival activities leading up to next years national congress, Hanefeldt said.
Albert's Culbertson Grass is approximately 64 +/- acres of native grass pasture accessed by a well maintained, paved county road. The property has a barbed wire perimeter fence and there is a well with a windmill (the Seller nor their representative know the quality of the well). There is electrical service on the property. There are several potential building sites on the property so a Buyer will have many options with this terrific ranch.LandAlberts Culbertson Grass is 64 +/- acres of rolling native grass. ImprovementsThere is a perimeter barbed wire fence and electrical service to the property. RecreationAlberts Culbertson Grass and the Frenchman River Valley offers endless recreation, from hunting small game and varmints to monster plains mule deer and White-tailed deer. You also have the opportunity to go hiking, biking or having fun on your ATV/UTV all on your own property! Swanson Reservoir, which boasts some excellent fishing and waterfowl hunting is only a short 15 mile drive to the west of Alberts Culbertson Grass. AgricultureCurrently Alberts Culbertson Grass is operated as a cattle pasture. Water/Mineral Rights & Natural ResourcesAll appurtenant water rights associated with this property will transfer to the Buyer at Closing. Seller owned mineral rights will transfer to the Buyer at Closing. General OperationsAlberts Culbertson Grass is currently used as a cattle pasture. Region & ClimateHitchcock County, Nebraska gets 21 inches of rain, on average, per year.The US average is 38 inches of rain per year. Hitchcock County averages 24 inches of snow per year.The US average is 28 inches of snow per year. On average, there are 240 sunny days per year in Hitchcock County.The US average is 205 sunny days. Hitchcock County gets some kind of precipitation, on average, 71 days per year. Precipitation is rain, snow, sleet, or hail that falls to the ground. In order for precipitation to be counted you have to get at least .01 inches on the ground to measure. Weather Highlights Summer High:the July high is around 90 degrees Winter Low:the January low is 14 Rain:averages 21 inches of rain a year Snow:averages 24 inches of snow a year HistoryThis area is rich in history. On 30 Aug. 1873 the first election was held in the county. It was held at the residence of F.U. Martin on Section 14, Township 3, Range 32 West, two miles east of the present town of Culbertson. The first officers elected were: Thomas LeGrand, W.W. Kelly and F.U. Martin, commissioners; W.Z. Taylor, Clerk, J.E. Kleven, Treasurer; G.E. Baldwin, Sheriff; A.J. Vanderslice, Judge; J.H. Conklin, surveyor; Daniel Murphy, Superintendent of Schools; J.H. Miller, Coroner. The county seat was located on the north half of Section 17, Range 31 West, the site of the town of Culbertson. Prior to 1869, the Republican Valley was a major retreat for the hostile Sioux and Cheyenne Indians. The valley was in the heart of buffalo range and was one of the great hunting grounds of the West. Whites made only occasional hunting trips into the region, due to the threat of Indian problems. In the summer of 1869, at the Battle of Summit Springs, near present Sterling, Co., Gen. Eugene A. Carr and his Republican River Expedition defeated the hostile Indians under Chief Tall Bull, which virtually cleared the Republican for settlement. The counties to the east of Hitchcock County were quickly organized by adventuresome frontiersmen and women. Though he did not file upon the land until August, George C. Gessleman was the first person to settle in what is now Hitchcock county, arriving in the early spring of 1873. During the next few months, he was joined by about a dozen other men, staking claims along Blackwood Creek to the east and north of present Culbertson. On 30 May 1873, a flash flood on the Blackwood brought near disaster to those first frontiersmen of the county. In the night, after everyone was in bed, most sleeping outdoors, a flood rushed down the creek, washing away tents, wagons and possessions. The boundaries for Hitchcock County had been defined by the legislature in January 1873 and named for Phineas W. Hitchcock, then serving as United States Senator from Nebraska. Situated near the southwest corner of Nebraska, the county is twenty-four miles north and south and thirty miles from east to west. In June the settlers petitioned Governor Robert W. Furnas for permission to organize the county, and he issued a proclamation on 5 July 1873, calling for an election to organize the county to be held on August 30th. In July, William Zacariah Taylor arrived on the present site of Culbertson and began building a store, probably at the instigation of the Republican Valley Land Company, the town site company of the Burlington Railroad. He named the site for Alexander Culbertson , noted trader of the Upper Missouri County in the 1840s and 1850s, who was living out his old age at Orleans, Harlan County, where his son-in-law was a Burlington official. Before the election, however, the settlers went through another time of trial, when the Sioux defeated the Pawnee at the Battle of Massacre Canyon on Tuesday morning, August 5th. The day before the battle a party of Sioux warriors had terrorized some of the settlers along the Blackwood, destroying some property. An account of the battle is given elsewhere in this history. Eighteen votes were cast at the first election on August 30th, and the men elected served only until the regular election on October 14th. Several of those elected had apparently left the county by the second election, however. A party of buffalo hunters were robbed in early October on the Stinking Water and left afoot on the prairie later making their way to the Kansas settlements. They and others said the robbery was done by some of these first county officials. During that first summer, only a few acres of ground were broken. For survival, these first frontiersmen depended upon the buffalo and other wild game. Supplies had to be transported from the railroad in the Platte Valley, mainly from North Platte or Plum Creek (Lexington). Having little money, many of the settlers traded buffalo meat for essentials. This was to remain the main source of trade until the buffalo herds were finally wiped out. Though 1874 started out well, the grasshopper hordes arrived in late summer and the few small fields were devastated. Many of the settlers left the county, leaving only a handful of men. In 1875 a major change came to the county. Large scale ranching began in Southwest Nebraska. Some ranchers came from the East, but others were Colorado ranchers who entered the region from the west. Thus began Culbertsons boom period. Though a few very small settlements, such as Stratton, Palisade and Benkleman were started about 1880, until about 1883, Culbertson was the only real settlement in Southwest Nebraska, being the only town between Indianola and Ogallala. Though many of the ranchers and their families lived in Culbertson, at least during the winter, and many of the men served as officials of Hitchcock County. Until the railroad built up the valley, few settlers entered the region, for they would have had no way to market their produce except for the long haul to the Platte. When the Burlington began to build west, many homesteaders entered the county, settling on the Driftwood and the Frenchman, as well as building up the river valley. It was not until about 1884, however, that homesteaders began to settle on the divide lands, booming the population of the county. Early history of Hitchcock County tells of frequent Indian scares, but no injury was ever done the settlers. In the fall of 1876, two horse thieves were killed in Massacre Canyon and buried near Culbertson. In the fall of 1878, a band of Cheyenne Indians escaped from their reservation, to visit their old Nebraska home, and passed near here. In the fall of 1881 the Burlington and Missouri Railroad was completed to Culbertson and trains began running regularly to this point. In March 1882, trains began running westward as far as Akron, Colorado. The first school district was organized 21 Feb. 1876. This district was the north one-half of the county. No other district was organized until 1879 when four more districts were added. Another district was formed in 1880 and three more in 1881, making nine school districts in the county by 1882. There were 335 children of school age and 12 teachers holding certificates. The salaries of the teachers ranged all the way from $20 to $40 per month. The first newspaper in the county was the spring of 1879 by W.Z. Taylor, and Nat L. Baker was the editor. This paper was published until the spring of 1800, when Baker took the material and started the Chipper. Taylor started another paper called the Sun at the same time and employed R.D. Graham as editor. During the same summer the Clipper failed and Baker returned the material and the Sun remained the only paper published in the county. LocationAlberts Culbertson Grass is located in Hitchcock County in SW Nebraska. The closest community is Culbertson and the nearest large community is McCook (15 minutes). The property is only a mile north of US Hwy 34 and is located almost an equal distance from Interstates I-70 and I-80.

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Stormy Daniels Hush Money

Case type: Criminal

Where: New York County

Prosecutor: Alvin Bragg, Manhattan district attorney

When: The trial is currently set for March 25, 2024

On March 30, a grand jury officially voted to indict Trump, making him the first former president to face criminal charges. Michael Cohen, Trumps former lawyer, had paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels to prevent her from sharing her story about an alleged past affair with Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. Cohen has maintained that his former boss directed him to make the payoff, reimbursed him in a series of payments for the cost, and cooked the Trump Organizations books to cover it up. On April 4, Trump surrendered in Manhattan and was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree over how the payments to Cohen were recorded by the Trump Organization. You can read Ankush Khardoris analysis of the charges and their legal chances here. Judge Merchan has set rules barring Trump from using evidence in the case and required the former president to attend a May 23 hearing via video conference to learn about the restrictions. The trial is currently set for March 25, 2024.
WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court on Thursday issued a surprising 5-4 ruling in favor of Black voters in a congressional redistricting case, ordering the creation of a second district with a large Black population.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined with the court's liberals in affirming a lower-court ruling that found a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in an Alabama congressional map with one majority Black seat out of seven congressional districts in a state where more than one in four residents is Black.

The case had been closely watched for its potential to weaken the landmark voting rights law.

The court had allowed the challenged map to be used for the 2022 elections and at arguments in October, the justices appeared willing to make it harder to use the voting rights law to challenge redistricting plans as racially discriminatory.

The chief justice himself suggested last year that he was open to changes in the way courts weigh discrimination claims under the part of the law known as section 2. But on Thursday, Roberts wrote that the court was declining "to recast our section 2 case law as Alabama requests."

Roberts was part of conservative high-court majorities in earlier cases that made it harder for racial minorities to use the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in ideologically divided rulings in 2013 and 2021.

The other four conservative justices dissented Thursday. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the decision forces "Alabama to intentionally redraw its longstanding congressional districts so that black voters can control a number of seats roughly proportional to the black share of the State's population. Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it."

The current case stems from challenges to Alabama's seven-district congressional map, which included one district in which Black voters form a large enough majority that they have the power to elect their preferred candidate. The challengers said that one district is not enough, pointing out that overall, Alabama's population is more than 25% Black.

A three-judge court, with two appointees of former President Donald Trump, had little trouble concluding that the plan likely violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the votes of Black Alabamians. The panel ordered a new map drawn.

But the state quickly appealed to the Supreme Court, where five conservative justices prevented the lower-court ruling from going forward. They allowed last year's congressional elections to proceed under the map that the lower court had said is probably illegal.

At the same time, the court decided to hear the Alabama case, and arguments were held in early October.

Louisiana's congressional map, also identified as probably discriminatory by a lower court, was allowed to remain in effect by the Supreme Court, too.

Partisan politics underlies the case. Republicans who dominate elective office in Alabama have been resistant to creating a second district with a Democratic-leaning Black majority, or close to one, that could send another Democrat to Congress.

The judges found that Alabama concentrated Black voters in one district, while spreading them out among the others to make it impossible for them to elect a candidate of their choice.

Alabama's Black population is large enough and geographically compact enough to create a second district, the judges found.

Alabama argued that the lower court ruling would have forced it to sort voters by race and the state insisted it is taking a "race neutral" approach to redistricting.

At arguments in October, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson scoffed at the idea that race could not be part of the equation. Jackson, the court's first Black woman, said that constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War and the Voting Rights Act a century later were intended to do the same thing, make Black Americans "equal to white citizens."

The 9 current justices of the US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Justice Clarence Thomas Justice Samuel Alito Justice Sonia Sotomayor Justice Elena Kagan Justice Neil Gorsuch Justice Brett Kavanaugh Justice Amy Coney Barrett Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
- The three most impacted Alberta producers  Cenovus Energy, Crescent Point, and Paramount Resources  have restarted

- Following a steady rebound in Canadian gas production by the end of May, gas output has dropped below the 18 BCf per day mark again as the number of out-of-control fires rose to 17 lately.

- A return to above-normal temperatures and prolonged dry weather has led to a resurgence in wildfires across Western Canada, impacting oil and gas production in the province of Alberta.

- The International Monetary Fund came out this week saying that OPEC+ production cuts would lower Saudi Arabias GDP growth in 2023 to 2.1%, after last years unprecedented 8.7%.

- According to Bloomberg, if one is to account for Saudi Arabias giga projects (such as the new city of Neom) which the IMF treats separately, the countrys breakeven level would rise to $95 per barrel.

- The Saudi government remains optimistic and is still expecting an annual fiscal surplus of 4.3 billion this year, although the IMFs breakeven level of $81 per barrel looms large.

- Saudi Arabias decision to unilaterally cut 1 million b/d of production in July 2023 has so far been backfiring as oil prices dropped back to levels seen before the OPEC+ summit, brushing aside the Middle Eastern kingdoms pledge.

1. Saudi Arabia Takes One for the Team

- Saudi Arabias decision to unilaterally cut 1 million b/d of production in July 2023 has so far been backfiring as oil prices dropped back to levels seen before the OPEC+ summit, brushing aside the Middle Eastern kingdoms pledge.

- The Saudi government remains optimistic and is still expecting an annual fiscal surplus of 4.3 billion this year, although the IMFs breakeven level of $81 per barrel looms large.

- According to Bloomberg, if one is to account for Saudi Arabias giga projects (such as the new city of Neom) which the IMF treats separately, the countrys breakeven level would rise to $95 per barrel.

- The International Monetary Fund came out this week saying that OPEC+ production cuts would lower Saudi Arabias GDP growth in 2023 to 2.1%, after last years unprecedented 8.7%.

2. Canadian Wildfires Become a Large-Scale Risk Again

- A return to above-normal temperatures and prolonged dry weather has led to a resurgence in wildfires across Western Canada, impacting oil and gas production in the province of Alberta.

- Following a steady rebound in Canadian gas production by the end of May, gas output has dropped below the 18 BCf per day mark again as the number of out-of-control fires rose to 17 lately.

- The three most impacted Alberta producers  Cenovus Energy, Crescent Point, and Paramount Resources  have restarted most of shut-in oil production and it remains to be seen if a similar drop is to happen with crude output, too.

- In total, more than 4.3 million hectares have already burned in this years unprecedented fires, roughly 15 times the annual average of previous years.

3. As European Gas Prices Rebound From Lows, Focus Shifts to 2024

- European natural gas prices have seen a significant rally this week back to 30 per MWh (10 per mmBtu) amidst fears that global LNG competition would

Intensify and lower supply.

- LNG sendout across Europe is set to decline this month as Frances Montoir LNG terminal is shut until June 10 for maintenance, whilst several Norwegian gas fields will be shut for field maintenance.

- In the futures markets, the spread between the December 2023 and December 2024 contracts started to widen, signaling expectations for supply tightness into this year are easing but uncertainty is still there for 2024.

- The 2023/2024 discrepancy is also driven by the looming end of the Russian-Ukrainian gas transit deal which is about to expire in December 2024 and is almost certain not to be extended.

4. Dam Catastrophe Add to Bullish Pressures on Wheat

- Wheat prices have been surging ever since the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine brought fighting between Russia and Ukraine to a new level, jeopardizing the water supply in the region.

- The markets have also started to price in the end of the Black Sea grain deal after Russias ammonia pipeline  the resumption of which was Moscows main demand - was blown up this week.

- Wheat prices spiked at 6.40 per bushel earlier this week, whilst the other two key agricultural commodities coming out of Ukraine, corn and oat, also saw notable upswings.

- The destruction of the dam spells trouble for water supply to 31 field irrigation systems across 584,000 hectares, harvesting around 4 million tonnes of grain.

5. Spain Becomes Europes Solar Energy Pioneer

- Spain is on track to generate more than 50% of its electricity from renewable sources, the first large European country to reach that level thanks to its early start into wind and solar.

- With onshore solar and offshore wind taking 20% each of Spains power generation, bolstered by 10% coming from hydro, Spains power prices have been on average 34% lower than in neighboring France.

- Madrid has made great progress in phasing out coal, seeing its share decrease from 20% in 2015 to 2% currently, whilst nuclear and oil-fired plants are expected to be phased out by 2035.

- By now, Spains generation capacity stands at 120 GW, equivalent to 2.6 times the countrys peak demand, but its dependence on solar energy keeps the sunset-to-dawn period relying on gas.

6. Having no Other Option But LNG, Japan Readies for Higher Temperatures

- As many Asian countries have been experiencing strong heat waves since the start of 2023, Japan is readying its power grid to deal with higher temperatures, even if El Nino were to arrive later this year.

- In terms of profits, Tokyo would seek to maximize coal burning as dark spreads have been routinely surpassing gas-fired spark spreads, but the countrys coal capacity is already running near maximum levels.

- This means that heat waves in Japan would inevitably trigger higher LNG buying, 3-4 extra cargoes per month compared to current levels, as natural gas remains cheaper than fuel oil.

- According to Kpler data, Japan imported 27.8 million tonnes of LNG in January-May this year, a 13% year-on-year decrease as Tokyo focuses on restarting idled nuclear capacity.

7. Citi Says Copper Bull Run Is Around the Corner

- Citigroup is predicting a bull run in copper once the current recession-driven pricing weakness subsides, saying investors looking for exposure to the energy transition will prefer the base metal.

- The bank predicts that rising allocations from index-tracking investors could lift net bullish positioning in copper contracts to about 4 million tonnes by 2025, a sea change compared to the net shorts seen currently.

- Additionally, Citi expects additional long-term hedging from carmakers as they ramp up production of EVs, adding a further roughly 1 million tonne equivalent in long positions.

- With copper currently trading at $8,240 per metric ton, down 14% from this years January peak, the US investment bank is expected it to dip further and then start rallying within 6 to 12 months.
Vaccines against African swine fever being tested in Vietnam are close to approval, global and US veterinary officials said, in what would be a major breakthrough to tackle the deadly animal disease that regularly ravages pig farms worldwide.

African swine fever has for years disrupted the $250 billion global pork market. In the worst outbreak in 2018-19, about half the domestic pig population died in China, the worlds biggest producer, causing losses estimated at over $100 billion.

After decades of failed attempts due to the complexity of the virus, two vaccines co-developed by US scientists being tested in large pilot schemes by Vietnamese companies are showing very promising results, Gregorio Torres, head of the science department at the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH), told Reuters in a telephone interview.

We have never been so close to get a vaccine that may work, Torres said, noting the two shots had probably the highest chances to succeed and be authorized for sale worldwide.

Both vaccines have received approval in Vietnam for pilot commercial use, now completed. The next step will be nationwide authorization, the first ever for an African swine fever vaccine, and possible sales overseas.

US agriculture secretary Thomas Vilsack said there was likely to be interest in precautionary purchases in the United States, despite the country having so far been spared from the virus.

There will be a specific interest obviously, Vilsack said in an interview with Reuters in April, speaking about possible purchases of the Vietnamese vaccines.

The vaccines were tested in Vietnam, where swine fever is a constant threat, because they could not be developed in the US as the virus is not present there.

Since 2021, swine fever, which is not deadly to humans, has been reported in nearly 50 countries and caused about 1.3 million pig deaths, WOAH said in a regular report last week.

Currently there are no major outbreaks, but agribusiness lender Rabobank warned in April that the possible spread of the disease, especially in China, remained among the top risks to the global pork industry.

No safety issues

United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) researchers have reviewed the results of one of the vaccines, NAVET-ASFVAC, which they co-developed with Vietnamese company NAVETCO, a USDA spokesperson said.

After the vaccine showed a high level of efficacy and no safety risks in trials, 600,000 doses were approved for initial sales to pig farmers in Vietnam, of which the first 40,000 have been delivered without any safety problems, USDA said.

That followed an initial hiccup when use of the vaccine was suspended after dozens of pigs died last summer following inoculations in farms that used the vaccine off-label, USDA said, administering it to hogs that were not supposed to be inoculated, such as pregnant sows.

No problems emerged after deliveries resumed with adequate veterinary monitoring, USDA said.

NAVET-ASFVAC is an attenuated live-virus vaccine, like those used in childrens routine vaccinations around the world. Use of unlicensed live-virus vaccines in China in past years raised concerns they caused the emergence of new strains of swine fever.

Only limited data are available from Chinas trials on a live-virus vaccine against swine fever.

The second vaccine tested in Vietnam, AVAC ASF LIVE, which was discovered by US researchers and commercialized by Vietnamese firm AVAC, has been delivered to more pigs than NAVET-ASFVAC under its pilot deployment, but USDA said it had not yet reviewed the data.

NAVETCO, AVAC and Vietnams agriculture ministry, which is responsible for approval of veterinary vaccines, did not respond to requests for comment.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Worlds first swine fever vaccine nears approval in Vietnam"
However, concerns over global economic headwinds deepened on Wednesday, erasing the gains made earlier in the week. The initial surge in U.S. WTI crude oil prices following Saudi Arabia's commitment to output cuts was short-lived. Worries about a looming recession and somber economic readings put a lid on oil prices, undermining the efforts of OPEC+ to maintain stability. Additionally, reports from the American Petroleum Institute (API) revealed an unexpected buildup in U.S. gasoline and distillates inventories, raising concerns about fuel consumption and the ability of the top oil consumer to maintain robust demand.

Monday began with a surge in U.S. WTI crude oil prices, driven by Saudi Arabia's announcement of an additional production cut of 1 million barrels per day starting in July. The world's top oil exporter aimed to counteract the macroeconomic challenges that had been weighing on the market. The Saudi energy ministry revealed that the kingdom's output would decrease to 9 million barrels per day, marking its most significant reduction in years and contributing to recent gains in oil prices. This unexpected decision by Saudi Arabia aligned with the broader agreement made by OPEC+ to limit oil supply until 2024, resulting in a bullish outlook for the short-term oil market.

Saudi Production Cuts Provide Early Boost to Crude Oil Prices

Monday began with a surge in U.S. WTI crude oil prices, driven by Saudi Arabia's announcement of an additional production cut of 1 million barrels per day starting in July. The world's top oil exporter aimed to counteract the macroeconomic challenges that had been weighing on the market. The Saudi energy ministry revealed that the kingdom's output would decrease to 9 million barrels per day, marking its most significant reduction in years and contributing to recent gains in oil prices. This unexpected decision by Saudi Arabia aligned with the broader agreement made by OPEC+ to limit oil supply until 2024, resulting in a bullish outlook for the short-term oil market.

Global Economic Worries Dampen Oil Prices

However, concerns over global economic headwinds deepened on Wednesday, erasing the gains made earlier in the week. The initial surge in U.S. WTI crude oil prices following Saudi Arabia's commitment to output cuts was short-lived. Worries about a looming recession and somber economic readings put a lid on oil prices, undermining the efforts of OPEC+ to maintain stability. Additionally, reports from the American Petroleum Institute (API) revealed an unexpected buildup in U.S. gasoline and distillates inventories, raising concerns about fuel consumption and the ability of the top oil consumer to maintain robust demand.

Volatile Price Action Persists

The negative sentiment surrounding oil prices persisted on Thursday after a news report suggested that the U.S. and Iran were close to reaching an agreement on oil exports. WTI oil prices initially dropped by over $3 per barrel in response to the report, which indicated a temporary deal where Iran would reduce uranium enrichment in exchange for some relief from oil-related sanctions. However, these losses were partially reversed when doubts arose about the quick lifting of oil sanctions, and the White House declared the news report false. A spokesperson from the White House National Security Council denounced the report as false and misleading, referencing an article published on the Middle East Eye website. The U.S. had implemented sanctions on Iran's oil sector in 2018 after withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal.

Mixed Events Lead to Flat-to-Lower Trade

Despite the volatility and fluctuations throughout the week, WTI oil prices were lower overall. Concerns about a global economic slowdown impacting demand overshadowed Saudi Arabia's promised output cuts. The market sentiment was also affected by rising fuel stocks in the United States and disappointing Chinese export data. The unexpected increase in U.S. fuel inventories, particularly gasoline and distillates, raised concerns about demand from the world's largest oil consumer. While Saudi Arabia's additional production cut was seen as a positive development, analysts expressed skepticism about the long-term support it would provide to oil prices. The outlook for oil prices remained uncertain, with supply tightening but weak demand projections for the year.

Weekly Technical Analysis

Weekly July WTI Crude Oil

Trend Indicator Analysis

The main trend is down according to the weekly swing chart. A trade through $63.90 will reaffirm the downtrend. A move through $82.91 will change the main trend to up.

Retracement Level Analysis

The contract range is $37.18 to $99.09. Its retracement zone at $68.13 to $60.83 is the major support. The market successfully tested this area the week-ending May 5 at $63.90 and again the week-ending June 2 at $67.03. The price action over the past three months indicates that this area is a value zone.

The minor range is $82.91 to $63.90. Its retracement zone at $73.41 to $75.65 is resistance. It stopped the rally this week at $75.06. The market would have to overcome this zone to get excited about the upside potential.

Weekly Technical Forecast

The direction of the July WTI crude oil market the week-ending June 16 is likely to be determined by trader reaction to the minor 50% level at $73.41.

Bullish Scenario

A sustained move over $73.41 will signal the presence of buyers. This could lead to a quick test of the minor Fibonacci level at $75.65. Overcoming this level could trigger an acceleration to the upside.

Bearish Scenario

A sustained move under $73.41 will signal the presence of sellers. This could lead to a retest of the major 50% level at $68.13. This level has to hold or prices could collapse into the support cluster at $67.03 - $63.90.

Short-Term Outlook - Cautious

This week was marked by volatility for July WTI crude oil futures. The initial boost from Saudi Arabia's output cut was overshadowed by concerns over global economic headwinds and rising inventories. The report of a potential U.S.-Iran agreement on oil exports caused a significant drop in oil prices, but the losses were later reversed when doubts emerged and the news report was declared false.

The market sentiment is like to remain cautious, and the short-term outlook for oil prices is limited. However, the summer driving season in the United States and tighter global supply conditions held the potential for upside movement, while the planned purchase of crude oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve by the U.S. government may help mitigate downside risks.

The weekly chart indicates a recurring pattern where lower prices in value areas attract buyers, but there is limited motivation to break out towards higher levels. The price action implies that the market has potentially shifted into a cycle of "buy the dip" and "sell the rally."
Cutting off Middle East oil exports to China would be an immediate boost to Russian oil, of course, and Putins war with Ukraine is a long war that will not likely see any resolution. At best, it will become a frozen

The variables to consider here are many and varied. First, China is increasing its intake of discounted Russian crude as a fairly fast clip, though the Saudis remain Chinas top oil exporter. Chinas imports from Russia rose nearly 9% in April alone, year-over-year. Year-to-date imports from Russia rose 26.5% to 32.4 million tonnes, compared to Saudi imports, which were up 2.9% to 31.28 million tonnes.

The argument being circulated by certain DoD officials is this: Because some 98% of Chinas energy imports from the Middle East traverse the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off this chokepoint would do severe damage to Beijing, and CENTCOM is positioned to step in.

U.S. Defense Department officials have been busy spreading the message that in the event of an intensified conflict with China, CENTCOM could cut off Chinas oil imports by blocking oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, most notably, along with some other chokepoints. In terms of potential foreign policy stances, this isnt the 1940s anymorethis a world of entrenched globalization, and the knock-off effects of such a move would have far-reaching consequences well beyond any sanctions on Russian oil over Ukraine.

U.S. Defense Department officials have been busy spreading the message that in the event of an intensified conflict with China, CENTCOM could cut off Chinas oil imports by blocking oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, most notably, along with some other chokepoints. In terms of potential foreign policy stances, this isnt the 1940s anymorethis a world of entrenched globalization, and the knock-off effects of such a move would have far-reaching consequences well beyond any sanctions on Russian oil over Ukraine.

The argument being circulated by certain DoD officials is this: Because some 98% of Chinas energy imports from the Middle East traverse the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off this chokepoint would do severe damage to Beijing, and CENTCOM is positioned to step in.

The variables to consider here are many and varied. First, China is increasing its intake of discounted Russian crude as a fairly fast clip, though the Saudis remain Chinas top oil exporter. Chinas imports from Russia rose nearly 9% in April alone, year-over-year. Year-to-date imports from Russia rose 26.5% to 32.4 million tonnes, compared to Saudi imports, which were up 2.9% to 31.28 million tonnes.



Source: Reuters

Cutting off Middle East oil exports to China would be an immediate boost to Russian oil, of course, and Putins war with Ukraine is a long war that will not likely see any resolution. At best, it will become a frozen conflict that leaves no window open for a relaxed sanctions regime.

Beyond this, a U.S. military move on the Strait of Hormuz would ignite the Middle East. If Russias war on Ukraine and the Western response was not enough to launch WWIII, cutting off oil in the Strait of Hormuz would.

What would the Saudi response be, at a time when Riyadh has been repairing diplomatic relations with Tehranthe other always-looming threat in the Strait of Hormuz? What would the Saudis do at a time when Chinese influence is spreading throughout the Kingdom?

If we want a global energy crisis on top of this, the U.S. may be far more insulated (as it has been with Russia sanctions), but in an age of globalization, this insulation can protect to a certain extent from the aftereffects of a global economic meltdown. Such a move would, of course, further boost the push for clean energy, though having mega dollars to fund that transition is critical.

Despite the low-brow rhetoric and ideological writings to the contrary, everyone in Washington is hawkish on China. Cutting off the Strait of Hormuz, is the extreme side of this. There is no such thing as a detente or a reset in the books, or even being discussed in reality.

Even discounting the prospect of WWIII, massive damage would be done to global markets. When Iran attacked two vessels in the Strait of Hormuz in 2019, oil prices immediately shot up 4%. That is merely a tiny taste of the market response to a blockage of China-bound oil shipments. Inventories would soar, forcing OPEC into a major production cut, with the Saudis bearing the brunt of that. Such an attack would be viewed as an attack on Saudi Arabia.

Iran would rally behind the cause for an initial war against the U.S. in the Persian Gulf, solidifying an axis of China, Russia and Iran, with the Saudis and UAE left to choose sides. Irans response would be to attack the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 30% of the worlds seaborne crude oil passes, rendering the Strait unsafe and putting Western markets in a state of turmoil, as well.

The Western intelligentsia can talk all they want about Russias unethical weaponization of energy against Europe, weaponizing energy against China would be far more significant and dangerous.
Uncertainty remains rife within oil markets after production cuts from Saudi Arabia were countered by economic concerns in the U.S., China, and Europe. Rumors that a U.S.-Iran deal was back on the table sent prices tumbling on Thursday, but denials from both countries boosted prices again.

Oilprice Alert: Whether you are new to the oil and gas industry or an energy market veteran, you will regret not signing up for Global Energy Alert. Oilprice.com's premium newsletter provides everything from geopolitical analysis to trading analysis, and all for less than a cup of coffee per week.

Friday, June 9th, 2023

In yet another week of contradictions, the key market focus moved away from Saudi Arabias production cuts and week-on-week upticks in US product inventories, moving to a story that has been barely discussed in 2023 so far  the Iranian nuclear deal. Media reports that the US and Iran are close to a scaled-down nuclear deal were quickly refuted by both sides, leading to another seesaw motion in global oil benchmarks as Brent is set to finish the week around the $76 per barrel mark.

US, Iran Lower Expectations for New Deal. After a Middle East Eye report claimed that an interim nuclear deal with Iran was being discussed under which Iran would accept some limits on its program in return for partial sanctions relief, both Washington and Tehran vehemently denied the rumor and called it misleading.

Cargill Suspends Biodiesel Spending Spree. Soaring feedstock costs and lack of skilled labor have prompted agriculture behemoth Cargill to suspend plans for a giant soybean processing plant with a production capacity of 62 mbu in Hayti, MO, a giant setback for US renewable diesel production.

Offshore Explorers Discuss Combining Forces. The United Kingdoms largest independent producer Harbour Energy (LON:HBR) is in talks with US offshore-focused producer Talos Energy (NYSE:TALO) to merge, listing at the New York exchange and confirming Harbours move away from the North Sea.

EIA Warns of US Diesel Demand Decline. The US Energy Information Administration forecasts that diesel demand in the country would drop through 2024 despite economic growth, with distillate-weighted manufacturing declining by 1.1% even though they expect US GDP to grow by 1.3% in 2023.

Ukraine Dam Blast Horrible News for Agriculture. Ukraines agriculture minister Mykola Solsky said the destruction of the Kakhovka dam would deprive of water supply to some 500,000 hectares of highly fertile land in three regions, requiring years to fully repair the damage to irrigation.

Bangladesh Struggles Through Worst Crisis in Years. Battered by a currency crisis and repeated heatwaves, Bangladesh is going through its worst power supply crisis in 10 years, forcing the national grid operator to cut electricity every day in May with the power deficit rising to 15% of consumption.

Shareholders Oppose Oneok-Magellan Merger. The fourth largest shareholder of Magellan Midstream (NYSE:MMG), the investment firm Energy Income Partners owning some 3% of the company, intends to vote against a mulled deal to merge with peer pipeline company Oneok for a total of $18.8 billion.

Pipeline Blast Makes Extension of Black Sea Grain Deal Unlikely. The longest ammonia pipeline in the world connecting Russias Togliatti and Ukraines Odesa, a conduit that Moscow wanted to restart as part of the Black Sea grain deal has been damaged by bombing this week, greatly reducing the likelihood of a grain deal extension.

Irving Oil to Launch Strategic Review. Canadas largest oil refiner Irving Oil, operating the 320,000 b/d Saint John, NB refinery and the 75,000 b/d Whitegate refinery in Ireland, is reportedly launching a strategic re-evaluation of its operations that might lead to a full or partial sale.

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UK Windfall Tax Set to Improve a Little. According to the Financial Times, the UK government is planning to introduce a price floor for the countrys 35% windfall tax, meaning the levy would be removed if oil prices sustainably drop below $71.40 per barrel and gas prices below $0.54 per therm.

Indonesia Lambasts EU Imperalism with Deforestation Law. After the European Union passed a law that bans EU imports of commodities linked to forest destruction, Indonesian exports of palm oil, cocoa or rubber have been heavily impacted, with Jakarta denouncing Brussels regulatory imperialism.

Guyanese Courts Up the Ante for Exxon. A Guyana Appellate Court stayed a lower courts order that requires US major ExxonMobil (NYSE:XOM) and its partners in the Stabroek block to provide an unlimited financial guarantee to cover potential oil spills, increasing the risks that Exxon might retaliate by cutting production.

Argentina Approves Offshore Drilling Plan. The offshore Fenix project led by Frances oil major TotalEnergies (NYSE:TTE) has received the final approval from Argentinas environment ministry, seeking to start natural gas production in 2025 and produce some 10 MMCm per day within a couple of years.

Namibia Bans Exports of Unprocessed Minerals. One of the worlds largest producers of uranium, diamonds, and lithium, the government of Namibia has banned the export of unprocessed minerals which are deemed critical for the domestic mining industry, despite an EU trade deal last year.

By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com

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An appeals court has suspended an order issued by a lower court that could have seen supermajor Exxon lose its license to operate the Liza-1 offshore well that yields about half of the countrys oil output.

According to its contract with the Guyanese government, the consortium that operates the Liza-1 well and explores in the whole Stabroek block, must have insurance cover to be able to pay all costs of a potential spill plus an unlimited guarantee provided by the lead partner, which is Exxon, that covers everything not covered by the insurance policy.

Yet a Guyanese court recently found that this guarantee was non-existent and, in the case of a spill, the Guyanese state would have to shoulder the burden of any costs not covered by the insurance policy. Exxon and its partners appealed the decision and won.

Despite the favorable decision of the appeals court, Exxon would still need to make a security deposit of $2 billion within ten days, Argus reported, while the case waits to be adjudicated in the top appeals court of the South American country.

If the company doesnt pay, the demand for an unlimited guarantee for insurance coverage would be reinstated, forcing Exxon to suspend production. This would cost the consortium partners some $350 million monthly in lost revenues, Reuters reported.

Exxon and its partners Hess Corp. and Chinas CNOOC have made some 30 discoveries offshore Guyana since they started exploring the Stabroek block. Production is climbing consistently, likely to hit 400,000 bpd by the end of this year. Guyana is a priority jurisdiction for Exxon, along with U.S. shale.

Exxon, Hess, and CNOOC are the only oil producers in Guyana, but the countrys government has big plans. Guyana is tendering 14 more blocks this year as it seeks to speed up its transformation into a major oil producer while reducing Exxons dominance of its emerging oil industry.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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Norways government plans to submit to Parliament in the coming weeks plans to open a large area to deep sea mining as it seeks to access and extract critical minerals from the seabed.

The government has prepared an impact assessment which was open for comments until the end of January this year. The Petroleum and Energy Ministry now plans to submit a report and a plan to open a Germany-size area to deep sea mining to Parliament, which is expected to vote on the proposal this autumn.

The plan has drawn opposition from environmental groups and the fishermens association.

The government and the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) believe that deep sea mining could become an important new industry in Norway and could help raise supply of metals key to the energy transition.

Deep sea mining could help Europe meet the desperate need for more minerals, rare earth materials to make the transition happen, Amund Vik, state secretary in Petroleum and Energy Ministry, told the Financial Times.

Early this year, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate issued a resource assessment, in which it said that there were substantial resources on the Norwegian shelf.

Copper, zinc, manganese, cobalt, rare earth minerals, and other critical minerals could be found on the Norwegian seabed, according to the report, which noted that The NPDs assessment is that the resources in place are significant. For several of the metals, the mineral resources compare to many years of global consumption.

Still, the NPD noted that It remains to be seen whether the areas will be opened, and whether production can be profitable from a financial standpoint.

At the end of the consultation period in January, Norways Fishermens Association said that the impact assessment had significant shortcomings on the impact on environment and fisheries. The governments assessment is not a good enough decision-making basis to authorize a possible opening of large parts of the Norwegian Sea for deep sea mining.

WWFs Norwegian chapter, Greenpeace, and other environmental organizations called on the government to halt the process of opening the shelf to deep sea mining as the assessment has many unanswered questions about the consequences of exploration and extraction on the Norwegian economy, climate, and seabed habitat.

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By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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Despite the Western sanctions, Russian oil companies boosted their gasoline exports by 37% between January and May compared to the same period in 2022, Russian daily Kommersant reported on Friday, citing sources familiar with the data.

The Russian Energy Ministry last month asked oil companies to reduce their exports and raise supply on the domestic market, according to Kommersant's sources.

After a sharp rise in wholesale gasoline prices in May and recommendations from the Energy Ministry to oil firms to curb exports, Russia's daily gasoline exports in the first six days of June were four times lower than the levels at the end of May, Kommersant reports.

Russia has stopped reporting official data about oil production and exports, much to the frustration of its OPEC+ partners, as the leader of the pack, Saudi Arabia, is reportedly looking to boost oil prices to at least $80 per barrelthe estimated breakeven price for its budget for 2023.

Russia has redirected both crude oil and petroleum product exports after the EU embargoes on imports of seaborne Russian oil. The EU banned crude imports in early December 2022 and embargoed fuel imports from Russia as of February 5, 2023.

Russian gasoline exports surged in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period in 2022, as Moscow placed growing volumes of fuels with African customers after the EU embargo on seaborne imports of Russia's fuels. Russian gasoline exports were estimated at 1.9 million tons in the first quarter of 2023, up compared to 1.3 million tons exported in the same period of 2022, per Refinitiv data cited by Reuters.

The trade shift in Russian oil flows also benefits Moscow's Middle Eastern allies in the OPEC+ pact as the biggest Arab Gulf oil producers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), scoop up Russia's fuels at discounted prices.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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The UKs government may lift the controversial 35% windfall tax it imposed on the energy industry last year in response to the supply crunch that sent energy prices soaring.

The decision comes amid a consistent decline in energy prices and would come into effect once these prices fall below a certain level, Bloomberg reported, citing an unnamed source in the know.

The energy price level, at which the tax would potentially cease to apply is yet to be determined.

Reports about the possibility of lifting the additional tax burden that the industry resented loudly first emerged in March, when City A.M. reported that the government was considering putting a floor on the tax for fear that Norways Equinor might decide to pull out of the Rosebank offshore gas project because of the additional levy.

Indeed, the security of investments has been the primary focus of critics of windfall taxes both in the UK and elsewhere, as industry leaders warned additional taxes would lead to a reconsideration of investment decisions and, as a result, lower oil and gas supply and higher prices.

As early as February, the UKs oil and gas industry association, Offshore Energies, warned that with the windfall tax the total tax burden of oil and gas operators had risen to a massive 75%.

It was the highest tax burden of any industry in the UK, the body said, noting that many operators were already announcing lower investments and deferring drilling plans. They were also pulling out of new projects.

After the windfall tax was raised, Harbour Energy, the biggest oil and gas producer in the UK North Sea, backed out of the ongoing licensing round aimed at awarding more than 100 new licenses. Shell has said it would be re-evaluating each project comprising its $30.5 billion (25 billion pounds) planned investment in the UK energy system, and TotalEnergies has said it would slash its investment in the UK by 25%.

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A car crash and subsequent gunfight in North Omaha sent two people to the hospital and other people to jail.

At 6 p.m. Thursday, police responded to shots being fired near 18th and Spencer Streets. A car crash occurred between a Nissan Altima, which police said was stolen, and an Infiniti FX3. Gunshots were subsequently exchanged. Two people were taken to the Nebraska Medical Center with gunshot injuries.

Two 20-year-old men were taken to the Douglas County Jail on suspicion of multiple offenses. A police spokesman said one of the men was also a gunshot victim.

One of the men was taken to jail on suspicion of shooting at an occupied vehicle, using a weapon to commit a felony and tampering with evidence. The other man was taken to jail on suspicion of obstruction and unlawful occupancy.

A 14-year-old boy and a 16-year-old boy were taken to the Douglas County juvenile detention center on suspicion of various offenses. The 16-year-olds alleged offenses include possessing a stolen firearm and obstruction. The 14-year-olds alleged offenses include obstruction.

A 17-year-old boy still has not been released from the hospital. He is scheduled to be taken into custody for alleged offenses including shooting at an occupied vehicle, felony gun possession and obstruction.

Our best Omaha staff photos & videos of June 2023
WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court on Thursday issued a surprising 5-4 ruling in favor of Black voters in a congressional redistricting case from Alabama, with two conservative justices joining liberals in rejecting a Republican-led effort to weaken a landmark voting rights law.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh aligned with the court's liberals in affirming a lower-court ruling that found a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in an Alabama congressional map with one majority Black seat out of seven districts in a state where more than one in four residents is Black. The state now will have to draw a new map for next year's elections.

The decision was keenly anticipated for its potential effect on control of the closely divided U.S. House of Representatives. Because of the ruling, new maps are likely in Alabama and Louisiana that could allow Democratic-leaning Black voters to elect their preferred candidates in two more congressional districts.

The outcome was unexpected in that the court allowed the challenged Alabama map to be used for the 2022 elections, and in arguments last October the justices appeared willing to make it harder to challenge redistricting plans as racially discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The chief justice himself suggested last year that he was open to changes in the way courts weigh discrimination claims under the part of the law known as section 2. Roberts also was part of conservative high-court majorities in earlier cases that made it harder for racial minorities to use the Voting Rights Act in ideologically divided rulings in 2013 and 2021.

However, Roberts wrote Thursday that the court declined "to recast our section 2 case law as Alabama requests."

The other four conservative justices dissented. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the decision forces "Alabama to intentionally redraw its longstanding congressional districts so that black voters can control a number of seats roughly proportional to the black share of the State's population. Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it."

The Biden administration sided with the Black voters in Alabama.

Attorney General Merrick Garland applauded the ruling: "Today's decision rejects efforts to further erode fundamental voting rights protections, and preserves the principle that in the United States, all eligible voters must be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote free from discrimination based on their race."

Evan Milligan, a Black voter and the lead plaintiff in the case, said the ruling was a victory for democracy and people of color.

"We are grateful that the Supreme Court upheld what we knew to be true: that everyone deserves to have their vote matter and their voice heard. Today is a win for democracy and freedom not just in Alabama but across the United States," Milligan said.

Alabama Republican Party Chairman John Wahl said in a statement that state lawmakers will comply with the ruling. "Regardless of our disagreement with the Court's decision, we are confident the Alabama Legislature will redraw district lines that ensure the people of Alabama are represented by members who share their beliefs, while following the requirements of applicable law," he said.

Steve Marshall, the state's Republican attorney general, said he expects to continue defending the challenged map in federal court, including at a full trial. "Although the majority's decision is disappointing, this case is not over," he said in a statement.

Deuel Ross, a civil rights lawyer who argued the case at the Supreme Court, said a full trial "doesn't seem a good use of Alabama's time, resources or the money of the people to continue to litigate their case."

The case stems from challenges to Alabama's seven-district congressional map, which included one district in which Black voters form a large enough majority that they have the power to elect their preferred candidate. The challengers said that one district is not enough, pointing out that Alabama's overall population is more than 25% Black.

A three-judge court concluded the plan likely violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the votes of Black Alabamians and issued a preliminary injunction ordering a new map drawn.

The state appealed to the Supreme Court, where five conservative justices prevented the lower-court ruling from going forward but decided to hear the case.

Louisiana's congressional map had separately been identified as probably discriminatory by a lower court. That map, too, remained in effect last year and now will have to be redrawn.

The National Redistricting Foundation said in a statement that its pending lawsuits over congressional districts in Georgia and Texas also could be affected.

Separately Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled for the family of a nursing home resident with dementia that had sued over his care. The justices were asked to use his case to limit the ability of people to use a federal law to sue for civil rights violations. That outcome could have left tens of millions of people participating in federal programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, without an avenue to go to court to enforce their rights.

The Supreme Court previously said that a section of federal law  Section 1983  broadly gives people the right to sue state and local governments when their employees violate rights created by any federal statute. The court by a 7-2 vote reiterated that Thursday.
The Akwa Ibom State governor, Udom Emmanuel, on Wednesday signed the 2019 budget of the state into law.

Mr Emmanuel recently won re-election for a second term.

The budget passed for implementation is N672 billion.

The signing ceremony at the Government House, Uyo, was witnessed by the leadership of the Akwa Ibom House of Assembly, led by the Deputy Speaker, Felicia Bassey, according to a government house press statement.

The Attorney General of the State and Commissioner for Justice, Uwemedimo Nwoko, and the Commissioner for Finance, Linus Nkan, were also present at the brief ceremony.

The budget, christened Budget of Industrialisation for Poverty Alleviation is intended to help actualise the industrialisation and job creation agenda of the administration, the finance commissioner, Mr Nkan, told reporters at Government House after the signing ceremony.

The Commissioner for Education, Victor Inoka, told reporters that the governor has granted approval for the states college of education to become a degree-awarding institution.

Mr Inoka, a professor, said that the college was now affiliated to the University of Uyo.

In the draft presented to the state House of Assembly in November last year by Governor Emmanuel, roads, works and transport was allocated N157.31 billion, the biggest sum in the budget.

N53.6 billion was proposed for housing and urban renewal, while N13 billion was for agriculture.

About N15 billion was for education, and N10 billion for law and justice.

Akwa Ibom is one of Nigerias richest states. Its budget is funded largely from oil derivation fund.
(CNN)  Pope Francis was recovering well in a Rome hospital on Thursday, the day after the 86-year-old had abdominal surgery that renewed health fears.

The night went well, said Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni, in a statement on the Vaticans press office Telegram account.

Francis spent a peaceful night managing to rest for a long time and is in good general condition, alert and breathing easily, a Vatican spokesperson told reporters Thursday.

The pope is informed of the messages of closeness and affection that have arrived in the last few hours and expresses his gratitude, at the same time asking to continue to pray for him, said the spokesman.

The pope will spend the remainder of the day resting, as advised by his medical staff.

Francis left for hospital on Wednesday after his general audience at St. Peters Square, where he stopped to chat with members of the crowd. The pope then traveled to Romes Gemelli Hospital, which has a 10th-floor suite reserved for popes, according to Reuters.

This wasnt an urgent surgery, Dr. Sergio Alfieri, the surgeon who operated on Pope Francis, said at a press conference.

He continued to feel the pain, so a surgery was decided, Alfieri said.

There were no reported complications, according to the Vatican. It had earlier said the pope would stay in hospital for several days.

Francis reacted well to the surgery and to the anesthesia, and had already made a joke since the operation, Alfieri said.

Other pathologies or illnesses were not found, Alfieri said, adding that the pope has resumed his work from hospital.

Popes fragile health

This operation is the latest in a series of health scares surrounding Pope Francis.

He was forced to cancel several work commitments in late may after he was debilitated by a fever. He was also hospitalized in March for bronchitis, but recovered after taking antibiotics.

When he left hospital on that occasion, Francis joked that hes still alive.

Wednesdays procedure  called a laparotomy  involved general anesthesia and is intended to repair a hernia that the Vatican said caused recurrent, painful and worsening symptoms.

Medical sources say that the intervention was likely related to the surgery Francis underwent in 2021, which removed half of his colon.

Francis also had one part of his lung removed after a severe bout of pneumonia as a young man. In 2019, he had ocular surgery to treat a cataract. He has also struggled with chronic sciatica pain.

Over the past year, knee troubles have also largely confined him to the use of a cane or a wheelchair.

Should Francis be incapacitated for any length of time, the Vatican could face a constitutional crisis. There is no vice pope in the Catholic system, meaning someone who can exercise the popes authority in his absence.

The Vaticans secretary of state, currently Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, can oversee routine day-to-day management, but he has no authority, for example, to appoint bishops or to create or suppress dioceses around the world.

Bruni said before the procedure that the pope was expected to make a full functional recovery. The Prefecture of the Papal Household said all of Francis audiences have been canceled until June 18.

Tourists and members of the faithful at the Vatican told CNN they were praying for Pope Francis, as he left for hospital on Wednesday.

I went to the audience today and saw the pope. Then we heard the mass and the priest said to say a prayer for the pope. We are praying for Pope Francis now, Sister Annatuli, 40, said.

Carina, 30, said she had traveled from Mexico to visit her aunt, who is a nun in Rome. I can comprehend how serious this is. Its difficult because so many people are devoted to him and the church.

We hope that he will recover.

Resignation letter written in advance

In an interview with Spanish daily ABC in December, Francis said he had already prepared a letter of resignation in the case of permanent medical incapacity shortly after his election in 2013.

Francis said he wrote the letter several years ago and gave it to then-Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who resigned in 2013.

In his first public comments about the letters existence, the pope was quoted as saying: I have already signed my renunciation. The Secretary of State at the time was Tarcisio Bertone. I signed it and said: If I should become impaired for medical reasons or whatever, here is my renunciation.

Papal resignations are exceedingly rare. In 2013, Francis immediate predecessor, the late Pope Benedict XVI, because the first pope to step down in nearly 600 years, citing advanced age as his reason.

In 2013, Francis immediate predecessor, the late Pope Benedict XVI, made the almost unprecedented decision to resign from his position, citing advanced age as the reason and startling the Catholic world.

The decision startled the Catholic world. The last pope to step down before his death was Gregory XII, who in 1415 quit to end a civil war within the church in which more than one man claimed to be pope.

Pope Francis has positioned himself as a more progressive leader than his predecessors during his decade-long tenure.

In 2016, he urged priests around the world to be more accepting of LGBTQ communities, but later walked back on comments declaring support for civil union for same-sex couples.

He has made historic visits to Myanmar and Iraq, and was also the first pontiff to celebrate Mass in the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam, in 2019.

The pope has also been a vocal supporter for peace in Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met the pope at the Vatican in May.

Francis has also taken steps to address clerical sexual abuse  an issue that has dogged the Catholic Church around the world  saying in 2018 that young Catholics have been scandalized by the churchs monstrous abuse crisis.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Popes night went well in hospital after abdominal surgery, Vatican says"
The Code of Conduct Tribunal has dismissed a no-case application brought by the suspended Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen.

Mr Onnoghen had earlier on Friday dismissed charges of false asset declaration against him as useless and invalid, saying the Code of Conduct Bureau failed to follow its standard operations procedure in raising the charges.

He therefore argued that he had no case to answer, implying the charges be dismissed.

But a three-member panel of the tribunal led by Danladi Umar dismissed the application, saying the argument that the CCB, which is the prosecution, failed to abide by its guidelines amounted to a mere internal communication flaw.

Mr Umar said the standard operational procedure of the bureau was faulty and must not be complied with by the prosecution.

According to the tribunal, the procedure which is internal, cannot be above the Nigerian constitution.

The tribunal adjourned immediately after the ruling.

There is an uproar in the court room at Jabi, Abuja, currently, as lawyers from both sides confront each other over the decision of the tribunal to adjourn till Monday.
Kaduna State Governor Nasir el-Rufai on Friday said the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Presidential candidate Atiku Abubakars claim that he won the presidential election in Kaduna State, could only happen in his dreams.

He spoke with State House correspondents after meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa to show that he was alive against the rumour of his involvement in car accident.

Reacting to the PDPs claims of winning election in his state, he said: Well, I heard about that. Initially, I thought it was a joke and when I checked I saw clearly that he said he won Kaduna. It must be in his dreams.

Let me say this without any fear of contradiction, since President Buhari started contesting for the presidency since 2003, he has never lost Kaduna.

So, PDP has never won elections in Kaduna from 2003, even with a sitting governor in 2003, 2007, 2011 and 2015.

It has never happened. I dont know what will happen that Atiku will win Kaduna in this election this time.

He lost Kaduna, he lost very badly, even though about 100,000 votes he claimed to have got were added because elections conducted without card reader in some parts of the state, thats how he even got up to the 400,000 that he got.

He has lost Kaduna, he will always lose Kaduna. He will lose Kaduna 10 more times because he has never won Kaduna in any presidential elections.

When reminded the results were said to have come from the INEC server, he said: Well, I dont know about INEC server, it must be Atikus server.

I dont know about INEC server, we dont know how they had access to it. They will tell us during the tribunal proceedings what is this server and how they got access to it and how they got their numbers.

You do not go to court in an election petition by quoting INEC server or any other server. Anyone can create a server, I can go and buy it, it is a piece of equipment and call it INEC server.

But that does not mean that it amounts to anything, we are guided by the electoral act and the evidence act and other enabling legislation and he has to proof his case.

But anyone can make claims, we live in the age of fake news and fake claims. Anyone can make claims but you have to proof it, he said
*Whoever feels that we offended him or her should forgive us

It was during a home coming in Osogbo that Ogbeni Rauf Aregbsola, the immediate past Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, said he is nothing without God, President Bola Tinubu and his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari.

I need to thank Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. It was through him that I became a commissioner in Lagos State and a two-term governor in Osun, Aregbesola said at a welcome party organised in his honour by his loyalists in Osogbo, the Osun State capital, on Wednesday, June 7.

True, Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos State, apart from making Aregbesola Commissioner for Works and Infrastructure from 1999 to 2007, was instrumental to his emergence as governor of Osun State from 2010 to 2018. Then Buhari appointed Aregbesola the Minister of Interior from 2019 to 2023.

He said: I come back to thank you, the people of Osun, and those who made it possible for me to progress in politics.

I appreciate former President Muhammadu Buhari; after God, it was he that made me the minister; the assignment, which I just concluded.

He added: I am here today to seek restructuring of the party.

I did not offend anybody; but whoever feels that we offended him or her should forgive us.

In 2019, after the Supreme Court affirmed the mandate of the former governor, I called for unity in the party.

I warned that disunity would not produce any good result. But devil did not allow those handling the partys affairs at that time to listen.

We seek forgiveness from those who are smearing our image, though we never offended them.

We are here for the restructuring of the party and that is why we are begging anybody that feels that we offended him or her to forgive us.
The FCT High Court in Gwagwalada has ordered a student, Istifanus Irmiya to clean the premises of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for two weeks as a consequence of his involvement in internet fraud.

Irmiya was arraigned on Thursday by the EFCC on charges of cheating and impersonation, to which he pleaded guilty and appealed for leniency from the court.

Justice Aliyu Shafa, delivering the judgment, found Irmiya guilty and sentenced him to clean the EFCCs premises daily from 9 am to 12 noon for two weeks.

The judge also ordered Irmiya to pay a fine of N100,000, and to burn the phone used by the convict to perpetuate the crime.

I have carefully listened to the plea of allocutus made by the convict and the defence counsel.

The rate of internet fraud through Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, among others in society is so alarming. That he is a first-time offender is not an excuse to go scot-free.

The rate of Yahoo-Yahoo among youths is alarming. Many who resort to crime always have the I want to get rich quick mindset. Sending him to prison might make him more hardened, the judge ruled.

Istifanus Irmiya, in his plea to the court, expressed remorse for his actions and requested mercy, assuring that he would never engage in such activities again.

I want to beg the court for mercy. Im deeply sorry for what I have done. Im a changed person now knowing fully well the consequences of my offence, he said.

The defense counsel, Mr. Chibuike Chima, supported the convicts allocutus and informed the court that Irmiya had no prior criminal record and had shown genuine remorse.

Irmiya is the only son of the family and he is seeking admission into the university. He has spent one month in EFCC custody.

The convict has shown remorse and genuinely repented over the crime he has committed by way of expressing genuine repentance, he has restituted the proceeds of crime which is the sum of 250 Euros.

The convict is a first-time offender. He has not been convicted for any other crime of whatever kind. We urge my lord to temper justice with mercy.

We assure this court that going forward, the convict will be of good behaviour, Chima pleaded.

The EFCC Counsel, Ms. Taiwo Aromolaran, informed the court that Irmiya had committed the offense of cheating by impersonation.

Aromolaran stated that the convict deceived his victim by posing as a Caucasian woman named Mistress Clara.

She explained that Irmiya engaged in fraudulent activities, leading a German individual named Alex Lexis to transfer 250 Euros to him via PayPal and Nosh Apps, which he subsequently transferred to his own account with Polaris Bank.

She said the convict sometime in 2022, also had in his possession documents containing false-pretence, where he represented himself as a German on his Facebook and KK accounts, created by him with the intent to induce Alex Lexis to deliver money to him.

The offense committed by the convict, according to Aromolaran, violated the provisions of the Penal Code Act of the Federation (Abuja) 1990, under Section 321, and is punishable under Section 324 of the same Act.

It also contravened Section 6 in conjunction with Section 8 of the Advance Fee Fraud and Other Related Offenses Act, 2006, and is punishable under Section 1 (3) of the same Act.

Aromolaran requested the court to order the forfeiture of the cell phone used by the convict for the crime, highlighting the rise in the prevalence of internet fraud in Nigeria and the involvement of syndicates in such activities.

KanyiDaily had also reported how EFCC arrested 19 undergraduates of the Akwa Ibom State University for suspected internet-related offences, otherwise known as Yahoo Yahoo.

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The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, on Thursday, arraigned the duo of Saadu Maiwada and Sani Lawal BK before Justice Musa Danladi of the Katsina State High Court on a five count charge of conspiracy and criminal breach of trust.

The defendants, in their capacity as then Sub Treasurer and Deputy Sub Treasurer in the office of Accountant General of Katsina State, allegedly conspired and converted the sum of N289,000,000 (Two Hundred and Eighty Nine Million Naira) from the coffers of Katsina State.

A statement issued by the EFCC Spokesman, Wilson Uwujaren said investigation revealed that the defendants laundered the stolen funds through the account of Integrated Gas Services Limited, a company where the first defendant (Maiwada) is a Director.

The sum of N49, 000,000 was also allegedly transferred from the account of Integrated Gas Services Limited to the personal account of the second defendant (Lawal BK) who is now the Deputy Accountant General of the state.

One of the charges reads, That you, Saadu Miawada and Sani Lawal BK sometime in 2017 at Katsina within the jurisdiction of this Honourable Court while being entrusted with dominion over money belonging to Katsina State Government dishonestly converted to your own use the sum of N120,790,942.86 (One Hundred and Twenty Million, Seven Hundred Ninety Thousand, Nine Hundred and Forty-two Naira, Eighty-six Kobo) which was transferred from Katsina State Government Sub -Treasury Expenditure Account number 1012424374 domiciled in United Bank for Africa (UBA) PLC to Integrated Gas Services Company Limiteds Fidelity Bank account no 4010693761 (CO1717299) and you thereby committed an offence punishable under Section 297 of the Penal Code Law of Katsina State 2021.

Both defendants pleaded not guilty when the charges were read to them.

In view of their pleas, counsel for the prosecution, Aisha Tahar Habib prayed the court for a trial date.

Counsel for the defendants, J.B Israel made an oral bail application on behalf of his clients but the prosecution objected, demanding for a formal application as the court is a court of record.

Justice Danladi, however, admitted the defendants to bail in the sum of N5, 000,000 (Five Million Naira) each.

The court ordered that each defendant must provide a surety with a landed property within Katsina and present letters of introduction from a traditional ruler.

The matter was adjourned till July 24, 2023 for trial.

In other news, Kanyi Daily reported that the EFCC said operatives of its Uyo Zonal Command have arrested two identical twins: Takwan Potential and Takwan Peter and 26 others for alleged internet fraud in Calabar, Cross River State.

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By Joshua Chibuzo Andrew, Owerri

President Bola Tinubu and the All Progressives Congress, APC, on Thursday, kicked against the invitation of five ad-hoc staff members of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to testify as special witnesses in the petition that a former Vice President and candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, filed to challenge the outcome of the 2023 presidential election.

President Tinubu, who is the 2nd Respondent in the petition that is seeking to nullify his election victory, said he did not have fore knowledge of contents of statements the witnesses deposed on oath before the court.

Arguing through his team of lawyers led by Chief Wole Olanipekun, SAN, Tinubu, maintained that the law made it mandatory that such vital statements must be front-loaded ahead of time so as give other parties the opportunity to prepare adequately.

Relying on plethora of decided case laws, President Tinubu, said it was not right for Atiku and the PDP, who are the joint petitioners, to spring a surprise by producing statements of subpoenaed witnesses, midway into the hearing of their case.

Consequently, he urged the Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC, sitting in Abuja to reject the evidence of the five subpoenaed witnesses and not accord any probative value to their testimony in the matter.

On its part, the All Progressives Congress, APC, which is the 3rd Respondent in the matter, aligned itself with President Tinubus position.

The APC, through its team of lawyers led by Prince Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, argued that Atiku ought to have included the written statements of the witnesses at the time the petition was filed.

Similarly, the head of INECs legal team, Mr. Abubakar Mahmood, SAN, said he was equally opposed to the court allowing the five subpoenaed witnesses to testify in the matter since their statements were not part of the proof of evidence the petitioners adduced ab-initio.

However, Atikus lawyer, Chief Chris Uche, SAN, urged the court to dismiss all the objections and okay the witnesses to proceed with their evidence.

Uche, SAN, argued that issues the Respondents raised in their objections were misconceived, stressing that it would not have been possible to front-load the written statements of the subpoenaed witnesses since they were not summoned as at the time the petition was filed.

The Petitioners lawyer insisted that the witnesses were special since their appearance in the matter was based on a summon from the court.

Meanwhile, though the Justice Haruna Tsammani-led five-member panel initially stood down the matter to prepare a ruling, however, it subsequently reconvened and gave the petitioners the nod to call the witnesses.

The court said it would reserve the ruling and deliver it on a later date.

Though five INECs ad-hoc staff members who participated in the conduct of the disputed presidential election were subpoenaed to appear before the court, however, only two of them were able to testify on Thursday, with three others reserved for Friday.

The two that testified on Thursday, Egumah Friday and Grace Timothy, told the court that they served as Presiding Officers in Abia and Bauchi, respectively, during the general elections.

The witnesses told the court that on the day of the presidential election, all efforts they made to upload polling unit results to INECs I-Rev portal, using the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, machines, failed.

The witnesses said they were however surprised that though results of the presidential election failed to upload through the BVAS machines, they were able to upload results of the National Assembly elections that held on the same day.

The subpoenaed INEC ad-hoc staff members who are ex-corps members, said they however snapped pictures of the results with the BVAS machines.

Though President Tinubu and the APC did not oppose the evidence of the second subpoenaed witness, Grace, they however accused the first witness, Friday, of being an impostor.

They told the court that the name of the Presiding Officer that was at the polling unit that Friday claimed that he served on the election day, was Faga Kehen.

The Justice Tsammani-led panel adjourned further hearing on the case till Friday.

Atiku, who came second in the presidential contest that held on February 25, had in the joint petition he filed with his party, alleged that the election was rigged in favour of President Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC.

In his 66-paged petition, Atiku accused the electoral Commission of installing a third-party device he said was used to intercept and switch results of the presidential election in favour of the APC and its candidate, Tinubu.

He further alleged that INEC had prior to the election, redeployed its in-house ICT expert, Mr. Chidi Nwafor, and replaced him with an IT Consultant that helped it to install the third-party mechanism.

According to Atiku, the said IT Consultant, Mr. Suleiman Farouk, ensured that the device intermediated between the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the IRev Portal, known as Device Management System (DMS).

He told the court that the DMS was the software that allowed INECs IT Security Consultant, Mr. Farouk, to remotely control, monitor and filter data that was transmitted from the BVAS devices to the electronic collation system and the IRev platform.

The 1st Respondent (INEC) engaged an appointee of the 2nd Respondent (Tinubu) to man and oversee the sensitive ICT Department of the 1st Respondent for the purpose of the Election.

The Petitioners contend and shall lead evidence to show that contrary to the original design of the BVAS machine to upload data directly to the electronic collation system and the IReV portal, the 1st Respondent contrived and installed an intervening third-party device (Device Management System) which, in its ordinary usage, is meant to secure and administer the 1st Respondents technological ecosystem for the elections but as it relates to the Presidential Election, was used to intercept the results, quarantine and warehouse same, and filter them before releasing same to the IReV Portal.

The 1st Respondent used the said Device Management System to manipulate the Election results in favour of the 2nd and 3rd Respondents.

The Petitioners state and shall lead expert evidence to show the critical components of the 1st Respondents Information and Communications Technology (ICT), including but not limited to the BVAS which is an Android Device manufactured by Emperor Technologies China and supplied to the 1st Respondent by Activate Nigeria Limited, the petitioners added.

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Ogbeni, as he is fondly called, has lost his magic wand. He was in town yesterday and Osogbo was not locked down. Ilesa, where he comes from and from where he began his home coming trail was cool and calm at the time of his visit. No long convoy of vehicles and motorcycles to indicate that an important personality was within the vicinity.

The scanty crowd around him in Ilesa, from the pictures officially released by his men, was a clear indication that Ogbeni Rauf Adesoji Aregbesola has lost it.

From Ajegunle area to Old Garage, Osogbo, where in the past, people abandoned whatever they were doing to catch the glimpse of the man who once called the shot in Lagos and Osun State, there was nothing to indicate Ogbeni ti de (Ogbeni has come). A few who tried to show interest asked rhetorically se bi ati pari election(I thought we were done with election).

At the Mandela Freedom Park, where his men used the photographic effect to convey the impression that they had a crowd, all the spaces that in the past would be filled to brim were empty. It happened because Ogbeni has lost the broom. He could not even brand it yesterday. That was his talisman. That was his logo. But they are all gone.

The strategists around him too compounded the Wednesdays outing for him as they were confused as to which narrative to portray in the media. While journalists who covered the event reported his contrite comment, I will return to that later, Osun Defender, Ogbenis newspaper which he deployed to spread false and misleading stories about the Oyetolas administration, reported something else, making it look like the journalists misrepresented him.

In fact, in most of the WhatsApp platforms I belong, I saw staffers of the paper insisting that what the journalists reported were false. But by the time I got hold of the video this morning, I realised that it was those around Aregbesola that were being economical with the truth. They were being clever by half. But I am not surprised; it is their style, always trying to play the victim.

Back to Ogbenis contrite comment, without going too much into the details of his Ikires statement of I used two years to beg Oyetola which I know was untrue, I will leave members of the public and my readers to do a contextual analysis of the message below and draw their conclusions if indeed it was an apology:

I did not request for anything from my successor talkless of being denied such thing but some people just feel envious of our presence. Despite all of these, I seek forgiveness from those who felt offended with some of our actions.

After this, I will not beg anybody again. We didnt offend anyone and we dont believe anyone offended us. But its possible that they believe we offended them, thats why we are seeking forgiveness, Aregbesola said.

Regardless, Allah knows immediate past Osun Governor, Adegboyega Oyetola, did everything humanly possible to cover up for Ogbeni to the chagrin of a section of Osun people. He received blames and insults for actions carried out by Ogbeni Aregbesola. He served Aregbesola faithfully and diligently and ensured his weaknesses were never exposed. Is it during the labour wahala, when Aregbesola could no longer walk freely in Osun even as a sitting governor? Or the financial wizardry that was deployed to ensure Osun did not go insolvent? I can go on and on.

Oyetola meant well. If he could manage his relationship with Senator Iyiola Omisore, to the extent that Omisore decided to join APC fully before emerging as the National Secretary of APC, he could never have shied away from managing Ogbeni. But our man refused to make himself available to be managed. Today, we can all see the results.

Omipidan, a journalist and Public Affairs analyst writes from Ile Olorisa Compound, Eyindi, Ila Orangun.
The presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi; and Anambra State Governor, Chukwuma Soludo, on Thursday, expressed sadness over the death of Senator Annie Okonkwo.

Okonkwo, a former lawmaker representing Anambra Central Senatorial District at the National Assembly, reportedly died in the United States after a prolonged illness.

In a statement by his Press Secretary on Thursday, Governor Soludo noted that as a prominent son of Anambra State who hailed from Ojoto in the Idemili South Local Government Area of the state, the late Senator Okonkwo paid his dues to the state.

The governor commiserated with the family and friends of the deceased over this painful loss.

Also, in Twitter post on Thursday, Obi, who is also a former governor of Anambra State, praised Okonkwo as one of the strongest pillars of his presidential ambition despite not being a member of the Labour Party.

He said the deceased lawmakers highly entrepreneurial spirit and political sagacity will be greatly missed in the country today.
AKwa Ibom State Governor, Pastor Umo Eno, today, was received in audience by President Bola Tinubu at the Aso Rock Villa, Abuja, on a scheduled courtesy visit.

During the meeting, Governor Eno, congratulated the President on his assumption of Office, and conveyed the best wishes of the Government and the good people of Akwa Ibom State to the President.

President Tinubu, who displayed a deep knowledge of Akwa Ibom State in his response said that he was very happy to receive Governor Eno, adding that he will support the A.R..I. S.E Agenda of Governor Enos Administration.

Speaking with State House Correspondents after the courtesy visit, Governor Eno said he was on a mission to build political and economic bridges for the good of Akwa Ibom State in particular and Nigeria in general.  I needed to come here and congratulate the President on his assumption of Office as the President and Commander- in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic Of Nigeria.

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According to Governor Eno, he used the opportunity also to brief the President on the progress we have made in Akwa Ibom State and solicit his support for the completion of the Ibom Deep Sea Port project, the Calabar-Itu Road and the Export Free Zone license for the Maintenance, Repairs and Overhaul (MRO, ) hanger at the Victor Attah International Airport, Uyo, which is the only MRO in West Africa.

According to Governor Eno: Politics is over. Its time for governance. We must do whatever it takes to bring the dividends of democracy and good governance to the people of Nigeria and Akwa Ibom State in particular.

The Governor, also commended the President whom he said received him extremely very well.
It was a long day for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, as he met with governors of the opposition PDP

The president held a meeting with the PDP G5 governors and Governors Pastor Umo Eno of Akwa Ibom State and Caleb Muftwang of Plateau State, at the Villa, on Thursday, June 8

According to the governors, the elections are over it is time to work with the current administration to fix Nigeria

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Thursday, June 8, held a closed-door meeting with two governors from the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

Pastor Umo Eno of Akwa Ibom State and Caleb Muftwang of Plateau State met with Tinubu at the Presidential Villa in Abuja on Thursday.

Tinubu meets with PDP governors, Governor Caleb Mutfwang of Plateau State and Governor Umo Eno of Akwa Ibom. Photo credit: Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu

Source: Facebook

Tinubu meets with opposition governors

The president confirmed the development through a post shared on his page accompanied by pictures.

PAY ATTENTION: heck out news that is picked exactly for YOU  find the Recommended for you block on the home page and enjoy!

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Governor Eno emphasized the need to set politics aside and focus on governance now that the elections are over, The Nigerian Tribune reported.

He expressed his commitment to working with the federal government to ensure that the people of Akwa Ibom benefit from democracy.

The governor said he requested the presidents assistance for the completion of the Ibom deep seaport and an export license for the free zone at the Ibom airport, The Cable report added.

Eno stated,

We came to visit with the President, to congratulate him on the election and his swearing-in and to pledge our support, our commitment, and our loyalty to the President and the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Details of Tinubus meeting with Wike, other G5 govs emerge

G5 members, popularly called the Integrity Group of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), on Thursday, June 8, met President Bola Ahmed Tinubu amidst speculations that the group may be planning to join the ruling party.

Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo, however, said the G5 members only visited Tinubu to brief him on the latest happenings and their stance on fairness, equity and justice in the country.

Makinde, who was flanked by the four other members of the group who are now immediate past governors, further acknowledged that nation-building is a difficult task and demands constant evaluation.

Enugu governor meets Tinubu, makes 1 strong demand

Governor Peter Mbah of Enugu State has opened conversations on the release of the self-acclaimed leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) Nnamdi Kanu.

Mbah requested President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to give the matter the utmost consideration to extend the hand of fellowship to the South-East people.

Mbah told State House correspondents, after a private meeting with the president on Thursday, June 8, that among the issues discussed was the possible release of the secessionist agitator who has had a series of favorable court judgement over his prosecution.

Source: Legit.ng
(CNN)  Dozens of heat records have fallen in Siberia, as temperatures climbed above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 Celsius).

Despite only being early June, records are tumbling across parts of Siberia as extreme heat pushes into unusually high latitudes.

Last Saturday, temperatures reached 37.9 degrees Celsius (100.2 Fahrenheit) in Jalturovosk, its hottest day in history, according to the climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures across the globe.

A slew of temperature records have fallen in Siberia since then.

Several all-time heat records were broken on Wednesday, including in Baevo, which reached 39.6 degrees Celsius (103.3 Fahrenheit), and Barnaul, which hit 38.5 degrees Celsius (101.3 Fahrenheit).

Some of these stations have between five and seven decades of temperature recordings, Herrera told CNN. So we can say its really exceptional. Its the regions worst heat wave in history, he posted on Twitter on Wednesday.

And it looks set to get even worse. Records keep falling today with again temperatures around 40 degrees Celsius, Herrera told CNN on Thursday

A scientific analysis may be done to asses how much influence climate change is having on this event, but we know that global warming is causing more extreme temperatures, especially in the higher latitudes.

A particularly intense and prolonged heat wave in 2020, which saw the Arctic Siberian town of Verkhoyansk hit 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius), would have been almost impossible without human-caused climate change, an analysis by a team of international scientists found.

Siberia tends to see large monthly and yearly temperature fluctuations, but the last few decades have seen a strong warming trend.

Siberia is one of the fastest warming regions on the planet with hot extremes increasing in intensity, Omar Baddour, chief of climate monitoring and policy services at the World Meteorological Organization, told CNN.

The region has seen some very intense heat waves, said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the the European Unions Copernicus Climate Change Service. These heat waves have major implications for people and nature and will continue to happen more frequently unless we rapidly cut emissions of greenhouse gases, she told CNN.

As wildfire season takes hold in the Northern Hemisphere, Siberia  along with Canada  has also been grappling with significant and intense wildfires. Fired that raged across Russias Ural Mountains in May, killed at least 21 people.

Extreme heat is likely to worsen wildfires.

Its not just Siberia that has seen record heat this week. It has spread across Central Asia. In early April, Turkmenistan saw temperatures of 42 degrees Celsius (107.6 Fahrenheit), which was a world record for that latitude, Herrera said.

Since then the heat hasnt stopped, with rolling heat waves gripping the region.

On Wednesday, temperatures of more than 45 degrees Celsius (111.2 Fahrenheit) were recorded in China, 43 degrees Celsius (109.4 Fahrenheit) in Uzbekistan and 41 degrees Celsius (105.8) in Kazakhstan.

Its a historic heat wave, which is rewriting world climatic history, Herrera said on Twitter.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Siberia swelters in record-breaking temperatures amid its worst heat wave in history"
The judge also ordered her to go to the same platform, WhatsApp, add their friend in Saudi Arabia and tell them that she was lying, begging for the defendants forgiveness.

A woman, Habiba, has been handed a 3-months jail term by a Kano State Sharia court for calling her friend, Rukayya Muhammad, a pr*stitute.

Habiba was arraigned before the court by the police for calling and addressing her friend as sharmota, which means pr*stitute, on her WhatsApp status.

She sent the same message to their friend who is residing in Saudi Arabia.

When the charges were read against her, she pleaded guilty.

The Judge, Mallam Sani Tanimu Sani Hausawa, found Habiba guilty of the offence, sentenced her to three months in prison with an option of N40,000 fine.

The judge also ordered her to go to the same platform, WhatsApp, add their friend in Saudi Arabia and tell them that she was lying, begging for the defendants forgiveness.
Eight of the suspects were arrested at Anthony Village, while one of them was arrested around June 1, 2023, with over 100-metre-long armoured cable suspected to have been stolen from a construction site in Lekki.

The arrested suspects

Men of the Rapid Response Squad in Lagos have arrested eight suspected cable vandals in Igbo Efon, Lekki area of the state.

This was contained in a statement via the commands Twitter account, Friday, June 9, 2023.

Eight of the suspects, according to the command were arrested at Anthony Village, while one of them was arrested around 9 pm on June 1, 2023, with over 100-metre-long armoured cable suspected to have been stolen from a construction site in Lekki.

The statement read, Operatives of Lagos Rapid Response Squad have arrested eight suspected cable thieves and recovered over 100-metre-long armoured cable from one of the suspects in Igbo Efon, Lekki.

Seven of the suspects were arrested at about 9:30 p.m. in Anthony Village, Lagos on June 1, 2023, when RRS operatives on patrol in the area accosted them while digging and shovelling the ground for armoured cable belonging to Ikeja Electric.

The suspects, Kamalu Mohammed m aged 32, Usman Lawal m aged 33, Ibrahim Salisu m aged 22, Hassan Salisu m aged 20, Zulkiful Sani m aged 23, Umar Haruna m ages 26 and Amadu Muazu m aged 22

Further investigation led to the arrest of the last suspect, Nasir Lawal m aged 30 with over 100-metres-long cable believed to have been stolen at a construction site around Igbo Efon, Lekki, Lagos.


In a new report, Mrs Seun Aiyedatiwa, the wife of Ondo State Deputy Governor, Lucky Aiyedatiwa, has alleged that she suffered constant beatings, humiliation and torture from her husband.

She also stated that her husband lied in his response to allegations of domestic violence levelled against him.

A womens group Society for Women Empowerment (SWE) first went public with the allegation, threatening to protest if Ayedatiwa does not make a public apology to his wife.

But Mr Aiyedatiwa denied the allegation, stating that it was political blackmail taken too far.

However, in a statement on Thursday reportedly sent from London and shared by Qed.ng titled, My ordeal at the hands of Lucky, Mrs Aiyedatiwa said that although she does not know the true intentions of the womens group she would speak out for the sake of other women.

She said, Prior to Luckys appointment as the deputy governor, we had ongoing issues revolving around abusive behaviour. Each time, he would apologize, often attributing his actions to alcohol. Our children have witnessed this on two occasions. They implored me to have him arrested, but I explained that Nigerian culture does not provide room for such measures.

I am not happy about revealing my personal struggles publicly. It is a painful reality I must confront. I have reached the conclusion that concerted efforts must be made to eradicate the scourge of violence against women. I have endured physical, emotional, and mental abuse from my husbandbeatings, torture, and constant mistreatment.

On December 1, 2022, during a minor argument, I experienced one of the most severe beatings of my life at the hands of my husband. I was left bruised and battered, to the extent that I could not attend the birthday ceremony of Toyin Akeredolu, the younger sister of Governor Akeredolu, in Ibadan. He threatened to kill me, uttering words of disdain.

On Friday, December 2, I travelled to Ibadan to meet with the First Lady, Chief Betty-Anyanwu Akeredolu, to report Luckys actions. When she saw my battered face, she was enraged. She subsequently reported Lucky to the Governor. Lucky used to be the First Ladys favourite, but since that day, she has distanced herself from him.

Upon returning to Akure, even with my bruised face, Lucky slapped me again. He accused me of exposing him to the Governor and First Lady. He not only slapped me but also poured Hennessy on my head, berating me as a worthless woman.

A few days before the FOWOSO summit, I was burdened with depression and numerous issues. I had already made up my mind not to attend the program. However, Lucky approached me, pleaded, and promised never to harm me again. I had to apply heavy makeup and wear dark glasses to conceal the bruises on my face, just to attend the event.

By the end of January, Lucky resumed his abusive behaviour. As much as I am a strong supporter of his aspirations to succeed the Governor, I have consistently advised him to exhibit decorum in his public life.

Every time I mentioned this, he dismissed it as jealousy and insecurity, showing no regard for my feelings. Disrespectful calls were frequently received at our home, especially from one Ambassador Tolu Taiwo, one of his girlfriends.

During the first week of February, we had a conversation about his political aspirations, and I advised him to refrain from making certain remarks to people. Instead of considering my advice, he unleashed his anger on me, subjecting me to further physical abuse. He threatened to kill me and make another woman the First Lady when he becomes Governor.

Lucky not only assaulted me but also locked me out of the house. I had to spend two nights at St. Jacob Hotel. He instructed the gatekeeper not to allow me entry. From there, I had to travel to Lagos and eventually moved to Ilesa, my hometown.

After being locked out, my driver eventually went to the house to retrieve my bag, which contained my passport. Since then, I have relocated to London.

I am aware that Lucky may attempt to deny this story once again. However, I urge you to question him: Why have I not refuted the allegations of his abuse?

He is my husband, and no woman would want to falsely accuse her spouse. If he claims that all of this is untrue, ask him to call me and put our conversation on speaker. He is well aware of my position on this matter. I refuse to continue hiding and suffering in silence.

Once again, the First Lady is fully aware of this situation.

If Lucky denies it once more, I will come out with pictures and videos, no matter how humiliating it sounds. I am taking this step because I can no longer endure this situation silently.
A man has been arrested for beheading his wife.

It was gathered that the 27-year-old man identified as Mkwate Chimbizi murdered his wife after accusing her of cheating.

The tragic incident happened in Ngabu, Chikwawa, Malawi.

The suspect allegedly killed his wife by cutting off her breasts and removing her private parts before beheading her.

South East Police Region spokesperson, Edward Kabango, who confirmed the incident in a statement on Friday, June 9, 2023, said that Chimbizi suspected that his wife, Luwiza Leonard, 23, was having an extramarital affair.

Kabango said the suspect was arrested on Thursday, June 8, and led officers to a site where he buried the victims head which had been found in a decomposed state.

The police spokesperson said Chimbizi threw his wifes genitalia and breasts in a pit latrine.

According to him, the couple had a heated argument which escalated into a fight.

The suspect then allegedly hit Luwiza on the head with a stone, killing her instantly. He then took a panga and cut off her head, breast and private parts.

Kabango said the incident occurred June 3, 2023, adding that a search for the victims body is underway.
Former US President, Donald Trump has been indicted on seven counts in the special counsels classified documents probe, making him the first former president to face federal charges.

Trumps attorney, Jim Trusty told CNN on Thursday that the ex-president is facing charges under the Espionage Act, as well as charges of obstruction of justice, destruction or falsification of records, conspiracy, and false statements.

The special counsel has been investigating Trumps handling of classified documents that were taken to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after he left the White House. They are also examining possible obstruction of the investigation and government efforts to recover the material.

In a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump claimed that he had been informed of the indictment by the Justice Department and was summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, Trump wrote.

However, Trusty clarified that Trumps attorneys received a summons via email listing the charges but have not yet seen the indictment. He criticized the Espionage Act charge as ludicrous.

The announcement of the indictment caught law enforcement officials off guard, as the Secret Service and US Marshals were not given advance notice. They are now scrambling to prepare for Trumps expected court appearance in Miami next week Tuesday.

The federal indictment is the second time that Trump has been charged criminally this year. In April, the Manhattan district attorney charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business.

Trump is currently running for president again in 2024 while simultaneously facing criminal charges in two jurisdictions  and with two additional investigations into his conduct still underway.

The charges against Trump come just seven months since Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel after Trump announced he was running for president, in order to keep the investigation independent from the Biden Justice Department.

Now, Donald Trump will face federal charges from the special counsel while campaigning against President Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election.

KanyiDaily had also reported how a New York grand jury indicted Donald Trump over hush money payments made to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, during his 2016 campaign.

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President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been urged to prioritise the nations challenges in his government

The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammadu Saad Abubakar III made this known to Tinubu during the presidents meeting with Royal Fathers on Friday, June 9, 2023

The monarch noted that the Royal Fathers of the land are not envious of the president but they are confident of his Renewed Hope mantra to fix Nigeria

The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammadu Saad Abubakar III on Friday, June 9, revealed how the president is perceived by traditional rulers in Nigeria.

The monarch told President Bola Ahmed Tinubu that given the number of challenges in the country at this time, royal fathers do not envy him as a leader.

Sultan of Sokoto says Royal Fathers are not envious of Tinubu rather they want to be part of his government to help fix Nigeria.

Photo credit: Daddy D.O @DOlusegun

Source: Twitter

Use us severally, Royal Fathers urges Tinubu during their meeting on Friday, June 8

He made the statement when the president met with royal fathers from the six geo-political zones under the aegis of the National Council of Traditional Rulers at the State House Banquet Hall in Abuja, the nations capital, Channels TV reported.

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Leading the group on the visit, the Sultan of Sokoto however assured the President of the support and loyalty of the royal fathers, underlining their availability at any time it is required, The Nation report added.

The royal fathers also reposed confidence in the Tinubu-led administration and the Renewed Hope mantra which they believe will lead the country on a path of progress.

In his remarks, the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Enitan Adewusi, who chanted Use Us severally, urged President Tinubu to make more use of the traditional rulers particularly in tackling the challenge of insecurity.

First son sef dey use power bank: Photos of Seyi Tinubu inside Aso Villa spark reactions

The son of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Seyi Tinubu has triggered reactions online with recent photos of him from the Aso Villa.

In the images posted on his Instagram page, he is spotted in a stylish black outfit, phone in hand, in the surroundings of the Villa.

What caught their attention was that he was holding his phone with a cord stuck in his pocket.

Details of Tinubus meeting with Wike, other G5 govs emerge

G5 members, popularly called the Integrity Group of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), on Thursday, June 8, met President Bola Ahmed Tinubu amidst speculations that the group may be planning to join the ruling party.

Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo, however, said the G5 members only visited Tinubu to brief him on the latest happenings and their stance on fairness, equity and justice in the country.

Makinde, who was flanked by the four other members of the group who are now immediate past governors, further acknowledged that nation-building is a difficult task and demands constant evaluation.

Source: Legit.ng
The Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi-Ojaja II has disclosed details of his meeting with President Bola Tinubu alongside other traditional rulers.

Politics Nigeria reports that the National Council of Traditional Rulers had paid a courtesy visit to President Tinubu at the Villa on Friday.

Addressing journalists after the meeting, the Ooni said the traditional rulers promised to help the president tackle Nigerias lingering security challenge.

The respected Yoruba traditional ruler explained that it has become expedient for the President to make use of them as they are the closest to the people and best suitable to tackle the issue head-long.

There are areas we will like to work with you, one of which is security. It is time to use us the more, we are not saying we are idlebut to make your work easier use us, Ooni said.

The foundation of this country today are the traditional rulers. We are here to pledge our loyalty and support. We want to work with you to ensure you leave a legacy.

Dont underestimate what traditional rulers can do, he said.

Corroborating, the Sultan of Sokoto and co-lead Alhaji Saad Abubakar III, noted that the monarchs do not envy President Tinubu at this time with the numerous challenges facing the country.

Abubakar expressed confidence that with the combination of himself and Vice President, Kashim Shettima, Nigeria is on its way to better days.

The Sultan of Sokoto pledged the commitment of traditional rulers to the safety, peace and development of the country.
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By Lateef Bamgbose

The Coordinator of the Tinubu/ Shetima Presidential Campaign in the North -East, Haruna Garus Gololo, on Friday called on the leadership of the All progressives Congress ( APC), to put Abubakar Yari in check, ahead of the inauguration of the 10th National Assembly on Tuesday June 13.

In a statement he circulated to journalists in Abuja, Gololo, accused the Senator-elect for Zamfara West Senatorial District playing a dangerous script to distablise the President Bola Tinubus administration by insisting on running for the Office of the President of the Senate, against the wishes of the Party.

 Yari, Senator Kalu are working for the Labour Party ( LP), presidential Candidate, they are working to discredit Senator Godswill Akpabio and President Tinubu

 They have also engaged the service of Chuks Akuna, a hiring to discredit Akpabio, but we are not surprised that Chuks went to AIT during a Newspaper review to say Akpabio will be a yes Senate president

 The sponsor of this blackmail, Abubakar Yari, is aware he doesnt have Akpabios credentials and credibility, other wise those that have been following events in AIT would know Chuks has been speaking for Peter Obi and their Obidients army of failed politicians

 The script keeps growing by days. What is Northern Elders business with the decision of APC, a party they never work for? Baba Ahmed the self acclaimed Northern Elders Forum and Professor Ango Abdullahi, have suddenly recovered from the shock after the presidential election, which Peter Obi and Datti Ahmed , Baba Ahmed younger brother lost to say the presidency should not interfer in the election of the leadership of the National Assembly 

He said: Yaris position and continuous insistence is a mutiny and should be treated as anti-party. The party has in its wisdom, zone the leadership of the Senate and the House to the South and the North West respectively, but Yari is bent on working against the decision of the party. .

It is consistent with his antics as a politician. Recalled he had threatened the former National Chairman of the party, Adams Oshomole, not to enter Zamfara State after conducting a sham primary that later cost the party its victory at the Supreme Court. He is back on this path of infamy.

Every party supporter and lawmaker-elect should support the decision of the leadership of the party by working for the emergence of Senator Godswill Akpabio and Jubrin Barau for the Senate President and Deputy Senate President and in the House of Representatives, Tajudeen Abbas for the Speaker and Hon. Benjamin Kalu as the choice for Deputy Speaker.

In terms of pedigree, Yari just acquired a Diploma from a polytechnic, in Talata Mafara. Godwsill Akpabio apart from his uncommon transformation of Akwa-Ibom State, he is a senior lawyer. The business of National Assembly should not be exclusive reserve of those who think they can buy the lawmakers. It is a serious business.

We are behind Akpabio and we will continue to support him, because there is no justifiable reason for Yaris continuous insistence other than to work against the Party and Tinubus administration.

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A major issue during the week, was the advice by a member of Nigeria Interreligious Council (NIREC) and former National Director of Legal and Public Affairs, Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Evangelist Samuel Kwankur, to the Northern leaders to caution the former Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai, to refrain from inflammatory statements capable of setting Nigeria on fire.

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Kwankur was reacting to statements credited to the former governor in which he allegedly told his audience before handing over to his successor that the Islamic dominance in Kaduna had come to stay and had been successfully replicated at the federal level.

El-Rufai spoke in Hausa. I only have a passing understanding of the language. But those that are versed in it, allege that he had sniggered that the emergence of Bola Tinubu had silenced CAN, the umbrella body of Christians in the country and that he would ensure an uninterrupted Islam-dominated government in Kaduna and at the national level for the next 20 years and beyond.

Now, in a highly volatile and religion-sensitive setting as Nigeria and especially, a complex entity as Kaduna, the remarks by the former governor, are uncalled for. They are not edifying. At his age and the positions he had held, either as governor, Director-General, Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) and Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, El-Rufai, should be seen and addressed as an elder. Elders are cautious and measured in outings and utterances.

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Age and position mellow the activism in one and make him sober and reflective. But this does not seem the case for the former governor. In fact, it can only take those not familiar with his antecedents to be surprised that he could be associated with the careless comments attributed to him. He is free with words and deploys them at will, not minding the consequences.

On the alleged Islamisation comments, he was on familiar track. Recall that as a governor, he had, in flagrant disregard to the complex cultural and religious sensitivities of Kaduna, appointed a fellow Muslim, Hadiza Sabuwa Balarabe, as deputy and carried on as if it did not matter. He even encouraged his successor and protege, Senator Uba Sani, to follow the odious step.

For El-Rufai, a man of brief size and height, controversy seems a second name. He courts it and revels in it, even at the cost of public good. He is never tired of playing games with important issues. To him, everything is politics and politics is everything.

Recall when he threatened international election observers that they would be evacuated in body bags if they ventured into the country to monitor the 2019 presidential elections. Recall, also, when he claimed being asked to offer bribes by Senators during his screening for ministerial appointment, during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency but when pressed to provide evidence on his claims, he chickened out, saying God was his witness.

Once on this space, I had noted that the former governor acts the good boy, when it suits his agenda and hits hard when he has an interest to pursue. He has not deviated from that path. For him, scruples are matters of convenience to be observed when necessary but can be discarded, if need be. He is shrewd. And cold! The trend, now, is the scramble by leading members of the All Progressives Congress (APC), for appointments at the centre. El-Rufai is equally on heat, sort of, in that regard and needed to court the attention of President Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettima, his fellow Muslims.

Of course, there is nothing wrong in his aspiration for any job or position that animates him. He is also free to support any candidate of any religious persuasion that excites him. They are all within his constitutional rights. The beauty of democracy is plurality of views and opinions. It is a game of numbers but certainly not without principles and guidelines. El-Rufai should not be allowed to re-write those rules while pursuing his personal interest. He cannot be allowed to create the bubble and move on, as he has always done. He should be stopped from his antics before they do enormous harm on Kaduna state and the country at large.

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Kaduna was the capital of the defunct Northern Region and the seat of government from where the late Premier, Sir Ahmadu Bello, provided people-oriented governance to the region. Till date, it remains the pride of the North and every Northerner of note. Nigeria has always passed for a secular state where no particular faith has dominance over others. There is no state religion. The situation should remain so.

The danger in the careless remarks by El-Rufai, is that they are capable of setting the country on the edge. The immediate past Muhammadu Buhari administration did not manage the diversities in the country very well. It rather widened the major fault lines among the citizens on ethnic and religious grounds. El-Rufai was close to the government and a visible ally to Buhari. A system with people like him on drivers seats can hardly make progress.

Tinubu and Shettima need to be on the watch. The controversies and contentions surrounding their emergence are yet to settle. The suspicion on their same-faith ticket is still thick. They also have the huge tasks of national healing and reconciling the various tendencies in the land. Nigeria has witnessed so much waste of its citizens over avoidable circumstances to allow petty issues as religion and choice of leadership burden it more.

Recent reports by the people of Southern Kaduna, under the aegis of Atyap Community Development Association (ACDA), that 518 people have been killed, 20 villages ransacked, 18 burnt down, and thousands of victims rendered refugees across many communities from 2017 till date, over the persistent attacks and killings in Atyapland in the Zangon Kataff Local Government Area of Kaduna State, should matter to the new authorities in the state and Abuja. El-Rufai was the governor at the time of these gruesome occurrences. The figure speaks volume of what lies ahead if he is allowed to forge ahead with his Islamisation agenda.
Kwankwaso, a former Minister of Defence, has been a close ally of Tinubu, who has variously described the incumbent President as a strategist.

Nigerias number one man, President Bola Tinubu is currently meeting with Rabiu Kwankwaso.

He is having a closed-door meeting with Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) in Abuja.

Kwankwaso, a former Minister of Defence, has been a close ally of Tinubu, who has variously described the incumbent President as a strategist.

DAILY POST recalls that the immediate past governor of Kano State, Abdullahi Ganduje, served under Kwankwaso as deputy governor before succeeding him.

Both men later fell out over some political differences.
(CNN)  Ukraine and its allies will be at the whim of American voters once again next year if the winner of the US election is not as enthusiastic about defending democracy on the European continent as US President Joe Biden has been over the last fifteen months.

Former President Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner, has refused to say whether he believes Ukraine should win the war against Russia, and his main challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has hedged on the conflict, describing Russias unprovoked invasion as a territorial dispute.

Asked by CNNs Kaitlan Collins on Thursday about Trumps comments, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak highlighted strong support in the US for funding Ukraine, adding that his meetings with congressional leaders in both parties this week indicated a willingness to support the countrys ongoing efforts to defend itself amid Russian aggression.

Obviously, it wouldnt be right for me to comment on domestic politics here. But I did spend a good amount of time in Congress yesterday talking to leaders from both parties, and I think there is strong support for the efforts that America is putting in to support Ukraine, Sunak said in an exclusive interview at the presidential guest residence Blair House, moments after meeting with Biden.

I think theres an acknowledgment, as I said, that the values that were fighting for are universal. Theyre values that America has always stood up for, which is democracy, freedom and the rule of law, he added.

In apparent nod to Trump, who has bemoaned that NATO countries were not meeting the security alliances spending commitment of 2% of their GDP, Sunak added: I think its entirely reasonable for people to ask: is everybody doing their bit? Im proud to say the UK is. Behind the US, were the next largest contributor to the effort to support Ukraine. And more broadly, when it comes to defense spending, were one of the few countries that invests 2% of our GDP in defense.

It is a position he has spoken to other leaders about, he said. I think its reasonable and right that we expect other countries in the NATO alliance to increase defense spending up to those levels. And thats something that I speak to other leaders about as well, Sunak replied.

The comments come after the British leader met with Biden at the White House, where both men spoke about the countrys close relationship and their shared perspective on Ukraine.

Despite two changes in its leadership in the past 12 months, the UK has remained at the forefront of nations supporting Ukraine, coming second in total financial support only to the United States.

Under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the UK pushed European and other Western allies to supply Ukraine with lethal defense systems and tanks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky repeatedly thanked Johnson for this, with Ukrainians going so far as to rename streets in Kyiv after the former British leader.

Sunak has continued with this policy, most recently pressing allies to push forward in supplying Ukraine with fighter jets.

His talks with Biden come at a turning point in the Russia-Ukraine war, following the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam and ahead of a widely expected counteroffensive meant to retake territory.

In his news conference on Thursday, Biden also said he was confident that Congress would continue providing support for Ukraine.

The fact of the matter is that I believe well have the funding necessary to support Ukraine as long as it takes, Biden said. I believe that were going to get that support, it will be real.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tells CNN he has confidence in US support in Ukraine"
Says former Gov chased him out of Kano for three and half years

By Johnbosco Agbakwuru, Abuja

Former governor of Kano State Rabiu Kwankwaso, Friday, said that he and the immediate past Governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, were summoned by President Bola Tinubu over the ongoing demolition in the State.

Kwankwaso, who was the Presidential candidate of the New Nigeria Peoples Party, NNPP, said that Ganduje as a governor chased him out of Kano State for three and half years.

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Fielding questions from State House correspondents, he claimed that most of the buildings demolished were illegally acquired by the Ganduje administration and that President Tinubu was shocked when he briefed him on the true picture of what led to the present demolition.

Asked if he was satisfied with the presidents intervention, he said: The President was shocked. Are you not shocked that somebody will sell University? Are you not shocked that he demolished the only university? Daula Hotel, for those of you who are in Kano, you know the old Daula, demolished to zero and that is a faculty under the University of Science and Technology. He demolished that one. Are you not shocked?

The President was shocked. He didnt know. He even mentioned that he talked to somebody to go and find out for him. But when I told him, I said you are a Muslim, very soon you are going for Sallah. How can you go under that circumstance and pray in that place? And even the Triumph place he is talking about, you are journalists. You should be angry because thats your constituency, he demolished completely and put shops everywhere.

According to Kwankwaso, his party under Governor Abba Yusuf, was only fulfilling the campaign promises to demolish such structures.

You see the governor is doing what we campaigned with. I wanted to be president, I campaigned also. And I went to Kano and told them that these places, schools, in fact most of our schools in Kano were being encroached on. And it is our policy to make sure that the encroached areas are returned to them.

Regarding speculations of accepting a ministerial position from the Tinubu administration, Kwankwaso revealed that talks were ongoing about the possibility.

However, he dismissed rumours of defecting to the ruling party, emphasising that Tinubu was more focused on a government of national unity.

He described Ganduje as a stooge he made his Special Adviser and also his deputy while he held sway as governor.
Former governors of Kano State Abdullahi Ganduje and Rabiu Kwankwaso took turns to visit President Bola Tinubu at Aso Rock.

The duo, who is at loggerheads, visited the Nigerian leader in Abuja on Friday as they continued in what many have described as a supremacy battle.

While Ganduje (contesting and winning under the All Progressives Congress) succeeded the presidential candidate of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) as governor, the duo fell out some years back.

But the NNPP defeated Gandujes APC in the 2023 governorship election as Kwankwaso took third in the presidential poll.

Months after the elections and with Tinubu of the APC becoming the president, there have been efforts to reconcile Kwankwaso and Ganduje.

That was one of the major talking points of Tinubus recent meeting with the NNPP chieftain in France.

Fridays meeting was in furtherance of consultations with Kwankwaso who is expected to work with the new government.

But Gandujes faceoff with his predecessor, which is a major obstacle to that, appears to have worsened with new Kano State Governor Abba Yusuf demolishing some structures erected by the previous government.

Infuriated by Abbas moves, Ganduje said he could have slapped Kwankwaso if they met at Aso Rock.

I know he (Kwankwaso) is in the building but we have not met. Probably if we met, maybe I could have slapped him, Ganduje.

He claimed that some of the properties demolished by the NNNP-led Kano State government were done under a private-public-partnership, expressing disappointment over the development.

Kwankwaso, was, however, quick to dismiss claims by his successor and accused Ganduje of appropriating government properties to himself and his family.

Away from this, he said conversations around a ministerial post for him in the Tinubu administration also took centre stage during the visit.

The NNPP presidential candidate reiterated his commitment to working with Tinubu but maintained he wont join the APC as being speculated in some quarters.

According to him, Tinubu is only interested in forming a government of national unity.
According to a report by The PUNCH, the Federal High Court in Abuja on Monday dismissed a suit challenging the decision of the All Progressives Congress to adopt indirect primary for nominating its candidate for the forthcoming November 16, 2019 governorship election in Kogi State

The judge, Justice Taiwo Taiwo, upheld the preliminary objections filed by the APC to challenge the suit, in ruling that the suit had been caught by the statute of limitation.

He said it was needless to go into the proprietary of the partys choice of indirect primary since the court lacked the jurisdiction to hear the case on merit, having been statute-barred.

He held that the suit, marked FHC/ABJ/CS/883/2019, was a pre-election matter which ought to have been heard and determined within 180 days as provided by Section 285(10) of the Nigerian Constitution.

According to the judge, although the suit was filed only on July 18, 2019, it was clearly premised on another one marked FHC/ABJ/CS/833/2019 which, instead of being determined within 180 days, was only ruled upon on Monday.

The judge, on the grounds of statute limitation, in the earlier judgment on Monday, dismissed the said foundational suit which was instituted by the Chairman and Secretary of a parallel executive committee of the APC in Kogi State, Haddy Ametuo and Tam Adejoh, respectively.

The said foundational suit was instituted against the APC, and Abdullahi Bello, who is the Chairman of the Governor Yahaya Bello-backed faction of the party in the state.


The United States District Court at St. Loius has sentenced a 49-year-old American woman, Wende Anne Terril, to one year in prison for stealing about $200,000 from her company to help her fiance, a Nigerian scammer who conned her in an online romance scam.

According to Sahara Reporter, Wende Anne Terril was sentenced on Friday with an order to pay back the money she stole from her company.

The prosecutors said Terrill wrote five-figure cheques and sent one wire transfer from her employer, Midwest Petroleum, to other accounts between January 27, 2017 to March 31, 2017.

The woman was the company controller and the accounts were associated with companies with which Midwest was not doing business, court documents showed.

The money was almost immediately transferred overseas. Several links in the chain of money transfers had Nigerian connections, prosecutors have said in court documents.

After Terrill left the company, a Midwest official discovered emails between her and others about fiance Santino Gallo, who was supposedly an oil rig worker with outstanding debts.

Prosecutors said the 49-year-old was the victim of a Nigerian romance fraud scheme in which scammers create fake online profiles, develop a romantic relationship with their victims before making series of requests for money until the victims finances are exhausted.
South Africa Department of Home Affairs, on Wednesday, said that more than 10,000 illegal migrants have been deported from South Africa in the first six months of 2019.

Home Affairs Minister spokesman Siya Qoza said it was clamping down on illegal migration and that plans were in place to secure the countrys porous borders.

These deportations happen regularly, following the prescribed legal processes, Xinhua quoted him as saying.

In the same period we have charged 1,048 employers for breaching immigration laws and more than half of these were in Gauteng.

With regards to hiring of undocumented foreign nationals, we will clamp down on private business owners who do not abide by the Labour and Immigration Laws, said the spokesman.

Qoza said the department was planning to implement the Border Management Authority in the next financial year to improve the security at the borderline and ports of entry.

The Border Management Authority will help us because the problem is not the actual port, but the borderline.

This will allow us to have guards along the borderline and also simply process people around the border, said Qoza.
Radisson Hotel Group, one of the worlds largest hotel groups, has announced the signing of 11 new hotels across Africa within the first nine months of 2019, accelerating its expansion across the continent.

This brings the Groups African portfolio to almost 100 hotels and over 17,000 rooms in operation and under development across 32 African countries and firmly on track to reach 130+ hotels and 23,000 rooms by 2022.

According to the Senior Vice President, Development, Sub Sahara Africa, Radisson Hotel Group, Andrew McLachlan, the group has signed a new hotel deal every 25 days, each aligning with its focused development strategy which includes the introduction of new brands and scaled growth in key cities where it can develop and operate multiple hotels within the same city.

We are currently focusing on 23 of the 60 larger cities in Africa and have a proven track record when one compares the size of our portfolio in Africa for the 19 years we have been active on the continent. We are proud that our flagship brand, Radisson Blu, has for a second year in a row secured the top spot as Africas fastest growing hotel brand, according to the W Hospitality Pipeline Report.

Commenting on the Groups East African development plans, McLachlan said, Aligned with our five-year development plan, we are seeking scale in proactive key cities, such as Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Kampala. There are great opportunities in Ethiopia because of the population and ease of airlift access, with Africas leading airline, Ethiopian Airlines. Addis Ababa has the potential to host each of our five active hotel brands in Africa.

These opportunities are not only for new build hotels, but also for locally branded conversions. East Africa presents unique bush and beach opportunities. We are exploring eco-tourism projects, leveraging the National Parks in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya. In terms of beach prospects, we are investigating opportunities in Mombasa, Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam and Diani.

Tim Cordon, Area Senior Vice President, Middle East & Africa, Radisson Hotel Group, said: With our new operational model, we broke records in 2018 with an increase in GOP margins in every market, despite some rate decline. This year we continue to do so with various milestones achieved, such as the group revenue increasing by 14%, a 30% increase in Radisson Rewards Meetings revenue, over 50 awards won and 90% of Radisson hotels in Africa securing Safehotels certification.

Weve set a global first in hotel safety and security with Radisson Blu Hotel & Conference Center Niamey securing the highest level of Safehotels certification, Executive, just three days after the hotel opened in June 2019. We have placed continued investment in resources within Africa, growing the support team of our hotels and owners.
The 23-year-old Kano man, Sulaiman Isa, who is set to marry a 46-year-old American, Jeannine Sanchez said his decision to settle with the white woman was because Hausa women are very materialistic and they dont like someone for the sake of love.

Isa, who stated this during qn exclusive interview with Daily Trust, said he has had bitter experiences with some Hausa ladies who he alleged are more interested in material benefits instead of true love.

He said Hausa women dont go into relationship for the sake of love but because of what they think they would gain in the end. Isa said:

I have had several relationships and it all ended in very horrible experience. My experience with Hausa girls and most of Nigerian women is they are very materialistic, they dont like someone for the sake of love. If a Nigerian lady says she loves you, you have to think twice, its either because of money or something else. I dont really believe in Nigerian love he added, recalling one of his terrible moment with a lady from Zamfara state who he said left him stranded in an island of love. My experience in Zamfara was very horrible. When we started the relationship it was honest, but as time goes on, she met some guys who were more richer than me, then she decided to dump me, he said.

He advised young men using the social media to always strive to be honest in all their dealings with friends the platform.

Daily Trust reports that the lovers had met on Instagram about a year ago, and what started as a normal platonic relationship had grown and blossomed into online courtship.

The lovers are now set for marriage in a few months following the arrival of the American woman to Nigeria to meet her heartthrob and his family members in Kano.

Sanchez, who arrived at the Panshekara residence of her online lover, said she was in Kano not only to see her heartthrob and his parents but also to declare her intention to marry him and afterwards fly to America where they intend to settle.

It was learnt that parents of the 23-year-old lover had accepted the proposal of the white lady on condition that Isas religious beliefs should not be compromised on account of the relationship either at home or in America.

KanyiDaily had also reported how an American man, Richard Stewart, flew all the way from Hawaii, United States, to Enugu State, Nigeria, to tie the knot with his heartthrob, Precious Destiny Stewart, whom he meet on social media.
The Deceased, Chibuisi Okameme, Inspector Stanley Asu

A petrol attendant, Chibuisi Okameme, was on Sunday shot dead allegedly by a policeman, Inspector Stanley Asu.

The incident occurred opposite the Greenmac Energy Limited filling station on the New Umuahia Road, Ogborhill area of the Aba North Local Government Area of Abia State.

Punch Metro gathered that a diabetic patient was on his way to hospital for treatment when some policemen attached to the Ohuru Isimiri Police Division, who were enforcing the lockdown occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic, intercepted his vehicle opposite the filling station.

Okameme was said to have intervened on behalf of the patient, who is a regular customer at the filling station, but Asu allegedly shot the 26-year-old around 1pm.

The bullet penetrated Okamemes pelvis and he was soaked in a pool of his own blood.

His co-workers and the security guards at the filling station apprehended the inspector, while the victim was rushed to the Abia University Teaching Hospital for treatment.

The manager of the filling station, Nwabeke Ndubuisi, said Okameme died as doctors were battling to save his life, adding that security guards at the station prevented Asu and his colleagues from escaping.

Ndubuisi stated, The man, who was going to hospital, is one of our regular customers, but the policemen, who were enforcing the lockdown directive of the state governor, stopped him in front of our filling station and were about taking him to the station when Okameme went to plead with the policemen to leave the man alone. As both men were pleading, one of the policemen shot Okameme.

The men didnt engage in an argument with the five policemen; they were only pleading with them when Asu shot Okameme. The policemen were in a commercial bus and were about fleeing when some of members of staff and soldiers guarding our filling station stopped them. The soldiers instructed the policemen to take him to hospital and we all went to the Abia State University Teaching Hospital, where he died.

A picture made available to our correspondent showed Okamemes remains lying on a hospital bed with a blood-stained bandage wrapped around his waist.

The deceaseds brother-in-law, Dr Cyril Irobi, while condemning Asu for perpetrating the crime, demanded justice and urged the police authorities to intervene in the case.

He stated, We want justice for Okamemes death. The shot was direct and the bullet went through his left pelvis and came out of his right pelvis. The DPO said he had been cautioning his officers, but I asked him how a policeman could make use of his weapon to do such a thing.

The man, who was intercepted by the policemen, has been released, because the policemen at the station confirmed that he is a diabetic patient and came out because he required treatment. We want justice.

There could have been a total breakdown of law and order if not that I intervened, because an angry mob was about to attack the station. Even the DPO could not come out, but I had to caution the youth not to take the law into their own hands. When I visited the station, I saw Inspector Asu crying in a cell and the DPO was specific that he had been cautioning him.

Another brother-in-law of the deceased, Christian William, said the victims mother was also demanding justice.

I want the government to stop the police harassment; they have been using guns to threaten people. I want justice to prevail over my in-laws death. His father is late, but I have personally informed his mother, Aloma Chikezie, and she wants the policeman to be dealt with. We were told to visit the State Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department tomorrow (Tuesday), William said.

When contacted, the Police Public Relations Officer in the state, Geoffrey Ogbonna, said, It was an accidental discharge; it was not intentional and we sincerely condemn that carelessness on the side of the policeman. Definitely, the family of the deceased will get justice. The case is under investigation.
Funke Akindele and her husband

Some legal practitioners have said that in the eyes of the law, popular Nollywood actress, Funke Akindele and her husband are now ex-convicts.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), reports that Akindele and her husband, popularly called JJC Skillz, on April 4, held a party at their residence with over 20 persons in attendance.

The duo later appeared in court charged with contravening Regulation 8(1)(a) and (b) and 17(1)(i) of the Lagos State Infectious Disease (Emergency Prevention) Regulations 2020, and therefore committed an offence under Section 58 of the Public Health Law Cap P16 Vol. 9, Laws of Lagos State 2015.

The law deals with the social distancing policy targeted at minimising large gatherings in the effort to contain the dreaded Coronavirus pandemic.

They two were thus sentenced to 14 days community service, besides other penalties, by Chief Magistrate Court 1 Ogba, Lagos.

Speaking to the News Agency of Nigeria(NAN), Mr Ahmed Raji, SAN, said: Akindele and her husband, AbdulRasheed Bello, can be referred to as ex-convicts having pleaded guilty and were sentenced for violating restrictions order in Lagos.

Technically speaking, anybody who has gone through a trial and is convicted can be referred to as an ex-convict.

He restated that if the law under which the duo were convicted was a recognised one, then they were ex-convicts because they admitted and the court gave them a light sentence.



This is a form of punishment.

Raji, however, said that the development would not debar Akindele and Bello from holding political offices in the country since the offence did not involve financial misappropriation.



It is not in all cases that an ex-convict will not be allowed to hold or seek for a political office. Minor traffic offences and what have you will not disqualify you from holding or seeking for a political office, he said.

Also speaking, Mr Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa,SAN, said:there is no doubt that they are ex-convicts.



This is because before the judge passed the sentence, they would have pleaded guilty, and trial would have taken place before judgment.

So, as far as the law is concerned presently, they are ex convicts; but, I believe they took that process for convenience of their freedom, he said

Adegboruwa, however said based on the provisions of the law and the case of Awuko vs Fagbemi, the judgment cannot stand and the case will be set aside on Appeal.



This is because, there is no known law under which they were charged and no document showing that they violated any law.

The directive of a Governor not backed by approval by the House of Assembly, is not law; such directive cannot lead to conviction and sentencing of any individual.

So, I am advising her and her lawyers to take up the proceedings and file an appeal for it to be set aside.

Section 36 of the Constitution provides that no one can be convicted except there is a law which specicifes the terms of such conviction , he said

In the same vein, an Abuja-based lawyer, Mr Tunji Oba, said that the sentence passed on Akindele and her husband stand until the pronouncement is set aside by an appellate court.

Oba said once a competent court gives a pronouncement, it stands until such is set aside by an appellate court.



Because of that guilty plea, they were convicted .

A competent court convicted them after they pleaded guilty. It does not matter whether the offence was a misdemeanor so long as there was a conviction.

Before an act could be termed criminal there must be a law to back it up enacted by the National Assembly

The charge was filed against them following the Lagos State Infectious Diseases (Emergency Prevention) Regulations 2020 made by the Governor .

I am sure the Regulations were aimed at preventing further spread of the virus (covid-19) within the state . This regulation was made pursuant to the Lagos State Public Health Law, and Section 8 of the Quarantine Act, Cap Q2 LFN 2004, he said.

Oba added that some lawyers have argued that a regulation does not qualify as a law under sections 36 (12) and 318 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended.



Section 36 (12) of the 1999 Constitution is that for a person to be arrested, detained or prosecuted for a criminal offence: There must be a written law, (ii) The offence must be defined in the written law and; A penalty therefore must be prescribed and they must all Co-exist.

Section 318 provides that for an Act to be a valid law it must be enacted by the National Assembly he said.

According to him, it means any law made by the National Assembly and includes any law which takes effect under the provisions of this constitution as an Act of the National Assembly;

He stated further that though, the Constitution guarantees your rights to free movement, freedom of religion and association, however these rights are not absolute.

The regulation made by the Governor of Lagos State was a subsidiary legislation which derived its authority from existing Act / law of Public Health and Quarantine law.



The essence of the regulation was to ensure that exigencies like the convid-19 are effectively controlled in the interest of public health and public safety.

It follows that the regulation under which the Nollywood actress and her husband were convicted is a valid law properly so called  he said.

Section 45 of the Constitution provides that your rights will not invalidate any law that is reasonably justifiable in the interest of public safety or public health

In that case, we should take COVID-19 as one of such situations which necessitated the containment of our constitutionally guaranteed right, in the interest of public safety and health  he said.

When asked about his views on the status of the couple, Mr Femi Falana,SAN, said: your request unfortunately, cannot be met because I am involved in the matter.

She (Funke Akindele) has already briefed me and once the lockdown is over, we are likely to go to court;

So, I dont want to be seen as pre-empting what we are going to do, he said
While the Nigerian government is battling to contain the spread of coronavirus in the country, 13 Nigerian citizens have died of coronavirus in the UK and US. The Nigeria Diaspora Commission on Thursday released a video revealing the identities of the 13 Nigerians killed by coronavirus (COVID-19) overseas.

The commission revealed that the 13 Nigerians in Diaspora were killed by COVID-19 in the United Kingdom and the United States. Commission (NIDCOM) has revealed

The Diaspora Commission in the video circulated through its Twitter handle, gave details of the demised Nigerians in Diaspora.

It was narrated that eight of the victims died in the UK and five died in the US. The victims were further classified to include eight males and five females, among who were one medical doctor, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, and a pastor

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The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management, Hajiya Sadiya Farouq announced that Nigerians with more than 5,000 Naira in their bank accounts will not receive palliative from the Federal Government. She made this known while addressing correspondents after a closed-door with the President. She also disclosed that the state Government will be involved in the distribution of relief materials.

Her statement reads:

You are aware that the President in his broadcast of Monday 13th April, directed that we expand the beneficiaries of the conditional cash transfer by one million and in this regard, we are going to focus more now on the urban poor.

These are people who depend on the informal sector to earn their livelihood; they are daily wage earners and these are the people that we are really going to focus more on as well as people living with disabilities.

On how the ministry intends to find out these people to benefit from the relief activities. She said, Well, we have three options; one, we are going to use the national social register that we already have, two, we are also going to focus on the urban poor as I mentioned, by using their verified BVN accounts to get them, that is, people that have an account balance of N5,000 and below.

This means no palliative for persons with more than 5,000 Naira in their bank accounts.

We are also using the mobile networks, to know people that top up the credit units for their phones with may be N100 or less. Those are also people that we consider to be poor and vulnerable. So, these are the three options that we are exploring and I am sure that by the time we get this data we will be able to give this intervention.

Hajiya Sadiya also stated that only 25% of the Countrys population will benefit from these activities for now and that scope moving forward, the scope will be expanded.

Let me also say that we have a standard. 25 percent of the total population is what we will take out. It cannot go round everywhere but we are starting from somewhere.

25 percent of lets say the location of Lagos state for example is what is going to benefit from this intervention that we are doing. Going forward, we might expand it but this is what is obtainable for now.

On the distribution of materials She said, On the issue of palliatives in terms of food relief, we have an emergency response plan in place. In the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, we have different functional groups.

One of such groups, is that which deals with mass care, logistics and security, to be led by the National Emergency Management Agency under the Ministry and they have a structure; from National, States, down to Local Governments, where the various State Emergency Agencies and other security agencies are involved in this distribution.

So far, we have already done the distribution together with the State authorities in these two states affected by the lockdown, together with the FCT but going forward, when we are going to give these food items, we are going to hand them over to the states because issues have come up, as at yesterday, Monday, Our people were mobbed, some of them were attacked in the course of carrying out this assignment so the general conclusion is that we give this food relief directly to the State governments for them to distribute to the beneficiaries.

In addressing how the Federal Government is spending the donations from EU For the COVID-19 fight in Nigeria, she said majority of the money will go into Medical equipment purchase.

This donation is coming in kind basically by way of medical equipment and also some structure to be put in place as a response to this COVID-19 pandemic. In that intervention, there are also humanitarian issues that would be addressed. As you are aware, this is a health emergency but at the same time it is also a humanitarian emergency so the Ministry is going to come in here because we are to coordinate all humanitarian interventions coming into the country by way of making sure that such interventions get to the poor and vulnerable in our society She added.
President of the Senate, Dr. Ahmad Lawan, has reacted to the resignation of his aide, Mr. Olu Onemola.



It was earlier reported the resignation of Onemola as Special Assistant on New Media Senate President Ahmed Lawan.

Onemola is an ex-aide to Senator Bukola Saraki, whose reappointment by Lawan had sparked controversy, especially within the circle of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

He tendered his resignation letter earlier today saying he would want to be excused from the job because of the controversy it has generated.

Reacting to the development, Dr. Ahmad Lawan said he has accepted the resignation of Onemola as his aide on New Media.

This was contained in a tweet on the official handle of the Senate President on Sunday.

Olu Onemola, the Special Assistant to the President of the Senate has resigned his appointment.

The resignation is contained in a letter he addressed to the Senate President.

In the letter, Onemola thanked Lawan for the offer to continue to serve and promote the work of the 9th Senate, which Im sure is borne out your patriotic desire to serve the Nigerian people.

The President of the Senate has since approved the resignation and wished Onemola all the best in his future endeavors, the tweet read.
The Ooni of Ifes wife, Olori Naomi Ogunwusi, recounted some experiences in her journey as a preacher while speaking on Saturday at the Seraphim Media Summit held at Seraph Land, Maba, Ogun State.

Revealing that she has always loved the Cherubim & Seraphim church, Naomi Ogunwusi said the people who claimed she preached like a member of the church when she started off at a tender age, worked to bring her down.

When I began preaching at a tender age, it was strange to the church I worshipped. They said I preached like the people from C&S. I thank you for bringing me here today because I have always wanted to be identified with the

people they say I preach like. I love the church so much and I will always speak for you anywhere she said. The Ooni of Ifes wife also told members of the church to shun negative criticisms, which according to her was a deliberate act by certain people to ridicule what the church stood for.

I rejoice with the church today because of the foundation. When I wanted to learn about indigenous men of God, the first person that came to my mind was the late founder of the church, Moses Orimolade. I want you to know that you are a beautiful brand regardless of what people say about you.

You have a beautiful mark of identification; with your white garment, you dont need any further introduction to anyone.We all know that in every original product, there are fake ones. People will always try to bring you down. When people said I was preaching like a C&S member, they were trying to bring me down, she said.

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The Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, said the Federal Government has got in touch with the affected persons in Wuhan, China.

The minister while addressing journalists on Friday, January 31, 2020, said the 16 Nigerians have not shown interest in returning to their country.

While urging Nigerians to reconsider travelling to China, the minister said the Federal Government cannot stop Nigerians from travelling to the country.

He said, We know it is a bit difficult to ban people from travelling. Another thing is that this is not a basis to stigmatise people who come from there.

Even if we have Nigerians who are there, unless they indicate interest that they want to come home, we cant force them.

I know we have Nigerians in Wuhan; our Embassy in China has confirmed that we have about 16 Nigerians in Wuhan and they are in touch with them.

They have, however, not indicated their interest to come home. They will, however, contact our embassy if they like to come home.

We need a lot of public enlightenment. We need to let people who travel know that there is the need for absolute transparency and absolute honesty when they are filling out forms.

The disease, which has now been declared global emergency by World Health Organisation (WHO) has reportedly killed 213 people in China.

Coronavirus recently broke out in China and has spread to 16 countries, namely Australia, Cambodia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, US, Vietnam and the United Kingdom.

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The phrase end of an era is overused a lot these days. But the unexpected passing of Dotty Garrett last month truly feels like a sad milestone for the Bloomington-Normal area.

Dotty, age 85, was the owner of the Wee Sew Shop in Bloomington for nearly 50 years. Just home from a beach vacation in Florida, she seemed as vibrant and steady as ever. So it was a shock when she passed away May 24 after a very brief respiratory illness.

When customers came in the store and heard the news, there was so much emotion, ranging from disbelief to sadness to deep grief, said Christi DeMoss, Dottys daughter.

Since her death, Dottys loyal staff has been working round the clock to complete unfinished alterations. Linda Schuerman, who is retired, returned to join Lydia Hammerstrand, Darlene Weber and Daisy Badie to keep operations temporarily running.

They have been so gracious, said Tamela McEnany, Christis sister.

Sadly, the little sewing shop, with the small but mighty team of expert seamstresses, will soon close. The last day of business will be tomorrow, June 10.

We want to thank all the wonderful customers for their support, said Christi and Tamela.

A note of business: Those who have orders at the shop should please pick them up before 1 p.m. June 10. After that, pickup is by appointment only until July 31, which can be arranged by calling the shop.

As for my husband and me, we feel as though weve lost a family member. Dotty came to our rescue many times over the years with her sewing magic on prom dresses, Halloween costumes and even my childhood doll, Raggedy Ann.

Walking into the shop at Towanda Plaza was a comforting experience. It was a cozy space, filled with ironing boards, sewing machines and a variety of zippers and buttons. And there was always a happy greeting from the friendly women who worked there. No matter what alteration was needed, they could do it.

I was always amazed at Dottys physical agility (she took Pilates classes every week) and her endless energy. A former math teacher, she had an analytical mind and liked to solve problems.

She learned to sew in seventh grade because she was tired of having to wear clothes from the childrens section (she was petite) when other girls in her class were wearing grown-up clothes. Her first creation was a straight skirt. No elastic waist band.

My favorite memory of her is from one of the shops hectic prom seasons, when my own daughters full-length dress required extensive hemming. There was Dotty on the floor, busily pinning yards and yards of tulle, almost completely hidden by all the material.

It would be hard to know how many formal dresses the ladies at Wee Sew prepared for school dances in 47 years. On average, they altered six to nine dresses a day in the weeks leading up to 14 area proms each year.

We let material out; we take it in. We add netting to fluff it up and remove netting to make it sleek. We add straps and remove them, Dotty said back then.

Just recently, Dotty and her sister Nancy Fosdick had discussed the future and getting older.

Dotty emphatically stated she wanted to work as long as she could still sit on the floor and mark a hem, said Nancy.

And with the exception of a very brief illness, that is exactly what Dotty did. She was still sewing and still smiling.

We will miss you, dear friend, and the beloved Wee Sew Shop. It just wont be the same without you. It truly is the end of an era.
BLOOMINGTON  Bloomington firefighters spent Friday afternoon putting out a garage fire on the city's west side.

About 1:45 p.m., the Bloomington Fire Department was called to the scene at 810 W. Washington St.

A Pantagraph photojournalist on the scene at 2 p.m. observed flames coming from the structure as crews from several firetrucks fought to control the blaze.

Battalion Chief Dave Talley said the detached garage was engulfed in fire from the roof when firefighters arrived on scene. The fire damage was limited to the garage, as well as a vehicle parked inside and another parked outside.

No injuries were reported. The cause of the fire remains under investigation, Talley said.

A damage estimate was not immediately available.

Photos: Emergency crews train on air disaster readiness at Bloomington airport 061222-blm-loc-1training.JPG 061222-blm-loc-2training.JPG 061222-blm-loc-3training.JPG 061222-blm-loc-4training.JPG 061222-blm-loc-5training.JPG 061222-blm-loc-6training.JPG 061222-blm-loc-7training.JPG 061222-blm-loc-8training.jpg
BLOOMINGTON  A 35-year-old Chicago man was sentenced to 40 years in prison for armed robbery at a Bloomington business.

Terrance T. Jones received his sentence Thursday before Judge Jason Chambers in an hour-long hearing in which the victim named in the armed robbery testified and security camera footage was shown.

The Pantagraph previously reported that Jones and Antoine Williams, 30, were charged with armed robbery after Bloomington police responded on May 18, 2022, to McLean County Exchange, 2016 Ireland Grove Road in Bloomington.

Williams pleaded guilty in April to one count of armed robbery, a Class X felony, and was sentenced to 30 years in the Department of Corrections and three years of mandatory supervised release, with credit for 290 days served.

The shop's owner, Michael Moss, 64, testified Thursday, sharing his account of the incident, during which he was battered by the two men and had numerous items robbed from his business.

Assistant's State Attorney Kirk Schoenbein presented three videos from the security cameras at McLean County Exchange that showed Jones observing the cases in the business before pointing a firearm at Moss, who then grabbed Jones' gun and began to fight with him.

Two gunshots were fired and struck the ceiling during the altercation. The video showed Jones hit Moss over the head with his firearm before Williams entered the business and the pair began beating Moss on his head and all over his body.

Moss said after being beaten, he was dragged into a backroom where he later regained consciousness and was able to press a sound alarm for Bloomington police to respond.

Moss said he suffered a skull fracture and bruising all throughout his body and spent six days at a local hospital because of a concussion.

A third gunshot was fired in the backroom at Moss, but the firearm jammed and caused the bullet to fall out of the barrel, Moss said.

"If I (didn't) fight back ... he would've killed me," Moss said.

Schoenbein said this incident is above the average armed robbery and is Jones' fifth felony sentence with a previous conviction to the Department of Corrections in 2014 for felony possession of a firearm. Jones was released on parole later that year and discharged in 2016.

"What I'm arguing is under the history and character of this defendant, where the trajectory is that we haven't even seen the worst yet," Schoenbein said. "In other words, the worst came just now."

Defense attorney Terry Dodds said more consideration should be taken by the court for Jones' sentence because he had already pleaded guilty in April to the one count of armed robbery, a Class X felony. The remaining charges were dismissed.

"There are many defendants that come through these doors who don't do what he did," Dodds said. "I do think a lot of consideration should given by the court to Mr. Jones' guilty plea."

Jones apologized in court and said that the gun shouldn't have gone off.

"Judge, I'm gonna say I'm sorry for showing my face in this courtroom, and to my momma, I'm sorry, too, with everything going on," Jones said.

Jones was sentenced to 40 years in the Department of Corrections, with credit for 369 days served. He is required to serve 85% of the sentence.

He was also ordered to serve two years of mandatory supervised release and pay all the necessary fines and costs as well as restitution to Moss' medical expenses.

Chambers said the risk to the community outweighs the impact Jones' sentence has on himself and his family.

"It has an impact on the community and I do think that the sentence is necessary to deter others from committing the same crime," Chambers said.

Updated mug shots from The Pantagraph Bryant Lewis Derek Roesch Justin M. Mata Marcus D. Wesley Phillip Tinch Trisha L. Hanke William B. Givens David L. Oliver Kenneth E. Funk Jordan R. King Holly M. Isaacson Kenneth L. Minton Tony L. Jackson Britley L. Hilger Jasmine L. Smith Jackie S. Claypool Noah R. Demuth Brandon L. Parsano Alexander N. Williams Carlos Sanchez-Solozarzano Jaylin S. Bones Jordan R. King Dominique M. Banks Austin T. Daugherty Sandra M. Lewis Samantha E. Morris Nolan C. Love Nikkita L. Sandefur Katlin M.B. Wilson Eli C. Garozzo Tysean T. Townsend Curtis J. Byrd Noral K. Nelson Charles J. Tankson Davis, Micah S Livingston, Joshua D. Kevin L. Ewen Emmanuel K. Mpay Ahmad S. Manns Dylan R Mann Tony L. Jackson William R. Linden Zadek U. Moen Zachary T. Willis Cecily M. Sexton Tonisha A. Jackson James A. McConnaughay Jessica M. Longberry Barry D. Guyton Keon E. Spiller Melina Aguilar Carlos D. Cregan Andrea M. Sheets
BLOOMINGTON  A 20-year-old Champaign man was sentenced Tuesday in McLean County court to two years in prison for illegally possessing a loaded weapon.

Corey K. Butler pleaded guilty that day to a Class 4 felony charge of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon. As part of his plea agreement, accepted by Judge Jason Chambers, two additional weapons charges were dropped. Those now-dismissed charges were possession of a stolen firearm, a Class 2 felony, and a second Class 4 felony offense of aggravated UUW.

The case was prosecuted by Assistant State's Attorney Jeffrey Horve, who told the court Butler was arrested March 12, 2022. He said a person told dispatchers a suspicious, potentially armed person was at an apartment complex on Goose Creek Drive in Bloomington. Horve said the caller pointed out Butler to arriving officers, who found him with a loaded 9 mm gun in his waistband. He did not have a valid FOID card.

Butler was credited for 33 days already served. Chambers said the sentence is expected to be served at 50%. The judge noted that Butler had no prior criminal record, and told him he hoped he would make better choices after his release from prison.

Assistant Public Defender Brian McEldowney represented Butler. Asked to comment on the outcome, he described the case as an isolated incident.

Echoing Chambers' comment about Butler's lack of prior record, McEldowney said it was a shame that statutory requirements did not allow the court to have discretion when sentencing someone in Butler's position, and that he had to be sentenced to the Illinois Department of Corrections.

McEldowney said a prison sentence for the charge Butler pleaded guilty to is mandated by state law.

The weapons being used in the Russia-Ukraine war Warplanes and missiles: Kalibr Warplanes and missiles: Iskander Rockets: Grad Rockets: Smerch and Uragan Cluster munitions and thermobaric weapons Russian rockets and artillery Ukraine's arsenal: NLAW anti-tank missiles Ukraine's arsenal: US javelin missiles Ukraine's arsenal: Bayraktar TB2 drone Russian missiles: Iskander Russian howitzers Russian howitzers Russian howitzers Russian self-propelled artillery Why ethical behavior matters even in the fog of war
BLOOMINGTON  A McLean County judge granted a select number of discovery requests from the attorneys of Barton McNeil, who is seeking exoneration of his 1999 murder conviction, on Tuesday.

McNeil is serving a 100-year sentence after his conviction in the suffocation death of his 3-year-old daughter, Christina. McNeil has maintained his innocence and has claimed that his ex-girlfriend, Misook Nowlin, was responsible.

In March, McNeil's attorneys with the Illinois Innocence Project and the Exoneration Project filed a motion to introduce evidence that would corroborate the out-of-court confessions of Nowlin in an evidentiary hearing and a motion for discovery for multiple records. The state also filed a motion to dismiss both of these motions.

However, Yoder only granted four of the defense's 11 discovery requests. Discovery is the process of exchanging information between the parties about witnesses and evidence, according to the American Bar Association.

The approved discovery items include a written list from the state of the names, address and birthdates of each individual they intend to call as a witness at the evidentiary hearing; the production by the state of any materials they intend to use at the evidentiary hearing; correspondence between the state's or defense's potential witnesses and anyone acting on behalf of the state; the name and curriculum vitae of any expert the state intends to call as a witness at the evidentiary hearing on this matter; and leave to subpoena Department of Child and Family Services records regarding Nowlin.

Yoder said the court needs to be cognizant of the scope of the requests so the discovery doesn't amount to a "fishing expedition." He also granted the defense the ability to present limited evidence to corroborate that Nowlin allegedly confessed to the crime.

Following the hearing, McNeil's cousin, Chris Ross, and a handful of supporters met outside the courthouse to maintain McNeil's innocence and present evidence they feel was overlooked.

This included the presence of Nowlin's DNA, which couldn't be tested in 1998, on the bed where Christina was killed and Nowlin's history of threats and violence, which included a 1997 arrest and an incident where she was believed to have smothered her own daughter, and out-of-court confessions.

Ross called on the Illinois Attorney General's Office and Gov. J.B. Pritzker to appoint a special prosecutor to begin the process of convening a grand jury for the case.

"And we believe that that jury, that grand jury, would return a verdict of yes, Misook Nowlin should be charged in the first-degree murder of Christina McNeil," Ross said.

Ross also played an audio clip from McNeil in which he said that even after 25 years, he is no less determined to bring his daughter's killer to justice.

"As would any father of a murdered child, it has been my parental duty to seek justice on behalf of Christina," McNeil said. "Since the day of my daughter's death, I pursued her then-obvious killer with all my might in the hopes that Misook Nowlin would be held accountable for what she's done to Christina."

Currently, Nowlin is serving a 55-year prison sentence after being convicted of murder charges in the 2011 strangulation death of her 70-year-old mother-in-law, Linda Tyda.

A status hearing in McNeil's case is scheduled for 11 a.m. July 19.

Updated mug shots from The Pantagraph Bryant Lewis Derek Roesch Justin M. Mata Marcus D. Wesley Phillip Tinch Trisha L. Hanke William B. Givens David L. Oliver Kenneth E. Funk Jordan R. King Holly M. Isaacson Kenneth L. Minton Tony L. Jackson Britley L. Hilger Jasmine L. Smith Jackie S. Claypool Noah R. Demuth Brandon L. Parsano Alexander N. Williams Carlos Sanchez-Solozarzano Jaylin S. Bones Jordan R. King Dominique M. Banks Austin T. Daugherty Sandra M. Lewis Samantha E. Morris Nolan C. Love Nikkita L. Sandefur Katlin M.B. Wilson Eli C. Garozzo Tysean T. Townsend Curtis J. Byrd Noral K. Nelson Charles J. Tankson Davis, Micah S Livingston, Joshua D. Kevin L. Ewen Emmanuel K. Mpay Ahmad S. Manns Dylan R Mann Tony L. Jackson William R. Linden Zadek U. Moen Zachary T. Willis Cecily M. Sexton Tonisha A. Jackson James A. McConnaughay Jessica M. Longberry Barry D. Guyton Keon E. Spiller Melina Aguilar Carlos D. Cregan Andrea M. Sheets
RANTOUL  An armed man who was fatally shot by a Central Illinois police officer after fleeing a traffic stop has been identified as an 18-year-old local man, authorities said Thursday.

Champaign County's coroner said Jordan A. Richardson of Rantoul died at a hospital from a gunshot wound to the chest after being shot Wednesday by a Rantoul police officer. An autopsy was scheduled for Friday.

Richardson was the passenger in a car that was stopped Wednesday by Rantoul police, who found cannabis in the vehicle. Police said Richardson ran from the car, dropped a gun, then picked it up and continued running.

Police said Richardson then fell to the ground and turned toward an officer with the gun still in his hand, prompting that officer to fire a single shot, striking Richardson, The (Champaign) News-Gazette reported.

The officer who shot Richardson has been placed on paid administrative leave while the fatal shooting is investigated by police and the Champaign County State's Attorney's Office.

Rantoul Police Chief Tony Brown said his department was cooperating with a team of police officers from other jurisdictions who are reviewing the case. Illinois State Police are leading that investigation.

When the investigation is completed, its finding and evidence in the case will be forwarded to Champaign County State's Attorney Julia Rietz for review.

Rantoul is about 110 miles south of Chicago.

Photos: Pritzker sworn in for second term
SPRINGFIELD  Illinois lawmakers passed 566 bills through both chambers of the General Assembly in the recently concluded legislative session  all but one of them in May.

It sets the table for an approximate three-month bill-signing season for Gov. J.B. Pritzker. Thats because the states constitution gives legislative leaders 30 days from a bills passage to send it to the governor, who then has 60 days to sign or veto it.

If the governor takes no action in that time, the bill would become law automatically. Historically, the legislature has sent bills to the governor in batches, allowing his staff ample time to review the proposals.

Below are some of the bills that Pritzker will consider signing in the coming months.

Noncitizen licenses

A measure backed by Democratic Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias would allow residents of Illinois to obtain a standard drivers license, rather than the temporary visitor drivers license that is currently allowed under law. An applicant would be required to show their U.S. immigration documentation or, if they dont have that, a passport or consular card. They would also have to prove they have car insurance.

A standard license can be used as identification, whereas a TVDL cannot. Advocates said that has made tasks such as buying alcohol or picking up a prescription challenging for many TVDL holders. Under House Bill 3882, noncitizens would still be ineligible to receive a federal Real ID certified license.

According to the secretary of states office, more than 300,000 people currently have a TVDL. Those would still be valid until their expiration date, but the state would not issue any new ones.

It passed the House 67-35 and the Senate 33-18.

Noncitizen law enforcement

House Bill 3751 provides that noncitizens can become law enforcement officers in Illinois if theyre authorized by federal law to work in the country or if action on their immigration status has been deferred under the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals process.

Those individuals must meet all other state qualifications for being in law enforcement and must be authorized to possess a firearm under federal law.

The measure passed 37-20 in the Senate and 100-7 in the House.

License plate readers

Another measure backed by Giannoulias would prohibit any user of an automated license plate reader from sharing data collected by the device with out-of-state law enforcement officers who are investigating activities related to abortion care or someones immigration status.

Prior to sharing any data, an ALPR user  which includes law-enforcement agencies and other entities if they share the data with law enforcement  would first need a written declaration that the law enforcement agency would not use the data contrary to the bills language. If no such declaration exists, the user would be prohibited from sharing the data.

House Bill 3326 passed 39-15 in the Senate and 69-34 in the House.

Native American repatriation

House Bill 3413 would streamline the process through which Illinois returns Native American remains and materials to their communities. In part, it would create a procedure in which the Illinois Department of Natural Resources would consult with affiliated tribal nations when returning remains.

The measure was spurred by reporting from ProPublica which showed the Illinois State Museum has the second-largest collection of unrepatriated Native American remains in the U.S. As of 2022, the state museum had only returned 2 percent of the 7,700 remains it reported to the U.S. government.

HB 3413 allows IDNR to establish burial sites for Native American human remains and other artifacts that are closed to the public and protected by the state.

Additionally, it creates a fund in the state treasury that would be paid into by violators of the act and subject to appropriation to cover costs including reinternment, repatriation, repair or restoration of human remains.

It passed both houses unanimously. One lawmaker voted present in the House.

Probation drug testing

Senate Bill 1886 would limit the circumstances under which a judge could order a person to refrain from cannabis and alcohol use and submit to testing while on probation. A judge could still mandate testing if the person is under 21 or was sentenced for an offense that included use of an intoxicating compound.

Testing could also still be required if the person is in problem-solving court or if the person has undergone a clinical assessment that includes alcohol or cannabis testing. Courts could also still require a person to abstain from cannabis and alcohol for 30 days between sentencing and the persons participation in a clinical assessment.

The measure would also prohibit a court from banning cannabis use if it is prescribed by a medical professional and from assessing fees for mandatory drug or alcohol testing if the person is indigent as defined in state law.

It passed 75-40 in the House and 31-18 in the Senate.

Child influencers

Senate Bill 1782 aims to protect child influencers who are under the age of 16 and featured in at least 30 percent of money-making internet videos, or vlogs, published by a family member in a 30-day period.

Vloggers who feature children under the age of 16 would be required to keep records of the childrens inclusion in vlogs, proof of age and other documents. If they dont, the child would have a right to sue in civil court.

If the vlog reaches a platforms money-making threshold or generates at least 10 cents per view, the vlogger would be required to put a percentage of earnings into a trust fund for the child that is equal to half of the percentage of content that features the child. Percentages differ if multiple children are featured.

It passed the House 98-17 and the Senate 57-0.

Hotel worker protections

House Bill 2220 would give hotel managers greater authority to remove disruptive visitors from their premises. That includes individuals who refuse to pay, threaten employees, violate laws or posted hotel rules, or use verbally abusive language.

The hotel industry pushed for the changes, which also state the removed guest must be refunded for unused portions of their stay. It also states the language cant be used to evict long-term residents or if the area is under a severe weather warning. It also may not be used to discriminate against a guest based on characteristics protected under federal, state or local law.

Hotel managers would be allowed to refuse accommodation to anyone who destroys or threatens to destroy hotel property or who is on the premises for the purpose of providing alcohol to an underage person or possessing a controlled substance.

It passed 108-3 in the House and 51-2 in the Senate.

Full-day kindergarten

House Bill 2396 would require Illinois elementary and unit public school districts to offer full-day kindergarten by the 2027-2028 school year. After that time, offering half-day kindergarten would be optional. Some districts would be able to apply for a two-year waiver based on their level of state funding.

The measure would also create a task force to study the number of districts offering kindergarten, the number of students enrolled and several other factors. The task force is to be named by October, with an interim report due to lawmakers by June 30, 2024, and a final report by Jan. 31, 2025.

It passed 52-1 in the Senate and 85-24 in the House.

New state flag commission

Senate Bill 1818  numbered for the year Illinois entered the union  would create a commission to consider new state flag designs and make recommendations to the General Assembly as to whether the current flag should be replaced.

Members would be appointed by the governor and legislative leaders of both parties, as well as the secretary of state, the state board of education and the state museum. They would be unpaid other than a per diem reimbursement.

The commission would set guiding principles for a new flag, raise awareness for the effort and create a submission process for new designs. By Sept. 1, 2024, they would select 10 of those designs, and by Dec. 3, 2024, they would report to lawmakers with their recommendations.

It passed 39-16 in the Senate and 72-40 in the House.

Teacher licensure

Senate Bill 1488 will temporarily suspend and create a task force to review one of the tests prospective teachers must pass to be licensed in Illinois. The test is known as the Teacher Performance Assessment, or edTPA, which would be suspended through Aug. 31, 2025, under the measure.

The edTPA is a performance-based assessment that requires applicants to submit a portfolio including lesson plans and tests theyve administered while student teaching, along with examples of student work and other material. The portfolios are scored by outside teachers and teacher educators. It has been a requirement in Illinois since 2015 but was temporarily stalled by Pritzkers executive orders related to the COVID-19 pandemic, which expired May 11.

SB 1488 would also establish a task force to evaluate teacher performance assessment systems and make recommendations to the State Board of Education and the General Assembly by Aug. 1, 2024.

It passed the House 84-19 and the Senate 55-2.

School district cash reserves

Senate Bill 1994, which passed both chambers unanimously, would require school districts to report their annual cash reserves and average three-year operating expenditures to the state. When reserves exceed 2.5 times the average three-year expenditures, the school district would be required to file a plan to the state board detailing how they plan to spend reserves down to 2.5 times their average expenditures or less.

Districts would not be required to spend reserves, but only to submit the plan detailing how they intend to do so over three years.

Capitol News Illinois reporters Peter Hancock and Nika Schoonover contributed to this report.

Photos: Pritzker sworn in for second term
Rights group Amnesty International has called on Senegalese authorities to carry out independent investigations into the deadly violence during protests last week, saying at least 23 people died.



The death toll by Amnesty is higher than the official number of 16 announced by the government.



The rights group says three children were among 23 killed. It said the deaths "including some by gunfire" were recorded in the capital Dakar and the southern town of Ziguinchor during the violent protests on 1 and 2 June.



"We call on the authorities to carry out a credible, independent and impartial investigation into the circumstances of these deaths and to ensure that those responsible for unlawful killings are prosecuted according to fair trial standards," it said.



Senegal's government had earlier said it had launched an inquiry into the protest deaths. It has not responded to Amnesty's statement.



There has been a wave of recent protests in Senegal relating to the trial of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko.



Last week deadly protests erupted after Mr Sonko was sentenced in absentia to two years in jail for immoral behaviour, but cleared of rape charges.



His supporters say his charges are politically motivated.

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 investigation has been launched into a Court of Appeal Judge, Emmanuel Ankamahs handling of a case involving the estate of a deceased pastor while he was a High Court Judge at Tema.



Justice Ankamah and then Registrar of the court, Sebastian Agbo, are under scrutiny by a five-member Supreme Court panel for potential damage to the image of the Judiciary.



The case in question pertains to a dispute over who should administer the estate of Rev Emmanuel Dorgbadzi.



Justice Ankamah is said to have dismissed documents filed to prevent proposed administrators of the estate from gaining permission without a hearing.



The Supreme Court ruled that the case was handled irregularly, pointing to possible bias against the applicants.



A five-member Supreme Court panel, with retired Justice Victor Jones Dotse presiding, called for the investigation insisting that the conduct of the Judge and then Registrar of the court, Sebastian Agbo, has the potential to affect the image of the Judiciary.



The case arose following the death of one Rev Emmanuel Dorgbadzi, as to who should administer his estate. The matter ended up at the Tema High Court presided over at the time by Justice Ankamah.



The documents were filed to prevent proposed administrators of the estate from getting permission to administer it.



Justice Ankamah is said to have struck out these documents, even though they were not listed for hearing and failed to give the parties in whose favour they were issued a hearing.



According to Justice Dotse, the irregular manner in which the case was handled pointed to the fact that the presiding judge appeared to be biased against the applicants. Due to this irregularity, Justice Dotse ruled that the court breached the rules of natural justice.



Aside from setting aside the decision by the Tema High Court, the Supreme Court also prohibited Justice Ankamah and the Registrar of the High Court from ever dealing with the case. Justice Dotse further expressed concern about how properties belonging to the deceased were valued.



A hospital at Obuasi was valued at GH60,000, a school at Obuasi at GH35,000, and the house of the deceased at Tema valued at GH30,000.



The Judicial Secretary has meanwhile announced in a statement that the Registrar of the Tema Land Court, Sebastian Agbo, has been dismissed for fraudulently preparing 30 court orders.



The case was heard by Justices Victor Jones Dotse, Avril Lovelace-Johnson, Issifu Omoro Tanko Amadu, Henrietta Mensa-Bonsu, and Emmanuel Yonny Kulendi.

Source: dailyguidenetwork.com









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The President of the Republic, H.E. Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has called on Ghanaians and the world to develop the habit of tree planting to save the planet. He said the climate crisis, and the consequences it is having on lives and livelihoods, particularly in Africa, requires that we take urgent steps to protect the world, and forests provide one the best solutions.



The President said this at a commemorative tree planting exercise on the Green Ghana Day, June 9, 2023, held at the University of Ghana.



The Green Ghana Day was introduced in 2021 as part of Governments aggressive afforestation and reforestation programme to restore the lost forest cover of the country, and contribute to global action against climate change. In the first two editions, the targets of five million and twenty million set by the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources were exceeded. According to the Ministry, over thirty million trees were planted between 2021 and 2022, of which twenty-three million have survived.



This year, the Ministry set a target of ten million trees. The President, who has participated in this national tree planting exercise since its inception, planted at the University of Ghana, with the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, the Greater Accra Regional Minister and the Vice Chancellor of the University.



Speaking ahead of the tree planting exercise, President Akufo Addo said climate change has the potential to undo all the developmental gains we are making as a nation and a continent. He said fighting the climate crisis requires collective, ambitious, and meaningful efforts from all countries.



The President said Ghana has committed, in its enhanced Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), to reduce greenhouse gas emissions bysixty-four million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030. He said since most of our emissions emanate from land use change, addressing the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation is key to achieving the 2030 target. The Green Ghana Project is, therefore, very crucial to delivering on our commitments, both in our Nationally Determined Contributions, and to the international community,the President added.



He said Government remains committed to enhancing our forest cover through afforestation and reforestation programmes, and called on all Ghanaians and residents of Ghana to join Government in this national tree planting exercise.



On his part, the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Hon. Samuel A. Jinapor, MP, saidGovernment has since 2017, implemented several afforestation and reforestation programmes, including Ghana Forest Plantation Strategy, the Forest Investment Programme (FIP), the National Alternative Employment and Livelihood Programme (NAELP), the Ghana Landscape Restoration and Small-Scale Mining Project (GLRSSMP), and the Cocoa and Forests Initiative (CFI).



He said the Green Ghana Day was however crucial, as it serves as a day to awaken peoples consciousness about the importance of trees, inculcate the culture of tree planting in people, particularly the youth, scale up national awareness on forest protection and preservation, and demonstrate the countryscommitment to implementing nature-based solutions to halt climate change.



According to the Minister, the target was revised downwards this year to devote more resources to nurturing the twenty-three million trees that have survived from the first two editions. He said the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources will continue to provide support for the nurturing of the trees. He however called on who all those who take part of the tree planting exercise, particularly in homes, offices and communities, to make conscious efforts to nurture the trees.













Source: Peacefmonline.com









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The Minority in Parliament has revealed the intentions of the National Democratic Congress to conduct another SIM re-registration exercise should it win the 2024 elections.



The parliamentary caucus of the NDC has expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the current government's re-registration exercise, citing flaws in the sole document used for the process, the Ghana card.



According to Sam George, the Member of Parliament for Ningo Prampram, the claim that the current government's stance on the re-registration exercise is aimed at combating crime is false.



Speaking during a media briefing in Parliament on June 8, 2023, he argued that the Ghana card, which serves as the primary identification document for the re-registration, is fundamentally flawed. As a result, the NDC has the intention to undertake a proper re-registration of SIM cards in the future, eliminating the need for subscribers to queue at telecom offices.



"It is not true that they are using this to fight crime because the Ghana Card fundamentally is flawed. That is why we have served notice that the next NDC government will do a proper re-registration of SIM cards, which will not involve you having to go and queue in telecom offices, citinewsroom.com quoted him as saying.



The current SIM re-registration exercise, which commenced on October 1, 2021, has led to the deactivation of approximately 9 million unregistered SIM cards by telecommunications firms in Ghana. The directive for the exercise came from the National Communications Authority (NCA) and the Ministry of Communications, with the aim of enhancing regulatory compliance and combating potential security threats.



Meanwhile, the Minister of Communications and Digitalisation, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, has provided an update on the status of the SIM re-registration exercise. She announced that Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are collaborating with the Bank of Ghana to facilitate the retrieval of funds for individuals who had their money locked in mobile money accounts due to deactivated SIM cards.









Source: ghanaweb.com









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Managing Editor of the Insight newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jnr. says the outcome of the Assin North by-election will have a significant impact on Parliament.



To him, the Assin North by-election is more unique than the by-election that was held at Kumawu in the Ashanti Region which saw a New Patriotic Party candidate winning the parliamentary seat.



Contributing to Peace FM's "Kokrokoo" show, Mr. Pratt opined that the Assin North by-election will affect the balance of Parliament stressing "it isn't like Kumawu (by-election). This one is unique and it is unique because if the NPP wins the seat, it will affect the parliamentary balance significantly. Kumawu did not present that for the NPP but now it (Assin North) presents that for the NPP".



"Kumawu didn't have controversy as this one; this one has become a little controversial and this has also jacked the temperature up a bit," he added.



The Assin North by-election is scheduled for Tuesday, June 27, 2023 with the contest chiefly between NDC candidate, James Gyakye Quayson and Charles Opoku of the New Patriotic Party.



Mr. Pratt called for a violence-free and peaceful by-election, advising both the New Patriotic Party and National Democratic Congress to lawfully conduct themselves.





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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This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

Credit: Alexandree/Shutterstock

It's not often that the UK feels as hot as the central Sahara, but there were certainly a few days in the summer of 2022 when that was the case. Such heat waves can occur when the Sahara arrives on our doorstep on the back of unusual winds. How do these events work and what can we expect from them in the future?

Heat waves are made in several ways, starting with intense sunshine. But as the early weeks of the summer of 2023 in the UK have shown, you can have noticeably cool air and bright, near-peak summer sunshine at the same time.

What really raises the temperature is the importing of heat from somewhere else. That process is often very efficiently carried out by the wind and that somewhere is the Sahara, when a southerly wind blows for long enough. We have come to call these events African plumes, or sometimes Iberian plumes as you may have heard them described in recent weather forecasts. They only visit the UK a few times a year.

Where plumes come from

African plumes are characterized by a hazy atmosphere laden with dust from the Saharathe biggest source of that material anywhere on the planet come the summer months in the northern hemisphere.

Very large particles of dust are raised from the desert surface by gusts blowing over hundreds of kilometers, produced by the outflow of energy from thunderstorms. The big bonus following the arrival of this air in the UK is very colorful sunsets, as the setting rays are scattered by the dust, leaving only the red colors of the more elusive longer wavelengths of light for us to see.

While the process of importing heat from afar might sound exotic, it isn't really. That is exactly what the weather is geared to do. Every day the Earth's atmosphere has to respond to a never-ending problem of being inundated by an unfathomable amount of energy from the sun and to make things interesting, that energy is unevenly distributed so that some regions, such as the tropics and subtropics receive lots and other regions, notably the high latitudes and polar regions, very little.

Outside the tropics, the number one method for sorting out that discrepancy in energy is to move heat in the winds. In the northern hemisphere, winds from the south are warm and those from the north cool. A constant supply of cool northerly wind has been a key reason why decent June sunshine hasn't raised temperatures just yet this summer. By crossing latitudes, cool winds going south and warm winds going north help to even up the problem of uneven heating from the sun.

At the latitudes of the UK, weather systems transport more than 3 petawatts of heat polewards. That is about 300 times the installed electricity generation capacity worldwide. If the climate system is so good at carrying out this heat transport, what is it that makes the African plume events infrequent?

First, to line up a wind which blows all the way from the Sahara to the UK takes a special configuration of pressure systems. No one low or high pressure system is quite big enough to do this on its own. And second, that configuration has to stay in place for at least three days because the wind has to travel the better part of 3,000 km.

Assuming those things are to hand, the UK can experience Sahara-like conditions. Of course, the temperature of the wind will be modified as it makes its journey, in this case, cooling slightly the further it gets from the furnace of the Sahara. But that cooling process is much less efficient than you might think. Air retains the conditions at its origin quite stubbornly, and crossing the hot Iberian Peninsula as African plumes have often done in the pasta part of the world which is warming steeply as a result of climate changedoesn't help.

What the future has in store

Will warming in the UK in future decades result in more African plumes? Well, here's the surprise. Meticulous work by the Met Office which involved slicing up British weather into 30 different types showed that three out of four of the patterns which can generate southerly winds from the overheated Sahara are actually projected to become less frequent in future, and only one (a southerly wind driven by a high pressure system over Scandinavia) is expected to increase.

Likewise, the persistence or longevity of those weather patterns (and remember, to get the Saharan heat to the UK requires it persisting for three days or more) decreases for three out of four patterns, again only increasing in the case of the Scandinavian high. Meanwhile, there are also weather patterns which can transport heat from central Europe to the UK. And the Met Office work shows that these patterns are set to increase in frequency in the futureand also extend into the autumn months.

Dry soils over Europe reinforce the heat-making pressure pattern. Sunshine warms a dry surface much more readily than a wet one. So Europe is a source of intense heat for Britain too, with temperatures not far off those of the Sahara.

This plume of heat forecast for early June is a good example. We might lose those striking sunsets made of Saharan dust, but the heat is here to stay.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The pulsar PSR B105552 and its environment as detected in the HST F110W observation. Credit: Posselt et al.

Using the XMM-Newton satellite and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers have conducted X-ray and near-infrared observations of a nearby middle-aged pulsar known as PSR B1055-52. Results of the observational campaign, published on the arXiv preprint server, deliver essential information regarding the properties of this pulsar.

Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars emitting a beam of electromagnetic radiation. They are usually detected in the form of short bursts of radio emission; however, some of them are also observed via optical, X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes.

Although the distance to PSR B105552 remains uncertain, previous studies suggest that it is located not farther than 2,300 light years away from the Earth. PSR B105552 has a spin period of 197 milliseconds, spin-down age of about 535,000 years, spin-down power of 30 decillion erg/s, and a surface magnetic field at a level of 1.1 TG.

PSR B105552 is a well-studied pulsar, however there are some discrepancies regarding its X-ray spectral parameters and fluxes. That is why, a group of astronomers led by Bettina Posselt of the University of Oxford, UK, decided to inspect PSR B105552 with XMM-Newton and HST.

"Previous observations of the middle-aged gamma-ray, X-ray, and radio pulsar B105552 indicated some peculiarities, such as a suspected changing of the X-ray flux and spectral parameters, a large excess of the alleged thermal component of the ultraviolet (UV) spectrum over the Rayleigh-Jeans extension of the X-ray thermal spectrum, and a possible double break in the nonthermal spectral component between the optical and X-ray bands. We observed PSR B105552 with the XMM-Newton observatory in X-rays and the Hubble Space Telescope in near-infrared (NIR)," the researchers explained.

The study found that long-term X-ray properties of PSR B1005-52 seem to be stable based on the comparison between the 2000 and the new XMM-Newton observations conducted in 2019. Moreover, the possibility that short-term X-ray flux changes occurred before or around 2012 cannot be entirely excluded. The astronomers assume that a calibration issue with the 2012 Chandra observation may explain the discrepancies reported by previous studies.

The power-law spectral index for PSR B1005-52 was measured to be 0.57 in the energy band 310 keV, and a power-law slope was calculated to be approximately 0.24 for the color index of 0.03 mag. It was noted that the power-law components in the ultraviolet-optical-infrared and X-ray spectra have similar slopes and connect with each other smoothly, which suggests common acceleration and emission mechanisms.

Furthermore, the X-ray spectrum of PSR B1005-52 is inconsistent with neutron star atmosphere model spectra, similar to other middle-aged pulsars. This may indicate a condensed neutron star surface, whose spectrum is possibly closer to the blackbody spectrum.

The new observations also allowed the researchers to accurately measure the proper motion of PSR B1005-52, which could be essential in order to estimate the kinematic age of this pulsar.

"In principle, the now well-known proper motion could be used to constrain a kinematic age, providing an independent age estimate preferable to the rather uncertain characteristic age. Such information enables more reliable comparison with other NSs [neutron stars] as well as with theoretical predictions, e.g., NS cooling curves," the authors of the paper concluded.

More information: B. Posselt et al, X-ray and near-infrared observations of the middle-aged pulsar B1055-52, its multiwavelength spectrum, and proper motion, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2306.00185 arxiv.org/abs/2306.00185 Journal information: arXiv

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Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

An ongoing study looking at water quality in and around Chichester and Langstone harbors has revealed high levels of potentially harmful chemicals.

In a novel collaboration between local interest groups and Portsmouth and Brunel Universities, hundreds of samples were gathered off the coasts of Hampshire and West Sussex by the Clean Harbors Partnership (CHP) campaign group last year as part of Project Spotlight.

University of Portsmouth and Brunel University London researchers analyzed 288 samples and have so far detected more than 50 compounds across 22 sites. These include pharmaceuticals, and recreational drugs.

The team also discovered pesticides, including simazine, propamocarb, imidacloprid, and clothianidin.

Professor Alex Ford, from the University of Portsmouth's School of Biological Sciences, said, "We know there are billions of liters of sewage discharges annually around the UK but the impact of these discharges are not clearly understood."

"This project is enabling us to determine what chemical contaminants are in our marine life and coastal waters."

"We have found a large variety of prescribed and illegal drugs plus a variety of pesticides in coastal waters and marine organisms, such as crabs and oysters."

"This is important, because we know that aquatic ecosystems are under threat from pharmaceuticals and farming practices such as biocides and fertilizers."

Professor Ford's previous research revealed tiny quantities of antidepressants in water can affect wildlife, such as crustaceans and mollusks. It also found drugs will affect the behavior and biological make-up of these creatures, including changing color, growth and reproducing less or more.

He added, "There is a staggering list of prescription drugs passed from humans to wastewater treatment plants and into receiving streams, estuaries, or oceans by direct consumption, metabolism, and excretion or by toilet flushing of old prescriptions."

"The release of human pharmaceuticals into aquatic ecosystems is an environmental problem we should consider seriously."

A post storm seawater sample taken by CHP near an outflow pipe from Budds Farm treatment works, near Langstone, showed a reading of 380,000 colony forming units (cfu) per 100ml of E.coli, which is 760 times safe levels as set out under the European Bathing Water Directive. Levels above 500cfu/100ml signify a risk to human health.

Scientists will now compare the concentrations of these pollutants, found during last year's drought, to those taken at the same sewage discharge locations after combined sewer overflow (CSOs) discharges had been activated by rainfall.

"Chemical pollution from CSOs is becoming a real cause for concern due to the number of chemicals that are being found all over the environment and not just in the UK," explained Dr. Tom Miller from Brunel University.

"It is important that the public are becoming more aware of the problem, and it has been a really great opportunity to work with locals in the area and address some of their concerns surrounding the issue."

Project Spotlight was crowdfunded by concerned local residents, groups of water users and organizations through the CHP, its community partners, and the University. The aim is to reveal what chemical contaminants are impacting important coastal environments and as a result influence change.

CHP co-founder, Rob Bailey, said, "Thanks to community funding, we are starting to get an insight into the cocktail of chemicals polluting our sea water and their sources. Some pesticides seem to have been lingering for several years and the presence of partly digested antidepressants, drugs for type 2 diabetes and bladder infections is concerning. So little is known about their impact on marine life."

"The sheer scale of sewage discharges into our water courses has shocked the public. It looks like the debate is set to continue as we learn what's in the water and how ineffective the authorities have been at managing such obvious threats to our precious environment."
China sees fastest improvement in air quality globally

09:03, June 09, 2023 By Liu Yi, Kou Jiangze ( People's Daily

There have been significantly more "blue sky" days over recent years, said Zou Yi, a Beijing citizen.

Since 2013, Zou has taken photos of the sky at a fixed spot in Beijing's Chaoyang district every day, as a way to record the changes in air quality. So far, he has taken over 3,000 photos.

"The city is getting more and more beautiful, which gives people a better mood," he said.

Heavy smog was once a big headache for Beijing citizens. To cope with the severe problem, Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and surrounding cities have strengthened efforts to control air pollution caused by industrial production, coal consumption, automotive and dust.

Photo shows the beautiful scenery along the Grand Canal in Tongzhou district, Beijing, capital of China. (People's Daily/Du Yifei)

Last year, Beijing's annual average concentration of major airborne fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, dropped to 30 micrograms per cubic meter, reaching the second-level national standard for two consecutive years.

Compared with 2013, the figure was reduced by 60 micrograms per cubic meter. Also, the annual average concentrations of PM10, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide fell by over 50 percent in the Chinese capital.

The improvement in Beijing is a miniature of China's efforts to better air quality. Since 2013, the country has launched an Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan and a three-year action plan on air pollution control, making remarkable and historic achievements.

China is the world's first developing country to control PM2.5 pollution with comprehensive treatment. It has twice improved its atmospheric pollution prevention law.

With a firm determination and unprecedented measures, local authorities and relevant departments across the country are confident in defeating air pollution.

Regions across the country have vigorously adjusted industrial, energy and transportation structures, put high-energy consuming and high-pollution industries under strict control, and raised standards on energy conservation and environmental protection.

Under the blue sky in Linfen, north China's Shanxi province, people are working out in the fresh air along the ancient city walls and Fenhe River.

"Today, there are more and more ecological beauties for us to shoot. The storage of my hard disk is just running out," said Yan Ruipeng, a photographer in Linfen, north China's Shanxi province.

Linfen once relied on resource-based industries such as coal, coking and steel. In 2016, it ranked last among all 168 key cities in China in terms of air quality. The concentration of sulfur dioxide once exceeded 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter three times in just 10 days.

Photo shows the beautiful scenery in a park near the Fenhe River in Linfen, north China's Shanxi province. (People's Daily Online/Li Xianjun)

To turn things around, the city launched forceful measures. The average annual concentration of sulfur dioxide in the city fell to 10 micrograms per cubic meter last year, an 80 percent drop from 2017.

"Photos look great even without toning," Yan said.

Historic changes have taken place in China's air quality over the past decade thanks to the forceful and targeted measures launched by relevant departments and local authorities.

A clean and low-carbon energy structure has been improved.

Two-thirds of the increase in China's energy consumption came from clean energy in the past 10 years. The country ranks first in the world in terms of the development and utilization of new energy and renewable energy.

Its total installed capacity of renewable energy power generation has exceeded 1.2 billion kilowatts, and the consumption of clean energy accounts for over a quarter of the country's total energy consumption.

Besides, China has built the world's largest clean coal power generation system, and is home to 1.05 billion kilowatts of coal-fired power units that have achieved ultra-low emission status.

The industrial structure has effectively carried out green transformation and upgrading.

Over the past 10 years, China has worked vigorously to eliminate outdated capacity and reduce excess capacity, cutting about 300 million tons of steel, 300 million tons of cement and 150 million weight cases of plate glass. The country is comprehensively promoting the ultra-low-emission upgrading in the steel industry, and around 630 million tons of crude steel capacities have completed or are in the process of the upgrading.

Green transitions have been made in the transportation system.

Photo shows a wind farm in Tongdao Dong autonomous county, central China's Hunan province. (People's Daily Online/Li Shangyin)

The country has shifted more freight transport from road to railway. Last year, Chinese railways transported over 4.98 billion tons of cargo, up 211 million tons from a year ago.

Over 30 million old and high-emitting motor vehicles were removed last year, and the country now has more than 10 million new energy vehicles, ranking first in the world.

Air quality has been improved with science and technology support.

The country established a national joint control center for preventing atmospheric pollution, which is joined by over 2,000 researchers. They have made key technological breakthroughs in the causative mechanism, targeted control and forecast of atmospheric pollution, and completed a research program on causes of heavy air pollution and proposed solutions.

Last year, the share of days with good air quality stood at 86.5 percent in 339 cities across the country at or above the prefectural level. The proportion of days with heavy air pollution was 0.9 percent, dropping to less than 1 percent for the first time.

In 2022, the average PM2.5 concentration dropped to 29 micrograms per cubic meter in those cities, falling below the 30-mark for the first time since the data was first monitored.

China's experience in smog control contributed the Chinese wisdom and plans to global environmental and climate governance. China's ecology and environment minister Huang Runqiu noted that China has seen the fastest improvement in air quality across the world.

Huang added that according to Bloomberg, China has reduced air pollution in seven years between 2013 and 2020 nearly as much as the United States did in three decades since the U.S. Clean Air Act was implemented.

(Web editor: Chang Sha, Liang Jun)
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Temporary formation of a defect pair in copper iodide. Although these defects only survive for a couple of picoseconds, i.e., for a trillionth of a second, they substantially influence macroscopic heat transport processes. Credit: Florian Knoop, NOMAD Laboratory

The NOMAD Laboratory researchers have recently shed light on fundamental microscopic mechanisms that can help with tailoring materials for heat insulation. This development advances the ongoing efforts to enhance energy efficiency and sustainability.

The role of heat transport is crucial in various scientific and industrial applications, such as catalysis, turbine technologies, and thermoelectric heat converters that convert waste heat into electricity.

Particularly in the context of energy conservation and the development of sustainable technologies, materials with high thermal insulation capabilities are of utmost importance. These materials make it possible to retain and utilize heat that would otherwise go to waste. Therefore, improving the design of highly insulating materials is a key research objective in enabling more energy-efficient applications.

However, designing strongly heat insulators is far from trivial, despite the fact that the underlying fundamental physical laws have been known for nearly a century. At a microscopic level, heat transport in semiconductors and insulators was understood in terms of the collective oscillation of the atoms around their equilibrium positions in the crystal lattice. These oscillations, called "phonons" in the field, involve a huge number of atoms in solid materials and hence cover large, almost macroscopic length- and time-scales.

In a recent joined publication in Physical Review B and Physical Review Letters, researchers from the NOMAD Laboratory at the Fritz Haber Institute have advanced the computational possibilities to compute thermal conductivities without experimental input at unprecedented accuracy. They demonstrated that for strong heat insulators the above-mentioned phonon picture is not appropriate.

Using large-scale calculations on supercomputers at of the Max Planck Society, the North-German Supercomputing Alliance, and the Julich Supercomputing Centre, they scanned over 465 crystalline materials, for which the thermal conductivity had not been measured yet. Besides finding 28 strong thermal insulators, six of which feature an ultra-low thermal conductivity comparable to wood, this study shed light on a hitherto typically overseen mechanism that allows one to systematically lower the thermal conductivity.

"We observed the temporary formation of defect structures that massively influences the atomic motion for an extremely short period of time," says Dr. Florian Knoop (now Linkoping University), first author of both publications.

"Such effects are typically neglected in thermal-conductivity simulations, since these defects are so short-lived and so microscopically localized compared to typical heat-transport scales, that they are assumed to be irrelevant. However, the performed calculations showed that they trigger lower thermal conductivities," adds Dr. Christian Carbogno, a senior author of the studies.

These insights may offer new opportunities to fine-tune and design thermal insulators on a nanoscale level through defect engineering, potentially contributing to advances in energy-efficient technology.
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Credit: CC0 Public Domain

When we communicate with others over wireless networks, information is sent to data centers where it is collected, stored, processed, and distributed. As computational energy usage continues to grow, it is on pace to potentially become the leading source of energy consumption in this century. Memory and logic are physically separated in most modern computers, and therefore the interaction between these two components is very energy intensive in accessing, manipulating, and re-storing data.

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Penn State University is exploring materials that could possibly lead to the integration of the memory directly on top of the transistor. By changing the architecture of the microcircuit, processors could be much more efficient and consume less energy. In addition to creating proximity between these components, the nonvolatile materials studied have the potential to eliminate the need for computer memory systems to be refreshed regularly.

Their recent work published in Science explores materials that are ferroelectric, or have a spontaneous electric polarization that can be reversed by the application of an external electric field. Recently discovered wurtzite ferroelectrics, which are mainly composed of materials that are already incorporated in semiconductor technology for integrated circuits, allow for the integration of new power-efficient devices for applications such as non-volatile memory, electro-optics, and energy harvesting.

One of the biggest challenges of wurtzite ferroelectrics is that the gap between the electric fields required for operation and the breakdown field is very small.

"Significant efforts are devoted to increasing this margin, which demands a thorough understanding of the effect of films' composition, structure, and architecture on the polarization switching ability at practical electric fields," said Carnegie Mellon post-doctoral researcher Sebastian Calderon, who is the lead author of the paper. In-situ experimental STEM images (left panel) and first-principles calculation prediction (right panel). Credit: Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering

The two institutions were brought together to collaborate on this study through the Center for 3D Ferroelectric Microelectronics (3DFeM), which is an Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) program led by Penn State University.

Carnegie Mellon's materials science and engineering department, led by Professor Elizabeth Dickey, was tapped for this project because of its background in studying the role of the structure of materials in the functional properties at very small scales through electron microscopy.

"Professor Dickey's group brings a particular topical expertise in measuring the structure of these materials at very small length scales, as well as a focus on the particular electronic materials of interest of this project," said Jon-Paul Maria, professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State University.

Together, the research team designed an experiment combining the strong expertise of both institutions on the synthesis, characterization and theoretical modeling of wurtzite ferroelectrics.

By observing and quantifying real-time polarization switching using scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), the study resulted in a fundamental understanding of how such novel ferroelectric materials switch at the atomic level. As research in this area progresses, the goal is to scale the materials to a size in which they can be used in modern microelectronics.

More information: Sebastian Calderon et al, Atomic-scale polarization switching in wurtzite ferroelectrics, Science (2023). DOI: 10.1126/science.adh7670 Journal information: Science
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A platform for an array of 36 mechanical resonator devices. A nano-resonator is fabricated and connected electrically in one of the sections of this array. The entire pieces is then placed inside the cryostat for the measurements. Credit: ICFO

Quantum information (QI) processing may be the next game changer in the evolution of technology, by providing unprecedented computational capabilities, security and detection sensitivities. Qubits, the basic hardware element for quantum information, are the building block for quantum computers and quantum information processing, but there is still much debate on which types of qubits are actually the best.

Research and development in this field is growing at astonishing paces to see which system or platform outruns the other. To mention a few, platforms as diverse as superconducting Josephson junctions, trapped ions, topological qubits, ultra-cold neutral atoms, or even diamond vacancies constitute the zoo of possibilities to make qubits.

So far, only a handful of qubit platforms have been demonstrated to have the potential for quantum computing, marking the checklist of high-fidelity controlled gates, easy qubit-qubit coupling, and good isolation from the environment, which means sufficiently long-lived coherence.

Nano-mechanical resonators may be a part of the handful of platforms. They are oscillators, like springs and strings (e.g. guitars) that when driven, create harmonic or anharmonic sounds depending on the strength of the drive. But what happens when we cool a nano resonator down to absolute zero temperature?

The energy levels of the oscillator becomes quantized and the resonator vibrates with its characteristic zero point motion. The zero-point motion arises from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In other words, a resonator maintains motion even when it is in the ground state. The realization of a mechanical qubit is possible if the quantized energy levels of a resonator are not evenly spaced.

The challenge is to keep the nonlinear effects big enough in the quantum regime, where the oscillator's zero point displacement is miniscule. If this is achieved, then the system may be used as qubit by manipulating it between the two lowest quantum levels without driving it in higher energy states.

For many years, there has been a lot of interest in realizing a qubit system with a mechanical nano resonator. In 2021, Fabio Pistolesi (Univ. Bordeaux-CNRS), Andrew N. Cleland (Univ. Chicago), and ICFO Prof. Adrian Bachtold, established a solid theoretical concept of a mechanical qubit, based on a nanotube resonator coupled to a double-quantum dot under an ultrastrong coupling regime.

These theoretical results proved that these nanomechanical resonators could indeed become ideal candidates for qubits. Why? Because they have been shown to feature long coherence times, a definite "must" for quantum computing.

Taking into account that there was a theoretical framework to work with, the challenge now was to actually make a qubit out of a mechanical resonator, and find the appropriate conditions and parameters to control the non-linearities in the system.

After several years of endless work on these systems, the challenges of experimentally realizing this has given its first very welcomed green light. In a recent study published in Nature Physics, ICFO researchers Chandan Samanta, Sergio Lucio de Bonis, Christoffer Moller, Roger Tormo-Queralt, W. Yang, Carles Urgell, led by ICFO Prof. Adrian Bachtold, in collaboration with researchers B. Stamenic and B.Thibeault from University of California Santa Barbara, Y. Jin from Universite Paris-Saclay-CNRS, D.A. Czaplewski from Argonne National Laboratory, and F. Pistolesi from Univ. Bordeaux-CNRS, achieved the first pre-experimental steps for the future realization of a mechanical qubit by demonstrating a new mechanism to boost the anharmonicity of a mechanical oscillator in its quantum regime.

A platform for an array of 36 mechanical resonator devices. Credit: ICFO

The experiment: Engineering anharmonicity close to the ground state

The team of researchers fabricated a suspended nanotube device of approximately 1.4 micrometers in length, with its extremes hooked onto the edges of two electrodes. They defined a quantum dot which is a two level electronic system on the vibrating nanotube by electrostatically creating tunnel junctions at both ends of the suspended nanotube.

Then, by adjusting the voltage on the gate electrode, they allowed the flow of only one electron at a time onto the nanotube. The mechanical motion of the nanotube was then coupled to the single electron in the single electron tunneling regime. This electromechanical coupling created anharmonicity to the mechanical system.

Subsequently, they decreased the temperature down to mK (milikelvins, almost absolute zero) and entered into an ultra-strong coupling regime where each additional electron on the nanotube shifted the equilibrium position of the nanotube away from its zero-point amplitude. With an amplitude only a factor of 13 over the zero-point motion, they were able to notice these nonlinear vibrations.

The results are astonishing because vibrations present in other resonators, cooled to the quantum ground state, showed to only be nonlinear at amplitudes approximately 106 times greater than its zero-point motion.

This new mechanism displays remarkable physics because, contrary to what was expected, the anharmonicity increases as the vibrations are cooled closer to the ground state. This is just the opposite of what has been observed in all other mechanical resonators so far. As first author Chandan Samanta says, "when researchers first began studying nanomechanical resonators, a recurrent question was whether it would be possible to achieve nonlinearities in vibrations that are in the quantum ground state."

"Some leading researchers in the field argued that this would be a challenging feat due to technological limitations, and this view has remained the accepted paradigm until now. In this context, our work represents a significant conceptual advance because we demonstrate that nonlinear vibrations in the quantum regime are indeed achievable."

"We are confident that the nonlinear effects could have been further enhanced by getting closer to the quantum ground state, but we were limited by the temperature of our current cryostat. Our work provides a roadmap for achieving nonlinear vibrations in the quantum regime."

Contrary to what has been observed so far in other mechanical resonators, the team of researchers found a method to boost the anharmonicity of a mechanical oscillator near its quantum regime. The results of this study set the first stepping stones for the future development of mechanical qubits or even quantum simulators.

As Adrian Bachtold remarks, "It is remarkable that we entered into ultra-strong coupling regime and observed strong anharmonicity in the resonator. But the damping rate becomes large at low temperature due to the coupling of the resonator to one quantum dot."

"In future experiments that target cat states and mechanical qubits, it will be advantageous to couple nanotube vibrations to a double-quantum dot, since it enables strong nonlinearities together with long-lived mechanical states. The damping arising from the electron in the double-quantum dot is exponentially suppressed at low temperature, so that it should be possible to achieve damping rate of 10 Hz measured in nanotubes at low temperature."

More information: C. Samanta et al, Nonlinear nanomechanical resonators approaching the quantum ground state, Nature Physics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-023-02065-9 Journal information: Nature Physics

Provided by ICFO
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Artistic depiction of KISS exfoliation, showing 2D layer separated from the bulk crystal and left on gold substrate. 2D material is then measured with photoelectron spectroscopy to study electronic structure, an example of which is seen in the background. Credit: Antonija Grubisic-Cabo and Dina Maniar

It has almost been 20 years since the establishment of the field of two-dimensional (2D) materials with the discovery of unique properties of graphene, a single, atomically thin layer of graphite. The significance of graphene and its one-of-a-kind properties was recognized as early as 2010 when the Nobel prize in physics was awarded to A. Geim and K. Novoselov for their work on graphene. However, graphene has been around for a while, though researchers simply did not realize what it was, or how special it is (often, it was considered annoying dirt on nice, clean surfaces of metals REF). Some scientists even dismissed the idea that 2D materials could exist in our three-dimensional world.

Today, things are different. 2D materials are one of the most exciting and fascinating subjects of study for researchers from many disciplines, including physics, chemistry and engineering. 2D materials are not only interesting from a scientific point of view, they are also extremely interesting for industrial and technological applications, such as touchscreens and batteries.

We are also getting very good at discovering and preparing new 2D materials, and the list of known and available 2D materials is rapidly expanding. The 2D materials family is getting very large and graphene is not alone anymore. Instead, it now has a lot of 2D relatives with different properties and vastly diverse applications, predicted or already achieved.

Nevertheless, one thing has not changed much since early 2000s, and that is the way we make graphene and other 2D materials. The first method used to make graphene, using a sticky tape, is still the most popular method to make 2D materials as it provides 2D materials of highest quality. This conventional method, however, does have some drawbacks: usually, the resulting 2D flakes are very small, and the tape leaves behind glue and polymer residues on the substrate where the 2D material is deposited. While this drawback is manageable for many studies, it is not desirable in my field, surface science. In this field, we have strict cleanliness requirements and the need for larger 2D materials than samples produced with a sticky tape.

This necessitates a different approach, for example, growth of materials directly in ultra-high vacuum. But this is also not idealit often takes a very long time to come up with the right "recipe," and some materials simply cannot be grown on all of the substrates.

For this reason, we came up with a new method to produce 2D materials, kinetic in situ single-layer synthesis, or the KISS method. Our research is published in the journal Advanced Science.

How can we make 2D materials in a simpler and cleaner way?

But how does the KISS method produce materials in a simple, but cleaner way? One advantage lies in the realm of surface science, where most of the work is done under ultra-high vacuum conditions. You probably know about vacuum, a space or a container devoid of matter, including even atoms. In reality, it is simply a region of space with pressure lower than atmospheric pressure. The lower the pressure, the less matter occupying that space or container. Ultra-high vacuum is exactly that, a region of extremely low pressure, akin to the vacuum of space. In this low-pressure chamber, the presence of atoms and molecules is significantly reduced, so I can keep my samples clean and for a long time. Ultra-high vacuum and cleanliness is one of the fundamental ingredients in the KISS exfoliation process.

KISS exfoliation setup. A spring loaded sample holder with layered crystal is marked with a purple arrow, and gold substrate is marked with a light blue arrow. Materials are brought in contact, and a 2D layer is left on the gold surface. Credit: Antonija Grubisic-Cabo

Another key ingredient is the use of exceptionally flat and clean substrate on which the 2D material is placed. The substrate can be a metal like gold or silver, or even a semiconductor such as germanium, as long as it is atomically flat and clean. To keep things simple, the substrate is also used for exfoliation as a sort of a stiff sticky tape.

These are some of the main reasons why KISS exfoliation works so well. My "sticky tape" substrate is extremely flat, and extremely clean, which facilitates excellent contact with the entire crystal surface, allowing a 2D material to stick well to the substrate.

How simple is this to do, really? For researchers working in surface science labs, this method proves to be incredibly simple. We always do things in ultra-high vacuum, and know how to clean things well, so that part is easy. The substrates that are used, single crystal Ag(111) or Au(111), are also commonly used for calibration of surface science equipment, so they are also often found in surface science laboratories. The only additional requirement is attaching the layered crystal to a holder with a spring-like mechanism, similar to the one from a pen, ensuring a gentle and precise contact during the KISS exfoliation process.

The dawn of the KISS method

So how applicable is the KISS method? In our research paper detailing the KISS method, my colleagues and I conducted extensive tests using several materials and three types of substrates, and we prepared 2D layers from four layered materials. We did these experiments in two separate laboratories in Sweden and Denmark, and even tested multiple holder designs to assess the method's versatility. The results are promisingit turns out, quite a lot! With KISS exfoliation we could prepare many different 2D materials, and the setup is easily adaptable in different laboratory settings. We have successfully implemented it in my research group at the University of Groningen, and several of my collaborators from other research institutes have successfully applied it despite working with a completely different setup and studying different materials. Given its simplicity and suitability for surface science, particularly for materials sensitive to air, the KISS method has the potential to revolutionize the production and study of 2D materials.

My hope is that researchers in the field of surface science around the world, and perhaps even in other disciplines, will adopt and adapt this method for their research, making their experiments easier and faster. Who knows? In the future, we may even be able to adapt the KISS method for large-scale production of 2D materials.

This story is part of Science X Dialog, where researchers can report findings from their published research articles. Visit this page for information about ScienceX Dialog and how to participate.

Antonija Grubisic-Cabo is an Assistant Professor at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials of the University of Groningen. She is the principal investigator (PI) of the research group "Experimental nanophysics with advanced spectroscopic and structural analysis methods," studying electronic and structural properties of nanomaterials in and out of equilibrium. Her main research interests are two-dimensional (2D) and quantum materials, such as graphene, 2D transition metal dichalcogenides and topological insulators, which she studies with spectroscopy techniques such as angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and time-resolved ARPES.
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Credit: Bart van Overbeeke

Nanoparticles consisting of a designer protein that counteract an overreaction of the immune system, while simultaneously boosting that system. This invention offers possibilities for the treatment of sepsis, a condition in which the immune system is severely dysregulated.

Immunologists from Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc) and bioengineers from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) have joined forces to develop and test an innovative new nanomedicine. Their research results have just been published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition in which the immune system becomes dysregulated due to an infection with a bacterium, fungus, or virus. This dysregulation can lead to an overly intense immune response known as hyperinflammation. As a result, tissues are damaged and organs fail.

Simultaneously, the immune system can also become exhausted; so much so that it becomes paralyzed. This is called immune paralysis and a result, the body is not resistant to a new infection.

Joining forces

For years, scientists worldwide have been searching for an effective therapy against sepsis. The drug behind such a therapy must simultaneously counteract both the overreaction and the paralysis of the immune system. However, a significant risk is that a possible drug against that overreaction may actually lead to paralysis.

Immunologists from Radboudumc center discovered in a petri dish containing immune cells that the cytokine interleukin-4 impedes inflammation, while unexpectedly inducing trained immunity. This paradoxical feature may be utilized to treat sepsis, but it requires that interleukin-4 is targeted to immune cells in the human body. On the technological side, researchers at TU/e have extensive experience in the development of innovative nanotechnology-based approaches to combat cancer, for example.

With their respective research in mind, TU/e bioengineers have designed a new nanotechnology-based approach by developing a fusion protein between interleukin-4 and a protein that naturally forms nanoparticles with lipid molecules.

Small fat particles

The researchers developed a new type of nanomedicine, which consists of small fat particles built from natural proteins that interact very specifically with immune cells. In this case, the bioengineers developed a new fusion protein of interleukin-4 and another body protein that integrates into fat particles. As a result, interleukin-4 is specifically delivered to immune cells, inhibiting the acute inflammatory response while simultaneously boosting the immune system. Thus, the immune system is balanced.

Mihai Netea, professor of Experimental Internal Medicine at Radboudumc, says "We know that the protein interleukin-4 counteracts an overreaction of the immune system. We were surprised that in a test tube this protein could also trigger trained immunity in certain immune cells."

Trained immunity is the part of our innate immune system that has a learning ability and thus strengthens our immune system. To achieve that in humans, TU/e developed a new nanomedicine based on interleukin-4. And it worked, the results indicate. In both blood samples from sepsis patients and laboratory animals, the nanoparticles brought the immune system back on track.

New technology

The innovative thing about using this nanotechnology is that the researchers managed to direct interleukin-4 to certain immune cells. Willem Mulder, professor of Precision Medicine at both Radboudumc and TU/e, says "We have been developing new proteins by fusing body proteins for some time. We did the same for interleukin-4. We made nanoparticles of it. By injecting these nanoparticles into the bloodstream, interleukin-4 is delivered to the target cells."

The researchers stress that the therapy has not yet been tested in patients. Follow-up research is needed for this. However, the method is a very innovative form of immunotherapy, offering new possibilities in the treatment of sepsis, a disease that kills about 3,500 people annually in the Netherlands alone.

To bring the new technologies to the patient, Mulder and Netea have joined forces with drug developers and biotech investors to found the biotech incubator BioTrip. "We don't want this exciting technology to end with our beautiful publication, which often happens in academia. Through BioTrip, we have a pathway for clinical translation. Hopefully, our work and joint efforts will ultimately lead to a therapeutic that can help decrease the high mortality and morbidity rates in sepsis," adds co-author and dean of TU/e's Department of Biomedical Engineering Professor Maarten Merkx.

More information: David P. Schrijver et al, Resolving sepsis-induced immunoparalysis via trained immunity by targeting interleukin-4 to myeloid cells, Nature Biomedical Engineering (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41551-023-01050-0 Journal information: Nature Biomedical Engineering
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Northern Bettong. Credit: James Cook University

Scientists surveying the endangered northern bettong have discovered one particular sub-population of the species is in significant trouble and needs urgent help.

James Cook University Ph.D. candidate Stephanie Todd led a study examining the genetic diversity of existing populations of northern bettong.

This was ahead of the recent establishment of a new population on the Australian Wildlife Conservancy's (AWC) Mount Zero-Taravale sanctuary near Paluma in Queensland. She said Australia has a poor track record of mammal conservationlosing 10% of species in the past 250 yearsthe highest rate of mammal extinctions in the world.

"Declines are continuing across Australia and are affecting most small to medium-sized mammal species, including four members of the bettong genus."

"Populations of three bettong species have fortunately been safe-guarded in predator-free havens across southern Australia, although one endangered species, the northern bettong, has not been relocated into a predator-free sanctuary until now," said Ms Todd.

She said relocation can restore populations and prevent extinction of threatened species, but sourcing adequate genetic diversity is essential.

"Between 2014 and 2021 we collected 240 ear tissue samples from four northern bettong sub-populations and genotyped them, quantifying their genetic diversity and structure. We wanted to maximize the chance of reintroduction success by maximizing genetic diversity, while minimizing the impact on source populations," said Todd.

She said the best strategy was found to be a 'mixed source' approach, with individuals sourced from three populations in the Lamb Range area, rather than sourcing all from a single population.

But Todd said the study turned up a worrying finding.

"Ongoing monitoring of one sub-population at Mount Spurgeon near Port Douglas indicates that it's particularly small and declining, and we demonstrated that it has a small effective population size and low genetic diversity."

"Moving some of its members to Mount Zero-Taravale may have reduced the fitness of the founding population by introducing a harmful genetic load. It's very small population size also meant removing any individuals would have been overly risky."

The scientists' advice was followed by Traditional Owners, AWC scientists and the broader Northern Bettong Recovery Team, with the recent relocation of 49 northern bettongs from across the Lamb Range.

"We believe saving the Mt Spurgeon sub-population is also of utmost conservation importance, and further management interventions should be undertaken to prevent its extinction, including supplementing the population," said Todd.
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The University of Minnesota researchers' new method of searching for the hypothetical axion involves measuring the decay of the particle into two muonsknown particles that are essentially the heavier version of the electronas illustrated in the above image. Credit: Raymond Co, University of Minnesota

One of the most high-profile mysteries in physics today is what scientists refer to as the "Strong CP Problem." Stemming from the puzzling phenomenon that neutrons do not interact with electric fields despite being made up of quarkssmaller, fundamental particles that carry electric chargesthe Strong CP Problem puts into question the Standard Model of physics, or the set of theories scientists have been using to explain the laws of nature for years.

A team led by University of Minnesota Twin Cities theoretical physicists has discovered a new way to search for axions, hypothetical particles that could help solve this mystery. Working in collaboration with experimental researchers at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory, the physicists' new strategy opens up previously unexplored opportunities to detect axions in particle collider experiments.

The researchers' paper is published and featured as the Editor's suggestion in Physical Review Letters.

"As particle physicists, we're trying to develop our best understanding of nature," said Zhen Liu, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy. "Scientists have been tremendously successful in the past century in finding elementary particles through established theoretical frameworks. So, it's extremely puzzling why neutrons do not couple to electric fields because in our known theory, we would expect them to. If we do discover the axion, it will be a great advance in our fundamental understanding of the structure of nature."

One of the primary means for studying subatomic particles, and potentially discovering new ones, is collider experiments. Essentially, scientists force beams of particles to collideand when they hit each other, the energy they produce creates other particles that pass through a detector, allowing researchers to analyze their properties.

Liu and his team's proposed method involves measuring the "decay" productor what happens when an unstable heavy particle transforms into multiple lighter particlesof the hypothetical axion into two muonsknown particles that are essentially the heavier version of the electron. By working backward from the muon tracks in the detector to reconstruct such decays, the researchers believe they have a chance to locate the axion and prove its existence.

"With this research, we're expanding ways we can search for the axion particle," said Raymond Co, co-author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy and William Fine Theoretical Physics Institute. "People have never used axion decay into muons as a way to search for the axion particle in neutrino or collider experiments before. This research opens up new possibilities to pave the way for future endeavors in our field."

Liu and Co, along with University of Minnesota physics and astronomy postdoctoral researcher Kun-Feng Lyu and University of California, Berkeley postdoctoral researcher Soubhik Kumar, are behind the theoretical part of the research. They're a part of the ArgoNeuT collaboration, which brings together theorists and experimentalists from across the country to study particles through experiments at Fermilab.

In this paper, the University of Minnesota-led theoretical team worked with the experimental researchers to perform a search for axions using their new method and existing data from the ArgoNeuT experiment. The researchers plan to use the experimental results to further refine their theoretical calculations of the axion production rate in the future.

More information: R. Acciarri et al, First Constraints on Heavy QCD Axions with a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber Using the ArgoNeuT Experiment, Physical Review Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.221802 Journal information: Physical Review Letters
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The seven aerophones discovered at Eynan-Mallaha. Credit:  Laurent Davin

A team of researchers, including a Virginia Commonwealth University professor, has discovered rare prehistoric instruments made from the bones of birds dating back more than 12,000 years, according to findings published Friday in the journal Scientific Reports.

The seven flutes, or aerophones, found at the Eynan-Mallaha site in northern Israel belonged to the Natufians, who lived between 13000 B.C. and 9700 B.C. and were some of the last hunter-gatherers known in the Levant, or Near East region, during that time.

Tal Simmons, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Forensic Science at VCU's College of Humanities and Sciences and a co-author of the Scientific Reports paper, identified 1,112 bones from 59 species of birds found at the site. Her research guided the team's understanding of what time of year the nomadic hunter-gatherers occupied the site and what species' bones were most frequently found there.

"Although bone 'flutes' or 'aerophones' are known from other archaeological sites elsewhere in the world, they are quite rare and have been found mostly in Europe. These are the first to ever be identified from the Near East and date to circa 12,000 years ago," Simmons said. "The flutes actually make the sounds of other birds of prey that were hunted at the site."

One of the seven small waterfowl bone aerophones discovered at the Final Natufian site of Eynan-Mallaha that can be described as a notched flute (Andean quena type). Detail of the play-holes (in green), the marks (in blue), the mouthpiece, the distal part and the red ochre residues that decorated the instrument. Credit: Davin et al., 2023

The discovery marks the first time a prehistoric sound instrument from the Near East has been identified, and it is the oldest that imitates a bird call from any ancient civilization.

One aerophone is fully intact, complete with finger holes and a mouthpiece. When played, the flute sounds like a raptor callor, as Simmons said, "a high-pitched 'screeching' call, very much like a smaller bird of prey up in the treetops."

"All seven were intentionally made by grooving and rotational scraping with small stone blades into the long bones of two types of birdsthe Eurasian teal and the Eurasian coot. They all show microscopic use-wear indicating they were, in fact, used or played," Simmons said. "They are also really unique because the sound they produce is very similar to that of two specific birds of prey that were hunted by the people living at the site where they were discovered, namely the kestrel and the sparrowhawk."

The researchers believe the aerophones may have been used in hunting, in communication or in music-making in spiritual practices.

A: Map of the distribution of Final Natufian sites in the Levant 12,000 years ago. B: Detail of the position of Eynan-Mallaha in the Houla Valley of Northern Israel. Credit: Davin et al., 2023

"Because these are some of the earliest aerophones, it sheds light on the role of music in Natufian cultureand perhaps on the relationship of Natufian peoples with birds of prey," Simmons said.

"It may have been as a duck callto try to lure the birds so that they could be hunted. However, it may also have been an attempt to spiritually commune or communicate with these birds of prey; they were important to Natufianand earliercultures in the Levant, as seen in the disproportionate number of raptor talons in archaeological bird-bone assemblages. These may have been worn by the prehistoric people as ritual 'jewelry' and may even have been 'totem' animals."

The aerophones currently are in the zoological collections at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem on the Givat Ram campus.

More information: Laurent Davin et al, Bone aerophones from Eynan-Mallaha (Israel) indicate imitation of raptor calls by the last hunter-gatherers in the Levant, Scientific Reports (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-35700-9 Journal information: Scientific Reports
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Credit: Anton Berking, Shutterstock

Off the coast of Spain and Portugal, killer whales have been biting boats. And the famous beluga whale nicknamed "Hvaldimir" has popped up againthis time in Sweden. When first spotted in Norway in 2019, wearing a suspicious harness, some suggested he could be a Russian spy.

These unusual human-wildlife interactions raise questions about managing risk. Both situations present a maritime safety concern. And the whales are at risk of being injured or killed by the boat.

What's more, fans of Hvaldimir are also putting themselves in harm's wayby trying to get too close to a wild animal that lives in the water, leaning from boats and dangling from wharves.

So what's driving these unusual whale antics? And how and when should we intervene?

Iberian killers targeting boats

In southwestern Europe, several killer whales from a critically endangered sub-population off the Iberian coast have been targeting vessels for the past two years.

Mariners have filmed killer whales biting rudders, causing steering wheels to violently move from side to side.

In extreme cases, the killer whales have broken rudders, created holes in boats and sunk at least three vessels, forcing sailors to seek maritime assistance.

A friendly 'Russian spy' in Swedish waters

Hvaldimir the beluga whale came to fame in 2019 when he turned up in Norwegian waters wearing a harness labeled "Equipment St. Petersburg". (His name is a combination of the Norwegian word for whale "hval" and the Russian name Vladimir.)

Obviously, wild beluga whales don't wear harnesses. So Hvaldimir must have been taught to do that, just as you teach a dog to wear a collar.

This means it's likely he spent time in captivity. He appears to enjoy human company. Viral videos show him retrieving mobile phones and playing ball.

After four years off the coast of Norway, Hvaldimir traveled into Swedish waters. No one is quite sure why.

There are concerns for his safety. This area is busy with boats and fishing activity. His presence may annoy some people, such as boaties and fishers, but attract others. They're clamoring to get close to him, on boats, jet skis and busy wharves. I call this "Hvaldimir tourism".

There might also be less fish for him to eat in comparison to Norwegian waters. Feeling helpless, British mariner Martin Even decided to stop for a cup of tea when killer whales bit on their rudder.

Understanding this behavior

We don't know why the killer whales are biting boats. But there are several theories.

One is that a matriarch killer whale known as White Gladis may have had a negative interaction with a boat and begun biting back at them, prompting others to copy her behavior.

Or could yachts be a plaything for killer whales? When the rudder moves from side to side it makes a sound, much like a noisy dog toy or baby toy. Recent reports from people monitoring this behavior have said the killer whales became disinterested and left soon after they broke off boat rudders.

Perhaps over time, the killer whales will lose interest in boats. Maybe it's a passing fad, just like killer whales' "salmon hat trend" observed in the 1980s.

And what about Hvaldimir's behavior? His time in care may have taught him that humans are "good". Beluga whales are very social, often found in pods. So he might just be lonely.

What's the solution?

Wild animals can choose what they want to do. Hvaldimir chooses to engage with humans. For the killer whales, it's the vessels they're interested in.

The Atlantic Orca Working Group continues to investigate this "disruptive" whale activity. It's a collaborative effort with the Iberian maritime community, marine mammal experts, various organizations and the public.

They provide communication around killer whale behavior and provide a place to report sightings. There's also a dedicated app mariners can use. And of course, authorities remain in place to help mariners in need of assistance.

Hvaldimir's presence does present a challenge. He's very mobile and seeks out humans. Norwegian and Swedish authoritiesand dedicated organizations such as OneWhaleare seeking to protect him.

So should we just let Hvaldimir roam free and continue monitoring him? He's proven his maritime smarts over the last four years. He's not dependent on humans, able to feed himself, navigate coastal waters and dodge most human activities (although he has been injured by boats and fishing gear).

Or, do we move him to his own "safe fjord"a closed off area with minimal human interaction and a vet on standby? This would keep him safe from tourists, vessels and fishing gear. Other "rescued" captive whales could also be placed there, with the potential for later release back to the wild. However, this is not always a straightforward endeavor.

Hvaldimir will continue to require human assistance, regardless of whether he remains wild or moves into a captive environment. If left to roam free, he may still feed himself but he will continue to seek opportunities to interact with people. These interactions will have to be monitored.

If he's taken into human care, he will be removed from the general public but will require food from humans. He may also be visited by people who wish to see him.

There's no silver bullet

Efforts to monitor both situations remain ongoing. Collaborative management involving the maritime community, scientists and the general public is key to protecting these marine mammals.

No doubt lessons will be learnt from the management of both situations and possibly adapted to managing future interactions between wildlife and humans.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Performance of hydrogel-in-hydrogel printing. a Strategy and set-up for hydrogel-in-hydrogel live bioprinting. HCC-hydrogel 2P-printing can be performed within solid gel of a 3D organ-like culture at any experimentally required time point of cell growth by (i) allowing liquid HCC-polymers to diffuse within the pre-existing solid gel, (ii) fabricating 3D hydrogel objects by using a multiphoton microscope equipped with a motorized xyz stage and a femtosecond near-infrared tightly-focused pulsed laser emission, (iii) removing the un-crosslinked HCC-polymers from the 3D organ-like culture via diffusion. b Quantification of the diffusion coefficient of 40 (gray) or 500 (black) kDa FITC-dextrans within Matrigel. Data are shown as mean  s.d. of three independent replicates; unequal variance Students t-test; *P < 0.0213. c Left, representative confocal z-stack images of sequentially fabricated HCCgel hydrogels (green) within the same Matrigel drop and printed at different xyz positions by using near-infrared laser pulses through a multiphoton microscope; total z = 100 m or 50 m or 25 m. Scale bars, 100 m. Middle and right, 3D-volume reconstruction reveals the volumetric position of the various objects; coordinates are shown in red. d Quantification of the minimum line width obtained using scan or freeline scanning mode, respectively scan and line scan. Data are shown as mean  s.d. of three independent replicates. e Multiple HCCGel structures of three independent replicates fabricated by near-infrared multiphoton laser pulses. z = 20 m. Scale bar, 20 m. f Representative 3D reconstruction of three independent replicates of a HCCGel spiral-shaped hydrogel fabricated using the free line-scan mode. z = 30 m. Coordinates are shown in red; scale bar, 100 m. g Quantification of the area of hydrogels sequentially fabricated at fixed laser power (1 mW) and wavelength (800 nm) within the same Matrigel drop; each hydrogel series was analyzed just after photo-crosslinking (day 0) or at 2 days after the last 3D bioprinting. Data are shown as mean  s.d. of three independent replicates. h Youngs modulus measured by atomic force microscopy of hydrogels photo-crosslinked at fixed laser power (1 mW) and wavelength (800 nm). Each hydrogel series was analyzed just after photo-crosslinking (day 0) or at 2 days after the last 3D bioprinting. Data are shown as mean  s.d. of three independent replicates; multiple comparison one-way ANOVA was used; n.s., not statistically significant. Credit: Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-37953-4

Scientists from the NIHR Great Ormond Street Hospital Biomedical Research Centre (a collaboration between GOSH and UCL), London, and University of Padova, Italy, have shown for the first time how 3D printing can be achieved inside "mini-organs" growing in hydrogelscontrolling their shape, activity, and even forcing tissue to grow into "molds."

This can help teams study cells and organs more accurately, create realistic models of organs and disease, and even better understand how cancer spreads through different tissues.

A particularly promising area of research at the Zayed Centre for Research (a partnership between Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), GOSH Charity and University College London Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (UCL GOS ICH)) is organoid sciencethe creation of micro-versions of organs like the stomach, the intestines and the lungs.

But this tissue almost always grows in an uncontrolled way and doesn't represent the complex structure of naturally occurring organs. This is particularly important as an organ's shape and structure is as crucial as its cellular make upin the stomach, or lungs and heart, for example.

This research shows, how scientists can create solid structures within a pre-existing gel to solidify specific patterns in real time, guiding organoids growing in the gel into a particular structure by using light from a high-specification microscope. This means that any cell in the growing mini-organ or entire organoids will grow in a specific and precise way.

The paper, published in Nature Communications, shows how the team hope to recreate and study what happens to an organ's function when it doesn't grow correctlyfor example in many malformations that develop in the early stages of pregnancy.

The team hope this research will create better models of disease which means that their studies are more reliable, the results are of better quality and the need for animal research is one day reduced. The work could also lead to treatment through the delivery of biologically accurate 'patches' in living organs.

Examples of 'printing' uses:

Ordered cells: To study microscopic brain cells called neurons, organoid research would traditionally create disordered bundles of neurons that are impossible to isolate and study. This technique allows the team to create hardened gel 'rails' for the neurons to grow along, like the lanes of an Olympic pool.

Defined shapes: To create microscopic intestines with the same shape as 'real' developing intestines, the team created a complex hydrogel mold that guided organoids into shapes that mimic the complex structures of a developing intestine called 'crypts' and 'villi."

Creating branches: Scientists were able to pattern a hydrogel to encourage lung cells to create branches, like they do in 'real' lung.

Cancer spread: To study how cancer travels through tissue of different hardness and density, the team created hardened gel cages around cancer cells and monitored how the cancer cells movement changes depending on the density of its surroundingsthis is important for understanding the spread of cancer

Dr. Giovanni Giobbe from UCL GOS ICH, Co-lead author of the research said, "It's been amazing to see these precise structures begin to form before our eyes due to our small but painstaking adjustments in the polymer gel. We're really excited to see where this can take us in the understanding of human disease and one day, treatment."

Dr. Anna Urciuolo from University of Padova and lead of the Neuromuscular Engineering Lab at the Institute of Pediatric Research said, "This work is an exemplar of the advancements of the multidisciplinary approach that is exploding in biomedical research. The ability to reproduce models of organs in the lab and the development of technologies that help scientist to recapitulate healthy and diseased tissues and organ complexity on the bench is the outset of how translational medicine will change in the next future/"

Professor Paolo De Coppi, Pediatric surgeon at GOSH, Professor of Pediatric Surgery at UCL GOS ICH, and co-lead of the tissue engineering and regenerative medicine theme at the NIHR GOSH BRC said, "This work as an excellent example of how we can bring interdisciplinary, international teams together to improve our research and benefit patients."

"Teams at GOSH and UCL that specialize in organoid research in the UK, working with Italian teams specializing in design and application of gel-printing, are what have made this incredible and beautiful piece of research come to fruition. This will have implications for laboratory-based research to improve our understanding of disease but could also lead to in-patient uses and treatments."

Next steps for this work will be to study these controlled, molded and directed mini-organs to better understand how they can mimic real organs and conditions in the body.

More information: Anna Urciuolo et al, Hydrogel-in-hydrogel live bioprinting for guidance and control of organoids and organotypic cultures, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-37953-4 Journal information: Nature Communications
By Politico staff writer

Politico can authoritatively reveal that the CID in the coming days will charge a schoolboy with murder over the death of his teacher in Freetown. Usually, reliable sources say after weeks of painstaking investigations, a decision has now been reached to charge Aroun Conteh with the murder of 68-year-old Gilis Edwin Ola Johnson.

Mr. Johnsons body was found in blood in the afternoon of Saturday 11th March 2023 at Victoria Street in Freetown. Neighbors told Politico that Aroun Conteh was seen leaving the house on that day. Close family members say he attended private classes with other young people at Mr. Johnsons residence regularly and was very close to the slain man.

According to the police, Conteh a pupil of Providence Secondary School went to the Aberdeen police station and reported the killing of his teacher which he blamed on an officer from the Operational Support Division (OSD) of the Sierra Leone Police.

Hundreds turned out for the funeral of Johnson who taught for more than 40 years with members of the Sierra Leone Teachers Union putting on black clothing to mourn a fallen colleague.

A senior member of the Sierra Leone Teachers Union told Politico We are patiently waiting for this case to come to trial and for justice to be done. Copyright  2023 Politico (17/05/23)
Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties were again under an air quality health advisory on Thursday due to Canadian wildfire smoke in the atmosphere.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency reported the Glens Falls air quality index level was at 150 as of 4 p.m., which is within a range categorized as unhealthy for sensitive groups. Thats below levels that exceeded 300 at times on Wednesday, when the area was within the hazardous alert level. The highest reading on the scale is 500.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation had the upper Hudson region and much of upstate New York under the advisory through midnight, with air quality index levels expected to remain well above 100.

When pollution levels are elevated, the New York State Department of Health recommends that individuals consider limiting strenuous outdoor physical activity to reduce the risk of adverse health effects, the National Weather Service stated in an alert issued earlier in the day. People who may be especially sensitive to the effects of elevated levels of pollutants include the very young and those with pre-existing respiratory problems such as asthma or heart disease. Those with symptoms should consider consulting their personal physician.

Meanwhile, Warren County announced that it has received N95 masks to distribute to residents for use when needing protection outdoors. The masks, provided by the state are available to the public on a first-come, first serve basis while supplies last at Warren County Municipal Centers DMV entrance from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. The center is located at 1340 Route 9 in Queensbury. The DMV entrance is on the south end of the building.

In addition, Warren County Office of Emergency Services is working with community organizations, municipalities and first responder agencies to get masks to vulnerable populations and public works crews who have to operate outdoors, the county said.

Conditions in the Adirondack and upper Hudson regions were expected to continue to improve on Friday, with wind shifts pushing the smoke to other areas.

The DEC issued another air quality advisory for Friday, but only western New York, Long Island and New York City were included.

Canada wildfires making air 'unhealthy' in Glens Falls area A series of intense wildfires throughout Canada has cast the state of New York in a potentially dangerous haze of smoke, causing health officials to issue air quality warnings across much of the state.

Pet health

In addition to the precautions recommended by state officials, American Humane, a national animal welfare organization, is reminding people to take similar steps to protect their pets.

Smoky conditions triggered by wildfires can affect cats and dogs just like humans, and pet owners should act accordingly, Dr. Thomas Edling, chief veterinary officer of American Humane said, in a prepared statement. Shorter walks to avoid strained breathing and monitoring your animal for coughing, sneezing, and general respiratory issues is recommended. Animals with inherent breathing problems  including French Bulldogs and Pugs  or older animals should be under even closer observation.

Edling recommended the following steps be taken to keep pets safe and healthy during poor air quality conditions.

Limit your dog or cats time outdoors.

Keep doors and windows shut.

Avoid strenuous exerciseincluding playing fetch, going for a jog, or taking a long walk.

Take your pet outside for short potty breaks and come immediately back inside.

Bring outdoor water bowls inside so it doesnt collect airborne particles associated with the smoke.

If you have to be outside, mornings are best when the weather is cooler.

Americans should take precautions to keep all members of their family safeeven the furry ones, he added.
Top New York officials are aiming to provide more help to fight wildfires raging in Canada.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has deployed a team of seven state Department of Environmental Conservation forest rangers to Quebec to assist with the firefighting efforts. Hundreds of wildfires have been reported in Canada. Many of the blazes are in Quebec.

A DEC forest ranger was sent to Nova Scotia last week to lead an interstate firefighting crew. These deployments are the first time since 2005 that New York forest rangers have been sent to Canada to fight wildfires.

The smoke from the wildfires has caused poor air quality in much of New York. The air quality index in central New York reached a level so high it was considered hazardous for anyone to be outside.

While we continue to monitor the haze caused by smoke from Canadian wildfires, we are fortunate to have forest rangers trained and ready to take on the daunting task ahead, Hochul said. New Yorkers are always at the ready to help those in need, and I thank our brave wildland firefighters whose efforts will be critical in containing these wildfires.

Glens Falls area air quality improving Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties were again under an air quality health advisory on Thursday due to Canadian wildfire smoke i

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is also urging the federal government to provide more assistance to Canada. He is asking Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to double the number of U.S. Forest Service personnel deployed to fight the wildfires.

Schumer, D-N.Y., noted that the wildfires are a crisis for both countries since they are the cause of the poor air quality reported in New York and several other states.

The best way to ensure that upstate New York does not suffer another wave of wildfire air pollution from these fires is to contain them as soon as possible, Schumer said. That will not be easy, but the federal government must explore all options on the table to keep residents in New York across the U.S. safe. We must send personnel, equipment and we must offer any assistance that our friends north of the border need.

According to the White House, more than 600 federal and state firefighters have been sent to Canada to help battle the blazes. President Joe Biden said Thursday that he spoke with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday and offered additional assistance.
With portions of New York state continuing to experience compromised air quality, state officials on Friday reported that asthma-related emergency department visits were on the rise and suggested that people consider canceling outdoor plans.

According to the state Department of Health, there were 147 asthma related emergency department visits to New York hospitals, not including New York City, on Wednesday, compared to an average of 80 for the preceding five-day period, an increase of nearly 18%.

Vulnerable people, including those with cardiovascular disease, lung disease and children under 18 and adults over 65 should continue being especially cautious, depending upon the air quality in their community.

The air quality index in the Glens Falls area Friday afternoon had improved to a good rating of 26, after having been rated above 300 on Wednesday, which was within the most-severe hazardous range.

Officials said that air flow was expected to continue to send the heaviest smoke south and west of New York Friday, with the southerly and western regions of the state continuing to see smoke conditions. The forecast for Saturday showed winds turning to a more north-northwesterly direction, with the possibility some smoke could come into the state late Saturday.

A statement from Gov. Kathy Hochuls office on Friday said that refunds would be made available to those with reservations to visit a DEC or state park campground or day use area and wish to cancel due to air quality concerns. State campgrounds remain open, and all reservations will be honored for those who chose to camp this weekend.
SARATOGA SPRINGS  The Glens Falls man who was shot by Saratoga Springs police for allegedly refusing to drop his weapon during an-early morning altercation in November will be back in court later this month.

A status hearing for Vito E. Caselnova IV will be held on June 23 at 1:30 p.m. in Saratoga County Court.

Caselnova, who is an off-duty Vermont deputy, is facing an eight-count indictment including second-degree attempted murder and first-degree assault for an incident that occurred on Nov. 20 just after 3 a.m. on Caroline Street.

Police have said that Caselnova got into a physical altercation with a group of three Utica men.

Both Caselnova and one of the men, Alexander Colon, fired shots during the incident, court documents showed.

When police responded, Caselnova allegedly refused repeated commands to drop his weapon and was shot by officers.

Caselnova is also facing two counts of possession of a large capacity ammunition feeding device and misdemeanors of second-degree menacing and second-degree reckless endangerment and a violation of second-degree harassment.

Prosecutors have indicated that they are ready for trial, according to paperwork filed on May 31.

Much of the discussion during the last few months has centered around the actions of a grand juror, who wrote a letter to the commissioner of jurors dated March 30 stating that they believe the prosecutions presentation was complex and that jurors deliberations were hurried. The juror cited off-the-record conversations between the assistant district attorney and jurors regarding scheduling, which the juror said created undue pressure to reach a decision.

Another juror contacted the Saratoga County District Attorneys Office to refute that argument, and state that they had no issue with the process.

Caselnovas legal team had sought disclosure of the grand jury minutes. Prosecutors objected, given the traditional secrecy of those proceedings and were worried that they would be shared with other parties.

In their motions, prosecutors said that the grand jury heard from over 25 witnesses and saw over 100 pieces of evidence.

Caselnova remains free on bail.
ATLANTIC CITY  The U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds will return to the city's skyline for the 2023 Visit Atlantic City Airshow returning Aug. 16, organizers said Thursday.

The U.S. Marine Corps AV-8B Harrier Demo Team, U.S. Army Golden Knights Parachute Team and 177th Fighter Wing of the New Jersey Air National Guard will also perform in the show, which is celebrating 20 years in town, Visit AC said in a news release.

To celebrate 20 years in Atlantic City, we knew that we had to make this years show our best one yet, said Michael Chait, president of the Greater Atlantic City Chamber. Anchored by fan favorites the Thunderbirds and Golden Knights, with our friends at the 177th Fighter Wing bringing local flair, the addition of the Marines Harrier team is only going to enhance this years experience for fans, visitors and sponsors alike."

The event drew a record crowd of more than 550,000 people in 2022.

The Visit Atlantic City Airshow has been a staple in our community for 20 years, and were thrilled to serve as the premier sponsor for this landmark celebration, said Larry Sieg, president and CEO of Visit Atlantic City. This event brings an exciting flair to our beach, and were looking forward to seeing all the new acts this summer."
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OCEAN CITY  E-bikes do not operate recklessly on the Boardwalk.

Some e-bike riders do, residents told City Council as members took up an ordinance banning the battery-powered two-wheelers from the Boardwalk on Thursday.

Most on council agreed, delaying a vote to allow time to gather more information, with a potential for the creation of a committee to weigh the issue.

Mayor Jay Gillians administration proposed an ordinance keeping e-bikes off the Boardwalk but allowing them on other bike paths and routes in the city, citing safety concerns about the operation of the bikes.

For more than a year, council has heard from residents concerned about the operation of the bikes on the Boardwalk. The bikes are capable of reaching high speeds, at least relative to the other, pedal-powered bikes riding on summer mornings, and some had stories of reckless behavior by riders.

Council member Bob Barr brought up a similar story, saying a friend of his had a close call with an e-bike recently. He said his friend could have been seriously injured as a teenage rider whizzed by, apparently not paying attention.

The bikes are heavier than other bikes, with the potential to do more damage.

We need to send a clear message to these teenagers, Barr said at the meeting. This cannot be tolerated.

Ocean City has been searching for tools to deal with young people this summer, after rowdy crowds overran the Boardwalk over Memorial Day weekend. Gillian first raised the possibility of an e-bike ban at a news conference outlining strict new rules aimed at rowdy teens, including an earlier curfew, beach closings at 8 p.m. and a ban on backpacks on or near the Boardwalk after 8 p.m.

But the people speaking against the proposal Thursday were not teenagers.

Im 73 with a heart condition and a proud owner of an e-bike, said resident Bill Eberle. He and other speakers said the power assistance of e-bikes allows those with limitations to exercise regularly and to enjoy the Boardwalk. Eberle said his doctors appreciate that he is keeping active, and he enjoys his time riding the boards.

Eberle was one of several people to speak against the proposal. He described the ordinance as unfair and arbitrary, and said it would ban the bikes all year, even though the Boardwalk only gets very crowded in July and August.

Resident Keith Beale asked rhetorically what the problem was with e-bikes.

Are they too fast? No. Do they swerve into people and are reckless? No. Do they ride where pedestrians are walking? No. Then whats the problem? Nothing, he said at the meeting. The problems with the drivers of the bikes. And not just e-bikes.

The proposed ordinance would address low-speed e-bikes and scooters, by definition those designed to travel 20 mph or slower. There are powered bikes that can travel much faster. But at least one speaker suggested that many of the bikes can get close to 40 mph right off the rack, and with some changes could reach 70.

I dont think anybody here are the irresponsible people doing 38 on the Boardwalk, said David Spengler. Will there be somebody? In a freaking heartbeat.

In the summer, bicycles are allowed on the Boardwalk until noon. In 2019, Gov. Phil Murphy signed legislation that categorized low-speed electric scooters and e-bikes in the same way as bicycles.

That means they can be operated on streets and bike paths throughout the state. In addition to governing where they can be ridden, the e-bikes do not require registration, insurance or a license.

Some at the Thursday meeting suggested further limiting the time for e-bikes on the Boardwalk, perhaps allowing them until 9 or 10 a.m. before crowds reach their peak.

Most members of council agreed more study and review were needed before a ban is put in place.

I dont want to make a rush decision, said Council member Terrence Crowley, who suggested a committee be created to find more information. To sit here and make a gut decision, were going to miss something.

Crowley made a motion to table the ordinance, which would allow it to be taken up again at a future meeting or modified. Council member Karen Bergman was the lone vote against tabling it, although she indicated her mind was changed by the comments at the meeting, and calls and emails she received before it.

Before coming into this meeting at the beginning of the week, I was all for this, because I saw it as a safety risk, Bergman said. She raised the possibility of a child getting hit or another serious accident. But she also expressed sympathy for the people asking that the bikes be allowed. I guess I never really understood just how many people depend on these bikes for exercise.

With the tourist season already underway, Bergman did not want to see a delay in the process, saying the ordinance could be amended before a final vote.

Ventnor has new plans for business development VENTNOR  The city is looking to improve its business districts by cleaning up trash, improv

But Council President Pete Madden pointed out that even if the ordinance moved forward Thursday, it could not take effect until August at the earliest, because it would need to be advertised before a public hearing and final vote, and then would not take effect for 30 days.

Council member Jody Levchuk said there are plenty of safety concerns with e-bikes, and not just on the Boardwalk. He appealed to parents to enforce safety rules, and said he often sees young people operating the bikes without wearing helmets.

How are you not worried sick about whats going to happen to your kid the way theyre flying all over town on their e-bike? he said. I hope thats the best thing to come out of this, that people are thinking about how their kid is leaving to go to school tomorrow and coming home from school on their e-bike.
ATLANTIC CITY  Work on testing gas lines, remediating mold and fighting pest infestations had to stop this week at Stanley Holmes Village and the eight other complexes owned by the Atlantic City Housing Authority.

Contractors were working under emergency contracts, and the authority must now move to awarding regular contracts, new Executive Director Matt Doherty said Friday.

The authority is funded and overseen by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which wants contracts to be awarded on a nonemergent basis. That process takes longer but assures competitive bidding.

"Those continuing to perform work procured under emergency contracts ... their work has stopped," Doherty said. "We have to go out and properly procure contractors to continue."

Doherty has been on the job about a month, and some of the emergency contracts were negotiated by his predecessor, interim part-time Executive Director John Clarke, who is also the executive director of the New Brunswick Housing Authority and runs the Princeton Housing Authority on an interim basis.

Clarke, who continues as a consultant with the Atlantic City Housing Authority, had put out regular contracts for some work, like bedbug extermination, while those for elevator maintenance and repair predate him. That work will continue, Doherty said.

But work on the gas lines at Stanley Holmes, and on eradicating rodent and roach infestations and mold intrusions, was only put out under emergency contracts, so it must stop until regular contracts can be obtained.

It is unclear why regular contracts were not negotiated for all services at some point in Clarke's tenure, which started in August.

Atlantic City Housing Authority hires emergency contractors ATLANTIC CITY  The board of the Atlantic City Housing Authority met Thursday evening and hi

South Jersey Legal Services is suing the authority over conditions at Stanley Holmes Village and has serious concerns about the work stoppage.

"We do appreciate the new administration's openness in discussing issues with us," said Olga Pomar, Legal Services housing preservation and community development coordinator, of Doherty and Chief Operating Officer Tom Sahlin. "We are hoping they continue to look for better solutions than stopping all work for 60 days or whatever it takes to do the bids."

The authority had replaced leaky gas lines under several buildings and was testing others to determine whether more needed to be replaced, she said.

"The Housing Authority had assured us they were doing daily testing, to make sure no such hazards developed. There is no mechanism now for that to continue," Pomar said.

There are still about a dozen of the complex's 31 buildings where gas lines have not been replaced, she said. That includes Building 1, which is one of the oldest sections, dating to the 1930s.

"I don't understand how that is not an emergency," Pomar said.

She is also concerned the new heating system planned for Stanley Holmes will not be completed by the fall.

"And there are units undergoing some renovation or repair that may be left in uninhabitable conditions if work is stopped midway," Pomar said. "How are those repairs going to get made?"

Doherty had three major goals for the summer: increase communication with residents, test and replace all problem gas lines, and replace the ancient boilers and underground pipes for heat and hot water with an on-demand tankless system powered by gas.

He had hoped HUD would allow the new heating system to be installed on an emergency basis.

"We ran it up the flagpole for HUD," Doherty said. "HUD said no."

The authority had an inspection report that said the boilers will inevitably fail again.

But the likelihood of a failure is not an emergency, Doherty said of the explanation he got from HUD.

Six of 31 buildings at Stanley Holmes were found to have leaks, and those gas lines have been replaced, Doherty said. Another six buildings were later found to have leaks as well, he said, and those lines were also replaced.

"All the gas leaks have been fixed. (The gas lines) all need to be replaced, but if they are not leaking it is deemed not to be an emergency," Doherty said.

Requests for proposal will be going out soon for regular contracts to handle that work, he said.

Stanley Holmes Village seniors will no longer be forced to move ATLANTIC CITY  Senior citizens living in the troubled Stanley Holmes Village public housing

Only one emergency contract is being allowed to continue, he said. That is for eradicating black mold in scattered sites buildings, which are single-family and townhome developments around town.

The city declared an emergency at Stanley Holmes Village in October, when the heating and hot water systems failed, and the authority was unable to continue providing trash pickup and other services.

The heating system has since been stabilized, and the city had provided trash pickup for some time.
Amid a growing national battle over censorship and parental rights, New Jersey legislators are taking steps to discourage public schools and libraries from banning books by withholding state aid from those who don't comply.

A bill proposed recently by two Democratic lawmakers could make the state one of the first in the country to consider a measure that would bar school boards and public libraries from restricting or banning access to certain books.

The legislation is in response to a growing movement that has targeted books across the country, most frequently those about race, racism, gender or sexuality.

"I wish we didn't have to do this. It's really discouraging to see the number of attempts going on in New Jersey and around the country," said state Sen. Andrew Zwicker (D-Middlesex), the bill's main sponsor. "It's so unbelievably divisive and just wrong."

In 2022, there were 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources nationwide, the most attempted book bans since the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom began compiling such statistics more than 20 years ago. There were 729 challenges reported in 2021.

In New Jersey, there were 13 attempts to restrict access to books last year, according to the Library Association. Zwicker believes the number may be higher, with school boards or libraries quietly removing books without a public debate.

The Washington Township Public School District in Gloucester County made headlines this year when it removed Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" from the curriculum after a parent complained, and the Hamilton Township School District in Mercer County was asked to remove "Gender Queer," a graphic novel that chronicles the author's sexual identity journey.

"Clearly, we've seen this movement," said Senate Majority Leader Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), another bill sponsor. "The bigger and larger issue is that this is not something I think school boards should be dealing with. Libraries are sacred."

If adopted, the measure, S3907, would direct the state Department of Treasury to withhold state aid from districts that don't comply. Zwicker said he hopes districts will avoid putting their funding at risk. Details about how much money would be in jeopardy would be determined later.

Zwicker plans to meet with librarians and school officials to tweak the proposal. He expects to hold hearings on the bill in the fall and bring it for a vote by January, when the legislative session ends. He believes there will be bipartisan support for it and Gov. Phil Murphy would sign it.

Murphy and nine other governors sent a letter last month to publishers urging them to avoid "political pressure" to censor textbooks, saying "our country's future is on the line." Murphy cited a law signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis giving parents more rights to challenge books and materials.

Republican lawmakers say they want to make sure books distributed in public schools and libraries are age-appropriate. State Sen. Ed Durr (R-Salem, Gloucester, Cumberland) is drafting a bill that would require an age-rating system for books in school libraries, similar to that used for movies, to determine appropriate reading materials.

"It's a total misrepresentation for Democrats to say that parents are looking to 'ban books' simply for expressing their concerns about the unrestricted availability of content that's not age-appropriate in their school libraries," Durr said.

Nikki Stouffer, leader of the NJ Fresh Faced Schools group, opposes the measure and dismissed it as "the porn bill." A mother of two, she has shared graphic content from books that her group says should be pulled from schools.

"This isn't education at this point," said Stouffer, a bio statistician from Medford, Burlington County. "It is not really appropriate for school."

Zwicker said he was inspired by Illinois legislation and a decision by a school in Florida last month to restrict poet Amanda Gorman's poem and book, "The Hill We Climb." Gorman read the poem at President Joe Biden's inauguration in 2021.

Over 200 pedal the the island at Le Tour de Downbeach VENTNOR  Yellow shirts flooded the Ventnor and Atlantic City boardwalks and the rest of Abs

"It truly is needed," said Olga Polites, a retired school librarian and leader of the New Jersey Chapter of Media Literacy Now. "It almost feels like, 'Did we learn nothing from previous decades?'"

Librarians have been vilified for book selections and some have left the profession, said Ewa Elliott, president of the New Jersey Association of School Librarians. Her organization supports the bill.

Elliott said her organization supports the rights of parents to make decisions about what their children read, but that doesn't outweigh the rights of other parents. Her group is working with lawmakers to tweak the bill.

"They have rights to take care of their own children. They shouldn't be pushing the same rules on everybody's children," she said.
Pune is experiencing frequent episodes of urban flooding every monsoon. These floods happen in a relatively short period of time and can inundate an area with several feet of water.

Urban floods can cause loss of lives and are a disturbance in city life. Even though casualties are typically low, the economic damages are high. The 2019 floods in Pune were devastating; 21 people were killed and many left homeless. The floods exposed the impacts of encroaching upon rivers and the network of their streams.

Channelisation of rivers

The Mutha river is extensively channelised within Pune city. Such concretized riverbanks alter the natural functioning of rivers. The natural river channel has its own course carved through millions of years of action. The river flow carries out the function of exchange of sediment, and silt. There is an exchange of surface and subsurface water between river and riverbank, riverside wetlands.

Due to concretized banks, the connection of the river with its banks, and its water spread area is broken. This affects various natural habitats created along rivers, stagnant pools of water are formed in depressions along rivers, and springs meeting rivers are also affected. The riverbed area outside the constructed channel becomes an easy place for dumping of garbage and debris, construction, illegal structures etc. All these factors cause obstruction to floodwater spread.

Action/solution: Removal of concretized banks and restoring the riverbank, riparian zone through ecological measures and protection of springs along the riverbed and in the source region.

Encroachments

Construction and illegal encroachment are seen within the riverbed. Roads are also planned within the riverbed. For example, the 3.5 km road was planned by Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) from Warje to Vitthalwadi along the Mutha. This road was inside a blue floodline. A petition was filed by Sarang Yadwadkar against this encroachment and 65 percent of the road construction was already completed. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) ordered the road to be removed. The Supreme Court also continued the order by NGT. The road was removed by PMC following an order from NGT. However, the debris was left as it is in the riverbed.

Action/solution: Removal/relocation of these structures and establishing natural riverbanks using ecological measures, restoring the original topology altered by these structures.

Obstructions

In riverbeds, redundant objects are seen lying like defunct big pipelines and scrapped cars. Junked cars are regularly dumped in the riverbed towards the right bank of Mutha, near Chhatrapati Sambhaji Bridge. Sewage pipeline is lying idle in the Mutha riverbed, which is not connected anywhere. It was probably brought for some work and is left as it is right in the riverbed.

Sewage chambers and Ganesh immersion tanks are constructed in the riverbed. All these objects are obstruction to flood water flow.

Action/solution: Immediate removal of the defunct objects /structures and relocation of other structures

Debris dumping

Construction debris is heavily dumped along riverbanks. Sometimes, it is used for levelling of riverside land for the protection of farms or property from flood waters. This hampers the riverbank and its riparian zone, affects groundwater recharge, and most importantly obstructs and alters the flow of flood water. It causes the breaking of stream links, which trigger water-logging and flash floods in the rainy season. Action/solution: Strict action by Municipal authorities and a separate team of river watch guards to be formed for prompt action. Removal of all existing debris along the riverbank and restoring the area by ecological measures

Devp in blue line

In many places, development is seen within the blue line. Some structures are illegal and some legally constructed with the permission of local authorities. This violation of development plan rules encourages others to follow the same. During flooding, such areas are highly at risk and are major obstructions to flood water flow.

Action/solution: Strict action against such violations and removal of the structures. Some policy to be devised for compensation in case construction is prior to establishment of rules.

Devp projects

Agriculture land along rivers are rapidly getting converted into non-agricultural (NA) status and going under developmental projects (building construction and township development). In the case of a flooding scenario, there is no space left for the flood water to spread, ultimately it causes more harm to human life and to the construction itself.

Action/solution: Declaring the riverside area as a green zone and giving some incentives to farmers for not converting the land to NA status. Green zone areas along both the riverbanks to be decided with the help of geology and ecology experts.

Illegal settlements

Riverbanks are convenient sites for temporary settlements of workers or the formation of slums. Such settlements spread rapidly, destroying the riverbank habitat, and encroaching upon an area where floodwater could spread, recede, and recharge groundwater or the hyporheic zone. People living here are most vulnerable during floods.

Action/solution: Removal of the illegal settlements from the riverside and provide rehabilitation with the help of NGOs.

Underground interventions

Metro pillars in the riverbed reach deep underground. As per the aquifer disposition map of Pune city by ACWADAM, the shallow aquifers along the Mutha river fall in the category of aquifer type 1. Concrete pillars might have hampered the aquifer system.

Action/solution: Watersensitive urban designs.

(The researchers of this report published in www.researchgate.in are Gurudas Nulkar, Shailaja Deshpande, Swati Gole and Himanshu Kulkarni)
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Chief Sharad Pawar questioned the law and order situation in the state while reacting to the question related to a death threat he received through a social media platform. Pawar was speaking to media personnel outside his house in Pune.

Every citizen of this state has a right to express his or her opinion on any issue. If somebody feels that they can silence the voice by threatening then they are misunderstood Pawar said.

He also praised the police department and said he has faith in them. I have complete faith in the capability of the agency (police) responsible to maintain law and order in the state hence I do not care much about this issue. However, at the same time those who have power (government) in the state cant run away from their responsibility he added.

It may be noted that Supriya Sule has lodged a complaint with Mumbai Police after she received a message about a death threat to her father NCP chief Sharad Pawar. Chief Minister Eknath Shinde earlier condemned the act and has said that a strict action will be taken against the offender. He also said that the police have instructed them to investigate the matter and take strict action against the one found responsible.

NCP leader Ajit Pawar while speaking to media claimed that the person who threatened Sharad Pawar through social media has a BJP worker mentioned in his profile.
Moline firefighters, with mutual aid from five other Quad-City departments, battled a fire Thursday night at Gold Star FS, a propane company located at 2607 4th Ave.

Homes in the 2500-2700 block of 4th Avenue were evacuated because of the possibility of explosions, Moline Fire Chief Steve Regenwether said.

It was not known Thursday night how many people were evacuated.

With the number of propane tanks and the various sizes of propane tanks, we were concerned about possible explosions being a danger to the public, so we have evacuated all residential structures near Gold Star FS, Regenwether said.

Regenwether announced at 11:30 p.m. that residents were allowed to return to their homes.

The fire was reported at about 8:30 p.m. as it was reported heavy black smoke was seen coming from Gold Star FS, he said.

Smoke permeated to the Mississippi River to the north and as far west as the Interstate 74 bridge.

We completely went 100% defensive, Regenwether said.

Firefighters will continue to pour water onto the blaze until it is out, he added. Were going to be here a long time.

Crews were on scene a total of around four hours, the department said in a news release around 12:35 a.m. Friday.

Four tower trucks were pouring water through the roof of the building at about 10:30 p.m.

Use of the Moline Police Departments drone allowed firefighters to pinpoint hot spots and aim water at those spots, Regenwether said.

The drone is able to get above it and view where the fire is so we can point our master streams in a better direction, he said.

Moline was assisted at the scene by firefighters from Rock Island, East Moline, Bettendorf, Silvis and Rock Island Arsenal.

No injuries were reported.

The cause of the fire is under investigation. Regenwether said there was work being done to the building and it was highly unlikely that arson was the cause.

Photos: Attorneys for amputee, spouse, hold news conference on lawsuit after building collapse in Davenport
There's a new leader at the Rock Island Arsenal.

Thursday morning, leaders held a change-of-command ceremony honoring Col. David G. Guida as the 52nd Commander of the Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center (JMTC). Guida is taking over for Col. Shari Bennett.

Bennett was selected to lead the JMTC in 2021 and made history as the first woman and first person of color to hold the position. Following the change in command, she and her family will move to St. Louis.

Maj. Gen. Darren L. Werner, the commanding general for the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command opened the ceremony with kind remarks about Bennett, saying she would be missed on the island.

"Shari, we appreciate you and your family," Werner said. "The JMTC is much better today than it was two years ago, and I like to think that as we bring in new commanders, they make their mark and their positive marks."

The JMTC works with an annual operating budget of $177 million, he said. The JMTC consists of more than 30 buildings with more than 3 million square feet of manufacturing space. Of its 750 employees, 99% are civilian. As a whole, the Arsenal employs more than 6,000 people  80% of whom are civilians.

JMTC works on as many as 300 projects at a time. This summer, the center will become home to the world's largest 3D printer. It will be capable of fabricating large metal components, including hulls and other equipment for military vehicles, in one solid piece, rather than requiring dozens of individual parts to be welded. It also will be faster and more efficient than traditional manufacturing by producing less scrap.

Leading the center now will be Col. David G. Guida, a Minnesota native who enlisted in the infantry in 1998. He attended Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps in June 2002. He already was based at the Arsenal before being named JMTC commander.

"The Army selected a stellar officer," Werner said of the incoming commander.

Taking on the role as the lead of the JMTC is a big job but one that Guida will thrive in, Werner said.

"You've got a lot to do, but Shari and the team set you up well," he said. "The place you need to be is on the factory floor. You're going to do that. I know you will."

Bennett also offered her congratulations and words of encouragement to the incoming commander.

"When I took command two years ago, I didn't know what to expect," she said. "I wish you best of luck, because your success is the JMTC's success."

Guida said he was looking forward to continuing the success Bennett had with the JMTC and leading the organization for the next two years.

"Col. Bennett has worked real hard to develop three lines of effort. The first of those is people, the second is business and the third is modernization. Those lines of effort are completely in line with what the Army wants, so I am excited to continue that," he said.

Reflecting on his 25 years in the military, Guida said he has used all of the equipment the JMTC makes and is interested in learning how it's made. Now, he is looking forward to continuing the legacy.

"A lot of time and energy has been placed against preparing me for this particular assignment," he said. "I'm excited to do it, and I know the Army has put me in the right position."

Photos: Change of command at the Rock Island Arsenal Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center.
A Scott County judge rejected a plea in the municipal citation case filed against Andrew Wold's Davenport Hotel LLC in relation to the May 28 building collapse in Davenport.

A hearing in the case was held Friday morning.

The partial collapse of the building at 324 N. Main St. occurred in the center of the west side of the six-story structure and involved every floor. Three people had been confirmed dead as of June 5, and many others lost their homes and property.

The city filed the citation on May 30, accusing Wold, doing business as Davenport Hotel LLC, of failing on May 28 to maintain the 324 Main St. property in a safe, sanitary and structurally sound condition.

In a Friday morning hearing, Scott County Magistrate Catherine Cartee rejected a plea of nolo contendere electronically filed on Davenport Hotel LLCs behalf by its attorney Alexander Johnson. Wold did not appear.

When people offer a plea of nolo contendere (no contest), it means they are not admitting guilt but also are not offering a defense. They are then subject to penalties as if they had pleaded guilty but retain the option of denying the charge in other legal proceedings.

In her written ruling, Cartee said the court did not accept or acknowledge that the plea complies with the Iowa Code of Civil Procedure.

Wold will have to enter a different plea or set the case for trial, Cartees order states. He can appear by counsel or in writing.

The hearing was continued to Monday.

A conviction for such a violation means a fine of $300 with an additional $95 in court costs, according to the citation.

Photos: One week after the partial collapse of The Davenport
Accountability. Transparency. Resignations. Those were the big three demands from Davenport residents who spoke during public comment at the most recent Davenport City Council meeting.

The public spoke for more than an hour Wednesday night, expressing their feelings on how the council handled the situation at 324 Main St. The building partially collapsed Sunday, May 28, just before 5 p.m., leading to three deaths.

LaCanna Dixon was among the crowd and expressed her disgust for how things unfolded. She told the council she watched national media coverage, where they reported the situation was under control and nobody was inside. When she asked media where they got that information from, they cited the city as the source.

"All of a sudden Miss Lisa (Brooks) hung her head out of that window," she said. "They bleed the same color as all of us here. And you did nothing to help them."

Dixon identified alderperson Judith Lee, 8th Ward, as the only member of the council who stood with advocates at the site of the collapse. The rest, she said, should have followed suit.

"If you can't stand behind the people that voted for you, you need to get out of your seat," she said. "This is my community. I am an activist because I will speak up for my people. All of you signed up for the same thing."

She then raised her right hand and her palm was covered in red paint as a silent symbol that the council had blood on its hands.

Council members are not allowed to respond to public comments during meetings.

Other members of the community outside of Ward 3, where 324 Main St. is located, were present to raise their concern. Among them was Michael Ross, a self-proclaimed community activist who lives in Ward 2.

Ross told the council he toured the building before and said people were living in, "substandard conditions." He said he called neighborhood services about the building last fall.

"I was told that because I was a community activist, that the tenant had to call. Mind you, this tenant just lost her daughter due to COVID and feared retaliation from the landlord," he said.

He also credited Alderperson Lee for being on site in the days following the collapse and called the rest of them "cowards." Ross then singled out his council representative, Ward 2 Alderperson Maria Dickmann, and asked her to resign.

Dickmann chuckled, nodded her head and said, "OK." She has announced previously she is not running for reelection in November.

Other residents took aim at the council as a whole. James Woods, a resident of Ward 8, said the public was told in the days following the collapse that the building was on the verge of collapsing further, even while city workers stood just 25 feet from the building.

Woods went on to say the council had the ability to save lives, and the 911 call placed the day before the collapse proves that.

"They should be able to live in a place where they have the security to know the floor will not fall out from underneath them," he said. "We should never let any citizen in this town go through what the residents of 324 Main had to."

Families respond

At least one resident of the building, Lisa Brooks, was present at the meeting. She was rescued from a fourth-floor window hours after city officials said they did not believe anyone was still unaccounted for.

Wednesday night, Brooks arrived in yellow sneakers, gray-and-plaid pants and a gray T-shirt. She sat in the front row, next to her nephew, Antoine Smith. Brooks said she had been homeless since the collapse.

"What are you going to do for us?" she asked, stressing to the council they had homes and beds to return to. "Ladies and gentlemen, what are you going to do? People have kids and are homeless in the streets."

Family advocacy was a theme Wednesday evening. Six days after the collapse, the body of Branden Colvin Sr. was retrieved from the site. Speaking to the council on his behalf was his cousin, Mike Collier, who stood with two of his aunts.

He told the council he was mad, sad and exhausted. One of his aunts, Rose Wilson, demanded answers from the council.

She asked the council who approved the inspector's signature on the building inspection and who approved the demolition scheduled for one day after the collapse if there was no council meeting and no vote could be taken. Wilson blamed Davenport City Administrator Cori Spiegel.

"The city and community deserve better leadership," she said.

New leadership was another demand made by the group assembled in council chambers. Eric Russell, an activist with the Tree of life Justice League of Chicago, came to express his own outrage and search for facts.

At the beginning of the meeting, Alderperson Derek Cornette said he wanted to put the rumor that the Davenport Police Department was protecting Andrew Wold, the property owner, to rest. Russell said that was beside the point.

"We don't give a damn on rumors about a slumlord being guarded by the police. What we are concerned about is the utter disrespect of the residents who live their life in that building," he said.

Days after the collapse, the city's building inspector, Trishna Pradhan, resigned from her position. Russell said Davenport Mayor Mike Matson should follow suit.

"What happened across the street was not just a tragedy of a collapse, it was criminal," he said. All we are seeking is transparency. Accountability. That accountability starts with this council that failed.

That message was upheld by Alicia Goosens, the owner of Gilly's Corner Tap at Pine and 3rd streets in Davenport. The west-end bar was denied a liquor license in January following a shooting outside the business.

"I just want to know if you're going to hold everyone accountable the way you held me accountable," she said.

Malik Salsberry was born and raised in Davenport and moved back after five years away. He told the council he didn't just have heartbreak on his face but frustration and anger. The response to the collapse showed a "disdain and disinterest" in poor residents and residents of color, he said.

"As your constituent, I would like to ask you all to resign. If you can't handle hard questions from your constituents, maybe you shouldn't be here," he said.

Photos: Davenport City Council Meeting, June 7, 2023
Attorney General Marty Jackley released a draft explanation Tuesday for a proposed amendment to remove the limitation that a constitutional amendment embrace only one subject.

Quincy Hanzen, of Sioux Falls, is sponsoring the amendment, which officially made it to Jackley April 24.

The single subject rule was passed in 2018 as part of Constitutional Amendment Z. It requires that proposed amendments needed to be presented and voted on separately.

It was approved with 195,790 yes votes, which was 62.41% of the election's voters.

In 2021, Amendment A, which would've legalized the recreational use of marijuana for 21-year-olds and older, was approved by 54.18%, but was later overturned by the State Supreme Court after being deemed unconstitutional.

South Dakota State Senator Helene Duhamel (R-Dist. 32), who supported Amendment Z in 2018, continues to see its importance and says she would personally reject the effort to overturn the single subject rule.

"Perfect example was the 2020 election. We had two things, same subject kind of: Amendment A and Initiated Measure 26. The advertising never advertised legal, recreational marijuana. It was all cleverly bundled together. If you look back at their ads, you'll see something like, 'My kid has seizures. So I'm voting yes on A and 26.' But all you needed was 26 for medical marijuana; A was both medical and recreational marijuana."

She then mentioned that in 2022, when recreational marijuana  Initiated Measure 27  was on the ballot by itself, it didn't pass.

"That's my point," Duhamel said. "Sometimes people can bring a complicated or a controversial amendment to the Constitution that could have eight or nine different ideas and one or two good ones. The whole process, Amendment Z, was intended to clarify what's in front of us on the ballot when we're deciding an issue."

Matthew Schweich, former campaign manager of Initiated Measure 27, feels the single subject rule has weakened the initiative process and has caused a lot of problems for people trying to write initiatives.

"I think that the voters can be the judge of whether an initiative embraces too many subjects or not," he said. "I think voters are capable of making that decision. Politicians appear they don't think voters are capable of making that decision. That's why they've repeatedly attacked the initiative process for years."

Politicians and the political establishment have been "trying to chip away at the initiative process" for years, he said.

"The single subject rule is one of the most successful attacks they've made on the initiative process," Schweich said. "There's quite a lot of people in South Dakota who are sick of this, and if we could repeal the single subject rule, that would be a major step in the right direction, and kind of restoring some balance between the people and the politicians."

The amendment to repeal the single subject rule requires over 35,000 petition signatures to be put on the 2024 general election ballot. The Attorney General is required by state law to draft a ballot explanation for all initiated constitutional amendments.

Public comments can be made about the draft until June 16. They can either be submitted by hand delivery, mail or email with more information on how to file comments on the Attorney General's website.

The Secretary of State will receive the final ballot explanation June 26.
Governor Noem will testify before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources Thursday, June 15, in favor of House Resolution 3397.

H.R. 3397 was introduced May 17. This bill would require the Bureau of Land Management to abandon the proposed rule on Conservation and Landscape Health.

Washington bureaucrats dont know how to manage land better than the South Dakotans who have been stewarding it for centuries. But Joe Bidens Administration is pursuing a regulatory land grab, said Governor Kristi Noem. Their proposed rule will result in poorly managed federal lands, which will devastate conservation and management efforts, harm our wildlife, slow economic growth, and endanger public safety.

The Bureau of Land Managements proposed rule elevates conservation practices as a use within the Federal Land Policy and Management Act multiple-use framework. BLM intends to pursue conservation leases for both protection and restoration activities. This proposed rule would fundamentally change the way multiple use and sustained yield mandates are carried out.

Governor Mark Gordon of Wyoming will also be testifying. Governor Noem has previously worked with Governor Gordon on several issues pertaining to land management. In December 2022, Noem and Gordon issued a joint letter to the Black Hills National Forest Supervisor, Jeff Tomac, asking the USFS to revisit their proposed draft assessments for the Forest Plan Revision. Their greatest concern was the reduction of timber sale in the Black Hills, Noem pointing out "flawed statements...not backed by scientific material" in those revision plan assessments.

The Biden Administration could use this proposed rule change to determine currently permitted activities on BLM lands are incompatible with a conservation lease or areas identified as intact landscapes. This could include loss of grazing, energy production, and recreation  all of which are essential to the South Dakota way of life, Noem said.

H.R. 3397 was introduced by Congressmen John Curtis (R-UT), Dan Newhouse (R-WA), and Russ Fulcher (R-ID). It has 16 Republican cosponsors, including several from nearby states: Harriet Hageman (R-WY), Ryan Zinke (R-MT), Matthew Rosendale (R-MT), Pete Stauber (R-MN), Doug Lamborn (R-CO) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO).
A 30-year-old Rapid City man was sentenced May 25 to six years probation and a 15-year suspended prison sentence for fourth-degree rape that occurred last spring.

Micah Medalen pleaded guilty to the charge March 9. Before entering into a plea agreement, he also faced 10 possession or distribution of child pornography charges and one count each of solicitation of a minor, furnishing a minor with alcohol and violation of a no contact order.

Fourth-degree rape is defined as sex with a minor between the ages of 13 and 16 who is three years younger than the perpetrator. The victim in Medalen's case was 15 years old. He was 29 at the time.

Circuit Court Judge Jane Wipf Pfeifle ordered that Medalen register as a sex offender within three days, submit himself to alcohol testing twice a day, attend Alcoholics Anonymous at least once a week, as well as undergo a mental health evaluation and go through Pennington County's Cognitive Behavioral Interventions for Substance Abuse (CBISA) program.

The judge also banned Medalen from being around children under 18, the victim or the victim's family. She also banned Medalen from possessing pornography of any kind.

Wipf Pfeifle told Medalen, "You have a lot of work to do to avoid prison."

Senior Deputy Pennington County State's Attorney Roxanne Hammond asked the court to sentence Medalen to 15 years in prison with five suspended.

Hammond pointed out Medalen was on probation for "yet another charge involving a child" when he was arrested. Court records show Medalen pleaded guilty in 2019 to child abuse and was given a 10-year suspended sentence and six years of probation.

"He didn't just violate probation," Hammond said. "He did so with gusto  having sex with a minor and keeping pictures and videos on his phone."

The judge called the behavior "hideous," but stated she did not find a penitentiary sentence is "warranted at this time."

Hammond said the "only appropriate answer" for Medalen would be a prison sentence, stating a psychosexual evaluation determined he is likely to offend again.

The court denied Medalen's defense attorney John Murphy's request to have an expert witness testify during the sentencing. Murphy said the expert would have testified that giving the psychosexual evaluation was inappropriate given his client's low IQ.

Murphy said his client is a "substantially impaired person," noting his IQ score is 68. The majority of people  68%  have IQ scores between 85 and 115, according to the American Psychiatric Association.

Murphy pointed out his client, despite his impairment, "has stayed employed for five years."

He also said Medalen "took responsibility and knows he put the victim through an "embarrassing and traumatic event" before asking for a probationary sentence so Medalen can work on his alcohol abuse issues, which have "plagued him."

Medalen chose not to speak on his own behalf at his sentencing.
Rapid City Police are investigating a Wednesday night shooting that left one man injured.

RCPD responded around 6:30 p.m. Wednesday to a residence in the 1000 block of Willsie Avenue after a report of a man with a gunshot wound.

The man's injuries were serious, but not life-threatening, according to an email from the Rapid City Police Department. He was taken to the hospital.

The Criminal Investigations Division investigated the shooting through Wednesday evening and into Thursday, according to the email.

"Police have encountered various levels of cooperation among witnesses to the event, however, the investigation into the incident is progressing," RCPD wrote in the statement.

The RCPD asked anyone with information about the incident to contact Det. Brandon Johnson at (605) 394-4134. An anonymous tip can also be submitted by texting the letters RCPD and the information to 847411.
Another incident of tourists acting inappropriately around wildlife was announced on Thursday, this time in Grand Teton National Park where officials are seeking help tracking down two individuals.

On Sunday, June 4, at approximately 1 p.m., two individuals were seen approaching and touching a bison calf at the southern end of Elk Ranch Flats in the park.

Anyone in the Elk Ranch Flats area on the afternoon of June 4 that has information that could help in this investigation, or if you know who these individuals are, call the park Tip Line at 307-739-3367. Anyone who sees harassment of wildlife in the park may also call the Teton Interagency Dispatch Center at 307-739-3301 to report the incident.

Interference by people can cause wildlife to reject their offspring. In this case, the calf was successfully reunited with its herd, but in Yellowstone National Park a few weeks earlier a bison calf had to be euthanized after a man pulled it out of the Lamar River. The man was caught and fined.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, individuals picked up an elk calf, put it in their car and drove to the West Yellowstone police station.

The National Park Service asks everyone to follow these simple rules:

 Be alert for wildlife and keep a safe distance. Always maintain a distance of at least 100 yards from bears and wolves, and 25 yards from other wildlife. Use binoculars, a spotting scope, or a telephoto lens for a good view. Never position yourself between a female and offspring  mothers are very protective. Let wildlife thrive undisturbed. If your actions cause an animal to change their behavior, you are too close.

 Treat all wildlife with caution and respect as they are wild, unpredictable and can be dangerous. The safety of visitors and wildlife depends on everyone playing a critical role in being a steward for wildlife by giving them the space they need to thrive  their lives depend on it.

To watch wildlife safely:

 Do not tease, touch, frighten or intentionally disturb wildlife.

 Roadside viewing is popular, but please keep the road clear. Use pullouts or pull completely off the roadway with all four wheels to the right of the white line.

 It is illegal to feed any wildlife  birds, ground squirrels, bears, foxes, etc. Wildlife will depend on people for food, resulting in poor nutrition and aggressive behavior. If fed, any animal may become unhealthy, bite you, expose you to rabies, or need to be killed.

 To protect wildlife and visitors, the park may close key habitat areas to all travel. Some areas are temporarily closed and others have seasonal closures.
Kathmandu, Nepal, June 9, 2023: Nepal has been elected as a member of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).





In the elections held at UN Headquarters in New York on Thursday, Nepal got elected with the highest number of votes from the Asia Pacific region. With the election, Nepal will serve in the ECOSOC for a three-year term of 2024-2026.





Nepals election is an acknowledgment of its constructive leadership and engagement in several UN processes and its abiding faith in the purposes and principles of the United Nations, reads the press statement issued by the Nepal's Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York.




Kathmandu, Nepal, June 9, 2023: National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and the National Human Rights Committee of Qatar (NHRCQ) have signed in an agreement to protect and promote the Human Rights of Nepalese migrant workers in Qatar.





Both the national human rights bodies signed in the agreement amid a function on Thursday. The agreement was signed for three years.





With the agreement complaints can be filed with the Human Rights Committee of Qatar about the violation of the human rights of Nepalis who have reached Qatar for employment.




As mayor of the city of Hopewell, Virginia, Johnny Partin is too busy trying to lead the community forward and make critically needed infrastructure improvements to think too much about his age.

One year into the job as mayor, the 30-year-old Virginia Military graduate (Class of 2014) was just 26 when he was elected as a Hopewell City Council member. Partin, who is also a captain in the Virginia National Guard, attributes his passion for service to the influence of his grandfather, who was a one-star general in the National Guard and the Army Reserve.

The elder Partin wasnt able to complete his college education because of the Great Depression and World War II, but he told all six of his grandchildren that hed help them through college. There was one string attached, though, Partin said. They had to attend VMI, the small, state-supported military college in the mountains of western Virginia. The school, which has produced a Nobel Prize winner, 11 Rhodes Scholars, seven Medal of Honor recipients, a Pulitzer Prize winner, college presidents, generals and flag officers, is far from ordinary.

VMI was the only option because my grandfather loved the model of being a citizen-soldier, Partin said. He loved the schools model because it incorporated a lot of the philosophy that the National Guard is built on.

VMIs unique combination of an excellent academic program, physical fitness, honor, character, and military training appealed to the younger Partin as well. During his time at the school, he participated in the Institute Honors program, served as vice president of the Honor Court, and was president of the VMI chapter of Engineers Without Borders, a humanitarian service group.

After graduating with a degree in civil engineering, Partin moved to Hopewell, an economically disadvantaged community (population 23,000) south of Richmond, where he began attending City Council meetings. He quickly realized the council was in need of leadership. Making his case to voters several decades his senior, Partin realized that his degree from VMI was one of his greatest strengths.

They saw that I was a graduate of VMI They knew that this guy knows what hes doing. This guy is a leader. He knows how to get things done. Johnny Partin - 2014 VMI alumnus

VMI itself prepares you for leadership positions, he said. It prepares you to tackle a lot of the problems that you're going to face in life, whether it is in business, whether it's in politics, whether its in the nonprofit sector, or even in the military. And thats what VMI is truly all about serving as a role model and as a leader, and also helping people, helping your community, helping your country, and basically being a part of that call to selfless service.

Since he was elected, Partins goal has been to improve public safety and help facilitate neighborhood improvements that are currently in the works. Some of these involve fixing drainage issues, upgrading utilities and improving the wastewater plant.

Nearly a decade after graduating from VMI, Partin reflects and remembers his younger self who would have never had imagined he would one day lead a community.

[VMI] prepares you to tackle a lot of the problems that you're going to face in life, whether it is in business, whether it's in politics, whether its in the nonprofit sector, or even in the military. Johnny Partin - 2014 VMI alumnus

His grandfather would be proud.

For more information, please visit vmi.edu.

Take a look at what else is happening at VMI in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Richmond muralist Emily Herr unveiled her new, massive 4,000-square-foot mural in Scotts Addition on Tuesday.

Its the 31-year-olds largest mural to date and the entire process took roughly three years to complete.

The mural was commissioned by The Otis, the mixed-use development with 350 apartments and shops like Grit Coffee encompassing a city block at 1601 Roseneath Road in Scotts Addition.

The beautiful mural has already sparked some controversy.

Entitled Starting Space: A Love Letter to the Creative Process, the mural is a love letter to a certain time period in Scotts Addition history.

While Scotts Addition has become known as Richmonds adult playground for its recent explosion of craft breweries, bars and apartments, Herr reached back  not to Scotts Additions industrial roots in the 1920s -- but to the more recent past.

She honed in on the past two decades of Scotts Addition, roughly the time period between 2000 and today.

I wanted to honor the DIY community, Herr said. Before the craft breweries and apartment buildings moved in, Scotts Addition had plenty of affordable space in warehouses where Richmonders could find studio space for cheap or launch a business. Her mural is an homage to the makers, painters, welders, weavers, restaurateurs and retailers who found space to work and create in Scotts Addition.

I talked to many people about their experiences of setting up shop in Scotts Addition in the early 2010s, Herr said. I wanted to show the invisible community that did occupy this neighborhood over the past 20 years, Herr said.

My hope is that those that inspired this mural will (literally and figuratively) see themselves in it, Herr said in a statement.

However, many of the businesses and people pictured in the mural have had to move out of Scotts Addition, either through loss of space going to development or due to skyrocketing rents.

We have mixed feelings about the mural, Johannah Willsey, co-owner of Phoenix Handcraft, a custom furniture maker featured in the mural, said. Phoenix Handcraft had space on Altamont Avenue in Scotts Addition since 2010 before moving to central Virginia last year.

(The mural is) a beautiful and exciting tribute to the maker community, as well as a deeply researched reflection of that history. On the other hand, it's a form of branding used by large corporations that whitewashes the history of pushing the creative community out of the neighborhood.

While this has come to be seen as a normal cycle in city neighborhoods, from cheap rent that's accessible for small business creatives to trendy upscale neighborhoods, it's bittersweet for those of us who got our start there, Willsey said.

Hack.RVA, a member-run nonprofit makerspace on Roseneath Road, moved into the neighborhood in 2012.

Kent Durvin, vice president of the group, said the neighborhood was filled with empty warehouses, plenty of parking, and no place to eat. We had a coal forge in the parking lot, and we raced drone-like air cars around the lot.

But now, the Hack.RVA space on Roseneath Road is being sold and redeveloped. Hack.RVA will be moving just across I-95 to a new location on Dabney Road.

There is some negativity around the transition from empty spaces [in this neighborhood] to breweries, Herr said. But spaces like this, it doesnt stay the same anywhere.

Herr took inspiration from Diego Riveras Detroit Industry murals, a series of stunning murals painted for the Detroit Institute of Arts in the 1930s to depict the automotive industry, as well as other sources.

Herr began painting the mural last summer, along with the help of several assistants. Painting took 14 weeks, whereas a more standard-size mural takes her anywhere from 4 days to 4 weeks.

Herr is known locally for the traveling mural project Girls! Girls! Girls! to better represent women in public art. In 2022, she traveled to Kosovo where she was invited to participate in the MuralFest, along with other Richmond muralists over the years such as Nils Westergard and Mickael Broth.

In 2015, Herr bought a step-van and transformed it into a mobile studio complete with running water that carries her paints, brushes and materials with her. She calls it the HerrSuite mobile studio.

Its where I do all my demo work. Its where I mix paint and make my sketches. I take everything with me onsite, like a turtle. I dont know how anybody else does it, she said.

Rather than moving in a chronological time frame, the mural moves from panel to panel in perspective, painting a portrait of the makers and artists who made Scotts Addition their home.

The Highpoint, a shared workspace for creatives since 2018 featured in the mural, closed earlier this year in March. The Blue Bee Cider building, pictured in several panels, was sold and the new owners of the cidery are taking the business to Henrico. And Studio Two Three is currently packing up its Scotts Addition space, which it has held since 2015, and moving to the former Dogtown Dance Theatre in Manchester later this year.

"Scott's Addition has been the hottest real estate market in Richmond for several years and artist spaces are becoming fewer and farther between," Ashley Hawkins, executive director of Studio Two Three said. "Emily captured the legacy of artists and DIY culture in the neighborhood (in her mural)."

"Richmond has had an identity as a rough, gritty, artistic scene. But that's been changing over the past few years, as it's becoming more expensive to live here and more development comes in. I'm hopeful the city will recognize the benefit of that identity. It needs tending to thrive. It doesn't just happen," Herr said. "My hope is that when people look at this, people wonder, where are these people going to go?...How does an artist impact a city? And how does the city impact the artists?

PHOTOS: Emily Herr's new Scott's Addition mural
Dine Out for Pride

For the first time, Richmond is celebrating Dine Out for Pride week. More than two dozen restaurants  such as Bar Solita, Casa del Barco Canal Walk, Eazzy Burger, Heritage and more  will offer a special Jack Daniels or Titos Pride-themed cocktail with a portion of the sale going to VA Pride and the Richmond Region Tourism Foundation. Through Sunday. Find a full list of participating establishments at outrva.com/dineoutforpride.

Ardents ninth anniversary block party

Ardent Craft Ales is celebrating its ninth anniversary with a block party blow-out on Saturday. Ardent will be taking over Leigh Street with guest breweries, live music, Ardent beers and food trucks such as Saltys Lobster & Co. Noon-8 p.m., free to enter, pay as you go. 3200 W. Leigh St. Get more information at ardentcraftales.com.

Biscuits & Gravy has closed

Biscuits & Gravy, located in the former Dairy Bar spot at 1602 Roseneath Road, has closed.

The owners of Tang & Biscuit bought The Dairy Bar and converted it into their own breakfast-focused spot with simple, comfort food. It was open for roughly a year.

We came here to honor the rich history this building holds. We believe that we accomplished just that thanks to our loyal patronsUnfortunately, our portion of the story has come to a close, the owners posted to social media.

The Dairy Bar originally opened in 1946 and has been a Richmond staple since. Husband-and-wife team Bill and Tricia Webb bought the breakfast and lunch restaurant in 1997 and sold the business in 2020 to one of their cooks, Corey Martin. The restaurant then quietly closed its doors in 2021. The owners of Tang & Biscuit acquired the building and opened it as Biscuits & Gravy in 2022. No details were available for plans for the building.

Citizen Burger Bar closes, will become Indian restaurant

After posting to social media that it was closed for renovations, Citizen Burger Bar in Carytown is now permanently closed, as first reported by Richmond Bizsense, and will be replaced by an Indian restaurant.

Citizen Burger was owned by the Charlottesville-based The Virginian Restaurant Co. and Andy McClure, which also co-owns Jardin in the Fan and Grisette in Church Hill.

McClure sold the building. According to Sperity Real Estate Ventures, which brokered the deal, Jannat Indian Cuisine will launch Carytown Indian Cuisine in the space. Jannat has an Indian restaurant at 7801 W. Broad St. in Henrico County.

Haitian food delivered from Lakay Zaz

You can now get Haitian-inspired food from local Lakay Zaz delivered on Doordash and Grubhub.

Haitian chef Sthara Normil has been doing pop-ups around Richmond as Lakay Zaz, often selling out popular dishes such as griot, marinated pork chunks deep fried ($18) and whole deep fried snapper with pickled cabbage and fried plantains ($35).

Lakay Zaz has joined the restaurant co-op at Richmond Eats, 2812 W. Broad St., where her dishes are available via Doordash, GrubHub and touchscreen kiosks. Other dishes include fish patties, creole chicken ($15), oxtails ($24), tassot de boeuf ($17) and beef patties ($3).

Were one of the few Haitian restaurants in Virginia, Normil said. People drove from all over  Virginia Beach and D.C.  to visit our pop-ups.

Top five weekend events: Ilana Glazer, Juneteenth & Taste of India Comedian Ilana Glazer Imagine 2023 Juneteenth 2023, A Freedom Celebration Richmond Symphony & 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire' Taste of India
The suspect in the May homicide that took place in VCU Medical Center stairwell has been indicted.

Christopher Boisseau, 24, of Henrico, has been charged with first-degree murder and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. He remains charged with maliciously discharging a firearm in an occupied building.

At approximately 12:04 a.m. on May 10, officers from the Richmond Police Department and the VCU Police Department received an emergency call about shots fired and an active threat inside the VCU Medical Center North Hospital, located at 1300 E. Marshall St.

VCU and Richmond police responded immediately to the scene.

Officers determined an altercation between two co-workers in a stairwell resulted in one shooting the other. The victim, TyQuan White, 25, of Richmond, received treatment before succumbing to his injury.

There were no other injuries.

Anyone with information about this homicide is asked to call RPD Major Crimes Detective N. Reese at (804) 646-0712 or Crime Stoppers at (804) 780-1000. The P3 Tips Crime Stoppers app for smartphones also may be used. All Crime Stoppers reporting methods are anonymous.
In the wake of Tuesday nights fatal shooting at the Altria Theater, many students and their families are experiencing myriad emotions.

William Fox Elementary hasnt had a normal year since before COVID-19. Last year, a devastating fire impacted the school. This year, parents and students were looking forward to celebrating the end of a normal year, when school was canceled for the last three days because of the shooting.

People lost their lives, and that is just feeling too much like the new normal, Katie Ricard, a Fox mom said about having to explain to her kids why school was canceled.

Ricard, a former high school administrator in Chesterfield, knows the effort put into getting students their diplomas and what should have been a joyous occasion for the Huguenot students  a generation that has already experienced loss and a disruption in education during COVID-19, Ricard said.

It really breaks my heart that this day was marred by tragedy for them, Ricard said.

Shawn Jackson, 18, and his stepfather, Lorenzo Smith, 36, were killed in the shooting in Monroe Park. Jackson had just received his diploma from Huguenot High School, which held its commencement ceremonies in the nearby theater. At least a dozen people were hurt in the panic after the gunfire.

Amari Pollard, 19, who authorities said had a longstanding dispute with Jackson, was arraigned Wednesday morning on two counts of second-degree murder.

Other students, like Jude Shelton-Eide, 14, and Maya Weinstein, 13, who recently graduated from Binford Middle School in Richmond, expressed sadness, fear and anxiety in response to Tuesdays shooting.

I think its really awful and its so sad, Shelton-Eide said. She mentioned another 13-year-old boy at her school who was killed outside of school grounds in an accidental shooting earlier this year. Its scary and terrifying. More kids are being shot. Whenever you hear a big bang or something, you always think, is it a gun?

Shelton-Eide said that she had visited the Altria Theater last week to see Hadestown. Its definitely nerve-wracking to think, could that have been me?

There are so many school shootings around the U.S. now. Its really scary, and it makes it hard to want to go to school without being scared, Weinstein said.

Both Weinstein and Shelton-Eide said that they were relieved they didnt have to finish out the school year this week and that their graduation, which was held earlier this week, wasnt impacted.

My kids are 9 and 7; they are sad and confused by Tuesdays events. Despite our best efforts to answer their questions and help them feel safe and loved, I worry about the long lasting effects of all our kids having to grow up with the fear of mass shootings as gun violence has become the leading cause of death for children in this country, Richmonds Faith A. Alejandro said.

Her children attend Mary Munford Elementary School, which canceled school after the shootings.

My oldest wont have a formal middle school graduation, as she didnt have a formal elementary school graduation (because of COVID), Jessica Levy-Lavelle, a parent with three children in Richmond Public Schools, said. But thats not where my frustration lies. It lies with our collective inaction to do better and create a safer world for our kids.

Dr. Anjali Ferguson is a clinical psychologist specializing in trauma-informed care who treats children and families. Traumatic events like the shooting can have a wide range of impact, whether a child or young adult experiences the trauma firsthand or sees the events happen in their communities, Ferguson said.

These impacts can include changes in sleep, appetite and mood or in behaviors such as anxiety, anger, avoidance and frustration. Trauma may also impact the ability to focus or interfere with ones interpersonal relationships. Children and young adults may no longer feel a desire to be out in public spaces due to not feeling safe in them anymore, Ferguson said.

Some consequences may be physical. Ferguson said science has observed cumulative trauma resulting in toxic stress, which in the long term may lead to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke or alcoholism.

Marginalized communities are at greater risk for experiencing different types of toxic stressors. A lot of it is due to systemic inequalities and systemic racism, along with disparities in resources available, Ferguson said.

Our marginalized communities are experiencing a greater need and that disparity is just growing, Ferguson said. The gaps are widening.

Ferguson said parents must have conversations with their kids about what theyve seen or heard. Richmond is a strong community that will need to work through these issues and do it together, she said.

Its not necessarily a mental health issue; its an access to firearms issue, Ferguson said. If you ask any mental health expert, they will outline steps that we can take from a policy standpoint and legislative standpoint that would help minimize these risks significantly for our communities.
The first reactions are coming in to Donald Trump saying Thursday that he was indicted for mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate.

Two people familiar with the situation who were not authorized to discuss it publicly told the Associated Press that the indictment included seven criminal counts. One of those people said the former president's lawyers were contacted by prosecutors shortly before he announced on his Truth Social platform that he had been indicted.

Trump charged over classified documents in 1st federal indictment of an ex-president Donald Trump says hes been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate, igniting a federal prosecution that is arguably the most perilous of multiple legal threats against the former president as he seeks to reclaim the White House.

Appearing Thursday night on CNN, Trump attorney James Trusty said the indictment includes charges of willful retention of national defense information  a crime under the Espionage Act, which polices the handling of government secrets  obstruction, false statements and conspiracy.

No one is above the law, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Fairfax, posted on Twitter.

University of Virginia Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato also weighed in.

"It says something that no one  absolutely no one  is shocked that Donald Trump is the first former president to be indicted. With more to come," he said Thursday night.

No one is above the law.  Rep. Gerry Connolly (@GerryConnolly) June 8, 2023

As of late Friday, no statement had been issued by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who has been considered as a possible 2024 presidential candidate against Trump.

When the former president was indicted on more than 30 counts related to business fraud in Manhattan in March, Youngkin posted on Twitter after news broke: It is beyond belief that District Attorney Alvin Bragg has indicted a former President and current presidential candidate for pure political gain. Arresting a presidential candidate on a manufactured basis should not happen in America. The lefts continued attempts to weaponize our judicial system erode peoples faith in the American justice system and it needs to stop.

The former president is dominating early primary polls despite the legal challenges.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis condemned the indictment of Trump, his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, as a political hatchet job.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation, DeSantis tweeted.

Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? he said.

The former president said he is scheduled to appear in a Miami court on Tuesday.

Prosecutors in Georgia also are investigating whether Trump broke the law while trying to overturn his 2020 election loss.
Richmond residents can now order cannabis products straight to their homes. All you need is an Instagram account and exact change.

Marijuana delivery services have sprung up in the city since 2021, when the state legalized adult recreational use. Now a customer can contact a seller on Instagram and place an order through an encrypted app. An hour or two later, a car will appear at the curb, ready to exchange marijuana flower, pre-rolled blunts and edibles for cash.

It is like Uber Eats for weed, and it has become a primary method of obtaining cannabis in Richmond and throughout the country.

One Instagram page that several people said provides cannabis products has 10,000 followers, sells T-shirts with the companys name and gives away free concert tickets. The Richmond Times-Dispatch sent a message to the Instagram page and requested a menu. In response, the newspaper received a text messaged list of products and prices from an unidentified phone number. The Times-Dispatch is not naming the Instagram page.

The practice is very much illegal.

While Virginia allows possession, it has not legalized the sale of marijuana. Without a proper marketplace, a black market has emerged. New Frontier Data, which studies cannabis consumption, expects illegal cannabis sellers in the state to make $2.4 billion this year.

Police and prosecutors have not cracked down on these businesses  so far. Richmond Commonwealths Attorney Colette McEachin said she was unaware delivery services exist in the city.

In other parts of the country, delivery services have been raided and indicted, and a federal prosecutor in Virginia said her office would pursue large-scale, interstate distributors.

Pay the driver cash

To make a purchase, a customer often starts by sending his or her phone number to a company through Instagram.

The menu sent to the newspaper lists dozens of products, including marijuana flower starting at $40 for an eighth of an ounce to as much as $400 for 1 ounce, depending on quality. A Virginia adult 21 years and older can legally possess up to 1 ounce. A person caught with more than 1 ounce but less than 4 ounces can receive a $25 civil fine. Marijuana remains illegal at the federal level.

According to the menu, cake mix-flavored joints cost $35, vape pens are $70 and red ruby grapefruit gummies are $30. Some products  such as Uni by Teds Budz and HiTech, a high-end flower  are labeled, branded and can be found online.

For $30, a customer can buy a T-shirt bearing the Instagram accounts name. Customers must pay cash, exact change is required and tips are encouraged, according to the menu. Orders can be placed each day between noon and 8 p.m.

Contacted via email, the Instagram pages operators denied selling cannabis.

We do want to clarify that we are exclusively an art/clothing/lifestyle brand, an email from the company stated. We strictly wanted to help bring the community of RVA closer by connecting local artists and their artwork to the community by putting their work into the hands of as many people as possible.

The companys customers receive stickers featuring designs of local artists. Other businesses use these stickers in their ventures, said the company, which declined an interview request.

Weve seen some confusion around that issue before, the company said.

Gifting marijuana was popularized in Washington D.C., where delivery services seized on a loophole in the law, said Eric Postow, a Northern Virginia lawyer who specializes in the cannabis industry. Distributors sell an expensive hat or T-shirt and include marijuana as a gift.

Everyone knows its a ruse, but that worked for D.C., Postow said.

That does not work in Virginia, where lawmakers specifically banned gifting marijuana in conjunction with the sale of goods or services. The only legal ways to obtain cannabis in Virginia are to grow it yourself, share it with a friend or obtain a prescription for medical marijuana and purchase it from a licensed distributor, such as GLeaf.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said it does not matter what the company says it is selling; as long as the buyer expects marijuana, it is still illegal. And the companies face another hurdle: product liability.

Because the sale is against the law, delivery services could be held liable in civil court for their products, Tobias said. If a person were to consume marijuana, drive a car and strike a person, the victim could sue the marijuana seller, who could be found legally responsible.

Its safe because theres a system

RyShawn, a 32-year-old Richmond resident, delivers cannabis products for a competing service. A handful of delivery companies in Richmond have popped up and disappeared in recent months.

He sells only products high enough in quality that he would consume himself, he said. His companys marijuana is grown out of state and comes from people he knows. The Times-Dispatch agreed to identify him only by his first name.

With brand names come trust, and that is what delivery services hope to earn. Their products are often labeled and packaged. This is not a rolled-up-plastic-bag operation.

We want people on the streets to trust what they have, RyShawn said. It is safe because theres a system.

RyShawn makes two to three sales a day, he said, and has earned up to $30,000 a year delivering. Business is best on weekends, at the middle and end of the month  when people receive their paychecks  and when the weather is bad.

He started using marijuana in college to reduce stress, and before the pandemic, he started delivering on the side to make extra money while working for a rental car business.

His service charges significantly less than some competitors, he said  less than $75 for an ounce. A good, consistent product keeps prices low.

He accepts payment on CashApp, and he is not too worried about police, who have shown little interest in stopping marijuana sales, he said. While delivering, he wears a sword on his left hip for protection. He has never had to use it, he said.

In Virginia, the illegal market is flourishing. New Frontier projects that $2.4 billion worth of marijuana will be sold in the state this year, and all but 1% will be sold illegally.

No other state has a legal framework like Virginias, experts said, where the recreational use is legal but the sale is not, making the states unregistered market larger than in other states.

And legalized possession has made marijuana use more popular. The states illicit market has grown 30% since 2019.

Prosecutors are not going after them

Delivery services are seemingly avoiding arrest and prosecution. McEachin, Richmonds top prosecutor, said she was not aware such businesses exist here.

The illicit companies seem to be jumping aboard a ship that hasnt been built yet, she said.

When McEachin learns about potential illegal activity, she asks the Richmond Police Department to investigate. She declined to say whether cannabis delivery could merit an investigation, and Richmond police did not respond to questions on the matter.

It is unclear if the business model will remain uninterrupted. Police have raided, and authorities have indicted, unlicensed sellers in other parts of the country. A federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Virginia told The Washington Post her office was primarily concerned with large-scale, interstate distributors. Illegal sales have prospered in some other states, where sales are illegal but the taxes are so high, customers choose to buy illegally.

Jessica D. Aber, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said the Eastern District will prosecute those whose massive enterprises violate federal and state law. But when authorities indicted a Washington D.C. distributor for the first time, the judge gave the defendants no jail time.

Police and prosecutors are stuck in a difficult spot, Postow said, having to decide whether to pursue a crime that may not exist in the years to come.

Were just in a really strange time, Postow said. Its obvious the people of Virginia want access to cannabis.

While Democrats in the General Assembly have pushed for a legal marketplace, Republicans often oppose it.

The problem with the black market, Postow said, is that it is not as safe as a legal marketplace. There are no consumer protection standards. Customers do not know if the grower used a clean lab or safe pesticides. Buyers often do not know what is in their product because it has not necessarily been tested.

I think theres a false sense of security out there, Postow said. Weve ignored it, and were allowing this problem to get bigger and bigger and bigger.

States with the highest revenue from cannabis taxes States with the highest revenue from cannabis taxes #11. Maine #10. California #9. Massachusetts #8. Michigan #7. Arizona #6. Illinois #5. Oregon #4. Alaska #3. Washington #2. Nevada #1. Colorado
The strongest evidence that Donald Trumps federal indictment is already shaping Virginias legislative elections: Politicians with the most to lose dont want to talk about it.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin, whose bromance with the former president has soured as Youngkins presumed national ambitions have soared, took to Twitter Friday morning, offering a meek, one-and-done backhanded defense of Trump, who remains deeply unpopular in Virginia, having twice lost the state. Youngkin didnt even mention 45 by name.

With his approval rating in a just-out poll the lowest since taking office 17 months ago  a sign Youngkin could hurt rather than help Republican candidates for the General Assembly  the governor suggested that the indictment of Trump for allegedly mishandling top-secret national security documents is politically motivated.

These charges are unprecedented and its a sad day for our country, especially in light of what clearly appears to be a two-tiered justice system where some are selectively prosecuted and others are not, said Youngkin, likening the case against Trump to criticism of Virginia parents angry over supposed woke-ism in the states public schools.

Regardless of your party, this undermines faith in our judicial system at exactly the time when we should be working to restore that trust.

These charges are unprecedented and its a sad day for our country, especially in light of what clearly appears to be a two-tiered justice system where some are selectively prosecuted, and others are not. Parents in Virginia know firsthand what its like to be targeted by  Glenn Youngkin (@GlennYoungkin) June 9, 2023

The governors remarks paled in comparison with his full-throated, Twitter-borne defense of Trump in March, when a Manhattan grand jury indicted him for concealing ahead of the 2016 election supposed hush-money payments to an adult-film star who said that she had an affair with Trump.

Arresting a presidential candidate on a manufactured basis should not happen in America, Youngkin said on the social-media platform at the time. The lefts continued attempts to weaponize our judicial system erode peoples faith in the American justice system and it needs to stop. What changed, beyond Trumps legal troubles ballooning and potentially inflating further? Though Trump is the double-digit favorite of Virginia Republicans for the 2024 nomination over Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the GOP brand, in general, and Youngkin, in particular, are somewhat diminished.

The latest Roanoke College Poll shows more voters identifying as Democrats, which likely explains Youngkins declining approval rating. Its 51%, down six points from 57% in February. In a blue-trending swing state such as Virginia, these shifts are a reminder that politicians in both parties face peril in straying too far from the center.

This may be why Youngkin, whos all but done for if Republicans fail to restore total control of the legislature, struck a timid note responding to the latest Trump indictment.

The governor, having been narrowly elected, faces a constant balancing act, bowing to the Republican Partys dominant MAGA crowd but doing so with disciplined understatement, lest he alienate GOP-leaning independents and anti-Trump Republicans whod been drifting to the Democratic Party.

As Democrats see it, Youngkin cant keep this up  at least thats their hope. However, in the November elections for the General Assembly, Trump could figure prominently, if not decisively, in 13 toss-up districts  three in the state Senate, now held by Democrats, and 10 in the House of Delegates, currently controlled by the GOP.

This is probably the first of several groups of indictments and the governors cozying up to election deniers and refusal to condemn Trump is going to haunt the entire Virginia GOP, said Sen. Scott Surovell of Fairfax, a prospective Senate Democratic floor leader should his party retain the chamber.

Though this years elections are irrefutably state-oriented, the Virginia electorate is increasingly nationally focused. This is because non-natives outnumber natives, magnifying the significance of party affiliation and marquee  usually national personalities, Democratic and Republican.

Its no wonder, then, that many of the issues Youngkin and legislative candidates would prefer to discuss  say, state tax cuts, ensnared in bogged-down budget negotiations between the House and Senate  are overshadowed by hot topics driving cable news and social media. And Trump is among the hottest.

Even before his current legal calamity, Trump was a name not uttered by Republicans in Virginias suburban battlegrounds.

Juan Pablo Segura, a wealthy info-tech guy running as a Republican for a state Senate seat anchored in Democratic-leaning Loudoun County, posted an introductory video on his website in which he does not mention the former president, the GOP or Youngkin, whose parents-rights theme was drawn from school controversies in Loudoun.

Republicans need no reminder Trump was the key to their rapid collapse, beginning in 2017 with a second consecutive Democratic statewide sweep and followed by three years of losses. The most devastating came in 2019, when the GOP surrendered the House and Senate, triggering a wave of left-of-center legislation long thwarted by Republicans.

But what goes around comes around. And disappointment with Joe Biden would be central to the Youngkin-led Republican resurgence in 2021.

The bungled American withdrawal from Afghanistan  closely watched in defense-rich Virginia  as well as continuing anxiety over COVID-19 disruptions of the economy and education energized GOP voters and dispirited Democrats. Republicans not only won all three statewide offices, they regained the House.

But holding the House and snagging the Senate, paradoxically, depend on a level of public obeisance to Trump that Youngkin attempts to avoid.

In Republican primaries in rural Southwest Virginia and suburbs south of Richmond, Del. Wren Williams of Patrick and Sen. Amanda Chase of Chesterfield boast their MAGA credentials, confident thats what their voters want to hear  more so now that Trump is under federal indictment.

Biden and his bureaucratic friends in Washington want to silence their political opponents before next years election since they cannot sell their Marxist principles to the American people, said Williams.

Chase, the self-styled Trump in heels, said that in the run-up to the June 20 primary, she prefers to emphasize constituent services and issues unique to her district because voters are tired of the controversies synonymous with Trump.

Its background noise for most people, said Chase.

But its the kind that gets her people to the polls.
VIRGINIA BEACH  Pat Robertson, a religious broadcaster who turned a tiny Virginia station into the global Christian Broadcasting Network, tried a run for president and helped make religion central to Republican Party politics in America through his Christian Coalition, died Thursday at the age of 93.

His death was confirmed in an email by his broadcasting network, which did not cite a cause.

Robertsons enterprises also included Regent University, an evangelical Christian school in Virginia Beach; the American Center for Law and Justice, which defends the First Amendment rights of religious people; and Operation Blessing, an international humanitarian organization.

For more than a half-century, Robertson was a familiar presence in American living rooms, known for his 700 Club television show, and in later years, his televised pronouncements of Gods judgment, blaming natural disasters on everything from homosexuality to the teaching of evolution.

The money poured in as he solicited donations, his influence soared and he brought a huge following with him when he moved directly into politics by seeking the GOP presidential nomination in 1988.

Robertson pioneered the now-common strategy of courting Iowas network of evangelical Christian churches, and finished in second place in the Iowa caucuses, ahead of Vice President George H.W. Bush.

His masterstroke was insisting that three million followers across the U.S. sign petitions before he would decide to run, Robertson biographer Jeffrey K. Hadden said. The tactic gave him an army.

He asked people to pledge that theyd work for him, pray for him and give him money, Hadden, a University of Virginia sociologist, told The Associated Press in 1988. Political historians may view it as one of the most ingenious things a candidate ever did.

Robertson later endorsed Bush, who won the presidency. Pursuit of Iowas evangelicals is now a ritual for Republican hopefuls.

Robertson started the Christian Coalition in Chesapeake in 1989, saying it would further his campaigns ideals. It became a major political force in the 1990s, mobilizing conservative voters through grassroots activities.

In 2000, the day before Virginias March 1 Republican presidential primary, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., then battling Texas Gov. George W. Bush for the GOP presidential nomination, traveled to Virginia Beach, where he labeled Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell as agents of intolerance who practice the political tactics of division and slander.

McCain described himself in his remarks as a pro-life, pro-family fiscal conservative and said his positions had been distorted by self-appointed leaders, including Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, and Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority.

The next day Bush carried Virginia with 53% of the vote and took a large step toward securing the GOP nomination. (Six years later, McCain accepted an invitation by Falwell to speak at Liberty University, the Christian school Falwell founded in Lynchburg. McCain told graduates to value the right of dissent.)

On Thursday, Bob McDonnell, Virginias governor from 2010 to 2014, praised Robertson in a statement as one of the most visionary and consequential men of the last 100 years. McDonnell, who earned a graduate degree from Regent University and later taught at the school, called Robertson a pioneer in using the power of television and technology to spread the Christian gospel around the world.

McDonnell added: Virginia, the nation, and the world are better because of the consequential work of a servant leader, Pat Robertson.

By the time of his resignation as the coalitions president in 2001, Robertsons impact on both religion and politics in the U.S. was enormous, according to John C. Green, an emeritus political science professor at the University of Akron.

Many followed the path Robertson cut in religious broadcasting, Green told the AP in 2021. In American politics, Robertson helped cement the alliance between conservative Christians and the Republican Party.

Marion Gordon Pat Robertson was born March 22, 1930, in Lexington, Virginia, to Absalom Willis Robertson and Gladys Churchill Robertson. His father served for 36 years as a U.S. representative and U.S. senator from Virginia.

After graduating from Washington and Lee University, he served as assistant adjutant of the 1st Marine Division in Korea.

He received a law degree from Yale University Law School, but failed the bar exam and chose not to pursue a law career.

Robertson met his wife, Adelia Dede Elmer, at Yale in 1952. He was a Southern Baptist, she was a Catholic, earning a masters in nursing. Eighteen months later, they ran off to be married by a justice of the peace, knowing neither family would approve.

Robertson was interested in politics until he found religion, Dede Robertson said in 1987. He stunned her by pouring out their liquor, tearing a nude print off the wall and declaring he found the Lord. They moved into a commune in New York Citys Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood because Robertson said God told him to sell all his possessions and minister to the poor.

Robertson received a masters in divinity from New York Theological Seminary in 1959, then drove south with his family to buy a bankrupt UHF television station in Portsmouth. He said he had just $70 in his pocket, but soon found investors, and CBN went on the air on Oct. 1, 1961. Established as a tax-exempt religious nonprofit, CBN brought in hundreds of millions, disclosing $321 million in ministry support in 2022 alone.

One of Robertsons innovations was to use the secular talk-show format on the networks flagship show, the 700 Club, which grew out of a telethon when Robertson asked 700 viewers for monthly $10 contributions. It was more suited to television than traditional revival meetings or church services, and gained a huge audience.

His guests eventually included several U.S. presidents: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

Robertsons son Gordon succeeded him in December 2007 as chief executive of CBN, now based in Virginia Beach.

His wife, Dede, a founding board member of CBN, died last year at the age of 94. The couple had four children, 14 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren, CBN said.
Days after tragedy and chaos ensued just few feet away, solidarity and candlelight illuminated Monroe Park.

On a hazy grey Thursday evening as the sun fell, dozens of people gathered at the Grace & Holy Trinity Episcopal Church for a prayer vigil and honored Huguenot High School graduate, Shawn Jackson, and his stepfather, Renzo Smith - who were fatally shot outside of the Altria Theater on Tuesday moments after Jackson's commencement ceremony - as well as others who are affected by gun violence.

The shriek and wailing of police and ambulance sirens from only a few days ago were replaced with prayer and song as supporters and congregants walked through the heart of the VCU campus that only days ago was a crime scene.

Yellow police barricade tapes gave way to the golden hue of candles as participants sang, "This little light of mine." For safety, an off-duty Richmond police officer was also in attendance throughout the vigil.

We figured that since we're a church here at Monroe Park, although we don't have a direct connection to the lives lost, that we want to talk for a space here for people to come, to feel safe, to pray, to mourn," said Paul Evans, the associate rector of the church who helped organize the vigil.

Evans said he had contacted a mother of someone who was injured in the chaos, but she said she wasnt ready emotionally to attend the memorial.

Whether or not they're with us, we are praying for them. And we want them to know that we care that they're welcome here, Evans said. We hope very much that people will know us as a place of healing.

Assistant Bishop Gayle Harris of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia led the prayers, noting the shooting occurred on the 157th day of 2023 -- but that it was the 279th mass shooting in the U.S. this year.

Tuesday a sense of security and comfort in our community was shattered," she said. We are shocked and should be; we cant afford to be complacent.

Harris called on people to be a blessing to the world, which she said is measured through how we respond in moments like these, and that one way to be a blessing was to demand government officials enact sensible gun laws.

Harris said she had received emails and calls from people around the world, including one from Israel today about gun violence in the U.S.

The shooting was the second to take place at a Richmond Public School event this year. Amari Pollard of Henrico was arraigned on Wednesday in Richmond General District Court on two counts of second-degree murder in connection with the shooting. Several other people were shot and injured including Jackson's 9-year-old sister, Renya Jackson Smith, who was struck by a car during the mayhem.

"What has become of America? Harris asked. We're living in a time of multiple pandemics: Pandemic COVID, pandemic of gun violence, the pandemic of lies and distortions that keep us from effectively addressing these issues, she said.

Said Susan Moffett, one of the vigil participants, I'm here for a need for solace, a need to be with others. Gun violence is sad for all of us. I think we need to do more than just feel bad about it. We need to try to act, and I think leaders need to speak out.

Kyle Reed, a VCU grad who formerly worked at Grace & Holy Trinity Church, attended to show support for his community.

Its just senseless violence. Having one of the happiest days of your life turned upside down and then having to live with that memory forever, its a lot to take in.

Elsewhere in Monroe Park, others also gathered in prayer circle.

Richmonders Morgan Bogert and Jadon Franklin led a separate group of people from different churches and faiths.

Were just praying over people who might have been here and were affected by the chaos and anxiety that happened, as well as people whose families were connected to the shooting. Bogert said.

We just believe that the best response to violence and loss is to call in the name of Jesus, Franklin added. Nobody in history has dealt with loss and tragedy better than Jesus, so we depend on him.
Two Tabasco men cuffed for assaulting PDC citizen

Playa del Carmen, Q.R.  Solidaridad Transit officers arrested two men for assaulting a citizen during an altercation. The victim, who was not identified, requested police help from the security booth of a shopping center after being assaulted.

When police arrived, the two men began to leave the scene. The victim detailed to police their physical and verbal assault by two men, one of whom was a taxi driver. One man was arrested from the scene and the second man, the taxi driver, intercepted on 28th Street south.

Police have identified the two detained as 32-year-old Belisario N and 25-year-old Esteban N from Tabasco. Police did not provide details of the altercation in their statement.
U.S. and Mexico officials meet at Felipe Angeles International Airport to talk strategy

Mexico City, Mexico  The Secretaries of Mexico and the United States held a meeting during a joint visit to AIFA. Officials spoke about the progress of moving cargo from the Mexico City International Airport (AICM), as well as the recategorization of Mexicos aviation security.

The Secretary of Infrastructure, Communications and Transportation (SICT), Jorge Nuno Lara, spoke with the Secretary of Transportation of the United States, Pete Buttigieg, in the framework of a visit made by the North American official to the Felipe Angeles International Airport (AIFA).

During the tour, both officials spoke about the progress of the respective dedicated cargo moving processes from the Mexico City International Airport (AICM), which is being done to decongest the countrys second busiest airport.

Secretary Buttigieg visited the loading facilities and the control tower of the AIFA during his Wednesday visit. Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard Casaubon and the United States Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, were at the airport during the U.S. visit.

Both sides also discussed the ongoing issue of Mexico returning to a Category 1 safety status. Nuno Lara reiterated to his counterpart that Mexico satisfactorily responded to 100 percent of the evaluation carried out by the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) audit team last week, as part of the final audit to recover Category 1.

The head of the SICT commented that among the actions carried out by the Federal Civil Aviation Agency (AFAC) in the recategorization process, the development of a comprehensive implementation plan to comply with the safety standards established by the Organization of International Civil Aviation (ICAO).

President Lopez Obrador also met with Pete Buttigieg at the Felipe Angeles International Airport. Photo: AMLO June 7, 2023.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador also met with Pete Buttigieg at the Felipe Angeles International Airport.

AMLO explained that they addressed two issues, one of which was the transfer of cargo airlines to the Felipe Angeles International Airport and the other, the return of the Benito Juarez International Airport to category 1.

The meeting, he said, was respectful and purposeful.
Venezuelan man to stand trial for starting deadly INM fire that killed 40

Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua  Venezuelan man Carlos C is to stand trail for his involvement in a deadly INM building fire that killed 40. During his Wednesday arraignment, a judge found sufficient evidence to move forward with charges against Carlos C.

Carlos C was arrested from his Ciudad Juarez hotel room last week. He was the second person to be detained for the fire.

According to the FGR, he is accused of being the perpetrator for the crimes of homicide, injuries and damages caused by the fire in the provisional immigration stay in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, allegedly being one of the subjects who started the fire.

His trial is set to begin in four months.
WASHINGTON  Women often use hormone therapy to relieve hot flashes and other menopause symptoms  and new research suggests patches or creams may be safer for their blood pressure than pills.

As womens bodies produce lower levels of reproductive hormones during menopause, their risk for heart disease rises. High blood pressure further increases that risk  but its not clear whether theres a link with hormone therapy for menopause symptoms.

Canadian researchers wondered if the way hormones are absorbed  orally, vaginally or through the skin  could play a role.

The University of Calgary team examined health records of more than 112,000 women ages 45 and older who filled prescriptions for at least six months worth of estrogen-only hormone treatment between 2008 and 2019. They tracked which women went on to develop high blood pressure at least a year after starting treatment.

While the differences werent huge, women who took estrogen pills had a 14% higher risk of developing hypertension compared to those using skin patches or creams, the researchers reported Monday. Oral estrogen carried a 19% greater risk than vaginal versions.

The findings were published in the journal Hypertension.

Hormone therapy has a mix of risks and benefits that mean its not for everyone. Today its prescribed not to prevent disease but to relieve menopause-related symptoms  generally using the lowest possible dose for the shortest time. Most commonly used are combination pills of estrogen and another hormone, progestin. Estrogen-only pills typically are prescribed to women without a uterus.

Different versions of hormone therapy may work better for different menopause symptoms, something the study didnt address.

But it adds important clues to understanding the complex relationship between hormone therapy and blood pressure, said Dr. Garima Sharma, a womens heart specialist with Virginias Inova Health System and the American Heart Association.

Sharma would like to see a more rigorous trial that compares different hormone versions. But she pointed to a possible biological explanation: Maybe oral estrogen affects enzymes linked to blood pressure as its being processed, while skin and vaginal versions have much more limited activity in the body.

Still, these findings are very clinically relevant, Sharma said in an an email, and suggest its especially important to monitor blood pressure in women who use oral hormone therapy.
A Botetourt County man was sentenced to six years in prison Friday for pepper-spraying police officers who were trying to defend the U.S. Capitol from a mob he was part of.

Markus Maly, 49, has called himself a January 6 P.O.W who was unfairly convicted by a jury last December.

His comments to a far-right online publication, which also promoted a fund-raising campaign that garnered more than $16,000 in contributions for his family, became an issue at his sentencing.

Federal prosecutors asked U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta to fine Maly the amount raised, citing what it called his fraudulent attempts to profit from his notoriety.

The money he has raised following his conviction is entirely profit built on his efforts to publicize his case and portray himself as a political prisoner and martyr, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Rancourt wrote in court documents.

But Mehta declined to impose a fine that Malys lawyer said he had no ability to pay.

The $16,516 collected through a fund-raising website has already been spent to support an extended family that lost its sole breadwinner when Maly was incarcerated following his trial, according to assistant federal public defender Benjamin Schiffelbein of Roanoke.

In stark contrast to Mr. Maly asking for funds to help his familys living expenses, former President Trump has received millions based on his false, flagrant, and inciteful claims that he won the 2020 presidential election, Schiffelbein wrote in a sentencing memorandum, referring to campaign contributions Trump has received.

If the government wants to claw back earnings from those who profited from crimes related to January 6, there is any easy target who actually has the ability to pay, the document stated.

Testimony at a December trial showed that Maly traveled alone by bus to Washington the morning of Jan. 6, 2021. There, he joined thousands at a rally to hear Trump urge them to fight like hell against an election he claimed was stolen from him.

Maly then joined a large and unruly crowd that vastly outnumbered police who were trying to defend the Capitol.

At about 2:30 p.m., Maly made his way to the front of a mob that had gathered on the Lower West Terrace. Facing a line of police officers who were trying to prevent rioters from entering a tunnel that led into the Capitol, Maly directed a stream of pepper spray at the formation.

The spray struck Christopher Boyle, an officer with the Metropolitan Police Department, directly in the face. Boyle was temporarily overcome by the toxic irritant, which caused pain that he ranked at the top of a 10-point scale.

Rioters then forced their way into the tunnel, yelling heave ho in unison as they pushed against police. A canister of pepper spray was passed between Maly and two other men, who were tried together with him, before one of his co-defendants discharged the orange-colored substance, the jury was told.

Maly then took a police shield that was passed to him, saying he intended to keep it as a trophy.

At one point, he climbed scaffolding that had been erected for the upcoming inauguration to get a better view of the chaos he was part of. This is what happens when you steal elections, he said in a selfie video that showed rioters climbing the steps of the Capitol.

You get a p- off f America, he said. And America knows how to fight back.

In court Friday, Maly insisted that he merely occupied space in the crowd and denied attacking and pepper-spraying police.

I went to a rally. Thats what I did, he told the judge.

The judge said jurors had ample evidence to convict Maly of assaulting police. Its not that you were there and occupying space. Its that you did these things and kept doing them that day, Mehta told him.

More than 1,040 people from across the country  including seven from Western Virginia  have been charged with participating in the insurrection.

Of the approximately 524 defendants sentenced through this week, about 310 have received prison terms. About 118 more were placed on home detention, and the remainder got probation, community service or other non-custodial forms of punishment, according to figures from the U.S. Attorneys Office.

Prosecutors asked Mehta to impose a sentence of 15 years and eight months for Maly, citing the severe gravity of his conduct and a prior criminal record that included more than 30 convictions.

Schiffelbein countered that his clients past crimes were that of a young man living in Florida. Maly later moved to Botetourt County, started a family and found work as a flooring installer.

At the time the request was made in April, it would have been the longest punishment to date in the insurrection cases. But since then, the founder of the extremist group the Oath Keepers was sentenced to 18 years for his role in orchestrating the uprising.

Some information in this story came from the Associated Press.
Radford University President Bret Danilowicz said he is focused on fundamentals as the institution considers its next steps.

One of the goals that I set for my first year at the university was to develop and present an initial framework for Radford Universitys next strategic plan, said Danilowicz, who started last summer. As weve learned together over this year, theres a lot of work to be done at the university.

He delivered a presidents report to the university board of visitors during its meeting Friday.

A whole lot of work to be done, and much of that triangulates back to enrollment, Danilowicz said. Its my belief that there are a lot of fundamental improvements that can be made at the institution.

He identified four fundamental focus areas: defining Radfords distinctive nature, stabilizing enrollment, spurring economic development in partnership with the community and streamlining the institution to increase efficiency.

Weve really got to focus on those changes first, Danilowicz said. With so much work to be done, I do believe its important to put a vision out there for where we are going to be moving as an institution, so we can prioritize those changes and make sure that were aligning our work together.

To that end, he said leadership at Radford is using those four priorities to formulate goals for a two-year strategic plan. That plan will steer the school through December 2025, after the universitys current strategic plans come to a close at the end of this year.

There is a lot of work that will fall outside of those priority areas, Danilowicz said. Theyre important things that need to get done, but they cant serve as distractions.

As the two-year plan wraps up closer to 2025, Radford will then work toward creating a five-year plan for 2026-30, Danilowicz said. More details about the upcoming two-year plan should be available in October, he said.

Its been a fascinating year getting to know the students, the faculty, the whole community around us, which includes the business leaders our elected officials. Just such a range of individuals to work with, Danilowicz said. I do feel that I have a good understanding of the expectations of those individuals and the changes that they would like to see at the institution.

Also during the board of visitors meeting Friday, Rector Deb McMahon was named to another year as chair of the 14-member board. Board member Marquett Smith was elected Vice Rector.
PULASKI  Rob Graham was named the next superintendent of the Pulaski County school system Thursday, just two days after an emotional meeting in Radford where the school board voted to accept his resignation.

Graham starts on July 1. He will succeed Kevin Siers, who was recently named the district chief for Franklin County schools.

The Pulaski County School Board approved Grahams hiring on a 5-0 vote and a few members voiced praise for their new superintendent. The announcement was met with resounding applause from the crowd in the Pulaski County Middle School auditorium.

The mood Thursday evening stood in contrast to one in Radford Tuesday, when the citys school board voted 5-0 to accept what was called a voluntary resignation. More than 100 people  including teachers and parents  turned out at the Radford meeting to show support for Graham, who was visibly upset at times that night.

Graham was at the Pulaski County meeting where, after the vote, he delivered some remarks on his new job and posed for photos and shook hands with board members and other district staff.

Im absolutely thrilled. Couldnt be more happy and excited, said Graham, who has spent decades in education.

Although Graham has been with Radford City Schools since 2006, he had previously worked for the Pulaski County school system. When he moved back to the area in 2003 as part of a desire to see his children grow up in Southwest Virginia, he took a job as a building administrator at Dublin Elementary School. He said he held that job for a couple years before moving to central office.

As he did earlier in the week with the Radford schools staff, Graham voiced praise for the employees in Pulaski County.

I want to make a difference in the lives of children, said Graham, who added that hes excited about how professionalism of the countys school board.

Although Graham earlier this week declined to discuss the specifics of his resignation from the Radford district, he said Thursday that he became interested in the Pulaski County job when the application process opened.

Siers was named the Franklin County schools boss last month. He said Thursday that he was among those who cast a vote for Graham when he was named Region VII Superintendent of the Year earlier this year.

But I still wasnt sure what my fate was going to be in Radford, Graham said, adding that he still held out some hope that the situation there would have gone differently. Maybe hoping is the right word, but deep down in my heart I kind of knew where it was going, where it was going to go.

Radford school board members have declined to discuss Grahams resignation, but have wished him well in his future. Graham and the Radford board issued a joint statement Wednesday that, among other things, said the superintendent notified the elected body on June 4 of his intent to voluntarily resign.

Rob Graham has been a valued and dedicated employee of Radford City Schools as an administrator and, for the last eight years, as division superintendent, said Radford school board Chairwoman Jenny Riffe in the statement. As a native of Radford, Rob has led the division with an abiding love for the children in our school division and a commitment to their success.

Grahams resignation from Radford is effective June 30. He has been that systems superintendent since 2015 and was a 1987 Radford High School graduate.

Many who turned out in support of the superintendent in Radford Tuesday night speculated that he was being pushed out and that he would probably resign. Graham himself told the supportive crowd that night that he was heartbroken and didnt want to leave the district.

Many of the Radford supporters criticized their board, with at least a few saying the elected bodys issues with Graham and other administrative staff were rooted to several board members extremist political views. Supporters said board members have repeatedly brought up problems with little credible evidence.

On a Facebook account under the name of one of the board members, posts were made earlier this week about issues related to Grahams management. Those posts have since been removed from the account, based on what was accessible Thursday.

Pulaski County School Board Chairwoman Beckie Cox declined to comment on the Radford situation earlier in the week, but she said she and her colleagues feel very fortunate to have Graham.

Their [Radford] loss is our gain, and were happy to have him, Cox said.

Pulaski County School Board Vice Chairman Timothy Hurst voiced comments on the decision, too. He said there are currently 20 superintendent openings in Virginia.

The great ones dont last long. Its an extremely competitive environment, he said.

Hurst said he knows there were questions about whether the board should have appointed an interim chief as they continued their search. He said that choice presented a challenge because its difficult to find a district chief during the middle of the school year.

Its not fair to the division  and absolutely not fair to the children, Hurst said.

He said they also didnt want to pass up on the right candidate if that person was already available.

Cox didnt provide specifics of Grahams contract  including his salary  Thursday, but said the district will probably release those details next week.

At Radford, Graham was paid an annual salary of $153,207, according to figures provided earlier this week.

A condition in Grahams Radford contract would have entitled him to continue receiving pay for two more years had the board terminated him without cause. He said those conditions are now moot because he voluntarily resigned.

Graham said hes now looking forward to getting to know the Pulaski County staff better. He said hell work to make improvements to areas staff say need attention and build on the districts existing strengths.

I think Im in a place that I can help, they can help me and we can move together as a family, Graham said.
This spring, members of YMCA at Virginia Tech staff, board, volunteers and Y Student Leaders gathered for a special celebration at the Y offices in the historic Lancaster House in Blacksburg. The organization recognized and honored Executive Director Ryan Martin for 10 years of excellent service, and celebrated our graduating student leaders.

Board Treasurer Jim Lawrence said, Ryan Martin took the helm of a ship in distress in 2013 when the YMCA at Virginia Tech was floundering. With his attention to detail and persistent leadership, the Y was able to weather that storm and is now expanding programs with staff, student and volunteer participation. With Ryans leadership, the Y at VT is not only surviving, it is thriving. And planning is underway for next years celebration of the organizations 150 years of service to the campus and surrounding community. The board of directors is proud of todays YMCA at VT and its rich history, and we look forward to the future with Ryan at the helm. Thank you, Ryan!

As executive director, Ryan is responsible not only for the success of the organization, but also filling in for the needs of the organization day to day. Board member Meredith Jones said, Ryan spends countless hours ensuring the programs are well staffed and supported even if it means filling in personally for volunteers when the need arises. Though an executive director position can be difficult, for 10 years Ryan has remained positive, energetic, and always does his work with a smile. He believes in filling community needs by leveraging the Ys resources and collaborating with other community groups. This has allowed our organization to capitalize on creative opportunities within our region, providing much-needed services. Our organization is extremely thankful for his leadership and perseverance to make this YMCA the success it has become.

During the event we also celebrated our graduating Y Student Leaders. Shifa Banani has been with the YSL for two years and served as president of the Y student organization this past school year. Naya Nerikar is in her second year as the program leader for Healthy Kids Day. Milee Makawana is the program leader for Joining Generations, our program connecting seniors in the community with Virginia Tech students. Christine Tan is the program leader for Meals on Main. Catherine Breeden is the Field Study for events and engagement activities. These five students graduated from Virginia Tech in May. Jol Burgan has been the manager of our Thrift Shop for two years and graduated from Radford University.

To learn more about the YMCA at Virginia Tech, go to https://vtymca.org/.

- Submitted by Laureen Blakemore
BRISTOL  PBS Appalachia Virginia plans launch of the nations first all-digital public television station dedicated to Southwest Virginia, in conjunction with the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Bristol.

In partnership with Hard Rock International, PBS Appalachia plans to construct a state-of-the-art television studio in the future Hard Rock Bristol location, according to a written statement. The studio was originally envisioned to be located inside the Southwest Virginia Cultural Center and Marketplace.

Work is currently underway at the future casino site at 500 Gate City Highway and the facility is expected to open in summer 2024.

The resort and casino plans to dedicate 4,000-square-feet of space to house a glass-encased television studio, podcast studio and adjacent control room, allowing people to witness television productions in progress or enjoy local shows on a massive virtual wall during non-production hours, according to the statement.

Partnering with Hard Rock is a perfect fit for PBS Appalachia because we are both community-minded companies who want to help move the region forward, says Julie Newman, General Manager of PBS Appalachia, and former news anchor in Bristol. We are grateful for their partnership and support.

The studios strategic location is designed to ensure regional access and high foot traffic.

Construction will take place over the next year, with anticipated opening in July 2024.

Starting Saturday, viewers can watch the new station through local cable providers or enjoy live streaming via the website PBSAVirginia.org or the mobile app PBS Appalachia Virginia. Additionally, viewers around the world can access programs on-demand at PBS.org or through the mobile app.

Our communities deserve a station that captures the culture, heritage and artistic talent of our region, Newman said. Our producers are from Southwest Virginia, they are natively familiar with our culture, and they are using cutting-edge equipment to produce Emmy-winning content that speaks to the heart of Appalachia.

In addition to broadcasting the full PBS schedule, PBS Appalachia will debut with three local series. Episodes from all three programs were pre-released and have garnered eight Emmy nominations from the National Capital Chapter, along with five Telly Awards and two VAB Awards.

Every Monday, viewers can tune in to French Magnolia Cooks, as Chef Missy leads audiences on a culinary journey from hunt and farm to wine and table, shared with family and friends.

Thursdays belong to Hometowns, an off-the-beaten-path expedition through Southwest Virginia communities. The show delivers personal stories, and an authentic look at life in a small town. Audiences are treated to an immersive experience, guided by those who know the land and her history.

On Saturdays, The Life of a Musician delivers a stripped-down, authentic acoustic interview and performance show featuring some of the nations most talented guitarists.

Hear unscripted one-on-one conversations, and gain insight into the musicians life through personal anecdotes and trade secrets, according to the musician.
A California jury has returned a $63 million verdict against Chevron after finding the oil giant covered up a toxic chemical pit on land purchased by a man who built a house on it and was later diagnosed with a blood cancer
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing an amendment to the United States Constitution that would enshrine into law regulations on guns, including implementing universal background checks and raising the minimum age to buy a firearm to 21
More in Graduation Collection | Congratulations to the Class of 2023 (6 of 20)
" " As with any radically new weapons system, the unavoidably expensive Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter inspired doubt as to its capabilities. Those doubts were erased during the Persian Gulf War, when Stealth fighters slipped through Iraqi radar and attacked their targets with impunity. See more military jets pictures. m

The famous Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter was that rarest commodity in the American military arsenal -- a well-kept secret. Lockheed began development of the Stealth Fighter at its secret Skunk Works facility in 1976, and by 1977 had subscale-technology demonstrators flying under the code name Have Blue at the famous Area 51 proving grounds at Groom Dry Lake, Nevada.

Military Jets Image Gallery

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Led by the late, great Ben Rich, engineers at the Skunk Works developed a formula for stealth by constructing an aircraft with flat surfaces placed at angles so that incoming radar beams are deflected away. (Kelly Johnson, the founding father of the Skunk Works, had stayed on as a consultant, and in his view, Ben's ideas simply would not work. Ben was delighted to be able to prove, for once, that his old boss was wrong.)

This faceted-plate construction technique, combined with the use of radar-absorbent materials and careful attention to the suppression of infrared signals, reduced the radar signature of the supersecret Stealth Fighter to the size of a marble. It was, quite literally, invisible to radar.

The first Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter prototype flew on June 18, 1981, piloted by Harold Farley, Jr., but the existence of the aircraft was not acknowledged by the Air Force until 1988. The need for secrecy stemmed from the unique nature of the F-117A's mission. It was to fly alone against the heaviest enemy defenses, and destroy key command and control centers, radars, and other vital targets with precision-guided munitions.

The term "stealth fighter" is really a misnomer, for the F-117A is purely an attack aircraft, and does not have the armament or the maneuverability to engage in dogfighting. The nature of the mission and the characteristics of the aircraft demanded extremely skilled, well-trained pilots, and competition for the chance to fly the Nighthawk was intense.

The aircraft was introduced into combat on December 19, 1989, in Operation Just Cause, the U.S. attack on Panama to capture President Manuel Noriega. When Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the F-117As were called into action. Twenty-one Nighthawks flew from their Tonopah, Nevada, base to Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. From there, 18 of the aircraft made the 15-hour nonstop flight to King Khalid Air Base in Saudi Arabia, refueling seven times en route.

Keep reading to learn more about the Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter, and to check out specifications for this airplane.

For more information on airplanes, check out:

Aviation Stealth and the Birth of Stealth Fighters There have been attempts at aviation stealth since the First World War, when the Germans attempted to cover some aircraft with Cellon, a clear, cellophanelike material. It did not work -- the clear panels reflected the sun even better than painted ones. Other attempts at stealth included mufflers for engines, camouflage, and even an array of lights mounted on the wings and fuselage of a World War II Consolidated B-24, intended to make it "invisible" against a light background. But radar, which tracks aircraft by reflected radio waves, became the biggest threat. The answer, ironically, was found by Lockheed's Denys Overholser, who read an obscure paper by a Soviet scientist, Pyotr Ufimtsev. Overholser and Bill Schroeder used the paper as a basis for creating a computer program "ECHO I" which showed how "faceting" would give an airplane stealth characteristics. The Stealth Fighter was born. Read More
Not surprisingly, pyroCbs can be incredibly dangerous. On Feb. 7, 2009, the most devastating day of fires in Australia's history spawned at least three pyroCbs that carried embers 18 miles (30 kilometers) from their source and sparked lightning that ignited additional fires 62 miles (100 kilometers) away. Known as the Black Saturday bushfires, these fires collectively burned 1,737 square miles (4,500 square kilometers) and claimed 173 lives.

A pyroCb that formed during the Carr Fire near Redding, California in 2018 had such strong winds that it created a tornado-strength fire vortex, and a pyroCb in Canberra, Australia, in 2003 was so extreme that it released a torrent of black hail and turned the daytime sky as dark as night.

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Fortunately, these events are still relatively rare, although 2019 research from Australia suggests that climate change may cause conditions there to become more favorable for the formation of pyroCbs in the future.

Nick Nauslar, who forecasts fire weather for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service, said that about 25 to 50 pyroCb events occur around the world each year. He said that predicting exactly when the storms will occur remains a challenge for scientists.

"They are still really difficult to forecast," Nauslar said. Even though scientists can check the weather conditions before a fire, they can't describe exactly how a wildfire will affect the lower atmosphere and change the weather conditions. The effort to study pyroCbs "is still so young and there's still so much to learn," Nauslar said.

" " This natural-color image collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) shows a pyrocumulonimbus cloud erupting from a 2014 fire north of Buffalo Lake in Alberta, Canada. NASA
Kenneth Nixon, left, talks to police recruits about his own wrongful conviction at age 19 for a murder he did not commit. Credit: Fred Zwicky

I'm in a room with more than 100 police recruits and I can't believe what I'm hearing. The future police officers are learning about the devastating consequences of criminal prosecutions gone wrong. These aren't just abstract stories. More than a dozen exonerees are here to share their stories with the police recruits.

This is the Wrongful Conviction Awareness and Avoidance course, a training program first introduced years ago as an elective class at the Police Training Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The Illinois Innocence Project at the University of Illinois Springfield developed the class with former PTI director Michael Schlosser in 2016.

This year, the Illinois State Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board mandated that all Illinois police recruits participate in the four-hour course as part of their standard training. Today is the first class since the mandate was put in place.

Schlosser tells the recruits he took a risk when he first brought the training to PTI seven years ago. Police authorities are sometimes unwilling to consider that wrongful convictions occur, seeing exonerations as a setback rather than a much-needed course correction. When he first discussed the course with a former director of the police training board, he was told to shut it down.

"So I didn't do the wrongful conviction class anymore," Schlosser says. "I did a 'guest speaker' course that was identical to it. I took a chance on that because it was too important to me. And it was the right thing to do."

The class always featured at least one exoneree telling their story to the recruits. The current training board understands the importance of the lessons embedded in those stories, Schlosser says.

Today, the recruits hear from several key people at the Illinois Innocence Project: Larry Golden, a founder of the IIP; Marc Beach, a retired police officer who now serves as the director of its the Wrongful Conviction Awareness and Avoidance Program; former executive director John Hanlon; and interim director Stephanie Kamel, who offers some devastating statistics about wrongful convictions.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, more than 3,000 people have been exonerated in the U.S. since 1989. This number reflects only those who have had their cases fully reviewed and overturned for serious crimes such as murder and rape.

It does not include the many exonerations for lesser felonies and misdemeanors, Kamel says. The mistakes that lead to wrongful convictions not only victimize innocent people, they also allow the actual perpetrators to commit more crimes.

Wrongful convictions also can be deadly for those wrongfully incarcerated, Kamel says.

"The National Academy of Sciences has taken the exonerations in real life and looked at it scientifically," she tells the recruits. "According to the statistics, 4% of all death row inmates are innocent. Right now, that means 97 people on death row are innocent."

Exoneree Kristine Bunch tells recruits about her experience of a wrongful conviction for arson and murder for a fire that was the result of faulty wiring, not a crime. Bunch spent 17 years in prison before she was exonerated. Credit: Fred Zwicky

Kamel explains how innocent people end up behind bars, often with extended sentences or death sentences. According to the NRE*, bad forensics account for 25% of the wrongful convictions that are later overturned, she says. Eyewitness misidentifications are implicated in 28% of cases.

False confessionsthe result of confusion, exhaustion, intoxication and/or coercion in police interviewsoccur in 12% of the cases. Roughly 27% of exonerees had inadequate defense counsel. Official misconduct occurred in 55% of the wrongful convictions. Such misconduct includes coercion, violence and manufactured, suppressed or destroyed evidence.

Kamel describes the case of Ronald Cotton, who was convicted of rape after the victim confidently but mistakenly picked him outfirst in a photograph and later in a line-upand identified him as the perpetrator. More than a decade later, DNA evidence exonerated Cotton. For many years, he and his accuser, Jennifer Thompson, told the story of her mistake to anyone who could listen. Thompson founded Healing Justice, a nonprofit working on restorative justice.

Kamel also tells the story of Chris Ochoa, who confessed to a rape and murder he hadn't committed after police coerced and threatened him with the death penalty. Years later, when the real perpetrator confessed to law enforcement, Ochoa maintained his false confession due to fear from the threats made against him and his family during his two 14-hour interrogations. Three years after the real perpetrator came forward, DNA testing exonerated Ochoa and he was released after spending 13 years in prison.

The exonerees here today also have their own Kafkaesque stories. Sabrina Butler was sentenced to death in Mississippi in 1990 at the age of 18 for a murder she did not commit. John Huffington of Maryland, Ronald Keine of New Mexico, Ray Krone of Arizona and Ralph Wright Jr. of Florida were all sent to death row after wrongful convictions. Others were sentenced to decades or life in prison on convictions related to murder, sexual assault, kidnappingall of them later overturned.

"We're not talking about people who were freed because of an error," Hanlon says when it's his turn to speak. "We're talking about people who had nothing to do with the crime for which they were convicted."

The main event of the day is a presentation by Kristine Bunch, who in 1996 was wrongfully convicted of arson and the murder of her child after a fire broke out in her home. Bunch spent more than 17 years in prison before the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University helped her get the conviction overturned.

She describes her bewilderment when it became clear that police suspected her in the death of her own son, how the evidence was improperly analyzed and how her lack of understanding of forensics or police procedure further limited her ability to counter the charges or challenge the interpretation of the evidence.

After her exoneration, Bunch says she had trouble trusting the police. When she first met Michael Schlosser, she thought he might be shady because he was a cop.

"We all have unconscious bias," she tells the recruits. "We judge people based on appearance. I see this program breaking down barriers. We can all stop making mistakes."

When her presentation ends, every person in the roompolice recruits and exonereesstands and applauds.

Provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
WHO recommends Politecnico di Milano guidelines for the design of future hospitals. Credit: Politecnico di Milano

The World Health Organization presented in Baku (Azerbaijan) the new design recommendations for new hospitals to be built in the European Region, the result of a research partnership with the Politecnico di Milano. The document was prepared by the Design & Health Lab in the Department of Architecture, Construction Engineering and the Built Environment at the Politecnico under the coordination of Professor Stefano Capolongo.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of preparedness for natural and man-made disasters, emergencies and other social crises. The ability to provide continuous health services is crucial in these situations, and designing an architecture for health is the key route towards tackling the multiple factors that are transforming society, the economy and the environment.

Hospitals are particularly important because they best interpret these transformations, promote urban regeneration and have a widespread positive impact in a given area. For a hospital to remain functional during emergencies and disasters, it must be designed with a solid and flexible infrastructure, high resistance to hazards and with particular focus on safety and comfort.

The COVID-19 pandemic also underlined the importance of the hospital environment in the transmission of pathogens and highlighted the need to ensure sustainable compliance with hygiene standards.

"What will the hospital of the future look like? We are already in the future: technology, design and organizational solutions have reached very advanced levels," says Professor Stefano Capolongo, director of the Department of Architecture, Construction Engineering and the Built Environment at the Politecnico di Milano.

"The challenge today is to systemize all principles aimed at sustainable, inclusive development from a One Health perspective. The technical brief prepared for the World Health Organization brings together the main strategies for the implementation of flexible, resilient and evidence-based innovative hospitals throughout the European region."

The guidelines are designed for health institutions, health organizations and their governance bodies: the general managers, but also architects and technicians who work on health infrastructure.

The recommendations address future challenges from different points of analysis. Firstly, the choice of hospital location, with different functions depending on whether it is located in the city center or in the suburbs (the latter capable of serving larger areas). The focus then shifts to the importance of green areas for the benefit of patients and medical staff and the well-being of workers.

The spaces need to be designed so as to be accessible to all segments of the population, including in terms of aesthetics, both inside and outside the hospital.

At managerial level, digitization makes a significant contribution, greatly facilitating the management of goods and services in the hospitals and the organization of work and services in the local area.

The hospital of the future must not be closed and unchangeable: synergies with the local health network can improve services and the resilience of the health system and facilitate patient access to local medical services.

In planning, we must be aware of the risks of infection within hospitals, and therefore pay due attention to air quality control in design and construction, which must include hygiene management.

The hospital of the future is socially, economically and ecologically sustainable, with a strategy that is integral to the entire life cycle of the facility, including energy and resource management, and its possible adaptations and extensions.

Prevention and safety are essential, from the point of view of both general safety and the risk of fire and seismic events; an issue that must be addressed comprehensively: design and construction, maintenance, training and emergency preparedness.

Provided by Polytechnic University of Milan
 By 6-3 vote, SCOTUS expands Second Amendment rights by striking down NY public-carry licensing requirements | Main | "Nothing but Time: Elderly Americans Serving Life Without Parole" 

June 23, 2022

Are all broad felon-in-possession criminal gun statutes now constitutionally suspect after Bruen?

I am still working my way through the Supreme Court's various opinions in today's big Second Amendment case, Bruen (basics here). And, because I am not a Second Amendment expert, my first-cut reactions to Bruen may not be worth much. But, since the majority opinion in Bruen seems to reject lots of recent lower court rulings regarding the application of the Second Amendment, I cannot help but start wondering now if all broad felon-in-possession criminal statutes are constitutionally suspect.

Lower courts have largely upheld felon-in-possession criminal prohibitions even since Heller decided the Second Amendment provided for an individual right. But I read Part II of the Court's opinion in Bruen as rejecting much lower-court jurisprudence since Heller and creating a new textual and historical approach for the consideration of Second Amendment claims:

In keeping with Heller, we hold that when the Second Amendments plain text covers an individuals conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. To justify its regulation, the government may not simply posit that the regulation promotes an important interest. Rather, the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nations historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only if a firearm regulation is consistent with this Nations historical tradition may a court conclude that the individuals conduct falls outside the Second Amendments unqualified command.... Heller and McDonald do not support applying means-end scrutiny in the Second Amendment context. Instead, the government must affirmatively prove that its firearms regulation is part of the historical tradition that delimits the outer bounds of the right to keep and bear arms.... We reiterate that the standard for applying the Second Amendment is as follows: When the Second Amendments plain text covers an individuals conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nations historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only then may a court conclude that the individuals conduct falls outside the Second Amendments unqualified command.

American citizens with felony records are surely part of "the people" covered by the plain text of the Second Amendment, and so their conduct in possessing a firearms would seem presumptively protected. Turning then to "the Nations historical tradition," I surmise from various academic articles (see here and here; see also here) that only dangerous and violent people, not all felons, were historically disallowed to have firearms. As one of these articles puts it: "there is no historical justification for completely and forever depriving peaceable citizens  even nonviolent felons  of the right to keep and bear arms."

But one need not take an academic's word for this notion that there is not historical tradition for dispossessing all felons. Then-Judge, now Justice Amy Coney Barrett made this point quite effectively when dissenting in Kanter v. Barr, 919 F.3d 437 (7th Cir. 2019). Here is the start of her lengthy dissent in a case upholding application of the federal felon-in-possession ban to a nonviolent felon:

History is consistent with common sense: it demonstrates that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns. But that power extends only to people who are dangerous. Founding-era legislatures did not strip felons of the right to bear arms simply because of their status as felons. Nor have the parties introduced any evidence that founding-era legislatures imposed virtue-based restrictions on the right; such restrictions applied to civic rights like voting and jury service, not to individual rights like the right to possess a gun. In 1791  and for well more than a century afterward  legislatures disqualified categories of people from the right to bear arms only when they judged that doing so was necessary to protect the public safety.

Notably, the Bruen opinion for the Court makes repeated reference to the petitioners as "law-abiding" individuals. But I am not sure that dicta alone could or should undermine what Second Amendment's plain text and historical tradition now seem to suggest, namely that governments are on very shaky constitutional ground if and whenever they seek to criminalize gun possession by nonviolent (or "non-dangerous") persons with criminal records.

June 23, 2022 at 12:56 PM | Permalink

Comments

Doug --

You are a positive genius at finding some way to turn a disaster for liberals into a big victory that others are inexplicably missing. Do you have an actual evidence that the present Court is going to ditch Scalia's Heller dictum? Prohibiting felons as a class from gun possession has a long, long historical pedigree, and that all the majority is demanding.

Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 23, 2022 3:22:12 PM

I am wondering how much weight to put on the Justice Kavanaugh concurrence. It appears that, for now, at least he and the Chief Justice are still agreeing the the Scalia dicta from Heller about what types of "traditional" rules will be followed including laws related to felons in possession and the ability to bar dangerous and unusual weapons (like machine guns).

For proposed gun control reforms, the issue will become what is sufficiently dangerous and unusual to fit within that tradition -- high capacity magazines for example.

The concurrence also seems to permit licensing/permit schemes as long as they are an objective test with qualifications that the average person can meet. Does that mean that the government could require a training/gun safety course before a person can buy a handgun?

Posted by: tmm | Jun 23, 2022 3:53:30 PM

Bill, have you read then-Judge Barrett's opinion in Kanter or any of the academic sources I cited? Neither the text of the Second Amendment nor historical traditions support a broad felon exception to the Second Amendment. I will reprint some of the history reviewed by the Duke Center for Firearm Law, which I believe maintains a fairly comprehensive repository of gun laws:

"[T]here are laws from the Revolutionary War that disarmed persons who failed to take an oath of loyalty. There are also laws in the Repository preceding that time that prohibited the sale to Native Americans 'in order to prevent such dangers of isolated murders and assassinations' and because such sale was 'very poisonous and destructive to the English.'

"However, there is not a law that explicitly addresses taking weapons from a person who has been convicted of a crime in the Repository until 1885. That law came out of Florida, and it authorized sheriffs and other officers making an arrest to 'take possession of any arms found upon the person arrested under this act.' Law enforcement officials were then to retain the weapons until after the trial of the person arrested, and if the person was convicted then his arms were forfeited. Only the arms that were on the person are covered by the law. The statute does not reference any other arms that the person convicted possessed or may later purchase, and thus seems to only cover those weapons that were on their person at the time of arrest.

"Laws that ban possession of some firearms by felons begin to pop up in the Repository in 1914.... These are the same laws that were already referenced in our first blog post in this series out of North Dakota, California, Nevada and Oregon, which banned possession of certain weapons capable of being concealed by aliens and felons (among others in some). As mentioned in that post, the statute adopted in all four states is vastly similar in phrasing and effect. All of these statutes refer to a person who has been convicted of a felony as opposed to a person who has been convicted of a crime of violence.

"There is currently only one law on the Repository that completely bans possession of all firearms by felons (not just those capable of being concealed). It was enacted by Rhode Island in 1927, and only concerns those who have been convicted of a crime of violence."

In other words, at the time the Second Amendment was ratified AND at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, broad felon dispossession statutes were entirely unknown to American history. You and perhaps many other think such modern laws --- such as the broad federal felon-in-possession law subjecting violators to up to 10 years in prison (or a mandatory minimum of 15 years if they have the wrong criminal history) --- make for really good policy. But the Supreme Court makes clear today the Second Amendment is not to be applied based on your or my view of good gun policy. It is to be applied based on text and history.

And, to repeat, neither the text of the Second Amendment nor the history of English or American gun laws prior to the 20th Century provides any support for a broad felon ban. Justice Barrett clearly gets that, and I suspect she is not the only one in the current majority willing to be consistent with textualism and originalism here. Whether there are five true textual/originalists on the Court on this issue (or in lower federal courts), though, is another question that is sure to be explored a whole lot in the coming weeks and months and years --- on average, 150 people are sentenced every weekday on FIP convictions in federal courts (though I suspect many of these folks would qualify as "dangerous" so that history/tradition might support their dispossession).

Posted by: Doug B. | Jun 23, 2022 4:08:10 PM

Doug --

Two quick questions: Do you know how many times over the last few years cert petitions have presented the question whether FIP laws cut too broad a swath under the Second Amendment and therefore cannot stand? And do you know how many times the Court has granted such a petition (much less decided on the merits in favor of your position)?

I don't know the answer to the first question. The answer to the second question is zero. Which five votes are you getting for your stance here? I can give you five votes against it right now: Roberts, Kavanaugh (if not assassinated per Senator Schumer), Kagan, Sotomayor and Breyer. I think a sixth, Alito, is also highly likely.

P.S. I met Justice Barrett a few weeks ago at one of my fancy-schmancy Georgetown parties. Why didn't I get to practice before judges who look like that?

Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 23, 2022 6:03:37 PM

Whatever the answers to your discussions, and the absurd decisions of the Supreme Court to restrict the right to exercise gun control in the US, the one certainty is that more children and innocents will likely lose their lives after today. I thought the mantra of conservatives was the "right to life". Who really believes your children are going to be or feel safer tomorrow? The Supreme Court has a very warped idea of what constitutes Justice.

Posted by: peter | Jun 23, 2022 6:23:05 PM

I totally disagree with Barrett's originalist interpretation of the 2nd Amendment and find her analysis off center. However, if this opinion opens the door to (non-violent) felons retaining the right to possess firearms, then it strikes down most, if not all, statutes prohibiting felons from possessing firearms. This opinion, while lauded by gun nuts, may produce the unintended effect of allowing convicted felons to possess guns. Fewer people will be sentenced to prison and folks already serving time on FIP charges may see their sentences reduced. I disagree with originalism, but this could see a positive consequence for criminal defendants.

Posted by: anon | Jun 23, 2022 6:43:10 PM

Bill, two quick answers:

1. Denials of cert do not make constitutional law, Supreme Court rulings do. Today's Supreme Court decision provides that, for a restriction of gun possession to be constitutional, "the government must affirmatively prove that its firearms regulation is part of the historical tradition that delimits the outer bounds of the right to keep and bear arms." Until the 20th Century, there was absolutely no historical tradition that persons with nonviolent convictions were excluded from Second Amendment protections.

2. It could be years before Bruen's application to federal FIP cased get to the Court. Notably, the current Supreme Court has only 4 of the 9 Justices who were on the Court when Heller was decided (and one of those four will be gone in two weeks). Even with the current Justices, if the case were to involve, say, Martha Stewart who took possession of a gun in order to protect herself from a violent threat, who knows. More important for now is what lower court federal judges, who are duty bound to apply Bruen's new constitutional test, might have to say on this issue. If they faithful comply with their duty to only uphold gun restricts that are "consistent with the Nations historical tradition of firearm regulation," they ought to have deep concerns with broad application of the federal firearm law criminalizing possession by nonviolent felons.

My question back: Do you dispute my assertion that neither the text of the Second Amendment nor the history of English or American gun laws prior to the 20th Century provides any support for a broad felon ban? If text and history are what matters, they both point in one direction here, no?

Posted by: Doug B. | Jun 23, 2022 7:22:05 PM

Doug --

Look at the Kavanaugh (with Roberts) concurrence. It's crystal clear from that that the FIP ban will survive. You take those two and add them to the three dissenting liberals (who would curtail gun rights much more than either of us, or the Court majority), and you get five. End of story. Supreme Court cases are not won with debating points on blogs. They are won with five votes. FIP bans have them and Martha Stewart doesn't.

I swear, it's always the same thing. Your side never, ever loses no matter what the opinions say!!! When you bomb out on qualified immunity, it's really a disguised announcement of the seeds of tomorrow's victory. When you bomb out on capital punishment, same deal. When you bomb out on acquitted conduct, ditto.

Blogs are neat and I like them, obviously. But law gets made in court. That's where I practiced for about a quarter of a century. I know what wins and what loses, and FIP is here to stay.

Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 23, 2022 10:06:42 PM

Bill, I sincerely do not think the Constitution and the interpretation and applications of the rights it protects is about "sides." That you apparently do, and talk about these important issues in this partisan way, makes it so very clear that for you this is all really just about personal policy preferences, and not about fidelity to the rule of law. That's fine, but just own up to the fact that you just want judges to bless your policy preference and do not actually care at all about fidelity to the text or history of the Constitution.

Tellingly, you have not answered this fundamental question: Does either the text of the Second Amendment or the history of English or American gun laws prior to the 20th Century provide any support for a broad felon ban?

You have claimed elsewhere that constitutional interpretation should be focused on the text and original meaning, and you have criticized judges and Justices who do not focus on the text and constitutional history. This serves as a useful opportunity to help me understand what you really mean. As I read the text and understand the history, there is no constitutional foundation for a broad felon ban as an exception to the Second Amendment. Does text and history matter to you in this setting? Should it matter to judges and Justices? Or do those things only matter when they fit your policy views and are simply to be ignored when you do not like the policy consequences? Plenty of reasonable people ignore constitutional text and history when they do not produce a preferred policy outcome -- including perhaps the Chief and Justice Kavanaugh. But I am just seeking to determine if are among those for whom constitutional interpretation, when it gets hard, is about policy preferences and not about text and history.

Posted by: Doug B. | Jun 23, 2022 10:53:24 PM

Peter,

The constitution does not care about your feelings. SCOTUS should not either. They are not a superlegislature of unelected people in robes. They should not make policy, as the liberals on the court believe.

A law can be 100% great and 100% unconstitutional. Likewise, it can be 100% awful, and 100% constitutional. Its not the courts job to decide based on good or awful policy preferences.

Posted by: Peter | Jun 23, 2022 11:07:09 PM

My apologies. The above post had Peter in the name of the poster. It was a response to Peter.

Posted by: TarlsQtr | Jun 23, 2022 11:08:42 PM

Doug --

So now you're more of an originalist than Nino Scalia, the author of the famous FIP approval passage in Heller?? Well that's rich! Where is your originalist criticism of Miranda for making up out of thin air mandatory police warnings that appear nowhere, and are not even hinted at, in the text of the Constitution? No, really, where is your criticism of that?

It doesn't exist so far as I've seen. And the reason it doesn't exist is that you are less driven by originalism than by whatever interpretive hook will help the criminal get back on the street earlier. It's only a small exaggeration to say that you've devoted your very noteworthy career to that end. Your originalism, such as it occasionally may be, seems merely to be ad hoc interpretive "flexibility" wearing a fig leaf.

You support a bunch of positions that have lost in court for decades, like opposition to qualified immunity, prohibition on the use of acquitted conduct, bans on FIP penalties, and bans on appeal waivers. But after years and years of failing to persuade judges of all parties and ideologies, you portray yourself as the champion of law, while I'm a mere ideologue.

Ummmmmmmmm, I don't think so. And I've got a long -- and if I don't say so, successful -- record in federal appellate litigation to prove it.

Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 23, 2022 11:53:57 PM

Bill,

Sorry, but I have to agree with the Professor here. Actually, I have even more problems with the machine gun restrictions than I do the felon-in-possession ban (which has now expanded far past that basis anyway). They simply have no history that predates ratification of even the 14th amendment (the latest date I believe appropriate for such historical inquiry).



Posted by: Soronel Haetir | Jun 24, 2022 12:43:06 AM

TarisQtr - the Constitution was written and signed by good men in 1787 of integrity, with passion and feeling for their country and countrymen. It was practical, moral and acceptably authoritative for its time and gave a foundation for the future stabilization and future for the federal state. But the law created in 1787 was never intended to enslave future lawkeepers and lawmakers from adapting it to meet future needs and progress. The Supreme Court, whether its current membership or their supporters like it or not, earns its respect from the publicly perceived primary role as final arbiter of Justice. If all it becomes is the librarian of a dusty scrap of paper from 1787, its public credibility and hard earned respect will quickly fritter away. Justice is not served well by that. Belatedly, it looks like Congress may be beginning to understand that.

Posted by: peter | Jun 24, 2022 2:35:54 AM

I'm glad to hear there's a chance at overturning such absurd restrictions. I was falsely convicted of a non-violent crime 44 years ago. I was never accused of any crime of violence. My record is perfectly clear before and since. So I'm quite offended when people say that the way to prevent mass shootings is to further crack down on people like me, and I think that those people have taken complete leave of their senses. If universal access to guns was the cause of mass shootings, Switzerland would have lots of them.

What next, a mandatory five year prison sentence for possession of a car by someone who was falsely ticketed for riding a bicycle too fast half a century ago?



Posted by: Keith Lynch | Jun 24, 2022 7:07:53 AM

One thing should be clear from the opinions is that it is now open season for judicial activism in Second Amendment cases. The question for judges is now what weapons from the 1780s and 1860s are the equivalent to today's weapons. That is ultimately a matter of opinion rather than fact or law. I can make an argument that the main weapons in both eras had to be reloaded for each shot. While revolvers existed, the Colt .45 revolver only dates back to the 1870s after the fourteenth amendment. So a plausible argument can be made that neither framing generation intended the right to bear arms to cover semiautomatic weapons. On the other hand, the majority seems to feel that semiautomatics are the modern day equivalent of the musket and other common weapons of the time. But it will always be what judges feel are the equivalent weapons because modern weapons are simply not the equivalent of the old weapons. Guns evolve all the time and with each evolution (and attempts to legislate against the evolution), judges will have to decide whether the change to the weapon is legally significant.

Posted by: tmm | Jun 24, 2022 8:58:47 AM

Bill, you continue to talk about various topics without addressing a seemingly critical question after Bruen's account of how the Second Amendment is to be interpreted: Does either the text of the Second Amendment or the history of English or American gun laws prior to the 20th Century provide any support for a broad felon ban?

I am hoping you can answer that question without going on tangents about Miranda or your record inventing waivers for plea agreements. I do not claim to be an originalist; I think of myself as a legal process textualist (which does make me a critic of Miranda, but that's another conversation). By the same token, I do not assail persons who do claim to be originalists or who adopt other interpretive methodologies in good faith, I am just eager to better understand what various approaches to the Constitution might mean in various settings.

In contrast, Bill, you have claimed to be a textual and an originalist and you have often criticized judges and Justices (including our newest Justice) who do not show fidelity to these interpretive methodologies. Perhaps you want to say "flexibility" is needed in the context of the Second Amendment because, as we all know, guns in the wrong hands can be very dangerous. That's what I am trying to explore here: if, after Bruen's account of the Second Amendment, text and history really will be key or will courts continue to be guided by notions of sound gun policies.

I presume, Bill, that you think broad felon bans on gun possession make for good policy. But that is not what Bruen says really matters, and so I will ask again for your view on what seems to be a key question after Bruen: Does either the text of the Second Amendment or the history of English or American gun laws prior to the 20th Century provide any support for a broad felon ban?

Can you answer that question and/or explain why it should not be a concern for courts and others after Bruen?

Posted by: Doug B. | Jun 24, 2022 9:38:14 AM

Why was Johnny Cash a deputy sheriff ?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/johnny-cash-deputy-card-found-nashville-sheriff-reveals-music-icon-became-a-deputy-in-1979/

Because back then there were no carry permits.. Now we can all have a gun in public.. I do think the convicted felon will not fall into the 2nd Amendment

Posted by: david raybin | Jun 24, 2022 10:57:59 AM

Peter,

Interesting that you mention enslave future law keepers and lawmakers. Im not trying to change the subject but I believe it is relevant. What is your position on Dobbs?



Also, what does the phrase, Congress shall make no law mean?



Posted by: TarlsQtr | Jun 24, 2022 11:13:50 AM

Doug --

Donald Trump was just as sure he was right about the election as you're sure you're right about felon in possession. But although I voted for Trump, I concluded publicly (https://ringsideatthereckoning.substack.com/p/why-the-jan-6-hearings-are-doing) that Trump is unfit for Office because he will not follow the law. I have exactly the same thinking about FIP bans. You must follow the law regardless of how sure you are it's wrong and that a better reading of the Constitution would vindicate you. That is what citizenship means.

The law, as uniformly announced in the circuits and in Heller (and Bruen properly read for that matter) is that FIP bans are legal. As I've already explained, given the Kavanaugh/Roberts concurrence, it's absolutely clear that the such bans are still legal and have five votes minimum.

If you think I'm wrong, you have a remedy: GO. WIN. YOUR. CASE.

Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 24, 2022 11:49:55 AM

Again, Bill, can you address the question that the Supreme Court's opinion in Bruen, while rejecting lower court jurisprudence that you cite, makes the Second Amendment's touchstone: Does either the text of the Second Amendment or the history of English or American gun laws prior to the 20th Century provide any support for a broad felon ban?

I am sincerely interested in your answer to this question. Your answer, either way, is not going to lead me to incite a bunch of people with felony records to storm the Capitol. I am eager to understand whether those who claim to be textualist and originalist )and criticize others for failure to show fidelity to these interpretive methods) will be faithful to these principles in this context. Or, as seems likely, jurists may prove inclined to look for "flexibility" here because they favor on policy grounds certain gun control laws that seem inconsistent with the text and history of the Second Amendment.

I do not dispute that the Kavanaugh/Roberts concurrence suggests that these Justices may be eager to adopt a more "flexible" approach to the Second Amendment even in the face what the text and history of the Second Amendment indicate. I surmise you do, too. That's fine, but I think it useful for all of us to understand just when and how policy preferences can and will impact supposed commitments to the text and history of the Constitution in this context (and others).



Posted by: Doug Berman | Jun 24, 2022 12:52:44 PM

TarlsQtr- Dobbs is a huge mistake. Roe was one of those standout achievements that gave recognition to the right of women to exercise control of their own health and bodies. There is nothing more fundamental than that in terms of human rights. Dobbs demonstrates yet again that the Supreme Court has been hijacked by political interests and is no longer independently protecting the interests of individuals or Justice. "Congress shall make no law ..." refers, as I'm sure you already know, to the protection of the right of free speech and of the right to petition government for change. Congress can and should otherwise make federal law in the interests of good governance, national security, and for the benefit of society. It's time it got on with that and broke the wretched political stalemate that the Supreme Court is currently trying to take advantage of. Indeed, Congress has the power to amend the Constitution and has done so on multiple occasions in the past. It can also change the composition of the Supreme Court if current members overreach themselves as they currently are doing. Whilst a dramatic reaction to the Courts position on gun law and Dobbs, if Congress were serious about returning the Court to a truly balanced independent body, it in theory could do so. Of course, with the current impasse in Congress, it won't happen any time soon.

Posted by: peter | Jun 24, 2022 2:21:09 PM

Re: the weapons of 1791. Anyone who thinks the Second Amendment only applies to weapons that existed when the amendment was ratified in 1791 must logically also think that the First Amendment doesn't apply to anything said via telephone, radio, television, movies, or the Internet. Or to anything printed in newspapers, magazines, books, petitions, or protest signs unless they used printing presses of the type that existed in 1791. Or to freedom of religions that didn't exist in 1791, such as Mormonism. Did you write on your protest sign with a quill pen or with a Magic Marker? If the latter, go straight to jail.



Posted by: Keith Lynch | Jun 24, 2022 7:34:09 PM

Doug --

I think the Second Amendment means just what it says. But I agree with (I'm trembling as I type this) Joe Biden when he insists it's not absolute. Not that this is any big insight. The First Amendment isn't absolute either (fire in a crowded theater and all that), nor is the Sixth Amendment (you have a right to a lawyer, but if he's not admitted in this state, forget it). To be a full-fledged believer in the Second Amendment as written (or the First or Sixth or any of them), you don't have to be a nutjob. No sane person believes that a five year old has a right to "bear arms" and no sane person believes a lunatic does either. And I don't care whether all that was written down in 1790. There has to be, and there is, a place for basic common sense in the law.

Common sense tells you that dangerous people should not be allowed to have guns. Now it's true that not ALL felons are dangerous people. But it's also true that not all people below 21 will be irresponsible with alcohol. But drawing the line at 21 has been and is close enough for the courts (unless you've seen otherwise -- I haven't), and so is a felony conviction. Poor little Martha Steward will just have to rely on her beefy security detail to protect her. This is not exactly breaking my heart (or hers, truth be told).

Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 25, 2022 4:51:12 PM

Again, Bill, can you address the question that the Supreme Court's opinion in Bruen, while rejecting lower court jurisprudence that you cite, makes the Second Amendment's touchstone: Does either the text of the Second Amendment or the history of English or American gun laws prior to the 20th Century provide any support for a broad felon ban?

I will stop asking you this question if you will expressly concede that your repeated failure to address this question is an admission that text of the Second Amendment and our historical traditions do NOT support a broad felon ban. (Your 21-age point on drinking is a legislative line, as you know, NOT an issue on constitutional interpretation.) I am troubled that you keep want to talk about issues other than textualism and originalism, which you have promoted in the past and attacked others for disregarding. The hypocrisy is obvious, but I was hoping you might try to at least address these matters. That you won't even try is so telling, though disappointing. In the end, it seems, constitutional interpretation is fundamentally policy preferences all the way down, I suppose, for you and others. So be it.

Posted by: Doug B. | Jun 25, 2022 5:18:05 PM

Doug --

I have answered your question, just not in the straightjacket terms you demand I use. Having been a courtroom lawyer for many years, I know better than to let my questioner dictate the exact vocabulary I must employ in giving my answer. I would also note that your question, even taken in its own terms, is not the steel trap you seemingly imagine it to be. Your question is: "Does either the text of the Second Amendment or the history of English or American gun laws prior to the 20th Century provide any support for a broad felon ban?" And my answer, which I've already given a couple of different ways, is: Text and history must be and routinely are viewed with normal common sense, as the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" illustrates in First Amendment interpretation; and "prior to the 20th Century" leave about 120 years of history, which is lots.

The reason you'll be losing this issue (as you've all but conceded you'll be losing it) is that there at least five Justices (more if I had to guess) who have normal common sense.

P.S. I find it a little jarring that the ONLY thing that interests you about this case is how CRIMINALS could benefit from it, not how the massively larger number of normal people trying to DEFEND themselves from criminals could benefit. What a very unusual way to see things.

Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 25, 2022 7:09:10 PM

Bill, you seem to be conceding the text and the history deemed relevant by the Bruen Court do not support your preferred interpretation of the Second Amendment, but normal common sense does. So you are embracing the normal common sense approach to constitutional interpretation over textualism and originalism. (Justice Breyer may be glad to hear his general approach has more adherents.) I always suspected you (and others) are willing and eager to jettison any principled commitment to textualism and originalism whenever what you think makes "common sense" as a policy preference justifies doing so.

Meanwhile, I am not sure why you find it jarring that I believe those who are truly committed to textualism and originalism should be prepared to extend gun rights to more non-violent people. But with your living "common sense" approach to the Constitution, I guess you are fine with the Second Amendment as a second-class right (though the Bruen Court said that was improper). I look forward to hearing more about whose versions of "normal common sense" policy preferences decide just when to jettison textualism and originalism in constitutional interpretation.

Posted by: Doug B. | Jun 25, 2022 7:59:54 PM

Doug --

-- It was Justice Scalia who wrote the Heller dictum that has you so roiled up (and that a majority of the Court signed onto). Are you more of a textualist than he was? Do tell!

-- I see you just walk past my point that the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" exception is nowhere written down in the First Amendment, but universally recognized as limiting it. And why is it universally so recognized? Because of common sense. Your fury at using common sense as allegedly being interpretive perversion speaks for itself. I hardly need add anything.

-- I trust you'll be just as disconsolate with the Justices who turn down your view of FIP (as you've acknowledged a majority is likely to do) as you are with me. I just hope you won't embrace the Certified Chuck Schumer Method of dealing with them -- and I'm sure you won't, since you're not that kind of person. As to some of your more crackpot commenters.......well..............ummmmmmmmm.............

Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 26, 2022 2:25:14 PM

I had always heard, Bill, that the Heller dictum was required to get Justice Kennedy's swing vote. I suspect I am more of a textualist than Justice Kennedy, and Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion in Brown v. Plata has always led me to question his textualist bona fides. Scalia said there that sometimes "tradition and common sense ... ought to shape the law, rather than vice versa."



Perhaps Justice Scalia's reference to "common sense" in Plata in an effort to ignore the plain text of the PLRA contributes to my suspicion about using that term to make up non-textual doctrines. I often find that when someone has no valid legal authority for a claim, they just say it is "common sense." But, in operation, a "common sense" approach to constitutional interpretation provides another means to enable judges and Justices to say the law is and must be whatever makes "sense" to them personally based on their policy views. After all, school segregation was "common sense" to many for decades; Justice Holmes in Buck v. Bell reasoned that common sense justified forced sterilization of the "feeble-minded."

And that is all I really mean to highlight here -- namely that many (including the late great Justice Scalia) often can and will find means to smuggle in policy preferences through "common sense" constitutional interpretation.

Posted by: Doug B. | Jun 26, 2022 6:59:02 PM

Mr. Otis said, in reply to Doug, "I find it a little jarring that the ONLY thing that interests you about this case is how CRIMINALS could benefit from it, not how the massively larger number of normal people trying to DEFEND themselves from criminals could benefit."

Someone who had once been convicted of a crime but who has had a perfectly clean record for decades (not counting time spent in prison or otherwise incapacitated) cannot reasonably be called a criminal. They are either reformed, i.e. an ex-criminal, or they were wrongfully convicted, i.e. never a criminal. And in either case, their long-ago conviction doesn't mean they have no possible need to ever defend themself from a criminal. Especially in today's US where if someone is committing murder, and you call the police, they'll quickly arrive and courageously "secure the scene" while the killer goes about his deadly business unmolested.



Posted by: Keith Lynch | Jun 26, 2022 10:45:39 PM

While I understand Professor Bermans point about the apparent implications of Bruen for the validity of FIP statutes, given the Roberts/Kavanaugh concurrence it doesnt seem likely that there would be four votes on the Court to grant certiorari on the FIP issue *unless* one of the court of appeals strikes down ACCA and the certiorari petition comes from the Government. But I dont anticipate that any of the courts of appeals *will* use Bruen to strike down ACCA because Heller, McDonald, and the R/K concurrence in Bruen all seem to make it clear that everyone but Thomas, Gorsuch, and Barrett still consider FIP statutes to fall within the heartland of permissible firearm regulation.

It would not be as surprising to me, though, if some court used Bruen to strike down the misdemeanor crime of domestic violence enhancement provision.

Posted by: JoPaCro | Jun 30, 2022 5:56:05 AM

This is a great resource. I'm a criminal defense attorney in CA with a ton of gun cases, for both felons and non-felons, that can now be attacked. Thank you!

Posted by: Jesse Adams | Aug 18, 2022 5:24:13 PM

Interesting read.

First off I have a non violent no victim ( paperwork as did not renew a license) federal felony.

The rights granted under our constitution do not say as a felon you lose your rights.

Many believe all felons are bad or have committed a violent crime. As a man that had served 19 months 2 years paper. No fines no restitution. This starting back in 2007. I can assure all readers there are many in our prison system that should never be there.

A man or woman should have the opportunity to protect themselves or family with whatever means required.

Many believe that if a felon was to get their rights back they would commit another felony.

I laughed at that. As a 61 year old retired man living on a 40 acre farm. Should I not have the same opportunity to protect my livestock or family they same as the man on the other side of the fence.

A man or woman at 40 is not the same person as at 18.

Yet we hold that person ( only on federal cases not state ) accountable their entire life.

What we need is a more severe sentencing for violence.

And what many do not realize is one thing. This felon you do not want to have a firearm. Well they had them before the conviction. And they did not commit violence using one.

I would like to see a system where after all sentencing has been completed. All rights reinstated.

If a person can not be trusted with a firearm. Why are they released from prison

Posted by: David Raymond | Sep 1, 2022 7:50:59 AM

Federal Court in Texas just ruled someone under felony indictment may purchase firearms, hints at Bruen Ruling allows for Felons to have their 2nd Amendment Rights reinstated. A great victory for The Constitution

Posted by: Fricn Media | Oct 24, 2022 7:09:57 PM

Defense attorney. I not only agree with the author, but have a hard time seeing how even violent ex-felons are able to be denied firearms based solely on "history and tradition." The historical pedigree would be considered absurd in any other issue. The only relevant cites are during times of war or open rebellion--surely powers which do not translate to civil society. It would seem like these historians would count disarming the British at Yorktown or the Confederates at Appomattox as historical examples where people could be lawfully disarmed. Absurd.

Never, prior to the 20th century, was someone convicted of robbery, mayhem, or any indisputably violent crime and punished by lifetime disarmament. Yes, I think this result is an undesirable one, but it is a necessary consequence of Heller and Bruen, the ipse dixit of "presumptively lawful" restrictions notwithstanding.

Posted by: Jason T Gain | Jan 30, 2023 6:26:52 PM

Bill Otis foolishly said

"Prohibiting felons as a class from gun possession has a long, long historical pedigree"

My response? Utter and complete nonsense. I am not aware of any felon denial of guns prior to the Sullivan Law which the Supreme Court in Bruen overturned in June 2022. After that, I am only aware of the 1933 National Firearms Act as denying violent Exf-elons the RTKBA. I believe that was even declared unconstitutional, or at least it wasn't enforced, until the 1968 gun control Act (GCA) which denied all ex-felons the right to keep and bear.

Keep in mind that in 1791, when the second amendment was ratified, essentially all felons were guilty of a death penalty offense or at least a lifetime sense. Any person convicted of a lesser offense was called a misdemeanor, and such a person was eventually going to get out of prison. My understanding is that they automatically got their right to keep and bear arms back automatically, no paperwork required.

So apparently Bill Otis doesn't know very much about the history of the Second Amendment. If he did, he would realize that today's definition of the term felon has virtually nothing to do with the definition it had in 1791.

And therefore there is no reason to believe that the word felon, and its gradual change in meaning, would affect the rights granted by the Second Amendment.

I think that any interpretation of bruin that does not overturn all felon denials of guns will eventually fall.



Posted by: Jim Brll | Apr 29, 2023 4:04:45 AM

When someone receives a felony conviction, they are sentenced by the court who goes by the legislature laws. They cannot sentence you to a longer sentence than what the legislature says. To add other penalties over and above what the court give you no matter if he give you no jail time but could have given you 30 years but gave no jail but probation only, he gave the sentence he thought was right. To go above that and the Government to make it so you cannot vote, own a firearm for protection is a harsher sentence under the law.I believe most would have to agree with that. The sentence should also fit the crime in some way. If they used a gun, maybe than it would be right to take there gun rights away but if not, what does one have to do with the other? If you drink and drive, they take your license. Driving is a privilege not a constitutional right. The Supreme Court said in North Carolina vs. Pierce, you cannot receive a harsher sentence for exercising your constitutional right. Going to court is a constitutional right and if you have a felony theft charge that is non violent and you go to trial, that is a right, so how have they gotten away with taking more rights away that what the court gave you? What does felony theft have to do with guns if none were ever used? Red flag laws a unconstitutional since there is no due process. Protection Orders are a joke since you have no time to research the case and many people receive them to get even by a ex lover, girlfriend etc. You are lucky if it has not happened to you, because it is very easy to become reality.

Posted by: jon | May 5, 2023 11:09:43 AM

As much I agree with the results of Heller and Bruen, I think their deficient legal reasons with leave them to be overruled in the future alongside Roe and Casey. The "exceptions" were nothing but pure ipse dixit with no legal analysis, and none of them pass muster under the "history and tradition" test announced in Bruen. Same with the "commonly owned" firearms declaration in Heller. First, no law at the founding prohibited the possession of any weapon at all. Second, M-16s, which Scalia said are not commonly owned, are not simply because of the 1934 NFA. It seems that the law acts as its on constitutional justification.

Further how common is commonly owned? I read that 23 million AR-15s are owned in the U.S. Seems common. Only 6% of the population own them. Seems not common. Under Heller or Bruen, which statistic controls? Do we look at only gun owners or all people, even felons and children who are prohibited from owning them? Do we just look at the class of gun (e.g. "handgun" in Heller)? If so, why don't we just view an M-16 as a "rifle."? After all, Dick Heller's single action .22 revolver is likely not commonly owned, but handguns in general are. Nor is a .22 single action very suited to home defense or militia use. Why define his type of arm so broadly?

It seems that at least Roberts and Kavanaugh want to carve out possession of guns in the home and shall issue concealed carry but keep the absurd Heller limitations without analysis. Looks just like what conservatives accused liberals of doing with abortion.

Posted by: Jason Gain | May 26, 2023 3:08:57 PM

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This new Slate commentary by Mark Joseph Stern, headlined "Progressive Judges May Have Found a Use for Clarence Thomas Terrible Guns Ruling," notes the alignment of judges in the recent en banc Third Circuit ruling in Range (discussed here) and makes some notable claims developing about Second Amendment jurisprudence. Here are excerpts:

Will progressive judges ever find use for the Supreme Courts recently expanded and disastrous interpretation of the Second Amendment? A major ruling on Tuesday suggests that they already are. By an 114 vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit held that some people convicted of felonies retain their right to bear arms. The decision drew support from judges across the ideological spectrum, uniting the courts most conservative and liberal judges despite  or perhaps because ofits potentially revolutionary implications. This consensus suggests that we may be entering a new era of Second Amendment litigation, one in which left-leaning judges reluctantly embrace gun rights as a tool of progressive constitutionalism....

Whats behind the cross-ideological support for Range? Probably not a deep certainty that Hardimans cursory historical overview and logic were correct, at least on the left flank of the court: In her exhaustive dissent, Judge Cheryl Ann Krause, an Obama appointee, eviscerated the majoritys historical analysis with a mountain of evidence proving that legislatures have historically possessed the authority to disarm entire groups, like felons, whose conduct evinces disrespect for the rule of law. (Krause also pointed out that Ranges conduct would have been a capital offense in 1791, and its difficult to see how a crime could be punishable by execution but not disarmament.) In Bruen, though, Justice Thomas simply ignored or discredited any evidence that did not fit his preferred narrative, tacitly inviting lower courts to do the same. We are long past the point of pretending that the actual historical record matters to judges who are eager to bulldoze gun safety laws.

Whats a progressive judge to do? Public defenders have already offered an answer: employ the Second Amendment in furtherance of progressive constitutional values like equal protection and the rights of criminal defendants. Because so many high-profile gun cases are manufactured by conservative activists  including this one  its easy to forget whos really on the front lines of the Second Amendment revolution: criminal defense attorneys representing indigent clients charged with firearm offenses. (Its telling that one Biden appointee who joined the majority in Range, Arianna Freeman, spent her entire legal career as a federal public defender.) Public defenders have a Sixth Amendment obligation to provide their clients with a zealous defense, which increasingly includes constitutional challenges to gun restrictions.

Thats why New York Citys public defenders filed a brief in Bruen urging the Supreme Court to strike down nearly all limitations on public carry. And its why the 3rd Circuits top public defenders  Freemans former colleagues  filed a similar brief in Range attacking the federal felon-in-possession ban. The Supreme Courts Second Amendment decisions all envision law-abiding, responsible citizens who seek to protect themselves and their families from violence. But in the real world, the people who have the most to gain from these rulings are criminal defendants facing down years or decades in prison. Recent decisions establishing a right to scratch out a guns serial number and purchase a firearm while under indictment or restraining order all arose out of criminal prosecutions, not NRA-backed test cases.

Like a growing number of public defenders, liberal judges like Freeman, Ambro, Greenaway, and Montgomery-Reeves may think that the Second Amendment can be repurposed as a weapon against over-policing and mass incarceration. If upheld by the Supreme Court, Range will certainly be a boon to the criminal defense bar, as well as a source of immense confusion for prosecutors. The majoritys standard is extraordinarily vague: It acknowledges that some people may be disarmed for committing a felony, but a person like Range could not. How can judges tell when someone falls on Ranges side of the line? The majority didnt say. In 2019, then-Judge Amy Coney Barrett took a stab at a clearer standard, asserting that only dangerous and violent felons may be disarmed. But which crimes count as violent? Is selling or using cocaine violent? How about possessing child pornography? Drunk driving? Burglary? Harassment? In a 2015 decision, the Supreme Court found it impossible to give the term violent felony a principled and objective standard. Why should courts have any more luck today?

This uncertainty would force prosecutors to think twice before bringing felon-in-possession charges, asking first whether they could persuade a court that the defendant is sufficiently dangerous or violent or non-law-abiding to justify disarmament. And from a criminal justice reform perspective, thats not necessarily a bad thing. Plenty of left-leaning commentators have argued that the felon-in-possession ban is disproportionately enforced against people of color, contributing to mass incarceration and persecution of minority communities. For many progressives, these problems raise concerns about equal protection, unlawful policing, and unconstitutional sentences. But this Supreme Court doesnt see them that way; it cares far more about gun rights than traditional civil rights, such as basic civic equality of Black Americans. So progressive judges may instead seek to use the Second Amendment as a stand-in for constitutional principles that SCOTUS has abandoned.

If thats the strategy, it carries real risks. Most obviously, this approach risks legitimizing a sweeping and lethal interpretation of the Second Amendment during an epidemic of gun violence in America. Liberal support for an expansive right to bear arms could entrench decisions like Bruen, contributing to their status as settled precedent that will be harder to overturn in the future. In 2023, though, progressive judges must take their wins wherever they can find them. Only they can decide whether the trade-offs are worth it.
 SCOTUS limits reach of aggravated identity theft two-year mandatory statutory add-on sentence | Main | Arguing that Second Amendment rulings are serving "as a tool of progressive constitutionalism" 

June 8, 2023

How many of the many thousands convicted of federal aggravated identity theft might now have Dubin claims?

As reported in this prior post, the US Supreme Court this morning rejected the Fifth Circuit's (and the Government's) very broad reading of aggravated identity theft under 18 U.S.C.  1028A(a)(1). The Court explained in Dubin v. US, No. 22-10 (S. Ct. June 8, 2023) (available here), that the two-year mandatory sentence of 1028A only applies "when the defendants misuse of another persons means of identification is at the crux of what makes the underlying offense criminal, rather than merely an ancillary feature." For a variety of reasons, I hope federal prosecutors have in the past mostly used the hammer of the two-year mandatory prison term of 1028A in "crux" cases rather than "ancillary" cases (and I sense some other circuits have sometimes limited cases in this way). But the Dubin case and others cited therein certainly suggest that more than a few persons in the past have been wrongly subject to 1028A liability in "ancillary" cases.

Helpfully, the US Sentencing Commission has one of its great "Quick Facts" publications focused specifically on "Section 1028A Aggravated Identity Theft Offenses." This July 2022 version reports on the total number of 18 U.S.C.  1028A offenders sentenced from Fiscal Year 2017 through 2021. Interestingly, in the three pre-pandemic years, there were over 1000 annual total 1028A offenders sentenced in federal courts; but in FY 2020 and thereafter the yearly numbers clocked in at just over 600. The typical sentence for most of these offenders across a number of years seems to be in the four- to five-year range. Consequently, using very "back of the envelop" math, I would guestimate there could be as many as a couple thousand 1028A offenders who are currently imprisoned and maybe a few thousand more currently serving terms of supervised release. I remain eager to believe and hope that most of these folks were soundly convicted in "crux" cases, but surely many may be eager to claim in court that their convictions and added prison terms were wrongly imposed in "ancillary" cases.

Offenders now looking to pursue what might be called "Dubin claims" could, of course, face procedural barriers of all sorts. But the still open-ended sentence reduction authority of 3582 might be one ready means for at least some (over-sentenced) prisoners to secure relief. And there are likely more than a few currently pending federal prosecutions that may get a jolt of uncertainty with Dubin now requiring crux/ancillary distinctions in the application of 18 U.S.C.  1028A(a)(1). (But, critically, Justice Gorsuch's concurring opinion warns that we ought not try to sort any of this out while driving to summer vacation. As he sternly explains: "Criminal statutes are not games to be played in the car on a crosscountry road trip.")

June 8, 2023 at 05:04 PM | Permalink

Comments

There are two types of potential Dubin claims: 1) those who actually received the enhancement; and 2) those who pled guilty to an unenhanced charge to avoid the enhancement. At least from my experience in the state system, courts are only likely to look with favor on the first type of claim (if raised in a timely fashion) on the theory that there was insufficient evidence (or insufficient factual basis in the case of a plea) or that the enhancement language failed to state an offense. The second one is harder because it almost has to be phrased as ineffective assistance and, prior to the decision, competent counsel would have had to advise the client that there was a chance that the courts might find that they were subject to an enhancement.

Posted by: tmm | Jun 8, 2023 5:57:58 PM

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It was the first time the IMDA exercised its authority under the amended Broadcasting Act to combat such content.

IMDA Urges Meta to Take Immediate Action: Removing Child Sexual Exploitation Material on Facebook Page and Group. (Photo: Getty Images)

SINGAPORE  The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) has notified Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to urgently review and remove a Facebook Page and Group containing child sexual exploitation material

This marks the first time the IMDA has exercised its authority under the amended Broadcasting Act to address such content, said the authority in a media release on Friday (9 June).

Meta promptly removed the offensive material from its platform within 24 hours.

Additionally, IMDA has directed internet service providers in Singapore to block a website associated with the Facebook Page and Group, which facilitated the distribution of further child exploitation content.

Investigation uncovered network promoting child sexual exploitation material

The investigation was initiated after the Singapore Police Force alerted the IMDA to a Facebook Page that was involved in a network promoting the sharing of the child exploitation material.

Subsequently, the IMDA discovered a Facebook Group with similar content, including hyperlinks directing viewers to a website hosting the content.

The IMDA and the SPF firmly condemn the solicitation and distribution of such material, recognising it as an egregious form of harmful content, as defined by the amended Broadcasting Act.

The act holds social media platforms accountable for ensuring the safety of local users by safeguarding them from online harm. Failure to comply with the amended legislation may result in significant penalties, including fines of up to $1 million or the blocking of social media services in Singapore.

A comprehensive effort involving all stakeholders is necessary to tackling the global issue of harmful online content, the IMDA said.

"The Singapore government has strengthened our regulatory framework and will continue its efforts in ensuring that regulatory and public education measures can address the growing range of harmful online content and protect Singapore users against online harms," the IMDA wrote in its statement.

The authority also emphasised the crucial role that social media services play in ensuring the safety of all users, particularly children and reaffirmed its commitment to collaborate closely with social media services to enhance Singapore's online safety further.

Do you have a story tip? Email: sgnews.tips@yahooinc.com.

You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. Also check out our Southeast Asia, Food, and Gaming channels on YouTube.
The cats have been roaming freely on the grounds in Kranji, STC's apprentice jockey Jerlyn Seow shared.

Cats at Singapore Turf Club (Photos: Jerlyn Seow)

SINGAPORE - The Singapore Turf Club (STC) is set to close by October 2024, before its return to the government in March 2027.

Beyond the employees and the race horses, there's another group which faces an uncertain future  the over hundred cats that live on the grounds in Kranji

Jerlyn Seow, the STC's only female apprentice jockey, shared with Yahoo Southeast Asia that the felines live and roam freely in the 124-hectare space.

"The cats are very well loved by everyone here. We treat them like our own cats. There are 20 over cats in some stables, with other stables having one or two, and some with five to six cats."

"We always feed the cats when we go to work at around 5 or 6am and after work at around 4pm in the afternoon," she shared.

Seow suggested there could be between twenty to up to a hundred staff members who feed and interact with the cats on a daily basis.

They consist of B-trainers (otherwise known as horse trainers), riders, stable groomers and stable superiors.

She also shared that the cats usually roam around the stables, and not in close proximity with the horses, due to differences in size and to avoid injured.

They are mostly fed kibble and canned food, she said, though out of a prey instinct, some of them would catch pigeons and rats. Some of the community felines have names such as 'Jackie' and 'Tiger', while others remain nameless.

Community cats of Singapore Turf Club (Photos: Jerlyn Seow)

Future hopes for the community cats

With plans to redevelop the racecourse into public housing, Seow suggested that legalising cat ownership in HDB flats might help to encourage public adoption of the community cats.

The 29-year-old expressed a desire to bring some of the cats home herself, but is unable to do so as she is already the proud owner of six cats.

"I just really hope they find their forever home. If people adopt some of these cats who can be a bit shy, I hope they mesh up their windows. The cats may have a tendency to run outdoors since they have been living outdoors throughout their life and might not have seen a window before."

She also expressed concerns over the need to clip the cats' claws should they be adopted, and whether the cats might be comfortable undergoing nail trimming.

When asked about the general consensus and emotional state of workers after news of STC closing down broke, Seow said that most employees are still grappling with coming to terms with the news.

"We are left in shock and disbelief. Most of the workers here are Malaysian and locals from the Bukit Timah era more than a decade ago. They have worked here for over thirty years and that's all they know - working together with the horses."

Yahoo Southeast Asia has also reached out to Cat Welfare Society about the situation with the cats at the Singapore Turf Club.

Do you have a story tip? Email: sgnews.tips@yahooinc.com.

You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. Also check out our Southeast Asia, Food, and Gaming channels on YouTube.
San Franciscans step gingerly around the detritus of homelessness (feces, discarded drug paraphernalia), past volatile mentally ill derelicts and shuttered stores that are casualties of crime, especially all-but-legalized shoplifting. Residents of their picturesque but dystopian city know, however, that government is worrying about one problem: slavery. Which the state of California never had.

A 15-person city task force has made 111 recommendations, including $5 million payments to certain eligible individuals. Because many disadvantages downstream from slavery, such as housing discrimination, are ascribed to it, degrees of victimhood must be negotiated. Particularly now that racial identities ("I identify as . . .") are even more fluid than genders, and multiply faster than pronouns.

Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans, who had many generations of terrible treatment in California, need not apply. But then, Soledad Ursua, writing in City Journal, notes that Japanese American households lead the Los Angeles metro area in median net worth ($592,000), and Chinese American households (median $408,200) also lead White households (median $355,000).

What is owed to African Americans who identify as multiracial (nationwide, more than 3 million)? Should descendants of the hundreds of thousands of White Union soldiers killed (by battle or disease) or maimed in the Civil War be exempt from paying reparations? Solomonic decisions must be made.

Some San Francisco politicians are disappointed by their constituents (although not the 7 percent of the city's residents who are registered Republicans). Many vociferous progressives are unenthusiastic about a reparations bill estimated (by Stanford's Hoover Institution) to cost $200 billion, almost 30 times the city's 2022-2023 general fund budget of $6.8 billion.

A relatively parsimonious California task force, whose final report is due this month, last year initially suggested $223,200 (the $200 was a whimsical touch) as recompense just for housing discrimination. A more recent figure is $360,000 for all the state's Black residents who had enslaved ancestors. Although the total cost might be about three times the state's budget, a task force member who mints novel verbs is disappointed that the news media has focused on dollars and is "not able to nuance better."

Nationally, the reparations bidding has reached $14 trillion (more than half the nation's GDP), that being the calculation by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) of the nation's bill for "reparatory justice" regarding slavery "and its lasting harm." Evanston, Ill.  a college town, naturally: Northwestern University  has its own reparations program. Other progressive cities might practice what they preach, although the fun is the preaching part.

The Goldwater Institute's Matt Beienburg, writing in National Review, reports that thanks to the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, a school near you might soon teach "reparations math." Seventy-four percent of eighth-graders are not proficient in math, but first things first. The Pulitzer Center, which Beienburg says is "a curriculum partner of the New York Times' 1619 project," says "two essential questions" are: "How does white rage fuel the racial wealth gap?" and "What are ways that the United States could begin to repair the harm of enslavement, Jim Crow, and other forms of wealth theft from Black Americans?" Among the "guiding questions" for teachers is this: "What patterns do we notice about violence and terrorism by White Americans against the Black middle class?"

Reparations are another example of a metastasizing phenomenon: solemn silliness. All calculations of costs are fanciful, depending as they do on capricious inclusions and exclusions of categories of people from access to the trough. The multibillion-dollar race industry ("diversity, equity, inclusion" consultants, governments' spoils systems of racial set-asides, etc.) involves some awkwardness. A piquant New York Times headline announces on page one: "Reparations Put Democrats in a Quandary." Do tell.

Progressives bandying the idea that the nation was born racist and remains so cannot tiptoe away from reparations without seeming insincere. Advocacy of reparations involves, however, the culminating denial of Blacks people's agency: Crippled by history, they necessarily have the status of permanent wards of government. The progressive vocabulary of "equity" says disparate social outcomes are definitionally the results of racism that is "systemic," therefore it is incurable until a new social system arrives. Meaning: never.

Some San Francisco offcials hope that $5 million payments to eligible individuals will slow the exodus of the city's Black residents. (The flight is part of the multihued flow from California: Between April 2020 and July 2022, the state's population declined by more than 500,000.) The payments might, however, subsidize Black flight to, say, Texas, a former Confederate state where taxes, housing costs and homeless rates are lower, job creation is higher and slavery ended a while ago.
Rent-A-Space Sale

Riverside Lutheran Church, 1817 Riverside Boulevard, will hold a Rent-a-Space Sale in their parking lot from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, June 10. Vendors will be selling a variety of items. The church will also have a Bake Sale, Lunch items and a Quilt Raffle. This fundraiser will help with the cost of replacing church windows.

Barberghetti

Redeemer Lutheran Church, 3204 So. Lakeport St., would like to invite the public to join us from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Monday, June 12, in the Redeemer gymnasium (door 6) for Barberghetti--a blend of barbershop harmony and spaghetti. Enjoy a delicious spaghetti dinner while the Siouxland Discovery Chorus and Quartets serenade you with beautiful, harmonic music. A free-will donation will be collected.

Rummage Sale

St. Paul United Methodist Church, 2003 A Street, South Sioux City, will hold a church-wide rummage sale from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Friday, June 16, and from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, June 17. There will be a lunch counter and bake sale, as well as morning coffee and rolls available for purchase. Please collect treasures to donate; donations are tax deductible. You do not need to be a St. Paul member to participate. Item pickup can be arranged by contacting Rose Dudley at 712-330-9081. Every donation is appreciated.

Overnight Experience at the Warming Shelter

St. John Lutheran Church, in partnership with the Warming Shelter, 916 Nebraska St., will host an overnight experience beginning at 5:30 p.m. Friday, June 23. Participants will experience firsthand the day-to-day struggles those who are facing homelessness experience while living in an emergency shelter. They will gain understanding through simulations that mimic real-life situations of barriers that those in the shelter are facing. The event is meant to give attendees the opportunity to take an educated stance of their own against homelessness.

Tickets can be purchased by contacting Pastor Wayne Gallipo at stjohnlutheranpastor@gmail.com or by calling 712-277-3945 between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m., or contact Shayla at 712-301-9808 during normal business hours.

Pancake Breakfast

St. John Lutheran Church, 2801 Jackson St., will host a pancake breakfast from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m., in the southern parking lot. Menu will include pancakes, sausage, eggs, coffee, juice, milk, butter, and syrup. Free will offering for breakfast will go to the St. John Food Pantry.

Summer Worship

St. Mark Lutheran Church ELCA begins Wednesday evening worship in the summer months at 7 p.m. All are welcome for this brief service of prayer, scripture, and Holy Communion. St. Mark is in the east Morningside neighborhood at 5200 Glenn Ave.

Food pantry

St. Thomas Episcopal Church, 1200 Douglas St., will have its food pantry open from 10 a.m. to noon Mondays.
SIOUX CITY  A Sioux City man was sentenced Thursday to 20 years in prison for sexually abusing a young girl for more than two years.

Nicholas Bunce, 39, pleaded guilty in Woodbury County District Court to third-degree sexual abuse and delivery of a controlled substance, charges which were reduced as part of a plea agreement from second-degree sexual abuse and distribution of a controlled substance to a person under age 18.

Bunce also will be required to register with the Iowa Sex Offender Registry and serve a lifetime special sex offender sentence after he completes his prison sentence. If he were to violate terms of the special sentence, he could be sent back to prison.

Bunce began making sexual advances on the girl in December 2017 and later began having sex with her. He also offered her methamphetamine on one occasion.

Bunce had sex and other sexual contact with the girl until August 2020, when the girl told him she no longer would have sexual contact with him.

She reported the abuse in late 2022, and an arrest warrant was issued for Bunce on Jan. 10. At the time, Bunce faced charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm and operating while intoxicated in Plymouth County. He pleaded guilty to the charges on Feb. 8 and was sentenced to six years in prison. The Woodbury County sentence will run consecutive to the Plymouth County charge.

This article has been updated for a correction.
SIOUX CITY  The transition from elementary school to middle school can be a daunting task for students. Thats why West Middle School is hosting transition camps for sixth-graders entering the school this fall.

Wildcat Camp is a week-long program at West Middle that allows the students to get comfortable with the building, meet the staff, learn new rules and make new friends.

On Thursday, the first group of sixth graders learned about lunch expectations and used a mock-up schedule to find their classrooms.

Avery Griffin and Bella Ivener-Hansen were grouped during the search for classrooms. Both said they were enjoying the program. Griffin said he enjoyed walking around the school and finding the different classrooms. Ivener-Hansen said she enjoyed recess.

While they said the Wildcat Camp was helpful to learn the building, Ivener-Hansen added it will help them help other students who dont have the time to participate in the class.

If we know the school, then we can show them around, Griffin said.

Tori Albright, assistant principal at West Middle School, said school administration reaches out to all elementary schools that feed into West in January to invite students to participate in the camp.

This is the third year West Middle has held this transition camp. It is a free, week-long experience for the students, Albright said. With a large variety of exploratory courses, a different grading system, different teachers, and more students, the change can be daunting, she said.

Its a big change between elementary and middle school, she said.

While students are given a short opportunity to tour the school in the spring and another opportunity to participate in a boot camp in August, this program is a more in-depth opportunity, she said.

Half of the incoming West Middle sixth grade class is signed up for the camp. The students who have previously participated in the camp show more confidence at the beginning of the year, even volunteering to help other students, one teacher said.

At the end of the week, the students get a West Middle School tee-shirt and are more confident entering the school in August, Albright said.

If families are interested in sending their kids to the camp they can call West Middle to sign up; there are still three separate weeks left in June.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP)  Joran van der Sloot, the chief suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway, arrived in the United States from Peru on Thursday to face charges that he attempted to extort money from the missing teen's mother.

An FBI-operated plane carrying van der Sloot landed at Birmingham's Shuttlesworth Airport about 2:30 p.m.  just hours after Peruvian authorities handed him over temporarily to U.S. custody  and the suspect was escorted down the steps into a black SUV, which brought him to a local jail.

Van der Sloot is scheduled to be arraigned in federal court in Birmingham at 11 a.m. Friday, according to court records. Kevin Butler, an attorney listed as van der Sloot's public defender, did not return an email seeking comment on the case.

The suspect has been serving a 28-year sentence in Peru after confessing to killing a Peruvian woman. He is wanted in the U.S. on one count each of extortion and wire fraud  the only charges to have ever linked the Dutch citizen to Holloways disappearance on the Caribbean island of Aruba. He was handed over to the U.S. roughly a month after both countries agreed on his extradition.

Holloways mother, Beth Holloway, said she was overcome with mixed emotions.

As a mother who has tirelessly pursued justice for the abduction and murder of my precious daughter, I stand before you today with a heart both heavy with sorrow and yet lifted by a glimmer of hope, she said in a written statement. For 18 years, I have lived with the unbearable pain of Natalees loss. Each day has been filled with unanswered questions and a longing for justice that has eluded us at every turn. But today ... I am hopeful that some small semblance of justice may finally be realized.

Natalee Holloway, 18, was on a high school graduation trip with classmates in Aruba when she vanished in 2005. She was last seen leaving a bar with van der Sloot, who was a student at an international school on the island. Van der Sloot was identified as a main suspect and detained weeks later for questioning, along with two Surinamese brothers, but no charges were filed in the case.

A judge declared Holloway dead, but her body has never been found.

U.S. prosecutors said that in 2010, van der Sloot reached out to Beth Holloway, seeking $250,000 to disclose the location of the young womans body. A grand jury indicted him that year on one count each of wire fraud and extortion.

Video and photos released by Peruvian authorities Thursday showed van der Sloot wearing jeans and a black puffer jacket, shaking his shoulders and grimacing as officers adjusted his handcuffs and removed an Interpol-marked vest. Footage and images also showed van der Sloot in a conference room with law enforcement officers from Peru, the FBI and Interpol, and a health care professional.

Holloways mysterious disappearance sparked years of news coverage and countless true-crime podcasts.

In 2012, van der Sloot pleaded guilty in Peru to killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores, a business student from a prominent Peruvian family. She was killed in 2010 five years to the day after Holloways disappearance.

Van der Sloot married a Peruvian woman in July 2014 in a ceremony at a maximum-security prison. He was transferred among Peruvian prisons in response to reports that he enjoyed privileges such as television, internet access and a cellphone, and accusations that he had threatened to kill a warden.

A 2001 treaty between Peru and the U.S. allows a suspect to be temporarily extradited to face trial in the other country. Van der Sloots attorney, Maximo Altez, initially indicated his client would not challenge his extradition but that changed Monday when he filed a writ of habeas corpus. A judge ruled against van der Sloot the following day.

The time that van der Sloot ends up spending in the U.S. will be extended until the conclusion of the criminal proceedings, including the appeal process, should there be one, according to a resolution published in Perus federal register. The resolution also states that U.S. authorities agree to return van der Sloot to the custody of Peru afterward.

Joyce Vance, a federal prosecutor in Alabama when van der Sloot was charged, said his arrival in the Southern U.S. state is a long-awaited opportunity for justice.

We always say that justice delayed is justice denied, and theres a certain simple truth to that," said Vance, the former U.S. attorney for the northern district of Alabama, which includes Birmingham. But this case makes me think sometimes justice delayed is actually worth it. Its not optimal. Its not what anybody would have wanted at the outset, but justice delayed is better than justice never delivered.

This story has been edited to correct that van der Sloot was taken to a jail, not a courthouse.
ARGYLE, N.Y.  Seth Jacobs has about 100 bins packed with marijuana flower sitting in storage at his upstate New York farm.

And thats a problem. There arent enough places to sell it.

The 700 pounds of pungent flower was harvested last year as part of New York's first crop of legally grown pot for recreational use. He also has roughly 220 pounds of distillate. Months later, there are only a dozen licensed dispensaries statewide to sell what Jacobs and more than 200 other farmers produced.

Now, another growing season is underway and farmers still sitting on much of last year's harvest are in a financial bind.

We are really under the gun here. Were all losing money, Jacobs recently said at his farm on rolling land near the Vermont border. Even the most entrepreneurial and ambitious amongst us just cant move much product in this environment.

New York pot farmers arent the only ones struggling with difficult economic conditions. Marijuana growers in western states have also complained that low prices, tough competition from the black market, high state taxes and federal banking and exporting restrictions have made it tough for legal growers to make money.

But the farmers' plight in New York is directly tied to the bumpy launch of the state's recreational pot market.

State leaders always planned to gear up the market in stages, giving a chance for a diverse set of participants to get a toe-hold. The state's process for licensing new dispensaries, however, has moved at a far slower pace than expected.

Last fall, Gov. Kathy Hochul foresaw 20 new shops opening every month or so to start this year. Instead, one store was open by the start of the year, with 11 more opened since.

Unlicensed shops rushed in to fill the void, especially in New York City, but those outlets aren't a legal market for the state's farmers. Federal law prohibits New York farmers from transporting their crop across state lines.

That means limited shelf space to sell the 300,000 pounds of cannabis grown in the state last year, much of the product meant to be processed for items like gummies and vapes.

Statewide, there is estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars worth of unsold cannabis, about 80% in the form of cannabis oil, according to the Cannabis Association of New York, a trade group. There are concerns the smokable flower will become too old to sell.

Jacobs keeps his bins of buds at Slack Hollow Organics in secure, temperature-controlled units. More valuable still is the distillate at various processors he's waiting to sell. Elsewhere in rural New York, Brittany Carbone, co-founder of Tricolla Farms, said the stock they're sitting on includes 1,500 packs of pre-rolled joints and about 2,000 packs of edibles.

What we really need to see is more retailers get open, and thats going to actually give us the sustainable solution, Carbone said.

The lack of sales is a particular problem for small farmers who stretched themselves thin financially to produce last year's crop and now need capital for their second year.

Jacobs, whose brand is Bud & Boro, said he won't grow plants for distillate this year because of the backlog. Carbone said they are planting on less than the acre theyre legally allowed and are holding off on infrastructure investments, like hoop houses to help with growing.

In New York, many critics blame missteps by state officials in their well-intentioned effort to open the market to a diverse array of entrepreneurs. That meant reserving the first legal pot harvests for struggling hemp farmers. And people with past marijuana convictions were given the chance to open some of the first dispensaries.

Critics say the process has been cumbersome for dispensary applicants. And there have been issues with a planned $200 million fund to help social equity dispensary licensees with the costly task of setting up shops.

The fund was supposed to consist of up to $150 million in private investment. But state Dormitory Authority spokesperson Jeffrey Gordon declined to say whether any private money had been invested yet, saying in an email only that work to raise private capital is ongoing.

Gordon noted New York's complex and unprecedented effort to create a new statewide enterprise from scratch, which included evaluating 10,000 commercial properties for dispensary locations and arranging for banking, training and other services for the licensees.

The retail rollout also was hobbled by a federal judges ruling in November that temporarily barred New York from issuing dispensary licenses in parts of the state, including Brooklyn and Buffalo. The injunction was later narrowed to the Finger Lakes region before a settlement was reached this week.

The Office of Cannabis Management has taken recent steps to boost demand, including the provisional approval last month of 50 new dispensary licenses. And plans are in the works for that would allow groups of growers to join with retail licensees to sell their cannabis at places other than stores, like at a farmers' market or a festival.

Though frustrated, farmers like Jacobs and Carbone are hanging on. Carbone has gotten her farm's brand, TONIC, into six dispensaries. Jacobs has received some intermittent payments and hopes the farmers market policy being devised will give him a new avenue to sell his marijuana.

This all will get worked out, Jacobs said. And I want to be there when it does.

Photos: Missouri voters approve legalizing recreational marijuana Missouri legalize recreational marijuana Missouri voters approve legalizing recreational marijuana Missouri legalize recreational marijuana Missouri legalize recreational marijuana Missouri legalize recreational marijuana Missouri legalize recreational marijuana Missouri legalize recreational marijuana Missouri legalize recreational marijuana Missouri legalize recreational marijuana Missouri legalize recreational marijuana Missouri legalize recreational marijuana Missouri voters approve legalizing recreational marijuana Missouri legalize recreational marijuana Missouri legalize recreational marijuana
The Offutt-based U.S. Strategic Command has turned over responsibility for providing missile defense for the United States and its allies to the U.S. Space Command, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

President Joe Biden made the change April 25 as part of the governments adoption of a new Unified Command Plan that assigns missions to the U.S. militarys major combatant commands, including Stratcom and SpaceCom as well as regional commands such as Northern Command, European Command, and Indo-Pacific Command.

However, the missile defense change was not announced until last week, in a press release from Space Command.

In the release, Spacecom's commander, Army Gen. James Dickinson, described the transfer as the culmination of a comprehensive study on the roles, responsibilities and authorities associated with the Missile Defense enterprise.

He said the change will bring missile warning, missile defense and space domain awareness under one command.

Stratcoms commander, Air Force Gen. Anthony Cotton, said he backs the realignment, which he said better supports our integrated deterrence framework in safeguarding our nation.

No military or civilian jobs are expected to be lost at Stratcoms Offutt Air Force Base headquarters because much of the missile defense work has already been taking place in Colorado Springs, said Lt. Cmdr. Joshua Kelsey, a Stratcom spokesman.

It doesnt change a whole lot, Kelsey said. Instead of Stratcom overseeing it, its Spacecom.

Stratcom is best-known as the keeper of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, but it has also carried out other duties under its broader mission of strategic deterrence.

The missile defense element has its roots in the early-warning system set up across Canada and the northern tier of the United States by the Strategic Air Command in the 1950s and '60s, said retired Lt. Gen. Bob Hinson, Stratcoms deputy commander from 2000 to 2002.

It devolved into a mixture of ground-based radars and space-based systems, said Hinson, who also commanded the 14th Air Force, which is responsible for space-related activities.

SAC stood down after the Cold War, and the expanding work of missile defense moved to other commands, including the Missile Defense Agency (created as part of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as Star Wars) and a former version of U.S. Space Command that was established in 1985.

Stratcom took over missile defense after the original Spacecom was inactivated in 2002, and three years later it became part of Stratcoms Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense. The commands work has included missile defense planning, operations and advocacy.

In 2019, U.S. Space Command was re-established by an act of Congress, and Dickinson became its commander the following year. He has supported the integration of space and missile defense operations.

Its evolving back to where it should be, Hinson said.

Photos: Offutt Air Force Base through the years Offutt Air Force Base is named for Lt. Jarvis Offutt  the first airman from Omaha killed in World War I. 1891 1952 1956 1957 1959 1961 1962 1962 1967 1970 1989 1992 1997 2000 2000 2003 2006 2012 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2019 2019
THE MINI: If the country did not live by a budget for the last umpteen years and 25-trillion or so dollars, why should taxpayers believe this 
When did Pride Month get so complicated, so commercial and so contentious?

Everyone is mad at everyone, everywhere, all at once.

No one knows this better than the folks who are running corporations. They can't seem to please anyone nowadays.

On the one hand, more and more businesses are showing support for Pride Month, a celebration in June inspired in part by the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York's Greenwich Village. Most of those efforts are symbolic and superficial. They're about signage, slogans and selling merchandise. You never hear of companies having a sustained dialogue with LGBTQIA+ activists about how they can improve the lives of people in that community.

At the same time, even these meager offerings from corporations are seen as excessive by those Americans who are uncomfortable with how fast society is changing with regard to sexual identity. Anheuser-Busch, Target and Disney are just some of the companies under pressure from conservative groups to scrap their outreach efforts to marginalized communities or risk a boycott by right-wingers.

We seem to have lost sight of the purpose of Pride Month. It was born of good intentions. Our society makes LGBTQIA+ people feel as if there is something wrong with them. Our friends and family members have been teased, attacked, humiliated, belittled, discriminated against and made to feel ashamed of who they are.

It's a lot for anyone to endure. For some people, it's too much, and they take their own lives. So, the thinking went, why not set aside the month of June as a time when LGBTQIA+ Americans could feel proud of who they are, and the rest of us could learn more about what they experience so we can be better allies? The month has also traditionally presented an opportunity for individuals to come out and live as their true selves.

This year, however, a lot of Americans are acting up in juvenile ways that no one should be proud of. From protests and fistfights to boycotts and corporate capitulation, Pride Month is taking a pummeling.

In North Hollywood, an elementary school recently became a battlefield when an assembly for Pride Month, where a book about nontraditional families was read, brought out protesters from both sides and resulted in a physical altercation. The ruckus occurred at Saticoy Elementary, where a week earlier an LGBTQIA+ flag was burned. A parent-led groupwearing shirts that read "Leave Our Kids Alone" squared off against LGBTQIA+ activists who held signs that read "Love not Bigotry." Police were called, and officers had to form a line to separate the groups.

This promises to be a Pride Month like no other. We're only about a week in, and already I'm exhausted.

But then again, these days, I'm feeling a lot of things.

I'm disappointed in how closed-minded many of my fellow Americans are, on both sides of the cultural divide. Many conservatives are afraid that "the woke" are indoctrinating children to become part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Meanwhile, many liberals think that anyone who has qualms about how fast the world is changing, or questions whether drag queens should be reading books to children, must be a bigot.

I'm also frustrated by the lack of nuance in media coverage that spotlights the extremes. The Fourth Estate isn't interested in the view from the center of the road. Where is the story about the middle-aged gay woman in a committed relationship who supports the trans rights movement but worries that it is backfiring because it demands that all Americans celebrate change while change is coming at lightning speed?

It's one of the reasons I was intrigued by what I heard recently from a caller to "The Michael Smerconish Program" on Sirius XM radio. During a discussion about the conflicts surrounding Pride Month, Jim in Vero Beacha self-described "male gay moderate" and successful businessman in a long-term relationship who said he is not defined solely by his sexualitysaid much of the turmoil is fueled by the extremes.

"They speak louder. They shout. And they're emotional," he said. "I feel like there's a lot of us who understand that both sides need to chill out."

You heard the man. Let's chill out, Americaand be kinder to one another. Not just for one month but all year long. It's that simple.
MIAMI  Donald Trump improperly stored in his Florida estate sensitive documents on nuclear capabilities, repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a Pentagon plan of attack and classified map, according to a sweeping felony indictment that paints a damning portrait of the former presidents treatment of national security information.

The conduct alleged in the historic indictment  the first federal case against a former president  cuts to the heart of any presidents responsibility to safeguard the governments most valuable secrets. Prosecutors say the documents he stowed, refused to return and in some cases showed to visitors risked jeopardizing not only relations with foreign nations but also the safety of troops and confidential sources.

Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced, Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case, said Friday in his first public statements. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.

Trump, who is the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is due to make his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon in Miami. In a rare bit of good news for Trump, the judge initially assigned to the case is Aileen Cannon, someone he appointed and who drew criticism for rulings in his favor during a dispute last year over a special master assigned to review the seized classified documents. Meanwhile, two lawyers who worked the case for months announced Friday that they had resigned from the legal team.

All told, Trump faces 37 felony counts  31 pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information, the balance relating to alleged conspiracy, obstruction and false statements  that could result in a substantial prison sentence in the event of a conviction. A Trump aide who prosecutors said moved dozens of boxes at his Florida estate at his direction, and then lied to investigators about it, was charged in the same indictment with conspiracy and other crimes.

Trump responded to the indictment Friday by falsely conflating his case with a separate classified documents investigation concerning President Joe Biden. Though classified records were found in a Biden home and office, there has been no indication that the president, unlike Trump, sought to conceal them or knew they were there.

Nobody said I wasnt allowed to look at the personal records that I brought with me from the White House. Theres nothing wrong with that, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. But among the various investigations he has faced, legal experts  as well as Trumps own aides  had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution. Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trumps attorneys were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.

The indictment arrives at a time when Trump is continuing to dominate the Republican presidential primary. Hes expected to make his first public appearance since the charges were made public on Saturday, when he attends state GOP conventions in Georgia and North Carolina.

But the documents startling scope and breadth of allegations will almost certainly make it harder for Republicans to rail against than an earlier New York criminal case that many legal analysts had derided as weak.

The 49-page indictment centers on hundreds of classified documents that Trump took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving office in January 2021. Even as tens of thousands of members and guests visited Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trumps presidency and August 2022, when the FBI obtained a search warrant, documents were recklessly stored in spaces including a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room. A photograph included in the indictment shows several dozen file boxes stacked in a storage area.

The case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years  as president and private citizen  but had never before charged him with a crime. The most notable investigation was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, but prosecutors in that probe cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Once he left office, though, he lost that protection.

The inquiry took a major step forward last November when Attorney General Merrick Garland, a soft-spoken former federal judge who has long stated that no person should be regarded as above the law, appointed Smith, a war crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation, to lead both the documents probe as well as a separate investigation into efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

The indictment alleges that Trump, who claimed without evidence that he had declassified all the documents before leaving office, understood his duty to care for classified information but shirked it anyway. It details a July 2021 meeting in Bedminster in which he boasted about having held onto a classified document prepared by the military about a potential attack on another country.

Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, the indictment quotes him as saying, citing an audio recording. He also said he could have declassified the document, but Now I cant, you know, but this is still a secret, according to the indictment.

Using Trumps own words and actions, as recounted to prosecutors by lawyers, aides and other witnesses, the indictment alleges both a refusal to return the documents despite more than a years worth of government demands but also steps that he encouraged others around him to take to conceal the records.

For instance, prosecutors say, after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for the records in May 2022, Trump asked his own lawyers if he could defy the request and said words to the effect of, I dont want anybody looking through my boxes.

Wouldnt it be better if we just told them we dont have anything here? one of his lawyers described him as saying.

But before his own lawyer searched the property for classified records, the indictment says, Trump directed aides to remove from the Mar-a-Lago storage room boxes of documents so that they would not be found during the search and therefore handed over to the government.

Weeks later, when Justice Department officials arrived at Mar-a-Lago to collect the records, they were handed a folder with only 38 documents and an untrue letter attesting that all documents responsive to the subpoena had been turned over.

But suspecting that many more remained inside, the FBI obtained a search warrant and returned that August to recover more than 100 additional documents. The Justice Department says Trump held onto more than 300 classified documents, including some at the top secret level.

Walt Nauta, one of the aides alleged to have transported the boxes around the boxes, lied to the FBI about the movement of the boxes and faces charges that he conspired to hide them. His lawyer declined to comment.
Flamin Hot is the inspirational story of Richard Montanez, the Mexican immigrant who rose from being a janitor at Frito-Lay to inventing one of the snack giants most transformational products. Or  maybe its not. According to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times Sam Dean published in 2021, after Montanezs memoir and life rights were sold to Searchlight Pictures, the story of how he was inspired to add spices inspired by Mexican street corn to the companys preexisting chips is largely a fabrication. Montanez was a janitor at Frito-Lay, and he did become a director of marketing, with a particular skill for reaching overlooked and underserved Latino consumers. But according to a company statement backed up by the Times reporting, Montanez was not involved in any capacity in the development of Flamin Hot Cheetos. The facts do not support the urban legend.

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The L.A. Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, who repeated Montanezs story in his book Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, weighed in two days after the article published, acknowledging that it played into a long history of cultural theft, one that perpetuates the idea of American ingenuity and Mexican idleness. But in this case, he said, it wasnt just a trope. Mexicans, he wrote, can stretch the truth to fit a convenient narrative as well as gringos when it comes to our food, folks.

The movie, which was written by Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chavez and directed by Eva Longoria, doesnt directly address Deans article, and Longoria told the Times earlier this year, That story never affected us. But she was also careful to reframe the movie in more subjective terms. We never set out to tell the history of the Cheeto, she said. We are telling Richard Montanezs story and were telling his truth.

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Flamin Hot never cops to any inaccuracies. In fact, early on, Jesse Garcia, who narrates the movie as Montanez, insists, I didnt make this up. I lived it. But at the time, hes still discussing his early adulthood, when he was making ends meet as a petty criminal. Even in his childhood, the narrator admits that its easy to confuse how things feel and the way they are. In the movie, young Richard, played by Carlos S. Sanchez, is bullied by his white elementary school classmates for the unfamiliar foods his mother packs him for lunchthat is, until he persuades one of them to take a bite and starts selling them burritos, the first inkling of his talent for marketing Mexican flavors. Taco Bell didnt introduce the world to burritosme and my mama did, he tells us, pausing a beat before adding, At least, thats what it felt like to me.

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Even as hes living his life story, Richard seems aware that hes not entirely right for the part. Baby, whats initiative mean? he asks his wife, Judy (Annie Gonzalez), as hes filling out his Frito-Lay job application. Do I look like a guy whos got initiative? But looks arent everything. The managers at Richards manufacturing plant are all white, as, after we finally make our way inside it, are the men in the boardroom of Frito-Lays parent company, PepsiCo. But to Richard, the C-suiters were just like gangsters throwing down in a drug den. The movie illustrates the point by having three white executives argue in emphatic Spanglish, mouthing phrases like Sabes que? as Richards narration provides their voices. He then offers to replay the scene after running it through a cholo translator, at which point its just three men in suits bickering about corporate strategy. Same story, a lot less interesting.

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Flamin Hots pivotal moment gets replayed twice too. In one, Richard, faced with his plants closing because of a drop in sales, drafts his family and eventually his entire community into coming up with prospective spicy mixturesthe technical term for the Cheetos batter, thankfully not used too often, is slurryto apply to chips and curls, before settling on the perfect blend. His youngest son serves as the ultimate judge of whether the final product is good hot, the kind that burns your mouth but makes you crave more, or simply too spicy to be consumed. Meanwhile, Richard admits, apparently in the Midwest, they had already been spicing things up for a while. We see white people in white lab coats in an all-white room, handling flasks of bright red liquid as if theyre filled with deadly chemicals. But they dont seem to know a good thing when theyve got it. After one throws back a shot of red, he fans himself and yells out, Hot! Hothothot!

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The difference between the lab-coat crew and his kitchen-table tinkering, Richard says, is that their ingredients came in test tubes and syringes and his came from the ground, our roots. But the actual ingredients of Flamin Hot seasoning read more like the product of industrial chemistry than artisanal experimentation: maltodextrin, monosodium glutamate, sodium diacetate, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate. If anything in there came from the ground, its hiding under the umbrella of natural flavor.

The movie sidesteps the issue by glossing over a few details. Richard tracks down PepsiCo head Roger Enricos phone number and persuades him to visit the Rancho Cucamonga plant where he worksat which point he successfully pitches his boss on the idea of what he calls chile chips. But theres no scene in which Richard or anyone else devises the product tag that gives Flamin Hot its title. The first bags off the production line simply show up with Flamin Hot written on the outside, which would be like Air skipping the scene when a character comes up with the name Air Jordans. (Montanez did, according to the L.A. Times, play a major part in the development of the companys Sabrositas line, which included a lime-and-chile Frito, but that was in 1993, three years after the Flamin Hot launch.) Even as it plays back Montanezs version, in which Enrico sees a kindred spirit in this eager plant worker and immediately elevates him to a position of prominence, Richard the narrator allows, Judy says I exaggerate this part a lot.

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Related from Slate Nadira Goffe Flounder Is Not a Flounder, and Other Things You Notice Watching The Little Mermaid if Youre a Fish Person Read More

Before the controversy stirred up by Flamin Hot, Id never given any thought to who invented Flamin Hot Cheetos. They were thought up by no one, came from nowherethey simply were. (And besides, Im more of a Takis person.) But that depersonalized, deracinated notion is as much a product of the Frito-Lay company as the chips themselves. The recent spate of movies that effectively serve as origin stories for beloved productsAir, Tetris, and Blackberry among themfeed a collective desire for a return to an era when inventors dominated the public imagination and technological advances were attached to individuals instead of emerging from an NDA-sealed box. Richard Montanez may not be the real inventor of Flamin Hot Cheetos. But better his story than none at all.
Each week in the Wednesday column, Prudence asks readers for their thoughts on a question that has her stumped. Shell post her final thoughts on the matter on Fridays.

Before we get to the letter, a note about a small change: To create an opportunity for people who dont use Twitter to share ideas for Were Prudence, weve decided to collect ideas in a Google form. So instead of a Twitter handle, youll see the name each reader has chosen to accompany their suggestion. Be sure to look out for each weeks Were Prudence letter in the Wednesday column.



Heres this weeks dilemma and answer; thanks to Penny Lane and Devin Sandiford for their ideas!

Dear Prudence,

Right now, my wife and I are living in a one-bedroom condo that my father owns. We talked about having children but agreed to wait until we were 30, after our careers have taken off and weve had our adventures. We pay only utilities and the association fees, so we have a lot of extra financial resources than most. Last week, we had a pregnancy scare. I was terrified. My wife was elated and then angry about how relived I acted when we found out it wasnt real. We fought badly. My wife argued that having a baby now wasnt the worst thing in the world. I said I am allowed to have an honest reaction, and what about all our plans? I thought we were on the same page and did she really want to raise a baby in a one-bedroom condo?

She told me that she expected my father to sell the condo so we could get a bigger place then. I couldnt believe the words coming out of her mouth. She has never spoken like this before and it contradicts everything we talked abouteven at our pre-marital counseling. I told her that she should never bring that idea up to my father. The fact that he is letting us live here rent-free is generous enough. Since then, I insist on condoms if we are intimate. My wife sees this as a lack of trust in her. I just see it as a sensible precaution. There is this rift between us now. We are on a waiting list to see a counselor. Before this, I would swear on a stack of Bibles that I knew my wife inside and out. I just dont anymore.

Different Pages

Dear Different Pages,

I can absolutely see why this experience unsettled and alarmed you. Its obviously not great that theres a rift between you and your wife. Butbut BUT!the good news is that the pregnancy scare and your different reaction to it, combined with the conversation about the condo, has provided an opportunity to open up a conversation. When I asked our readers for assistance giving you advice, the most helpful responses offered ideas for taking advantage of this to actually understand each other better and tweak your life plan as needed.

Im going to do something unusual and quote two pretty long ones because I thought they were so insightful:

It seems like there are two separate issues: His reaction to the pregnancy scare and the wifes assumption about FILs condo. Seems like they should talk it more in regards to their original reactions to the possible pregnancy; it sounds like he was terrified (understandable) while she maybe started thinking about their future, possibly even was excited to think about that next chapter (also understandable). Neither reaction is wrong, but if youre already excitedly planning for a future baby (even mentally) while your partner is freaking out, it can feel a lot like rejection, maybe more so if youre disappointed about the negative result while hes relieved. They need to talk (maybe with a therapist) and get back on the same page about their feelings and their timelines  maybe one of them has changed their minds about how soon they want children. Either way, they need to rebuild trust and reassure each other that their reaction to the pregnancy scare wasnt a rejection of the other partner. In terms of the comment about the condo it sounds like LW is upset his wife assumed his family would step up and help in that way  maybe they would, maybe they wouldnt, but if this came at a time while she was fantasizing about having a child and imagining what their life might look like, I think he should cut her some slack (while reiterating that they should not presume to take advantage of the generosity his family has already shown). Also seems like not a bad time to re-evaluate your finances and savings to make sure youre setting aside enough if your eventual goal is to use the savings from free rent to eventually buy your own home! Penny Lane

The personal experience shared in the next response made me really hopeful and offered some good perspective on how intense and even triggering any conversation about kids can be. I like the example of how to push past your initial reactions to dig into how they were received, and why:

A completely different, but related, version of this happened to me too. We already had a child (who I as a male had dreamt of having since I was very young ~10 years old), but when my wife threw out the idea of have a second child I made the face Im imagining our letter writer made with the baby scare. Like a mix between lol you must be joking and ah nah hell nah! Yall and up and done it! My wife was so hurt by my visceral wordless expression that she started crying and saying she couldnt believe I wouldnt have another baby with her. I was like, huh? When did I say that? I tried to explain that it wasnt a wouldnt but just that I didnt think we were ready. It was just that even being a 100 percent engaged father, I remembered how much of a full body and full mind activity having and caring for a newborn and raising a child took. Me explaining this also didnt go over well with her and for several weeks we were at odds. I never said this out loud, but I thought she wanted another baby more than she wanted another child. Like you know babies grow up and start having opinions and verbal requests and stuff lol. A whole different type of energy required, which is fun and incredible but also A LOT. Anyway, I would recommend our writer to first take a look back at not only the things they said, but how the things they said were heard by their partner. So when I said were not ready my wife heard youre not a good mom. This was not trueshe was and is an excellent mom. But thats subconsciously what she heard because she had already been telling herself this based on what our culture told her moms were supposed to be. When I said having a kid is a lot of work she heard Im doing more work than you. This actually was true at the timebut it was also something that was good in our relationship (a lot of the stereotypical mom activities were things I loved to do either together as parents or even alone as a loving and caring dad). We didnt fit the stereotypes of mom does more of the child care and dad cuts down trees to build a home. We both worked jobs and parented, but not like Hollywood told us we were supposed to and that was good. Looking back at the difference between what I said and what she heard made all the difference for us. We were able to meet each other in conversation much more wholeheartedly and see that a lot of our argument about having a child was an argument with our society more than with each other. She wanted to feel like a good mom even if she chose moments of just being herself and I wanted to have enough space to be just as engaged with a second child as with our first. Im the youngest of three so imagining not having my whole heart and sufficient amount of focus to give to a second child made me feel afraid theyd feel neglected. Once we had our better talk we were both actually on the same page and back to being ourselves. That second child is 8 years old now, and genuinely the best decision I ever okayed in my life. But kids, or even just conversations about having kids, can turn people into different versions of themselves, so as surprised as you were that your partner seemed like a different person with new things coming out of her mouth, start to expect this for both of you. Youll never fully know each other because youll both be growing (forced by children if not willingly). This is what keeps life scary and interesting. Oh and to the point about your dads condodefinitely make sure shes not counting on the sale. Thats an overstep for sure. First, because its his property, not yours, and second, because newborns can live in a place the size of a small bathroom until the age of like 3 or older if necessary. I know it sounds cruel to say that, but engaged parents who, like you said have more funds than most, will carry 90 percent of everything that child needs  the last 10 percent wont be filled in by anythingand certainly not by a 3-bedroom house with a picket fence. Nothing in the world will ever make it a perfect 100 percent in parenting. In any case, good luck! Im rooting for you! Devan Sandiford

You have an affordable place to live and you dont yet have a baby. Thats actually a great position to be in because you have the time and flexibility to use this major misunderstanding to explore the feelings behind your reactions and what they could mean for your future. Worry less about what you thought you knew about your wife, and get interested in what you know now. I hope she does the same for you.
The undisputed front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination was just indicted on federal charges related to his mishandling of classified documents, including an alleged violation of the Espionage Act. One might think that the other Republican candidates, who are competing with Trump and searching desperately for any advantage that might slow his coronation, would seize on the opportunity of their rival beingonce more for dramatic effectindicted on federal charges.

But that is not the modern Republican Party, nor the modus operandi of its mewling class of top Republican hopefuls.

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Related from Slate Dennis Aftergut Trump Blew an Enormous Hole in His Classified Documents Defense Read More

A quick survey of Trumps fiercest competitors shows that, as of press time, not a single top candidate identified Trumps unprecedented legal troubles as a case for their own candidacy. Largely they are deferential or defensive, hoping that will keep them safe from Trumps wrath, and perhaps somewhat favorable in the eyes of Trumps supporters. But at a certain point you may have to wonder if they even want to beat Trump at all, and why theyre wasting time and money running for president when they could spend the next 12 months doing literally anything else.

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Here is a sample sentence that I might use if my archrival were indicted for federal crimes: Doing federal crimes is not good, and I, Candidate, did not do federal crimes, which is one reason to vote for me. And yet, heres Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trumps mortal enemy. The ex-president has been brutally and relentlessly attacking the governor, burying him in mean tweets and scathing campaign ads about everything from his freehand pudding consumption to his COVID policy.

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The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, DeSantis wrote. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society.



We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.



Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?



The DeSantis  Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) June 9, 2023

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Heres Mike Pence, less fulsome in his support of Trump, but also somehow more timid: In lieu of a formal statement, the former vice president simply retweeted conservative radio host Hugh Hewitts summary of Pences comments on Hewitts show, in which he called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to explain to the American people what exactly he thinks hes doing. (Notably, he did not post to Truth Social, the best forum in which to reach the Hang Mike Pence contingent.)

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Before the sun sets tonight former VP @Mike_Pence just said on my show, AG Garland should be before the American people explaining the facts in the indictment of fmr President Trump and providing the indictment. Audio and transcript will post shortly.  Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) June 9, 2023

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Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and fourth-place polling stalwart, waited more than 18 hours to weigh in. But when she did, she was similarly defensive of the ex-president.

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This is not how justice should be pursued in our country, she said. She liked that message so much she retweeted herself immediately after posting it.

This is not how justice should be pursued in our country.



The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics.



Its time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions.  Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) June 9, 2023

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Vivek Ramaswamy, hoping to boost himself out of fifth place, borrowed Trumps very own Page 1/Page 2 posting format to defend the ex-president. I never thought wed see the day when the U.S. President deputizes the DOJ to arrest his lead rival in the middle of an election, he wrote. He also posted a video with these hashtags: #Truth #MAGA #IStandWithTrump #Trump #TrumpIndictment #Biden #SaveAmerica #AmericaFirst #StandwithTrump.

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Heres sixth place, Sen. Tim Scott, who interrupted his tweeting about the University of South Carolina Gamecocks to weigh in obliquely on Fox News: As President, I will purge all the injustices in our system so every American is seen by the Lady of Justice with a blindfold on.

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Americans deserve to have confidence in our justice system.



As President, I will purge all the injustices in our system so every American is seen by the Lady of Justice with a blindfold on. pic.twitter.com/Ncrw2MoUQQ  Tim Scott (@votetimscott) June 9, 2023

Asa Hutchinson is polling at 0.7 percent of the vote. Somehow, he is one of the only members of this cadre that has acted in any way resembling someone competing with Trump for a job. The former governor of Arkansas put out a statement in a timely manner criticizing the ex-president.

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Donald Trumps actionsfrom his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of lawshould not define our nation or the Republican Party. Maybe this will boost him to one full percent of GOP vote share! But hes not really in competitive running.

See below for Governor Hutchinsons statement on Donald Trumps recent indictment: pic.twitter.com/x4jfWJe38R  Gov. Asa Hutchinson (@AsaHutchinson) June 9, 2023

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Chris Christie sort of tweaked Trump, but its a little lukewarm for someone who just joined the race as a Trump-seeking missile:

We dont get our news from Trumps Truth Social account. Lets see what the facts are when any possible indictment is released. As I have said before, no one is above the law, no matter how much they wish they were. We will have more to say when the facts are revealed.  Chris Christie (@GovChristie) June 9, 2023

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If you, as a candidate, cannot make hay out of your opponent being rung up on the most serious criminal indictment in the history of the American presidency, probably you are not very good at this. Probably you should not be running for president. Yes, yes, maybe you can convince yourself its politically savvy to wait it out, hope it blows over. But thats not really the Trump world we have been living in. And outside of their vain attempts at tactical political jujitsu, its still worth pondering our incredible reality, in which no competitive non-Trump Republican running for president is willing to even try to win points on this. In fact, the whole bunch of them seem to think it is better to just not lose points on this, which is surely no way to close the 30-plus-point gap between Trump and the rest of the field. As Trump heads to Miami for his arraignment, perhaps he can take comfort in the fact that he seems to have his nomination practically sewn up.
The Supreme Court turned down red states request to blow up Medicaid on Thursday in a 72 decision by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, surely her most important opinion to date. These GOP-controlled states, led by Indiana, sought to abolish Medicaid patients ability to sue health care providers who violate federal law, gutting the enforcement of countless rights secured by Congress. Their argument proved to be too unhinged for the courtthough not for Justice Clarence Thomas, who wholeheartedly embraced the states theory on the basis of fraudulent, ahistorical pseudo-scholarship.

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Jacksons opinion in Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County v. Talevski shoots down an argument so outlandish that its frankly difficult to summarize. Start with this background: The federal government funds a bunch of programs, like Medicaid, that are administered by the states. Congress generally writes the rules while states implement the services. This set-up, known as cooperative federalism, is authorized by the Constitutions spending clause, which gives Congress broad powers to tax and spend for the general welfare. In theory, when a state violates the rules set out by Congress, the federal government can withhold funding until the state complies. In practice, this remedy is counterproductive: It effectively punishes a states entire population (by defunding a social welfare program) because state officials wont implement the program lawfully. No one wants that! So Congress also allows individuals to sue when states violate various rights guaranteed by federal law.

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Talevski involves two such rights, which grant nursing home patients the freedom from unnecessary chemical restraints and unjustified transfer or discharge. The case arose when a patient, Gorgi Talevski, sued a private nursing home and a health care system owned by Marion County, Indiana, alleging that they ran afoul of these federal safeguards. The defendants, backed by Indiana, tried to repurpose the lawsuit as an opportunity to demolish the entire system of cooperative federalism described above. They proffered the novel argument that Congress cannot create individual rights through spending-clause legislation like Medicaid. That was a bold claim, since a 19th-century civil rights statute called Section 1983 permits individuals to sue whenever state officials violate rights secured by the Constitution and laws. Medicaid is a law that creates rights, so it would seem that Section 1983 authorizes lawsuits like Talevskis.

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Why is that so important? Because if patients cant sue, then nobody will, and violations will be unaddressed forever. The federal government lacks the time, staff, or resources to consistently protect patients rights, leaving this task to patients themselves. And if the federal government does decide to crack down, its main tool is the threat of withholding fundswhich, again, punishes everyone and solves nothing. It is a good thing, then, that Medicaid is a law that can create a private right to sue under Section 1983as the court of appeals held below.

Appealing to the Supreme Court, the petitioners, supported by the attorneys general of 21 other red states, tried to avoid this commonsense conclusion. They asserted that spending-clause laws like Medicaid are not actually a law at all, but a contract between Congress and the states. And because individual patients are not parties to those contracts, but mere third-party beneficiaries, they have no authority to sue. This argument is ostensibly rooted in vague historical claims about the original understanding of contract law as well as constitutional concerns about Congress coercing states into accepting novel conditions on federal funds.

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Related from Slate Mark Joseph Stern John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh Just Delivered the Surprise of the Supreme Court Term Read More

On Thursday, Justice Jackson said: No. Her opinion is a marvel of concision, astutely rebutting the petitioners invitation to reimagine Congresss handiwork (and our precedent interpreting it). She explained that their historical arguments are at a minimum, contestable and at the very least, perplexing. (Jacksons restrained rhetoric understates the matter; there is a wealth of evidence that these arguments are just flat-out bogus.) The upshot is that the history is at least ambiguous. And since SCOTUS has allowed Congress to create private rights through spending-clause legislation for decades, the petitioners need more than ambiguous historical evidence to justify uprooting precedent. They could not provide such evidence because it is does not exist.

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Jackson then turned to the narrower question, which is whether federal law does indeed grant the rights that Talevski sought to vindicate. Under the courts precedent, these rights must be unambiguously bestowed, with an unmistakable focus on the benefited class. The Medicaid regulation at issue, she concluded, clearly fits the bill, using rights-creating language to give nursing home patients freedom from cruel or negligent treatment. And vindicating these rights in federal court is not incompatible with the specific administrative processes that Congress imposed on noncompliant facilities. So Talevskis suit under Section 1983 can move forward.

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Only Justices Thomas and Alito dissented, and Alitos heart was not in it; he took the narrow view that because patients could pursue their rights through administrative processes, they were precluded from filing a federal lawsuit. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, penned a gratuitous concurrence that simply restated Jacksons main points. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a one-paragraph opinion agreeing with Jackson but warning that there may be lurking constitutional issues with suits like Talevskis, then shrugging them off because the petitioners failed to fully develop them.

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Thomas dissent, though? Even by his standards, it was grievously off of the mark. Thomas suggested that the Constitutions spending clause does not exist, and declared that laws like Medicaid are in fact unconstitutional federal commandeering of the States. He drew many of his historical conclusions from Robert Natelson, a conservative law professor, former talk-radio host, and failed Republican candidate. Natelson is notorious for authoring a comprehensively debunked originalist attack on Indian law, and his scholarship on this topic is not much better; in one footnote, Thomas approvingly cites Natelsons claim that the removal of a semicolon from a draft of the Constitution proves that Congress has no independent power to tax and spend for the general welfare. The justices punishingly long dissent would, if adopted by the court, upend trillions of dollars in federal funds by dismantling social welfare programs that are implemented by the states. It is reassuring that the other justices decided a fairy tale about an errant semicolon did not justify this drastic step.

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The headline after Talevski is that a healthy majority of the court does not want to trigger a Great Depression by toppling the very structure of multitrillion-dollar spending programs. Which raises the question: Why did SCOTUS take this case in the first place? A cynic might suspect that justices like Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett use these big-swing cases to create the false image of moderation, making themselves look like centrists by spurning the most wackadoo theories under the sun. Or perhaps they took up the case out of a desire to narrow the scope of Section 1983, only to be repelled by the petitioners radical and indefensible arguments. If so, Talevski amounts to yet another case in which ambitious conservative lawyers shot for the moon then blew up on the launchpad.
Its more fun via email (promise). This article first appeared in our Slatest evening newsletter, which seeks to surface the best pieces published across Slates digital and audio journalism. We publish it there to help you cut to the chase at the end of each day. To get it in your inbox, along with more of the best work we published that day, sign up below.

Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh just saved the Voting Rights Act! This is quite the plot twist. For several years now, many progressive attorneys have assumed that the VRA is pretty much dead, and the only question was when SCOTUS would deliver the final blow, Mark Joseph Stern writes.

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The 54 decision is a huge victory for multiracial democracy that sends a scathing message to red state lawmakers. Stern explains why this is such a big deal, and what it means for voting rights going forward.

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Plus: Dahlia Lithwick explains why Roberts reversed himself this time on voting rightsand why that still doesnt make him a centrist.

And Richard H. Pildes breaks down why the courts voting rights decision is even better than it looks.

To get regular updates on all the consequential opinions coming out at the end of the Supreme Court term, make sure to sign up for our pop-up Opinionpalooza newsletter!

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Former President Donald Trump has been indicted in Miami on federal charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents, he announced Thursday night in a series of posts on his Truth Social website. The central premise of the posts (that he has been indicted) was subsequently confirmed by other reporting.

Trump is already scheduled to stand trial in March 2024 on New York state charges that he falsified records to conceal a hush money payment to pornographic actress Stormy Daniels. He now reportedly faces federal charges in Florida including conspiracy to obstruct justice, willful retention of national defense information, and making false statements.

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Trump has been under investigation since last November by special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to look into both Trumps alleged mishandling of classified material that he took to his Mar-a-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, Florida, and his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. (He has not yet been charged with any crimes in connection to the latter issue, although a district attorney in Georgia who is leading a related investigation has indicated she will make charging decisions in August.)

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Related from Slate Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann The Likely Reason the Trump Grand Jury Has Suddenly Pivoted to Florida Read More

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, Trump wrote in the first of several posts about Thursdays notes, which are broken up by a junk advertisement which appears to assert that tinnitus can be cured by holding a water bottle over ones ear. He subsequently claimed to be leading 2024 presidential polls, wrote twice that he is AN INNOCENT MAN, and complained that current president Joe Biden keeps sensitive documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is secured by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time.

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Both Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence disclosed that they discovered classified material in their possession in the wake of the FBIs August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago. (It is, in fact, true that some Biden documents were found in a Delaware garage where he keeps a green 1967 Corvette.) Pence has been informed that he will not be charged in the matter, possibly because he alerted authorities to the location of the documents and handed them over voluntarily. Trump, by contrast, reportedly failed to turn some of the material in his possession over to the National Archives despite attesting that he was doing so. (Bidens case is being investigated by a different special counsel than the one investigating Trump. There has not been any reporting suggesting that he is suspected of knowingly keeping classified documents after learning they were on his property.)

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Trump and his representatives have previously argued that presidents can declassify documents just by thinking about doing sobut this potential legal defense may be undermined by the reported existence of a 2021 recording in which Trump allegedly tells two individuals interviewing him that he has a classified document outlining plans for a potential U.S. military attack on Iran. (This suggests that he understood that he cannot, in fact, declassify documents with his mind.)

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In a four-minute video published on Truth Social after his initial written posts about the indictment, Trump reiterates that he believes himself to be an innocent man and complains that the United States is in decline and going to hell. He is shown standing in front of a painting that appears to be Jean Leon Gerome Ferris The Doctrine of Monroe, which is appropriate for a situation in which a president is claiming unilateral authority to do something related to national security. According to CBS News, the Secret Service will meet with Trumps staff on Friday to create a plan for him to travel to Miami for an arraignment.
The federal indictment of Donald Trump recounts, in damning detail, the story of a shocking and unprecedented crime: Special counsel Jack Smith alleges that the former president willfully retained classified national security documents after leaving office, storing them in an insecure location at Mar-a-Lago and showing them off to members of the public. But the indictment is equally focused on the cover-up that occurred after the Justice Department caught wind of this initial crime. According to Smith, Trump and Waltine Nautaonce his bag man, now his co-defendanthid key documents from Trumps own lawyer and falsely informed the FBI that they had turned over all relevant materials.

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This blundering plot constituted a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, forming the basis of six more felony charges for Trump. Four of these charges carry a 20-year maximum sentence, 10 years longer than the maximum sentence for unlawfully retaining national security documents. The charges, in other words, are just as serious, if not more so, than the allegations at the heart of the indictment.

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Trump and Nauta were not exactly subtle in their alleged scheme to conceal documents from the prying eyes of lawyers and FBI agents. According to the indictment, the grand jury issued a subpoena on May 11, 2022, demanding all documents in Trumps possession with classification markings. Twelve days later, two of his attorneys met to discuss the matter. Trump told them: Wouldnt it be better if we just told them we dont have anything here? and suggested that his lawyers should lie on his behalf. Trump Attorney 1, who is undoubtedly Evan Corcoran, said he would return on June 2 to go over the boxes of documents, identify the papers sought by the grand jury, and ensure compliance with the subpoena.

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Between that meeting and Corcorans return, Trump allegedly directed Nauta to smuggle approximately 64 boxes of classified documents from the Mar-a-Lago storage room to Trumps personal residence. (Some were stored in a shower.) The FBI interviewed Nauta during this period, asking him if he was aware of any boxes transferred to Trumps private residence. Nautawho had been busy moving boxes into Trumps private residencesaid no.

Shortly before Corcoran returned on June 2, Trump allegedly told Nauta to return 30 boxes to the storage room. It appears that the former president had removed all documents of interest and then returned enough boxes to trick Corcoran into thinking that he had access to the entire set of files. Corcoran still found 38 documents with classified markings; Trump may have overlooked these documents, or intentionally left them for Corcoran to find so he would not grow suspicious. Either way, Trump allegedly implied to Corcoran that he should pluck them out before turning over the files to the FBI. (He did not.)

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Then, on Trumps behalf, Corcoran and another attorney certified that they had searched all of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Florida and provided all classified documents to federal investigators, as required by law. Following this handoff, the indictment states, Nauta surreptitiously loaded several boxes onto the plane that Trump and his family would fly north for the summer. Trump and Nauta must have thought they had gotten away with their alleged scheme scot-free.

Related from Slate Dennis Aftergut Trump Blew an Enormous Hole in His Classified Documents Defense Read More

They hadnt. Their alleged box switcheroo was captured on surveillance footage obtained by prosecutors and shown to the grand jury. It formed one basis of the warrant that authorized a search of Mar-a-Lago in August, when FBI agents found many more documents that Trump had allegedly concealed from his lawyers and law enforcement.

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Federal law does not look kindly upon criminal conspiracies to obstruct an investigation into the unlawful concealment of top-secret national security documents. These papers, after all, included highly classified information about other countries nuclear programs and military activities, details about the United States own nuclear weaponry, information about potential retaliation in response to a foreign attack, revelations about the United States own military vulnerabilities, and much more. Trump allegedly concocted a weeks-long plot to ensure that he could keep all these documents in his personal possession. That now translates into extraordinarily serious federal charges.

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Just how serious? Smith hit Trump with a variety of charges designed to punish suspects who attempt to thwart an FBI investigation. The marquee charge is conspiracy to obstruct justice, backed up by several charges of illegally concealing documents that are the subject of a federal investigation, as well as making false statements to law enforcement. A majority of these crimes carry a 20-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine. Each is a felony offense.

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It may be fruitful to compare this obstruction case with the one that Robert Mueller identified but failed to charge. In that investigation, Mueller found that Trump had used thinly veiled codetelling his underlings I expect loyalty, for instanceto cajole them into lying to law enforcement. He urged various associates to withhold the whole truth at key junctures and applied personal pressure to lobby them against cooperating with the probe. And he tried to wheedle his White House counsel into firing Mueller. All damning stuff, to be sure. But compare that to what Smith has; proof that Trump: 1) repeatedly lied to his own lawyers to avoid complying with a subpoena; 2) directed the concealment of incriminatory evidence so that the FBI would not find it; and 3) lied to the FBI himself by representing, through his lawyers, that he had complied with prosecutors demands. The difference is stark. Muellers case connected the dots between various unseemly actions to identify a broader conspiracy behind the scenes. Smiths case rests on surveillance footage, audio recordings, photographs, texts, and other communications that catch Trump in the act of obstructing justice. It really is that black and white.

The former president is in grave legal jeopardy. These are major crimes that carry life-ruining penalties. Smiths ironclad allegations of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct a federal investigation are not a mere afterthought to this indictment. They are an independent and dire threat to Donald Trump.
Federal prosecutors laid out their case against Donald Trump in an indictment on Friday, accusing the former president of, among other things, mishandling highly secret government documents after leaving office and then obstructing officials investigation into the matter. Included in the 49-page filing are black-and-white images of the rather creative places within his winter residence, Mar-a-Lago, that Trump and his employees stored dozens of boxes allegedly full of these documents (one of which Trump described as a plan of attack when he showed it off to guests who did not have security clearances, prosecutors say). These locations included a shower, a bathroom, a storage room, the Lake Room, and the White and Gold Ballroom at the Palm Beach, Florida, club and resort. Soon after, color versions of the images were released:

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BREAKING: Photos Have Been Released Showing BOXES Of Classified Documents In Mar-A-Lago #TrumpIndicted pic.twitter.com/nzxHvzOBKo  Divided No More (@DividedNoMoreCo) June 9, 2023

Related from Slate Mark Joseph Stern The Most Damning Part of the Trump Indictment Read More

After spending some time browsing Mar-a-Lagos website, I found one picture that is eerily similar to the one on page 10 of the indictment, showing the boxes resting on an ornately painted stage. This picture was in the Weddings and Events tab. The same ornate, palatial walls and ceilings that envelop the boxes of documents shine brilliantly on the Mar-a-Lago website, without a cardboard box in sight. Events held here, the page reads, inspire, enchant and exceed every expectation. Indeed!

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Heres a closer look at the image released by the Department of Justice:

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And heres the one on the Mar-a-Lago weddings page:

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Im not saying Mar-a-Lago hosted any weddings in this room while the documents resided there. Presumably someone renting the room wouldve considered the boxes an eyesore. But here is what prosecutors write: From January through March 15 2021, some of TRUMPs boxes were stored in The Mar-a-Lago Clubs White and Gold Ballroom, in which events and gatherings took place. As for you, you theoretically could book an indictment-themed soiree in the same room should you happen to be so inclined. All you would need is a sponsor who is a member of Mar-A-Lago (the initiation fee is just $200,000). Once you have your sponsor, according to the Weddings and Events page, you can book the event with the catering director. Easy.

The Mar-a-Lago website claims that the historic destination, built by the socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post in the 1920s, is the finest example of living history. After Fridays events, that couldnt be more true.
Former President Donald Trumps indictment, which was unsealed Friday afternoon, is even more shocking than his lawyers suggested in advance. It charges him with seven separate crimes, including 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information at his Mar-a-Lago compound, several counts of withholding or corruptly concealing public documents, and a few of lying to federal investigators38 counts in all.

But quite apart from the legal issues (which seem incontestably grave), what was in all these documents? Could Trumps mishandling of them have really jeopardized national security?

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Even now, 15 months after the FBI investigation got underway, we dont know exactly what information these documents contain. But even before this indictment we knew enoughand now we know moreto infer that the damage, at least potentially, was very high. As another former president, Barack Obama, once said, Theres classified, and theres classified. By that measure, many of the documents that Trump took with him from the White House were classifieditalicized and boldfaced.

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According to the indictment, one document dealt with an intelligence briefing about the nuclear capabilities of foreign countries. Others dealt with U.S. and allied military capabilities as well as their vulnerabilities to foreign military attacks. Some dealt with military operations. And a lot of them were classified at a very high level.

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Let us review the facts that were made public nearly a year agobut may have been widely forgotten. The affidavit filed by the Justice Department last August noted that in early 2022, the FBI retrieved 15 boxes of documents, that 22 documents were classified top-secret, and that some of those (the number was unspecified) contained even more sensitive markings, including HCS, SCI, FISA, ORCA, and NOFORN.

These obscure acronyms suggest that Trump is in very deep trouble, and its completely self-inflicted.

HCS means HUMINT Control System, and HUMINT means human intelligencei.e., intelligence gathered by human spies. These documents may contain the identities of spies as well as the information they supplied.

FISA means information processed through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Acts special court. This would include intercepts of foreign governments communications.

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ORCON stands for originator controlled, meaning that disseminationeven within the government, even to officials cleared for top-secretmust first be approved by the originator (e.g., the CIA, if the document was created by CIA). In other words, Trump couldnt have declassified these papers, even if he had wanted to.

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NOFORN means the document cannot be shared with foreign governments or citizens, not even with allies.

In other words, some of these documentsas an official familiar with them told the Washington Post at the timeranked among the most sensitive secrets we hold.

The FBI special agent who filed the affidavit wrote that he had probable cause to believe that there were more boxes containing more highly classified documents still hidden away at Mar-a-Lago, many in unsecured locations. The judge approved his request to go back for another look. The court-ordered search three days later, on Aug. 8, retrieved more than 300 classified documents.

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In other words, this is not a case of a few sheets of paper marked secret getting shuffled in with personal effects as a presidents staff hastily vacates the White House before a successor moves in. The indictment quotes tape recordings of conversations proving that Trump knew he had classified documentshes showing them to a visitor during the conversationand that he had no business having them.

The indictment also claims, with photographic evidence, that these boxes were stored, for several months, in places at Mar-a-Lago that were completely accessible to guestsincluding a ballroom stage, a public bathroom, and a storage room that could be reached from multiple outside entrances, including one near a swimming pool.

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It also states that Trumps valetwho is also indictedhelped him move boxes in order to conceal them from federal agents who came to retrieve them.

Trump and his lawyers have said that what he did with secret documents was no different from what Hillary Clinton or President Joe Biden did with theirsbut in fact, those cases are very different. It is true that Biden had classified documents among his archive at his Washington think tank and in his Delaware home. We dont know how many, or just how classified they were (an investigation is ongoing), but he did hand them over instantly; in fact, the documents at the think tank were discovered by his staff, who let the FBI know about them.

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As for Clinton, when she was secretary of state, she did text or discuss classified information on her cellphone, which could have been tapped or hacked. But an FBI investigation uncovered only eight calls that contained top-secret information. Seven of those dealt with CIA drone strikes, which were classified by nature but which had been reported in newspapers around the time of the calls. One of them was about a conversation with the prime minister of Malawi; also, by nature, conversations with foreign leaders are deemed top-secret. None of them contained SCI, HCS, or any of the other beyondtop-secret designations. If Russian or Chinese agents had transcribed everything she said, they wouldnt have learned anything of use.

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It is worth recalling that, during the 2016 campaign, Trump railed against Clintons carelessness with secrets. It galvanized the war cry at that years Republican National Convention: Lock her up! It also drove him, early on in his presidency, to upgrade at least one law against improper handling of secret information from misdemeanor to felonykarma indeed!

If Trump is found guilty on all counts, he could be imprisoned for up to 100 years and fined $1.75 million.

Why did Trump take so many secret documents with him? Was it just to show them off to visitors? He apparently did some of that. From a legal point of view, it doesnt matter. The laws apply regardless of motive. At least one of the laws doesnt even specify that the mishandled document needs to be classified. This, of course, is foolish; maybe the case against Trump will drive some Republicans to modify some of these laws (probably not, though).

Meanwhile, though, some of these documentssome of Trumps pilferings and mishandlingsare serious by any criterion, not just legal technicalities. It is not true that all presidents have done this, as Trump and some of his apologists claim. The prosecutors dont need to draw any distinction on legal grounds. But they need to draw them anyway, not for political reasons but to prevent Trumps trial from becoming politicized.
On Thursday, news broke, via Donald Trump himself, that he has been indicted on federal charges in Miami for mishandling classified information. On Friday, prosecutors released the indictment, which specifies the charges against Trump and outlines the evidence against him.

Trump is accused of 37 counts of unlawfully retaining national security information and obstructing justice, and the outlines of the case will not be surprising to anyone who has read coverage of the investigation. Hes said to have instructed his staff to move numerous boxes of documents and other materialincluding classified material that must, by law, be kept in a secure federal facilityfrom the White House to his home at the Mar-a-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, Florida, after his term ended. After being notified both informally and via subpoena that he was legally required to turn all of this classified material over to representatives of the National Archives, he attested that he had done so despite allegedly working privately (with an assistant, Walt Nauta, who is also charged) to keep some of the material anyway.

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According to the government, the material kept at Mar-a-Lago included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.

Related from Slate Dennis Aftergut Trump Blew an Enormous Hole in His Classified Documents Defense Read More

The unsecured locations that the government says Trump kept this material include the stage in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower in The Mar-a-Lago Clubs Lake Room, and a storage room that was accessible from The Mar-a-Lago Club pool patio through a doorway that was often kept open. According to the indictment, Trumps personal assistant at one point found several of TRUMPs boxes fallen and their contents spilled onto the floor of the Storage Room, including a document marked SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY, which denoted that the information in the document was releasable only to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. There is a photo in the indictment of the bathroom in question. In the photo, above, you can see a number of boxes stacked within inches of a toilet.

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Trump is also accused of showing classified documentsa map of a country in which a U.S. military operation was ongoing, and a plan to attack an unnamed country that other reports have identified as Iranto individuals who werent authorized to see them, including staff members, two writers who were interviewing him, and an employee of his political action committee. (Hes further said to have told these individuals that the documents he was showing them were secret and highly confidential.) And according to the indictment, he responded to a May 2022 subpoena requesting all the relevant documents that remained in his possession by instructing Nauta to move a number of boxes out of the room where he knew one of his lawyers was scheduled to search for responsive material. That lawyer later told authorities that after he told Trump he had found some classified documents in the boxes that remained, Trump did the following:

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He made a funny motion as though  well okay why dont you take them with you to your hotel room and if theres anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out. And that was the motion that he made.

This plucking motion occurred, according to notes allegedly taken by one of the lawyers, after Trump had asked his legal team, in reference to the Department of Justice, Wouldnt it be better if we just told them we dont have anything here?

Via his Truth Social site, the former president has said he is INNOCENT of all charges.
Nvidia, the company that dominates the market for graphics processing units, was once known mostly in the video game world. But these days, Nvidia GPUs are also the go-to source for the massive computing power needed to run generative A.I. systemsand the recent explosion in A.I. hype has propelled the companys stock into the stratosphere. Nvidia briefly hit a trillion-dollar valuation, putting itself in league with tech giants like Alphabet and Apple and launching a bit of a frenzy in the markets. Nvidia is looking like the first big stock win of the A.I. era, and investors are salivating.

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On Sundays episode of What Next: TBD, I spoke with Don Clark, a freelance reporter who specializes in the chips industry, about how Nvidia rode the A.I. revolution, became the hottest chipmaker in the world, and made the entire A.I. craze suddenly seem very real. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Emily Peck: In 1993, Nvidia was just an idea that CEO Jensen Huang and a couple of his friends were mapping out inside a Dennysthe stuff of Silicon Valley myth. At that moment, what were they focused on?

Don Clark: They basically set out to do the graphics job. Gaming was a big thing. CPUs didnt do it very well, so they started in that business and they rode it really hardbasically anything thats visual about computing, they were there. They were always involved in the chips that made movies, chips that scientists use to visualize things. Anything that involves painting images on a screen, Nvidia has just been pushing the envelope constantly. Theyve spent $37 billion in research since the companys inception.

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Is there something about Jensen that makes him at the forefront of this, something that is making him take risks that others arent?

Generally speaking, when your CEO is very deep technically, those are the glory days of any company. When Bill Gates was running Microsoft, they were kicking ass; when Steve Jobs was running Apple, they were kicking ass. The great leaders who have really helped the industry, no engineer can snow them about, Oh, its too complicated, or We cant do it. Jensen is very, very deep technically, and he reads all the scientific literature, he talks to the scientists directly. He was a young maverick in 1993, and now hes 60but he still gives off that energy.

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Nvidia is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the A.I. rush. Their chips are some of the most advanced on the market, and theyve been the leading chipmaker that powers A.I. systems for almost a decade now. What does that mean for the company?

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Theres an argument to be made that A.I. is going to change every single bit of software. Think of every single thing that has intelligence in it, from your toaster to your carit all has software in it. Jensen describes basically how the many trillions of dollars of investment in the data centers of the world are all going to be changed to do this kind of A.I. way of working. Nvidia famously was in phones and decided to get out of it; they just decided to focus on data centers.

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This isnt the first time Nvidia has seen immense growth on the back of a new technology it powers. During the crypto boom, Nvidia GPUs were highly sought-after by crypto miners, and as crypto went gangbusters, Nvidias stocks soared, only to crash back down to earth along with the crypto markets. What makes the A.I. boom distinct?

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Basically, crypto miners were competing with gamers for the same kind of GPUs used to power video games, and so the stock got this bubble. It was very hard to quantify because nobody quite knew how much of Nvidias numbers reflected the crypto boom, and so they got hit when it all sort of unwound. But the A.I. boom is about changing everything we do. I mean, every Google search you do now is powered by A.I.; every time you look up somebody on Facebook and people are recommended, thats A.I. Its not a fad, it is inevitable.

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I cover markets for Axios and weve been watching Nvidia stock do really well this year. But when it recently touched a trillion-dollar valuationin league with Apple, Amazon, Microsoftthat felt like it came out of nowhere. Did it surprise you?

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I knew it was going to be a big quarter, but I did not expect it was going to be like that. The markets are always six months ahead of predicting these cycles. Last year was a terrible year for semiconductor stocks. But then, if you think the cycles going to turn, you want to be the first person to bet on getting in thereso basically there was a lot of premature betting that there was going to be this turnaround.

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Related from Slate Emily Peck Can the U.S. Bring Chip Manufacturing Home? Read More

Nvidia has seen a rush of orders for its chipswhy is that? Was it the introduction of ChatGPT that kind of upped the level of competition in the overall A.I. market and pushed companies to ramp up?

Thats basically what happened. Microsoft and OpenAI did this deal, and it was announced last year, with Nvidia saying tens of thousands of GPUs were involved. So everyone else realized they had to up their generative A.I. game. All these cloud providers are basically using GPUs in two ways. They have their own A.I. jobs that theyre doing internally for themselves, and then, with the exception of Meta, theyre also selling computing cycles to other people. So if youre a startup and you want to do A.I., what youre usually doing is not buying a GPU, youre going to AWS and using their Nvidia-powered computing service.

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But because of how much companies rely on Nvidia for their infrastructure, Nvidias biggest competitors are also their biggest customers, right?

I would say the most serious competition to Nvidia is the internally developed A.I. chips at Google and Amazon, and because they know the job pretty specifically and they can tailor their software for it, they can get a pretty good cost reduction in doing this A.I. work.

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Googles most famous for doing it. They do some of their own work and sell some work on their own TPU chips. Amazon, which has done a lot of its own chips for other parts of the computing jobs, recently introduced a couple of A.I. chips itself, which it says are starting to get traction, although its pretty early days.

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I believe you that everythings going to be running on A.I., and its the futurebut it still has this feeling, looking at the stock market, looking at Nvidias stock price and all the coverage right now  it has bubble vibes. It reminds me of the dot-com boom.

Im not defending the current stock price of Nvidia, because theres all kinds of speculative stuff in there. And the money flows like, Oh, Im a fund and I need to get some A.I. in my portfolio, who can I buy? So if were having this conversation two years from now, would I think Nvidias stock price would be where it is now? I wouldnt say its guaranteed at all.

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I wouldnt discount anything about the revenue theyre going to get from A.I. The question is going to be how is that factored into how much the stock price is already inflated. Thats one of the things about this whole semiconductor space: Its not enough to build one great chip, you have to have a roadmap of better, better, better, and each one of those things costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. So its not a game for the faint of heart.

How has Nvidia simplified getting into the A.I. business?

People underestimate the software. Nvidia makes it so easy, relatively speaking, to get into A.I. They have a university to teach people how to do stuff, they have their own supercomputers that sell cycles to other people, they sell reference designs for other server makers to make things, they have all these pretrained A.I. models that they give you for specific jobs and specific industries. They have built up just a huge software moat around their business.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
They are sailing around the harbor. Photo: Reuters



The view of Hong Kong was brightened up by a pair of giant yellow rubber ducks. The Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman sent them to the local Victoria harbor in droves  the ducks are part of his art installation, which he named Double Ducksand he himself hopes that they will bring joy and happiness to the city.

People are excited. Photo: Reuters



The 18-meter-tall inflatable yolks will reside in Hong Kong harbor for two weeks, but this is not the first time that this kind of creature has become a temporary resident of Hong Kong  exactly ten years ago, Hofmanns sculpture called the Rubber Ducky (Rubber Duck) attracted a lot of people there.

I hope it brings as much pleasure as it has in the past. In a world where we have suffered due to pandemic, wars and political situation, I think it is the right moment to bring back double happiness, said the author, thus explaining that a duck with a companion this time also means twice the funThe two ducks have already aroused enthusiasm among the locals, some believe that the ducks are positive for Hong Kong, especially in times when society is in a bad mood.

According to the curator of the creative studio AllRightsReserved, the ducks are actually similar to the symmetrical Chinese characters shi for luck and peng for friends. Inspired by a world map and a rubber duck for the rubber duck installation, Hofman embarked on a world tour in the Netherlands in 2007, stopping in ports from France to Brazil.
According to this new information the Russians have known about alien civilizations for several decades, to many this comes as no surprise,...
Assange has been in custody in London for the past four years. Photo: Reuters



Assange has been in custody since 2019, when the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he took refuge, withdrew his asylum protection, the Guardian reports.

Its Tuesday Jonathan Swifta British High Court judge, dismissed all eight counts of Assanges appeal against extradition to the US, signed by the then British Home Secretary last June, in a three-party ruling Come on Patel.

Assanges wife Stella Assange announced that a new appeal against the extradition will be filed next week. As she explained, two other judges should then decide on the appeal. We remain optimistic that we will win and that Julian will not be extradited to the US to face charges that could see him imprisoned for the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for publishing true information about war crimes that the US government did.

Assanges legal team insists, among other things, that the US is politically motivated to prosecute the Wikileaks founder. His brother Gabriel Shipton believes the Australian government could do more for Assange.

The Australian is being prosecuted by US authorities for publishing classified documents leaked to the public in 2010 and 2011 related to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She played a big role in this Chelsea Manning (before Bradley Manning), who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq, and who then handed over to WikiLeaks in 2010 a large number of documents from the Pentagon on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and diplomatic cables from the State Department. Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in military prison in 2013, and in 2017, then-Pres. Barack Obama pardoned.

According to the US, by publishing the classified documents, Assange violated the law and endangered lives. He has been in custody since 2019, although in the meantime he served time for violating the terms of his parole. He faces up to 175 years in prison in the United States.
Last year, most bathing waters in Europe met the strictest EU standards for excellent water quality. In countries such as Austria and Croatia, almost all evaluated bathing waters received an excellent rating, while in Slovenia they were all of adequate quality. Slovenia remains at the top of Europe in terms of the excellence of its coastal bathing waters.

Swimming in Soca PHOTO: Shutterstock

According to the European Commission, since the adoption of the European bathing water directive in 2006, the proportion of bathing facilities with an excellent rating has increased. In recent years, it has been between 85 and 89 percent for coastal and between 77 and 81 percent for inland bathing waters, according to the latest report on bathing waters, which is prepared every year by the commission and the European Environment Agency (EEA).

Last year, 85.7 percent of all rated bathing waters in the EU received an excellent rating, and 95.9 percent of them met the minimum standards.

Last year, 95 percent of bathing water in Cyprus, Austria, Greece and Croatia met the standard of excellent quality. In addition, in Malta, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia and Luxembourg, all assessed bathing waters met at least minimum quality standards, the European Commission pointed out in a press release.

In Slovenia, the Zustern swimming pool and Primostek na Kolpa remain in a sufficient condition, which is the result of pollution in the past years. The bathing waters of Nadiza, Idrijca, Baca pri Modrej, Krka and in some places on Kolpa are of good quality. All bathing waters on Lake Bled and Lake Bohinj, on Soca and almost all on the sea and Kolpa received an excellent rating.

Water quality at coastal bathing sites, which account for two-thirds of all rated bathing sites, is generally better than at inland river and lake bathing sites. The reason for this is the greater self-cleaning ability of the sea, Ars explains.

In 2022, 88.9 percent of EU coastal bathing facilities were classified as excellent, compared to 79.3 percent of inland bathing facilities. In Slovenia, this share was 95.2 percent, which, as it has been for many years, ranks us at the very top behind Cyprus (99.2 percent), Croatia (98.9 percent) and Greece (96.5 percent), the agency emphasizes for the environment.

In the report, the European Commission and the EEA note that the share of bad bathing water has declined over the last decade and has remained stable since 2015. Last year, the share of swimming pools with poor water quality was 1.5 percent. This means that the health risks associated with swimming in bathing waters in Europe are slowly decreasing, according to the commission.

In 2022, only two countries had more than three percent of poor quality bathing water, namely the Netherlands (3.4 percent) and Sweden (4.1 percent).

In Albania, which voluntarily sends data on the state of bathing water to the European Commission, there was a noticeable improvement in quality last year. In 2015, 36.1 percent of all bathing waters there received a bad rating, and last year this share fell to 6.7 percent. The researchers attribute the improvement in the situation to the construction of a larger number of water treatment plants in recent years.
Former Italian Prime Minister and notorious media mogul Silvio Berlusconi has landed in the hospital again, from where he was discharged only a few weeks ago. His admission to the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan has increased speculation about the seriousness of his medical condition.

Silvio Berlusconiformer populist Forza Italia party leader and billionaire media mogul, was discharged from San Raffaele Hospital in Milan 20 days ago after being diagnosed with acute leukemia.

This time, Berlusconi was admitted to the normal hospital ward of Pavilion Q1 and is not in intensive care. Its the same department he was fired from a few weeks ago. It is not excluded that the leader of the Forza Italia party is in the hospital for a new treatment.

Later, the Italian agency Ansa reported that Berlusconis eldest daughter, Marina, had arrived at the hospital.

Silvio Berlusconi PHOTO: AP

The former prime minister was suffering from myelomonocytic leukemia, as announced in a bulletin signed two months ago by Professor Zangrillo, Berlusconis long-time doctor. He was last admitted for a lung infection, from which Berlusconi recovered after spending several days in intensive care. He arrived at the hospital in early April and left it in mid-May. During the days of his hospitalization, Berlusconi did not spare himself, as he even recorded a long speech that was broadcast at the convention of the Forza Italia party. However, the former Prime Minister did not return to public speaking.

READ MORE Berlusconi returned home after more than six weeks in the hospital

Chronic myelomonocytic leukemia is a blood cancer that usually appears in old age and can manifest itself in different forms, in which anemia and neutropenia (a decrease in the number of white blood cells) dominate, or a proliferative form with a large number of white blood cells. The only treatment option is a stem cell transplant from a healthy donor. Treatment is available, but due to the advanced age of most patients, it is difficult to implement in many cases.

In recent years, Berlusconi has been hospitalized several times. In 2016, he underwent open-heart surgery, and three years later he had an operation on his intestines. In 1997, he was operated on for a prostate tumor. In 2021, he was hospitalized several times, both for heart problems and for covid-19 and its complications.

The populist politician was three times the president of the Italian government between 1994 and 2011 at different intervals.
A well-planned advertising campaign can elevate your small business, increasing sales, customer engagement, and growth. But how do you set one up?

In this small business advertising guide, youll discover how advertising can help your business and read a step-by-step guide to designing your advertisement campaign. We will also show you how to define clear goals, understand your target audience, select optimal advertising channels, craft compelling messages, and measure your success.

What is an Advertising Campaign?

An advertising campaign is a strategic initiative designed to promote a specific product, service, or brand to a targeted audience. It comprises multiple interconnected advertisements spread across different platforms with a common theme and goal. These campaigns aim to increase brand visibility, foster customer engagement, and ultimately, drive sales.

Small businesses, particularly, stand to gain substantially from successful advertising campaigns. They provide a platform to create brand identity, reach potential customers, and compete in markets often dominated by larger enterprises.

Lets explore the three broad types of advertisement campaigns:

Branding: A branding campaign aims to create or enhance your brand identity in the market. These campaigns emphasize your businesss core values, mission, and unique selling points, creating an emotional connection with potential customers. Its all about telling your brand story and setting your business apart. Direct Marketing: Direct marketing campaigns focus on prompting immediate action from potential customers. Techniques such as direct mail, telemarketing, and email marketing are commonly used. The primary goal is to encourage purchases, sign-ups, or inquiries by providing direct value propositions and clear calls to action. Digital Marketing: Digital marketing campaigns are run across digital platforms such as social media, search engines, email, and websites. Given the widespread use of digital devices and the internet, these campaigns can reach a vast audience. They can involve various strategies, including content marketing, social media advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Branding Campaigns: Building Your Business Identity

Branding campaigns are all about defining who you are as a business. They create an image in the minds of potential and existing customers about your brands personality, culture, values, and unique attributes that set you apart from competitors.

Successful campaigns can transform your small business from a mere name or logo into a living, breathing entity with its own character and purpose. It builds an emotional connection with your audience, fostering loyalty and long-term customer relationships.

A key aspect of a branding campaign is consistency across all communication platforms  from your website and social media accounts to print advertising and customer service interactions. Consistent use of tone, style, imagery, and language ensures a uniform brand experience that customers can identify and resonate with.

Branding campaigns can also articulate your brands value proposition  why should customers choose you over competitors? By highlighting what makes your products or services superior, branding campaigns can help customers understand your unique selling points, and why they matter.

Overall, branding campaigns lay the foundation of your business identity. They enable your small business to stand tall in the marketplace, build trust with customers, and carve out your niche. Without a strong brand, its hard to make a lasting impression. But with the right branding campaign, your small business can capture hearts and minds, building a loyal customer base that powers your success.

Direct Marketing Campaigns: Targeting Your Audience Directly

Direct marketing campaigns involve promoting your products or services directly to your target audience. They use tactics designed to evoke an immediate response, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or visiting your website. The goal is to forge a direct link between your business and the customer, eliminating intermediaries.

Direct marketing campaigns typically use channels such as direct mail, telemarketing, SMS, email marketing, and targeted online ads. A key feature of these campaigns is the use of personalized messages tailored to the recipients interests, preferences, or previous interactions with your business. This high degree of personalization can make the communication feel more relevant and engaging to the recipient, increasing the chances of a positive response.

Direct marketing campaigns can be highly effective for small businesses for several reasons:

Targeted Approach: These campaigns allow you to focus on a specific demographic or customer segment, increasing the chances of your message reaching people who are genuinely interested in your offerings. Measurable Results: Its easier to track responses in direct marketing, providing clear data on what works and what doesnt, aiding in improving future campaigns. Cost-Effective: Since youre communicating with a targeted group, direct marketing can be more cost-effective than mass marketing methods, making it a good choice for small businesses with limited budgets.

Digital Marketing Campaigns: Leveraging the Power of the Internet

Digital marketing campaigns utilize the internet and digital technologies to promote a product, service, or brand. These campaigns leverage various online platforms, from social media networks and email to search engines and websites, allowing businesses to reach consumers where they are spending increasingly more time: online.

In a digital marketing campaign, you might use:

Content Marketing: This involves creating and sharing valuable content (like blog posts, videos, or infographics) to attract and engage your target audience. Social Media Marketing: You can use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn to promote your brand, engage with your audience, and drive traffic to your website. Email Marketing: This allows you to send targeted messages directly to your subscribers inboxes, which can be personalized to increase engagement. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): By optimizing your website and content, you can increase your visibility on search engine results pages, driving organic (free) traffic to your site. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: Here, you pay a fee each time one of your ads is clicked on platforms like Google Ads or social media networks.

The internets role in digital marketing is fundamental. It enables businesses to reach a global audience, engage with customers in real-time, and tailor their messaging based on rich data insights.

The Importance of Advertising Campaigns for Small Businesses

Advertising campaigns play a crucial role in the growth and sustainability of small businesses. They are more than just tools for promotion; they are strategic drivers that can propel your business forward in several key areas:

Brand Awareness: An effective advertising campaign can put your business on the map. By consistently showcasing your brands unique attributes across various platforms, you can engrave your brand in the minds of potential customers. With heightened brand awareness, you enhance recognition and recall, making it more likely for consumers to think of your business when they need a product or service you offer. Customer Acquisition: Advertising campaigns are essential for attracting new customers. Whether its through direct marketing efforts that offer an immediate value proposition, or digital marketing strategies that drive online traffic to your business, well-executed campaigns can widen your customer base, expanding your market reach. Sales Improvement: By strategically promoting your products or services, advertising campaigns can stimulate demand and drive sales. Effective campaigns not only reach potential customers but also convince them of the value your business offers, increasing the likelihood of conversions and boosting your bottom line. Competitive Advantage: In markets saturated with options, advertising campaigns help your business stand out. They distinguish your offerings from those of competitors, giving customers compelling reasons to choose you over others.

In essence, advertising campaigns are a pivotal component of a small businesss strategy. They foster growth, not just by increasing visibility, but by actively contributing to customer acquisition and sales.

The Role of a Successful Marketing Campaign in Business Growth

Successful advertising campaigns can catapult small businesses into new levels of growth and profitability. Lets consider a couple of real-world examples that demonstrate this potential.

Dollar Shave Club : When Dollar Shave Club launched in 2012, it was a small startup with a simple idea: deliver high-quality razors to your door for a dollar a month. They kicked off with a hilarious, irreverent video that quickly went viral. The video was a huge success not only because it was entertaining, but also because it clearly communicated the brands value proposition: stop overpaying for brand-name razors. Within two days of the videos launch, the company had 12,000 new subscribers. By the end of 2015, it had more than 2 million members and was purchased by Unilever in 2016 for $1 billion.

: When Dollar Shave Club launched in 2012, it was a small startup with a simple idea: deliver high-quality razors to your door for a dollar a month. They kicked off with a hilarious, irreverent video that quickly went viral. The video was a huge success not only because it was entertaining, but also because it clearly communicated the brands value proposition: stop overpaying for brand-name razors. Within two days of the videos launch, the company had 12,000 new subscribers. By the end of 2015, it had more than 2 million members and was purchased by Unilever in 2016 for $1 billion. Airbnb: When Airbnb first started, it was a small operation with an innovative concept that was unfamiliar to most people. To raise awareness and credibility, they launched a clever advertising campaign during the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. They sold limited-edition, politically-themed cereal boxes (Obama Os and Capn McCains) online to provide accommodation support for convention-goers. The campaign went viral, leading to national press coverage that significantly boosted Airbnbs visibility, leading to the worldwide presence it has today.

These examples demonstrate that a successful advertising campaign, whether its branding, direct marketing, or digital, can serve as a growth catalyst for small businesses.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Your Small Business Advertising Campaign

Setting Goals for Your Advertising Campaign

Before launching any advertising campaign, its essential to define what you want to achieve. Clear, measurable goals will guide your campaigns direction and help evaluate its success.

Goals might range from increasing website traffic or boosting product sales, to expanding your email list or enhancing brand awareness. Its important to align these goals with your overall business objectives.

Ensure your goals are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, instead of saying I want to increase website traffic, a SMART goal would be I want to increase website traffic by 25% over the next three months.

Having well-defined goals not only gives your campaign direction but also allows you to measure its performance against predefined benchmarks. This way, you can accurately assess the effectiveness of your campaign and make necessary adjustments for future initiatives.

Target Audience Identification and Understanding

Identifying and understanding your target audience is a critical step in setting up your advertising campaign. Your target audience is the specific group of people you want to reach with your message, those most likely to be interested in your product or service.

To define your target audience, consider the following aspects:

Demographics: What is their age, gender, income level, education, or occupation? Geographics: Where do they live or work? Psychographics: What are their interests, attitudes, values, or lifestyle? Behavioral Factors: What are their purchasing behaviors or product usage patterns?

Understanding your audience goes beyond just knowing who they are. Its about comprehending their needs, preferences, and pain points. Use tools like customer surveys, marketing research, and data analytics to gain insights into your audiences behavior and motivations.

Choosing the Right Channels for Your Ad Campaigns

Choosing the right channels for your ad campaign is crucial in ensuring your message reaches your target audience. Todays advertising landscape offers a plethora of options, from traditional media like television, radio, and print, to digital platforms like social media, search engines, and email.

Heres how to choose the best ones for your business:

Know Your Audience: Where does your target audience spend their time? For instance, if theyre active on social media, channels like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn might be a good fit. If your target audience frequently uses search engines for research, consider search engine advertising. Consider Your Budget: Some advertising channels are more cost-effective than others. For example, social media and email marketing can be less expensive than television or radio ads. Determine what channels you can afford while still reaching a substantial portion of your target audience. Align with Your Goals: Some channels may be more effective than others depending on your goals. If youre aiming for brand awareness, you might benefit from display ads on social media. If youre trying to increase direct sales, pay-per-click ads on search engines could be more effective. Test and Measure: Consider running small tests on different channels to see which generate the best results. Measure engagement, conversion rates, and ROI to determine the effectiveness of each channel.

Remember, the goal is to choose ad campaign channels that will best deliver your message to your target audience. It might not be about using every available option, but rather about leveraging the right channels that align with your audience, budget, and goals.

Crafting the Perfect Message for Your Ad Campaign

The message you convey in your advertising campaign is the heart of your communication. Its what will either draw in your audience or push them away. Here are key steps to crafting the best advertising campaign messages:

Know Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Understand what makes your product or service unique. What sets you apart from your competitors? Your USP should form the core of your message. Understand Your Audiences Needs: Your message should address the needs or pain points of your target audience. Make sure your message clearly articulates how your product or service can provide the solution they are seeking. Be Clear and Concise: Your message should be straightforward and easy to understand. Avoid jargon or complicated language. Remember, clarity trumps cleverness when it comes to communication. Include a Strong Call to Action (CTA): Prompt your audience to take action after viewing your ad. Whether its Buy Now, Sign Up, or Learn More, ensure your CTA is clear and compelling. Emphasize Benefits, Not Features: Your audience wants to know how your product or service will benefit them. Instead of just listing features, explain how those features translate into benefits for the customer. Be Consistent: Maintain a consistent message across all channels and platforms. This enhances your brands credibility and makes it easily recognizable to your audience.

Allocating Budget and Resources for Your Advertising Campaign

The budget and resources allocated for your advertising campaign can greatly influence its reach and impact. Heres how to approach this crucial task:

Define Your Budget: The first step is to decide how much youre willing to spend. This should be an amount thats affordable but sufficient to make a noticeable impact. Keep in mind that your budget needs to cover all aspects of your campaign, from creative development and ad creation to placement and monitoring. Understand Cost Structures: Different advertising channels have different cost structures. For example, traditional media like TV or print might charge a flat rate, while digital platforms like Google or Facebook often use a pay-per-click model. Familiarize yourself with these structures to make informed decisions. Prioritize Channels: Based on your target audience and chosen channels, allocate more of your budget to channels where your audience is most active and where youre likely to get the best return on investment (ROI). Consider Timing: If your business is seasonal, you might want to allocate more funds to peak periods. Similarly, if a certain channel performs better on specific days or times, consider increasing your spending during those periods. Allocate Resources: Apart from the budget, youll also need to allocate human resources. Determine who will manage the campaign, create the content, monitor performance, and make necessary adjustments. Monitor and Adjust: Monitor your campaign closely to see how well each channel is performing. Dont be afraid to adjust your budget allocation based on performance data. If a particular channel is not performing well, consider shifting funds to a more successful one.

Monitoring, Measuring, and Optimizing Your Advertising Campaigns

An advertising campaign isnt something you set and forget. Its a dynamic process that requires constant monitoring, measurement, and optimization to ensure its delivering the desired results. Heres how to approach these tasks:

Monitoring: Regularly check your campaigns performance to assess if its running as expected. Monitor engagement metrics like clicks, shares, comments, and view time on digital platforms, or response rates in direct marketing. Watch for any unusual activity, like sudden drops or spikes, which could signal a problem or an opportunity. Measuring: Use appropriate tools to measure the results of your campaign against your defined goals. Google Analytics, for instance, can track website traffic and user behavior, while social media platforms offer built-in analytics tools for tracking engagement and reach. Look at metrics such as conversion rate, cost per lead, and return on ad spend to evaluate the success of your campaign. Optimizing: If your campaign isnt performing as well as expected, dont be afraid to make adjustments. Perhaps your message isnt resonating, or maybe youre not reaching the right audience. Experiment with different variables, like your ad copy, visuals, or targeting criteria, to see what improves performance. Learning: Take lessons from every campaign. What worked? What didnt? Use these insights to inform your future campaigns. Remember, continuous improvement is a key part of successful advertising.

The Key Elements of a Great Advertising Campaign

A successful advertising campaign relies on the following key elements:

Targeting: The first step to creating a successful advertising campaign is to target your ads to the right people. This means understanding your target audience and their needs. You can use demographic data, psychographic data, and behavioral data to create a target audience profile.

The first step to creating a successful advertising campaign is to target your ads to the right people. This means understanding your target audience and their needs. You can use demographic data, psychographic data, and behavioral data to create a target audience profile. Messaging: Once you know who youre targeting, you need to create a message that will resonate with them. This means using language that they understand and appeals to their emotions. Your message should also be clear, concise, and persuasive.

Once you know who youre targeting, you need to create a message that will resonate with them. This means using language that they understand and appeals to their emotions. Your message should also be clear, concise, and persuasive. Creative elements: The creative elements of your ad, such as the visuals, copy, and design, should all work together to create a cohesive message. The visuals should be eye-catching and relevant to your product or service. The copy should be clear, concise, and persuasive. And the design should be consistent with your brand identity.

The creative elements of your ad, such as the visuals, copy, and design, should all work together to create a cohesive message. The visuals should be eye-catching and relevant to your product or service. The copy should be clear, concise, and persuasive. And the design should be consistent with your brand identity. Channel Selection: Choosing the right marketing channels is vital. Select platforms and mediums where your target audience is most likely to be present. This could include digital platforms, social media, print media, TV, radio, or outdoor advertising, based on your audiences preferences and behavior.

Choosing the right marketing channels is vital. Select platforms and mediums where your target audience is most likely to be present. This could include digital platforms, social media, print media, TV, radio, or outdoor advertising, based on your audiences preferences and behavior. Consistency and Integration: Maintain consistency in branding elements across all channels to strengthen brand recognition. Integrate your messaging and creative elements seamlessly to create a cohesive brand experience for your audience.

Maintain consistency in branding elements across all channels to strengthen brand recognition. Integrate your messaging and creative elements seamlessly to create a cohesive brand experience for your audience. Budget: Advertising can be expensive, so its important to set a budget before you start. Your budget will determine the size and scope of your campaign.

Advertising can be expensive, so its important to set a budget before you start. Your budget will determine the size and scope of your campaign. Measurement: Its important to track the results of your advertising campaign so you can see whats working and whats not. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track website traffic, social media engagement, and sales.

Its important to track the results of your advertising campaign so you can see whats working and whats not. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track website traffic, social media engagement, and sales. Innovation and Adaptability: Stay ahead of the curve by embracing innovation and adapting to changes in the market and consumer behavior. Explore new technologies, trends, and emerging platforms to reach your audience effectively.

Embracing the Digital Era: Online Advertising and Digital Advertising Campaigns

Digital advertising campaigns refer to promoting products or services through digital channels such as websites, search engines, social media platforms, and mobile applications. It offers several key benefits for small businesses:

Targeted Reach: Online advertising enables precise targeting, allowing businesses to reach their specific target audience based on demographics, interests, and online behaviors. This ensures that your message reaches those most likely to be interested in your offerings, maximizing the effectiveness of your campaigns. Cost-Effectiveness: Online advertising often offers flexible budgeting options, allowing businesses to set and control their advertising expenses. With various pricing models like pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM), you can optimize your spending and ensure youre getting value for your investment. Measurable Results: Digital advertising campaign provide detailed analytics and reporting, allowing you to track and measure the performance of your ads in real-time. This data-driven approach helps you understand the effectiveness of your campaigns, make informed decisions, and optimize your strategies for better results.

Benefits of Digital Advertising Campaign for Small Businesses:

Increased Visibility: By utilizing a well-crafted search engine advertising strategy, display ads, social media advertising, or email marketing, you can reach a larger audience and generate brand awareness more effectively. Enhanced Targeting and Personalization: Digital advertising allows for precise targeting and personalization. With tools like audience segmentation and retargeting, you can tailor your messages to specific audience segments, delivering more relevant and personalized ads, which can improve engagement and conversions. Improved Customer Engagement: Interactive elements in digital marketing campaign, such as videos, quizzes, or interactive banners, enhance customer engagement and promote two-way communication. This helps build stronger connections with your audience, fostering loyalty and increasing the likelihood of conversions. Flexibility and Agility: A digital marketing campaign offers flexibility in terms of budget, scheduling, and creative modifications. This allows small businesses to adapt their strategies quickly, respond to market changes, and optimize their campaigns based on real-time insights.

Digital Advertising Campaigns: The Future of Small Business Advertising

Digital ad campaigns offer numerous advantages for small businesses. Heres why they are crucial:

Wider Audience Reach: Digital advertising allows small businesses to transcend geographical boundaries and reach a vast online audience. With billions of people active on various digital platforms, businesses can tap into new markets and extend their reach like never before. Precise Targeting: Digital ad campaigns provide advanced targeting capabilities, enabling businesses to reach their ideal customers based on demographics, interests, online behavior, and more. This precision targeting ensures that your message reaches the right people, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversions. Cost-Efficiency: Digital ad campaigns often offer cost-effective solutions, allowing businesses to optimize their budgets. Compared to traditional advertising channels, digital platforms offer the cheapest way to advertise a small business. They also provide flexible pricing models and better return on investment (ROI), making it accessible for small businesses with limited resources. Data-Driven Optimization: Digital advertising provides in-depth analytics and performance metrics. Leveraging these insights, small businesses can measure the effectiveness of their campaigns in real-time, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven optimizations to achieve better results.

Trends in Digital Advertising Campaigns:

Mobile Advertising: With the increasing use of smartphones, mobile advertising has become a dominant force in the advertising industry. Optimizing campaigns for mobile devices, leveraging responsive design, and utilizing mobile-specific ad formats can significantly enhance campaign effectiveness. Video Advertising: Video content continues to gain popularity. Incorporating engaging video ad campaigns, whether on social media platforms or video-sharing platforms, can capture audience attention and boost engagement. Personalization and Automation: Tailoring ad campaigns to individual preferences and delivering personalized experiences has become more critical than ever. Utilizing automation tools and personalized targeting techniques can enhance the relevancy and effectiveness of your campaigns.

Tips for Maximizing Benefits from Digital Ad Campaigns:

Define Clear Objectives: Clearly define your campaign objectives, whether its brand awareness, lead generation, or driving sales. This clarity will help guide your strategy and ensure alignment with your business goals. Research Your Audience: Conduct thorough research to understand your target audiences demographics, preferences, behaviors, and digital habits. Use this insight to craft personalized and compelling messages that resonate with your audience. Optimize Landing Pages: Ensure your landing pages are optimized for conversions. Create clear calls-to-action, streamline the user experience, and provide relevant and valuable content to drive conversions. Experiment and Test: Dont be afraid to try different approaches and ad formats. Test different creatives, messaging, targeting options, and platforms to identify what works best for your audience and refine your strategy accordingly. Track and Analyze Results: Continuously monitor and analyze the performance of your campaigns using analytics tools. Identify key metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost per acquisition to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns and make informed optimizations.

Online Advertising: Platforms and Strategies for Success

Small businesses have a variety of online ad platforms and strategies at their disposal to achieve advertising success.

Online Ad Platforms:

Search Engine Advertising (SEA): Platforms like Google Ads allow businesses to display ads in search engine results when users search for specific keywords. SEA offers precise targeting, cost control, and the ability to reach users actively searching for relevant products or services. Social Media Advertising: Platforms such as Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and Twitter Ads enable businesses to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors. These platforms offer a wide reach, engagement opportunities, and various ad formats like image ads, video ads, and carousel ads. Display Advertising Networks: Networks like Google Display Network and Bing Ads provide access to a vast network of websites and apps where businesses can display banner or text ads. Display advertising offers broad reach, advanced targeting options, and the ability to leverage visual elements. Video Advertising Platforms: Platforms like YouTube Ads and social media video ad options allow businesses to reach audiences through engaging video content. Video ads can be skippable or non-skippable and provide opportunities for storytelling and brand engagement. Native Advertising Platforms: Native ad platforms such as Taboola and Outbrain integrate ads seamlessly into the content of websites, blending them with the user experience. This approach enhances user engagement and reduces ad resistance.

Online Ad Strategies:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimizing your website for search engines helps improve organic visibility and drive targeted traffic. Focus on keyword research, high-quality content creation, on-page optimization, and building quality backlinks to enhance SEO efforts. Content Marketing: Creating valuable and relevant content, such as blog posts, articles, infographics, or videos, helps attract and engage your target audience. Distribute your content through various channels and leverage it to drive brand awareness and establish thought leadership. Retargeting Campaigns: Implementing retargeting campaigns allows businesses to show ads to users who have previously visited their website or interacted with their brand. This strategy helps reinforce brand awareness, nurture leads, and increase conversions. Influencer Marketing: Collaborating with influencers relevant to your industry or target audience can amplify your brands reach and credibility. Identify influencers with an engaged following, align their values with your brand, and leverage their influence to promote your products or services. Email Marketing: Building an email list and sending targeted email campaigns helps nurture leads, retain customers, and drive conversions. Use personalized, engaging content and automation tools to deliver timely and relevant messages to your subscribers. Geotargeting: Geotargeting allows businesses to display ads to users in specific geographic locations. This strategy is particularly useful for local businesses targeting a specific area or for businesses running location-based promotions.

Harnessing the Power of Social Media: Crafting a Successful Social Media Marketing Campaign

Social media has revolutionized the advertising landscape, playing a pivotal role in the success of modern marketing campaigns. Heres an exploration of the key roles social media plays in successful campaigns:

Audience Reach and Targeting: Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn boast billions of active users, providing businesses with unparalleled access to diverse audiences worldwide. These platforms offer powerful targeting tools that allow businesses to precisely reach their desired demographic, interest groups, and even custom audiences, ensuring their ads are seen by the right people. Engagement and Interaction: Social media platforms facilitate direct engagement and interaction between businesses and their audience. Through likes, comments, shares, and messages, businesses can build relationships, foster brand loyalty, address customer queries, and gain valuable feedback. The interactive nature of social media helps businesses connect with their audience on a personal level, driving engagement and fostering a sense of community. Visual Storytelling and Content Promotion: Social media places a strong emphasis on visual content. It offers businesses the opportunity to visually showcase products, services, brand culture, and values through high-quality images, videos, and infographics. This enables businesses to capture attention, evoke emotions, and effectively convey their brand story, resulting in increased brand awareness and customer engagement. Amplification and Virality: Well-crafted content on social media has the potential to go viral and be shared extensively. When users engage with and share content, it expands the reach of businesses beyond their immediate followers, amplifying brand exposure and generating organic growth. This viral potential is a powerful aspect of social media that can significantly enhance the impact of an ad campaign. Influencer Partnerships: Social media platforms provide opportunities for businesses to collaborate with influencers who have established credibility and a dedicated following. Influencers can help businesses tap into their audience, expand brand reach, and drive conversions through authentic recommendations and endorsements. Data Analytics and Optimization: Social media platforms offer robust analytics tools that provide insights into the performance of an ad campaign. Businesses can track key metrics such as reach, engagement, click-through rates, and conversions, allowing them to measure campaign effectiveness and make data-driven optimizations for better results. The availability of real-time data empowers businesses to refine their strategies, target their audience more effectively, and allocate resources wisely. Social Listening and Market Research: Social media platforms serve as valuable channels for businesses to listen to conversations, gather market insights, and understand their audience better. By monitoring social media conversations, businesses can uncover trends, preferences, and sentiments, enabling them to tailor their advertising strategies, refine messaging, and stay ahead of the competition.

Content Marketing: Engaging Customers Through Value-Driven Content

Content marketing plays a crucial role within the scope of digital advertising, offering businesses the opportunity to engage customers through valuable and relevant content. Heres why small businesses need to produce high-quality, value-driven content:

Building Customer Relationships: Content marketing focuses on creating and sharing content that provides value to the target audience. By offering informative, entertaining, or educational content, businesses can establish themselves as industry experts and build trust with their customers. This helps nurture long-term relationships and encourages customer loyalty. Enhancing Brand Awareness: Producing high-quality content allows businesses to increase their brand visibility and awareness. When businesses consistently deliver valuable content, they become recognized as a go-to resource in their industry. This recognition helps expand their reach, attract new customers, and create brand advocates who actively promote their business. Driving Website Traffic: Valuable content serves as a magnet, attracting potential customers to a businesss website. By incorporating relevant keywords and optimizing content for search engines, businesses can improve their organic search visibility and attract more visitors. This increase in website traffic provides opportunities for engagement, lead generation, and conversions. Engaging and Educating Customers: Content marketing allows businesses to engage customers on a deeper level by addressing their pain points, answering their questions, and providing solutions to their problems. By delivering value through content, businesses can educate their customers, help them make informed decisions, and position themselves as trusted advisors in their industry. Supporting Social Media and Email Marketing: Valuable content serves as the foundation for effective social media and email marketing campaigns. Businesses can share content through their social media channels, driving engagement, attracting followers, and encouraging sharing. In email marketing, businesses can provide valuable content to subscribers, nurturing leads and driving conversions. Encouraging Customer Action: Through content marketing, businesses can inspire customer action. By strategically incorporating calls-to-action within their content, businesses can direct customers to take desired actions such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting more information. Well-crafted content helps guide customers through the buyers journey, influencing their decisions and driving conversions. Analytics and Iterative Improvement: Content marketing provides valuable data through analytics tools, allowing businesses to measure the performance of their content and make data-driven decisions. By analyzing metrics like engagement, click-through rates, and conversions, businesses can refine their content strategy, optimize campaigns, and improve their overall digital advertising efforts.

FAQs: Advertising Campaigns

How Much Should a Small Business Spend on an Advertising Campaign?

The amount a small business should spend on an advertising campaign varies depending on factors such as industry, target audience, and marketing objectives. As a general guideline, it is recommended that small businesses allocate around 5-10% of their annual revenue towards advertising. However, this can be adjusted based on the businesss growth stage and competition.

Its crucial to strike a balance between investing enough to reach your target market effectively and ensuring the campaign remains within your budgetary constraints. Conducting market research and consulting with marketing professionals can help determine an appropriate advertising budget for your specific business.

How Long Should an Advertising Campaign Run?

The duration of an advertising campaign depends on goals, budget, and product/service. Short-term campaigns, lasting a few weeks, work for time-limited promotions or events. Longer-term campaigns, spanning months, are ideal for brand awareness or product launches. Balance campaign length with budget, consider target audience buying cycle, and regularly evaluate performance for successful marketing campaigns.

How Can I Measure the Success of My Advertising Campaign?

To measure the success of your advertising campaign, consider these key metrics:

ROI (Return on Investment): Calculate revenue generated compared to campaign cost.

Conversion Rate: Determine the percentage of people taking the desired action.

Click-Through Rate (CTR): Measure the percentage of clicks compared to impressions.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): Calculate the average cost to acquire a customer or lead.

Website Analytics: Track website traffic, user behavior, and conversions using tools like Google Analytics.

Social Media Engagement: Monitor likes, comments, shares, and followers gained.

Brand Awareness Surveys: Conduct pre-and post-campaign surveys to measure changes in brand perception.

Can I Run Multiple Ad Campaigns for My Small Business at the Same Time?

Yes, running multiple ad campaigns simultaneously for your small business is possible and can be advantageous. It allows you to target different audiences, promote various products or services, and test different marketing strategies. Allocate your budget strategically, ensure message consistency, track campaign performance, and manage resources effectively to make the most of multiple campaigns.

How Often Should I Review and Adjust My Advertising Campaign?

It is recommended to review and adjust your advertising strategy on an ongoing basis. Depending on the campaigns duration and goals, conduct regular assessments weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Monitor key performance metrics, such as ROI, CTR, and conversion rates, to identify areas for improvement. Adjustments can include refining targeting, messaging, creative elements, or media placements. By continually optimizing your campaign, you can adapt to market changes, improve effectiveness, and achieve successful marketing campaigns.

What are the Types of Advertising Campaign?

There are different types of advertising campaigns, including:

Brand Awareness Campaigns: Increase visibility and familiarity with a brand. Product Launch Campaigns: Introduce new products or services to the market. Promotional Campaigns: Offer limited-time discounts or special incentives. Lead Generation Campaigns: Attract potential customers and collect their information. Rebranding Campaigns: Communicate new brand identity. Social Media Campaigns: Leverage social media platforms for brand engagement.

What do Successful advertising campaigns have in common?

Successful advertising campaigns share common characteristics, including:

Clear Objectives: They have defined goals aligned with the overall marketing strategy. Targeted Audience: They understand and connect with their specific target audience. Compelling Creativity: They use impactful visuals, copywriting, and storytelling. Consistent Branding: They maintain a consistent brand image across different channels. Multi-channel Approach: They leverage various relevant marketing channels. Measurement and Optimization: They measure performance and make data-driven adjustments. Adaptability: An effective advertising campaign adapts to market trends and consumer feedback.
The Chief Operating Officer (COO) is an indispensable figure in the realm of small businesses. This crucial position brings profound influence on the organizations strategic planning, business operations strategy, business development, and the achievement of organizational efficiency. The COOs primary responsibility lies in managing the day-to-day operations and driving the implementation of business strategies, a task that requires robust leadership skills and extensive experience in business administration.

Understanding the COO Role and Job Description

The chief operating officer job description varies from one company to another, depending on the businesss size, scope, and industry. In essence, however, the COO role is often second only to the chief executive officer (CEO) within the senior management team, emphasizing its criticality.

A successful chief operating officer shapes the companys operating capabilities and spearheads the execution of actionable business strategies, while ensuring employee productivity and operational excellence. They possess the ability to present a coherent business operations strategy and are adept at performance management, demonstrating the importance of management expertise.

One significant aspect of a COOs duties includes overseeing financial procedures, from monitoring cash flow to analyzing financial reports, to ensure profitability. They are also entrusted with investor targets and sales management, showcasing their broad spectrum of responsibilities.

Chief Operating Officer (COO) Requirements and Qualifications

The ideal candidate for a COO role typically holds a degree in business or a related field, coupled with a proven track record of strategic planning and business development. Their job description template often highlights the necessity of experience in business software, signifying the importance of tech-savviness in todays digital age.

A COOs qualifications also extend to their ability to foster an ethical leadership environment and promote the companys culture. They exhibit a knack for developing strategies and driving the organizational vision forward. To fulfill the requirements of the role, a COO must also demonstrate strong presentation skills, showcasing their ability to communicate complex ideas effectively.

If your small business seeks a COO, consider advertising on popular job boards today. Your job descriptions should be concise, encompassing all the responsibilities and qualifications that your ideal candidate should possess. By doing so, you can attract qualified candidates who are well-equipped to drive your company towards its goals.

The role of a Chief Operating Officer in a small business is expansive and multifaceted, with a significant influence on the companys growth and success. Understanding the depth and breadth of this role can help small businesses leverage the COOs capabilities to the fullest, fostering a pathway towards operational excellence and sustainable success.

Chief Operating Officer (COO) Job Description: Templates for Hiring at Your Business

Template 1:

The small business is currently seeking an exceptional Chief Operating Officer (COO) to provide visionary leadership and strategic direction. The COO will be responsible for optimizing operations, streamlining processes, and driving business growth. This is a unique opportunity for an accomplished leader to make a significant impact and contribute to the companys ongoing success.

Job Title: Chief Operating Officer

Location: [City, State]

Company: [Company Name]

About Us: [Company Name] is a thriving small business dedicated to [describe the businesss mission and industry]. We are seeking an experienced and visionary Chief Operating Officer (COO) to join our team and oversee our daily operations. As a key member of our leadership team, the COO will play a critical role in driving operational excellence, fostering growth, and ensuring the overall success of our business.

Job Description: As the COO at [Company Name], you will be responsible for leading and managing our operational activities, including [list key responsibilities and duties specific to your business]. You will collaborate closely with the CEO and other key stakeholders to develop and execute strategies that align with our business goals and objectives. The ideal candidate is a results-oriented leader with a proven track record in operational management, business development, and driving organizational success.

Responsibilities:

Oversee the day-to-day operations of the company, ensuring efficiency and effectiveness across all departments.

Develop and implement operational strategies, policies, and procedures to drive business growth and profitability.

Collaborate with the CEO and other executives to define the companys strategic direction and long-term goals.

Drive continuous improvement initiatives to optimize operational processes and enhance productivity.

Lead and develop a high-performing team, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and accountability.

Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to track operational performance and make data-driven decisions.

Identify and mitigate operational risks, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and industry standards.

Build and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders, including clients, vendors, and partners.

Stay abreast of industry trends, market dynamics, and competitive landscape to inform strategic decision-making.

Represent the company in meetings, conferences, and industry events as a knowledgeable and influential leader.

Qualifications:

Bachelors degree in Business Administration, Management, or a related field (MBA preferred).

Proven experience as a Chief Operating Officer or in a similar senior leadership role.

Strong business acumen and a strategic mindset, with the ability to translate vision into actionable plans.

Excellent leadership and people management skills, with a track record of building high-performing teams.

Exceptional communication and interpersonal abilities, with the aptitude to collaborate effectively across all levels of the organization.

Demonstrated experience in driving operational efficiency, process improvement, and change management.

Financial literacy and the ability to analyze complex data to inform decision-making.

Proven track record in driving business growth and delivering results in a small business environment.

Strong ethical standards and a commitment to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace.

Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment with a hands-on approach.

Benefits:

Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package.

Opportunity to make a significant impact and drive the success of a growing small business.

Collaborative and supportive work environment.

Professional development and growth opportunities.

To Apply: Interested candidates are encouraged to submit their resume, cover letter, and any other relevant documents to [email address]. Please include COO Application  [Your Name] in the subject line. We appreciate all applications, but only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

[Company Name] is an equal-opportunity employer and values diversity in our workforce. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected characteristic. We are committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming environment for all employees.

Template 2:

A reputable small business is in search of an experienced Chief Operating Officer (COO) to oversee and enhance its operations. The COO will be responsible for developing and implementing strategies, improving efficiency, and ensuring the companys goals are achieved. This role offers the chance to be part of a dynamic team and contribute to the continued growth and success of the organization.

Job Title: Chief Operating Officer

Location: [City, State]

Company: [Company Name]

About Us: [Company Name] is an innovative and fast-growing small business operating in the [industry/sector]. We are seeking a dynamic and results-driven Chief Operating Officer (COO) to join our leadership team. The COO will be responsible for overseeing our daily operations, driving operational efficiency, and ensuring the overall success of our business.

Job Description: As the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at [Company Name], you will play a pivotal role in overseeing and optimizing our companys operations to drive growth and profitability. You will work closely with the CEO and other key stakeholders to develop and execute operational strategies that align with our business objectives. The ideal candidate is a strategic thinker with a proven track record in operational management, business development, and fostering a high-performance culture.

Responsibilities:

Develop and implement operational plans, policies, and procedures to ensure efficient and effective business operations.

Drive the execution of strategic initiatives to achieve business objectives and financial targets.

Oversee the day-to-day operations of multiple departments, ensuring seamless coordination and collaboration.

Establish performance metrics and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the progress and success of operational goals.

Identify areas for operational improvement, develop action plans, and lead change management initiatives.

Foster a culture of operational excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement throughout the organization.

Build and maintain strong relationships with internal teams, clients, and external partners to drive collaboration and business growth.

Monitor industry trends, market conditions, and competitive landscape to identify opportunities and mitigate risks.

Ensure compliance with relevant regulations, industry standards, and ethical practices.

Provide leadership, guidance, and mentorship to a diverse team of managers and employees.

Qualifications:

Bachelors degree in Business Administration, Operations Management, or a related field (MBA preferred).

Proven experience as a Chief Operating Officer or in a similar executive leadership role.

Strong business acumen and strategic thinking skills, with a deep understanding of operational dynamics and industry trends.

Demonstrated ability to develop and execute operational strategies that drive business growth and profitability.

Excellent leadership and people management abilities, with a track record of building and developing high-performing teams.

Exceptional communication, negotiation, and relationship-building skills.

Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities, with a data-driven and results-oriented approach.

Experience in driving digital transformation and leveraging technology to enhance operational efficiency.

Proven track record in managing budgets, financial analysis, and resource allocation.

Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and adapt to changing priorities.

Benefits:

Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package.

Opportunity to be a key driver of the companys success and make a lasting impact.

Collaborative and inclusive work environment that values innovation and personal growth.

Professional development opportunities to enhance your skills and knowledge.

To Apply: Interested candidates are invited to submit their resume, cover letter, and any other relevant documents to [email address]. Please include COO Application  [Your Name] in the subject line. We appreciate all applications, but only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

[Company Name] is an equal-opportunity employer and values diversity in our workforce. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected characteristic. We are committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming environment for all employees.

Template 3:

The small business is seeking a highly skilled Chief Operating Officer (COO) to lead its operations and drive organizational excellence. The COO will be responsible for managing day-to-day operations, implementing best practices, and maximizing efficiency across departments. This role requires a proven track record of success in strategic planning and operational management, offering the opportunity to make a significant impact on the companys growth and profitability.

Job Title: Chief Operating Officer

Location: [City, State]

Company: [Company Name]

About Us: [Company Name] is a well-established small business dedicated to [describe the businesss mission and values]. We are seeking a visionary and strategic-minded Chief Operating Officer (COO) to join our team. As the COO, you will be responsible for overseeing our day-to-day operations and driving the overall success of our business.

Job Description: The COO at [Company Name] will provide leadership and strategic direction to our operational teams, ensuring seamless coordination and collaboration across departments. You will work closely with the CEO and other key stakeholders to develop and execute operational strategies that align with our long-term goals. The ideal candidate is a proactive and results-oriented leader with strong business acumen and a passion for driving organizational success.

Responsibilities:

Develop and implement operational plans, policies and procedures to optimize business operations and enhance efficiency.

Oversee and manage the day-to-day operations of multiple departments, ensuring effective resource allocation and coordination.

Collaborate with the CEO and senior leadership team to develop and execute the companys strategic objectives.

Drive operational excellence by implementing best practices, process improvements, and performance metrics.

Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess operational performance and identify areas for improvement.

Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement throughout the organization.

Build and maintain strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders, including clients, vendors, and partners.

Ensure compliance with industry regulations, legal requirements, and ethical standards.

Provide leadership and mentorship to a diverse team, promoting professional development and employee engagement.

Stay informed about industry trends, emerging technologies, and competitive landscape to drive innovation and maintain a competitive edge.

Qualifications:

Bachelors degree in Business Administration, Operations Management, or a related field (MBA preferred).

Proven experience as a Chief Operating Officer or in a similar executive leadership role.

Strong business acumen and strategic thinking skills, with the ability to align operational initiatives with overall business goals.

Excellent leadership and people management abilities, with a track record of building high-performing teams.

Solid understanding of financial management and budgeting principles.

Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate with stakeholders at all levels.

Demonstrated experience in driving operational efficiency, process improvement, and change management.

Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities, with the ability to make data-driven decisions.

Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and manage multiple priorities.

Ethical conduct and commitment to fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment.

Benefits:

Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package.

Opportunity to make a significant impact on a small business and contribute to its growth and success.

Collaborative and supportive work environment.

Professional development opportunities to enhance skills and knowledge.

To Apply: Interested candidates are invited to submit their resume, cover letter, and any other relevant documents to [email address]. Please include COO Application  [Your Name] in the subject line. We appreciate all applications, but only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

[Company Name] is an equal-opportunity employer and values diversity in our workforce. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected characteristic. We are committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming environment for all employees.

Template 4:

An innovative small business is looking for a results-driven Chief Operating Officer (COO) to lead its operations and drive business performance. The COO will be responsible for developing and executing operational strategies, optimizing processes, and ensuring the delivery of exceptional products/services. This role offers the chance to work in a dynamic and entrepreneurial environment, contributing to the companys success and shaping its future trajectory.

Job Title: Chief Operating Officer

Location: [City, State]

Company: [Company Name]

About Us: [Company Name] is a dynamic and growing small business operating in the [industry/sector]. We are seeking an experienced and strategic-minded Chief Operating Officer (COO) to join our leadership team. The COO will be responsible for overseeing and optimizing our operational activities to drive efficiency, growth, and customer satisfaction.

Job Description: As the COO at [Company Name], you will be at the forefront of our operational strategy and execution. You will work closely with the CEO and other stakeholders to ensure the effective management of our business operations. The ideal candidate is a results-driven leader with a passion for operational excellence and a track record of delivering impactful results.

Responsibilities:

Develop and execute operational strategies to drive business growth, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

Oversee and manage the day-to-day operations of various departments, ensuring smooth and efficient processes.

Collaborate with the CEO and senior leadership team to define and implement the companys strategic vision.

Identify opportunities for operational improvement and implement initiatives to enhance productivity and efficiency.

Establish and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure operational performance and identify areas for optimization.

Build and maintain strong relationships with internal teams, clients, and partners to drive collaboration and achieve business objectives.

Monitor industry trends, competitive landscape, and market conditions to identify opportunities and mitigate risks.

Ensure compliance with relevant regulations, standards, and legal requirements.

Foster a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, and accountability within the organization.

Provide leadership and mentorship to the operational teams, promoting a high-performance culture and professional development.

Qualifications:

Bachelors degree in Business Administration, Operations Management, or a related field (MBA preferred).

Proven experience as a Chief Operating Officer or in a similar executive leadership role.

Strong business acumen and strategic thinking skills, with the ability to translate vision into actionable plans.

Demonstrated success in driving operational excellence and process improvement.

Excellent leadership and people management abilities, with a track record of building and motivating high-performing teams.

Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate effectively with stakeholders at all levels.

Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities, with the ability to make data-driven decisions.

Financial acumen and experience in managing budgets and financial resources.

Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and adapt to changing priorities.

Ethical conduct and commitment to fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment.

Benefits:

Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package.

Opportunity to be a key driver of the companys success and contribute to its growth.

Collaborative and inclusive work environment that values innovation and personal growth.

Professional development opportunities to enhance your skills and knowledge.

To Apply: Interested candidates are encouraged to submit their resume, cover letter, and any other relevant documents to [email address]. Please include COO Application  [Your Name] in the subject line. We appreciate all applications, but only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

[Company Name] is an equal-opportunity employer and values diversity in our workforce. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected characteristic. We are committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming environment for all employees.

The Necessity of Strong Leadership Skills

A successful COO demonstrates exceptional leadership skills, often being the linchpin for the senior executive team. The COO nurtures a highly inclusive culture, driving the company culture while fostering professional development among the workforce. Leadership development is not just about developing strategies but about instilling an organizational vision and promoting this vision to oversee daily operations.

In addition, the COO is responsible for risk management and plays an active role in succession planning. They collaborate with key leaders, key customers, and external partners, demonstrating the importance of excellent communication skills in their role.

Setting the Business Growth Trajectory

A significant portion of a chief operating officers job description revolves around business growth. They are in charge of shaping the companys long-term objectives, developed in sync with the organizations vision, and steering the implementation of these objectives. They monitor progress continually, using data analysis skills to interpret data and adjust strategies as needed. These strategies are not only limited to financial growth but also extend to establishing a high-performance management team, ensuring the companys profitability, and monitor performance.

A COO also takes the helm in process enhancement, implementing improved processes that boost efficiency and drive business growth. As an operations director, the COO reviews and modifies the operational structure of the company as necessary, demonstrating a commitment to operational excellence.

Driving a Robust Business Operations Strategy

The chief operating officer coo is pivotal in the development and execution of the companys operations strategy. Their leadership team works closely with them to ensure that internal operations align with company strategies and that sufficient investment capital is allocated to essential projects.

A COO brings their senior management experience into play by establishing systems that enable quick decision-making, cross-functional collaboration, and organization-wide goal setting. In addition, theyre often instrumental in identifying and targeting potential key customers, which plays a significant role in the companys growth.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a Chief Operating Officer (COO) do in a small business?

A COO in a small business is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations and driving the implementation of business strategies. Their role is pivotal in strategic planning, business development, enhancing operational efficiency, and fostering a company culture that promotes growth and success.

What are the primary responsibilities of a COO?

A COOs responsibilities include overseeing day-to-day operations, implementing business strategies, performance management, managing the leadership team, fostering organizational efficiency, and contributing to business growth and profitability.

How does a COO contribute to business growth?

A COO plays a vital role in shaping the companys long-term objectives and steering the execution of these objectives. They monitor progress, interpret data to adjust strategies as needed, implement improved processes, and work towards establishing a high-performance management team.

What qualifications does a COO need?

The ideal candidate for a COO role typically holds a degree in business or a related field, with extensive experience in strategic planning, business development, and operations management. They should have strong leadership and presentation skills, with a proven track record of driving growth and operational excellence.

How does a COO impact team management?

A COO plays a significant role in team management. They are responsible for developing and maintaining a high-performance management team and promoting an environment that enhances employee productivity and professional development.

How does a COO improve organizational efficiency?

A COO employs their skills and experience to streamline processes, improve workflows, and enhance productivity, thereby fostering organizational efficiency. They also work towards implementing improved processes and continually monitor and refine systems to drive operational excellence.
Summer in Bratislava, the future of stores, and the general prosecutor objects to a sentencing decision.

The future of safer abortion in Slovakia is still unknown. (Source: Marko Erd, SME)

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Good afternoon. Here is the Friday, June 9 edition of Today in Slovakia - the main news of the day in less than five minutes.

Slovakia continues to be an EU holdout by barring access to abortion pill

Discussions about how to make abortion safer have been going on for 10 years in Slovakia. An option favoured by clinicians, the abortion pill, which avoids surgical complications and reduces future pregnancy risks, was introduced and even registered in 2013  but then rejected by politicians. The Health Ministry still forbids all non-surgical methods of abortion. It is one of just four countries in the EU still to ban use of the pill.

A change could now come with the new caretaker government. Prime Minister Ludovit Odor, while noting that virtually all advanced countries provide access to the abortion pill, has left the final decision in the hands of his health minister, Michal Palkovic.

Abortion pills are still unobtainable in Slovakia. (Illustrative photo) (Source: Marko Erd, SME)

More from The Slovak Spectator website

Bratislava : Get ready for summer to start with the city's annual cultural festival.

: Get ready for summer to start with the city's annual cultural festival. Weekend : Looking forward to a vacation near the sea? Get in the mood at the Nitra Gallery and its sea-dedicated exhibition.

: Looking forward to a vacation near the sea? Get in the mood at the Nitra Gallery and its sea-dedicated exhibition. Drivers: A new sign reminds drivers how to behave at busy intersections. If you like what we are doing and want to support good journalism, buy our online subscription with no ads and a print copy of The Slovak Spectator sent to your home in Slovakia. Thank you. Feature story for Friday

A possibility for more sustainable shopping

Online shopping has the ability to reduce our carbon footprint  single trips to the shop are less sustainable than a delivery service, at least when deliveries are planned strategically in terms of both economy and ecology. The future of retail could be in completely self-service stores, the CEO of Tesco Stores SR, Martin Kuruc, tells The Slovak Spectator in an interview.

Martin Kuruc, country CEO of Tesco Stores SR (Source: Courtesy of Tesco SR)

In other news

General Prosecutor Maros Zilinka has ordered the Bratislava Prosecutor's Office to appeal against Dusan Dedecek's sentence. Dedecek was convicted yesterday and sentenced to 15 years for a crash at the Zochova bus stop in Bratislava last October in which he killed 5 people and injured 20 more while driving drunk. Prosecutors effectively agreed to the sentence as part of a plea deal, but Zilinka considers it too low for the death of five people. (SME)

Speaker of Parliament Boris Kollar (the leader of the Sme Rodina party) formally announced the date of the snap general election for September 30, 2023. Political parties need to submit their candidate lists at least 90 days beforehand, and pay a deposit of 17,000. It is possible to vote via mail and from abroad, but voters must request the service. (TASR)

The Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute (SHMU) issued warnings because of ongoing rainfall. Storm warnings with second-level severity apply to all of Slovakia. Flash floods warnings, also at second-level severity, apply to regions around Humenne in eastern Slovakia, regions around Banska Stiavnica in southern Slovakia, and regions around Trencin in western Slovakia. (SHMU)

A floor at the Bratislava-Ruzinov hospital gets flooded on June 8, 2023.

Weather forecast

For Saturday and Sunday, rain is expected to continue, with temperatures around 23C. Skies will be partly clear on Monday; partly sunny in the west, sunny elsewhere. Temperatures will be around 22C. (SHMU)

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P.S. If you have suggestions on how our news overview can be improved, you can reach us at editorial@spectator.sk.

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Three foreigners on the sometimes hard decision to leave Slovakia.

The decision to leave Slovakia, much like the decision to move here, is different for each migrant. (Source: Pexels)

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The Na Slovensku Aj Po Anglicky podcast, with support from Fjuzn, is wrapping up its season on the migrant experience with a new episode. This time, we are addressing the deceptively simple question: should I stay, or should I go?

So far in this series we have discussed the many challenges migrants face when they decide to leave home and take a chance on settling in Slovakia. For most of these migrants, integration into Slovak society is their goal. However, successful integration is neither guaranteed nor complete. In fact, many of these transplants feel rejected by Slovak society, no matter how hard they try.

https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/4OMFJ3mizoIrIYXRp9itzN?utm_source=generator

Eviction notice

For Micheal from Mexico, this feeling of rejection came to a head at the start of the war in Ukraine. Seven years ago, he and his Ukrainian wife settled in Kosice, so they could be closer to family in Kyiv while still living in the European Union. The young family struggled with finding their place in the city, and making connections with neighbours and the wider community proved difficult and fruitless.

As bombs rained down on Kyiv in the first days of the war, Michaels Ukrainian family quickly fled across the border into Slovakia. Soon Michaels rented home in Kosice was filled with his wifes terrified family. It was only meant to be a temporary solution, one week altogether, until they could be relocated, but this was deemed a great intrusion by the neighbours.

Within a few days, Michaels landlord appeared at his doorstep, demanding to be let inside. The landlord quickly discovered the family of refugees and demanded that they all leave. She then claimed the family had breached their lease agreement and immediately filed an eviction notice. Three weeks later, the young migrant family was forced into a new home.

This was the last straw for Michael and his family. They struggled mightily for years, but never found the acceptance they desperately sought. This experience cemented their decision to leave Slovakia, though they knew it would be difficult. The family is now looking to move elsewhere in Europe but, as Michael stated, as a non European, its hard to find a job somewhere else.

Certainly not all migrants leave Slovakia under such pressure. Many young professionals come looking for excitement and a chance to get to know a foreign country. While they may be open to extending their stay, most fully expect to return to their home countries.

Deep love for Slovakia

Anna Fay, from the United States, moved to Slovakia in order to travel and pursue a career in writing. Through a personal connection with the Slovak Spectator, she landed a job at the publication as a copy editor and writer. The job suited her well, but after a few years, she was hit with the realisation that she had become a little too comfortable in Slovakia. This alarmed the young American, so she decided that a career change and a move back home were just what she needed.

The transition to life at home wasnt as easy as many people may think. Anna moved home only a week before starting her new job. At the same time, she had to deal with the pressure of getting her new Slovak husband legally into America (he is still waiting for his visa at the moment). She has also been experiencing what is called reverse culture shock.

For Fay, getting used to the American phenomenon of mass shootings has been a challenge. Certainly watching the news and hearing about shootings almost every day... That never gets normal. I think one thing I didnt miss about America is the gun culture, Anna noted.

This young American, through her experiences and now a Slovak husband, has formed deep bonds with Slovakia. She misses the cobblestone streets and the coziness of Bratislava, but she is happy to be home. However, she is open to the possibility of returning to Slovakia.

Polish woman meets her British partner in Bratislava

Like Anna, Aneta Czyszczon from Poland, moved to Slovakia, looking for adventure and professional development. Her transition to the country was comparatively easy because of the similar languages and culture. However, after a few years, she grew dissatisfied with Slovakia. Life for migrants, even for the Polish, can be full of complications and loneliness.

Fortunately, Aneta met the love of her life, a man from the UK who came to Bratislava on holiday. The relationship quickly grew, and she shortly joined him in the UK. The couple soon had their first child, but life hasnt been smooth sailing.

Aneta has had to deal with the negative stereotypes many Polish migrants face in the UK. As well, she is confronted with different cultural expectations for new parents. Poland, like Slovakia, enjoys a generous parental leave, and mothers are given time to be with their new children. However, in the UK, new parents are pressured to return to work as quickly as possible. This difference has been a challenge for the new mother.

Aneta has used her few quiet moments to reflect on her life in Slovakia. She misses her Slovak friends, neighbours, and the nation. Here, she believes that, you can feel at home sometimes, because I think that Slovak people are really welcoming. Unfortunately, she doesnt always feel this way in the UK. Again, like Anna, Aneta can see herself living in Slovakia someday in the future.

The decision to leave Slovakia, much like the decision to move here, is different for each migrant. Some leave with an unpleasant taste in their mouths, while others reluctantly leave, only to dream of Slovakia while in their new homes. Nevertheless, almost all agree that their experiences in Slovakia have taught them much about life and given them tools to live a much better life in the future.
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230608/trump-says-hes-been-indicted-over-mar-a-lago-docs-told-to-appear-tuesday-in-court-1111016015.html

Trump Says He's Been Indicted Over Mar-a-Lago Docs, Told to Appear Tuesday in Court

Trump Says He's Been Indicted Over Mar-a-Lago Docs, Told to Appear Tuesday in Court

US President Donald Trump has revealed that his legal camp has been informed that he's been indicted over classified documents retrieved by FBI agents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

2023-06-08T23:39+0000

2023-06-08T23:39+0000

2023-06-09T06:12+0000

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Former US President Donald Trump revealed late Thursday that his legal camp has been informed he's been indicted over classified documents retrieved by FBI agents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.Trump made the announcement on his Truth Social account, a social media site he owns. Spanning over three posts, Trump railed against the indictment, calling it politically motivated and a "DARK DAY" for the United States.The one-time commander-in-chief went on to underscore that he is "an innocent man," adding that he has been summoned to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami, Florida, on Tuesday at 3 p.m. local time.In a video posted to Truth Social about 40 minutes after his first post, Trump called the indictment "election interference of the highest level. There has never been anything like what's happening. I'm an innocent man, I'm an innocent person.""I am innocent and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly," he stressed.Trump has claimed that he declassified the documents through the use of his then-presidential powers; however, a recently released audio tape saw Trump in 2021 discussing a Pentagon document that he said was still classified.Unconfirmed early reports have suggested that Trump has been indicted on seven charges, some of which are said to include the willful retention of national defense information, corruptly concealing documents, conspiracy to obstruct justice and false statements.The US Department of Justice has not confirmed Trump's indictment, nor offered any confirmation on what specific charges Trump may face.Trump further asserted in his social media posts that he received "far more votes than any sitting president in the history of our country," adding that he is leading in the polls against "all candidates, both Democrat and Republican."His comments echo Newsmax columnist Michael Shannon, who told Sputnik earlier Thursday that the indictment and everything surrounding it was politically motivated.Like Trump, Shannon also pointed out that US President Joe Biden also retained classified documents at his residences and offices from his time as vice president during the Obama administration.The former president has faced multiple and piling legal issues since leaving office in 2021. In late March, he was indicted in New York on more than 30 counts related to business fraud. He was also found liable of sexual assault in a civil case stemming from an encounter with a New York City columnist in the early 1990s.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/mar-a-lago-indictment-designed-to-make-trump-reelection-impossible-1111015907.html

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/belgian-defense-minister-says-still-no-response-from-kiev-on-arms-used-in-belgorod-attack-1111030549.html

Belgian Defense Minister Says Still No Response From Kiev on Arms Used in Belgorod Attack

Belgian Defense Minister Says Still No Response From Kiev on Arms Used in Belgorod Attack

Belgium has not yet received Ukraine's response on the issue of the possible use of Belgium-supplied weapons in a recent attack on Russia's Belgorod Region, Defense Minister Ludivine Dedonder said on Friday, adding that FN SCAR automatic rifles were identified on the photos from the scene.

2023-06-09T14:36+0000

2023-06-09T14:36+0000

2023-06-09T14:36+0000

russia's special operation in ukraine

ukrainian crisis

ukrainian attacks on belgorod region

russia-nato showdown

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The Belgian defense minister also said that Ukraine was responsible for the use of weapons after Brussels had handed them over to Kiev. The defense minister did not specify the exact dates when she expected to receive Kiev's response on the matter, adding that if Brussels does not get the answer until a meeting of the contact group on Ukraine on June 15, she will personally hold a meeting with Reznikov. On Wednesday, the Belgian Defense Ministry demanded an explanation from Kiev after Belgian weapons were seen to have been used in Ukraine-orchestrated attacks on Russia's Belgorod Region. On May 22, Belgorod Region Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said that a Ukrainian sabotage group had infiltrated the territory of the Grayvoronsky district of the Russian border region; he then announced an anti-terrorist operation. Last week, the US newspaper reported, citing US officials familiar with intelligence findings, that Ukrainian militants had been armed with Belgian and Czech rifles and at least one AT-3 anti-tank weapon, which was used by US and allied troops. The Ukrainians drove mine-resistant MRAP armored vehicles donated to Ukraine by the US and Poland.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230604/kiev-hoped-for-natos-direct-entry-into-ukraine-conflict-when-staging-shebekino-terror-attack-1110901190.html

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230603/watch-russian-rocket-artillery-eliminate-ukrainian-terrorists-in-belgorod-region-1110874299.html

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230603/ukrainian-terrorists-used-nato-given-gear-in-belgorod-regions-attack-last-week---reports-1110874797.html

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/can-norways-deep-sea-mining-bid-fuel-eus-faltering-green-transition-1111025223.html

Can Norway's Deep-Sea Mining Bid Fuel EU's Faltering Green Transition?

Can Norway's Deep-Sea Mining Bid Fuel EU's Faltering Green Transition?

The EU has estimated that the demand for critical rare earths will increase tenfold towards 2050, yet 98 percent of its current imports stem from China.

2023-06-09T11:35+0000

2023-06-09T11:35+0000

2023-06-09T11:35+0000

economy

norway

china

greenland

european union (eu)

european commission

environment

mining

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The Norwegian authorities are reportedly finalizing a plan to extract a number of metals from the bottom of the Greenland and Norwegian Seas southwest of the arctic Svalbard archipelago to help Europe meet its urgent need for such resources.According to Amund Vik, state secretary at Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy, deep sea mining will help Europe cope with its drastic need for minerals and rare earths needed for the "green transition."In the next two weeks, the Norwegian Ministry of Energy reportedly seeks to present a draft which will open a sea zone the size of Germany for exploration and extraction. A vote on the deep-sea mining project is expected in the fall.According to data, 38 million tons of copper are estimated to be contained in this zone, alongside major cobalt deposits. That said, Norway has been touted as the first country offering potential to mine metals needed for the production of batteries from the seabed, as this area is thought to contain deposits of rare earths such as neodymium and dysprosium, which are used in the assembly of electric vehicles and wind turbines.Apart from the Green Transition, deep-sea mining may facilitate the EU's so-called economic decoupling gamble, given that the current supply of these metals is largely controlled by the PRC. Today, wholly 98% of Europe's need for rare earths is met through imports from China.Potential Hurdles Along the WayNorway argues it commands exclusive mining rights owing to the Svalbard Treaty of 1920, which stipulates Oslo's sovereignty over the islands, yet gives other countries the right to economic activity on land and in the territorial waters around the archipelago. Therefore, Russia, the EU and the UK are all at odds with Norway over how large an area of water this treaty covers.Furthermore, Norway's current plans to develop the mining industry have raised objections from fishermen and environmentalists alike due to possible future pollution of the sea, in particular the possibility of toxic heavy metal particles being released. Norway's own environment agency has strongly opposed the plan, stressing the government's failure to provide enough sustainability data. In response, Oslo said that the potential for conflict is minimal given the limited fishing activity and maritime traffic in the area, and reassuringly emphasized its deep commitment to protecting the environment.Despite arguably being ahead in the race for the riches of the depths, Norway is not alone, as mining companies in China, Japan, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea are exploring ways to extract metals from these counties' respective territorial waters.What Are Rare Earth Elements?Rare earth elements (REE) is a collective term for 17 minerals used in most modern technology, such as laser technology, medical technology, defense, electronics and communication devices and hardware of all kinds. The EU has estimated that the demand for them for use in permanent magnets  necessary for electric cars and wind turbines  will increase tenfold towards 2050.The demand for rare earths is accelerating rapidly and the European Commission expects demand to quintuple by 2030, largely driven by the Green Transition - with the electrification of transport, industry and wind power as important examples.Norway is not the sole pillar of the EU's desire for more leverage on the rare earth market. The Swedish mining company, LKAB, also announced the discovery of a large deposit in Kiruna, but it is unlikely to become operational until well into the 2030s.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230131/norway-discovers-abundance-of-costly-rare-earths-on-its-seabed-1106846299.html

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Coastal park witnesses ecological restoration progress

Xinhua) 09:24, June 09, 2023

Aerial photo taken on June 5, 2021 shows Dongjiang coastal park in the Binhai New Area of north China's Tianjin. (Xinhua/Zhao Zishuo)

TIANJIN, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Dongjiang coastal park in north China's Tianjin Municipality has seen a big increase in the number of visitors.

Tourist Zhang Shu and her daughter collected some tiny crabs and clams in their small pink bucket.

"Here, we can not only enjoy the beautiful coastal view but also pick sea shells and crabs," said Zhang, who is from the city of Tangshan in the neighboring Hebei Province.

Things were not like that in the past.

Located in deep Bohai Bay, where the Haihe River flows into the sea, Tianjin has a natural coastline of some 100 km but no natural beach. The coastal ecosystem has been fragile due to the special enclosed locations and pollution.

In 2019, the city initiated an ecological restoration program called "Blue Bay."

Under the program, the urban management commission of the city undertook efforts to clean up coastal domestic waste and industrial solid waste, the municipal commission of agriculture and rural affairs moved to tackle pollution related to mariculture and fishing industries, while the water authority acted to improve the waterway environment of the rivers flowing into the sea.

Dongjiang coastal park is part of the restoration program.

With a 1.8-km coastline, the park has become a sightseeing hotspot covering an area of 200,000 square meters, said Lu Huibing, deputy chief of the land planning and construction bureau with the Dongjiang Free Trade Port Zone in Tianjin (DFTP).

Nowadays, visitors can play on the beach, enjoy the sunrise and watch birds in the park, which received 571,000 visitors during the May Day holiday, said Lu.

Zhang Xiaodan, an ecology and environment official with the DFTP, said DFTP has set up an intelligent monitoring system for marine garbage, which monitors the environmental conditions near the coastline by drones.

The intelligent photo transmission system and AI recognition system help figure out the types, density and cleaning methods of garbage near the coastline, she said.

By the end of 2022, the density of garbage on beaches and floating on the sea surface in DFTP has dropped by more than 86 percent.

On June 5, World Environment Day, Dongjiang coastal park held various activities, including a low-carbon life knowledge contest and an interaction with the theme of garbage sorting.

"We hope in this way, tourists can take away the awareness of protecting the ecological environment while having fun here," said Zhang.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/chinas-embassy-nothing-to-share-on-reports-of-blinkens-visit-next-week-1111019212.html

China's Embassy: 'Nothing to Share' on Reports of Blinkens Visit Next Week

China's Embassy: 'Nothing to Share' on Reports of Blinkens Visit Next Week

The Chinese Embassy in the United States said Thursday there was "nothing to share" on US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's visit to China.

2023-06-09T02:46+0000

2023-06-09T02:46+0000

2023-06-09T02:46+0000

world

asia-pacific region

antony blinken

joe biden

beijing

chinese embassy

china

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"Nothing to share at the moment on the specific questions you have raised," the embassy said in a statement to Sputnik.Earlier on Thursday, US media reported, citing two people familiar with the matter, that Blinken was scheduled to potentially visit China as soon as next week. The State Department was still working on finalizing details, the report said. The Biden administration has voiced its interest in rescheduling Blinken's visit to China, which was canceled in the wake of the balloon incident in early February, but was still awaiting a response from Beijing. US President Joe Biden met with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at the G20 summit in Indonesia's Bali in November. The meeting was the first for the two leaders since Biden took office.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230204/blinkens-now-cancelled-visit-to-china-was-never-officially-announced-beijing-says-1106971383.html

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chinese embassy, antony blinken, china, us, us-china tensions,
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/colombian-govt-eln-armed-group-agree-to-ceasefire-for-6-months---cuban-minister-1111036962.html

Colombian Govt, ELN Armed Group Agree to Ceasefire for 6 Months - Cuban Minister

Colombian Govt, ELN Armed Group Agree to Ceasefire for 6 Months - Cuban Minister

The government of Colombia and the National Liberation Army (ELN) rebel group have agreed to establish a ceasefire, which will begin on August 3, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said on Friday.

2023-06-09T22:18+0000

2023-06-09T22:18+0000

2023-06-09T22:18+0000

americas

colombia

cuba

national liberation army (eln)

bruno rodriguez

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On Friday, the third round of negotiations between the Colombian government and ELN rebels, mediated by Cuba, was held in Havana. The radical left National Liberation Army consists of several thousand people and is the second largest armed rebel organization in Colombia after the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Colombia, the United States and the European Union designated ELN as a terrorist organization. The negotiation process between the government of Colombia and ELN was launched in 2016 but stopped two years later. New rounds of negotiations between the parties were held in November-December 2022 and in March 2023 after Gustavo Petro was sworn in as the country's president. Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela and Norway act as guarantor countries in the negotiations.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20220821/colombian-president-suspends-arrest-warrants-for-chief-eln-negotiators-1099809283.html

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/ex-japanese-prime-minister-says-tokyos-stance-towards-moscow-wrong-1111026113.html

Ex-Japanese Prime Minister Says Tokyo's Stance Towards Moscow 'Wrong'

Ex-Japanese Prime Minister Says Tokyo's Stance Towards Moscow 'Wrong'

The attitude of the Japanese government led by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida towards Russia is wrong, former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama told Sputnik on Friday.

2023-06-09T10:34+0000

2023-06-09T10:34+0000

2023-06-09T10:34+0000

world

ukrainian crisis

japan

russia-nato showdown

russia's row with japan over kuril islands

kuril islands

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On Friday, ambassadors of some 40 states visited the Russian Embassy in Japan on the occasion of the upcoming Russia Day, which is celebrated annually on June 12. Hatoyama was among those who visited the embassy. The former prime minister said that Japan's power elite should adopt a more balanced approach to building relations with Russia. A total of 700 individuals, including 311 individuals from Russia's new regions, and 207 companies have been sanctioned by Japan since the beginning of Russia's military operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022. A total of 437 Russian entities have been affected by export restrictions under Japan's sanctions packages. Russia and Japan have been locked in a dispute over the four southernmost Kuril Islands (Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan, and Habomai) since the two countries never signed a permanent peace treaty after World War II. Japan has refused to give up its claims over the four islands, which it refers to as its Northern Territories. Moscow and Tokyo have tried to negotiate separate aspects of their disagreements, but have never signed a full postwar peace treaty. In 2018, Japan and Russia agreed to accelerate negotiations on a peace treaty based on the 1956 Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration. However, in March 2022, Moscow withdrew from talks with Japan on signing a post-World War II peace treaty, and suspended visa-free travel for Japanese citizens to the Southern Kuril Islands and joint economic activities on the disputed islands. The move was due to Tokyo's "unfriendly" steps over the Ukraine conflict, Moscow has said.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230603/is-us-dragging-japan-into-conflict-with-russia-and-china-1110876946.html

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230520/hiroshima-bombing-survivor-speaks-against-zelenskys-arrival-1110479077.html

https://sputnikglobe.com/20220422/japan-describes-southern-kurils-as-occupied-areas-for-first-time-since-2003--reports-1094955602.html

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/ex-reagan-aide-says-gifted-archive-to-russias-presidential-library-to-spark-peace-talks-1111031764.html

Ex-Reagan Aide Says Gifted Archive to Russia's Presidential Library to Spark Peace Talks

Ex-Reagan Aide Says Gifted Archive to Russia's Presidential Library to Spark Peace Talks

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - Suzanne Massie, who used to advise US President Ronald Reagan on Russia in the final years of the Cold War, told Sputnik that her... 09.06.2023, Sputnik International

2023-06-09T16:09+0000

2023-06-09T16:09+0000

2023-06-09T16:09+0000

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russia-nato showdown

ukrainian crisis

ronald reagan

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Massie shared with Sputnik that she has signed an agreement with Russia's Presidential Library on handing over her archive to the institution. Massie revealed that in the near future, the archive will be transported from the US to Russia. It will be scanned and made available to the public, allowing anyone interested to access it by obtaining a reader's ticket from the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library. Massie's archive includes Reagan's personal letters, her correspondence with US President Bill Clinton, Vice President Albert Gore and other political and other personalities, including writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and choreographer George Balanchine. The author's research papers and original manuscripts of her books on the history and culture of Russia are also included in the archive. Before signing the agreement on the transfer of the archive, Massie met with US Ambassador to Moscow Lynne Tracy, during which she notified the American side of her decision. In the near future, Massie, together with a group of Russian specialists involved in the transfer of the archive, will go to the United States. An agreement with the American side on obtaining visas has been reached. The transfer of the archive is supported by the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian Embassy in Washington. Massie pointed out that she devoted her whole life to studying the history and culture of Russia. She shared that during her very first visit to Russia and communication with its people, she was immediately fascinated by the soul of the Russian people. "I have written six books about my vision of Russia, they are used in the best US universities to study and understand the peculiarities of the Russian people," she said. "I became an adviser to the 40th US President, Ronald Reagan, and thanks to my books, which he loved to read and after that he never called Russia the 'Evil Empire' again." Massie went on to say that she was personally sent by Reagan on an important assignment to the USSR "behind the scene" to convince the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev to accept Reagan's invitation to go to Washington to negotiate the end of the Cold War. Massie underscored that she deeply respects current Russian President Vladimir Putin and has had "the fortunate opportunity to personally meet him." Massie acted as an unofficial adviser to President Reagan as a backchannel to the Soviet Union from 1984-1988. During her service, Massie shared with Reagan her extensive knowledge of Russian culture and people, helped him prepare for the meetings with Gorbachev and contributed to ending of the Cold War between the two countries. She famously taught Reagan the Russian proverb, "trust but verify," which he repeatedly used during missile treaty talks. Massie is fluent in Russian and has written numerous books on Russia's history and culture.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230509/us-russia-have-to-remember-they-were-allies-can-be-allies-again---veteran-1110212020.html

https://sputnikglobe.com/20160425/war-commemoration-history-rewrite-1038603873.html

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20220903/reagan-adviser-gru-warned-about-possible-assassination-plot-on-gorbachev-during-us-visit-1100344195.html

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/fbi-caves-and-gives-access-on-the-biden-documents-to-gop-members-1111015315.html

FBI Caves and Gives Access on the Biden Documents to GOP Members

FBI Caves and Gives Access on the Biden Documents to GOP Members

On todays episode of The Backstory, host Lee Stranahan discussed current events including Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson dying at age 93, and China establishing a spy base in Cuba.

2023-06-09T04:14+0000

2023-06-09T04:14+0000

2023-06-09T10:42+0000

the backstory

radio

twitter

ukraine

fox news

weather

ufos

climate change

alabama

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The FBI Caves and Gives Access to GOP Members on the Biden Documents On todays episode of The Backstory, host Lee Stranahan discussed current events including Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson dying at age 93, and China establishing a spy base in Cuba.

Ted Rall - Political Cartoonist, Syndicated Columnist | The Stupidity of Russia Blowing up its Own Dam, The WildFires in Canada, and Tucker's Ten Minute Twitter Rant.In the first hour, Lee spoke with Ted Rall about the public appetite for alternative news, all bad things are blamed on Russia, and climate change. Ted explained how the Canadian wildfires have affected the New York skies and the FBI versus Congress showdown ends. Ted discussed the DOD UFO whistleblower and how climate change can cause bigger wildfires.In the second hour, Lee spoke about the current thirteen Republicans running for the 2024 election nominee, the legality of the COVID-19 restrictions enacted in 2020, and the Supreme Court decision regarding districting in Alabama. Lee talked about the lack of differences in the announced Republican nominees and how the debt ceiling deal will hinder the next President. Lee spoke about the war in Ukraine and Mike Pence supporting more weapons for the Ukrainian military.We'd love to get your feedback at radio@sputniknews.comThe views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Sputnik.

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the backstory, pat robertson, china, cuba, wildfires in canada, blame russia narrative, 2024 election, more weapons to ukraine
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/germany-can-serve-as-hub-for-ukraine-fighter-coalition---lawmaker-1111026446.html

Germany Can Serve as Hub for Ukraine Fighter Coalition - Lawmaker

Germany Can Serve as Hub for Ukraine Fighter Coalition - Lawmaker

Germany can become a hub of the international coalition for providing Ukraine with US-made F-16 fighter jets and even provide training to Ukrainian pilots but it will not provide the aircraft, Bundestag Defense Committee chairwoman Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann said on Friday.

2023-06-09T10:51+0000

2023-06-09T10:51+0000

2023-06-09T13:49+0000

russia's special operation in ukraine

ukrainian crisis

russia-nato showdown

f-16

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The senior German lawmaker also said that Ukraine could not become a NATO member so long as it was involved in active armed conflict. Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said at a European Political Community press conference in Kishinev that there were numerous countries standing prepared to provide Ukraine with F-16s, the fighter jet of its choice. Following the United States' go-ahead to its European allies to provide Ukraine with F-16s last month, an international coalition started to form to help Kiev obtain and use the aircraft, including by providing training to Ukrainian pilots. Top German officials have on several occasions said that the country would not be providing the fighter jets but can contribute to the coalition in other ways. Russia has slammed the possible deliveries of F-16s to Ukraine and warned that the jets will become a legitimate target for Russian forces. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Monday that the supply of F-16 fighters to Ukraine would become another escalation as the jets have one modification that is nuclear-capable.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230522/why-does-ukraine-want-f-16s-1110518595.html

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230531/us-has-gotten-ukraines-assurances-f-16s-wont-be-used-on-russian-land---kirby-1110824568.html

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/house-democrats-accuse-fbi-agent-of-lying-to-us-congress-about-media-leaks---reports-1111018735.html

House Democrats Accuse FBI Agent of Lying to US Congress About Media Leaks - Reports

House Democrats Accuse FBI Agent of Lying to US Congress About Media Leaks - Reports

House Democrats are accusing a suspended FBI agent who testified to Congress as a whistleblower of lying to lawmakers about purported leaks of sensitive information to the press, US media reported.

2023-06-09T02:20+0000

2023-06-09T02:20+0000

2023-06-09T02:20+0000

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fbi

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Last month, suspended FBI agent Garret O-Boyle provided testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government alongside another suspended FBI agent and a former agent, who discussed matters related to the January 6 US Capitol riot. FBI Executive Assistant Director for Human Resources Jennifer Moore reportedly provided testimony to the Weaponization Subcommittee indicating that OBoyle was suspended for allegedly leaking sensitive information to media organization Project Veritas. In turn, Representative Jerry Nadler and Delegate Stacey Plaskett sent a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday to express concerns about OBoyle potentially lying to Congress. The letter alleges that OBoyle lied to the panel by claiming he did not provide information to members of the media prior to his suspension from the FBI, US media reported. The lawmakers are referring the matter for review by Garland. The FBI was able to determine that OBoyle acted as a whistleblower source for a May 12, 2022, Project Veritas video, Moore reportedly testified. The FBI suspended OBoyle on September 23. The FBIs probe into the matter also revealed that OBoyle removed sensitive information from agency computers and provided it to Project Veritas without authorization, Moore said. A spokesperson for OBoyle denied the assertion that he lied to lawmakers about his suspension or that he leaked sensitive information to any media outlet.A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed receipt of the lawmakers letter but declined to comment on the matter, the report added.

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/mccarthy-unconscionable-for-biden-to-indict-leading-candidate-opposing-him-1111018883.html

McCarthy: 'Unconscionable' for Biden to Indict 'Leading Candidate Opposing Him'

McCarthy: 'Unconscionable' for Biden to Indict 'Leading Candidate Opposing Him'

US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Thursday it was "unconscionable" for US President Joe Biden to indict "the leading candidate opposing him," in reference to former US President Donald Trump.

2023-06-09T02:29+0000

2023-06-09T02:29+0000

2023-06-09T02:29+0000

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"Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America. It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him," McCarthy said on Twitter.McCarthy's remarked reiterated similar sentiments aired by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who blasted the "weaponization of federal law enforcement agencies" as a "mortal threat to a free society.""We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation," he continued, claiming that a DeSantis White House would "excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all."Earlier Thursday, Trump revealed on Truth Social that "the corrupt Biden administration" had informed his lawyers that he had been indicted in a federal investigation over alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Florida residency, and was summoned to appear in court on Tuesday. The ex-president expressed despair over the indictment, pointing out that he is being prosecuted as polls show he is by far the leading candidate among both Republicans and Democrats. US media reported on Thursday that Trump is facing seven counts that include willful retention of national defense information, corruptly concealing docs, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and false statements. Trump has denied any wrongdoing in the classified documents case and the other three criminal probes he is involved in, including charges of falsifying business records and the former president's alleged involvement in the events on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230608/trump-says-hes-been-indicted-over-mar-a-lago-docs-told-to-appear-tuesday-in-court-1111016015.html

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/russian-publics-trust-in-vladimir-putin-rides-high-at-76-poll-reveals-1111022520.html

Russian Public's Trust in Vladimir Putin Rides High at 76%, Poll Reveals

Russian Public's Trust in Vladimir Putin Rides High at 76%, Poll Reveals

Despite minor fluctuations, the level of trust remains extremely high.

2023-06-09T08:53+0000

2023-06-09T08:53+0000

2023-06-09T08:53+0000

russia

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The majority of Russians trust President Vladimir Putin (76%) with 77% positively assessing his performance in office, a weekly survey by the Public Opinion Foundation shows.The poll was conducted among citizens over 18 years of age on June 2-4, 2023. The sample consisted of 1,500 respondents from 104 urban and rural communities in 53 subjects of the Russian Federation. The statistical error does not exceed 3.6%.In January, sociologists revealed that more than half of the Russian public considered Vladimir Putin as politician of the year for 2022.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230316/putin-says-russian-economy-beginning-to-develop-according-to-new-model-1108464566.html

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/sunak-biden-trans-atlantic-love-affair-just-public-relations-fluff-1111030901.html

Sunak-Biden Trans-Atlantic Love Affair Just Public Relations Fluff

Sunak-Biden Trans-Atlantic Love Affair Just Public Relations Fluff

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's visit to Washington DC to meet President Joe Biden has long on platitudes but short on substance, yielding only the 'Atlantic Declaration', updating the 80-year-old 'special relationship'.

2023-06-09T17:40+0000

2023-06-09T17:40+0000

2023-06-09T17:40+0000

world

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Rishi Sunak's US trip has been a mostly-fruitless photo opportunity, three academics say.Professor Rodney Shakespeare, a political commentator and binary economist said the 'Atlantic Declaration' was a "falsity."The professor said both countries "will be massively increasing their spying  particularly on their own citizens."Dr Roslyn Fuller, director of the non-profit think tank Solonian Democracy Institute, said most of the declaration would have been agreed before the White House meeting."However, it has started to normalize international relations after a tumultuous period - first with the pandemic and then with the war in Ukraine," she said.Turning to the two leaders' pledges to strengthen military cooperation  especially on arming Ukraine for its conflict with Russia, the think-tank chief said that had never been in doubt since the Second World War. "There are elements in this Declaration which, if approved, will facilitate even easier cooperation in the defence industry, but the basic alignment on that aspect of life was already a given," Fuller said.Alistair Jones, associate professor of politics at De Montfort University in the UK, said the real aim of Sunak's visit was to "Demonstrate to the world that Britain is still an important ally of the USA and an important global player."He said the 'Atlantic Declaration' was a failure for Sunak since it falls short of his Conservative predecessor Boris Johnson's 2019 election pledge to strike a free trade deal with Washington.Indeed, Biden appeared not to know who Sunak was and to ignore him when the PM welcomed the President to Belfast in April. Biden had previously mispronounced the PM's name as "Rasheed Sunook" in public.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230511/china-eu-ramp-up-high-level-exchanges-amid-noise-from-us-1110265676.html

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/biden-sunak-talks-signal-end-of-any-hope-for-bilateral-free-trade-deal---reports-1111022285.html

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rishi sunak's visit to washington dc for talks with joe biden, the anglo-american special relationship, us and british military aid to ukraine, anglo-us tensions over the northern ireland protocol
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/supreme-court-strikes-down-alabama-voting-map-that-threatened-to-disenfranchise-black-voters-1111019636.html

Supreme Court Strikes Down Alabama Voting Map That Threatened to Disenfranchise Black Voters

Supreme Court Strikes Down Alabama Voting Map That Threatened to Disenfranchise Black Voters

The US Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a map drawn by Alabamas Republican-dominated legislature of congressional voting districts that civil rights activists and other critics assert discriminated against Black voters.

2023-06-09T03:18+0000

2023-06-09T03:18+0000

2023-06-09T03:18+0000

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republican

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john roberts

brett kavanaugh

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district

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us

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In a surprise move, two conservative Supreme Court justices sided with the liberal minority in a 5-4 decision striking down the map.The majority sided with a District Court panel in opposing the maps that appeared designed to dilute the power of Black voters by dividing them into districts where white voters dominate. "The District Court concluded that plaintiffs had carried their burden at the totality of circumstances stage given the racial polarization of elections in Alabama, where 'Black Alabamians enjoy virtually zero success in statewide elections' and where 'Alabamas extensive history of repugnant racial and voting-related discrimination is undeniable and well documented,'" Chief Justice John Roberts said, writing for the majority in a court opinion."The [Supreme] Court sees no reason to disturb the District Courts careful factual findings." The Supreme Court affirmed the District Court's finding that plaintiffs demonstrated a reasonable likelihood of success on their claim that the Alabama law violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The ruling means that the map of seven congressional districts, which skew heavily in favor of Republicans, must be redrawn. US Attorney General Merrick Garland applauded the decision as a rejection of efforts to erode fundamental voting rights. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said that while the majoritys decision is disappointing, "this case is not over."

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230609/teflon-don-frustrates-ron-1111018471.html

'Teflon Don' Frustrates Ron

'Teflon Don' Frustrates Ron

Trump announced that he was being indicted for a second time on Thursday. Due to his popularity, it has put his primary opponents in the awkward situation of defending him.

2023-06-09T02:00+0000

2023-06-09T02:00+0000

2023-06-09T02:16+0000

americas

ron desantis

mike pence

department of justice

republican

donald trump

ted rall

sputnik cartoons

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Trumps closest opponent for the Republican nomination for president, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has oscillated between praising and criticizing Trump. In 2018, Trump endorsed DeSantis for governor, a move he now says he regrets.The former president has lived up to his nickname Teflon Don. Despite a previous indictment, two impeachments while in office and several investigations that may lead to more indictments, Trump had remained popular in Republican circles, putting his primary opponents in the awkward situation of publicly defending their opponent in an attempt to not anger Trump supporters.Trumps other Republican opponents have also been struggling with how they balance criticism and praise for Trump, who is still very popular with Republican voters. On Wednesday, before the indictment became public knowledge, Trumps former Vice President Mike Pence, who is also running, said Trump is not above the law but that the Department of Justice should not indict him because of unique circumstances.In response to the announcement, DeSantis questioned the "uneven application of the law" for Republicans and Democrats.After Trump's first indictment, DeSantis indicated he would not assist the federal government in extraditing the former president from Florida.

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Ukraine Launches Offensive; Kakhovka Dam Attack; FBI Raid on Uhuru Threatens US Constitution

Ukraine Launches Offensive; Kakhovka Dam Attack; FBI Raid on Uhuru Threatens US Constitution

The US Neocon's scorched earth policy has once again manifested itself as the Kakhovka ecological disaster in Eastern Europe.

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Ukraine Launches Offensive; Kakhovka Dam Attack; FBI Attack on Uhuru Threatens US Constitution The US Neocon's scorched earth policy has once again manifested itself as the Kakhovka ecological disaster in Eastern Europe.

Dr. Richard Wolff, professor of economics and host of "Democracy at Work" on YouTube, joins us to discuss the new world order. Professor Wolff argues that everyday people understand that the world economy is changing but the ruling elite class refuses to accept that reality.Regis Tremblay, an American citizen in Crimea, joins us to discuss Ukraine. Ukraine has launched a counter-offensive and the US scorched earth war on the world has manifested itself in the Kakhovka dam attack.George Koo, journalist, social activist, and international business consultant, joins us to discuss neocons against China. Russia and China are holding combined airspace drills in the Pacific and President Biden's plan to keep China from rising has failed.Caleb Maupin, journalist, and political analyst, joins us to discuss Asia. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to visit China soon. Also, most Europeans want to stay neutral in any conflict between Washington and China.Margaret Kimberley, editor and senior columnist at Black Agenda Report and author of "Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents, joins us to discuss the stories from the Black Agenda Report. The US attack on the Uhuru movement is an attack on the Constitution. Also, Cuba needs to defeat the blockade without waiting for it to be lifted.Dr. Tony Monteiro, scholar and activist, joins us to discuss the decline of US imperialism. 19 nations seek to join the BRICS economic block as US leaders ignore the decline of US hegemony.Dr. Margaret Flowers, activist and editor of "PopularResistance.org," joins us to discuss the Global South. A growing solidarity movement seeks to end the US war on Cuba. Also, USAID is up to no good in Ethiopia.Dan Lazare, investigative journalist and author of "America's Undeclared War, joins us to discuss foreign policy. The ex-NATO chief argues that some nations may escalate to full-scale war with Russia. Also, the FBI worked with Ukrainian Nazis to censor Twitter users.We'd love to get your feedback at radio@sputniknews.comThe views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Sputnik.

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Three $20,000 conditioned paces headlined the card at Plainridge Park on Thursday afternoon (June 8) with Duke Of Cornwall N throwing the fastest mile of the day despite starting from post eight.

Odds On Blockchain (Luke Hanners) took control of the race after a four-horse breakout off the gate. After a :26.2 quarter and :55 flat half, DP Realordeal (Bruce Ranger) pulled first over and Duke Of Cornwall N (Mitch Cushing) was right on his back. As they paced past three-quarters, DP Realordeal and Duke Of Cornwall N were one-two and breaking away from the field. As the pair headed down the lane, Duke Of Cornwall N collared DP Realordeal and then pulled away to a 1-1/2 length win in a new lifetime best of 1:50.

It was the third win in four starts this year for Duke Of Cornwall N ($5.40), who is owned by Richard Pollucci and trained by Tahnee Camilleri.

Earlier in the card, High Baller (Greg Merton) sat second behind Always A Miki (Matty Athearn) through quarters of :26.3, :54.3 and 1:22.3 as Crunch Hanover (Brett Beckwith) pushed the issue on the outside in the third quarter. As they headed towards the wire, High Baller shook loose to get the lead and then held off a late-closing The Wild Card (Bruce Ranger) to win by a length in 1:50.4, which was a new seasonal mark.

High Baller ($23.60) is owned by Morrison Racing Stable and Brian Gordon and is trained by Andrew Adamczyk.

In the third group, Patrikthepiranha A (Brett Beckwith) took a lot of air to the quarter before getting the lead from Skyway Victor (Bruce Ranger) in front of the stands. At that point, Beckwith grabbed leather and backed down the half to :56.3 and the race was basically over. Indictable Hanover (Greg Merton) made a push in the third quarter and matched strides with the leader into the last turn. But Patrikthepiranha A was just too good as he turned him away before holding off Skyway Victor at the line where he won by one length in 1:51.4.

Patrikthepiranha A ($2.60) got his third win of the year for Thestable Patrikthepiranha and trainer Melissa Beckwith.

Brett Beckwith, Mitch Cushing and Luke Hanners all had driving doubles on Thursday while 11 different trainers all claimed one win apiece.

Live harness racing will resume at Plainridge Park on Monday, June 12 at 4 p.m. and there will be a $9,501 carryover in the Jackpot Wicked Hi-5 pentafecta in race six and a $225 carryover in the Pick-6 in race four.

(Standardbred Owners Of Massachusetts)
Hippodrome 3R will begin live racing on Fridays starting June 9 with a nine-race card beginning at 4 p.m.

The track will now be open two days a week, Fridays and Sundays (12 p.m. post time) through the summer months.

To kick off the first Friday twilight program, the race office at H3R has scheduled a Preferred Pace headlined by Manhattan Joe, a son of Up The Credit who is seeking his fourth straight win.

The seventh race feature spots Flamboro Downs invader Manhattan Joe starting from post seven for H3R's leading driver Pascal Berube. The five-year-old gelding is now trained by Marc-Andre Simoneau. In his three-race winning streak, Manhattan Joe had led from start to finish, winning his last two starts in identical times of 1:54.3.

Another of the three return winners in the field is Arrhythmogenic from post nine for owner-driver Daniel St Pierre. He is coming off a 1:58 score. Windsun Cheyenne will start from the inside after his last start where he was able to take the lead at the quarter and win in 1:57.1.

Also on the card in the third race is a Preferred Trot featuring Frido PV, who was second by a nose to Stella Alpha last week in the top trot in 1:59.2. He has won two of his last three starts for driver Jonathan Lachance and will start from post five.

Other contenders include Morally Flexible (post six) for driver Stephane Brosseau and X O X O (post one) for driver Jocelyn Gendron.

For a free race program, visit the Hippodrome 3R website.

To view Friday's harness racing entries, click the following link: Friday Entries - Hippodrome 3R.

(With files from Quebec Jockey Club)


Charlie May finds himself behind the eight ball in Saturdays $200,000 Battle of Lake Erie for older pacers at MGM Northfield Park, but the five-year-old gelding is no stranger to overcoming disadvantageous spots at the northern Ohio half-mile oval.

In fact, hes pretty much made a habit of it.

Charlie May and driver Brett Miller will begin the Battle from post eight, the outermost position on the starting gate and the worst spot, statistically, in terms of win percentage at Northfield (4.8 per cent).

Over the course of his career, though, Charlie May has raced six times at Northfield, posting four wins and two seconds. All four victories have come from posts that typically rate among the least favourable there  one from post eight (a division of the Ohio Sire Stakes in 2021), two from post seven (including the Carl Milstein Memorial in 2021), and one from post nine (the Myron Charna Presidents Pace in 2022).

Charlie May also has shown proficiency on half-mile tracks in general, hitting the board in 14 of 16 lifetime races with eight triumphs. He has three sub-1:50 wins on a half, the most of any starter in this years Battle, and his 1:48.4 victory in the 2021 Milstein remains tied for the fastest mile ever by a three-year-old on a half.

Hes had some rough goes of it, some bad luck in his career  hes not been a horse thats drawn the rail every time, said trainer Steve Carter, who trains Charlie May for breeder/owner Don Tiger. But hes very consistent. When its race time, hes ready. Hes like an old hunting dog, he knows what day it is to go hunting. Hes a good racehorse.

Charlie May, a son of McArdle-Stipple Hanover, has won 24 of 51 career races, finished in the top three 16 additional times, and earned $1.57 million. He has two second-place efforts in his two starts this season, with the most recent a neck loss in the June 3 Open at Eldorado Scioto Downs.

I do look for him to be sharper this start, said driver Miller. Last week, we got away kind of in a bad spot and I came first-over with him, but overall he raced great. I think he needed that start. I look for him to be really good Saturday, its just a shame we drew the eight-hole.

Jimmy Freight finished second from post eight in last years Battle of Lake Erie. Ponder drew post eight in back-to-back editions of the Battle, 2005 and 2006, and finished second in both. The first of those runner-up performances came in a race won by Miller, who was driving Maltese Artist, and had to hold off the fast-closing Ponder.

You never know what can happen, said Miller, who has won the Battle of Lake Erie three times. But this is such a good group of horses. When that gate folds, theyre all going to be leaving so fast.

Regardless of the starting position, Miller will be expecting a good effort from Charlie May.

Hes one of those horses that gives 110 per cent, said Miller. It feels like he would do whatever he could do to get past another horse. Hes just got heart and guts. Hes definitely special when hes on his game.

Ruthless Hanover, who won the Joe Auger Memorial in a world-record 1:46.3 at five-eighths-mile Harrahs Philadelphia on May 28, is the 5-2 morning-line favourite in the Battle of Lake Erie. He will be making his first-ever start on a half-mile oval. Charlie May is 20-1 on the morning line.

Racing begins at 6 p.m. (EDT) at Northfield Park. For more about the Battle of Lake Erie and other highlights on Saturdays card, click here.

(USTA)
With all 10 horses in the Week 6 edition of Dave Little's "Road to The Meadowlands Pace" in action at Woodbine Mohawk Park in four North America Cup eliminations, it's a safe bet that next week's poll will look different from this week's with the countdown to 'The Pace' at just 37 days.

To view the complete list, click here. (Note all earnings are in USD)

(Meadowlands)
Local Adorabella will look to return to winning form in Saturday's $50,000 MGM Buckeye Distaff, an invitational for top veteran Ohio-sired pacing mares.

While she had little racing luck in the Ohio Sires Stakes for trainer Christi Noble, she was sent to trainer Jody Riedel where she immediately reeled off two straight victories. When she didn't continue her success, Riedel suggested that Sam Schillaci give the mare a shot.

"She [Adorabella] is Ohio-bred, so when things weren't clicking, Reidel suggested to the owner that they send her to us," said Jodi Schillaci.

Schillaci would only have the mare for three starts in 2019, hitting the board once, but the husband/wife duo knew they had seen something special. Reidel would give Adorabella another shot against top talent; however, it was clear she did better against conditioned horses.

Adorabella returned to Northfield Park in December 2020, scoring her first win against conditioned company on Jan. 2, 2021. Over the next couple of weeks, the Schillacis would see the daughter of Pet Rock blossom into one of the Midwest's classiest mares.

For the next year and a half, it would be Adorabella against the world, dominating Open company in many starts. Those efforts shocked both Jodi and her husband, Sam.

"She had a killer year and a half. For what she started out being, she has definitely overachieved for us," said Schillaci. "Her owner Vincent Costa Jr. bred and raised her. He always knew she was something special, it just took her some time to put it all together."

Adorabella competed in the inaugural edition of the MGM Buckeye Distaff, finishing a solid third behind Snobbytown and Screamin Demon. Adorabella hasn't been as sharp this season, and while Schillaci is slightly nervous about the race on Saturday, she believes that their talented mare is starting to show glimmers of her old self.

"She is starting to act like her old self, she's been really good this week and we have our fingers crossed that it carries over into Saturday night," said Schillaci.

While some mares can be tough to work with in the barn, Schillaci says she is great to be around and loves her snacks. For the Schillacis, who have raced horses in both the Ohio Sires Stakes and New York Sire Stakes, the pair say if they can pull off a victory on home soil Saturday, "it would be one of the greatest victories of our career, especially for our owner who raised her and has always believed in her."

Competing against Adorabella (Aaron Merriman) on Saturday will be McMarkle Sparkle (George Napolitano Jr.), Love Me Hill (Ronnie Wrenn Jr.), Ocean Music (Tyler Buter), Dragons Lucky Lady (Brett Miller), Violets Rainbow (Matt Kakaley), Cold Hearted Gypsy (Chris Lems), Smothastenesewisky (Billy Davis Jr.) and Shesonebadmomma (Chris Page).

The MGM Buckeye Distaff will go as Race 13 on the power-packed program and feature a $25,000 estimated 20-cent Super Hi-5 pool.

MGM Northfield Park will kick racing off at 6 p.m. and feature Charity Night presented by the Ohio Harness Horsemen's Association. Charity Night will feature nine different charities, each having the opportunity to race for a donation to their respective group.

(MGM Northfield Park)
The first of two full baby race sessions was conducted on Friday (June 9) at Woodbine Mohawk Park, with a trotter clocking the fastest time of the eight dashes.

Ladies First was the order of the day as fillies flaunted it on Friday before male pacers and trotters have their chance over the seven-eighths mile oval on Saturday, June 10.

Friday's forecast was much different than past days, with rain prompting judges allowing three to four seconds over the course of the session.

In that final dash with a three-second allowance, Tactical Strike was an ultra-impressive winner in the fastest mile of the morning. The daughter of Tactical Landing - Sorceress Seelster made every call a winning one for driver James MacDonald, making the lead in :31.4 then trotting evenly with three consecutive 30-second fractions to hit the wire 11 lengths the best in a time of 2:01.4.

Desiree Jones trains Tactical Strike for owner Gino Toscani on Mount Hope, Ont., who purchased the filly at the 2022 Lexington Selected Yearling Sale for $80,000.

Jack Darling has a big void to fill in his barn now that Bulldog Hanover has been retired to stud duty, but horses like Diamond Girl might help the Hall of Fame trainer add some winner's circle photos to his collection going forward.

The daughter of All Bets Off - Beach Of A Time made the top in her qualifying debut for driver Jody Jamieson, yielded to Black To Reality (Sylvain Filion) in the third stanza, then willingly passed that rival in the lane while pacing her final quarter in :29 over the off going for a 2:02.2 winning mile. She was three parts of a length better than Sweet Report (Rick Zeron), who showed good late kick to finish second.

A homebred of Jack Darling Stables Ltd., Diamond Girl is a half-sister to the likes of Ontario Sires Stakes graduate Neon Moon p,3,1:51.1s ($182,646).

The full stream video stream from Friday's session is available below.

For results from the qualifying session, click the following link: Friday Results - Woodbine Mohawk Park (Qualifiers).
A 74-year-old Edinburg man died earlier this week in a pedestrian crash in Shenandoah County.

Virginia State Police is investigating the incident that occurred 10:25 a.m. on Tuesday, June 6 along Route 11 (Old Valley Pike) just north of Route 672 (Chapmans Landing).

A pedestrian was walking north with a bicycle in the far-right of the travel lane on Route 11 when he was struck from behind by a northbound 2013 Hyundai Elantra, according to a release from Virginia State Police spokesman Sgt. Brent Coffey.

The pedestrian, Ramon L. Santiago Rivera, died at the scene from his injuries.

The driver of the Hyundai, Deborah A. McCormick, 70, of Fort Valley, was not injured. She was charged with reckless driving.

The crash remains under investigation.
GERING  Here comes the pony!

Every year, the National Pony Express Association reignites the spirit and memory of the Pony Express during the annual Re-Ride, where letters are carried in a mochila by over 750 riders on the original Pony Express Trail. The 1,966-mile, eight state event is conducted 24 hours a day until the mail is delivered to its destination. This year, the Re-Ride will be traveling eastbound from Sacramento, California, to St. Joseph, Missouri.

Monument volunteer Jerry Lucas will be set up inside the visitor center theater on Wednesday, June 14, starting at 4 p.m. to provide a short talk about the history of the Pony Express. Following the program, see the Pony Express in action when the annual Re-Ride stops at Scotts Bluff National Monument.

The Re-Ride is expected to arrive at Scotts Bluff National Monument at 4:45 p.m. but can be early or late. Follow the ride at nationalponyexpress.org/annual-re-ride/follow-the-ride.

Also, further information about Scotts Bluff National Monument programs and schedules is available at the visitor center, by calling 308-436-9700 or by visiting the monuments website at nps.gov/scbl/index.htm or Facebook at facebook.com/scottsbluffnps.
The Offutt-based U.S. Strategic Command has turned over responsibility for providing missile defense for the United States and its allies to the U.S. Space Command, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

President Joe Biden made the change April 25 as part of the governments adoption of a new Unified Command Plan that assigns missions to the U.S. militarys major combatant commands, including Stratcom and SpaceCom as well as regional commands such as Northern Command, European Command, and Indo-Pacific Command.

However, the missile defense change was not announced until last week, in a press release from Space Command.

In the release, Spacecom's commander, Army Gen. James Dickinson, described the transfer as the culmination of a comprehensive study on the roles, responsibilities and authorities associated with the Missile Defense enterprise.

He said the change will bring missile warning, missile defense and space domain awareness under one command.

Stratcoms commander, Air Force Gen. Anthony Cotton, said he backs the realignment, which he said better supports our integrated deterrence framework in safeguarding our nation.

No military or civilian jobs are expected to be lost at Stratcoms Offutt Air Force Base headquarters because much of the missile defense work has already been taking place in Colorado Springs, said Lt. Cmdr. Joshua Kelsey, a Stratcom spokesman.

It doesnt change a whole lot, Kelsey said. Instead of Stratcom overseeing it, its Spacecom.

Stratcom is best-known as the keeper of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, but it has also carried out other duties under its broader mission of strategic deterrence.

The missile defense element has its roots in the early-warning system set up across Canada and the northern tier of the United States by the Strategic Air Command in the 1950s and '60s, said retired Lt. Gen. Bob Hinson, Stratcoms deputy commander from 2000 to 2002.

It devolved into a mixture of ground-based radars and space-based systems, said Hinson, who also commanded the 14th Air Force, which is responsible for space-related activities.

SAC stood down after the Cold War, and the expanding work of missile defense moved to other commands, including the Missile Defense Agency (created as part of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as Star Wars) and a former version of U.S. Space Command that was established in 1985.

Stratcom took over missile defense after the original Spacecom was inactivated in 2002, and three years later it became part of Stratcoms Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense. The commands work has included missile defense planning, operations and advocacy.

In 2019, U.S. Space Command was re-established by an act of Congress, and Dickinson became its commander the following year. He has supported the integration of space and missile defense operations.

Its evolving back to where it should be, Hinson said.
The Hurst Turner Unit 65 of the American Legion Auxiliary in Statesville has selected the residents who will attend the 84th session of ALA Tar Heel Girls State to be held June 11-17 at Campbell University in Buies Creek. ALA Tar Heel Girls State is a leadership development program for rising high school senior girls to learn how government functions by creating their own state.

Attending this years session from Statesville are Ashley Anderson from West Iredell High School and Jocelyn Mills from Crossroads Arts and Science Early College.

Program participants organize their local governments and develop two fictitious political parties complete with party platforms, campaigns and conventions. The week culminates in the election of a slate of state officers to govern their newly created state. Citizens draft bills and resolutions to be voted on by their new states General Assembly. The installation of state officers, a variety showcase, engaging speakers, and a college fair are some of the highlights of the weeks activities.

ALA Tar Heel Girls State is sponsored by the American Legion Auxiliary Department of North Carolina. All 50 states have a Girls State program. Begun in 1939, North Carolinas Girls State program has the distinction of having the longest, continuously running Girls State program in the nation as it did not suspend the program during WWII as all other states did.
Miss Aven Tanner has been in Floyd County for 22 years, and she has always been an art teacher. She taught at each of Floyds elementary schools and is now a teacher at Floyd County High School.

While she teaches many art forms to her students, Miss Tanners favorite is pottery, and shes largely inspired by local and international artists, including musicians.

In class, when the weather is good, she takes her classes outside and for a walk because nature is essential to her process, and it often inspires students to use natural elements to their works.

Miss Tanner enjoys her job at the high school and said being able to get outside and slowdown are two aspects of her job that were absent from when she taught at all four elementary schools.

She enjoyed teaching at the elementary schools, she said, but when she got the high school position, she was be able to stay in one place.

Miss Tanner has made a lot of artwork outside of the classroom and mainly works with mixed media. She has an art studio downtown that she runs with her friend called the Black Cat Studio.

They tend to host an open house at least once a year so the public can see their various works, ranging in medium from mixed media and 3D art to paintings and illustrations.

Miss Tanner said her friends would describe her as optimistic, humorous, artistic and authentic, and somewhat different. She is very outgoing and spontaneous with her artwork.

Currently, Miss Tanner said, one of her favorite styles of art revolves around New Mexico culture. Most art in New Mexico is Pueblo pottery, which was first made by the indigenous Pueblo people in the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico.

Art is not a little box that everyone puts it in  its not making a pretty little painting that has to go on a wall in the living room, Miss Tanner said.

She is also very down-to-earth and passionate when she talks about the things she likes and pieces that are close to her heart. Every piece of artwork is priceless if the person who made it cares about it.

Miss Tanner said that she even gets a little emotionally attached to her artwork, particularly her very first piece titled What is beauty?, a piece representing womens rights and how they are seen by other people.

She said she felt very connected to it because it took so long, and it was a little unusual. Miss Tanner could never fathom selling it.

Some of Miss Tanners favorite artists include Georgia OKeeffe, a pioneer of American art who is famous for her floral and landscape paintings, and Frido Kalo, whose most famous piece is a self-portrait with vibrant colors and prominent features, like her eyebrows.

Miss Tanner also loves American writer and Civil Rights activist Maya Angelo and looks to her for inspiration. Still I Rise, one of Angelous most famous works, reminds Miss Tanner what is important and to keep trying.

Trauma and pain make some of the most beautiful artwork, Miss Tanner said.

Sometimes you will never know what people are going through, but looking at their art you can see their expressions. Miss Tanner describes it as something more than just painting on a canvas

Art is something that gives you peace.
A five-day jury trial scheduled to begin on Monday was scrapped when Robert Joseph Gibbons pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter for the 2014 death of his father.

The father, Robert James Langhorne Gibbons, was reported missing from his home on Lick Ridge Road in Floyd County on Aug. 29, 2014, by his daughter.

The elder Gibbons was not found during search efforts that involved the Virginia State Police, Floyd County Sheriffs Office and others. His daughter was eventually appointed custodian of his estate.

Commonwealths Attorney Eric Branscom said in a June 5 written statement that Tori Mask first called the sheriffs office in early 2020. She said she was the estranged wife of the younger Gibbons and that she had information related to her former husband killing his father, Branscom said.

However, Mask refused to make a formal statement, Branscom said, and attempts to locate the fathers remains were unsuccessful.

Within a month, a deputy from Pocahontas County, West Virginia, contacted Capt. Scott Garman of the Floyd County Sheriffs Office and said Mask had made statements about a killing in Floyd County. Branscom said that at the time Mask was hospitalized and on suicide watch.

The following day she wanted to give a full statement.

Branscom said Mask told Garman that she and her then-husband went to see his father to ask about living on the property.

The elder Gibbons, Mask said, got angry, an argument became a fight and the father was knocked to the ground and was unconscious.

Mask said she participated in the fight and helped wrap the victim in rug and put his body in a shallow grave, Branscom said.

The two then cleaned the house to remove any evidence of a fight and later moved to Idaho before settling in West Virginia.

In August 2020, Floyd County deputies and Virginia State Police trooper located Gibbons remains. With Mask as a witness to the crime, the younger Gibbons was charged with first-degree murder.

However, in late 2022, after suffering from mental health issues, Ms. Mask committed suicide, Branscom said Monday. With the death of the only eyewitness to the events, the commonwealth feels that it can demonstrate that the victim died of an illegal act but not that the killing was intentional and thus supports a charge of voluntary manslaughter.

The younger Gibbons did not testify, and Circuit Judge Mike Fleenor accepted the plea agreement. Involuntary manslaughter can lead to a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

Gibbons was returned to jail to await sentencing on Aug. 15 at 1 p.m.

In another case that was expected to be a trial, Aaron David Ray Vest, 36, of Floyd entered a no contest plea to object sexual penetration by force, child abuse with serious injuries and making an underage girl under age 15 perform in pornography.

No contest pleas are considered to be admitting guilt by Virginia courts, Judge Fleenor said.

Branscom said Vest became part of a Department of Homeland Security investigation of child pornography and sex trafficking after tracing photos of his victim posing naked and performing other inappropriate acts.

The original charge of object sexual penetration of a girl under the age of 13 carries a mandatory life sentence.

The amended charge, Fleenor said, carry sentences that can range from 50 years to life in prison.

Vest did not speak at his plea hearing. The judge set sentencing for Oct. 10.

In bond hearing Monday, Fleenor denied bail for Bryan Keith Hall of Christiansburg.
A Pulaski County man and woman were found dead Tuesday after a shooting inside a residence.

Jimmy Ray Brewer III, 27, and Ashley Nicole Ray, 25, both of Dublin, were pronounced dead by rescue workers who found them in the Tiny Town Mobile Home Park, located on Wilderness Road east of Dublin and near Interstate 81s Exit 101, a news release from the county sheriffs office said.

According to the news release, multiple gunshots were reported at the mobile home at about 6:20 p.m., and the sheriffs office was told there might be two victims inside. Officers found Brewer and Ray. There also were two children in the residence, neither of whom was harmed, the news release said.

The children were taken to a neighbors home until the Department of Social Services could arrive, the news release said. Virginia State Police, the Dublin Police Department and Pulaski County Public Safety also assisted after the shooting, the news release said.

No other details were given about the shooting, except that the news release said that no one else seemed to be involved.

The incident was determined to be isolated and no further threat to the public existed, the news release said.

The sheriffs office is continuing to investigate.
Washington's second auction of greenhouse-gas pollution allowances last week raised more than half a billion dollars.

The Department of Ecology announced Wednesday it had sold about 8.6 million 2023 allowances and 2.5 million 2026 allowances, each representing one metric ton of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Washington's first quarterly auction of pollution allowances raised nearly $300 million earlier this year.

The price for this month's auction allowances came in more than $7 per ton higher than the state's first auction, and more than $25 per ton higher than the most recent auction held for polluting businesses in California and Quebec.

The price for 2023 allowances was $56.01 per ton, more than double the starting price of $22.20, while the price for the 2026 allowances was $31.12, totaling $557 million.

This 2023 allowance price exceeded a "trigger price" of $51.90, so another auction of reserve allowances will be held on Aug. 9. The point of this auction is to ensure that businesses have access to enough allowances at prices that are reasonable, according to Ecology.

The revenue raised from last week's auction will be finalized in an Ecology report later this month.

The state's carbon-pricing program is the centerpiece of the state's 2021 Climate Commitment Act. It sets a statewide cap on the amount of carbon pollution that can be emitted by certain industries and requires those businesses to buy allowances to cover their emissions. The goal is to be carbon-free by 2050.

Over time, the number of available allowances will decrease. Lawmakers this session budgeted about $2 billion in anticipated revenue from the auctions for projects intended to reduce emissions over the next two years.

Nearly 90% of those who participated in the auction were businesses required to pay for their emissions, according to Clean and Prosperous Washington, a climate policy group. Businesses eligible to participate included Puget Sound Energy and other energy providers, oil companies like Shell, and Washington State University. The remainder were investors.

Before the state's first auction, some fuel suppliers were raising the price of fuel in anticipation of their compliance costs with the new program.

Businesses covered by the program  those emitting more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year  do not need to turn in any allowances until November 2024. Then, one third of 2023 emissions are due. The rest of allowances for the first compliance period are not due until November 2027.

California's program was criticized for lacking teeth after its first auction in 2012 sold allowances for just a few cents above the floor price of $10. Washington's prices near or exceeding the trigger price drew ire from the oil industry, which after the first auction argued the price was "unnecessarily expensive" and would harm consumers and the economy.

To former state Sen. Reuven Carlyle, the architect of the climate legislation, the premium cost to pollute is a sign that the pressure is on.

"A guiding principle that's a real important lesson learned that our friends in Quebec and California shared with us, is incentivize that early action," Carlyle said. "And that's exactly what I think the market is embracing here."

Meanwhile, some oil companies are passing their new compliance expenses down the line to distributors and customers.

Washington's average price at the pump for gasoline is lower than a year ago, but the difference between Washington's average price and the national average has grown about 64 cents a gallon, according to AAA data.

"We recognize that in effect, the wholesale price is impacted and the oil companies are going to make choices at the retail level of what they do," Carlyle said.

Some of that cost is likely also influenced by global commodity oil prices and international policies.

Oil companies reported record profits in 2022, totaling an estimated $200 billion. In March, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law that would penalize companies engaged in price gouging. It goes into effect later this month.

On the day of Washington's latest auction, leaders from about a dozen federally recognized tribes in the state of Washington met with Gov. Jay Inslee about the impact of compliance costs on fuel prices.

Some leaders shared concerns about the financial burden on tribal nations, many of which have invested millions across the state in projects to combat climate change.

State Sen. Joe Nguyen D-White Center, chair of the Environment, Energy and Technology Committee, said he and other lawmakers are exploring ways to reduce the impact on overburdened communities, like proposing policy similar to California's that would compel oil companies to increase transparency around their costs, and using revenues from the auctions to mitigate the costs to people with lower incomes.

The Climate Commitment Act aims to reduce the state's production of carbon dioxide, methane and related gases to 45% below 1990 levels in the next seven years, 70% below 1990 levels by 2040 and decarbonize by 2050.

Washington state's greenhouse-gas emissions in 2019 reached their highest level since 2007: 102 million metric tons. It was a 7% increase from 2018, and 9% higher than 1990 levels.

Some polluters, like natural gas utilities and oil refineries, initially get a generous portion of their allowances free, but are required to buy more if they plan to release greenhouse gases above the allotted levels.

The next quarterly auction is set for Aug. 30.
More than a year after the Longview and Kelso police departments rolled out cameras for their officers to wear on call, the demand for the footage in records requests has been less impactful than officers originally expected.

A Washington state law passed in 2021 required police interviews for felony investigations or any juvenile cases be recorded. The rule led to dozens of police departments creating a body cam policy, including the Longview and Kelso police departments, as the simplest way to comply with the new requirement.

Kelsos cameras took effect in January 2022 and Longview followed shortly after.

Kelso Police Chief Darr Kirk told the Kelso City Council in April that the department had seen fewer requests than expected last year. His department processed around 17,000 video files in 2022 and had just 45 public record requests that included footage.

The Longview Police Department had 68 public records requests that included bodycam footage between April 2022 and this April. A Longview police record specialist said that was an inexact number because some records requests may not have initially specified that they were interested in the footage.

Longview Police Capt. Branden McNew said the addition of the video footage makes it more time-intensive for the records employees to handle requests, especially for cases that required major redactions to the video.

You cant release the face of the child in an investigation. So you have to use the software to blur their face for a whole hour-long video, McNew said. That takes time, even with a sophisticated software tool, and then you watch the entire video again to make sure it worked.

Longview Police Department records at least one video for every call for service that comes in. The police system generally has at least 40,000 videos stored at any given time, each kept for a minimum of 60 days.

Longview City Council agreed to pay $218,000 for a five-year contract for the body cameras and the processing software. The city was changing to an internal records staff around the same time that the cameras were being established, so McNew said there were no hires made specifically because of the new footage.

To address the new demands to store and process the camera footage, the Kelso police hired a fulltime records staffer to replace a part time position. The staffers additional $86,000 in salary and benefits was the majority of the cost involved in starting up the program.

Kirk said that sending records to the prosecutors office involved little or no redaction but still took effort by the records office to catalog and track the footage.

Both cities received funds from the state legislature in 2021 to help implement new policing laws. The body cameras were the main recipient of those funds, covering more than half of the cost for each city.

McNew said the cameras had minimal impacts on officers but provided some improvements. The footage can be used to address citizens complaints about the police, as happened in September after Officer David Mora confronted Rayshaun Swagerty-Owens in an interaction some viewers of the viral video called disrespectful. Mora was later disciplined for escalating the situation.

Body cameras also provide the police another form of evidence during their investigation.

People want to see it for themselves, McNew said. So when you have three officers at a scene capturing the video themselves, it becomes very good eyewitness video that the prosecutors or jurors can see.
At least three of the six women whose bodies have been found in Oregon and Washington in recent months shared similar circumstances and had frequented the same places in the months before their deaths, according to a source close to the investigations.

In particular, investigators are examining potential connections among JoAnna Speaks, 32; Charity Lynn Perry, 24, of Longview; and Bridget Leann Ramsey Webster, 31, who all had been known to frequent Southeast 82nd Avenue and an area near the Clackamas Town Center, said the source, who is not authorized to speak on behalf of any of the half-dozen police agencies investigating the cases.

The source discounted a statement issued Sunday by Portland police that said the bureau has no reason to believe these 6 cases are connected.

It was premature to state that these deaths are unrelated or related, the source said. Investigators always look for commonalities with unsolved homicides.

Portland police did not respond to a request for comment about whether the bureaus assessment was premature.

The personal histories of Speaks, Perry and Webster share similarities, the source said, but declined to elaborate.

It remains unclear whether a single perpetrator is linked to the deaths of the three women, the source said.

Speaks died of blunt force trauma in a homicide, investigators have said. Perry and Webster both died under suspicious circumstances, detectives said, but they have not released other information.

All died within about three weeks of each other in April.

Maj. Alex Gardner, who oversees the Oregon State Police Forensic Science & Pathology Bureau, said in an email Tuesday that state police prioritize forensic work and DNA analyses in suspected homicides but offered no timeline for completing them in these cases.

Speaks body was found April 8 inside a Clark County barn on an abandoned property in Ridgefield, Washington, about 22 miles north of Portland. Authorities determined Speaks, who lived in Clackamas County, died of blunt head and neck injuries.

Perrys body was found April 24 by Multnomah County sheriffs deputies in a culvert at East Historic Columbia River Highway and Northeast Tumalt Road, near Ainsworth State Park in east Multnomah County. The sheriffs office has not said anything about the circumstances of her death, referring to it only as suspicious.

Authorities have said Perry, of Vancouver, was frequently seen near Southwest Washington Street and Fourth Avenue in downtown Portland at the beginning of March, an area where open-air fentanyl dealing and use has been rampant.

Websters body was found April 30 on Harmony Road near Mill Creek in northwest Polk County. Little has been released about the circumstances of her death, though authorities have said its suspicious. She was last known to have lived in an apartment in Clackamas County.

Three other women also turned up dead around the same time as Speaks, Perry and Webster.

The body of an unidentified woman was found April 24 near Interstate 205 and Southeast Flavel Street in Southeast Portlands Lents neighborhood; Portland police said Sunday that foul play was not suspected.

Ashley Real, 22, of Portland, disappeared March 27 in Southeast Portland; her remains were found May 7 in the Eagle Creek area of Clackamas County. Investigators say her death is suspicious. She had previously lived in Clackamas County.

The body of Kristin Smith, 22, of Gresham, was found Feb. 19 in a wooded area near Southeast Deardorff Road and Flavel Street in Southeast Portlands Pleasant Valley neighborhood. She had been reported missing Dec. 22. Officers and county investigators searched the area for evidence, and the Multnomah County medical examiner has not yet determined a cause of death, police said.
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Two approaches to learn drawing. On the left, a plate from the classic Charles Bargue drawing course 1875 where the student is asked to reproduce "as seen" exactly the shape of the figure and the dark/light areas. In comparison, the right panel shows a typical anatomy study where students learn the muscle groups and bones structure to accurately draw the human form. Credit: Paul Richer Anatomie Artistique 1890.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made remarkable progress creating images that are not only breathtaking, but astonishingly diverse in style. Ten years ago, such an achievement would have been deemed unlikely by experts. Today, AI can create images using specific artistic styles, such as Van Gogh's unique approach, with an infinite range of variations.

This raises an intriguing question. How can a series of instructions running on a computer produce art that rivals human creativity?

Art history and AI

Examining the similarities between the evolution of AI and art history may provide some answers.

The history of modern science can be characterized by the development of specific models that represent the world. Traditional models are developed using mathematical equations, physics, and logic. For example, Newton's law describes how gravity works with a very simple formula.

However, modern AI has become increasingly reliant on generic models that can learn complex relationships from vast datasets. They do this without encoding explicit knowledge (so-called artificial neural networks). These new models do not rely on physics or complex mathematical equations but rather are built by layering many small computation units. Taken as a whole, these can learn and reproduce any pattern present in the data.

Interestingly, the evolution of art mirrors that of AI in many ways. Art has also undergone a significant transformation, from being rooted in explicit knowledge and classical traditions, to embracing approaches that challenge the boundaries of art itself.

Like AI, art has evolved to incorporate a more organic and intuitive approach that emphasizes the discovery and creation of new forms and styles.

The era of building accurate models

For decades, constructed AI models relied upon analytical solutions and equations. These were defined by a handful of meaningful parameters crafted by human experts. The primary objective of this early iteration of AI was to adjust those parameters to explain experimental data.

Artists also used models and adapted them to represent what they observed. Their models came from the careful study of anatomy, color and shape. For example, during the Renaissance, da Vinci dedicated himself to studying the human form by performing dissections of humans and animals. He constructed a mental model of what a human body should look like, which was then used to accurately reproduce characters or imagine allegorical religious paintings.

In 2004, anatomy professors Massimo Gulisano and Pietro Bernabei used computers to analyze Michelangelo's David, confirming the extreme anatomical accuracy of the sculpture (except for a missing muscle that upon investigation was due to the stone imperfection).

These mental models became more sophisticated during the turn of the 16th century, with artists perfecting the texture and vibrancy of fabrics, water, and light.

Early artists went through methodical studies to accurately represent the world, as see in this anatomical study. Credit: Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana

The data-driven era

With advances in computing, new methods emerged allowing AI to recognize sophisticated patterns in large datasets. A watershed moment occurred in 2012 when computer scientists trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to recognize the content of images. It outperformed existing methods by a wide margin. The research community suddenly realized the potential of data-driven approaches.

Ever since, increasingly complex models are learning more sophisticated patterns from increasingly large datasets. It seems there is no end to what enough data and a large model can achieve with enough resources.

In the 19th century, artists began painting what they saw, refusing to be constrained by the subject giving rise to the Impressionist art movement. This is much akin to a data-driven approach: reproduce the data (observed scene) without trying to use models of the subject matter.

In 1874, Claude Monet's defining Impression, Sunrise was exhibited in Paris. It was mocked by art critics as a personal 'impression' rather than a realistic representation of the scene in question.

This was the seed of the Impressionism movement and is often considered a watershed moment in art history. Others soon realized how powerful art could be when the constraints of realism were lifted.

The reason for this evolution

While the internet and advanced computing disrupted AI, technology also disrupted the art world.

For art, it was photography. Until the 19th century, the only way to produce an image was through the work of artists. There was a huge demand for immortalizing events, individuals, or places.

By the end of the 19th century, photography was good enough to meet that demand and art was disrupted. Art evolved to produce "impressions" or abstract pictures, leaving the job of documenting reality to photographs.

The modern era

The evolution of art is reflected even today in how drawing is taught.

One approach is drawing only what one sees, without reference to any model, which is deceptively challenging. A second involves studying anatomy, basic shapes, and how light interacts with forms, so one can draw a model using the scene merely as a reference and not as something to reproduce accurately.

Over time, artists blend these techniques, with others, to develop their personal approaches. However, the duality between model-based and data-driven approaches remains clear and ever-present.

For example, many artists endeavor to identify the essence of things or emotions, a technique well-illustrated by Picasso's bull study. This is a key theme in AI, which reduces the complexity of very large models to identify the core architecture, generating the simplest possible model.

As methods have mixed in the modern art world, so too have many scientists pushed for a mixed approach to AI that infuses data-driven models with symbols and physics. The aim is to strike a balance between the interpretability of symbolic AI and the scalability and power of data-driven methods.

By combining these techniques, researchers hope to create more robust and adaptable AI systems that can manage complex and diverse real-world problems.

Meanwhile, the arts continued to build on Impressionist freedom. This resulted in an explosion in techniques and movements throughout the 20th century that continues unabated to this day.

This is not dissimilar to the way modern AI systems can create realistic and beautiful images.

Patterns in images can be learnt by AI, and patterns of those patterns, to such an extent that any image can be understood as a hierarchical assemblage of patterns. All arising from a vast library that the AI system has learnt.

The era of generative models

Fast forward to 2023, and generative AI methods have been developed to assemble patterns in new ways to create never before seen images. The selection and ways these patterns combine are informed by prompts. These can range from human-defined text prompts, rough sketches and sound to even the motion of a crowd, as in the case of Refik Anadol's Unsupervised. The AI-driven digital display constantly creates a new picture depending on the location of the viewers.

While generative AI art is undoubtedly impressive, it poses numerous challenges. These include copyright ownership, deep fake images and videos, and AI-generated pieces swamping art websites with an infinite supply of new works.

Moreover, this technology raises deeper questions about the nature of creativity and human experience.

As we witness a world increasingly dominated by AI-generated art, we must wonder whether anything new can ever be created again or whether what we consider as new art is merely an unlikely and interesting random fluctuation that happens to resonate with us. After all, what humans generate is often a complex collection of experiences and existing pieces assembled in new and innovative ways.

While the ability of AI to create art that rivals human creativity remains a subject of debate, the evolution of AI and art share remarkable similarities.
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Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra speaks during the opening of contract talks with the United Auto Workers on July 16, 2019, in Detroit. Barra was the second highest paid woman CEO in a survey done by AP and Equilar. She received a base salary of $2.1 million, a $6.3 million performance-based bonus, $1.1 million in perks and $19.5 million in stock and option awards, for a total pay package of $29 million. Credit: AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File

Electric vehicles made by General Motors will be able to use much of Tesla's extensive charging network beginning early next year.

In addition, GM will adopt Tesla's connector, the plug that links an electric vehicle to a charging station.

GM joins Ford in shifting its electric vehicles to work with about 12,000 of Tesla's roughly 17,000 chargers, and both Detroit automakers are pushing to make Tesla's connector the industry standard. GM CEO Mary Barra and her Tesla counterpart, Elon Musk, made the announcement Thursday during a Twitter Spaces conversation.

Their discussion comes two weeks after Ford CEO Jim Farley joined Musk to announce that Ford's electric vehicles would gain access to much of Tesla's EV-charging network, the largest in the nation. Farley also said Ford would switch to Tesla's connector rather than go with the connector used by the rest of the industry.

At the opening bell Friday, shares of Tesla Inc. jumped 6% to hit a new high for the year. General Motors Co. rose 3%, and Ford Motor Co. rose 2%.

At first, GM and Ford EV owners will need an adapter to hook into the Tesla stations, which have their own connector. But both GM and Ford will switch to Tesla's North American Charging Standard connector starting with new EVs produced in 2025.

Twitter, now X. Corp, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk poses prior to his talks with French President Emmanuel Macron, May 15, 2023 at the Elysee Palace in Paris. Lawyers seeking to bring a class-action lawsuit against Tesla submitted declarations Monday, June 5, 2023, in Alameda County Superior Court from 240 Black workers who testified to rampant racism and discrimination at the electric car maker's Fremont factory in Northern California. Credit: AP Photo/Michel Euler, Pool, File

Tesla has about 17,000 Supercharger stations in the U.S. There are about 54,000 public charging stations in the U.S., according to the Department of Energy, but many charge much more slowly than the Tesla stations.

"Like Ford, we see this as an opportunity to expand access to charging," Barra said, adding that GM hopes the rest of the industry will move to the Tesla charging connector, which is different from the CCS connector used on most other EVs.

Musk said that GM and Tesla vehicles would have an even playing field at the charging stations.

"We will provide support equally to both," he said. "The most important thing is we advance the electric vehicle revolution."

Financial details of the agreement between the two companies were not released Thursday, but GM spokesman Darryll Harrison said GM isn't paying Tesla.

Tesla vehicles charge at a station in Emeryville, Calif., Aug. 10, 2022. Electric vehicles made by General Motors will be able to use much of Tesla's vast charging network starting early next year. GM joins Ford in shifting its vehicles to about 12,000 of Tesla's chargers, and both Detroit automakers are pushing to make Tesla's connector the industry standard. Credit: AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vasquez, File

"Tesla will get better utilization of their network and all the new charging revenue, which will help them expand the network further," Harrison said. "There are other opportunities both companies can take advantage of as a result of the agreement."

Details of how customers would gain access are still being worked out. GM EV owners may have to pay a monthly charge to access Tesla's charging network, or they could pay for each use. Current GM owners probably will need to buy the adapter, Harrison said.

Tesla's supercharger network is a huge competitive advantage for the company based in Austin, Texas, which sells more EVs than anyone else in the U.S. Chargers often are located near freeways to enable long trips, where most fast-charging plugs are needed, and generally they're more reliable than other networks.

But opening access to EVs from GM and Ford, which rank a distant second and third in U.S. EV sales, will make it easier for those owners to charge while traveling. It also could rankle some Tesla owners who already are jockeying for space at some of the busier Supercharger stations, largely in California.

Barra said joining Tesla's network would almost double the number of chargers available to GM electric vehicle owners.

Tesla electric vehicles are seen at Tesla chargers Wednesday, May 10, 2023, in Westlake, Calif. Electric vehicles made by General Motors will be able to use much of Tesla's vast charging network starting early next year. GM joins Ford in shifting its vehicles to about 12,000 of Tesla's chargers, and both Detroit automakers are pushing to make Tesla's connector the industry standard. Credit: AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill

"At the end of the day, we're looking at what's best for our customers," Barra said. "We aren't the only company that comes up with good ideas."

Mike Austin, an electric vehicles analyst for Guidehouse Insights, said GM joining the Tesla network is a huge step toward making Tesla's connector the industrywide standard.

"It seems like there's a lot of momentum going the way of the North American Charging Standard, for sure," he said.

If other large EV makers such as Hyundai, Kia, Volkswagen and Nissan, also switch connectors, Tesla would get a large amount of revenue from its chargers, Austin said.

Still, Tesla appears to be holding back at least part of its network for use only by Tesla owners, he said. The risk, he said, is that Tesla owners could have to wait for access to a plug.

"Tesla owners are used to not having to wait," he said.

Tesla electric vehicles are seen at Tesla chargers Wednesday, May 10, 2023, in Westlake, Calif. Electric vehicles made by General Motors will be able to use much of Tesla's vast charging network starting early next year. GM joins Ford in shifting its vehicles to about 12,000 of Tesla's chargers, and both Detroit automakers are pushing to make Tesla's connector the industry standard. Credit: AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill

The Tesla connector and cord are much lighter and easier to handle than the CCS system used by the rest of the auto industry, Austin said.

Earlier this year, the White House announced that at least 7,500 chargers from Tesla's Supercharger and Destination Charger network would be available to non-Tesla electric vehicles by the end of 2024. But the rollout thus far has been slow.

 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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A: Provincial peak load and offshore wind levelized costs for mainland China; B: Wind roses at typical locations for offshore wind development, with each location indicated in a; C: Offshore wind installation statistics and national planned capacity for all coastal provinces. 2020Q4 plan was incorporated in the analyses. Credit: Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-37536-3

Offshore wind power offers a promising solution to the challenge of decarbonizing coastal China. China's coastal provinces, though small in land mass, are home to 76% of the population; they are also responsible for 72% of total national power consumption and 70% of total CO 2 emissions. Transitioning the coastal areas away from fossil fuels is one of China's core challenges for achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, and offshore wind power may hold the key.

New research published in Nature Communications develops a bottom-up model to test the capabilities of the grid to accommodate renewable power variability and to design the optimal investment plans for offshore wind power.

The new paper from the Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy and Environment, a U.S.-China collaborative research program based at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and collaborators at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in China, is one of the first to analyze opportunities for province-by-province grid integration of renewables at elevated levels of offshore investment.

China's onshore wind investment, accounting for over 80% of national and 30% of global wind commitments, has both significantly less output in winter and limited grid flexibility. Other zero-carbon energy sources like solar and nuclear power also have financial, geographic, and safety constraints. Offshore wind, on the other hand, can provide a more optimal renewable energy resource.

Capacity variation of transmission network expansion between S1 (limited level of offshore wind according to prier roadmap study), and S3 (freely optimization of offshore wind). All existing inter-provincial transmission lines are presented by gray lines. Red lines illustrate the transmission increment, while green lines illustrate transmission decrement. Provincial allocation of offshore wind investment under S3 is presented on the right table. Credit: Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-37536-3

"The results indicate that at least 1,000 GW of offshore wind capacity could already be available at a levelized cost below that for nuclear units in China," explains Michael McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies at SEAS and chair of the Harvard-China Project. "We found that offshore wind investment levels could be more than double the current government target."

To create the optimal deployment plan for offshore wind, the researchers led also by Prof. Xinyu Chen of HUST, an alumnus of the Harvard-China Project, designed a high-resolution assessment model of China's provinces. The model combines a refined analysis of offshore wind resources and economics; considers the micro siting of wind farms with optimization of the delivery system; and simulates hourly power system demands, identifying optimal plans for provincial investments in offshore installations, transmissions and storage.

The modeled system doubles current offshore wind investment by 2030. It also improves current provincial deployment plans for offshore wind, shifting part of the investment from Guangdong to provinces such as Jiangsu and Zhejiang. As a result, the plan could boost national renewable penetration from 31.5% to 40%, at a cost lower than that anticipated in the current plan. By 2050, offshore wind capacity in China could reach as high as 1500 GW.

"China has abundant wind resources and favorable sea depth conditions to develop offshore wind power," says says Xinyang Guo, a visiting fellow with the Harvard-China Project, Ph.D. candidate at HUST, and first author of the paper. "Deployment of offshore wind farms in China could not only provide the largest market for the global wind industry in the upcoming decade, but it could offer also an important building block for China to transition away from fossil fuel-based energy systems."

More information: Xinyang Guo et al, Grid integration feasibility and investment planning of offshore wind power under carbon-neutral transition in China, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-37536-3 Journal information: Nature Communications
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The prototype robot created by the researchers. Credit: He at al, SSRN (2023). DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.4455959

In recent years, roboticists have created a growing number of autonomous systems based on different structures and designs. Among these are modular robots, which are composed of different elements or "modules" that can be reconfigured to carry out specific tasks more effectively.

Origami, the Asian art of folding paper to create 3D decorative shapes, can be a valuable inspiration for the creation of modular robotic structures. This is because it offers predefined models and patterns through which 2D sheets of materials can be turned into elaborate 3D structures with different mechanical properties.

Researchers at Guangzhou University, Yanshan University, and other universities in China recently created a new modular continuous robot constructed of a series of tubes based on a specific origami fold, known as the Miura fold. This robot, introduced in a pre-print paper published on SSRN, can contract and bend following specific patterns to complete different tasks.

"Folding a flat sheet under a specific crease pattern may form a three-dimensional origami tube, which has been proven to exhibit unique mechanical properties and has wide engineering applications," Junfeng He, Guilin Wen and their colleagues told Tech Xplore. "In this study, a Miura-derived origami tube is designed and its precise circular closing condition and mechanical properties are analyzed, revealing that the origami tube has programmable stiffness characteristics."

The Miura fold is an origami pattern that results in the folding of a flat surface into a structure with a smaller area. This fold has been used to create different technologies that may benefit from this change in shape, including large solar panels for satellites, which can be launched while folded on themselves and then spread out in space.

As part of their study, He, Wen and their colleagues used this fold to create flexible tubes, which then served as the basis of their robot. These tubes are based on a sheet of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a robust material sometimes used to create medical devices, pipes, and insulations for cables.

This material has several advantageous characteristics, including flexibility and a high resistance when bent or compressed. As a result, the tubes that serve as the backbone of the modular robot are flexible and can be bent, compressed, and twisted without breaking.

To assess the viability of their design and the robustness of the origami structures it is based on, the researchers created a prototype robot made of three flexible tube modules. This robot can both fold on itself to reduce its size and bend to the side.

"Three separate steel wires drive each module to achieve independent contraction or bending movement," He, Wen and their colleagues explained in their paper. "The unified installation of steel wire-driven motors on the base endows the robot with a lightweight, interconnected inner space, high scalability, and [a flexible] backbone."

He, Wen and their colleagues evaluated their prototype in a series of experiments and found that it could successfully complete two different tasks. The first consists of docking onto its base when in a narrow space, and the second, requiring the installation of a magnetic gripper at the top of its structure, entails holding and lifting objects.

In the future, this new modular, origami-based design could be used to create other robots that can effectively tackle different real-world problems. In addition, this team's work could inspire the creation of other origami-based flexible structures that could serve as the backbone of other robotic systems.

More information: Junfeng He et al, A Modular Continuous Robot Constructed by Miura-Derived Origami Tubes, SSRN (2023). DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.4455959

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(Photo : Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken revealed that he and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman talked about the normalization of ties between the kingdom and Israel.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Washington plans to prioritize the normalization of diplomatic ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia

Blinken's remarks come amid his three-day visit to the kingdom to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman

Saudi Arabia's Prine Faisal bin Farhan, on the other hand, was working on gaining support from the US to generate nuclear power

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Washington would prioritize efforts to normalize ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, considered the main Middle East allies of the United States.

The American official's remarks came amid his three-day visit to the kingdom to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In his Thursday statement, Blinken declined to say whether or not the US plans to support Riyadh's nuclear ambitions in the future.

Normalization of Ties Between Israel and Saudi Arabia

During a joint news conference, Prince Faisal bin Farhan said that he hoped they would agree on US support of the kingdom's plans to generate nuclear power. However, neither of the two officials addressed whether this would be given in exchange for the normalization of ties with Israel, as per Reuters.

Blinken's visit to Saudi Arabia aims to address various recent issues, such as oil prices, human rights, and Riyadh's opening to Iran. He argued that the normalization of diplomatic ties between Israel and its neighbors is a priority of the US to pave the way for a more integrated Middle East.

In a statement, the US secretary said they discussed such topics during his visit to the kingdom. The situation comes as Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's two holiest shrines, has resisted US pressure to end generations-old non-recognition of Israel.

Speaking alongside Blinken, Prince Faisal agreed that the normalization of ties between the two nations has its benefits. However, he argued that these would be limited if officials did not create a pathway toward a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians.

Blinken also called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday so that he could brief him on his talks with Saudi Arabian officials. The latter is known to want to work with the Biden administration in making a peace agreement with the kingdom, according to Axios.

Read Also: Uganda's LGBTQ 'Lockdown' Raises HIV Concerns

A More Integrated Middle East

Faisal's use of the word pathway when discussing the normalization of ties with Israel deviates from how previous Saudi Arabian officials discussed the issue. In the past, the kingdom has demanded establishing a Palestinian state as a condition for the potential normalization of ties.

Blinken's visit to the kingdom also comes more than half a year after United States President Joe Biden's administration reacted to a decision by OPEC+ to cut oil production. The US secretary of state said that Saudi Arabia knew the decision would only work to increase "Russian revenues."

Furthermore, the American official said Washington was already considering implementing "consequences" for the decision. However, CNN said the Biden administration did not negatively react to Saudi Arabia's announcement of another cut to oil production, which was made a few days before Blinken's visit.

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Jacquelyn Busa has always been known by those in her North Zulch community as a selfless individual who will give to those in need. Now, as she battles breast cancer, her community is returning the favor.

After discovering an abnormal lump in her breast on Christmas morning, Busa was diagnosed with Atypical Ductal Hyperplasia, or ADH, of the left breast, a condition that affects the cells of the milk ducts in the breast and increases risk for breast cancer  a biopsy later confirmed the cancer. As part of Busas treatment, she will undergo a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery on June 27 from Texas Breast Specialists in Austin, in addition to having a total hysterectomy in November.

As a nurse at Central Texas Heart in Bryan, Busa said her experience in the medical field means she knows what the worst-case scenario of her procedures could be.

Its scary because you know what could happen, she said. Im about to undergo a 14-hour surgery  Ill be in the ICU for four days. Theres risk of blood clots, and I already have a blood-clotting disorder.

Karina Hannon has known Busa since 1998 when they met in high school. Hannon lost her son, Bailin, in 2020 and said Busa was the first to reach out and offer assistance.

She is the first person I know of that wants to help when she sees somebody in need, Hannon said. It doesnt matter if she knows them personally or not. If shes passionate about something, shell do everything she can to support somebody.

When Hannon found out her best friend had been diagnosed with breast cancer, she quickly jumped at the opportunity to return the favor  creating a GoFundMe to benefit Busa. Additionally, Hannons nonprofit foundation created in honor of her son, Love Like Bailin Therapy Farm, hosted a goat-roping benefit for Busa in April.

When I went through the battle of losing my son, money is the last thing you think about, Hannon said. Its also a big stress reliever when thats something you dont have to worry about. That was the reason we did the benefit and the GoFundMe, because if you can take that pressure off of them, thats one less thing they have to worry about.

Shelly Allphin, Busas mother, said she was touched by seeing the community support her daughter at the April benefit.

It was a very emotional day, Allphin said. But a very great day just full of gratefulness and happiness that those around her love her so much to come out and support her.

Beyond the support she has received from her local community, Busa said she and her family have relied on their faith and church community at Madison Christian Fellowship, where they have attended for six years.

Theyve supported us through prayer and through monetary donations as well, Busa said. Not a lot of people can give, we get that, basically I just appreciate prayers.

As medical bills for surgeries and medicines increase, Busa said she is grateful to anyone who supports her during this time.

Im just thankful, she said. I know its hard for everybody right now just to live. I am thankful for the generous donations, the people that have already donated and mainly the prayers.

Individuals interested in donating to Busas GoFundMe can visit gofund.me/920c5649 or donate directly to her Cash App at $jackiebusa or her Venmo at @JackieBusa-1986.
AUSTIN  Texas will soon deploy a string of buoys in the middle of the Rio Grande River in a new effort to deter migrants, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday.

A 1,000-foot long set of marine floating barriers will be placed in the river near Eagle Pass by July 7, state officials said. Each buoy is about 4 feet in diameter.

If the initial test works, we can put mile after mile after mile of these buoys in the water at locations where crossings by large groups of migrants are expected, Abbott said. Its unclear how long the test will last.

The buoys will create a layering effect, combined with concertina wire laid on the bank of the river by Texas National Guard and swiftly mobilized formations of state police and soldiers standing nearby, Abbott said.

What these buoys will allow us to do is to prevent people from even getting to the border, the three-term Republican governor said at a Capitol news conference.

Abbott spoke after signing six border-related bills sent to him by the Legislature in the session that ended on Memorial Day. The measures are in addition to $5.1 billion in the new state budget thats on Abbotts desk and a bill before lawmakers in their special session that would authorize a prison sentence of at least 10 years on smugglers of migrants.

The new laws compensate farmers and ranchers whose land is damaged by migrants, authorize the Texas Military Department to use drones at the border and declare Mexican drug cartels foreign terrorist organizations.

The cost of the initial deployment in Maverick County will be under $1 million, said Col. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Reaction from staunch opponents of President Joe Bidens immigration policies was favorable.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation supports the inflatable barrier because it might help stop migrants from wanting to cross into Texas through bodies of water, said Joshua Trevino, chief of intelligence and research for the conservative think tank.

It certainly passes the common sense test, Trevino said. Given that this is an effort by the state to fulfill its legitimate, constitutional function of controlling its own international border, then we support it.

Wade Miller, executive director of Citizens for Renewing America, another conservative group, said time will tell if the tactic is effective.

Any type of barrier that makes cartel-controlled human and child trafficking more difficult is moral policy, he said.

The key here is if it actually stops people from trying to cross the border, said Miller, who previously served as chief of staff to Texas Rep. Chip Roy. If it doesnt significantly stop illegal crossings, then its a waste of taxpayer funds.

Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, called it overreach by Abbott and said the state should invest in border communities, not usurp the federal governments role as enforcer of immigration laws.

People already face the risk of drowning in the Rio Grande due to plants, debris and an unpredictable current, said Garza, who was the Democratic nominee for Texas attorney general in 2022. These barriers would only add to the danger they already face.

Ramona Casas of ARISE Adelante, a group that organizes residents of colonias in the Rio Grande Valley, took issue with officials saying the buoys are a way to further protect Texas from undocumented immigrants crossing into the state.

When you hear the phrase protect the border, its like viewing migrants as an enemy or a threat, Casas said in Spanish. I dont think that a family or a child or a single mother thats looking to claim asylum and protection are people we need to defend ourselves from.

McCraw noted that the buoys, as well as the concertina wire that has been used in Abbotts Operation Lone Star over the past two years, are mobile.

They can be placed in a location, gathered up and then transported to a different part of the river, the state police chief explained.

Its something we can do quickly, McCraw said. We can put it there and it deters the large groups of people from moving in that area. We can control it ..., along with the deployment of razor wire and a sufficient number of soldiers and troopers. Its an in-depth defense.

The U.S. Border Patrol originated the idea of placing strings of buoys in the river, and conducted tests to make sure there was minimal risk of harming migrants, McCraw said.

Asked if the buoys would help migrants by providing a place to rest before proceeding, McCraw said they would not.

Because of the water and the buoys, its very difficult to be able to go through these, he said. Theres ways to overcome it. But it takes great effort. It takes specialized skills and equipment to do it.

Abbott and McCraw said state officials carefully weighed any safety risks posed by the strings of floating barriers.

We dont want anybody to get hurt. In fact, we want to prevent people from getting hurt, prevent people from drowning, McCraw said.

The buoys rotate and are made of polyethylene, contain closed cell marine foam and include galvanized fixtures and steel components, Considine said.

Asked if migrants could foil a string of buoys simply by swimming underwater, Considine replied: It is a substantial barrier on a body of moving water that is already dangerous to cross, making it much more difficult for an individual to cross illegally and impossible for human smugglers to use rafts.
Low-income mothers in Texas won some health gains during this past legislative session, primarily through the expansion of postpartum Medicaid benefits, but overall state lawmakers kept their eyes and dollars focused on law tweaks and boosting dollars to existing health care programs instead of launching sweeping new initiatives.

For the most part this legislative session, state lawmakers stuck close to the familiar, leaving bolder measures on substance abuse and mental health treatment by the wayside. There was no expansion of eligibility for medical marijuana. The talk of decriminalizing fentanyl testing strips was just that. A Republican lawmakers bill to help address the mental health workforce shortage was left to die in committee. And of course, no bill was moved forward to remove the largest barrier for uninsured people in Texas: the expansion of Medicaid health coverage.

The state is one of 10 that have refused to expand Medicaid coverage to its residents after lawmakers in North Carolina reached a deal this year on expansion. It is a measure that both Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have long opposed despite some 75% of Texans supporting expansion in some form.

Also, with deadlines approaching between now and next year for federal pandemic relief to end, there was no plan to preemptively replace that funding with state dollars, putting the funding of child care and student mental health programs that were the greatest beneficiaries at risk. Thats despite the state having nearly $33 billion in additional revenue available this session.

Were disappointed that the Legislature failed to pass a number of priorities for Texas kids and families, Stephanie Rubin, CEO of Texans Care for Children, said in a post-session news release.

Still, there were several health care winners this legislative session.

Womens health

Two House priorities related to womens health passed both chambers. The first comes via Senate Bill 379, which eliminates sales tax on diapers, menstrual supplies and many pregnancy-related supplies.

The other priority was the successful extension of Medicaid coverage for moms, from two months to a year after childbirth. The measure garnered bipartisan support after debate over an anti-abortion amendment. Maintaining health care coverage for a year after giving birth has long been the top recommendation of the states maternal mortality task force.

Legislators threw some additional support to new parents in the form of protections for pregnant and parenting college students and eight weeks of paid parental leave for state employees.

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers also passed House Bill 916, which requires health insurers that cover contraception to provide a years supply of the medication at once. This bill, which has been sent to the governor, was the only contraception-related legislation to receive a hearing in both chambers.

Making it easier to obtain refills of birth control prescriptions will benefit thousands of Texas women, Republican state Rep. Shelby Slawson of Stephenville, who helped author the bill, said in a statement after it passed the House. HB 916  will help busy Texas women by making the refill process more efficient.

No meaningful changes to Texas abortion laws gained traction this session, the first to be held after the U.S. Supreme Courts overturning of Roe v. Wade and the near-total ban on abortion in Texas. No new exceptions were added to the laws, which ban abortion in all cases except to save the life of a pregnant patient, but no additional restrictions were put in place either.

The main change came in House Bill 17, a bill that allows elected prosecutors to be removed from office if they say they will not enforce specific categories of crimes. This bill was a direct response to the handful of prosecutors in the states large, left-leaning counties who have said they wont pursue abortion-related charges.

Nursing

Faced with an ongoing nursing shortage, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 25, which establishes scholarships, grants and loan repayment programs to support nursing students and faculty.

The bill was sponsored by Brenham Republican state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst at the suggestion of the lieutenant governor.

Last fall I came up with the idea of a new scholarship program to address our nursing shortage in Texas, Patrick said in a statement. I asked Chair Kolkhorst to design the program and she has done a masterful job in crafting this legislation.

A staffing crisis is playing out at hospitals all across the United States as medical professionals are leaving the field due to burnout, the number of violent attacks against medical workers has risen and the workload has increased because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than half of Texas nurses reported being subject to workplace violence in their career, according to a 2016 state study. Nationwide, the rate of violence for health care workers increased more than 60% between 2011 and 2018, and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has found the rate of serious violent incidents in health care is more than four times greater than for those in other industries.

With Senate Bill 240, by state Sen. Donna Campell, R-New Braunfels, health care facilities will be required to establish a workplace violence prevention committee, responsible for policies to prevent and respond to incidents of workplace violence. The bill further requires facilities to respond to workplace violence by providing post-incident services, including acute medical treatment if necessary, and protects employees right to report the incident internally and to law enforcement without retaliation.

Mental health programs receive a boost

In the state budget, lawmakers have set aside about $4 billion for state behavioral health services over the next two years as they attempt to tackle a lingering mental health crisis. This is a substantial increase from the over $3 billion previously allocated to mental health. About a quarter of that money will go toward either the renovation of existing state psychiatric hospitals or the construction of new mental health facilities as part of a 2015 strategic plan to address the waitlist in county jails for inmates who need psychiatric treatment.

The funds for the next two years will allocate a little over $20 million for mental health services for veterans, $80 million to a grant program to reduce the recidivism rate among those with mental illness, a little over $54 million to community mental health grant programs and $300 million to maintain salary increases for front-line staff at mental health state hospitals.

The budget for the next two years also includes $7.4 million for telepsychiatry consultations for rural hospitals.

Texas lawmakers also made the biggest investment for broadband development in state history last month with House Bill 9, filed by state Rep. Trent Ashby, R-Lufkin, which will create the Texas Broadband Infrastructure Fund. The bill allocates $1.5 billion to an infrastructure fund that is meant to expand internet availability in a state where 7 million people lack access to the service.

Also included is $15 million to be made available to hospitals and groups that set up and operate mental health programs, particularly for children.

But one of the largest hurdles to mental health equity has been the Medicaid reimbursement rate, and once again it has been left untouched.

In Texas, many therapists decline to accept Medicaid insurance payments because the reimbursement rate for their services is far lower than that offered by private pay insurance. The low rate has been a problem for years, reducing treatment access for low-income Texans.

One short-term fix proposed this session came by way of House Bill 1879, which would have allowed a licensed master social worker or a licensed professional counselor associate to accept Medicaid reimbursement for their services while they are still training and pursuing a license. The bill failed to pass the Senate.

Mental health funds missing from budget

In the first legislative session since the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School that killed 19 Uvalde students and two teachers, requests for dedicated mental health funding to school districts were ignored as lawmakers focused on community grants instead. This puts many student behavioral health programs at risk of shutting down.

Thats because, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the federal government sent money to states from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, also known as ESSER.

Of the 714 school districts that participated in a statewide survey, over 73% reported using ESSER funds for mental health, primarily to help with rough transitions for students who faced numerous classroom disruptions because of the pandemic. These funds expire at the end of 2024 and little will be available to replace them.

Meanwhile, lawmakers sent House Bill 3, authored by Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, to Abbott, which would invest more than $300 million in school safety measures and give the state more control over how school districts are boosting security at their campuses. If districts dont comply with the states guidelines, they can be placed under the Texas Education Agencys supervision.

In addition, the state also allocated $1.1 billion to the TEA to help schools meet the states safety requirements.

While these school safety funds can also be used to support the creation or further expansion of student mental health programs, school administrators say the new safety requirements will eat up most of the provided cash.

Despite a request from 36 Texas health and wellness organizations, bills that could have sent more money to offset the loss of federal funding failed to make any progress this session. The groups had wanted the creation and funding of a separate student mental health allotment during the session.

We dont want our schools to become the delivery system for our mental health system, Kolkhorst said during a House meeting last month.

The Legislature also passed a bill this session that gives schools the option to use school safety funds to pay for unlicensed chaplains to work in mental health roles. Volunteer chaplains also will be allowed in schools.

One funding winner was the states boost in funding to the Texas Child Health Access Through Telemedicine, or TCHATT, program that connects school districts with mental health professionals. Through TCHATT, mental health professionals can help identify and assess the behavioral health needs of students and help provide access to those services. The program is expected to receive $140 million for the next two years.

Child care faces an uncertain future

Day care options have been dwindling across the state, but a request for additional funding to support the industry went unheard during the session.

According to a recent survey from the Texas Association for the Education of Young Children, 44% of responding child care programs indicated their program is likely or maybe likely to close within the next year when federal COVID-19 relief funding expires.

Since 2020, more than $4 billion in COVID-19 relief funds went directly to 10,790 Texas child care providers in 85% of Texas counties to help cover costs for an estimated 836,000 children, according to the federal Administration for Children and Families Office of Child Care.

The House budgets wish list included a $2.3 billion proposal to help revive the already fragile industry as federal aid mobilized by the pandemic expires later this year. This would have provided a direct-to-provider payment of about $1,000 per child per year, based on the number of children a day care facility is licensed to serve. The Legislature didnt include the funding in the final budget bill.

Child abuse reporting receives a change

In an attempt to weed out false reports of child abuse, the Texas Legislature has approved a bill that would bar Texans from making child abuse reports anonymously.

House Bill 63, authored by state Rep. Valoree Swanson, R-Spring, was approved by lawmakers and sent to the governor last month. The bill is the latest measure to not only reduce the workload volume of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, but also marks a sea change in the way Texas alerts officials to potential child abuse.

Currently, anyone can call DFPS child abuse hotline  800-252-5400  or file a report online to anonymously notify investigators of potential neglect or abuse of a child. A child abuse investigator will then follow up on that tip and conduct a preliminary investigation. If the investigator finds no corroborating evidence, the report is considered unfounded and no other action is taken.

But this bill would require the child abuse agency to obtain a callers identity from the start. No report would be taken unless the caller or the online reporter provided their own name, phone number and address. The identity of the caller would remain confidential to all except those who work at DFPS.

Fentanyl test strip bill killed

To combat the growing number of fentanyl overdose deaths in Texas, lawmakers passed a number of bills based on drug awareness and Narcan distribution.

However, advocates for changing the states drug policies to legalize test strips that can detect fentanyl found that their bill lost steam after initial support from state leadership.

Debate in the Senate seemingly killed House Bill 362, which would have removed fentanyl test strips from the states list of drug paraphernalia, letting people avoid a potential misdemeanor charge for possessing one. Currently, possession of drug paraphernalia  items used to consume illegal substances that can include fentanyl testing strips, used syringes and pipes  is a Class C misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500.

Instead, lawmakers took a more tough on crime approach to the fentanyl epidemic by passing House Bill 6, which will classify overdoses from the synthetic opioid as poisonings, triggering murder charges for those convicted of giving someone a fatal dose of the synthetic opioid.

Supporters of the legislation argue the enhanced penalties give law enforcement more tools to help address a growing crisis in the state by holding dealers accountable.

Over two years, from fiscal year 2019 to 2021, overdose deaths involving fentanyl in the state rose nearly 400%. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 5,000 people in Texas died of drug overdoses between July 2021 and July 2022.

The issue has gained even more attention after the deaths of Texas teens and young adults from fentanyl overdoses. The victims had thought they were taking the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder drug Adderall.

Several bills this session specifically targeted drug safety awareness among young people as fentanyl has hit some local school districts hard.

House Bill 3908 will allow for fentanyl abuse prevention and drug poisoning awareness education in public schools. While Senate Bill 629 covers a wide range of topics regarding the use of overdose reversal medications, including allowing physicians to dispense such medication to schools without requiring identification of the user and setting training standards for school personnel.

Medical marijuana expansion fails

Texans who suffer from chronic pain and potentially other debilitating conditions would have been able to access the states medical marijuana program under House Bill 1805 by House Public Health Chair Stephanie Klick, R-Fort Worth. The bill won overwhelming support in the Texas House but died in the Senate without a public hearing.

The bipartisan legislation would have been an expansion on the states 2015 Compassionate Use law  which has, in a number of legislative changes since it was created, allowed a growing number of patients in Texas to legally use cannabis to treat debilitating symptoms of conditions such as epilepsy, autism, cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

No Medicaid expansion, again

Two years ago, Democrats and a growing number of Republicans were hopeful about expanding access to Medicaid to more people. But the bill to do that died during that 2021 session, spelling certain doom on any future efforts. This session, there were bills filed to expand Medicaid access but none made it to a vote.

Texas is one of only 10 states that has steadfastly refused to expand Medicaid coverage to more people. The federal health insurance program offered states the option to expand access in the 2014 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

But this session, lawmakers had tens of billions in budget surplus and little motivation to expand the program in exchange for the billions of dollars being offered by the federal government as an incentive.

Texas has the highest rate and number of uninsured residents in the country.

Of the Texas uninsured adults who could be covered with Medicaid expansion, nearly 8 in 10 are workers, in sectors like construction, food services and home health, said Anne Dunkelberg, senior fellow at Every Texan, a nonprofit policy institute. Those who arent working are caring for children and adults with disabilities or for young children and cant earn enough to cover child care.

More legislation against COVID-19 restrictions

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, lawmakers moved to ban state and local governments from requiring masks, vaccines and business closures during future health emergencies. State Sen. Brian Birdwells Senate Bill 29, largely restrains government bodies from demanding private and public schools be closed or making businesses operate with specific restrictions to slow the spread of a contagious pathogen.

But it wasnt the first time lawmakers targeted governmental efforts to rein in the pandemic that killed more than 92,000 Texans.

In 2021, just as vaccines were being made widely available and people were still dying every day from the virus, state lawmakers sent a slate of bills to the governor aimed at protecting Texans rights against a state pandemic response that conservative state leaders believed went too far. During that session, lawmakers passed bills that, among other things, prohibit so-called vaccine passports and ban the mandatory closure of churches and gun stores during an emergency declaration.
Alithya Group Inc. (TSE:ALYA  Get Rating) rose 0.8% during mid-day trading on Tuesday . The stock traded as high as C$2.43 and last traded at C$2.41. Approximately 11,922 shares traded hands during mid-day trading, a decline of 61% from the average daily volume of 30,210 shares. The stock had previously closed at C$2.39.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

ALYA has been the topic of several analyst reports. Barrington Research set a C$3.50 target price on Alithya Group and gave the company an outperform rating in a research report on Wednesday, February 8th. BMO Capital Markets lifted their price target on Alithya Group from C$3.00 to C$3.50 in a research report on Wednesday, February 15th. Finally, Cormark lifted their price target on Alithya Group from C$3.50 to C$3.85 in a research report on Wednesday, February 15th.

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Alithya Group Trading Up 6.6 %

The stock has a market cap of C$225.83 million and a price-to-earnings ratio of -13.53. The company has a quick ratio of 1.32, a current ratio of 1.21 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 73.09. The business has a 50-day moving average of C$2.57 and a 200-day moving average of C$2.44.

About Alithya Group

Alithya Group Inc provides strategy and digital technology services in Canada, the United States, and Europe. The company's business strategy services include strategic consulting, digital transformation, organizational performance, and enterprise architecture services. It also provides application services, such as digital applications DevOps, legacy systems modernization, control and software engineering, cloud infrastructure, quality assurance, and automated testing; enterprise solutions comprising enterprise resource planning, corporate performance management, customer relationship management, and human capital management; and data and analytics solutions, including business intelligence, data management, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning, as well as internet of things.

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Shares of Bank of Georgia Group PLC (OTCMKTS:BDGSF  Get Rating) hit a new 52-week high on Thursday . The stock traded as high as $39.15 and last traded at $39.15, with a volume of 0 shares trading hands. The stock had previously closed at $39.15.

Bank of Georgia Group Price Performance

The firms 50 day moving average is $35.27.

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Bank of Georgia Group Plc is a holding company, which engages in the provision of banking and wealth management services. It operates through the following business segments: Retail Banking, Corporate and Investment Banking, and JSC Belarusky Narodny Bank (BNB). The Retail Banking segment provides consumer loans, mortgage loans, overdrafts, credit cards and other credit facilities, funds transfer, and settlement services.

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European Union ministers have agreed on a historic deal to implement stricter asylum and migration policies across the bloc.

Ministers from the European Union have agreed on an initial plan to enact stricter asylum and migration policies

The proposal was announced on Thursday following a roughly 12-hour negotiation between officials from the bloc

Some members, such as Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands, initially argued that the compromise proposal was not good enough

European Union ministers have agreed on a "historic" deal that would enact stricter asylum and migration policies in the bloc after hours of negotiation.

Officials from the 27 member states of the bloc announced the news in a Thursday statement. Sweden, who currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, said that the agreement is a "good balance" of responsibility towards the people seeking asylum and solidarity in the bloc.

EU Agrees on Historic Asylum and Migration Deal

On the other hand, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser called the deal a "historic success" for the bloc. The deal came after roughly 12 hours of intense negotiations because some members of the bloc, such as Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands, argued that the compromise proposal was not good enough to address the current problems in the region, as per DW News.

On the other hand, Hungary and Poland voted against the compromise proposals as Bulgaria, Lithuania, Malta, and Slovakia abstained from the vote. In a statement, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that the compromise agreement is "not an easy one at all."

Baerbock added that if officials were able to decide on the reform as a federal government on their own, it would have been completely different. She noted that if Germany made concessions, the attempt to share asylum-seekers across the bloc would have ended in failure.

In her remarks, the minister said that if her country had voted against the compromise in the latest vote, joining Hungary and Poland, a common European asylum policy based on solidarity would not be possible for years.

The compromise deal was made after years of division across the bloc that started in 2015 when more than a million people, who were mostly fleeing from Syria's war, traveled to the EU across the Mediterranean, according to Reuters.

Read Also: Russia Accuses Ukraine of Hitting Major Ammonia Pipeline

Hosting Asylum Seekers

European Interior Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson said that the compromise deal was a "great, great achievement." She argued that the agreement shows that it is possible to work together in addressing the issues with migration across the bloc.

EU countries, unable to agree on how to share responsibility in the past, most prioritized bringing down arrival rates. This came as United Nations data showed that there were fewer than 160,000 people who made it across the sea last year out of half a billion people.

Authorities also reported that roughly 2,500 people died or have gone missing making the dangerous crossing over the same period. The latest proposal calls for compulsory cooperation between EU countries, but gives the option of doing so in one of two ways.

Officials are prioritizing the sharing of hosting of asylum seekers who arrive at countries found on the bloc's outer rims. If nations refuse to host refugees, they could be fined up to $21,000 per person that they refuse to take. The money would then go to a fund that Brussels would be in charge of, said WION News.

Related Article: Antony Blinken Reveals Plans To Normalize Ties Between Israel, Saudi Arabia

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Basilea Pharmaceutica AG (OTCMKTS:BPMUF  Get Rating)s stock price hit a new 52-week high during mid-day trading on Tuesday . The stock traded as high as $50.00 and last traded at $50.00, with a volume of 0 shares changing hands. The stock had previously closed at $50.00.

Basilea Pharmaceutica Stock Performance

The company has a 50-day moving average of $51.32 and a 200-day moving average of $51.64.

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Basilea Pharmaceutica AG engages in the development and commercialization of pharmaceutical products. Its products include Cresemba, Zevtera, Derazantinib, BAL101553, and BAL3833. The company was founded on October 17, 2000 and is headquartered in Allschwil, Switzerland.

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Community Investors Bancorp, Inc. (OTCMKTS:CIBN  Get Rating)s stock price fell 5.6% on Tuesday . The stock traded as low as $17.00 and last traded at $17.00. 307 shares were traded during mid-day trading, a decline of 52% from the average session volume of 644 shares. The stock had previously closed at $18.00.

Community Investors Bancorp Stock Up 0.6 %

The firms fifty day moving average is $16.48 and its two-hundred day moving average is $16.27.

Community Investors Bancorp Company Profile

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Community Investors Bancorp, Inc is a holding company, which provides banking and financial services. Its banking services include personal, business, loan center, and retirement planning. The company was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Bucyrus, OH.

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Shares of Deutsche Wohnen SE (OTCMKTS:DTCWY  Get Rating) were up 2.4% during mid-day trading on Tuesday . The company traded as high as $10.68 and last traded at $10.68. Approximately 152 shares changed hands during mid-day trading, a decline of 95% from the average daily volume of 3,029 shares. The stock had previously closed at $10.43.

Deutsche Wohnen Stock Up 4.8 %

The business has a 50 day simple moving average of $10.52 and a 200-day simple moving average of $10.94.

Deutsche Wohnen Company Profile

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Deutsche Wohnen SE is a holding company, which engages in the development and management of residential properties property portfolio. It operates through the following segments: Residential Property Management; Disposals; and Nursing & Assisted Living. The Residential Property Management segment engages in the management of residential properties in the context of active asset management.

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European Opportunities Trust plc (LON:EOT  Get Rating)s share price rose 0.8% on Tuesday . The company traded as high as GBX 791 ($9.83) and last traded at GBX 790 ($9.82). Approximately 196,785 shares traded hands during trading, a decline of 3% from the average daily volume of 202,818 shares. The stock had previously closed at GBX 784 ($9.75).

European Opportunities Trust Stock Down 0.5 %

The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 9.09, a quick ratio of 0.11 and a current ratio of 0.07. The firm has a fifty day moving average price of GBX 774.88 and a 200 day moving average price of GBX 754.84. The firm has a market capitalization of 782.78 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -920.00 and a beta of 0.85.

About European Opportunities Trust

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European Opportunities Trust plc is a closed-ended equity mutual fund launched and managed by Devon Equity Management Limited. The fund is co-managed by FundRock Management Company SA It invests in the public equity markets of Europe. The fund seeks to invest in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors.

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Forge Global Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:FRGE  Get Rating) traded down 1.6% during trading on Tuesday . The stock traded as low as $1.78 and last traded at $1.80. 503,531 shares changed hands during trading, an increase of 69% from the average session volume of 298,505 shares. The stock had previously closed at $1.83.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

A number of analysts recently issued reports on the stock. Oppenheimer increased their price target on shares of Forge Global from $2.00 to $2.40 and gave the stock an outperform rating in a report on Wednesday, March 1st. JMP Securities lowered their price target on shares of Forge Global from $8.00 to $7.00 and set a market outperform rating on the stock in a report on Monday, April 10th. Four analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and two have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat.com, Forge Global has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $3.23.

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Forge Global Stock Performance

The companys 50 day simple moving average is $1.48 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is $1.63.

Insider Activity

Institutional Trading of Forge Global

In other news, CEO Kelly Rodriques sold 50,202 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, April 19th. The shares were sold at an average price of $1.52, for a total value of $76,307.04. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 6,065,442 shares of the companys stock, valued at $9,219,471.84. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available at the SEC website . Insiders own 11.26% of the companys stock.

Several hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Citigroup Inc. acquired a new stake in Forge Global during the first quarter worth approximately $28,000. Penserra Capital Management LLC acquired a new position in shares of Forge Global in the 1st quarter valued at $193,000. State Street Corp increased its holdings in shares of Forge Global by 2.0% in the 3rd quarter. State Street Corp now owns 334,117 shares of the companys stock valued at $585,000 after acquiring an additional 6,500 shares during the period. Virtu Financial LLC acquired a new position in shares of Forge Global in the 1st quarter valued at $340,000. Finally, Geode Capital Management LLC increased its holdings in shares of Forge Global by 1.3% in the 4th quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 869,778 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,504,000 after acquiring an additional 10,869 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 13.68% of the companys stock.

Forge Global Company Profile

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Forge Global Holdings, Inc provides marketplace infrastructure, data services, and technology solutions for private market participants. It enables private company shareholders to trade private company shares with accredited investors. The company was founded in 2014 and is based in San Francisco, California.

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Franklin Resources, Inc. (NYSE:BEN  Get Rating) declared a quarterly dividend on Thursday, June 8th, RTT News reports. Stockholders of record on Friday, June 30th will be given a dividend of 0.30 per share by the closed-end fund on Friday, July 14th. This represents a $1.20 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 4.59%.

Franklin Resources has raised its dividend by an average of 3.7% annually over the last three years and has raised its dividend every year for the last 41 years. Franklin Resources has a dividend payout ratio of 47.1% indicating that its dividend is sufficiently covered by earnings. Equities analysts expect Franklin Resources to earn $2.62 per share next year, which means the company should continue to be able to cover its $1.20 annual dividend with an expected future payout ratio of 45.8%.

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Franklin Resources Stock Down 0.4 %

Shares of Franklin Resources stock traded down $0.11 on Thursday, hitting $26.15. 2,512,327 shares of the companys stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 3,536,707. The stock has a market cap of $13.10 billion, a P/E ratio of 15.82 and a beta of 1.26. The company has a quick ratio of 2.09, a current ratio of 2.09 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.85. The firms 50-day moving average is $25.67 and its 200 day moving average is $27.47. Franklin Resources has a 52-week low of $20.24 and a 52-week high of $34.37.

Insider Transactions at Franklin Resources

Franklin Resources ( NYSE:BEN Get Rating ) last issued its earnings results on Monday, May 1st. The closed-end fund reported $0.61 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $0.57 by $0.04. Franklin Resources had a return on equity of 11.21% and a net margin of 10.79%. The firm had revenue of $1.93 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $1.80 billion. During the same period last year, the company earned $0.96 earnings per share. The firms revenue for the quarter was down 7.4% on a year-over-year basis. Equities analysts anticipate that Franklin Resources will post 2.34 earnings per share for the current year.

In related news, insider Franklin Resources Inc acquired 2,465,483 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, April 28th. The shares were acquired at an average cost of $10.14 per share, with a total value of $24,999,997.62. Following the purchase, the insider now owns 4,955,483 shares of the companys stock, valued at $50,248,597.62. The acquisition was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through this hyperlink. Company insiders own 23.40% of the companys stock.

Institutional Trading of Franklin Resources

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the business. Resurgent Financial Advisors LLC acquired a new stake in shares of Franklin Resources during the 4th quarter worth approximately $27,000. Eagle Bay Advisors LLC acquired a new stake in Franklin Resources during the second quarter worth $26,000. Caisse DE Depot ET Placement DU Quebec bought a new stake in Franklin Resources in the 1st quarter valued at $41,000. Money Concepts Capital Corp raised its stake in shares of Franklin Resources by 444.2% in the 4th quarter. Money Concepts Capital Corp now owns 2,476 shares of the closed-end funds stock valued at $65,000 after buying an additional 2,021 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Coppell Advisory Solutions Corp. bought a new position in shares of Franklin Resources during the 4th quarter worth about $79,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 45.47% of the companys stock.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

BEN has been the topic of a number of research analyst reports. Evercore ISI lowered their price target on Franklin Resources from $27.00 to $24.00 and set an underperform rating on the stock in a report on Thursday, April 13th. BMO Capital Markets raised their price target on Franklin Resources from $19.00 to $20.00 in a report on Tuesday, May 2nd. StockNews.com initiated coverage on Franklin Resources in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock. Finally, Bank of America lowered their price target on Franklin Resources from $28.00 to $24.00 and set an underperform rating on the stock in a report on Wednesday, April 5th. Six investment analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating and six have assigned a hold rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, the stock has an average rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $24.55.

Franklin Resources Company Profile

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Franklin Resources, Inc is a holding company, which engages in the provision of investment management and related services. The firm offers services and products under various distinct brand names, including, but not limited to, Franklin, Templeton, Legg Mason, Benefit Street Partners, Brandywine Global Investment Management, Clarion Partners, ClearBridge Investments, Fiduciary Trust International, Franklin Bissett, Franklin Mutual Series, K2, LibertyShares, Martin Currie, Royce Investment Partners and Western Asset Management Company.

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Glaukos Co. (NYSE:GKOS  Get Rating) CEO Thomas William Burns sold 17,382 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, June 7th. The shares were sold at an average price of $67.20, for a total transaction of $1,168,070.40. Following the completion of the sale, the chief executive officer now owns 673,963 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $45,290,313.60. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is accessible through this hyperlink.

Thomas William Burns also recently made the following trade(s):

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On Friday, June 2nd, Thomas William Burns sold 142 shares of Glaukos stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $60.00, for a total transaction of $8,520.00.

On Tuesday, May 23rd, Thomas William Burns sold 7 shares of Glaukos stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $60.00, for a total transaction of $420.00.

On Thursday, May 18th, Thomas William Burns sold 11,662 shares of Glaukos stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $60.17, for a total transaction of $701,702.54.

On Tuesday, May 16th, Thomas William Burns sold 3,704 shares of Glaukos stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $60.01, for a total transaction of $222,277.04.

Glaukos Trading Up 2.6 %

Shares of NYSE GKOS traded up $1.71 during midday trading on Thursday, reaching $68.26. The stock had a trading volume of 809,275 shares, compared to its average volume of 421,540. The stock has a 50-day moving average of $53.50 and a 200-day moving average of $49.46. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.70, a quick ratio of 6.02 and a current ratio of 6.67. Glaukos Co. has a 12-month low of $40.45 and a 12-month high of $70.05.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Glaukos

Glaukos ( NYSE:GKOS Get Rating ) last posted its earnings results on Wednesday, May 3rd. The medical instruments supplier reported ($0.59) earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of ($0.61) by $0.02. The company had revenue of $73.90 million during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $67.74 million. Glaukos had a negative net margin of 48.15% and a negative return on equity of 21.20%. Glaukoss quarterly revenue was up 9.2% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period last year, the company posted ($0.38) earnings per share. Sell-side analysts forecast that Glaukos Co. will post -2.3 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the stock. Amalgamated Bank boosted its stake in shares of Glaukos by 0.9% during the 4th quarter. Amalgamated Bank now owns 23,073 shares of the medical instruments suppliers stock worth $1,008,000 after purchasing an additional 204 shares during the period. American Century Companies Inc. boosted its stake in shares of Glaukos by 3.1% during the 1st quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 6,878 shares of the medical instruments suppliers stock worth $339,000 after purchasing an additional 207 shares during the period. State of Alaska Department of Revenue boosted its stake in shares of Glaukos by 0.7% during the 4th quarter. State of Alaska Department of Revenue now owns 33,217 shares of the medical instruments suppliers stock worth $1,450,000 after purchasing an additional 246 shares during the period. Captrust Financial Advisors boosted its stake in shares of Glaukos by 17.1% during the 2nd quarter. Captrust Financial Advisors now owns 1,738 shares of the medical instruments suppliers stock worth $79,000 after purchasing an additional 254 shares during the period. Finally, UBS Asset Management Americas Inc. boosted its stake in shares of Glaukos by 0.5% during the 2nd quarter. UBS Asset Management Americas Inc. now owns 61,400 shares of the medical instruments suppliers stock worth $2,789,000 after purchasing an additional 299 shares during the period. 92.17% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

A number of analysts have recently issued reports on the stock. Mizuho lifted their price objective on shares of Glaukos from $48.00 to $52.00 in a report on Tuesday, April 18th. Piper Sandler raised shares of Glaukos from a neutral rating to an overweight rating and boosted their price target for the stock from $55.00 to $80.00 in a research note on Wednesday. 888 restated a maintains rating on shares of Glaukos in a research report on Thursday, May 4th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. boosted their price target on shares of Glaukos from $42.00 to $48.00 and gave the company a neutral rating in a research report on Thursday, February 23rd. Finally, Wells Fargo & Company boosted their price target on shares of Glaukos from $44.00 to $63.00 in a research report on Monday. Four research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and six have given a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, the stock presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $61.67.

About Glaukos

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Glaukos Corp. is an ophthalmic medical technology and pharmaceutical company, which focuses on novel therapies for the treatment of glaucoma, corneal disorders and retinal diseases. It engages in development and commercialization of therapies across several end markets within ophthalmology. The company was founded by Olav B.

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Global X MSCI China Information Technology ETF (NYSEARCA:CHIK  Get Rating) shares were down 1.1% on Tuesday . The company traded as low as $15.70 and last traded at $15.98. Approximately 4,473 shares traded hands during mid-day trading, an increase of 135% from the average daily volume of 1,904 shares. The stock had previously closed at $16.15.

Global X MSCI China Information Technology ETF Stock Down 0.0 %

The stock has a market capitalization of $13.95 million, a PE ratio of 13.33 and a beta of 0.73. The businesss 50-day moving average is $17.03 and its two-hundred day moving average is $17.32.

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Institutional Investors Weigh In On Global X MSCI China Information Technology ETF

An institutional investor recently raised its position in Global X MSCI China Information Technology ETF stock. Flow Traders U.S. LLC increased its position in shares of Global X MSCI China Information Technology ETF (NYSEARCA:CHIK  Get Rating) by 152.4% in the 4th quarter, according to its most recent disclosure with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 31,856 shares of the companys stock after purchasing an additional 19,237 shares during the period. Flow Traders U.S. LLC owned approximately 3.50% of Global X MSCI China Information Technology ETF worth $525,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

Global X MSCI China Information Technology ETF Company Profile

The Global X MSCI China Information Technology ETF (CHIK) is an exchange-traded fund that mostly invests in information technology equity. The fund tracks a market cap-weighted index of Chinese large- and mid-cap companies in the information technology sector. The index includes A shares. CHIK was launched on Dec 7, 2018 and is managed by Global X.

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Vulcan Materials (NYSE:VMC  Get Rating) CEO J Thomas Hill sold 4,695 shares of Vulcan Materials stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, June 7th. The shares were sold at an average price of $201.79, for a total value of $947,404.05. Following the sale, the chief executive officer now owns 80,039 shares in the company, valued at $16,151,069.81. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through this link.

Vulcan Materials Stock Up 0.6 %

Shares of NYSE:VMC traded up $1.16 on Thursday, reaching $206.15. The company had a trading volume of 763,006 shares, compared to its average volume of 787,195. Vulcan Materials has a 52-week low of $137.54 and a 52-week high of $206.77. The firms 50 day simple moving average is $183.66 and its 200-day simple moving average is $180.26. The firm has a market capitalization of $27.43 billion, a PE ratio of 45.35, a PEG ratio of 1.52 and a beta of 0.73. The company has a current ratio of 2.37, a quick ratio of 1.59 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.55.

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Vulcan Materials (NYSE:VMC  Get Rating) last announced its earnings results on Thursday, May 4th. The construction company reported $0.95 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $0.64 by $0.31. Vulcan Materials had a return on equity of 10.36% and a net margin of 8.14%. The firm had revenue of $1.65 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $1.57 billion. During the same period in the previous year, the business earned $0.73 EPS. The firms revenue for the quarter was up 7.0% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, analysts expect that Vulcan Materials will post 6.45 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Vulcan Materials Dividend Announcement

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, June 9th. Investors of record on Friday, May 26th will be paid a dividend of $0.43 per share. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, May 25th. This represents a $1.72 annualized dividend and a yield of 0.83%. Vulcan Materialss dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 38.05%.

VMC has been the subject of a number of recent research reports. The Goldman Sachs Group upgraded Vulcan Materials from a neutral rating to a buy rating and lifted their price objective for the company from $188.00 to $212.00 in a research note on Monday, April 3rd. Royal Bank of Canada boosted their price target on Vulcan Materials from $191.00 to $193.00 and gave the stock an outperform rating in a research note on Friday, February 17th. Truist Financial upped their price objective on Vulcan Materials from $210.00 to $225.00 in a research report on Friday, February 17th. Morgan Stanley reduced their price objective on Vulcan Materials from $191.00 to $186.00 and set an equal weight rating for the company in a research report on Thursday, April 20th. Finally, Seaport Res Ptn reiterated a neutral rating on shares of Vulcan Materials in a research report on Friday, February 10th. Four equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and nine have given a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the company presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $208.08.

Institutional Trading of Vulcan Materials

Institutional investors and hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Achmea Investment Management B.V. acquired a new position in shares of Vulcan Materials in the 1st quarter valued at about $29,000. CI Investments Inc. raised its holdings in Vulcan Materials by 956.3% in the 3rd quarter. CI Investments Inc. now owns 169 shares of the construction companys stock worth $27,000 after purchasing an additional 153 shares during the period. General Partner Inc. acquired a new position in Vulcan Materials in the 4th quarter worth about $30,000. HBC Financial Services PLLC acquired a new position in Vulcan Materials in the 4th quarter worth about $30,000. Finally, New Hampshire Trust acquired a new position in Vulcan Materials in the 4th quarter worth about $31,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 90.08% of the companys stock.

About Vulcan Materials

(Get Rating)

Vulcan Materials Co engages in the production of construction aggregates. Its products include crushed stone, sand, and gravel. It operates through the following business segments: Aggregates, Asphalt, Concrete, and Calcium. The Aggregates segment produces and sells asphalt mix and ready-mixed concrete primarily in its mid-Atlantic, Georgia, Southwestern, Tennessee, and Western markets.

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Pan American Silver (NYSE:PAAS  Get Rating) and Lynas Rare Earths (OTCMKTS:LYSCF  Get Rating) are both basic materials companies, but which is the better business? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their profitability, dividends, institutional ownership, earnings, valuation, risk and analyst recommendations.

Profitability

This table compares Pan American Silver and Lynas Rare Earths net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

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Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Pan American Silver -22.82% 0.74% 0.54% Lynas Rare Earths N/A N/A N/A

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Pan American Silver and Lynas Rare Earths revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio Pan American Silver $1.45 billion 2.27 -$341.75 million ($1.91) -8.17 Lynas Rare Earths N/A N/A N/A ($0.17) -29.93

Institutional & Insider Ownership

Lynas Rare Earths has lower revenue, but higher earnings than Pan American Silver. Lynas Rare Earths is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Pan American Silver, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

44.1% of Pan American Silver shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 5.6% of Lynas Rare Earths shares are owned by institutional investors. 12.9% of Pan American Silver shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of recent recommendations for Pan American Silver and Lynas Rare Earths, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Pan American Silver 0 0 4 0 3.00 Lynas Rare Earths 0 2 0 0 2.00

Pan American Silver presently has a consensus target price of $25.50, indicating a potential upside of 63.46%. Given Pan American Silvers stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, equities research analysts clearly believe Pan American Silver is more favorable than Lynas Rare Earths.

Summary

Pan American Silver beats Lynas Rare Earths on 9 of the 11 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Pan American Silver

(Get Rating)

Pan American Silver Corp. engages in the operation, development, and exploration of silver and gold producing properties and assets. It operates through the Silver and Gold segments. The company was founded by Ross J. Beaty and John H. Wright on March 17, 1979 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.

About Lynas Rare Earths

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Lynas Rare Earths Ltd. engages in the production of rare earth minerals. It focuses on the exploration, development, mining, and processing of rare earth deposits. The company was founded by Nicholas Anthony Curtis on May 25, 1983 and is headquartered in Perth, Australia.

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The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced the suspension of all its food aid to Ethiopia.

The pause comes after USAID halted its food assistance to the Tigray last May following its discovery of a widespread diversion scheme.

USAID Suspends All Food Aid to Ethiopia

According to CNN, the humanitarian agency has decided to temporarily halt sending food assistance to Ethiopia in the wake of mounting concerns over the diversion of the aid. The decision was made in response to widespread allegations of aid diversion and misuse.

Ethiopia is home to roughly 20 million people grappling with widespread hunger. And as such, these folks desperately rely on food support, such as aid from USAID.

However, the USAID spokesperson confirmed in a statement on Thursday, June 8, that they "cannot move forward with distribution of food assistance" in the entire country. The US Agency further notes they came up with the decision "in coordination with the Government of Ethiopia" and "after a country-wide review."

Al Jazeera reports that the humanitarian group plans to resume food aid to the country as soon as possible. Although they want to restart the assistance, they want to ensure proper distribution. USAID notes they want to be "confident in the integrity of delivery systems."

In early May, the USAID and the World Food Programme suspended their food aid in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, citing alleged diversion of assistance, wherein it is reportedly sold in the local markets.

Read Also: Zelensky Visits Kherson After Dam Bust, Calls for International Aid

Diversion Scheme Investigation

(Photo : Jemal Countess/Getty Images)

MEKELE, ETHIOPIA - JUNE 16: An aid worker distributes measured portions of yellow lentils to residents of Geha subcity at an aid operation run by USAID, Catholic Relief Services and the Relief Society of Tigray on June 16, 2021 in Mekele, Ethiopia.

As per the Voice of America, The US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with the Deputy Minister of Ethiopia Demeke Mekonnen on Thursday amid the Riyadh Saudi Arabia meeting. During the talk, the State Department announced that the US and the Ethiopian government are working hand in hand to conduct a full investigation of the diversion scheme.

Both countries have partnered "to conduct a full investigation into the diversion of U.S. food assistance and to hold accountable those found responsible," according to the State Department.

The USAID accused officials from the Ethiopian government of stealing the food aid. And instead of distributing them to those in need, the agency says the assistance was fed to ex-combatants and soldiers. On top of that, the allegations also shed light on schemes wherein government officials are allegedly selling flour in the open market.

According to a document seen by The Washington Post, the food aid diversion appears to be a "coordinated and criminal scheme, which has prevented life-saving assistance from reaching the most vulnerable."

Related Article: UN Raises Less Than $1 Billion in Humanitarian Aid for the Horn of Africa

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Shares of Penn Virginia Corporation (PVAHQ) (OTCMKTS:PVAHQ  Get Rating) passed above its two hundred day moving average during trading on Tuesday . The stock has a two hundred day moving average of $0.00 and traded as high as $0.02. Penn Virginia Corporation (PVAHQ) shares last traded at $0.02, with a volume of 0 shares changing hands.

Penn Virginia Corporation (PVAHQ) Stock Performance

The firms 50 day simple moving average is $0.02.

Penn Virginia Corporation (PVAHQ) Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Penn Virginia Corporation is an independent oil and gas company. The Company is engaged in the onshore exploration, development and production of crude oil, natural gas liquids (NGLs) and natural gas. Its operations consist primarily of drilling unconventional horizontal development wells, and operating its producing wells in the Eagle Ford Shale field or the Eagle Ford, in South Texas.

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Permianville Royalty Trust (NYSE:PVL  Get Rating) traded up 0.8% on Tuesday . The company traded as high as $2.54 and last traded at $2.52. 35,417 shares traded hands during mid-day trading, a decline of 80% from the average session volume of 177,516 shares. The stock had previously closed at $2.50.

Permianville Royalty Trust Price Performance

The firm has a market capitalization of $81.84 million, a PE ratio of 5.51 and a beta of 1.28. The company has a fifty day moving average of $2.54 and a 200-day moving average of $2.80.

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Permianville Royalty Trust (NYSE:PVL  Get Rating) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Monday, May 15th. The company reported $0.13 earnings per share for the quarter. The firm had revenue of $14.20 million for the quarter. Permianville Royalty Trust had a net margin of 23.62% and a return on equity of 24.45%.

Permianville Royalty Trust Cuts Dividend

Institutional Trading of Permianville Royalty Trust

The firm also recently announced a monthly dividend, which will be paid on Wednesday, June 14th. Shareholders of record on Wednesday, May 31st will be given a dividend of $0.0135 per share. This represents a $0.16 annualized dividend and a yield of 6.53%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Tuesday, May 30th. Permianville Royalty Trusts payout ratio is 35.56%.

Institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the stock. Royal Bank of Canada raised its stake in shares of Permianville Royalty Trust by 65.4% in the 3rd quarter. Royal Bank of Canada now owns 9,190 shares of the companys stock valued at $31,000 after acquiring an additional 3,635 shares in the last quarter. Northstar Advisory Group LLC acquired a new stake in shares of Permianville Royalty Trust in the first quarter worth $27,000. Jane Street Group LLC bought a new stake in shares of Permianville Royalty Trust during the 2nd quarter worth $61,000. Cambridge Investment Research Advisors Inc. acquired a new position in Permianville Royalty Trust in the 4th quarter valued at $68,000. Finally, Morgan Stanley raised its holdings in Permianville Royalty Trust by 51.6% in the 4th quarter. Morgan Stanley now owns 22,740 shares of the companys stock worth $76,000 after acquiring an additional 7,740 shares during the period.

Permianville Royalty Trust Company Profile

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Permianville Royalty Trust operates as a statutory trust. It engages in the acquisition and holding of net profits from the sale of oil and natural gas production from certain properties in the states of Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico held by Enduro Resource Partners LLC, for the benefit of the trust unit holders.

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Shares of Teranga Gold Co. (TSE:TGZ  Get Rating) passed above its 200-day moving average during trading on Tuesday . The stock has a 200-day moving average of C$0.00 and traded as high as C$12.49. Teranga Gold shares last traded at C$12.33, with a volume of 960,887 shares.

Teranga Gold Price Performance

The stock has a market capitalization of C$2.07 billion and a P/E ratio of 122.08. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 37.77, a quick ratio of 0.37 and a current ratio of 0.91. The firm has a fifty day simple moving average of C$12.33.

About Teranga Gold

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Teranga Gold Corporation engages in the exploration, development, production, and sale of gold in West Africa. The company's flagship project is the Sabodala gold mine covering an area of 291 square kilometers mine license and 629 square kilometers exploration land package located in the Republic of Senegal.

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The European Smaller Companies Trust PLC (LON:TRG  Get Rating)s share price fell 1.8% during trading on Tuesday . The stock traded as low as GBX 175 ($2.18) and last traded at GBX 175 ($2.18). 107,418 shares traded hands during trading, a decline of 51% from the average session volume of 221,291 shares. The stock had previously closed at GBX 178.20 ($2.22).

The European Smaller Companies Trust Price Performance

The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 10.60, a current ratio of 0.04 and a quick ratio of 0.01. The company has a 50 day moving average price of GBX 175 and a 200 day moving average price of GBX 175. The firm has a market cap of 701.52 million and a PE ratio of 2.13.

The European Smaller Companies Trust Company Profile

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TR European Growth Trust PLC is a closed-ended equity mutual fund launched and managed by Henderson Investment Funds Limited. It is co-managed by Henderson Global Investors Limited. The fund invests in the public equity markets of Europe. It seeks to invest in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors.

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U.S. Xpress Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE:USX  Get Rating) shares traded down 0.2% on Tuesday . The company traded as low as $6.10 and last traded at $6.11. 201,482 shares changed hands during mid-day trading, a decline of 68% from the average session volume of 621,417 shares. The stock had previously closed at $6.12.

Analyst Ratings Changes

A number of research analysts have weighed in on the stock. Morgan Stanley lifted their price target on shares of U.S. Xpress Enterprises from $3.00 to $6.00 and gave the company an equal weight rating in a research note on Tuesday, April 4th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. raised shares of U.S. Xpress Enterprises from an underweight rating to a neutral rating and set a $6.15 price target on the stock in a research note on Tuesday, April 11th.

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U.S. Xpress Enterprises Stock Performance

The companys fifty day simple moving average is $6.03 and its 200 day simple moving average is $3.49. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.76, a current ratio of 0.71 and a quick ratio of 0.71.

Insider Activity

Institutional Investors Weigh In On U.S. Xpress Enterprises

In related news, insider Lisa M. Pate sold 300,000 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, March 22nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $5.96, for a total transaction of $1,788,000.00. Following the completion of the sale, the insider now owns 2,013,914 shares of the companys stock, valued at $12,002,927.44. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at the SEC website . 31.94% of the stock is currently owned by company insiders.

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently bought and sold shares of the company. American Century Companies Inc. lifted its holdings in shares of U.S. Xpress Enterprises by 1.4% in the first quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 119,701 shares of the companys stock worth $716,000 after acquiring an additional 1,691 shares during the last quarter. HHM Wealth Advisors LLC increased its stake in shares of U.S. Xpress Enterprises by 33.3% in the first quarter. HHM Wealth Advisors LLC now owns 16,000 shares of the companys stock valued at $95,000 after buying an additional 4,000 shares during the period. Bank of America Corp DE increased its stake in shares of U.S. Xpress Enterprises by 33.4% in the first quarter. Bank of America Corp DE now owns 22,183 shares of the companys stock valued at $132,000 after buying an additional 5,558 shares during the period. Captrust Financial Advisors increased its stake in shares of U.S. Xpress Enterprises by 25.0% in the second quarter. Captrust Financial Advisors now owns 28,500 shares of the companys stock valued at $76,000 after buying an additional 5,699 shares during the period. Finally, UBS Group AG increased its stake in shares of U.S. Xpress Enterprises by 89.4% in the first quarter. UBS Group AG now owns 12,796 shares of the companys stock valued at $76,000 after buying an additional 6,041 shares during the period. Institutional investors own 30.14% of the companys stock.

U.S. Xpress Enterprises Company Profile

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US Xpress Enterprises, Inc engages in the provision of truckload carrier services. It operates through the Truckload and Brokerage segments. The Truckload segment offers asset-based truckload services, including over-the-road and dedicated contract services. The Brokerage segment is involved in non-asset based freight brokerage services.

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Black Diamond Group Limited (TSE:BDI  Get Rating) crossed above its 200-day moving average during trading on Tuesday . The stock has a 200-day moving average of C$5.81 and traded as high as C$6.21. Black Diamond Group shares last traded at C$6.19, with a volume of 36,267 shares.

Analyst Ratings Changes

A number of brokerages recently commented on BDI. Canaccord Genuity Group reduced their price objective on shares of Black Diamond Group from C$8.50 to C$8.25 in a research report on Monday, May 8th. Raymond James lifted their price target on Black Diamond Group from C$8.00 to C$10.00 and gave the company a strong-buy rating in a research note on Friday, March 3rd. BMO Capital Markets upped their price objective on Black Diamond Group from C$7.00 to C$8.50 in a report on Friday, March 3rd. Finally, Acumen Capital raised their target price on Black Diamond Group from C$8.50 to C$9.75 in a report on Monday, March 6th.

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Black Diamond Group Stock Performance

The stocks fifty day simple moving average is C$6.56 and its 200-day simple moving average is C$5.81. The company has a market capitalization of C$377.66 million, a PE ratio of 14.16 and a beta of 1.56. The company has a quick ratio of 1.05, a current ratio of 1.24 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 86.14.

Black Diamond Group Dividend Announcement

Black Diamond Group Company Profile

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Saturday, July 15th. Investors of record on Friday, June 30th will be paid a $0.02 dividend. This represents a $0.08 annualized dividend and a yield of 1.28%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, June 29th. Black Diamond Groups payout ratio is currently 18.18%.

(Get Rating)

Black Diamond Group Limited rents and sells modular space and workforce accommodation solutions. It operates through two segments, Modular Space Solutions and Workforce Solutions. The Modular Space Solutions segment provides modular space rentals to customers in the construction, real estate development, education, manufacturing, health care, financial, government, and defense industries in North America.

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CMC Markets plc (LON:CMCX  Get Rating) insider David Fineberg purchased 168 shares of the companys stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, June 5th. The stock was bought at an average price of GBX 178 ($2.21) per share, with a total value of 299.04 ($371.76).

David Fineberg also recently made the following trade(s):

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On Thursday, April 6th, David Fineberg purchased 180 shares of CMC Markets stock. The stock was bought at an average price of GBX 169 ($2.10) per share, with a total value of 304.20 ($378.17).

CMC Markets Stock Up 1.7 %

Shares of LON:CMCX opened at GBX 175.20 ($2.18) on Friday. The company has a current ratio of 2.57, a quick ratio of 2.47 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 4.86. The company has a fifty day simple moving average of GBX 177.58 and a 200 day simple moving average of GBX 214.24. The firm has a market cap of 490.24 million, a PE ratio of 700.80 and a beta of 0.55. CMC Markets plc has a 12-month low of GBX 165 ($2.05) and a 12-month high of GBX 317 ($3.94).

About CMC Markets

CMC Markets plc, together with its subsidiaries, provides online retail financial services to retail, professional, stockbroking, and institutional clients in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, and internationally. The company offers its clients with the ability to trade contracts for difference and financial spread betting on a range of underlying shares, including indices, foreign currencies, commodities, cryptocurrencies, shares and ETFs, and treasuries through its trading platform.

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UBS Group upgraded shares of DTE Energy (NYSE:DTE  Get Rating) from a neutral rating to a buy rating in a research report report published on Tuesday, The Fly reports. They currently have $124.00 price objective on the utilities providers stock, down from their previous price objective of $129.00.

Other equities research analysts also recently issued research reports about the stock. Guggenheim cut their target price on shares of DTE Energy from $131.00 to $127.00 in a research report on Monday, April 24th. Morgan Stanley boosted their price objective on shares of DTE Energy from $120.00 to $126.00 and gave the company an overweight rating in a research report on Thursday, April 20th. Jefferies Financial Group set a 23.60 ($25.38) price objective on shares of DTE Energy in a research report on Thursday, February 23rd. Barclays set a 25.00 ($26.88) price objective on shares of DTE Energy in a research report on Thursday, February 23rd. Finally, The Goldman Sachs Group set a 25.00 ($26.88) price objective on shares of DTE Energy in a research report on Thursday, February 23rd. Three investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and five have issued a buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat, the company has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $76.82.

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DTE Energy Trading Up 0.7 %

NYSE:DTE opened at $112.00 on Tuesday. The company has a current ratio of 0.88, a quick ratio of 0.68 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.66. DTE Energy has a 12 month low of $100.64 and a 12 month high of $136.77. The company has a market cap of $23.08 billion, a PE ratio of 19.82, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.95 and a beta of 0.60. The company has a 50 day simple moving average of $76.70 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $69.67.

DTE Energy Dividend Announcement

DTE Energy ( NYSE:DTE Get Rating ) last posted its earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The utilities provider reported $1.33 EPS for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $1.38 by ($0.05). DTE Energy had a return on equity of 10.59% and a net margin of 6.15%. The company had revenue of $3.78 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $4.79 billion. During the same period last year, the firm posted $2.31 EPS. Research analysts forecast that DTE Energy will post 6.18 earnings per share for the current year.

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Saturday, July 15th. Shareholders of record on Monday, June 19th will be paid a $0.9525 dividend. This represents a $3.81 annualized dividend and a yield of 3.40%. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, June 15th. DTE Energys payout ratio is currently 67.43%.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In other DTE Energy news, SVP Joann Chavez sold 4,000 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Friday, May 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $113.09, for a total value of $452,360.00. Following the sale, the senior vice president now owns 14,607 shares in the company, valued at approximately $1,651,905.63. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through the SEC website. In other news, VP Lisa A. Muschong sold 700 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, June 7th. The shares were sold at an average price of $110.41, for a total transaction of $77,287.00. Following the sale, the vice president now directly owns 5,455 shares in the company, valued at approximately $602,286.55. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through this link. Also, SVP Joann Chavez sold 4,000 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Friday, May 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $113.09, for a total transaction of $452,360.00. Following the sale, the senior vice president now owns 14,607 shares in the company, valued at $1,651,905.63. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Corporate insiders own 0.61% of the companys stock.

Institutional Trading of DTE Energy

Several hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the business. Ameritas Advisory Services LLC bought a new position in DTE Energy during the 1st quarter valued at about $26,000. CI Investments Inc. grew its holdings in DTE Energy by 966.7% during the 3rd quarter. CI Investments Inc. now owns 256 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $29,000 after purchasing an additional 232 shares during the last quarter. U.S. Capital Wealth Advisors LLC bought a new position in DTE Energy during the 4th quarter valued at about $29,000. BerganKDV Wealth Management LLC grew its holdings in DTE Energy by 462.0% during the 1st quarter. BerganKDV Wealth Management LLC now owns 281 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $31,000 after purchasing an additional 231 shares during the last quarter. Finally, OLD Second National Bank of Aurora bought a new position in DTE Energy during the 4th quarter valued at about $35,000. 74.55% of the stock is currently owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

About DTE Energy

(Get Rating)

DTE Energy Co operates as a diversified energy company, which engages in the development and management of energy-related businesses and services. It operates through the following segments: Electric, Gas, DTE Vantage, Energy Trading, and Corporate and Other. The Electric segment consists of generation, purchase, distribution, and sale of electricity to residential, commercial, and industrial customers in southeastern Michigan.

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Jefferies Financial Group restated their hold rating on shares of Energean (LON:ENOG  Get Rating) in a report issued on Monday, MarketBeat reports. The brokerage currently has a GBX 1,215 ($15.10) target price on the stock.

Separately, Berenberg Bank decreased their price objective on shares of Energean from GBX 1,585 ($19.70) to GBX 1,530 ($19.02) and set a buy rating on the stock in a report on Monday, May 22nd.

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Energean Stock Performance

Shares of LON ENOG opened at GBX 1,091 ($13.56) on Monday. The companys fifty day moving average price is GBX 1,216.68 and its 200 day moving average price is GBX 1,241.10. Energean has a 1 year low of GBX 929.50 ($11.56) and a 1 year high of GBX 1,622 ($20.16). The company has a market capitalization of 1.95 billion, a PE ratio of 13,637.50 and a beta of 0.51. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1,423.73, a quick ratio of 1.42 and a current ratio of 0.22.

Energean Announces Dividend

Energean Company Profile

The business also recently disclosed a dividend, which will be paid on Friday, June 30th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, June 8th will be issued a dividend of $0.30 per share. This represents a yield of 1.94%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, June 8th. Energeans payout ratio is 120,000.00%.

(Get Rating)

Energean plc engages in the exploration, development, and production of oil and gas. It operates through four segments: Europe, Israel, Egypt, and New Ventures. The company holds interests in the Eastern Mediterranean. Its flagship project is the Karish and Tanin development located to the offshore Israel.

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Dynatrace, Inc. (NYSE:DT  Get Rating) CEO Rick M. Mcconnell sold 98,323 shares of Dynatrace stock in a transaction on Wednesday, June 7th. The shares were sold at an average price of $51.75, for a total value of $5,088,215.25. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 615,634 shares in the company, valued at approximately $31,859,059.50. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this hyperlink.

Dynatrace Price Performance

Shares of NYSE:DT traded up $0.28 on Friday, reaching $50.98. 2,640,350 shares of the company traded hands, compared to its average volume of 2,865,916. Dynatrace, Inc. has a fifty-two week low of $31.54 and a fifty-two week high of $52.99. The companys 50 day moving average is $45.43 and its 200-day moving average is $41.59. The stock has a market capitalization of $14.83 billion, a PE ratio of 137.03, a P/E/G ratio of 13.00 and a beta of 1.10.

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Dynatrace (NYSE:DT  Get Rating) last released its earnings results on Wednesday, May 17th. The company reported $0.20 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $0.09 by $0.11. The company had revenue of $314.48 million during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $303.51 million. Dynatrace had a return on equity of 10.81% and a net margin of 9.32%. As a group, analysts expect that Dynatrace, Inc. will post 0.43 EPS for the current year.

Institutional Trading of Dynatrace

Analyst Ratings Changes

A number of hedge funds have recently modified their holdings of the business. Ontario Teachers Pension Plan Board raised its holdings in shares of Dynatrace by 28.6% during the first quarter. Ontario Teachers Pension Plan Board now owns 50,359 shares of the companys stock worth $2,130,000 after acquiring an additional 11,206 shares in the last quarter. Prelude Capital Management LLC raised its holdings in shares of Dynatrace by 53.8% during the first quarter. Prelude Capital Management LLC now owns 11,789 shares of the companys stock worth $499,000 after acquiring an additional 4,125 shares in the last quarter. Putnam Investments LLC raised its holdings in shares of Dynatrace by 66.4% during the first quarter. Putnam Investments LLC now owns 342,805 shares of the companys stock worth $14,501,000 after acquiring an additional 136,819 shares in the last quarter. New York State Common Retirement Fund raised its holdings in shares of Dynatrace by 6.9% during the first quarter. New York State Common Retirement Fund now owns 247,161 shares of the companys stock worth $10,455,000 after acquiring an additional 15,879 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Advisory Services Network LLC raised its holdings in shares of Dynatrace by 50.9% during the first quarter. Advisory Services Network LLC now owns 661 shares of the companys stock worth $28,000 after acquiring an additional 223 shares in the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 97.17% of the companys stock.

Several research analysts have commented on DT shares. Loop Capital raised their price objective on Dynatrace from $40.00 to $50.00 in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. William Blair started coverage on Dynatrace in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued an outperform rating on the stock. Bank of America raised their price objective on Dynatrace from $54.00 to $58.00 in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. BTIG Research raised Dynatrace from a neutral rating to a buy rating and set a $57.00 target price on the stock in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. Finally, Citigroup dropped their target price on Dynatrace from $52.00 to $50.00 and set a buy rating on the stock in a research report on Friday, April 21st. Seven analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and sixteen have issued a buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat, Dynatrace currently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $50.14.

Dynatrace Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Dynatrace, Inc engages in the business of developing software intelligence platforms which are purpose-built for the enterprise cloud. The firm also focuses on cloud ecosystem integration; incident and alert management integration; DevOps CI/CD integration; and user experience and business intelligence insights.

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(Photo : Niall Carson - Pool/Getty Images)

United States President Joe Biden hits back at critics of transgender care and surgeries in his latest show of support for the LGBTQ community.

United States President Joe Biden reiterated his support for the LGBTQ community when he criticized those opposed to transgender care and surgeries

The Democrat called critics "hysterical and "prejudiced" in their stance against transgender individuals

Biden's remarks came during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak

United States President Joe Biden hit back at critics of transgender care and surgeries, calling the opposition "hysterical" and "prejudiced," reiterating his support for the LGBTQ community on Thursday.

During a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the Democratic leader faced questions about Republicans' actions with the intent to "restrict rights and medical care" of transgender Americans. He was also asked about the anti-LGBTQ protests that became violent in California earlier this week.

Biden Reiterates Support for LGBTQ Community

Laura Barron-Lopez, the PBS Newshour's White House correspondent that asked the questions, told Biden that she had interviewed the family of a transgender child in Texas. She noted that they were considering not only moving out of the state over its laws but also leaving the United States entirely to protect their child, as per the Daily Mail.

In response, Biden said that he wanted to get the family's number so that he could them himself. He said he wanted to let them know that the U.S. president and his administration would have their backs regarding the issue.

Then, the Democratic leader pointed to his own pro-LGBTQ record of trying to roll back former United States President Donald Trump's ban on transgender troops. He also cited his signing of the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified the Obergefell decision. That came after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that it could be re-examined after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Biden argued that it was wrong that a person can be married in the morning in the United States and later on fired from their job in the afternoon simply because he is gay. He added that it was wrong that there is a increasing amount of violence and hate crimes targeting LGBTQ individuals. He also criticized officials who are pushing hateful bills, targeting transgender children, scaring families, and criminalizing doctors who are trying to help.

Read Also: Bud Light Co-Sponsors 'All-Ages' Pride Drag Event Despite Dylan Mulvaney Backlash

Criticizing Opposition to Transgender Care

On Thursday, the president also announced new measures that seek to help schools and LGBTQ children navigate around book bans. He also plans to help community centers fight threats, give better care access to transgender youth, and have Congress pass the Equality Act, according to Reuters.

Recently, Republican-led states have signed a series of bills that target transgender youth as some states have even banned teachers of younger kids from discussing gender or sexuality topics. Furthermore, conservative lawmakers have proposed or passed various laws that restrict drag performances.

Biden also postponed a Pride Month celebration that was scheduled to be held on the White House lawn and would have included thousands of guests from across the United States. The event was rescheduled to Saturday and is designed to be a high-profile show of support for the LGBTQ community, said NBC News.

Related Article: Louisiana Passes Law Prohibiting Sex-Change Surgery on Youths

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Shares of iShares Morningstar U.S. Equity ETF (NYSEARCA:ILCB  Get Rating) saw strong trading volume on Friday . 111,837 shares were traded during trading, an increase of 712% from the previous sessions volume of 13,776 shares.The stock last traded at $59.04 and had previously closed at $58.94.

iShares Morningstar U.S. Equity ETF Trading Up 0.1 %

The firms 50 day moving average is $56.95 and its two-hundred day moving average is $55.45. The firm has a market cap of $775.59 million, a P/E ratio of 18.13 and a beta of 1.01.

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Institutional Trading of iShares Morningstar U.S. Equity ETF

A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in the business. Atria Wealth Solutions Inc. acquired a new position in iShares Morningstar U.S. Equity ETF during the first quarter worth $1,501,000. Royal Bank of Canada increased its holdings in iShares Morningstar U.S. Equity ETF by 5.4% during the first quarter. Royal Bank of Canada now owns 70,226 shares of the companys stock worth $4,414,000 after buying an additional 3,604 shares during the last quarter. FMR LLC increased its holdings in iShares Morningstar U.S. Equity ETF by 14.8% during the second quarter. FMR LLC now owns 10,092 shares of the companys stock worth $524,000 after buying an additional 1,300 shares during the last quarter. Wells Fargo & Company MN increased its holdings in iShares Morningstar U.S. Equity ETF by 3.4% during the second quarter. Wells Fargo & Company MN now owns 61,018 shares of the companys stock worth $3,170,000 after buying an additional 2,012 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Citadel Advisors LLC acquired a new position in iShares Morningstar U.S. Equity ETF during the second quarter worth $437,000.

About iShares Morningstar U.S. Equity ETF

The iShares Morningstar U.S. Equity ETF (ILCB) is an exchange-traded fund that is based on the Morningstar US Large-Mid Cap index. The fund tracks a market cap-weighted index consists of both growth and value stocks, selected from the top 90% of the US market-cap spectrum. ILCB was launched on Jun 28, 2004 and is managed by BlackRock.

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JPMorgan Chase & Co. reaffirmed their overweight rating on shares of Pearson (LON:PSON  Get Rating) in a report published on Tuesday morning, Marketbeat.com reports. JPMorgan Chase & Co. currently has a GBX 1,230 ($15.29) price objective on the stock.

PSON has been the topic of a number of other research reports. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft reiterated a buy rating and issued a GBX 1,140 ($14.17) price objective on shares of Pearson in a research note on Wednesday, May 3rd. Citigroup reiterated a buy rating on shares of Pearson in a research note on Wednesday, March 1st. Two equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and four have given a buy rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat, Pearson currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of GBX 1,015 ($12.62).

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Pearson Stock Performance

Shares of LON:PSON opened at GBX 819.40 ($10.19) on Tuesday. The company has a market capitalization of 5.87 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 2,483.03, a PEG ratio of 0.83 and a beta of 0.26. The company has a current ratio of 1.90, a quick ratio of 1.07 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 29.33. Pearson has a 12 month low of GBX 722.60 ($8.98) and a 12 month high of GBX 1,006.29 ($12.51). The firms 50-day moving average is GBX 829.60 and its 200 day moving average is GBX 883.67.

Insider Transactions at Pearson

Pearson Company Profile

In other news, insider Graeme Pitkethly bought 257 shares of Pearson stock in a transaction dated Friday, March 31st. The shares were acquired at an average cost of GBX 832 ($10.34) per share, with a total value of 2,138.24 ($2,658.18). In other Pearson news, insider Sally Johnson sold 65,220 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, May 2nd. The shares were sold at an average price of GBX 762 ($9.47), for a total transaction of 496,976.40 ($617,822.48). Also, insider Graeme Pitkethly bought 257 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Friday, March 31st. The stock was acquired at an average price of GBX 832 ($10.34) per share, for a total transaction of 2,138.24 ($2,658.18). Insiders own 0.67% of the companys stock.

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Pearson plc provides educational courseware, assessments, and services in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, the Asia Pacific, other European countries, and internationally. It operates through five segments: Assessment & Qualifications, Virtual Learning, English Language Learning, Higher Education, and Workforce Skills.

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Philip Morris International Inc. (NYSE:PM  Get Rating) has received an average recommendation of Moderate Buy from the eleven research firms that are covering the stock, MarketBeat.com reports. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, two have issued a hold rating and seven have issued a buy rating on the company. The average 1 year price objective among analysts that have covered the stock in the last year is $110.60.

PM has been the subject of a number of research analyst reports. JPMorgan Chase & Co. upgraded shares of Philip Morris International from a neutral rating to an overweight rating and increased their target price for the stock from $109.00 to $116.00 in a research report on Thursday, March 30th. Stifel Nicolaus began coverage on shares of Philip Morris International in a research note on Thursday, April 13th. They set a buy rating and a $114.00 price target on the stock. UBS Group upgraded shares of Philip Morris International from a neutral rating to a buy rating and increased their price target for the stock from $106.00 to $116.00 in a research note on Wednesday, March 1st. Finally, StockNews.com began coverage on shares of Philip Morris International in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock.

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Philip Morris International Stock Down 0.1 %

PM stock opened at $92.19 on Friday. Philip Morris International has a 12-month low of $82.85 and a 12-month high of $105.62. The company has a market cap of $143.10 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 16.49, a PEG ratio of 2.34 and a beta of 0.68. The company has a 50 day moving average of $95.64 and a two-hundred day moving average of $98.55.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Philip Morris International ( NYSE:PM Get Rating ) last released its earnings results on Thursday, April 20th. The company reported $1.38 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $1.34 by $0.04. Philip Morris International had a net margin of 10.80% and a negative return on equity of 128.55%. The company had revenue of $8.10 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $8.03 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the firm earned $1.56 EPS. The companys revenue was up 4.6% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, research analysts anticipate that Philip Morris International will post 6.18 EPS for the current year.

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the company. Fairfield Bush & CO. grew its position in Philip Morris International by 1.1% in the 1st quarter. Fairfield Bush & CO. now owns 26,141 shares of the companys stock worth $2,456,000 after purchasing an additional 281 shares during the last quarter. American Century Companies Inc. grew its position in Philip Morris International by 35.6% in the 1st quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 4,939 shares of the companys stock worth $463,000 after purchasing an additional 1,296 shares during the last quarter. Loomis Sayles & Co. L P grew its position in Philip Morris International by 24.7% in the 1st quarter. Loomis Sayles & Co. L P now owns 3,065 shares of the companys stock worth $288,000 after purchasing an additional 608 shares during the last quarter. Covestor Ltd grew its position in Philip Morris International by 54.9% in the 1st quarter. Covestor Ltd now owns 525 shares of the companys stock worth $49,000 after purchasing an additional 186 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Mather Group LLC. grew its position in Philip Morris International by 14.7% in the 1st quarter. Mather Group LLC. now owns 8,987 shares of the companys stock worth $844,000 after purchasing an additional 1,154 shares during the last quarter. 75.85% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

About Philip Morris International

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Philip Morris International, Inc is a holding company engaged in the manufacturing and sale of cigarettes, tobacco, and nicotine-containing products. Its products include cigarettes and reduced-risk products, including heat-not-burn, vapor, and oral nicotine products. The firm operates through the following geographical segments: European Union, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, South and Southeast Asia, East Asia and Australia, and Americas.

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SSP Group (LON:SSPG  Get Rating) had its price objective hoisted by equities researchers at Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft from GBX 325 ($4.04) to GBX 340 ($4.23) in a note issued to investors on Wednesday, Marketbeat reports. The brokerage presently has a buy rating on the stock. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschafts price objective would suggest a potential upside of 25.00% from the stocks previous close.

Other analysts also recently issued reports about the company. Shore Capital restated a house stock rating on shares of SSP Group in a report on Friday, May 19th. Peel Hunt reiterated a buy rating and issued a GBX 350 ($4.35) price target on shares of SSP Group in a report on Tuesday, May 23rd. Barclays reiterated an overweight rating and issued a GBX 290 ($3.61) price target on shares of SSP Group in a report on Wednesday, May 24th. Finally, Numis Securities reiterated an add rating and issued a GBX 290 ($3.61) price target on shares of SSP Group in a report on Thursday, February 16th. Eight investment analysts have rated the stock with a buy rating, According to data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has a consensus rating of Buy and an average target price of GBX 316.43 ($3.93).

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SSP Group Trading Up 1.9 %

Shares of SSP Group stock opened at GBX 272 ($3.38) on Wednesday. SSP Group has a fifty-two week low of GBX 181.45 ($2.26) and a fifty-two week high of GBX 280 ($3.48). The firm has a market cap of 2.17 billion, a PE ratio of 27,200.00, a P/E/G ratio of -0.77 and a beta of 1.71. The businesss fifty day moving average is GBX 258.18 and its two-hundred day moving average is GBX 249.43. The company has a quick ratio of 0.66, a current ratio of 0.56 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 541.40.

Insider Buying and Selling at SSP Group

SSP Group Company Profile

In related news, insider Patrick Coveney sold 19,545 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, April 12th. The shares were sold at an average price of GBX 247 ($3.07), for a total transaction of 48,276.15 ($60,015.10). In other news, insider Tim Lodge acquired 4,840 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, May 30th. The stock was purchased at an average price of GBX 264 ($3.28) per share, with a total value of 12,777.60 ($15,884.63). Also, insider Patrick Coveney sold 19,545 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, April 12th. The stock was sold at an average price of GBX 247 ($3.07), for a total transaction of 48,276.15 ($60,015.10). Over the last 90 days, insiders have bought 4,984 shares of company stock worth $1,315,306. 0.55% of the stock is owned by company insiders.

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SSP Group plc operates food and beverage outlets. The company operates outlets at airports, railway stations, motorway service areas, hospitals, and shopping centers. It operates approximately 550 brands in 36 countries in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, and internationally. SSP Group plc was incorporated in 2006 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

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Benchmark began coverage on shares of Turning Point Brands (NYSE:TPB  Get Rating) in a research report sent to investors on Monday, The Fly reports. The brokerage issued a buy rating and a $28.00 price objective on the stock.

Separately, StockNews.com initiated coverage on shares of Turning Point Brands in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating for the company.

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Turning Point Brands Price Performance

NYSE TPB opened at $23.37 on Monday. The business has a 50 day simple moving average of $22.15 and a 200 day simple moving average of $21.82. Turning Point Brands has a 52-week low of $18.81 and a 52-week high of $30.84. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 3.28, a quick ratio of 3.67 and a current ratio of 6.80. The stock has a market cap of $410.98 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of 61.50 and a beta of 0.44.

Turning Point Brands Dividend Announcement

Turning Point Brands ( NYSE:TPB Get Rating ) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, May 3rd. The company reported $0.59 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $0.45 by $0.14. The company had revenue of $100.96 million during the quarter. Turning Point Brands had a net margin of 1.99% and a return on equity of 42.17%. Analysts anticipate that Turning Point Brands will post 2.15 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, July 7th. Stockholders of record on Friday, June 16th will be issued a $0.065 dividend. This represents a $0.26 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 1.11%. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, June 15th. Turning Point Brandss payout ratio is presently 68.42%.

Insider Activity

In related news, Chairman David Edward Glazek acquired 5,000 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Monday, May 15th. The stock was bought at an average price of $20.92 per share, with a total value of $104,600.00. Following the acquisition, the chairman now owns 68,973 shares in the company, valued at approximately $1,442,915.16. The purchase was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. 5.20% of the stock is currently owned by insiders.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Turning Point Brands

Several hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in TPB. Swiss National Bank lifted its holdings in Turning Point Brands by 6.0% during the 1st quarter. Swiss National Bank now owns 33,500 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,139,000 after purchasing an additional 1,900 shares during the last quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. lifted its holdings in Turning Point Brands by 88.3% during the 1st quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. now owns 69,405 shares of the companys stock valued at $2,360,000 after purchasing an additional 32,550 shares during the last quarter. Bank of New York Mellon Corp lifted its holdings in Turning Point Brands by 3.8% during the 1st quarter. Bank of New York Mellon Corp now owns 71,594 shares of the companys stock valued at $2,435,000 after purchasing an additional 2,609 shares during the last quarter. MetLife Investment Management LLC lifted its holdings in Turning Point Brands by 58.5% during the 1st quarter. MetLife Investment Management LLC now owns 8,903 shares of the companys stock valued at $303,000 after purchasing an additional 3,286 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Rhumbline Advisers lifted its holdings in Turning Point Brands by 3.0% during the 1st quarter. Rhumbline Advisers now owns 14,808 shares of the companys stock valued at $504,000 after purchasing an additional 426 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 83.74% of the companys stock.

Turning Point Brands Company Profile

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Turning Point Brands, Inc engages in manufacturing, marketing, and distributing branded consumer products including alternative smoking accessories and consumables with active ingredients. It operates through the following segments: Zig-Zag Products, Stokers Products, and NewGen products. The Zig-Zag Products segment markets and distributes rolling papers, tubes, finished cigars, and MYO cigar wraps.

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Shares of Veolia Environnement SA (OTCMKTS:VEOEY  Get Rating) were up 1% during trading on Thursday . The stock traded as high as $15.49 and last traded at $15.46. Approximately 100,898 shares were traded during trading, an increase of 2% from the average daily volume of 99,213 shares. The stock had previously closed at $15.30.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Several analysts recently commented on VEOEY shares. JPMorgan Chase & Co. raised shares of Veolia Environnement from an underweight rating to a neutral rating in a research report on Tuesday, April 25th. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft raised shares of Veolia Environnement from a hold rating to a buy rating in a research report on Friday, April 21st.

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Veolia Environnement Trading Up 1.0 %

The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.44, a quick ratio of 0.93 and a current ratio of 0.98. The companys 50 day simple moving average is $15.44 and its 200-day simple moving average is $14.60.

Veolia Environnement Increases Dividend

Veolia Environnement Company Profile

The business also recently announced a dividend, which was paid on Friday, May 26th. Shareholders of record on Monday, May 8th were paid a dividend of $0.4677 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Friday, May 5th. This represents a yield of 5.42%. This is a boost from Veolia Environnements previous dividend of $0.41.

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Veolia Environnement SA engages in the management of water supplies and distribution systems and provides waste management services. It operates through the following business segments: Water, Environmental Services, and Energy Services. The Water segment integrates drinking water and waste water activities such as water distribution, water and waste water treatment, industrial process water, and manufacture of water treatment equipment and systems.

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The Canadian wildfire smoke that has surged southward into Virginia is reminiscent of the hazy summer days of the 1970s and 1980s before the Clean Air Act was passed. During that time, summer air pollution was regularly much worse than we have had over the past 20 years.

Air pollution then was largely from ground level ozone, before regulations were put in place to curb industrial and automobile emissions. But air pollution this week has been from particulates  wildfire smoke. And some of this particulate matter is especially small, imperceptible to the naked eye. Known as PM2.5, these particles are about 20 times smaller than the width of a human hair, reaching deep into the lungs and bloodstream, causing longer-term respiratory problems.

Looking to the source, it is important to remember that wildfires are not uncommon in Canada, but the intensity of the fires and the transport of the smoke southward is highly unusual this year.

Regarding a connection to the changing climate, a warming climate does dry out ground surfaces and vegetation more quickly, which contributes to a more rapid spread of wildfires once they begin. Notably, much of Canada had its hottest May on record, so the warming climate probably has an influence.

However, the number of fires is not obviously becoming more numerous in Canada. There has been an upward tick in total area burned since the start of the 21st century, but there were years with larger areas burned in the 1980s and 1990s.

Back in Virginia, and areas immediately north, it is the trajectory of the wind that has made this entire event so unusual. It is related to the relatively cooler weather in Virginia of the past several weeks and the historically hot May in Canada.

The jet stream has been blocked into place, with a relatively consistent trough, or southward surge, in eastern North America since early May. As a result, our wind direction has been from the north more often than we typically see this time of the year.

This is also the reason heat waves have been holding west of Virginia so far this season, allowing much warmer air to surge into Canada, and sending the Canadian wildfire smoke southward.

A combination of things may be in play to cause the unusually blocked up weather pattern. A broad area of storminess that slowly circulates around the tropics (known as the MJO) may be reacting with the rapidly warming eastern Pacific Ocean (El Nino).

But exactly how these interact is not straightforward. According to Jan Dutton, a meteorologist at the Charlottesville-based World Climate Service, A rapidly developing El Nino does tend to promote a North Atlantic blocking pattern in early summer, but the block is not clearly related to the El Nino trajectory. Its more likely connected to the big MJO phase 4 in early May. Or perhaps a combination of the two.

Research from the Canadian Forest Service suggests the area burned north of the border will tend to increase as the climate warms further in the coming decades. But whether that smoke is sent southward into Virginia will be more related to the shorter-term weather patterns around the time of the fires. Generally by June, our prevailing winds are from the west or southwest, keeping Canadian air, whether cool and clear or hazy and smoky, away from Virginia.

While it is probably premature to assign the hazy and smoky skies from Virginia to the Northeast solely to a warming climate, it is an important reminder of a recent past where the summer sky was much hazier and the air was much dirtier. And it serves as a caution that the tapestry of work that has been done to make the air cleaner can be unraveled as the climate continues to warm, increasing the risk of larger wildfires and, in time, hazier and smokier skies.

So when the wind pattern does slip into something unusual, we could go through this all over again.

Gallery: Wildfire smoke from Canada pours into U.S.
Economic growth could add to power shortage severity: legislator

By Huong Dung Fri, June 9, 2023 | 5:34 pm GTM+7

Power shortages in Vietnam could become more severe if economic growth recovers to 6-7%, said Vu Hong Thanh, Chairman of the National Assemblys Economic Committee.

Talking to the press on the sidelines of the legislatures ongoing session, he said warnings about potential power shortages in Vietnam had been issued a few years ago, even before the Covid-19 pandemic.

He attributed the situation to the slow progress of power projects implemented by state-owned entities Vietnam Electricity (EVN), Petrovietnam, and mining group Vinacomin.

"Renewable energy such as wind and solar power should be developed at an appropriate level but not massively, as they also depend on the availability of transmission lines," Thanh noted.

An uneven distribution of power sources, with too much renewable energy in the central region where demand for electricity is low, has caused an imbalance in supply and demand, putting pressure on the transmission network and causing partial congestion, he said.

"This is also the reason why the northern region still suffers power shortages although renewable energy sources accounted for nearly 27% of the installed capacity of the entire power system and met about 15% of demand in 2022," he added.

In addition, a number of thermal power projects in the northern and southern region are behind schedule, posing the risk of power shortages due to the lack of backup power capacity, especially in the north, until 2025.

Under the newly-approved Power Development Plan VIII, hydroelectricity has little room for development while coal-fired power needs to be gradually reduced.

Water levels at the Son La hydropower reservoir in Son La province, northern Vietnam drop to record low levels. Photo courtesy of VOV newspaper.

Hydroelectricity, one of the two main sources of electricity in the north, has seen a sharp decrease in output due to drought and lower water levels in hydroelectric reservoirs.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, currently 11 hydropower plants have halted operations, including five in the north, namely Son La, Lai Chau, Huoi Quang, Thac Ba and Tuyen Quang. This has led to a shortage of 5,000 MW in the region.

Northern Vietnam is forecast to lack 30.9-50.8 million kWh a day and the risk of power shortages throughout the day is looming. The National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting predicted that hydroelectric reservoirs will remain "thirsty" for the next 10 days.

On Wednesday, Tran Viet Hoa, director of the Electricity Regulatory Authority of Vietnam under the industry and trade industry, said that the available capacity of all power sources in the northern region, including imported electricity, was 17,500-17,900 megawatts, or about 59.2% of the installed capacity. Meanwhile, the demand was about 20,000 MW and could reach 23,500-24,000 MW in hot weather.

It is estimated that each day Vietnam is short of 30.9 million kWh, and even 50.8 million kWh at peak times. Facing power shortages, EVN has had to cut off electricity in the north. For example, at 4:30 p.m. on Monday, the power consumption capacity was cut by 3,609 MW, including about 1,423 MW at major industrial parks and 1,264 MW in residential areas.

Since the beginning of June, people in Hanoi as well as northern provinces have faced frequent power cuts. The average electricity consumption in the whole country reached nearly 820 million kWh a day in May, an increase of over 20% from April.

Vietnam posted economic growth of 8.02% in post-pandemic 2022, the highest in 12 years. The figure was much higher than the 2.58% recorded in 2021 which saw the height of the pandemic. Economic expansion in the first quarter of this year was 3.32% year-on-year.
Japan's Meiko Electronics lines up $200 mln factory in Hoa Binh province

By Tri Duc Fri, June 9, 2023 | 9:59 am GTM+7

Japans Meiko Electronics is looking to invest $200 million to build a factory in northern Vietnam's mountainous province of Hoa Binh.

Director and managing executive officer Atsushi Sakate made the proposal to Nguyen Phi Long, chief of Hoa Binh's Party Committee, at a meeting on Thursday. The firm, which designs and manufactures printed circuit boards (PCBs), plans to build the factory at the Bo Trai Song Da Industrial Park, covering 9.2 hectares, Sakate added.

Nguyen Phi Long, Secretary of Hoa Binh's Party Committee (center), poses for picture with Meiko Electronics executives in the northern province on June 8, 2023. Photo courtesy of Hoa Binh newspaper.

Meiko has so far invested in three plants in Vietnam, with a total investment of $500 million, employing 7,000 people and contributing $30 million to the state budget annually, the executive said.

The three are located in the Thach That-Quoc Oai Industrial Zone and Thang Long Industrial Park in Hanoi, and Phuc Dien Industrial Zone in Hai Duong province, all in northern Vietnam.

On a global scale, Meiko recorded a net income of JPY8,800 million ($63.33 million) on net sales of JPY167,300 million ($1.2 billion) in fiscal year 2022, down 22.7% and up 10.6%, respectively, according to the firms financial results.

Long said his province would provide the best conditions for Meikos investment.

Registered foreign direct investment (FDI) capital in Vietnam declined 7.3% year-on-year to nearly $10.86 billion in the first five months of 2023, while disbursed capital dropped 0.8% to $7.56 billion, according to the Foreign Investment Agency (FIA).

Of which, Hoa Binhs figure was modest with $0.84 million of registered capital. As of May 20, Hoa Binh had attracted 51 FDI projects with total registered capital of $720.14 million, ranking 44th among Vietnam's 63 provinces and cities.
US solar energy firm Sun Pacific seals distribution deal with Vietnam producer

By Tuong Minh Fri, June 9, 2023 | 10:15 pm GTM+7

Sun Pacific Power Corp. (SPPC) has signed an exclusive contract to purchase and distribute solar panels in the U.S. on behalf of its Vietnam-based partner GEP New Energy Co.

The two-year contract aims to support the green energy holding companys new marketing and distribution program, New Jersey-headquartered Sun Pacific Holding, which wholly owns SPPC, announced on Friday.

GEP New Energy produces high-efficiency solar cells and solar photovoltaic modules at its factory in Que Vo 3 Industrial Park, Bac Ninh province, near Hanoi.

Production equipment at GEP New Energy in Bac Ninh province near Hanoi, northern Vietnam. Photo courtesy of GEP New Energy.

Sun Pacific said it will launch its own production at the corporations 1.2 giga-watt manufacturing facility. The GEP Energy contract will be able to cover excess orders while the comany prepares to launch a new solar manufacturing facility.

The American holding corporations announcement came three weeks after U.S. President Joe Biden vetoed a Congress resolution that would have undone his two-year moratorium on tariffs for solar panels and modules imported to the U.S. from Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Cambodia.

His tariff suspension, announced in June 2022, covered a 24-month period to make sure U.S. factories were operational and the solar industry was ready to power up American homes, businesses, and communities.

Sun Pacific Holding CEO Nicholas Campanella said in a company release from New Jersey: While we recently started our sales and marketing campaign, we felt we had a need to be prepared with inventory for our U.S. sales while we wait to build out our own factory.

We have structured a two-year exclusive agreement with GEP New Energy which will also help us as we prepare for our own factory. The GEP New Energy plan will help bring new technology such as Bi-Facial panels including Perc and Topcon in conjunction with technical expertise to our new factory we are working to develop with Pt.IDN technical team.

Campanella's corporation plans to bring over 5MW of solar panels to be housed in the two states of New Jersey and California for sales and distribution to engineering procurement and construction (EPC) contractors.

Its first order will include 18 containers for the two states which will provide a better logistical distribution opportunity, Campanella said.

We are working with our sales and marketing teams using various products including GEP New Energy panels and then we will have them for additional original equipment manufacturer products in excess of our 1.2GW plant.

This way we will not be so limited in our launch and be able to meet the growing U.S. demand for advanced solar power products, said the CEO.

The GEP New Energy Co. plant in Vietnam's northern province of Bac Ninh runs a fully automatic solar module production line. The 11,000-square meter facility received an investment license in October 2022.

Vietnam has attracted global producers of solar modules and panels, with major American, Canadian, and Chinese investors already present, as the tropical country is ramping up investment in solar and wind power.

JinkoSolar, one of the worlds top makers of solar modules, has 12 production facilities globally, including two in Vietnam. Both are in the Song Khoai Industrial Park, developed by Thailands Amata Corp., in the northern province of Quang Ninh.
(Photo : Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The Justice Department has federally indicted former United States President Donald Trump with at least seven criminal charges in relation to his handling of classified documents.

The Justice Department federally indicted former United States President Donald Trump

The decision was made over the Republican businessman's handling of classified documents he took from the White House

A source familiar with the matter said that the indictment includes seven charges, one of which is a conspiracy charge

The Justice Department has made the momentous decision of lodging federal criminal charges against former United States President Donald Trump over his handling of classified documents taken from the White House.

A source familiar with the matter who spoke under the condition of anonymity said that the Republican businessman has been charged with seven counts in the indictment. Another source noted that at least one of the charges against the former president will be a conspiracy charge.

Donald Trump Federally Indicted

The special counsel has been investigating the former president's handling of classified documents that were discovered at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after he left office in January 2021. The probe also seeks potential obstruction of the investigation and the government's efforts to retrieve the sensitive materials, as per CNN.

In his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote that he was informed by the Justice Department that he was indicted. He added that officials told him he was "summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3:00 p.m."

The former president continued to say that the "corrupt Biden administration" has informed his attorneys that he was indicted. He said that the decision was made seemingly over the "Boxes Hoax."

The special counsel declined to comment regarding the latest development in the case and the Justice Department is now moving additional resources to Miami ahead of Trump's anticipated appearance.

The filing is the first time in the history of the United States that a former president has faced federal charges. It also places the country in an extraordinary position given Trump's status not only as a former president but also as a front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, according to the New York Times.

Read Also: Louisiana Passes Law Prohibiting Sex-Change Surgery on Youths

The Culmination of Special Counsel Investigation

Trump could potentially face off against United States President Joe Biden in the 2024 elections but the Democratic leader's administration is now seeking to convict his possible rival. The charges against the former president include willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act and making false statements.

The office of special counsel Jack Smith was the one that filed the indictment two months after New York prosecutors filed more than 30 felony charges against the Republican businessman. These were related to a hush-money payment that was made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election.

In his Truth Social post, Trump said that it was unbelievable that such a thing could happen to a former president of the United States. He claims that it marks a dark day for the country, saying that the nation is now in a "serious and rapid decline."

The classified documents related to the latest indictment included roughly 11,000 materials that the FBI seized, with around 100 of them being marked classified. Furthermore, some of the materials were labeled top secret, said BBC.

Related Article: Fox News Accuses Tucker Carlson of Contract Breach Over New Twitter Show

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Vietnam firm to build $200 mln industrial cluster in Ben Tre province

By Tri Duc Fri, June 9, 2023 | 10:59 pm GTM+7

Vietnamese firm Pacific Group plans to invest $200 million in an industrial cluster in the Mekong Delta province of Ben Tre for the production of renewable energy equipment.

Pacific Group CEO Le Ngoc Anh Minh made the proposal at a Thursday meeting with Ben Tre Vice Chairman Nguyen Minh Canh.

The 50-hectare industrial cluster, named An Hoa Tay, is set to manufacture electrical components and wind power equipment for a Japanese company. The industrial cluster will also feature rooftop solar power and wastewater treatment systems to optimize the use of renewable energy and water resources.

The Ben Thanh branch of private lender VPBank has committed to providing credit of VND478.56 billion ($20.4 million) for the project, the executive added.

In reply, Canh asked the provincial Department of Industry and Trade to assist Pacific Group in completing project documents before taking next steps.

Pacific Group CEO Le Ngoc Anh Minh (right) at a meeting with Ben Tre authorities in the Mekong Delta province on June 8, 2023. Photo courtesy of Ben Tre's news portal.

One day earlier, Vietnamese corporation Trungnam Group had a meeting with Vice Chairman Canh for a green hydrogen complex project in the province.

The first phase of the 106.45-hectare project will be a 400 MW green hydrogen factory, with a designed capacity of 45,000 tons a year, including 13,500 tons for commercial purposes.

The plant, to be located in Thanh Phu district, will electrolyze water with alkaline technolgoy, powered by wind and solar power generated on the project site and by other renewables projects.

In the second phase, the investor will build power sources for the project, while in the third phase it will construct a port to export products. The project will employ 500 people during operation and 5,000 during construction, according to the firm.

Boasting strong potential in renewable energy, Ben Tre plans to raise its renewable energy capacity to 1,500 MW with an annual output of 4.5 billion kWh by 2025, according to the provincial Department of Industry and Trade. Ben Tres energy sales reached 2.14 billion kWh in 2022, of which solar and wind power accounted for 14.6%.
Vietnam hospital market opens up to investors

By Tuong Minh Fri, June 9, 2023 | 4:27 pm GTM+7

Healthcare assets in Vietnams market of 100 million people are attracting attention from investors looking to expand in or enter the market.

Although Vietnams merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions have slowed, with 35% lower transaction value in 2022 compared to 2021, healthcare may buck the trend this year.

PwC, in its 2023 Global M&A Industry Trends Outlook has predicted that healthcare will be one of a handful of the top sectors drawing FDI to Vietnam this year.

Thomson Medical Group, a Singapore-based healthcare company, has confirmed with Singapore newspaper Business Times that it is in advanced talks to buy a controlling stake in French-backed FV Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City after a Bloomberg report on Thursday about the discussions.

The healthcare company, backed by tycoon Peter Lim, has surpassed other interested candidates to remain in the bidding and is working with a financial adviser on the potential acquisition, according to the report, which says the process is private.

In 2017, Quadria Capital, an Asian healthcare-focused private equity firm, announced it had bought a stake in FV Hospital for an undisclosed amount. Other investors who joined the investment included funds managed by Neuberger Berman Private Equity and DEG  the German development finance institution under KfW, a German state-owned investment and development bank. In 2022, Bloomberg reported that Quadria Capital was exploring the sale of its stake in FV, which could fetch around $300 million to $400 million.

FV opened in HCMC in 2003, and the general hospitals current resources include 220 beds and around 950 staff.

Vietnam's leading investment management group VinaCapital is exploring the sale of its minority stake in Thu Cuc Medical System TCI in a deal that could value the Hanoi private hospital operator at between $150 million and $200 million, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

The process is also private, and the sources declined to be named. The two added that VinaCapital is in talks with at least one financial investor on the potential sale of its roughly 30% stake in Thu Cuc Medical.

A VinaCapital-led consortium paid $26.7 million for the stake in 2020, one of the sources told Reuters. "Because TCI is well-managed and highly regarded, we have, over time, received a number of inquiries from parties interested in acquiring our stake," a VinaCapital spokesperson said in an email to Reuters.

CT scanner room at the Thu Cuc general hospital in Hanoi, northern Vietnam. Photo courtesy of the hospital.

Thu Cuc Medical did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters, the international news service agency said.

It added investors are now betting on the Vietnamese hospital and healthcare sector's ability to weather a challenging economic environment.

Thu Cuc Medical was founded in 2011 and now operates a general hospital in Hanoi's Tay Ho district and three other clinics in the Vietnamese capital.

At present, VinaCapital has more than $3.9 billion of assets under management, including a closed-end fund listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Clear growth opportunities

Vietnams healthcare sector is opening up to investors. The EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), that took effect in 2020, has eliminated tariffs for around 71% of pharmaceutical products, and the remaining tariffs will be gradually phased out upon the full implementation of the agreement.

As part of the agreement, Vietnam has committed to allowing EU-invested enterprises to import pharmaceuticals into Vietnam and to establish 100%-foreign owned companies in the pharmaceuticals sector. This could boost the availability of high-quality medications for Vietnamese consumers while increasing the profitability of EU firms in the industry.

Vietnams hospital market is anticipated to witness a steady compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.2% and reach some $11.23 billion by 2028, according to the Vietnam Hospital Market Insights Report 2023 by the global market research company Research and Markets.

The study, released on Thursday, said that the hospital market has witnessed significant growth over the past few years due to several factors that have contributed to the proliferation of the healthcare industry in the country.

The growing middle class is becoming more health-conscious, leading to an increase in demand for healthcare services. Additionally, the country's healthcare infrastructure is expanding, resulting in better access to healthcare services, the report said.

Meanwhile, Vietnam's population is aging, with the number of people aged 60 and above expected to increase from 12.5 million in 2020 to 25 million by 2050. This demographic shift has led to an increase in demand for healthcare services, particularly for chronic diseases that are more prevalent among older adults.

The study notes that Vietnam is rapidly urbanizing, with the proportion of the population living in urban areas expected to increase from 35% in 2020 to 50% by 2030. Urbanization is associated with lifestyle changes, such as a shift towards more sedentary jobs, which has contributed to an increase in chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension.

Another factor that is luring investors is that Vietnam's government has been actively promoting the development of its healthcare industry in recent years. The government has recognized the importance of a robust healthcare system in improving the country's overall well-being and supporting its growing economy.

Research and Markets also mentions increasing medical tourism in Vietnam.

Vietnam has emerged as one of the leading medical tourism destinations in Southeast Asia. The country's healthcare industry has been growing rapidly, thanks to its government's initiatives to improve healthcare infrastructure and promote medical tourism."

The reasons behind the increasing popularity of medical tourism in Vietnam include high-quality healthcare services.

Vietnamese hospitals are equipped with state-of-the-art medical equipment, and the country's healthcare professionals are highly trained and skilled. This has led to an increasing number of patients from other countries coming to Vietnam for medical treatment, the study added.
Vietnam seeks to cut logistics costs to drive sector's development

By Truong Van Fri, June 9, 2023 | 2:16 pm GTM+7

Vietnam needs to reduce its high logistics costs to improve the new global production hubs competitiveness, Minister of Transport Nguyen Van Thang has said.

The minister mentioned the subject on Thursday as parliament members discussed why the sectors contribution to Vietnams economy is still low but logistics costs are high.

Minister of Transport Nguyen Van Thang speaks at the ongoing National Assembly meeting in Hanoi on June 8, 2023. Photo courtesy of the parliament.

Thang said logistics costs in Vietnam in 2012 were equal to 16.8% of the countrys GDP. Under Vietnams logistics development strategy, the ratio by 2025 is in the range of 16-20%.

According to the Vietnam Logistics Business Association (VLA), the Vietnamese ratio is higher than others in Southeast Asia - 8.5% in Singapore, 13% in Malaysia, and 15.5% in Thailand, and the fourth highest in ASEAN.

The minister told the parliament that his ministry will continue to work closely with the Ministry of Industry and Trade and other relevant ministries to reduce costs via a number of solutions.

The first is to focus on developing a synchronous transport infrastructure system, including building dry ports and logistics centers to promote multimodal transport. He said the Ministry of Transport is working with ministries, government agencies and localities on investment plans to connect different forms of transport, concentrating on connectivity between waterways and seaports.

In the near future, the Hai Phong-Hanoi-Lao Cai railway line, and a railroad connecting the port cluster of Cai Mep-Thi Vai in Ba Ria-Vung Tau province near Ho Chi Minh City with border gates in the Mekong Delta will be built.

Secondly, the transport ministry will continue to review the current situation to make cost cutting proposals and reduce fees for using roads and seaport infrastructure facilities.

The minister said Lach Huyen Port in the northern city of Hai Phong, the cluster of Cai Mep-Thi Vai, and other ports already have a capacity equivalent to major seaports in Singapore and Malaysia.

Container shipping in Vietnam and its neighbor Cambodia had the lowest turnaround times at ports across ASEAN in June 2022 as both secured an average of 0.9 days, the World Bank said this April. The findings were included in the banks Logistics Performance Index (LPI) 2023 report, which came after three years of unprecedented supply chain disruptions during the Covid-19 pandemic when delivery times soared.

The LPI, which covers 139 economies, measures the ease of establishing reliable supply chain connections and the structural factors that make it possible, including the quality of logistics services, trade and transport-related infrastructure, and border controls.
Southern Seven Health Department, in partnership with genetic service company Invitae Corporation and the Hope Light Foundation, is now offering genetic testing for cancer to local residents that are 18 and older. Their goal is to help reduce cancer-related deaths from inherited cancers.

Shawna Rhine, community outreach coordinator and public information officer for Southern Seven, said their region, which includes Alexander, Hardin, Johnson, Massac, Pope, Pulaski and Union counties, sits inside hot spots for cancer in the nation.

We sit in a health dessert (a location with little or no health care available). People have to travel many, many miles for screening or treatment, Rhine said.

Through genetic cancer testing, individuals can identify their risk for certain cancers before a diagnosis, which could mean earlier detection and prevention of cancer, especially with cancers that do not have screening tests.

For residents of Southern Illinois who face increased rates of cancer when compared with the rest of the state, genetic testing is vital to surviving cancer.

There is a growing need in Southern Illinois to improve access to genetic testing both before and at the time of diagnosis to reduce barriers for all populations, Rhonda Andrews-Ray, S7HD executive director and public health administrator, said. This is especially true for those in underserved rural communities.

Those who have genetic testing results can take that information to their primary care physician.

According to the National Cancer Institute, about 13% of all cancers may be due to inherited genetic changes. In Illinois this year, an estimated 8,900 individuals will die from inherited cancers, with about 37,100 new cases of inherited cancers diagnosed.

A positive test can pinpoint the risk of developing cancer and help people to make informed medical decisions to reduce their risk. Genetic testing is extremely important for those with a risk for cancers that do not have a screening test which can detect the cancer in early stages, such as a colonoscopy or mammogram.

Dr. Catherine OConnor, a breast surgeon at the SIH Breast Center in Carbondale, said testing positive for one inherited cancer, such as breast, prostate, ovarian, pancreas, some types of melanoma, kidney, colon, uterine and thyroid, may increase the risk for other cancers.

Testing positive for BRCA2 gene, often associated with breast cancer, raises the risk for pancreatic and prostate cancer and melanoma.

Some genes that affect cancer can be carried, such as the MUTHY gene. If a person carries the gene, other family members need to be part of the cancer conversation.

We dont want folks taking this to their graves, OConnor said.

The first step toward genetic testing is to talk to your family. Families dont always talk about cancer. Find out what family members had cancer and what kind it was. It helps test for the right genes.

To order the correct test, you have to know what you are looking for, OConnor said.

For people living outside the area of Southern Seven, having information about family members with cancer can help get insurance to pay for genetic testing.

Genetic testing through Southern Seven Health Department is available by appointment only, and involves a simple blood draw or saliva sample to determine your risk of nine potential cancers. Those include breast, colorectal, ovarian, prostate, stomach and uterine cancer.

It can also help to identify other at-risk relatives for whom genetic testing is recommended.

Testing may be right for you if you or a relative (including siblings, children, parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents):

Had a rare cancer

Had cancer before age 50

Was diagnosed with more than one cancer

Had multiple relatives on the same side of your family with the same type(s) of cancer

Had 10 or more colorectal polyps found during your colonoscopies

Tested positive for a genetic variant related to cancer risk

For more information about genetic cancer testing available through Southern 7 Health Department, call 618-634-2297, visit southern7.org or download the Southern 7 app.

Those living outside of Alexander, Hardin, Johnson, Massac, Pope, Pulaski and Union counties should talk to their doctor about genetic testing for cancer.
Invited guests were treated to an afternoon of adventure last month as the family of Luther B. Wannamaker welcomed three talented ladies to share some of the history of Revolutionary War heroine Rebecca Brewton Motte.

More than 100 people, including members of the South Carolina Daughters of the American Revolution, family and friends, gathered at St. Matthews Parish Episcopal Church for the start of this unique experience.

I want to welcome everyone. We are thrilled to have you, said Wannamaker, praising his family for helping to put on the event and giving special recognition to Charles Baxley, who is the publisher and co-founder of Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution, an online journal.

You are going to get informed by a wonderful historian, inspired by a great actress and hear from a lady who knows Fort Motte like no one else and tells all the legends, Wannamaker said.

Author and scholar, Alexia Jones Helsley, remarked, Wow, a standing-room-only crowd.

We are here to commemorate a significant battle: I call it the gut punch in the British defense  all these little forts across the state. Nathanael Greene teams up with partisans like Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter, William Harden and Andrew Pickens and says were going to get rid of them (the British). So, they get Fort Motte and Thomas Sumter takes Orangeburg and a week later he takes Fort Granby and the whole center is gone from their defenses. Its remarkable, Helsley said.

We are going to celebrate the life of Rebecca Brewton Motte, a heroine she has researched for decades and touts as highly educated and politically aware.

By 1775, her associates refer to her as our Roman matron. In ancient Rome, this was the ideal married woman. They held her up as honorable and dedicated to her childrens education and the public good; an exceptional woman who left her mark on history. By any analysis, this is an apt description of Rebecca Motte, she said.

Delving into her personification of Motte, nationally known actress Chris Weatherhead exclaimed, It is so kind of you to be so interested in my adventures in the Revolution.

It began to get very hard on us in Charlestown when the taxes of the king began to land on us like huge hammers, and for the next ten years or so, we just kept trying to fight it. By 1775, my dear husband, Jacob, he cared so much to help in anything he could. We would send food and supplies.

By January of 1780, my magnanimous and marvelous husband got very ill and passed on. So, there I was mourning and hearing every day that the British had taken Savannah and they were coming for us. I knew that they had 12,000 soldiers and we only had 5,000 in Charlestown.

So in they come - the British - like a high tide of horror down our streets.  Sir Henry Clinton took one look at my house and said, That will be my headquarters.

Well, I asked if they might let me live there and I didnt fight them like many other women who were being thrown into the dungeons. I said that I would be mistress of table and feed their officers while secretly hoping that one night filled with Madeira wine, some officer would speak a word or a phrase that I could pass on to those who I trusted to keep the flame of freedom alive in our imprisoned city.

Finally, they allowed us to leave there and we moved up to my other house on the Congaree River. But, we had not been there so very long when the British cavalry came storming up the lane and into my house saying that they had now chosen that house to be their headquarters.

Motte and her family moved into a second home on the property over at Buckhead Hill while the British occupied the main house, which rose 250 feet from the Congaree River. From her vantage point, also at an elevation of 250 feet, she could keep an eye on the activity across the way on the neighboring hilltop.

They were digging deep trenches around my house and I realized that it was now a fort, a British fort. One morning I heard word that Nathanael Greene knew about Ft. Motte.

The next dawn, riders came rushing in from Charlestown and were able to get in, but they were not able to get out because Francis Marion and Light Horse Harry Lee and about 400 soldiers were all crawling up through the underbrush. They could see those muskets all around pointed up out of these deep trenches, but the British didnt have any artillery.

Francis had a little cannon that he set up on a little rise and all those British soldiers were trapped in their little fort. There were skirmishes for days.

They (the Patriots) had noticed those dry shingles on my roof, so they had a meeting. Light Horse Harry came to me and he said that there was such concern in every soldiers heart for me to render such a sacrifice as to consider burning my house.

Laughing, she said, Oh, on the contrary. Burn it. Burn them out if you can. I am just so gratified that you are granting me the opportunity to join the fight for the sake of my country. I will watch it with delight.

The flames spread to the main house.  Pretty soon the front door was belching out British officers waving a white flag of surrender. Praise God.

Then, Francis got his men to put the fire out. So, we took the fort and we saved my house. We hadnt eaten for days, so I was only too happy to prepare a meal for not just the Patriot officers, the British also.

Remember this: all of the great liberties that we gained in that war must be defended. There will always be evil conspirators out there just beyond the shadows waiting for us to be weak.  Each of you, do what you can to keep them at bay. God bless us all, Weatherhead-Felder concluded.

Following this incredible accounting of Mottes remembrances, Reta Westbury, Calhoun County resident and local regent of the William Thomson Chapter, NSDAR, gave her rendition of a mythical tale as recounted in her portrayal of Rachel Heatley Lloyd. She spoke of living in the little frame house on what is now referred to as Buckhead Hill and could have been the overseers house where Motte resided while her main home was under siege.

I was born 22 years before Rebecca Motte. My husband had a habit of drinking and he had a habit of using really bad profanity.

I told him, John, if you dont stop this, youre going to meet the devil himself.

Well, we were sitting on our front porch on a bluff that goes about a mile long. All of a sudden, in the distance we could see a cloud coming up. We could see lightning and we could hear thunder.

Out of the blue, here comes this beautiful, black horse and a fancy gig, and inside, sitting there, was this handsome guy, dressed in black broadcloth looking really neat.

This stranger supposedly asked the way to McCords Ferry, which according to Lloyd was near their house. When people got lost, they would often come over to ask directions. Her husband invited the stranger to stay for supper and began entertaining him with stories.

When he would get drunk, John started telling these stories over and over to anyone who would listen to him. This man encouraged him to keep talking.  They continued to drink and the profanity continued.

I started smelling smoke.  I could see that there was smoke coming from under the table. I looked under there and I realized that his shoes didnt match. One looked like an oxs foot. It was so big that it could not stay inside that boot.

I thought, This is the devil, so I ran in my bedroom and started reading my Bible backwards. I was scared to death. I read and read. I just kept reading until the cock crowed three times and when that last cock crowed, that man jumped up from the table.  He leaped and made one giant leap all the way across that river.

He landed where the Congaree and the Wateree come together. I have heard that there is a rock on that side of the river that matches the rock on this side of the river. The rock on this side has a wagon wheel (track) and a footprint. This was where the horse that was so pretty was hitched to my front porch.

He unhitched himself, if you can believe that, and pulled that gig across that river right after that devil, Westbury said, concluding her talk as Rachel Heatley Lloyd with the famous mythical story that has been printed in several publications.

Following the presentations, attendees were escorted to the Rebecca Motte Monument and Fort Motte Battle site located on the grounds of Mount Joseph Plantation overlooking the Congaree River, just few miles out of St. Matthews. This property of approximately 370 acres, which features twin hilltops, has been protected and cared for by the Wannamaker family since 1919.

Upon arriving at the historical monument site atop one of the hilltops, guests were allowed to stretch their legs and look out over a portion of the vast Congaree National Park. Attendees then were invited to gather to hear attorney David Reuwer of the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust, who gave a spirited accounting of the Patriots and the battle they fought at Ft. Motte against the British.

Two vans offered guests a drive-by visit to certain points on the property, including the famous Devils Track rock and the grounds of Buckhead Hill.

One visitor, Vera Mitchell, current St. Matthews resident, said, This whole experience is awesome. Youve heard about Rebecca Motte, but you didnt realize what this landscape looked like. This landscape is like something you would expect in the Smoky Mountains, the land is so hilly.

This is a very interesting history of South Carolina. I find it educational and awe-inspiring. I think all natives of South Carolina should get to see this and know that there is such history embedded in these woods, Mitchell said.

For more information on this historical site, please contact Luther Wannamaker at LBWSeed@aol.com.
Do you have a fishing rod in your garage? Or maybe even a cane pole? If so, the South Carolina Wildlife Federation (SCWF) invites you to join our Plishing Challenge this summer! Plishing is a combination of the Swedish phrase plocka upp, meaning litter pick up, and fishing! Our Plishing Challenge is designed to keep the public engaged with fishing, and to help keep our waterways clean by using best fishing practices, picking up litter, and catching fish!

This conservation initiative is a great way to enjoy South Carolinas aquatic resources, practice conservation, and win prizes. The challenge is designed to be simple and fun for all ages. Once registered, you can enter each fish you catch and each bag of litter you collect from our waterways. You do not have to weigh or measure any fish to participate, just snap a photo or video in the app and enjoy the outdoors. There is a different sponsor each month offering prizes including gift cards, apparel, and fishing gear.

At the end of the summer, there will be an overall winner for fish, an overall winner for litter collection, and a randomly selected winner, who will each receive a $500 gift card to Palmetto State Armory. In addition, Palmetto State Armory is covering the cost of the first 250 people to register for the challenge. Register early for the best chance at getting a free spot in the challenge!

Fishing and being on the water are great ways to spend time outdoors. Health benefits of fishing include boosting your immune system, relaxation, and lowering stress. Whether you like to fish solo, or take your whole family, SCWFs Plishing Challenge is a great way to connect with your environment and appreciate our beautiful state.

In addition to Palmetto State Armory, our other amazing sponsors for the Plishing Challenge include Palmetto Pride, AFTCO, Local Boy Outfitters, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, the South Carolina Boating and Fishing Alliance, and Angling Women. The event runs from June 1 through August 31 and has dedicated Facebook and Instagram pages, SCWF Plishing Challenge. For more information, visit www.scwf.org/plishing. Tight lines!
The seaward land area has been reclaimed opening the way for the next phase of construction.

After little over a months work, which started in late April, the dredger M.V. HAM 316 (of the internationally renowned Van Oord fleet) left the shores and sea limits of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.





During the month or so of work, the dredger was expected to remove some 1.17 cubic meters of sand from an area on the south east coast of mainland St. Vincent, and dump it in Kingstown so as to reclaim up to 16.1 acres of seaward land, to accommodate the construction of a new container port, part of the overall Kingstown Port Modernisation Project.





How much sand was actually removed THE VINCENTIAN is yet to confirm, together with whether or not the promised sum of ec$20m was paid by the contractors, Aecon Group Inc., of Canada, to the government of St. Vincent., for the sand.





While here, the dredger made up to six trips daily from source to Kingstown, each trip bringing up to 6,000 cubic meters of sand, depending on the weather and sea conditions.





With the designated area of seaward land reclaimed, the next step will be vibro compaction which will stablise the loose sand and gravel. This is in preparation for the commencement of construction in earnest.





Construction work will include a terminal (to include a freight station), container storage yard, maintenance areas for break-bulk vehicles, administration and customs building, workshops and warehouses.




The top three female bards: Queen Fya Empress (seated), Ist Runner up Nubian Empress (right) and Singing Shaunelle.

Lornette Fya Empress Nedd is the 2023 Queen of Calypso in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.





She earned the honour, in her debut entry in the competition, when she dethroned defending Queen- Shaunelle Singing Shaunelle McKenzie, and defeated nine other contenders, on Saturday 3rd June, at the Russells Auditorium, Kingstown.





Singing Shaunelle slipped to third in the pecking order having been also outdone by Nubian Empress, whose second place was her most successful showing to date, albeit in a short career.





Fya Empress rendered the song Price of Neglect which focused on childrens issues, skillfully crafted around the basis of the African Proverb, It takes a village to raise a child.





She presented with a command that was unmatched on the evening. Her elocution, punctuated with appropriately placed emphasis, her sustained melodious and precise interpretations, her in-person delivery that exuded empathy made for an all-round, near perfect presentation which if equalled, and/or improved, will make her a strong contender should she be selected for the National Calypso Monarch competition, which from all indications so far is a given.





Her performance moved at least one patron to voice that she reminded him of the late, great Barbadian-Trinidadian calypsonian- Francine Singing Francie Edwards. Quite a compliment.





Unlike in the past when there was speculation as to who might have written a song for whom, Fya Empress, in an interview with the API, made public her thanks to the songs composer  Christopher Grant, a renowned Trinidad and Tobago attorney/calypso composer who has written for no less than five National Calypso Monarchs in that country. This was the first time, according to Fya Empress that Grant had written for her.

With this victory, Fya Empress has added to a suite of firsts she has already accumulated here.





She lists two National Calypso Monarch titles on her resume - 2012 and 2017; Ragga Soca and Road March titles in 2012; and a second place in the Soca Monarch competition  2012.





She is one among a rarefied class of three females to have won the National Calypso Monarch title, the others being Monique Princess Monique Hector in 2003, 2004, 2008 and Bridget Joy_C Creese in 2009 and 2010.

And she has already made known her intention to add another National Calypso Monarch title to her accolades. Saying that while winning the Queen of Calypso Monarch is an accomplishment in itself, her real game is the National Calypso Monarch where she will come toe to toe with the best male bards in the land.





Given her Queen of Calypso performance, she should not be taken lightly.
According to the Prime Minister, the current development activity in SVG is such that there are openings for skilled persons in a variety of areas.

Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves said that there are currently more people working in St. Vincent and the Grenadines than at any other time in the countrys history.





The Prime Minister delivered the statement during the "Issues at Hand programme aired on WE FM last Sunday. He referred to data from the National Insurance Services (NIS) to support his claim.





He stated that when the Unity Labour Party government assumed office in 2001, there were approximately 30,000 active registrations at the NIS for employees and self-employed individuals. However, the current data indicates that there are now over 42,000 registered workers with the NIS, indicating an increase in the number of people engaged in the workforce.





According to Gonsalves, self-employed persons and employees amounted to just over 30,000 (under NDP). "By 2019, the year before Covid, was about 41,000. Now its about 42,000 plus. There is no carpenter, no mason, no electrician, no plumber, no tile man, no general construction worker who wants work in St. Vincent and the Grenadines today, cant get it. In fact, laborers are leaving the farms and going to work construction; making it difficult for farmers to get workers, said Gonsalves as he highlighted the state of economic activity in the country.





He said that over 300 Vincentians are working at the construction site of the $550 million dollars Sandals Resort at Buccument, with hundreds more expected upon the completion of the resort.





The 2023 Estimates revealed that 115 new jobs were created by the government with the bulk of these posts being allocated to the Royal St. Vincent and the Grenadines Police Force (RSVGPF). The positions were spread across nine ministries and departments.





The announcement was made by Minister of Finance, Camillo Gonsalves on Tuesday, December 13, 2022 as he presented the Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure for the 2023 fiscal year.





The opposition NDP has chided the government in the past, for the lack of employment opportunities for Vincentians, particularly young people.
It will take some time, according to one citizen, for Vincentians to get accustomed to the fact that parliament will no longer be sitting in this building.

"It is going to take some time for us to get accustomed to not having the Parliament meet in Kingstown, but it is perhaps for the better that it is removed from Kingstown. It will get it business done with less interference.





This is but one of the responses that THE VINCENTIAN got to its question, albeit to a handful of readers, about how they felt about the Parliament being removed from Kingstown.





Members of Parliament - elected and nominated  on Thursday, 1st June, met for the final time in the building in Kingstown that housed both the Parliament and the main Courthouse.





Moving through history





It is no secret that the building has been in dire need of repairs for some time now. (Readers of THE VINCENTIAN will recall the late Justice Frederick Bruce-Lyle having to go public with a request that the authorities attend to some repairs (leaks) in his chambers.) And while there is unequivocal support for this work, there is a clarion call that the building be preserved in its original style/architecture.





The records show that the building is well over 200 years old and while it would have been blessed with a few modern conveniences (e.g. air condition) through the decades, the building has remained, for all intents and purposes, untouched. It stands as one of the last historic buildings  standing in its original design  in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.





Interestingly, the building was constructed a stones throw away from what was known as the Market Square, originally an open area where citizens gathered daily to conduct trade as well as to share information on world events and their views on developments in the colony.





It was from that location on October 21, 1935 that the people moved into the precincts of the parliament building to make their feelings known on certain bills (tax increases) that were down for debate in the Legislative Council (Parliament) on that day. That public expression of descent resulted in what became known as the 1935 Riots and placed the name George Augustus McIntosh indelibly in the pages of the history of this country.





Parliamentarians and the business of the highest law-making body in the land, will now transition to a temporary location in Calliaqua until such time as a new Parliament is constructed in Beachmont/Richmond Hill, just outside the main commercial area of capital Kingstown.





Special final sitting





A special June 1st 2023 sitting of Parliament gathered past and current elected and nominated members of Parliament, past and present Speakers of the House and specially invited guests.





Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves addressed the Sitting and prefaced his expectations with a history of the building, referencing the 15th May 1798 resolution that made provision for the construction of a building to house the Courthouse on the ground floor and "the Legislative Council above.





He shared, "And I want to say, for members who are here on the opposite side, that at the end of the day, we are here as representatives of the people. And whatever we may say about each other that we give recognition that we see all of us in our own way to see how we can represent the people of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Leader of the Opposition Dr. Godwin Friday said, inter alia, that the history of the building abounds with political parties and figures who rose, played their part and moved on.





"The humbling part of that is that for all of us, it comes to an end  whether its 22 years, five years or three years, said Dr. Friday.





"I actually like this building. I like this occasion and Kingstown. I like its across the street, where people can come and protest and exercise their democratic rights. That its close to them, he added.





In her address to the gathering, current Speaker of the House Rochelle Forde said, as the Parliament transitions to its new location, "We will take with us some physical reminders from this chamber into the new temporary Parliament building, and in that small yet symbolic way, we will transplant historical significance of the old into the new.





Other currents members of the Parliament also gave brief remarks.





Going forward





The next sitting of Parliament will take place at the new but temporary location in Calliaqua. That temporary facility was constructed at a cost exceeding EC$4 million.





On completion of the new Parliament building and Hall of Justice at Richmond/Beachmont, the temporary facility will be converted into a students hostel.





Construction of the new Parliament and Hall of Justice is expected to commence later this year. That project is estimated to cost some EC$50 million and Parliament has already authorized Government to borrow this money from the Republic of China on Taiwan.
South Africa: Water Minister assesses developments in Lekwa

Water and Sanitation Minister, Senzo Mchunu and his deputies, David Mahlobo and Judith Tshabalala, are on an oversight visit to Lekwa Local Municipality, Mpumalanga, to assess progress in the intervention projects aimed at addressing water and sanitation challenges.

The visit on Friday follows Mchunu's visit to the area in July 2022, where he committed an amount of R350 million to assist Lekwa to deal with its water and sanitation challenges.

The support by the Department of Water and Sanitation is geared towards the refurbishment of ageing infrastructure, as well as operations and maintenance to improve service to communities, the department said.

Mchunu will see for himself how things have improved since his last visit, and also engage with various stakeholders, including community members.

The Minister will visit various pump stations, waste water treatment works and sewer pipelines.

These include the Standerton Extension 8 Bulk Outfall Sewer Pipeline Project, Concor Drainage Site, Rooikopen Booster Pump Station 3 Project and Standerton Water Treatment Works.

Following the site visits, Mchunu and his deputies will meet the community at Sakhile Stadium.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2023-06-09. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
U.S. forces carry out military exercise in E Syria

Xinhua) 09:29, June 09, 2023

DAMASCUS, June 8 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. forces on Thursday carried out a live fire exercise at a gas field it controls in Syria's eastern province of Deir al-Zour, a war monitor reported.

The military exercise was conducted in the Koniko gas field in the countryside of Deir al-Zour, involving helicopters and warplanes firing live ammunition and carrying out airstrikes in the vicinity of the field, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The UK-based watchdog group said the move comes as part of the U.S. forces' efforts to fortify its positions in eastern Syria, particularly after Iranian-backed pro-Syrian government fighters had carried out several drone attacks against U.S. positions in that part of Syria.

The current military exercise came in tandem with arrangements by the U.S. forces to fortify their positions inside the gas field, said the observatory.

The Syrian government has long regarded the presence of U.S. troops in Syria as illegal, demanding an immediate withdrawal of the U.S. from Syria and blaming it for the deteriorating living conditions in Syria given the fact that the U.S. and its allied Kurdish groups control key gas and oil fields in eastern Syria.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
The United States (US) Navy received its first-ever upgraded "doomsday" plane, which the aerospace and defense giant Northrop Grumman officially delivered.

Northrop Grumman successfully sent the upgraded aircraft to the Navy under its multi-million Integrated Modification and Maintenance Contract or IMMC.

US Navy Receives First-Ever Upgraded 'Doomsday' Plane

The aerospace and defense giant announced in a press release that Northrop Grumman has successfully delivered the first E-6B aircraft, also known as the doomsday plane, to the US Navy.

Interesting Engineering reports that the "doomsday" aircraft acts as the network community backbone of the US Navy between the White House and its nuclear submarine fleet.

The upgrade to the E-6B includes new avionics, communications systems, and a self-defense system. The new avionics will allow the plane to fly for longer periods and in more challenging environments. Meanwhile, the all-new communications systems improve the plane's ability to transmit messages. And on top of that, the self-defense system will protect the plane from enemy attack.

It is worth noting that the upgraded E-6B is a significant improvement over the previous model. The new systems will make the plane more capable and more survivable. It should help to ensure that the Navy can continue to provide critical command, control, and communications capabilities to the fleet.

The E-6B is an airborne command, control, and communications platform, which the US Navy will operate.

As per Aero Time, the program manager of the US Navy PMA-271 acquisition command Captain Adam Scot says the "doomsday" plane would help them improve their "nuclear deterrence mission." He discloses, "During the past year, the team that fielded this capability worked tirelessly to implement improvements to deliver the Block II capability with urgency."

Read Also: VIDEO: Chinese Warship Nearly Collide With US Navy Destroyer; China Defends Actions, Accuses Washington of 'Provocation'

Northrop Grumman Integrated Modification and Maintenance Contract

According to the Defence Blog, the US Navy awarded the aerospace giant Northrop Grumman the Integrated Modification and Maintenance Contract last February 2022. The agreement grants the firm an opportunity to work on the E-6B Mercury platform, which is heavily based on the commercial aircraft, the Boeing 707.

Interesting Engineering notes that the contract costs to the tune of $111 million. Besides that, the US Navy confirmed that it tapped Northrop Grumman to work on several other "Mercury" aircraft by 2027.

And with that, the Aircraft Maintenance and Fabrication Center of Northrop Grumman in Lake Center took charge of the massive project.

The aerospace and defense juggernaut says it has successfully installed "five kits" to the upgraded E-6B platform. The firm notes that its integration should take the "aircraft command, control, and communications functions to the next level."

Related Article: US Navy Awards Northrop Grumman Contract for New Maritime Navigation Sensor

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(TBTCO) - Cac nha hoach inh chinh sach cua Cuc Du tru Lien bang My (FED) a phat tin hieu uu tien tu bo viec tang lai suat trong cuoc hop hai ngay, dien ra vao ngay 13-14/6 toi, trong khi van e ngo kha nang that chat hon nua. O nhung noi khac tren the gioi, ECB co kha nang tiep tuc tang lai suat, trong khi BoJ tiep tuc giu lai suat va cac quan chuc tien te Trung Quoc co the tranh bo sung cac bien phap kich thich vao luc nay.
Romanian civic activists and legal institutions team up to create child-friendly interview spaces for young victims of sexual abuse.

A comfortable sofa, a small table with two angel-winged chairs, coloring sheets and crayons, and even a dolls house. Things that would not be expected in this formal building. But rooms 305 and 306 are different. A sign on one of the doors reads: Good Place. Childrens hearing room.

We are in the Bucharest Prosecutors Office, a place where victims, witnesses, and defendants of the most serious crimes in the Romanian capital are interviewed daily.

Mihaela Chiper, president of Asociatia Victimelor Infractiunilor Sexuale (Association for Victims of Sexual Crimes, or VIS), is framing drawings that children have made while being interviewed over the past two years. She will hang the pictures on the newly lilac-colored walls. In 2022, VIS renovated and installed modern video equipment in the rooms.

Since 2021, Chiper and her association have set up this and seven other hearing rooms in prosecutors offices across the country, from scratch, through a fundraising campaign with another non-governmental organization.

Since 2021, two Romanian nonprofits have set up this childrens interview room in Bucharest and six others like it across Romania through a fundraising campaign. The rooms are designed to give children a safe space where they can speak about traumatic experiences without fear.

I wish every prosecutors office had a prosecutor specializing in child sex abuse cases, Chiper says when we meet again in Constanta, the seaside town where she lives with her partner and their three daughters. Two years ago, a special interview room funded by VIS opened here. Its a warm space, papered in blue with white polka dots and decorated with childrens drawings in colorful frames on the walls.

Along with a team of prosecutors and psychologists, her NGO brought in international experts last year in a joint project to train Romanian professionals in a relatively new, less stressful, method of interviewing child victims of sexual abuse.

Developed two decades ago by experts at the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, along with researchers from Israel, this method, known as the NICHD protocol, is now in use in around a dozen countries. Based on research into child psychology and memory, the method helps children to recall and tell the most painful stories of their lives in a way that makes them feel safe and listened to. Prosecutors and judges in the countries that have adopted the use of the NICHD protocol believe it allows them to obtain important details of a crime and improve the chances that the perpetrators are found and sentenced.

In 2022, 1,485 children were sexually abused in Romania, according to data from the county social welfare and child protection departments. Romanian police data, which are not correlated with social services data, show that in the same year there were 869 criminal reports of child rape and 694 reports of sexual assault on minors. Police also recorded 3,097 reports of the crime of sex with a minor, although in almost 70% of these incidents, the case was not sent to trial, according to justice experts.

The childrens hearing room in Bucharest first opened back in 2016, on the initiative of FONPC, an umbrella group of childrens NGOs.

At the time, Marian Trusca, a prosecutor in the Bucharest Prosecutors Office, set up the countrys first team of prosecutors specialized in child sexual abuse, all of them eager to use the well-received NICHD protocol. After seven years, the VIS group wanted to replicate this model throughout the country.

The germ of the idea behind VIS came to Chiper at her former job, when she covered the justice beat as a reporter on national TV. In 2016, the last story she filed, shortly after becoming a mother, reported the trial of several teachers at a private preschool accused of physically abusing toddlers.

Chiper sat in the courtroom, watching as very young children were brought in to testify. It was an image that stuck with her, and got her thinking about what she could do to make justice more child-friendly.

I was shocked and didnt understand why the judge was ordering that the children be brought to the courtroom for statements, she says.

Already aware of the special childrens hearing room and team of trained prosecutors in Bucharest, Chiper found herself wishing that every Romanian town could be similarly equipped. When in 2020 she mentioned this dream to a former TV colleague, Melania Medeleanu  now the head of Zi de bine (Tell Me the Good News), an association that raises funds for various humanitarian causes  Medeleanu replied, Why dont you create these rooms yourself? and promised to support her.

Just over two years ago, with the support of friends, her life partner,who is an architect, and Zi de bine, VIS raised funds and gained official permission to open the first special hearing room in Constanta.

Child Victims: Neither Seen nor Heard

Prosecutors from Bucharests special team say that unlike other crimes, where evidence can take the form of witness statements and audio or video recordings, in the case of child sexual abuse the victims statement is the crucial evidence. And to obtain such a statement requires not only the physical infrastructure of the special interview rooms but also human infrastructure: prosecutors trained to interview under the NICHD protocol. This method helps them to relate and build a safe relationship with the child in order to get important details about their abuse story.

More than 85% of complaints of sexual abuse never reach a judge, Trusca says, and many that do are dismissed for lack of evidence.

In the fall of 2022, Trusca went public with a claim that the Prosecutor Generals Office bore responsibility for the lack of training of prosecutors across the country to investigate cases of child sexual abuse.

The General Prosecutors Office in Romania is ignorant when it comes to dealing with child sexual abuse, he wrote for Juridice.ro, a site for Romanian justice professionals, making similar statements in an interview with RFE/RL.

Trusca had already joined VISs project to open more special childrens hearing rooms and train prosecutors in how to use them. Chiper and her organization accomplished in a year what the Romanian state has not been able to do for decades, he told Transitions.

She has created processes that are now a model for the Romanian state, for the public system, and I hope this model will be taken up, he said.

Romanias justice system has also come in for criticism from international institutions over the way it tackles sexual abuse of children.

According to a 2016 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decision, Romanian justice investigates such cases inconsistently, with no nationwide coordination, and has failed to pass legislation punishing all forms of rape and sexual abuse of children.

Laura Albu, a civic activist and a member of the Council of Europes GREVIO expert group on violence against women and domestic violence, argues that the Romanian justice system fails to treat children with respect. Its a longstanding problem in Romania, Albu says. In the early 2000s, she helped set up a childrens hearing room in Iasi, the northeastern city where she lives.

Opening the room in itself was an incredible achievement, she says, before sadly recalling that police never used it as intended.

Now, 20 years later, were in the same situation, nationally. We dont have special rooms where children can be listened to; we dont have justice professionals specialized in interacting with children; we dont have continuous training for these professionals, she says.

In a report issued in 2022, GREVIO cited the need for childrens hearing rooms, so that their statements need to be taken only once so as not to interview them multiple times and increase the risk of further traumatizing them.

Some childrens advocates say Romanias legislation treating sexual violence is not in line with European law and have called for European Union action to spur Romania to update its legislation. This spring, 36 non-governmental organizations called for European Commission action against Romania over the treatment of victims of sexual crimes.

One problem is that interviews with child victims are not video-recorded so they are often interviewed more than once, which can cause re-traumatization, according to the NGOs.

Government Follows Civil Societys Lead

In 2021, Medeleanu and Chiper raised almost 82,000 euros to set up six childrens interview rooms through crowdfunding campaigns and corporate donations. They say it costs 13,000 euros to furnish a room and equip it with a special recording system.

Its not a sexy topic and it wasnt easy to raise the money, but we at Zi de bine mainly fund solution-based projects that can be replicated, either by the state or further managed by NGOs. And this project was clearly a solution for the justice system, Medeleanu says.

Chiper said dozens of prosecutors and judges got in touch with her after learning of the rooms opened by VIS and Zi de bine to say such facilities would help them in their daily work of interviewing children.

Last summer, a prosecutor from Constanta told Chiper that he obtained a five-year sentence for an elderly man who intimately fondled his 9-year-old niece. Being able to interview the child in the prepared hearing room made her statement important evidence in the case, he said.

The positive reception of Bucharests pilot of special hearing rooms led to the idea being adopted on a countrywide level. In 2021, the Justice Ministry started a 2-million-euro project with Norwegian funds to set up 35 more interview rooms for minors.

Even the exterior of the Bucharest prosecutors office tries to send a welcoming message to children.

Its extremely important that, once this kind of trauma occurs, the minor does not end up being subjected, again and again, to relive those abominable events, Mihai Pasca, state secretary in the Ministry of Justice, said last year, the educational news site Edupedu.ro reported.

In addition to these new hearing rooms in prosecutors offices, a governmental program called Din grija pentru copii (For children, with care) oversaw the creation of 23 childrens interview rooms in police stations in 19 counties, as of October 2022.

Chiper welcomes these steps on the part of justice and police officials, saying it demonstrates that the idea of treating young victims with respect is having an impact. However, she stresses, both she and the original Bucharest group of prosecutors of crimes against minors, whom she considers her partners, know that physical infrastructure is only half the solution.

Thats why, starting last year, with the help of a UNICEF Romania grant obtained by VIS, half of the countrys prosecutors are being trained to interview children using the NICHD protocol.

A Kind, Yet Powerful Legal Instrument

Trusca, a prosecutor with more than 20 years experience, was among the first to undergo such training six years ago. He has since worked to train his colleagues, passing on his knowledge to younger prosecutors.

Last year, the Bucharest prosecutors office took another step not common in Romania, assigning a prosecutor to work solely on child sexual abuse cases.

This job belongs to Alexandra Tomescu, an enthusiastic 34-year-old. A mother of two, she says she has always been the kind of person who connects easily with children.

Tomescu has prosecuted numerous sexual perpetrators and obtained preventive measures and convictions based on victims testimonies, in one case tracking down evidence in a rape case 10 years after the assault.

She believes children need safe spaces where they can speak without fear, but its more than the infrastructure. The interviewer also needs training in how to talk to children.

The relationship you form with the child in the interview is very important, Tomescu says. The central evidence is this statement by the injured party, which ideally should be taken with this scientific method, the NICHD protocol.

Importantly, the child must know it is acceptable to tell the interviewer that they dont know the answer to a question, and that they should speak up when the interviewer makes a mistake. In this way, Tomescu explains, the prosecutor can establish a trusting relationship with the child and train their memory to recall details that may prove vital.

The NICHD protocol is used extensively in the Nordic countries as well as Canada, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Portugal, Scotland, and the United States. Legal professionals are trained not just in how to elicit information, but in how to gain the childs trust and cooperation. Often the interviewer will start by asking open-ended questions about the childs everyday life, preparing the child to later answer questions about the recent traumatic event.

Like any human interaction touching on highly intimate topics, it cannot be learned from a simple workshop of an hour or two, says Tomescu, who has practiced this interviewing method since 2021. But it can be learned from recurrent, ongoing training and practice in the special rooms, with support from your superiors, she adds.

Its important not to sit with your nose stuck in the printed protocol in front of you, but to connect with the child without tiring them out, she says. That means to somehow be connected with their story, not to sit and write all the time. Thats why its good to have a backup person in the other room, watching the interview, and prompting you afterward to ask other questions if youve missed things.

Next Step: Training and More Training

To help prosecutors deal with the 13,000 child sexual violence cases in the pipeline, training in the NICHD protocol at the national level is urgently needed, according to Chiper.

The grant from UNICEF Romania brought in international experts to train 30 prosecutors and psychologists. The trainers included researchers who helped develop the NICHD interviewing method, such as psychology professors Mireille Cyr of the University of Montreal, Canada, and Irit Hershkowitz of the University of Haifa, Israel.

Alexandra Tomescu and her colleagues from the Bucharest Public Prosecutors Office attended the training session. This year, they are the ones who will teach the technique to other prosecutors in the country.

Investing in justice in this way is extremely important, says former judge Corina Voicu, a lecturer at the National Institute of Magistrates, where she teaches future prosecutors and judges.

Voicu says the Romanian state has always underfunded the justice system, starting at the grassroots level. Some judges, including her, have bought their own ergonomic chairs or PC monitors. Equipping the justice system has been a problem that nobody has been interested in, she says.

This becomes clear at trials of accused sexual offenders, she says. Although on paper we have laws that protect all kinds of victims from meeting [the accused] in court, in reality those much-needed separate circuits for victims and aggressors have not been built.

If the authorities replicate the training scheme at a larger level, Voicu hopes, this along with the growing network of special interview rooms will persuade more prosecutors to specialize in child abuse cases.

Chiper says that since the VIS-supported rooms started operating, reports of child sexual abuse have risen nationwide. Hundreds of children have been interviewed in the less stressful setting of the new rooms. However, not every prosecutors office is using the rooms to their full potential, she says, noting that at one point, only five interviews had been done in Sibiu, compared to 80 interviews in Bacau, although the two rooms opened at almost the same time.

Another, potentially more serious obstacle to using the rooms and the NICHD protocol at full potential is the patchy acceptance of the new methods by judges. Prosecutors who use the new hearing rooms hoped to use the recorded interviews with child victims to help them educate judges who may not fully grasp the reality of childrens suffering, Chiper says. Some judges do not watch the recorded interviews and choose to re-hear victims, whether in private or in the courtroom, despite the risk of adding to the childs trauma.

The problems with [such judges] go beyond our nice cameras and good quality recordings, Chiper says.

Chiper is now working full-time, joined by five other staff members, with the goal of developing her organization and providing NICHD protocol training to more legal professionals. VIS recently took part in a swimming contest to raise funds for a childrens interview room in Vaslui County in the far east of the country, where many people live in vulnerable rural communities impacted by high rates of poverty and domestic violence.

Assessing the VIS project, now in its third year of training legal professionals and setting up child-friendly interview rooms, Chiper says its biggest achievement is to have reached many prosecutors and psychologists across Romania.

They all share the same concern for children that we do. But they also share the belief that we have to support children, to believe them and make their voices heard.



Oana Sandu is a freelance journalist with more than 15 years of experience in radio and narrative journalism in Romania. Her reporting focuses primarily on social issues such as domestic violence, extreme poverty, and discrimination against children with disabilities. In 2022, she was awarded a fellowship from the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and wrote about the impact of domestic violence on early childhood.

All photos courtesy of Asociatia VIS.
The Wyoming Supreme Court ruled Thursday that state circuit courts have jurisdiction to decide if criminal defendants charged with felonies are mentally fit to appear in legal proceedings before their cases advance to district court.

A Park County District Court judge raised the question after being made aware of an unpublished legal decision, which ruled that circuit courts are unable to determine competency or suspended proceedings for competency evaluations in felony cases, the ruling states.

Circuit courts have limited jurisdiction; they deal with misdemeanor crimes that carry a sentence of a year in jail or less.

However, a person charged with a crime such as first-degree murder will also have their proceedings start in circuit court for an initial appearance and preliminary hearing. A judge will then determine if enough evidence exists to move the case to district court.

If it appears at any stage of a criminal proceeding that there is reasonable cause to believe that the accused has a mental illness or deficiency, all further legal proceedings must be suspended, the ruling states.

The right to be competent arises from due process, the ruling states.

Wyomings highest court says the plain language of state statute clearly gives circuit court the right to address this.

As we have repeatedly held that a preliminary hearing is a critical stage of a criminal proceeding, there can be no doubt that a preliminary hearing is a stage of a criminal proceeding, the ruling states.

At these hearings, a person must understand the nature of their alleged crime, consult with counsel and assist in preparing a defense, the ruling states. An individual must be in a position to fully comprehend these proceedings as part of their due process rights.

So circuit court must address competency, as it is the introduction to all criminal proceedings  even if the case will ultimately land elsewhere, the ruling holds.
The Department of Justice is investigating possible campaign finance violations tied to a conservative-backed operation in Wyoming to spy on Democrats and some Republicans ahead of the 2020 election, people familiar with the matter told CNN, which broke the news early Friday.

No one has yet been accused of wrongdoing, CNN reported.

The investigation stems from a 2021 New York Times story that documented the undercover operation, which aimed to sabotage people and organizations seen as threats to former President Donald Trumps agenda. A story published Friday by the Times confirmed CNNs reporting.

According to the 2021 Times investigation, two conservative operatives, Sofia LaRocca and Beau Maier, posed as progressive donors to infiltrate and gather information from Wyomings liberal and moderate Republican circles. The Times reported that Gore-Tex heiress Susan Gore, a wealthy conservative donor and founder of the Wyoming Liberty Group, funded the effort, though Gore has said the allegations amount to disinformation, and that she wasnt aware her money was being used for the operations.

Prosecutors have subpoenaed Gore and other individuals and companies as part of the investigation, according to reports. Former British intelligence official Richard Seddon, security contractor Erik Prince, who is the brother of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and former head of Project Veritas James OKeefe were also included in one of the subpoenas. Seddon and Prince received funding from Gore to train activists for the political operation, the Times reported.

Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, Gillette Republican Sen. Eric Barlow, Laramie Democrat Karlee Provenza and her spouse, Better Wyoming Executive Director Nate Martin, were among those in Wyoming subject to spying in the conservative-backed operation, according to the Times.

Gordons spokesperson said the governor is traveling and couldnt immediately comment on the development. Barlow, who was surprised by the news, said he hadnt heard about an investigation and that no one has contacted him regarding one.

Provenza told the Star-Tribune on Friday that a CNN journalist had contacted Martin about the story, but that prior to this she had no knowledge of an investigation and was surprised to learn there have been subpoenas.

Shes unsure what, if any, role she will have in the investigation, but said that shes grateful the Department of Justice is at least interested in looking into the covert operation. She added that people who use money to disrupt democracy and get in the way of what voters want should be held accountable.

The Times reported in 2021 that LaRocca and Maier went on double dates with Provenza and Martin. According to the investigation, they had also pledged large political donations to Democratic organizations and candidates, which gained the couple entry into fundraisers and a Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas.

Its unclear if LaRocca and Maier made these donations at someone elses request. Under federal law, its illegal to make campaign donations using another persons name. So-called straw donations have been subject to federal investigations.

It was super unsettling, Provenza said of how it felt to learn that the two had been spying on her and Martin. They were in our lives for years. I laugh about it now, but its been something that I havent laughed about.

Last year, Provenza confronted Gore at the Wyoming Capitol during the legislative session, later describing the interaction on Twitter.

Susan Gore, who paid over a million dollars to spy on me and members of the legislature for over a year, just testified in Senate Minerals, Provenza wrote. When I shook her hand and said You paid over a million dollars to have spies sent to my home. She replied, I know, I made you famous.

According to the Times investigation, former Wyoming GOP national committeewoman Marti Halverson, who has also served in the Legislature, provided a list of people for the operatives to target. Though Halverson told the Times that she had nothing to say on the subject, she later told WyoFile that she did create a list of legislators for Gore sorted by votes on spending bills. But she told WyoFile that she wasnt aware of how the list would be used.

Halverson didnt immediately respond to a Star-Tribune message seeking comment.

This story had been updated.
The most fundamental right of American citizenship is the right to vote.

Today, the Supreme Court rejected Alabama's attempt to dilute the voting power of Black Americans and to further weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

READ NEXT: Readout of President Biden's Call with Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada

This decision upheld the law, but our fight to protect, strengthen, and expand the freedom to vote continues. Voting is the right that unlocks all other rights, and fair maps are essential for representation.

Important freedoms we enjoy and continue to fight for today come from our equal access to the ballot box. That is why the President and I continue to call on Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.

READ MORE: Statement by President Joe Biden on the Passing of William Spriggs

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A Biden administration plan to spend $570 million to reduce railway crossing incidents in the U.S. is a step in the right direction, but doesnt go far enough, a Wyoming lawmaker whos worked to address rail-safety issues said Wednesday.

The large allocation from the federal government, part of the $1 trillion infrastructure package passed last year, comes as rail companies increase train lengths to deal with ever-growing staffing issues and a desire to cut costs.

Rail companies maintain the increase in train lengths does not pose any additional safety concerns, but some in Congress have called this into question after a rise in derailment incidents.

The funding also aims to eliminate incidents of individuals or emergency services being blocked by mile-long trains without any other alternative routes.

Federal officials have announced a number of specific projects tied to the program. A Wyoming-based project has yet to be publicly announced.

Albany County Rep. Ken Chestek, a Democrat, advocated for stronger rail regulations during this years legislative session with his failed Allowable Train Lengths House Bill  which would have imposed an 8,500-foot limit and a 10-minute maximum limit for trains to block an intersection.

Chestek said funding to improve or eliminate railroad crossings is a positive step  but fails to address the root of the problem.

What these infrastructure projects are doing are enabling the train companies to continue to run long trains, Chestek said. The more crossings you eliminate, the more incentive there is to run long trains. It solves one of the safety issues but does nothing for the other safety issue  being derailment.

Chesteck brought forth his legislation on the same day of a major train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The train was carrying hazardous materials.

Rail regulation proposals are not a new topic in the Wyoming Legislature.

There have been 13 railroad regulation-related pieces proposed since 2000 in statehouse. Only one that has passed  it dealt with rules governing stopping distances for cars when approaching railways.

Five proposals would have required certain classes of Wyoming trains to have two operators in the cab of a locomotive  instead of the typical single operators.

Advocates for the two-operator rule point to the lack of federal requirements and the ever-diminishing presence of humans inside locomotives with the integration of automated technology.

Former Rep. Stan Blake, D-Rock Springs, said rail unions want the automation safety technology in the locomotive, but that it cant replace the need for an additional operator in the locomotive with the conductor.

Its just like a plane, said Blake, who worked for Union Pacific Railway for 31 years and who pushed for the two-train operators requirement in the Legislature. Planes can basically fly themselves  if something goes wrong  then its nice to have a second pair of hands  like a co-pilot.

In 2022, there were 15 recorded on-the-job injuries by rail operators across Wyoming counties, with varying incidents involving overexertion, sprains, fractures, crushed appendages, and exposure to fumes.

Chestek said he hopes to return to train regulation debates with a new proposal in the 2025 legislative session.
CHEYENNE  James Watt, the Reagan administrations sharp-tongued, pro-development interior secretary who was admired by conservatives but ran afoul of environmentalists, Beach Boys fans and eventually the president, has died. He was 85.

Watt died in Arizona on May 27, son Eric Watt said in a statement Thursday.

In an administration divided between so-called pragmatists and hard-liners, few stood as far to the right at the time as Watt, who once labeled the environmental movement as preservation vs. people and the general public as a clash between liberals and Americans.

In that sense, Watt foreshadowed combative Interior secretaries like Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt, who, like Watt, aggressively pushed to grant oil, gas and coal leases on public land, increase offshore drilling and limit expansion of national parks and monuments.

While no ones death should be celebrated, he was the worst of MAGA before it was invented, tweeted David Doniger, a senior strategic director at the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, referring to former President Donald Trumps Make America Great Again slogan.

Watt and his supporters saw him as an upholder of President Ronald Reagans core conservative values, but opponents were alarmed by his policies and offended by his comments. In 1981, shortly after he was appointed, the Sierra Club collected more than 1 million signatures seeking Watts ouster and criticized such actions as clear-cutting federal lands in the Pacific Northwest, weakening environmental regulations for strip mining and hampering efforts to curtail air pollution in Californias Yosemite Valley.

With his bald head and thick glasses, he became the rare interior secretary recognizable to the general public, for reasons beyond the environment. He characterized members of a coal advisory panel using derogatory language and in 1983 tried to ban music from Fourth of July festivities on the National Mall, saying it attracted the wrong element.

The Beach Boys had been recent mall headliners, and their fans included President Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan. With Watts statement facing widespread mockery, the Reagans invited the Beach Boys for a special White House visit. Watt, meanwhile, was summoned to receive a plaster model of a foot with a hole in it.

In his 1985 book The Courage of a Conservative, Watt wrote that the controversy actually arose because I was a conservative. Members of a liberal press saw an opportunity to create a controversy by censoring the facts and avoiding the real issues. He said the initial stories about the rock music ban only mentioned that the Beach Boys had performed in the past. Yet before we knew what was happening, banner headlines proclaimed that I had banned the Beach Boys. I was astonished.

Cutting regulations was his primary mission. Between the time he was confirmed as Interior secretary in 1981 until he resigned under pressure in 1983, Watt implemented an offshore leasing program that offered virtually the entire U.S. coastline for oil and gas drilling and held the largest coal lease sale in history, auctioning off 1.1 billion tons (1 billion metric tons) of coal in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming.

Watt tripled the amount of onshore land being leased for oil and gas exploration and doubled the acreage leased for geothermal resources.

Watt did spend $1 billion to restore and improve national parks and added 2,800 square miles (7,300 square kilometers) to the nations wilderness system. And his efforts to exploit natural resources made America stronger, he wrote to Reagan in October 1983.

Our excellent record for managing the natural resources of this land is unequaled  because we put people in the environmental equation, Watt wrote.

But eight days after writing to the president, he rode horseback into a cow pasture down the road from Reagans California ranch to announce his resignation. He was succeeded by a longtime Reagan aide, William Clark.

I had outworn my usefulness, Watt said of his decision, adding that others wouldnt get off my case about his insulting coal advisory panel comment.

Watt was born Jan. 31, 1938, in Lusk, Wyoming, and his family later moved to Wheatland, Wyoming, where his father practiced law. He attended the University of Wyoming, graduating in 1960 and obtaining a law degree two years later.

In 1962, Watt became a personal assistant to former Gov. Milward L. Simpson, and he went to Washington after Simpson was elected to the U.S. Senate later that year. In 1966-69, he helped develop policies on such issues as pollution, mining, public lands and energy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, then in early 1969 he joined the Nixon administration as an Interior Department undersecretary.

In 1975, President Gerald Ford appointed him to the Federal Power Commission.

While Jimmy Carter was president, Watt worked in the private sector as president and chief legal officer of the pro-development Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver.

He did consulting work after leaving the Reagan administration, at one point turning heads when he agreed to represent Indian tribes in oil operations and hotel developments after previously labeling Indian reservations the failure of socialism. He also accepted six-figure consulting fees to represent developers of a federally subsidized housing project.

He moved back to Wyoming in 1986 and set up a law office in Jackson, taught at his alma mater and served as a legal consultant and speaker.

But his consulting work involving federal housing money came under scrutiny in the late 1980s when an investigation was launched into corruption in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In 1996, he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor for withholding documents from a grand jury investigating HUD. He was fined $5,000, put on five years probation and ordered to perform community service. He said he had made a serious mistake and hoped to get on with a constructive role in society.

Over the years, Watt expressed fears that unless they were stopped, radical environmental movements like Earth First! would persuade the cowards of Congress to ban all hunting, eliminate all logging and livestock grazing on public lands and further jeopardize the minerals industries.

He lived in his later years in Wickenburg, Arizona, with his wife, Leilani.
For the second time, Wyomings congressional delegation is calling an indictment of former President Donald Trump a political ploy aimed at hurting the Republican presidential candidate.

They also responded to the latest indictment, which is based on allegations Trump mishandled public documents, by questioning President Joe Bidens own handling of classified documents.

Trump revealed Thursday afternoon on his Truth Social platform that federal prosecutors had indicted him for allegedly mishandling more than 100 classified documents after he left the White House. In the 49-page indictment unsealed Friday, a grand jury charged Trump with 37 separate counts, the majority of them linked to the Espionage Act including the willful retention of national defense information. He was also accused of obstructing attempts by the federal government to collect the documents.

Trump called the indictment the Boxes Hoax on Truth Social, saying he was innocent and was being attacked by the Biden administration and Democrats to weaken his campaign for president.

As she did when Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury in March for hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, Rep. Harriet Hageman called the federal charges something that Third World countries do while seconding Trumps assertions that the indictment is politically motivated. Hageman released a statement backing the former president within a half an hour of Trump breaking the news about the indictment on Truth Social.

Everyone knows that if Trump were not running for president again, none of this would be happening, which proves this is a political prosecution, Hageman said in a statement. I hope every American can see this for what it is  the abuse of federal law enforcement powers against a political opponent.

All three of Wyomings Republican representatives also pointed to the ongoing investigation into classified documents discovered at Bidens former Washington office and Wilmington, Delaware, home last year while expressing doubts about the indictment. As in the Trump case, a special counsel is investigating the Biden documents.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis said in a Friday statement that she has serious concerns about Trumps handling of classified documents, but that the Justice Department shouldnt be weaponized to target President Bidens political opponent.

This is the first time the DOJ has decided to pursue criminal charges against a former president. Classified documents were recently found at other leaders homes, including President Biden, and the question is, will he be held to the same standard as President Trump? she said.

Sen. John Barrasso also referenced former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clintons handling of classified documents and the lack of criminal charges for both Clinton and Biden in suggesting that Trump is being treated unequally.

You cant help but ask why this is happening, Barrasso said in a Friday morning statement posted to Twitter. It feels political, and its rotten.

In her full-throated defense of Trump, Hageman said that the indictment would only serve to help Trump.

Its un-American and its wrong, but like all the other attempts to trip up President Trump, it will only make him stronger, she said.

The indictment and past support

The unsealed indictment shows that Trump faces a range of charges including obstruction of justice, withholding a document or record and corruptly concealing a document or record. Alongside Trump, his aide Walt Nauta was also charged for his role in an alleged scheme to shield classified documents at Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida from federal investigators.

Among the documents Trump retained after leaving office was information on U.S. nuclear programs, military vulnerabilities and the weapons capabilities of both the U.S. and foreign countries, according to the indictment. Federal prosecutors allege that Trump showed others without clearance secret documents on two occasions while admitting that they were classified. In one, a recording captures Trump saying he could have declassified the information as president but now couldnt as a private citizen.

Trump is slated to appear in federal court in Miami for arraignment on Tuesday. He still faces separate criminal probes in Georgia and Washington for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and role in the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol.

While Wyomings representatives compared Trumps handling of classified documents to that of Biden and Clinton, fact checkers and analysts have said that there is little overlap. The difference stems from Trumps knowledge of the documents and his attempts to fight the National Archives requests to return them.

Wyomings congressional delegation has had different responses to Trumps candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination ahead of next years primaries. Hageman, Trumps pick to defeat Rep. Liz Cheney, remains an ardent supporter of the former president, while Barrasso and Lummis have been relatively noncommittal, saying they will support the Republican nominee.

The delegation also backed Trump after an investigation overseen by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg led to his indictment earlier this year for hush money payments during his 2016 presidential campaign. They called the charges politically motivated and portrayed the investigation as an organized attempt to hurt Trump.
Levi Wardell knows more about drug use and overdoses than anyone should.

He started using meth at 15 with his dad in Cheyenne. Alcohol abuse and other drugs followed in meths wake. He entered recovery four years ago after surviving several overdoses and other devastating consequences of his addiction.

Addictions deadly costs are still a part of his day-to-day life, but now from a new perspective.

As a funeral director and practitioner apprentice at the Wiederspahn-Radomsky Chapel of the Chimes in the capital city, Wardell helps families who have lost one of their own to an overdose. Some saw it coming. Many didnt.

It is not just the typical junkies and druggies, he said. We get a lot of really good families that come through here that are planning the funeral  and theyre just brokenhearted.

In mid-April, three likely overdose deaths came through the funeral homes door in a single week  the most Wardell can remember seeing in such a short timeframe.

Of course, he only knows theyre overdoses when families tell him, so he may have missed other surges. The rising body count corresponds to the states influx in illicit fentanyl  an extremely potent and cheap man-made opioid.

For Wardell, it seems the overdose deaths keep coming.

I feel like were getting them once a week, he said. And maybe thats exaggerated, it just seems like theyre constant.

Tattoos peaked from the cuffs of Wardells blue tailored suit as he related his experience in the basement of a beautiful suburban home across from a park. His pregnant wife and young daughter went about their lives upstairs.

For his little girls sake, he hopes the scourge of overdoses and deadly synthetic opioids like fentanyl get more attention around Wyoming. Fentanyl and its analogs have been a growing danger around the state and the nation.

That should be getting just as [many] headlines as freaking COVID, he said of the opioid epidemic. People are dropping left and right, and its not just junkies and criminals.

Fentanyl is increasingly being mixed into drugs like meth or cocaine, but its also pressed into pills that can look deceptively similar to pharmaceuticals like Oxycontin and Adderall. The varying strength of these drugs can blindside users  from those with long-term substance use disorders to teens experimenting at a party  with deadly consequences. These powerful opioids are even making their way into schools.

Laramie County School District No. 1 started stocking Narcan in every school and outlying building on Jan. 15, according to school nurse Janet Farmer. Theyve already used the opioid reversal drug once, Farmer said in early May. They would have used it once or twice more if theyd had access to the life-saving drug sooner.

The school district isnt the only institution or organization taking proactive steps to combat the opioid epidemic  often in response to hard-earned direct experience  but such efforts remain rare and disconnected. Thats partially because comprehensive statewide awareness and nuanced community-based interventions have been hampered by limited access to timely information about whats happening in their own communities.

WyoFile found through six months of reporting that access to Wyomings overdose data is so limited its often unusable. By the time many of the people working to save lives learn about an influx of tainted drugs, or a spike in overdoses, its already too late  even though the data often exists.

Health officials and local experts say the cautious approach to data dissemination is due to privacy and accuracy concerns that arise, in part, from the states small population and correspondingly small numbers of overdoses. Other rural states like Alaska and Missouri, meanwhile, have figured out how to provide far more data in a timely manner.

But in Wyoming, information that is potentially life-saving is not reaching the people who could warn residents about specific, real-time local risks, provide overdose reversal drugs or prepare and equip first responders.

Suspected overdoses

Data obtained by WyoFile through records requests shows that in January of this year, Wyoming EMS workers responded to a significant spike in suspected overdoses.

Laramie County EMS recorded the most with 32 the highest monthly number in the five years of data WyoFile procured. The tally includes suspected overdoses and does not specify whether or not the patient died. It excludes overdoses in which a person was contacted and revived by someone other than EMS personnel.

Several other counties saw record overdose numbers in January, too, according to the EMS data, including Natrona (27), Campbell (18), Sheridan (9) and Lincoln (7). Some counties tied with previous records in January, like Albany (8). County population rates revealed this trend, too. However, this analysis cant show whether there are similar trends in other counties because the Wyoming Department of Health shielded small numbers over privacy concerns.

But the spike in EMS-suspected overdoses is something Laramie County Commissioner Gunnar Malm says he wasnt privy to.

It just goes back to one of the biggest problems probably in government efficiency in general, is the siloization of information, he said. When you have these silos and different agencies responsible for different things, its really hard to make sure that you have good collaboration.

An influx of locally controlled resources, and the corresponding opportunity for on-the-ground officials to affect meaningful change, make the knowledge gap between EMS and policy makers all the more consequential.

Laramie County, like many other counties and towns, has a big new pot of money to combat the opioid crisis. The funds came from legal settlements stemming from over prescription of opioid pain medications that caused many to develop addictions.

As of late last year, the Wyoming Attorney Generals office calculated the state would receive about $9.4 million from the first few settlements  and more is expected from other settlements in the works. Counties and local communities will get 65% of the total settlement, according to the OneWyo Opioid Settlement Memorandum of Agreement.

Laramie County alone is expecting more than $1 million in settlement funds, according to Malm. The county is collaborating more with medical professionals, the coroner and law enforcement to figure out how best to spend the money, he said. Because of his experience, addiction treatment resources are also a personal priority.

Im actually a person in long-term recovery myself, he said. Im an alcoholic. So I have about seven and a half years sober at this point.

Even with input from a broad array of stakeholders, though, leaders say better data could help them make better decisions. In Campbell County, Commissioner Colleen Faber says theyre working to allocate settlement funds, too.

We didnt have any hard data or numbers to say, OK, our opioid use is really high or fentanyl is increasing by this much in the county, which would be helpful, in my opinion, she said.

Campbell County received about $300,000 in its first settlement payment, County Administrative Director Denton Knapp said, and commissioners are working with local groups and experts to figure out how to spend it. When asked, neither Knapp nor Faber said they were aware of a spike in overdoses.

Asked about the January overdose spike, Wyoming Department of Health Director Stefan Johansson asked WyoFile to share the analysis that demonstrated the trend. WDH spokesperson Kim Deti then followed up that WyoFile should be cautious with the data to avoid misrepresenting the severity of the problem.

The analysis in this series followed strict protocols to focus on statistically significant and certain trends. The raw data provided by WDH pre-analysis is here.

Its unclear whether Johansson was previously aware of the spike, but he maintains that siloed communication is not a challenge for the WDH.

We dont have any issues sharing data within the department, Johansson said. And so maybe theres a perception that behavioral health division is operating in its vacuum and EMS or public health is operating in its vacuum. [But thats] certainly not the case.

Hidden in plain sight

Aaron Koehler noticed the January uptick in overdoses while compiling information WyoFile requested, he said. He directs the Office of EMS, which is responsible for providing statewide overdose information to the federal NEMSIS database. That data set shows approximate rates of nonfatal opioid overdoses by state and county. It was released to the general public late last year.

As of June 1, NEMSIS showed that Wyoming had lower-than-average nonfatal overdoses as reported by EMS. At the county-level, though, Fremont was higher than the national average, while Sweetwater and Laramie were around the average. This changes frequently, though.

The Wyoming OEMS is a small team with a big job that goes well beyond data collection and dissemination, Koehler said.

Im here to regulate the EMS profession and provide the best patient care, he said. While other WDH offices are tasked with focusing on data work, we have a very small, very small office of one data manager, who does his best.

In 2020, the state cut the OEMS budget by nearly 30%. Still, getting more information to the public is the right thing to do, Koehler said, and he intends to make it happen.

I really do feel that were public servants. Were here to serve the public, he said. With a lot of things going on in the country right now, providing data, providing hard evidence, and really being able to show the full, fully encompassed story of whats going on, I think its very important.

As for spreading the word about the spike, Koehler said hed want data from more recent months before declaring that this is an actual trend, but assured WyoFile there are ongoing discussions about how to better communicate this kind of information to the public and other stakeholders.

One of the biggest puzzles is how to share information without revealing exactly who overdosed  a real challenge in Wyomings small towns. In the OEMS data obtained by WyoFile, officials suppressed  or omitted  every data point in which there were between one and four suspected overdoses in a county in a given month to secure individuals privacy. Thats standard practice in other states and federal agencies. The privacy measure comes at a cost though: It can leave sparsely populated rural areas in the dark and make trends hard to spot.

In addition to privacy, analysts have concerns about statistical relevance in smaller communities. No one, for example, wants to rewrite policy because overdoses increased by 100% if the actual change is from one person to two.

Its one thing to be in New York City and count the number of opioid overdoses; its another thing to be in Pinedale, right? said Rodney Wambeam, a senior research scientist with the Wyoming Survey & Analysis Center. It doesnt mean Pinedale might not have a bigger problem per capita, its just that when numbers are so small, its hard to know.

There could be steady overdose increases in Albany, Teton or Sheridan Counties, for example, but because of how much EMS data was suppressed to protect privacy, its impossible to say.

Even with these limitations, a WyoFile analysis found  with a high level of mathematical certainty  that several Wyoming counties have seen a steady increase in EMS-reported overdoses over the past several years.

Identifying and conveying local trends is still important, Wambeam said, because even though Wyoming communities share similarities, they each handle problems in their own way.

Wambeam and WYSAC will be working over the next year and a half to get a better grasp on the states opioid-related data needs, as contracted by WDHs Behavioral Health Division.

Through federal funding from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the Agency has the opportunity to address the opioid misuse epidemic through data collection and aligning goals, strategies, and activities, WDHs request for proposal states. The goal of this needs assessment and strategic planning process is to create a deeper understanding of the data and a roadmap for addressing this complex epidemic.

This is a step in the right direction, but it could mean years of waiting on more local data to inform the types of interventions that could save lives.

Meantime, volunteers are on the ground working with, and advocating for, people who use drugs in the state.

Ariel Bernath works with the Wyoming Harm Reduction Collective, and said the group is doing its best with limited data and resources. More local, timely information could help them save lives, she said.

Having information like the EMS data that WyoFile procured makes it so much easier to make a case for more grant money in the state, she said.

That grant money could be used for outreach and to bring more harm-reduction tools like fentanyl test strips and naloxone into the areas that need them most and in a manner that responds directly to fact-based need.

But also, maybe down the line, [it could inform] policy changes too, she said. Lawmakers are often interested in data.

Counting the dead

EMS data could include both fatal and nonfatal overdoses, but doesnt differentiate between the two. The state relies on its 23 county coroners to tally drug overdose deaths.

WDHs statewide dataset shows these deaths have remained fairly level over the last decade  but once again, local trends are harder to spot with limited data.

Ninety-six Wyoming residents died from drug overdoses in 2013. Annual totals dipped as low as 60 in the intervening years, before climbing again. Ninety-three people died from drug overdoses last year.

The state provides five-year averages for overdose deaths by county  a metric that may not paint the clearest picture during a time of rapid change. Wyoming experienced a decrease in overdose deaths about five years ago, for example, followed by a more recent increase. That fluctuation could inform response efforts. But a five-year average of the same data can obscure changes over time and instead could show little or no change.

Deti with WDH acknowledges that balancing medical privacy concerns with the limited data can lead to unsatisfactory results.

There is no comprehensive or definitive source of data that can tell you how many overdoses occurred in the state or by county, she stated in an email. The pieces of that puzzle that are available are not complete. Again, that may be frustrating but it is also true.

Director Johansson echoed those points, adding that WDH also aims to provide the most accurate data, which can take time and limit whats released.

We provide what we can, and that has some constraints, both in terms of data availability and [data privacy], he said.

The result is WDH information with limited utility for local leaders.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes county-level overdose data in Wyoming that suppresses data sets with fewer than 10 deaths for each month. But that, too, leaves many counties data completely in the dark.

County coroners can also supply information, and a few gave WyoFile information for 2022: Natrona County had 17 overdose deaths, Sweetwater County had 13 and Fremont County had 16.

Coroners often provide that data to local leaders too, though single-county information doesnt reveal whats going on in neighboring areas.

WDH does publish a Wyoming opioid dashboard with additional information, like ages of the deceased. Much of the dashboards data was between three and four years old before being updated in early May following repeated WyoFile requests for data. The resource now includes overdose death rates through 2022  but still relies on five-year averages for counties.

The dashboards emergency room visits and hospitalization rates are still only updated through 2019.

Other states like Alaska and Missouri have dashboards that share annual rates of fatal overdoses and hospitalization numbers, even for rural areas. According to people working with both states health departments, they havent heard privacy concerns over the dashboard data they provide.

Alaska launched its dashboard in 2017 after the governor issued a disaster declaration because of the opioid epidemic, according to Jessica Filley with the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services. The state recorded 100 opioid overdose deaths that year.

Since then, Filley said, stakeholders have met every few weeks to update the dashboard and get data to groups requesting it  including legislators, reporters and grant writers. It currently has overdose death data through August 2022 and reveals local data at the health district level.

The people I hear back from  it gives them awareness of the general issues, she said of the dashboard.

In 2019, when much of Wyomings drug overdose-involved emergency room and hospitalization data was last updated, Levi Wardell was still using illicit drugs. Around that period, he said, he first encountered a drug driving increases in overdose deaths around the county and the region.

I remember towards the end of my using, I bought some fentanyl pills, he said. The dealer was like: yeah, this is fentanyl pills. Be careful.

They looked like oxycontin, he said, but his dealer told him they werent. He bought heroin that he knew was laced with fentanyl, too, he said. Nowadays, though, he said people are buying what they think is oxycontin or other drugs. Instead, its fentanyl.

And people are dying because of it.

If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, you can call or text the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.
The local government election bell has been rung and citizens will go to the polls on August 14, 2023.

The election comes after the Privy Council decision that the extension of the life of local government bodies proposed in the Local Government Amendment bill did not apply to incumbent councillors and aldermen.
THEY came wishing on a star, hoping to walk away with a smartphone or laptop for only $1.

But instead, hundreds of people were left frustrated, angry and empty-handed.
ByteDance's new AI-powered chatbot is being tested, as shared by one of its employees who wanted to remain unidentified.

As of writing, ByteDance is still facing numerous issues because of the criticisms against its online video platform, TikTok. But these problems don't stop the Chinese company from innovating. Now, ByteDance is believed to be working on a new artificial intelligence tool.

The TikTok owner calls this new AI project "Grace." The anonymous source stated that the tech firm is already testing Grace among its employees.

ByteDance's AI-Powered Chatbot Now Tested!

According to Time Magazine's latest report, the new AI Grace chatbot is already used by selected ByteDance employees.

Read Also: 'Black Mirror' Creator Uses ChatGPT AI to Write Script, But it Was 'Sh*t'

Those who have access to the generative AI model will be able to receive a pop-up message which states that Grace is based on several large language models.

Although the anonymous ByteDance employee didn't mention if Grace is similar to ChatGPT, numerous rumors claim that the new Chinese AI chatbot will work like OpenAI's popular generative artificial intelligence.

The new AI Grace is the first effort of ByteDance to enter the generative AI sector.

As of press time, Grace's features and other details are still limited. It is still unclear if this new AI chatbot will be used exclusively by ByteDance's employees or if it will be released to the public market.

Another AI Chatbot Tested on TikTok

Aside from the rumored Grace AI chatbot, ByteDance is also testing another AI model called Tako.

As of writing, the new Tako chatbot isn't widely available. The Verge claims that the social media platform is only testing it in the Philippine region.

This means that users in North America and Europe can't access Tako. Regarding functionality, the Tako chatbot works like ChatGPT and other generative AI tools.

It can answer users' queries. If you are in the Philippines, you can use Tako by clicking its icon; it is located above the TikTok profile on the right side of the video.

"If I'm watching food videos and ask for a recipe, I'll get related TikTok videos for the recipe, or if I ask for good art exhibitions in Paris, it'll show videos alongside a list of suggestions in the answer," said Daniel Buchuk of Watchful Technologies.

Because of Tako's functionality, Buchuk believes that if ByteDance rolls out this new AI feature globally, it can radically change search and navigation on TikTok.

Related Article: ChatGPT Can Create Mutating Malware, Warns Security Experts

@ 2023 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Todays local government election in Guyana will be shaping the future of its political landscape and its national developmental path.

It is expected to be a calm election, with free and fair results declared soon thereaftersomething this country has not experienced in the main in the past decades.

It is widely expected that the PPP/C governing party will sweep the polls and the opposition PNC/APNU will be decimated in the majority of the country.
Rescuers in Washington state are praising the resourcefulness of a 10-year-old girl who survived on her own for more than 24 hours in the rugged terrain of the Cascade mountains after getting lost while out with her family.

Shunghla Mashwani was at a gathering with her extended family in the Cle Elum River Valley on Sunday when she became separated from the group as they crossed a pedestrian bridge over the river to eat lunch near the Cathedral Pass Trailhead, the Kittitas County Sheriffs Office said in a Facebook post. Kittitas County is about 85 miles east of Seattle.

The girl and her family arrived in the U.S. two years ago from Afghanistan and like to spend time in the high backcountry because it reminds them of home, the sheriffs office said.

Shunghla told her family and rescuers she found herself suddenly separated and alone when the family was travelling back toward the footbridge and couldnt find the bridge on her own, the sheriffs office said.

When the family noticed Shunghla hadnt crossed the bridge with them, about 20 adults in the group went back and started searching, the post said.

There is no cell service in the area and the family had been looking for Shunghla for about two hours when a passerby offered to call police from a satellite phone at their nearby cabin around 2 p.m.

Deputies, volunteer ground search teams and crews from nearby law enforcement agencies swarmed the area. Drones, helicopters and K9s were also brought in to help find Shunghla.

The sheriffs office had the girls father record a message of reassurance in their native language that was broadcast over the search area, a spokesperson for the sheriffs office told CNN. The message told Shunghla that there were people looking for her and trying to help.

The search area was steep, rugged, and remote, with dense trees and undergrowth cut through by the fast-running Cle Elum River, the sheriffs office said.

She was spotted around 3 p.m. Monday by two ground search volunteers about 1.5 miles south of where she was last seen, the sheriffs office said. She had only minor scrapes.

I was trying to go to sleep in the night and then wake up early in the morning, and then Ill find my dad and mom in the forest, Shunghla told CNN affiliate KING of her night in the wilderness.

She hiked downstream through the dense forest and spent the cold night between some trees. She said she knew it was the right thing to follow the river. She proved an extraordinarily resourceful and resilient 10-year-old, the sheriffs office said.

Rescuers loaded Shunghla into an inflatable rescue boat and brought her across the river to be reunited with her father.
NEW YORK  Images of smoke obscuring the New York skyline and the Washington Monument this week have given the world a new picture of the perils of wildfire, far from where blazes regularly turn skies into hazardous haze.

A third day of unhealthy air from Canadian wildfires may have been an unnerving novelty for millions of people on the U.S. East Coast, but it was a reminder of conditions routinely troubling the country's West  and a wake-up call about the future, scientists say.

"This is kind of an astounding event" but likely to become more common amid global warming, said Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth College geography professor and climate scientist. "This is something that we, as the eastern side of the country, need to take quite seriously."

Millions of residents could see that for themselves Thursday. The conditions sent asthma sufferers to hospitals, delayed flights, postponed ballgames and even pushed back a White House Pride Month celebration. The fires sent plumes of fine particulate matter as far away as North Carolina and northern Europe and parked clumps of air rated unhealthy or worse over the heavily populated Eastern Seaboard.

At points this week, air quality in places including New York, the nation's most populous city, nearly hit the top of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's air-pollution scale. Local officials urged people to stay indoors as much as possible and wear face masks when they venture out.

Such conditions are nothing new  indeed, increasingly frequent  on the U.S. West Coast, where residents were buying masks and air filters even before the COVID-19 pandemic and are accustomed to checking air quality daily in summer. Since 2017, California has seen eight of its 10 largest wildfires and six of the most destructive.

The hazardous air has sometimes forced children, older adults and people with asthma and other respiratory conditions to stay indoors for weeks at a time. Officials have opened smoke shelters for people who are homeless or who might not have access to clean indoor air.

"The West has always burned, as has Canada, but what's important now is that we're getting these massive amounts of smoke in a very populated region, so many, many people are getting affected," said Loretta Mickley, the co-leader of Harvard University's Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group.

Fueled by an unusually dry and warm period in spring, the Canadian fire season that is just getting started could well become the worst on record. More than 400 blazes burned Thursday. Over a third are in Quebec, where Public Safety Minister Francois Bonnardel said no rain is expected until next week and temperatures are predicted to rise.

He said there have been no reports of injuries, deaths or home damage so far from the fires, but it remained unclear Thursday when more than 12,000 evacuees from various communities would be able to return. Manon Cyr, mayor of the evacuated town of Chibougamau, said she advised residents to be "Zen and patient. That's the most important."

She noted the real solution will be a good dose of rain.

In neighboring Ontario, a haze hung over Toronto, Canada's most populous city, where many school recess breaks, day care center activities and outdoor recreation programs were canceled or moved inside.

U.S. President Joe Biden said Thursday that hundreds of American firefighters and support personnel have been in Canada since May, and he'd offered Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "any additional help Canada needs to rapidly accelerate the effort to put out these fires." The two spoke Wednesday.

Wildfires aren't the only air-quality problems that beset major population centers around the globe.

Chemically, wildfire smoke can be more toxic than typical urban pollution, but with an asterisk: With smog, "the problem is you're in it all the time," says Jonathan Deason, an environmental and energy management professor George Washington University.

In New York City, Health Department spokesperson Pedro Frisneda said emergency rooms saw a "higher than usual" number of asthma-related visits from the blanket of smoke, estimating patients were in the "low hundreds."

The city public school system  the nation's largest  said Friday's classes would be conducted remotely. Motorists even got a break Thursday and Friday from having to move their cars for street cleaning.

In Washington, a big Pride Month celebration on the White House's South Lawn was moved from Thursday to Saturday, and a Washington Nationals-Arizona Diamondbacks game was postponed. Local officials closed public parks and suspended some road work.

Philadelphia ended trash collection ended early, for the sake of sanitation employees. Bridgeport, Connecticut's largest city, opened spaces usually used as hot-weather cooling centers so that residents could escape the unhealthy air.

A Chris Stapleton concert at a Syracuse amphitheater was pushed back, fireworks were canceled at Niagara Falls and racing was canceled at New York's Belmont Park two days before the famed Belmont Stakes. It wasn't yet clear whether the Triple Crown race itself might be affected; Gov. Kathy Hochul said that would depend on the air quality at the track Saturday.
WASHINGTON  In an era when companies are building driverless cars and 30-inch infotainment screens, the auto industry found itself in Congress this week fighting over technology thats a little more old school: AM radio.

Bipartisan lawmakers are considering requiring automakers to keep AM radio in all new vehicles as some companies  including Tesla Inc., Volkswagen AG, Volvo Cars and BMW AG  are eliminating the frequency from electric vehicles because battery motors interfere with signals.

During a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing Tuesday, the lobbying arm of the U.S. auto industry asked lawmakers not to do that, saying that plenty of technology is available to transmit safety messages, and that mandates could hamper future innovation.

That argument was met with united skepticism from both Democrats and Republicans: Lawmakers argued that AM radio is a crucial source for local news and public safety messages in remote areas.

When hurricanes, tornadoes or other natural disasters strike, AM radio remains steadfast, providing vital information to those in affected areas when other communication channels fail, said subcommittee chair Rep. Bob Latta, R-Ohio.

Subcommittee ranking member Rep. Doris Matsui, D-California, said we know AM radio is more than just a lifeline during an emergency. For many, it represents an irreplaceable connection with their community.

The electrical components in electric vehicle batteries generate static that makes it harder to receive clear AM radio signals. Some automakers aimed to minimize that interference, the committee said, while several automakers opted to eliminate AM radio from new EVs.

AM radio frequencies generally have poorer sound quality and are more susceptible to interference than FM radio, but AM can be heard further away from a transmitter than FM.

On Tuesday, a representative for automakers said the industry takes the safety of consumers and the public seriously but that there is a federal system (the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, or IPAWS) that provides multiple alert options that will ensure people can get emergency information.

The federal government and industry must work together to modernize IPAWS and continue to incorporate new technologies, said Scott Schmidt, vice president for safety policy at the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. Doing so will ensure we collectively provide the best, most capable and resilient technologies to the public, also strengthening public safety.

He added that there is declining listenership for AM radio: We are technology agnostic in the sense that we are looking to deliver alerts to our customers as efficiently as possible, as broadly as possible, in the most efficient manner and in a manner thats not going to decline in the future.

Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Michigan, said she spoke with federal officials about IPAWS abilities and believes we are not adequately prepared to reach all Americans in the event of a disaster.

The president of a network of radio stations in Indiana and Ohio and an officer from the New Jersey State Police also spoke in favor of keeping AM radio. They said AM is the most consistent, dependable platform in case of emergencies.

Panel members raised concerns that automakers may start charging customers for access to AM and FM radio.

The fact that AM is free is something that should cause all of us to sit up and take notice, said Michigan Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Michigan. This is how people in rural areas like my district get their news. They connect with their religion, they raise money for local causes, they take part in diverse conversations that they might not otherwise have access to.

Schmidt said he can only speak to the industrys safety commitment, that automakers will ensure drivers have access to free public alerts and safety warnings.

The congressional uproar over AM radio began last month when Latta and 103 other members of Congress sent a letter to automakers that planned to eliminate AM radio.

Two days later, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-New Jersey, introduced the AM for Every Vehicle Act, which would require the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to mandate that new vehicles come with AM radio at no additional cost. Sens. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, introduced similar legislation in the Senate.
PHOENIX  The states top schools official said Thursday a hotline he set up two months ago has resulted in credible tips about what he calls critical race theory unacceptably being taught in Arizona classrooms.

But Tom Horne, a Republican elected to the post in November, refused to say how many such reports there were. He acknowledged there were 30,000 crank calls to the hotline, which invites parents and teachers to report what he calls unacceptable practices in Arizona classrooms of controversial issues. When pushed for specifics of complaints with possible merit, he cited four.

None of those, however, resulted in his Arizona Department of Education taking action. Instead, Horne said, his office has reached out to the districts for more information.

One of the four incidents he cited  a list from a principal at Orange Grove Middle School in Catalina Foothills school district of the pronouns students wanted used for them  occurred in 2021. District policy is not to hide information from parents, and staff will answer any questions parents have, district spokeswoman Julie Farbarik has said of that incident.

Horne conceded at a Thursday news conference he called about the hotline that even if he could prove validity to complaints that a school district has what he believes is unacceptable racially tinged curricula, he lacks the power to do anything about it. That ability exists within individual school boards, which are locally elected.

That answer did not sit well with two self-defined dissident members of the Scottsdale Unified School District governing board, invited by Horne to the news conference, who complained about materials being used at the elementary and high school levels. One module for lower grade students is how to be a good citizen, said board member Karen Warner.

Its showing children protesting with politically charged posters as well as racially charged posters, Warner said. Pushed to define what she called racially charged, she said Black lives matter.

There also was what she described as a test for upper grades so students could see how racist you are.

Our kids deserve better than this, Warner said.

Only thing is, the materials were approved by the other three board members, who all determined they were appropriate.

Horne said state law gives parents the right to review all books, teaching materials and supplemental lessons available to students. And all parents are free to lobby school board members about what they should and should not approve for classrooms.

Wont make complaints public

The Thursday news conference was the latest bid by Horne to wipe out what he calls critical race theory.

That academic concept is about racism and how society continues to be affected by historical and current factors such as discrimination, red-lining to keep minorities out of neighborhoods, and subtle racism.

But in what has become a culture war, Horne and many other Republicans contend any lesson that teaches anything other than equality is critical race theory. He said that theory tells children race is the primary factor of how people treat each other.

This all started during COVID when parents could see what the students were being taught because it was online, Horne said. And many parents were shocked at what they saw, especially critical race theory kinds of things that were being taught to the students.

One result was Hornes hotline, billed as a place where parents and teachers can report what the Department of Education called inappropriate public school lessons that detract from teaching academic standards.

Those, the department said, include not just focusing on race or ethnicity rather than individuals and merit, but also promoting gender ideology, social emotional learning, or inappropriate sexual content.

Horne has refused to make the complaints public.

Nor would he say on Thursday how many of the calls or emails were legitimate.

We can try to use our influence, Horne said, when asked what the point of calling the hotline is if he cant act on complaints. If a teacher is abusing the position of using a captive audience to promote an ideology, that might be unprofessional conduct, he said.

All that would allow him to do is recommend that the state Board of Education suspend or revoke the persons teaching license.

Outrageous to me

Horne said nothing in his objections to critical race theory prevent the teaching of historical facts, such as slavery and Jim Crow laws discriminating against people of color.

But he was less clear about how to handle current issues of racism.

Earlier Thursday, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Alabama lawmakers drew congressional districts in a way that discriminated against Blacks. The justices said the maps put together had just one district out of seven where Blacks were likely to be able to elect a candidate of their choice in a state where more than one in four residents is Black.

Horne said discussing the court ruling itself would be acceptable in classroom lessons under the category of accurate history.

Asked what a teacher should be able to tell a student who complains of being a victim of discrimination, he answered, I think the solution is teach the other kids that they are to treat everybody as an individual and that race is not relevant and that sexual orientation is not relevant, not to tell kids that they live in a white supremacy country. Thats outrageous to me and I think its unprofessional as hell.

Horne said his concerns go beyond critical race theory. He also lashed out at anything that teaches about a dominant culture, unconscious bias, privilege and restorative justice, the last he defined as talking to people when they misbehave versus punishing them.

Amy Carney, another member of the Scottsdale school board invited by Horne to the news conference, acknowledged that parents are entitled to opt their children out of lessons they find inappropriate, such as the ones the board adopted earlier this week over the objections of Warner and herself. Students must also be provided with alternative assignments.

But that doesnt address her objection, Carney said.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has vowed to fight like heck against a federal court ruling that could overturn a mandate that health insurers provide HIV-preventive medication without charge.

Mayes, backed by health advocates, said if the ruling by a judge in Texas is allowed to take effect, it could have devastating consequences for Arizonans who rely on lifesaving preventive services under the Affordable Care Act.

As the attorney general of Arizona, it is my job to protect the people of Arizona, to uphold the law and to represent state agencies as well that might be impacted by this lawsuit, she said.

Mayes, speaking on a call Thursday organized by Protect Our Care Arizona, was joined by other health care advocates who said the ruling could stop the clock on what has proven to be a cost-effective health mandate.

Im going to fight like heck against the Braidwood case, fight to uphold preventive services in the state of Arizona and to make sure the ACA continues to be the massive success that it has been so far, Mayes said.

She was referring to Braidwood v. Becerra, in which a group of businesses and individuals challenged that part of the ACA that requires insurance companies to provide select preventive care services at no additional charge to the customer.

Among other things, the plaintiffs objected to ACA requirements that insurance plans include coverage for contraceptives, screenings and treatment for drug use and sexually transmitted diseases, vaccination for human papillomavirus and an HIV-preventive medication known as pre-exposure prophylaxis  or PrEP.

The plaintiffs challenged the right of federal agencies to determine which preventive care measures need to be provided. They also said they should not be forced to pay for coverage they do not want or need and, for at least three of the plaintiffs, for coverage that violates their religious beliefs.

In particular, Braidwood Management  which court documents call a Christian for-profit corporation  said that providing PrEP facilitates and encourages homosexual behavior, intravenous drug use, and sexual activity outside of marriage between one man and one woman.

U.S. District Judge Reed OConnor agreed in September, ruling that forcing Braidwood to choose between providing PrEP and paying a substantial monetary penalty  for refusing to do so imposes a substantial burden on religious exercise.

OConnors ruling has been on hold, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held a hearing this week in which it considered letting the ruling take effect, which would lift the preventive care mandates.

Arizona advocates said Thursday that it would be a mistake to lift the mandate to provide preventive care like PrEP, which Mayes said has saved countless lives in Arizona and made our state stronger.

Arizona Public Health Association Executive Director Will Humble said the preventive care mandate in the ACA is designed to catch people at the top of the waterfall and let them avoid expensive medical treatments.

If you can screen for depression in kids and adolescents early and get them into treatment, you can prevent not just really bad outcomes like suicide but other long-term effects because you are able to intervene more quickly with conselling, Humble said.

Brian Hummel of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network said the district court ruling would freeze preventive treatment back in time and limit access to newer, less-invasive treatments. He stressed the essential nature of preventive services in catching and treating cancers in their early stages.

We know that having access to no-cost preventive services matters, he said. It has been demonstrated in study after study that catching cancer early can improve the likelihood of successful treatment.

Hummel pointed to an American Cancer Society survey that found a majority of cancer patients and survivors said they would be less likely to keep up with their care if those services came with an out-of-pocket cost.

All the speakers said preventive care is cost-effective as it typically negates the need for expensive and invasive medical intervention. Humble said the mandate has helped to keep a lid on insurance premiums, while Mayes noted that preventive care has saved Arizona an untold amount of money in healthcare costs.
The nose of a brand new white van pointed toward the sky, bursting from the rear end of an upturned tan train car, one of many piled one over the other and crushed to resemble accordions  the aftermath of a 167-car freight train's derailment overnight.

Some neighbors in Williams heard a terrible crashing sound in the late hours as at least 23 rail cars careened off the tracks around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday night. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) train appeared to be hauling vehicles as its cargo.

Coconino County Sheriffs Deputies responded to the derailment to assist BNSF PD and personnel, making sure that no one was injured. According to CCSO spokesperson Jon Paxton, there was no evidence of hazardous materials being spilled. BNSF has confirmed that no one was injured during the derailment.

On Thursday morning, a BNSF police officer was stationed by the nearest railroad crossing, keeping curious passers-by safely off of the tracks. Unable to comment on the incident himself, the police officer was one of many employees responding to the wreckage. Heavy equipment and cranes were being employed throughout the day Tuesday, working to remove the overturned cars.

The Arizona Daily Sun has reached out to BNSF for an official comment, and will update this story with any response.

In the meantime, a steady stream of side-by-sides and off-road vehicles trickled down Pinetree Drive in Williams, where one home stands just a few feet away from one of the wrecked train cars.

Most of those people are neighbors, people like Jan Larson, who lives close to the tracks but a safe distance away from the derailment.

I heard a lot of weird noises at night, but Im a couple miles up the road, she said, marveling at the wreckage and how close one of her neighbors homes came to being crushed by an overturned train car.

Further up Pinetree Drive, a Christian youth camp, the West Branch of the Bill Rice Ranch, is getting ready to receive campers later this year. They opened in 2014 and are used to hearing the train.

This morning, however, none of the staff noticed the derailment until they saw images on the news.

Almost nobody noticed until we pointed it out, said West Branch Camp Director Troy Carlson. He said campers often ask jokingly if the train is derailing when its particularly loud, but he never imagined hed see wreckage right behind their property. Over Carlsons shoulder, a number of overturned cars were in view. Farther up the tracks, a single orange BNSF engine still stood erect ahead of the trail of cars.
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne discusses the results of his departments Empower Hotline on June 8, 2023, in Phoenix. The hotline was launched to allow parents and others to file complaints about social agendas in classrooms perceived as "inappropriate" for school. Photo by Gloria Rebecca Gomez | Arizona Mirror

The teacher complaint hotline touted by state Superintendent Tom Horne as the key to unearthing hidden agendas in schools has so far resulted in an unknown number of legitimate reports and tens of thousands of prank calls and emails.

The Empower Hotline, as its officially known, was created to field email and phone call tips about inappropriate school content, defined as anything that focuses on race or ethnicity, rather than individuals and merit, promoting gender ideology, social emotional learning, or inappropriate sexual content. Teachers protested the policy and public school advocates criticized it as yet another example of conservative politicians demonizing public education. Horne, a Republican, campaigned on promises to unveil and eliminate culture war topics from classrooms, including LGBTQ issues and critical race theory  a collegiate level academic study used as a catch-all term by Republicans to refer to any meaningful discussion of racism and cast aspersions on public schools.

On Thursday, the eve of the hotlines three-month anniversary, Horne shared that it received 30,000 prank phone calls and emails, but he was unable to say how many genuine complaints were submitted. Of the four incidents he pointed to as evidence that the hotline works, one was a spreadsheet of student pronoun and name changes used in a Catalina Foothills District school in 2021. The spreadsheet allowed students to indicate whether or not they wanted their parents to be notified about the information. When the document was circulated on social media by conservative activists in early March  days before the Empower Hotline launched  Catalina Foothills School District denounced the schools actions.

Another case involved the creation of a Gay Straight Alliance club at a Chandler high school to discuss gender issues, in which emancipation paperwork was purportedly distributed to students. Under state law, minors are legally allowed to emancipate themselves from their parents care if they are at least 16 and can prove to a judge that their request is valid and theyre capable of financially supporting themselves. Stephanie Ingersoll, a spokesperson for Chandler Unified School District, told the Mirror in an emailed statement that the Arizona Education Department had not reached out to school officials with concerns about the club.

The two remaining complaints involved teacher training content at Mesa Unified District. A list of discussion topics included terms such as intersectionality, privilege, nonbinary, ethnicity and antiracist. And a picture of a racial trauma training lesson that was, according to Horne, sent by a teacher read: In the U.S., Black, Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) are most vulnerable due to living under a system of white supremacy. Horne criticized the statement as divisive and bigoted.

None of the four cases nor any of the other tips have resulted in any repercussions.

Were not looking for people to lose their jobs, were looking for people to teach academics, Horne said.

But he wouldnt rule out acting on what he called unprofessional behavior if a teacher was found to be pushing their political ideology onto students. He noted that theres little his office can do, however, about changing district-wide practices such as the content of teacher training courses or the collection of student pronouns. Currently, the department is only discussing complaints with districts.

I dont know that we would have the power to force them, he said. Right now, were trying to find out what the facts are and publicize (them) and let people know why the hotline is beneficial.

Scottsdale Unified School District Board Vice President Carine Werner joined Horne in urging parents to report concerns about their schools. Werner, who was part of a minority that unsuccessfully opposed a recent adoption of supplemental teaching materials in SUSD, warned that textbooks and online curricula are rife with controversial content. As proof, she pointed to SUSDs newly adopted content, which includes information about protesting and activism under a lesson about how to be a good citizen. Pictures in that lesson depicts protesters with Black Lives Matter and Climate Change posters, which Werner called racially and politically charged.
(CNN)  Special counsel Jack Smiths monthslong investigation into Donald Trumps alleged mishandling of classified documents has entered a new chapter with a grand jury voting to indict the former president, sources familiar told CNN Thursday.

Its not yet known what Trump has been charged with.

Smith, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, was tasked in November to look into whether Trump or his aides committed crimes by taking classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort after he left the White House and whether they obstructed the investigation. The probe had escalated in recent weeks with several high-profile interviews and a former White House official telling prosecutors that Trump knew the proper process for declassifying documents and followed it correctly at times while in office, undercutting Trumps claims that he automatically declassified everything he took with him to Mar-a-Lago. Earlier this week, CNN reported that the Justice Department informed the former presidents legal team that he is a target in the probe  such notification is often a strong sign that an indictment could follow.

Trump has denied wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty to the charges. He and his right-wing allies have slammed the probe as partisan and a weaponization of the federal government.

Smith, who is also overseeing the DOJs investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, however, has investigated members of both parties, handling some of the most high-profile political corruption cases in recent memory  to mixed outcomes.

The special counsels experience ranges from prosecuting a sitting US senator to bringing cases against gang members who were ultimately convicted of murdering New York City police officers. His career spans multiple stints in the Justice Department and international courts, which until his appointment had allowed him to keep a relatively low-profile in the oftentimes brassy legal industry.

After serving as a prosecutor at the local and federal levels as well as a stint at the International Criminal Court, Smith oversaw corruption cases as chief of the Justice Departments public integrity unit from 2010 to 2015.

Smith was the head of the section when the department failed to convict former senator and vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, a Democrat, in a corruption case in 2012 and when then-Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, was indicted in 2014. He also oversaw the investigation into former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Republican, closing the probe in 2010 without bringing charges.

Smith would go on to serve as an assistant US attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, taking over as acting US attorney in early 2017. He became vice president of litigation for the Hospital Corporation of America later that year.

In recent years, Smith lived outside of the United States as the chief prosecutor for the special court in The Hague, a role he assumed in 2018 in which he investigated war crimes in Kosovo.

The-CNN-Wire

 &  2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
At an Egyptian resort, a distressed Russian father described how he watched helplessly as his son cried, "Papa, save me!" before being mauled to death by a "meat grinder" tiger shark.

In the Hurghada resort, Yury Popov was compelled to watch helplessly as the predator circled his son, Vladimir, 23, before pulling him below, according to the Daily Mail.

As terrified bystanders yelled for Vladimir to swim away from the shark before he was mauled to death, tourists scrambled from the water.

The tiger shark was then captured, boated to land, and put to death.

Despite earlier reports claiming the 23-year-old's girlfriend had managed to escape the attack, the distraught father claimed no family members were around to assist him in the water.

He said that it was a coincidence considering that it is supposed to be a safe beach, with ships nearby. Popov also noted that, usually, the sharks attacked wild beaches and remarked that what happened to his son was some kind of "evil fate."

Before the horrifying incident, Vladimir had been staying with his father in Egypt for a couple of months. Popov stated that he would cremate his kid and bring his ashes back to their home country of Russia.

Read also: Hammerhead Shark Attacks Kayaker Off Malibu Coast

Shark Attack Caught on Video

Following the attack, the tiger shark is seen on video being caught and hauled ashore by a boat; it was still alive when it was fatally clubbed.

The shark has been given over for studies to ascertain the reasons behind its behavior and determine whether the animal is related to one that has "caused several prior accidents," according to the Egyptian authorities.

Vladimir can be heard anxiously yelling "Papa, Papa" in footage captured by startled bystanders as the predator circled him in the water before attacking.

The 23-year-old is seen making futile attempts to swim toward the coast. His legs rise above the water's surface, and his body is seen spinning in the water.

The man's head comes back to the surface as the splashing in the water ceases. He looks to be swimming gently once more in the water.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons / ChrisDHDR) Sign warning about the presence of Sharks at the beach (South Africa). The sign's text is below.

The shark's body is visible at the surface; its fin and tail are visible as it circles the victim.

Once more, turning around to strike, the shark charges the victim before encircling him in its jaws and dragging him beneath the sea.

The shark's body is visible, writhing in the water as it appears to maul the man's body and drag it deeper into the sea as the man's head emerges from the water one more time.

According to witnesses, the victim's girlfriend was in the water when the incident occurred. According to Russian reports, she is safe and traveled back to Russia.

Not A First

The foreign ministry confirmed the death of a Russian person due to a shark attack. The 23-year-old is not the first person to die at the resort at the hands of a shark.

Elisabeth Sauer, 68, an Austrian, was attacked in Sahl Hasheesh in July 2022 in front of terrified witnesses at a resort - 15 minutes after English-speaking visitors warned Egyptian lifeguards about sharks, but their warnings had been laughed off.

Related article: Shark Could Have Killed Snorkeling Woman in Maui; Officials Conclude After Husband Recalls Incident

@ 2023 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Save Oak Flat from mining companies

Re: the May 29 article Oak Flat mining project paused.

According to the Economist Magazine, In November the court said it would rehear the case en banc (meaning with a panel of 11 judges). Fewer than 1% of requests for rehearing en banc are granted. It is rarer still for a court to decide to rehear a case of its own accord, as it did in this instance.

Though American law is designed to protect all faiths equally, native American claims have often fared badly. Courts have ruled that when the government prevents a church from building an extension, it may be curtailing religious freedom. But sacred native American sites have been lawfully bulldozed.

The Supreme Court will probably have the last word. Todays court may be different. Justice Neil Gorsuch is an expert on American Indian law and has championed native American religious rights. And the current bench seems invested in protecting religion. Of 22 religious-freedom cases brought before the court since 2012, 21 decisions have expanded those freedoms, 18 of them unanimously.

Robert Shatz

Foothills

School vouchers

I do not vouch for vouchers. I do not wish to support well-off parents who are sending their children to private schools. The vouchers I am paying for provide $7572 for parents to send their children to a private high school. Just so you know, it costs $12,100 to send a child to Salpointe Catholic School and $20,550 every year to the Gregory School. People may not realize that these vouchers in any way provide for the full tuition at a private school. Many less well-off parents cannot afford private schools even with a voucher. Finally, I am well-off and chose to send my children to public schools so they could have a more diverse experience. My children are now well-off.

Chris Pinhey

Foothills

Food stores

To the governor,

When will the state start clamping down on these grocery stores? The prices are high enough without being overcharged on almost everything. Safeway is the worst. If something is on sale, they ring up the regular price and then are supposed to give credit for the sale. It seems my wife spends a lot of time at the service desk getting back the overcharges. I am sure all the seniors experience the same problem, but most dont question this practice. On June 3, my wife was overcharged over $17 at Albertsons, and then had to spend 45 minutes in line at the service desk. This is wrong!

Donald Bernier

Midtown

Gas

So Saudi Arabia is cutting back on oil disbursement to shore up the price. Remember when Trump was president and gas was $2.25 a gallon and we were energy independent. We didnt have to worry about what other countries did with their oil.

Deedee Bruster

Northwest side

Sen. Sinemas failure to support Student Debt Relief

Kyrsten Sinema is no friend of Arizonans. As evidenced by her recent vote when she sided with all 49 Senate Republicans to block President Bidens student debt relief plan, which would provided relief to an estimated 16 million people, including 300,000 students in Arizona, the Senator has again shown her true colors when it comes to doing what is best for our States residents. In a statement prior to the vote, she described the Presidents plan as being fueled by politics and not reality [and] creates false expectations and undermines the students economic certainty. I would urge the 300,000 students, families and friends who are the butt of Sinemas cynical action to mobilize  and mobilize now  in removing her from office if, and when, she runs for re-election in 2024. By uniting like-minded voices across the State we can collectively give the Senator a true taste of reality by telling her  once and for all  goodbye.

Jeffrey Feierabend
FORT LIBERTY, N.C. (AP)  President Joe Biden traveled to the recently renamed Fort Liberty in North Carolina on Friday to sign an executive order that aims to bolster job opportunities for military and veteran spouses whose careers are often disrupted by their loved ones' deployments.

Less than 100 miles away at the states Republican Party convention, GOP presidential contender, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, vowed to restore the former name of the base that until last week was called Fort Bragg in honor of a Confederate general, if voters elect him president.

Its an iconic name and iconic base, and were not gonna let political correctness run amok in North Carolina, DeSantis said at the convention in Greensboro hours after Biden's speech and signing ceremony at Fort Liberty.

The installations former name honors Gen. Braxton Bragg, a North Carolinian, who was known for owning slaves and losing key Civil War battles that contributed to the Confederacys downfall. Biden made no mention in his remarks before hundreds of soldiers and their spouses about the renaming of the base which was formally done by military officials last week.

The renaming of the base was part of a broader effort by the U.S. military to confront racial injustice in the aftermath of the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. An independent commission last year recommended new names for Bragg and eight other Army posts that commemorate Confederate officers.

The installation is the largest U.S. Army base by population, with roughly 47,000 active-duty soldiers. The recent renaming didnt play a role in selecting the base to serve as a backdrop for Biden to announce his executive order, according to an administration official who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In addition to DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and former President Donald Trump, the current GOP front-runner, are scheduled to address delegates on Saturday at the state convention in Greensboro. Trump, who has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate, is also slated to speak on Saturday to the Georgia Republican Partys convention.

The order Biden signed on Friday directs agencies to develop a federal government-wide strategic plan on hiring and job retention for military spouses; bolster child care options; improve the collection of data on military and veteran spouses, caregivers and survivors in the federal workforce; and more than a dozen additional actions.

In remarks shortly before signing the order, Biden noted that the U.S. next month will mark 50 years of the all-volunteer force, which the president proclaimed the greatest fighting force in the history of the world, bar none.

The reason weve been able to sustain that force year after year, decade after decade, is because military spouses, caregivers and survivors have answered the call as well, Biden said. You have your loved ones backs, just like they have the countrys back.

Biden was accompanied by first lady Jill Biden, whose Joining Forces initiatives focuses on aiding military families. She said that while the new executive order is a step forward, employers must also do their part by hiring military spouses and offering their families support.

Spouses bring experience and adaptability that really can't be taught, Jill Biden said. And when they get the opportunities that they deserve, our service members can do their duty knowing that those they love most are able to thrive"

The order was largely framed by conversations through the first lady's initiative, which looks to support families, caregivers and survivors of members of the U.S. military, Jill Biden said on a call with reporters previewing the order.

With nearly one in five military families citing challenges with spousal employment as a reason for considering leaving active-duty service, the issue is no small matter for the military's recruitment and training efforts, according to the White House. More than 16,000 military spouses work within the federal government.

Were asking agencies to make it easier for spouses employed by the federal government to take administrative leave, telework and move offices, the first lady said. Were creating resources to support entrepreneurs. And the executive order helps agencies and companies retain military spouses through telework or when they move abroad.

Before their visit to Fort Liberty, the Bidens took a tour and met with students at Nash Community College in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The school is part of a coalition that received $23.7 million to train students for clean energy jobs from Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.

Biden said the job training effort is part of a strategy to "make us once again the most competitive nation in the world.

Associated Press writer Meg Kinnard in Greensboro, N.C.., and Seung Min Kim in Washington contributed to this report.
AUSTIN, Texas (AP)  A Texas businessman at the center of the scandal that led to the historic impeachment of state Attorney General Ken Paxton was charged Friday with making false statements to mortgage lenders to obtain $172 million in loans.

The federal indictment of real estate developer Nate Paul is the result of a yearslong FBI investigation  a probe Paxton involved his office in, setting off a chain of events that led to a separate federal probe of the attorney general and his impeachment and suspension from office last month.

Paul was charged with eight counts of making false statements while seeking loans from mortgage lenders in the U.S. and Ireland. There was no mention of Paxton or the attorney generals office during the hearing.

Paul, 36, who entered the federal courtroom shackled and wearing jeans, a blue shirt and Nikes, did not enter a plea during his initial appearance in an Austin court nor visibly react as the charges were read. He was released ahead of trial but ordered to surrender his passport and inform the court of any travel outside Texas.

Following the hearing, Paul left through a back door and climbed into a car in a gated area outside the courthouse.

Paul is adamant that he is not guilty," defense attorney Gerry Morris said after hearing, adding that he did not know when his client last spoke with Paxton. An attorney for Paxton, Dan Cogdell, speculated Thursday evening that prosecutors might use the charges against Paul to try to get him to flip and cooperate in the investigation of the attorney general.

Paul is accused of overstating his assets and understating his liabilities while seeking loans in 2017 and 2018, including by giving financial institution false and counterfeit records. In one case, prosecutors said, Paul told banks he had $18 million in an account when he had less than $13,000. In another case laid out in the 23-page indictment, Paul is accused of telling a credit union he had around $3 million in liabilities when he actually owed more than $28 million at the time.

A grand jury handed up the indictment Tuesday but a judge sealed the document until after the court hearing, which took place just a few blocks from Paul's downtown Austin offices.

Prosecutors said each count of making false statements carries a penalty of up to 30 years in prison and a fine up to $1 million.

FBI agents examining Pauls troubled real estate empire searched his Austin offices and palatial home in 2019. The next year, eight of Paxton s top deputies reported the attorney general to the FBI on allegations of bribery and abuse of office, including for hiring an outside lawyer to examine the developers claims of wrongdoing by federal agents.

The allegations by Paxtons staff prompted an FBI investigation that in February was taken over by the Justice Departments Washington-based Public Integrity Section. They are also central to 20 articles of impeachment overwhelmingly approved by the GOP-led state House of Representatives. They include abuse of public trust, unfitness for office and bribery.

The impeachment accuses Paxton of using his office to help Paul over his unproven claims of an elaborate conspiracy to steal $200 million of the developers properties. The bribery counts say that in return the developer employed a woman with whom Paxton had an extramarital affair and paid for expensive renovations to the attorney generals million-dollar Austin home.

Paxton's lawyers sought to rebut the latter claim this week by releasing a bank statement that included a 2020 wire transfer purportedly showing Paxton, and not a donor, paying more than $120,000 for a home renovation. But the document raised new questions about the mens dealings.

The wire transfer was dated Oct. 1, 2020  the same day Paxtons deputies signed a letter informing the head of human resources at the Texas attorney generals office that they had reported their boss to the FBI. The $121,000 payment was to Cupertino Builders, whose manager had done work for Paul and had an email address with his company, state corporation and court records show.

Paul has faced numerous lawsuits from creditors and business partners over the years, with several of his companies filing for bankruptcy or being placed under the supervision of court-appointed overseers. Last year, one of those receivers wrote in a report that Cupertino Builders was used for fraudulent transfers from Paul's business.

Paul has denied bribing Paxton. The attorney general has also broadly denied wrongdoing and said he expects to be acquitted during an impeachment trial in the state Senate, where his wife is a member.

The Senate will set its own rules for a trial that has little precedent, given that Paxton is just the third sitting official in Texas history to be impeached. The proceeding is set begin no later than Aug. 28.

Paxton was separately indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, though he has yet to stand trial.

Bleiberg reported from Dallas.
BERLIN  Nations resumed talks on tackling global warming Monday with the aim of shaping a deal that might put the world on track to prevent a dangerous increase in temperatures, as the U.N.'s top climate official called for deep cuts in fossil fuel use.

Diplomats began two-week negotiations in Bonn, Germany, despite failing to agree on a formal agenda because of differences on the topic of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The issue lies at the heart of the climate problem, since burning oil, coal and gas is responsible for most warming that's occurred since preindustrial times.

Simon Stiell, who heads the U.N. climate office, told The Associated Press in an interview over the weekend that limiting global warming to 2.7 Fahrenheit will require a phaseout of fossil fuels, something many oil-producing countries have pushed back on.

Environmental campaigners have lamented that this year's U.N. climate summit will be held in the United Arab Emirates, a major fossil fuel exporter, but Stiell said that having leaders gather in Dubai this fall should be seen as an opportunity.

"We have a president (for the talks) who has significant experience in the oil and gas sector, in an oil and gas producing nation," he told reporters in Bonn. "It provides an opportunity to ask some very difficult questions, but also to seek some very difficult but needed answers."

Meanwhile, officials said Monday that the cause of global warming is showing no signs of slowing as heat-trapping carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere increased to record highs in its annual spring peak, jumping at one of the fastest rates on record.

The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration announced that the carbon dioxide level measured in May in Hawaii averaged 424 parts per million. That's 3 parts per million more than last year's May average and 51% higher than pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm. It is one of the largest annual May-to-May increases in carbon dioxide levels on record, behind only 2016 and 2019.
Goff Fest, the annual celebration of the life and work of influential Tulsa architect Bruce Goff, will take place this weekend with events in Tulsa and Bartlesville scheduled through Sunday, June 11.

Goffs organic, and sometimes eccentric, designs can still be seen in buildings such as the Tulsa Club Hotel and the Spotlight Theater, which he designed, and Boston Avenue United Methodist Church, where he was a collaborator with Adah Robinson, the buildings designer.

A digital map showing all of Goffs buildings still in existence in Oklahoma went live on June 8, which would have been Goffs 119th birthday. The map can be viewed at goff-fest.com.

Among the scheduled events are:

An exhibit of works by Tulsa artists inspired by Goffs architecture, including a representation of the Spotlight Theater made with Lego blocks by Wyatt Dunham. The exhibit will open as part of the Tulsa Arts Districts First Friday Art Crawl, 6-9 p.m. Friday, June 9, at the Tulsa Artist Fellowships Archer Building Annex Space, 109 N. Martin Luther King Blvd. The exhibit will remain on display through July 8.

Frequency: A Night at the Spotlight, featuring music, dancing, refreshments, Goff-inspired art and tours of the theater, 8 p.m.-midnight Friday, June. 9, and the Spotlight Theater, 1381 Riverside Drive.

The dedication of Bruces Tulsa, a new mural created by Jamie Pierson/Scraps Designs, 10 a.m. Saturday, June 10, at Mexicali Border Cafe, 14 W. Reconciliation Way.

The Tulsa Foundation for Architectures Distinctive Dwellings: Bruce Goff in Bartlesville, a self-guided tour that includes Frank Lloyd Wrights Price Tower, where Goff had his offices for several years, as well as two residences he designed, 1-4 p.m. Sunday, June 11.

Goff Fest is sponsored by the Goff Center of the Continuous Present with support from the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Tulsa Foundation for Architecture, Tulsa Creative Engine, Living Arts of Tulsa, Studio 66, Flash Flood Print, Tulsa Spotlight Theater and the Price Tower Arts Center in Bartlesville.

For more information and a detailed list of activities: goff-fest.com.

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BROKEN ARROW  Alfa Laval is adding 30 jobs to its Broken Arrow heat-exchanger factory, it announced Thursday.

Sparks flew in the background during a press conference inside the Sweden-based companys Broken Arrow site, where the manufacturing of wet surface air coolers will be moved from the Buffalo, New York, area.

The wet surface air coolers, which use water to cool air, are used in facilities such as refineries, said Alfa Laval Air Group General Manager Brandy Moore. The companys other products include pumps, valves and boilers, according to Alfa Lavals website.

Moore said the decision to close the New York factory and relocate its manufacturing work was a difficult one.

But ultimately we saw Broken Arrow and this community as a great place to be able to utilize a lot of the same skill sets, she said.

Sales, engineering, service and support operations will stay in the Buffalo region, according to a press release from the Broken Arrow Chamber of Commerce.

Some of Alfa Lavals large customers are refineries and export terminals in Houston, which is about a two-day drive from Oklahoma for delivery of the large heat exchangers, Moore said.

Broken Arrow officials typically like to attract new jobs instead of taking jobs from other areas, Broken Arrow Economic Development Corp. CEO Jennifer Conway said.

But this is exciting because it was a targeted decision based off of Broken Arrows qualified workforce and pro-business environment, Conway said. So that speaks a lot. When these businesses are making strategic decisions  whats best for their growth  and they look to where they can get the right employment and the right people.

The new jobs will have an average wage of $66,000, including benefits, and will have a potential economic impact of $13.9 million, according to the chamber.

Mayor Debra Wimpee said she was looking forward to the impact of Alfa Lavals expansion on the local economy.

It can help the business expand, which means they could create more jobs, which creates, hopefully, more residents that are in your city, having new money and bringing higher wage jobs to our community, Wimpee told the Tulsa World. Its a wonderful cycle that helps our city continue to grow and thrive.



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An ambitious plan to build a mixed-use development highlighted by a 42-story skyscraper on the southern half of the Evans-Fintube property near downtown came to an end Thursday. The city announced that it has halted negotiations with the developer.

The Tulsa Authority for Economic Opportunity  the citys economic development arm  and the city informed Team Alchemy of their decision Thursday afternoon, citing a material change in the development team and the companys inability to maintain the requirements set forth for the developer in the original request for proposals.

Development projects of this magnitude are incredibly difficult to bring from concept to construction to completion. While we are disappointed to have to take this step, we are committed to pursuing redevelopment of the Evans-Fintube site, Kian Kamas, executive director of TAEO, said in a press release.

The decision comes four months after Team Alchemy, the development group led locally by Be Good Development Partners, informed TAEO that real estate development consultant Michael Collins and J.E. Dunn Capital Partners would no longer have predevelopment roles with Team Alchemy.

In response, the city gave Team Alchemy 30 days  later extended to 120  to find new partners who could provide the same expertise, experience and financial resources as their original ones.

Team Alchemy responded to the citys request on June 1. The response did not include the information requested by the city.

Over the past two years, hundreds of Tulsans engaged in a process to help envision the possibilities for redevelopment of the Evans-Fintube site. Throughout these efforts, it was clear that north Tulsa residents, stakeholders and partners are eager to see progress and a development that brings economic opportunity to the neighborhood, Mayor G.T. Bynum said.

While this is a disappointing setback, the city remains steadfast in its commitment to identifying the best approach to redevelopment that will support these long term goals.

The city of Tulsa and TAEO  also known as PartnerTulsa  plan to evaluate the sites development potential and conduct community engagement and outreach over the next six to nine months to help determine the best course forward for the property.

That process will begin at 6:30 Wednesday with a community update meeting at Greenwood Cultural Center, 322 N. Greenwood Ave.

The meeting is designed to explain the process to date, update the community on the recent determination, and offer preliminary information on potential next steps.

Franchell Abdalla, who leads Team Alchemy, said the city was using smoke and mirrors to explain why it ceased negotiations.

Because the city never provided the group with a redevelopment agreement, Abdalla contends, she could not secure what the city was seeking when it provided the 120-day extension.

It is the most basic step in this process, she said. And because they would not provide me one, there was no co-development partner, no equity partner and no capital partner that would provide or even think about a partnership because there was no demonstration by the city or PartnerTulsa to do business.

They knew that. I provided them emails from the potential co-development partners and the capital partner stating exactly that. Without the demonstration of the intent to do business, which is a letter of intent, or a redevelopment agreement, which demonstrates site control, I cannot go into a bank  I cannot go to a capital partner or a co-development partner  and ask them to join the team or look at the project.

Following an extensive public-engagement process, a 15-member review committee selected Team Alchemy in May 2022 to develop the 9-acre site.

The proposal envisioned a multi-phase construction schedule that would begin with an extensive overhaul of the old Oklahoma Iron Works building, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Plans called for the revamped structure to include retail, dining, a brewery, studio space and co-working space.

Phase 2 of the construction was to be highlighted by The Beacon, a 42-story mixed-use structure. As proposed, the building could include rooftop dining, a hotel, a performance theater, studio space, first-floor retail and mixed-income multifamily housing.



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Throwback Tulsa: USA BMX headquarters opens in the historic Greenwood District last year BMX Headquarters opens in Tulsa USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening USA BMX Opening Check out our latest digital-only offer and subscribe now HIDE VERTICAL GALLERY ASSET TITLES
His endorsement of Ron DeSantis presidential bid had nothing to do with the Florida governors campaign stop in his district, state Rep. Terry ODonnell, R-Catoosa, said with a chuckle.

I didnt help with that decision, ODonnell said earlier this week.

ODonnell, in his final term representing a district that includes the F&E Creek Event Center, 18280 E. 11th St., where DeSantis is scheduled to speak at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, is one of 20 Oklahoma legislators to endorse the one-time congressman for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Former 1st District Congressman and National Aeronautics and Space Administration Administrator Jim Bridenstine is also backing DeSantis, according to the campaign.

ODonnell said he plans to be at Saturdays event, and Gov. Kevin Stitt  who has not endorsed DeSantis  told an Oklahoma City television station this week that he does, too.

National polling, and the limited public polling in Oklahoma, show former President Donald Trump with a substantial lead over DeSantis among Republican voters. Some Republican insiders, though, say Trump carries too much baggage  and the load is getting heavier.

ODonnell said hes backing DeSantis instead of Trump because the policies are the same but Gov. DeSantis doesnt seems as bombastic. I like President Trumps policies. What I didnt like is all of that other stuff.

DeSantis, fair to say, can also be combative and acerbic, but some find him more controlled than Trump and with fewer legal headaches.

ODonnell also suggested that being limited to one more term, as Trump would be under the 22nd Amendment, might be a factor.

It will take more than four years to straighten out Washington, he said.

Age, too, could be in DeSantis favor. Trump is 76 and would be 78 by the time he took office in January 2025. Current President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, is 80 and would be 82 when he began a second term.

DeSantis is 44 and would be 46 on Inauguration Day.

ODonnell said he likes the pro-business and pro-family things DeSantis has done in Florida and believes that he did a good job handling COVID.

Some argue that DeSantis fights with Disney and other large Florida employers, as well as his attacks on public schools and LGBTQ people, are the opposite of pro-business and pro-family, but his positions are popular with many conservatives.

ODonnell said Disney has received beneficial treatment from the state and then took positions on social issues contrary to those of DeSantis and Florida lawmakers.

Besides ODonnell, the list of endorsements from Oklahoma legislators includes House Minority Leader Jon Echols, R-Oklahoma City; Rep. Mark Lepak, R-Claremore; Rep. Chris Sneed, R-Fort Gibson; Rep. Neil Hays, R-Checotah; and Rep. Josh West, R-Grove.

ODonnell said Echols approached him in May, saying, Some of us are getting up a list to endorse Gov. DeSantis.

Saturdays event is scheduled for 4:30-6 p.m. See events/neverbackdown.org for ticket reservations.



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The 2024 presidential field, in the order they've announced Donald Trump, Republican Nikki Haley, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican Marianne Williamson, Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Democrat Larry Elder, Republican President Joe Biden, Democrat Asa Hutchinson, Republican Tim Scott, Republican Ron DeSantis, Republican Mike Pence, Republican Chris Christie, Republican Doug Burgum, Republican
OKLAHOMA CITY  Officials on Thursday announced the state will contract with three major companies to manage health care for about 800,000 Oklahomans receiving Medicaid benefits through SoonerCare.

The Oklahoma Health Care Authority will contract with Aetna Better Health of Oklahoma, Humana Healthy Horizons of Oklahoma and Oklahoma Complete Health, a subsidiary of the Centene Corp., to shift care for the majority of Medicaid recipients to managed care from a fee-for-service model.

Combined, the three contracts will cost the state about $3.75 billion  or about $1.25 billion per health care entity  over the first 15 months, making them some of the largest contracts in state history.

The Health Care Authority will pay these entities a flat fee for every Medicaid recipient they serve, a change from the current model in which health care providers are paid for each service they perform. Managed care proponents say the new system will incentivize providers to improve patient health by connecting Medicaid beneficiaries to primary care physicians, reducing emergency room visits and improving management of chronic illnesses.

Oklahoma has been ranked 45th in the nation for health outcomes for too long and its unacceptable, said Health Care Authority CEO Kevin Corbett.

With these partnerships and this shift to SoonerSelect, we can change the course of health care in Oklahoma, he said. I hope everybody believes that. We certainly do.

The contracts, which include renewal options, will last until at least June 30, 2025.

The Stitt administration has been trying for years to shift Oklahomas Medicaid program to a managed care model, which supporters say will provide budget stability as costs associated with SoonerCare, one of the states most expensive programs, continue to rise.

Some in the medical community have expressed opposition to the change, saying the states previous attempts to implement managed care were a failure. Critics have also expressed concerns that managed care entities are incentivized to cut health care costs, which could be detrimental to patient care.

Oklahoma State Medical Association President Diane Heaton said the states previous attempts at managed care had disastrous results.

We fully believe that taxpayer dollars should be used to care for Oklahoma patients, not pad the bottom lines of big insurance companies, she said in a statement. We will closely monitor the implementation of this plan and stand ready to advocate on behalf of physicians and their patients to make sure the system provides the best possible care to SoonerCare members and makes good use of our states healthcare funds.

At least 40 other states have implemented some form of Medicaid managed care.

Under this new model, Medicaid recipients will get to select their own health plan, similar to the process someone goes through during an open enrollment period for insurance coverage.

The Health Care Authority awarded contracts to two of the same companies, Humana Healthy Horizons and Oklahoma Complete Health, when it first tried to implement managed care two years ago. The four contracts the agency inked in 2021 were voided after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled the Health Care Authority didnt have the authority to implement managed care without approval from state lawmakers.

The three contractors chosen through the most recent public bidding process are all provider-led health care entities, Corbett said. That means each entity is governed by a board largely made up of Oklahoma-based health care providers, he said.

After the Supreme Courts ruling, the Oklahoma Legislature passed a new law that gave the Health Care Authority the green light to pursue managed care while also directing the agency to give local provider-led entities preferential treatment in the bidding process.

A group of Medicaid providers in January sued the Health Care Authority over its request for proposals seeking medical managed care companies. The group alleged the agencys public bidding process did not, as required by law, give preferential treatment to local providers already serving Medicaid patients. The Oklahoma Supreme Court tossed the lawsuit in March.

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On Thursday, two U.S. senators said that they had put out a proposal to forbid the Federal Aviation Administration from purchasing or utilizing drones built in China.

The Intelligence Committee's chair, Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat, and Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn have introduced legislation that would also forbid the FAA from giving government cash to foreign drone corporations from China and other nations. She said that the FAA uses more than a dozen Chinese-made drones in its operations.

Chinese Drones No More

Drones produced in Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba would also be subject to the bans, as reported by Reuters.

The plan would also require the FAA to swap out any drones made in China for ones made in the United States or by allies within a year.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio requested last week that the U.S. Chinese drone maker Autel Robotics' drones will no longer be used by Capitol Police due to security reasons.

The top drone manufacturer DJI was subject to export restrictions in 2020 after the Commerce Department accused it of supporting the military or participating in the oppression of China's Uyghur minority.

Republican representatives Elise Stefanik and Mike Gallagher submitted legislation in April to put DJI on the FCC's Covered List, preventing it from using the country's communications infrastructure.

According to the congressmen, DJI, a Chinese corporation, manufactures more than 50% of the drones that are sold in the United States and is the drone that public safety agencies most frequently utilize.

Other steps have been taken by the US government to restrict the acquisition of drones built in China.

Read also: Lawmakers Express Alarm About China's Drones Detected Flying Over Washington DC's Restricted Airspace

The Ongoing Battle Over Drones

The United States and China are locked in an ongoing battle over drones, with both countries vying for dominance in the global market for these unmanned aircraft.

The US is the world's leading manufacturer of drones, with companies like General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Northrop Grumman, and AeroVironment producing some of the most advanced drones in the world. These drones are used by the US military for a variety of missions, including surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeted strikes.

China is a rapidly rising power in the drone industry, and its companies are now producing some of the most capable drones on the market. These drones are used by the Chinese military, and they are also being sold to customers around the world.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Paul Brennan) No drone zone area sign

The US and China are increasingly competing for influence in the global drone market, and this competition is likely to intensify in the years to come. Both countries are investing heavily in research and development, and they are both trying to build a strong domestic drone industry.

The battle between the US and China over drones is part of a larger rivalry between the two countries. This rivalry is playing out in a number of different areas, including trade, technology, and security. The outcome of this rivalry will have a significant impact on the global balance of power.

Related article: China Powers Drones with Lasers To Keep Them Up Longer in the Air

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Hoisted on her dads shoulders and with her right hand raised, Alina Souki was among 90 children and adults from 26 countries who were naturalized as United States citizens Thursday at the Gathering Place.

Alinas mother, Nadia Jurdi Souki, traveled to Beirut shortly before the world COVID-19 shutdown in 2020 to take care of her mother, who had had a stroke. In the middle of the pandemic and with travel bans still in place, she couldnt return to the U.S. before she gave birth to Alina.

Said Souki, Alinas father, didnt get to meet his daughter until last year due to the ongoing travel bans and government agency shutdowns.

He said finally having his daughter as a U.S. citizen is exciting and that getting to take part in the ceremony was something they had been waiting for.

Alina, who is just over 2 years old, was one of the youngest people naturalized Thursday. The ceremony was Tulsas third and largest childrens citizenship ceremony since the city began hosting the event in 2019.

Among the other countries represented Thursday were Brazil, Burma, Cuba, India, Iraq, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines and Saudi Arabia.

Mayor G.T. Bynum told the new citizens that there is nowhere better to lead a life of meaning and purpose than in the U.S. and that Tulsa is a community that wants immigrants to thrive.

The lives that you will lead are of historic significance, Bynum said. The city of Tulsa is proud of you  and so proud that you are here as Tulsans and as Americans.

The majority of the children naturalized Thursday derived citizenship through the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, which allows foreign-born, biological and adopted children of U.S. citizens to receive citizenship by satisfying certain requirements before the age of 18.

But Alfred Pavels, who was included along with the children, waited around 60 years to receive his documents proving that he was a U.S. citizen.

Pavels, a Vietnam War veteran and Purple Heart recipient, was born in Australia and was naturalized in the 1960s when his father became a citizen. At the time, however, Pavels never received his documentation.

He said finally having proof of his citizenship meant a great deal to him because he will finally be able to receive a drivers license in Oklahoma and receive his benefits as a veteran. Up until now, he said he couldnt use the majority of his benefits.

Ive been (in the U.S.) for a long time. It was funny that we found out I couldnt get my drivers license because I didnt have proof of citizenship, Pavels said. So I found out then that we had to go through this whole process again, and it was a tremendous amount of work.

The Gathering Places Reading Tree was surrounded by friends and family supporting those who were naturalized, and Bynum said the entire community was excited for this new group of citizens.

Were excited for what your life is going to look like. Immigrants in Tulsa have achieved great things, Bynum said. Right now, immigrants all across the country are doing amazing things.  We want you to do big things, too, right now in Tulsa.



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Donald Trump said Thursday that he was indicted for mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate, a remarkable development that makes him the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges by the federal government that he once oversaw as he seeks to reclaim the White House.

The indictment carries unmistakably grave legal consequences, including the possibility of prison if he's convicted.

The Justice Department did not immediately publicly confirm the indictment. But two people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to discuss it publicly said Trump's team had been informed that he had been indicted on seven counts and that prosecutors had contacted lawyers to advise them of the indictment shortly before Trump announced it himself on his Truth Social platform.

This is indeed a DARK DAY for the United States of America, Trump posted. We are a Country in serious and rapid Decline, but together we will Make America Great Again!

Within 20 minutes of his announcement, Trump, who said he was due in court Tuesday afternoon in Miami, had begun fundraising off it for his 2024 presidential campaign.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. As the prosecution moves forward, it will pit Trumps claims of sweeping executive power against Attorney General Merrick Garlands oft-stated mantra that no person, including a former commander in chief, should be regarded as above the law.

The indictment arises from a monthslong investigation by special counsel Jack Smith into whether Trump broke the law by holding onto hundreds of documents marked classified at his Palm Beach property, Mar-a-Lago, and whether Trump took steps to obstruct the governments efforts to recover the records.

Prosecutors have said that Trump took roughly 300 classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, including some 100 that were seized by the FBI last August in a search of the home that underscored the gravity of the Justice Departments investigation.

Trump and his team have long seen the special counsel investigation as far more perilous than the New York matter  both politically and legally. Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trumps attorneys were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.

But it remains unclear what the immediate and long-term political consequences will be for Trump. His first indictment spurred millions of dollars in contributions from angry supporters and didnt damage Trump in the polls. No matter what, the indictment  and the legal fight that follows  will throw Trump back into the spotlight, sucking attention away from the other candidates who are trying to build momentum in the 2024 presidential race.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump opponent in the primary, condemned the indictment on Twitter, saying it represented the weaponization of federal law enforcement.

Trump has insisted he was entitled to keep the classified documents when he left the White House, and has also claimed without evidence that he had declassified them.

The former president has long sought to use mounting legal troubles to his political advantage, complaining on social media and at public events that the cases are being driven by Democratic prosecutors out to hurt his 2024 election campaign. He is likely to rely on that playbook again, reviving his longstanding claims that the Justice Department  which, during his presidency, investigated whether his 2016 campaign had colluded with Russia  is somehow weaponized against him.

The case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years  as president and private citizen  but had never before charged him with a crime. Garland was appointed by President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection in 2024.

Among the various state and federal investigations that Trump faces, legal experts  including Trumps own former attorney general  had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as one of the most likely to result in indictment and the one where evidence seemed to favor the government.

Court records unsealed last year showed federal investigators believed they had probable cause that multiple crimes had been committed, including the retention of national defense information, destruction of government records and obstruction of an investigation.

Since then, the Justice Department has amassed additional evidence and secured grand jury testimony from people close to Trump, including his own lawyers. The statutes governing the handling of classified records and obstruction are felonies that could carry years in prison in the event of a conviction.

Signs had mounted for weeks that an indictment was near, including a June 5 meeting between Trumps lawyers and Justice Department officials. After that meeting, Trump said on social media that he anticipated he could be charged, even as he insisted he had done nothing wrong.

Though the bulk of the investigative work had been handled in Washington, with a grand jury meeting there for months, it recently emerged that prosecutors were presenting evidence before a separate panel in Florida, where many of the alleged acts of obstruction scrutinized by prosecutors  including efforts to move the boxes  took place.

Trumps legal troubles extend beyond the New York indictment and classified documents case.

The special counsel has a separate probe underway focused on efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. And the district attorney in Georgias Fulton County is investigating Trump over alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election in that state.

The classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, along with thousands of other unclassified government records, were taken from the White House to the Florida club after Trump left office in January 2021.

The Justice Department has said Trump and his lawyers repeatedly resisted efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration to get the documents back. After months of back-and-forth, Trump representatives returned 15 boxes of records in January 2022, including about 184 documents that officials said had classified markings on them.

FBI and Justice Department investigators issued a subpoena in May 2022 for classified documents that remained in Trumps possession. But after a Trump lawyer provided three dozen records and asserted that a diligent search of the property had been done, officials came to suspect even more documents remained.

They obtained surveillance footage boxes of records being moved from a storage room at Mar-a-Lago.

The investigation had simmered for months before bursting into front-page news in remarkable fashion last August. Thats when FBI agents served a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago and removed 33 boxes containing classified records, including top-secret documents stashed in a storage room and desk drawer and commingled with personal belongings. Some records were so sensitive that investigators needed upgraded security clearances to review them, the Justice Department has said.

The investigation into Trump had appeared complicated  politically, if not legally  by the discovery of documents with classified markings in the Delaware home and former Washington office of President Joe Biden, as well as in the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence. The Justice Department recently informed Pence that he would not face charges, while a second special counsel continues to investigate Bidens handling of classified documents.

But compared with Trump, there are key differences in the facts and legal issues surrounding Bidens and Pences handling of documents, including that representatives for both men say the documents were returned as soon as they were found.

In contrast, investigators quickly zeroed on whether Trump, who for four years as president expressed disdain for the FBI and Justice Department, had sought to obstruct the inquiry by refusing to turn over all the requested documents. The focus on obstruction was reminiscent of the special counsel investigation Trump faced as president, when prosecutors examined whether Trump illegally tried to thwart the Russia probe, including by firing his FBI director.

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Timeline: Key dates in the investigation into Trump's Mar-a-Lago docs Jan. 20, 2021 May 2021 December 2021 NARA "continued to make requests" for records it believed to be missing for several months, according to the affidavit. Around late December 2021, a Trump representative informed the agency that an additional 12 boxes of records that should have been turned over had been found at the former president's Mar-a-Lago club and residence and were ready to be retrieved. Jan. 18, 2022 NARA received 15 boxes of presidential records that had been stored at Mar-a-Lago  14 of which, it would later be revealed, contained classified documents. The documents were found mixed in with an assortment of other material, including newspapers, magazines, photos and personal correspondence. In total, the boxes were found to contain 184 documents with classified markings, including 67 marked confidential, 92 secret and 25 top secret. Agents who inspected the boxes also found special markings suggesting they included information from highly sensitive human sources or the collection of electronic "signals" authorized by a court under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Feb. 9, 2022 Feb. 18, 2022 Feb. 19, 2022 NARA revealed in a letter to a congressional oversight committee that classified information was found in the 15 recovered boxes and confirmed the Justice Department referral. Trump's Save America PAC released another statement insisting, "The National Archives did not 'find' anything," but "were given, upon request, Presidential Records in an ordinary and routine process to ensure the preservation of my legacy and in accordance with the Presidential Records Act." April 12, 2022 NARA informed Trump of its intent to provide the documents to the FBI, at the request of the Justice Department. A Trump representative requested an extension until April 29. April 29, 2022 May 10, 2022 NARA informed Trump's lawyers that it would provide the FBI access to the records as soon as May 12. May 11, 2022 The Justice Department issued a subpoena for additional records. June 3, 2022 June 8, 2022 The Justice Department sent a letter to Trump's lawyer requesting that the storage room be secured, and that "all of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago (along with any other items in that room) be preserved in that room in their current condition until farther notice." Aug. 5, 2022 Aug. 8, 2022 Aug. 12, 2022 Aug. 30, 2022
The Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has proposed that the General Administration of China Customs agree to a protocol for seafood safety, quarantine, and inspection in order to shore up Vietnamese shipments to China.

The proposal is also aimed at easing a large backlog of container trucks carrying Vietnamese farm produce stuck at northern border gates.

The ministry sent a telegram to the General Administration of China Customs on Thursday putting forward several solutions to boost export and import activities between Vietnam and China.

The Vietnamese ministry also proposed the Chinese customs agency consider approving certain fruits and fish products for export to China.

Vietnamese exporters which meet all export requirements set by the Chinese agency should be allowed to ship seafood to China as soon as possible, according to the ministry.

Moreover, the Vietnamese agency proposed allowing shipments of fresh seafood to enter China via border gates in Yunnan, southwest China, and creating favorable conditions for local exporters.

Also, the Vietnamese ministry suggested that China work with Vietnamese authorities to hold an annual meeting in November to beef up two-way trade activities.

Between May 29 and June 2, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development sent a working delegation led by Deputy Minister Tran Thanh Nam to China to promote cooperation and ramp up two-way trade.

Vietnams agro-fishery-forestry exports to China amounted to over US$4 billion in the first five months of 2023, accounting for 20 percent of the formers total farm produce shipments.

Statistics from the Chinese customs agency showed that the country imported 1.26 million metric tons of fishery products worth $5.8 billion in the first four months of 2023, up 6 percent in volume and 10 percent in value year on year.

Meanwhile, Vietnam shipped $363.28 million worth of seafood to the Chinese market during the January-April period, a year on year decline of 32 percent.

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The U.S. government will continue to fulfill its commitments to helping Vietnam cope with the impacts of war, according to Kelly K. McKeague, director of the U.S. Defense Prisoners of War/Missing In Action (POW/MIA) Accounting Agency.

McKeague made the statement during his meeting with Senior Lieutenant General Hoang Xuan Chien, Deputy Minister of National Defense of Vietnam, in Hanoi on Wednesday.

Speaking at a reception in Hanoi, Chien said McKeague's visit to Vietnam coincides with the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Vietnamese Office for Seeking Missing Persons (VNOSMP) and 35 years of joint operations to search for American personnel missing in action (MIA).

Chien also hailed the U.S. agencys efforts in promoting the Vietnam-U.S. relations over the years, especially in overcoming the impacts of war in Vietnam.

The Vietnamese military official affirmed that cooperation in searching for American soldiers who went missing during the war serves as a bridge and first contact channel between leaders of the two countries, enabling the people of both countries to better understand each others goodwill and humanitarian policies.

Chien also revealed that both sides are carrying out several cooperative initaitives. So far, a combined 150 unilateral MIA search operations have been conducted, and the 151st search campaign is currently underway.

As for cooperating on carrying out searches for and collecting the remains of Vietnamese martyrs, the two sides have actively worked together to achieve remarkable results.

So far, the U.S has provided Vietnam with 30 sets of documents relating to Vietnamese soldiers who lost their lives or went missing during the war, as well as a significant amount of war memorabilia.

The Vietnamese Ministry of National Defense seeks further support from the U.S. in locating the additional 180,000 Vietnamese martyrs who remain missing, Chien said.

Chien expressed his hope that both sides will continue to facilitate MIA search cooperation activities.

For his part, McKeague affirmed the U.S. governments commitment to addressing the consequences of the war in Vietnam.

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Hanoi resolutely objects to Taiwanese live-fire exercises in the waters near Ba Binh (Itu Aba) Island, part of Vietnams Truong Sa (Spratly) archipelago in the East Vietnam Sea and demands that Taiwan not to repeat such actions in the future, Vietnams Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Thursday.

Ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang made the objection in response to questions from local media regarding Vietnams reactions to Taiwanese live-fire drills near the Truong Sa Archipelago on Wednesday.

Vietnam has sufficient historical evidence and legal basis to affirm its sovereignty over Truong Sa, Hang stated.

The fact that Taiwan performed live-fire drills in the waters near Ba Binh in Truong Sa is a serious violation of Hanois territorial sovereignty over the archipelago; threatens maritime peace, stability, safety and maritime security; causes tension; and further complicates the situation in the East Vietnam Sea, the spokeswoman said.

Vietnam firmly opposes and demands that Taiwan cancel such illegal activities and not repeat similar violations in the future, Hang stressed.

Ba Binh is the largest natural island in Truong Sa, which belongs to Vietnam but has been illegally occupied by Taiwan since 1956.

According to unverified information published in the Taipei Times, Taiwan has deployed domestically-made Kestrel anti-armor missiles on Itu Aba to strengthen garrison defenses and anti-landing capabilities.

Vietnam has repeatedly proclaimed that it has enough historical evidence and legal foundation to prove its sovereignty over the Truong Sa and Hoang Sa (Paracel) archipelagoes in the East Vietnam Sea in accordance with international law, the spokesperson stated.

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Two family members in Tay Ninh Province, southern Vietnam are in critical condition and the third has died after eating wild mushrooms stir-fired with sponge gourds.

A representative of Cho Ray Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City said on Thursday that the hospital admitted three family members, including two parents and their 17-year-old daughter, for treatment due to mushroom poisoning on Tuesday.

Despite treatment efforts, the father passed away.

Dr. Nguyen Thi Thuy Ngan, deputy head of the Department of Tropical Diseases at Cho Ray Hospital, said that the family had picked the mushrooms themselves and cooked them with sponge gourds.

The father consumed half of the dish, while his wife and daughter shared the rest.

Eight to 12 hours after their meal, the three developed symptoms of nausea and diarrhea. They were taken to a local hospital after their health conditions became worse and eventually were transferred to Cho Ray Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City.

Shortly after being referred to Cho Ray Hospital, the husband began showing symptoms of shortness of breath and respiratory failure.

He received endotracheal intubation at the hospital but eventually succumbed to the poisonous mushrooms.

The two others suffered liver failure, elevated liver enzymes, and hemophilia.

After two days of treatment, the daughters health began to improve, but her mother was still in a critical condition.

The exact toxin in the mushrooms they ate remains unidentified, said Dr. Ngan.

This family often picks wild mushrooms in the rainy season. This was the second time they picked mushrooms to cook. They experienced no issues in the first time.

Dr. Ngan warns against consuming wild mushrooms as they often contain toxins that can destroy human organs such as kidney and liver.

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Check out the latest news in Vietnam today:

Society

-- The Slovak government on Wednesday officially recognized the Vietnamese community as the countrys 14th ethnic minority group and approved regulations for the community, the Vietnam News Agency reported.

-- Ho Chi Minh City reported 287 new cases of hand-foot-mouth disease from May 29 to June 4, soaring over 133 percent against the average of the last four weeks, at 123 cases, according to the municipal Center for Disease Control.

-- Three family members in southern Tay Ninh Province were hospitalized for food poisoning treatment on Tuesday, after they ate mushrooms stir-fried with sponge gourds, with the husband confirmed dead and his wife in critical condition.

 The administration of southern Dong Thap Province has earmarked VND76 billion (US$3.2 million) for a project of conserving and raising a group of 100 red-crowned cranes in the next decade in an attempt to protect biodiversity.

Business

-- Hanoi has decided to suspend a park project called Sanrio Hello Kitty World Hanoi by BRG in a prime location in Tay Ho District, citing the project developer, BRG Group, no longer allowed to use the project location, as the main reason.

Sports

-- As of 8:30 pm on Thursday, the Vietnamese delegation pocketed 66 gold, 56 silver, and 77 bronze medals, ranking third in the medal tally after Indonesia and Thailand at the 12th ASEAN Para Games in Cambodia, the Vietnam News Agency reported.

World News

-- European Union ministers agreed on Thursday on how to share out the responsibility for looking after migrants and refugees, after 12 hours of negotiations got Italy and Greece to sign up to a deal that has eluded the bloc for nearly a decade, according to Reuters.

-- Former U.S. President Donald Trump has been indicted by a federal grand jury for retaining classified government documents and obstruction of justice, according to a source familiar with the matter, Reuters reported.

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Ho Chi Minh City has put into service four bathrooms built in prime locations to serve the needs of dwellers and tourists as part of a bid to address a dearth of toilets in the city.

The citys administration approved the building of makeshift toilets on four out of five vacant land lots in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, according to the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Natural Resources and Environment.

They are located on Le Duan Boulevard, Hai Ba Trung, Nguyen Trung Truc and Nguyen Hue Streets.

Each of these public toilets covers eight square meters and features a stall outside for selling goods. Earnings from this sale booth will be used to maintain the operation of these public bathrooms.

The District 1 administration had earlier called on over 100 restaurants, eateries and coffee shops to offer gratis toilet service to residents and tourists.

A bathroom featuring a shopping booth is open to the public free of charge. Photo: Luu Duyen / Tuoi Tre

A public restroom at Phong Chau Park in District 1 in Ho Chi Minh City deteriorated and was closed in 2021. In March this year, the bathroom was rehabilitated and reopened. Photo: Luu Duyen / Tuoi Tre

In late May, two public toilets built on vacant land lots on Nguyen Trung Truc and Nguyen Hue Streets were put into operation. They are smart standard bathrooms costing VND500 million (US$21,350) each. Photo: Luu Duyen / Tuoi Tre

The city is facing a severe shortage of public toilets. Photo: Luu Duyen / Tuoi Tre

The model of a public toilet in combination with a shopping kiosk is run by Voluntary Youth Public Benefit Service Company. The company is managing 44 bathrooms in the city. Photo: Luu Duyen / Tuoi Tre

A coffee shop on Le Loi Street in District 1, Ho Chi Minh City offers free toilet service to residents and tourists. Photo: Phuong Quyen / Tuoi Tre

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The bus system in central Da Nang City was suspended as drivers and driving assistants were going on a strike on Thursday to demand their unpaid salaries for four months.

Up to 103 out of the 120 employees of Quang An 1 JSC, which operates public bus services in the city, were on strike.

Nguyen Van Dung, a bus driver of the company, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that they have yet to receive their salaries since February this year, so their life is full of hardships.

We have worked hard and seriously to contribute to serving local residents travel demand.

However, Quang An 1 JSC fails to fulfill its responsibility to employees. It pays neither our salaries for a long time nor social as well as health insurance premiums, Dung added.

Buses in Da Nang City are left idle as drivers and driving assistants go on a strike. Photo: Truong Trung / Tuoi Tre

Many other drivers agreed that the company often fails to pay employees salaries as scheduled.

Once laborers demanded salaries, the company issued announcements saying that it would pay salaries on certain dates.

However, it has been four months since employees of the company last received their salaries.

This is not the first time the bus system in Da Nang City was halted due to employees strikes.

Quang An 1 JSCs failure of making salary and social insurance premium payments over the past few years has resulted in the systems suspension, affecting local commuters travel.

At a recent press briefing, Nguyen Dang Hoang, director of the municipal Department of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs, attributed Quang An 1 JSCs slow salary and social insurance premium payment to a slump of bus service demand.

Employees of Quang An 1 JSC cry for help. Photo: Truong Trung / Tuoi Tre

Quang An 1 JSC always takes the lead in social insurance premium arrears for many years and has no goodwill to make payments, according to the Da Nang Social Insurance.

Following many administrative sanctions, the municipal social insurance agency took drastic measures to collect social insurance premium arrears from the company in March this year.

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People arbitrarily butchering or eating meat of buffaloes and cows that were sick or died of unknown causes may be at a very high risk of infection with anthrax from such cattle, the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Developments Animal Health Department has warned.

The warning was included in an urgent dispatch issued by the department to the departments of agriculture and rural development as well as animal health agencies in six northern provinces including Dien Bien, Ha Giang, Lai Chau, Son La, Cao Bang and Lao Cai, urging them to promptly strengthen measures against anthrax.

So far this year, 14 human anthrax cases have been documented, including 13 in Dien Bien and one in Ha Giang, and these two provinces have recorded a total of four outbreaks of anthrax in cattle, the department reported.

The cause of anthrax transmission is mainly because cattle have not been vaccinated against anthrax, according to the department.

The risk for anthrax to continue occurring in Ha Giang and Dien Bien and to spread to other localities is very high, due to the trade, transport and consumption of livestock that may have contracted the disease, it stated.

In order to control and prevent anthrax from spreading on a large scale, the department requested the six aforementioned provinces to destroy all diseased cattle, disinfect all relevant locations, and set up checkpoints to tighten control the transport of livestock and their products from epidemic areas to outside.

It is urgent to vaccinate cattle in places at high risk of anthrax as well as in locations where cattle are slaughtered, and in areas where people buy meat of suspected infected cattle for consumption.

Local health authorities should provide people with signs and dangerous nature of anthrax, and request residents not to arbitrarily transport, slaughter, sell, give, donate or consume cattle infected or suspected to be infected with the disease.

Anthrax is a highly infectious disease caused by Bacillus anthracis, a type of gram-positive, rod-shaped bacteria, which is found naturally in soil and affects domestic and wild animals globally, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Humans can contract anthrax by interacting with infected animals or contaminated animal products, and the disease can lead to severe conditions in both humans and animals, the CDC warned.

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A newly declassified intelligence suggests that Iran has been sending materials to Russia for the development of a local facility which the US believes will be used to build drones intended for the attack in Ukraine. This news comes as the latest sign of a growing military alliance between Tehran and Moscow.

Iran Has Been Supplying Components to Russia to Build a Drone Factory, Possibly for Ukraine Attacks

On Friday, June 9, the White House announced that the drone factory might begin producing drones as early as next year. Nearly a thousand kilometers east of Moscow, in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, it published satellite photos showing the construction of the alleged facilities, as reported by CBS News.

The government also issued a map showing the route that hundreds of attack drones reportedly delivered from Iran to Russia had taken.

According to National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, "The drones are built in Iran, shipped across the Caspian Sea, from Amirabad, Iran to Makhachkala, Russia, and then used operationally by Russian forces against Ukraine."

Recently, Russia reportedly attacked the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv using Iranian drones.

Concerns Over the Strengthening Military Links Between Iran and Russia

CBS News said that during a press conference last month, Kirby expressed concern that the Iran-Russia military ties were expanding, saying that Russia was likely to seek more sophisticated models from Tehran.

In 2022, the Biden administration also revealed photos from a visit by Russian officials to Iran's Kashan Airfield in order to see a drone with the capability of carrying a weapon in the previous year. Later on, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with his Iranian and Turkish counterparts on his first overseas tour since the beginning of the Ukraine war.

National Security Council's Kirby stated on Friday that "the support is flowing both ways: from Iran to Russia, and from Russia to Iran." He said that Russia was providing Iran with unprecedented defense cooperation, including assistance with missile development, electronic systems, and air defense.

The US has already said that it expects ties between Moscow and Tehran to remain transactional, with CIA Director William Burns citing potential limits to the partnership in July 2022.

Both nations are under sanctions from the federal government, and both want to emerge from political isolation, according to Burns during the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. He added, "If they need each other, they don't really trust each other, in the sense that they're energy rivals and historical competitors."

Prior to this, the US and the European Union had placed sanctions on Iran's drone industry and on any purported procurement networks supplying the sector with materials.

According to Bloomberg, the White House also said on Friday that it would be releasing new government guidance to assist countries and companies in taking precautions to prevent unwittingly aiding Tehran's drone program.

@ 2023 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The Slovak government officially acknowledged the Vietnamese community as the countrys 14th ethnic minority group and, as a result, approved regulations to address the needs and concerns of this vibrant community.

The recognition came about following recommendations from experts and the Slovak government Council on Human Rights, Ethnic Minorities, and Gender Equality.

The Vietnamese community fully meets the criteria in quantity and has lived in Slovakia for nearly 70 years and the third generation has fully integrated into society, The Slovak Spectator magazine quoted experts as saying.

In accordance with the governments resolution, the Vietnamese community will have representatives at the Committee on Ethnic Minorities and Ethnic Groups under the Council of the Government of the Slovak Republic for Human Rights, Ethnic Minorities, and Gender Equality.

Moreover, the community will receive financial support from the Fund for Cultural Support of Ethnic Minorities and will have the right to express opinions and contribute to decision-making regarding the allocation of funds.

According to an official census conducted in Slovakia in 2021, 2,793 Slovak citizens identified themselves as having Vietnamese ancestry and 489 individuals held Vietnamese nationality as a secondary citizenship.

Third-generation people from the community speak fluent Slovak, are successful in their professional fields, and contribute to the prosperity of Slovakia.

The last time Slovakia recognized a community as an ethnic minority was 13 years ago when it recognized the Serbian community as an ethnic minority, according to the Vietnam News Agency.

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ABC revisits the case of Kathleen Folbigg, released from prison after 20 years.

Australian Story speaks to scientists who did the groundbreaking research that found two of the Folbigg children could have died as a result of genetic mutations.

Once dubbed Australias worst female serial killer, Kathleen Folbigg has now been set free after a decade-long campaign by a loyal band of friends, lawyers and scientists who gathered new evidence questioning her guilt.

Australian Story has followed the twists and turns of Folbiggs story since she was convicted of killing her four children in 2003. She has always claimed her innocence.

In a two-part series in 2004, Australian Story spoke with the two detectives who investigated her case and with Folbiggs friends and family.

In 2018, Australian Story produced a program which kickstarted the scientific research which ultimately freed her. Nine days after the program aired, a new inquiry into the Folbigg case was announced.

After numerous appeals and two independent inquiries, former NSW Chief Justice Thomas Bathurst this week found theres a reasonable possibility that three of the children died of natural causes.

Now we talk to the scientists who did the groundbreaking research that found two of the Folbigg children could have died as a result of genetic mutations.

I think it seemed that the legal team in Australia had finally accepted that the science had to be looked at in detail and taken seriously, says geneticist Prof Carola Vinuesa, who began researching Folbiggs DNA after watching the 2018 Australian Story episode.

Kathleen Folbigg was pardoned this week.

One of the really clear conclusions of the Folbigg case is that we need a better system for evaluating cases where theres a possibility of a wrong conviction, says Profess Stephen Cordner from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine.

8pm Monday on ABC.
Seven News Sydney boss Jason Morrison has resigned from Seven after 8 years at the helm, to to pursue other opportunities outside of the network.

He will be replaced by Neil Warren, most recently news boss at Brisbane and Gold Coast newsrooms, from Monday, 19 June.

Jason Morrison said: I have loved working here with this amazing team whove built and solidified 7NEWS as the best news service in town.

Its been a real honour to be in this role and to achieve the success and growth that we have.

Director of News and Public Affairs, Craig McPherson said: I want to thank Jason for his tireless efforts over the past eight years. He leaves the team in very good shape as we move home base and into a new era for 7NEWS. He departs Seven with tremendous goodwill and best wishes for his next venture.

Neil Warrens television career spans 43 years, the past 31 of which have been with Seven, he has worked as a journalist, bureau chief, executive producer and most recently leading the 7NEWS Brisbane and Gold Coast newsrooms.

Neil is a news craftsman, devoted to the product and the team. I am sure Neil will enhance and continue the momentum Jason and the Sydney News team have built, said McPherson.

Neil Warren said: 7NEWS has a terrific and very talented Sydney team. Its an exciting time, with the transition to a brand-new newsroom, and Im grateful and very much looking forward to being part of that.

Jason Morrison said: I wish Neil all the best in his new job. Hes one of the industrys gentlemen  a good friend and widely respected in the news business.

Current Deputy News Director, Michael Coombes steps into the News Director role inBrisbane and Gold Coast, vacated by Warren.
EXCLUSIVE:

A new series of Mystery Road: Origin is in development.

In 2022 Mark Coles Smith featured a young Jay Swan in the prequel which became a success for ABC.

An ABC spokesperson told TV Tonight, ABC is currently working with the Mystery Road team to develop a new series of Mystery Road: Origin.

Mystery Road: Origin is loved by audiences across the country and continues to be one of the most popular dramas on ABC iview ever. Its also been recognised overseas and currently has a nomination in the UKs Broadcast Digital Awards, with the likes of The White Lotus and The Last of Us.

TV Tonight understands a new series, to be filmed in Western Australia, is set to screen in 2024.

Managing Director David Anderson, who announced ABCs new 5 Year Plan in Perth yesterday told local ABC Radio, One of the reasons were here in WA, most of the leadership team as well as the Board, is to reiterate the commitment that we have to the West. Our job is to reflect contemporary Australia to tell stories from around the country. Were always looking to partner and partner to do it.

(ABCs) 11 locations and over 200 staff in WA is enduring. But we also commission with the independent production sector. Over the last five years, we spent $25m a year, which generated $75m worth of value for the audience. I think its important to always have, geographically, the country represented in what it is we do.

Mystery Road: Origin is produced by Bunya Productions.
(Bloomberg) -- Semiconductor research projects with 8 billion ($8.6 billion) in public funds were approved by the European Unions executive arm as part of a push to increase the blocs domestic chip-supply chain.

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The projects are backed by a total 13.7 billion in private funding, amounting to about 22 billion, the European Commission announced Thursday. It said a total of 68 Important Projects of Common European Interest  or IPCEI  have been given the go-ahead from 56 companies in 19 countries, including Norway.

Europe is taking its destiny into its own hands, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton wrote in a blog post. By mastering the most advanced semiconductors, EU will become an industrial powerhouse in markets of the future.

TSMC in Talks for Up to Half German Plants Cost in Subsidies

The commission proposed the EUs Chips Act in early 2022, setting an ambitious goal to produce 20% of the worlds semiconductors by 2030. These IPCEI projects form one component of that plan, which also opened the door for governments to provide funds for production facilities.

So far, companies like Intel Corp, Infineon Technologies AG, STMicroelectronics NV, GlobalFoundries Inc and Wolfspeed Inc have all announced new investments. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is also looking at building a production site in Germany.

Some businesses, however, has been critical of the timeframe it took to get the IPCEI projects approved.

German Economy Minister Robert Habeck praised the decision, saying Germany has 31 projects in 11 regions. We can thus increase resilience across Europe in this important field and secure value creation and jobs, he said in a news release.

(Updates with Habeck comment. An earlier version misstated the year the Chips Act was proposed)

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(Bloomberg) -- French President Emmanuel Macron met with artificial intelligence experts from Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.s Google, among others, to discuss Frances role in AI research and regulation.

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In a meeting at the Elysee Palace with Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire and Digital Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, Macron heard from experts including chief AI scientist Yann LeCun from Meta and Joelle Barral, engineering director at Google Research, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the meeting was private.

The guests talked about Frances status in the global AI race, the positive and negative impacts of the technology on society and Europes upcoming regulation known as the AI Act, according to the people. Macrons office didnt respond to a request for comment on Thursdays meeting.

While Macron was mostly looking to hear from the guests, the attendees understood that the French president wants to play a key part in European and global AI regulation. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has also expressed interest in influencing regulation and Macrons strategy stands to further escalate a rivalry between London and Paris to become the go-to destination for all things tech, innovation and venture capital.

Macron is expected to present Frances blueprint regarding generative AI next week at Paris technology conference VivaTech, which starts June 14, according to people familiar with the matter. Next week he is also scheduled to speak about the countrys economic sovereignty, and meet with representatives of a drug-making plant and a high-tech sneaker company before addressing an event about how to reduce the carbon footprint of planes, the people said.

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of electric-car maker Tesla Inc. will also attend the VivaTech conference. Last month, Musk said after meeting with Macron in Paris that he was confident that Tesla would make significant investments in France in the future.

Macron Aims to Convince Musk That France Is Top Electric Car Hub

The Elysee meeting also featured Antoine Bordes, vice president of European defense startup Helsing; Arthur Mensch, a former DeepMind scientist and co-founder of Mistral AI, a potential French rival to OpenAI; Laurent Daudet, co-CEO of LightOn; and Charles Gorintin, co-founder of insurance unicorn Alan.

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The collapse of the Nova Kakhovka Dam along the Dnipro River has become one of the largest industrial and ecological disasters in Europe, destroying cities, villages, and farms, depriving people of power and clean water, and causing massive environmental damage and a possible nuclear meltdown.

With the public information being provided, there is still no concrete reason why the dam failed, as the dam and hydroelectric power plant are currently under Russian control and inaccessible to independent investigators.

As a result, Western officials have blamed Russia for the destruction of the dam and played a part in the displacement of both Ukrainian civilians and Russian military positions downstream.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said while they could not independently verify the cause of the dam's destruction, it was "another devastating consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine."

However, engineering experts speculated that, among the countless possibilities, an explosion was the most likely cause of the dam failure.

A CNN article provided several theories about the collapse of the dam and what experts say about each of them.

Russian Sabotage

The Ukrainian government quickly blamed Moscow for the incident, saying the Russians blew up the reservoir from the inside. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky cited its own intelligence reports from 2022, claiming the Russians mined the dam. Several social media posts indicate people heard the explosions around the time the dam was thought to have been damaged.

The Russian sabotage theory would make sense as the Ukrainians are preparing to launch its counter-offensive, which Zelensky and his government are tight-lipped about. Another reason for the theory's plausibility was due to the Ukrainian recapture of Kherson in November 2022, which is the first major city along the Dnipro's banks after the dam.

Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak said the Russian's "obvious" goal was to stall the Ukrainian counter-offensive by making it difficult for them to cross the Dnipro. "This once again confirms that the Kremlin is not thinking strategically, but rather in terms of short-term situational advantages. But the consequences are already catastrophic," he added.

According to the Ukrainian Agricultural Ministry, the dam breach also resulted in the fall of water levels in the reservoir, affecting 94% of irrigation systems in Kherson, 74% in Zaporizhzhya, and 30% in Dnipro oblasts "without a source of water."

The Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant also depends on the dam's reservoir as it supplies cooling water to Europe's largest nuclear power station. Any bad move to the plant would trigger a repeat of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.

Read Also: Ukraine Accuses Russia of Blowing Up Major Dam in Kherson

Ukrainian Artillery

On the other hand, Russia has denied any involvement in the incident and blamed Ukraine for destroying the dam. However, the Kremlin has not provided any evidence aside from saying the Ukrainians launched "mass artillery attacks" on the dam.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed the attack was "planned and carried out by order received from Kyiv, from the Kyiv regime," to "deprive Crimea of water," and to distract from the battlefield. Consequently, Ukraine denied such accusations.

University of Exeter Tidal Engineering and Environmental Services chair Chris Binnie said the theory of Ukraine targeting the dam was "highly unlikely" as it would need to get "massive explosives close to the foundations."

Meanwhile, HR Wallingford technical director Craig Goff said inflicting enough damage on the dam would require a very precise strike, similar to the actions of the Royal Air Force Dambusters back in World War II.

"It wasn't a simple thing," he explained. "You had to get the explosives right down on the upstream side of the dam at a deep depth. If it was just the top of the dam then it would probably still survive. You'd lose a bit of water but it would survive."

Another consequence of the dam failure was Crimea's water security.

When Crimea was annexed by Russia in 2014, Kyiv quickly blocked the North Crimea Canal to deprive the peninsula of water. The Russians reopened the canal when they captured the dam during the first days of their invasion in 2022.

The destruction of the dam did not only affect the villages downstream but also the people of Crimea, as their source of water would slowly deplete again.

However, some suggested the dam burst also surprised several Russian units as much as the Ukrainians, with reports of Russian soldiers being swept up in flood waters and leaving the east bank of the Dnipro.

Structural Failure

The 35m high, 85m long Nova Kakhovka Dam is the last of six Soviet-era dams that tame the Dnipro before emptying into the Black Sea. As it was an old facility, there are speculations the dam failure was a technical one and not caused by any of the belligerents.

Goff explained that the dam was of the gravity type, the most commonly constructed across the world. "They've been built for hundreds of years, and if they were designed and built well and are maintained adequately, then the chance of a failure is very, very low," he said. "It would be extremely unusual for this type of dam to fail with no warning."

There is very little information on how the dam was maintained under Russian occupation, as the area surrounding the dam has been the most heavily-contested region since the start of the invasion.

Satellite images taken by Maxar suggested the road above the dam was damaged on June 5, just days before the structural collapse. The last time the bridge was intact was May 28, meaning the bridge was probably damaged between June 1 and 2.

Additionally, NORSAR, an independent Norwegian firm detecting earthquakes and nuclear explosions, spotted an explosion at the dam around the time of the first reports of its collapse on June 6.

NORSAR CEO Anne Lycke said they quickly noticed "there had been an explosion close to the dam or at the dam."

Another speculation of a technical failure included a possible failure inside the power plant. Goff referred to the 2009 explosion at the Sayano-Shushenskaya station, the largest hydroelectric plant in Russia, saying the problem which caused the explosion was "one of its turbines." "[T]hat killed people inside the powerhouse, but it didn't affect the dam in that instance because of the way the dam was built," he said.

Related Article: Zelensky Visits Kherson After Dam Bust, Calls for International Aid

@ 2023 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Ten foot shark beaten to death after tourist who screamed for papa killed in Egypt

A tiger shark has been beaten to death after a tourist was killed at a popular beach destination in Egypt.

Vladimir Popov, 23, was spending the day by the Red Sea in Hurghada when he was mauled to death by the 10ft animal.

His father Yury watched on helplessly as the shark circled around Russian Mr Popov who screamed out papa, papa and was dragged under the water.

The shark was lifted out of the sea and taken to the beach where it was beaten to death (ShuttleTV)

We went to the beach to relax. My son was attacked by a shark. It all happened in seconds, he told local media.

What kind of help can you give? This meat grinder happened in 20 seconds, he was just dragged under the water.

Witnesses said the shark toyed with Mr Popovs body in the water for two hours, according to reports.

The beast was then lifted out of the sea in a net and taken to the beach on a small boat where it was bludgeoned to death.

Video footage shows people hitting the fish over the head with what appeared to be a metal pole or a stick.

It appeared to be alive as it thrashed on the sand with a hook in its eye.

Authorities closed off a 46-mile stretch of the coastline, announcing it will remain off limits until Sunday.

Witnesses said the shark toyed with Mr Popovs body in the water for two hours, according to reports. (Grigory Kataev via REUTERS)

Yury added: This is an absolutely ridiculous coincidence, because it is a safe beach. There are ships and yachts around.

It's never happened there. They usually attack on wild beaches. It's just some kind of evil fate."

The ministry later said it had caught the shark and was examining it in a laboratory to try to determine the reasons for the rare attack.

Shark attacks are rare in the Red Sea coastal regions.

However, in 2022 there were two fatal attacks in Hurghada within days, killing an Austrian and a Romanian tourist.

Shark attacks are rare at the popular beach resort, pictured, and in the wider Red Sea coastal regions (Reuters)

Egypts Red Sea resorts, including Hurghada and Sharm El-Sheikh, boast some of the countrys most renowned beach destinations and are popular with European tourists.

Divers are attracted by the steep drop-offs of coral reefs just offshore, which offer a rich and colourful sea life.

Egypt has in recent years sought to revive the vital tourism sector, which has been hurt by years of political instability, the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

Tiger sharks are large species that reside in tropical and temperate waters and are among sharks most cited by the International Shark Attack File for unprovoked attacks on humans.
Guy Ritchie is best known for making ensemble gangster comedies, but occasionally, he surprises us with something completely different - such as The Covenant.

The war thriller is set in Afghanistan in March 2018 and follows U.S. Army Special Forces Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his team as they try to find IED (improvised explosive device) factories.

His interpreter, Ahmed (Dar Salim), is the newest member of the team and proves he can offer more than his language skills. When the team are ambushed by the Taliban during a raid on a potential factory, Kinley and Salim end up on the run together.

The film follows the two vastly different men as they try to get back to Bagram Air Base on foot over treacherous terrain with the Taliban on their tail.

This thriller tells a deeply satisfying story with serious dramatic stakes and several gripping action sequences, particularly the ambush and the climactic showdown.

It shines a light on an aspect of the War in Afghanistan that people may not have considered before. It makes you think about how local Afghan interpreters were treated by the Taliban for working with the American military, particularly after the U.S. fully withdrew from the country in 2021. They are supposed to be protected in exchange for their service but this isn't always the case.

Gyllenhaal has starred in a war movie before but it is clear to see why he has returned to the genre - The Covenant is very different to 2005's Jarhead in most respects - the story, the tone, and the war it depicts, to name a few.

He is the big name here and his performance is excellent but the star of the show is Salim. Ahmed is a hero who selflessly goes above and beyond the call of duty to help an American.

Salim is terrific as the character, who is given just as much backstory, depth and screentime as his counterpart. He is not an Afghan stereotype, like we've seen in many films before; he is an intelligent, hardworking and heroic character.

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant has flown under the radar in the U.K., which is a shame because it deserves to be seen by a much wider audience.

On Prime Video now.
(Bloomberg) -- The White House pushed back on a report that the Chinese government cut a deal with Cuba to set up a spy base on the island that would target US military bases and communications.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Ive seen that press report. Its not accurate, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in an interview on MSNBC, without specifying if the report was false in its entirety.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that China and Cuba had struck a secret agreement to establish a spy facility on the island, citing US officials familiar with the matter, who said Beijing was paying several billion dollars for the base. The facility would allow Chinese intelligence services to eavesdrop on electronic communications throughout southeastern US where many military bases are located, according to the report.

The US learned about the plan in recent weeks but believed building had yet to start on the facility, CNN reported Friday, citing two sources familiar with the matter.

Earlier: White House Sees Growing Aggressiveness From Chinese Military

What I can tell you is that we have been concerned since day one of this administration about Chinas influence activities around the world, certainly in this hemisphere and in this region, Kirby told MSNBC. Were watching this very, very closely.

Cubas foreign affairs ministry denied the report, saying in a statement it was fabricated by US officials.

Chinas Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said they were not aware of the reports at a briefing in Beijing on Friday. Its well-known that the US interferes in the affairs of other countries and has been a leading power in hacking and eavesdropping, he added.

The revelation comes as the US looks to resume high-level dialog with China after separate allegations of Chinese espionage earlier this year derailed talks. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to travel to China in the coming weeks to meet senior officials, including potentially Chinese President Xi Jinping, Bloomberg News reported earlier this week.

The Biden administration has been working for months to arrange that visit, after Blinken canceled a trip to Beijing in February after an alleged Chinese spy balloon crossed the US.

While high-level communication is resuming, military tensions between the worlds two largest economies have flared over the past month. China declined a US meeting request between the two countries defense ministers last week, and the White House has warned of growing aggressiveness by Chinas military forces who have engaged in dangerous maneuvers off the coast of China.

Kirby earlier predicted it would not take long before people are injured if Beijing doesnt start behaving more responsibly.

--With assistance from Michael McDonald, Matthew Bristow, Jenni Marsh, Lucille Liu and Dan Murtaugh.

(Updates with Foreign Ministry comment.)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) may be spying on American TikTok users after all.

A former high-level ByteDance executive claimed in a court filing that TikTok has a "back door channel" in its code allowing CCP officials to view data from users anywhere worldwide, including the US and Hong Kong.

ByteDance is TikTok's parent company.

Ex-ByteDance Executive TikTok Claims Details

TikTok is an app at the center of many investigations and government scrutiny worldwide. A significant number of countries, such as the US and Canada, have banned the app from government-issued devices.

Meanwhile, India and Afghanistan banned the use of the app entirely due to it being inconsistent with Islamic laws and national security concerns, respectively, per Mashable.

Many of the countries that banned TikTok from government-issued devices believe that the app provides an avenue for CCP officials to either track or spy on users' data, giving them access to what should have been private or confidential information. In this case, however, their concerns may have been proven right.

Yintao "Roger" Yu, the former ByteDance executive, mentioned in a court filing that the company has a back door channel CCP officials can access to obtain data from users worldwide, especially in the US and Hong Kong, per Gizmodo.

Roger, who was ByteDance's head of engineering in its US branch, mentioned this claim in the lawsuit, first spotted by The Wall Street Journal (paywalled), that he filed in Superior Court in San Francisco in early May for being wrongfully terminated after raising concerns about what he believed were ByteDance's illegal business practices. These practices include allegedly stealing content from Snapchat and Instagram, per CNN.

Read More: Twitch Releases Apology for Branded Content Changes on Its Platform

Roger also claimed that CCP officials had used this back door channel at least once to identify users involved in pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. He also revealed that the CPP and ByteDance officials have a "deep relationship" with each other and that TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew downplayed it in public statements.

Additionally, the CCP had a special office or unit in the company; ByteDance gave the people in this unit "superuser" credentials, giving them access to the data ByteDance collects.

If Roger's accusations turn out to be true, it would confirm lawmakers' concerns worldwide about the national security risks TikTok presents. The company is scrambling to avoid a total ban in the US as of press time; it is facing bipartisan scrutiny over national security concerns and its failure to protect underage users from harmful content.

ByteDance's Response To Roger's Claims

A ByteDance spokesperson said in an emailed statement that Roger's claims are "intended to garner media attention," and that the company plans to oppose his claims, which the company describes as baseless allegations.

The spokesperson pointed out that Roger never raised such allegations during the five years after 2018, when ByteDance terminated his employment.

Bloomberg also reports that Roger worked for the company for less than a year and was assigned to a now-discontinued app called Flipagram, per ByteDance's spokesperson.

Related Article: TikTok Files a Lawsuit Against Montana After Statewide App Ban
HA NOI  Viet Nam's power giant EVN has explained the reasons behind its purchase of electricity from neighbouring countries rather than from renewable energy facilities at home.

The first reason is geographical. Power shortages often strike the northern region, whereas wind and solar farms predominantly cluster around the central and southern regions. The current capacity of the national grid doesn't allow for the transmission of excessive power from the two regions to the other.

Another reason centres around power purchase agreements. Viet Nam has signed such an agreement with Laos for a long time, so it is traditional to import part of its power consumption from the neighbour. The same goes for China, which has been its power exporter since 2005.

Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade ang Hoang An said the imported electricity was a drop in the bucket compared to what generators produced at home. Viet Nam imported around 10 million kWh per day while generating 850 million kWh per day.

"We import electricity not because we are short of electricity, but because it is in line with our power purchase agreements," said An.

EVN has also clarified its stance on why its subsidiaries put dozens of trillions of ong in banks while EVN itself pressed for a hike in power prices.

EVN said it is common practice to make deposits into banking accounts to service short-term debts. By the time the subsidiaries deposited their money, their short-term debts had amounted to over VN60 trillion (US$2.56 billion). As such, they had to maintain a sufficient banking balance to keep good credit scores.

EVN also said its negotiations of power purchase with renewable energy facilities had got results. By May 31, 40 out of 50 facilities that requested temporary prices equaling half the ceiling prices defined in Decision No.21 had been approved by the ministry.

More importantly, seven facilities with a total capacity of 430MW had come into operation and connected to the national grid.

EVN also said it had actively embraced digital transformation to improve its operational efficiency. And as a result of the ensuing increased productivity, its headcounts on the payroll fell by 1,100 year-by-year.

EVN has phased in digital electric metres since 2015 to supersede mechanical metres which require manual reading. About 80 per cent of the mechanical metres had been replaced to date, and the phase-in was expected to be completed in 2025.  VNS
LANG SON  The northern border province of Lang Son has sped up customs clearance for import/export activities at two border gates of Huu Nghi and Tan Thanh.

Currently, Huu Nghi Border Gate handles customs clearance for about 750 vehicles per day, while its area for those carrying imports/exports can accommodate about 450 vehicles. So, vehicles are directed to non-tariff areas which have room for about 800 to 1,000.

Meanwhile, from May 26 to June 5, over 630 trucks carrying durian to China went through the Tan Thanh Border Gate.

On average, the border gate provides customs clearance for 300 vehicles per day while it can deal with about 1,100-1,200 at maximum. If the vehicles carrying agricultural products and fruits exceed the capacity, they will be directed to a non-tariff area that can deal with about 100.

It is forecast that the demand for goods trading through Huu Nghi and Tan Thanh border gates will increase sharply as Viet Nam and other countries enter the peak time in the harvest season of fruits and agricultural products.

Quarantine authorities were asked to strengthen the inspection and control of exports, especially Vietnamese fruits and agricultural products, to ensure compliance with the regulations of the two countries.

The provincial Industry and Trade Department was asked to continue overseeing the situation and removing difficulties and obstacles in import and export activities, especially in terms of mechanisms and policies.

The department was requested to update the situation and consult provincial authorities and businesses about goods volumes transported to border gates.

Businesses were called on to shift to export products to China via official channels.

Organisations, individuals, and businesses are urged to take the initiative in business plans, fulfil financial obligations, and continue to improve infrastructure to meet import and export demand.

Ha requested agencies and units to strictly follow the directions of the provincial Party Committee and People's Committee on improving the business and investment environment, preventing corruption and negativities at the border gate, and raising the responsibility of staff.

In the first five months of 2023, import and export activities at five border gates in the province were reported to run smoothly. On average, over 1,1000 vehicles traversed the border gates daily. Total import-export turnover topped US$17.44 billion.  VNS
HA NOI  Industry leaders of the plastics, rubber, printing, and packaging industries are gathering at the HanoiPlasPrintPack 2023, held from June 8 to 11 in Ha Noi at the I.C.E. - Hanoi International Center for Exhibition.

The 11th Hanoi International Plastics, Rubber, Printing & Packaging Industry Exhibition is making a grand comeback in its physical format, showcasing a lineup of 220 exhibitors, occupying 340 booths across an exhibition area of 8,000 square metres.

They represent diverse countries and regions, including Belgium, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, and Viet Nam. These exhibitors are presenting up-to-date machinery, equipment, and advanced technology solutions.

Organised by the Ministry of Industry & Trade - Vinexad National Trade Fair & Advertising JSC (VINEXAD) in collaboration with Yorkers Exhibition Service Viet Nam, the exhibition aims to drive industrial transformation and upgrades in Northern Viet Nam.

The growth of Viet Nam's plastics industry has been truly impressive, with plastic product production reaching 11.2 million tonnes in 2022. This represents a remarkable 12.5 per cent increase compared to the previous year, said Judy Wang, President of Yorkers.

The exhibition gathers remarkable exhibitors from various sectors. The plastics industry is showcased by renowned leaders, including CMIC, GUIBAO, BOLE, CUTECH, FU CHUN SHIN, SHINI and BOUCHERIE, demonstrating their latest technologies and innovative solutions.

In the printing sector, big names like SANSIN, FUJIFILM, EPSON and HX PRODUCTION exhibit the latest achievements in digital printing and printing equipment.

Visitors can also explore a diverse range of packaging solutions from experts such as LI SHENQ, BAO BI HOA TRUNG, JORN and DRICK. Additionally, PAN STONE, NASTAH, SQUARE SILICONE and HUAQI SEALING represent the rubber sector, showcasing high-quality rubber products and solutions.

A series of inspiring seminars are also hosted to provide an opportunity to build valuable connections and gain insights into the future of the plastics, printing, and packaging sectors.  VNS
HA NOI  PVI Insurance Corporation (PVI Insurance) proudly achieved remarkable recognition on Wednesday, as the sole insurance enterprise in Viet Nam honoured in the prestigious "International Finance Insurance Awards" by the United Kingdom's International Finance Magazine (IFM).

PVI Insurance received the esteemed title of "Worlds Most Innovative Non-life Insurance Company 2023".

The International Finance Awards are renowned for celebrating organisations that have demonstrated exceptional accomplishments and advancements across various sectors worldwide. In insurance industry, the award acknowledges the companies that are dedicated to safeguarding the interests of customers globally.

Earlier in February, PVI Insurance also became the first and only company in Viet Nam to receive an excellent A- rating from AM Best thanks to its strong financial position and robust performance.

In 2022, PVI Insurance successfully surpassed its business plan targets and maintained its prominent position as the leading non-life insurance company in Viet Nam.

The company secured a total consolidated revenue of VN14.4 trillion (US$612 million) in 2022, exceeding the annual target by 23 per cent. Its profit after tax also surpassed the plan by 21.3 per cent, reaching VN1.1 trillion.

In addition to striving for financial success, PVI Insurance places a strong emphasis on enhancing customer experiences through collaborations with leading e-commerce entities and continuous service and product improvements.

Furthermore, with the establishment of PVI Digital Insurance Company as its 40th member unit in early 2023, PVI Insurance has taken significant strides in integrating technology into its operations. These initiatives help diversify non-traditional insurance distribution channels and ensure the best possible experiences for customers.

In 2021, PVI Insurance also received two accolades from IFM, distinguishing itself as the sole Vietnamese non-life insurance company to win the titles of "Best CSR Insurance Company" and "Best Non-Life Insurance Company".

These accolades serve as a testament to PVI Insurance's unwavering commitment to creating, developing and enhancing the quality of insurance products to provide optimal protection for partners and customers. They serve as a driving force and a clear objective for PVI Insurance as it continues to strengthen its position in both the domestic and international insurance markets in the years to come.  VNS
HA NOI  The COVID-19 pandemic brought people's attention to zoonotic diseases  transmitted between animals and humans  and the risks of bush meat consumption to global health security, experts said.

However, the wildlife trade is still a common source of livelihood in many countries in Southeast Asia.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) in close collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on Thursday (June 8) kicked off the Safety Across Asia for the Global Environment (SAFE) project.

This project aims to reduce zoonotic disease risks at high-risk wildlife facilities with the generous support of the European Union.

During opening remarks, Vuong Tien Manh, an expert from the MARD, stated that this project would boost the government's effort toward reducing the risks of wildlife trade and bush meat consumption.

"Over the past few years, the Vietnamese Government has been strengthening surveillance systems and promoting responsible wildlife trade practices while preserving livelihoods, enhancing biosecurity in farms and markets, and improving awareness of zoonotic diseases, Manh said.

This project will strengthen our work and help us improve captive wildlife management according to the draft national plan," he said.

The SAFE project is a joint initiative implemented in the Laos Peoples Democratic Republic, Sabah state of Malaysia, Thailand and Viet Nam.

FAO Viet Nam Emergency Centre for Trans-boundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD) Senior Technical Co-ordinator Pawin Padungtod explained that FAO is implementing the SAFE project in Viet Nam to support the government in identifying high-risk facilities, including socio-economic impact and risk mitigation, enabling the development of improved national policies and regional co-operation towards better pandemic prevention and preparedness.

The project will also support the development of regional biosafety standards and joint strategies within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), ultimately strengthening cooperation, and sharing best practices between Viet Nam and other ASEAN countries.

Through the One Health approach, efforts are also being made to enhance collaboration between the public health, animal health and environmental sectors.

"The SAFE project was conceived with a clear focus on reducing the risks of future pandemics by targeting both health and crime risks associated with wildlife facilities," says Jenna Dawson-Faber, UNODC SAFE project coordinator.

"It requires collective action among stakeholders to achieve this purpose. And I am grateful that Viet Nam and other project countries are continuing to engage with all relevant partners to ensure the project results will benefit the country, ASEAN and global communities," she said. VNS
With Viet Nam determined to take drastic measures to not just recover the economy but also work hard toward development priorities, Viet Nam News Agency (VNA) asks Jonathan Pincus, UNDP Senior International Economist, for recommendations to speed up the nations efforts and achieve its set targets.

As a development partner that has helped Viet Nam work its way toward human centred development and sustainable growth, what are your assessments on the current economic situation in Viet Nam and what are the challenges lay ahead?

Viet Nam has made tremendous progress toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. The headcount Multidimensional Poverty Index, which considers income and access to basic services and amenities like healthcare, education, housing, clean water and sanitation, fell by more than half from 2016 to 2022 from 9.2 per cent to 4.3 per cent of the population. These gains were achieved despite the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on jobs and incomes.

Viet Nam has made gains on other goals such as an increase in upper secondary school enrolment rates and further declines in maternal mortality. Although still a lower middle-income country, Viet Nam achieved High Human Development Status in 2021, signalling the countrys commitment to pro-poor growth, access to health services and education.

More progress is needed on some of the SDGs, for example gender equality and environmental protection. The sex ratio at birth in 2022 was 111.5 boys to 100 girls in 2022 as a result of the widespread practice of pre-natal sex selection. Women are under-represented in senior positions in government and the private sector, and domestic violence remains a serious issue. Marine and coastal ecosystems are vulnerable to over-exploitation and pollution from agriculture, industry and household waste.

By far the greatest development challenge facing Viet Nam is climate change. As a country with a long coastline and two low-lying delta regions, Viet Nam is often listed among the countries most vulnerable to sea level rise, floods, drought and extreme weather events. In the Mekong Delta region, rising sea levels and saline intrusion could force millions of people to relocate. Billions of dollars in investment will be needed to upgrade rural and urban infrastructure to protect communities from storms and floods.

Like other countries, Viet Nam has embarked on a long-term journey from fossil fuel dependence to renewable energy. The Government has pledged to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and eliminate coal-fired power plants in the 2040s. The transition will deliver economic benefits including energy security and cleaner air, and Viet Nams green credentials will bolster export industries.

The investment effort required to achieve net-zero is measured in the hundreds of billions of US dollars. Mobilising finance on this scale is an unprecedented challenge. Traditional financial instruments like government bonds, commercial banks and overseas development assistance will not be enough. Viet Nam will need to innovate to create larger, deeper domestic financial markets and to use the governments balance sheet to crowd in private investment, especially from the domestic private sector.

What are UNDPs recommendations for Viet Nam to deal with those challenges in order to keep up the nation's remarkable progress that has been made over the years?

UNDP policy recommendations to Viet Nam and other countries is based on the principle that development should 'Leave No One Behind'. We support policies to achieve equality of outcomes and human development for all.

Viet Nam has demonstrated that rapid economic growth is consistent with a deep concern for equality. Since 2018, income growth for the poorest 40 per cent of households has been higher than average national income growth. The under-five child mortality rate in 2021 was 20.6 per 1,000 live births, less than half of the average of lower middle-income countries. Access to electricity and basic sanitation is nearly universal, even in remote areas.

Some problems remain. Food insecurity among ethnic minority children is stubbornly high at 32 per cent of children under five years of age. Elderly poverty is a rising concern, with 9 per cent of people over 65 years old living in poverty at the national poverty line and another 15 per cent vulnerable to poverty. Nearly half of elderly people are still in work and 90 per cent receive financial assistance from family members.

Social assistance programmes are in place to help poor and vulnerable individuals and households including children, the elderly and people living with disabilities. However, Viet Nams spending on social assistance at 0.7 per cent of GDP is low compared to the rest of the Asia-Pacific region. Benefit levels are also low, both in absolute terms and compared to other lower middle-income countries.

The Governments Master Plan for Social Assistance Reform and Development (MPSARD), approved in 2017, identifies reforms to close these emerging poverty gaps, including expanding social pensions and child benefit. However, these innovations have not yet been funded.

UNDP proposes universal child benefit and social pensions as a policy to ensure that all Vietnamese citizens benefit from development and to build the resilience of households with young children and elderly members to manage income loss due to economic headwinds, health emergencies like COVID-19 and other risks.

Estimates compiled by scholars at the National Economics University indicate that universal child benefit and social pensions would be an affordable, effective means to eliminate poverty, build social cohesion and prevent widening inequalities from undermining Viet Nams development gains.

The transition to renewable energy will generate benefits but will also give rise to substantial economic costs for every activity, sector and region of the country. The aim of achieving a Just Energy Transition is to ensure that these costs and benefits are fairly distributed, and in particular that the living standards of the poorest and most vulnerable members of society are protected.

UNDP is working closely with the Government to understand the social and economic implications of climate change and the energy transition and to identify policies and programmes to protect vulnerable citizens and communities.

Viet Nam has determined to take drastic measures to not just recover the economy but also work hard toward development priorities. As a long-term development partner of Viet Nam, what is UNDPs plan to support Viet Nam in achieving its goals?

UNDP works closely with the Government and other partners to support sustainable and inclusive economic growth, to help Viet Nam increase resilience to shocks and adapt to the effects of climate change and to promote improvements to the quality of governance and access to justice for Vietnamese citizens.

The Sustainable Development Goals and the principle of Leaving No One Behind motivate UNDPs work in Viet Nam. We identify evidence-based policy options with the Government and other partners to help Viet Nam accelerate progress towards achieving all the SDGs. Gender equality and increasing economic opportunities for young people have emerged as priority issues for UNDP and other United Nations agencies.

As already noted, UNDP is engaged in work on social protection reform and achieving a Just Energy Transition. We also work with the Government to support efforts to make public agencies more responsive to citizens concerns and aspirations from central authorities to villages and towns. PAPI, a national survey of local governance and public administration, provides important insights on citizens needs and perceptions of public institutions.

The Vietnamese public is increasingly concerned about the quality of the natural environment. The 2021 Law on Environmental Protection and the decision on circular economy development in 2022 are important milestones. The new environment law brings Vietnamese concepts and regulations in line with international practice and provides a legal basis for carbon trading. Official endorsement of circularity will have important implications for domestic policies relating to solid waste management and for Viet Nams key export industries including textiles, footwear and electronics.

The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has made us all more aware of the need to build resilience to disasters and climate change, health impacts, and economic risks such as financial crises or sudden weakening of external demand as we are experiencing at the moment. The capacity to anticipate risks and respond effectively is an essential function of government. VNS
PARIS  Minister of Foreign Affairs Bui Thanh Son highlighted Viet Nams determination to achieve green transition at a panel discussion of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) Ministerial Council Meeting 2023 in Paris on Thursday.

Speaking at the discussion chaired by the Secretary of State for the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Son said for the green transition process to succeed, balance and equity must be ensured. It involves a strategic balance between clean energy transition and energy security, taking into account the different conditions and development levels of countries to build diverse and practical energy transition pathways. It encompasses equity in access to green technology and green finance for developing and under-developed countries. It also entails fairness in ensuring space and development opportunities among different groups of countries and communities within society, so that no individual or nation is left behind.

According to him, green transition must be carried out synchronously worldwide, and thus needing policy coordination and determination of all countries in the world.

Viet Nam highly values the Inclusive Forum on Carbon Mitigation Approaches (IFCMA) of the OECD, he said, adding that IFCMAs mission of reaching common orientations and policies at the global level is important.

Son stressed that the green transition process is a revolution that requires breakthrough thinking and actions, especially in the bold application of newer, more efficient, and smarter green technologies. To minimise the trade-offs associated with these breakthroughs, Vietnam hopes that OECD countries, which are at the forefront of technology, can pioneer the development and transfer of efficient, safe, and suitable new technologies for developing countries, he said.

The minister went on to say that Viet Nam is one of the countries hardest hit by climate change. Transitioning to a green, circular, and low-emission economy has been a consistent and coherent development policy of Vietnam. Despite being a developing country undergoing transition, Viet Nam has made ambitious commitments and shared responsibilities with the international community for addressing climate change. This determination has been clearly demonstrated through Vietnam's strong commitments at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), the establishment of the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) with G7 countries, and most recently, the approval of the National Power Development Plan for the 2021-30 period.

He concluded that this climate action roadmap can only succeed with the support of international friends, particularly OECD, through concessional funding, technology transfer, policymaking, governance, and high-quality workforce training.

Viet Nam also looks to OECD for assistance in sustainable water management, particularly in the Mekong Delta region, he said.  VNS
PARIS  Minister of Foreign Affairs Bui Thanh Son met with officials of Brazil, France, the European Commission (EC), and Canada on the sidelines of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) Ministerial Council Meeting 2023 in Paris on Thursday.

Meeting with his Brazilian counterpart Mauro Vieira, he affirmed that Viet Nam treasures and wishes to enhance the comprehensive partnership with Brazil, one of its most important partners in Latin America.

Son suggested the two sides maintain high-level delegation exchanges as well as coordination and mutual support at international organisations and multilateral forums, especially the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and others of which both are members.

He asked Brazil to support and push the launch of negotiations on a free trade agreement between Viet Nam and the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), adding Viet Nam is ready to serve as a bridge helping strengthen sectoral partnerships between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Brazil, along with the ties between ASEAN and MERCOSUR.

Minister Vieira congratulated Viet Nam on its achievements in socio-economic development and agreed with his counterparts suggestions, especially those about boosting effective and substantive cooperation in different spheres.

Both officials underscored the importance of ensuring security, safety, and freedom of navigation and overflight in the East Sea to peace and prosperous development in the regions and the world. They shared the view that all disputes must be resolved peacefully via dialogue and on the basis of international law, especially the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Talking to Minister Son, Diplomatic Advisor to the French President Emmanuel Bonne expressed the determination to strongly promote the Viet Nam - France strategic partnership.

He noted there remains much room for bilateral trade and investment links to grow further, the two sides should fully and effectively carry out the EU - Viet Nam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), and that France will soon consider the ratification of the EU - Viet Nam Investment Protection Agreement (EVIPA).

The two officials also agreed to support the expansion of cooperation in potential fields like climate change response and renewable energy production, and in responding to regional and global issues.

At the meeting with Executive Vice President of the EC Valdis Dombrovskis, Son called on the EC to promote the EVIPA ratification by the parliaments of member countries to create breakthrough in bilateral investment, and soon remove the yellow card warning against illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing for Viet Nams fishery exports.

He also asked both sides to work closely to implement the commitments under the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) to help with energy transition in Viet Nam.

Dombrovskis said Viet Nam is an important partner of the European Union (EU) in Asia-Pacific and recommended the two sides step up connections in trade, investment, and climate change response. He also took note of Vietnams proposal for accelerating the EVIPA ratification.

The Vietnamese and EC officials expressed their delight at the progress in the Viet Nam - EU comprehensive partnership and cooperation, particularly in economic affairs, and agreed to further increase high-level mutual visits. They also discussed the possibility of expanding ties in other aspects such as labour, health care, and pharmaceuticals.

Regarding the East Sea issue, they affirmed support for the peaceful settlement of disputes on the basis of international law.

Meeting with Canadian Minister of International Trade, Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development Mary Ng, Minister Son called on the North American country to continue opening its market to key exports of Viet Nam such as agricultural and fishery products, apparel, footwear, and steel.

The officials agreed on the need to keep fostering the Viet Nam - Canada comprehensive partnership, especially in high-level delegation exchanges, trade and investment, green transition, OECD programmes, and education - training, as the countries are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their diplomatic relations.

The two countries will also capitalise on the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and bolster coordination at regional cooperation mechanisms such as ASEAN - Canada and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), they said.

Later on Thursday, Minister Son left for the Czech Republic, wrapping up the working visit to France and OECD. VNS
HCM CITY  The Malaysian consulate general in HCM City will organise the Malaysia Madani Week from June 9 to 18 to showcase trade, education and tourism.

Speaking at a press briefing in HCM City on Tuesday, Wong Chia Chiann, the countrys consul in HCM City, said the event is part of the celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment of bilateral relations.

A series of commemorative events will take place during the week, with the highlights including a Malaysia Madani pavilion, an education fair and food and cultural promotion.

Business matching sessions from June 9 to 11 will gather more than 30 Malaysian brands.

An education fair also from June 9 to 11 will be attended by officials from Education Malaysia Global Services and representatives of 11 public and private universities.

A food and cultural promotion event will be held at four city hotels with eight Malaysian chefs taking part.

The consulate in collaboration with the Viet Nam-ASEAN Friendship Association and HCM City Union of Friendship Organisations will host a business networking session between Malaysian and Vietnamese businesses on June 12.

A cultural exchange programme on June 14 at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities will feature cultural and musical performances by Malaysian troupes.

Celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of bilateral relations will be held at the Opera House on June 13 and in ong Nai Province on June 15.  VNS
At the Viet Nam-Cambodia trade forum.  VNA/VNS Photo

In his remarks, Ambassador Nguyen Huy Tang noted that economic cooperation has received the attention of the two countries high-ranking leaders, saying it is necessary to foster the economic, trade and investment links to maximise the potential and advantages of the two neighbouring countries.

The forum offers an opportunity for Vietnamese and Cambodian businesses to exchange information, seek partners, stay updated on new economic policies of the two countries, and speak of obstacles to their operations and propose solutions to them, he said.

Ho Siv Yong, from the Cambodian Ministry of Commerce, highlighted trade opportunities in Cambodia, saying the countrys international trade policy has focused on capacity improvement to accelerate its integration into the regional and global economy.

Chea Vuthy, deputy secretary general of the Investment Board under the Council for the Development of Cambodia, also briefed the participants on Cambodias investment policy.

Within the framework of the event, Vietnamese businesses set up booths introducing their products, aiming to enhance connectivity with Cambodian partners.

Bizhub
The aerial situation in New York is improving, albeit slowly.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently decided to lift the ground stop it mandated for flights bound for New York's LaGuardia airport due to smoke but has delayed some flights on the ground instead.

The smoke New York is experiencing comes from the wildfires in Canada, which started due to either lightning or human activity, per Reuters.

FAA LaGuardia Flight Delays Details

The FAA mentioned in a statement to CNN that it had slowed air traffic to and from New York City area airports, including LaGuardia Airport, due to reduced visibility from wildfire smoke and that it will adjust the volume of traffic to account for the rapidly changing conditions.

As such, it lifted the ground stop it imposed on LaGuardia Airport, opting to delay some flights on the ground instead for the safety of the airliners' crew and passengers.

The FAA also revealed it New York is not the only state suffering from the smoke from the Canadian wildfires - flights into Philadelphia are also being impacted by the smoke, causing an average 30-minute delay. The government agency also warned that the wildfires are also affecting Boston, Baltimore, and Washington DC, meaning that flights through these states may encounter some delays at best.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg assured people in his now-deleted tweet that the FAA is fully prepared to modify operations as needed to protect people.

Read More: Twitter Extends Tweet Editing Window to One Hour

Wildfire Smoke's Effects On The Ground

Meanwhile, companies have been instructing employees to stay in their homes due to the "unhealthy" air quality in many parts of the East Coast. These include the Detroit area, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Pittsburgh, and North Carolina.

According to Business Insider, which cited a CNBC report, Google is one of these companies that issued such an order; it even released a memo advising employees to work from home and limit their exposure to outdoor air instead of following its hybrid workweek policy.

The US government is also issuing air quality warnings to people across the Midwest and Northeast, telling people to limit time spent outdoors.

What Caused The Wildfires?

Canada's wildfires are caused by an amalgamation of reasons, according to the Washington Post. These reasons include lightning, human activity (like throwing burning cigarettes on the ground), spontaneous combustion, and climate change.

As of press time, there are 423 active fires across Canada, with 246 of them being out of control, per the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center. Of the Canadian cities affected, Quebec is getting the worst of the situation, with it being the origin of 154 of them.

Alberta would come next with 70 active wildfires, while there are 68 active ones in British Columbia. Additionally, 45 of the new wildland fires are located in Ontario.

Time reports that US weather officials warn that high smoke levels are expected to remain in the Midwest and Northeast over the next few days. As such, using N95 masks can help filter out some of the particles in the smoke are a must if going outside during this time is unavoidable.

Face coverings like cloth masks, surgical masks, or wet handkerchiefs won't be as effective, per the Environmental Protection Agency.

Related Article: FAA Gets Sued for SpaceX's Environmental Damage in Florida
Helping Travel Merchants to Seize the Business Opportunities of International Tourism

TAIPEI, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- KKday, Asia's leading travel experiences platform, is committed to promoting the digital transformation of Asian travel merchants with the official launch of "KKday Marketplace" in Southeast Asia. The move comes as the company expects international tourism to rebound in 2023, following a record-high global revenue in 2022. "KKday Marketplace" is designed to help local merchants develop e-commerce operations and expand the service capacity of international travelers while sharing KKday's global network traffic. The first wave of the campaign targets water and outdoor activities operators, offering early bird commission discounts. The goal is to reach 2,000 merchants worldwide in 2023 while expanding cross-border travel opportunities in the post-pandemic era.





KKday executives photo - Ming Chen, founder and CEO of KKday (middle), Clement Wen, KKday Marketplace Director (right) and Jasmine Lin, rezio CEO of KKday Group (left)

The Southeast Asian market is the driving force behind the quick rebound in tourism in Asia, but according to KKday's local observations in Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, at least 90% of Southeast Asian travel experience merchants have not made the digital transition yet. On the other hand, more than 85% of travelers who use KKday place orders via mobile devices and are used to digital browsing, online booking, online payment, and instant customer service interaction.

Aiming at digital tourism and contactless service opportunities, after launching the rezio booking system in 2020, which has served more than 5.1 million travelers worldwide, KKday launched the "KKday Marketplace" service at the end of 2021 to help travel suppliers establish their e-commerce brands.

"KKday Marketplace" features six major advantages, through which merchants can set up their stores quickly, list their products independently, price their products flexibly, control their inventory accurately, respond to orders instantly, and access the KKday platform's global traffic. At present, "KKday Marketplace" has more than 1,000 merchants globally, including water and outdoor activities operators, cultural experiences providers, and traditional agencies. In anticipation of the post-pandemic boom in the Southeast Asian tourism market, "KKday Marketplace" aims to expand its local presence in this market.





KKday Marketplace showcase of Japanese merchant_ To set up English brand page by the multi-language system

KKday noted that although many small merchants that focus on Southeast Asian travel experiences have survived the pandemic and have established basic digital operations, such as websites and social media platforms, their ability to attract overseas traffic and international travelers is still limited in the wake of the recovery of international travel. Presently, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese merchants are using KKday Marketplace's multilingual services to capitalize on the rebounding of cross-border travel. For example, a small local ATV operator in Hualien, Taiwan, MK ATV , has received orders from tourists from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and even Germany and North America after joining "KKday Marketplace," driving a revenue growth of more than 30%. Similarly, OrengeBus , a Japanese travel agency, has introduced multilingual services and enjoyed overseas traffic after becoming a "KKday Marketplace" merchant, generating 12 million yen in revenue within a month, and its business continues to grow with the arrival of the peak travel season.

Southeast Asia has always been an exploration paradise for global independent travelers, and its unique, sophisticated, and exclusive local experience tours are extremely attractive to travelers. To promote business in the Southeast Asian market, "KKday Marketplace" will target small, non-franchise merchants with less than 10 employees and a capital of less than USD10,000, who serve a single city or island, willing to take on casual travelers, with Chinese or English language skills, and services that focus on in-depth day tours and half-day tours experiences.

KKday added that due to the rich and diverse tourism resources and language advantages in Southeast Asia, small-scale local tourism operators will have great potential in the post-pandemic era. In this initial phase, "KKday Marketplace" is targeting water and outdoor activities operators, offering early bird commission discounts, to help businesses establish their brand on e-commerce platforms to seize business opportunities in the upcoming summer travel season. For more information, please visit the KKday Marketplace website.

(For more news photos of KKday Marketplace, please visit this file link )

About KKday

Founded in 2014, KKday is Asia's leading travel experiences platform with millions of users and 12 offices across the Asia Pacific. Today, the platform offers more than 300,000 unique experiences in over 550 cities and 92 countries. KKday aims to provide users with seamless access to endless lifestyle experiences, from local theme parks and top restaurants to staycations and multi-day hiking trips.

About KKday Marketplace

At the end of 2021, KKday Marketplace was launched as an open platform, where travel merchants can establish their own ecommerce brands, independently list and manage travel products, and reach KKday consumers first-hand for instant digital order-taking and digital transformation. With the recovery of international tourism, merchants can also reach out to global travelers through the KKday Marketplace multilingual system and grow their travel business. Welcome to access the KKday Marketplace website for more information.

CONTACT: KKday Press Contact, PR Manager, Dennis Lin+886-989-528-298dennis.lin@kkday.com; PR Assistant Manager, Sheena Yang | +886-938-891-682 | sheena.yang@kkday.com; KKday Marketplace Contact, Marketplace Director, Clement Wen+886-920-646-971clement.wen@kkday.com; Product Manager, Stanley Li | +886-911-116-808 | stanley.li@kkday.com

Source: KKday
SURABAYA, Indonesia, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- School holiday has arrived! The Westin Surabaya presents an extraordinary holiday itinerary for families with DreamWorks Studio, namely "Wonderful Weekend with Kung Fu Panda". The Westin Surabaya is the first hotel in Indonesia to officially present the Kung Fu Panda character from the 3D musical animation film by DreamWorks Studio. After previously having success with bringing in characters from the film "Trolls", this time it was Po and Mei-Mei's turn, a couple of panda characters to entertain the guests in Surabaya on weekends.

A Fun-filled School Holiday Event: Meet and Greet with DreamWorks' Kung Fu Panda at The Westin Surabaya

On Saturdays, the kids can enjoy a meet and greet with Po, the movie lead panda character who is expert in kung fu, and Mei-Mei, Po's partner, for an afternoon tea session at The Westin Grand Ballroom. The kids can also take part in learning activities on basic kung fu techniques, decorating cakes and lanterns, while enjoying Kung Fu Panda themed snack and dessert, prepared by The Westin Culinary Team.

Meanwhile, on Sundays, Magnolia Restaurant serves a Kung Fu Panda themed brunch as well. The decoration of the China village covers this restaurant, decorated with Kung Fu Panda movie characters in every corner. Guests can enjoy a variety of Asian-style curated cuisine that are rich in taste, as if they were in China. They can also take pictures with Po and Mei-Mei who greet them from table to table.

"We surely don't want to miss out on family vacation moments in this school holiday. For the second series of the DreamWorks Studio collaboration program with The Westin Surabaya, we present the famous character from Kung Fu Panda which is not only a favorite of children, but also other adult guests. Through the Westin Weekend program, we present a memorable experience, for a fun weekend with all the family," said Reza Aryawarman, Hotel Manager of The Westin Surabaya.

"Wonderful Weekend with Kung Fu Panda" is part of The Westin Weekend, Westin's special program that provides guests with a range of activities and amenities to enhance their weekend and to indulge guests in the most unforgettable weekend with this five-star hotel.

For more information about The Westin Surabaya, please visit www.westinsurabaya.com and follow Instagram @WestinSurabaya .

Media Contact:

Tessa Zelyana Hidayat

Complex Marketing Communications Manager

The Westin Surabaya and Four Points by Sheraton Surabaya, Pakuwon Indah

Email: tessa.hidayat@westin.com

Source: The Westin Surabaya
SEOUL, South Korea, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Pearl Abyss announced today that it unveiled an exclusive trailer for Black Desert SEA's upcoming region, the "Land of the Morning Light," at the global stage of the Summer Game Festival. Also, the trailer reveals "Imoogi," a new boss that features fearsome fangs and a spine-chilling roar, which will come along after launch.

Black Desert's Land of the Morning Light Imoogi

The trailer showcased vicious bosses starting from the ferocious tiger lord Sangoon, the savage Golden Pig King, the vengeful ghost Songakshi, and more throughout the region's nonlinear questline. Adventurers can choose the order in which they face the bosses, enabling them to create their own adventure through an intricately woven story featuring 80 cutscenes, 40 vignettes, and 6,000 fully-dubbed lines.

It also features a new boss, Imoogi, who will be released after launch. The story around Imoogi has varied across generations, but Korean legends say it is a gigantic serpent-like creature aspiring to become a full-fledged dragon. It will be one of many folklore-inspired objectives that await Adventurers in the Land of the Morning Light.

Dive into Black Desert SEA's new region to start a whole new journey on June 14.

About Black Desert IP

The Black Desert IP is Pearl Abyss' open-world action MMORPG franchise with cutting-edge visuals and skill-based combat that redefines the genre. With the most developed character customization system of any game currently on the market, users can break out of the norm and make unique characters that truly represent themselves. Its intuitive controls, beautifully designed world, and extensive lore will excite both newcomers and veterans of MMO games and action RPGs. Pearl Abyss is currently servicing the Black Desert IP, which has gained 50 million players across the world on PC, mobile, and console.

Source: Pearl Abyss Related Stocks: Korea:263750
BANGKOK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- NEXTDC Limited (ASX:NXT), Australia's leading data centre as a service provider has announced its entry into the Malaysian market with its first data centre development in Kuala Lumpur (KL1), a new, world-class data centre facility right in the heart of the Klang Valley metropolitan region, the cultural, financial, and economic centre of Malaysia.

NEXTDC Kickstarts Regional Expansion with KL1 Data Centre in Malaysia

Once completed, KL1 will be the first Uptime Institute (UI) Tier IV certified data centre facility in Peninsular Malaysia. Strategically located in Petaling Jaya, the KL1 site is less than 10km from the centre of the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur as well as being close to major network and business hubs in Klang Valley. The facility is designed to scale rapidly and will grow to approximately 65MW of IT critical power coupled with direct cloud interconnectivity and will welcome customers into the facility from 2025.

KL1 represents NEXTDC's entry into Asia, which includes some of the largest and most rapidly growing data centre markets globally. NEXTDC considers Malaysia an optimal market for its first step into Asia, with its rapidly growing demand for quality data centre solutions, increasingly sophisticated digital economy, high data consumption per capita and increasing adoption of cloud-based technologies.

NEXTDC intends to market its services in KL1 through its existing ecosystem of more than 750 technology partners, including global hyperscale customers, a considerable number of whom plan to commence operations in Malaysia, as well as existing and new enterprise and government customers.

Using Malaysia as the regional hub for its Asia expansion, NEXTDC will also develop a new Regional Operations Center for multidisciplinary staff to support growth across the Asian region. This will create the potential for continued investment in the region with many Asian economies experiencing similar strong underlying economic tailwinds as well as rapid take up of digital services.

Over the next 5 to 10 years, NEXTDC will invest approximately RM3 Billion in Malaysia and will also commit to digital skilling and educational initiatives to help empower Malaysia's ICT and digital workforce to drive Malaysia's competitive advantage in Asia.

Yang Berhormat Senator Tengku Datuk Seri Utama Zafrul Tengku Abdul Aziz, Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry (MITI) said, "We welcome NEXTDC's decision in selecting Malaysia as its new investment destination beyond the Oceania region. This reflects confidence in our investment and business ecosystem, reaffirming Malaysia's growing reputation as a premier data centre investment destination and our position as a preferred digital hub in Southeast Asia. As a supportive component of a digital economy, NEXTDC's strategic initiative is also well-aligned with our New Investment Policy, which aspires to create a more sustainable, balanced and inclusive socio-economic growth moving forward. MITI and its agency, MIDA are committed to facilitating the success of NextDC's strategic initiative in Malaysia, particularly towards helping us create higher-paying jobs and a more vibrant domestic SME supply chain."

Commenting at the official launch of NEXTDC's Malaysian operations, Malaysian Minister of Communications and Digital, Yang Berhormat Tuan Ahmad Fahmi Bin Mohamed Fadzil said, "Malaysia is recognised as the premier destination for data centre investment in Southeast Asia. Our strategic location, stable political environment, and robust digital infrastructure have solidified our position. With NEXTDC's investment in Malaysia, we take a significant stride towards establishing our nation as the definitive digital hub of ASEAN."

He further added, "The Malaysia Digital (MD) national strategic initiative is propelling our digital capabilities and enhancing our value proposition to attract digital investments, ultimately boosting the digital economy. Together with the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), we will fully support NEXTDC's presence and the growth of our data centre industry through various PEMANGKIN initiatives. By unveiling their new data centre campus, NEXTDC not only reinforces Malaysia's digital infrastructure but also accelerates our ongoing digital transformation. This move reflects the unwavering confidence in our robust and empowering data centre ecosystem, digitally skilled talent pool, and world-class infrastructure."

Chief Minister of Selangor, Yang Amat Berhormat Dato' Seri Amirudin Bin Shari also highlighted the commitment to facilitate investment into Selangor, "The State Government of Selangor is fully committed to support high impact investors like NEXTDC. In Selangor, we are committed to continuously streamline business processes to improve the ease of doing business. When businesses flourish, workers and their families flourish. This is the key to improve the quality of lives for Selangorians and we are confident of working with the business community to realise this.

Highlighting the support of the Australian Government for this initiative, which strengthens the already deep political, social and economic ties between the countries, the Australian High Commissioner to Malaysia, His Excellency Dr Justin Lee said, "NEXTDC's RM 3 billion investment in Malaysia reflects the close and growing economic partnership between Australia and Malaysia. Digital economy cooperation is a priority under the Australia-Malaysia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. NEXTDC's entry into Malaysia and the broader Asian market is a major milestone, boosting Malaysia's digital economy ambitions by investing in the critical infrastructure and skills to attract major tech companies."

Hosting the launch event at Mandarin Oriental Kuala Lumpur, CEO of NEXTDC, Craig Scroggie said, "The development of the KL1 data centre, and the establishment of our new Regional Operations Centre are exciting new frontiers for NEXTDC in Asia, and we are delighted to be making these investments in the Malaysian digital economy. The new KL1 facility will feature world leading sustainability benchmarks and critical infrastructure standards. This special occasion marks the initiation of NEXTDC's regional expansion throughout Asia, and we are excited about the contribution these strategic investments will make to shaping the future of digital infrastructure and creating a wealth of technology job opportunities in Malaysia and beyond."

For more information, log on to https://www.nextdc.com/ to find out more.

About NEXTDC

NEXTDC is an exciting ASX 100-listed technology company enabling business transformation through innovative data centre outsourcing solutions, connectivity services and infrastructure management software.

As the leading independent data centre operator with a nationwide network of Tier III and Tier IV facilities in the Australian market, we provide world-class colocation services to local and international organisations. With a focus on sustainability and renewable energy, we deliver our customers industry leading solutions that champion the best energy efficiency ratings in the country, and NABERS 5-star certification.

Our partner ecosystem comprises the country's largest specialised IT community of more than 750 clouds, networks, and IT service providers. The power of our network-rich ecosystem enables our customers to source and connect with cloud platforms, service providers and vendors to build integrated Hybrid Cloud deployments and scale their IT infrastructure and services.

Source: NEXTDC
Agricultural products are sold online (Photo source: bacgiang.gov.vn)

Bac Giang  The northern province of Bac Giang will continue paying attention to promoting digital society, said the director of the provincial Department of Information and Communications, Tran Minh Chieu.

Accordingly, telecommunications enterprises in the province will continue to develop information technology and telecommunications infrastructure to meet the requirements of the development of smart cities in the locality.

Departments, branches, and localities in the province continue to review information technology infrastructure in their units so as to ensure conditions to support citizens in online public services.



People's Committees of districts and cities continue to offer training for community-based digital technology teams to help popularise digital platforms, digital technologies, and digital skills in the community, enabling all people to use digital technologies.

The provincial Department of Labour, Invalids, and Social Affairs continue coordinating with district-level People's Committees in implementing non-cash payment plans for social security services.

The Department of Health is urged to accelerate digitalisation in order to achieve the targets assigned by the National Committee for Digital Transformation in Bac Giang province in 2023.

Accordingly, over 30 per cent of the provinces population is expected to use platforms that support distance medical examination and treatment, and over 80 per cent of the population with have electronic health records.

According to the provinces Department of Information and Communications, at present, the province's telecommunications infrastructure has basically met the requirements for digital transformation and smart city construction, especially the Internet and mobile phone network. Now, over 83 per cent of the provinces household access broadband Internet, and 75.97 per cent of the provinces mobile phone subscribers use smartphones.

Since the beginning of this year, the provincial committee of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union (HCM CYU) has implemented a pilot digital programme at its chapters. It also set up a team of young people to support people in conducting online public services at the provincial Public Administration Service Center.

The HCM CYU committee of Bac Giang city also launched projects on e-libraries for local communities and worked with the MobiFone telecom company to develop a virtual tourist guide at dulichso.bacgiang.gov.vn.

HCM CYU chapters at different levels in Bac Giang have organised three conferences on digital transformation, attracting the participation of more than 1,500 young people across the province.

Youth union members also join communication campaigns on cashless payment. Currently, in the province, 70 per cent of the population aged 15 and over have banking accounts and 91 per cent of the province's population have electronic health records.

Up to now, all communes and hamlets in the province have digital technology groups with about 16,000 members who are expected to help promote digital transformation at the grass root level.

Bac Giang grants licences to projects worth 132 million USD The authorities of the northern province of Bac Giang on May 4 presented certificates recognising investment registration to two Singaporean-funded projects worth 132 million USD in the local districts of Viet Yen and Yen Dung.
Operating in Vietnam for 30 years, C.P. Vietnam has eight factories producing animal and poultry feed. Located in Hanoi, Hai Duong, Binh Dinh, Binh Duong, Dong Nai, Tien Giang, Bau Xeo, and Binh Phuoc, the factories produce a total capacity of more than 5.3 million tonnes of meat per year. Three factories in Dong Nai, Ben Tre, and Can Tho produce a total capacity of 550,000 tonnes of aqua feed per year.

In addition, C.P. Vietnam has two seafood processing factories in Hue and Ben Tre provinces, and four meat processing plants in Hanoi, Dong Nai, Binh Phuoc and Ho Chi Minh City.

The company works with Vietnamese farmers in both livestock and aquaculture using a modern agro-industrial model combined with feed production processes heavily focused on safety. These processes cover the kinds of input materials, breeding stock, animal feed, processing, and food distribution.

Every year, C.P. Vietnam delivers more than 6.8 million pigs to the market, more than 750 million eggs, and over 66 million broiler chickens, and exports over 20,000 tonnes of processed seafood to markets such as Australia, Japan, China, and Europe.

C.P. Vietnam named top sustainable group for third time Thailands C.P. Vietnam (CPV) was named among the top 10 most sustainable manufacturing companies in the country at Sustainable Companies Vietnam 2022.
A tourist at Tien Cave in Lao Cai Province - Photo 52hz.vn

Tien Cave is one of the beautiful landscapes in the country and attracts many tourists to Lao Cai Province.

The cave has a wild beauty with many beautiful and studding stalactites. With a white sandy beach and crystal clear water, the scenic cave is an ideal resting place among the mountains on summer days.

The path leading to the cave in Coc Ly Commune, Bac Ha District is a small flow of the Chay River, originating from stream branches in the northwest of Ha Giang Province.

On a boat trip on the stream leading to Tien Cave - Photo traveloka.com

The Chay River coming here seems to be constricted to form a deep river, bringing a gentle look, weaving between the two steep cliffs. The two sides are primeval forests, covering the whole landscape with a cool, fresh climate.

To reach this place, we went through Bao Nhai Commune and then took a boat upstream on the Chay River for nearly an hour. During the journey to the cave, we passed the 300-year-old Trung Do Temple, a national historic site. The temple is the place to worship General Vu Van Mat along with his subordinates, who protected the border and developed the land of Trung Do in Bao Nhai Commune.

Going upstream about 200m, we met a large cave, feeling like being lost in a wonderful maze created by nature, with layered stones acting as a natural barricade.

According to the Lao Cai Tourism Promotion Information Centre, Tien Cave is a natural cave not yet fully on the tourism map. Previously, the cave was mainly known to foreign tourists through the Bao Nhai - Coc Ly Market tourism route. By early 2023, the cave has gradually attracted more domestic tourists.

Inside Tien Cave are extremely beautiful stalactites-Photo vietfuntravel.com.vn

Tien Cave boasts of its camping grounds and streams for visitors to experience water activities.

The campsite is a flat ground next to the stream, about 100m from the mouth of Tien Cave. This area is completely isolated from the outside world, there are no car horns, only the sounds of the mountains and forests with birds singing, insects chirping and streams flowing.

After setting up a tent on the sand bank, we experienced activities on the stream such as SUP rowing, swimming and bathing in the stream. Cool spring water helped us dispel the heat of summer.

After experiencing activities at the stream, we paddled to the mouth of Tien Cave and walked inside to explore.

The cave is surrounded by trees and streams pouring water from above like a silk strip. Going deep inside, we felt like we were lost in a magical and beautiful maze with no need to escape. The further inside we venture, the more poetic and beautiful it becomes. We heard the sounds of small water streams flowing on the cliffs, dripping to form stalactites with countless beautiful shapes.

When going deep into the cave, the movement was relatively dangerous. We had to climb the rocky banks, following the tree roots. The cliffs are quite mossy and it is slippery so we needed to be extra careful.

When we went deep inside, it was like entering another world, a beautiful small island with lots of green trees. Ancient stalactites of various shapes and sizes accumulated over thousands of years appeared.

In the evening at the campsite, we organised a barbecue party, made a campfire and watched the starry sky through the mountains. Catching fish, and shrimp at night was an interesting experience that could not find in urban areas.

Camping at Tien Cave - Photo traveloka.com

The scenery around Tien Cave. - Photo 52hz.vn

Dung Nguyen, a local tour guide, said that summer, from April to July, is the ideal time to visit Tien Cave. At this time, the stream water is clear, smooth and shallow while the weather is dry, sunny and convenient for camping. From July onwards, when the dry season ends, it rains a lot, so the stream becomes more opaque and the water is no longer clear.

If you do not want to camp and spend the night in Tien Cave, you can stay overnight at homestays or motels in Trung Do Village. Room rates range from VND200,000 to 300,000 per room per night. Boat rental price is VND500,000. Each boat can carry up to six persons.

Tourism and cultural activities to be held at Bac Ha festival The annual Bac Ha White Plateau Festival will take place in Bac Ha and neighbouring districts in the northern province of Lao Cai from June 4 to 12.

Australia to provide long-term support for Lao Cai Through the GREAT programme, Australia will continue to support Lao Cai province to promote the sustainable development of agriculture and community tourism and improve womens empowerment.
Vietnamese Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son speaks at the event (Photo: VNA)

Paris  Minister of Foreign Affairs Bui Thanh Son highlighted Vietnams determination to achieve green transition at a panel discussion of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) Ministerial Council Meeting 2023 in Paris on June 8.

Speaking at the discussion chaired by the Secretary of State for the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Son said for the green transition process to succeed, balance and equity must be ensured. It involves a strategic balance between clean energy transition and energy security, taking into account the different conditions and development levels of countries to build perse and practical energy transition pathways. It encompasses equity in access to green technology and green finance for developing and under-developed countries. It also entails fairness in ensuring space and development opportunities among different groups of countries and communities within society, so that no inpidual or nation is left behind.



According to him, green transition must be carried out synchronously worldwide, and thus needing policy coordination and determination of all countries in the world.



Vietnam highly values the Inclusive Forum on Carbon Mitigation Approaches (IFCMA) of the OECD, he said, adding that IFCMAs mission of reaching common orientations and policies at the global level is important.



Son stressed that the green transition process is a revolution that requires breakthrough thinking and actions, especially in the bold application of newer, more efficient, and smarter green technologies. To minimise the trade-offs associated with these breakthroughs, Vietnam hopes that OECD countries, which are at the forefront of technology, can pioneer the development and transfer of efficient, safe, and suitable new technologies for developing countries, he said.



The minister went on to say that Vietnam is one of the countries hardest hit by climate change. Transitioning to a green, circular, and low-emission economy has been a consistent and coherent development policy of Vietnam. Despite being a developing country undergoing transition, Vietnam has made ambitious commitments and shared responsibilities with the international community for addressing climate change. This determination has been clearly demonstrated through Vietnam's strong commitments at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), the establishment of the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) with G7 countries, and most recently, the approval of the National Power Development Plan for the 2021-2030 period.



He concluded that this climate action roadmap can only succeed with the support of international friends, particularly OECD, through concessional funding, technology transfer, policymaking, governance, and high-quality workforce training.



Vietnam also looks to OECD for assistance in sustainable water management, particularly in the Mekong Delta region, he said.
Alejandro Osorio, CEO of Grab Vietnam

As Vietnam gradually embraces the era of EV, Grab Vietnam is diligently implementing a series of pilot programmes to thoroughly evaluate the advantages and challenges associated with utilising environmentally-friendly transport.

"Collaboration with EV manufacturers and partners to enhance the experience of our esteemed drivers is a pivotal facet of Grab's strategic framework. Presently, Grab is engaging in pilot programmes with esteemed partners in Vietnam for GrabExpress service, conscientiously observing, evaluating, and meticulously devising comprehensive plans to get insights and find innovative ways to increase the adoption of EV in our ecosystem," Osorio said.

However, Osorio knows that the Vietnamese market is not yet fully primed for large-scale deployment of EVs, owing to multifarious factors.

"The transition to EVs necessitates both time and conducive conditions. Grab Vietnam is currently engrossed in an experimental phase of EV adoption, an integral component of our long-term strategy. This judicious approach enables Grab to amass invaluable data and fine-tune our plans to ensure an optimal, efficient, and sustainable transition towards electric vehicles," Osorio said.

He also expressed optimism on the burgeoning interest of domestic and international EV manufacturers in penetrating the Vietnamese market, and creating alluring collaborative prospects for Grab.

"Grab Vietnam's overarching objective is to identify the most captivating propositions that provide optimal value and efficiency for our operations. Our collaborations are not bound by geographical limitations; we are open for partnerships with both local Vietnamese enterprises and counterparts from around the globe. For us, the paramount focus lies in fostering a joint effort to expedite the transformation from conventional vehicles to eco-friendly alternatives, enabling cost savings, reducing noise pollution, minimised environmental impact, and elevated service quality," he said.

Additionally, Grab is determined to comprehend the exigencies and hurdles faced by their driver partners during the EV adoption process, encompassing challenges such as cost considerations, travel duration, and overall convenience. By conducting pilot programmes to assess and garner feedback from driver-partners, Grab can effectively tailor solutions and proffer bespoke support mechanisms.

Osorio remained sanguine about the progressive proliferation of EVs in Vietnam, primarily thanks to the strong focus on the EV infrastructure development and augmented investments in charging stations.

In tandem with their EV long-term strategy, Grab proactively advocates various initiatives to play its part in driving the company's unwavering commitment towards achieving carbon neutrality by 2040.

"Among these pioneering endeavours is the carbon offset feature on the Grab app, empowering customers with the option to make a nominal contribution to a non-governmental organisation. Subsequently, these funds are utilised to offset the carbon emissions generated from their own rides. This transformative initiative conveys profound significance, fostering individual responsibility and raising awareness of the consequential environmental impact of our actions," Osorio added.

Standard Chartered Vietnam takes lead in sustainability efforts Standard Chartered Vietnam is continuing to lead the way in sustainability and, in turn, drive growth for its customers and the economy at large.

Grab Vietnam unveils the GrabUnlimited membership package Grab Vietnam has launched the GrabUnlimited membership package in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi to ease customers' concerns amidst rising costs.
The fair at AEON Ha Dong will last until June 11 and is part of a number of trade, investment, and tourism promotion activities held by the Hanoi Centre for Investment, Trade, and Tourism Promotion (HPA) in 2023.

The opening ceremony of Hanoi Agriculture Fair 2023 on June 8

Speaking at the opening ceremony, Nguyen Anh Duong, director of the HPA said, 2023 is a very meaningful year, marking the important milestone of the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Vietnam and Japan (1973-2023). I believe that the Fair in 2023, and those in the following years, will continue to make an important contribution to intensifying the cooperation relationship between Hanoi and AEON in particular and between Vietnam and Japan in general.

The event features about 70 booths and the participation of around 60 organisations and businesses from 20 provinces and cities.

The key displays highlight over 1000 agricultural and processed products such as cordyceps, various kinds of tea, dairy products, bird's nests, vermicelli, noodles, coffee, spices, dried food, agarwood, honey, and others.

The fair is an important trade promotion event that provides enterprises producing and trading agricultural products and processed foods with an opportunity to promote their brands, boost business cooperation, and expand their export potential through Aeon's distribution system, both in Vietnam and globally.

The HPA is a unit assigned by the Hanoi People's Committee to implement cooperation programmes with AEON. Since 2016, it has cooperated with AEON to carry out many agricultural trade promotion activities directly with Vietnamese companies.

The two sides have supported local businesses to export agricultural products and foods to the Japanese market through AEON's retail systems.

A similar fair is expected to be held at AEON Long Bien from June 22-25, and another AEON Ha Dong in September.

Hanoi promotes agricultural product trade In the framework of the fair Hanoi Agriculture Fair 2020, the forum Connect, promote trading and consuming agricultural products in Hanoi 2020 by Hanoi Promotion Agency has created many opportunities for retail businesses to meet, connect, and cooperate.

Hanoi Agriculture Fair 2021 opens to promote trade Hanoi Agriculture Fair 2021 officially opened on December 10 at AEON MALL Long Bien, starting week-long trade promotion activities to increase trade in Vietnamese farm produce via AEON Malls to $1 billion by 2025.
Apple is currently getting all the tech world's attention after its WWDC 2023 event, especially after the company unveiled its first AR/VR headset, Vision Pro. Although Apple is not stopping with the headset in the augmented reality scene as it acquires an AR startup.

Apple Acquires Mira

The AR startup that the tech giant purchased was a Los Angeles-based company. Mira creates light hardware for augmented reality. Although they're a small company in an even smaller market, Mira has actually developed features that other giants haven't.

The headset is able to augment characters and game items in real space. In fact, the company is behind the headsets that are used for Nintendo World's Mario Kart Ride in Japan, as well as Universal Studios theme parks in Los Angeles, as mentioned in Interesting Engineering.

Even though the company is relatively small, it has managed to raise around $17 million in funding until the acquisition. Mira's CEO even happily posted on Instagram with the caption "7-year journey from dorm room to acquisition."

Since Apple already has AR tech of its own, it is hard to see why it would acquire a company that does the same. When asked, Apple stated that it buys smaller tech companies from time to time and that it does not need to discuss its purpose or plans.

The iPhone manufacturers did not disclose the amount for the acquisition, although Mira's CEO and founder Ben Taft revealed it in a private post on Instagram. The real question is, what does Apple need the company for?

As reports show, the demonstration of the Apple Vision Pro does not really show a specific function for gaming. You can use it to view the screen in AR space and even play games on Apple Arcade, but it's mainly for Apple apps that people usually use.

The AR/VR gaming devices that are already in the market are created for games specifically, which means that they will run games better and has unique features that are meant to make gameplay more immersive for their users.

Acquiring Mira could put Apple in the AR/VR gaming market since the startup already has a foundation that makes it easier to enter the field. We may see Apple compete with Meta Quest and PS VR headsets soon.

Read Also: Microsoft Says Their HoloLens is 'Doing Great,' Will it Work on the Metaverse?

What About Mira's Military Contracts?

The AR startup has military partnerships, with the US Navy awarding it a $700,000 contract and another from the US Air Force on the way. But, Apple hasn't really worked on anything military-related, and no signs that they plan to, meaning that part of Mira is still a mystery.

Should Mira choose to go through with the military contracts, it will likely use the headsets to aid its users in combat and provide them with a quick way to access essential information in the field, just like Microsoft's HoloLens does.

According to The Verge, The US Air Force will use Mira's Prism Pro headset to display information such as equipment instructions and heads-up. The company claims that it can build the most scalable augmented reality hardware and software solutions for frontline workforces.

Related: Sony Plans To Release 20 Major Games for PlayStation VR2
At the signing ceremony (Photo source: en.antaranews.com)

Jakarta - Indonesian Minister of Trade Zulkifli Hasan and Malaysian Minister of International Trade and Industry Tengku Zafrul Aziz signed the Indonesia-Malaysia Border Trade Agreement (BTA) update in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on June 8.

The governments of the two countries welcomed the signing of the agreement, which is expected to provide major benefits for the two Southeast Asian nations citizens living in border areas.



In a written statement, Minister Hasan emphasised that Indonesian citizens who live in the Indonesia-Malaysia border are an inseparable part of this country.



The BTA update is hoped to help meet the demand of Indonesian citizens who reside in the border, he remarked.



Since being implemented on August 24, 1970, this is the first time the BTA has been updated after taking into account the latest circumstances and conditions, including fulfillment of the people's needs, mechanism regulation, and supervision improvement.



After the agreement was signed, the two countries will continue the ratification process in accordance with the provisions applied in each country before the BTA is implemented and can facilitate people in the border area.

Malaysia to expand defence cooperation with Indonesia, Philippines Malaysia has agreed to strengthen three-way defence cooperation with Indonesia and the Philippines through a trilateral cooperative arrangement (TCA), Malaysian Defence Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein has said.
According to industry sources cited by Reuters, the total value of these investments could exceed $1 billion.

Xiamen Hithium Energy Storage Technology, a company expanding in Europe and the United States, has approached industry managers in Vietnam to discuss a $900 million investment to build a factory spanning over 30 hectares.

According to Reuters, if the investment materialises as planned, it would become one of the largest foreign investors in the nation.

A second source confirmed that the investment under consideration would be worth at least $500 million.

Previously, VIR reported that Tran Duc Thang, Secretary of Hai Duong Party Committee, held a meeting and working session during the week of May 22 with the leadership of Xiamen Hithium Energy Storage Technology.

During the meeting, director of investment and development at Xiamen Hithium Energy Storage Technology Will Shangguang and his delegation explored the potential advantages of Hai Duong, focusing on its geographical location, transportation infrastructure, industrial zones, and skilled workforce.

Founded in 2019, Xiamen Hithium Energy Storage Technologys headquarters is located in Haicang, China, with additional offices and manufacturing facilities in the US, Germany, India, Australia, and Singapore.

Xiamen Hithium Energy Storage told Reuters that they do not have any pending deals. However, they shared plans to expand their production capacity to 70GW by the end of this year, compared to the current level of 15GW.

The firm specialises in manufacturing fixed energy storage products, including battery cells and large containers, for managing energy supply from solar or wind farms. The company is not currently active in Vietnam.

Another company intending to make a significant investment in Vietnam is Growatt New Energy.

The company has leased a manufacturing plant in Vietnam and plans to allocate around $300 million to purchase approximately 15ha of industrial land for a new factory.

Growatt New Energy is involved in the production of battery systems and energy storage inverters for commercial and residential purposes. The company declined to comment on the matter.

According to Precedence Research, the global energy storage market is estimated to reach a value of approximately $224 billion by the end of this decade, compared to just over $31 billion in 2021. Major players in the market include Tesla, Panasonic, and Philips.

Vietnam is a growing renewable energy market as its economy is booming and electricity shortages persist this summer.

MyStorage expands to cater to Vietnam's rising storage demand MyStorage, the first professional mini storage company in Ho Chi Minh City, is looking to expand its offerings amidst rising competition.

AMI AC Renewables and Honeywell to pilot battery energy storage scheme AMI AC Renewables, through its subsidiary, AMI Khanh Hoa, has signed an MoU with Honeywell to collaborate on a battery energy storage pilot scheme in Khanh Hoa, Vietnam.

Chinas Xiamen Hithium Energy Storage Technology to invest in Hai Duong Hai Duong province has proactively welcomed Xiamen Hithium Energy Storage Technology, a prominent Chinese high-tech business specialising in lithium-ion battery materials and energy storage systems, highlighting its dedication to attracting high-tech investments and fostering a favourable business environment.
According to the UOB ASEAN Consumer Sentiment Study 2022, there has been a significant increase in the number of Vietnamese who are interested in finding out more about sustainable investing.

Nine in 10 Vietnamese feel that financial institutions should provide better information about the benefits of sustainable investing, while 19 per cent of those surveyed are ready to consider sustainable investing if it matches their risk appetite.

Recognising the gap in the market, UOB Vietnam has entered into a strategic partnership with UOBAM Vietnam to bring comprehensive sustainable investment solutions to customers.

After the MoU signing ceremony at the end of November 2022, UOB Vietnam organised an event exclusively for priority customers on May 30. The event was held at the Sheraton Saigon Hotel, with more than 100 guests in attendance.

Sharing the cooperation's strategic vision at the event, Paul Kim, head of the Personal Financial Services Division at UOB Vietnam, said, "UOB always does everything it can to bring the best products and services to Vietnamese customers. Through this strategic cooperation with UOBAM Vietnam, we aim to help customers invest effectively with quality investment products sustainably, managed by some of the most experienced financial experts in Vietnam."

To mark the partnership, UOBAM Vietnam introduced two investment solutions tailored to the Vietnamese market with a focus on sustainability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards. These are the United Vietnam ESG Equity Fund (UVEEF) and Trust Portfolio Management Service (SAM).

UVEEF is the first open-ended fund in Vietnam's financial market to apply ESG criteria in parallel with analysis of stock fundamentals. UVEEF invests mainly in blue-chip stocks with strong fundamentals, good growth potential, and high ESG ratings.

In addition, UOBAM also provides the Trust Portfolio Management Service (SAM) for high-end clients, with securities portfolios tailored to their investment goals and personal risk appetite. Applying the ESG investment process and latest risk management standards, UOBAM Vietnam's team of experts directly advise on investment strategies to help customers achieve their sustainable asset growth goals for the long term.

The stock market has witnessed several signs of improvement since the volatility of the end of last year. Investment in UVEEF or SAM will help investors keep up with market trends safely and effectively while limiting risk. The professional investment experts at UOBAM aim to help non-specialist investors make investments.

UOBAM Vietnam boasts safe and simple investment procedures so that investors can start investing with a small amount of diversified capital. The investment bank has quickly become one of the top choices in the fund management market. When UOB Vietnam customers have investment needs, they will be connected with experienced investment experts at UOBAM Vietnam to open an account and start making investments based on their own financial goals and risk appetite.

UOBAM Vietnam is a subsidiary of Singapore headquartered - UOB Asset Management Ltd - one of Asia's top asset management groups. UOBAM Vietnam has more than 35 years of experience in providing fund management and advisory services to both institutional and retail clients, with over 320 international awards. The bank won seven awards at the 2023 Best of the Best Awards organised by Asia Asset Management. Of all the awards won, the group is proudest of the Best Asset Management House in Asia (20 years) accolade.

With the achievements over the past years and the team of investment experts, UOB Vietnam and UOBAM Vietnam have underlined their commitment to bring customers effective investment solutions. The partnership is one of the bank's efforts to promote a sustainable financial future for customers and the next generation.

UOB reaffirms long-term commitment to Vietnam with fresh capital injection UOB is reaffirming its long-term commitment to contributing to Vietnams economic growth and deepening its support of customers by increasing its charter capital from VND3 trillion to VND5 trillion ($130.43-217.4 million).

UOB: Vietnam experiences major setback in Q3 before rebound in Q4 UOB has reported a record decline in the third quarter of 2021 in Vietnam as a consequence of strict social distancing measures, particularly in the south. However, the increasing vaccination rate could help Vietnam's headline GDP growth to rebound to 7 per cent in Q4, which will translate to a 3 per cent increase for 2021.
This collaboration aims to provide UOB Vietnams cardholders and Vietnam Airlines' Lotusmiles members with great travel benefits and access to exclusive offers and privileges.

As the bank with the largest ASEAN consumer footprint and the top card issuer in the region, UOB aims to do right by customers wherever they are by offering deals and rewards for every lifestyle and life stage.

The bank has continuously expanded its partnership ecosystem with established brands to offer its customers the very best deals that align with their preferences and desires.

In Vietnam, UOB has a strong focus on establishing partnerships with industry leaders across key sectors such as travel, dining, and retail, which include Lazada, Shopee, Starbucks, CGV, Be, GrabFood, and top-notch restaurants to provide customers with the best deals and offers.

Paul Kim, head of Personal Financial Services at UOB Vietnam shared, Our partnership with Vietnam Airlines marks another milestone for us as we expand our partnership ecosystem to serve our customers better. This collaboration aligns with our vision to provide comprehensive solutions and exceptional experiences for our customers, making us the bank of choice in Vietnam. Together, we will continue to enhance the travel experience and create greater value for our customers.

Under this partnership, UOB's cardholders and Vietnam Airlines' Lotusmiles members can look forward to a range of exclusive benefits and privileges.

Nguyen Sy Thanh, Lotusmiles director at Vietnam Airlines said, We are excited to partner with UOB Vietnam to bring enhanced travel experiences to our valued customers. We hope this cooperation will bring more benefits to the customers of both sides when travelling with Vietnam Airlines and spending on a UOB card. In the future, Vietnam Airlines and UOB will work together to introduce more attractive cooperation products and bring more privileges and rewards to customers.

Capture the recovering flow of in-country and cross-border travel

According to a forecast from the International Air Transport Association, by the end of 2022, Vietnams domestic aviation market will have fully recovered, with high growth compared to the 2019 period.

The international market is growing, gradually recovering, and is forecast to reach 2019 levels by the end of 2023. Vietnam's total air transport market in 2023 is forecast to approximate 80 million passengers, an increase of 45.4 per cent compared to 2022.

In the first two months of 2023, the passenger numbers for Vietnamese airlines reached 9.8 million, an increase of 91.9 per cent on-year. The demand for international travel during summer is also expected to continue surging during this peak season.

Through this partnership with Vietnam Airlines, UOB Vietnam aims to capture the rising demand for both in-country and cross-border travel, especially during the summer season.

Offering customers attractive deals for the peak travel season

Under this partnership, UOB's cardholders and Vietnam Airlines' Lotusmiles members can look forward to a range of exclusive benefits and privileges.

Accordingly, from now until July 31, customers have the chance to enjoy free Lotusmiles membership and no annual fees for the first year, together with attractive benefits when applying for credit cards issued by UOB from Vietnam Airlines and UOB Vietnam cooperation.

Lotusmiles members in the Million Miler, Platinum, Gold, or Titanium tiers will receive up to 15,000 bonus miles, equivalent to a round-trip flight from Hanoi to Danang or Ho Chi Minh to Danang when they meet the spending requirement of VND8 million ($345) within 60 days from the date the credit card is approved. In addition, the document requirements for member tiers from Titanium are simplified, with only ID and Lotusmiles membership required for submission.

Customers with a PremierMiles card issued by UOB can convert the awarded miles from UOB Vietnam to Lotusmiles easily. Miles can be used to redeem Vietnam Airlines flights and Skyteam services and rewards in the diverse ecosystem of the Golden Lotus programme.

Furthermore, customers with a PremierMiles card issued by UOB can earn one mile for every VND25,000 ($1.08) spent. As a token of appreciation, they can also receive up to 15,000 additional miles every year and enjoy eight complimentary Airport Lounge visits per year through the Priority Pass membership card.

T&T Group and DB Group form strategic partnership to fuel investment opportunities T&T Group and DB Group have joined forces in a strategic alliance, aiming to drive investment collaboration across various sectors in Vietnam but with a primary focus on the insurance industry.

BIDV enters strategic partnership with Switzerland-based Edmond de Rothschild The private banking services of BIDV, with support from Switzerland-based private banking institution Edmond de Rothschild, are expected to provide tailored financial solutions and investment advice to high-net-worth clients in Vietnam.

Vietnam, Australia foster economic partnership The third Vietnam-Australia Economic Partnership Meeting was held in Hanoi on April 17 under the co-chair of Minister of Planning and Investment Nguyen Chi Dung and Australian Minister for Trade and Tourism Don Farrell.
With the current high demand for electricity during the peak time of summer, the Department of Industry and Trade in Khanh Hoa has required Sumitomo to take the turbine from the 60-70 per cent capacity of its pilot period to 80-100 per cent capacity. As of June 5, the first turbine has been operating at full capacity.

The Japanese investor is now preparing for the pilot run of the second turbine. Phan Thi Thu Cuc, deputy director of the Department of Industry and Trade said that at present the 500kV Van Phong - Vinh Tan transmission line is connected, and the province is completing procedures to implement the 500kV Van Phong - Binh Dinh transmission line to increase capacity for Van Phong 1 thermal power plant.

The Van Phong 1 project is backed by a 25-year power purchase agreement with Electricity of Vietnam. The plant uses ultra-supercritical technology, with a capacity of 1,320MW, comprising two generating sets of 660MW, in Van Phong Economic Zone.

When put into operation fully, the plant will supply the national grid system with about nine billion kWh per year. Sumitomo began construction of the plant in October 2019.

$2.35 billion Quang Tri thermal power project terminated The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) has officially announced the termination of the VND55 trillion ($2.35 billion) Quang Tri thermal power project after construction was delayed for over a decade.

Thai Binh 2 Thermal Power Plant officially inaugurated The long-delayed Thai Binh 2 Thermal Power Plant, with a $1.2 billion investment from state-run PetroVietnam, was officially inaugurated on April 27.

Quang Tri calls for investors in the terminated $2.35 billion thermal power plant Quang Tri Peoples Committee has proposed solutions for alternative investment capital for the $2.35 billion thermal power plant, which currently faces termination.
The VinFast VF 3 is part of the small car segment, specifically classified as a mini car. Photo courtesy of VinFast

Hanoi - VinFast officially launched the VF 3, a mini electric car model designed specifically for the Vietnamese market.

Boasting a compact and contemporary design, the VF 3 offers numerous benefits, making it suitable for a wide range of applications and operating environments. This eco-friendly vehicle is also equipped with smart features, providing a dynamic mobility option for individuals of all backgrounds.

The VinFast VF 3 is part of the small car segment, specifically classified as a mini car. The VF 3 represents VinFast's initial endeavor in developing a small car model design dedicated to the distinctive characteristics and driving patterns of domestic consumers.

The car has an overall length of approximately 3,114 mm and features a two-door design, a rear trunk, and sufficient interior space to accommodate up to five people. The body is compact yet tall and robust, providing ample ground clearance and equipped with 16-inch wheels. The exterior design is characterised by bold geometric blocks and strong lines that run consistently from the front to the back, creating an eye-catching appearance.

The car is equipped with an electric motor and battery that offer an impressive travel distance, catering to the needs and daily usage patterns of most Vietnamese drivers. It is expected that VinFast will begin accepting VF 3 orders in September 2023 and deliver in Q3 2024.

VinFast expands into Southeast Asian market At the Future Mobility Asia 2023 event in Thailand, VinFast  the electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer from Vingroup  made a groundbreaking announcement, unveiling its expansion plans into the Southeast Asian market while maintaining its existing focus on North America and Europe.

Chairman of Vingroup highlights VinFast's path to profitability During Vingroups annual shareholders' meeting on May 17, chairman of Vingroup Pham Nhat Vuong provided insights into the company's strategic roadmap and its journey towards profitability.
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP)  A former North Carolina state legislator and Winston-Salem City Council member was sentenced to five years of probation along with monetary penalties after pleading guilty to fraud for spending money from the homeless center organization he had led for personal use.

U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs on Thursday accepted the guilty plea by Derwin Montgomery, 34, contained in an agreement he signed last fall to one count of program fraud. Fourteen other counts from an indictment filed against him last year were dismissed.

Biggs ordered Montgomery to pay $38,618 in restitution to the Bethesda Center for the Homeless and $22,270 for his probationary supervision, the Winston-Salem Journal reported. He was also placed on home detention for 120 days.

Montgomery served as the centers executive director for six years before he resigned in early 2021. The center had received at least $10,000 in federal assistance from the U.S. Small Business Administration in 2020, a court document shows.

This is a serious case because it involves the abuse of the public trust, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joanna McFadden told Biggs in court. Taxpayers in this country should know that their money is being used appropriately by nonprofits who receive federal money.

Montgomery, a Democrat, was elected to the Winston-Salem City Council in 2009 while a student at Winston-Salem State University. He moved to the state House in 2018 to fill a vacancy and won a two-year term later that year. He was a unsuccessful primary candidate for the 6th Congressional District seat in 2020.

Montgomery told Biggs in court that he was sorry for what happened.

This is hard, Montgomery said. I regret my actions that brought me here. I ask for your grace in this matter. Biggs said she was moved by letters from local residents urging her to give Montgomery probation.

A court document that served as the factual basis for the plea agreement said Montgomery converted center funds for his own personal use starting in or around 2018 and through 2020. They included about $5,100 related to Montgomerys travel and over $6,500 for the lease of an SUV.

In 2020, Montgomery charged the center about $23,000 related to marketing and media services purportedly performed by his own company in contravention of conflict of interest policy, and despite the center already receiving such services as a charitable donation, the document said.

The indictment had alleged Montgomery charged the shelter for airfare to Cancun, Mexico, for a vacation with a romantic partner, stays at luxury hotels, and expenses at a strip club in Las Vegas.
Waco attorney Seth Sutton is accustomed to bringing his skills as an actor into the courtroom, but this weekend finds him putting the courtroom into the theater for his debut play, Second Chair.

I combined my passions (for theater and law) a long time ago, but I only used the combination in the courtroom, said Sutton, an attorney with the Law Offices of Vic Feazell.

His play, produced by Silent House Theatre Company, centers on the drama that ensues when defense attorney Ben Collins (Jacob Reiger) returns to his small Texas hometown for the funeral of his father James (Bill Selby).

While in town, the sense that somethings not quite right about a murder case involving town neer do well Daniel Scott (Jackson Parker) leads him to sign on as defense attorney. As the case unfolds, Ben finds his late father appearing to provide advice and support, acting as the attorneys second chair as the trial proceeds. Then, the delight of a writer and the fear of an attorney, theres a major twist to the story as it approaches its end.

Sutton initially imagined Second Chair for television, writing a pilot about four years ago. As he got back into acting onstage locally, he realized there was talent at hand to perform his piece as a play, so he rewrote it as a stage drama.

He met with Silent Houses Collin Selman about the prospect of the company staging his play and the company co-founder readily agreed, signing on as director.

For Selman, Second Chair offered an opportunity to create a new play, a first for the company, and perform a contemporary courtroom drama, although there was a 17th-century court setting in the companys production of The Crucible.

As in a trial unfolding in a courtroom, both Selman and Sutton have changed the script of Second Chair throughout rehearsals as needed to strengthen a scene or sharpen dialogue.

In writing the play, Sutton admitted he started with the courtroom scenes first and expanded from there. Both plays and courtroom trials involve stories, he noted. When you get a discovery file (as an attorney), youre opening a story for a proposal. You want to portray your client as the protagonist. The prosecution wants to portray an officer or a witness as the protagonist, he said.

The case at the center of Second Chair is assembled from pieces of other cases Sutton experienced and the strained father-son conflict doesnt mirror Suttons own relationship with his father, though theres some truth in how talking can resolve problems.

Sutton isnt alone as a Waco attorney transforming courtroom experience into a literary product: His boss Vic Feazell, a former McLennan County district attorney, used his legal experience to inform the plot of his novel Rhinos Sharks & Unicorns: A Heros Journey, which has a freewheeling Austin attorney at its center.

On a more serious note, Sutton has his own date as a defendant in a courtroom ahead of him, with his trial on charges of solicitation of capital murder in an alleged murder-for-hire scheme set to begin Aug. 14. Ive maintained all along that Im not guilty (of those charges), but there will be a trial, he said.
The Kakhovka dam collapse causes humanitarian and environmental costs

Xinhua) 09:31, June 09, 2023

BEIJING, June 8 (Xinhua) -- The recent attack on the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant in Ukraine has caused a catastrophic dam burst, which holds back the country's largest reservoir, releasing a torrent of contaminated water into cities and towns downstream.

As Russia and Ukraine have been trading accusations over the attack, the dam collapse continues to inflict humanitarian, environmental and agricultural costs upon the flooded zone, with a potential impact that is likely to ripple across the world in the years to come.

HUMANITARIAN COST

A humanitarian crisis triggered by the disaster is already playing out. As water gushes out, more than 4,000 people had been evacuated from the flooded areas in the Kherson region, acting governor of the Kherson region Vladimir Saldo said on Wednesday.

Statements from the Ukrainian side said that "about 80 settlements in the flood zone" and more than 40,000 people have been affected, as homes and infrastructure have been destroyed.

Media reported that the flood is disturbing mines laid earlier, posing further dangers to the displaced people and those coming to help.

The United Nations has warned of "grave and far-reaching consequences" following the dam breach, as representatives from various UN agencies in Ukraine were in Kherson to assess the impact and coordinate the humanitarian response.

"They tell us that the disaster will likely get worse ... as water levels are still rising, and more villages and towns are being flooded. This will impact people's access to essential services and seriously raise health risks," said Stephane Dujarric, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres's spokesman.

Access to water is another concern. Hundreds of thousands of people depend on the reservoir formed by the dam for drinking water, and the levels are dropping rapidly.

ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER

Experts have been warning of the environmental cost of the dam failure, calling it an "ecological catastrophe."

Damaged equipment at the power plant could be leaking oil. According to the Ukrainian government, the river has been contaminated with 150 tonnes of industrial lubricant, and another 300 tonnes were at risk of leaking.

Environmentalists have said that pollutants from industries clustered along the banks of the Dnieper River, downstream from the dam, can be swept into the Black Sea, affecting the marine ecosystem.

"There are catastrophic consequences for the environment," Ukrainian Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources Ruslan Strilets told reporters Tuesday.

Video clips posted online showed that large quantities of beached fish lie on the depleted shoreline as the water level falls.

The summer temperatures worsen the health risks from the dam breach, with living matter breaking down faster and further contaminating water supplies, said Yevhen Korzhov, a hydrologist from Kherson State Agrarian and Economic University.

"In the coming months, we will observe the deterioration of the quality of drinking water and the infection of fish, birds, and aquatic animals," Korzhov told the media.

AGRICULTURAL CONSEQUENCE

The incident's rippling effect has been felt worldwide as Ukraine has long been the leading supplier of corn and wheat in the global market. Water from the Kakhovka reservoir irrigated the farming region of southern Ukraine, which produces much of the country's significant agricultural exports.

After the dam's breach, agricultural land in the region has been washed away. Agricultural fallout could far surpass the immediate destruction caused by flooding and is likely to be felt worldwide for years.

The Kakhovka disaster will stop the water supplies to about 30 irrigation systems, which irrigated about 1 million hectares of agricultural fields, according to Oleksii Kushch, an economist at "United Ukraine," a think-tank.

"Ukraine may lose 10-15 percent of its agricultural potential due to indirect or direct influence (of the Kakhovka incident). The damage is estimated to reach millions of tons of agricultural products," Kushch told Xinhua.

The Ukrainian government has warned that the country's grain fields "may turn into deserts as early as next year," and damage to the reservoir could affect global food supplies.

Due to fears that the dam attack could disrupt Ukraine's exports of agricultural products, global prices for wheat and corn have soared since Tuesday when the dam collapsed.

The attack on the dam is possibly the most significant damage to civilian infrastructure since the start of the Ukraine crisis in February 2022, according to UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths.

"The sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realized in the coming days. But it is already clear that it will have grave and far-reaching consequences for thousands of people in southern Ukraine," he said.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
From left, Shinan Financial Group Chairman Jin Ok-dong, KB Financial Group Chairman Yoon Jong-kyoo and Hana Financial Group Chairman Ham Young-joo. Courtesy of each firm





By Lee Min-hyung







Leaders from Korea's major financial holding firms are ramping up their overseas investor relations (IR) activities, in a bid to improve stock performance by attracting more foreign investment.







Starting from Thursday, Shinhan Financial Group Chairman Jin Ok-dong embarked on an eight-day business trip to three European countries  such as the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom. Jin will meet with its investors and shareholders there.







He will also discuss future partnerships with BNP Paribas from France during his trip to Paris. Both companies have maintained close business ties for more than two decades. BNP Paribas is the fourth-largest shareholder of Shinhan Financial Group with a stake of 3.55 percent as of the end of 2022.







This is the second time that Jin has engaged in overseas IR after his trip to Japan in April. He sought digital partnerships with the country's Mizuho Financial Group and Nomura Securities.







The efforts can be seen as part of Shinhan's bid to support its stock price. Major financial stocks  including Shinhan, KB, Hana and Woori  have displayed a sharp downward trajectory after hitting a one-year high in January. Shinhan's stock price was traded at as high as 44,900 won per share earlier this year but has been on the decline to around 35,500 won as of June 9.







Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) Governor Lee Bok-hyun, center, speaks during a panel discussion with overseas investors on the sidelines of the Invest K-Finance: Singapore IR 2023 event in Singapore, May 9. From left are KB Financial Group Chairman Yoon Jong-kyoo, Lee and Hana Financial Group Chairman Ham Young-joo. Courtesy of FSS





Other leaders of Shinhan's rival companies are also stepping up their overseas IR for a similar reason. In May, KB Financial Group Chairman Yoon Jong-kyoo and Hana Financial Group Chairman Ham Young-joo took a five-day trip to three Southeast Asian countries  Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia  to promote the growth potential of Korea's financial industry and attract more foreign investment.







The two financial firms are also facing sluggish stock performance with a double-digit decline in their stock price from a high in January this year. Shares of KB Financial Group, the largest financial holding firm by market capitalization, fell by more than 15 percent. Hana Financial Group also suffered a bigger decline of 20 percent during the same period.







Despite the sluggish recovery in their stock value, leaders from the groups expressed optimism to overcome lingering financial volatility.







"Driven by robust earnings performance, Hana will continue engaging in an aggressive set of investment attraction activities by enhancing direct communication with foreign investors," Ham said during its Singapore IR event in May.







Woori Financial Group, another top-tier financial holding firm, has yet to confirm its official plans for overseas IR activities due to its drastic organizational reshuffle after Woori Chairman Yim Jong-yong took office in March. But the company is also widely forecast to follow the similar footstep of its counterparts as early as the latter half of 2023.


Criminal charges against former Bellmead Assistant Police Chief Brenda Kinsey were dismissed Thursday by a McLennan County grand jury.

The criminal charges against Ms. Kinsey were No Billed, meaning dismissed for lack of merit, today by a Grand Jury, Kinseys attorney, Ryan Johnson, said by email Thursday.

Bellmead police arrested Kinsey, 44, on Feb. 3 charging her with misuse of official information, a third-degree felony, and breaching computer security, a state jail felony charge. McLennan County District Attorney Josh Tetens recused his office from the case because Kinsey consulted his law firm about the original case before Tetens ran for DA, taking office in January.

Prosecutors from Williamson County presented the case before a McLennan County grand jury, which cleared Kinsey of the charges Thursday, records show.

This is the second time Yost Zakhary has attempted to assert these criminal charges against Ms. Kinsey, a decorated peace officer, Johnson said, referring to the Bellmead city manager and former interim police chief.

The misuse of official information charge under which police arrested Kinsey in February was nearly identical to a prior case dismissed in December by prosecutors under former DA Barry Johnson, days before the end of his term. The dismissal documents say the alleged incident did not meet the elements of the crime required by statute. Police alleged Kinsey asked a dispatcher in August 2021 to look up license plate information for a personal reason.

The breaching computer security charge from February was new but based on the same set of allegations underlying the charges dismissed in December.

Bellmead police arrested Kinsey on the first set of charges about a year before Barry Johnsons office dismissed the case. The initial arrest came one day after Kinsey filed harassment, gender discrimination and disparate treatment claims against Zakhary, when Kinsey was still in her assistant chief position.

Ryan Johnson is also one of Kinseys attorneys in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed March 17 against the city of Bellmead and Zakhary in his official capacity with the city.

In that case, Kinsey is suing the city and Zakhary for alleged gender discrimination, harassment and wrongful termination of employment. Waco-based U.S. District Judge Alan Albright on June 1 declined motions to dismiss the suit filed by Zakhary and the city of Bellmead.

Another woman, formerly a Woodway city employee, made similar discrimination and harassment claims against Zachary before he resigned as city manager there, the Tribune-Herald previously reported. The former employee and the city settled a lawsuit in July 2018 for $50,000, the Tribune-Herald reported at the time.
The Waco Founder Lions Club commemorated the 50th anniversary of the downtown Freedom Fountain this week by awarding the widow and daughter of Willie Hobbs Jr., an active Lion for 51 years who helped to get the fountain built.

Club President Phillip Crawford presented a certificate of merit Wednesday to Barbara Hobbs, who was Willies wife for 66 years, and their daughter, Gail Hobbs. Willie Hobbs died Jan. 12 at the age of 89. The Freedom Fountain, between the Waco Convention Center and the Waco Hilton, was a result of efforts by a group known as Wacos Committee of Twelve, including Willie Hobbs, to advocate for better treatment of prisoners of war. In the early 1970s, the group took petitions to Vietnam War peace talks in Paris.

The Freedom Fountain meant so much to my father, getting the letters and signatures to Paris, Gail Hobbs said. I go there sometimes to reflect, and I encourage everyone to go there and reflect.

The Committee of Twelve flew to Paris on April 10, 1971 to visit the Vietnam War peace talks, said Gayle Avant, a former Baylor University political science professor. Representing a cross section of residents, the group brought 40,825 letters and petition signatures calling for improved treatment for prisoners of war to give to the North Vietnamese negotiators.

They were frustrated because the North Vietnamese didnt accept the signatures, Avant said. They had to leave the petition and signatures on a table in the room where they met with the negotiators. The negotiators wouldnt let them hand over the papers.

The Committee of Twelve, under the leadership of then-Mayor Karl May and Chair Cullen Smith, included Willie Hobbs, then-Waco Tribune-Herald editor Harry Provence, Ed Brigham, Baylor student body President Manuel Gonzales, Jack Flanders, Richard Hill, Nadine Baldwin, Linda Hamilton, Carroll Fadal and Gary Jinks.

Returning to Waco after a week in Paris without having fully accomplished what they set out to do, the group thought of building a Freedom Fountain along the Brazos River, or elsewhere in Waco, to inspire freedom for POWs, for Americans and for all people around the world, Avant said.

Dedicated May 21, 1973, the fountain stands near the Waco Convention Center and it has the word freedom written around it in 54 languages. The Committee of Twelve and other supporters raised nearly $50,000 to pay for design and construction of the fountain.

At the dedication, two freed POWs attended: Col. George Hall, whose wife lived in Waco during his captivity, and Capt. Ronald Bliss, who went on to attend law school at Baylor University.

Willie Hobbs was born in Mexia in 1933. He met his wife, Barbara, in the library at Prairie View A&M University, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in industrial arts. From 1970 to 1995, Willie Hobbs worked at McLennan Community College, retiring as the admissions director.

Willie loved the Lions Club, Barbara Hobbs said Wednesday. In his last years while he struggled with illness, Willie continued to do things with the Lions Club.

Willie Hobbs served on the Heart of Texas Housing Finance Board, the Hillcrest Hospital board and the Freeman Center board. He also served with the YMCA, Red Cross and United Way.
ATLANTA  After years of criticizing mail voting and so-called ballot harvesting as ripe for fraud, Republicans at the top of the party want to change course.

They are poised to launch aggressive get-out-the-vote campaigns for 2024 that employ just those strategies, attempting to match the emphasis on early voting Democrats have used for years to lock in many of their supporters well ahead of Election Day. The goal is to persuade voters who support GOP candidates that early voting techniques are secure and to make sure they are able to return their ballots in time to be counted, thus putting less pressure on Election Day turnout efforts.

It marks a notable shift from the party's rhetoric since 2020, when then-President Donald Trump was routinely sowing doubt about mail voting and encouraging his voters to wait and vote in-person on Election Day. As recently as last year, Republican activists peddling the stolen election narrative were telling GOP voters who received mail ballots to hold onto them and turn them in at their polling place on Election Day rather than use mail or drop boxes.

Now Trump is asking donors to chip in for his "ballot harvesting fund"  saying in a fundraising email, "Either we ballot harvest where we can, or you can say goodbye to America!"

Republicans say the shift is needed to ensure GOP victories up and down the 2024 ballot, arguing they cannot afford to give Democrats any advantage. At the same time, they acknowledge skepticism from many of their own voters conditioned by false claims of widespread voter fraud from Trump and others.

Across the country, Republican-controlled legislatures have acted against early voting  shortening windows for returning mail ballots, banning or limiting the use of drop boxes and criminalizing third-party ballot collection.

In announcing a "Bank Your Vote" initiative for 2024, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the party "has never said 'don't vote early,'" but acknowledged the GOP will have to work to shift voters' perceptions.

"That certainly is a challenge if you have people in your ecosystem saying, 'Don't vote early or don't vote by mail,' and those cross messages do have an impact," McDaniel told reporters Wednesday. "I don't think you're seeing that heading into 2024. I think you're seeing all of us singing from the same songbook."

The nationwide GOP plan emphasizes "in-person early voting, absentee voting, and ballot harvesting where legal," while also pledging "to fight against bad ballot harvesting laws." Republicans use the term to describe when someone else returns a mailed ballot on behalf of another voter, especially third parties that gather multiple ballots.

McDaniel emphasized she remains opposed to ballot collection, and she said the party would deploy an army of poll watchers and election monitors to reassure Republican voters that their ballots will be protected.

"Do I think it's the most secure way of voting? No," McDaniel said. "But if it's the law, we're going to have to do it just like the Democrats are."

The challenge will be providing a consistent message that reassures GOP voters.

The same day McDaniel announced her initiative, Republicans in Congress were holding a hearing considering legislation that, among other things, would ban ballot collection in the District of Columbia. GOP state lawmakers around the country have chipped away at advanced voting opportunities since 2020. Some state and local election Republicans have gone further, advocating for just a single day of voting.

After the 2020 presidential election, the movie "2000 Mules" was a popular video that made various debunked claims about mail ballots, drop boxes and ballot collection. Even the co-chair of the new GOP strategy, U. S. Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., has been a critic. In November, he issued a call on social media to "End ballot harvesting."

Nonetheless, McDaniel noted that Republican presidential candidates, including Trump, have been talking about the importance of advance voting and ballot collection.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a high-profile GOP contender, recently told a voter he planned to launch his own "ballot harvesting" effort, according to video posted online by a Washington Post reporter. DeSantis said he wasn't going to "fight with one hand tied behind my back."

The Trump and DeSantis campaigns did not respond to messages seeking details about ballot collection plans. Florida is among the mostly Republican-led states that have sought to ban or limit the practice in recent years, despite the GOP's reliance there on older, more conservative voters who prefer voting methods other than casting Election Day ballots.

Since the 2020 election, lawmakers in 31 states have introduced 124 bills that would restrict third-party ballot returns, according to data collected by the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks voting-related legislation in the states. Of those, 14 bills in 11 states have been enacted. That includes one DeSantis himself signed that makes it a felony for an individual to collect more than two mail ballots other than the person's own or one belonging to an immediate family member.

While some states are silent on the issue, 31 states allow someone other than the voter to return a ballot on behalf of another voter. Nine limit how many ballots one person can return, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many states limit ballot handling to a family member, household member or caregiver.

In California, efforts to lock in the early vote could be decisive next year in a string of U.S. House districts, most of them in the southern California suburbs, that are expected to play a pivotal role in determining control of the chamber. California is a Democratic stronghold, but Republicans retain pockets of strength across rural and small-town areas and the Central Valley farm belt, while the state's suburban congressional districts have yielded many tights races in recent election cycles.

As many as nine congressional seats are considered competitive, and several races will play out in districts won by President Joe Biden but where the seat is held by a Republican. Each of California's 22 million registered voters is mailed a ballot one month before Election Day.

"In any close election, the ability to capture absentee votes becomes extremely important, especially in a state like ours, where every single voter has a ballot in their home," conservative activist Jon Fleishman said.

Democrats were critical of the new GOP effort after years of messaging by Republicans against mail voting.

"Donald Trump and extremist Republicans have spent years telling lies about elections to justify their losses. That includes demonizing mail ballots and ballot collection," said Jena Griswold, Colorado's secretary of state and head of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. "These hypocritical extremists are only interested in spreading chaos and trying to gain power at any cost."

Top Republicans remain determined to make the case within their own ranks, said Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C.

"We've got to have a change of culture among Republican voters," said Hudson, who chairs the House GOP's national campaign committee. "And it's going to require us all on the same page."

___

The 2024 presidential field, in the order they've announced Donald Trump, Republican Nikki Haley, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican Marianne Williamson, Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Democrat Larry Elder, Republican President Joe Biden, Democrat Asa Hutchinson, Republican Tim Scott, Republican Ron DeSantis, Republican Mike Pence, Republican Chris Christie, Republican Doug Burgum, Republican
Every several weeks there is another incident at sea or in the air with an adversarys ships or planes maneuvering aggressively or dangerously close to our ships or planes. Most of the recent ones have been Chinese misbehavior, although we also used to get this from Vladimir Putins Russia, before he got so bogged down with war in Ukraine.

The most recent incident was with the Chinese in the Taiwan Strait. A Chinese warship cut dangerously close across the bow of a U.S. destroyer (and a Canadian warship). Under normal circumstances, this is egregiously incompetent behavior risking a collision like that. But these circumstances are not normal: We are being tested for signs of weakness.

Our typical measured response is to slow down or change course to avoid the collision, which is exactly what happened in this case. Its a non-aggressive way to avoid the danger, and to avoid provoking any conflict. Any normal civilized person would not misinterpret that.

But these countries are run by dictators who do not think like that. Both Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are would-be Adolf Hitler clones, out to secure as much world domination as they can. You have to understand that in order to understand how they interpret our measured responses as a sign of weakness. The proof of that thesis is that they continue to provoke confrontation.

The only way to stop this is to respond strongly in terms they actually understand: raw, naked force. It has nothing to do with logic, common sense or civilized behavior. It has everything to do with effectively slapping the dictator upside his head.

The Navy destroyer involved in the Taiwan Strait incident was equipped with a five-inch gun turret on its foredeck. We have to use it, in the centuries-old unmistakable way of first responding with a shot across the bow of the offender. If the offender persists, then we hit him with it on the second shot. If he shoots back, we sink him. The ship has missiles that will do just that.

This concept is called gunboat diplomacy, and it has worked for centuries. But it is really hard to do gunboat diplomacy if your boats lack guns. Some of ours have no guns, only missiles. That was a mistake.

Yes, it is conflict. No, it will not start a general war, other than a war of words (about which we should not care much). It would put a stop to the offensive behavior at sea, however.

In the air, it is enemy fighter jets zooming too close to our unarmed patrol bomber spy planes. We have to arm them, or else provide an armed fighter escort. The inherent short ranges of fighters would suggest we instead just arm the spy planes. Gunboat diplomacy demands these planes need both guns and missiles, and tracer ammunition in the guns.

When the adversary starts to zoom in too close, put a line of highly-visible tracer gunfire in front of him. If he persists, hit him with a missile. Yes, it is armed conflict. No, it will not start a general war, only a war of words.

Arming these planes does impact their mission. From that point forward, you must keep them in international airspace only; we can never violate sovereign territory with them again. But international airspace is where they do most of their missions anyway, so it is only a small change.

The analogy with Putins Russia is that Ukraine must win its war. They are our proxy to stop Russian armed aggression. A draw, or a negotiated peace without Ukrainian victory, is just a sign of our weakness in Putins eyes. He will just keep on doing these egregious things  unless we smack him very hard to stop him. That is the nature of these Hitler-clone dictators. There is no other way.

Of the two, China is more dangerous because it has a much bigger economy than todays Russia. There are many other minor Hitler wannabes out there, too.

I would suggest that the next time North Koreas Kim Jong Un launches a rocket, we shoot it down before it gets very far. We have that capability. What could he possibly do about it? Nothing. It starts only a war of words, and it will constrain his future behavior.

The key here is that we respond to these dictators misbehavior with significant force, each time and every time. They understand only force as a strong response. They see anything less as a sign of weakness, inviting more misbehavior.

And that escalating misbehavior does eventually lead to general war. Weve seen this before, a bit over eight decades ago. It cost over 15 million military lives and over 38 million civilian lives, even without nuclear weapons (except two right at the end). The cost today with nuclear weapons is in the billions of lives.
Your incoming freshman college student is raring to start, and all the dorm gear has been ordered or is already boxed up and ready for move-in day.

A new laptop, printer and smartphone, not to mention the big-screen TV that was a graduation gift from Mom and Dad. A new bicycle to get from one end of campus to the other and, of course, a thousand dollars in college textbooks are on the way.

That adds up to well over $3,000 in personal property thats being lugged to a dorm room this fall that could be a haven for burglars, who perpetrate the most commonly reported campus crimes.

Now comes the question you probably havent thought much about: Do you need renters insurance protection in case of theft?

The short answer: Some schools may require students to have some form of renters insurance. But by and large, students living in dorms or other campus housing may have at least partial coverage on their parents homeowners insurance policy and dont need a separate policy.

However, some homeowners policies dont automatically cover a students dorm-room residence, and some charge a higher deductible than a standard renters policy. In addition, coverage may be limited to 10% of the personal property coverage in a parents homeowners policy.

Renters insurance is surprisingly affordable  in some cases as low as $5 per month.

In many cases, you may be able to get a discount by buying renters insurance from the same company that insures your automobile.

If your student is living off campus this fall for the first time, many landlords will require proof of insurance as a condition of the lease.

When shopping for a policy, insurers recommend adding up the value of your students personal belongings as accurately as possible to determine whether a policys limits are adequate. Know whats covered and whats not.

For example, renters insurance may cover the theft of a laptop but not knocking it off a desk and cracking a screen.

Some insurers may add an apartment roommate or three for a slightly higher premium as long their name is on the policy. But many insurers will require roommates to have separate policies.

For peace of mind, its worth shopping and comparing coverage and costs of various renters insurance at sites such as TheZebra.com and Gabi.com.

While you may think college campuses are safe, serene communities, the reality is they are small cities where crime does happen. Then there are the unexpected damages from, say, a broken water pipe in a dorm that floods lower-level rooms and destroys electronics, furniture and clothing, or a burglar who cleans out an apartment of high-tech gear during a long weekend.

Finally, count on the unexpected, such as a party getting out of hand and a big-screen TV getting broken, or an expensive laptop walking away. Those incidents happened to my kids, and I was glad I had renters insurance to cover the losses. The monthly premiums were well worth the money I spent for protection.
NARA received 15 boxes of presidential records that had been stored at Mar-a-Lago  14 of which, it would later be revealed, contained classified documents. The documents were found mixed in with an assortment of other material, including newspapers, magazines, photos and personal correspondence.

In total, the boxes were found to contain 184 documents with classified markings, including 67 marked confidential, 92 secret and 25 top secret. Agents who inspected the boxes also found special markings suggesting they included information from highly sensitive human sources or the collection of electronic "signals" authorized by a court under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
WATERLOO  The city has received more than $600,000 in new funds to focus on a former Rath Packing Company building, currently occupied by Crystal Cold.

The Environmental Protection Agency Region 7 presented the city with $642,400 as a grant recipient for brownfields cleanup. A brownfield is a former industrial or commercial site where the land could be affected by environmental contamination. The grant program is funded by President Joe Bidens Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

The funds will be used to clean up the former Rath property at 1442 Sycamore St. The more than four-acre site has four interconnected brick structures which operated as a meat packing plant from 1908 to 1985. The cleanup would remove the asbestos in the building materials, preparing it for possible demolition.

In 1985, when Rath went bankrupt, Crystal Cold moved into the multi-story building. Since then, Crystal has had four expansions on the Rath site for its cold storage business, with the latest addition at 1656 Sycamore St. being the largest. The building now has 200,000 square feet of refrigerated space.

The $21 million expansion sits where the former Rath slaughterhouse used to be. After nearly two years of construction, the building has now created efficiency and modernity in refrigeration and extra safety for both employees and the food in cold storage.

Tom Poe, the president of Crystal Cold, said the one-story building eliminates the need for elevators, which are used in the Rath building. He said the elevators there are so old that no one wants to fix them.

The city currently owns the Rath building and Poe hopes every employee is phased into the new building by mid-July. Then, the EPA will do asbestos abatement. After that, Poe hopes the building will be torn down.

If it is, he expects there to be another expansion of Crystal Cold. Another possibility, he said, is that a new food processing plant would to come to town.

Mayor Quentin Hart, along with multiple people from the EPA, were glad Crystal Cold didnt move far from its Rath location. At one point, Waterloo was labeled as Factory City, Iowa, according to Hart.

(Waterloo) has been instrumental across the country for providing products and providing service to our greater country, he said. Its important to make sure that we never forget those cities in the impact that we have done, or may have done to the overall environment of our local community.

He said its important to transform former industrial sites into a place to provide more jobs to the community.

Other brownfield sites in Waterloo that have been cleaned up and repurposed include the former Grand Hotel, now Grand Crossing; the former Wonder Bread Bakery, now SingleSpeed Brewing; and a former dry cleaner, which is now the Boys and Girls Club.

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WATERLOO  Prosecutors said they know how Tamica Allison and her friend, Andrea Taste Anderson, were shot to death.

County Attorney Brian Williams also said he knows the who part of the case. He alleges it was Allisons boyfriend, Matthew Dee Buford III, 39, who pulled the trigger in their West Second Street apartment on Feb. 10, 2020. But what remains elusive is why they died.

The only people who could tell you why are dead in pools of their own blood, Williams told jurors on Thursday as testimony began in Bufords trial for two counts of first-degree murder and one count of flight to avoid prosecution.

Following the double slaying, Buford said goodbye to friends and family and traveled to Peoria, Illinois, before eventually turning himself into authorities, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said Buford shot both women shortly before 10 p.m. while Allisons teen son and daughter were in their rooms upstairs.

Her daughter, who was 14 years old at the time, recounted how she heard the adults talking downstairs.

She heard her mother say, What are you going to do, shoot me in the face? I dont care, Im not scared.

That was immediately followed by two gunshots. She noticed that music that had been playing also stopped.

The daughter said she was scared and attempted to wake her older brother.

From the landing, she saw that Buford turned off the light downstairs and walk out of sight. She called out his name.

Dont come down here, because I love you, Buford told her, according to her account.

She came down.

I saw my mom on her back, and I saw Taste on her side or her stomach, and there was a lot of blood under them. And Matthew was sitting in a chair, and he was holding a gun, the daughter testified.

She returned upstairs to her brother.

I told him I think that they are dead  because they werent moving and there was a lot of blood, the daughter said.

Thats when Buford called them downstairs, telling them to bring jackets.

The three of them left through the front door, bypassing the room with the bodies.

He asked the teens where they wanted to go and dropped off the son at a friends house, driving off.

According to the daughter, they then drove around. Buford went to visit his own children at their mothers house, waking them to give hugs but not offering any explanation.

They drove around to other family and friends. Buford told the daughter Youre not going to love me anymore. You are going to hate me.

I felt stuck, like I couldnt say anything, she told jurors. I just kept thinking about see my mom and Taste on the floor.

Buford eventually took her to the home of Andersons daughter. She was crying when they let her in and she told them what happened.

Defense attorney Alfred Willett said prosecutors wont be able to meet the burden of proof.

The states evidence will fail to show that Matthew Buford shot and killed Tamica Allison and Andrea Anderson, Willett said.

He said no one saw the shooting and there is no evidence linking Buford to the gun recovered in the investigation.

There is no DNA connecting the firearm, there is no DNA connecting the magazine to the firearm that was found. There are no latent fingerprints linking the firearm to the defendant, Willett said.

He said the medical examiner wont be able to determine which woman was shot first and toxicology tests indicated both of the victims were intoxicated.

Testimony in the trial is scheduled to continue Friday.

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WATERLOO  The Waterloo Career Center is working to create a nursing assistant apprenticeship with Western Home Communities.

We are excited to have Western Home Communities join our ever-growing list of partners helping us grow our award-winning work-based learning program, and help students grow as professionals in this earn and learn model, Jeff Frost, Waterloo Community Schools executive director of professional technical education said in a news release.

A signing event will be held 3 p.m. Friday at the Career Center to celebrate the care facility becoming an official Partner in Education with the district.

Through this partnership, they will be creating a registered apprenticeship-certified nursing assistants program that will allow students to work within Western Home Communities. In addition to the CNA apprenticeships, Career Center culinary students will be able to apply for paid internships in Western Home Communities culinary and hospitality departments.

This is a win-win partnership since well be able to expose more students to the opportunities available in senior living, which is a growing field due to high demand, Kris Hansen, chief executive officer of Western Home Communities, said in the release. From the outset, we can help further their training by introducing them to high standards of care and providing jobs with a respected employer.

The Career Center currently works with multiple Cedar Valley organizations to help pair students with third-party learning experiences. Students have gained valuable internships and assistantships through businesses such as John Deere, UnityPoint Health, Amy Wienands Real Estate, Power Engineering, and the Waterloo Schools information technology department.

This partnership with Western Home Communities will be the final Partners in Education signing for the 2022-23 school year.

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WATERLOO  Downtown is about to become more monitored through the installation of pedestrian-level cameras.

The City Council approved the purchase of these cameras during a special session on Thursday.

The cost of the cameras is not to exceed $150,000. The invoice document shows that 72 cameras will be purchased. The cameras would be paid with bond money.

A pedestrian-level camera would be mounted or pointed lower than a standard traffic camera in order to see more of the streets and sidewalks and get around obstructions, such as trees or businesses awnings.

Police Chief Joe Leibold said the cameras would cover an area bounded by Franklin Street to the north and Washington Street to the south between Park Avenue and Fifth Street. This would include Lincoln Park. He said there would be no facial recognition technology.

Leibold said he doesnt see the cameras necessarily as a need for downtown. Rather, the city is just following trends of greater use for the devices.

Its standard in public safety anymore for events where things are held to have cameras, he said. Its different than it was 30 years ago.

He said the city has been having conversations about more cameras for multiple years but it is now coming to fruition with the expansion and revitalization of the East Fourth Street corridor.

As more technology and funding is available, he would like to expand the range of the cameras in places such as parks, near schools, where children congregate and where national news making events happen.

Leibold hopes the cameras will be installed before Irish Fest, which is held in August.

PHOTOS: Waterloo East baseball and softball at Mason City 060523-spt-east-bb-1.JPG 060523-spt-east-bb-2.JPG 060523-spt-east-bb-4.JPG 060523-spt-east-bb-thomas.JPG 060523-spt-east-mc-bb-1.JPG 060523-spt-east-sb-1.JPG 060523-spt-east-sb-2.JPG 060523-spt-east-sb-3.JPG
South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin speaks during an interview with Yonhap News Agency at his office in Seoul, June 8. Yonhap



South Korea's top diplomat has said the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) remains essentially paralyzed in terms of dealing with illegal provocations by North Korea, and stressed Seoul's intention to urge China and Russia to play a constructive role within the system.



In an exclusive interview with Yonhap News Agency on Thursday, Foreign Minister Park Jin noted the UNSC as being the "highest decision-making body of the U.N." but that its functions are "virtually paralyzed in regards to dealing with illegal provocations (by the North)."



The minister was apparently alluding to repeated oppositions by China and Russia, two of the five permanent members of the council with veto power, to impose additional sanctions on Pyongyang over evolving threats.



Pyongyang fired 69 ballistic missiles in 2022 alone, setting a new annual record of ballistic missile tests that far exceeded the previous record of 25.



"I believe that continuing in this manner is not desirable for international peace and security," Park said.



The minister added that Seoul, which was newly elected as a nonpermanent member of the council for 2024-25, intends to "urge China and Russia to play a constructive role" to address the North's threats from both inside and outside the council.



This marks the third time for South Korea to serve as one of the 10 nonpermanent UNSC members. It first held a seat during the 1996-97 term. Since then, the country has seen a dramatic growth in its stature and strength on the global stage, Park assessed.



He noted that with South Korea's election to the Security Council, the Yoon Suk Yeol administration's "Global Pivotal State" diplomacy has moved into full gear and that Seoul should become more engaged diplomatically with the international community backed by its enhanced national strength.



The Global Pivotal State is the foreign policy slogan of the Yoon administration, highlighting the country's commitment to playing a more active role in tackling regional and global challenges.



Park said it was imperative for Seoul to "fulfill the responsibilities and obligations embedded in the spirit of the U.N. Charter, such as those of peace, human rights and development."



On the likely trilateral summit involving South Korea, the United States and Japan in Washington later this year, Park said the exact timing of the gathering has yet to be determined. He expected related consultations to proceed while taking into consideration each country's situation.





South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin speaks during an interview with Yonhap News Agency at his office in Seoul, June 8. Yonhap
BATON ROUGE, La.  Louisiana legislators who last year demanded answers from Gov. John Bel Edwards on whether he was complicit in a cover-up of state troopers' killing of a Black motorist quietly abandoned their work without hearing from the governor or issuing any findings.

Lawmakers involved in the special committee probing the 2019 killing of Ronald Greene offered an array of explanations, including election-year politics, concern the probe of state police wasn't playing well with Louisiana's mostly conservative voters and even a lack of resources in the legislature.

"We only make $17,000 a year, and as much as I want to get to the heart of the Ronald Greene matter for justice, I also want my kids to have dinner tonight," said state Rep. Tanner Magee, a Republican who chaired the bipartisan panel and ran unsuccessfully last year for a state judgeship.

"We're not the feds with unlimited resources," Magee said. "Behind the facade, it's a Mickey Mouse organization trying to do its best."

Republican House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, who launched the panel and is now running for secretary of state, said lawmakers decided to take a back seat to a U.S. Justice Department investigation that predated the committee's formation by two years. He accused the second-term Democratic governor of declining to participate.

Edwards recently told reporters he would still be willing to testify about his handling of the Greene case but added "there wouldn't be anything new to be gained."

For Greene's mother, Mona Hardin, who last month marked the fourth anniversary of her son's May 10, 2019, death, it's another disappointment in a long wait for justice.

A state grand jury late last year brought the first charges in the case, indicting five law enforcement officers on counts ranging from negligent homicide to obstruction. But the Justice Department still has not indicated whether it will bring federal charges following a yearslong civil rights investigation. Hardin says the abandoned legislative inquiry cuts deeper because of the hope and spotlight it promised.

"No matter where you turn there's nobody who can be trusted," she said. "I'm bothered more than anything that everyone can just continue on their merry way."

Greene's killing at the end of a high-speed chase in rural northeast Louisiana was shrouded in secrecy from the beginning, when troopers told grieving relatives and put in initial reports that the 49-year-old died in a car crash  an account questioned by both his family and an emergency room doctor who examined his battered body.

It would take 464 days before the Louisiana State Police opened an internal probe, and officials from Edwards on down refused for more than two years to release the troopers' body-camera video.

That changed in May 2021 when The Associated Press obtained and published the footage that showed troopers stunning, punching and dragging Greene by his ankle shackles as he wailed, "I'm your brother! I'm scared! I'm scared!"

It showed the heavyset Greene forced to stay face-down on the ground for nine minutes before he eventually went limp. One trooper was later captured on video admitting in a phone call to a colleague that he "beat the ever-living f--- out of him."

Lawmakers began looking into Edwards' role early last year after an AP investigation found he was informed in a text from the state police within hours of Greene's death that troopers engaged in a "violent, lengthy struggle," yet the governor stayed mostly silent on the case for more than two years as the state police he oversees continued to press the car crash theory.

Another AP report found that Edwards in 2020 privately watched a key body-camera video of Greene's deadly arrest six months before state prosecutors say they knew it even existed, and neither the governor, his staff nor the state police acted urgently to get the footage into the hands of those with the power to bring charges.

Fellow Democrats on the Legislative Black Caucus berated Edwards behind closed doors over his handling of the case, and GOP leader Schexnayder invoked the language of impeachment from the outset of the probe, saying the governor's actions "would demonstrate gross misconduct."

Edwards repeatedly said he did nothing to influence or hinder the Greene investigation and eventually described the troopers' actions on the video as both criminal and racist. He also said there was no way he could have known that the footage he privately watched in 2020 had not already been turned over to prosecutors.

After initially dismissing the legislative inquiry as a "witch hunt," Edwards agreed to cooperate and testify. Lawmakers postponed his first scheduled testimony last June due to a special legislative session. When the committee invited the governor to testify again at its last meeting in November, it gave him only a few days notice and Edwards instead attended an out-of-town ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Since then, Edwards hasn't received another invitation, his spokesman told AP, and the committee "never made any requests for documents from us."
DES MOINES, Iowa  In March, when Donald Trump became the first former president in U.S. history indicted on criminal charges, his reelection campaign saw a huge surge in donations. Even political rivals rushed to support him. There was no dent in his front-runner status after the state charges in New York.

Thursday's news that Trump has been indicted again, this time on federal charges related to his handling of classified documents, may offer a repeat.

A 37-count felony indictment unsealed Friday accuses Trump of willful retention and improper sharing of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice and corruptly concealing a document or record, among other charges. The top counts carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison upon conviction.

But soon after he was indicted, there were clear signs that Republican voters may be willing to entrust him again with access to the nation's biggest secrets and authority over the very laws prosecutors say he defied.

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said the indictment would not fundamentally change Trump's standing in the GOP or his advantage in the crowded 2024 Republican primary.

In any other decade, this would be more than enough to kill a presidential contender in the crib. That's no longer the case  particularly for Donald Trump, Newhouse said. He argued Trump has been effectively setting expectations for more charges for months.

This comes as a surprise to very few Republicans, Newhouse said. Trump's been saying he'd get indicted. He got indicted. The sense from many Republican voters is that this is all about politics.

The prospect that someone under indictment  twice  could somehow still be considered a viable presidential candidate underscores Trump's grip on the Republican Party and the ways that he has fundamentally transformed democratic norms in America.

It also illustrates just how effective he has become at inoculating himself against political fallout by setting expectations and controlling the narrative. And it reflects growing Republican hostility toward the federal government and particularly the Justice Department, which Trump has now spent the better part of a decade maligning.

But even if the indictment doesn't hurt Trump's standing with Republican primary voters, its far from certain that the broader set of general election voters, which includes independents and moderates in both parties, will be as forgiving next fall in a prospective matchup against President Joe Biden.

The Democratic president beat Trump in 2020 with a promise to restore a sense of normalcy to Washington after Trump's drama-filled presidency. With these new charges, Trump's baggage is only growing heavier.

The former president faces the possibility of still more indictments in Georgia and Washington, D.C., a prospect that could see him facing trial in four separate jurisdictions while running to return to the highest office in the land.

For now, the new indictment throws Trump back into the spotlight, dominating every news cycle and denying his rivals space to break through to voters, just as many have formally launched their campaigns.

Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, a fierce Trump critic and founder of the Republican Accountability Project, acknowledged the indictment might ultimately help Trump seize the GOP nomination.

I've certainly seen a rally around Trump effect every time Trump is impeached or indicted, she said, adding that much depends on the reaction of his Republican 2024 challengers.

Does anyone have the political talent to seize this as an opportunity? Or will they all line up behind Trump? she said. Because if they all defend him, they will relegate themselves to bit players in Trump's drama and never get around to making an affirmative case for themselves.

Still, Doug Heye, another Republican strategist, said Trump's primary opponents do have a major opportunity to argue that the former president cannot win in 2024 because of his baggage.

This should be gold for Republican presidential candidates, should they choose to use it, Heye said.

So far Trumps rivals instead seem to be rallying to his side  an acknowledgement of his enduring popularity with the GOP voters they need to win over in order to snag the nomination.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who received backlash after he briefly knocked Trump over the New York case, lashed out at the Justice Department in a tweet Thursday night. The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, he wrote.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott used similar language in an appearance on Fox News, decrying the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president."

Former Vice President Mike Pence said he was deeply troubled that Trump had been indicted because he believed it would further divide the nation.

Only former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot candidate and frequent Trump critic, offered a rebuke. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign, he said.

The 2024 presidential field, in the order they've announced Donald Trump, Republican Nikki Haley, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican Marianne Williamson, Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Democrat Larry Elder, Republican President Joe Biden, Democrat Asa Hutchinson, Republican Tim Scott, Republican Ron DeSantis, Republican Mike Pence, Republican Chris Christie, Republican Doug Burgum, Republican
MIAMI  Donald Trump 's historic criminal case on felony charges of mishandling classified documents is set to unfold in Florida and will at least initially be overseen by a federal judge who issued rulings favorable to him last year and expressed repeated skepticism of Justice Department positions.

The assignment of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, confirmed Friday by a person familiar with the development, is a rare bit of positive news for Trump in the face of an indictment with several criminal charges that carries the prospect of a years-long prison sentence.

Cannon was broadly criticized last year for granting the Trump legal team's request for a special master to conduct an independent review of the hundreds of classified documents seized from his Florida property last year. The move, which temporarily halted core aspects of the Justice Department's investigative work, was overturned months later by a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court.

Meanwhile Friday, two of Trump's lawyers  James Trusty and John Rowley  who had handled the documents probe for months, said they had resigned their roles and would no longer be representing him. Trump, in his own post, said that the case going forward will be handled by Todd Blanche, a lawyer representing him in a separate prosecution in New York, and other yet-to-be-named attorneys.

The Justice Department was expected before Tuesday to make public an indictment ahead of a historic court appearance next week in the midst of a 2024 presidential campaign punctuated by criminal prosecutions in multiple states.

Trump's indictment carries unmistakably grave legal consequences, including the possibility of prison if he's convicted.

Read the full version of the story here, plus more of the latest developments:

***

Photos: Donald Trump through the years Talking politics With Melania 'How to Get Rich' On the course At Doral Sarazen Cup With Serena USS Iowa Debating Jeb Bush In Biloxi Campaign rally Winning South Carolina She's with him Signing autographs Another debate Waving to supporters In Arizona The Trump family At the convention The nominee The ticket Showing her support In Mexico Debating Clinton Casting his vote Election Night In the Oval Office Mitt Romney The inauguration Thumbs up Taking the oath Waving goodbye Armed Forces Ball James Comey Trump to lay out his agenda to Congress Thanking school children Medal of Honor recipients Justice Anthony Kennedy swears in Neil Gorsuch Easter Egg Roll Super Bowl champs Little Sisters of the Poor Russian foreign minister, ambassador At the Western Wall Meeting the pope Wreath-laying ceremony in Arlington National champs Congressional shooting At the White House Congressional Picnic Go, Cubs, go Departing the White House USS Gerald R. Ford joins the Navy The eclipse 9/11 anniversary Trump addresses world leaders at U.N. General Assembly Las Vegas shooting Trump visits Puerto Rico Trump meets Kissinger With Trudeau Medal of Honor Happy Halloween National Christmas Tree Lighting Celebrating GOP tax plan March for Life State of the Union School shootings State dinner With Olympians Greeting a guest Freed Americans Historic summit With Kim Kardashian West In Washington Trump North Carolina Debating Joe Biden Election Night 2020 Jan. 6 Leaving the White House
DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP)  The remaining tenants of a building near a partially collapsed apartment structure were evacuated Thursday because of areas of structural concern, Davenport officials said.

Residents of five apartments at the Executive Square Building were told to evacuate out of an abundance of caution, city spokeswoman Sarah Ott said in a statement.

The decision came after city staff and structural engineers assessed conditions near the apartment building that partially collapsed on May 28, killing three people, injuring several and displacing dozens, Ott said.

Assessments are being made before dismantling the partially collapsed building proceeds, she said.

Thursday's evacuations will leave the Executive Square building vacant. Most residents and commercial unit tenants had already been ordered to leave.

Lawsuits have been filed in connection with the partial collapse of the apartment building. Plaintiffs contend the property owner, Andrew Wold, and the city received several complaints about the building's poor condition in recent years.
Donald Trump improperly stored in his Florida estate sensitive documents on nuclear capabilities, repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a Pentagon plan of attack and classified map. That's according to a sweeping felony indictment that paints a damning portrait of Trump's treatment of national security information. The first federal case against a former president cuts to the heart of any presidents responsibility to safeguard the governments most valuable secrets. Prosecutors say the documents he stowed, refused to return and in some cases showed to visitors risked jeopardizing not only relations with foreign nations but also the safety of troops and confidential sources.
Fogh Rasmussen was not a very smart person before. And now he completely fell into doctrinaire dementia. In an interview with The Guardian, he said that even if Banderokraina does not receive an invitation to NATO in Vilnius, the countries of the Alliance will be able to send their troops there. Kind of on your own.

Well, the population of these countries was asked? Which of them wants war with Russia? You want hypersonic strikes on Europe, right? And what does Uncle Sam think about this? It will also affect him

Thats what it means at the wrong time to become a freelance adviser to all sorts of greedy nits like powder and other corrupt Nazis.

WtR
 The acting head of Russias Donetsk Peoples Republic (DPR) Denis Pushilin said in an interview with Sputnik that the situation in the recently liberated city of Bakhmut, also known as Artemovsk, was difficult because of constant shelling by Ukrainian troops. But he added that it was under control.



He said the city was being shelled by artillery guns, mortars and drones.

Pushilin said Ukraines claims that it had retained a presence in Bakhmut were false.

DPRs leader added that after the restoration of Artemovsk, an official referendum on the name of the city could be held, but even now there is an understanding that local residents support the option which has now been approved.

He also said that Ukrainian troops today need to be moved at least 500km from the administrative borders of the new regions and a new frontier could pass along the Dnepr, but it is necessary to liberate the entire territory of Ukraine.

Subscribe to @SputnikInt

WtR
Human remains found Wednesday north of Mabel have been confirmed to be those of missing Winona woman Madeline Kingsbury.

Winona Police Chief Tom Williams broke the news at a press conference Thursday afternoon after the Southern Minnesota Regional Medical Examiners Office performed an autopsy in the morning.

The announcement was met with cries and tears in the audience.

Unfortunately, while this discovery is not what we were hoping for, were thankful to be able to bring Maddi home to her family, Williams said.

The faces of those who gathered in the crowd had somber, tearful frowns or resembled a stern and strong resilience as they received the news from law enforcement.

A Fillmore County Sheriffs Deputy found Kingsburys body off a low-maintenance public roadway while investigating a tip at about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday. The body was covered and concealed in a manner that she was not visible.

To say the least, the last 69 days have been frustrating, full of heartache and pain for the family, law enforcement, and the community, Williams said. But during this time, the family never gave up, law enforcement never gave up, the community never gave up.

Father arrested

Police said Adam Fravel, the father of Kingsburys two children, was arrested on suspicion of second-degree murder at 5:20 p.m. Wednesday at a residence in Mabel and booked into the Winona County Detention Center.

We felt we had enough evidence to make a probable cause referral, Williams said.

Fravels family owns property near Mabel. Fillmore County Sheriff John DeGeorge said the Fravel property is in the same area of Fillmore County and within several minutes of the bodys location.

Kingsburys body was concealed and found in a wooded area off the low maintenance road.

We are grateful to help bring the search for Madeline to a close, DeGeorge said.

The location where Kingsburys body was found had previously been searched by law enforcement and volunteer teams.

Special Agent Michelle Frascone, of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, said over 450 tips were sent in and considered over the course of the search.

Every homicide agent throughout the state has helped investigate this case, Frascone said.

Digital evidence, including phone and computer data, was instrumental in finding Kingsburys body, Williams said.

At Thursday afternoons press conference, law enforcement did not answer questions about pending charges against Fravel and said theyll be discussed at a later date.

Missing 2 months

Kingsbury was last seen March 31 when she and Fravel took their two kids to daycare shortly after 8 a.m.

After returning to Kerry Drive residence in Winona around 8:15 a.m., she did not show up to work at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, authorities said.

Just over a week after Kingsburys disappearance, large-scale searches were organized in Winona and Rushford with about 2,600 volunteers turning up in two days.

Previously, Fravel has said he had nothing to do with Kingsburys disappearance. On April 4, Kingsburys children were located at Fravels parents house in Mabel when law enforcement and social workers enacted a 72-hour hold on the children.

The children, ages 5 and 2, have been in custody of Winona County Health and Human Services and, as recently as Monday, Fravel and Kingsburys parents reached an agreement in the Children in Need of Protection or Services case. The children will remain with their grandparents while the custody case plays out in family court.

The Winona County Attorney, Karin Sonneman, hired an additional attorney in May to aid her office in its work related to Kingsburys disappearance.

Many community members in Winona, and across the state, have stood in solidarity for Kingsbury since she was last seen March 31.

In early May, around 300 community members gathered in prayer for a candle-lit vigil in Winona for Kingsbury. And on what would have been Kingsburys June 1 birthday, many Winona residents had blue lights shining from their homes for Kingsbury.
The disappearance of Madeline Kingsbury has captivated Winona, and thousands have actively participated in searches, offered tips to law enforcement and closely followed the investigation.

With the discovery of her remains Wednesday and the arrest of Adam Fravel, the father of Kingsburys kids, the case is set to enter a new phase.

Fravel was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of murder. As the criminal case is set to enter the courts, Winonans took stock of all that has transpired since Kingsbury failed to show up for work March 31 at Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

Eric Featherston of Winona said he was under the impression Fravel was involved in Kingsburys disappearance from the beginning.

It was not a surprise when I heard the news, Featherston said. I was kind of expecting, at some point, that thats where everything would lead.

Winona resident Carol Galbus said the case generated many rumors around the community, with many of them pointing at Fravel as the culprit.

The rumors were flying and I did not repeat any of them because some of them were so outlandish, Galbus said. But thats what everybody suspects. Its got to be the father of the kids.

Mary Ostrander of Winona said she thinks theres a lot of work ahead to prosecute Fravel.

Whatever the outcome is for him, the children are going to suffer the rest of their lives, Ostrander said. Its just devastating.

Galbus said her initial response to the news was concern for the children, whom she hopes are young enough to move on from this traumatic time.

The children, ages 5 and 2, have been in custody of Winona County Health and Human Services and placed with their grandparents while a custody case plays out in family court.

With the news Wednesday, Ostrander said it has to be the hardest on the Kingsburys family.

Its the family that has to live through this whole thing, Ostrander said.

Featherston said the topic of Kingsburys disappearance was frequently discussed among his social circles at places like the Eagles Club.

When the news first broke March 31 about the disappearance, Featherston said he was shocked to hear something like this had happened in Winona.

It just doesnt happen, Featherston said. But it feels good that they actually have enough information to arrest Fravel.

Elizabeth Stevenson of Winona said since Kingsburys disappearance, shes prayed often for her.

Its just sad that something like this could happen here, Stevenson said. Im just glad that the family can have some closure.

Winona resident Kathy Schell also was thinking about the Kingsbury family more than Fravel when the news broke. She said her heart has been with the family since March 31.

Schell said her response to hearing about the discovery of Kingsburys body and Fravels arrest was a mix of relief and sadness.

Theres just a lot of sadness, Schell said. But Im also relieved for the safety of the children, too. But its just a sad, sad thing.

Like Ostrander, Schell said shes less concerned about what happens to Fravel.

My emotions go more toward the loss of Madeline, Schell said. What happens to Fravel, I dont know, but its just a loss. Its really sad for the whole community to lose one of our neighbors.

Galbus said Kingsburys disappearance has brought a new awareness to her everyday life, specifically her daily walks.

The idea of having somebody on the loose that you dont know about makes you a little nervous about walking around, Galbus said. A nervousness that creates more of an awareness rather than fear.

Ostrander said the hard times for the Kingsbury family may not yet be over.

Having to go through everything thats happened up to this point, its the family thats going to suffer again, Ostrander said.

Schell said the communitys response to Kingsburys disappearance reflected Winonas values. The coming together of volunteers at the searches, the blue lights in solidarity and support from the community showed a strength among the people of Winona.

The banding together of everybody to find her, it was one heart, one purpose, Schell said. Thats how Winona is. You dont see that until something like this happens. You dont see that a lot but the people here are really good people.

Galbus said the response from the community was noteworthy on a scale that stretches past the bluffs of Winona.

It was nice that the whole of southern Minnesota and beyond came together to show that they cared, Galbus said.
People watch the North Korean side as they visit to celebrate the New Year at Imjingak Pavilion in Paju, near the border with North Korea, Jan. 1, 2022. AP-Yonhap



By Lee Hyo-jin



South Korea could experience a significant increase in defectors from North Korea in the coming months, according to analysts, as the reclusive regime is considering whether to reopen its borders following three years of closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which might pave the way for more defections.



Given North Korea's critical food crisis, diplomats and high-ranking officials who were abroad for overseas assignments prior to the pandemic may attempt to seek refuge in South Korea instead of returning home, the experts viewed.



Rep. Tae Yong-ho of the ruling People Power Party (PPP), who served as North Korea's deputy ambassador to Britain before defecting to South Korea in 2016, said on Thursday that there are growing signs of North Korean diplomats looking to defect to the South.



"There have been rumors circulating among North Korean overseas missions that due to the pandemic, some families have been separated, with husbands in Pyongyang and wives and children abroad, creating a North Korean version of 'separated families,'" the defector-turned-lawmaker wrote on Facebook.



He also claimed that some diplomats who served in Europe and South Asian nations during the pandemic have gone "penniless" after becoming stranded in Beijing as the Kim Jong-un regime kept its borders shut, blocking their return.



"Our government must take special attention to ensure the safe defection and travel of North Korean residents to the South, the number of which are set to increase in the foreseeable future. This would include diplomatic negotiations with countries where they are staying, as well as the active engagement with overseas intelligence networks," he said.



A recent incident brought the matter into focus when two family members of a North Korean official surnamed Park living in Vladivostok, Russia, were reported missing earlier this week in what is viewed as an attempted defection. Russian authorities have issued missing persons alerts for Kim Kum-sun, 43, and her 15-year-old son Park Kwon-ju.



According to Radio Free Asia, the older Park is a trade representative who was dispatched to earn foreign currency for the North Korean government by owning two restaurants in the Russian Far Eastern city. However, his wife Kim became the restaurants' acting manager on behalf of her husband after he was summoned to Pyongyang in 2019.



South Korea's unification ministry, foreign ministry and National Intelligence Service have yet to share any information regarding the missing family.



Park Won-gon, a professor of North Korean studies at Ewha Womans University, said Kim and Park may have contacted the South Korean consulate in Vladivostok seeking to defect to Seoul.



The professor expected South Korea to see a growing number of North Korean defectors in the coming months, not only from Pyongyang but also from China and Russia, as the North Korean government slowly prepares to reopen its borders.



"We may see the number (of defectors) return gradually to pre-pandemic levels," he said.



The COVID-19 pandemic led to a sharp decline in the number of North Korean defectors to South Korea due to strict border controls. The number, which was tallied at around 1,000 in 2019, dipped to 229 in 2020, 63 in 2021 and 67 last year.



"The ongoing food crisis, though it wouldn't be as severe as the Arduous March in the 1990s, may prompt defections of a lot of North Koreans, including diplomats and overseas workers," Park said.


The Friends of Mirror Lake State Park and park staff will host the Cajun Strangers, a Midwest Cajun music dance band born out of their love for Louisiana porch music, performs Cajun and Zydeco dance music from 7-8:30 p.m. Friday, June 16.
Weather Alert

...A thunderstorm with strong northwest winds will impact Pyramid Lake through 700 PM PDT... At 600 PM PDT, Doppler radar was tracking a strong thunderstorms near the north shore of Pyramid Lake, moving southeast at 30 to 40 mph. HAZARD...Wind gusts in excess of 40 mph, and rough water with waves of 2 to 4 feet. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Gusty winds could knock down tree limbs and blow around unsecured objects. Locations impacted include... Pyramid Lake, Nixon, Sutcliffe and The Needle Rocks. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... If on or near Pyramid Lake, get out of the water and move indoors or inside a vehicle. Remember, lightning can strike out to 10 miles from the parent thunderstorm. Boaters can expect sudden increases in wind and wave heights on the lake through 7 PM. && MAX HAIL SIZE...0.00 IN; MAX WIND GUST...40 MPH

...FLOOD WATCH IN EFFECT FROM THIS AFTERNOON THROUGH MONDAY EVENING... * WHAT...Flash flooding caused by excessive rainfall is possible. * WHERE...Portions of California and western Nevada, including the following areas, in California, Greater Lake Tahoe Area, Lassen-Eastern Plumas-Eastern Sierra Counties and Mono County. In western Nevada, Greater Lake Tahoe Area, Greater Reno-Carson City-Minden Area and Mineral and Southern Lyon Counties. * WHEN...From this afternoon through Monday evening. * IMPACTS...Excessive runoff may result in flooding of creeks, streams, and other low-lying and flood-prone locations. Flooding may occur in poor drainage and urban areas. Area creeks and streams are running high and could flood with more heavy rain. * ADDITIONAL DETAILS... - Slow moving thunderstorms will produce areas of heavy rainfall with localized rainfall rates on the order of 1.00 to 1.50 inches per hour. Soils are already saturated with creeks, streams, and rivers running full due to ongoing snowmelt. It will not take as much rain to cause excessive runoff. Also, heavy rainfall may lead to flash flooding and debris flows near burn scars and steep terrain. - http://www.weather.gov/safety/flood PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... You should monitor later forecasts and be prepared to take action should Flash Flood Warnings be issued. &&
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If you feel like requests for tips are everywhere, youre not alone. From dry cleaners to shops, prompts to provide a gratuity are popping up in unusual places.



Tipping has long been part of American culture, expected in restaurants, hair salons and taxis  anywhere workers rely on them for a livable wage. An explosion of digital point-of-sale terminals and contactless checkouts has resulted in even more requests for tips.

It can be frustrating and annoying for consumers who dont want to give 20 percent for a $5 purchase at the convenience store every morning. Nearly 2 in 3 (66 percent) of U.S. adults in a Bankrate survey said they have a negative view about tipping. 

Among the respondents:

41 percent said businesses should pay employees better

32 percent expressed annoyance at seeing pre-entered tip screens

30 percent feel the tipping culture is out of control

15 percent are confused about whom and how much to tip

16 percent would be willing to pay more in lieu of tipping

The tip jar used to sit quietly next to the register  now the tip screen actively asks us to say no,  says Lizzie Post, coauthor of Emily Posts Etiquette: The Centennial Edition. Its a harder hurdle to get over.

People grew accustomed to tipping during the pandemic to help small businesses and restaurants stay afloat. In turn, more businesses added the ability to tip to their point-of-sale terminals and  voila!  a new tipping culture emerged. Now that the Pandoras box has been opened, you cant really shut it again, says Jaime E. Peters, assistant dean of accounting, finance and economics at Maryville University in Town and Country, Missouri.

But just because youre prompted to tip everywhere doesnt mean you have to. There are times when it is absolutely necessary and other instances when theres discretion. Heres how to navigate the new tipping culture.
British Ambassador to Korea Colin Crooks, left, shakes hands with Korea Britain Society (KBS) President Daniel Fertig after signing a memorandum of understanding to support the Chevening Scholarship at the ambassador's residence in central Seoul, Thursday. The scholarship, which marks its 40th anniversary this year, covers full funding for a one-year master's program in the U.K., and KBS' sponsorship guarantees one student annually will receive the scholarship until 2026. Crooks commended the society for its unwavering support and encouraged applicants from diverse backgrounds, including North Korean-born people, to apply for the scholarship. Courtesy of British Embassy Seoul
We wish the latest case of mistreated children being returned to an abusive home was shocking.

Unfortunately, its not. Its just the latest example of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Departments inability to protect vulnerable children and its overreliance on family reunification.

CYFD placed two of 25-year-old Gabriel Desotos children and two of his stepchildren in foster care with their grandparents after Desotos 6-week-old boy was brought to an Albuquerque hospital on Nov. 9 with broken ribs and a tear in his mouth doctors said was probably caused by a pacifier inserted with excessive force.

I am highly concerned for abuse and neglect and feel that the child is at extremely high risk of death from further injury if she is placed back with (Desoto and the mother), a doctor wrote in medical records.

Doctors examined three children living in Desotos home and found his 2-year-old stepdaughter also had broken ribs and a skull fracture. They determined all four children living in the home werent safe.

But the children were returned to Desotos home after he and the mother of the children didnt show up for an interview with detectives in February. The abuse case was simply dismissed.

Police say the abuse soon resumed. On March 4, the 2-year-old stepdaughter was brought to the hospital again with a skull fracture and other injuries, while showing signs of malnutrition.

We wouldnt know any of this if it werent for court records, because CYFD routinely cites the confidentiality of the state Childrens Code to shield its failures from the public.

But the agencys failures have been exposed time and time again in police records and court cases. Here are some recent examples:

 The 2019 beating death of 4-year-old James Dunklee Cruz, who was repeatedly physically and sexually abused until he was finally found dead in his mothers apartment. Ten child abuse or neglect referrals were made to CYFD. His injuries included a bruised penis. Yet child welfare workers never filed for legal custody.

 The gruesome death of a 16-year-old disabled girl last summer. Detectives said the blind girl was so emaciated she looked 10 years old and her South Valley apartment was so filthy their shoes stuck to the floor. The poor girls neglect stretched back to 2016. Her mother was investigated seven times by CYFD prior to the girls death, and yet she was left to starve to death in her toddler-sized bed, supervised by a younger sister.

 State child welfare workers conducted multiple visits at a Texico home where children were repeatedly beaten by a kinship guardian and another women, and chained to their beds to keep them from eating at night. Its unclear how long the torture, starvation, child abuse and neglect took place until State Police removed six children from the home last summer.

 After a 7-month-old Albuquerque boy with methamphetamine in his system suffocated in his home last year, we learned CYFD returned three older children between 1 and 3 years old, who also had methamphetamine in their systems, to the same meth den  twice.

 Just last month a 2-year-old girl was brought to an Albuquerque hospital dead from consuming fentanyl. The girls mother lost guardianship of an older son in 2014 because of her history of drug-related offenses dating back to 2001 and several years spent in prison for trafficking. The 2-year-olds 6- and 8-year-old brothers were taken into CYFD custody only after their sisters death.

Fault for these and other tragedies cant just be laid at CYFDs door. Police, school officials and other authorities also dropped the ball in many cases. But a common thread is CYFD and its repeated practice of returning or leaving children in dangerous homes.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who has retained tight control over CYFD and quashed numerous reform attempts, needs to step up and ensure her agency closely examines its policies regarding drug use in the home and how long families stay on its radar, as well as prioritizing family reunification, because all are proving deadly time and again.

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.
SANTA FE  A state judge on Thursday rejected a challenge to Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Olivers authority to determine whether New Mexico laws targeted for repeal are exempt from referendum under the state Constitution.

The ruling by 13th District Court Judge James Noel represents a setback for a coalition of groups who have sought to annul six laws passed this year by the Democratic-controlled Legislature via the rarely-used referendum process.

Several of those laws, which deal with abortion, elections and gender-affirming care, are set to take effect next week.

Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, ruled after receiving a referendum petition targeting a law prohibiting public bodies from limiting access to abortion services and gender-affirming care that the bill  House Bill 7  meets an exemption for public peace, health or safety of the state.

For that reason, she denied the referendum petition, though supporters of the effort have continued to collect voter signatures.

It is very disappointing that New Mexicans are being misled about the referendum petition process by certain groups and individuals, Toulouse Oliver said in a Thursday statement. But Im pleased to see the court clarify this matter today with their ruling in favor of our position that the laws currently being targeted for referendum are, in fact, exempted from the referendum process.

This is a win for the rule of law and for all New Mexicans, she added.

The court challenge against the secretary of state was filed in April  just weeks after the 60-day legislative session ended  by Ramona Goolsby of Rio Rancho, who is involved with a coalition of groups seeking to get the targeted laws on the November 2024 ballot for a repeal vote.

In her petition, she argued Toulouse Oliver overstepped her authority by ruling the abortion law is exempt from referendum, saying only the Legislature can determine whether laws or necessary for the public peace and welfare.

But Noel rejected that argument in his Thursday ruling by granting a motion filed by the Secretary of States Office to dismiss the court challenge.

In all, Toulouse Oliver has denied 23 referendum petitions since a 60-day legislative session ended in March due to technical problems with the paperwork and legal objections.

The Secretary of States office has also directed county clerks not to provide voter lists to those pushing the repeal effort, and warned voters that current petitions circulating are not valid since they have not been approved.

In a statement late Thursday, Goolsby, who is representing herself, said she had filed court motions seeking to keep the case open.

She also said there are concerns that partisan politics are alive and well in our courts, citing the appointment of Noel, a former state assistant attorney general, to the judiciary by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in 2020.
There are few feuds as infamous as the dog and the mailman  and stats show theres still work to be done on reaching a standing truce.

In 2022, more than 5,300 mail carriers in the country were attacked by dogs, 24 of which happened in New Mexico, according to the U.S. Postal Service.

Albuquerque letter carrier Dee Dee Molina, who was bitten on the job, knows firsthand how physically and psychologically damaging a dog attack can be.

Its very traumatizing. At one point, I believed I had (post-traumatic stress disorder) from it, Molina said. Every time I heard a dog bark, I would jump.

Molina urged dog owners Thursday at a press event marking Dog Bite Awareness Week to take preventative measures to keep both pets and postal workers safe.

Fourteen postal workers were attacked by dogs last year in Albuquerque, which was six fewer than in 2021. Houston ranked No. 1 with 57 attacks in 2022.

Molina said the best way to keep your neighborhoods letter carrier safe is by restraining your dog while the worker is present. Whether thats keeping your dog on a leash, or putting them in another room, learning your carriers schedule can prevent injury for both parties. Also, make sure your dog is properly restrained because, as Molina said, many attacks happen when dogs burst through screen doors unexpectedly, catching letter carriers off guard.

No matter how sweet your dog is just put them in another room. Molina said. Make it safe so that we can do our job effectively and efficiently. And be safe and go home the way we came to work  in one piece.

Whether the dog is a cute Chihuahua or a robust Rottweiler, Molina advised carriers to always remain cautious. Treat every animal as though they are dangerous because at a split second it might appear theyre friendly, and then they turn on them and immediately bite, she said.

Not only can a letter carrier be severely injured if a dog attacks, but because postal workers are required to carry dog spray to protect themselves, your pooch could get hurt, too. In the worst case scenario, she said, dogs that maul carriers may also be put down.

Additionally, if carriers feel unsafe because of aggressive animals, door-to-door delivery on that route will cease until the problem is resolved, USPS spokesperson Sherry Patterson said.

Though it took time, Molina was able to recover from the attack with the help of a furry friend.

What helped me, which is kind of ironic, is that I ended up getting a dog. Molina said, I rescued a golden retriever pit mix.
SOCORRO  A funeral for a member of the Bandidos motorcycle club killed in a shootout in Red River over Memorial Day weekend is expected to draw 400 people  many of them fellow club members  to Socorro this weekend, according to the sheriff.

And like a scene out of an old Western, some of the local watering holes plan to close Friday and Saturday when outlaws ride into town.

That makes sense to Edward Padilla, whos been cutting hair for more than 60 years and co-owns Edwards Barber and Beauty Salon on California Street.

In those cowboy movies, they go into a bar and just start shooting, he said.

Law enforcement agencies said they are aware of the funeral and are monitoring the situation. There will be a strong police presence in the area over the weekend.

Many liquor establishments are expected to be closed because of the influx of bikers, said Socorro County Sheriff Lee Armijo. It wasnt exactly clear what places would close and what would remain open throughout the weekend.

Were working together to make sure it goes off without any problems. And if there are problems, were going to be ready, Armijo said in an interview.

The sheriff said he wouldnt share any specific law enforcement tactics that police and deputies will deploy over the weekend.

He acknowledged its a situation he hasnt encountered in his law enforcement career  advising businesses to close for a weekend because hundreds of people in a motorcycle group are rolling through town.

I really think that theyre not coming into town to cause problems, he said of the Bandidos. Theyre usually really low key. They dont like attention.

Rally shootout

Damian Breaux, 46, of Socorro, was one of two Bandidos who were killed during a shooting on a crowded and bustling Main Street during the height of the Red River Motorcycle Rally. The shooting was between Bandidos and the Waterdogs, a lesser known smaller motorcycle club in New Mexico.

Anthony Silva, 26, of Los Lunas, and Randy Sanchez, 46, of Albuquerque, were also killed in the shooting. Silva was a Bandido and Sanchez was a Waterdog, according to police. Five people also affiliated with the two motorcycle groups were shot and injured,

The shooting stemmed from a feud between the clubs, according to New Mexico State Police and court documents.

City officials in Red River and two other cities in New Mexico have canceled future motorcycle rallies.

In a case against one of the bikers who was arrested after the shooting, an FBI agent testified in court Monday that agency officials believe its likely the Bandidos would try to retaliate for the shooting.

We have been monitoring the situation closely and have appropriate measures in place to address any risks that may arise, as well as manage traffic, and respond to any incidents that may occur, NMSP officer Ray Wilson, a spokesman for the agency, said in an email.

Talk of the town

Socorro Mayor Ravi Bhasker and other city officials declined to comment. But during a public meeting this week they discussed an event from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the convention center that was going to bring hundreds of people to the town, which is about 75 miles south of Albuquerque and home to about 8,400 people. Several residents said Bhasker had relayed the same message about the funeral to them via text, which he often does with locals, they said.

New Mexico State Police said they are aware of the funeral services.

At El Camino Restaurant & Lounge on Thursday, diners talked about the upcoming weekend.

Its crazy, weve never been through this, said Dora Lucero as she served up chile rellenos, taco salads and French toast.

A 45-year veteran bartender at the lounge attached to the restaurant, Lucero said shes never heard of a bar closing for similar circumstances.

We want it to be nice and cool and for everybody to behave, she said. But theres always that little eerie feeling for that many bikers. So we just hope that its a peaceful ceremony

One of Luceros customers, Bob Eveleth, worked as a bartender to put himself through New Mexico Tech in the 1960s. He said keeping bars closed may help ensure a calm weekend.

But these guys are probably gonna be packing their own suds, he said.

Eveleth said city officials announcing that hundreds of Bandidos or other motorcycle riders will descend on the town has been a topic of conversation.

That puts a twist on the entire situation, he said. So you can understand why locals are kind of walking on eggshells.

How will he spend his weekend?

Ill probably stay up on the hill, he said.

Down the road at Edwards, Padilla cut Manuel Chavezs hair as they talked about the weekend. Chavez said he was hoping to see a strong State Police presence in the town.

Theres not enough law enforcement in Socorro to take care of that, he said.

But because the Bandidos were coming to town for a funeral, as opposed to a bike rally, they said it was likely the weekend would stay peaceful.

I hope nothing happens, Padilla said. But I do want to see all those bikes.

Armijo said State Police have taken a lead of sorts in planning for the funeral.

We understand this event may cause concerns among community members, but the New Mexico State Police and our law enforcement partners are committed to maintaining public safety and are taking necessary measures to address any potential challenges, Wilson said. We ask the public to be vigilant and report any suspicious activities or behavior to law enforcement.

Breauxs brothers

Breauxs brother Ricky is 40 years old and has Down syndrome. And every day, first thing in the morning, Ricky would call his older brother Damian, said Adeo Joseph Breaux, the 38-year-old youngest child.

Damian no matter what, no matter where he was, no matter what he was doing, he always picked up the phone, Adeo said in an interview.

Adeo described himself as a nerd who likes barbershop harmony. He knew his brother Damian to be soft-spoken and big-hearted. Adeo said his older brother hid some parts of his life from his family.

I dont really know much about the Bandidos side of things, he did a really good job of keeping that from us, Adeo said.

The town sheriff said he had met Damian Breaux many times.

I didnt know him, know him. But I had met him and I talked with him for years, Armijo said. I never had a bad thing to say about him. He was always positive.

Several other people in the tight-knit town said they knew Breaux and his relatives, and all described them as friendly and kind.

Adeo said he and members of his immediate family arent invited to the funeral because of a family dispute.

Meanwhile, for five days after his brothers death, Ricky kept waking up and calling his brothers phone. Adeo said Ricky would wail when Damian didnt pick up.

Never in my life have I seen him cry like that over and over and over, Adeo said. I know he understands the finality of death. He doesnt understand why it happened and what happened. And Im trying the best to tell him that I dont know. None of us do.


KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Alyona Shkrygalovas family kept a rubber boat for their daily needs along the broad Dnieper River.

The boat was nothing special until Tuesday, when the Kakhovka dam ruptured and sent a flood from Ukraines largest reservoir into cities, towns and countryside downstream in a region that has suffered terribly since Russia invaded the country last year.

Water climbed waist-high on the second floor of Shkrygalovas two-storey house. Her family began using their boat to scavenge for food, and find houses on higher ground with dry places to sleep. That way, they survived in the war zone until Shkrygalova, 60, spotted a group of people in a boat and raised yellow, white and pink fabrics to get their attention.

We were scared, we were trying to understand, Whos approaching us? Are they Russian or not? We raised a flag, Shkrygalova said.

Lucky for her and her family, they were Ukrainian.

According to those stranded and their desperate Ukrainian rescuers, Russian forces are taking rescuers boats. Some say the soldiers will only help people with Russian passports.

Russian soldiers are standing at the checkpoints, preventing (rescuers) from approaching the most-affected areas and taking away the boats, said one volunteer, Yaroslav Vasiliev. They are afraid of saboteurs, they suspect everyone.

Others have been turned away from rescue.

Viktoria Mironova-Baka said she has been in touch from Germany with relatives stuck in the flooded region.

My relatives said that Russian soldiers were coming up to the house today by boat, but they said they would only take those with Russian passports, she told The Associated Press. Her grandmother, aunt and more than a dozen other people are taking shelter in the attic of a two-story house.

Details of life in Russian-occupied Ukraine are often unclear. The AP could not independently verify reports of boat seizures or that only Russians were being evacuated, but the account is in line with reporting by independent Russian media.

Its a sharp contrast to Ukrainian-controlled territory flooded by the dam collapse. Authorities there have aggressively evacuated civilians and brought in emergency supplies. On Thursday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy traveled to the area to assess the damage. Russian President Vladimir Putin has no plans at the current moment to visit affected Moscow-occupied areas, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.

The latest disaster in the region began Tuesday, when the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, roughly 80 kilometers (50 miles) upstream from the town of Oleshky, collapsed, sending torrents of water down the Dnieper and across the wars front lines. The Russian-occupied town across the river from the city of Kherson had a prewar population of 24,000.

Officials say that more than 6,000 people have been evacuated from dozens of inundated cities, towns and villages on both sides of the river. But the true scale of the disaster remains unclear for a region that was once home to tens of thousands of people.

Officials on both sides indicated that about 20 people were known to have died, but the figures could not be independently verified. Oleshkys Ukrainian mayor, Yevhen Ryshchuk, said corpses were floating to the surface.

Many of the survivors are homeless, and tens of thousands are without drinking water.

The floods ruined crops, displaced land mines, caused widespread environmental damage, and set the stage for long-term electricity shortages.

Ukraine says Russia destroyed the dam with explosives. Russia accuses Ukraine of destroying it with a missile strike.

A drone flown Wednesday by an AP team over the dams wreckage revealed none of the scorch marks or shrapnel scars typical of a bombardment. The bulk of the dam itself is now submerged, and The AP images offered a limited snapshot, making it difficult to rule out any scenario. The dam also had been weakened by Russian neglect and water had been washing over it for weeks. It had been under Russian control since the invasion in February 2022.

Compounding the tragedy, Russia has been shelling areas hit by the flooding, including the front-line city of Kherson. On Thursday, Russian shelling echoed not far from a square in Kherson where emergency crews and volunteers were dispensing aid. Some evacuation points in the city were hit, wounding nine people, according to Ukrainian officials.

Russia claims that the Ukrainians also have been shelling flood-hit areas that Moscow controls. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov praised the selfless work of Russian emergency teams helping victims of the flooding, noting that they have been working under constant Ukrainian shelling.

People who suffered from the flooding have been killed by the shelling, including a pregnant woman, Peskov said.

The floodwaters have irrevocably changed the landscape downstream, and shifted the dynamic of the 15-month-old war.

Ryshchuk, the Oleshky mayor, said that by Thursday afternoon water levels were beginning to fall, but roughly 90% of the city remained flooded.

Ryshchuk fled after Russian forces tried to force him to collaborate, but he remains in close contact with people in and around the city.

Russia says it is helping the regions civilians. Moscow-appointed regional Gov. Vladimir Saldo claimed over 4,000 people had been evacuated from the flood zones. He shared a video showing empty beds in shelters prepared for evacuees.

Ryshchuk dismisses such talk.

He said some people trying to leave flooded areas were forced back by Russian soldiers who accused them of being waiters  people waiting for Ukraine to reclaim control of the region.

Others, who called the Russian-controlled emergency services, were told they would have to wait for help, he said.

Thats it, he said. Yesterday, some Russians came in the morning, took a few people off the roofs, filmed a video, and left. Thats everything they have done as of today.

The help that made it through has been scattered.

Ukrainian military footage, for instance, showed their forces dropping a bottle of water from a drone to a boy trapped with his mother and sister in the attic of their home near Oleshky. Ukrainian soldiers later evacuated the family and their pets to the city of Kherson, National Police reported.

Much of the help is being organized by volunteers communicating on the encrypted app Telegram. Messages about stranded people, often trapped on the roofs of their houses, appear in these groups every few minutes. Most are posted by relatives in safer areas.

Just one of these volunteer groups has a map showing over 1,000 requests to locate and rescue people, mostly in Oleshky and the nearby town of Hola Prystan.

A woman helping with one of the groups, who spoke on condition her name not be used for fear of reprisals from the Russian occupiers, shared a message with an AP journalist.

We were looking for a person named Serhii Borzov, the message read. He was found. Unfortunately, dead. Our condolences to the relatives.

___

Karmanau reported from Tallinn, Estonia. Arhirova reported from Warsaw, Poland.

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Follow APs coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
SAN FRANCISCO (AP)  Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recruiters set their sights on Sacred Heart Catholic Church in the Texas border city of El Paso in search of asylum-seekers they could take from its bustling migrant shelter to Californias capital on taxpayer-funded private jets.

Intentionally or not, envoys for Floridas Catholic governor and Republican presidential candidate infused an element of his own religion into his latest move on immigration, which has drawn sharp criticism from El Pasos Catholic bishop.

Without going into the details of the politics of it, it does seem clear that they were being used not out of concern for the migrants but in an effort to make a political point, Bishop Mark Seitz told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Seitz said many migrants arriving in the U.S. dont know the geography, including how far cities and states are from one another, and are just anxious to move on.

If youre seeking to help a person who needs to get to a certain destination where they have a sponsor, where they have a job or something like that, that is a commendable act, Seitz said. But if they are being moved simply in order to use them to make a political point, that is reprehensible. It is taking person who already has lost everything  everything. They have nothing, not even a nation they can really call their own because they have had to flee that nation. And then using them for your own purposes: That is not morally acceptable.

DeSantis has acknowledged that Florida paid to transport 36 mostly Venezuelan migrants from Republican-led Texas to Sacramento on charter flights last Friday and on Monday. The first group was dropped off in front of the Roman Catholic Diocese in Sacramento, also the headquarters of Catholic Charities, apparently without warning. Local advocates and officials met the second group at the airport after learning of their arrival.

The governor says they made the trip voluntarily  a claim that some migrant advocates challenge. He also says they signed waivers to that effect and that California effectively invited them with its welcoming policies.

I think the border should be closed. I dont think we should have any of this. But if theres a policy to have an open border, then I think the sanctuary jurisdictions should be the ones that have to bear that, DeSantis said Wednesday at an event for law enforcement officials in Sierra Vista, Arizona.

Asked about the bishops criticism, DeSantis spokesman Jeremy Redfern said the governors previous comments stand on their own.

In May, DeSantis signed a law allocating up to $12 million for migrant flights, like two that Florida funded last year from San Antonio to the pricey Massachusetts island of Marthas Vineyard.

References to the Marthas Vineyard flights have become a staple in DeSantis presidential stump speech and often draw hearty applause from Republican primary voters. The Sacramento flights are part of a broader effort by certain Republican-led states to send migrants to Democratic-leaning parts of the country, including New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

President Joe Biden is also Catholic and, like DeSantis, he has clashed with bishops, though in Bidens case over LGBTQ+ rights and abortion. In addition to immigration, DeSantis has split with bishops over the death penalty, which the governor supports and the church doesnt.

Seitz, who chairs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops migration committee, has been bishop for a decade in heavily Catholic El Paso, which sits in one of the busiest corridors for illegal border crossings. Sacred Heart is downtown, a few blocks from Mexico.

Two men and a woman working for the Florida government recruited migrants outside Sacred Heart with promises of jobs and housing in California, said Imelda Maynard, director of legal services at Diocesan Migrant & Refugee Services Inc., which is part of the Diocese of El Paso.

A Venezuelan man said he was lured to a distant motel with his wife and four children for three days, Maynard said. He became suspicious and pulled out after being told he would have to fly separately and the rest of his family would follow on a different flight because there wasnt enough room for them to go together.

The man didnt know where the motel was, but Maynard suspects it was in Deming, New Mexico, which was where the charter flights departed for Sacramento. The family hitchhiked back to Sacred Heart.

A passenger who was on the first flight called the Venezuelan migrant to say he had been duped, Maynard said.

Dont come. Its a scam. There are no jobs here, there is no room and board. They just dumped us in the middle of nowhere at this church and no one knows whats going on, the Venezuelan migrant recounted being told.

Sacred Heart is a well-known shelter, particularly among Venezuelans. It is indicative of the many Catholic charities along the southern border from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, that provide food, showers, housing and transportation to migrants seeking a rest stop before leaving for their final destinations in the United States.

It is unclear if Sacred Heart was the only place that DeSantis recruiters targeted. Maynard said she didnt know of any others.

Maynard said standing outside a shelter promising jobs that dont exist was gross. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, DeSantis perennial Democratic rival, has suggested it may be criminal.

Its really dehumanizing to have someone play with you that way because no one took into account these are human beings and they were toyed with, Maynard said.

DeSantis office has emphasized that its contractor safely delivered migrants to Catholic Charities of Sacramento Inc., which is located at the California diocese. The Sacramento charity has not responded to the APs requests for comment.

Seitz applauded Catholic Charities response.

Im inspired by the way I see people received here on the border, and, Im hearing reports, by the way they were received in Sacramento by Catholic Charities, he said. Catholic Charities was not informed, but they stepped up and received them, and thats the good news in all of this.

___

Spagat reported from San Diego.

___

Find more AP coverage of the immigration issue: https://apnews.com/hub/immigration
DETROIT (AP)  Electric vehicles made by General Motors will be able to use much of Teslas extensive charging network beginning early next year.

In addition, GM will adopt Teslas connector, the plug that links an electric vehicle to a charging station.

GM joins Ford in shifting its electric vehicles to work with about 12,000 of Teslas roughly 17,000 chargers, and both Detroit automakers are pushing to make Teslas connector the industry standard. GM CEO Mary Barra and her Tesla counterpart, Elon Musk, made the announcement Thursday during a Twitter Spaces conversation.

Their discussion comes two weeks after Ford CEO Jim Farley joined Musk to announce that Fords electric vehicles would gain access to much of Teslas EV-charging network, the largest in the nation. Farley also said Ford would switch to Teslas connector rather than go with the connector used by the rest of the industry.

At the opening bell Friday, shares of Tesla Inc. jumped 6% to hit a new high for the year. General Motors Co. rose 3%, and Ford Motor Co. rose 2%.

At first, GM and Ford EV owners will need an adapter to hook into the Tesla stations, which have their own connector. But both GM and Ford will switch to Teslas North American Charging Standard connector starting with new EVs produced in 2025.

Tesla has about 17,000 Supercharger stations in the U.S. There are about 54,000 public charging stations in the U.S., according to the Department of Energy, but many charge much more slowly than the Tesla stations.

Like Ford, we see this as an opportunity to expand access to charging, Barra said, adding that GM hopes the rest of the industry will move to the Tesla charging connector, which is different from the CCS connector used on most other EVs.

Musk said that GM and Tesla vehicles would have an even playing field at the charging stations.

We will provide support equally to both, he said. The most important thing is we advance the electric vehicle revolution.

Financial details of the agreement between the two companies were not released Thursday, but GM spokesman Darryll Harrison said GM isnt paying Tesla.

Tesla will get better utilization of their network and all the new charging revenue, which will help them expand the network further, Harrison said. There are other opportunities both companies can take advantage of as a result of the agreement.

Details of how customers would gain access are still being worked out. GM EV owners may have to pay a monthly charge to access Teslas charging network, or they could pay for each use. Current GM owners probably will need to buy the adapter, Harrison said.

Teslas supercharger network is a huge competitive advantage for the company based in Austin, Texas, which sells more EVs than anyone else in the U.S. Chargers often are located near freeways to enable long trips, where most fast-charging plugs are needed, and generally theyre more reliable than other networks.

But opening access to EVs from GM and Ford, which rank a distant second and third in U.S. EV sales, will make it easier for those owners to charge while traveling. It also could rankle some Tesla owners who already are jockeying for space at some of the busier Supercharger stations, largely in California.

Barra said joining Teslas network would almost double the number of chargers available to GM electric vehicle owners.

At the end of the day, were looking at whats best for our customers, Barra said. We arent the only company that comes up with good ideas.

Mike Austin, an electric vehicles analyst for Guidehouse Insights, said GM joining the Tesla network is a huge step toward making Teslas connector the industrywide standard.

It seems like theres a lot of momentum going the way of the North American Charging Standard, for sure, he said.

If other large EV makers such as Hyundai, Kia, Volkswagen and Nissan, also switch connectors, Tesla would get a large amount of revenue from its chargers, Austin said.

Still, Tesla appears to be holding back at least part of its network for use only by Tesla owners, he said. The risk, he said, is that Tesla owners could have to wait for access to a plug.

Tesla owners are used to not having to wait, he said.

The Tesla connector and cord are much lighter and easier to handle than the CCS system used by the rest of the auto industry, Austin said.

Earlier this year, the White House announced that at least 7,500 chargers from Teslas Supercharger and Destination Charger network would be available to non-Tesla electric vehicles by the end of 2024. But the rollout thus far has been slow.
Police found a man who had been fatally shot in a vehicle outside a park in Northeast Albuquerque.

Gilbert Gallegos, an Albuquerque police spokesman, said officers responded sometime before 11 a.m. to a shooting at Taylor Park, near Indian School and Pennsylvania NE.

An adult male was discovered this morning inside a vehicle in the area of Taylor Park, he said. The victim was determined to be deceased, and detectives were called out to start an investigation.
A proposed rule under consideration by the Bureau of Land Management could help shape the future of Otero Mesa, the greater Chaco Canyon area and 13 million acres overseen by the federal agency in New Mexico.

And time is running out for the public to weigh in.

The agency is accepting public comment on the proposed public lands rule through June 20  with a final decision expected in March next year.

A coalition of conservation and outdoor recreation enthusiasts is urging New Mexicans to support the proposal. They describe it as a way to put conservation on equal footing with other potential uses of public land  such as oil and gas development and livestock grazing  and to strengthen collaboration with Native American tribes, nations and pueblos.

Opponents, in turn, question whether the rule will be used to curtail drilling, grazing and similar activities.

The proposal, in any case, is expected have an outsized impact on the West and New Mexico, where the federal government is the largest land manager in the state.

It would allow environmental groups or others to lease federal land for conservation  a step the Bureau of Land Management says would simply put conservation on equal footing with other potential uses, such as development.

A conservation lease, for example, could be used to restore animal habitat or help compensate for development of other public lands.

Jesse Deubel, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, said the proposal is particularly important for hunters and anglers in New Mexico, where some families rely on what they catch for food.

To a lot of New Mexicans, public lands are more than just outdoor recreation, he told the Journal on Thursday. Public land is actually our grocery store.

Advocates for the oil and gas industry, however, say the federal law already provides significant protection for sensitive lands and ecosystems.

The Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico called the rule a highly flawed proposal that should be withdrawn.

By elevating conservation above all other uses, Jim Winchester, the groups executive director, said Thursday, the BLM violates its own statutory requirements to balance multiple uses of public lands.

State Rep. Greg Nibert, a Roswell Republican who works as an oil and gas attorney, said the proposed rule could affect wind farms and renewable energy, not just drilling operations. Its practical impact, however, is unclear, given that the agency already is charged with managing the land for multiple uses, he said.

But one of my concerns, Nibert said, would be that this would be used as a tool to slow things down or to create another hurdle for (oil and gas) leasing.

Joe Vigil of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association described the proposed rule as an overreach with too many unanswered questions.

The Bureau of Land Management, he said, already has rules that strike the right balance between energy development and environmental stewardship.

But Danielle Murray, senior legal and policy director of the Conservation Lands Foundation, said the agency has skewed for decades in favor of extractive industries.

Under the rule, she said, development of federal lands will continue, but conservation would be on par with other uses and require the agency to show it has considered impacts on watersheds and landscapes.

Michael Casaus, New Mexico state director for the Wildnerness Society, said the rule could help protect Otero Mesa  the largest remaining Chihuahuan desert grassland of its kind in the country, he said  in southern New Mexico. The area is home to 200 bird species, native pronghorn antelope and other wildlife, he said.

Vulnerable to oil and gas development, Otero Mesa is one of the most endangered ecosystems in America, Casaus said.

The greater Chaco region in northwestern New Mexico could also benefit, he said. Even outside the boundaries of the Chaco Canyon Historical Park, Casaus said, the broader region has archaeological sites that deserve protection.

The proposed rules requires meaningful consultation with Native American tribes, nations and pueblos.

We know these lands, the animals and plants  their importance to our culture and history, said Keegan King, whos from Acoma Pueblo and is executive director of the Native Land Institute, which supports the rule.

The local coalition supporting the proposed rule the overwhelming majority of land managed by the BLM in New Mexico is open to oil and gas development, while only 11% is protected.

The Bureau of Land Management is part of the U.S. Interior Department, led by Cabinet Secretary Deb Haaland, a Democrat and former congresswoman from New Mexico.
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The Canadian rapper himself, who was found guilty of shooting the 'WAP' hitmaker in 2020, previously attempted to disqualify a judge in the case after his motion for a new trial was dismissed.

Jun 9, 2023

AceShowbiz - Prosecutors in Tory Lanez and Megan Thee Stallion's shooting case want to put him behind bars for more than a decade. It's unveiled that they want the rapper to serve 13 years in jail after being found guilty of shooting the "WAP" hitmaker in the foot after a 2020 party.

Meghann Cuniff of Los Angeles Public Press shared a memorandum online that the prosecution filed on Tuesday, June 6. It read, "Words have power and the pen is oftentimes mightier than the sword. In this case, Daystar Peterson [Lanezs legal name] used both... Not content to have hurt the victim by use of his sword (gun), he also used his pen. His online posts for nearly three years have re-traumatized the victim."

"His online reach is worldwide (millions of followers plus casual observers) and the defendant's statements embolden his followers so that they too have been complicit in re-traumatizing the victim," the memo added. "He is responsible for the effect of his words and his actions."

In May, it was unveiled that Tory attempted to disqualify a judge in his case after his motion for a new trial was dismissed. "Herriford went through the seven main arguments from Lanez's lawyers and dismantled each one. He concluded there were no errors. But he also said even if he concluded each error existed, the errors didn't have a material affect on the outcome of the trial to warrant a new trial," Meghann tweeted out from the courtroom at the time.

According to the journalist, the judge concluded, "In the end, the jury believed the prosecution's case beyond a reasonable doubt." She reported that the judge "called out Lanez's lawyers for not mentioning any of the other evidence against Lanez when they focused on perceived problems with some evidence."

The judge set June 13 at 10:30 A.M. as the time of the sentencing. In what Meghann described as "a jaw-dropping move," Tory's lawyers filed a motion to disqualify Judge Herriford from the case and argued that they didn't think the judge could issue his ruling until the motion was resolved. Judge Herriford disagreed, though.

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National Security Adviser Cho Tae-young delivers a keynote speech during a conference in Seoul, June 9. Yonhap



South Korea's national security adviser said Friday the country aims to establish a "healthy" relationship with China, stressing that "mutual respect" should be the foundation for such bilateral ties.



National Security Adviser Cho Tae-yong made the remarks at a forum a day after Chinese Ambassador to Seoul Xing Haiming expressed his discontent with South Korea's "pro-U.S. diplomacy" during a meeting with opposition leader Lee Jae-myung.



During the meeting, Xing called for Seoul's support for Beijing's "One China" principle, claiming that China-Korea relations have recently faced "external challenges."



"Relationships between countries should be based on mutual respect," Cho said in a keynote speech for a conference to assess the first-year diplomacy and security policy of the Yoon Suk Yeol administration.



"We will form healthy South Korea-China relations through a 'confident' diplomacy that is befitting to the increased national power of the Republic of Korea and the expectations of the people," he said.



Cho also hinted the government may protest Xing's remarks through its diplomatic channels. When asked about what he meant by mutual respect, Cho told reporters that the foreign ministry will "take good care" of the issue.









Cho, meanwhile, lambasted North Korea's nuclear and missile developments as the "most immediate" and "substantive" security threat that has also jeopardized the lives of the North Korean people.



The conservative Yoon administration has taken a stern stance in dealing with the secretive regime's human rights violations since taking power in May last year.



"While the North Korean regime is carried away with its missile and nuclear developments, its people are suffering from the worst economic crisis and human rights violations," Cho said, noting that Pyongyang's botched attempt to launch what it claimed to be a satellite-carrying rocket cost what could have fed its people for 10 months.





National Security Adviser Cho Tae-young delivers a keynote speech during a conference in Seoul, June 9. Yonhap
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The star of 'Vanderpump Rules' and 'The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills' has reportedly gotten a green light from Hulu to film the ten-episode unscripted series wherein she will serve as executive producer.

Jun 9, 2023

AceShowbiz - Lisa Vanderpump's new reality series will be filmed in her French villa. Having starred on multiple reality shows during the course of her career, including "Vanderpump Rules" and "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills", the 62-year-old businesswoman is now planning to shoot her new Hulu series at her luxurious French villa.

The ten-episode series of "Vanderpump Villa" has already been ordered by Hulu, according to Deadline. The show will follow the story of Lisa's hand-picked staff as they work at the villa. While the upcoming series doesn't have a launch date, Lisa has already been made an executive producer of the unscripted show.

Outside her TV projects, Lisa has enjoyed significant success as a restaurant, bar and club owner, and she previously claimed that she's only motivated by passion projects. The reality star also discussed her ambitious plans in Las Vegas. She told Forbes, "I've got to a stage in my life where everything has to be a passion project. I've done so many different things that now I find that I am motivated by something that excites me."

"I love design. My design partner [Nick Alain] is here now. We have two new big projects coming up," she went on to elaborate. "We're designing two new restaurants that have a deadline and nothing is as motivating as a deadline. I've just opened Paris Casino in Las Vegas, which we presented to them and they fell in love with our visuals. Everything is bespoke and couture and designed by Vanderpump Alain."

What's more, Lisa claimed that "Vanderpump Rules" has benefited her business empire. The wife of Ken Todd said, "Many people said 'No, don't do it.' It was just the unknown and that was 500 episodes ago and 12 years later. So, that opened so many doors for things I dreamt of."

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After being spotted joining the 'Emo Girl' rapper in London for his ring collection exhibition, the 'Transformers' actress is seen showing her support at his show in Berlin.

Jun 9, 2023

AceShowbiz - Megan Fox has heated up rumors of her reconciliation with Machine Gun Kelly. Less than two weeks after being spotted joining the "Emo Girl" spitter in London, the "Bad Boys 2" actress was seen showing her support at his concert in Germany.

On Wednesday night, June 7, the 37-year-old beauty was spotted attending the 33-year-old artist's gig at the Waldbuhne in Berlin. She was seen sitting among the audience. In a photo making its way online, she could be seen wearing an all-black ensemble.

Showing off her curves, the "Transformers" actress donned a sleeveless body fit black top with a plunging neckline and a pair of sheer lacy black leggings. She also sported a black leather jacket with red lining inside, and added several gold necklaces. As for her hair, she adopted the curtained 'do for her loose wavy long ginger-colored tresses.

This was not the first time Megan showed up to support MGK. On Tuesday night, May 30, she accompanied him to an exhibition for his ring collection, The 8th Deadly Sin - GOSSIP with Stephen Webster taking place at The Bomb Factory in London, England.

For the special occasion, the "Jennifer's Body" star looked stunning in a casual outfit. Flaunting her hourglass body figure, she donned a sleeveless fitted cropped white top and a pair of long black pants which came with sparkling silver detailing.

Megan completed the look with a pair of black open-toe platform heels and a matching small handbag. She styled her brunette hair in loose waves and parted her tresses in the middle.

Meanwhile, MGK, whose real name is Colson Baker, showed off a more formal look. He covered his upper body tattoos under an unbuttoned sleeveless gray vest, and put on a pair of loose long gray pants. He completed his look with a pair of black Converse sneakers, a chain necklace and a wrist watch.

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The 'Renfield' actor and the 'Bridgerton' star, along with several other contenders, reportedly advance to first in-person tests with DC co-heads Peter Safran and James Gunn.

Jun 9, 2023

AceShowbiz - James Gunn is one step closer to finding the new Superman and Lois Lane for his "Superman: Legacy". After months of search, Nicholas Hoult and Phoebe Dynevor have reportedly made it to the shortlists of actors to star in the upcoming movie.

According to Deadline, both actors, along with several other contenders, advance to a second round of testing. They will be having the first in-person tests with DC co-heads Peter Safran and Gunn, who is writing and directing the pic, around Father's Day weekend or the Monday or Tuesday after.

But the "X-Men: First Class" star and the "Bridgerton" breakout star are not securing any roles in the project just yet. The 33-year-old British hunk is reportedly competing with David Corenswet and Tom Brittney for the role of Clark Kent a.k.a. Superman, while the 28-year-old beauty, who is also a Brit, is expected to test for Lois Lane along with Emma Mackey and Rachel Brosnahan.

Sources additionally note that the test deals are still being negotiated and haven't all closed, but as of now these names are expected to participate in future auditions.

While Hoult has previously been reported circling a role in "Superman: Legacy", The Hollywood Reporter previously spilled that he was tipped to play the classic villain Lex Luthor. "The studio has loved him since '[Mad Max: Fury Road]'," a source told the site in May.

As for Brosnahan, who has been said to have delivered an "outstanding" audition, she has responded to the casting rumors during an appearance on "The View" on May 15. "I mean, look, take everything you read on the internet with a grain of salt is my first piece of advice," she coyly said at first.

While she neither confirmed nor denied the news, the Emmy-winning "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" actress added, "Look, it would be extraordinary. I grew up watching Lois Lane, this incredibly talented journalist, far from a damsel in distress, and I would jump at the chance if it arose."

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The 'Pitch Perfect' actor tells a shocking story of a 'crazy' party which was attended by the rich in his neighborhood and ended with someone being gunned down.

Jun 9, 2023

AceShowbiz - Adam DeVine witnessed a man get "gunned down" outside his house this week. The "Pitch Perfect" actor and his wife Chloe Bridges were on the balcony of their Hollywood Hills home watching people arrive for a "crazy poker game," but things took a dark turn when one of the players was shot dead.

"This is a true scary thing that just happened. So, across the street from my house they are running this, like, crazy poker game, right?" he said when appearing live on the "This Is Important" podcast on Wednesday, June 7 evening.

"Where People were rolling up in like Lamborghinis and Bentleys and Rolls-Royces and s*** and like old guys, who for sure f*** prostitutes and play cards. And I see these dudes and it's like fun to sit and watch, [so] me and my wife, we're sitting up on our balcony, and like, this looks crazy..."

"This is where it gets sad. Someone was murdered there. Someone was murdered. Yeah, dude, I called that s***, I called that s***. I was like 'This is dastardly s*** going down here' and sure enough, someone is gunned down."

Hosts Blake Anderson, Anders Holm, and Kyle Newacheck appeared taken aback by the revelation. Anders said, "Yeah, a real person, no longer with us." Adam, 39, replied, "Yeah but, that happens, people be dying. This isn't Hollywood, this is a story about my actual life."

The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed Thursday that a fatal shooting occurred just after 2 A.M. on Wednesday, June 7, with the victim later identified as 39-year-old Emil Lahaiel. Police said the victim was standing outside the house talking to a suspect when he was shot.

LAPD public information officer Drake Madison told People magazine, "The suspect produced a handgun and fired multiple shots and those shots struck the victim. The suspect fled the scene east in a vehicle."

The victim was pronounced dead at the scene and no arrests have been made.

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BBC Studios Kids & Family has announced the appointments of Katharina Pietzsch as VP Content Sales, BBC Studios Kids & Family; and Kelly Wood in the newly created role of Head of Content Strategy, BBC Studios Kids & Family.

These senior appointments at the heart of Kids & Family complete the new divisions senior management restructure designed to support its ambitious growth plans.

Pietzschs role will see her lead the sales and co-production strategy for the BBC Studios Kids & Family portfolio. Working closely with the content and production teams in this senior client facing role she will manage priority accounts with responsibility for enhancing sales revenue and profit targets across co-productions, commissions and tape sale activity globally.

Leading the high-performing content strategy team, Wood will work closely with other BBC Studios Kids & Family leads to define global and local content strategies and roll-out plans for its brands on BBC Studios global channels, third party services and digital platforms to ensure each Kids & Family show achieves maximum reach with young audiences.

Pietzsch joins the division from ZDF Studios where she was a Director in its Junior department and brings extensive experience of international sales, co-productions and co-commissions of kids and family programmes. At ZDFS she was responsible for negotiating pre-sales, co-productions and commissions for all key-account, pan-national, Scandinavian and global clients and deals and also developed custom made projects with selected producers worldwide. Pietzsch originally joined ZDF Studios as a management trainee and has worked as Acquisitions Manager for ZDF and KiKA and Sales and Coproduction Director for ZDF Ss kids & family content.

Wood brings a wealth of knowledge to BBC Studios Kids & Family. Her previous role as editorial lead at Paramount Kids and Family UK and Ireland, saw her overseeing content and programming strategy for the Nickelodeon brand across linear and non-linear platforms in the region. There she was responsible for communicating priorities and developing and executing content strategies to drive the performance and brand health of Nickelodeon and core franchises across all touchpoints. Prior to this, Wood worked at Channel 4 and media agency OMD.

Announcing the appointments, Cecilia Persson, Managing Director, BBC Studios Kids & Family, says: I am delighted that Katharina and Kelly are bringing their considerable experience and insight to help up us deliver our ambition to create high quality content and build globally appealing brands that leave a lasting impression and have the power to make a difference to the lives of kids and their families everywhere.

Katharina Pietzsch said: Im really excited to join BBC Studios Kids & Family at a key period of growth for the business. I greatly admire the BBCs globally-renowned, distinctive content and cant wait to start supporting the divisions brands and helping them grow and develop internationally.

Kelly Wood added: Im passionate about young audiences and developing new and innovative ways to reach them. I am so excited to be working with this incredibly creative team to help develop strategies which will create tomorrows ground-breaking, impactful and cherished content.
Bridgers PR, a leading communications agency specializing in strategic brand management, is excited to announce its partnership with Tsuyo Manufacturing Pvt Ltd, an innovative Make in India EV startup focused on design, product engineering, and manufacturing, a comprehensive range of Motors and compatible Controllers dedicated for delivering sustainable solutions towards Electric Vehicle OEMs across different application categories.

As Tsuyo's official strategic brand communications partner, Bridgers PR will take the helm of Tsuyo's media communications, working towards enhancing its corporate image, brand reputation, and market presence among its target audience in India.

Talking about this exciting news, Mr. Anubhav Singh, Founder of Bridgers shares, Our team at Bridgers is filled with young and fresh talent with a strong aim to work in Tandem with young startups that are passionate about innovating sustainable solutions that will shape the future in their respective industries. Our association with Tsuyo Manufacturing Pvt Ltd aligns with our vision and helps us contribute to the growth of new solutions. Moreover, we are excited and looking forward to working with the team at Tsuyo and are confident that this will be a great journey together.

Mr. Vijay Kumar, Director of Tsuyo Manufacturing Pvt Ltd adds, As the startup ecosystem in India undergoes rapid transformation, we are proud to be part of this revolution. Partnering with Bridgers PR gives us the confidence that their dynamic team will help us expand our reach and accelerate the adoption of Electric Vehicles, enabling us to connect with vehicle manufacturers as well.
The Federal Bank has launched an extraordinary campaign that celebrates people and their culture by transforming an entire bank branch into a living museum of local stories. The 'I am Adyar, Adyar is me' campaign has handpicked 40 compelling stories of individuals, which are showcased in an exclusive exhibition at the Adyar branch of Federal Bank. This art exhibition will run at the Adyar branch premises of Federal Bank between 10 am and 6 pm for 2 weeks. This a first of its kind micro-marketing initiative in the banking industry aims to showcase the soul of Adyar, including its people's struggles, triumphs, and everything that makes Adyar special.

The walls of the Adyar Branch are adorned with vibrant paintings that reflect the lively spirit of the locality. The bank's team ventured into the neighborhoods of Adyar, listening to the people and collecting around 100 stories and portraits of the individuals involved. The entire Adyar has undergone a Federal makeover, with several branded boards displayed at various local shops, making Adyar Federal. Over 100 autos decorated with the campaign's branding traverse the streets, spreading the message far and wide.

The inauguration of the campaign was held at branch Adyar with Samay Singh IPS, Deputy Commissioner  Traffic, Government of Tamil Nadu as the Chief guest in the presence of senior executives of the Bank Harsh Dugar  Group President & Country Head  Wholesale Banking, Eqbal Manoj  Senior Vice President & Zonal Head  Chennai, MVS Murthy  Chief Marketing Officer, Betty Antony  Deputy Vice President 1 & Regional Head  Chennai, staff, other guests and customers.

M V S Murthy, Chief Marketing Officer, Federal Bank at the inauguration said, I am Adyar, Adyar is me is a sincere ode by the Bank to celebrate life, living and memories of the people of Adyar. Federal Bank recognizes its role as the Bank that encourages citizens to dream big and achieve their aspirations. We believe the fuel for enterprising economic growth is service with empathy. He further said, Federal Bank is honoured that the neighbours around its branch in Adyar have graciously shared their stories in an authentic & inimitable way. Their faces and stories trace the everyday journeys, joys and accomplishments in Adyar.

The Federal Bank's unique project in Adyar has connected with people in a way that is not just transaction-based, but also personal. It has absorbed into the culture of the locale, rather than compelling itself. This is in line with the Bank's values, where people are given more prominence. The Bank has gone beyond banking with an aim to create an emotional connection with the community, making them feel valued and heard. Earlier in the calendar year, Federal Bank had emphasized its focus on human connection with the campaign, Rishta Aap Se Hai, Sirf App Se Nahi.
Winners of IMAGEXX Awards 2023 were announced at a glittering ceremony held at the Crowne Plaza, Gurugram, tonight. Amid loud cheers in a full house, the industry celebrated outstanding work and contributions of Indias Public Relations and corporate communications professionals and agencies. The Awards rounded up the day-long IMAGEXX Summit 2023, which saw the whos who of the PR and corporate communications industry set the agenda and future course.

The loudest cheers were reserved for Adfactors PR, which was adjudged PR Agency of the Year (India). The agency put up a stellar show, winning several accolades during the course of the evening.

Pooja Pathak, Founder and Director, Media Mantra, was honoured with the PR Agency Head of the Year award.

Among the other major award winners, was Hill+Knowlton Strategies, which walked away with the award for PR Agency of the Year (Large Size PR).

Greycell PR won the award for PR Agency of the Year (Medium Size PR), while BCW India Group bagged the PR Agency of the Year (Adgully Choice) award. Avian WE was adjudged PR Agency of the Year (Global Network).

There were four winners in the Specialist Consultancy/ Firm of the Year category. The Specialist Consultancy/ Firm of the Year (Creative Communication) award went to Teamwork Communication Solutions. Kaizzen PR walked away with the award for Specialist Consultancy/ Firm of the Year (Digital PR), while Candour Communications was adjudged Specialist Consultancy/ Firm of the Year (IT & Technology). PR Professionals won the award for Specialist Consultancy/ Firm of the Year (Adgullys Choice).

The Best Independent PR Agency category also saw four winners. Media Mantra won the award for Best Independent PR Agency (Large Size PR), while the award for Best Independent PR Agency (Medium Size PR) went to 80dB Communications. Kommune Brand Communications was Best Independent PR Agency (Adgullys Choice), while Teamology Softech & Media Services won the award for Best Independent PR Agency (Less than 5 Years).

Click here for the complete list of winners of IMAGEXX Awards 2023.
Zenith India, the media agency under Publicis Groupe India, has announced the appointment of Vaibhav Jadon as its National Buying Head, effective immediately.

Jadon will lead the integrated buying function, driving strategy, and ensuring executional excellence across Zenith Indias client portfolio and will report directly to Jai Lala, CEO of Zenith India. In addition, he will also contribute to Publicis Medias investment practice, PMX.

With over two decades of work experience both in India and international markets, Jadon brings a wealth of expertise in managing large clients (advertisers) within leading organisations. Prior to joining Zenith, he was heading the national media-buying and partnerships at Dentsu.

Zenith, the ROI agency blends data, technology, and brilliant specialists to solve complex business challenges for brands. In India, the agency has topped COMvergences recent new business rankings.

Throughout his career, Jadon has demonstrated a deep understanding of market trends, consumer behaviour, technology, and emerging platforms, enabling powerful and impactful media campaigns. In his past assignments, he has closely worked with clients such as Reckitt, Maruti, Honda, AMFI, JLR, Heineken-UB, Abbott, and Coca-Cola, to name a few.

Commenting on the appointment, Jai Lala, CEO, Zenith India, said, Vaibhav is known for his vast experience and expertise in media. He comes with strong and solid relationships in the publisher, broadcast, and overall, media ecosystem and has a proven record of success with leading brands. The overall media landscape is dynamic and evolving in both complexity and opportunity. With Vaibhav strategising and strengthening our media-buying functions, leading pivotal partnerships, and bringing in new insights that optimise media buys, we expect to deliver even greater value for our clients.

On his new role, Vaibhav Jadon said, I am delighted at the new role, and this is an opportune time to be joining Zenith which is seeing phenomenal growth, topping new business rankings, and has an incredible roster of brands. Zenith has a strong and differentiated ROI product, proposition, and focus and I look forward to leading and enhancing media strategies and buying excellence for its clients and bringing in exceptional results for them. I am excited to be part of Zeniths growth and success story.
Chinese Ambassador to Korea Xing Haiming, left, gestures during his meeting with main opposition Democratic Party of Korea Chairman Lee Jae-myung at the former's residence in Seongbuk District, Seoul, Thursday. Joint Press Corps



Gov't summons Chinese envoy over inflammatory remarks



By Nam Hyun-woo



China is advancing its diplomatic outreach to Korea's National Assembly, particularly opposition party members, seeking to gain leverage in Korean politics against the Yoon Suk Yeol administration's U.S.-leaning foreign policy.



In response, Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Xing Haiming, the Chinese ambassador to Korea, on Friday, over remarks he made during a meeting with main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) Chairman, Lee Jae-myung, on Thursday, which the ministry described as "irrational and provocative."



A day earlier, Xing had a dinner meeting with the main opposition leader at the ambassador's residence in Seoul.



During the meeting, Xing said, "The current China-Korea relations are facing a slew of difficulties, and honestly, the responsibility for these problems does not lie with China."



He continued, "The Taiwan issue is a core part of China's key interests and is closely related to the fundamental of China-Korea relations. We hope that the Korean side will honor its commitments and respect China's core concerns regarding the Taiwan issue  With the U.S. exercising full-fledged pressure on China, some people are placing their bet that the U.S. will prevail and China will defeat. This is a wrong bet  They will regret their decision in the future."



Xing also noted that he is paying attention to Seoul's recent increases in trade deficits with China, attributing the deficits to "attempts to decouple from China."



The ambassador's comments referred to the Korean president's policy of strengthening Seoul's relations with Washington to their highest level, while building a framework for closer cooperation between Korea, Japan and the U.S.



In doing so, Yoon has echoed U.S. views on issues that China finds sensitive, namely the contentious geopolitical issue of Taiwan. Yoon has said that he is against any "attempt to change the status quo by force" referring to Beijing's stance on the self-governing island state.



"Beijing had been thinking that Korea was a weak link of U.S. strategy to encircle China, and it now sees the necessity to slow down Seoul's prompt leaning toward Washington," said Lee Dong-gyu, a research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.



"Ambassador Xing's comments during his meeting with the opposition party leader were seen as a subtle warning, and it seems that Beijing is seeking to use Korea's domestic politics to build up opinions desirable for China."



In response, Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a release that it summoned Xing on Friday, and First Vice Minister Chang Ho-jin warned the envoy that his "criticism against the Korean government's policy with wrong facts and unacceptable rhetoric goes against the diplomatic custom, and constitutes an interference of domestic affairs."



Chang also noted that the remarks dashed the both governments' desire to improve the bilateral relations under the principle of mutual respect and irresponsibly inflicted misunderstanding between the two countries.



"Chang warned that Xing should not deviate from the duty of a diplomatic envoy, and that all results will be his responsibility," the release read.



In protest against Seoul's summoning of its envoy, China also called in Korean Ambassador to Beijing Chung Jae-ho, Saturday, to lodge a complaint, according to its foreign ministry, Sunday.



Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Nong Rong met with Chung and expressed serious concerns and a complaint over what it called an unfair response that Korea showed about the Lee-Xing meeting.



The Chinese official also asked the Korean government to reflect on where the problem lies in relations between the two countries, respect the spirit of the joint statement adopted when the two countries established diplomatic relations, and work with China for a healthy and stable development of relations, according to the ministry.



The meeting with the DPK leader, which was requested by Xing, was seen as an indirect expression of China's complaints against the ruling bloc, because the ambassador had the dinner with the opposition party chairman before meeting the ruling party leader Kim Gi-hyeon.



According to the ruling People Power Party (PPP), the Chinese embassy in Seoul contacted the party on June 6 to request a meeting between Kim and Xing, far later than the meeting between Lee and Xing was arranged.



Kim told reporters on Thursday that "we (he and Xing) are friends so we can always meet," but showed an angry response on Friday, slamming Xing's comments during the dinner was "clearly an interference in internal affairs and a serious breach of diplomatic protocol."



Korea's Director of National Security Cho Tae-yong said in a forum on Friday that "we will build a healthy Korea-China relations that befits our enhanced national status, through confident diplomacy," adding that "mutual respect is the basis of country-to-country relations."



On the contrary, DPK Chairman Lee said on Friday that he had discussions with Xing in order to "explore ideas to revive the strained Seoul-Beijing economic cooperation and revitalize China-bound trade."



"With exports standing as the backbone of our economic growth, it is almost impossible to rebound from economic slowdown while excluding its largest trade partner," DPK's Lee said.





Director of National Security Cho Tae-yong delivers a speech during a forum at the Four Seasons hotel in Jongno District, Seoul, Friday. Yonhap
The Federal Council

Bern, 09.06.2023 - UBS has announced that it will probably complete the Credit Suisse takeover on 12 June 2023. The takeover was the key component of the Federal Council's overall package of 19 March to safeguard financial stability and thus avert damage to the Swiss economy. To make the takeover possible, the federal government provided UBS with a guarantee for potential losses incurred on the realisation of Credit Suisse assets. The loss protection agreement was signed on 9 June 2023. The guarantee will take effect only if the losses arising from the realisation of these assets exceed CHF 5 billion. It is limited to a total of CHF 9 billion. The priority for the federal government and UBS is to minimise potential losses and risks so that recourse to the federal guarantee is avoided to the greatest extent possible. The Federal Council was informed of the loss protection agreement during its meeting on 9 June 2023.

In taking over Credit Suisse, UBS is also taking over a portfolio of assets that are considered non-core to UBS and do not fit its business and risk profile. As part of the takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS, the federal government therefore declared on 19 March that it was prepared to shoulder a portion of any losses arising from the realisation of these assets. Article 14a of the emergency ordinance forms the basis for this. UBS has to bear the first CHF 5 billion of any losses realised when winding down these Credit Suisse assets. If this amount is exceeded, the federal government will assume losses up to a maximum of CHF 9 billion. A net approach will be taken when calculating the losses, which means that any profits from the realisation of the portfolio will also be taken into account.

According to the announcement by UBS, the takeover of Credit Suisse is to be completed as early as 12 June 2023. This takeover became necessary in order to prevent a Credit Suisse bankruptcy or restructuring, which would have had serious ramifications for the Swiss economy and international financial stability. An important element of this takeover has now been finalised, with the Federal Department of Finance (FDF) and UBS signing the associated loss protection agreement on 9 June 2023. The key terms are as follows:

Portfolio of assets : the loss protection agreement covers a specific portfolio of Credit Suisse assets, which corresponds to approximately 3% of the combined assets of the merged bank. The portfolio includes primarily loans, derivatives, legacy assets and structured products from Credit Suisse's Non-Core Unit. UBS will provide regular information on its new Non-Core Unit as part of its quarterly reporting.





: the loss protection agreement covers a specific portfolio of Credit Suisse assets, which corresponds to approximately 3% of the combined assets of the merged bank. The portfolio includes primarily loans, derivatives, legacy assets and structured products from Credit Suisse's Non-Core Unit. UBS will provide regular information on its new Non-Core Unit as part of its quarterly reporting. Covered losses : in principle, only losses actually realised are covered by the guarantee. Any profits as well as any losses are included in the calculation. Only after the final realisation of the assets can UBS draw the guarantee for any losses exceeding CHF 5 billion from the federal government (up to a maximum of CHF 14 bn).





: in principle, only losses actually realised are covered by the guarantee. Any profits as well as any losses are included in the calculation. Only after the final realisation of the assets can UBS draw the guarantee for any losses exceeding CHF 5 billion from the federal government (up to a maximum of CHF 14 bn). Guarantee fee/costs : UBS will pay the federal government a guarantee fee consisting of an initial set-up fee of CHF 40 million, an annual maintenance fee of 0.4% of CHF 9 billion (CHF 36 mn p.a.) to cover the Confederation's advisory costs, among other things, and an annual drawn portion fee (risk premium) of between 0% and 4% of CHF 9 billion, depending on the already realised losses and those still expected. The greater these losses, the higher the respective risk premium, which will have to be paid only in the event of the guarantee being drawn.





: UBS will pay the federal government a guarantee fee consisting of an initial set-up fee of CHF 40 million, an annual maintenance fee of 0.4% of CHF 9 billion (CHF 36 mn p.a.) to cover the Confederation's advisory costs, among other things, and an annual drawn portion fee (risk premium) of between 0% and 4% of CHF 9 billion, depending on the already realised losses and those still expected. The greater these losses, the higher the respective risk premium, which will have to be paid only in the event of the guarantee being drawn. Duration: the agreement will remain in place until the final realisation of the guaranteed portfolio. UBS may terminate the loss protection agreement at any time, but would thus cease to benefit from the federal loss protection.

Separate organisational unit to manage the assets

The federal guarantee is subject to strict conditions. UBS is obliged to manage the assets in such a way that losses are minimised and realisation proceeds are maximised. The federal government has broad information and audit rights in order to verify this. UBS is required to establish an appropriate organisational structure in the form of a separate organisational unit, including the appointment of an oversight committee and a management team, and to report to the federal government on a quarterly basis. Moreover, UBS is obliged to maintain its headquarters in Switzerland in order to be eligible for a payment under the guarantee.

The federal government's primary objective is to keep the financial and legal risks for the Confederation, and thus for taxpayers, as low as possible. The priority for both UBS and the federal government is to minimise the asset realisation losses so that recourse to the federal guarantee is avoided to the greatest extent possible.

Public liquidity backstop repaid in full by Credit Suisse

The overall package of 19 March 2023 also included a federal default guarantee for liquidity assistance loans from the Swiss National Bank, up to a maximum of CHF 100 billion (public liquidity backstop, or PLB). As of the end of May, Credit Suisse had repaid its outstanding PLB amounts in full to the Swiss National Bank. Consequently, the Confederation has not yet incurred any losses on the corresponding guarantee, and instead generated receipts of CHF 111 million as of the end of May.

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The Federal Council

Bern, 09.06.2023 - At its meeting on 9 June 2023, the Federal Council definitively adopted the report on relations between Switzerland and the European Union and submitted it to the Federal Assembly. The report was deliberated in December 2022 and adopted subject to the outcome of the consultation of the Foreign Affairs Committees of both chambers of Parliament.

The report 'Assessment of the status of relations between Switzerland and the EU' provides an overview of current bilateral Swiss-EU relations, an assessment of the current situation with regard to European policy and an outlook. It concludes that the bilateral approach remains the most advantageous solution for Switzerland. A draft of the report was published after the Federal Council meeting on 9 December 2022.

The Foreign Affairs Committees of both chambers of Parliament discussed the draft at their January and February meetings. The Federal Council took the outcome of the consultation into consideration when establishing the final version of the report. With the consultation, the Federal Council responded to Parliament's request to be more closely involved in Switzerlands European policy. The definitive version of the report was submitted today to the Federal Assembly after the Federal Councils meeting.

The Federal Council is currently having the key parameters of a negotiating mandate drawn up. At the same time, it is continuing its talks with the EU in order to establish common ground to start negotiations. As before, the Federal Council will continue to work closely with the Foreign Policy Committees of the Federal Assembly for upcoming decisions on European policy.

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The Federal Council

Bern, 09.06.2023 - At its meeting of 9 June 2023, the Federal Council took note of the seventh annual report on the implementation of the Federal Act on Private Security Services Provided Abroad (PSSA). Under this federal act, companies based in Switzerland intending to provide private security services abroad must first declare the activity to the competent federal authority. In 2022, the FDFA received 95 declarations from companies and none of their activities were prohibited.

The unit in charge of implementing the PSSA is the Export Controls and Private Security Services Section (ECPS) of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA). In 2022, the ECPS received 95 declarations, falling mainly into four groups of activities: protection of persons and guarding of property and buildings in a complex environment, operational or logistical support to armed or security forces, private intelligence and security services.

In 2022, the ECPS initiated three review procedures and prohibited no activities. The ECPS did not identify any private security services involving direct participation in hostilities or which could result in serious human rights violations. Such activities are prohibited under Articles 8 and 9 of the PSSA.

The revised PSSA ordinance also had a strong impact in 2022. The number of activities subject to the requirement to declare decreased significantly as a result of this revision.

Audit by the Swiss Federal Audit Office (SFAO)

At the beginning of 2022, the SFAO conducted an audit of the effectiveness of the implementation of the PSSA and the correct application of the act by the ECPS. The SFAO's audit concluded that the ECPS had established appropriate reporting and verification procedures and applied them effectively.

The ECPS has continued its information and awareness-raising work

At national level, numerous companies continue to experience difficulties in assessing whether with the new and more precise definition certain activities had to be declared or were exempt from the requirement to declare. Companies active in various relevant fields were contacted to determine to what extent they might be affected by the law.

In the context of the war in Ukraine, the ECPS was confronted with a number of questions, in particular concerning the scope of the Act and the Ordinance of 4 March 2022 on measures in relation to the situation in Ukraine.

At international level, the ECPS participated in several events related to the regulation of private security services and to issues of international law. Of particular note was the ECPS's participation in the third session of the United Nations Human Rights Council's intergovernmental working group tasked with developing an international regulatory framework on the regulation of private military and security companies. Informal contacts were also established with a number of national regulatory authorities to foster inter-state exchanges in the field of private security services.

Finally, in the second half of 2022, the ECPS's activities were focused on preparing Switzerland's mandate for its seat on the UN Security Council. As a centre of expertise specialising in private security services abroad, the ECPS contributed its expertise to addressing issues related to conventional private military and security companies and actors such as the Wagner Group.

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By John Stone



This is a commentary to one of the oddest events in modern British politics which occurred in the House of Commons last week when MP Andrew Bridgen got up to give a speech on the Covid shot fallout and the entire chamber emptied - involving the unusual behaviour of veteran Foreign Office minister and long time Bill Gates familiar Andrew Mitchell. In only a few seconds there were only seven MPs left out of a potential 643: these included four government representatives, the deputy Speaker and just one person supporting Andrew Bridgen, Christopher Chope. No one was present from any of the opposition parties to hear Bridgens meticulously documented speech.

While it is hard determine exactly what Mitchell was up to he certainly provides an interesting thread to tug at, since as well as being Minister for International Development and Africa he is also a Polio Eradication Gender Champion, an honour bestowed by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a project of the WHO, Rotary International, the US CDC, UNICEF, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and GAVI. Of course, as we have seen these things can go wrong. Despite this interest in vaccination Mitchell did not stop to listen to what Andrew Bridgen had to say, and consider it on its merits.

When it comes to African polio vaccines the British state is peculiarly conflicted: it is not only that as Andrew Bridgen and many others have pointed out the MHRA (the UK licensing authority) is largely paid for by the industry and therefore not remotely independent from it, it is actually through its subsidiary National Institute for Biological Standards and Control part of a partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the WHO manufacturing the products. Last year I transcribed some passages from an MHRA meeting (courtesy of UK Column) involving the interim director of NIBSC Mark Bailey and the Chairman of the MHRA Stephen Lightfoot:

Bailey:

Significant investment by NIBSC and also its partners the Gates foundation and of course its part of the WHO lab in (indecipherable) and of course basically premiere eradication. There are three strains of polio and the team at NIBSC developed three different vaccines. It happens that strain two is the one that has been deployed most in clinical trials in Africa and it's listed product by the WHO which mean it can be used in emergency situations even though it is not proved. We are now moving to clinical trials with the other two strains as well, so it's very exciting: it's a huge huge combination: its effect is that this vaccine cannot revert. So the Salk vaccine which was used with most of us as kids there was always a low chance of it reverting back to wild type which means things like polio begins to appear in the population. This is a great leap forward here because it can't revert so basically its much safer.



Lightfoot:
As stocks rose just enough Thursday for Wall Street to barrel into a new bull market, there were more losers than winners on our Birmingham and Alabama Stock Report.

Birmingham-based ProAssurance Corporation topped the list, though, rising 4.3%. It is a property and casualty company that sells professional liability insurance to doctors.

Boeing, which has had a presence in Alabama for decades, was second-highest, rising 2.9% to close at $218.11 a share, just off its 52-week high of $221.33.

Since 1962, Boeings Alabama facilities have been concentrated around Huntsville, Madison County, where the company supports the activities of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and military operations at Redstone Arsenal. The company currently employs about 2,700 people in the state, primarily as engineering and research support staff, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Amazon was up a little more than $3, or 2.5%.

It has several operations sites with thousands of employees across Alabama, including Bessemer, Huntsville, Madison, Mobile, Montgomery and Theodore.
As stocks rose just enough Thursday for Wall Street to barrel into a new bull market, there were more losers than winners on our Mobile and Alabama Stock Report.

Enviva, the wood pellet manufacturer with a major facility coming soon to Epes in Sumter County, continued its bull run of a week, though, soaring 7.3%. It partially exports out of the Port of Mobile.

Boeing, which has had a presence in Alabama for decades, was next, rising a modest 2.9% to close at $218.11 a share, just off its 52-week high of $221.33.

Since 1962, Boeings Alabama facilities have been concentrated around Huntsville, Madison County, where the company supports the activities of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and military operations at Redstone Arsenal. The company currently employs about 2,700 people in the state, primarily as engineering and research support staff, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Amazon was up a little more than $3, or 2.5%.

It has several operations sites with thousands of employees across Alabama, including Bessemer, Huntsville, Madison, Mobile, Montgomery and Theodore.
Roughly three and a half years after opening its doors, Old Majestic Brewing is no more.

The Mobile brewery, located on St. Louis Street adjacent to The Cheese Cottage, announced the closure Friday on its Facebook page.

No explanation was given, but court documents show the brewery owners, Chad Marchand and John Minton, are being sued by the property owners, 660 St. Louis St. Land LLC, for $1.3 million in damages. The landlords are also seeking an immediate eviction order.

At the heart of the issue is the brewerys failure to pay the agreed upon rent. When the two parties signed the lease in January 2018, the rent for the first five years was set at $13,987 per month, and would rise to $14,686 in years 6-10. According to the lawsuit, the property owners spent roughly $2.83 million to relocate and renovate an 8,489-square-foot former cotton warehouse from Greenwood, Miss.

The brewery opened for business in December 2019. By January 2021, Old Majestic was seeking investors to ostensibly aid with expanding the business, with Marchand and Minton promising a $170% return over the next six years. Its unknown how many people invested.

But just over a year later, court documents show Old Majestic owed the landlords more than $221,000 in past due rent. In an agreement signed in March 2022, 660 St. Louis Street Land agreed to settle the past due rent for $70,000, plus forfeiture of more than $26,000 in security deposits. Old Majestic also agreed to pay a percentage of gross revenues each month to the property owners, with the percentage ranging from 1% to 3%, depending on the amount of the gross revenues.

In return, the property owners agreed to lower the monthly rent to $10,000 per month through December 2024, with the rent reverting back to the original $13,987 after December 2024.

By last December, however, Old Majestic filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Actor Yoo Ah-in/ Yonhap



Disgraced actor Yoo Ah-in is suspected of having taken at least two more kinds of drugs than previously known, police said Friday, referring him to the prosecution without detention for further investigation and possible indictment.



Yoo is charged with taking more than seven types of drugs in violation of the Narcotics Control Act, according to the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency.



He was previously accused of using five different illegal drugs for nonmedical purposes  propofol, marijuana, cocaine, ketamine and zolpidem. But his medical records obtained by police have raised suspicions that the actor took at least two more types of banned substances  midazolam, which is used for general anesthesia, and alprazolam, an insomnia medication.



The 37-year-old actor, whose real name is Uhm Hong-sik, has been under investigation after the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety said his prescription purchases of propofol for nonmedical purposes have been too frequent since 2021. Police have also investigated 20 others, including the actor's acquaintances, on suspicion of using drugs alongside Yoo or aiding him in his drug injections.



But a court rejected the police's request for an arrest warrant for Yoo late last month, saying he admitted to most of his charges and is unlikely to destroy evidence or flee. (Yonhap)




Embezzlement charges against a woman accused of stealing nearly $17,000 from a Little League organization have been dropped in Florida due to a jurisdictional issue, according to NorthEscambia.com, but they may be refiled in Alabama.

Paula Star Pugh was arrested in April and charged with grand theft and fraud. Authorities said the charges stemmed from transactions totaling $16,977.87 over a 17-month period between July 2021 and December 2022.

With the case dropped in Florida, Pugh is currently not charged with any crime.

However, the Escambia County Sheriffs Office told NorthEscambia.com that all the investigative files and evidence on the case are being transferred to the Atmore Police Department in Alabama, as many of the transactions took place at a bank in Atmore.

Atmore police confirmed they will investigate the case.

Pugh had served as the treasurer/bookkeeper of the Northwest Escambia Little League from 2017 until last December, when league president John Maughon became suspicious and alerted law enforcement to the suspect theft.

According to the Escambia County Sheriffs Office, investigators obtained bookkeeping records and bank records which showed transactions reportedly made by Pugh from the league account held at First National Bank in Atmore. The transactions, unauthorized by the leagues board of directors, included ATM withdrawals, debit card purchases and checks cashed, according to the authorities.

The documents obtained by investigators show Pugh cashed checks from the league account for amounts ranging from $530 to $2,000. There were 25 separate ATM withdrawals, all but one completed at First National Bank in Atmore, ranging in amounts from $40 to $300, according to the sheriffs office.

In all, there were 43 unauthorized transactions listed in the arrest report. None of the transactions cited in the arrest report had supporting receipts or other documentation, according to investigators.
Cracker Barrels Pride Month ad, posted to social media, was met with mixed reviews Thursday.

The company posted, We are excited to celebrate Pride Month with our employees and guests. Everyone is always welcome at our table. Happy Pride!

Earlier this week, Cracker Barrel reported traffic fell noticeably in April and May as consumers faced economic pressures, executives said Tuesday, but the company is looking to increase frequency among consumers with continued value messages and a planned loyalty program beta launch in July.

The Tennessee-based company reported earnings for its third quarter was down 2.3 percent in the period.

Thanks for sharing! Our teams take pride in creating a welcoming, safe atmosphere where people can enjoy time with family and friends the moment they walk through our doors.   Cracker Barrel (@CrackerBarrel) June 8, 2023

We take no pleasure in reporting that @CrackerBarrel has fallen.



A once family friendly establishment has caved to the mob. pic.twitter.com/IM0p1NT20S  Texas Family Project (@FamilyProjectTX) June 8, 2023

Here is some of the reaction:

New Bud Light just dropped pic.twitter.com/OSzJcq0OlK  Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) June 9, 2023

LMAO hold upso Pat Robertson dies, Trump gets indicted and Cracker Barrel goes "woke".The MAGAs must be losing their shit right now  pic.twitter.com/ursAPVoOcF  Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) June 9, 2023

Cut this crap out @CrackerBarrel the money you will lose from your actual customer base that is tired of this shit is greater than the miniscule amount you make when gay people take their grandparents to cracker barrel to awkwardly avoid the subject of what's wrong with em. pic.twitter.com/2A7Fo0cAyZ   Aristophanes  (@Aristos_Revenge) June 9, 2023

Cracker Barrel, why do you hate your patrons? How did you come to despise your consumer base? You have lost your mind if you think the thousands of people who drive out of their way to eat your middling food want this.



Never again. No more bus loads for you. pic.twitter.com/Kt2DwJabYn  Shelby Foote Appreciator (@NoJesuitTricks) June 9, 2023

Gonna put my Mickey Mouse ears on, grab a 12 pack of @BudLight from @Target and then head over to @CrackerBarrel for some country fried steak. https://t.co/wvHLbzR5Ni  Peter Schorsch (@PeterSchorschFL) June 9, 2023

Today:

-Pat Robertson has died

-Supreme Court has upheld voting rights for Black voters in Alabama

-Trump is indicted in Miami

-Cracker Barrel has fallen  Ashton Pittman  (@ashtonpittman) June 9, 2023

Mark Heim is a reporter for The Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Mark_Heim. He can be heard on The Opening Kickoff on WNSP-FM 105.5 FM in Mobile or on the free Sound of Mobile App from 6 to 9 a.m. daily.
PHOENIX (AP)  Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs is urging President Joe Biden to use the Antiquities Act to designate the tribally proposed Baaj Nwaavjo Itah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument.

In a letter dated May 30, Hobbs told Biden that she is committed to preserving cultural and natural treasures throughout Arizona and said the Grand Canyon is a culturally sacred place stewarded by Indigenous Peoples for centuries.

Hobbs wrote that in addition to tribal voices, her office has heard from people across the political spectrum including sporting groups, faith leaders, outdoor recreation businesses, conservation groups and others from a broad array of interests that support this monument designation.

Hobbs also said she can think of no better use of the Antiquities Act than to protect our states namesake treasure.

She said the Arizona Game and Fish Department will retain its existing authority related to the management, control and regulation of fish and wildlife so that this authority is clearly delineated prior to the years-long formation of a monument management plan.
A 12-year-old girl who was pulled unresponsive from a pool at an east Birmingham home on Sunday has died, according to the Jefferson County Coroners Office.

Truth Archie died at Childrens of Alabama Thursday at 10:45 a.m.

Truth was rushed to the hospital Sunday about 3 p.m. from a home on Charles Court in the Roebuck area.

Fire medics began CPR on the scene. Truth was in critical condition at the time of transport.

BFRS Battalion Chief Jack Hickes on Sunday said the incident happened in an above-ground pool at a private home.

An examination will be performed today to assist with determining the cause and manner of death, the coroners office said.
For criminal justice reform advocates, the 2023 session of the Alabama Legislature was a mixed bag.

Groups managed to push through a bill limiting courts ability to suspend drivers licenses for missed payments or court dates. Other bills they opposed failed to pass.

But few other priority measures gained traction in a year when the Legislature looked to enact laws that either created new penalties or made punishments under existing laws more severe.

More from Alabama Reflector

What we are getting a lot of times is that individual members may have something happen in their district, or happen to someone they know or love, and they want to bring a law that is going to be universal instead of something that is going to be specific to their area, said Senate Minority Leader Bobby Singleton, D-Greensboro.

Heres a look at eight such bills the legislature considered this session:

GOOD TIME INCENTIVE

Among them was SB 1, sponsored by Sen. April Weaver, R- Brierfield, that reduced the amount of corrective incentive time, or good time, that inmates could receive for good behavior while incarcerated.

Corrections assign good time credit to inmates based on the class they are in. Weavers bill reduced good time incentives for those at the highest level from 75 days for every 30 days of good behavior to 30 days. The next lowest class went from 40 days of good time to 15 days and from 20 days to five days for those in the third class.

The bill was a response to the death of Bibb County Deputy Sheriff Brad Johnson, who was shot while in pursuit of a motor vehicle. Austin Patrick Hall, charged in Johnsons death, had been released early from the Alabama Department of Corrections, despite a previous attempt to escape while incarcerated that should have canceled any good time points he accumulated.

I thought that was a very important thing for us lawmakers to wrap our minds around on these offenders who are being sentenced in our court system, and there is a certain level of expectations by the victim that their offender is going to serve that time in prison, Rep. Russell Bedsole, R-Alabaster, who carried the bill in the House. But what we were finding is that was drastically cut because of the good time statute.

Critics said Halls release was about an administrative error, not good time itself, and said cutting good time would further hurt a system struggling with violence and overcrowding.

There are already so few individuals who qualify for good time, said Alison Mollman, senior counsel for the ACLU of Alabama. To see our legislature step in and cut that even more, to actually see people, for basic disciplinary reasons, have years of their gain time taken away from them, is going to exacerbate our overcrowding crisis, and is going to perpetuate this crisis at the Alabama Department of Corrections.

FENTANYL TRAFFICKING

HB 1, sponsored by Rep. Matt Simpson, R-Daphne, imposed mandatory minimum sentences for trafficking fentanyl. Those found guilty of distributing between 2.2 pounds and 100 pounds would face at least 3 years in prison and a $50,000 fine.

Those who distribute less than 500 pounds of fentanyl will be sentenced to at least five years in prison, 1,000 pounds of fentanyl will be sentenced to 15 years in prison and those who sell at least 1,000 pounds of fentanyl will serve life in prison.

We have addressed the issue of fentanyl, which is a major issue in our state, Simpson said when describing his bill along with others. We have gone at it with the sense of attacking the dealer, the trafficker, the person who is providing the drugs and bringing them into our community and not the user.

CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE PENALTIES

SB 143, sponsored by Sen. Will Barfoot, R-Pike Road, will enhance penalties for crimes committed by members of criminal enterprises, such as gangs. Under the bill, those convicted of Class A felony and identified as a member of a criminal enterprise, will serve at least 25 years in prison. Those convicted of a Class B felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison, would be sentenced for a Class A felony, with punishments of up to 99 years or life in prison and a $60,000 fine.

People who have been convicted of a Class C felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $15,000 fine, will serve the same penalty as someone who serves a Class B felony.

The bill also enhances penalties for members of criminal enterprises using firearms while committing a crime. Possession of a firearm would result in five years in prison. Brandishing a firearm is punishable with at least seven years in prison. Firing a weapon, or possessing a short-barreled shotgun or rifle, will get a person 10 years in prison. Using a machine gun amounts to 30 years in prison. The sentences will also be consecutive and without reductions.

Critics are concerned about the impact the longer sentences will have on the criminal justice system, especially for the health and safety of not only those who are serving time in prisons, but also the corrections officers overseeing them in the facilities.

I think there were laws passed that were quite counterproductive for some of the problems we face in Alabama right now, especially our overcrowded and dangerous prisons, said Russell Gold, an associate professor of law at the University of Alabama. Laws that make that problem worse are quite misguided.

PAROLE BOARD GUIDELINES

Bills to reform the criminal justice system faced long odds in a year when the Legislature was calling for stiffer penalties for those who violated the law. HB 16, sponsored by Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, would have established a Criminal Justice Policy Development Council to create guidelines for the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles when deciding whether to grant inmates parole.

Currently, the Board has discretion for ignoring recommendations and risk assessments when they deny parole. Critics have said that has contributed to parole grants falling to a trickle, which they say exacerbates the prison overcrowding crisis.

The bill would have required the board to incorporate the councils guidelines into its decisions. It would have also given inmates the opportunity to appeal the Boards decision to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals.

Members of the House Judiciary Committee voted to send the bill to a subcommittee, where it died.

We know that one in four people who are denied parole in Alabama are at work release facilities, Mollman said. And it is our position that if people are safe enough to work in the communities, they are safe enough to return to their families.

HABITUAL OFFENDER ACT REFORM

HB 229, also sponsored by England, passed the House but failed to come to a vote in the Senate. The legislation involved sentencing reform that would have offered those sentenced under the states Habitual Offender Felony Act, to have their cases reviewed.

The bill was changed as it made its way through the legislature and eventually passed the House chamber. It would have allowed a judge to review the cases of those who committed a crime before May 2000 that did not result in a physical injury to another person.

Alabama passed the Habitual Offender Felony Act in 1977, enhancing penalties for people who have been convicted of felonies in the past. The law has been a factor in the states prison overcrowding crisis.

Many lawmakers seem perfectly fine ignoring the powder-keg conditions across the prison system and the upcoming federal trial, said Carla Crowder, executive director of Alabama Appleseed. Throughout the session we heard from family members whose sons were terrorized in state custody. We watched as overdose and homicide deaths continued in a prison system with the highest death rates in the country. Entire dorms have no guards and incarcerated people are literally sleeping on sidewalks outside the cell blocks. This is not a system that can safely manage an increase in population or be trusted to rehabilitate people. But that hard truth was all but ignored by lawmakers.

UNANIMOUS DEATH SENTENCE VERDICTS

England also proposed HB 14, which would require unanimous jury verdicts to impose the death penalty. Currently, 10 of 12 jurors must vote to put someone to death.

It also offers people who are on death row to be resentenced if the trial judge overruled the jurys verdict for life in prison. The Legislature in 2017 ended the ability of judges to impose the death penalty over a jurys opposition. But the change was not made retroactive.

That has been a longtime goal of Alabama Arise, to reform the death penalty, said Mike Nicholson, a policy analyst with Alabama Arise. Legislation, typically that reforms the death penalty, is not even brought up in committee, so having that bill that would have required unanimous jury verdicts, as well as making judicial override retroactive, to have that brought up in committee is a big step for that legislation.

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the bill but never took a vote on the measure.

There were some victories for advocates.

DRIVERS LICENSE BILL

Prior to the drivers license bill becoming law, people could have their drivers licenses suspended for missing a single court appearance or fine or fee payment.

SB 154, sponsored by Barfoot, allows someone to continue driving as long as the person does not miss more than one court appearance or two payments on their fines and fees.

Alabama Appleseed had advocated strongly for this legislation, claiming that it would help lower-income individuals who had been incarcerated.

We had significant opposition last year on drivers license reform, but through persistence, compromise, and the determination of our bill sponsors we passed major economic justice reform which was also common-sense legislation, Crowder said.

ABSENTEE BALLOTS

Advocates also saw the failure of HB 209, sponsored by Rep. Jamie Kiel, R-Russellville, as a victory. The legislation would have criminalized some individuals and organizations for assisting people with their absentee ballots.

The bill would have made it a Class C felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, to accept money for completing a persons ballot. Paying someone to assist with a ballot would have been a Class B felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Helping someone complete a ballot is a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail. The bill did include exceptions in certain cases.

That was thinly veiled voter suppression, said Muaath Al-Khattab, a community organizer with the Montgomery chapter of Faith in Action Alabama.
Casey Cole White, in a jailhouse interview last December, claimed that he killed a woman and a baby while he and Vicky White were on the run last year from authorities.

NewsNation is reporting White made the admission during a phone interview, which authorities do not believe.

While speaking with NewsNation National Correspondent Brian Entin, Casey White made the admission, saying the murder happened while he and Vicky White were staying in an Evansville, Ind. motel.

I got a woman and a baby girl buried up in Evansville, Indiana, White said.

White was sketchy on details, saying he would only talk to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the alleged crime.

There is a dead body up there that aint been buried yet, he said. He made the admission, he said, because he had to get it off my chest and do the right thing.

Police in Evansville, Ind., however, say there are no missing person cases matching what White says. Authorities also pointed to false confessions in Casey Whites past. Whites attorneys say they White is lying in an effort to be transferred out of prison.

I think that is highly unlikely, Robert Tuten, one of the attorneys representing White, said.

On Thursday, moments before his sentencing, White told an Alabama court that he had Vicky White, just wanted a new life together because she knew the truth. I can handle the truth because I know who I am. I chose this road. Its cost me my life and freedom.

White, 39, had been charged with murder in the May 9, 2022 death of Vicky White, the Lauderdale County jail officer who walked out with Casey White on April 29, 2022.

Vicky White, who was not related to Casey, took her own life with a gunshot to the head in Evansville, Ind.

Police were closing in on them following an 11-day manhunt, after Vicky helped Casey escape from the Lauderdale County Jail. Casey White, who reportedly was also injured by Vickys fatal shot, faced murder charges because Vicky Whites death occurred during the commission of a felony.

Casey White also faces a capital murder trial set for Aug. 14 for the 2015 slaying of Connie Ridgeway in Rogersville. He was arrested after confessing to the crime by letter.

When he escaped from jail, White was being held for the trial, then just weeks away. That trial was delayed in the aftermath of the escape and White retaining a new team of attorneys.

White is currently serving a 75-year sentence for convictions stemming from an array of 2015 charges, including attempted murder.
The federal government last month agreed to call a halt to a civil rights investigation on the condition that Alabama finally do something about wastewater pooling in yards in rural Lowndes County.

The investigation targeted the Alabama Department of Public Health. And it marked the first-ever civil rights settlement between the feds and a state over environmental justice, and probably the first time a state health department has ever been forced to provide sewer access for people who cant afford it on their own.

Heres the full story: https://www.al.com/news/2023/06/alabama-black-belt-becomes-environmental-justice-test-case-is-sanitation-a-civil-right.html

The precedent-setting agreement will likely have lasting impacts in Alabama and across the country, as the government declares that not providing sanitation for impoverished, minority communities is a violation of their civil rights.

Here are seven takeaways from we know so far:

1. A long-standing problem will finally be addressed

Perhaps first and foremost, thousands of Lowndes County residents will escape an endless cycle of sewage overflows and potential health hazards. Many homes in Lowndes are connected to septic tanks or sewer systems that dont work, in part due to the geology in the area, and some resort to straight piping waste away from their homes. These conditions have caused generations of Lowndes residents to move away, tanked property values in the area and hampered any kind of economic development in the area between Selma and Montgomery.

2. Feds say Alabama engaged in a consistent pattern of inaction and/or neglect

The U.S. Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services said their investigation showed that Alabama had engaged in a consistent pattern of inaction and/or neglect concerning the health risks associated with raw sewage, in Lowndes County. The state had made efforts in the past to address wastewater issues in Lowndes County, but the federal departments determined it wasnt enough.

3. Alabama agreement could set precedent

Lowndes County has become a national poster child for poor sanitation conditions, at one point earning a visit from a United Nations delegation. But its hardly the only place that struggles with poor sanitation. Will Alabama be forced to clean up sewage problems in other rural counties? Will other states find themselves in the crosshairs of discrimination complaints over sanitation issues in remote communities?

This is the first time the federal government has done this, which is significant, said Melanie Fontes Rainer, director of the Office of Human Rights for the Department of Health and Human Services. And this is not the last.

4. How will Alabama fix it? Questions remain

Over the next six months, ADPH will conduct detailed surveys of Lowndes County to figure out exactly how many homes have failing sewage systems and how best to fix them. Some may be connected to nearby sewer systems, some may get new septic systems, or join hybrid systems being developed by researchers from the University of Alabama, Auburn University and the University of South Alabama. Until those surveys come back, its nearly impossible to estimate how difficult this project will be and how much it might cost.

5. Lowndes residents need to opt in

The program is mandatory, but ADPH cant install anything on private property without the owners consent. Lowndes residents will have to participate in ADPH surveys to let the department know what their needs are and theyll have to cooperate as the system is installed.

6. Mostly federal money, but nothing is free

The federal agencies say Alabama should seek federal infrastructure funding. But with the price tag still undetermined, its impossible to tell whether federal funding would be enough, or if Alabama would have to seek out funding from elsewhere, or pay for some of the projects with state money. Even if federal funding is enough to cover the Lowndes project, it would likely come at the expense of other parts of the state. Alabama has already been given more than $1 billion in infrastructure funding to work on water and sewer projects across the state, but its had more than $3 billion in applications for funding from local water systems.

7. Whats next? Sewer lines arent the only environmental justice issue

Environmental justice isnt limited to sewage treatment and even that isnt limited to Lowndes. Other parts of the Black Belt, like Uniontown in Perry County, also have issues with wastewater treatment and with businesses like a cheese processing plant, a catfish processing plant and one of the states largest landfills.

The 35th Ave Superfund site in Birmingham could clearly be seen as neglect and inaction, as residents have had to live in the shadows of heavily polluting industrial facilities for decades. And large landfills have also been a target of complaint, as they tend to operate near poor, majority Black communities in rural Alabama.
Joran van der Sloot pleaded not guilty this morning in a Birmingham federal courtroom on charges he tried to extort the mother of missing Mountain Brook teen Natalee Holloway.

Also in the courtroom were Natalees parents, Beth and Dave Holloway, and her brother, Matt.

Beth Holloway remained poised and showed no emotion as she looked at van der Sloot during the proceedings.

Beth Holloway declined to comment after the hearing, but thanked reporters for being there and their continued support. In a written statement she said, Now 18 years later, the wheels of justice have finally begun for our family and we are getting our long-awaited day in court.

Joran van der Sloots not guilty plea is not disheartening to us,' the statement read, it simply means his legal team is going to try to make the state prove the case.

We are confident the U.S. Attorneys Office in Birmingham will succeed in getting a conviction.

I am confident that today was an important step toward accountability and hopefully, justice, Natalees father, Dave Holloway said in a statement. I am trusting that this prosecution will lead us to the truth about Natalee.

Van der Sloot was brought into court wearing the same jeans and white t-shirt he wore as when he was brought to Birmingham Thursday. He was handcuffed.

Joran van der Sloot's booking photo, taken at the Shelby County Jail.

When he was offered a translator, van der Sloot said his English was pretty perfect and he did not need one.

Van der Sloot was advised of the charges and pleaded not guilty.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Gray Borden had informed van der Sloot and his federal public defenders, Kevin Butler and James Gibson, that he would only accept a plea of not guilty at Fridays hearing and should van der Sloot decide he wanted to plead guilty, that would be done at a later date.

The case is being prosecuted by Lloyd Peeples, chief of the U.S. Attorneys Criminal Division, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Catherine Crosby.

Van der Sloot is charged with wire fraud and extortion, and was advised of his rights. He responded, yes sir to the judge. A not guilty plea was entered on his behalf.

The judge this morning issued a protective order regarding potential evidence containing sensitive information such as addresses and bank account numbers.

Prosecutors had asked for the order because documents that need to be filed in the case have personal identifying information like names, addresses, and bank account numbers.

While the government is providing those documents to van der Sloots lawyers, the volume and form of documents bearing this sensitive information makes it impractical to manually redact each document, prosecutors said in a filing.

The judge ordered that van der Sloots team only use the information necessary for their case and not share the information with anyone.

Those documents will be redacted before being filed in public court records.

The hearing lasted about 3 minutes and the only words heard from van der Sloot were yes, sir when advised about his rights and the moment when he said an interpreter wasnt necessary.

Van der Sloot also waived his right to a detention hearing. He will be custody pending his trial.

He is currently being held at the Shelby County Jail.

The courtroom was crowed with onlookers, including Natalees best friend from Mountain Brook High School, Claire Fierman.

Van der Sloot was extradited on Thursday from Peru, where he is serving 28 years for the 2010 murder of college student Stephany Flores, to Alabama.

See also: The key figures in Joran van der Sloot extortion case

The 35-year-old was whisked from a Birmingham airport to the Hoover City Jail. After Fridays hearing, he was transferred to the Shelby County Jail.

Although van der Sloot has long been suspected in the disappearance and death of the Mountain Brook High School graduate visiting Aruba in 2005, he has never been charged in connection to her death.

However, federal authorities in Alabama contend that in 2010 van der Sloot exploited the fear of Holloways mother, Beth, that she would never find her daughters body or know what happened to her unless she paid him $250,000.

Outside the courthouse now, waiting to see if any of the lawyers will speak. Natalees family exited the courthouse from the back without speaking to reporters. pic.twitter.com/bnosu0P2Ey  Ivana Hrynkiw Shatara (@IvanaSuzette) June 9, 2023

For an initial payment of $25,000, he would take the Holloway representative to the location of Natalees body. Once the body was recovered and confirmed to be Natalee, he said, he would then collect the remaining $225,000.

Charged with extortion, an affidavit said Natalee Holloway died after Joran van der Sloot threw her to the ground when she attempted to stop him from leaving her.

See also: A timeline of the Natalee Holloway case

The affidavit says that his late father, Paulus van der Sloot, then helped him dispose of her body.

#unsolved #missingperson #timeline  10 minutes technostylish and cool atmosphere(1391300) - Kazamasata @al.comnews Nearly two decades have passed since Natalee Holloway, an American teenager, disappeared while on a graduation trip to Aruba. Joran van der Sloot, the main suspect in her case, is currently in Peru, serving time for murdering a young woman, Stephany Flores Ramirez, back in 2010. It was recently announced that Joran will be extradited to the United States to face charges in relation to Natalee's case. Despite maintaining his innocence, no one has been brought to trial or currently faces charges in Natalee's death, and her whereabouts remain unknown to this day. Watch this video and learn about the complex timeline surrounding the unsolved case of Natalee Holloway. Produced by: Amanda Khorramabadi #nataleeholloway

Van der Sloot told a representative for Beth Holloway that his father buried her remains in the gravel under the foundation of the single-story house.

He later admitted to the representative that he lied about the location of Natalees remains.

I am hopeful some small semblance of justice will finally be realized may finally be realized, even though no act of justice will heal the pain weve endured, a statement from Beth Holloway on Thursday read.

For 18 years, I have lived with the unbearable pain of Natalees loss. Each day has been filled with unanswered questions and a longing for justice that has eluded us at every turn, Holloway said.

At the end of this, he has to be returned to Peru, Van der Sloots attorney in Peru, Maximo Altez told The Associated Press. He will spend at most two years in the United States.
A Maryland funeral home owner is accused of killing a pallbearer at a funeral service for a child this week.

The Prince Georges County Police Department claims Wilson Chavis gunned down a rival funeral service operator Tuesday afternoon. The victim, 30-year-old Ronald Steven Banks of Washington, D.C., was helping carry the casket of a 10-year-old girl when he was killed.

Cops said Chavis confronted Banks and another person while the burial was getting underway at Washington National Cemetery.

Those individuals are affiliated with a second funeral service company with which Chavis has a long-standing business dispute, police claimed.

The alleged shooters company was handling the service. Several people attending the funeral reportedly became upset with Chavis when he addressed his rivals. Thats when cops say he killed Banks and fired a second shot grazing a female attendee. The suspect fled in his car, but was quickly apprehended by authorities.

Im so traumatized that this happened at my daughters burial site, grieving mother Antionette Belk told NBC News4. Its trauma after trauma.

Belk claims Chavis yelled I own this body and spat on a preacher before opening fire. The preacher was the dead childs uncle. According to Belk, her family had nothing to do with the parties involved in the conflict at her daughters funeral service.

News4 reports the girl was killed last month when a bullet hit her familys car while they were returning from a Mothers Day celebration in Washington D.C. Police believe the killing was unintentional.

Charges against Chavis include first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder.

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2023 New York Daily News. Visit at nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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Congressional districting

If Congresswoman Terri Sewell has her way, The United State Supreme Courts decision Thursday to order Alabama to redraw its congressional districts would mean a new map for the 2024 elections.

Sewell, a Birmingham Democrat, has long been the states only Democratic member in the House of Representatives, and she represents the states only majority-black district.

The Supreme Court, with John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joining the more liberal justices, affirmed a lower courts ruling that Alabamas Congressional District, as drawn after the 2020 Census, most likely violate the Voting Rights Act and that there should be a second district that is majority or near-majority Black.

It doesnt require deep analysis to point out that means Alabama have an additional seat in the House that might be in play for the Democrats. With perhaps both the districts at least somewhat less of a slam dunk than the current Alabama 7, which is Sewells district.

She said shes ready for it to get done.

It is about making sure that every Americans voice in this democracy is heard, she said.

Small slip in reading scores

This spring, Alabamas second and third graders tested a little lower in reading than they did a year ago, reports AL.coms Trisha Powell Crain.

Seventy six percent of third-graders and 78 percent of sixth graders showed they were reading up to their grade level. Thats two percentage points lower for each.

Remember, these standards were adopted two years ago and are tougher than they were before. Challenges to getting the students ready this year included new textbooks that werent available at the beginning of the school year and a class of third-graders whose educational careers began with COVID-19 taking out the last part of their kindergarten year and making a mess of their first-grade year.

State superintendent Eric Mackey: This is a true accounting of where we are. But we want it to be a lot better.

Iraq war heros name

Army Chief Warrant Officer 4 Keith Yoakum had plans to retire from the Army near Fort Novosel (formerly Fort Rucker), Alabama.

He had bought 51 acres, and his wife and children were settling in and waiting for him, and he had talked with his twin brother, Kevin, about his moving there and going into an aviation business with him.

But in 2007 Yoakum was on deployment in Iraq, flying an Apache helicopter on patrol with 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, when he took enemy groundfire. The brigade said that, with other aircraft to protect, Yoakum and fellow pilot Jason DeFrenn chose to stay in the fight until their Apache crashed and killed both of them.

Now, Stars and Stripes reports that the brigade has renamed its airfield to honor the two pilots.

The Yoakum-DeFrenn Army Heliport opened last month at Fort Cavazos (formerly Fort Hood) in Texas.

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This photo shows a special screening of documentary film "Dodomu" at the opening event of the UNHCR Online Film Festival: Hope Away From Home at a hotel in Seoul, June 9. Yonhap



The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Korea on Friday kicked off an online film festival showcasing documentary films themed on the lives of displaced refugees in various countries.



The UNHCR Online Film Festival: Hope Away From Home presents seven documentary works via the festival website (unhcrkoreafilms.com), available for free viewing during its two-week run until June 23.



The festival aims to share with audiences the experiences of people forced to flee their homes as they strive to rebuild lives in foreign places. It also aims to shed light on the messages of hope that arise along their journey to find their new homes.



The works include "Dodomu," directed by Neil George, which follows three refugees from Ukraine as they navigate the challenges of starting anew in Poland after Russia's aggression into their homeland. Dodomu means "home" or "homeward bound" in Ukrainian.



"Belonging," directed by Paul Wu, was filmed in Korea and Sweden, and looks at what belonging means especially to those who have been displaced in some way. "Writing to Reach You" is a short documentary exploring the lives of four refugees trying to find new lives in Korea.



Six of the seven works available for viewing features the participation of South Korean actor Jung Woo-sung, a longtime goodwill ambassador of UNHCR.



To mark the opening of the festival, UNHCR Korea held an offline screening of "Dodomu" in Seoul.



"We wanted to share the stories of many individuals who had to leave their hometowns for various reasons through the language of film. These individuals face inevitable challenges as they build new lives in unfamiliar places," UNHCR Korea Representative Jun Hai-yung said.



Kang Joo-yeon, director-general for international organizations at Seoul's foreign ministry, said in her congratulatory remarks that Korea "promises to actively participate in international efforts to address refugee issues" as it serves as a nonpermanent member of the United Nations Security Council starting next year. (Yonhap)


Gov. Kay Ivey earlier this week signed into law Senate Bill 284, which establishes a dam safety program for the State of Alabama.

Under the new law dam owners who choose to opt into the program will be required to have their dam inspected every two years by a licensed civil engineer. The engineer is then required to certify that the inspection has been completed to the local Emergency Management Agency (EMA) and deliver a record of the inspection to the dams owner.

As part of the regular inspections the engineer must also assign each dam a hazard designation which can include rankings of low, significant, or high, depending on the extent of damage that would be caused by a dams failure according to the Association of State Dam Safety.

Participating owners must also notify their local EMA of any new dam construction or enlargement.

Dam owners who choose to elect in and own significant or high-hazard dams or reservoirs are also responsible for developing an emergency action plan with the inspecting engineer and the director of the emergency management organization for the county or municipality in which the dam or reservoir is located according to the bills text. The plan would go into effect if the dam should fail in any way.
A former Alabama police chief pleaded guilty Thursday to a lesser charge in the federal case against him stemming from the kneeing of a suspect.

John Tyler Norris, the former chief of police for the city of Citronelle, pleaded guilty to deprivation of rights under color of law, and in doing so admitted that he kneed the suspect twice while the suspect was handcuffed and cooperating.

Norris was initially facing up to 10 years in federal prison, but under the plea agreement he reached with prosecutors he only faces up to a year in a federal lockup, according to a copy of the deal filed with the court.

Prosecutors tried Norris twice but both trials ended in hung juries. Norris indicated Wednesday he would plead guilty to a lesser charge, avoiding a third trial.

According to the statement of fact filed along with the plea deal, Norris admitting to kneeing the suspect, only identified as I.M., in the abdomen on June 30, 2021 without justification while he was handcuffed and cooperative.

The former chief also intentionally damaged the suspects vehicle, according to the statement of fact.

A Citronelle officer tried to conduct a traffic stop when the suspect ignored police lights and sirens and drove at high speeds.

The suspect stopped his vehicle in an empty parking lot, where he rolled down his window and placed his head and hands outside the window.

He remained compliant and told the officers that he was unarmed, the statement of fact stated.

As officers positioned their patrol vehicles to block the exit to the parking lot, Norris drove his vehicle and struck the drivers side door of I.M.s car, damaging it and preventing the officers from removing I.M. from the drivers side of his vehicle.
A woman living was convicted by a federal jury in Montgomery on arson and other charges for setting fire to the citys historic First Baptist Church two years ago, prosecutors said Thursday.

Xiaoqin Yan, a 29-year-old Chinese national, was also convicted of possession of a firearm by an illegal alien, said Sandra J. Stewart, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama.

Montgomery firefighters were able to extinguish the Sept. 30, 2021 blaze, but not before the church sustained significant damage, prosecutors said.

According to court records, Yan is a citizen of China who was in the U.S. on a student visa. Her visa had been revoked after arrest on Oct. 4, 2021.

Surveillance videos taken from inside the church the day before the fire showed a woman carrying duffel bags and a plastic bag into the church during its Wednesday night service, prosecutors said.

Just after 2 a.m. on the day of the fire, the video showed the same woman removing silver containers from one of the bags and igniting multiple fires around the building.

Investigators identified a vehicle used by the suspect and obtained a tag number linking the vehicle to Yan, prosecutors said.

Law enforcement officers also learned that First Baptist Church employees encountered someone matching Yans description on the church campus on multiple occasions before the fire was set. In one encounter, Yan was escorted off the church property due to her odd behavior.

When Yan was arrested at a Montgomery home, agents found duffel bags identical to the ones seen in the churchs surveillance videos as well as clothing matching the type worn by the suspect.

Gas containers, starter logs and lighters were also found in the house along with a handgun.

Yan was in the United States illegally due to overstaying her non-immigrant visa, meaning she could not lawfully possess a firearm, prosecutors said.

She faces up to 20 years in prison when she is sentenced.
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This is an opinion column.

Evan Milligan was in church when his phone began to buzz. In church in Berlin, among a group visiting and studying an area that was once home to one of the regions largest Jewish communities. Its much, much smaller now, Milligan says, because of the Holocaust.

They were inside Marienkirche (St. Marys Church). Dr. Martin Luther King famously preached there on September 13, 1964, after crossing Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall with only a credit card for identification.

King had been invited to Berlin by Willie Brandt, mayor of West Berlin, to commemorate a cultural festival. King described the city as a symbol of the divisions of men on the face of the earth, yet in the pulpit said: We are all one in Christ Jesus, and that faith overcomes all man-made barriers.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr at the Soviet Sector border of the Berlin Wall in Bernauer Strasse, Berlin, Germany, September 12, 1964. Werner Steltzer, director of the Berlin Information Center is indicating points of interest. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)Getty Images

Milligan, 42, is executive director of Alabama Forward, the statewide civic engagement network at the center of the legal battle against the states gerrymandered congressional districts, which pooled Black voters largely into one district. African Americans comprise 27 percent of the states population, yet byzantine district lines left them represented by only 14 percent of Alabamas seven members of the U.S. Congress.

He is the named plaintiff in the caseAllen (Secretary of State Wes Allen) v. Milliganthat rose to the U.S. Supreme Court, which stunningly ruled this week that Alabama had indeed diluted Black voting power in violation of the U.S. Constitution. The 5-4 decision, conservatives Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the courts three liberal justices, fortified provisions of the Voting Rights of 1965, which has long been under attack.

Of all the places to receive this news, Milligan shared with me Thursday from Berlin. I broke down in tears thinking about my dad.

For Evan, who was born in Houston and moved to Alabama as a young child, the now-historic case bears the name, too, of Bill Milligan, who died in 2021, just as his son was getting in the groove with redistricting coalition work.

He was the one everyone called Milligan in segregated Houston, Evan said. I had hoped for a victory in the case that bears his name and our familys name. It connects his story, symbolically and emotionally, to the people doing the work and the people the case will empower.

FILE - Evan Milligan, center, plaintiff in Merrill v. Milligan, an Alabama redistricting case that could have far-reaching effects on minority voting power across the United States, speaks with reporters following oral arguments at the Supreme Court in Washington, Oct. 4, 2022. Standing behind Milligan are Milligan's counsel Deuel Ross, from left, Letetia Jackson, Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., and Janai Nelson, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. A U.S. Supreme Court decision a decade ago that tossed out the heart of the Voting Rights Act continues to reverberate across the country. Republican-led states continue to pass voting restrictions that, in several cases, would have been subject to federal review had the court left the provision intact. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)AP

Evan, for the first five years of his life, visited his maternal great-grandparents in Montgomery every summer. Once they grew older and needed care, Bill and Clair moved to Alabama, first to Birmingham then to Montgomery when their son was ready for first grade.

Even didnt know the name of what he wanted to do when he grew up. Home was filled with Black historyart, artifacts, and books. Evan was a fantasy and sci-fi fan, and he devoured the Golden Legacy collection of Black history comics, illustrated biographies of iconic Black men and women, including Robert Smalls, Matthew Henson, Harriet Tubman, and Alexander Dumas.

I didnt know the word for it, I just longed to be part of their storyline, he said. I wanted to do work that helped my people on a larger scale. What was Malcolm Xs job? I didnt know. As I got older I saw how my parents moved within the community and that I lived around people like [Malcom X]not one person, but a network, that was about the people.

After graduating from Birmingham Southern College and earning a degree and the New York School of Law, Milligan discovered the career path illustrated in the comic storylines of his youth: social justice. He joined the Equal Justice Initiative before taking the helm at Alabama Forward.

Allen v Milligan was not the first case in which he was involved to reach the nations highest court. He was at EJI in 2010 when the Supreme Court ruled in Sullivan (an EFI client) v. Florida and the accompanying case Graham v. Florida, making it unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to life in prison without parole for non-homicides. Two years later, EJI won a similar case in Miller v. Alabama, an accompanying case to Jackson v. Hobbs, when SCOTUS ruled it unconstitutional to sentence juveniles convicted of homicides to life without parole.

The rulings led to the freeing of many individuals across many states. I personally witnessed 15 to 20 clients coming home because of those rulings, Milligan said. Overwhelmingly, the majority were Black men.

Milligan was approached by the coalition to serve as a lead plaintiff in the redistricting case after Gov. Kay Ivey signed the bill in November 2021 that created new maps for congressional districts, the state House of Representatives, and the Board of Education.

He was reluctant. I was most accustomed to playing in the background so I couldnt see inserting myself into the storyline, he said. He was persuaded to consider the role because his experience in numerous redistricting capacities would be invaluable.

They wanted the named plaintiff to be someone they leaned on for testimony, he said. Id been doing this work in some fashion for a long timeId worked in all 67 counties, prisons, many childcare centers, and so many nooks and cranniescombined with how I grew up, they told me those things were valued.

I said, Oh. Okay.

RELATED: Historic SCOTUS redistricting ruling proves a Black womans voice should never be misjudged

Bill Milligan finished college about the same time as his son; he was in his 60s. He was autodidactic, Evan said. Taught himself through books, collected African American art, albums; he was a deejay and self-taught in photography. He was good at all these things but not someone who considered himself of influence when it came to elections and politics.

He voted but considered himself as lower on the totem pole of the Black community.

Not long after his phone buzzed as he sat in the church where King spoke of faith overcoming man-made barriers, Evan began to embrace the barriers the coalition had overcome.

Thats something Im sensitive to, he said. Ive been thinking about how democracy and freedom are not perfect, but they can, at minimum, help us question and confront the rigid caste systems and other things that determine life options.

Milligan now stands among the names associated with the most vital Supreme Court cases in our history that confronted racism and preserved voting rights for Blacks and other minorities.

Stands as a name of influence.

More columns by Roy S. Johnson

Alabamas SCOTUS lawyer gets critical race history lesson, courtesy Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

Are we becoming the land of the bully and home of the nasty?

Through faith, former Birmingham news anchor finds unlikely new season as an actor

United Methodist member recalls effort in 1970s to merge Black and white congregations.

Instead of forcing kids to hear the Star-Spanged Banner, they should study it

Questioning parenting after youth violence is real, but does not absolve lawmaker inaction

Im a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and winner of the Edward R. Murrow prize for podcasts: Unjustifiable, co-hosted with John Archibald. My column appears in AL.com, as well as the Lede. Stay tuned for my upcoming limited series podcast Panther: Blueprint for Black Power, co-hosted with Eunice Elliott. Subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, The Barbershop, here. Reach me at rjohnson@al.com, follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj
The indictment of former President Donald Trump in connection with alleged mishandling of classified documents is the most sinister turn yet of President Bidens weaponization of the Justice Department, an Alabama congressman said Friday.

The weaponization of the Justice Department by Biden has taken its most sinister turn yet, tweeted Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Saks. The endless political persecution of Pres. Trump is un-American and must end now. The rule of law has no meaning anymore to radical Democrats. Those responsible must be held accountable.

The weaponization of the Justice Department by Biden has taken its most sinister turn yet. The endless political persecution of Pres. Trump is un-American and must end now. The rule of law has no meaning anymore to radical Democrats. Those responsible must be held accountable.  Mike Rogers (@RepMikeRogersAL) June 9, 2023

Rogers, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was the third member of Alabamas congressional delegation to release a statement in support of Trump after the former president posted on social media that he was being federally indicted.

Six members of Alabamas nine-member delegation to Washington released public statements, with five of them sticking by Trump. Three members -- Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala.; and Reps. Robert Aderholt, R-Haleyville and Jerry Carl, R-Mobile, did not yet issue public statements.

Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Hoover, echoed Rogers sentiment.

The federal indictment of former President Trump is another example of the weaponization of the Department of Justice against President Bidens political enemies, he said.

The federal indictment of former President Trump is another example of the weaponization of the Department of Justice against President Bidens political enemies.



Read my full statement below  pic.twitter.com/otY2bE5er7  Gary Palmer (@USRepGaryPalmer) June 9, 2023

Rep. Dale Strong, R-Monrovia, claimed the Justice Department was applying a double standard with how Trump is treated with regard to classified material compared to 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Biden.

Hillary Clinton was exonerated after mishandling classified information, and it is unlikely we see an indictment of our current President Joe Biden for the same thing, the congressman tweeted.

I believe in equal justice, but apparently some of this countrys top prosecutors do not, Strong said. This appears to be a weaponization of our nations justice system to influence elections.

(1/2): The DOJ is applying a double standard when it comes to the indictment of President Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton was exonerated after mishandling classified information, and it is unlikely we see an indictment of our current President Joe Biden for the same thing.  Dale W. Strong (@RepDaleStrong) June 9, 2023

Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, the lone Democrat in the delegation, said the charges against Trump are very serious and have grave implications for our national security.

Just like every American, he is entitled to due process. But lets be clear. No one -- not the even a former president -- is above the law, Sewell continued. We must let the legal process play out based on the facts and the evidence.

My statement on the indictment of former President Trump  pic.twitter.com/fAsWOvPJEp  Rep. Terri A. Sewell (@RepTerriSewell) June 9, 2023

Republicans have accused Biden of using the Justice Department to wound his former opponent and frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024.

But the decision to indict Trump in connection with the classified documents investigation did not come from Attorney General Merrick Garland but from Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Garland in November.

Based on recent developments, including the former Presidents announcement that he is a candidate for President in the next election, and the sitting Presidents stated intention to be a candidate as well, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint a special counsel, Garland said in a statement at the time.

Such an appointment underscores the Departments commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters, he continued. It also allows prosecutors and agents to continue their work expeditiously, and to make decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law.

On Thursday, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., and U.S. Rep. Barry Moore, R-Enterprise, accused the Justice Department of putting its thumb on the scale.

The same DOJ that labeled parents questioning school boards as domestic terrorists are now doing everything in their power to stop @realDonaldTrump from retaking the White House, Tuberville said, referring to a Republican talking point that has been labeled a false claim by factcheck.org.

The Biden Administration is the most corrupt in American history, the senator continued.

The same DOJ that labeled parents questioning school boards as "domestic terrorists" are now doing everything in their power to stop @realDonaldTrump from retaking the White House.



The Biden Administration is the most corrupt in American history.  Tommy Tuberville (@TTuberville) June 8, 2023

Rep. Barry Moore, R-Enterprise, used similar language to describe the Justice Department.

[Thursday nights] news is another alarming chapter in the complete weaponization of our government. Bidens corrupt Justice Department has gone after parents, Catholic parishioners, pro-life Christians, and now his top political opponent, he said. Americas political battles belong at the ballot box, not in the hands of Bidens DOJ.
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Protests over school recognition of Pride month turned violent for the second time over the past week in Southern California. Among these protesters are allegedly members of the white nationalist Proud Boys organization.

On Jun. 2, parents of Saticoy Elementary School gathered to protest the schools Gay Pride and Rainbow Day assembly. Outside of the Glendale Unified School District (GUSD) school board meeting in Glendale, Ca. on Tuesday Jun. 7, anti-LGBTQ groups protested the boards decision to recognize June as Pride month. In both cases, counter-protesters who showed up in support of LGBTQ recognition were faced with violence by anti-LGBTQ extremists.

While conservative lawmakers and activists nationwide seek to eradicate the education of gender, sexuality and race, conservative extremists are organizing on the ground to make their point very clear: LGBTQ history and events in schools are to be eliminated.

Tensions over Gay Pride and Rainbow Day assembly at Saticoy Elementary School

Prior to the incident at Saticoy, a neighborhood in Ventura, Ca., when the Gay Pride and Rainbow Day assembly was decided last month, unhappy parents of the school took it to Instagram to create an extremist Instagram account named Saticoy Elementary Parents to organize in protest of the assembly.

Their bio says: Keep your kids home and innocent on Jun. 2. Shortly after, an unknown suspect broke into the school on May 22 and burned a small Pride flag that belonged to a trans teacher.

The Pride assembly was meant to highlight diversity, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) told KTLA. Teachers had also planned to read Mary Hoffmans The Great Big Book of Families, a book that depicts gay parents and non-traditional families, in addition to adoption, foster parenting, and blended families.

The teacher, who is still at Saticoy Elementary but working at another location for safety reasons, told LAist that theyve been at the school for seven years in a 30-year-long teaching career. In the meantime, theyve been taking a temporary leave in order to keep their students safe, though they are unsure if they will go back.

The teacher shared their frustrations about anti-LGBTQ rhetoric theyve faces, especially regarding notions of pedophilia and groominga common talking point by anti-LGBTQ conservatives.

I didnt give 30 years to the district and all the years with two masters degrees and a bachelors degree, and an AA degree and everything else that I did to get here to prey on children, said the teacher.

In attendance that day was Vishal P. Singh, a Hollywood documentary filmmaker and independent journalist who focuses on social justice, police brutality and far-right extremism in Southern California. Singh, who is nonbinary, has had harassment campaigns made against them, including having their address and phone number doxed. Singh tells Reckon that at the protest, they were repeatedly shoved and hit by right-wing demonstrators, many of whom were calling me by name.

A right-wing demonstrator even grabbed my neck before LAPD moved in and pulled me to a safer location, they said. At least one pro-LGBTQ+ person was left unresponsive on the ground during that brawl and received a concussion. There were no arrests on either side and no injuries on the anti-LGBTQ+ side. The current anti-LGBTQ+ political climate feels like a powder keg and Im not sure when it will blow.

Singh believes that the Proud Boys, and other extremists pushback is more focused on base building, recruitment and radicalization as opposed to preventing an assembly or winning a local school board vote. A video on Twitter reveals that several people often seen with Proud Boys were present, one of them calling counter-protesters animals in the video. A few who were amongst the anti-Pride crowd were aggressive towards the police as well.

Over 100 parents rallied against the assembly, and they outnumbered those who were there in support. According to ABC7, the crowd remained mostly peaceful, but AIR7 HD was overhead when some individuals appeared to get into a heated argument. A large fight, including other real-time videos can be found in this Twitter thread.

Ray Jones, who goes by the name Serendipity in drag, was also on site at Saticoy last week. During the outburst, Jones, who is based in Sun Valley, witnessed an unhoused person beat nearly to death by right-wing extremists. They are currently fundraising for the victim, whose name is Percy.

Violence in Glendale over school boards vote to recognize Pride month

Jones also attended the gathering for the Glendale school board meeting to decide whether June will be recognized as Pride month. The board held a unanimous vote in favor of Pride month, which has happened for the past five years. This year, according to NBC Los Angeles, protestors whove taken issue with the LGBTQ curriculum and policies have been gathering outside of the board meetings for the past few weeks.

According to the LAPD, While most of the protest was peaceful, a small group of individuals engaged in behavior deemed unsafe and a risk to public safety. Videos online surged, showing far-right extremists including members of Proud Boys attacking LGBTQ parents. In one video, a far-right extremist pepper sprayed a religious clergy member who was there in support of LGBTQ families.

It isnt necessarily surprising, said Jones, who tells Reckon that the Los Angeles School District (LASD) and GUSD consistently vote pro-LGBTQ. What people forget is that this is a very loud minority. Because its a smaller community here, youre gonna hear these people a lot louder. Im just on a high level of alert, because you have that trauma in the back of your head, like, is that gonna happen again?

In a video, Proud Boys Bryce Henson, Louie Flores, Sylvie Araujo were identified alongside a Jan. 6 insurrectionist Andy Lai at the Glendale school board meeting. One footage shows clear tensions amongst a crowd, including Proud Boy Adam Kiefer. The situation eventually grew confrontational, leading to physical fights.

Despite police attempts to de-escalate the situation, at least three individuals were arrested for various charges, including unlawful use of pepper spray and willfully obstructing officers in the course of their duties, Glendale Police Department said in a statement.

As violence sparks over kids curriculum, what does it all mean?

According to Californias 2011 Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act, LGBTQ curricula are necessary. Also known as SB48, it amended its preexisting FAIR Actoriginally set to include women, Native Americans, Black Americans and even European Americansto include LGBTQ studies. It does, however, provide schools flexibility on how inclusion of LGBTQ curriculum is implemented. Regardless, real violence is happening as a result.

One thing thats really important to say is that this is [caused by] extremist lawmakers, says Dr. Eliza Byard. She is the former Executive Director of GLSEN and current co-founder and Senior Advisor of Campaign for Our Shared Future, a nonprofit for inclusive education.

Byard says that she works with Republicans who are equally horrified by whats happening. Extremist politicians are pursuing a political program of exclusion, targeting and harm, she said.

To her, the harm affects children, families who are experiencing the brunt of this and the quality of education.

It is clear the vast majority of parents want their children to get a good education, want them to learn empathy, and want them to adhere to basic American values of diversity and pluralism, Byard said. We cant allow the political agenda of a minority of extremists to undercut crucial benefits of every single familys child.

Ultimately, Singh suggests building networks and communities, but also to not be afraid of outnumbering far-rights in the streets to remind them that their prejudice is a minority in this country.

When we do that, we can close down ideological spaces of supremacist and prejudiced thinking, Byard said. You cant necessarily change the way an individual looks at an issue, but you can help build a world around a community that incentivizes love and empathy for each other.










English News China-Thailand railway under smooth construction

Alwihda Info | Par peoplesdaily - 8 Juin 2023



The alignment between the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025 and the BRI will further strengthen connectivity, lower logistics costs, and promote personnel exchanges, thus creating more opportunities for countries along the Belt and Road and promoting regional integration.

By Sun Guangyong, People's Daily The construction of the China-Thailand railway, a landmark project representing the high-quality construction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is currently under full swing.



Crossing the most densely populated areas in Thailand, the railway will inject new impetus into the development of the country's economy and transportation.



Upon completion, the railway is expected to boost economic development along its route. It will be connected to the China-Laos railway, forming a railroad artery that crosses the Indochina Peninsula and accelerating infrastructure connectivity in the region.



Pak Chong district in northeast Thailand's Nakhon Ratchasima province is an important gateway connecting central Thailand and the country's northeastern provinces. The Nakhon Ratchasima province is the terminal of the first phase project of the China-Thailand railway. Currently, the construction of the first phase project is in full swing.



At the construction site of the project, piers of viaducts are being erected along the direction of an existing track. To ensure the quality of the construction, Viloth, deputy head of a construction supervising team of the project, takes a boom lift every week to dozens of meters high to inspect the top of the piers.



"The Chinese teams have brought advanced philosophies, modern technologies and management experiences to Thailand's railway construction. The building of the railway not only better connects Thailand and China, but also brings the two peoples closer," said Viloth.



The China-Thailand railway promotes the idea of green transport and has applied green and low-carbon technologies during its construction. It will be built into a green railway that features technological innovation and ecology-friendly development.



Apart from Nakhon Ratchasima province, the construction of the China-Thailand railway has also commenced in Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya, Saraburi and other provinces along the route.

The section 4-3 in Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya province is the largest one of the project. So far, 1,912 foundation piles have been driven, 106 bearing platforms built and 17 piers erected. Prefabricated beams are neatly placed at the site and will be used for the viaduct construction.



"We completed a blueprint for the civil works of the first phase project in June 2019. The civil works currently underway include bridges, roadbeds, tunnels, and station buildings," said Ma Shengshuang, head of the Thai branch of China Railway Design Corporation.



The first phase project connects Bangkok and Nakhon Ratchasima province, and the second phase will extend the track to Nong Khai province, an important town for border trade in northeast Thailand that faces Lao capital Vientiane just across a river. The second phase is expected to connect the railway with the China-Laos railway.



The Krung Thep Aphiwat Central Terminal in Bangkok will be made into a transfer station for the China-Laos-Thailand high-speed railway and the Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore high-speed railway.

According to Nirut Maneephan, governor of the State Railway of Thailand, 16.72 percent of the China-Thailand railway's first phase project construction had been completed as of mid-January this year, and the railway is expected to be put into operation in 2027.



The second phase of the project is expected to start in 2024, and aims to open in 2028, he said.



Recently, a delegation of Thai railway and customs officials visited Laos to discuss cooperation. The China-Laos-Thailand railway is likely to cut the cost of cargo transport by 30 to 50 percent in the next three to five years.



Thailand has stepped up its efforts in the past year to integrate itself into the China-Laos-Thailand railway, including upgrading its domestic transport network and railway facilities, and improving the capacity of cargo warehousing, distribution and inspection in its northeast region.



It is believed that the China-Laos-Thailand railway will significantly promote sub-regional development and bring the Indochina Peninsula into an era of high-speed railways.



Nirut noted that the high-speed railway network will not only connect regions in Thailand, but also form a railway system of the ASEAN. When all high-speed railway projects are connected as a whole, they will become a gigantic railway network for passengers and cargo that links China, Malaysia, Singapore, Laos and Thailand.



Surasit Thanadtang, director of the Thai-Chinese Strategic Research Center under the National Research Council of Thailand, said the railway network is expected to strengthen connectivity among Southeast Asian countries and help them gain more market opportunities.



The alignment between the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025 and the BRI will further strengthen connectivity, lower logistics costs, and promote personnel exchanges, thus creating more opportunities for countries along the Belt and Road and promoting regional integration.



Dans la meme rubrique : < > China sees fastest improvement in air quality globally China vigorously builds marine ranches China's governance meets needs of people in livelihood improvement Pour toute information, contactez-nous au : +(235) 99267667 ; 62883277 ; 66267667 (Bureau N'Djamena)










English News Guizhou promotes high-quality development of big data industry

Alwihda Info | Par peoplesdaily - 8 Juin 2023



The revenue of Guizhou's software and information technology sector jumped 90.5 percent year-on-year in 2022, 6.5 times of that in 2015, said Hu. The province is home to more than 260 software and information technology firms above the designated size, and a featured digital industry cluster has taken shape, Hu added.

By Su Bin, Chen Junyi, People's Daily A new batch of data centers, power centers and dispatching centers were recently built at the Guizhou Information Park of China Telecom Cloud Computing in Gui'an New Area, southwest China's Guizhou Province.



It marked the almost completion of a new phase of a telecommunication data center in the park, which is expected bring at least 70,000 new servers into use.



According to Wu Kaiming, general manager of the operation center of the Guizhou Information Park, the park now comprises eight data centers with a total of 200,000 server racks, and its annual output exceeds 200 million yuan ($28.14 million).



In 2014, the development of the big data industry was elevated to a provincial-level strategy in Guizhou province. Over the past nearly decade, 11 super-large data centers have been established in the province by Huawei, Tencent, China Telecom and other tech and communication giants, and 23 key data centers have been put into use or are under construction.



As one of the eight approved national hub nodes for the development of an integrated computing power network, Guizhou is accelerating the development of a national computing power and algorithm supporting base, turning data into resources and ensuring that data are well stored and utilized.



Wu told People's Daily that Guizhou, located in the karst mountain region, enjoys a safe and stable geological environment, where the air is always fresh and cool, with summer temperature averaging 24 degrees Celsius. Besides, the province also boasts rich power resources and a relevantly cheaper electricity price, Wu added.



Compared with other regions, the province enjoys advantages in geography, climate and energy, given that data centers are a big consumer of energy, he noted.



Last July, Guizhou province launched a campaign to build stronger clusters of data centers in the Gui'an New Area, said Hu Jianhua, an official with the Big Data Development Administration of Guizhou Province. According to the man, the Gui'an New Area is expected to boast 4 million servers as of 2025 and the total output of data centers in the area will hit 100 billion yuan.



Computing power is productivity in the era of digital economy. Since China launched an "east data, west computing" project, Guizhou province has worked vigorously to improve the operational models and demand-supply matchmaking of computing services.



The province now plays an important part in the post-production rendering of more and more films.



Zhongyun is a big data service company in Guizhou, which moves traditional digital production systems to the cloud via cluster and distributed computing. With its self-developed cloud service platform and computing platform, the company has reduced the time of rendering for big-screen films from over 100 hours to just minutes.



"The company can utilize over 10,000 compute nodes and offer computing services for more than 10,000 enterprises and studios in film and animation production, promoting digital and intelligent transformation of traditional cultural industries," said an executive of the company.



In May last year, the Guizhou dispatching platform of a national integrated computing power network was officially launched. The platform, matching the supply and demand sides of computing power and enterprises in the data industry, aims at efficient cross-region, cross-industry and cross-platform dispatching of computing power.



Recently, a computing resource zone was opened in the Global Big Data Exchange in Guiyang to nurture the market of data and computing power trading.



The computing resource zone will commercialize and standardize computing power, realize cross-regional dispatching and coordination of computing power, match the supply with the demand of computing power in a targeted manner in east China, promote in-depth integration of computing power and data, and accelerate the exploration of new business forms and models of digital economy, said Ye Yuting, general manager of the Global Big Data Exchange in Guiyang.



Nianhua Data Technology Co., Ltd. is one of the first tech firms in Guizhou dedicated to the development of software technology and services. Over recent years, the company has grasped the opportunity brought about by big data development and launched a data development and governance platform that offers big data services for clients and releases the value of data.



According to vice general manager of the company Wang Gang, the company serves clients in 10 provinces. It is expected to see revenue of 150 million yuan this year and register growth for a sixth consecutive year. Wang said.



The revenue of Guizhou's software and information technology sector jumped 90.5 percent year-on-year in 2022, 6.5 times of that in 2015, said Hu. The province is home to more than 260 software and information technology firms above the designated size, and a featured digital industry cluster has taken shape, Hu added.



According to him, 84,300 5G base stations have been built in Guizhou, and the province is building itself into a major hub of computing services as a campaign to accelerate the transmission of computing power has kicked off.



Dans la meme rubrique : < > China sees fastest improvement in air quality globally China vigorously builds marine ranches China's governance meets needs of people in livelihood improvement Pour toute information, contactez-nous au : +(235) 99267667 ; 62883277 ; 66267667 (Bureau N'Djamena)
There are several reasons why long-shot marginal candidates, even those with name recognition, run in presidential primaries.

They want former presidential candidate on their resume, which can increase speaker fees.

Theyre promoting a new book.

They need national exposure to raise money for future campaigns or endeavors.

They want to make history, such as being the first [ fill in the blank ] to run for president. In 1972, long-shot candidate Rep. Shirley Chisholm was the first black to run for the Democrat nomination. Chisholm generated a lot of media attention and spoke at the DNC convention.

] to run for president. In 1972, long-shot candidate Rep. Shirley Chisholm was the first black to run for the Democrat nomination. Chisholm generated a lot of media attention and spoke at the DNC convention. They want to participate in at least one debate where they can promote specific policy positions.

They have been encouraged to run by social media followers. Marianne Williamson, running in the Democrat primary, has a half-million TikTok followers. Vivek Ramaswamy, on the Republican side, has 180,000 TikTok followers.

They are so uber rich that they can afford to finance their own campaign. Steve Forbes spent $70 million of his family fortune running for the Republican nomination in 1996 and 2000. In 2016, Carly Fiorina spent $25 million of her own money to do the same. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg spent $558 million just on television ads even as his quest for the White House quickly crashed. For 2024, Trump and Ramaswamy are using much of their own wealth to fund their campaigns.

Their spouses want to be First Lady or First Gentlemaneven if the spousal candidate has health issues. (For more details, google Jill Biden or Giselle Fetterman.)

And then theres Harold Stassen

Long-shot presidential candidates sometimes run once and move on when their campaign ends, having achieved their goals or spent their money. Others consider the initial run a launching pad and try again four years later. But few are like Republican Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen. He was elected to the governorship in 1938 at age 31 and ran for president every four years thereafter, starting in 1940 until 1992. In Long Shots Part 2: Why Do They Do It? Eric Felten and Carl M. Cannon of Real Clear Politics write:

Stassen started as a serious politician, and became a running joke, mostly by mounting quixotic presidential campaigns again and again and again. More than that, actually. Stassen ran as a favorite son candidate in 1940, apparently to get a top speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. He gave a nice speech and endorsed GOP nominee Wendell Willkie. He reprised his effort in 1944. He ran in the 1948 campaign, too, making the cover of Time magazine and coming close to getting the Republican nomination. But Harold Stassen wasnt a man who knew when to quit. He ran again in 1952, 1964, and 1968 (against Pat Paulsen, among others). He wasnt much of a threat to Richard Nixon, but the strength of the GOP nominee wasnt his primary concern or Stassen wouldnt have run against Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. His last two campaigns were in 1988 and 1992, a Harold Stassen presidential candidacy by then being as certain a quadrennial event as the Olympics. And though Stassen grew defensive about it, his seriousness of purpose never went away. I know Ive had an impact, that some things Ive done have really counted for world peace, for the passion of the individual, Stassen said late in his career. I sometimes wish people would ask not how many times Ive run a political campaign, but how many times Ive been right on the issues.

2024 presidential campaign

Long-shot candidates are often helped by the unwitting actions of other candidates. For instance, Joe Biden is immensely helping Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Many political observers believe Biden will not be the Democrat nominee and is just a placeholder. Polls show a plurality of Democrats do not want Joe to run again because of (check all that apply):

Mental health acuity-dementia issues.

Age, as he would be 87 years old at the end of his second term.

Policies lean too far toward Marxism.

Corrupt (e.g., the Biden crime family).

However, the longer Joey stays in the race, the more difficult it becomes for undeclared candidates to announce, and that enormously helps Kennedy who continues to campaign. Three Democrats who are itching to run for president are:

Vice President of Word Salads Kamala Harris

California Governor Gavin Hair Gel Newsom

Secretary of No Transportation Pete Buttigieg

In the meantime, as they dither, long-shot Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. grows his base by holding rallies, speaking on TV and radio programs (including conservative shows), writing op-eds, giving interviews, and posting on social media, although far-left big tech has made it difficult, but not impossible for him to get his message out.

It must be wonderful having so much money and/or support that you can regularly run for president. At least you know you are running. We cant say the same about Joe Biden who often introduces Vice President Harris as president, shakes hands with the air, yells during speeches, walks aimlessly on the stage following speeches, frequently falls, and responds to reporters questions by turning away.

As the 2024 presidential campaign continues along, it might be time for me to announce that I am running for president. I would be a long-shot candidate (but still with better chances than Chris Christie), but Robin Itzler, former presidential candidate, would look so cool on my business card.

Image: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (edited). YouTube screen grab.

Robin M. Itzler is a regular contributor to American Thinker. She can be reached at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com.
Sex addicts live for their next kick, do it today for sure and right now if possible  and they always need bigger and bigger kicks.

Medical people have long thought that the specific triggers for bigger kicks don't matter much. Some people get their kicks from doorknobs; others like whips and leather; still others like cats, horses, and dogs.

I've been trying to figure out the Biden gang for a long time, and the one thing I keep seeing is sex addiction. These people really don't care how much damage they do to the United States as long as they get their kicks.

Kill off American oil production to give Putin the power to invade Europe?

Sure! Got that handled on day 1.

Tell Germany to pursue energy dependence on Russia?

What could go possibly wrong?

Addicts will shoot up until they kill themselves. On the streets of our (formerly) great cities, it happens to hundreds of people every single day, right in front of God and everybody. We don't know how many "homeless" overdose deaths are actually deliberate suicides, but if you're hooked on the biggest high ever, the alternative of a fentanyl overdose can't seem so bad.

It's easier than getting a job.

This is why the first great physician in Western history, Hippocrates of Kos, is quoted in Plato's most famous work as saying "nothing in excess." Sex addiction leads to sodomy addiction leads to fentanyl addiction, on and on, maybe because the human brain doesn't know the difference.

"Nothing in excess"  Hippocrates was thinking of a sex addict called Alcibiades, who was also sitting at the Symposium, Plato's drinking party. Alcibiades tried to seduce Socrates (who turned over and went to sleep), and then he betrayed his own city-state of Athens in a time of vicious war, but it really didn't matter. The Athenians welcomed him back after that betrayal, because what's a little thing like treason?

Hippocrates and his school of medicine saw a lot of sexual excess in ancient Greece, plus a lot of suicidal warfare and mob madness. Socrates himself was condemned to death by the mob, the "demos" ("the people"  as in Democrats). Jesus was condemned by a gaggle of politicians playing to the mob. The mob likes blood.

We just call it cancel culture, but it's always the same.

Do you get your kicks from killing people? Go for it, dude.

The Weimar Republic crashed from sexual decadence, and Hitler's SA killers came out of that without a hitch. Once you can break all the rules, killing innocents is easy.

The current resident of the White House seems to take a kind of perverse pride in parading his personal oddities on YouTube. It's true that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton didn't seem to care, either, and maybe JFK and LBJ knew that everybody in the cocktail circuit knew about their little habits. The New York Times obviously knew all about presidential sexcapades. As long as the Imperial Media Guards protected Democrats, they relished their immunity from consequences.

And now, here we are in the Third Millennium, where we are following step-by-step in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, featuring public kicksville, open treachery, and malicious exhibitionism.

I'm so bad! I can hear "Rachel" Levine silently screaming at us. Like the Roman emperor Caligula, Pete Buttigieg tells us, "I'm so gay!" And the crowds are paid to cheer.

The Romans told themselves that "bread and circuses" would keep the people in virtual slavery, and they were not wrong  not until Rome collapsed.

Every corrupt regime in the world is watching this, and most of them know about sexual decadence from their own history. All ancient civilizations have gone through this  so they know exactly what's happening today in Washington, D.C.

My bet is that they are rubbing their hands and making it worse, because the United States is still a formidable military power, but the fish is rotting, and that kind of insidious warfare is now working again like gangbusters. The CCP blame the British for supplying opium to Chinese mandarins 200 years ago, and they must be celebrating every time another fentanyl shipment goes to Mexico.

I've stopped believing in all the different sexual "identities"  all the capital letters of the rainbow flag that now hangs from U.S. embassies, to notify the world that we are rotting from within. As far as I can tell, L=G=B=Q=P = whatever, dude!  any kicks you can get.

The rainbow flag has only one color, and it's the Yellow Jack.

In 1900, Sigmund Freud had sexual addictions all figured out, because Viennese physicians saw every color of the rainbow every day, along with all the STDs that inevitably resulted. Freud figured out early on that there was really only one basic drive. He called it "Id," and all the politically active sex cults today have their own totem pole, but basically it's all the same-old, same-old.

With the Jeff Epstein epidemic, which was more damaging than COVID-19, the cult of Bigger Kicks reached its logical end point: the betrayal of trusting children by the Disney Corporation.

Can you hear the sound of sadistic laughter from hell?

Neglected children do not thrive. They tend to sicken and die early, and nobody knows why, but we know it for a fact. Children thrive on trust, and adults who betray their children's trust belong...where? In the Democrat party?

If you have any babies of your own, this is the time to move out of the centers of infection, L.A., S.F., N.Y., and all the rest.

Hint: If your city's downtown has burned down, it's high time to check out Texas.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
President Yoon Suk Yeol delivers a congratulatory address at Kangwon National University in Chuncheon, 76 kilometers northeast of Seoul, during a ceremony marking Gangwon Province's new status as a special self-governing province, June 9. Yonhap



President Yoon Suk Yeol congratulated Gangwon Province on Friday on its new status as a special self-governing province, saying the newly gained autonomy and ability to remove regulations will give a boost to the local cutting-edge and tourism industries.



Yoon made the remark during a ceremony at Kangwon National University in Chuncheon, 76 kilometers northeast of Seoul, two days before the province gains its new status under a law enacted last June.



Under the new law, Gangwon Province will gain autonomy over policy decisions and the ability to ease regulations set by the central government in the forestry, environment, agriculture and defense sectors.



Gangwon is the third region to win the status after Jeju and Sejong.



"Gangwon Province has until now been tied down by unnecessary multilayered regulations due to reasons of national security and the environment," Yoon said during the ceremony attended by some 1,600 people, including Gangwon Gov. Kim Jin-tae and lawmakers with constituencies in the province.



"Now the special self-governing province will vitalize the cutting-edge and tourism industries by removing the obstacles to development by itself," he said.



Yoon promised the central government's active support and massive assistance toward realizing Gangwon's vision for a "future industry global city," noting the city of Gangneung has been designated a candidate site for a national bio industrial complex and the designation of Taebaek as a special regulation-free zone for the production of hydrogen energy using forest biomass.



"Gangwon Province, with its splendid natural environment and abundant resources, will now develop dramatically based on cutting-edge science technologies," he said. (Yonhap)


The DOJ just indicted former President Trump for what is a non-crime involving alleged possession of classified documents from the Mar-a-Lago raid last year (see analysis). Yet real crimes documented in the Durham Report remain unprosecuted. How is this not banana republic behavior?

John Durham released his report on the alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election. Durham concluded there was no Russian collusion. He confirms that the Russian narrative was a disinformation operation run by the unelected Deep State, including the FBI and others on behalf of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Durham did not pursue Hillary Clinton's involvement or the source of the damaging DNC hack. If it wasn't the Russians, who was it? Seth Rich, perhaps? The FBI has deep-sixed Rich's laptop, too. Was Rich murdered to protect the false Russian Collusion narrative?

Durham did not recommend filing any criminal charges as the FBI implemented policies and procedures to prevent future occurrences. I'm not that naive. Without individual accountability, there can be no reform. In my opinion, Durham did document well the failures of the FBI and others but did not follow the evidence where it led to its logical conclusion to prosecute the crimes committed by the FBI, DOJ, and others.

Was this unintentional by Durham because he couldn't see the forest for the trees, or was this intentional? In my opinion, these failures by the FBI and others were intentional  part of the effort that Professor Alan Dershowitz titled his recent book about: Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process and Our Constitutional Rule of Law.

Most likely, Durham, who had the power and authority to do so, deferred to protect the federal agencies rather than holding those who committed the crimes accountable, as former FBI director James Comey did with Hillary Clinton's possession of classified documents in her pay-to-play scheme. The crimes committed by the FBI and others are well known to the readers of the American Thinker and extend back to at least the Obama administration (here).

Many conspirators acting alone or in concert with others, including the FBI, CIA, and DNI, committed many crimes to attempt to secure Clinton's election as president. When Clinton lost the election, the conspiracy continued as a soft coup to undermine and sabotage the presidency of a duly elected president. The conspirators interfered with the 2016 election with the false Russian narrative and the 2020 election by suppressing the information on Hunter Biden's laptop as Russian disinformation.

Our federal agencies are no longer politically neutral and intentionally violate the Constitution with impunity  dogs that will hunt only for "right-wing extremists" to the exclusion of the Marxist left.

I believe that the Biden and Clinton families are criminal enterprises as defined in the RICO Act. Both families conspired with others, both foreign advisories and domestic operatives, to undermine, sabotage, and implement policies counter to the best interest and national security of the United States in return for their benefit  a cabal.

This cabal is a vast alliance that extends beyond the Biden and Clinton families and has corrupted our government through and through:

the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Globalists, the radical Marxist left, self-dealing and corrupt politicians, the Deep State, the ruling elite, the leftist media complex, big tech, multinational corporations, and foreign adversaries [China]. "These actors have robbed the public treasury of billions of dollars in broad daylight." These actors seek and are driven by control of the people, to retain and gain more power and money [my emphasis].

I emailed Durham several times that this cabal is an ongoing criminal conspiracy under RICO. RICO would allow individual criminal acts to be tied together under the RICO umbrella, extending the statute of limitations.

In my last email, I wrote:

The Russian Collusion narrative is within your mandate to investigate. I would challenge you to investigate all aspects of this false narrative as it will expose the perpetrators and those who aided or abetted in the commission of these crimes. ... The DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, and others intentionally violated the civil rights of citizens, including the right of free speech, unreasonable search and seizure [Illegal wiretapping], ignored the rule of law and equal justice for all. Instead, all engaged in or covered up for politically based selective prosecutions by entrapment, lying, the abuse of power, and unlawful use of force under the color of authority. You, Sir, have the authority and power to do so. The fate of our Country is in your hands.

Kash Patel is a former federal prosecutor who worked national security cases and was the lead investigator for Congressman Devin Nunes in the investigation of the Russian Collusion narrative.

Patel castigated Durham:

There is no justification for Durham's alleged inability to utilize the grand jury process and subpoena individuals, according to Patel . . . There's no way he doesn't know how to use the grand jury process and subpoena individuals . . . Moreover, Patel accused high-ranking officials, including former Attorney General Bill Barr, former Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, and former FBI Director James Comey as well as current officials like FBI Director Chris Ray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, of prioritizing the protection of their institutions over affecting necessary reforms. The two-tier system of justice today continues because John Durham failed.

The case in chief to impeach Joe Biden is simply stated. Congress should impeach Biden, but this is not likely to happen:

Biden's policies are detrimental to the United States' strategic interests and outright violations of federal law and the Constitution. Joe Biden is a puppet of the Chinese and Ukraine (source). ... Biden abdicated his constitutional duty to defend the border [An invasion]. The Chinese exploited this opportunity to flood the country with Fentanyl  supplying the Mexican cartels with the precursors to manufacture and distribute the Fentanyl. The Fentanyl is killing about one hundred thousand yearly to wreak havoc and chaos in our communities. The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan directly benefited the Chinese. In his pursuit of green energy, Biden also immensely rewards the Chinese and others in this scam (here), which is a massive redistribution of wealth (source).

Victor Davis Hanson calls it Our French Revolution. Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. calls it "The Fascist Threat." I can't entirely agree with Rockwell calling the local police thugs, but I agree on our federal Stasi:

Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police state as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive state the unlimited master of society. This describes mainstream politics in America today. And not just in America. It's true in Europe, too. It is so much part of the mainstream that it is hardly noticed any more. ... In the long run even the most despotic governments with all their brutality and cruelty are no match for ideas. Eventually the ideology that has won the support of the majority will prevail and cut the ground from under the tyrant's feet. Then the oppressed many will rise in rebellion and overthrow their masters.

The constitutional checks and balances have failed to prevent the abuse of power and law violations because of systemic corruption. Our sheepdogs have gone rogue and no longer protect the flock from evil. The Judiciary, the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, and others have gone full Stasi, supporting the authoritarian state (here and here).

These conspirators must be held accountable "to restore faith in the government we empower to govern. It is up to us, We the People, to do so."

The House Oversight Committee can, through the power of the purse, revise policies and procedures or reorganize or dismantle these agencies. Unfortunately, the committee can't prosecute individual conspirators.

I'm at a loss of how to hold those accountable who failed to uphold their oaths to defend the Constitution and committed crimes with Durham's failure to prosecute or recommend prosecution. The DOJ and FBI do the prosecution, but many of the high-level officials of these agencies are principals in these crimes  a Catch-22. Such accountability may have to wait for a new administration to clean house.

In the meantime, become involved. Do seek out alternative sources of information, don't be sheeple mindlessly trusting the government, don't succumb to state propaganda, and don't be afraid to raise your voice and ensure free and uncorrupted elections.

Exposing the truth is all-powerful!

Ron Wright is a retired detective, having served thirty-five years with Riverside P.D., Calif. Ron earned a B.A. in political science from Cal State University, Fullerton, and a Master of Administration from the University of California, Riverside. Facebook at Ron T. Cop.



Unofficial banana republic flag by Federico Zenith (public domain).
With weak, doddering, and likely compromised Joe Biden at the helm of the U.S., the Chinese are moving fast now, taking their cold war with the U.S. deep into our hemisphere.

It's not just illegal police stations, extensive spying on Congress members, and brazen balloon surveillance.

Now this shocking news came out yesterday about China's reach into the U.S.-dominated Caribbean.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON  China and Cuba have reached a secret agreement for China to establish an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island, in a brash new geopolitical challenge by Beijing to the U.S., according to U.S. officials familiar with highly classified intelligence. An eavesdropping facility in Cuba, roughly 100 miles from Florida, would allow Chinese intelligence services to scoop up electronic communications throughout the southeastern U.S., where many military bases are located, and monitor U.S. ship traffic. Officials familiar with the matter said that China has agreed to pay cash-strapped Cuba several billion dollars to allow it to build the eavesdropping station and that the two countries had reached an agreement in principle. The revelation about the planned site has sparked alarm within the Biden administration because of Cuba's proximity to the U.S. mainland. Washington regards Beijing as its most significant economic and military rival. A Chinese base with advanced military and intelligence capabilities in the U.S.'s backyard could be an unprecedented new threat.

It's bad. According to the Journal:

An eavesdropping facility in Cuba would make clear "China is prepared to do the same in America's backyard," said Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national-security think tank in Washington. "Establishing this facility signals a new, escalatory phase in China's broader defense strategy. It's a bit of a game changer," Singleton said. "The selection of Cuba is also intentionally provocative."

It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that they're doing this. Their aim is to take Taiwan. They know the critical importance of sea lanes and sea lines of communication for the projection of power. The U.S. fought Spain over this very issue in the Caribbean in 1898.

The Chinese also know that if they set up an operation here, the already stretched U.S. Navy, enervated by wokesterly priorities and recruitment deficits, will have fewer resources with which to patrol the Pacific  the South China Sea. The intelligence bonanza from all the U.S. military bases they'll be in a position to eavesdrop upon is not known, but it's likely to be major, well above the value of the billions they're paying for the rent.

And Cuba, the world's biggest communist garbage dump, which keeps its citizens poor in order to control them, is eminently, cheaply purchaseable, not just for eavesdropping stations targeted at all the emails, phone calls, and satellite transmissions from the states, but in coming times for missile installations and military bases when they can get away with it.

China knows this and is moving fast for it. Joe Biden, after all, is no JFK, given his Cuba-coddling, and even if he wanted to be, he no longer has the military muscle.

That may be why the U.S. and Cuba are falling over themselves to deny the report:

On Thursday, after publication of this article, Kirby said, "This report is not accurate," without providing any details. He added: "We remain confident that we are able to meet all our security commitments at home and in the region."

Cuba's Embassy in Washington said Thursday that the article was "totally mendacious and unfounded information." The Chinese Embassy had no comment.

The guys with a stake here, and who intend to project the power, are saying nothing.

Who controls the Caribbean controls the hemisphere.

That was what noted geographer and geopolitical expert Robert D. Kaplan found in his research for his electrifying 2014 book, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific.

An excerpt can be read in the National Interest here:

The Greater Caribbean (including the Gulf of Mexico) is roughly the size of the South China Sea  1,500 miles in one direction and 1,000 miles in the other. Whereas the South China Sea can be dubbed the Asian Mediterranean because of its centrality to the Indo-Pacific world, the Greater Caribbean can be dubbed the American Mediterranean because of its centrality to the whole Western Hemisphere. For as the mid-20th century Dutch-American strategist, Nicholas J. Spykman, observed, the basic geographical truth of the Western Hemisphere is that the division within it is not between North America and South America, but between the area north of the Amazon jungle and the area south of it. Colombia and Venezuela, as well as the Guianas, although they are on the northern coast of South America, are functionally part of North America and the American Mediterranean. So once the United States came to dominate the American Mediterranean, that is, the Greater Caribbean, and separated as it is from the southern cone of South America by yawning distance and a wide belt of tropical forest, the United States had few challengers in its own hemisphere. The domination of the Greater Caribbean, by providing domination of the Western Hemisphere, left America with resources to spare for influencing the balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere. First the Greater Caribbean, next the world, in other words: such was the history of the United States in the 20th century with its two world wars.

Kaplan notes that (in 2014) the Chinese also have the hooks in in Panama, with a Hong Kongbased company controlling two sides of the Panama Canal and a Chinese company in talks to build another canal across Nicaragua.

I haven't checked the status of those developments recently, but there have been recent developments that China can claim as part of its plan to take over not just the South China Sea, but the Caribbean, too: Honduras and El Salvador dropped their decades-long diplomatic relations with Taiwan in favor of China.

Read that, and one can only conclude that a Chinese presence, and growing control of this region, is about as direct a threat to the roots of U.S. power as any we will ever see, the "unprecedented new threat" described by one of the analysts quoted by the Journal.

Image: European Space Agency via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.
We've come a long way from Obergefell, that 2015 Supreme Court opinion that redefined marriage. For the record, I thought the Court should have left marriage at the state level. However, a 5-4 Court opinion said otherwise.

Today, the battle is way beyond "sexual orientation" or two same-sex people wanting to get married. We are now into stuff that is much harder to accept, as David Strom wrote:

The argument against gay marriage was simple, as was the argument for it. Today's alphabet arguments are about completely eradicating the foundations of reality.

In other words, it's one thing to watch two men kiss at the altar. I don't like it, I don't have to go the ceremony, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they think that their union is based on love.

It's quite another thing to watch what "Pride" has turned into.

Watching men dressed as nuns interrupting a communion is not about "gay rights" but something more sinister. Putting these "Sisters" on stage is an attack on a Catholic like me. After all, I don't mock anyone's religion, and I expect the same.

Watching men dressed up as "drag queens" dancing in front of young children is depravity.

I won't touch the weird beer commercial or what the famous retail store did with female bathing suits with a little extra space for parts that women don't have. My guess is that a serious homosexual thinks that's strange, too.

"Queerism" is on a mission to destroy our society. They think we are wrong and want to change it at any cost.

As Mr. Strom points out in the aforementioned article:

This ideology, unlike gay rights, is a bridge too far for most Americans. Largely because it is based upon a rejection of those very Americans' values. That includes traditional liberals and traditional conservatives. All of us are oppressors in a system designed to keep Queers down.

We've come a long way from hearing that same-sex "marriage" is for people who love each other. What we seeing on TV reports, in our street marches, and in retail stores is indeed "a bridge too far." In fact, it's so far that there is not enough steel or concrete to build it.

PS: Check out my blog for posts, podcasts, and videos.

Image: Rawpixel.com.
When I lived in Nevada, paying taxes was not only easy...it was fun!

Whenever I got the urge to pay state income tax, I drove to any one of hundreds of Nevada's tax collection centers (AKA casinos). While I paid my taxes I enjoyed free drinks and was allowed to smoke. If I paid enough tax, I got a free buffet out of the deal. Then there were those times when I left with more money than I arrived with! And if I didn't feel like paying, I could just sit at home while Californians paid tax for me.

Now I live in Illinois. They call it the "Land of Lincoln" because you can't back out of your driveway on to a pothole-infested road without Governor J.B. Pritzker wanting five bucks. Illinois liberals think taxation is a substitute for proper financial planning. They are wrong.

Missouri legalized recreational marijuana back in January. In Illinois, J.B. Pritzker was shocked by the unexpected plunge in tax revenue from marijuana for Q1 of 2023. He ran around Springfield like Dr Fauci at an adult sudden death syndrome conference scratching his head and asking "why?" Why, indeed.

Illinois is a pretty narrow state, and most of the residents live within an hour's drive of a major out-of-state shopping area like Kenosha, Dubuque, Davenport, St. Louis, Cape Girardeau, Paducah, Evansville, Terre Haute, or Gary. At almost all of the border towns, economic activity is always larger in the town that isn't in Illinois, the only exception being Chicago and Gary/Hammond.

If you drive by any dispensary in Eastern Illinois, you will notice that about a quarter of the license plates are from Indiana or Kentucky. If you drive by a dispensary in Eastern Missouri, you will notice that about half the plates are from Illinois, with a few Indiana and Kentucky in the mix.

Back in December, East St. Louis had a ton of billboards advertising dispensaries in Illinois. Now the billboards and the dispensaries are gone. It looks like highly taxed legal weed, empty casinos, and on-demand abortion facilities won't be enough to save East St. Louis. And I think the closures make it pretty obvious what happened to J.B.'s missing marijuana tax revenue. It went to Missouri.

Marijuana isn't the only thing cheaper in Missouri. Everything is cheaper in Missouri. And the parking lots reflect it. Twice a month, we go to Crestwood, MO and buy groceries, liquor, cigarettes, clothing...everything but ice cream in the summer. It's a pleasant day out, and there are always lots of Illinois plates outside the stores. And we don't shop right on the border, either. Crestwood is one of the ritzy Western St. Louis suburbs, about ten miles inside. There are still a ton of Illinois plates everywhere.

Folks in Illinois haven't ever been shy about crossing state lines to get what they want. If you drive eastbound on any Chicagoland freeway, you will be inundated with billboards for Krazy Kaplin's Fireworks...in Indiana.

Now that one of Illinois's neighbors has legal weed, too, the high sales tax avoidance habits of Illinoisans are pretty obvious...to everyone but the high tax cheerleaders in Springfield, that is. Sales tax tourism is a thing. Just ask the Missouri Department of Revenue!

Image: Kai Gradert via Unsplash, Unsplash License.
Canada had some of the most draconian COVID restrictions in the world. In January 2022, Canadian truckers had enough. They banded together in a massive convoy headed for Ottawa. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded with a brutal crackdown, arresting many and, even worse, working with banks to impoverish the truckers and their supporters. And thats where most of us thought it endedwith defeated truckers. Now, though, a Twitterer has written a post explaining that the convoy was wildly successful, news that Canadas (and the worlds) media stifled.

I enthusiastically supported the convoy, which was a truly grassroots uprising against Canadas COVID tyranny. If you want to relive the convoy experience, from its exciting beginnings to the huge support Canadians gave to the convoy as it traveled to Ottawa and once it arrived there, to the tyrannical crackdown that included destroying the truckers finances, heres a list of the contemporaneous posts I wrote about that brave protest:

Image: The Freedom Convoy. YouTube screen grab.

As you can tell from the tenor of the post titles, the convoys ultimate outcome seemed very grim. Trudeau, by using his police state power, combined with the banks willingness to ally themselves with the government, had won.

However, a person on Twitter who goes by the handle CatGirl Kulak (Anarchonomicon) has written a long tweet explaining that The Freedom Convoy was the most wildly immediately successful protest in Canadian history, maybe WORLD history. While we have vividly imprinted in our minds eyes crackdowns, police with batons, and frozen bank accounts, in the immediate aftermath, The government caved on absolutely everything within a week for the most important things, and then a month or so for the rest.

Please read the whole thing because its important (and Ill explain why at the end):

I keep encountering this misconception from people who don't follow Canadian politics...



That somehow the Trucker convoy was defeated.



The Freedom Convoy was the most wildly immediately successful protest in Canadian history, maybe WORLD history.



People remember Trudeau's pic.twitter.com/bhF1NQYarz  CatGirl Kulak  (Anarchonomicon) (@FromKulak) June 7, 2023

Why is this important? Its not just important historically insofar as it corrects the record. Its also important because it reminds us that state media (whether the fully funded media in Canada or the ideologically aligned media in America) dictate our understanding of the world, not just by what they write, but by what they dont write.

In this case, they convinced the world that a huge, strongly supported peaceful protest failed. If that was what actually happened, why would anyone ever protest again? Certainly, in America, that message was made clear with the governments January 6 crackdown following that imaginary insurrection by unarmed, ordinary Americans who found themselves swept into the Capitol and responded by taking pictures.

The message is clear: Unless you are aligned with the left, any effort to push back peacefully against government overreach will be destroyed. You have no chance because we will break youand nothing will change. Except that in Canada, it turns out that everything changed. As events in America sweep forward and the 2024 election looms, ignore the propaganda and remember the truth.
The European Union (EU) is considering a mandatory ban on using Huawei 5G equipment in the continent. The move comes after some EU members continued to use Huawei equipment despite knowing about possible risks.

Huawei and some other Chinese tech companies were blacklisted by the US government and EU over espionage allegations and collaboration with the Chinese government. While US lawmakers completely banned Huawei from operating in the country, only a third of EU countries have removed the Chinese vendor from their 5G communication network, the Financial Times says.

The EU internal market commissioner Thierry Breton said, This is too few. And it exposes the unions collective security. The EU reportedly prepares a toolbox of security measures to guide member states in the process. Huawei claims that no court has neither found them engaged in malicious intellectual property theft nor asked them to pay damage for infringing others intellectual property.

Some EU members are still using Huawei 5G equipment, a mandatory ban is on the way

Following pressure from the US government in 2020, the EU members agreed on the toolbox of security measures that included certification requirements and diversification of suppliers. The toolbox is still in the works, and a European Commission spokesperson promised to monitor its implementation.

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Among the EU members, Germany is the most notable country that delayed the implementation of the toolbox of security measures. The country said earlier this year that its reviewing the use of Chinese equipment in its 5G network. Deutsche Telekom, the largest telecommunications provider in Europe, reportedly has close ties with Huawei.

In response to the news, Huawei argued, Assessing cyber security risks without sticking to technological standards, or excluding specific suppliers from the system without proper technological evaluation, is a violation of the principles of fairness and non-discrimination, and also against the laws and regulations of the European Union and its member states.

Experts already noted that removing Huawei from 5G networks could cost over $100 billion. However, the potential risks cant be ignored. The EU warned members of the costs of long-term dependencies on China, saying the case is similar to dependence on Russian energy after the Ukraine war. Portugal is the latest EU country to consider banning some Huawei 5G equipment from its network.
It comes as no surprise that ever since the success of ChatGPT and its subsequent integration into the Edge browser as the Bing AI chatbot, Microsoft has gone from being the underdog in the search engine market to now seeing themselves fighting for market share with Google. However, the company has always been aggressive in discouraging people from downloading Chrome, and its recent actions have raised some eyebrows as Microsoft shamelessly tampered with its Bing AI chatbot, effectively ignoring searches for Google Chrome and promoting Bing features instead.

As reported by The Verge, Microsoft presented users searching for Chrome or related terms with a Bing AI widget that did not provide the expected search results but instead displayed a list of Bing features. This essentially served as a full-scale advertisement for the service, disrupting the users search experience and favoring Microsofts products over unbiased search results.

Furthermore, to make matters worse, the result that Microsoft displayed to people searching for Chrome-related terms wasnt even a Bing AI-generated message. It was a calculated move by the company, as the message remained the same for all searches, and the AI is designed to never generate the same message twice.

However, this is not the first time Microsoft has engaged in such practices. Earlier this year, the Edge browser showed an ad for Bing next to the Google Bard URL in the search bar, and although the ad disappeared after a while, it left a Bing icon in place that opened the Bing AI chatbot in split view.

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Microsofts response

In response to the controversy, Microsoft released a statement acknowledging their experimentation with new features and behaviors to enhance customer experiences. While Microsofts efforts in the AI field are commendable, and it is common for companies to conduct tests to improve their products, the situation is quite severe as by disregarding searches for a leading competitors product and substituting them with self-promotion, Microsoft not only undermines fair competition but also erodes user trust.

We often experiment with new features, UX, and behaviors to test, learn, and improve experiences for our customers. These tests are often brief and do not necessarily represent what is ultimately or broadly provided to customers, said Microsoft.
Samsung has reportedly begun the development of its own ChatGPT-like AI tool. The company plans to introduce the new LLM (Large Language Model) solution as early as the end of July 2023. The in-development product doesnt yet have a name.

According to the Korean media, Samsung Research is leading this project. It has devoted substantial resources and manpower to the project to ensure swift development. The firm has even restricted or limited other business units from using GPU resources between June and July. Since training LLMs require a massive amount of GPU power, it doesnt want any additional burden on its GPUs during the development of its AI tool.

Samsung will use this AI tool for internal business purposes

Rumors of Samsung working on a ChatGPT-like AI tool first emerged in May. The company was said to be in talks with domestic tech firm Naver to jointly develop the tool. The report suggested the initial version of the new AI solution may debut in October this year.

However, a new report coming out of South Korea says Samsung plans to complete the development of the first-gen model in just two months. Moreover, theres no mention of it co-developing the AI tool with Naver. The company reportedly decided to go solo after a recent high-level management meeting attended by Executive Chairman Lee Jae-yong. Potential collaborations with Open AI, Microsoft, and Google were also discussed before deciding to develop an in-house solution as soon as possible.

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Unlike the AI tools from these companies, Samsungs solution wont be available to the public. At least not the initial version. The company plans to use it for internal business purposes. It sees AI helping boost or speed up various business processes. The Korean behemoth wants to leverage AI in software development, document summarization, translation, and other internal operations. It believes AI could drastically shorten the period of software development and semiconductor design, Chosun.com reports.

Samsung tried using external AI tools for these purposes earlier. In March, it gave some employees in the semiconductor division access to ChatGPT in hopes of speeding up business processes. However, the OpenAI-made tool ended up leaking confidential company information, forcing the company to ban the use of all such external tools. It is now hurrying to come up with an in-house solution that doesnt pose such risks.

Given the current AI landscape, Samsung may eventually release a public version of its AI tool, but the initial development appears to be intended for internal use. If the rumored launch timeline of July end is accurate, we may hear the company talk about AI during its Galaxy Unpacked event on July 27 where it will launch new foldables, tablets, and smartwatches.
Chinese Ambassador to Korea Xing Haiming, left, gestures during his meeting with main opposition Democratic Party of Korea Chairman Lee Jae-myung at the former's residence in Seongbuk District, Seoul, Thursday. Joint Press Corps



The ruling People Power Party (PPP) slammed Chinese Ambassador Xing Haiming on Friday after the envoy unleashed remarks criticizing South Korea for getting closer to the United States, saying the remarks constitute a "serious diplomatic discourtesy."



Xing made the remarks during a dinner meeting at his residence with Rep. Lee Jae-myung, chairman of the main opposition Democratic Party, saying it is a wrong bet to believe that China will lose in the rivalry with the United States.



"I can say definitely that those betting on China's defeat will certainly regret it later," Xing said.



The remark was an apparent swipe at the government of President Yoon Suk Yeol that has been seeking to bring South Korea closer to the U.S. and Japan in a departure from the previous Moon Jae-in administration that had put a greater emphasis on China.



"Ambassador Xing and Chairman Lee were jointly blaming our government," said Rep. Kim Gi-hyeon, leader of the PPP, during a party meeting. He further stated that the envoy's comments amounted to a "clear interference in domestic affairs and a serious diplomatic discourtesy."



During the meeting, Xing warned against making misjudgments about Beijing-Washington relations, emphasizing that China-South Korea relations faced numerous difficulties due to external factors.



Later in the day, the party said Kim had decided to decline a dinner invitation from the Chinese ambassador. Xing had extended the invitation Wednesday, and the party had informed the press they could meet in July or August.



However, after receiving a report on the meeting between Lee and Xing, Kim instructed his secretariat to convey his intention to decline the dinner, an aide said.



"Ambassador Xing's remarks bordered on a threat," remarked Rep. Kang Min-kuk, a senior spokesperson for the PPP, adding that he had shown disrespect for diplomatic norms by instructing Seoul on matters of national security.



Rep. Yoon Sang-hyun said Xing appeared to regard South Korea as a vassal state of China.



"It appeared as if China still considers itself the center of the world and regards South Korea as a vassal state in tributary relations," he said in a Facebook post. "The Republic of Korea is a sovereign independent country."



Lee, who has been critical of President Yoon's prioritization of the U.S. alliance at the expense of other relationships, said that he had engaged in extensive discussions with Xing.



"I have already had sufficient discussions regarding the economy and security," Lee told reporters at the National Assembly on Friday.



Xing and Lee also addressed other pending issues, including South Korea's trade deficit with China and public concerns over Japan's planned release of radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.



Both sides agreed that the two countries should collaborate to prevent Japan from releasing the contaminated water into the ocean.



"As China and Korea are Japan's neighbors, we have to do our best to prevent Japan from discharging radioactive water in order to save our people's lives and security, and the world's marine life," Xing said.



Xing further intensified his criticism of the release plan, saying Japan is using the Pacific Ocean as its sewer for economic gain. (Yonhap)




The Xiaomi 13 Ultra launched in China back in April. Back then, Xiaomi confirmed that the phone is coming to more markets, but it did not say when. Xiaomi France (possibly) slipped up recently, announcing that the Xiaomi 13 Ultra global launch date is set for June 12, and the companys CEO just confirmed the news.

The Xiaomi 13 Ultra global launch date is now officially confirmed by CEO

Lei Jun went to Twitter to say that the Xiaomi 13 Ultras global sale will kick off on June 12. He did say, however, that this is a Western Europe launch, but that more markets will join soon after that.

So, the floodgates open on June 12, it would seem. Its worth noting that the phone launched in Hong Kong recently, two days ago. It is coming to plenty more markets, thats for sure.

The Xiaomi 13 and 13 Pro launched globally earlier this year. The Xiaomi 13 Ultra is the most powerful smartphone the company ever announced. It comes with an even more powerful camera setup than the Xiaomi 13 Pro.

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We reviewed the device not long ago, the Chinese variant. The global model will include the same specs and design, but different software. A global version of MIUI will come pre-installed on it.

The phone includes plenty of RAM, fast wired & wireless charging, four 50MP cameras & more

As a reminder, the Xiaomi 13 Ultra is fueled by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor. The phone packs in up to 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM in China, and up to 1TB of UFS 4.0 flash storage. Were not sure what the global model will offer in this regard.

A 5,000mAh battery is also included in the package, and the same goes for 90W wired charging. 50W wireless charging is also supported, while the device does include a charger in the box.

Four 50-megapixel cameras sit on the back, with Leica lenses. The main one utilizes a 1-inch camera sensor from Sony, and a 2-stop variable aperture. The camera hardware overall is immensely powerful.

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A 6.7-inch QHD+ display with a 120Hz refresh rate is also a part of the package. The same goes for stereo speakers, and much more.
A UK Government fund of 150 million to help Ukrainians into their own homes and to continue sponsorship arrangements has been announced.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year, more than 124,000 people have arrived in the UK under the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

The new money will go to councils to help Ukrainian families into private rented accommodation and find work.

It will also go towards continuing sponsorship arrangements, as many guests are in their second year in the UK.

The funding is being divided according to the number of Ukrainians in each nation  England will receive around 109 million, Scotland 30 million, Wales 8 million and Northern Ireland 2 million.

Felicity Buchan appealed for more people to become hosts (PA)

Those hosting Ukrainians will continue to receive a monthly 350 thank-you payment during guests first 12 months, rising to 500 a month during the following year.

In March, the Red Cross warned many Ukrainians are staying in inappropriate accommodation.

UK housing minister Felicity Buchan said: The UK has an honourable tradition of offering shelter to those fleeing the horrors of war.

Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of hosts in this country, over 124,000 Ukrainians have now found safety in the UK.

Sadly, the fighting in Ukraine shows no sign of ending soon, so we are appealing for more people to become hosts while providing councils with this additional funding to support guests into long-term housing.

In Scotland, more than 24,000 displaced Ukrainians have arrived through an individual sponsor or the Scottish Governments super-sponsor scheme.

Thousands remain in temporary accommodation while waiting for a permanent home.

John Lamont said the UK Government will continue to help Ukrainians forced to flee their homes (Jane Barlow/PA)

Scotland Office minister John Lamont said: The UK has a long, proud history of helping those fleeing danger or persecution and we will continue to help the Ukrainians whose lives were thrown into turmoil when Russia illegally invaded their country.

Todays announcement of a further 30 million for Scotland to help rehome people from Ukraine brings a welcome boost to the great effort already made.

I want to thank everyone who has helped support Ukraine for more than a year now, including all those who have helped Ukrainian refugees make new lives in Scotland.

Petro Rewko, of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, said his organisation welcomes the funding commitment during difficult economic times.

He added: Ukrainians everywhere are grateful to the Government and the British people for opening their homes and hearts to Ukrainians fleeing their homes as a result of Russias illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Actress Nikki Sanderson is due to enter the witness box at the High Court in London to give evidence in her claim against the publisher of the Mirror for alleged unlawful information gathering.

Former Coronation Street star Ms Sanderson, 39, is suing Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) for damages, claiming journalists at its titles  which also include the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People  were linked to methods including phone hacking, so-called blagging or gaining information by deception, and use of private investigators for unlawful activities.

Her case is one of four representative claims being heard in London, alongside similar claims brought by the Duke of Sussex, Coronation Street actor Michael Turner, known professionally as Michael Le Vell, and comedian Paul Whitehouses ex-wife Fiona Wightman.

Ms Sanderson, who played Candice Stowe in Coronation Street between 1999 and 2005, is due to enter the witness box to give evidence on Friday.

Her barrister David Sherborne told the court on Thursday that Ms Sanderson only became aware she had a potential claim against MGN after chatting with Hollyoaks co-star Gary Lucy.

Ms Sandersons barrister David Sherborne said his clients claim spanned a period of 10 years (Lucy North/PA)

He said she had suspected friends, people working on Coronation Street and members of the public of selling stories about her, and therefore didnt suspect unlawful methods being used until she spoke to Mr Lucy in about 2019.

Mr Sherborne said Ms Sanderson was surprised when Mr Lucy told her that, based on a case he was bringing against MGN at the time, she would definitely have a claim.

He added: Prior to her conversation with Mr Lucy, she had nothing on her mind to do with being hacked.

The barrister said Ms Sanderson, who filed her claim in December 2020, says she had never heard about the Leveson Inquiry into press standards, knew that the News Of The World had closed but not why, and had no knowledge of the previous High Court phone-hacking trial in 2015.

Mr Sherborne told the court that Ms Sanderson had been an actress for most of her life, first appearing in the long-running soap when she was aged 15.

Indeed, she would say she grew up on the show until she left in 2005, the barrister said.

Mr Sherborne said Ms Sandersons claim spanned a period of 10 years, 1999 to 2009, and that she complains about 37 articles in Mirror titles.

Ms Sandersons case is one of four representative claims being heard in London (Aaron Chown/PA)

He told the court that MGN had admitted unlawful information in relation to one story from October 2004, and made admissions that its journalists instructed private investigators to unlawfully obtain information on four occasions.

MGN has previously denied that 35 of the 37 articles involved phone hacking or unlawful information gathering, with one article being not admitted.

Mr Sherborne said MGN had apologised to Ms Sanderson for the first time in a document submitted for the trial, adding that this was despite the fact that her claim has been going on for three years.

The trial previously heard that Ms Sanderson felt like she was public property and experienced abuse in the street following false insinuations in articles published by MGN titles.

In its trial defence, the publisher says Ms Sandersons claim is brought too late, but unreservedly apologises over four payments made to private investigators which it admits are evidence of instructions to unlawfully obtain her private information.

The publisher also claims that evidence does not suggest Ms Sandersons phone was successfully hacked.

MGN previously brought a bid to have Ms Sandersons claim thrown out but it was allowed to proceed by Mr Justice Fancourt in a May 2022 ruling.

The trial is due to resume at 11am on Friday following a hearing in relation to an application by the duke, which may be held in private.
Renowned teacher accompanies gaokao examinees for 13 consecutive years

People's Daily Online) 09:39, June 09, 2023

Zhang Guimei, the founder and principal of Huaping High School for Girls in Huaping county, southwest China's Yunnan Province, accompanied high school students as they headed to take China's national college entrance exam, commonly known as "gaokao," on June 7. Since 2011, Zhang has faithfully adhered to the tradition of seeing off and accompanying gaokao examinees, maintaining an impressive streak of 13 consecutive years without absence.

Zhang Guimei, the founder and principal of Huaping High School for Girls in Huaping county, southwest China's Yunnan Province, accompanies high school students as they head to take China's national college entrance exam on June 7. (Photo courtesy of the media convergence center of Huaping county)

At the break of dawn, Zhang arrived at the school building, eagerly awaiting the students' arrival for the early morning study session. She reminded them to bring all necessary examination materials and provided them with words of encouragement. Before departing, teachers and students gathered to offer heartfelt cheers to the candidates.

During the journey to the examination site, Zhang joined the senior students in singing songs, offering them a comforting presence.

As a renowned educator, Zhang Guimei has been dedicated to helping girls from impoverished areas pursue education for over 40 years. In recognition of her outstanding contributions, she was awarded the Communist Party of China's top honor, the July 1 Medal, in 2021.

Zhang Guimei, the founder and principal of Huaping High School for Girls in Huaping county, southwest China's Yunnan Province, accompanies high school students as they head to take China's national college entrance exam on June 7. (Photo courtesy of the media convergence center of Huaping county)

(Web editor: Xian Jiangnan, Liang Jun)
President Yoon Suk Yeol, right, shakes hands with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at his office in Yongsan, central Seoul, June 9, 2023. OpenAI is the creator of ChatGPT. Yonhap



South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol met with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, the president's office said Friday, to discuss a variety of topics regarding artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.



"ChatGPT is stirring up a global sensation," Yoon told Altman, who is traveling to meet political and tech leaders around the world.



"I asked ChatGPT some questions when writing up my New Year's speech and got some very decent results," Yoon said.



Altman suggested South Korea, one of the world's most active users of ChatGPT, can help advance technologies that power the AI chatbot even further, partly by producing more advanced chips.



Collaborating with the country, home to the world's two largest memory chip makers, Samsung Electronics Co. and SK hynix Inc., is important, the CEO said, as ChatGPT needs a vast amount of memory chips and demand for such semiconductors will continue to rise.



Altman also called on South Korea to reduce regulations on AI products and services, and actively participate in setting up international standards.



Yoon agreed on the need to set up global standards to prevent side effects associated with ChatGPT, at a time when the pace of technology development is so fast.



Earlier in the day, Altman said he is ready to invest in promising startups in the country.



"We're exploring investing more in Korean startups. And we'd be very excited to explore the joint chip collaborations to develop AI accelerators," he said while meeting with South Korean startups.



"Korea is one of the places in the world that has adopted OpenAI most the earliest, use it the most creatively. It's amazing to see what people are doing here," he said.



"Those two combined with the culture of innovation and what's happening with the use of AI, particularly OpenAI, make us very excited to collaborate more deeply with the country." (Yonhap)




Boris Johnson has called time on his political career by lambasting a committee of MPs whom he claims were biased and determined to see him go.

Mr Johnson, 58, announced he was stepping down as MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip  and compared the Privileges Committee probe into whether he lied to Parliament over partygate to a kangaroo court.

His resignation statement on Friday, which was sent to the media just hours after the Government published his long-awaited resignation honours list, came after he received a letter from the Privileges Committee which Mr Johnson says made it clear they were determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of Parliament.

Former prime minister Boris Johnson (Kirsty OConnor/PA)

Mr Johnson wrote: I have been an MP since 2001. I take my responsibilities seriously.

I did not lie, and I believe that in their hearts the Committee know it.

Mr Johnson led the Conservatives to a landslide election victory in 2019  but was given a fixed penalty notice over Downing Street lockdown parties and then forced out by his own MPs after three years in office, following a string of scandals.

He resigned in July 2022 and his final speech in Downing Street appeared to hint at a comeback  including a reference to Cincinnatus, who was recalled from his farm to save ancient Rome from crisis.

Just months later, he emerged as an early front-runner to be the next prime minister.

His replacement Liz Truss crashed and burned after 45 days in the job, and had resigned after her policy programme spooked the financial markets.

At the time polling suggested he was still deeply unpopular with the public at large, although not as unpopular as Ms Truss and he had significant support among Tory members.

Former prime minister Boris Johnson attending a prayer service to mark the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Yui Mok/PA)

Mr Johnson largely kept a low profile following his resignation, apart from a tribute to the late Queen and continuing his steadfast support for Ukraine until in March, he found his political future was in the hands of the Privileges Committee.

He faced a grilling which lasted more than three hours from the committee where he insisted he did not lie to the House over his reassurances about Covid guidance being followed in Downing Street during the pandemic.

He told the panel it would have been utterly insane for him to have misled Parliament.

But even before becoming prime minister, he had been accused of racism and homophobia, as well as multiple affairs, and was forced to apologise to Parliament for failing to properly declare outside earnings totalling more than 50,000 on several occasions.

Despite this he seemed to continue defying political gravity, rising ever upwards from MP to mayor of London to foreign secretary and, eventually, into Number 10 itself.

He even built up a reputation for being able to win in unexpected places, starting with his bid for the London mayoralty in 2008.

Although not quite the Labour stronghold it is now, the capital was still a daunting prospect for a Conservative after two terms of Red Ken Livingstone, but Mr Johnson managed not only to win but then retain the mayoralty in 2012.

And then, in December 2019, his promise to Get Brexit done saw him lead the Conservatives to a landslide victory, picking up swathes of traditionally Labour territory.

But even with his majority, Mr Johnson was confronted by significant challenges.

He did manage to secure a Brexit deal, but his decision to reopen the question of the Northern Ireland Protocol suggested Brexit was not done while also opening him to accusations he was reneging on an agreement with the UKs international partners.

Then came the pandemic, derailing many of his plans to level up the country and seeing him admitted to an intensive care unit as he was struck down with Covid.

MPs became rebellious as he broke manifesto pledges on tax rises, U-turned on social care, backtracked on rail promises and continued to impose Covid restrictions that some felt draconian.

And still scandal dogged him. Just as he appeared unassailable  leading in the polls, presiding over a successful Cop26 and a triumphant Tory conference  it all started to fall apart.

First came the Owen Paterson affair and then the revelations of partygate that saw him become the first prime minister to receive a criminal penalty while in office, before finally the Chris Pincher scandal brought an avalanche of ministerial resignations and his exit from Downing Street.
A British girl who was one of four children stabbed in a knife attack in the French Alps was on holiday in the area.

The knifeman attacked the group of children  aged between 22 months and three years  and two adults at a lakeside park in Annecy on Thursday.

French interior minister Gerald Darmanin said the suspect, a 31-year-old Syrian man, had tried to claim asylum in France but it was refused on Sunday because he had previously been granted asylum in Sweden 10 years ago.

The British girl is three years old and was taken to hospital in Grenoble, a city around an hour-and-a-half from Annecy by car.

French President Emmanuel Macron travelled to the Alps on Friday to meet families and witnesses who have been left traumatised by the attack, his office said.

Mr Macron and his wife Brigitte flew to Grenoble where they met three of the children injured in the attack before heading to Annecy.

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne confirmed all four children underwent surgery and are under constant medical surveillance.

Tributes left near the scene at a lakeside park in Annecy, France (Peter Byrne/PA)

Two of the children remain in a critical condition on Friday morning, government spokesman Olivier Veran said, but reports suggest the British girl is stable.

The public prosecutor of Annecy confirmed the suspects custody had been extended on Friday morning.

Translated to English, a tweet said: Stab attack in Annecy. The defendants custody is extended. No other communication planned for this day in the state.

Tearful well-wishers have visited the playground where the children were stabbed.

Flowers and messages were laid at the scene, with messages including Love Annecy, and Children I dont know you but in this hour you are fighting.

The Swedish Migration Agency has confirmed the suspect was granted permanent residency in 2013 and although the agency did not identify him, it said he subsequently sought Swedish citizenship in 2017 and 2018, both denied, and applied again in August last year.

Mr Darmanin said the suspect entered France legally, adding: For some reasons we dont really understand, he applied for asylum in Switzerland, in Italy and in France, which he didnt need to do as he already had asylum in Sweden for the past 10 years.

(PA Graphics)

Local prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said one of the adults was seriously injured by both a knife wound from the attacker and a bullet wound from police as officers shot at the knifeman while trying to detain him.

The Telegraph reported the gunshot victim is a 78-year-old man who is now in a life-threatening condition in hospital after also being stabbed six times.

Witnesses said the knifeman shouted in the name of Jesus Christ as he launched the attack, including stabbing a child in a pushchair repeatedly as bystanders screamed for help.

Security forces examine the scene of knife attack in Annecy (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone/AP)

Ms Bonnet-Mathis told a press conference on Thursday afternoon the attackers motives were unclear, but they did not appear to be related to terrorism.

Footage of the attack shared on the internet shows a man in dark glasses and with a blue scarf covering his head brandishing a blade as people screamed for help.

In another video, the man appears to shout in the name of Jesus Christ while waving the knife in the air, with people nearby screaming for police.

He then slashed at a man carrying a rucksack who attempted to approach him.

The video then shows a woman frantically pushing a stroller inside the play area of the park as the attacker approached her while she screamed for help.

Local schools were locked down after the knife attack (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone via AP)

She attempted to fend off the attacker before he leaned forward and stabbed down into the pushchair.

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the suspect had no criminal or psychiatric record and appeared to have acted alone.

We are talking here about infants, very young infants who have been very seriously injured, she told a press conference, according to a translation.

We are absolutely shaken by all this and we are standing firm by the people of Annecy.

Flowers and teddy bears left at the childrens play area (Peter Byrne/PA)

Speaking at a press conference at the White House on Thursday evening alongside US President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described the attack as unfathomable.

He said: All our thoughts are with those who were affected in this unfathomable attack, including a British child, and their families.

I have been in touch with President Macron. We stand ready to offer any assistance that we can.
A British girl who was one of four children stabbed in a knife attack in the French Alps while on holiday has been visited by French President Emmanuel Macron.

The knifeman attacked the group of children  aged between 22 months and three years  and two adults at a lakeside park in Annecy on Thursday.

French interior minister Gerald Darmanin said the suspect, a 31-year-old Syrian man, had tried to claim asylum in France but his bid was refused on Sunday because he had previously been granted asylum in Sweden 10 years ago.

The British girl, named locally as Ettie, is three years old and was taken to hospital in Grenoble, a city around an hour-and-a-half away from Annecy by car.

She is awake and watching television, according to Mr Macron.

Mr Macron and his wife, Brigitte, visited her and other victims in hospital on Friday before travelling to the lakeside town where the attack took place.

Speaking at a police headquarters close to where the incident took place, he said: I had the opportunity with my wife to meet with several of these families in Grenoble and then Annecy.

Mr Macron continued: But we are of course, in our thoughts, in our emotions, and in solidarity, behind the children and adults who were targeted and one of the victims is here with us.

Mayor of Annecy Francois Astorg also told reporters: The children are stable right now, the adults are much better.

President Macron this morning went to see the children in Grenoble and the adults later.

The kids have been operated on, they are stable and we are confident, I dont want to say more than that at the moment.

French prime minister Elisabeth Borne confirmed all four children underwent surgery and are under constant medical surveillance.

Tributes left near the scene at a lakeside park in Annecy, France, following a knife attack (Peter Byrne/PA)

Ms Borne also confirmed all four children are in a stable condition in hospital.

The public prosecutor of Annecy confirmed the suspects custody had been extended on Friday morning.

Mr Macron also shook hands with a man who appeared to chase the knifeman around the park, at a police headquarters close to the incident.

Henri, 24, who is travelling across the country visiting various cathedrals and was visiting the lakeside town at the time of the attack, was labelled a hero in France after the video was shared on social media.

Mr Macron said: Attacking children is the most barbarous of acts and I think that is what has shocked us.

He told Henri: You experienced very hard moments, traumatising. I am very proud of you.

Tearful well-wishers visited the playground where the children were stabbed.

Flowers and messages were laid at the scene, with messages including Love Annecy, and Children I dont know you but in this hour you are fighting.

A British mother of two, Katie Jackson, 39, was in tears as she said her son had asked to visit the park on the day of the attack.

Tributes left near the scene in Annecy (Peter Byrne/PA)

Ms Jackson moved to the town three years ago with her husband. She has two sons, Rudy, five, and Vinnie, nine months.

She said: Locally we call this the pirate playground, because it has a pirate ship in it, its a place that our kids know and love.

It was my sons fifth birthday yesterday and he had mentioned he would be interested in going to the pirate place, but he was at school.

Its a local treasure, thats why its so shocking. I dont know anyone who hasnt visited the pirate playground.

The Swedish Migration Agency has confirmed the suspect was granted permanent residency in 2013 and although the agency did not identify him, it said he subsequently sought Swedish citizenship in 2017 and 2018, both denied, and applied again in August last year.

Mr Darmanin said the suspect entered France legally, adding: For some reasons we dont really understand, he applied for asylum in Switzerland, in Italy and in France, which he didnt need to do as he already had asylum in Sweden for the past 10 years.

Local prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said one of the adults was seriously injured by both a knife wound from the attacker and a bullet wound from police as officers shot at the knifeman while trying to detain him.

Witnesses said the knifeman shouted in the name of Jesus Christ as he launched the attack, including stabbing a child in a pushchair repeatedly as bystanders screamed for help.
A businessman has denied paying hush money to a former Royal Marine who planted two bombs in Londons legal district.

Jonathan Nuttall, 50, allegedly orchestrated a plot aimed at two lawyers acting for the National Crime Agency with whom he was in a financial dispute.

Jurors at the Old Bailey have heard he was unhappy that he might lose his family home, Embley Manor in Romsey, Hampshire, to pay off a 1.4 million legal settlement with the NCA.

It is alleged he deployed his driver Michael Sode, 58, to act as a middleman with Michael Broddle, 46, who planted the two devices at Grays Inn on September 14 2021.

On Friday, Nuttall denied that he paid Broddle via Sode for the activities that he had engaged him to do and then paid more money to keep him quiet afterwards.

Cross-examining, prosecutor Catherine Farrelly said: Following his arrest you continued to pay him money, money that Im going to refer to as hush money. Money to keep quiet.

Nuttall replied: Thats completely wrong.

The defendant was then quizzed about his failure to answer questions in his police interview.

Ms Farrelly suggested he sat back and listened to what police had uncovered in their investigation then chose not to answer their questions because you did not an an answer for them at the time.

Nuttall responded: I answered quite a number of questions at the beginning.

The prosecutor went on: What you did was you let the police reveal the information that they had and went away and manufactured your defence thereafter.

The defendant answered: Thats completely wrong. I was never asked a question after that date.

He told jurors he was in complete shock at being arrested as he was not someone who was involved in criminal activity like this.

Nuttall and Sode, of Deptford, south-east London; and Broddles sons Charlie, 18, and Joshua, 20, from Hounslow, west London; deny two charges of conspiring with Michael Broddle to place an article with intent on or before September 14 2021.

Charlie Broddle denies possession of an explosive substance in relation to one of the devices.

Nuttall, Sode, Michael Broddle, Joshua Broddle and George Gray, 25, of Hounslow, deny conspiring to transfer criminal property.

Nuttall faces six charges and Sode two charges of failure of comply with a notice.
Curators are delighted to have secured a little black dress designed by Chanel in 1926 to open an exhibition on the success of the garment over almost a century.

Beyond The Little Black Dress, which launches at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh next month, will bring together more than 60 looks from collections and designers around the world.

It opens with a long-sleeved black day dress designed by Gabrielle Coco Chanel in 1926, which was hailed by US Vogue as the frock that all the world will wear.

The silk crepe dress is on loan from the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative Arts) in Berlin.

The dress is on show as part of the exhibition, Beyond The Little Black Dress (Jane Barlow/PA)

Georgina Ripley, principal curator of modern and contemporary design at National Museums Scotland, said: The dress is incredibly significant for its own merit anyway, but for our exhibition its really pivotal because we are opening the exhibition with the idea that this is kind of the birth of the little black dress.

The well-known story within fashion history is of Chanel being the inventor of the little black dress and 1926 being the date, and thats because a very simple long-sleeved day dress of silk crepe de Chine was featured in American Vogue in the October edition and it called this dress the frock that all the world will wear.

The dress that we have on loan from the museum in Berlin is not the exact dress that featured in that Vogue article, but it is the exact same style, made from the same sort of fabric, and its incredibly rare to actually find little black day dresses from that date in collections.

Its been amazing for us to be able to locate one, to be able to tell this really important story within the history of the little black dress.

Vogue compared the dress to Henry Fords model T motor car, linking it to the idea of the democratisation of fashion, although it would still have been very expensive and only affordable to the wealthy.

The dress drew on the functionality of menswear and of clothes worn by those working in the service industry, such as maids and shop workers.

Chanels contemporary Paul Poiret described the style as poverty de luxe  things that have humble origins elevated to couture-style clothing.

While black was already in fashion before 1926 and other little black dresses had been created, something about Chanels design was seen as being an important moment in the modernisation of womens fashion.

The exhibition was originally due to open in 2020 but was pushed back due to Covid, and curators were thrilled they could still borrow the dress from the museum in Berlin this year.

Ms Ripley said: This is such a natural place to start this story because its known in fashion history and we also wanted to confront head on that it really is just a moment that has been picked upon as the origin of the little black dress, but it would be really strange to tell that story without having that dress.

We had our heart set on telling the story in that way and opening with this dress, so were delighted weve been able to see that mission through.

The exhibition looks at fashions through the decades, from early pieces by Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior and Jean Muir to contemporary designers and brands such as Gareth Pugh, Simone Rocha and Off-White.

Areas of the exhibition are dedicated to highlighting black British designers whose work explores both blackness in terms of identity and the role the colour plays in crafting a futuristic, sci-fi aesthetic.

It also considers how perceptions of the colour black differ in a global context.

The exhibition runs from July 1 until October 29.
Disposable vapes must be banned and others sold in plain packaging to curtail the Wild West market in e-cigarettes which is damaging young people, the Childrens Commissioner for England has said.

Dame Rachel de Souza said she was deeply worried by the fact children feel under pressure to vape  including avoiding using school toilets where it is happening  saying it is insidious these products are intentionally marketed and promoted to children.

Her comments echo those from Englands Chief Medical Officer, Professor Sir Chris Whitty, who in February attacked the appalling marketing of vapes to children  saying it is clear some products are intended to appeal to underage youngsters.

Earlier this week, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) also called for a ban on disposable vapes, saying youth vaping is fast becoming an epidemic and that e-cigarettes are not a risk-free product and can be just as addictive, if not more so, than traditional cigarettes.

Dame Rachel published new research including from more than 3,500 children aged eight to 17 and their parents which found youngsters are worried about peer pressure and being exposed to promotion of vaping on social media.

She said the sale of nicotine-free vapes to children should be banned, and welcomed a Government review in this area, but also said e-cigarettes should be sold only in plain packaging to prevent their appeal to youngsters.

Furthermore, age-of-sale signs on vaping products should be mandated in the same way as for tobacco.

Dame Rachel said: I am concerned by the rise in the number of children vaping in this country, particularly given the risks it poses to their health and wellbeing.

It is deeply worrying to hear how children feel pressured to vape.

We urgently need stricter regulation of this Wild West market. It is insidious that these products are intentionally marketed and promoted to children, both online and offline.

Many children who are addicted to vaping have never even smoked tobacco, with vaping acting as a gateway rather than a quitting strategy.

Children deserve to lead long, happy, healthy lives, which is why I am unequivocal in my view that no child should be smoking or vaping.

In May, data for Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) showed there has been a 50% rise in the last year in Great Britain in the proportion of children trying vaping.

It found a rise in experimental vaping among 11 to 17-year-olds, from 7.7% last year to 11.6% this year.

Social media carries posts from teenagers discussing flavours such as pink lemonade, strawberry, banana and mango (PA)

The figures showed that, as children get older, regular use of vapes and experimentation increases.

Some 10.4% of 11 to 15-year-olds had ever vaped, rising to 29.1% of 16 and 17-year-olds and 40.8% of 18-year-olds.

The proportion of children who have never smoked but who have tried vaping is 11.5%.

Disposable vapes are the e-cigarette of choice among youngsters, and purchases of vapes are mostly made from corner shops.

In 2021, current child vapers were least likely to buy disposable vapes (7.7%) but in 2022 they became the most used (52%) and this has continued to grow to 69% in 2023.

It is illegal to sell vapes to under-18s but social media carries posts from teenagers showing coloured vapes and discussing flavours such as pink lemonade, strawberry, banana and mango.

In her submission to the Governments consultation on vaping, Dame Rachel drew on her survey of children aged eight to 17 and their parents, as well as from the largest ever survey of children in England  the Big Ask  in 2021.

She said: I was shocked and concerned to hear from children as young as 12 who told me that vaping was normalised among their peers  even on school premises.

It is deeply worrying to hear accounts from children who now struggle to concentrate for whole lessons, unable to use their vape.

Other children are avoiding using school toilets, for fear of peer pressure to join in.

Schools have been horrified to discover that vapes confiscated from

their students contain dangerously high levels of chemicals like nickel and lead, exposure to which can affect the central nervous system and brain development.

When asked what the Government should do to make childrens lives better, Dame Rachel said both children and adults mentioned vaping, its health risks, and the need to prevent children from vaping, such as enforcing bans.

A Department for Health and Social Care spokesman said: It is illegal to sell nicotine vapes to children and we are concerned about the recent rises in youth vaping  particularly because of the unknown long-term harms.

We are taking bold action to crack down on youth vaping through the 3 million illicit vapes enforcement squad to tackle underage sales to children.

We have also launched a call for evidence to identify opportunities to reduce the number of children accessing and using vape products and explore where the Government can go further.
Commuters in Dundee face weeks of travel misery as a bus company slashes its timetables amid a walkout by workers.

Around 200 Xplore Dundee workers based at the citys East Dock Street depot will strike for 12 weeks from Monday, Unite confirmed on Friday after last ditch talks with the bus firm failed to provide a breakthrough.

The bus company has warned the strike will mean most services will run to a modified Sunday timetable  with services running every 30 to 60 minutes during the day on its core routes.

Some services, including Dundee and Fife school buses, will be suspended, the firm said, but some extra early morning journeys had been added for those travelling to work, including those to and from Ninewells Hospital.

Only the service to Edinburgh Airport is running as normal, with a bus every 90 minutes.

Dougie Maguire, Unite regional coordinating officer, said: The only thing that will prevent strike action from happening is if the company significantly improve their pay offer. It really is that simple.

Either the company value their workers and are prepared to pay them to going rate, which they can well afford, or they instead want strike action.

Workers involved in the strike  which was backed by 93% of those who took part in the ballot  include drivers, duty managers, platform and admin staff.

Unite members had rejected a 7% rise, which the union said had not been improved, and that discussions at the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) on Friday made no progress.

Mr Maguire said: Xplore Dundee management in a last ditch attempt to stop the imminent strike action sought talks with us through Acas.

It was a cynical move on the last day possible when they have had months to resolve this dispute.

But Ralph Roberts, chief executive of Xplore Dundees owners McGills Group, said the company strongly refute the narrative being put forward by the union which, he said, have sold a false expectation to their members and will leave the Dundee public to pick up the pieces of their unreasonable demands.

Mr Roberts said the company had amended its offer to try to meet the unions aspirations but that the union are unwilling to put this offer before their members and we couldnt reach agreement.

The strike will now go ahead as planned. McGills will endeavour to minimise the disruption to our customers as much as possible by running a modified Sunday timetable, he said.

We will be writing to our staff in the coming days to reiterate the improved offer that was made.

Ahead of Mondays strike, Unite claimed its members had fallen behind those who work at other similar bus firms across Tayside and Fife.

The union claimed workers in other companies enjoyed more competitive rates of pay, and have access to overtime pay and a company sick pay scheme.

Workers had recently supported striking at Xplore Dundee. Some 93% of the 88.6% who took part in the ballot backed the walkout.
The family of a 14-year-old boy who died following an incident at a school have paid tribute to their beautiful boy as police confirmed he died of natural causes.

Hamdan Aslams family revealed he had a pre-existing heart condition that had never been detected, and said sadly his death could have occurred at any time.

Emergency services were called to St Kentigerns Academy in Blackburn, West Lothian, to a report of concern for the teenager at around 1.20pm on Tuesday.

He was taken by ambulance to hospital, but he died a short time later.

In a statement released through their solicitor Aamer Anwar, his family said: Our family is left devastated by the sudden and tragic loss of our beautiful boy Hamdan, who brought so much joy to our lives.

We want to assure Hamdans friends and our community that this was an entirely natural death and could not have been predicted.

A full police investigation is being carried out, but we can confirm that Hamdan had a pre-existing heart condition that had never been detected, and sadly his death could have occurred at any time.

There is no-one to blame for his loss, it was Gods will.

We know that Hamdans teachers and friends did everything possible to save his life and for that our family will forever be grateful to them.

Emergency services were called to the school on Tuesday (PA)

The family also urged people to stop engaging in rumours on social media, saying it is untruthful and compounding our grief.

Police Scotland said that as with any sudden death, a report has been sent to the procurator fiscal.

Chief Inspector Jocelyn OConnor said: This has been a tragic incident which has deeply affected everyone at the school.

Our thoughts remain with Hamdans family and friends at this very difficult time and we are providing our support to them.

They have requested privacy and I would ask their wishes are respected.

St Kentigerns headteacher Andrew Sharkey said: Hamdan was an exemplary student and he will be hugely missed by the St Kentigerns community.

Hamdan was a bright and diligent young man, and conscientious in his studies. He was very friendly, popular with his classmates and he had a close group of friends. He was always polite and well-mannered in class and popular with his teachers. Hamdan was kind and thoughtful in all he did and he was always happy, with a beautiful smile.

Our thoughts and prayers remain with his family and friends at this incredibly difficult time.

Our dedicated team at St Kentigerns Academy will continue to provide support to pupils and we would ask that the familys privacy is respected.
Five members of a gang ride-out have been locked up for life for a revenge shooting which left one man dead and two passers-by injured.

Sharmake Mohamud, 22, was fatally shot while walking along Green Lanes in Haringey, north London, on the evening of September 21 2021.

He had suffered eight gunshot wounds to the chest, arms and bicep from up to four bullets and was pronounced dead at the scene.

The driver of a passing moped, Newton Junior, 40, and pedestrian Arber Dervishi, 26, were hit by bullets but survived.

Mr Junior was shot once in the buttock while Mr Dervishi suffered three gunshot wounds to his legs.

The Old Bailey was told Mr Mohamud was associated with a Turnpike Lane gang and had been the intended target.

CCTV footage captured the attackers embracing in apparent celebration afterwards.

The gunman, Ali Ceesay, 29, admitted murder and two counts of wounding with intent after giving evidence in his Old Bailey trial.

On Friday, the manipulative ringleader was jailed for life with a minimum term of 35 years and 275 days.

Ali Ceesay, 29, was ordered to serve more than 35 years in jail (Met Police/PA)

His spotter Abdul Mohamed, 25, and Mehdi Younes, 22, from Enfield, were found guilty of the charges and were jailed for life with minimum terms of 34 years and 31 years respectively for their roles.

Younger recruits Jaymar Creary and Joyce Manzenza, both now aged 18, from Waltham Forest, were also convicted after a trial and were each detained at His Majestys pleasure for at least 22 years.

The defendants were handed concurrent jail sentences for the two charges of wounding with intent.

Abdul Mohamed, 25, from Enfield, was jailed for at least 34 years (Met Police/PA)

Sentencing, Judge Simon Mayo KC said it was a carefully planned and pre-meditated tit-for-tat revenge attack which was all the more serious because it took place in public.

The fact a passing moped rider was hit by a stray bullet graphically demonstrates the grave danger to members of the public when a firearm is discharged on the streets, he said.

He condemned the defendants post-attack celebration, saying: All right-thinking people would be appalled by such a callous disregard for life.

In a statement read to the court, Mr Mohamuds mother Bilan said: No mother should have to bury their child first. It should always be the other way round.

Where is the basic human emotion and empathy? These gang rivalries need to stop.

His father Ali said: September 22 2021 will be a day that I will never forget. My son whom I watched for 22 years left this world. His time was over. These were the worst moments of my life.

The victims girlfriend added: Sharmake was such a selfless person always willing to go the extra mile for someone he loves. I lost someone who I wanted to spend my life with until the end of times and the afterlife.

Mehdi Younes, 22, from Enfield, was jailed for at least 31 years (Met Police/PA)

Previously, the court had heard how Ceesay had launched the gun attack after he and another man got out of a dark-coloured Jaguar which was stolen and had false registration plates.

Firearms casings recovered from the scene indicated Ceesay had been armed with a Tokarev-pattern self-loading pistol.

The occupants of the Jaguar were Ceesay, the two 18-year-olds, and Mohamed, while quartermaster Younes provided key backup.

The ride-out vehicle was later abandoned and set on fire in a failed bid to destroy evidence.

A latex glove and disposable paper face mask recovered from near the car had Ceesays DNA on them.

A sweatshirt, tracksuit bottoms and trainers found inside the Jaguar were linked by DNA to one of the 18-year-olds and a second glove had Mohameds DNA on it.

A machete sheath was also retrieved from the footwell of the vehicle, the court heard.

After the shooting, Ceesay had fled to The Gambia and was arrested upon his return to the UK on October 27 2021.


By Sandip Kumar Mishra



It happened after a long time. The top leaders of South Korea and Japan visited each other's capital cities in quick succession. First, the South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol visited Japan on March 16-17 and then the Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida visited South Korea on May 7-8. The visits brought optimism for an improvement in their economic, cultural, educational and people-to-people exchanges.



With regional security imperatives pushing both countries to forge trustworthy and close relations, it is a welcome step that the two leaders finally decided to reconnect the interests of their two countries. However, the problem is that in the process that they have been trying to hurriedly resolve: the emotive issues of sex slaves and forced labor, are layered and complicated.



On the forced labor issue a fund has already been established by the Yoon Suk Yeol government before his visit to Japan and for compensating the sex slaves, an $8 million fund was announced in 2015, through a final and irreversible agreement between the two countries. During his visit to Seoul, Kishida also said that his "heart ached deeply for the pain and sadness that so many people suffered under the harsh circumstances of those days" and many observers argue that the demand for apology and compensation on these emotive issues has been addressed.



Actually, the South Korean President himself has said that Japan does not need to apologize for something which "happened hundred years ago" or his statement that Japan does not need to apologize to South Korea anymore since they had already done it "several dozen times."



Nonetheless, critics say that the statement of Japanese Prime Minister Kishida was neither an apology on behalf of Japan nor an admission about who perpetrated the pain. His statement did not mention any specific acts of atrocities. The demands for apology and compensation must be understood in more comprehensive and nuanced terms. Korean people feel a sense of humiliation due to colonial Japan forcing girls and laborers in Korea into inhuman exploitation. In general, they want four things from the current Japanese state and Japanese people.



One, South Koreans want Japan to accept the role of the Japanese state in such atrocities. Two, Japan must also accept that such acts were illegal and immoral. Three, Japan must give a sincere apology. Here the apology must be by the Japanese state not by any particular leader. Here sincerity means that the Japanese state must conduct itself in a manner that aligns with the formal apology. Four, Japan must compensate the victims of these atrocities.



Actually, lots of observers feel that already Japan has compensated South Korea through the 1965 normalization agreement, through a fund for comfort women and now another fund by South Korea for forced laborers. They also feel that Japanese leaders have tendered their apologies multiple times and thus South Korea's demands for an apology are not appropriate. However, these observers do not realize that the compensation and apology come third and fourth in the priority order. A real beginning would be to accept the role of the Japanese colonial state in specific atrocities and their illegalities. Otherwise, the apologies and compensation would appear as if Japanese leaders were saying that though we did not have any formal role in these atrocities, since Korea suffered, we are apologizing and ready to compensate.



In the light of above understanding, a comprehensive and final solution to these issues is neither easy nor imminent. Now, the South Korean state and society have to reflect that if the Japanese state and its society are not ready to have a comprehensive reassessment of their grievances, is it possible for South Korea to force them to do so? Actually, all such attempts by South Korea so far have been futile and it will remain so in the near future.



Therefore, would it not be better, if South Korea articulates a framework for forgiveness in which it does not ask any such thing from Japan? It does not mean that they have to forget these atrocities, but healing may happen if a strong South Korean society, state and victims decide to forgive the perpetrator. It would be a morally high position and it may give an important message to the Japanese people. Moreover, it would also be pragmatic to do so as both countries could reap immense benefits from their bilateral cooperation in various domains.



For a better future concerning South Korea-Japan relations, Japan needs to comprehensively address the issue. South Korea need not keep repeating its demand for an apology and compensation and rather, try to bring forgiveness to its approach. It is both a moral and pragmatic strategy on the part of South Korea. The top leaders of both countries should not try to superficially address these emotive issues and should try to create a sensitive framework for them.





The author is associate professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and could be reached at sandipmishra10@gmail.com


The Government has been accused of bowing to pressure from oil and gas giants by announcing that it will remove the windfall tax should the price of the commodities continue to fall.

Ministers said they would slash the current 75% tax on North Sea oil and gas profits back to its regular 40% if prices reach certain levels.

They said they would take the move if the average price of oil fell to or below 71.40 dollars per barrel for two consecutive quarters, and the average price of gas fell to under 54p.

Gareth Davies, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, met with leaders in the oil and gas industry during a visit to Aberdeen on Friday.

He told the PA news agency there is a dual lock which requires the prices of both oil and gas to fall for two consecutive quarters before the windfall tax can end.

He said: If the price floor is triggered, what weve announced today is that the EPL (the windfall tax) will be permanently removed.

And I think thats a fairly reasonable thing to say, that when prices return to normal levels, the taxation regime should return to normal levels.

He also said there would be a longer-term fiscal review for the oil and gas sector.

The announcement drew criticism from opposition parties, unions and poverty campaigners, with the change branded premature and one of Rishi Sunaks biggest personal failures as chancellor and Prime Minister.

The windfall tax was first announced a year ago to ensure that oil and gas companies were not benefiting unduly from Vladimir Putins war in Ukraine.

Oil and gas prices soared after the Russian president launched a full-scale invasion, bent on taking Kyiv in just three days.

But well over a year later Ukraine is now pushing to take back the territory it lost in the early days of the war, which started in 2014.

The Government said the windfall tax will remain in place until 2028 as previously planned unless oil and gas prices fall to the levels needed for it to be revoked.

It said the tax had so far raised 2.8 billion since being implemented.

NEW  | Suspending the windfall tax would be a GIFT to energy giants who have enjoyed a record-breaking cash bonanza. Meanwhile, families across Britain have struggled to heat their homes.  Trades Union Congress (@The_TUC) June 9, 2023

Downing Street said the change was being made to protect domestic energy supply and safeguard thousands of jobs reliant on that sector.

Industry has warned that companies are cutting back on investment, the Government said.

This puts the long-term future of the UKs domestic supply at risk, meaning we would be forced to import more from abroad at a time when reliable and affordable energy is a focus for families and businesses.

But a union chief said ministers should not bow to pressure from oil and gas giants.

This would be a gift to energy giants who have enjoyed a record-breaking cash bonanza, while families across Britain have struggled to heat their homes, TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said.

Oil and gas companies have been allowed to get away with treating the British public like cash machines.

He criticised the Government for considering scaling back this already-moderate windfall tax after already leaving billions on the table by refusing to impose a proper windfall tax.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said: This out-of-touch Government has shown yet again that it doesnt care about people struggling just to get by, or the small businesses clinging on.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey branded the change an energy tax failure (Yui Mok/PA)

This energy tax failure ranks as one of Rishi Sunaks biggest personal failures as chancellor and Prime Minister.

The Green Party said it is beyond comprehension that the Government seems happy to allow these huge corporations to not only wreck the climate but to profit off the back of the cost-of-living crisis which they themselves have contributed to.

Simon Francis, the co-ordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, said the idea was premature.

Energy bills are predicted to remain high and levels of household energy debt are still surging, he said.

Greenpeace UKs climate campaigner, Georgia Whitaker, said: The Governments windfall tax on oil and gas companies already contains more loopholes than a block of Swiss cheese. And now they want to scrap it altogether.

But Offshore Energies UK, which represents the industry, said that it was not enough to restore confidence.

Weve always been clear that when the windfall conditions go, the windfall tax should go, its chief executive David Whitehouse said.

This is a step in the right direction, but many more will need to be taken to restore confidence to our sector.

Conservative MP Simon Clarke, a former cabinet minister and ally of Liz Truss, said the former prime ministers administration was quite clear last year that you cannot tax your way to growth.

He said: Ever higher taxes will only dissuade business from investing in Britain and creating the jobs and growth that we desperately need.

It seems that the Treasury is finally playing catch-up as far as the windfall tax is concerned; how long before it clicks that their corporation tax hike is doing similar damage?
Parents who care for disabled young people will be better supported to access vital savings, including child trust funds (CTFs), due to a new guide, according to the Government.

The toolkit marks the first step in the Governments pledge to raise awareness of the law to support families, providing the information they need in an easily accessible format so they can access funds quicker.

It will help parents and carers understand their rights and what they need to do under the Mental Capacity Act to manage the finances of their child, should they lose the ability to make decisions for themselves.

The Mental Capacity Act 2005 applies to people aged over 16 living in England or Wales who lack the capacity to make some or all of their own decisions.

The law is in place to empower and support adults with learning difficulties or severe disabilities to make their own decisions about their property or finances where they can.

It also serves to protect their bank accounts from fraud and abuse by people looking to exploit their vulnerability, the Government said.

The launch comes in response to a Government consultation published in February which found many parents were unaware of the legal steps they have to take to be able to make financial decisions on behalf of their child as they transition into adulthood.

In February, the Government said it had decided against developing a scheme that could have allowed the parents of teenagers who lack mental capacity to access small payments from CTFs without going through certain legal processes.

It said focusing on improvements to the application process, alongside raising awareness of the Mental Capacity Act, would address the root cause of the problem, so people know about the need to obtain legal authority for adults lacking capacity.

The Government is working with disability charities and the finance sector to raise awareness of the Act, as well as working to speed up application processes for families.

Banks, financial services, schools and disability charities will also be able to use the toolkit to better support families and guardians in understanding how the law works, the Government said.

Funds saved in bank accounts, such as CTFs and junior Isas, can help families provide care for their child or buy specialist equipment to support their needs.

To access funds, parents need to apply to the Court of Protection or have a lasting power of attorney in place.

CTFs are long-term, tax-free savings accounts for people born between September 1 2002 and January 2 2011, which they can access when they turn 18.

Many children received around 250 each from the state at the time their CTF was started, while those from low-income families or in local authority care received an additional 250.

The National Audit Office recently raised concerns that accounts are at risk of becoming forgotten or lost track of by those holding them.

Justice minister Mike Freer said: Parents who care for their disabled children face huge challenges every day and we understand the frustration theyve often experienced when trying to access their savings.

Raising awareness of the Mental Capacity Act is a vital part of supporting families so they better understand the important and necessary steps they need to take when their loved one loses capacity  easing their childs transition into adulthood while protecting their finances from fraud.

Alex Ruck Keene KC, a barrister specialising in mental capacity, said: Awareness-raising and education is a never-ending task, but it is extremely helpful to have up-to-date and practical materials to assist families  in particular  navigate the requirements of the Act to keep the focus on the needs of those with impaired decision-making capacity.
A jury has been shown a gun holster identical to one Louis De Zoysa was wearing when he allegedly murdered a Met Police custody sergeant.

De Zoysa, 25, is accused of shooting dead Sergeant Matt Ratana, 54, at a custody block in Croydon, south London, on September 25 2020 while he was handcuffed.

Members of the jury in the trial at Northampton Crown Court watched while a copy of a gun holster was shown in the courtroom during a brief hearing on Friday.

Jocelyn Ledward, for the prosecution, said the holster shown to the jury was exactly identical to the one owned by De Zoysa.

Sergeant Matt Ratana (Metropolitan Police/PA)

The prosecution alleges De Zoysa, who denies murder, pulled the trigger on purpose four times while he was handcuffed in a holding room at the custody centre, the first and second shots hitting Sgt Ratana, the third hitting the wall during a struggle with officers, and a fourth hitting De Zoysa himself.

They say the gun and holster were probably concealed under one of his armpits.

He had been arrested on London Road, Norbury, south London, during the early hours of September 25 2020, after a stop and search by officers found he had cannabis and seven rounds of ammunition.

Officers did not know De Zoysa had a gun until it was used to shoot Sgt Ratana.

Sgt Ratana had five injuries caused by two bullets  a fatal gunshot wound to the chest, with the bullet going through his heart, and four other injuries caused by a second bullet.

The second bullet passed through the muscles of his thigh and buttocks.

Both the prosecution and the defence agree De Zoysa, who was 23 at the time of the incident, pulled the trigger on the first and second shot and that the gun was fired four times.

They also agreed the third shot was fired when the gun was still in De Zoysas hand, and the fourth hit De Zoysa in the neck.

The trial continues on Monday.
Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spaceys trial for alleged sex offences is on track to see a jury sworn in on June 28, a court has heard.

Mr Justice Wall told a hearing at Coventry Crown Court that a second overflow courtroom would be set up at Londons Southwark Crown Court for Spaceys trial, to accommodate members of the press and other interested parties.

Spacey was not required to attend Fridays pre-trial hearing, which saw prosecutor Christine Agnew KC and defence counsel Patrick Gibbs KC both appear via videolink.

The court was told Mr Spacey had been given leave not to attend by the judge prior to the hearing.

During discussions about arrangements for the trial, Mr Justice Wall said: A number of spaces are to be reserved for the press in the court itself and (in) the overspill court.

Spacey, known for starring in American Beauty, The Usual Suspects and House Of Cards, denies a total of 12 charges relating to four men.

The offences are alleged to have taken place between 2001 and 2013.

The actor, 63, pleaded not guilty in January to three counts of indecent assault, three counts of sexual assault and one count of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent.

He had previously denied four charges of sexual assault and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.
The King and Queen will attend an event in Edinburgh next month in a historic occasion to mark their coronation.

Charles will be presented with the Honours of Scotland  the oldest crown jewels in Britain  at a national service of thanksgiving at St Giles Cathedral on Wednesday July 5, as part of Royal Week.

The Prince and Princess of Wales, known as the Duke and Duchess of Rothesay in Scotland, will also be in attendance.

A peoples procession of around 100 community groups will collect the honours from Edinburgh Castle.

Corporal Cruachan IV met the late Queen at Balmoral in 2014 (PA)

The procession will be escorted to the cathedral by the Royal Regiment of Scotland and its Shetland pony mascot Corporal Cruachan IV, supported by cadet musicians from the combined cadet force pipes and drums.

Meanwhile, a royal procession will travel from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to the cathedral, with the public lining the Royal Mile to view both processions.

A 21-gun salute will fire from Edinburgh Castle at the end of the St Giles service, before the royal procession travels back to the palace.

Scotlands First Minister Humza Yousaf said: Scotland will welcome the new King and Queen in July with a series of events to mark the coronation.

A peoples procession, a royal procession, a national service of thanksgiving and a gun salute will take place in Edinburgh.

The Prince and Princess of Wales will join the event (PA)

Representatives from many different communities and organisations in Scotland will take part in these historic events.

People who wish to mark this historic occasion can get involved by watching broadcast coverage or viewing events in person.

We will issue more information confirming how members of the public can access events in the coming weeks.

The Stone of Destiny will be in the cathedral during the service, and there will also be a fly-past by the Red Arrows following the event.

The peoples procession will include representatives from a wide range of organisations in Scotland, including the Scottish Youth Parliament, Guide Dogs, the Scottish Tartans Authority, the College of Master Kilt Makers, Scouts and Girl Guides.
Proposed changes to a controversial Government Bill on the legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles are not about covering up state wrongdoing, a minister has insisted.

Lord Caine, the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) minister who tabled the amendments, acknowledged the draft legislation was very challenging for victims of the conflict but he urged them to give the proposals fair wind.

The Bill has proved highly contentious, with victims groups, all of the main Stormont parties and the Irish government all opposed to it.

Lord Caine came to the defence of the Bill as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar reiterated his criticism as he said the amendments dont go far enough.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the amendments do not go far enough (PA)

The draft legislation would establish a new commission aimed at uncovering facts around unsolved Troubles deaths.

One of the most controversial aspects of the new legal framework is the offer of immunity from prosecution for perpetrators who co-operate with the commission.

The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill would also halt future civil cases and inquests linked to killings during the conflict.

An earlier draft of the legislation would have allowed any inquest that had commenced with a substantive hearing prior to May this year to proceed to conclusion.

One of the amendments brought forward by Lord Caine changes this provision, with all ongoing inquests, other than those at the point of verdict, to cease on May 1 2024.

The NIO minister said the uncompleted inquests would be transferred to the new Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR), which will be led by former Northern Ireland Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan.

Families ought to have every confidence that therell be a seamless transition from the current inquest process to these cases being dealt with by the new body, the peer told the PA news agency.

And I think its important to know that the purpose of the body is essentially to do the same, produce the same results, in a slightly different way, not in an identical way, but to produce the same result as an inquest would, which is to establish the facts of what happened in a particular case.

He added: One thing that is not intended here, and Im very, very clear about this  this is not intended to be some great cover-up.

We are in the business of trying to get more answers, more information to those families that want them.

And Im perfectly sure that in the course of doing this therell be things that come out from the commissions investigations which will be embarrassing to the British state, just as there will be things that come out that will be embarrassing to others. So, Im totally prepared for that.

The Bill is currently at its report stage in the House of Lords before its return to the House of Commons. The Government is hoping the final legislation will be passed by the end of the summer.

Other amendments tabled by Lord Caine include clarification that the commission will have the powers to carry out full criminal investigations, in instances where perpetrators do not gain immunity for co-operation.

Anyone who is convicted in such circumstances would also not benefit from the early release provisions included in the Good Friday Agreement.

A fine for non-compliance with the commission has been increased from 1,000 to 5,000 and anyone found guilty of misleading the truth recovery body can been prosecuted and face a potential two-year jail sentence.

Another amendment places the commission under a new duty to rigorously test the veracity of the accounts of anyone applying for immunity. Immunity would also be revoked if the recipient is subsequently convicted of a terrorism offence.

Further amendments would place the ICRIR under a duty to offer victims and their families the opportunity to submit personal impact statements and put an obligation upon the ICRIR to ensure its examinations of historical cases are compliant with human rights laws.

Lord Caine defended the Bills contentious immunity provision, insisting it was only offered in limited and specific circumstances.

I completely understand the difficulties around this concept, he said.

It really comes back to what can we realistically deliver, which is greater information about what happened in Troubles-related cases to families, victims and survivors. How do you encourage people to co-operate  it is by offering some kind of an incentive and therefore conditional immunity.

Grainne Teggart of Amnesty International said the Bill could not be fixed (PA)

Speaking to reporters in Co Tipperary on Friday, Mr Varadkar restated the Irish governments opposition to the Bill.

It is one of the few things that all five major parties in Northern Ireland are united on, that they dont think this is the right approach to have a de facto amnesty, not just for former Army personnel but also for former terrorists, he said.

I dont agree with that approach and while there have been some amendments put forward, they dont go far enough, they dont fundamentally change the fact that any response to legacy has to be victim centred and victim orientated.

To take away the possibility of justice from those families, even if it is remote, is wrong in my view.

Grainne Teggart, Amnesty International UKs Northern Ireland deputy director, said the Bill could not be fixed.

The UK Government needs to drop the pretence that these amendments are about addressing victims concerns, she said.

In fact, amendments such as those on inquests significantly worsen the situation for victims.

To end inquests already under way that have not reached their stage of verdict by the beginning of May 2024 is another devastating blow for victims.

Lets be clear, this remains a Bill that will deny truth and justice.
The UK's best nudist beaches are waiting for you. (Posed by models, Getty Images)

Brits looking to strip off for a naked trip to the sea can now consult a list of the best naturist beaches across the UK.

Naturism has seen something of a surge recently, with the rise in WFH encouraging many to switch their stuffy work suits for birthday suits.

And 14% of people (the same as 6.75 million adults) in the UK actually describe themselves as naturists or nudists, according to a recent Ipsos survey. This is a huge leap from a similar poll in 2011, which then confirmed the figure at 3.7 million (6%).

"Attitudes to nudity are changing with taboos and stigma being eroded," Dr Mark Bass, president of British Naturism, said of the findings.

"Modern society is weighed down by a body confidence crisis and more and more people are discovering the benefits that nudity brings to mental, emotional and physical health by allowing us to reclaim ownership of our identities."

While some may prefer to head to far-flung destinations to beach it in the buff, with the cost of living crisis still biting, this summer naturists may opt to brave Britain's best instead.

Thankfully, travel experts from My Baggage have explored 11,000 miles of coastline to reveal five of the most popular spots among people who want to bare all on the beach  rain or shine.

It actually isn't illegal to be nude on any beach in the UK. (Getty Images)

UK's best naturist beaches

Due to our chilly climate, most beaches on the list of places to bare all are down south, (no pun intended), but one official naturist beach in the very north of Scotland has made the list for those brave enough to bare all in nippy temperatures.

Sillery Sands, Devon

Top of the suns-out, buns-out beaches is Sillery Sands, in Devon. While it's a bit of a mission to get to, the secluded space and stunning views more than make up for it.

Located just east of Lynmouth, naturists tend to stay at the north-eastern end of the beach, which has a sandy stretch at low tide and boulders and shingle below the cliffs throughout the day.

Watch: Carrie Hope Fletcher said swimming at a nudist beach was 'incredible'

Black Rock Naturist Beach, Brighton

Set just five minutes away from Brighton town centre, this nudist beach is one of the most accessible in the country.

The 200-yard stretch of sand reserved for naturists is at the eastern end of the town, a stones-throw from the marina.

Crakaig Beach, Scotland

Those brave enough to bare all in the cold should give Crakaig Beach in Scotland a visit. The beautiful sandy beach is set on the remote north-west coast of Scotland and backed by low sand dunes and fields.

It is one of only a handful of beaches in Scotland solely dedicated to being a designated, naturist beach.

The beautiful beach at Studland Bay, Dorset, which has a naturist section. (Getty Images)

Studland Beach, Dorset

Whilst this beach has a nudist area, those seeking solitude should probably pass on this pretty beach as it is extremely popular on sunny days.

The nudist beach is marked by posts in the centre mile of a three-mile-long sandy stretch, which is backed by sand dunes and heather.

Swale Naturist Beach, Kent

As well as a mixture of sand and shingles and a large grassy area, the beach also boasts a beautiful view of the coastline.

Naturists tend to set up camp on the grassy area, as it offers a little more shelter from the brisk winds.

There are many beautiful naturist beaches in the UK. (Getty Images)

Tips for trying a naturist beach for the first time

Seek out an official naturist beach

While it is perfectly legal to be naked on any public beach across England, Scotland, and Wales for a first visit it's a good idea to visit a beach known to be frequented by naturists.

"Meeting members of the public for the first time naked  whether that be on a walk or a beach  can be concerning for the new naturist as they will be unsure how the public are likely to react," explains naturist Donna Price.

"In our experience most people dont react badly, but certainly, for new naturists, being naked around clothed people can be a bit daunting."

Follow naturist etiquette

This means keeping your distance, refraining from taking pictures (even selfies), and absolutely no staring.

"Being nude does not mean being lewd, so it is important to respect everyone else on the beach!" says a spokesperson for My Baggage.

Check out facilities in advance

It's worth remembering that because many naturist beaches are off the beaten track, they may not have amenities like toilets or shops.

"So people thinking of giving a nudist beach a try should pack plenty of water, sun cream and snacks," the spokesperson adds.
Odey Asset Management has revealed it is in active discussions with its broker partners, after fresh misconduct allegations published against its founder led banks to review their relationship with the fund.

It followed a report in the Financial Times (FT)  together with Tortoise Media  which included several allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct from women who either worked at the hedge fund or had social or professional dealings with its founder, Crispin Odey.

In a letter to investors, seen by the PA news agency, Odey Asset Managements (OAM) chief executive Peter Martin said: We do not recognise the picture of the firm that has been painted by the Financial Times.

For legal reasons, the firm said it would not comment in detail on the allegations, which it said its lawyers are looking into.

Mr Martin added: We are aware of press coverage relating to actions allegedly being taken by prime brokers and other service providers to OAM.

While we cannot comment in detail (again for legal reasons), we are in active discussions with all service providers and we are confident that our service providers will continue to work with us to ensure that the interests of investors are protected.

On Friday, asset manager Schroders cut ties with OAM and sold its remaining investment in the business following the allegations.

Schroders is not invested in Odey Asset Management, a spokeswoman for the firm said.

On Thursday, it emerged that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is investigating the company and that banks are rethinking their relationships with the fund.

The American bank JP Morgan is understood to be looking at its ties with OAM, while reports emerged that Morgan Stanley is also moving to sever its prime broking relationship with the fund manager.

Both banks declined to comment.

The FT, citing a source, reported that the FCA opened an investigation into OAM two years ago. The FCA declined to comment.

The allegations involve 13 women who claim that Crispin Odey abused or harassed them, with eight of the 13 saying he sexually assaulted them.

The incidents happened between 1998 and 2021, the FT reported, after interviewing 40 former employees at Odey Asset Management.

Mr Martin said OAM treats, now and in the past, all such allegations extremely seriously, adding: Staff wellbeing is also central to the culture of OAMs business.

The PA news agency attempted to contact Mr Odey on Thursday. Reached by the FT, he said that the allegations were rubbish.

Contacted by Reuters after reports that Morgan Stanley was to cut back its prime broking relationship with Odey AM, Mr Odey said: That is a massively quick reaction to an allegation by the FT.

Mr Odey has previously faced similar allegations. In 2021, he was acquitted of indecent assault of a woman in 1998.

The judge in the case said that his accusers story contained inconsistencies.
Industrial action in the NHS should not become business as usual, a senior health chief has warned, as patients brace for more walkouts this month.

Sir Julian Hartley, the chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents trusts providing NHS hospital, mental health, community and ambulance services in England, said the long-term impacts of strikes on patient care was a major concern.

His comments come as junior doctors prepare to walk out for 72 hours from 7am on Wednesday.

The BMA Junior Doctors Committee has called for a 35% hike in wages, but earlier this week Health Secretary Steve Barclay branded the demand unreasonable and said there must be movement on both sides of the dispute.

Chief executive Sir Julian said: We cant go on like this. We cant let strikes become business as usual for trusts and their patients.

He added: We understand why junior doctors feel so frustrated by their pay rising below inflation.

Every hour that trust leaders and staff have to spend reorganising strike-hit services is time that takes them away from core business: seeing patients as quickly as possible, providing first-class care and cutting waiting lists.

The Government has been locked in a series of disputes with unions over pay and working conditions in the NHS since last year, resulting in a wave of strike action across the health service.

Hospital doctors union the HCSA is sending ballot papers to junior doctors to extend their mandate for strike action over pay for a further six months.

Consultants in England are also balloting to strike, with the vote set to close on June 27, while the Society of Radiographers 20,000 members in England will be balloted on industrial action in the coming weeks.

NHS workers on the picket line outside St Thomas Hospital, London, in May (Jordan Pettitt/PA)

Almost 300,000 members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) in England are currently being asked to renew their mandate for industrial action until the end of the year with the vote scheduled to close on June 23.

Sir Julian urged the Government and unions to talk and said its not too late to prevent walkouts.

He added: Getting round the table and talking is the only way to sort this out. Yet this isnt happening and its patients, yet again, who will pay the price.

Trust leaders and their staff will continue to do everything they can to minimise disruption and keep patients safe. But there is major concern about the long-term impact on patients who have their care delayed, on the cost of ensuring cover and the knock-on effects on wider health services.

The longer that industrial action goes on and trusts have to keep coping with the fallout from the most significant period of industrial action in the history of the NHS, the less they can focus all of their energy on patients.

HCSA president Dr Naru Narayanan said: Junior doctors dont want to strike. They want to be with their patients.

They have been driven to take this action by years of pay erosion  something that NHS leaders understand.

At its heart this dispute is about patient care. A series of governments have been asleep at the wheel as a staffing crisis has spiralled out of control. The sooner this Government recognises it must address more than a decade of real-terms pay cuts, the better for the NHS and for patients.

Junior doctors, their colleagues and NHS leaders are all calling for the government to engage in serious talks which recognise the strength of feeling among doctors.

Our door has always been open. We urge the government to stop stonewalling, see sense and get round the table to negotiate a deal that will end these strikes.


By John J. Metzler



The world seems to have forgotten about Syria. You could excuse this after a dozen years of bloody conflict, humanitarian catastrophes and a jarring earthquake in February. Equally, there's a global crisis overload from the Middle East to Eastern Europe and looming in East Asia. Syria's place in the constellation of conflicts seems to have dimmed and clearly been overshadowed. We have become numb to the pain.



"Syrians need the support of the international community now more than at any time in the past 12 years," implored Ms. Ghada Eltahir Mudawi, a U.N. Deputy-Director for humanitarian affairs. Addressing the Security Council she stated, "After twelve years of conflict, the vast majority of the Syrian population continues to face daily challenges to meet the most basic food, health and shelter needs."



She added, "A staggering 15.3 million people require humanitarian assistance throughout the country, representing nearly 70 percent of Syria's population." And humanitarian aid is in short supply and often blocked at northern border crossing points.



French diplomat Isis Jaraud Darnault stated unequivocally, "Bashar Al-Assad's regime and its allies are responsible for a war with unprecedented consequences: more than 500,000 deaths; more than 130,000 people missing; the displacement of 12 million Syrians; the use of chemical weapons by the regime against the population."



But let's not forget that a gaggle of jihadi terrorist organizations facing the Russian-backed Assad regime has kept this witches' brew boiling for over a decade. There are few winners.



Now there seems to be some diplomatic movement in the political logjam; Assad is being curiously courted and brought back into the Arab League. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who a decade ago supported anti-Assad militants, has welcomed the Ruler of Damascus back at a Saudi Summit. Not long before, Moscow hosted a meeting of the foreign ministers of Iran, Russia, Syria and Turkey.



Geir Pedersen, the U.N.'s Special Envoy for Syria stated, "It is vital that the recent diplomatic moves are matched with real action. Because let us remember that the Syrian people continue to suffer on a massive scale  the economy continues to reach new lows."



Ambassador Pedersen added, "The cumulative effects of a decade of war and conflict, corruption, the Lebanese financial crisis, COVID, sanctions, illicit drug trafficking and the war in Ukraine means that the economic morass of the Syrians has never been more acute. Changing this must be a key priority of any confidence-building process too."





There are at least 6 million Syrian refugees. One million Syrians are in neighboring Lebanon; the small country hosts the largest number of refugees per capita in the world. At least three million more have fled into Turkey. And let's not forget the summer of 2015 when more than a million Syrians fled to Germany and Sweden.



But the conflict's instability goes well beyond Syria's borders; the country has emerged as a nexus for international Islamic jihadi terrorist groups not only opposing Assad's rule but destabilizing the region, especially Lebanon's sensitive border with Israel.



But reaching a long-awaited political solution is not as easy as we assume despite the war weariness. "For France, there can be no lasting return to stability in Syria and the region without a political solution that meets the legitimate aspirations of all Syrians and enables them to live in peace in their country," Jaraud Darnault stressed.? "The parameters of the political process are known."



Before the conflict exploded during the Arab Spring of 2011, approximately 10 percent of Syria's 22 million population was Christian with the majority being Sunni Muslim. Today that number is drastically lower; of the 2.2 million Christian inhabitants prior to the war, only approximately 638,000 remain. Christians were particular targets of jihadi forces opposing the government.



U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield informed the Council, "Until there is political progress toward a durable resolution of the conflict, U.S. sanctions will remain in place  The United States will continue to hold the regime accountable for its abuses, including torture and killing." Credible reports cite at least 130,000 people held in regime-run detention centers.



"It is time to see the Syrians engaged in dialogue and return to discussing their own future together in the Constitutional Committee," cautioned Geir Pedersen, "to facilitate a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political resolution that restores Syria's sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity."



That's a tall order for a beleaguered land bathed in blood, religious sectarianism and political division. Syria's ongoing trauma must not continue; the hate and devastation have exhausted everyone.





John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of "Divided Dynamism: The Diplomacy of Separated Nations; Germany, Korea, China."






Actress Nikki Sanderson lost some of her sparkle because of the Mirrors publisher, her mother has told the High Court as part of the actresss phone hacking claim.

Hollyoaks star Ms Sanderson is suing Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) for damages, claiming journalists at its titles  which also include the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People  were linked to methods including phone hacking, so-called blagging or gaining information by deception, and use of private investigators for unlawful activities.

Ms Sanderson, who played Candice Stowe in Coronation Street between 1999 and 2005, entered the witness box in the High Court in London on Friday to give evidence in her representative claim, part of a trial that has also featured the Duke of Sussex.

As well as the actress, several other people have given written evidence in support of her case  including her mother Judith Sanderson, ex-boyfriend Danny Young and former co-star Tina OBrien  who have each previously settled their own claims with MGN.

In written evidence before the court, her mother said that when her daughter began working on the soap as a 15-year-old, she was one of the nicest children you could wish for.

Judith Sanderson said in her witness statement: We were expecting some changes, but we werent expecting for Nikki to have to deal with grown-up issues.

She said her daughter very quickly turned from being a carefree, happy girl with her friends who she loved dearly into somebody who was very suspicious.

Judith Sanderson said that her daughter was worried about going out because members of the public would attack her.

The drama school receptionist continued: MGN wrote such horrible things about Nikki and she was not able to defend herself.

In the end, Nikki was very depressed. She lost confidence and became very unsure of herself.

She was paranoid as she felt like she had to watch out all the time, and she dreaded going out because of the reaction she got from the public.

She lost some of her sparkle which, as her mum, was very painful to see.

Judith Sanderson also said in her written evidence, which has not been challenged by MGNs lawyers, that she did not know about phone hacking at the time because I thought that things like that only happened to royalty and American movie stars.

I never saw Nikki as being mega; shes not Hollywood, so I didnt think they would have been interested in her as a normal person, she added. I still find it very strange.

Fellow actress Tina OBrien gave written evidence in support of Ms Sandersons case (Ian West/PA)

Fellow actress Ms OBrien, who started playing Sarah Platt in Coronation Street in 1999, described Ms Sanderson as very private in her written evidence.

However, she said the press made up their little show about Ms Sanderson falsely being a party girl.

Ms OBrien said in her witness statement: It made her feel very uncomfortable to see these articles and not to know where the information was coming from or how to stop them.

The result of all these doubts and suspicions was that Nikki was sometimes very lonely and she always had this low-level anxiety as she didnt know what was coming next.

It kind of feels like a toxic relationship; that we deserved that treatment from the media as we had gone into this job, she added.

Ms OBrien later said that while her own claim against MGN was settled in December 2016, she had not told anyone about it because of how traumatic it was.

I felt like someone had taken my private diary and opened it up for the world to see, Ms OBrien added.

Ms Sandersons former partner Danny Young has also provided written evidence in support of the 39-year-olds claim.

In his witness statement, Mr Young said that Ms Sanderson was essentially used as tabloid fodder during her time on Coronation Street and that the pair changed their behaviour because of press intrusion.

I can recall going for dinner at random locations and the press would be there  We stopped going to certain places because we were paranoid about things ending up in the papers, he said.

He also said that he could remember hearing clicking noises on his phone line and that he would miss voicemail messages he was left.

MGN says Ms Sandersons claim has been brought too late and denies unlawful activity save for four occasions in 2004 and 2005 when its journalists instructed private investigators to obtain information about her.
Actress Nikki Sanderson has told the High Court she was harassed by the public  including by once having her hair set on fire  due to her portrayal in papers published by Mirror Group Newspapers.

Former Coronation Street star Ms Sanderson, 39, is suing Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) for damages, claiming journalists at its titles  The Daily and Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People  were linked to methods including phone hacking, so-called blagging or gaining information by deception, and use of private investigators for unlawful activities.

In a 28-page witness statement in support of her claim, the actress said that MGN created and repeated a narrative that she was stuck up, nasty, rude, promiscuous, and a party girl.

It feels like character assassination, she said.

Ms Sanderson claimed that in articles published in November 2004, The Mirror suggested she was bed-hopping and having sex with three people in one week, which was so upsetting as it was so far removed from the truth.

She continued: The backlash from the public was also very difficult and I was subjected to both mental and physical abuse.

People would shout at me in the street, calling me a whore, a slag or a slut.

People would elbow me, push me and, on one occasion, a group of girls even set my hair on fire.

The actress said she was in the toilets of a club and smelled burning as she washed her hands.

I looked down and they had set fire to the back of my hair, she continued.

She also added: No wonder people threw drinks over me when this is how I was portrayed in the media.

Ms Sanderson, who played Candice Stowe in Coronation Street between 1999 and 2005, also said MGN had a frightening amount of access to her and her whereabouts due to surveillance allegedly commissioned by the publisher.

She said: Learning about MGNs surveillance of me through my claim makes me so angry as I was a young girl at the time and they were hiring random men to follow me  they could have done anything to me.

How did MGN know that they hadnt hired someone who was capable of rape or murder? It has been particularly distressing to learn that these illegal activities continued for a period of many years.

The actress also said that having people in bushes watching her was creepy, like those things you see on serial killer dramas.

Ms Sanderson later described how she was self-conscious about going out because she believed random people were tipping off newspapers about what she was doing.

She continued: The reality is nobody was ringing up the papers with this information; the defendants journalists were hacking into my phone and carrying out surveillance on me.

Nikki Sanderson attending the British Soap Awards 2023 at The Lowry Theatre in Salford ahead of her appearance in the High Court this week (Danny Lawson/PA)

Its really upsetting now to find out the reality of what actually went on.

Ms Sanderson concluded: Of course being in the public eye means that there will be some level of scrutiny but I dont believe that it means that your whole life has to be laid bare; that is not my job.

My job is to portray characters on screen and on stage, but Nikki is not a character; Nikki is me.

MGN says Ms Sandersons claim has been brought too late and denies unlawful activity save for four occasions in 2004 and 2005 when its journalists instructed private investigators to obtain information about her.
A report into whether Boris Johnson misled MPs over his partygate assurances will be published promptly after the former prime ministers decision to dramatically quit the Commons.

The Commons Privileges Committee said the cross-party panel of MPs will meet on Monday to complete its inquiry.

It comes after Mr Johnson launched a blistering attack on the Conservative-majority committee, comparing it to a kangaroo court and a witch hunt, as he announced his intention to stand down as an MP and trigger an immediate by-election.

In a statement, a spokesman said: The committee has followed the procedures and the mandate of the House at all times and will continue to do so.

Mr Johnson has departed from the processes of the House and has impugned the integrity of the House by his statement.

The committee will meet on Monday to conclude the inquiry and to publish its report promptly.

Mr Johnson had accused the probe, chaired by veteran Labour MP Harriet Harman, of bias and suggested it was attempting to use its investigation to drive me out of Parliament in a move he said was motivated by a desire to reverse Brexit.

Several reports have suggested the committee had ruled that Mr Johnson did lie to the Commons when he said that Covid rules were followed in Downing Street following reports that lockdown-busting parties were held during the pandemic.

Boris Johnson accused Harriet Harmans committee of bias (House of Commons/UK Parliament)

The committee was said to be recommending a 10-day suspension from the Commons, a conclusion which would have resulted in a recall petition among his constituents and a potential by-election in his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency.

Mhairi Black, SNP deputy Westminster leader, said the former No 10 incumbent jumped before he was pushed.

The former Conservative Party leaders announcement that he was quitting as an MP came only hours after his resignation honours list had been published, in which he gave peerages, knighthoods and damehoods to close allies.

Mr Johnsons resignation means Rishi Sunaks Tories face a tough battle to hold onto his old seat at an upcoming by-election.

Polling released by Savanta suggested Labour, which was 7,000 votes behind in second place at the 2019 election in Uxbridge, currently holds a 14-point lead over the Tories in Mr Johnsons former west London constituency.

Even before Mr Johnsons decision to stand down, the constituency was already in Labours top 100 target seats at the next election, which is expected to be held next year, as Sir Keir Starmer seeks a majority to put him into Downing Street.

The contest was the second by-election triggered on Friday following former culture secretary Nadine Dorries decision to quit the Commons immediately, rather than wait until the next election.

Boris Johnson criticised Prime Minister Rishi Sunaks administration in his resignation statement (Danny Lawson/PA)

Mr Johnson said he was stepping down forthwith after receiving a letter from Ms Harmans inquiry setting out its position.

However, he left the door open to making a return to frontline politics, saying he was leaving Parliament for now.

In a scathing attack on the Privileges Committee, he accused the MPs of producing a yet-to-be-published report riddled with inaccuracies and reeks of prejudice while providing him with no formal ability to challenge anything they say.

They know that I corrected the record as soon as possible; and they know that I and every other senior official and minister  including the current Prime Minister and then occupant of the same building, Rishi Sunak  believed that we were working lawfully together, he said.

I did not lie, and I believe that in their hearts the committee know it.

He said he was bewildered and appalled at being forced out, anti-democratically by a probe that he claimed had set out from the beginning to find me guilty, regardless of the facts.

The Privileges Committee inquiry into Mr Johnsons partygate comments is made up of seven MPs, with the four Tories  Sir Bernard Jenkin, Sir Charles Walker, Alberto Costa and Andy Carter  holding the majority.

Their inquiry took both written and oral evidence from Mr Johnson, along with other witnesses, with the former British leader giving testimony during a lengthy session held in March.

Boris Johnson pictured giving evidence to the Privileges Committee in March (House of Commons/UK Parliament)

In his resignation statement, Mr Johnson was also critical of Mr Sunaks administration, questioning the decision to increase taxes and abandoning the prospect of a free trade deal with the US.

But he said the Tory Party has the time to recover its mojo and its ambition and to win the next election.

Mr Johnson became prime minister four years after returning as an MP, having stood down as MP for Henley in 2008 after being elected mayor of London, replacing Theresa May in Downing Street in 2019.

His landslide election victory at that years snap winter general election allowed him to deliver on taking the UK out of the European Union.

Mr Johnson left office in September after repeated scandals including the partygate row over lockdown breaches in Downing Street, the Owen Paterson lobbying affair and his handling of complaints against former deputy chief whip Chris Pincher.

Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner said the British public was sick to the back teeth of this never ending Tory soap opera played out at their expense as she urged voters to turn the page with a fresh start under a Labour government.

Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper said it was good riddance to Mr Johnson.
Robert Carlyle says he has previously been offered roles in blockbuster superhero movies, but turned them down because he did not fancy the tights or capes.

The Trainspotting star, 62, said kitchen sink dramas were his home and territory and he preferred playing roles that gave voices to those who dont generally get heard.

It comes as Carlyle reprises his famous role of Gaz from the 1997 hit film The Full Monty, which followed six unemployed South Yorkshire steel workers who turn to stripping to make ends meet.

The Trainspotting star, 62, said kitchen sink dramas were his home and territory (Danny Lawson/PA)

He now stars in a new Disney+ spin-off series, set 25 years later, alongside original cast members including Mark Addy, Steve Huison and Lesley Sharp.

Speaking to the Chris Moyles Show on Radio X, Carlyle said he had skirted around the world of big budget movies for around 20 years.

Its not for me Ive always been at home with kitchen sink dramas, thats my home, thats my territory, he said.

Its where Im from, those are my people and I like to represent that, and giving voices to people that dont generally get heard.

Asked by Moyles about a possible part in a Marvel film , he replied: I dont fancy the tights and the cape really.

Ive been offered them but, nah.

The Chris Moyles Show on Radio X airs weekdays from 6.30am to 10am and on Global Player.
A number of senior officials who were implicated in the partygate scandal have been nominated in Boris Johnsons resignation honours list.

Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said it was sickening that those who held boozy lockdown bashes during the pandemic in Downing Street had been recognised by the former prime minister.

Martin Reynolds, formerly Mr Johnsons principal private secretary in No 10, has been nominated for a peerage.

He has admitted emailing Downing Street staff to invite them to come for drinks in the No 10 garden to make the most of this lovely weather on May 20, 2020.

The bring your own booze event took place at a time when rules and guidance restricted gatherings of more than two people and workplaces were meant to maintain social distancing.

In his evidence to the Commons Privileges Committee investigation into whether Mr Johnson misled MPs over his response to the scandal, Mr Reynolds admitted the wording, which he has said he signed off but did not draft, had been totally inappropriate.

Conservative MP Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has been given a knighthood by Mr Johnson, said a peerage for Mr Reynolds was a perfectly reasonable recognition of his public service, while acknowledging he may have made a mistake in sending the email.

Shelley Williams-Walker, who was head of operations at No 10 during Mr Johnsons premiership, has been made a dame.

She was allegedly in charge of the music during one of two leaving dos held on the eve of the Duke of Edinburghs funeral on April 16, 2021.

Ms Williams-Walker, who in October was named director of Mr Johnsons private company that he set up after leaving Downing Street, was reportedly nicknamed DJ SWW during the party.

Some attendees were later fined by police for their participation, with socialising indoors banned at the time between people from other households, and when meeting others outdoors was limited to groups of six people or two households.

Former No 10 communications director Jack Doyle has been made a CBE (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Jack Doyle, who was director of communications when the partygate story broke, will be made a CBE as part of the honours roll.

A former Daily Mail political associate editor, Mr Doyle attended a Secret Santa event in the No 10 press office on December 18, 2020.

At the time, indoor gatherings of two or more people from different households were prohibited.

Mr Johnson, in his Privileges Committee evidence, said it was Mr Doyle who first brought the allegations of lockdown gatherings to him in November 2021, informing the former Conservative Party leader that the Daily Mirror was preparing to publish an article about the press office gathering.

The Uxbridge and South Ruislip MP said he trusted the assurances of his communications chief at the time that the mid-pandemic Christmas party had been within the rules.

Mr Doyle has said he did not tell Mr Johnson that all coronavirus guidance was followed.

Shaun Bailey, who ran unsuccessfully for London mayor in 2021, has been handed a peerage.

The London Assembly member was pictured attending a lockdown busting party in December 2020 at Conservative Party headquarters.

Mr Bailey and Tory aides were seen posing for a photo while raising glasses beside buffet food, while indoor socialising was banned in the capital.

The police said in November that no fines would be issued to those who attended the festive gathering.

Ms Rayner said: Its a sickening insult that those who planned Covid parties and held boozy lockdown bashes while families were unable to mourn loved ones are now set to be handed gongs by Rishi Sunak.

Downing Street said the Prime Minister had no involvement or input into the approved list.
Labour shadow minister Bambos Charalambous has been suspended by the party after a complaint about his conduct.

A formal complaint against the Enfield Southgate MP was made to Labours independent complaints process, the PA news agency understands, immediately triggering an investigation.

His party membership was administratively suspended within 24 hours, a move that means he will have the Labour whip removed in Westminster while the probe is carried out.

Mr Charalambous, who will sit as an independent in Parliament following the suspension, said he will co-operate fully with the process.

I am aware that there is an allegation that requires investigation by the Labour Party. It is right and proper that process is allowed to take place. I will cooperate fully and play my full part. It is not appropriate to say anything further at this time.  Bambos Charalambous MP (@BambosMP) June 9, 2023

He tweeted: I am aware that there is an allegation that requires investigation by the Labour Party.

It is right and proper that process is allowed to take place. I will cooperate fully and play my full part.

It is not appropriate to say anything further at this time.

Mr Charalambous has also been stood down from his frontbench role on the shadow foreign affairs team, it is understood.

He has been contacted for comment.

Labour is not commenting on the nature or details of the complaint.

Mr Charalambous, a former solicitor, was first elected in his London constituency in 2017.

The 55-year-old held several posts on Sir Keir Starmers frontbench, including shadow minister for crime and then immigration, before being appointed shadow minister for the Middle East and North Africa in 2021.

His suspension comes just over a week after the party suspended MP Geraint Davies following allegations of sexual harassment made by a number of women.

Two formal complaints were subsequently submitted to Labour, including one by a sitting Labour MP, according to the Politico news website.

At the time of the initial claims, a Labour spokeswoman said: These are incredibly serious allegations of completely unacceptable behaviour.

We strongly encourage anyone with a complaint to come forward to the Labour Partys investigation.

Any complainant will have access to an independent support service who provide confidential and independent guidance and advice from external experts throughout the process.
Social care recruitment efforts have been branded largely ineffective by a leading care body as figures revealed millions have been spent on a Government campaign in recent years yet vacancies have hit a record high.

There were 165,000 vacancies in the social care sector in 2021/22  the same year almost 6.5 million was budgeted for the adult social care recruitment campaign, according to figures retrieved by Care England.

A total of 23,650,000 has been budgeted for the campaign since 2018, including a projection for the 2022-23 year, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said in response to a Freedom of Information request from the leading representative body for care providers in England.

Professor Martin Green, Care Englands chief executive, said money spent on ineffectual campaigns would have been better allocated to bring care staff benefits in line with NHS staff.

He said the social care sector is in crisis and problems with recruitment must be tackled through better pay, benefits, terms and conditions.

Previous analysis by the Kings Fund health charity stated that, at 10.7%, the vacancy rate in adult social care is the highest it has been since Skills for Care began collecting data in 2012/13.

Annual budgets increased from 2.8 million in 2018-19, to 3.8 million the following year, then 6.8 million in 2020/21 and 6.45 million in 2021/22, the DHSC figures showed.

Care England said it was concerned by the drop to a 3.8 million forecast budget for the 2022/23 year.

Prof Green said: It is clear that the Governments recruitment efforts have fallen short and have been largely ineffective. The 24 million has been spent on ineffectual campaigns which could have been better allocated to bring care staff benefits in line with NHS staff.

The recruitment campaigns represent an awareness campaign that is unlikely to result in a tangible change to the number of recruits entering the sector.

The introduction of a minimum care wage that outpaces the NLW (national living wage), tied to NHS band 3, is not an option but a necessity to ensure that social care professionals receive the respect and fair compensation they are owed.

The social care recruitment crisis will only be solved when care staff benefits, terms and conditions are brought into parity with those of the NHS  including pensions, statutory sick pay, holiday entitlements, and access to training. This will begin to redress the underpayment and underappreciation of care workers compared to their NHS counterparts.

DHSC said its campaign aims to encourage people with the right values to apply for, and fill, immediate paid vacancies in the adult social care sector.

The figures come as the Government announced its volunteer programme was being expanded from the NHS into social care, with those who sign up picking up and dropping off medicines for people, and collecting and delivering food shopping and prescriptions.

DHSC said volunteers are crucial in supporting the health and care sector, and complementing the existing workforce, but they do not replace the existing, highly-valued, paid health and care staff.

While care leaders welcomed the use of volunteers, they warned that investment in the trained workforce is still badly needed and must be a priority.

The Government was criticised for announcing earlier this year that social care workforce funding would be halved from a previously pledged 500 million.

The move was branded a betrayal by charities, unions and opposition parties, with ministers accused of broken promises.

The Government has insisted no funding for the adult social care sector had been removed or reallocated to the NHS and that up to 600 million has not yet been allocated, and will be targeted on measures that will have the most impact over the next two years.

Last year Chancellor Jeremy Hunt confirmed that social care charging reforms promised by Boris Johnsons government would be delayed for two years to 2025, including an 86,000 cap on personal care cost contributions, as well as an expanded means test that is more generous than the existing one, which had been due to come into effect from October this year.

Asked during his trip to Washington when the Tory manifesto pledge on long-term reform of social care will be delivered, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said: What weve done is invest billions of pounds into social care right now.

Given the situation we face, its right that money was going in to actually just build resilience, expand capacity in the sector  14 billion at the autumn statement last year in both the NHS and social care that was warmly welcomed by the sector.

At the time, we announced that we were postponing the long-term reform that had been previously announced because the priority in the here and now is getting money into the sector so that they can continue to give high-quality care. I think thats the right priority and thats what were going to carry on doing.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: We are fully committed to our 10-year vision to reform adult social care, and recently published our Next Steps To Put People At the Heart Of Care plan  setting out how we are spending 700 million on adult social care reform over the next two years, including 250 million on the workforce.
Rishi Sunak has praised Joe Bidens experience on China and foreign policy as particularly valuable after the signing of a new UK-US partnership.

The Prime Minister reportedly noted the age difference between himself and the US President, describing his counterparts time in politics as incredibly helpful to someone who is newer to this.

At 43, Mr Sunak is the youngest leader in the G7 group of industrial democracies, while Mr Biden is the oldest at 80.

Mr Sunak praised Mr Bidens experience on foreign affairs (Kevin Lamarque/PA)

In an interview with CNN before returning to the UK on Friday morning, the Prime Minister said: I find that President Bidens experience is incredibly helpful, particularly on issues like China. I think there are, you know, few leaders anywhere who have spent as much time talking to President Xi (Jinping).

It follows the announcement of the Atlantic Declaration, a partnership aiming to bolster UK-US economic security in response to Beijings growing influence, during Mr Sunaks first trip to the White House as Prime Minister.

The agreement comes after hopes of a full-blown free trade deal were abandoned, with UK officials insisting the new, targeted approach is better suited to challenges posed by China and Russias invasion of Ukraine.

The bilateral declaration is the latest sign that the globalisation of recent decades is being replaced by an era of trading alliances of like-minded nations.

Meeting Mr Sunak in the Oval Office, Mr Biden  who inadvertently referred to the Prime Minister as Mr President  said the special relationship was in real good shape.

In his CNN interview, the Prime Minister also said he had observed in the US strong support for helping Ukraine in defending itself against Moscows attack, having spoken to leaders of both parties in Congress.

The US leader said the special relationship was in real good shape (Niall Carson/PA)

I think theres an acknowledgment, as I said, that the values that were fighting for are universal. Theyre values that America has always stood up for, which is democracy, freedom and the rule of law, he said.

Mr Biden has condemned President Vladimir Putins invasion and pledged support for Ukraine for as long as it takes.

Meanwhile former president Donald Trump, who is still the Republican frontrunner ahead of next years US election, had refused to say who he thinks should win the war.
Naver Cloud CEO Kim Yoo-won introduces the company's upgraded hyperscale artificial intelligence service called HyperCLOVA X, during DEVIEW 2023 conference at COEX in Seoul in this Feb. 27 file photo. Courtesy of Naver



By Park Jae-hyuk



Korean IT firms, mobile carriers, gaming companies and others are competing fiercely to come up with better generative artificial intelligence (AI) services in line with the global competition sparked by OpenAI's development of ChatGPT, according to industry officials, Thursday.



Admitting their technology is still inferior to those of U.S. tech giants like Microsoft and Google, Korean companies are focusing more on attracting domestic users by providing AI services fluent in Korean.



Naver plans to launch SearchGPT by the end of this year by integrating its search engine with a hyperscale AI service called HyperCLOVA, which specializes in Korean. The new service is intended to support optimized searches for each user, according to the tech firm. In July, the company will unveil an upgraded hyperscale AI service called HyperCLOVA X.









"To create a competitive domestic hyperscale AI ecosystem, we will launch the next generation of hyperscale AI HyperCLOVA X this summer," Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon told investors last month. "HyperCLOVA X is the world's third-largest Korean language learning model and the first in Korea."



Kakao will unveil KoGPT 2.0 during the second half of this year. The upgraded generative AI service will be able to make sentences by understanding Korean texts, according to the company. Also, Kakao will soon unveil an upgraded Karlo, which can create new images based on texts and original images input by users.



"Using AI technology, we will lead people to a better life and continue to pursue our vision, which is to keep asking unthinkable questions," Kakao Brain CEO Kim Il-doo said in March.





SK Telecom CEO Ryu Young-sang introduces the company's plan for artificial intelligence business, during a press conference in Barcelona in this Feb. 26 file photo. Courtesy of SK Telecom
Labour has renewed calls for Rishi Sunak to stop Boris Johnson handing honours to a carousel of cronies amid speculation the list could be published imminently.

Shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock said the Prime Minister had caved in to appease warring factions within the Conservative Party by reportedly accepting his predecessors recommendations.

The list, which is said to include around 50 names, is likely to be made public on Friday, according to multiple reports.

Mr Kinnock said that some of the appointments appear very, very dubious indeed and accused Mr Sunak of being too weak to block them.

Stephen Kinnock criticised Rishi Sunak (PA)

He told Sky News: More evidence of just how weak Rishi Sunak is.

Some of the people on that list, it just looks like a carousel of Boris Johnsons cronies and frankly the Prime Minister has caved in yet again because theres warring factions in the Conservative Party.

Theyre so divided and fragmented and the Prime Minister realises that if he wants to keep the sort of Johnson wing of his party quiet hell need to Some of the names on there are very, very dubious indeed and the Prime Minister should not be accepting them.

It comes after The Times reported that the long-awaited list has been trimmed, with casualties including former culture secretary Nadine Dorries and Sir Alok Sharma, president of the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow.

Reports suggest the two Tory MPs have been struck from it to avoid potentially damaging by-elections.

The pair were expected to stand down to take peerages, which would have left Mr Sunak facing two early electoral battles in their seats.

Sir Alok holds a 4,000-vote majority over Labour in his Reading West constituency and a by-election would likely be closely fought by Sir Keir Starmers party, which is well ahead of the Tories in the polls.

Ms Dorries, who has already announced her plan to quit as the MP for Mid Bedfordshire at the next election, has a majority of more than 24,600 over the main Opposition party.

Ms Dorries and Sir Aloks names have been resubmitted to the House of Lords Appointments Committee for vetting and their peerages could be granted further down the line, according to the Times.

Speaking to TalkTV on Friday, Ms Dorries said she had not heard anything but did not expect to be entering the Lords any time soon.

I know nothing, she said.

There is a process and the last thing I would want to do would be to cause a by-election in my constituency.

I dont believe I will be going into the House of Lords any time soon.

The Prime Minister, asked about the reports during his trip to the US, said he could not comment on his predecessors submission.

Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper accused Mr Sunak of rewarding failure by allegedly giving the list the green light.

The buck stops with Sunak  he must ensure that Johnsons honours list is put through the shredder.

Mr Johnsons spokesman said: We strictly do not comment on honours.

Former prime minister Liz Truss, despite being the shortest serving prime minister in modern British political history, has also reportedly submitted a short resignation honours list.
A knifeman who stabbed a group of children in the French Alps  including a British girl  had been denied asylum in France just days before the attack, according to a minister.

The man, who French police said is a 31-year-old Syrian, attacked four children and two adults at a lakeside park in Annecy on Thursday.

According to reports, the British girl is a three-year-old who was on holiday in the area.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said the suspect had tried to claim asylum in France, but it was refused on Sunday because he had previously been granted asylum in Sweden 10 years ago.

Authorities said the children were taken to hospital in critical condition, but Annecy Mayor Francois Astorg told French media on Thursday evening they were stable and out of the operating room  with the Telegraph reporting the British girl is now in hospital in Grenoble, a city around an hour-and-a-half away by car.

Dozens of tributes including flowers, teddy bears, candles and written messages were left at the park on Thursday night, with messages including Love Annecy, and Children I dont know you but in this hour you are fighting.

The six were wounded in a childrens play area (Peter Byrne/PA)

The Swedish Migration Agency has confirmed the suspect was granted permanent residency in 2013 and, although the agency did not identify him, said he subsequently sought Swedish citizenship in 2017 and 2018, both denied, and applied again in August last year.

Mr Darmanin said the suspect entered France legally, adding: For some reasons we dont really understand, he applied for asylum in Switzerland, in Italy and in France, which he didnt need to do as he already had asylum in Sweden for the past 10 years.

Local prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said one of the adults was seriously injured by both a knife wound from the attacker and a bullet wound from police as they shot at the knifeman while trying to detain him.

Security forces examine the scene of knife attack in Annecy (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone via AP)

The Telegraph reported the gunshot victim is a 78-year-old man who is now in a life-threatening condition in hospital after also being stabbed six times.

Witnesses said the knifeman shouted in the name of Jesus Christ as he launched the attack, including stabbing a child in a pushchair repeatedly as bystanders screamed for help.

Ms Bonnet-Mathis told a press conference on Thursday afternoon the attackers motives remain unclear, but do not appear to be related to terrorism.

Footage of the attack shared on the internet showed a man in dark glasses and with a blue scarf covering his head brandishing a blade as people screamed for help.

Schools were in lockdown after the knife attack in Annecy on Thursday morning (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone via AP)

In another video, the man appeared to shout in the name of Jesus Christ while waving the knife in the air, with people nearby heard screaming for police.

He then slashed at a man carrying a rucksack who attempted to approach him. The video then showed a woman frantically pushing a stroller inside the play area of the park as the attacker approached her while she screamed for help.

She attempted to fend off the attacker before he leaned forward and stabbed down into the pushchair.

Flowers and teddy bears left at the childrens play area (Peter Byrne/PA)

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the suspect has no criminal or psychiatric record and appeared to have acted alone.

We are talking here about infants, very young infants who have been very seriously injured, she told the press conference, according to a translation.

We are absolutely shaken by all this and we are standing firm by the people of Annecy.

Yves Le Breton, @prefet74, et Line Bonnet, @ProcAnnecy, appellent a ne pas organiser de rassemblements spontanes suite aux evenements graves intervenus ce jour. Consultez notre communique de presse ainsi que l'arrete prefectoral d'interdiction de manifestation  pic.twitter.com/8hXghJyaqh  Prefet de la Haute-Savoie (@Prefet74) June 8, 2023

Speaking at a press conference at the White House on Thursday evening alongside President Biden, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described the attack as unfathomable.

He added: All our thoughts are with those who were affected in this unfathomable attack, including a British child, and their families.

I have been in touch with (French) President (Emmanuel) Macron. We stand ready to offer any assistance that we can.
Thousands of fans sang to Johnny Depp in Romania as the Hollywood star celebrates his 60th birthday.

The Pirates Of The Caribbean star thanked fans for the beautiful gesture, adding that it was the largest happy birthday song Ive ever heard.

It comes as Depps band The Hollywood Vampires kicked off their European tour in Bucharest, Romania, on Thursday.

A video posted to the bands Instagram page showed the actor with a hand over his heart, thanking fans and blowing them kisses.

Depps 60th birthday comes just over a year following his victory in his high-profile defamation case with his former wife Amber Heard.

He had sued the Aquaman star for 50 million dollars, claiming her 2018 article in the Washington Post was defamatory.

Over the past 12 months the actor has made a slow but steady return to the spotlight, touring with musician Jeff Beck and making a surprise appearance at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards.

Johnny Depp (Photo by Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP)

More recently he appeared at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of new film Jeanne Du Barry, in which he stars as King Louis XV.

Speaking at a press conference at the festival he said he had no further need for Hollywood, and described the fallout from the trial as a weird joke.

The Hollywood Vampires  a supergroup consisting of Alice Cooper, Aerosmiths Joe Perry and Depp  are touring Europe this summer including several dates in the UK in July.

The band was recently forced to cancel a string of dates in the US after Depp suffered an ankle fracture.
Two competing billboards from Burger King and McDonald's have been placed next to each other in Brazil. Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images, Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Two billboards from Burger King and McDonald's have been placed next to each other in Brazil.

The ads feature answers written by ChatGPT and have a similar design, per The Drum.

Burger King's ad appears to be a response to McDonald's launching a wider campaign.

Two competing billboards from Burger King and McDonald's have been placed next to each other in Brazil.

According to translated versions of the billboards reported by The Drum, the chatbot calls McDonald's Big Mac the most "iconic burger" and names Burger King's Whopper "the biggest." The ads both feature answers written by ChatGPT and have a similar design.

Burger King's billboard appears to be a response to McDonald's launching a wider campaign based on the chatbot's answer.

The fast-food company asked OpenAI's chatbot what the most iconic burger in the world was and it named the Big Mac the "most globally recognized." The Big Mac was introduced in 1967 and even has its own index.

The Burger King ad seems to follow McDonald's directly, asking: "And which is the biggest?" According to the advert, The Whopper is the biggest in terms of size and amount of ingredients.

When Insider asked ChatGPT which was the most iconic burger in the world, it listed the Big Mac, the Whopper, and the In-N-Out Burger in that order.

Both ads have a similar look, featuring lines of colored text to look like a burger. It is unclear if the ads are always placed next to each other or how many are featured in Brazil.

Representatives for McDonald's Brazil did not provide the ad or comment when contacted by Insider. Burger King did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, made outside normal working hours.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Another round of federal grand jury subpoenas went out this week in connection with the corruption investigation into Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey.

Two sources familiar with the matter said at least one powerful New Jersey politician  North Bergen Mayor Nicholas Sacco  was among those who received subpoenas.

A North Bergen spokesman said, As they always have, Mayor Sacco and the Township of North Bergen will comply with any inquiry they receive from law enforcement and will cooperate fully.

For months, Menendez has been under criminal investigation into whether he and his wife improperly took cash and gifts from the owners of IS EG Halal, an Edgewater halal meat business.

Menendez and the companys owners have denied any wrongdoing.

I know of an investigation. Dont know the scope or the subjects and of course stand ready to help authorities when and if they ask any questions, Menendez said in October.

A Menendez spokesman declined to comment.

The newly issued subpoenas  including the one delivered to Sacco  are unrelated to any allegations involving the meat company and Menendez, the two sources said.

The sources added that the subpoenas in part seek information about certain legislative changes in New Jersey, but they did not offer details.

The subpoena for Sacco, a Democrat, was issued Wednesday, a day after he was re-elected mayor.

Saccos spokesman said, We do not feel that it would be appropriate to offer any additional comment at this time.

An FBI spokesman and a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Damian Williams of Southern New York, whose office is leading the federal investigation, declined to comment.

As for Menendez and IS EG Halal, questions persist about how the company won an exclusive worldwide contract with Egypt to certify halal exports  as numerous other firms contracts were suddenly canceled in 2019.

Numerous other sources familiar with the matter said some officials at the U.S. Agriculture Department were among those who raised concerns about how the contract was awarded to a New Jersey firm with little experience.

An Agriculture Department did not return calls for comment.

In addition, numerous sources said Menendezs wife is friends with IS EGs owners. Menendez chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees billions of dollars in U.S. aid to Egypt.

Lawyers for IS EG have denied any wrongdoing, and the owners have said they won the contract with Egypt on the merits. Other firms in the industry, however, have been raising questions.

This was an unfortunate decision as all of us certifiers lost our authorizations to provide Halal certification for Egypt. This had a severe impact on the industry, the USA Halal Chamber of Commerce said in a statement.

Menendez said last month he was opening a legal defense fund to help pay lawyers in connection with the criminal investigation.

In 2015, Menendez was indicted on federal corruption charges of illegally accepting favors from a Florida eye doctor, including flights on a private jet, three nights at a five-star hotel in Paris and more than $700,000 in political contributions for him and the Democratic Party.

The case ended in a mistrial after jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict. Federal prosecutors decided not to retry him.

Menendez, who has been in the Senate since 2006, is up for re-election next year.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP)  The Supreme Court of the Netherlands on Friday ordered that a Dutch museum's trove of historical treasures from Crimea be sent to Ukraine, upholding a lower court ruling that the 300 artifacts are part of Ukraines cultural heritage.

The collection of archaeological objects, some more than 2,000 years old, was on display at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, sparking a dispute over the repatriation of the borrowed pieces.

Both the Ukrainian government in Kyiv and the four Crimean museums that had loaned bronze swords, golden helmets, precious gems and other artifacts to the Allard Pierson demanded the objects back. The Amsterdam museum instead opted to store the items until a court could decide their fate.

The legal tug-of-war has now ended with the Hague-based Supreme Court ordering the collection to be returned to Ukraine. Judges cited the lack of national recognition for the Russia-annexed Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

Although the museum pieces originate from Crimea and can therefore also be regarded as Crimean heritage, they are part of the cultural heritage of Ukraine, the ruling said.

Mediation in 2014 between all the museums involved and Ukrainian authorities failed, and the Allard Pierson Museum took the matter to court.

Highlights from the Crimea  Gold and Secrets of the Black Sea exhibition included a solid gold Scythian helmet from the 4th century B.C. and a golden neck ornament from the second century A.D. that weighs more than a kilogram (two pounds).

In 2016, the District Court of Amsterdam cited the 1970 UNESCO convention, finding that the objects must be returned to the sovereign state that loaned them and the issue of ownership should be decided by a Ukrainian court.

The Crimean museums appealed and Russia threatened to stop lending objects to Dutch museums if the museum didnt return the pieces. In 2021, an appeals court again ordered the objects to be sent to Ukraine.

In a statement, the Allard Pierson Museum says it can now act on the decision and return the objects. Legal fees and storage have already cost the museum more than 500,000 euros ($538,000), according to documents it submitted during the proceedings.

It is unclear when the transfer of the objects will take place.

___

Follow AP's coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
A Florida woman appeared at her first court hearing after she was arrested in the shooting death of her neighbor, a mother of four, after an alleged dispute with the neighbor's children.

Susan Lorincz, 58, who is white, appeared in court via video from the Marion County Jail where she is currently being housed, according to the Marion County Sheriff's Office (MCSO). She allegedly shot and killed Ajike Owens, who is Black, on June 2 in Ocala, Florida, on the doorstep of Lorincz's home. Lorincz admitted to calling children in the neighborhood the n-word and other derogatory terms in the past, according to a police report.

The state attorney requested that Lorincz be held with no bond and said that the state would file a motion for pretrial detention.

Judge Lori Cotton said she will hold off on the bond hearing until the state files a motion for pretrial detention, which will be scheduled within five days. Cotton said Lorincz's next court date will be on July 11.

"The fact that she has no job, no property kind of limits her ties to this community," the state attorney said of Lorincz. "So we ask that, at least for the time being, she remain on a no-bond status."

MORE: Family calls for justice after neighbor arrested in killing of mom of 4 in front of her children

PHOTO: A protester holds a poster of Ajike Owens at the Marion Co,unty Courthouse, on, June 6, 2023, in Ocala, Fla. (John Raoux/AP)

Authorities say the suspect told police that she shot the 35-year-old Owens in self-defense.

"Oh my God, this lady just tried to break down my door," Lorincz told the emergency dispatcher on a 911 call ABC News obtained from the sheriff's department. "I shot through the door."

Through their investigation, the sheriffs office said it was determined Lorinczs actions were not justified under Florida law.

At a press conference Wednesday, Ben Crump, the attorney representing Owens' family, claimed Lorincz often directed racial slurs at Black children around the neighborhood and antagonized them to not play on the field near her home.

Lorincz's attorney, the sheriff's office and the state attorney's office did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment on these claims.

Lorincz mostly gave one-word answers during the hearing Thursday. One exception was when Cotton asked Lorincz if she planned to find a job. Lorincz said she has been out of work for two weeks and had been employed in the medical field helping people set up doctor's appointments.

"We set up appointments for people who have Medicare, Medicaid insurance," Lorincz said to the judge.

"Are you intending on getting another job?" Cotton asked.

"Eventually," Lorincz replied.

Lorincz was arrested this week and charged with first-degree manslaughter, punishable by up to 30 years in prison, if convicted, the sheriff's office said in a statement. She was also charged with culpable negligence, battery and two counts of assault.

In a statement, MCSO explained they conducted interviews with witnesses, Owens' children and Lorincz.

"Ms. Lorincz's fate is now in the hands of the judicial system, which I trust will deliver justice in due course," Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods said in a statement. "As I go to bed tonight, I will be saying a prayer for Ms. Owens' children and the rest of her family. I'd ask all of you to do the same."

Woods said there was an ongoing feud between Lorincz and Owens. The day of the shooting, the children were playing in a field on the property in which the suspect's home is located. At that point, the suspect allegedly engaged in an argument with the children, the sheriff's department said.

PHOTO: Otis Dias, brother to Ajike Owens, talks about his late sister at a press conference with attorney Ben Crump on June 7, 2023, at the New St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Ocala, Fla. (Doug Engle/Ocala Star Banner via USA Today Network)

Lorincz allegedly threw a pair of skates at Owens' 9-year-old son and hit the child in the toe, according to MCSO. Afterwards, the minor and his 12-year-old brother went to Lorincz's home to speak to her. Lorincz swung an umbrella at them, according to a statement from the sheriff's office.

The children notified Owens, resulting in Owens going to the suspect's home and demanding that she come out. That's when Lorincz shot Owens through her closed door, striking her in the upper chest, according to MCSO. Owen's 9-year-old son was beside her, police said.

"Our 12-year-old blames himself for the death of his mother because he couldn't save her," Pamela Dias, Owens' mother, said at a press conference on Wednesday. "He couldn't give her CPR. His words, 'Grandma, grandma, I couldn't save her! I tried to give her CPR! I tried to give her CPR!'"

PHOTO: This image taken from video provided by the Marion County Sheriff's Office shows Susan Lorincz after her arrest in Ocala, Fla., on June 6, 2023. (Marion County Sheriff's Office via AP)

According to police records, when officers arrived on the scene, they found Owens under a nearby tree with a gunshot wound. She had a faint pulse as the officers applied medical aid. Owens was transported to a local hospital where she was pronounced deceased later that evening.

MORE: Video shows fatal shooting during parking spot fight in Florida

In a press conference on Monday, Woods said that Florida Stand Your Ground laws made it harder to execute an immediate arrest. The sheriff's major crimes unit was finally able to arrest Lorincz on Tuesday after gathering enough evidence, the sheriff's department said.

"I pray that God gives me the strength, the wisdom and the ability to raise these children as our daughter would have us to do," Dias said. "[They] witnessed their mother murdered in cold blood."

Florida woman appears in court after arrest in killing of neighbor Ajike Owens originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Rep Becca Balint of Vermont strongly criticised former Trump administration official Mandy Gunasekara in a congressional hearing on Tuesday for asserting that sustainable investment strategies by companies promote gender transitions for children.

Ms Gunaskara, who worked at the Environmental Protection Agency when Donald Trump was president, was testifying at a House Oversight Committee meeting on the topic of ESG  a corporate governance framework called environmental, social, governance that considers social and environmental factors that has rankled conservatives.

Partway through her testimony, she made the claim that ESG structures promote the notion that children should change their gender identities. Ms Balint was unimpressed.

I want to know: do you really believe this garbage? Ms Balint asked.

Its not about believing, its a matter of fact, Ms Gunasekara replied.

Balint: I want to know, do you really believe that garbage? pic.twitter.com/DjMUmI25Yv  Acyn (@Acyn) June 6, 2023

Ms Balint was not having it.

Oh  so you believe that investing strategies are actually weaponised to support and promote gender transition for children, Ms Balint said. Is essentially that what youre saying? Or do you just use it as another opportunity to beat up on children? Do you believe this?

Ms Balint, who is LGBT+ and the first woman ever elected to Congress from Vermont, later relayed to Ms Gunasekara that she had just come from a meeting with parents of trans children from states attempting to outlaw gender-affirming care for kids.

They literally said, when you leave this room, could you please, the next time youre in a room with someone bringing up, yet again, our children and our families as some kind of boogyman, that you will actually stand up for us, Ms Balint said. I didnt think it would take less than a half hour.

Conservatives and the Republican Party have made transgender rights a central political issue this year. As of April, state legislatures around the country had already set a record by introducing more than 400 bills targeting the LGBT+ community.

A number of those bills specifically target the trans community, with numerous states banning gender-affirming care for trans youth that studies show can save lives.

Ms Balint then noted the frequency with which Republican-aligned witnesses have turned to attacking trans children in recent months in congressional hearing rooms.

It feels like every single hearing that I am in, whether it is in Oversight, or whether it is in Budget, or whether it is in a subcommittee, somehow the witnesses find a way to bring in trans children into whatever conversation were trying to have here, Ms Balint said.
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During a rager of a party at the Bushmills Distillery, master distiller Colum Egan was in fine form. He had plenty of reason to be, because he and his entire team were celebrating the opening of the brand-new Causeway Distillery which has doubled production capacity at Bushmills, putting it on par with the biggest single malt distilleries in Scotland. Also, Egan was leading a tasting of a few unreleased single malts, including one that he enthusiastically described as being a whiskey interpretation of rum raisin ice cream.

Bushmills, located in Northern Ireland, is known as being the oldest licensed distillery in the world. That license dates back to 1608, but the actual distillery wasnt built until 1784, which still makes it pretty damn old. Bushmills is owned by Proximo Spirits, the same company behind the boozy juggernaut Jose Cuervo, along with smaller brands like Stranahans and The Kraken Spiced Rum. Bushmills does one thing and one thing only: It makes single malt Irish whiskey, meaning whiskey made at one distillery from a mashbill of 100 percent malted barley. The core expression from Bushmills is a blend, however, so the grain whiskey used in that comes from Midleton in the Republic of Ireland (the distillery where brands like Jameson and Redbreast are made).

These days, most people associate single malt whiskey (the Irish spell it with the e like we do) with Scotland, but that is changing. The new Causeway Distillery cost Proximo 60 million to build, so this nearly 40,000 square foot distillery is a huge bet on the future of Irish single malt. Indeed, Bushmills cites double digit growth in sales of its single malt whiskeys, a portfolio that includes 10, 12, 16, and 21-year-old expressions which are some of the best you can find. Expensive 25 and 30-year-old whiskeys were recently added to the lineup, and there are also annual limited-edition releases in the Rare Cask series. These vintage whiskeys are aged for three decades or more and get a secondary maturation in different types of fortified wine casks.

There are very few, if any other, distilleries in Ireland or Scotland that can claim the amount of aged whiskeys that Bushmills has, said master blender Alex Thomas at a tasting of the Bushmills portfolio. She has been with the distillery since 2004, and was appointed to her current role in November of 2021. We have over 460,000 casks, which is over 65 million liters of alcohol in our warehouses, and the majority of them are our single malts We care for every single drop of whiskey we have. According to Thomas, expanding annual production capacity at the distillery from five million to 11 million liters was a dream come true. The new distillery is designed so we can stand in one place and see every single part of the processthe mill, the lauter tun, the washbacks, the distillation, she said. It was all about looking to the future, but also ensuring our whiskey doesnt change.

Bushmills is a leader in Irish single malt, but of course its not the only player in the category. Weve put together a list of 11 of the best Irish single malts to try, including some fantastic whiskeys from Bushmills and some other brands.

Bushmills

Bushmills 16

The 16-year-old single malt expression from Bushmills sits in that Goldilocks zone of maturationnot too old, not too young, just right. Its aged for about 16 years in sherry and bourbon barrels before being put into port wine pipes for close to another year. The whiskey is sweet and rich with a bit of spice on the palate, a perfect after-dinner dram and a great introduction into the Irish single malt category.

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Bushmills

Bushmills 30

The new 25 and 30-year-old expressions from Bushmills are both great, but the latter is perhaps the better of the two. This ultra-aged single malt spent 14 years in bourbon and sherry barrels, then another 16 years in Pedro Ximenez sherry casks. For those who are unfamiliar, thats a rich, sweet sherry from Spain, and that lengthy secondary maturation has imbued this whiskey with wonderful notes of dried fruit, fig, raisin, sweet toffee, and vanilla. This is a special occasion whiskey that's as good as any similarly aged scotch.

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Waterford

Waterford Whisky The Cuvee

Waterford is something of a disrupter in the Irish whiskey industry, a distillery that is focused on the effects of terroir on whiskey in a way that no others are. The Cuvee is the flagship release, a blend of about 25 of the distillerys single farm origin whiskeys that was aged in several different types of oak. Visit the website and enter the code on the back of the bottle to dive deep into details about maturation and barley variety, but rest assured that this whiskey will please your palate with notes of berry, orange, baking spice, and bright apple.

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Knappogue

Knappogue Castle 12

This Irish whiskey brand does not have its own distillery, so its sourced from other established operations. The 12-year-old single malt is the anchor of the range, triple distilled and aged entirely in bourbon barrels. This is a classic Irish single maltwith a palate full of fruit, biscuit, and vanilla notes, with some black pepper and nutmeg on the finish.

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Tyrconnell

The Tyrconnell Madeira Cask Finish

This brand is owned by drinks giant Beam Suntory, and the whiskey is produced at the Cooley distillery. There are several single malts to try, but this 10-year-old whiskey finished in Madeira casks stands out. Madeira is a fortified wine from Portugal, and this finish after a decade of maturation complements the whiskeys bright, fruity palate with dark berry, spice, and citrus notes.

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Teeling

Teeling Blackpitts

When Teeling opened in 2015, it was the first distillery to operate in Dublin in over a century. The distillery both sources and produces its own whiskey, while using a variety of barrels to finish it. Blackpitts stands out in that its a peated single malt, which is unusual but not unheard of in Irish whiskey. Its mostly aged in bourbon barrels, with some sauternes white wine casks in the mix as well. Dont expect an Islay scotch level of smoke herethis is a bit more subtle, with notes of tropical fruit and honey on the palate.

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Limavady

Limavady

This is a newer brand, founded by ex-Bushmills master distiller Darryl McNally. Its owned by WhistlePig, the Vermont distillery known for its high-end rye whiskeys. The whiskey is sourced and aged in bourbon barrels for about five years before getting a finish in PX sherry casks. What makes it unique, aside from being a very high quality single malt, is that its a single barrel releasemeaning each bottle comes from just one barrel instead of a marriage of many. That means the flavor will vary depending on the cask, so try a few different ones side-by-side to see if you can find the flavor differences.

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The Quiet Man

The Quiet Man 8 Year Old

The Quiet Man distillery wont open for a few more years, so for now the whiskey is sourced for this Northern Ireland brand. The single malt is an eight-year-old whiskey matured in bourbon barrels, and its bottled in Derry. Its not as old as some other Irish single malts, but the flavor is rich with oak, honey, spice, and fruit nonetheless.

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Writers' Tears

Writers Tears Red Head

This is the sister brand to The Irishman, both of which fall under the Walsh Whiskey umbrella. Most Writers Tears whiskeys are blends of single pot still and single malt whiskeys, but Red Head is a single malt aged entirely in Oloroso sherry casks. Its non-chill filtered and bottled at 46% ABV, and has a complex palate of fig, orange, nut, and raisin flavors.

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Glendalough

Glendalough 7 Year Old Mizunara Finish

Glendalough has a wide range of Irish whiskeys in its core lineup, ranging from blends to this seven-year-old single malt. The twist is that its finished in a mizunara cask. This rare Japanese oak has been used for whiskey maturation in Japan for decades, and it's been gaining in popularity stateside over the past few years. The whiskey has the trademark spice and incense notes that mizunara famously adds, along with a healthy amount of fruit and vanilla.

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West Cork Distillers

West Cork Virgin Oak Cask

This distillery produces many different Irish whiskeys, including several single malts that are given various cask finishes. One of the most intriguing of the bunch is the Virgin Oak finish, which consists of single malt initially aged in bourbon barrels and then matured in virgin oak casks. This new wood treatment gives the whiskey an intensity of flavor with vanilla, caramel, and apple notes on the palate, and a burst of spice on the finish.

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YASUYOSHI CHIBA - Getty Images

When Russia launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it aggressively pushed its main battle tanks and lighter, but heavily-armed, BMP and BMD fighting vehicles forward on the offense. But in a classic tactical error, Russian armor lacked enough escorting infantry to detect and flush out ambushes in built-up areas.

This resulted in rapid, catastrophic lossesand contributed to Russia hitting the milestone of 2,001 main battle tanks visually confirmed destroyed, captured, or abandoned by May 30, 2023. That count only includes losses individually documented by the Oryx blogmeaning that the actual count is surely higher, considering the losses that didnt get photographed.

However, a May report by the UKs Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank clarifies that Russian tankers are now mostly using more cautious tactics supporting infantry, and employing technologies and techniques that implicitly reduce the effectiveness of even highly capable Javelin missiles supplied by the U.S.

This is part of a broader, ongoing process of adaptation by Russias military attempting to correct at least some of its least successful tactics from early in the war.

The reports authors Jack Watling and Nick Reynold arrived at their findings on Russian armor through interviews with various individuals, including two members of Ukraines general staff, the deputy commander of Ukraines northern command, deputy brigade and tank battalion commanders, and a Ukrainian tank crew.

Russias Staggering Tank Losses

Of the over-2,000 Russian tanks counted lost by Oryx, 62% were deemed permanently destroyed, another 27% were confirmed captured by Ukraine, and the remainder were labeled abandoned or heavily damaged. Attrition of valuable infantry fighting vehicles was similarly immense, with 2,372 Russian BMP, BMD, and BTR-82A vehicles lost.

John Moore - Getty Images

Ukrainian infantry armed with long-range anti-tank missilesnotably, heat-seeking Javelin missiles, shorter-ranged predictive-guidance NLOS missiles, and Ukrainian laser-guided Stugna-Psaccounted for many Russian armor losses early on. But Ukrainian sources later reported that indirect artillery fires guided by overwatching drones actually killed even more Russian tanks than anti-tank missiles.

Other contributors to losses include anti-tank mines, shorter-range anti-tank rockets, civilian quadcopter drones dropping anti-tank grenades, and Ukraines own tankswhich engaged Russian armor in battles around Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Volnovakha.

Wikimedia Commons

Russia is thought to have had an active fleet of roughly 3,000 tanks when it invaded Ukraine, meaning that it has lost the equivalent of 2/3 of what it started with. However, Russias fleet is receiving a trickle of newly produced T-90M tanks. The fleet is also receiving old Soviet tanks reactivated from storage, though Russia has only proven able to reactivate a small subset of that stockpile.

Tactical Adaptations: Infantry Support and Gunfire Raids

The RUSI report states that after the early war catastrophes, Russian armor is using significantly evolved tactics aimed at minimizing losses by keeping them in a supporting role. The primary mission is now observed to be direct fire support by tanks situated 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) from Ukrainian positions, outside the reach of shorter-range anti-tank weapons. At that distance, Russian tankists use their optics to spot enemy positions and destroy them with direct main gun fire.

The notable recent exception to that support-oriented role was Russias disastrous winter offensive targeting Vuhledar, where massed Russian armor assaults repeatedly smashed themselves to pieces against robust, prepared Ukrainian anti-tank defensesincluding pre-sighted artillery, mines, kamikaze FPV drones and anti-tank guided missilesleading to the effective destruction of Russias 155th Naval Infantry Brigades.

Currently, a favored Russian tactic is the gunfire raid, preferably made at night by agile 0020T-80BVM tanks equipped with superior passive thermal optics (many older Russian tanks rely on infrared searchlights, which expose their position when used.)

In such raids, a Russian tank rushes up to allow for direct fire on a Ukrainian position, fires off all their ammunition as rapidly as possible, and then hightails it back out of sight. Such attacks are often timed to hit Ukrainian forces changing shifts to cause maximum chaos. You can read a detailed analysis of a more risky gunfire raid recorded by a Separatist tank unit in the video below.

Russian tanks, especially old ones, are also being used as indirect fire artillery. The report observes that while this use is inefficient due to their low angle of fire, tanks are sufficiently protected to provide indirect support in higher-risk areas where artillery and munition supply convoys would be at grave risk of destruction, particularly from aerial attacks or counter-battery artillery salvoes.

Watling observes that even the antiquated T-54 and T-62 tanks that Russia has deployed to Ukraine pose a serious battlefield threat when there are a limited number of [long-range] anti-tank guided missiles Their big guns still leave them more effective in many fire support roles than most BMPs with smaller, shorter-range cannons.

Older, more expendable tanks are also often used in urban combat, where engagement range is short and flank ambushes are common enough that the advantages of modern tanks with superior optics and frontal armor are reduced.

The report notes that Russian tanks serve crucial support rolls in urban assaults through suppression of urban structures and rapid breaching of buildings to avoid entering through choke points and known avenues of advance. Less euphemistically, it implies that Russian tanks are being used to literally blast new corridors through buildings, through which infantry can ingress at reduced risk.

Close and Quick on the Draw: Tank Vs. Tank Battles

The occasional tank-vs-tank battles in Ukraine usually occur at short range, from one kilometer (.62 miles) down to just 50 meters. They are usually won by the tank that spots the other and shoots first, as has long been the case historically. Ukrainian gunners report that striking the point between the turret and glacis (frontal hull armor) is most likely to result in a one-shot-kill of a Russian tank.

A tank duel in the Luhansk region: a Ukrainian T-64 against a Russian T-72.

Another victory for the Ukrainian Armed Forces!



 by 92nd Mechanized Brigade. pic.twitter.com/ukuwhW1k91  Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) December 11, 2022

However, mobility kills aimed at tank tracks are also extremely effective, as immobilized tanks on the frontline that cant be promptly recovered are almost inevitably finished off by precision artillery or small drones dropping grenades through the hatches left open by the fleeing crew. That said, attempts to recover abandoned tanks often results in extended skirmishing by both sides.

Old and New Tricks

Watling writes that the characteristic bricks of explosive reactive armor (ERA) girding both Russian and Ukrainian tanks are actually highly effective against most anti-tank guided missiles, including gun-launched Kombat missile used by Ukrainian tanks. Multiple guided-missile hits sometimes fail to knockout Russian tanks.

But, more worryingly, Watling implies that Russia is having some success with counter-measures aimed at defeating U.S.-supplied Javelin heat-seeking top-attack missilesarguably the most expensive and capable of this type of missile given to Ukraine.

NurPhoto - Getty Images

One method is to operate around dusk and dawn (when thermal imagers struggle to distinguish vehicles) to significantly decrease.the probability of a kill as well as using special infrared signature-minimizing coverings that are highly effective in reducing the heat signatures of their vehicles.

Watling also notes that alterations to the engine decks on Russian tanks are effective in reducing their heat plume. This may refer to snorkel-like heat-venting pipes spotted before the war on some Russian tanks intended to divert IR-missiles.

As the vast majority of missiles used by and supplied to Ukraine employ optical or laser guidance, that implies that the missile being referred to is likely the IR-guided Javelin.

The RUSI reports findings may seem to contradict the huge outpouring of media showing the destruction of Russian tanks. But it also may simply mean that anti-tank methods not described in the report are responsible for a larger share of the killsparticularly mines and artillery fire.

Whether Russias more successful adaptations can stem the massive bleeding from this war remains to be seen. Theres a particular risk that Russian armor may again be subject to higher losses, as its employed for counter attacks in response to Ukraines forthcoming summer offensive.

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OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman gestures while speaking at University College London as part of his world tour of speaking engagements in London, on May 24. AP-Yonhap



Open AI Chief Executive Sam Altman is set to meet with Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and about 100 local startups on Friday, as the country seeks to encourage domestic competitiveness in artificial intelligence.



After crisscrossing Europe last month meeting lawmakers and national leaders to discuss the prospects and threats of AI, Altman has travelled to Israel, Jordan, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, India and Korea - all this week.



Korea is one of few countries that has developed its own foundation models for artificial intelligence in a field dominated by the United States and China, thanks to local tech firms such as Naver, Kakao, and LG .



The firms are seeking ways to tap niche or specialised markets that have not yet been addressed by big tech in U.S. or China.



Naver said it has been keen to develop localised AI applications for countries with political sensitivities in the Middle East as well as for non-English speaking countries, such as Spain and Mexico, the Financial Times reported in May, citing a Naver executive.



The rapid development and popularity of generative AI since Microsoft Corp-backed OpenAI launched ChatGPT last year is spurring lawmakers globally to formulate laws to address safety concerns linked to the technology.



The European Union is moving ahead with its draft AI Act, which is expected to become law later this year, while the United States is leaning toward adapting existing laws for AI rather than creating whole new legislation.



Korea has new AI regulation awaiting full parliament approval, which is seen as less restrictive than the EU's version.



In February, a parliament committee passed an AI law draft that guarantees freedom to release AI products and services, and will only restrict them if regulators deem any product to be harming the lives, safety, and rights of people.



Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT announced in April plans focused on fostering local AI development, such as measures to provide datasets for training hyperscale AI, while continuing discussions in AI ethics and regulations.






Rumor has it teenagers only worry about their phones and their friends. But what if they worry about money, too?

Research from the 2022 Junior Achievement Teens & Personal Finance Survey found that over 54% of teens feel unprepared for their financial futures. One way parents could help their kids feel more prepared is by addressing their money fears.

UNCOVER YOUR TEENS MONEY FEARS

There are several ways to learn about your teens money fears, but a good place to start is by looking at yours.

(Parents) have to look at their own issues because what you bring to the table is what your kids are going to pick up, even if you tell them to do the opposite, says Michele Paiva, a Downingtown, Pennsylvania-based licensed psychotherapist whose work focuses on trauma recovery, and financial education and therapy.

Get introspective about what your feelings about money are and how that might show up in your home. For instance, if youre always arguing with your partner about their or your spending habits, this could contribute to your teen developing insecurities about their ability to manage their finances.

Once youve looked within, explore learning about money as a family. Paiva says playing Monopoly is a fun way to spark money-related conversations: Do I want to spend all of my money on property? If I land on someone, do I have enough money for rent? If I go to jail, do I have enough money to get out of jail?

Conversations can go beyond a Monopoly board to asking scenario-based questions. Ask them what theyd do if they had $100 today, suggests LaQueshia Clemons, an accredited financial counselor and licensed clinical social worker in Middletown, Connecticut.

Use those types of questions to kind of gauge where theyre at and then, based on (the) child, go a little deeper to have that conversation with them, she says.

UNDERSTAND COMMON MONEY FEARS

Timmesha Butler-Davis holds a doctorate in social work and is a licensed independent clinical social worker who owns Mastery Counseling and Consulting in Ewing, New Jersey. She works with teens at a trauma-informed group in Camden, New Jersey, and they discuss money fears often. A common one she comes across is teens  especially kids who are growing up in poverty  having fears about not having enough to keep up with peers in terms of affording the same things.

There is a lot of stress and worry and fears and feelings of judgment when it comes to kids who are currently living in poverty, Butler-Davis says. And it really does have a significant impact on the way that they feel about themselves, and so it affects their levels of self-esteem.

Butler-Davis also says teens have fears about not being able to make enough to sustain themselves. This money fear often comes from poverty as a form of chronic trauma, she adds. Chronic trauma happens when youre repeatedly exposed to traumatic events. In this instance, it may relate to trauma caused by a lack of financial security.

Oftentimes that trauma can lead into phases of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), where you see kids grow up to either have severely detached relationships with money or severely insufficient or maladaptive relationships with money, Butler-Davis says. This can lead to people hoarding their money so they dont end up like their parents or spending it all, she adds.

DEVELOP A HEALTHIER RELATIONSHIP WITH MONEY

Reversing your teens money fears wont happen in a day. However, with time and effort, you might help them turn those fears into confidence.

One way is through affirmations, which is a form of encouragement, says Clemons.

Being a therapist, Im all about affirmations. One thing I love is, I am in control of my success, and what success means for every person could be different. She suggests exploring what success looks like for your child and reminding them theyre in control of that success.

Depending on what your childs money fears are, another way to help them is by providing them with financial literacy, says Butler-Davis. This could help a child who is worried about how theyll pay for college or keep up with expenses when they become an adult. Being actively engaged could look like taking them to open a savings account or teaching them about credit cards. You could also practice budgeting with them and let them shadow financial planning activities you do.

Finally, for kids who are afraid they arent valuable if they dont have tons of money, you can help them by reorienting how they determine their value: The biggest thing is knowing that you as a person are valuable no matter what you have, but also that your value is not placed in the money that you have, Paiva says.

_______________________

This article was provided to The Associated Press by the personal finance website NerdWallet. Elizabeth Ayoola is a writer at NerdWallet. Email: eayoola@nerdwallet.com.

RELATED LINK:

NerdWallet: How generational trauma affects your finances and how to heal https://bit.ly/nerdwallet-generational-trauma

Junior Achievement Teens & Personal Finance Survey Methodology:

The Junior Achievement Fintech Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research (www.wakefieldresearch.com) among 1,000 nationally representative US Teens ages 13-18, between February 18th and February 24th, 2022, using an email invitation and an online survey. Data was weighted to ensure a reliable and accurate representation of U.S. teens ages 13-18.

Results of any sample are subject to sampling variation. The magnitude of the variation is measurable and is affected by the number of interviews and the level of the percentages expressing the results. For the interviews conducted in this particular study, the chances are 95 in 100 that a survey result does not vary, plus or minus, by more than 3.1 percentage points from the result that would be obtained if interviews had been conducted with all persons in the universe represented by the sample.
New presidential candidate Mike Pence wasn't afraid to talk this week about the politically perilous choices that loom right around the corner for Social Security and Medicare.

But the former Vice President may face an uphill battle in bringing the rest of the field into that conversation.

In a kickoff speech Wednesday that largely focused on things like his faith and his role on Jan. 6, Pence also took significant time to tell Iowans that if the growing entitlement program costs are not addressed, it could crush the future of the American economy and opportunities for our children.

He has also declined to rule out politically unpopular options to solve the problem like raising the retirement age.

The blunt foray into the so-called "third rail of American politics" was notable because of how scarce a policy-focused discussion of the issue has been on the 2024 campaign trail so far.

Pence himself said as much this week. He named both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump as candidates who won't talk about the issue and whose policy is insolvency. He charges that both figures have calculated that a reform debate is apparently less important than their short-term political fortunes.

Former Vice President and 2024 Presidential hopeful Mike Pence after his campaign launch event in Ankeny, Iowa on June 7. (STEPHEN MATUREN/AFP via Getty Images)

Biden and Trump may be right on the politics of the moment but experts warn that entitlement reform is an issue that will likely be inescapable during the next presidential term.

As a statement of reality [Pence] is 100% correct, said Mark Warshawsky, a former deputy commissioner at the Social Security Administration who is now at the American Enterprise Institute, while quickly noting that the politics are a little more complex.

He added in an interview Thursday that Pences challenge ahead is to convince the public of the seriousness of the problem and translate the issue from something abstract into the way people live right now.

The most recent government report on the programs found that Social Security only has the funds to continue paying out 100% of benefits through 2034. After that, benefits could be decreased by over 20%. Meanwhile, a key Medicare trust fund could run low on funds by the final year of the next presidential term, in 2028.

A race where most candidate say were not going to mess with Social Security

Pence begins his campaign mired near the bottom of the 2024 GOP field in spite of his near universal name recognition. Whether or not he can shift the conversation on this issue remains to be seen but experts say the issue will be on the president's desk in coming years no matter what.

Marc Goldwein is senior VP at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and noted in an interview Thursday that a key headline measure tracked by the trustees of Social Security and Medicare is whether the programs will be solvent over the coming decade.

He says its more likely than not that, for the first time, the first trustee's report of the next president or the next administration is gonna fail that test with flying colors.

He compared the situation to a car. Now, "the check engine light is on he says, but the situation in coming years will be more akin to one where the alarm that your car may not make it another 50 miles is on.

But for the moment, the leading candidates appear more focused on using the issue as a political weapon.

Former President Trump does bring the issue up with some frequency but almost exclusively to attack fellow candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) for ever being open to reform. Thats a bad one, the former president has taken to saying.

DeSantis, meanwhile, has distanced himself from his time in Congress when he did look at options to raise the retirement age and slow Social Securitys spending growth. He offers little on the topic these days beyond saying were not going to mess with Social Security as Republicans, as he told Fox News recently.

Another candidate who, like Pence, has weighed in on the challenges in some detail is former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley. She has directly discussed the need to change the retirement age for younger Americans.

Pence has been a bit more vague about what reforms he has in mind, but said in a CNN town hall Thursday that the reforms needed could be a change in the age of eligibility, but it also could include letting younger Americans invest a portion of their payroll taxes in a mutual fund.

He added in a Fox News interview Thursday that "we can replace these New Deal programs with a better deal for every American."

On the Democratic side, President Biden has focused more on increasing taxes to cover the shortfall and repeatedly criticized any Republican who discusses reform. He had a memorable moment in his State of the Union address when he baited Republicans to promise to take entitlement programs off the table and stand up for seniors.

President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address on Feb. 7 as Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy look on. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

In the weeks since, the White House has been happy to use the issue as a political weapon, with Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates recently charging that Republicans still plan to undermine the programs. Democrats have also critiqued Nikki Haley for her comments on entitlement reforms.

For budget hawks like Goldwein and Warshawsky, there may be little optimism that the issue will get the debate it deserves in the months ahead. But there is at least hope that the groundwork can be laid for real reforms in the coming years  given Pence's prominence and focus on the issue  even if he doesn't emerge victorious.

If Pence can get others in the field "to be a little more serious in their discussion of it, then thats a sign of success, Warshawsky says.

Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

Click here for politics news related to business and money

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KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted Friday that Ukrainian troops have started a long-expected counteroffensive and were suffering significant losses. His comments came just hours after a string of drone strikes inside Russian territory.

It was Putin's latest effort to shape the gut-wrenching narrative of the invasion he ordered more than 15 months ago, sparking widespread international condemnation and reviving Cold War-style tensions.

The conflict entered a complex new phase this week with the rupture of a Dnieper River dam that sent floodwaters gushing through a large swath of the front in southern Ukraine. Tens of thousands of civilians already facing the misery of regular shelling fled for higher ground on both sides of the swollen and sprawling waterway.

Kyiv has played down talk of a counteroffensive, reasoning that the less said about its military moves the better. Speaking after he visited flood zones on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was in touch with Ukrainian forces in all the hottest areas and praised an unspecified result from their efforts.

Putin said Russian forces have the upper hand.

We can clearly say the offensive has started, as indicated by the Ukrainian army's use of strategic reserves, Putin told reporters in Sochi, where he was meeting with heads of other states in the Eurasian Economic Union. But the Ukrainian troops havent achieved their stated tasks in a single area of fighting.

Kyiv has not specified whether reservists have been mobilized to the front, but its Western allies have poured firepower, defensive systems, and other military assets and advice into Ukraine, raising the stakes for the expected counteroffensive.

We are seeing that the Ukrainian regime's troops are suffering significant losses, Putin said, without providing details. Its known that the offensive side suffers losses of 3 to 1  its sort of classic  but in this case, the losses significantly exceed that classic level.

On Friday, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Russia was on the defensive in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia province, though the epicenter of fighting remained in the east, particularly in the Donetsk region. She described heavy battles in Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Marinka.

Valerii Shershen, a spokesperson for Ukraines armed forces in Zaporizhzhia, told Radio Liberty that they were searching for weaknesses in Russias defense, which Moscow was trying to strengthen by deploying mines, constructing fortifications and regrouping.

Earlier, regional authorities in southwest Russia near the Ukrainian border reported the latest flurry of drone strikes. The strikes have exposed the vulnerabilities of Moscow's air defense systems.

The regional governor of Voronezh, Alexander Gusev, said on the Telegram app that a drone crashed into a high-rise apartment building in the city of the same name, injuring three residents who were hit by shards of glass. Russian state media published photos of windows blown out and damage to the facade.

Gusev said the drone was targeting a nearby airbase but veered off course after its signal was jammed. The city lies some 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Ukraines Luhansk region, most of which is occupied by Russia.

Separately, Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov of the neighboring Belgorod region, which also borders Ukraine, said air defenses had shot down two unspecified targets overnight. An apartment building and private homes were damaged, he said, without saying by what. He also said a drone fell on the roof of an office building in the city of Belgorod. It failed to detonate but caught fire on impact, causing insignificant damage, he wrote.

The leader of a third region of Russia, Kursk Gov. Roman Starovoit, said a drone crashed to the ground outside an oil depot and near water reservoirs in the local capital, causing no casualties or damage.

Ukrainian authorities have generally denied any role in attacks inside Russia. Such drone strikes  there was even one near the Kremlin  along with cross-border raids into southwestern Russia have brought the war home to Russians.

In Ukraine, the governor of the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said Friday that water levels had decreased by about 20 centimeters (8 inches) overnight on the western bank of the Dnieper, which was inundated starting Tuesday after the breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam upstream.

Officials on both sides indicated that about 20 people have died in the flooding. The United Nations' humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, Denise Brown, visited the flood-hit town of Bilozerka on Friday, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

Ms. Brown said that although initial estimates indicate that 17,000 people are being impacted in the areas controlled by Ukraine alone, it is important to understand that the crisis has not stopped and continues to evolve rapidly, Dujarric said.

Kyiv accused Russia of blowing up the dam and its hydropower plant, which Russian forces controlled, while Moscow said Ukraine bombarded it.

The Norwegian earthquake center NORSAR said Friday that a seismological station in neighboring Romania recorded tremors in the vicinity of the dam at 2:54 a.m. Tuesday, around the time Zelenskyy said the breach occurred.

What we can see from our data is that there was an explosion in the area of the dam as the same time as the dam broke, NORSAR head of research Volker Oye told The Associated Press.

The Norwegian center is part of a global monitoring system that helps verify compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Experts predicted the consequences of the dam's collapse would last for months. Continued fighting in the region was bound to slow recovery efforts.

Viktor Vitovetskyi, a representative of Ukraines Emergency Service, said 46 municipalities in the Kherson region have flooded, 14 of them along the Russian-occupied eastern bank of the river.

Even as efforts were underway to rescue civilians and supply them with fresh water and other services, he said Russian shelling over the last day killed two civilians and injured 17 in the region.

In other developments Friday:

___

Kozlowska reported from London. Jon Gambrell in Kyiv; Hanna Arhirova in Warsaw, Poland; Edit M. Lederer at the United Nations; and David Keyton in Stockholm, Sweden, contributed to this report.

___

Follow AP's coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Unhealthy air in parts of the U.S. was forecast for another day Friday as smoke from Canada wildfires continued to be brought south by winds, but some improvement has been seen.

New York City had been blanketed by an eerie orange haze that began Tuesday when smoke from wildfires in Canada was carried south.

The city of more than 8 million people had been considered to have the worst air quality in the world this week, but by early Friday it ranked 15th on a list by the tracking service IQAir.com.

Air quality alerts covered most of New York state, as well as Connecticut, New Jersey, all of Pennsylvania and Indiana, and parts of Ohio and Michigan, according to the National Weather Service.

"An area of upper low pressure has and will continue to direct the smoke from the wildfires in Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia down into parts of the Midwest, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic through the weekend," the weather service said in a Thursday forecast discussion.

A person runs on the National Mall as the U.S. Capitol is seen shrouded in haze and smoke caused by wildfires in Canada, in Washington, U.S., June 8, 2023. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Reuters)

New York Mayor Eric Adams had warned vulnerable New Yorkers to stay indoors and everyone else to limit their time outside amid the smoke. The weather service said an air quality alert extends into Friday for much of the area.

Other cities, including Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., were also affected. Flights were also delayed or canceled because of the conditions.

Philadelphia schools were to operate remotely Friday out of an abundance of caution, the city's school district said.

New York City public school students who were scheduled to attend classes Friday were also shifted to remote, although a previously scheduled "clerical day" meant some students would not have been attending classes Friday anyway.

More than 400 wildfires were burning in Canada, which is experiencing very warm temperatures and dry conditions, according to Canadas government and U.S. forecasters.

The U.S. and other countries have sent or pledged to send firefighters or other help to Canada.
Former Texas AG Ken Paxton. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)

AUSTIN, Texas (AP)  The FBI on Thursday arrested a businessman at the center of the scandal that led to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's historic impeachment, a move that came amid new questions about the mens dealings raised by financial records the Republican's lawyers made public to try to clear him of bribery allegations.

Nate Paul, 36, was taken into custody by federal agents and booked into an Austin jail in the afternoon, according to Travis County Sheriffs Office records. It was not immediately clear what charges led to his arrest, but the records showed he was being held on a federal detainer for a felony.

Paul's arrest followed a yearslong federal investigation into the Austin real estate developer  a probe that Paxton involved his office in, setting off a chain of events that ultimately led to his impeachment last month.

Lawyers for Paul did not immediately respond to requests for comment. One of Paxton's defense attorneys, Dan Cogdell, said he had no additional information on the arrest. The FBI declined to comment, and a spokesman for federal prosecutors in West Texas did not respond to inquiries.

FBI agents examining Paul's troubled real estate empire searched his Austin offices and palatial home in 2019. The next year, seven of Paxton s top deputies reported the attorney general to the FBI on allegations of bribery and abusing his office to help Paul, including by hiring an outside lawyer to examine the developer's claims of wrongdoing by federal agents.

The allegations by Paxton's staff prompted the FBI to investigate, which remains ongoing, and are central to articles of impeachment overwhelmingly approved by the GOP-led state House of Representatives.

On Wednesday, Paxtons defense team showed a packed room of journalists a bank statement that included a 2020 wire transfer purportedly showing him, and not a donor, paying more than $120,000 for a home renovation.

$121,000 payment to Cupertino Builders

The wire transfer was dated Oct. 1, 2020  the same day Paxtons deputies signed a letter informing the head of human resources at the Texas attorney generals office that they had reported Paxton to the FBI.

The $121,000 payment was to Cupertino Builders, whose manager was an associate of Paul, state corporation and court records show.

The company did not incorporate as a business in Texas until more than three weeks after the transaction took place. A company of the same name was formed in Delaware in April of that year, although public filings there do not make clear who is behind it.

Last year a court-appointed overseer for some of Pauls companies wrote in a report that Cupertino Builders was used for fraudulent transfers from his business to Narsimha Raju Sagiraju, who was convicted of fraud in California in 2016. The report described Sagiraju as Pauls friend.

Paul, who also employed a woman with whom Paxton acknowledged having an extramarital affair, has denied bribing Paxton. In a deposition, Paul described Sagiraju as an independent contractor and said he didnt remember how they first met.

The timing of the payment  and the identity of who was paid for renovations at Paxtons home in Austin  was not publicly known before his new legal team held a news conference Wednesday in which they put financial documents on a projector screen while criticizing the impeachment. They were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Tony Buzbee, a prominent Houston attorney who was hired by Paxton over the weekend and led the news conference, said by email Thursday that receipts clearly demonstrate Paxton paid for the repairs. He did not address questions about the timing of the payments or Cupertino Builders.

Without any evidence the politicians leading this sham impeachment falsely accused General Paxton of not paying for the repairs to his home. That is a lie, Buzbee said.

Since becoming just the third sitting official in Texas history to be impeached, Paxton has attacked the proceedings as politically motivated and rushed, saying he was never given the chance to rebut the accusations in the state House.

We have the receipts, Buzbee told reporters Wednesday as the documents flashed onscreen. This is the type of evidence we tried to offer them once we found out this foolishness was going on.

Paxton is temporarily suspended from office pending the outcome of a trial in the Texas Senate that is set to begin no later than Aug. 28. The jury will be the members of the 31-seat Senate; one of them, Paxtons wife, Sen. Angela Paxton, has not said whether she will recuse herself.

20 articles of impeachment

The Paxtons purchased the Austin house in 2018. When it was remodeled two years later, Paxtons former staff alleged in court documents, Paul was involved in the work.

Among the 20 articles of impeachment are accusations that Paxton used the power of his office to help Paul over unproven claims of an elaborate conspiracy to steal $200 million of the developers properties. The FBI searched Pauls home in 2019, but he has not been charged and his attorneys have denied wrongdoing.

The city has no record of building permits from the time of the renovations. A different Austin contractor  not Cupertino Builders  received a federal grand jury subpoena in 2021 for records related to work on Paxtons home that started in January 2020.

Cupertino Builders was formed in October 2020 and dissolved less than two years later, according to Texas corporation records. Its manager was Sagiraju, who said in a deposition for an unrelated case that he did consulting work for Pauls business and had an email address with Pauls company.

Sagiraju acknowledged that he served prison time for securities fraud and grand theft in California before moving to Austin, according to a transcript of the deposition. He said he was first introduced to Paul by a mutual friend before his prison term and they later did a few projects together.

A lawyer for Sagiraju did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Paxton was separately indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, though he has yet to stand trial.
By Nandita Bose and Jeff Mason

ROCKY MOUNT, N.C. (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden said on Friday he had not spoken to Attorney General Merrick Garland and had no plans to do so, as the Justice Department's indictment of former President Donald Trump was unsealed.

"I have not spoken to him at all and Im not going to speak with him," Biden said, when asked by a reporter if he would speak to the attorney general, continuing a pattern of distancing himself from the DOJ's investigation into his political rival.

Trump faces 37 criminal counts including charges of unauthorized retention of classified documents and conspiracy to obstruct justice after he left the White House in 2021, according to federal court documents made public on Friday.

Republican hopefuls have alleged, without evidence, that the investigation into Trump, who is running to unseat Biden from the White House in 2024, is politically motivated. Biden and top officials have repeatedly said the DOJ is acting independently.

As the charges against Trump were unsealed, Biden was in North Carolina, where he was discussing his economic agenda and had plans to meet with military members.

White House spokesperson Olivia Dalton said earlier that Biden found out about the indictment of his former rival at the same time others did and had not had advance knowledge of it. She declined further comment.

"This is a president who respects the rule of law," she told reporters on Air Force One. "That's precisely why we're not commenting here."

Garland, who last appeared publicly with Biden at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, appointed special prosecutor Jack Smith, who is not registered with any political party, to head the investigation last year.

Trump sought to challenge the legitimacy of FBI search warrants last year related to the probe, but a conservative-leaning federal appeals court rejected his arguments.

BIDEN, TRUMP IN SWING STATE

North Carolina is a key political swing state that Republicans are courting this weekend during a state convention. Trump, who declared himself an "innocent man" in relation to the charges, is scheduled to speak there on Saturday evening.

Biden and his wife, Jill, made a stop at Nash Community College in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, to discuss workforce training programs and then traveled to the newly renamed Fort Liberty military base to talk about new efforts to help veterans and families of those serving in the military.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Trump, who are competing against each other and a field of others for their party's 2024 presidential nomination, are expected to speak there on Friday and Saturday nights, respectively.

Biden's trip underscores his team's political strategy as he makes an unprecedented run at the age of 80 for reelection. As Trump faces a host of lawsuits and investigations and Republican hopefuls trade barbs, Biden will be keen to be seen visibly, actively governing, especially on non-partisan issues like jobs.

The so-called bully pulpit is a key advantage that incumbent presidents of both parties have long put to effective use. Just 10 presidents running as incumbents have lost reelection bids.

Biden is slated to attend a rally with union members on June 17 in Philadelphia.

North Carolina, with 15 electoral votes, is an important political swing state that Trump won, though only with a slim margin, in 2020. Biden won overall with 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232.

Trump is ahead of his rivals in North Carolina and that lead mirrors his dominance in other states, according to a poll released Thursday by Opinion Diagnostics. He leads the North Carolina Republican field with 44% of the vote, followed by DeSantis at 22%, the poll shows.

At Fort Liberty, Biden signed an executive order that the White House said would "increase the economic security of military and veteran spouses, caregivers, and survivors."

Fort Liberty was recently renamed from Fort Bragg as part of an effort to relabel bases named for Confederate officers.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose and Jeff Mason; additional reporting by Sarah Lynch and Jarrett Renshaw; Editing by Heather Timmons, Alistair Bell, Daniel Wallis and Diane Craft)
Two people were injured, one seriously, when a boat exploded, caught fire and sank Thursday afternoon near Pointe Oasis at Lake of the Ozarks, according to the Missouri State Highway Patrol.

A mechanical failure is being blamed for causing the explosion in the engine compartment about 3:20 p.m. at the 13 mile mark of Wideford Hollow Cove, according to the preliminary crash report from the highway patrol.

A 35-year-old woman, identified as Amanda M. Kingston from Wincotte, Pennsylvania, was seriously injured and was flown to a hospital.

The boats 78-year-old operator, Benny E. Thomas of Four Seasons, Missouri, suffered minor injuries and also was taken to a hospital.

The fire on the boat was extinguished and the boat subsequently sank, the highway patrol said.

A mechanical failure is being blamed for causing an explosion in the engine compartment of a boat about 3:20 p.m. at the 13 mile mark of Wideford Hollow Cove at the Lake of the Ozarks, according to the preliminary crash report from the Missouri Highway Patrol.

Boat explosions

In 2019, The Star reported there were 157 boating accidents involving fuel-related fire or explosions, resulting in 2 deaths and 103 injuries in 2017, the most recent data available at the time from the U.S. Coast Guard.

Over the two years prior, the online news site LakeExpo had covered several similar explosions at Lake of the Ozarks that killed one man and injured three.

That included a 47-year-old Sunrise Beach man who was injured when his boat exploded just after refueling at the Paradise Bar & Grills docks. A month later, a 20-year-old Eldon woman was seriously injured when her 2002 Polaris personal watercraft exploded when she tried to start it.

The summer before, a 76-year-old Nevada, Missouri man was killed when a boat exploded at the gas docks at Pier 31. A 58-year-old El Dorado Springs woman was seriously injured in the blast.

The site also reported boaters were being urged last year to check for gas vapors in the engine compartments of their boats.

We remind boaters to use the exhaust blower for at least 4 minutes after fueling & before starting the engine to remove gas vapors in the bilge, the Missouri Highway State Highway Patrol said at the time.
Trainer Bob Baffert observes the stables at Belmont Park as workouts continue Friday ahead of the Belmont Stakes. The race will be run Saturday after air quality improved following dissipation of haze from Canadian wildfires. (John Minchillo / Associated Press)

The sky over Belmont Park had cleared, gone was the orange haze from Canadian wildfires that forced state officials to suspend racing and training two days before the final leg of the Triple Crown.

Horse racing was to resume in a few hours as Bob Baffert hopped out of his black Escalade and pointed up.

The weather here is better than California, Baffert said. We havent seen the sun in two weeks. Its cloudy and gloomy there.

Friday was Bafferts first time back at Belmont Park since 2018, when Justify completed his bid to become the 13th winner of the Triple Crown. It was wild back then, with about 50 members of the media breathlessly awaiting every utterance from the Hall of Fame trainer.

On Friday morning, there were only three reporters and a television cameraman. Baffert did three separate interviews rather than a collective one. He had the time.

It feels good to be back here, Baffert said. Belmont is nice and its going to be big [Saturday]. Its exciting. The classics are exciting. To be part of it with a horse that has a chance, the excitement is there.

Clearly the media crowd was missing because a Triple Crown is not on the line. In fact, no horse has won two legs of the series since Justify. If anyone but Bafferts horse, National Treasure, wins the Belmont Stakes on Saturday, it will be a streak of 16 races with different winners starting with Justify.

No one is going for a Triple Crown this year, Baffert said. The Triple Crown makes all the difference. Its history being made and its difficult. You learn to appreciate it.

This years Belmont is probably the best of the Triple Crown races. The Kentucky Derby was overshadowed by a spike in horse fatalities and scratches. The Preakness Stakes did not have an impressive array of horses. Most of the Belmont attention is focused on Forte, who was the Derby favorite before Kentucky state officials scratched the colt on race day because of a bruised hoof. He is the morning line favorite for the Belmont at 5-2 odds. Tapit Trice, who finished seventh in the Derby, is the second pick at 3-1 while Angel of Empire, who was third in the Derby, is at 7-2.

Bafferts top assistant, Jimmy Barnes, has been supervising the training of Preakness winner National Treasure as Baffert didnt arrive in New York until Thursday night after a six-hour flight delay.

His late arrival also helps partially explain why he has been absent from Belmont Park for so long.

Usually, we would be at Churchill Downs, Baffert said. When we come from Churchill, we come in on a Wednesday. But being that I wasnt at Churchill, but was coming from California, I came in later. If I was at Churchill, I would be here earlier.

The reason Baffert was not at Churchill is a two-year ban imposed by the track after Medina Spirit tested positive for a medication banned on race day after he won the Kentucky Derby in 2021. After it was clear that Medina Spirit was not going to run in the Belmont, the New York Racing Assn. banned Baffert for two years, later reduced to one, even though he never had a horse fail a drug test in the state.

Were still dealing with that right now, Baffert said of the ongoing litigation. Were still in the process of wondering why they did that. Were at the bridge right now and havent crossed it yet. I just want to clear my name.

Last year during the Triple Crown series, Baffert was serving a 90-day suspension from Kentucky, and honored by all states, for the Medina Spirit violation.

Bafferts Churchill ban is set to expire July 3. For the last two years, Bafferts Derby horses were transferred to Tim Yakteen, his former assistant. National Treasure was moved to Yakteen this year to run in the Santa Anita Derby, but his fourth-place finish wasnt good enough to get him into the Derby field. After the race, the colt was transferred back to Baffert.

Just getting to the Derby is tough, Baffert said. Then, if a horse doesnt run well in the Derby, they say hes just tired. And the people are tired too. Its still going to be an exciting race, the Belmont is very important to the fans in New York. Its tradition.

All the good horses used to run in all the big races. Now the trainer wants to pick their spots, give their horse a month off.  Look, there are only nine horses [in Saturdays race]. Weve had three weeks and there are still only nine horses.  Its the classics and the Breeders Cup that keeps this sport going.

As the 2023 Triple Crown series comes to a close Saturday, the sport hopes to come out of the shadow of controversies and point itself to the Breeders Cup at Santa Anita in November.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP)  Joran van der Sloot, the chief suspect in Natalee Holloways 2005 disappearance, pleaded not guilty Friday in Alabama to charges he tried to extort money from the missing teens mother in exchange for revealing where to find her daughters remains.

Although he's not on trial for harming Holloway, the extortion and wire fraud charges are the only alleged crimes that link the Dutch citizen to Holloway's unsolved disappearance on the Caribbean island of Aruba. The 18-year-old went missing during a high school graduation trip with classmates and was last seen leaving a bar with van der Sloot, a student at an international school on the island where he grew up.

Van der Sloot, now 35, walked shackled into the Alabama courtroom Friday as Holloways parents looked on. He'd been extradited Thursday from Peru, where hes serving a 28-year sentence after confessing to killing a Peruvian woman in 2010  five years to the day after Holloway went missing.

Natalees mother, father and brother were in the courtroom Friday. Beth Holloway stared occasionally at van der Sloot but otherwise showed no obvious emotion.

The wheels of justice have finally begun to turn for our family, she wrote in a statement. It has been a very long and painful journey.

Van der Sloot, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, declined to use a Dutch interpreter offered to him, saying I dont think its necessary. During the brief court preceding, he entered a not guilty plea through his attorney and answered Yes when asked if he understood his rights.

Afterward, Beth Holloway hugged friends who had come to offer support. She declined to comment outside the courthouse.

Her spokesperson, George Seymore, told reporters that seeing van der Sloot in court was chilling but at the same time gratifying.

The mysterious disappearance sparked years of news coverage and countless true-crime podcasts. Van der Sloot was identified as a main suspect and was detained for questioning along with two Surinamese brothers, weeks after Holloway went missing. No charges were filed in the case.

A judge declared Holloway dead, but her body has never been found.

U.S. prosecutors say that in 2010, van der Sloot sought money from Beth Holloway to lead her to the young woman's body. A grand jury indicted him that year.

In 2012, van der Sloot pleaded guilty in Peru to killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores, a business student from a prominent family, in 2010.

Van der Sloot married a Peruvian woman in July 2014 in a ceremony at a maximum-security prison. He was shuffled between prisons in response to reports he enjoyed privileges like television, internet access and a cellphone, and accusations he threatened to kill a warden.

Peru will let van der Sloot remain in U.S. custody until the Alabama case is concluded, including any appeal if he's convicted, according to a resolution published in Perus federal register. U.S. authorities agreed to return him to Peruvian custody after that, the resolution states.

Cindy Rysedorph, a friend of the Holloways, said the family is doing as well as can be expected.

Its progress, she said. Im so grateful that hes here.
BEIJING (Reuters) - China's largest naval training ship sailed for the Philippines on Friday, its last stop of a regional "friendly" tour, amid growing unease over Chinese maritime activities in the South China Sea.

The giant training vessel, Qijiguang, bigger than a typical destroyer, left Brunei on Thursday for the Philippines as part an around 40-day trip which has included stops in Vietnam and Thailand before Brunei.

At the end of its trip, Qijiguang and its crew of 476 navy students and officers would have passed through the Yellow Sea, East China Sea, South China Sea, Gulf of Thailand and West Pacific.

Training conducted by the ship, named after a Ming dynasty general who fought against Japanese pirates, would focus on navigation, anti-piracy and shooting exercises with light-weight weapons, according to Chinese state media, which had described its passage in the region as "friendly".

Its impending arrival in the Philippines comes amid tensions with its neighbours over the South China Sea, which China mostly claims but parts of which are also claimed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines.

The visit also comes immediately after the first-ever trilateral coast guard exercise involving the Philippines, Japan and the United States that ended on Wednesday.

The Philippines has ramped up its military ties with the United States this year, conducting more drills and even allowing U.S. access to local military bases. The decision angered China when Manila said the access would be useful if Chinese forces attacked Taiwan, which China claims as its territory.

Heightening tensions further, the Philippines placed navigational buoys in the contested Spratly islands of the South China Sea last month, quickly prompting China to do the same.

On May 23-25, the training vessel made port in Vietnam, overlapping with the sailing of a Chinese research ship in Vietnam's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) from May 7-June 6. The presence of the research ship prompted a rare protest from Hanoi.

The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will hold its first-ever multilateral military drill in the South China Sea in September, its chair Indonesia said on Thursday.

(Reporting by Albee Zhang and Ryan Woo)
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, speaks during a meeting with startup leaders and journalists in Korea at 63 Square in Yeouido, Seoul, Friday. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul









By Baek Byung-yeul







Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of U.S.-based artificial intelligence (AI) technology company OpenAI, is very interested in Korean startups developing services using his company's generative AI platform ChatGPT, he said Friday, adding the U.S. firm would like to collaborate more with them in many areas.







"We love to support people building on our platform. Some of our team here today is happy to help with that. We're exploring investing more in Korean startups. And we'd be very excited to explore joint chip corporations to develop AI accelerators," Altman said during a meeting with 130 local startup leaders and journalists here at the 63 Square in Yeouido, Seoul.







"We would be delighted to host Korean startups in the United States. We'll also be really excited to meet as many as we can here today. And I think this kind of collaboration is essential to our work."







Minister of SMES and Startups Lee Young, left, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman participate in a meeting with local startup leaders and journalists at 63 Square in Yeouido, Seoul, Friday. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul





OpenAI has wowed the world since it released the 3.5 version of its generative AI service ChatGPT last November, showing everyone that AI is already changing the world. From helping users find what they are searching for to supporting their creative work, it has been clear that AI is going to make a huge difference in our daily lives.







To talk to world leaders about the world that AI will change and the threats the technology may pose, Altman has been traveling the world this year, for what he calls the "OpenAI Tour 2023." In May, he visited Europe to meet lawmakers and leaders to discuss the future opportunities and possible threats of AI. He also has visited Israel, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and India.







Altman and OpenAI executives came to Korea after being invited by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups. Minister Lee Young emceed the meeting to share the purpose of his visit to Korea, his plans to collaborate with Korean companies, advice for younger founders and prospects of the AI industry.







As to advice for startup founders in the AI field, Altman encouraged more adventurers to launch their businesses because he and they are in the middle of the same revolution as when the internet started.






By Nelson Acosta

HAVANA (Reuters) -Colombia's government and the left-wing ELN guerrilla group declared a bilateral ceasefire on Friday, as a third cycle of peace talks closed in Havana.

Preparations for the ceasefire, which will come into full force on Aug. 3 and last 180 days, are due to begin immediately, said Cubas foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez, speaking on behalf of the participants.

"On Aug. 3, 2023, the full implementation ... of the national and temporary bilateral ceasefire will begin with the full application of the protocols and the full operation of the monitoring and verification mechanism," Rodriguez said.

A fourth cycle of peace talks will take place in Venezuela between Aug. 14 and Sept. 4, Rodriguez said.

The ceasefire announcement is good news for the embattled Colombian president Gustavo Petro, who is facing allegations at home of financial irregularities in his election campaign, threatening other aspects of his planned political and social reforms.

"Here ends a phase of armed insurgency in Latin America," Petro told participants at the closing ceremony in Havana. "The world of arms, and of killing one another ... must cease."

Colombia's conflict, which has run for nearly six decades, has killed at least 450,000 people.

The leftist Petro, who flew from Colombia to attend the ceasefire announcement, early in his tenure promised an ambitious plan for total peace in the South American nation long plagued by domestic conflict.

The Havana negotiations stalled in mid-May after Petro questioned the groups unity of leadership, prompting a rebuke from the ELN, which at the time said talks had entered into "crisis."

The ELN is Colombia's oldest remaining rebel group, and the talks are the cornerstone of efforts by Petro - himself once a member of the now-demobilized M-19 insurgents - to negotiate peace or surrender deals with remaining rebels and crime gangs, as well as to fully implement a 2016 accord with the FARC rebel group.

Mexico, Norway, Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil and Chile are guarantor nations for the negotiations.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, who also spoke at the ceremony, said Cuba had persevered in the peace process and had obtained results, he said, despite paying a "high price" for its participation.

The United States in 2021 designated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism in part, it said, because Havana, citing peace process protocols, had refused to extradite ELN leaders on the island following a January 2019 bombing in Bogota.

"The price we have paid is high, but we do not regret it," Diaz-Canel said.

(Reporting by Nelson Acosta in Havana; Additional reporting by Oliver Griffin and Nelson Bocanegra in Bogota; Editing by Dave Sherwood, Nick Zieminski and Daniel Wallis)
By Karen Freifeld and Jacqueline Thomsen

(Reuters) - U.S. courthouse activity in Miami suggests that federal prosecutors might bring criminal charges against former President Donald Trump in his home state of Florida rather than in Washington.

Special Counsel Jack Smith has convened grand juries in both places to hear evidence in his investigation into whether the former president mishandled classified information after leaving the White House in January 2021.

Taylor Budowich, a former Trump spokesman, said on Wednesday he had appeared before the Miami grand jury. Media outlets have reported seeing prosecutors working on the investigation at the Florida courthouse.

Legal experts have questioned whether the charges at issue would need to be filed in Florida because the alleged crimes took place in Palm Beach at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club.

A spokesman for Smiths office declined to comment. A lawyer for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Federal prosecutors have notified Trump's attorneys that he is a target of the investigation, a person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

Experts say the U.S. Justice Department may opt to bring a case in Florida to avoid a drawn-out legal challenge from Trump's team over the proper venue. Under federal law, defendants have a right to be charged where the activity in question took place.

Smith could indict Trump in Florida and charge others in Washington, especially if they are cooperating and have waived the venue issue.

Bringing the case in Florida would deprive Trump's team of the argument that prosecutors were holding the trial on politically hostile terrain. Florida voted for the Republican Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, while Washington is overwhelmingly Democratic.

But the strength of the evidence may override any concerns about the jury pool, said Michael Bromwich, a former federal prosecutor in Washington.

"Smith and his team are assembling a pretty overwhelming case, so even with a less favorable jury pool they probably have a high level of confidence they can prove it to virtually any jury," he said.

The choice of venue may depend on whether Trump is ultimately charged with obstruction of justice, which would point to a Florida prosecution, or a larger conspiracy that includes taking the documents from the White House, said Washington lawyer William Taylor III.

"If they define the conspiracy more broadly, theres no question they can bring it in D.C," he said.

(Additional reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Howard Goller)
By Anna Mehler Paperny and Kyaw Soe Oo

TORONTO (Reuters) - Just when it seemed safe to unmask, some Canadians are donning the face coverings made ubiquitous during the coronavirus pandemic as a protection against hazardous smoky conditions as wildfires ravage much of the country.

Canada is seeing its worst-ever start to wildfire season as blazes burn from the western provinces to Atlantic Canada. Smoke from wildfires in Quebec has settled over southern Ontario and travelled into the United States, disrupting flights and sending people indoors.

Some mask companies that sold protective equipment during the pandemic have turned to wildfire marketing. On Wednesday mask supplier United Canada sent out an email with "Wildfire Season Safety Tips" that included an N95 mask. Canada Strong sent out an email Tuesday titled "Ontario Smoke will be Intense - Helpful Tips."

Neither responded Thursday when asked whether they have seen an uptick in mask interest.

Rivi Hume-Beardall could feel the difference when she stepped outside.

"It kind of hurts and just the minute I stepped outside, it was a little harder to breathe. So I just put a mask on."

The 18-year-old Toronto resident has asthma, and "I don't want my lungs to get damaged at all," she told Reuters Thursday.

It's "a little disheartening" to be wearing a mask again, she said, but "that's what you have to do. ... I don't want to regret not wearing one."

Hume-Beardall added she hopes the spectre of smoky air "is a little bit of a wakeup call to people around the environment."

The concern with this smoky air is particulate matter that is 2.5 microns or less in diameter - small enough to get inside not only the lungs but the bloodstream, said Samantha Green, a family doctor with Unity Health in Toronto.

Studies in people have linked wildfire smoke with higher rates of heart attacks, strokes, and cardiac arrests, increases in emergency room visits for respiratory conditions, and weakened immune defenses. Wildfires have also been linked with eye irritation and skin problems.

When the air quality health index is above 7, "then everyone who is spending time outdoors should be wearing" a mask, Green said, adding that protections are needed for people who are more exposed to air pollutants because they work outdoors or are homeless.

"We know things are worsening and we need to be better prepared on a systems level," she added.

Marietta Haberer, 77, started wearing an N95 left over from her pandemic supply on Wednesday. The campfire smell in the air "is fine if you're camping," she said.

(Reporting by Anna Mehler Paperny; editing by Diane Craft)
PORTLAND, Maine (AP)  Ann Allen loved going to church and the after-school social group led by a dynamic priest back in the 1960s.

The giggling fun with friends always ended with a game of hide and seek. Each week, the Rev. Lawrence Sabatino chose one girl to hide with him. Allen said when it was her turn, she was sexually assaulted, at age 7, in the recesses of St. Peters Catholic Church.

I dont remember how I got out of that cellar and I dont think I ever will. But I remember it like its yesterday. I remember the smells. The sounds. I remember what he said, and what he did," she said.

Allen, 64, is one of more than two dozen people who have sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, Maine, over the past year, seeking delayed justice since lawmakers allowed lawsuits for abuse that happened long ago and can't be pursued in criminal courts either because of time limits or evidence diminishing over time.

More survivors are pursuing cases as states increasingly consider repealing time limits for child sex crime lawsuits. Vermont was the first state to remove the limits in 2019, followed by Maine in 2021 and Maryland this year.

Michigan, Rhode Island and Massachusetts are poised to take action before their legislative sessions end.

"The momentum is irreversible," said Marci Hamilton, CEO of CHILD USA, a think tank aiming to prevent child abuse and neglect.

In April, Maryland lifted time limits on child sexual abuse lawsuits against institutions less than a week after the attorney general detailed decades of abuse of more than 600 children by over 150 priests associated with the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

Other states, meanwhile, have briefly removed the statute of limitations on lawsuits for childhood abuse. More than 10,000 lawsuits were filed when New York set aside time limits for two years.

Across the country, those lawsuits have targeted churches, summer camps, scout groups and other institutions accused of enabling pedophiles or turning a blind eye to wrongdoing.

More states eliminating the limits would help achieve justice and prevention, according to advocates who say survivors tend to keep the trauma to themselves, backed by new research suggesting survivors typically come forward in their 50s.

More and more people come forward as they realize that theyre not alone, said Michael Bigos, one of Allens attorneys, whose law firm has brought 25 lawsuits since last June and is evaluating more than 100 additional potential cases, including about 65 targeting the Portland diocese.

In his law offices, Allen looked at a photo of herself at her first communion at St. Peter's, which serves what was once Portland's Little Italy neighborhood and hosts a popular street party each summer.

The photo was taken after the assault. Her joy and exuberance are gone. When I look at it, I see a pretty damaged child, she said.

Sabatino quickly became part of the fabric of St. Peters when he arrived in 1958 after leaving another church where parents reported to police that he had sexually abused their 6-year-old daughter. The priest was warned by the Diocese of Portland not to engage with children or play games, but was soon doing both.

Parishioners, including Ann Allens family, invited him into their homes. He visited her familys beach house.

Allen thought she was lucky when she was selected to hide with him. But the abuse became a dark secret she carried for decades.

She never considered telling her parents. Allen said she didnt think anyone would believe her.

As a school principal in California, Allen was protective of children, especially those who reported abuse. She would try to help them and say the right things  things she wished had been done for her. Then, she went home to curl up in a ball," she said.

But her secret came bubbling back when she returned to Maine and had to confront her past, she said.

Robert Dupuis tells a similar story.

He was 12 years old in 1961 when he was abused by the Rev. John Curran in Old Town, a riverside city in Maine. Decades later, he sought help from Alcoholics Anonymous when his marriage was in jeopardy. He acknowledged the abuse in group therapy, at around age 55, and the revelation changed his life.

It healed me and it freed me from holding back, the 74-year-old said.

His marriage and friendships have improved, he said. Now, he encourages others who have been abused to come forward.

Most of Maine's newly filed civil lawsuits target the Diocese of Portland, accusing leaders of ignoring accusations against priests like Sabatino and Curran, or simply moving them to new parishes, allowing the abuse to continue.

Diocese officials concluded that allegations against Sabatino and Curran were credible. Both have long since died.

Maine removed its time limits in 2000 to sue over childhood sexual abuse, but not retroactively, leaving survivors without recourse for older cases. Changes in 2021 allowed previously expired civil claims. The Legislature also is considering easing the statute of limitations on criminal charges for sexual assaults of children.

The Portland diocese contends survivors had ample time to sue and its unconstitutional to open the door to new litigation, which could lead to requests for damages of tens of millions of dollars.

A judge rejected the arguments. The diocese has appealed to the state supreme court. An attorney and a spokesperson for the diocese both declined comment.

For Patricia Butkowski, it was 1958 when her family alerted police that she said Sabatino assaulted her at a parish in Lewiston. After the diocese transferred him to Portland, Allen and others became victims.

Im now at 70 feeling emotions and allowing myself to feel emotions that I never knew I had. Anger is at the top of it. Im like a volcano spewing and theres just so many emotions, and anger at the church," she said.

Butkowski, who now lives in Oklahoma City, wants the church to apologize and acknowledge the wrongs done to her and others so she can "hopefully regain some sort of faith before I die, she said.

What was done to me by the priest damaged my soul, she said. I dont have a soul anymore. Its broken.

___

Follow David Sharp on Twitter @David_Sharp_AP.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP)  Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recruiters set their sights on Sacred Heart Catholic Church in the Texas border city of El Paso in search of asylum-seekers they could take from its bustling migrant shelter to California's capital on taxpayer-funded private jets.

Intentionally or not, envoys for Florida's Catholic governor and Republican presidential candidate infused an element of his own religion into his latest move on immigration, which has drawn sharp criticism from El Pasos Catholic bishop.

Without going into the details of the politics of it, it does seem clear that they were being used not out of concern for the migrants but in an effort to make a political point," Bishop Mark Seitz told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Seitz said many migrants arriving in the U.S. don't know the geography, including how far cities and states are from one another, and are just anxious to move on.

If you're seeking to help a person who needs to get to a certain destination where they have a sponsor, where they have a job or something like that, that is a commendable act," Seitz said. "But if they are being moved simply in order to use them to make a political point, that is reprehensible. It is taking person who already has lost everything  everything. They have nothing, not even a nation they can really call their own because they have had to flee that nation. And then using them for your own purposes: That is not morally acceptable.

DeSantis has acknowledged that Florida paid to transport 36 mostly Venezuelan migrants from Republican-led Texas to Sacramento on charter flights last Friday and on Monday. The first group was dropped off in front of the Roman Catholic Diocese in Sacramento, also the headquarters of Catholic Charities, apparently without warning. Local advocates and officials met the second group at the airport after learning of their arrival.

The governor says they made the trip voluntarily  a claim that some migrant advocates challenge. He also says they signed waivers to that effect and that California effectively invited them with its welcoming policies.

I think the border should be closed. I dont think we should have any of this. But if theres a policy to have an open border, then I think the sanctuary jurisdictions should be the ones that have to bear that, DeSantis said Wednesday at an event for law enforcement officials in Sierra Vista, Arizona.

Asked about the bishop's criticism, DeSantis spokesman Jeremy Redfern said the governor's previous comments stand on their own.

In May, DeSantis signed a law allocating up to $12 million for migrant flights, like two that Florida funded last year from San Antonio to the pricey Massachusetts island of Marthas Vineyard.

References to the Marthas Vineyard flights have become a staple in DeSantis presidential stump speech and often draw hearty applause from Republican primary voters. The Sacramento flights are part of a broader effort by certain Republican-led states to send migrants to Democratic-leaning parts of the country, including New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

President Joe Biden is also Catholic and, like DeSantis, he has clashed with bishops, though in Biden's case over LGBTQ+ rights and abortion. In addition to immigration, DeSantis has split with bishops over the death penalty, which the governor supports and the church doesn't.

Seitz, who chairs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops migration committee, has been bishop for a decade in heavily Catholic El Paso, which sits in one of the busiest corridors for illegal border crossings. Sacred Heart is downtown, a few blocks from Mexico.

Two men and a woman working for the Florida government recruited migrants outside Sacred Heart with promises of jobs and housing in California, said Imelda Maynard, director of legal services at Diocesan Migrant & Refugee Services Inc., which is part of the Diocese of El Paso.

A Venezuelan man said he was lured to a distant motel with his wife and four children for three days, Maynard said. He became suspicious and pulled out after being told he would have to fly separately and the rest of his family would follow on a different flight because there wasn't enough room for them to go together.

The man didn't know where the motel was, but Maynard suspects it was in Deming, New Mexico, which was where the charter flights departed for Sacramento. The family hitchhiked back to Sacred Heart.

A passenger who was on the first flight called the Venezuelan migrant to say he had been duped, Maynard said.

"Dont come. Its a scam. There are no jobs here, there is no room and board. They just dumped us in the middle of nowhere at this church and no one knows whats going on, the Venezuelan migrant recounted being told.

Sacred Heart is a well-known shelter, particularly among Venezuelans. It is indicative of the many Catholic charities along the southern border from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, that provide food, showers, housing and transportation to migrants seeking a rest stop before leaving for their final destinations in the United States.

It is unclear if Sacred Heart was the only place that DeSantis' recruiters targeted. Maynard said she didn't know of any others.

Maynard said standing outside a shelter promising jobs that don't exist was gross. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, DeSantis' perennial Democratic rival, has suggested it may be criminal.

Its really dehumanizing to have someone play with you that way because no one took into account these are human beings and they were toyed with, Maynard said.

DeSantis office has emphasized that its contractor safely delivered migrants to Catholic Charities of Sacramento Inc., which is located at the California diocese. The Sacramento charity has not responded to the APs requests for comment.

Seitz applauded Catholic Charities response.

Im inspired by the way I see people received here on the border, and, Im hearing reports, by the way they were received in Sacramento by Catholic Charities, he said. Catholic Charities was not informed, but they stepped up and received them, and thats the good news in all of this.

___

Spagat reported from San Diego.

___

Find more AP coverage of the immigration issue: https://apnews.com/hub/immigration
LONDON (AP)  He was the mayor who reveled in the glory of hosting the 2012 London Olympics, and the man who led the Conservatives to a whopping election victory on the back of his mission to get Brexit done.

But Boris Johnsons time as prime minister was marred by his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and a steady stream of ethics allegations. In 2022 he was forced from power, and on Friday he quit as a lawmaker, jumping before he could be sanctioned over lockdown-breaching parties during the pandemic.

Here is a timeline of events relating to Johnsons political career:

2001-2008: Serves as a member of Parliament in the House of Commons representing the constituency of Henley.

2008-2016: Serves as London mayor, overseeing 2012 London Olympics.

2016: Co-leader of the campaign to take Britain out of the European Union, in opposition to then-Prime Minister David Cameron, a fellow Conservative. Cameron resigns after voters approve Brexit in a national referendum on June 23, 2016.

2016-2018: Serves as Foreign Secretary under Camerons successor, Prime Minister Theresa May. Johnson resigns in July 2018 in opposition to Mays strategy for a soft Brexit that would maintain close ties with the EU.

June 7, 2019: Theresa May resigns as Conservative Party leader over her failure to persuade Parliament to back the Brexit agreement she negotiated with the EU. The party is split between those who back May and hard-liners, led by Johnson, who are willing to risk a no-deal Brexit in order to wring concessions from the EU.

July 23, 2019: Johnson is elected Conservative Party leader in a vote by party members. He takes office as prime minister the next day, inheriting a minority government that relies on votes from Northern Irelands Democratic Unionist Party to pass legislation. Johnson insists Britain will leave the EU on Oct. 31, with or without a deal.

Aug. 28, 2019: Johnson announces he will shut down Parliament until mid-October, giving opponents less time to thwart a no-deal Brexit.

Sept. 3, 2019: Twenty-one rebel Conservative Party lawmakers support legislation requiring the government to seek an extension of Brexit negotiations if it cant negotiate an agreement with the EU. The measure passes and the rebels are expelled from the party.

Sept. 5, 2019: Johnson asserts he would rather be dead in a ditch than ask the EU for another extension.

Sept. 24, 2019: U.K. Supreme Court rules governments suspension of Parliament was unlawful.

Oct. 19, 2019: Johnson asks the EU to delay Brexit again. New deadline set for Jan. 31.

Nov. 6, 2019: Parliament is dissolved and early elections are set for mid-December as Johnson seeks a mandate for his Brexit strategy.

Dec. 12, 2019: Johnson wins an 80-seat majority in the general election, giving him the backing to push through Brexit legislation. The victory makes Johnson the most electorally successful Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher.

Jan. 23, 2020: The Brexit deal becomes law after approval by U.K. Parliament. European Parliament approves the deal six days later.

March 23, 2020: Johnson places U.K. in first lockdown due to COVID-19.

April 5, 2020: Johnson hospitalized and later moved to intensive care with COVID-19. He is released from the hospital on April 12, thanking the nurses who sat with him through the night to make sure he kept breathing.

Nov. 3-4, 2021: Johnsons government orders Conservative lawmakers to support a change in ethics rules to delay the suspension of Owen Paterson, a Johnson supporter who had been censured for breaching lobbying rules. The measure passes. A day later, facing an angry backlash from lawmakers of all parties, Johnson reverses course and allows lawmakers to vote on Patersons suspension. Paterson resigns.

Nov. 30, 2021: Allegations surface that government officials attended parties in government offices during November and December 2020 in violation of COVID-19 lockdown rules. The scandal grows to reports of more than a dozen parties. Johnson denies the allegations, but opposition leaders criticize the government for breaking the law as people across the country made sacrifices to combat the pandemic.

Dec. 8, 2021: Johnson authorizes investigation into the scandal, dubbed Partygate. Pressure builds for a leadership challenge, but fizzles.

April 9: Johnson meets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, pledging a new package of military and economic support. Johnson's staunch support for Ukraine after Russia's invasion helps bolster Johnson and his supporters, who argue the government should not focus on domestic political squabbles.

April 12: Johnson is fined 50 pounds ($63) for attending one of the lockdown parties. Johnson apologizes but insists he didnt know he was breaking the rules.

May 22,: Findings of the Partygate investigation are published, detailing 16 gatherings at Johnsons home and office and other government offices between May 2020 and April 2021, at a time when millions of people were unable to see friends and family.

June 6: Johnson narrowly wins a vote of no confidence, with Conservative lawmakers voting 211148 to back him. The scale of the revolt  some 41% voted against him  shakes his grip on power.

June 15: Christopher Geidt quits as ethics adviser to Johnson, accusing the Conservative government of planning to flout conduct rules.

June 24: Johnsons Conservatives lose two former strongholds to opposition parties in special elections.

June 29: Parliaments cross-party Privileges Committee issues a call for evidence for a probe into whether Johnson misled Parliament over lockdown parties.

June 30: Lawmaker Chris Pincher resigns as Conservative deputy chief whip amid allegations he assaulted two guests at a private members club in London. Previous sexual misconduct allegations emerge about Pincher. Questions swirl about whether Johnson knew about the claims when Pincher was given the job.

July 5: Johnson apologizes for his handling of the Pincher scandal and says he had forgotten about being told of the allegations. Two of Johnsons most senior Cabinet ministers, Treasury chief Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Sajid Javid, quit the government.

July 6: Some three dozen junior ministers resign from the government, attacking Johnsons leadership.

July 7: Johnson resigns as Conservative Party leader, but plans to remain as prime minister while the leadership contest is held.

Sept 6: Johnson leaves office, replaced by Liz Truss.

Oct. 25: Sunak replaces Truss as prime minister after her tax-cutting economic plans caused turmoil on financial markets.

November 2022: Johnson begins stepping up speaking engagements that take him around the world from India to Nigeria to Singapore to the United States. During the current parliamentary term, he reports earning 2.7 million pounds ($3.4 million) from speaking engagements.

March 3, 2023: A U.K. parliamentary committee says evidence suggests Johnson repeatedly misled Parliament about his knowledge of lockdown-breaking parties at his Downing Street office.

March 22: Johnson insists hand on heart that he never lied to lawmakers about rule-breaking government parties, mounting a robust defense at a hearing that could damage or even end his tumultuous political career.

June 9, 2023: Johnson resigns his parliamentary seat after receiving report on lockdown plans.
By Edward McAllister

DAKAR (Reuters) - A student who died in Senegal's capital Dakar on Friday during clashes between security forces and protesters was killed by a live round in his back, an autopsy report seen by Reuters showed.

Elhaji Cisse, 26, was shot yards from his home in a suburb of Dakar on Friday evening as he returned from praying at a nearby mosque, his brother and friends told Reuters.

Hundreds attended his funeral in Dakar's Grand Yoff neighbourhood, and later at a cemetery by the ocean, where Cisse was laid to rest covered in a shroud.

The autopsy results, which have not been previously reported, said Cisse was shot in the back and that the bullet punctured his right lung before exiting around his upper arm.

It was not clear who killed Cisse. His brother and friends said security forces shot at protesters and that Cisse was caught in the middle. Reuters was unable to verify this.

At least 16 people have died and hundreds were injured in the worst riots in the West African country in decades, sparked by a jail sentencing given to popular opposition figure Ousmane Sonko that could rule him out of presidential elections in February.

Protesters ransacked petrol stations, banks, businesses and a central university campus. The police responded with tear gas and what rights groups have described as a heavy handed response. More than 500 people have been arrested.

"The recent deaths and injuries of protesters set a worrying tone for the 2024 presidential elections and should be thoroughly investigated," Carine Kaneza Nantulya, deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement on Monday.

President Macky Sall on Wednesday called for an investigation into the violence. Much of the anger is directed towards him for failing to rule out running for a third term in office. Under Senegalese law, presidents are limited to two terms.

(Reporting by Edward McAllister; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
By Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and five of its allies on Friday condemned the use of trade practices that amount to economic coercion in a joint declaration that did not single out other countries but appeared to be aimed at China.

Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan, and New Zealand jointly released the statement with the United States, emphasizing that "trade-related economic coercion and non-market-oriented policies and practices" threatened the multi-lateral trading system and "harms relations between countries."

The statement comes after the Group of Seven leaders last month agreed to a new initiative to counter economic coercion and pledged action to ensure that any actors attempting to weaponize economic dependence would fail and face consequences.

The United States, Britain, Japan and Canada are also members of the G7.

The countries expressed concern about "pervasive subsidization," anti-competitive practices by state-owned enterprises, forced technology transfer, and government interference with corporate decision-making.

Washington has regularly raised such concerns about trade practices by Beijing, and an official from the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, who spoke to reporters about the joint declaration, cited China for imposing a ban on imports from Lithuania after Lithuania allowed Taiwan to open a de facto embassy.

China, which regards the democratically-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory, suspended imports of beef, dairy and beer from Lithuania last year.

In May, Beijing protested the G7's declarations, including on economic coercion, saying the U.S. was "pushing hard to weave an anti-China net in the Western world."

In their joint statement on Friday, the U.S. and its five allies also raised concerns about forced labor.

"We are also seriously concerned about the use of forced labour, including state-sponsored forced labour, in global supply chains. All forms of forced labour are gross abuses of human rights, as well as economic issues, and it is a moral imperative to end these practices," they said.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Additional reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Sonali Paul)
ORANGE CITY, Fla. - A 2-year-old girl died in Florida on Thursday after reportedly being left in a hot car for hours, reports FOX 35 Orlando.

According to the Volusia Sheriff's Office, a family left their home in Orange City to grab a bite for lunch in DeLand. They returned to their home shortly before 3 p.m. with the young girl and her two older brothers, ages 15 and 8.

Around 5 p.m., the girl's parents found her unresponsive and still in the car. Authorities said they drove her to a local hospital, where she died shortly before 6 p.m.

The circumstances of the childs death are under investigation.

The FOX 35 Storm Team said the high-temperature Thursday in the Orlando area was 91 degrees. The low was 84.

MINUTES MATTER: WHAT YOU SHOULD DO IF YOU SEE A CHILD LOCKED IN A HOT CAR

This is the second child to have died after being left in a hot car in Central Florida in the past two weeks.

In Brevard County, a mother was arrested and charged with manslaughter after she reportedly left her 11-month-old infant in the back seat of a vehicle while she attended a church service in Palm Coast.

The baby had been left in the hot car for nearly three hours. Officials, however, said the charges may not hold up in court.

"I dont know what the state is going to do," board-certified criminal trial expert, Geoff Golub, previously told FOX 35 News. "I think sometimes you just have tragic things that happen. Obviously, she is going to be scarred for the rest of her life."



These tragedies happen more often than people may think. Florida is second in the nation for hot car deaths and doctors say, parents arent always to blame.

It doesn't have to be a 90-degree or even 80-degree day for it to be dangerous for a child left alone in a hot car. When it's 80 outside, inside a vehicle can be between 40 and 50 degrees hotter. The initial heat rise happens in the first 20 minutes.

This year six children have died from heat stroke after being left in hot cars, according to NoHeatStroke.org.
FARGO, N.D. (AP)  A Georgia man has been sentenced to 18 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to accusations that he conspired to smuggle people from Mexico across the U.S.-Canada border into and through North Dakota.

Rodolfo Arzola-Carrillo, 39, a Mexican national living in Georgia, pleaded guilty in federal court in Fargo, North Dakota, on Wednesday, the Bismarck Tribune reported.

In November, Arzola-Carrillo "partially carried out the smuggling of seven people who did not have legal permission to cross the border from Canada into the U.S., according to the U.S. Attorneys Office in North Dakota. The group included children ages 4 and 9.

Georgia was the intended final destination, but the plan fell apart due to cold and snow, officials said. The group sought help from North Dakota's Pembina County Sheriffs Office, which supplied aid and then alerted U.S. Border Patrol.

Co-defendant Ernesto Falcon Jr., also from Georgia, is scheduled for a change-of-plea and sentence hearing in August.

As this case and others have shown, attempting to smuggle human beings across the northern border is not just illegal and exploitative, it is also a threat to human life, Mac Schneider, U.S. attorney for North Dakota, said in a statement.

Last month, a Florida man pleaded not guilty to federal charges of human smuggling after four migrants were found dead in January 2022 after a freezing blizzard near the Canadian border. Surviving immigrants identified them as Indian nationals. Federal authorities have said that case may be linked to a larger smuggling operation along the Canadian border.
The country's increasing minimum wage is pressuring many small business owners. Gettyimagesbank



By Ko Dong-hwan



A majority of small business owners in Korea are struggling to pay minimum wages to their employees and many are considering sacking workers if the current base pay rises further, according to a recent survey.



The survey by the Korea Federation of Micro Enterprise (KFME) showed that almost two out of three or 65 percent of the respondents wanted the current minimum wage to be lowered. The survey was conducted on 1,000 small business owners in the country last month.



The survey showed that 33 percent of the respondents wanted the present minimum wage of 9,620 won ($7.40) per hour to remain unchanged. Only two percent said the figure should be increased.



Almost 100 percent said the current minimum wage is "too burdensome," while over 53 percent said the wage is "excessively high compared to the level of productivity."



In a multiple-answer question that asked how the owners hire workers as the minimum wage continues to rise, 58 percent said they will hire fewer new employees. Over 44 percent said they will reduce the present number of employees, and 42 percent said they will reduce working hours for existing workers. Over 33 percent said they already sacked some of their employees due to an increasing financial burden caused by the minimum wage hike.



Most of the respondents also said the hourly minimum wage system, which is universally applied in the country, should be "adjustable" depending on the sector. As to how it should be adjusted, over 57 percent said the sectors that comprise the highest number of small businesses should benefit from the adjustment first.



Also, 32 percent said the adjustment should be implemented first to the sectors with the highest risks for business owners violating the minimum wage  namely, agricultural, fishery, forestry, restaurants and lodging businesses.



The survey also found that the average monthly wage business owners had to pay each employee from January to April this year was 2.91 million won, up 10.4 percent from 2021. The average monthly net income for the owners, on the other hand, was 2.81 million won.



The survey "clearly proved how the minimum wage is sucking the life out of the country's small business owners," Oh Sae-hui, president of KFME, said. She said the minimum wage should not be increased in 2024 and it should also be implemented with higher priority to certain industrial sectors instead of being implemented universally.


Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday highlighted new immigration laws he says will increase security on the Texas-Mexico border, as a proposal to create a 10-year minimum penalty for human smuggling is stalled in the Legislature.

Im signing bills today to ensure that Texas will be able to do even more to stop illegal immigrants from crossing into our state, he said.

But Abbott said theres more to be done when he included border security among his call for a special legislative session that began on May 29, just hours after the regular session ended.

In addition to property tax relief, he said lawmakers should pass legislation solely for the purpose of increasing or enhancing the penalties for certain criminal conduct involving the smuggling of persons or the operation of a stash house. The call came after lawmakers failed to pass a sweeping border security bill, House Bill 7.

The House quickly came in on May 30, passed a new immigration bill and property tax bill, and adjourned the same day. Senators have remained in Austin as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan clash over the best way to deliver school property tax cuts.

The Senate on Wednesday continued to pass several bills, despite the lack of House lawmakers in Austin to advance proposals to Abbotts desk.

House Bill 2 would create a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years for human smuggling and the operation of a stash house. The Senate passed an amended version of the bill Wednesday that is subject to House approval because of the changes.

The Senate also passed immigration bills outside the scope of Abbotts special session agenda. Senate Bill 2 by Brian Birdwell, a Granbury Republican, establishes a new state crime for illegally entering Texas. Senate Bill 8 by Birdwell would create a Texas Border Force.

The proposals must also be passed by the House before going to Abbott, meaning theyll not go any further during this special session, unless the House were to return. Patrick suggested in a Tuesday news conference that the House could still come back to continue work before the session expires.

Abbott ceremonially signed six immigration bills Thursday. Among the new laws is a bill to give border patrol agents arrest, search and seizure authority. Another defines drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations under state law. Another bill would compensate landowners for property damage from border-crimes related to human smuggling or trafficking, evading arrest or drug-related offenses.

Abbott also announced that the state would install a barrier made of buoys along parts of the Rio Grande River on the Texas-Mexico border, the first of which will be 1,000 feet long in Eagle Pass. That stretch costs under a million dollars, said Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw.

When were dealing with gatherings of a hundred or a thousand people, one of the goals is to slow down and deter as many of them as possible, Abbott said.
OCALA, Fla.  A white woman charged with fatally shooting her Black neighbor through a closed door said she bought the handgun used in the killing about a year ago after an altercation between them, an arrest affidavit states.

The woman, Susan Louise Lorincz, also told investigators that she called neighborhood children the N-word out of anger in the past, according to an addendum filed with the court Thursday. The case has drawn national attention and raised questions about race and Floridas stand your ground self-defense law.

Authorities have said Lorincz had a long-standing "neighborhood feud" with the victim, Ajike "AJ" Owens, about Owens' children's playing in a grass field near Lorincz's rented home.

Lorincz said she had been having a problem with the children for about two years due to their lack of respect for her peace and privacy, according to the affidavit. She also alleged that the children had threatened to kill her, it says.

She told investigators, according to the affidavit, that she bought a .380-caliber Remington gun "for protection after an altercation" with Owens; it is not clear when the incident is alleged to have occurred. Lorincz also owns a .22-caliber Ruger, the affidavit says.

Attorneys for the Owens family did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Ajike

The affidavit details only one previous incident between the women, in February 2022, when Lorincz alleged that Owens came to her home and confronted her about an argument between her children and Lorincz, the affidavit says.

The argument centered around Lorincz not liking the juveniles around her apartment, it says.

According to an incident report about the case, Lorincz said Owens ripped a metal no-trespassing sign out of the ground and threw it toward Lorincz, striking her in a leg. Owens said she threw the sign down as she was leaving but did not throw it toward Lorincz, authorities said. No one was arrested.

On Friday, the night of the shooting, Owens' children had been playing in the field.

Lorincz told investigators that she told the children to leave and that she threw a pair of roller skates in the yard and told one of the children to go "fetch them," according to the affidavit. She said she did not throw the skates at anyone and "just threw them in the yard due to the juveniles leaving items in the yard near her residence," it says.

Ben Crump, who is representing the Owens family, said one of the children left an iPad while leaving. He said Lorincz took it  an allegation she denies, according to the affidavit.

Owens went to Lorincz's home, the sheriff's office said. Lorincz said Owens "started banging on her door while yelling, Im going to f------ kill you!'" the affidavit says, noting that other people investigators interviewed said they did not hear Owens threaten to kill Lorincz.

Lorincz said that "Owens banged on the door so hard everything started shaking and she thought the door was going to come off, the affidavit says. "She advised that she panicked and stated to herself, Oh my god shes really going to kill me this time. At that point, Lorincz advised she fired one round from her handgun. She advised she retrieved the firearm from the trashcan in her bedroom where she normally stores the weapon."

Asked whether Lorincz thought Owens was trying to get inside her home, she told investigators, She was trying as hard as she could, the affidavit says.

I asked her if that meant she was trying the door handle, and Lorincz said she was just beating the door. Lorincz advised she yelled back through the door that the victim was trespassing, it says.

Lorincz said she fired the round from the kitchen, according to the affidavit. Owens, 35, a mother of four, was hit in the upper chest and pronounced dead at a hospital, according to the sheriffs office.

Lorincz, 58, was arrested Tuesday on charges of manslaughter with a firearm, culpable negligence and battery and two counts of assault.

She made her first court appearance Thursday by video and entered a written plea of not guilty, according to court documents. During the hearing, Lorincz said she worked up until two weeks ago, does not have any savings and helped take care of her sister. Her attorney could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Several residents said Lorincz had a history of harassing children who played in the field and would use racial slurs against them. She would also call the police on the children, Sharna Mozell, 36, told NBC News.

Lorincz used to come outside, and she used to record them constantly. And shell just flick them off while shes recording the kids, calling them out their names, said Mozell, the mother of four children ages 10 to 19.

She added that Lorincz would bully children and was known in the neighborhood as a Karen, a sarcastic term for a white woman who harasses people of color and has a reputation for racism. Mozell said her youngest daughter told her that Lorincz would record them and then contact authorities for the mere act of playing.

Mama, Karen called the police on us today, Mozell said her daughter would tell her.

In addition to racial slurs, Lorincz admitted to investigators that she called children "other derogatory terms," according to Thursday's addendum.

Phyllis Wills, 33, said that "everybody in this neighborhood has feuded" with Lorincz over their children.

She said Lorincz had a problem with children simply being children.
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP)  Honduran President Xiomara Castro arrived in Shanghai on Friday on her first visit since China established ties with her nation, pulling it away from former diplomatic ally Taiwan.

Castro will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping to jointly plan for the future development of ties, Chinas official Xinhua News Agency said. She will also attend the inauguration of Honduras embassy in Beijing, according to state media.

Honduras established formal relations with China in March, becoming the latest in a string of countries to break diplomatic ties with Taiwan. China sees self-governed Taiwan as a breakaway province, to be retaken by force if necessary, and prohibits its own diplomatic partners from having formal ties with Taipei.

Beijing has intensified its battle to win away Taiwan's diplomatic allies since independence-leaning Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen took office in 2016. Since then, China has managed to lure away nine of Taiwans former partners with a campaign involving billions of dollars of investments.

Beijings latest victory comes as tensions have risen with the United States in recent months, including over Chinas increasing assertiveness toward Taiwan and growing influence in Latin America.

Taiwan is always at the core of U.S.-China tensions, said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore who focuses on Greater China governance. (President) Xi Jinping and his team will  spare no efforts, particularly on Taiwan.

China sees pulling diplomatic allies away from Taiwan as worthwhile regardless of the cost, Wu added. Beijing also sees the efforts as a way to counteract increasingly frequent trips by European and U.S. lawmakers to Taiwan. Such visits, including a visit last August by former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, usually trigger angry responses from Beijing.

Taiwan has only 13 diplomatic partners left: Belize, Paraguay and Guatemala in Latin America, Vatican City, Eswatini in southern Africa, and several nations in the Caribbean and South Pacific.

When Honduras considered the switch to China, its government said it wanted new investment and less debt. The countrys foreign minister, Eduardo Enrique Reina, told local media in March that Honduras had asked Taiwan to renegotiate debt worth $600 million and for Taipei to double its annual aid to Honduras. Taiwan said it had continuously cooperated with Honduras to address the nations needs.

Experts say Honduras is eyeing large investments from China in infrastructure projects including a new hydroelectric dam, part of a larger plan to construct three dams along the Patuca River. China already invested almost $300 million in the first dam, inaugurated in January 2021.

Castros first stop on her six-day visit to China - the financial hub of Shanghai - is another indication the two countries will likely announce fresh economic deals. She is to spend two days in Shanghai, during which she is to visit a Huawei research center and the headquarters of the New Development Bank - a project by the BRICS developing nations - before going to Beijing, according to Phoenix TV.
MOUNT SINABUNG, Indonesia (AP)  A rumbling volcano on Indonesias Sumatra island unleashed an avalanche of searing gas clouds down its slopes during an eruption on Thursday. No casualties were reported.

Mount Sinabung in North Sumatra province was shooting smoke and ash as high as 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) into the air and hot ash clouds were blowing 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) to the southeast, Indonesias Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation Center said.

There were no casualties from the eruption, said Armen Putra, an official at the Sinabung monitoring post. He said villagers were advised to stay 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) from the craters mouth and should be aware of the peril of lava.

An alert has been maintained at the second-highest level while authorities closely monitor the volcano after sensors picked up increasing activity in recent weeks.

The 2,600-meter (8,530-foot) mountain has been rumbling since last year. It sent volcanic materials more than 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) into the sky and deposited ash on nearby villages when it erupted early this month.

About 30,000 people have been forced to leave their homes around Sinabung in the past few years.

Sinabung was dormant for four centuries before erupting in 2010, killing two people. Another eruption in 2014 killed 17 people, while seven died in a 2016 eruption.

The volcano, one of two currently erupting in Indonesia, has sporadically come to life since then.

Sinabung is among more than 120 active volcanoes in Indonesia, which is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the Pacific Ring of Fire, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.
KFAR CHOUBA, Lebanon (AP)  Israeli soldiers fired tear gas to disperse scores of protesters who pelted the troops with stones along the border with Lebanon Friday, leaving some Lebanese demonstrators and troops suffering breathing problems.

The tension on the edge of the Lebanese border village of Kfar Chouba began earlier this week over the Israeli military digging in the area that Lebanon claims.

On Wednesday, a Lebanese villager tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer from digging a trench along the border. Once the villager's legs were covered with sand as the bulldozer moved ahead, U.N. peacekeepers jumped in and convinced the driver to move back. Videos of the elderly man with his legs stuck in the sand dune went viral on social media.

Israel ended an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon when its troops withdrew from the area in May 2000.

Fridays protest took place on the edge of Kfar Chouba hills, which Beirut says is Lebanese land occupied by Israel. Kfar Chouba hills and the nearby Chebaa Farms, are areas captured by Israel during the 1967 Mideast War and claimed by Lebanon.

On Friday, some of the protesters tried to break through a fence in the rugged area overlooked by an Israeli military post. Israeli forces fired tear gas to disperse them while Lebanese troops and U.N. peacekeepers later moved in and pushed the protesters back.

DO NOT CROSS THE BLUE LINE, read a banner carried by a U.N. peacekeeper in Arabic, English and French, referring to the border drawn after Israels withdrawal in 2000. Israeli troops and several vehicles, including a heavily armored Merkava tank, were seen in the area.

Lebanese troops were on alert in the area and reinforcements were brought in.

In a statement, the Israeli military said protesters tried to damage a border barrier and threw stones at Israeli soldiers in the area. The military said forces responded with riot dispersal means, which typically means tear gas or stun grenades. The military said it would not allow any attempt to violate Israeli sovereignty.

Andrea Tenenti, a spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping for known as UNIFIL, said peacekeepers are on the ground working to decrease tension in the area.

We have urged the parties to utilize our coordination mechanisms effectively to prevent misunderstandings, violations, and contribute to the preservation of stability in the area, Tenenti said. He added that UNIFIL leadership is in contact with the parties, seeking a solution.

We call upon both sides to exercise restraint and avoid actions along the blue line that may escalate tensions, Tenenti told The Associated Press.

The protesters later held Friday prayers in the area and then tried to sneak in again, leading to more tear gas fire.

Fridays tension came a day after the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, Maj. Gen. Aroldo Lazaro, chaired a meeting with senior Lebanese and Israeli officers at the U.N. headquarters along the border. The general appealed for restraint along the border and work on reducing tensions.

The Lebanon-Israel border has been relatively calm since Israel and Hezbollah fought a 34-day war in 2006. Despite that, there have been tensions.

In April, Israel launched rare airstrikes on southern Lebanon after militants fired nearly three dozen rockets from Lebanon at Israel, wounding two people and causing some property damage.

___

Associated Press writers Tia Goldenberg in Tel Aviv, Israel and Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed to this report.
ROME/TUNIS (Reuters) -The leaders of Italy, the Netherlands and of the European Commission should announce an EU aid package when they visit Tunisia on Sunday, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Friday.

The visit comes as donor countries push President Kais Saied to agree reforms needed to finalise an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan that would in turn unlock extra funds in bilateral aid. Meloni met Saied earlier this week.

However, Saied has shown no sign he is willing to budge and with time running out to save Tunisia's finances, donors say the government has made no new proposals for an alternative deal with the IMF.

The government is already struggling to finance some key imports, leading to shortages, and credit rating agencies have warned Tunisia may default on sovereign debt. Foreign currency reserves this week fell to 91 days from 123 days a year ago.

European governments fear Tunisia's state finances could collapse, turbocharging a new wave of migration across the Mediterranean.

Meloni will travel on Sunday with her Dutch counterpart Mark Rutte and the EU commission's Ursula von der Leyen. "It seems to me that important steps forward are being taken," Meloni said.

A senior Tunisian official said any financial assistance from Europe would be a welcome gesture of goodwill "and could encourage Tunis to do more on the migration issue".

Tunisia's government negotiated a preliminary agreement with the IMF in October for a $1.9 billion loan to support reforms that included cuts to subsidies and the public sector wage bill, and restructuring of state-owned companies.

Saied has publicly rejected those reforms, which were proposed by his own government, as risking social unrest and called them tantamount to "lighting a match next to high explosives".

He has instead suggested raising taxes on richer Tunisians, but any new agreement based on that principle would have to be negotiated with the IMF, a process that could take months.

The senior official said Saied's stance "was not likely to change much", particularly his opposition to cutting subsidies.

Donors have made clear they are not willing to offer Tunisia long-term budget support without an IMF deal that would reassure them Tunisia could eventually repay its debts. However, they have given Tunisia smaller amounts to help it buy food and fuel.

(Reporting by Giuseppe Fonte and Stefano Bernabei in Rome and Tarek Amara in Tunis; Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by Alvise Armellini and Jonathan Oatis)
A judge overseeing the case against Bryan Kohberger, charged with killing four University of Idaho students last fall, is set to hear arguments Friday over a gag order that largely bars attorneys and other parties in the case from speaking with news reporters.

A coalition of more than 30 media organizations has challenged the order, saying it violates the Constitutions guarantees of free speech and a free press, as has a lawyer for one of the victim's families. But prosecutors and the defendant's lawyers insist it's needed to prevent prejudicial news coverage that could damage Kohberger's right to a fair trial.

It remains appropriate to have an Order reminding lawyers and their agents of the rules of engagement in this country and that we try cases in court, not in the press, one of Kohberger's attorneys, Jay Weston Logsdon, wrote in a memo to the court this week.

Kohberger, 28, is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and burglary in connection with the stabbing deaths in Moscow, Idaho, on Nov. 13, 2022. Second District Judge John C. Judge entered not guilty pleas on his behalf last month. Prosecutors have not said if they will seek the death penalty.

The bodies of Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were found at a rental home across the street from the University of Idaho campus. The slayings shocked the rural Idaho community and neighboring Pullman, Washington, where Kohberger was a graduate student studying criminology at Washington State University.

The case has garnered widespread publicity, and in January Latah County Magistrate Judge Megan Marshall issued a nondissemination order barring attorneys, law enforcement agencies and others associated with the case from talking with the press or issuing statements unless they are quoting directly from a court document.

The Idaho Supreme Court in April declined to vacate the gag order, saying the news organizations, including The Associated Press, should have first asked the lower court to lift the order. The justices did not weigh in on whether the gag order violates First Amendment rights.

The news organizations subsequently did ask the lower court to revoke the order, and Judge scheduled arguments for Friday. The media coalition says that while it respects the defendant's right to a fair trial under the Sixth Amendment, the court should not have issued a gag order without evidence that right would be infringed by their ability to speak with attorneys involved in the case.

Intervenors agree that there has been, and will continue to be, great publicity surrounding this case, the coalition's attorneys wrote. But publicity alone is not prejudicial. ... The States and Mr. Kohbergers failure to present any evidence of prejudicial news coverage, and the Courts failure to consider alternative measures, means the competing constitutional rights here were improperly balanced and the Gag Order should be vacated."

Shanon Gray, an attorney for the Goncalves family, has also asked the judge to lift the gag order, saying he should be allowed to speak on the family's behalf.

Gag orders that prohibit journalists from writing about certain cases are considered to be severely problematic under the First Amendment. But the U.S. Supreme Court and other appeals courts have upheld some that prohibit attorneys, police or others involved in a case  those with privileged information about it  from speaking with reporters to begin with, as a way to avoid influencing potential jurors or otherwise jeopardizing a defendant's right to a fair trial.
LONDON (AP)  A British judge has rejected the latest attempt by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to fight extradition to the United States to face spying charges.

High Court justice Jonathan Swift said a new appeal would simply re-run arguments that Assanges lawyers had already made and lost.

Assange has battled in British courts for years to avoid being sent to the U.S., where he faces 17 charges of espionage and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks publication of classified diplomatic and military documents more than a decade ago.

In 2021, a British district judge ruled that Assange should not be extradited because he was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions. U.S. authorities later provided assurances that the Australia-born Assange wouldnt face the severe treatment that his lawyers said would put his physical and mental health at risk.

Those assurances led Britains High Court and Supreme Court to overturn the lower courts ruling, and the British government authorized extradition in June 2022.

Assange is seeking to halt extradition by obtaining a new court hearing on parts of his case that were dismissed by the first judge.

But in a ruling made public on Friday, Swift said all eight parts of Assanges potential appeal were not arguable and should not be heard.

The proposed appeal comes to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made to and rejected by the district judge, he said.

Assanges wife, Stella Assange, said the WikiLeaks founder would make a new appeal attempt at a High Court hearing on Tuesday. He has almost exhausted his avenues of appeal in the U.K. but could still try to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

We remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States, where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the US government, Stella Assange said on Twitter.

Assanges supporters and lawyers maintain he was acting as a journalist and is entitled to First Amendment protections of freedom of speech. They argue that the case is politically motivated, that he would face inhumane treatment and be unable to get a fair trial in the U.S.

Assange, 51, remains in Londons high-security Belmarsh Prison, where he has been since he was arrested in 2019 for skipping bail during a separate legal battle. Before that, he spent seven years inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.

Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed, but British judges have kept Assange in prison pending the outcome of the U.S. extradition case.
LONDON (Reuters) - WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange has lost his latest attempt to fight extradition from Britain to the United States where he is wanted on criminal charges, though he will renew his appeal next week.

Assange, 51, is wanted by U.S. authorities on 18 charges relating to WikiLeaks' release of vast troves of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables.

Britain has given the go-ahead for his extradition and a judge at London's High Court ruled this week that Assange had no legal grounds to challenge the decision, according to a court order published on Friday.

However, his wife Stella Assange said there will be a hearing next week at which Assange will again appeal against the decision to extradite him.

"We remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the U.S. government," she said on Twitter.

In January 2021, a British judge ruled Australian-born Assange should not be extradited, saying his mental health meant he would be at risk of suicide if convicted and held in a maximum security prison.

But that decision was overturned after an appeal by U.S. authorities who gave a package of assurances, including a pledge he could be transferred to Australia to serve any sentence.

The extradition was signed off by the then-British interior minister last June.

WikiLeaks first came to prominence in 2010 when it released hundreds of thousands of secret classified files and diplomatic cables in what was the largest security breach of its kind in U.S. military history.

(Reporting by Sam Tobin; editing by William James)
Speakers at the 12th chairs' meeting of the KCCI and the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in the South's southeastern port city of Busan, are seen in this June 9 photo provided by KCCI. Yonhap



Business chambers of Korea and Japan agreed Friday to work together to realize Seoul's bid to host the 2030 World Expo and a successful opening of the same event in Osaka in 2025.



The agreement was reached between the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) and the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry (JCCI) in a joint statement adopted during their chairs' meeting in Busan, South Korea's southeastern port city bidding for the expo, the KCCI said.



"The Busan Expo (bid) can be described as part of an effort to address global challenges, and we would like to connect it with the upcoming Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, as one solution platform," KCCI Chair Chey Tae-won said in the opening remarks.



Friday's meeting marked the first such gathering between the two business chambers in six years. It had been suspended since 2018 amid deteriorating bilateral relations over a dispute stemming from Japan's 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.



Bilateral ties have warmed dramatically after South Korea proposed in March compensating the Korean victims of Japan's wartime forced labor without contributions from accused Japanese companies.



JCCI Chairperson Ken Kobayashi called the economic relationship between Seoul and Tokyo "inseparable," saying he feels glad relations are on the right track for improvement.



"I do hope that the 2025 Osaka Kansai Expo and the 2030 Busan Expo bid will offer us a chance to revive various exchanges, from the regional exchanges between sister cities, tourism to culture and education, and that mutual understanding will be deepened," Kobayashi said.





Speakers at the 12th chairs' meeting of the KCCI and the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in the South's southeastern port city of Busan, are seen in this June 9 photo provided by KCCI. Yonhap



In the joint statement, the two chambers agreed that the KCCI will actively participate in the Osaka-Kansai Expo in 2025, and the JCCI will actively cooperate to attract the Busan World Expo in 2030.



Korea is competing with Italy, Ukraine and Saudi Arabia to host the World Expo in 2030, with the winner to be announced in November.



The KCCI and JCCI agreed to promote cooperation in economic security, including rebuilding the supply chains, achieving carbon neutrality, and cooperating on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, among others.



They agreed to bolster private exchanges in tourism, culture and education in line with the post-COVID-19 recovery and border reopening.



Seoul's decision on the compensation led to the first summit between the two countries' leaders in more than a decade and a mutual promise to resume exchanges in diplomacy, business and other areas.



Seizing on the diplomatic shift, business circles are stepping up to reinvigorate various exchanges and partnerships at the industry level.



Some 30 representatives of the two chambers attended Friday's meeting, including the heads of the regional business chambers of the two countries.



The KCCI and JCCI agreed to host the next chairs' meeting in Osaka in 2024. (Yonhap)




ASTANA (Reuters) - Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev will not attend the annual economic forum in Russia's St Petersburg next week, the government said on Friday, after refusing to toe the Kremlin's line over the Russian invasion of Ukraine at last year's event.

The Kazakh government said only two officials will represent the Central Asian nation at this year's forum.

Until its invasion of Ukraine, Russia regularly hosted world leaders and business titans at the forum, but Western officials and business figures now shun it, and last year Tokayev stole the limelight by rejecting the Kremlin claims on Ukraine.

Sharing the stage with Russian President Putin - who will address the forum this year as well - Tokayev said then that Kazakhstan would not recognise the independence of pro-Russian statelets in eastern Ukraine or other ex-Soviet republics.

His comments raised eyebrows because Kazakhstan, which shares the world's longest continuous land border with Russia, has for decades been a member of Moscow-led security and trade blocs, and calls Russia its strategic partner.

Asked who would attend the conference this year, a Kazakh government spokeswoman said only Deputy Prime Minister Roman Sklyar and Deputy Economy Minister Timur Zhaksylykov would go.

Tokayev's office declined to comment on the reasons why he was not attending.

Russia's RIA news agency reported last month that Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, invited by Putin, said would not be able to attend the forum. Russian media have not announced plans by any other world leaders to attend.

(Reporting by Tamara Vaal; writing by Olzhas Auyezov; editing by Mark Heinrich)
An Eastern Kentucky coal company that pleaded guilty in connection with cheating on tests designed to protect miners from deadly black lung disease was sentenced to pay a $200,000 fine.

U.S. District Judge Robert E. Wier sentenced Black Diamond Coal LLC in federal court in Pikeville Thursday.

The judge sentenced Walter Perkins, who was in charge of the testing at Black Diamond, to six months in jail and six months on home detention for his role in the cheating.

Black Diamond operated an underground mine in Floyd County from August 2018 to April 2021, according to a court document.

When employees of the Mine Safety and Health Administration arrived at the mine on Oct. 8, 2020, they found a dust monitor sitting on a table in the first-aid trailer, when a machine operator was supposed to be wearing it underground, according to the court record.

The monitors are used to measure the concentration of respirable dust in coal mines, meaning dust that can be inhaled into the lungs. Machines that dig coal churn out dust from coal and rocks.

Coal companies are required to use ventilation and other measures to hold down dust in mines, and can be fined over unsafe levels.

Leaving the dust monitor in an office meant it would record clean air, not the level of dust inside the mine.

Coal dust causes black lung, an incurable disease that slowly chokes off a miners lung function, often leading to premature death.

Perkins told inspectors he had given the monitor to the operator of a continuous mining machine to wear, but that the operator returned it because it hadnt worked properly, according to Perkins plea agreement.

However, MSHA was able to determine the monitor had not malfunctioned and hadnt been underground because sensors in it hadnt recorded any movement and the temperatures the unit recorded were warmer than in the mine.

The continuous mining machine operator told authorities Perkins had not given him the dust monitor during the time he was supposed to wear it.

The purpose of these safety regulations is to prevent a progressive and irreversible disease, said U.S. Attorney Carlton S. Shier IV. Shier said that companies that falsify the dust sampling arent just violating the law, they are dramatically reducing the safety of their employees. That is simply unacceptable, and compelled us to prosecute this case.

A display case at NIOSH shows a normal lung and a diseased black lung, caused by inhaling coal dust and other harmful particles while coal mining.

Black Diamond pleaded guilty to a charge of willfully violating a mandatory health and safety standard and a charge of making false statements.

Perkins, 45, of Harlan County, pleaded guilty to a charge that he authorized, ordered or carried out a violation of a health and safety standard and to a charge of making false statements.

Prosecutors said his actions cut out the heart of that system designed to protect his fellow coal miners.

In addition to the fine, Black Diamond is to pay $400 to any miner who worked at the mine during the violation but isnt employed in the industry anymore  meaning they dont get free screening for black lung  so they can get screened.

That payment to former miners is the first of its kind, according to a news release from Shier.

Perkins attorney, Michael B. Fox, argued in memorandum that a sentence of probation would be appropriate for him.

A supervisor told Perkins to lie to MSHA about the dust data, and his need to keep his job was a significant factor in his crime, the memo said.

Walter was dependent upon his employer to maintain his livelihood and believed refusing to follow his employers directive to provide false information would result in his dismissal as an employee, Fox wrote.

The attorney for Black Diamond, Brandon W. Marshall, said in a memo that the company closed not long after the inspection that led to the criminal charges.

In a situation in which some mine operators might have raised insolvency as a shield against a significant fine, Black Diamond instead wanted to make amends and worked out a cooperative, meaningful, punitive deal with the government, Marshall wrote.

After dropping for decades, the prevalence of black lung rose beginning around 2000, particularly in Central Appalachia, which includes Eastern Kentucky.

One study published in 2018 said that 20.6% of miners in Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia had black lung, four times the rate among miners elsewhere in the country.

Researchers have pointed to several possible reasons, including increased dust from mining in thinner coal seams, but cheating on dust sampling was also identified as a factor.

A 2020 paper quoted miners and others as saying negligent dust practices and fraudulent dust sampling have become commonplace in many Appalachian mines.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration can only protect miners from the risk of developing black lung disease if it has accurate sampling results, Chris Williamson, an official with the agency, said in a news release. Given the troubling spike in black lung cases in Appalachia, we must hold accountable those who choose not to comply with the law and put miners health and lives at risk.
BEIRUT (AP)  A little white pill has given Syrian President Bashar Assad powerful leverage with his Arab neighbors, who have been willing to bring him out of pariah status in hopes he will stop the flow of highly addictive Captagon amphetamines out of Syria.

Western governments have been frustrated by the red-carpet treatment Arab countries have given Assad, fearing that their reconciliation will undermine the push for an end to Syria's long-running civil war.

But for Arab states, halting the Captagon trade is a high priority. Hundreds of millions of pills have been smuggled over the years into Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries, where the drug is used recreationally and by people with physically demanding jobs to keep them alert.

Saudi Arabia has intercepted large shipments of pills hidden in crates of fake plastic oranges and in hollowed out pomegranates  even pills crushed and molded to look like traditional clay bowls.

Analysts say Assad likely hopes that by making even limited gestures against the drug he can gain reconstruction money, further integration in the region and even pressure for an end to Western sanctions.

The vast majority of the worlds Captagon is produced in Syria, with smaller production in neighboring Lebanon. Western governments estimate the illegal trade in the pills generates billions of dollars.

The United States, Britain and European Union accuse Assad, his family and allies, including Lebanons militant Hezbollah group, of facilitating and profiting from the trade. That has given Assad's rule a massive financial lifeline at a time when the Syrian economy is crumbling, they say. The Syrian government and Hezbollah deny the accusations.

Syrias neighbors have been the biggest and most lucrative market for the drug. As the industry flourished, experts say Damascus in recent years saw Captagon as more than just a cash cow.

The Assad regime realized that this is something they can weaponize for political gain ... and thats when production started being on a large scale, said Karam Shaar, a senior fellow at Washington-based New Lines Institute.

Stopping the trade has been a top demand of Arab countries in their talks with Syria on ending its political isolation. Syria was readmitted last month from the Arab League, from which it was suspended in 2011 because of Assads brutal crackdown on protesters. On May 20, Assad received a warm welcome at the Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

A possible sign of the behind-the-scenes trade-offs came on May 8, when airstrikes in southern Syria reduced the home of a well-known drug kingpin to rubble. Merhi al-Ramthan, his wife and six children were killed. Another strike destroyed a suspected Captagon factory outside the city of Daraa, near the Jordanian border.

Jordan was likely behind the strike, with Assads consent, say activists and experts. The strike came one day after the Arab League formally re-admitted Syria, a step Jordan helped broker.

Assad gave assurances that he would stop the regime from supporting and protecting smuggling networks, a former brigadier general of Jordans intelligence service, Saud Al-Sharafat, told The Associated Press. For example, he facilitated the disposal of al-Ramthan.

Jordan, he said, sees the Captagon trade as a threat to both security and communal peace.

In public comments, Jordans foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, refused to confirm or deny whether his country was behind the airstrikes but said it was willing to take military action to curb drug smuggling.

Arab states, many of which had backed the rebels trying to oust Assad, say they share the goal of pushing him to make peace. Ahead of the Jeddah summit, Jordan hosted a meeting of top diplomats from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt, and the long agenda included setting a roadmap for peace talks and the return of millions of Syrian refugees.

But it was on Captagon where the gathering made the most progress. Syria pledged to clamp down on smuggling, and a regional security coordination committee was agreed on. Days later, Syrian state media reported that police quashed a Captagon smuggling operation in the city of Aleppo, discovering 1 million pills hiding in a pickup truck.

Jordan has intensified surveillance along the Syrian border in recent years and has raided drug dealers. Jordanian troops killed 27 suspected smugglers in a fierce gun battle in January.

Smuggling routes have made untangling drug networks more difficult. A member of an Iraqi militia told the AP that militias in Iraqs desert Anbar province, which borders Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, have been crucial for Captagon smuggling. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Syrian lawmaker Abboud al-Shawakh denied the government profits from the drug trade and insisted authorities are trying vigorously to crack down on smuggling.

Our country is used as a regional transit route as there are border crossings out of the states control, al-Shawakh told the AP. He alleged that only armed opposition groups are involved in Captagon dealing.

Syrian opposition groups are believed by many observers to have some involvement in drug smuggling. Western governments, however, accuse Assads relatives and allies of a direct role in Captagon production and trade and have imposed sanctions on a string of individuals close to Assad.

While Assad may be willing to move against some parts of the drug trade, he has little incentive to crush it completely without winning something in return from Arab states, al-Sharafat said.

A Saudi official denied reports that Riyadh had offered billions of dollars to Damascus in exchange for a crackdown. But he added that whatever the kingdom might offer Syria would be less costly than the damage that Captagon has caused among Saudi youth. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

The U.S. and other Western governments fear that the Arab states normalization with Syria undermines attempts to push Assad to make concessions to end Syrias conflict. They want Assad to follow a peace roadmap outlined in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254, passed unanimously in 2015, which calls for talks with the opposition, rewriting the constitution and U.N.-monitored elections.

So far, the resolution has gone nowhere. Since it passed, Assad regained control over previously lost territory, confining the opposition to a small corner of the northwest. His grip on power now seems solid, though much of the north and east remains out of his hands, held by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters.

Shaar said Assad might use the Captagon card to try to get the U.N. resolution shelved.

Other concessions, like the lifting of Western-led sanctions, would be harder for him to win. While Gulf Arab states wont be able to directly inject cash into Assad's government with the sanctions in place, Shaar said they could funnel money through U.N.-led projects in government-held Syria to get action from Assad against Captagon.

He will be politicking with Gulf states, Shaar said.

___

Associated Press writers Bassem Mroue in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad, contributed to this report.
MEXICO CITY (AP)  A federal judge in Mexico has charged another Venezuelan migrant for his alleged role in the March blaze at a Mexican detention center that left 40 dead and dozens more wounded.

Mexico prosecutor's office said Thursday in a statement that a man identified as Carlos C was charged with homicide, injuries and damages caused by the fire in a migrant detention facility in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.

Authorities identified him, along with another migrant from Venezuela, as one of the people who allegedly started the fire, which was the deadliest ever at a Mexican immigration facility.

The tragic blaze and its aftermath captured global attention earlier this year as loved ones across the Hemisphere mourned and demanded justice for the victims.

It also sparked controversy and intense criticism about the treatment of migrants by both Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and American authorities, which have constantly pressured the Mexican government to ward off rising arrivals of people from across Latin America and the Caribbean.

On March 27, a small number of the migrants being held in the detention facility started a fire in their cell apparently to protest conditions. Their highly flammable mattresses quickly filled the area with smoke and guards fled without unlocking their cell, security camera videos show.

In response, authorities have already opened criminal proceedings against Francisco Garduno, head of Mexico's National Migration Institute, and another director for unlawful exercise of public service and failure to perform their duties, which resulted in death by asphyxiation of many migrants.

Authorities also detained six other immigration officers, a private security guard and the other migrant, charging them with homicide and for other injuries caused by the fire. Following the fire, NMI closed small- and medium-sized detention facilities similar to the one in Ciudad Juarez, and began a review of conditions in larger facilities.
A general view shows the Rikers Island facility on June 6, 2022. (Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images)

New York Citys Department of Correction, which includes one of the United States deadliest jails, will no longer inform the public of inmate fatalities, a move that criminal justice experts say could set a harmful precedent for other jails across the country.

Currently, the Department of Correction website lists the number of inmate deaths for 2023 as unknown, but at least three inmates have died this year, including Rubu Zhao and Joshua Valles, whose deaths were not reported to the public.

DOC leadership apparently doesnt care about the humanity of the people in its custody enough to even report honestly when they die, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander said in a press release in June, adding that deaths cannot be swept under the rug.

New Yorks notorious jail

Rikers Island, New York Citys largest jail, is a pretrial detention facility that consists of 10 jails, and is notorious for inhumane conditions and the repeated deaths of people incarcerated there as they await trial, Olayemi Olurin, public defender at the Legal Aid Society, told Yahoo News.

An aerial view of Rikers Island Prison complex (foreground) in the Queens borough of New York City, in April 2017. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

Last year, the DOC reported 19 deathsin custody, the city's worst toll since 2016.

Previously, the department would send out a press release after anyone died in custody, including their name, time of death, and the facility. This had been standard procedure for approximately two years, but the Department of Correction now describes announcing inmate deaths to the public as a practice, not a policy.

The halt of information followed the release of a special report from the federal monitor on May 26 revealing that that the jails have had serious and disturbing incidents involving harm to incarcerated persons that have gone unreported.

Rikers has been subject to a federal monitor for the past six years. The report stated that the The Federal Monitor's latest report detailing the recent incidents of violence and deaths within city jails was jarring and illustrated repeated failure by the Department of Correction (DOC) to notify the Monitor of serious incidents in a timely manner, according to a June 1 press release.

Bags intended to resemble body bags are displayed in New York Cityon Nov. 3, 2022, at a protest calling for the closure of Rikers Island.(Leonardo Munoz/VIEWpress)

While the media will no longer be informed of inmate deaths, the department will continue reporting to other agencies. All appropriate internal investigations and required notifications to oversight and outside agencies always take place immediately, DOC said in a statement to Yahoo News.

Should public reporting be required?

Under the Death and Custody Act of 2013, law enforcement agencies, like jails, are required to submit deaths to the Department of Justice, but advocates say thats not enough.

I think there should be a requirement of public reporting, not just to the Department of Justice, because people who are locked in jails and prisons are invisible to us, Nicholas Turner, president of the Vera Institute of Justice, told Yahoo News.

Advocates and some city officials are pushing for Rikers to be placed under receivership. The appointment of a federal receiver to operate Rikers is a moral and operational necessity to confront the jail systems utter disregard for transparency and accountability, Lander said in the June release.

A demonstrator joins a press conference to address the latest death on Rikers Island at City Hall on June 1, 2023 in New York City. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Andrea Armstrong, the Dr. Norman C. Francis Distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola University New Orleans, told Yahoo News that transparency has significantly decreased thanks to the DOC officials' decision.

What we know is that deaths are a critical piece of information for understanding the functioning of facilities, Armstrong said. So just imagine, for example, if public schools said that we are no longer going to release information about our graduation rates.

'Problematic trend'

Experts say this decision could impact jails across the country. It would be a problematic trend, Armstrong said.

In 2020, at least 4,998 inmates died in jails nationwide before they were able to get their day in court, according to a nationwide survey from Reuters.

In this country, we have fought for greater transparency and not less. In a nation that has close to 2 million people incarcerated, and millions of people impacted by the criminal justice system, New York City ought to be a beacon to the world, Stanley Richards, deputy chief executive officer at the Fortune Society, and former vice chair of the New York City Board of Correction, told Yahoo News.

Richards says he was surprised by DOCs decision because it is taking us back to the decades when Rikers was truly out of sight and out of mind.

This decision could very well impact the way other jurisdictions manage their jails and prisons; it could shape what happens on a national level. This decision to have less transparency can also serve as a beacon of hopelessness to countless people, including incarcerated individuals, officers and staff who work in our jails, Richards added.

Turner says the state of fear of families of those incarcerated will only intensify.

People hold up banners with the names of inmates who have died in the last two years while incarcerated at New York's Rikers Island jail, including Joshua Valles, at a press conference near City Hall in New York on June 1. (Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock (13943357c)

Unfortunately for family members of future decedents, the information that they may receive from Rikers might be less comprehensive than they would have received before when those records were public, Armstrong said.

According to the DOC, the next of kin of deceased inmates and their legal counsel will be notified. The Commissioner wants to respect those who have transitioned while also continuing to be as transparent as possible, DOC said in a statement to Yahoo News, adding that every inquiry about an inmate's death will receive a response.

When New York Mayor Eric Adams was asked about the recent decision, he defended the Department of Correction commissioner, Louis Molina, according to Fox 5 New York.

I support him to do the job I hired him to do and whatever methods he needs to do it, within the boundaries of not violating any laws or rights of people, Adams said.
SALEM, Ore. (AP)  Oregon has long been known as a mecca for high-quality marijuana, but that reputation has come with a downside: illegal growers who offer huge amounts of cash to lease or buy land and then leave behind pollution, garbage and a drained water table.

Now, a bill passed by the Oregon Legislature seeks to tackle that by making the landowners themselves responsible for the aftermath. The bill also prohibits the use of rivers or groundwater at the illegal site, as well as criminalizes seizing the identity papers of migrant workers who tend the plants or threatening to report them for deportation.

Under the bill, local governments are authorized to file a claim of lien against property used for illicit marijuana, if the owner doesnt pay for the cleanup.

A leader of the states cannabis and alcohol regulatory agency has said southern Oregon is to marijuana what Bordeaux is to wine. But the state faces challenges on two fronts: The regulated industry has a glut of product that has slashed prices and profit margins, and there has been huge growth in illegal pot farms operating under the guise of growing hemp, which became legal nationally in 2018.

After passing the Senate and House, the House Speaker Dan Rayfield signed the measure Wednesday, over the objections of some Republicans. Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek is expected to sign it next week.

This is just an assault on property rights here in the state of Oregon, GOP Sen. Dennis Linthicum said on the Senate floor.

But Sen. Jeff Golden, of Ashland, said property owners should know something is amiss when they are approached at the beginning of the growing season with requests to lease their property for tens, sometimes hundreds of thousand dollars for a single year.

Witnesses have described backpacks with thousands of dollars in cash being handed over to landowners and getting numerous offers to buy.

We pay CASH and offer a fast close, says one letter received by a landowner last year, one of three offers.

Jackson County Sheriff Nathan Sickler told lawmakers that after police raid illegal pot farms, neither landowners nor the suspects make efforts to remove the cheaply built greenhouses, known as hoop houses, latrines, and other debris, including plastics and chemicals.

Frankly, it's an eyesore for our community, with no means to deal with it, Sickler said.

Some two years ago, the ideal growing conditions began attracting criminal gangs from Mexico, Russia and other countries, police said. Thousands of hoop houses cropped up and police were overwhelmed, nailing only a fraction of the sites. Workers at these farms often live in squalid conditions and use open latrines, and they are sometimes cheated out of their pay.

Due to persistent police raids, which netted over 100 tons of illegal marijuana across the state last year, the grow sites have become smaller and more dispersed. For example, on Thursday, Josephine County Sheriff's deputies and other officers raided a property in Cave Junction and destroyed about 2,000 marijuana plants and 100 pounds of processed marijuana.

Landowners who have been intimidated and suffered environmental damage from illegal grow sites are applauding the bill.

At least most of the landowners knew what they were doing was wrong. I believe this measure will help to stem the tide, said Jack Dwyer, who has a house near the community of Selma. In 2021, Dwyer said a large illegal grow site nearby siphoned all the water from a creek that runs through his property, causing it to run dry.

Christopher Hall, who works to engage the public in water stewardship, said the bill shows that Oregon officials understand the problem of large-scale illicit cannabis operations and are committed to solving it.

The illicit sites not only turn streams into gravel roads but also lead to serious human rights violations and dumping of trash, sewage, chemicals, and other waste into ditches, riparian areas, and streams," he said.

The Senate approved the measure before GOP senators began a walkout on May 3 over Democratic measures on abortion, gender-affirming care and gun safety. The House passed the marijuana bill on a 53-3 vote on May 31. The bill will now go to Kotek to sign into law, taking immediate effect.

"The governor supports cracking down on illegal cannabis operations that have been prevalent in southern Oregon, said Elisabeth Shepard, Kotek's spokesperson.
The Defense Department is denying reports that China has reached a deal with Cuba to build an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island nation.

Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder called a Wall Street Journal report on the apparent deal inaccurate during a briefing Thursday.

Certainly we know that China and Cuba maintain a relationship of sorts, but when it comes to the specific activities outlines in the press reporting, based on the information we have, that is not accurate, Ryder said. We are not aware of China and Cuba developing any type of spy station.

The Wall Street Journal report cited U.S. officials familiar with the matter and claimed that China would pay several billion dollars to build the facility on Cuba, which is roughly 100 miles from the coast of Florida.

CNN also reported Thursday that Cuba has agreed to allow China to build a spying facility.

Cuba denies Journal story about Chinese spy base

If China were to build the facility, it would be the closest foreign adversary base to the U.S. mainland and allow Beijing to intercept emails, phone calls and satellite communications.

While the Chinese spy balloon that drifted across the country in February captivated the nations attention, a facility so close to the U.S. mainland would have significantly more espionage capabilities.

Its unclear if Washington could stop any construction of a Chinese listening post if such a deal were ever reached, as U.S. relations with the communist regime of Cuba are poor.

China has only one overseas military base in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa.

Republicans, including 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley, took to social media after news of The Wall Street Journal report to slam the Biden administration for failing to stop Chinese aggression.

Ryder on Thursday called the reporting inaccurate several times but did not speak further on the details.

He also said the Pentagon was unaware of China attempting to build a similar facility anywhere else in the Central or South American region.

Separately, Ryder said the U.S. is continuing to monitor the relationship between China and Cuba.

Chinas activities both in our hemisphere and around the world, he said, are something that we will continue to watch closely.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon on Thursday dismissed a report in the Wall Street Journal about Chinese plans to set up an electronic eavesdropping facility in Cuba, saying it was not aware of any such effort and characterizing the report as "inaccurate."

"I can tell you based on the information that we have, that that is not accurate, that we are not aware of China and Cuba developing a new type of spy station," said Pentagon spokesperson Brigadier General Patrick Ryder.

"In terms of that particular report, no, it's not accurate."

(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali)
By Faith Hung and Ben Blanchard

TAIPEI (Reuters) -Taiwan electric vehicle battery maker ProLogium is working with the French government to secure subsidies for a 5.2 billion euro ($5.7 billion) battery factory it is going to build in the north of France, Prologium's CEO said on Friday.

Vincent Yang told reporters in Taipei the parties were in the final phase of talks and that he expected a joint announcement by the end of this year.

He and the director of the French Office in Taipei, Jean-Francois Casabonne-Masonnave, declined to comment on the size of the subsidy being discussed.

French President Emmanuel Macron announced ProLogium's investment last month in the country's northern region of Dunkirk.

"The French government's efficiency is quite impressive," Yang said.

With production slated to begin in 2026, the gigafactory will be the fourth in northern France, adding to an emerging specialised cluster devoted to Europe's electric car industry.

Yang said there would be many sources of funding in addition to any French subsidies, including loans, funds raised from an initial public offering, and investment from automobile manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz Group.

"Mercedes has already invested, and other auto makers are also showing interest," he said.

Europe currently largely depends on batteries made in Asia for electric cars, and national leaders are offering various incentives to grow its own industry.

ProLogium expects the project to create 3,000 jobs directly and four times as many indirectly, a boon in a region where both far right and far left political parties score highly among voters after years of industrial decline.

The ProLogium investment also highlighted fierce competition among EU member states for deals.

The timing of the French win over Germany and the Netherlands was fortuitous for Macron, who wants to turn the page on months of strikes and protests over his raising of the retirement age and show sceptical voters his pro-business push is bearing fruit.

(Reporting by Faith Hung and Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Sonali Paul)
Bhc Chairman Park Hyeon-jong, fourth from left, pose with other company officials at the opening ceremony for side-by-side Outback Steakhouse and Super Duper restaurants at Starfield CEOX Mall in Gangnam, Seoul, Friday. Courtesy of bhc





By Kim Jae-heun







Local food franchise firm bhc has opened an Outback Steakhouse and a Super Duper Burger at Starfield COEX Mall in southern Seoul's Gangnam to maximize the synergy between the two restaurants, the company official said Friday.







The two branches at the country's longest-running multi-shopping mall is meaningful, as they are the 94th Outback Steakhouse and the third Super Duper introduced in Korea.







"We have high expectations for the opening of two restaurants with unrivaled identities, which have maximized customer contact by entering COEX Mall. We hope the two franchises having two distinct but similar brand identities will create synergy and realize customer satisfaction by focusing on their capabilities within the group," bhc Chairman Park Hyeon-jong said at the opening ceremony for the two restaurants, Friday.







Outback Steakhouse's COEX Mall branch, which opened based on its store relocation strategy, is a design-specific store.







It is designed based on persona marketing that provides a differentiated atmosphere from other Outback Steakhouses. The size of the premium dining restaurant extends to 667.7 square meters with a total of 166 seats.







Super Duper's branch is 247 square meters in size with a total of 80 seats. The exterior design of the restaurant adopts Super Duper's signature orange color to attract consumers' attention. Modern metal and wood materials are appropriately mixed to create a luxurious and sophisticated interior design.


MECENCANI, Croatia (AP)  After the deadly earthquake came the sinkholes.

A central Croatian region about 40 kilometers (25 miles) southwest of the capital, Zagreb, is pocked with round holes of all sizes, which appeared after December's 6.4-magnitude quake that killed seven people and caused widespread destruction.

Scientists have been flocking to Mecencani and other villages in the sparsely-inhabited region for observation and study.

These are so-called dropout sinkholes, and they appeared because of the specific geological composition of this area, as the soil rests on limestone rocks heavily saturated with groundwater, said geologist Josip Terzic of the Croatian Geological Survey.

While the appearance of sinkholes is not unusual following strong seismic activity, residents have been baffled by their number  about 100 have been spotted over the past two months  and the speed at which they emerged after the main earthquake on Dec. 29, which was followed by a series of aftershocks. Geologists have said that the temblor accelerated the process of sinkhole formation that would normally have taken years, if not decades.

Terzic said scientists are planning various exploration methods to determine the underwater morphology and other characteristics. He spoke to The Associated Press as he stood beside a large sinkhole that he said was up to 15 meters (yards) deep and equally wide.

Some sinkholes have appeared by people's houses or on their farmland, prompting the authorities to advise caution. Nenad Tomasevic, a teacher from Mecencani, said it all seemed too much.

The earthquake itself felt pretty unpleasant to say the least. And after that, these holes started popping up, said Tomasevic, who had to move to a neighbors house after an expanding hole appeared in his backyard.

Experts say that these sinkholes would have formed naturally anyway over time, but the earthquake acted as sort of a catalyst which sped up the whole process, unfortunately, he added.

Some three months after the earthquake, the hardest-hit area is still struggling with its devastation, with many houses still in rubble and the region's main town, Petrinja, semi-abandoned. Occasional earthquakes, including those of magnitude 4 or more, can still be felt, further upsetting residents and adding to the coronavirus pandemic woes.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP)  Iranian authorities have summoned and arrested a cartoonist who has a history of being imprisoned for political posts on her Instagram account, her lawyer said Friday.

Mohammad Moghimi said in a tweet said his client, Atena Farghadani, a painter, cartoonist and former political prisoner, was summoned to the Evin courthouse in Tehran and arrested. He did not elaborate on why she was detained.

In 2016, Farghadani was released after spending 18 months in jail for portraying lawmakers as animals to criticize a draft law restricting contraception and criminalizing voluntary sterilization.

On Wednesday, Farghadani posted one of her cartoons showing people with animal and satanic faces.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday that Iranian authorities must release Farghadani and stop efforts to silence commentators and members of the press.

This cycling of journalists and commentators through prison is a continuation of authorities long-standing revolving door policy and a hallmark of Irans failure to respect the rule of law, said Sherif Mansour, CPJs Middle East and North Africa program coordinator.
By Jeff Mason and Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The White House said on Friday that Russia appeared to be deepening its defense cooperation with Iran and had received hundreds of one-way attack drones that it is using to strike Ukraine.

Citing newly declassified information, the White House said the drones, or Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), were built in Iran, shipped across the Caspian Sea and then used by Russian forces against Ukraine.

"Russia has been using Iranian UAVs in recent weeks to strike Kyiv and terrorize the Ukrainian population, and the Russia-Iran military partnership appears to be deepening," White House spokesman John Kirby said in a statement.

"We are also concerned that Russia is working with Iran to produce Iranian UAVs from inside Russia."

Kirby said the U.S. had information that Russia was receiving materials from Iran required to build a drone manufacturing plant that could be fully operational early next year.

"We are releasing satellite imagery of the planned location of this UAV manufacturing plant in Russias Alabuga Special Economic Zone," he said.

The U.S. has previously sanctioned Iranian executives at a defense manufacturer over drone supplies to Russia. Iran has acknowledged sending drones to Russia but said in they past they were sent before Russia's February invasion. Moscow has denied its forces used Iranian drones in Ukraine.

Support between Iran and Russia was flowing both ways, Kirby said, with Iran seeking billions of dollars worth of military equipment from Russia including helicopters and radars.

"Russia has been offering Iran unprecedented defense cooperation, including on missiles, electronics, and air defense," he said.

"This is a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful to Ukraine, to Irans neighbors, and to the international community. We are continuing to use all the tools at our disposal to expose and disrupt these activities including by sharing this with the public  and we are prepared to do more."

Kirby said the transfers of drones constituted a violation of United Nations rules and the United States would seek to hold the two countries accountable.

Britain, France, Germany, the U.S. and Ukraine say the supply of Iranian-made drones to Russia violates a 2015 U.N. Security Council resolution enshrining the Iran nuclear deal.

Under the 2015 U.N. resolution, a conventional arms embargo on Iran was in place until October 2020.

Ukraine and Western powers argue that the resolution includes restrictions on missiles and related technologies until October 2023 and can encompass the export and purchase of advanced military systems such as drones.

The Iranian and Russian missions to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the U.S. accusations.

"We will continue to impose sanctions on the actors involved in the transfer of Iranian military equipment to Russia for use in Ukraine," Kirby said.

He said a new U.S. advisory issued on Friday aimed "to help businesses and other governments better understand the risks posed by Irans UAV program and the illicit practices Iran uses to procure components for it."

The advisory highlighted key items sought by Iran for its development of drones, including electronics such as processors and controllers.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Steve Holland; additional reporting by Michelle Nichols and Daphne Psaledakis; Editing by Heather Timmons, Chizu Nomiyama and Marguerita Choy)
An employee of Kern High School District has been charged with six counts related to the making and selling of explosives, which he allegedly did through an Instagram account and with the help of a high school student.

A federal grand jury on Thursday charged Angelo Jackson Mendiver of Bakersfield with conspiring to commit offenses against the United States; engaging in manufacturing and dealing in explosive materials; mailing an explosive device; improper storage of explosives; and making false statements to FBI agents.

According to the Department of Justice, agents found and seized 500 pounds of explosives and explosive materials from the residence of the 26-year-old.

Another 500 pounds were seized from the residence of a student who worked closely to help Mendiver fulfill transactions, according to court documents.

The manufacturing and dealing in explosive materials could carry a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $250,00 fine. If convicted of making false statements and conspiring to commit offenses against the United States, he faces another possible 10 years and $500,000 in fine. The mailing of an explosive device and improper storage of explosives carry maximum penalties of one year and a $100,000 fine, according to the Department of Justice.

Mendiver is scheduled for arraignment June 15.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  South Koreas Foreign Ministry summoned China's ambassador on Friday to protest comments he made accusing Seoul of tilting toward the United States and away from China, as competition between Washington and Beijing for global influence intensifies.

South Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Chang Ho-jin warned Chinese Ambassador Xing Haiming over his senseless and provocative remarks made during a meeting with a South Korean opposition leader.

The ministry accused Xing of violating diplomatic protocols and interfering with South Korean domestic politics but didnt specify the parts of Xings comments it saw as inappropriate. The ministry also didn't share what Xing said in reply to Chang.

In a meeting Thursday with South Korean Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung, a key rival of conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol, Xing accused Yoons government of leaning excessively toward Seoul's treaty ally, the United States, and damaging its relations with China, its biggest trading partner.

Xing said South Korea was entirely to blame for the many difficulties in bilateral relations, citing its growing trade deficit with China which he attributed to de-Chinaization efforts, apparently referring to actions by South Korean companies to shift their supply chains away from China. He demanded that Seoul respect Beijings core interests including Taiwan and other major regional issues.

With the United States pressuring China with all its might, some are betting that the United States will win and China will lose. But this is clearly the wrong judgment, Xing said, describing a rosy future for his country under authoritarian leader Xi Jingping. What can be said with certainty is that those who bet on Chinas defeat will surely regret it later," Xing said.

South Korea's Foreign Ministry said Xings irresponsible comments countered "the desire of both countries' governments and people to value and further advance South Korea-China relations based on mutual respect.

South Korea, whose economy depends greatly on exports of computer memory chips and other technology products, has struggled to strike a balance between the United States, its decades-long military ally, and China, the biggest buyer of its goods as the rivalry between Washington and Beijing deepens over regional influence and technology.

Faced with a growing nuclear threat from North Korea, Yoon has pushed aggressively to strengthen the alliance with the United States, making it a central goal of his policies.

Seoul has expanded joint military training with the United States and is seeking stronger assurances that it would swiftly and decisively use its nuclear weapons to defend South Korea in the event of a North Korean nuclear attack.

The Biden administration in turn has been seeking stronger three-way cooperation with South Korea and Japan to counter both the North Korean threat and Chinas increasingly assertive foreign policy.
CAIRO (AP)  The Sudanese government announced that the U.N. envoy to the country and key mediator in its brutal conflict is no longer welcome as the warring sides in the African nation agreed to a new, 24-hour cease-fire.

Sudan's Foreign Ministry issued a terse statement late Thursday, weeks after the military chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, demanded in a letter that envoy Volker Perthes be removed from his post. The ministry said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was notified that Perthes was declared persona non grata by Sudan.

Since mid-April, Sudan's military, headed by Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, led by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, have been locked in a violent conflict. The fighting has killed more than 860 civilians, according to Sudans Doctors Syndicate, which tracks civilian casualties, though the actual death toll is likely much higher.

The United Nations denounced the move, saying that a member of U.N. personnel cannot be declared persona non grata  meaning, unacceptable to the government the diplomat was assigned to  and that this goes against the U.N. charter.

U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Perthes will remain the organizations envoy to Sudan but did not say whether the German diplomat would be returning to the African country.

When U.N. special envoy for Somalia Nicholas Haysom was declared persona non grata by Somalias government in January 2019 the U.N. issued a similar statement. Haysom was outside the country at the time and never returned to Somalia.

Also Friday, the military and the RSF agreed to another truce, to last 24 hours, starting 6 a.m. on Saturday. The cease-fire was announced by Saudi Arabia and the United States in a joint statement then later confirmed by Sudan's warring sides on their social media pages.

Washington and Riyadh have been mediating in Sudan's fighting  the latest truce is to be the eighth such cease-fire since the clashes first erupted two months ago. All past agreements have foundered.

Last week, Washington and Riyad suspended formal peace talks that had been taking place in the Saudi coastal city of Jeddah since late May, accusing both sides of repeated cease-fire violations. That same day, Washington imposed sanctions against key defense companies tied to the military and the RSF, along with visa restrictions.

Despite the breakdown, the two mediators said they remain in contact with both sides in hopes of reviving the peace talks.

Perthes has been a key mediator in Sudan since 2021, first during the countrys failed attempts to transition to democracy and then as relations between the military and the RSF deteriorated. Perthes' native Germany condemned Sudan's announcement.

The international community, including the German government, continues to stand fully behind Mr. Perthes and his efforts, said Andrea Sasse, spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry in Berlin.

She said Perthes will continue to do his job from Kenya, from where he is supporting efforts in Jeddah to get the warring parties back to the table. The envoy had received death threats and numerous calls to resign in recent months.

In his letter, Burhan accused Perthes of being partisan, and negatively contributing to pre-war talks between the generals and pro-democracy groups in the weeks building up to the conflict.

Perthes had dismissed the threats on his life as coming from marginal extremists and insisted there is a wide appreciation of U.N. efforts in Sudan.

Sudan's conflict has reduced the capital of Khartoum to an urban battlefield, with many city districts without running water or electricity. Widespread looting and sexual violence has been reported, including the rape of women and girls in Khartoum and the western Darfur region. Almost all reported cases of sexual attacks were blamed on the RSF. The paramilitary has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

According to Shabia Mantoo, a spokesperson for the U.N. refugee agency, hundreds of thousands have been displaced from their homes by the fighting. About 1.42 million have been displaced within Sudan and some 451,000 have left the country, including refugees from South Sudan who have returned home, Mantoo told reporters in Geneva on Friday.

On Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross rescued 297 children from an orphanage in Khartoum. The operation came after 71 children had died from hunger and illness in the facility since mid-April.

Also Friday, the aid group Mercy Corps warned that Sudan's fighting could trigger a catastrophic food crisis and disease outbreaks in the coming months.

June marks the beginning of Sudan's three-month rainy season. Last year, heavy flooding triggered by the rains killed scores of people.

___

Associated Press writers Geir Moulson in Berlin, Jon Gambrell in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
Supreme Court justices have ruled 5 to 4 that Alabama's Republican-controlled Legislature must draw a new election district that would be likely to favor a Black Democrat. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

The Supreme Court upheld the broad reach of the Voting Rights Act on Thursday, ruling that Alabama's Republican lawmakers are required to draw a new election district that would likely elect a Black Democrat to Congress.

In a 5-4 vote that surprised voting rights advocates, the justices rejected an appeal from Alabama Republicans and reaffirmed the principle of fair representation for racial and ethnic minorities.

The outcome could bolster Democrats in Republican strongholds across the South and potentially tilt control of the closely divided House of Representatives.

Writing for the court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said Congress had amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 to ensure that Black voters were not denied an equal opportunity to "elect representatives of their choice." The voting power of Black people would be "diluted" and made meaningless if nearly all districts can be drawn to preserve white majorities, civil rights advocates said.

Six of Alabama's seven congressional districts reliably elect Republicans, although about 27% of the state's population is Black. Last year, a panel of three judges said the state could easily draw a second compact and "reasonably configured" district that a Black candidate could win.

Joining Roberts to affirm that decision were Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Thursday's ruling in Allen vs. Milligan could have significant political impact, particularly across the South, from Georgia and Florida to Texas. These Republican-led states have resisted drawing more voting districts that would likely result in the election of more Democrats. The court's ruling will bolster legal claims that these election maps deny fair representation for Black or Latino people.

Given how closely divided the House of Representatives currently is, the decision could even shift control of the chamber, said David Wasserman, the U.S. House expert at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. In addition to Alabama, new district lines could be drawn in Louisiana, South Carolina and Georgia and lead to the "creation of 2-4 new Black-majority districts, netting [Democrats] 2-4 seats," he tweeted.

The decision also applies to election districts for state legislatures, county boards and city councils.

Voting rights advocates hailed the ruling as a major victory, not because it expanded the law but because a conservative high court voted to preserve it.

Alabama Republicans had argued it was unconstitutional to draw new districts along racial lines.

The National Redistricting Foundation, an affiliate of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, called the decision a "massive win for voting and for voters across the country. Black voters in Alabama have long been denied fair representation  and todays Supreme Court decision in favor of voters marks a landmark moment to move the needle in the right direction," said Marina Jenkins, the group's executive director.

The decision came as a surprise in part because Roberts has been a longtime critic of the Voting Rights Act.

As a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, he opposed the 1982 amendments on the grounds that they would lead to "proportional representation" based on race.

He also led the court 10 years ago in overturning a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that had required Alaska, Arizona, seven Southern states and certain other jurisdictions to obtain clearance from Washington before making changes in voting rules or election laws. In a 5-4 decision in Shelby County vs. Holder, Roberts said this special burden was no longer justified.

In Thursday's ruling, he said the court was not seeking to change the law but to maintain it. He said "a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us" shows that Alabama must draw an extra district that could elect a Black candidate.

Since the 1980s, he said, the court has held that states must draw one or more districts that favor Black or Latino candidates when certain conditions are met. Those conditions include whether there are enough Black or Latino people to make up a voting district that would be "compact" and "reasonably configured." Another factor is whether voting is "racially polarized." Lawyers said that in Alabama, no Black candidate had a chance of winning in a white-majority district.

Last year, the three-judge panel applied those standards and ruled that the state must redraw its map to create a second compact, near-majority Black district. The judges, including two appointed by former President Trump, said the Voting Rights Act required giving Black voters a meaningful opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.

But last year, in a preliminary win for the GOP, the Supreme Court blocked that decision from taking effect.

Then, Kavanaugh voted with four other conservative justices to block the creation of the new district.

But the court agreed to review the case and hear arguments on the law. Kavanaugh then cast a deciding vote to join Roberts and the court's three liberals to affirm the lower-court ruling.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
(Reuters) - A convicted killer suspected in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba pleaded not guilty on Friday in a U.S. courtroom to charges of extortion and wire fraud related to her death, according to media reports.

Joran van der Sloot, 35, was extradited to Birmingham, Alabama, from a prison in Peru on Thursday for arraignment in federal court in northern Alabama. The Dutch national is serving a 28-year prison sentence in the South American country for another woman's killing.

Holloway, an 18-year-old from a Birmingham suburb, mysteriously vanished in 2005 during a high school graduation trip to Aruba. While her remains have not been discovered, an Alabama judge declared her legally dead in 2012.

The teenager was last seen in Aruba with van der Sloot and another man. Her disappearance and an exhaustive investigation drew heavy media attention.

Van der Sloot, who was once arrested in the U.S. in the case but not charged, is accused of extorting the girl's mother, Beth Holloway, for money and offering false information about the teen's whereabouts in 2010, according to prosecutors.

Beth Holloway watched as van der Sloot was arraigned in the courtroom, according to local media.

During the brief court appearance, van der Sloot wore a T-shirt. He had an earpiece for translation of the hearing into Dutch but chose not to use it, CBS News affiliate WIAT-TV reported.

Van der Sloot will be returned to Peru upon the trial's conclusion in Alabama.

He was convicted in 2012 to 28 years in prison in Peru after he confessed to beating, strangling and suffocating a 21-year-old Peruvian business student in 2010.

(Reporting by Tyler Clifford in New York City; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
By Brad Brooks

(Reuters) - Federal prosecutors on Friday leveled charges of making false statements to financial institutions against a real estate developer who is at the center of allegations that led to the impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

A grand jury indicted Nate Paul, 36, on eight counts of making false statements to lenders based in Texas, New York, Connecticut and Ireland to obtain $172 million in real estate loans in 2017 and 2018.

Paul, who was arrested by the FBI on Thursday and jailed overnight, briefly appeared before a federal judge in Austin on Friday. He did not enter a plea and was allowed to go free on bond. He is scheduled for a June 15 arraignment. His attorney, Gerry Morris, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Paxton was not mentioned in Paul's indictment and Morris told reporters after the hearing that the case against his client did not involve Paxton.

Paxton, a supporter of former President Donald Trump whose lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results was tossed out by the Supreme Court, was impeached by state legislators on May 27 and temporarily suspended from office pending his trial in the Senate.

The articles of impeachment against him accuse Paxton of having employees of the attorney general's office intervene in a lawsuit against Paul, of helping the developer obtain information about the FBI investigation against him, and of providing legal favors to Paul in exchange for his renovating Paxton's home.

Paxton, 60, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Aside from his impeachment, he is under a separate corruption investigation by the Justice Department, according to the special prosecutors in Texas leading his state case.

The Texas Senate will try Paxton on the 20 articles of impeachment lodged against him on or before Aug. 28.

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
Roses lay at the playground after a knife attack Thursday, June 8, 2023 in Annecy, French Alps. AP-Yonhap



Four toddlers and two pensioners were stabbed in a knife attack in the tranquil French mountain town of Annecy on Thursday and the government said the suspected assailant was a Syrian refugee.



A video of the attack, taken by a bystander and verified by Reuters, showed the assailant jump a low wall into a children's playground and repeatedly lunge at a child in a stroller, pushing aside a woman who tries to fend him off.



Two of the wounded children and one adult were in hospital in a life-threatening condition, while the other victims were less seriously hurt.



Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the suspected attacker, who was in police custody, was a 31-year old Syrian national who was granted asylum in Sweden 10 years ago. He had entered France legally, she said, and was carrying Swedish identity documents and a Swedish driving license.



Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said France had rejected an asylum request made by the suspect earlier this month, and that he had been carrying "certain Christian religious insignia".



The local prosecutor leading the investigation said there was no indication that terrorism was the assailant's motivation. The suspect was under investigation for attempted murder.



The four children were just toddlers, aged between 22 months and three years, Annecy prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis told reporters.



One of them was a British national, another was Dutch, Bonnet-Mathis said.



As the assailant, who wore a blue-chequered headscarf and sunglasses, slashed at his victims, one bystander tried to stop him by throwing his backpack at him, the video showed.



Police have not publicly released the suspect's name.



A woman identified as his ex-wife told BFM TV that her former partner was a Christian.



"He does not call me for four months. (Our relationship) stopped because we lived in Sweden and he did not want to live in Sweden anymore," she told BFM TV, adding that he had not previously shown a violent streak.



French news agency AFP reported the assailant was carrying a prayer book on his person when he launched his attack.





Soldiers patrol after a knife attack in Annecy, French Alps, June 8. AP-Yonhap



Court conviction



The incident took place at around 0745 GMT in Le Paquier park in Annecy, a town in the French Alps.



"He clearly targeted the babies," a witness who gave his name as Ferdinand told BFM TV.



President Emmanuel Macron said his country was in shock, calling the attack "an act of absolute cowardice".



Swedish court documents seen by Reuters showed the suspect - whose name Reuters confirmed with police - was fined for fraud in Sweden in 2022 for claiming unemployment and student benefits at the same time.



The ruling said that he had struggled financially and at one point had to sell his wife's jewelry to make ends meet.



The attack ended when police shot at the attacker and then overpowered him, an eyewitness video verified by Reuters showed.



He was not injured, the prosecutor said.



Several witnesses described Le Paquier park as an usually tranquil place popular with tourists for its stunning views of Lake Annecy and the mountains.



"It's a place where babysitters and parents take young children to play. I often see around 15 toddlers there in the morning, and the atmosphere is fantastic," said Yohan, who works at an ice-cream parlor just opposite the park.



France has been shocked by a number of violent incidents over the past few months, including the fatal stabbing last month of a nurse in the northern town of Reims.



Macron has denounced what he calls a "de-civilization process" in the country, while opposition lawmakers say his government has been too lax on law and order.



"Nothing more abominable than to attack children," National Assembly speaker Yael Braun-Pivet said on Twitter. Parliament observed a minute of silence to mark the incident. (Reuters)



Police officers stand on a bridge near the scene after a knife attack, June 8. AP-Yonhap
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Two lawyers defending Donald Trump quit the case on Friday, one day after the former U.S. president was indicted on federal charges of illegally retaining classified documents, obstruction and other crimes.

The Wall Street Journal at the same time reported that Trump's former military valet, Walt Nauta, had been charged alongside Trump. Nauta went to work at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort after working in the Trump White House.

Nauta's lawyer, Stanley Woodward, declined to comment when contacted by Reuters.

The surprise announcement by Trump's lawyers John Rowley and Jim Trusty could prompt further legal complications ahead of Trump's scheduled appearance in federal court in Miami on Tuesday in the documents case.

"This morning we tendered our resignations as counsel to President Trump," the two lawyers said in a statement. "It has been an honor to have spent the last year defending him, and we know he will be vindicated."

Trump said on social media that he was being represented by white collar defense lawyer Todd Blanche.

The indictment of a former U.S. president on federal charges is unprecedented in American history and emerges at a time when Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination next year.

Trump faces seven criminal counts related to his treatment of sensitive government materials he took with him when he left the White House in January 2021, according to a source familiar with the matter.

He is due to appear in the Florida court on Tuesday, a day before his 77th birthday.

The cases do not prevent Trump from campaigning or taking office if he were to win the November 2024 presidential election. Legal experts say there would be no basis to block his swearing-in even if he were convicted and sent to prison.

Investigators seized roughly 13,000 documents from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, nearly a year ago. One hundred were marked as classified, even though one of Trump's lawyers had previously said all records with classified markings had been returned to the government.

"I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!" Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Thursday after announcing he had been indicted.

Trump has previously said he declassified those documents while president, but his attorneys have declined to make that argument in court filings.

CNN reported on Friday that Trump said after leaving office that he had retained military information that he had not declassified. Those comments, captured on audio, could be a key piece of evidence in the case.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has been initially assigned to oversee the case, according to a separate source who was briefed on the matter. She could preside over the trial as well, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Cannon, appointed by Trump in 2019, made decisions that favored him in legal skirmishes during the documents investigation last year. Her rulings were overturned on appeal.

Cannon would determine, among other things, when a trial would take place and what Trump's sentence would be if he were found guilty.

Trump lawyer Jim Trusty told CNN the charges include conspiracy, false statements, obstruction of justice, and illegally retaining classified documents under the Espionage Act.

It is the second criminal case for Trump, who is due to go on trial in New York next March in a state case stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star.

If he wins the presidency again, Trump, as head of the federal government, would be in a position to derail the federal case, but not the state one in New York.

POPULAR WITH REPUBLICANS

Trump's legal woes have not dented his popularity with Republican voters, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling. His main Republican rivals have so far lined up behind him to criticize the case as politically motivated.

Trump served as president from 2017 to 2021, and he has so far managed to weather controversies that might torpedo other politicians. He describes himself as the victim of a witch hunt and accuses the Justice Department of partisan bias.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is heading the investigation, is leading a second criminal probe into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

Smith has been given a degree of independence from Justice Department leadership to pursue the politically sensitive cases.

President Joe Biden found out about the indictment like everyone else and did not have advance knowledge of it, the White House said on Friday.

Trump also faces a separate criminal probe in Georgia related to efforts to overturn his loss to Biden in that state.

Smith convened grand juries in both Washington and Miami to hear evidence, but has opted to bring the case in the politically competitive state of Florida, rather than the U.S. capital, where any jury would likely be heavily Democratic.

Under federal law, defendants have a right to be charged where the activity in question took place. A Florida prosecution, legal experts say, could head off a drawn-out legal challenge from Trump's team over the proper venue.

The Republican state-by-state presidential nominating contest kicks off early next year, and the party is due to choose its nominee for the November 2024 election in July of that year.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch, additional reporting by Jack Queen; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Chizu Nomiyama and Howard Goller)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. senators on Thursday introduced two separate bipartisan artificial intelligence bills on Thursday amid growing interest in addressing issues surrounding the technology.

One would require the U.S. government to be transparent when using AI to interact with people and another would establish an office to determine if the United States is remaining competitive in the latest technologies.

Lawmakers are beginning to consider what new rules might be needed because of the rise of AI. The technology made headlines earlier this year when ChatGPT, an AI program that can answer questions in written form, became generally available.

Senators Gary Peters, a Democrat who chairs the Homeland Security committee, introduced a bill along with Senators Mike Braun and James Lankford, both Republicans, which would require U.S. government agencies to tell people when the agency is using AI to interact with them.

The bill also requires agencies to create a way for people to appeal any decisions made by AI.

"The federal government needs to be proactive and transparent with AI utilization and ensure that decisions aren't being made without humans in the driver's seat," said Braun in a statement.

Senators Michael Bennet and Mark Warner, both Democrats, introduced a measure along with Republican Senator Todd Young that would establish an Office of Global Competition Analysis that would seek to ensure that the United States stayed in the front of the pack in developing artificial intelligence.

"We cannot afford to lose our competitive edge in strategic technologies like semiconductors, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence to competitors like China," Bennet said.

Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he had scheduled three briefings for senators on artificial intelligence, including the first classified briefing on the topic so lawmakers can be educated on the issue.

The briefings include a general overview on AI, examining how to achieve American leadership on AI and a classified session on defense and intelligence issues and implications.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; additional reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Alistair Bell)
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)  The United Nations World Food Program said Friday that it is temporarily suspending food aid to Ethiopia because its supplies are being diverted, an announcement that came a day after the United States Agency for International Development said it was doing the same.

Food diversion is absolutely unacceptable, and we welcome the government of Ethiopias commitment to investigate and hold accountable those responsible, WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain said. he program's head office in Rome declined further comment when contacted by The Associated Press.

Some 20 million Ethiopians rely on food aid because of drought and conflict, out of the country's population of roughly 120 million. Much of the aid comes from USAID and the World Food Program.

The suspensions brought worries that malnutrition could rise in Africa's second most populous country,

USAID, WFP and the Ethiopian government have not said who is responsible for the food diversion, which the U.S. has described as widespread and coordinated."

However, an internal memo prepared by a group of foreign donor representatives and seen by the AP this week pointed at government involvement.

The scheme appears to be orchestrated by federal and regional government of Ethiopia entities, with military units across the country benefiting from humanitarian assistance, said the document from the Humanitarian and Resilience Donor Group, which includes bilateral and multilateral partners.

In a joint statement with USAID on Thursday, the Ethiopian foreign ministry spoke of deeply concerning revelations and said it was investigating with the U.S. so that the perpetrators of such diversion are held to account.

The nationwide food aid suspensions follow USAID and WFP saying last month they had suspended food deliveries to Ethiopia's northern Tigray region while they investigated reports of food aid theft there. The region is recovering from a two-year conflict.

That suspension by the World Food Program and allegations of aid diversion in Tigray were first reported by the AP. Some 5.4 million of the regions 6 million people rely on humanitarian help.

Earlier this year, USAID administrator Samantha Power told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that aid theft in Tigray appeared to involve collusion between parties on both sides of the conflict, which ended in November.

In its statement Friday, WFP said it was continuing other programs in Ethiopia for children, mothers and drought-hit pastoralists.

WFP is working closely with its U.N. and humanitarian partners and local stakeholders to reform the way assistance is delivered across Ethiopia and in all high-risk operational contexts where we work, it said.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a new process on Thursday that will enable Afghan nationals to renew their parole and continue to live and work in the United States.

"The new process is streamlined and will be at no cost, and will provide for a two-year renewal of parole for qualifying individuals," the DHS said in a statement.

Afghan nationals are encouraged to pursue a permanent status in the United States for which they may be eligible, the DHS added.

"The renewal requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons and for a significant public benefit," the DHS said.
The Biden administration plans to help Haiti tackle the scourge of illegal arms and ammunition trafficking by investing in a criminal investigative unit in collaboration with the Haitian national police.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who spent the day meeting with Caribbean leaders, including Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry, during a historic visit to Nassau, Bahamas, on Thursday, announced the initiative as part of more than $100 million in commitments the Biden administration is making in the region in the areas of climate change, clean energy and security.

Too many people in all of our countries are dying from gun violence, she said.

Ahead of the visit, the White House announced that it is creating a new position inside the Justice Department for Caribbean firearms prosecutions to maximize information sharing between the U.S. and the region. But at the top of a bilateral meeting with the president of the Dominican Republic, the secretary general of the 15-member Caribbean Community, known as CARICOM, and most of its leaders the prime ministers of Antigua and Barbuda and St. Vincent and the Grenadines were no-shows  Harris announced additional efforts.

The U.S., she said, will also support the recently established Caribbean Crime Gun Intelligence Unit in Trinidad and Tobago to train officers and help bring criminals to justice. The administration will create a Haiti Transnational Criminal Investigative Unit in collaboration with the Haiti National Police to facilitate investigations and the prosecution of foreigners and human trafficking, which affects the entire region.

Our administration is committed to disrupt gun trafficking. We are committed to interdict shipments of arms and ammunition and hold traffickers accountable, Harris said.

The vice president didnt go into details on how the support will work. While Caribbean leaders said in a statement that they welcome the increased resources, they want the United States to better manage its porous borders to control the illegal pipeline of weapons flowing from its shores.

The increase in the illegal exportation of guns from the United States, Caribbean leaders emphasized, contributes significantly to crime and violence in the region, causing death and disabilities, and compromising safety and democracy.

A recent study found that the ready accessibility of firearms and ammunition in some neighboring countries, including the U.S., combined with inadequate screening of mail and cargo shipments, undermines the often-robust controls on firearms and ammunition adopted by many Caribbean states.

Also, most of the firearms trafficked from the U.S. are traced to states with seaports like Florida.

The same study found that U.S. exports of illegal firearms contribute significantly to violent crime, including violent deaths, in CARICOM member states. The latter is almost three times the global average and firearms are used in more than half of all homicides in the entire region. In some countries that proportion reaches 90%, the study commissioned by the the Caribbean Community Implementation Agency for Crime and Security in Trinidad and the Small Arms Survey found.

During the visit Harris highlighted the United States investment of more than $100 million, including $98 million in new funding from the United States Agency for International Development, to address climate, energy, food security, and humanitarian assistance in the Caribbean.

Harris is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit The Bahamas since the country achieved independence from Great Britain 50 years ago next month. The moment was not lost on Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis or other Caribbean leaders who flew into Nassau for their fourth multilateral meeting with her  meetings that came on the heels of years of complaints from regional leaders about being ignored by multiple U.S. administrations

We are not starting anew. We are building on the work and dialogue of last Junes Summit of the Americas, in Los Angeles, and in regional meetings held since, Davis said as he opened the meeting shortly after 3 p.m. inside a conference room at the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island. Coming together here in The Bahamas, let us seize the moment  to accelerate and deepen our engagement, and to work together to produce tangible outcomes.

Davis said leaders are pleased by Harris decision to travel to the region and told her he believes they all feel and appreciate the depth and sincerity of your commitment to the region and to our people. He then listed the subjects to be raised: energy and hunger, climate resilience, development finance and economic opportunity, and regional cooperation and security.

Harris said that as a neighbor, the United States shares common bonds and interests with the Caribbean, and believes the partnership is essential to our mutual security and prosperity.

Strengthening the U.S.- Caribbean relationship is a priority for me, as it is for President Joe Biden, she said. These meetings have proven to be very important and essential to the strength of these relationships.

Harris also noted that in all of the engagements she has led with regional leaders, they have discussed the priorities and identified specific areas of collaboration, Harris said. Since we last met, I do believe we have made significant progress.

Most of that progress has been in the area of the climate crisis, she said, noting that Caribbean nations are on the front lines.

The United States last year launched a new partnership designed to help the region transition to clean energy and to promote energy security and climate resilience. They have also worked together to help build capacity for disaster preparedness.

Since we last met, we have also worked to bring investors to the Caribbean to identify new opportunities for clean energy infrastructure, including through trade missions, we have provided $28 million in food security assistance, said Harris, who also added that the the United States will lead a diplomatic campaign on multilateral development bank reform to help Caribbean nations access low-cost concessional financing.

Still in their discussions, Caribbean leaders emphasized the need for a balanced approach to tackling some of the issues the U.S. deems to be a priority.

Leaders recognized that to address the challenge of energy security, there must be a balanced approach to develop the regions hydrocarbon resources and to maximize renewable energy potential, they said in a statement. They agreed that the Caribbean-US engagement must continue to examine areas for deepened collaboration where opportunities exist.

They also called for a greater commitment from the United States to assist the region in tackling hunger and supporting regional efforts to do so, especially as the tourist-dependent countries face rising food costs and huge import bills.

Commitments already made must be implemented, and that the two sides should examine additional ways to address this challenge, which affects the Region and the global community, the CARICOM statement said.

Another area where the two sides arent likely to see eye to eye is how to address the security issue in Haiti. While the Dominican Republic has pushed for an outside security force to be deployed to Haiti, leaders of CARICOM in February pushed back on supporting such a plan and instead said they will focus on helping the beleaguered Haitian national police force.

During her meeting, Harris pushed for a multinational security force to come to Haitis aid.

She also noted that the country continues to suffer from a worsening humanitarian and security crisis. This week Haiti experienced back-to-back disasters: deadly floods and an earthquake that together left over 50 people dead and thousands more displaced.

I will say that our hearts go out to those who have lost loved ones and all who have been impacted by, just this week alone, the flooding and the earthquake. The international community must continue to support the Haitian people in light of the devastating humanitarian and security crisis in that country, Harris said. The United States supports the development of a multinational force to Haiti and today I am pleased to announce $53.7 million in new humanitarian aid for Haiti.

Harris visit here came three days before more than three dozen Haitian stakeholders are expected to fly to Jamaica for three days of meetings focused on trying to broker a Haitian solution to the countrys paralyzing political crisis and deepening instability. CARICOM has appointed three former Caribbean prime ministers to lead the negotiations. The former leaders of the Bahamas, St. Lucia and Jamaica recently met in Miami ahead of the Jamaica meeting.
PROVO, Utah  Crews in Utah used explosives to blow away an ice bridge that formed over a river following a massive avalanche earlier this year.

The Utah County Sheriff's Office said more than 30 feet of snow, ice and other debris had been covering the Provo River since an avalanche at Bridal Veil Falls in Provo Canyon back in January.

On Wednesday, crews worked together to remove the span, so more people dont try and jump in the river, deputies said.

10 LARGEST US LAKES WORTH VISITING DURING YOUR NEXT VACATION

The sheriff's office made the call to destroy the dangerous mounds around the falls after the river's current had melted surrounding snow, creating thin bridges of ice that were dangerous to hikers.

"As the snow in this avalanche deposit melts, it melts from the top down, but it also melts from the bottom up," Sgt. Spencer Cannon told FOX 13 in Salt Lake City. "You may think you're standing on 10 or 15 or 20 feet of snow when you may be really standing on just a few inches of snow and if you break through, then you drop 10 or 15 or 20 feet down to the rocks below or into the river."

The sheriff's office said it could be a few more weeks before the snow avalanche deposit would melt, and the area will remain closed until deemed safe.
People take photos of the sun as smoke from the wildfires in Canada cause hazy conditions in New York City on Wednesday. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

The wildfire smoke that has gripped several U.S. cities and states this week may be a watershed moment in people's understanding of the reality of climate change, experts say.

These days may wake millions of people up to the climate crisis all around them, Leah Stokes, an environmental policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Yahoo News. It can be seen in the orange skies and the dirty air. We know from political science research that experiencing climate impacts like this can mobilize people to act politically on climate change. Whether thats voting for a pro-climate ballot initiative, attending a protest or purchasing clean electric machines.

Pictures worth a thousand words

Social media platforms are rife with eerie photos and videos from cities like New York, where the air has been the worlds most polluted at times in recent days. Widely followed accounts, including those of drummer and producer Questlove and James and Karla Murray, photographers who specialize in capturing local small business, posted alarming images of the city with captions on Wednesday decrying apocalyptic air and blasting climate deniers.

A new normal?

The Northeast and Upper Midwest are generally wet regions, unaccustomed to widespread wildfire smoke. To the extent that residents there have seen the effects of climate change firsthand, it has typically been in the form of unusually heavy rains or more powerful storms, like Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

But now those regions are in the thick of a massive plume of smoke originating from fires in Canadian provinces such as Ontario and Nova Scotia that experts say have been exacerbated by climate change.

The World Trade Center tower in lower Manhattan as seen from Jersey City, N.J., on Thursday. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

I attended a play reading in Midtown [Manhattan] on Wednesday night, Sergei Burbank, a 43-year-old New York City-based playwright, told Yahoo News. While the haze was mildly irritating during quick trips around my Brooklyn neighborhood and definitely scary to look at out the window, after four hours on the subway and in Manhattan, I coughed through the night, woke up spitting blood, and my voice has been reduced to a Tom Waits snarl all day. I have never been forced to experience the physical toll sudden climate shifts like this take in such a painful, immediate way.

Experts say that climate change will make such shifts more common.

Wildfires are more intense than they used to be, because you have drier wood, you have a longer dry season and you have higher temperatures, all of those contribute to more intense wildfires, Mark Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere/Energy program Stanford University, told Yahoo News.

How experience informs public opinion

Climate change and air pollution experts say that growing, tangible problems like wildfire smoke and extreme heat have already brought the problem home for many Americans.

Ive been working on air pollution and climate change advocacy for more than a decade and Ive been seeing that, increasingly, we have to do less and less work to help people understand the connections between climate change and their health, Laura Kate Bender, national assistant vice president for healthy air at the American Lung Association, told Yahoo News.

The sun is shrouded as it rises in a smokey sky behind the Empire State Building in New York City on June 8, 2023, as seen from Jersey City, New Jersey. (Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)

There is some historical precedent for air pollution inspiring policy change. In 1952, four days of especially bad smog  caused largely by the soot from burning coal  caused the deaths of an estimated 12,000 Londoners, which galvanized public support for United Kingdoms first Clean Air Act, passed in 1956.

Similar events in the United States led to the passage of the U.S.s first environmental laws as well. As a result, American air consistently got cleaner for four decades, although that progress has been recently undermined by increased particulate pollution from worsening wildfires, according to the American Lung Associations latest State of the Air, which gathers air monitoring data nationwide.

But longtime observers note that the publics memory can be short.

I think it will galvanize people right now, whether theyll remember two weeks from now what happened is a different story, Jacobson said.
Track workers treat Mongolian Groom after the horse was injured during the Breeders' Cup at Santa Anita Park in November 2019. Mongolian Groom was later euthanized. (Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)

Its a scene that plays out at racetracks more frequently than anyone wants. A horse is pulled up and out of competition as the race continues and those in attendance cheer for their horse, or more realistically, their wager on that horse.

Those looking to the spot where the horse pulled up see an outrider arrive first. The jockey pulls off the saddling equipment. In a matter of moments, a track veterinarian, who has been following in a vehicle behind the field, starts examining the horse, hoping for the best but prepared for the worst.

An equine ambulance is called and it pulls up very close to the stricken horse. If lucky, the horse is calm and not favoring any limbs. They willingly walk onto the ambulance and it seems as if everything will be OK.

The horse is taken by ambulance to the backside where, if things are good, they go back to their barn. If not, the horse goes to the equine medical center. That is, if it even makes it that far.

For those in attendance, thats it. End of story. If you are in California or New York, you can check a website to see the outcome. If you are in Kentucky, Florida, Maryland or one of the other 30-plus states that host racing, you might never hear a word.

Finally, through social media or the racetrack grapevine, you are shocked to learn the horse was euthanized. The horse didnt look that bad. They walked on to the ambulance. If a human walks into an emergency room, there is a good chance they are walking out. Race horses rarely walk into an ER, much less walk out.

How can this be? Why cant more horses be saved?

Horse racing finds itself jumping from one existential crisis to another.

Even this week, the Belmont Stakes has been put on a temporary hold because of the air quality in New York. If the wind shifts direction and redistributes all the smoke from the Canadian wildfires, which is expected, the race will go on. If not, the third leg of racing's Triple Crown, might have to be postponed.

Not all the crises are so short term.

During a 15-week period in 2011-12, 21 horses died at Aqueduct in New York and an investigation was launched. Reforms were made. The sport was made better.

In 2019, 30 horses died at Santa Anita and an investigation was launched. Reforms were made. The sport was made better.

This year, 12 horses died at Churchill Downs. An investigation was launched. Racing was moved to another track in Kentucky. But, not before two more race cards were run and training was allowed to continue, still to this day.

All of these incidents are a rallying cry for animal rights activists, who immediately call for an investigation, followed by a plea that the sport be banned everywhere. They have made little headway except in the area of public awareness.

At the height of the Santa Anita crisis, activists pushed for the Los Angeles district attorney to conduct a criminal investigation, which, nine months later, found no criminal animal cruelty or unlawful conduct.

These investigations rarely find a smoking gun. The word multifactorial is dropped as often as a Slinky going down a long flight of stairs.

The reason rarely given for a spike in fatalities is the horse itself.

Here Mi Song is lead into a equine ambulance after racing at Churchill Downs ahead of the Kentucky Derby on May 6. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)

A horse's anatomy helps explain why more horses cant be saved. Its a fact that horsemen accept, but the general public struggles to understand. Everyone wants a sport with no deaths, but those within horse racing know the goal is unattainable.

If you had a table with four legs, spindly legs that become narrower the closer they are to the ground, imagine if the tabletop were 1,000 pounds. Then consider the impact if you lost use of one of those legs, even temporarily, and the pressure it would put on the other three.

You have risks that are unique to the horse as opposed to a human, said Dr. Jeff Blea, equine medical director of the California Horse Racing Board. With a person, you can say, Youve got a fractured bone, were going to put you in traction and keep you in bed for a few weeks or months. With the horse, we cant do that. They dont tolerate that well.

Blea separates fractures into two categories, neither with a particularly good outcome.

If its an open fracture, where the fracture has penetrated the skin and the bone is exposed, your prognosis rapidly decreases due to infection because you are running on a dirt surface, Blea said. Another factor you have to consider depending on the injury, especially to the distal limb [below the knee and hock], is blood flow and nerve innervation.

An injury that disrupts the blood flow of that injury, regardless of surgical intervention, will not heal. And that horse will suffer. An injury where the blood flow is disrupted or eliminated, those have a much reduced chance of success as well.

Unlike a human, when a horse is injured, it often will keep on running. Its the horse's instinct and often leads to a catastrophic complication.

With shoulder injuries or humeral [upper limb] stress fractures, those are difficult to save because you have a four-legged animal that you cant say, Stay in bed until this heals. They are moving around, and given their respiratory system, when they tend to be stagnant, and unable to move, there is greater risk of pneumonia," Blea said.

And when they are unable to move, they are also at a higher risk of colic [abdominal pain symptomatic of other issues] because of the intestinal tract of a horse and how it works as an herbivore.

Track personnel try to hold down Eight Belles after the horse broke both of her front ankles during a second-place finish in the 2008 Kentucky Derby. Eight Belles was immediately euthanized. (Brian Bohannon / Associated Press)

The short answer is a healing horse just cant stay still without risking other serious complications.

One of the most painful, and least understood, side effects of an injured or sick horse is laminitis. The tissue between the hoof and the coffin bone, the lowest bone in a horse, becomes inflamed and in the some cases the two parts separate.

There are a ton of reasons why horses get laminitis, said Dr. Ryan Carpenter, an equine surgeon based at Santa Anita. Weve learned a lot about laminitis over the years, but its still a mystery. We will still have horses succumb to laminitis today despite all the advances in technology and surgical intervention.

Laminitis was what eventually forced the euthanasia of Barbaro, the winner of the 2006 Kentucky Derby who broke down in the Preakness Stakes. The best veterinarians and surgeons in the country, using the most advanced techniques at the time, worked seven months to try to save him. In the end, it was laminitis that ended his life.

Weight distribution is a huge deal, Blea said. You cant change the normal distribution. Its like the four-legged stool that loses a leg, the weight is different. In a horse, if they dont have use of one of their limbs, your chance of laminitis goes way up.

One of the most disquieting scenes at a racetrack is when a horse goes down and the emergency veterinarian crew puts up a dark screen around it so the spectators don't see what is happening.

I never say [its fatal] 100% of the time, but there is high likelihood if the screen goes up, they are trying to address the issue at the time, Blea said.

If the horse has collapsed, or perhaps even died, or cant be brought upright to put on the ambulance, a large mat is placed under the horse, a cable is connected to a winch and the horse is dragged onto the ambulance. Its a process only a handful ever witness.

In the United States, the act of euthanasia is always by chemical means at the racetrack. Its done the same way a veterinarian euthanizes the family dog or cat. If there is time, and the horse is not in obvious horrible pain, the horse is first administered an anesthetic so that it loses consciousness. Then an overdose of a barbiturate, usually pentobarbital, is given to stop the heart and breathing. In extreme cases, they just use the barbiturate to quickly end the horse's pain and life.

It wasnt always this way. Many years ago, a gun was used to put a bullet in the horses head, while on the track.

Talking to old timers like Noble Threewitt and Charlie Whittingham, they used to say you could actually hear the bang from the stands, said Dr. Rick Arthur, who was equine medical director at the CHRB for 15 years before retiring in 2021.

In 2014, there was public outcry in England when pictures emerged of a veterinarian shooting Wigmore Hall in the head on the track, shielded by a screen, after he broke down.

We dont do that in the U.S. at the racetrack, Arthur said.

Horses race at Santa Anita Park in September 2019. Thirty horses died during the track's 2019 winter/spring season. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

As grim as those stories can be, there is a real push for animal safety and welfare, especially in California, which has shown a 55% decrease in fatalities since 2019.

The culture in Southern California as a whole has become very risk averse, Carpenter said. The clients who come to me today now say, This horse isnt just right, hes not holding his left lead in his last breeze like he has in the past. Can we do a PET scan or MRI? Just to make sure hes OK. Ten years ago, we almost never did imaging to make sure they are OK, but now we do it very routinely.

The Santa Anita fatality crisis changed everything. The Stronach Group instituted a series of safety reforms, most of which were adopted by the CHRB, and then more layers of safety precautions were added.

But it comes with a cost. Racing is an expensive game and business decisions can be tough.

If [Triple Crown winner] American Pharoah broke his sesamoid bone, then there would be no question about saving his life because he has a huge financial return if that horse can go to the breeding shed, Carpenter said. But if you have a $10,000 claimer gelding that would likely just become a pasture pet and the surgery is going to cost $20,000 for the first six weeks, then people make the decision to put the horse down because it doesnt make financial sense to give him a chance.

In 2019, 19 of the 21 early fatalities were all fetlock failures. So, we asked ourselves, If we removed finances from the discussion, because the procedure is very expensive, and we evaluated these horses solely from a medical perspective, would we have done surgery to give some of these horses a chance?' 

In stepped The Stronach Group (owner of Santa Anita), Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, Los Alamitos and the Thoroughbred Owners of California. They agreed to partner with the owners to offset some, or if the owner has little finances, all of the costs of the surgery and immediate aftercare.

The split between the groups is dependent on the owners ability to pay. In many cases, racing is a rich persons game, so money is not the issue.

Carpenter has refined a procedure called arthrodesis, a surgery where a movable joint is made immovable. Its similar to spinal fusion on humans. The cost is about $20,000 for the first six weeks. After surgery the horses cant return to racing but can do things like light riding, trail riding or non-jumping forms of equestrian.

Some are going into rehab-type facilities where there are disabled veterans or kids with disabilities and they ride the horses and take care of the horses, Carpenter said. There is a unique bond that these horses offer because they may have an injury with metal in their leg like the person has too.

Horses run during the 149th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on May 6. (Julio Cortez / Associated Press)

Santa Anita, along with the TOC, has had 12 successful interventions since 2020. Del Mar, which has a shorter season, has had five.

Blea points out that even if a horse can be saved, it's not always the right decision.

"Over time nobody wants to see any horse suffer or in pain, 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Blea said. "So quality of life has always been the crux on which decisions to euthanize or attempt surgery or heroic salvage-type procedures. The decision is what is that horses quality of life going to be."

Racing is hoping to merge the optics and reality of saving horses into the fabric of everyday life at the track.

I think everyone in the business is coming to the realization that for horse racing to survive and thrive, there cant be any question that we are doing all we can to protect horses and make racing as safe as possible, Arthur said. We have to take care of horses before, during and after races.

As Saturday's Belmont Stakes approaches, those within horse racing hope to avoid a spate of deaths, or even a single one, for fear it could overshadow race day the way it did at Churchill Downs five weeks ago. The survival of the sport might depend on it.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
NEW YORK (Reuters) -A U.S. appeals court on Thursday refused to reinstate a lawsuit by Amy Cooper, the white woman who became known as "Central Park Karen" after calling police on a Black bird-watcher, against the employer that fired her following the encounter.

In a 3-0 decision, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said Cooper did not prove that Franklin Templeton illegally dismissed her on the basis of race or defamed her by branding her a racist.

Cooper had been an insurance portfolio manager at Franklin Templeton, a unit of San Mateo, California-based Franklin Resources.

"Karen" is sometimes used as a pejorative for an entitled white woman.

The case arose from a May 25, 2020 video that went viral, in which Cooper confronted bird-watcher Christian Cooper, who is not related.

Amy Cooper said she would tell police "there's an African-American man threatening my life" after Christian Cooper asked her to leash her dog to comply with park rules.

Franklin Templeton fired Amy Cooper the next day, saying it had conducted an internal review and that "we do not tolerate racism of any kind."

The appeals court said Franklin Templeton's statements said nothing about Cooper's race, and that if reasonable readers thought it were accusing her of racism they would have considered it an "expression of opinion" based on the video.

That video, the court added, had been circulated "in the midst of an ongoing national reckoning about systemic racism," having been taken the same day a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, who was Black.

Lawyers for Cooper did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Franklin Templeton said it was pleased with the decision. "We continue to believe the company responded appropriately," it added.

The decision upheld a lower court judge's dismissal of Cooper's case last September.

The case is Cooper v Franklin Templeton Investments et al, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 22-2763.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Richard Chang and Bill Berkrot)
Chinese student carries mobility-impaired classmate to school for 10 years, wants to continue during college

People's Daily Online) 09:46, June 09, 2023

"I hope we'll be admitted to the same college. And I'm willing to continue being his 'feet'," said Zhu Jinxiang, a Chinese student who has carried his classmate and close friend, Zhong Huaqiang, on his back to school for 10 years.

Due to skeletal dysplasia of both legs, Zhong Huaqiang, a Chinese student who was born with cerebral palsy and suffers from spinal curvature, can only squat on a chair to study. (Photo/WeChat account of Ganzhou Internet Information Office)

The two teenagers are sitting the gaokao, China's annual college entrance exam, which kicks off on June 7 and lasts for two days.

Zhong was born into a poor family in Ganzhou city, east China's Jiangxi Province, with cerebral palsy, which later caused spinal curvature and made it impossible for the boy to walk upright.

Fortunately, help from Zhu and other warm-hearted students, has brightened up Zhong's daunting journey to knowledge.

Chinese student Zhu Jinxiang (first from right) carries his mobility-impaired classmate Zhong Huaqiang back to the classroom. (Photo/WeChat account of Ganzhou Internet Information Office)

Zhu lives in the same village as Zhong. He and other students have taken turns to carry Zhong on their backs to school since third grade in elementary school.

After they entered middle school, Zhu and Zhong studied in the same class again. By chance, they became deskmates, and that's when their friendship started to grow stronger with each passing day.

Zhu carried Zhong on his back to their classroom, playground, bathroom, among other places of their school that Zhong needed to go, and helped him fetch water and organize personal belongings day after day. They also talked with each other and did their homework together everyday.

Photo taken on Aug. 4, 2020 shows Chinese student Zhu Jinxiang (right) and his mobility-impaired classmate Zhong Huaqiang doing homework together at home. (Photo/WeChat account of Ganzhou Internet Information Office)

While Zhu took pleasure in helping his pal, Zhong benefited greatly from the generous support and did well in his studies. Both of them got excellent results in the high school entrance examination and were admitted to the same key high school. Zhu continued to carry Zhong wherever he needed to go during high school.

"At first I just tried to show how strong I was by carrying him. Then I found that every time I was upset or sad, he would cheer me up. As time went by, we became good friends who shared everything with each other," Zhu recalled.

Although Zhong suffers from physical inconvenience, he has a good sense of humor and a strong will, according to Zhu, who noted that he admires Zhong for his great qualities and hopes they can continue to study in the same school.

Chinese student Zhu Jinxiang carries his mobility-impaired classmate Zhong Huaqiang back to their dormitory after self-study classes at night. (Photo/WeChat account of Ganzhou Internet Information Office)

Photo shows some of the certificates of merit awarded to Zhong Huaqiang, a Chinese student who was born with cerebral palsy and suffers from spinal curvature. (Photo/WeChat account of Ganzhou Internet Information Office)

Chinese student Zhu Jinxiang (second from right) and his mobility-impaired classmate Zhong Huaqiang (second from left) talk with other classmates about their examination paper. (Photo/WeChat account of Ganzhou Internet Information Office)

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
Workers finish tending a street lamp as smoke from Canadian wildfires obscures the view of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, Thursday, June 8. AP-Yonhap



Images of smoke obscuring the New York skyline and the Washington Monument this week have given the world a new picture of the perils of wildfire, far from where blazes regularly turn skies into hazardous haze.



A third day of unhealthy air from Canadian wildfires may have been an unnerving novelty for millions of people on the U.S. East Coast, but it was a reminder of conditions routinely troubling the country's West  and a wake-up call about the future, scientists say.



"This is kind of an astounding event" but likely to become more common amid global warming, said Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth College geography professor and climate scientist. "This is something that we, as the eastern side of the country, need to take quite seriously."



Millions of residents could see that for themselves Thursday. The conditions sent asthma sufferers to hospitals, delayed flights, postponed ballgames and even pushed back a White House Pride Month celebration. The fires sent plumes of fine particulate matter as far away as North Carolina and northern Europe and parked clumps of air rated unhealthy or worse over the heavily populated Eastern Seaboard.



At points this week, air quality in places including New York, the nation's most populous city, nearly hit the top of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's air-pollution scale. Local officials urged people to stay indoors as much as possible and wear face masks when they venture out.



Such conditions are nothing new  indeed, increasingly frequent  on the U.S. West Coast, where residents were buying masks and air filters even before the coronavirus pandemic and have become accustomed to checking air quality daily in summertime. Since 2017, California has seen eight of its 10 largest wildfires and six of the most destructive.



The hazardous air has sometimes forced children, older adults and people with asthma and other respiratory conditions to stay indoors for weeks at a time. Officials have opened smoke shelters for people who are homeless or who might not have access to clean indoor air.





A person sells face masks outside a souvenir store in New York on Wednesday, June. 7. AP-Yonhap



So what's the big deal about the smoke out East?



"The West has always burned, as has Canada, but what's important now is that we're getting these massive amounts of smoke in a very populated region, so many, many people are getting affected," said Loretta Mickley, the co-leader of Harvard University's Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group.



Fueled by an unusually dry and warm period in spring, the Canadian fire season that is just getting started could well become the worst on record. More than 400 blazes burned Thursday. Over a third are in Quebec, where Public Safety Minister Francois Bonnardel said no rain is expected until next week and temperatures are predicted to rise.



He said there have been no reports of injuries, deaths or home damage so far from the fires, but it remained unclear Thursday when more than 12,000 evacuees from various communities would be able to return. Manon Cyr, mayor of the evacuated town of Chibougamau, said she advised residents to be "Zen and patient. That's the most important."



But, she noted, the real solution will be a good dose of rain.



In neighboring Ontario, a haze hung over Toronto, Canada's most populous city, where many school recess breaks, day care center activities and outdoor recreation programs were canceled or moved inside.



U.S. President Joe Biden said Thursday that hundreds of American firefighters and support personnel have been in Canada since May, and that he'd offered Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "any additional help Canada needs to rapidly accelerate the effort to put out these fires." The two spoke Wednesday.



Wildfires aren't the only air-quality problems that beset major population centers around the globe.



In Beijing, for example, decades of sandstorms blowing in from the Mongolian plains have mixed with human-made pollution, sometimes making neighboring buildings invisible to one another. Commuters have even been spotted walking down streets wearing plastic bags over their heads to insulate against particulates.



Many African countries in and near the Sahara Desert, too, regularly grapple with bad air mainly because of sandstorms. Senegal, in particular, has endured years of unsafe levels of air pollution, which is causing asthma and other respiratory diseases, climate experts say.





This GOES-16 GeoColor satellite image taken Wednesday, June 7, at 2:20 p.m. EDT and provided by CIRA/NOAA, shows a broad view of smoke from Canadian wildfires drifting across the Midwest and Northeast of the United States. AP-Yonhap



Chemically, wildfire smoke can be more toxic than typical urban pollution, but with an asterisk: With smog, "the problem is you're in it all the time," says Jonathan Deason, an environmental and energy management professor George Washington University.



In New York City, Health Department spokesperson Pedro Frisneda said emergency rooms were seeing a "higher than usual" number of asthma-related visits from the blanket of smoke, estimating patients were in the "low hundreds."



The city public school system  the nation's largest  said Friday's classes would be conducted remotely, a decision that mostly affected high schoolers because most other pupils already had a scheduled day off. Motorists even got a break Thursday and Friday from having to move their cars for street cleaning.



In Washington, a big Pride Month celebration on the White House's South Lawn was moved from Thursday to Saturday, and a Washington Nationals-Arizona Diamondbacks game was postponed. Local officials closed public parks and suspended some road work.



Philadelphia ended trash collection ended early, for the sake of sanitation employees. Bridgeport, Connecticut's largest city, opened spaces usually used as hot-weather cooling centers so that residents could escape the unhealthy air.



A Chris Stapleton concert at a Syracuse amphitheater was pushed back, fireworks were canceled at Niagara Falls and racing was canceled at New York's Belmont Park two days before the famed Belmont Stakes. It wasn't yet clear whether the Triple Crown race itself might be affected; Gov. Kathy Hochul said that would depend on the air quality at the track Saturday.



And in central Pennsylvania, Country Meadows Retirement Communities temporarily closed walking areas and outdoor courtyards designated for residents in secured memory support units  "they may or may not recognize when they experience respiratory distress," explained company spokesperson Kelly Kuntz. All 2,300 residents of its 10 facilities were asked to cancel outdoor trips and strenuous outdoor activities.



"Bocce is huge," Kuntz said. "No bocce ball until this is done." (AP)




AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will allow 32 states to submit written opinions in a case in which Ukraine accused Russia of falsely applying genocide law to justify its invasion of its neighbour.

The U.N.'s top court in a statement released on Friday said countries had until July 5 to give their opinions on the case.

The ICJ in a preliminary decision in the case in March last year ordered Russia to cease military actions in Ukraine immediately.

The court's rulings are binding but it has no direct means of enforcing them.

Ukraine filed its case shortly after Russia's invasion began on Feb. 24, 2022, saying Russia's apparent justification - that it was acting to prevent a genocide in Eastern Ukraine - was unfounded.

Ukraine at the hearings last year said there was no threat of genocide in Eastern Ukraine, and the United Nations' 1948 Genocide Convention, which both countries have signed, does not allow an invasion to prevent one.

Russia, which describes the invasion as a "special military operation," skipped the hearings last year and called the lawsuit "absurd."

(Reporting by Bart Meijer; Editing by Mark Porter)
As smoke smothered New York City in a sepia haze, city and state officials scrambled to mount a response to the unhealthy air. They called news conferences, issued health advisories and handed out masks.

But there was only so much that could be done. New York and other East Coast cities responded to the wildfire smoke crisis without the same protective laws, preparedness measures and planning common in the often smoke-choked West Coast.

Even for a city that has spent years planning to deal with climate change, smoke has not been a major concern.

Wildfires were not really a scenario, in all honesty, that I recall us specifically contemplating, said Daniel Kass, who was New York Citys deputy commissioner for environmental health from 2009 to 2016.

Kass, who is now senior vice president for environmental, climate and urban health at Vital Strategies, a nonprofit global public health organization, said that efforts were made to create detailed maps of communities and populations that are particularly vulnerable to climate emergencies but that the reports did not typically include wildfires and their associated air pollution.

A jogger trots under haze over the Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., on June 7, 2023. (Julio Cortez / AP)

Wildfire smoke experts said that it would have been difficult to foresee such dramatic impacts to cities like New York but that climate change is also reshaping natural hazards at a startling pace and leaders throughout the country need to prepare better for impacts. The smoke is a reminder that it is difficult, if not impossible, to isolate from the threats associated with climate change.

Scientists have not yet studied the weeks of heat and subsequent fires in northern Canada in detail, but decades of research on wildfire and smoke say there is more risk of severe wildfire and impactful smoke as the climate warms.

New York state, unlike California, Washington and Oregon, does not have a law to protect outdoor workers from smoke impacts. The citys hazard mitigation plan makes scant mention of wildfire smoke. City leaders did not broadly publicize specific locations of cleaner air centers for people to take breaks from the smoke, a common practice in cities like Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, when the air turns dangerous.

More than two days after the smoke event began, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., asked the city on Twitter to open city cooling centers to offer purified air and to provide personal protective equipment to vulnerable New Yorkers.

Officials and scientists acknowledged they were surprised by the magnitude of the threat.

People on the East Coast arent used to seeing these types of situations. There was a much slower response, said Peter DeCarlo, an associate professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University. We can probably learn a thing or two from our West Coast friends.

Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science at Stanford University, called the smoke a historic event but also a wake-up call.

Burke analyzed Wednesdays smoke event and found that it was the worst day of smoke exposure per person in the U.S. since 2006. Tuesday was the fourth worst. Smoke exposure levels did not climb as high as they have in the West Coast cities in the past, but the overall impact was greater because the smoke struck population centers like New York City.

The Manhattan skyline shrouded in smoke from Canadian wildfires on June 7, 2023. ( Yuki Iwamura / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

During the crisis, New York state and city officials did communicate many of the messages experts say are best, about staying inside and seeking cleaner air. They shuttered outdoor events as visibility declined and health risks skyrocketed.

After New York City sent its first notifications about smoke, Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday he went outside and realized the city was dealing with something novel and brutally unpleasant.

It wasnt until I went outdoors and basically said, What the hell is this? Adams said at a news conference when reporters asked him when he realized the smoke was a bigger problem. It was clear there was something different that was happening in the city.

New York Citys emergency planning documents and website, which are designed to assess all the hazards that could affect the city, have few mentions of wildfire smoke.

Zachary Iscol, the commissioner of NYC Emergency Management, said at a news conference Tuesday that the agency was working to develop triggers for smoke and other climate impacts.

The other types of weather events where we have an off-the-shelf plan, that leads to certain specific actions. So thats something that we are now developing, he said.

In a statement to NBC News, NYC Emergency Management said its existing emergency plans are scalable and flexible to a variety of hazards, including the recent air quality emergency. The agency said that it was hosting multiple interagency calls every day to address the hazard, that it had sent notices about smoke through Notify NYC, its emergency notification system, and that other city agencies had distributed high-quality masks.

Unexpected climate impacts have stung unprepared cities.

Seattle did not have a specific plan for heat waves in June 2021, when temperatures soared to 108, 5 degrees hotter than its previous record, in an event scientists later said would have been virtually impossible without the influence of climate change. The city was not ready for heat: Just two of its community centers had air conditioning, and only 20% of its drinking fountains  turned off during Covid  were operational on the first day of extreme temperatures. City leaders later said they did not have a sufficient plan to help older residents. A historic number of medical and fire calls challenged first responders and overwhelmed local emergency departments.

Smoke-filled summers on the West Coast have pushed officials to revamp their emergency planning processes to contend with days of unhealthy or hazardous smoke.

In the Portland area, tormented by oppressive smoke in 2020, among other years, officials have developed a playbook shared across local agencies that outlines specific actions to take, triggered by air quality index measures. Oregon officials have adopted a similar set of measures.

Before smoke season, which typically starts in late summer in the Pacific Northwest, health officials mount a weeklong campaign called Smoke Ready Week, which urges residents to buy mechanical air filtration systems and develop clean air spaces within their homes, said Andrea Hamberg, the director of environmental health services at the Health Department in Multnomah County, which includes Portland. Throughout the year, the state and the county work to distribute air cleaning devices to low-income residents.

The playbook has several thresholds for AQI that trigger specific health guidance and actions across city and county departments, Hamberg said. During prolonged smoke events, the city and the county will open cleaner air centers  public spaces with air filtration designed to give people a break from the smoke.

The county keeps a list of public buildings equipped with air scrubbers, Hamberg said. It also keeps a limited amount of supplies on hand to help people construct do-it-yourself air filtration boxes when smoke strikes.

During very unhealthy air events  which have happened twice in the Portland area  officials will cancel all outdoor events, recommend that people shelter in place and keep students at home, Hamberg said.

There are also laws to address smoke risks faced by workers.

Oregon legislators passed a law in 2021 requiring stringent workplace rules for smoke events. Employers must provide N95-quality respirators for employees voluntary use when AQI measures exceed 100  levels considered unhealthy for sensitive groups. Respirators are required when the AQI hits 251, or very unhealthy.

The rules require communication with employees about smoke and to relocate workers indoors and change their schedules during poor air quality days. Washington and California have adopted similar measures.

New York state has no law to govern workers exposures specifically to wildfire smoke, said Marina Jabsky, a policy expert with the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health.

Kevin Riley, the director of UCLAs Labor Occupational Health & Safety program, said he was not aware of any states apart from Washington, Oregon and California that have specific smoke protections for workers.

The conditions that brought smoke to the eastern U.S. are becoming increasingly common because of climate change and historical policies of fire suppression in North America.

A decade ago, less than half a million people in the U.S. lived in areas that experienced unhealthy levels of wildfire smoke for at least a day. In research last year, Burke and other researchers found the number had risen to more than 8 million.

The Clean Air Act and other legislation have made marked improvements in industrial and tailpipe pollution in the U.S., which has dramatically boosted overall air quality. Now, wildfire smoke  which is not regulated by the act  is reversing that progress in parts of the country.

The Statue of Liberty seen through haze June 8, 2023. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

In the past five to 10 years, weve seen a slowdown of progress in the West. And in the Northern Rockies, weve seen a reversal, Burke said.

As temperatures rise, wildfires are expected to increase in frequency and severity in the U.S., according to the U.S. National Climate Assessment. Smoke is expected to increase, too. The Pacific Northwest, for example, is expected to see more than 1.5 times as much smoke by midcentury, the report says.

The same wildfire trends are playing out in Canada, said Xianli Wang, a fire research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, whose modeling projects lengthier fire seasons, hotter temperatures, less overnight cooling critical to dampening wildfire  and more smoke.

We are living it, Wang said of climate changes influence, adding that historical policies of fire suppression also play a role by boosting the amount of material ready to burn in North American forests.

The East Coast, historically, has not been immune to wildfire smoke impacts, but this months event is unexpected, even for researchers like Burke.

Its the worst possible setup right now for how the winds are moving and where the fires are. Its a fire hose onto the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., Burke said, calling it a historic event that highlights the need to better prepare for smoke events in all regions of the country.

Maybe were prepared and we dont get another event like this in a decade, and thats wonderful. Maybe were prepared and we get one in July.
Independent pharmacies have lost a lot of market share over time. But that trend has recently reversed slightly, making them attractive prospects for large pharmacy benefit managers like Cigna's (CI) Express Scripts, as well as startup discount platforms like Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs.

The number of independents has gradually grown by 8% over the past 10 years, even though for decades they lost market share to big retail outfits. Between 2022 and 2023, so far, 99 new independent pharmacies have opened, which translates to 0.4% growth, according to the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association.

That gradual change in landscape is attracting the attention of both Express Scripts and Cost Plus. In addition, indie pharmacies can help fill the coverage hole left by big retail chains.

Cuban's Cost Plus, a discount platform that partners with PBMs, is capitalizing on growth in the niche market with new benefit cards that will be accepted by more than three dozen independent pharmacies in Indiana, Texas and New Jersey, with a growing list daily, it says.

In a tweet announcing the move, Cuban said the new benefit card will not be available for big retail pharmacies because "they don't like us. We will be working with indie pharmacies, groceries and others."

Unlike other discount cards, the benefit card is a membership tied to individual patients. And unlike discount cards, which charge pharmacies a fee for filling the prescription using their discount, Cost Plus will pay the pharmacies $8  equivalent to the charge of labor of shipping if a patient orders from its website, according to the company.

CEO Alex Oshmyansky said the goal is to cut out the middlemen and their fees by directly negotiating with manufacturers and passing on the savings. By doing so, "We can decrease the cost to patients while making independent pharmacies....more sustainable as a business in the long term," he told Yahoo Finance in a recent interview.

"It's always been in our plan to try and support the local pharmacists who are really in their community, who know their patients," Oshmyansky said. He added that big pharmacy managers, which set the drug prices, are often owned by the drug store chains like CVS. Thus, they have squeezed profits for independent pharmacies.

"I think these entities are just addicted to these absurd profit margins, from these ultra-high-cost generic products, and are unwilling to bring them down," Oshmyansky said.

Cost Plus is largely playing in the generics market, where other discounters like Walmart (WMT) and GoodRx (GDRX) have been for some timeand where there is significant competition for lower prices. Online pharmacies or mail-order platforms are also increasingly competitive for generics, including with Amazon (AMZN) now in the mix.

All of this has added to the competition that independent pharmacies have faced in recent years.

Meanwhile, Cigna's PBM, Express Scripts, announced a strategy that would increase reimbursements to independent pharmacies that fill prescriptions for its members, plus a longer-term strategy to increase the importance of these pharmacies in the communities they serve.

Mark Cuban: Offering a lifeline to indie pharmacies? (Photo by Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports)

One for Express Scripts, according to president Adam Kautzner, is to ensure that underserved populations in both rural and urban areas finally get the attention they've been missing.

Lack of access

Underserved populations vary from rural areas to pockets that lack access in urban areas.

The access gap has been amplified in recent years: Large retail chains like CVS, Walgreens (WBA) and Rite Aid (RAD) have announced that they have, or will be, closing locations. This year, CVS said it would shutter 900 outlets, but didn't specify where. (Rite Aid said it would open mini locations to serve rural areas.)

A University of Southern California study shows that "as of 2020, pharmacies in Black and Latino neighborhoods were more likely to close and less likely to offer immunizations, 24-hour, and drive-through services than pharmacies in other neighborhoods," according to the study's authors.

The Cost Plus focus on these vulnerable populations can help independent pharmacies in these markets. The company recently announced a partnership with Zocalo Health, a telehealth platform that provides care for cash for underinsured and uninsured individuals in the LatinX market community, according to CEO Erik Cardenas. The National Hispanic Medical Association has told Congress that Latinos are more likely to be uninsured.

It's why Zocalo teamed up with Cost Plus. The care providers at Zocalo can help ensure and track the fulfillment of prescription needs of patients, and answer questions about medications as needed.

And the benefit goes both ways. The more independent pharmacies do business, the more drug manufacturers and insurers will too. Which is also why the additional screening and testing services, which could create more prescription volume, is part of the strategy.

"By continuing to have accessibility to independent pharmacies, to keep them strong and to be able to continue to grow their own businesses, patients will be able to and get new prescriptions, refill their prescriptions, and stay adherent (to current prescriptions)," Express Scripts' Kautzner said.

More than drugs

"I'm a pharmacist from rural America. So this area is also top of mind to me, of the role independent pharmacists play," Kautzner said.

That's why he's spearheading the effort that will provide greater reimbursements for prescriptions for rural pharmacies that are within a 10-mile radius of an Express Scripts member.

Express Scripts will also help boost the services such as common medical screenings and vaccinations.

The company, meanwhile, is also convening a new advisory committee focused on independent pharmacies. That committee will also be instrumental in coordinating with state and federal government bodies to ensure these independent pharmacists are able to succeed.

Kautzner said that in rural areas, which serve about 20% of the U.S. population, pharmacists sometimes are the only medical professional a person has access to as physicians are in short supply. "So this is a way for them to expand the level of services that they can provide."

Kautzner said Express Scripts decided to launch the strategy after studying the independent pharmacy space last year and coming to the conclusion that there are more pharmacies opening up in some areas. He added: "That's definitely encouraging, post-pandemic, that we are starting to see some of them continue to thrive and expand."

Follow Anjalee on Twitter @AnjKhem

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YEREVAN, JUNE 9, ARMENPRESS. United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken is planning to travel to Beijing as soon as next week, POLITICO reported citing two people familiar with the scheduling.

The trip will mark the highest-level visit of a U.S. official to China since that of then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2018.

The Biden administration has been working to renew high-level diplomatic and military communication following a near breakdown over the Chinese spy balloon incident in February. Blinken had originally been scheduled to visit China few days later and postponed because of the rancor over the balloon.

Last month, U.S. President Joe Biden predicted a thaw in U.S.-China relations. Within days, Chinese Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao had flown to the U.S. for meetings with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. But Beijings denial of a request by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to meet with his counterpart Li Shangfu at the Shangri La Dialogue defense summit in Singapore suggested that bilateral ties remained tenuous, according to POLITICO.
YEREVAN, JUNE 9, ARMENPRESS. The woman suspected of attempting to kidnap Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyans son Ashot Pashinyan has fired her defense lawyers.

Georgy Melikyan, a criminal defense lawyer who represented Gayane Hakobyan  the woman accused of attempted kidnapping of Ashot Pashinyan  told reporters that her client no longer wants to be represented by him due to a dispute on how to build the defense case. This was our clients desire, we respect her decision, Melikyan said.

Hovsep Sargsyan, another criminal defense lawyer who represented Hakobyan, said that their most recent motion filed to court pertains to granting bail for their jailed client. The court is taking measures to assign a new lawyer, we are no longer authorized to represent her in this case, Sargsyan added.

The attorneys said that they wanted to build Hakobyan's defense case around vindication, while Hakobyan herself had a differing opinion. The lawyers did not elaborate.

Asked whether or not the move could mean that Hakobyan will plead guilty, Melikyan said: Perhaps your assumption is correct, but we havent said such thing.

The attorneys also said that Ashot Pashinyan had a change of stance in his testimony at the closed court hearing, but again did not elaborate.

Hakobyan, a mother of an Armenian soldier killed during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, was detained on suspicion of attempting to kidnap Ashot Pashinyan on May 17.
YEREVAN, JUNE 9, ARMENPRESS. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Overchuk has commented on the results of the trilateral session on regional connections unblocking, emphasizing that Armenias sovereignty is not being questioned by anyone.

Overchuk told Sputnik Armenia that the Armenia-Azerbaijan-Russia deputy prime ministerial meeting lasted for nine hours.

In principal, the text is on a high level of readiness, there is a couple of contradictions which require additional discussions, and also around issues as to where the railway will pass. We have voiced this, we agreed how the customs control of goods will take place, Overchuk said.

Overchuk added that the railway will be an ordinary railway, an ordinary border with passport, border and customs control.

The Russian Deputy PM said that all parties want a speedy launch.

Asked whether or not the possible involvement of Russian Federal Security Service in ensuring control and security has been discussed, Overchuk said: This would depend on Armenia.
YEREVAN, JUNE 9, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had a meeting with the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin in Sochi, ARMENPRESS was informed from the Office of the Prime Minister.

Russian President Vladimir Putin - "Dear Nikol Vladimirovich, we meet regularly, I am very happy to talk once again about the current state of bilateral relations and regional issues, which we discussed in detail during the previous meeting. I am very happy to see you."

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan - "Thank you dear Vladimir Vladimirovich. First of all I want to congratulate you on the upcoming Russia Day and wish the best for the Russian Federation. Yes indeed, we meet regularly and discuss a wide range of issues. Today we will also discuss bilateral agenda and regional issues. We will also discuss the situation in Nagorno Karabakh, in the zone of responsibility of the Russian peacekeepers, unfortunately the humanitarian situation there remains tense. There has been no gas and electricity in Nagorno-Karabakh for several months, the situation in the Lachin Corridor continues to be quite tense. By the way, I must emphasize that now the supplies of food to Nagorno Karabakh are carried out with the support of Russian peacekeepers, it is a limited amount of food. The humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh continues and it is also a very important issue and I am sure we will discuss it today."

The meeting of the participants of the sessions of the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council and the Council of Heads of Government of the CIS countries with the President of the Russian Federation also took place.
In his words: "I am just a professional writer, which means I don't do blogs and try and get money for whatever I write."

Harry has lived with the trauma of that death from his early childhood

The moons beauty is borrowed light

Or is it the contrast with the dark?

The bit thats hidden from our sight?

Do you see a mirror in my eyes

That reflects truths of what you are

Or is it a portrait of vanitys lies?

From The Dance of the Gropies, by Bachchoo

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, is haunted by memories of the death of his mother, Princess Diana, in a car crash in Paris when she and her lover Dodi al-Fayed were pursued by the paparazzi. A security official who survived the crash says the car was doing more than 100 mph when it crashed -- and even that Dodi and Diana were exhorting the driver to go faster and faster to outpace the pursuing photographers. What may or may not be true is that both Dodi and Diana were high on cocaine at the time.

Harry has lived with the trauma of that death from his early childhood. He obviously doesnt believe Dodis father, Mohamed al-Fayed, who alleged that Harrys grandfather Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh, had sent an agents car to force Dodi and Dianas car to crash. Harrys estrangement from the royal family has, as the world knows, not been caused by any suggestion that he believes al-Fayeds fabrication. No, his now-lifelong battle is with the press and its pursuing paparazzi.

This past week, having missed a day of giving evidence when he was required in a British court to so do, he has been in the witness box. He cavalierly assumed his superior status and spent the day when the judge ordered him to appear celebrating his daughters birthday in California. He then flew to Britain to pursue his case against Britains Mirror group of newspapers accusing them of having obtained news stories about him by illegal means such as phone-hacking and planting recording devices in his car.

Prince Harrys allegations and case against the Mirror group and its journalists is one of a group of the same allegations by celebrities such as Elton John. Obviously, the newspapers they accuse of criminal activity deny and contest the charges.

While the trial is in progress and Harry is in the witness box, The Times, Britains Murdoch-owned, but supposedly prestigious, independent paper of record, published the Mirror groups defence on a series of allegations, proving in each case that the information they published was not obtained by illegal means like phone hacking or legally prohibited surveillance. There is yet time and it may be proved in court that Harrys phone was hacked, and even a single proven allegation of this sort would result in a guilty verdict against the Mirror group, its then editors and its participating journalists. Dekha jayega, aagey aagey hotha hein kya as we say, usually with reference to romantic outcomes, in Bollywood.

Framing the court case is the curious allegation by Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, that they were relentlessly and dangerously pursued by the paparazzi for hours in New York. The taxi driver who drove them and the police chief in charge of traffic in the Big Apple say that there was no such prolonged chase and, though there may have been photographers from the press pursuing the couple, there was no instance of such a pursuit becoming dangerous or fatal, as Harry later alleged to the press. Curioser and curioser or perhaps understandable in the context of his memory of his mothers death through pursuit.

The British press now reports that their daughter Lillibets second birthday celebration, for which Harry missed his first day in court, was not acknowledged with presents or greetings from this daughters grandfather King Charles III, his wife Queen Camilla or her uncle and aunt, the Prince and Princess of Wales. Bit of a snub? Not aimed at the hapless two-year-old but, one supposes, at Meghan and Harry in retaliation for all the negativity about the British royal family which the two of them have propagated through the famous interview with Oprah Winfrey and others and through the autobiographical book Spare, that Harry made bold to publish.

Pardon my deviating, gentle reader, to make a general point. The protest movements of Black Lives Matter, in the US and all over the world, had as many or more white people involved as the descendants of the slaves in the US or in the Caribbean or the descendants of colonised Africans. It was a moment which said we come here from diametrically different histories, but want to assert that from now on let us share the same circumstances which in time will be one united history.

The marriage of Harry to Meghan, who is half white and half Afro, was universally much more significant than the mixed racial marriage of Meghans father and mother. Multi-racial marriage? No big deal in todays world, but a British royal marrying a Black American petty actress draws the same worlds attention. Here again are two different histories in confluence and very much in the public eye. But what the hell have they made of it? Tinpot celebrity based on titular heritage? An attempt to abolish a parasitical monarchy? Err despite the accusations against the family, no sign of that! Poor Meghan is no Coretta Scott King or Michelle Obama, but even she could have contributed to a potential confluence of histories rather than a dismal drama of celebrity complaint.
Houses are seen underwater in the flooded village of Dnipryany, in Russian-occupied Ukraine, Wednesday, June 7, after the collapse of Kakhovka Dam. AP-Yonhap



Hundreds of Ukrainians were rescued from rooftops on Thursday, two days after waters from a huge breached dam submerged villages, fields and roads in the southern region of Kherson, as Kyiv dismissed reports its counteroffensive had begun.



Drone video showed areas where often only the roofs were visible above the flooding. The region's governor said some 600 square kilometres, or 230 square miles, were under water.



The collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam came as Ukraine prepared a counteroffensive, likely the next major phase in the war in which tens of thousands of people have been killed, millions uprooted and entire cities reduced to ruins since Russia's "special military operation" began on Feb. 24 last year.



NBC news, citing a senior officer and a soldier near the front lines, said the offensive had begun. The Washington Post cited "four individuals" in the armed forces saying the same thing.



Asked about the reports, a spokesperson for the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces told Reuters: "We have no such information."



In its daily Ukraine briefing, Britain's defence ministry on Thursday reported heavy fighting along "multiple sectors of the front", adding that Kyiv held the initiative in most areas.



Ukraine's military said the flooding in Kherson had forced Russian troops to retreat by five to 15 km and had "practically halved" Russian shelling.





Ukrainian servicemen evacuate local resident Olena, center, by a boat from a flooded neighborhood in Kherson, Ukraine, Thursday, June 8. AP-Yonhap



A senior Russian commander briefed President Vladimir Putin on how his forces had repelled a large-scale Ukrainian attack in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, the TASS news agency reported.



Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said earlier on Thursday that Russian forces had withstood fierce overnight attempts by Ukrainian troops to break through the frontline in Zaporizhzhia and had inflicted heavy losses on them.



Reuters could not independently verify the battlefield reports.



Trading blames



Russia and Ukraine have traded blame for the bursting of the Soviet-era Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, which sent waters cascading across the war zone of southern Ukraine in the early hours of Tuesday, forcing tens of thousands to flee.



Moscow and Kyiv also accused each other on Thursday of shelling the area as rescue workers in rubber dinghies tried to save people and animals from the still rising flood waters.



Russian shelling wounded at least nine people in Kherson on Thursday as residents were being evacuated, Ukraine's interior ministry said.



The Prosecutor General's office initially said one person had been killed by the shelling but later said no deaths had been reported. A Reuters reporter in Kherson said he could hear what appeared to be artillery fire.



The Kremlin similarly accused Ukraine of shelling Russian rescue workers in the area.



Friends and family of stranded residents posted appeals online with names, photos and GPS locations of residents. The coordinator of a volunteer group on the Telegram messaging app said the appeals were getting more urgent because people were running out of drinking water.





A view of a flooded neighborhood in Kherson, Ukraine, Thursday, June 8. AP-Yonhap



One man, Sergei, told Reuters the last time he spoke with his 83-year-old father-in-law in the Oleshky region was several days before the dam collapse.



"The latest information is that there was a lot of water in the street, as high as a person," he said. "Houses collapsed and went under water."



Ukraine said the floods would leave hundreds of thousands of people without access to drinking water, swamp tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land and turn at least 500,000 hectares deprived of irrigation into "deserts".



Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has appealed for a "clear and rapid" international effort to help flood victims, held emergency talks with officials in Kherson, one of five Ukrainian regions which Moscow claims to have annexed but only partially controls.



The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said aid agencies had delivered bottles of drinking water, water purification tablets, hygiene kits and jerrycans.



"Drinking water remains the most pressing need," it said.



Mine hazard



The Kremlin said Putin had no plans to visit the region but was monitoring the situation.



Putin, without providing evidence, has accused Ukraine of destroying the Russian-controlled dam at the suggestion of its Western allies.



Kyiv said several months ago the dam had been mined by Russian forces who captured it early in their invasion, and has suggested Moscow blew it up to try to prevent Ukrainian forces crossing the Dnipro river in their counteroffensive.





Ukrainian servicemen arrive by boats to evacuate people in a flooded neighborhood in Kherson, Ukraine, Thursday, June 8. AP-Yonhap



It is not known how many people may have died as a result of the flooding. The Russian-installed mayor of Nova Kakhovka, near the dam site, said on Thursday at least five people had died but the total death toll is sure to be much higher.



Kherson's Ukrainian governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said 68 percent of the flooded territory was on the Russian-occupied left bank of the Dnipro River.



The "average level of flooding" in the Kherson region on Thursday morning was 5.61 meters (18.41 ft), he said.



The water level at the Kakhovka reservoir was approaching a dangerous low, the state company overseeing the facility said on Thursday, saying this could affect the nearby Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station and water supply to other regions.



The U.N. atomic watchdog said on Tuesday the plant, Europe's largest, has enough water to cool its reactors for "several months" from a pond located above the reservoir.



Ukrainian and Russian officials have also warned of the danger posed by mines planted during the war and now scattered by the floods. (Reuters)




Today's headlines: Tension between India and Canada over a demonstration where Sikhs "celebrated" Indira Gandhi's assassination; Skyscrapers at risk in Tianjin, evacuated nearly 4,000 people; Minister Shanmugaratnam runs for president of Singapore; New ultimatum for monks linked to the Moscow Patriarchate still in the Kiev Lavra Monastery.

RUSSIA-UKRAINE-MIDDLE EAST

Floods caused by the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine's Russian-controlled Kherson region have already sent global crop prices soaring, with wheat up 2.4 percent Tuesday and corn up 1 percent, before falling slightly Thursday. Analysts say the Middle East will suffer from the damage to agricultural products in a region that has become a breadbasket for the world, just as it did when exports slowed at the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year.

CHINA

Nearly 4,000 people have been evacuated from 3 high-rise buildings in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin after several ground collapses created large cracks in nearby streets. Geologists believe they were caused by underground cavities at a depth of 1,300 meters. It cannot be ruled out that the drilling of geothermal wells caused soil loss and ground subsidence in the area, local authorities in Tianjin said.

INDIA-CANADA

India's Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar warned the Canadian government that activities on its territory by Khalistani elements--Sikh autonomists from Punjab--could impact bilateral relations between the two countries. A float in Toronto on Sunday that depicted the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as "revenge" for Operation Bluestar, the military action ordered by Gandhi in 1984 to flush out separatist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale and his supporters from the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar sparked anger and outrage in India.

SINGAPORE

Social Policy Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, 66, has announced his intention to run for Singapore's presidency and has therefore resigned from government posts. The announcement comes just over a week after President Halimah Yacob declared that she will not run for a second term. Singapore's next presidential election must be called by September 13.

AFGHANISTAN

An explosion near a mosque in Nabawi in northern Afghanistan killed at least 15 people during a memorial service for the Taliban's deputy provincial governor of Badakhshan, who died Tuesday in another attack. Responsibility for the attack was not immediately claimed, but Khorasan Isis had claimed responsibility for the attack on Tuesday.

RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN ORTHODOX

Ukraine's Culture Minister Aleksandr Tkacenko has issued a warning to all monks still in the Kiev Lavra of the pro-Moscow Upz jurisdiction: they will have to leave the monastery within three days, the procedures for vacating space and returning property having been "concluded," otherwise they will have to face court proceedures.

KAZAKHSTAN

Kazakh President Tokaev has ordered Astana Mayor Zenis Kasymbek to "immediately take all necessary operational and system-wide measures" to solve the capital's water supply problem. The move follows protests by citizens who took to the streets exasperated because for more than a week water has been given only at night.
A court in Shanxi found the lawyer guilty of "subversion of state power after a "secret trial" and extensive use of torture and abuse during interrogation, which included the "tiger chair" as well as food and sleep deprivation. For CHRD, such a cruel reprisal targets people who fight against injustice.

Beijing (AsiaNews)  Activist and pro-human rights lawyer Chang Weiping was convicted in a secret trial of "subversion of state power" and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

The sentence was announced yesterday at the Feng County Detention Centre in Baoji City, Shanxi.

The defendant wad "twice detained, repeatedly tortured" ahead of the secret trial and the harsh and unjust sentence, Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) reports.

The authorities waited nearly a year before announcing the sentence, after Chang secretly appeared in court in July 2022.

Scores of officers, police vehicles and anti-COVID enforcers prevented Chang's wife and other family members from attending the trial, held behind closed doors for less than two hours.

According to CHRD, the way the Chinese government dealt with the activist's case shows multiple failures to meet its obligations under the International Convention against Torture, to which it is a signatory.

On the contrary, China still uses this tool to extract confessions, punish those who stand up against the dominant ideology and impose unfair prison sentences.

"This sentence is outrageous," said William Nee, CHRD Research and Advocacy Coordinator. "Chang Weiping should not be spending even one day in prison.

The governments handling of this case has been rife with procedural illegality and human rights abuses throughout, and the sentencing is a cruel reprisal against a lawyer who defended victims of injustice and who bravely revealed the details of torture that he had experienced, Nee explained.

For him, the sentence is meant to deter other torture victims from coming forward. For the Chinese government, sadly, systemic use of torture is a feature, not a bug.

In December 2019, Chang Weiping attended a meeting of human rights lawyers and activists in the southern coastal city of Xiamen. Subsequently, all those present were subjected to repression, systematically detained and questioned.

Chang was accused of endangering national security and placed under residential surveillance in a designated location (RSDL). He was released after ten days, but remained under close watch and his licence to practice law was revoked.

In October 2020 he posted a video online, describing how he was tortured during questioning, strapped in a "tiger chair" held in place by painful handcuffs and leg irons.

During his detention, he was subjected to interrogation while under extreme hunger, exhaustion and pain. In fact, the authorities turned down his request to see a doctor and deprived him of adequate food while his interrogators ate snacks in front of him.

Instead of launching a prompt and impartial investigation into police officers accused of abuse and torture, the authorities violated international law again by re-arresting Chang Weiping and keeping him in solitary confinement for almost eleven months.

When he was able to meet a lawyer for the first time in September 2021, he said that he had been tortured, with long periods on the "tiger chair", including one stint of six days and six nights.

This, combined with sleep deprivation and inadequate food, was designed to extract a confession in order to reach a conviction, which arrived yesterday.
The Taliban want foreign NGOs out of education, already crippled by restrictions on Afghan women and girls. For UN spokesman, this will harm the population. Last weekend, almost 80 schoolgirls were poisoned in the north of the country.

Kabul (AsiaNews)  The decision by Afghanistans Taliban authorities to ban all international NGOs active in education is raising great concerns. For the United Nations, this will be another horrendous step backward with dire consequences.

If carried out, the departure of foreign NGOs would be a hard blow both to the countrys education system, which already excludes girls and young women, as well as to the voluntary sector where Afghan women have already been excluded.

If this happens, it would "be another horrendous step backward for the people of Afghanistan and especially for women and girls," said UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric.

"Our colleagues in Kabul are speaking to the de facto authorities. We're trying to ascertain exactly what is being planned. We have not gotten anything official."

"Every person has a right to an education, and we want to make sure that the de facto authorities guarantee access to education for children and young adults," he added.

If approved, the ban would be the latest in a series of restrictions imposed by the Taleban following a December 2022 decree banning Afghan women from working with NGOs.

Despite their initial commitments to protect human and women's rights, the Taliban have progressively curtailed them since returning to power in August 2021. More and more, women are being forced into the shadows.

Thousands have been fired or have been forced to resign from government and private sector jobs.

Womens and girls education is a touchy in Taliban's Afghanistan. Like in neighbouring Iran, nearly 80 female students have recently been poisoned in two schools in the northern Sar-e-Pul province.

Some 60 students were poisoned in Naswan-e-Kabod Aab school, and 17 others were poisoned in Naswan Faizabad school, said Mohammad Rahmani, head of the provincial education department, speaking to TOLOnews.

It seems, he added, that the unidentified person who orchestrated the poisonings had a personal grudge against the schools.

This is the first case since the Taliban seized power almost two years ago, when they began to crack down on women and girls.

Girls education stops at grade sixth, and women are excluded from most jobs and public life.
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Twitter, now X. Corp, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk poses prior to his talks with French President Emmanuel Macron, May 15, 2023 at the Elysee Palace in Paris. AP-Yonhap



Electric vehicles made by General Motors will be able to use much of Tesla's extensive charging network beginning early next year.



In addition, GM will adopt Tesla's connector, the plug that links an electric vehicle to a charging station.



GM joins Ford in shifting its electric vehicles to work with about 12,000 of Tesla's roughly 17,000 chargers, and both Detroit automakers are pushing to make Tesla's connector the industry standard. GM CEO Mary Barra and her Tesla counterpart, Elon Musk, made the announcement Thursday during a Twitter Spaces conversation.



Their discussion comes two weeks after Ford CEO Jim Farley joined Musk to announce that Ford's electric vehicles would gain access to much of Tesla's EV-charging network, the largest in the nation. Farley also said Ford would switch to Tesla's connector rather than go with the connector used by the rest of the industry.



Before the opening bell Friday, shares of Tesla jumped 6 percent and appeared headed for a new high for the year. General Motors rose 4 percent, and Ford Motor rose more than 1 percent.



At first, GM and Ford EV owners will need an adapter to hook into the Tesla stations, which have their own connector. But both GM and Ford will switch to Tesla's North American Charging Standard connector starting with new EVs produced in 2025.



Tesla has about 17,000 Supercharger stations in the U.S. There are about 54,000 public charging stations in the U.S., according to the Department of Energy, but many charge much more slowly than the Tesla stations.



"Like Ford, we see this as an opportunity to expand access to charging," Barra said, adding that GM hopes the rest of the industry will move to the Tesla charging connector, which is different from the CCS connector used on most other EVs.





Tesla cars are loaded onto carriers at the Tesla electric car plant on May 13, 2020, in Fremont, Calif. AP-Yonhap
A regional carrier based in Queensland is determined to start operating an emissions-free passenger aircraft powered by hydrogen just three years from now. It joined forces with industry partners to reach this ambitious goal, launching a pioneering alliance, the HFA (Hydrogen Flight Alliance).

kW

Brisbane will host the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2032. What if the athletes could travel around Queensland with no emissions, flying in purely green aircraft? It sounds like a bold vision, but Skytrans, a regional airline, is on track. Last summer, it found its main ally  Stralis Aircraft, a young company developing a hydrogen-electric passenger aircraft.This year, Skytrans took the next step by launching the HFA, together with two airports (Brisbane and Gladstone), two universities (CQUniversity and Griffith University), a hydrogen expert (H2 Energy Company), and an aviation school (Aviation Australia).While Stralis is working on a hydrogen-electric aircraft, the other Alliance members will help create the optimal ecosystem for commercial service. For instance, sustainable hydrogen production and adequate supply at airports are still considerable hurdles that need to be addressed.The Olympics are far away, but Skytrans wants to kick off hydrogen-powered flights as soon as 2026. The first aircraft would travel between Brisbane Airport and Gladstone Airport. This is not a new type of airliner, built from scratch. Stralis has modified a Beechcraft 1900D, swapping the turbine engine and kerosene fuel system with its proprietary hydrogen-electric propulsion system (HEPS) and a dedicated liquid hydrogen storage tank.The retrofitted aircraft will be a 15-seater with a maximum payload of 1,500 kg (3,300 lb). Powered by the Stralis HEPS, it could cover 800 km (432 nautical miles) at maximum payload, with a top speed of 500 kph (270 knots).Stralis will add the power plant (two units boasting 955at 1,700 rpm), overhaul the airframe and avionics, and refresh the cabin interior.The modified B1900D-HE will obtain Supplemental Type Certification with CASA (Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority) and FAA (the Federal Aviation Administration). A flight test campaign will be kicked off at the beginning of next year with a smaller six-seat demonstrator.As ambitious as its sounds, the B1900D-HE would only be the first step. Stralis wants to eventually design and build a green aircraft based on the feedback from the retrofitted version. The SA-1 would boast a much greater range (3,000 km/1,620 nautical miles) and capacity (50 seats). The aviation company hopes that the hydrogen-electric SA-1 will enter service by the end of this decade at similar operating costs as conventional single-aisle aircraft.The Beechcraft 1900 is a legendary airliner. At one point, it was the best-selling 19-seat airliner of all time. Raytheon halted production of the Beechcraft 1900 two decades ago, but older units are still in operation to this day. With help from the Australian HFA, this iconic aircraft could make history again.
SUV

Last year we singled out Honda as the most improved carmaker featured on the US automotive market. The company presented stuff like the all-new HR-V (bigger, based on the eleventh Civic platform, redubbed ZR-V internationally), the next iteration of the best-selling CR-V compact crossover, plus the high-performance, record-breaking Civic Type R hot hatchback. And that was not all, as the mid-size heroes also joined the roster  the next Pilot three-row CUV including with a rugged TrailSport grade, plus the eleventh-gen Accord sedan. Oh, and let us not forget about Acura's excellent new Integra Type S.Naturally, Toyota countered hard with lots of novel goodies. They brought back the Crown nameplate  now a crossover-style sedan and dropped the XW60 Prius 'Hybrid Reborn,' including in 220-hp Prius Prime plug-in hybrid format. The C-HR subcompact bowed out and was quickly replaced by the Corolla Cross Hybrid, and there's also an entire Corolla Nightshade family incoming. But that's (mostly) the passenger car part of the story. Moving on to even more crossovers, SUVs, and trucks, there are big superstars like the 2024 Grand Highlander family-oriented three-row CUV, plus the best-selling 2024 Tacoma  complete with new i-Force Max hybrid powertrain and the adventurous Trailhunter trim.And that was just for the first part of the year  whereas the middle of 2023 undoubtedly belongs to Lexus and its three-way release of novelties. First up was the smallest crossover to date, the first-ever 2024 LBX presented in Milan, Italy, for the European, Japanese, and a few other markets. Not North America, of course, but the fans won't lament its absence because they have to ponder the double ensemble of the 2024 TX and GX Of course, that does not mean Toyota is ready to rest on its first half-year laurels. Instead, folks are eagerly awaiting the next big installment in the 4Runner or RAV4 series. Speaking of the latter compact crossover, while the fifth generation (dubbed XA50) still roams around even though it was first introduced in early 2018 at the New York International Auto Show, that is only valid for the real world. Across the parallel universes of CGI, meanwhile, Dimas Ramadhan, the virtual automotive artist behind the Digimods DESIGN channel on YouTube, has again taken up the task of revealing the all-new (XA60) RAV4  but only in CGI.While last time when the pixel master tried his digital prowess on the sixth iteration of the Toyota RAV4, he applied some sporty goodies and apparently stole some Lambo (Urus) DNA in the process, this time around, everything is kept in the Japanese automaker's family. Alas, that does not mean it is any less quirky because the front styling does not even come remotely close to current Toyota models, and the rear design of the LED taillights seems directly stolen from the all-new third-generation Lexus GX. So, do we give it our CGI hall pass, or should the author try harder?
They say progress is a slow process. Well, UK-based boutique automaker Briggs Automotive Company's (BAC) growth has been steady and promising for the last 14 years. And like any other enterprise that expects to widen its consumer base, expansion is vital. North America isn't the luckiest bunch when it comes to foreign imports  but this time, luck seems to be on their side after BAC announced significant expansion plans in the territory.

We are thrilled to announce that we are continuing our global expansion with three state-of-the-art locations across the USA: BAC Philadelphia, Greenwich and Newport Beach ???? pic.twitter.com/dAKiZLPFte  BAC (@discovermono) June 8, 2023

BAC isn't the same boutique automaker it was when it first set up a shop in Speke, Liverpool, in 2009. Today, the BAC Mono, its flagship supercar model, is a global supercar with active clientele in 46 territories.Earlier in the year, the supercar automaker inaugurated three new facilities in Asia (sales divisions), two retailers in Japan, and one in Taiwan.Asia is a critical market in the automotive world; it accounts for up to 33% of BAC's total international export volume. By adding North America, the brand will offer an integral touchpoint for potential BAC owners in the future.In a press release on Thursday, 8, the British supercar automaker said the North American expansion plans are at three state-of-the-art locations on both coasts of the United States: Philadelphia, Greenwich, and Newport Beach.The United States is already BAC's largest primary global market . The additional locations on both coasts will help the automaker meet the growing demand.The BAC Mono automaker views the North American expansion as an opportunity to deliver one-of-a-kind bespoke craftsmanship and an unprecedented retail presence in the region.BAC has formed an alliance with RDS Automotive Group, a prolific automobile retailer in the territory with more than 15 years of experience representing some of the leading automotive brands globally. The Liverpool-based automaker hopes the new partnership will take their brand to the next level across the nation.BAC's Mono range is a one-seater full-blown supercar, and as such, the locations were strategic to its target clientele . The automaker believes the three locations will offer a blend of high luxury and advanced tech that closely mirrors the core values underpinning its Mono model range.The new immersive client spaces will offer an integral touchpoint for future North American customers and BAC's design team in their renowned BAC Bespoke process that ensures each Mono unit developed is a true 'One-of-a-Kind.'Chris Lockhart, Head of Global Sales at BAC, said, "Today marks yet another momentous milestone in BAC's journey with the launch of our official operations in North America. To have an on-the-ground presence on both coasts of the USA  two on the east with BAC Philadelphia and BAC Greenwich, and one on the west with BAC Newport Beach  gives the brand direct access to a passionate and growing community of BAC owners, prospective customers, and enthusiasts."BAC is betting on its new partnership with RDS, new strategic locations in the territory, and an increasing demand for its 'One-of-a-Kind' Mono range of models.
Mercedes-Benz has made another significant step in deploying its Drive Pilot system for SAE Level 3 conditionally automated driving  California has officially certified the technology. That makes Mercedes-Benz the first automaker with authorization to introduce such a system in a production vehicle for use on public roads in California.

If you're not familiar with the levels of autonomy, here's the gist of it. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) determined five levels of autonomy. Level 2 means automatic braking and steering, but the driver must constantly monitor the car. Level 3 systems provide more autonomy in certain situations as they analyze the driving environment.Level 3 is still defined as conditional automating, requiring drivers to intervene. Level 4 systems require geofencing, but they're even more highly automated. And lastly, you'll discover full autonomy in Level 5 systems. Level 4 and Level 5 systems have yet to be available in production vehicles.The German automaker describes its Drive Pilot system as the "world's only SAE Level 3 system with internationally valid type approval." The system debuted in Germany in May last year. More recently, Nevada approved it for use on the state's highways.Let's take a closer look at what the system does exactly. Mercedes-Benz's Drive Pilot can control the vehicle up to 40 mph (64 kph). The controls for activating the system are located on the steering wheel, on the left and right above the thumb recesses.Once the system identifies the proper conditions (on suitable freeway sections and where there is high traffic density), the control button will indicate availability. Once it's on, Drive Pilot will control the distance and speed and maintain position within the lane while monitoring the route profile and traffic signs. In case of an unexpected traffic maneuver, the system will handle the vehicle via evasive maneuvers.Since it is a Level 3 system, drivers still need to take back control occasionally. The car will start prompting the driver and begin the countdown of a takeover time. If it expires, Drive Pilot will bring the vehicle to a standstill in a controlled manner, unlock the doors, and activate the hazard system and the emergency call system.Drive Pilot uses the surround sensors of the Driver Assistance Package, but it also has additional sensors required for top-of-the-line safety and efficient operation. There's a LiDAR, a camera in the rear window, microphones for detecting emergency vehicles, and even a road wetness sensor in the wheel well. What's more, by opting for the Drive Pilot system extra, the car is fitted with redundant steering and braking, as well as a redundant on-board electrical system.The ultimate goal for Mercedes-Benz is to make Drive Pilot's final iteration operate at speeds up to 80 mph (129 kph). The automaker has teamed up with Nvidia and Luminar to achieve its goal and to continue to innovate autonomous driving. Even though the company beat Tesla by being the first to obtain approval in California, Tesla fans fight their own battle with the Drive Pilot and make fun of its limitations.Drive Pilot will be available in the US as an option for the 2024 Mercedes-Benz S-Class and EQS Sedan models, which are expected to reach customers in late 2023.
Tiny homes are practical, but can they pass the aesthetics test? TinyVille surely does. This incredibly stylish two-loft bedroom tiny house, born to be both a home and a vacation rental on the beach, might be the most beautifully-designed home on wheels. With two designers as owners, that's no surprise. Once again, tiny living proves to be highly adaptable and efficient in every way.

If there's one name that's simply unrivaled in the world of tiny house design, it would be Build Tiny. This New Zealand-based brand has proven time and time again outstanding creativity with each and every home-on-wheels model. Its portfolio is extensive and highly diverse. Basically, there are no two Build Tiny homes the same. Each one is a work of art, showcasing at least one original design solution that brings a fresh perspective.TinyVille is one of the Kiwi builder's older creations and still one of the most inspirational ones out there. If you think that tiny homes can't boast flawless interior style while maximizing functionality, TinyVille will change your mind.Only 7.2 meters (23.6 feet) long and less than five meters (16.4 feet), this gorgeous house displays two bedrooms, a full kitchen with a dining nook, an atypical living area, a full bathroom, and storage galore.In 2018, Shirley and Rodney decided to get a new tiny house in a beautiful spot near Wellington, with gorgeous views of Waikawa Beach. The plan was to use it as an Airbnb for part of the year, which meant that it had to offer generous accommodations and feel welcoming enough for all guests. Plus, they were both designers, which raised the bar considerably when it came to the future homes interior look.Build Tiny was up for the task  this team has brought to life some of the coolest designs in the industry. By Fall 2018, TinyVille was up and running: the perfect beach house that could please even the most sophisticated taste.One major characteristic of TinyVille is the absence of any bulky staircase, making room for an atypical main floor layout. By replacing one of the double doors with a bi-folding window, the builders made room for a comfy sofa along the wall. As soon as you walk in, you're greeted by this large sofa sitting in the center of the house, with windows above and generous storage to the side.The kitchen and the bathroom flank the living area. The two-sided kitchen is a peaceful oasis that connects to the outdoors . There's generous countertop space on each side and large windows that seem to bring the outdoors inside. The front countertop doubles as a dining spot with two chairs neatly tucked under and could work just as fine as a home office when needed.All the basic appliances are in place, including a well-integrated fridge. Storage abounds, with large cupboards covering an entire wall, plus soft-close drawers and cabinets. Bi-folding windows are a Build Tiny trademark and a great addition to the kitchen and living area because they open up fully, blurring the line between the inside and the outside."Hidden is a word we'd have to use repeatedly to describe this imaginative layout. The designers at Build Tiny use this as a secret weapon  the smart integration of functional elements without cluttering the living space at all. Moving to the other end of the house, you'd discover a useful wardrobe hidden behind the bathroom door.The bathroom itself hides a washing machine cupboard. Still, there's enough space for a full-size shower, a beautiful vanity, and extra shelves. Cool features include a modern shower dome that effectively eliminates steam, preventing mold, and a chemical toilet (that can work off-grid ) with backdoor access.Since there's no bulky staircase, how do the owners access each loft bedroom? The answer is yet another ingenious solution that Build Tiny designers came up with. The second loft room above the kitchen is accessed via a conventional ladder. Since it's easily tucked away when not in use, it saves a ton of space.This particular space could be used for various things, and the TinyVille owners opted for a second bedroom. It's beautifully styled as a relaxation spot with two comfy futon chairs, which conveniently turn into a single bed at night.The other loft room, or the main bedroom, boasts a full-height walking platform, enough space for a queen-size bed, and additional storage. Like the other bedroom, it's fitted with a large window for wonderful views.At first glance, there seems to be no way to access it, but here's the twist: a second, clever ladder is perfectly hidden in the living room wall. This cool sliding ladder has aluminum steps and is fully retractable. When you want to go upstairs, it simply slides from the wall. For the rest of the time, it disappears as if by magic.A neutral-tone color palette with black accents is the final touch for this stylish tiny house with bohemian vibes. Unconventional yet highly practical, TinyVille could rival any contemporary home.
Ford announced that it's reducing the wait time for the most popular trim of the F-150 Lightning as the production catches up with demand. Ford is on track for an annual production capacity of 150,000 units by the end of this year, and the XLT trim will make up the bulk of the production. Ford's announcement sounds positive but could also mean the demand has cooled.

EV

Ford F-150 Lightning has been crowned North America's most popular electric pickup truck, with almost 16,000 units delivered in 2022. Nevertheless, the 2023 performance has been somewhat disappointing, falling behind Rivian. Ford delivered about 4,300 electric pickups in the first three months of the year. This is still respectable, considering that F-150 Lightning production was stopped at RougeCenter for over a month in the first quarter. The production halt was triggered after one truck burst into flames in a holding lot due to a battery defect.In May, Ford surprised everyone by announcing that the reservation system would not be needed anymore. Ford amassed 200,000 reservations for the electric pickup before it stopped accepting new ones. Surely, it couldn't possibly fulfill them all. Ford delivered a little more than 20,000 Lightnings by then, which indicates that many of those reservation holders gave up on them. Whatever the case, Ford decided the reservations were worth nothing, instructing dealers to allow everyone to order the truck.Ford announced that delivery times would be drastically reduced, at least for the XLT trim. This is the most popular F-150 Lightning version because it gives the best bang for the buck. Not only that, but most XLT configurations qualify for the full $7,500 IRA tax credit after Ford adjusted prices on May 9. More specifically, it raised the price of the Standard-Range XLT version by $1,000, to $64,474, and made the Extended Range version $2,100 cheaper, at $78,874.Ford again claims that the increased production at its Rouge EV Center in Michigan allowed it to reduce the wait time. The Blue Oval says the plant is on track to reach the 150,000-unit planned production by the end of the year. Thus, customers who order one F-150 Lightning XLT today will be able to drive it home as early as September. This sounds impressive, but we've seen similar announcements from Rivian, and it wasn't for a good reason. The EV startup is having a hard time convincing customers to buy its trucks , even though it promised a speedy delivery in less than 14 days.Giving up the reservation system was already a red line, indicating that reservation holders were not serious about buying the electric truck. With the latest announcement, Ford admits that the production is finally matching demand because the latter is very low, not because the former is very high. On the other hand, the Blue Oval closed the order books for the F-150 Lightning Pro , the work truck version of the electric pickup, as it sold out for the 2023 model year.
It's official  General Motors is joining forces with Tesla. The North American Charging Standard (NACS) will be installed on the auto giant's cars from 2025 onwards. Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, and Buick customers will be able to use the Supercharger network seamlessly, while Tesla will ensure everyone has a great charging experience. Here's their plan.

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Photo: Tesla

We're teaming up with @tesla to enhance your electric vehicle experience. More charging stations, less range anxiety, more sustainable journeys. It's about your convenience, not our competition. #EverybodyIn pic.twitter.com/D4joovLjPh  General Motors (@GM) June 8, 2023

The floodgates opened after Ford decided to ditch its plans for a Supercharger rivaling network and adopted the NACS . Many expected other brands to follow suit, but the fingers pointed at Rivian or Lucid. However, CEO Mary Barra confirmed via Twitter Spaces that America's next automaker to go with Tesla in theera is nonother than General Motors.The simplified NACS port will be seen on GM-made vehicles from 2025. But the deal with Tesla also gives the GM-branded EV drivers access to the Supercharger network starting next year. Barra said owners would be able to use an adapter but didn't specify if she was referring to Tesla's Magic Dock solution or an adapter provided by the Detroit-based OEM.Anyhow, it's happening  American automakers are joining forces to fast-track EV adoption by unifying their approach. It's a significant step forward that can strengthen the belief in EVs being a viable alternative to internal combustion engine vehicles. But besides all this, it's interesting to see that all of this is unfolding on Twitter  the social network owned by Tesla's CEO.Elon Musk told Mary Barra that GM and their customers have his and Tesla's "full support," meaning everyone will be treated equally no matter what battery-electric vehicle they're driving."We want to make driving an EV a fantastic experience, whether it is a car made by GM or Tesla," said Tesla's CEO.Musk briefly pointed out that the NACS encompasses only one connector, which can recognize immediately if the charging is AC or DC. He also praised the Supercharger connector for being simpler and more aesthetically pleasing.Barra said this doubles access to chargers for the company's existing EV customers, who will be able to choose next year. They can use a charging service provided by companies like Electrify America or take advantage of Superchargers . Some can do this even today, thanks to the Magic Dock solution encompassing a CCS to NACS adapter in the charging stall. But it's yet to be widely available, so some will have to wait until next year.Barra says adoption of the NACS will only increase from here on out because Tesla, Ford, and GM are now joining forces in leaving CCS behind. It's worth noting, however, that Aptera was the first to announce the implementation of the NACS.GM's CEO argued that this decision was taken because customers complained about not having access to a "robust charging infrastructure." This decision will address those complaints, believes the executive.The official Twitter account of General Motors, which has a gold checkmark , also published a message in this regard. The brand said they're teaming up with Tesla to eliminate range anxiety and create "more sustainable journeys." Using the hashtag #EverybodyIn, the automaker underlined that it's not about competition but customer convenience.Tesla isn't earning money from this directly because it opened the NACS in November 2022. It will, however, gain many new customers for the Supercharging network who might have to pay more than Tesla owners when plugging in for some electrons.
Dubai is widely known as one of the most luxurious tourist destinations in the world, and it also wants to become a center of innovation related to clean transportation. eVTOLs (electric vertical take-off and landing) are essential for lowering flight-related emissions and optimizing traffic. The aircraft themselves are ready to enter service. Still, another step must be completed before that, which has to do with dedicated infrastructure centers known as vertiports.

In 2019, an AAM (Advanced Air Mobility) startup called Skyports launched what claimed to be the first vertiport in the world. It was a full-scale prototype located in Marina Bay, Singapore. Skyports developed it with a German eVTOL manufacturer, Volocopter, which is why the vertiport was named VoloPort.Thousands of people visited the site over five days, admiring the Volocopter aircraft up close and learning more about the specific technologies implemented at vertiports, such as battery swapping for the air taxis and biometric check-in for passengers.In 2024, a different AAM infrastructure company wants to inaugurate a functioning vertiport (not just a prototype) in Dubai. More than an airport for electric air taxis, this will be the first AAM integrator center in the world. This means it will include flight test airspace specifically dedicated to eVTOLs on their way to certification. With AAM still an emerging sector, VPorts wants to support manufacturers so that eVTOL can enter commercial service as soon as possible.The future center will occupy 37,000 square meters (nearly 400,000 square feet) in Dubai South. VPorts' partner in this exclusive project is the Mohammed bin Rashid Aerospace Hub (MBRAH) in Dubai. The two have signed a 25-year lease agreement at the end of last year.VPort is ready to start building the AAM World Integrator Center next year in compliance with the UAE General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) regulations. A second vertiport (Ras Al Khaimah) will also be certified soon after.VPorts also developed specific technology for managing and interconnecting these future vertiports. The system is called VOCC (Vertiport Operation Control Center). It will help link vertiports with eVTOLs and Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs). Tools like this are essential for safe and efficient operations, especially as the number of electric air taxis and infrastructure sites will continue to grow.Skyports, on the other hand, has its plans for Dubai. Together with the California-based eVTOL manufacturer Joby Aviation, Skyports presented a vertiport concept to the local authorities earlier this year.The concept envisions a network of four main vertiports located in strategic areas  the Dubai International Airport, Palm Jumeirah, Dubai Downtown, and Dubai Marina. The Skyports network would connect the busiest areas here while supporting an emission-free alternative means of transportation. This vertiport project also got the green light and is preparing to launch operations in 2026.
Socialist Appeals campaign to organise communists and hit the 1000 membership milestone is going from strength to strength. New branches are springing up across Britain. Join us today, and help build the forces of Marxism in your area.

The International Marxist Tendencys Are you a communist? campaign  our recruitment drive to reach 1000 members across Britain  continues apace!

Comrades are recruiting and building branches in new parts of the country with elan and determination.

The Marxists are painting Britain red. Join us today to get organised, and help lay the foundations for revolution in your area!

Since the start of our #AreYouACommunist recruitment drive, over 500 people have applied to join the IMT in Britain. These are just a handful of the reasons people gave when asked why they want to get organised. Do you share this burning desire to overthrow capitalism? Join us! pic.twitter.com/v11HP2s6Hb  Socialist Appeal (@socialist_app) May 25, 2023

Fighting capitalism in the capital

Amongst the achievements of the campaign so far, were proud to announce that we have reached the milestone of having 250 comrades in London, organised in 24 different branches across the city.

Off the back of impressive growth in west London, for example, our existing Kensington branch has voted to create two additional branches in Hammersmith and Fulham.

The Kensington branch of Socialist Appeal has grown so big and so quickly that we have had to split into 3 branches!



Kensington @icmarxists

Hammersmith @sa_hammersmith

Fulham



Communists are getting organised across London and Britain. DM us and help us fight for socialism! pic.twitter.com/ZrNou3W5Qo  Fulham Socialist Appeal (@Fulham_Marxists) May 31, 2023

Similarly, a branch has recently been formed in Tooting, south London. This is composed of four brand new comrades who have all joined in the last fortnight, paying an average monthly membership donation of 63.

This puts us well on course to meet our target of 30 branches in the capital by September, with the aim of building new branches in Barking, Stratford, and Harrow, amongst others.

Communism: Coming to a town near you

Nationally, weve identified over 20 towns and cities with the potential for new branches to be created before the end of the year.

In Greater Manchester, comrades are targeting three areas in the region to build new branches  places where people have already written in asking to join. This is on top of our two existing branches in the city of Manchester itself.

Our Devon & Cornwall branch, meanwhile, has now divided into a Cornwall branch and a Plymouth branch, on the back of a spurt of recruitment in the South West.

And nearby, we are close to forming a third branch in Bristol, thanks to seven new joiners in the city over the last month.

A second branch in Hull is also on the way, after the comrades recruited five new members in two weeks. And further down the east coast, Ipswich is set to see its second IMT branch soon, thanks to rapid growth over the last year and a half, since it was first founded.

Successful sunny paper sale in Bristol today, 27 copies sold! At the Arnolfini every Saturday from noon, Come on down, pick up a paper and get involved  pic.twitter.com/oq4bxnT5hT  Bristol Socialist Appeal (@BristolMarxists) June 3, 2023

Get organised! Help us build!

Weve never seen anything like this. Weve been inundated with reports of new recruits. The potential for new branches exists everywhere.

Whether youre new to the IMT, or have been involved for decades, we can all be equally inspired by the success of this campaign for communism so far. And we can all play our part in building the forces of Marxism.

If youre a university student, for example, and are returning to your hometown over the summer, then you should make serious plans to build a new branch in this location. (See our Comrades Corner column on p13 for some handy advice.)

Our recent recruitment shows that we can establish groups of communists anywhere, as long as we are armed with energy, enthusiasm, and the ideas of Marxism.
Ever since Rover was calling the shots at Land Rover, the sport utility vehicle manufacturer's quality left much to be desired. The British automaker still isn't a paragon of quality as of June 2023, partly because Land Rover has a thing for weird engineering decisions or  put simply  bad design choices.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

recall number 23V-394 perfectly encapsulates the aforementioned with the 2022 and 2023 model year Range Rover. The taillights are prone to fail  either partially or 100 percent  as a result of damage to the wiring caused by foam blocks located adjacent to the taillights. Care to guess which is Land Rover 's remedy for this problem? Not surprising anyone, dealers nationwide will be instructed to remove the foam blocks in question.If those foam blocks move as much as to damage the taillamp link lead wiring, there's no denying that someone didn't account for said movement during the development of the smartest and most luxurious Range Rover to date. Jaguar Land Rover started investigating this problem on March 9 in the wake of numerous field reports of taillight failures. The Product Safety and Compliance Committee within JLR tasked engineering with finding the root cause for said failures and the scope of this issue. So far, the British automaker is aware of no fewer than eight field reports in the United States market.In addition to removing the foam blocks described earlier, dealers will also inspect the taillights and wiring. If either doesn't look good, both will be replaced at no cost to the customer. In the document attached below, Jaguar Land Rover North America didn't report how this condition was corrected in production at the Solihull plant in the United Kingdom.An estimated 12,922 vehicles are called back, with production dates ranging between July 21, 2021, and November 29, 2022. This relatively random cut-off date may indicate a change in production that Jaguar Land Rover didn't make public. Dealers will be informed of recall number 23V-394 on June 15, with customers to be notified by first-class mail around July 28.Recently spun off into a sub-brand as JLR transitions to all-electric vehicles, Range Rover has updated the uhm Range Rover for 2024 with more choices for customization, Dynamic Response Pro 48-volt active roll control, and a more powerful twin-turbo V8 of BMW origin. Exclusive to the well-appointed SV, this lump belts out 606 horsepower and the same 553 pound-feet (750 Nm) of torque as the 523-hp version.Range Rover calls these mills P615 and P530, with P standing for petrol in British English and the numerical designations refer to metric horsepower. Lower down the spectrum, the full-size luxury sport utility vehicle can be had with inline-six engines featuring mild-hybrid or plug-in hybrid assistance.Not long now, the palatial Range Rover and platform sibling Range Rover Sport will receive all-electric powertrains. The British company intends to roll out its first zero-emission vehicle sometime in 2024, most likely as a 2025 model year.
Porsche has a long history of limited-run supercars. It all started with the 959, the most technologically advanced street-legal car of that era. The German automaker then wowed everyone with the superb-looking Carrera GT, which leveled up from the progenitor's flat-six lump to a race-derived V10.

kWh

EV

The 918 Spyder followed suit as a concept at the 80th edition of the Geneva Motor Show in 2010. Three years later, series production of the plug-in hybrid V8-powered supercar kicked off in Zuffenhausen. Where to next? According to Porsche , fully electric is the only way forward after the 918 Spyder.Enter the Mission X, a zero-emission concept with Le Mans hypercar influences and a high possibility of going into series production. As per the press release attached below, a decision will be made in the nearest of futures in regard to the road car's feasibility. The vision behind the Mission X can be split into four bullet points, beginning with power-to-weight ratio.The company that made a name for itself with the Neunelfer targets one metric horsepower per kilogram, which means one mechanical horsepower for every 2.2 pounds. Porsche didn't mention how much the concept weighs, how many electric drive units it has, nor the battery's net or gross capacity.As for the second point of interest, Porsche intends to work its magic in the wind tunnel to create an electric hypercar with more downforce than the 992-generation 911 GT3 RS. The most track-focused Neunelfer entitled to wear a license plate as of June 2023 generates a whopping 1,895 pounds (860 kilograms) of downforce at 177 miles an hour (285 kilometers an hour).Charging performance is another point of interest, with Porsche making a case for a 900-volt system. This architecture would allow the road-going version of the Mission X  which is likely to happen  to replenish its battery almost twice as quickly as the Taycan Turbo S. As a brief refresher, all variants of the Taycan use an 800-volt architecture. Battery packs range from 79.2 to 93.4(71.0 to 83.7 kWh of usable capacity).Finally, as the headline implies, Porsche intends to shame all other street-legal vehicles at the world's most challenging racetrack. Needless to say, the Mission X's production version would also be crowned as the fastest road-legalon the Nurburgring. But still, will that road car ever happen?From the wording of the press release below to the exterior design of the vehicle, there's no denying that Porsche is eyeing series production. The Mission X would also spearhead Porsche's upcoming lineup of all-electric vehicles, which will include the Macan, Cayenne, Boxster, and Cayman. The entry-level 718 Boxster and coupe-bodied Cayman, for example, will switch to all-electric propulsion sometime in 2025
With a hydrogen-powered vehicle category set to become an integral part of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Toyota expressed its interest in the class by revealing the GR H2 Racing Concept. Toyota's chairman, Akio Toyoda, presented this hydrogen engine prototype at the Automobile Club de l'Ouest (ACO) press conference.

This should come as little to no surprise, considering Toyota is one of the biggest proponents of hydrogen vehicles and one with a racing heritage. The Japanese automaker has previously fielded cars in the Prototype (LMP1) and Hypercar (LMH) categories of Le Mans. Now, Toyota is naturally looking toward the future, as it's the first automotive giant to show strong interest in the WEC's hydrogen class, which is set for a 2026 debut.On top of that, Toyota has prior experience with racing a hydrogen-engine Corolla in the Super Taikyu Series and the IDEMITSU 1500 SUPER ENDURANCE 2022. This shows commitment to the introduction of more sustainable fuels in motorsport. That meant the Japanese carmaker had the chance to learn and develop its technologies based on actual experience in motorsport.Sadly, technical specifications relating to the GR H2 Racing Concept are sparse. So far, all we know is that it will have a hydrogen-hybrid powertrain, a length of 5,100 mm (201 in), and a width of 2,050 mm (80.7 in). The silver lining here is that the prototype will be displayed at ACO's "H2 Village" at the venue of Le Mans during the race.As a result, Toyota is eager to embrace this opportunity to showcase what it has learned so far and encourage competitors to consider this exciting new option. According to Akio Toyoda, there's more to hydrogen than meets the eye.Obviously, the main advantage is steering motorsport toward a more carbon-neutral direction, which could trickle down to our road cars. This is one of Toyota's goals, as the company is pursuing multiple avenues toward developing a carbon-neutral society, including battery electric vehicles But there's also the fact that hydrogen could be the solution fans are looking for. The one that would keep the same excitement and performance we previously enjoyed. Toyoda pointed out that this option would allow us to enjoy the sound, torque, and dynamics we have fallen in love with.On top of that, Toyota's chairman also mentioned one critical advantage hydrogen holds over traditional gas engines. That edge is related to hydrogen being lighter than gasoline, with weight being a massive factor in racecars.Lastly, this strong interest Toyota shows in using hydrogen in motorsports also has to do with Toyoda's confidence in the technology. Toyota's chairman believes this technology could win races, stating the company would not invest in it otherwise. And he likely knows what he's talking about, having sat behind the wheel of a few racecars before, including testing a hydrogen-powered GR Yaris at a WRC stage. Overall, this is exciting news coming from Toyota, giving old-school motorsport fans a reason to look forward to the future of racing.
9 June 2023 18:30 (UTC+04:00)

Qabil Ashirov Read more

Azerbaijan continues to reap the fruits of its sophisticated foreign economic and political strategy. The country has intended to modernize its aging military Air Force for a few years. However, it has encountered challenges in this regard. Due to the interference by the Armenian lobby, the main military producers in the world, such as France, the USA, Germany, and so on, were reluctant to sell ordinary weapons, let alone, any military aircraft.

Nevertheless, Azerbaijan has been able to overcome these challenges through its economic and political maneuvers. So, the signing of the deal on the purchasing of C-27J Spartan military transport aircraft with Leonardo s.p.a, the Italian company, can be considered an Azerbaijani success. Even, the statement of Leonardo confirms that the inking of the agreement is a spin-off of closer energy ties between Italy and Azerbaijan.

Initially linked to the energy sectors, the collaboration between Italy and Azerbaijan is now also extended to defense industry products thanks to the valuable contribution provided by the Italian Ministry of Defense working group, the company emphasized.

The C-27J Spartan is twin-turboprop tactical transport aircraft that is equipped with new-generation avionics, propulsion, and navigation systems. The aircraft has a loading system compatible with that of the American-made C-130 Hercules. The C-27J fuselage can carry 2.2 meters-tall pallets weighing up to 4,550 kilograms, or 3.65 meters long platforms weighing up to 6,000 kilograms.

The militaries of 17 countries including the USA use different variants of the C-27J aircraft. The plane serves as the primary transportation aircraft for the Italian military forces. The U.S. Air Force extensively used the aircraft during its campaign in Afghanistan.

Speaking to Azernews on the Azerbaijani-Italian military cooperation, and Italy's modern aircrafts, the military expert Heydar Mirza noted that Italian aviation engineering dates back to the years of the First World War. Italy has traditions in this field and has put out magnificent examples in modern aviation. He pointed out that it is not the first deal between Azerbaijan and Italy in military aviation.

The agreement between Italy and Azerbaijan on the purchase of M-346 jet training aircraft in the field of aviation existed even during the 44-day civil war. The agreement on C-27 J Spartan is a continuation of the previous agreement. The main advantage of these planes is that they will generally increase the agility of the Azerbaijan Armed Forces, especially when time is of the essence, Azerbaijan Army will gain the upper hand with the help of Spartans. Besides, these planes can fly long distances. It is more about strategic flexibility. The increase of such military transport aircraft in our armed forces is quite urgent to respond to new challenges, the pundit said

As for the importance of this agreement, Heydar Mirza noted that the most important factor is that Italy is an EU member, and cooperation between EU members and Azerbaijan in the military-technical field is ultimately important.

Because, as we know, Azerbaijan's military partnership with all western countries is not comprehensive. There are political reasons for this. The problem is that EU countries usually do not send their lethal weapons to countries with conflicts. For example, the M-346 is a military aircraft, but it is a fighter jet. The C-27 J Spartan is a military transport aircraft. But still, this is a very serious technique and useful for the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan, the pundit added.

In conclusion, Heydar Mirza said that with the help of this agreement in itself, the Azerbaijani side is developing its cooperation with the Western European state in the military field, and this will be a good precedent. He pointed out that it is commendable and should be developed.

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Qabil Ashirov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @g_Ashirov

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9 June 2023 15:01 (UTC+04:00)

Elnur Enveroglu Read more

The geopolitical realities in the South Caucasus are beginning to prevail over the myth. Issues that once covered dust and are not remembered have now become the most important topic in agenda - the opening of the Zangazur corridor.

Yes, the successful policy pursued by Azerbaijan even after the Patriotic War is bearing fruit today. Although this seems impossible to many, today unimaginable forces have already begun to take initiatives to turn impossible issues into possible ones, even without Azerbaijan's pressure. It is talked about Russia's request to Armenia to open the Zangazur corridor and communication lines according to the November 10 capitulation document.

It should be noted that the Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, has recently visited the Russian city of Sochi in connection with the discussion of the abovementioned issue. The agenda of the meeting included the development of transport and logistics infrastructure, digitalization of freight rail transportation. Before that, the Armenian prime minister was received by his Russian counterpart Mikhail Mishustin, and Mr Mishustin concentrated on the issue of unblocking transport communications, i.e. the Zangazur corridor.

Pashinyan replied that he was ready to open communications, but "within the framework of the principle of sovereignty and jurisdiction of those parties through which these communications pass". When discussing the issue, Pashinyan also mentioned the 9th paragraph of the statement of the leaders of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, signed in November 2020, an agreement that stopped the second Karabakh War.

Besides that, the spokesperson of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, guided by the provisions of the November 10 agreement, has made a statement about the opening of Armenian communication lines, including the Zangazur corridor, and the implementation of control there by the Russian FSB.

A BBC expert, a British author David Parry, who commented on the issue for AZERNEWS, emphasized the possibility that there are other goals behind Russia's enthusiasm for Zangazur.

"Of course, I have no doubts about Azerbaijan's visionary policy. However, I must note that the Azerbaijani side should not rely too much on this Russian initiative. Otherwise, it can be no more than a self-deception. All meaning, the Russian delegation will have enormous difficulties accepting this agreement in full, let alone uncover the political realities in front of them. All in all, the November 10th initiative will be extremely difficult to implement, while I simply cannot see how the FBS can take enough control of the agreed corridor to make the situation workable."

The expert added that Russia's haste in opening the Zangazur and communication lines may harm Azerbaijan on the one hand. Because, according to David Parry, Russia always prioritizes its own interests in solving any problem in the South Caucasus.

"These developments can do little other than cause rifts between Armenia and the present Russian Administration. After all, finding itself overstretched on a number of levels, Russia is currently looking for rational solutions in regions historically plagued by deep-seated tensions. As such, my concern is that the promised speed of a proposed resolution will blind every stakeholder to inherited complexities to the detriment of Azerbaijan."

Expert also touched on Pashinyan's dreams in the South Caucasus regarding the West and the European Union. According to him, although Pashinyan wants more European mediation in the South Caucasus, especially in the issue of border delimitation and the Zangazur corridor, this seems unrealistic within the framework of the Russian factor.

"The suggestion of any European intervention in the Zangazur Corridor appears rather unrealistic, once the current international situation is taken into account. In a better world than ours, such optimistic recommendations might be progressive and helpful, but with global tensions at an unprecedented height, this is more akin to a comforting delusion than any realistic political proposal."

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Elnur Enveroglu is AzerNews deputy editor-in-chief, follow him on @ElnurMammadli1

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9 June 2023 11:37 (UTC+04:00)

Rena Murshud Read more

An Azerbaijani delegation was in Italy for the contract signing in the presence of representatives of the Defense Ministers of the two countries, Azernews reports.

The Italian concern Leonardo announced the conclusion of a contract for the supply of C-27J transport aircraft for the Azerbaijani Air Force.

Originally linked to the energy sector, the cooperation between Italy and Azerbaijan is now extended to defense industry products thanks to the valuable input of the working group of the Italian Ministry of Defense. The agreement is part of a large-scale modernization program for the Azerbaijani Armed Forces, which are increasingly paying attention to the products of Italian industry, the head of the company representative stressed.

It is noted that the C-27J Spartan aircraft is capable of performing a wide range of tasks for the defense and protection of civilians, "considered the ideal aircraft" for various tasks, paratroop and cargo landing, special forces operations, humanitarian aid, and disaster relief.

Also, recall that Italy's Leonardo has been closely cooperating with Azerbaijan's AZAL since 2006. During the entire period of cooperation, many projects were implemented, including the supply of aircraft, helicopters and more. Among the projects of recent years are the supply of a navigation system and an aircraft landing system at international airports built in the liberated territories of Azerbaijan.

Besides, initially linked to the energy sectors, the collaboration between Italy and Azerbaijan is now also extended to defense industry products thanks to mutual relations between the two countries, and the valuable contribution provided by the Italian Ministry of Defense working group.

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Rena Murshud is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @RenaTagiyeva

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9 June 2023 15:47 (UTC+04:00)

Kazakhstan intends to sell electricity to Turkiye and Europe through Azerbaijan, Azernews reports, citing Kazakh Energy Minister Almassadam Satkaliyev telling at the Astana International Forum.

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9 June 2023 10:11 (UTC+04:00)

Within the Astana International Forum, Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov met with Serik Zhumangarin, Deputy Prime Minister of Kazakhstan - Minister of Trade and Integration, co-chair of the Joint Intergovernmental Commission, Azernews reports, citing the Azerbaijani Energy Ministry.

It was noted that the visit of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan in April this year and the signed documents created great opportunities for the comprehensive development of bilateral relations and strengthening of multifaceted partnerships. The current growth dynamics in trade turnover between the two countries was assessed as an indicator of the development of trade and economic relations.

During the conversation, issues related to the wide use of export-Import potential, increasing transport and logistics opportunities, cooperation in the fields of agriculture, as well as the joint investment prospects were discussed. Opportunities related to the export of Kazakh oil from the territory of Azerbaijan were considered. It was noted that, transportation of Kazakh oil through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline provides diversification of energy supplies. From April 2023 to the end of the year, it is planned to transport about 1.125 million tons of Kazakh oil through the BTC.

At the meeting, it was agreed to hold an online meeting within the Intergovernmental Commission in September-October of this year in order to jointly evaluate the issues arising from mutual activity on cooperation priorities and to determine the next steps.

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9 June 2023 16:38 (UTC+04:00)

Minister of Energy Parviz Shahbazov, who participated in the Astana International Forum, spoke at the session on Regional development in renewable energy: alternative ways to ensure energy security, Azernews reports, citing the Azerbaijani Energy Ministry.

Emphasizing that the development of green energy is currently encouraged by energy transition, environmental protection policy, as well as concerns about energy security, the Minister said that renewable energy sources are one of the alternatives that provide diversification for sustainable energy supply.

It was stated that Azerbaijan is developing "green energy" in order to ensure the energy security of its partners and not itself, and to become a country of green growth with a clean environment by 2030. According to our renewed strategic energy partnership with the European Union, green energy is one of the sources of additional gas supplies from Azerbaijan to European countries. Extensive use of renewable energy sources allows Azerbaijan to become both an exporter of green energy and increase its export opportunities due to large volumes of saved gas.

Also, cooperation with international energy companies on more than 28 GW of green energy projects, market research confirming the commercial feasibility of production and export of green hydrogen implemented with the support of the EBRD, commissioning of production capacities of 7 GW by 2030 and plans related to the export of green energy were discussed: It is planned to export 4 GW of green energy to Europe via the Caspian-European Green Energy Corridor, and 1 GW to Turkiye and Europe via Nakhchivan, which has been declared a green energy zone. The entry of our country into the European energy market in a new status is supported by the EU.

It was noted that Azerbaijan is now transferring its strategic development experience related to oil and gas resources and their access to diversified infrastructures to global markets to green energy. Our strategic guide in the implementation of this new mission is the President of Azerbaijan Mr. Ilham Aliyev`s will and determination.

The event continued with panel discussions. Companies from Kazakhstan and the countries represented at the event were invited to participate in the projects on green energy and energy transition in Azerbaijan.

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9 June 2023 13:27 (UTC+04:00)

Laman Ismayilova Read more

Azerbaijan has been represented at the Revelations International Biennial of Crafts and Creation, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary at Grand Palais Ephemere.

The Azerbaijan stand was set up at the biennale with the support of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and the organization of the Azerbaijani Embassy in France, Azernews reports.

A modern installation "Under one sun" created by Elvin Nabizade for the Venice Biennale in 2017 was exhibited at the biennale.

The Azerbaijani Ambassador to France Leyla Abdullayeva, Assistant to the President of Azerbaijan Anar Alakbarov, Executive Director of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Anar Alakbarov, Deputy Culture Minister Saadat Yusifova, head of the Azerbaijan-France Inter-Parliamentary Connections Working Group Soltan Mammadov, President and CEO of the Grand Palais in Paris Jean-Paul Cluzel, Azerbaijani and French deputies attended the opening ceremony of the Azerbaijani stand.

In her speech, the Azerbaijani Ambassador to France Leyla Abdullayeva highlighted the projects implemented by the Heydar Aliyev Foundation for the promotion of Azerbaijani culture and art.

Noting that the works of talented national artists have been exhibited in Paris many times with the support of the foundation, the ambassador stressed that the installation at the Azerbaijan stand reflects the rainbow and that it embodies peace and a clear future in Azerbaijan.

Assistant to the President of Azerbaijan Anar Alakbarov, Executive Director of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Anar Alakbarov said that the author of the installation Elvin Nabizade, is one of the talented sculptors of the Azerbaijani contemporary art.

Pointing out that E. Nabizade's works are exhibited in many well-known galleries worldwide, Anar Alakbarov emphasized that this art work had a special place in the Venice Biennale. Among the numerous works exhibited at the biennale, this installation attracts attention with its uniqueness.

President and CEO of the Grand Palais in Paris Jean-Paul Cluzel expressed his gladness with Azerbaijan's participation in the Revelations Biennale. He underlined that the main goal of the biennale is to identify and promote talents in the field of artistic creativity. Revelations is a cultural message of peace and solidarity. The Azerbaijan stand reflects the message of the biennale.

Sculptor Elvin Nabizade, the author of the "Under one sun" installation, thanked the Heydar Aliyev Foundation for the chance it created for him.

He spoke about the creation of the work. After ending the Karabakh conflict, which was going through a 44-day war in Azerbaijan, the sculptor decided to give music a new - second life, and thus the installation "Under one sun" was created.

The installation consists of 44 pieces of music in the shape of a rainbow, which is a symbol of luck, is a symbol of Azerbaijan's multiculturalism, the unity of different nationalities and peoples living in our country.

The Azerbaijan stand, prepared with the support of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, which contributes to the protection of the national and moral values and promotes the recognition of the Azerbaijani culture throughout the world, attracted the attention of not only visitors, but also international artists, who participated in the biennale.

Around 400 artists from 30 countries participated in the biennale.

The Revelations International Biennial of Crafts and Creation will run until June 11.

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9 June 2023 16:59 (UTC+04:00)

Laman Ismayilova Read more

All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature has hosted a creative evening of the People's Artist of Azerbaijan, Honored Art Worker of Russia, film director, screenwriter and photo artist Tofig Shahverdiyev.

The evening was organized by the Russian office of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, the Azerbaijan Cultural Center and the All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature, Azernews reports.

Tofig Shahverdiyev is a member of the Russian Union of Artists, the Guild of Russian Film Directors, the International Guild of Professional Photographers. He is a laureate of many international prizes, including the Golden Eye Award.

The participants of the creative evening viewed a photo exhibition themed "Thousand-Faced Second", which will last until June 30.

A short films "Lagich", "Baku" and "Peaceful military music" were screened as part of the event.

Opening the evening, Director General of the Foreign Literature Library Pavel Kuzmin expressed gratitude for the cooperation of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and the Azerbaijan Cultural Center.

"When look through photos taken by Tofig Shahverdiyev, the words from a well-known song come to mind: Don't think about the seconds down, the time will come, you will understand, probably. They whistle like bullets at the temple: moments, moments, moments. Great happiness when a person can catch this moment. The ability to recognize your inner world in photographs is art. You understand that every person has a soul, feelings, emotions. This unites us. Thank you for your look, for your soul, which you revealed to us," said Pavel Kuzmin.

Head of Humanitarian Programs at the Russian representative office of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Tamilla Ahmadova thanked the Foreign Literature Library for its cooperation, noting that this joint work is a modest contribution to the great friendship between Russia and Azerbaijan.

"Photography was supposed to be the tenth muse on the Olympus of the Arts. It's not just an image on paper. This is our history. It was not for nothing that Einstein said: What a blessing that there is a photograph, because the moment that was yesterday is our door to the future. Tofig Rzakulievich masters this skill perfectly. He has a unique style and manner. You will have the opportunity to peer into his work and see what dynamics, what play of light. He has some extraordinary flair to catch the moment that we could pass by and not even notice. A talented person is talented in everything. In addition to photography, he brilliantly shoots films. I am pleased that today you will see three wonderful films - "Lagich", "Baku" and "Peaceful Military Music". The last film is especially relevant today. It tells that people in military uniform can speak not the language of weapons, but the language of notes," she said.

Director of the Azerbaijan Cultural Center Nisa Mustafayeva thanked the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and personally Vice-President Leyla Aliyeva for the full support of the projects of the cultural center.

"Tofig Shahverdiyev was brought to the cultural center by Tamilla Ahmadova, and she was the instigator of all the beauty that we see today. Today we have an acquaintance with a master, an artist. It seems to me that the words of William Thackeray about photography are ideally suited to creativity, to everything that Tofik Shahverdiev does: The art of photography is to make the familiar new, and the new familiar," said Nisa Mustafayeva.

"I have both Azerbaijani and Russian in me. Therefore, I shot the first two films in Azerbaijan, and the next ones in Russia," said Tofig Shahverdiyev.

He also thanked the organizers and guests of the evening for their interest in his work.

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9 June 2023 13:48 (UTC+04:00)

The exact date of the next visit of President of the Republic of Turkiye Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Azerbaijan has become known, Azernews reports.

On June 12, he will visit the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and the next day - Azerbaijan.

According to the information, on June 13, the Turkish leader will stop in the fraternal Republic of Azerbaijan. During the visit, meetings with high-ranking officials of this country are planned.

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9 June 2023 14:31 (UTC+04:00)

Today, a trial will be held over the Azerbaijani serviceman Husein Akhundov, who got lost on April 10 of this year and crossed into the territory of Armenia, Azernews reports.

The trial will take place in a court of general jurisdiction in the territory of Western Zangazur. Huseyn Akhundov's "criminal case" will be considered by Judge Napoleon Oganyan.

It should be noted that false accusations were made against the soldier of the Azerbaijani army Hussein Akhundov. He is accused of "killing" a 57-year-old security guard in the Syunik region.

Recall that the servicemen of the Azerbaijani army Agshin Babirov and HuseIn Akhundov disappeared due to limited visibility in adverse weather conditions in the Shahbuz region of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic on the border with Armenia. On April 13, the RA Ministry of Defense announced their detention.

Later, in the Armenian segment of the Web and in a number of media, footage was circulated showing how Armenians beat and brutally torture Husein Akhundov, who was taken hostage.

A criminal case has been fabricated against our soldiers on the basis of false accusations.

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9 June 2023 14:09 (UTC+04:00)

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has participated in the opening ceremony of the first stage of the Alat Free Economic Zone.

Chairman of the Board of the Alat Free Economic Zone Authority Valeh Alasgarov informed the head of state of the works done.

The Alat Free Economic Zone occupies a total area of 850 hectares. The construction work started on the 60-hectare area (Zone 1, Stage 1), which is the initial development stage of the Free Economic Zone.

The head of state viewed the conditions created in the Business Center of the Alat Free Economic Zone.

The Business Center`s building, which covers a total area of 16,000 square meters, consists of three functional parts.

The foundation stone of the Alat Free Economic Zone was laid on July 1, 2021 with the participation of President Ilham Aliyev.

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9 June 2023 17:36 (UTC+04:00)

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has signed a decree on amendments to the "Action Plan for the implementation of the Strategy for Children for 2020-2025".

According to the decree, the Cabinet of Ministers, the State Committee on Family, Women and Children, the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of the Population should ensure the preparation of a new law "On the rights of the child".

The project preparation period will cover 2023-2024.

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9 June 2023 17:18 (UTC+04:00)

On June 9, 2023, Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan Jeyhun Bayramov met with European Union Special Representative for the South Caucasus Toivo Klaar, Azernews reports.

During the meeting, the parties exchanged views on the process of normalization of Azerbaijani-Armenian relations, the current state of the negotiation process mediated by international partners, including the European Union, and discussed regional security.

Minister Jeyhun Bayramov once again brought to the attention of the position of the Azerbaijani side on the current situation on the peace agreement, discussions on unblocking transport and communication lines in accordance with the obligations, as well as on the issue of delimitation.

The opposite side noted that the EU supports the process of normalization of relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia and stated that in the future it will spare no efforts to continue contacts between the political leaderships of both countries in this direction.

At the same time, the parties exchanged views on the prospects for cooperation between Azerbaijan and the European Union.

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9 June 2023 18:07 (UTC+04:00)

Ambassador of Ukraine to Azerbaijan Vladislav Kanevsky thanked the friendly Azerbaijani people for the next humanitarian aid and noted that after arriving in Ukraine it would be sent to the disaster zone, Azernews reports.

He said that in addition to this assistance, 20 tons of fuel were also sent: It is intended for equipment and ships used in rescue operations. We can say that our strategic partnership has reached an even higher level. This is true and sincere friendship."

Note that, a huge dam in southern Ukraine has been destroyed, unleashing a flood. Thousands of people have been evacuated from low-lying areas either side of the river Dnipro.

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10 June 2023 00:33 (UTC+04:00)

On June 9 at 10:50 p.m., the information disseminated by the Ministry of Defense of this country about the firing of different types of firearms and mortars on the positions of the Armenian armed forces located in the direction of the Garaiman settlement of Basarkecher district by units of the Azerbaijani Army is completely false and untrue.

"We categorically deny this information spread by the other side," the Ministry of Defense said.

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9 June 2023 09:00 (UTC+04:00)

Five out of seven people, who were missing after massive flooding following the destruction of the Kakhoka dam in southern Ukraine, have been found dead, said the local mayor of the Nova Kakhovka city, Azernews reports, citing Anadolu Agency.

"Today it became known that out of seven people who were grazing cattle, five drowned. We are currently engaged in the evacuation of the remaining two people," Vladimir Leontyev told Russian media.

Leontyev said that the emergency services have started pumping out water, after which the process of restoration will start.

He accused Ukraine of preparing the sabotage and said that multiple US-made HIMARS missiles hit the dam.

"Overflights by drones were carried out, they knew perfectly well where each HIMARS missile hit, they knew the state of the hydroelectric power station, and struck the final blow at the vulnerable areas," he said.

Russia and Ukraine on Tuesday accused each other of damaging the Kakhovka dam, which led to the flooding of the neighboring settlements.

Moscow accused Ukraine of attempting to cut Crimea off the freshwater it receives from the Kakhovka Reservoir, formed by the dam, while Kyiv claimed that Russia tries to slow an expected counteroffensive.

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9 June 2023 10:53 (UTC+04:00)

By Abdul Kerimkhanov, Day.az Editor-in.Chief

On June 8, it became known that the EU civilian mission in Armenia (EUMA) plans to establish three additional operations centers in Gafan, Ijevan and Yeghegnadzor in the coming months, gradually reaching full readiness in the near future. This was stated by Head of Mission Markus Ritter while receiving a delegation of the Council of the European Union (EU) Working Group on Eastern Europe and Central Asia (COEST) together with EU Ambassador Andrea Wiktorin.

He noted that in the first quarter of its activity, the mission carried out over 300 patrols from its centers in Gerus, Jermuk and Martuni. Patrols cover more than 3800 km every week.

On the same day, Michael Rott, chairman of the Foreign Relations Commission of the German Bundestag, expressed hope that Azerbaijan would also agree to the activities of the EU civil mission from the Azerbaijani side. However, according to him, there were no optimistic signals in this regard. Rott said this in an interview with journalists in Yerevan.

"We are grateful to the Armenian government for inviting the EU civil mission to conduct monitoring in Armenia. We are pleased to announce that the EU mission will expand its activities in the near future. And we hope that the Azerbaijani side will also agree to the activities of a similar mission from the Azerbaijani side," he said.

A German journalist, political scientist, historian, former adviser to the German government Alexander Rahr in a comment on the activation of the EU mission in Armenia and its attempts to infiltrate Azerbaijan, said that Armenia is ready to come under the protective wing of the European Union.

"Apparently, Yerevan believes that it is better to hide under the wing of the European Union than Russia," the German journalist emphasized.

Our interlocutor also noted the lack of funding for the Armenian economy:

"The Armenian economy desperately needs investments and capital. And, alas, Russia is under sanctions. The European mission, which contributes to the settlement of the military conflict, for Pashinyan today seems to be an important prospect for stability in the region."

As for Azerbaijan, it does not want to return to the old days, when the European Union lectured it on every corner on issues of values and democracy. Baku does not want to experience any more such "colonialism" from the West. Baku also does not need the protection of the European Union, it has its own good relations with Russia and Turkey," Alexander Rahr concluded.

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9 June 2023 19:35 (UTC+04:00)

The Netherlands was Georgia's major foreign direct investor country in the first quarter of this year with $239.6 million, followed by Japan with $63.2 million and the United States with $54.7 million, the National Statistics Office of Georgia reported in its latest figures on Friday, Azernews reports, citing Agenda.ge.

The largest share of the FDI was registered in manufacturing, where the figure reached $226.3 million, as well as in trade ($90.7 million) and transport ($43.3 million).

Overall, foreign direct investments in Georgia totalled $496.6 million in the first quarter, down 13.7 percent compared to the same quarter of 2022 and up 53.3 percent from the data of Q4 2022.

Georgian Deputy Economy Minister Irakli Nadareishvili said the growth of foreign direct investments was the result of the investment environment the Georgian Government and Georgian business had been creating in recent years.

Georgia maintains a particularly high rate of foreign direct investment - in the first quarter of 2023, the inflow of foreign direct investment to Georgia was almost half a billion dollars - and it should be emphasised that compared to 2019, the period before the pandemic, this is an increase of almost 56 percent, he said.

Nadareishvili highlighted that almost 51 percent of the FDI had come from European Union member states, a five-fold increase compared to the figures from 2019.

This is especially important when Georgia is taking another important step in terms of both economic and political rapprochement with the European Union, Nadareishvili said.

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9 June 2023 20:40 (UTC+04:00)

The rate of rejection of applications for Schengen visas from Turkiye continues to increase, with Estonia, Finland and Belgium topping the refusal rates in 2022, data showed, Azernews reports, citing Anadolu Agency.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has described the visa problem with some Western countries as "political blackmail," saying the issue will be resolved soon.

About 906,000 Schengen visa applications were made from Turkiye in 2019, with 9.7 % of them being rejected. The rejection rate increased to 15% in 2022.

The comparison has been made with 2019 figures because of travel restrictions in 2020 and 2021, when coronavirus was at its peak.

Russia given more visas despite sanctions

According to data from the Schengen Visa Info website, 15% of the 778,000 Schengen visa applications made from Turkiye in 2022 were rejected.

In the same period, Russian visa rejections amounted to 10%, despite Western sanctions over the country's war on Ukraine.

Estonia tripled refusals

As many as 1,517 applications were made from Turkiye to the Estonian Embassy in Ankara for a Schengen visa in 2022. But 52.1% of these applications were rejected, meaning Estonia did not issue a visa to one in two applicants.

The refusal rate of visa applications made through the Estonian Embassy in Ankara in 2019 was 16.95%.

Finland rejected 4 out of 10 applications

After Estonia, Finland had the second-highest rejection rate in Schengen visa applications made from Turkiye last year.

In 2022, 4,073 applications were made to the Finnish Embassy in Ankara. Of these, 1,558 were not granted visas and the rejection rate was 40.6 %.

The rate is striking as the mission in Ankara rejected 23.20% of the 3,676 applications made in 2019.

Belgium refused every 3rd applicant

Belgium's Consulate General in Istanbul did not grant visas to 2,566 out of 7,211 applications made in 2022, with the rejection rate being 37.7%. Thus, Belgium rejected more than one out of every three applications.

The rejection rate of the consulate in 2019 was 33%.

Sweden

Last year, 13,553 applications were made to Sweden's diplomatic mission in Turkiye, of which 22.7% were rejected. The refusal rate was 20% in 2019.

Denmark's rejection rate nearly tripled compared to 2019

Denmark, with 34% in 2022, became the fourth country to reject most visa applications from Turkiye.

Last year, 5,407 applications were made from Turkiye to Danish missions and 1,822 of them were rejected.

In 2019, as many as 7,511 applications were made and 13% of them rejected.

Hence, the data shows, the rate of rejection of Danish visa applications from Turkiye almost tripled in three years.

Norway's rejection rate decreased compared to 2019

Norway rejected 1,482 of 4,648 applications from Turkiye in 2022, with a 31.9% rejection rate.

In 2019, however, the Nordic country had turned down 1,537 out of 3,442 applications from Turkiye, and the percentage of visa denials was 38%.

75% of Schengen applications made to 4 countries

The EU countries where Turks applied for visa the most last year are Germany, Greece, France and Italy, respectively.

More than 591,000 of the 778,000 applications made from Turkiye for the Schengen visa was made to the diplomatic missions of these four countries.

With 21%, Germany had the highest rejection rate among the countries with the highest number of applications. France followed it with 13.4%.

Italy, on the other hand, rejected the least number of visas -- 7%.

Germany

In 2022, 223,699 people from Turkiye applied to Germany's diplomatic missions in Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir for Schengen visas. But more than 48,000 of these applications were rejected, and rate of refusal exceeded 21%, almost double than that in 2019.

More than 253,000 applications were made to German diplomatic missions in 2019, and the number of rejections was recorded as 30,823, which is 12.1%.

Greece

After Germany, the country to which Turks made the most visa applications was Greece in 2022.

As many as 164,829 applications were made to the diplomatic missions of Greece in Ankara, Edirne, Istanbul and Izmir. Of these, 15,913 were rejected, and the rate of rejection was 9.65%.

In 2019, Athens rejected 6,359 out of 148,551 applications, and the percentage of visa denials was 4.2%.

France

France turned down 115,114, or 13.4% of visa applications from Turkiye last year.

In 2019, the figure was 143,478, or 6.3%. Hence, the visa refusal rate doubled compared to 2019.

Italy, one of the countries with the lowest rejection rate

In 2022, 87,648 Schengen visa applications were made to the diplomatic missions of Italy in Turkiye. Of these, 6,259 applicants, or 7%, were unable to obtain visa.

The figure was recorded as 6% in 2019.

The Netherlands

Last year, 48,807 applications were made to the diplomatic missions of the Netherlands. Of these, 9,714, or 19.90% of the applications, failed to acquire a visa. In 2019, the visa refusal rate was 15.6%.

According to the Embassy of the Netherlands in Ankara, 30,114 visa applications were made from Turkiye in the first five months of this year, and the rejection rate was 12%.

Most of these refusal decisions were made due to missing documents, the mission said.

Spain

In 2022, 27,664 visa applications were made from Turkiye to the diplomatic missions of Spain. Of these, 2,837 were rejected, with Spain being one of the least rejecting countries, with a 10% refusal rate. However, the figure was 4.3% in 2019.

The Spanish Embassy in Ankara said more than 16,000 visa applications were approved in Turkiye in the first five months of 2023, while nearly 10% of requests were rejected.

Hungary

Some 19,531 applications were made from Turkiye to the diplomatic representations of Hungary in 2022 and 2,366 of them were rejected, which is 12%. The percentage was 11 in 2019.

The rejection rates of other Schengen Area countries in 2022 are as follows:

Latvia (33%), Lithuania (24%), Austria (20%), Czechia (18%), Malta (15%), Switzerland (15%), Slovenia (15 %), Portugal (11%), Poland (10%), Slovakia (9 %) and Luxembourg (7 %).

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
9 June 2023 21:45 (UTC+04:00)

As part of the state visit of the Amir of the State of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, to Uzbekistan, a Memorandum of Cooperation in the legal field was signed between the Government of the Republic of Uzbekistan and the Government of the State of Qatar, Azernews reports, citing UZA.az.

A Cooperation Program for 2023-2025 was developed and approved to implement the agreement between the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Uzbekistan and the Ministry of Justice of the State of Qatar.

Based on the main tasks of the two countries ministries, the Cooperation Program provides for the acceleration of interaction in relevant areas, their saturation with effective practical measures. It is planned to cooperate in the development and implementation of a curriculum on innovative approaches, rule-making, and exchange of experience to improve the efficiency of the justice system of the two countries, as well as to increase the legal consciousness and legal culture of citizens, enhance the provision of legal services, train lawyers, improve administrative procedures, digitalization.

It is also envisaged to organize and conduct joint events  conferences, workshops, trainings, mutual participation in international affairs of the two countries, and the organization and conduction of collaborative research to exchange experience.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
You can reach Ishani Desai at 661-395-7417. You can also follow her at @_ishanidesai on Twitter.
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For International Travelers to U.S., South Oregon Coast Provides Bold, Rugged Adventure

Published 06/01/23 at 4:22 p.m.

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff





(Coos Bay, Oregon)  The entire Oregon coast is still slowly getting discovered by international visitors to the U.S., moving up the layers of awareness to those from other lands. Some of it is happening by word-of-mouth from their countrymen, even being passed down from generation to generation, as parents or older friends who had stumbled onto these shores in the last two, three decades rave about it. (Above: Arch Rock Viewpoint between Brookings and Gold Beach, were glowing phytoplankton shows off one late summer's eve, photo courtesy Steven Smith / Solution 7 Media)

Not that the Oregon coast is off people's radar outside these borders: it's just that the newbies are steadily growing. Now, after the pandemic had all but killed off international tourism all around, this year is starting to see a good influx again.

For many international visitors, it's not necessarily the upscale hotels and the foodie / brew scenes that draw them. They're looking to rough it, and that's beginng to draw more interest in the whole region.

This puts the south Oregon coast in a prime position. There are more chunks of that stretch that are wild and untamed than vestiges of civilization. Towns are fewer and farther between than up north. And when those from foreign lands arrive, at least one visitor center says they're seeking a few more thrills.

The south Oregon coast is defined as the approximately 180 miles of shoreline from Florence down to the California border.

The Coos Bay  North Bend  Charleston Visitor & Convention Bureau (otherwise known as Oregon's Adventure Coast) said when international travelers walk through their doors, it tends to be a lot of Canadian, Australian, UK, German and Chinese folks  though that's more of an anecdotal observation than a hard numbers study.

Janice Langlinais, executive director of Oregon's Adventure Coast, said their interests tend to align with the name of her organization.

For our area, most of our international visitors want to experience our outdoor adventures, she told Oregon Coast Beach Connection. They are very interested in the Oregon Dunes, Shore Acres State Park and the waterfalls out at Golden and Silver Falls State Natural Area.

So what are the really rugged parts of the south Oregon coast foreign travelers would enjoy as a destination? A quick overview (largely north to south):



Photo Sheila Sund

Oregon National Dunes Recreation Area. 40 miles of dunes are the big attraction, which makes for some wondrous, surrealistic, minimalist photography as well as zipping around on various vehicles. It surrounds the areas of Reedsport and Coos Bay.



Shore Acres, courtesy Manuela Durson - see Manuela Durson Fine Arts for more

Between Coos Bay and Bandon. It's easy to find long stretches of hidden beach with no access for miles around, and in the hills just overlooking Bandon the mountain biking trails are vast and adrenaline-inducing. Shore Acres makes for waves some 200 feet high in the winter, which you can watch safely from above.

Arizona Beach, courtesy Manuela Durson - see Manuela Durson Fine Arts for more

Bandon to Port Orford. 20 miles of mostly remote beaches are here, often requiring a few miles of hiking between beach accesses. Floras Lake hosts the insanely beautiful Blacklock Point and its colorful cliffs. Many of the campgrounds are out in the true wilderness. Bandon Visitors - Port Orford



Hills beyond the beach near Port Orford, photo courtesy Oregon Department of Forestry

Port Orford to Gold Beach. Now you're heading into a long stretch with no towns, and mostly sprawling views and soaring heights that give way to very unpopulated beaches. Humbug Mountain towers at 1700 feet with trails over five miles long there and back  and that's not counting the rough country behind the mountain. In Gold Beach, the river jet boat attractions are exhilarating. Gold Beach Visitors



Natural Bridges, courtesy Manuela Durson - see Manuela Durson Fine Arts for more

Gold Beach to Brookings / California Border. Not much is touched by human construction here except the highway. One of these untamed highlights is the Samuel H. Boardman Scenic Corridor, some 15 miles of exceptionally wild beach trails, cliffs and oddball structures. The Natural Bridges area creates a fantasy world atmosphere, and the offshore sea stacks and arches also evoke some Lord of the Rings moments as well.

Kayaking On the South Coast. Many of the rivers here are perfect for this year-round, but when summer and fall's calmer conditions descend you can hit the ocean and wander through some of these spectacular arches and other rocky features.

South Coast Hotels - Where to eat - Maps - Virtual Tours





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Oregon Dunes, courtesy Travel Lane County

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Andre' GW Hagestedt is editor, owner and primary photographer / videographer of Oregon Coast Beach Connection, an online publication that sees over 1 million pageviews per month. He is also author of several books about the coast.

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Now that the public is allowed to know the truth regarding the Hunter Biden Laptop Scandal, after more that 2 1/2 years of deception by the corrupt Corporate Media Kabal, propropagandidats all, and the discredited Deep State, we have NOW learned that the infamous laptop is far less about the Biden Boy's fetish for pornography, narcotics and Russian whores, and far more about Hunter's pivotal role in the Biden Crime Syndicate's selling of deep access to our foreign adversaries, and to what extent it has compromised our national security: What is your opinion about this possible coordinated Treason?

It is imperative that we know the truth of what may be the greatest scandal in our Republic's history, and all aforementioned parties prosecuted for their crimes against the People.

Currently, our Two Tiered Justice System is constructed to protect all Democratic Socialists, their corrupt "Journalist" spokes-sheople, and their Deep State enablers ... so why bother.

It is Donald Trump's fault.
Opponents of school choice claim that private schools are unaccountable because they don't have to satisfy every testing mandate required of traditional public schools, yet private schools are subject to the highest standard of accountability: parents

Critics claim that school choice would drain money from struggling public schools, but state spending on public education continues to increase, and schools would only lose students if they aren't meeting their needs

Opponents claim that school choice harms academic achievement, yet most studies have found that school choice programs improve the academic performance not just of students who participate in the programs but also of those who remain in public schools

This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation . The author of this post is Kaitlyn Shepherd Universal school choice is one step closer to becoming reality in North Carolina, despite several common myths being repeated by critics and the media.On May 17, the North Carolina House approved a bill entitledThis proposal wouldThe Senate Education Committee sanctioned a similar bill, Senate Bill 406, on April 26, and some provisions of that bill were also incorporated into the chamber's biennial budget proposal.North Carolina's Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), which gives the families of eligible students vouchers to use toward tuition and fees at private schools, remains popular. Polling results released by the John Locke Foundation in January 2023 revealed that 67% of respondents support the program.Yet despite the OSP's appeal, opponents of school choice continue to circulate myths to hinder similar opportunities from being extended to all K-12 students. News outlets and politicians have recently recycled several of these common excuses.Let's examine a few.Myth 1: School choice would funnel money to unaccountable private schoolsIn an apocalyptic address delivered on May 22, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper alleged that legislation to universalize the OSP wouldBy accountability, opponents of school choice usually mean that private schools aren't subject to all the testing requirements with which public schools must comply. This fact, they claim, makes private schoolsConspicuously absent from the conversation is any discussion of the fact that few, if any, traditional public schools are held accountable for poor standardized test results - even when, despite increased spending, large numbers of students can't read or do math at grade level.For example, end-of-grade reading scores for 2021-2022 indicated that only about half of North Carolina students in grades three through eight were reading at grade level.Fewer Than Half of North Carolina Public School Students Tested Proficient for Reading in Most Grades in 2021-22Indeed, school choice opponents proceed from a flawed conception of what accountability is. Lawmakers continually spend more and more on the public school system, yet test scores remain virtually stagnant or even decline.True accountability begins with parents, who love their children the most and are best positioned to know each child's unique needs. Empowering parents to choose the school that works best for their child ensures that schools are responsive to students' needs. If parents aren't happy with the education their child is receiving at a private school, they can enroll their child elsewhere. Schools must cater to the needs of students and families or risk losing money.Myth 2: School choice would drain money from public schoolsAn opinion piece that originally appeared in The News & Observer on May 8 proclaimed,Going on, it stated,Regardless of the existence of school choice programs, students leave public schools for many reasons. For instance, they may graduate, move to another neighborhood or state, or become homeschooled. Schools already find ways adjust to these losses, as they do when families choose to participate in North Carolina's current Opportunity Scholarship Program.Additionally, although North Carolina has implemented the OSP since 2014, the mass exodus from public schools that school choice opponents predicted hasn't materialized. In the Tar Heel State, 20,377 students received OSP scholarships for the 2021-2022 academic year. For comparison, average daily membership (ADM) in the public school system during the same year was 1,357,681 students (note: ADM for 2022-23 is not yet available).If the OSP really siphoned money from public schools, one would expect spending on the public school system to decrease. Yet despite the OSP's existence, spending on public schools has only increased.Finally, let's not forget,only if families choose to leave public schools and participate in the OSP. If public schools do their jobs well and serve the needs of students, most families will choose to stay.Myth 3: School choice harms academic achievementA recent Economic Policy Institute article stated,It cited four statewide studies finding that voucher users scored worse than their public-school peers and one study of Milwaukee's voucher program that found an uptick in performance after voucher students returned to public schools.Some studies have found thatLong-term research, however, shows that these losses reverse after about four years. At that point, voucher users tend to score higher than their public-school peers.Most studies have found that school choice programs improve participants' test scores, as shown in the 2022 edition of the EdChoice review of research on private school choice. In fact, 11 of 17 studies examining the test scores of students who participate in school choice programs found positive gains.Research Findings of Positive vs. Negative Effects of School Choice Programs on Participants' Test ScoresStudies have also shown that the presence of school choice programs correlates to improved academic performance of students who remain in public schools. Twenty-five of 28 studies found that public schools in areas where school choice programs operated experienced improved outcomes. One study found no visible effects, while only two reported declining performance.Improved Academic Performance of Public Schools in Areas with School Choice ProgramsIn 2020, researchers from North Carolina State University published a study specifically looking at results from the Opportunity Scholarship Program. They reported findingtest score increases among OSP participants.These studies show that school choice improves academic outcomes for public and private school students alike.ConclusionAs more and more states work to enact and expand school choice programs, they will encounter myths like these. Policymakers, families, and advocates can take heart, however. The fact is, school choice programs can be confidently implemented for the benefit of all students.
FORMER Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara has thrown his weight behind Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) leader Nelson Chamisas candidature ahead of the August 23 general elections.

In an interview with Alpha Media Holdings digital radio and television station,Heart & Soul TV (HSTV), Mutambara described Zanu PF leader and presidential candidate Emmerson Mnangagwa as an average and incompetent leader.

I have a lot of respect for my colleagues in the CCC. I have a lot of respect for president Chamisa. He is doing a great job, Mutambara said on HSTV FreeTalk programme.

I try as much as I can to advise quietly, but they are doing a good job and they deserve our support.

They could fix one or two things here and there but I communicate privately and tell them what I think can been done, added Mutambara who served as Deputy Prime Minister between 2009-13 representing the MDC-M during the Government of National Unity.

Mnangagwa won the disputed 2018 presidential election by a slight margin, with Chamisa claiming the Zanu PF leader was aided by the courts and the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to win the poll.

Mutambara, however, warned that it would be difficult to change the status quo citing the unfair playing field which favours the ruling Zanu PF party.

Its a tragedy because I dont see anything positive coming out of this election because already there is the story around the voters roll, where people go and cant find their names. The voters roll is not available to the opposition. The political opposition is being harassed. Job Sikhala (CCC MP for Zengeza West) and (Transform Zimbabwe leader Jacob) Ngarivhume are locked up as we speak.

What kind of election can we have when your opponents are locked up and cannot have political rallies?

Sikhala has been in pre-trial detention since June last year facing the charge of inciting violence during the funeral of slain CCC activist, Moreblessing Ali.

Ngarivhume is serving a four-year jail sentence for inciting violence. He has, however, appealed against both conviction and sentence, but the ruling in his case was last week reserved indefinitely.

A number of opposition members face various charges.

Mutambara accused Mnangagwas government of being a haven of corruption and incompetence.

Mnangagwa is a crude version of the late Robert Mugabe on corruption, on tribalism, he said.

On incompetence, he is worse because he has no finesse. Mugabe had an element of finesse around him, but this one is very crude in terms of naked corruption and naked incompetence.

Mutambara had no kind words for Mnangagwa who he said was very insecure.

These guys are insecure, very insecure, very incompetent and they are very quick to use force because they doubt their legitimacy, yet Mugabe had a veneer of legitimacy as the founding father of the nation, who brought independence and carried out the land reform programme, Mutambara said.

Mutambara hinted that he might return to active politics after the elections.

If they continue failing, I might have to reconsider my retirement but for now I am teaching. I am a professor and director at the University of the Future of Knowledge, but I keep my options open. Newsday
Former Sitka, Alaska-based family medicine physician Richard McGrath, DO, has been sentenced to 17 years in prison for sexually assaulting three women, Alaska's News Source reported June 9.

Dr. McGrath, a former employee of Sitka Community Hospital, agreed to a plea deal where he was charged with one count of third-degree sexual assault in three separate sexual assaults that occurred in 2018 and 2019. His medical license has since been revoked.

Fifteen of the years to which he was sentenced were suspended, meaning the 79-year-old will serve two years in prison.






Tomah (Wis.) Veterans Affairs Medical Center physician Mary Jo Lanska, MD, has been fired after accusations she misdiagnosed veterans suffering from brain injuries and other neurological disorders, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported June 8.

Dr. Lanska, who was fired May 16, performed disability exams on veterans seeking benefits for traumatic brain injury and other service-related injuries.

Last year, an investigative reporter from KARE 11 began interviewing several veterans with neurological conditions who claimed Dr. Lanska denied they were suffering from these conditions and they were thus denied disability benefits.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has since launched a review of Dr. Lanska's disability exams, which includes up to 1,000 claims. According to the report, around 600 veterans who received a disability exam from Dr. Lanska will be able to undergo a new exam.
Smita Rouillard, MD, associate medical director of Oakland, Calif.-based The Permanente Medical Group, joined Becker's to discuss ways that physicians leverage their power in her health system.

Editor's note: This response was edited lightly for brevity and clarity.

Question: How can physicians leverage their power in the healthcare industry?

Dr. Smita Rouillard: As part of a physician-led, integrated and value-based organization, the Permanente Medical Groups have always operated differently. Our model demonstrates how physicians can partner with hospitals and health plans to deliver 21st century medicine. We believe physician leadership drives exceptional care for our patients. Physician leadership guides every action, and every decision is made with the patients' best interests at heart.

We know, through our nearly 80-year history at Kaiser Permanente, that value-based care drives better quality. We see that in our NCQA results; we see that in our CMS results. Better quality equals better cost outcomes. Physician leadership enables us to derive this through quality efforts versus costs alone. For example, as a gastroenterologist, I thought it was interesting to see how a large fee-for-service organization approaches colonoscopy surveillance and diagnostic care. This now requires pre-authorization while a screening colonoscopy does not. Why? To prompt physicians to use guidelines in decision-making.

We operate differently with guidelines at the front of physician decision-making and due to our prepaid model, the patient, physician and health plan interests are all in alignment. As a first-line test for screening the average-risk individuals, we want to use fecal immunochemical tests, which patients can use at home and then send to a lab for analysis. Depending on the outcome of those tests, a physician may order a colonoscopy with no pre-authorization and no out-of-pocket co-payment for the patient. We use gastroenterology society guidelines (for example, those provided by ACG, AGA, ASGE, etc.) to determine the interval for colonoscopy surveillance  without the need for pre-authorization. It is a perfect example of the difference of true integration and physician leadership with patients at the center of the decision-making, not in the middle.
Less than a year after the Texas Medical Board withdrew a disciplinary order against ophthalmologist David Stager, MD, they were forced to suspend his medical license, according to a June 5 report from D Magazine.

On June 2, the board suspended Dr. Stager's license following a May arrest for domestic violence in which the physician was reportedly under the influence. The board said they believe "Dr. Stager's practice of medicine would be a threat to public welfare," according to the report.

In 2018, Dr. Stager faced disciplinary action after being involved in a domestic dispute while in an impaired state. The disciplinary matter said he had to refrain from drinking alcohol or using dangerous drugs or controlled substances.

He was also required to participate in the Texas Medical Board's drug testing program and submit to drug and alcohol screenings. If he did not comply, the board threatened to suspend his license.

He was also required to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, be monitored by a work site monitor for a year and participate in Alcoholics Anonymous 10 times a month.

In August 2022, after three years and nine months, the order was terminated due to Dr. Stager's compliance. Now, 10 months later, his medical license has been suspended pending further action, according to the report.

Dr. Stager has an office in Plano, Texas, and is affiliated with Medical City Dallas and Children's Medical Center Dallas. He practices pediatric ophthalmology.
New Hyde Park, N.Y.-Northwell Health is expanding into the United Arab Emirates through a new partnership with Abu Dahbi-based provider Burjeel Holdings.

Through the partnership, the two entities will launch a new neuroscience institute at Burjeel's flagship facility in Abu Dhabi. Northwell will work with Burjeel to transfer knowledge related to neurological health, according to a June 9 Northwell news release.

The facility will provide treatment for neurological disorders such as autoimmune brain disorders, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis.

Souhel Najjar, MD, executive director and senior vice president of the Northwell Health Neurology Service Line, will lead the institute.
Madison, Wis.-based American Family Children's Hospital launched a pediatric heart transplant program, according to a news release.

The heart program took two years to create and is ready to take its first patient, Sonya Kirmani, MD, medical director of the UW Pediatric Heart Transplant Program, told NBC affiliate WMTV on June 8.

"We have a growing population in South Central Wisconsin and so we recognize the need for having more services locally for children," she told the news outlet.

The UW Health Transplant center already provides lung, liver, pancreas and kidney transplants for pediatric patients.
An unauthorized party gained access to Petaluma (Calif.) Health Center's network, possibly breaching patients' protected health information.

On March 14, Petaluma shut off access to its network when it noticed suspicious activity on it and began investigating the incident.

The investigation determined that an unauthorized party accessed the network and may have accessed patient information such as names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, medical information and health insurance information, according to a June 1 breach notification from Petaluma Health.

Petaluma Health Center said it has no evidence that the patient information has been misused, but it is providing notice to all affected individuals. It did not mention how many patients were affected.

The hospital's network has since been secured.
The Michigan Health and Hospital Association has launched a new campaign to create a pipeline of nurses and other healthcare workers with the aim of addressing the severe staffing shortages affecting Michigan hospitals and health systems.

The campaign, dubbed Mi Hospital Careers, began June 12 and will run until September 2023, according to a June 8 press release from the Michigan Health and Hospital Association. The campaign focuses on encouraging young Michigan residents to choose healthcare careers.

"Healthcare careers, particularly nursing, provide an opportunity to contribute to a meaningful, long-term and successful career," Amy Brown, MSN, chief nursing officer of Lansing, Mich.-based E.W. Sparrow Hospital, said in the release. "Our state and our current pool of nurses continue to age, creating a situation where we need young professionals entering the workforce to consider nursing careers to meet the future demand of our hospitals."
From expanding health plans to developing destination programs and ramping up their ambulatory surgery center presence, health systems are focused on growth in many areas.

CEOs and CFOs from Trinity, Northwell, Intermountain and IU Health recently told Becker's about their biggest opportunities for growth.

Editor's note: Responses are lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mike Slubowski: CEO of Trinity Health (Livonia, Mich.): You have to shoot to where the puck is going, and ambulatory surgery is rapidly moving to freestanding ASCs, so we have partnerships with a number of physician groups to do freestanding ambulatory surgery. We're starting to open a lot more freestanding ASCs. Care is shifting away from hospital-based ambulatory surgery as well because patients and payers don't want to cover the additional cost of being hospital-based. There is such a proliferation of ASCs being developed by investors or physician-owned groups and health systems like ours. In the future, I think you're going to see an oversaturation of ASCs, which we are already seeing in some markets.

Janie Wade: CFO of Intermountain Health (Salt Lake City): Our biggest growth opportunity is our insurance plan, SelectHealth. It allows us to move into markets like Colorado, where we're going to be operating a plan in 2024 for Medicare Advantage and the individual exchange. We have a partnership in Colorado with UCHealth in a clinically integrated network, which is something we think will deliver a lot of value to the community in terms of value-based care in a way that's never been done in Colorado before.

There's also tuck-in growth opportunities including ASCs, imaging centers and physician practice acquisitions. We don't have any large merger and acquisition targets on the horizon. It's primarily growth in our existing markets in the communities we already serve and bringing our quality of care, affordability and innovation into those communities with new providers and services.

Michael Dowling. CEO of Northwell Health (New Hyde Park, N.Y.): Our biggest growth is in outpatient care. A lot of surgeries are moving outpatient, so we have to get ahead of that. Some think we are only a hospital system, but only about 46 percent of our business is from our hospital sector today. Home care is going to grow phenomenally, especially given the new technology that's available. Digital health will also dramatically expand.

We're also looking at expanding into new geographic areas and markets. It's about positioning your offerings in places close to where people live, so you reduce the inconvenience of people having to travel long distances for care when it should be available to them closer to home. When you do that, you increase market share. We're constantly increasing our market share by being very aggressive about going to where the customer is and providing the highest quality care that we can. Part of that is also being able to recruit top-line, quality physicians. When you do that, you attract new business because you have competencies that you didn't have before. It's a combination of all of these things, but there's certainly no limit to the opportunities in front of us. We're not in a world of challenges; we're in a world of opportunity. The question is are we aggressive enough and do we have enough tolerance for some risk? We need to be as aggressive as we possibly can to take advantage of some of those opportunities.

Jennifer Alvey. CFO of IU Health (Indianapolis): Our big area of focus is on our destination programs. We are on the cutting edge of oncology, neurosciences/neurosurgery, and we are really expanding our cardiovascular service line, too. We've doubled down on those three programs in partnership with the IU School of Medicine to lead in the area of physician education, research, clinical programs and having nationally known physicians in those specialties. We also expect to see a lot of material growth in those three areas in the next several years.
As hospitals and health systems begin to navigate potential use cases for generative AI technology such as ChatGPT in healthcare, David Higginson, chief innovation officer of Phoenix Children's Hospital, told Becker's that he isn't "over regulating" the technology just yet and is encouraging staff to experiment.

"I'm hesitant to say that staff should come through me as the CIO to get permission to use this," Mr. Higginson said. "I want people to experiment in a safe way."

Mr. Higginson said he wants physicians and staff to be conscious of what they put into ChatGPT as it is a public domain, and that the technology is not yet ready for diagnosis work, but for uses that aren't direct patient care. He encourages staff to experiment and to be inquisitive about the technology.

"Our approach is allow people to use the tool, experiment with it, but be cautious about it," Mr. Higginson said. "And when they think they have something, then let's talk about it and figure out how to operationalize it."

Mr. Higginson said there are myriad use cases for this technology, but that Phoenix Children's Hospital isn't looking at how it should be incorporated at patients' bedsides just yet, and said the organization is "getting its feet wet."

"For me, GPT feels like a new grad out of college," Mr. Higginson said. "It has lots of information, it is performing in the top 5 percent of its class, but it doesn't have a lot of experience yet and doesn't have a lot of the nuances, but who doesn't want a new grad working for them?"

Mr. Higginson said this is why he isn't ready to start building a governance committee to regulate the use of ChatGPT.

"My mantra at the moment is let's experiment, let's be cautious, and let's see what's possible," Mr. Higginson said. "I'm looking at use cases where ChatGPT can do well."

Right now, Phoenix Children's Hospital is looking at how the technology can relieve administrative burdens for its staff, including how ChatGPT can answer patient inquiries, and asking ChatGPT questions about policies and procedures.

"We're focusing on use cases that can make people's lives easier, not if the technology can cure cancer or give someone a diagnosis," Mr. Higginson said. "I think that will come, but we're not ready for that just yet."
Elmer Polite has been appointed president of Brentwood, Tenn.-based Lifepoint Health's eastern division, where he will oversee the system's acute care hospitals in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Mr. Polite was made president of the eastern division after initially serving in an interim capacity. He previously served as CFO for the eastern division.

In the new role, he will provide operational oversight of 14 facilities that make up Duke LifePoint Healthcare, a joint venture partnership between Lifepoint and Durham, N.C,-based Duke University Health System.

Before joining Lifepoint in 2021, Mr. Polite served as the chief financial executive for Prisma Health's midlands market in Columbia, S.C. In this role, he oversaw the financial management and operations for six hospitals. Before Prisma, he served as system CFO and chief staffing officer of HCA Healthcare's Macon, Ga., market, and also as CFO of Franklin, Tenn.-based Community Health Systems' Georgia market.

Mr. Polite has a master's degree in finance from Arlington, Va.-based DeVry University and is a member of the Healthcare Financial Management Association and American College of Healthcare Executives.
The CEO of an independent community hospital in Colorado is raising concerns about Intermountain Health's intent to expand its insurance plan into the state next year.

"Threats from larger health systems in and around our communities are a few of the main items keeping us up at night," Chris Thomas, president and CEO of Grand Junction, Colo.-based Community Hospital, said. "In our region, [Intermountain] acquired the largest hospital, and is now bringing their health insurance products into our market. If they are successful at growing the number of lives covered by their health insurance products, we fear they will block access to our hospital through tiered products, driving more of the covered lives into their hospital."

Mr. Thomas delivered his comments at a June 8 Senate Finance Committee hearing on consolidation within the healthcare industry.

Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health merged with Broomfield, Colo.-based SCL Health in April 2022, adding eight SCL hospitals to the health system. The merger included SCL's St. Mary's Medical Center, which is one of two hospitals in Grand Junction.

Intermountain Health is also planning to expand its insurance plan, SelectHealth, into Colorado in 2024, which the health system has described as its "biggest opportunity for growth." SelectHealth will offer Medicare Advantage and individual plans on the Colorado exchange, pending regulatory approvals.

"SelectHealth has a unique opportunity with a lot of experience that helps us in this space, and we can scale faster than brick-and-mortar can," Curt Howell, SelectHealth's Colorado market president, told Becker's in April. It's probably not a great time to build a hospital, but we probably can bring on half a million to a million members in Colorado over the next five to 10 years."

SelectHealth currently has more than 1 million members across Utah, Idaho and Nevada.

"Our concern is that if they come in and develop insurance products in our community, obviously St. Mary's and Intermountain facilities will be tier one facilities," Mr. Thomas told Becker's. "If they do achieve that many lives in the state of Colorado, we fear that's going to take away from our number of commercially insured patients."

Mr. Thomas said Community Hospital is working with other independent hospitals in the state to build an integrated network that can partner with a large commercial payer.

Editor's note: Mr. Thomas did not name Intermountain Health in his comments before the Senate Finance Committee, but confirmed with Becker's he was referring to the health system.






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On June 8, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly ceremonially signed a bill to increase the criminal penalties for people convicted of battery of a healthcare provider.

The law, which takes effect July 1, amends the crime of battery to define battery against a healthcare provider as "a battery committed against a healthcare provider while such provider is engaged in the performance of such provider's duty."

Under the new law, battery against a healthcare provider is now a Class A misdemeanor.

"The number of stories we've heard over the last few years of healthcare workers being harassed and abused while doing their jobs is appalling and unacceptable," Ms. Kelly said in a news release. "This bill is a win for our state, showing that both sides of the aisle can come together to save lives and protect healthcare workers."

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also recently signed a bill to enhance criminal penalties for people who knowingly commit assault or battery upon workers at a hospital.
Burnsville, Minn.-based Inspired Spine Surgery Center celebrated the grand opening of a new, state-of-the-art facility specializing in minimally invasive spinal surgeries.

The new facility is equipped with the most advanced equipment and a modern design for patient comfort and safety, allowing them to receive complex spinal care in an ambulatory setting, according to a June 8 press release.

An observation and training lab featuring three surgeons from across the country was held in the new facility, and it will open its doors to the general public on June 23.

The center was founded by Hamid Abbasi, MD, PhD. He specializes in performing minimally invasive trans-Kambin oblique lateral lumbar interbody fusion procedures at Inspired's facilities.
Dublin Airport will handle more than 100,000 passengers a day during the summer

The DAA, the operator of Dublin Airport , has dismissed Ryanairs call to use land the semi-state company owns to immediately provide extra car parking for passengers as simplistic nonsense.

The DAA, whose CEO is former Ryanair executive Kenny Jacobs, has pointed out that it would require planning permission to provide additional car parking infrastructure.

The DAA has been warning passengers for the past two weeks that demand for car parking at the gateway is extremely high. It has urged travellers without an existing booking for a car space to consider using public transport or a taxi to travel to the airport for their flight.

Smooth sailing at Dublin Airport as travellers jet off on busy Bank Holiday with effortless departures

A former Quickpark long-term parking facility beside the airport hasnt been used since before Covid. It over almost 17 hectares (almost 42 acres) and has permission for 6,122 long-term car parking spaces as well as office space for staff.

In 2021, the courts determined that developer Gerry Gannon was entitled to a near 2.2m judgment against a company controlled by transport entrepreneur John OSullivan that operated the car park.

Mr Gannon subsequently put the site up for sale with a 70m price tag. Last autumn, he accepted an offer from the DAA. However, independent Senator Gerard Craughwell said in January that he had referred the planned purchase by the DAA to the competition watchdog.

Ryanair, whose group chief executive is Michael OLeary, claimed on Friday morning that the DAA was claiming its car parks are full as a reason to pressure the Competition Authority to wave through approval of its monopoly grab for the Quickpark car park.

The DAA owns lots of land immediately surrounding Dublin Airport (such as the Dublin Airport Driving Range for example), which could be opened as a temporary car park at very short notice, releasing pressure on Dublin Airport car parking and more importantly keeping the cost of car parking low for customers, it claimed.

But opening land for use as a car park requires planning permission and cannot be done arbitrarily.

DAA refutes the simplistic view that we can simply open up fields at Dublin Airport this summer and conjure up additional car park spaces, a spokesperson for the airport operator said on Friday.

They added: Car parking requires infrastructure which requires planning permission. We are running the fifth largest transatlantic hub airport in Europe, not a County Fair.

Ryanair has also said that Transport Minister Eamonn Ryan should instruct the DAA to withdraw its bid for the Quickpark car park to encourage other investors to introduce much needed competition for car parking availability at Dublin Airport.

The DAA should stick to growing traffic at Dublin Airport, and reducing its expensive passenger fees, claimed a Ryanair spokesperson.

The DAA says that its passenger charges are the lowest of any airport in a European capital.

DAA is far from being a monopoly, a spokesperson for the state-owned company said. DAA does not set its own charges as we are a regulated business unlike airlines who do set their own fares.

We leave airlines, including a world class operator like Ryanair, to run their very profitable businesses while we continue to invest in vital strategic infrastructure to connect Ireland to the world, they added.
Lender Halifax is shutting down two branches here, suggesting to Larne customers that they could take an indirect 90-minute bus journey to Ballymena if they still want to use a branch.

Its decision to shut its premises in Lurgan and Larne leaves it with 11 branches in Northern Ireland. Staff are to be offered jobs in other branches.

It follows a trend among all banks and building societies to drastically reduce their branch numbers in recent years due to the rise in online banking.

One customer with an account in Lurgan said it would inconvenience a fair few, especially in rural areas like Waringstown, Dollingstown, Magheralin and Donaghcloney.

A Halifax spokesperson said: As many customers now choose to bank online or through their mobile app, visits to our Lurgan and Larne branches have fallen over recent years.

The local Post Offices offer everyday banking, with cash also available at close by free-to-use ATMs, alongside other ways to bank such as online, phone and mobile banking services.

The spokesperson added: Halifax will also be introducing a community banker in Larne, to provide face to face services to customers in the local community, including making payments, account enquiries and online banking support.

All colleagues who work at these branches will be offered a role at another branch or in another part of our business.

A closing branch review document relating to Lurgan says that two-thirds of users of the bank were aged 35 to 74, and 7% were 75 and over.

And 80% of customers had used other Halifax branches, online banking or telephone banking. Some 184 of its customers used the branch regularly in 12 months to January 2023.

Branch transactions in Lurgan had fallen 45% in last five years, while cash machine transactions were down 25%.

In Larne, those aged 35 to 74 also accounted for around two-thirds of users, while 71% of its customers had used other branches, online banking or telephone banking.

However, 14% were 75 and over  a much higher proportion than Lurgan.

Just over 200 customers had used the branch regularly in the 12 months to January 2023.

But branch transactions were down 47% in last five years, while cash machine transactions were down 27%.

Santander, Tesco and Post Office cash machines were nearby, while Post Office banking services were also available in the town.

However, the closest alternative branches were in Newtownabbey and Ballymena, the bank said.

The review document explains that Newtownabbey is 16.5 miles away. There are hourly indirect buses, via Belfast or Carrickfergus, with a journey time of around 70 minutes.

And Ballymena, at 19.6 miles away, was also offered as an alternative. There are hourly indirect buses to Ballymena, via Belfast or Carnlough, with a journey time of around 90 minutes.

Customer accounts in Lurgan are being moved to Portadown, the bank said. It pointed to Halifax branches in Portadown and Lisburn and to banking services available at Lurgan Post Office. Portadown is five miles away with a direct bus taking 35 minutes and Lisburn 12 miles away, with a direct bus taking 40 minutes.

There are also Bank of Ireland and Ulster Bank cash machines in the towns Market Street

Asked if a 90-minute indirect bus journey from Larne to Ballymena was a practical suggestion, Halifax said: For face-to-face banking, alongside the Newtownabbey and Ballymena branches, customers in Larne can use the local Post Office  this is a three-minute walk away from the branch and provides banking services for personal and business customers.

In addition, after the branch has closed, Halifax will be introducing a new community banker in the area  who will provide face-to-face banking support for as long as the community needs it. Well be discussing with the local community which locations, and days, will work best for the community banker to visit.

Read more Belfast-based banker held to account for his bid to fleece three elderly Halifax customers

East Antrim DUP MP Sammy Wilson said: I am disappointed to learn that Halifax plan on closing their Larne branch in November. This will be a further blow to the Main Street and those, especially the elderly, who do not have access to internet banking.

It is also important to note that this will affect those who have taken the decision to cancel their broadband subscriptions because of the cost of living crisis.

He said the closure would mean the loss of another cash machine. Businesses will be more restricted in where they can deposit cash to, as the financial regulator has prevented the Post Office taking large cash deposits.

"It is crucial that Halifax put in place measures to ensure businesses can deposit cash with them moving forward.

Scott Kennerley, director of financial services at the Consumer Council, said: While many have made the switch to mobile banking, we know that some rely on face-to-face banking services.

Our advice to Halifax customers is to contact their bank to discuss their banking needs and the options that are available to them.

"For consumers in towns such as Larne and Lurgan, there is also the option of switching to a different banking provider in the area, as well as using the Post Office.

"Basic banking services is something the Post Office provides for all banks in Northern Ireland which allows you to pay in cash and cheques, withdraw money, and check bank balances.
Ballymena bus manufacturer Wrightbus has received 32m in new funding as part of a 50m package of support backed by UK Export Finance.

The government body has given a guarantee on 80% of a loan to Wrightbus from Barclays Bank, with the financing intended to support the manufacturers ambitious export strategy.

It will enable Wrightbus to deliver orders to new markets, such as Germany and North America, as well as additional orders in existing markets like Singapore and Hong Kong.

The announcement comes a week after Minister for Investment Lord Johnson visited Wrightbus site in Ballymena ahead of the Northern Ireland Investment Summit taking place later in the year.

Lord Johnson said: Wrightbus is a fantastic example of a British business seizing the vast exporting opportunities around the world and embracing clean growth. UK Export Finance support for Wrightbus will be a great boost to its exporting journey, helping the company to create more local growth and jobs.

This is the type of success we will build on at this autumns Northern Ireland Investment Summit, which will be a catalyst for securing more investment, creating more jobs and empowering more businesses to seize exporting opportunities.

The company generated 27% of its revenues from exports in 2022 but wants to grow that by nearly a fifth by the end of 2023.

Wrightbus plans to double its workforce by 2026, creating 1,000 new green jobs with most of the roles based at the companys Ballymena hub.

The companys hydrogen-powered, zero-carbon buses are in strong demand globally with over 600 buses of all types expected to be delivered by the end of 2023, up from 450 last year. Wrightbus now has the largest hydrogen fleet in the UK, with 100 buses in operation.

Jean-Marc Gales, Wrightbus CEO, said: UKEF and Barclays support has been fundamental to the development of Wrightbus. The flexible products suit the needs of our business, which is growing exponentially and requires financial headroom.

We are excited about our next phase and working within the Ballymena and wider Northern Ireland community to deliver innovative British technology to the global market.

James Binns, global head of trade and working capital at Barclays, said: Barclays are proud to work alongside UKEF to enable British companies to get the competitive edge when it comes to exporting.

This new funding builds on our previous support to Wrightbus, providing crucial flexibility which will enable further growth in exports and domestically, continuing the vital pivot towards zero-emission sales.
Escape to the Chateau stars Dick and Angel Strawbridge are making a big move after being dropped by Channel 4.

The pair appeared on the programme, which follows their renovation of a 19th-century chateau in Martigne-sur-Mayenne, France, for nine series, beginning in 2016 and ending in December 2022.

Dick was raised in Co Antrim and attended Ballyclare High School.

Deadline first reported that the broadcaster had ended its relationship with the Strawbridges earlier this month. According to the article, an independent HR investigation was ordered by Channel 4 after Two Rivers Media, the company that produces the Escape To The Chateau franchise, raised concerns about the couple.

Following a review, we have taken the decision not to work with Dick and Angel on any new productions in the future, a Channel 4 spokeswoman said.

The outlet then obtained a foul-mouthed audio recording, in which Angel can be heard calling a producer a f***ed up little c***.

It has now been reported that the couple have applied to close their castle company Chateau-de-la-Motte Husson Limited.

MailOnline claims that the application to Companies House was signed on 9 May, with the company allegedly set to be dissolved within the next six weeks.

All of the chateaus events are nowmarked unavailable, with weddings no longer able to take place there.

The Strawbridges have been contacted for comment.

Escape to the Chateau

This development follows their annoucement of a UK tour on Thursday (8 June).

Its been nearly a year in the planning and we simply could not wait to tell you that we are hitting the road for our biggest ever theatre tour! the couple wrote, while vowing to set the record straight.

Escape to the Chateau came to an end in December 2022, with the couple saying they believed the show was going out on a high. They said in a statement last month: It was a Strawbridge Family decision early last year to conclude Escape To The Chateau.

The couple added in a statement via their joint Instagram page: We know there are lots of stories in the press right now. Its not worth us even trying to comment or give context, because anything can be made into a good headline. We understand.

They continued: There are two sides to every story and from the incredible support we have received, most of you know that. We are proud of who we are, and we feel we must do what we believe to be correct, that is in fact what kept Escape to the Chateau unique, and whilst we have indeed parted ways with Channel 4, we are hugely grateful to them and their teams for their support and creativity over the years.

The future truly could not look more exciting and we thank you for your continued love and support.

A Channel 4 spokesperson said: Channel 4 is taking an active role in challenging unacceptable behaviour in our industry. Following a review of our processes in 2021 we have made it easier to raise complaints both formally and informally.

We require all our production partners to follow our Supplier Code of Conduct and when concerns are raised with us, they will be taken seriously and action will happen to ensure they are investigated and addressed appropriately. There is always more to do and alongside our suppliers we are committed to building safe, inclusive and professional working environments.
Broadcasting veteran Anne Diamond has revealed she has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

The GB News presenter said she had received the diagnosis the same day as finding out she was to be made OBE.

After beginning her career in regional news, Diamond went on to work for both ITV and the BBC, becoming a star of daytime TV in the 1980s and 1990s.

She presented programmes like BBC Ones Good Morning with Anne And Nick, TV-ams Good Morning Britain and TV Weekly.

Anne Diamond (Edmond Terakopian/PA)

She joined GB News in 2022 to host weekend breakfast shows with Stephen Dixon, though has been off air for six months.

Speaking to GB News Dan Wootton, she revealed she had undergone a double mastectomy in her fight against breast cancer  which she described as a long journey.

I havent been on a world cruise, which is what I know social media has been saying because Im well known now for loving cruises, she said.

Its been a fight against breast cancer. Thats what its been. Its been a long journey. And five months later, Im still not at the end of the journey, but Im through it enough to come back to work.

Diamond recalled how she had learned the news on the same morning she was told via email that she had been awarded an OBE for her campaigning on cot deaths.

She and her then husband Mike Hollingsworth lost their son Sebastian in 1990 after he died from sudden infant death syndrome (Sids)  commonly called cot death.

Diamond joined forces with the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths (FSID), now known as The Lullaby Trust, and the Department of Health to launch the successful Back to Sleep campaign.

She was made OBE in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to public health and charity.

It was a wonderful moment and that was like 9.30 in the morning, she told GB News.

But I knew then, because Id already seen my GP, that I had to go to a breast cancer screening thing later in the morning. I thought I would just go for a mammogram, and a couple of tests and Id be free in an hour.

I spent the entire morning at my local hospital where they did everything, biopsies, X-rays, CT scans, a couple of mammograms, everything, and by lunchtime I was still there.

And a lovely lady came with a lanyard around her neck that said MacMillan Cancer Care and I knew then it was serious.

Diamond added that she did not have advice for others as she was still going through it, but added that she was well enough to return to work.

She was made OBE in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to public health and charity, following her campaigning on cot deaths (Anne Diamond/PA)

I had the full works, the full mastectomy. This is the first time Ive talked about it, so its quite difficult but Ive had the full works. The first operation I had was nine hours long, she said.

Ive had a load of radiotherapy, which I found very hard too.

So its been a journey, but Im not pretending for a minute that I am extraordinary, because I am fully aware that a quarter of women in this country are going through what Ive just gone through and I dont have any advice to give.

I only have empathy.

Diamond will return to GB News on Saturday to host Breakfast with Dixon.

She has also been a presenter on radio shows on LBC, Radio Oxford, BBC London and BBC Berkshire as well as a panellist on Loose Women and The Wright Stuff  a topical debate show hosted by journalist Matthew Wright.

In 2002 Diamond appeared on Celebrity Big Brother and became the second person to be evicted.
Jennifer Coolidge has said that she almost turned down TV show The White Lotus as she was feeling depressed.

For her role as Tanya McQuoid in the HBO series, Coolidge, 61, won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for best supporting actress in a limited series, anthology series or television motion picture.

Talking to British GQ about how she felt when she was told about plans for The White Lotus, Coolidge said: I was, like, not in the mood. I was depressed, I was very depressed.

Jennifer Coolidge said that she almost turned down her role in The White Lotus (Charlotte Rutherford)

The White Lotus is a comedy drama by Mike White that depicts groups of holiday makers at a luxury hotel resort.

Season two of The White Lotus portrays the demise of Coolidges character, with the show set in Sicily, Italy  the stars fantasy destination.

Discussing what she had hoped for the second series, Coolidge said: I had encouraged Mike to tell an Italian story, I said I would love to be in Italy or something, riding around on a Vespa with all these men reaching out and trying to light my cigarette.

Thats my fantasy. But then I guess that suggestion got me killed.

Jennifer Coolidge attending the Vanity Fair Oscar Party (PA)

The 61-year-old also spoke about why she has never started a family.

Friends have encouraged the Legally Blonde actress to adopt, but Coolidge says that immaturity had stopped her from having children in the past.

She explained: Im very, very immature, I think that has kept me from having children, because Im sort of a child.

Maybe if I had kids, I wouldve had to have grown up.

Musing on her dating habits, Coolidge also revealed that she has never had a laidback boyfriend.

Ive never had, like, a laid back boyfriend that was just full of joy, you know? Like, someone who laughs at all your shortcomings. Thats never who I choose for myself, she said.

Eddie Kaye Thomas and Jennifer Coolidge during a photocall promoting American Pie: Reunion (PA archive)

Known also for her role as Stiflers mum in American Pie, Coolidge used to live with co-star Eddie Kaye Thomas in the early noughties in Los Angeles.

Explaining that the two had a platonic relationship, she said: I wasnt the love of his life, he had girlfriends. My bedroom was across the hallway from his.

Jennifer Coolidge will be speaking at the GQ Heroes conference in association with BMW, taking place at Soho Farmhouse, Oxfordshire from July 19 to 21.

The summer issue of British GQ is available on newsstands from June 13.
Greta Thunbergs event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival sold out in under 24 hours (PA)

Tickets for an event featuring climate activist Greta Thunberg at the Edinburgh International Book Festival sold out in less than 24 hours, organisers have said.

Ms Thunberg will take part in the Its Not Too Late To Change The World event at the Edinburgh Playhouse on August 13, where she will give a speech and have an in-depth discussion about her climate change activism.

Due to the demand, the event will now be livestreamed so audiences can watch from anywhere in the world, with the move sponsored by the Open University in Scotland.

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Book festival director Nick Barley said: When Greta Thunbergs event with Gemma Cairney sells out in less than a day, its clear that audiences are keen to play an active part in the climate conversation.

Thats why Im so pleased we can also livestream the event. I am incredibly grateful to the Open University for allowing us to open this event up to even more people from all over the world.

Susan Stewart, director at the Open University in Scotland, said: The book festivals approach to opening up access to books, literature and current debate complements our mission at the Open University to be open to people, places, methods and ideas.

Greta Thunberg was mobbed by supporters when she arrived in Glasgow for Cop26 in 2021 (Jane Barlow/PA)

We are also particularly dedicated to contributing to social and environmental justice by placing sustainability at the heart of our teaching, research and knowledge exchange.

I am proud that the Open University in Scotland is sponsoring this important event with Greta Thunberg and delighted that it will now reach an even wider audience via the livestream.

The event will be Ms Thunbergs first appearance in Scotland since she visited Glasgow in 2021 for Cop26.
A popular food review channel has given a Belfast pizza restaurant its seal of approval as the best theyve tried in the category of reliable and deliverable pie.

The Food Review Club (FRC) was full of praise for Belfast as a foodie destination.

They said Pizza Guyz won two awards last year for best takeaway and best pizza.

Their business model is to deliver fast, piping hot and on time from its stores on the Andersontown Road and the Ormeau Road.

FRC founder Matt Binge said Pizza Guyz was high quality pizza that people in Belfast should know all about.

Judging by the honking horns as he delivered his verdict, the bearded presenter has become a well-known face around the city having returned a number of times.

Tasting the pizza, he said: Id have this over a Neapolitan style all f****** day long. Keep your wood-fired nonsense, this is the one for me, I could eat the whole chuffing lot, and, you know what, I probably will off camera.

In this category of reliable, deliverable pizza, have we ever had a better one? I dont think we have.

Im going to give this a really big score today, Im going to give this an eight out of ten. For this style of pizza I dont think it gets better to be honest.

Weve got very, very high standards of pizza, its something thats growing on me, its close to my heart, its one of my favourite things to review: the cheese, the sauce, the cooking, the consistency, the people  fantastic, eight out of ten, massive review.

Pizza Guyz, yeah, officially certified.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ8IWNQgiLA

East Belfast pizza shop Flout! Pizza previously received a perfect ten out of ten.

The Tik Tok-famous reviewer Food Review Club told its 550,000 TikTok followers that it was on par with the best in the world.

At the time, Matt said he had travelled to Northern Ireland with the sole intention of trying one of their famous slices.

Along with getting a perfect score, Food Review Club said the New York-style cheese pizza he tried rivalled Lucalis, a Brooklyn restaurant considered by many as the best pizza in the world.
A 22-year old man who sexually assaulted his friend while she slept was jailed for nine months today.

Mateusz Zdanuczyk appeared at Belfast Crown Court where he was handed an 18-month sentence, which was divided equally between prison and licence.

With an address as the Simon Community on Belfasts Malone Road, Zdanuczyk admitted the charge of sexual assault by penetration, committed on April 6, 2021.

Crown barrister Neil Connor KC said that, prior to the incident, Zdanuczyk and the injured party had been friends and he had helped her decorate her flat.

Mr Connor said they had also kissed on a prior occasion, but that was the extent of any intimate contact.

In April 2021, the injured party had been the victim of an assault, and on April 5 she asked Zdanuczyk to stay at her flat as she was concerned about being on her own.

He stayed on April 5 without incident and they spent the following day in each others company taking drugs.

On the evening of April 6 they went to bed together and she fell asleep, and Mr Connor said that an unknown time thereafter she was awakened by the defendant, who was sexually assaulting her.

The prosecutor added: She has been asleep and therefore unable to consent to that sexual activity.

After he left, Zdanuczyk then sent the injured party a text saying: Im really sorry for everything that happened last night.

She told a friend what had happened, police were alerted and Zdanuczyk was arrested.

During interview, he gave a no comment response to questions put to him but later admitted the charge.

A defence barrister said Zdanuczyks guilty plea was an acknowledgement of his wrong-doing and that since the incident he had expressed remorse for what happened.

The barrister also spoke of a lack of criminal record and a diagnosis of Aspergers syndrome, which he said may have impacted on Zdanuczyks impulsive decision making.

After listening to submissions from both the Crown and defence, Judge Patricia Smyth addressed Zdanuczyk and said: A plea to sexual offence is of enormous value to the victim because it publicly vindicates her in her complaint.

Saying she was taking into account the fact Zdanuczyk was only aged 20 at the time of the incident and that large amounts of drugs had been taken, Judge Smyth said the text message sent in the aftermath did show genuine remorse for your behaviour at that time.

As well as being handed an 18-month sentence, Zdanuczyk was also made the subject of a five-year Sexual Offences Prevention Order and was placed on the sex offenders register for ten years.
BRI collaboration vital to innovation: Malaysian official

Xinhua) 11:06, June 09, 2023

KUALA LUMPUR, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Collaborations under the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), encompassing investments, research and development (R&D), and technology transfer, can play a vital role in driving innovation and addressing related challenges, a Malaysian official said on Friday.

These collaborative efforts can help bridge the digital divide, boost productivity, support capacity building, and foster economic development, thereby encouraging entrepreneurship and job creation, Malaysia's Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Chang Lih Kang said in his keynote address at the launching ceremony of roundtables commemorating the BRI's 10th anniversary here.

Chang said Malaysia could draw on China's remarkable aptitude for adopting and integrating technology into everyday life, and that China is reshaping the future of digital lifestyles, reinventing traditional industries, and catalyzing economic growth.

"I look forward to seeing more technology-driven, high-value added investments and collaborations between Malaysia and China, where the benefits of progress are shared among all members of society," he said.

Chang added that the two countries could also collaborate on the development of green hydrogen as well as in food security, both being challenges that many countries are facing.

"With China's notable advancements in agricultural technology, such as precision farming, agricultural machinery, and crop breeding techniques, joint efforts can enhance agricultural productivity, bolster food security, and promote sustainable farming practices," he added.

In conjunction with the 10th anniversary of the BRI, the Southeast Asia Research Center for Humanities (SEARCH) and the Center of Regional Strategic Studies (CROSS) have jointly launched the BRI 10th anniversary nationwide tour, the organizer said in a statement.

Through a series of roundtable meetings and seminars held across Malaysia, the project aims to showcase the achievements of Malaysia-China collaboration within the BRI framework, as well as to gather ideas and suggestions from various stakeholders, paving a clear path for future Malaysia-China cooperation under the initiative.

For his part, Chinese Ambassador to Malaysia Ouyang Yujing said the BRI is a cooperation platform aimed for common development, facilitating smooth trade and economic activities, in addition to building critical infrastructure across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

"With China and ASEAN countries continuing to deepen strategic coordination, more high-quality BRI projects will emerge to further boost the regional economy," he said, adding that Chinese efforts to develop various rail and other transport networks have found success and are well-received.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
A Belfast man who committed 16 offences while subject to a probation order was re-sentenced and jailed today.

Lewis Goodall appeared at Belfast Crown Court in September 2020 where he was placed on probation for three years.

The order was imposed for three offences committed in February 2019, but after breaching the order by both committing further offences and failing to engage with probation, the order was revoked.

The 24-year-old, of Malone Road, south Belfast, was back in court today, via a video-link with Maghaberry Prison, where he was re-sentenced for the February 2019 offences and was handed a nine-month jail term.

The original offences date back to February 22, 2019, when police received a call from members of the public regarding suspicious activity at a house on the Ravenhill Road.

Crown prosecutor Gareth Purvis said that when police arrived it was clear the property had been broken into, with Goodall detained at the scene while a co-accused made off on a bike.

Goodall also had a bicycle with him and investigations indicated it has been stolen during an overnight burglary at a property on the Cregagh Road.

Mr Purvis said that when Goodall was searched, items of jewellery and other items stolen from a separate burglary of a house on the Ravenhill Road were found on his person.

He was charged with two counts of handling stolen goods and one charge of burglary and was sentenced by Judge Stephen Fowler in September 2020, when he was made the subject of a three-year probation order.

Defence barrister Richard McConkey told Judge Patricia Smyth that Goodall was a young man with a significant history of mental health issues as well as ADHD and autism.

The barrister said these conditions hampered Goodalls work with both probation and other agencies, adding that part of the non-compliance was due to him being in and out of custody.

Mr McConkey also raised Goodalls issues with alcohol and drugs, which he said his client consumed to deal with difficulties in his life.

As she re-sentenced Goodall, Judge Patricia Smyth said he had squandered the assistance and support offered to him by probation by failing to engage with services designed to address his issues and offending behaviour.

She told him: You are a young man and everybody who had been involved with you has done their best to try to help you find a way out of the spiral of misery you are in.

Telling Goodall he now needs to take personal responsibility, the Belfast Recorder urged him to address his issues or else the same problems are going to arise when you get out of prison.
A 26-year-old man has been arrested in Lurgan, while police have searched a property in the area Chloe was last seen

Chloe Mitchell (21) has been missing since Friday, June 2, 2023.

Community Rescue Service volunteers brief before early morning Ballymena search for missing person Chloe Mitchell. Photo: Community Rescue Service Western District

Searches are continuing for missing Chloe Mitchell in Ballymena, Co Antrim (Photo: Community Rescue Service Western District. Inset: PSNI)

Searches are continuing in Co Antrim on Friday morning for Chloe Mitchell, a 21-year-old woman that was last seen in Ballymena a week ago.

The young woman was captured on CCTV walking in the town centre in the direction of James Street in the late hours of Friday 2 June, into the early hours of Saturday 3 June.

The PSNI and forensics teams searched a property in the James Street area on Thursday evening.

A 26-year-old man was also arrested in Lurgan on Thursday afternoon in relation to the case and is currently helping police with enquiries.

Search and rescue teams continue searches in Ballymena for missing 21-year-old

Searches involving Community Rescue Service volunteers continued until well after dark and have resumed on Friday.

CRS regional commander Sean McGarry has said the team is working closely with police.

He told the BBC: Our teams were using special equipment to assist with the search. We started yesterday morning in the early hours and went right through into this morning.

We took a break and now we are back at it as we speak.

The search is quite wide-ranging. The focus, of course, is in the last place where Chloe was seen.

Community Rescue Service volunteers brief before early morning Ballymena search for missing person Chloe Mitchell. Photo: Community Rescue Service Western District

He added: Our teams are working along the Braid River. Because it has been so dry through the past few weeks, there isnt a big flow in the river.

We are not searching on the basis that we think Chloe might have got into difficulties in the river, we are searching on the basis of it is within the vicinity of the search area.

We concentrate on all waterways and all areas as we carry out the search.

Sean McCarry is regional commander of the Community Rescue Service (Liam McBurney/PA)

Mr McGarry said quite a number of the team was involved.

We bring additional resources as we need them and the tasks come through to us from the police, he said.

Starting this morning, we have about 35 people on the job. We would expect that to increase throughout the day.

Chloes family have made a series of appeal on social media, asking anyone who may have information on her location or who may have seen her to get in touch with them.

Local community associations in Harryville and Ballykeel have also been involved in searches by residents, sharing posts online hoping for the young womans safe return.

Chloe Mitchell (21) has been missing since Friday, June 2, 2023.

PSNI Chief Inspector Arnie ONeill said: We are becoming increasingly concerned as to the whereabouts of 21-year-old Chloe Mitchell.

We are now aware that Chloe was last seen in the late hours of Friday June 2nd into the early hours of Saturday 3rd in Ballymena town centre. She was seen on CCTV walking in the direction of James Street.

He added: Chloe was wearing a green and black North Face style jacket, a white t-shirt, leggings and Nike trainers.

Anyone with any information is asked to contact 101, quoting reference number 2262 05/06/23.
Police are on the scene of a security alert in the Trench Road area of Newtownabbey. Picture: Aodhan Roberts/Belfast Telegraph.

Police are on the scene of a security alert in the Trench Road area of Newtownabbey. Picture: Aodhan Roberts/Belfast Telegraph.

A security alert in Co Antrim has ended.

Police and army bomb experts attended the scene in the Trench Road area of Newtownabbey on Friday.

A number of nearby businesses were evacuated as a precaution following the discovery of a suspicious object.

PSNI Sergeant Knox confirmed it was safely removed by Ammunition Technical Officers and taken for further examination.

However at this stage it is not believed to have been anything untoward, he said.

Members of the public, including motorists, had previously been asked to avoid the area.

Meanwhile, in a separate incident a man was reportedly hospitalised after being taken into the City Cemetery on the Falls Road by two masked men and shot once in his foot.

The incident happened on Thursday at around 10.30pm.

SDLP councillor Paul Doherty has said that the local community has been left shocked following the incident.

There can be no place for shootings anywhere, but the fact that this took place in a cemetery has upset many people in this area who have loved ones buried there, he said.
It was reported to the PSNI at 10.30pm that a man had been taken into the City Cemetery on the Falls Road by two masked men and shot once in his foot.

The victim of the gun attack has been taken to hospital for treatment.

SDLP councillor Paul Doherty has said that the local community is shocked after the incident.

This shooting was a despicable act and the fact that it took place within the grounds of the City Cemetery has left the local community both shocked and angry, he said.

"There can be no place for shootings anywhere, but the fact that this took place in a cemetery has upset many people in this area who have loved ones buried there.

The presence of masked men with guns on our streets is extremely sinister and has once again drawn attention to our community for all the wrong reasons. This is a place where good work goes on every single day, where people have each others backs and the men who carried out this attack have no support here.

I hope that the victim of this shooting makes a quick recovery from their injuries and would urge anyone with any information about what happened to come forward to police so that these gunmen can be apprehended and this weapon seized before it causes anymore harm.

Anyone with any information about the incident, or who may be able to help with the investigation, is asked to call police in Woodbourne on the non-emergency number 101, quoting reference number 2231 08/06/23.
The PSNI are examining a number of scenes as part of the investigation. Arthur Allison/Pacemaker Press.

Police are treating Chloe Mitchell as a high risk missing person and said it is completely out of character for her not to be in touch with her family.

The 21-year-old was was last seen in Ballymena a week ago.

The young woman was captured on CCTV walking in the town centre in the direction of James Street in the late hours of Friday 2 June, into the early hours of Saturday 3 June.

PSNI issues statement amid the ongoing search for missing Chloe Mitchell

Phillip Mitchell, Chloes brother, told BBC News NI he has been "broken" since his sister disappeared.

On Friday afternoon Mid and East Antrim District Commander, Superintendent Gillian Kearney, said the search is ongoing and a 26-year-old man remains in custody.

We are treating [Chloe] as a high-risk missing person, she added.

"I am appealing directly to Chloe to make contact with the police, family or friends so that we know you are safe and well.

"I am also asking the public to contact us if they have seen Chloe.

Intensive search underway for missing 21-year-old Chloe Mitchell

The Community Rescue Service has been conducting searches along the Braid River in the town.

Spokesperson Darren Harper described it as a "pretty significant operation" with difficult terrain presenting challenges for those involved.

"We do have the water technical team in the water and [on] the river banks and we also have ground teams searching other areas," he said.

Mr Harper also said the warm weather is posing additional challenges for personnel wearing specialist equipment.

Meanwhile, Superintendent Kearney said detectives are becoming increasingly concerned about Chloes safety.

"It is completely out of character for her to not be in contact with her family, who are being supported by specialist officers during this worrying time, she said.

"We have launched a criminal investigation into her disappearance and we are examining a number of scenes.

"A 26-year-old man was arrested in Lurgan yesterday and is currently helping police with their enquiries.

The PSNI are examining a number of scenes as part of the investigation. Arthur Allison/Pacemaker Press.

"Please look at the photograph of Chloe. She was last seen wearing a green and black Northface style jacket, a white t-shirt, leggings and Nike trainers.

"I would like to thank the public and search and rescue teams for all their help in trying to find Chloe.

"If you have any information, even if you think it might not be important enough to share, please contact police on 101, quoting reference number 2262 of 05/06/23. What you tell us could hold the key to finding Chloe."

Alternatively, information can be provided to Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 or online at www.crimestoppers-uk.
Gavin Robinson has said he is humbled after being crowned the new deputy leader of the Democratic Unionist Party.

The MP for East Belfast came out on top against Jonathan Buckley in vote by party MLAs and MPs on Friday.

He succeeds Paula Bradley as the DUP's second-in-command.

Mr Robinson entered politics when he was co-opted onto Belfast City Council in March 2010. He went on to become the Lord Mayor of Belfast and has been an MP since May 2015.

He is on the partys more liberal wing and is a close ally of DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson.

Mr Robinsons appointment will have to be ratified by the party executive at a later date. Sir Jeffrey Donaldson was also re-elect as party leader on Friday.

DUP chairman Lord Morrow said: Following our internal democratic processes Sir Jeffrey Donaldson MP has been re-elected as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and Gavin Robinson MP has been elected to serve as deputy leader.

Mr Robinson said he is humbled to be elected to the role.

"I look forward to continuing to work with colleagues at every level within the party as we seek to deliver on our election commitments, he said.

A new generation of unionists are stepping forward to serve at every level within our party and in service to Northern Ireland. We all share the desire to play our part to help shape Northern Ireland into an even better place to live and work.

I am excited that the DUPs membership is growing as more and more people step forward to play their part in their local areas.

I look forward to visiting every part of the country and playing my part in building and promoting the pro-Union cause as well as working to deliver on our plan for Northern Ireland.

Sir Jeffrey said: It has been an honour to serve as not only the DUPs leader but also the leader of unionism. I thank colleagues for their renewal of my mandate to serve.

I want to thank Paula Bradley for her service as deputy leader and party officer. Paula was returned to Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council at the recent local government election and she will continue to serve her constituents as well as remaining active within our ranks.

When first elected leader in July 2021 I said that my focus would be the restoration of Northern Irelands place within the United Kingdom. That remains my focus. Aligned to this objective is the coalescing of pro-union people around the DUPs message.

The way forward for unionism must mean less hunting for heretics and more encouragement for converts. We remain focused on delivering on our plan for Northern Ireland and promoting the pro-Union message. Across the pro-Union community, it remains my view that there is more that unites us than divides us.

Mr Robinson appointment now means the DUPs top two leadership roles are filled by MPs, with Ms Bradley previously serving as an MLA before choosing not to seek re-election last May for family reasons. She was later co-opted on to Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council and held the seat in last months local government elections.

Until Mr Buckley entered that deputy leadership race, it was widely assumed that Mr Robinson would run unopposed. Prior to the vote Sir Jeffrey played down suggestions that the subsequent contest indicated a split within the party.

"I think it's a healthy thing in a democratic political party that people have choice and it's a healthy sign that the DUP has young people like Gavin and Jonathan coming forward and wanting to take up senior positions within the party, he said.

"Gavin is a seasoned and experienced parliamentarian. Jonathan has been in the Assembly for some time. They both bring strong attributes in making their case and I wish them both well.

"It's not for me to decide, it's for the electoral college to decide who should be the deputy leader.

"So, I don't detect any sense that this is about splits or divisions. And it is not unusual in a political party to have competition for posts such as this and it demonstrates that the DUP is in healthy shape."

The DUP leader added: "There certainly isn't a split. The DUP has shown both in the Assembly and the council elections that our unity is our strength.

"I've worked hard as party leader over the last two years to build that unity and it's there.
Unions have gathered in protest of the installation of CCTV cameras in Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council offices without staff consultation.

Additional cameras were recently installed to supplement existing security and governance arrangements within council buildings, with staff said to be concerned that no consultation was carried out beforehand.

Members of Nipsa, GMB and Unite The Union held a protest outside the councils headquarters in Cloonavin this afternoon to voice their opposition to the move.

It comes following a series of discussions that were held between the unions and council officials after a union request to have the cameras removed last month.

A letter seen by this newspaper was sent to union members yesterday outlining the detail of the meetings.

It is understood unions were assured that the cameras were not yet active and would not be activated until consultation was completed with staff.

Council then told unions the cameras would be covered until that consultation took place and that no function to record audio was in place.

Further correspondence from Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council then confirmed that when they went to cover the cameras, they realised they have been active after all.

The letter said further questions from union representatives about who the data controller was, who authorised the cameras and who had access to the recordings went unanswered.

Union members and representatives outside Cloonavin

The council said there would be no further progress on the installation of cameras until consultation can take place.

As part on an ongoing review and upgrade of facility security, additional CCTV devices have been installed at council headquarters at Cloonavin, said a spokesperson.

The additional devices are being installed to enhance council security and to ensure staff feel safe in the workplace.

This matter will not be progressed any further until after consideration of governance processes and staff consultation.

It comes after a document presented to elected members in a behind-closed-doors meeting in April revealed that a review of security had been carried out following reports of secret recordings having taken place within council buildings.

It is understood councillors at the meeting approved the instruction of legal advisers to continue the process of seeking an injunction to prevent details of the recordings being published.

Read more Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council and senior officials were granted superinjunction over office recordings

Former councillor Padraig McShane said the move had provided unlimited funding and support for legal proceedings.

Earlier this month, a court heard that legal action over the recordings could be widened.

At a brief court appearance on May 5, Mr McShane said the issue of possible further legal steps in Switzerland and New Zealand had been raised in relation to attempts to obtain information from a site believed to have posted any relevant recordings.

The interim injunction preventing publication of details of the recordings was extended to June 5, before being further extended to June 12.

An earlier hearing had lifted a previous order preventing reporting of those proceedings, the effect of which is akin to a superinjunction.
A victims campaigner has questioned whether the Troubles Legacy Bill is prioritising victims or is simply a means of control and closure for the state and terrorist organisations.

The government announced a series of amendments which included allowing ongoing criminal investigations, inquests, the consideration of prosecution decisions, and the publication of reports, to continue until May 2024.

This, the government says, will ensure a smooth transition between the ending of the current mechanisms and the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR) taking on full responsibility for dealing with legacy cases

However, victims groups, Amnesty International and Sinn Fein were quick to voice concern.

The Pat Finucane Centre described it as a new all-time low, adding that the amendments seek to prevent any new inquests and will stop all investigations and civil cases.

Kenny Donaldson, Director of the South East Fermanagh Foundation (SEFF), who believes there was no justification for terrorism or other criminal violence irrespective of who carried it out, said he will take time to fully consider the amendments.

Undoubtedly there is a conditioning policy well underway through the appointment of a Chief Commissioner-designate for the proposed ICRIR body and also the announcement of a 5m legacy memorialisation fund and digitisation project to commemorate the Troubles in Northern Ireland, he said.

Our position remains that we do not support the direction of travel taken by the UK Government, we have not yet received confidence that the process before us will deliver better outcomes for our constituency of victims and survivors.

Read more Irish Government kept in dark over criminal investigation into Bloody Sunday

Who is this Bill or any Legacy Bill for? Is the priority victims and survivors or is the priority containment, control and closure for States and proscribed terror organisations?

Mr Donaldson added: There are those who say, you must get in there and shape it, be part of that process but if there is a loaded deck against you, then only a fool would ever play a hand.

Government has significant distance to travel with our constituency in rebuilding any level of trust or confidence which would allow for a different level of debate to take place around these issues.

2Our constituency will not give anyone blank cheques and unconditional trust, it is for those who are seeking to drive people down a particular road to confirm in clear and unambiguous terms how and what will happen which can and will lead to better outcomes and a levelling up of the current legacy system which is highly weighted against innocent victims/survivors of terrorism?
Soil from a reservoir in Portugal searched by police last month is being compared with samples from main suspect Christian Brueckners camper van, it has been reported.

Detectives believe Brueckner visited the remote Barragem do Arade reservoir in Portugals Algarve region days after Madeleine McCann disappeared.

Officials now believe they can prove that Brueckners van was in the area at the time the three-year-old was abducted , sources told The Daily Mirror.

The insider claimed that if the soil sample analysis reveals a positive match, police may be able to further close the net around Brueckner, 45, who has not yet been charged.

Earlier, a forensics expert warned that traditional evidence will be difficult to find after 16 years have passed since Madeleine McCanns disappearance.

Dan Matthews said that investigators would have searched the remote reservoir in Portugal for things that couldve stood the test of time and not been destroyed by its passage, such as clothing fragments or jewelry.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow will deploy some of its tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus next month in a move that the Belarusian opposition described as an attempt to blackmail the West.

Mr Putin said during a meeting with Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko that work on building facilities for the nuclear weapons will be completed by July 7-8, and they will be moved to the territory of Russias neighbour and ally quickly after that.

The move comes as Ukraine has stepped up attacks in several sectors of the front line in what some observers see as the start of its long-expected counter-offensive.

Russia used Belarus territory to send its troops into Ukraine on February 24 2022, and has kept forces and weapons on land belonging to its ally.

Russian president Vladimir Putin is deploying nuclear weapons in Belarus (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Everything is proceeding as planned, Mr Putin said in televised remarks as he hosted Mr Lukashenko at his residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

On July 7-8 the preparations of the relevant facilities will be completed and we will immediately start the activities linked to the deployment of those weapons on your territory.

Tactical nuclear weapons are intended to destroy enemy troops and weapons on the battlefield. They have a relatively short range and a much lower yield than nuclear warheads fitted to long-range strategic missiles that are capable of obliterating whole cities.

Mr Putin announced the planned deployment of the short-range nuclear weapons in Belarus earlier this year in a move widely seen as a warning to the West as it stepped up military support for Ukraine. He has emphasised that Russia will retain control of them.

Mr Putin and Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko met in the resort city of Sochi (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russia did not say how many nuclear weapons would be sent to Belarus. The US government believes Russia has about 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, which include bombs that can be carried by aircraft, warheads for short-range missiles and artillery rounds.

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya strongly condemned the move.

Putin and his puppet Lukashenko are planning to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus immediately before Natos summit in Vilnius in July, Ms Tsikhanouskaya told The Associated Press. This is a rude blackmail, an attempt to force Europe to back down, but we cant allow dictators to dodge punishment for the nuclear blackmail.

Mr Lukashenko, who has been in power for 29 years, has relied on Russias political and economic support to survive months of protests, mass arrests and Western sanctions following an election in 2020 that kept him in power but was widely seen at home and abroad as rigged.
An Indonesian migrant worker rests after working on a palm oil plantation run by the government-owned Felda in Malaysia, in early 2020.

Indonesian police said Friday they had arrested eight people suspected of trying to smuggle 123 workers to Malaysia, amid a rise in human trafficking cases where syndicates prey on citizens seeking jobs overseas.

The news came a day after the Indonesian president and his Malaysian counterpart met in Kuala Lumpur and discussed protections for Indonesian migrant workers, among other issues.

The Indonesian workers were rescued on Tuesday and Wednesday from two ships in Nunukan, a border town in the Indonesian section of Borneo, said Asep Edi Suheri, the head of a special task force on human trafficking.



The victims, from various parts of Indonesia, were lured by promises of jobs as domestic workers, plantation workers, drivers, sailors and other occupations in Malaysia. But they did not have the proper papers or protections required by Indonesian law for overseas workers, officials said.

Some of them only had identity cards and no passports or visas, Suheri said. Officers seized 22 cellphones, 54 identity cards and 45 passports as evidence from the suspects and the victims, he added.



Police were looking for two additional suspects who are believed to be in Malaysia, Suheri said. The suspects face charges of violating the laws on human trafficking and protections for migrant workers that carry penalties of up to 15 years in prison.

Indonesia is one of the worlds largest source countries for migrant workers, with an estimated 9 million citizens working abroad in 2017, according to the World Bank. Only about 4.7 million of these workers are officially registered by the labor protection agency, leaving the rest vulnerable to exploitation by illegal syndicates.

Most of the Indonesian migrants are women who work in low-wage sectors such as domestic work and manufacturing. They mainly go to Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Letting the big fish get away

Indonesian President Joko Jokowi Widodo and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, during their talks in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday, agreed to establish a special bilateral mechanism to resolve problems of Indonesian migrant workers, the former said.

This weeks arrests occurred amid a rise in human trafficking cases in Southeast Asia involving hundreds of Indonesians trapped in online scams. They fell victim to human trafficking syndicates that operate across the region and exploit porous borders and lax law enforcement.

In May, 46 Indonesian migrant workers returned home after being ensnared in Myanmar and the Philippines and forced to work for online fraud companies.

Indonesian President Joko Jokowi Widodo (right), accompanied by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, speaks to an Indonesian vegetable vendor during a visit to Chow Kit Market in Kuala Lumpur, June 8, 2023. [S. Mahfuz/BenarNews]

Late last month, Jokowi ordered a crackdown on human trafficking syndicates after the Migrant Workers Protection Agency (BP2MI) reported that an average of two nationals had died every day of various causes during the past three years.

Some 3,600 others have returned home suffering from depression, memory loss or physical disabilities after being sent abroad illegally, during the same period.

Agency chairman Benny Rhamdani said BP2MI had handled 94,000 Indonesian migrant workers who were deported from the Middle East and Asia since 2020, and 90% of them had left Indonesia via illicit means.

Netty Prasetiyani, a lawmaker from the labor and health commission, praised the police for stopping the Indonesian workers from boarding a ferry to Malaysia.

She said Nunukan, in North Kalimantan province, was one of the main gateways for illegal migrant workers to Malaysia, where they often end up working in palm oil plantations or as domestic helpers without proper documents or protection.

This is a complex problem that requires serious attention from the government and not half-hearted measures. Its not enough to just stop them from leaving, but also to eradicate the root causes, she said in a statement Friday.

Human trafficking syndicates are networks of domestic and foreign criminals who exploit the high demand for cheap labor in Malaysia and the desperation of many Indonesians who seek jobs abroad despite the risks, she said.

Anis Hidayah, a commissioner at the National Commission on Human Rights, commended the police for arresting several suspects, but said they should not stop at low-level perpetrators.

She said human trafficking was not only a crime committed by street-level recruiters but by others, including middlemen and state officials.

The police should expose who is really behind this, whether they are law enforcement officials or government members who are part of the trafficking ring, she said.

This is crucial to expose because the police have always only gone after the low-level offenders, letting the big fish get away with their crimes.
Evacuees board a government vehicle in Darga municipality over fears that the nearby Mayon volcano could erupt, June 9, 2023.

Thousands of people living near one of the Philippines most active volcanoes began evacuating on Friday amid signs of an imminent hazardous eruption, officials said.

More than 10,500 people within the six-kilometer (3.7-mile) permanent danger zone around the Mayon volcano were relocated to more than 100 evacuation sites as of Friday, said Edcel Greco Lagman, the governor of eastern Albay province.

About 16,000 others could be evacuated from homes located between six and seven kilometers from the center of the zone should the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) raise Mayons alert level, he said.

We have been receiving reports that the ash fall from Mayon has been intensifying, although we have not yet seen pyroclastic materials being expelled from the crater of Mount Mayon, Lagman said in a local television report.

Pyroclastic flows contain a high-density mix of hot lava blocks, pumice, ash and volcanic gas, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Meanwhile in neighboring Indonesia, the Anak Krakatau volcano erupted on Friday, spewing a column of ash more than three kilometers (1.8 miles) into the sky, Agence France-Presse news service reported, adding there were no immediate reports of damage or casualties.

The Philippines and Indonesia, neighboring archipelago countries, both sit on the The Philippines sits on the Pacific Oceans so-called Ring of Fire where continental plates collide causing seismic and volcanic activity.

No state of panic

On Thursday, Phivolcs elevated its warning for Mayon, the 2,462-meter (8,077-foot) cone-shaped mountain, to alert level 3 on its scale of five after detecting a growing number of rock falls and repeated collapses of the summit dome. The agency has since recorded nearly 200 events of superheated rocks falling off the volcanos slopes.

Lagman said people in Albay quickly respond to emergency alerts and orders for preemptive mandatory evacuations.

They are very compliant and we made sure that their farm animals, like cows, water buffalos, pigs would be evacuated too, he said.

There is no state of panic in the province. All the other functions of the government are normally being undertaken, Lagman said.

Many of those evacuated are from Camalig and Guinobatan municipalities, two of the most vulnerable areas in the province.

The Mayon volcano is seen spewing white smoke from Camalig, one of the communities nearby in the eastern Philippines, June 8, 2023. [Kristin Moral handout via AFP]

On Friday, Phivolcs director Teresito Bacolcol said rock falls lasting for a few minutes occurred overnight, indicating that theres a continuous supply of magma to the surface, dislodging old and new portions of the lava dome.

The difference right now is that we dont see high amounts of sulfur dioxide, he told reporters, adding experts were hoping that it would follow the same pattern as in 2014, when the volcano also expelled rocks followed by a short lava flow before suddenly stopping.

Hopefully it will not go the way of the 2018 activity, Bacolcol said, referring to January 2018 when at least 40,000 people were forced to evacuate after Mayon spewed a column of ash about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) into the air, blanketing surrounding areas.

Raffy Alejandro IV, spokesman for the Philippine Civil Defense Office, said the permanent danger zone around Mayon was declared off-limits.

We ask local officials and government agencies to review their preparedness measures and check their resources for possible deployment and distribution, he said.

In 2013, five hikers, including three Germans who ignored warnings and strayed near the volcanos summit, were killed when it erupted. Mayons most destructive eruption was in 1841, when an entire town was buried and 1,200 people killed.

Jeoffrey Maitem and Basilio Sepe in Manila contributed to this report.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen (right) and Chinese Ambassador Wang Wentian attend a groundbreaking ceremony for an expressway in Phnom Penh, June 7, 2023.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen on Thursday said he was reassured after seeing a statement from Thailands Move Forward Party that said it would not expel migrant workers if it forms a government.

His statement came days after he expressed worry on Sunday that a new Thai government would enact policies jeopardizing the status of migrant workers from neighboring countries.

This policy will not be supported by Cambodia and Laos, he said. Cambodia doesnt have much, but I want to leave a message: Please watch out. I dont want to advise Thai politicians but please watch out.

Cambodias Ministry of Labor has said that at least 1.2 million Cambodians are working in Thailand.

Migrant construction workers travel in the back of a crew cab in Bangkok, May 25, 2020. [Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP]

Move Forward, the top vote-getting party in Thailands May 14 election, denied it has a policy to repatriate migrant workers.

The partys stance is to protect the welfare and labor rights of all workers in Thailand, regardless of their nationalities, it said in a statement on Thursday. The Move Forward Party recognizes the importance of the contribution made by the migrant workforce to the economic and social development of Thailand.

Move Forward and Pheu Thai  Thailands two largest opposition parties  dealt a resounding defeat to the countrys pro-military establishment in last months election. But an alliance of eight parties remains short of the 376 seats required to govern in Thailands 750-seat bicameral legislature and no new government has been formed.

Thai economys need for migrant workers

On Thursday, Hun Sen said he welcomed the Move Forward statement.

So now we dont have any concerns that the workers will leave Thailand, he said during a public event with thousands of garment factory workers in Kampong Chhnang province.

But Sou Piseth, a migrant worker in Thailand, speculated that Hun Sen was making the statements to gain votes ahead of Cambodias July 23 elections. He pointed out that Hun Sens government did not do anything to help workers who were stuck in Thailand during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pheu Thai Party leader Chonlanan Srikaew (left) and Move Forward Party leader Pita Limjaroenrat respond to supporters in Bangkok following the first meeting to discuss forming a coalition government, May 17, 2023. [Sakchai Lalit/AP]

Dy The Hoya, migration program director at the Phnom Penh-based Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights (CENTRAL), also said he was not worried about Thailand sending thousands of Cambodians back across the border.

Thailand wont expel workers because they benefit from them as well, he said.

In its statement, Move Forward said it would like to expand and improve regular pathways for migrant workers and ensure those pathways are free from extortion, coercion, or other forms of exploitation.
Bennington, VT (05201)

Today

Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low near 60F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low near 60F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph.
FILE  Former President Donald Trump speaks with supporters at the Westside Conservative Breakfast, June 1, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. In a written submission Thursday, June 8, 2023, lawyers for Trump say a $5 million jury award for his sexual abuse and defamation of columnist E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room, in 1996, should be slashed to less than $1 million.
The Massachusetts Senate unveiled a long-awaited $590 million tax relief proposal Thursday as the Democratic-led Senate and House, and Democratic Gov. Maura Healey, work to come up with a final tax-cutting plan
PITTSFIELD  The Berkshire Museum has much to celebrate.

So much, that it will take three exhibits to celebrate its entire 120-year history. That history, beginning with the museum's founding in 1903, will roll out over the coming months in a series of exhibitions celebrating successive eras of the institutions development.

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If You Go 120th Anniversary Gala What: Berkshire Museum's annual fundraising gala. Proceeds benefit the museum's education programs, including its Mobile Museum Units (MoMUs) and summer camps. Dress in your favorite decades fashion. With: Music by Lucky 5, delicious bites by Brennan Catering and drinks by Another Round. Where: Crane Model Farm, 161 Main St., Dalton When: 5-8 p.m., June 17 Tickets: $175 to $15,000 for a table of 10 Information and reservations: 413-443-7171 ext. 382, berkshiremuseum.org/120gala 120th Anniversary: Cabinet of Curiosities, 1903-1939 What: The first of three exhibits chronicling the history of the Berkshire Museum from its founding by Zenas Crane in 1903 to the present. This segment focuses on the founding through the tenure of its first director, Laura Bragg. Where: Berkshire Museum, 39 South St., Pittsfield When: June 17 through Sept. 10 Information and tickets: 413-443-7171, berkshiremusuem.org

The first exhibition, "Cabinet of Curiosities," will open June 17, coinciding with the museums annual fund-raising gala, which will honor the contributions of the Crane family over the years, said Executive Director Kimberley Bush Tomio.

Zenas Crane, the third generation owner of Crane & Company, the Dalton-based paper manufacturer and supplier of currency paper to the U.S. Treasury, founded the Berkshire Museum in 1903 and provided the initial collections.

I would say it is basically just highlighting the museums history and its milestones and discoveries and community involvement over the past 120 years, Bush Tomio said of the anniversary exhibitions.

THREE ERAS

Chief Curator Jesse Kowalski said of the early planning discussions for the exhibits, When we are talking about 120 years, I thought it might be better to break it up into segments. Three different periods of the museum.

Kowalski said the first exhibition will focus on 1903 to 1939, the second from 1940 through 1978, and the third will cover 1979 to the present.

Each will cover works that were collected during that period and describe what the museum was doing during the period, he said. The final section will deal a lot with contemporary art and GE leaving Pittsfield, and how the economy affected the museum  but also the changes in the building and the renovations.

The museum has undergone extensive renovation and building upgrades in this century, beginning with roof work in 2006, and another renovation project is now in the conceptual stage, Bush Tomio said.

CURIOSITIES

The first exhibition, Cabinet of Curiosities Kowalski said, and is based on Zenas Cranes idea to gather materials from around the world to create a cultural center in the Berkshires.

Crane sought to create a window on the world by assembling a varied collection of fine art, natural science specimens and historical artifacts.

Today, the museums diverse collection includes more than 40,000 objects, including the art and artifacts acquired by Crane. Among those early acquisitions are a group of Hudson River School paintings, some of which are now on display at the museum in Romance & Nature: Art of the Hudson River School, continuing through Oct. 1.

The wide-ranging museum collections include an Egyptian mummy, a 143-pound meteorite; ancient jewelry, and representations of natural habitat, plant and animal life and minerals, along with items associated with historical figures or events, such as Matthew Henson's arctic gear worn on the first successful expedition to reach the geographic North Pole and parts of the cider press used to make Mammoth Cheshire Cheese that was presented to President Thomas Jefferson in 1802.

Crane, it is said, was inspired by such institutions as the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and sought to bring attributes of those institutions to the Berkshires.

Bush Tomio and Kowalski said the first exhibition marking the 120th anniversary will run from June 17 through Sept. 10.

The second, called Building the Museum, will run from Oct. 7 through Jan. 7, 2024, and the third, Planning the Future, will be displayed from Feb. 3 through May 5.

STRUCTURAL CHANGE

Collections manager Jason Vivori said of the museum that the building came in stages. The first was the front portion of the museum, in 1903. And next was the south galleries, and then the north galleries, so you had kind of a U-shaped structure.

After the arrival of Laura Bragg, who became became director in 1931 and led the institution through 1939, further renovations were undertaken, Vivori said. That included the Crane Room and theater space, which opened in 1937.

Bragg had earlier in her career become the first female director of a publicly-funded art museum in the U.S., the Charleston Museum in South Carolina.

In Pittsfield, Bragg brought progressive outreach educational initiatives she had developed, like her traveling exhibitions that became known as Bragg Boxes. The boxes were sent out to schools across Berkshire County and contained information and objects on a range of topics related to the museums collections.

RENOVATIONS

Vivori said that during the 1980s, the museum added classroom space and administrative offices; then a new roof in 2006. In 2008, a major renovation installed a climate control system and other improvements.

A passenger elevator and sprinkler system also were added over the past decade, he said.

The most recent renovation was in 2020, Vivori said, and we redid the second floor galleries.

Work during that period included new gallery walls and flooring, insulation; new restrooms and improved LED lighting in galleries.

As the collections manager, what was most important to me, is that they dug out all around the foundation and sealed the foundation from the outside, because we were having moisture problems, Vivori said.

A new freight elevator was also installed.

A CONTROVERSIAL SALE

The recent museum upgrades were funded by a controversial sale  bitterly opposed by some in the community and in the art world  of artworks from the museums collection, including works by Norman Rockwell, Alexander Calder and Albert Bierstadt.

However, the sale in 2018, which brought in more than $53 million and helped define the current era, was needed, museum officials contended, to fund overdue upgrades and avoid a possible closure because of recurring annual deficits.

The sale proceeds also bolstered the museums endowment.

A third phase renovation also is on the horizon, Bush Tomio said of the 21st-century structural changes.

We are sort of developing the concepts and the design to meet the needs of the staff and the community needs for that to be successful, she said.

She added, We dont have a timeline for that to be ready to actually launch, but we are actively working towards it.

Depending on the timing, Bush Tomio said, the museum might be ready around the close of the 120th exhibitions to release information about what the future may hold for the institution.

She added Its not over yet, and we have some more work to do in the building, but the future, the director said, looks bright.

IF YOU GO

120th Anniversary Gala

What: Berkshire Museum's annual fundraising gala. Proceeds benefit the museum's education programs, including its Mobile Museum Units (MoMUs) and summer camps. Dress in your favorite decades fashion.

With: Music by Lucky 5, delicious bites by Brennan Catering and drinks by Another Round.

Where: Crane Model Farm, 161 Main St., Dalton

When: 5-8 p.m., June 17

Tickets: $175 to $15,000 for a table of 10

Information and reservations: 413-443-7171 ext. 382, berkshiremuseum.org/120gala

120th Anniversary: Cabinet of Curiosities, 1903-1939

What: The first of three exhibits chronicling the history of the Berkshire Museum from its founding by Zenas Crane in 1903 to the present. This segment focuses on the founding through the tenure of its first director, Laura Bragg.

Where: Berkshire Museum, 39 South St., Pittsfield

When: June 17 through Sept. 10

Information and tickets: 413-443-7171, berkshiremusuem.org
Reporter

Greta Jochem, a Report for America Corps member, joined the Eagle in 2021. Previously, she was a reporter at the Daily Hampshire Gazette. She is also a member of the investigations team.
Police clear large area in search for Savoy man accused of stabbing his ex-girlfriend, but he remains at-large
An ethical will can be a powerful tool to pass on wisdom. Congregation Knesset Israel is offering lessons on how to create one
News Reporter

Matt Martinez is a news reporter at The Berkshire Eagle. He worked at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, graduated Marquette University. He is a former Report for America corps member.
Lee adds another representative to the Rest of River committee. He's a vocal opponent of the plan to store PCB-contaminated soil in the town
Students involved in the art project at Lee Elementary School were assigned to draw butterflies and depict what they thought life would have been like for a child in Nazi Germany on one wing of the butterfly. On the other wing, they drew what a normal life is like free of Nazis.
Dalton Delan can be followed on Twitter @UnspinRoom. He has won Emmy, Peabody and duPont-Columbia awards for his work as a television producer.
Ecclesiology dictates how a church is run, from its priestly hierarchy, to how offerings are collected, to when and how communion is given. The structure of Catholic and Protestant churches present some of the most obvious differences between them.

The Catholic Church observes a strict hierarchy among the members of its clergy. The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, as well as the sovereign of Vatican City, the seat of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. This position is an elected one, and the body that elects him is that of the Cardinals. Below the Cardinals are the Arch-Bishops, Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. Each position has an outlined set of responsibilities and expectations. A certain amount of tithe money from the Catholic Churches around the world are sent to Rome. Its own understanding of itself is that it is, one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church," and that it is the continued presence of Jesus Christ on earth.

Protestant Churches manifest in different ways depending on the denomination. Some Protestant Churches started as state churches, such as the Anglican or Lutheran denominations, or still are, such as the Church of Scotland or the Church of Sweden. These churches usually have a pastor or reverend in charge, some have lower clergy, and most have deacons or elders. Protestant churches that lean more evangelical, Pentecostal, or perhaps Methodist usually have one pastor or reverend, deacons, and elders. Some use the title of Bishop. Some churches are led by the clergy, while others leave most decisions to their congregations.

4. Eucharist

The Catholic Church teaches that when a believer takes communion, he or she is partaking in a sacred ordinance instituted by Christ at the last supper. When the bread and wine, the Eucharist, are offered at communion they are consecrated by the priests. According to Catholic doctrine, this consecration leads to an act of transubstantiation - or change - where the bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Christ. This change does not change the appearance, merely the substance of the thing.

Protestant denominations also hold communion as a sacred practice, ordained by Jesus at the Last Supper. Like Catholics, Protestants take the idea of communion seriously, as both groups hold that a believer who is actively in sin, or living with unconfessed sin, should rectify the situation before participating in communion. However, Protestants do not agree with the principle of transubstantiation, holding that when Jesus spoke of the bread and wine as the body and blood, it was figurative, and should be considered symbolic, rather than literal.

Photo credit: Getty Images/emtal
Tonight's rundown:

 Talking Points Memo: Joe Biden continues to decline with the world watching and remains out of the press reach

 Presidential Historian Larry Cook weighs in on how Bidens relationship with the press compares to past presidents

 US Special Forces have been confirmed to be in Ukraine

 OReilly describes Democrats hosting the DNC in Chicago as Crazy Arrogant

 The trial of Fox News gets underway

 58% of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck even as inflation begins to cool off

 Smart Life: Utilizing Kelly Blue Book when searching for a new car

 This Day in History: FDR dies in office

 Final Thought: what to do when someone is disrespectful to you

In Case You Missed It:

 Read Bill's latest column, "Reason to Believe"

 Join 'Team Normal!' Order your gear now at BillOReilly.com!

 Pre-order Bills next bestseller Killing the Witches NOW

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The HIV/Aids treatment centre in Kampala is almost empty, days after Uganda enacted one of the most draconian anti-gay laws on Earth.

Source: Reuters.

The usual daily influx of around 50 patients has all but dried up, say staff. Antiretroviral drugs pile up unused.

Andrew Tendo, resident medical officer at the US-funded clinic, warned that new waves of HIV infections were forming even as vulnerable people stayed away from treatment centres, afraid of being identified and arrested under the new laws.

"The LGBT community in Uganda is on lockdown now," he said. "They don't have preventive services. They cannot access condoms ... they cannot access ARTs (antiretrovirals)."

Under the bill, which President Yoweri Museveni signed into law last week, gay sex is punishable by life in prison while "aggravated homosexuality" - which includes transmitting HIV - is punishable by death.

Until this year, the Kampala clinic had been a beacon of success for the fight against HIV in Uganda, where 1.4 million people live with the virus and 17,000 die a year as a result of its ravages, according to the state-run Uganda Aids Commission.

Now, though, when patients do come in, it's often out of absolute necessity, said Tendo, adding that the HIV cases presenting had become more severe as people skipped treatments.

Uganda's health minister disputed a suggestion from a US official that the law would reverse the country's gains fighting HIV/Aids, saying last week that the government would ensure that prevention programmes would remain accessible to those that needed them.

The health ministry declined to comment for this article.

Nonetheless, the trend of HIV patients staying away from treatment centres is being mirrored on a national level, according to Mary Borgman, country director for the US president's emergency plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), which funds the Kampala clinic and about 80 other drop-in centres across Uganda.

She said fear had increasingly been deterring people from coming in for treatment ever since the anti-gay bill was introduced in parliament in March.

'Afraid to leave home'

A rare patient visiting the Kampala clinic said he despaired at the new legislation.

"I felt so sad when the law was enacted because we fear Pepfar will cut off funding for the free services we have been receiving," said the 27-year-old gay man, who asked not to be identified for fear of being targeted by authorities.

"Members of the LGBT community are afraid to leave their homes, which means even if the funds are not cut some will still not seek services, and that's very depressing to think about."

Such fears of reduced American funding aren't far-fetched; after Museveni signed the bill into law, US President Joe Biden directed his national security council to evaluate the implications for US engagement with Uganda, including Pepfar.

In the 2021/2022 fiscal year, Pepfar provided $418.4m in funding to Uganda, more than half of the country's HIV/Aids treatment budget.

The programme has been instrumental in Uganda's progress against HIV/Aids, which includes a nearly tenfold reduction in mother-to-child HIV transmission over the past two decades.

Pepfar estimates its support for the scale-up of antiretroviral treatments in Uganda helped avert nearly 600,000 HIV-related deaths between 2004 and 2022.

Borgman said the American government was acutely aware of the impact any funding cuts would have on vulnerable communities, including LGBTQ Ugandans.

"The review is around whether we can operate within the environment that we are provided with," Borgman said, without elaborating on specific legal concerns.

Reporting gay activity

Lillian Mworeko, the east African regional co-ordinator for the International Community of Women living with HIV/Aids, said some providers feared that offering medical services to LGBTQ patients could be classed as "promoting" homosexuality, an offence punishable by 20 years in prison under the new law.

The Ugandan bill toughened up an existing British colonial-era law, under which gay sex was already illegal. Proponents say the new legislation is needed to counter what they allege are efforts by LGBTQ Ugandans to recruit children into homosexuality.

The amended version signed by Museveni didn't criminalise merely identifying as LGBTQ - as a previous version did - and revised a measure that required people to report gay activity to only oblige reporting when a child was involved.

At the Kampala clinic, run by local charity Icebreakers, Uganda, medical officer Tendo said he understood the fears of LGBTQ people in Uganda who often endured painful lives, featuring rejection by their families and arrests.

"The majority of these people, like transgender or queer people, have gone through a lot already," he added. "They wouldn't want to be in a place where they can be raided or detained at any time."
J.C. Le Roux, SA's most loved sparkling wine, is excited to present Celebration Inside, a 4-part digital series featuring some of SA's most admired and respected women who share their own personal stories and tools that spark optimism and encourages women to find more reasons to celebrate in their everyday lives.

Mpoomy Ledwaba Zoe Brown

This inspiring series is hosted by Mpoomy Ledwaba, who is a multi-talented businesswoman, wife, mother, podcaster and content creator, as she sits down with an impressive lineup of guests who offer insights on different aspects of cultivating a positive mindset, including gratitude, and finding moments to celebrate. Among the guests are award-winning radio and TV personality, Zoe Brown; attorney, multimedia entrepreneur and brand influencer, Ayanda Vana; multi-award-winning journalist and media editor, Makhosazana Zwane-Siguqa; and Miss South Africa 2020 and mental health advocate, Shudufhadzo Musida.

Ayanda Vana

Nicola Jansen, J.C. Le Roux marketing manager, says: At J.C. Le Roux we believe in uplifting women by sparking optimism and celebration  it is something that is very important and relevant to us, both as a brand as well as to South African women today. We want to encourage and inspire women to develop an optimistic mindset that allows them to appreciate themselves and others and celebrate the big and small things in their lives. And what better way to kick-start this movement of optimism than sitting with your fellow women over a glass of your favourite bubbly and hearing each others personal stories and insights? The Celebration Inside series features such powerful and talented ladies that really set a beautiful and inspiring example for more women to start, or continue, their journey to achieving an optimistic mindset.

Shudufhadzo Musida Makhosazana Zwane-Siguqa

Filmed at the picturesque House of J.C. Le Roux in Stellenbosch as the perfect backdrop, you can watch the first two episodes of J.C. Le Rouxs Celebration Inside, and make sure to look out for more episodes coming soon!

Episode 1 with Zoe Brown

Episode 2 with Ayanda Vana

To learn more about J.C Le Roux and the Celebration Inside series, visit www.jcleroux.co.za.

Follow J.C Le Roux on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram or join the conversation by sharing your stories of celebration using the hashtags #SoMuchToCelebrate #JCLeRoux #JustCelebrate




South African retailers are excelling in driving positive consumer perceptions through special offers and affordable product promotions, but their customer service capabilities are leaving much to be desired.

This is according to the South African Retail Sentiment Index, conducted by DataEQ in collaboration with PwC South Africa, which measures Net Sentiment across three identified customer satisfaction drivers: pricing, customer service, and product offering.

While consumer sentiment around pricing (32%) and products (21.8%) was positive, customer service (-68.4%) drove negativity across the industry. The full index includes data and analysis for the top 6 retailers.

Woolworths leads the pack

Ranking first in consumers eyes, Woolworths topped all three satisfaction drivers in the index to achieve an overall Net Sentiment score of 19.2%  15.9 percentage points above the industry average.

With regards to pricing, South African shoppers argued that the premium retailer was at times less expensive than other stores, while product-related mentions saw Woolworths lauded for its house brands and high-quality goods.

Price-sensitive consumers respond positively to promotions

On an industry level, South African retailers leveraged special offers and promotions  especially relating to essential items  to shape their narrative around pricing. In this tough economic climate, shoppers are always on the lookout for good deals. So, while the positive consumer sentiment towards pricing may seem surprising, this was largely driven by feedback around well-priced promotions and specials, says Riaan Singh, PwC South Africa experience consulting leader.

Retailers battle a customer service bottleneck

Customer service was notably the most prominent pain point for both in-store and online shoppers, with turnaround time issues driving almost half (49.8%) of all service-related complaints. This highlights consumers high expectations for fast and efficient service across physical and digital channels.

To meet these expectations, Singh says that retailers must assess the capabilities needed to service customers across multiple platforms and resolve those queries efficiently through integrating technology and multi-skilled teams. This often requires a change in the traditional operating model and moving towards a target operating model that is omnichannel-led, empowering staff with visibility of the customer at each touchpoint.

Omnichannel service extends to social media

In many instances, unanswered mentions and delayed responses on social platforms further compounded consumer frustration. This is understandable, considering that the retailers only responded to a third (33.4%) of public Twitter mentions citing a customer service request, and took over 12 hours on average when they did respond, notes Melanie Malherbe, DataEQs MD.

Emphasising the importance of a truly omnichannel service experience, Malherbe warns local retailers against omitting social media from their customer service strategy.

Customers typically reach out on social media when their queries arent being resolved through other channels, with the expectation that social service agents will be equipped to answer them or be able to communicate with other service teams quickly to resolve the issues at hand. This points to a growing need for retailers to integrate their social agents into their broader customer service teams, Malherbe concludes.
Nominations for the Accenture 11th Africa Gender Mainstreaming Awards, presented by Business Engage, are open. These awards offer a platform dedicated to promoting diversity and excellence with a focus on gender mainstreaming.

In a world where gender equality is not just an aspiration but a strategic imperative, Africa is emerging as the hub for gender mainstreaming success. Business Engage and all the sponsors, including Accenture, AECI, JSE, Vodacom, DP World, RMB, and Assupol, invite corporates and individuals to join us on a journey of recognition, celebration, and empowerment at the Accenture 11th Africa Gender Mainstreaming Awards to be held on 5 October 2023 at Vodacom Dome.

To drive change, organisations need to refocus their environments to support the development of women alongside their male counterparts  as equals.

 Khethiwe Nkuna, CSI and responsible business lead for Accenture in Africa

Says CSI and responsible business lead for Accenture in Africa, Khethiwe Nkuna: "We are proud to be the naming sponsor of the Accenture 2023 GMA Awards that celebrate the fundamental principle of gender equality that we regard as our normal way of doing business.

"To drive change, organisations need to refocus their environments to support the development of women alongside their male counterparts  as equals. Both women and men must become agents of gender equality within their workplaces and spheres of influence. Each business leader must become a champion for change, supporting women's advancement into leadership positions by recognising and promoting capable women where it is due."

Corporates and individuals are invited to celebrate gender mainstreaming by nominating remarkable individuals and corporates who have made a real difference in achieving diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.

"We are extremely proud to have an opportunity to be a sponsor for this year's Gender Mainstreaming Awards, which celebrate those making a real difference in this area. Addressing the ongoing gender inequality that exists in the workplace is a key step in combating skills shortages, improving innovation, and driving progress in our market. This is especially true of the science, technology, engineering, and maths fields where women, especially women of colour are still largely excluded.

For many years now, Vodacom has focused on driving female empowerment through various programmes which promote diversity and inclusion both within our own organisation and generally within the technology space. The improvements to the gender profile of our board which is now comprised of 50% black women and our hugely successful 'Code Like a Girl' programme are testament to our commitment to growing female empowerment in the technology space both at home and across Africa," says Njabulo Mashigo, HR director for Vodacom South Africa.

Over the years, the Gender Mainstreaming Awards have been a powerful indicator of the strides made to create more gender-balanced corporate entities. These awards recognise and reward both corporates and individuals who have shown remarkable commitment to gender mainstreaming.

Says Bridget Mokwena-Halala, Assupol CEO: "Transformation is always at the helm of our agenda; hence we are deliberate in our efforts to appoint women in strategic positions and contribute to a society that supports and embraces the empowerment of its women. Assupol is proud to be involved in the 2023 Gender Mainstreaming Awards. As leaders in our industry, we take the responsibility to lead by example very seriously."

The Gender Mainstreaming Awards have expanded into Africa, encompassing East and West Africa. And are represented by an overall Africa Gender Mainstreaming Champion, as well as Champions in the Southern, East and West Africa regions. The Awards aim to make Africa the gender hub, exporting stories of success to the rest of the world. The 10th Gender Mainstreaming Awards in 2022 comprised very successful simultaneous in-person events with 500 attendees in Gauteng, South Africa, 300 in Nairobi, Kenya and 100 in Accra, Ghana. The event was also streamed online, hosting 6,800 attendees from across Africa.

"Our partnership with the Gender Mainstreaming Awards aligns closely with our continuous drive for gender diversity, gender equality and women empowerment in the workplace  ensuring that as a business and individuals, we hold ourselves accountable to being the change we want to see. We have a long-standing history with Business Engage and have felt the significant impact that these awards bring to businesses and people. We look forward to this year's entries and the continued commitment by corporate South Africa to driving and supporting women empowerment," says Esha Mansingh, executive head of sub-Saharan Africa corporate affairs and sustainability at DP World.

Vuyo Lee, director: marketing and corporate affairs at the JSE adds: "As the JSE, we recognise and understand that gender equality is both a moral imperative and important driver of financial inclusion in South Africa. For this reason, we support the Gender Mainstreaming Awards, as they are a vehicle for recognising organisations that are making meaningful contributions to the progression of women in their businesses and communities. In our organisation, 64% of our board of directors and 80% of our executive members are women. We are proud of this achievement and our participation in the awards. We hope this serves as a catalyst for more companies to focus on gender mainstreaming in our economy."

Currently, there are eleven private sector categories for corporates and individuals to enter.

There are eight corporate awards:

Women on Boards



Women on Executive Committees in Multinationals



Economic Empowerment



Mainstreaming Gender and Disability



Economic Empowerment



Investing in Young Women



Women Empowerment in the Workplace



Empowerment of Women in the Community

There are three individual categories:

Positive Role Model



Inclusive Leader Award



RMB African's Fearless Thinker Award

"Our long-standing relationship with the Business Engage and the Gender Mainstreaming Awards is an attestation to our commitment to a more gender-equal future. We continuously work towards creating an environment where women feel they are empowered to achieve their individual career goals and are committed to growing the number of women in leadership in financial services." says Dharshni Padayachee, head of diversity and inclusion, RMB

Corporates and individuals should note that all entries are submitted online with supporting documentation under the Enrolment Form tab on http://gender-mainstreaming.awardsplatform.com. We have entries for East Africa, West Africa and Southern Africa. It is a condition of entry that finalists attend the Gender Mainstreaming Awards.

The deadline for entries has been extended to 20 June 2023. The semi-final event for individual categories in southern Africa will follow on 28 July 2023. The judges will interview all shortlisted companies and individuals from 4 July 2023 to 28 July 2023, and finalists will be announced by 2 August 2023.

"We believe the best way to influence change is to strengthen and grow the current conversation, then couple that with deliberate actions," concludes Colleen Larsen, chief executive of Business Engage.

Visit www.genderawards.com for more information or to enter.




Understanding how to look after your vehicle has just become a lot easier with the launch of an exciting course through a new initiative called Car Basics. Launched by Paige Lindenberg in association with Tiger Wheel & Tyre, Car Basics aims to address the knowledge gap that exists in automotive maintenance, empowering individuals to feel safer and more confident on the road.

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself what would happen if you suddenly got a flat tyre and nobody was around to assist? Or if your cars battery went dead, leaving you stranded? These scenarios can occur without warning, and their consequences can be dangerous. While we spend a lot of time in our vehicles, the reality is we may know very little about how they work, or what to do in an emergency. Its best to be prepared and proactive, for yourself and those close to you.

Studies indicate that a significant number of individuals, both women and men, lack the confidence and knowledge to perform simple car maintenance tasks. Car Basics recognises that by providing comprehensive, training on vital skills such as changing a tyre, checking oil levels, and jump starting a car, individuals can become more self-reliant and learn so much more!

Having grown up surrounded by cars and racing, Paige Lindenberg knows the various challenges that motorists face every day and brings extensive, personal experience to each of these unique courses. Together with Tiger Wheel & Tyre and supportive sponsors, Goodyear, SABAT, Havoline and Moov, Paige has devised a number of fun yet fundamental courses that will guide you step by step. In addition to teaching these practical skills, the courses will also dispel the fear and confusion that has previously been a barrier between motorists and their vehicles.

Car Basics' programme offers a safe and inclusive learning environment, encouraging participants to learn at their own pace and ask questions without judgment. The initiative understands the importance of tailoring the learning experience to different skill levels and prior knowledge. Participants will receive hands-on training from experienced instructors who will guide them through practical demonstrations, ensuring they gain the necessary skills and confidence to handle common car maintenance issues, irrespective of what car they drive.

Considering the amount of time that we spend in our vehicles and how reliant we are on them, we must not take it for granted that theyll always be in the best condition, says Lindenberg. Over the years I have seen a growing need for training and education that can be done in a simple and fun way, to make motorists feel safer out on our roads. Its amazing that Tiger Wheel and Tyre share this vision of mine and by hosting these courses across their established network, as well as inside their state-of-the-art workshops, well be able to offer an unforgettable experience.

Farishta Singh, group marketing executive at TiAuto Investments: Tiger Wheel & Tyre is extremely thrilled to partner with Paige for this initiative that brings our world of vehicle fitment even closer to our consumers. As a brand, we are consistently pushing the importance of safety when it comes to vehicle maintenance. This is a key opportunity to empower customers with knowledge and equip them with the basic skills to get out of a sticky situation, should that arise. We are always looking at ways to diversify our offering  and with Car Basics, we hope to provide that safe space required for drivers to learn and explore the right way of doing things when it comes to vehicle safety.

Tickets to Car Basics can be purchased via Quicket with the first event taking place at Tiger Wheel & Tyre in Sunninghill on 1 July. This will be followed by monthly events around the country, so keep an eye out for one near you and follow Car Basics SA on Instagram for regular updates.

Book now: https://bit.ly/45MPJgH




South Africa is in the middle of a severe electricity crisis , with enforced power cuts that have worsened every year. Electricity is sometimes unavailable for 10 hours a day. The shortfall is the consequence of frequent breakdowns at its ageing coal power plants, which constitute 74% of the country's generating capacity

Source: Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko

In theory, improving the performance and reliability of the existing coal plants would resolve the power crisis. This remedy is promoted in some quarters. But its easier said than done. To function satisfactorily, many of the plants would require a complete overhaul, which would be both time-consuming and prohibitively costly.

Estimates suggest that South Africa needs around 6,000MW of extra capacity to overcome the current deficit. The following sections explain why I predict it is likely to require as long as five years to eradicate this shortfall, though partial improvement should already be felt by the end of 2024.

Building new coal, nuclear or gas plants is still being considered to improve future power supply, but these typically require construction times of 10 years. They would, therefore, not play a role in the short- to medium-term period under consideration, and I dont discuss them further here.

Time lines for fixing existing power stations

The 4,800MW Kusile and its twin Medupi are the two largest power stations in South Africa, and among the biggest coal plants in the world. Their construction was commissioned in 2007. At the time they were expected to guarantee South Africa ample electricity supply and allow the decommissioning of older plants.

But the construction of the plants proceeded disastrously. Costs escalated to more than double the initial projections and construction was much slower than anticipated. One of Kusiles six units has still not been finished.

Calamity also struck twice in the first few years of operation. The damage caused by an explosion at Medupis Unit 4 in 2021 resulted in so much damage that the unit has not yet been brought back on line. Then in October last year a chimney at Kusile collapsed. This forced the closure of three Kusile units.

The 1,800MW Koeberg nuclear power plant has in recent decades contributed about 5% of South Africas electricity. It will reach the end of its initially projected 40-year lifespan in 2024. To extend its operating licence for a further 20 years, the National Nuclear Regulator requires specific part replacements and upgrades, the most significant being the installation of new steam generators.

These operations were initially projected to require 10 months (five months for each of Koebergs two units) to be completed. The attempted upgrade of the first unit early last year was aborted after it became clear that preparations for the project were incomplete.

The second attempt began in January this year. But it has already been acknowledged that this stage, initially projected to end in June, will not be completed until at least August. After that a similar process will commence for the other unit, and this will be followed by a 200-day planned outage.

Koeberg is, therefore, effectively only running at half-power, and this state of affairs will likely continue into 2025.

Gas power ships

Amid clear signs of a deepening power crisis, the minister of mineral resources and energy in 2021 announced successful bids to supply 2,000MW of emergency power. The bulk of this award, 1,200MW, was allocated to Turkeys Karpowership, a company with a fleet of floating gas plants to be shipped in and moored in three of South Africas ports  Richards Bay, Nqurha and Saldanha.

The award attracted controversy, with accusations that the terms of reference of this bidding round amounted to an unfair advantage to Karpowership. Court challenges queried the legality of the environmental impact approvals too.

The key objection to the Karpowership deal is that it would cement what is painted as an arrangement for temporary emergency power for a 20-year period.

This opposition and delays in some other projects reaching financial close mean that the emergency programme is at least a year behind schedule. Some might come on line at the end of 2023, but the added capacity would decrease South Africas electricity shortfall by only a moderate amount.

Renewables

The Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme was designed to enable the production of mostly solar and wind energy by private developers, who would then sell it to the power utility, Eskom.

Given the intermittency of sunshine and wind, solar and wind farms in South Africa on average typically only produce about 25% (solar) and 35% (wind) of what they can generate under ideal conditions. Meeting a national shortfall of 6,000MW with one of these technologies alone would therefore require solar farms with a total capacity of 24,000MW, or wind farms with a total capacity of 18,000MW.

Two rounds of establishing new plants under the renewables programme are under way. The first of these should see 1,000MW of solar power and 1,600MW of wind power come on stream by early 2025, while the second round will see a further 1,000MW of solar projects completed about a year later.

A mega-initiative to install 15,000MW of solar and wind power has recently been touted by the new electricity minister. While this would massively ameliorate the power scarcity, it would be very challenging to construct such a large number of solar plants simultaneously, due to potential import bottlenecks and a shortage of skilled installers. So while some of these plants might be ready by late 2025, the entire programme is likely to require five years.

Domestic and private solar installations

The greatest progress in accelerating electricity production has been achieved by small-scale solar power installation initiatives, ranging from municipal or private enterprise solar farms to solar panels on household roofs. Although this component is still comparatively small, late last year the president announced that projects amounting to a total of 9,000MW were under development.

Despite the major growth in this sphere, the rollout of private solar installations is hampered by the same constraints faced by the renewables programmes: import bottlenecks and skills shortages. While municipalities and smaller entities able to get such programmes working will experience considerable relief from power cuts, these initiatives will only moderately cut the national shortfall.

The timeframe for a possible recovery

Any remedies to the South African power crisis initiated now or already under development are not going to have a significant impact this year. The projections also assume that no major setback like last years Kusile accident is imminent.

While 1,000-2,000MW might be added to the generating capacity towards the end of the year, a substantial decrease in the power shortage will only be possible towards the end of 2024, if Kusile repairs are then completed as expected, and when several renewable energy initiatives should come on line.

Ending power cuts completely will probably take another five years if the infusion of more solar and wind capacity proceeds as currently planned.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.




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Odey Asset Management has revealed it is in active discussions with its broker partners, after fresh misconduct allegations published against its founder led banks to review their relationship with the fund.

It followed a report in the Financial Times (FT)  together with Tortoise Media  which included several allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct from women who either worked at the hedge fund or had social or professional dealings with its founder, Crispin Odey, one of Britain's best-known hedge fund managers.

In a letter to investors, seen by the PA news agency, Odey Asset Managements (OAM) chief executive Peter Martin said: We do not recognise the picture of the firm that has been painted by the Financial Times.

For legal reasons, the firm said it would not comment in detail on the allegations, which it said its lawyers are looking into.

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Mr Martin added: We are aware of press coverage relating to actions allegedly being taken by prime brokers and other service providers to OAM.

While we cannot comment in detail (again for legal reasons), we are in active discussions with all service providers and we are confident that our service providers will continue to work with us to ensure that the interests of investors are protected.

On Thursday, it emerged that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is investigating the company and that banks are rethinking their relationships with the fund.

The American bank JP Morgan is understood to be looking at its ties with OAM, while reports emerged that Morgan Stanley is also moving to sever its prime broking relationship with the fund manager.

Both banks declined to comment.

The FT, citing a source, reported that the FCA opened an investigation into OAM two years ago. The FCA declined to comment.

The allegations involve 13 women who claim that Crispin Odey, who was a leading backer of Brexit, abused or harassed them, with eight of the 13 saying he sexually assaulted them.

The incidents happened between 1998 and 2021, the FT reported, after interviewing 40 former employees at Odey Asset Management.

Mr Martin said OAM treats, now and in the past, all such allegations extremely seriously, adding: Staff wellbeing is also central to the culture of OAMs business.

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The PA news agency attempted to contact Mr Odey on Thursday. Reached by the FT, he said that the allegations were rubbish.

Contacted by Reuters after reports that Morgan Stanley was to cut back its prime broking relationship with Odey AM, Mr Odey said: That is a massively quick reaction to an allegation by the FT.

Mr Odey has previously faced similar allegations. In 2021, he was acquitted of indecent assault of a woman in 1998.

The judge in the case said that his accusers story contained inconsistencies.
The operator of Dublin Airport has insisted it is not running a county fair as it took aim at Ryanair after the airline suggested a temporary car park is created for the peak summer months.

Dublin Airport warned passengers travelling last weekend that all 23,000 car parking spaces were sold out, and advised those who have not booked a space to consider taking public transport.

Ryanair has accused the airport operator DAA of "gaming the system".

A Ryanair spokesperson said the authority "owns lots of land immediately surrounding Dublin Airport (such as the Dublin Airport Driving Range for example), which could be opened as a temporary car park at very short notice, releasing pressure on Dublin Airport car parking and more importantly keeping the cost of car parking low for customers."

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A spokesman for the DAA rejected the idea as simplistic, pointing out the operator is not running a county fair.

Car parking requires infrastructure which requires planning permission, he said. We are running the fifth largest transatlantic hub airport in Europe, not a county fair.

Ireland Owner of land up for sale at Dublin Airport believ... Read More

DAA claimed that failure to sanction a new car parking facility was behind the car parking shortage.

It has placed a successful bid to purchase the currently-closed Quick Park facility but that move is now under review by the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), which must approve the deal.

However, Ryanair accused the DAA of regulatory gaming and called on the competition watchdog to reject its bid for the QuickPark car park.

The DAA claims that its car parks are full as a reason to pressure the CCPC to wave through approval of its monopoly grab for the QuickPark car park, it said, adding that the regulator should also reduce airport fees at the facility.
The five-year jail term imposed on a man who abused five sisters over almost an entire decade was not excessive, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

The man (55), who cannot be named in order to protect his victims' identities, began abusing the girls when he was 12 at the beginning of the 1980s, with the abuse stopping when he was 20 years old.

The five sisters were all aged between seven and 13 when he abused them at his home address at a Dublin town.

The man pleaded guilty to one count of rape and six counts of indecent assault at the Central Criminal Court in November 2021. In February 2022, he was sentenced to a total of six years and six months' imprisonment with the final 12 months suspended. The two largest sentences, three and a half years for rape and three years for indecent assault were to run consecutively, the trial judge ordered.

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At the Court of Appeal on Friday, Conor Devally SC, for the man, submitted that the use of consecutive sentences did not signal that the trial judge, Mr Justice Paul McDermott, sufficiently took account of the mitigating factors in the case.

Mr Devally said that he could not say that any aspect of mitigation had been overlooked by the judge but that insufficient weight regarding mitigation had been applied to the sentence.

Mr Devally said his client was 12 years old at the time of the beginning of the offending which meant the accused was a boy of "gross immaturity" at the time. Counsel added that his client also suffered with cognitive difficulties throughout his life.

Mr Devally said the appellant had a "huge lack of insight into his own actions, into the impact of what he has done and has a huge inability to express himself".

Counsel said the man had been remorseful, pleaded guilty and had advanced money to the victims in compensation for the offending.

After the abuse of the sisters stopped, the man isolated and distanced himself from his victims and had not come to any Garda attention in the intervening 33 years until he was charged.

Mr Devally said the remorse signalled by the man to the court below was not sufficiently reflected in the use of consecutive sentences, adding that his client also had "developmental issues".

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Ms Justice Isobel Kennedy said the remarks of the trial judge in addressing the use of consecutive sentences seemed to be "beyond reproach".

Mr Patrick Gageby SC for the State, said that consecutive sentences in the case were "not only appropriate but called for".

Mr Gageby said there were five victims and that the offending, which included oral and anal rape, went on from 1980 to 1988. He said the victims were subjected to "invasive and undignified" sex assaults and that the accused was 20 years old when he stopped.

Mr Gageby said that the man's cognitive issues did not diminish his culpability and noted that an oral rape was committed by the man while he was looking out a window in case his mother would return home.

Counsel said that the man was cognisant of the wrongdoing in that he had told the sisters not to tell anyone of the abuse and told at least one of the girls that they would not be believed if they spoke up, which showed "a crude sophistication" on his part.

Mr Gageby said the trial judge's decisions were "well explained and applied the totality principle".

Mr Gageby said that if the sentences had run concurrently then the State would have considered them to be "unduly lenient", amounting to a "free pass" for the man for his six indecent assaults.

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Counsel said it was "entirely open to the judge and within his discretion to deal with the entirety of the offending".

In dismissing the appeal, Mr Justice John Edwards said the court rejected the submission that there was insufficient regard by the trial judge to mitigating factors.

Mr Justice Edwards said the judge was "very scrupulous" in weighing all aspects of mitigation and had sufficiently considered the man's age at the time of the offending, his mental ability, his remorse, the guilty plea and that he had not come to adverse attention after the offending.

Mr Justice Edwards said the court did not accept the man's cognitive ability could be directly compared to culpability.

The judge said that there had been coercion involved in warning the victims they would not be believed and noted that one offence was committed when the man was watching for his mother's return.

Ireland Kildare waste management firm owner jailed over la... Read More

Mr Justice Edwards said there had been no error in principle in what was a "very serious case".

He said the decisions of the judge had been "well explained, well referenced and assiduous" in a case where the judge could not avoid a custodial sentence.

Mr Justice Edwards said the trial judge had sentenced the man in "an appropriate, careful and considered manner" and then dismissed the appeal.

If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, you can call the national 24-hour Rape Crisis Helpline at 1800-77 8888, access text service and webchat options at drcc.ie/services/helpline/, or visit Rape Crisis Help.
A former waste company owner has been handed a prison sentence over waste management breaches at a landfill site in Co Kildare.

Tony Dean (70) of Woodhaven, Milltown, Dublin, was found guilty last November by a jury at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court of two breaches of a waste management licence and of holding or recovering waste in a manner likely to cause environmental pollution at a 25 acres site at Kerdiffstown, Naas, Co Kildare between October 2003 and November 2008.

Dean, who owned Dean Waste Management Ltd, pleaded not guilty to the three charges. The prosecution case was that he was negligent rather than that he had connived or consented to commit the offences, which are contrary to the Waste Management Act, 1996.

'Significant environmental impact'

Imposing sentence on Friday, Judge Melanie Greally said the breaches had had a significant environmental impact and an effect on activities and residents of adjacent properties.

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While acknowledging the absence of actual harm to human or animal health, the judge said the landfill was accepting more waste than it could manage at that time, and the motivation was financial. She noted there was evidence that large profits were generated and appeared to have been prioritised over compliance.

She noted the persistent nature of the non-compliance over the five-year period and that Dean neglected to take steps to comply with the relevant legislation and avoid environmental pollution.

Judge Greally handed Dean a three-year sentence, with the final 12 months suspended on condition that he keep the peace and be of good behaviour.

Judge Greally acknowledged that Dean entrusted a manager with the day-to-day running of the site, and they were not ultimately made accountable for failings in management. But she said the court also had to consider the principles of general deterrence and punishment.

At a previous hearing, the court heard a licence was issued to Dean Waste in 2003 for the storage of waste in lined landfill cells in former sand and gravel pits a few kilometres outside of Naas.

The licensed area was about 30 hectares at its height, but the area subject to the offending was a 35-acre section in the northwest part of the site. The court heard that the only provision for disposal of the waste was in lined landfill cells constructed in 2005; however, waste was not ultimately disposed of in these cells until 2008.

Audits and inspections

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Between 2003 and 2008, a series of audits and inspections by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials identified a growing mound of waste which contravened the terms of the licence.

Nephin Trading Ltd., (NTL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Dean Waste Ltd., operated the licence and failed to address this non-compliance despite repeated warnings from the EPA. The facility ceased trading in 2010. A liquidator was appointed to NTL, and Dean Waste went into receivership.

In January 2011, a major fire broke out at the site. The court heard that the quantity of the waste was unhelpful in terms of the fire, but the cause could not be laid at the door of NTL or the defendant as the site was no longer in their control at this time.

Barry White SC, defending, said his client had hired Dr Ted Nealon, a former employee of the EPA, to advise him. The court heard Mr Nealon was prosecuted in relation to the Kerdiffstown site in 2015 but acquitted at the direction of the trial judge. The Supreme Court later ruled that the direction to acquit Mr Nealon was wrong but ordered no retrial due to the passage of time.

Mr White said his client had entrusted day-to-day operations with the EPA to Dr Nealon, who he said is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He said that in these circumstances, it would be grossly unfair to impose a custodial sentence on his client.

Guilty plea

The court heard that in 2009 Dean pleaded guilty to a charge of the recovery of waste without a licence relating to a site at Whitestown Quarry, near Baltinglass, between January 1st and May 1st in 1998.

He also has a conviction for offences of assault causing harm, threatening and abusive behaviour and intoxication in a public place, all occurring on September 29, 2006.

Ireland Medical college advises against using environment... Read More

Passing sentence on Friday, Judge Greally noted that 61.5 million of public money was spent to remediate the site, and although no sum could be attributed specifically to NTL, a portion of the work was necessary as a direct consequence of NTL's activities in general.

She set a headline sentence of four years on each of the charges, which she reduced to three years with the final 12 months suspended. All sentences are to run concurrently.

Judge Greally said she took into account the mitigating factors, including Dean's poor health, low risk of re-offending and the added difficulties of prison for someone of his age and background.

Other mitigation included Dean's hardworking and entrepreneurial qualities and the economic benefits and job creation associated with his waste management operation.
A man who sustained extensive burn and blast injuries in an industrial accident at the Stryker plant in Co Cork has died in hospital.

It is understood that employees of Stryker in Cork were informed of the death of John Murphy (41) on Friday morning.

In their staff briefing Stryker described Mr Murphy "as a friend to many and a valued colleague." They offered their heartfelt condolences to his family.

The family of Mr Murphy contacted the Neil Prendeville show on Cork's Red FM in the aftermath of the incident in April.

They released a statement in which they said that they were writing with a "heavy heart" after their family received the "worst news" of an accident at the plant in Carrigtwohill.

They described him as "a kind, mild mannered family man, 41 years old, with a loving wife, a baby, a young child and a stepson - who are his world."

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The statement added that they were "heartbroken" at this shocking turn of events.

The incident occurred at the medical equipment manufacturer's plant on April 18th.

Two men suffered burns while working on the roof when a mini explosion occurred. Mr Murphy was seriously injured.

Three units of the Cork County Fire Service attended at the scene alongside the emergency services and members of Stryker's trained fire fighting force. Gardai were also in attendance. They had received a 999 call in relation to the incident.

The Health and Safety Authority is continuing to investigate to the incident.

Ireland Man on life support after 'mini-explosion' at Cork... Read More

Stryker, which employs around 4,000 at six locations in Cork, established a base in Ireland in 1998.

The US multinational medical company was named Cork company of the year in February this year.

Following the accident Stryker issued a statement in which it expressed its commitment to a "safe and healthy work environment at all of their facilities."

Two years ago the Irish Examiner revealed that six Stryker workers from three sites in Co Cork made a protected disclosure to the HSA in 2020 in which they listed safety concerns.
Facebooks owner, Meta, has been granted a short stay by the High Court on a decision that it must suspend the transfer and storage of user data from Europe to the US.

Last month, the Data Protection Commission (DPC) fined Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd 1.2billion and ordered it to cease unlawful processing and storage of personal data of millions of European Economic Area (EU countries along with Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein) Facebook users.

That decision followed a successful legal challenge by Austrian privacy campaigner, Max Schrems, over concerns that EEA users data is not sufficiently protected from US intelligence agencies when it is transferred across the Atlantic.

While Meta updated its contractual terms with users following the Schrems decision, the DPC found these arrangements did not address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms of data subjects in accordance with a European judgment in that case.

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Following an inquiry, the DPC issued orders that Meta suspend the data transfers and to cease the processing and storage of the data.

Meta says the decision means it will have to cease providing its Facebook service to EEA users by October 25th next and after that it will have to permanently delete all their accounts.

As a result, on Friday it sought leave from Mr Justice Denis McDonald, with only the Meta side represented, to bring judicial review proceedings challenging what it says is the DPC's unlawful decision.

The judge said that having read the papers in the case he was satisfied Meta had established arguable grounds for the relief sought. He was satisfied to grant leave to bring judicial review proceedings on notice to the DPC.

He said the case could come back on June 19.

Declan McGrath SC, for Meta, then asked the judge for an interim stay on the DPC decision because of the financial losses his client will incur without it.

The judge said he was only prepared to grant a stay until June 19 but stressed that in doing so, it did not call into question the validity of the DPC. His order only meant Meta had established arguable grounds to suggest the decision is invalid, he said.

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In an affidavit, Meta Ireland director and head of office, Anne O'Leary, said that suspending Facebook for hundreds of millions of EEA users - or even telling them suspension will occur - would result in the loss of a very significant number of users and advertisers to competing platforms.

She said the damage will begin to occur even before the October date when the orders are to take effect and will increase significantly once users are notified of the impending suspension and deletion of accounts. Without a stay, she said, the estimated revenue loss is around $714m (664m).

Ms O'Leary says the US government and the EU Commission have reached agreement on a new framework for transatlantic data flows (known as the Adequacy Decision) and it is likely the EU will have that framework in place shortly.

In the event of an unexpected delay in the Adequacy Decision coming into effect, Meta will find itself having to suspend and engage in the "irreversible bulk deletion" of user data which will have a massive impact on users, she said.

Ireland Kerry woman sexually abused young boys in 'heinous... Read More

Without a stay on the DPC decision, she said millions of users will be unable to connect with friends and family across the globe and millions of business would no longer be able to use Facebook to sell goods and services.

It would also have serious adverse consequences for Meta's 4,700 strong EU workforce, including 4,470 in Ireland, she said.

Ms O'Leary said a significant factor to the balance of interests in this matter is that Meta Ireland is just one of many communications and technology businesses and organisations which transfer EEA personal data to the US.

Despite this, as far as Meta is aware, the DPC has not commenced own-volition inquiries or taken any steps to prevent the transfer to the US by these other businesses, she said.
A male has been shot in the foot by masked men in Belfast.

The incident occurred shortly after 10.30pm on Thursday at the City Cemetery on the Falls Road.

The PSNI said the victim taken into the cemetery grounds by two masked men and shot once in his foot.

Officers at scene of shooting in west Belfast pic.twitter.com/OFp5H9WAWL  Police West Belfast (@PSNIBelfastW) June 8, 2023

The man was taken to hospital for treatment.

Anyone with any information about this incident or who may be able to help with the investigation, is asked to call police in Woodbourne on the non-emergency number 101, quoting reference number 2231 08/06/23.

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Accommodation for asylum seekers and refugees amid a potential increase in arrivals over the summer is the lead story for some of Friday's papers

The Irish Times reports that the Government could house up to 6,000 Ukrainians in refurbished accommodation before the end of next year.

The Government believes theres a risk that the number of refugees arriving in Ireland will increase again over the summer months, according to the Irish Examiner.

The Irish Independent reports that complaints about domestic abuse and sexual violence against gardai have increased in recent years.

The Irish Daily Mail claims the State will have billions extra to spend in this year's budget.

The Irish Daily Star reports on the trial of Thomas McConnell for the murder of one of Gerard Hutch's nephews.

A taxi driver recorded allegedly threatening a passenger with a gun attempted to flee after the dashcam footage went viral, according to the Belfast Telegraph.

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The knife attack on four children in Annecy, France, features on the majority of the British newspaper front pages.

The Metro and The Sun reports on the horrific knife attack on four children, including a British three-year-old child, in a playground in the French Alps.

Tomorrow's Paper Today 



STABBED IN THEIR PUSHCHAIRS



 British baby is one of four knifed in attack

 Syrian refugee, 31, held by French gun cops #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/Bk6s1OjDuf  Metro (@MetroUK) June 8, 2023

On tomorrow's front page: a Brit girl of three on holiday was among four tots stabbed by a knifeman in a playground todayhttps://t.co/h0qaP7d4BL pic.twitter.com/9xf2uUw3Ce  The Sun (@TheSun) June 8, 2023

The Daily Mirror and the Daily Express praise the hero who stepped in to try to stop the attacker who was stabbing children in their strollers.

Friday's front page: Hero who fought to save the innocentshttps://t.co/yIIOKJVgxn pic.twitter.com/OGXfmmhBTA  The Mirror (@DailyMirror) June 8, 2023

The Daily Mail features a photo of the attacker in France as it leads with a new guide for NHS bosses which prioritises patient comfort.

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British prime minister Rishi Sunaks deal with US president Joe Biden on economic co-operation features on the front of the Guardian and the i.

Guardian front page, Friday 9 June 2023: PM signs pact with Biden as hope of trade deal vanishes pic.twitter.com/LTMSVwIEUk  The Guardian (@guardian) June 8, 2023

The Daily Telegraph looks abroad on their front page, reporting Ukraine will begin a counteroffensive against Russia as tanks from the west reach the front line.

The front page of tomorrow's Daily Telegraph:



Kyiv begins counter-offensive as Western tanks hit the front line#TomorrowsPapersToday



Sign up for the Front Page newsletterhttps://t.co/x8AV4OoUh6 pic.twitter.com/u7RxEPWQMh  The Telegraph (@Telegraph) June 8, 2023

The Financial Times reports on the probe into the Odey firm after sexual assault claims.

Just published: front page of the Financial Times, UK edition, for Friday 9 June pic.twitter.com/pDLYCuY625  Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) June 8, 2023

And the Daily Star says they have been asked to prove aliens exist by an internet watchdog.

Space cadets are demanding proof from the Daily Star that aliens exist https://t.co/y1aF1RMBfW pic.twitter.com/ItKWb9EPHi  Daily Star (@dailystar) June 8, 2023
A Kildare woman who injured her partner after discharging a shotgun when she discovered he was having an affair has been given a two-year suspended jail sentence.

Andrea Booth (48) of Nurney Bog Road, Nurney, Co Kildare pleaded guilty at Naas Circuit Criminal Court to a charge of recklessly discharging a firearm at the home she shared with her partner, Patrick Healy, on October 7th 2020, contrary to Section 8 of the Firearms and Offensive Weapons Act 1990.

Garda James Young told the court on Friday that the couple had been drinking the previous evening in a pub in Kildare town where Mr Healy had consumed eight pints and the accused had also drunk some alcohol before they returned to their log cabin home outside Nurney.

Garda Young said Booth had flipped over the recent discovery that her partner had been having an affair.

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The court heard that Mr Healy heard his partner hitting his car and later hitting the wall of a bedroom with his legally held shotgun.

Garda Young said the gun was discharged during the incident and Mr Healy suffered wounds from two shotgun pellets which struck his arm.

He said Mr Healy was able to disarm Booth before her family came and took her away from the property.

The court heard the couple had since reconciled and remained in a stable relationship with Mr Healy accompanying his partner in court.

Garda Young said Booth had admitted being angry when questioned by gardai.

She recalled feeling the weapon was long and heavy as she was sitting on a bed.

Garda Young said Booth next remembered hearing a bang which she said scared the shit out of me.

She added: I never wanted to hurt him.

Garda Young said the accused could not really remember the incident and did not even know if she meant to fire the weapon.

Counsel for Booth, Tony McGillicuddy SC, said a probation report had found that his client posed a low risk of re-offending.

Mr McGillicuddy said Booth was a law-abiding citizen who wished to apologise to her partner and was very sorry for what had happened during the course of an argument which he described as an act of madness.

The barrister said his client was the eldest of six children and worked as a cashier with Dunnes Stores.

Pleading for leniency, Mr McGillicuddy said Booth had learnt a very difficult lesson from the incident.

Judge Martin Nolan noted that Mr Healy had suffered minor injuries from pellets fired by the gun after Booth had discharged the weapon accidentally but recklessly.

Ireland Man injured in industrial accident at Stryker plan... Read More

The judge noted that the case showed that storing weapons in houses could lead to all kinds of incidents.

If the victim was a bit more unlucky, she could be in a different court. Everybody was somewhat lucky, Judge Nolan remarked.

He added: The mixture of firearms and alcohol just doesnt go.

Judge Nolan sentenced Booth to a prison term of two years which he fully suspended on condition that she be bound to the peace over the period.
Chilean writer Isabel Allende returns with her latest novel, a fictional look at refugees over the ages

Fiction

1. Another Person by Kang Hwagil, translated by Clare Richards, is published in paperback by Pushkin Press. Available now

Dark Academia the way I like it

- Hanna Bervoets



Another Person - Pushkin's 1st Korean translation! - by Kang Hwagil, trans. Clare Richards



A graduate (or survivor?) must return to the university that nearly destroyed her: and she was one of the lucky ones



1st June 2023 pic.twitter.com/FdBDfCfrld  Pushkin Press (@PushkinPress) May 23, 2023

Another Person is a confronting and timely book about consent, toxic masculinity, sexual assault and how women are treated in South Korea, by one of the countrys most prominent feminist writers. It starts with a young woman, Jina, locking herself away in her apartment, after she revealed to the world she was assaulted at work  but the internet swiftly turned on her, accusing her of being a liar and trying to ruin a promising young mans life. The experience makes Jina explore her past at Anjin University, thinking back to what really happened during her time there  particularly to one student, Ha Yuri, who everyone wrote off as promiscuous and mysteriously died. Its told from different viewpoints, helping the reader build a full  and shocking  picture of what its like to be a woman in South Korea; its a powerful look at sexism and assault in university campuses and beyond.

9/10

(Review by Prudence Wade)

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2. Radical Love by Neil Blackmore is published in hardback by Hutchinson Heinemann. Available now

John Church is a preacher on mission to spread a message of love  but Regency London is not a society which tolerates outsiders. For those who experience unnatural desires, the city is a place of fear, where love can survive only in the shadows of street corners, in secret molly-houses, in clandestine moments snatched when backs are turned. But Church is a passionate man, and when his desires are sparked by a meeting with intellectual ex-slave Ned, a flame is ignited in him which threatens to consume them both. Blunt, raw and unapologetically sexual, Radical Love is a story of human flaws, the dangers of both honesty and deception, and idealism in the face of cruel reality. With plenty of references to penetrating truths that still resonate two centuries later, it holds a lens up to 19th-century existence, whilst asking uncomfortable questions of our own. It is a story of the search for freedom and for acceptance, and it demands an answer: how high a price must be paid for the radical pursuit of love?

8/10

(Review by Hannah Colby)

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3. The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende is published in hardback by Bloomsbury. Available now

 'A new novel by Isabel Allende is always a treat' DAILY MAIL



 Intertwining past and present, The Wind Knows My Name tells the tale of two unforgettable characters, both in search of family and home.https://t.co/PICjUJVuRd pic.twitter.com/Y8Xp7B4pVT  Bloomsbury Books UK (@BloomsburyBooks) May 25, 2023

Legendary Chilean writer Isabel Allendes latest offering is a fictional look at immigration and refugees. It starts in the 1930s, where six-year-old Samuel  who is Jewish  is separated from his parents after Kristallnacht and sent to England on the Kindertransport. Later, this is mirrored in the present day with the story of Anita Diaz  who has fled violence in El Salvador and made the dangerous trip to the US, only to be separated from her mother. Its particularly fashionable in fiction right now to have books from multiple perspectives  sometimes it can be powerful, but for The Wind Knows My Name, it makes things feel a bit disjointed. While Allendes prose is polished and beautiful  as is to be expected of her  the similarities of the two stories is altogether too obvious to be that clever, making the link feel a bit forced.

6/10

(Review by Prudence Wade)

Non-fiction

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4. Fearless: Adventures With Extraordinary Women by Louise Minchin is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Sport. Available now

This is it, publication day for #Fearless, Adventures with Extraordinary Women. What an adventure it has been writing it, and now you get to read it. Let me know where you see it and what you think.  pic.twitter.com/Eq5JUHZ8eU  Louise Minchin (@louiseminchin) May 25, 2023

It wasnt enough for former BBC Breakfast presenter Louise Minchin to write true stories of women who have taken on mega-challenges, including freediving in Finlands ice and swimming in the shark-invested waters of Alcatraz. Oh no, the broadcaster and triathlete was going to do it with them. Over 17 chapters, each charting a different adventure, this book celebrates the bravery of these women of all backgrounds, religions, ages, shapes and sizes, as she joins them in everything from wild caving in the Mendip Hills to diving under a one-metre cut-out of ice in the centre of a frozen lake, to emerge out of another ice hole 15 metres away. Many adventures are terrifying, some are painful, all are exhilarating. Its interesting, too, that her back story for doing the book stems partly from her BBC battles over male-dominated adventure stories, when she felt womens feats should be equally highlighted. Itll leave you feeling inspired, thrilled  and utterly exhausted.

9/10

(Review by Hannah Stephenson)

Childrens book of the week

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5. Flora And Nora Hunt For Treasure by Kim Hillyard is published in paperback by Ladybird. Available June 8th

From our Waterstones Children's Book Prize Illustrated Category Winner the wonderful @kimhillyard, comes a beautiful new picture book about the power of friendship! Flora and Nora Hunt For Treasure arrives in June and is available to PREORDER here: https://t.co/gNyJZmsutA pic.twitter.com/B8GEyNbC60  Waterstones Kids (@WaterstonesKids) May 10, 2023

Flora And Nora Hunt For Treasure is Kim Hillyards fourth picture book. The story follows two best friends Flora and Nora, a pair of sea-faring cats, on an adventure  finding out how they react when disaster strikes. On their quest for treasure, the boat they are on is hit by lightning, splits in two, and leaves the cats separated, with no way of contacting one another. The book is beautifully illustrated and easy to follow for a three-year-old. It provides important lessons about friendship, not giving up and an understanding that everyone is different. The snappy, simple narrative is complemented by colourful pictures that encourage imaginations to run wild  which is exactly what you want from a childrens story.

8/10

(Review by Lauren Westmoreland)

BOOK CHARTS FOR THE WEEK ENDING JUNE 3rd

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HARDBACK (FICTION)

1. Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang

2. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

3. Atlas by Lucinda Riley & Harry Whittaker

4. Happy Place by Emily Henry

5. The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan

6. Killing Moon by Jo Nesbo

7. Henry VIII by Alison Weir

8. The Book That Wouldnt Burn by Mark Lawrence

9. Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson

10. The Making Of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks

(Compiled by Waterstones)

HARDBACK (NON-FICTION)

1. The Extra Mile by Kevin Sinfield

2. Bored Of Lunch by Nathan Anthony

3. The Future Of Geography by Tim Marshall

4. Eject! Eject! by John Nichol

5. The Wager by David Grann

6. Johnson At 10 by Anthony Seldon & Raymond Newell

7. Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken

8. How Westminster Works And Why It Doesnt by Ian Dunt

9. But What Can I Do? by Alastair Campbell

10. Uhtreds Feast by Bernard Cornwell & Suzanne Pollak

(Compiled by Waterstones)

AUDIOBOOKS (FICTION AND NON-FICTION)

1. Ladys Well by LJ Ross

2. Atomic Habits by James Clear

3. A Lesson In Dying by Ann Cleeves

4. Killing Moon by Jo Nesbo & Sean Kinsella

5. Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken

6. Spare by The Duke of Sussex

7. Lessons In Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

8. The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

9. Confessions Of A Forty-Something Fk Up by Alexandra Potter

10. The Couple At No. 9 by Claire Douglas

(Compiled by Audible)
Actress Nikki Sanderson has told the High Court in London that Mirror Group journalists abused her when she was a child as she gave evidence in her claim against the publisher for alleged unlawful information gathering.

Former Coronation Street star Ms Sanderson, 39, is suing Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) for damages, claiming journalists at its titles  The Daily and Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People  were linked to methods including phone hacking, so-called blagging or gaining information by deception, and use of private investigators for unlawful activities.

Her case is one of four representative claims being heard in London, alongside similar claims brought by Britain's Prince Harry, Coronation Street actor Michael Turner, known professionally as Michael Le Vell, and comedian Paul Whitehouses ex-wife Fiona Wightman.

MGN says Ms Sandersons claim has been brought too late and denies unlawful activity save for four occasions in 2004 and 2005 when its journalists instructed private investigators to obtain information about her.

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Andrew Green KC, for the publisher, told Ms Sanderson on Friday that MGN unequivocally apologises to her for those incidents.

Ms Sanderson, who played Candice Stowe in Coronation Street between 1999 and 2005, began giving evidence on Friday.

In a witness statement prepared for the trial, Ms Sanderson said MGN was continuing the abuse through its conduct of the litigation since she filed her claim in 2020.

She said: I have used the word abuse a number of times throughout this statement, and I do not use it lightly, but the fact is these people were in positions of power and I was a child and a young female, and I was attacked by people who were more powerful than me.

I did nothing to deserve this treatment.

Ms Sanderson, who has played Maxine Minniver in the Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks since 2012, added: The last three years have been extra victimisation and have caused so much more anger, hurt and frustration.

MGN abused me when I was a child and they continue to abuse me now by dragging this out.

Asked by Mr Green about this part of her statement in court on Friday, the actress told the court: The behaviour has been horrific, the gas lighting I feel has gone on with me.

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The fact that Im having to do this today is traumatic.

But Mr Green asked her: If you consider your treatment by MGN to be tantamount to child abuse  why were you giving an interview to the Daily Mirror in 2019?

Former Coronation Street actress Nikki Sanderson (left) arrives at the Rolls Buildings in central London for her phone hacking trial against Mirror Group Newspapers (Lucy North/PA)

Ms Sanderson said it was a planned piece for Valentines Day and later told the court there was a difference with prepared interviews which were under her control.

Ms Sanderson said in her written evidence that she was shocked to learn she had a claim against MGN from lawyers after she spoke about hacking to her then-Hollyoaks co-star Gary Lucy and her friend and former Coronation Street colleague Tina OBrien.

She said that, after her conversation with Mr Lucy: I remember thinking why on earth would the press have been interested in me?

Im a girl from Bury, not an A-list celebrity.

Describing the impact of the alleged unlawful information gathering, she said it has had a huge impact on how I navigated my life both at the time and to this day.

I have spent the last 20 years of my life being hyper-aware of

certain things, she added.

She said she had suspected friends, people working on Coronation Street and members of the public of selling stories about her, but now believed it was the result of unlawful activities.

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Her mother Judith Sanderson said in a witness statement that it was hard to see her daughter lose her sparkle as she became suspicious of people following press coverage.

She said: MGN wrote such horrible things about Nikki and she was not able to defend herself.

In the end, Nikki was very depressed. She lost confidence and became very unsure of herself.

She was paranoid as she felt like she had to watch out all the time, and she dreaded going out because of the reaction she got from the public.

She lost some of her sparkle which, as her mum, was very painful to see.

Ms Sanderson was questioned by Mr Green about a May 2003 People article featuring a photo of her and then Coronation Street co-star Tina OBrien out shopping and asked if seeing it caused her distress.

It does, she replied, adding that it showed we were being followed consistently and that it caused distrust in the public.

Its distressing to know that this type of thing is being done, Ms Sanderson said of the suspicious article.

Especially being a young woman. A young woman being followed around is distressing.

Andrew Green KC, the lead lawyer for Mirror Group Newspapers, questioned Nikki Sanderson over newspaper articles about the actress (Aaron Chown/PA)

At one point during her cross-examination, Ms Sanderson became emotional and asked for a tissue after being shown an old interview she had given to the Sunday Mirror.

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It actually makes me a bit sad, she said, adding that it was upsetting to read about her late grandmother.

She said she believed the alleged unlawful activities of MGN journalists had contributed to a backlash against her and negative opinions about her among the public.

In her statement she said: The backlash from the public was also very difficult and I was subjected to both mental and physical abuse. People would shout at me in the street, calling me a whore, a slag or a slut.

People would elbow me, push me and, on one occasion, a group of girls even set my hair on fire.

She said that an earlier bid by MGN to have her case thrown out  which was rejected in a May 2022 ruling, was horrific and belittling.

In her statement, she said: MGNs actions throughout the course of my claim have made a traumatic experience even more traumatising.

I sat through a three-day court hearing in April 2022 in which MGN tried to make out that I was the problem because I didnt know about my claim sooner.

The whole process was horrific and belittling.

I was not rummaging around newspapers like The Guardian or The Independent to work out if I had been hacked by a multimillion-pound paper because I truly had no idea about any of this, but MGN is gaslighting me and trying to put the blame back on me.

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MGNs tactics feel like another type of character assassination.

Ms Sanderson says she had never heard about the Leveson Inquiry into press standards, knew that the News Of The World had closed but not why, and had no knowledge of the previous High Court phone-hacking trial in 2015.

The actress is bringing her claim in relation to 37 articles published in Mirror titles between 1999 and 2009.

Ms Sandersons case is one of four representative claims being heard in London (Aaron Chown/PA)

MGN has previously denied that 35 of the 37 articles involved phone hacking or unlawful information gathering, with one article being not admitted.

In its trial defence, the publisher says Ms Sandersons claim is brought too late, but unreservedly apologises over four payments made to private investigators which it admits are evidence of instructions to unlawfully obtain her private information.

The publisher also claims that evidence does not suggest Ms Sandersons phone was successfully hacked.

Mr Green told the court on Friday that the evidence in Ms Sandersons case is weak and that the publisher does not accept that it establishes a case of voicemail interception and does not show systemic hacking of her phone.

He said that MGN does not know whether her phone was ever hacked, and, therefore, in relation to some of the period covered by her claim it was neither denied nor admitted, but not admitted.

He added: But it is certainly not accepted that her voicemails were intercepted to any significant extent.

The actress is due to continue giving evidence on Monday.
Two of the four children stabbed in a knife attack in the French Alps were on holiday in the area.

The knifeman attacked the group of children  aged between 22 months and three years  and two adults at a lakeside park in Annecy on Thursday.

French interior minister Gerald Darmanin said the suspect, a 31-year-old Syrian man, had tried to claim asylum in France but it was refused on Sunday because he had previously been granted asylum in Sweden 10 years ago.

French president Emmanuel Macron travelled to the Alps on Friday to meet families and witnesses who have been left traumatised by the attack, his office said.

Mr Macron and his wife Brigitte flew to Grenoble before heading to Annecy.

Two of the children remain in a critical condition on Friday morning, government spokesman Olivier Veran said.

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The attack took place in a childrens play area (Peter Byrne/PA)

Tearful well-wishers have visited the playground where the children were stabbed.

Flowers and messages were laid at the scene, with messages including Love Annecy, and Children I dont know you but in this hour you are fighting.

The Swedish Migration Agency has confirmed the suspect was granted permanent residency in 2013 and although the agency did not identify him, it said he subsequently sought Swedish citizenship in 2017 and 2018, both denied, and applied again in August last year.

Mr Darmanin said the suspect entered France legally, adding: For some reasons we dont really understand, he applied for asylum in Switzerland, in Italy and in France, which he didnt need to do as he already had asylum in Sweden for the past 10 years.

Local prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said one of the adults was seriously injured by both a knife wound from the attacker and a bullet wound from police as officers shot at the knifeman while trying to detain him.

The Telegraph reported the gunshot victim is a 78-year-old man who is now in a life-threatening condition in hospital after also being stabbed six times.

Witnesses said the knifeman shouted in the name of Jesus Christ as he launched the attack, including stabbing a child in a pushchair repeatedly as bystanders screamed for help.

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Security forces examine the scene of knife attack in Annecy (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone/AP)

Ms Bonnet-Mathis told a press conference on Thursday afternoon the attackers motives were unclear, but they did not appear to be related to terrorism.

Footage of the attack shared on the internet shows a man in dark glasses and with a blue scarf covering his head brandishing a blade as people screamed for help.

In another video, the man appears to shout in the name of Jesus Christ while waving the knife in the air, with people nearby screaming for police.

He then slashed at a man carrying a rucksack who attempted to approach him.

The video then shows a woman frantically pushing a stroller inside the play area of the park as the attacker approached her while she screamed for help.

Local schools were locked down after the knife attack (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone via AP)

She attempted to fend off the attacker before he leaned forward and stabbed down into the pushchair.

French prime minister Elisabeth Borne said the suspect had no criminal or psychiatric record and appeared to have acted alone.

We are talking here about infants, very young infants who have been very seriously injured, she told a press conference, according to a translation.

We are absolutely shaken by all this and we are standing firm by the people of Annecy.

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Flowers and teddy bears left at the childrens play area (Peter Byrne/PA)

Speaking at a press conference at the White House on Thursday evening alongside US president Joe Biden, British prime minister Rishi Sunak described the attack as unfathomable.

He said: All our thoughts are with those who were affected in this unfathomable attack, including a British child, and their families.

I have been in touch with president Macron. We stand ready to offer any assistance that we can.
Former US president Donald Trump said he has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate.

The Justice Department did not immediately publicly confirm the indictment which would ignite a federal prosecution and provide arguably the most perilous of legal threats against the former president.

US media outlets said the indictment covered seven counts, Mr Trump said he is due in court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon  making him the first former US president to face federal criminal charges.

He has already been indicted in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that could lead to criminal charges.

Former US president Donald Trump

Mr Trump claimed the investigation is a witch hunt posted on his Truth Social media platform: This is indeed a DARK DAY for the United States of America. We are a Country in serious and rapid Decline, but together we will Make America Great Again!

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The indictment arises from a months-long investigation by special counsel Jack Smith into whether Mr Trump broke the law by holding onto hundreds of documents marked classified at his Palm Beach property Mar-a-Lago and whether he took steps to obstruct the governments efforts to recover the records.

Prosecutors have said the former president took roughly 300 classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, including around 100 which were seized by the FBI in August during a search of the home that underscored the gravity of the Justice Departments investigation.

The former president has insisted he was entitled to keep the classified documents when he left the White House and has claimed without evidence that he had declassified them.

Mr Trump and his team have long seen the special counsel investigation as far more perilous than the New York matter  both politically and legally.

Prosecutor Jack Smith. Photo: AP

It remains unclear what the immediate and long-term political consequences will be for Mr Trump.

His first indictment spurred millions of dollars in contributions from angry supporters and did not damage Mr Trump in the polls as the 2024 presidential race ramps up.

Mr Trumps legal troubles extend beyond the New York indictment and classified documents case.

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World Pence blasts former boss Trump as he opens campaig... Read More

The special counsel has a separate probe underway focused on efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election while the district attorney in Georgias Fulton County is investigating Mr Trump over alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election in that state.

Meanwhile, Mr Trumps lawyers have asked a judge in New York to reduce the five million dollars awarded to writer E Jean Carroll in a civil suit to less than one million dollars.

The payment was awarded by a jury in May for sexual abuse and defamation after E Jean Carroll had claimed the former president raped her in a department store in 1996.
European Union ministers agreed on Thursday on how to share out the responsibility for looking after migrants and refugees, after 12 hours of negotiations got Italy and Greece to sign up to a deal that has eluded the bloc for nearly a decade.

Home affairs ministers from the 27-member bloc sealed the deal, hoping to end years of division dating back to 2015 when more than a million people  mostly fleeing war in Syria  reached the EU across the Mediterranean.

Germany's Nancy Faeser hailed the agreement as "historic". The bloc's top migration official said it amounted to "a win-win" situation for all EU member states.

"This is a great, great achievement, showing that it's possible to work together on migration. We are so much stronger when we work together," home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson said.

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Hosting immigrants has become an increasingly divisive issue in the bloc since 2015.

Unable to agree how to share the responsibility, EU countries mostly focused on bringing down arrivals, with UN data showing fewer than 160,000 people made it across the sea last year to the bloc of half a billion people.

Nearly 2,500 people died or went missing in the dangerous crossing over the same period.

Countries on the EU's southern edge, including Italy and Greece, have long demanded more help to cope with the numbers of people arriving on their shores. Richer countries, including Germany and Sweden, have balked at how many head on to their soil.

Eastern EU countries such as Poland and Hungary refused to host anyone from the mainly-Muslim Middle East and North Africa, while right-wing and populist parties across the bloc have fuelled the debate with anti-immigration rhetoric.

"You can still win and lose any election in any member state on migration. It is an illustration of how contentious this issue is," said an EU diplomat involved in the negotiations.

Deal

As the ministers talked, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, her Dutch peer Mark Rutte and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a visit to Tunisia to discuss economic and energy ties with the country, a gateway for African migration to Europe.

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Earlier on Thursday, Italy and Greece demanded last-minute changes to the proposed agreement, pushing for a cut in the number of people each state would take on and laxer rules to send people back to countries outside of the EU.

Under the deal that eventually came togetherand is to be finalised ahead of a 2024 EU election, each country would be responsible for a set number of people, but would not necessarily have to take them in.

World Italy border police under investigation over ship... Read More

Countries unwilling to receive irregular migrants and refugees arriving ad hoc to the EU would be able to help their hosting peers through cash  around 20,000 per person  equipment or personnel.

The agreement would introduce a new expedited border procedure for those deemed unlikely to win asylum to prevent them from lingering inside the bloc for years.

Poland and Hungary  among the EU's loudest voices against accepting sea immigrants  opposed the deal, saying the bloc's national leaders should return to the matter when they meet later in June. That, however, did not scupper the majority deal.

Liberal critics of the agreement said the rapid border procedure risked reviving tragic scenes that played out on the Greek islands several years ago by creating even more overcrowded and inadequate migration camps on EU periphery.
Former US president Donald Trump has been indicted for illegally retaining classified government documents after leaving office in 2021. Here is a rundown of what this means for his 2024 presidential campaign.

Will the indictment prevent Trump from campaigning or taking office?

The indictment is under seal, but Mr Trump's lawyer said he is charged with seven criminal counts including violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and conspiracy. None of those would bar Mr Trump from office if he is convicted.

A trial would take place many months from now, and Mr Trump can freely campaign during this time. The US Constitution only requires that presidential candidates be natural-born US citizens who are at least 35 years old and have lived in the country for 14 years.

Mr Trump said on Thursday on his Truth Social platform that he is innocent. He would be free to campaign even if he is convicted and sent to prison, and legal experts say there would be no basis to block his swearing-in as president even if he is incarcerated, though this would pose extraordinary logistical and security questions.

What impact will the case have on Trump's campaign?

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It is unclear what the impact will be on Mr Trump's standing with voters. Mr Trump's poll numbers rose after his indictment in March in a separate case in New York, and he is the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

He has used the cases and investigations he faces as fundraising tools, telling supporters that he is under attack and needs their help.

Mr Trump's campaign said in April that donations surged after he was indicted in New York.

What happens if Trump takes office while the case is pending?

It is unlikely that the prosecution would proceed if Mr Trump won the November 2024 election.

The US Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, and presidents are the top federal law enforcement officers in the country. Federal prosecutors generally serve at their pleasure.

The US Justice Department has a decades-old policy that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. The department can deviate from policy in extraordinary circumstances with the approval of the US attorney general.

A lame-duck attorney general serving under Democratic president Joe Biden, in this case Merrick Garland, could ignore that policy and forge ahead, but Mr Trump, as president, could fire him and hire an acting replacement of his choice before naming a permanent successor subject to US Senate confirmation.

Could Trump pardon himself?

Maybe.

Many scholars have said a self-pardon would be unconstitutional because it violates the basic principle that nobody should be the judge in his or her own case.

Others have argued that a self-pardon is constitutional because the pardon power is very broadly worded in the Constitution, which states that presidents shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment".

Mr Trump could not pardon himself for a conviction in state court.

He is currently under indictment in New York state court for allegedly using falsified records to conceal hush money payments he paid to a porn star, and Georgia prosecutors are investigating his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in that state.
Boris Johnson said he was quitting his seat and triggering an immediate by-election because he was bewildered and appalled at the Privileges Committees investigation into him.

He said he had received a letter from the committee which is investigating whether he lied to MPs over partygate making it clear, much to my amazement, that they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of Parliament.

He said: I have today written to my association in Uxbridge and South Ruislip to say that I am stepping down forthwith and triggering an immediate by-election, he said.

I am very sorry to leave my wonderful constituency. It has been a huge honour to serve them, both as mayor and MP.

He added: It is very sad to be leaving parliament, at least for now, but above all I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out, anti-democratically, by a committee chaired and managed, by Harriet Harman, with such egregious bias.

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In a rallying call to his followers, Boris Johnson used his resignation statement to deliver a stinging attack on Rishi Sunaks government.

When I left office last year the government was only a handful of points behind in the polls. That gap has now massively widened, he said.

World Senior aides implicated in partygate nominated for... Read More

Just a few years after winning the biggest majority in almost half a century, that majority is now clearly at risk. Our party needs urgently to recapture its sense of momentum and its belief in what this country can do.

We need to show how we are making the most of Brexit and we need in the next months to be setting out a pro-growth and pro-investment agenda. We need to cut business and personal taxes  and not just as pre-election gimmicks  rather than endlessly putting them up. We must not be afraid to be a properly Conservative government.

Why have we so passively abandoned the prospect of a Free Trade Deal with the US? Why have we junked measures to help people into housing or to scrap EU directives or to promote animal welfare?

We need to deliver on the 2019 manifesto, which was endorsed by 14 million people. We should remember that more than 17 million voted for Brexit. 
An Irishman has reportedly died after falling from an apartment building in Bangkok, Thailand.

The man fell to his death from the 23rd floor of the condominium building in the Thai capitals Bang Khae district on Friday morning, according to the Bangkok Post.

His body was found on a balcony on the third floor.

According to Thai police quoted in the Bangkok Post, the deceased is an Irish national who worked as a teacher at a school in the city.

Police were examining CCTV footage and gathering evidence to aid the investigation, the report said.

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Israeli soldiers have fired tear gas to disperse scores of protesters who pelted troops with stones along the border with Lebanon, leaving some demonstrators and troops suffering breathing problems.

The tension on the edge of the Lebanese border village of Kfar Chouba began earlier this week over the Israeli military digging in an area that Lebanon claims.

On Wednesday, a Lebanese villager tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer from digging a trench along the border.

When the villagers legs were covered with sand as the bulldozer moved ahead, UN peacekeepers jumped in and convinced the driver to move back. Videos of the elderly man with his legs stuck in the sand went viral on social media.



A Lebanese protester throws stones at Israeli troops on the outskirts of the Lebanese village of Kfar Chouba (Mohammad Zaatari/AP)

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Israel ended an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon when its troops withdrew from the area in May 2000.

Fridays protest took place on the edge of Kfar Chouba hills, which Beirut says is Lebanese land occupied by Israel. Kfar Chouba hills and the nearby Chebaa Farms were areas captured by Israel during the 1967 Middle East War and claimed by Lebanon.

Some of the protesters tried to break through a fence in the rugged area overlooked by an Israeli military post. Israeli forces fired tear gas to disperse them while Lebanese troops and UN peacekeepers later moved in and pushed the protesters back.

Do not cross the blue line, read a banner carried by a UN peacekeeper in Arabic, English and French, referring to the border drawn after Israels withdrawal in 2000.

Israeli troops and several vehicles, including a heavily armoured Merkava tank, were seen in the area.

Lebanese troops were on alert in the area and reinforcements were brought in.

In a statement, the Israeli military said protesters tried to damage a border barrier and threw stones at Israeli soldiers in the area.



Lebanese soldiers carry weapons amid tensions on Lebanons southern border with Israel (Mohammad Zaatari/AP)

The military said forces responded with riot dispersal means which typically means tear gas or stun grenades. The military said it would not allow any attempt to violate Israeli sovereignty.

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Andrea Tenenti, a spokesman for the UN peacekeeping force for known as Unifil, said peacekeepers are on the ground working to decrease tension in the area.

We have urged the parties to utilise our coordination mechanisms effectively to prevent misunderstandings, violations, and contribute to the preservation of stability in the area, Mr Tenenti said.

We call upon both sides to exercise restraint and avoid actions along the blue line that may escalate tensions, he told The Associated Press.

The protesters later held Friday prayers in the area and then tried to sneak in again, leading to more tear gas fire.

Fridays tension came a day after the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, Major General Aroldo Lazaro, chaired a meeting with senior Lebanese and Israeli officers at the UN headquarters along the border. The general appealed for restraint along the border and work on reducing tensions.

The Lebanon-Israel border has been relatively calm since Israel and Hezbollah fought a 34-day war in 2006.

However in April, Israel launched rare air strikes on southern Lebanon after militants fired nearly three dozen rockets from Lebanon at Israel, wounding two people and causing some property damage.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow will deploy some of its tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus next month in a move that the Belarusian opposition described as an attempt to blackmail the West.

Mr Putin said during a meeting with Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko that work on building facilities for the nuclear weapons will be completed by July 7-8, and they will be moved to the territory of Russias neighbour and ally quickly after that.

The move comes as Ukraine has stepped up attacks in several sectors of the front line in what some observers see as the start of its long-expected counter-offensive.

Russia used Belarus territory to send its troops into Ukraine on February 24 2022, and has kept forces and weapons on land belonging to its ally.

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Russian president Vladimir Putin is deploying nuclear weapons in Belarus (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Everything is proceeding as planned, Mr Putin said in televised remarks as he hosted Mr Lukashenko at his residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

On July 7-8 the preparations of the relevant facilities will be completed and we will immediately start the activities linked to the deployment of those weapons on your territory.

Tactical nuclear weapons are intended to destroy enemy troops and weapons on the battlefield. They have a relatively short range and a much lower yield than nuclear warheads fitted to long-range strategic missiles that are capable of obliterating whole cities.

Mr Putin announced the planned deployment of the short-range nuclear weapons in Belarus earlier this year in a move widely seen as a warning to the West as it stepped up military support for Ukraine. He has emphasised that Russia will retain control of them.



Mr Putin and Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko met in the resort city of Sochi (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russia did not say how many nuclear weapons would be sent to Belarus. The US government believes Russia has about 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, which include bombs that can be carried by aircraft, warheads for short-range missiles and artillery rounds.

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Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya strongly condemned the move.

Putin and his puppet Lukashenko are planning to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus immediately before Natos summit in Vilnius in July, Ms Tsikhanouskaya told The Associated Press. This is a rude blackmail, an attempt to force Europe to back down, but we cant allow dictators to dodge punishment for the nuclear blackmail.

Mr Lukashenko, who has been in power for 29 years, has relied on Russias political and economic support to survive months of protests, mass arrests and Western sanctions following an election in 2020 that kept him in power but was widely seen at home and abroad as rigged.
Labour has renewed calls for Rishi Sunak to stop Boris Johnson handing honours to a carousel of cronies amid speculation the list could be published imminently.

Shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock said the British prime minister had caved in to appease warring factions within the Conservative Party by reportedly accepting his predecessors recommendations.

The list, which is said to include around 50 names, is likely to be made public on Friday, according to multiple reports.

Stephen Kinnock criticised Rishi Sunak (PA)

Mr Kinnock said that some of the appointments appear very, very dubious indeed and accused Mr Sunak of being too weak to block them.

He told Sky News: More evidence of just how weak Rishi Sunak is.

Some of the people on that list, it just looks like a carousel of Boris Johnsons cronies and frankly the Prime Minister has caved in yet again because theres warring factions in the Conservative Party.

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Theyre so divided and fragmented and the Prime Minister realises that if he wants to keep the sort of Johnson wing of his party quiet hell need to Some of the names on there are very, very dubious indeed and the Prime Minister should not be accepting them.

It comes after The Times reported that the long-awaited list has been trimmed, with casualties including former UK culture secretary Nadine Dorries and Sir Alok Sharma, president of the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow.

Reports suggest the two Tory MPs have been struck from it to avoid potentially damaging by-elections.

The pair were expected to stand down to take peerages, which would have left Mr Sunak facing two early electoral battles in their seats.

Mr Sharma holds a 4,000-vote majority over Labour in his Reading West constituency and a by-election would likely be closely fought by Sir Keir Starmers party, which is well ahead of the Tories in the polls.

Ms Dorries, who has already announced her plan to quit as the MP for Mid Bedfordshire at the next election, has a majority of more than 24,600 over the main Opposition party.

Ms Dorries and Mr Sharma's names have been resubmitted to the House of Lords Appointments Committee for vetting and their peerages could be granted further down the line, according to the Times.

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The UK prime minister, asked about the reports during his trip to the US, said he could not comment on his predecessors submission.

Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper accused Mr Sunak of rewarding failure by allegedly giving the list the green light.

The buck stops with Sunak  he must ensure that Johnsons honours list is put through the shredder.

Mr Johnsons spokesman said: We strictly do not comment on honours.

Former prime minister Liz Truss, despite being the shortest serving prime minister in modern British political history, has also reportedly submitted a short resignation honours list.
Donald Trump described a Pentagon plan of attack and shared a classified map related to a military operation, according to a sweeping 37-count felony indictment related to the mishandling of classified documents which could reshape the 2024 presidential race.

The indictment paints a damning portrait of Trumps treatment of sensitive information, accusing him of wilfully defying Justice Department demands to return documents he had taken from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago and enlisting aides in his efforts to hide the records and telling his lawyers he wanted to defy a subpoena for the materials stored at his Florida estate.

I dont want anybody looking through my boxes, one of Trumps lawyers described the former president saying, according to the indictment.





He also asked if it would be better if we just told them we dont have anything here.

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The newly unsealed indictment is built on Trumps own words and actions as recounted to prosecutors by lawyers, close aides and other witnesses.

Totalling nearly 50 pages, the detailed charging document  with allegations that Trump not only intentionally possessed classified documents but also boastfully showed them off to visitors  is likely to be harder for fellow Republicans to attack than an earlier New York case criticised by some analysts as weak.

The indictment includes 37 counts, including wilful retention of national defence information, obstruction and false statements, that taken together could result in a years-long prison sentence.

Trump is due to make his first court appearance on Tuesday in federal court in Miami, where the case was filed.



Documents spilling on to the floor at Trumps Florida estate (Justice Department/AP)

He was charged alongside Walt Nauta, an aide and close adviser who prosecutors say brought boxes from a storage room to Trumps residence for him to review and later lied to investigators about the movement.

A photograph included in the indictment shows several dozen file boxes stacked in a storage area.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges.

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Legal experts  as well as Trumps own aides  had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution.

Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trumps lawyers were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.



Boxes stored on the stage in a ballroom (Justice Department/AP)

Enumerating the defence and foreign intelligence-related information included in the documents, prosecutors wrote that their unauthorised disclosure could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.

Noting the tens of thousands of members and guests who visited the active social club of Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trumps presidency in January 2021 until the August 2022 search, prosecutors said Trump had nevertheless stored the documents there, including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

The indictment claims that, for a two-month period, some of Trumps boxes were stored in one of Mar-a-Lagos gilded ballrooms. A picture included in the indictment shows boxes stacked in rows on the ballrooms stage.

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Photographs also show boxes spilled over in a storage room, including a document marked SECRET/REL TO USA, FVEY, which means information releasable only to members of the intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US.

Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who filed the charges, said the country has one set of laws and they apply to everyone, adding that prosecutors will seek a speedy trial.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and House leader Hakeem Jeffries released a statement saying Trumps indictment must play out through the legal process, without any outside political or ideological interference.

World Explained: What the Trump indictment means for his... Read More

We encourage Mr Trumps supporters and critics alike to let this case proceed peacefully in court, they said.

But the House speaker, Republican Kevin McCarthy, suggested that the nations core legal values were being undermined.

This is going to disrupt this nation because it goes to the core of equal justice for all, which is not being seen today. And were not going to stand for it.
The United Nations envoy to Sudan, a key mediator in the countrys brutal conflict, is no longer welcome in the country, Sudanese authorities have said.

A terse statement issued by Sudans Foreign Ministry comes just weeks after the head of the countrys military, General Abdel Fattah Burhan, demanded in a letter to envoy Volker Perthes that he should be removed from his post.

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has been notified that Mr Perthes has been formally declared persona non grata, the Foreign Ministry said.

Since April 15, Sudans military, headed by Mr Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, have been locked in a violent power struggle that has killed more than 860 civilians, according to the Sudans Doctors Syndicate which tracks civilian casualties. The actual death tally is likely to be much higher.

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General Abdel-Fattah Burhan visits troops in Khartoum (Sudanese Army via AP)

Later on Friday, the military and the RSF agreed to a new 24-hour ceasefire to start at 6am local time on Saturday, Saudi Arabia and the US said in a joint statement published by the state-run Saudi Press Agency.

The day-long truce, brokered by Washington and Riyadh, will be the conflicts eighth ceasefire deal. All past agreements have foundered.

Last week, the two mediating nations suspended formal peace talks that had been taking place in the Saudi coastal city of Jeddah since late May, accusing each other of repeated ceasefire violations. The same day, Washington announced the imposition of sanctions against key defence companies tied to the military and the RSF, along with visa restrictions.

Despite the breakdown, Washington and Riyadh said they have remained in contact with representatives from both forces in the hope of reviving formal peace talks.

Mr Perthes has been a key mediator in Sudan since being appointed as special envoy in 2021, first during the countrys failed attempts to transition to democracy and then as relations between the military and the RSF deteriorated. Fighting exploded in April.

Mr Perthes native Germany condemned the announcement.

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The international community, including the German government, continues to stand fully behind Mr Perthes and his efforts, said Andrea Sasse, spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, in Berlin.

She said Mr Perthes will continue to do his job from Kenya, from where he is supporting efforts in Jeddah to get the warring parties to the table and secure a ceasefire.

Mr Perthes was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopias capital, on Thursday meeting representatives from the African Union and the eight-nation eastern Africa bloc known as IGAD.

In recent months, the German diplomat has received death threats and numerous calls to resign.

In his letter last month, Mr Burhan accused Mr Perthes of being partisan and negatively contributing to pre-war talks between the generals and pro-democracy groups in the weeks building up to the conflict.

Responding to these allegations, Mr Volker told The Associated Press that those who threatened him were marginal extremists and that there is a wide appreciation of UN efforts in Sudan, which has relocated its headquarters to the coastal city of Port Sudan.



Children were evacuated from the Foster Home for Orphans in Khartoum (Nazim Sirag/AP)

The conflict between the two generals has reduced Khartoum to an urban battlefield, with many districts of the city without running water or electricity.

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There have been reports of widespread looting and sexual violence, including the rape of women and girls in Khartoum and the western Darfur region, which have seen some of the worst fighting in the conflict.

Almost all reported cases of sexual attacks were blamed on the RSF.

On Wednesday, 297 children were rescued from an orphanage in Sudans capital after being trapped there while fighting raged outside, Unicef said. The evacuation came after 71 children had died from hunger and illness in the facility since mid-April.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size On a cool morning in mid-March this year  as a series of bank runs gripped America  a fast-growing investment house in Oakland, California, would spark a chain of events that would have enormous ramifications in Australia. The company, Terra Global Capital LLC, spent the morning desperately trying to move $25 million out of San Francisco lender First Republic Bank amid fears the regional lender would soon collapse. The little-known carbon abatement investor had a lot to lose. Only months beforehand, it won a $US640 million ($960 million) investment mandate from Anew Climate, which is majority owned by a division of US private equity giant TPG Capital. Over a series of hurried emails, Anew agreed to help its partner out. Over the next two weeks, Terra Global and Anew arranged for Terra Global to send its cash in First Republic  $US19 million ($25 million)  to Anews bank accounts at Bank of America for safe keeping. The two companies agreed that Anew would then return it to Terra Global on request at a later date. What would happen next would seem more fitting of a modern-age financial crime thriller. Loading Without either Anew or Terra Globals knowledge, a group of hackers had been lurking in Terra Globals systems. These hackers used cloned emails of Terra Globals chief executive and chief financial officer to impersonate them and convince executives at Anew to send the money to a bank account in Australia, despite Terra Global having no business here. The hackers appear to have opened that bank account with National Australia Bank using an Australian company claiming to operate out of a house in the Sydney suburb of Leichhardt. The director and shareholder of the Australian company was a man called Michael, living nearly 175 kilometres away in the outer suburbs of Maitland, a rural city in the NSW Lower Hunter Valley.

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The mega swindle is now the subject of investigations by the US Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Australian agencies and lawyers from the major Australian firm Gilbert + Tobin, who are all trying to find the missing cash. But investigators have hit a snag after learning the names and addresses of ordinary Australians, with no links to Terra Global, Anew, or in some cases even NAB, have been used, or attempted to be used, by the hackers as part of their fraud. Much like the hacks of other large companies in Australia such as Optus, Medibank and Latitude Financial, the fraud at Terra Global again highlights the hacking dangers posed to big businesses with weak security systems. It also cruelly demonstrates how easy it is for crooks to plunder the rivers of Australian identification documents that have been uploaded to the dark web after hacks of our biggest companies. Its on the dark web that fraudsters can get the data to set up bank accounts to commit frauds in the names of unsuspecting, ordinary people. (This masthead has chosen not to report the surnames of the Australian people tied to fraud as they are suspected victims of identity theft). Anew Climate, which counts TPG Capital as a major shareholder, had invested nearly $1 billion for carbon abatement projects in developing countries. Credit: Getty The set-up Back on January 11, things were bright for Terra Global and Anew. Both groups had trumpeted the $US640 million investment by TPGs Anew into Terra Global, which invests in forest renewal and other similar style carbon-offset programs in developing countries.

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Were proud to partner with another woman-led business that drives the development and advancement of climate finance, said Marc Mezvinsky, partner at TPG and member of Anews board of directors. It was big money and someone was already watching. Loading Within 20 days of the January 11 announcement, unbeknown to anyone at the time, someone set up a company in Australia called Terra Global Capital LLC. The company was registered to a man called Jason who was said in documents filed with the corporate watchdog to live in an apartment building in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern. It appears that group never did any business. Several weeks later in early March  about 10 days before the meeting between Terra Global executives and Anew senior management  another Australian entity was set up. This time the companys name was Terra Global Capital LL. The director was listed as Allan from Peakhurst in Sydney. Again the business appears to have not done any business. By March 23  during Terra Globals discussions with Anew over the transfer of the $US19 million  the fraudsters had hit on the winning formula. They set up a new Australian company, Terra Global Capital Pty Ltd. Michael from Maitland was listed as the director and shareholder. Now the company looked like a legitimate Australian small business and would soon obtain an NAB bank account. It became one of the final pieces needed for the gang to execute their fraud.

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The intercept Already the hackers had infiltrated Terra Globals systems. Once inside, the hackers created a rule in the Terra Global emails that caused emails between Anew and Terras CFO and CEO to be diverted to third-party email addresses so that the emails could be intercepted. At the same time, the hackers set up new email addresses for the senior staff at Anew under the domain anewclimates.com instead of anewclimate.com. These tricks, along with the cloning of the CFO and CEOs email, meant that the hackers were able to send emails from Terra Globals cloned email addresses to Anews legitimate email addresses. Terra Globals real executive email addresses were then programmed to only contact the fake Anew addresses. The incredibly complex scheme set the scene for the intercept. At some point around late March, hackers hijacked the conversation between Terra Global and Anew, which was now safely holding the cash for Terra Global in its Bank of America accounts and expecting an email from its investment partner asking to return the money. Using a cloned email of Terra Globals chief financial officer, Bart Kortum, hackers wrote to Anew: Please find revised wire instructions for the return of funds we have better insurance with the Australian bank than with First Republic bank to cover the funds. Feel free to use return of funds as description. Amounts and bank information can be found in email string below. Copying for your convenience

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The email included wiring instructions to an account held by National Australia Bank. Two days later on April 6, the Thursday before Easter, Anews top brass received an email from the hackers again impersonating Kortum saying: We confirm safe receipt of the funds in our Australian bank, Thank you. Have a good easter [sic] weekend. It would take 10 days for anyone in the US to suspect they had been had. Once they were aware of the heist, lawyers in Australia would quickly lodge civil action in the Victorian Supreme Court to successfully obtain freezing orders over the NAB bank account, while Anew would report the matter to the FBI and then the US Secret Service. The Secret Service deputy assistant director Jason Kane told Anews executives that most of the money was long gone. Hackers are easily able to access the rivers of Australians personal data on the dark web. Credit: Getty As the lawyer for Anew, Gilbert + Tobin partner Janet Whiting told the Victorian Supreme Court: During the call, Mr Kane indicated the amount of funds identified to be recovered was $US1.18 million and those funds were at NAB.

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HISTORY

The Russo-Ukrainian War

Serhii Plokhy

Allen Lane, $35

What can be harder than to write a history of a war that is still going on? We all want to find out how it will end, but nobody knows. The next best thing is to find a reliable guide to the state of play up to now. This is what Serhii Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, sets out to offer.

Plokhy, Ukrainian by ethnicity and education, was born in what was then Soviet Russia. That doesnt mean his sympathies are divided, but it gives him a degree of familiarity in dealing with both sides. Plokhys side is the Ukrainian one, with a special animus against Putin for his interpretations of Ukrainian and Russian history. In addition to this intellectual stake, Plokhy has a personal one: a cousin, who died fighting in the Ukrainian Army near Bakhmut, to whose memory this book is dedicated.

Ukrainian soldiers head towards their forward positions near Bakhmut in the Donetsk region. Credit: AP

The story starts in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea. That region, including the important Black Sea naval base of Sebastopol, had been part of the Russian republic in the Soviet Union until 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev, in an expansive gesture to mark 300 years of Ukrainian-Russian union, handed it over to the Ukrainian republic. Crimeas population was largely Russian; the issue of its return was a perennial one in the post-Soviet Russian Parliament. The annexation encountered almost no resistance in the region itself and only token disapproval internationally. In other words, Putin got away with it.
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Eating outRestaurant news This is going to be a problem: How changes to student visa rules will hit hospitality Industry leaders say July 1 is too soon to reintroduce student visa work restrictions. Bianca Hrovat June 10, 2023 Save Log in , register or subscribe to save recipes for later. You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more. Save this article for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime. Got it Share

Staff shortages and service standards across the hospitality industry are predicted to worsen from July 1, when the Australian government reintroduces working restrictions on international students. Student visa work restrictions were temporarily removed in January 2022 in an effort to alleviate widespread labour shortages caused by COVID border closures and lockdowns. The scheme proved beneficial to hard-hit industries such as hospitality. In Melbourne, restaurateur Manpreet Sekhon relied on international students to keep her businesses, Masti and Elchi, operational. Students became the backbone of the hospitality industry, Sekhon says, who estimates they make up almost 99 per cent of her workforce. Restaurateur Manpreet Sekhon says students have been the industry backbone. Carlie Jane

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At Ho Jiak restaurants in Sydney, founder and executive chef Junda Khoo has spent the past three years training students to become chefs, filling roles that would have been taken by skilled migrant workers had borders not closed. They really helped us return to normal, Khoo says. During COVID, they didnt receive any income support, but they hung around and stayed back to fight and survive. Now, well have to cut their hours back. Junda Khoo and student Ivy Angelina at Sydney restaurant Ho Jiak Town Hall. Brook Mitchell Come July, restaurants, bars and cafes must limit the working hours of student visa holders to 48 hours a fortnight (about three shifts a week). Often, this will leave business owners scrambling to fill roster gaps.

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A recipe for disaster: The rules putting Sydneys international students at risk Februarys announcement sparked concern across the board  from small, family-run restaurants such as Sekhons to hospitality giants like Merivale. International students  play a significant role in contributing to the growth of our hospitality industry and the economy, says Merivale chief executive officer Justin Hemmes. The increase implemented by the previous government  was a big relief for us, so any winding back of that is, of course, detrimental to our industry and to the individuals. Stefano Catino, co-founder of Sydney cocktail bar Maybe Sammy, argues its too soon to reintroduce the working cap.

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While [the labour shortage] isnt as bad as it was, the problem hasnt been solved. We still need skilled workers, he says. Once the restrictions come in, Ill have to hire two people to do the job of one  or go back to opening just four days a week. Everyone is going to suffer from this. I want to make it very clear: this is going to be a problem. Cutting students hours will definitely have an impact on service at restaurants such as 400 Gradi in Melbourne, says owner Johnny Di Francesco. Anyone who thinks its easy to find good staff right now has got it wrong, he says.

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We have been getting plenty of people inquiring about work but around 70 to 80 per cent of them dont turn up for interviews. And when we do manage to get more people  well have to train them. That can take anywhere from four to 12 weeks and that will always have an impact [on customers]. The team from Al Dente Enoteca in Carlton (from left) co-owner Andrea Vignali, manager Michelle Badek, co-owner Davide Bonadiman and worker Gautam Timalsina. Simon Schluter For hospitality students such as 23-year-old Gautam Timalsina, the changes mean he will barely earn enough to scrape by. The chef de partie-in-training has been studying commercial cookery while working full-time at Al Dente Enoteca in Melbournes Carlton. Almost half of my pay will be gone, just like that, Timalsina says.

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Timalsina says the restaurants managers work around his classes and coursework, allowing him ample time to study. Al Dente Enoteca co-owner Michelle Badek says, as a former student herself, she knows how to support international student employees to balance their commitments. I hope [the student working cap] doesnt deter young people from coming to Australia, Badek says. But as the number of international students swells beyond 585,000 (numbers have jumped 85 per cent between December 2021 to February this year), Home Affairs Minister Clare ONeil seeks to ensure the appropriate use of a student visa. I do not think too many Australians are going to love the idea of people coming here as international students and effectively using that as a pathway to becoming a full-time worker in our country, ONeil says.

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They are either here as students or they are here as workers. A pre-existing condition of the visa mandates that students maintain course enrolment, satisfactory course attendance and good grades while in Australia. ONeil says students are unable to get a good-quality education in Australia if theyre working full-time. Thats why the rule has existed before, she says. Many of the international students working in hospitality are studying at culinary schools such as the Kingsford International Institute in Sydney. KII marketing manager Sandra Arias employs student visa holders at her newly opened Elizabeth Bay business, Greenknowe Cafe. For our staff, this job is not just a means of making money but also a means of gaining their qualification, Arias says.

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Theyve been worried about these restrictions. Imagine having your wages halved during a cost of living crisis, when rent prices are so ridiculous. For bars such as Old Mates Place in Sydney, the new restrictions will mean allowing fewer customers inside on busy nights. It means well suffer financial losses, but thats all you can do, says owner Dre Walters. [Otherwise], people end up waiting too long, and then you get bad reviews. I think youll see a lot more operators bringing in QR codes. Service will have to become simpler, with less attention to detail.
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Review Eating outClaremont Nolita: An authentic Italian with atmosphere Rob Broadfield June 9, 2023 Save Log in , register or subscribe to save recipes for later. You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more. Save this article for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime. Got it Share

1 / 5 Squid cooked properly. Rob Broadfield 2 / 5 Nolita chefs at work. Rob Broadfield 3 / 5 The vegetables. Rob Broadfield 4 / 5 The steak. Rob Broadfield 5 / 5 Pasta. Rob Broadfield Previous Slide Next Slide Italian$$$ A few hundred metres north of Bolognas main square and its marble clad San Petronio Basilica is a neighbourhood not frequented by tourists, where locals eat and drink and carouse among the ancient, cobbled streets. There are a few terrific restaurants where the food is first rate and the experience is about as Italian as it comes. We were reminded of this at Nolita in Claremont where the service, the decor and the simple dishes are a nostalgic reminder of small bar restaurants in Italy. Authentic is a much traduced word in Australian hospitality, but Nolita could claim  but doesnt  to be an entirely authentic experience. Close your eyes and you could be in a back street in Milan or Bologna. It has atmosphere too, that rarest of assets for a successful restaurant. Nolita was recently taken over by Il Lido and Canteen Pizza owner Lyndon Waples and the changes he and his team have brought to the Bay View Terrace shop front have been gradual and low key but nonetheless game changing.

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The pasta is now house made, the produce is fresh and superb, frozen food has gone from the kitchen, the cookery is restrained, modest and back to Italian basics. The menu has been deftly redesigned. Theres new stemware in the dining room. In short the experience is better and more authentic than its ever been. Want to find out just how good a kitchen is? Order calamari. There are a thousand ways to ruin this simple fry-up of squid rings. The experience  and its always about the experience  is driven by restaurant manager Giacomo (Jack) Moriero, an Italian hospo professional who thinks first and last about his customers. Would you like a break before the next course? Yes. Give me a number  10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes? 15 minutes thanks. The question rarely gets asked. Even more rare is to be asked when the main course should be called away. This is not only first-rate customer service, it is a pleasurable antidote to the typically off-hand, service-by-numbers delivered in many Perth restaurants. Moriero is also a trained wine expert (dont call me a sommelier) with a degree in oenology. His wine recommendations are delivered with savant level knowledge.

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Moriero is one of the finest front-of-house operators in the city. Want to find out just how good a kitchen is? Order calamari. There are a thousand ways to ruin this simple fry-up of squid rings. Nolitas kitchen knows its stuff. The small squid pieces were dusted in a well seasoned flour and cornmeal. They arrived hot and crunchy like popcorn. A cheek of lemon and an indifferent mayonnaise was on the side. The squids were superb and as simply cooked as good produce should be. The primi course was a pasta dish sauced with a light white wine sugo of pork, sage and cherry tomatoes. The flavours were swashbuckling but not flashy. Seasoning was heavy but well nuanced. And it was served hot. The pork mince was also salted well and crusty in parts from a good sear. It was a difficult dish to put down. For mains, sirloin steak was ordered rare and delivered rare and properly charred. It was delivered with a simple reduction sauce as black as anthracite and deeply flavoured and garnished with snake beans which had been artistically bundled and tied in a knot, no really, and cooked on the grill. Some of the beans were charred by the fire. Those at the centre of the knot were just cooked, green and tender. Its an interesting technique, more Margaret Fulton than haute cuisine, but it was sensational. It takes a confident chef to cook vegetables just this side of burnt and for the outcome to be so right. On the side, a plate of caulini, a portmanteau vegetable: half cauliflower, half broccoli, with florets at the end and a delicate flavour. It was served with romesco sauce which was way out of whack. Too much onion, not enough roasted capsicum and roasted tomato and too little of the acerbic back beat of red wine vinegar that this Spanish sauce requires. It was beige. Literally and figuratively.

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The romesco was the only slip up in an otherwise delightful meal. The kitchen is a well-oiled machine. It doesnt show off. Theres no weird look-at-me cookery going on. Experience, polished technique and chefs who know what theyre doing are the hallmarks of Nolitas simply cooked, cleanly flavoured Italian dishes. Just like youd find in the back blocks of Bologna.



The low-down 16/20 Prices: antipasti $10-$29; pasta $32-$36; mains $30-$48; dessert/cheese $15-$18.
Danielle Alvarezs linguine with prawns and chilli. Credit: Instagram/@oscardarling

No passports, no visas, no vaccinations, no packing, and travel all around the world from the comfort of my armchair, 52 Dream Destinations [June 3]. Ive crisscrossed time zones, have no jet lag, and Im feeling totally relaxed and inspired. This was a weekend to remember!

Judith Caine

Donvale, VIC

Thanks for the 52 Dream Destinations but sadly, the dream for most Australians today is to maintain, or even find, a warm and safe roof over their head.

Ray Peck

Hawthorn, Vic

Dont let the travel bugs bite in 2023 and beyond! Until re-ignition by 52 Dream Destinations, my wanderlust had been quelled by 100 days of SE Asia Unlimited. Minimising my carbon spend was enabled by mapping journeys onto a globe using a piece of string. The one that cut the shortest looped Indonesia eastward from Northern Sumatra to Flores across Java and Bali. After circumnavigating Borneo, I city-hopped northward from Singapore to Bangkok and Laos via Kuala Lumpur, then hugged Vietnams coast between Hanoi and Saigon in a southerly hurry before flying home to Brisbane.

Joseph Ting

Kelvin Grove, QLD
Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore has been urged to ditch her antipathy to cars and allow more parking spaces at high-density developments, as angry neighbours from surrounding areas claim their streets are being swamped by other peoples vehicles.

The issue was a flashpoint at a public meeting convened by opponents of a proposed Meriton development in Zetland, near the border with Kensington, which will contain about 860 parking spaces for its 814 apartments and shops.

High-rise apartment blocks are common in Zetland. Credit: Rhett Wyman

The local MP, Local Government Minister Ron Hoenig, said high density housing in Zetland was predicated on a train station that was secretly dropped from Metro West plans in 2019. Without it, people would drive more than the City of Sydney expected, and they would need more parking.

Its a big call to ask Clover Moore to put in more parking spaces, but its not an unreasonable request, Hoenig told the meeting of about 50 people at Kensingtons Jubilee Hall on Thursday.
Melbourne tradie Chris Miles, a Formula 1 fan, said that the most striking thing about the morning of Friday, March 13 was that it was a perfect autumn day. It was too lovely, he said, for anything bad to happen. As he rode on a packed tram to the Albert Park track, rumours that the emerging virus could derail the grand prix were the hot topic of conversation, but few seemed genuinely concerned. Waiting spectators are told the Australian Grand Prix is cancelled on the morning of Friday, March 13, 2020. Credit: Joe Armao Miles felt the other fans shared his view that this new disease would go the way of swine flu, SARS and Ebola, where nothing really ever turned into anything  at least anything that directly impacted his life. Yet the gates were, surprisingly, still shut when he reached the tracks entrance. I remember thinking this is so stupid; they dont want people to crowd, but then they have got these huge lines of people waiting.

Eventually, an official wielding a megaphone emerged to break the news. The [Australian Grand Prix Corporation] has been advised by Formula 1 that the Australian Grand Prix has been cancelled, he said, looking nervous as he read off a mobile phone. Miles, who had been looking forward to a week off work and a busy weekend at the grand prix, experienced the first hint of a feeling that would grip Melburnians and other Australians during the years that followed: they didnt have anything to look forward to, and life seemed reduced to working  if you were lucky  and essential tasks. The hardest thing for me about the pandemic is I never had anything to look forward to, he recalled. Something Id really looked forward to for a long time was suddenly just taken away. As news emerged on Friday of Suttons resignation as the states chief health officer, after more than four years, few would have been asking why.

Perhaps the better question is how he lasted quite so long, and how he took himself from the exhausted man on the couch, overwhelmed by the thought of what was to come, to the resilient face of Victorias pandemic response. Public perceptions of him ranged from a hero to the silver fox lining of the pandemic and, to some, a villain. Premier Daniel Andrews and Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton at a COVID-19 briefing in August 2020. Credit: Wayne Taylor I wasnt much attached to either the adulation or the vitriol. I think it is always going to happen in a crisis, to an extent, where youre a focal point of peoples attention, and where the decisions do sit with you, Sutton said. For close to two years, Sutton was arguably the most powerful and recognisable public figure in the state, short of Premier Daniel Andrews. He signed off on every one of Victorias six lockdowns, spanning a cumulative 262 days.

Despite spending hours talking through each health direction and every potential outcome in granular detail with many dozens of his colleagues, Sutton said he felt very alone as he put his signature to orders. It was a precautionary approach, he said. But the general feeling was about how you needed to act when the early signs looked catastrophic, and the potential was inconceivable in many respects. Loading Melbournes second lockdown was heralded as a social and economic disaster for the city and the state. Sicktoria locked down for round two blared a headline in Brisbanes Courier-Mail the next day. There had been a fleeting window of freedom when Victorians could see their families again or go for a beer at the pub, only for the return to normality to be snatched away. There was collective grief when it became apparent that the new surge of cases would become another wave, and not simply a speed bump on the path back to life as before.

Sutton told us that Victorias second wave of coronavirus cases had crept up on authorities, as it was hidden in the tail end of the first. We couldnt see there were new chains of transmission that were taking off in the way that they were, he said. I wish Id acted sooner, because it would have made the scale of the challenge so much less. Sutton speaks to the media in May 2021. Credit: Getty Images There were so many hard lessons like that which came after the fact about what it means not to act for a day or for a week  it means several weeks of pain and hardship and suffering, and more deaths and more disability. As the COVID count kept rising  165 cases a day, 238 cases, 459 cases  there was heartache for Sutton being with his family physically but not psychologically as he tucked his young children into bed at night.

In many respects, I didnt have a moment to contemplate how I could manage myself, he reflected. I wasnt thinking of it. I was thinking of all of the things that were playing out, that needed to be decided, the hundreds of emails, text messages, conversations and meetings that were happening every day, essentially through all of 2020. When Sutton took his first day off in months on the anniversary of his fathers death, it would happen to coincide with the day that Victoria reported its highest number of deaths in the second wave. His father, Terry, had died from a stroke when Sutton was nine years old. His death affected him deeply as a boy, to the point that Sutton was later diagnosed as being in profound shock by the familys GP. Terrys death became a catalyst for Sutton studying medicine. I was in my own head for a lot of that day [the anniversary], and it was particularly tough, as I recall, Sutton said.

There were countless other difficult days, too, in the emotionally charged months of the pandemic, when chief health officers suddenly became caught in the crossfire of politics. Sutton struggled to contain his anger after a television crew arrived at his doorstep during the lockdown of 2020, his daughter answering the door in her pyjamas. By August 2021, there was a point where roughly 15 million Australians were back in lockdown as several states fought incursions of the Delta strain. Melbourne went into its sixth shutdown on August 5. It was only meant to last seven days. Instead, it stretched to 77. A deserted Bourke Street Mall during Melbournes fifth lockdown in July 2021. Credit: Justin McManus Its now clear to us that we are not going to drive these numbers down  they are instead going to increase, Daniel Andrews said on September 1, 2021. The declaration that the state would no longer pursue COVID zero was an emotional moment for many Victorians who had sacrificed so much, again and again, to eradicate outbreaks. But whenever Sutton has contemplated the alternative  a less restrictive approach that did not rely heavily on lockdowns, and allowed for transmission to circulate  he has always come back to what it could have meant, not only for Victoria but the rest of the country.

Clearly, it was impossibly hard, and clearly it harmed populations, and it harmed individuals economically, psychologically [and] physically because of the constraints on our movements, and the constraints on our freedoms and the limit on our interactions, Sutton said. Without the restrictions imposed on Victorians, he said that COVID would have breached the borders of other states, irrespective of closures. I think there would have been another 30,000 or 40,000 deaths in Australia because they couldnt have contained it to Victoria. What might surprise many Australians, and rankle others, is that sweeping lockdowns and international border closures were never part of the plan. According to the Australian Health Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza, there were several measures that authorities could call on in the inevitable scenario that the nation was faced with a new pandemic. Social distancing was among them, but school closures, workplace shutdowns and bans on mass gatherings were generally not recommended, unless the pandemic was at the more serious end of the scale. The plan certainly didnt envisage a scenario in which people were only allowed to leave their homes for a small number of essential reasons, nor did it foresee anything close to monitored, 14-day quarantine.

Professor James McCaw, who helped develop the pandemic plan, said that if anyone had asked him prior to COVID-19 if forcing people to stay in an organised quarantine facility for two virus incubation periods would stop the disease getting in the country, his answer would have been yes. Loading But this measure wasnt written into the plan because it was thought it would be unacceptable to the community, and therefore not palatable for politicians. It was the same with lockdowns. Sutton told us that officials and experts were prompted to rethink their assumptions as they looked beyond Australia and saw hospital systems straining under coronavirus cases and the rationing of intensive-care beds in Italys Lombardy region. Millions of Italians were locked down in early March. Then there was China, which by the end of February was beginning to drive cases down through lockdowns. That suggested it might be possible to gain some control over the virus.

Life as We Knew It, by Age journalists Aisha Dow and Melissa Cunningham, explores Australias experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its out in October. Credit: Scribe Sutton said officials around the globe moved from the assumption that the Western world could never contemplate the idea of a lockdown to believing it might be the thing required to address the extraordinary challenge they were facing. I think Italy demonstrated that (a) it was necessary, and (b) it was something that the population was prepared to go to as a measure to deal with what was an overwhelming situation, he said. It was not expected that lockdowns and international traveller quarantine would temporarily eliminate the disease from the community. Several leading public health experts say the initial success of these radical measures left them grappling with a strange if not unwelcome quandary: What now?
Sutton also conceded he had some regrets about how Victorias response unfolded, including around the shutting of playgrounds. I think knowing what we know [now] about the risk of transmission, indoors versus outdoors, the freedoms that we could allow outdoors are clearly greater, he said. Bourke Street in Melbournes CBD in late 2020. Credit: Wayne Taylor But he was adamant the government always sought to protect Victorians. Look, there shouldnt be a person in the world whos been part of the public health response, who wouldnt reflect on things that they would do differently, things that they regret. Im absolutely no different in that regard, Sutton said.

We acted with the understanding and information that we had at the time, with the best of intentions, and with an eternally focused eye on protecting the health and wellbeing of Victorians. Loading Tony Blakely, a University of Melbourne epidemiologist who is chairing a royal commission into New Zealands COVID-19 response, helped develop the elimination strategy that Sutton and Premier Daniel Andrews embraced in 2020 as the way out of Victorias second wave epidemic. Blakely credits Sutton, in part, with the governments later decisions to redefine the role and powers of the chief health officer and decentralise the states public health resources. Under the states pandemic laws, which then-health minister Martin Foley said Sutton helped shape, the chief health officers advice is published but the minister wields the power to order people to stay home or close schools.

In a situation where a pandemic is affecting all of society and is no longer just a health issue, it is no longer appropriate for a chief health officer to have those type of powers, Blakely said. Under [Suttons] watch we saw a transference back to what a democracy is about; elected politicians having the final say. Loading Finn Romanes, a public health physician who has worked alongside Sutton in Victorias health department for a decade, said his colleague also played an important role in pushing for the establishment of local public health units, a reform that has transformed Victorias approach to managing COVID and other communicable diseases. He has been incredibly supportive of broadening the public system, building the workforce and trying to get action at the local level, said Romanes, now the director of the Western Public Health Unit. There wasnt an established playbook when COVID arrived. Brett is an exceptional public health professional who recognised the profound threat and danger proposed by COVID, probably before anyone else. He has always shown the deepest consideration for our communitys health and Brett made sure that we took clear, evidence-based, decisive action when it was needed.

Allen Cheng, the director of infectious diseases at Monash Health, has experienced some of the pressure Sutton faced during the worst periods of the pandemic. At the peak of Victorias second wave epidemic, Cheng served as one of Suttons deputies and occasionally stood in for him as CHO. This is very much public service, he said. I only had a small taste of his world but jeez, it is hard work. You feel like you are the fulcrum. Everyone is trying to tell you what to do, you are having robust discussions with business, government, the rest of your department and the Commonwealth government. All the pressure just gets funnelled through one spot. There is so much pressure, you are getting it from everywhere, and he was so calm and methodical throughout that time. Then-deputy CHO Allen Cheng addresses the media in 2020 as Premier Daniel Andrews watches on. Credit: Joe Armao Early in the pandemic, when Cheng was working at The Alfred hospital, he called Sutton to tell him a mechanic for the McLaren Formula 1 team, who was in town for the grand prix, had tested positive. The next morning, Sutton cancelled the event as patrons were lining up outside the Albert Park gates. Brett had said if there were any cases diagnosed among the crew, they would call it off, Cheng said. I had to call them on the Thursday night saying wed picked up a positive case in one of the crew. There was silence on the end of the phone.

Suttons relationship with the Andrews government was complex, occasionally strained and ultimately contributed to his decision to cut short what he once described as his dream job. Loading Suttons press conference on Friday was his first since last August. Since then, dozens of media requests to interview Sutton about vaccine boosters, emerging variants or public health issues unrelated to COVID-19 have been rejected by his health department minders, at the direction of the premiers office. The job has really changed, a public health colleague with knowledge of the situation said. Access is absolutely controlled, they dont want him anywhere near the media, ever. He is not happy with it. Although Sutton stood next to Andrews for most of the daily press conferences used by the government to provide information on case numbers, outbreaks and changes in public health policy through the COVID crisis, the premier did not return the favour on Friday.

Instead, Andrews issued a tweet: For more than a decade, Professor Sutton has served our state and guided us through some of the most difficult times. As CHO, Brett helped keep us informed, and above all, safe. Thank you for your service, and all the very best for your next role. Loading Michael OBrien led the state opposition at the start of the pandemic and said before the introduction of new laws requiring the CHOs advice about pandemic orders to be published, it was difficult to know where Suttons advice ended and the governments political considerations began. He was put in a very difficult position, OBrien said on Friday. These things dont come with instruction manuals, but I certainly got the sense there wasnt a broader consideration of the public interest taken on a lot of these decisions. Everything was done quite secretly and when we asked questions publicly, we were attacked for undermining public health. I had deep suspicions that political factors weighed heavily on what we were told was the health advice. Occasionally, a bit of daylight would sneak in.
Former Coalition defence minister Linda Reynolds has called for more transparency about how the Australian Defence Force is improving its culture following the Brereton war crimes inquiry and urged the nations most senior officers to take greater responsibility for alleged wrongdoing in Afghanistan.

Reynolds, who was defence minister when the Brereton report was released in 2020, said there was still resistance to recognising the militarys ethical failures in Afghanistan, even after a Federal Court judge found Ben Roberts-Smith to be a murderer and war criminal when dismissing his defamation case against media outlets last week.

Former defence minister Linda Reynolds is calling for more transparency from the Australian Defence Force about how it has reformed its culture. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

There is still an attitude in some quarters that if you raise these issues, it is a slight against all veterans, that somehow what happens in war should stay in war, Reynolds said in an interview.

But we cant sweep this under the rug. There can be no legal or moral excuses for war crimes.
Reynolds later told the estimates hearing she had met with Gallagher and Wong, who had also been in the hearing. I had a very respectful discussion during the dinner break, and theyve assured me they were not involved in that matter becoming public. I accept their assurance. Thank you, Reynolds said at the time. Gallagher did not respond to requests for comment on Friday, but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was confident the minister did not mislead parliament. Ruston and Wong were asked for comment.

Bruce Lehrmann, the man accused by Higgins of rape, has always denied the allegations, and his trial was aborted because of juror misconduct. The charges were later dropped. Lawyers for Lehrmann, Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson appeared in the Federal Court in Sydney on Friday for a preliminary hearing in Lehrmanns defamation case against the broadcaster and its high-profile reporter. Loading Sue Chrysanthou, SC, acting for Wilkinson, said there had been an overwhelming amount of inappropriate media ... directed to my client and to witnesses who she may call, which tends to, and has had, the effect of putting improper pressure on my client. She alleged Higgins phone records, among other material, were being distributed to the media and it seems to us to be an orchestrated campaign and referred to articles published in The Australian and The Daily Telegraph.

An affidavit by Tens solicitor, read in court on Friday, revealed the network also raised concerns with Lehrmanns lawyers that his interview on Seven Networks Spotlight program last Sunday may have aired separate material obtained from Ten during his since-abandoned criminal trial, which may amount to a contempt of court. But Matthew Richardson, SC, acting for Lehrmann, told the court that his client absolutely denied the allegation. It is a grave and serious allegation; it is aggravating the damages in this case, Richardson said. In an email on June 6, the ACTs acting Director of Public Prosecutions, Anthony Williams, SC, told Tens solicitor that on the basis of information provided to him it did appear there had been a breach of legal obligations not to disclose information obtained from Ten under subpoena for the purposes of the criminal trial. However, he said what is not clear to me on the available information is who exactly breached the undertaking, and the circumstances surrounding that breach. He noted that a breach constitutes a contempt of court.

One reasonably available inference is that Mr Lehrmann provided the material to Channel 7 in breach of the undertaking. But that, of course, it not the only reasonably available inference. It also remains reasonably possible that any number of other people who had access to the documents could have breached it. What is also unclear is the knowledge of Channel 7 surrounding the provenance of the documents, Williams said. Williams said he did not propose to institute proceedings for contempt of court, but said that Ten could do so. The text messages published over the past week suggest that Sharaz was in direct contact with Albanese when he was opposition leader. He gave his phone number to Sharaz on April 21, 2021 to organise a meeting with Higgins. Albanese and then-prime minister Scott Morrison both met Higgins in Sydney on April 30, 2021.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek also features in messages between Sharaz and Higgins on May 5, 2021, as someone they should approach with information that Morrisons former chief of staff, John Kunkel, had asked Higgins to discuss her rape allegations. While the text messages suggest that Sharaz was contacting Albanese, Gallagher and Plibersek, they do not show whether they replied or what they said in response. On Friday morning, Albanese said no when asked if Gallagher had misled parliament. What is being suggested here by Peter Dutton, you had allegations by a Liberal staffer that another Liberal staffer had a sexual assault in a Liberal ministers office and somehow Katy Gallagher has some responsibility for what was going on here? This is bizarre, he said. You had a circumstance also where Scott Morrison had an inquiry by Phil Gaetjens, his former chief of staff who was then the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet into who knew what in his own office. We still have never, ever seen that report.

She [Gallagher] is a great minister, she is a great finance minister, and she is a great minister for the status of women. Loading Deputy Opposition Leader Sussan Ley said on Friday Gallagher appeared to know about the rape allegations before they were aired publicly, which meant she may have misled parliament in the June 2021 Senate hearing. It looks like Katy Gallagher has misled parliament about what she knew and when she knew it. And this is a serious problem; she is part of Anthony Albaneses leadership team, Ley said. We have only heard one side of the story through these text messages. But thats because the other side  the finance minister  refuses to front up and take any questions.
Leave it to the Japanese to turn bathing into a fine art. An onsen experience can be relaxing, indulgent and deeply meditative. From ancient bathhouses to forest-flanked springs, these towns offer some of the best spots for a soak.

Kinosaki Onsen

Kinonsaki onsen. Credit: Shogo.Nishiyama

While many hot-spring resorts have unedifying architecture, Kinosaki, 150 kilometres north-west of Kyoto, preserves an old-world appearance and has a well-organised tourist infrastructure, making this Japans best onsen experience. Wooden buildings, small craft shops and a mossy Shinto temple overlook canals spanned by stone bridges and lined with willow and cherry trees. A single pass provides access to seven public bathhouses, with visitors in yukatas and clogs strolling from one to another and stopping at teahouses along the way. Tajima beef and snow crab are local delicacies. Forested hills rise around the town; take a hike to venerable Onsen-ji Temple. See visitkinosaki.com

Noboribetsu
Sometime ago I was having breakfast in a Paris hotel (Traveller letters, June 3), sharing a table with a pleasant and handsome Frenchman and enjoying the opportunity to practise my recently acquired French. Eventually he stood up, politely bowed and departed, leaving an untouched bread roll. I souvenired it. However, he returned shortly after with a coffee to finish his breakfast. I still feel guilty. Margaret Atchison, Armidale, NSW Waste not, want not Whenever I travel, I always pack a small box of Glad lunch bags that are resealable and use them to take the leftovers from breakfast (Traveller letters, June 3) or even to put a sandwich in for the kids to have by the pool later in the day. I have found that when the kids help themselves from the breakfast buffet, there are always uneaten items which make perfect snacks for later in the day. Ive even stayed at resorts that ask if you want to take any leftovers to eat later. Ive found that hotels dont want the waste and dont want their staff to see food thrown away when it could have been taken. Ive been doing this for about 18 years of travel and have never had anyone question me or ask for payment. Belinda OCallaghan, Glen Iris, Vic

Soothe operators On a recent Virgin night flight from Darwin to Melbourne, a passenger became ill. I was really impressed with how the cabin crew dealt with this in such a cramped situation. The young lady was given an oxygen mask and soothing reassurance. A call for a doctor or paramedic on board was responded to and an ambulance organised for arrival at Melbourne. The young womans travelling companions were also reassured and informed fully of what was happening with their friend. At no stage was there any panic. Well done to those concerned. Barbara Kemp, Yarram, Vic Gut reaction I recently returned from a wonderful holiday in Poland and Portugal. To enjoy the history and the architecture in both countries was a treat. But to enjoy the bread, pastries and beer without any gut issues was the highlight. Having to eat gluten-free foods back here all the time (and Im not a coeliac) can be rather dull. But thanks to the European wheat I was able to hoe into luscious bread rolls, pastries and local beers with lunch or without any bloating. What is wrong with Australian-grown wheat? How many other GF travellers to Europe have found the same gut response?

Pam Montgomery, Pretty Beach, NSW Solo man Racing to catch your flight? Japans Narita Airport has got your covered. Credit: Alamy Our son was returning from Japan and his arrival at Narita Airport was delayed. He raced from the train to the Singapore Airlines desk and the staff greeted him politely and explained that they could get him on his scheduled flight. One amazing young woman slung his checked luggage over her shoulder to get it under the plane. He was then escorted by a team of five women and they all ran to get him through security and to the gate. Thank you to the wonderful staff who cared enough to help a young man on his first solo journey. Sally Karlovic, Yarraville, Vic
Cambodia earns 77.4 mln USD from milled rice export to China in first 5 months

Xinhua) 11:23, June 09, 2023

PHNOM PENH, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia exported 118,041 tons of milled rice to China in the first five months of 2023, earning 77.4 million U.S. dollars in revenue, said the Cambodia Rice Federation (CRF)'s press release on Thursday.

"China is the main export market for Cambodian milled rice, which accounted for 42.43 percent of Cambodia's total rice export volume (during the January-May period of 2023)," the press release said.

CRF President Chan Sokheang said that China is a huge market for the commodity.

"The federation will continue to collaborate with the Ministry of Commerce to ensure that annual milled-rice sales to China top 400,000 tons each year," he said.

According to the press release, Cambodia exported 278,184 tons of milled rice to 50 countries and regions during the first five months of this year, generating 191.6 million dollars in revenue.

Milled rice varieties included premium aromatic rice, fragrant rice, long grain white rice, parboiled rice, and organic rice, it added.

The news release said the Philippines is a new market for Cambodia's milled rice, and the kingdom exported its first-ever big volume of 2,575 tons to the Philippines in May.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
Beijing: Chinas foreign ministry on Friday said spreading rumours and slander was a common US tactic, following reports that China had reached a deal with Cuba to set up an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island.

Citing US officials familiar with classified intelligence, the Wall Street Journal said such a spy installation would allow Beijing to gather electronic communications from the southeastern United States, home to many US military bases, as well as monitor ship traffic.

San Lazaro street in Havana, Cuba. Credit: AP

The Journal reported that Beijing was paying several billion dollars for the base. The US learned about the plan in recent weeks but believed building was yet to start on the facility, CNN reported Friday, citing two sources familiar with the matter.

The White House pushed back on a report about the deal. Ive seen that press report. Its not accurate, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in an interview on MSNBC, without specifying if the report was false in its entirety.
Washington: Former US president Donald Trump has been indicted on charges of illegally retaining classified government records at his Florida estate after leaving the White House in 2021, and obstruction of justice. Here is what to expect as the case proceeds.

What happens next?

Trump, who on Thursday proclaimed his innocence, is scheduled to make his first appearance in a Florida federal court on Tuesday.

Former US president Donald Trump faces 37 charges. Credit: Alex Brandon

On Friday, US prosecutors unsealed an indictment against Trump that accused him of risking some of the countrys most sensitive security secrets with his handling of unclassified documents. The indictment charged Trump with 37 counts. A former aide, Walt Nauta, also faces charges.
ASIC has permanently banned a former Sydney credit broker from engaging in any credit activities and from providing any financial services after he was convicted of fraud offences.

Trevor William King pleaded guilty to charges of making false documents to obtain financial advantage in December last year. He was sentenced to a 14-month intensive corrections order in February.

King part-owned and operated two credit brokerage businesses, JT King Finance Pty Ltd (JT King) and Australia Enterprises Pty Ltd (Australia Enterprises), which helped clients to obtain home loans, personal loans, credit cards and car loans. The businesses generated income by earning commissions on approved loans referred to lenders.

In a statement, ASIC said that between July 2013 and May 2016, King made 74 false documents (57 false payslips, nine false PAYG payment summaries and eight false real estate documents) with the intention that he or another person would use them to support loan applications for clients of either JT King or Australia Enterprises. King or others would then obtain loan commissions for the approved loans.

The commissions King and others obtained from the approved loans ranged from $643.50 to $6,795.36 in upfront commissions, and $99.67 to $2,470.69 in trail commissions. The total amount of commissions was $81,057.35.

Under the Corporations Act and National Consumer Credit Protection Act, ASIC may permanently ban a person from the financial services and credit industries if they are convicted of fraud. Consequently, on the basis of these convictions, ASIC decided to ban King permanently.

The ban prevents King from:

providing any financial services or engaging in credit activities;

controlling an entity that carries on a financial services business or another person who engages in credit activities;

performing any function involved in the carrying on of a financial services business; and

performing any function involved in the engaging in of credit activities.

King has the right to appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal for a review of ASICs decision. Kings ban will also appear on ASICs banned and disqualified register.
Gender-affirming surgeon speaks at Jacobs School LGBTQIA+ event

Keynote speaker Blair Peters, assistant professor at Oregon Health & Science University and a gender-affirming surgeon, discussed how medicine can have a binary bias and noted that gender isnt always binary. Photo: Sandra Kicman

Keynote speaker Blair Peters, assistant professor at Oregon Health & Science University and a gender-affirming surgeon, discussed how medicine can have a binary bias and noted that gender isnt always binary. Photo: Sandra Kicman

I feel like many health care providers are not speaking up and I think awakening this population is going to be really pivotal in how the narrative shifts. You may not be trans or queer, but if you care about these people, be loud or just be open in supporting them. 

News of that talk had led to protests and activities on campus by student groups that sought to push back against what many saw as a hate-filled narrative.

On May 23, the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences held its inaugural LGBTQIA+ Education and Inclusivity in Health Care event. It had been in the planning stages since early in the semester, but gained importance, organizers say, in March, when a student club hosted an on-campus talk by a conservative pundit known for spreading anti-trans rhetoric.

Speak justice loud

As a queer person whos been out since high school, with a very supportive family and community, it was the first time in my life that I felt any sort of fear around my identity, said Chloe Cottone, a rising second-year medical student and co-president of OUTpatient, the LGBTQIA+ student group at the Jacobs School. We wanted to respond but you cant take away the right of speech, even from those who spread hateful speech. But we can certainly speak justice loud.

By holding this inaugural event celebrating education and inclusivity, Cottone said OUTpatient  and the Jacobs School  were doing just that.

Just by holding it, this event accomplishes a lot, she said. In the face of the current political climate with all the anti-trans and anti-queer narratives and rhetoric going around, just putting it on in the face of all that is, I think, really powerful.

Cottone said it was a statement that hate-based narratives, such as the one the previous campus speaker was disseminating, werent going to succeed in silencing either the UB community or the wider community. The half-day event, which included a keynote address, as well as workshops and an expert panel, was focused on education as a way to combat discrimination.

The event not only received funding from the Office of the Dean, but Allison Brashear, vice president for health sciences and Jacobs School dean, introduced the keynote speaker, Blair Peters. Funding was also provided by the schools Office of Inclusion and Cultural Enhancement and the Office of Biomedical Education.

The fact that the dean spoke at our event was just really meaningful to us, Cottone said.

Inviting Peters (he, they) to speak was also absolutely intentional.

An assistant professor at Oregon Health & Science University with dual appointments in the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and the Department of Urology, Peters frequently lectures across the country regarding advocacy and policy change for all queer people. A double fellowship-trained plastic and reconstructive surgeon, they strive to be a strong queer voice in medicine and surgery, focusing on mentoring the future generation of gender-affirming surgeons.

Dr. Peters is very loud in how much he supports trans patients, he has a huge social media presence (@queersurgeon) and he flies from state to state providing gender-affirming care, Cottone said. I feel like many health care providers are not speaking up and I think awakening this population is going to be really pivotal in how the narrative shifts. You may not be trans or queer, but if you care about these people, be loud or just be open in supporting them.

In introducing Peters, Brashear talked about the unique role of health care providers and how the event served to remind attendees of the importance of solidarity and creating an inclusive atmosphere at the Jacobs School.

When Peters came to the podium, they surveyed the Dozoretz auditorium, where more than 100 students, faculty, staff and members of the public had gathered to hear the talk.


They said Byjus has closed a Rs 2,000-crore ($250 million) round from the US-based investment firm and it may stop or consider slowing down the flow of various tranches of that capital to the company. It may also decide not to provide any new funding or participate in any such round in the future, the sources said. The legal battle between Byjus and lenders in the US on the edtech firms $1.2-billion term loan B (TLB), along with the company skipping an interest payment of $40 million on the loan, has made the other investor Davidson Kempner Capital Management, extremely concerned, according to the people familiar with the matter.



According to sources, disbursement of the capital is still within the control of David Kempner. If there are certain defaults, the lender can choose not to disburse (any further amount), said a source. They are extremely concerned, said the person familiar with the matter. They have disbursed a part of the amount and there could be no further pay-outs.



Byjus has filed a suit against US-based investment management firm Redwood, challenging the acceleration of a $1.2-billion TLB facility and to disqualify the lender for its predatory tactics, the edtech major said recently. Byjus also skipped an interest payment of about $40 million on the loan, thus becoming the only Indian start-up to have defaulted on a US-dollar loan. Kempner declined to comment to a query sent on Friday.

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Byjus, which filed the suit in the New York Supreme Court, said that contrary to the conditions of the loan facility, Redwood purchased a significant portion of the loan while primarily trading in distressed debt.



They are vulture funds, said a person. What Byjus is arguing is that Redwood was on that restricted list and therefore the initial lenders could not have sold the loan on the secondary market to Redwood, said a person. According to the sources, Byjus had a restricted list of lenders, which contained hedge funds that for living purchase distressed debt at discounted prices, expecting to profit if the company recovers, or, if it files for bankruptcy protection.



Now obviously this is going to have a serious impact on the fundraising of the company, said the person. That is why Byjus is suing Redwood in the New York Supreme Court. Because after Redwood bought the loan, they called it default and exercised the right to replace the Board.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday said it has issued show-cause notices to the Indian arm of Chinese mobile phone manufacturer Xiaomi, its chief financial officer and director Sameer B Rao, former managing director Manu Kumar Jain and three foreign banks for alleged violations of the foreign exchange law to the tune of more than Rs 5,551 crore. The Adjudicating Authority (of the Foreign Exchange Management Act) has issued the notices to Xiaomi Technology India Private Limited, the two executives, the CITIbank, the HSBC bank and the Deutsche Bank AG under section 16 of the FEMA, the federal agency said in a statement.

A show-cause notice is issued after the completion of a FEMA probe and once it is settled, the accused may have to pay a penalty that could be three times the amount contravened.

The notices have been issued to the firm, along with Jain and Rao, the ED said.

The Adjudicating Authority has also issued show-cause notices to three banks -- Citibank, HSBC Bank and Deutsche Bank AG -- for contravention of sections 10(4) and 10(5) of the FEMA and directions issued by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as they allowed foreign outward remittances in the name of royalty through the banks, "without" conducting due diligence and "without" obtaining any underlying technical collaboration agreement from the company, it said.

The ED had earlier seized funds worth Rs 5,551.27 crore of Xiaomi Technology India Private Limited lying in its bank accounts under the FEMA for the "unauthorised" remittance of this amount in guise of royalty abroad by the company.

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"The competent authority, appointed under section 37A of the FEMA, has confirmed the said seizure order. The authority, while confirming the seizure, held that the ED is right in holding that foreign exchange equivalent to Rs 5,551.27 crore has been transferred out of India by Xiaomi India in an unauthorised manner and is held outside India on behalf of the group entity in contravention of section 4 of the FEMA, 1999 and the same is liable to be seized in terms of provisions of section 37A of the FEMA," it said.

The agency said the competent authority also observed that the payment of royalty was nothing but a tool for transferring the foreign exchange out of India and the same was in "blatant" violation of the FEMA provisions.

The ED said its investigation, launched last year, has found that the company had remitted foreign currency equivalent to Rs 5,551.27 crore to three foreign-based entities, including a Xiaomi group entity, in the guise of royalty.

"Under the cover of various unrelated documentary faade created amongst the group entities, the company remitted this amount in the guise of royalty abroad, which constitutes violation of section 4 of the FEMA," it said.
This is not the first logo battle that DC Comics has won. In May 2019, Indonesias legal system ruled against DC in a legal battle with PT Marxing Fam Makmur, a Surabaya-based food and beverage company, over its Superman-themed snacks. Marxing had been using Superman on its products (biscuits, ice cream and chocolate bars) since 1993. But in November 2020, in a new legal appeal, the Central Jakarta Comm

The firm, Commerciale Italiana and Luigi Aprile, had intended to use the image of a black bat inside a white oval frame on its products and tried to prove that people don't always link the bat sign to the Caped Crusader. However, the General Court, Europes second-highest tribunal, ruled that the icon is distinctive enough to warrant its trademark on all items.


According to the report, before the pandemic 12 to 15 brands used to enter India annually. In 2020, just one global brand set up its shops in India. In 2021 and 2022, three and 11 brands entered India respectively. Mostly due to high post-coronavirus consumption, around two dozen global brands like Dunhill, Roberto Cavalli, Lavazza and Armani Caffe, and Foot Locker are soon expected to enter Indian markets, The Economic Times (ET) reported on Friday.



Apart from this, several Indian companies are also bringing global brands to the country. In the last few months, McLaren, Valentino, and Balenciaga, among several others, have debuted in India. Tim Hortons, Popeyes, Pottery Barn, and Pret A Manager are some others on the list.



H&M has also launched its home like in some of the flagship stores across the country. Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd (ABFRL) has recently formed a partnership with Galeries Lafayette to open luxury departmental stores and a dedicated e-commerce platform in India. Reliance Retail is set to bring Chinese fashion company Shein back into the country.

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Go First had declared insolvency on May 2 owing to a cash crunch and its application was admitted by the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) on May 10.

Go Firsts lenders on Friday discussed the grounded airlines revival plan and appointed Shailendra Ajmera, of consultancy EY, resolution professional.

The lenders, however, opted for a new resolution professional because Lal had been selected by the Go First management. They also selected a resolution process advisor and legal counsel for the committee. All the resolutions were approved with a hundred per cent vote, it is learnt.

The tribunal had confirmed Abhilash Lal of Alvarez & Marsal as interim resolution professional.



Go First had earlier sought Rs 200 crore from banks to resume operations with 22 aircraft. This would be used as working capital for operational expenses.

The resolution professionals appointment will first have to be confirmed by the NCLT. Applications for funds too will be made by him. Banks will take decisions based on merit, subject to their boards approval. However, banks in general are keen to see the airline restart operations. We will be able to recover only if the airline continues as a going concern, said a senior executive of a lender.

Also Read Cabinet approves Rs 89,047 crore revival plan for state-run telco BSNL Vodafone Idea expected to come up with revival plan within a month: Report Get CoC approval on revival plan before we consider it: DGCA to GoFirst Go First's IRP submits 6-month revival plan to DGCA; check details ABB steps up focus on manufacturing amid revival in the capex cycle Edtech giant Byju's 'meritless' suit effort to avoid obligations: Lenders Air India's San Francisco-Mumbai flight cancelled due to technical snag Tech titans Zuckerberg, Musk cast a critical eye on Apple's Vision Pro ED issues notices to Xiaomi, 2 senior executives for FEMA violations Air India makes pre-payment to Boeing for ordered planes: CFO Hejmadi



In a resumption plan submitted to the DGCA, the airline said it had the requisite number of employees, including 675 pilots and a 1,300-strong cabin crew, to fly its 26 operational planes.

The banks have discussed the airlines financing requirements internally. Their executives have met officials of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the civil aviation ministry to understand if it has regulatory support. We think the banks have got the comfort. Go First is confident of receiving support and funds from banks and would like to resume flights as soon as possible, said an airline source.


However, the court has asked all the petitioners to submit a report to Google by July 15, on the number of downloads of their apps from Play Store in June and directed them to pay a four per cent commission to Google. The Madras High Court (HC) on Thursday extended an interim injunction that barred Google from delisting the start-ups that have petitioned the court against the Play Store billing policy, till the next hearing on June 19.



According to the ET report, Matrimony.com and Shaadi.com were given an unconditional stay but under the Jeevan Saathi (another petitioner) order, the court had asked them to report their monthly downloads and pay four per cent commission on that. Several start-ups such as Unacademy, Kuku FM, TrulyMadly, QuackQuack, Aha, Stage, and Kutumb had approached the HC challenging Googles mandated billing route and seeking to stop the company from removing them from Play Store, according to a report in The Economic Times (ET).



One of the start-ups said levying even a four per cent commission would be unfair. Google is expected to raise an invoice by July 20 and these companies will have to pay by July 25, according to the ET report.

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He said that Google doesn't have any right to ask for their private business data just because they were listed on the Play Store. Vinay Singhal, Stage co-founder and chief executive, said, As much as we have got the injunction, we still believe that even four per cent is unfair to us at many levels.

Singhal said that these companies pay only 1-2 per cent to payment gateways at the moment and that the court direction would add an extra four per cent cost without providing any services.
IndiGo is all set to commence codeshare flights through Istanbul to the US as the no-frills carrier continues to expand its international connectivity.

The flights, in codeshare partnership with Turkish Airlines, will provide connections to New York, Boston, Chicago and Washington, effective June 15, it said in a release on Friday.

The airline, India's largest in terms of domestic market share, already provides codeshare connections to 33 destinations.

"We are thrilled to expand our codeshare partnership with Turkish Airlines, for the first time across the Atlantic to the United States of America. New York, Boston, Chicago, and Washington are renowned for their cultural significance, iconic landmarks, and vibrant lifestyles," IndiGo's Head of Global Sales Vinay Malhotra said.

Codesharing allows an airline to book its passengers on its partner carriers and provide seamless travel to destinations where it has no presence.

The overseas connectivity expansion of IndiGo, which has more than 300 planes, also comes at a time when Tata Group-owned Air India is reviving and expanding its fleet as well as routes.

Also Read IndiGo Q3: Focus on international destinations lifts outlook, say analysts IndiGo reinstates cabin crew bonus after 2nd consecutive profitable quarter Analysts see upto 38% upside in IndiGo; suggest tracking costs, airfare cap IndiGo passenger has heated argument with crew member, DGCA launches probe Go First may be grounded, but IndiGo is in no hurry to expand capacity Mahanagar Gas to set up Rs 500-cr biogas plant in city, signs MoU with BMC Air India puts together 'huge financing deal' for new fleet: CEO Wilson Maruti launches Alto K10 based Tour H1 for commercial segment at Rs 4.8L From Batman to Sholay, icons that have fought and won the trademark fight Life Insurance Corporation increases stake in SAIL by 2.001% to 8.687%


The sources said Ola, which makes electric scooters and is backed by investors such as SoftBank and Temasek, is looking to raise between $600 million and $1 billion in its IPO, which is planned for late 2023.

Ola Electric will hold talks next week with investors in Singapore and the United States on its planned stock market listing, the first of a series of meetings for its up to $-1 billion initial public offering (IPO), two sources with direct knowledge said.



Olas founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal will travel to Singapore, United States, and United Kingdom over the next two weeks, said the two sources, who declined to be named.

With the IPO still some way off, Ola is embarking on investor meetings earlier than usual to explain the business potential of Indias nascent EV market.



Ola Electric declined to comment. BlackRock, GIC and T Rowe Price did not respond to Reuters requests for comment. Ola Electric is likely to file regulatory papers on the IPO for approval by August, the sources said. Aggarwal plans to meet investors, including BlackRock, Singapores sovereign wealth fund GIC, and mutual funds such as T Rowe Price, the first source said.


In a regulatory filing, the company said, The Phase-IV Evidences- XI trial will enrol approximately 1500 male and female NAFLD patients with comorbidities (either obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia or metabolic syndrome- 200 patients each). Zydus Lifesciences Ltd, on Friday, announced the commencement of Phase-IV real-world data registry trial Evidences- XI for Saroglitazar Magnesium in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) patients with comorbidities.



Id like to thank all the patients, investigators, and study sites that are now participating in our Phase 4 Evidences-XI Real World Evidence trial. We hope that this will be a big leap forward in managing and treating the unmet healthcare needs of NAFLD and NASH, he added. Pankaj R Patel, chairman, Zydus Lifesciences Ltd said, NAFLD and NASH are serious life-threatening conditions and we have now studied Saroglitazar Mg in over 10 different trials which have been completed and the ongoing Evidences I to X series of clinical trials in patients with NAFLD and NASH across clinical sites in India, Mexico, USA, and Europe.



Shares of Zydus Lifesciences Ltd, on Friday, fell over 1 per cent at Rs 507.60 on the BSE. The study duration is approximately 56 weeks. The primary endpoint is to measure the change in liver stiffness measurement performed by transient elastography from Baseline to Week 52, the company said in a statement.

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This Phase 4 Evidences-study is a landmark study establishing one of the largest prospective registry of patients with non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) in the world. It will help generate novel real-world data (RWD) in NAFLD/NASH patients that is especially lacking in Asian populations, said Dr. Rohit Loomba. Dr. Rohit Loomba, MD, Professor of Medicine, Division Chief of Gastroenterology at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, and Director of Hepatology at UC San Diego Health will lead the steering committee of this Phase IV Evidences- RWD Study.
Worried about liquidity tightness in view of advance tax and GST outflows, banks remained reluctant to park funds with the Reserve Bank of Indias variable rate reverse repo (VRRR) auction on Friday.

Banks are playing it safe ahead of advance tax and GST outflows, said the head of treasury of a public sector bank, explaining a tepid response to the VRRR auction. Banks expect over Rs 2 trillion outflows this month.

It is noteworthy that Rs 1.8 trillion worth Rs 2,000 notes have been returned so far, since the process started on May 23. Of this Rs 1.8 trillion, 85 per cent was deposited, which is around Rs 1.5 trillion.

banks have been cautious and let me also make one point. There is still some amount of liquidity sitting there. When we say banks are cautious, lets remember that about Rs 1.5 trillion have been mopped up through VRRR operations, said RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das during an interaction with the media, after the announcement of the monetary policy review on Thursday.
India has expressed interest in negotiating a free trade agreement (FTA) with Africa with an aim to boost economic ties between the two regions.

This was stated by commerce and industry Minister Piyush Goyal during his interaction with fifteen ambassadors from several countries of the Africa region here on Thursday.

"India is open to FTA negotiations bilaterally or individually with African countries or Africa as a whole," he said.

India would act as a trusted partner to expand trade, commerce, business, investment and opportunities with Africa, he said.

In such agreements, two or more trading partners either significantly reduce or eliminate customs duties on maximum number of goods traded between them. Besides, they ease norms for promoting trade in services and attract investments.

The 15 ambassadors are from countries, including Algeria, Botswana, Egypt, Ghana, Republic of Guinea, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Morocco, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

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The African continent presents vast opportunities for Indian businesses, with its rapidly growing population, emerging middle class, and abundant natural resources.

Through increased trade and investment, both the regions can benefit from each other's strengths and expertise, fostering inclusive growth and job creation.

The two-way trade between the regions stood at over USD 90 billion.


India is weighing a proposal to cut official annual gross domestic product estimates to four releases from six to avoid multiple revisions that market watchers in the past have described as confusing, according to people familiar with the matter. By Vrishti Beniwal



The Statistics Ministry would start this from next year, the people said, asking not to be identified before a final decision is made. The proposal is being discussed between the ministries of statistics and finance as well as top officials from Prime Minister Narendra Modis government as part of a drive to boost the quality of economic data, they added.

This would help India reduce the time for finalizing its national income estimates to about two years from nearly three years, the people said. The move comes after numerous controversies over Indias data with market watchers often describing the numbers as inadequate or even confusing due to sharp and unexpected revisions. The Statistics Ministry would start this from next year, the people said, asking not to be identified before a final decision is made. The proposal is being discussed between the ministries of statistics and finance as well as top officials from Prime Minister Narendra Modis government as part of a drive to boost the quality of economic data, they added.



These moves buy time for the Statistics Ministry to incorporate more data in its estimates, enabling better policymaking, particularity for budget on Feb. 1 and avoiding major deviations in revisions, the people said. The proposed changes include bringing forward the first annual advance estimate by a week to mid-January, while skipping the second forecast in end-February. This would be followed by an update in May and then two more annual revisions.

Also Read IMF raises Asia's growth forecast to 4.6%; India, China to be key drivers GDP preview: Why is India likely to retain fastest-growing economy tag Monsoon rains over Kerala likely in next 48 hours, says IMD forecast S&P keeps India's economic growth forecast unchanged at 6% in FY24 India GDP growth slows down to 4.4% in Q3; FY23 estimate retained at 7% RBI needs monsoon to deliver before weighing rate cuts in next MPC meet Expansion plan for one of world's biggest coal mines challenged in India Easy trade finance system key to achieve $2 trn export target by 2030: DGFT Monetary policy: RBI maintains status quo, turns hawkish on inflation Cap subsidised fertiliser bags, overhaul PM-AASHA scheme, says CACP



Indias GDP data has been at the center of debate since 2015, when the government revised the base year to reflect changes in the economy. It puzzled India watchers again when the government revised 2016-17 GDP growth to an impressive 8.2% in 2019 after an unprecedented cash ban devastated the economy. A spokesperson for the Statistics Ministry didnt respond to an email seeking comments.
An investor who put in Rs 100 in retirement savings seven years ago would have seen her NPS nest egg grow to Rs 182 by 2023, according to the analysis based on the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authoritys recently released Handbook of National Pension System Statistics 2023. The corresponding EPFO return would be worth Rs 176 as seen in chart 1 below





The Rs 9-trillion National Pension System (NPS) seems to be delivering incrementally higher returns than the twice-as-large Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), shows a Business Standard analysis of data over the last seven years for the two retirement fund bodies.


The incident took place in a village on the border of Kangpoki and Imphal West districts. The insurgents are believed to be from the Meitei community, the officials said. Three people were killed in a village in Manipur's Imphal West district on Friday when a group of insurgents dressed as security personnel called them out of their homes on the pretext of a combing operation and fired at them, officials said.



During his visit to the northeastern state, Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced a CBI probe into six FIRs five on alleged criminal conspiracy and one on general conspiracy behind the violence in Manipur. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has formed a 10-member special investigation team (SIT) under a DIG-rank officer to probe six cases related to the Manipur violence referred to it by the state government, officials said on Friday.



He said the SIT has been constituted for a "thorough probe" in the cases and to unearth the criminal conspiracy behind the unfortunate incidents.

The CBI had dispatched Joint Director Ghanshyam Upadhyay to coordinate with the state officials and upon his return, the SIT was constituted. The Special Crime Branch, Kolkata will probe the cases, the officials said. The CBI has registered six cases transferred by the state of Manipur pertaining to large-scale violence leading to destruction and looting of the properties arson, looting/snatching of arms/ammunition and loss of human lives, etc. in various districts of the state, an agency spokesperson said.

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A total of 953 arms, 13,351 ammunition and 223 bombs of different kinds have been recovered till date, they said. Meanwhile, security forces recovered 57 arms, 1,588 ammunition and 23 bombs from Imphal East, Kakching, Tengnoupal and Bishnupur districts of Manipur during the last 24 hours, sources said.
Almost 4 lakh diarrhoeal disease deaths can be averted if Jal Jeevan Mission' meets its target of providing clean water to all rural households, according to a new study by the World Health Organisation.

The government launched the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) in 2019, a nationwide programme that aims to provide all houses in rural areas with safe and adequate drinking water through individual tap connections by next year.

The World Health Organization (WHO) was requested by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation to conduct a study to assess potential health gains and associated cost savings due to increased access in safely-managed drinking water services in India.

The study found that, on an estimate, if the Jal Jeevan Mission provided safely-managed drinking water to all of India, this would result in averting almost 4 lakh deaths caused by diarrhoeal disease.

According to official figures, till now 62 per cent rural households have been provided with tap water connection.

"With universal coverage of safely-managed drinking water in India, almost 14 million DALYS (Disability adjusted life years) from the diarrhoeal disease are estimated to be averted, resulting in estimated cost savings of up to USD 101 billion," the study said.

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Also, the study said that providing a tap connection to every household would result in significant time saved on water collection (66.6 million hours each day), especially among women.

Presenting the research findings, Richard Johnston, co-lead of WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene, said if the world achieves its Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) targets of drinking water and sanitation, it will be because of India.

"There are two reasons for it -- population and size -- as India is the country with the largest population in the world so what happens in India is important for the world but it is also because India is demonstrating what can be done and what is possible when it makes commitments and investments," he said.

Dr Rajiv Bahl, Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research, said these findings are plausible.

"We must understand that these are gross underestimates of the total benefits of providing safe water not only because these benefits go beyond health and they affect many communicable and non-communicable diseases. And even malnutrition, which is a big issue for us as they are all also related to water, so we must consider these just modest assumptions and tip of the iceberg," Bahl said.

WHO estimation of health impacts is based on comparative risk assessment (CRA) methods, which are used extensively in the burden of disease assessments (Ezzati 2002, Pruss-Ustun 2019).

The analysis estimated potential health gains from the Mission by comparing two scenarios.

The JJM scenario assumed that coverage of safely managed drinking water services in India increases linearly from baseline levels to 100 per cent coverage at the end of the programme, whereas, the business-as-usual scenario assumed improvements in coverage rates are in line with historical annual rates of 0.5 percentage points change per year.

For the economic analysis, the value per DALY averted from the JJM initiative was based on an approach described in the 2001 report of the WHO's Commission on Macroeconomics and Health which assigned each life year a value of three times the GDP per capita.
Union minister Anurag Thakur alleged on Friday that no effort was made to rectify the narration of history set out by the British, who glorified Mughal emperors and made a brief mention of warriors such as Maharana Pratap.

"Why was this conspiracy hatched to keep Indians away from their history? What was achieved by doing this?" Thakur asked in his inaugural address at the "National Conference on Recent Advances in School Education" here in Punjab.

He asserted that there is a need to understand why an entire page in history textbooks was devoted to Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, why Akbar was referred to as "great" while Maharana Pratap got a mention of just a few lines.

"They came as aggressors and destroyed India. They ruled India and destroyed our culture, system of knowledge. Even after Independence, no efforts were made to rectify this. The western thought was forced on us," he said.

The information and broadcasting minister added that "Indianness" is very much necessary in the country's education system, which was not visible in the policies framed after Independence.

Thakur said a proper discussion is required to know why Indians were not taught their actual ancient history.

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He said the Mughals and the British destroyed the Indian education system, culture and values, adding that now, on the 75th anniversary of Independence, the country needs to come out of that mindset of slavery.
The Delhi High Court Friday listed for July 4 Trinamool Congress (TMC) strongman Anubrata Mondal's plea challenging the trial court's order denying him default bail in the case registered by the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) related to multi-crore cattle smuggling in West Bengal.

Mondal had moved the high court on January 31 challenging Rouse Avenue Court's order dated January 24 denying him bail, finding no reason to give it to him.

The ED's Special Public Prosecutor Nitesh Rana had said that Mondal's bail application was without any merit.

During the hearing on Friday, a bench of Justice Chandra Dhari Singh listed the matter for hearing on July 4.

Advocate Mudit Jain appearing for Mondal contended that a default bail plea was filed on January 30 and on April 24 an early hearing application was filed, it was then listed on June 1, thereafter June 9 date was given.

"ASG Raju in the early application had agreed to list the plea as per convenience of the court. The early hearing plea was filed as the matter was listed for hearing on July 27...this is a default bail application pending since January 30," he said.

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The ED had arrested Mondal based on an FIR registered by the CBI in Kolkata against Satish Kumar, the then Commandant of the Border Security Force.

On August 11 last year, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) arrested Anubrata Mondal, a close aide to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, in connection with the cattle smuggling case.

--IANS

spr/dpb


IMD has already issued a warning for the next five days and urged fishermen to avoid fishing due to severe weather conditions. According to India Meteorological Department (IMD), the severe cyclonic storm Biporjoy would intensify further, moving north-northwest wards in the next few hours. The weather could go harsh in the upcoming days as the wind speed could take the storm to 135-145 KMPH gusting to 160 KMPH in the next three to four days.

Cyclone Biporjoy to intensify in next 48 hours



IMD department tweet reads, "VSCS BIPARJOY lay centred at 0530 hours IST of today, near latitude 14.7N and longitude 66.2E, about 820 km west of Goa, 840 km west-southwest of Mumbai, 850 km south-southwest of Porbandar and 1140 km south of Karachi. To intensify further during the next 48 hours." The next 48 hours are crucial in Mumbai, Goa, as the storm will intensify in that period. India Meteorological Department informed via Twitter.

Monsoon arrives over mainland





ALSO READ: Cyclone Biparjoy: IMD warns of severe cyclone storm in next 12 hours Amid cyclone Biporjoy, the monsoon finally hit the Kerala coast yesterday marking the beginning of the rainy season in India. This year, the monsoon is delayed by seven days. During the normal season, the monsoon arrives on June 1, unlike this year, when the monsoon arrives on June 8.

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Monsoon to arrive Bengal by Sunday



However, heatwaves will continue in effect in all districts except Kolkata, North and South 24 Parganas, and East Midnapore. The heatwave in West Bengal is shifting towards Purulia, Bankura, and East and West Burdwan on Sunday and Monday.

Bengal is also expecting a monsoon by Sunday as a thunderstorm is forecasted in coastal areas like Howrah, Kolkata, and Hooghly for Sunday and Monday.

Wind speed may go up to 45 to 55 knots on June 10,11,12

Director of India Meteorological Centre (IMD), Manorama Mohanty, the cyclone is approaching Ahmedabad with wind speeds ranging from 45 to 55 knots on June 10, 11, and 12. Coastal regions are expected to experience light rains and thunderstorms due to cyclones.


Quoting officials in the know, the newspaper said that mock polls are part of the first-level check (FLC) process. An office holder with the ECI said that the checking of the polling machines is a pan-India exercise and will also be conducted in Wayanad, Kerala. In the wake of the upcoming elections in five state assemblies and the general elections scheduled next year, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has started the first-level checks of EVMs and paper trail machines in a phased manner, Mint has reported.



He was convicted in a criminal defamation case by a sessions court in Surat, following which Rahul Gandhi was disqualified from the Lok Sabha. The Lok Sabha constituency fell vacant when Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was disqualified from the lower house of the Parliament.



At present, the Lok Sabha seats of Wayanad, Pune, Chandrapur (Maharashtra), Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana's Ambala do not have representatives and are due for elections. An EC official told the news agency PTI, "The EC issues a calendar for such exercises and there are standing instructions that are to be followed by state chief electoral officers. FLCs will also take place in the five poll-bound states of Rajasthan, Mizoram, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, and Madhya Pradesh as well as assembly and parliamentary seats where by-polls are due."

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Citing a 2021 CAG report, the Congress on Friday claimed the central government "misused" funds meant for railway safety on crockery, car rentals, furniture, laptops and foot massagers.

"This is how funds specifically meant for railway safety were used. This is the CAG's finding," Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said on Twitter.

Quoting the findings of the March 2021 CAG report, he alleged that the Narendra Modi government has been "misusing" Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh (RRSK) funds on



crockery, car rentals, foot massagers, furniture and laptops.

According to an official document, the national transporter spent more than Rs 1 lakh crore on safety measures between 2017-2018 and 2021-22 with a steady growth in expenditure on track renewal.

Government sources also indicated that the railways will soon reply to the same Comptroller and Auditor General of India's (CAG) report cited by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to attack the Centre over the recent triple train accident in Odisha's Balasore that claimed 275 lives and injured more than 1,000 people.

Kharge, in his letter to the prime minister, had said that all empty safety claims of Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw have been exposed.

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He further pointed out that the CAG report titled 'Derailment in Indian Railways' highlighted that funding for the Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh had been reduced by a massive 79 per cent. It was claimed during the budget presentation that about Rs 20,000 crore would be available annually, but this was not done, Kharge had said and asked why were the required funds not allocated for track renewal work.

However, data in the document showed that from 2017-18 to 2021-22, the railways spent more than Rs 1 lakh crore on RRSK work. In February 2022, the government extended the validity of RRSK by another five years, starting 2022-23.

Report number 22 of the said CAG report was tabled in Parliament on December 21 last year.
It was once normal for girls to marry at a young age and deliver a child before they turned 17, a judge of the Gujarat High Court has remarked while hearing a minor rape survivor's plea for permission to terminate her pregnancy.

While indicating that he might not allow the petition if both the girl and foetus were healthy, Justice Samir Dave of the high court also referred to the Manusmriti during the hearing on Wednesday.

The rape survivor is 16 years and 11 months old and carrying a seven-month-old foetus. Her father moved the HC seeking permission for abortion as the pregnancy had crossed the 24-week threshold up to which abortion can be performed without a court's leave.

On Wednesday, his lawyer sought an early hearing, saying the family was concerned because of the girl's age. Justice Dave said there was anxiety because "we are living in the 21st century". "Ask your mother or great-grandmother. Fourteen-fifteen was the maximum age (for marriage), and girls used to give birth to their first child before turning 17. And girls get mature before boys....Though you may not read, but you should read Manusmriti once," he added. As the expected date of delivery is August 16, he consulted expert doctors in his chamber, the judge informed the lawyer. "The court can consider (allowing abortion) if any serious ailments are found in the foetus or the girl. But if both are normal, it will be very difficult for the court to pass such an order," the judge said. In the end, the court directed the Medical Superintendent of Rajkot Civil Hospital to get the girl examined by a panel of doctors to find out if the medical termination of pregnancy was advisable. The doctors should also carry out ossification test on the girl and a psychiatrist should ascertain her mental condition, Justice Dave said, asking the hospital to submit reports by June 15, the next date of hearing. During the hearing, the judge also advised the girl's lawyer to start looking for options in case the medical opinion went against the termination of pregnancy. "I will not give permission if both are found healthy. The weight of the foetus is also good...What will you do if the girl gives birth and the child lives? Who will take care of that child? I will also inquire if there are government schemes for such children. You should also check if someone can adopt that child," said the judge.

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India and New Zealand have held the first round table joint meeting, where both the sides acknowledged the huge potential in a mutual partnership and the need for bringing in synergy for enhanced economic relations in areas of mutual interest.

They arrived at a common understanding that there is a need to work beyond any free trade agreement and explore other areas where both can complement each other.

The deliberations took place on Thursday in the national capital with the

industry and industry associations.

It was co-chaired by the additional secretary in the commerce ministry, Rajesh Agarwal and high commissioner of New Zealand in India, David Pine.

Looking at the present quantum of bilateral trade between the two countries, both sides acknowledged the huge potential in India and New Zealand partnership and the need for bringing in synergy for enhanced economic relations in areas of mutual interest, official sources said.

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It was a common understanding that there is a need to work beyond any free trade agreement and explore other areas where both can complement each other, they added.

The discussions also focussed on taking forward the objectives of the joint trade committee (JTC), formed under the bilateral trade agreement of 1986.

--IANS

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President Droupadi Murmu and Serbian counterpart Aleksandar Vucic on Thursday agreed to set a target for bilateral trade from the present 32 crore Euros to one billion euros by the end of the decade, Ministry of External Affairs said on Thursday.

During the business event, both leaders agreed to set a target for bilateral trade from the present 32 crores to a billion euros by the end of the decade, Ministry of External Affairs Secretary-West Sanjay Verma said in a media briefing.

MEA Secretary said that President Droupadi Murmu had a packed day of official engagements, which started with a guard of honour at the Serbia Palace, followed by restricted-level talks, delegation-level talks, a joint address to the media and a business event.

"During the interactions on Thursday morning, both presidents reiterated old commitments and resolved to explore new areas of cooperation for further strengthening bilateral relations," MEA Secretary West Sanjay Verma said.

There was also a call on by the Speaker of the National Assembly of Serbia, Dr Vladimir Orlic Honor President.

After that, President Droupadi Murmu laid a wreath on the memorial of the unknown Warrior atop Mountain Avala in Belgrade, Serbia

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During delegation-level talks, President Vucic was joined by the Ministers of Defense, Agriculture, Culture, Health, mining and energy, construction, transport and infrastructure, trade and tourism, and youth, which means eight members of the Cabinet were present today for the delegation-level talks. Each participating minister was briefed about the potential in their respective sectors, Sanjay added.

At the outset, President Vucic expressed his condolences for the loss of lives in the tragic train accident in Odisha. During the bilateral interactions, both leaders reiterated their principle stand on the rule of law, respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations. President Butcheck described Serbia's relationship with India as a fraternity.

He termed India as a time-tested, friendly country and told the Indian president to consider Serbia as a second motherland.

President Vucic identified six major areas of cooperation. "These included defence and military tech cooperation pharmaceuticals, agriculture, industrial cooperation, information technology, AI cultural cooperation, including film production and cemetery graphics".

Both sides discussed "cooperation in the field of culture, particularly in cinema films, and tourism came up repeatedly". Serbia sees the potential of attracting Indian filmmakers for shooting post-production and during the visit, there is a high-profile Indian film crew shooting in this country.

"Well-appreciated discussions continued on the positive advantages of collaborating in the space of cinema because of its relationship with tourism and also building business relations as countries get familiar with each other," he said..

Serbia has also offered very attractive concessions for filming in Serbia.

For instance, about 20 to 25 per cent cashback facility is given by the Serbian government to film units shooting in this country. President Vucic also emphasized that it was his desire to establish direct air linkages between Belgrade and Delhi.

On the matters of operationing direct flight between India and Serbia, he said, "Describing his own personal experience as a youth, he appreciated the sincerity and work ethos of Indians on direct connectivity. President Vucic mentioned several concessions or subsidies that Serbia was willing to offer to Indian Airlines if they operated a direct flight between India and Serbia."

President Murmu assured President Vucic that the Indian Airlines private alliance would be informed about these facilities and concessions that Serbia was offering to India's private civilization sector.

Recalling his visit to India in 2017, as then the Prime Minister of Serbia, President Vucic appreciated personal commitment and leadership for further sending India-Serbia relations. President Murmu also thanked the Serbian government for issuing a special postal stamp commemorating 75 years of India's independence.

Adding to the list of President Vucic, she highlighted the unprecedented change that India is going through and called for cooperation in new areas like science and technology, machinery, equipment, startups, and clean and renewable energy.

President also identified skilled and semiskilled manpower from India as having the potential to fill a vital gap in human resources in Serbia.

The spiritual heritage of India as well as yoga and Ayurveda also came up repeatedly in the conversation. Because these Indian contributions, both yoga and ayurveda, are popular in Serbia and do not require an introduction, both presidents after that addressed the media jointly.

On arrival, President Murmi was accorded a ceremonial welcome and a guard of honour at the airport. She paid floral tributes at the bust of Mahatma Gandhi in Belgrade.

On arrival later in the afternoon, she addressed a gathering of the Indian diaspora and Friends of India. She underlined that both India and Serbia are ancient lands and the relationship has been defined in the context of the nonaligned movement.

In recent years, both sides have shared an understanding of each other's core interests. Serbia has been a valuable partner in India's sustainable development program. As India emerges as a leading power, her role will enhance an issue related on issues related to climate change, counterterrorism connectivity, maritime security, financial inclusion, and food and energy security.

President appreciated and admired the contribution of the diaspora and Friends of India and underscored their positive contribution towards strengthening India.

And on the other hand, the Indian community is at its incipient state here, and in the coming few years we will find more Indian professionals here students, entrepreneurs, et cetera.
Jharkhand government will probe the alleged misuse of farmers' Aadhaar cards to avail benefits of the Centre's micro-irrigation scheme Per Drop More Crops' in parts of the state.

The government swung into action after farmers from some blocks, alleged that their Aadhaar cards had been misused or they were misled into signing up for the scheme without their knowledge.

Jharkhand Agriculture Minister Badal Patralekh said a high-level probe committee has been set up to investigate the issue.

"I have set up a four-member probe committee to look into alleged misuse of Aadhaar cards under the scheme," Patralekh told PTI on Friday.

The four-member committee will be headed by Hazaribag sub-divisional officer as maximum cases of irregularities were reported from the district, he said. "If any anomaly is found, strict action will be taken," he said.

Some farmers said micro-irrigation equipment had been dumped in their farms, though they hadn't applied for the scheme.

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Farmers alleged that some companies, empanelled for implementing the scheme, have misused their Aadhaar cards without their knowledge to create a beneficiary list and collected money in their names. Under the scheme, farmers contribute 10 per cent of the cost of equipment, while the rest is borne by the Centre and the state, an official said.

"We will conduct a probe and strict action will be taken against the guilty," Jharkhand Agriculture Secretary Aboobacker Siddique told PTI.

The scheme focuses on enhancing water use efficiency at the farm level through drip and sprinkler irrigation systems. It also aims to increase productivity of crops through precision water management.

Siddique said all processes to avail benefits of the scheme are done online. "Farmers first apply for the scheme with details including land. After approval, empanelled agencies approach the farmers for micro-irrigation service. Thereafter, it is verified by a third party. Once it gives approval, the subsidy amount is released," he said.

Different companies are empanelled for different districts to provide micro-irrigation related services such as installation of units or equipment.

"Even if any middleman or agent applies it online misusing farmer's details including land or Aadhaar, how can the third party certify it without verification?" Siddique said.

He added that the third party, which is responsible for final verification, is not hired by the state government but by NABARD's consultancy NABCONS. "Everything will be clear once the probe is completed," Siddique said.
The Supreme Court on Friday directed the Madras High Court registry to file a detailed report on measures taken to address the lack of toilets for women lawyers in the Nilgiris Court Complex in Tamil Nadu's Ooty.

The apex court said the earlier report of the registrar general does not explain in detail about the facilities for women lawyers in the new court complex and as to whether there was any shrinkage of such facilities which were earlier available.

A vacation bench of Justices Aniruddha Bose and Rajesh Bindal asked the registry to file the report by Sunday.

"Let a detailed report be filed by the high court administration through the registrar general. Such report should reach the registry of this court by Sunday through electronic mode and this matter shall be listed on June 12, Monday," the bench said.

The top court was hearing a plea by Women Lawyers' Association of Nilgiris alleging lack of toilet facilities for female advocates at the recently inaugurated combined court complex in Ooty.

National Commission for Women (NCW) chairperson Rekha Sharma had written a letter on June 7 to the Registrar General of the Madras High Court seeking measures to address the lack of toilets for women lawyers in the Nilgiris Court Complex.

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The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has filed six FIRs and formed a special team to probe the alleged conspiracy related to the ethnic violence in Manipur, officials said.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah, during his visit to Manipur, had ordered a CBI probe into the matter.

"As part of the CBI investigation, six cases have been identified for further examination. One of these cases focuses on a possible common conspiracy, aiming to determine whether the ethnic violence was pre-planned. The investigation will delve into the details to uncover any evidence suggesting a coordinated effort behind the unrest," said an official.

Last Thursday, the central government had announced several actions to bring peace and rebuild trust in Manipur, which has been facing unrest since May 3. These measures included the investigation of the situation by a special team from the CBI and the formation of a Judicial Commission.

During his Manipur visit, Amit Shah had told reporters in Imphal that a special team from the CBI would handle six cases connected to the riots. Additionally, a Judicial Inquiry Commission, led by a retired High Court judge, would investigate the origins of the violence and identify any potential conspiracy that led to unrest in the state. He had said that the government was taking these steps to understand the reasons behind the turmoil and hold those responsible accountable.

As of June 3, a total of 3,734 FIRs have been filed in Manipur where clashes between the Kuki and Meitei communities have resulted in over 100 deaths since May 3. The district with the highest number of cases is Imphal West, with 1,257 FIRs registered. Kangpokpi district follows with 932 cases, and Bishnupur district with 844 cases, as per the Chief Minister's office.

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--IANS

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Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday said the Narendra Modi government's priority is to ensure that Amarnath pilgrims have a comfortable visit and directed officials to make adequate security arrangements along the entire pilgrimage route in Jammu and Kashmir.

The home minister said this while chairing a high-level meeting where he took stock of the preparations for the Amarnath pilgrimage with top officials of the central government, Army and the Jammu and Kashmir administration.

The 62-day-long annual pilgrimage to the cave shrine of Amarnath, located at a height of 3,880 metres in the south Kashmir Himalayas, will begin on July 1 and continue till August 31.

During the meeting, the home minister said it is the priority of the Narendra Modi government that Amarnath pilgrims should have comfortable "darshan" and should not face any difficulty. He directed officials to make adequate security arrangements on the entire route of Amarnath pilgrimage, according to an official statement.

The pilgrims travel through two routes -- Baltal and Pahalgam -- in Jammu and Kashmir.

At the meeting, it was apprised that all the pilgrims will be given RFID cards so that their real-time location can be traced and everyone will be given Rs 5 lakh insurance cover. There will be insurance cover of Rs 50,000 for each animal carrying pilgrims.

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Shah stressed on providing smooth arrangements on the route from the airport and railway station to the pilgrimage base camp and directed to make available air service from Srinagar and Jammu at night for the convenience of the pilgrims.

The home minister also directed to ensure adequate stock of oxygen cylinders and their refilling and asked for availability of additional teams of doctors.

He directed to ensure adequate number of medical beds and deployment of ambulances and helicopters to meet any medical emergency.

Shah gave instructions to make proper arrangements for all necessary facilities for the pilgrims and that include travel, stay, electricity, water, communication and health. He directed to ensure better communication system on the pilgrimage routes and deployment of machines to immediately open routes in case of a landslide.

Besides, arrangements for tent city, Wi-Fi hotspots and proper lighting will be made on the travel routes. Additionally, online-live "Darshan of Baba Barfani", live telecast of morning and evening "aarti" in the holy Amarnath cave and religious and cultural programmes will be organised at the base camps, the statement said.

Jammu and Kashmir Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha, the Army's Northern Command chief Lieutenant General Upendra Dwivedi, Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla, Director of Intelligence Bureau Tapan Deka were among the top functionaries who attended the meeting.

Sources said all stakeholders of the pilgrimage have taken part in the meeting and all issues relating to arrangements being made for it have been been discussed.

Last year, 3.45 lakh people visited the holy cave and this year, the figure could go up to 5 lakh, they said.

The sources said that to avoid any incident like last year's flash flood which claimed 16 lives near the shrine, the National Disaster Response Force has started identifying ideal locations for setting up pilgrim camps keeping in mind any possible unforeseen natural disaster.

Indian Air Force helicopters are expected to be deployed to carry out aerial sorties in the upper reaches of the holy cave to check for glacial events and the formation of lakes that may trigger flash floods downhill.

Last year, such sorties were conducted only after the flash floods occurred in June, but this year, the exercise will be undertaken before the start of the pilgrimage and at continuous intervals during the two-month yatra, the sources said.

The aerial surveys may be conducted by a team with expertise in remote sensing and satellite, hydrology and disaster response. Once a dangerous water build-up is spotted, contingency measures will be taken all along the pilgrimage route, especially in the areas near the cave shrine, they added.

Recently, a lot of snow has been found along both the routes - Baltal and Pahalgam - leading to the holy cave and therefore the Border Roads Organisation has been given the task to clear the snow by June 15, the sources said.
The Calcutta High Court on Friday expressed ire over the "slow" pace of investigation by central agencies in the multi-crore municipalities' recruitment case in West Bengal.

As counsel for Enforcement Directorate (ED) presented a progress report on the investigation, Justice Amrita Sinha expressed dissatisfaction over the contents of the report. "The report is not satisfactory. It is not clear what is new in the report. Why is the progress of investigation so slow?" she asked.

In reply, counsel submitted that since Central Bureau of Investigation is the prime investigation agency in the manner, the progress of the ED's investigation is, to a great extent, dependent on the CBI's progress. However he assured that the ED officials are keeping a close watch on the progress in the case.

The CBI counsel, on his part, informed the court that the agency needs some more time for filing its progress report on this count.

Finally, Justice Sinha directed both the agencies to submit their respective progress reports to the court on the next date of hearing which is scheduled on June 14.

On Friday, the state government also faced the ire of Justice Sinha for first keeping multiple court options open in the matter and then withdrawing the special leave petition (SLP) filed at the Supreme Court.

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The state government, while approaching a division bench of the Calcutta High Court to seek a stay on central agency probe in municipalities recruitment case, also moved the apex court on this count. However, on Friday, the state government has informed the division bench that it is withdrawing the SLP at the apex court.

"First you filed the SLP at the Supreme Court against the order of the single-judge bench of the Calcutta High Court. Then you withdrew the SLP. What kind of a move is this? Are you not bearing the cost behind such litigations? Whose money is being spent behind such litigation?" Justice Sinha questioned.

--IANS

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the US this month will set new benchmarks for bilateral ties and big announcements are likely to be made on defence industrial cooperation and boosting India's indigenous military base, the Pentagon has said.

Prime Minister Modi will embark on his first state visit to the US at the invitation of President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden this month. During his four-day visit starting on June 21, the US president and the First Lady will host Modi for a state dinner on June 22.

When Prime Minister Modi comes here to Washington for a State Visit later in the month, I think it will be a historic visit setting new benchmarks for the relationship, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner said during a panel discussion at the Center for New American Security on Thursday.

I think it (the visit) will be looked back upon similar to how the Japan two plus two earlier this year was a pivotal moment in the relationship. People will be looking back on this visit by Prime Minister Modi as a real springboard for the US-India relationship, he said.

Ratner said US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited India recently to advance a number of bilateral issues and prepare the ground for the prime minister's visit to Washington by finalising particular agreements and initiatives that the two countries are working on.

Among the priorities are clear strategic alignment around the question of co-development and co-production between the United States and India on the defence side. This is a priority for Prime Minister Modi to strengthen India's indigenous defence industrial base, as well as advancing the military modernisation, he said.

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US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and his Indian Indian counterpart Ajit Doval here in January launched the initiative for critical and emerging technology (iCET) to try to bolster technology cooperation between the US and India and there is a very strong defence component of that that the two countries are looking to advance.

I know there have been efforts at this in the past. Sometimes there's skepticism around, is it going to be real this time? And my answer is, I think, all signs are pointing toward yes, it's going to be real and we're going to have some really big, historic, exciting announcements out of the prime minister's visit in terms of particular projects around defence industrial cooperation, Ratner said.

We are also enhancing our operational coordination in a number of different places. A lot of focus on the Indian Ocean, a lot of focus on the undersea domain, as well as new domains, space and cyber and new efforts around information sharing, he said.

If you look at the development of the US-India relationship, it's really unbelievable how far the relationship has moved over the last couple of decades. That's true now more than ever, he said.

Ratner said the two countries are seeing increasing strategic alignment.

From our perspective, from India's perspective, we do share a vision again for a free and open Indo-Pacific. A strong US-India partnership is a critical ingredient to realising that vision. That's what both sides have understood that from India's perspective and from the US perspective, that a closer partnership is going to be essential to the manifestation of that vision, he said.

The US, India and several other world powers have been talking about the need to ensure a free, open and thriving Indo-Pacific in the backdrop of China's rising military manoeuvring in the region.

China claims nearly all of the disputed South China Sea, though Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all claim parts of it. Beijing has built artificial islands and military installations in the South China Sea.

One of the major thrusts of the bilateral defence relationship and one of the things we were talking about, while we were in Delhi, is this ongoing US effort to support India's military modernisation," Ratner said.

"The integration of our defence industrial base is more co-production, co-development, and I think that is based upon the belief that a stronger India that can defend its own interest and its sovereignty is good for the United States, he said.
The State Visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the invitation of President Joe Biden is a "big deal" and a powerful signal that the future of the two countries is together, US-India Business Council (USIBC) president Atul Keshap has said.

Prime Minister Modi is visiting the US from June 21-24 at the invitation of US President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden. This will be his first State Visit to Washington.

The old saying goes, trade follows the flag. The two flags indicate the relevance of one to the other. A State Visit is a big deal. It is only the third in the entire history of diplomatic relations between the United States and India. It is the highest level of protocol area and diplomatic gesture that the United States can offer, Keshap told PTI in an interview.

This is only the third State Visit of the Biden administration. It is an honour reserved for our closest friends. India is now one of our closest friends. The fact that the prime minister and the president have agreed to this, their coming together is a powerful signal from the top of each government that our future is together,Ambassador Keshap, who previously served as the Charg d'Affaires at the US embassy in New Delhi said.

It's in strategic relations, it's in economic relations, it's in technological relations. I would say one more word, not merely relations, but convergence."



"The more the United States and India, the two greatest democracies on earth come together in these fields, the happier, safer, more stable, and more prosperous the entire world is going to be," he said.

Responding to a question on expectations from the visit, Keshap said he is hoping that it will send a powerful signal to the business communities of both countries that they are the preferred partners of each other and that there can be investment and trade in both directions with the full blessing and approval of the two governments.

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"I have articulated repeatedly that we must be impatient in attaining our USD 500 billion goals for annual trade between the United States and India. While we're only at USD 190 billion, we have to put on our track shoes, and our sneakers, and run faster. Both governments giving this encouragement is important."



"Look at energy, that's where the big money deals are, and it weaves countries together in a strategic and economic way. I'd like to see some energy deals between the US and India. I'd like to see deals on things like semiconductors and chips where we deleverage the risk in the supply chain, Keshap said reflecting the wish list of the US corporate sector ahead of the visit.

I want to see every possible effort in terms of e-commerce, and supply chain manufacturing to ensure resilience and to ensure the security of our supply chains so that free people are never exposed to any vulnerability in the supply chain. I want to see our companies finalise deals in the digital economy, in FinTech, in energy, in aerospace and defence, he said.

Keshap announced that on the eve of prime minister Modi's visit, USIBC will host a wedding mela at the United States Chamber of Commerce, bringing American and Indian startup enterprises in the defence space together to try to see if they can make partnerships, to build the defence articles that both of the countries need for a strong defence.

A strong defence, results in deterrence and deterrence very simply makes any other person think twice about playing any games.

"For the US and India to be strong, to have strong deterrents, we need our companies, our private sectors working together. So IndUSX on the June 20 at the US Chamber is our contribution to doing that. We were asked to do so by both the Pentagon and the Indian Ministry of Defence."



"We are very honoured to do that. If we see, deals flow from this in all of those areas, and we see the trade volume start to climb past USD 200 billion heading for USD 500 billion, then I feel like I'm doing my dharma, he said.

Observing that the defence sector is a very regulated industry, he said it's the private sector that can actually amplify and boost capability.

They have the technology in our system. It doesn't repose in the US government, it reposes in the companies, but what is being sent is a signal to say, get together, collaborate, produce, he said.

Keshap said if the United States and India, the world's greatest democracies are strong and capable at any moment, their enemies who may seek to challenge them will think twice, that's the whole purpose of deterrence.

Deterrence is about avoiding the next war. So having a very strong defence industry is very important. What have we learned from the pandemic? What have we learned from the Russia, Ukraine war? We have learned that countries have to be prepared, they have to be strong, they have to be capable. Building up India's defence production in the private, private sector. Very important for the peace and safety of India and the entire world, Keshap said.

From the American company perspective, he said "they just want to be treated equally and fairly to be able to do their business, make their investment decisions, and they want to have predictability. I think what American firms want to hear is about predictability and ease of doing business and a level playing field. I would say, and I don't think I can speak as authoritatively for the Indian companies, but they are also my members."



"They feel that in the United States, they have a pretty good field in which to run. there is a level playing field. There is speedy arbitration of any disputes in the courts. They do get a fair shake from all of the state governors that they go to when they look to see where they might invest," he said.

They get a lot of incentives. They are treated with respect and treated fairly. While they're Indian firms, they're not American, they are viewed as generators of jobs and investment and prosperity. I know about Indian companies that are training young kids in high school, how to do computer coding so that they can get a really high-paying job, whether they go to college or not, he said.
Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann on Friday said that after giving more than 29,000 government jobs to youths in the last one year, the state government will now ensure 2.77 lakh jobs to them in the private sector.

Mann said it is a matter of great pride and satisfaction that the AAP government has so far provided more than 29,000 jobs to the youths in various departments of the state government.

He claimed that it is a record as none of the previous governments have given so many jobs to youths, especially in the first year of their tenure.

According to an official statement, Mann said that merit and transparency have been the twin pillars on the basis of which job opportunities have been given to the youths across the state.

With this, the state government is making strenuous efforts to generate new jobs in the private sector also, he said.

"So far, due to the massive efforts made by the state government, an investment worth around Rs 48,000 crore has been roped in for Punjab," Mann said.

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The chief minister said these jobs will give a major boost to economic activity in Punjab besides making the youth an active partner in the socio-economic growth of the state.

He said that the major thrust of the state government is to reverse the trend of brain drain in the state and the youth no longer need to go abroad in search of jobs because the Punjab government will provide them lucrative jobs here.

On Thursday, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, accompanied by Mann and Haryana AAP leaders, while addressing a gathering during "Tiranga Yatra" in Jind district, had said, In Delhi, we have given jobs to 12 lakh youths. In Punjab, nearly 30,000 government jobs have so far been given while arrangements are being made to give 3 lakh more jobs in the private sector.
The RSS has united the Hindu community as a result of which, Ram Temple is being built in Ayodhya and Article 370 was abrogated in Jammu and Kashmir, the head of the Sangh's intellectual cell said on Friday.

Swant Ranjan, the all-India Baudhik pramukh of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), made the remark while addressing the concluding ceremony of the 20-day 'Sangh Shiksha Varg' at Hindaun City in Karauli district.

"The Sangh has ensured that the Hindu community is united. Due to this, Ram Temple is being built in Ayodhya and Article 370 has been abrogated in Jammu and Kashmir," a release issued by the RSS quoted Ranjan as saying.

"... but there is a need to remove caste discrimination prevailing in the society," he added.

The training camp was organised on the premises of Adarsh Vidya Mandir School. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat visited the camp and stayed with the volunteers for three days.

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The Supreme Court on Friday sought the Centre's stand on the Delhi government's plea challenging a high court order staying a notice to bike-taxi aggregators Rapido and Uber and allowing them to operate till the final policy has been notified.

A vacation bench of justices Aniruddha Bose and Rajesh Bindal directed that the copy of the petitions be served to Solicitor General Tushar Mehta.

"Let the copy of both petitions be served upon the Solicitor General so that views of the Union of India can be taken into account. List on Monday," the bench said.

Earlier, senior advocate Manish Vashisht, appearing for the Delhi government, said the high court's decision to stay the government's notice till the final policy is notified is like virtually allowing the writ petition by Rapido.

On May 26, while issuing a notice to the Delhi government on Rapido's plea challenging a law that excludes two-wheelers from being registered as transport vehicles, the high court directed that no coercive action should be taken against the bike-taxi aggregator till the final policy was notified.

The high court, which listed Rapido's plea on August 22 before the registrar for completion of pleading, said, "The counsel for the petitioners (Rapido) submits that policy is under active consideration."



"Accordingly, we hereby stay the notice and make it clear that the stay shall operate till the final policy is notified. However, once the final policy is notified, if the petitioners are still aggrieved, they are at liberty to take steps before the appropriate forum," the high court said.

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In its petition before the high court, Roppen Transportation Services Private Limited, which runs Rapido, has said the Delhi government order directing it to immediately stop plying non-transport two-wheelers from carrying passengers on hire-and-reward or for commercial purposes was passed without any reason or rationale.

In a public notice issued earlier this year, the government had cautioned bike-taxis against plying in Delhi and warned that violations would make aggregators liable for a fine of up to Rs 1 lakh.

Rapido has also challenged a show-cause notice issued to it by the city government in that context, saying it is in violation of various fundamental and constitutional rights, and has been passed in violation of the principles of natural justice.

"The direction issued by the transport department under the impugned notice is ex-facie arbitrary and passed without following due process under law, without providing any reasons for such prohibition," the plea said.

It also said that the city government's conduct was contrary to the intent and object of the Centre with respect to the issuance of licences to aggregators as laid down under the Motor Vehicles Act, read with the Motor Vehicle Aggregator Guidelines, 2020 (MoRTH Guidelines).

"Transport department is yet to come up with its own guidelines with respect to plying of two-wheeler non-transport vehicles as transport vehicles for the purpose of aggregation and ride-sharing/ride-pooling.

"MoRTH Guidelines expressly allowed vehicle pooling in non-transport vehicles in furtherance of the central and state governments' objective of reducing traffic congestion and automobile pollution and achieving effective asset utilisation unless it is prohibited by the state government," the plea said.

It also said a blanket ban on the petitioner's services impacts the lives and livelihood of a huge number of vehicle owners and riders as well as a substantial number of daily commuters.
: The Special Investigation Team (SIT) of Hyderabad Police probing the leak of question papers of the State Public Service Commission on Friday filed a charge sheet in the case.

A press release from the city police said as of now 49 accused individuals have been arrested in connection with the case, while one person, currently residing in New Zealand, is still at large.

The total money transacted in the buying and selling of various TSPSC question papers is Rs 1.63 crore, it said.

"All the material evidences seized during the arrest of the accused persons were sent to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Ramanthapur, and experts opinion obtained. Legal opinion is obtained and the preliminary charge sheet has been filed today in the Hon'ble jurisdictional Court," the release said. The TSPSC on March 15 cancelled the Assistant Engineers (AE) exam held on March 5, following allegations that the question paper had been leaked.

Amid massive protests by the Congress, BJP and other opposition parties and students groups over the leakage of a question paper of a recruitment test, the TSPSC had earlier cancelled the Group-I Preliminary Examination and other recruitment tests.

The Enforcement Directorate too had registered an 'Enforcement Case Information Report' (ECIR) in connection with the case.

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Here are the latest updates on the situation. The Centre decided to carry on with the internet suspension in Manipur for one more day. While allegations of attacks have come in, no incidents of violence or casualties have been reported in more than 24 hours.

Internet suspension continues

The Manipur Human Rights Commission (MHRC) has requested the state government to consider restoring internet services in Manipur, which have been suspended since the outbreak of ethnic violence on May 3. The MHRC emphasised the importance of internet access in modern-day life, particularly for remote work, online education, and communication.



Alleged attack on of MLA Soraisam Kebi On Friday, June 9, the government extended the suspension of internet services until June 10 due to concerns about the spread of rumors and provocative content that could affect the law and order situation. The Manipur government initially suspended internet services to control the violence that erupted during and after the 'Tribal Solidarity March' opposing the demand to include the Meitei community in the Scheduled Tribe category.

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Soraisam Kebi, also known as Kebi Devi, is the BJP MLA from Naoriya Pakhanglakpa constituency in Imphal West district. The incident reportedly took place outside her residence on Thursday night. In a separate incident, two individuals on a motorcycle allegedly threw a low-intensity improvised explosive device (IED) at the residence of MLA Soraisam Kebi in Manipur, according to a report by NDTV on Friday, June 9.



According to the report, so far around 10,000 army and Assam rifle personnel have been deployed in the state in order to restore peace. The police are investigating the incident, however, no casualties have been reported so far.

Kuki tribals demand for separate administration

In the midst of the ongoing violence, the Kuki tribals in Manipur have reiterated their demand for a separate administration equivalent to a separate state for their community on Thursday. The Kuki Inpi Manipur (KIM), an apex body of the Kuki tribals, accused the Meitei community of conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Kuki community and called for their separation from Manipur to live peacefully in their ancestral lands. However, both Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh and Union Home Minister Amit Shah have rejected the demand for a separate state for the tribals.

Unwillingness to surrender arms

The Coordinating Committee on Manipur Integrity (COCOMI), a valley-based civil society organisation, has expressed concerns that local youths in Manipur are not willing to surrender their arms as attacks by militants continue to intensify. COCOMI has called for the replacement of inactive paramilitary troops and the deployment of 'more sincere' security forces like the Border Security Force (BSF) to establish confidence among the people.



Furthermore, security forces recovered 29 automatic weapons, along with mortars, hand grenades, ammunition, and other warlike stores. The joint combing operation was carried out in sensitive areas of Manipur's hills and valley sectors to locate hidden weapons and ammunition. COCOMI also criticised the governments for their inability to clear blockades on the highways caused by militants, hindering the transportation of essential goods.

In the last 24 hours, reportedly 27 arms, 245 ammunition and 41 bombs were recovered from the Porompat police station jurisdiction of Manipur's Imphal East district while one weapon and two bombs were seized in the state's Bishnupur district.
Four states in the country have breached the 10 per cent mark in electric two-wheeler (e2W) penetration, according to the latest data from Vahan Dashboard. Goa leads the way with 17.20 per cent, albeit with modest numbers, followed by Kerala (13.66 per cent) and Karnataka (12.19 per cent). Maharashtra, with a penetration of 10.74 per cent, is by far the largest state in the number of e2Ws sold. Overall, India reached an e2W penetration of 5.63 per cent as of May 31, up from 4.05 per cent in 2022, with 392,681 e2Ws sold in the first five months of this year out of the total two-wheeler sales of 6.98 million, the data showed. This augurs well for the governments target of increasing the penetration of e2Ws to 80 per cent by 2030. Read more..
Birsa Munda took on the British troops between 1897 and 1900. He attacked Khunti Police Station with arrowheads and captured 400 troops in August 1897. The British army routed Mundas and their allies on the banks of the Tanga River in 1898, and they detained several tribal chiefs.

Indian Tribal leader and freedom fighter Birsa Munda died on June 9, 1900, at age 25. Today is his 123rd death anniversary. Birsa Munda was born on November 15, 1875. He revolted against the British in the late 19th century.
E-commerce firm Amazon India on Friday signed an agreement with the government's premier agri-research body ICAR to guide farmers enrolled on its 'Kisan store' on scientific cultivation of different crops and help them achieve optimum yield and income.

A 'Kisan store' section was launched on the Amazon platform in September 2021. Farmers can avail doorstep delivery of agri input products via Kisan store through assisted shopping at Amazon Easy stores.

The outcomes from a pilot project at Pune between Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR)-Krishi Vigyan Kendra and Amazon India has motivated to further expand the partnership, the company said in a statement.

On behalf of ICAR, U S Gautam, Deputy Director General (Agricultural Extension), and Siddharth Tata, Product Leader, Amazon Fresh Supply Chain and Kisan, signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

"ICAR will collaborate with Amazon for technologies, capacity building and transfer of new knowledge," ICAR Director General Himanshu Pathak said on the occasion.

He also expressed hope for success of this Public-Private-Peasants-Partnership (PPPP).

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Asserting that technology holds immense potential to revolutionize the agricultural sector and uplift the lives of Indian farmers, Amazon India Director and Head- Fresh and Everyday Essentials- Harsh Goyal said: "This partnership will enable an ecosystem for the farming community, strengthening the 'farm to fork' supply chain."



Amazon said this MoU in farmers partnership with Amazon Kisan store will help ensure access to high quality fresh produce for consumers across India, including those ordering through Amazon Fresh.

Under the MoU, Amazon and ICAR will collaborate to extend the latest and most precise agriculture practice that have been developed by ICAR's extensive research to bridge the technical knowledge gaps in integrated cultivation by leveraging ICAR's KVK Knowledge network, it said.

KVKs strengthen a wider group of farmers by leveraging technological base through transfer of technology and capacity building programmes.

Additionally, ICAR and Amazon will work together on farmer engagement programmes at KVKs, conducting demonstrations, trials, and capacity building initiatives to enhance farming practices and farm profitability.

Furthermore, Amazon will provide training support and assist farmers in marketing their produce through its online platform, facilitating direct connections with consumers, it added.


About 2.2 million gunny bags are available with Rajfed, but the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (NAFED) had not given the permission to use these despite requests made by the state. The Rajfed is demanding about 6.3 million gunny bags of mustard and over 5.7 million grams from NAFED. If we are not provided with gunny bags soon, then I will write to the central Government in this regard, Anjana said.

Rajasthan Cooperative Minister Udaylal Anjana last week said a delay in providing gunny bags to the state cooperative marketing federation (Rajfed) was affecting the procurement of crops like mustard and gram.

support price in the state. Till June 6, 347,000 tonnes of gram and mustard have been procured from over 140,000 farmers. The minister said mustard and gram were being procured from April 1 on



During the Budget session in February, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot had announced the Mukhyamantri Free Annapurna Food Packet Yojana that aims to provide benefits to 100 million families under the National Food Security Act (NFSA). Anjana said the benefits of Annapurna Yojana would be made available to the beneficiaries soon. The tender has been approved and the process will begin soon.

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Under the Rajasthan Free Food Packet Scheme, the state will provide 1 kg of pulses, 1 kg of sugar, 1 kg of salt, and 1 litre of edible oil and spices to each family free of cost per month.




In a notification to the stock exchanges on Friday, SBI said the central board of the bank had approved raising of funds by debt instruments. State Bank of India (SBI), the countrys largest lender, will raise Rs 50,000 crore by way of bonds, including additional tier-1 bonds and tier-II bonds, in the current financial year.



In April, the SBI board had approved funds raising of $2 billion through foreign currency bonds in 2023-24 in single or multiple tranches. SBI said the funds would be raised through private placement mode to Indian and/or overseas investors during the financial year, subject to the central governments approval wherever required.



In FY23, credit growth was 15 per cent while deposit growth trailed at 9.6 per cent. According to the latest Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data, year-on-year credit growth of banks stood at 15.4 per cent as on fortnight ended May 19, while deposits were growing at 10.9 per cent. Deposit growth is expected to improve as the Rs 2,000 banknotes are coming back to banks after the RBI announced its withdrawal. The fundraise activity comes on the back of healthy credit growth in the banking system, though deposit growth has been lagging loan offtake.

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SBIs net profit for the previous financial year was Rs 50,232 crore  its highest ever yearly profit.




While Google tried to lure its employees back to the office by offering free-of-cost food and other perks, it has now taken a firm stand in western countries and issued a memo directing employees to come to the office three days a week. Employees failing to do so will face repercussions in their appraisals, the report said. Tech giants like Google and Indian information technology companies are facing the same challenge of getting their employees back to the office, a report in Financial Express (FE) said.



Accounting firm Deloitte is also facing a similar situation and the company is offering free transportation to its employees to incentivise work from home. The company policy is to reimburse all the costs incurred on conveyance. Indian software services companies are also working hard to get their employees back to the office. To this end, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has also mandated three-day work at the office. To make it easier to come to the office, TCS is offering free transportation facilities to employees deployed on critical projects, the FE report said.



While tackling a similar challenge, companies like Infosys, Tech Mahindra, and Persistent Systems have devised a different solution. These companies are opening offices in smaller cities and are asking their local employees to report to these offices instead of the headquarters located in big cities like Bengaluru or Hyderabad. Deloitte is even willing to pay the parking charges for employees coming to the office. To this end, Deloitte India offices will reimburse travel expenses up to Rs 20,000 per month for executives of the rank of senior manager and below, the FE report added.

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IT major Infosys had informed in its FY23 annual report that it was going to open offices in Hubballi, Indore, Nagpur, and Coimbatore to expand its reach, closer to its talent pool.


The proposed facility will be a tier-3 facility and will have a capacity of 32 MW of IT load. It is projected to be operational in the second half of 2025. The firm has already bought a land parcel spread over five acres for the proposed development. Web Werks has developed four data centers in Pune, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Noida, and two in Mumbai in the past two years. Web Werks, an Indian data center provider, and Iron Mountain Data Centers, an NYSE-listed company, will invest Rs 1,400 crore (approximately $170 million) to develop a large data center in Navi Mumbai's Rabale locality, The Economic Times (ET) reported on Friday. The data center will be the seventh in India for Web Werks and the third in the Mumbai region.



Mark Kidd, EVP and global general manager, of Iron Mountain Data Centers, said that the company will scale up by securing land to build its third facility in one of Indias most important data hubs.

The data center campus has received approval to build an additional power substation with a capacity of 120 MVA. This sub-station can be used to expand the total capacity of the data center at a later stage. Mark Kidd, EVP and global general manager, of Iron Mountain Data Centers, said that the company will scale up by securing land to build its third facility in one of Indias most important data hubs.



The firm is raising the standards of solutions with advanced hosting infrastructure, cloud-on ramp, network, and security, Rathi added. We Werks is also building new data centres in Chennai and Kolkata. The new Mumbai data centre will be built close to the highly connected MUM- 1 and the newly opened Mum-2 facility, which is a standalone greenfield data centre with 6 MW of IT load. Nikhil Rathi, CEO, Web Werks, said the company has several strategic priorities for the rest of the year. The company will launch new data centres in important Indian cities and has signed multiple pacts with the Karnataka and Telangana governments to set up data centres in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, positioning the company as market leaders in co-location solutions for hyper scalers and enterprise customers.


Just the next day, it sued Coinbase Global for running an "illegal exchange". Last week saw a turbulent week for the cryptocurrency market. On Tuesday, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (US SEC) sued the largest crypto exchange Binance and its chief executive officer (CEO) Changpeng Zhao for breaching the rules.



On Wednesday, the crypto market shed five per cent and major digital tokens like Bitcoin and Ethereum were down nearly 10 per cent. After a brief recovery, they plunged again after the charges on Coinbase surfaced. Both Coinbase and Binance denied the SEC's allegations and have pledged to vigorously defend themselves in court. However, the crypto market reacted sharply to both allegations.



"The similarity in both the lawsuits is that the SEC claims that both platforms were trading certain tokens, that have been identified as 'unregistered securities'. Interestingly, both Bitcoin and Ethereum have not been mentioned in the filings as securities and hence have traded around the anchored levels of $27,000 and $1,800 respectively, down less than two per cent over the course of a highly eventful week," said Parth Chaturvedi, Investments Lead, CoinSwitch Ventures. However, on Friday, the market showed recovery. According to CoinMarketCap, Bitcoin was trading at $26,627, down just 1.7 per cent in the last seven days. Ethereum was trading at $1,843, just over two per cent down in the last seven days. The total market cap recovered to $1.1 trillion from $1.08 trillion on Wednesday.

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"The markets realised this as a medium-term positive, which would bring much-needed clarity on the classification of crypto assets and sharply rebounded," Chaturvedi added. The reports revealed that Coinbase was mainly being sued for trading "unregistered securities", an issue that the exchange had itself brought to the lawmakers' notice, on several occasions.



"The SEC action on crypto firms has not impacted Bitcoin prices in a big way as the world's largest crypto holds strong above the $26,000 mark. The largest altcoin, Ethereum, also remains resilient and did not slide further in the last 24 hours which is mainly due to optimism around Fed's monetary policy decision which is due next week. There is a sense in the market that the Fed may relax its hawkish stance to boost market liquidity," said Shivam Thakral, chief executive officer (CEO) of crypto exchange BuyUcoin. Moreover, the US Federal Reserve (Fed) is set to announce its monetary policy decision next week. It is expected to be less hawkish and is keeping the markets buoyant.


Investors pulled out Rs 27,569 crore last month, the highest since September 2021, when equity MF units worth Rs 27,979 crore were redeemed. As a result, net inflows into equity schemes declined to a six-month low of Rs 3,240 crore in May, data from the Association of Mutual Funds in India (Amfi) showed on Friday.

Redemptions in active equity mutual funds (MFs) hit a 20-month high in May as investors booked profits amid a sustained market rally.



After a weak performance between December and February, the markets have been on an upward trajectory since March-end, buoyed by robust inflows from foreign portfolio investors. In May, the Nifty50 index rose more than 2 per cent, extending its three-month gain to 5 per cent. On the other hand, the Nifty Midcap 100 index rose 6.2 per cent in May, while the Nifty Smallcap 100 index gained 5.1 per cent, stretching their three-month gains to 10 per cent and 7 per cent, respectively. However, gross investments into equity schemes remained elevated, with investors pumping in a record Rs 14,749 crore through systematic investment plans (SIPs). The overall inflows in May stood 21 per cent higher month-on-month at Rs 30,800 crore, the data showed.



Profit booking in a rising market, along with probable expenses towards vacation and education, could have led to lower investments in mutual funds in May, observed Manish Mehta, national head (sales, marketing & digital business), Kotak Mahindra AMC. Industry executives and experts attribute the surge in outflows to profit booking and redemptions for expenses towards education and other requirements.

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Investors pulled out the highest amount from largecap, flexicap and thematic & sectoral schemes. The three fund categories together recorded an outflow of Rs 13,245 crore. This resulted in negative net inflows into these categories with largecap schemes recording the highest net outflow at Rs 1,362 crore. However, smallcap schemes continued to rake in good inflows. In May, net inflows into smallcap schemes stood at Rs 3,283 crore, the highest since Amfi started releasing the data in April 2019. The lower net inflows are due to profit booking coupled with concerns regarding the US governments decision to raise the debt ceiling, said Melvyn Santarita, analyst - manager research, Morningstar India.



Net inflows into equity MF schemes have shown an inverse correlation with market performance in the recent past. Investors put in higher amounts into equity MF schemes during market downturns as compared to periods when markets are going up. Redemptions also go up during phases of market rally. According to experts, this trend in inflows shows that investors are taking investment calls based on valuations. Amfi CEO NS Venkatesh said investors were finding smallcaps attractive due to improved valuations after a steep correction in FY23.



The inflows into debt schemes along with the mark-to-market gains in equity schemes in the last two months led to almost a 10 per cent rise in the total assets under management (AUM) to Rs 43.2 trillion at the end of May. Active debt schemes, which recorded the highest inflows since October 2020 last month, continued to see strong inflows in most shorter-horizon schemes. Buoyed by over Rs 45,000-crore net inflows into liquid schemes, the overall net inflow into debt schemes stood at Rs 46,000 crore.
This is entirely of a piece with the reality on the ground. Barely 10 days before the picture was taken, ahead of a review meeting in Ajmer of the partys poll preparations, supporters of the two st

The picture that was clicked is a comment for posterity on the state of play between the two leaders. It shows Mr Pilot, lips pursed, arms crossed over his chest as Mr Gehlot grimaces into the camera in a parody of a smile. Party General Secretary K C Venugopal appears grim and watchful as he stands between them. The message the picture sends is: Together, but separate.


As various Asian economies rise and fall, so too do their financial markets. The traditional stalwarts of Hong Kong and Singapore are being joined by the rapidly growing markets of mainland China, the Middle East, and of course, India. These markets are in some cases augmenting into specialist or accelerated markets with unique characteristics such as single-city Free Trade Zones, specialist tech-focused equities boards, or holistic all-in-one financial centres like the International Financial Services Centre at GIFT City. As global financial markets become ever-more interconnected, and as cross-border financial instruments grow in complexity, we are seeing a new pressure on financial centres to offer a point of difference relative to their peers. Raw market volume is declining in value as a proxy for market relevance.



If the ongoing Financial Markets Dialogue between the Indian and UK governments is anything to go by, there seems to be a strong will to capitalise on this foundation. Financial cooperation is one of the key elements of the 2030 Roadmap adopted during the 2021 meeting of the Indian and UK Prime Ministers. In talking to policy makers, regulators and market participants both in India and in London where I am based, India has many unique advantages in this market development arms race. There is genuine optimism on both sides about Indias growing relevance in the financial sector. The unique, long-established legacy of trade and investment between India and the UK is a particular point of difference, and the consensus is that it can potentially turbo charge the development of Indias financial markets and the broader financial services sector.



As we enter a period of accelerated change in the financial sectorthrough the proliferation of digital assets, the globalization of financial markets and the important ascent of sustainable financethere is new space for developing markets to assert themselves as innovators and regulatory first movers. India has the infrastructure in place to gain ground in these emerging areas, attracting influence and capital in the process. The most recent joint statement from the Financial Markets Dialogue in April saw both sides reiterate their commitment to collaboration on GIFT Cityand this lies at the heart of the opportunities on offer for the Indian market. GIFT City has an offering that extends across capital markets for dual listing, sustainable finance, fund management and re-insurance.

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In thinking about one of the newest and most vibrant areas of financial market developmentsustainable financethere is tremendous opportunity for Indian companies and the Indian market at large, because of the prospect for tight collaboration with other markets, including the UK. In this case, a collaboration that is already well underway. The UK has long been an exporter of financial services insofar that it often holds a key role in the formulation of global financial policy and standards. Further, Londons long-established ecosystem of financial institutions, centuries old law firms and thriving capital markets mean that the UK has had outsized influence over financial market operations and best practices.



Opportunities to collaborate around Sovereign Green Bonds are also on the slate for exploration. And all of this will go a long way in channeling green finance to markets like India. There is also a fair amount of work under way at the GIFT IFSC to put in place an enabling framework to help turn it into Indias green finance hub. The Financial Markets Dialogue makes clear that it envisages collaboration between the India and UK central banks on climate scenario analysis and stress testing, as well as capacity building and spreading awareness on Climate Risk and Sustainable Finance. These are critical exercises in formulating the policy responses and market norms of the future.



As in all things, momentum matters a great deal. On the policy front, the UK-India momentum looks vibrant with the looming possibility of a Free Trade Agreement. A comprehensive FTA would further enhance the bilateral trading relationship which is already worth an estimated GBP 34 billion. The trade partnership between India and the UK is stronger than it has ever been  with more than GBP 28 billion invested in each other's economies, supporting over half a million jobs and a record number of Indian-owned companies doing business in the UK. The foundation for Indias position as a climate leader is already being laid. The India Chapter of the Climate Finance Leadership Initiative that was launched by Michael Bloomberg in partnership with the Governments of India and UK is a live example of cooperation between the two countries. While still in relative infancy, the initiative promises to make significant strides in terms of mobilizing private capital in support of Indias low-carbon transition. Its these sort of cross-government, public-private collaborations that can attract meaningful investment where it is needed most.



(The writer is European Director at Bloomberg LP and Global Head of Government Relations and Regulatory Affairs.) Ive had the pleasure of meeting with a significant number of Indian business and government leaders in recent monthsboth in the UK and here in Indiaand the sense of opportunity is tangible. This current coalescence of economic growth, market innovation and regulatory synergy is a rare moment for both nations that can deliver significant gains for both sides, boosting FDI in both directions and fostering deeper economic ties.

(These are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the 'Business Standard' newspaper.)


BJP leader and Home Minister Amit Shah will be addressing public meetings in four states on June 10 and 11 as part of the party's programmes to mark the Narendra Modi government's nine years.

One of the venues for his meetings is Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, where the political atmosphere is abuzz with speculation on whether the BJP will join hands with the N Chandrababu Naidu-led Telugu Desam Party after the two leaders met recently in the national capital.

Shah will address the public meeting in Andhra Pradesh on Sunday, and people will keenly look for any message in his address on the BJP's political plans for the state in terms of a new alliance. The state's ruling YSR Congress has been largely supportive to the central government on key issues so far.

BJP president J P Nadda is also scheduled to address a public meeting in Tirupati in the state on June 10. He will also offer prayers at the Tirupati Balaji temple.

On Saturday, Shah will address meetings at Patan in Gujarat and at Nanded in Maharashtra. Official sources said he will pay obeisance at the Hazur Abchalnagar Sahib Gurudwara in Nanded.

He will address a meeting at Vellore in Tamil Nadu on Sunday before travelling to Andhra Pradesh.

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The BJP is observing a month-long public outreach programme between May 30 and June 30 to mark the government's anniversary.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday attacked the BJP-led central government by claiming that Indian Railways was destroyed the day the practice of presenting a separate Railway Budget was stopped.

The Narendra Modi government merged Railway Budget with the Union Budget in 2017, ending a practice of about 100 years.

"When I was the Railway Minister, we had the option of having six secretaries of Cabinet rank for various railway departments - finance, employee welfare, signalling, engineering and electrical. They helped in coordination among different departments. Today, this coordination has gone.

Indian Railways was destroyed the day we stopped presenting the Budget separately. No one seems to care about these things these days," Banerjee told reporters.

The TMC supremo's statement came in the aftermath of the June 2 triple train accident in Odisha that left 288 people, including residents of West Bengal, dead.

Banerjee slammed the BJP government at the Centre alleging that it was busy suppressing the truth behind the train crash.

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"I have said this earlier too, and I will repeat it again. All we want is the truth about the cause of the accident must come out. However, we have seen how truth has been manipulated, and fake stories are pushed to suppress the real cause of the accident," she said.

Referring to the unrest in Manipur, Banerjee claimed that the Centre was not allowing anybody including the journalists to visit the northeastern state so that it can suppress the truth.

"We have seen how the central government tries to suppress news about Manipur. Journalists aren't allowed to travel there and report freely. Hence, when I say that this government hides facts, it is true. The countrymen will give their reply to the government, I am waiting for that day," she said.

On reports that the Union Ministry of Labour & Employment, writing to the state alleging that it has diverted the Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board's funds to pay compensation to the victims of the triple train accident, Banerjee said she has used money from the Disaster Management department.

"What is more important to me is providing aid to the people. I don't see which department the money comes from. Instead of focusing on where I got the money from, they should go do something positive. All funds belong to the state government," she stated.

The BJP is a party of liars who create false narratives, Banerjee asserted.

They (BJP) should be ashamed of themselves for remaining silent over the atrocities taking place in Manipur and Uttar Pradesh," she added.

Alleging that the central government has halted sending funds to West Bengal for numerous projects and schemes, she said she is confident that these issues will be resolved once a new government is installed in New Delhi after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Amid signs of differences between the BJP and its ally JJP, Haryana Deputy Chief Minister Dushyant Chautala on Friday said the alliance between the two parties after the 2019 assembly polls was forged to form a stable government in the state and not due to any compulsion.

The Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) leader asserted that the alliance was finalised after the October 2019 polls in the presence of senior BJP leader and now Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

After the Haryana Assembly polls, BJP had won 40 seats in the 90-member House, though last year it added one more MLA into its kitty after winning the Adampur bypolls, in which JJP won 10 seats.

Both outfits, who had fought against each other, forged a tie-up and formed the government.

In the present House, BJP has 41 seats, Congress 30 and JJP 10. While six out of seven Independents support BJP, one each member belongs to Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) and Haryana Lokhit Party (HLP), which, too, is supporting the M L Khattar-led government.

On Thursday, four independent MLAs from Haryana, all of whom are supporting the Khattar government, met BJP in-charge for the state Biplab Kumar Deb in Delhi.

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On Friday, HLP chief and legislator Gopal Kanda, whose party is also supporting the government, met Deb in the national capital.

On asking whether differences have cropped up between the two allies after some statements were made by the leaders of the two sides, Chautala said, "Both the parties had discussed ways to maintain a stable government in the state and only after that the alliance was forged with a mutual consent. It was neither my nor BJP's compulsion.

"State needed a stable government and we delivered on that. Today, Haryana is making progress...I dont think anyone did any favour on anyone," he added.

He said right from the beginning of this alliance he has been hearing that it won't last three months with others saying that it will break within a year.

"The day there will be any "talkhi" (bitterness in relations), I think you (media) people won't even get a chance to ask," the deputy CM said.

"I am very clear that state should have a stable government and it should progress and with this thought, I am doing my work and I think others, who are a part of this government, are also doing the same," he said.

When asked if BJP and JJP will fight the next year's polls together, he replied, "that will be decided by the leadership of the two parties and I think both parties want to walk together".

When asked whether he see any fissures in the alliance, Sombir Sangwan, one of the four Independent MLAs who met Deb, said, "As far as I am concerned, BJP is at loss with the continuation of this alliance".

He claimed that people are unhappy with the JJP and if this alliance continues, the BJP will have to bear the loss.

"Twenty-five per cent more people will connect with BJP if this alliance breaks," Sangwan further said, claiming that BJP did not need JJP for a stable government as it enjoyed the support of most Independents.

Deb had recently said the JJP did no favour to the BJP by supporting it as the regional party also joined the government. Some JJP leaders had later made counter statements.

Both parties have been non-committal on whether they would contest the 2024 assembly polls together.

Gopal Kanda said right from the start his party is supporting the BJP.

He said during his meeting with Deb they discussed the state's political scenario and how to take forward the policies and programmes of BJP-led governments at the Centre and in the state.

Like Sangwan, Kanda also felt that BJP did not need JJP's support.

"Even if JJP is not with BJP, there is no danger to the government and it will still run," Kanda said.

Meanwhile, Haryana Congress president Udai Bhan took a potshot at both parties, saying, "We have been saying this right from the beginning that the BJP-JJP alliance is not a 'gathbandhan', but a 'thug bandhan', one based on interest and not based on any ideology".

"BJP has always betrayed their allies, be it INLD, now is the turn of JJP, Akali Dal, Shiv Sena, Nitish Kumar, whoever worked with them, their party has been finished, he said.

"BJP is adopting the use and throw policy for JJP," Bhan claimed.
Trinamool Congress (TMC) National General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee declined to comply with an Enforcement Directorate (ED) summon issued to him on Thursday in connection with the alleged teacher recruitment scam.

The anti-money laundering agency had summoned the TMC leader to its office on June 13.

Addressing a public meeting, Banerjee said that in his last appearance before the ED, he had requested the officials not to summon him in the next few days on account of a scheduled TMC Yatra.

Banerjee said that he is not blaming the ED officials for summoning him on that date since they are bound by duty. He said that he is ready to send any document that the ED may ask for but he is too busy at the moment to be questioned for hours at their office.

"I am not blaming the ED officials because they are only doing their duty. Their political bosses are getting sleepless nights owing to the huge success of the Nobojowar Yatra," Banerjee said.

"Our program ends on June 16 and the panchayat elections have been announced, which will conclude on the 8th July. They will question me for several hours and the net result would be zero. After the polls get over, if you summon me I will appear before you," the TMC general secretary added.

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Taking care to mention that he is ready to comply with the ED investigation Banerjee said, "It is my duty to face the ED and support them in their investigation but I will not go for questioning now."

The TMC General Secretary also said that the ED officials had questioned his wife, Rujira on Thursday in connection with the coal pilferage case for four hours. His wife who was on his way to Dubai with her two children was stopped from flying at the airport and was issued a summon by the ED at 11 am on the same day.

Banerjee said that no 'outcome' is reached even after recording statements for long hours at the ED office. He said, "It is nothing but harassment by the ruling party."

Banerjee hit out at the Central government and said that their double engine is ED and CBI.

"BJP's double engine is ED and CBI. When one engine (CBI) failed now they are using another engine," he said, adding that the party is getting sleepless nights after seeing "Nobo Jowar Yatra".

Last month, Banerjee was questioned for over 9 hours by the Central Bureau of Investigation in the multi-crore recruitment scam in West Bengal schools.
Union Minister Rajeev Chandrashekar on Friday hit out at the Congress government in Karnataka over reports about it removing a lesson on RSS founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar from school textbooks, saying the party's views on history are limited to the Nehru-Gandhi family.

The senior BJP leader termed the reported move as Congress antics to grab attention, and alleged that it has a long history of rewriting the country's history to remove those who are not part of a "dynasty".

On Thursday, Karnataka Primary and Secondary Education Minister Madhu Bangarappa had said revision of school textbooks will be done this year itself in the interest of students.

Bangarappa, while talking to reporters in Bengaluru, had also indicated that the proposal on the textbook revision will be placed before the Cabinet probably when it meets next.

He, however, did not wish to go into details, when asked about reports stating that plans are on to remove some lessons from textbooks introduced by the previous BJP government, including one on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) founder.

Addressing a press conference here, Chandrashekar, a Rajya Sabha member from Karnataka, said, "I don't have control on them what they do or say Its (move to remove a lesson) absolutely wrong. It is in their DNA and intent to take out from history whosoever is not part of dynasty."



Their "prism" of looking at history is limited to the Nehru-Gandhi family, he said.

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Chandrashekar also described the reported move of the Karnataka government to remove a lesson on Hedgewar as "crime against the youth of India" and said people will respond to the Congress for depriving students from the truth about India.

The Congress in its manifesto for the recently concluded Karnataka assembly polls had promised to undo the changes made to school textbooks when the BJP was in power and had also promised to scrap the National Education Policy-2020 in the state.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Friday said his government in its six years eliminated "corruption, disorder and anarchy" from the recruitment process.

The CM made the remark at an event where he handed over appointment letters to 7,182 ANMs (Auxiliary Nurse and Midwife) selected through the Uttar Pradesh Subordinate Services Selection Commission.

"We have not accepted rigging, disorder, anarchy and corruption in any selection process within the last six years," he said.

Be it the several state commissions or the Basic Education Council, recruitment process everywhere is now transparent, an official release quoting the CM said.

Congratulating all selected ANMs, he urged them to discharge their duties honestly.

"Instead of protesting, you trusted the government and after the process of selection, waited for the decision of the Supreme Court to come in your favour," he said.

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"People tried to obstruct the selection process, but we have attacked their unethical actions," he said referring to the recruitment at the Uttar Pradesh Subordinate Services Selection Commission.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi after assuming power in 2014 had said that the entire country is one family and we cannot discriminate against anyone.

"We have implemented it strictly from 2017 in Uttar Pradesh. We have given more than 6 lakh government jobs in 6 years and there is no room for any kind of discrimination," he said.

Adityanath also asserted that all those recruited "have not needed any recommendation."



He said there is a system of teleconsultation at more than 600 places at present in the state and that health ATMs have been set up across districts which allows one to book 50 to 60 types of tests.

Encouraging the newly appointed ANMs, the CM said "You have the chance to see people in your respective districts and villages and get respect by doing better work in this field."



He said so many women becoming part of the healthcare force promotes both 'Mission Shakti' and 'Mission Rozgar.
Japanese electronics maker Sony on Friday launched in India the HT-S2000 Dolby Atmos sound bar. Featuring a vertical surround engine and S-Force PRO Front Surround, the device is said to deliver a three-dimensional sound experience by positioning sound in vertical space. The S-Force PRO creates cinematic surround sound, with audio emerging from both sides, the company said.

As for the introductory offer, Sony is offering a discount of Rs 14,990 on purchasing the optional rear speaker with the sound bar and subwoofer. Customers will get an additional Rs 4,000 off from Sony if the sound bar is purchased along with the Bravia 108cm (43) and above televisions.

The HT-S2000 is priced at Rs 42,990. It will be available for purchase from June 9 at all Sony retail stores and ShopatSC portal, besides select electronic stores and e-commerce websites such as Amazon India and Flipkart.
Google announced that it will end support for "Drive for desktop" on Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 and all 32-bit versions of Windows, in August.

"To avoid service interruption, Windows users should upgrade to Windows 10 (64 bit) or higher before August 2023," Google said in a support page.

The company further said that users of a 32-bit version of Windows can still access Google Drive through a browser.

In April this year, the company had limited the number of files that users can create and save in Google Drive.

Now, users can create a maximum of five million files in Drive.

According to Google spokesperson Ross Richendrfer, this change aims to "maintain strong performance and reliability" and will help prevent "misuse" of the company's systems.

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Meanwhile, the company had introduced a "search chips" feature for Drive, which allows users to filter by criteria like file type, owner and last modified date anywhere in the web app.

--IANS

aj/prw/ksk/
President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak launched wide-ranging talks at the White House on Thursday by vowing that they would work in lockstep as the globe tries to adapt to a period of rapid economic, political and technological change.

The leaders' Oval Office talks were expected to cover the war in Ukraine, China, economic security, international cooperation on regulating the growing field of artificial intelligence, and more. Biden and Sunak have already had four face-to-face meetings since Sunak became prime minister in October, but the talks in Washington will offer the two leaders a chance for their most sustained interaction to date.

We will put our values front and center," Biden said.

Sunak reflected on the significant conversations that their respective predecessors have had over the years in the Oval Office and acknowledged that both he and Biden were facing their own daunting moment. The visit to Washington is Sunak's first since becoming Britain's prime minister in October.

Our economies are seeing perhaps the biggest transformation since the Industrial Revolution as new technologies provide incredible opportunities. but also give our adversaries more tools, Sunak said.

The 15-month-old Russian invasion of Ukraine was expected to be high on the agenda. The U.S. and U.K. are the two biggest donors to the Ukraine war effort and play a central role in a long-term effort announced last month to train, and eventually equip, Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets.

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Sunak also is looking to make the case to Biden for U.K. Defense Minister Ben Wallace to succeed outgoing NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who is set to end his term leading the 31-member alliance in September. Stoltenberg is slated to meet with Biden in Washington on Monday, and leaders from the alliance are set to gather in Lithuania on July 11-12 for their annual summit.

The U.S. and the U.K. have stood together to support Ukraine," Biden said at the start of their meeting.

Biden also reflected that the two countries have worked through some of the toughest moments in modern history side-by-side, recalling the meetings that Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt held in the White House.

You know Prime Minister Churchill and Roosevelt met here a little over 70 years ago and they asserted that the strength of the partnership between Great Britain and the United States was strength of the free world," Biden told Sunak. I still think there's truth to that assertion.

Sunak is keen to make the U.K. a key player in artificial intelligence, and announced that his government will gather politicians, scientists and tech executives for a summit on AI safety in the fall.

He said it was vital to ensure that paradigm-shifting new technologies are harnessed for the good of humanity.

No one country can do this alone," Sunak said on Wednesday. This is going to take a global effort.

Sunak's visit comes as U.S. and British intelligence officials are still trying to sort out blame for the breaching of a major dam in southern Ukraine, which sent floodwaters gushing through towns and over farmland. Neither Washington nor London has officially accused Russia of blowing up the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam.

Sunak said Wednesday that U.K. intelligence services are still assessing the evidence, but if it does prove to be intentional, it will represent a new low ... an appalling barbarism on Russia's part.

Russia throughout this war has used as a deliberate active strategy to target civilian infrastructure, he told broadcaster ITV in Washington.

The two sides are hoping to demonstrate that the U.S.-U.K. relationship remains as strong as ever despite recent political and economic upheaval in the U.K. Sunak is one of three British prime ministers Biden has dealt with since taking office in 2021, and the administrations have had differences over Brexit and its impact on Northern Ireland.

There also have been some awkward moments between the two leaders in the early going.

Biden, at a White House celebration in October to mark the Hindu holiday of Diwali, noted the elevation of Sunak, who is the U.K.'s first leader of color and the first Hindu to serve in the role, as a groundbreaking milestone but he badly mangled the pronunciation of Sunak's name.

At a March meeting in San Diego with Sunak and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to announce plans to sell Australia nuclear-powered attack submarines, Biden jokingly told Sunak maybe you can invite me to your home in California. The lighthearted aside resurrected old political baggage for Sunak, whose political aspirations briefly dimmed as he faced an ethics investigation last year after it emerged that he had possessed a U.S. green card two years after being appointed chancellor of the exchequer. Sunak, a former hedge fund manager with an MBA from Stanford University, and his wife own a home in California.

Nonetheless, there's a sense in the Biden administration that the U.S.-U.K. relationship is back on more stable footing after the sometimes choppy tenure of Boris Johnson and the 45-day premiership of Liz Truss.

I think there's a sense of relief to some degree, not just in the White House, but throughout Washington, that the Sunak government has been very pragmatic and maintained the U.K.'s robust commitment to Ukraine and to increasing defense spending, said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He added that with Sunak, there's also been somewhat of a return to pragmatism on economic issues and relations with the European Union post-Brexit.

Biden invited Sunak to stay at Blair House, the official presidential guest residence on Lafayette Square. Before the U.S. government purchased Blair House in 1942, foreign leaders visiting the president often stayed at the White House.

In a lighter moment, the president began telling the story of how in the pre-Blair House days Churchill wandered toward the president's family quarters in the wee hours to rouse the sleeping President Franklin D. Roosevelt for conversation. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt was said to have cut off Churchill before he could make it to the president.

"Don't worry," Sunak interjected. You won't see me bothering you and the first lady.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is planning to travel to China this month as the Biden administration pushes to improve badly deteriorated ties with the Chinese.

U.S. officials say Blinken expects to be in Beijing on June 18 for meetings with senior Chinese officials, including with Foreign Minister Qin Gang and possibly President Xi Jinping.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because neither the State Department nor the Chinese foreign ministry have yet confirmed the trip.

The visit, which was agreed between Xi and President Joe Biden last year at a meeting in Bali, had been initially planned for February but was postponed after the spy balloon incident in which the U.S. shot down a Chinese aircraft that Beijing insisted was a weather balloon that had strayed off course.

Since then, there have been contacts between the U.S. and China, but they have been rare as tensions have risen over China's conduct in the South China Sea, aggressive actions toward Taiwan and support for Russia's war against Ukraine.

Last week, China's defence minister rebuffed a request from U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin for a meeting on the sidelines of a security symposium in Singapore.

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However, China's commerce minister travelled to the U.S. last month and Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with China's top diplomat, Wang Yi, in Vienna in early May.

The White House said at the time that the meeting was part of ongoing efforts to maintain open lines of communication and responsibly manage competition.

The two sides agreed to maintain this important strategic channel of communication to advance these objectives.

More recently, the top U.S. diplomat for the Asia-Pacific region, Daniel Kritenbrink, travelled to China earlier this week along with a senior National Security Council official.
France's president travelled on Friday to the side of families traumatised by the savage stabbings of four very young children, all said to be in stable condition after emergency surgery, while investigators worked to unravel the motives of a Syrian man taken into custody.

President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte traveled together to a hospital treating three of the four children who suffered life-threatening knife wounds in Thursday's still unexplained attack in and around a play park in the Alpine city of Annecy.

Macron's prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, said all four children aged between 22 months and 3 years underwent surgery and are under constant medical surveillance.

Their situation is stable, she said.

Government spokesman Olivier Veran, a medical doctor by training, said two of the children remain in critical condition.

Most of the children were rushed after the attack to a hospital in the French Alpine city of Grenoble the first stop for Macron and his wife on Friday morning. They did not speak to reporters as they went inside.

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The fourth injured child was being treated in Geneva, in neighboring Switzerland.

Two of the four children are French and the other two were tourists one British, the other Dutch.

Two adults also suffered knife wounds life-threatening for one them, authorities said. One of the adults was injured both with a knife and by a shot fired by police as they were detaining the suspected attacker.

The suspect, a 31-year-old Syrian with refugee status in Sweden, remains in custody. Psychiatrists are evaluating him, Veran said.

The helplessness of the young victims and the savagery of the attack sickened France, and drew international condemnation.

French authorities said the suspect had recently been refused asylum in France because Sweden had already granted him permanent residency and refugee status a decade ago.

Lead prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said the man's motives were unknown but did not appear to be terrorism-related. He was armed with a folding knife, she said.
China on Friday said it is ready to work with South Africa to bolster the security for the BRICS summit in August in light of the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

BRICS is an international grouping comprising China, India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa.

The 15th BRICS summit is set to take place in Johannesburg in August this year. The possible attendance of Putin who is the subject of a war crimes arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court (ICC) has put South Africa's handling of the warrant and summit security under the spotlight.

The ICC issued a warrant on Putin in March, accusing him of the unlawful deportation of children and transfer of people from the territory of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.

As a signatory to the ICC, South Africa will be obliged to execute the warrant if Putin visits the country for the BRICS Summit.

On Thursday, the South African Police Minister Bheki Cele who is on a visit here, held talks with Chinese Minister for Public Security Wang Xiaohong.

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During talks, Wang told Cele that China is ready to work with South Africa to earnestly implement the consensus reached by the two heads of state, and strengthen pragmatic cooperation in BRICS Summit security among others, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

South Africa is among some 40 African nations with which China has signed public security and law enforcement agreements, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post quoted a report by Paul Nantulya, an Africa-China security expert at the National Defence University in Washington.

Wang also offered Chinese assistance for the security of Belt and Road projects, a crackdown on transnational crimes and law enforcement capacity building, promoting personnel exchanges and cooperation mechanisms at all levels, and pushing for more development of the China-South Africa comprehensive strategic partnership.

For his part, Cele said South Africa is willing to strengthen law enforcement and security cooperation with China so as to constantly advance bilateral relations, the Xinhua report said.

China's offer of bolstering security at the BRICS summit assumed significance as the ICC has issued an arrest warrant against Putin over human rights violations by the Russian security forces in the current Ukraine war.

South Africa, which is obliged to execute the arrest warrant as it is a signatory to the ICC has issued diplomatic immunity for attendees of the summit.

However, Russia has not yet confirmed Putin's attendance at the BRICS Summit. According to media reports China, a close ally of Russia, has offered to host the summit.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted in the media saying on May 30 that Russia will participate in the BRICS summit at an appropriate level.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Friday parried questions on whether Chinese President, Xi Jinping will attend the BRICS summit or Beijing host the summit.

I have no information to offer on these specific questions, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a media briefing here.
For the first time, China, together with Pakistan and Iran, has decided to find ways and means to counter the threat of terrorism facing the region, media reports said.

For China, which is behind the CPEC projects in the region, this trilateral cooperation would go a long way to ensure that security threats are addressed for these projects to be completed, The News reported.

China has also sensed that the continuing border incidents on the Pakistan-Iran border, where non-state actors carry out terrorist attacks inside both countries, should be contained, the report said.

"The delegations held detailed discussions on the regional security situation, particularly the threat of terrorism faced by the region. Based on the outcome of these consultations, the three sides have decided to institutionalise the trilateral consultations on counter-terrorism and security," the Pakistan Foreign Office said during its weekly media briefing.

"Further details will be worked out in due course," Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said.

Meanwhile, as Pakistan's Petroleum Minister Musadik Malik visited the United States to discuss the future of the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline, the Foreign Office spokesperson struck a cautious note.

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"As we have said in the past, for Pakistan, it is an important project and we remain committed to it. There are certain complications with regard to its implementation.

"In that context, we remain engaged with both Iran and the United States. Exact details of the meetings that the Minister for Petroleum held in the United States may be ascertained from the concerned ministry," she said.

Meanwhile, Pakistan said that it has seen the statement from Iranian Naval chief Rear Admiral Shahram Irani, who had proposed an Ocean Naval Alliance including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, India and Pakistan.

"We will examine the proposal when it comes to Pakistan. At this stage, we are not in a position to comment on the statement which has been made," said the spokesperson.

--IANS

san/arm
Embers from a smoldering scrap wood fire set days earlier outside a home used by a Christian religious communal group along with a sparking power line caused a 2021 Colorado wildfire fanned by high winds that destroyed nearly 1,100 homes and left two people dead, authorities said on Thursday.

Authorities spent 18 months investigating and determined criminal charges were not warranted for either The Twelve Tribes that occupied the home or the utility in charge of the power line, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said at a news conference.

If we were to tell you today we are filing charges, it would be wrong and unethical," Dougherty said.

The December 30, 2021, blaze in heavily populated suburbs between Denver and Boulder caused USD 2 billion in damage, making it the most destructive in Colorado history.

Two people were also found dead after what was known as the Marshall Fire.

The inferno erupted following months of drought amid a winter nearly devoid of snow and fed on bone-dry grassland surrounding fast-growing development in the area near the Rocky Mountain foothills. It spread rapidly in winds that gusted up to 100 mph (160 kph) in places.

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Experts say similar events will become more common as climate change warms the planet and suburbs grow in fire-prone areas.

The scrap wood fire buried by residents Dec. 24 in a manner approved by firefighters who stopped by that day to investigate was one cause when the powerful winds uncovered the buried embers six days later, Sheriff Curtis Johnson said at the news conference.

Once they realized there was a fire and it was spreading, they attempted to put it out, but the winds were quickly spreading the flames faster than they could put it out, said Johnson, who lost his home in the blaze and teared up during the news conference.

A loose Xcel Energy power line caused a separate fire less than half a mile (1 kilometer) away around the same time, Johnson said.

The two fires combined to cause the massively destructive blaze.

Xcel Energy strongly objected to the findings of the investigation, contending in a statement that it didn't have a chance to review what the company called flawed" analyses.

We strongly disagree with any suggestion that Xcel Energy's power lines caused the second ignition, said a statement from spokesman Tyler Bryant.

We operate and maintain our electric system consistent with leading energy service practices.

A worker at a Boulder deli run by The Twelve Tribes declined to comment or give their name Thursday when The Associated Press visited the restaurant. Members of the group a Christian religious community thought to have 2,000 to 3,000 members worldwide have repeatedly declined to discuss the fire or what happened since the 2021 blaze.

The fire that destroyed swaths of houses in the cities of Superior and Louisville, neighboring towns about 20 miles (32 kilometers) northwest of Denver, is blamed for the death of a 69-year-old man who lived near where investigators believed the fire started.

The remains of a 91-year-old woman, who was last seen trying to rescue her dogs from her home in Superior, were also found.

Thousands of residents were at home the day before New Year's Eve and used the suburban area's extensive road network to escape amid smoke, flames and blowing embers, which spread the fire in the wind. Shifting winds caused the skies to turn from clear to smoky and then back again in an area filled with middle- and upper-middle class subdivisions surrounded by shopping centers, parks and schools.

As smoke filled the parking lot of a Costco warehouse store and debris whirled around, a sheriff's deputy ordered people inside to leave their carts, evacuate the sprawling building and head toward Denver, away from the fire. Within hours, it destroyed 1,084 homes and seven commercial buildings, and damaged nearly 200 structures.

Old coal mines that smoldered underground in the area could not be ruled out as playing a role in the fire, but were not deemed to be part of the cause, investigators said.

The area includes an abandoned coal field where two underground fires, fuelled by coal deposits, have slowly burned over the years.

The fire, which spanned 9.4 square miles (24 square kilometers), ranks as the most destructive in state history in terms of homes and other structures destroyed and damaged.

The second-most destructive fire erupted in 2013 outside Colorado Springs, destroying 489 homes and killing two.

A lawsuit filed against Colorado's largest utility, Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy, alleged that sparks from a power line started the blaze. It says witnesses saw a fire igniting near a power line in the area identified by investigators, with one witness videoing sparks flying from a malfunctioning power line and igniting a fire on the ground.

One man whose home burned expressed frustration the fire's cause wasn't pinned down more definitively.

It doesn't really provide any answers that help us. I guess I don't know, it kind of leaves it open in my mind, Rex Hickman said.

Hickman and his wife, Barba, said they might be interested in joining litigation against Xcel Energy to try to recover costs, pointing to a California utility's 2019 settlement for wildfire damages.

For now, the Hickmans have been settling into their new home in Charlottesville, Virginia, where they built a new home using insurance money. They plan to sell their vacant lot in Colorado.

We were looking to get away from the fires in the West, and I have asthma pretty badly. The constant fires every summer is one of the reasons for us moving on, Barba Hickman said.

The investigation took a long time for what was announced, but the decision not to pursue criminal charges seems appropriate, said Barney Thinnes, another homeowner who has had to rebuild.

I'm with the sheriff. I just want to move forward with the whole thing, Thinnes said.

Jesse Bedayn is a corps members for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
Cuba has agreed to allow China to construct a surveillance facility on the island that could allow the Chinese to eavesdrop on electronic communications across the southeastern US, two sources familiar with the intelligence told CNN.

The US learned about the plan in the last several weeks, the first source said, and it is unclear whether China has already begun building the surveillance facility, CNN reported.

The second source familiar with the intelligence says it suggests that a deal has been struck in principle but there hasn't been any movement on building the facility.

But Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio has denied the reports.

It would not be the first time China has attempted to spy on US electronic communications, known as signals intelligence. A suspected Chinese spy balloon that transited the US in February was capable of gathering signals intelligence and is believed to have transmitted back to Beijing in near-real time, CNN reported citing sources.

In that case, the US took steps to protect sensitive sites and censor intelligence signals before shooting down the balloon. But it is unclear what the US can do to stop the construction of a Chinese spying facility in Cuba.

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But National Security Council spokesman John Kirby denies the report saying "This report is not accurate".

"We have had real concerns about China's relationship with Cuba, and we have been concerned since day one of the Administration about China's activities in our hemisphere and around the world. We are closely monitoring it and taking steps to counter it. We remain confident that we are able to meet all our security commitments at home and in the region," Kirby added.

CNN reported that Kirby initially told the Wall Street Journal on Thursday morning that he "cannot speak to this specific report," but that US officials are "well aware of--and have spoken many times to the People's Republic of China's efforts to invest in infrastructure around the world that may have military purposes, including in this hemisphere."

At a press conference in Havana on Thursday, Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio called them "totally untrue" and "slanders."

"Slanders like these have been fabricated frequently by US officials," he said, alleging that the reported spy base was being used to legitimize US sanctions on Cuba.

"Fallacies promoted with the malicious intention to justify the unprecedented reinforcement of the economic blockade, destabilization and the aggression against Cuba and deceive public opinion in the United States and around the world," de Cossio added.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, a Democrat, and Vice Chairman Marco Rubio, a Republican, released a statement expressing concern about the reports.

The first source familiar with the intelligence noted that while an eavesdropping base on Cuba would be concerning, China has already established footholds inside the US, namely, secret police stations that the Biden administration has begun to crack down on, CNN reported citing sources.

The US also conducts spying missions near China, using reconnaissance aircraft that routinely engage in electronic eavesdropping. One of those US planes was recently intercepted by a Chinese fighter jet, in what the US described as a dangerous and unprofessional maneuver, CNN reported.

But the revelation about the potential Chinese outpost in Cuba comes as US-China relations have reached a low point, following the spy balloon incident and several aggressive maneuvers by Chinese aircraft and ships against US assets in the South China Sea.

The US has been trying to mend the relationship and dispatched CIA Director Bill Burns to Beijing last month for talks with Chinese officials. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is also expected to visit China in the coming weeks.

But last week, China's defence chief refused a meeting request by US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and warned the US to stop operating near Chinese waters and airspace.

"The best way to prevent this from happening is that military vessels and aircraft not come close to our waters and airspace," Chinese defence minister Li Shangfu said in Singapore last week, referring to recent close calls between Chinese and US planes and ships. "Watch out for your own territorial waters and airspace, then there will not be any problems."

The Biden administration has done little to try to improve relations with Cuba and has only resumed limited bilateral conversations on matters like migration. Following rapprochement efforts under the Obama administration, relations plummeted due to the so-called "Havana Syndrome" illness that impacted US diplomats posted in the Cuban capital and the Trump administration's decision - during the final days of that administration - to re-list Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.
The death toll from clashes between displaced people inside a U.N. site in South Sudan has risen to more than 20, with more than 50 others wounded, the medical charity MSF said Friday.

The statement by the organisation, which is also known as Doctors Without Borders, said that two of its staff were among those hurt.

Some of the injured were being airlifted to the capital, Juba.

While the situation was relatively calm this morning, many women and children who fled the camp are yet to return in fear of escalation, said Luz Linares, MSF's head of mission in the country.

Thursday's clashes in the Malakal camp occurred between members of the Shilluk and Nuer ethnic groups, a local representative of the displaced people told The Associated Press.

The U.N. office in South Sudan said the fighting began with a stabbing, and that its mission had reinforced the military and police presence in the area in close collaboration with South Sudan's military and authorities.

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Deadly violence between ethnic groups and communities still troubles South Sudan years after a 2018 peace deal to end a five-year civil war. During the conflict, thousands of people took shelter inside U.N. protection sites.

More than 41,000 people are staying in the Malakal site, which is also a designated camp for people fleeing the violence in neighbouring Sudan, MSF said.


The indictment of a former US president on federal charges is unprecedented in American history and emerges at a time when Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination next year. Former US President Donald Trump faces a new legal challenge  this time from the government he used to lead  when he appears next week in federal court in Miami on charges of illegally retaining classified documents, obstruction and other crimes.



Trumps lawyer Jim Trusty told CNN the charges include conspiracy, false statements, obstruction of justice, and illegally retaining classified documents under the Espionage Act. He said he expects to see the charging document by Tuesday, when Trump is due in court. Trump faces seven criminal counts related to his treatment of sensitive government materials he took with him when he left the White House in January 2021, according to a source. He is due to appear in court on Tuesday, a day before his 77th birthday.



ABC News, citing sources, reported that US District Judge Aileen Cannon has been initially assigned to oversee the case.It is unclear whether she will preside over the trial. Cannon, appointed by Trump in 2019, made decisions that favoured him in legal skirmishes during the documents investigation last year. Her rulings were overturned on appeal. Trump is the first president to face criminal charges. It is the second criminal case for Trump, who is due to go on trial in New York next March in a state case stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star.

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Trump has previously said he declassified those documents while president, but his attorneys have declined to make that argument in court filings.

Investigators seized roughly 13,000 documents from Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, nearly a year ago. One hundred were marked as classified, even though one of Trumps lawyers had previously said all records with classified markings had been returned to the government.







Within minutes of his announcement, Trump began fundraising off it for his presidential campaign. He repeated that the investigation is a witch hunt. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN! Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform after he announced that he had been indicted.

What now for the embattled former prez?

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Trump is scheduled to make his first appearance in Florida federal court on Tuesday



Soon after Trump appears in court, prosecutors will begin handing over evidence to Trumps lawyers. That could include years of correspondence between Trumps lawyers, the US National Archives and Records Administration and federal prosecutors The indictment is under seal and it is unclear if it will be made public before then



They are also likely to argue that the case should be tossed for what they allege was misconduct by prosecutors, including alleged violations of a legal doctrine that permits people to keep communications with their lawyers private Trump's lawyers are expected to file a motion to dismiss the case for a variety of reasons, including his claim that he declassified the documents before taking them

IMPACT ON TRUMP'S CAMPAIGN?

The charges wouldnt automatically prevent Trump from campaigning or taking office if he is convicted



WHEN WILL THE CASE GO TO TRIAL? Trumps numbers rose after he was indicted in a separate case in New York in April
A drone crashed into a high-rise residential building in southwestern Russia near the border with Ukraine, a regional governor said Friday, exposing the latest vulnerabilities in the country's air defence systems as President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine increasingly affects Russian soil.

The latest drone attack to target Russian cities in recent weeks wounded three people and came amid a front-line push by Ukrainian forces in what appears to be the early stages of a long-awaited counteroffensive in pockets of south and east Ukraine that Russia invaded more than 15 months ago.

The Ukrainian presidency's website posted a video statement overnight from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that alluded to the latest efforts of his country's forces to drive out the Russian invaders, along various parts of the more than 1,000-kilometer front line.

Speaking inside what appeared to be a train car after visiting flood-hit southern Ukraine on Thursday, Zelenskyy said it was not time yet to talk about the details of the fighting.

Ukrainian officials have kept generally quiet about their latest military moves, refusing to join in on rising commentary from Western military experts and others that the counteroffensive critical for Ukraine's Western-funded military effort was underway.

Analysts and Russian reports suggest Ukrainian forces have been active around the city of Bakhmut, which was largely devastated in a bloody, monthslong standoff, as well as carrying out probing operations around Russian-occupied areas of the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.

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Ukrainian authorities have generally also denied any role in attacks inside Russia.

In a Telegram post Friday, regional governor Alexander Gusev said the three residents were hurt by shards of glass from broken windows in the city of Voronezh and received help on the spot.

Russian state media published photos showing a high-rise apartment building with some windows blown out and damage to the facade.

Gusev said the drone was targeting a nearby airbase, but veered off course after its signal was electronically jammed.

The city lies some 250 kilometers north of Ukraine's eastern Luhansk region, most of which is occupied by Russia.

Separately, Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov of the neighbouring Belgorod region, which also borders Ukraine, said on Telegram that air defences had been working overnight and an apartment building and private homes had been damaged.

He said two unspecified targets were shot down, but he did not specify the cause of the damage.

Such drone strikes they have previously hit places like residential areas in southern Krasnodar and there was even one at the Kremlin along with cross-border raids in southwestern Russia have exposed glaring breaches in Russian air defences and porous border security, and brought the war home to Russians.

Separately, Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin of Ukraine's southern Kherson region said Friday that water levels had decreased by about 20 centimeters overnight on the western bank of the Dnieper River, which was inundated starting Tuesday after a breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam upstream.

The lower part of the river runs along the front line between Russian and Ukrainian forces.

Officials on both sides gave figures that indicated about 20 people have died in connection with the flooding, which has added misery to the lives of Ukrainians beleaguered by the war.

Viktor Vitovetskyi, a representative of Ukraine's Emergency Service, said 46 municipalities in the region have been flooded 14 of them along the Russian-occupied eastern bank.

Even as efforts to rescue civilians and supply them with fresh water, health care and other services, Russian shelling over the last day killed two civilians and injured 17 in the region, Prokudin said.

Across the country, a total of at least 4 civilians were killed and 41 people were injured over the past day, according to Zelenskyy's office.

In other developments in Ukraine's war:



--- Air raid sirens and alert systems went off across Ukraine overnight warning of more Russian long-range strikes by drones and missiles. Falling debris from a downed Russian missile killed one civilian and injured three others in the western city of Zviahel, said Gov. Vitalii Bunechko of the surrounding Zhytomyr region.

--- Gladkov, the governor of Russia's Belgorod region, said Ukrainian shelling overnight wounded three civilians in the border town of Shebekino, two of whom have been hospitalised.

--- The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank that has been tracking the conflict, said a variety of indicators suggested that the long-anticipated counteroffensive had begun, and that the new phase of the war may also see the highest Ukrainian losses.


Hotter, drier conditions brought about by greenhouse gas pollution make wildfires like those burning in Quebec more common in forests throughout the planets temperate zones. By Eric Roston



The fires that are burning in Quebec are the biggest fires in the world right now, said Thomas Smith, an associate professor in environmental geography at the London School of Economics. Theres one that I analyzed satellite imagery of. Its about 100,000 hectares, 1,000 kilometers squared. There are very few fires that get to that size. An unseasonably hot spring this year primed trees, plants and soil for the extraordinary event thats turned skies orange above New York City. Its scale calls to mind 2020s Siberian fires: Human-caused climate change made the heat wave behind that event at least 600 times more likely.



Wildfires are normal but these seem not to be. Is there a link to climate change? Smith is an environmental and fire scientist who specializes in wildfire behavior and climate emissions. He answered questions for Bloomberg Green about wildfires, their prevention and climate change.

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Whats concerning is this particular series of fires [in Canada] has happened very early in the year. The cumulative burn area is almost what youd expect by the end of the fire season. Most of the fires usually happen in late July or August, early September. The reason why were seeing such large burn area at this time of the year is because of this heat wave  double digits in Celsius above the mean temperature for this time of the year. Youd expect to see a fire in a particular stand of forest every 100 to 130 years or so. What were seeing in other parts of the world with the boreal forests ecosystem, particularly in Siberia, is the frequency is increasing. Its not just the Siberian fires. The [2019 to 2020] New South Wales fires had a World Weather Attribution study and that basically concluded that it would have been impossible without climate change; that that fire just simply could not have happened.



What are the long-term effects of an event like this? If its warmer than usual, youre going to have a faster fire, youre going to have a more intense fire. The link between climate and fire behavior is important.



Read More: What Science Tells Us About the Dangers of Wildfire Smoke Even if forests were to grow back, that carbons going to be in the atmosphere now for 30, 40, 50 years before its sequestered. And its these next few decades that are really important. You need to stop burning anything that releases CO2.



Can you explain the relationship between weather  temperature, relative humidity, wind speed  and how a fire behaves? About 30% to 50% of the soil is probably peat in this area. If its dry  this early it might not be dry yet, but it has been extremely hot  but if it is dry, then you will see the peat burning as well. That is like burning fossil fuels because the [carbon-rich] peat has taken hundreds of years to accumulate.



Ive been looking at conspiracy theories about these Canadian fires in Quebec. People asking, why do they all flare up at the same time? The reason for that is the weather, the relative humidity. Overnight [when the temperature drops], the relative humidity goes higher. That calms the fire down, because of the moisture in the air. When temperature goes up, generally the relative humidity goes down. The reason for that is that warmer air can hold more moisture.



It really, really annoyed me seeing these conspiracy theories. I was just like, Well, it's just because the weather has changed and the sun has risen. But then as the temperature rises with the sunrise, the relative humidity goes down, and the fire flares up again because of that relationship between these weather variables and fire behavior. You start seeing much larger flames. With that, you see a lot more combustion of fuels, which is why you see the smoke plumes suddenly appearing in the morning and you dont really see them at night.



Land management and fuel management play a really important role here. I hate to say it, but even Trump was slightly right when he said that the California forest needed better management. How big a problem is forest management on top of the climate influence?
A British judge has rejected the latest attempt by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to fight extradition to the United States to face spying charges.

High Court justice Jonathan Swift said a new appeal would simply re-run arguments that Assange's lawyers had already made and lost.

Assange has battled in British courts for years to avoid being sent to the US, where he faces 17 charges of espionage and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks' publication of classified diplomatic and military documents more than a decade ago.

In 2021, a British district judge ruled that Assange should not be extradited because he was likely to kill himself if held under harsh US prison conditions. US authorities later provided assurances that the Australia-born Assange wouldn't face the severe treatment that his lawyers said would put his physical and mental health at risk.

Those assurances led Britain's High Court and Supreme Court to overturn the lower court's ruling, and the British government authorized extradition in June 2022.

Assange is seeking to halt extradition by obtaining a new court hearing on parts of his case that were dismissed by the first judge.

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But in a ruling made public on Friday, Swift said all eight parts of Assange's potential appeal were not arguable and should not be heard.

The proposed appeal comes to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made to and rejected by the district judge, he said.

Assange's wife, Stella Assange, said the WikiLeaks founder would make a new appeal attempt at a High Court hearing on Tuesday. He has almost exhausted his avenues of appeal in the UK but could still try to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

We remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States, where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the US government, Stella Assange said on Twitter.

Assange's supporters and lawyers maintain he was acting as a journalist and is entitled to First Amendment protections of freedom of speech. They argue that the case is politically motivated, that he would face inhumane treatment and be unable to get a fair trial in the US.

Assange, 51, remains in London's high-security Belmarsh Prison, where he has been since he was arrested in 2019 for skipping bail during a separate legal battle. Before that, he spent seven years inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.

Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed, but British judges have kept Assange in prison pending the outcome of the US extradition case.
Pakistan has said it will examine the proposal floated by Iran with regard to forming an Indian Ocean naval alliance aimed at ensuring collective maritime security, media reports said.

Iran's Naval chief Rear Admiral Shahram Irani had proposed the alliance comprising Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, India and Pakistan, The Express Tribune reported.

"We have seen that statement and we will examine any proposal when it comes to Pakistan. At this stage, we are not in a position to comment on a statement which has been made," Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said.

The proposal, if executed, will be one of the most important regional security initiatives after the China-mediated rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March this year. According to reports, China may have an important role to play in the proposed maritime alliance, The Express Tribune reported.

China has emerged a key player in Middle East politics after brokering a landmark deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Meanwhile, the spokesperson said Pakistan will follow its laws and international obligations while taking up the cases of individuals responsible for the May 9 violence.

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Responding to a question about the US State Department's request about the provision of consular access to a suspect of May 9 vandalism, Khadija Shah, and requests considering other dual nationals who have been detained, the spokesperson said that the requests have been received and forwarded to the Ministry of Interior.

--IANS

san/arm
In an effort to speed up work on Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India (Tapi) gas pipeline project and finish the feasibility study as soon as possible, Pakistan and Turkmenistan signed a Joint Implementation Plan (JIP) on Thursday, according to The Express Tribune.

According to a statement, the JIP was signed by State Minister and Head of TurkmenGaz Maksat Babayev and Minister of State for Petroleum Dr. Musadik Malik.

Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, key cabinet members, and representatives from the Petroleum Division and Inter State Gas Systems Pvt Ltd all attended the signing event.

A high-ranking Turkmenistan team led by Babayev, Deputy Minister of Energy Annageldi Saparov, and CEO and Chairman of BOD, TPCL, Muhammetmyrat Amanov, inked the agreement at the conclusion of a two-day visit to Pakistan, according to The Express Tribune.

It said that the JIP would envisage the constitution of a Senior Coordination Committee (SCC) to expedite and oversee the project activities.

The prime minister nominated Special Assistant to PM, Jehanzeb Khan, to work as a focal person from the Pakistan side as the head of the SCC, The Express Tribune reported.

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In the meeting with the Turkmenistan delegation, PM Shehbaz said that being a critical component of his government's vision, the Tapi gas pipeline project would ensure energy security, economic growth and prosperity in Pakistan as well as the entire region.

"Tapi gas project is a manifestation of the strategic cooperation between Pakistan and Turkmenistan in the energy sector," a statement issued by the PM Office quoted Shehbaz as saying, The Express Tribune reported.

The prime minister said Pakistan and Turkmenistan enjoyed brotherly relations underpinned by common history, culture and religion. He said the leadership on both sides had a keen desire to further promote economic and commercial relations.

He underscored that Pakistan could be a gateway for quick access to Turkmenistan's rich energy reserves.

The prime minister renewed the commitment to early implementation of the project and hoped that the TAPI gas pipeline would be completed at the earliest by optimising all available resources by all relevant parties.

The government of Pakistan also invited Turkmenistan to explore gas connectivity from the Chaman border to Gwadar and building LNG terminals at Gwadar, which would expand supplies to Europe and global LNG markets, The Express Tribune reported.

The Tapi gas pipeline project aims to bring natural gas from the Galkynysh gas field in Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan.

The pipeline will transport up to 33 billion cubic metres (bcm) (average 3.2 BCFD) of natural gas per year over a 30-year period. The supply source is the Galkynysh gas field in the eastern region of Turkmenistan whereas Pakistan's off-take will be 1.3 BCFD with a pipeline diameter of 56 inches.

The proposed route is the supply source, Herat, Kandahar, Chaman, Zhob, DG Khan, Multan, and Fazilika with a pipeline length of 1,849 kilometres. The engagements/interactions of the Turkmen delegation were characterised by mutual goodwill in a spirit of understanding, cooperation, and amity, The Express Tribune reported.

The Turkmen delegation offered its profound gratitude to its Pakistani "brothers" for their "traditional hospitality" and remained optimistic that bilateral ties between the two friendly countries would continue to expand in all spheres.

The Tapi project will be transformative towards the energy security of Pakistan. Low-cost gas supplies will make Pakistan's industrial sector competitive worldwide and lead to far-reaching employment opportunities for the youth, The Express Tribune reported.

Pakistan continues to attach great importance to the Tapi gas pipeline project to meet emerging energy challenges for the country and as a manifestation of meaningful commercial, energy cooperation between Pakistan and Central Asia.


MBS said it would result in "major economic consequences for Washington" and that "he will not deal with the US administration anymore", the report said. After US President Joe Biden vowed to impose "consequences" on Saudi Arabia for slashing oil production last year, Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), the West Asian nation's crown prince, threatened to alter the relationship between the two nations, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Friday, citing a classified document.



The WSJ report said that even though Biden scarcely communicates with MBS, the US diplomats have continued their effort to rebuild ties with the West Asian nation, especially on topics like the peace deal in Yemen, ceasefire in Sudan, counterterrorism as well as supply of oil. In the run-up to the presidential elections, Biden pledged that he would make Saudi Arabia a "pariah". However, eight months into his presidency, the two countries continue to engage diplomatically. Earlier this week, MBS met US secretary of state Antony Blinken outside Jeddah.



After a 1 hour and 40 minutes-long meeting with MBS, Blinken said, "Together, we can drive real progress for all our people, not only to address the challenges or crises of the moment but to chart an affirmative vision for our shared future." The report also quoted some officials as saying that the relationship between the two countries is "too important" for the Western nation to let languish. This is due to "Riyadh's economic and political clout and Beijing's courtship of traditional US partners" in the region.

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It is unclear whether the threat was conveyed by MBS directly to US officials or intercepted, but it shows the problematic nature of this bilateral relationship. The two had a "candid, open" conversation on topics like Yemen conflict, human rights and fighting in Sudan.
The United Nations envoy to Sudan, a key mediator in the country's brutal conflict, is no longer welcome in the African country, Sudanese authorities say.

A terse statement issued by Sudan's Foreign Ministry late Thursday comes just weeks after the head of the country's military, Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, demanded in a letter to envoy Volker Perthes that he should be removed from his post.

UN Secretary-General Antnio Guterres has been notified that Perthes has been formally declared persona non grata, the Foreign Ministry said.

Since April 15, Sudan's military, headed by Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, have been locked in a violent power struggle that has killed more than 860 civilians, according to Sudan's Doctors' Syndicate which tracks civilian casualties.

The actual death tally is likely to be much higher.

Perthes has been a key mediator in Sudan since being appointed as special envoy in 2021, first during the country's failed attempts to transition to democracy and then as relations between the military and the RSF deteriorated.

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Fighting exploded last month.

Neither the UN nor Volker immediately commented.

In recent months, the German diplomat has received death threats and numerous calls to resign. In his letter last month, Burhan accused Perthes of being partisan, and negatively contributing to pre-war talks between the generals and pro-democracy groups in the weeks building up to the conflict.

Responding to these allegations, Volker told The Associated Press that those who threatened him were marginal extremists and that there is a wide appreciation of UN efforts in Sudan, which has relocated its headquarters to the coastal city of Port Sudan.

The conflict between the two generals has reduced Khartoum to an urban battlefield, with many districts of the city without running water or electricity.

There have been reports of widespread looting and sexual violence, including the rape of women and girls in Khartoum and the western Darfur region, which have seen some of the worst fighting in the conflict.

Almost all reported cases of sexual attacks were blamed on the RSF, which didn't respond to repeated requests for comment.

On Wednesday, 297 children were rescued from an orphanage in Sudan's capital after being trapped there while fighting raged outside, UNICEF said.

The evacuation came after 71 children died from hunger and illness in the facility since mid-April.
The breaching of a major dam in southern Ukraine and the susequent collapse of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant earlier this week, will lead to devastating economic and ecological consequences, an expert has said.

"Up to 1 million people may face drinking water problems," Oleksii Kushch, an economist at "United Ukraine" think-tank, told Xinhua in an interview.

The breaching of the dam and the subsequent destruction of a hydro-electric power plant in the Russian-controlled Nova Kakhovka region in the early hours of Tuesday, have led to mass evacuations as water levels downstream rapidly increased.

Officials have said that 30 towns and villages along the river have been flooded and nearly 2,000 homes have been submerged in the city of Kherson -- the region's capital controlled by Ukraine.

Of the 30 flooded towns and villages, 20 are controlled by Ukraine and 10 are occupied by Russia.

Kiev and Moscow have traded accusations over the dam's destruction, without providing concrete proof that the other is culpable.

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It is not yet clear whether the dam was deliberately attacked or whether the breach was the result of structural failure.

Apart from the humanitarian consequences, the catastrophe will take a heavy toll on the economic development of Ukraine's central Dnipropetrovsk and southern Mykolayiv, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions, Kushch said.

"The water use intensity in the regional gross domestic product will change significantly -- industrial enterprises will lack water. These are mainly enterprises in the processing industry and metallurgy," he said, citing the industrial cities of Kryvyi Rih and Nikopol among those to be severely hit by the water crisis.

In addition, the disaster will stop the water supplies to about 30 irrigation systems, which irrigated about 1 million hectares of agricultural fields, the expert said, adding as a result, Ukraine may lose 10-15 per cent of its agricultural potential due to indirect or direct influence of the breaching incident.

Consequently, Ukraine's southern regions, where vegetable growing and horticulture were concentrated, may soon turn into semi-deserted areas.

"The land use in this region will be changed. Instead of vegetables and moisture-loving plants, mostly unpretentious plants, primarily sunflowers, will be grown in the region," Kushch said.

As the Kakhovka plant destruction would cause the loss of approximately 60 percent of water resources in the regional water balance of Mykolayiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, soil salinazation may become another environmental disaster, posing risks to people's health, he warned.

"In the absence of water and irrigation, groundwaters, which consist primarily of salt marshes in this region, will rise... Some salt marshes in the region contain heavy metals and harmful substances that could be spread by the wind. They enter the human body through the respiratory system. This can lead to an increase in serious diseases and abnormalities in the development of children," Kushch said.

The expert estimated that the restoration of the Kakhovka plant and its structures would take about five years and require about $2 billion.

The attack on the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant is possibly the most significant damage to civilian infrastructure since the Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths.

"The sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realized in the coming days. But it is already clear that it will have grave and far-reaching consequences for thousands of people in southern Ukraine," he told an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.

--IANS

ksk/
The International Court of Justice has accepted requests from 32 countries to back Ukraine in a genocide case against Russia, the United Nations' highest court said Friday.

It's the largest number of countries to join another nation's complaint at the world court based in The Hague, Netherlands.

Ukraine's government filed the legally creative case days after Russia invaded its neighbor in February 2022. The Kremlin snubbed hearings held the next month, while protesters holding Ukrainian flags chanted antiwar slogans outside the court building's gates.

Latvia was the first country to intervene in the complaint, which alleges Russia violated the 1948 Genocide Convention by falsely accusing Ukraine of committing genocide in its eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and using that as a pretext for the invasion.

A record 33 countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia and every European Union member nation except Hungary requested to participate on Ukraine's side in the case. However, the U.N. court's judges rejected the U.S. request on a technicality.

"The court concludes that the declarations of intervention filed in this case, except for the declaration submitted by the United States, are admissible, they said.

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Any country that has signed the post-World War II treaty criminalizing genocide is allowed to file for intervention in cases brought under the accord. The United States did not accept part of the Genocide Convention when it signed the treaty, so the judges determined the country wasn't entitled to participate.

Countries and organizations not directly involved in legal proceedings often ask courts if they can submit arguments in a case, particularly if the outcome might impact them in some way.

Experts see the petitions in the pending case as attempts to demonstrate support for Ukraine and to condemn Russia's war rather than countries seeking opportunities to advocate particular legal positions or arguments.

The countries are expressing solidarity with Ukraine, Ori Pomson, a legal scholar at the University of Cambridge whose research focuses on the International Court of Justice, told the Associated Press.

In March 2022, the court ordered Russia to stop hostilities in Ukraine, but Moscow has failed to comply.

The world court is hearing a separate case brought earlier by Ukraine linked to Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russian funding of separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine.

A similar group of countries also asked the European Court of Human Rights to intervene in a group of cases Ukraine brought against Russia over the war. In March, the Strasbourg-based court granted 31 groups the right to back Ukraine in those proceedings.
The United Nations World Food Programme said on Friday that it is temporarily suspending food aid to Ethiopia because its supplies are being diverted, an announcement that came a day after the United States Agency for International Development said it was doing the same.

Food diversion is absolutely unacceptable, and we welcome the government of Ethiopia's commitment to investigate and hold accountable those responsible, WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain said.

The programme's head office in Rome declined further comment when contacted by The Associated Press.

Some 20 million Ethiopians rely on food aid because of drought and conflict, out of the country's population of roughly 120 million. Much of the aid comes from USAID and the World Food Programme.

The suspensions brought worries that malnutrition could rise in Africa's second most populous country,



USAID, WFP and the Ethiopian government have not said who is responsible for the food diversion, which the US has described as widespread and coordinated".

However, an internal memo prepared by a group of foreign donor representatives and seen by the AP this week pointed at government involvement.

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The scheme appears to be orchestrated by federal and regional government of Ethiopia entities, with military units across the country benefiting from humanitarian assistance, said the document from the Humanitarian and Resilience Donor Group, which includes bilateral and multilateral partners.

In a joint statement with USAID on Thursday, the Ethiopian foreign ministry spoke of deeply concerning revelations and said it was investigating with the US so that the perpetrators of such diversion are held to account.

The nationwide food aid suspensions follow USAID and WFP saying last month they had suspended food deliveries to Ethiopia's northern Tigray region while they investigated reports of food aid theft there. The region is recovering from a two-year conflict.

That suspension by the World Food Programme and allegations of aid diversion in Tigray were first reported by the AP. Some 5.4 million of the region's 6 million people rely on humanitarian help.

Earlier this year, USAID administrator Samantha Power told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that aid theft in Tigray appeared to involve collusion between parties on both sides of the conflict, which ended in November.

In its statement on Friday, WFP said it was continuing other programmes in Ethiopia for children, mothers and drought-hit pastoralists.

WFP is working closely with its UN and humanitarian partners and local stakeholders to reform the way assistance is delivered across Ethiopia and in all high-risk operational contexts where we work, it said.
The Pentagon announced Friday that it will provide an additional $2.1 billion in long-term weapons aid for Ukraine.

The new assistance package will include funding for more Patriot missile battery munitions, Hawk air defence systems and missiles, and small Puma drones that can be launched by hand.

The latest infusion of funding, one of the larger packages the U.S. has provided, comes as there are signs that Ukraine is beginning or about to begin the much anticipated counteroffensive to try to take back territory that has been seized by Russia.

Unlike the U.S. equipment, weapons and ammunition that are more frequently sent from Pentagon stocks and delivered quickly to Ukraine, this money would be provided under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and is meant to be spent over the coming months or even years to ensure Ukraine's future security needs.

In a statement, the Pentagon said the package shows America's continued commitment to both Ukraine's critical near-term capabilities as well as the enduring capacity of Ukraine's Armed Forces to defend its territory and deter Russian aggression over the long term.

The aid also will include munitions for laser-guided rockets, an undisclosed amount of artillery rounds, and funding for training and maintenance support.

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A number of administration officials have acknowledged that the fighting in Ukraine has intensified in recent days, but much of the focus turned early this week to the collapse of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River.

The White House and the Pentagon insisted Thursday they are still working to determine who caused the damage, which set off a scramble to evacuate residents in dozens of flooded areas and get aid to those still there.

Although the U.S. has been willing to provide billions of dollars in military weapons and other aid, the Biden administration has been clear that there will be no U.S. combat forces inside Ukraine.

In that vein, Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said Thursday the military had no plans to directly provide transportation or other support to the areas damaged by the dam collapse.

The Biden administration has provided more than $37.6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and several top members of the Biden administration will join powerful Congressional leadership and top corporate players from India and the US at this year's 'India Ideas Summit' next week.

The theme for this year's two-day summit beginning on June 12 is Trust, Resilience, and Growth and will focus on how these three organising principles underpin the US-India economic partnership across sectors.

The annual summit of the US India Business Council (USIBC), which is part of the US Chambers of Commerce, gains significance this year as it comes ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's first state visit to the US which starts on June 21.

On Monday, June 12th, we're gonna have the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, come and speak to our group. We are also gonna have a session with Deputy Secretary of State Rich Verma. We are looking to see how we can lift the ambitions of the United States and India for even greater realisation of happiness and prosperity between our two free peoples," USIBC president Atul Keshap told PTI in an interview on Thursday.

"So, it's gonna be great to hear from the top leadership of the State Department. That's gonna be on Monday. We're also gonna have a congressional component. We have a board dinner, he said.

On Tuesday, the Ideas Summit would be addressed by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, along with Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk, and Amos Hochstein, the president's advisor on energy issues.

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Lindsey Ford, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia, Dr. Vivek Lall, chief executive of General Atomics Global Corporation and many others would talk about ways to ensure shared prosperity between the US and India.

India's Ambassador to the US Taranjit Singh Sandhu would offer his perspectives from the government of India about ways to take the relationship forward. Keshap said Indian and American companies who are members of USIBC are the world leaders in terms of technology capability and managerial skill.

"They take care of their employees. They take care of their communities. They are very respectful about how they inter interact with the people who host them in their various places in America and in India. They help uplift the communities.

"There are so many good stories about USIBC companies that are investing in people, in the United States and India, and we wanna showcase that, he said.

Beyond merely that activity, we wanna talk about how our companies are increasing choice and increasing quality of life and opportunity for people in both of our countries, he said.

There is a historic moment underway now, he said. India's rise to global prominence is accelerating. India went from being the fifth largest economy in the world to hurtling as fast as possible towards being the third largest economy on the planet.

"All of our member companies hope for India to be a USD 30 trillion economy in our lifetimes. That's gonna be good for hundreds of millions of Indian people, and frankly, good for America and good for the planet, he said.

The theme of this summit is to capture that opportunity to the greatest extent possible so that Indians themselves can capture the most potential in their lives and live happy, prosperous and peaceful lives, he said.

Keshap said that India's economic growth is deeply impressive.

GDP is to a great extent, the marker by which we gauge the power and influence of nations and India's GDP is rising at really impressive rates. So, reasonable projections by very legitimate institutions, estimate that India will be a five and 10 and 20 trillion economy in a space of time that is really incredible to consider. You know, by 2047, India could stand transformed in world affairs. So that's incredibly good, he said.

Noting that India is a very sober and stable voice in international relations, Keshap said the country is a global net provider of security through UN peacekeeping, and through its efforts to keep the sea lanes open in the Indian and Pacific oceans. "It is a donor country to countries that need a lot of help, and has helped greatly, even in its own neighbourhood like with Afghanistan over the years and with Sri Lanka, he said.

India is a constructive power and a country with whom Americans feel a great deal of affinity, he said.

The Americans feel that India is stable and peaceful, and it contributes to the peace and well-being of the world, Keshap said.

India is also a democracy. It is a democracy like ours. We see ourselves in India. It is a deeply layered, complex, sometimes messy democracy, but that's the genius of democracy. So, there's a lot of affinity between Indians and Americans.

"That affinity is now being expanded through the QUAD and through our global security partnership to ensure the peace and security and tranquillity and happiness of people everywhere, Keshap said.

India's rise is very impressive. It is very positive. I think that our two governments are engaging in more and more dialogues about all of the areas where they can work together, he said.

Keshap said all the CEOs who visited India recently and met with Prime Minister Modi have committed to making major investments in the country.

That is a recognition that India's macroeconomic policy situation is getting better and better. There are a lot of economic innovations by the government of India that are capturing the interest of the global investment community.

India has put a lot of homework, thought and effort into attracting certain sectors, like the electronics manufacturing sector, FinTech sector and digital economy sector, he said, adding that those are real growth engines of the Indian economy.

"India can outcompete other countries that are playing the same game of trying to attract dollars, including the US. India will be a very attractive partner. It has incredible demographics. It has the largest, quantity of skilled professionals in the world.

"I think our companies respect and admire that. So, this is really India's game to lose, and it depends on the ease of doing business level, playing field and predictable and stable regulatory environment, Keshap said.
Sri Lanka President Ranil Wickremesinghe has instructed relevant government departments to expedite the drafting of legislation necessary for the implementation of the Action Plan for Reconciliation that seeks to address the thorny issue of ethnic reconciliation of Tamilians in the island nation.

Sri Lanka has endured a three-decade conflict including a protracted and brutal armed conflict, between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the country's armed forces.

On May 18, 2009, the separatist campaign led by the LTTE to establish a separate Tamil homeland in the northern and eastern province of the island nation came to an end with the killing of the LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabakaran by the Sri Lankan Army.

In 2015, the Sri Lankan government renewed its commitment to reconciliation and thereafter embarked on several initiatives for national reconciliation.

The Action Plan for Reconciliation was part of the government's need for a comprehensive national policy to resolve these prickly issues.

During a meeting on Thursday, President Wickremesinghe sought the progress of initiatives in five key areas, namely legislation, institutional activities, land issues, prisoner release, and power decentralisation, which were also reviewed, the President's media division said in a media release.

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The implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the establishment of a National Land Council, and the formulation of a National Land Policy were among the matters that were also discussed.

Additionally, the President emphasised the need for enhanced operations of the Office of Missing Persons, including digitisation efforts and the issuance of Certificates of Absence for individuals who had previously disappeared without a trace, the press release said.

Furthermore, President Wickremesinghe also instructed the relevant parties to complete the ongoing initiatives to establish the Office of Reparations and the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation within the next two to three months, it said.

A comprehensive report on the progress of these programmes was also requested, it added.

To address the release of prisoners and matters of amnesty, the President instructed the relevant officials to submit a detailed report through the Ministry of Justice.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Sabri, President's Senior Adviser on National Security and Chief of Presidential Staff Sagala Ratnayaka were some of the key members who participated in the meeting.

Sinhalese, mostly Buddhist, make up nearly 75 per cent of Sri Lanka's 22 million population while Tamils make up 15 per cent.

The majority hardline Buddhist clergy has also been thwarting attempts for reconciliation with the Tamil minority since 1948 when the country gained its independence from Britain.

The Tamils allege that thousands were massacred during the final stages of the war that ended in 2009, a charge the Sri Lankan Army denies.

At least 40,000 Tamil civilians may have been killed in just the final months of the civil war, according to a UN report.

Sri Lanka has been subject to the UN human rights council resolutions since 2013 calling for accountability through international investigations to the incidents of alleged war crimes.

Ousted president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was the defence secretary during the final phase of the conflict, is accused of ruthlessly ending Sri Lanka's civil war with the killing of LTTE supremo Prabhakaran.

The island nation has had a long history of failed negotiations with the Tamils.

An Indian effort in 1987, which created the system of a joint provincial council for the Tamil-dominated North and East, faltered as the minority community claimed it fell short of full autonomy.

Wickremesinghe, who took over as the president last year amidst the unprecedented economic crisis and political turmoil, earlier, underlined the need to fully implement the 13th Amendment to the Constitution to grant political autonomy to the minority Tamils in the country.

The 13A provides for the devolution of power to the Tamil community in Sri Lanka.

India has been pressing Sri Lanka to implement the 13A which was brought in after the Indo-Sri Lankan agreement of 1987.
Aerospace giant Boeing has been sued by Colorado-based Wilson Aerospace over alleged theft of intellectual property (IP) related to NASA's Artemis rocket mission.

In the lawsuit, the small family-run tools company claimed that Boeing has stolen its IP related to multiple devices over the last two decades.

The company alleged that Boeing built "counterfeit" variations of Wilson's tools for NASA projects including the International Space Station (ISS) and its NASA's Space Launch Systems rocket.

It stated that the tools that Boeing passed on as its own to NASA were behind the leaks on ISS and hydrogen leaks during repeated attempts to fuel and launch SLS rocket for its Artemis 1 mission. These endangered lives of astronauts.

"Boeing has not only stolen our intellectual property and damaged our company's reputation but has used the technology incorrectly and at the expense of astronauts' safety, which is beyond despicable," said David Wilson, Jr., Wilson Aerospace president and founder, in a press statement.

Wilson's "lawsuit is rife with inaccuracies and omissions", a Boeing spokesperson was quoted as saying in a statement to CNBC.

Also Read First crewed flight of Boeing 1st Starliner postponed to July: NASA Nasa announces crew for lunar mission Artemis II to be launched in Nov Indian-origin engineer to lead NASA's latest Moon to Mars Programme NASA, Boeing one step closer to joint Starliner crewed flight to ISS Nasa to invest $45mn in small biz to develop tech for future missions EV financing platform Revfin Services raises $5 million from US FDC Hawaii Kilauea Volcanic Eruption after 3 months break, details inside US secretary of state, commerce secretary to address 'India Ideas Summit' Cheap diabetes drug could cut risk of developing long coronavirus: Study Canadian MP slams Indira Gandhi's death celebration by Khalistan supporters

According to Wilson's lawyer Pete Flowers, the theft of tools helped Boeing's win billions in contract awards and fees from the government, while the company faced a loss of "hundreds of millions of dollars".

The company brought 10 claims against Boeing, including claims of copyright infringement, misappropriation and theft of trade secrets, and fraud, the report said.

Wilson said it believes the theft is "a broader pattern of criminal behaviour by Boeing". The company pointed to prior litigation such as theft of Lockheed Martin trade secrets in 2006.

"We fully believe that there are other companies, probably small American-owned companies, that have been affected by this same activity inside Boeing," Wilson lawyer Flowers told CNBC.

"We will vigorously defend against this in court," Boeing said.

--IANS

rvt/shb/
President Xi Jinping has called on China's border troops to forge a "great wall of steel" along the country's frontiers by enhancing their capabilities in border defence and control, the state media reported Friday.

Xi, 69, who heads the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) and the country's Central Military Commission (CMC), the high command of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), made a fact-finding trip on Wednesday to survey the work of border management and control and the development of frontier troops in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

The Chinese president asked troops to break new ground in border defence, state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.

Xi has called on Chinese border troops to enhance their capabilities in border defence and control to forge a "great wall of steel" along the country's borders, it said.

Unlike his predecessors, Xi, who came into power in 2012, has regularly visited troops in various border regions, including Tibet.

In 2021, he made a rare visit to Nyingchi, a strategically located border town close to Arunachal Pradesh, during his first visit to Tibet.

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While visiting the Inner Mongolia military command of the PLA, Xi emphasised the importance of ensuring integrity and a high degree of unity among the border troops.

Highlighting cooperation among the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) and government departments, the military, law enforcement agencies, as well as the ordinary people in border defence as China's unique strength, Xi called for joint efforts from all parties to break new ground in defending the country's borders.

He called for additional efforts to intensify troop training and enhance combat preparedness, and speed up capacity building concerning information technology-enabled border defence and control. He also called for efforts to transform how border defence duties are performed, tighten military discipline, maintain good troop order, and foster more border defence professionals.

Xi commended the role of the region's border troops in ensuring security and stability on the country's northern border.

Praising China's progress in border defence work since he came to power in 2012, Xi said the country's border troops have boosted military training and combat preparedness and resolutely safeguarded border security and the stability in regions along the frontiers.

He added that the troops have effectively safeguarded China's sovereignty, security, and development interest.

Stressing the importance of border defence in ensuring national stability and governance, Xi called on the border troops to have a stronger sense of mission and responsibility and guard the borders diligently for the ruling Communist Party and the people.

Xi underscored the need for continuous efforts to enhance cohesion and forge the soul of the border troops with the CPC's new theories, as well as to improve their education on political discipline, discipline regarding the public and affairs related to foreigners, and policies on ethnic and religious affairs.

Xi has been placing more emphasis on ramping up security and increasing the combat levels of the troops ever since he was re-elected as head of the CPC for an unprecedented third time last year.

He is the only leader after the party founder Mao Zedong to continue in power for more than two five-year terms.
Business leaders, scholars and government officials took to the stage in Hong Kong on Friday for the one-day event. Under the theme Sailing into a New Phase of Opening, guests including the citys Chief Executive John Lee and Hong Kong Stock Exchange boss Laura Cha delivered speeches, while discussions focused on subjects ranging from shaping the future of openness to emerging from the pandemic

Jun 09, 2023 08:59 PM
China expected to remain Philippines' top trade and investment partner: Ambassador

11:27, June 09, 2023 By Zhong Wenxing ( People's Daily Online

Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Nong Rong (R) meets with Philippine ambassador to China Jaime A. FlorCruz (L) in Beijing on June 8. (Photo provided by the Philippine Embassy in China)

"In 2022, despite the pandemic, China ranked as the Philippines top trading partner, our third largest export market, our top market supplier, import supplier and one of our major foreign investors," stated Jaime A. FlorCruz, Philippine ambassador to China, during a reception held in Beijing on June 8.

"With the momentum created by our President's state visit in January, we expect China to remain one of our top trade and investment partners in the coming years," the ambassador said on the partnership between the two nations.

FlorCruz made the remarks at a reception organized by the Philippine Embassy in China to celebrate the 125th Anniversary of the Proclamation of Philippine Independence and Nationhood. China's Assistant Foreign Minister Nong Rong attended upon invitation the reception.

The Philippine ambassador expressed gratitude to China for its "friendly assistance" in providing the first batch of COVID-19 vaccine doses to the Philippines. He acknowledged that this played a crucial role in initiating their immunization campaign and containing the spread of the disease.

FlorCruz highlighted this year's visit of Philippine President Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr. to Beijing, where he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The visit served to renew the friendship between the two countries and bolster their relations. Both nations reaffirmed the importance of cooperation in education, tourism and people-to-people exchanges. He added, "We also seek to cooperate in infrastructure, clean energy, connectivity and other fields."

The Philippine Embassy in China holds a reception in celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Philippine Independence and Nationhood on June 8, 2023. (Photo provided by the Philippine Embassy in China)

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
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The UPPCL Recruitment - All Indian citizens with 10th, 12th, ITI, Diploma, or Postgraduate degrees are eligible to apply for Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited Vacancy Openings. The official notification for UPPCL Job Vacancies is available in the UPPCL Recruitment 2023. Candidates can apply online via www.upenergy.in for a position.

Assistant Engineer Trainee and other positions are available at Uttar Pradesh Power Company Ltd, according to a 01 notification. Assistant Engineer Electrical & Mechanical, Junior Engineer Civil, Accounts Officer, Law Officer, Personnel Officer, and Senior Industrial Engineer Jobs are also available. Notification, detailed posts, admission card download link, vacancy details, syllabus, Sarkariresult, and more updates are all available below.

UPPCL Recruitment 2023

If you are interested in advancing your career in a government agency, you should take advantage of this opportunity and submit an application for UPPCL Recruitment by providing all of the information requested.

Candidates who are interested in filling the latest vacancies at Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited (UPPCL) are encouraged to read the full announcement before submitting an online application. The company will shortly issue an invitation to applicants who are talented and dedicated. Candidates should check their eligibility by reading this article before beginning their application. Additionally, you will soon have access to the direct application link for the UPPCL Vacancy 2023. Apply as soon as you can, and get ready for the UPPCL Recruitment Process well.

Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited (UPPCL) has reduced the recruitment period from 2023 to 2023. A specific date will be set for the submission of the application form. Several other details should reach you as soon as possible, not just an application form. You should understand first and foremost that you are able to apply for the position or not, as well as the type of exam and other details about the process. Here are some useful information for you.



Here's How To Apply UPPCL Recruitment 2023 Online?
Remember the Mitsubishi Colt? Well, this is how it looks like right now thanks to an OE partnership with alliance member, Renault. The seven...
Annecy kicks off this weekend, and with hundreds of screenings, pitchings, workshops, panels, and parties, its impossible to see everything the festival has to offer.

In planning for the week ahead, we decided to pick out a few features that weve been looking forward to catching since this years lineup was first announced.

Below, in no particular order, weve picked eight features screening in either the main competition or Contrechamp lineups. The list is not exhaustive, and well hope to catch many other films during this years festival.

Art College 1994, Liu Jian

There has been plenty of buzz around this title since it premiered at Berlin back in February. Were excited to see what all the buzz is about, but also thrilled that director Liu Jian will finally be back in Annecy with one of his films. Back in 2017, Luis Have a Nice Day was selected to screen in competition at Annecy, where China had been selected as that years guest country. However, on the eve of the festival, the Chinese government lobbied Annecy to remove the film from competition, a request with which the festival complied.

Mars Express, Jeremie Perin

Anyone who follows European animation has had this title on their radar for several years. A gritty sci-fi noir epic, the few clips weve seen demonstrate all the hallmarks of what makes sci-fi so much fun. Perin, who directed the fantastic French animated series Lastman, previously explained: One thing Ive always loved in cinema is when genre films  science fiction, thriller, horror  treat the codes of these genres like a pleasant gift box in which the spectator can easily get their bearings because they know the codes. To that end, Mars Express clips look familiar but also innovative. Were excited to see what the full 85-minute feature has to offer.

The Inventor, Jim Capobianco, Pierre-Luc Granjon

We singled this title as one of the Annecy projects that impressed us at last years event. This year, the finished film will screen in the main competition. The Inventor is the latest project from Disney and Pixar veteran Jim Capobianco (who shared an Oscar nomination for Ratatouilles screenplay) and Pierre-Luc Granjon (Poppety in the Fall, The White Wolf). Using puppets that spark an instant nostalgia for classic Rankin/Bass holiday stop-motion fare, the feature visits time spent by Leonardo da Vinci as part of the French court in the years following his departure from Italy. In France, the inventor finds greater freedom to experiment on his timeless inventions and the company of the audacious Princess Marguerite.

Johnny & Me  A Journey through Time with John Heartfield, Katrin Rothe

Another mixed-media delivery, this documentary turns on graphic designer Stefanie, who is having a creative crisis. During a visit to a museum, she is enchanted by the satirical photomontages of Nazi opponent John Heartfield and magically transported into his studio.

Robot Dreams, Pablo Berger

This one premiered at Cannes in last month and was a favorite among critics and audiences at the festival. The film Bergers animation debut, although he is an accomplished director whose 2012 film Blancanieves (Snow White) is considered a modern Spanish classic. It won dozens of awards at home and abroad, including ten Spanish Academy Goyas. Distributors were impressed as well, and indie powerhouse Neon eventually scored U.S. rights to the kid-friendly feature with a bittersweet tone that should appeal to adults too.

Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams, Benoit Chieux

Another title that will be familiar to those who follow European animation, Sirocco pitched at many of the continents most important industry get-togethers on its way to opening this years Annecy. The fantasy follows the adventures of two young sisters as they try to make their way home after getting trapped in the world of their favorite book. The stills that have been released are stunning, and we cant wait to see them move.

Lonely Castle in the Mirror, Keiichi Hara

As is typically the case, Japanese animation is well represented at this years Annecy. One of the numerous standout titles from this years crop is Haras main competition player Lonely Castle in the Mirror. Not only is there a fair bit of buzz around this GKIDS pickup, but Hara is an Annecy regular who has impressed with previous films including Miss Hokusai and Colorful, the latter winning the Audience Award and a special distinction in 2011.

The Inseparables, Jeremie Degruson
Days before launching the worlds oldest and highest-profile animation festival, the French city of Annecy is in shock after a man wielding a knife attacked a group of schoolchildren and adults in a local park.

According to authorities from the Haute-Savoie prefecture, six people were injured in the attack, four of them preschool-age children. Two of the children and one adult are said to be in a serious condition, with the others slightly hurt. All six were taken to the hospital.

The attack took place in Le Paquier dAnnecy, a park on the north side of the lake. Anyone who has attended the Annecy festival in the past has likely walked its paths numerous times commuting to and from the Bonlieu and the Imperial Palace.

Local reports have indicated that the suspected attacker is a 31-year-old Syrian refugee who originally applied for asylum in France and was granted it in Sweden in April. Police have not yet provided any motive for the attack.

Starting this weekend, the Annecy Festival will host more than 14,000 guests, a new record for the event.

Festival organizers were understandably stunned after learning of the attack, and have since released a brief statement:

The Annecy International Animation Film Festival management and team were shocked to learn about the tragic events that took place on Le Paquier this morning. Our thoughts immediately go to the victims and their families.

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted (translated by Google):

Attack of absolute cowardice this morning in a park in Annecy. Children and an adult are between life and death. The Nation is in shock. Our thoughts are with them as well as their families and the emergency services mobilized.

Annecy mayor Francois Astorg said he was appalled by the attack, and that a news conference will be held later in the day.

Update from the afternoon new conference of French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne:

According to Bourne, the child victims were as young as 22 months and three years old and all four are in a severe state. Witnesses to the attack who were not physically injured are in shock and receiving specialist medical care.

She confirmed that the suspect is in custody and that he is a Syrian national who had refugee status in Sweden. He has no criminal or psychiatric record. There is still no indication of motive, but police have said there is no evidence of a link to terrorism.
Former Bobs Burgers voice actor Jay Johnston was arrested in Los Angeles on Wednesday for his involvement in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Johnston turned himself in at the FBIs field office in L.A. on Wednesday, a day after the FBI issued a warrant for him. That afternoon, he appeared in U.S. District Court where he was released on $25,000 bail and ordered to participate in a remote hearing on June 13.

Johnston has been charged with felony obstruction of officers during civil disorder, as well as several misdemeanor offenses, according to court reports.

Although the warrant was only issued this week, the FBI had publicly been looking for more information about Johnstons involvement in the attack for over two years. In March 2021, the organization tweeted two photos of the actor which were taken during the January 6 riots. In December 2021, it was confirmed that Johnston had been banned from further involvement with the Bobs Burgers series.

The #FBI is still seeking information on people who took part in the violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. If you know this individual, visit https://t.co/iL7sD5efWD. Refer to photo 247 in your tip. pic.twitter.com/CetMHzU190  FBI (@FBI) March 4, 2021

The FBIs latest report is thorough and indicates the agency spoke with three of Johnstons associates who confirmed he is the person in the photographs. In a text message from Johnston to one of the associates, Johnston wrote, The news has presented it as an attack. It actually wasnt. Thought it kind of turned into that. It was a mess. Got maced and tear gassed and I found it quite untastic.

The affidavit says there is also video of Johnston pushing against police and helping other rioters attack officers guarding an entrance to the Capitol in a tunnel on the Lower West Terrace.

Additionally, the FBI uncovered flight records that show Johnston booked a round-trip flight from L.A. to Washington DC leaving on January 4 and returning on January 7.

According to the Associated Press, Over 1,000 people involved in the January 6 riots have been charged with federal crimes. More than 500 of them have been sentenced so far, with more than half of those receiving jail time ranging from seven days to 18 years.
NZ WINDFARMS LIMITED: AOKAUTERE EXPANSION PROJECT REFERRED TO EXPERT CONSENTING PANEL UNDER THE COVID-19 RECOVERY (FAST-TRACK CONSENTING) ACT 2020

NZ Windfarms Limited (NZX: NWF ) is pleased to announce that the Minister for the Environment, the Hon David Parker, has decided to accept the Companys application to refer the Aokautere Expansion Project (Project) to an expert consenting panel (Panel) for consideration under the COVID-19 Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Act 2020 (FTCA).

The Aokautere Expansion Project to install up to nine wind turbines on neighbouring land is separate for consenting purposes to the recently approved Te Rere Hau Repowering Project to decommission the existing fleet and install up to thirty new wind turbines on the current site.

This is the Companys second application to the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) to utilise the fast-track resource consent pathway.

An Order in Council is now being drafted for the Project. If the Order is approved by Cabinet for submission to Executive Council, it will then be signed by the Governor-General and notified in the New Zealand Gazette. The Company will make another announcement once that has occurred. The day after notification in the Gazette, the Company will be able to apply to the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) for fast-tracked consideration of its resource consent applications by a Panel under the FTCA.

Importantly, the Ministers decision to refer the Project to a Panel under the FTCA, should not be taken as an indication or direction that resource consents will be granted. Additionally, the referral decision does not in any way endorse any related planning decisions that may affect the Project.

The Aokautere Expansion Project could have a capacity of 37.8MW and comprises up to 9 x 4.2MW modern three-bladed wind turbines producing approximately 170 GWh per annum. That is enough renewable energy to power 23,000 average kiwi households or to charge 75,800 electric vehicles.

Craig Stobo, NZ Windfarms Chair says The Company is excited about utilising the fast-track resource consent pathway for the second time to accelerate the Companys strategic growth aspirations. We are very pleased that the Minister has decided to accept our Aokautere Expansion Project for Fast-Track referral. Mr Stobo says We are committed to working with partners to add additional renewable energy generation that creates mutual economic and environmental benefits and contributes towards the transition to a low emissions economy.

Mr Warren Koia, NZ Windfarms Chief Executive says The Companys team of consultants will work to compile its fast-track resource consent application for the Aokautere Expansion Project and we expect to submit that towards the end of the calendar year in accordance with the transitory provisions of the FTCA.

For further information, contact Warren Koia, Chief Executive, by phone on 06 280 2773, or by email at info@nzwindfarms.co.nz.

Nga mihi | Thank you

Craig Stobo

Chairman

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Devki Group to boost clinker exports

09 June 2023

National Cement (Devki Group) has announced that it will export up to 80 per cent of the clinker it produces when its new West Pokot plant in Kenya starts production. This will see increased clinker supply to the neighbouring countries of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.



Uganda's market is starved of clinker production with a capacity of just 1.86Mta, far below its nominal cement capacity of 7.13Mta, according to The Global Cement Report Plant Database (GCR PD). Rwanda's market is similarly deficient of clinker supply, with a total production of 0.48Mta, while its cement production reaches 1.2Mta. Burundi does not manufacture clinker and has just one grinding plant with a cement capacity of 0.1Mta, according to the GCR PD.

The signing of the supply deals for clinker with neighbouring countries will see the export of approximately 6000tpd of clinker to Devki's clients across the border. The greater export potential for Devki Group will arise when the delayed West Pokot plant begin operations in August 2023. The plant will have a clinker capacity of 3.5Mta and expects to export around 2.5Mta. Simba and National Cement (Devki Group) are now the largest clinker producers in east Africa, with a production capacity of 7.5Mta of cement.

Currently we are exporting 20 per cent of our production to these countries but we are now signing long-term contracts that will see us supply clinker worth US$200m (KES27.7bn) a year, said Devki Group Chairman, Narendra Raval.



Controlling clinker imports

Devki's growing clinker export trade is seen as a further move to control clinker supply in the region. Most Kenyan cement producers have to import clinker for cement production as local limestone is of insufficient quality and blended cements are popular in Kenya's market to differentiate products. It is thought that National Cement and Mombassa Cement have continued to import clinker for these reasons despite having clinker production faclities in Kenya.



After Devki Group set about lobbying the Kenyan government to raise clinker import taxes by 10-25 per cent, an investigation by the National Independent Clinker Verification Comittee concluded that locally produced clinker was 30 per cent cheaper than imported clinker from Egypt and Tanzania. Therefore, the Finance Bill 2023 has proposed a 10 per cent duty on clinker imports in an effort to promote locally-produced clinker. Mr Raval said, in May 2023, "This [tax] will reduce imports and save the country foreign exchange spent on buying clinker from external markets."

However, the opposing Kenyan brands of Rai Cement, Bamburi Cement, Savannah Cement, Ndvou Cement and cement traders Riftcot Ltd have argued that they have been given a grace period of four years lapsing in 2026 to build their own grinding plants in Kenya. This could see local players each invest US$1bn in domestic clinker production at their plant sites.

Devki Group expansion

Meanwhile, in May 2023, Devki Group also announced that it plans a KES45m (US$0.32m) Cemtech Ltd grinding plant in Eldoret, Kenya. The production will be based on pozzolana limestone cement with clinker being imported from the group's Lukenya (Machakos) and Salgaa (Nakuru) cement plants in Kenya.



The Devki Group owns Simba Cement, which is a subsidiary of National Cement. Cemtech Ltd was acquired by Simba Cement in March 2022 following approval form the Competition Authority of Kenya.

Published under
Meridian Energys new demand response agreement with New Zealands Aluminium Smelter (NZAS) for 2023 and 2024 has become unconditional following approval announced this morning by the Electricity Authority.

The agreement, which was announced last month but subject to approval by the Electricity Authority, will see NZAS reduce consumption of electricity at the Tiwai Point Smelter by up to 50 MW (roughly the same amount of energy consumed by 50,000 typical kiwi homes) when requested by Meridian, to reduce pressure on the electricity system.

Meridian Energy Chief Executive Neal Barclay welcomes the Electricity Authoritys approval.

Simply put, this agreement means Aotearoa will likely need to burn less coal when a dry spell causes the hydro lakes to drop to low levels. When NZAS reduces consumption of electricity, that power can effectively be made available to other users.

The net result is likely to be a reduction in carbon emissions from burning less coal and, just as importantly, a reduction in the overall cost of the electricity system, which ultimately reduces costs to customers, says Neal Barclay.

NZAS will be compensated for lost production when they are asked to reduce consumption.

We appreciate the flexible and constructive approach NZAS has taken in reaching this agreement and also the decision of the Electricity Authority to approve it in time for winter this year, says Neal Barclay.

As New Zealand works towards a more renewable electricity system, we need to think creatively about how we can manage winter demand and dry period energy needs. Customers who can be flexible in how they use power and the development of alternate green fuels such as hydrogen and biomass, when combined with smart technology, will enable New Zealand to transition to net zero emissions far more quickly and more cost effectively than most other nations. Its good that we are getting on with it.

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Air New Zealand provides earnings guidance update for FY23

AIA - Auckland Airport FY23-27 price changes

Infratil successfully completes NZ$750 million placement


Auckland Airport FY23-27 price changes: Aero charges to fund investment in resilience, customer experience and pave the way for the new domestic facility

Airline charges reset for FY23 to FY27 (period of Price Setting Event Four)

Increase in charges to support major investment in long-life infrastructure, including transport, airfield, stormwater upgrades and a new baggage system

Resilience and improving the customer experience at New Zealands main aviation gateway the priority

Today Auckland Airport reset its aeronautical charges for Price Setting Event Four (PSE4), the five-year period spanning the 2023 to 2027 financial years.

The new charges will take effect from 1 July 2023, ending the year-long price freeze that Auckland Airport adopted to help airlines rebuild following the pandemic.

With the post-pandemic recovery now well underway, Auckland Airport Chief Executive Carrie Hurihanganui said Auckland Airport has set its new charges following consultation with major airlines  something that happens once every five years in accordance with the Airport Authorities Act.

The new charges will fund part of the much-needed investment in infrastructure that is underway at Auckland Airport. For PSE4, this amounts to $2.5 billion of commissioned infrastructure, focusing on important airfield, terminal, baggage and transport improvements to be completed and in use by airlines by the end of the five-year period.

Ms Hurihanganui said the increase in PSE4 airline charges also reflected the higher cost of capital in the current economic environment compared to the previous price setting event.

Travel is back, and the recovery is taking place more quickly than anyone expected. Now is the time for investment in Auckland Airport if we are to deliver the resilience and customer experience travellers want and the gateway New Zealand needs for the future, Ms Hurihanganui said.

Our domestic terminal is 57 years old and needs replacing. We know travellers are fed up with the domestic travel experience  theyve told us that clearly. Other key aeronautical infrastructure also needs replacing. The pandemic meant we had to put much of this investment on hold and we are now in catch-up mode.

We dont think any travellers would say we are making the move to upgrade the airport too soon, she said.

Auckland Airports pricing announcement today is the result of 24 months of extensive consultation with major airlines regarding aeronautical investment in Auckland Airport over PSE4 to support their business operations, as well as consultation over the airports wider ten-year development roadmap.

Key projects to be delivered over PSE4 include critical infrastructure that will pave the way for construction of a new domestic facility to be integrated into the existing international terminal and replace the ageing domestic terminal. This includes:

$1.5 billion in enabling works for the new integrated domestic facility, including the largest expansion of Auckland Airports airfield in history at 250,000m2 or 23 rugby fields; providing new remote stands for jet aircraft; new fuel infrastructure; and stormwater capacity enhancements.

New baggage system to transform luggage handling at Auckland Airport.

A new experience for arriving and departing international travellers, with a new public drop off and pick up area on the doorstep of the international terminal as part of the Transport Hub development. Other roading and terminal forecourt upgrades are taking place to support terminal integration.

Expansion of the international check in area to accommodate more travellers for when the new integrated terminal opens.

Upgrades to improve the customer experience in the existing domestic terminal while the new integrated domestic terminal is being built.

Airlines only begin to pay for new infrastructure once it is complete and in use.

While Auckland Airport is building a new $2.2b domestic facility integrated into the international terminal, the facility itself wont be complete and open to passengers until 2028 or 2029 (beyond PSE4), meaning those costs will be reflected in the next pricing period (PSE5).

Ms Hurihanganui said the ongoing recovery in aviation is strong, as is the need to invest in critical aviation infrastructure for the future.

There are now 22 airlines flying to 37 destinations to and from Auckland Airport, up from 12 airlines and 21 destinations during the toughest days of the pandemic. In May, international seat capacity recovered to 91% compared to pre-pandemic and domestic recovered to 89%. The return of airlines is also working to support the recovery of trade with 80% of airfreight coming into Auckland in the belly hold of passenger aircraft.

Ms Hurihanganui said Auckland Airports new aeronautical charges would be rising from a very low base, accounting for a small portion of an airline ticket.

Auckland Airport has long been one of the cheapest major airports for airlines to operate from in the region.

At $7 our current domestic jet aeronautical charges are 40-50% lower than comparable airports in our region and have risen just 65 cents in real terms over the last decade, reflecting the ageing domestic terminal. Meanwhile, international charges have fallen 10% in real terms over the past decade. Our charges currently represent about 3% to 3.5% of the cost of an average domestic or international fare.

From July, the following changes will be introduced to Auckland Airports aeronautical charges to airlines, which are calculated on a per passenger basis:

Domestic jet travel (Auckland to/from main centres):

Airline domestic jet charges will average $11.85 over the five-year PSE4 period. Charges will initially rise $3.50 from $6.75 to $10.25  lower than current charges at Wellington Airport ($15.20), and at Christchurch Airport ($14.60).

Prices will then reach $15.45 by FY27, the final year of PSE4.

Regional airline charges:

Airline regional charges will average $8.15 over the five-year PSE4 period.

Regional charges will initially increase by $2.70 in July from $4.40 to $7.10  this is $3 to $4 cheaper than comparable current charges at Wellington Airport ($11.20) and Christchurch Airport ($10).

Regional charges will reach $10.70 by FY27, the final year of PSE4.

International charges:

Airline international charges will average $37.25 over the five-year PSE4 period.

International charges will initially increase by $9.40 from $23.40 to $32.80 - this is lower than current published equivalent charges at other major international airports in the region including Sydney ($42.20), Melbourne ($35.90) and Brisbane ($56.70).

International charges will reach $46.10 by FY27, the final year of PSE4.

These changes have not been introduced lightly, particularly in the current economic environment. We are very mindful of cost to our airline partners and ultimately travellers. Thats why we have been working hard to deliver a pragmatic and affordable solution while responding to airline requests for changes as much as possible.

At the same time, weve considered what we need to invest to ensure Auckland Airports infrastructure is at an appropriate standard, capable of delivering a good customer experience for expected passenger numbers and is resilient for the future. Thats our role. Doing nothing is not an option.

Our new airline charges for PSE4 are in line with other comparative airports in the region. They will also be reviewed by the Commerce Commission.

Auckland Airports prices across the 20232027 financial years target an after-tax return on investment of 8.73%, equal to the mid-point weighted average cost of capital (WACC) calculated by applying the Commerce Commissions most recent (2016) WACC Input Methodology, but using updated data as at 1 July 2022, the start of PSE4 and not applying any downward adjustments. This is consistent with Auckland Airports submissions to the Commerce Commissions WACC Input Methodology review and is supported by independent expert analysis.

Over PSE4, Auckland Airport will invest up to $5 billion in aeronautical infrastructure, including work to progress the new domestic facility. However, pricing for PSE4 reflects just the $2.5 billion of investment that will be completed and in use by airlines and passengers by the end of that period.

Ms Hurihanganui said Auckland Airport will continue to raise debt funding from a mix of both domestic and offshore markets to fund the capital expenditure programme. Because of the large forecast debt-funded works under construction balance towards the second half of PSE4, she said new equity may be raised in future.

This remains subject to a range of future uncertainties including the ongoing recovery in aviation, the future financial performance of Auckland Airport, and the execution run rate for the 10-year capital roadmap.

Auckland Airport is continuing to consult with airlines on potential future regional terminal infrastructure, the solution for which is currently expected to be in use during PSE5. The second runway does not feature during PSE4 and the project remains on hold.

ENDS

NOTES FOR EDITOR:

Consultation process

Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch Airports are subject to information disclosure regulation by the Commerce Commission, providing transparency about airport pricing, spending decisions and performance.

Auckland Airport re-sets its aeronautical prices every five years, a process that includes consultation with major airline customers and the Board of Airline Representatives New Zealand.

Prices are set with reference to the Commerce Commissions current information disclosure framework (2016) with target return parameters updated as at the start of each pricing period.

After Auckland Airport sets its aeronautical prices, the Commerce Commission reviews the pricing decision and publicly releases a report setting out its findings.

Auckland Airport has now re-set its aeronautical prices payable by airlines for the remaining four years of the five-year PSE4 pricing period of July 2022 - June 2027. (Auckland Airport was due to re-set charges from 1 July 2022 but chose to freeze existing charges for the first year of the pricing period to support airlines' recovery from the pandemic.)

10-year capital roadmap

Under Commerce Commission rules, Auckland Airport is required to share a ten-year capital roadmap at each price setting event. However, this remains subject to change throughout its ten-year life cycle, with the ability to defer or accelerate infrastructure projects depending on air traffic demand following consultation with airlines. Priced aeronautical capital investment commissioning over the ten-year capital roadmap is currently estimated at about $5.6 billion.

A key element of the airports ten-year capital roadmap is delivering a new domestic facility ($2.2b of which $2b will be recovered through aeronautical charges) as part of an expansion of the existing international terminal and to replace the ageing domestic terminal, along with other key terminal integration projects associated with the development ($1.7b of which $1.5b will be recovered through aeronautical charges). These costs include forecast construction cost escalation and holding costs. This project is underway and due for completion in 2028 or 2029.

Along with the terminal integration programme, other key projects included in the ten-year capital roadmap are reflected in the below table. As noted above, this roadmap contains a list of all possible projects. Some may be replaced, deferred or cancelled following consultation and actual project commissioning costs will change versus the estimates presented below:

Forecast Commissioning profile of Priced Regulated Assets PSE4-5

Refer AIA Auckland Airport FY23-27 price changes Media Release for a copy of the Forecast Commissioning profile of Priced Regulated Assets PSE4-5.

ENDS

Analyst and media webcast for Price Setting Event Four (PSE4)

A webcast for analysts and media with our Chief Executive Carrie Hurihanganui and Chief Financial Officer Phil Neutze will be held at 2.00pm NZDT today.

Analysts and media can dial in to the conference call by:

1.Registering in advance of the conference using the link provided below. Upon registering, you will be provided with participant dial-in numbers and a unique registrant ID.

2.In the 10 minutes prior to the call start time, you will need to use the conference access information provided in the email received at the point of registering.

Conference call registration link for phone participants:

https://register.vevent.com/register/BI899b1db5b712488abf957c86a47b635c

Webcast link:

https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/qoiqqouv

For further information, please contact:

Investors:

Stewart Reynolds

Head of Strategy, Planning and Performance

+64 27 511 9632

stewart.reynolds@aucklandairport.co.nz

Media:

Libby Middlebrook

Head of Communications and External Relations

+64 21 989 908

Libby.middlebrook@aucklandairport.co.nz

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NWF - Aokautere Expansion - Fast-Track Consent Referral

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Infratil successfully completes NZ$750 million placement


Infratil Limited (Infratil) (NZX/ASX: IFT) is pleased to advise that it has successfully completed the underwritten [1] placement (Placement) component of its planned NZ$850 million equity raising announced yesterday.

The Placement raised a total of $750 million at a price of NZ$9.20, representing a discount of 8.9% to the last close price on the NZX of NZ$10.10 on Tuesday, 6 June 2023 and a 7.9% discount to 5-day VWAP of NZ$9.99.

The Placement was strongly supported attracting bids well in excess of the offer amount from both existing and new investors in local and offshore markets, including broker firm clients. Eligible shareholders who bid for up to their pro-rata share of new shares under the Placement were allocated their full bid.

Infratil CEO, Jason Boyes, said, We are very pleased with the strong level of support received for the Placement, particularly from our existing shareholders. The additional capital will be deployed towards our acquisition of a further stake in One NZ and provides flexibility to support our attractive pipeline of investment opportunities.

Settlement of the Placement is expected to occur on Tuesday, 13 June 2023 on the ASX and Wednesday, 14 June 2023 on the NZX. Allotment of the new shares issued under the Placement is expected to occur on Wednesday, 14 June 2023 with trading of the new shares commencing on the NZX and ASX on the same date.

Retail Offer

The non-underwritten retail share offer (Retail Offer) announced on 7 June will open next Tuesday, 13 June 2023. A Retail Offer document will be made available to eligible shareholders on Tuesday, 13 June 2023, and can also be accessed on the website established for the Retail Offer https://www.infratilshareoffer.com/.

All eligible shareholders are encouraged to visit the website and apply online before the closing date at 5.00pm New Zealand time / 3.00pm Sydney time on Tuesday, 27 June 2023.

Further information

Further details of the equity raising and our acquisition of One NZ are set out in the Investor Presentation we released to the NZX and ASX yesterday.

Any enquiries should be directed to:

Mark Flesher, Investor Relations, Infratil Limited mark.flesher@infratil.com

Footnote

1. The Placement was fully underwritten, other than in respect of pre-committed pro rata participation in the Placement by interests associated with Morrison & Co and related parties amounting to $43.7 million worth of new shares in the aggregate.

NOT FOR RELEASE OR DISTRIBUTION IN THE UNITED STATES

The distribution of this announcement in jurisdictions outside New Zealand and Australia may be restricted by law and you should observe any such restrictions. Any failure to comply with such restrictions may constitute a violation of applicable securities laws. In particular, this announcement may not be distributed or released in the United States.

This announcement does not constitute an offer to sell, or the solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities in the United States or in any jurisdiction in which such an offer would be illegal. The securities to be offered and sold in the Placement and the Retail Offer have not been, and will not be, registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the Securities Act) or the securities laws of any state or other jurisdiction of the United States. Accordingly, the securities to be offered and sold in the Placement may not be offered or sold, directly or indirectly, in the United States except pursuant to an exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements of the Securities Act and applicable securities laws of any state or other jurisdiction of the United States. The securities to be offered and sold in the Retail Offer may not be offered or sold, directly or indirectly, in the United States or to any person that is acting for the account or benefit of a person in the United States.

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Senator Marsha Blackburn said the indictment by former President Donald Trump by the Justice Department over the issue of confidential documents is part of "a vendetta."

She said, From the time President Trump first announced his candidacy, the FBI has displayed an unprecedented vendetta against him. A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for an Attorney General to approve an FBI raid on the home of a former president.

All the while, the Left is employing a playbook of distract and deflect that feels eerily familiar.

After Hillary Clinton got caught deleting thousands of classified emails from her private server as Secretary of State, the FBI and Democratic politicians fabricated a plan to accuse President Trump of Russian collusion. Now that President Biden is reportedly involved in a $5 million bribery scheme with a foreign nation, what does the DOJ do? Attempt to interfere with a congressional investigation into Biden and go after Trump instead. This is the pinnacle of two tiers of justice at work.
With the Chattanooga Municipal Airport reporting record numbers of passengers and expanded destinations with the expected conversion of jet fuel to an all electric fleet of puddle jumpers, an update is necessary.

In previous articles Lewis Grizzard (L.G.) expressed concern over being placed in the seat next to a large passenger in commercial aircraft has been well documented.

Honoring the family reputation of this website, we have left out any risque reference to Erica Jongs best seller the Mile High City (Denver) and the Mile High Club, and this article is now more timely than ever before due to the current tension filled atmosphere in the commercial aviation industry.

An added concern is the risk of the potential arrest of the Pride (not that type) of Moreland, Ga., due to his intense alcohol consumption before takeoff and his continued consumption of his favorite beverage on the tarmac and in the air on Delta, Southwest, and Wing and a Prayer Airlines.

L.G.'s chances of getting obnoxious, ordered off the jet, or transported to the local jail increased substantially after he indulged in a large amount of alcohol.



In his 1989 paperback Fear of Flying, (Longstreet Press) with illustrations by Mike Lester, L.G. in 19 chapters of his 11th bestseller once again conveys his fears and concerns about having to cross the country after the replacement of trains by planes.



As a kid I was never all that impressed by airplanes. My dad was a foot soldier, so I never heard stories of aerial combat. The planes that flew over our town werent much to seemostly military cargos that looked like Greyhound Scenic cruisers with wings. And, of course, every time a plane went over, somebody brought up Uncle Alton.

Even in the movies and on television, flying wasnt all that hot. Peter Pan, who could fly all over the room, was too swishy for my tastes. I didnt know anything about sexual persuasion in those days, but I knew a fruitcake when I saw one. Maybe it would have been different if Mickey Rooney had played the role instead of Mary Martin.

Superman had everything going for him except one thinghe would never stand up to Lois Lane. That bimbo led him around like she had a Kryptonite collar on him. I couldnt stand to see him leap tall buildings in a single bound and then hop every time she called.

And what a disappointment Batman was. That sucker wore a cape like Superman, but he couldnt have flown if they had bought him a ticket. And Robin, with his bird legs, was just as bad; hed have been better off eating worms and rock, rock, rockin along.

Mighty Mouse? Ever notice how he flew in to save the day only after the bad guys had beaten the pulp out of some little fellow? An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure in the real world, but it wasnt worth its weight in cheese in TV ratings.

And there was Sky King and his ugly niece, Penny, the one with the Ovaltine mustache. All Sky ever did with his plane was round up stray cows. Heck, Lassie could do that without ever leaving the ground.

So there just werent a lot of role models that glorified flying for me. Trains, on the other hand, were the talk of the old men I knew growing up. And there was that soft spot in my daddys heart for trains.

(As the reader can ascertain, L.G. in said article offended gays, women, transgenders, Disney World, and pilots but repeated his love for trains.)



* * *

You can reach Jerry Summers at jsummers@summersfirm.com
Beginning on Monday, EPB of Chattanooga crews will close the intersection of McBrien Road (1500 block) at Ringgold Road to install two new utility poles on McBrien Road next to Stone Street.

Construction is planned to begin on Monday, and to be completed within approximately four days. Work will be completed during daylight hours. During this phase of construction, the intersection will remain closed while crews complete construction.



During this closure, all traffic attempting to access McBrien Road (1500 block) will be redirected to Tombras Avenue to Bennett Road, then east to McBrien Road. Detour signs and alternate route information will be placed to redirect traffic.



In the event of an emergency, contact East Ridge Police Department at 423 622-1725 or dial 911.


The Tennessee Court of Appeals has reinstated a lawsuit brought by a former BlueCross employee who was fired after expressing her objection to being required to take a COVID vaccination.

The Appeals Court directed Chancellor Jeffrey Atherton to have further proceedings.

Heather Smith had filed the lawsuit, represented by attorney Steve Duggins.

The Appeals Court noted that Ms. Smith emailed members of the Tennessee General Assembly expressing her concerns and grievances about vaccine mandates. BlueCross fired Ms. Smith

after it found out about her emails.

Ms. Smith sued BlueCross for common law retaliatory discharge.

Chancellor Atherton had dismissed the case.

The Appeals Court said, "We hold that Article I, Section 23 of the Tennessee Constitution, which guarantees the right of citizens to petition the government, is a clear and unambiguous statement of public policy representing an exception to the doctrine of employment-at-will. Smith has alleged enough at this stage to withstand BlueCrosss motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim.

"We reverse the Trial Court and remand for further proceedings consistent with this Opinion."
Air New Zealand last provided earnings guidance for the 2023 financial year to the market on 27 April 2023, and is today providing an update to that guidance.

Since the previous update, the airline has experienced stronger ongoing demand than usually observed at this time of the year, which is typically considered the airlines off-peak period.

In addition to this, US dollar jet fuel prices have declined even further and have been consistently below those assumed in the earnings guidance provided in April.

On the basis of the updates above, and assuming an average jet fuel price for June of US $89 per barrel, the airline now expects earnings before other significant items and taxation for the 2023 financial year to be no less than $580 million. This compares with the prior guidance range given in April of $510 million to $560 million.

Air New Zealand continues to invest in our people, our customers and our digital capabilities. As indicated at the interim results in February 2023, over the next five years the airline is investing approximately $3.5 billion in aircraft and retrofitting alone.

Looking ahead to the 2024 financial year, the airline remains mindful of the uncertain economic environment it is facing into. With more capacity entering the market in the coming months, fares are expected to moderate from the current peaks.

Ends.

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Steel & Tube Shareholder Newsletter June 2023

TEM - Final Results

FSF - Capital Return - Interim Orders Received

June 12th Morning Report

NWF - Aokautere Expansion - Fast-Track Consent Referral

BPG - PEARL DIVER MARKET UPDATE

Meridian / NZAS demand response agreement unconditional

AIA - Auckland Airport FY23-27 price changes

Infratil successfully completes NZ$750 million placement


RE: Blackburn Says Trump Indictment By Justice Department Part Of Vendetta

Senator Blackburn is wrong. It appears that Blackburn and others do not understand the rule of law; nor how to evaluate whether a crime could have been committed. Trumps actions have been very dishonorable and has been viewed as a betrayal to the people of the United States. I am disappointed that Blackburn doesnt support the people of the United States; and chooses to support a twice impeached; rightly indicted ex-president who continuously force responsible people of the United States to question the content of his character. We survived him once and now he wants to be president again.

Trump and some Republicans have claimed that the rest of us have a vendetta against this former president. That is the claim of a narcissistic, self-absorbed failed candidate who cannot admit he lost an election. Also, Senator Blackburn should know that there was no FBI raid on Trumps home. There was an executed subpoena. The bottom line is that every alleged crime that Trump took into the White House when he was elected or committed while he was there is being addressed. These alleged crimes were deferred because he was in office; but not forgotten. If he is not guilty, the rule of law will clear him. If he is guilty, the rule of law will convict him. I would think everyone would want to know the truth. And if you dont want to know the truth; why not? Some doubt that truth rises; but it truly does. And, when you dig for dirtthat is exactly what you get.

So, if there is any truth out there that would warrant an indictment to be issued to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or current President Biden, it will rise to the top. And, the rule of law applies to us all. What Blackburn and other elected officials should do is stop promoting Trumps talking points. I will hear Trump say something (a fact checked lie, denial or deception) and the next thing I know the exact same words are coming out of Republicans mouths in the House of Representatives and Senate to the American people.

Renee Smith

* * *

Ms Smith, in light of your confidence in our current legal system, let me ask you why the FBI held on to Hunter Bidens laptop during the 2020 campaign if that rule of law you cite was in effect for the Biden family? Was it so 50 so-called intelligence experts could cast doubt on its authenticity to take hold in the news and social media?

Why did former FBI chief, Comey, credited with both stopping prosecution of Hillary Clinton as well as her election, just endorse an octogenarian, career politician Joe Biden, who had classified documents for decades in several unsecured locations and polls show a majority in his party dont want him to run again?

Dont you find it more than coincidence that after announcing for president, Trump was indicted in NYC? Now after a House committee has repeatedly and publicly asked the FBI for a document alleged to have evidence of a crime committed by Joe Biden when he was Vice President, Trump is indicted by a federal prosecutor? So why did the FBI hold that document for so long before allowing members of the committee to see it? Were they waiting for this indictment to come down?

Obviously Mike Pence is not being charged as he is no threat to the Deep State. And if you are waiting for the law to play out on the Bidens, you may learn what is really behind decades of UFOs before that ever happens.

There appears to be a pattern here, but I dont expect those who thought Trump was guilty of something, anything, the day he took office to ever believe it. It reminds me of Lewis Grizzards comment about his mother, she believed man didnt go to the moon, but wrasslin was real.

Ralph Miller

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The Trump name is synonymous with legal problems. The Trump University fiasco is a great example, and dont forget their false charity scam. Trump has had hundreds of lawsuits, which is not so uncommon for a businessman, until you bother to look into why he was sued to start with.

The twice impeached occupant of our White House even managed to grift millions of dollars by using his office as leverage to overcharge the Secret Service, and demanding that foreign dignitaries stay at his hotel.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Trump for falsifying New York business records in order to dodge taxes, defrauding banks, and for concealing damaging information and unlawful activities from American Voters before and after the 2016 election.

In May, a jury found Trump liable for sex abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, and awarded her a $5 million settlement. True to form, Trump immediately continued defaming Carroll who in turn filed another suit against him. It was so telling in how rabid Trump and his worshippers are, that it caused the judge in that case to keep the names of the jurors secret.

Every time Trump lands in trouble, he sends out fundraising appeals for money from his cult members. Those worshippers dutifully fork over their cash to help their idol, who boasts that he is a billionaire, to pay for his legal bills. Then, almost on cue, the cult starts playing the victim card blasting, and even threatening the investigators and their family members at the FBI, the DOJ, the Courts, Democrats, and even the media.

This past week we saw another legal problem bearing down on Trump, and this one has the potential to be the biggest one he has ever faced. The Florida Grand Jury empaneled by the DOJ, indicted Trump with 37 criminal counts, 31 of which are Espionage Act violations. He didnt just have documents concerning our nuclear weapons, he had military invasion plans, our defense plans in case we were invaded, and our allies military capabilities.

Republican leaders, including most of those vying for the 2024 nomination, echoed Trumps complaint about the weaponization of the Justice Department. There were a few notable exceptions, such as Chris Christie, Mitt Romney, and Asa Hutchinson, but most that should have known better chose to take the spineless path and attack the DOJ.

Why do Republicans always find fault with our FBI, DHS, DOJ and IRS, the very safeguards protecting our democracy from becoming an oligarchy?

I dont know how the document indictments will play out, even though reading the indictment the case seems clear cut and damning.

Also, over the past year the Fulton County District Attorney has been investigating whether Trump and his minions illegally meddled in the 2020 election. Judging from what has been seen and heard, indictments will be coming out of Georgia real soon. The saddest part is not that charges are forthcoming, its that the district attorney has already warned the members of her Department and the State Courts system to increase security.

Because its Trump, should the New York prosecutor, the Fulton County prosecutor, the DOJ Prosecutor just ignore that laws were broken and refuse to prosecute? We either are a nation of laws, or we are not. Trump is not above the law, and if he is innocent, he and his cult have nothing to worry about by going to trial.

Here is what the Right-Wing faithful doesn't seem to understand. I like Joe Biden, and yes I am a loyal Democrat. But if he broke the law then I have no problem with prosecuting him.

Hunter Biden is a civilian and is entitled to the same rights you and I deserve under the law. But if he broke the law, prosecute him.

After more hearings than you can shake a stick at, along with multiple special prosecutors being put on the case, Hillary Clinton is still free and walking around. If there was a there-there why isnt she in jail? Either Republicans are the ineptest lawyers to ever exist, or she is the most sinister villain to ever walk the earth. Give it a rest about the emails, already.

You see, we Democrats havent built a golden idol of Obama, Biden, or Clinton, and we dont worship at their feet. If they have indeed broken the law, then prosecute them. It is quite one thing to make accusation after accusation against them, and another to prove it with hard evidence.

I can only hope members of Trumps base will admit theyve been played for fools and stop this childish whataboutism game. Most adults gave that elementary school idiocy up long before they reached their teens.

Trump instigated an insurrection in our Capitol Building, and more than 1,033 of the rioters have been arrested. Almost 500 federal defendants have received sentences so far. Trumps time is coming in that act of treason. So, the legal cases are going to continue until Trump is brought to bear for every illegal act he has committed.

Rod Dagnan
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Saturday marks one year since a Chattanooga landmark, the former Highland Park Baptist Church, was destroyed by an intentionally set fire.



The investigation remains ongoing and Chattanooga Fire Department investigators are looking for new information from the public to move the case forward. Tips poured in following the fire, but they did not lead to any arrests.



CFD officials said, "Investigators have worked tirelessly on this case, piecing information and evidence together. The staff from the Redemption to the Nations Church has been extremely helpful throughout this process, assisting the CFD along the way and we appreciate their efforts to aid investigators. We also thank the Chattanooga Police Department, TBI, and ATF for their assistance.

"We have heard from many people who have shared their memories from events held at these well-known Chattanooga structures through the years. Thousands have attended church services, meetings, weddings and graduations there.

"The CFD is dedicated to bringing this case to a close and finding who was responsible for setting the fire."

Anyone with information is asked to call the Tennessee Arson Hotline at 1-800-762-3017. A cash award of up to $5,000 is available for tips that lead to an arrest.
Pixabay/M P

Bandits took forty Bege Baptist Church members hostage in the first week of May while having church service. Several members were miraculously freed, but 16 others were held during captivity. As a result of the Muslims' contribution of money and the purchase of a motorcycle for the bandits, the remaining church members have recently returned to their homes.

16 Members of Bege Baptist Church Returned Home

Based on a report from the Daily Post, on Monday, June 5, Rev. John Joseph Hayab, the state chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), revealed that the 16 worshippers still being held captive were freed on Sunday, June 4. Many freed worshippers reportedly reunited with their families, while those who were injured are currently undergoing medical treatment in a hospital. According to The Guardian, a harmonious and peaceful neighborhood is necessary for the entire growth of the state, and everyone in other regions of the state should strive to live their lives in imitation of the Muslim community in Madala, which lives a life that serves as an example for others.

As mentioned, Rev. Hayab extended his gratitude to the Muslim community in the region, noting that the Muslim community in the area where the worshippers had been kidnapped had contributed money and purchased a motorcycle as part of the ransom needed to secure the release of their Christian brothers and sisters who were being held captive. He also claimed that this is evidence of excellent, loving, and honest neighbors who, in practice, expressed concern for the situation of their brothers and sisters who had been kidnapped and who sincerely wished for their safe return to their homes so that they may continue to live with those around them in peace and harmony. Rev. Hayab added that it demonstrates that good neighbors care about one another. Furthermore, the priest asserted that the Muslim community has also shown that one does not need the education to perform a necessary action, highlighting that Nigerians from all walks of life should be their brothers' protectors to eliminate all forms of danger in every region of the country.

Also Read: Terrorists in Nigeria Killed Rev. Musa Mairimi of Evangelical Church Winning All, Wife Kidnapped

Abduction in Nigeria

An article from The Conversation stated that in the first half of 2021, Nigerian bandits were responsible for aborting more than three thousand people. At the same time, it is estimated that there were around 571 kidnapping incidents in January 2022. The crisis caused by terrorism in Nigeria is a multifaceted situation involving a lot of different interests and actors. Certain criminals are motivated by opportunity, while others are motivated by organization. Banditry is used by terrorists, insurgents, and militants as a method of fundraising for their operations as well as a negotiation tool.

Accordingly, kidnappings for the purpose of demanding a ransom are widespread in Nigeria because the criminals have access to both the financial incentive and the chance to do so, and victims find it more convenient to pay the ransom. On the other hand, eliminating incentives, establishing more stringent deterrents, improving the efficiency of police work, and increasing vigilance are all potentially viable approaches to stop these incidents.

Related Article:Bandits in Nigeria Kidnapped 25 People at Bege Baptist Church
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CatholicVote, a well-known Catholic advocacy organization in the United States, is pleading with parents and other concerned citizens to have their local libraries remove sexually explicit children's literature. The group makes the case that organizations receiving funding from taxpayers shouldn't expose kids to what is considered "pornography."

CatholicVote started its second annual "Hide the Pride" event on June 1 to coincide with libraries and businesses exhibiting rainbow flags and pro-LGBTQ content for gay pride month. This program intends to raise awareness of the growing number of Pride events and LGBTQ-themed children's literature in libraries, especially in blue states.

Catholic Advocacy Group Urges Removal of Sexualized Children's Books from Libraries

According to the article in Fox News, parents are urged by "Hide the Pride" to sign a letter objecting to these books, take down the Pride book displays, borrow the books, and hand the letter to the librarian. In addition to offering a complete catalog of children's literature about sexuality and gender identity, CatholicVote also offers a sample letter that can be printed.

CatholicVote president Brian Burch lamented the transformation of libraries, which were once family-friendly spaces that welcomed everyone, into establishments proudly displaying what he considers "totally inappropriate and pornographic" content. Burch explained to Fox News Digital that the movement seeks to unite parents, people of faith, and concerned Americans to "push back against this assault on childhood innocence."

Burch anticipates that this year's "Hide the Pride" event will become quite popular, and she attributes this to the public backlash against brands like Bud Light and Target. He thinks that more people than ever before are aware of how the LGBT rights movement is intruding on parental rights and public areas.

According to the article shared in Alaska Commons, Burch asserts that this movement has developed past its original ideals of tolerance, equality, and love. He contends that it now seeks to force all Americans to give up their fundamental moral convictions and accept what he sees as its most radical features. Burch cites the boycotts of Target and Bud Light as proof that this campaign is extremely polarizing and has gone beyond appropriate bounds.

Also Read:Kirk Cameron Overwhelmed with Emotion at 10th New Jersey Library Event, Celebrates Families' Support

Controversy Surrounding the 'Hide the Pride' Campaign and LGBTQ Programming in Public Libraries

The American Library Association (ALA) criticized the Catholic lobbying group CatholicVote's "Hide the Pride" campaign as an unethical attempt at censorship. The American Library Association asked libraries to report any attempted book removal and recommended customers express their concerns to nearby Catholic organizations. CatholicVote justified their nonviolent demonstration in an effort to draw attention to what they believed to be sexually explicit material for children.

In the meantime, taxpayer-funded public libraries in the US increased LGBTQ activities for kids, igniting discussions over programming. Supporters emphasize inclusivity, while critics argue against subjecting kids to adult themes. The difficulty for libraries is to retain intellectual freedom while balancing different ideologies.

Related Article: Kohl's Sparks Shopper Uproar as LGBTQ Clothing for Children Draws Controversy: Strong Reactions and Calls of 'Inappropriateness'
Pixabay/ Andrys Stienstra

The Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) has historically decided to ordain women as pastors, marking a significant departure from its tradition. The decision comes after four years of extensive official discussions and debates within the organization.

Ordination of Women

Christianity Today reported that CMA, which consists of approximately 2,000 churches in the United States, saw over 60 percent of its delegates approve the changes at the Alliance's general council held in Spokane, Washington, last week. The CMA aims to rectify this disparity and provide equal opportunities for all aspiring pastors. By recognizing the calling and qualifications of women to serve as pastors, the denomination takes a significant step toward inclusivity and gender equality, as reported. While endorsing the modifications, John Stumbo, the Alliance's president, emphasized acknowledging diverse interpretations of New Testament passages concerning church leadership. Stumbo stated that while the denomination required unity, it did not demand uniformity. As a result, churches that embrace the ordination of women and those that hold a different stance can still collaborate effectively in spreading the gospel.

However, Christian Headlines reported that critics of their viewpoint voiced apprehensions about the potential consequences of ordaining women into leadership positions, cautioning against what they perceived as a "liberal slide." Paul Taylor, the esteemed pastor of Discovery Alliance Church in Missoula, Montana, articulated their stance with conviction. He emphasized the significance of upholding the roles of men within the body of Christ and the authority bestowed upon shepherds by God through His Word. According to Taylor, adopting such changes would jeopardize sacred roles and potentially lead to the withdrawal of God's blessings.

Also Read: Saddleback Church Expelled by Southern Baptist Convention Over Women Pastors Debate

Pope Francis on Ordaining Women

According to the Catholic News Agency, Pope Francis clarified that women cannot be ordained as priests within the Catholic Church. As mentioned, he emphasized the crucial role that women play in the life of the Church, shedding light on the need for further development of theology centered on the "Marian principle." Addressing the question of women's ordination, Pope Francis expressed his unwavering stance, stating, "And why can a woman not enter ordained ministry? It is because the Petrine principle has no place for that." According to the Holy Father, the Petrine principle represents the ministry aspect of the Church, and he referred to it as the "ministerial dimension" associated with ordained service. Additionally, the pope also pointed out the need for further theological exploration of the Marian principle. He acknowledged that a comprehensive theology embracing the role of women as exemplified by the spousal and feminine nature of the Church is yet to be fully developed.

Furthermore, Pope Francis's remarks reaffirm the Catholic Church's position on women's ordination while emphasizing the vital role of women within the Church community. His call for further theological exploration of the Marian principle signals an intention to develop a more comprehensive understanding of women's place in the Church. As the Catholic Church continues to navigate discussions surrounding gender roles and inclusivity, Pope Francis' comments provide insight into his perspective, highlighting the importance of the Petrine and Marian principles in shaping the Church's identity.

Related Article: Southern Baptist Convention Cut Ties with Saddleback Church Over Decision of Ordaining Three Women Pastors
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A young Christian man was reported to have blasphemous images on his mobile phone, which led to the local court in Pakistan handing down a sentence of death against him. It is alleged that the young man shared content that violated religious norms via the app known as WhatsApp.

Death Sentence

Based on a report from Hindustan Times, in response to accusations that he had disseminated blasphemous content on a messaging app, law enforcement apprehended Noman Masih in 2019 and placed him in custody. The prosecution provided evidence through a forensic record taken from Maih's mobile phone, demonstrating that he had communicated the offensive content to others over WhatsApp. The court also heard testimony from several witnesses. As a result, on Tuesday, May 30, a local court in the city of Bahawalpur in Pakistan handed down a death sentence to a Christian man who was 22 years old and levied a punishment of 20,000 or approximately $250.

However, according to Morning Star News, the lawyer representing Noman Masih, Lazar Allah Rakha, asserted that the blasphemy claim against Masih could not be supported by any of the witnesses provided by the police. Additionally, MSN reported that Joseph Jansen, a human rights activist in Pakistan, indicated in his testimony that the investigation into the case was not carried out fairly, which resulted in the defendant being found guilty and sentenced to death. Jansen voiced his dismay and anguish over the fact that a young guy who identifies as Christian was given a death sentence. He also expressed his anxiety over the latest development. Moreover, the accusers and witnesses making false claims against the defendant frequently walk free without consequence.

Accordingly, wrongful claims of blasphemy against members of religious minorities are frequently leveled to resolve personal grudges, property disputes, religious prejudice, or commercial rivalries. Jansen noted that this could be witnessed in several situations, including the case of Mussarat Bibi. Furthermore, Ilyas Samuel, a human rights activist, believed that the High Court would overturn the death sentence handed down by another judge and drop all accusations brought against Noman.

Also Read: North Korean Christian Toddler Sentences to Life in Prison Camp Over Bible Possession, Reveals US State Department Report

Banning Blasphemous Content in Pakistan

Following rumors that surfaced on Saturday, Feb. 4, in the media, Pakistan has disabled the online encyclopedia Wikipedia because it refuses to take down content that could be considered offensive or blasphemous. Outlook reported that the decision to ban Wikipedia was made several days after the Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA) threatened to stop the website if the content regarded as 'blasphemous' was not removed from it after the PTA degraded Wikipedia's services for 48 hours. As per NDTV, the Wikimedia Foundation is the organization in charge of hosting Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia created and revised by individuals worldwide. According to the spokeswoman for the PTA, Wikipedia was contacted and asked to remove or prohibit access to the offending content through a notice.

On the other hand, the possibility of a hearing was made available; nevertheless, the platform did not comply by removing the blasphemous content, nor did it appear before the authority to answer their questions. As mentioned, Pakistan has a mainly Muslim population, and blasphemy is a sensitive issue for them. Thus, restoring the website's services will be considered if the content flagged as unlawful is restricted or removed.

Related Article: Christian Mother Asia Bibis Death Sentence Postponed by Pakistans Supreme Court Justices
Pixabay/Arek Socha

The former employee of Pikes Peak Christian Church, Sara Ann Mock-Butler, has been accused of utilizing about $350,000 in church funds to purchase items for her personal use. These include lingerie and even adult toys.

Church's Former Financial Director's Misconduct

Based on the report from KOAA News5, the arrest document claims that Mock-Butler stole thousands of dollars throughout her unchecked or unsupervised tenure as finance director from 2017 to 2022 and sought to remove proof of this crime just before finding employment elsewhere. As mentioned, after lead Pastor Ross urged Mock-Butler to quit and the new finance director discovered disparities between bank account numbers and financial displays from the church records, the case was brought to the board of directors' attention, who decided to launch an investigation.

The church authorities who conducted the internal inquiry discovered strange transactions from the church's operating account to its credit union account. These payments were reportedly not related to church business in any way. According to Pastor Ross, Mock-Butler lied on the permission form paperwork and frequently double-signed them, which is against the church's rules. Moreover, Detective Williams concluded that Mock-Butler had faked the signatures of three different church leaders to use them on authorization documents.

As per Fox 21 Local News, starting in March 2018, the suspect began using increasingly significant amounts of the church's cash annually. To cover her tracks, she obliterated any record of her financial activities and falsified paperwork to make it look like her acquisitions were lawful. The initial fraud case occurred on March 7, 2018, when Mock-Butler stole $7,000 in cash from the congregation's checking account, then another $2,700 the next day. This was followed by a second occurrence of theft on March 8, 2018, when she stole an extra $1,000. Later in the same month, Mock-Butler made an installment payment to Capitol One of $17,700, wiping off a car loan. While in the bookkeeping records of the church, there was never any remark that stated the reason for the cash withdrawal.

On the other hand, based on the affidavit, only a short time after the initial incident, Mock-Butler used congregation cash to make orders from Chipotle and Amazon and pay her personal insurance premium. Additionally, the suspect indicates that most of the transactions carried out on behalf of the church required prior authorization from a minimum of two people. However, the affidavit discloses that Mock-Butler would often duplicate, sign her name as authorization, submit repeated purchases, or use the permission stamps of other church officials without their consent or knowledge.

Also Read: Church Trial Concludes Former Pastor Stole $300,000 Church Money, Court Asks $26,000 Additional Payment For Penalty

Charges Against Mock-Butler

On Tuesday, May 31, Mock-Butler presented herself at the El Paso County Sheriff's Office in response to an arrest warrant concerning 896 financial-related offenses. According to the report, she paid off a bond of $10,000. Christian Standard reported that the new financial director of the church detected financial irregularities in October 2022, according to the senior pastor, Ross Frisbee.

"For a while [after that], we had to, of course, watch our spending, and some [projects were] put on hold. As far as normal ministry, things have been going well. The church responded very generously," Pastor Frisbee asserted. In addition, the pastor expressed his gratitude to the congregation for continuing to put their faith in the team of employees as they work toward improving the system of checks and balances going forward.

Related Article: Former Employee of Saint Matthew Catholic Church and School Sentenced 2 Years in Prison After Stealing $574k For Gambling and Vacation
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Members of the Worcester community voiced concern after the zoning board approved the establishment of a modest residential area at the Zion Lutheran Church. The facility aims to create a place of refuge inside the church walls featuring six bedrooms.

Zoning Board's Approval

After its meeting on Monday, Jun 5, the Zoning Board of Appeals in Worcester, Massachusetts, granted special permits to allow a temporary family home to be housed in a church in the Greendale section of the city, despite screams from the general public. Mass Live reported that Worcester Community Housing Resources purchased the Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church located at 39 and 41 Whitmarsh Ave. to lease the sanctuary space, social hall, and other areas back to the church while renovating the remaining complex into its offices, a small six-bedroom temporary family shelter, and upgrading its kitchen.

However, some residents in the neighborhood have voiced their opposition to establishing the facility. Throughout the past few weeks, they have voiced their worries about the potential impact the temporary shelter could have on the market value of their properties and the general safety of the community. Several community members have come together to support the facility, arguing that initiatives similar to it are required to assist in resolving the growing problem of homelessness in the city.

Also Read: Historic Church Overcomes Devastation and Rebuilds Stronger than Before after March 2020 Tornado: Churches As Shelter For Natural Calamity

Community's Concern Over Church's Plan to Open Small Homeless Shelter

MSN reported that although the zoning board determined that the designs complied with zoning regulations and ultimately gave clearance during the hearing on Monday night, Jun 5, public opinion regarding the shelter was quite divisive and sometimes contentious. According to Jason Callahan, who lives close to the church, they raise their concerns because shelters tend to attract individuals with untreated mental illness. "And we're not saying don't have a shelter, we're saying move it downtown," he asserted.

Moreover, as per Spectrum News 1, Alan Kusy, who has lived in the area for a long time, is another resident who has expressed his disapproval of the zoning board's decision. He lives on Summerhill Avenue and feels the six-unit shelter will burden the community, adding that it will "affect our pocketbooks." Kesy also pointed out that "They Will Tell You 'Oh No, Your Property Values Will Go Up.'" Given the current circumstances, their properties may increase. But it is quite unlikely that they will increase by as much as everyone else's.

On the other hand, Trish Appert, the Friendly House's executive director, recognized that many individuals still need to be more comfortable with the notion. Nevertheless, she said a few neighbors approached her at a recent community gathering to tell her they had altered their minds and supported the initiative. She intends to carry on those discussions with the locals despite the fact that the shelter has been given the go-ahead at this point.

Furthermore, the pastor of Zion Lutheran Church, Andrew Borden, has come under fire from congregation members, such as Kusy, who believe that he is "running the church like a business." At the zoning board meeting, several attendees expressed sentiments comparable to his, but the Reverend Aaron Payson of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Worcester backed him. In addition, the shelter is scheduled to reopen in 2024 once the necessary improvements have been completed. People living in Worcester reportedly can challenge the verdict.

Related Article: California's Calvary Church Shelters Ukrainian Refugees Fleeing To America Amid War With Russia
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As a result of their conflicting opinions on LGBTQ rights, the Quest Church decided to leave the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC) denomination voluntarily. The megachurch in Seattle reportedly welcomes members of the LGBTQ Christian community who can even be a pastor, while the members of the Evangelical Covenant Church do not accept this.

Different Stances on LGBTQ Rights

The Evangelical Covenant Church stated that the decision to move the vote on the compulsory removal of Quest from the roster of churches to the 137th Annual Meeting was made by the Covenant Executive Board in October. The agenda for the assembly, which will take place between June 29 and July 1, was made public under the rules and regulations of the denomination 30 days before the event was scheduled to take place. Action will be taken on Quest as part of item 10b of the agenda titled "Action on Involuntary Removal from Membership." Even though the agenda cannot be changed any further before the meeting, the moderator of the Annual Meeting intends to amend the motion that the Quest Church be voluntarily expelled from the meeting since the church recently announced its disaffiliation from its denomination.

Church Leaders reported that Rev. Gail Song Bantum, the head pastor of Quest, posted on Facebook that the church had informed the ECC leaders of its separation from the organization that morning via a formal letter that Quest had given to the denominational affiliation. As mentioned, a vote against excluding Quest and another LGBTQ-affirming congregation, Awaken Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, was scheduled for this summer within the ECC when Quest voluntarily disaffiliated itself from the organization. "We have discerned that, to be the body of Christ, we must embrace the fullness of God's life in all of our members, including our LGBTQIA+ siblings," she asserted.

Moreover, Rev. Song Bantum observed that this view is not held despite their uniqueness or values as an ECC church; instead, it is because of these identities and ideals. The congregation would reportedly leave the denomination both heartbroken and encouraged by how the Holy Spirit is working in their community, despite the ECC's refusal to accept God's activity among them.

Also Read: Christian Leader Renamed 'Pride Month' as 'Fidelity Month' to Highlight Importance of Fidelity to God

Quest Church Support on LGBTQ Community

According to a report from MSN, in 2001, the Reverend Eugene Cho, who left the church in 2018 and now serves as the leader of Bread for the World, a prominent Christian advocacy organization committed to alleviating hunger, launched Quest Church. At that time, the church was holding its weekly services at Interbay Covenant Church. Song Bantum said that Interbay donated their church building to Quest, everything the church possessed, and who they were in 2007, characterizing the church's legacy of giving and revolutionary inclusivity in response to the Spirit. She also mentioned that this practice continued in 2021 when Quest completely affirmed their LGBTQIA+ siblings in theology and practice.

Accordingly, the LGBTQ community celebrates Pride Month every June, and Quest's social media accounts incorporate rainbow-colored logos with messages of encouragement for a good Pride Month. The organization's website characterizes it as "fully affirming." Their website shows everyone who "calls Quest home" is eligible for membership and leadership roles within the organization, including the pastor job. This includes but is not limited to, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual, and queer people. However, this led to conflict between the ECC and those who led its congregation. The ECC has requested its ministers not to participate in same-sex marriages since 2015, despite including LGBTQ people as not one of its core teachings.

Related Article: Christ Methodist Church Decides to Leave United Methodist Church Due to New Stance on LGBT Rights, Paid $65,000
Unsplash/Giovanni Gagliardi

The St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School is set to open its doors in the autumn of 2024 after receiving clearance from the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board. This historic choice creates the first religiously affiliated charter school in the country, providing a distance learning option based on the Catholic heritage of academic excellence.

The virtual school seeks to enable kids throughout Oklahoma to reach their full potential by recognizing the value of offering varied educational environments that cater to each child's unique requirements. It aspires to help underserved groups in particular, such as kids from rural areas, Native American and Hispanic communities, and those with specific educational needs.

St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School Approved to Open in Oklahoma

According to the article in Oklahoman, the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School will function similarly to other virtual school options already available in the state, but with a base built on the Catholic intellectual tradition that has been supported by the Catholic Church for centuries. Since the first Catholic school opened in the United States in the 1700s, this tradition has served as a symbol of superior education.

Pope Francis highlighted the incorporation of cutting-edge teaching strategies and best practices, which promote the all-around development of people while highlighting the distinctiveness of Catholic education. The St. Isidore virtual school will take a comprehensive approach to education by fostering the intellectual, practical, and emotional components of learning.

Even though parents and families are a child's first teachers, the St. Isidore virtual school will cater to the needs of thousands of children in Oklahoma who have difficulties in traditional educational settings. In the article that was shared in Yahoo! News, students with learning disabilities like dyslexia who might not have access to or enough assistance from specialized programs in their local communities will now have the chance to flourish in a setting designed to meet their needs.

The St. Isidore virtual school will be accessible to all kids, regardless of their physical location, religious preferences, or cultural origins, just like Oklahoma's more than 30 existing Catholic schools. This dedication to inclusivity guarantees that all children in Oklahoma, regardless of their unique circumstances, have access to high-quality education.

Also Read: Oklahoma Composed to Welcome the Nation's First Religious Charter School

Governor Kevin Stitt Applauds Approval of St. Isidore Catholic Virtual School, While Attorney General Gentner Drummond Raises Constitutional Concerns

The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board's recent decision to allow the founding of the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School has been praised by Governor Kevin Stitt. According to the article in CNN, Governor Stitt praised the board's decision as a triumph for the state's religious and educational freedoms in a statement.

The people of Oklahoma, according to Governor Stitt, firmly support religious freedom and an educational system that gives families cutting-edge options. He stressed that the state of Oklahoma had delivered a clear statement that religious discrimination would not be accepted on this day, which the nation had observed.

Gentner Drummond, the attorney general of Oklahoma, raised questions about the decision's legitimacy and suggested that if a contract for the religious school is signed, there may be grounds for legal action. Drummond stated that it is against Oklahoma law and not in the best interest of taxpayers to approve any publicly sponsored religious institution.

He attacked the board members, pointing out that their backing of the religious charter school violates their oath of office and subjects the state to potentially expensive legal repercussions. Drummond expressed his dissatisfaction, noting that the board members' conduct not only jeopardized their own integrity but also exposed the state to potential legal and financial penalties.

Related Article: First Religious Charter School Approved in the US as Oklahoma Grants Official Authorization
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Pope Francis recently cautioned believers in an interview about the authenticity of reports of the Virgin Mary appearing, saying that not all sightings are true. The pope did not mention a specific occurrence specifically, but it appears that he was referring to Maria Giuseppe Scarpulla, who lured thousands of pilgrims to a village outside of Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary in her possession dripped blood.

The pope stressed the value of focusing on Jesus instead of the Madonna during an interview with Rai 1 on Sunday. He also warned against placing an excessive amount of emphasis on Madonna's representations. He voiced worry over selfish Marian's devotion and asked both those who practiced it and those who promoted it to reconsider their methods.

Pope Francis Warns Against False Apparitions of Virgin Mary

According to the article in The Guardian, this interview was conducted just after inhabitants of Trevignano requested Pope Francis' help regarding Maria Giuseppe Scarpulla, also known as Gisella Cardia. A statue of the Virgin Mary is housed in a glass case in a park that overlooks Lake Bracciano, and for the past five years, Scarpulla has held monthly celebrations there. The statue, which Scarpulla purchased from a Catholic shrine in Medjugorje, Bosnia, is said to have displayed miraculous occurrences, including apparitions and bloody tears. Scarpulla also claimed to have received communications from Madonna.

While his diocese conducts an inquiry to confirm the validity of the purported phenomena around the statue, the local bishop, Marco Salvi, recently pleaded with pilgrims to forgo visiting the place on the third of the month. In search of comfort and in the hope of a miraculous cure for life-threatening illnesses, a large number of people had been flocking to the location.

A private investigator's assertions that the blood spots on the monument were caused by a pig have now provoked a court investigation into Scarpulla. According to the article shared in Irish Times, additionally, a few of her supporters have come forward and said they were duped. Scarpulla, who had previously been found guilty of bankruptcy fraud, started a foundation to raise money purportedly for the construction of a facility for sick children. But according to a guy who spoke to La Repubblica, he and his wife gave her foundation 123,000 (106,000) before realizing they had made a "spectacular mistake."

Also Read:Pope Francis Extends Support, Solidarity to Suffering Chinese Catholics

Convicted of Bankruptcy Fraud

The subject of the alleged Marian apparitions at Trevignano, Maria Giuseppe Scarpulla, has previously been found guilty of bankruptcy fraud. The article in WION stated the center for sick children, was supposed to be constructed by the foundation that Scarpulla formed. It has since been revealed, nevertheless, that she solicited funds under false pretexts.

After an investigation into allegedly supernatural occurrences involving the Virgin Mary statue in their possession was launched in April of this year, Scarpulla and her husband left Trevignano. The statue's glass case was to be demolished as part of the study as well. Scarpulla expresses her determination to carry on her work despite these occurrences and stays unmoved and unaffected. Scarpulla has a history of bankruptcy fraud convictions, which casts doubt on her honesty and motivations. This information raises new questions for the investigation and casts doubt on the veracity of the alleged miracles connected to the statue.

Related Article: Pope Francis Honors 21 Coptic Martyrs Slain by ISIS, Includes Them in Catholic Calendar
While risking its own safety, a parachurch organization in Pakistan is boldly caring for its refugee neighbors from Afghanistan.

A large-scale human tragedy unfolded in Afghanistan with the country embroiled in conflict, withdrawal of US troops, an unstable government, and a militant rule that led many families to flee Afghanistan. Not long ago, we saw horrifying images of people clinging on to an Air Force plane in hopes of a better life. Some plunged to their death, never to leave their war-torn land.

According to the UNHCR, the overall situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated since 2021, with significant consequences among the most vulnerable. 3.4 million people are currently internally displaced by conflict. Over 1 million IDPs have returned to their places of origin and 1.6 million new arrivals have been witnessed in neighboring countries. Iran and Pakistan, neighboring countries of Afghanistan, also host some 2.3 million registered Afghan refugees, as well as other Afghans with different statuses. (Source: UNHCR)

Pakistan has been fighting its own inadequacies while taking in refugeesnot just since the Afghanistan crisis, but as early as 1979. Pakistan has had 600,000 new arrivals from Afghanistan since 2021. However, Afghan refugees took to the streets there this year to protest the over a year-and-a-half long wait theyve had to endure for their visas (and resettlement in the United States). The delay in approvals has proved costly for Afghan families struggling to make ends meet, who also deal with a lack of access to work and education and the post-traumatic stress of war (UNHCR).

An uplifting story of light and hope amidst unseen struggles is that of a parachurch organization in Pakistan that is caring for its refugee neighbors from Afghanistan.

A local ministry leader, a true good Samaritan, Samad*, shares his personal ministry experiences of walking alongside the Afghans in their grief, sorrows, and struggles. Samads organization Open House* welcomed a group of 50 Afghan refugee families to their safe space. He was surprised to learn that they turned out to be professing Christians. They fled to Pakistan in hopes of religious liberty, freedom, and a new life. Their initial hesitancy to disclose their identities was owing to fear, but their faith has kept them going through some of the unimaginable seasons of life. What a testimony of God-breakthroughs in tough terrains!

Samad and his team have been engaged in an open house ministry to men, women and young children for the last 2 years. The spiritual care, counseling, and mentoring Open House has provided have been a balm to wounded souls. While the organizations initial strategy was to reach out to the majority faith people groups in their own country, God led them to this ministry of compassion, prayer, and hospitality among Afghans.

Samads organization is involved in church planting, evangelism, and discipleship. They operate behind closed doors because of security risks. However, they are eager to expand their services and offer peer-to-peer support for young men and their families. Samad is aware of security concerns and says its a tough turf to work in. He boldly says that God empowers him and his team to step out in faith. He believes God is working in the heart of Afghan refugees as the local ministry helps them with support in relocation, job training, language skills, and cultural adjustment.

Samads ministry is a great example for churches who want to develop robust community engagement models and guidelines (which should include processes and instruction to equip local church members to care and receive their neighbors well).

Why the global Church should be the first line of response: Stepping out in love

The Lord sees and watches over the foreigner  Psalm 149:16

Frontline work in the field can be hard, messy and often underappreciated. In unprecedented times like this, with disasters and wars at stake, the role of the global Church is critical. Churches can be open houses and forts of stability, offering love, empathy, and support for communities in distress. Churches are called to be aware of the needs not only of the local community but also of the global Church. A lived-out faith inspires love in action and bolsters strong ties between the church and the neighbors in the community who seek help.

Church leadership must prayerfully engage their congregations in identifying, caring, and equipping willing members to be involved in Christ-exalting community workboth locally and globally. Extending a hand of friendship, hospitality, and compassion will go a long way in shaping an individuals future and facilitating healing from trauma.

What we can do: Come together and pray

Samads team have worked with small groups over the last 2 years. Small focus groups help the team to have peer-to-peer support and individual care. Samad shares the story of a young man who came as a new believer. Seeing the love demonstrated through Samads team and their work, his wife was moved to seek and follow Jesus.

Would we as the Church come together to remember and pray for Samad and the work of the global persecuted Church:

 For safety and protection for Samad and his team as they work among the Afghan people group while facing security risks.

 For wisdom and strength as they train local believers to live out the faith.

 For Open Doors to reach out to families in need.

 For scores of Afghan families who dream of a better life and opportunities (employment, training, etc.).

 For us to be a sensitive, caring, and compassionate community to welcome the stranger at the table.

While this young leader faces a risk to his life, the love of Christ compels him to step into the unknown and share that love with people uprooted and in unfamiliar terrain.

Beyond international relief and humanitarian efforts, there is no doubt that God is still at work as small-scale ministries continue to toil, serve, and testify of Gods work in the dark, unseen places.

*Names of both the organization and the leader have been changed to protect their identities.

The Better Samaritan blog is produced by the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, which offers a M.A. in Humanitarian & Disaster Leadership and a Trauma Certificate. To learn more and apply, visit our website

Joanna Dhanabalan is an alum of HDIs MA in Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership program and works as Director of Communications at Outreach. Her faith drives her vocation and her calling to serve communities in the unseen. She is involved in Global Diaspora ministries working among young professionals, refugees and immigrants in Chicagoland.
From drug lord to pastor: Herman Mendoza shares powerful testimony of prison transformation

Herman Mendoza's journey from being a drug dealer and gang member to becoming a devoted Christian pastor, driven by a strong desire to spread the Gospel, was an incredibly challenging transformation. He acknowledges that it was God's mercy that saved his soul during his darkest moments.

Mendoza vividly remembers spending many years involved in drug abuse and selling, often engaged in gang-related activities that repeatedly led him to prison. However, everything changed when he was faced with an imminent 18-year sentence. According to Mendoza, if it hadn't been for God's intervention, he would have never experienced freedom again.

In a May 26 episode of Delafe Testimonies, Mendoza openly shared his journey from battling severe drug addiction and involvement in drug lord activities to his profound transformation through Christ.

"Trust God in all circumstances," Mendoza said. "The Bible says that 'We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us' in Philippians 4:13. And I think once we apply that principle and say, 'God, sometimes things are beyond our control and beyond our strength and beyond our ability, but I'm going to seek after help.'"

Today, Mendoza is the lead pastor at Iglesia Promesa Internacional, a Spanish-speaking church located in New York City. He also serves as the director of PowerHouse Kids Ministry, a vital part of Promise Ministries International in the same city.

Mendoza is the author of the book Shifting Shadows: How a New York Drug Lord Found Freedom in the Last Place He Expected.

He also serves as one of the speakers for The 4/14 Window Movement, a global initiative that seeks to raise the next generation to be the leaders of tomorrow through Christ.

Mendoza has spoken at conferences, schools and churches across the globe, spreading the message of hope, faith, grace and redemption through Jesus Christ. He regularly uses his life story to advise those who attend his church and those who hear his Christian testimony.

"When you seek that help in all the right places, people within the Body of Christ, the Church, that can give a good counsel, that can give a good direction and good advice, then that's where it starts," he added.

"And remember, everyone has gifts and talents. As the Scripture says, 'Your gift will make room for you.' You just have to find that and apply it and let that be that tool through Christ that can really bring about your aspirations and your goals to come to fruition."

The biblical advice Mendoza frequently imparts today took him some time to grasp fully, he said. He had to endure personal struggles before he could witness any breakthroughs in his life journey, which now enables him to offer valuable insights and lessons based on his own experiences.

Yearning for his place

Mendoza grew up in Queens, New York, in a family with roots in the Dominican Republic. His parents migrated to America in the early 1960s with Mendoza's two older brothers. Over time, his parents expanded their family and had three more children, with Mendoza being the youngest among five boys.

"It was really challenging at home because of five brothers, five boys. You can only imagine the competitiveness and everyone trying to find their identity within the household. But I was the youngest, and so I was always taken care of, looked after," Mendoza recalled.

He added that he yearned for brotherhood and a sense of belonging.

Mendoza recalled that during his early teenage years in the 1980s and 1990s, as he lived in the culturally diverse community of Queens, he began observing emerging trends. He became aware of the growing influence of hip-hop culture and the unfortunate rise of teenage gangs in the area.

"I wanted to kind of fit in and be a part of that culture during the time. So I got involved with some young people in the community, which were local gang members, and I was introduced to marijuana, basically [at] 12 years of age.  I had two other siblings that were also sort of involved with me," Mendoza detailed.

"We started to consume marijuana and alcohol. And that really caused a lot of problems because my parents were somewhat noticing my behavior. They noticed that I was really changing in my attitude towards them, towards school."

At 13, Mendoza became a member of a gang.

During one violent gang altercation, Mendoza said his friend was shot with a firearm and later died.

"I thought that was going to shake my core, right? It was going to change my behavior, but it didn't. I continued to be involved in his gang and consume drugs and smoke weed. And then eventually, that led me to use cocaine," Mendoza said.

During the early 1980s, cocaine became popular on the streets, influenced by a desire to be part of Hollywood culture. Mendoza succumbed to this trend and became deeply addicted to cocaine.

Driven by his addiction, Mendoza approached a local drug dealer in his neighborhood, offering to sell drugs. He started selling small amounts of cocaine in a specific area of Queens to sustain his drug habit.

Landing behind bars

Mendoza said his cocaine habit eventually drew him into heroin use as a young teenager.

"[My parents] noticed my behavior that I was coming home drugged out. But, they didn't know what to do. They didn't know how to interact with me. They didn't know how to address the situation, being from the Dominican Republic, immigrants," Mendoza recounted.

During a gathering with male friends, Mendoza participated in a robbery, which resulted in his confinement in a juvenile detention facility in the Bronx for approximately a year.

Upon his release, Mendoza's parents reached a breaking point and sent him to the Dominican Republic to live with his grandparents. The intention was for him to attend a private school and undergo a positive transformation.

But after a period of time in the Dominican Republic, Mendoza returned to his parent's home in New York. His grandparents reported that he was consistently skipping school and returning home intoxicated each night.

In New York, Mendoza sank deeper into drug abuse and got increasingly involved in the drug trade, ultimately leading to his incarceration in a detention center.

To his astonishment, the detention center where he ended up was the same one where his brother was serving his sentence.

When Mendoza first encountered his brother in the detention center, he was struck by a noticeable change in him.

"[My brother] looks at me, and he just extends his hand up to me and he says, 'Hallelujah, praise the Lord.' And I look at my brother with indifference. I'm like, 'What is he talking about? Praise the Lord. Hallelujah. We're in jail.  He's lost his mind.' So, he's like, 'You know God loves you. You don't understand. I've been praying for you. I've been praying for your salvation,'" Mendoza said.

As days turned into weeks, Mendoza experienced frequent feelings of profound sadness and a strong desire for inner peace. He admits that repentance was not at the forefront of his thoughts.

Learning from his attorneys that he was potentially facing a sentence of up to 18 years in prison significantly impacted Mendoza's state of mind.

God's transforming power

After learning about the severity of his potential sentence, Mendoza's brother invited him to attend a chapel service in the detention center.

During the service, Mendoza listened to testimonies from fellow inmates, some of whom were facing life sentences for serious crimes like murder. These individuals shared their stories of redemption through the grace of the Lord.

One particular inmate took the stage and started preaching a message that resonated deeply with Mendoza. He strongly believed that the words spoken were specifically intended for him to hear as a direct message from God.

"The [inmate] said, 'There's a gentleman here ... amongst 55 inmates here, [who] has been chasing after things, and those things have led him down the road of destruction. And he is seeking after peace.' And this is the word that I felt that God was telling me. I had been telling God, 'I want peace. All I need is peace. I'm going crazy in prison,'" Mendoza recounted.

"And as I'm sitting in the back, the pastor said, 'There's someone that's been telling God that He wants peace.' He said, 'The peace that God can give you surpasses all of your understanding. You know who you are. God can change your life.' I just felt this peace come on me. And I knew it was for me. I was like, 'Man, how does this inmate know my story?'"

After the inmate concluded the sermon, he invited Mendoza to come forward. On that significant day, Mendoza made the life-changing decision to surrender his life to Christ.

While incarcerated, Mendoza dedicated himself to studying the Bible and theology. Both he and his brother reached out to theology schools, expressing their desire for educational resources.

Graciously, the schools provided them with complimentary educational materials.

Eventually, Mendoza assumed the role of head pastor at the detention center chapel, witnessing numerous inmates have transformative encounters with Christ.

To his surprise, Mendoza was given a reduced sentence of five years and six months instead of 18 years.

Throughout the remaining period of his sentence, Mendoza persevered in preaching the Word of God and engaging in Bible studies with fellow inmates until his eventual release.

"As I was released, I was crossing that bridge from the island of Rikers Island, which is an island where 10 jails are located. And as I went over, and I was physically free, I got on my knees and said, 'God, thank you. Lord, thank you for giving me freedom," Mendoza continued.
Instagram connects pedophiles to network of child sex abuse content, researchers say

Instagram has created a task force to investigate researchers' claims that its algorithms connected pedophiles to underage sexual content.

An investigation into the Meta-owned social media website by The Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that its services cater to people who wish to view illicit materials by connecting them to sellers of such content through its recommendation system.

Instagram's recommendation systems are intended to connect people online with shared interests.

As the newspaper reported Wednesday, the researchers behind the investigation discovered that the social media website allowed users to search for the hashtags "#pedowh**e" and "#preteensex," connecting them to accounts advertising child-sex material.

The Christian Post attempted to use these hashtags in Instagram's search bar on Thursday, but the search did not yield any results.

According to the report, the accounts offering child sex abuse material post menus of content instead of publishing it openly. The Standford Internet Observatory found that some accounts also sell videos of children harming themselves and performing sexual acts with animals. For a price, children are even available for "meet-ups."

The distribution or production of child pornography is prohibited under federal law, and violators face severe penalties.

In response to a Thursday inquiry from CP about the WSJ report, a Meta spokesperson condemned child exploitation as a "horrific crime," assuring that the company works to prevent it on its platforms and supports the prosecution of the criminals behind it.

"Predators constantly change their tactics in their pursuit to harm children, and that's why we have strict policies and technology to prevent them from finding or interacting with teens on our apps, and hire specialist teams who focus on understanding their evolving behaviors so we can eliminate abusive networks," the spokesperson wrote.

The Meta representative shared that, between 2020 and 2022, the team dismantled 27 abusive networks. In January 2023, the team deactivated over 490,000 accounts for violating the company's child safety policies.

Meta also has "detailed and robust policies" against child abuse, nudity or exploitation, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and inappropriate interactions with children, with the spokesperson providing a link to such policies.

"We're continuously exploring ways to actively defend against this behavior, and we set up an internal task force to investigate these claims and immediately address them," the spokesperson continued.

"For example, we fixed a technical issue that unexpectedly prevented certain user reports from reaching content reviewers, we provided updated guidance to our content reviewers to more easily identify and remove predatory accounts, and we restricted thousands of additional search terms and hashtags on Instagram. We're committed to continuing our work to protect teens, obstruct criminals, and support law enforcement in bringing them to justice."

Providing some background on the issue, the Meta spokesperson noted that WSJ's reporting showed that child sex abuse material is not shared openly on the company's platforms, highlighting that the article stated "accounts offering to sell illicit sex material generally don't publish it openly."

The spokesperson also stressed that the report did not find evidence that child sex abuse material is traded on Meta's platforms, pointing out that the WSJ report acknowledged the accounts selling it often link "to off-platform content trading sites."

The spokesperson noted that the report found such accounts may connect accounts that "advertise child-sex material for sale."

"To take on predators who attempt to use our services to connect online, we hire specialists with backgrounds in law enforcement and work with child safety experts and organizations to identify these networks, monitor their latest tactics and eliminate them," the Meta representative stated.

"We know predators may attempt to set up multiple accounts to evade our enforcement, so when they violate certain child safety policies, we disable the accounts held by the account holder and restrict the device from setting up future accounts."

Between May 27 and early June 2, Meta automatically blocked over 29,000 devices for violating the company's Instagram child safety policies, according to the spokesperson.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation lists Instagram on the organization's 2023 Dirty Dozen's List of mainstream contributors to sexual exploitation.

"Instagram has enabled predators to reach children for far too long," NCOSE Vice President Haley McNamara told CP Thursday, adding that NCOSE is "glad to see Instagram take some action to remove pedophile networks, but the social media giant must continue to work proactively to prevent this from continuing to happen on a mass scale  without waiting for bad press."

McNamara recommended several systemic improvements Instagram could make to prevent sexual exploitation, such as "investing in technology to scan for and block sexually explicit content in posts and messages."

McNamara also suggested that the social media website prohibits accounts, hashtags, comments, and content sexualizing minors. In addition, she advised the website to restrict adult Instagram users from seeing minors on a "suggested users" list or "discover people" page and to remove or limit high-risk features such as "Vanish Mode" for young teens.
Criminal prostitution case against Pastor John Blanchard is sound, special prosecutor finds

William Blaine, a special prosecutor appointed to review whether a prostitution-related case against Rock Church International Senior Pastor John Blanchard in Virginia Beach should be reopened, has concluded that the criminal charges against the pastor are "sound" but has decided not to refile the case.

The decision comes after what outspoken members of the public saw as Blanchard receiving special treatment from Chesterfield County Commonwealth's Attorney Stacey Davenport.

Blaine, who is Brunswick County Commonwealth's Attorney, wrote in a June 2 letter to two Chesterfield judges cited by The Virginian-Pilot that it wouldn't be appropriate for him to re-file the case because Blanchard is currently abiding by the terms of a deal he struck with the Chesterfield County Commonwealth's Attorney's Office even though the criminal charge was "sound."

"Again without going into detail about what the new evidence is, the new evidence  in my respected opinion  does not affect the prosecution of what happened on that [offense] date in October of 2021," Blaine wrote. "The evidence, if admissible, might be found to bolster the government's case against Defendant."

Blanchard was among 17 men accused of solicitation of prostitution after an online sting operation by police on Oct. 29, 2021. The married father of two was charged with solicitation of prostitution of a minor and use of a vehicle to promote prostitution, which are felonies. He was arrested at a hotel where he was supposed to meet a detective posing as a 17-year-old girl.

After almost a year of legal maneuvering, however, the charges against Blanchard were withdrawn or nolle prossed ahead of a criminal trial last October. A case that is nolle prossed means prosecutors could bring those charges again.

A report from the Chesterfield County Police Department said Davenport cited a "lack of evidence" in not moving forward with the case against Blanchard.

Attorney and Republican state Delegate Tim Anderson, who represents the Virginia Beach area, showed in information released on Facebook that the case against the megachurch pastor was dismissed only after a discussion between Davenport and the pastor's defense attorney.

The two agreed that Blanchard would do a psychosexual evaluation and sex offender-related counseling in exchange for tabling the matter.

Blaine argued that if people still aren't satisfied with Davenport's actions, they should speak loudly at the polls. Davenport was first elected in 2019 and is up for re-election this year against Republican challenger Thomas McKenna in the county's June 20 primary.

"If enough people are not satisfied with a particular outcome, there are political remedies to change members of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Indeed, in every decision I make, for example, on plea agreements in Brunswick, I have to consider whether that decision can be defended as fairly representing justice especially if it might not be the politically popular decision with the voters," Blaine noted. "Such is the nature of elected prosecutors."

Chesterfield County Police Chief Jeffrey Katz, who previously criticized Davenport's decision in Blanchard's case, told the publication said he felt validated by the special prosecutor's findings and defended the work done by his department to present sufficient evidence.

"The Brunswick Commonwealth's Attorney validated what I've publicly said all along  the Chesterfield County Police Department conducted a competent and compelling investigation," he noted. "This was never about politics  it was about standing up for men and women doing high-quality work on behalf of others."
Republican rivals react to Trump's indictment: 'No one is above the law'

Former President Donald Trump has been indicted over his reported possession of classified documents, which led to a raid of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida last summer.

In a series of posts on the social media platform Truth Social Thursday, Trump stated that federal officials informed his attorneys that he was being charged in federal court over what the former president called "box hoaxes."

The indictment, released publicly on Friday, consists of 37 federal charges against Trump, including 31 counts of "willful retention of national defense information." The document specifically alleges that Trump, "without authorization, retained at the Mar-a-Lago club documents relating to the national defense."

It also charges Trump and an associate with conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation and making false statements and representations.

The charges come as Trump is seeking to return to the White House as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2024 presidential election.

After noting that he had been summoned to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami next Tuesday, Trump declared his innocence and stressed that he is "currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in the polls of the 2024 Presidential Election."

Special Counsel Jack Smith, tasked by the U.S. Department of Justice with investigating the former president's handling of classified documents, elaborated on the indictment at a brief press conference Friday.

"Today, an indictment was unsealed, charging Donald J. Trump of felony violations of our national security laws, as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice," Smith said. "This indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida."

Smith vowed to "seek a speedy trial in this matter, consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused."

Trump leads his closest rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, by 30.8 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls sampling Republican primary voters' intentions in the primary.

He maintains a lead of 1.8 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls surveying voters about a hypothetical rematch with President Joe Biden.

Trump's current and former rivals have issued statements responding to the news of his indictment, which ranged from condemnation of the candidate's behavior to allegations of politicization at the U.S. Department of Justice.

The following pages highlight four reactions to the Trump indictment.

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Ma Ying-jeou Foundation plans to invite mainland students to Taiwan

Xinhua) 13:04, June 09, 2023

TAIPEI, June 8 (Xinhua) -- The Taiwan-based Ma Ying-jeou Foundation announced on Thursday that it is planning to invite 50 college students from the mainland to visit the island in mid-July.

According to the planned schedule released at a press conference, the mainland students from five universities, including Hunan University which Ma Ying-jeou visited in April, will be led to several Taiwan universities and engage in dialogue with their peers.

The trip is estimated to last for nine days and will include stops at some well-known scenic spots and relic sites on the island, said the foundation.

The executive director of the foundation Hsiao Hsu-tsen said he had called on the island's mainland-affairs authority to prudently consider the plan and resume normal exchanges across the Taiwan Strait as soon as possible.

From late March to early April, Taiwan former leader Ma Ying-jeou led a group of Taiwan students visiting several cities on the mainland, such as Shanghai, Wuhan and Changsha, during which the delegation had exchanges with mainland college students.

During the exchanges, Ma personally invited mainland students to visit Taiwan, said Hsiao, adding that since May, the foundation has been working on the invitation, and the mainland has been actively responding to these efforts.

"This shows that it is the common aspiration of both sides of the Strait to have exchanges with each other," said Hsiao.

He added that the invitation is conducive to conveying more kindness and message of peace and promoting the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
5 controversial things Pat Robertson said while hosting The 700 Club

Notable televangelist and conservative Christian political activist Pat Robertson announced last week that he is stepping down as host of Christian Broadcasting Network's The 700 Club after more than 50 years.

The 91-year-old still plans to make guest appearances and the program will now be hosted by his son, Gordon Robertson, who has co-hosted the show in the past.

During his long tenure as the program's host, Robertson didn't shy away from hot-button issues, including abortion, homosexuality, feminism, 9/11 and Middle East politics.

At times, comments from guests on his program led to public backlashes, such as when the Rev. Jerry Falwell suggested some blame for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, should be placed on feminists, liberal groups and homosexuals.

Shortly after that broadcast, Robertson released a statement clarifying that he held no one other than the terrorists and the people and nations who have enabled and harbored them responsible for [the] attacks on this nation.

Over the years, Robertson himself received widespread attention and periodic backlash for comments he made while hosting The 700 Club.

The following pages highlight times Robertson garnered controversy while hosting The 700 Club.

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Elizabeth Sherrill, author who helped 'elevate the impact' of Christian publishing, dies at 95

Christian author, editor and publisher Elizabeth Sherrill died last month at the age of 95.

Alongside her husband, John Sherrill, she co-founded Chosen Books in 1971, along with Guideposts Magazine Editor Len LeSourd and author Catherine Marshall LeSourd.

Chosen Books "dramatically elevated the profile and the impact of Christian publishing," Jeff Crosby, president and CEO of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, said in a statement.

"Elizabeth's gifts as a manuscript stylist, editor, and publisher were enormous. She knew how to tell a story with power and with an economy of words, and the books she touched were brought to a mass market audience," Crosby continued.

"I was privileged to chair ECPA's recognition committee the year it awarded her and, posthumously, John Sherrill with our Kenneth N. Taylor Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. And as a bookseller in the 1980s, I marveled at the way the books she touched and inspired readers toward belief."

Born on Feb. 14, 1928, Sherrill died on May 20. She authored over 30 books, several with her husband, including God's Smuggler alongside Brother Andrew; The Hiding Place with Corrie ten Boom, and The Cross and The Switchblade with David Wilkerson.

She also contributed more than 2,000 articles to the Christian publication Guideposts. She was known for her ability to produce captivating stories, making Guideposts a cherished platform for personal accounts of faith.

"It seems appropriate that she was born on Valentine's Day because she exuded love. For her family, for her colleagues, for the subjects of the countless stories she wrote and edited, for Guideposts readers, for her faith community, for God's beautiful world and the people in it," reads an article published by Guideposts in honor of her life.

"A founding contributor, it's hard to imagine how Guideposts would have ever happened without her; because of her contributions, it became a much-loved venue for true personal stories of faith in action," the article continues.

"She was the embodiment of hope and inspiration. Those of us who have worked for the organization and written for it all learned from Tib. In fact, she was not only a model of a compassionate storyteller but a wonderful teacher of writing."

In one article published at Guideposts, Sherrill candidly discussed her battles with clinical depression and how faith helped her as she grappled with the illness.

"I'd had such attacks as long as I could remember, and they were always as unaccountable as this one. I can still hear my father's cry of bafflement the one and only time I tried to tell him how I was feeling," Elizabeth Sherrill wrote in the article titled "Hope and Faith in Times of Sadness."

"Not happy? With a loving family, good health, material comfort beyond anything he had dreamed of in his own childhood! He told me that as a boy he was sent each Saturday to the store, clutching the dime that was to buy Sunday's meat for the family of nine," she continued.

"How could a child who had been as fortunate as I fail to be happy? How could I, years later as a young wife and mother, be anything but content?"

Through a relationship with God, she said, she found healing.

"I can accept myself  delight in myself  because, the Bible tells me, God made me for himself, and can use all the particulars of my history for good. The very things I like least about myself, indeed, may be those he values most," she wrote.

According to Guideposts, Elizabeth Sherrill's vulnerability made an impact on many of the publication's readers.

"She brought empathy and spiritual depth to what otherwise might have remained commonplace testimony. She never forgot the needs of the reader," Guideposts stated.

"For those of us blessed to know [Elizabeth] professionally, her voice will be with us forever, in our hearts and our work."

Sherrill is survived by her three children, John Scott Sherrill, Donn Hardwick Sherrill, and Elizabeth Flint, along with eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Minnesota transfers biological male to women's prison, pays $495K to settle lawsuit

The transfer of a Minnesota man who identifies as a woman to a female prison is the first time the Gopher State has allowed a trans-identifying individual to move to a facility that corresponds with their preferred gender identity.

Following a settlement of a discrimination lawsuit, the Minnesota Department of Corrections will transfer Christian Lusk (who changed his name to Christina) to a female prison in Shakopee. The DOC also agreed to pay $495,000 to settle the lawsuit and to refer Lusk to a provider that can perform a vaginoplasty.

The department announced the transfer last Thursday under the agency's new policies for trans-identified inmates that went into effect in January.

Minnesota joins 10 states and the District of Columbia to permit the transfer of trans-identified individuals to prisons that align with their perceived gender identity.

The agency clarified that requests for transfer are granted if "the requested placement would pose a heightened risk of physical or sexual harm to that person or those housed in the preferred facility."

The law calls on facilities to create Gender Identity Committees to review requests for accommodations, including showering arrangements and single cell assignments.

"The DOC is constitutionally obligated to provide medically necessary care for incarcerated people, which includes treatment for gender dysphoria," DOC Commissioner Paul Schnell stated. "Based on the facts of this specific case, the incarcerated person will now have access to the medical care she needs, she deserves, and we have a legal obligation to provide."

Lusk, who was imprisoned at a Minnesota Correctional Facility in Moose Lake due to a 2018 drug conviction, has identified as a woman since 2008.

Last June, Lusk filed a complaint alleging ongoing harassment at the men's facility where he was housed. The inmate also complained that he had been denied access to "gender-affirming care."

"Our resolution to this case was appropriate," Lusk stated in a Thursday press release from Gender Justice, the advocacy group that represented him. "Everybody needs to come together in unity, and embrace positive change. I believe we have made a big step toward allowing people to express who they truly are, and bring some sort of peace and happiness to their lives."

"This journey has brought extreme challenges, and I have endured so much," he continued. "My hope is that nobody has to go through the same set of circumstances. I relied on my faith, and I never gave up hope. I can truly say that I am a strong, proud, transgender woman, and my name is Christina Lusk."

As CP has previously reported, many female inmates or formerly incarcerated women in the United States have expressed concern about placing biological men in women's jails.

In a bonus episode of CP's podcast series, "Generation Indoctrination: Inside The Transgender Battle," former inmate Amie Ichikawa recalled telling her disbelieving family that she had been locked up at the Central California Women's Facility along with men.

"It's the most helpless feeling I've had to date," Ichikawa said.

"Just to know that you have absolutely no control of your environment, your own physical wellbeing, your mental health, nothing. And there's really no one you can talk to about it. It's so unbelievable that I would call home every day crying for weeks, trying to explain to my family that there was a serial rapist housed here. And that this is legal, that the state really did it," she continued.

"[My family] thought I was delusional," Ichikawa added. "And that just adds to the helplessness, the feeling of utter vulnerability. It's just like you're emotionally naked. And it creates this cloud of hopelessness that sits over the entire prison. The whole population is on pins and needles and it creates more tension."
US divorce rate hits 50-year-low while marriage rate continues to fall, study shows

The United States experienced its lowest rate of divorce in about 50 years in 2019, according to a new report by the Institute for Family Studies.

The Charlottesville, Virginia-based research organization released the report on Tuesday, drawing data from the U.S. Census Bureaus American Community Survey.

In 2019, the data showed that for every 1,000 marriages, 14.9 ended in divorce. The figure is lower than it was in 1970, which had a rate of 15 divorces per 1,000 marriages.

The 2019 divorce rate is much lower than the 1980 divorce rate when the National Vital Statistics reported a divorce rate of 22.6 divorces per 1,000 marriages.

Still, though, the 2019 divorce rate was higher than that of 1960, when there was a recorded divorce rate of 9.2 per 1,000 marriages.

The 2019 data also shows an increase in the median duration for marriages  raising from a median duration of 19 years in 2010 to 19.8 years in 2019.

IFS Director of Research Dr. Wendy Wang, the author of the report, told The Christian Post that while the divorce rate has been declining since the 1980s, the new development is that the rate has been falling much faster in the past decade.

People are getting married later in life these days, and they are less likely to rush into a marriage which they may regret later on. On the other hand, we've seen the record low marriage rate happening in the U.S., explained Wang.

College-educated adults are more likely than those without a college degree to get married, and their divorce rate is lower.

IFS also found that the U.S. marriage rate in 2019 hit an unprecedented low.

Data found that in 2019, 33 out of 1,000 unmarried adults got married. This is slightly below 35 per 1,000 in 2010 and 86 per 1,000 in 1970.

In July, the group Legal Template reported that there was a 34% increase in the sale of their divorce agreement paperwork compared to the same period in 2019.

According to a survey on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on relationships, 31% of couples say the quarantine has been damaging. With so many couples struggling, lawyers across the US are predicting record numbers of divorce filings once quarantine restrictions are lifted, reported the group.

Many couples are spending 24/7 together and confronting major COVID-19 related stressors that are spilling over into their marriages, such as quarantine conditions, unemployment, financial strain, death of loved ones, illness, homeschooling children, mental illnesses and more.

Wang told CP that she does not believe that the coronavirus pandemic will have a lasting effect.

In fact, recent survey data shows the pandemic has actually brought more couples closer to each other, Wang stated. Also, initial data from some states suggests that divorce filings have declined.

A majority of married Americans say that the pandemic has made them appreciate their spouse more. And half agree that their commitment to marriage has deepened, she continued.
Exploring the frontiers of AI amid depraved humans (part 2)

Last week I penned a column for The Christian Post entitled, Artificial intelligence: Blessing or curse? Upon reflection, a better title might have been Artificial Intelligence: Blessing and Curse.

Clearly, artificial intelligence holds enormous promise to aid in the discovery and treatment of human ailments and the general improvement of the human condition. In fact, artificial intelligence suggests it has great potential to bring about quantum leaps in progress that tantalize the human imagination.

However, as I pointed out last week, change is not always progress, and even when it is progress, it always comes with costs. And society has a moral responsibility to seek to anticipate and mitigate those costs.

Of course, the main point of the column was the ever-present danger of universal human depravity looming over all human endeavor and activity.

No matter how noble the human soul and its aspirations and motivations may be, the fallen nature is ever present and even when relatively dormant for years, is always ready to tempt, ensnare, captivate, and bewitch human beings as to what actions they should undertake. And this is true not only of the natural man but those redeemed by the Christian faith as well. The Apostle Pauls graphic description of his earnest struggle to run the race then with determination. I am no shadow-boxer, I really fight! I am my bodys sternest master, for fear that when I have preached to others I should myself be disqualified. (I Cor. 9:27, Phillips translation)

In the Epistle to the Romans, Paul bemoans that even the Apostles are not free of the fallen nature. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. (Rom. 7:19).

A few readers have asked me why use the fictional work Lord of the Flies by William Golding as the chief illustration of the truth of the ubiquitous presence of sin and human natures susceptibility to it. I guess the answer is explained by the preacher in me. I am used to using illustrations in sermons.

In doing so, I am following the example of the Master Teacher, our Lord Jesus Himself. Quite strikingly, Jesus made masterful use of narratives, parables, and stories to illustrate the divine truths He was teaching. And Goldings masterful novel does quite powerfully illustrate the innate sinfulness of mankind from birth onward.

As related by Golding, the experienced schoolmaster, when the rescuing British naval officer grasps what has happened to the young boys left alone on the island, he exclaims, I should have thought that a pack of British boysyoure all British, arent you?would have been able to put up a better show than that.

In addition to witnessing to innate human depravity, Lord of the Flies undermines cultural and ethnic myths of superiority.

Imagine my surprise in the last week to have discovered a true story that is an even more graphic illustration of the extent and depth of human depravity. New York Times best-selling author David Grann has written The Wager. A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (2023).

This captivating page-turner tells the true story of the H.M.S. Wager, a British vessel that had been dispatched in 1740 on a secret mission to capture a treasure-filled Spanish galleon. The Wager wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia in extreme Southern South America.

The crew were marooned on this island and the discipline and order of the British navy disintegrated quickly into anarchy and violence.

It is a ripping, but sobering yarn that does not reflect optimism about human nature under stress. (I will not spoil the tale for you by revealing more, but I would recommend the story as a very informative, yet entertaining read.)

So what are we as a society to do? First, people will continue to pursue the frontiers of artificial intelligence (A.I.) no matter what regulations may be passed to restrict it. In a very real sense, the toothpaste has left the tube and it cannot be put back in its container.

I believe the best solution is to recognize the fallenness of man, be he scientific researcher, government regulator, eager consumer, or profit-minded investor.

We should follow the example set by our founding fathers who, believing in the depravity of man, set up a system of checks and balances with the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government monitoring and checking each other to guard against any one branch getting too much power.

As a society, we need checks and balances, with government regulating research limitations (not everything that can be done should be done, and those decisions should be made by the peoples informed, elected individuals).

Laissez-faire in this field will lead to human calamity and heartbreaking tragedy sooner, rather than later.
Is the Church a sleeping giant on abortion issue?

Every beat of the human heart is a gift from God. Our founders said in the Declaration of Independence, Americas birth certificate, that it is self-evident truth that we have been endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights. The first right they listed, of course, was the right to life.

But in our day, abortion is a direct assault on that right to life. I am grateful that Roe v. Wade, the infamous 1973 Supreme Court decision that ushered in abortion on demand in America, has been overturned. Because of this, 60,000 babies have been saved so far. Tragically, Roe caused some 66 million unborn babies to have had their lives snuffed out before they were ever born.

There are many pro-life ministries that God has raised up to address the abortion issue, including crisis pregnancy centers, which provide a loving alternative to abortion.

In May 2022, the draft of the June Dobbs v. Jackson decision that did overturn Roe as unconstitutional was leaked. Since that leak, the source of which has never been revealed, there have been some 87 attacks against pro-life ministries, such as crisis pregnancy centers. Pro-abortion forces have also attacked many pro-life churches as well.

The Biden Administrations Justice Department and FBI dont seem very interested in addressing these attacks. Maybe thats because they are too busy sending out body-armor-clad and long-gun-equipped agents to arrest peaceful pro-life activists like Catholic writer Mark Houck  in their homes and in front of their kids.

Love Life is a pro-life ministry, that, in the words of the Rev. Frank Trotta, a director for the chapter in South Florida, serves the local church to awaken the church to the reality of abortion in their city. In doing so they help mobilize the body of Christ to Love God and Love neighbor, by being a peaceful, prayerful presence at the abortion centers.

As an associate minister in a local Presbyterian church in south Florida, I was privileged to speak on two separate Saturday mornings to address the abortion issue. These short speeches took place in a church parking lot, and then about 30 of us or so (including a handful of our church members) walked over to the abortion clinic a few blocks away.

In front of the clinic, we peaceably assembled to pray about the matter of abortion. Our first prayers were offered up on behalf of the owner of the clinic and their medical personnel  that God would open their eyes to see the error of their ways and repent.

There are many in our time who have left the abortion field because their eyes were opened to the grisly work, they have been doing in killing these unborn babies.

In fact, a former Planned Parenthood Employee of the Year (2008), Abby Johnson, a former clinic manager for the abortion giant, became instantly pro-life when she saw a sonogram of a 15-week-old boy being aborted in her own clinic in Bryan, Texas, in 2009.

Fast forward to today, Abby Johnson, the author (along with Cindi Lambert) of Unplanned (with both a book and movie of that title), has begun the ministry, And Then There Were None. This work helps those involved in the abortion business to leave that business and settle in some field that does no harm. Some 650 former employees have walked away from the abortion industry.

We also prayed for the mothers considering abortion  praying that they wont go through with it. But if they do, that they would find Gods forgiveness and healing for their souls. And we prayed for the church throughout the land to arise even more and address this evil of abortion.

I once interviewed Justin Reeder, the founder of Love Life for Truths That Transform, the weekly television show from D. James Kennedy Ministries. He told our viewers: The whole mission of Love Life is to unite and mobilize the church to create a culture of love and life that would result to an end to abortion.

One of those who is out there on Saturdays to intervene on behalf of life is Darci Schattinger. She knows firsthand the pain of abortion because many years ago, she herself had one. But later, by the grace of God, she found healing through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

So far Love Life is in 17 communities, including South Florida. Lord-willing, one day it will be in all 50 states.

The Church of Jesus Christ, in its various branches, is often on the front lines in the abortion issue. And yet in some ways, the Church is like a sleeping giant on this issue. Its gratifying to see ministries like Love Life, trying to arouse more and more elements of the sleeping giant.
Absent fathers, collapse in marriage major reasons why Christianity is declining in US: study

(CP) A new study on faith and relationships suggests that absent fathers and collapsed marriages might be two of the best explanations for why Christianity is declining in the United States.

The Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships, research recently released by the church-consulting organization Communio, reports that "family decline appears to fuel faith decline."

The study drew data from a nationwide survey of 19,000 Sunday church attendees from 112 Evangelical, Protestant and Catholic congregations in 13 states. The research comes as marriage rates have dropped 31 percent since 2000 and 61 percent since 1970, while less than half of all adults under 30 today grew up in a home with married parents.

According to the study, individuals who regularly attend church are more likely to have fathers present in their lives.

In the U.S., approximately 80% of Sunday churchgoers were raised in homes where their biological parents were married to each other throughout their upbringing.

Additionally, the study confirms that "boys who grew up in homes with married parents are considerably more likely to attend church regularly as adults."

Communio President J.P. DeGance, who contributed to the study, told The Christian Post that young people are not leaving churches in large numbers because of a lack of ministry outreach.

"We've never spent more money in the history of the church to transmit our faith to our young people, and yet they're falling away at higher and higher numbers," DeGance said.

"The reason for the decline in faith is unpacked in the study; that the absence of a married home where dad is warmly engaged in the life of his child is the cause of the fire that is the source of the reason less and less people believe."

DeGance said, "unless we get deeply effective and strategic about increasing the number of Christian marriages and young people raised in homes with faithful and healthy Christian families, we're going to continue to see an increase in religious non-affiliation."

"Throughout the Old Testament and into the New Testament, God's love is told spousally, most frequently that God is chasing after the Church like a bride. And when Jesus comes at the end of time, He is going to be looking for His bride," DeGance said.

"I think it shouldn't surprise us that when the human analog of marriage and the family breaks down, it's a lot harder for a young person to understand that there's a Father in Heaven, 'who so loved [them] that He sent His only Son to die for [them].'"

"This becomes difficult when someone has never been able to relate to a dad in a healthy way, if they perhaps hate their dad or have a difficult relationship with their dad."

The study predicts that "the overall population of the religious nones is unlikely to stabilize until 25-30 years after family structure has stabilized."

"The number of young people being born and raised and reaching adulthood in a home where mom and dad stayed continuously married appears to have been constant over the last 10 years. In some sense, that's some good news; at least temporarily it seems to be stabilized. This is incredibly important for churches," DeGance said.

The vast majority of polling shows that young people overwhelmingly still want marriage, but they just lack the ability to do it, according to DeGance.

"I see this as a great opportunity to advance the Gospel, that churches can become schools of love. They can actually help form people to discern relationships well, and to form healthy dating relationships that can actually lead to marriage and to help Christians who married to have a thriving and healthy Christ-centered marriage," he said.

"All of that is within the reach and power of the Church. And if the Church answers this time of crisis with this kind of approach, the study would suggest that you're going to see a great revival."

DeGance warned that if the Church doesn't take drastic steps to "evangelize fruitfully in the 21st century," the declining number of marriages will continue and marital health will remain low, as well as the effectiveness of fathers in those marriages.

"The sexual revolution has been a never-ending set of events in so many ways. We've certainly had a decoupling of sex from marriage and sex from partnering and sex from parenting," DeGance said.

"As Christian parents and as pastors, we also need to own a portion of the responsibility to ask ourselves: are we discouraging marriage ourselves? Are we discouraging our young people from the ideas that would lead to a healthy marriage?"

 The Christian Post
Catholic pilgrim who took on French park attacker hailed a hero

A pilgrim has credited his Catholic faith with giving him the courage to take on a knifeman who attacked children in a French park on Thursday.

The 24-year-old, named only as Henri, chased after the attacker and used his backpack to block him.

Henri was visiting the park in Annecy while on pilgrimage around cathedrals when the attack unfolded on Thursday morning, leaving four children, including a British girl, badly injured.

Talking to CNEWS, Henri suggested it was God's will that he was in the park at the time of the attack.

"All I know is that I was not there by chance. On my journey to the cathedrals I crossed paths with this man and I have acted instinctively. It was unthinkable to do nothing," he said.

He has been hailed a hero and has since met French President Emmanuel Macron.

The suspect in the attack is a 31-year-old Syrian who had refugee status in Sweden. Media reports say that he claimed to be a Christian and was seen clutching a crucifix necklace during the attack.

Asked what he thought about reports of the attacker being a Christian, Henri said, "It is profoundly unchristian to attack the vulnerable.

"The entire Christian civilisation on which our country is built is a knightly message to defend widows and orphans. I think that, on the contrary, something very bad inhabited him."
Welby urges Church of Uganda to reconsider support for anti-LGBTQ law

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has written to the head of the Anglican Church of Uganda asking him to reject a new law making "aggravated homosexuality" punishable by death.

The Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023 was signed into law last month by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in a move that was welcomed by the head of the Anglican Church of Uganda, Archbishop Stephen Samuel Kaziimba Mugalu.

Archbishop Kaziimba said he was "grateful" for the new law, although he said he would prefer the death sentence to be replaced with life imprisonment.

In a statement, the Archbishop of Canterbury expressed "grief and dismay" at the Church of Uganda's support for the new laws and urged Archbishop Kaziimba to reconsider his endorsement.

Archbishop Welby said that his opposition was not about imposing Western values on Uganda Anglicans but that there was "no justification" for any Anglican province to support such legislation.

"I make this public statement with sorrow, and with continuing prayers for reconciliation between our churches and across the Anglican Communion," Welby's statement reads.

"I am deeply aware of the history of colonial rule in Uganda, so heroically resisted by its people. But this is not about imposing Western values on our Ugandan Anglican sisters and brothers.

"It is about reminding them of the commitments we have made as Anglicans to treat every person with the care and respect they deserve as children of God."

The statement adds that support for such legislation represents "a fundamental departure from our commitment to uphold the freedom and dignity of all people".

"There is no justification for any province of the Anglican Communion to support such laws: not in our resolutions, not in our teachings, and not in the Gospel we share," said Welby.

His statement also calls on orthodox Anglican bodies, Gafcon and the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans, to make it "explicitly and publicly clear" that no Anglican province should support the criminalisation of LGBTQ people.

The statement ends, "As disciples of Jesus Christ we are called to honour the image of God in every person, and I pray for Anglicans to be uncompromising and united in this calling."
Francoise Gilot: a passionate, courageous life

In memory of Francoise Gilot, who has died at the age of 101, we revisit a feature published in 2021 when an exhibition was held in Hong Kong to mark her 100th birthday

The French artist Francoise Gilot  who turns 100 on 26 November  remembers a childhood conversation that splendidly anticipated her life and career ahead. It happened when Gilot was just five and on a trip with her parents to the Swiss Alps. Struck by the gorgeous mix of light green meadows and dark green forest, she asked her father if he could see the same thing  In other words, was [her view] objective or was it subjective? Monsieur Gilot called such a question stupid as the retina is the same for everybody. To which his daughter retorted: Yes, Father, the retina is the same for everybody, but the imagination is not.

This tale of the young Francoise will be entirely credible to anyone that knows the adult Francoise: an independent thinker, who refuses to pander to male authority and thinks that art springs chiefly from what is inside artists rather than what's in front of them. Gilot made her name as one of the leading lights of the School of Paris, which flourished in the French capital after the Second World War. She has spent most of her career in the US, though, where she moved in 1970. (She currently occupies an apartment on Manhattans Upper West Side, which doubles as a studio in which she still paints almost every day.) To mark her 100th birthday, Christies is staging a solo exhibition at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, featuring more than 30 works from across Gilots career (11 of them offered for private sale).

Open a larger version of this image Francoise Gilot in Paris, 1943. Photo: Endre Rozsda

The artist once said that there are two sorts of people: Those who have courage in life and those who dont. If you do have it, there are bumps along the way, but life is so much more interesting. Even a cursory look at Gilots biography demonstrates that she has always had courage. An only child, she was born into an haute bourgeois family in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1921. Her father was an agronomist, her mother a ceramicist. She rode horses each morning and was tutored at home until the age of 10. By the time she went to school, she was, in her own words, ahead of all the other children my age... I refused to submit to rules if I did not see they had any meaning. After undergraduate studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne, in 1939 she enrolled at law school. When war broke out and Paris fell to the Germans, however, she chose to pursue a career in painting instead, which until then had just been a pastime. Her father was so enraged by this decision that he beat her and banished her from the family home. Undeterred, Francoise entered the atelier of the Franco-Hungarian Surrealist, Endre Rozsda.

Open a larger version of this image Francoise Gilot (1921-2023), Nu Abstrait, 1945. Oil on canvas. 50 x 73 cm (19 x 28 in)

From November 1940 onwards, she had to report to the local police station each day, after taking part in a protest at the Nazi occupation. Her name was now on a list kept by the Abwehr of young French rebels, and she was placed under indefinite city arrest (meaning she was unable to leave Paris). Much of Gilots early work expresses a lament at her homelands fate. She had her first exhibition in 1943, the same year that she was introduced to Pablo Picasso at a restaurant. She was 21, he 61, but the age gap didnt prevent the pair from going on to have a 10-year romantic relationship. The details of that relationship are well known  in no small part thanks to a best-selling memoir penned by Gilot herself, Life with Picasso, in 1964  and dont need retelling. Suffice to say that she served as his model, muse, housekeeper, mother of two children (Claude and Paloma), and much else besides. Gilot grew frustrated by this arrangement, however, and went on to become the only of Picassos lovers or wives ever to leave him. (With Picasso, I had to put my own personality in my pocket, she has said.)

Open a larger version of this image Francoise Gilot (1921-2023), Etude bleue, 1953. Oil on panel. 147 x 115.2 cm (57 x 45 in)

The Spaniard undoubtedly had an impact on Gilots work in the years they were together: for example, in her new willingness to distort the human figure. She tended to do so in more lyrical, less violent fashion than he did, however. (Lyricism is a quality that has always characterised Francoises work.) In truth, it wasnt Picasso but his long-time friend, Matisse, who exerted the most enduring influence on Gilots art, most obviously in her use of highly saturated colour. In 1946, Picasso had actually taken Francoise to visit the great  but by now increasingly infirm  Frenchman at his house in Vence in south-east France. Matisse took an immediate liking to her and commented how much he loved her circumflex eyebrows  that is, their triangular form.

Open a larger version of this image Francoise Gilot (1921-2023), Les Peintres, 1952. Oil on panel. 163.5 x 131 cm (64 x 51 in)

Despite such privileged access early in her career to two Modernist giants, its worth stressing that Gilot has always trodden her own artistic path. After the war, she loosely aligned herself with the likes of Sonia Delaunay and Nicolas de Stael in a group of abstractionists known as Realites Nouvelles (New Realities). By the late 1950s, however, Gilot had reintroduced representative elements into her imagery again.

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She went on to master printmaking techniques such as lithography and aquatint. In 1980, she began her celebrated Floating Paintings, so called because these vast canvases  painted on both sides and supported only by a wooden bar at the top  hang away from a wall and seem almost to float. More recently, she has pared the aesthetic of her work back, with the forces of nature, time and the cosmos among her preoccupations.

Open a larger version of this image Franoise Gilot in 2010. Photo: Colas Engel
Howard Hodgkin: My entire life is in my paintings

The British artist described his works as representational pictures of emotional situations, and as such they can present something of a riddle. Perhaps, says Alastair Smart, they are best approached by simply diving in, and summoning associations of ones own

The British novelist Julian Barnes tells a story about a seaside holiday that he and his wife once took with their friend Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017). The artist took a fancy to a black towel that he saw in a shop window. After going inside to make a purchase, he was unimpressed with the choice of seven or eight towels that the shopkeeper offered him from the shelves. None of them, Hodgkin said, was as black as the item in the window. To resolve the matter, the shopkeeper brought out the towel in question  and was surprised to find that it was indeed a shade blacker than the others. A sale was then concluded. According to Barnes, You know, intellectually, that painters have a more highly developed sense of colour, but this was a brilliant, and unwitting, public demonstration. Its fair to say that, even among painters, Hodgkin was a standout colourist. Proof of this can be found in his painting Goodbye to the Bay of Naples (1980-82) which fetched 1,688,750 at Christies in 2017, the highest price ever paid for a work by Hodgkin at auction. At its centre is a bar of brilliant cobalt blue (representing the sea), above which can be seen a touch of cerulean blue (the sky) and a piercing flare of yellow (the sun).

Open a larger version of this image Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017), Goodbye to the Bay of Naples, 1980-82. Oil on wood. 22 x 26 in (55.9 x 66.9 cm). Sold for 1,688,750 on 6 October 2017 at Christies in London. Artwork:  The Estate of Howard Hodgkin. All rights reserved, DACS 2023

Sir Nicholas Serota, who as director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford gave Hodgkin his first institutional show in 1976, called him a hue-perfect artist. Not that Hodgkin was a painter who delighted in colour for its own sake. It would be better to describe him as a great user of colour, because  as will be set out below  the uses he found for it extended far beyond decoration. Hodgkin was born in London in 1932. His father was an executive at the chemical company ICI, and the family had a number of celebrated figures as ancestors. These included Thomas Hodgkin, who in the mid-19th century had discovered the disease Hodgkins lymphoma. In his youth, Howard didnt seem destined for great things himself. He made a habit of running away from the boarding schools that he had been forced to attend, before going on to study at Camberwell School of Art and Bath Academy of Art. His style, broadly speaking, shifted from figurative to abstract as his career progressed.

Hodgkin was always loath to discuss his work  telling one interviewer who asked for the inspiration behind a painting, What do you want, a shopping list?

He received his first solo show in 1962, at Arthur Tooth & Sons gallery in Mayfair. Commercial success and critical praise were still some way off, however. As Hodgkin himself remembered in later life, Until I was middle-aged, [nobody] seemed to want to look at my pictures at all. The mid-1970s is the period when it is generally agreed that Hodgkins art matured. His friend Bruce Chatwin attributed the change to the liberation he felt upon leaving his wife Julia at this time and coming out as gay. Hodgkin himself never subscribed to this theory, nor did many others. However, his work undeniably grew bolder and freer thenceforth, with more complex colours. It also appeared to move close to complete abstraction, devoid of any of the oblique figurative references of the recent past. Hodgkin represented his country at the Venice Biennale in 1984. He won the Turner Prize in 1985. He was knighted in 1992, the same year that he designed a mural for the British Councils new Indian headquarters in New Delhi. In 1995 he received a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Open a larger version of this image Hodgkins mural for the British Council building in New Dehli was the result of close collaboration with its architect, Charles Correa. The mural was made using Makrana marble and locally quarried black stone. Photo: Ram Rahman, courtesy Charles Correa Foundation. Artwork:  The Estate of Howard Hodgkin. All rights reserved, DACS 2023

Success followed success. Hodgkin insisted, however, that despite appearances and despite myriad commentators suggesting the contrary, he wasnt actually an abstract painter. As he put it, in a much-repeated phrase, I paint representational pictures of emotional situations. He meant that his imagery amounted to distilled memories, to evocations of past encounters and experiences. As such, the works are loaded with feeling. This is reflected in their intense colour  and the vivacious sweeps, stabs and slashes of Hodgkins brush, which often covered even a pictures frame in paint. In many cases, the memories were painful; in some cases, they were positive (perhaps recalling a happy moment in his relationship with the writer Antony Peattie, Hodgkins companion for his final three decades). Either way, the recollections were emotionally charged.

Open a larger version of this image Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017), The Spectator, 1984-87. Oil on wood. 17 x 19 in (45 x 49.8 cm). Estimate: 800,000-1,200,000. Offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 28 June 2023 at Christies in London

The artist preferred to work on wood rather than canvas, as it proved more resistant to the attacks of his brush. Some pictures took years to complete, with Hodgkin progressively adding more and more marks. Painting is agony, he said on several occasions. He was also known to pour himself a cocktail after completing each picture. The sense is of an artist who grappled constantly with his past, with the end result representing a kind of catharsis. Catharsis for Hodgkin, that is. For everyone else, the pictures are visual riddles to be solved. My entire life is in my paintings, Hodgkin said, but viewers wont know what episode in that life theyre looking at  especially given the lack of figurative references.

Open a larger version of this image Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017), Scotland, 1994-95. Oil on wood. 20 x 23 in (52.6 x 59.5 cm). Estimate: 300,000-500,000. Offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 28 June 2023 at Christies in London

Its true that the titles occasionally help. Goodbye to the Bay of Naples, for example, does at least give a sense of place. As do Scotland (1994-95) and the many paintings with Bombay in the title (referencing the almost annual trips Hodgkin took to India). In terms of our grasping the particular incident in Hodgkins memory, however, knowing where is still a far cry from knowing what. An alternative way of engaging with his pictures is to forget their source and simply dive into them, promptly summoning memories or associations of ones own.

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Mai, the Polynesian courtier who charmed 18th-century London  and presented an irresistible challenge to Sir Joshua Reynolds

In a negotiation supported by Christies, the National Portrait Gallery and Getty have jointly purchased Reynoldss Portrait of Mai, with the painting to be exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic. But who exactly was Mai  and why is this work so important?

On 14 July 1774, a young Polynesian named Mai (circa 1751-circa 1779) arrived in England. Quiet, courteous and quick to learn, at 22 Mai had already had a remarkable life. The son of a minor courtier on the French Polynesian island of Raiatea  the second largest of the Society Islands, after Tahiti  Mai had escaped an incursion by neighbouring Bora Bora by fleeing to Tahiti, where he persuaded the British explorer Captain James Cook to let him travel to England on HMS Adventure. On arrival in London, Mai requested a meeting with King George III to plead for support (and arms) to overthrow the Bora Borans. He showed remarkable bravery, says Ruth Cornett, Senior Director of Christies Heritage and Taxation. Here was a young man barely out of his teens, who was prepared to journey across the world, in great danger, to save his land. In London, Mai was greeted as a celebrity, thought to personify Jean-Jacques Rousseaus romantic ideal of man untrammelled by European social conventions. In fact, Mai came from a highly stratified society and was quick to grasp the British class system, which he played to his advantage.

Open a larger version of this image William Parry (1743-1791), Omai (Mai), Sir Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, circa 1775-76. Oil on canvas. 60 x 60 in (152.5 x 152.5 cm). Photo:  National Portrait Gallery, London / National Museum Cardiff / Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby

Under the guidance of the botanist Sir Joseph Banks and the Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander, Mai was introduced to the London intelligentsia, among them Dr Samuel Johnson and his biographer, James Boswell. In a letter to his sister, Banks wrote that Mai had so much natural politeness I never saw in any man: wherever he goes he makes friends and has not I believe as yet one foe. For the society painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), Mai was a challenge he could not ignore, and he invited the young adventurer to pose for him. The resulting work, Portrait of Mai, is, says Cornett, a tour de force. It is seminal in terms of its subject matter but also in terms of Reynoldss virtuosity. Standing at more than seven feet high  well over two metres  the full-length portrait depicts the young Polynesian as a confident, barefooted hero. Reynolds was known for idealising his subjects, and this portrait is no exception. The turban and drapery are not Polynesian dress, and a preparatory sketch reveals that the artist altered Mais features slightly. The portrait is almost sculptural, says Cornett. You get the feeling of the body in the round.

Open a larger version of this image Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), Portrait of Mai (Omai), circa 1776. Oil on canvas. 93 x 57.3 in (236 x 145.5 cm). Image courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London, and Getty

Unusually for a time of British imperial expansion, when encounters with other countries were often embattled and ferocious, Mai is portrayed as a fearless individual and very much in control of his destiny. It is a rare example of a great 18th-century portrait that places a non-white person at the centre of events, says Cornett. Reynolds was so proud of the painting that it remained in his studio until his death, in 1792. It was later bought by Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle, and remained in the family until 2001. Now the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London and the Getty in Los Angeles have joined together to buy the painting at a cost of 50 million. A shared-ownership scheme will enable the public on both sides of the Atlantic to see the work in perpetuity.

Open a larger version of this image The Getty Center in Los Angeles. Photo:  2017 J. Paul Getty Trust

The painting will be on show at the NPG from 22 June 2023, when the museum reopens following a major transformation project. Cornett explains that Christies supported the negotiations, and is delighted with the outcome. It is the first time a transatlantic joint purchase like this has happened in the UK, she says. It is a major coup for the National Portrait Gallery, and could be a blueprint for the way public museums acquire masterpieces in the future. John Stainton, Deputy Chairman of Old Masters in London, says, Reynoldss magnificent portrait of the young Tahitian Mai is among the most important paintings executed in Britain in the 18th century, and we are proud to have been closely involved in the negotiations that have ensured its future on public exhibition.

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by Vijay Prashad

Thirty years ago, in my economics textbook in India, the section on international trade referred to Argentina. It would be better, according to the textbook, for Argentina to concentrate on the production and export of beef, while Germany should direct its resources towards the production of electronics. This example was used to illustrate Adam Smiths absolute advantage principle  countries should focus on what they do best, rather than diversify their economies. It seemed churlish to me, that developing countries such as Argentina should only produce raw materials, while wealthy countries such as Germany went ahead with technological development.





Members of the Land Workers Union (UTT) harvesting beets in Argentina. (Courtesy of UTT)





Argentina, at that time, was still a major producer and exporter of beef. My peers and I had no access to Jose Hernandezs epic poem Martin Fierro, about the gauchos of the pampas, the cowboys of the plains of Argentina, but we knew of the ferocious compadritos (streetcorner thugs) and cuchilleros (knife fighters) from the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. There were cowboys mixed in here, loners who sat on their horses on Argentinas flatlands and gathered their cattle for the market. No longer do these horsemen define Argentinas rural society. Today, the countryside is defined by the small farmer and the agricultural proletariat who work for the large agribusinesses and are the protagonists of the countrys fortunes.





In 2021, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) noted that Argentina remains a major exporter of agricultural products, which, at that time, accounted for nearly two-thirds of the countrys exports (as of April 2023, agricultural goods accounted for 56.4% of the countrys exports). The main products are grains (wheat, maize), soya, and beef. Argentinas agribusinesses enthusiastically entered into the global soybean market, even producing a soy dollar scheme to encourage greater exports so that the country could earn dollars to offset its major foreign exchange crises.





Argentina has been wracked by three consecutive years of drought (exacerbated by the climate catastrophe) and faced pressure from the increasing acreage for soybeans in the other four leading producers (Brazil, the United States, China, and India). The production of soybeans has transformed Argentinas countryside, drawing in over half of the countrys arable lands and concentrating production into the hands of what the economist Claudio Scaletta called the invisible giants (corporations such as Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland Argentina, Bunge Argentina, Dreyfus, and Noble Argentina). It is no longer cattle that run through the pampas; it is now the soybean flowers that tilt in the breeze.





Our latest dossier, Whose Land Is It and What Is It For? An Unfinished Debate about Land Access in Argentina (June 2023), explores some of the most startling contradictions that afflict Argentinas rural landscape. The most obvious incongruity is that Argentina has more than enough arable land to feed its 46 million people, and yet hunger is growing in the country. Most of the food consumed by the people is produced not by the large agribusiness conglomerates but by family farms, and yet these family farms are disappearing as families find it impossible to economically sustain themselves and make the trek from rural areas to the cities in large numbers. Rising landlessness and hunger have produced the social reality out of which new forms of political protest have appeared: verdurazos (vegetable protests) and panazos (bread protests), often led by rural social organisations, confront the ridiculous situation in which those who farm the soil cannot eat its crops.





A few years ago, I spent some time with small-scale farmers outside La Plata. Wildo Eizaguirre of the Federacion Rural told me that the greatest burden for farmers such as himself is rent. Antonio Garcia as well as Else and Mable Yanaje agreed that rent is a dead weight for them. The cost of land is prohibitive and their tenure on the land is uncertain. It prevents the farmers from making capital improvements to the farm or even from buying equipment (such as tractors) to make their labour more productive. These farmers neither own the fields nor do they control the pathways to the market. Brokers buy their produce at the lowest prices and then take them to be processed or sold directly to supermarkets. The money is made elsewhere than on the fields.





It is out of the struggles of people such as Wildo and Mable that Argentinas government passed key laws such as the Historical Reparation of Family Agriculture Law of 2014 and the Indigenous Territories Emergency Law of 2006 (repeatedly extended in 2009, 2013, 2017, and 2021). The Historical Reparation of Family Agriculture Law seeks to construct a new rural life in Argentina and guarantee access to land for family, peasant, and indigenous agriculture, given that land is a social good. These are powerful words but, in the face of the power of the agribusiness, they are not often translated into deeds. The law itself does not close off the class struggle. In Brazil, for instance, the Movement of Rural Landless Workers (MST) uses the 1988 Brazilian Constitution to the letter as a legal justification for its land occupations. And yet, punctually, Brazils agribusinesses and their political allies try to criminalise the MST occupations with a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, which MST leader Joao Paulo Rodrigues correctly considers an opportunity to hold a public dialogue about agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and social equality.





In 2020, the International Land Coalition and Oxfam released an important report called Uneven Ground. Land Inequality at the Heart of Unequal Societies. There are 608 million farms in the world, the report notes, most of them being family farms (with 2.5 billion people involved in smallholder farming). The largest 1% of the farms, however, control more than 70% of global farmland, while 80% of the farmers are smallholders who operate less than two hectares. Land concentration, the report shows, has increased dramatically since 1980. Meanwhile, according to a study by Luis Bauluz, Yajna Govind, and Filip Novokmet, in Latin America the top 10% of landowners capture up to 75% of the agricultural land value, while the bottom 50% own less than 2%. As the dossier highlights, in Argentina the disparity is extremely sharp: 80% of family farmers (who are characterised as smallholders) occupy around 11% of demarcated agricultural land, while the big landowners who make up 0.3% of farmers occupy almost double that land. The tendency towards land concentration is hastened by the power of multinational agribusinesses and by the increasing use of farmland as a financial asset by private equity firms and asset managers (as Madeleine Fairbairn argues in her book Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush, 2020). On the African continent, farmers are being pushed off the land due to nature conservation and the growth of the mining sector (such as we documented in Xolobeni in South Africa).





Over the past century, peasant movements have put forward a demand for agrarian reform as the antidote to capitalisms devastation of the countryside. In the foreword to our dossier, Manuel Bertoldi of the Federacion Rural writes, We must start talking without fear about agrarian reform, food sovereignty, agroecology, and about socialism as an alternative system, since it is through socialism that these ideas become viable.





The Brazilian poet Joao Cabral de Melo Neto wrote with great feeling about the only piece of land to which the peasants are entitled, their graves. In 1955, he composed the verse Morte e Vida Severina (Death and Life of Severino), where he wrote,





 The grave youre in

Is measured by hand,

The best bargain you got

In all the land.





 You fit it well,

Not too long or deep,

The part of the latifundio

Which you will keep.





 The graves not too big,

Nor is it too wide,

Its the land you wanted

To see them divide.





 Its a big grave

For a body so spare,

But youll be more at ease

Than you ever were.





 Youre a skinny corpse

For such a big tomb,

But at least down there

Youll have plenty of room.





Farmers and peasants around the world know that their struggles are existential, a feeling that gripped the Indian farmers and peasants during their ongoing struggle against the privatisation of the marketplace for agricultural commodities. They want land to live, not just for their graves.
The Ukraine War saw a lot of innovations and many of them involved the innovative use of commercial UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) like the Chinese Mavic quadcopters. Ukrainians also designed and built their own UAVs or heavily modified commercial models like Mavic. Russian soldiers also use Mavic quadcopters when they can get them. Corruption in Russia makes importing Mavic quadcopters difficult. This isnt just about Mavic because corruption became more widespread in Russia after the Ukraine War and the subsequent sanctions disrupted the Russian economy. The government bureaucracy in Russia discourages and disrupts any private efforts to design and build not merely UAVs, but private efforts to build most anything which might compete with government ways of building or doing things. Because that will interfere with government corruption. Ukrainians have noticed that one of their assets in the war is the disruptive effect the Russian bureaucracy has on the Russian military.

While there is some corruption in Ukraine, there is also a lot more popular anger and active opposition to any corruption hurting the war effort. Less corruption in wartime Ukraine means there are a lot more opportunities for innovation without interference from some corrupt official or supplier. Russian troops still had a lot of UAVs but not as many as the Ukrainians and not with all the innovations found in many Ukrainian UAVs. This made a difference and still does, even though the Russians have been quick to use new forms of jamming to disrupt or destroy Ukrainian UAVs. Both sides suffer heavy (in the thousands) UAV losses each month and Ukraine, with NATO support and unencumbered by economic sanctions, is able to maintain a UAV edge on the battlefield.

Ukrainians were particularly adept at modifying quadcopters to carry explosives. If the operator found an enemy tank or lighter armored vehicle with a top hatch open, the vehicle could be destroyed when an explosive was dropped through the open hatch. The explosives were often used against Russian troops in foxholes or open trenches. This capability is bad for Russian morale and the Ukrainians made the most of it.

DJI quadcopters are popular with military customers worldwide, as well as with gangsters, drug smugglers and Islamic terrorists. American forces were banned from using DJI products from 2017 to 2020 because of fears that DJI, which thrives, and survives by cooperating with the Chinese government, might have hidden capabilities in the control software that would enable DJI quadcopters to be monitored by the Chinese, especially in wartime. Several years of trying to prove this failed to discover anything and the American ban was quietly dropped.

The ban on military use of DJI quadcopters was not universal, even among NATO countries. But many NATO members did avoid DJI and found that alternatives were more expensive and less capable. For example, in 2021 the French military ordered 300 ANAFI USA micro-UAVs from Parrot, a French firm that is the largest European designer and manufacturer of consumer and commercial UAVs. The ANAFI USA model was developed in response to a 2019 U.S. Army order for a militarized quadcopter that was similar to the banned DJI products. That was considered difficult to do because DJI had a huge head start, especially with flight control software and reliability.

The American military determined that Parrot was best suited for this contract because there were few Western firms as capable as Parrot. The French military spent $36 million not just for the purchase of 300 ANAFI quadcopters. The five-year deal includes Parrot developing new ANAFI features to meet specific needs of army, navy and air force users.

One of the first users will be French special operations units. The ANAFI quadcopter is a militarized version of a similar, but lighter (at 300 grams), consumer model. ANAFI weighs 500 grams (1.1 pound), has endurance of 32 minutes and standard equipment is a day/night vidcam using military-grade communications. Parrot carries two 4K (21 megapixel) vidcams with 32X zoom and the ability to identify man-sized targets two kilometers distant plus useful detail in general at up to five kilometers. There is also a thermal sensor on the Parrot that works with the 4k vidcam and enables the operator to see hot spots superimposed over the video image. The flight software is as capable as DJT models and uses no Internet access. An additional security feature is the flight control software being regularly audited to ensure that no new features have compromised security. ANAFI is very quiet and is inaudible when about 130 meters away. ANAFI can be ready for use in less than a minute and is designed to be used after brief training. For experienced quad-copter users, ANAFI is very familiar and training consists of explaining the unique security and military features.

ANAFI is also built to accept accessories that generate digital maps and thermal videos. This kind of flexibility is a major feature of Parrot commercial quadcopters and one reason for its market dominance in Europe. The ANAFI is being delivered to French forces as systems, each with two quad-copters, additional batteries and operator controllers.

Parrot does have some competition in the military market. Since 2015 Israeli firms have designed and built several quadcopters for military and police use. In 2016 the Israeli military bought some locally made Roetm L UAVs for their infantry to use in urban combat. Rotem L is a lightweight (4.5 kg/10 pound) quad-copter based on commercial designs, but modified so that it not only carries the usual day/night cameras but can also replace the cameras with two 450g (one pound) grenades which can be armed and released by operator command. With 30-minute endurance and easily learned operation, Rotem L can be carried (in a case) by one man, set up and ready to go in a minute or so and recovered for reuse. The controller has a range of up to 10 kilometers but in a dense urban environment, the max range is more like 1,500 meters. The major advantage of Rotem L is that it is quiet and can be flown through open doors or windows. Carrying one or no grenades allows Rotem L to stay airborne for up to 45 minutes. The grenades can be triggered while still aboard Rotem L to provide a self-destruct mechanism. If Rotem L lands with live grenades aboard, the operator can double-check the armed status of the grenades before recharging it for another mission. Rotem L can be used unarmed by police or carry tear gas and flash-bang grenades. Rotem L is expensive, costing over $10,000 each. Military users prefer to use it equipped with vidcams and use the cruise missile option only when forced to. Israel firms offer less expensive unarmed quadcopters for military and police use.

Parrot was competitive with the Israeli designs and offered to build ANAFI USA in the U.S. as well as demonstrating it could incorporate military-grade security features and a quad-copter that matched Israeli and Chinese designs in flexibility, features and price. Parrot had another advantage because France was a NATO member and this made it easier for French firms to meet NATO standards that enabled all NATO members to easily purchase Parrot UAVs.

NATO troops in places like Syria, Iraq, Mali and Afghanistan found that both Islamic terrorist and local security forces were eager users of high-end Chinese-made DJI commercial quadcopters. A particular favorite is the DJI Matrice 200/210. This is an industrial-grade quadcopter costing up to $20,000 each. The DJI 210 weighs 4.7 kg (10.3 pounds) and can carry up to 1.45 kg (3.2 pounds) of cameras, additional batteries or improvised weapons. Max endurance is about 30 minutes and top speed is 60 kilometers an hour. When under user control the 210 can operate up to eight kilometers away although five kilometers is more common. The 210 can be programmed to use its GPS/GLONASS navigation system to cover a specific route and return. If the control system is lost for any reason, the quadcopter will automatically return to where it started and land. While the 210 is mainly used for surveillance and reconnaissance, some have been equipped with an explosive dispenser. Anything from grenades to IEDs (improvised explosive devices) can be used. The 210 can be rigged as a one-way cruise-missile but that is expensive and increasingly common with groups backed by Iran as well as other well-funded Islamic terrorists. High-end models like the 210 are favored because they are rugged and can handle wind and incorporate obstacle avoidance. This is important when operating in urban areas, forests or at night using a night-vision camera.

While popular with Islamic terrorists, gangsters and less-well equipped police and military units, Western forces tended to avoid DJI products because of fears that China may have ordered the manufacturer to include secret features that would allow the Chinese military to disable or take-control of DJI products. No one has ever found such a back door in the quadcopter software and these Chinese quadcopters, especially those made by DJI, are the most popular models worldwide. Thats because DJI models offered are the best value as well as being the most reliable.

Sometimes these bans were issued after troops had already obtained and were using DJI quadcopters. For example, in early 2018 the U.S. Marine Corps announced a new squad and platoon organization, based on its experience so far this century, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the unique changes to the new 12-man squad was that each one would get a commercial quadcopter. These were smaller, more compact models costing less than two thousand dollars each. The Marines had already bought 600 and ordered another 200 when the U.S. Department of Defense ordered a ban on the use of Chinese quadcopters. The Marines did manage to get an exemption to the new ban and sought government approved to purchase commercial quadcopters. These are out there but none as inexpensive as the Chinese models. The complaints about the DJI ban from military users in the United States and other NATO countries played a role in the ban being lifted in 2020.

The U.S. Army banned the use of DJI quadcopters in 2017. The troops had been encountering these DJI quadcopters in combat zones for years and some troops had bought them with their own money to use (successfully) in combat. Its no secret that DJI quadcopters have been showing up in combat zones with increasing frequency since 2014. Initially the most popular of these was the DJI Phantom quadcopter. The Phantom 3 showed up in 2015. It costs about a thousand dollars, weighs 3.9 kg (8.6 pounds), can stay in the air about 20 minutes per flight and can go up to 2,000 meters from the operator. The operator can see (at 720p resolution) what is under the Phantom using a small display and capture a higher resolution video (2.7k or 1080p) on a 16 GB micro memory card on the UAV. The Phantom 3 was widely available. It is easy to operate and has flight control software that makes it easy to operate and keeps the video image stable. You can equip these with a night vision camera. Max altitude is over 500 meters (1,600 feet) but most Phantoms operate lower down because getting to higher altitude takes time. DJI kept upgrading its Phantom line of quadcopters from the moment the first one hit the market in 2013. The Phantom 1 was basically a quadcopter you could add your own GoPro wireless vidcam to. But every few months DJI added new features and major upgrades were introduced as a new model. Phantom 2 appeared at the end of 2013, Phantom 3 in early 2015 and Phantom 4 a year later. Phantom 3 was the most popular model and Phantom 4 was basically a Phantom 3 with lots more capabilities (4K video, video transmission range of five kilometers) and a higher price (about $1,500 each). New models of the Phantom continued to appear, sometimes just with a few new features and a lower price. New features include collision avoidance sensors and software. The Phantom line was replaced by the Mavic and Matrice which included low (Mavic) and high end (Matrice) models. Year by year the capabilities of the DJI quadcopters increased and the troops were not happy that they could not use them but the enemy could and did.

For combat troops cost is an important feature because something low-cost and capable in the combat zone equipment is quickly worn out. This is especially true with quadcopters. As a result, the troops have become accustomed to buying commercial products whenever they can get away with it.
The U.S. Marine Corps is reorganizing and improvising to make itself useful in a future war in the Pacific. The latest innovation is a LRUSV (Long-Range Unmanned Surface Vessel) that does not carry aircraft but a large number of the Hero-120 loitering munition. Hero 120 weighs 12.5 kg (27.5 pounds) including a 4.6 kg warhead. Max endurance is 60 minutes and max range of the control signal is 40 kilometers. Because the LRUSV has to remain silent (no transmissions) to avoid detection, the Hero-120 will be modified to home on enemy transmissions.

The LRUSV is a 12.5 meter (40-foot) autonomous (unmanned) boat designed to operate at ranges of nearly 2,000 kilometers and launch loitering munitions to engage enemy targets afloat and ashore. The LRUSV must maintain accurate knowledge of position and time for navigation. During hostilities, GPS availability may be disrupted, degraded or denied by jamming. There is also the risk of spoofing (a form of jamming that changes the GPS data received). LRUSV has a backup INS (Inertial Navigation System) which requires position updates from GPS or an automated celestial navigation system to survive potential enemy jamming and spoofing efforts. Celestial Navigation (CELNAV) is a technique which has been around for hundreds of years and there is new technology that allows CELNAV to be performed without human intervention. This system still has reliability problems, which will delay a fully protected from uninterrupted accurate navigation system for the LRUSV. This means that initially LRSUV will enter service without a dependable, under all conditions, navigation system.

The primary mission of LRUSV is surveillance and reconnaissance. The Hero-120 missiles are an optional accessory for special operations that require a missile weapon. The marines already have some experience with Hero-120. Earlier experiments included converting some of their marine LAV-M 8x8 wheeled armored vehicles to carry an eight cell MCL (Multi-Canister Launcher) that will use the Hero-120, modified for USMC command and control systems. Hero-120 is one of many similar loitering munitions that Israeli firm Uvision has been developing and selling since 2011. The smallest Hero system is a family of small loitering munitions. The latest and largest of them is the Hero 20, which weighs 1.8 kg (four pounds) including a 200-gram (7 ounce) warhead, Endurance is 20 minutes and operator range is 10 kilometers. Hero 30 weighs 3 kg (6.6 pounds) with a .5 kg (1.1 pound) warhead, and 30 minutes endurance. Hero 70 weighs 7 kg (14.4 pounds) with a 1.2 kg (2.6 pound) warhead and 45 minutes endurance. All these weapons are stored and fired from a canister and the smaller three are designed to be carried by infantry. All use the same controller and digital camera. All use fold-out wings and an electric motor with the propeller in the rear that provides speeds of up to three kilometers a minute. Cruising speed, to obtain max endurance, is about half that.

The marines planned to use the MCL launcher on other vehicles or on ships. The Hero-120/MCL combination gave the marines a recon/attack UAV that can find and hit boats and other small craft as well as a wide variety of land targets. The MCL can be reloaded with different size canisters carrying more of the smaller Hero 30s or fewer of the Hero 400.

Uvision has developed and produced numerous Hero munitions in different sizes. All are battery powered except the largest one; Hero 900. This one uses a gasoline engine; weighs 97 kg (213 pounds) and carries a 20 kg (44 pound) warhead. This Hero has seven-hour endurance and a max range (from the operator) of 250 kilometers. In 2015 the Hero 400 was introduced with four-hour endurance, weight of 40 kg (88 pounds) with an 8 kg (18 pound) warhead. This UAV is battery powered and can operate up to 150 kilometers from the operator. In 2017 a new version, the Hero 400EC was released that had improved software and a return and land (using a parachute) capability. All Hero models are reusable and can be sent on longer range missions against a target using the GPS location. This is what made Hero-120 so attractive for the marines: a portable, inexpensive guided weapon with a max range of over 100 kilometers.

The marines have been using the 13-ton 8x8 LAV25 since 1983 and most are personnel carriers (11 crew and passengers) but some have been converted to carry heavy weapons, like the LAV-M mortar carrier equipped with an 81mm mortar.

The marines have already tested use of M142 HIMARs (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) guided rocket vehicles on the flight deck of an amphibious ship. In 2017 the marines found that, with a few modifications to the HIMARS fire control software, the vehicle could accurately fire GMLRS (GPS guided MLRS) rockets from the flight deck of one of an LHA or LHD ships. This is nothing new as during World War II U.S. forces fired unguided rockets from ships in support of amphibious operations. But the use of GMLRS meant HIMARS could provide precision fire support from a ship at sea and hit targets up to 85 kilometers away.

Innovations like LRUSV and the use of Hero-120s or GMLRS missiles from a flight deck are the sort of moves the marines have made before to remain useful. This is because the marines have opposed becoming too large and treated like an elite ground combat force. In 2010 the marines proposed a sharp reduction in the Corps size. Senior marine commanders expressed a preference for a smaller force, one that concentrated on its main mission; amphibious operations. The current proposals take that further and want the marines to become soldiers in a new Army Amphibious Corps. That misses the point about what makes the marines special.

Currently the marines were still dissatisfied with the way they have been used as an army auxiliary since 2001. The marines consider themselves specialists, while the army proved adaptable in major wars. It was the army, for example, that carried out more amphibious operations than the marines did during World War II. A 1956 law specified the minimum size of the Corps as three divisions and three air wings. While this law could be changed by Congress, it also allows the marines to reorganize themselves. For over a decade the marines have been asking for the 1956 law to be amended to allow a smaller minimum size of the marine corps. The marines point out that they have come to comprise a quarter of America's ground combat forces. That's active duty, when you count the much larger army reserve force, the marines were 18 percent of ground combat forces in 2010 and that has not changed much since then. The marines never wanted to be just another part of American ground combat forces, even if they were still marines. Among many liberal politicians, efforts to eliminate the marine corps entirely is always a good way to get some attention.

For over a decade the marines were also concerned about their relationship with the U.S. Navy, which formed another ground combat force in 2005. To understand how this came about, you have to understand the relationship between the navy and the marines. The marines are not part of the navy, as they are often described. Both the navy and marines are part of the Department of the Navy. The Department of the Army and Department of the Air Force each have only one component.

Over the years, the marines have acquired more and more autonomy from the navy. When the U.S. Marine Corps was created at the start of the American Revolution, marines were sailors trained and equipped to fight as infantry, and they were very much part of the navy, and a standard component of ship crews. This changed radically in the late 19th century, when all-metal steam ships replaced wooden sailing ships. The new "iron ships" really didn't need marines, and there were proposals to eliminate them. In response, the American marines got organized and made themselves useful in other ways. For example, the marines performed very well as "State Department Troops" in Latin America for half a century, from the late 19th century to just before World War II. This was a period when American troops were frequently used to deal with civil disorder abroad, and attempts at nation building. During World War I (1914-18), they provided a brigade for ground combat in Europe, where they demonstrated exceptional combat skills.

During the 1930s, as World War II approached, the U.S. Marine Corps saw an opportunity because the navy realized they would have to use amphibious assaults to take heavily fortified Japanese islands in any future war. Thus, once the U.S. entered World War II, the marines formed their first division size units, and ended the war with six divisions, organized into two corps.

At that point the Marine Corps was no longer just a minor part of the navy, but on its way to being a fourth service. Over the next half century, it basically achieved that goal. But in doing that, the navy lost control of its ground troops. Navy amphibious ships still went to sea, each with a battalion of marines on board. But because the marines are mainly an infantry force, and the war on terror was basically an infantry scale battle, the marines spent a lot more time working alongside the army in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In effect, the American marines want to be more like the British marines. That's interesting, because British marines are called Royal Marine Commandos, and are quite different. Britain, which invented the modern concept of the commando, disbanded it's ten army commandos, as the battalion size commando units were called, at the end of World War II. The Royal Marines, however, saw the commando concepts as a welcome addition to their own amphibious doctrine and retained three of their nine Royal Marine Commandos. Since World War II, the Royal Marines have maintained at least three commando battalions. Artillery and engineer units are supplied by the army.

Like the U.S. Marines, the Royal Marines realized that assault from the sea was always a commando operation, requiring special training, bold leadership and an aggressive spirit. The Royal Marines, like their American counterparts, continued to innovate. In 1956, it was a Royal Marine Commando that launched the first helicopter assault from ships against a land target during the invasion of Egypt. The Royal Marine Commandos were used extensively to keep the peace in Ireland during the 1970s and 80s. In 1982, it was two Royal Marine Commandos and one parachute battalion that did most of the fighting to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina. The Royal Marines have performed peacekeeping duty in the Balkans and Africa, and served as an amphibious fast reaction force.

While the U.S. Marines made a name for themselves with multi-division amphibious operations in the Pacific during World War II, the Royal Marines stuck with the commando type operations that characterize what marines spend most of the time doing between major wars. An important aspect of this is that the last large scale amphibious operation took place seventy years ago when American marines, accompanied by South Korea marines they had trained, led a daring operation to seize Inchon, Korea in 1950. That was deemed impossible by the invading North Koreans, who did not leave a large force to defend Inchon from such an attack. Because of the marines, and the army divisions who came in behind them, the North Korean forces further south were cut off from supplies and reinforcements and soon defeated. As remarkable as the Inchon operation was, since then the typical marine mission has been a quick assault using a small (usually battalion size) force.

In anticipation of this, the U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MARSOC) was created in 2006. Over the next four years MARSOC sent some of its 2,400 personnel on over thirty deployments to South America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and Southeast Asia. MARSOC is organized into a headquarters, a two battalion Special Operations Regiment, a Foreign Military Training Unit, and a Marine Special Operations Support Group. There are 3-4 Special Operations companies in each battalion. The marines basically lost two of their four Force Recon companies in order to build MARSOC. Meanwhile, more troops have been added to division level reconnaissance units, to take up some of that slack. The marine Special Operations troops provide a combination of services roughly equal to what the U.S. Army Special Forces and Rangers did, as well as some of the functions of the marine Force Recon units.

All the other services, except the marines, contributed to the formation of SOCOM in the late 1980s. The marines finally got around to working with SOCOM in 2005, when it was agreed that they would create a marine special operations command (MARSOC). The Marine Corps had long resisted such a step, largely because of its belief that marines are inherently superior warriors, capable of highly specialized missions. This attitude began to change during the fighting in Afghanistan, when marines were assigned to support SOCOM troops there.

As a result of that experience, marines were attached to SOCOM for liaison and observation purposes. In 2004, the marines organized a company sized unit of commandos, "Detachment One", using volunteers from their Force Recon troops, the closest thing the marines had to commandos. Detachment One was sent to Iraq, where it's performance convinced SOCOM that marines could operate at the SOCOM level.

The marines see their future as a smaller, by up to a third, or more and even more elite force that is better equipped. The marines want to get back to sea, and that can be done without losing a lot of the valuable combat experience the marines have gained in the recent wars. The marines continue the more extensive training marines have been getting for several decades now. This makes the marines an even more elite and very resourceful force, which is what many marines are fine with. That does not impress many peacetime critics who forget how marine attitudes and improvisations proved invaluable time and again in wartime.
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The United States and Israel have resolved their differences over the use of two Iron Dome batteries the Americans purchased but were unable to use because Israel refused to provide source code for Iron Dome that the U.S. demanded based on claims that the U.S. needed it to integrate the system into American air defense networks. It took nearly three years for the Americans and Israelis to achieve a solution both found acceptable.

In 2020 the U.S. Army found itself in an embarrassing situation after spending a billion dollars to buy two Israel Iron Dome missile defense batteries. The problem was the army refused to put their Iron Dome systems into service because Israel refused to turn over the source code for the novel anti-rocket/mortar system. The army said it needed the source code in order to make Iron Dome part of the army air defense system. There is no such integrated system and, if there was, the source code was unnecessary as an API (Application Programming Interface) could link one system with others.

The army also expressed doubts about being able to use Iron Dome in other countries, like Iraq or Afghanistan, without source code. But Israel had sold dozens of Iron Dome batteries to export customers like Azerbaijan, Czech Republic, India, Romania and Singapore with possible sales to NATO, South Korea and (very discreetly) Saudi Arabia. The sale to the Czech Republic was contingent on Iron Dome being capable of integration into the NATO air defense system, which includes many different systems. That was done with an API. The sale to Singapore, like the possible (or already completed) sale to Saudi Arabia was handled confidentially so as not to anger nearby Moslem nations. Singapore has Malaysia and Indonesia to worry about and Saudi Arabia has a lot more potentially offended Moslem neighbors. Such sales are not entirely secret. Iron Dome cannot be disguised as something else and one Moslem nation, Azerbaijan, had already openly purchased Iron Dome with no ill diplomatic effects. The sale to the Czech Republic means Iron Dome would be integrated with nearby NATO nations who use American air defense systems.

U.S. Army officials protested that their situation was somehow different. There is some disagreement over how and why this situation is different. The U.S. Army has long been criticized for neglecting air defense. This was true and there were practical reasons for that attitude. The U.S. Air Force gained air dominance, which is one step up from air superiority, towards the end of World War II. Thus from 1945 to now, no one has been able to seriously damage U.S. ground forces from the air. American troops have suffered losses from airstrikes, but these were friendly fire incidents when air force jets were called in to provide close air support. Until the development of smart bombs such air support always involved some risk to the troops being supported. After the Cold War ended in 1991 American ground forces found themselves increasingly vulnerable to missile and rocket attacks. The air domination provided by American airpower was less effective against these and the army was increasingly pressured by the public (via Congress) to develop more effective defenses against this new threat from the air. The army procurement system has not got a great record in situations like this and is especially resistant to obtaining foreign systems, even ones like Iron Dome that have been combat proven and an obvious solution to a very real problems with defending American bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere against the kind of weapons Iron Dome have proven it can handle.

The army, under pressure from Congress, said it would put the two Iron Dome systems into service. The Dome Batteries arrived in 2020 and a hundred or so soldiers were trained to operate the equipment. The army admitted that, if called on, their Iron Dome batteries, or at least one of them, could be ready to deploy before the end of 2020.

There is still the mystery over why the U.S. Army was so intent on trying to force Israel to turn over the source code. The U.S. successfully tested the Iron Dome systems it obtained earlier for evaluation. The Israelis point out that they have not shared Iron Dome source code (and a lot of other similar stuff) with anyone. In addition, the U.S. has been much less successful at keeping secrets than Israel. The U.S. Army is under pressure to use Iron Dome in places like Iraq where American bases are being hit with rockets fired by Iran-backed Iraqi militias. Israel even modified Iron Dome in 2016, at American request, so that it could also shoot down UAVs.

There was an American proposal to hold a competition to evaluate other systems that can do what Iron Dome does. The problem was that there are no other such systems and the Israelis rightly thought the U.S. armys demand for the Iron Dome source code was only so the U.S. government and American defense contractors could reverse-engineer it and create a competing U.S. made system.

What makes Iron Dome unique, other than the fact that it works, is the use of two radars to quickly calculate the trajectory of the incoming rocket and do nothing if the rocket trajectory indicates it is going to land in an uninhabited area. But if the computers predict a rocket coming down in an inhabited area one (or often two to be sure) $50,000 Tamir guided missiles are fired to intercept the rocket. This and the fact that the Iron Dome fire control system can track hundreds of incoming missiles at once makes the system cost-effective. So far Iron Dome has shot down about 85 percent of the rockets it calculated were headed for populated areas. The Tamir missiles used by Iron Dome weigh 90 kg and have a range of 70 kilometers against rockets, mortar shells and artillery shells up to 155mm. Iron Dome can also shoot down aircraft and helicopters that are operating at up to 10 kilometers (32,000 feet) altitude. The Iron Dome software includes the capability to quickly integrate a new map that indicates areas that must be protected and other areas where the rocket or shell can be allowed to land harmlessly. Export customers have been satisfied with how this works. Some critics have cast doubt on the actual effectiveness of Iron Dome. Yet property and human losses plunged precipitously once Ir0n Dome was in service and the people being protected were satisfied.

There have been competing systems. In 2008, while Iron Dome was still being developed and several years away from entering service, Hamas in Gaza was increasing the number of rockets and mortar shells fired into southern Israel. At that point, several hundred rockets and mortar shells a month were fired into southern Israel. Many Israelis had noted that the Americans and British were already using an effective anti-rocket system; C-RAM. This is a modified version of the U.S. Navy Phalanx system, which was originally designed to protect warships from anti-ship missiles. As originally designed, you turned Phalanx on whenever the ship was likely to have an anti-ship missile fired at it. The Phalanx radar can spot incoming missiles out to about 5,000 meters, and the 20mm cannon is effective out to about 2,000 meters. With incoming missiles moving up to several hundred meters a second, you can see why Phalanx is set to automatic. There's not much time for human intervention, which is why the Phalanx has to be turned on and set to automatically detect and shoot at incoming missiles. But weapons engineers discovered that Phalanx could take out incoming 155mm artillery shells as well. This capability is what led to C-RAM. Israel considered buying C-RAM to provide some protection to towns on the Gaza border but decided against it because Iron Dome was close to being operational, which occurred in 2011.

Since 2003 there have been two major Phalanx mods. In one, the Phalanx was adapted for use on land, to shoot down incoming rockets. This was done by using a larger artillery spotting radar, which directs Phalanx to fire at incoming mortar shells and rockets. Not all the incoming stuff is hit, but nearly 80 percent of it is, and that is very useful. The second mod was for shipboard use, and changes the software so the Phalanx can be used against small boats, especially those of the suicide bomber variety.

In 2007 Britain bought a C-RAM system to protect its airbase in southern Iraq. A C-RAM Phalanx system, which can cover about four kilometers of border, costs $8 million and was effective in defending bases. What it could not do effectively was defend long borders Israel had to guard in the north (Lebanon and Syria) and south (Gaza).

C-RAM uses high explosive 20mm shells that detonate near the target, spraying it with fragments. By the time these fragments reach the ground, they are generally too small to injure anyone. At least that's been the experience in Iraq. The original Phalanx used 20 mm depleted uranium shells, to slice through incoming missiles. Phalanx fires shells at a rate of 75 per second. Another advantage of C-RAM is that it makes a distinctive noise when firing, warning people nearby that a mortar or rocket attack is underway, giving people an opportunity to duck inside if they are out and about.

The first C-RAM was sent to Iraq in late 2006, to protect the Iraq Green Zone, the large area in Baghdad turned into an American base. It was found that C-RAM could knock down 70-80 percent of the rockets and mortar shells fired within range of its cannon. Not bad, since it only took about a year to develop C-RAM. Meanwhile, another version, using a high-powered laser, instead of the 20mm gun, was in development but never achieved enough effectiveness to enter service. By 2008 there were nearly 900 Phalanx systems in use, including some on Israeli warships. Most have not gotten these software mods that enable the cannon to knock down rockets and shells, as well as incoming anti-ship missiles.

Since 2011, when Iron Dome entered service, Israel has made progress in developing Laser Dome, a shorter range (two kilometers) Iron Dome that uses laser beams instead of rockets. Laser Dome is meant to reinforce Iron Dome, not replace it. A longer range (over 100 kilometers) missile has been developed for Iron Dome that enables one battery to protect a larger area. Laser Dome would be used against key targets that might be subjected to an overwhelming attack by a hundred or more rockets at once. Iron Dome cannot launch enough missiles to defend against such an attack, but Laser Dome could handle it since it can fire far more laser beams in less time than Iron Dome can fire longer range missiles. Laser Dome turned into Iron Beam and was introduced in 2023, Iron Beam will enter service in 2025, as part of Iron Dome systems. Iron Beam has a range of up to ten kilometers, depending on how large the target is. Larger targets often require more than one dose of Iron Beam before they are disabled. Iron Bean does not run out of ammunition as long as its power supply keeps working. The fire control system enables Iron Beam to rapidly identify and hit targets.

The key to Iron Dome success is its software and U.S. insistence on having access to it is seen as proof of how essential, and valuable that software is. The Israelis insist on keeping it secret.
Libya remains divided and deadlocked. There are two main factions, one in the east based in Tobruk and another in Tripoli, in the west. The UN backs the Tripoli faction, as do local Islamic militias and Turkish troops and mercenaries. The eastern faction controls most of the oil and export ports. The Russian Wagner Group mercenaries are based in the east but now see themselves as peacekeepers and work with the Turks to maintain a ceasefire. This allows Russian oil firms to operate in Libya and do work for the Libyan national oil company. Both factions support national elections to unite the country but neither faction trusts the others enough to proceed with elections. Russia and the Turks refuse to withdraw their troops from Libya until they receive guarantees that their interests in Libya are respected. The UN and NATO oppose that because the Tripoli faction wants to legitimize an illegal treaty signed by the Tripoli faction in 2019 granting Turkey some of Greeces offshore oil and natural gas rights in an area between Libya and Turkey that ignores existing, and internationally recognized, claims on that area. Turkey and Greece are both NATO members and NATO backs Greece in this matter. Turkey wont withdraw its forces from Libya until a new national Libyan government assures the Turks that the illegal agreement is confirmed by a national Libyan government. Many people in both factions do not want to be stuck with a treaty that the UN and NATO consider illegal. Russia is no friend of NATO and is currently at war with NATO in Ukraine. Turkey is also a NATO member but most other NATO members would like to expel the Turks from NATO and there is no legal mechanism for that. Turks and Russians are troublemakers in Europe and Libya is a foreign branch of that mischief.

Despite all the divisive problems, all the factions recently agreed to support one prime minister and hold national elections before the end of 2023.

Russia has moved its embassy from Benghazi to Tripoli. Delays were caused by security concerns. Tripoli still has problems with local militias. By reopening its embassy in Tripoli and backing the Abdulhamid Dbeibah faction in Tripoli rather than the Fathi Bashagha faction and the LNA (Libyan National Army) in the east, Russia is in effect cooperating with Turkey, whose illegal agreements with the Tripoli government include giving Russia some of Greeces rights to explore for oil and gas in areas of the Mediterranean. Libya is encouraging the reestablishment of embassies in Tripoli. The American embassy closed in 2014 but so far the Americans have no plans to reopen their embassy. A few dozen nations have, or are planning to reopen their embassies in Tripoli.

China has not waited for an embassy to open and has already negotiated several investment deals, including a $33 billion railroad, bus route transportation project and a license to mine for gold in the south. China is accused of bribing local tribes and others to enable these projects to move forward.

June 5, 2023: The Libyan GAAIA (General Authority for Awqaf and Islamic Affairs) is seeking to establish a Guardians of Virtue organization to police the practice of Islam in Libya. This sort of thing is not popular with most Libyans.

June 4, 2023: In the east, about half the 4,000 Egyptians found to be in Libya illegally have been sent back to Egypt. Some of these Egyptians were in Libya to get on a boat to Europe. Others sought work in Libya, something Egyptians have been doing for decades.

June 2, 2023: The UN renewed the European Union authority to inspect ships near Libya to prevent illegal arms shipment to Libya.

May 31, 2023: In Tripoli, another gun battle broke out between rival militias loyal to the Tripoli government. Several people were wounded before the fighting stopped.

May 27, 2023: The Tripoli government used armed UAVs to carry out airstrikes against smugglers operating near Tripoli.

May 23, 2023: The Libyan 6+6 committee met in Morocco and worked out the agreement required to hold national elections by the end of the year. The 6+6 means six representatives from the House of Representatives government in the east and six from the High Council of State government in Tripoli. Now Libya has only one prime minister. Morocco has hosted several conferences like this over the last few years and some progress was made each time.

May 16, 2023: In the east, the House of Representatives government ousted its prime minister Fathi Bashagha because of mismanagement and corruption. This makes it more likely that a peace deal with the government in Tripoli can be negotiated.
MBABANE  Young entrepreneurs in the arts sector will get the opportunity of a lifetime from Epic Gig IV.

The youth-driven festival Epic Gig, in its fourth season, is calling out for young business entrepreneurs in the kingdom to contact them for an opportunity to exhibit their work during the course of the festival. The call out is for all business entrepreneurs in the arts sector from arts and crafts and other businesses in the same field. It has been over a month since Epic Gig first made the call, which is still ongoing.

This years three-day festival, which is in its fourth edition, will be held at Mavuso Trade and Exhibition Centre from June 30 to July 2.

Makhosazane Pascua Pelembe, Epic Gig PRO, shared with this publication that each interested individual who would love the opportunity for their work to reach the large number of people who will be in attendance may contact Epic Gig on +268 7625 6594.

They need to be registered in our database so that they are given the platform to showcase their work and reach many. This will come at no cost to all willing participants, as the Epic Gig will simply help them get through to a larger market than they would normally get. We advise those interested to contact us as soon as possible.

Pelembe went on to say the benefit of empowering youth goes beyond understanding how they think and behave from a social, developmental, and psychological perspective. Allowing youth the platform to showcase their own work, tangible ideas and opinions to others is transformative in itself. The Epic Gig has invited guests and participants to heed this call by applying their skills, talents, and resources to various festival projects and initiatives.

This commitment towards uniting organisations and creative activists to effect meaningful, sustainable, and inclusive change will result in a drop in depression and substance abuse among our youth, said the PRO. She went on to say that their goal this year is to go to all four regions of the kingdom and do activations that will help identify youth doing arts in the different tinkhundla and give them the platform to showcase their skills, businesses, and services.

Those in the performing arts will get a chance to perform on the Freshman stage during the course of the festival. The youth identified from all the regions will then be granted space and all the required equipment to exhibit in each dedicated pavilion at Mavuso Trade and Exhibition Centre, to showcase their businesses and generate some income at no cost to them for the entire duration of the festival. They will then be registered on our database for the Business Eswatini (BE) initiative, which helps train youth in arts and business as well as fund their projects and businesses. There will also be other initiatives held at the other pavilions, such as:

The Film and Television Training and Exhibition

The Asikutulisane Arts programme discussion

The Modern Day Business and Youth Seminar

Lets Talk: Youth in Rehabilitation, featuring Vulamasango Youth

The Beauty of Culture Exhibition

SMEs Exhibition

According to Pelembe, Mavuso Trade and Exhibition Centre is the ideal venue to host such a festival because it has all the facilities necessary to cater for all the activities the festival has to offer. We will need the entire venue for the execution of this festival. Most of the challenges faced by the youth in the kingdom stem from lack of activities, job knowledge, exposure, and platforms that will help them showcase their creativity and give them skills to thrive in their respected fields, said the PRO.

She went on to say that this leads to depression, which then leads to substance abuse and their joining movements and organisations that lead them astray and create so many problems in the country. We are targeting to get over 2 000 youth participants from the 34 tinkhundla centres that will be visited and also from registrations. These will be the ones that will be given the pavilions to showcase their businesses and arts for free during the entire course of the festival, said Pelembe.
Termeni de referinta. Concurs de selectare a 2 consultanti-formatori/ consultante-formatoare care vor realiza un program de abilitare privind aplicarea Metodologiei cu privire la prevenirea si combaterea bullyingului pentru profesionistii/istele
ESWATINI must be proactive to succeed amid South Africas (SA) challenges if she is to avert sinking with the Titanic. The political and economic challenges facing our largest trading partner may look grim, but they present a possible 1980s scenario where the apartheid era boosted our economic gains.

In its recent report on SA, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) describes business and consumer confidence and sentiment in the SA economy as weak. It says our neighbours are facing mounting economic and social challenges and projects real GDP growth of 0.1 per cent in 2023, reflecting a significant increase in the intensity of power outages, weaker commodity prices and the external environment.

Eswatini may be heavily attached to the SA economy and very prone to catching the cold of its sneeze, but such proximity can also be advantageous to investors keen on continuing to use the region as their business hub. This opportunity needs a proactive strategy, which one hopes the business sector is already exploring before SA gets its act together. We cant afford to repeat the mistakes of the past.

In an excerpt from a private sector diagnostic of Eswatini, published in September 2022, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank and the largest global development institution focused on the private sector in emerging markets, recalled how Eswatini experienced strong investment-led growth during apartheid SA due to foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows from companies that sought to avoid the sanctions against South Africa, while keeping access to its market. The report notes how Eswatini lost its comparative advantage as an investment destination after SAs democratic transition in 1994, as the latter became the regions preferred destination for investment and skilled labour.

Eswatini shifted from a private investment-led higher-growth model to a government spending-led lower-growth model after the end of apartheid in SA. The growth outcomes of the two models have been starkly different: Real gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaged 6.7 per cent between 1980 and 2000 and three per cent between 2000 and 2019, reads the report.

Repeat

So how do we avoid a repeat of this scenario? This time we need to ensure any investor settling here is there for the long haul, no matter how and when SA stabilises politically and economically. Lets take cues from countries such as Namibia, which is luring investors their way by offering Namibian residency by investment visa, which allows global investors to obtain a renewable work permit and Namibian residency in exchange for a minimum investment of about E5 million (US$265 000). The initiative also offers permanent residence permits to international investors if they purchase at least 10 per cent of the shares of a new or existing Namibian company.

How far are we from offering a similar incentive? I do recall His Majesty tasking Commerce, Trade and Industry Minister Manqoba Khumalo to engage with his counterpart at the Home Affairs Ministry to work on this inducement. The Kings call was made during an Eswatini Business Forum hosted in New York in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

It came about after UNDP Regional Director for Africa Ahuuna Eziakonwa received a text from a successful business friend she had just informed of the existing investment opportunities in Eswatini. The acquaintance had asked her to inquire from His Majesty if permanent residency for investment was a possibility. I have just been instructed by His Majesty to take this matter up with my colleague at Home Affairs to work on making this a possibility for those who make investments at a reasonable threshold, was a response of Minister Khumalo at the event. This came shortly after the King had assured the forum of Eswatinis commitment to offering various incentives that would make their investments worth their decision.

Prospects

The IMF recently gave Eswatini a more positive review of its growth prospects when compared to the report it gave SA recently. The IMF projects our GDP growth at 3.2 per cent, while that of SA has been placed at 0.1 per cent in 2023. The organisation noted the risks to Eswatini imposed by the weaker growth of SA and the new shocks to food, fuel and fertilizer.

The IMF has recommended the implementation of macro-structural and governance reforms to support private sector-led inclusive growth and reduce poverty and inequality. The IMF directors agreed that continued efforts to improve the business climate, diversify the economy and close gender gaps are key. What this all boils down to is how quick we can act on getting our house in order to see the opportunities that lie in the cloud of uncertainty facing SA and the world at large as the Russia-Ukraine war continues to divide global superpowers.

Let us market ourselves as an ideal alternative investment site and implement incentives to ensure that people who do move here do not wish to leave for a long time. Every crisis, as the saying goes, contains an opportunity. Those who made a fortune during the COVID-19 outbreak may testify to this more clearly.


Paul Reddish has announced today that, after four years, he will be stepping back as chief executive of Volunteering Matters.

Reddish will remain in post until a new chief executive has been recruited  a process in which he is involved. Its just trying to find the right person to take the work forward, he says.

He says he loves the role and enjoys working with his colleagues but feels it is time to leave his current position, partly to spend more time with his family and avoid potential burnout, but also because there is a pull factor.

First charity CEO role the making of me as a person

Reddishs career started in financial services, but he was involved early on in youth work and in the charity sector through other means, such as being a trustee or volunteering.

The sector wasnt new to me. Although Id never actually had a job in the sector, Id done quite a few different things at a community level.

He wasnt getting the fulfilment out of the banking job, and became ProjectScotlands CEO in 2013.

It took some adjusting moving into the sector, he says, and it was a massive learning curve, but a good one.

It was my first CEO role, but I would also say the making of me as a person, and understanding who I am, what my values are, what Im about, what sort of leader I want to be.

Only when I started to do that role did I realise that I was someone slightly different at work at the bank than to the real me.

Youd call it going in with your armour on. Youd go into the corporate environment that banking was and you'd leave a little bit of yourself at home.

When you start to really deeply understand the impact you can have on people when youre just yourself, and youre authentic and you lead through what you know to be right, it is completely life changing.

I had developed all of these skills in the roles that Id done, but Id never really been myself, and I think theres something about this sector that allows you to be yourself that maybe doesnt exist in other sectors, and you dont know it until youre in it  its quite precious.

Growth during the pandemic

Volunteering Matters has been on a bit of a journey in since Reddish became its CEO in October 2019, he says.

Its been emotional at points, its been challenging and tough to navigate through aspects of it. But its also been a real privilege and a sense of achievement.

He joined just as the charity had sold a property and began to undergo a restructure.

We needed to turn it around fast and cut some costs, and we did that. And then during Covid we actually doubled in size because of all of the work we were asked to do.

It was hard, Covid. I worked more hours than I ever want to work again, and I asked my staff to do some things timewise that I hope to never ask anybody to do again.

However, Reddish says that in a way, [the pandemic] was a making of us as it focused the charity on its redefining its purpose  this charity is at its best when it stands alongside communities.

We have to take the best of whats come out of Covid and sustain it, but weve also got to acknowledge that some of the things from Covid have to go. So the pace that we ask people to work at, thats not sustainable.

Last 12 months has been hard

The charity was rebuilding and had put a growth plan in place, when the cost-of-living crisis hit.

A whole raft of our bills went up overnight. There was a double whammy really because it wasnt just about cost-of-living prices, it was the impact that then had on the behaviour of government and local authorities.

He says central government turmoil last year also disrupted its funding processes, which hit us really hard.

In addition to all these costs coming in, there was a period last summer and autumn where there were hardly any tenders coming out, hardly any money being pushed out to the sector.

The charity also had limited reserves and an 18m pension hole through its involvement in a local government scheme. He says the only good thing that came out of the economic turmoil caused by Liz Truss tenure as prime minister was pretty much overnight, our pensions deficit shrunk.

Now, Reddish says, the charitys financial position is healthier.

Here we are a few months later, all of those renewals have come in, all that money has been released from local authorities and it looks like were going to get no debt from the pension scheme. So ironically, as of the first of June, were probably healthier than weve ever been.

Im not going to lie, the journey to get to where we are today over the last 12 months has been hard. And I think its just a sign of how things have been recently with the sector. We seem to be going through these extremes and a sign of the things that charity leaders have had to take on over the last few years.

The right time to leave

I think you have to put everything into leading a charity, says Reddish, and it takes a lot personally to do the job well.

Not just all of your professional skills, your heart, your emotions, all of the things that make you want to be in this sector.

It just means that there are points of self-care where you have to reflect on how long you can sustain that for in order to be effective.

This feels like the right time for me. Im not burnt out, but I might be if I keep going and its recognising that.

Reddish also wants to spend more time with his family, and has three children under 10.

This charity is amazing, does amazing work, has brilliant people, it is an absolute privilege. But I miss my kids. And I also recognise the other part about how much longer can I do it at the pace and do it well.

I do love this role, being able to be honest with yourself about when its right for you is I think an important part of the journey, and Ill miss it, I will miss the people and miss the sector.

Im just feeling like its time to go and do something on my own, leaving the charity, and hopefully the volunteering sector, in a much better space.

For Volunteering Matters, Reddish says his successor has got a stable charity to do brilliant things with, some amazing partners, and a 10-year vision for changing volunteering.

Whats not to like? For me its the best job in the sector for someone whos got the real energy and drive to take this forward. All good things come to an end.

Nonetheless, Reddish is not intending on leaving the sector forever and has plans to continue working with campaign groups such as Running out Racism in Scotland.

The existential threat to volunteering is not understanding change

Reddish says the pandemic caused a natural disruption to volunteering with some lifelong volunteers stopping and others doing it for the first time but he says that is now starting to settle.

Moreover, Reddish says young people volunteer in a different way to the over 50s, and tend to be less brand focused, and more concerned with activism.

It requires charities to adapt to changing behaviours around how people want to interact with their communities. And I think the existential threat that some people are saying exists to volunteering is not understanding that change, as opposed to people not wanting to volunteer.

Volunteering Matters worked in partnership with many other organisations during Reddishs tenure, and formed a lot of really strong collaborations out of Covid with organisations that we knew about before, but we didnt really have deep relationships with.

It was just so heartening to see people leaving their organisation hats at the door and just doing the right thing for communities together.

Thats a real moment for the sector, to give up time and space for each other, were going to do it because volunteering communities are important, and theyre more important than our organisations.

I do hope its an irreversible trend. I think the more the sector can tackle things together and compromise and give space for each other, the more progress we can make around some of the systemic issues that have been around for a long time.
On Wednesday, during an early-morning stroll through Central Park, Chris Licht, the chairman and CEO of CNN, was fired by David Zaslavthe head of Warner Bros. Discovery, the networks parent company, whom Licht considered a mentor. The site of the firing provided poignant detail in this weeks CNN-implosion story: according to the New York Times, Licht was offered the networks top job early last year during a similar walk through the park with Zaslav. This time, Zaslav tossed his protege into the shrubbery, as an ominous yellow haze enveloped the city.

The scrum of coverage about Lichts ouster has focused largely on his hubris, presented to Tim Alberta, a writer for The Atlantic, in a masterful profile. Licht, a rising star, clearly thought that he could win over Alberta, and maybe his own staff. Instead, he came across as arrogant, vacuous, severely out of his depth. Postmortems, of which there were many, blamed the Atlantic story, CNNs sagging ratings, and a revolt among on-air talent. Yet Licht, for all the words he managed to confide in Alberta, seemed unable to articulate a vision to his staff that made any sense.

Journalism can look easy from the outside. I once worked for a boss (you may have heard of him) who could not understand why feature reporters accustomed to doing a story every week or two couldnt just as easily churn out one a day. How hard could it be? Hard, it turns out, and maybe harder now than at any time in our media history. Lichts mistake was in thinking he could see something no one else could: a straightforward path out of the deeply politicized, broadly distrustful, intensely personal, and politically dishonest moment that the country finds itself in. Journalists are living that moment like everybody else, and newsrooms are struggling as they plod their way through.

Anyone who claims that the solution is very simpleas Licht did, with specific reference to coverage of Donald Trumpis deluded. (Consider, for instance, The Messenger, a startup news site that billed itself as an answer to a supposed left-wing tilt in newsrooms when it launched recently, only to devolve into a den of clickbait and internal strife almost on day one.) The dwindling media chorus on Twitter is rarely much better, berating news organizations anytime they deign to hear from a Republican.

Licht, abetted by Zaslav, suggested there was a simple blueprintand that CNNs journalists, among the best in the world, had been intentionally heading in the wrong direction when he took over. Another Times story this week quoted Frank Sesno, a former Washington bureau chief at CNN, who believes that CNN did need to tone certain elements down and dial some things back following the Trump presidency. But Sesno also told the Times that Lichts approach was misguided: What Licht was really trying to do, and it didnt work, was he was trying to make a tonal change but he made it sound like a substantive change.

The challenge for news outlets, as for every American planning to vote in 2024, is how to process a political climate that has become a threat to the democratic process. How do you cover a major-party contender, in Trump, who has been impeached, arrested, indicted, and discredited, yet continues to command the loyalty and attention of millions? How do you speak to voters who dont trust the media but who seem comfortable in a sea of professionalized disinformation? How do we keep the press from becoming the story along the way?

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Thoughtful people, including many of the journalists inside the CNN newsroom, are trying to wrestle with these questions. A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, puzzled through the predicament of the press in a recent essay for CJR. Jon Allsop, the author of CJRs The Media Today newsletter, wrote earlier this week that the problem with most television news is less about individual personalities than its conventional, optics-driven tone. (Lichts formulations read as conceptually shallow, Allsop observed. What is journalism, exactly, and whom must it be trusted by?) To me, it seems best to avoid the sweeping correctives that Licht, and Zaslav, pursued. Journalism cant be packaged like a consumer good, marketed in a certain political direction. Truth isnt centrist or left leaning or inclusive.

The hard, worthwhile work of journalism lies in day-to-day decision-making that prioritizes what we know to be objectively trueand not repeating a lie, no matter who says it. Dont assume that the loudest, most provocative person in the room is worthy of the most attention. Give your staff the time, and the resources, needed to make sense of an enormously complicated, and unsettled, time. Admit fallibility and confusion.

Some reporters at CNN, and elsewhere, may be celebrating the demise of a bad bossand rightly so. (Can we please, though, dial back a tad on the nostalgia for Jeff Zucker, Lichts predecessor at CNN, who, as New Yorks Shawn McCreesh points out, was the ultimate Trump-platformer who green-lit The Apprentice and offered Trump debate advice?) Zaslav has vowed a patient search for a new leader; for now, CNN will be run by Amy Entelis, the longtime head of talent and content development; Virginia Moseley, the head of editorial; Eric Sherling, the programming chief; and David Leavy, who was announced as the incoming COO of CNN just last week, and whose arrival was mooted by media reporters (correctly) as a bad omen for Licht. For the moment, the moves mean that all the major news networks in the US have women in the top editorial jobs. The Times reports that on the networks editorial call yesterday morning, Licht was barely mentioned. In a statement, he said, I learned a lot over the past 13 months.

CNN remains the most important place on TV for breaking news, and it will no doubt be indispensable during the 2024 campaigns. But the tensions highlighted by Licht arent going anywhereat CNN, nor at any other major US outlet. Zaslav seems to think that his networks problems can be solved by saying the right things to placate those who hate it. The answers instead are to be found in confronting our deeply divided country with truth and independence, and in not sounding like a bro taking media advice from his trainer.



Other notable stories:

Related: Chris Licht, Chuck Todd, and a tale of two Sunday shows

Kyle Pope is the editor in chief and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review.
DETROIT (AP)  The head of the U.S. governments office that investigates automobile safety problems has resigned from his post just days after the release of a harsh audit criticizing how the office was managed.

Stephen Ridella stepped down as director of the Office of Defects Investigation at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on June 3, Veronica Morales, a NHTSA spokeswoman, confirmed this week.

Ridella, who started at the agency in 2006 after a long career in the auto industry, wrote in a LinkedIn posting that he has taken a new job as director of safety planning and regulatory reporting at Zoox, an autonomous vehicle company owned by Amazon.com Inc. He declined further comment when reached Thursday by The Associated Press.

On June 1, the inspector general for the Department of Transportation, which includes NHTSA, released an audit saying the defects investigation office is slow to investigate safety problems, limiting its ability to respond quickly to severe risks to automobile safety. Auditors found that the defects office often missed its own goals for speedier investigations, it doesnt have clear requirements for documenting probes, and it failed to adequately supervise investigators.

NHTSA said last week that it already has finished most of the improvements recommended by the inspector general.

Ridella was in charge of the defects office as it began trying to force ARC Automotive Inc. of Tennessee recall 67 million air bag inflators that can explode with too much force and hurl shrapnel. NHTSA says the inflators have caused two deaths in the U.S. and Canada and injured seven others. The agency sent a recall request letter to ARC in April after an investigation that was started eight years ago.

The Office of Defects Investigation began investigating ARCs inflators in 2015, but it took nearly eight years for the agency to seek the recall. In 2021, a 40- year-old mother of 10 was killed in Michigans Upper Peninsula after an ARC inflator exploded in a relatively minor crash.

NHTSA made a tentative determination that ARCs inflators are defective, and it has ordered the company to say whether it expects more inflators to rupture. ARC has until June 14 to respond. The next step in the process would be for NHTSA to hold a public hearing, and then possibly take the company to court to get a recall order.

ARC maintains that no safety defect exists and that NHTSAs demand is based on a hypothesis rather than technical conclusions.

In his LinkedIn posting, Ridella wrote that hes thrilled to join Zoox as it develops a robotaxi. Safety has been the focus of my entire career, and I am excited to continue this journey with my new team at Zoox, he wrote.

Zoox is under investigation by NHTSA. In March the defects office began looking into the companys 2022 certification that its vehicle met federal safety standards for motor vehicles. The agency said at the time that it would look into whether Zoox used its own test procedures to determine that certain federal standards werent applicable because of the robotaxis unique configuration.

Ridellas departure creates another vacancy in top leadership at the agency, which has been without a Senate-confirmed administrator, its top position, since Steven Cliff left last September to run the California Air Resources Board, which regulates pollution. Last month President Joe Biden withdrew his nomination of Ann Carlson, NHTSAs chief counsel, to be NHTSA administrator.

Morales, the NHTSA spokeswoman, said Cem Hatipoglu, associate administrator for vehicle safety research, will run the Office of Defects Investigation while the agency searches for Ridellas replacement.

In the audit of the Office of Defects Investigation, the inspector general found that it may miss critical information for launching investigations because it didnt follow procedures needed to evaluate risk from potential auto safety defects.

The agency also doesnt have an integrated computer system for its probes, and doesnt consistently follow its own procedures for making safety problems a high priority, the audit found.

It also found that the office doesnt always record key documentation in its investigative files. In 22 of 24 investigations in 2018 and 2019, files were missing documentation, the audit found.

The agency sets timeliness targets for investigations, but the audit found that the targets were missed in 33 of 35 probes sampled over three years.

The defects office sets a goal of finishing preliminary investigations in 120 days. When it upgrades those to an engineering analysis, the goal is to finish in a year. But auditors found that preliminary probes in a 2018 and 2019 sample took an average of 617 days to finish. The engineering analyses were open for another 1,001 days on average, almost three times the goal.

NHTSAs statement said it finished the first phase of a multiyear information technology update by 2020, improving data storage and analysis. Since then, its continually introduced technology updates.

NHTSA believes it is well positioned to build upon its successful implementation of standardized operating procedures, including rigorous documentation and risk-based escalation processes, the statement said.

The agency said improvements have positioned it to oversee a growing number of recalls that are addressing safety risks faster than in the past. It said there were a record 896 vehicle and equipment recalls in 2021, and 850 in 2022. NHTSA is continuing its efforts to further enhance its ability to identify safety issues more quickly while engaging manufacturers earlier in the process to conduct more timely recalls, the statement said.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
DENVER (AP)  Embers from a smoldering scrap wood fire outside a home days earlier and a sparking power line caused a Colorado wildfire fanned by high winds that destroyed nearly 1,100 homes and left two people dead, authorities said Thursday.

The Dec. 30, 2021, blaze in heavily populated suburbs between Denver and Boulder caused $2 billion in damage, making it the most destructive in Colorado history. Two people were also found dead after what was known as the Marshall Fire.

The inferno erupted following months of drought amid a winter nearly devoid of snow and fed on bone-dry grassland surrounding fast-growing development in the area near the Rocky Mountain foothills. It spread rapidly in winds that gusted up to 100 mph (160 kph) in places.

There is no evidence to support criminal charges against anyone for the fire, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said at a news conference.

The scrap wood fire  buried by residents Dec. 24 and OKd by firefighters who stopped by that day to investigate  was one cause when the powerful winds uncovered the buried embers six days later, Sheriff Curtis Johnson said at the news conference.

A loose Xcel Energy power line caused a separate fire less than half a mile (1 kilometer) away around the same time, Johnson said.

The two fires combined to cause the massively destructive blaze.

Experts say similar events will become more common as climate change warms the planet and suburbs grow in fire-prone areas.

The blaze destroyed nearly 1,100 homes as heavy winds pushed it across the heavily populated suburbs between Denver and Boulder on Dec. 30, 2021. Two people were found dead in what is known as the Marshall Fire.

The fire that destroyed swaths of houses in the cities of Superior and Louisville, neighboring towns about 20 miles (32 kilometers) northwest of Denver, is blamed for the death of a 69-year-old man who lived near where investigators believed the fire started. The remains of a 91-year-old woman, who was last seen trying to rescue her dogs from her home in Superior, were also found.

Thousands of residents were at home the day before New Years Eve and used the suburban areas extensive road network to escape amid smoke, flames and blowing embers, which spread the fire in the wind. Shifting winds caused the skies to turn from clear to smoky and then back again in an area filled with middle and upper-middle class subdivisions surrounded by shopping centers, parks and schools.

As smoke filled the parking lot of a Costco warehouse store and debris whirled around, a sheriffs deputy ordered people inside to leave their carts, evacuate the sprawling building and head toward Denver, away from the fire. Within hours, it destroyed 1,084 homes and seven commercial buildings, and damaged nearly 200 structures. An estimate in 2022 put the damage at at least $513 million.

Experts say similar events will become more common as climate change warms the planet and suburbs grow in fire-prone areas.

The fire, which spanned 9.4 square miles (24 square kilometers), ranks as the most destructive in state history in terms of homes and other structures destroyed and damaged. The second-most destructive fire erupted in 2013 outside Colorado Springs, destroying 489 homes and killing two.

Authorities have not previously released any details about what started the fire. Early on, then Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said investigators had narrowed their search for the origin of the fire to an area south of Boulder, where a passer-by captured video of a burning shed. Since then, the sheriffs office has only said that it was investigating old coal mines that smoldered underground, power lines and human activity as among the possible causes for the fire.

The area includes an abandoned coal field where two underground fires, fueled by coal deposits, have slowly burned over the years.

Authorities said early on that the area they were looking at included property occupied by members of The Twelve Tribes  a Christian religious community thought to have 2,000 to 3,000 members worldwide  but said it was not the only focus of the probe.

A lawsuit filed against Colorados largest utility, Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy, alleged that sparks from a power line started the blaze. It says witnesses saw a fire igniting near a power line in the area identified by investigators, with one witness videoing sparks flying from a malfunctioning power line and igniting a fire on the ground.

Xcel has said its investigation found that the companys equipment in the area of the fire was properly maintained and inspected.

Top photo: A worker stands on a new home being built in a development wiped out by the Marshall Fire, Sunday, Feb. 5, 2023, in Superior, Colo. Authorities say they have wrapped up their investigation into what started the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history and will announce their findings on Thursday, June 8. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
China, Myanmar sign cooperation agreements to mark 73rd anniversary of diplomatic ties

Xinhua) 13:37, June 09, 2023

YANGON, June 8 (Xinhua) -- China and Myanmar signed cooperation documents to mark the 73rd anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations on Thursday.

The signing ceremony was held in Myanmar's capital Nay Pyi Taw, with Chinese Ambassador to Myanmar Chen Hai and senior Myanmar officials attending.

Speaking at the event, Myanmar's Union Minister for Foreign Affairs Than Swe said that Myanmar and China are connected by mountains and rivers, and the peoples of the two countries have a deep friendship.

He said that since the establishment of diplomatic relations, the two countries have respected each other, treated each other on an equal footing, deepened mutually beneficial cooperation, and supported each other on the international arena.

He said that the signing of the documents reflects the outcomes of bilateral cooperation, and the projects will help Myanmar's economic and social development.

Chen said that China is willing to continue to provide assistance within its capacity for the development of Myanmar, and work with Myanmar to promote cooperation in various fields.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
PIGGS PEAK  Botswana Police have arrested a liSwati man together with 10 Tswana men for allegedly smuggling 18 bags of dagga weighing over 300kg into the Republic of Botswana.

According to a press statement issued by Botswana Police Service Senior Superintendent Near Bagali, for the Public Relations Officer (PRO), 11 suspects aged between 22 and 44 were charged and appeared at the Village Magistrates Court on Monday, June 5, 2023 for trafficking in narcotics drugs or psychotropic substances.

Independent calculations by this publication revealed that the 18 bags of dagga, weighing over 300kg, have a street value of over E1.26 million.

The Botswana police revealed that one of the suspects is Mgucisi Phindukuthula Dlamini, a male aged 36 and originates from the Kingdom of Eswatini. According to Dlaminis passport or travel document seized by Botswana authorities, he is originally from Mahlangatja.

Suspects

The other suspects are 10 Botswana male citizen, namely; Nelson Mmereki aged 41 of Mankge Ward, Gabane, Katlego Diboko aged 31 of Block 6, Gaborone, Boago Ramarumo aged 22 of Mmopane, Keabetswe Seatla Moemele aged 41 of New Canada, Gaborone, Moabi Mpho Renyere aged 42 of Mafatshwa Ward, Tlokweng, Tshepo Matshaba aged 29 of Mafatshwa Ward, Tlokweng Lesego Bogatsu aged 33 of Tlokweng, Katlholo Molapo aged 44 of Leruthari Ward, Phitshane, Kemoitsele Kopano aged 35 of Extension 9, Palapye and Phenyo Setshwantsho aged 31 of Block 6, Gaborone.



All the 11 suspects were remanded in custody and will appear again in court on June 19, 2023. According to the Botswana communique, eight of the suspects were arrested last week Thursday (June 1, 2023) at Gaborone West Industrial, following a police search and subsequent recovery of the 18 bags containing a substance suspected to be dagga, weighing over 300kg. Preliminary investigations revealed that the suspected dagga was smuggled into Botswana.Three more suspects were later arrested on different dates in connection with the same offence.

Reported

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, this publication reported that the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), destroyed a dagga plantation and confiscated dagga worth E2.1 million, belonging to an undocumented liSwati national in Pongola. This was during a joint operation between the seven South African Infantry Battalion and Pongola South African Police Service (SAPS) on one of the farms at Stilo, in Pongola. According to information sourced from the SANDF website, during the operation by the forces, they discovered the liSwati national within the plantation, where there was approximately 0.3 hectares of dagga, which weighed 500kg when rooted out.

This has been described as one of the biggest successes by SANDF from the seven infantry Battalion that was recorded since their arrival in KwaZulu-Natals boarders with Mozambique and Eswatini.According to the SANDF statement, the soldiers on the ground displayed high spirit and morale and they were fully committed to fulfilling joint Tactical Headquarters of the KwaZulu-Natal objectives.
PEPPER PIKE, Ohio  Judge Lindsay C. Jenkins encouraged members of the Orange High School Class of 2023 to pursue their dreams and offered them advice for the future when she served as keynote speaker at the schools commencement.

The graduation ceremony was held Sunday (June 4) at the Connor Palace at Playhouse Square in Cleveland.

Jenkins, a 1995 graduate of Orange High School, serves as a United States District Court judge for the Northern District of Illinois.

Today is the culmination of so much hard work and sacrifice over the last four years, she said. Youve been climbing a hill to get to this moment, and the climb has seen its fair share of struggles and challenges.

But the struggles eventually led you to the top of the hill  the completion of a physical, spiritual and emotional journey to get you to this moment.

Its the first of many hills that you will climb in life. Let that struggle serve as a monument to what you are capable of achieving in turbulent times.

A Cleveland native, Jenkins said when she stood in the graduates shoes many years ago, she had no idea what the future held for her.

I had no desire to leave Ohio and every reason to believe that I would raise a family in the city I had always called home, she said.

But there were other plans for me  plans that led me to law school, to practice law in Chicago, and eventually led me to a nomination by the president of the United States to a seat on the federal bench.

Jenkins said when she graduated from Orange High School, she could not have appreciated the gratitude that she has for the obstacles she has experienced.

There were a lot of setbacks along the way, some rejection, she said. But those struggles and that rejection did not mean failure; it was redirection.

It meant I had to adjust, to pivot, be patient, work harder, try again and remember that my time would eventually come.

And because she did not quit and adjusted and kept trying, she eventually reached her goal, Jenkins said.

The struggle, the hard work, the sacrifice, the dedication, I owe my success to all of those things, and those things made achieving the goal even more sweet, she said. That journey started with my experiences at Orange.

The skills and relationships that I made here, and later in college and then in law school, prepared me for the struggle and for the setbacks, she continued.

And when the time came for me to finally be nominated and confirmed by the United States Senate, I knew that regardless of the scrutiny, a lifes worth of preparation and determination had trained me to meet my moment.

Jenkins told the graduates that they are ready for the most unimaginable and unexpected opportunities.

The task is to use your education, your skills, your passions, your hopes and your dreams to ensure that when the doors open, youre prepared to walk through them and pull others through with you, she said.

Your stories are as unique as each of you, and you inspire us as you enter this next phase of life.

Jenkins closed by offering three pieces of advice to the graduates that she would have given her younger self when she sat in their seats.

First, dont shy away from opportunities, she said. Know that when you are ready, they will find you, regardless of whether the timing is on your schedule.

Second, dont set your sights on a particular position or amount of wealth. Serve people, not professions. Dont find a job; find a purpose.

And finally, appreciate the struggle. The struggle shapes you for purpose. There may be more setbacks than successes at first, but one day it will all have more meaning.

Jenkins earned a bachelors degree from Miami University in Oxford in 1998 and a law degree from Cleveland State University College of Law in 2002.

Class president Teresa Achkar, from left, valedictorian Daniel Suh and salutatorian Lindsey Wang celebrate their graduation from Orange High School Sunday (June 4). (Photo Courtesy of Orange City Schools)

Other speakers included class president Teresa Achkar and valedictorian Daniel Suh. Salutatorian Lindsey Wang was also recognized.

There were 150 graduates, including 23 legacy students, who are children of Orange High School alumni.

The entire ceremony can be viewed on the Orange Schools website, orangeschools.org.

Middle school earns designation

Brady Middle School has been designated as a 2022-23 No Place for Hate school.

This designation comes after a year of focused work and effort on the part of students and staff to meet the requirements of the Anti-Defamation League.

Morgan Bond, Catie Hodgson, Stacey Beacher and Darla Wagner led the committee of students and the building at large through the process, according to a news release from the Orange City School District.

2023 YAVC winner

Brady Middle School seventh-grader Brennan Lepene finished first in the 2023 Young Aerospace Visionaries Contest (YAVC), sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Northern Ohio Section.

The contest encourages students to explore science, technology, engineering and mathematics with curiosity and mind helping society.

Brennan competed in the grades 5-8 division.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Disgraced former Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora was released from prison earlier this week, about seven years shy of his estimated date.

The former commissioner who orchestrated a vast and widespread pay-to-play scheme across the county will serve the remainder of his sentence, until 2030, on house arrest, according to the Bureau of Prisons.

The Bureau of Prisons granted Dimoras release on Wednesday under the CARES Act, according to prison officials and his former attorney, Phil Kushner.

Im very happy for him, Kushner said.

Dimoras release came just days before the CARES Act is set to expire.

The act was passed in 2020 as an emergency economic relief package during the onset of the pandemic, but it contained a host of other provisions. Since the public health emergency officially ended on May 11, the CARES Act stays active for an additional 30 days, meaning it expires on Saturday.

Under the CARES Act, prison officials decide whether to release certain inmates who pose a particular risk of contracting the coronavirus based on a variety of factors, including their behavior in prison, the security level they were being held in and if they were convicted of a violent crime.

Dimora has argued in recent appeals and court hearings that his health deteriorated in prison and that he needed to be released.

Among the issues he suffered from: a heart defect, an intestinal disorder, an inner-ear equilibrium disease and knee issues. He had a stroke and contracted COVID-19 at least twice in prison, according to court filings.

He had been serving time in the Federal Medical Center Devens in Massachusetts, which houses seriously ill inmates.

Dimora was also eligible after his sentence was reduced last year after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a different case. The five-year reduction in his sentence meant Dimora served enough time to eligible for release, Kushner said.

Dimora was initially sentenced in 2012 to serve 28 years in prison for puppeteering a pay-to-play scandal in Cuyahoga County government that was at the time one of the states most expansive corruption cases in history.

Dimora and former Auditor Frank Russo ran the scheme for years at the top of the county government and the local Democratic Party. Russo died in April 2022 after his release from prison.

Nearly 60 politicians, government officials and contractors were convicted after the investigation by the FBI and IRS. Cuyahoga County voters approved wholesale changes to its county form of government in the wake of the investigation and convictions, changing from one run by three commissioners to one with governed by a county executive and council.

Prosecutors said Dimora made about $450,000 off bribes, including trips to Las Vegas, prostitutes and an infamous outdoor stone-fired pizza oven installed in the backyard of his Independence home.

U.S. District Judge Sara Lioi last year reduced Dimoras sentence to 23 years in prison after the nations top court clarified the definition of what constitutes a bribe under federal law.

Dimora most recent appeal came in January, in a case where he is proceeding without an attorney. The appeal is pending.

Adam Ferrise covers federal courts at cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. You can find his work here.
SURFSIDE BEACH, Texas  Nearly two dozen teenagers were hospitalized after a raised walkway collapsed while they were walking on it Thursday, officials said.

The incident happened at about 1 p.m. Thursday when a walkway ramp collapsed at Stahlman Park near Surfside Beach in Texas, according to the Surfside Beach Police Department. Five of the teenagers injured were air-flighted to Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston, while five were transported to local hospitals via ambulance and nine were transported by private vehicles, police said.

None of the victims, all of whom are between 14- to 18-years-old, sustained life-threatening injuries, according to police. The teenagers were visiting the area as members of Bayou City Fellowship, a church group with campuses in Cypress, Spring Branch and Tomball, Texas, according to The Brazosport Facts news outlet in Texas.

The cause of the incident remains under investigation.

Five were taken by Life Flight. Several were taken by ground to Lake Jackson. There were no life-threatening injuries, Surfside Beach City Attorney Patton Ritter said at the scene, according to The Brazosport Facts. As far as whats going on, thats still under investigation. Were going to let that play out, let the investigation go through and see what happens.
MARION, Ind.  An Indiana police officer was fired just two days after he started his position due to previous racist posts on his personal Facebook account, officials said.

Officer Chaz Foy was sworn into the Marion Police Department on Monday morning. On Wednesday afternoon, he was let go.

On June 6, 2023, it was brought to my attention that there were some racist posts on Officer Chaz Foys personal Facebook account. I reviewed those posts. The posts are not in keeping with the standards of the Marion Police Department, Marion Chief of Police Angela Haley said in a statement. I do not condone this type of behavior and will not tolerate it. On June 7, 2023, Chaz Foys employment with the Marion Police Department was terminated.

One July 2022 post on Foys Facebook account showed an image of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin with his knee on George Floyds neck, according to Channel 27 News in Indiana. The caption read, With gas hitting 4.89 and climbing, lets all take a moment to appreciate the better times.

Chauvin was sentenced to 22  years in prison in June 2021 after being convicted for Floyds murder.

Another April 2021 post showed a meme cartoon depiction of a Black man surrounded by Nike, Apple and Louis Vuitton merchandise, with the caption reading Martin Looter King.
WASHINGTON, D. C. - Ohio Republicans rallied around former President Donald Trump on Thursday evening after Trump announced that a grand jury indicted him for mishandling classified documents he brought from the White House to his Florida estate, marking the first-ever federal indictment of a former president.

U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, a Cincinnati Republican who won last years GOP primary after an endorsement from Trump, posted a statement on Twitter to decry the indictment.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Rep. Bob Latta, a Bowling Green Republican who co-chairs the Congressional Autonomous Vehicles Caucus, looks forward to the day when he can let a self-driving vehicle take him home from far-flung reaches of his congressional district, without me sitting behind the wheel thinking Ive got to stay awake.

Latta co-founded the caucus last year with Michigan Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell to educate Congress members on how autonomous vehicle technology can improve the safety and accessibility of the nations roads. While design innovations are making cars safer, Latta says accidents arent falling because of distracted driving. He views fully self-driving vehicles as a potential solution.
Heres a look at some of the top stories trending online today. They include what to expect next for Donald Trump and his legal cases, updates on fighting in Ukraine and much more.

Top stories

Trump charged with 7 counts in classified documents case; 1st federal indictment of an ex-president (AP)

Here are the other investigations involving Donald Trump (AP)

Biden and British PM Sunak offer unwavering support to Ukraine (CBS)

Kyiv says it has proof Russia was behind Kakhovka dam blast (Al Jazeera)

Ukraine army attacks Russian forces in southern Zaporizhzhia region (BBC)

Another day of unhealthy air is forecast in parts of the U.S. due to Canada wildfire smoke (NBC)

Other trending headlines

S&P 500 Starts a New Bull Market as Big Tech Lifts Stocks (WSJ)

China seeking to spy on the U.S. from a base in Cuba (Politico)

Supreme Court sides with Jack Daniels in trademark dispute with dog toy maker (NPR)

Bud Light is no longer Americas best-selling beer (Yahoo)

Pat Robertson, Who Gave Christian Conservatives Clout, Is Dead at 93 (NY Times)

Jana Kramer is pregnant following surprise engagement after splitting from cheating ex-husband (Fox)
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Relief from the Canadian wildfire smoke should start to arrive late Friday afternoon as a storm system from northern Canada moves into the Great Lakes region and winds start to shift, according to the National Weather Service.

Northeast Ohio has been experiencing high levels of small particulates in the air because of the smoke, but not nearly at levels that have been experienced along the East Coast.

A statewide air quality advisory for Ohio was in effect on Thursday up until midnight, but it was not renewed for Friday, said James Lee, spokesperson for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

In Northeast Ohio, an air quality advisory was issued for Friday through midnight by the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency. This covered Ashtabula, Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Portage and Summit counties.

As a result of the changing weather patterns, northern winds that have been bringing smoke into Ohio will gradually shift, becoming more westerly and then coming out of the south by Sunday, NWS meteorologist Kirk Lombardy said.

He said there is also a 90% chance of rain Sunday night, with precipitation extending through the night and then tapering off Monday. It has not rained in Cleveland since May 20, the second longest dry streak on record for this time of the year.

There could be a thunderstorm as well, Lombardy said. About three-quarters of an inch of rain is expected in total.

As of 10 a.m. Friday, the air quality index for the Cleveland-Akron-Lorain area was 115 for PM 2.5, which are fine particulates with a diameter of 2.5 microns or less. They are the biggest health concern related to the smoke because they are small enough to get into lungs and cause inflammation and other health concerns.

A reading of 101-150 is considered unhealthy for sensitive groups. A reading of 151-200 means conditions are unhealthy for everybody.

The air quality index for the Cleveland-Akron-Lorain area is determined by the highest reading among several monitoring stations, Lee said.

Monitoring for fine particulates in the Cleveland is done near Progressive Field in downtown Cleveland, where the reading Thursday at 10 a.m. was 114; behind St. Theodosius Church in Tremont where the reading was 115; and in Warrensville Heights, near the intersection of Interstate 271 and 480, where the reading was 106.

Air quality readings can fluctuate sharply in a little amount of time. Variations can be caused by vertical winds that push particulates toward the ground, Lee said.

Related: Air purifiers for relief from Canadian wildfires smoke: Where to buy

Peter Krouse covers the enviroment for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. Read more of his stories here.
CULPEPER, Virginia -- I see young people walking along a sidewalk playing with their cellphones, and I think, Poor kids! My generation fell in love with a large, chrome-laden, dazzling vehicle. We didnt carry it, it carried us. A weak substitute, the cellphone.

Back then, I had been earning just $32.50 a week as a copy boy at the Cleveland News, just out of high school, Class of 1952, so a car must wait. Meantime, I treasured my new drivers license. I passed the vision test only through the sympathy of the cop. A young man about to cry is a pitiful sight.

Two years later, I was a reporter with $125 a week, and a car. I chose, for an extra $200, the next General Motors brand up from Chevy -- a 1955 Pontiac Chieftain, with an Indian head logo. Two shades of blue. I paid extra for a hardtop convertible. The top was indeed hard, but no way did it onvert.

With each new model, Detroit was adding length. A worry, since our garage wasnt adding length.

It was love at first sight in 1957 at Fodors Pontiac on Euclid Avenue with a glimmering, 88-foot-long, top-of-the-line white Star Chief convertible, a long red splash on each side. Red and white leather bench seats. No seat belts. I finally had a car for how I wanted to feel about myself: powerful, handsome, sexy. Ive never heard anyone say that came with their cellphone.

I was attracting the competitive spirit of other young men. Theyd pull up in the next lane at a red light. Glancing over, they would rev their engine, ready for a race. Sometimes, I took them up on it, but usually I was happy just to be considered a worthy opponent. I did get speeding tickets. I blamed the car. Its a flashy car, I told my mother. It attracts police.

To see Terry, my boyfriend on Clevelands West Side, was an al fresco drive on the Shoreway from Euclid with the top down and Monroe, my basset hound, my appreciative passenger. He claimed the front seat, staring straight ahead. No hanging his head out a window like common dogs; he had dignity.

In the open air, I commanded the sleek machine for everyone to see. Soon, I was adding cool touches. I got spinner hub caps, and Terry drove around the block so I could see how they looked. Out went the single antenna; in came twin antennae on the rear fenders. Fender skirts, too. Rumbling dual exhausts. The piece de resistance was a pair of big furry dice swinging from the rearview mirror. Who needed a designer for style?

Every Saturday morning, I joined thousands of other young men in a labor of love: car washing. Detroit held us captive with its chrome and color. Monroe and I would be side-by-side in the driveway with hose, pail, car wash, chrome cleaner, whitewall cleaner, leather protector.

Vincent Burke in a contemporary photo.

Eventually came the day when the older stands aside for the young. I could barely afford it, but I got a 1960 Thunderbird convertible, when Thunderbird was status. Five thousand dollars, diamond blue. I was foolish with my money. Six months later, I was bored with the color and had it painted navy blue. Couldnt afford that, either. I was craving the excitement I had with my Star Chief, but the Tbird was second string.

Then came a 1962 midnight-blue Pontiac convertible. Ho hum. Still not my red-and-white Star Chief.

Eventually, I left the Cleveland job Id taken after the News closed in 1960, turned my blue Pontiac over to Terry, and relocated to Manhattan, where I wouldnt need a car. Never again would I have a red-and-white Star Chief. Terry drove me to Hopkins airport. I felt sad parting from Terry, and even from my lackluster car. I held onto the door, tenderly. An era ended.

I now have a cellphone.

Vincent Burke lived in Cleveland for ten years when he was a reporter for the Cleveland News, and for decades visited the city and his family here. He is a retired Madison Avenue adman, and author of Forgiveness: A Gay Mans Memoir. He now lives in Virginia.

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* Send a letter to the editor, which will be considered for print publication.

* Email general questions about our editorial board or comments or corrections on this editorial to Elizabeth Sullivan, director of opinion, at esullivan@cleveland.com
PIGGS PEAK  Flies and worms have infested part of the Piggs Peak Government Hospital due to human tissue, fluids and used equipment that has not been disposed of.

Patients, staff and members of the public, have been exposed to a serious health hazard at the hospital due to the undisposed used items. Biohazardous and medical waste is disposed of next to the government hospitals incinerator, which is reportedly non-functional. An incinerator is an apparatus for burning waste material, especially industrial waste, at high temperatures until it is reduced to ash. Sources within the hospital informed this publication that the incinerator had been non-functional for months now, after it was allegedly burnt.

Hazardous

Consequently, the hospital is currently without an apparatus to destroy or burn hazardous bio-waste. The sources also revealed that following the damage to the incinerator, arrangements were made by government and hospital management to have the bio-waste transported from Piggs Peak to Mkhuzweni Health Centre to be destroyed there. However, according to sources, this has also become a challenge in that Mkhuzweni Health Centre was now without diesel used in the burning of the bio-waste in the incinerator. As a result, sources revealed that it was pointless transporting the bio-waste to Mkhuzweni Health Centre.

The sources said the hospital staff, patients and public were now exposed to danger of coming into contact with the bio-waste.The insiders revealed that the bio-waste included human tissue disposed of from the surgery or operating room. These are now producing a foul smell. During a visit to the hospital, heaps and heaps of bio-waste in plastic bags were found stored near the non-functional incinerator. Though they had been sealed in medical refuse bags, the area had a foul smell and was infested with flies and tiny worms.

Further, exposure to extreme weather conditions and other factors resulted in the deterioration of the waste.The bio-waste is not in a sealed enclosure, and anyone within the health institution can easily have access to it as the gate to the incinerator is usually left wide open. The hospitals Senior Medical Officer (SMO), Dr Brian Munro, said he was attending a conference in the Republic of China (Taiwan) when he was reached for comment.

Incinerator

He further disclosed that management of the incinerator was under the administrator. Efforts to get comment from the hospital management proved unsuccessful as the SMO was identified as the only person authorised to speak on matters relating to the hospital. Director of Health Services Dr Velephi Okello said she was on leave and asked that the Deputy Director, Rejoice Nkambule, be consulted. Nkambule said she needed to consult with the relevant department before responding to questions.

The senior health official had been asked if the matter had been reported and what was government doing to address it. According to Wikipedia, biomedical waste or hospital waste is any kind of waste containing infectious (or potentially infectious) materials generated during the treatment of humans or animals as well as during research involving biologics. It may also include waste associated with the generation of biomedical waste that visually appears to be of medical or laboratory origin (e.g. packaging, unused bandages, infusion kits etc.), as well research laboratory waste containing biomolecules or organisms that are mainly restricted from environmental release. Discarded sharps are considered biomedical waste whether they are contaminated or not, due to the possibility of being contaminated with blood and their propensity to cause injury when not properly contained and disposed of.

Microbiological

Biomedical waste may be solid or liquid. Examples of infectious waste include discarded blood, sharps, unwanted microbiological cultures and stocks, identifiable body parts (including those as a result of amputation), other human or animal tissue, used bandages and dressings, discarded gloves, other medical supplies that may have been in contact with blood and body fluids, and laboratory waste.Waste sharps include potentially contaminated used (and unused discarded) needles, scalpels, lancets and other devices capable of penetrating skin.

Disposal of this waste is an environmental concern, as many medical wastes are classified as infectious or biohazardous and could potentially lead to the spread of infectious disease. The most common danger for humans is the infection which also affects other living organisms in the region.

Daily exposure to the wastes (landfills) leads to accumulation of harmful substances or microbes in the persons body.
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LOBAMBA  A clause on divorce under customary law marriage has been restored to the Civil Registration Bill.

Intervention and guidance that was provided by the Attorney General (AG), Sifiso Khumalo, saw the return of two controversial clauses to the National Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Bill of 2022. The Bill aims at harmonising and consolidating laws relating to the mandatory registration of citizens and non-citizens legally resident in Eswatini, to provide for insurance of identity cards, procedure change of surname and all life events registration.

During the debates and workshops on the Bill, senators strongly challenged two clauses of the Bill. These were Clause 40 and 55. Clause 40 is on election of female spouse to change surnames. The clause states that a female spouse may, at any time while married, elect in the prescribed manner to change her surname to; The surname of the husband; or A surname consisting of her surname and that of the husband, hyphenated or combined or (b) Resume the surname that the female spouse had immediately before marriage, at any time after a marriage is dissolved by divorce, annulment or death. The proposed law says, the former spouse may elect in the prescribed manner to resume the surname that the spouse had immediately before marriage.

Argued

Senators had argued that the clause was unSwati and wanted it not to be included in the Bill. Clause 55 on expunging of record of marriage in terms of Eswatini law and custom had been removed from the Bill, as Senators stated that there was no divorce under kutekwa or customary marriage.

Yesterday before the senators passed the Bill, Khumalo explained in detail the two controversial clauses, which eventually made it back to the Bill. Clause 40 was adopted as is by Senate. He also read Sections 27 and 28 of the Constitution. He said, if families were okay with their daughter-in-law using their birth surname, she shouldnt be barred.

Lacking

He, however, made adjustment to Clause 55, saying it was lacking some elements. I am with senators, there is not divorce under customary marriage. However, I am saying to the Ministry of Home Affairs, this is essential in cases where all processes have been followed that involve separation of a married couple, which includes family meetings. Royal kraals can register the annulment, he said. The AG noted that the Bill did not outline those processes as grounds for registration of expunging.

From the Bill, the ministry made itself a court, yet it is supposed to state that parties should bring evidence through court, he said. The legal head said the ministry was not competent to determine whether a couple should divorce, but the court. He said Home Affairs deregistered a marriage that had undergone all the processes. A court order would be issued that would be presented at the ministry for deregistration.

Proposing

I am proposing that Section 55 reads as Director may expunge marriage conducted in Eswatini law and custom upon receipt of a court order from a competent court, he said. In as much as some senators had other reservations in some areas, the AG provided the much needed clarity to the extent that the entire house had him to thank and the Bill was passed by the senators. Chairperson of the Ministrys Senate Portfolio Committee, Senator Chief Ngalonkhulu Mabuza said the passing of the Bill will see a reduction in stealing of elderly grants. The senator stated there were so many deaths that were not registered, more especially those of elderly people. He said some families continued receiving grants, therefore, the passing of the Bill, which has strong teeth and provisions in all forms of registration, would save government a lot of money.

On another note, the passed Bill will now grant judges the power to issue a surname to children who have been found abandoned.

This came after it was scrapped out that every child found dumped must be given a Dlamini surname. Under the new law, the judge will grant a surname.
CNBC's Jim Cramer told investors on Thursday that above all else, they should not underestimate the transformative power of generative artificial intelligence, as it has the potential to revolutionize most industries, from auto manufacturing to fast food.

"Tonight, I want to explain why the AI bulls could actually be right," Cramer said. "I want to talk about why the bears are likely wrong."

Adobe stock soared on Thursday, with shares up nearly 5% by market's close. Cramer said this is because Adobe 's software  namely its program Firefly  can be used well with supercomputers that are at the heart of the AI revolution.

Cramer stressed you should not get bogged down in the ethereal, macro way in which many authorities discuss the potential of AI. Adobe's Firefly alone could save company's huge amounts of time and money, and just because we're not yet sure of the specifics does not mean we should discount such a groundbreaking innovation, Cramer said.

Cramer referenced Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's Computex speech in Taiwan, where he said AI will have the most significant impact on the business of making factories. Although the industry is not always in the public eye, Cramer told viewers to remember that it is a multitrillion-dollar industry and the biggest one in the world.

AI has the power to create digital twins of entities like factories, so companies can save enormous amounts of time and money by running changes through artificial twins instead of letting things play out in real life. Car manufacturer BMW is about to start building the first factory imagined using such a digital twin.

"So, what's it worth? Again, we're not able to calculate it, darn it," Cramer said. "However, if you remove the largest amount of friction from the biggest industry in the world, you could see a real GDP impact, that's not nonsense."

Cramer also reminded audiences about AI's potential across industries. Fast-food chain Jack In The Box is already using AI in its drive thru locations, which CEO Darin Harris said saves on the cost of employees and actually manages to up-sell more efficiently to customers.

"Here's the bottom line: when you consider the scale of the business-to-business opportunity, you can see why AI might be worth far more than most people realize, even if it's too early to calculate the exact numbers," Cramer said.

"I know there's a lot of hype here and in some individual cases, it is overblown, but anybody who tells you that the AI theme's pure hype  that person is only fooling herself."
Donald Trump has become the first U.S. president, former or otherwise, to be indicted on federal criminal charges.

The 37-count indictment against him was made public Friday afternoon, a day after Trump was charged in the case in U.S. District Court in Miami.

"Today, an indictment was unsealed charging Donald J. Trump with felony violations of our national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice," special counsel Jack Smith said in brief remarks Friday. "I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged."

He added: "The men and women of the United States intelligence community and our Armed Forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people."

Thirty-one counts charge that Trump willfully retained national defense information, a violation of the Espionage Act. The other six allege that Trump caused false statements to be made, concealed documents from investigators, obstructed justice and allegedly conspired to do these things.

Trump, the leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination next year, is scheduled to appear Tuesday at a federal courthouse in Miami. He is still set to hold a previously scheduled birthday eve fundraiser in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Tuesday night, the Trump campaign confirmed to NBC News.

Trump had kept reams of classified documents in boxes at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida until federal agents raided it last year and seized the records.

The ex-president said he's innocent and ripped the case as a hoax.

Trump attorney Jim Trusty, appearing on NBC on Friday morning, said Trump is ready for a battle. "He's a fighter, and he's going to come out swinging, and he'll be fine," Trusty said. "He's not afraid of this thing." Hours later, in a shocking turn of events, Trusty and another attorney on the team, John Rowley, resigned from the case.

Smith said he would seek a "speedy" trial for Trump. The special counsel has been investigating Trump over the removal of classified documents from the White House after he left office, as well as apparent efforts by Trump and his aides to potentially stymie the government's investigation.

This is the second time Trump has been indicted. Earlier this year, a grand jury in New York indicted Trump on state charges for allegedly falsifying business records related to hush money payments to women who said they had sexual trysts with him.

Trump still faces two other criminal probes, as well: Smith's investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol, and an inquiry in Georgia looking into whether he attempted to interfere with the presidential election in that state.

Key posts:

CNBC's Chelsey Cox, Rohan Goswami and Amanda Macias also contributed to this live blog.
Randy Smallwood, the CEO of precious metals streaming company Wheaton, told CNBC's Jim Cramer on Thursday that gold and silver have perpetual power on the market due to their very nature as one of the world's oldest currencies.

"I mean that's what gold has been forever, a store of value, a measure of value that lasts," Smallwood said. "It's not subject to political influence, and that's what gold has always provided, that's what precious metals have always provided: you can't copy it, there's only one, there's only one gold, there's only one silver, and as a store of value it's just, it's lasted for thousands of years, and it will last for thousands of years."

Wheaton reported first quarter earnings back in May, with $214 million in revenue  below consumer estimates of $235 million  and gave guidance that estimated 320,000 to 350,000 ounces of gold by the end of 2023. But Smallwood said the company expects to see 50% growth by 2027, or close to a million gold equivalent ounces.

As a streaming company, Wheaton funds mining operations in order to then buy metals at a discount. In this way, Smallwood said, it's a lower risk opportunity for shareholders and investors to put their money in precious minerals without worrying about the liabilities that come with investing in actual mines.

Although Smallwood is the chair of the World Gold Council, his favorite metal is silver, which is harder to find than its flashy counterpart because there are fewer silver mines in the world, he said.

"Most silver is produced as a byproduct, and most of it comes from lead zinc mines, and there's just not a lot of new lead zinc mines getting built," Smallwood noted. "There already is a bit of a supply shortage on the silver side, and we're seeing that add some strength to the silver price, we just haven't seen the move that we expect so far."
Pictured here is a cargo ship sailing from China's Yantai port to Indonesia on April 23, 2023.

BEIJING  China can't easily rely on its neighbors as export markets in a global slowdown, the latest trade data show.

Exports to the Association of Southeast Asia Nations have been growing. The 10-member bloc surpassed the European Union during the pandemic to become China's largest trading partner on a regional basis.

Data showed that exports to Southeast Asia fell by 16% in May compared to a year ago, dragging down China's overall exports.

Exports to the U.S.  China's largest trading partner on a single-country basis  fell by 18% from a year ago in U.S. dollar terms in May. That's according to official figures accessed through Wind Information.

At $42.48 billion, the U.S. exports in May were more than the $41.49 billion China exported to Southeast Asia that month, according to customs data.

Southeast Asia can't fully offset the loss from the U.S. market, said Bruce Pang, chief economist and head of research for Greater China at JLL.

ASEAN is made up of 10 countries: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

The U.S. is one single market versus a grouping of 10 countries, Pang pointed out, adding that companies can also sell at higher profit margins in the U.S. market.
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Special counsel Jack Smith is set to deliver an on-camera statement following the public release of the federal indictment against former President Donald Trump.

Smith has been leading the Department of Justice investigation into the transfer of classified documents to Trump's home Mar-a-Lago.

Trump announced Thursday that he had been indicted in the criminal probe into his handling of classified records after leaving the presidency. The case in federal court in South Florida was under seal until about 1:40 p.m. ET Friday.

Trump is set to appear in court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon.

Earlier Friday, two of his lawyers announced they would no longer represent him in the criminal case, or as part of another federal criminal investigation related to the events surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

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Wall Street is abuzz with excitement around artificial intelligence. At the center lies Nvidia , which designs and sells graphics processing unit (GPU) chips that are used in data centers and go on to power AI applications. The blowout earnings it reported in late May came on the back of a huge forecast beat driven by strong AI chip demand , and triggered a wave of buying into the stock. But Jordan Cvetanovski, chief investment officer and portfolio manager at Pella Funds Management, told CNBC Pro this week that he wouldn't buy Nvidia as it's simply too expensive right now. Instead, he would buy Taiwan's TSMC and Dutch firm ASML . Both are tied to how well Nvidia does: The U.S. chipmaker depends on TSMC to manufacture its GPUs. TSMC, in turn, uses machines made by ASML to make the most advanced semiconductors. Why Nvidia is a 'poor investment' Cvetanovski said Nvidia is likely to capture a large portion of the initial wave of investments into GPU stacks in data centers, and relies on an extreme positive outlook for this area. "However, there are already other players with GPU alternatives and some of the very large technology companies like Apple have been investing in their own solutions. The point is that competition in GPUs will eventually intensify and margins and revenue share that Nvidia enjoys will diminish," he said. Investors would be paying for more than 40 times EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) by the end of this year, with markets pricing in around 20% growth for the next decade, said Cvetanovski. "This is a hefty valuation with very little margin for even the smallest slippage," he said. "AI is a great story, Nvidia is a great story but a poor investment due to its valuation." ASML versus TSMC While ASML and TSMC will both benefit from AI, one has an edge over the other, according to Cvetanovski. "So we think that a lot of the positivity is priced into Nvidia, however, we think buying TSMC and ASML is actually a much better way  to play it to invest in the space now given the valuation differential, but also the different potential there," Cvetanovski said. He said TSMC offers a more diversified exposure to "general advancement in global technology." "TSMC is arguably a great story at a great valuation making it a very strong investment for us. Even before the Nvidia upgrade, TSMC was very cheap, it has almost the same EBIT margins as Nvidia, expected to grow at high teens vs Nvidia at high 20s but at a fraction of the valuation," he said, adding that it's still cheap even now. "TSMC won't care which GPU wins in the long term as it will supply all GPU suppliers," he added. He said both TSMC and ASML have become monopolies in their respective areas: TSMC in leading-edge chips  "they are the only ones that can really make this on a grand scale"  and ASML in extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, in which it has 100% market share. Cvetanovski described ASML as a "keystone in all technology." "The whole advancement in technology is relying on them," he said, referring to its EUV machines. "ASML does not abuse its monopolistic position and will not take advantage through price, but it will certainly enjoy volume growth and stability in its order book over time. Although it has done well it is still undemandingly valued on a FCF basis relative to its visibility and growth potential," he said. If he had to pick one stock, however, he would give TSMC more upside  around 30% from its price today, while he believes ASML is already fairly valued. "TSMC is a better investment in terms of returns. We think it's cheaper, and offers a better return potential than ASML assuming there are no risks in any way from anything negative happening," said Cvetanovski. "However, we think although TSMC is a leader in what they do, ASML is one of the best companies in the world  without ASML there's no TSMC, without TSMC there's no Apple, without Apple, there's no iPhone." According to FactSet, analysts covering both TSMC and ASML give them around 10% upside each on average.
General Electric is in final discussions to cement a partnership with India's Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. to co-manufacture jet engines in the country, CNBC has learned.

The deal, expected to be signed either before or during a visit by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Washington, D.C., later this month, would give the Indian aerospace company access to GE's highly coveted F414 engine, according to two people familiar with the deal who requested anonymity to discuss not-yet-public details.

The engines would be used utilized in fighter jets for India, the people said.

Earlier this week, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited India and discussed the jet engine deal with Indian officials, sources told CNBC.

The nature of the agreement  whether it will be labeled a partnership, joint venture or co-assembly  still remains to be seen. Two Indian startups are also a part of the venture, the sources said.

GE declined to comment.

A partnership of this sort would require the transfer of technology and therefore approval by Congress to move forward. Experts say once the U.S. State Department formally notifies congressional committees on Capitol Hill of the GE partnership, a 30-day period to approve the deal would begin.

Representatives for the State Department and the Indian government did not immediately return requests for comment. The Pentagon declined to comment.

"We know that sharing advanced technology is what India wants from the U.S. to show it is in this relationship for the long term," said Richard Rossow, chair of U.S.-India policy studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

For years, India has relied on Russia for its defense needs, however, Indian defense officials have engaged in a series of meetings with Washington in recent years to procure U.S. equipment as well.

"What the Indians want is co-production. They want to develop and produce this equipment in India  not just be a foreign purchaser," said Daniel Silverberg, managing director at Capstone and a former national security advisor.

The potential GE deal comes as India's economy has grown exponentially, drawing more interest from corporate giants like Apple , Google and Amazon . In May, Apple CEO Tim Cook traveled to India and met with Modi as the iPhone maker opened its first two big retail stores in the country.

The emerging market is also increasingly seen as a way to counterbalance China's dominance in broader Asia.

"One policy objective of the U.S. administration is to strengthen the capacity of the Indian military to play a key role in the counter-China effort," said Silverberg.

GE Aerospace has been growing its presence in India for four decades, leveraging joint ventures to gain market share.

"We certainly see a lot of activity brewing in India," GE CEO Larry Culp told CNBC in late April, weeks after Air India placed a massive order for more than 800 GE LEAP engines.
U.S. Rep. George Santos (R-NY) heads to the floor of the House of Representatives for a vote on a Republican motion to refer a Democratic-sponsored resolution to expel Santos from the House to the House Ethics Committee instead of an immediate explusion vote, on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 17, 2023.

Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., asked a federal court Friday morning to reverse a judge's order to reveal the identities of the people who guaranteed the $500,000 bond in his criminal fraud case.

An attorney for Santos, the scandal-plagued freshman congressman who is charged with multiple financial crimes, argued that the backers' identities should remain private because of concerns that they will be attacked and harassed as a result of the "media frenzy" surrounding the case.

"It is respectfully submitted that the court failed to perceive the importance of the privacy issues of these suretors," the attorney, Joseph Murray, wrote in a court filing in U.S. District Court in Long Island.

"Given the political temperature in this Country and acts of political violence that occur, the privacy interests of these suretors are far more concerning, especially considering their ages and respective employment," Murray wrote.

Magistrate Judge Anne Shields three days earlier had granted requests from several news outlets that had argued that the public had a right to know the guarantors' identities. Shields had given Santos until noon on Friday to file his appeal.

Santos, 34, has pleaded not guilty to charges of defrauding his campaign supporters, lying to obtain unemployment money and making false statements on his congressional disclosure forms. The charges follow a pile of scandals that have weighed down the congressman since even before he took office in January.

He has vowed not to resign and is seeking reelection, although he previously acknowledged that he lied about his record while campaigning.

Lawyers for The New York Times had argued that the large bail amount backed by the yet-to-be-identified people "presents an obvious opportunity for political influence," especially because Santos "has been charged with involve abusing the political process for personal gain."

But Murray said that "countervailing factors" support keeping the bail backers' identities under wraps. He said that Santos, his staff and others have been subjected to "hateful attacks" through the case.

"These attacks have been extremely angry, anti-gay, anti-Republican and all around antisocial," Murray wrote.

"It is reasonable to conclude that if Defendant's suretors are identified, that the attacks and harassment will commence against them too," the lawyer argued.

That climate contributed to a third potential suretor "having a change of heart and withdrawing," Murray wrote.

He added that if the other two backers' identities are released, they are likely to decide "that they shall have to withdraw from, serving as suretors."

"There is great concern for the health, safety, and well-being of our two suretors, which sadly, was not shared by Judge Shields, at least as a factor of their privacy concerns," Murray wrote.
Earlier this year, Thunberg was arrested alongside other campaigners during a protest against the demolition of a small German village to make way for a coalmine.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg on Friday took part in her final school strike, signing off after 251 consecutive weeks of demonstrations with a warning that "the fight has only just begun."

"Today, I graduate from school, which means I'll no longer be able to school strike for the climate," Thunberg said on Twitter. "This is then the last school strike for me, so I guess I have to write something on this day."

The 20-year-old was catapulted to fame for skipping school every Friday to hold a weekly vigil outside the Swedish Parliament in 2018. Just as she did in August of that year, Thunberg marked her final school strike by protesting with a handmade sign that translated to read, "School strike for climate."

Initially a one-person demonstration, Thunberg's act would go onto inspire a global protest for climate action. Millions of children in over 180 countries took part in school strikes for the climate in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic forced the "Fridays for Future" movement to find new avenues to protest.

Thunberg was named Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2019  the same year she received criticism from the likes of then-U.S. President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Earlier this year, Thunberg was arrested alongside other campaigners during a protest against the demolition of a small German village to make way for a coalmine.

"Much has changed since we started, and yet we have much further to go," Thunberg said. "We are still moving in the wrong direction, where those in power are allowed to sacrifice marginalised and affected people and the planet in the name of greed, profit and economic growth."

"We're rapidly approaching potential nonlinear ecological and climatic tipping points beyond our control," she continued. "There are probably many of us who graduate who now wonder what kind of future it is that we are stepping into, even though we did not cause this crisis."
Investors are beginning to stretch for yield as the Federal Reserve's rate-hiking cycle winds down, ETF flows data suggests. The iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (HYG) , brought in nearly $1.2 billion in cash over the past week, according to FactSet. That made it the fifth top fund of the week by inflows, trailing only four broad equity funds. But it wasn't just HYG. The seven biggest high-yield ETFs saw inflows over the past week, according to FactSet. Investors bought into the iShares Broad USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (USHY) . The fund saw about $117 million in flows this past week. The interest in high-yield debt comes ahead of next week's Federal Reserve meeting. According to the CME FedWatch Tool , traders expect the central bank to hold rates steady at this meeting, though the market is split on which direction the Fed will go by its December meeting. If the Fed signals it is done hiking, market yields could fall as traders price in future cuts, which means some investors might want to buy now to lock in the higher yields. At the same time, the recent rally for stocks, led by growth sectors, shows there is some risk appetite among investors. "High yield's kind of in a sweet spot right now. It's got a really attractive yield that you haven't seen in almost two decades.  I think investors are bullish. In terms of the equity market, you're seeing a pretty strong rally this week. High yield is loaded to growth in terms of some of the smaller companies, lower-rated companies," said Komson Silapachai, vice president of research and portfolio strategy at Sage Advisory in Austin, Texas. The spread between high yield and safer debt could widen in coming months if the labor market continues to weaken, but the high-yield market appears to be of better quality than in previous economic cycles, Silapachai said. Here are some other notable ETF stats from the week: Retail funds had a solid week, with the Amplify Online Retail ETF (IBUY) and the SPDR S & P Regional ETF (XRT) each gaining about 4% through Thursday. The biggest investment grade corporate debt fund saw outflows, with the iShares iBoxx $ Investment Grade Corporate Bond ETF (LQD) shedding more than $900 million. The Invesco S & P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP) was in the top five for inflows this week despite underperforming the S & P 500 dramatically year to date. That could be a sign investors are betting the market rally will start to broaden out.
MBABANE - Relatives and friends of the self-confessed commander, Thabo Kunene, are for now not allowed to visit him at the Correctional Services facility where he is currently being kept.

According to His Majestys Correctional Services (HMCS), this is done for security reasons. The relatives who attempted to go and see him said they were informed by officers of the Correctional Services facility that they would be advised in due course when it would be conducive for them to be allowed to visit him. Currently, the Correctional Services said they would only allow an attorney to have access to Kunene. This position, which also applies to Kunenes co-accused, Sibusiso Nkomonye, was confirmed by HMCS Public Relations Officer Senior Superintendent Gugulethu Dlamini, who said this was done for security reasons. It is true that other people except for a lawyer are not allowed to see the accused and this has been done for security reasons, said Senior Superintendent Dlamini.

Investigation

It has been reliably gathered that Kunene and Nkomonye are still assisting the police in their investigation. They are said to have been taken to various areas as part of the collection of evidence by the police. The Correctional Services facility, where the accused are being kept has also not been disclosed for safety reasons. The duo will appear at the High Court for their second remand hearing on Monday. It remains to be seen whether when the accused persons appear in court on Monday, they would be having a legal representative or not. During their maiden court appearance, they were self-represented and Kunenes relatives were reportedly encountering difficulties in securing legal representation for him.

Many lawyers are reportedly not comfortable in representing him. Kunene and his co-accused Nkomonye are facing 43 charges of allegedly contravening the Suppression of Terrorism Act of 2008. The charges include six murders, 17 attempted murder, nine of malicious damage to property and two counts of arson. The accused persons as per the charge sheet also had a hand in the murder of a warder, Mike Mthethwa, murder of Zandondo Chief Mahloma, shooting at the homestead of Chief Justice Bheki Maphalala and murder of law enforcement agents. In the summary of evidence that was presented in court, the prosecution submitted that during the month of June 2021, there was a civil unrest in the country.

Damaged

The Crown went on to submit that during the unrest, government and most of emaSwati had their properties seriously damaged and or burnt, lives were lost and some people were injured. A group of people who called themselves underground solidarity forces emerged. The attacks were targeted mainly to the armed forces, judicial officers, prosecutors, traditional authorities, regiments, Members of Parliament (MPs) and the public, submitted the Crown.

It was further the submission of the prosecution, that on July 25 of the same year, Kunene, who introduced himself as a commander of the solidarity forces and at times referred to himself as a member of the solidarity forces, made instigating, threatening and intimidating statements. This week, the police obtained an order to seize, among other things, the camouflage jackets with hoods that were worn by Kunene and Nkomonye.The other items which had also been seized by police, through the court order, are cellphones, camouflage trouser, commercial explosives, explosive blasting cartridge and an electric cable.
The company test fires one of its Ripley rocket engines in Colorado.

A pair of Colorado space companies laid off employees this past week, seeking to adapt to the new normal of a tight funding environment.

The layoffs came at Ursa Major, which makes rocket engines, and Orbit Fab, a startup aiming to provide refueling services to spacecraft.

A person familiar with Ursa Major told CNBC the company let go of 27% of its employees, or about 80 people. An Ursa Major spokesperson confirmed to CNBC the company restructured but declined to specify the number of layoffs made. In a statement, Ursa Major said the job reductions are "realigning our workforce to better meet the needs of our national security customers."

"We do want to acknowledge contributions of every current and former Ursa Major professional. Their efforts and achievements cannot be overstated, and we deeply appreciate the advances in space and hypersonic propulsion they helped make possible," Ursa Major said.

In LinkedIn posts, multiple former Ursa Major employees wrote Wednesday was a "rough day" at the company, with "top-notch people" let go as part of the "major layoff."

Orbit Fab's Chief Commercial Officer Adam Harris said in a statement to CNBC 10 people were let go this week, and the company will have about 50 employees after the restructuring. It recently hired a new chief operating officer and plans to bring on a chief engineer and others in the coming months.

"Our refined strategy will enable Orbit Fab to better meet critical and growing demand for in-space refueling infrastructure for commercial and government markets and missions," Harris said.

After years of record funding levels in the space sector, the first quarter of 2023 saw the lowest period of investment in the industry since 2015, according to Space Capital.

Ursa Major last raised money in October, with a $150 million round at a $550 million valuation, according to PitchBook. Based in Berthoud, Colorado, and founded in 2015, the company had about 300 employees before the layoffs. Ursa Major's lineup of rocket engines has won orders from customers including the Air Force Research Laboratory, Stratolaunch and Astra.

Orbit Fab raised funds more recently, with a $29 million round in April at a $113 million valuation, per Pitchbook. Based in Lafayette, Colorado, and founded in 2018, Orbit Fab aims to offer spacecraft refueling services as soon as 2025, having launched demonstration flights in 2019 and 2021. It has won early contracts from Space Force and the U.K. Space Agency.

TechCrunch first reported the Ursa Major layoffs.
"Poshmark, eBay, TikTok. [I've gotten] nonstop phone calls," Velez said. "TikTok flew in from China to meet with us."

That market size might explain why some major platforms are rushing to grab a piece of the action here in the U.S.

The trend involves a seller broadcasting live video of themselves showing and explaining products while viewers ask questions and make purchases in real time. Livestream shopping started on social media in China, and according to Coresight Research, has grown into a $512 billion market.

"All the metrics exceed any other form of shopping I've seen  period," Velez said. "We can go live on three to four platforms simultaneously."

The secret to his success, he told CNBC, has been diving into the world of livestream shopping.

This year, business is much different: Velez has closed all of his physical locations, but he's generating up to $100,000 a day.

Last year, Anthony Velez, CEO of Bagriculture, a small business selling pre-owned designer handbags, made up to $100,000 a month across his seven brick-and-mortar stores in New York City.

In its most recent quarterly report, Coresight Research, which tracks the livestreaming e-commerce industry globally, projected that U.S. livestream sales would reach $32 billion by the end of 2023. However, CEO Deborah Weinswig told CNBC the firm has since revised that projection.

The original estimate was set early this year, she said, and didn't fully take into account South Korean internet giant Naver's acquisition of Poshmark. At the time, TikTok Shops, a way for users to buy products within the app without having to go to a separate e-commerce store, was also still getting its footing.

Now, "we believe that livestreaming sales in the U.S. could easily reach $50 billion this year," Weinswig said. The firm also estimates livestream shopping will account for more than 5% of total e-commerce sales in the U.S. by 2026.

TikTok, Poshmark and eBay all told CNBC they're currently testing livestream shopping.

"We're really bullish for the growth of this new way to shop," said eBay's chief product officer, Eddie Garcia. "The sky's the limit  and we're gonna keep learning. We're going to keep investing."

Garcia, who oversees eBay Live, the company's livestreaming platform, said it is currently focused on fashion and collectibles, with plans to expand from there.

"We have 134 million buyers all around the globe who are chomping at the bit and really thrilled to engage with sellers in this new way," Garcia said.

Meanwhile Velez said he's still fine-tuning his deals with the platforms, which involves handing over some of his earnings. Right now, he pays between 13% and 20% of each sale to cover things like payment processing and promotions.

"We give a percentage our sale in exchange for visibility, ease of use," he said.

Influencer Danielle Santana hosts live shopping shows on Amazon , selling products from other businesses  everything from cheese graters to make-up sponges. She said she gets a cut of every transaction.

Santana, who can sell 500 to 3,000 items in one show, told CNBC she made six figures just on Amazon Live last year.

"[My commission] ranges from 2% to upwards of 20%  and that all depends on the category and the items that you are selling," she said.

Santana is one of hundreds broadcasting on the platform every day. A spokesperson for Amazon said in an email that "thousands of creators" livestreamed throughout the e-commerce site's Prime Day event in July of last year.

And while some major platforms are jumping into livestreaming, one social media giant is pulling out.

A spokesperson for Facebook and Instagram parent Meta told CNBC by email the company made the "hard decision" to end support for its Live Shopping feature in March.

Previously, according to Instagram, businesses and creators were able to tag products when they went live on the platform, allowing viewers to buy or save products added to the shopping video.

"Businesses will still be able to use live broadcasting but the ability to tag products will be going away. This allows us to focus on experiences that provide more value for people and businesses like Reels and Ads that help with product discovery," the company spokesperson said.

According to Coresight's Weinswig, Meta is "missing out."

"It could ultimately impact the number of eyeballs, which will impact the advertising dollars. They will also not benefit from the sales being concentrated on their platform," Weinswig said. "Even the bigger miss for [Meta] will be the community, which will look elsewhere to shop and converse and learn from each other."

Weinswig estimates that companies working to establish themselves with livestreaming could see upward of 25% top-line growth.

So, who is poised to emerge victorious in the livestreaming battle?

According to Weinswig, it's TikTok, which has a significant opportunity in the U.S. market given its 150 million monthly active users and popularity with younger consumers.

The platform's technological advantage over its competitors enables it to target users with products they may be interested in purchasing.

Weinswig also noted that TikTok has streamlined the shopping process for users, keeping livestreams and purchases all in-feed  without leaving the app.
A Ukrainian serviceman fires a rocket launcher during a military training exercise not far from front line in Donetsk region on June 8, 2023.

The collapse of a strategically important dam in Russian-occupied Ukraine raises questions about the ability of Kyiv to launch a long-anticipated counteroffensive, but analysts believe the resulting carnage is unlikely to deter the next phase of the war.

The Nova Kakhovka dam, which is situated on the Dnieper River, was blown up Tuesday. The breach has since wrought havoc on a swathe of southern Ukraine, with tens of thousands of people fleeing as entire cities were reduced to ruins by the cascading floodwater.

Ukraine accused Russian forces of blowing up the dam, while the Kremlin denied the attack and said Kyiv intentionally sabotaged the dam to distract attention from its counteroffensive. CNBC has not been able to independently verify the claims.

The dam breach comes amid months of buildup to Ukraine's counteroffensive, a phase of the war that many see as potentially pivotal in Kyiv's pursuit of victory.

NBC News reported Thursday that Ukraine had finally launched its counteroffensive, citing a senior officer and a soldier near the front lines. The report said a wave of Ukrainian attacks on the war's southeastern front lines appeared to reflect a significant new push.

A spokesperson for the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on Friday, however, dismissed reports that a counteroffensive had begun, according to Reuters. Ukraine's government has repeatedly said there will be no public announcement of the start of the counteroffensive.

Andrius Tursa, Central and Eastern Europe advisor at Teneo, a political risk consultancy, said the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam may alter Ukraine's offensive plans  but was "unlikely to derail" them.

In a note published Thursday, Tursa said intensifying and offensive actions by Ukraine could indicate the start of a wider campaign, but it is likely to be "gradual and cautious."

"Ukraine's offensive was long expected to focus on liberating southeastern regions of the country, which could sever Russia's 'land bridge' to Crimea, split the occupying forces, and pose new risks to Russian military assets in the peninsula," Tursa said.

"While this likely remains one of the objectives, Ukraine is also under increasing political pressure to demonstrate that Western military equipment and training have enabled it to deal major blows to the Russian forces and recapture significant areas of occupied territory regardless of where it is."
Prince Harry became the first high-ranking British royal to take to the witness stand in more than 130 years this week in a court case over alleged phone-hacking by U.K. media group MGN. Carl Court | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Prince Harry became the first high-ranking British royal to take to the witness stand in more than 130 years this week, seeking justice for he and wife Meghan Markle after what he described as years of hounding by the U.K. press. Harry  King Charles' III's youngest son, who stepped down from royal duties in 2020  spent a day-and-a-half giving evidence to London's High Court over claims that he had been unlawfully targeted, including via phone hacking, by Mirror Group Newspapers' (MGN) titles. MGN has denied using illegal methods to obtain information about the prince. The 38-year-old, who was represented in court by lawyer David Sherborne, claimed the intrusion had sustained for a period of 15 years, from when he was a child through to his mid-twenties, destroying his adolescence and ruining relationships, including with ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy. Though the allegations pre-date his relationship with Meghan, Harry told the court he was motivated to bring the case after a chance encounter with Sherborne, when they discussed ways to "stop the abuse, intrusion and hate that was coming towards me and my wife."

Phone hacking on an 'industrial scale'

Prince Harry is one among over 100 claimants, including actors and actresses, who are suing MGN over allegations of unlawful information-gathering over a two-decade period from 1991 to 2011. The group claims that senior editors and executives at MGN were aware of and encouraged the wrongdoing, including phone hacking  the illegal interception of voicemails. MGN, publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, has previously admitted that its titles were responsible for phone hacking. But MGN's lawyer Andrew Green said there was no evidence to show Harry was a victim. Green described the allegations as "total speculation," saying that some information published by the papers had come from senior Buckingham Palace aides, while other stories were based on details already made public.

Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) lawyer Andrew Green said there was no evidence to show Prince Harry was a victim of phone-hacking. Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

However, Harry said that intimate details about his break-up with Davy and an argument they had over a visit he made to a strip club were not public and had instead been obtained by phone hacking and a tracking device on her car. The prince also broke royal protocol in saying that he believed the U.K. government and media had hit "rock bottom," and suggesting that his mother, Princess Diana, had been a victim of phone hacking prior to her death in a car accident in 1997. "I believe phone hacking was on an industrial scale across at least three of the papers at the time and that is beyond doubt," Harry told the court. "To have a decision against me and any other people that come behind me with their claims, given that Mirror Group have accepted hacking ... I would feel some injustice," he added.

British media under the spotlight
Ukraine continues to deal with the fallout of the destruction of its Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power station, which burst open in the early hours of June 6 and has caused massive flooding and destruction in the southern Kherson region. Kyiv and Moscow both blame each other for the attack.

Rescue efforts continue as swathes of territory face humanitarian and ecological disasters and thousands of residents have been forced to flee their homes.

Ukraine's security service released the audio of what it said was an intercepted phone call proving Russian forces were behind the sabotage attack. The dam has been in Russian-occupied territory since shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. NBC cannot independently verify the audio.

Russian authorities say three people were injured after a drone strike on the southern Russian city of Voronezh damaged a residential building. Voronezh, some 110 miles from the Ukrainian border, lies next to Russia's Kursk and Belgorod regions, both of which have come under increased shelling and drone strikes by pro-Ukrainian forces in recent weeks.

Meanwhile, fighting is escalating in Ukraine's east as the country's long-awaited counteroffensive gets underway. Russia's military reported heavy fighting in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia, describing drone, infantry and artillery battles.
Recreational cannabis was still illegal when Nancy Whiteman left her high-paying consulting job to cook edibles in Boulder, Colorado, in 2010.

Four years later, the state legalized retail sales of marijuana, and Whiteman's gamble paid off. The 64-year-old founder of edible cannabis company Wana is now one of the richest self-made women in the U.S., with a net worth of $225 million, according to Forbes.

"I like to say I went from the most traditional industry to the least traditional industry," Whiteman told CNBC Make It in 2018. "I wanted a business where I could build value, and it didn't depend on me. I also love to cook."

Much of Whiteman's fortune comes from selling Wana for $350 million in 2021 to Canopy Growth, an Ontario, Canada-based cannabis company. She owned 100% of the company at the time of the acquisition  and was paid an initial installment of $297.5 million in up-front cash, according to the sale announcement.

Whiteman remains CEO of Wana today. It all started with the father of her daughter's friend, who dropped hints in conversation that he worked in a somewhat illicit industry, Forbes reported earlier this month.

That "got my undivided attention," Whiteman told Forbes.
Palantir's boss Alex Karp opposes the idea of a pause in artificial intelligence research, in contrast to an open letter from the Future of Life Institute signed by some of the biggest names in the tech industry.

The letter, which has garnered over 31,000 signatures including names like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, called for a pause on AI research on models larger than GPT-4, which powers tools such as ChatGPT.

The letter also said that if "such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium."

Speaking to BBC Radio in an interview broadcast Thursday, Karp said he is of the view that "many of the people asking for a pause, are asking for a pause because they have no product."

He added, without naming anyone, that this is because "people who have nothing to offer want to study AI," but by taking a pause, this could lead to adversaries stealing a lead in not only commercial applications, but also military applications.

To him, "studying this and allowing other people to win both on commercial areas and on the battlefield" is a really bad strategy.
Emily Swift has a lot riding on TikTok's ability to stay accessible and legal in the U.S. Swift, who spent her pre-Covid years as a Connecticut-based photographer, now runs a business called Darkslide Film Lab that scans and develops film by hand in a traditional black-and-white darkroom. She also posts TikTok videos about the process. When one goes viral, client orders for Swift and her one part-time employee come pouring in  leading to upwards of $6,000 in extra revenue per month, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Nearly five million businesses have TikTok accounts, according to the social media platform. Many are Covid-era side hustles that became full-time gigs after viral videos led to real-world popularity. Some of those entrepreneurs are worried about losing it all. TikTok is under fire from U.S. legislators who allege it poses a significant national security concern. The app, owned by Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance, stands accused of potentially funneling American consumer data to the Chinese government. The company denies the allegation, and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was grilled by American lawmakers over the issue in March. The acrimony could potentially lead to a nationwide prohibition of TikTok, following a Montana statewide ban signed into law last month. Swift and some of her small-business compatriots say they feel caught in the crossfire. "I really hope that doesn't happen, because I'll be screwed," Swift says.

How TikTok helps small businesses make money

Swift's business is more than a woman and a phone camera: She and her one part-time employee process 30 to 60 rolls of camera film per day, sent in by customers, which requires practiced hands. That usually takes about six hours, leaving the remainder of the day for Swift to make videos. Unable to book photography clients in March 2021, Swift used an unemployment check to launch Darkslide. She reached her first month of profitability much more quickly than she expected after her first viral video, a behind-the-scenes look at developing film from a vintage camera owned by a customer's grandfather. "I'll never forget thinking, 'Oh my god, all we had to do all this [whole] time was just film what we do every day,'" Swift says. Swift says she's sticking with the platform for the long haul  and she's unsure where to turn if it gets banned. "I can show up as myself, anytime, anywhere, any day [on TikTok] and my followers are going to accept that," she says. "If I tried to do the same on Instagram, it'll look almost a bit unprofessional to show up there like that, because what people are expecting is your best."

Why Congress is considering a TikTok ban

For the most part, U.S. lawmakers' concerns center around a Chinese intelligence law, which states that if the government requests data from "any organization or citizen" in the country on the basis of national security, the organization or citizen must provide it. In the case of TikTok, that might include your email address, phone number, search and browsing history, phone contacts and photos, or videos you've uploaded on the app. There's no publicly known evidence of the Chinese government requesting data from TikTok, or TikTok providing it. It's unclear whether TikTok would even be required to hand over data on U.S. consumers, which the company says it stores on U.S. servers. The lack of clarity is exactly what American lawmakers say they find troubling. Security concerns are an industry-wide problem, Chew argued in his congressional testimony. "The potential security, privacy, content manipulation concerns raised about TikTok are really not unique to us," he said. "The same issues apply to other companies." To an extent, that's true, says Aram Sinnreich, a professor and chair of American University's Communication Studies division: Tech companies like Amazon, Alphabet and Meta do collect similar types of data, and use it to sell targeted advertising to their clients. None of them, however, are nearly as likely to be forced to hand their data over to a foreign government, some American legislators say. The likeliest outcome of Congress' deliberations is either a nationwide ban  which would be met with First Amendment challenges and "years of litigation"  or some type of heavy regulation, Sinnreich says. No regulatory proposals have gained significant momentum in Congress as yet.

What small-business owners in Montana are already experiencing

To see what a TikTok ban or regulation would mean for small-business owners, look to Montana. The state's governor, Greg Gianforte, signed a bill last month that will prohibit Google and Apple's app stores from offering the TikTok app, starting in January 2024. TikTok responded with a federal lawsuit against Montana, for infringing on its First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. The app disputed Montana's claim that TikTok is used for surveillance, saying the state has "nothing to support these allegations."

Taylor Reed, owner of Kalispell, Montana-based Reed Painting. Courtesy subject
Swiss authorities brokered the controversial emergency rescue of Credit Suisse by UBS for 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.37 billion) over the course of a weekend in March.

UBS and the Swiss government announced Friday that they had signed a loss protection agreement, which will come into effect once the takeover of Credit Suisse is completed.

The provisions will see the Swiss government cover losses of up to 9 billion Swiss francs ($10 billion) following UBS' acquisition of its former rival. This is guaranteed on a "designated portfolio of Credit Suisse non-core assets," once UBS incurs the first 5 billion Swiss francs in losses.

"The priority for the federal government and UBS is to minimise potential losses and risks so that recourse to the federal guarantee is avoided to the greatest extent possible," the Swiss government said in a statement.

The administration added that it had facilitated the deal to "safeguard financial stability and thus avert damage to the Swiss economy," but had always agreed to guarantee a portion of losses due to UBS taking over a portfolio of assets that "do not fit its business and risk profile."

In return, the agreement states that, after the takeover, UBS must support the development of Switzerland's status as a financial centre. The bank has confirmed intentions to keep the headquarters of the merged group in Switzerland for the duration of the loss protection provisions.

"UBS will manage these assets in a prudent and diligent manner and intends to minimize any losses and maximize value realization on these assets," UBS said.

UBS Group shares were down 0.2% at 10:00 a.m. London time.
The smoke from the wildfires has enveloped the skies, leading to a significant increase in air pollution levels. Around 13 states have issued alerts on the air quality, impacting an estimated population of 115 million people, according to an Independent report.

For the last two to three days, residents of New York City have been witnessing an unusual sightan orange skyline. The New York City and several other cities in the northeastern United States are currently experiencing hazardous air conditions as the thick smoke originating from hundreds of wildfires in eastern Canada has engulfed the region.

The smoke from the wildfires has enveloped the skies, leading to a significant increase in air pollution levels. This unprecedented environmental phenomenon has sparked concerns among residents and health authorities. The hazardous levels of air pollution pose potential health risks and can negatively impact air quality.

Numerous videos and images showcasing the orange skyline of New York City have surfaced on social media platforms, capturing the eerie ambiance created by the smoke. On Friday, a video clip showed the famous New York Bridge covered under a veil of smoke.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 9)  Bangko Sentral Governor Felipe Medallas one-year term as central bank chief expires next month, but he said on Friday that it will be a blessing if he is reappointed to a fresh six-year term.

Medalla helmed the monetary authority for a year to serve the unfinished term of then-BSP Governor Benjamin Diokno, who had to leave his post after he was appointed as Finance Secretary.

From the very beginning, I always behaved as though I will serve for only one year. It will be a blessing if I serve longer than that, said Medalla, who was appointed to his post in June 2022.

He has also been a member of the policymaking Monetary Board since 2011.

Medalla also served a year of the supposed six-year term of then-BSP Governor Nestor Espenilla, Jr. who succumbed to cancer in 2019.

From the very beginning, I think that my duty was to do the best job I can do to finish the term that was started by Governor Nesting and then later on served by Governor Diokno, he said.

The 73-year-old outgoing central bank governor said he will welcome a reappointment.

Under the BSP charter, a central bank governor serves for six years even if his term overlaps with a new presidency.

The chance to have served for one year is a gift and Id be too greedy to be asking for more, he said.
The 25th annual Art on the Streets, an outdoor gallery of a dozen sculptures and murals scattered throughout downtown, will be on display for the next year.
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The Missourians Opinion section is a public forum for the discussion of ideas. The views presented in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missourian or the University of Missouri. If you would like to contribute to the Opinion page with a response or an original topic of your own, visit our submission form
US lawmakers on Thursday introduced two bills related to artificial intelligence in the Senate as the proliferation of the technology continues to gather momentum after the launch of Microsoft-owned OpenAIs generative AI driven ChatGPT and Googles Bard.

One of the bills introduced in the Senate necessitates US government bodies or agencies to let citizens or users know when AI is being used to interact with them.

This bill, which was introduced by senators Gary Peters (a Democrat from Michigan), Mike Braun (Republican from Indiana), and James Lankford (Republican from Oklahoma), postulates that government agencies should create a mechanism for citizens to appeal decisions taken by AI.

The federal government needs to be proactive and transparent with AI utilization and ensure that decisions aren't being made without humans in the driver's seat, Braun was quoted as saying by Reuters.

Several industry leaders have either warned about the use of AI or spoken at length about controlling the technology.

Last month, hundreds of tech industry leaders, academics, and other public figures signed an open letter warning that the evolution of AI could lead to extinction and that controlling the tech should be a top global priority.

In the same month, Microsoft President Brad Smith sought the formation of a new US agency to govern AI while expressing concerns over the safety and security aspects of the latest technology and laying out a blueprint for public governance of AI.

Like the US, other governments worldwide have been grappling with regulations to rein in AI-related dangers.

The other bill introduced in the Senate, by Michael Bennet (Democrat from Colorado) and Mark Warner (Democrat from Virginia), sought the formation of a body, dubbed Office of Global Competition Analysis, in order to ensure that the US is ahead of other countries in technology prowess, especially in sectors such as AI, semiconductors, quantum computing, and 5G.

This bill comes just days after a US Treasury official said the administration of US President Joe Biden was drafting new regulations that would prohibit investments and transfer of technology to Chinese firms working on developing advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.
Taha International Company for Industrial Services has announced a game-changing agreement with top South Korean company Hwarim Tech that will help strengthen and expand the cooperation between the two companies within the realm of aluminium processing.

A multi-discipline solutions provider with corporate office in Netherlands, Taha is a specialist in innovative, environmentally-friendly and cost-effective services and offers key equipment and products to the aluminium and steel industries worldwide.

Since 2014, Taha has been providing metal recovery services to Aluminium Bahrain (Alba), the worlds largest single site aluminium smelter ex China.

The scope of the partnership encompasses various areas, including boosting technology trade deal of Industry Dust & Gas Extractor System, and aluminium dross treatment system and know-how support & knowledge.

As per the agreement, Taha will supply the Korean company with secondary aluminum materials. The purpose behind this collaboration is to leverage innovative methodologies that promote sustainability and environmental preservation, specifically through the extraction of aluminum metal.

This collaboration is aimed at fostering the exchange of invaluable experiences and knowledge, facilitating the development of investment opportunities and joint cooperation in projects related to the enhancement of manufacturing processes, quality standards, and the exploration of innovative technologies and methodologies within the field of aluminum.

The agreement was signed during the recent visit of a Bahraini trade delegation led by Minister of Industry and Trade, Abdullah bin Adel Fakhro, to South Korea.

Taha said that the primary objective of the visit was to foster stronger bilateral investments between the two friendly nations, thus aligning with the economic recovery plan.

This initiative received valuable support from Export Bahrain, further enhancing the prospects of mutual growth and prosperity.

The strategic collaboration aligns with the objectives of Taha International in promoting sustainable development within the aluminum industry and transitioning towards a greener economy, said its top official.

"This signifies our commitment to bolster trade cooperation between the Kingdom of Bahrain and South Korea in the aluminum sector, with a particular focus on advancing aluminum processing technologies," remarked its CEO Ammar Awachi.

"The aim is to foster stronger ties and strategic partnerships between the Bahraini and South Korean aluminum industries, while capitalizing on the South Korean counterparts cutting-edge technologies," he stated.

Under this partnership, the two companies will join forces to offer comprehensive solutions to enterprises operating within the aluminum sector.

"Leveraging our existing economic and trade relations, we intend to establish enduring partnerships and initiatives that facilitate fruitful collaboration and pave the way for future growth plans," he added.

These solutions will revolve around employing cutting-edge technologies to effectively treat aluminum dross and extract aluminum metal in a manner that is both environmentally friendly and energy-efficient.

Lauding the collaboration, Awachi said: "Our commitment remains steadfast in exporting our services and products to global markets, while fostering continuous cooperation to drive innovation, leverage cutting-edge technologies, and shape global trends in the utilization of aluminum metal."

"We commend Export Bahrain for their active role in creating a conducive environment for private sector institutions, enabling them to thrive, prosper, and expand their operations," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Just weeks after Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner for industry, urged Europe to make its own chips, the bloc has announced up to $8.7 billion (8.1 billion) in public funding for building microelectronics and communication technologies.

The funding plan, put together by 14 EU member nations, was created as an Important Project of Common European Interest (IPCEI), a project category that takes advantage of rules that allow member states to pool resources and cooperate across borders.

While the member states involved in the IPCEI will provide up to $8.7 billion in public funds, another $14.7 billion is expected in private investments, bringing total funding for projects under the plan to over $22 billion, EU Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

This IPCEI, which is the EUs largest to date, will see 56 companies across Europe  including startups, large enterprises, and small and medium-size enterprises  undertake a total of 68 projects, Vestager added.

Some of the companies involved in the IPCEI include Bosch, STMicroelectronics, GlobalFoundries, Orange, and Continental Automotive.

The direct result of the IPCEI, according to Vestager, will see the creation of 8,700 highly skilled jobs. The first direct products of the projects are expected to hit the market by 2025, she added.

Vestager said that the IPCEI will ensure that taxpayers' money is wisely spent and the aid will be limited to the amount necessary for the project actually to go ahead.

In addition, large beneficiaries will return part of the aid received if their projects turn out to be more profitable than foreseen. We call this a claw-back mechanism, Vestager said.

Further, the innovations arising out of the IPCEI will benefit all member states, Vestager said.

The EUs decision to aid chip-making and communication technologies such as 5G and 6G comes at a time when the US and China are locked in a battle for supremacy over chip manufacturing.

Both nations have tried several strategies including partnering with other nations and banning the use of chips manufactured by companies that are headquartered in the other nation.

Last month, the UK, which is no longer a part of the EU, announced a 1 billion chip manufacturing investment, which was heavily criticized for being insufficient to make any substantial difference.
New Delhi, June 9 (UNI) The Congress on Friday launched a scathing attack at former Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat for reportedly lauding Nathuram Godse, and demanded his expulsion from the BJP.

"Former Uttarakhand CM Trivendra Singh Rawat called Nathuram Godse a 'patriot' during a programme. He repeatedly said that Godse was a patriot. On the one hand, (Narendra) Modi ji bows before Bapu (Mahatma Gandhi) when he visits abroad, on the other hand, BJP leaders insult Gandhi ji," said Congress' Communication Department Secretary, Vaibhav Walia at a press conference here, over the recent remarks of Rawat.

He further said, "It is not only an insult to Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, but the entire nation itself. We want the glorification of Godse should stop in the country."
Dig into the ground, and theres no telling what youll find. Maybe youll find the body of someone who was murdered. Or maybe youll find the body of someone who wasnt murdered. Mostly, you find bodies, actually.

Just for a change, however, we looked up some cases of people who dug into the ground and stumbled upon stuff other than bodies. Even without finding a single human skull, they wound up pretty surprised.
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Well, congratulations, you criminal. The moment you bring a single sled dog onto the continent of Antarctica, youve broken the law. The first people to explore the continent made use of them, but they had the advantage of doing so before any scientists panicked about them ruining all that pristine nature. Up until fairly recently, they were a central part of any activity on the continent, but in 1993 they were banned because of worries about them transmitting diseases like the thoroughly old-timey sounding canine distemper to native wildlife, like seals.

Pixabay I think a nice baguette would be a better reward for a successful spacewalk than applesauce tube.

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In terms of pure, warm, comfort from a food, bread is pretty high on the list. Nothing but pure, unadulterated carbohydrates, its like building a nourishing, cozy log cabin inside your tum-tum. Upgrade to something like a croissant or a fluffy biscuit, and man, youve got something that could probably give you a couple seconds of peace during an active plane crash. Now, I understand that some people have gluten intolerance, or the real version of that, celiac disease, and to them I say: We get it, nerd! Enjoy your lettuce-wrapped burgers and brownies made out of dry chocolate dust held together by the bakers sheer will.

If youre off to space as an astronaut, though, despite heading into a high-stress environment and situation, you wont be able to rely on the airy, stretchy internal hug of a tasty sandwich or pastry to calm you. Thats because bread in most forms is banned on NASA spacecraft. As for the reason why, just think back to the state of your jeans after your last croissant. Eating bread rates pretty high on the crumb-generation scale. Its no Nature Valley granola bar, but each bite definitely looses a miniature squadron of bready bits that, in zero-G, are now off on a singular mission to start a small electrical fire.
Dhaka, June 9 (UNI) Bangladesh and Myanmar are now moving ahead with a pilot project for the repatriation of Rohingyas mediated by China.

But the biggest obstacle in the implementation of that project is the United Nations itself. The United Nations refugee agency stopped food rations for four Rohingya families who initially agreed to repatriate.

On Thursday UNs Special Envoy on Myanmar Tom Andrews from Geneva called for the pilot project to be suspended immediately.

The whole matter is being closely monitored by the Bangladesh government.

Special Rapporteur Tom said that if the Rohingyas return, their lives and freedom will be at risk. Based on various reports, he alleged that 'Bangladesh is trying to deport Rohingyas back to Myanmar through fraudulent and forceful methods.'

He claimed, "There is no environment for the Rohingyas to return to Myanmar." Based on various reports, he alleges that Bangladeshi authorities are threatening to arrest Rohingyas, confiscate their documents and other threats.

Regarding the UN envoys position on the pilot project, Bangladesh foreign minister Dr. AK Abdul Momen told UNI that, the special envoy is American. He can take Rohingyas to his country to give them a better future. His country has ample job opportunities and no shortage of land. Americans are also responsible for taking care of the Rohingyas. So he can recommend taking them to western countries including America. In the last six years, his country has sheltered only 62 people.

Meanwhile, the Rohingyas living in various camps in Ukhia-Teknaf have rallied to demand that they begin repatriation to Myanmar as soon as possible.

Rohingyas organized this program in 13 camps around 10 am on Thursday (June 8).

In the rally, Rohingya community leaders said that during the persecution, murder and rape in Myanmar, they fled for fear of their lives and took refuge in Bangladesh. The government of Bangladesh has given asylum on humanitarian grounds. For which the Rohingyas are grateful. We have been living here in the camp for six years. We want to return home to Myanmar as soon as possible.

It should be noted that on August 25, 2017, the country's army started indiscriminately killing and torturing the Rohingyas in the Rakhine region. At that time, more than 700,000 Rohingyas fled across the border and took refuge in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. There were already hundreds of thousands of oppressed Rohingya here.

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Ariana Madix has accused Tom Sandoval of trying to "manipulate a narrative".

The 37-year-old star split from Tom, 39, after it was revealed that he had a months-long affair with Raquel Leviss, and Ariana has now slammed her ex-boyfriend.

Asked why their split has attracted so much attention, Ariana told Glamour: "There are layers to it. The best-friend layer, the fact that [he] and I were together for so long and so many people, including myself, saw us as endgame.

"Its the deception, the trying to manipulate a narrative, the fact that so many people have been through this themselves and they recognise parts of it."

Ariana was a "snooper" in her past relationships - but she made a conscious decision to change her ways when she started dating Tom.

As a result, the 'Vanderpump Rules' star never had any idea that Tom was cheating on her.

Asked how she felt when she found out, Ariana shared: "I think the shock prevents you from being sad immediately. It was like the air was sucked out of my lungs. It was shock, disbelief on some level, but then also anger."

In May, Ariana admitted to being "glad" that she found out about the affair.

During an appearance on the 'Call Her Daddy' podcast, Ariana explained: "The plan was to end the relationship without any sort of mention of an affair or cheating. Whether that was pre-reunion or not or pre-going to film Winter House or not. And then they would just start dating.

"The narrative that he was the victim in our relationship or [that] I just suck would have already been planted."

Ariana suggested that Tom's "plan" was ruined when news of his affair leaked.

She said: "If I had found out the way you all had planned ... I would have been just a cog in the machine of this whole narrative."
Chinese envoy slams AUKUS nuclear submarine deal

Xinhua) 13:45, June 09, 2023

VIENNA, June 9 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy lambasted the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal at the board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) held here Thursday.

Li Song, China's permanent representative to the IAEA, stressed that the essence of the deal would transfer tons of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium from the United States and Britain, both nuclear-weapon states, to their military ally Australia, a non-nuclear-weapon state.

Under the trilateral AUKUS alliance, announced in September 2021, Australia can build nuclear-powered submarines with technology provided by the United States and Britain.

The AUKUS countries have carried out the strategic military cooperation for "widely known geopolitical purposes," which has unprecedentedly violated the principles and practices of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and severely undermined the international non-proliferation regime and the IAEA's safeguards system, Li said.

Thursday's meeting marked the eighth consecutive time the IAEA reviewed the AUKUS issue through intergovernmental discussions at China's proposal.

The Chinese envoy noted at the meeting that the AUKUS submarine collaboration and the three countries' efforts to politicize the issue at the IAEA and polarize the agency's member states reflect their Cold War mentality and confrontational blocs.

The AUKUS countries have attempted to depict their nuclear submarine deal as a routine safeguards issue between a non-nuclear-weapon state and the IAEA Secretariat. They have requested the IAEA invoke Article 14 of the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement to make safeguards exemption arrangements, said the envoy, stressing that "this is a clandestine move to coerce the IAEA Secretariat into endorsing their cooperation."

Noting that the AUKUS countries claimed they would work out suitable arrangements with the IAEA Secretariat to set a precedent for other countries' pursuit of naval nuclear propulsion programs, Li questioned such legitimacy.

"Who has granted this right to the three countries? Will other countries have a say on this issue?" Li said, adding that in the past, the three countries always emphasized "the intergovernmental process led by member states" when they set the rules for others.

"But this time, when they want to set the rules for themselves and impose the rules on other member states, they have been very reluctant to initiate an intergovernmental process involving all parties and have constantly tried to obstruct it," he said.

The Chinse envoy also pointed out that the AUKUS deal involves complicated political, security, legal and technical issues, which have caused huge disputes among the IAEA member states.

Representatives from more than 20 countries, including Russia, Pakistan, Egypt, South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil and Argentina, echoed the position of the Chinese side in their speeches at Thursday's IAEA board meeting.

"During the meeting, more member states have put forward important views from different perspectives," Li said, adding that all countries must join hands to steadily advance an open, inclusive, transparent and sustainable intergovernmental discussion process.

Li urged the AUKUS countries to address the international community's concerns with concrete actions, fulfill their non-proliferation obligations, and maintain candid and transparent communication with other parties on the basis of equality and mutual respect.

Li expressed the hope that IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi will fully respect and objectively present the different views and concerns of all parties. He also called on the IAEA Secretariat to comply with the IAEA Statute and the mandates of member states.

After the meeting, the Chinese envoy told reporters that China's diplomatic efforts have helped advance the IAEA member states' understanding of the AUKUS issue and promote an intergovernmental discussion.

China will continue to actively advocate and practice genuine multilateralism, firmly uphold the authority of international non-proliferation, safeguard international law and the global system with the United Nations at its core, and oppose a Cold War mentality, bloc confrontation and double standards, he added.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
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A 48-year-old banker, a 57-year-old financial consultant, and a 36-year-old private equity executive seem unlikely pretenders to the vacant French throne.

Yet there are many who truly support these three sharp-suited financiers and their grandiose ambitions.

So why do the Duke of Anjou, the Count of Paris and the man who styles himself Prince Napoleon think they should be King of France?

The simple answer is that they represent the last three dynasties to wear the crown  the Bourbons, the Orleanists and the heirs to Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Bourbon claimants are known as the Legitimists and believe that the Bourbons, who included Louis XIV were the one true French monarchy.

Socially conservative and a descendant of the Spanish dictator Franco, Louis Alphonse de Bourbon (left) is against same-sex marriage and adoption and wants to see a Christian society

The banker currently styles himself Duke of Anjou. He is married to Venezuelan wife Maria Margarita Vargas Santaella (right)

Louis Alphonse de Bourbon's is the most senior living male descendent of the Bourbon Louis XIV, the Sun King (pictured)

The Orleanists say that descendants of Louis-Philippe I should be king. And the Bonapartists maintain that as the last monarch in France was a Napoleon, then it is they who should have the throne  if it ever becomes available.

Trying to adjudicate between the competing claims of three middle-aged men in the finance industry would outwit even the wisest of judges - and might be more a matter of taste rather than legal or genealogical argument.

The Bourbons or Legitimists

Current pretender: Louis Alphonse de Bourbon

Age: 48

Current title: Styles himself Duke of Anjou

Married to: Venezuelan wife Maria Margarita Vargas Santaella. They have four children

Occupation: Banker

Claim to the throne: the most senior living male descendent of the Bourbon Louis XIV, the Sun King.

It is fair to say that de Bourbon is on the right of the political spectrum. Socially conservative and a descendant of the Spanish dictator Franco, he is against same-sex marriage and adoption, and wants to see a return to a Christian society.

Bourbon has also spoken in support of the insurgent Yellow Vest movement which has disrupted France since the first protests broke out over fuel prices in 2018

Although he is entitled to the Spanish Dukedom of Franco, it is not clear why he currently styles himself Duke of Anjou

Bourbon would take the name Louis XX should he ever ascend the throne

He has also spoken in support of the insurgent Yellow Vest movement which has disrupted France since the first protests broke out over fuel prices in 2018.

Born in Madrid, the banker takes his claim from Louis XIV via his grandson Philip V of Spain. He is also a great-grandson of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco through his mother, Maria del Carmen Martinez-Bordiu y Franco.

Bourbon would take the name Louis XX should he ever ascend the throne.

Although he is entitled to the Spanish Dukedom of Franco, it is not clear why he currently styles himself Duke of Anjou  something said to have provoked criticism from his cousin Juan Carlos, former King of Spain.

The Bonapartists

Current pretender: Jean-Christophe Napoleon

Age: 36

Current claimed title: Prince Napoleon

Married to: Countess Olympia von und zu Arco-Zinnerberg with one child

Occupation: Private equity executive

Claim to the throne: the great-great-great-nephew of Emperor Napoleon 1 (Bonaparte). He is also descended from Emperor Napoleon III, the final French monarch, and, through his mother, from King Louis XV.

The holder of an MBA from Harvard Business School and a successful financier, Napoleon is less politically vocal than his two rivals.

Instead, he enjoys mixing with his fellow European aristocrats and actual royalty  his wedding in 2019 was attended by Princess Beatrice  and he represents the house of Bonapartists at events such as the bicentennial commemoration of the battle of Waterloo in 2015.

Jean-Christophe Napoleon is married to Countess Olympia von und zu Arco-Zinnerberg

Jean-Christophe Napoleon's claim to the throne is that he is the great-great-great-nephew of Bonaparte, Emperor Napoleon I (pictured)

The holder of an MBA from Harvard Business School and a successful financier, Napoleon is less politically vocal than his two rivals. Pictured: Jean-Christophe Napoleon with his mother Princess Beatrice of Bourbon Two Sicilies

He enjoys mixing with his fellow European aristocrats and actual royalty. His wedding in 2019 was attended by Princess Beatrice

Unlike dOrleans and de Bourbon, Napoleon does not seem to harbour serious public ambitions for the restoration of the monarchy in France

Unlike dOrleans and de Bourbon, Napoleon does not seem to harbour serious public ambitions for the restoration of the monarchy in France.

In 2019 he married Countess Olympia von und zu Arco-Zinnerberg (who happens to be the great-great-great niece of Napleon Bonapartes wife) at a ceremony attended by Princess Beatrice in Paris. This was followed by a lavish wedding at the 12th century Fontainebleau Palace.

The Orleanists

Current pretender: Jean dOrleans

Age: 57

Current claimed title: Count of Paris

Married to: Austrian aristocrat Philomena de Tornos Steinhart in Paris in 2009. They have five children

Occupation: Financial consultant, reservist Colonel

Claim to the throne: Jean, Duke of Vendome, is head of the House of Orleans, which is a branch of the House of Bourbon. He is also descended from Frances citizen king Louis-Philippe dOrleans (Louis Philippe I), who reigned from 1830-1848

Like his Bourbon rival, dOrleans is also socially conservative, and is against abortion, same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption.

Like his Bourbon rival, Jean dOrleans is also socially conservative, and is against abortion, same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption

Jean dOrleans (pictured right with Prince Albert of Monaco) is a financial consultant, reservist Colonel and father of five children

Claim to the throne: Jean dOrleans is descended from Frances citizen king Louis-Philippe dOrleans (Louis Philippe I), who reigned from 1830-1848 (pictured)

Believing that the French are natural monarchists, he also naturally thinks that he should be the King. Certainly, his magnificent ancestral home, the Chateau dAmboise, looks palatial enough.

Unfortunately he is in the middle of suing the Saint-Louis Foundation, the institute that owns the property and manages his familys former estate, for insisting that he pays rent to live at the Royal Domain of Dreux, west of Paris. He is reportedly demanding 1million euro damages from the foundation and requesting the return of five properties.

The neo-Gothic Royal Domain of Dreux features a number of well-appointed buildings including the Royal Chapel, which houses the family's tombs.

The Saint-Louis Foundation has been under the management of the interior ministry since its creation in 1974 by his grandfather, Prince Henry VI of Orleans.

France has not had a King since 1830, when revolution returned to France for a second time and the last of the Bourbon monarchs, King Charles X abdicated and fled to Britain.

Yet the French monarchy itself survived, because the government chose to elect Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans as King, and he would be known as King Louis-Philippe I. As a result, the House of Orleans, rather than the House of Bourbon, was on the throne.

Louis-Philippe reigned for 18 years, until in 1848 revolution once again swept France. And once again, the French king hopped across the Channel to safety in Britain.

He married Austrian aristocrat Philomena de Tornos Steinhart in Paris in 2009. They have five children

Believing that the French are natural monarchists, he also naturally thinks that he should be the King. Pictured: Jean dOrleans and Queen Sofia of Spain

Count of Paris Jean d'Orleans (second left), with his wife Philomena de Tornos y Steinhart (second right), and their children Prince Gaston and Princess Antoinette welcome French President Emmanuel Macron (Centre) and his wife Brigitte

The new government was headed by a President for the first time, who came in the form of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon himself.

In 1852, proving that old habits died hard in his family, Louis-Napoleon declared himself Emperor and reigned until 1870.

His surrender and capture in the Franco-Prussian War of that year was the death knell for his reign and with the creation of a Government of National Defence in 1870-71, France finally got rid of the monarchy.

Since then, it has remained a republic, but that has not stopped descendants of all three royal houses maintaining that, should France ever get rid of its president, then it is one of their families who should be sitting on the French throne.

What of the original French Revolution in 1789? Isnt that when the French people overthrew the King? The answer is yes but only temporarily.

In 1793, in the aftermath of the revolution, the Bourbon monarch, King Louis XVI and his wife, Queen Marie-Antoinette, were beheaded by guillotine.

France would only be a republic for just over a decade, however, because in 1804, perhaps the most famous Frenchman who has lived  Napoleon Bonaparte  declared himself Emperor.

Then, after losing a war in 1814 to a coalition of Prussians, Austrians and Russians, Napoleon went into exile, and his place on the throne was taken by Louis XVIII, who lasted only a year until Napoleon wrested back the crown in March 1815.

The battle of Waterloo that same year saw Napoleon lose the throne once again after just over a hundred days, and the Bourbon monarchy was once again restored.
We last saw petrolheads Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May in the autumn, tearing around Scandinavia. Now the trio are roaring back onto our screens with a journey titled Eurocrash.

As ever therell be jaw-dropping stunts, raucous rivalry and incredible  if not to say bizarre  vehicles: Jamess car appears to move by itself, Richards keeps telling him hes terrible in bed and Jeremys sprouts chandeliers!

The gang banter their way through a 1,400-mile jaunt across Eastern Europe, starting in Gdansk, Poland, before journeying to Slovakia and Hungary, en route to their final destination, stunning Lake Bled in Slovenia.

But it wasnt a burning desire to sample Eastern Europes scenery that prompted the itinerary. More that every country they might want to visit is now a trouble hotspot or wont let them in!

I dont think people realise just how small the world has become in the last 25 years, or the available world, we should say, explains Jeremy Clarkson.

James May, Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson (pictured L-R) pose next to the Crosley. The trio wanted to devise a road trip that nobody had thought of, in cars nobody would ever think to use for a road trip

There are lots of places  almost all of the Middle East, all of North Africa, lots of places weve been to before  that we cant go to now. Not just because we got banned for saying something or doing something, but because theyve become bloody dangerous.

'So, the concept is a road trip that nobody has ever thought of, in cars nobody would ever use for a road trip. We thought wed try to go from the Baltic to the Adriatic, sticking to countries that used to be behind the Iron Curtain.

His vehicle is the ostentatious Japanese-made Mitsuoka Le-Seyde, which he describes as a hideous homage to Liberaces bathroom. Meanwhile Richard has a large American convertible pick-up truck.

It's a road trip nobody's ever thought of, in cars that nobody would ever use for a road trip

But its James who ultimately paid the price for following the brief. He picked a little-known Crosley  an obscure US saloon built in the 1940s  which became the running joke of the whole show. And he admits that alcohol was consumed while he was bidding for it online

Its a car nobody has ever heard of, and nobody would ever buy, he admits.

People love seeing great cars like Ferraris but its a better story for telly when youve got a crap car, which goes all the way back to our original Cheap Car Challenge on Top Gear where you had 100 or whatever to buy a car.

'I think I ended up paying 12,000. Never drink wine and bid! Unfortunately, the Crosley was so slow that James missed some fascinating stops, notably Stalag Luft III, the prison camp immortalised in The Great Escape. I was sad James wasnt there because I know hed have loved it, says Jeremy.

But dont be fooled by that compassion. When they arent causing havoc at a motor race featuring Soviet-made Formula 1 vehicles or checking out flying cars, the trio are pranking each other with stunts like moving Jamess car into the hotel restaurant. Not that James was an innocent party

Jeremy tests out a Soviet-made Formula 1 vehicle at a motor race. The flying cars that also feature on the show are another highlight

He added sound effects on my car which were embarrassing and deeply irritating, reveals Richard. When I hit the brakes, it sounded a bell and when I used the indicators there were a variety of sirens.

'Throttling past a certain point of acceleration, it played bagpipes. The worst was when I put the roof down or up, it loudly broadcast a message in the local language which suggested I was impotent.

Yet as Richard admits, they commended each others ingenuity. If its something really clever  like when James put candelabras on Jeremys car  thats superb. Youve got to say, Credit where credits due, thats actually very funny.

Thats the magic of The Grand Tour. The cars and locations are great, but its the presenters 20-year friendship that means its a joy for them to make  and for us to watch.

Its lovely when three people who have known each other that long can still reduce each other to tears of laughter, says Richard.
A woman who was diagnosed with anal cancer linked to sexually transmitted HPV has revealed how 'laughing' at her diagnosis helped her come to terms with it.

Julia DeVillers, from New Albany, Ohio, had been suffering from anal bleeding and discomfort which was dismissed by a doctor as 'harmless' and diagnosed as a hemorrhoid.

She underwent an outpatient procedure to remove it the following week but, when she woke up, was told that it was actually a cancerous tumor.

Julia, who is a children's book author, has since undergone treatment and - despite spending five weeks in intensive care - tackled each day with humor.

Julia DeVillers, from New Albany, Ohio, had been suffering from anal bleeding and discomfort which was dismissed by a doctor as 'harmless' and diagnosed as a hemorrhoid

Julia, who is a children's book author, has since undergone treatment and - despite spending five weeks in intensive care - tackled each day with humor

In May 2022, Julia received the diagnosis that she had anal cancer which is linked to sexually transmitted HPV with risk factors including 'multiple sexual partners.'

In an essay for Newsweek, she wrote: 'Who knew my college fun would come back to bite me in the butt? Literally...

'I didn't want to tell people I had anal cancer. Cancer, alone was a traumatic conversation. Add anal - such a loaded word.'

But Julia soon found that the diagnosis and intensive treatment was easier to process with humor.

She said that her colleagues, who are writers and entertainers, soon bought into the idea too - before presenting her with a homemade membership card for 'Anal Cancer of the Month Club.'

They gave her light-hearted gifts including a butt-shaped mug, a science museum pillow of Uranus and socks emblazoned with the words 'I'm a badass' - to name just a few.

Meanwhile, Julia underwent five days a week of chemotherapy by pill with two IV doses interspersed as well as daily radiation for six weeks.

She struggled with the side effects that included 'crushing fatigue' and 'relentless stomach issues.'

Julia underwent five days a week of chemotherapy by pill with two IV doses interspersed as well as daily radiation for six weeks

Julia said things took a turn for the worst after her second round of IV chemo.

She said: 'Everything that had been put into me poured out in a radioactive neon green. I lost 30 pounds in a week.'

What is anal cancer? Anal cancer is an uncommon type of cancer that occurs in the anal canal which effects an estimated 8,000 in the US every year. Most people are treated with a combination of chemotherapy and radiation. Symptoms of anal cancer include: Bleeding from the anus or rectum

Pain in the area of the anus

A mass or growth in the anal canal

Anal itching Sources: Mayo Clinic Advertisement

And she then spent 37 days in the intensive care unit at the cancer hospital.

The writer revealed: 'I don't remember much: The incessant beep beep of the machine feeding me fentanyl, oxy, and nutrients, my husband and mom taking turns sleeping in the chair next to me, the doctors' voices getting increasingly somber.

'I was aware my body was shutting down. For several days, I couldn't open my eyes but I saw a tunnel of darkness with two pinpricks of bright light. I don't know if that's the tunnel people speak about, but I felt the darkness cut so deep into me, like the deepest depression.

'My kids were called to come back to town. Hospice was called. The doctors told my family they'd know in 48 hours which way things would go. I had no idea what was happening around me.'

Julia eventually came out of it and was sent home to continue treatment.

But, six months later, doctors revealed that her scans looked good and she had 'achieved NED' - no evidence of disease.

Julia is now helping raise awareness for anal cancer alongside the HPV Cancers Alliance in a bid to break down the stigma.

She concluded: 'I didn't want to be a "face of ass cancer," but here we are.'
If you thought you had a bad commute to the office, this intern definitely has it worse.

Sophia Celentano, 21, took to TikTok to reveal how she had landed a hybrid internship in corporate marketing - the only catch being it was more than 700 miles away from her home.

But the tenacious worker found a way around it and now takes a flight from South Carolina to the office in Parsippany, New Jersey, once a week.

Despite the grueling schedule, Sophia insists that it still works out cheaper than renting nearer her work.



Sophia Celentano, 21, took to TikTok to reveal how she had landed a hybrid internship in corporate marketing - the only catch being it was more than 700 miles away from her home

The commute involves her getting up at 3am, leaving for the airport at 4am, boarding a flight at 5.15am for a 6am take off, taking an Uber on landing and arriving at work around 8:30am

Sophia has detailed her complex commute on the video-sharing platform.

It involves getting up at 3am, leaving for the airport at 4am, boarding a flight at 5.15am for a 6am take off, taking an Uber on landing and finally arriving at work between 8:30am and 8:45am.

Then Sophia has to do the reverse journey to get home after 5pm.

Since posting about her intense commute, Sophia has received hundreds of comments from shocked viewers, with many stating how exorbitant the trip must be.

One user said: 'Commuting? Babe that's a business trip.'

Another added: 'Babes there is no way that flying once a week is cheaper than renting a place with roommates outside of the city.'

And a third wrote: 'Not a single job in the world is worth this.'

But, after receiving backlash about her commute, Sophia decided to set the record straight.

But, despite the grueling schedule, Sophia insists that it still works out cheaper than renting nearer her work

In a follow-up TikTok, she highlights that her commute is more cost effective than if she were to rent an apartment close to the New Jersey.

She tells viewers: 'I am saving a good amount of money living at home I don't have to pay rent and I don't have to pay money for food.'

The aspiring marketing executive then gives a breakdown of her costs.

She says she spends around $100 on flights, $100 on Ubers and $25 on food and other bits on her once-a-week commute.

In total, this comes out at $2,250 for her ten-week internship.

Sophia then estimates what her costs would be if she were to live near the office in New Jersey.

She estimates she would pay $750 for rent per month if she was 'lucky,' $150 a week on food without the convenience of her parents' fridge, and $50 on 'extra stuff like gas.'

In total, these costs over a ten-week period would come out at $4,250 - saving her $2,000.

Along with saving money, she says other perks of her hybrid internship are being close to family and seeing more of her boyfriend.

Along with saving money, she says other perks of her hybrid internship are being close to family and seeing more of her boyfriend

While the early wake-up call every Wednesday is tough, Sophia finds waiting around at the airport the more tedious part of her commute.

Then, when her working day is done, all she wants to do is get home but she must take an Uber, board a flight and then take a drive before she can get some well-earned sleep.

Many viewers also expressed concerns around Sophia's commute and the impact of it on her mental health, but she reassured them that 'it's honestly not that difficult for me.'

She explained: 'I'm used to traveling a lot, I like traveling a lot... I like adventure... I did a semester as sea. I lived on a ship for four months.

'For some people it would be their worst nightmare but for me its fine.'

The college student told DailyMail.com that she wasn't expecting her commuting videos to blow up as much as they did.

Explaining why she filmed them, she said: 'My reason for filming them came more from a place of "it'll be cool to look back on that one summer in undergrad when I commuted by plane for my internship" than "this will definitely make me go viral."'

Many viewers also expressed concerns around Sophia's commute and the impact of it on her mental health, but she reassured them that 'it's honestly not that difficult for me'

Sophia revealed that her fellow interns and managers 'were definitely surprised' when she told them how she was commuting, 'but they never responded from a place of judgement.'

She added: 'If anything they have made jokes like, "well I really have no excuse to come in person now if you're coming from states away."'

Looking ahead to the future, the South Carolinian says: 'I hope this internship has a positive impact on the opportunities I will have after graduating from the University of Virginia in media studies next spring.

'A lot of people in my TikTok comments were surprised I was doing this for an internship, the lowest level of seniority in a company.

'I would encourage them to realize that the job market is extremely brutal right now for young people. People who are completely qualified for positions and have degrees from top universities aren't getting hired.

'My internship could make a world of difference for what my life will look like post-grad. If I have to commute by plane in order to meet in-person expectations, so be it.'
The US-based star, 30, told fans to 'keep waiting' for her reply as she relaxed

Influencer Mia Khalifa has revealed she is so engrossed in a video game, she has been unable to get back to her adoring fans - as she asks them to 'keep waiting' for her reply.

The US-based star, who used to work in the porn industry but has recently begun speaking out against it, shared a snap of herself playing Hogwarts Legacy on Instagram.

The star, 30, was seen enjoying a Starbucks coffee as she played the latest Harry Potter-themed game on her console after a busy week, as she has said she needs to rest.

Mia shared a Harry Potter emoji on the top right of the screen on her Instagram Story as she showed off her toned legs with her 27.6 million followers.

The caption read: 'If I owe you an email back, keep waiting.

Influencer Mia Khalifa told fans to 'keep waiting' for her reply as she appeared to be enjoying some downtime at home

'I need at least 3 days of Portkey, takeout and oui'd to recovery from all the socializing I've done the past two weeks.'

Mia's recovery period comes after an intense fortnight at several fashion shoots and events, including a recent Diesel fashion show.

It comes after she gave fans a glimpse inside her fun-filled holiday to Mexico where she is staying in a luxurious villa.

The beauty posted clips on her Instagram story of herself and her pals twerking in the Casa Xixim villa.

Mia opted for a fuchsia frock with a plunging neckline and frill detail as she had a night in with her friends - but it was by no means a quiet evening.

As music blares in the background, the influencer, 30, takes on her friend in what appears to be a twerking contest, The Sun reported.

She captioned the story: 'Photos, or it didn't hap omg.'

The US-based star, who used to work in the porn industry but has recently begun speaking out against it, shared a snap of herself playing Hogwarts Legacy on Instagram

Mia's recovery period comes after an intense fortnight at several fashion shoots and events, including a recent Diesel fashion show

Mia appeared to be loving her time in Mexico as she posted a round-up of photos and videos on her Instagram grid yesterday from her fun night.

She wrote: 'Mexico, te amo con todo mi corazon' which translates to 'Mexico, I love you with all my heart'.

Mia continued: 'This country, the people, the food, the history it's pure magic.'

The Lebanese-born star concluded: 'Tengo tanto suerte en esta vida' which translates to: 'I am so lucky in this life.'

The group is staying in the exclusive Casa Xixim villa, which costs around 2,000 a night to rent and comes with a private chef.

Mia, whose real name is Sarah Joe Chamoun, spends much of her time calling out the porn industry following her three-month stint forming pornographic films in 2014.

The star, who now speaks out about her time in the porn industry, took to the floor and showed her best moves

She became a controversial figure after filming sketches while wearing a hijab, and revealed in 2019 that she had received death threats over her work.

In an interview with Stephen Sackur on BBC's HardTalk, she was asked to explain what drove her to star in adult films fresh out of college after being approached by a man on the street.

'I don't think low self-esteem discriminates against anyone,' she said. 'It doesn't matter if you come from a great family or if you come from a not-so-great background.

Mia explained that her self-esteem issues started at an early age, and part of her interest in porn stemmed from wanting to feel attractive.

Mia was in Miami when a man approached her about joining the adult film industry, but she explained he wasn't immediately forthcoming about what he was really asking.

'It wasn't just, 'Hey, do you want to come do porn?'' she recalled. 'It was more, 'Oh, you're beautiful. Would you like to do some modeling? Oh, you know, you have a great body, I think you would be great in nude modeling.' Things like that.'

Elsewhere, Mia posed on the beach in her frilled fuchsia dress which had a plunging neckline

She said the studio was 'very respectable' and in a 'gorgeous location.' It was clean, the people were friendly, and employees' cubicles were decorated with family photos. There was nothing that made her feel uncomfortable.

'I don't really see myself as a victim. I don't like that word,' she said. 'I did make my own decisions, even though they were terrible decisions. I think that something needs to change in the way women are approached.'

Mia stressed that producers can't force film stars to do a sex act they don't want to do, but she admitted she had 'very little say' during filming when it came to the theme and location.

She explained that she doesn't even really remember what it was like to film sex acts because her adrenaline was running so high at the time.

'I shocked even myself,' she said of the decision that not only changed her life but also destroyed her relationship with her family.

'They disowned me when they found out. I felt completely alienated by not just the world, but my family and the people around me,' she said. 'Especially after I quit, when I was still alone, even though I left. And I just realized some mistakes aren't forgivable. But time heals all wounds, and things are getting better now.'

When asked if she had any qualms about filming in a hijab, Mia said she told the producers they were going to get her killed, but they just laughed.

Though it was ultimately her choice to film it, she admitted she felt too nervous to tell them she wasn't willing to do it, especially after the reaction she got when she voiced her concerns.

'When there are four white male producers in the room and you say something like to them and they all just laugh, I mean, it's kind of devastating,' she said. 'It makes you not want to speak up and say anything again.'

Mia said the video, which launched her to viral stardom, 'shattered' her world. She never intended to be a famous porn star, far from it.

'The reason I thought it was okay for me to do porn was because I thought no one would ever find out about it,' she said. 'There's millions of girls who film themselves having sex and do things like that and no one knows their name. No one knows who they are. No one recognizes them.

'I wanted to do it as my dirty little secret, but it blew up in my face.'
Former WWE competitor Billie Kay has today revealed she is expecting her first child.

The 33-year-old, whose real name is Jessica McKay, confirmed the news with a sweet video posted to her Instagram page on Friday morning.

The clip, set to James Arthur's 'Heartbeat', shows a sign reading: 'Baby arriving December 2023'.

Jessica and another person - presumably her partner, though their identity isn't known - then place a sonogram on the board, underneath the notice.

She captioned the video: 'I'm waiting for your love.'

Former WWE competitor Billie Kay has today revealed she is expecting her first child

Jessica made history in 2019 when she was crowned the WWE Women's Tag Team champion with her wrestling colleague Peyton Royce - known as The Iconic Duo or The IIconics.

The Australian pair were released by the WWE in 2021, but went on to work together under the name The IInspiration until April 2022.

At this point, the team confirmed they were "indefinitely stepping away from in-ring action".

Shortly afterwards, Peyton Royce - whose real name is Cassie Lee - confirmed she had welcomed a baby boy, Austin, with All Elite Wrestling star Shawn Spears.

Now, Jessica has shared she is expecting her own bundle of joy.

The 33-year-old, whose real name is Jessica McKay, confirmed the news with a sweet video posted to her Instagram page on Friday morning

Friends and fans took to the comments of her Instagram post in their droves, congratulating the former WWE star for her happy news

Jessica made history in 2019 when she was crowned the WWE Women's Tag Team champion with her wrestling colleague Peyton Royce - known as The Iconic Duo or The IIconics

Friends and fans took to the comments of her Instagram post in their droves, congratulating the former WWE star for her happy news.

Her former wrestling partner Cassie said: 'Eeeeehhhhh! ITS HAPPENING! We're so excited!'

WWE Raw star Biance Belair posted a number of heart eye emojis in response to the news, and said: 'Congrats!'

Nikki Garcia, a retired wrestler, said: 'Aww yay!!!! Congratulations!!!'

Chelsea Green said: 'I've got chills!!!! I CAN'T WAIT!!!!!!!!!!!'
A worried resident in South West London has sparked a discussion on social media about whether their property has been staked out for a potential burglary - after finding a mysterious cross etched on a plant pot this week.

The property owner, from Richmond, posted on the Next Door app their concern after finding the chalk mark.

In the past, UK police departments have released a list of symbols - dubbed the 'Da Pinchi Code' - that they say could be being used by criminals to mark homes as a burglary target - including a flower sign that means 'wealthy', a D symbol that means 'too risky', and a book sign suggesting 'vulnerable female'.

Others have suggested the marks are simply an 'urban myth'.

The Richmond resident wrote this week: 'We found the "x" marking with black chalk marked on our pot in our patio this morning.

'This is definitely man made mark and wasn't there before as I washed the pots few days ago and would have noticed it. We are afraid this may be robbery mark as a potential target.'

Urban myth or a genuine code? Police have in the past released a list of symbols that could have been used by burglars to stake out properties

This week, a South West London resident said they'd found a chalk cross on a plant pot on their patio, fearing it might be a symbol used by criminals

Many responded saying that the mark could indicate the social media user's home might have been identified by criminals as a target and advised caution.

One responded: 'It's a known mark for burglary, car on the drive worth taking (or CAT converter) and also known as looking like vulnerable people people living there. Definitely move the pots.'

Another wrote: 'My friend had a marking on her driveway and her car was stolen.'

MailOnline has contacted Surrey Police for comment.

Other people dismissed the idea of a meaning behind the symbols as 'scaremongering', saying that there's little proof that the chalk marks ever result in a property being burgled.

One wrote: 'I have heard stories about "secret burglar marks" before and it invariably turns out to be paranoia about something completely innocent. I suspect that the whole thing is an urban myth, if someone was going to burgle a house why on Earth would they advertise it in advance by leaving marks outside?'

Another agreed, saying: 'Burglar signs are a myth, despite local police forces and tabloid media falling for them. Can anyone find an example of a house being burgled that also had markings found outside?

'We'd need to see a photo of it but for all we know it was just some kid playing with chalk.'

The Safeguarding Hub, which offers online advice to raise awareness about safeguarding vulnerable people, says the jury's out on whether the symbols actually translate into crimes.

On it's website, it says: 'The use of the symbols is now disputed by some police forces who have released statements advising that there is no evidence to link these marks to any criminality.

'The argument against the link to burglars contends that these are in fact, harmless road markings used by utility firms or broadband companies to indicate planned works.

'However, a bit like crop circles, these reports of strange marks continue to emerge locally.'
A man who says he is a 'black alien', with inked eyeballs and green forked tongue said his body transformation is only 46 per cent complete - and he still wants to amputate his leg.

A new Channel 4 documentary, The Black Alien Project, tells the shocking true story of Anthony Loffredo, 33, from France, who has gained notoriety across the globe for undergoing extreme body modifications to transform himself into a so-called 'black alien'.

In a clip from the programme, Anthony, who has amassed 1million followers on social media, is seen telling first-time filmmaker Arthur Bruel that, despite already having had his nose, ears and two fingers amputated, he still believes his body transformation journey isn't complete as he looks at photos of his old self.

He tells Bruel he was a 'sexy man' but adds that he never felt comfortable before making the modifications as he was not in a body that he considered his own.

However, the documentary reveals that Anthony's most radical procedure is still to come as he plans to amputate one of his legs and replace it with a robotic one.

A new Channel 4 documentary tells the shocking true story of Anthony Loffredo, 33, from France, who has gained notoriety across the globe for undergoing extreme body modifications to transform himself into a so-called 'black alien'

It also shines a light on the emotional and psychological motivations behind Anthony's body choices.

As he looks at historic photographs of himself before ever having any work done, Anthony remarks that he used to be a 'very sexy guy'.

However Anthony admitted he felt he had to transform himself because it was 'not [his] real body'.

In the documentary, Arthur Bruel delves into Anthony's personal life and the people behind his transformative procedures, after tracking down the body modification enthusiast in Mexico.

Despite never even having had a tattoo himself, Arthur cultivates an unlikely friendship with the enigmatic Frenchman.

Filmmaker Arthur said: 'When I first got in touch with Anthony to see if he'd be interested in talking with me about his extraordinary life, I could never have imagined that I'd end up travelling to Mexico, spending so much time with him, and forming a remarkable bond that gave me an eye-opening insight into why Anthony and others modify their bodies to such a striking extent.

'This documentary raises questions about the ethics of plastic surgery and its impact on our society, and also explores the importance of self-acceptance and the right to self-determination.

In an exclusive clip, Anthony is seen telling first-time filmmaker Arthur Bruel that, despite already having had his nose, ears and two fingers amputated, he still believes his body transformation journey isn't complete

As he looks at historic photographs of himself before ever having any work done, Anthony remarks that he used to be a 'very sexy guy'

In The Black Alien Project Arthur Bruel obtains unprecedented access to Anthony's personal life and the people behind his transformative procedures

'But in the main, it tells the true, unfiltered story  not of a 'black alien'  but of Anthony Loffredo, the real human being behind the headlines.'

Speaking to LadBible TV, the Frenchman previously admitted that his extreme look has earned him some criticism, and that local restaurants won't serve him on the terrace anymore.

'If I want to eat at a restaurant, sometimes the server says I can't eat on the terrace,' the Alien wannabe said.

He added that changing his body to look more Alien-like has boosted his self-confidence, saying: 'There are people that said thanks to me as they feel more secure now. That now the looks they get from other people, don't bother them.'

He previously told the Club 113 podcast: I can't find a job, there's lots of negative stuff. It could be positive because you feel better, but you have to know there's also a dark side.

Loffredo has undergone surgery to have a hole cut through the skin below his bottom lip. He often posts images to Instagram of himself poking his forked tongue through the hole.

He tracks Anthony down in Mexico and, despite never even having had a tattoo himself, Arthur cultivates an unlikely friendship with the enigmatic Frenchman

Last year, Loffredo revealed he had surgery in Mexico to cut off his two fingers so that his hand looks like a claw

Last year, Loffredo revealed he had surgery in Mexico to cut off his two fingers so that his hand looks like a claw.

Graphic images and video footage showed Loffredo lying on an operating table surrounded by surgeons as he raised up his hand to look at his new 'claw' in awe.

In July, Loffredo revealed that he was preparing to remove two fingers from his right hand as well so that he can have matching 'claws'.

He said he dreamed of removing his skin entirely and replacing it with metal and listed his arms, legs and fingers, along with the back of his head, as the next parts of his body he wants to have modified.

Speaking to French newspaper Midi Libre in 2017, Loffredo said he had been 'passionate about mutations and transformations of the human body' from a young age.

When he was working as a security guard in his twenties, he realised he was not living in the way that he wanted to.

Loffredo, who has previously revealed his extreme look has hindered him from finding work, said: 'It's something really hard because I have a healthy leg, and an amputation is something big

The Frenchman, who documents his dramatic physical alterations for his 1.2 million followers on Instagram, now wants to go one step further by amputating his leg from the knee down

'I stopped everything at 24 and left for Australia', Loffredo, who according to his Instagram is now based in Montpellier, France, told the paper.

'It has become normal, even unconscious, to constantly think about my plans [for body modification] for the next few months,' The Mirror reported Loffredo as saying.

The striking-looking individual said he loved 'getting into the shoes of a scary character'.

'I often settle down somewhere and play a role, especially at night in the dark streets,' he said.

'I explore the contrast between the role I play and myself.'

You can stream The Black Alien Project in full on the Channel 4 Docs YouTube channel from 6pm on 11 June.
The mom-of-three initially rocked the look at the restaurant chain in the 1990s

She stunned in the signature figure-hugging white top and skimpy orange shorts

US-based Nikki Merrill, 49, took to TikTok to model her old Hooters' uniform

A mom-of-three has caused quite the stir after slipping effortlessly back into her Hooters' uniform after 30 years.

US-based Nikki Merrill took to TikTok to model her old work attire in a 24-second clip shared yesterday on the video-sharing platform.

The now 49-year-old stunned as she sported the restaurant chain's signature uniform consisting of a figure-hugging white top and very skimpy orange shorts.

She revealed: 'February of 1993 I was 19 years old and I started working at Hooters. It's now 2023, 30 years later, and I put on my uniform that I found in the attic.'

US-based Nikki Merrill after slipping effortlessly back into her Hooters' uniform after 30 years. Pictured: Nikki in 2023 (left) in 1993 (right)

In the clip, which has been viewed more than 26,000 times, Nikki proudly flaunts her retro attire, she declares: 'This is my outfit from back then!'

She adds that she 'even' slipped on a pair of 'stockings on with a run in them - because if you worked there, you know how easy they rip.'

'So this is me, 30 years later', she concludes, finishing with a 360 degree twirl for flourish.

According to the caption, Nikki vows she 'didnt do my makeup or hair' prior to filming, also noting that her 'shirt is DONE and no the stockings aren't from back then.'

While a photo from the 1990s included in the video shows Nikki in a Hooters' top emblazoned with the location of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in the present-day footage she's donning a top labeled Aruba.

She goes on to explain that around 1995 she worked out of the paradisal south Caribbean outpost of the eatery.

Responding to a comment reading 'You lived in Aruba!!!!! Omg jealous,' Nikki explains that her gig there short-lived, writing, 'Well it wasnt long term. We were there for a month but still!! It was an amazing experience!'

A second video shows Nikki waiting near the entryway of her home for her husband to return before capturing his reaction.

A second video shows Nikki waiting near the entryway of her home for her husband to return before capturing his reaction

'Did I ever think that when I was wearing this outfit, working with it, that I would be standing in my kitchen 30 years later waiting for my husband to come home to see me in my outfit from 30 years ago? No!' she begins, facing her front door.

As her husband walks in and sees Nikki, he quips 'How you doin'?!' before jokingly stating, 'I'd like to order some wings, extra blue cheese!

'With a side of... hot brunette,' he continues as he embraces his wife of 21 years.

'Damn!' he adds of his wife in her old Hooters' regalia.

'I can't breathe! Why is it so tight?!' she lightheartedly vents to her hubby.

Other social media users were left stunned as one commented: 'Girl you're winning if you can fit into it 30 years later.'

Another wrote: 'Honestly you could definitely work there now!'

And a third simply said: 'Slaying still.'
Sarah Ferguson has showered her daughter Princess Beatrice with praise for wearing her tiara to Crown Prince Al Hussein and Princess Rajwa Al Saifs royal wedding in Jordan earlier this month.

The Duchess of York, 63, shared her thoughts in a recent episode of her lifestyle podcast Tea Talks With Sarah.

The author shared a snippet of the pod on her Instagram page, where she and co-host Sarah Thomson discussed Beatrice's attendance at the royal wedding on June 1.

The duchess was first seen in the exact same tiara on her wedding day in 1986, and the stunning jewel hasn't been seen in public since then.

Fergie remarked how 'proud' she was of her daughter for making the choice and added that she looked 'incredible' in the tiara.

Sarah Ferguson, 63, has showered praises on her daughter Princess Beatrice (pictured), 34, for wearing her tiara to Crown Prince Al Hussein and Princess Rajwa Al Saifs royal wedding on June 1

The Duchess of York (pictured) shared her thoughts on the sweet nod while discussing the famous Jordanian wedding on her Tea Talks with Sarah podcast

She said to her co-host: 'I think you saw that Beatrice and Edo went to Jordan for the wedding.

'I did and I was going to ask you about that because there was so much about the tiara' replied Sarah.

The Duchess responded: I know you like those sparkly things to which her co-host marvelled at how 'incredible' and 'beautiful' the princess looked.

The duchess continued: 'I think the first hairdresser she went to, I think the hairdresser put the tiara on thinking she'd watched too much Disney.

'It was right at the front. It was a lovely hairdresser in Jordan. Very nice I'm sure but I think they had been studying Disney princesses.

The duchess then added that a resilient Beatrice opted to place the tiara herself, and the results were 'incredible'.

'I was very, very proud of her' added the royal.

Princess Beatrice, 34, attended the Jordanian prince and his wife Rajwa's wedding in Amman with her husband Edo Mapelli Mozzi and the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Princess Beatrice attended the Jordanian prince and his wife Rajwa's wedding in Amman with her husband Edo Mapelli Mozzi

The tiara was purchased from London-based jewellery Garrard for Sarah Ferguson to mark her wedding to Prince Andrew in July 1986

The duchess co-hosts her lifestyle podcast with Sarah Thomson, and in a recent snippet posted to Instagram, she remarked how 'proud' she was of her daughter for wearing her tiara

For the evening state banquet hosted by Jordan's royal family, the mother-of one opted for a pale pink embellished satin pique gown with ruffled sleeves and wore her strawberry blonde locks down, with the York tiara.

The choice of tiara was particularly significant, as it was gifted to her mother Sarah Ferguson for her wedding day to Prince Andrew on 23 July 1986, and has not been worn in public for 20 years.

The accessory was made even more special by the fact that Princess Beatrice rarely wears tiaras, having only donned one before, for her wedding in July 2020.

Beatrice wore a baby blue sparkling dress and a hair bow for the earlier wedding ceremony, but switched up her look for the evening reception at Al Husseiniya Palace.

She donned the resplendent pink gown from designer Reem Acra and added a touch of glamour with a diamond scroll tiara.

Up until Beatrice's surprise appearance in Jordan yesterday, the tiara had only been worn by her mother.

The York tiara, which is made of platinum and diamonds with a leaf detail, is a rare breed, as it was brand new when Fergie debuted it on her wedding day at Westminster Abbey.

It was purchased for her from London-based jeweller Garrard by her in-laws, the late Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.

The beautiful head piece remained the Duchess of York's property even after her split from Prince Andrew in 1992, and she wore it on several occasions following her divorce.

However she eventually stopped wearing to public engagements, with one of its last appearances being the White Ball, where Fergie wore it with a flattering black gown in 2001.

Tiaras are only worn by members of the royal family at official engagements such as state banquets, the annual Diplomatic Corps reception, and the State Opening of Parliament, which would not ever be attended by Beatrice, as she is not a working royal.
Josh Ball claims the food 'had a few tiny marks on them'

Farmer rescued 1200 cauliflowers that were 'too ugly' to sell at supermarket

Farmers and shoppers are shocked after a major supermarket rejected 1500 fresh cauliflowers because the food was too 'ugly' to sell.

Josh Ball, co-founder of Farmers Pick which sells 'imperfect food', was visiting a farm in Werribee South, Victoria, when a huge truck arrived to return the produce.

He claims he managed to rescue 1200 of the cauliflowers from being disposed of.

Josh detailed the situation in a TikTok video to highlight to 'unsustainable practices' big-name supermarkets utilise. He did not disclose which specific supermarket giant rejected the food.

In the comments he wrote the cauliflower wasn't accepted because the food 'had a few tiny marks on them' but was otherwise 'perfectly edible and tastes great.'

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Josh Ball, co-founder of Farmers Pick which sells 'imperfect food', claims to have rescued 1200 cauliflowers that were rejected from a 'major supermarket' in Australia

'I just got back from the farm down in Werribee South. One of our big growers down there, [a] big cauliflower producer, they had some pretty bad news late yesterday,' Josh said in the video.

'So the truck rolled in from one of the big supermarkets this morning. 1500 rejected cauliflowers.

'Luckily we were there just at the right time and we picked up 1200 of them.'

In the clip Josh pans across to show the vegetables in 144 crates and four huge bins containing the vegetables.

There are a number of reasons why fruit and vegetables might be rejected from supermarkets - for example, the food might not be up to size standards or small scratches may be visible.

Overnight the video went viral exceeding more than 108,00 views and leaving thousands shocked.

'I don't understand why people expect fruit and veg should be perfect,' one commented.

'Supermarkets need to be stopped from treating producers like this. Once the cauliflower is cut and cooked who knows if its perfect or not!' another wrote.

'Why dont supermarkets just sell it all and stop the pickiness?' a third questioned.

In response the business wrote: 'We couldnt agree more! Enforcing unrealistic beauty standards on fruit and veggies is absurd, it all tastes the same!'

'Wow. What a waste,' another added.

According to Food Bank, food waste costs the economy around $36.6 billion or $2,000 to $2,500 per household per year.

The amount of water used to grow food that is wasted equals the volume of water in five Sydney Harbours (2600 gigalitres).

By shopping 'imperfect' produce from Farmers Pick, Australians can save up to 30 per cent on every shop.
A British doctor admits he was shocked when he was told to 'go home on time' during his first shift in Australia.

Dr Michael Mrozinski said it was ten past five on on his first day of work Down Under when his boss asked why he was 'still here'.

'I was so confused, you actually want me to go home? Madness,' he said.

He had only stayed back ten minutes but soon realised Australians are much more laid back and value having a good work/life balance.

The young Scottish-born doctor has previously said his 'worst day ever working in Australia is still better than his best day at the NHS'.

Dr Michael also credited the move to Australia with 'saving' his passion for medicine.

He's worked all over the country but the GP now predominately works out of offices in St Kilda, Melbourne and loves advocating for men's health, practicing sport's medicine and doing skin checks.

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Dr Michael Mrozinski said it was ten past five on on his first day of work Down Under when his boss asked why he was 'still here'

'It's sad that I have to move to the other side of the world to achieve that, but it's the best decision I ever made,' he said.

The doctor made headlines two years after he first landed in Australia - when he talked about a viral campaign over a job opportunity for doctors in the remote Queensland town of Julia Creek in 2022.

Poll Do you finish work on time? Yes, I am Australian! Yes, I am not Australian! No, but I am Australian. No, I am not Australian Do you finish work on time? Yes, I am Australian! 478 votes

Yes, I am not Australian! 101 votes

No, but I am Australian. 431 votes

No, I am not Australian 124 votes Now share your opinion





The town was looking for permanent doctor for the 500-strong population - and had been advertising rent-free housing and a $500,000-per year salary.

A doctor was locked-in to the job after the campaign went viral, with the help of the popular GP.

In a video about the opportunity he said doctors don't care about money 'that much' and explained the difficulties with working so remotely, mostly around burnout.

He's no stranger to the rural circuit and spent his first two years, primarily in hospitals across Queensland, including Cairns, Townsville, Atherton, Inglewood, Texas and Warwick.

Since then he has advocated for more doctors to move to Australia, noting the surprises he's found along the way on Instagram.

And other medical professionals echoed his sentiments on Australia's work/life balance.

'So many people are transferring to Melbourne from the NHS. They have a little giggle when I tell them 40 people in the ER is busy,' one man said.

Dr Michael, pictured here with his partner, during a working visit to Queensland earlier this year where he was doing rounds in rural areas

'I get scolded for not taking my tea breaks here,' said a former NHS medic.

'I had the same thing, only I am a nurse, I said I just needed to finish a few things and they said thy would do it,' one woman wrote.

Others explained the importance of 'heading home on the dot'.

'Aussies never want to be at work, it is the best part of their culture,' one said.

'In my grad year, I was told to go home on time, and pick it up the next day. Otherwise I'm not valuing my time appropriately,' said another.

Some also commented that doctors leaving on time is a matter of safety, not laziness.

'A doctor's mental health and ability to make the right call is important. We don't want tired doctors,' one woman said.

One woman pleaded Dr Mike to 'keep it to himself'.

'Don't tell the other doctors that are left here this, we won't have any,' she scolded.

Dr Mike has previously taken aim at people who try to scare doctors from relocating to Australia and says it is the best thing he's ever done.
A woman has revealed exactly why you should watch what you wear when shopping at Coles - after an angry customer mistook her for staff.

The woman, Kara, otherwise known as Bingle on TikTok, was wearing a bright red t-shirt when the incident unfolded.

She explained a woman approached her as she perused the shelves for some lamb mince and 'started complaining about how much 500grams of diced beef costs'.

The angry shopper then demanded to know how anyone could afford to pay for meat at the supermarket.

Scroll down for video

Kara said she piped up in that moment to explain she wasn't a staff member and hoped the awkward conversation would end.

'She said, 'Oh sorry, you have got a red top on and then continued to complain to me about the cost of living',' Kara said.

The shocked shopper recounted the story from the safety of her car after escaping the awkward situation.

People were shocked by the angry woman's 'oblivious' attitude.

'Coles employees on the minimum wage hearing about people complaining about the cost of living like they aren't also living,' one woman fumed.

Some couldn't understand her complaint.

Woman shocked after being mistaken for a Coles worker

'Meat has been expensive for years, if anything the price has stayed the same. The price of pork has gone down,' one savvy shopper said.

Kara's story rang true for many.

'I went into Woolworths in my Muffin Break shirt and people asked for help,' one woman complained.

'I don't even look the part and people ask me for help at the supermarket,' said another.

'Now you know how us Coles workers feel,' another said.

Poll Have you ever mistaken another shopper for staff? Yes, oops! No.. I have been mistaken for staff! Have you ever mistaken another shopper for staff? Yes, oops! 127 votes

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I have been mistaken for staff! 86 votes Now share your opinion





Kara said she understands why people are complaining, everyone is struggling, but the staff shouldn't be blamed.

'Coles worker here and they speak to me like it is my fault and only I can fix it,' one woman said.

Some people stuck up for the angry shopper.

'If I see you I will 100percent talk to you about the cost of living,' one man said.

'It costs nothing to be nice,' said another.

A Coles spokesperson told FEMAIL staff wear a red polo so they can stand out from the crowd.

'The red t-shirt aims to stand out so that our customers know who they can turn to when they need help from our friendly team members,' they said.

They also commented on the cost of living crisis and said diced beef is 15percent cheaper now than it was last year.

'Coles is always working hard to help Australians keep the cost of living down and we know that many of our customers rely on us to help them make ends meet,' they said.

'We currently have 480 products of Dropped & Locked pricing, giving customers more price certainty on some of the biggest brands and popular products across the store. One of our products that customers can currently save on is Coles Diced Beef (500g), which has been dropped and locked from $13 to $11.'
A distraught wife who came home to an empty house and maxed-out credit cards realised her American husband had left her one day after his Australian partner visa was approved.

Isabelle Glastonbury, now 31, met Michael* in Dallas in 2015, and quickly fell head over heels in love with the charismatic and charming Texan.

After a whirlwind engagement one year later, the pair relocated from the United States to Australia together in 2018.

The couple married in a fairytale wedding at the Boathouse in Palm Beach, the bill of more than $50,000 generously paid by her parents.

But her newlywed happiness turned to heartbreak following an evening of dinner and drinks to celebrate Michael's visa approval in January 2021, 2 years and 4 months after applying, the fee also funded by her mum and dad.

'I got home and literally 90 per cent of his stuff had disappeared,' Isabelle told Daily Mail Australia.

Isabelle (pictured) married Michael* in an intimate wedding in Palm Beach in 2018

Isabelle returned home to an empty apartment in 2021 after her husband's spousal visa was approved

'I had this sinking feeling,' she recalled.

'I tried logging into our immigration accounts, I had been locked out of everything, my credit cards were maxed-out, and I was blocked on his phone, none of my calls or messages going through.'

For over a month Isabelle was in the dark as to why Michael, now 29, had suddenly disappeared without any explanation.

'He ghosted everyone - all of our mutual friends, the best man from our wedding and his own family, no-one knew where he was.'

But in hindsight the months leading up to discovering her husband had disappeared were concerning, she said.

'He had become distant and started disappearing at night, I felt like I was married to a complete stranger.'

The former couple tied the knot in a fairytale wedding at The Boathouse in Palm Beach

Isabella's parents paid more than $50,000 for her wedding to Michael, only for him to vanish after his Australian visa was granted

Isabelle claimed that in the days prior to ghosting her Michael had said he wanted them to relocate to Queensland, buy a home and start a family.

'I don't know what his plan was, none of it made sense,' she says.

'I think we got married, he got over it and was too chickensh*t to say anything to my face but just wanted to stay in Australia.'

According to Isabelle, The Department of Immigration and Border Protection did little to reject Michael's visa after he vanished, a $10,000 expense her parents covered when the couple first moved to Sydney.

'So many people reported him to immigration and nothing happened,' she said.

'I have such a problem with the visa situation, literally people can leave and have no repercussions or be forced to have any accountability.'

It's been over a year since the former couple officially divorced and Isabelle hasn't seen or spoken to Michael since their brief meetup in February 2021 where he gave her the vague explanation that he 'had to be single'.

Isabelle and her high school sweetheart Max welcomed baby Mason three months on

'Just the other day my friend told me Michael got married again - almost a year to the day we officially divorced.'

'He was my best friend, my ride or die. He fooled everyone, including me.'

Isabelle has also moved on, rekindling her relationship with her high school sweetheart and best friend Max, with the couple welcoming baby Mason three months ago.

'I'm in a good place, I've wanted to share my story for awhile now because you never think it'll happen to you until it does,' she said.

And her advice for others?

'Don't be blind, because I'm sure I could have seen the signs before this happened and I just ignored it, you never really know who you're sleeping next to.'
Ozempic and Wegovy, the weight loss jabs taking Hollywood by storm, could also help alcoholics, a new study suggests.

The drugs' active ingredient, semaglutide, works by mimicking hormones that trick the brain into thinking the stomach is full, reducing people's appetite and helping them shed excess pounds as a result.

But Swedish experts think the medication's ability to hijack normal brain chemistry could also be used to break the cycle of alcohol abuse.

Researchers at the University of Gothenburg tested the chemical on dozens of rats which had been exposed to alcohol, and like many humans, grown to enjoy it.

They were allowed free reign on an alcohol supply in addition to their food and water during the experiment.

A Swedish study where alcohol addicted rodents were given the slimming drug semaglutide found it cut their booze intake by half in a finding researchers say could have implications for human alcoholics (stock image)

Wegovy and Ozempic work by triggering the body to produce a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1 that is released naturally from the intestines after meals

Compared to rodents given a placebo, those taking semaglutide consumed half as much alcohol.

Once deprived of alcohol for a week to heighten their cravings, alcoholic rats given the medication still drank much less.

This finding could be important for humans as people trying to escape the clutches of alcohol addiction can end up drinking even more than they previously did if they happen to relapse.

Scientists were inspired to test semaglutide on alcohol dependent rats after anecdotal reports from Ozempic patients that while on the drug they had had felt fewer cravings for booze.

While medications already exist to help alcoholics kick the habit, their efficacy varies per patient, so unlocking new treatments could help more people.

Read more: Warning that drinking ANY amount of alcohol may raise risk of 60 diseases - including 33 that had never been linked to booze before Researchers in the UK and Australia noted that while alcohol is responsible for 'substantial disease' around the world, their findings suggest it 'may actually be beneficial' for inflammation Advertisement

The researchers, publishing their findings in the journal eBioMedicine, also set out to study why semaglutide was helping the rats stay on the wagon.

Brain tests showed the drug reached part of the organ that releases dopamine  the 'feel good' chemical.

Alcohol activates this area and this then releases of dopamine, creating the feeling of being 'buzzed'.

But this feeling can create a feedback loop of behaviour where people consume increasing amounts of alcohol to chase this feeling, forming an addiction.

Cajsa Aranas, a doctoral student who worked on the study, said their research suggests semaglutide inhibits this craving.

'Alcohol activates the brains reward system, resulting in the release of dopamine, something that is seen in both humans and animals,' she said.

'This process is blocked by the medication in mice, and with our interpretation, this could cause a reduction in the alcohol-induced reward.'

The researchers added said while the findings were promising, more research needed to be done before semaglutide can be given to people struggling to quit alcohol.

However, they added that previous research on rodents with other drugs aimed at treating alcoholism had eventually produced similar results in people.

There are currently four medications available to help alcoholics on the NHS.

These include drugs that alter the brain chemistry to stop cravings as well as those that produce incredibly unpleasant sensations like nausea and dizziness if alcohol enters the body.

Government figures estimate there are 600,000 Brits with an alcohol dependency in need of specialist treatment in England alone.

The dangers of excessive drinking are well-known with liver cirrhosis  scarring caused by continuous, long-term liver damage  strokes and cancer just a few.

However, recent research has indicated drinking any alcohol could raise your risk of contracting as many as 60 diseases.

Excessive alcohol use is estimated to kill 27 Brits and 241 Americans every day, though figures vary depending if an alcohol death is defined as strictly medical, such liver failure, or related such as a death from drink-driving.
An inquiry has been launched into the care of a toddler whose stage four cancer was misdiagnosed as constipation by blundering NHS medics.

Ella Formby-Smith, three, had been 'back and forth' to hospital since she was born complaining of crippling stomach pain.

Doctors initially put Ella's pain down to a viral infection, lactose intolerance or even constipation, her mother Claire claims.

But the three-year-old was eventually diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma  an aggressive type of cancer that mostly affects babies and young children  in March after deteriorating so badly that she was 'crying with pain curled up in bed'.

Warrington Hospital, Cheshire, has now launched an inquiry into claims that doctors repeatedly missed crucial warning signs of Ella's cancer.

Ella Formby-Smith, pictured, had been 'back and forth' to hospital since she was born complaining of crippling stomach pain. Doctors initially put Ella's pain down to a viral infection, lactose intolerance or even constipation, her mother Claire claims

The three-year-old was eventually diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma  an aggressive type of cancer that mostly affects babies and young children  in March after deteriorating so badly that she was 'crying with pain curled up in bed'

Warrington Hospital, Cheshire, has now launched an inquiry into claims that doctors repeatedly missed crucial warning signs of Ella's cancer

Ms Formby, 38, from Runcorn, Cheshire, said: 'We have been told she could have been born with this.

'Im just feeling so let down with the number of times weve been back and forth.

'I just can't get my head around how its not been detected in three years of going to hospital with stomach problems.'

WHAT IS NEUROBLASTOMA? Neuroblastoma is a rare cancer that affects children and usually starts in the abdomen. Around 100 children, who are typically under five, are diagnosed every year in the UK. The disease affects approximately 800 new children annually in the US. In around half of cases, neuroblastoma spreads to other parts of the body, particularly the liver and skin. Neuroblastoma's cause is unclear. There may be a family-history link. The main symptom is usually a lump in the abdomen, which may cause swelling, discomfort or pain. If the disease affects the spinal cord, it can lead to numbness, weakness and loss of movement in the lower part of the body. Treatment depends on how advanced the cancer is and the risk it will return after therapy. Surgery, and chemo and radiotherapy, are commonly used. Source: Cancer Research UK Advertisement

Little Ella has already undergone six gruelling rounds of chemotherapy.

She now faces surgery, a stem cell transplant, radiotherapy and immunotherapy to treat the cancer, Ms Formby claimed.

'It's up and down at the moment. It's good days and bad days,' her mother said.

'She's got no energy and no mobility at all for her to run around or play, it's taken it right out her.

'She's amazing and was active and bouncing around all the time, just a happy three-year-old who went to nursery, so it's literally just changed her whole lifestyle.'

In previous hospital visits Ella had been diagnosed as lactose and dairy intolerant, Ms Formby claimed.

'Every other time we've been we were told it's constipation or a viral infection', she added.

But in February the pain 'gradually got worse' until Ella 'was crying with pain'.

A doctor's appointment advised it was a viral infection, she claimed.

During a second visit later in the month, medics said they would send Ella for celiac tests.

When the pain intensified, Ms Formby took Ella to Warrington Hospital where doctors said she would have to wait two weeks before blood tests were taken, she claimed.

During a further hospital visit after Ella's condition continued to deteriorate, Ms Formby insisted further investigations were carried out.

Eventually Ella was referred to Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool on March 16, where an ultrasound scan revealed a large mass at the back of her stomach.

After an MRI scan a week later, Ella was diagnosed with cancer on March 27.

Ms Formby said: 'As soon as she went to Alder Hey it was 100 miles an hour. She is now on her seventh round of chemotherapy.'

Neuroblastoma mainly affects babies and young children. It develops from specialised nerve cells  neuroblasts  left behind from a baby's development in the womb.

Medics at Warrington Hospital told Ella, from Runcorn in Cheshire, she could also simply have a viral infection, her mother Claire Formby claimed

Ella now faces surgery, a stem cell transplant, radiotherapy and immunotherapy to treat the cancer. Neuroblastoma mainly affects babies and young children. It develops from specialised nerve cells  neuroblasts  left behind from a baby's development in the womb

By stage four, the cancer has spread to parts of the body that are some distance from where it started  most commonly to the bones, bone marrow or liver.

Some 100 children in the UK and 800 youngsters in the US are diagnosed with the rare cancer every year, which is most common in under-fives.

Around half of those diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma will live for five years after their diagnosis.

A spokesman for Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: 'The Trust is very sorry to hear about Ella's diagnosis at the regional specialist children's hospital.

'An investigation into the care provided to Ella during her hospital admissions at the Trust is being progressed.

'We appreciate that this is a very difficult time for Ella's family, and we will do all that we can to support Ella's family during the investigation, ensuring that all findings are shared as soon as possible.'

A GoFundMe campaign has also been launched for Ms Formby and Ella, raising more than 22,000 since April for Ella's care.
One doctor wrote on Twitter that the 'powerful documentary' could save lives

Channel 4 viewers have praised Davina McCall for having her coil changed on TV.

The 55-year-old presenter looked at the problems faced by women on contraception in an hour-long documentary that aired last night.

As part of her eye-opening Pill Revolution programme, Davina was filmed having her Mirena coil removed and replaced.

The mum-of-three, who uses it as HRT, hoped it would help debunk the 'horror stories' surrounding the five-minute procedure.

Women have for years been put off getting the coil because of claims it is painful when inserted. Some viewers even claimed the 'horrific' pain they endured was worse than childbirth.

Davina McCall looked at the biggest problems with contraception during her hour-long documentary, Pill Revolutionary. During the programme she had her Mirena coil replaced

Davina  shown reacting in real-time  described the fitting as 'uncomfortable' but added: 'It is not too bad and with this gel, I can barely feel a thing.'

She was given a numbing gel ahead of the insertion, which was carried out by Dame Lesley Regan, one of Britain's leading gynaecologist and the Government's women's health tsar.

Davina hailed the breathing advice given to her, which saw her told to 'blow out your breath, so it hits the ceiling' as she removed the coil.

The ex-Big Brother host did admit to having suffered two painful coil incidents in the past, including one that felt like a 'scrape'.

She had previously used the coil as a contraceptive as a younger woman.

Twitter users were shocked to learn that local anaesthetic could be used during the procedure, with some women revealing they were left in tears after being offered just a couple of painkillers.

Some users said Davina was 'out of touch with the majority of women' because they were not given the option for anaesthesia

But, according to the NHS, you can ask for it before fitting the device.

Clinicians and viewers praised the presenter as many women said they had learnt more about contraception in 30 minutes than in their lifetime.

One doctor said the 'powerful' programme was so important that it 'could save lives'.

A coil, or IUD, is a small T-shaped device put into your womb. They can be hormonal or non-hormonal.

Davina also talked about the pill and other contraceptive options

A coil, or IUD, is a small T-shaped plastic and copper device put into your womb

The reversible contraceptive, introduced in 1967, helps prevent pregnancy for five to ten years.

IUDs are more than 99 per cent effective when inserted correctly, according to the NHS.

There is a small risk of infection after it has been fitted  but it can be removed any time.

IUSs, like the Mirena coil, release progesterone instead of copper.
Exposure to smog from Canadian wildfires could cause adverse side effects

Many are already aware that the thick clouds of smog hovering above America's northeast can cause an itchy throat, coughing and stinging eyes  but they may not have heard of the lesser-known health complications.

Dr Gregory Wu, a critical care doctor at Albany Medical Center in New York, has revealed three weird warning signs that the body is reacting to air pollution.

He said that when the smog gets into the lungs and causes inflammation, it can lead to anything from trouble sleeping to wrinkles and even irritable children.

About 50 million Americans are still under air pollution warnings across the US as wildfires in Canada cause swaths of smog to fill the air.

Smog coming through the US from Canadian wildfires can cause a host of unusual symptoms, including wrinkles, sleep issues, heart attack, and irritability in children

Dr Wu told NBC News: 'Even if you are healthy, you may feel some effects.

'We do encourage folks, if they are having chest pain or chest tightness, that they should be seeking care.

'And similarly, if folks are having headaches or dizziness, that's another good reason to seek care or at least get indoors.'

One of the top effects of smog that Dr Wu mentioned was its ability to throw off your sleep.

According to the Sleep Foundation, fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke can get into the blood and travel to the brain's frontal cortex and cerebellum  the parts that control sleep  disrupting them.

At the same time, the particles can also reduce the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen  meaning the heart has to work harder.

This extra work may also conversely make someone more tired, Dr Wu said.

Another risk is that the smog could actually damage your skin  and speed up the development of wrinkles.

The particle matter penetrates the skin and, when it does so, leads to an immune reaction causing inflammation.

This can, in turn, damage skin cells and cause them to lose their structure, raising the risk of wrinkles.

A 2021 study in JAMA Dermatology found that short-term exposure to this smoke can cause flare-ups of skin disorders like psoriasis and eczema. These could even show up weeks later.

Additionally, parents may need to pay extra attention to how their kids are coping with the air quality. Dr Panagis Galiatsatos, a pulmonologist with the American Lung Association, said that young children are more likely to be irritable, angry or more moody than adults.

'The biological reason is not fully understood,' he said. 'If children are exposed to things that are toxic, they tend to get more irritable.

'Its the same thing seen with a respiratory virus. Maybe they cant breathe as well or maybe theyre just congested.'

Too much smoke exposure also raises the risk of a heart attack, scientists say.

While it's not clear exactly why this happens, one theory is that the fine particle matter in wildfire smoke that is inhaled and ends up in the blood.

According to the American Heart Association, those particles can constrict blood vessels and increase blood pressure.

When blood vessels are blocked, it keeps oxygen from flowing to the heart. The heart muscle then has to work harder and become weakened.

High blood pressure also weakens the arteries and causes them to become blocked.

Additionally, a 2020 study from the Journal of the American Heart Association found that exposure to heavy smoke from wildfires raised the risk of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests by up to 70 percent.

Dr Galiatsatos recommended to stay indoors as much as possible to prevent symptoms. If you do need to go out, wear a tight-fitting mask, such as an N95.
A monoclonal antibody to protect babies against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has been recommended to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by one of its advisory panels.

Members of the agencys Antimicrobial Drugs Advisory Committee backed the use of Sanofi and partner AstraZeneca's experimental antibody, nirsevimab, for infants in a 21-0 vote on Thursday.

In a separate 19-2 vote, the panel also backed the therapy's use in children aged up to two years who are vulnerable to severe illness through their second RSV season.

It comes as a Pfizer vaccine that could protect unborn babies RSV was also recommended for approval by advisors to the FDA last month.

Nirsevimab lowered the risk of RSV-related lower respiratory tract infections that needed medical attention by roughly 75 percent and RSV-related hospitalization by around 78 percent

Swedish Orphan Biovitrum's treatment Synagis is currently the only approved monoclonal antibody  a type of antibody that is man-made  for infants.

But it is only cleared for those who are at high-risk, such as babies born prematurely  at or before 35 weeks and who are six months old or less at the start of RSV season.

RSV is a leading cause of hospitalizations during an infant's first year of life, triggering up to 80,000 every year in the US alone. It also causes 14,000 deaths.

Unlike Synagis, which is given as monthly injections, nirsevimab is administered as an injection once a year.

It is expected to be a long-acting therapy and to prevent infection regardless of additional medical conditions in infants.

The therapy works by introducing antibodies that can fight off an RSV infection, boosting an infant's defences.

In clinical trials, nirsevimab lowered the risk of RSV-related lower respiratory tract infections that needed medical attention by roughly 75 percent and RSV-related hospitalization by around 78 percent when compared to a placebo.

No major side effects were observed and only rash and injection-site reactions were noted.

Panel member Nimish Patel: 'This is probably the closest thing to an RSV vaccine that we have and it really moves the field forward.'

Two studies showed the therapy was effective in preventing lower respiratory tract infections, the FDA staff reviewers had said on Tuesday.

The panel vote comes a few weeks after advisers to the FDA backed the use of Pfizer's maternal vaccine, boosting its chances to become the first shot to protect infants from RSV.

It is not known how the therapy works in infants whose mothers have received experimental RSV shots.

Panelist Karen Kotloff said: 'I think there will need to be studies that are done to figure out when one is more useful than the other.'

Nirsevimab's peak sales are estimated to touch $2 billion, according to Morningstar analyst Dampen Conover.

The advisory panel provides non-binding recommendations to the FDA, which is expected to make a decision on whether or not to approve the therapy by July.

Virtually all children catch RSV at least once by the time they are two years old, with most facing a mild, cold-like illness.

But the FDA says that babies under six months old are at particular risk of severe disease from the virus, which may be because their immune systems are still developing or they are not able to cough as forcefully as older children.

Up to one in 50 children in this age group are hospitalized by the virus, the FDA says, facing treatments including IV fluids and mechanical ventilators. A few hundred under five years old die from the infection every year in the US.
People are urged to go to the ER room for testing even without symptoms

Anyone who received an epidural at two Mexican clinics is at risk, the CDC said

A fourth Texan has died from fungal meningitis, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported.

The CDC has warned anyone who was given an epidural anesthesia (injection into the spine to numb part of the body) during surgery is at risk and should go to the nearest emergency room to be tested, even if they do not have symptoms.

The epidural is used in procedures such as liposuction, breast augmentation and Brazilian butt lifts, which can be more than $16,000 cheaper than in the US.

The CDC believes around 180 Americans who traveled to clinics in Matamoros this year could be at risk, and urged people to go to the nearest emergency room as soon as possible to be evaluated, even if they do not have symptoms.

Four Texans have died after receiving cosmetic surgery, including liposuction in Mexico. Health officials say the women received treatment at clinics in Matamoros, Mexico, including River Side Surgical Center (left) and Clinica K-3 (right)

Ms Robinson traveled to Mexico for liposuction, a BBL and breast augmentation done by Dr Luis Manuel Rivera De Anda. She is pictured pe-op (left) and post-op (right)

The clinics under scrutiny are River Side Surgical Center and Clinica K-3 in Matamoros, Mexico, both of which have now been closed.

Two of the four deaths are confirmed as fungal meningitis, and two are probable, the CDC said.

One of the women, Lauren Robinson, 29, died last week after traveling to Mexico for cut-price cosmetic surgeries on February 27.

TikTok videos previously shared by the Texan mother-of-four suggest she contracted the fatal fungal infection after receiving liposuction, a Brazilian butt lift (BBL) and a boob job.

Dr Luis Manuel Rivera De Anda, who is listed as a gynecologist online, carried out her operation.

His Instagram shows a plethora of before and after surgery photos and promotes an offer of full liposuction, a BBL and breast augmentation for 5,000 USD.

It is not known whether Ms Robinson's infection had anything to do with Dr Rivera De Anda's actions.

Dr Rivera De Anda did not respond to a request for comment from DailyMail.com.

The mother-of-four was diagnosed with meningitis after her plastic surgeries, which eventually killed her

Some 1.2million US residents travel to Mexico annually to undergo elective surgery at a discount, according to Medical Tourism Mexico, which advertises that patients can save up to 80% on a comparable procedure in the US

The above map shows the location of Matamoros, where the procedures took place. People are being urged not to go there for plastic surgeries

Soon after her surgery, Ms Robinson began experiencing severe headaches.

Her husband, Garret Robinson, told 12News: 'She was great, the results were great, everything was good, she started going back to work, then she started constantly telling me, "I have a headache, something is not right,".'

After attending multiple hospitals in Galveston, Texas, doctors took spine fluid and blood from Ms Robinson and sent it off for testing.

She was then diagnosed with meningitis.

Health officials believe the fungal meningitis can be contracted if medical devices such as the needle used during an epidural or medications such as morphine are contaminated with fungi or if proper infection prevention control practices are not taken.

In her final weeks in the hospital, Ms Robinson suffered four strokes. She is one of the three American victims who have died after the cosmetic surgery in Matamoros.

Mr Robinson said: 'I can't explain how it feels to go through this, and I can't tell everyone enough, don't do it.'

According to the CDC, there have been four confirmed cases of fungal meningitis detected from samples.

Fourteen of the cases are suspected fungal meningitis  infections of the brain and spinal cord  and 10 are probable.

The patients reported symptoms including headaches, fever, stiff neck, nausea, vomiting, confusion, and sensitivity to light.

The infection causes swelling of the protective lining around the brain and spinal cord, known as the meninges.

Testing for fungal meningitis involves a lumbar puncture, also known as a spinal tap, to collect fluid to be checked in a laboratory for meningitis.

Healthcare workers will insert a needle into patients' lower back in an area near their spine to collect the fluid.

If patients test positive for fungal meningitis, they will be given antifungal medicines in the hospital, which they may need to take for several months at home.

If they test negative, patients will be advised to watch out for symptoms for at least four weeks after their spinal tap.

It is possible to initially test negative and then develop meningitis later, the CDC warned, meaning patients should go back to the ER room if they have new or worsening symptoms.

If patients stay asymptomatic, some doctors may advise a second spinal tap roughly two weeks after the first to make sure an infection has not developed.

An update from the Texas Department of State Health Services said: 'Fungal meningitis can be life-threatening, and finding infections early is important for treatment.

'Public health workers are directly contacting people in Texas who got surgery at two clinics in Matamoros to inform them of the situation and what steps they should take.'

CDC officials are looking into how exactly patients were exposed to the infectious fungus during the surgeries, as well as if any other clinics were involved.

US health bosses have called for the deadly fungal outbreak to be declared an international health emergency by the World Health Organization.
Central Park West

by James Comey

(Head of Zeus 20, 336pp)

The debut legal thriller from the seventh director of the FBI  who was fired by Trump soon after his presidency began  reads like fact not fiction. The characters are so convincing that you almost feel you can put a name to them all.

As the author admits, the places and procedures are as accurate as he could make them, and many of the characters are inspired by people he has known  and it shows.

The story opens with the murder of a New York governor, who has fallen from grace after harassing innumerable young women, and is apparently killed by his furious ex-wife.

At the same time, federal prosecutor Nora Carleton is trying to send a Mafia mobster to jail when she is offered testimony that connects the assassination of the disgraced governor to the Mob.

Fast-moving and authentic, it grips like a vice and proves that the former FBI chief has a promising future in fiction.

The Rule of Three

by Sam Ripley

(Simon & Schuster 16.99, 432pp)

This creepy and ingenious story focuses on the urban myth that bad things always happen in threes, and the impact it has on three young women who have suffered two horrifying events and are waiting for a possible third.

Will it bring their death? Is there anything they can do to prevent it? It is a striking idea which Ripley  a pseudonym for a best-selling thriller writer  executes with elegant skill.

Amy lost her sister Maya in a car crash, and then her parents both committed suicide on her 18th birthday, leaving her deeply troubled and in a dark haze of drink and drugs as she tries to cope.

The second woman, Ila, is a model student, but she too lost a sibling and then both her parents, and is terrified that she may also fall victim to the rule of three. Shes heard about what may have happened to Amy and is fearful the same could happen to her.

So begins a pulse-racing essay in paranoia that wraps its readers in a pall of fear and uncertainty that will send a shiver down their spines.

The Interpreter

by Brooke Robinson

(Vintage 14.99, 336pp)

Written by an Australian playwright who studied drama in London, this debut tells the intriguing story of a court and police interpreter, Revelle, who realises that she can manipulate the course of justice by subtly amending the meaning of some of the words she translates.

It gives her the power to alter the outcome of a trial. Terps  as theyre called in the judicial system  have to be available at all times, which is not easy when Revelle is in the midst of adopting six-year-old Elliot, who has had a troubled childhood.

She speaks ten languages and uses her skills to alter the significance of the words she translates for courts, or the police, if she feels an injustice might be done  to get the verdict she wants. But someone spots her manipulation with painful consequences.

Brutally honest about the trauma of adoption, and yet still written with affection about a woman who is desperate for justice, it is no surprise that it has already been bought by Hollywood.
With the sun making more of an appearance, most of us won't be thinking about our boilers very much.

But experts say getting a boiler serviced over the summer, rather than leaving it until the winter months, could help households save money.

By getting ahead you could avoid having to shell out for an emergency service during winter, when your boiler is once again running full whack.

These call-outs can cost upwards of 400, according to figures from the tradesperson directory, Checkatrade.

In comparison, the average cost of a service for a gas boiler is around 80. An annual service is usually a condition of a boiler's warranty.

Get ahead: There are signs your boiler is on the blink that you can look out for to avoid having to get an emergency repair

Ben Gallizi, energy expert as Uswitch.com comments: 'While your boiler isn't often top of mind during the summer, it could be a good time to consider getting it serviced.

'Having your boiler serviced at least once a year will help to ensure it's safe and working to its maximum efficiency. Leaving any issues undiscovered could become dangerous.

'Thinking ahead and getting your boiler serviced over the summer means you'll eliminate any issues before the winter, when you'll be relying on it most.'

Gallizi also said that engineers may be able to attend an appointment more quickly in summer, as winter tends to be busier.

Some even offer cheaper rates to customers getting a service while the sun is shining.

Nat White, head of brand communications at gas and heating experts Rated People, said: 'In the warmer months of the year, heating engineers are naturally less busy, so may offer discounts or off-season rates where they're able to.

'Even if they can't, you can still save money by swerving an emergency call-out charge that comes when you need to deal with a boiler breakdown fast.'

One million UK households can't afford to get their boiler serviced or repaired though, according to a survey from Rated People.

But homeowners are being urged to stay on top of their boiler services if they can.

A faulty boiler can be a serious health risk if it's leaking carbon monoxide.

Nathan Martin-Nicholls, a heating engineer, said: 'Carbon monoxide is an invisible and very dangerous gas that can cause serious illness, brain damage and can result in fatalities.

'It is very hard to detect because it cannot be seen and it doesn't have a smell or taste either.

'Your home should have a carbon monoxide alarm fitted to help detect this poisonous gas' he adds.

Costly fixes: Rated People has estimated the cost of common household repairs

Price of common household repairs Repair Cost Fixing broken appliances 70 - 200 Fixing poorly insulated areas 920 - 2,320 Fixing mould and/or damp 400 - 4,000 Boiler servicing 60 - 120 Boiler repairs 2,500 - 3,500 Roof repairs 95 - 2,280 (range of different jobs) Plumbing maintenance and repairs, e.g. leaking pipes 300 - 400 (day rate) Fixing broken window 100 - 250 Gas safety check 35 - 99 Electrical maintenance, upgrade or repairs 3995 (rewiring of 3 bed home) Source: Rated People

Signs your boiler needs a service

These are the early signs your boiler needs servicing according to experts.

1) The pilot light flame colour has changed

The pilot light on your boiler should be blue. If the flame has changed to an orange-yellow colour, then it could be an indication of poor combustion which is an extremely concerning sign.

Turn your boiler off as soon as you see this and call a gas and heating engineer straight away.

Other signs of poor combustion include the smell of gas, brown or black scorch marks, musty smells, and increased condensation on windows in your home.

2) Water is leaking from the boiler

This could be a sign that an internal part has failed. Although this is not necessarily dangerous in and of itself, it could be a safety issue.

If you spot a leak be sure to switch off the boiler to ensure the electrics don't short circuit and to stop water from damaging your home.

3) The pilot light keeps going out

This is another sign that requires professional help sooner rather than later.

If this is also paired with leaks, new noises or scorch marks, then this is considered to be a red flag.

4) Your boiler has suddenly become noisy or is making new sounds

Although this isn't a definite signal of danger, it should not be ignored.

Banging sounds or whistling coming from your boiler could signify a build-up of air within your central heating or a drop in the water pressure.

If this is left for a long period of time, it could lead to your boiler breaking down and leave you with a bigger bill.
Now suppliers are hiding behind Ofgem regulations to avoid paying out

It means small firms have been paying more for their energy

Millions of small businesses that have used brokers to fix energy contracts could be entitled to thousands of pounds in compensation.

Businesses and other organisations, including local authorities, care homes and charities, have unknowingly been paying over the odds for energy as prices soar and the Government ditches much of its support.

Law firm Harcus Parker launched a 2billion claim against energy firms back in February, over allegations they paid secret commissions to third-party energy brokers and inflated customer bills.

Wild west: Energy brokers charge suppliers a secret commission which is passed on to small business customers

The firm currently has about 3000 claimants, but the no-win, no-fee claim could pay out up to 2million customers, with an average claim of 20,000 per customer.

Harcus Parker lawyers say it's possible claims for long-term contracts for heavy energy users could exceed 1million.

Now the firm claims suppliers are dodging responsibility and using lawyers to block businesses from finding out how much they've been charged in secret broker commissions, This Is Money can reveal.

'Brokers can charge what they want'

The use of 'secret commissions' between suppliers and brokers has been widespread in the energy industry.

An energy broker typically offers to help customers find an energy contract with a supplier, under the illusion it is the best option for them.

What they're not told is that the broker is paid by the supplier and this fee is added on to the customer's energy bill.

Zoisa North-Bond, chief executive of Octopus Energy for Business, told This Is Money: 'About 18 months ago, while we were going through Covid, we could see brokers were capitalising on economic downfall saying they were going to bring value.

'The fundamental issue is that the people selling contracts are incentivised they are pretty much unregulated how much commission they can charge.

'Commission varies. A broker will hound a small business with special energy deals. They can charge pretty much what they want to charge with very little transparency.'

Research by Harcus Parker reveals how some energy companies, including British Gas, have allowed brokers to charge commission of up to 10p/kWh, while other suppliers don't have any limit on commission rates.

Knowing we could have got cheaper energy for all those years leaves a bitter taste in your mouth James Hall, social club manager

The key is that customers don't know they're paying these secret fees - they have to ask the suppliers themselves.

James Hall, a social club manager in Tyne and Wear who has joined the Harcus Parker claim, told This Is Money his unit cost was originally 32p, but the supplier was charging 36p due to the secret commission.

'Knowing we could have got cheaper energy for all those years leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. No one likes to be ripped off, not once, never mind for a number of years.'

'We were struggling anyway but this has made it more difficult to the point where it almost went into administration almost eight years ago. That's not all down to the energy [bills], but it contributed.'

North-Bond said: 'We know [brokers] can charge pretty much what they want SMEs use them because these contracts are bigger than buying a home contract they think they're taking advice.'

Calls are mounting for the energy regulator, Ofgem, to step up and take action on the wild west that is the energy market.

'There has to be some regulation,' says North Bond. 'There has to be something at the point of sale that is very transparent. If you choose to buy it, you know that for the convenience you will be paying x per cent more.'

HOW TO JOIN THE CLAIM If you've used an energy broker for your small business, you may be able to join Harcus Parker's claim. It's not always obvious if you have used a broker in the past as they often cold call small businesses and say they're contacting them on behalf of a supplier, so it is worth getting in touch anyway. One of the main points of the claim is whether or not commission has been properly disclosed to a customer. In earlier contracts there's less disclosure, if at all, so nothing is mentioned about brokers in your bill. If you have used a broker in the past, even if you're not sure whether commission was paid, you can find more details of Harcus Parker's claim here. JMW Solicitors is also launching a claim, which you can find more details about here.

Suppliers 'dodge payouts by hiding behind regulator'

In a further twist, Harcus Parker is now accusing energy suppliers of hiding behind existing regulation to try and block businesses from finding out how much they're owed.

Harcus Parker alleges that some energy firms are instructing their lawyers to refuse to disclose the amount owed to customers, while others are using new Ofgem regulations as an excuse.

Lawyers representing suppliers 'have been concocting various excuses as to why they should not disclose the broker payment amounts in a bid to stop claims,' say Harcus Parker.

In December 2022, Ofgem told energy suppliers they must tell micro-businesses how much money is added to their bills to cover the cost of broker fees.

Many energy companies are now claiming businesses and organisations that don't fall into this micro-business category - which means they employ fewer than 10 people - don't have the right to be told how much their bill has increased because of secret broker fees.

Harcus Parker said: 'The fact that Ofgem has introduced a new regulation to increase transparency on broker fees and that this is now being used as an excuse by energy companies not to tell customers information about their bill is laughable.

'Ofgem has been aware of the problem of hidden broker fees since at least 2013 and has failed to crack down on this bad practice.

'All customers have the right to know how much of their unit cost for energy is made up of broker fees. The energy regulator needs to get a grip and make it clear to energy companies that this information should be released.'

A spokesperson for Ofgem told this Is Money: 'If a company is a micro-business as defined by the licence conditions, and its energy supplier does not acknowledge this, the company should raise this with its supplier.

'Ofgem expects all suppliers to fulfil their licence conditions. We take action where appropriate to ensure suppliers comply with our rules.'

What is most baffling about this approach is that, should the claim be brought to court, the suppliers will have to disclose the information anyway.

In the meantime they are facing pressure from other claims, including that of Sacha Lord, Greater Manchester's night-time adviser, who this week said he had engaged JMW Solicitors to help recover hidden commissions.

'We're about to claw back money they paid under duress. A national scandal that we think could be as big as the PPI scandal,' he said.

Most businesses now just want to return to normal. For social club manager James Hall, it couldn't come any sooner.

'Any money we can get back will be money for the club,' he said. 'We'll be able to give it back to the members in some shape or form, maybe by freezing prices for the community It would be good to get the money back.'
Speaking out: Oliver Blume

The biggest threat to the electric car revolution is the failure of governments to keep pace with it, says Oliver Blume, global head of Volkswagen and Porsche.

Carmakers are doing their bit to provide enough zero-emissions vehicles, yet politicians who have set stringent deadlines to kill off petrol and diesel cars from 2030 are not providing public chargers fast enough, the boss of Europe's largest car manufacturer claims.

Installing chargers was a collaboration between car makers, energy providers and the authorities. But governments and the EU needed to do more to help meet their own targets, Blume told me in an exclusive interview.

'It's not enough to define an ambitious target. You need a clear plan and timings,' he said. 'We will deliver the products. But government has to think about the charging infrastructure. We are prepared but need more support. Each filling station needs charging points.'

He was speaking just after unveiling Porsche's 2 million electric Mission X hypercar to celebrate the company's 75th anniversary at its HQ near Stuttgart.

Blume, 55, rules the giant Volkswagen group whose brands include Volkswagen, Audi, Skoda, Cupra, SEAT, Bugatti and Britain's Bentley.

Porsche is also developing a synthetic fuel for internal combustion engines. It is persuading the German government and EU to accept it as a green alternative to electric.

The Mission X 200mph-plus two-seater 1,500 hp supercar will accelerate from 0 to 62mph in less than 2 seconds  and it aims to be the world's fastest-accelerating car.

Fastest acceleration on the planet: Porsche's 2million Mission X hypercar

It is expected to be produced in a limited run of about 1,000. Charging to 80 per cent is projected to be possible in under ten minutes.

Measuring 4.5m long, 2m wide and just 1.2m tall, the car's all-wheel drive twin electric motor will run on 20in wheels at the front, 21in at the rear and is designed for the road as well as the track.

The firm aims to have 50 per cent of its vehicles pure electric by 2025, 80 per cent by 2030.

Hilo One e-scooter launches

Intelligent: Special safety features are designed to reduce accidents

Former Aston Martin boss Dr Andy Palmer swapped four wheels for two to launch the Hilo One e-scooter from the British tech startup he co-founded.

Special safety features are designed to reduce accidents  AI alerts the rider to potential dangers, using visual and audible warnings, and a pool of light warns pedestrians and other road users of its presence at night. Its 12.5 in front wheel improves stability.

A folding system transforms the Hilo One into a briefcase. Prices will start from about 1,750 from next year.

Two awards at motor industry 'Oscars'

I am delighted to receive two gongs this week in the motor industry 'Oscars' organised by Newspress  Automotive Consumer Journalist of the Year and a Lifetime Achievement award for my motoring coverage with the Mail over nearly three decades.
Stock markets are organic and companies come and go all the time. Firms heading to the UK include WE Soda, payments fintech group CAB and AI specialist Palantir, which has chosen to bring its European headquarters to Britain.

Amid this ferment it may seem curious to question the sale of Middle East credit card processor Network International to Canada's buyout firm Brookfield Asset Management in a $2.8billion (2.2billion) deal.

It is the second public-to-private buyout on the London Stock Exchange in just over a week, following the 4.5billion sale of veterinary pharma group Dechra to EQT.

The departure of Network International might appear no big loss, given that most customers are merchants in Africa and the Middle East. These are two of the fastest-growing neighbourhoods in the world and it is just the kind of enterprise which investors in London should be supporting.

It could be argued that it is bringing the magic of fintech to areas where the UK, through Standard Chartered and Barclays DCO, brought Western banking.

Selling out: The UK has become the world's bargain basement

Paradoxically, the power behind the throne at Network International is Ron Kalifa, who sits on the governing Court of the Bank of England and also produced a post-Brexit report for the Tories aimed at building on the City's expertise to bring financial innovation to public markets.

No one could be more qualified than Kalifa, given his role in founding Worldpay, now long lost in the entrails of US finance, which, arguably, was the 'Arm Holdings' of fintech payments. Moreover, Brookfield is not just any buyout firm but is chaired by former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney.

Money always speaks loudly when it comes to deals but there is a whiff of hypocrisy when grand figures, with the Bank of England imprimatur, work against the national interest. The argument is that the premium to the pre-takeover share price of Network International, at 64 per cent, made the deal irresistible. But is it really so generous?

New York shares trade at a 40 per cent premium to London's All-Share index of 600 or so stocks, so the actually uplift on underlying value is 24 per cent, which is a far from a 'must-accept' offer. UK defined benefit pension funds have neglected London stocks since Gordon Brown removed the dividend tax relief in 1997, effectively ringing the death knell for equity investment.

Persuading defined contribution schemes, local authority pension funds and others to pick up the slack is a titanic task.

The UK has become the world's bargain basement. Building world-class tech companies for the rest of this century, as happened in the past, is all but impossible.

Arm, Worldpay, Dechra and the like are simply sold to the highest bidder like a modest pair of bronzes on the BBC TV's Flog It! None of this, in an era of rising economic nationalism, makes long-term sense.

Profiles in courage

Each time that a pusillanimous board decides to take the money and run I think of AstraZeneca.

When French-Aussie chief executive Pascal Soriot repelled a 70billion bid from Pfizer in 2014, who would have thought it would be worth 184billion nine years later  and the most valuable company on the FTSE 100?

Astra may have gained national attention for the Oxford Covid-19 vaccine but its subsequent successes with cancer care are inestimable. The great goal of pharma used to be the discovery of blockbusters, defined as compounds with sales of $1billion a year.

Astra's tagrisso treatment is transforming cancer care and has reduced death rates for lung disease by 50 per cent.

Not surprisingly, sales are soaring and the forecast for it is $5.4billion (4.4billion) this year.

That's good for humanity  and demonstrates what happens when boards show bravery and investors stand firm.

Sanctions payday

Mervyn Davies took it upon himself to single-handedly save Russian private equity outfit Letter One  owner of natural health chain Holland & Barrett  from collapse when sanctions were imposed by the Government. As non-executive chairman, it looked like an act of altruism.

The truth turns out to be different, following the disclosure that he picked up 32.2m in pay and bonuses over the last two years.

The correct course of action?

Donate it to Ukrainian citizens suffering terrible privations caused by indiscriminate Russian aggression.
Oil and gas producers will not pay a windfall tax if energy prices drop to 'historically normal levels' for a continued period, under plans announced by the government.

HM Treasury said the measure was needed to encourage investment in the North Sea, protect jobs and improve the UK's domestic energy supply amidst Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Oil and gas firms currently pay a 35 per cent 'energy profits levy' on the profits made from North Sea production, in addition to a 40 per cent headline rate of tax.

Taxing: Oil and gas firms currently pay a 35 per cent 'Energy Profits Levy' on the profits made from North Sea production, in addition to a 40 per cent headline rate of tax

The UK government estimates the levy has raised 2.8billion since being introduced by then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak in May 2022 and is anticipated to raise about 26billion by March 2028.

Money from the levy has gone towards supporting households and businesses with their energy bills, which have skyrocketed in the past 18 months due to the conflict in Ukraine and the loosening of Covid-related restrictions.

But energy companies have complained that the levy has forced them to cut investment plans, even though they can save 91p in tax for every 1 they invest in new oil and gas extraction.

Harbour Energy recently declared it would cut 350 jobs and shift expenditure away from the UK after it stopped bidding for new North Sea projects and saw annual profits virtually wiped out by the windfall tax.

The government has now said petroleum firms will not pay the EPL if oil prices stay below $71.40 per barrel and gas remains under 54 pence per therm for two successive quarters.

On Friday, a barrel of Brent Crude was trading at $76.13 a barrel, while natural gas stood at 68.4 pence per therm.

Gareth Davies MP, exchequer secretary to the Treasury, said: 'It's so important that we secure investment in our own domestic supply, protecting the tens of thousands of British jobs that come with it.

'It would be beyond irresponsible to turn off the North Sea taps overnight. Without oil and gas from British waters, we would be forced to import even more from overseas, putting our security of supply at risk.'

Earnings: Many campaigners and politicians believe reducing the windfall tax is wrong, given that some oil and gas companies such as Shell and BP are making record profits

A ban on new North Sea oil and gas investment would lead to the UK's dependence on imports rising from 50 per cent to 80 per cent by 2033, according to figures from the government and the North Sea Transition Authority.

The Treasury's decision comes as Norwegian energy giant Equinor prepares to decide on the future of Rosebank, a 4.5billion project that could produce up to 300 million barrels of oil.

But environmental groups are vehemently opposed to the site's development, with the organisation Uplift claiming it would emit over 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Many campaigners and politicians also believe reducing the windfall tax is wrong, given that some oil and gas companies are making record profits and spending huge sums on share buybacks and dividends.

BP made 23billion in underlying earnings and bought about $11.7billion of its own shares last year, more than double the previous year's amount.

Just as controversial with environmental activists, the firm announced a scaling back of its planned carbon emissions reduction target.

Meanwhile, Shell revealed a record 32.2billion annual profit for 2022, 1.4billion higher than analysts had predicted, mainly due to soaring gas prices.

Alice Harrison, fossil fuels campaign leader at Global Witness, said: 'Now is not the time to be asking those companies to pay even less tax. This is a government on the side of polluters, not the people.'

Harrison further accused the government of having 'learned nothing from the energy crisis and is intent on returning to business as usual as quickly as possible.

She added: 'The fossil fuel industry has used its enormous influence and power to fight the windfall tax, and it is an affront to humanity that it appears to have won.'
The Canadian investment giant led by Mark Carney has won a 2.2billion bidding war for payments firm Network International  making it the latest London-listed firm to be snapped up by foreign suitors.

Brookfield Asset Management has agreed to buy the credit card processor in a 400p-a-share deal  a 64 per cent premium to the group's value before the takeover battle first kicked off in April.

The offer trumped a rival 387p-a-share proposal from a consortium including private equity giant CVC Capital Partners.

The proposed takeover by Brookfield, where former Bank of England Governor Carney is chairman, comes amid frenzied interest in British companies.

A host of targets were snapped up after Covid struck in what was dubbed 'pandemic plundering' as predators swooped on firms with bombed-out share prices. Last week veterinary drugs maker Dechra Pharmaceuticals agreed a 4.5billion takeover led by Swedish private equity outfit EQT.

Cashing in: Ron Kalifa nets 2.4m; (right) Mark Carney

London's status as a global financial centre has also been called into question by Cambridge chip designer Arm's decision to list in New York, and a switch by 29bn buildings materials firm CRH from the City to Wall Street.

Analysts said the purchase of Network International, the largest payment provider in the Middle East and Africa, and its pending removal from the London market was a further setback.

Danni Hewson, an analyst at AJ Bell, said: 'It's a decent deal for shareholders if you're looking near-term but once again this is a London-listed company with a pretty sweet price tag. It's exactly the kind of business that London wants to attract more of and its loss will rub a bit more salt in something of a festering wound.'

It is not all doom and gloom, however, with chemicals giant WE Soda and fintech firm CAB Payments this week opting to list in London. CAB looks set to be valued at 1billion, while WE Soda, the world's biggest producer of natural soda ash for glass and batteries for electric vehicles, could be worth as much as 7billion.

The Brookfield swoop thrusts Carney into the spotlight alongside City bigwig Sir Ron Kalifa, who is chairman of Network International and author of a review for the Government in 2021 on how to boost Britain's fintech sector. Kalifa is set for a 2.4m payout after the takeover, having joined Network in 2019.

Critics have urged ministers to do more to boost London's position as a leading global financial centre. But City minister Andrew Griffith this week hit back at critics who have been sniping at the pace of reforms.

Six months after Chancellor Jeremy Hunt launched the so-called 'Edinburgh reforms' which are designed to boost the UK's status as a financial centre, Griffith told the Mail: 'This is a bumper package for the sector and  while some armchair generals remain determined to comment from the sidelines  we are delivering reforms that will maintain our status as a world-leading centre.'
Founder: Crispin Odey

The head of the firm founded by Crispin Odey is battling to keep clients on-side as the hedge fund manager is embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal.

Peter Martin, chief executive of Odey Asset Management, said he was 'confident that our service providers will continue to work with us to ensure that the interests of investors are protected'.

Some of the world's biggest banks are distancing themselves from the fund following misconduct allegations against Odey.

French brokerage Exane, part of BNP Paribas, was said to have cut ties with the fund while Morgan Stanley has also severed links.

JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are reviewing their relationship as prime brokers, entities that provide hedge funds with credit. And Schroders has sold its last remaining investments.

The fund faces a probe by the Financial Conduct Authority into 'non-financial misconduct'. The regulator was investigating governance issues after Odey fired his executive committee in 2021 when it tried to discipline him after a warning not to behave inappropriately with female staff.

That probe may be widened to include new allegations in the Financial Times made against the financier by 13 women.

Odey, 64, has 'strenuously disputed' claims and said none 'have been stood up in a court room or an investigation'. Martin said the allegations' were being 'looked into' by company lawyers and it took them 'extremely seriously'.

Odey made his name betting against bank shares during the 2008 crisis. The FT said an internal probe concluded he behaved inappropriately with female staff.
Day by day apprehension is growing over the impact on civilisation of AI  artificial intelligence. But so too is the excitement over its potential.

As the AI phenomenon gathered pace in April, I suggested that it made sense to ensure you had some exposure to the sector, directly or through funds such as Allianz Technology, Polar Technology or Templeton Emerging Markets.

This is still my view. It is reasonable to worry about the consequences of the spread of ChatGPT, Dall-E and other 'deep-learning' generative AI systems, that produce images, sound and text, while also wishing to benefit from the boom they will create.

Shares in the mega tech companies in this field have risen sharply.

Investors want to back the big and small businesses that will supply the 'picks and shovels', the tools that will enable the tech age gold rush.

The future?: Day by day apprehension is growing over the impact on civilisation of AI

For example, C3.ai, a Californian software developer, has risen 237 per cent this year  maybe partly because it trades under the AI ticker symbol.

Nvidia, the Silicon Valley semiconductor giant which makes the chips for ChatGPT, is up by 168 per cent in 2023: its market capitalisation briefly came close to $1trillion (795billion) last month.

Yet the group is still rated a 'buy' by a consensus of analysts, an assessment that highlights the hopes of the returns the AI revolution could yield.

Stephen Yiu, the manager of Blue Whale fund, which holds Nvidia and other AI-related stocks, says: 'We are at the beginning of the journey. Generative AI is only just turning from a concept in a sci-fi movie into reality.'

Management consultancy McKinsey predicts 70 per cent of companies will be using at least one type of AI by 2030, as bosses exploit these technologies to 'automate, augment, and accelerate work'.

The ebullient Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and chief executive, is hugely confident, saying: 'A trillion dollars of installed global data centre infrastructure will transition from general purpose to accelerated computing as companies race to apply generative AI into every product, service and business process.'

The journey will be eventful. Sceptics warn of an AI stock bubble, created by hype: the public-facing version of ChatGPT reached 100m users in two months, causing some investors to have unrealistic expectations about its rapid adoption in education, healthcare and other fields. Meanwhile, anxiety that generative AI could trigger catastrophic job losses is leading to calls for the slowing of its implementation.

This is despite concerns that, if the West takes time to ponder the implications, 'the bad guys' could gain an advantage, or so one senior Wall Street figure argues.

Sam Altman, founder of Open AI, the creator of ChatGPT, is among those warning of the existential risks, and Rishi Sunak is to host a global summit that could set rules to regulate AI.

Against this background, optimism about the payback has boosted shares in what Bank of America has dubbed the 'Magnificent Seven'. They are: Amazon, Apple, Alphabet (owner of Google), Meta (the Facebook and Instagram group), Microsoft, which has a stake in Open AI, Tesla and, of course, Nvidia.

Yiu suggests a broader range of businesses. He says: 'The tools for AI come from names like ASML, Applied Materials chipmaker and Lam Research, an equipment manufacturer. Intel, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company build chips.

'Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia and wireless technology specialist Qualcomm are experts in design and sales.'

You may be held back from committing to this sector by AI angst  the concern that humankind will be rendered redundant.

Jobs will be lost. But productivity will be improved, and individual ingenuity will still be prized.

Yiu says: 'AI will help you assemble a Powerpoint presentation far more quickly, but you will still be able to add that personal touch.'

AI systems should also help feed the world. James Yardley, of Fund Calibre, says: 'Imagine being able to water and feed plants individually in a field  changing their mix depending on the soil and type of plant from one row to another.

'That's already happening, with John Deere's See & Spray AI.'

You may conclude that you are already on the AI journey if you have money in funds with sizeable stakes in Nvidia, like T Rowe Price Global Technology, Martin Currie US Unconstrained or Martin Currie Global Unconstrained.

Microsoft, which is incorporating ChatGPT into its Bing search and Microsoft 365 products, is the largest holding at the F&C trust, where I have some cash.

If you're looking for more opportunities, Yardley points to Sanlam Global Artificial Intelligence, saying: 'What this fund's manager, Chris Ford, doesn't know about AI really isn't worth knowing.'

What no one can know is the scale of change AI will bring. Take only bets that you can afford on this journey into the unknown.
Golden touch: Cartier, worn here by Rita Ora, would be boosted if the tax is scrapped

Britain's tourist tax is damaging the UK  not just London, says the boss of a luxury jeweller.

Simon Walton, managing director of Berry's, said spending by visitors has dried up in places such as York after VAT-free shopping ended.

His comments highlight that it is not only big luxury businesses such as Burberry  whose boss Gerry Murphy said the policy was a 'spectacular own goal'  which are suffering.

Walton said: 'The tourists may be coming but they are certainly not spending because of the restrictions on tax-free shopping.'

Berry's has 12 stores in Leeds, Nottingham, Hull, Windsor, Newcastle and York and more than 120 staff. But sales are down as fewer Chinese shoppers visit.

He said: 'They used to have two, three hours of shopping in York. There's lovely streets that were full of Chinese tourists from June to October and there's now very few  the ones who are coming are clearly not shopping.'

Walton said Chinese visitors would typically buy watches worth thousands of pounds.

Tourists are instead taking advantage of tax breaks in Europe, he said, hitting destinations such as Cambridge, Edinburgh, Bath and Windsor. He rejected claims the Treasury could not afford to bring back tax breaks for tourists.
Pharma giant AstraZeneca has signed a huge deal with a UK start-up to create treatments for diabetes and other autoimmune diseases.

The FTSE 100 firm will team up with London-based Quell Therapeutics to collaborate on research and the licensing of any new medicines.

The aim is to develop treatments for Type 1 diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease through the use of genetically engineered 'regulatory T-cells'  'Tregs' for short.

Tregs help to stop the immune system from overreacting in areas of the body affected by a disease. Quell's technology is an extension of therapies which have proven successful in treating cancer.

Astra says it will pay Quell 68m upfront to help fund the research.

Deal: AstraZeneca will team up with London-based Quell Therapeutics to collaborate on research and the licensing of any new medicines

The start-up will also be eligible for over 1.6billion in development milestone payments and royalties if any drugs are approved for sale.

Mene Pangalos, executive vice-president of biopharmaceuticals research at Astra, said the deal would allow it to 'explore the untapped potential with Treg cell therapies'.

Quell boss Iain McGill added: 'This collaboration builds on our pioneering work to develop exquisitely engineered, multi-modular Treg cell therapies for immune disorders.'

Quell was founded in 2019 by six immunologists from King's College London, University College London and Hannover Medical School.

Prior to the deal with Astra, it raised about 175m from a consortium of investors and is valued at about 239m.

A major backer is London-listed firm Syncona, a trust that invests in companies focused on cell and gene therapies. The firm owns just over a third of Quell.

'Astra's expertise and capability will be instrumental in driving these important programmes forward,' said Martin Murphy, who is chairman of both Syncona and Quell.

News of the tie-up came as Astra announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had voted to recommend its drug nirsevimab as a treatment to prevent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in infants.

RSV is a common infection that causes cold-like symptoms. Most people recover within two weeks but the illness can become serious in infants and older adults and may lead to lung infections and pneumonia.

If nirsevimab is approved, it will be the first medicine designed specifically to protect infants from RSV.

'We look forward to continuing to work with the FDA to complete their expedited review, and we hope to see nirsevimab available as soon as possible given the significant burden of RSV in infants,' said Iskra Reic, Astra's executive vice-president of vaccines and immune therapies.
Sally Rooney in The Paris Review:

In 1923, the year after James Joyces novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape. Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the timeits initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boardsEliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as an illiterate, underbred book  the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are. In comparison, Eliots praise is triumphal. A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape. And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But its also a notoriously difficult book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.

More here.
Oil stocks climbed as investors cautiously welcomed plans to soften the windfall tax.

In a bid to boost production in the North Sea, the Treasury said it will reduce the tax rate on profits from 75 per cent to its previous level of 40 per cent if oil and gas prices normalise for at least six months.

The energy profits levy was introduced in May last year as the industry cashed in on soaring energy prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The tax rate will be axed so long as oil and gas prices fall to, or below, $71.40 a barrel and 54p per therm for two consecutive quarters. Prices last reached these levels in 2021, with oil currently $76 a barrel while gas is around 63p a therm. That is a far cry from when Brent crude peaked at $130 a barrel last year and gas soared as high as 6 a therm.

Harbour Energy gained 2 per cent, or 4.9p, to 251p, Enquest added 4.1 per cent, or 0.63p, to 16.14p, Serica Energy was up 3.4 per cent, or 8.2p, to 250p and Ithaca Energy rose 4.9 per cent, or 7.2p, to 153.2p. Major oil explorers, which rely far less on the North Sea for business, were little moved with BP down 0.8 per cent, or 3.75p, to 471.6p while Shell slid 0.6 per cent, or 14.5p, to 2294.5p.

Windfall tax: The energy profits levy was introduced in May last year as the industry cashed in on soaring energy prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine

The levy was brought in to support households who are battling soaring energy bills.

It has raised 2.8billion and will remain in place until March 2028, and is expected to bring in a total of almost 26billion.

But growing concerns that the measures are stifling investment, hitting energy supply and costing jobs have forced Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to change tack.

The oil and gas sector in the North Sea supports 215,000 jobs, according to the trade association Offshore Energies UK (OEUK).

David Whitehouse, chief executive of OEUK, said: 'We've always been clear that when the windfall conditions go, the windfall tax should go. This is a step in the right direction.'

Panmure Gordon's Ashley Kelty described the move as 'nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig' while Stifel analysts warned that shutting down the North Sea would mean a loss of 20bn in tax take. In March Harbour Energy boss Linda Cook said that the windfall tax 'has all but wiped out our profit for the year'.

The FTSE 100 fell 0.5 per cent, or 37.38 points, to 7562.36 and the FTSE 250 was down 0.1 per cent, or 15.89 points, to 19,091.66.

Investors in Croda International were spooked after the chemicals group said profits would be lower than hoped as customers use existing stock rather than buying more. The company, which extracts critical ingredients used in anti-ageing skin creams, said profits for the year to the end of May are expected to be between 370m and 400m, short of the 440m expected by analysts. It fell 12.5 per cent, or 750p, to 5274p.

CMC Markets took a 33 per cent stake in the blockchain solutions firm Strikex Technologies. The trading firm, led by the Tory peer Lord Cruddas, said its 'arm's length investment' will help it to grow. It fell 3.1 per cent, or 5.4p, to 169.8p.

There was good news for the defence sector after BAE Systems won a ten-year contract worth 270m from the Ministry of Defence to support the Royal Navy's three main radar systems.It rose 0.1 per cent, or 1.2p ,to 940p.

But S4 Capital fell 2.9 per cent, or 3.8p, to 125.3p after the advertising agency warned revenue increased at a slower pace in the first four months of the year than in the same period in 2022.

Traders sprinted towards Shoe Zone  up 10.7 per cent, or 22.5p, to 232.5p  after the footwear firm's strong summer sales. Profit for the year to October 2 should be at least 10.5m, compared to a previous forecast of 8.5m.
Australia could be at the edge of a fifth Covid wave, with cases rising in every state and territory as a leading public health expert demands the government take action.

'These figures are definitely going in the wrong direction,' Bill Bowtell AO, adjunct professor at UNSW and health policy expert, told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday.

'We're going into winter, where people gather together indoors. The policies we have are not good enough from a public health point of view.'

Professor Bowtell wants to see a clear mandate for masks brought back in hospitals and residential aged care settings and a government push to get Covid booster vaccines up.

The current official advice for masks in healthcare settings varies between states and territories.

In NSW, masks are required to visit hospitals and recommended in general practices and medical centres, while in Queensland there are no Public Health Directions requiring the wearing of face masks.

In Victoria and SA, the advice is masks should continue to be worn by staff and clients in indoor healthcare settings, hospitals are enforcing their own rules, but there is no government requirement.

Western Australia has entirely scrapped their Covid hospital mask rules.

'Masks should be used in hospitals and aged care, especially with vulnerable people,' Professor Bowtell said.

'I don't think at present mask mandates are required on public transport and more generally, but we must be vigilant and assess how cases are trending.'

Covid cases have seen a 'dramatic' surge across the country as more than six months passes since most Australians had a vaccine booster

Professor Bowtell said Australians are not getting booster shots, and as the vaccine loses its efficacy without top ups, there's more risk of serious consequences, especially in the vulnerable and aged care populations.

More than 16.5 million Australians have not received a Covid booster shot in 2023, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) said on Thursday.

In the last week alone, nearly 1,500 Covid sufferers were admitted to hospitals in NSW, which has seen the most severe surge in cases.

'There is a dramatic rise in infections. There's been more than half of hospitalisations in NSW where in the previous several weeks ten or so a day have died from Covid.'

Professor Bowtell is an infectious diseases expert who was involved in making the public health policy that successfully brought the HIV/AIDS crises under control in Australia in the 1980s.

'Covid is not the cold or flu, it is a different disease, and the health authorities have to take responsibility. Saying you're on you're own is not going to get a grip on the situation.'

While Professor Bowtell would not be drawn on whether he thinks any lockdowns should be brought back in, he was adamant the government needs to take a more hands-on approach.

Infectious diseases policy expert Professor Bill Bowtell said Covid isn't 'in the rearview'

'Certainly, an effort by the government to get the vaccination rate up is needed.'

'Air quality and air treatment methods in public buildings also is in need of urgent review'

'If you say Covid is in the rearview mirror enough, then people don't take action.'

'There's that saying - objects in the rearview mirror may be closer than they appear.'

'It's no use waiting until things get out of hand, we need prevention.'

'Covid didn't get the memo that its supposed to be gone and the government needs to explain what steps it's taking.'

The AMA agrees, warning that more than six months have passed since the majority of Australians have had a Covid booster shot.

An average of 5517 Covid infections were being recorded per day across the country for May, more than double the average daily rate in March.

Influenza cases are also on the rise with 17,277 recorded between May 15 and 28, more than double the previous fortnight's total.

AMA president Steve Robson is also urging Australians to get up to date with both their Covid booster and flu vaccine, which can be done at the same time.

Every state and territory in Australia has seen an uptick in case numbers in the last few weeks

'The age of lockdowns and restrictions is over, so it's understandable why many people are falling into a false sense of security, but the latest data shows the virus is infecting thousands of Australians every day,' Dr Robson said on Thursday.

'Having a Covid booster and a flu shot at the same time is an effective and safe way of ensuring you are protected from both viruses.

'We are seeing a significant spike in the number of flu and COVID cases, making this a potentially dangerous winter, particularly for elderly and immunocompromised people.'

Dr Robson also urged parents to ensure their kids were protected.

'As we know, children under five years of age aren't badly affected by Covid but influenza can be extremely serious for them, so it is crucial they get their flu shots as soon as possible,' he said.

Epidemiologist Professor Catherine Bennett says lockdowns won't work to stop the spread of the virus.

'Lockdowns won't work, they don't work with Omicron  we would only go back to that if we were absolutely desperate,' she said.

'If we had a variant that was bringing serious illness in a way we haven't seen before, then we might need to resort to more enforced measures.'

Chief medical officer Paul Kelly said it was 'not likely' Australia would return to tough Covid restrictions.

'You know, that's not my decision, but I don't think that (fresh restrictions are) likely,' Professor Kelly said on Sunrise.

'My advice at the moment is to be alert but not afraid  I think that would be a good way to look at it.'
A crocodile lover has hit out at a 'croc serial killer' after a well-known reptile was butchered with a chainsaw and filleted to feed dogs.

The head and spine of Lizzie the croc were found on the banks of the Daintree River in far north Queensland on May 18.

It comes after another croc was found discovered with its head hacked off at Cow Bay, north of Cairns last April - sparking fears the incidents were related.

Tour guide David White came to know the most recent victim as he took tourists up and down the river through his daily Solar Whisper cruise tours.

Mr White, who has witnessed the 'gentle soul' hatch many nests of baby crocodiles over the past two decades, said the croc's death had 'devastated' him.

The head (pictured) and spine of Lizzie the croc were found on the banks of the Daintree River in far north Queensland on May 18

Tour guide David White came to know Lizzie the croc (pictured) as he took tourists up and down the Daintree River in far north Queensland

'She's family to me, she was a gentle soul and a most beautiful mother,' Mr White said (pictured, Lizzie with one of her babies)

'She's family to me, she was a gentle soul and a most beautiful mother. So I was absolutely devastated [and] broken,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'I feel like a man that's lost his family.'

The remains of the 'queen of the Daintree River' were found on the riverbank where he moors his boat.

Mr White recognised the distinct freckled features of the 2.7-metre crocodile he came to know when he saw the severed head.

'She was just left on the bank, filleted. All that was left was her head and backbone. She had been illegally shot,' he told the Cairns Post.

He said he received an anonymous phone call from man bragging about removing the crocodile's head with a chainsaw.

'He said he'd filleted her  and then fed her to his dogs.

'He said "I'm the real apex predator around here"'.

Mr White added the man taunted him telling him he needed to 'get a life' and that it was just a crocodile.

He said the 40-year-old Lizzie still had a lot of life left in her.

'Its just beyond comprehension the hate and cruelty directed towards these animals that want nothing to do with us but to live their lives,' he said.

The Department of Environment and Science confirmed a crocodile had been targeted and deliberately killed on the Daintree River.

Crocodiles in Queensland are protected under the Nature Conservation Act 1992.

Offenders face fines of up to $32,243 if they are found to have deliberately harmed or killed one of the man eaters.

The croc killing comes after another decapitated crocodile was found in far north Queensland last April.

It sparked an urgent investigation with wildlife warriors claiming the head was 'hacked off' for a 'trophy'.

Photographer Tom Hayes made the shocking discovery at Cow Bay, north of Cairns.

Mr White compared the distinct freckled features of the 2.7-metre crocodile's head from old photos he had of Lizzie (pictured, bottom) when he saw the severed head (pictured, top)

Crocodiles in Queensland are protected under the Nature Conservation Act 1992 (pictured, Lizzie the croc with larger male 'Scarface' in the river)

The headless four-metre crocodile (pictured) was found on Cow Bay Beach, north of Cairns

'I just saw the body of this beautiful, big old male crocodile laying there,' he said.

'When I got up closer, there was evidence of machete marks across his back.

'They're not marks made by a male crocodile that has attacked him.

'I just think it's disgusting - whether he was shot and mutilated or found dead and mutilated, it doesn't matter.'

Anyone with information about these incidents or about people in possession of crocodile skulls or other body parts, should call 1300 130 372 or contact Queensland Police.
Priscilla Galey, 65, tells DailyMail.com that married Robert Hanssen refused to have sex with her despite lavishing her with her expensive gifts

The stripper lured into the world of dead FBI traitor Robert Hanssen has exclusively told DailyMail.com: 'I'm certain he was grooming me to help spy for the Russians.'

Priscilla Galey  lavished with expensive gifts, cash and a Mercedes-Benz sedan by the former counterintelligence agent  said she believes he was testing her out during their 18-month friendship despite giving no hint of his deadly treachery.

Hanssen was found dead in his cell at the ADX supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado, on Monday, where he had languished for 20 years while serving 15 consecutive life sentences for selling secrets to Moscow.

The 79-year-old was snared in February 2001 as he delivered his final 'dead drop' in a park near his home in Vienna, Virginia, following two decades of treason that netted him $1.4million in cash, diamonds and foreign bank deposits.

Married and devoutly churchgoing, the spy began his relationship with Galey after being entranced while seeing her strip one night in summer 1990 at Joanna's 1819 Club in Washington DC.

Robert Hanssen, 79, was found dead in his federal prison cell in Florence, Colorado, on Monday, where he had languished for 20 years while serving 15 consecutive life sentences for selling secrets to Moscow

Priscilla Galey, 65, tells DailyMail.com that Hanssen lavished her with expensive gifts, cash, a Mercedes-Benz and a trip to Hong Kong in the 90s in what she says was an attempt to recruit her as a spy

'He gave me no clue that he was a spy... nothing. But looking back I now believe he wanted to recruit me in his spying activities, maybe to assist him with drops or pick-ups,' Galey told DailyMail.com. She's pictured in 2001 with Barbara Walters after she sat with her for an interview

For the next 18 months he secretly lavished her with gifts worth $100,000, regaled her in fancy restaurants, took her on a luxury trip to Hong Kong and even arranged a clandestine visit to the FBI training academy at Quantico  but refused to have sex with her.

'I always told Robert I was a chameleon and could blend in anywhere,' Galey, now 65, told DailyMail.com at a friend's apartment in her home city of Columbus, Ohio. 'While we were together I pretty much proved that.

Hanssen is pictured in his official FBI headshot. He was caught in February 2001 as he delivered his final 'dead drop' in a park near his home in Vienna, Virginia

'To him, I had the right props. Those days, I looked good, I could carry myself, I could deal with situations.

'He gave me no clue that he was a spy.. nothing. But looking back I now believe he wanted to recruit me in his spying activities, maybe to assist him with drops or pick-ups.

'Everything that we did together now feels like he was testing me in some way. It was all part of some bigger plan.

'We had a purely platonic relationship, so what was in it for him? It had to be that he was grooming me for spying. What else?'

Galey, who has battled crack cocaine addition and destitution in recent years, continued: 'He would ask me crazy things, like do you think it would be exciting to be a spy?

'I asked him in Hong Kong over dinner one night, haven't you ever done anything wrong? Incredibly, he said, I changed some test scores once. That's all he told me.

'There was no real indication of his secret life. If I had known, I would have got away from him  and fast.

'However, he was a big part of my life. He was a lot of things. He made nearly two years very, very intensely special. I mean, who does stuff like that for you?'

When Hanssen first set eyes on Galey, he was already well into a betrayal that a government report later described as 'possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history'.

His treachery started with the former Soviet Union in 1979 and continued with the Russian Federation after the fall of communism. He had breaks during that period, but ultimately handed over more than 6,000 classified documents, some detailing US nuclear secrets.

The father of six also blew the cover of nine double agents in Moscow, resulting in two of them being executed. He also compromised dozens of intelligence programs, including a secret tunnel beneath the Russian Embassy in Washington.

Hanssen began his relationship with Galey after being entranced while seeing her strip one night in summer 1990 at Joanna's 1819 Club in Washington DC. Galey is pictured giving a TV interview in the early 2000s

'There was no real indication of his secret life. If I had known, I would have got away from him  and fast,' Galey told DailyMail.com from a friend's apartment in her native Ohio

'I had no communication with him while he was in prison, but I wanted to, Oh God I wanted to,' said Galey. 'And I did want to visit him, but told myself that's not possible. And as the years went on, well things changed.

'I actually wanted to confront him and say, what really? Look what you did, and look at the position you put me in. After he was arrested I was grilled by FBI officials on what I knew. I didn't know anything. But I was mad, so mad.

'He did deserve to go to prison for what he did, but I believe it's right that he was not given the death penalty.

Galey of their first meeting, 'Robert had been watching one of my shows, it was the virgin set, me in all white'

'To his wife and family, I would say I'm so sorry for your loss. I never saw myself having a normal life with him. In fact at first I pictured him as a father figure to me, because I didn't have a father.'

Of their first meeting, Galey said: 'Robert had been watching one of my shows, it was the virgin set, me in all white.

'He sent $10 to the dressing room with a waitress, he'd just told her that he had never seen such grace and beauty before and she relayed that to me.

'I freaked out, it was a beautiful compliment. I had never heard anything like that about me before.'

Galey continued: 'I went out and saw him, he was so tall. Then he was going out the front door and I ran to catch him. He gave me his card and it said FBI. I immediately thought, I'm never going to call him. I was literally afraid to call him. I had never been in trouble, but he was FBI.'

Despite her reservations, Hanssen successfully wooed Galey. 'The very next time I saw him he gave me a beautiful diamond necklace,' she said.

'I wouldn't take it at first, but it was stunning. He said, it's beautiful, you should have it. And he put it on me and I thought, OK, I'll keep it.

'Another time he left money at the front of the club, the DJ booth, $2,000 to get my teeth fixed. With a beautiful note, which I wish I had to this day, it was so beautiful. It said you owe me nothing, this is just for your teeth.'

It was the beginning of a whirlwind 18 months with a man who was a committed member of the conservative Opus Dei sect of the Roman Catholic Church  yet also a deviant who showed friends videos of him and wife Bonnie having sex, filmed without her knowledge.

Hanssen  a 25-year FBI veteran  obtained a temporary passport for Galey before whisking her on the Hong Kong trip, she said.

Yet even then, the spy who secretly frequented strip joints and callously exposed his wife to friends would not be drawn into any physical contact with his travel partner.

'When we were there, he worked and I shopped. We met for breakfast and we met for dinner.. same hotel but separate rooms. I guess he was there on official business. We didn't even fly on the same flights. He was very discreet.

'Back of my mind, I thought we are out of the States and away from his family and he wants to make a pass at me. But he never did. I wanted that with him, he didn't.'

She continued: 'He wouldn't even let me hug him even when he bought me something and I wanted to thank him. Once I went to embrace him and he said 'no, no, no'. It freaked me out kind of because, believe me, I'd never had that reaction before.'

Hanssen, pictured here with his wife Bonnie and their six children, stopped spying for a few years when he was confronted by his wife. Hanssen was a devout member of the conservative Opus Dei sect of the Roman Catholic Church

Hanssen began his espionage operation just three years after being hired by the FBI and continued until shortly before his planned retirement

FBI agents are pictured arresting Hanssen near his Virginia home in February 2001

Of the gifts, Galey said: 'Oh my God, he tried to spend so much money on me. Once he said he wanted to buy me a house in DC, actually more like a mansion. I said, what would I do with that?

'But he did get me a Mercedes 190E, champagne silver with red leather interior. It was beautiful. I loved it. When you drive a Mercedes you can do almost anything you like. People treat you differently.

'At lunch he says, I've got a surprise for you. He handed me an envelope. It contained car keys... and he says, those are yours. I was freaked, they were for the Mercedes.

'I thought, whoa, I'm not hungry, let's go see the car.' When I first got it, I parked it outside my apartment for two weeks, I felt I couldn't touch it. He also gave me an American Express card that day, strictly for fixing the car.

'I did think, how could he afford to spend that on me. He had six kids and a wife. But he explained it away by claiming he had a large inheritance from his mother. I thought, OK, lucky you.'

Backing up her theory on spy grooming, Galey said of the Quantico visit: 'It was exciting but I thought, I'm going to get into trouble here. It wasn't any kind of official tour. He got me a name tag, the one in plastic that they all wore.

'I'd told him I was a chameleon and I can blend in anywhere. And I really could back then. All you need is the information and the props.

'Then we went to Quantico and he really put me to the test. He told me to go into the basement area, told me to stay down there. And he gave me code words like Eisenhower, and if I was asked what I was working on I was to say top secret stuff. I know it sounds weird, but that's what it was.'

Galey believes boredom partly drove Hanssen towards spying. 'He was smart. I do believe to this day that he was just bored with his life,' she said.

'He had a desk job, he didn't want a desk job. He didn't tell me that, but I always felt it.

'He talked very little about his family  but he said he had six children and they were all going to college and getting cars. I never had anything like that, so I was in awe of that.'

Hanssen also tried desperately to draw Galey into the Catholic Church in a bid to wean her off stripping. Bizarrely, he once persuaded her to come along to a Sunday service at St Catherine of Siena in Great Falls, Virginia, where his family worshipped, she said.

'But I just stood outside the church, all dressed up, and I couldn't go inside. I just couldn't face looking at his wife and children there. How weird is that? He wanted that. I just froze, then left.'

Galey and Hanssen drifted apart after she returned to Columbus in 1992 and fell in with a crowd who were smoking crack. Soon she became hooked herself.

'I didn't have a job and I began using the American Express card for things other than the Mercedes,' she said. 'Robert came up here for the credit card. And that was the last time I saw him.'

FBI agents are pictured in front of Hanssen's home after his arrest in 2001. Hanssen received $1.4million in cash from the KGB and its successor during his efforts

In February 2001, Hanssen was followed by FBI agents to a wooded Virginia park and arrested after taping a bag of classified documents to the underside of a footbridge (pictured)

Meanwhile, the once gleaming car met an untimely end  wrecked in an accident while being driven by a boyfriend.

Galey also admits she flirted with prostitution to help feed her crack habit, blaming her descent to selling her body on another man 'who was turned on by dating a prostitute'.

She escaped the relationship, had son Joshua and weaned herself off the lethal drug. 'It put a Band Aid on my life for a while. It made me feel better, even though it was eating me alive,' she confesses with disarming honesty.

The former stripper credits having a son as her route to being clean of drugs. 'My little boy saved me,' she said. 'I became determined to change when he came along.

'He's an adult now. He was three when Robert was arrested. I remember I was reading to him in the kitchen, the TV was on in the front room and I heard his name, which got my attention.

'I've watched the clip of him being arrested and I think he comes over as a smart ass. That quote with him saying 'what took you so long' to the agents. Come on, really?'

She added: 'I was so torn when he was arrested, Because he was so good to me. But then I thought, wait a minute, I could have been dead or in jail if I'd stayed with him. The worst mistake I ever made was my judgment of character in his case.'

Hanssen negotiated a plea deal to share information with US officials in return for avoiding the death penalty. When he was sentenced in May 2002, he said: 'I apologize for my behavior. I am ashamed by it. Beyond its illegality, I have torn the trust of so many.'

Espionage questions about Hanssen surrounded him for years. Eventually the FBI paid a former Russian intelligence officer $7million to obtain a KGB file that finally unmasked the mole and set in motion a trap to nail him.

The spy's cause of death has not yet been released. Galey fought tears as she said: 'Do people like that have funerals? I don't know. But if there was one, I'd love to go. I know that's unlikely.'
Bruce Lehrmann claims Brittany Higgins' fiance David Sharaz has been a 'puppet master' who carefully plotted using her rape claims to 'take down' the Coalition government.

Ms Higgins alleges she was sexually assaulted by Mr Lehrmann in a ministerial office in the early hours of March 23, 2019, while both were working as Liberal staffers, allegations he strongly denies.

Mr Lehrmann has seized on leaked texts between Mr Sharaz, who was working as a Labor staffer, and Ms Higgins to claim they show the 'weaponisation' of the rape allegations for political purposes.

Daily Mail Australia does not suggest any of the parties in the criminal proceedings who received the material leaked it.

'He (Mr Sharaz) just keeps injecting himself into it,' Mr Lehrmann told The Australian.

'He's just more worried about how best to spin it or sell it or drop something in the media.'

Former Liberal Party staffer Bruce Lehrmann claims the rape allegations against him were 'weaponised' to 'take down' the Liberal party

Texts leaked on Thursday show Mr Sharaz basking in the fame that Ms Higgins' airing of her rape allegations garnered after being revealed in a TV interview with Channel 10's Lisa Wilkinson on February 15, 2021.

After the show aired Mr Sharaz texted Ms Higgins eagerly asking if she was 'getting spotted' and recognised.

A month after The Project interview, Ms Sharaz sent a joking text to Ms Higgins: 'Don't ditch me now you're famous' and followed that minutes later by texting 'We exude power'.

In other texts he gloated about the pair being invited to socialise with former prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull.

Mr Lehrmann claimed Mr Sharaz's behaviour showed him to be a 'class A typical political staffer' as all he was doing was 'selling a message'.

'It wasn't about me, it was about a bigger purpose, and clearly it was for the Labor Party,' Mr Lehrmann said.

He accused Mr Sharaz 'of riding the wave of Higgins's fame'.

Mr Lehrmann said evidence given by senior AFP constable Emma Frizzell during the inquiry into the handling of his aborted rape trial in October also backs up his conclusions.

Constable Frizzell said that during a rest break in Ms Higgins' first recorded police interview in March 2021, Mr Sharaz 'entered the room and without concern for Ms Higgins' welfare'.

The officer said Mr Sharaz 'commenced showing and discussing media coverage to Ms Higgins'.

Mr Lehrmann has accused Ms Higgins' (pictured left) fiance David Sharaz (pictured right) of being a 'puppet master'

Freshly leaked texts sent by Mr Sharaz to Ms Higgins show him joking and boasting about the level of recognition she has

'I believe the level of media involvement did affect the conduct of the investigation of Ms Higgins' complaint,' Constable Frizzell said on May 26.

'I believe it was a tool driven by Ms Higgins and Mr Sharaz, which is evident by the first engagement I had with them, whereby Ms Higgins advised she wished to see how the media played out prior to providing a statement.'

Another freshly leaked text shows that Mr Sharaz set Ms Higgins up with a job as she was preparing to make her rape claims.

In a message to Ms Higgins on January 1, 2021, he wrote: 'Emma wants me to tell you that she's about to advertise for a media adviser. It's 80-90k and if you need a job for a short term to fill a void.'

'Emma' is his friend Emma Webster, who was working at the time for the First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria at the time.

She was previously a senior advisor to Finance Minister Katy Gallagher who is facing intense scrutiny over whether she misled parliament about being unaware of Mr Higgins' rape allegations before they aired in the media.

Mr Sharaz said Ms Higgins would work with Emma to 'progress the Treaty' and said it brings his 'two favourite women' together in the same workplace.

The stream of leaked texts and audio recordings surrounding Hs Higgins' rape accusations has become a political crisis for the Albanese government.

Another text reveals that Mr Sharaz set Ms Higgins up with a job as she was preparing to air her rape allegations

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher (pictured) is facing accusations that she misled parliament about being unaware of Ms Higgins' accusations before they were aired by the media

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek and Senator Gallagher all face accusations they colluded with Mr Sharaz, Wilkinson and Ms Higgins to 'weaponise' the allegations so as to damage the Morrison Government.

The criminal trial last held in the ACT last October was abandoned after a jury member brought unauthorised material to the jury room.

A second trial was set to go ahead in February but the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions Shane Drumgold discontinued the matter citing the 'significant and unacceptable' risk to Ms Higgins' mental health.

The handling of the case by the Australian Federal Police and Department of Public Prosecutions in now under review by an independent inquiry.
Almost half of Brits believe that ministers should be barred from using WhatsApp for official business.

Some 48 per cent of those polled for MailOnline by Redfield & Wilton Strategies felt that the Government should not be using the popular messaging app.

Fewer than four-in-10 believe they should be allowed to use the encrypted service, when asked in the wake of a furious row between Rishi Sunak's Government and the official Covid Inquiry.

The Cabinet Office is seeking a judicial review of an order from enquiry chairwoman Baroness Hallett to handover Boris Johnson's unredacted messages from when he was prime minister.

His successor Rishi Sunak has denied the Government is resisting the release because he fears embarrassment.

Some 48 per cent of those polled for MailOnline by Redfield & Wilton Strategies felt that the Government should not be using the popular messaging app.

The Cabinet Office is seeking a judicial review of an order from enquiry chairwoman Baroness Hallett to handover Boris Johnson's unredacted messages from when he was prime minister.

His successor Rishi Sunak has denied the Government is resisting the release because he fears embarrassment.

The Prime Minister has been accused of a cover-up after the Cabinet Office announced a High Court challenge to block the request for the wholesale handover of his predecessor's documents from the pandemic.

Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner earlier said the Government was 'obstructing the Covid inquiry' by launching the judicial review.

But Mr Sunak insisted it was 'not at all' the case the move was designed to hide anything.

Speaking to broadcasters during a visit to Washington DC, he said he was 'spending a lot' of time co-operating with the inquiry.

Asked whether he was worried about something in the messages causing him embarrassment, the Prime Minister said: 'No, not at all.

'I as well am co-operating and providing information to the inquiry. It's actually taking a lot of my own time, but that's right that I do that.

'But obviously there's a legal proceeding ongoing on one particular thing at the moment, which I can't comment on.

'But more broadly, the work that the inquiry is doing is important and necessary, and those involved should co-operate in a spirit of candour and transparency. That's what I'm doing and that's what the Government's doing.'

Mr Sunak said the work of the inquiry was 'important and necessary', but stopped short of expressing full confidence in it and its chairwoman.

Asked if he had full confidence in Lady Hallett, he replied: 'I think the Covid inquiry is doing important and necessary work.'

The Cabinet Office says some of the information requested by the UK Covid-19 Inquiry does not relate to the Government's handling of coronavirus and is 'unambiguously irrelevant'.

Earlier on Wednesday, ministers were accused of spending taxpayers' money on 'loophole lawyers' in an attempt to block the inquiry from being handed Mr Johnson's WhatsApp correspondence and notebooks.

In a feisty exchange between Ms Rayner and Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden in the Commons, Sir Keir Starmer's deputy said: 'They set up the inquiry to get to the truth, then blocked that inquiry from getting the information that it asked for, and now they're taking it to court.

'Does he think working people will thank him for spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of their money on loophole lawyers, just so the Government can obstruct the Covid inquiry?'

Ms Rayner also raised the Conservative Party 2019 manifesto pledge to ensure the judicial review process is 'not abused' or used to 'create needless delays'.

'The Tory manifesto promised to end the abuse of the judicial review - how's it going?' she asked.

Mr Dowden, who was standing in for Mr Sunak at Prime Minister's Questions due to the Prime Minister being in the US, said all Government Covid-related discussions would be handed to the inquiry.

The senior minister said: 'We will provide the inquiry with each and every document related to Covid, including all internal discussions in any form as requested, while crucially protecting what is wholly and unambiguously irrelevant.

'Because essentially (Lady Hallett) is calling for years worth of documents and messages between named individuals to be in scope and that could cover anything from civil servants' medical conditions to intimate details about their families.'

The decision to challenge the inquiry in the High Court is seen as highly unusual and one minister has raised doubts that the Government will win the contest, which could be heard before the end of the month.

At a preliminary inquiry hearing on Tuesday, Lady Hallett questioned why the Cabinet Office would want to redact information that Mr Johnson has confirmed he is happy to submit.

The retired senior judge has refused to back down from her request for Mr Johnson's messages, saying it is for her to rule what is relevant to the investigation.

Lady Hallett has given the Cabinet Office until the end of the week to clarify whether it would seek to redact information in Mr Johnson's notebooks, his diaries and the WhatsApp messages on his locked mobile, containing messages dating from before May 2021, if they were obtainable before the judicial review is heard on or shortly after June 30.

The first public evidence session of the inquiry is due to start next week, with witnesses being called to give testimony from Tuesday about Module 1 of the investigation, which relates to the UK's pandemic preparedness.
Sarah Everard, 33, a marketing executive living in Clapham, south-west London, disappeared on the evening of March 3, 2021, and her body was not found until a week later.

Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens emerged as the prime suspect and eventually pled guilty to murder when he was tried.

In September 2021 Couzens was served a whole life order, and has more recently also been found guilty on three counts of indecent exposure which occurred prior to murdering Ms Everard.

The case dealt a huge blow to public confidence in the Met Police, as well as sparking a national debate about the precautions which women have to take when walking on their own, especially at night.

As the details of the case are set to be uncovered in a new Channel 5 documentary, find a full timeline of the case and events which led to Couzens being exposed below.

In September 2021 Wayne Couzens was served a whole life order for the murder, before also being found guilty of three counts of indecent exposure in 2023

There was a huge search for Sarah Everard after she went missing after visiting a friend

Cities across the country hosted vigils to remember Ms Everard, as well as to highlight the worries experienced by all women walking home alone

How events in the Sarah Everard case unfolded, and how it got so tragically far

2011

Couzens joins the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), from Kent Police, after being vetted by Thames Valley Police.

2015

Kent Police fail to investigate an indecent exposure incident linked to Couzens. In February 2023, he pleads guilty to a charge over this incident.

Couzens' name was broadcast as a suspected sex offender on a radio channel to all Kent Police officers, but no further action was taken according to papers released by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) in May 2023.

2018

Couzens transfers to the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), from the CNC.

2019

Couzens and his wife buy a small area of woodland off Fridd Lane in Ashford, Kent.

February 2019

The PC joins a response team covering the Bromley area of south London, having initially served in a Safer Neighbourhood Team.

Couzens transfers to the Metropolitan Police Service, from the Civil Nuclear Constabulary in 2018

February 2020

He moves to the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command to patrol diplomatic premises, mainly embassies.
The pregnant fiancee of an ER doctor and crypto millionaire discovered dead in a lake in Arkansas can be pictured for the first time - as new eerie images show his stethoscope dangling from his abandoned car's mirror.

Laura Barnett, 39, called Dr John Forsyth the 'love of her life' in a series of heartbreaking posts after he vanished on May 21.

Forsyth, 49, had recently finalized his divorce when he failed to turn up for his shift at the Mercy Hospital in Cassville, Missouri. His body was found nine days later in Beaver Lake, Arkansas, with police confirming he had been shot.

Family members were immediately alarmed at his disappearance after it emerged he had left his wallet, passport, five cellphones, laptop and keys inside his unlocked RV and car.

But many were kept in the dark about his relationship with Barnett, who is eight months pregnant, with some only finding out that she existed after the tragedy.

Forsyth is pictured here for the first time with his pregnant fiancee Laura Barnett who in a social media post said she was 'heart broken' over his disappearance

Sheriff's Divers search Beaver Lake, Arkansas, for clues in the suspected murder of Forsyth

In one eerie new image his stethoscope can be seen dangling around the rear-view mirror of his Infiniti sedan

Pictured: Dr Forsyth's family; second on the left Dixie Andelin Forsyth (mother) and beside her Robert Duane Forsyth (father), Richard Forsyth (brother) is center, surrounded by his sisters

Forsyth was last seen on surveillance footage walking towards an RV he kept in the car park at around 7am and had texted his fiance to tell her he would see her later.

The family of Dr Forsyth was not aware of how the couple met, but a LinkedIn profile belonging to Barnett shows she worked as an ER nurse practitioner at the same hospital.

Posting on social media, Barnett said: 'My love love of my life I miss you more than anyone can imagine my heart is broken every second I do not know if you're ok.

'PLEASE help in finding my fiance Johnny please share and reshare to keep his face out there if anyone has seen him.'

She has not commented since he found dead, with family members telling DailyMail.com she is 'devastated' by his death.

Barnett had not publicly posted any images of the couple together until after he vanished, with the pair getting engaged just three days before he was last seen alive.

His brother Richard told DailyMail.com she was the 'love of his life', and other family members said he divorced his wife officially on May 11.

The father-of-eight did not tell many relatives that he was engaged to Barnett and others had not met her until after his disappearance.

His body was found near the bank across from the Lost Bridge South area of Beaver Lake, which is about 20 miles south of Cassville, police said

Many of his family members say they were kept in the dark about his relationship with Barnett, who is eight months pregnant

The family of Dr Forsyth was not aware of how the couple met, but a LinkedIn profile belonging to Barnett shows she worked as an ER nurse practitioner at the same hospital

An expansive 90-acre search was carried out by the Cassville Police Department

His brother Richard told DailyMail.com she was the 'love of his life' just days before he disappeared

Authorities located his black Infiniti sedan abandoned at the Cassville Aquatic Park in the Ozarks. The car keys were inside, along with Forsyth's wallet, passport and briefcase.

A further search by police revealed that two cell phones were left behind in Forsyth's luxury RV that he stayed in while on-call at the hospital.

An expansive 90-acre search was carried out by the Cassville Police Department soon after, which failed to turn up any results until a kayaker found his body last month.

The body was found near the bank across from the Lost Bridge South area of Beaver Lake, which is about 20 miles south of Cassville.

New pictures show the search efforts of officers across the lake where his body was found, as a stethoscope hung eerily from the rear-view mirror of his car.

It has since been claimed that the doctor had as many as five cell phones in his black vehicle, with his family saying they knew of at least two - one each for his personal and work life.

Shortly after he was reported missing, authorities located his black sedan abandoned at the Cassville Aquatic Park in the Ozarks

An expansive 90-acre search was carried out by the Cassville Police Department soon after, which failed to turn up any results until a kayaker found his body last month

Forsyth vanished on May 21 after leaving Mercy Hospital, Missouri, just ten days after he is said to have divorced his wife

It has since been claimed that the doctor had as many as five cell phones in his vehicle, with his family saying they knew of at least two

In a bizarre revelation, Richard previously revealed that his brother had been kidnapped and threatened by unidentified assailants in February 2022.

Richard, who founded the crypto firm OnFo with his brother, said that despite the terrifying ordeal, John never filed a police report.

He said he first learned about the kidnapping through a mutual friend, who only came forward to describe the incident to the family after John went missing in mysterious circumstances.

The brother said he believed the kidnapping was 'crypto related' but that he did not know anything else about the perpetrators from the account of the mutual friend, who wished to remain anonymous due to ongoing safety concerns.

Richard cautioned that there was no evidence yet linking the 2022 incident with John's death, but added: 'It stands out very stark in the tableaux of facts that have emerged about the case.'

'It was cold. He was zip-tied. He was made to feel very unsafe and taken on a car ride with some people to a bridge and was threatened.

'He did not file a police report because he believed he was in continued danger.'

The family say that they would rather be 'left in the dark' during the police investigation if it means they will get 'justice' for the doctor.
Donald Trump's indictment comes almost a year after FBI agents conducted their raid on Mar-a-Lago, turning the classified documents that would lead to the former president being formally charged.

The incident began when Trump left office with records from his administration, which is against federal law. It involved the appointment of a special counsel, multiple Trump aides testifying before a grand jury and a fury of denials from the former president, who claims he is the victim of a political witch hunt.

Here's a timeline of events:

January 20, 2021: Donald Trump leaves the White House as Joe Biden is sworn in as the nation's 46th president; Trump goes his West Beach home Mar-a-Lago.

May 2021: National Archives and Records Administration realizes some records from Trump's presidency are missing

Workers move boxes out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House grounds, before the departure of President Donald Trump on January 14, 2021

December 2021: Archives requests the documents from the former president; in late December, a Trump representative informed the agency that an additional 12 boxes of records that should have been turned over had been found at the former president's Mar-a-Lago club and residence and were ready to be retrieved

January 18, 2022: Archives received 15 boxes of material that had been stored at Mar-a-Lago, some of which were found to contain classified material

The agency said it 'identified items marked as classified national security information, up to the level of Top Secret and including Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Program materials.'

In total, the boxes were found to contain 184 documents with classified markings, including 67 marked confidential, 92 secret and 25 top secret.

February 8, 2022: The National Archives issues a public statement saying it is still searching for more of Trump's presidential records

February 9, 2022: The matter is referred to the Justice Department

February 10, 2022: U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee announces an investigation into Trump's handling of the documents

Donald Trump has claimed to be the victim of a political witch hunt

May 2022: After several back-and-forths with Trump's legal team, the Justice Department issues a subpoena for additional records they believe to be in the former president's Florida home

Investigators believe after that subpoena arrived, storage boxes, including some containing classified material, were moved from a Mar-a-Lago storage area, so Trump personally examined some of them.

April 12, 2022: Archives informed Trump of its intent to provide the documents to the FBI, at the request of the Justice Department. A Trump representative requested an extension until April 29.

April 29, 2022: The Justice Department sent a letter to Trump's lawyers seeking immediate access to the material, 'citing 'important national security interest.'

'Access to the materials is not only necessary for purposes of our ongoing criminal investigation, but the Executive Branch must also conduct an assessment of the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported and take any necessary remedial steps,' the department wrote.

May 10, 2022: Archives informed Trump's lawyers that it would provide the FBI access to the records as soon as May 12.

May 11, 2022: The Justice Department issued a subpoena for additional records.

June 2, 2022: Walt Nauta and two employees move documents out of a store room. Hours later, Trump's lawyers contact the DOJ and say they are welcome to visit and retrieve the documents

June 3, 2022: Three FBI agents and one DOJ attorney go to Mar-a-Lago to retrieve the additional material. They were given a single Redweld envelope, double-wrapped in tape, containing the documents, according to later court filings. That envelope contained 38 records with classification markings, including five papers marked confidential, 16 marked secret and 17 marked top secret

The FBI raided Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home (above) on August 8, 2022

August 5, 2022: DOJ applied for a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, citing 'probable cause' that additional presidential records and records containing classified information remained at Trump's Florida home. Court papers show that the original search warrant application showed agents believed that 'evidence of obstruction will be found at the premises.'

August 8, 2022: FBI agents raid Mar-a-Lago: They recover 18 documents marked as top secret, 54 marked secret, 31 marked as confidential, and 11,179 government documents or photographs that had no classification markings.

August 22, 2022: Two weeks after the FBI's search, Trump separately asks the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida for a so-called special master to review the documents, prompting the Justice Department's 54-page response.

August 26, 2022: The Justice Department releases a heavily redacted affidavit  a sworn statement outlining the evidence giving law enforcement officials probable cause to ask a judge to approve a search warrant  after media outlets sued for its release. A judge approved its release.

August 30, 2022: DoJ files its response to Trump's request for a special master review.

September 2, 2022: The FBI reveals in a court filing that it recovered more than 11,000 government documents and photographs during the August 8 search of Trump's estate, as well as 48 empty folders labeled as 'classified.'

U.S. judge agrees to appoint special master in Trump search case.

Documents found at Mar-a-Lago in an August raid are pictured on display

Jack Smith was appointed in November as special counsel to investigate Trump's handling of classified information

October 2022: Walt Nauta testifies to federal officials in the investigation; telling them that he moved boxes at the former president's request at a time when the government was seeking the return of classified material

November 18, 2022: Jack Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to serve as the Special Counsel

March 2023: Trump's communications aide Margo Martin, who worked in the White House and then moved with Trump to Florida, appeared before the grand jury in Washington, DC

At least two dozen people  from Mar-a-Lago resort staff to members of Donald Trump's inner circle at the Florida estate  are subpoenaed to testify

April 2023: About a dozen current and former U.S. Secret Service officials assigned to Trump testify before the grand jury

June 5, 2023: Trump's legal team meets with Smith at the Justice Department

June 7, 2023: It's revealed a second grand jury in Florida has been hearing testimony; Taylor Budowich, who has worked as a spokesman for Trump, appeared before it

June 2023: The Justice Department recently informs Donald Trump's legal team that he is a target in a federal investigation into the possible mishandling of classified documents

June 8, 2023: Trump announces in a post on his Truth Social platform that he's been indicted for mishandling of classified documents and summoned to appear before a federal judge in Miami
Kohl's has been forced to heavily discount its Pride merchandise after only a week of the monthly celebration, as Target continues to face the fallout from its own decision to promote Pride products.

The Wisconsin- based retailer, which has more than 1,100 stores across 49 states, is now discounting its Pride collection both online and in stores.

A navy blue t-shirt with the rainbow colors of the LGBTQ flag and the word 'pride' is now selling at a 60 percent discount, for $4.80.

Much of the Pride collection at a Long Island store visited by DailyMail.com was in the 50 percent discount selection.

A t-shirt being sold at Kohl's on Thursday was offered at a 60 percent discount, eight days into the Pride month celebrations

Much of the merchandise for Pride was found in the 50 percent discount section

A pack of baby bibs was being sold online at a 50 percent discount

A baby 'Pride Bodysuit Set' was also half price, at $9.99

And online, much of the collection was also being sold at half the original price - tote bags, table runners, baby bibs and pajamas.

A two-pack of baby bibs are now $11, down from $22.

'Celebrate the joy that comes from living authentically and unapologetically during Pride month and all year long with this Bioworld Pride Baby Bib 2-pk,' the website states.

A babygro with a woman carrying a Pride flag is $9.99, down from $19.99.

Kohl's, asked by DailyMail.com whether this meant the merchandise was not selling, has not commented.

However, the discounting comes after Target lost over $4 billion in market value in just under three weeks after it began selling its Pride collection, which included offering a 'tuck friendly' female swimwear line for transgender women.

Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary said the 'unprecedented' decline shows the company's failure to prioritize its investors over appeasing modern woke standards, including listening to diversity officers instead of business savvy executives.

'On one hand, companies want to show their support of diversity in all the mandates that society is discussing openly,' he told Fox News.

'On the other hand, the job of a business - particularly from the perspective of an investor, and those that are retired, for example, that own the S&P 500 or own Target stock  are concerned that maybe they're losing their way in terms of what the prime objective is: your customers, your employees, and your shareholders.'

Shark Tank star Kevin O'Leary (right) said the stunning collapse of Target should serve as a warning to other woke CEOs

O'Leary's remarks come as several major US corporations, including Target, Adidas and Bud Light, face significant backlash to woke advertising campaigns.

The Shark Tank investor warned that continued efforts to push ideological marketing on customers will see more companies suffer financially.

'The stunning collapse of Target market cap is almost unprecedented for its own stock in 20 years, and how this happened is being scrutinized by lots of other boards right now,' he said.

'If you start to get too distant or too far away from the primary mandate, the market has proven itself to really, really punish you.

'And it's woken up all kinds of boards.'

O'Leary said the outrage by customers over recent controversies, such as Bud Light's disastrous campaign with trans star Dylan Mulvaney, is heightened by social media.

'This is displaying the power of something most board of directors never thought about - social media,' he said.

'When you can't control the message anymore through social media, which is clearly obvious, you better figure out what message you're putting out before it ever gets out there.

'We almost need a new committee on boards. We have committees for risk, compensation, we've got compliance committees.

'We need a communications and media committee to advise the rest of the board who don't even have Twitter accounts or don't have Facebook or don't use LinkedIn.'

Target sparked backlash after releasing its LGBT Pride month product selection

He said social media-illiterate executives continue to fail to understand the 'risks inherent' in pushing such advertising.

However, while conceding roles such as diversity officers are here to stay, O'Leary insisted that businesses need to return to placing their bottom lines at the top of their priorities.

'I don't think you're going to find a lot of people saying, "Oh, let's not have diversity officers". I think that boat sailed,' he said.

'But what they do with their budgets now really matters and the risks they're putting the company into because of the power of uncontrolled social media is obviously measurable.

'When you lose $11 billion of market cap, there're a lot of unhappy cowboys out there. They're called your investors.'

This included the public humiliation of once-leading beer brand Bud Light, which has faced financial ruin in the wake of its partnership with Mulvaney.

'It took decades to create the American beer, and exactly 32 hours to destroy it,' he added.

The female swimsuit collection included a label which advertises the 'tuck-friendly construction' and 'extra crotch' coverage

Since partnering with Mulvaney, Bud Light's parent company Anheuser-Busch has faced boycotts and declining sales

The fallout from Anheuser Busch decision to collaborate with Mulvaney saw the company lose an astonishing $27 billion in just months.

And the knock-on effect was felt into Memorial Day weekend, when shoppers shared videos of unwanted cases of Bud Light sitting untouched on shelves nationwide.

The boycott has reportedly spread to independent wholesalers, who have seen their sales tank by up to $2,000-a-month as customers steer clear of the brand.
Eugene McCarraher at The Hedgehog Review:

[W]ith the victories of science, technology, and capitalism, we discovered that the cosmos of enchantment was unreal, or at best, utterly unverifiable; we cast most of the spirits into oblivion, and made room for their withered but venerable survivors in our chambers of private belief. Among the North Atlantic intelligentsia, at least, this story in some form is so widely hegemonic that even religious intellectuals accept it. For instance, in A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylora practicing Catholicaffirms, albeit in his own peculiar way, the consensus of disenchantment. In the pre-modern epoch of enchantment, Taylor explains, the boundary that separated our world from the sacred was porous and indistinct; traffic between the two spheres was frequent, if not always desired or friendly. Disenchantment began with the churchs rationalization of doctrine and the growing awareness that Christianity was not the worlds only religion. Now, having left the enchanted universe behind, we disenchanted dwell within the moral and ontological parameters of an immanent frame: the world as apprehended through reason and science, bereft of immaterial and unquantifiable forces, structured by the immutable laws of nature and the contingent traditions of human societies.

more here.
San Francisco has been forced to erect metal barricades outside a McDonald's after vagrants and illegal vendors crowded the sidewalk outside - as the city continues to grapple with its crime and homelessness crises.

Local police have put what they've termed 'event fencing' around the perimeter of the Mickey D's next to a stop on the city's BART transit line at 24th Street.

The barricades have been in place since at least Sunday to try and force illegal street vending bazaars to stop gathering in the area.

The BART station itself has had fences put up for the past ten months as part of a city-led attempt to get rid of the illegal vendors - but instead they pitched themselves right across the street outside the McDonald's.

A door to the fast food giant with a sign saying 'come on in' has been left unusable thanks to the new blockades.

San Francisco continues to try and grapple with its crime and homelessness crises , this time going so far as to barricade a local McDonald's to keep vagrants and vendors away

24th Street has a new problem not Bart no more now it's a McDonald's pic.twitter.com/4pnP25qLEO  Rafael guttierez (@Rafaelguttiere1) September 16, 2022

The original fencing around the BART station did not fare well: protesters ripped it down around a month after it was installed, according to SFist. The whole ordeal led to a licensing system and larger police presence at the station.

In a statement, San Francisco police said the new barriers were put outside the fast food chain to make it easier to walk through the neighborhood.

'The event fencing placed in the area of 24th and Mission Streets was done so in collaboration with local business, residents, and community stakeholders to help facilitate the flow of foot traffic in the neighborhood while ensuring ADA compliance.'

They did not say how long the barriers would remain standing.

DailyMail.com has reached out to McDonald's for comment.

San Francisco has had myriad troubles with homelessness and crime since the beginning of the pandemic, leading to a mass desertion of the city.

Researchers tracked smartphone use across 63 cities and found that San Francisco, which is battling waves of crime and homeless addicts on its streets, only has 32 percent of the activity that was recorded before the pandemic.

A disturbing report showed 95 retailers downtown - more than half the total - have closed since the start of the COVID pandemic.

Local police have put what they've termed 'event fencing' around the perimeter of the Mickey D's next to a stop on the city's BART transit line at 24th Street

In a statement, San Francisco police said that this was done in partnership with those in the area to make it easier to move around

The location is often the site of both homeless people and illegal vendors

At least one more is set to, with Williams-Sonoma announcing they'll shut down in 2024.

Out of 203 retailers open in 2019 in the city's Union Square area, just 107 are still operating, a drop of 47 percent in just a few pandemic-ravaged years.

Among the heavy hitters, Brooks Brothers, Ray Ban, Christian Louboutin, Lululemon and Marmot have all packed it in.

Another 12 new retailers have opened in the area since the pandemic began in 2020 but already two have them have either closed or plan to shut down.

San Francisco's decline has been spotlighted once again by a sharp uptick in overdose deaths among the city's homeless population.

The city saw a staggering 41 percent surge in the number of drug-related deaths in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same time last year, as fentanyl ravaged the city's homeless population.

The Californian coastal hub saw 200 people die due to overdoses between January and March, compared to 142 deaths in 2022, according to recent data from the city's medical examiner.

That amounts to one overdose death every 10 hours in a city that has seen its reputation as a coastal gem ravaged by worsening crime, drugs, and, homelessness rates, even as it remains home to tech billionaires.

The overdose victims were disproportionately black and Latino men, and frequently based in the Tenderloin area, a gritty downtown neighborhood, where a drug treatment center was shuttered in December.

San Francisco saw a staggering 41 percent surge in the number of drug-related deaths in the first quarter of 2023

Addicts openly smoke drugs on the sidewalk of the Tenderloin area of San Francisco, where overdose deaths have rocketed upwards in recent months

Those living on the streets were particularly hard hit  with the number of homeless people dying from drug overdoses doubling.

Fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid that's frequently trafficked from Mexico and can kill in even tiny quantities, was detected in 159 of the deaths.

The drug is 50-100 times stronger than morphine.

It is cheap, packs down small, is relatively easy to smuggle into the US, and is mixed into pills that then claim the lives of users, who are often unaware they are taking something so powerful.

Methamphetamine and cocaine were also present, although to a lesser extent.

The sharp increase in deaths started in December and continued into a record-breaking January.

This followed the shuttering of the Tenderloin Center, where addicts were allowed to use drugs and where the overdose reversal treatment, Narcan, was available for those who had taken too much.
Charging rates have fallen by two thirds since 2014 while crime has risen

Police need to get back to catching criminals instead of worrying about 'causes' as public trust is 'hanging by a thread', the Chief Inspector of Constabulary said in a hard-hitting report.

In his first annual analysis into the state of policing since taking the job, Andy Cooke said officers 'aren't there to champion social change or take sides'.

He warned forces have been 'dragged into political debates' and distracted by pursuing 'non-crime hate incidents'. The former Merseyside Chief Constable believes 'the police service has lost its discipline' over the last decade.

And he called yesterday for the return of 'immaculately polished boots, ties or cravats and custodian helmets' as the public need to see professionalism if they are to have confidence in officers.

'If the police want to be seen as professional, they need to look professional. Forces should make sure the right standards of appearance, as well as behaviour, are maintained,' he said.

Police need to get back to catching criminals instead of worrying about 'causes', a watchdog has warned (file image)

'If they can't get the standards of their appearance right, it raises wider questions about their standards.'

The Chief Inspector suggested the police service is at 'a historic turning point  and there is a limited window of opportunity to repair public trust'. 'The fundamental principle of policing by consent, upon which the service is built, is at risk,' he said. 'Public confidence hangs by a thread.'

Mr Cooke highlighted the collapse in charging rates which have dropped by two thirds since 2014, while police-recorded crime rose last year to the highest level since records began. 'Fewer criminals are being caught,' he said.

'The police aren't always focusing on the issues that matter most to the public, and charge rates are far too low. Too often, people offend with apparent impunity, and the police aren't targeting them consistently.' He added: 'The police are facing rising demand from the public and, quite simply, they aren't keeping up. At best, people can be left dissatisfied; at worst, people can be left at risk.'

Mr Cooke described how victims face a 'postcode lottery' and 'in too many cases, lose confidence in the criminal justice system and withdraw from the process entirely.'

He called for 'definitive action', saying chief constables won't fix things by 'issuing glossy strategies, mission statements, visions, concordats or the like'.

'The police must uphold the law as it is written. They aren't there to champion social change or take sides. This includes a requirement to preserve all rights, including the right to free speech,' he said. Mr Cooke is now calling for new legal powers for inspectors so they can order failing forces to improve when there are serious concerns.

Yesterday he urged Home Secretary Suella Braverman to give inspectors a say on the vetting and recruitment of chief officers and the ability to scrutinise the work of police and crime commissioners. Mr Cooke argues that in too many instances, chief constables are ignoring recommendations from the watchdog, but the new powers would mean forces would be legally required to comply.

In his first annual analysis into the state of policing since taking the job, Andy Cooke (pictured) said officers 'aren't there to champion social change or take sides'

He insisted policing was not 'broken beyond repair', but concluded: 'It needs to reset its compass and do so quickly; the police can and must do better.' In a rare positive note, the chief inspector praised forces for their commitment to attend every home burglary, which the Daily Mail revealed yesterday.

Andy Marsh, head of the College of Policing, said: 'The report illustrates the need for policing to produce action not words. Public trust has been eroded, and it can only be re-established by a service which focuses on catching criminals and fighting crime.'

National Police Chiefs' Council chairman Gavin Stephens, added: 'Policing must continue to do more to earn back the trust and confidence of the public.'
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been given a shock grilling over the Brittany Higgins row in a bruising interview with David Koch on the host's final day on Seven's Sunrise.

The PM appeared in person on the show to bid the TV veteran farewell but was instead given a punishing interrogation over the Higgins affair and the role of his finance minister Katy Gallagher.

'Hey Kochie, this is like a eulogy for you but youre still here, whats going on?'

But Koch was not in the mood for smalltalk, and hit Albanese with a series of tough questions.

'We've got to cover the news of the day,' said Koch moments after the PM sat down at the hosts' desk.

'Indeed,' replied the PM before Koch led straight into the blunt: 'Did your colleague mislead Parliament?'

'No,' snapped the PM as Koch followed up: 'From that vision it looks like she clearly did.'

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been grilled over the Brittany Higgins row in a bruising interview with David Koch on the host's final day on Seven's Sunrise

New leaked text messages between Brittany Higgins and her fiance David Sharaz (pictured together) appear to suggest that Anthony Albanese and other Labor heavyweights had 'direct contact' with the couple as part of a plot to publicise her alleged sexual assault inside Parliament House

Four days before Ms Higgins' allegations went public Mr Sharaz wrote of how Senator Gallagher (pictured) was 'really invested' in the saga

'No, it did not,' the PM fired back. 'Take a step back, Kochie.

'What is being suggested here by Peter Dutton - you had allegations by a Liberal staffer that another Liberal staffer had a sexual assault in a Liberal minister's office and, somehow, Katy Gallagher had some responsibility for what was going on here?

'This is bizarre.'

The tense exchange followed claims senator Gallagher helped 'weaponise' Ms Higgins' rape allegations to use against then-PM Scott Morrison.

Ms Gallagher told the Senate 'no-one had prior knowledge' of the accusations against Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann until they were made public.

But new texts allegedly show she was aware of Ms Higgins' rape accusations at least four days before her interview with Lisa Wilkinson on The Project was broadcast in February 2021.

Texts messages between Ms Higgins and Mr Sharaz said the senator was 'really invested' in Ms Higgins' claims four days before the shock allegations aired.

Daily Mail Australia revealed Mr Sharaz boasted of his friendship with the Labor senator and planned to brief her to ask questions in Parliament.

But the PM backed the senator and insisted: 'She's a great minister. She's a great finance minister and she's a great minister for the status of women.'

He dismissed concerns senator Gallagher was linked to Ms Higgins' multi-million dollar compensation deal for her treatment in Parliament after she made her rape allegations.

Ms Higgins lodged a claim for $3million and the case was settled on the first day of mediation without even hearing from key witnesses, including Ms Higgins' former bosses, ex-ministers Linda Reynolds and Michaelia Cash.

The PM stressed: 'Katy Gallagher had no involvement in that whatsoever.'

But Koch pressed the PM and said: 'The optics for the Australian public is that it is a serious charge. It's a serious allegation.'

Mr Albanese agreed but added: 'The idea that there's this conspiracy... well, that's nonsense. That's nonsense.

He added: 'You have these front page stories because of text messages between two partners. Let's be very clear here. One was a Liberal staffer.

'I've been questioned over it. I met with Brittany Higgins on the same day that she met with Scott Morrison.

'Before then I had never met her and that is the only conversation I've ever had with her.'

Explosive texts between Ms Higgins and Mr Sharaz revealed the pair plotted how they would 'f*** over' the then-PM Scott Morrison.

'Just wait,' Ms Higgins messaged Mr Sharaz. 'We've got him.' Mr Sharaz replied: 'I still hate the c***.'

But Mr Albanese said Mr Morrison had led the nation's concern over the allegations and ordered the Gaetjens Report into the incident which has still to have its findings revealed.

'There was a story about allegations of a sexual assault by one Liberal staff member against another Liberal staff member in a Liberal Minister's office, metres from the Prime Minister's Office,' said Mr Albanese.

'For Peter Dutton to talk about transparency frankly is quite farcical here. If you want to be transparent, he needs to release the report that we still have never seen.'

He added: 'The prime minister made comments on it the next day, speaking about a discussion that he had with with [his wife] Jenny and about how he felt directly about it.

'You then had you then had the Prime Minister establish himself an inquiry into what his office knew, and when a report that we have never seen, and the idea that questions wouldn't be asked.

'This was the lead story on this show, on every show, on every newspaper and of course, we asked questions there.'

Anthony Albanese said Scott Morrison had led the nation's concern over the allegations and ordered the Gaertjens Report into the incident which has still to have its findings revealed

Ms Gallagher told the Senate 'no-one had prior knowledge' of the accusations against Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann (pictured) until they were made public

Earlier deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley called for senator Gallagher to front a press conference to answer questions about her knowledge of Ms Higgins' accusations ahead of them being broadcast.

He added: 'At that time, it was Scott Morrison who stood up and made a statement to Parliament.

'The only time in all the time I've been in Parliament I can recall a prime minister without notice making a statement at the beginning of question time.'

The gruelling ambush ended on a softer note with the PM congratulating Koch on his 'amazing career' and added: 'I certainly personally wish you well.'

'If anyone - a politician or a journalist - sought to politically profit from a rape allegation, then that is just morally bankrupt,' she told Sunrise host Natalie Barr.

'There are serious questions here. Questions of character for Anthony Albanese and his leadership.

'There are two issues here - whether she knew about these allegations before they came out in the interview.

'And then whether she has a conflict of interest about the payment given to Brittany Higgins.

'It's a multimillion dollar payout and there are questions to be asked and answered there, but she hasn't answered those questions... she's in hiding.'

Labor education minister Jason Clare (pictured) insisted senator Gallagher was a 'person of integrity' and said she had answered the questions in an ABC interview earlier in the week

Labor education minister Jason Clare insisted senator Gallagher was a 'person of integrity' and said she had answered the questions in an ABC interview earlier in the week.

'If the Liberal Party want to refer this to the anti-corruption commission, then fill your boots,' he added.

'Remember what this is about - it's an allegation that a person was raped in Parliament House 50 metres from the Prime Minister's Office.

'That led to an inquiry that Kate Jenkins did, that exposed the fact that 40 per cent of women in the building had been sexually harassed.

'I know we're getting wound around the axle here about the politics of all of this, please don't forget the people and the work that we've all still got to do.

'That's not finished yet about making sure it's a safe place to work.'
The brother of an ER doctor and crypto millionaire discovered dead in a lake has said that police are treating the death as a homicide, and that he had planned to visit one of his daughters just days after he disappeared.

Dr John Forsyth, 49, was reported missing on May 21 when he had failed to show up for his 7pm shift at the Mercy Hospital in Cassville, Missouri.

His body was found nine days later in a lake in Arkansas, with police confirming he had been shot.

Speaking to DailyMail.com, his brother Richard said that they had dinner just days before he disappeared and said his behavior prior to his death were not 'the actions of a person who kills himself.'

Forsyth is pictured here with his pregnant fiance Laura Barnett who in a social media post said she was 'heart broken' over his disappearance

His brother Richard told DailyMail.com that his behavior prior to his death were not 'the actions of a person who kills himself.'

His body was found near the bank across from the Lost Bridge South area of Beaver Lake, which is about 20 miles south of Cassville, police said

He said: 'On May 17, which was four days before my brother went missing, he and I had a three hour dinner. We had, I suppose in retrospect, a very long goodbye.

It was at that dinner that he told me about [his fiancee] Laura, and that he was very happy to have found her and they were very much in love. And I congratulated him.

He seems to have really found something that made them happy. And I told him, I was just really glad about that. And he was very optimistic about the future

On the Monday after his disappearance, he had a plane ticket scheduled to fly out to see one of his daughters, he hasn't seen in a while to reconnect with a friend.

They had definite plans, he and I had plans. I know what kind of a person he was, he was driven, passionate. These are not the actions of a person who kills himself. I do not believe this was a suicide.

Richard also told DailyMail.com that homicide detectives have been brought in to investigate the case.

He continued: 'The police are not sharing much, but the homicide detectives who are working on this case, are still working on this case, as a homicide.

And this is post autopsy. That's not the police telling me something definitive, but you don't need a lot to connect those dots.'

Forsyth was last seen on surveillance footage walking towards an RV he kept in the car park at the hospital at around 7am and had texted his fiance to tell her he would see her later.

In an eerie new image his stethoscope can be seen dangling around the rear-view mirror of his Infiniti sedan

Shortly after he was reported missing, authorities located his black sedan abandoned at the Cassville Aquatic Park in the Ozarks

An expansive 90-acre search was carried out by the Cassville Police Department soon after, which failed to turn up any results until a kayaker found his body last month

Forsyth vanished on May 21 after leaving Mercy Hospital, Missouri, just ten days after he is said to have divorced his wife

Family members were immediately alarmed at his disappearance after it emerged he had left his wallet, passport, five cellphones, laptop and keys inside his unlocked RV and car.

At the time of his death many family members did not know Forsyth was engaged to Laura Barnett, 39.

Many were kept in the dark about his relationship with Barnett, who is eight months pregnant, with some only finding out that she existed after the tragedy.

It is not known how the couple met but a LinkedIn profile belonging to Barnett shows she worked as an ER nurse practitioner at the same hospital.

She has not commented since he found dead, with family members telling DailyMail.com she is 'devastated' by his death.

Barnett had not publicly posted any images of the couple together until after he vanished, with the pair getting engaged just three days before he was last seen alive.

Richard told Dailymail.com: 'We're letting her speak about that when she's ready, I can say that she's having a very hard time as anyone would surmise, which was very, very challenging for her.'

Forsyth is pictured here his pregnant fiancee Laura Barnett who he told his brother Richard was the 'love of his life'

His brother Richard told DailyMail.com she was the 'love of his life', and other family members said he divorced his wife officially on May 11.

Authorities located his black Infiniti sedan abandoned at the Cassville Aquatic Park in the Ozarks. The car keys were inside, along with Forsyth's wallet, passport and briefcase.

An expansive 90-acre search was carried out by the Cassville Police Department soon after, which failed to turn up any results until a kayaker found his body last month.

The body was found near the bank across from the Lost Bridge South area of Beaver Lake, which is about 20 miles south of Cassville.

New pictures show the search efforts of officers across the lake where his body was found, as a stethoscope hung eerily from the rear-view mirror of his car.

Sheriff's Divers search Beaver Lake, Arkansas, for clues in the suspected murder of Forsyth

The body was found near the bank across from the Lost Bridge South area of Beaver Lake , which is about 20 miles south of Cassville

It has since been claimed that the doctor had as many as five cell phones in his black vehicle, with his family saying they knew of at least two - one each for his personal and work life.

In a bizarre revelation, Richard previously revealed that his brother had been kidnapped and threatened by unidentified assailants in February 2022.

Richard, who founded the crypto firm OnFo with his brother, said that despite the terrifying ordeal, John never filed a police report.

He said he first learned about the kidnapping through a mutual friend, who only came forward to describe the incident to the family after John went missing in mysterious circumstances.

Pictured: Dr Forsyth's family; second on the left Dixie Andelin Forsyth (mother) and beside her Robert Duane Forsyth (father), Richard Forsyth (brother) is center, surrounded by his sisters

The brother said he believed the kidnapping was 'crypto related' but that he did not know anything else about the perpetrators from the account of the mutual friend, who wished to remain anonymous due to ongoing safety concerns.

Richard cautioned that there was no evidence yet linking the 2022 incident with John's death, but added: 'It stands out very stark in the tableaux of facts that have emerged about the case.'

'It was cold. He was zip-tied. He was made to feel very unsafe and taken on a car ride with some people to a bridge and was threatened.

'He did not file a police report because he believed he was in continued danger.'

The family say that they would rather be 'left in the dark' during the police investigation if it means they will get 'justice' for the doctor.
An Asian-American teenager who could help end affirmative action has been pictured for the first time, as he spoke out against racist discrimination he says he suffered.

Jon Wang, 18, got a 1590 on his SAT and a 4.65 high school grade point average but was rejected by six top schools.

He is one of the plaintiffs in a Supreme Court case seeking to end the practice over claims it unfairly discriminates against high-performing Asian Americans.

In January, the high court said it will take up lawsuits from anti-affirmative action group Students For Fair Admission claiming that Harvard University, a private institution, and the University of North Carolina, a state school, discriminate against Asian American applicants.

The suits claim that affirmative action - policies meant to favor members of historically disadvantaged groups - gives an edge to African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans over Asian students.

A decision against the schools could mean the end of that practice and disregard race altogether in college admissions. Wang has sued a public and private college in the hopes of having the practice struck down at all universities nationwide.

He said despite his terrific scores - and a perfect score on his math SAT - he was rejected by Harvard, as well as MIT, CalTech, Princeton, Carnegie-Mellon and UC Berkeley.

Wang, who has come forward to speak for the first time alleges he was warned in advance that it's 'gospel' that it's 'tougher to get in, especially as an Asian American' by friends and guidance counselors.

Jon Wang (pictured), 18, is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Harvard and said despite his terrific scores - and a perfect score on his math SAT - he was rejected by Harvard, as well as MIT, CalTech, Princeton, Carnegie-Mellon and UC Berkeley

Wang's parents are both immigrants from China and said he felt pressure about advocating for himself publicly.

'I was scared of getting backlash on social media for it,' Wang told Fox News. 'For fighting for what I think is a really important issue.'

Students for Fair Admissions, Wang said, were willing to be honest with him about his chances and about how he was being discriminated against.

'I gave them my test scores, and then they must've ran the model on that [they] told me I had a 20 percent chance of getting accepted to Harvard as an Asian American and a 95 percent chance as an African American,' he said.

Wang now attends Georgia Tech and has no worries with potential backlash for his future career.

'I feel like, if I'm looking back, 10 or 20 years from now, if I didn't do it [speak up], I'd be pretty upset with myself,' said Wang.

The Supreme Court's decision to take up the case was praised by Republicans in Congress but criticized by others who say abolishing affirmative action is removing a guardrail against inequality.

Lower courts had previously rejected the challenges to admissions practices, citing more than 40 years of Supreme Court rulings that allow colleges and universities to consider race in admissions decisions in a bid to admit more students from underrepresented backgrounds. But the colleges and universities must do so in a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity.

In January, the high court said it will take up lawsuits from anti-affirmative action group Students For Fair Admission claiming that Harvard University, a private institution, and the University of North Carolina, a state school, discriminate against Asian American applicants

The Supreme Court's decision to take up the case was praised by Republicans in Congress but criticized by others who say abolishing affirmative action is removing a guardrail against inequality

The Supreme Court is adding affirmative action to an already politically-charged docket of cases

The last time the issue came before the court was in 2016, when justices ruled in favor of the University of Texas and its admissions program in a 4-3 decision. That case had been brought by a white woman.

Anti-affirmative action group accuses Harvard of having an 'Asian penalty' in its admissions process The case against the Massachusetts Ivy League school's admissions practices was brought in 2014 by Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA) President Richard Blum. Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College was filed on behalf of a group of anonymous Asian American students who had been rejected from the institution. They accused Harvard of engaging in 'racial balancing' that unfairly limits the number of Asian American students admitted, citing an alleged increase in applications from that group while the proportion admitted remained the same. Plaintiffs argued that Asian Americans were held to a higher standard in admissions, amounting to an 'Asian penalty,' while the school gave preference to black and Hispanic students with poorer grades. They claim it goes against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans racial discrimination at institutions and programs receiving federal dollars. Edward Blum, who founded the anti-affirmative action group Students for Fair Admissions, lost his bid to overturn UNC's admissions policy after losing a similar case brought against Harvard University. But multiple Supreme Court decisions have allowed colleges to consider race as long as it is 'narrowly tailored' to promote diversity and is past of a holistic approach. Racial quotas are unconstitutional, the high court has ruled. A 2013 internal report at Harvard found that if the school weighed applicants on academics alone, 43 per ent of the admitted class would be Asian American, while in reality, it was 19 percent. But Harvard said the report was only meant to be 'exploratory' and was based on incomplete data. It's denied any discrimination and said in close calls between students, some underrepresented students may get a 'tip' in their favor, but their race is never counted against them. The school also dismissed SFFA as political group with no interest in helping Asian Americans. In November 2020, a US Appeals Court in Boston agreed with Harvard that its policies are in-line with past precedent allowing race as one of many factors that would bolster but not detract from a student. Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch said Harvard's use of race was not 'impermissibly extensive' but rather 'meaningful,' because it prevented losses in diversity. 'Harvard's race-conscious admissions program ensures that Harvard can retain the benefits of diversity it has already achieved,' she said. Advertisement

But the court has undergone a massive shake-up since then that's seen three conservative justices appointed to the bench by Donald Trump.

Two members of 2016's four-justice majority are gone from the court: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, and Justice Anthony Kennedy retired in 2018.

The three dissenters in the case, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, remain on the court.

Roberts, who's been known to side with the liberal justices on occasion as a moderating influence on the court, has also criticized using race as a major factor in public programs.

'It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,' he once wrote.

GOP Senator Tom Cotton called on the high court to end what he calls Ivy Leagues' 'discrimination' against Asian American students.

'Schools like Yale and Harvard use affirmative action to systemically discriminate against Asian American applicants. The Court should strike down these unconstitutional policies,' Cotton wrote on Twitter Monday.

His fellow Republican lawmaker, Rep. Michelle Steel of California, praised the justices for deciding to take up the case.

'This is big news! We need to protect the #AAPI community from discrimination in the halls of our schools and universities,' Steel also posted on the platform.

But the decision wasn't universally lauded by the GOP. Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, said getting rid of affirmative action would worsen inequality at America's top institutions.

'If the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in private universities without dealing with the faculty brat problem and rich alumni who lobby their kids in, we might was well just call the universities restricted country clubs (which they already are for most part anyway),' Painter wrote on Twitter.

The court already has heard arguments in cases that could expand gun rights and religious rights and also roll back abortion rights in a direct challenge to the Roe v. Wade ruling from 1973.

The affirmative action case probably will be argued in the fall.

Both suits were filed by Students for Fair Admissions, a Virginia-based group run by Edward Blum. He has worked for years to rid college admissions of racial considerations, and the court's new lineup breathed new life into his project.

The group is calling on the court to overturn its 2003 ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld the University of Michigan's law school admissions program.

The Biden administration had urged the justices to stay away from the issue, writing in the Harvard case that the challenges 'cannot justify that extraordinary step' of overruling the 2003 decision.

Harvard President Lawrence Bacow said that the Ivy League institution does not discriminate and vowed to continue defending its admissions plan.

'Considering race as one factor among many in admissions decisions produces a more diverse student body which strengthens the learning environment for all,' Bacow said in a statement.

Blum voiced hope that the high court will order an end to taking account of race in college admissions.

'Harvard and the University of North Carolina have racially gerrymandered their freshman classes in order to achieve prescribed racial quotas,' Blum said in a statement.

The Supreme Court has weighed in on college admissions several times over more than 40 years. The current dispute harks back to its first big affirmative action case in 1978, when Justice Lewis Powell set out the rationale for taking account of race even as the court barred the use of racial quotas in admissions.

Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton called affirmative action 'unconstitutional' on Monday

GOP Rep. Michelle Steel, who is Korean American, lauded the court's decision to take up the case

But former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter was concerned that removing the barriers of affirmative action would let inequality at America's top institutions spiral out of control

The University of North Carolina did not discriminate against white and Asian-American applicants by using its 'holistic approach' to race-based admissions, a federal judge ruled in October

In the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Powell approvingly cited Harvard as 'an illuminating example' of a college that takes 'race into account in achieving the educational diversity valued by the First Amendment.'

Twenty-five years later, Justice Sandra Day OConnor likewise invoked the Harvard plan in her opinion in the Michigan law school case.

Now the Harvard program is under fire from opponents of race-based affirmative action.

Harvard flatly denies that it discriminates against Asian American applicants and says its consideration of race is limited, pointing out that lower courts agreed with the university.

In 2020, the federal appeals court in Boston ruled that Harvard looked at race in a limited way in line with Supreme Court precedents.

Harvard, whose freshman class is roughly one-quarter Asian American, 16 percent black and 13 percent Hispanic, denies having discriminatory admissions practices

Harvard's freshman class is roughly one-quarter Asian American, 16 percent black and 13 percent Hispanic, Harvard says on its website.

'If Harvard were to abandon race-conscious admissions, African-American and Hispanic representation would decline by nearly half,' the school told the court in urging it to stay out of the case.

The Trump administration had backed Blum's case against Harvard and filed its own lawsuit alleging discrimination against Asian American and white people at Yale University. The Biden administration dropped the Yale suit.

North Carolina's flagship public university prevailed in a federal district court in October. U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs ruled that the school's program was intended to produce a diverse student body and had shown the benefits of doing so.

Biggs said in her decision that UNC did not discriminate against white and Asian American students with its 'holistic' admissions process.

Demonstrators against Harvard University's admission process hold signs and American flags while gathering during a protest at Copley Square in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., on Sunday, October 14, 2018

Ignoring race as a factor, Biggs said, 'misses important context to include obscuring racial barriers and obstacles that have been faced, overcome and are yet to be overcome.'

The court accepted the North Carolina case for review even though it has not been heard by a federal appeals court. Blum filed a Supreme Court appeal with the hope that it would be bundled with the Harvard case so that the justices could rule on public and private colleges at the same time.

In the case at Harvard, the plaintiffs argued that Asian Americans were held to a higher standard in admissions at the Ivy League, amounting to an 'Asian penalty.'

The claimed the school gave preference to black and Hispanic students with poorer grades.

A 2013 internal report at Harvard found that if the school weighed applicants on academics alone, 43 percent of the admitted class would be Asian American, while in reality, it was 19 percent.

But Harvard said the report was only meant to be 'exploratory' and was based on incomplete data.
An Australia Post customer has shared their immense frustration as they track a package sent to a client on a 30,000km loop around the nation's east coast.

The package was received by Australia Post on the afternoon of March 24 in Victoria and arrived in Brisbane to be processed on March 26.

However, tracking details shared to social media show the package being sent back to Melbourne just a day after arriving in Brisbane, where it would enter an endless loop of being sent between the cities.

The image posted to Reddit shows 18 trips between the two cities, including a stopover in Parkes in Central NSW, between March 24 and June 5.

'Thanks Australia Post, my parcel's now more well travelled than I am,' the customer wrote.

An Australian has been left watching a package take a maddening loop for over a month as it was sent to and from Brisbane and Melbourne between March 24 and June 5 (stock image)

The customer revealed in a comment under the Reddit Post that the delivery was intended for a client of theirs, who has since demanded a refund because of the delay.

'It's not even missing. They know exactly where it is, it's in Sunshine West getting ready to repeat the first stretch of the infinite Melbourne-Brisbane relay,' the frustrated customer wrote.

'I've already lost the money from it not getting delivered  The (customer) demanded a refund.'

Other users recounted similar stories as they theorised as to why the package continues to bounce between facilities.

'This happened to one of my parcels, apparently the automatic scanner can confuse the 'from' and 'to' addresses and it goes around in circles,' one user wrote.

'The reason this happens is the automated sorting equipment. It reads the sender as the recipient and directs the package back to where it came from,' a second wrote.

'AP is supposed to detect a stuck package like this and get a human to pull it out for manual processing but it doesn't always happen, in such a case you need to lodge an enquiry to force a human to intercept it.'

A person claiming to be a former employee of Australia Post even chimed in, saying: '(it's) likely a problem with the address'.

'The receiving facility system isn't recognising the address in its locality but somehow the sending facility is recognising it should be going to the receiving facility,' they wrote.

'It's all automated, there's no person sending it back and forth.'

The package's tracking data (pictured) was posted online and shows 18 individual trips between Brisbane and Melbourne facilities with one stopover in Parkes, in central NSW

While unable to track down the package without its tracking number, Australia Post urge customers to get in contact if there is an issue with their delivery.

In a statement to Daily Mail Australia, the national carrier said: 'Australia Post takes pride in its delivery record, sincerely apologises if something has gone wrong in this case, and encourages customers to get in touch if they feel there are issues with their delivery.

'Customers do play an important part in helping their parcels move through our network, first and foremost by making sure addresses are written clearly with clear distinction between delivery and sender addresses.

'If using recycled packaging, it's extremely important to remove any old barcodes or labels, and to secure loose tape.

'We also recommend customers wanting to wrap their parcels in plastic to check with their local post office, since certain types of plastic wrap can cause issues with our scanners.

'We encourage any customers experiencing these kinds of issues to get in touch with us directly by calling 13 POST (13 7678).'
Qantas have scrapped some of the strict rules of what its employees wear in the airline's largest overhaul of dress policy in 10 years.

Uniformed female staff at Qantas and Jetstar can opt to go without makeup and wear flat shoes instead of heels - while male employees can grow longer hair.

It comes after Qantas undertook an extensive review into its uniform policy after facing pressure from the Australian Services Union.

The ASU urged the airline last year to dump its rules compelling female workers to wear make-up, heels and hosiery.

The current uniform worn by airport staff, flight attendants and pilots will not be changed but the designated 'male and female' uniform set names will be scrapped.

The changes to Qantas dress code comes after the airline undertook an extensive review into its uniform policy after facing pressure from the Australian Services Union

In its latest move Qantas has allowed its female workers to wear flats instead of heels and they also won't be required to wear make-up (pictured, a stock photo)

They will instead be called uniform 'capsules' which specify which pieces can be worn together, along with grooming and make up requirements.

In its latest move Qantas has allowed its female workers to wear flats instead of heels and they also won't be required to wear make-up.

Other rules to be relaxed include letting staff wear colourful nail polish, diamond earrings, big watches and even Fitbits while on duty.

Men and women can also grow their hair long if they keep it neatly in a bun, ponytail or braided corn rows.

But rules still in force include staff having to cover up tattoos while stockings are still required for women when they wear a dress or skirt.

A Qantas spokesperson said the changes will make the uniforms more comfortable and practical for staff.

'Fashions change, and so have our style guidelines over the years,' the spokesperson said.

Other rules to be relaxed include letting airline staff (pictured) wear colourful nail polish, diamond earrings, big watches and even Fitbits while on duty

Until now female cabin crew were required to wear heels with a dress or skirt (pictured, a range of Qantas uniforms over the years)

The Australian Services Union urged Qantas last year to dump its rules compelling female workers to wear make-up, heels and hosiery

'We're proud of our diversity and as well as bringing our guidelines up to date, these changes will make wearing our uniform more comfortable and practical.

'Our iconic uniforms are loved around the world  and they aren't changing. Our customers will still see the same high standards of grooming and attention to detail that Qantas and Jetstar are known for.'

Its most recent cabin crew uniform with black, white, 'ruby red and fuchsia pink' colours was introduced in 2013 - and was designed by Paris-based Australian Martin Grant.

Until now female cabin staff were required to wear heels with a dress or skirt, while men could only have short hair and were forbidden to wear make up or jewelry.

All crew were also barred from sporting clear-framed glasses.
A Charles Line connecting major cities in the North of England must spearhead reforms for the region, Tory MPs will tell Rishi Sunak today.

An equivalent to the cross-London Elizabeth Line should be built to connect Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Bradford, John Stevenson, chairman of the Northern Research Group (NRG) of Conservative MPs, will tell the organisations national conference.

He will also call for a special Cabinet minister for the North with the power to invest 5billion in the region every year, and further devolution of power away from Westminster.

The Prime Minister will also be told that current housebuilding policy is skewed towards the South and more must be built in northern England.

During the speech at the conference in Doncaster, he will say: Look at London and the Elizabeth Line  it is already recognised as a huge success, perceived to benefit the whole of London, even if you do not use the line.

A Charles Line connecting major cities in the North of England must spearhead reforms for the region, Tory MPs will tell Rishi Sunak today. Pictured: A train crosses the River Irwell between Manchester and Salford

An equivalent to the cross-London Elizabeth Line (pictured) should be built to connect Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Bradford, John Stevenson says

We have a similar population in our northern city belt of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Bradford.

'Why should we not be aspiring to the Charles Line?

'A train link which properly and efficiently connects these major cities in exactly the same way.

Former Tory party chairman Jake Berry will also urge Mr Sunak to move away from the broken model of Blobonomics by returning power to the North and avoiding reliance on civil servants.

The NRG wants the plans put in the next Tory manifesto.
Former President Donald Trump has been sensationally indicted on a slew of federal charges including obstruction and a violation of the Espionage Act over the classified documents he took from Mar-a-Lago.

In an unprecedented move, the Department of Justice has hit him with seven counts and has made him the first former president to face federal charges.

A furious Trump raged at the 'corrupt Biden Administration' and accused them of election interference in a video posted just minutes after the announcement from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Later he said he would 'of course' plead not guilty to the list of seven charges - including conspiracy and classified documents retention - when he appears in a Miami court next Tuesday afternoon in his second arraignment in three months.

If convicted of the shopping list of allegations, he could face a maximum of 100 years in prison.

It is the second set of charges leveled at Trump this year, plunging the country into fresh legal and political uncertainty as he campaigns to return to office and after his defeat to President Joe Biden in 2020.

It means the leading candidate in the Republican primary will have to split his time between the courtroom and the campaign trail as he tries to seal the GOP nomination.

Photos of him facing the judge in the Stormy Daniels hush money trial, which starts in March, will dominate news cycles and the classified documents case leaves him in even more legal peril.

Former President Donald Trump has been sensationally indicted on a slew of federal charges including obstruction and a violation of the Espionage Act over the classified documents he took from Mar-a-Lago

A source told DailyMail.com that Trump has been indicted on charges of possession of the classified documents and obstruction, and that all seven counts relate to those two areas.

Additionally, Trump was charged with willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and an obstruction of justice conspiracy.

Prosecutors have investigated the transfer of presidential files to his Mar-a-Lago Florida estate since last year.

THE CHARGES TRUMP FACES AND THE MAXIMUM PRISON SENTENCES Trump lawyers have confirmed he is facing seven federal charges. They have not received the formal indictment, but have been sent summonses that suggest he will face the below counts and maximum sentences. Willful retention of national defense information in violation of The Espionage Act (maximum penalty of 20 years in prison if convicted)

Conspiracy to obstruct justice (20 years)

Withholding a document or record (20 years)

Corruptly concealing a document or record (20 years)

Concealing a document in a federal investigation (20 years)

Scheme to conceal (five years)

False statements and representations (five years) Advertisement

The probe exploded into the headlines in August when the FBI searched Trump's Florida home, recovering 11,000 documents, including about 100 that were marked as classified.

For his part, Trump has repeatedly insisted he did nothing wrong and that he is the victim of a federal witch hunt.

At times the controversy has even boosted his standing in the polls and allowed him to raise money from supporters who see a 'deep state' plot to take him out of the 2024 race.

'The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is 'secured' by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time,' Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday night.

'I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!'

Later Thursday night, he put out a video.

'Very sadly we're a nation in decline and yet they go after a very popular president,' Trump said.

'I'm an innocent man, I did nothing wrong,' he continued, vowing to 'fight this out.'

In an interview with Fox News Digital, Trump also said he would 'of course' plead not guilty.

Security is already being increased around the courthouse in Miami ahead of his appearance before a judge, scheduled for 3pm on Tuesday.

The investigation into Trump's handling of classified documents is being overseen by a special counsel, Jack Smith, who was appointed by the Attorney General Merrick Garland in November.

Documents found at Mar-a-Lago in an August raid are pictured on display

Melania Trump wore Chanel ballet shoes and carried a Chanel purse, paired with a khaki skirt and black top, when spotted leaving Trump Tower in New York City earlier Thursday

Trump attorneys Lindsey Halligan, from left, John Rowley and James Trusty exit the Department of Justice on Monday after meeting with federal prosecutors

On Monday, Trump's attorneys met with Smith and his team in Washington, D.C.

On Wednesday, it was confirmed that Trump was an official target of the investigation.

Trump himself is currently in Bedminster, New Jersey, huddled with his advisors.

Earlier this week, Trump took to his social media platform to condemn reports of looming charges.

'Wow, this is turning out to be the greatest and most vicious instance of election interference in the history of our country,' he wrote on Truth Social.

He had already earned the status of being the first former president to face criminal charges. Those relate to a $130,000 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

In April, he appeared in Manhattan court where he was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records as part of an alleged plot to hide damaging information from voters before the 2016 election.

Trump pleaded not guilty.

Legal analysts believe the documents case could be more legally difficult for the former president.

During the past year, a grand jury has heard testimony from Mar-a-Lago employees and former administration officials who worked in Trump's post-presidential office.

One of the final witnesses was Mark Meadows, Trump's last White House chief of staff.

And Taylor Budowich, who served as a spokesman for Trump after his presidency and runs a pro-Trump political action committee, confirmed that he had given evidence too.

'Today, in what can only be described as a bogus and deeply troubling effort to use the power of government to "get" Trump, I fulfilled a legal obligation to testify in front a federal grand jury and I answered every question honestly,' he wrote on Twitter.

The Messenger reported Thursday that a second person is expected to get charged alongside Trump.

Smith's team has not commented on the charges, which remain under seal.

If he is charged and convicted of obstruction of justice, or of sharing classified information, then he faces far more significant penalties than those potentially at stake in his Manhattan case.

Under the Presidential Records Act, all documents from a presidential administration are the federal government's property and go to the National Archives (NARA) upon the end of a presidency.

Trump has said he believed they were his property.

He told a CNN town hall last month that he was entitled to take the documents, and claimed that other presidents took records with them when they left the White House  including Barack Obama, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

'The Presidential Records Act is not criminal,' he said.

'I took the documents. I'm allowed to. You know who else took them? Obama took them, Nixon took them. Reagan took them.'

Trump's claim was false.

NARA was granted custody of the presidential records of former presidents, beginning with Ronald Reagan, as soon as these presidents left office, as required by the Presidential Records Act.

The Justice Department has been investigating potential mishandling of classified material by Trump for about a year.

A grand jury has been hearing testimony from dozens of witnesses in recent months at the federal courthouse in downtown Washington.

Jack Smith was appointed in November as special counsel to investigate Trump's handling of classified information

A Mar-a-Lago employee drained the resort's swimming pool and flooded a room where computer servers containing surveillance video logs were kept

Donald Trump has denied any wrongdoing but took to his Truth Social platform to post a message that seemed to indicate his lawyers had discussed with him the possibility he might be indicted

News of the indictment came days after it emerged that a storage room at Mar-a-Lago where surveillance camera footage was flooded.

The flooding happened as a swimming pool was being drained, it was reported on Monday.

Prosecutors wanted the footage to track how White House records were moved around Trump's Palm Beach residence.

It's unclear if the room was intentionally flooded or if it was a mistake.

Prosecutors are investigating whether there was any attempt by Trump or his associates to obstruct the Justice Department's investigation after Trump received a subpoena in May 2022 for classified documents.

Trump continues to deny any wrongdoing and claims to be the victim of a politically-charged investigation led by prosecutors who don't want to see him make another run for president.

Prosecutors have focused on Trump, his body man Walt Nauta and a maintenance worker who helped Nauta move boxes of classified documents ahead of federal agents searching the property last summer in their investigation.

The maintenance worker is the person who drained the pool that led to the flooding of the IT room where the surveillance footage was held, CNN reported.

Smith is also investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election - the subject of a similar, ongoing inquiry by prosecutors in Atlanta.

New York prosecutors charged Trump earlier this year with falsifying business records.
The payments allegedly came from the owner of the Ukrainian oil company Burisma, which was being investigated for corruption and hired Hunter

An FBI document seen by Republicans allegedly outlines how Joe and Hunter Biden were paid $5M each to have a Ukrainian prosecutor removed

House Republicans alleged on Thursday that President Joe Biden and his son Hunter each received a $5 million payment from the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma to shake off a corruption probe.

Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Marjorie Taylor Greene were among those given access to an FBI document from June 2020 that detailed testimony given to agents from an informant who had spoken with Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky.

That informant claimed that Zlochevsky said he had doled out $5 million to each Biden to call off an ongoing investigation by the Ukrainian prosecutor general at the time, Viktor Shokin.

A source close to the Republican investigation confirmed to DailyMail.com the contents of the FBI document that members have been viewing behind closed doors in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility).

Ukrainian prosecutors first launched an investigation into Bursima - a company on which Hunter had a board position for five years - over allegations of money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption in 2012.

According to those documents the $5 million payments were a 'bribe' paid by Zlochevsky to have Shokin fired - thereby killing the investigation.

House Republicans alleged on Thursday that President Joe Biden and his son Hunter each received a $5 million payment from the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma as a bribe to kill a corruption probe

Zlochevsky is a multimillionaire Ukrainian oil and gas oligarch who founded Burisma in 2002. According to those familiar with the document, he told an FBI informant that he paid both Joe and Hunter Biden $5 million each so as to ensure Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin was fired

Shokin was eventually fired in April 2016, a month after Biden, then-vice president, threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees to Ukraine if he was not replaced as prosecutor general.

Biden has since claimed that he was pushing for Shokin to be fired because he was failing to properly curtail corruption in Ukraine.

'There's no doubt in my mind that Joe Biden is guilty of bribery,' Luna told Fox News correspondent Chad Pergram.

'There was two separate transactions, one that went to Joe Biden for $5million, one that went to Hunter Biden for $5 million.'

Zlochevsky is a multimillionaire Ukrainian oil and gas oligarch who founded Burisma in 2002. He also served in various positions in the Ukrainian government from 2010 until February 2014.

Burisma brought Hunter onto its board in 2014 as it was looking to expand overseas, even though he had no previous experience of the industry.

Hunter supposedly served as a helpful non-executive director who offered advice on legal issues, corporate finance and strategy.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who reviewed the FBI document, has alleged that the $5 million payments were a 'bribe' paid by Zlochevsky to the Bidens to have Shokin fired

President Joe Biden and his son Hunter leave Holy Spirit Catholic Church in South Carolina after attending a mass in August 2022

The June 2020 document that contains the bombshell claims is internally referred to by the FBI as an FD-1023 form and is used by agents to record unverified reporting from confidential human sources.

A source familiar with the contents of the document has said that the informant was told of the alleged bribery by Zlochevsky, who at the time was supposedly consulting them on how Burisma could acquire a US-based oil company.

Zlochevsky allegedly explained to the FBI source that his company had paid the Bidens because Shokin was investigating Burisma, making it hard for the company to enter the US market.

According to the person familiar with the FBI document, the informant said Hunter and Joe Biden were paid 'through so many different bank accounts' that investigators would not be able to 'unravel this for at least 10 years'.

They also said the informant who told the FBI of the payments had been used as a source since 2010 and had been paid around $200,000 in exchange.

After a joint press conference with UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Thursday, Biden dismissed the accusations, saying: 'Where's the money?'

President Biden downplayed the accusation on Thursday, saying: 'Where's the money?'

It came at the end of a joint White House press conference with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and after journalists fired questions at the pair.

As the hubbub died away, Biden was asked about the Republican claims and added after his first remark: 'I'm joking. It's a load of malarkey.'

Biden's flippant response infuriated Rep. Nancy Mace, who sits on the Oversight Committee.

'We don't find selling out your country funny,' she tweeted. 'Prove us wrong by releasing your and your family's unredacted bank records. The F.B.I. can't protect you forever.'

White House officials have repeatedly expressed frustration at being asked about what they say are unfounded allegations, and the FBI has cautioned that the information is unverified.

Biden was also asked what he was doing to protect the independence of the Justice Department, after years of attacks by Donald Trump when he was in and out of office.

You'd notice, I have never once  not one single time  suggested [to] the Justice Department what they should do or not do relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge,' he said. 'I'm honest.'
Three men have been arrested on suspicion of murder after a young man was found dead in a house in Merseyside.

Merseyside Police said officers had been called to a report of concern for the safety of a man in his 20s in Huyton House Road, Huyton, at around 3.30pm on Thursday.

Officers attended the scene and found the body of a man in a property on the street.

He was pronounced dead at the scene and has not yet been formally identified. A port mortem is to take place to establish the cause of death.

The cause of the man's death is not yet known, but following initial inquiries, Merseyside Police have made three arrests on suspicion of murder.

Merseyside Police said officers had been called to a report of concern for the safety of a man in his 20s in Huyton House Road, Huyton (file image), at around 3.30pm on Thursday

The suspects are aged 25, 28 and 36.

The force appealed for anyone with information to get in touch as CCTV, forensic and house-to-house inquiries continue near the scene of the crime.

Detective Superintendent Helen Bennett said: 'It is with great sadness that we confirm that a man has died following an incident in Huyton.

'We are in the very early stages of the investigation as we seek to establish what has taken place.

'Although we have made three arrests, we are still appealing for anyone who has any information to please come forward.

'If you live in the area, please check your CCTV or smart doorbell footage to see if you captured anything suspicious, and if you were driving in the area please review your dashcam footage.

'Any information, no matter how small, might help the investigation.'
A Florida man survived an infection of flesh-eating bacteria that he got in bizarre fashion from another man while trying to break up a fight at a family party.

Donnie Adams was attending a family event in Tampa Bay in February when two relatives began to tussle.

Adams attempted to get in between them but one of them ended up biting him before he could stop the bout.

He immediately went to the hospital and got a tetanus shot and antibiotics, but he said that things only got worse.

'By the third day, my leg was very sore. I couldn't walk, it was very warm and very painful,' Adams said.

A Florida man survived an infection of flesh-eating bacteria that he got in bizarre fashion from another man while trying to break up a fight at a family party

He eventually returned to the hospital, according to WSAV, when he received startling news from osteopathic physician Dr. Fritz Brink at HCA Florida.

Brink told Adams he had necrotizing fasciitis, more commonly known as a flesh-eating bacteria.

The disease enters through a break in the skin, travels through the muscle sheath and destroys healthy tissue.

Brink immediately performed surgery to cut out the infected tissue in Adams' thigh, which the doctor believes came from the bite.

'A human bite is dirtier than a dog bite as far as the kinds of bacteria that grows,' said Brink. 'Normal bacteria in an abnormal spot can be a real problem.'

About 70 percent of the tissue in the front of Adams' thigh needed to be cut out, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

'You're torn between being as aggressive as you can be to stop the infection from spreading and leaving as much tissue behind so that it won't take two years to heal,' Brink said.

Adams claims that had he not gone to the ER, 'there was a good chance I would've lost my leg' or gone into a potentially fatal septic shock.

Donnie Adams was attending a family event in Tampa Bay in February when two relatives began to tussle

Adams (pictured right) was treated by osteopathic physician Dr. Fritz Brink (pictured left) at HCA Florida

Adams no longer has any functional problems but has a nasty, visible scar on his thigh from the surgery

'They assessed my wound and it was very horrific,' Adams remembered. 'It was unbelievable. But in my mind, I just had to get through whatever this was.'

Adams needed nearly three weeks to recover in the hospital but is in the middle of six months of treatment to fully heal.

He no longer has any functional problems but has a nasty, visible scar on his thigh from the surgery.

However, Adams has maintained a positive attitude about the entire process and owes his recovery to both doctors, as well as praying and meditating regularly.

'What you see now, you see not just a scar, but the beauty of the aftermath,' he said.

'I would've never imagined that a human bite would turn into something so horrific as a flesh-eating bacteria.'
A man shot dead outside the lavish $1.8 million mansion of Pitch Perfect star Adam DeVine's neighbor, was a high-rolling father-of-five from Miami.

Emil Lahaziel, 39, was 'gunned down' while attending a 'crazy poker game' at the Hollywood Hills West home of a friend June 7 - before he was brutally murdered.

The incident took place just after 2am on Wednesday morning and was observed by DeVine and his wife, Chloe Bridges, as they watched the night unfold from the balcony of their $2.6 million mansion.

DeVine described the horrific murder in great detail on the 'This Is Important' podcast later that same day.

The father-of-five was described by family as a doting father and often posted pictures of his lavish lifestyle with his family in Miami.

Emil Lahaziel, 39, was 'gunned down' while attending a 'crazy poker game' at the Hollywood Hills West home of a friend June 7 - before he was brutally murdered

A man shot dead outside the lavish $1.8 million mansion of Pitch Perfect star Adam DeVine's neighbor, was high-rolling father-of-five Lahaziel (right), 39, from Miami, Florida

Lahaziel had been living in Miami, Florida for the past eight and a half years according to his father - but hailed from Ashkelon, a coastal city in the southern district of Israel

'People were rolling up in like Lamborghinis and Bentleys and Rolls Royces and s**t and like old guys, who for sure f**k prostitutes and play cards,' he claimed.

'And I see these dudes and it's like fun to sit and watch, [so] me and my wife, we're sitting up on our balcony, and like, this looks crazy.

Adding: 'This is where it gets sad. Someone was murdered there.'

Lahaziel was later identified by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner.

He appeared to be a doting father-of-five who wasn't afraid to flash his wealth with images of private jets and sparkling blue poolside shots posted across Instagram.

In the wake of Lahaziel's death his wife was seen posting images of the couple's life together.

Lahaziel was later identified by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, he would often post pictures of luxury vehicles and 'had a car dealership' according to his dad

The 39-year-old was no stranger to flashing his wealth online as seen in pictures of expensive clothing and accessories

In one post, Lahaziel asked his followers which car he should drive while holding out a handful of Mercedes keys in front of a sparkling blue swimming pool

A day later, Cohen confirmed Lahaziel's death, posting a notice for the 39-year-old's funeral to be held at Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery June 9.

'We regrettably inform that we will be honoring the passing of Emil Lahaziel, son of Yaacov & Golda, husband to Lily, father to Dor, Rom, Liv, Leo & Leni,' it reads.

In a post on Instagram the mother-of-three posted a picture of herself and Lahaziel with the caption in Hebrew, translated it reads: 'Rest in peace Emil. May you know no more sorrow, be strong my soul.'

Pictures of the pair show Lahaziel and Cohen appearing smitten with one another as they cared for their three children.

DailyMail.com has contacted family members for comment. Los Angeles Police Department said that there have been no arrests or suspects taken into custody in connection to the homicide.

In the wake of Lahaziel's death his wife, Lily Cohen (right), was seen posting images of the couple's life together

Cohen, grief stricken, was seen posting multiple pictures and videos of the pair across her Instagram story

Cohen and Lahaziel were the picture of romance in the images she shared to social media

Israeli news website Ynet spoke to Lahaziel's father, Yaacov, who said he and Cohen were desperate for answers after the tragic death.

'I don't know what exactly happened there, neither does his wife. I didn't hear that he had conflicts with people,' he said.

The outlet reports that Lahaziel was originally a resident of Ashkelon, a coastal city in the southern district of Israel, but had been living in Miami for eight and a half years.

'Emil is my eldest son, he lives in Miami and goes to meetings in Los Angeles and meets people he knew there,' Yaacov said.

'Emil loved his family and took care of them, he was a child who had achievements in life. It is true that he also had falls, but he knew how to get up.

Lahaziel's father said that the father-of-five 'loved his family and took care of them' in this picture the 39-year-old is pictured with three of his children

Another picture posted by Cohen shows Lahaziel with the same three children. A funeral notice said that he was the father of five - Dor, Rom, Liv, Leo and Leni

Lahaziel can be seen kissing one of his children in another post uploaded online by Cohen

'He also opened a car dealership there to improve his financial situation. Emil was a child who was all about giving he would send money to us, to help us.'

Yaacov said that he had been in contact with Cohen who had 'insisted' on burying Lahaziel in Miami.

'We are all in shock, no one knows what happened, there are many versions. I understand that he met there with people he knew, but beyond that I have no idea,' he said.

The only eyewitness to come out about the horror shooting, thus far, has been DeVine.

'This is a true scary thing that just happened. So across the street they were running this like crazy poker game, right?' he said.

Despite his co-host's Blake Anderson, Anders Holm and Kyle Newacheck's, obvious discomfort, Adam DeVine launched into the moments leading up to Lahaziel's murder as part of the 'This Is Important' podcast live show

DeVine revealed how he and his wife Chloe Bridges watched Lahaziel 'gunned down' outside their neighbors $1.8 million home

'People were rolling up in like Lamborghinis and Bentleys and Rolls Royce's and s**t and like old guys, who for sure f**k prostitutes and play cards.

'And I see these dudes and it's like fun to sit and watch, [so] me and my wife, we're sitting up on our balcony, and like, this looks crazy.'

DeVine then pauses telling the audience 'this is where it gets sad.'

'Someone was murdered there,' he continues, before Anderson asks him to repeat what he said but with the added effect of a sinister sound byte.

'Someone was murdered,' he repeats, as Newacheck responds 'that's a downer.'

'Yeah dude, I called that s**t I called that s**t. I was like 'this is dastardly s**t going down here' and sure enough someone is gunned down,' he continued.

Police said a suspect fled the scene and is still on the loose. No description was given and a motive for the killing is still unclear, investigators said

DeVine made his name alongside co-stars Blake Anderson, Anders Holm and Kyle Newacheck's in Workaholics and played a bumper role in the Pitch Perfect franchise - he recounted the horrors of June 7 during their live podcast event

'That is sad,' Newacheck responds, when Holm quickly adds 'Yeah a real person, no longer with us.'

'Yeah but, that happens, people be dying,' said DeVine defending his retelling of the deadly shooting. This isn't Hollywood, this is a story about my actual life.'

'I mean its pretty Hollywood, you're like 'I guess I live places where people get murdered pretty cool,'' Holm says before the group quickly change the subject.

Police said a suspect fled the scene and is still on the loose. No description was given and a motive for the killing is still unclear, investigators said.

They believe he may have run off and got into a waiting vehicle, and said they do not think it is gang-related.
Rishi Sunak has failed to commit to a previous pledge to deliver social care changes in 2025.

The Prime Minister said the government was postponing the long-promised reform, but did not say for how long.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said last year that the flagship cap on the cost of social care would be delayed for two years.

It meant the cap was unlikely to be introduced before October 2025, after the next general election.

Speaking to reporters on his visit to Washington DC, Mr Sunak was asked when he would deliver the Tory manifesto pledge on long-term reform of social care.

The Prime Minister said the government was postponing the long-promised reform, but did not say for how long

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said last year that the flagship cap on the cost of social care would be delayed for two years

But he failed to give a timeframe. He replied: 'What we've done is invest billions of pounds into social care right now. Given the situation we face, it's right that money was going in to actually just build resilience, expand capacity in the sector - 14billion at the Autumn Statement last year in both the NHS and social care that was warmly welcomed by the sector.

'At the time we announced that we were postponing the long-term reform that had been previously announced because the priority in the here and now is getting money into the sector so that they can continue to give high-quality care. I think that's the right priority and that's what we're going to carry on doing.'

The government pledged in its 2019 manifesto that 'nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it'.

Last year ministers scrapped the health and social care levy, which was supposed to help pay for the care cap.

The social care cap is designed to limit the amount anyone will have to pay for care in later life to 86,000.

Mr Sunak's comments came after a leading care body branded social care recruitment efforts 'largely ineffective' as figures revealed that millions of pounds have been spent on a government campaign in recent years yet vacancies have hit a record high.

There were 165,000 vacancies in the social care sector in 2021/22 - the same year almost 6.5million was budgeted for the adult social care recruitment campaign, according to figures obtained by Care England.

A total of 23,650,000 has been budgeted for the campaign since 2018, including a projection for the 2022-23 year, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said in response to a Freedom of Information request from the leading representative body for care providers in England.

Professor Martin Green, Care England's chief executive, said money spent on 'ineffectual campaigns' would have been better allocated 'to bring care staff benefits in line with NHS staff'.

He said the social care sector is in crisis and problems with recruitment must be tackled through better pay, benefits, terms and conditions.

Previous analysis by the King's Fund health charity stated that, at 10.7 per cent, the vacancy rate in adult social care is the highest it has been since Skills for Care began collecting data in 2012/13.

Annual budgets increased from 2.8million in 2018-19, to 3.8million the following year, then 6.8million in 2020/21 and 6.45million in 2021/22, the DHSC figures showed.

Care England said it was concerned by the drop to a 3.8million forecast budget for the 2022/23 year.

Prof Green said: 'It is clear that the Government's recruitment efforts have fallen short and have been largely ineffective.

'The 24million has been spent on ineffectual campaigns which could have been better allocated to bring care staff benefits in line with NHS staff.

'The recruitment campaigns represent an awareness campaign that is unlikely to result in a tangible change to the number of recruits entering the sector.

'The introduction of a minimum care wage that outpaces the NLW (national living wage), tied to NHS band 3, is not an option but a necessity to ensure that social care professionals receive the respect and fair compensation they are owed.

'The social care recruitment crisis will only be solved when care staff benefits, terms and conditions are brought into parity with those of the NHS - including pensions, statutory sick pay, holiday entitlements, and access to training. This will begin to redress the underpayment and underappreciation of care workers compared to their NHS counterparts.'
Prince Harry is believed to be back in Montecito after flying to the UK for two days of gruelling High Court evidence at the Mirror phone hacking trial.

The Duke of Sussex, 38, did not take time during the visit to see his family, who were less than half a mile from where he was staying.

He is said to have landed in California yesterday evening, meaning that he will have left Britain around lunchtime on the same day - the same dash he took after King Charles's Coronation last month.

He stayed at Frogmore Cottage for three nights, according to the Telegraph, but it is expected to be his last visit to the home he once shared with his wife because his father has evicted him from the early summer. He is also understood not to have met with his father King Charles, nor brother Prince William, during his stay.

William is believed to be in the UK with his wife Kate carrying out several engagements near their Windsor home, Adelaide Cottage, just 700 yards from Frogmore.

Charles returned from Romania on Tuesday and went to a service at St Jamess Roman Catholic Church, in Marylebone, that evening. On Wednesday, when Harry testified for a second day, Charles was at Buckingham Palace for a military event to thank servicemen and women who took part in the Queen's funeral.

The Duke of Sussex, 38, outside the High Court where he has been giving evidence in a phone hacking trial this week

Harry and Meghan in the kitchen of Frogmore Cottage in footage from their Netflix documentary.

Harry is likely to have stayed at Frogmore Cottage, pictured, for the last time this week as King Charles is evicting him from early summer

Harry was staying just 700 yards from his brother William this week but reportedly did not see him, nor their father

The Duke of Sussex flew to London this week to give evidence across two days as part of his lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) over claims its journalists used hacking, 'blagging' and other illegal means of deception to write 140 articles published between 1996 and 2010.

Staying with his security team, the short visit marked what is likely to have been Harry's final nights in Frogmore Cottage, having been evicted by his father shortly after the release of his bombshell memoir Spare at the beginning of this year.

The Sussexes have been given until early summer to leave the property, but are understood not to be planning to visit the UK before then.

Harry flew to the UK to attend the High Court proceedings on Sunday night after celebrating his daughter Lilibet's second birthday.

He was accused of wasting court time after missing the first day of his testimony on Monday. An exasperated judge rebuked the duke's barrister when it became clear the royal witness was 'unavailable'.

Mr Justice Fancourt said he was 'a little surprised' that Harry was not there, and admonished Harry's barrister, David Sherborne, for causing 'timetable chaos'.

The duke appeared close to tears on Wednesday as he finished his historic day and a half of answering questions, which saw him become the first royal in more than a century to testify in court.

The Duke of Sussex is suing Mirror Group Newspapers for damages over claims journalists used hacking, 'blagging' and other illegal means of deception

Prince Harry seen in a court sketch giving evidence at the High Court in London for a second day

During a turbulent final few hours in the witness box, the duke volunteered details of his chequered love life, including a trip to a strip club.

MGN is contesting Harry's claims and has either denied or not admitted that articles about Harry being examined at the trial involved phone hacking or unlawful activity.

Meanwhile, afly-on-the-wall documentary series featuring the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for Netflix has been postponed until next year.

Harry and Meghan had been working on the series as part of their rumoured $100million (88million) deal with the streaming giant.

But with The Crown accused of fabricating a hurtful smear against King Charles by depicting him secretly plotting to oust the Queen, Netflix has now pushed it back.
Chevalier (12A, 108 mins)

Verdict: Jobbing biopic

Rating:

Transformers: Rise of The Beasts (12A, 127 mins)

Verdict: Overlong and over-loud

Rating:

The best five minutes of Chevalier come right at the start, when we are introduced to our hero, Joseph Bologne (the excellent Kelvin Harrison Jr), illegitimate son of an aristocratic Frenchman and a Senegalese slave, at a Mozart concert in 18th-century Paris.

It really is a Mozart concert, too. The star of the show is Wolfgang Amadeus himself, played by Joseph Prowen as a prissy diva. But when Mozart calls for requests, the unknown violinist Bologne strides dashingly and dishily down the aisle to suggest that he stands toe to toe with the great man.

If you recall the moment in 2009 when Susan Boyle first took the stage in Britain's Got Talent, igniting ill-concealed derision in both audience and judges, that's pretty much the scene here, only in frock coats and periwigs.

The best five minutes of Chevalier come right at the start, when we are introduced to our hero, Joseph Bologne (the excellent Kelvin Harrison Jr, pictured)

It's mostly a true story, too, though I expect there was some dramatic licence with the duelling violins

The very idea that a fellow of mixed race might be able to hold his own next to Mozart! But then he starts to play and, of course, he's sensational. It's the violin equivalent of the so-called duelling banjos scene in Deliverance (1972).

The audience are spellbound, while Mozart is first astonished and then incensed. While Bologne takes the ovation, he storms into the wings to ask the 18th-century versions of Ant and Dec: who is that f***ing guy?

It's a funny moment and, promisingly, appears to set us up for a comic telling of the undeniably remarkable story of a man later declared Chevalier de Saint-Georges  knighted, basically  by a smitten Queen, Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton).

It's mostly a true story, too, though I expect there was some dramatic licence with the duelling violins.

Disappointingly, however, the rest of Stephen Williams's film never lives up to that engaging opening scene, becoming a rather lump-enly formulaic account of Bologne's rise and inevitable fall. We know his fall is inevitable because in a perfunctory flashback, Bologne's nobleman father, after bringing the violin prodigy from Guadeloupe to install him in a swanky French music academy, tells him: 'Do not give anyone any reason to tear you down.' Warnings like that in screenplays like this mean only one thing.

At first, Bologne's rise is vertiginous.After all, he is not just a virtuoso violinist; there are many other strings to his bow. He is handsome beyond words and a swordsman supreme ('you play your instrument as well as you wield your sword,' gushes the Queen, a line that prompted titters at Vue Leicester Square on Tuesday evening).

Anyway, she thinks he's simply fab and so does the fragrant Marie-Josephine de Montalembert (Samara Weaving), into whose bed he soon falls.

This seems likely sooner or later (spoiler alert: it's sooner) to arouse the wrath of her powerful husband, the Marquis de Montalembert, played one-dimensionally by Marton Csokas as a sneering rotter.

It appears to set us up for a comic telling of the undeniably remarkable story of a man later declared Chevalier de Saint-Georges  knighted, basically  by a smitten Queen, Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton, right)

She thinks he's simply fab and so does the fragrant Marie-Josephine de Montalembert (Samara Weaving, pictured), into whose bed he soon falls

Nor is the Marquis remotely chuffed that Bologne has given Marie-Josephine, who sings like an angel, a starring role in his new opera. He has written it as part of a contest to determine whether he or the German composer Gluck (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) will become maestro of the Paris Opera, fully expecting to get the nod himself, but you might say that his Gluck is running out.

Jealousy, snobbery and racism, plus his own hubris, are conspiring against him. So is the Queen, along with another operatic star, La Guimard (Minnie Driver), who has never forgiven him for spurning her sexual advances.

Women loom large in this story, possibly even larger than they did in real life. When a pregnant Marie-Josephine tells him their affair is over, Bologne falls into a terrible funk, until his mother, having arrived from Guadeloupe for an awkward reunion, does him (and us) a favour by bellowing: 'Enough wallowing! It's pathetic!'

His mother, by the way, is a woman of limitless wisdom who is able to point her boy to his true destiny, which is to turn against his former patrons, embrace the causes of equality and freedom, and become a hero of the forthcoming French Revolution.

We have known all along that revolution is brewing, because there are occasional shots of angry mobs in the street. But Bologne's change of heart still happens with clumsy haste at the end of the film, with captions filling us in on what happened next.

If they impel you to go away and Google him, as they did me, then I suppose Chevalier will have done its job. But ultimately that's all this is; a jobbing biopic. His story deserves more.

Do the Transformers, those warring alien robots that convert into cars, trucks, planes and now animals, deserve more? Really, it's a moot point because whether they do or not, here they are again in Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts, the seventh outing in the film franchise inspired by the Hasbro toys.

It's the usual overlong, over-loud, semi-enjoyable extravaganza of daft plot and clashing metal as the good robots, with the help of a couple of obligatory humans (Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback), strive to keep a long-hidden key from the 'vile god' Unicron (voiced by Colman Domingo), who consumes entire planets as fuel.

It's the usual overlong, over-loud, semi-enjoyable extravaganza of daft plot and clashing metal as the good robots, with the help of a couple of obligatory humans strive to keep a long-hidden key from the 'vile god' Unicron

I hate to say it, but having grown up hearing that a Mars a day helps you work, rest and play, I'm on Unicron's side

If he gets hold of it, he will be able to access a portal through time and space, enabling him to rampage through the Universe, munching on the planets he needs to keep his strength up.

I hate to say it, but having grown up hearing that a Mars a day helps you work, rest and play, I'm on Unicron's side.
Oregon State University welcomed children to a drag show that involved nudity- with one performer baring her breasts and using them to lift weights.

The performance, which was branded the 'Illegal Drag Show', was held at the LaSells Stewart Center on the University campus in Oregon, Washington, last Friday.

It had been set up by LGBTQ+ group Rainbow Continuum and a poster for the event openly encouraged attendees to 'Be Gay. Do Crime' - while also advertising it to all ages.

In footage captured at the show and first reported by Campus Reform, a biological woman can be seen undressing and exposing her breasts to the audience.

One woman in the audience can be heard saying: 'Cover your eyes' as the performer begins undressing on the stage, while another says: 'Are you fricking kidding me? Oh my god.'

The performance, which was branded as the 'Illegal Drag Show', was held at the LaSells Stewart Center on the University campus in Oregon, Washington, last week

One woman can be heard saying: 'Cover your eyes' as the performer, pictured here, exposed herself to the audience

The unknown performer then starts hanging five lb. weights from her breasts and receives a large round of applause from the audience.

After retrieving a barbell weight from behind the curtain, the performer then proceeds to hang that from her breasts.

In another video, a young child has been brought on the stage by one of the drag queens and interviewed.

Responding to an unintelligible question by the drag queen, the child responds: 'He's a full grown man.'

Rebecca Lang, Students for Life President at Oregon State, told Campus Reform: 'The show consisted of extremely explicit sexual content including sexually provocative performances by men and women in drag and costumes.'

Lang also said that at least two children she spotted in the audience were so small they had to be seated on the laps of adults.

She added: '[They] were subjected to not only references but physical moves and sexually explicit dances by both biological men and women, and extreme nudity as well.'

The performer also hung five lb. weights from her breasts before the crowd that included children

In another part of the video, a young child has been brought on the stage by one of the drag queens and interviewed

It had been set up LGBTQ+ group Rainbow Continuum and a poster for the event openly encouraged them to 'Be Gay. Do Crime' while also advertising it to all ages

In a promotion for the event, Rainbow Continuum said: 'Queer people across the nation are under legislative attack, but we will NOT let them stop our partying!

'The show will be June 2nd, 7pm at LaSells. We've got a great lineup of local queer talent sure to raise the roof just in time for it to get replaced.'

It comes after the state of Montana announced it would ban people dressed in drag from reading to kids at public schools and libraries.

Governor Greg Gianforte signed the bill because he 'believes it's wildly inappropriate for little kids, especially preschoolers and kids in elementary school, to be exposed to sexualized content.'

The bill initially sought to ban minors from attending drag performances, which were defined as shows that 'excited lustful thoughts.'

The legislation was later amended to ban minors from attending sexually oriented or obscene performances on public property.

The law received intense public testimony at an earlier committee hearing in February.
It was 'canaried' by police while parked in a nearby caravan park

The car that ploughed into a tree killing three teenagers and its adult female driver had been declared unroadworthy at the time of the incident.

The red Toyota Corolla involved in the deadly May 27 crash in Bochara, three-and-a-half hours west of Melbourne, was reportedly declared not be fit drive by police in mid-April while it was parked in a caravan park in nearby Hamilton.

The crash killed 31-year-old Coles checkout supervisor and suspected driver, Alicia Montebello, and Hamilton teens Meghan Fox, 14, Joshua Elmes, 15, and Lucas Gorzali, 14.

Meghan's 17-year-old sister, Jorja, survived the crash and remains in a stable condition in hospital while police continue to probe the circumstances surrounding the accident.

The car at the centre of a deadly crash in Bochara (pictured) was declared unroadworthy by police weeks prior to the accident that killed three teenagers and an adult

The Herald Sun reports the car was 'canaried' by police, meaning they had reported the car unroadworthy with a yellow piece of paper.

It is unsure what influenced police to declare it unroadworthy or if it contributed to the crash.

It is believed the car was found unfit to drive just days before Montebello was arrested and charged with breaching her bail conditions when she was caught with the two teenagers in the early hours of the morning at Hamilton in April.

Ms Montebello was fined $700 without conviction for wilful damage, two counts of stalking, and four counts of contravening bail, reported the Warrnambool Standard.

The 31-year-old had also previously twice been disqualified for drunk-driving an unregistered car and driving while disqualified.

The first incident saw her banned from driving for four months and 14 days from January in 2015, she was then banned yet again and received a suspended 12-day jail sentence.

She had also previously faced other charges of speeding, driving an unregistered vehicle and driving with alcohol in her blood while on P plates, as well as drug possession charges.

A video posted to Snapchat just hours prior to the crash allegedly shows the car travelling at about 130km/h down a country road.

Assistant Commissioner Weir said a crash reconstruction on the narrow strip of road where the accident occurred indicated the car was travelling well in excess of 100km/h.

'To do that speed on that road at that time of day, any time really, is just incomprehensible to me,' he said.

The decision to 'canary' the car is believed to have occurred just days before the suspected owner of the car, Alicia Montebello (pictured), faced court for breaching bail conditions

The suspected driver at the time, Montebello was known to have driven 'erratically' by locals, and encouraged passengers not to wear seatbelts.

Matthew Elmes, 46, father of Joshua, feared Ms Montebello was a dangerous driver who was feeding the youngsters' need for quick thrills.

'If you want an adrenaline rush, it's probably better to go to a theme park or go skydiving, but don't get in a car,' said Mr Elmes.

None of the passengers are believed to have been wearing seat belts at the time of the incident.

Police are hoping for sole survivor Jorja to aid with enquiries when she recovers.

Montebello was feared by a teenager's parents to have been their child for sex, with messages between the pair and images of the pair appearing online.

Victoria Police could not comment on whether the car was found unroadworthy as the investigation is ongoing.
Ukrainian forces stepped up their major offensive yesterday using Western tanks to pound Russia's frontline in the war-torn country.

In the heaviest fighting since Kyiv launched its bid to liberate occupied territories, Ukrainian artillery 'came in waves' according to Russian sources.

The sudden upsurge in military activity followed Ukrainian reconnaissance, or 'shaping' missions intended to identify weaknesses in Russian defences.

US officials also confirmed the engagements in the Zaporizhzhia region yesterday appeared to be the start of a main thrust.

The heavy fighting resulted in losses on both sides and US officials added the Russians had put up 'stiff resistance'.

Ukrainian soldiers fire the grenade launcher towards the Russian positions on the frontline near Kreminna, Luhansk region on Thursday

Ukrainian soldiers work during a combat operation on the frontline near Kreminna, Luhansk region yesterday

Unconfirmed footage on Russian social media platforms appeared to show German-made Leopard tanks being destroyed.

Last night, the Ukrainian government offered scant details about the long awaited counter-offensive.

READ MORE HERE - Putin bombs fleeing flood victims: Huge blast strikes residential building as desperate residents evacuate Kherson in wake of devastating dam breach Advertisement

Deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar confirmed fighting was taking place: 'Battles continue for Velyka Novosilka in the Novopavlovsk direction. In the Orikhiv area, the enemy is already on the defensive.'

But some Russian sources were sceptical of this claim, with Vladimir Romanov - a military blogger based in Crimea - said the clashes so far were only 'active probings' and Russian troops were 'well enough prepared' for the counter-offensive.

Russian blogger Zapiski Veterana (Notes of a Veteran) said: 'I think we can already talk about the beginning of Ukraines long-announced offensive.

'There hasn't been such movement on the front for a long time. The Ukrainians came in waves.'

The angle of the attacks suggested Ukraine's objective priority was to piece through Russia's defences to reach the cities of Tokmak, Melitopol and Berdyansk on the Black Sea coast and cut off the Crimean peninsula.

Veterana added: 'All their [Ukrainian] forces are being thrown forward. The enemy has managed to seize several heights but they did not manage a deep breakthrough.'

A third advance around the heavily bombarded settlement of Bakhmut also took place yesterday, with Ukrainian sources saying its troops had gained a mile of ground around the city.

Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu said in a video address that an estimated 1,500 Ukrainian troops had taken part, attacking in four directions.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, hosts a video conference call with members of the newly formed international Expert Group on Russian ecocide yesterday

A British Challenger 2 tank which has been sent by the UK to aid Ukraine in its fight against Russia

The acceleration in the tempo of operations by Ukraine came as at least one person was killed after Russia shelled the flood-hit area of Kherson.

Thousands of homes remained underwater last night following explosions at the nearby Kakhovaka dam.

READ MORE HERE - NATO countries led by Poland may be willing to put troops on the ground in Ukraine - potentially dragging the alliance into war with Russia - former secretary general warns Advertisement

The civilian died and at least eight others were injured after the Kremlin targeted evacuees fleeing in the wake of Tuesday's blasts, which have been described as the biggest environmental disaster since Chernobyl.

The death was confirmed by the prosecutor's office in Kherson, which is 37 miles downstream from the dam.

The victims were being moved from a neighbourhood submerged by released water when the shelling took place. Unconfirmed Ukrainian reports this afternoon also suggested some people have drowned.

Russian shells also nearly killed Ukraine's chief rabbi who was visiting the disaster zone today. He was forced to dive for cover while conducting television interviews.

The Ukrainian interior ministry said: 'The shelling began precisely during the evacuation of citizens whose homes were flooded. And it continues to prevent Ukraine from saving the most valuable  human lives.'

Moscow continues to deny any responsibility for the blasts which have caused 20,000 people to leave their homes. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians also face the threat of serious diseases due to pollution caused by the blasts.

Grain fields across vast areas of southern Ukraine could also be turned into deserts as they will be deprived of irrigation previously provided by the dam on the Dnipro River. Ukraine is one of the world's largest grain exporters.

People help an elderly man onto a boat during evacuation from a flooded neighborhood in Kherson

A church surrounded by water in a flooded neighbourhood in Kherson after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam

The threat of exploding land mines also remains, according to the Red Cross. The ordnance, planted by Russian forces, will be a danger to civilians in the area 'for decades', the agency said today.

On a visit to Kherson today Volodymyr Zelensky criticised the international response to the incident, in particular the United Nations which is responsible for providing flood relief.

The Ukrainian president praised rescue workers for their exhaustive efforts and said today's priority was to 'protect lives'.

He said to them: 'You are going through this difficult ordeal now. We will help you and rebuild everything which needs to be restored. I thank you and wish you good health.'

An estimated 250 square miles of land are presently underwater. Most of the affected territory is in Russian-occupied parts of the Kherson region.
Leftist Democrat 'squad' member Cori Bush led the charge in celebrating the imminent second indictment of former President Donald Trump, gloating in a tweet.

Trump has been indicted for mishandling of classified documents and summoned to appear before a federal judge in Miami, he announced on Thursday. He has been charged with seven counts.

Bush, member of the left-wing progressive 'squad' started by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, initially tweeted her joy over the potential charges.

'The former white supremacist-in-chief has been indicted, again. He must be held accountable,' she wrote, before deleting just minutes later.

She has since tweeted out the statement once again. DailyMail.com has reached out to Representative Bush for further comment.

Leftist Democrat 'squad' member Cori Bush may have jumped the gun in celebrated the apparent imminent indictment of President Donald Trump, gloating in a now-deleted tweet

Other progressives joined in, however, after Trump announced himself that he would face indictment in Miami Tuesday.

Fellow squad member Ayanna Pressley wrote: 'Twice-impeached. Twice-indicted. One-term occupant of the White House.'

Yusef Salaam, a New York City Council candidate and member of the Central Park Five - now the 'Exonerated Five' - was a bit more blunt, writing: 'Karma - again.'

Trump notoriously took out a full page newspaper ads calling for New York to bring back the death penalty to punish the men, who were eventually exonerated.

Salaam previously branded Donald Trump's arrest in April 'karma' as he mimicked the former president's full-page ads three decades ago that called for his execution.

It is the second set of charges leveled at Trump this year, plunging the country into fresh legal and political uncertainty as he campaigns to return to office.

Prosecutors have investigating the transfer of presidential files to his Mar-a-Lago Florida estate since last year.

The probe exploded into the headlines in August when the FBI searched Trump's beachside home, recovering 11,000 documents, including about 100 that were marked as classified.

Trump has been indicted for mishandling of classified documents and summoned to appear before a federal judge in Miami, he announced on Thursday. He has been charged with seven counts

Yusef Salaam, pictured in August 1990, mimicked Donald Trump's full page ads thirty years after the former president called for his execution in the infamous Central Park Five case

Former President Donald Trump has been sensationally indicted on a slew of federal charges including obstruction and a violation of the Espionage Act over the classified documents he took from Mar-a-Lago

For his part, Trump has repeatedly insisted he did nothing wrong and that he is the victim of a federal witch hunt.

At times the controversy has even boosted his standing in the polls and allowed him to raise money from supporters who see a 'deep state' plot to take him out of the 2024 race.

'The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is 'secured' by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time,' Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday night.

'I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!'

Donald Trump on Thursday announced that he had been indicted for mishandling classified documents

Security is already being increased around the courthouse in Miami ahead of his appearance before a judge, scheduled for 3pm on Tuesday.

Earlier this week, Trump took to his social media platform to condemn reports of looming charges.

'Wow, this is turning out to be the greatest and most vicious instance of election interference in the history of our country,' he wrote on Truth Social.

He had already earned the status of being the first former president to face criminal charges. Those relate to a $130,000 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

In April, he appeared in Manhattan court where he was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records as part of an alleged plot to hide damaging information from voters before the 2016 election.

Trump pleaded not guilty.

Legal analysts believe the documents case could be more legally difficult for the former president.

During the past year, a grand jury has heard testimony from Mar-a-Lago employees and former administration officials who worked in Trump's post-presidential office.

One of the final witnesses was Mark Meadows, Trump's last White House chief of staff.

And Taylor Budowich, who served as a spokesman for Trump after his presidency and runs a pro-Trump political action committee, confirmed that he had given evidence too.

'Today, in what can only be described as a bogus and deeply troubling effort to use the power of government to "get" Trump, I fulfilled a legal obligation to testify in front a federal grand jury and I answered every question honestly,' he wrote on Twitter.

The investigation into Trump's handling of classified documents is being overseen by a special counsel, Jack Smith, who was appointed by the Attorney General Merrick Garland in November.

On Monday, Trump's attorneys met with Smith and his team in Washington, D.C.

On Wednesday, it was confirmed that Trump was an official target of the investigation.

Trump himself is currently in Bedminster, New Jersey, huddled with his advisors.

Smith's team has not commented on the charges, which remain under seal.

If he is charged and convicted of obstruction of justice, or of sharing classified information, then he faces far more significant penalties than those potentially at stake in his Manhattan case.

Under the Presidential Records Act, all documents from a presidential administration are the federal government's property and go to the National Archives (NARA) upon the end of a presidency.

Trump has said he believed they were his property.

He told a CNN town hall last month that he was entitled to take the documents, and claimed that other presidents took records with them when they left the White House  including Barack Obama, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

'The Presidential Records Act is not criminal,' he said.

'I took the documents. I'm allowed to. You know who else took them? Obama took them, Nixon took them. Reagan took them.'

Trump's claim was false.

NARA was granted custody of the presidential records of former presidents, beginning with Ronald Reagan, as soon as these presidents left office, as required by the Presidential Records Act.

The Justice Department has been investigating potential mishandling of classified material by Trump for about a year.

A grand jury has been hearing testimony from dozens of witnesses in recent months at the federal courthouse in downtown Washington.

Trump on Wednesday said he assumed for years he would be a target.

He wrote on Truth Social: 'No one has told me I'm being indicted, and I shouldn't be because I've done NOTHING wrong, but I have assumed for years that I am a Target of the WEAPONIZED DOJ & FBI, starting with the Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX, the 'No Collusion' Mueller Report, Impeachment HOAX, Impeachment HOAX, the PERFECT Ukraine phone call, and various other SCAMS & WITCH HUNTS.

'A TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE & ELECTION INTERFERENCE AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE.

'REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS MUST MAKE THIS THEIR # 1 ISSUE!!!'

Trump attorneys Lindsey Halligan, from left, John Rowley and James Trusty exit the Department of Justice on Monday after meeting with federal prosecutors

Jack Smith was appointed in November as special counsel to investigate Trump's handling of classified information

Documents found at Mar-a-Lago in an August raid are pictured on display

News of the indictment came days after it emerged that a storage room at Mar-a-Lago where surveillance camera footage was flooded.

The flooding happened as a swimming pool was being drained, it was reported on Monday.

Prosecutors wanted the footage to track how White House records were moved around Trump's Palm Beach residence.

It's unclear if the room was intentionally flooded or if it was a mistake.

Prosecutors are investigating whether there was any attempt by Trump or his associates to obstruct the Justice Department's investigation after Trump received a subpoena in May 2022 for classified documents.

Trump continues to deny any wrongdoing and claims to be the victim of a politically-charged investigation led by prosecutors who don't want to see him make another run for president.

Prosecutors have focused on Trump, his body man Walt Nauta and a maintenance worker who helped Nauta move boxes of classified documents ahead of federal agents searching the property last summer in their investigation.

The maintenance worker is the person who drained the pool that led to the flooding of the IT room where the surveillance footage was held, CNN reported.

A Mar-a-Lago employee drained the resort's swimming pool and flooded a room where computer servers containing surveillance video logs were kept

Donald Trump has denied any wrongdoing but took to his Truth Social platform to post a message that seemed to indicate his lawyers had discussed with him the possibility he might be indicted

Smith is also investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election - the subject of a similar, ongoing inquiry by prosecutors in Atlanta.

New York prosecutors charged Trump earlier this year with falsifying business records.
The Make America Great Again (MAGA) Inc. have questioned the timing of Donald Trump's indictment, pointing out it came on the same day that members of the House were shown a controversial Joe Biden 'bribery' document.

In a tweet they wrote: 'It's not a coincidence that Biden's Justice Department indicts President Trump the same day as this breaks.

'Joe Biden allegedly paid $5M by Burisma executive as part of a bribery scheme, according to FBI document.'

Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Trump's handling of classified documents, has told Trump's lawyers that the former president is being indicted, Trump announced on Thursday.

Smith himself has not confirmed the indictment.

Trump will reportedly face seven federal charges relating to his taking of classified material from the White House when he left.

Former President Donald Trump has been indicted on a slew of federal charges including obstruction and a violation of the Espionage Act over the classified documents he took from Mar-a-Lago

Jack Smith was appointed in November as special counsel to investigate Trump's handling of classified information

The decision to inform Trump of charges came on the same day that members of the House Oversight Committee were granted access to a FBI report into an allegation of bribery, while Biden was vice president.

Byron Donalds, a Florida congressman, said the timing was eyebrow raising.

Donalds, 44, sits on the House Oversight Committee and was on Thursday shown the 'bribery' documents held by the FBI.

He tweeted: 'On the day members of Congress learn from an FBI document linking then VP Joe Biden to receiving $5 MILLION from Burisma in a pay-for-play scheme, Biden's DOJ announces another phony indictment of the leading candidate for the GOP Presidential nomination, Biden's likely opponent, and the former POTUS.

'This mob-like justice system is turning Lady Justice on its head and is the most significant threat to our democracy.

'Stand with President Trump.'

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman for Georgia, who is also on the House Oversight Committee, echoed Donalds' anger.

'Just today, I read the FD-1023 form from the FBI's most trusted credible informant,' she tweeted.

'A detailed description of then Vice President Joe Biden getting paid $5 million to get Ukrainian Prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired for investigating Burisma. Hunter got paid too.

'Joe Biden has classified documents everywhere. Literally on the garage floor next to the garage door that opens and closes, but the corrupt and complicit FBI and DOJ do nothing.

Byron Donalds, a member of the House Oversight Committee, questioned the timing of Thursday's decision

'It's shameful. Pathetic really. Ultimately the biggest hypocrisy in modern day history.

'A complete and total failure to the American people. A stain on our nation that the FBI and DOJ are so corrupt and they don't even hide it anymore.'

On Wednesday, the FBI 'caved' into the House Oversight Committee's demands to release documents that claim Biden was involved in a bribery scheme when he was vice president.

The agreement ended a standoff that began on May 3, when the FBI director, Christopher Wray, was issued with a subpoena to hand over the document.

On Thursday, members of the committee were allowed to start reviewing the document under lock and key inside a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility).

Wray had initially refused to share the unverified document with anyone except the chair of the committee, James Comer, and the ranking Democrat, Jamie Raskin.

Comer came out from viewing the document and said it was troubling: Raskin said it was nothing.

Comer wanted all members of the committee to be able to see the document, unredacted: Wray refused.

On Monday, Comer threatened to hold him in contempt.

Marjorie Taylor Greene also condemned the decision, pointing out the timing

But, on Wednesday, Comer called off the vote on contempt after Wray agreed to allow the full committee to access a redacted file.

Comer praised the agreement, and crowed that Wray had 'caved' to his demands to allow viewing of the FD-1023 record.

The Biden document was written up by a longtime FBI source whom both Republicans and Democrats have described as credible.

In it, the source details an unverified tip received in 2020 about the business dealings of Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, in Ukraine.

Hunter Biden worked on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company.

'After weeks of refusing to even admit the FD-1023 record exists, the FBI has caved and is now allowing all members of the Oversight and Accountability Committee to review this unclassified record that memorializes a confidential human source's conversations with a foreign national who claimed to have bribed then-Vice President Joe Biden.

'Americans have lost trust in the FBI's ability to enforce the law impartially and demand answers, transparency, and accountability.

'Allowing all Oversight Committee members to review this record is an important step toward conducting oversight of the FBI and holding it accountable to the American people,' he added.

FBI Director Christopher Wray had until May 30 to hand over the document to congressional Republicans: he refused, and James Comer threatened to hold him in contempt of Congress. On Wednesday Wray agreed to allow access to the document

A spokesman for the Oversight Committee told DailyMail.com members could start reviewing the document from Thursday under lock and key inside a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility)

All committee members are now be able to view a redacted version of a confidential document.

It alleges a $5 million bribery scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national.

Joe Biden on Thursday dismissed the allegations as 'malarkey'.

'Where's the money? I'm joking. It's a bunch of malarkey,' he said to a shouted question at the end of a press conference at the White House with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

The White House on Wednesday said Comer was not credible, saying that he has a 'repetitive tactic of laundering thin innuendo.'

Last week the White House said Comer was engaged in a stunt to appear on Fox News.
A worried mother has opened up about how two of her children, the youngest just 13 years old, suffered severe withdrawals after they stopped puffing on supposedly nicotine-free vapes.

Sara Driver, a South Australian mother of three with 30 years of experience in the healthcare industry, spoke out about the horror effects the vapes purchased online had on two of her children after her experience helped her notice worrying symptoms.

Her youngest daughter, 13, was able to purchase the e-cigarettes 'online through social media' with the belief they did not contain highly addictive nicotine.

'They became underweight, not wanting to eat, not contributing anything to family life,' Mrs Driver said.

Sara Driver (pictured), a South Australian mother of three with 30 years of experience in the healthcare industry, spoke out about the horror effects the vapes purchased online had on two of her children

Her youngest daughter, 13, was able to purchase the e-cigarettes 'online through social media' with the belief they did not contain highly addictive nicotine

The SA government announced a two-month crackdown on the illegal sale of nicotine e-cigarettes, with the Health and Wellbeing Minister Chris Picton stating companies had been selling the 'complete lie' the vapes didn't contain nicotine to unsuspecting consumers.

'I am really concerned about the alarming rates of young people becoming addicted to vapes, with parents regularly contacting my office about the problem,' he said.

'These strict new conditions are designed to keep illegal nicotine vapes out of retail outlets and out of the hands of South Australians, especially children,' Mr Picton said.

Retailers have been given a one-month warning before new conditions are added on July 10 under the Tobacco and E-Cigarette Products Act.

The regulations require retailers to prove their vaping products are nicotine-free.

This is done either by providing information from suppliers or through lab testing.

From July 10 a two-month enforcement blitz on SA vape sales will ensue, with health officers conducting random without-warning visits to retailers who stock vapes to ensure they don't contain nicotine (stock image)

From July 10 a two-month enforcement blitz period will ensue, with health officers conducting random without-warning visits to retailers who stock vapes.

Current SA laws only allow the sale of nicotine vaping products with a prescription.

Anyone found selling the products without a licence will face prosecution and fines of up to $20,000.

The move is as an interim message while the Federal Government finalises plans to stop the importation and sale of non-prescription nicotine e-cigarettes.

Health Minister Mark Butler announced a major vaping crackdown this week, including banning popular single-use disposable vapes and barring the import of non-prescription vaping products into Australia.

Adults will only be able to purchase vapes in pharmacies with a prescription rather than in retail stores, and vapes will only be sold in plain packaging and flavours.

Mr Butler described vaping as the 'biggest loophole in Australian history' and the 'No. 1 behavioural issue in high schools'.

'I'm just not willing as the nation's Health Minister to normalise this product,' he said.

The move has been welcomed by health organisations such as the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), the Alcohol and Drug Foundation and the Public Health Association of Australia.
Trusty said they engaged in 'extortion' by bringing up application for judgeship

Donald Trump lawyer Jim Trusty has come out fighting after the former president was sensationally indicted on seven federal charges in the classified documents case and warned prosecutors they would be investigated.

Hours after Trump revealed the shocking news, Trusty claimed federal prosecutors 'extorted' the lawyer for a key witness and is demanding an investigation of internal communications to find out what happened.

Trusty made the allegations on CNN hours after Trump had been indicted on counts related to retention of classified documents and a violation of the Espionage Act, calling it a 'corrupt and politicized' process.

Then Trusty went after federal prosecutor Jay Bratt, head of the counterintelligence section of DOJ's National Security Division, who last year urged a court to seal the affidavit that preceded a search of Mar-a-Lago that uncovered classified material there.

His accusations related to the lawyer for former body man Walt Nauta, who served as a military aide to the president in the White House.

Trusty suggested federal prosecutors, while seeking to line up witnesses that might help them make their case against Trump, sought to apply pressure by bringing up a judgeship that Nauta's lawyer Stanley Woodward had applied for.

The conversation allegedly occurred when Bratt mentioned during a meeting with Woodward that the lawyer with a deep resume had applied for a judgeship in D.C. In Trusty's telling, the prosecutors tried to use the information as 'extortion' leverage, merely by introducing the topic of the career jump Woodward had sought.

Trump lawyer Jim Trusty called the prosecution of his client 'rotten' and accused DOJ prosecutors of 'extortion' through their alleged conduct during a meeting with a lawyer for Trump aide Walt Nauta

Trusty went as far as to charge 'criminal activity' by prosecutors.

'Members of the Department of Justice, led by Jay Bratt, who was a pivotal figure in this investigation. This is the guy who wanted to do a raid before they even had a subpoena out,' he said.

'He apparently, along with five other people in his presence from DOJ, extorted a very well respected, very intelligent lawyer from Washington DC, saying essentially, if you want this judgeship that's on Joe Biden's desk, you have to flip your guy to cooperate against the President of the United States,' Trusty added.

Seeking to probe prosecutors is a move out of Trump's political playbook. Trump demanded probes of former FBI Director James Comey and top FBI officials following the Russia probe, regularly attacked former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and his former AG Bill Barr appointed Special Counsel John Durham to investigate alleged FBI misconduct.

Trusty referenced a report in the Guardian about a meeting prosecutors had with Nauta's lawyer while seeking his cooperation  in a probe where Trump's state of mind as well as details on the movements of documents inside Mar-a-Lago is critical.

A lawyer for Trump aide Walt Nauta alleges prosecutors brought up a judgeship he hat put in for, according to a press report and Donald Trump's lawyer Jim Trusty

Former President Donald Trump has been sensationally indicted on a slew of federal charges including obstruction and a violation of the Espionage Act over the classified documents he took from Mar-a-Lago

The paper reported that the lawyer submitted court papers to Chief Judge James Boasberg of U.S. District Court in Washington describing the alleged incident.

'Bratt then turned to Woodward and remarked that he did not think that Woodward was a Trump guy and that he would do the right thing, before noting that he knew Woodward had submitted an application to be a judge at the superior court in Washington DC that was currently pending, the letter said,' according to the report.

Trusty said it was a serious incident.

'This is no political talker. This is something that was reported at the time by the attorney. It has been basically sworn to by him he's written a letter that's been submitted to a US District Court Judge confirming it happened. And and I think it'd be really interesting to find out whether DOJ whether the five people have sat in the room and watch that extortion have threads of text messages or emails where they comment about that,' he said.

Jay Bratt, Chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, The National Security Division, signed court filings related to the search of Donald Trump's home at Mar-a-Lago for classified material

Then he pointed to the 'discovery' process, suggesting a legal information gathering effort. 'So we're going to want some discovery about just how far ranging this criminal activity was by prosecutors,' he said.

Trump's House GOP allies have created a special subpanel on 'weaponization' of government amid multiple probes of Trump.

Prosecutors wouldn't get to determine who gets a federal judgeship, although raising the prospect of a judicial appointment could be interpreted as a use of leverage to secure cooperation from a witness.

Trusty indicated that DOJ brushed off the allegations after they got raised. 'We got an email from the guy who actually did the extortion message from DOJ ... [that] they're not going to worry about their own dirty house,' he said.

DailyMail.com has approached Woodward and DOJ for comment.

Trusty also said Trump was innocent of charges of retention of classified material, obstruction, and the other charges against him.

Documents found at Mar-a-Lago in an August raid are pictured on display

'He is innocent. I mean, everything about this case is absolutely rotten. The misconduct that we've documented for an attorney general who hides behind Jack Smith ...' he said, referencing AG Merrick Garland's decision to appoint Smith to place the case outside his direct control.

Woodward has represented such Trumpworld figures as Peter Navarro, Kash Patel, and Dan Scavino, and he has also been paid by Trump's Save America Pac.

Judges in DC's Superior Court are nominated by the president, after an individual applies for a vacancy and makes it through a commission that makes recommendations.
Grace Tame has deleted an Instagram post in which she declared Brittany Higgins was 'a national hero' and that the former political staffer was a 'warrior' and 'my friend'.

The sexual abuse survivor made national headlines when she wrote the post on Brittany Higgins' birthday last year, but it has now mysteriously disappeared from her social media page.

The rousing post, which was an emotional tribute to the former Liberal staffer, decried what Ms Tame called an 'insidious nationwide character assassination campaign' against Ms Higgins, saying her 'friend' had faced 'layered injustice' and 'relentless criticism'.

Posted with a striking photograph of the two women taken during a magazine cover shoot, the 2021 Australian of the Year wrote 'Happy birthday, dear Brittany. Warrior. Human. My friend.

'Brittany Higgins has taken every step of her excruciating journey under a microscope; with a nation breathing down her neck. This is no mean feat.

'I have been awed and floored by her intelligence, kindness, vulnerability and determination to keep fighting for herself and others in the face of prolonged, layered injustice and heightened relentless criticism,' Ms Tame wrote.

Grace Tame posted the tribute on Instagram about Brittany Higgins being a 'warrior' and 'national hero' as the former political staffer was in a mental health clinic last December

Grace Tame's powerful post decried the 'insidious nationwide character assassination campaign' against Brittany Higgins and called her 'a national hero'. The post has been deleted.

Ms Tame's December 7, 2022 post, which has now vanished from all stories about it linked to her Instagram page, was supporting Ms Higgins as she spent her 28th birthday in a Queensland mental health clinic.

Ms Higgins went into the clinic the week after prosecutors announced they were abandoning a second trial against her former colleague Bruce Lehrmann, who she alleged raped her in 2019.

Last Sunday, Mr Lehrmann appeared on television to speak publicly for the first time outside a court room, and repeat his denial of Ms Higgins' claims and give his account of what occurred at Parliament House on the night in question.

Controversy has since erupted over the actions of politicians, Ms Higgins' partner David Sharaz, Channel 10 TV star Lisa Wilkinson and others involved in the Higgins saga.

Daily Mail Australia has asked Ms Tame why the post was removed and whether it was linked to the current controversy.

The deleted post went up on Grace Tame's Instagram page on December 7 last year, Brittany Higgin's 28th birthday with this photo (above) of the sex abuse survivor with Ms Higgins taken at a magazine photo shoot

Clocking on a link to the Instagram post by Grace Tame praising Brittany Higgins as a 'national hero' now thrown up the social media platform's 'broken' or 'removed' message

In the now deleted post, Ms Tame wrote: 'I am not a judge or jury, but I am a person who has also walked repeatedly in the line of fire  often alone  and it is not for the faint-hearted.

'However, it is not for this reason that I stand with Brittany. It is simply because she is a decent human being. I stand with Brittany because I have compassion for her.

'High-speed devices are simultaneously diminishing our collective attention spans, desensitising us to delicate content, and distorting our boundaries.

'The aftermath of shock in online spaces often feels like a virtual stampede that leaves its subjects alone in the dust. I have seen this happen to Britt repeatedly.

'Anyone who argues that words can't cause serious damage has never been the target of an insidious nationwide character assassination campaign like Brittany has.'

Ms Tame said at the time that over a period of 18 months with both women at the centre of a national conversation, she had come to know Ms Higgins 'as a close friend' and had the 'honour of seeing a side of her I rarely see in digital or print media'.

Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame shared the cover of Marie Claire magazine in late 2021 and the two women had got to know each other as they became the centre of a national conversation

'She has provided support, comfort and reinforcement for myself and others amid some of the darkest, loneliest times. She is indeed a light, Ms Tame wrote.'

At least three posts referencing Ms Higgins remain on Grace Tame's Instagram account, including an image of the two women's Marie Claire magazine cover, posted in November 2021.

The women also appear in a photograph taken at the National Press Club, posted by Ms Tame in February last year and lauded by followers of Ms Tame's, one of whom wrote 'Grace and Brittany: thank you for speaking out'.

In an earlier post still up on Grace Tame's Instagram page, she wrote alongside an image of a lighthouse and choppy seas, that 'speaking out takes incredible coverage and I hope justice is reached'.

The post is dated one day after Ms Higgins' allegations went public on February 15, 2021.
Donald Trump's lawyer accused the United States of having a 'two tier system of justice', noting that Donald Trump has been indicted while Bill and Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden have not.

Alina Habba told Fox News that the indictment against Trump on federal charges related to the mishandling of classified documents were a sign of 'a sick world'.

She said it made her 'ashamed' to be a lawyer, called the indictment 'persecution', and said it was a 'sad attempt at political interference.'

'There is a two tier system of justice that we are seeing right now,' she told Jesse Watters.

'Hillary Clinton smashed a computer and got rid of emails.

'We had recordings in sock drawers.

'We have Biden and Obama who were hiding things - Biden still has things in Chinatown, in his home, with a son who is a drug addict.

'And nothing happens to these people.'

Alina Habba, a lawyer for Donald Trump, said that her client was being persecuted

Habba told Fox News host Jesse Watters that Trump's indictment was the sign of 'a sick world'

Hillary Clinton's aides admitted that they used a hammer to destroy two of her old phones.

Her staff also in 2015 deleted 30,000 emails on her server which were unrelated to government work, and were older than 60 days.

Her husband spoke to historian Taylor Branch while in office, with the pair of them recording their discussions for a book. Bill Clinton kept his tapes in a sock drawer. Conservatives have argued that they amount to presidential records and should be handed over.

Biden found classified material at the offices of his think tank, in Washington DC, and his Delaware home: they were handed over.

Obama's office denied taking any classified documents.

Donald Trump on Thursday published a video insisting he was innocent, and being persecuted

Yet Habba said there was a distinct prejudice against her client, which she blamed on his political prowess.

'When your name is Donald Trump, and you're leading in the polls, you are going to get hit hard,' she said.

'You are going to get indicted, until you can't take it any more.

'But they picked the wrong guy.'

Habba said that Trump's indictment - the first federal charges ever filed against a former president - was unfair, and 'shows what a sick world we are living in.'

She continued: 'I am petrified for the country at the moment, and sad for my client - although he is resilient and strong.

'And it just shows me once again why we need him back in the White House.'

Habba said that the 'establishment' was terrified by Trump because he was independent.

'Donald Trump is not owned by any lobbyist. He is not owned by any funder - anybody who would give him money in exchange for access,' she said. 'He does not need the money.

'And that is the most frightening thing to the current political climate in America.

'And because of that, he is the biggest threat to the corrupt political system we have; to the corrupt Justice Department we have.'

Habba said that they were looking forward to putting Trump's version of events forward.

Jack Smith was appointed in November as special counsel to investigate Trump's handling of classified information

She attacked the special counsel, Jack Smith, and accused him of being a political hack intent on bringing Trump down.

'All of these indictments, the American people need to remember, are a one-sided evidentiary hearing in a grand jury that is put on by far left Democrats,' she said.

'Jack Smith is effectively what you would call a Democrat, left wing operative.

'All he does is hate Trump, hate the right wing.

'He puts these people in a silo and gives them his evidence.'

She concluded: 'Now we get the opportunity to present our evidence, and see it through.

'If we get an impartial judge, an impartial jury, we will be vindicated on all fronts.'
Now a judge has upheld the ruling made by the board after the spa attempted to sue them

The board ordered the Korean run spa to change their policy on gender after finding them to have discriminated against Wilvich

A women's spa, where nudity is compulsory, has been ordered by a judge to admit pre-op trans women with penises after an activist complained when the owner tried to ban them.

Olympus Spa had attempted to sue the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC) after being ordered to change their rules.

Trans woman Haven Wilvich's membership application for the Korean spa was declined. She alleged the spa told her 'transgender women without surgery are not welcome' and complained to the commission.

The family-owned spa, which has a branch on the outskirts of Seattle and one in Tacoma, is modeled on Jjimjilbang - sex-segregated bath houses in Korea - and offers monthly memberships and day passes.

Now, a Washington District Court has dismissed the lawsuit filed by the spa and upheld the original ruling by the WSHRC. The Pacific Northwest state is one of several Dem-run areas where trans people are permitted to use facilities which align with their gender without question.

In her judgement, District Court Judge Barbara Jacobs Rothstein upheld the ruling made by the WSHRC and said that the measures taken to the prevent the spa from having a female-only policy had been lawful.

Haven Wilvich, pictured, had applied to join the spa but was denied. Olympus Spa offers memberships and day passes

Wilvich claimed the spa said 'transgender women without surgery are not welcome' and complained to the commission

In the initial complaint to the commission, Wilvich said she was a transgender woman who was 'biologically male' and had not undergone sex reassignment surgery.

Wilvich alleged that she had gone to the spa in January 2020 in search of a service but was discriminated against.

She claims that Olympus Spa told her that 'transgender women without surgery are not welcome because it could make other customers and staff uncomfortable.'

In March 2021, the WSHRC had served the spa owner Myoon Woon Lee and the spa's President Sun Lee with a Notice of Complaint of Discrimination.

The commission asked them to respond to the claims made by Wilvich, with Sun Lee releasing a statement standing by their decision.

Lee explained that Olympus was a family-owned 'women's Korean traditional health spa' and noted that nudity was required for certain treatments.

He wrote: 'We firmly believe it is essential for the safety, legal protection, and well-being of our customers and employees that we maintain adherence to this adaptation of a females-only rule.'

Lee explained that Olympus was a family-owned 'women's Korean traditional health spa' and noted that nudity was required for certain treatments

Wilvich alleged that she had gone to the spa in January 2020 in search of a service but was discriminated against.

The spa disputed the Wilvich's claims, asserting they had no documentation showing she had ever applied to enter the facility.

Lee also provided an education on the traditions of Jjimjilbang, which are large sex-segregated bath houses in Korea.

He concluded their response by saying that the spa was 'willing to consider a review of [its] current biological females only policy'.

The caveat to that Lee said was that 'we are unwilling to remake the 'jjimjilbang'' given they had 'worked so hard over many years to build and preserve, simply for the sake of promoting gender neutrality.'

Judge Barbara Jacobs Rothstein upheld the ruling made by the WSHRC and said that the measures taken by them had been lawful

The two also said that they are both Christian, and cited their faith as reasons as to why they did not wish to accommodate males in the facility.

The spa disputed the Wilvich's claims, asserting they had no documentation showing she had ever applied to enter the facility.

But the WSHRC upheld their ruling, and offered the spa a Pre-Finding Settlement agreement to avoid prosecution.

The Pre-Finding Settlement required the spa to remove all references to 'biological women' on their site, and provide staff with 'inclusivity' training.

This the prompted the lawsuit from the Spa, saying their First Amendment rights had been violated.

The court offered Olympus Spa 30 days to amend their complaint and refile.

Wilvich had previously boasted about the success of her complaint on Facebook after the initial WSHRC ruling.

She said: 'I did it! I worked with the WSHRC and got Olympus Spa (the main naked lady spa in the area) to change their policies and allow all self-identified women access regardless of surgery and genitals.'

In another post she said: 'Making fun of Viagra or small penises isn't the feminist act you think it is. It harms trans women and femmes with penises.'

Wilvich had previously boasted about the success of her complaints on Facebook after the initial WSHRC ruling

The spa disputed the Wilvich's claims, asserting they had no documentation showing she had ever applied to enter the facility

Wilvich had previously sat on the board of the Seattle Nonbinary Collective, and described himself as a 'a tall, bearded, transfemme, King County native'

Wilvich also posted on Facebook, writing: 'I realized something important today. I'm more woman than any TERF will ever be because I am an intentional woman whereas they are only incidental.'

Prior to Wilvich's transition, she sat on the board of the Seattle Nonbinary Collective, and described herself as a 'a tall, bearded, transfemme, King County native.'

Olympus Spa is not the first Korean spa in the United States to come into the crosshairs of the gender ideology debate over the past two years.

In 2021, a Korean spa in California made international headlines after a trans-identified sex offender was granted access to the women's facilities in accordance with California state law.

Suspect Darren Merager spent 15 months on the run following the controversy, which triggered riots between Antifa and women's rights campaigners.

Merager faces five felony counts of indecent exposure.
The Labor government stands accused of seeking to 'politically profit' from Brittany Higgins' rape allegations.

Ms Higgins reached a compensation agreement with the Commonwealth in December 2022 after she launched legal action against her employers in the previous coalition government.

Ms Higgins alleged she was raped by Bruce Lehrmann in 2019 inside the office of then-coalition minister Linda Reynolds, who they both worked for.

Mr Lehrmann has always denied Ms Higgins' allegation.

The Labor government stands accused of seeking to 'politically profit' from Brittany Higgins' rape allegations (pictured, Brittany Higgins outside court in October, 2022 in Canberra)

This week text messages between Ms Higgins and her partner David Sharaz emerged suggesting the pair contemplated strategising her story with Labor minister Katy Gallagher, when she was in opposition, after the rape allegation was made public.

It's further alleged by the opposition Senator Gallagher misled parliament in 2021 when she rebuffed claims she was tipped off about the rape allegation before it was made public in media reports.

Deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley told reporters on Friday senior government members needed to clear the air on what they knew and when.

'The release of text messages and audio recordings has brought into question the conduct of some senior Labor ministers, and the prime minister himself, relating to whether they chose to weaponise a rape allegation for political purposes,' she said.

'The government's credibility is in tatters and so every single claim needs to be validated.'

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the opposition attack as 'bizarre'.

Text messages Ms Higgins and her partner David Sharaz (pictured) emerged suggesting the pair contemplated strategising her story with Labor minister Katy Gallagher

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the opposition attack as 'bizarre' when he was asked by David Koch and Natalie Barr on Sunrise on Friday morning

'You had allegations by a Liberal staffer that another Liberal staffer had a sexual assault in a Liberal minister's office, and somehow, somehow Katy Gallagher has some responsibility for what was going on here,' he told Seven's Sunrise program.

'This is bizarre.'

Senator Reynolds - who was criticised over her handling of Ms Higgins' situation - has threatened to refer her compensation payment to the National Anti-Corruption Commission, which comes into force on July 1, with the support of her leader Peter Dutton.

But Independent MP Zali Steggall on Friday said the attack 'said a lot for (Mr) Dutton's moral compass'.

Prosecutors ultimately dropped the charge against Mr Lehrmann because of fears about the impact of a second rape trial on Ms Higgins' mental health after his initial trial was abandoned because of juror misconduct.

An ACT inquiry report into the handling of the rape trial is due to be handed down in July.

1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732)

National Sexual Abuse and Redress Support Service 1800 211 028

Lifeline 13 11 14

beyondblue 1300 22 4636
Two others have been recovered

UPDATE: The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) have confirmed that the search has been suspended as of 5pm on Friday and it is unknown if efforts will continue.

A desperate search is underway for a woman after a small boat capsized in rough waters, throwing its three occupants overboard.

Wendy Richardson, 68, was travelling on a small dinghy between islands when the notoriously dangerous waters of the Torres Strait flipped it around 2pm on Thursday afternoon.

Rescuers were able to recover two passengers, but were unable to find the Cairns speech pathologist and mum who was reportedly not wearing a life jacket.

The trio had been separated in the water, with the rescued people telling emergency services that she had last been seen swimming towards a large coral on her own.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) has not been able to locate Ms Richardson, who has now been missing for over 24 hours, and rescue efforts have resumed south-east of Mabuiag Island after pausing overnight.

Wendy Richardson, 68, was travelling on a small dinghy between islands when the notoriously dangerous waters of the Torres Strait flipped it around 2pm on Thursday afternoon

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) was able to locate and rescue two others who were on the same boat south-east of Mabuiag Island (pictured), but failed to find Ms Richardson who has now been at sea for over 24 hours

Ms Richardson worked in the area as a speech pathologist and was a valuable member of her communities, her sister, Julie Ryan, told Cairns Post.

'The family are very worried. We haven't had an update yet this morning, the best case scenario is she's alive but alone and has spent a lot of time in the water,' Mrs Ryan said.

'Wendy works as a speech pathologist for disadvantaged children. She goes up there so often because a lot of the kids need her help. She has to travel between the islands but she's always said the travel is very dangerous.

'She always told me she had to travel between the islands in "flimsy dinghys". She always said she was terrified of the travel,'

The trio had swam to a small reef after their six-metre Dory-style boat capsized between Badu and Mabuiag islands.

After deciding to swim towards a larger reef nearby, Ms Richardson was separated before she vanished.

The 34-year-old male and 22-year-old female were found approximately three nautical miles off the end of Mabuiag Island and were transported to Thursday Island Hospital for treatment.

Queensland Police, who are working with AMSA, confirmed the search and rescue operation was underway in the notoriously choppy waters of the Torres Strait.

'Police and emergency services commenced a wide-ranging surface and aerial search, involving multiple aircraft and vessels, with the rescue helicopter locating two people in the water at approximately 3.30pm yesterday afternoon,' they confirmed via a statement.

'Police hold serious concerns for her welfare.

'Boaties and other recreational water users are asked to immediately report any sightings to police.'

An AMSA spokesperson added that: 'Today, AMSA's Cairns-based Challenger Rescue Aircraft, and two helicopters resumed the search this morning. A Queensland Police vessel along with several other vessels from the area, are continuing to assist in the search for the missing person.'

'Yesterday afternoon, AMSA tasked the Horn Island-based rescue 700 helicopter, along with Maritime Safety Queensland (MSQ) and Queensland Water Police vessels from Mabuiag Island.'

Multiple helicopters and an aircraft have been sent out by AMSA, who are working with Queensland Police who bought numerous vessels of their own for the search

Ms Richardson had been helping disadvantaged children in the area and was passionate about her job, according to Mrs Ryan.

'She's in her 60s but hasn't retired for the sake of the children up there. She's very well known in Cairns,' she told Cairns Post.

Other recent rescue efforts in the area have seen mixed results for those lost at sea.

In December, 2022 a Moa Island man, 31, was adrift for 24 hours after his dinghy capsized, with only a piece of wood to cling to before rescuers saved him.

More recently, the search was called off for Denne Bourke, a missing outrigger paddler, whose empty canoe was discovered near Thursday Island on May 3.
As formal President Trump is set for an indictment for his handling of classified documents, the federal investigation into President Joe Biden's own handling of classified materials is not close to being finished.

Just a day after the November 8 midterm elections, the Justice Department quietly opened an investigation 'to understand whether classified information had been mishandled in violation of federal law' over Biden's alleged misdeeds.

This was after the president's personal lawyers found a small number of classified documents, reportedly 10, at Penn Biden, a Washington DC think tank where Biden previously held a private office.

Biden and federal officials have located documents at Penn Biden and at his Wilmington home, and have searched his Delaware beach house after the initial discovery days before the November elections.

Citing three sources, NBC News reported Thursday that not only is the end of the investigation into Biden not 'imminent,' they have yet to even question the president.

As formal President Trump is set for an indictment for his handling of classified documents, the federal investigation into President Joe Biden's own handling of classified materials is not close to being finished. He is seen reversing his Corvette into a garage filled with papers at his Wilmington home

The president has insisted that he and his team are being transparent and cooperative with investigators. He's also brushed off reporters' questions on the matter and outright ignored them at times.

A source close to Biden's team said that there was 'no way around it' when it comes the president having to be interviewed as part of the investigation. It will likely be one of the final interviews given.

The White House, Biden's personal attorney and a spokesperson for special counsel Robert Hur have all declined comment.

Hur was appointed special counsel to investigate the documents found in Biden's Wilmington home, which date back to his time as vice president.

On November 2, Biden's personal attorney discovered approximately 10 documents with classified markings on Nov. 2 at the Penn Biden Center, his private think tank run by the University of Pennsylvania.

The material dated back to the Obama administration. The National Archives and Justice Department were informed of the discovery.

But the crisis did not come to public attention until January after CBS News reported their existence, earning criticism for the Biden administration, which has promised transparency.

Days later more classified documents were discovered at Biden's Wilmington, Delaware, residence. Additional searches found more classified records - about two dozen total.

Biden and federal officials have located documents at Penn Biden and at Biden's Wilmington home (pictured)

They were also found at the offices of a think tank where Biden set up shop before he ran for president

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre took a public beating for saying on multiple occasions the search for documents was over only to have to reveal additional searches found additional documents.

The lack of disclosures, the misstatements, and Biden own testiness when asked about the issue contributed to the impression the White House had not been forthcoming on the matter.

Administration officials countered that the Archives and other federal agencies were notified immediately.

Trump has been indicted for mishandling of classified documents and summoned to appear before a federal judge in Miami, he announced on Thursday. He has been charged with seven counts.

Biden called Trump's mishandling of files, hundreds of which were recovered from Mar-a-Lago in the raid, 'irresponsible' during a September interview with 60 Minutes.

Trump has been indicted for mishandling of classified documents and summoned to appear before a federal judge in Miami, he announced on Thursday. He has been charged with seven counts

Former President Donald Trump has been sensationally indicted on a slew of federal charges including obstruction and a violation of the Espionage Act over the classified documents he took from Mar-a-Lago

Trump told Fox News Thursday evening that the indictment was 'election interference' and 'the greatest which hunt of all time.'

He plans to plead not guilty, saying he is 'totally innocent.

It is the second set of charges leveled at Trump this year, plunging the country into fresh legal and political uncertainty as he campaigns to return to office.

Prosecutors have investigating the transfer of presidential files to his Mar-a-Lago Florida estate since last year.

The probe exploded into the headlines in August when the FBI searched Trump's beachside home, recovering 11,000 documents, including about 100 that were marked as classified.

For his part, Trump has repeatedly insisted he did nothing wrong and that he is the victim of a federal witch hunt.

At times the controversy has even boosted his standing in the polls and allowed him to raise money from supporters who see a 'deep state' plot to take him out of the 2024 race.

'The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is 'secured' by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time,' Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday night.

'I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!'

Donald Trump on Thursday announced that he had been indicted for mishandling classified documents

Security is already being increased around the courthouse in Miami ahead of his appearance before a judge, scheduled for 3pm on Tuesday.

Earlier this week, Trump took to his social media platform to condemn reports of looming charges.

'Wow, this is turning out to be the greatest and most vicious instance of election interference in the history of our country,' he wrote on Truth Social.

He had already earned the status of being the first former president to face criminal charges. Those relate to a $130,000 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

In April, he appeared in Manhattan court where he was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records as part of an alleged plot to hide damaging information from voters before the 2016 election.

Trump pleaded not guilty.

Legal analysts believe the documents case could be more legally difficult for the former president.

During the past year, a grand jury has heard testimony from Mar-a-Lago employees and former administration officials who worked in Trump's post-presidential office.

One of the final witnesses was Mark Meadows, Trump's last White House chief of staff.

And Taylor Budowich, who served as a spokesman for Trump after his presidency and runs a pro-Trump political action committee, confirmed that he had given evidence too.

'Today, in what can only be described as a bogus and deeply troubling effort to use the power of government to "get" Trump, I fulfilled a legal obligation to testify in front a federal grand jury and I answered every question honestly,' he wrote on Twitter.

The investigation into Trump's handling of classified documents is being overseen by a special counsel, Jack Smith, who was appointed by the Attorney General Merrick Garland in November.

On Monday, Trump's attorneys met with Smith and his team in Washington, D.C.

On Wednesday, it was confirmed that Trump was an official target of the investigation.

Trump himself is currently in Bedminster, New Jersey, huddled with his advisors.
As news of Donald Trump's federal indictment in the classified documents case sent shockwaves through the United States, the fate of his 2024 White House run was brought into question.

The defiant former president has said he won't drop out and has instead ripped into the 'corrupt' Biden administration and the 'weaponized' Department of Justice, and claimed the cases against him are election interference.

He will now split his time between the courtroom and the campaign trail as he tries to seal the GOP nomination while facing seven federal charges, including obstruction and a violation of the Espionage Act.

And experts have different views on whether this will damage or drive his bid to be in the Oval Office for the second time. The criminal cases and investigations into him have so far not slowed him down - and it's unlikely to change in the near future.

A poll by Yahoo News/YouGov conducted last month found six in 10 Americans found he should be disqualified from office if he is convicted of a crime.

Yet he will still be able to run for President - and could serve in the White House - if he is eventually found guilty.

He has also maintained a double-digit lead in most polls over closest rival Ron DeSantis in the Republican primaries.

Strategists have spoken to DailyMail.com and have given their views on how the second indictment will impact Trump's campaign and how voters will react.

As news of Donald Trump's federal indictment in the classified documents case sent shockwaves through the United States, the fate of his 2024 White House run was brought into question

Will his opponents attack him? Will they make the case to Americans that Trump is not the man for the Republican Party? Will he lose more independent voters?

There is also a chance it could embolden Trump, and make the support among his staunch MAGA base even stronger.

THE CHARGES TRUMP FACES AND THE MAXIMUM PRISON SENTENCES Trump lawyers have confirmed he is facing seven federal charges. They have not received the formal indictment, but have been sent summonses that suggest he will face the below counts and maximum sentences. Willful retention of national defense information in violation of The Espionage Act (maximum penalty of 20 years in prison if convicted)

Conspiracy to obstruct justice (20 years)

Withholding a document or record (20 years)

Corruptly concealing a document or record (20 years)

Concealing a document in a federal investigation (20 years)

Scheme to conceal (five years)

False statements and representations (five years) Advertisement

John Feehery, a former top Republican staffer who now runs EFB Advocacy, told DailyMail.com: 'This will help Trump raise at least five million. Nothing like making him a martyr.

'The idea that he would get indicted for doing pretty much the same thing that Pence and Biden just shows how corrupt our judicial system has become.'

Republican Rep. Nancy Mace echoed this sentiment on Thursday night by saying Biden's Department of Justice had secured Trump's nomination with their unprecedented move.

Republican strategist Doug Heye told DailyMail.com the impact Trump's second indictment will have on the race will depend on what his challengers say.

'A second indictment gives them (his rivals) a very clear opportunity to say that Trump should step aside or that there's just too much drama and Republicans need somebody solely focused on beating Joe Biden.

'But will they do that?

'This will severely hurt Trump's chances in the general election with independent voters.

'So the Republicans running against Trump need to make the case that he's not the focus, and he might not be able to win in any event.'

Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who is trailing at less than 1 percent in the Republican 2024 polls, jumped on the news and said Trump should drop out.

'With the news that Donald Trump has been indicted for the second time, our country finds itself in a position that weakens our democracy,' said Hutchinson in a press release. 'Donald Trump's actions  from his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of law  should not define our nation or the Republican Party.

'This is a sad day for our country. While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign

The defiant former president has said he won't drop out and has instead ripped into the 'corrupt' Biden administration and 'weaponized' Department of Justice. Documents are seen scattered on the floor of Mar-a-Lago

Max Burns, founder and chief strategist at Third Degree Strategies, told DailyMail.com: 'Trump now adds at least seven felony charges to the 34 he's already facing, and with several investigations still ongoing.

'Trump now faces the reality that he'll be spending more time in courtrooms than on the campaign trail over the next year. That alone should give Americans deep concerns.

Rutgers University Presidential historian David Greenberg told DailyMail.com: 'If the past is any guide, it seems unlikely to hurt him with Republican primary voters.

'But depending on how the trial goes, it's not hard to imagine swing voters  specifically people not enamored of Joe Biden  developing new qualms about voting for Trump in the general election.

'This isn't a deathblow to his candidacy by any means, but neither can Trump and his circle be very happy about this news.'

The 76-year-old on Thursday said he had been told he was being indicted in relation to espionage - the first time in U.S. history that a former president has faced federal charges.

According to his attorneys, Trump faces four separate counts each carrying a potential prison time of 20 years: conspiracy to obstruct justice; withholding a document or record; corruptly concealing a document or record; and concealing a document in a federal investigation.

Melania Trump wore Chanel ballet shoes and carried a Chanel purse, paired with a khaki skirt and black top, when spotted leaving Trump Tower in New York City earlier Thursday

A Mar-a-Lago employee drained the resort's swimming pool and flooded a room where computer servers containing surveillance video logs were kept

One count carries a 10 year sentence: willful retention of national defense information.

And the final two counts have a maximum of five years each: scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations. Trump's indictment remains under seal, but his decision to publicize it means feds could unseal it as early as Friday, ahead of next Tuesday's court appearance in Miami.

The news was met with outrage among the Republican party, with even his 2024 rival, Ron DeSantis, declaring that the 'weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society.'

DeSantis stopped short of saying whether he'd pardon his rival if Trump was convicted, despite calls for the Florida governor to commit to doing so.

Trump himself - who was in Bedminster, New Jersey when the charging news broke - condemned the indictment in a clip which The New York Times said was pre-recorded, saying it was political persecution, and said: 'I am innocent.'
Elderly couple were home when the burglar broke in

A brazen burglar has been captured unmasked on a home security camera as he rummaged through an elderly couple's belongings in broad daylight.

The man was caught on full-colour home CCTV on the hunt for valuables at a home in Seaton, Adelaide.

Vision clearly shows his face multiple times as he goes through drawers in the retirees' bedroom, looking for valuable trinkets.

The alleged robbery took place around 2.30pm on Wednesday, with the thief entering through their back door, fully aware people were home.

A man who has stolen cash and jewellery from an elderly couple's home in broad daylight has been captured on CCTV (pictured) after the couple installed cameras after they were robbed years earlier

He was inside for 20 minutes where he allegedly stole cash and priceless jewellery, including an engagement ring from 1964.

The couple's home was broken into only a couple of years prior which is when they decided to get the high-quality cameras installed.

Police are investigating the robbery and anyone who recognises him is urged to contact police.

Social media users were amused at the thief's lack of knowledge of the CCTV cameras.

'Amateur hour, up on his tippy toes so as not to make noise, meanwhile his face even reflects in the mirror,' one person wrote.

'Sneaky swine,' another added.
A 51-year-old 'Peeping Tom' who watched and filmed women through their windows spent time behind bars for dozens of similar offences after being rejected by the army.

John William Goodwin pleaded guilty in the Brisbane District Court on Friday to more than 20 charges of making observations or recordings in breach of privacy and one count of possessing child exploitation material.

In 2014 he admitted 125 counts of recording in breach of privacy between December 2005 and February 2010, and pleaded guilty to charges including burglary, sexual assault, indecent treatment of a child and making child exploitation material.

Most recordings were taken while peering through windows and gaps in blinds and curtains of the 38 houses he visited but in some cases he broke in, according to court documents.

He sexually assaulted some women and videoed himself masturbating in bedrooms while women were sleeping.

John William Goodwin pleaded guilty to more than 20 charges of making observations or recordings between December 2005 and February 2010

A total of 59 complainants were identified, while five remained unknown.

Goodwin came to the attention of police when he posted a folder of images he had taken of an eight-year-old girl to a Russian website.

He spent years behind bars for those offences before being released on parole on Christmas Eve, 2019.

But police found images and about 186 videos of a 'Peeping Tom nature' on his phone in July, 2021, prosecutor Dejana Kovac said on Friday.

They showed 12 women aged between 15 and 49, some fully or partially naked, in their homes in the south Brisbane suburbs of Carina - where Goodwin lived - and Camp Hill.

The video footage was taken through windows at night in February and March, 2021.

Some days he went to more than one house, making recordings or just observing people in breach of their privacy.

Goodwin visited the house where the 15-year-old girl lived six times, while on two days in February he took more than 50 videos of five women, including one who was heavily pregnant, showering and dressing.

The women felt significantly violated by Goodwin's actions, Ms Kovac told the court.

'His offending in my submissions was premeditated, predatory and struck at the complainants' privacy and security in their own homes or homes of others they trusted.'

Goodwin had been subject to parole for a brief time after his previous jail sentence, his barrister Sarah Cartledge told the court.

He could not get a job due to his previous conviction, lived in a share house and had no support once his parole order ended.

'There was  a lack of anything to keep him occupied essentially ... (and) he struggled to return to community life which is a contributing factor to returning to this type of offending unfortunately,' Ms Cartledge said.

Most recordings were taken while peering through windows and gaps in blinds and curtains of the 38 houses he visited but in some cases he broke in, according to court documents

Goodwin witnessed acts of violence committed on family members during a traumatic and abusive childhood, court documents relating to his earlier convictions state.

'The sentencing judge noted ... most offending occurred during periods of unemployment, when the respondent became addicted to viewing internet pornography and collecting it.'

Judge Deborah Richards adjourned the sentence to July 7, ordering a pre-sentence report that includes a psychiatric assessment be completed within 28 days.

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Quanishia White Berry and her wife Lexus had been in their apartment in Davenport, Iowa, on May 28 when the building collapsed

A woman who lost her leg in an Iowa building collapse has shared her harrowing tale of how she survived by protecting her head and face and moving away from dripping water to avoid drowning.

Quanishia 'Peach' White Berry and her wife Lexus had been in their six-floor apartment building on May 28 when they noticed cracks beginning to form on their windows.

Speaking to CNN, she said: 'Imagine hearing a building get torn down, that's how it sounded when everything just fell - and I fell.'

After six hours under the rubble, Berry said she remembered thinking: 'I have to make it, for her especially. I have to survive this, I have to be able to tell this story.'

Berry said she had gallons of water pouring on her from pipes and she was using pieces of rubble to cover her face to avoid drowning.

Quanishia White Berry, right, and her wife Lexus, left, had been in their apartment in Davenport when the building collapsed

An aerial view shows a portion of a six-story apartment building after the collapse

Berry said: 'I got gallons of water just pouring on me, I'm soaking wet with metal everywhere. I was taking pieces of the floor, and covering my head so I didn't drown.'

After hours of rescuers making their way towards her, they had to amputate her leg at the scene.

Dr Calvin Atwell, a trauma surgeon at Genesis Medical Center in Davenport, told CNN: 'She was losing a fair amount of blood from her right leg and you could see an open wound.

'We crawled in there and put a tourniquet on that leg and they were working vigorously to get that leg untrapped.'

After realizing they wouldn't be able to free it, Atwell performed an above-the-knee amputation with a knife and power saw in the crumbling building as search and rescue team members shone lights on the procedure.

He continued: 'When she was unresponsive, we just made a decision: Lets get her out of here.

'We knew that shed been trapped for six hours, and we knew that she wasnt going to survive much longer.'

On her recovery, she said: 'Im looking forward to healing and getting good treatment, good care.

'Im already seeing myself walking again. I dont feel stopped by any means.'

Horrifying surveillance captured at the scene shows the building completely fall in on itself.

Puffs of dust can be seen pouring out from the building just seconds before it collapses. Three people were killed and dozens of apartments were destroyed.

Branden Colvin Sr., 42, Ryan Hitchcock, 51, and Daniel Prien, 60, were believed to have been at home during the collapse and had been declared missing after initial rescue attempts. Their bodies were finally recovered earlier this week.

The first lawsuit against the city and building's owner has already been filed.

The bodies of Branden Colvin Sr., 42, Ryan Hitchcock, 51, and Daniel Prien, 60, were recovered nearly a week after the building collapsed

Children draw on the ground with chalk at the scene where the building partially collapsed last month

Governor Kim Reynolds, center, talks with local officials while touring the site of the apartment building collapse on Monday



Tenant Dayna Feuerbach has accused the city of Davenport, as well as the building's current and former owners, of multiple counts of negligence, claiming they knew about the deteriorating conditions and failed to warn residents of the risk.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and notes that additional suits are likely.

Berry and her wife Lexus have also filed a similar suit against the city after their horrific ordeal.

Mayor Mike Matson said Monday that neither he nor other city officials have been in touch with building owner Andrew Wold.

On May 30, Wold released a statement saying' our thoughts and prayers are with our tenants.' He has not released any additional statements since.

County records show Davenport Hotel L.L.C. acquired the building in 2021 deal for $4.2 million.

Chief Bladel said the Davenport fire marshal's office had started an investigation of the building collapse with help from the state Division of Criminal Investigation, Davenport police and the medical examiners office.

The building, built as a hotel in 1907, had been converted into about 80 apartment units that were home to roughly 50 people.
His attorneys are fighting to keep the gag order in place

Kohberger appeared in court in Idaho Friday for two separate hearings

A judge overseeing Bryan Kohberger's quadruple murder trial refused to decide today whether or not he will lift a gag order that the Idaho murder victims' families say prevents them from speaking about the case.

Kohberger appeared in Latah County Court in a black suit, blue shirt and tie Friday for the hearing.

His attorneys want the gag order to remain in place for the duration of his trial.

He will go to court in October accused of murdering Kaylee Goncalves, Maddie Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin in Idaho in November last year.

Today, his attorneys appealed to the judge to keep the order in place, claiming it is one of the only ways to ensure a fair trial.

Kohberger appeared in Latah County Court in a black suit, blue shirt and tie today for the hearing

Kohberger pleaded not guilty to quadruple murder earlier this year. He will go to trial in October

The order prevents the families and attorneys on both sides from talking specifically about the case to the media.

The Goncalves family - and the media - is fighting the order.

Judge John Judge today did not make a decision. He said he will release a written decision after weighing both sides' arguments.

Kohberger is also asking that cameras be banned from the courtroom when he goes to trial.

In legal papers this week, his team claimed he was being unfairly scrutinized on social media, where his body language is discussed at length.

He complained in a filing this week that his body language was being over-analyzed on social media and could impact the case.

Kohberger is expected at both hearings today.

His attorneys have asked that the gag order remain in place.

The families of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle have been banned from speaking publicly about the case

Attorney Elisa Massoth listens to a speaker during a motion hearing regarding a gag order in Latah County District Court, Friday, June 9, 2023, in Moscow, Idaho.

Judge John Judge declined to make a decision on the gag order today

'It remains appropriate to have an Order reminding lawyers and their agents of the rules of engagement in this country and that we try cases in court, not in the press,' one of Kohberger's attorneys, Jay Weston Logsdon, wrote in a memo to the court this week.

Kohberger, 28, is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and burglary in connection with the stabbing deaths in Moscow, Idaho, on Nov. 13, 2022. Second District Judge John C. Judge entered not guilty pleas on his behalf last month. Prosecutors have not said if they will seek the death penalty.

The bodies of Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were found at a rental home across the street from the University of Idaho campus. The slayings shocked the rural Idaho community and neighboring Pullman, Washington, where Kohberger was a graduate student studying criminology at Washington State University.

The case has garnered widespread publicity, and in January Latah County Magistrate Judge Megan Marshall issued a 'nondissemination' order barring attorneys, law enforcement agencies and others associated with the case from talking with the press or issuing statements unless they are quoting directly from a court document.

The Idaho Supreme Court in April declined to vacate the gag order, saying the news organizations, including The Associated Press, should have first asked the lower court to lift the order. The justices did not weigh in on whether the gag order violates First Amendment rights.

The news organizations subsequently did ask the lower court to revoke the order, and Judge scheduled arguments for Friday.

The media coalition says that while it respects the defendant's right to a fair trial under the Sixth Amendment, the court should not have issued a gag order without evidence that right would be infringed by their ability to speak with attorneys involved in the case.

'Intervenors agree that there has been, and will continue to be, great publicity surrounding this case,' the coalition's attorneys wrote. 'But publicity alone is not prejudicial.

'The States and Mr. Kohbergers failure to present any evidence of prejudicial news coverage, and the Courts failure to consider alternative measures, means the competing constitutional rights here were improperly balanced and the Gag Order should be vacated.'

Shanon Gray, an attorney for the Goncalves family, has also asked the judge to lift the gag order, saying he should be allowed to speak on the family's behalf.

Gag orders that prohibit journalists from writing about certain cases are considered to be severely problematic under the First Amendment.

But the U.S. Supreme Court and other appeals courts have upheld some that prohibit attorneys, police or others involved in a case - those with privileged information about it - from speaking with reporters to begin with, as a way to avoid influencing potential jurors or otherwise jeopardizing a defendant's right to a fair trial.
Nguyen inserted parts of a toy into her baby's throat, killing him in 2022

Responded 'no' when asked if she wanted to harm herself or her son

New mum saw 10 different health practitioners leading up to incident

Within five days of giving birth to her first child, Alyssa Nguyen began displaying 'red flag' symptoms of post-natal depression and anxiety.

She did everything she could to help herself and went to see 10 different health professionals.

After six months of suffering, believing she could not be the perfect mother to her newborn son, she took baby Spencer's life.

On May 20, 2022, Nguyen used parts of the six-month-old boy's toy, inserting them in his throat, causing him to suffocate and die.

Nguyen then attempted to take her own life.

Alyssa Nguyen (pictured, left) saw psychologists, GPs and went to hospital to get help after suffering from tremors during a bout of post-natal depression

Nguyen used parts of her baby boy Spencer's toy, inserting them in his throat, causing the baby (pictured) to suffocate and die on May 20, 2022

Her husband, Ben Recto, found them lying in the couple's bedroom when he came home from work.

Nguyen, from Mernda in north-east Melbourne, was taken to hospital and spent weeks recovering from her injuries.

A suicide note she left behind was read to the Supreme Court on Friday, as she was convicted of infanticide and released on a three-year good behaviour bond.

The 37-year-old described her mental health battle in the letter and asked to be buried with her son.

'This battle with post-natal depression and post-natal anxiety is so real, it's now been six months and I keep getting worse,' she wrote.

Nguyen was once a bubbly, friendly person who changed dramatically after giving birth to Spencer.

She strived for perfection as a mother but felt overwhelmed and helpless.

Nguyen knew she needed help and took herself to see psychologists, GPs and to hospital after suffering from tremors.

Several health professionals asked her if she felt like harming herself or her son, and she responded no.

Justice Lex Lasry was critical of those professionals' reliance on Nguyen's self-assessments.

'Your assessment of yourself shouldn't have been relied upon,' he said.

'There were other clinical signs that made it clear you were at significant risk.'

Nguyen was only given the mental health treatment she needed after her son died, when she was admitted to in-patient care at a hospital psychiatric ward.

Her family want to make sure their heartbreaking experience will shine a light on a broken health care system.

'They want Spencer's death to be a learning experience for health care, that women are vulnerable after they give birth and that this was a tragedy that could have been avoided,' the family's lawyer Ruth Parker said.

'She reached out for help ... and the system is not equipped and is not ready to give the kind of assistance that she needed.'

Her husband, Ben Recto, hopes their experience will bring better awareness to the harm caused by improperly treated post-natal depression

Mr Recto hopes their experience will bring better awareness to the harm caused by improperly treated post-natal depression.

'I don't want Spencer's passing to not be a key lesson for families and the system,' he said, in a statement to the court.

'We have experienced the loss of our first child and I really want to build awareness so that there is more support for families and new mums.'

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Some of Monty Python's most famous film scenes, including the Black Knight, were almost cut - because the stars thought they were 'too silly, dull or offensive', the movies' editor has revealed.

Julian Doyle said several of Python's iconic moments such as Biggus Dickus were nearly shelved over concerns they were not funny.

He worked on Life Of Brian, The Meaning Of Life and The Holy Grail, alongside Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin.

He said some of the most memorable moments from the films almost never made the screen over concerns of taste, budget, pace and humour.

Doyle claimed there were fears the Judean People's Front Crack Suicide Squad from Life Of Brian would upset Jewish viewers.

Some of Monty Python's most famous film scenes, including the Black Knight (pictured), were almost cut - because the stars thought they were 'too silly, dull or offensive', the movies' editor has revealed

Some of the most memorable moments from the films almost never made the screen over concerns of taste, budget, pace and humour.

Julian Doyle claimed there were fears the Judean People's Front Crack Suicide Squad from Life Of Brian would upset Jewish viewers

A scene where a market trader barters over the cost of a fake beard was dubbed by the actors as 'too slow' - as was The Three-Headed Knight from The Holy Grail.

The Grail's Black Knight battle - one of the most famous Python moments ever - was also almost left on the cutting room floor.

The skit shows the defiant Knight, played by Cleese, losing all four limbs during a duel with Chapman's King Arthur - but still refusing to yield.

Cleese's lines - 'tis but a scratch', 'I've had worse' and 'Alright, we'll call it a draw' - have since become classics.

However, the Pythons thought the sword fight should be removed because it was 'so bloody that it was killing the rest of the film', Doyle said.

The stars were 'sticklers for perfection' and feared certain gags could damage the films by falling flat with audiences, he has revealed.

Doyle said several of Python's iconic moments such as Biggus Dickus were nearly shelved over concerns they were not funny

Two scenes featuring Otto were ultimately removed from the film but the Suicide Squad are later seen tapping their lifeless feet to the film's closing song, 'Always look on the bright side of life' (pictured, Brian singing the song while being crucified)

Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin in Monty Python's Life Of Brian (pictured)

With Life Of Brian, Cleese believed the famed Biggus Dickus scene became 'too silly' and wanted to cut the end section.

Many precious moments were saved thanks to Doyle's 'fanatical persistence' which Palin would later mention in more polite terms: 'Julian won't let anything go unless he thinks its right.'

Doyle, whose feature film credits also include Time Bandits and Brazil, said he fought 'tooth and nail' with the stars to keep the scenes.

Speaking at the launch of his new novel The Jericho Manuscript, which was inspired by his work on Life Of Brian, he said: 'The Monty Python films are known today as comedic masterpieces, and rightly so.

'But what no one knows, and has never known until now, is that several scenes that would go on to become iconic, side-splitting institutions in their own right, were in fact destined to suffer a brutal edit.

'The Pythons were sticklers for perfection, and thought some of these skits were too silly, too offensive or too dull.

'They and the producers wanted to cut the Black Knight sketch because they thought the scene was so outrageously bloody that it would kill the rest of the film.'

John Cleese with Eric Idle in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The film's unforgettable ending, where King Arthur is arrested just before claiming the Holy Grail, only came about because the production ran out of money

A scene where a market trader barters over the cost of a fake beard was dubbed by the actors as 'too slow' - as was The Three-Headed Knight (pictured) from The Holy Grail

Doyle continued: 'In the Biggus Dickus scene in Life Of Brian, John Cleese believed that after he, as the centurion, left the scene it became too silly for words with Palin teasing the soldiers to make them laugh.

'He originally felt Michael was moving out of character. And although John was probably right, when we ran the finished film the audience were in such hysterics as the scene progressed that they did not care about the finer details, they just wanted it to go on and on.'

The three feature-length Python films - released in 1975, 1979 and 1983 - followed the success of the troupe's cult comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus.

They continue to top polls of the funniest movies of all time, and their influence on comedy been compared to the Beatles' impact on music.

Yet according to Doyle, who worked on all three movies either as editor or special effects designer, at London's Neal's Yard studios, the six Pythons were 'tenacious in their pursuit of timeless gags' and would ask him to cut out anything that they felt wasn't '100 per cent perfect'.

Idle, he said , lost confidence in two of his most famous characters - Otto, and Harry the Haggler - and asked for them to be cut entirely from Life Of Brian.

Otto is the hapless leader of the 'udean People's Front Crack Suicide Squad and Idle feared the character's satirical Nazi overtones would upset Jewish viewers.

Two scenes featuring Otto were ultimately removed from the film but the Suicide Squad are later seen tapping their lifeless feet to the film's closing song, 'Always look on the bright side of life'.

He said the opening scene in The Holy Grail, which sees King Arthur riding into shot through the mist banging coconuts, was nearly never filmed because the film's entire 175,000 budget (approximately 1.5million today) had already been spent.

He revealed the film's unforgettable ending, where King Arthur is arrested just before claiming the Holy Grail, only came about because the production ran out of money.

Doyle said: 'I shot the opening scene of The Holy Grail on Hampstead Heath because the budget was used up and we couldn't return to Scotland where the rest of the filming took place.

'The original ending, meanwhile, was meant to be King Arthur wading through thousands of dead bodies holding the Holy Grail and saying, 'Best Grail I've ever seen!' but we couldn't afford a helicopter for the aerial shot or to pay for lots of extras.

'So, the closing scene of The Holy Grail was changed by the Pythons on the hoof and became the anarchic, brilliant ending it is today.'
A Russian colonel has claimed Wagner mercenaries are raping, kidnapping and torturing Vladimir Putin's soldiers.

Lieutenant colonel Roman Venevitin, who was captured near the embattled Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, claimed he was tortured by Wagner mercenaries, despite being on the same side of Russia's war.

'Wagner mercenaries stole two T-80 tanks, 4 cannons, a KAMAZ truck and armoured vehicles,' Venevitin said. 'The Wagner mercenaries took them as war trophies [even though we are supposed to be on the same side].'

In an extraordinary claim, Venevitin said: 'There were kidnappings of our servicemen, when they were physically abused and humiliated. One of our battalion's petty officers was kidnapped and tortured.

'He was kept naked on a cold floor in a basement.'

Russian Lt-Colonel Roman Venevitin claimed Wagner forces, who are supposed to be on Russia's side in the war, kidnapped Russian soldiers before torturing and raping them

Venevitin claimed Wagner mercenaries (pictured with Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin in Bakhmut) are raping, kidnapping and torturing Vladimir Putin's soldiers

Venevitin claimed: 'They sprayed acid into his eyes, so he temporarily lost vision, he was doused with petrol and [they] tried to burn him.

'One of the serviceman was beaten up and raped by Wagner mercenaries. He couldn't survive the humiliation, and killed himself.'

In a video orchestrated by Putin's top brass, he also accused Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin of discrediting the Russian army - a crime which could see him jailed.

Venevitin said kidnapped Russian soldiers were traded back to Putin's army in return for ammunition, which Wagner claims the Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu had failed to provide them.

He said the Russian soldiers were used as 'slaves to load [dead bodies] and [wounded soldiers]', or forced to sign contracts leaving the army for Wagner.

'This weakened the Russian flanks in the Battle of Bakhmut,' he said.

Apparently reading his statement to the camera, he said of Prigozhin: 'You are engaged in active discrediting of the Russian armed forces.'

This allegation hints that the authorities are preparing to charge Prigozhin.

'I [am speaking] to convey to the Russian public the truth about what happened, to tell some facts about the so-called Wagner,' he said. 'Honour requires me to do this.'

Venevitin said he was himself tortured by Wagner mercenaries when he was kidnapped, after being accused of opening fire at them as they pulled back from Bakhmut.

'I was tortured inside a basement when I was captured,' he said. 'They tortured me worse than an angry Russian soldier would treat a captive Ukrainian.

'I was beaten up, deprived of sleep, three times a night I was forced outside where they staged an execution by firing [squad].'

Earlier this week, a video emerged of Venevitin being captured by Wagner in the latest example of bitter infighting in the Russian ranks.

Venevitin was seen hanging his head in a humiliating video posted by the Wagner group in which he confessed his 'guilt' and admitted to being drunk on duty after allegedly shooting at a Wagner vehicle.

The shooting damaged a Ural supply truck but did not wound any Wagner soldiers, according to the private army.

Venevitin also confessed to leading a group of ten to 12 Russian army soldiers who 'disarmed' a Wagner rapid response group.

This followed claims by the mercenaries that the regular Russian army targeted their ranks with mines, as a clip showed their sappers clearing the explosive devices from a road.

Wagner mercenaries have been fighting for Putin in Ukraine and are credited with seizing the embattled city of Bakhmut from Ukrainian armed forces after months of bloody warfare.

But their success has seemingly angered regular Russian army commanders.

Wagner chief Prigozhin has launched several verbal tirades at Putin's military leaders. He has accused them of ordering their troops to retreat from their positions and leaving Wagner fighters unprotected on the frontlines.

In Prigozhin's latest rant, he claimed Russia may nuke its own territory in the Belgorod region where anti-Putin insurgents are causing havoc.

Yevgeny Prigozhin warned Russia might be forced to unleash nuclear weapons on its Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, where pro-Ukrainian Russian volunteer units have conducted a series of cross-border raids and reportedly taken hostages

Prigozhin warned Russia might be forced to unleash nuclear weapons on its Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, where pro-Ukrainian Russian volunteer units have conducted a series of cross-border raids and reportedly taken hostages.

Prigozhin, who has been highly critical of the Russian army, said Putin's forces could be retreating from the region because the Kremlin wants to 'drop a tactical nuclear bomb on their own territory'.

In recent weeks, pro-Kyiv paramilitary groups of Russians who have been fighting alongside Ukrainian forces have launched forays over the border into Russian territory, attacking the Belgorod region.

Prigozhin's latest rant came after he slammed claims by the Russian defence ministry it had killed 1,500 of Kyiv's soldiers in two days in the embattled city of Bakhmut as 'absurd science fiction'.

In remarks published on the Telegram channel of his press service, the 61-year-old said to kill that many Ukrainian troops would require daily gains of 150km (93 miles).

'I therefore believe that this is simply wild and absurd science fiction,' said Prigozhin.

Totting up the figures provided by the ministry would imply 'we have already destroyed the entire planet five times over,' he added sarcastically.

Prigozhin last week lambasted Russia's military leaders after Ukrainian armed forces managed to retake settlements on the outskirts of Bakhmut.

Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has launched several verbal tirades at Putin's military leaders. He has accused them of ordering their troops to retreat from their positions and leaving Wagner fighters unprotected on the frontlines

Prigozhin said it was a 'disgrace' that Kyiv's troops were able to push back Russian lines and seize Berkhivka, a town in the northern suburbs of the embattled city.

The mercenary figurehead hit out at Russia's defence minister Sergei Shoigu and army chief Valery Gerasimov, taunting them and urging them to go to the front lines and see the failures for themselves as the armed factions spiral towards civil war.

'Now part of the settlement of [Berkhivka] has already been lost, the troops are slowly falling back. What a disgrace!

'Shoigu, Gerasimov, I urge you to come to the front, raise your pistols at your men to make them go forward. Come on, you can!

'And if you can't, then you will die as heroes.'

Prigozhin has launched several verbal tirades at Putin's military leaders. He has accused them of ordering their troops to retreat from their positions and leaving Wagner fighters unprotected on the front lines.

Last week, Prigozhin unleashed an explosive tirade of abuse at Putin's cronies after Moscow was attacked by suspected Ukrainian kamikaze drones.

In a furious 70-second rant, Prigozhin screamed vulgar insults at Russia's defence officials, whom he described as 'smelly scumbags' and 'b*******'.

The Wagner boss said he was 'deeply outraged' by Putin's troops doing 'f*** all' to prevent explosive drones falling on the Russian capital this morning. Shortly after, Putin claimed that Moscow's air defence system worked 'satisfactorily'.

Known for his foul-mouthed rants, Prigozhin, who handed Bakhmut over to Russia's army last week, was translated as shouting: 'Smelly scumbags! What are you doing? Get your a**** up from the offices you've been put in to protect this country.'

His astonishing meltdown came after several buildings in the wealthy suburbs of Moscow were damaged by suspected Ukrainian kamikaze drones, just hours after Putin unleashed strikes on Kyiv.

He said: 'You are the Ministry of Defence. You've done f*** all in order to advance. Why the f*** are you allowing these drones to fly to Moscow? Who gives a s*** that they are flying to your homes on Rublyovka! Let your houses burn.

'And what should ordinary people do when drones with explosives crash into their windows? So as a citizen, I am deeply outraged that these scum sit quietly with their fat a**** smeared with expensive creams.

'And that's why I think the people have every right to ask them these questions, these b*******.

'But I have already warned about this many times, but no one wants to listen. Because I'm angry and I upset bureaucrats who have a great life.'

Prigozhin's outbursts highlight the rift inside the Kremlin forces fighting Ukraine, and some analysts see civil war as a possibility in Russia if Putin loses the war.

Despite huge losses, and a ban on recruiting prisoners from Russia's penal colonies, Prigozhin is still thought to have up to 60,000 men at his disposal.

Wagner is one of several private armies in Russia. Chechen warlord leader Ramzan Kadyrov controls a heavily armed group of his own, and Russian energy giant Gazprom has set up its own private military company.
Prince Archie was given a free bike with stabilisers for his birthday, the British owner of a Montecito store revealed today.

Martin and Jennifer Blevins delivered it to Meghan and Harry's $14.7million mansion along with flowers, balloons and a card for the little boy, who turned four on May 6.

The gift was revealed by the couple, who run the Mad Dogs & Englishmen Bike Shop in Montecito, after they posted a thank you letter from the Sussexes' on their Instagram page.

They did not reveal the bike Archie received, only that it was a Specialized bike, an exclusive brand that can cost up to 8,700 ($11,000). The only one on their website with stabilisers - known as training wheels in the US - retails for 240 ($300).

The married couple appear to be such fans of the royals that according to their Insta they have named one of their dogs Meghan Markle, riding their beloved pup around in a special sidecar attached to one of their luxury bikes. She also greets visitors to their store, used by a host of stars including fellow Brit Simon Cowell.

But the Blevins' have been criticised by some who believe the bike should have gone to a less privileged child. Sussex supporters were upset that they shared the thank you letter, on Sussex headed paper but not signed by the couple, on social media.

One critic wrote sarcastically: 'Too important to write their own letters'. But one supporter said: 'If youre angry a company sent a bike to a little boy on his birthday as a sweet surprise, youre the one who has the problem'.

Meghan and Harry's thank you letter after a Montecito store delivered a free bike for his 4th birthday last month

The couple did not reveal the bike Archie received, only that it was a Specialized bike. But the only one on their website with stabilisers - known as training wheels in the US - retails for 240 ($300).

Archie, pictured with his family, was said to be thrilled by the gift

Shop owner Martin, a Brit in California, delivered the gift personally. He appears to be such a fan of the couple he has named one of their dogs Meghan Markle (pictured in a sidecar)

Meghan the dog greets visitors to their store in Montecito

Jennifer Blevins told PEOPLE that they made the 'spontaneous' decision to give Archie a special birthday gift.

She said: 'He [Martin] went and he got one of our little Specialized kids' bikes  they're really nice little bikes  and he's like, "This one's perfect, it's got training wheels".

'And so he went and got some birthday balloons, and he got some flowers for Meghan and a birthday card, and he said, "Okay, I'm gonna bike over and take it to their house".'

Security then came to check who he was. After checking who Martin was, and the packages, security allowed him to leave the gift.

'He said, "I'm just a British business in town that wanted to give Archie a gift".', she added.

A month later the thank you letter arrived from the couple.

Ms Blevins said: 'A courier came by our little shop on Coast Village Road and he dropped off that letter.

'I was making a joke, I said, "It better be a thank you letter" and it really was. I wasn't expecting that. I had no idea.

'It was so thoughtful because, you know, they took the time to write something personal and not just a generic thank you.

'Every celebrity in that town has bought bikes from us, and they all come through there, she recalled. None of them sent a thank you letter.

'His little sister Lili can enjoy it too as she grows, it'll be one that both of them like'.

Martin with fellow Brit Simon Cowell

The bike shop has been criticised for giving a free bike to a prince and making it public

The letter from Harrison Colcord, from the Office of Prince Harry and Meghan, was then posted to the bike shops Instagram.

It read: 'On behalf of Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, please accept their sincere thanks for the thoughtful gift you sent to Prince Archie for his fourth birthday. The bike has brought much joy, and is most appreciated by the family. They asked that I convey their gratitude at the lovely surprise'.

Harry had dashed to the airport to jump on a British Airways flight home moments after the Coronation finished so he could see Archie on his birthday last month.

The Duke of Sussex was spotted entering Heathrow still in formal dress and clutching an order of service before boarding the 3.45pm plane.

The service had only finished at 1pm, giving Harry little time to make the 20-mile journey from Westminster which would usually take nearly an hour by car.

But he was determined to make it back to his Montecito mansion to be with Meghan on their eldest son Archies fourth birthday.

Harry, 38, touched down at LA Airport at around 6.30pm local time  2.30am in Britain  from where he was whisked to his home 90 miles up the coast.

The dukes chauffeur-driven Range Rover was spotted picking him up from the airports exclusive Private Suites hanger.

It meant he was likely celebrating with Meghan, 41, Archie and Lilibet, one, by around 8pm.

Sources had stressed Harry would be in and out of the UK in 24 hours in the run-up to the occasion as he did not want to miss his sons birthday.
Carole Middleton has been left deeply 'upset' by the collapse of her mail-order business - but admits she has been 'naive', it was revealed today.

The Princess of Wales's mother has been accused of 'betrayal' after Party Pieces went bust, owing 2.6million to creditors already warned it is unlikely they will recover their money.

Party Pieces helped send Carole and Michael's three children to the 42,930-a-year Marlborough College as well as buy a 4.7million manor house in Berkshire. But the business started from their kitchen table has gone to the wall with huge debts.

A close friend of Mrs Middleton told the Daily Mail's Richard Eden: 'Carole is understandably upset and deeply disappointed in this situation.

'Over the past five months she really has done her best to find a buyer, who not only would take the business forward, but would also honour any outstanding debts.

'Carole believes in accountability and accepts she had been a little naive to step back and trust someone else to run the business she had spent decades nurturing and it's been desperately sad to see the company sold off in this way.'

The Princess of Wales's mother, Carole Middleton, has been left deeply 'upset' by the collapse of her mail-order business, a close friend tells me

Yesterday, I reported that she was accused of 'betrayal' after Party Pieces went bust, owing 2.6million. Above: Carole with her husband Michael

Carole pictured with Kate (right) and Pippa (behind her) when she launched the firm while pregnant with James

The friend claims: 'The truth is Carole had stepped back from the business over three years ago, trusting the day-to-day running to a new management team.

'Sadly the business took a turn for the worse and by the time she realised, it was just too late.'

However, one of her suppliers told Mr Eden yesterday that Mrs Middleton had been giving personal assurances that debts owed by Party Pieces would be repaid in full earlier this year.

A statement published by administrators earlier this week revealed that Party Pieces owes the taxman 612,685.

The company also owes 218,749 to RBS bank for a Coronavirus Business Interruption loan, 456,008 to other creditors and 1.4 million in unsecured loans.

Party Pieces has been sold in part to Teddy Tastic Bear Company Limited for 180,000, the document says, with the firm keeping on 12 employees and remaining at its current base in Ashampstead, Berkshire.

The report adds that many owed cash will be out of pocket as a result of the business failure, saying: 'Based on current estimates, it is uncertain whether there will be funds available to enable a distribution to preferential creditors.

'It is unlikely there will be funds available to enable a distribution to unsecured creditors.'

The report details how the pandemic began to cause the company problems saying that revenue contracted from 4.5 million to 3.2 million between 2021 and 2022, with the company making a loss of 900,000.

The friend claims: 'The truth is Carole had stepped back from the business over three years ago, trusting the day-to-day running to a new management team'

James Sinclair took on Party Pieces. He started up as a party entertainer aged 15 and now operates a 30million leisure empire that includes an ice cream company and a variety of children's attractions

Carole and Kate Middleton pictured shopping in Chelsea in 2006

Prince Louis looks tempted as mum Kate watches him, George and Charlotte decorate cakes for a street party in Cardiff

It said: 'Management attributed this to the Covid 19 pandemic resulting in reduced social gatherings and a reduction in discretionary spend due to the cost of living crisis. This caused constraints on the company's cash flows.'

In early 2023 the CEO resigned and the Middletons and other members of the board tried to shore up the company and find a buyer.

But the report said: 'The company experienced increasing creditor pressure, including threats to present winding up petitions and other legal proceedings.'

In the face of the financial challenges the company approached 175 potential buyers and eventually settled on a deal for 180,000 which was for stock worth 120,000 and 60,000 for intellectual property, computers, contracts and other equipment.

All 12 employees will transfer to the new company, the administrator report said.

Children's entertainer turned ice cream entrepreneur James Sinclair runs 30m 'Partyman' empire operating soft plays and firm behind teddy-bear making kits

The saviour of the Middleton's family business is a children's party entrepreneur from Essex who calls himself the 'Millionaire Clown' and says he bases his 'outrageous' marketing style on Sir Richard Branson.

James Sinclair started up as a party entertainer aged 15 and now operates a 30million leisure empire that includes an ice cream company, nurseries, soft play centres and a variety of children's attractions.

The businessman confirmed on Instagram that he has now taken over Party Pieces, which was launched by the Princess of Wales' parents Carole and Michael Middleton from their kitchen table in 1987.

'The latest acquisition,' he wrote over an image of a news article announcing the purchase.

It is not yet clear what price Mr Sinclair paid for Party Pieces or how big the remaining liabilities were.

A larger than life character, Mr Sinclair balances the daily management of his main business, Partyman, with a career as a podcaster, vlogger and inspirational speaker.

He's also written several books, including The Millionaire Clown, which discusses 'how to make it in business and entrepreneurship'.

His YouTube channel boasts more than 600 videos that spread his business philosophy and give snapshots into his daily routine.

On his personal website, the entrepreneur says he began his children's party business in his 'nan's spare room' at the age of 15, with the target of earning 40,000 a year and owning a house by the time he was 20.

'By the time I'd been going for 18 months, and I was 17, I was fully booked every weekend for a year ahead and was turning over 500-1000 a week,' he writes.

His Partyman firm now includes nearly a dozen different brands, including Rossi Ice Cream, Marsh Farm, Lee Valley Animal Adventure Park, Twizzletops nurseries and Teddy Tastic - which sells teddy bear making kits.

Mr Sinclair's business nous will be much needed at Party Pieces, which plunged to a loss following a difficult pandemic.

Mr Sinclair is a larger than life character who was once a children's entertainer

Mr Sinclair is also an inspirational speaker, lecturing on how to make money

Mr Sinclair's business nous will be much needed at Party Pieces, which requires a boost after plunging to a loss following a difficult pandemic

Sources said that the sale had been carried out through what is known as a pre-pack administration, meaning that the firm had appointed insolvency practitioners before it was sold without some of its liabilities.

In a 2018 interview, Mr Sinclair named Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson as his role model.

'I was very influenced by the way he was prepared to be a little bit different and outrageous to get noticed,' he told growth business.

'As an entertainer that was a natural fit and I decided that it was what I needed to do too-I needed to stand out from the competition and I soon became well known in my local area for being a character and for offering something different.

'That helped me to build the Partyman brand and people booked me because they knew the name.'

The entrepreneur said he used social media to boost his profile in the hope of making Partyman 'the best family entertainment brand in the UK'.

Mr Sinclair calls his marketing style a 'little bit outrageous'. Pictured is one of his online promotions

Mr Sinclair is seen in this photo enjoying an ice cream with former UKIP leader Nigel Farage

Mr Sinclair's decision to buy Party Pieces came just seven months after Carole launched her party paraphernalia business in the US and used a cardboard cut-out of herself to promote the move.

Will Wright, head of restructuring at financial advisory firm Interpath and joint administrator, said: 'Party Pieces is a well-established brand with a proud British heritage, but like many other companies across the retail space, had been impacted profoundly by the effects of the pandemic and the ensuing restrictions on social gatherings.

'We're pleased to have been able to conclude this transaction which sees the business acquired by James Sinclair. We wish him all the very best for the future.'

The Middletons had wanted to sell Party Pieces with a dowry and avoid insolvency, but this proved impossible, insiders told Sky News.

Interpath Advisory was reportedly appointed as administrator in court this morning.

Friends revealed in April that Carole, 68, and Michael, 73, are planning to step away from the firm to spend more time with their grandchildren

The sale of Party Pieces comes just 12 days after King Charles's Coronation, where Carole and Michael were among the close family in attendance.

The business has also been selling a range of Coronation-themed items on its website.

These include Coronation Flag Bunting (4.99 for three metres), which features the side profile of the King in gold on a Union Jack background, a set of Great British Party hats and flags (5) and Union Jack paper plates (4.99 for eight).

The Middletons owned just over half the company while two investors owner the rest. They have appointed Interpath as strategic advisers.

In April a Party Pieces spokesman commented on news of Interpath's involvement: 'We are working with our advisers to secure additional investment which will help support the business as we look to embark on the next phase of our growth plan.'

From BA air hostess and John Lewis trainee to the mother of the future Queen: Carole Middleton's extraordinary rise

Former British Airways hostess Carole Carole  whose father Ron was a painter and decorator and her mother, Dorothy, the granddaughter of a miner  spent her first six months in a council flat in Ealing.

It has been claimed some of Prince William's circle called her 'Doors to Manual' in reference to her past.

She says she was always driven and, keen to get on, took a job with the Prudential aged 16, but loathed it, returning to school where she gained four A-levels.

After John Lewis, she worked briefly as a secretary before becoming an air hostess, which she says was different back then.

'You had to speak another language. It was almost like being at university'.

Kate Middleton and mother Carole visit the Spirit of Christmas shopping festival at London's Olympia. Carole started on the shop floor of John Lewis but quit because it was 'boring'

The Duchess of Cambridge holds her son Prince George seated next to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince William, back row from left, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, and the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Harry, Pippa Middleton, James Middleton, Carole Middleton and Michael Middleton, in an official christening photo for Prince George at Clarence House in London in October 2013

It was there that she met Michael  a manager for an international air station and she organised their wedding, right down to the chilli con carne and bonfire in the evening.

Next came a brief stint in Jordan, where they embraced the social scene at the British Embassy before returning to the UK and the semi in Bradfield where, aged 32 and pregnant with baby James, she set up Party Pieces.

'It was a good idea or it wouldn't have taken off,' she says. And it did, like a rocket. From the wooden shed near the Wendy house in their back garden to a huge business operating from an impressive complex of Dutch barns in Berkshire.

Carole, meanwhile, never took her foot off the accelerator. She worked and provided a loving home  complete with white rabbit marshmallow birthday cakes. In July 2013, she and Mike moved into Bucklebury Manor, a 4.7 million pile with vast grounds.
Tens of millions of dollars in COVID-19 fines remain unpaid as Victorians are warned not to ignore their penalties.

In Victorian state budget estimates on Friday, Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes said 50,150 fines totalling more than $100 million were issued for breaching health orders during the pandemic.

More than 5,500 of those have been paid in full or part and 14,319 are unpaid past their due date, leading to enforcement warrants being issued.

Tens of millions of dollars in COVID-19 fines remain unpaid in pandemic-era penalties in Victoria. Pictured are residents in the Melbourne CBD during the pandemic

Around 3,716 people elected to take their 4,052 fines to court and 11,800 were cancelled by enforcement agencies.

A further 152 fines were also registered with the Children's Court for enforcement.

So far the Victorian government has recouped $9.36m from COVID-19 fines paid in full and another $5.76 million are subject to ongoing payment plans.

Despite more than 20 per cent of the fines being withdrawn, Ms Symes warned people not to ignore them as they can build up over time.

'Fines don't go away unless you take action for them,' she told the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee.

'There is a variety of ways that you can seek to engage with the department to deal with your fines, whether it's through payment plans or whether people have got grounds to have them withdrawn.'
'Part-time premier' Annastacia Palaszczuk has been spotted enjoying the start of the long weekend in Sydney as Queensland grapples with a youth crime epidemic that has spiralled out of control.

Sydneysiders were on Friday afternoon shocked when they spotted the Queensland premier,53, wandering arm-in-arm with her surgeon boyfriend Dr Reza Adib, 50, around Circular Quay, after a gruesome stabbing near Brisbane left a mother and daughter fighting critical injuries and a teenage boy behind bars.

She was dressed in all-black outfit accessorised with black shoes and handbag to match her partner as the couple enjoyed the sights of Sydney Harbour.

Dr Adib was pictured placing a protective arm around his partner's back, a day after she shared harrowing details about a miscarriage she suffered at home many years ago before she entered politics.

It's been 12 months since she earned the 'part-time premier' moniker after Labor insiders divulged the 53-year-old appeared more focused on glitzy red carpet events than leading the state.

Ms Palaszczuk jetted off to the NSW capital with her partner as more desperate Queenslanders call for serious action against rising youth crime.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk (left) and her surgeon boyfriend Reza Adib (right) were spotted walking around Circular Quay on Friday

The pair (above) were snapped as tensions in Queensland rise over the growing youth crime epidemic

The latest in a string of alleged violent youth crime incidents hit a family home in Rosewood, Ipswich, on Thursday night.

Queensland Police have charged a 16-year-old boy, who lived with the family, with two counts of attempted murder.

Police responded to a triple-zero call from one of the victims at about 10.30pm.

'Upon arrival police located a 39-year-old woman and an 11-year-old girl who both had numerous stab wounds to the abdomen,' police said in a statement.

The pair underwent surgery on Friday morning, both remain in critical conditions.

The teenager will face Ipswich Childrens Court.

It comes after a 10-year-old girl issued a passionate plea for the Premier to take action to address youth crime.

The little girl wrote a heartbreaking letter to Ms Palaszczuk this week after her dance school in Townsville, in the state's north, was burnt down - allegedly by youth offenders.

'Young criminals break into houses, steal cars and destroy lives every single night in this city - every single night - I'm telling you right now I'm not safe,' Samantha's letter, seen by Today, reads.

'Children in Townsville are not safe, we are not safe in our own homes, even with doors locked they still find their way in.

'Please tell me what you are doing to make a difference, because right now I'm not looking forward to growing up, working hard to buy a house and a car, raise a family, when all of it can just be taken away in an instant by someone who ruins lives every single night.'

Ms Palaszczuk's office has not yet replied to Samantha's letter.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Ms Palaszczuk's office for comment.

Queensland Police have charged a 16-year-old boy with two counts of attempted murder after 39-year-old mother and an 11-year-old girl were stabbed on Thursday (pictured, forensic officer at the crime scene near Brisbane)

Townsville's 10-year-old Samantha (above) wrote to Palaszczuk to ask her what she was going to do about youth offenders after her dance school was burnt down

Palaszczuk's government introduced a range of measures in March to crackdown on youth offending including a law to make breach of bail a crime for children.

Queensland Police arrested 600 young people for 1,200 offences within a month of the law passing - including 73 who were charged with breach of bail, the ABC reported last month.

The government has also invested in a $10million regional trial of engine immobilisers and a new aggravation consideration for car thieves who brag about their crimes online.

'Both sides of politics voted for these stronger laws. They are the strongest laws in Australia that have been put in place,' Palaszczuk told reporters in May.

'They will take time to come into effect. We are throwing a lot of money at this as well, over $1.3billion dollars.

'We're building more youth detention centres across the state; we are putting more money into early intervention and prevention.'

Palaszczuk's government introduced a range of measures in March to crackdown on youth offending including a law to make breach of bail a crime for children (pictured, Palaszczuk and Adib in Sydney on Friday)

Palaszczuk (pictured with her boyfriend at the Elvis premiere) was labelled the 'part-time premier' last year for seemingly favouring red carpet events over leading the state

On Thursday, Ms Palaszczuk divulged the deeply painful details of a miscarriage as she responded to a Queensland woman's horrific hospital experience.

She spoke about the harrowing moment following claims a woman was left traumatised by the treatment she received at Ipswich hospital following a painful miscarriage.

The Premier's miscarriage occurred before she went into politics.

'I have also had a miscarriage... I do know exactly what it's like,' she told the Today show on Thursday.

'It is horrific and stays with you for the rest of your life.

'I had it in my house and I went to work, I was completely in shock and then I thought I'd better see my specialist and he said "I don't think you should be at work, you should be at home".'

Ms Palaszczuk spent the start of the June long weekend in Sydney spedning quality time with her partner

Ms Palaszczuk was forced to shoot down claims of her part-time premier status a year ago after Labor insiders claimed she had 'checked out' of her role and showed more interest in attending social events than running Queensland.

The claims emerged after Ms Palaszczuk and her boyfriend attended the premiere of Baz Luhrmann's film Elvis.

Days later, the Premier was pictured letting her hair down at a race meet at Eagle Farm before attending the Logies on the Gold Coast where she was grilled by reporters on the red carpet

'I work seven days a week,' Ms Palaszczuk said at the time.

'I've got a budget coming down, I'm across that, and I'll be back at my desk first thing tomorrow morning.

'And most of these events are on weekends so, we could be at home watching television but we're out here doing the job Queenslanders expect me to be doing.'

The premier also joined 50,000 screaming fans when Harry Styles performed at Heritage Bank Stadium on the Gold Coast in March as part of his nationwide tour.

Photos supplied to Daily Mail Australia by a concertgoer showed the Labor leader trying to make a low-key entrance as she arrived at the venue flanked by Dr Adib.

It came less than fortnight after she came under fire for posting photos and posing with locals while attending Chinchilla's Melon Festival.

Days earlier, she repeatedly declined invitations to meet Toowoomba residents at a crisis meeting to tackle the town's out of control crime wave, which is a two hour drive away.
Britain's police were today warned to get back to basics after a damning report found that public confidence in the service is 'hanging by a thread' due to their failures to tackle crime.

His Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary Andy Cooke urged officers to stay out of political matters and stop intervening in Twitter spats, and instead focus on deterring and solving crime and disorder.

In his bombshell report published today, Mr Cooke warned public trust in policing was 'hanging by a thread' following a series of scandals and officers not tackling the daily neighbourhood crime most people want them to focus on.

And he said police forces are failing at 'the basics' such as picking up phones, attending incidents, investigating crimes and keeping victims informed.



Mr Cooke highlighted the collapse in charging rates which have dropped by two thirds since 2014

Surveys show a steady rise in the number of people who think the police are doing a bad job

Mr Cooke's recommendations include:

A 'back to basics' approach to ensure the public feel they are receiving a high 'level of service;

A return to 'discipline' including 'immaculately polished boots' and 'custodian helmets' as the public need to see professionalism to have confidence in officers;

The consistent targeting of local criminals to ensure they are unable to 'act with impunity';

Avoiding being dragged into political debates and distracted by pursuing non-crime hate incidents;

Preserving the right to free speech rather than seeking to 'champion social change or take sides'.

His intervention has prompted victims of crime to reveal their stories of police failings and their frustration at the lack of neighbourhood officers in their local area.

Listeners to BBC Radio 4's Today programme told how they had phoned 101 to report a crime but struggled to get through.

Revealed: The UK police forces ranked inadequate by inspection area Crime data integrity - Devon and Cornwall, Gloucestershire, Sussex. Victim service assessment - Gloucestershire. Treatment of the public - None rated inadequate/not graded. Preventing crime - Cleveland. Responding to the public - Devon and Cornwall, Gloucestershire, Greater Manchester, Gwent, Met, Staffordshire, Sussex, Wiltshire. *SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM OF THE ARTICLE TO SEE HOW YOUR LOCAL FORCE WAS RANKED* Advertisement

Meanwhile, one told of being let down by West Midlands Police after an encounter with a dangerous driver.

'I'd been crossing a zebra crossing when a driver overtook the bus that had been stopping for me and ran at me at high speed,' they said.

'Fortunately I caught sight of this from the corner of my eye and managed to leap out of the way and be sideswiped rather that knocked to the floor and killed.

'The driver drove off. I provided all the information to the police, including how to get CCTV from a helpful chap at the bus garage. I heard nothing from them...'

A second listener said there had been an increase in 'opportunistic parcel theft' on their street - with eight neighbours having packages stolen.

'Known individuals follow vans and pick up parcels if left outside by couriers,' they said.

'If communities can now help identify the usual suspect and help identify the usual suspect, why does it appear to us that nothing is happening?

'Individual crimes are reported and not joined up, it seems.'

A third, Ken Cook in Portsmouth said anti-social behaviour was a 'regular occurrence' in the city but he rarely saw police on the streets except from when dignitaries come to visit the Royal Dockyard.

HMICFRS chief Andy Cooke, who released his first Annual State of Policing report yesterday after taking the job last year, said today that police forces had lost sight of what matters to the public.

'There's a real issue in dealing with the things that the public want the police to focus on - the issues that happen in neighbourhoods and the crimes that happen on a daily basis,' he told Radio 4.

'Sadly to quite a lot of people we're seeing the police is ineffective with dealing with those problems. There shouldn't be a situation when the public don't get a decent level of service from policing on the issues that affect them every day.'

'Policing needs to get back to the basis and it needs the assistance of the government to do so. Neighbourhood policing is the bedrock of British policing. Policing need to build further on that.'

Andy Cooke warned public trust in policing was 'hanging by a thread' due to officers not tackling the daily neighbourhood crime most people want them to focus on

In his report, Mr Cooke - the former chief constable of Merseyside Police - warned forces have been 'dragged into political debates' and distracted by pursuing 'non-crime hate incidents'.

He said while they might not like the views of the people they were protecting it was not their role to take sides.

'Discipline is a critical prerequisite for high standards. Over the past decade, to some extent, the police service has lost its discipline,' he said.

'In most forces, gone are the days of immaculately polished boots, ties or cravats and custodian helmets.

'But first impressions are important. If the police want to be seen as professional, they need to look professional.'

He continued: 'If supervisors are letting the small issues go, like officers not looking smart then what over things are they letting go as well? That discipline needs to be drummed into police officers from the start of the service.'

Mr Cooke insisted he was not calling for a return to 'Dixon of Dock Green' times, but insisted trust and confidence in policing was at an all-time low and forces needed to 'show professionalism' and focus on 'getting the basics right'.

'If they can't get the standards of their appearance right, it raises wider questions about their standards,' he said.

The chief inspector suggested the police service is at 'a historic turning point  and there is a limited window of opportunity to repair public trust'.

'The fundamental principle of policing by consent, upon which the service is built, is at risk,' he said. 'Public confidence hangs by a thread.'

Mr Cooke highlighted the collapse in charging rates which have dropped by two thirds since 2014, while police-recorded crime rose last year to the highest level since records began. 'Fewer criminals are being caught,' he said.

'The police aren't always focusing on the issues that matter most to the public, and charge rates are far too low. Too often, people offend with apparent impunity, and the police aren't targeting them consistently.'

Mr Cooke said: 'Policing needs to get back to the basis and it needs the assistance of the government to do so'

He added: 'The police are facing rising demand from the public and, quite simply, they aren't keeping up. At best, people can be left dissatisfied; at worst, people can be left at risk.'

Mr Cooke described how victims face a 'postcode lottery' and 'in too many cases, lose confidence in the criminal justice system and withdraw from the process entirely.'

He called for 'definitive action', saying chief constables won't fix things by 'issuing glossy strategies, mission statements, visions, concordats or the like'.

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'The police must uphold the law as it is written. They aren't there to champion social change or take sides. This includes a requirement to preserve all rights, including the right to free speech,' he said.

Mr Cooke is now calling for new legal powers for inspectors so they can order failing forces to improve when there are serious concerns.

Yesterday he urged Home Secretary Suella Braverman to give inspectors a say on the vetting and recruitment of chief officers and the ability to scrutinise the work of police and crime commissioners.

Mr Cooke argues that in too many instances, chief constables are ignoring recommendations from the watchdog, but the new powers would mean forces would be legally required to comply.

He insisted policing was not 'broken beyond repair', but concluded: 'It needs to reset its compass and do so quickly; the police can and must do better.'

In a rare positive note, the chief inspector praised forces for their commitment to attend every home burglary, which the Daily Mail revealed yesterday.

Andy Marsh, head of the College of Policing, said: 'The report illustrates the need for policing to produce action not words.

'Public trust has been eroded, and it can only be re-established by a service which focuses on catching criminals and fighting crime.'

National Police Chiefs' Council chairman Gavin Stephens, added: 'Policing must continue to do more to earn back the trust and confidence of the public.'
Germany reportedly wants the EU to adopt a Rwanda-style migrant system with asylum seekers being deported - similar to Britain's proposed scheme.

Germany is playing a 'leading role' in advocating for a deal with a non-EU state to filter out migrants who do not have much chance of being granted asylum, Die Welt newspaper reported.

Rwanda and Niger are both being considered as partner countries and would be compensated financially for the deal, according to the report.

While Austria and Hungary want asylum seekers to be deported to an African partner country regardless of the country that they came from, Germany is said to want to restrict this process to people who have spent time in the nations they would be exported to, while their application is weighed up.

Backbenchers in the coalition fear that the deal is aimed at deterring refugees from coming to Europe.

This week, 24 MPs from Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats and the Greens signed a letter urging Berlin to stand up for the rights of migrant during the negotiations (File photo)

This week, 24 MPs from Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats and the Greens signed a letter urging Berlin to stand up for the rights of migrants during the negotiations.

Scholz and interior minister Nancy Faeser are determined to push through a deal, given the increasing numbers of refugee arrivals.

Faeser said: 'If we fail today or in the next 14 days, it would be a bad signal that would lead to countries isolating themselves. I don't want that, I want to keep the borders open.'

'For us in Germany human rights standards are at the forefront, and I will fight hard for that today,' she added.

The Social Democrats, the biggest party in the coalition with the Greens and Free Democrats, are prepared to put their weight behind changes that would see migrants being detained at the EU's external borders.

The number of asylum applications in Germany this year has already hit 130,000 and local governments say they have run out of space to hold the new arrivals.

In May, Scholz announced that he would break with the liberal policies he inherited from Angela Merkel and look to reduce numbers using tighter border controls and more money for Frontex, the EU's border control agency.

This has led to worries that Scholz could shun fair asylum processes in order to reduce numbers.

The letter from backbenchers stated: 'We share many people's concerns that the proposals for a new Common European Asylum System could weaken the right to asylum.'

Separately, 730 Green party members have signed a letter demanding that their leadership change direction.

They said that they were 'shocked' by the proposals being negotiated in Brussels, which aim to put in place a new system based on 'deterrence and exclusion'.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser speak on May 10, 2023 in Berlin, prior to a summit of Scholz with state leaders focusing on the country's refugee policy

In the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has ordered ministers to begin migrant deportation flights to Rwanda within days of the scheme clearings its legal hurdles.

In a highly unusual move, Sunak has established a Covid-style Cabinet committee to ensure that the Rwanda scheme can 'hit the ground running' immediately.

The committee, which has been in place for a month, is already meeting twice a week to ensure there are no barriers to deportation flights beginning as soon as the Illegal Migration Bill clears Parliament, which is likely to be in September.

One Cabinet source described the preparations for the first flight as 'extraordinary'.

'No stone is being left unturned to make sure this goes smoothly,' the source said.

'There is really no precedent for a Prime Minister to lead a committee of this sort on the implementation of a Bill has that has not even passed.

'That legislation will effectively ban Channel crossings. The expectation is it will pass in September and you will see flights beginning within days.

'People arriving on small boats will be detained on barges for a day or so and then put on a plane to Rwanda or another safe country. Some of them may not even set foot on land.

'To do that we have to have everything in place  the accommodation, the transport, the legal advice. All of that is underway now to make sure things can happen immediately.

'As soon as you start getting the first flights to Rwanda you will start to see a deterrent effect. Officials won't accept it  ministers have had to push this all the way  but the PM is convinced.'

The Court of Appeal is expected to rule this month on legal challenges to the scheme, after the High Court ruled in December that it is lawful.

A Home Office source confirmed the scheme will not begin until all legal appeals in the UK have been exhausted.

The PM has suggested he is willing to use the Parliament Act to overrule the Lords, but this would delay the legislation until next year.
Lisa Wilkinson has been forced to make a grovelling apology to shadow Indigenous Affairs minister Jacinta Nampijinpa Price after a leaked recording showed her struggling to pronounce her name and comparing her preselection to hiring a black cleaner.

The comments, which were made during a lunch between Wilkinson, Brittany Higgins, her partner David Sharaz and Channel 10 producer Angus Llewellyn in January 2021 were leaked and aired publicly on Thursday night.

Senator Price said Wilkinson's comments were 'derogatory' and demanded an apology, which was eventually forthcoming on Friday night.

But the former The Project host only said sorry after an apology from her boss - Paramount Executive Vice President of Australia New Zealand Beverley McGarvey - to Senator Price leaked to Sky News.

It's understood McGarvey said the discussion of race did not reflect the values the network stood for and that it shouldn't have happened. Senator Price is said to have accepted the apology.

Finally at 9.17pm on Friday - more than 24 hours after the recording first aired at 5pm on Thursday - Wilkinson issued her own formal apology in a statement issued by Channel 10.

'I sincerely apologise to Senator Price for any offence I may have caused. The conversation was private and not intended to appear as it has out of context and in the public arena,' Wilkinson said.

'The tenor of our conversation was about the need for real, genuine change within the Liberal Party, and that too many of their female pre-selections were in unwinnable positions.'

Lisa Wilkinson (left) has apologised to Jacinta Nampijinpa Price more than 24 hours after audio from a meeting with her producer and Brittany Higgins (right) was leaked

Senator Price demanded an apology from Lisa Wilkinson after then The Project host struggled to pronounce her name and compared her preselection to hiring a black cleaner in a leaked recording.

It's understood Wilkinson also phoned Senator Price personally to apologise for her comments.

Channel 10 also issued a statement to regret any distress caused by the 'unauthorised publication of these intended private conversations.

'Network 10 was subpoenaed to provide confidential documents and audio recordings to the DPP and Bruce Lehrmann's legal team during the criminal case brought against Mr Lehrmann,' a spokeswoman said.

'With the criminal proceedings now concluded, there is no justifiable reason for this material to be made public.

'However, a currently unidentified source has leaked the recordings of a more than five-hour private conversation to sections of the media which have used comments from the individuals involved selectively and out of context, providing a distorted version of events without seeking clarification from the participants to the conversation.'

Audio emeregd on Thursday of Wilkinson making comments about the senator and struggling to pronounce her name during a pre-interview with Higgins and Sharaz in January 2021.

Ms Wilkinson said in the audio clip: '[The Liberal Party] has preselected over twenty new and wonderfully diverse and strong female candidates like, and what's her name, Nam Nampinjumba? [sic]. She's an Indigenous woman.'

Mr Sharaz laughed and said: 'She clearly got in. Clearly it was a safe seat.'

'That's the thing, it was - as soon as I looked at it I thought, 'Oh, you're joking',' Wilkinson replied.

Mr Llewellyn then joked about the Coalition preselecting Ms Price, saying: 'See, we know brown people'.

Mr Sharaz joined in: 'It's like, 'I'm not racist. I have a black friend' - it's that argument.'

The ex-Project host then added: 'And our cleaner's black.'

Higgins is not heard engaging in this part of the conversation.

The group joked about the Liberal Party's preselection of Senator Price (pictured), with Wilkinson comparing it to a white family 'hiring a black cleaner'

Senator Price demanded an apology from Wilkinson on Friday morning.

'It's not just an affront to an Australian such as myself but these attitudes and behaviours are an affront to all Australians,' she posted on Facebook

'If Lisa Wilkinson and her Channel 10 Producer Angus Llewellyn have a decent bone in their body they'll apologise.'

Senator Price said that she wasn't surprised by the 'derogatory' comments made by Wilkinson, who she accused of virtue signalling simply to pretend she cared about Indigenous people.

'I certainly didn't get to where I am without hard work, respect from my community and outlining the hard issues,' she told Ben Fordham's 2GB show.

'The Project has never been interested in the view of a conservative Indigenous woman from outback Australia. Not once has it demonstrated interest in the concerns I've raised.'

Ms Price said the level of arrogance and ignorance shown by the 'woke class' didn't surprise her, adding that she thought the most offensive part of the audio was the suggestion that she had been a diversity pick.

'We have a pretty bloody good track record on preselecting individuals, on merit, who happen to be Indigenous or mixed background,' she said.

'It's only the woke who believe in the diversity pick.

'I would absolutely expect an apology from the 10 network, from Lisa Wilkinson herself. That would be the decent thing,' she said.

Senator Price also accused Wilkinson of being out of touch with real issues pertaining to Indigenous Australians

'What would you expect from individuals who belong to the woke,' she said.

Ms Price said the audio clip was reminiscent of her interview with Wilkinson's husband, Peter FitzSimons, in August last year.

FitzSimons had interviewed the Country Liberal senator for the Northern Territory via telephone for a Nine newspaper article - but Price later accused him of being 'rude' and 'aggressive' towards her, which he denied.

She claimed FitzSimons had 'imposed' his view on her about the Indigenous Voice to Parliament and accused her of 'giving racists a voice'.

'The contempt he had for me in that interview, I felt like he was talking to me in a condescending manner,' she said.

'I would like to know who their black friends are.'

Fordham asked Ms Price whether she thought Finance Minister Katy Gallagher should resign after it was revealed she may have misled parliament when she denied knowing about Ms Higgins' allegations before the story broke back in June, 2021.

Ms Reynolds, who was the defence minister at the time, said: 'I was told by one of your senators two weeks before about what you were intending to do with the story in my office, two weeks before.'

Senator Gallagher replied: 'No-one had any knowledge. How dare you.'

Four days before Ms Higgins appeared on The Project in February 2021, Mr Sharaz messaged Ms Higgins: 'Katy [Gallagher] is going to come to me with some questions you need to prepare for  She's really invested now ha ha.'

He added: 'She's an old friend. We opened a chair together! So you can trust her.'

Later the same day, Mr Sharaz told Ms Higgins: 'Katy Gallagher messaged me. She's angry and wants to help. She's got the context. Says they knew something was wrong because they fired Bruce and not you. They avoided a scandal.'

Lisa Wilkinson (pictured Mr Sharaz) has been caught joking about shadow Indigenous affairs minister Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's name in an audio recording

Ms Price said the finance minister should 'absolutely be resigning'.

'The way she has treated my colleague Linda Reynolds has been atrocious. It has been horrible to watch her be treated that way.

'She should do the decent thing and resign.'

Deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley told reporters senior government members needed to clear the air on what they knew and when.

'The release of text messages and audio recordings has brought into question the conduct of some senior Labor ministers, and the prime minister himself, relating to whether they chose to weaponise a rape allegation for political purposes,' Ms Ley said.

'The government's credibility is in tatters and so every single claim needs to be validated.'

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the opposition attack as 'bizarre'.

'You had allegations by a Liberal staffer that another Liberal staffer had a sexual assault in a Liberal minister's office, and somehow, somehow Katy Gallagher has some responsibility for what was going on here,' he said.

'This is bizarre.'
A distraught Russian father has told of his horror at watching his son be mauled to death by a 'meat grinder' tiger shark at an Egyptian resort as he screamed out: 'Papa, save me!'

Yury Popov was forced to watch helplessly from the shore as the predator circled his son Vladimir, 23, before dragging him under water in the resort of Hurghada.

Holidaymakers scrambled from the water as horrified onlookers called out to Vladimir to swim away from the shark before he was mauled to death.

The tiger shark was then caught and dragged to land by boat before it was killed.

'We went to the beach to relax,' Mr Popov, originally from Russia, told the 112 media outlet. 'My son was attacked by a shark, it all happened in seconds.'

Vladimir Popov was heard screaming 'papa' as he was mauled to death by a shark today in Egyptian resort Hurghada. Pictured: A still grab from a graphic video showing the attack. The shark's fin can be seen just feet away from Vladimir as he attempts to swim away from the beast

Tourists watched in horror from the shore as the beast wounded Vladimir Popov before dragging him under the water

Holidaymakers scrambled from the water as horrified onlookers called out to Vladimir (pictured) to swim away from the shark before he was mauled to death

The heartbroken father said there were no family members near his son to help in the water, though initial reports said the 23-year-old's girlfriend had managed to flee the attack.

'What kind of help can you give? This meat grinder happened in 20 seconds, he was just dragged under the water,' Mr Popov said.

The father said: 'This is an absolutely ridiculous coincidence, because it is a safe beach. There are ships and yachts around. It's never happened there. They usually attack on wild beaches. It's just some kind of evil fate.'

Vladimir had been living with his father in Egypt for several months before the horrific attack. Mr Popov said he would cremate his son and return his ashes to their native Russia.

Video shows the tiger shark being caught and dragged ashore by a boat following the attack, and it appeared to be alive before being clubbed to death.

The Egyptian authorities confirmed the shark has been handed over for research to find out the causes of its behaviour and identify whether the animal is related to one that 'caused several previous accidents'.

Video taken by horrified onlookers shows Vladimir desperately shouting 'Papa, Papa' as the predator circled him in the water before launching the attack.

Vladimir Popov, 23, (pictured) has been named as victim of the shark attack in Hurghada

The victim Vladimir Popov (pictured) had moved to the resort with his father several months before the attack

The shark was later caught and clubbed to death on the beach (pictured)

The 23-year-old can be seen desperately trying to swim towards the shore to no avail. His body is seen spinning in the water, and his legs are raised above the surface.

'Swim away, swim away! Quick! A shark!' people can be heard shouting in the video.

Soon the splashing in the water stops, and the man's head returns to the surface. He appears to be moving around in the water again but slowly.

He can be heard screaming 'Papa', pleading for help, as the water turns red.

The shark's body is seen clearly at the surface at the moment, and its fin and tail are visible as it circles the victim.

The shark turns around again to attack and charges at the victim before clamping its jaws around him and pulling him under water.

The man's head appears above the water one last time, and the shark's body is seen writhing in the ocean as it appears to maul the body and drag it further into the depths of the water.

One witness said: 'The shark's eating his remains now. There she is, eating his remains.' Another said: 'Right in front of my eyes, the shark ate the guy, the girl [the girlfriend] managed to escape. He took the blow from the shark.

'It's a terrible thing, the remains of this man are lying there.'

A new video showed a distraught woman on the beach being comforted by two other woman moments after Vladimir was mauled to death.

It is believed the Russian woman had been pulled out of the water after being close to the man who was killed. It is not known if she was a relative of Popov.

So far Popov's father Yury is the only member of the family to speak.

After witnessing the attack, it evidently took a lengthy time to find the body and bring it onshore.

'Later, the remains were found, and the body was put in a bag and taken to the morgue,' he said.

A new video showed a distraught woman on the beach being comforted by two other woman moments after Vladimir was mauled to death

A view of one of the beaches that have been closed after a Russian citizen was killed in a shark attack at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Hurghada, on June 9, 2023

A boat at one of the beaches that have been closed after the shark attack in Hurghada

'Children swam [in the area where the shark attacked] very often - there were children's slides,' another witness said.

'All this happened not far from a descent into the sea, next to the ladder, used by everyone who went into the water.

'At one point, the shark appeared, and immediately bit this man. Rescuers saw this and began to start the boat. He tried to swim away from the shark, but he couldn't.

'And the shark dragged the body for two hours. It constantly dragged him under the water.'

Witnesses said the victim's girlfriend had been in the water at the time of the attack. Russian reports say she is safe and has returned to Russia.

The Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed the death of a citizen from a shark attack.

Vladimir had moved to the resort with his father at a time when many young males are moving abroad to avoid facing conscription - and likely death - as the brutal war in Ukraine continues.

The family had bought a property at the British Resort in Hurghada, say reports.

Other accounts said he had been staying at the four-star Elysees Dream Beach Hotel in Hurghada.

IT specialist Vladimir 'loved his father very much and was just beginning to live', said a friend.

He was said to be working remotely when he died, as are many young Russian men who are defying Putin.

Born in sub-Arctic city Archangel, or Arkhangelsk, he had moved to Moscow before decamping to Egypt amid the war with Ukraine.

His girlfriend, Anastasia, who is in her early twenties, has so far not spoken of the tragedy.

One female friend said: 'Vova [Vladimir] was a good guy.

'He was only a month away from his birthday.

'Friends say that he moved there [to Egypt] with his father.

'As far as I know, he really liked living in Moscow, his whole life was there.

'Vova was a wonderful person and loved his father very much.'

Oleg, who knew the deceased man, said: 'He was into music. He recorded songs.'

Vladimir's girlfriend Anastasia, who is in her early twenties, has so far not spoken of the tragedy

Vladimir Popov is seen with his girlfriend Anastasia

There was speculation that a woman seen on the beach being conformed by two other women was his mother.

But 360TV reported that she was at home in Balashikha, Moscow region.

A source said: 'His mother cried all day. She screamed that she had lost her son.'

The commotion was so great that a neighbour said 'we were even afraid that someone was being killed there'. Locals wanted to call the police.

The 23-year-old is not the first victim to be killed by a shark at the resort.

In July last year, 68-year-old Austrian Elisabeth Sauer was attacked in front of horrified onlookers at a resort in Sahl Hasheesh - 15 minutes after English speaking guests warned Egyptian lifeguards about sharks and their warnings had been laughed off.

The resort is a 30-minute drive from Hurghada, where Vladimir was killed.

A second woman - identified only as a Romanian national in her 40s - is thought to have been killed in a similar attack just 650ft away from where Ms Sauer died, with her badly disfigured remains found on a nearby reef the same day.

Ms Sauer lost an arm and a leg in an attack that was caught on film, as onlookers tried to distract the shark and get her to safety.

She reached the shore with the help of a flipper, but died a short time later.

Reports at the time - from news agency AFP and Austrian news outlets - pointed to the attack being committed by a Mako shark, while local Egyptian newspapers named the animal as an Oceanic whitetip shark.
One of Donald Trump's rivals for the 2024 Republican nomination has backed the former president over charges for illegally retaining classified documents, while another called on him to drop out of the race.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who announced his candidacy for president in February, slammed the federal charges against Trump that are expected to be filed next week in federal court in Miami, saying it demonstrated 'two tiers of justice'.

'I never thought we'd see the day when the U.S. President deputizes the DOJ to arrest his lead rival in the middle of an election,' Ramaswamy said in a statement after the news broke if the impending legal challenge.

'Obama shamefully tried to deputize the FBI to infiltrate Trump's 2016 campaign, but they're leaving nothing to chance this time around: the federal police state is outright arresting Trump,' he said.

Ramaswamy said that while he would have a better chance of winning the 2024 Republican nomination were Trump not in the mix, but he said he stands 'stand for principles over politics,' adding: 'I commit to pardon Trump promptly on January 20, 2025 and to restore the rule of law in our country.'

However, Trump did not receive the backing from all of his Republican rivals. Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson - another long-shot hopeful - called on the ex-president to drop out of the race, slamming his 'willful disregard for the Constitution'.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who announced his candidacy for president in February, slammed the federal charges against Trump that are expected to be filed next week in federal court in Miami, saying it demonstrated 'two tiers of justice'

However, Trump did not receive the backing from all of his rivals. Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson (pictured) - another long-shot hopeful - called on the ex-president to drop out of the race, slamming his 'willful [sic] disregard for the Constitution'.

'Donald Trump's actions  from his willful [sic] disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of law  should not define our nation or the Republican Party,' Hutchinson said in a statement on Thursday.

'This is a sad day for our country. While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.'

Trump faces seven criminal counts related to his treatment of sensitive government materials he took with him when he left the White House in January 2021, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Investigators seized roughly 13,000 documents from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, nearly a year ago.

One hundred were marked as classified, even though one of Trump's lawyers had previously said all records with classified markings had been returned to the government.

Trump has previously said he declassified those documents while president, but his attorneys have declined to make that argument in court filings.

According to a report, Trump could face 100 years behind bars if he is convicted of all seven charges related to mishandling of classified information.

The 76-year-old on Thursday said he had been told he was being indicted in relation to espionage - the first former president to face federal charges in U.S. history.

ABC News reported that Trump faces four separate counts each carrying a potential prison time of 20 years.

These four charges, it says, are: conspiracy to obstruct justice; withholding a document or record; corruptly concealing a document or record; and concealing a document in a federal investigation.

One count carries a 10 year sentence: willful retention of national defense information. And the final two counts have a maximum of five years each: scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.

Trump's indictment remains under seal, but his decision to publicize it means feds could unseal it as early as Friday, ahead of next Tuesday's court appearance in Miami.

The news was met with outrage among the Republican party, with even his 2024 rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, declaring that the 'weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society.'

DeSantis stopped short of saying whether he'd pardon his rival if Trump was convicted, despite calls for the Florida governor to commit to doing so.

Trump himself - who was in Bedminster, New Jersey when the charging news broke - condemned the indictment in a clip which The New York Times said was pre-recorded, saying it was political persecution, and said: 'I am innocent.'

He will appear in court in Miami on Tuesday at 3pm, where the charges will be put to him. Trump denies all allegations he faces.

Like DeSantis, Ramaswamy accused the Biden administration of weaponizing federal law enforcement.

'This is an affront to every citizen: we cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents. Its hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden,' he said.

Former president Donald Trump (pictured) faces a new legal challenge - this time from the government he used to lead - with charges for illegally retaining classified documents and other crimes expected to be filed next week in federal court in Miami

A FBI raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in August found a trove of classified documents (pictured). Investigators seized roughly 13,000 documents from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, nearly a year ago

'There are also serious legal questions about the Presidents power to declassify documents and the potential illegality of the over-classification of federal documents in the first place. Thats for the courts to decide, but we the people decide who governs this nation.'

THE CHARGES TRUMP FACES AND THE MAXIMUM PRISON SENTENCES Trump lawyers have confirmed he is facing seven federal charges. They have not received the formal indictment, but have been sent summonses that suggest he will face the below counts and maximum sentences. Willful retention of national defense information in violation of The Espionage Act (maximum penalty of 20 years in prison if convicted)

Conspiracy to obstruct justice (20 years)

Withholding a document or record (20 years)

Corruptly concealing a document or record (20 years)

Concealing a document in a federal investigation (20 years)

Scheme to conceal (five years)

False statements and representations (five years) Advertisement

He continued: 'It would be much easier for me to win this election if Trump werent in the race, but I stand for principles over politics. I commit to pardon Trump promptly on January 20, 2025 and to restore the rule of law in our country.

'We cant have two tiers of justice: one for Trump on government document retention, another for Biden. One for Assange, another for Manning. One for BLM/Antifa, another for peaceful protesters on Jan 6.'

Jan 6. is referring to Trump's supporters violently storming the U.S. Capitol building in January 2021 in an attempt to keep him in power by preventing a joint session of Congress from counting the electoral college votes to formalize Biden's victory.

Five people died either shortly before, during or after the insurrection attempt, and 138 police officers were injured in the riots.

Trump has been accused of trying to forcefully overturn the election by the House select committee investigating the incident.

Both Ramaswamy and Hutchinson are trailing behind Trump and DeSantis in the early polls of the race for the Republican nomination.

As of June 8, poll analysis website FiveThirtyEight said Ramaswamy was polling at around 3.5 percent, with Hutchinson at the bottom of the pack with just 0.7 percent.

Trump, meanwhile, is leading with 53.8 percent, while DeSantis is on 21.3 percent.

Hutchinson has been a staunch critic of Trump's approach and apparent disregard for democracy, with his latest statement making his feelings very clear.

In his statement, he said the news that Trump had been indicted for a second time means that 'our country finds itself in a position that weakens our democracy.'

Trump has already been indicted once this year, in New York, for his alleged role in facilitating a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Despite this, he still remains the favorite to win the Republican nomination.

Trump's lawyer, Jim Trusty, told CNN on Thursday that all seven charges 'break out from an Espionage Act charge'. Jack Smith, the special counsel who is overseeing the investigation, has not commented.

Despite the pre-recorded clip, CBS News claimed that Trump was not expecting to be indicted, and that he was upset with his inner circle for telling him there was only a low risk of charges over the classified documents incident.

The former president is said to have complained that there was 'too much happy talk for too long' from those closest to him over the prospect of criminal action.

He was indicted in Manhattan in April on state charges of making hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels - those state charges, too, were historic.

The investigation into Trump's handling of classified documents is being overseen by a special counsel, Jack Smith (pictured), who was appointed by the Attorney General Merrick Garland in November

But the classified information charges are federal and significantly more serious, and carry hefty prison sentences.

Prosecutors have investigated the transfer of presidential files to his Mar-a-Lago Florida estate since last year.

The probe exploded into the headlines in August when the FBI searched Trump's Florida home, recovering 11,000 documents, including about 100 that were marked as classified.

For his part, Trump has repeatedly insisted he did nothing wrong and that he is the victim of a federal witch hunt.

At times the controversy has even boosted his standing in the polls and allowed him to raise money from supporters who see a 'deep state' plot to take him out of the 2024 race.

'The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is 'secured' by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time,' Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday night.

'I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!'

Later Thursday night, he put out a video.

'Very sadly we're a nation in decline and yet they go after a very popular president,' Trump said.

'I'm an innocent man, I did nothing wrong,' he continued, vowing to 'fight this out.'

In an interview with Fox News Digital, Trump also said he would 'of course' plead not guilty.

Security is already being increased around the courthouse in Miami ahead of his appearance before a judge, scheduled for 3pm on Tuesday.

Trump on Tuesday will be arraigned at this federal courthouse in Miami. News crews are pictured on Thursday staking out their positions

The investigation into Trump's handling of classified documents is being overseen by a special counsel, Jack Smith, who was appointed by the Attorney General Merrick Garland in November.

DeSantis, who is second place in polls across the country, stopped short of saying he would pardon Trump if he won the 2024 race, and the former president was convicted.

But he condemned the decision to press charges.

'We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation,' he said.

'Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.'

DeSantis and Trump have been trading barbs as the 2024 Republican campaign for president heats up. But DeSantis dropped his guard to criticize the move.

He joined Republican members of Congress in ripping the double standards of justice and claimed the timing of the indictment was convenient given new allegations that President Biden received a $5 million bribe from a Burisma executive when he was Vice President.

DeSantis supporters have said that Trump should drop out of the White House race to the Florida governor can pardon him if he wins in 2024. Trump currently holds a considerable lead over DeSantis in the polls.

'Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America,' said House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. 'It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him. Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades.

Ron DeSantis has run to the defense of his 2024 Republican rival Donald Trump to attack the Department of Justice and ask why it isn't going after Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden

'I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.'

Josh Hawley, a senator for Missouri, tweeted: 'If the people in power can jail their political opponents at will, we don't have a republic.'

And Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, a senior Judiciary Committee member, wrote on Twitter: 'DOJ indicts former President / candidate Trump SAME DAY DOJ/FBI restricts access to unnecessarily redacted Biden allegations.

'And they wonder why ppl think there r two standards for justice.'
A 22-year-old woman who bravely fought for her life for two months after a horror crash has sadly died in hospital.

Macy Edwards was heading home to the Tasmanian town of Wynyard from a tour guide training course in Launceston on March 28 when the accident happened.

She was rushed to Hobart hospital where she remained in an induced coma as specialist doctors treated her injuries.

Once stable, Ms Edwards was flown to Melbourne suffering from brain and heart trauma and broken ribs, pelvis and collarbone.

Macy Edwards, 22, has died two months after a car crash

Ms Edwards was heading home to the Tasmanian town of Wynyard from a tour guide training course in Launceston on March 28 when the accident happened

Tragically, after 10 weeks in hospital, a spokesperson for the Edwards family announced on Friday that Ms Edwards had died.

'It is with overwhelming heartbreak that we let you know that yesterday Macy passed away surrounded by her family,' they said.

'Words cannot ease the pain we know this will cause many of you. I can only encourage you with the faith that Macy is now free and forever 22 - her life was full of adventure, laughs and vibrancy, and that will remain her legacy.

Macy Edwards (centre) and her family. Picture: Supplied

'We ask that you all continue to come together as a community to wrap your arms around each other and the Edwards' through this difficult time. We will provide an update on funeral details in the coming days.'

A GoFundMe account established days after the accident raised more than $61,655 to support Ms Edwards' family, including her mother Celisa, who is a deputy mayor in the state's north east.

The fundraiser's organisers, Allie House and Fiona Pearce, said Macy was 'destined to help people'.

Macy Edwards tragically died after a horror crash. Picture: Supplied

'Over the past 10 weeks you have flooded Steve, Celisa, Kinae, Lakia and Themis with the most extraordinary amount of love, prayer, thoughts, acts of service and generosity, and on behalf of the family, thank you doesn't feel enough,' they said.

'You have all entirely carried them through this as they cared for Macy and willed her to recover with everything they had.

'Unfortunately, the extent and permanence of Macy's brain injuries were unrecoverable and yesterday heaven inherited the most joy-filled soul it will ever have.'

Ms Edwards was flown to Melbourne suffering from brain and heart trauma and broken ribs, pelvis and collarbone. Picture: Instagram

Mayor of Burnie Teeny Brumby took to Facebook to share her condolences.

'Our community aches with the Edwards' family for their loss, as Macy was a vivacious, adventurous and spirited young lady, who served us coffee in several cafes on the coast,' she said.

'She will be deeply missed. I just wanted to extend our heartfelt condolences to the Edwards family on behalf of our North West Coast community at this time.'
An iconic speakeasy in London's Soho is facing closure following a series of complaints from a millionaire neighbour, sparking outrage among its patrons.

The New Evaristo Club, affectionately known as Trisha's in honour of its longtime Italian matriarch, has been a mainstay of the area for more than 80 years and counts Amy Winehouse and Led Zeppelin as former patrons.

The basement venue, on Greek Street, is seen by many as the last surviving connection to the 'old school' Soho, which has been decimated by a string of nightlife closures over the past decade.

But in an Instagram post on Thursday, its owners revealed Westminster City Council wants to review its licence, as it launched a last-ditch appeal for support from its fans.

The controversial review stems from a series of complaints lodged by a homeowner in nearby St Anne's Court, where properties fetch upwards of 3million. The courtyard is at least three streets away from Trisha's.

The New Evaristo Club, affectionately known as Trisha's in honour of its longtime Italian matriarch, has been a mainstay of the area for more than 80 years and counts Amy Winehouse and Jimmy Page as former patrons. (Pictured: The late Anthony Bourdain (right) with Marco Pierre White at Trisha's in Soho)

The late Peaches Geldof leaves Trisha's back in 2008, while right, legendary music producer Mark Ronson

The basement venue, on Greek Street (entrance pictured), is seen by many as the last surviving connection to the 'old school' Soho, which has been decimated by a string of nightlife closures over the past decade

According to a council document, the unnamed local complained that the venue was opening later than its licence permitted and claimed people were smoking on the premises. They also branded it a 'haven for drug users'.

In its appeal on Thursday, staff at the embattled venue wrote: 'To our enormous upset, Westminster Council have told us they want to ''review'' our licence. They are asking to close us down and we need your support.'

The appeal asked regulars to email the council to 'address your thoughts on how our much loved small music venue operates, paying particular to any (or lack of) crime and disorder and public nuisance.'

The post said all objections need to be sent to the local authority by the end of Friday.

It comes after the much-loved club managed to crowdsource funds to remain operational following the worst of the Covid pandemic in 2020.

It is famed for its cheap drinks and charm and has seen a host of famous faces over the years, including Led Zeppelin, Anthony Bourdain and Mark Ronson.

In his hit TV series The Layover, Bourdain famously took celebrity chef Marco Pierre White to Trisha's, telling the cook: 'There is no finer establishment.'

He branded it the 'Dean Martin of drinking establishments', adding: 'They don't give a f***. If you want your picture on the wall, you'd have to hang it yourself.'

Late music legend Amy Winehouse loved the venue and was often seen socialising in the smoking area sporting her iconic beehive haircut.

A bartender told Dazed magazine in 2020 how long-time owner Trisha Bergonzi once told Jimmy Page to 'f*** off' when he asked her to make him a cheese toastie on a packed-out Friday night.

Late music legend Amy Winehouse was a regular at Trisha's and was often seen hanging out in the smoking area sporting her iconic beehive

According to a council document, the unnamed local complained that the venue was opening later than its licence permitted and claimed people were smoking on the premises. They also branded it a 'haven for drug users'

A bar tender told Dazed magazine in 2020 how long-time owner Trisha Bergonzi once told Jimmy Page to 'f*** off' when he asked her to make him a cheese toastie on a packed-out Friday night (pictured: Revellers at the iconic Soho club)

Tracy Kawalik recalled: 'The following Monday, the band's manager came back in and reminded Trish what had happened.

'She had no clue who they were and apologised immediately, to which their manager said: ''Jimmy was made up. No one's ever told him to fuck off in Soho before'''.

Speaking to The Face that same year, Ms Kawalik reminisced about the characters she had met over the years.

She said: 'A couple of hours into my first shift at Trisha's, I'd swapped numbers with a guy wearing a three-piece suit and a pocket watch, and had been asked by an aspiring diamond-thief to check a hammer in behind the bar.

'Only moments before, I poured Jarvis Cocker a double and was told by Trisha to keep Patsy Cline's Crazy on loop. These anecdotes don't scratch the surface when it comes to summing up what makes her club a Soho institution that deserves being saved.'

She added that 'despite all the gentrification the neighbourhood has seen', Trisha has kept drinks and cover charges much lower than other bars and 'always made sure the staff and band get paid first.'

Tracy added: 'She is all-round pure class and has always been adamant to keep her bar, and by extension her neighbourhood, true to its roots.'

Big Little Lies star Shailene Woodley, 28, and fellow actor Callum Turner, 29, were also recently spotted enjoying a fun-filled outing there.

In its official justification for launching a review, Westminster Council said it first received a complaint from a local resident in January of this year, prompting a visit by inspectors

Trisha's is famed for its cheap drinks and charm and has seen a host of famous faces over the years, including Led Zeppelin, Anthony Bourdain and Mark Ronson (pictured: Revellers at the iconic Soho venue)

In its official justification for launching a review, Westminster Council said it first received a complaint from a local resident in January of this year, prompting a visit by inspectors.

It said management were then unable to produce some CCTV footage and claimed it had exceeded its 60-person capacity limit.

Council bosses also scolded the historic venue for 'failure to properly maintain members' and guests' books', adding that there was 'no effective control of people entering the premises.'

It admitted that 'some improvements' have been made in recent months, but after a series of meetings, City Inspectors 'have no confidence in the ability of the premises to comply' with its licence conditions.

The move has sparked outrage among the club's regulars on social media, who branded it an 'outrage' and a 'disgrace.'

One fumed: 'This is the last unique, special place standing in Soho, we need you open because you are the link between the past and the present and you stood throughout all the changes.'

MailOnline has contacted Trisha's and the London's night czar for comment.

Councillor Aicha Less, Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Communities and Public Protection, told MailOnline: 'Westminster City Council values the vibrant nightlife and unique heritage of Soho, but we also have a responsibility to protect the public and ensure all licensed venues operate legally, safely, and within the conditions of their licence.

'We work closely with owners and managers of licensed premises and provide support to ensure that they are complying with their licence agreements.

'However, following a council investigation and a series of complaints from residents and patrons, we have applied a review of this premise's licence.

'A licensing sub-committee will consider the evidence and decide what action, if any, will be taken, and it would not be appropriate to comment further while the review is ongoing.'
Tributes have poured in for a British tourist who died after crashing into a palm tree on a motor scooter in Turkey, during what was reportedly his 'first holiday abroad'.

Kyle Barrow, lovingly referred to as Keezy, died after he lost control of his bike in Manavgat, Antalya province, on Turkey's southern coast.

The 27-year-old from Manchester had reportedly been travelling from the beach town of Side to Kumkoy, some 30 miles away.

Photographs show the scooter lying next to the palm tree after the crash on Side Suleyman Demirel Boulevard.

Medics were called to the scene and Kyle was rushed to hospital by ambulance where he later died. His heartbroken best friend claimed Kyle passed away in his arms on Wednesday.

Friends described him as a 'legend', 'one in a million' and 'the spine of every group, the man that brought us all together', as they revealed touching tattoo tributes remembering Kyle's life.

Kyle Barrow (right) died after crashing into a palm tree on a motor scooter as he crossed a road at a tourist hotspot in Turkey

A 27-year-old British tourist has died after crashing into a palm tree on a motor scooter as he crossed a road at a tourist hotspot in Turkey

Photographs show the scooter lying next to the palm tree after the crash on Side Suleyman Demirel Boulevard

Friends described him as a 'legend', 'one in a million' and the 'spine of every group, the man that brought us all together', as they revealed touching tattoo tributes remembering Kyle's life

Cal Junior and other friends Kyle had been on holiday with commemorated the young man with the dates of his birth and untimely death.

Cal asked friends and loved ones for support on GoFundMe to get Kyle back home to Oldham, and shared a heartfelt tribute to his late friend on Facebook.

'It is with the heaviest heart imaginable that I have to tell you that Kyle was in an accident this afternoon and his life has sadly been lost.

'We are in Turkey and I'm doing my best to understand what I need to do next but will update everyone when I can.

The tourist reportedly lost control of the vehicle while crossing an intersection on the boulevard

'RIP my best friend for life, passed away in my arms... gone too soon... we will meet again one day boo boo... the memories will last forever.'

Another friend, Tay Nolan, shared his devastation at Kyle's death: 'Absolutely no words... my heart hurts so much just as I know it does for everyone else.

'Love and support to everyone who is dealing with this right now family friends and loved ones and especially Cal Junior.

'Keezy you were a one in a million friend... I've enjoyed every minute I knew you, always made me laugh even when you took the p*** out of me, I will never forget you... rest easy.'

Kyle had reportedly lost control of the vehicle while crossing an intersection on the boulevard and hit the palm tree, which was on a central reservation separating each side of the avenue.

Side is a popular tourist destination on Turkey's southern Mediterranean coast.

A FCDO spokesperson said: 'We are assisting the family of British man who died in Turkey, and are in contact with the local authorities.'
Rishi Sunak today praised octogenarian Joe Biden's 'experience' on issues including China and foreign policy as 'particularly valuable' after the signing of a new UK-US partnership.

The Prime Minister continued the thaw in previously chilly transatlantic relations after a warm meeting with the US leader at the White House yesterday.

At 43, Mr Sunak is the youngest leader in the G7 group of industrial democracies, while Mr Biden is the oldest at 80.

And the president has come under some pressure at home over his age and whether he plans to run for a second term that, if he is re-elected, will see him in the White House until he is 86.

When me and Mr Sunak met at the White House Mr Biden gaffed, by calling him the UK's 'president'. And last week he took a fall at a graduation ceremony.

But speaking to CNN ahead of his return to the UK last night, Mr Sunak said Mr Biden's lengthy political career 'incredibly helpful' to 'someone who is newer to this'.

I think there are, you know, few leaders anywhere who have spent as much time talking to President Xi (Jinping),' he said.

It follows the announcement of the Atlantic Declaration, a partnership aiming to bolster UK-US economic security in response to Beijing's growing influence, during Mr Sunak's first trip to the White House as Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister continued the thaw in previously chilly transatlantic relations after a warm meeting with the US leader at the White House yesterday.

The president has come under some pressure at home over his age and whether he plans to run for a second term that, if he is re-elected, will see him in the White House until he is 86

At 43, Mr Sunak is the youngest leader in the G7 group of industrial democracies, while Mr Biden is the oldest at 80.

The agreement comes after hopes of a full-blown free trade deal were abandoned, with UK officials insisting the new, targeted approach is better suited to challenges posed by China and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The bilateral declaration is the latest sign that the globalisation of recent decades is being replaced by an era of trading alliances of like-minded nations.

Meeting Mr Sunak in the Oval Office, Mr Biden - who inadvertently referred to the Prime Minister as 'Mr President' - said the special relationship was in 'real good shape'.

In his CNN interview, the Prime Minister also said he had observed in the US 'strong support' for helping Ukraine in defending itself against Moscow's attack, having spoken to leaders of both parties in Congress.

'I think there's an acknowledgment, as I said, that the values that we're fighting for are universal. They're values that America has always stood up for, which is democracy, freedom and the rule of law,' he said.

Mr Biden has condemned President Vladimir Putin's invasion and pledged support for Ukraine for 'as long as it takes'.

Meanwhile former president Donald Trump, who is still the Republican frontrunner ahead of next year's US election, had refused to say who he thinks should win the war.
South Africa: SA condemns killing of Palestinian toddler

South Africa has joined the international community in strongly condemning the killing of a two-and-a-half-year-old Palestinian toddler, Mohammed Tamimi.

According to reports, the toddler was shot in the head by Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank last week and died of his wounds on Monday, 5 June 2023.

The Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) said the continuous acts of aggression by the Israeli defence force, since the beginning of the year, have resulted in the killing of at least 156 defenceless Palestinians across Israel, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The civilian population, including more than 20 children, have been the casualties of the brutal acts of aggression sponsored by the Israeli government, DIRCO said.

The department said Tamimi is the latest victim of spiralling bloodshed under the illegal and unjust Israeli occupation of Palestine, which has prompted fears of a return to full-scale fighting.

Israeli occupation and its defence forces actions should be seen as criminal and a violation of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 6, which stipulates that parties recognise that every child has the inherent right to life, and should ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child.

According to DIRCO, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is unambiguous in its articulation that every child should be recognised, respected and protected as a rights holder and as a unique and valuable human being.

Israels acts of aggression aggravate the already tense situation and its impunity encourages it to openly demonstrate that it has no intention to negotiate a two-State solution on bona fide terms.

"It further encourages the continuous occupation of Palestine and the Israeli armys persecutions, massacres, raids and other violations that go against international law.

Sadly, Israels callous and unjust killing of Mohammed Tamimi took place a day after Child Protection Week in South Africa, which is commemorated in the country annually to raise awareness of the rights of children, as articulated in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa and Childrens Act (Act No. 38 of 2005), DIRCO said.

According to the department, Child Protection Week is an opportunity to educate individuals, families, communities and institutions about the crucial role they play in safeguarding childrens well-being.

South Africa remains unequivocally committed to an end to the occupation of Palestine and calls for concrete action concerning ending the apartheid system in Israel and Palestine.

South Africa values efforts aimed at reviving a political process, leading to the establishment of a viable Palestinian State, existing side by side in peace with Israel within internationally recognised borders, based on those existing on 4 June 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital, in compliance with all relevant UN Resolutions, international law and internationally agreed parameters.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2023-06-09. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
World's largest Legoland Resort to open in S China's Shenzhen in 2024

People's Daily Online) 13:58, June 09, 2023

Legoland Shenzhen Resort, located in Dapeng New District, Shenzhen city, south China's Guangdong Province, is expected to open in 2024, according to Siegfried Boerst, general manager of the resort.

Siegfried Boerst, general manager of Legoland Shenzhen Resort under construction in Dapeng New District, Shenzhen city, south China's Guangdong Province, shares the information about the highlights of the resort at the 19th China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industries Fair held in Shenzhen. (Photo/People's Daily Online)

On June 7, Boerst shared the information about the highlights of the resort at the 19th China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industries Fair held in Shenzhen.

The resort will be the largest Legoland Resort in the world and the first international intellectual property (IP)-based family theme park and resort in Shenzhen, Boerst said.

The construction site of Legoland Shenzhen Resort in Dapeng New District, Shenzhen city, south China's Guangdong Province. (Photo/People's Daily Online)

Spanning 584,000 square meters, Legoland Shenzhen Resort will include a theme park (Legoland Theme Park), a water park (Legoland Water Park), and three theme hotels, according to Boerst.

Aside from the resort, the water park in the resort is the largest of its kind in the world, noted Boerst, who disclosed that the Legoland Theme Park will have nine thematic zones and be able to provide more than 100 recreational facilities, theater performances, and attractions.

The Legoland Shenzhen Resort will also have the world's largest Legoland theater, which will boast of a seating capacity of over 1,000 and brand new original theater performances created for Chinese families, according to Boerst.

A plan of Legoland Shenzhen Resort, which is under construction in Dapeng New District, Shenzhen city, south China's Guangdong Province. (Photo/People's Daily Online)

The resort is expected to integrate concepts in Chinese culture and Shenzhen's advantage of rich sci-tech innovations, and fully adopt digital and smart technologies, Boerst said.

Legoland Shenzhen Resort will usher in a new chapter of recreational experiences for families in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and contribute to building the Dapeng New District into a world-class coastal ecotourism destination, he added.

Exhibits of Legoland Shenzhen Resort at the 19th China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industries Fair held in Shenzhen city, south China's Guangdong Province. The resort is under construction in the Dapeng New District, Shenzhen. (Photo/People's Daily Online)

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
An armed man remains at large while another is dead following a violent altercation inside a suburban house.

Emergency services were called to a home on Parroo Close at St Clair in Sydney's west around 4.30pm on Friday following reports a man had been stabbed.

Emergency responders arrived to find a man unconscious suffering from serious injuries and began performing CPR.

The man died at the scene, despite desperate efforts to revive him.

Two female occupants who were at home at the time were assessed by paramedics but weren't injured.

Sydney police are asking the public to be on the lookout for a man who fatally stabbed another after an altercation in St Clair, in the city's west just before 4:30pm on Friday

A manhunt is now underway for the alleged attacker.

The suspect is described as being aged in his mid-20s, of African appearance, with a solid build and black hair in short dreadlocks.

Police fear the man could still be armed.

A man has died following an altercation in St Clair, in the Sydney's west on Friday

A neighbour whose sister was home at the time said that the dispute may have been over a love triangle, Nine News reported.

The street remains closed off on Friday night.

Five police cars were seen driving away and begin patrolling the suburb as a desperate manhunt began.

Anyone who sees the man is urged not to approach him but to call Triple-0 immediately.
The police watchdog has launched an investigation into the death of a teenager who was killed when he crashed an e-bike after being followed by officers - as heartbroken mourners today left flowers at the scene.

Saul Cookson, 15, died after he struck the front of the moving ambulance just after 2pm yesterday in Salford - a month after two teenagers were killed after being followed by a police van in Cardiff.

Traffic officers began following Saul while he was pedalling the e-bike along Fitzwarren Street at around 2pm on Thursday, Greater Manchester Police said.

They continued into Lower Seedley Road before the police vehicle was blocked off by bollards. The crash between the e-bike and the ambulance - which was returning to base after responding to an incident - took place in Langworthy Road 'a short time later'.

The incident has been referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) 'in line with normal proceedings' and the watchdog is now leading the investigation.

Saul Cookson, 15, was killed when his electric bike crashed into an ambulance in Salford

The teenager died a short time after being rushed to hospital following the crash

This map shows Langworthy Road in Salford, Greater Manchester, where the crash took place

An IOPC spokesman said: 'We were notified by Greater Manchester Police due to the fact a police vehicle had been following the e-bike shortly before the collision.'

Messages at the scene say 'rest in peace my bro', 'fly high', 'shining bright up there' and 'forever 15'.

A white sheet hung on a railing was also covered in written tributes, while a cardboard sign pinned up beside it read: 'Kids on bikes - don't kill.'

Saul's sister said on Facebook: 'Words cannot describe my feelings at the moment. Rest in peace Saul, I love you.'

'Just so crazy how it happened. In one blink he was gone. He was way too young and shouldn't have gone at 15. He was seriously my best friend and brother in one. Even though he did annoy me we had the best memories and will never be forgotten.

'I'm so proud to call you MY brother and you will always be in my mind and by my side.

'Such a cruel world and how fast it happened. I was literally just talking to my mum and it just happened in one blink after all the good memories and I wish we could've made more but all of them are still in my heart. Rest easy Saul.'

The IOPC is investigating the incident and a cordon remained in place on Langworthy Road in Salford yesterday

Mourners today continued leaving flowers near to where 15-year-old Saul Cookson died in an e-bike crash

Messages at the scene say 'rest in peace my bro', 'fly high', 'shining bright up there' and 'forever 15'

Floral tributes were tied to lampposts and candles lit in the teenager's memory

Saul's cousin, Jack Pennington, wrote: 'Everyone who knew Saul knew he was the nicest lad about, had a good heart, polite and have you like no tomorrow.

'Can't believe I'm writing this, no other word describes it other than shock. Don't feel real in the slightest one of the best lads you could meet and I feel lucky to have called you my cousin.

'Had some good times growing up... can't believe that's just it. Shows what a cruel world we're living in. Miss you forever my brother. Can't say goodbye just see you later my mate love you RIP Saul my brother.'

A relative of the boy, who attended the scene to lay flowers, said the family was 'a mess' following the news.

Family friend Jacob Bailey, 19, said: 'I've known Saul since he was born. He was just one of those proper nice kids. No-one had a bad word to say about Saul.

'I just don't believe it. He had so much to live for and in the blink of an eye it's just all.. 15 is no age is it.'

A GoFundMe page has been set up in a bid to raise 2,000 for his funeral, which had raised more than 1,100 by Friday morning.

Traffic officers had following the boy since 2pm but were prevented from continuing the trail by bollards

Officers at the scene of the crash on Langworthy Road, Salford, yesterday afternoon

15-year-old Saul died after smashing into an ambulance

Greater Manchester Police: 'In line with normal proceedings, the incident has been referred to the IOPC who are now leading the investigation.

'Our thoughts are with the family and friends of the boy who tragically died.'

The IOPC said it was 'independently investigating the circumstances of a serious collision involving an e-bike and an ambulance in Salford'.

'Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones, as well as all those affected by this tragedy,' its spokesman said.

'We were notified by Greater Manchester Police due to the fact a police vehicle had been following the e-bike shortly before the collision.

'We have sent investigators to the scene of the collision, at the junction of Langworthy Road and Lower Seedley Road, as well as to the police post-incident procedures, to begin gathering evidence.'

He added the IOPC would provide 'further details once we are in a position to do so'.

Floral tributes have been left near a police cordon by the scene of the crash

The North West Ambulance Service said: 'We can confirm that an ambulance was involved in a collision with a young person, who was riding an electric bike, on Langworthy Road in Salford at around two o'clock this afternoon.

'The patient received medical treatment immediately by the ambulance crew and was transported to hospital, where he sadly later died. We are participating fully in the police investigation.

'We would like to extend our deepest condolences to the young person's family.'

It comes after 15-year-old Harvey Evans and 16-year-old Kyrees Sullivan were killed in an e-bike collision after being followed by a police van in Cardiff last month, sparking a riot in the aftermath.
A mother was forced to fly home early from her 'holiday from hell' in southern Spain last month after suffering horrorific burns from giant hogweed - leaving her needing to wear gloves whenever she leaves the house.

Lucy Jones was on holiday in Cadiz with husband Max, 31, and three-year-old daughter Lily Jones when she noticed a burning sensation on her right hand on May 23.

The stay-at-home mother, 29, says her skin erupted in agonising blisters, as if her hand 'had been dipped in boiling water'.

Horrified, she rushed to a pharmacy where staff dressed it and gave her steroids for dermatitis.

But the pain became so severe that the family were forced to cut their holiday short by three days and fork out 300 for earlier flights back to the UK.

Following her experience, the 29-year-old has to wear special SPF gloves until the burns heal

Mrs Jones's hand erupted in blisters as if 'her hand had been dipped in boiling water'

Giant hogweed (left), Latin name heracleum mantegazzianum, is a close relative of cow parsley (right)

Lucy Jones, 29, was forced to rush back from her holiday in southern Spain after she suffered burns from a giant hogweed

Mrs Jones was forced to cut her getaway in Cadiz three days short with husband Max and three-year-old daughter Lily

READ MORE: Is TOXIC giant hogweed growing near you? Advertisement

The 29-year-old mum went to Maidstone A&E in Kent, where medics were initially stumped about the cause of the blistering burns.

After being transferred to the burns unit, a doctor who had seen the symptoms before said she must have come into contact with the toxic hogweed plant.

There, Mrs Jones had the tops of her blisters scraped off and her hand dressed - a procedure she described as 'painful and traumatising'.

Once her burns have fully healed, she will have to slap on sunscreen three times a day and wear SPF gloves to protect her scorched skin from the sun.

Mrs Jones, from Maidstone, Kent, said: 'I woke up and my hand was red and sore and it looked like a sunburn.

'I went to a pharmacy because it was getting worse, it was a really horrible burning feeling.

'Over the next 24 hours it got worse. It was blistering, really swollen and I could barely move my fingers.

'It was so painful. We decided to catch a last-minute flight home and went straight to the hospital from the airport.

Despite being given steroids for dermatitis and rushed to a pharmacy, the hogweed burns ended the holiday early

Mrs Jones went straight to A&E in Maidstone after she touched down at the airport

'They had no clue what it was, no one in A&E had seen it before. They treated it as a burn, they took all the blisters off and removed a lot of skin.

What is Giant Hogweed? Giant hogweed can be attractive but presents a severe risk to people unaware of its harm Giant hogweed is invasive and potentially harmful. Chemicals in the sap can cause photodermatitis or photosensitivity, where the skin becomes very sensitive to sunlight and may suffer blistering, pigmentation and long-lasting scars. It is a close relative of cow parsley originally from Russia and Georgia and can grow to over 10ft in height. Source: RHS Advertisement

'It was painful and traumatising. It was as if my hand had been put in boiling hot water and there were blisters everywhere and some red patches started appearing on my left hand.

'I went back to A&E for a couple of days to get it dressed. I went to the burns unit and the consultant said he knew what it was because he'd seen it before.

'It completely ruined the holiday. We'd been looking forward to it for ages. My daughter was loving being out there and going in the pool.'

Mrs Jones doesn't know if she brushed against the plant in the UK or in Spain but says she suspects she may have inadvertently touched it near her home as her area is known for having a 'hogweed problem'.

Lucy said: 'People normally get it on their legs because they walk through it. I'm not sure where I touched the plant, in Spain or the UK.

'I can't recall walking through woodland. I was extremely surprised I hadn't heard of it.

'Since returning, my friend said that our area has a bit of a problem with it. It wouldn't surprise me if I touched it here without knowing then I reacted in Spain.'

Touching hogweed causes severe burns and blistering on the skin that lasts for several months.

The plant can grow to ten feet in height and chemicals in its sap can cause photosensitivity.

Mrs Jones said: 'When the sap goes on your skin it removes the melatonin which makes you extremely sensitive to light so perhaps when I went to Spain and was out in the sun it reacted.

Mrs Jones said she didn't know whether she came into contact with the hogweed at home in Maidstone or while on holiday in Cadiz, south Spain

The Jones family had to fork out 300 for new earlier flights back from Spain

'I've got to wear special SPF gloves [when they arrive] when outside until it heals but it isn't healing quickly.

'When it's healed I have to put on high SPF three times per day. It can last up to seven years on your skin.

'The skin has gone dark where all the dead skin is, it's quite raw where they took the skin off and the top layers are falling off.'
A soldier who blames the Army's drinking culture for a fall that left him brain damaged is suing the Ministry of Defence for 13million.

Lucca Brunozzi, 22, formerly a soldier in the Regiment of Rifles, also suffered neck and back fractures after toppling from a balcony at Ward Barracks, near Bulford, Wiltshire, in March 2019.

Mr Brunozzi, who also sustained skull fractures and a brain bleed, is claiming the Army encouraged a culture of hard drinking at the barracks, leading to the incident in which he says a drunken comrade pushed him.

The former rifleman is suing the Ministry of Defence for 13million compensation to cover the lifelong costs of his care and the loss of his career.

But the MoD is denying blame, disputing that Mr Brunozzi was pushed and suggesting the fall happened after he himself had been 'consuming a grossly excessive amount of alcohol' and brawling with his alleged attacker.

Lucca Brunozzi, 22, suffered neck and back fractures alongside a bleed on the brain from the fall in March 2019

Mr Brunozzi claims he was pushed over the edge of the balcony and says the Army did not provide high enough safety rails

In court documents, the ex-soldier's barrister Stuart McCracken said the tragedy occurred after Mr Brunozzi returned to their accommodation after a night out at The Chapel Nightclub, in Salisbury city centre.

Mr Brunozzi claims he had become the target of aggression from a fellow rifleman during the evening at the club, and this flared up again when they returned home via McDonalds.

He was on the top floor landing of the barracks when the young soldier he had clashed with earlier 'came at him aggressively', say his lawyers.

Although Mr Brunozzi managed to 'restrain' his comrade by placing him in a headlock, the attack resumed soon after.

'Mr Brunozzi was close to the balustrade on the landing area,' said his barrister.

'He felt a strong push, which the claimant believes to have been perpetrated by [his comrade].

'The push caused the claimant to make contact with the balustrade, to pivot over the top of it, to fall down on to the ground floor below, and to sustain serious injury.'

Mr Brunozzi claims his comrades then failed to call an ambulance despite his state, and simply hauled him back to his room, where he awoke the next morning 'undressed and in his own bed'.

His lawyers say the Army should have provided higher guard rails in the barracks and that it is also liable for the other soldier's alleged drunkenly violent conduct.

His barrister claims Army culture 'encouraged the drinking of alcohol and socialising between those stationed at Ward Barracks, such activities involving young servicemen, carrying with them an inherent risk of acts of aggression and/or over-exuberance by those servicemen.'

He claims that 'drinking and socialising between those living in the single living accommodation, including in the accommodation itself, was actively encouraged by the defendant.

'On the claimant's second day, Ward Barracks sponsored a drinking session for the service personnel based at the barracks, including the claimant and his colleagues.'

Mr Brunozzi's lawyers say the Army should have provided higher guard rails in the barracks and is also liable for the other soldier's alleged drunkenly violent conduct (file image of Ward Barracks, Bulford Camp)

Mr Brunozzi maintains he was the victim of an assault and battery, with his comrade 'pushing him towards and or/over the balustrade' and denies drinking to excess.

He insists he did his utmost to restrain from fighting, even playing the role of peacemaker among his friends when trouble flared at the nightclub.

Mr Brunozzi's lawyers say his injuries caused memory loss and reduced concentration, describing his current state as 'vulnerable'.

He may never work again, they said.

But defence barrister Andrew Ward denied that the Army 'encouraged and/or condoned excessive alcohol consumption or fighting between the junior ranks' and pointed out that disorderly conduct is a military offence.

'The defendant does not know how or why the claimant ended up going over the balustrade on the top floor, which he must prove,' he said in the MoD's written defence.

Mr Brunozzi had courted disaster by drinking too much and may have been brawling with his comrade, he added, highlighting a police report showing the soldier had downed six beers, four or five double vodka cokes and two Jaegermeisters on the night of his fall.

This suggested Mr Brunozzi was 'probably very intoxicated' when he returned to the barracks, argued Mr Ward, adding that he and his alleged attacker were 'apparently willing to fight each other after a drunken night out on the town'.

Any conflict between Mr Brunozzi and his fellow soldier was a private matter and outside the scope of their Army duties, Mr Ward said, adding: 'The MoD did not suffer, cause, permit or foster a culture of drunken fighting and/or inappropriate conduct and/or aggression whether as alleged or at all.'

The balustrade was also the right height and therefore 'reasonably safe', the MoD claims.

The case reached the High Court in a brief hearing between lawyers hammering out pre-trial issues, with Mr Ward also pointing out inconsistencies in Mr Brunozzi's evidence including whether he was shoved off the balcony or hoisted over by his legs.

The judge, Master Lisa Sullivan, said the key trial issues would boil down to whether there was a breach of duty by the MoD and the exact cause of the accident.

No date has yet been set for the full trial.
This is the surreal moment a group of Brits try to pull their trapped friend from the narrow opening of an underground waste container on the Costa del Sol after a 'drunken' prank went wrong.

One of his friends can be heard shouting 'Tiggy, give me your hand' and counting 'one, two, three' before yanking his arm upwards.

Another joins in by telling him 'Bring your knees up' as bemused locals offer advice in broken English on the best way to get him out and the top of the hemmed-in holidaymaker's head appears.

The bizarre drama at a central Malaga square ended with police, firefighters and workers from maintenance service firm Limasa being mobilised and having to dismantle part of the container so they could get him out following the failure of the amateur rescue attempt.

Overnight local reports said the tourists had put their trapped friend inside the container at busy Uncibay Square in Malaga's historic city centre after a drinking binge.

Friends and emergency services taking part in the rescue attempt. Overnight local reports said the tourists had put their trapped friend inside the container at busy Uncibay Square in Malaga's historic city centre after a drinking binge

Police and other emergency services were alerted around 1am yesterday by a local bar owner.

She is said to have told officers the group had been taking it in turns to open up the lid of the underground ecological waste container and climb inside before one of them got trapped.

His friends' attempts to pull him out included moments of tension when they yelled 'Make yourself small' and 'Listen to me, your leg, get your leg up' and unintelligible shouting mixed in with loud laughter as they realised the problems they had got themselves into.

One of the bemused locals watching on and trying to help with encouragement and advice could be overhead exclaiming: 'My God. Is this real!'

Tiggy, as his mates appeared to be calling him, seemed to be unfazed by all the attention, emerging with his shirt off but a smile on his face after being pulled out by firefighters to cheers from the crowds that had gathered round.

The friends are unable to get their friend out of the bin

The operation to free him took about half an hour. Armed police watched on but left the fire crews to do their job before taking the man's details down.

An ambulance had been put on standby but was not needed.

It was not immediately clear today if he or his friends would be asked to pay for the cost of his rescue or face fines.

Although his nationality has not yet been confirmed by officials, the video footage left it clear his mates were British and one local report also described him as British.

One Spaniard observing the moments leading up to the successful rescue and its happy ending said: 'There are stupid people and then these.

'They've put a lad in an underground waste container and they can't get him out.

'They've been trying to get him out for around the past half-hour.

'I don't understand these people who get drunk and do these sorts of things.'

He added as 'Tiggy' emerged with a smile on his face: 'Here's the guy. My God, my god. Drunkenness, eh!'

A small group of people watch as the emergency services take part in the rescue attempt

The incident had all the hallmarks of a stag do, although it is not known if the men involved were celebrating the impending marriage of one of their group.

In November last year Malaga city halls chiefs announced 650 fines for having inflatable penises and sex dolls as part of a crackdown on hen and stag parties.

The previous month scantily-clad models turned heads in the same city as they stripped down to their underwear on a packed street in front of shocked tourists and locals.

The women got out of a van before taking their clothes off and posing for a cameraman.

And one of the models briefly whipped her bra top off and exposed her naked breasts in front of children and OAPs after being egged on by a group of men opposite.

The shocking scenes occurred near Atarazanas Market in Malaga, the city's central market and one its city's architectural gems, around midday on Tuesday.

City hall officials confirmed at the time the daring photoshoot had not been authorised and they were investigating.
A retired shipyard worker with no surviving family has told how he leaves his will out every night in case he dies.

John Foster, 76, who appeared in Channel 4 Dispatches programme Britain's Forgotten Pensioners, said he has turned off his empty fridge and sits in the dark because he cannot afford to pay his energy bills.

He said he puts a milk carton by the door each night to keep it cool to save on bills.

The pensioner, from Sunderland, lives alone in the house he used to share with his parents and two siblings, and told of his daily struggle to cope with his isolation as well as the financial pressures of the rising cost of living.

'I'm completely on my own. I haven't even got any relations anywhere, I'm just here, that's it. Existing,' he told the documentary.

John Foster, who appeared in a Channel 4 Dispatches programme called Britain's Forgotten Pensioners, shows how he lays out his will before going to bed

'I'm completely on my own. I haven't even got any relations anywhere, I'm just here, that's it. Existing,' he said in a heartbreaking interview

The heartbreaking programme showed Mr Foster laying out his will and funeral arrangements before going to bed in case he died in the night.

'I started doing this when my sister died. I've got no family - they've all gone - so there's nobody to do things like this,' he said.

'If anyone comes into the house this is the first thing they're going to see. They will phone the funeral directors, they'll come out and everything will be done.'

READ MORE - Inflation-hit Britons reveal their struggles paying mortgages, feeding their children and filling up their cars Advertisement

Asked if he ever feels sad, Mr Foster said: 'You should say "do you ever feel happy?" Because I'm sad all the time.'

The pensioner explained that his brother, a miner, died four days before his 41st birthday, while his sister died five years ago. His mother and father died within 27 hours of each other.

'I've got no family, never been married, no kids. Family, if you lose one or two it's bad enough, but if you lose all of them you're completely on your own and it's just a nightmare,' he said.

'I can't believe I'm the last one here. It takes getting your head around it, you just can't work it out.'

The documentary showed Karen Noble, from local charity Pallion Action Group, helping Mr Foster gain access to benefits so he could afford utility bills and proper meals.

In total this amounted to an extra 131.25 every week which the pensioner did not know he was entitled to.

He said afterwards: 'I'm getting a lot more money now, which I've been entitled to for a few years and I didn't know, I had no idea.'

Mr Foster can now afford to go shopping and no longer needs to rely on foodbanks.

The 76-year-old lives alone in the house he used to share with his parents and two siblings, and told of his daily struggle to cope with his isolation

Mr Foster stays in the dark at night to avoid having to pay for his electric lights

Ms Noble said: 'I know that there's lots of information online, but we all know older people who don't go online.

'In John's case, if somebody had sat, when his sister had passed away and was on his own, had asked what was going on, then that would have highlighted that he needed some additional support.

'Nobody did, so whose responsibility is it and how are we going to solve it? I think it's shocking that we've got a 76-year-old man who could have been getting an additional benefit for ten years and nobody picked it up.'

A National Energy Action poll commissioned by Channel 4 for the documentary revealed the struggles elderly people are facing due to rising gas and electricity bills.

It revealed one in five (19 per cent) over-65s went to bed earlier than usual for warmth, while 1.8million older people turned off their heating completely this winter to save money.

Meanwhile, three in five (59 per cent) over 65s said they used their heating less than they ordinarily would.

Age UK director Caroline Abrahams said: 'Many viewers will be shocked by this programme, and they are right to be.

'Pensioner poverty fell steadily for a generation but then it rose again and now, as this documentary demonstrates, it's truly back with a vengeance.

'What we see in this programme ought to be a wake-up call that prompts an important discussion about how we ensure every older person can live decently and with dignity, free from the fear of the next big unaffordable bill.'

Mr Foster's will and funeral arrangements laid out on a sofa in his living room for someone to find if they walk in following his death

Hard-pressed households will receive a minor boost next month as Ofgem lowers its price cap to just over 2,000 a year - a saving of nearly 450.

Energy consultancy firm Cornwall Insight predicts the price cap will fall by 446 to 2,054 a year, based on falling wholesale energy prices.

However, campaigners warned households are not set to feel relief for another seven years, with energy bills set to remain high until 2030 at the earliest.

'We do not currently expect bills to return to pre-2020 levels before the end of the decade at the earliest,' Cornwall Insight said.

Fuel poverty charity National Energy Action (NEA) said that bills would remain 'unaffordable' for many due to the Government's decision to cut its winter support packages.

You can watch Britain's Forgotten Pensioners: Dispatches now on 4oD.
The company behind two of the Australia's most iconic attractions has admitted former and current casual staff have been underpaid in a payroll mishap.

Workers from Sydney's Taronga Zoo and Dubbo's Taronga Western Plains Zoo have collectively been underpaid about $2.6 million, including six per cent interest and 11 per cent superannuation.

Reimbursements for affected staff are due to begin in July, following a 'proactive review' by the company of their new payroll system which was introduced in February 2021.

Casual maintenance staff were ripped off after the new system wrongly interpreted the relevant award rates.

Casual staff at both Sydney's Taronga Zoo and Dubbo's Western Plains Zoo were incorrectly paid over a six-year period due to a faulty new payroll system (pictured, Taronga Zoo staff)

Over a six-year period, the system had incorrectly concluded casual workers were not entitled to a 15 per cent loading on weekdays, which resulted in a 'shortfall on the calculation of the 1/12th allowance which is paid in lieu of annual leave'.

Independent auditors are investigating the extent of the underpayments.

'Our people are the most important part of our organisation, and I am deeply sorry that this error has occurred,' Taronga chief executive Cameron Kerr said.

'I offer my sincere apologies to those current and former staff who have been impacted.'

Mr Kerr said it was disappointing that the underpayments weren't picked up earlier due to the disruptions of Covid-19 and the introduction of the new payroll system.

'Taronga is committed to ongoing monitoring of our industrial Awards and payroll systems to prevent a reoccurrence,' he added.

Taronga Zoo has issued an apology to current and former staff who have been impacted. Pictuted is Sydney's Taronga Zoo

Underpayments, late payments and leave and allowance complications continued for 18 months prior to Taronga's 'self-identification' of the issue, the Australian Workers Union said.

This comes after a snap strike was held at Taronga's Western Plains Zoo last year, with casual staff protesting underpayments and the loss of leave entitlements by the new payroll system.

NSW state secretary Tony Callinan told 7News it took the stop-work meeting at Dubbo for AWU members to meet with disgruntled staff.

'It's a bit rich for Taronga to come out today and claim to be self-reporting an underpayment when the payroll audit would have never happened if not for AWU members taking action.'

The zoo's payroll system will be corrected from July 13.
Ukraine launched attacks on Russian forces in the key southern Zaporozhzhia region and on the eastern front today, a Russian official said, in what observers believe could be the start of Kyiv's long-expected offensive.

Ukraine has not offered any confirmation but expectations have built for months over when its forces, bolstered with Western weapons and training, would launch a counter-offensive in a bid to reclaim land occupied by Russian forces.

Pro-war Russian bloggers reported intense battles today on the Zaporizhzhia front near the city of Orikhiv, around the mid-point of the 'land bridge' linking Russia to the Crimea peninsula, seen as one of Ukraine's main potential targets.

'At the moment, active combat is ongoing in the region between Orekhovo and Tokmak,' Vladimir Rogov, an official with Russian occupation authorities, wrote on the Telegram messaging service, referring to a locality known in Ukrainian as Orikhiv.

Alexander Sladkov, a correspondent for Russian media, wrote on Telegram of 'intense fighting' in the area.

Ukrainian soldiers run during a combat operation on the frontline near Kreminna, Luhansk region, Ukraine, on Thursday

A Ukrainian serviceman fires a rocket launcher during a military training exercise not far from front line in Donetsk region on Thursday

'The enemy is undertaking incredible efforts, attacks. In vain. Our forces are holding on. The front line is stable,' he wrote.

The information could not be independently verified and so it was impossible to assess the degree to with Ukraine's operation was underway.

Ukraine's army said only that 'the adversary remains on the defensive' in Zaporizhzhia, in a Facebook post. It said it destroyed four missiles and 10 drones, out of some 20 that Russia had fired at 'military installations and critical infrastructure'.

The fighting comes as the humanitarian and environmental cost climbed after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam unleashed destructive flooding in a different part of Ukraine's south.

Russia said on Thursday that its forces had fought a two-hour battle with Ukrainian troops in the early hours in the Zaporizhzhia region, which neighbours the flood-hit areas.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the Ukrainian offensive involved 1,500 soldiers and 150 armoured vehicles.

'The enemy was stopped and retreated after heavy losses,' he said.

Ukrainian officials have said their forces are ready for a long-expected counteroffensive but that there would be no formal announcement when it begins.

In its few comments, Ukraine has reported gains of territory in the east around the city of Bakhmut, which Russian forces captured last month after nearly a year of the deadliest ground combat in Europe since World War Two.

But Kyiv has said virtually nothing about the southern front, widely assumed to be the focus of its main assault as it tries to push towards the coast and cut Russia's access to Crimea.

In his nightly video address, delivered on a train after a visit to the flood zone in the south, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy thanked Ukrainian troops and repeated earlier claims of success in Bakhmut, but gave no further account.

'We see every detail. But it's not time to talk about it today,' he said.

Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar described heavy fighting in the east, where she said Ukrainian troops had mainly held off Russian attacks.

On the southern front she said only that battles were continuing for the settlement of Velyka Novosilka and that Russian troops were mounting 'active defence' at Orikhiv.

A Ukrainian tank fires in Chasiv Yar, the site of fierce battles with the Russian forces in Ukraine on Wednesday

Ukraine has been attacking targets deep in Russian-held territory for weeks in preparation for its assault.

The initial days of the counter-offensive have been overshadowed this week by a humanitarian disaster after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam holding back the waters of the Dnipro River that bisects Ukraine.

Thousands of people have been forced to evacuate homes flooded in the war zone, vast nature preserves have been wiped out and the destruction to irrigation systems is likely to cripple agriculture across much of southern Ukraine for decades.

Emergency services were racing to rescue people stranded by the flood-swollen waters of the Dnipro.

Ukrainian authorities said water levels in a reservoir which had been created by the Kakhovka dam had fallen 'below the critical point of 12.7 metres (42 feet)'.

They said the reservoir was no longer able to supply households and the cooling ponds at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, Europe's largest.

However late Thursday the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said he nuclear plant was continuing to receive water from the reservoir after the dam was damaged.

The plant's six reactors have been shut down but they still need cooling water to ensure there is no nuclear disaster.

Ukraine meanwhile called on Europe to double power supplies to two gigawatts.

Ukraine accuses Russia, whose forces control the dam area, of blowing up the dam, while Russia accuses Ukraine hitting it with artillery. Ukrhydroenergo, the dam's operator, said it was most likely mined from the inside.

Kyiv said on Friday it had intercepted a phone call proving that Russian forces in control of the dam had blown it up. Moscow says Ukraine sabotaged it.

Western countries say they are still gathering evidence but that Ukraine would have no reason to inflict such a devastating disaster on itself, especially right as its forces were shifting onto the attack.

The emergency service has warned the flood water has dislodged land mines that pose a threat to civilians.

The government has also sounded the alarm over the environmental impact, calling it 'a crime of ecocide'.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern could receive more than $1million in a record-breaking advance for her rumoured biography.

Ms Ardern, 42, is believed to be close to signing a book deal with publishing house Penguin after a major bidding war with several international publishers.

Her first authorised biography is set to be Ms Ardern's first major career move since resigning from office in April.

It's understood the advance for Ms Ardern's book could fetch anywhere between $1million and $1.5million, the New Zealand Herald reported on Friday.

Most publishing advances for Kiwi authors sit between $5,000 and $10,000. A typical memoir for a famous politician could go for as much as $20,000.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (above) could be paid between $1million and $1.5million for an advance on her new biography

Penguin remains tight-lipped on the supposed deal and any of the book's details.

'I don't think I can talk about that. Who's suggested that you get in touch with me about this?,' Penguin Random House New Zealand head of publishing Claire Murdoch said.

'I'm not in a position to comment on this. I don't think I can say anything about it. Presumably, there's one very obvious person to talk to about this.'

Ms Ardern is currently in the US.

Her EA told the Herald she couldn't comment.

Time Out Bookstore Manager Jenna Todd told Newstalk ZB radio host Heather Du Plessis-Allan on Friday that there'll be a lot of talk about the book and it'll sell on its own.

She added the book would have lots of international appeal.

Former All Blacks rugby star Sonny Bill Williams' autobiography payday came close to Ms Ardern's rumoured amount when the New Zealand, Australian and UK book rights were sold for $1million in 2021.

It's understood a publisher would need to sell at least 100,000 copies of a book to breakeven on a $1million deal.

While Ms Ardern has already been the subject of several biographies, including a children's story, her new book will be the first authorised one.

Ms Ardern has been the subject of several biographies, including controversial 'Jacinda Ardern: Leading with Empathy' (above), but the new title will be the first authorised one

One of Ms Ardern's most notable titles so far was the controversial 'Jacinda Ardern: Leading with Empathy' by journalist Supriya Vani and writer Carl A Harte.

The ex-PM said the interview published in the book was conducted under the pretence 'the author was writing a book on women and political leadership'.

'I was told there were roughly 10 other female political leaders involved,' she said at the time.

She added she had told the authors she was happy to be interviewed 'on that basis, given it was not specific to me'.

'The claim that it was an exclusive interview for the purpose of writing a book of that nature [a biography] is not true so I think I will certainly ask that that be clarified,' she said.

Ms Ardner (pictured with her partner Clarke Gayford) was elected prime minister in 2017 and led the country through several natural disasters, the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre and the Covid-19 pandemic

Ms Ardern, who was once the youngest female leader in the world, left NZ Parliament wearing a korowai - a traditional Maori feather cloak - in early April.

The globally respected PM led her country through several natural disasters, the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre and the Covid-19 pandemic.

She became the world's youngest female head of government when she was elected as New Zealand prime minister at the age of 37 in 2017.

The following year, Ms Ardern became only the second elected female leader to have a child while in office and the first since Benazier Bhutto in 1990 when she gave birth to daughter Neve, who turns five in June.

She now spends much of her time working on Christchurch Call, a project dedicated to removing extremist content from the internet that was created following the 2019 mosque attack.

She will join Ivy League institution Harvard University later this year in three fellowship roles in leadership and fighting online extremism.

She will head to the US to spend a semester at Harvard Kennedy School as the 2023 Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow and as a Hauser Leader in the school's Center for Public Leadership to engage with students on 'principled leadership'.

Ms Ardern will also take up a tech governance leadership fellowship at Harvard Law School's Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society, where she will study ways to improve content standards and platform accountability for extremist content online, and examine artificial intelligence governance and algorithmic harms.
A new sushi restaurant in Park Lane will see diners paying 420 each for an 18 courses tasting menu - and an additional 150 plus if they want to drink sake with it.

The pricing at the restaurant opened by Tokyo sushi master Shinji Kanesaka means it will vie with Salt Bae's Nusr-Et Steakhouse in Knightsbridge as the most expensive restaurant in London.

Sushi Kanesaka will seat a maximum of just 13 diners at a sitting catered for by a team of eight chefs, sommeliers and hosts.

Opening on July 1 inside the 45 hotel on Park Lane the restaurant's 420 tasting option will make it the most expensive set menu in Britain, according to the Evening Standard. Sake pairings to go with it start at 150 rising to 220.

Kanesaka also has a two-Michelin-starred restaurant by the same name in Tokyo and will be bringing staff from there to assist in the launch of his Mayfair enterprise.

The pricing at the restaurant opened by Tokyo sushi master Shinji Kanesaka (pictured) means it will vie with Salt Bae's Nusr-Et Steakhouse in Knightsbridge as the most expensive restaurant in London

The restaurant will be what's called in Japanese an 'omakese' which translates roughly as 'I'll leave it up to you' and the menu will be primarily built around sushi

One Brit who ate there in May told MailOnline: 'There was a lot of theatre and the food was very, very good but it was eye wateringly expensive and there wasn't enough sake for my liking.'

The restaurant will be what's called in Japanese an 'omakese' which translates roughly as 'I'll leave it up to you' and the menu will be primarily built around sushi.

The publicity material suggests Kanesaka aims to 'set a new benchmark for omakase dining in the city'.

Chef Kanesaka told The Standard: 'I am honoured to introduce our culinary heritage and passion for sushi, with some of my team and chefs from Sushi Kanesaka in Tokyo.

'We are thrilled to share the true essence of Edomae sushi, meticulously prepared using the finest ingredients, traditional techniques, and utmost dedication, transporting guests to the vibrant streets of Ginza  and the tranquillity of a traditional omakase service.

'Dining omakase is very special and unique, an intimate personal connection between the chef and the diner.

Pictured: Kanesaka's sushi rice box with crab, abalone, herring roe, shrimp, sea eel, marinated salmon roe and egg

Pictured: Kanesaka's sushi rice box with sea urchin, peony shrimp, fatty tuna, medium fatty tuna, lean tuna, yellow jack, cherry trout, Spanish mackerel and squid

Pictured: Salt Bae, who opened his steakhouse in Knightsbridge, London, in October 2021

Pictured: Salt Bae's Nusr-Et steak house in Knightsbridge, London, know for its pricey menu

45 Park Lane's general manager Lee Kelly said: 'I am delighted to welcome chef Sinji Kanesaka to open his first restaurant in Europe at 45 Park Lane.

'I have always admired chef Shinji Kanesaka and had the chance to meet him and taste his finest ingredients in Tokyo myself.

Other restaurants inside the hotel include Wolfgang Puck's CUT.
A young father-to-be shared a tragic post before he and his pregnant girlfriend died when their car smashed into a lorry.

Horse lover Jessica Poole, 18, who was around four months pregnant, and fitness fanatic Josh Alexander, 21, were driving their white Vauxhall Corsa on Monday when it crashed into a white lorry in Woodchurch, Kent, at about 5pm.

One of the last posts Josh shared on his Facebook showed a baby's onesie with a positive pregnancy test and a scan of their son inside the womb.

Josh accompanied the post with the words: 'November 2023. See you then lil one.'

Josh and Jessica's heartbroken friends and family paid tribute to the two youngsters online.

Josh's father Ben Sissens said his son's death had left him with a 'void I feel can never be filled', while one of Jessica's friends said 'losing you will be something I will never heal from'.

Jessica Poole, 18, who was thought to be around four months pregnant, died when the white Vauxhall Corsa she and her boyfriend were travelling in smashed into a white lorry in Woodchurch, Kent, at about 5pm on Monday

One of the last posts Josh shared on his Facebook showed a baby's onesie with a positive pregnancy test and a scan of their son inside the womb

Emergency services rushed to the scene, where the young couple from Hastings were pronounced dead

Jessica and Josh were from Hastings in East Sussex. Their heartbroken friends and family paid tribute to the two youngsters online

Emergency services rushed to the scene on Monday after the horrific smash but the couple from Hastings were pronounced dead.

Josh, who worked at Tenterden Leisure Centre, was described by friends as someone who 'brought the best out of everyone'.

In a tribute reported by KentOnline, Mr Sissens said of his son: 'You were my first, my everything, my mini me, my heart, my soul and my proudest achievement.

'Rest now my darling, with your beautiful Jess and your baby boy.'

Josh's friend Ben Wheeler wrote online: 'I have never met someone just as amazing, honest, kind and hardworking as you are.

'You deserved the world and deserved to be with Jess and your little boy.

'I hope all three of you are together in a better place. You'll be forever missed.'

Another friend, Michael Harmer, said: 'You were a blessing to my life and everyone else's - your light was radiant and you never failed to bring the best out of everyone.'

Josh's father Ben Sissens, pictured together, said his son's death had left him with a 'void I feel can never be filled'

Josh with his mother Becky Alexander

Charlie Louise Kent, a friend of Jessica's (pictured), said: '[I am] still wrapping my head around the fact my angel girl is gone, I am absolutely heartbroken'

Kent Police's Serious Collision Investigation Unit is appealing for witnesses and anyone with dashcam footage that may be able to assist to come forward

Charlie Louise Kent, a friend of Jessica's, wrote: 'I am unbelievably lost for words and in complete disbelief.

'[I am] still wrapping my head around the fact my angel girl is gone, I am absolutely heartbroken.

'You taught me the meaning of friendship and was and will always be the kindest soul I have ever come across.

'From being school girls to learning adulthood together, I made some of the most amazing memories with you and memories I will cherish forever.

'From talking every day and being with you all the time to having nothing but the mark you will leave behind, breaks my heart.

'I am more than lucky to have been a part of your life and you truly brightened mine.

'Losing you will be something I will never heal from but living on for you is something I promise.

'I hope you're somewhere at peace up there with baby Marcus [and] Josh.

'Never forget me because I will never forget you, I love you my special girl.'

Kent Police's Serious Collision Investigation Unit is appealing for witnesses and anyone with dashcam footage that may assist to come forward.

Witnesses should call 01622 798 538 or email sciu.td@kent.pnn.police.uk quoting MM/MD/059/23.
Adelia 'Dede' Robertson, the wife of controversial religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and a born-again Christian, died at her home in Virginia Beach last year.

Her death was followed by that of her husband's over a year later, on June 8, 2023.

Pat Robertson was best known for his role on 'The 700 Club,' a variety news hour presented from a Christian perspective. Much of his commentary focused on his religious beliefs, though he would often wade into political commentary.

His hybrid brand of religion and politics became a mainstay in the modern GOP, and Robertson himself unsuccessfully ran for president in 1988, but was frequently criticized for his views on women, the LGBTQ community and other religions.

Pat's wife Dede, who died aged 94, supported him throughout his career.

Here, DailyMail.com looks at her story...

Adelia 'Dede' Robertson (pictured), the wife of religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and a born-again Christian, died at 94 at her home in Virginia Beach last year

Who was Pat Robertson's wife Adelia 'Dede' Robertson?

Dede was born on December 3, 1927, to middle-class Christian Republicans Ralph and Florence Elmer in Columbus, Ohio.

She went on to get a bachelor's degree in Social Administration from The Ohio State University and eventually a nursing degree from Yale, where she met Pat.

She also competed in beauty pageants and participated in the Miss Ohio State contest and did modeling work.

She also sat on the board for Regent University - which her husband founded - and the Operation Blessing International relief and Development Corporation, as well as the family business: The Christian Broadcasting Network.

Robertson became a born-again Christian several months after her husband found his own faith.

The couple, who met in 1952, embarked on a journey that included living in a roach-infested commune in New York before Pat bought a tiny television station in Virginia.

That station would become the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in 1960. Dede Robertson would even be named Christian Woman of the Year in 1986.

Robertson's future husband was the son of a Southern Baptist, Democratic US senator Absalom Willis Robertson.

Eighteen months after meeting, they ran off to be married by a justice of the peace, knowing that neither family would approve.

He honored his wife in her obituary, saying she was a 'champion of the Gospel and a remarkable servant of Christ, who has left an indelible print on all that she set her hand on during her extraordinary life.'

Robertson's husband was interested in politics before finding religion, she told the Associated Press in 1987, and he even ran for president in 1988. She 'enthusiastically' campaigned in 52 cities on his behalf, her obituary said.

After finding faith, Pat stunned her by pouring out their liquor, tearing a nude print off the wall and declaring he had found the Lord.

Pictured: Dede cuts a ribbon outside one of Regent University's buildings, which her husband founded. She helped design several buildings at the university

The university even renamed Regent Theatre after her in 2019, which is now called the Dede Robertson Theatre (pictured)

They moved into the commune in Bedford-Stuyvesant because Robertson said God had told him to sell all his possessions and minister to the poor. Robertson told AP she was tempted to go back to Ohio, 'but I realized that was not what the Lord would have me do...I had promised to stay, so I did.'

Pat Robertson later heard God tell him to buy the small TV station in Portsmouth, Virginia, which would become a global religious broadcasting network.

He ran the network's flagship program, the 700 Club, for half a century before stepping down in 2021.

Meanwhile, Dede wrote a book - an autobiography, and another called The New You and wrote a monthly column in All in a Woman's Day, a Christian magazine.

She was appointed to the US on the Inter-American Commission of Women in 1982, which was established to ensure recognition of women's human rights. She played a key role in elevating the representative of those who lived in Latin America.

Robertson also traveled frequently for CBN and Operation Blessing International, as well as Flying Hospital medical missions. She traveled extensively through Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.

'I am really excited about [CBN's international efforts]. I have visited most of these countries and I have seen the ministry and seen them start from almost nothing.

'I am watching it grow. I have always had a real soft spot in my heart for China, and I am looking forward to the day that we have a big ministry in China,' she said in an undated interview with CBN.

She said she considered moving back to Ohio after her husband found faith and stunned her by pouring out their liquor, tearing a nude print off the wall and declaring he had found the Lord, but ultimately decided to stay. The pair eloped after meeting at Yale, knowing their families would never approve of their marriage

She also served on the board of Regent University, which her husband founded. She also had a heavy hand in the design of the theatre on campus and even choose the carpeting for the university's chapel.

The school also renamed Regent Theatre after her in 2019, now called the Dede Robertson Theatre.

'Robertson was an extraordinarily creative interior decorator,' her obit said.

Did Adelia 'Dede' Robertson have any children?

Dede had four children - Timothy, Elizabeth, Gordon, and Ann - 14 grandchildren, and 23 great-grandkids.

In an interview with CBN, she said her 'greatest personal accomplishment' was 'raising four children' and she was happy they were serving the Lord.

'I am very proud of all of my children. It is wonderful to know that my children are serving the Lord and doing what He wants them to do.'

'Mom was the glue that held the Robertson family together,' said Gordon Robertson, one of her four children, and the president and CEO of CBN. 'She was always working behind the scenes. If it weren't for Mom, there wouldn't be a CBN.'

However, in her autobiography My God Will Supply You, Robertson recalled bridling at staying at home and her husband's refusal to help around the house.

'I was a Northerner, and Northern men just generally help around the house a little more,' she said. 'I noticed the further south we moved, the less he did.'

Her attitude changed after she had her own born-again experience at a church service, she told AP: 'I began to see how important what he was doing really was.'

Robertson said that women should not work outside the home while their children are young unless they must.

She supported her husband's wish to be in politics - prior to his enlightenment - as he campaigned for presidency in 1988 (pictured: the couple at the Republican National Convention in Texas in 1992)

Dede even 'enthusiastically' campaigned in 52 cities on his behalf (pictured: Robertson, Pat, and their son Tim are seen in 1988)

Robertson watched on as her husband spoke at the 1988 caucus in Des Moines

She reared her kids and worked as a nursing professor after they went to school.

'My mother had so many virtues Ive never heard her complain or want to give upshe was steadfast. Thats what Dad needed beside him all these years; a steadfast partner who continually read the Bible and studied the Bible. She was not too concerned about herself. She was selfless. I always saw that growing up. She would make sure we had before she had,' her daughter Elizabeth said in the obituary.

Her daughter Ann said: 'My mom was a rock. She was a rock throughout our childhood. Dad had to travel a lot, but Mom was always there for us kids that gives great security to children.'

Robertson's son Timothy also said his parents growth was 'extraordinary' and said 'as they got older, it seemed like they were getting closer together...that was a great example for us kids to see.'
Greta Thunberg has staged her last ever school climate strike today as she graduates at the age of 20 - five years after the Swedish activist and her classmates first walked out to draw attention to climate change.

After she began striking in 2018 to raise awareness of rising sea levels and temperatures, the young campaigner's impact began to be felt worldwide in what became known as 'the Greta Effect'.

Millions of young people have since taken to the streets to protest for the future of the planet, and Greta went on to speak at the UN and raise her cause with governments around the world.

Barely out of her teens, she is now one of the most recognisable figures in the world, and arguably the face of the fight against climate change.

Here, MailOnline charts Greta's rise from a quiet schoolgirl to one of the most outspoken and impactful activists of her generation.

Great Thunberg has staged her last ever school climate strike today as she graduates at the age of 20

Greta and other climate activists protesting outside the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm

Started at home

Greta first found out about climate change in 2011 aged eight, and soon became depressed about the prospect of the planet dying.

She was later diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, OCD, and selective mutism - which she later pointed out, in reference to her climate change battle, means she 'only speaks when necessary'.

In her first win for the climate, Greta convinced her parents that they needed to change their lifestyles.

Initially unsure about her activism, and worried about her missing school, they soon came round to her Fridays for Future initiative.

Fridays for Future

Greta began missing school to strike in 2018. Her protests became part of the Fridays for Future movement

Greta staged her first school walkout protest on 20 August 2018.

The schoolgirl, who had just started ninth grade, decided not to attend school until Sweden's 2018 General Election on September 9.

Her decision to strike was sparked by Sweden's hottest summer in over 260 years and raging wildfires in the country.

She staged her protest outside the Riksdag, and demanded that the Swedish government reduce carbon emissions in accordance with the Paris Climate Agreement.

She protested every day for three weeks during school hours under the banner Skolstrejk for klimatet (School strike for climate) - which she has used until today.

The movement has seen the mass mobilisation of young people against climate change, with children as young as five putting pressure on governments around the world.

Greta leading a Fridays For Future rally demanding action against climate change in Turin in 2019

UN Climate Conference 2018

Greta's passionate speech criticising adults for not doing enough to save the planet for their children went viral in 2018, sparking widespread climate change activism.

The precocious 15-year-old impressed the world with her speech, telling the leaders present that they were 'not mature enough to tell it like it is'.

'What I hope we achieve at this conference is that we realise that we are facing an existential threat.

'This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced. First we have to realise this and then as fast as possible do something to stop the emissions and try to save what we can save.'

UK Parliament speech

Greta addressed politicians, media and guests with the Houses of Parliament on April 23, 2019

Greta held a talk for a cross-party group of MPs in 2019, with the notable absence of the then-Prime Minister Theresa May.

'We just want people to listen to the science,' the 16-year-old told those assembled for the roundtable discussion on climate change.

'The UK's active current support of new exploitations of fossil fuels, like for example the UK shale gas fracking industry, expansion of North Sea oil, the expansion of airports as well as the planning permission for a brand new coal mine is beyond absurd.'

'Did you hear me? Is my English OK? Because I'm beginning to wonder,' Thunberg said.

Her visit coincided with Extinction Rebellion's mass action across London, which saw days of disruption to roads and transport.

Donald Trump 'death stare'

Greta Thunberg's 'death stare' at Donald Trump (above) as he upstaged her at the UN Climate Summit on Monday has already become a viral meme on social media

Greta became an internet sensation yet again when she attended the United Nations Climate Summit in New York aged 16.

She told delegates 'you have stolen my dreams and my childhood' and that world leaders were 'failing' humanity.

Among those who didn't attend was the then-US President Donald Trump

As the pair briefly crossed paths at the UN headquarters, she was spotted giving him a steely look, labelled a 'death stare' by many online.

The enraged expression on her face quickly became an internet sensation, and a social media storm between the two ensued.

After her emotionally-charged speech at the UN, the U.S. President wrote that in a mocking tweet that Greta 'seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future'.

But appearing on a Swedish talk show from New York today, the teenage climate activist said Trump's ridicule 'doesn't make a difference'.

In December 2019, President Trump mocked her again after she was named Person of the Year for 2019 by Time

He tweeted: 'So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!'

Greta responded by changing her Twitter biography to: 'A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.'

She later reprised the back and forth during the 2020 presidential election, commenting on Trump tweeting: 'Stop the count!' with the text: 'So ridiculous. Donald must work on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Donald, Chill!'

Sailing to the UN

Greta arriving in the US after a 15-day journey crossing the Atlantic in the Malizia II, a zero-carbon yacht

The eco-warrior used her 2019 UN speech to call out Trump on his climate record, but it was her mode of transport to the New York conference which got many talking.

The 16-year-old sailed into Manhattan on a zero-carbon emissions yacht to avoid using a plane's gas emissions.

She was greeted by hundreds of activists when she stepped off the yacht near the World Trade Center.

She has spearheaded an anti-flying movement during her years campaigning, promoting travel by boat and train instead of high-carbon flying.

Carried off by police

Police officers carry Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg away from the edge of the Garzweiler II opencast lignite mine in January

The Swedish climate activist was carried off by police during a protest at a mine in Lutzerath in January.

Greta was again carried away by police officers during a protest in Oslo against a wind farm built on indigenous land in Norway.

The Swedish climate activist had joined indigenous Sami protesters in blocking access to the Norwegian foreign ministry to protest against wind turbines that remained in place on reindeer herding land, despite a court ruling.

What next?

Greta Thunberg stands with a sign that reads School Strike for climate on what was 'technically' the last day of her school strike for action, ahead of her graduation

While her school striking days may be over, Greta has pledged to continue her weekly walkouts.

'We who can speak up have a duty to do so. In order to change everything, we need everyone,' she wrote on Twitter.

'I'll continue to protest on Fridays, even though it's not technically "school striking".

'We simply have no other option than to do everything we possibly can. The fight has only just begun.'
A teenage babysitter who tortured and murdered a three-year-old boy and left him with 'car crash' injuries has been blocked from being moved to an open jail under new parole laws.

Kayley Boleyn, then 19, and her ex-heroin addict boyfriend Christopher Taylor, 25, were jailed for life in 2010 for the horrific murder of Ryan Lovell-Hancox in Bilston, West Midlands.

The couple were found guilty by a jury at Wolverhampton Crown Court of killing Ryan in December 2008. The court was told the toddler had suffered more than 70 injuries.

At sentencing for murder and child cruelty, Boleyn, now 32, was given a minimum term of 13 years in jail and Taylor's tariff was set at 15-years.

MailOnline can reveal that Boleyn had her second parole hearing in October last year. She had served her minimum term of 13 years.

Kayley Boleyn (pictured), then 19, and her ex-heroin addict boyfriend Christopher Taylor, 25, were jailed for life in 2010

Ryan Lovell-Hancox, three, was murdered on Christmas Eve by Boleyn and Taylor, who both received life sentences in 2010

The Parole Board refused the release of Boleyn, but recommended a move to an open prison.

A spokesperson for the Parole Board said: 'This was a recommendation only and the Secretary of State for Justice considers the advice before making the final decision on whether a prisoner is suitable for open conditions.

'We will only make a recommendation for open conditions if a Parole Board panel is satisfied that the risk to the public has reduced sufficiently to be manageable in an open prison and if a transfer to open prison is considered to be essential to inform future decisions about release.'

MailOnline understands that the then Justice Secretary Dominic Raab, in one of his last high-profile interventions before he resigned on the 21st April 2023, blocked the move at the 11th hour.

Under toughened parole laws introduced last year, the Minister has the right to intervene to stop a prisoner being moved from closed conditions to an open jail.

The Ministry of Justice confirmed to MailOnline that Mr Raab's then department stepped in 'late' last year to prevent Boleyn being moved and her security status being downgraded. She remains in a closed prison.

Ryan had been entrusted to Boleyn's care by his mother, Amy Hancox, 21, a childhood friend, who was suffering from depression

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice said: 'Protecting the public is our number one priority which is why we blocked Kayley Boleyn's move to an open prison  a decision which is only possible thanks to our tough reforms to the parole system.'

Dominic Raab introduced new powers for ministers to refuse the release of the highest risk prisoners in a package of measures announced in March 2022.

The reforms are specifically designed to ensure that killers such as Boleyn have their parole recommendations scrutinised after the Parole Board made a series of high-profile and contentious decisions to release dangerous inmates.

Boleyn is understood to be one of the first convicted female murderers to have a move to open conditions blocked under the new provisions.

The horrific murder of Ryan sparked revulsion but also anger as it emerged at their trial that Boleyn and Taylor were well 'known' to the social services and various agencies had failed to protect the vulnerable boy.

The jury was told that Ryan died on Christmas Eve 2008 after suffering 75 separate injuries at the hands of his teenage carer and her alcoholic boyfriend during a month of abuse in 'hell and squalor'.

The jury was told that Ryan died on Christmas Eve 2008 after suffering 75 separate injuries at the hands of his teenage carer and her alcoholic boyfriend

Ex-heroin addict Christopher Taylor, 25, were jailed for life in 2010 for the horrific murder of Ryan Lovell-Hancox

Only hours before he was taken to hospital, where he died, a housing officer called at Boleyn's run-down social-services-funded bedsit and heard the battered child groaning under a duvet.

But she failed to act after assuming that Ryan was being temporarily looked after and was simply waking up.

Officials also failed to notice Boleyn had moved her sadistic and domineering lover Taylor, and two dogs - including an alsatian called Soldier Boy - into the flat.

These were breaches of her tenancy which could have been used to evict her and save the boy's life.

The failures echoed the Baby Peter case, in which the child's mother, Tracey Connelly, kept brutal boyfriend Steven Barker's presence in her home a secret.

Read more: Sadistic drug addict parents who murdered Finley Boden on Christmas Day - days after the ten-month-old was sent back to them in lockdown - are jailed for life Finley Boden had 130 separate injuries at time of his death in December 2020 Advertisement

Ryan had been entrusted to Boleyn's care by his mother, Amy Hancox, 21, a childhood friend, who was suffering from depression and struggling to cope with her son.

Boleyn took him in to her bedsit in Bilston two months before his death in return for around 20 a week towards his keep.

The trial heard how Boleyn and Taylor blamed each other for Ryan's injuries. He was thrown against walls and floors, locked in a cupboard, punched and screamed at so aggressively that he wet himself in fear.

Taylor, a crack cocaine addict, rubbed the child's face in the soiled carpet as punishment, causing a friction burn to his nose.

In his final hours in December 2008, Ryan was struck up to ten times around the head causing injuries comparable to those seen in children involved in a head-on car crash. The injuries caused a brain haemorrhage which led to a cardiac arrest.

During a sentencing hearing at Wolverhampton Crown Court in July 2010, Mrs Justice Macur told the couple: 'You showed more concern about the two dogs that you introduced to the household than you displayed to Ryan.'

Ryan's father, John Lovell, 24, walked out on Miss Hancox 10 months before the tragedy when she started an affair.

After firemen attending a false alarm at Miss Hancox's Bilston flat found that she had left a child - not Ryan - in the company of drunks, social workers visited her but decided not to open a file.

Boleyn, meanwhile, had been in the care system herself and had been living in the bedsit for six months at the time of Ryan's death as part of a plan to prepare her for independent adulthood.

The illiterate teenager was monitored three times a week by a charity contracted by Wolverhampton City Council to deliver its 'after care' service. It was one of the charity's housing officers, Kelly Janner, who heard Ryan groaning.

The boy died at Birmingham Children's Hospital, 38 hours after he was admitted. He was baptised just before his death.

Mr Lovell and Miss Hancox sobbed in court as the judge told Boleyn she had been 'put in a position of trust by Amy Hancox to look after her little boy'.

Ryan Lovell-Hancox, 3, before he died from injuries sustained during an attack by carers looking after him

Wolverhampton City Council instigated an independent Serious Case Review into Ryan's death which reported in June 2011 and criticised 14 agencies for the death of the toddler

The judge added: 'This was a decision [Miss Hancox] will regret until her dying day.'

Outside court, Mr Lovell and Miss Hancox said the killers should have been jailed for whole life terms. They said: 'They deprived Ryan of his life, so they should be deprived of their freedom.

'They should never be released from prison. Life should mean life.'

Wolverhampton City Council instigated an independent Serious Case Review into Ryan's death which reported in June 2011. It criticised 14 agencies for failing to intervene and protect the toddler.

Taylor remains in jail and has not yet been referred to the Parole Board for a hearing.
Over twenty miles of picturesque beaches and luxury hotels make the Egyptian coast an attractive and relaxing holiday destination for tourists from all over the world.

But holidaymakers in one Red Sea coastal resort in Hurghada, Egypt, were violently disturbed this week by the blood-curdling screams of a 23-year-old shouting 'Papa! Help me!'.

Russian tourist Vladimir Popov, 23, was circled and viciously dragged under the water and killed by a tiger shark as his horrified father watched the water turn red with blood.

But how dangerous is a holiday to the Egyptian coast, and how many people have been attacked by sharks in the Red Sea?

The map below by MailOnline shows the Red Sea's shark attack hotspots over the past 50 years.

Russian tourist Vladimir Popov, 23, was circled and viciously dragged under the water and killed by a tiger shark

Florida Museum data shows sixteen non-fatal and fatal shark attacks have been recorded in the Red Sea since 1975.

There have been seven fatal attacks since 2004, and eight non-fatal attacks along the coast since 1974, according to the data.

The majority of attacks were by oceanic whitetip sharks, which can grow up to 11 feet long and live for 25 years.

But in the last year, the tiger shark has attacked three people including Mr Popov, a 40-year-old Romanian woman and a 68-year-old German woman.

Elisabeth Sauer, 68, was mauled to death by a tiger shark in July 2022 while swimming in the sea near Hurghada, Egypt.

And a 40-year-old Romanian woman was also killed by a tiger shark just 650ft away from Mrs Sauer on the same day - with her badly disfigured remains found on a neraby reef.

Elisabeth Sauer, 68, was mauled to death by a tiger shark in July 2022 while swimming in the sea off the coast of Hurghada, Egypt

What is an Oceanic whitetip shark? Oceanic whitetip sharks, are large stocky sharks with a huge, rounded first dorsal fins and long, wide-tipped pectoral fins. They grow up to 4m in total length with a maximum weight of 168 kg and usually live an age of 22 years. And are also on the critically endangered list according to Fraser University. Source: Marine Bio Advertisement

Mrs Sauer lost an arm and a leg in the attack that was caught on film, as onlookers tried to distract the shark and get her to safety.

She reached the shore with the help of a flipper, but died a short time later.

In this week's attack, video shows the man desperately shouting 'Papa, Papa' as the predator hunted him in the water, circling him before launching the attack.

The man can be seen desperately trying to swim towards the shore, but appears to be attacked by the shark while still in deeper waters.

His body is seen spinning in the water, and his legs raise above the surface - as horrified onlookers scream and shout for the man to swim.

'Swim away, swim away! Quick! A shark!' people can be heard shouting.

The splashing in the water stops, and the man's head returns to the surface. He appears in the video to be moving around in the water again, but only slowly.

He can be heard screaming 'Papa', pleading for help, as some of the water turns red.

The victim Vladimir Popov (pictured) had moved to the resort with his father several months before the attack

As he does so, the shark's body is seen clearly at the surface this time. The long black shape circles around the man, and its fin and tail are seen near the surface.

The woman filming the horrific attack can he heard repeating 'oh my god' as it unfolds.

As she does so, the shark turns around for another attack and swims at the man again, clamping its jaws around him, pulling him under the water.

The man's head appears above the water one last time, and the shark's body is seen writhing in the ocean as it appears to eat the man's body and drag it further down.

How rare are shark attacks in the Red Sea? Egypt's tourist hotspots, including Hurghada and Sharm El-Sheikh, boast some of the countrys most renowned beach destinations and attract tourists as well as divers with its offshore coral reefs. However, these spots also seem to attract aggressive sharks, like the two unprovoked fatal attacks in Egypt in 2022. Both took place in Hurghada, when an Austrian and a Romanian tourist were killed within days of each other. In June 2021, a 37-year-old Jordanian man was bit in the leg by a shark and survived. In December 2020, a German woman, 42, was savaged by a shark while diving in near Marsa Alam. In October 2020 a 12-year-old Ukrainian boy on holiday in Egypt and his tour guide lost limbs after an attack by an oceanic whitetip shark. In August 2018, a 41-year-old Czech tourist died after being attacked 12 miles north of the town of Marsa Alam. In 2010, five shark attacks took place at Sharm el Sheikh in the same number of days, seriously injuring three Russians and one Ukrainian and killing a German woman. Advertisement

One witness said: 'The shark's eating his remains now. There she is, eating his remains.'

Another said: 'Right in front of my eyes, the shark ate the guy, the girl managed to escape. He took the blow from the shark. It's a terrible thing, the remains of this man are lying there.'

The victim's father Yury Popov told the 112 media outlet: 'We went to the beach to relax. 'My son was attacked by a shark, it all happened in seconds.

'What kind of help can you give? This meat grinder happened in 20 seconds, he was just dragged under the water.

'This is an absolutely ridiculous coincidence, because it is a safe beach. There are ships and yachts around. It's never happened there. They usually attack on wild beaches. It's just some kind of evil fate.'

Vladimir had been living with his father in Egypt for several months before the horrific attack. Mr Popov said he would cremate his son and return his ashes to their native Russia.

Video shows the tiger shark being caught and dragged ashore by a boat following the attack, and it appeared to be alive before being clubbed to death.

The Egyptian authorities confirmed the shark has been handed over for research to find out the causes of its behaviour and identify whether the animal is related to one that 'caused several previous accidents'.

Gavin Naylor, Director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, said that the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba attract sharks due to them being very deep and generally steep-sided.

He explained: 'This brings pelagic animals (sharks) that typically live off -shore (like Oceanic white-tip and silky sharks) closer in to the shore than they would otherwise be.

'There is also a lot of tourism in these areas- which means a lot of people in the water.

'Additionally the behaviour of many of these species in the region, for reasons that are not currently clear, seem more habituated than is the case for the same species in other parts of the world.'

Habituation happens once animals learn that there is food in the area and can be seen in dive tourism operations which employ chum to bring sharks closer in as well as in places where food waste is dumbed close to shore, Mr Naylor added.

He said tiger sharks like the one who killed Mr Popov frequent warm waters and have been in the Red Sea for thousands of years.
Parents have been warned of the risks of 'sleeping pods' for babies which are placed in their beds as an inquest has heard how a little boy died after being placed in one such product.

Leonidas Ramsden was just four months old when he was found unresponsive at his home in Buckfastleigh, Devon, on April 28 last year.

A hearing yesterday was told he had been 'fed and placed in a sleeping pod upstairs on his parents' bed' before being found unresponsive some hours later.

And it has now emerged that sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) charity the Lullaby Trust has warned against the baby products - made popular by mummy bloggers and celebrities - which are widely available on websites such as Amazon and John Lewis.

In a previous warning to parents, it said in an open letter: 'Items such as cushioned sleeping pods, nests, baby hammocks, cot bumpers, pillows, duvets and anything that wedges or straps a baby in place can pose a risk to babies under 12 months.

'Evidence shows that sleeping a baby on anything but a firm, flat surface, or using soft, heavy bedding, can increase the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Leonidas Ramsden (pictured) was found unresponsive at his home in Buckfastleigh, Devon, on April 28 last year, at just over four months old

Grace Joy Roseman died after being put to bed in a luxury 300 cot in 2016

'They can lead to overheating or potentially obstruct a baby's airway if they roll or their face becomes covered by loose bedding.'

Leonidas's inquest showed no suspicious circumstances and a post mortem could not ascertain the cause of death for him.

It is not yet known what type or brand of sleeping pod he was placed in on the night he died.

Four years before his death in 2017, Tesco and Mothercare were among a string of British retailers to stop selling the products due to safety concerns.

They are still widely available on Amazon.

In 2016 a baby girl died in a cot branded a 'significant hazard' to any child old enough to lift their head.

Seven-week-old Grace Roseman died of asphyxiation in the 'dangerous' 199 Bednest cot after she became caught on the edge when she lifted her head over one of the fold-down sides, an inquest heard.

The webpage of the Bednest luxury cot, one of many such options being sold online

And 2021 a mother warned parents against using sleep pods after finding her baby 'gasping for air'.

Chloe Elliott had left her daughter Maisie in her pod for just three minutes as she nipped downstairs to get some washing.

When she came back, the nine-week-old was struggling to breathe, 'her skin was mottled and purple and she was covered in sweat'.

A spokesperson for The Lullaby Trust previously said: 'As a SIDS charity, we have watched with concern as products that go against safer sleep advice gain popularity.

How should my baby sleep? The Consumer Product Safety Commission has previously told parents they should follow this guidance: Best place for an infant to sleep is on a firm, flat surface such as that in a crib;

Parents and caregivers should use a fitted sheet only and never add blankets, pillows, padded crib bumpers or other items;

Infants should always be placed to sleep on their back;

Infants who fall asleep in an inclined or upright position should be moved to a safe sleep environment. Source: Consumer Product Safety Commission. Advertisement

'It is hard for parents when they are trying to choose from the overwhelming number of baby products on offer and many people make the reasonable assumption that if an item is sold on the high street or made by a recognised brand it is safe for their baby.'

Leonadis's mother Akita wrote a heart-wrenching appeal for funds to help pay for a memorial in the wake of her son's death last year.

She said: 'We are devastated and lost, feeling stuck in a reality that shouldn't exist. We will never feel complete again.

'I'm 21 years old. I have made two perfect, beautiful children. My daughter Azaylea and my son Leonidas-Aurelius. We fell in love the moment I met them...

'Our son Leonidas-Aurelius was 4 months and 3 days old when he rolled over in the middle of the night while his family slept. He didn't cry... he didn't wake up... he just slipped away in his sleep with small sweet smile on his face.

'The moment me and my partner woke from a couple hours napping. We had to face the most reality shattering and horrific realisation... that Leonidas-Aurelius, the perfect soul had left the beautiful vessel we had created.'

She added: 'Leo had the most beautiful low tones to his voice and he loved the sound of it... he was always showing off his lovely cooing sounds but most of all he loved to roar.

'When you held his hands he would hold on and lift himself into the air... Always smiling and holding his head high. He was such a beautiful sight... 4 months and 3 days of showering him in love and kisses was the best moments of my life.'

A full inquest will be held a later date.

Amazon has been contacted for comment.
A BMW driver has been arrested after a 12-year-old boy riding a bicycle died in a collision in Birmingham yesterday evening.

Officers were called to the incident at the junction of Coventry Road and Berkeley Road, at 6.17pm.

The boy was pronounced dead at the scene, considered one of Birmingham's busiest roads.

West Midlands Police said a man, 32, had been arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving and being unfit through drugs. He remains in police custody.

Detective Sergeant Paul Hughes, of West Midlands Police, said: 'We are appealing for witnesses and in particular for people with dashcam footage to please contact us.

West Midlands Police collision investigation officers examine the crash scene in the south Yardley area of Birmingham on Thursday evening

West Midlands Ambulance Service confirmed today that a boy, aged 12, died in the collision

'Our thoughts are with the family and friends of the boy and we are doing all we can to support them at this very difficult time.'

Police closed the A45 Coventry Road dual carriageway in South Yardley for more than six hours last night following the crash.

West Midlands Ambulance Service confirmed today that the boy died in the collision.

A second casualty, a man who was a pedestrian, who was involved in a separate collision involving a car nearby but escaped with minor injuries and was taken to Heartlands Hospital for checks.

A West Midlands Ambulance Service spokeswoman said: 'Upon arrival, ambulance staff found a boy who was the cyclist. He was assessed and had sustained life-threatening injuries.

'Ambulance staff administered advanced life support to him but unfortunately, despite their best efforts, nothing more could be done to save him and he was confirmed deceased at the scene.'
A lawyer for the parents of Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale said a 'manifesto' found by investigators after the massacre will be handed to the families of students at the school.

The pledge, made public during a court hearing on Thursday, comes amid an ongoing legal battle over whether the writings by Hale, who killed three children and three adults at the Covenant School on March 27, should be made public.

Lawyers for the victims' families and the school have argued against the release of the so-called manifesto, but others including some media outlets and the National Police Association say it should published. Hale, 28, a trans man and former student at the school, detailed how she spent months planning the atrocity.

At a hearing about the issue on Thursday, attorney David Raybin, who represents Hale's parents, Ronald and Norma Hale, said legal ownership of the documents will be transferred to the families of the school's students.

Raybin said the paperwork will be completed next week. The documents - which were recovered from Hale's home and car - are still held by Nashville Police Department and a judge will ultimately decide if they can be made public.

Hale, 28, had fired 152 rounds from two an assault rifle and a handgun during the shooting. Pictured: Hale before transitioning to male

A lawyer for Hale's parents, Ronald and Norma Hale (pictured), has said the shooter's manifesto will be handed to the families of students at the Covenant School

It's not clear what impact, if any, this will have on the decision to make the documents public, or whether it is a largely symbolic gesture by Hale's family. Raybin was approached for comment.

Hale murdered Hallie Scruggs, William Kinney, Evelyn Dieckhaus, all nine, and headmistress Dr Katherine Koonce, 60, substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, 61, and chef Mike Hill, 61.

Police stormed the school minutes after the shooting started and gunned down Hale in a mezzanine area. Dramatic bodycam footage captured the moment Officers Rex Engelbert and Michael Collazo brought the massacre to an end.

Hale had planned the attack for months in advance and studied other mass murderers before killing six people, police have said.

Police said in April: 'In the collective writings by Hale found in her vehicle in the school parking lot, and others later found in the bedroom of her home, she documented, in journals, her planning over a period of months to commit mass murder at The Covenant School.

'The writings remain under careful review by the MNPD and the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit based in Quantico, Virginia.

'The motive for Hale's actions has not been established and remains under investigation by the Homicide Unit in consultation with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit.

Hale used several weapons during the massacre, including this AR-style rifle which had been personalized with a sticker and daubed with 'Aiden', the name used after Hale transitioned

Officers Rex Engelbart (pictured left) and Michael Collazo (pictured right) were the members of the team who shot and killed Hale

'It is known that Hale considered the actions of other mass murderers.

'The investigation shows that Hale fired a total of 152 rounds (126 5.56 rifle rounds and 26 nine millimeter rounds) from the time she shot her way into the school until she was killed by police.'

A judge in Nashville was handed a copy of Hale's manifesto in May amid the row around whether it should be released. Opponents say it could inspire others to commit a similar attack.

Multiple lawsuits have been filed in a bid to make the materials public - some against the city of Nashville and others against the FBI.

Groups that have filed lawsuits seeking disclosure of the writings include the National Police Association and America First Legal, a legal group founded by former Trump White House policy adviser Stephen Miller.

Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, was one of the victims shot by Audrey Hale, 28, at the private Christian school

Hallie Scruggs, 9, was killed in the shooting and is pictured with her father, a pastor at the church, Chad Scruggs

Will Kinney, (pictured) who was shot and killed in the massacre

The Tennessee Firearms Association and retired Hamilton County Sheriff James Hammond are also are suing Metropolitan Nashville Police Department.

The department tweeted on May 3 that it would not be releasing the materials because an investigation was ongoing.

'Due to pending litigation... the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department has been advised by counsel to hold in abeyance the release of records related to the shooting at The Covenant School pending orders or direction of the court,' it wrote.

Police who raided Hale's home also found journals which referred to other school shootings and 'firearms courses', a suicide note and two shotguns, it was revealed by warrant records.

Details were disclosed of dozens of items recovered from Hale's home when it was raided by police hours after the massacre on March 27.
Joran Van Der Sloot, the Dutch man charged in relation to the 2005 disappearance of American student Natalee Holloway, pleaded not guilty to fraud and extortion today at his first court appearance on US soil.

Dutch national Van der Sloot, now 35, was a 17-year-old international student on the island of Aruba when Natalee, 18, vanished in May 2005 during a school trip.

He was offered a translator in court today but told the judge: 'That's really not necessary.'

Natalee's mother Beth sat in the third row as he pleaded not guilty.

No cameras were allowed inside the federal courthouse today.

Beth Holloway, Natalee's mother, entering the courthouse in Alabama today to face

Joran Van Der Sloot, the Dutch man now charged in relation to the 2005 disappearance of American student Natalee Holloway, will appear in court today in Alabama after being extradited from Peru. He is shown yesterday arriving in Alabama after being extradited from Peru

Holloway disappeared aged 18 while on a school trip in Aruba. She was last seen with Van der Sloot

Van der Sloot was immediately identified as a suspect back in 2005 because he had been seen leaving a bar with Natalee.

Over the years, he has been taken into custody in connection with the case multiple times but charges have never stuck.

In 2010, he was indicted on suspicion of extortion and wire fraud after allegedly offering Natalee's mother the location of her body in exchange for $250,000.

Before federal authorities could take him into custody, he skipped town, fleeing for Peru, where he went on to murder Stephany Flores. He pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 28 years in prison.

It wasn't until May this year that his extradition to the US to face charges for Natalee's disappearance got underway.

Van der Sloot was yesterday extradited from Peru, where he is serving a 28-year sentence for murdering another woman.

In March 2010, Beth and her attorney agreed to pay Van der Sloot as part of a sting operation. He was able to flee Aruba again before he was caught

Joran van der Sloot is in the federal courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama, this morning. He is shown arriving in a blacked out Ford. Van der Sloot pleaded not guilty to fraud and extortion

Today, he went before a judge in the Hugo Black federal courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama, at 11am today.

Ahead of that appearance, the Holloway family attorney, John Q. Kelly, appeared on NBC's Today show.

'She is overwhelmed by the whole situation she had a whole spectrum of emotions.

'On the one hand she was ecstatic he's on US soil, but it's still like pulling a scab off an old wound. You'll always have pain there. He is a painful reminder of what she's been through,' he said of Natalee's mother, Beth.

Kelly met Van der Sloot twice in 2010 when he tried to extort Beth.

'[He is] big guy, kind of an ominous presence, all business about money. That's all he cares about, that's all he wants to talk about.

'[He is] cold, heartless and has absolutely no sympathy, empathy, no feelings whatsoever for Beth, her family, or what they've been through.

'He just wants the money,' he said.

He added that Van der Sloot is the only key to finding Natalee's body.

'He's going to have to decide at some point if he wants to take a breath of fresh air outside of prison, down the road, or not.'

When he was charged this week, Van der Sloot was already serving a 28-year sentence in a Peruvian prison for murdering another woman. His attorney says he had planned to fight extradition.

DailyMail.com previously revealed his plans to claim that Holloway's mother approached him offering him money in exchange for information about where her body might be.

Ahead of that appearance, the Holloway family attorney, John Q. Kelly, appeared on NBC's Today show

John Q. Kelly, longtime lawyer of Natalee Holloway's family, joins @craigmelvin to share how the family is feeling amid the news that Joran van der Sloot, the prime suspect in the disappearance of Holloway, will face an American judge for the first time. pic.twitter.com/UmdU7kuYWl  TODAY (@TODAYshow) June 9, 2023

Van der Sloot was a 17-year-old international student on the island when Natalee disappeared. He was identified as a suspect weeks after her disappearance in 2005 (above)

Natalee's mother, Beth, says Van der Sloot asked her for $250,000 in exchange for the location of Natalee's body

Today's court hearing will be the first time the Holloway family comes face to face with him in court.

Yesterday, Holloways mother, Beth said she was 'overcome with mixed emotions.'

'As a mother who has tirelessly pursued justice for the abduction and murder of my precious daughter, I stand before you today with a heart both heavy with sorrow and yet lifted by a glimmer of hope.

For 18 years, I have lived with the unbearable pain of Natalees loss.

'Each day has been filled with unanswered questions and a longing for justice that has eluded us at every turn.

'But today...I am hopeful that some small semblance of justice may finally be realized.'

Holloway was last seen alive leaving a bar with Van der Sloot, who was a student at an international school on the island.

In 2012, van der Sloot pleaded guilty in Peru to killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores, a business student from a prominent Peruvian family. She was killed in 2010 five years to the day after Holloways disappearance.

Van der Sloot married a Peruvian woman in July 2014 in a ceremony at a maximum-security prison.

He was transferred among Peruvian prisons in response to reports that he enjoyed privileges such as television, internet access and a cellphone, and accusations that he had threatened to kill a warden.
The driver was taken to hospital for treatment but only suffered minor injuries

The CCTV footage, taken in Lanus, Argentina, has now gone viral

CCTV has captured the moment a 63-year-old woman in Argentina crashed her car during a disastrous driving test.

In the CCTV video, which has since gone viral, the woman drives hesitantly around the car park in her blue hatchback in the eastern city of Lanus.

She can be seen bumping into the kerb occasionally as she makes her way around the circuit with her lights flashing on and off.

The driver then mounts the kerb clumsily with one side of the car before inexplicably racing at full speed and crashing head on with a lamppost, sending the vehicle flying into the air.

The car can be seen lying on its side at the end of the video with its wheels still spinning, beside the snapped lamppost.

In the CCTV video, the driver mounts the kerb clumsily after hesitantly driving around the car park with her lights flashing

She then inexplicably races at full speed and crashes head on with a lamppost, sending the car flying into the air before it lands on its side

Civil Defense teams and firefighters were called to assist the driver with getting out of the vehicle after it tipped over on Wednesday.

She was taken for treatment in hospital after suffering minor injuries.

In 2018, a 66-year-old woman mixed up the pedals during a driving test and almost crashed into a group of people in the city of Berisso in Argentina.

Footage shows the moment the woman confuses her accelerator pedal with her brake during a driving test and reverses at high speed into the container cabin being used as a base by driving test examiners - sending people fleeing in panic.

Fortunately, nobody was injured in the accident, although the woman suffered an anxiety attack and needed treatment.

The start of the video shows the woman slowly driving around the circuit in her blue hatchback, occasionally bumping into kerbs
The southern 'family style' country themed chain restaurant, Cracker Barrel, plagued by a history of controversial anti-LGBTQ+ policies, has shocked some of its customers with a post celebrating Pride month.

The Tennessee-based company, with 700 restaurants across the country, wrote on its Facebook account Thursday that the chain is 'excited to celebrate Pride Month with our employees and guests,' adding that 'everyone is always welcome at our table. Happy Pride!'

In the past, the company took a very different stance on LGBTQ issues. In the 1990s, it was notorious for adopting a policy that forbid anyone who identified as homosexual from working there after firing nine gay employees in 1991.

While as recently as 2013, the company caved to pressure from conservatives when it initially stopped selling Duck Dynasty merchandise from its restaurants after one of the show's stars, Phil Robertson, made homophobic remarks in a GQ interview, only to reverse the policy shortly afterwards telling customers 'we listened' in an open letter.

The chain's attitudes have radically changed recently. In 2019, an outlet banned a Grayson Fitts, Tennessee police officer and pastor from holding an event at their restaurant after he called for gay people to be executed.

Since 2018, the company has been putting out social media messages that celebrate Pride month.

The Tennessee-based company, with 700 restaurants across the country, has a history of anti-LGBTQ+ controversies but has been celebrating Pride since 2018

The southern 'family style' country-themed chain restaurant, Cracker Barrel, has received backlash from conservatives after sharing a Facebook post celebrating pride month on Thursday, featuring a customized 'rainbow rocker'

The Pride post has been circulating social media, causing outrage among conservatives, with at least one claiming the once 'family friendly' establishment has 'caved to the mob,' while others fired back and celebrated the company's stance - mocking those offended by it.

Some said they are next on the list of companies to 'go woke, go broke.'

A supporter of the Pride post wrote on Twitter: 'Wonderful news! Ive avoided Cracker Barrel for as long as I can remember, not knowing if my family was truly welcome. Well be sure to stop by our local location soon!'

'Love that. Ive always loved Cracker Barrel. Love them even more now. Its a small gesture, but you know what? Its those small gestures of kindness that matter the most. Responding to only positive posts by users, Cracker Barrel has thanked people for their support,' another said .

The Texas Family Project, an organization building 'a political Calvary of pro-family forces,' tweeted: 'We take no pleasure in reporting that @CrackerBarrel has fallen. A once family friendly establishment has caved to the mob.'

The Texas Family Project tweeted: 'We take no pleasure in reporting that @CrackerBarrel has fallen. A once family friendly establishment has caved to the mob'

Another disappointed customer said: 'LMAO hold upso Pat Robertson dies, Trump gets indicted and Cracker Barrel goes 'woke'.The MAGAs must be losing their shit right now'

Many were calling for Cracker Barrel to be added to the list of brands to boycott for promoting inclusivity:

'It is with deep sadness that I am posting this because I have always loved Cracker Barrel. However, I Love My Country and My God More!! Go Woke, Go Broke!!'

Conservatives echoed this sentiment online:

'Cracker Barrel has no idea who their costumer base is. They've gone crackers, that's for sure! What is the government up to that's making all these companies give the middle finger to their costumers? CB this Bud's for you. Go woke go broke!'

Others were pleasantly surprised: 'Quite SHOCKED that @CrackerBarrel, which is based out of Lebanon, TN (about 30 minutes west of me), just shared this!'

Conservatives also received a solid share of mockery on Twitter from users making light of their strong reaction:

'LMAO hold upso Pat Robertson dies, Trump gets indicted and Cracker Barrel goes 'woke'.The MAGAs must be losing their s**t right now.'

But this isn't Cracker Barrel's first year celebrating Pride - the company started in 2018 when it introduced their 'limited-edition Rainbow Pride Rocker,' and has been celebrating the LGBTQ+ community every year since.

The company developed the rainbow painted rocking chairs as a show of support and commitment to the gay community. Since then, they have donated them to various LGBTQ+ organizations to help with fundraising efforts, according to their website.

This is the same restaurant that caused controversy back in 1991 after firing nine gay employees and then pledging to only hire heterosexual staff from that point forward. That policy was rescinded the following year.

Coming a long way from its previous intolerant company stance, Cracker Barrel announced its 'zero-discrimination' policy in 2019 after it was met with controversy once again, this time, over an anti-LGBT+ pastor planning to hold an event in one of their stores in 2019.

Cracker Barrel CEO Sandra Cochran, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company since September 2011 and leader of the chain's racial and LGTQ+ inclusivity, has been an integral part of the cultural shift at the company.

Cracker Barrel eventually said it wouldn't host the event by the Tennessee church whose pastor was a detective who preached that the government should execute gay people.

On its websites 'Diversity and Inclusion' page, Crack Barrel takes pride in the steps they have taken to show support for minority groups.

'Cracker Barrel has zero tolerance for discrimination and harassment,' it writes.

'This was made clear when it quickly condemned and turned away an anti-LGBTQ+ pastor when he announced plans in 2019 for his church group to meet at a Knoxville area Cracker Barrel. We issued a statement disagreeing strongly with the pastor's statements of hate and divisiveness, and he was not permitted on-site.'

Cracker Barrel started celebrating pride back in 2018 when it introduced their 'limited-edition Rainbow Pride Rocker,' and has been celebrating the LGBTQ+ community every year since

On its websites 'Diversity and Inclusion' page, Crack Barrel takes pride in the steps they have taken to show support for minority groups

Sandra B. Cochran, CEO of Cracker Barrel and leaders of the chain's racial and LGBTQ inclusivity has strongly supported the chain's deep cultural shift

The chain also brags that it was honored by the Nashville LGBT Chamber of Commerce with the Corporate Diversity Award in 2018. The award was in recognition of the progress and growth that has been made in the area of LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion in recent years.

They also highlight their pride in having Cracker Barrel LGBTQ+ Alliance BRG be named Employee Resource Group of the Year in 2018 by Out & Equal Workplace Advocates.

Cracker Barrel restaurant-gift shops are spread throughout the countryside, mainly inviting travelers along interstate highways in the south. The restaurants feature a solid lineup of southern-style comfort foods, including bacon, eggs, pancakes, burgers and fried chicken.
A large fire broke out at and 'engulfed' a pallet yard in Phoenix on Thursday evening.

Phoenix Fire Captain Todd Keller said crews were called to the wood pallet facility at around 8pm yesterday after receiving a call from Javier Pallets, local news reported.

When firefighters arrived the large flames had already engulfed the business' buildings, which is located in an industrial neighborhood, just west of the downtown section of the city.

The incident was quickly upgraded to a 3rd alarm response allowing for help from other cities' fire departments.

The Phoenix Fire Department explained on Twitter that the crew was working in a 'defensive strategy using a Big Water operation to attack the flames' and asked residents to avoid the area.

The large fire broke out at a pallet yard in Phoenix on Thursday evening

Javier Pallets is located in an industrial neighborhood just west of the downtown section of Phoenix

'This is a highly industrial area, commercial area, so youre going to have scrap yards, youre going to have pallet yards, so there are fires there.

'Recently, I know we did have one a couple of weeks ago,' Captain Keller said.

'You have this much combustible material, and this is exactly what happens when something catches fire. You put wind as a factor, its going to make a big difference.'

No cause has been yet been assessed, but the scene will be investigated once the flames are put out and the area secured, the department said.

Arizona is no stranger to wildfires in the dry summer weather, but fortunately the National Weather Service predicts the state will be average or below average for fire danger this year.

The fire outlook for March through June calls for below average precipitation, but also normal fire danger.

In some cases, the fire outlook shows below average fire danger in some parts of the state.

This is in contrast to last summer that saw severe drought across much of the state and therefore above average fire danger too.

Local news reports identified the Phoenix business as Javier Pallets

Phoenix Fire Deportment crews were called to the wood pallet facility at around 8pm

The incident was quickly upgraded to a 3rd alarm response allowing for help from other cities fire departments

The Phoenix Fire Department said the crew was working in a defensive strategy using a Big Water operation to attack the flames

'This is a highly industrial area, commercial area, so youre going to have scrap yards, youre going have pallet yards, so there are fires there' Captain Keller explained

Arizona has already seen multiple wildfires this year in the south of the state.

Wildfire experts told 12 News that this winter's wet conditions has produced a double-edged sword.

The amount of snow that fell in Northern Arizona may put off the fire season for a time.

However, the moisture will cause vegetation to grow more rapidly and as temperatures increase, that vegetation will die off, causing more fuel for any potential fires.
A 'stalker' who sent Taylor Swift's father a message declaring her as his 'soulmate' and was arrested after showing up at the star's Nashville home, is also an 'anti-government' extremist who says that he's running for the presidency in 2024.

Mitchell Taebel, 36, from Long Beach, Indiana, was arrested after he went to Swift's home on May 31 having already left threatening messages with the star's management, police say.

He is accused of sending pictures of weapons to members of Swift's team on March 25 and threatening to 'destroy them', according to local television station WGN. And five days later, Taebel allegedly left her father a message which said he is her 'soulmate' and 'he is the only one that can make her secure'.

In March, Taebel posted a bizarre TikTok video in which he urged fellow Taylor Swift fans to prepare for the Eras tour by 'being a step ahead of Taylor wherever she goes... watch her every move.'

The suspect says on his website that he is running for president and allegedly contacted governors offices in several states to say his campaign will be part of Swift's Eras Tour on the same day and contacted her team again.

In 2018, Taebel was arrested after engaging in a high-speed police chase in Arizona. Following his arrest, he told police officers: 'It is absolutely legal to resist arrest, with force, to the extent of taking an officers life if necessary.'

A 'stalker' who sent Taylor Swift's father a message declaring her as his 'soulmate' was arrested after he showed up at her Nashville home and left threatening messages with the star's management

Mitchell Taebel, 36, from Long Beach, Indiana, was charged with stalking by threatening serious injury or death, intimidation, invasion of privacy and harassment on May 31

Taebel allegedly left Swift's father a message which said he is her 'soulmate' and 'he is the only one that can make her secure'

On the day of the artist's Eras Tour performance in Nashville on May 5, he traveled to the city and snuck into her apartment and quickly left before the police arrived, according to court documents.

He was arrested on June 2 which was the first day of Swift's shows in Chicago. The suspect is charged with stalking by threatening serious injury or death, intimidation, invasion of privacy and harassment on May 31.

Taebel is currently in La Porte County Jail with his bail set at $15,000 and entered a not guilty plea in court on Tuesday.

The Southern Poverty Law Center maintains a profile on Taebel in which he's referred to as an 'anti-government extremist' who has previous assault convictions after punching the doorman at his then-girlfriend's apartment building who refused to let him in.

In 2013, he was arrested for 'attempting lewd and unlawful acts against an aspiring porn star in the Los Angeles valley.' He later tried to sue the City of Los Angeles for $1 billion claiming wrongful arrest. Taebel is also a second amendment advocate.

An investigation into his alleged stalking first began on March 25 after he allegedly threatened members of Swifts management company.

He is said to have used a fake Instagram account to threaten one of Swift's dancers on April 5.

Court documents state that Taebel posted a picture of someone firing a gun at a range and said: 'If today there is the sexual performance of Vigilant s**t, you can be sure that we will destroy you and all the other dancers and (Swift) too, I think you know what happened to Joe Alwyn.'

Taebel left a voicemail in which he is accused of saying he and Swift need to meet and that he would 'wear a bomb on his chest'.

And he posted threatening videos to Swift on Instagram throughout April with one captioned that she 'deserves to be shot', according to court documents.

He allegedly made his way to the top of her Nashville penthouse on May 5, which she bought in 2009, by sneaking in through an unsecured door.

And he is said to have told security he was a 'great-looking, well-dressed, popular TV host' before he asked if Swift was there.

The police were quickly called but he left before they arrived.

He secured tickets to attend her Nashville show the day after on May 6 from a third-party despite being on a 'security threat/concern list.'

And he allegedly placed himself where management and performers would have to get past him to get on stage.

On the day of the artist's Eras Tour performance in Nashville on May 5, he allegedly traveled to the city and snuck into her apartment and quickly left before the police arrived

Security are said to have recognized him and questioned him about why he turned up to her home and about his 'obsession' with her before he was escorted out of the venue.

And after returning to his home in Long Beach, Taebel posted a racist tirade on his Instagram page in which he admitted going to Swift's apartment, court documents state.

'I went to (Swifts) apartment complex and anybody in my opinion that thinks it is illegal in any way to go to somebodys apartment to see if they want to meet should be killed. They should die of a heart attack on a spot,' he allegedly said.

He is accused of using the N-word multiple times during the angry outburst and ended it with 'she had no idea a white man would come in there and talk to (Swift) like I did'.

A temporary restraining order for Swift's management company against Taebel in Nashville was granted on May 11.

And between May 16 and May 18, documents state that he posted multiple videos to Instagram and in one of them he allegedly said his 'dying wish is that anyone who had anything to do with them not meeting should be executed'.

They were used to extend the temporary restraining order, according to court documents.

Taebel was provided with a public defender and his next court date is on July 27.
The Israeli partygoer gunned down close to the Hollywood home of Adam DeVine was a yacht-owning auto tycoon with a horrifying history of domestic violence, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.

Emil Lahaziel, 39, had been to a poker party at the home of self-styled 'King of Instagram' Tony Toutouni and was shot dead in the front driveway around 2am Wednesday.

The dead man owned a stash of guns  including an Uzi which he repeatedly pointed at his petrified wifes face, according to court records.

'I do not believe my husband is capable of stopping the abuse towards me,' his wife Lily wrote in one complaint to the police.

Lahaziel had also expressed fears that unnamed enemies wanted to kill him because of activities he was involved in before moving to the US, according to the documents, obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com.

Cops identified Lahaziel as the man shot dead early Wednesday morning outside Toutouni's $1.8 million rented home. Pitch Perfect star DeVine, 39, and his wife Chloe Bridges witnessed the killing from their balcony.

Lily Lahaziel posted sweet memories of her husband but in reality their marriage had been scarred by frequent acts of violence

Tony Toutouni's social media pages are filled with derogatorry pictures of women as well as showing his extravagantly luxurious lifestyle

Tony Touhouli's rented house where Emil Lahaziel was murdered. He was killed in the stairwell to the right of the picture

A neighbor told DailyMail.com that the a man believed to be the killer turned up at Toutouni's house shortly before 2am and started talking to Lahaziel, who then went back inside to the poker party and the alleged shooter took off.

Minutes later he returned and asked the valet to go get Lahaziel. The valet returned and told the shooter that Lahaziel told him to come into the house.

After spending minutes inside the house the shooter came back outside with Lahaziel following.

Seconds later Lahaziel fell to the ground and the assailant ran off.

Toutouni, 52, has riled neighbors since moving into the Hollywood home with his wild parties and for racing through the area of narrow winding streets with his expensive cars which include a Ferrari, Bugatti and Lamborghini.

Hes a piece of s**t,' said one person living on the street. 'Hes garbage.

'His Instagram page is disgusting and I'm appalled hes our neighbor.

'Hes doesnt belong in this neighborhood. Most of the neighbors want him to leave. Hes a misogynistic pig.'

Toutouni, a platinum-haired Guy Fieri lookalike, has also become notorious on social media where he claims his Instagram page Lunatic Living has 1.5 million followers. The site has several pictures of women in compromising and degrading situations, fast cars and lavish displays of cash.

Toutouni is trying to distance himself from the murder to be as far away as possible,' one of his Hollywood neighbors told DailyMail.com

Toutouni warns married men and those with serious girlfriends not to follow him because doing so would end their relationships

Toutouni is a' piece of s**t,' said one person living on his street. 'Hes garbage. 'I'm appalled hes our neighbor. Hes doesnt belong in this neighborhood. Hes a misogynistic pig.'

He wrote on his Instagram page, Hated by women for my honesty. Shadow banned by Instagram, banned by Onlyfans. But loved by many whos (sic) lives Ive changed & thats all that matters.

He also wrote: 'When u make at least a mil a month, talk to me until then shut ur mouth, watch and learn.

On his Twitter profile, he says: 'If ur married DONT FOLLOW ME. If u have a GF DONT FOLLOW ME Or you will lose them and thank me.'

Since Wednesday's killing Toutouni has told neighbors that the dead man was in LA because he was trying to buy a boat from him. He had specifically asked if he could go to one of Toutouni's poker parties.

Several attempts were made to contact Iran-born Toutouni but he did not respond.

Emil and Lily Lahaziel were the picture of romance in the images she shared to social media but they hid the truth of his history of violence towards her

Lahaziel would often post pictures of luxury vehicles and had a car dealership in Miami. He was in LA hoping to buy a boat from Lahaziel

Lahaziel had been living in Miami, Florida for the past eight and a half years  but hails from Ashkelon, a coastal city in the southern district of Israel

One neighbor told DailyMail.com Tony is freaking out about what happened at his house.

Hes trying to distance himself from it to be as far away as possible. Im sure hes worried about being connected to a murder it cant be good for his following.

The victim was an Israeli immigrant who has owned a string of businesses and glitzy properties in south Florida, most recently a $6 million waterfront home in upscale Hallandale Beach.

Lahaziel and his glamorous wife Lily, 39, bought the four-bed property earlier this year for just over $4 million despite having flirted with separation for the past five years.

She posted family portraits of her slain husband on Instagram this week along with a glowing tribute, writing in Hebrew: 'Rest in peace Emil. May you know no more sorrow, be strong my soul.'

Pitch Perfect star Adam DeVine and his wife Chloe Bridges witnessed the murder from the balcony of their home across the street

LAPD homicide detectives leave Adam DeVine's home after an interview with the star on Thursday afternoon

Yellow crime-scene tape blocks the door to Toutouni's house in the stairwell where Lahaziel was gunned down

But DailyMail.com can reveal that behind the scenes their seven-year marriage was plagued by allegations of abuse with Lily filing for divorce in 2018 and again last year before voluntarily withdrawing her petitions on both occasions.

The pair, who married in 2016 and have three kids together, were outwardly successful and flashed their wealth in social media posts of private jets, luxury vacations and swimming pools.

They owned four more Florida properties, including a second $4.25 million mansion, and a yacht, according to their latest discontinued divorce.

But Lily, who runs her own retail consulting firm in Miami Beach, sought restraining orders against her 6ft 6in, 250-pound husband on two occasions, begging a judge in Broward County, Florida,for protection.

'My husband has threatened to kill me on too many occasions for me to count,' Lily Lahaziel said in complaints to police about his domestic violence

One application followed a December 2017 incident in which Lahaziel, who has two more two children from a previous relationship, got into a verbal argument that escalated into a physical altercation with his petite spouse, according to an arrest affidavit.

'The defendant started intentionally punching the victim several times in the face and head with a close fist, after which the defendant forcefully pushed the victim to the ground, the complaint states.

Lily suffered a large, swollen bleeding lump to the back of her head and small scratches on her neck and around her left wrist area, the filing adds.

Lahaziel was charged with misdemeanor domestic battery and booked into the Broward County jail. He pleaded not guilty and the case was dropped a year later, records show.

Lily told DailyMail.com on Thursday night: 'We are not divorced, we had no plans to divorce.

He was my husband and the father to my children. Any marital disputes that we may have had were always resolved.

I will not be making a statement at this time.

A second domestic violence petition filed by Lily in 2018 revealed she had only known her husband for a few months prior to their wedding.

My husband has repeatedly pushed me down  hit me, grabbed me, and repeatedly spit in my face, she alleged.

He has thrown things at my head, he has threatened to take our children and hide them from me.

He has a temporary residence card in the United States and has told me that as a result of some of the activities he did out of the country that there are people that are looking to kill him.

He has threatened me with a firearm on numerous occasions. He has pointed the firearms at my face on numerous occasions.

She added: 'I do not think my husband is capable of stopping the abuse towards me.'

Lily went on to reveal she suffered a miscarriage prior to the birth of her second child due to stress and fear.

She said her husband  who arrived in the US eight years ago and has run car dealerships, a towing firm and a boat hire company  didnt fear the police because he had been jailed before.

On many occasions I have slept in my car for safety because I have nowhere to go. My husband controlled all of the money, Lily added.

My husband has threatened to kill me on too many occasions for me to count.

Despite the shocking nature of the allegations Lilys demand for a permanent restraining order was voluntarily dismissed in February 2019.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz and dozens of other Republicans have backed tech workers who want the Supreme Court to scrap a visa scheme that lets some 200,000 foreigners compete against them for US jobs.

Cruz is one of five senators and 31 congressmen who have filed papers backing the case, which lawyers for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (Washtech) say is a powerful endorsement.

In their briefs, they say the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lets tens of thousands of foreign students stay in the US for years after their course has ended, competing with US citizens and driving down wages.

'President Biden's DHS is circumventing the law Congress has established regarding non-immigration visas, and it's hurting American workers,' Cruz said.

'This is a broken visa program that needs to be fixed.'

Texas Senator Ted Cruz and dozens of other Republicans have filed papers in support of the Supreme Court request

The number of OPT participants has risen to more than 200,000 in recent years, though numbers dipped in the pandemic, according to the Institute of International Education's Open Doors report

Senators Mike Lee of Utah, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Mike Braun of Indiana, and Katie Britt of Alabama also signed the papers, which were filed by America First Legal, a campaign group headed by former Trump Administration advisor Stephen Miller.

In those files, the senators point to research showing how Disney, AT&T, Walmart, and other big US firms have used the scheme to 'use low wage foreigners to displace American workers.'

Washtech's lawyer John Miano says the case has received an 'unusual amount of interest'

Washtech wants the court to tear up an Obama-era expansion of the Optional Practical Training (OPT) scheme that lets foreign student visa holders work in the US for a year after graduating.

Defenders of the DHS program say it lets migrants get real-world work experience in their field of study, while letting US tech firms bag fresh talent. Without it, they would simply study in a more welcoming country, they say.

The case highlights two key concerns of conservatives  that Americans are losing jobs to foreigners, and that federal government agencies exceed their powers by making rules that should be passed by Congress.

Washtech's lawyer, John Miano, from the conservative Immigration Reform Law Institute, said the 'case has attracted an unusual amount of interest' from some of America's best-known politicians.

This visa program 'strips from Congress the power to set terms for non-immigrant visas' and therefore 'naturally attracted the attention of members of Congress,' Miano told DailyMail.com.

Miano says DHS officials agreed to expand the scheme at a private dinner with representatives of the tech sector because other foreign worker programs, such as the H-1B, were capped.

Migrants who study at US colleges are allowed to work for a limited time after graduation. They are especially popular in the tech sector. Pictured: New foreign students enrolled at Penn State University

Washtech, a union of some 300 West Coast tech workers, last month filed its appeal to the Supreme Court after a lower court in February kicked out its previous request.

The top US judicial body is expected to decide whether to hear the case within weeks.

The court only hears about 5 percent of the thousands of cases it is asked to review each year.

The case is being assessed by one of the court's most conservative configurations in generations, and comes amid a wave of layoffs by Meta, Microsoft, and many other major US technology firms.

The OPT has existed in some form since 1947.

Washtech challenged it after it was tweaked by the Obama administration in 2016, by letting students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields get work permits for up to two years beyond the typical one-year period.

The original lawsuit says federal immigration law only lets international students remain in the US while they are enrolled in school.

David North, a fellow of the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank, says it incentivizes hiring migrants because an OPT tax break makes them about 8 percent cheaper than American workers.

Migrants with science and technology backgrounds are can work in the US for three years after graduation

The union is pitted against DHS, which oversees the OPT program. The department did not answer our request for comment.

Major business groups including the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers have intervened in the case to defend the OPT scheme.

They say it helps companies address a lack of qualified US workers.

Wolfsdorf Rosenthal, an immigration law firm, says the OPT scheme buys some time for foreigners who study in the US to find an employer, when otherwise they would have to leave.

'If we don't retain international students in the US after they complete their courses of study, they'll take their skills elsewhere and go to work for our competitors,' the firm said in a statement.

The US would then lose out to Australia, Canada, China, and India, which have post-graduate work programs, they added.

The number of OPT participants has risen from about 30,000 in the early 2000s to more than 200,000 in recent years, though numbers dipped in the pandemic, according to the Institute of International Education's Open Doors report.
A senior Labour MP has been suspended by the party after a complaint was made about his behaviour.

Shadow Middle East and North Africa minister Bambos Charalambous has had the whip removed amid a formal investigation into his conduct.

Mr Charalambous, 55, has represented the London seat of Enfield Southgate since 2017. He was born in London to Greek Cypriot parents.

The former local authority solicitor has also stood down from his shadow ministerial post.

He is the latest Labour MP to lose the whip. Geraint Davies, 63, the MP for Swansea West, was suspended last week over allegations of 'unwanted sexual attention' towards five women.

Shadow Middle East and North Africa minister Bambos Charalambous has had the whip removed amid a formal investigation into his conduct.

Mr Charalambous, 55, has represented the London seat of Enfield Southgate since 2017. He was born in London to Greek Cypriot parents.

In a statement Mr Charalambous said: 'I am aware that there is an allegation that requires investigation by the Labour Party. It is right and proper that process is allowed to take place.

'I will cooperate fully and play my full part. It is not appropriate to say anything further at this time.'
A British girl was one of four young children and two adults who were stabbed at a popular tourist spot in France.

The alleged attacker, 31-year-old Abdalmash H, originally from Syria, was detained by police. French authorities say it is not being treated as a terrorist incident.

An investigating source said also Abdalmash was a 'declared and devout Christian' who carried a prayer book and a cross at the time of his arrest.

Witnesses said the the attacker 'jumped out' in the park and started shouting and 'repeatedly stabbing the children.'

The park is a popular destination in the southeast town, one witness said the incident took place around 'boats, pedalos, and countless tourists.'

Four children aged between 22 months and three, and two adults, were seriously injured in the attack. Two of the young victims and one of the adults are now in life-threatening condition at a nearby hospital.

Here is a timeline of the tragic event at Annecy park.

The attacker, identified as Abdalmash H, 32, (pictured holding the knife in the playground) 'jumped out' and repeatedly stabbed his victims, an alpine town in southeastern France , at around 9.45am

A local prosecutor said there was 'no obvious terrorist motive' for the attack, adding that Abdalmash was 'not known by any intelligence service' and did not have 'any history of psychiatric problems'. He is pictured being apprehended by armed police

Thursday, June 8

9:45am: An attack was launched at the lakeside park in the town of Annecy, a tourist hotspot in southeast France.

Six people were injured in the attack including four children between 22 months and three.

Two children and one adult were left in critical condition.

Four minutes after the first police call an arrest was made. The male suspect, reported to be a Syrian asylum seeker, was taken to custody.

10:00am: Politicians in the French National Assembly in Paris interrupted a debate to hold a minute's silence for children and others injured in the attack.

It is announced French President Emmanual Macron will fly to Annecy to meet the victims.

11:30am: A press conference was confirmed to take place and was pushed back by until the afternoon.

12:46pm: A witness reports that the suspect 'had been sitting on a bench around the lake for 3 days' before the attack.

2:24pm: UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman tweets: 'I am appalled by the attack on young children in Annecy, France.'

'My thoughts are with the children, their families and the local community who have been affected by this shocking act.'

2:28pm: Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne revealed the suspect as a 32-year-old Syrian male who had obtained refuge in Sweden in April 2023, and was able to travel to France because of his status.

Paramedics treat victims at the scene of the attack in Annecy on Thursday, with one victim in a pram

Witnesses of the horrific knife attack are seen running away from the scene in Annecy on Thursday 9 June

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne is pictured at the scene in Annecy on June 8. She said Abdalmash has a child who is the same age as the children he attacked

French prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said the suspect has a child who is the same age as one of the children who was attacked.

Ms Borne said the man had no criminal record or psychiatric record. His motives remain unclear but were not thought to be linked to terrorism.

5:00pm: The four children are reported to still be in critical condition.

6:20pm: Locals gather at the park. One witness told BFMTV: 'There is a feeling of anger, sadness and hatred.'

A man offers flowers for the victims at a playground in the 'Jardins de l'Europe' in Annecy

Local residents gathered in 'Jardins de l'Europe' in Annecy placing flowers for the victims still recovering in hospital on June 9

Friday, June 9

8:00am: Local residents and children of Annecy continue to pay their respects to the victims

9:00am: French President Emmanual and Brigitte Macron arrive at Grenoble hospital to meet the victims of the attack

9:33: Elisabeth Borne gives updates on the victims, describing their condition as 'stable'.

11:45am: Video emerges of Henri, a philosophy graduate student surface online as he blocks the attacker with a backpack.

Social media hail him as the 'backpack hero', he told BFMTV: 'I acted as any Frenchman would have done.'

11:57am: It is confirmed the French president will meet Henri, the 'backpack hero'

12:35am: Emmanual Macron leaves Grenoble University Hospital and heads to Annecy
Voters overwhelmingly want to see President Joe Biden debate his unusual foes in the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination contest, the lifestyle guru Marianne Williamson and anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Fully 74 percent of voters want to see Biden square off against those two on stage, polling shows  an unlikely scenario given that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has said it's not planning a primary debate.

The feverish anticipation for a three-way face-off is evident on social media. One user said it 'would be comedy gold,' given Biden's unconventional opponents. Others bashed a selection process that was 'rigged' and 'anti-democratic.'

An Esquire article this month dubbed Kennedy a 'raving anti-vaxxer' and Williamson, a self-help author and former presidential candidate, as the 'Woo-Woo Queen of the Fields of Love.'

Nearly three quarters of voters want to see Biden get on stage with his long shot Democratic challengers

Marianne Williamson (left) went up against Joe Biden before in the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination race

Biden's White House has largely avoided commenting on the opponents. That keeps with tradition: no sitting president has taken part in a primary debate in decades, even when facing a well-known challenger.

Rasmussen's survey of some 1,000 voters suggests that's not what America wants.

Nearly three quarters of voters want the president to square off against his rivals, while only 17 percent do not want a debate, the survey says.

Another 9 percent of respondents were not sure.

Roughly similar numbers of Democratic and Republican voters want to see a three-way debate, Rasmussen says.

Among Democratic voters, Biden is the clear front-runner, with more than two thirds of respondents saying that would choose the president in a primary vote.

Still, Kennedy, who this week went to the US-Mexico border to decry a 'tsunami of migrants', has the support of 17 percent of voters.

Williamson has secured only 2 percent of voters.

Kennedy, a pro-choice former environmental lawyer, has tried to court centrist voters with promises of border security.

He portrays himself as the only viable left-of-center alternative to the aging and gaffe-prone commander-in-chief.

The son of Robert F. Kennedy, an attorney general and senator, has in the past promoted conspiracy theories about the safety of FDA-approved vaccines.

Williamson became a household name through her appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and ran in the 2020 presidential nomination contest.

She has railed against Biden and the DNC for rigging the process.

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited the US-Mexico border this week to slam the president's immigration policy

A televised Democratic primary debate in 2020. No incumbent president has taken part in a primary debate in decades, even when facing a well-known challenger

In an op-ed for Newsweek, Williamson said Biden and the party establishment 'don't really think the people can be relied upon' to choose the next president, and have stymied democracy to ensure Biden again wins the nomination.

Neither candidate is likely to win the Democratic nomination, with party apparatchiks rallying around Biden and trying to prevent a proper primary challenge.

Biden would be 86 at the end of his second term if he wins next year's presidential contest.

Questions about his fitness for office have been raised once more after he tumbled at an Air Force Academy graduation in Colorado on June 1.

Biden's loyalists have long dismissed discussions about the president's health as a baseless smear cooked up by conservatives.
Putin has revealed he will deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus in less than a month as he tells fellow dictator Alexander Lukashenko 'everything is going to plan.'

Russia will begin deploying tactical nuclear weapons to its neighbour after special storage facilities are ready on July 7-8, Putin said today.

The deployment will be Moscow's first move of such bombs outside Russian borders since the fall of the Soviet Union.

'Everything is going according to plan,' Putin told Belarusian President Lukashenko when discussing the planned nuclear deployment during talks at the Russian leader's Black Sea summer retreat in Sochi.

'Preparation of the relevant facilities ends on July 7-8, and we will immediately begin activities related to the deployment of appropriate types of weapons on your territory,' Putin said, according to a Kremlin transcript of his remarks.

Lukashenko, a key Putin ally, said: 'Thank you, Vladimir Vladimirovich.'



Russia will start deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus after special storage facilities are ready on July 7-8, President Vladimir Putin said on Friday, Moscow's first move of such bombs outside Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. Pictured: Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko walk during their meeting at the Bocharov Ruchei residence in the resort city of Sochi, Russia, Friday, June 9

More than 15 months into the biggest land war in Europe since World War Two, Putin says the United States and its Western allies are pumping arms into Ukraine as part of an expanding proxy war aimed at bringing Russia to its knees.

Putin raised alarm bells in in March by announced that he wanted to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, an apparent warning to the U.S.-led NATO military alliance over it support for Ukraine.

Leading NATO countries say they will support Ukraine and help it defend itself for as long as it takes from what Kyiv casts as an imperial-style land grab by Russia which threatens the survival of the Ukrainian state.

Putin, 70, casts the war as a battle for Russia's own survival in the face of what he says is an ever-expanding NATO. He has warned the West that Moscow will not back down.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says Ukraine will not rest however until every last Russian soldier is ejected from his country, which he wants to join NATO as soon as possible.

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with his Belarus' counterpart Alexander Lukashenko in Sochi on June 9

Putin's nuclear move is being watched closely by both the United States and its NATO allies in Europe and by China.

Beijing has repeatedly cautioned against the use of nuclear weapons in the conflict.

After the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, the United States and Russia worked hard to return the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal, then also deployed in newly independent republics such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, to Russia.

Only the United States had so far used nuclear weapons in anger - in the 1945 attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This is a breaking news story. More to follow...
A 14-month-old girl died after she became tangled in the straps of a bag hanging from a door, her parents have revealed.

Mia Macphee, from Alness, north Scotland, died in the tragic accident last month, and her parents have issued a warning to others about the dangers of hanging things from doors with children around.

Her parents Connor and Hannah were only away for a few minutes when their daughter, who was usually loud, went quiet.

Connor went to look and found Mia tangled in a small handbag-style rucksack with thin straps that was hanging from the door.

As he untangled her, Connor screamed for his partner, who took Mia to the kitchen floor and performed CPR, while the father rang for an ambulance to Raigmore Hospital.

Mia Macphee (pictured with father Connor) from Alness, north Scotland, was just 14 months old when she died in the tragic accident last month

Her parents Connor and Hannah were only away from Mia for a few minutes when their daughter, who was usually loud, went quiet

This is a similar bag to the one involved in the tragedy, although this bag has thicker straps

Baby Mia had been without oxygen, and it took 30 to 45 minutes for her heart to start beating again.

The one-year-old was transferred to hospital in Edinburgh, where he family spent almost four days with her before she passed away.

Ms Macphee told the Press and Journal: 'Connor and I lay in bed with her. I had my hand on her chest and could feel her slipping away. Her heart stopped beating.

Connor went to look and found Mia tangled in a small handbag-style rucksack with thin straps that was hanging from the door

The bubbly baby was rushed to hospital, where she tragically passed away four days later

'We fell asleep with her between us. That was the last proper time we had with our little girl.'

She added: 'Mia was bubbly, sassy, and every inch a daddy's girl. We could never have foreseen losing her. We thought we had years.

'We're paying tribute to her because she was amazing - but also so this doesn't happen to any other family.

'We can't stress this enough to anyone reading this: we didn't even give a bag hanging on a door a second thought. But everyday things like that need to be thought about.'
Temperatures across Britain are on the rise, with forecasts predicting highs of up to 30C (86F) on Saturday June 10 in the UK.

The upcoming weekend is set to be the warmest of 2023 so far, as Bournemouth hit 26C (78.8F) on Friday June 9 - the UK's highest temperature recorded to date this year.

But what exactly does the hot weather mean for your workplace rights? When is it too hot to work? Can schools be closed if it is too warm?

Read on below for a comprehensive breakdown of your rights in the hot weather.

Temperatures across Britain are on the rise, with forecasts predicting highs of up to 30C (86F) on Saturday June 10 in the UK

Government guidance suggests a minimum temperature of 16C, or 13C if employees are doing physical work

Can I refuse to work if it's too hot?

The government website states that there is no set limit when it comes to high temperatures in workplaces.

However, guidance suggests a minimum of 16C or 13C if employees are doing physical work.

Despite there not being a defined limit for working in extreme heat, government advice urges employees to talk to their employer if they feel the workplace temperature is uncomfortable.

The Union of Shop, Disruptive and Allied Workers (USDAW) has urged the government to change the laws on workplace temperatures so that employers must adopt cooling measures when their workplace temperature hits 24C.

Paddy Lillis, general secretary of the USDAW said: 'Indoor workers need cool drinks, more frequent breaks, relaxed dress code, along with opportunities to remove and replace face coverings.'

Can schools shut if the weather is too hot?

In similar fashion to the rules regarding workplaces, there is no law stating that schools must close when the weather reaches a certain temperature.

However, school leaders should make sure they take any steps necessary to make sure children are safe and comfortable, as they are more vulnerable to higher temperatures than adults because they sweat less.

The Department of Health and Social Care recommends that children should not take part in vigorous physical activity on very hot days, such as when temperatures are in excess of 30C.

It also suggests that children should wear loose, light-coloured clothing, in addition to wearing sunhats with wide brims to stay as as cool as possible.

Sunscreen should be used to protect skin and children should be provided with plenty of water.

The Department of Health and Social Care recommends that children should not take part in vigorous physical activity on very hot days, such as when temperatures are in excess of 30C

Further advice for schools includes opening windows in buildings and classrooms as early as possible in the morning to allow cooler air into rooms.

Crucially, windows should then be closed when outdoor air becomes warmer than the air indoors  this should help keep the heat out while allowing adequate ventilation.

Indoor blinds or curtains can be closed where possible but should not block any sources of ventilation.

Another helpful way of keeping children cool in schools is to minimise the use of electric lighting, as this generates additional heat.
A man has denied being the vigilante responsible for damaging one of Sadiq Khans controversial ULEZ cameras.

Kingsley Hamilton, 44, of Beddington near Croydon, south east London, appeared at Bromley Magistrates Court charged with one count of criminal damage and one count of going equipped to cause criminal damage.

The court was told the alleged offence took place after midnight on May 18 in Bromley, south east London.

Hamilton, who appeared at court in person, pleaded not guilty to both charges and the case was sent to Woolwich Crown Court for a Plea and Trial Preparation Hearing on July 7. He was granted unconditional bail.

A second man Joseph Nicolls, of Sidcup, south east London, was also due to appear in court today.

Sadiq Khan's much hated scheme is set to force Londoners in all boroughs to pay 12.50-a-day to drive in the capital from August 29, if their cars don't meet certain environmental standards

A 42-year-old man has been charged with damaging ULEZ cameras after just under 100 of the machines were targeted across the capital

The 42-year-old, who is charged with criminal damage, malicious communications and handling stolen goods, as well as aiding or abetting the destruction of, or damage to, property valued over 5,000, failed to turn up.

The prosecution counsel requested a three week adjournment while they obtain more information from the police.

Nicolls is now due to appear at Bromley Magistrates Court again on July 4.

A total of 96 allegations of criminal damage to cameras have been passed to the Met Police in Bromley by Transport for London

Police launched a proactive operation last month following 96 reported alleged incidents of criminal damage to Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) across London were referred to them by Transport for London.

Detective Superintendent Daniel Smith, who is leading the Met Police investigation, said at the time: We have been proactively targeting those we suspect of causing or seeking to cause damage.

We are carrying out a thorough investigation and this includes gathering CCTV, speaking to potential witnesses and following up active leads.

We are aware of the active discussions online and the passion felt by some in our communities. We will continue to support lawful protest but criminal activity is not acceptable.

We continue to work with TfL to prevent further offences in the future.
Moiler in coma, suffering burns to 38 per cent of body

Shared message of thanks in social media statement

The family of a mother-of-three who suffered severe burns after she was allegedly set her on fire by her estranged husband has broken their silence.

Kirsten Moiler, 33, was rushed to hospital with burns to 38 per cent of her body after allegedly being set alight in a car by her estranged husband Peter Moiler, 42, near her Mount Helena home in Perth on June 2.

One week on, she remains in a medically induced coma and will take months to begin to recover from her life-changing injuries.

Ms Moiler's mother Fiona Halton has posted a statement online to address the horrific incident that will 'impact [her daughter] forever'.'

'I'd like to thank everyone that assisted my daughter in the moments after the attack,' Ms Halton wrote.

'To the Mt Helena residents, the medical response team and the staff at Fiona Stanley Hospital I will forever be grateful for your actions that have saved my daughter.'

Kirsten Moiler, 33, (pictured) was allegedly being set alight in a car by her estranged husband on June 2

Ms Halton added her daughter has a very long road to recovery ahead of, which will take 'months'.

'She will have to undergo extensive medical treatment and procedures,' she added.

'Kirsten's family and I are very grateful for all the love and support at this time.

Ms Halton has set up an online fundraiser to assist with the growing costs of her daughter's extensive medical treatment and recovery.

'Her life will be impacted by this attack forever,' she wrote.

'Kirsten is a mum of three beautiful children who will now be separated from their mother for months to come as she tries to recover.'

'The community goal is to help raise money to contribute to any medical and personal costs that will arise as Kirsten embarks on this long hard road to recovery.'

Kirsten Moiler (pictured with her estranged husband) remains in a medically induced coma

Her three young children are being cared for by family members.

It's understood Ms Moiler has recently separed from her husband of 10 years.

Police were called to the corner of Honey Street and Mill End about 6:25pm on June 2 to reports a blue Holden Commodore was on fire and two people were suffering from burns.

Witnesses heard multiple explosions then a woman screaming for help, before seeing Ms Moiler running 100m from the scene to a nearby creek while tearing off her burning clothes.

One of the local residents who rushed to Ms Moiler's aid, told Daily Mail Australia she was in agony and 'terribly frightened'.

'She was in incredible pain. I couldnt converse with her,' she said.

'It was awful. She was in quite a bad way.'

Ms Moiler suffered burns to 38 per cent of her body after the attack and is now in a medically-induced coma (pictured, the burnt out car)

The RAC Rescue Helicopter airlifted Ms Moiler to Fiona Stanley Hospital with third-degree burns to 38 per cent of her body - including her face, arms, upper torso and lap.

Her estranged husband was taken to hospital by St John Ambulance with superficial burns.

He was charged with aggravated grievous bodily harm and faced Perth's Magistrates Court on June 4. He did not apply for bail and will reappear in court at a later date.
Former President Donald Trump's Republican presidential rivals reacted to his historic federal indictment in a number of ways - from criticizing the Justice Department to pushing him to drop out of the 2024 race.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis - considered Trump's greatest political threat - called out the DOJ for bias against Republicans.

'The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation,' DeSantis said in a Thursday night tweet. 'Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?'

He pledged that a DeSantis administration would bring 'accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.'

Former Vice President Mike Pence - who announced his presidential bid against Trump earlier this week - cancelled a planned appearance on Hannity Thursday night as the indictment news was breaking, The Messenger reported Friday.

Former President Donald Trump addressed the federal indictment news in a video from his Bedminster, New Jersey resort Thursday night. His Republican rivals started chiming in almost immediately

Trump is indicted in the classified documents case and will appear in court in Miami on Tuesday. Shown are the classified documents found in the August raid of Mar-a-Lago

'It was not a mutual cancellation,' The Messenger's source said, as Pence did not want to answer questions about the Trump indictment.

Pence did speak about the indictment Friday morning on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, saying he was 'deeply troubled' by the DOJ's move against his former boss.

'Well, I think it's important to note that we don't know the facts in this case. No one does,' Pence also said.

Pence also said the investigation into his handling of classified documents ended last week, with investigators determining 'it was an innocent mistake.'

'And my only hope is as we learn about the facts of this indictment next week, that the American people will see in this case that it would meet a high standard necessary to justify the unprecedented federal indictment of a former president of the United States by the current president of the United States' Justice Department, and by a potential rival,' Pence continued.

Like DeSantis, Pence pledged if he won the presidency he would clean up the DOJ and 'appoint men and women of integrity at every level that will restore the public confidence of the American people in equal justice under the law.'

Only former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said that Trump should drop out.

'This is a sad day for our country. While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign,' Hutchinson said.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie - who has positioned himself as the GOP candidate most likely to criticize Trump - suggested Americans should wait and see what is in the indictment, which remains sealed, before making a judgement call.

'We don't get our news from Trump's Truth Social account,' Christie said. 'Let's see what the facts are when any possible indictment is released.'

'As I have said before, no one is above the law, no matter how much they wish they were. We will have more to say when the facts are revealed,' the former governor added.

Trump's former Ambassador to the United Nations and 2024 candidate Nikki Haley also weighed in Friday morning.

'This is not how justice should be pursued in our country,' Haley said in a statement to DailyMail.com.

'The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics. It's time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions.'
The brother of an ER doctor who was found dead in the Ozarks has slammed suggestions that he had been living in an RV because he couldn't afford $19,000-a-month in alimony and child support for his eight children.

The body of Dr John Forsyth, 49, was found with a gunshot wound in Beaver Lake in Arkansas nine days after he was reported missing when he uncharacteristically did not show up to work.

The father was seen on surveillance footage on May 21, the day of his disappearance, walking towards a luxury RV he kept in the car park at the hospital in Cassville, Missouri, where he worked.

Speaking to DailyMail.com, his brother Richard said allegations that Forsyth lived in the trailer because he could not afford alimony are 'not at all' true and 'just ignorant.'

'He had an RV that he stayed at when he was on call for your duty. There were periods of time where he was working, but not needed, and needed to be available,' Richard claimed.

The body of Dr John Forsyth, 49, was found with a gunshot wound in Beaver Lake in northeast Arkansas

His brother Richard told DailyMail.com that the doctor would use the luxury RV to rest while on call or duty because he worked long hours

Forsyth is pictured here his pregnant fiancee Laura Barnett who he told his brother Richard was the 'love of his life'

'And so the RV was situated in the parking lot of the hospital where he would be on duty - he would go there just to rest, catch rest where he could, because he would sometimes work, you know, 9, 10, 12 hours in a row.

'And even during that those periods where he was not, theoretically on duty, he could be called in and so he had to get sleep break code, so he had that RV, but he also had other homes and buildings.'

Forsyth had seven kids with his wife and one more with a different mother. They range in ages from one year old to about 25, according to Richard.

His divorce was finalized last month and he was ordered to pay about $19,000 a month in alimony and child support, with many online commentators theorizing his death may be connected to the payments.

Forsyth was last seen going into someone's vehicle in the parking lot of a public pool in Cassville. He was then seen exiting the vehicle and walking around the parking lot for 10 to 15 minutes.

At the time of his death many family members did not know Forsyth was engaged to Laura Barnett, 39.

The doctor had proposed to Barnett, who is reportedly eight months pregnant, just days before he went missing. The couple worked together at Mercy Hospital, where she is a nurse.

His brother explained that Forsyth had kept his relationship with his fiance secret out of respect for his ex-wife during their divorce.

'I think that both of them were aware of the sensitivity of coming out with such information during a divorce,' Richard told DailyMail.com. 'And they also have their professional lives and reputations, and I think they wanted to handle things appropriately.

'They wanted to try to be as respectful to the communities they belong to as they could. And it's an odd thing to say that we may sometimes show respect by omitting important facts.'

Richard also said that police are treating the death as a homicide, but have not revealed additional details to the family.

Police have not said whether they are treating the death as homicide or a suicide, and have not released the location of the gunshot wound, saying the autopsy results will not be revealed until the investigation is complete.

DailyMail.com has reached out to the Benton County sheriff's office for comment.

The brothers had dinner just days before Forsyth disappeared and Richard said his behavior prior to his death were not 'the actions of a person who kills himself.'

He said: 'On May 17, which was four days before my brother went missing, he and I had a three hour dinner. We had, I suppose in retrospect, a very long goodbye.

Forsyth's body was found near the bank across from the Lost Bridge South area of Beaver Lake, which is about 20 miles south of Cassville, police said

An expansive 90-acre search was carried out by the Cassville Police Department soon after, which failed to turn up any results until a kayaker found his body last month

In an eerie new image his stethoscope can be seen dangling around the rear-view mirror of his Infiniti sedan

It was at that dinner that he told me about [his fiancee] Laura, and that he was very happy to have found her and they were very much in love. And I congratulated him.

He seems to have really found something that made them happy. And I told him, I was just really glad about that. And he was very optimistic about the future

Authorities located Forsyth's black Infiniti sedan abandoned at the Cassville Aquatic Park. The car keys were inside, along with Forsyth's wallet, passport and briefcase. His two cellphones were found inside the RV at the hospital.

An expansive 90-acre search was carried out by the Cassville Police Department soon after, which failed to turn up any results until a kayaker found his body last month.

The body was found near the bank across from the Lost Bridge South area of Beaver Lake, which is about 20 miles south of Cassville.

New pictures show the search efforts of officers across the lake where his body was found, as a stethoscope hung eerily from the rear-view mirror of his car.

In a bizarre revelation, Richard previously revealed that his brother had been kidnapped and threatened by unidentified assailants in February 2022.

Richard, who founded the crypto firm OnFo with his brother, said that despite the terrifying ordeal, John never filed a police report.

He said he first learned about the kidnapping through a mutual friend, who only came forward to describe the incident to the family after John went missing in mysterious circumstance.

Richard cautioned that there was no evidence yet linking the 2022 incident with John's death, but added: 'It stands out very stark in the tableaux of facts that have emerged about the case.'

'It was cold. He was zip-tied. He was made to feel very unsafe and taken on a car ride with some people to a bridge and was threatened.

'He did not file a police report because he believed he was in continued danger.'

The family say that they would rather be 'left in the dark' during the police investigation if it means they will get 'justice' for the doctor.
The sister of Kaylee Goncalves, who was murdered in her off-campus apartment while a student at the University of Idaho, has paid heartbreaking tribute to her sister on what would have been her 22nd birthday.

Gonclaves was stabbed to death last November alongside three other students in a brutal attack that shocked the nation.

The suspect, Bryan Kohberger, 28, is in custody and is due to stand trial in October.

In the emotional Instagram post dedicated to her sister, Autumn Gonclaves wrote: 'Happy birthday sissy. I love you so so much. I wish I could feel one more hug, see one more smile & hear one more I love you' alongside a sweet family photograph.

'You deserved your life more than anyone I know' the post continued, 'You worked so hard for everything you had, and you LOVED your life. You appreciated all the little things and thats a big deal.'

Kaylee Goncalves' sister Autumn paid heartbreaking tribute to her sister on her 22nd birthday

Gonclaves was stabbed to death last November alongside three other students in a brutal attack that shocked the nation

Adding: 'Learning to live without you is the hardest thing Ive ever had to do. Something I should have ever had to do.'

Autumn wished her beloved sister a happy birthday and expressed her joy at the idea of meeting her again one day: 'Meeting you again is something that never leaves my head. There is so much I have to tell you, so much I need to ask you.

'Seeing your smile again, hearing your laugh. It keeps me going each and every day. I know we will meet again but we should have never had to part like this.'

Best friends Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, both 21, and young couple Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, both 20, died in the horror attack, which was so brutal, blood could still be seen dripping down the walls of their rental home days after the killing.

Kaylee and Madison were discovered dead in bed next to each other, while Ethan and Xana were found on the floor below, with Xana discovered slumped over on the floor of her bedroom.

Kohberger, a criminology PhD student at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, was arrested after a six-week manhunt and charged with four counts of first-degree murder and burglary.

Police tied him to the gruesome quadruple murder of four college kids after tracking his white Hyundai to the scene.

They also matched his DNA to a sample that was left on a knife sheath found at the scene. The murder weapon was not recovered at the house.

Best friends Kaylee and Madison were discovered dead in bed next to each other

Bryan Kohberger, 28, appeared in court in Moscow, Idaho, where he 'stood silent' while entering a plea. The judge entered a not guilty plea on his behalf over the murders of four University of Idaho students

Maddie Mogen (top) Kaylee Goncalves (left) Xana Kernodle (right) and Ethan Chapin (center) - all students at the University of Idaho - were knifed to death on November 13 in the quiet college town of Moscow

Ethan and Xana were found on the floor below, with Xana discovered slumped over on the floor of her bedroom in the off-campus home

This is the murder house where four students were stabbed to death. The home is now boarded up and is slated for demolition

Officers also seized three knives from Kohberger's parents' property, including one in another sheath.

Police also seized a 'black mask', which is not dissimilar to the black ski mask described by the surviving roommate who saw the murderer leave the scene on November 13.

All together 63 items were seized from Kohberger's parents' house, including multiple items of clothing, books, documents, bills and prescriptions.

Police had been watching Kohberger for days before they raided the house in the early hours of December 30.

Survivors Mortensen and Bethany Funke said they heard noises on the night of the attack, with Mortensen telling cops she heard Kaylee say 'there's someone here' at approximately 4am.

Ten minutes later, she heard a thud and crying from Xana's room and a male voice saying 'it's ok, I'm going to help you'.

At 4.17am, a dog was captured barking loudly on a neighbor's security camera.

Around the same time, Mortensen said she opened her bedroom door again and saw a tall male with bushy eyebrows leaving through the sliding glass doors at the back of the home.

She described how she had been 'frozen in shock' as the black-clad male walked towards her and said she locked herself in her room after he left.

Kohberger appeared in court on Monday 22 May, where he entered a 'not guilty' plea by staying silent.

The suspect chose to use Idaho's 'standing silent' plea which means he has not pleaded either way but can still be tried.

The appearance, which saw the 28-year-old arrive in court wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and looking pale, was his first since being formally charged with the killings in early January.

Kohberger sat silently as Judge John Judge read his rights and reiterated that he faces the death penalty if found guilty of any of the murder charges before responding 'yes' when asked if he understood repeatedly.

Then, as the four murder charges and one of burglary were read out by Judge Judge, he sat flicking through his indictment papers and shifting in his seat before his lawyer Anne Taylor told the judge her client would be 'standing silent' when asked to respond.

The non-plea now means the case will proceed to trial, with Taylor asking the judge to schedule a six week trial that is now set to commence on October 2.

Looking on were Madison's dad Ben Mogen and Kaylee's parents Steve and Kristi, both dressed in black, who looked sad and serious as their daughters' names were heard in the packed courtroom.
Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has been admitted to San Raffaele hospital in Milan, two months after being diagnosed with leukaemia and a lung infection.

Berlusconi, 86, who is in a relationship with 33-year-old Forza Italia MP Marta Fascina, was taken to the hospital for medical checks, a source said.

The billionaire media tycoon was discharged from hospital last month after treatment for a lung infection linked to a Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukaemia (CML).

Berlusconi's health has markedly deteriorated in recent years, with open-heart surgery in 2016 and numerous hospital admissions since contracting Covid-19 three years ago.

He was admitted to intensive care in April in the cardiac unit of the San Raffaele hospital after suffering from breathing problems.

Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has been admitted at San Raffaele hospital in Milan, four sources told Reuters today

Berlusconi, 86, is in a relationship with 33-year-old Forza Italia MP Marta Fascina

While there, Berlusconi, the leader of the Right-wing Forza Italia party, was diagnosed with a lung infection and CML - a rare blood cancer characterised by high numbers of white blood cells.

WHAT IS CHRONIC MYELOMONOCYTIC LEUKAEMIA? Chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia (CMML) is a rare type of blood cancer, where there are too many monocytes in the blood and bone marrow. Monocytes are a type of white blood cell. In CMML the bone marrow produces abnormal monocytes. They are not fully developed and cant work normally. These abnormal blood cells either stay in the bone marrow or are destroyed before they get into the bloodstream. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has included CMML in a group of blood cancers called myeloproliferative and myelodysplastic disorders. Source: Cancer Research UK Advertisement

Berlusconi has previously overcome prostate cancer, which he described as 'a nightmare lasting months'.

But it was his battle with Covid in 2020 which he described as the 'most dangerous challenge' of his life.

The three-time prime minister of Italy, who has been embroiled in several scandals - most notably around his 'bunga bunga' parties - was admitted to hospital with a minor heart problem after fainting in 2006, and underwent heart surgery in a US hospital in January 2007.

The former AC Milan owner, who also had major heart surgery in 2016 to replace an aortic valve, has had a pacemaker for several years.

He was hospitalised again for a reported urinary tract infection in January 2022.

Berlusconi, who won a seat in Italy's Senate during general elections in September, has stirred controversy in recent months with his criticism of Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky, putting him at odds with Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni.

The billionaire, whose Forza Italia party is part of the ruling government coalition, was accused - but acquitted this year - of paying young starlets and others for 'silence and lies' about his notoriously hedonistic soirees, which he has always insisted were elegant dinners.

The verdict was the culmination of a legal battle which began in 2010 when Berlusconi, then prime minister, was accused of abusing his power to protect a young Moroccan nightclub dancer, Karima El-Mahroug.

Berlusconi, who has five children, was temporarily banned from political office after a conviction for tax fraud in 2013, for which he served a community sentence.

But he returned to the political front lines and was re-elected as a senator last year.

The media mogul, who first entered politics in 1994, does not currently have a role in government.
Distraught neighbours have recalled hearing harrowing screams from a burning home before a woman's body was found inside.

Emergency services rushed to the home in Angle Park in Adelaide's noorth-west at about 2.30pm on Friday where they found the residence engulfed in flames.

Witnesses managed to rescue one woman from the home but another, reported to be her sister was left trapped inside.

The surviving woman was taken to Royal Adelaide Hospital with minor injuries. She is reportedly helping police with inquiries.

Her sister's remains were tragically found inside the home after Metropolitan Fire Service crews extinguished the fire.

A woman's remains were found inside a burnt-out Adelaide home on Friday afternoon (pictured, firefighters at the scene)

Horrified neighbours said they heard screaming and were able to help one woman from the building (pictured, firefighters at the scene)

No others were being sought over the matter, police said.

Horrified neighbours said they heard screaming from inside as the fire took hold.

'I was at my computer and I heard yelling and screaming,' one resident told Nine News.

'After that, smoke came inside the house and I thought 'what the hell is going on?'.'

Neighbour Stasie Leonard raced outside after she smelled smoke and heard a 'huge bang'.

'I saw smoke and heard another bang,' she said. 'Flames were rushing out the window.'

Other neighbours grabbed their hoses to try to extinguish the blaze.

'Someone was going: 'there's someone still inside',' she said.

'It's just been chaos, it's been horrible.'

'One of the people were in there (the police van) just screaming. It's tragic.'

The cause of the fire has not been determined but Metropolitan Fire Service believe it started in the front room of the house (pictured, police officers at the scene)

The Metropolitan Fire Service believes the fire started in the front room of the house, the ABC reports.

'On arrival, 14 firefighters from three fire trucks and a command vehicle found a fire in the front room,' an MFS spokeswoman said.

'[It] took 20 minutes to bring the fire under control, and another 20 minutes to extinguish the blaze.'

The cause of the fire is still unknown but the cost of damage is estimated at $100,000.
Neonatal nurse Lucy Letby went out 'drinking fizz and going to the races' in the aftermath of carrying out the 'calculated and cold-blooded' murders of five baby boys and two baby girls, a jury heard today.

Giving evidence on the last of her 14 days in the witness box of Court 7 at Manchester Crown Court, the 33-year-old agreed with prosecutor Nick Johnson KC, that she was 'having a good time' during that period.

'Yes, there were times in those years that I had a good time,' she told him.

The admission came as Mr Johnson suggested she was 'a very calculating woman' who in the months and years after the alleged attacks frequently searched for babies' parents on Facebook to 'check up on [her] victims'.

He also put to her that she deliberately told lies in order to get sympathy and attention from people, including the jury at her trial.

The 33-year-old nurse, originally from Hereford, is on trial accused of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder a further ten

The prosecutor questioned her about a note she had written to two triplets  Baby O and Baby P - she is alleged to have murdered (pictured)

'You were killing children to get attention, weren't you? And you're getting quite a lot of attention now.'

'No,' said Letby.

The prosecutor questioned her about a note she had written to two triplets  Baby O and Baby P - she is alleged to have murdered, along with their brother who survived.

The note began with the line: 'Today is your birthday' and continues: 'You aren't here and I'm so sorry for that.'

When Mr Johnson asked why she had included the name of the surviving brother, Letby replied: 'I can't answer that.'

The barrister put to her: 'It's because in your mind, as (a medic) perhaps anticipating, there was a terminal end in sight for (the surviving triplet) if he'd stayed with you.'

'No,' said Letby.

Mr Johnson asked: 'Was the prospect of that exciting to you?'

'Absolutely not,' said the nurse.

Mr Johnson suggested her claim to have felt isolated 'from my friends and family' after eventually being removed from the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital was untrue.

Letby was handed a 26-page document that the barrister said was 'peppered' with social engagements she had attended between July 2016, when she was removed from the unit, and June 2018, when police first knocked on her front door to arrest her.

Some of these were with her best friend, a fellow nurse on the unit, and others with a married registrar at the hospital who cannot be identified for legal reasons.

On one occasion Letby went to London with the doctor, and was due to go a second time before the trip was cancelled.

He had sent a message to her ending with a large red heart emoji.

Mr Johnson asked her to read it aloud, but then had to prompt her twice before she finally referred to the emoji. 'It's a heart,' she told him.

Letby had responded to the doctor's love heart with one of her own, combined with a smiling face emoji.

'It's a smiley face and a heart,' she said.

Mr Johnson asked: 'But he wasn't your boyfriend?'

Letby replied: 'It's not a relationship at all. It's a friendship'.

Mr Johnson went on to refer to a note in which the nurse tells herself she is 'an awful person' and laments the likelihood that 'I'll never know what it's like to have a family.'

The barrister asked: 'What made you think at the time you wrote this that you would never have a family?'

Mr Johnson suggested her claim to have felt isolated 'from my friends and family' after eventually being removed from the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital was untrue

Re-examined by her barrister, Ben Myers KC, Letby said there was nothing more to the events in the social file than going for drinks with friends

Referring to her removal from the neonatal unit and her feeling of isolation in her new role at the hospital, she replied: 'I was still in that position and couldn't see how that would end.'

Mr Johnson said: 'You had a good job?'

Letby replied: 'It wasn't a choice for me.'

Mr Johnson probed: 'But still, a good job?'

'Good as in enjoyable?' Letby clarified.

Mr Johnson said: 'It's a secure job with a very secure employer.'

Letby said: 'Yes.'

Mr Johnson said: 'A good salary?'

Letby agreed: 'Yes, but not as much as (from) my nursing'.

Letby was handed a 26-page document that the barrister said was 'peppered' with social engagements she had gone on between July 2016 when she was removed from the unit and June 2018

Mr Johnson questioned Letby about a note in which the nurse tells herself she is 'an awful person'

The court has seen several notes written by Letby. In some she says she is 'an awful person' and writes the word 'HATE' in capital letters

Mr Johnson said: 'You had a house, you had a car, you had a boyfriend?'

'Yes,' the nurse replied.

Letby maintained that she 'couldn't see a future for myself' because she felt senior staff were trying to hold her accountable for what she believed were failings at the hospital.

Mr Johnson asked: 'But you were having a good time?'

Letby replied: 'Yes, there were times in those years that I had a good time. Yes.'

Mr Johnson: 'Drinking fizz? Going to the races? You felt like this because you knew and you had killed or grievously injured these children.'

'No,' she said.

The barrister continued: 'And that's the truth. You are a murderer'.

Letby replied: 'I've never murdered a child or harmed any of them'.

The 33-year-old nurse, originally from Hereford, is on trial accused of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder a further ten. She denies all the charges and her trial continues.

Re-examined by her barrister, Ben Myers KC, Letby said there was nothing more to the events in the social file than going for drinks with friends.

The court was shown photographs of the nurse on holiday in Torquay with her father, David, having drinks with university friends and on a day out to Port Sunlight with both her parents.

Mr Myers asked why she was smiling in the photos, given that they were taken at around the time she was writing her handwritten notes.

She replied: 'Because despite what is going on, you have to find some kind of quality of life.'

In answer to a series of questions, she denied having harmed any babies. She had never wanted to hurt infants 'to be happy', 'because she was bored' or 'to get attention from anybody', she said.

The trial resumes next week.
Bookings for Chicago hotels hit record occupancy thanks to a boost from Taylor Swift's Eras tour last weekend.

The city saw hotels 97 percent full with an average of 44,383 hotel rooms occupied each night Swift played her concerts.

The all-time high for Chicago's hotels was recorded by Choose Chicago, the citys marketing organization, who also credited a medical convention that coincided with Swift's visit to the city.

'Taylor Swifts sold-out concerts, layered on top of one of our largest annual conventions, combined to become the most successful weekend for Chicago hotels in recent history,' Michael Jacobson, president of the Illinois Hotel and Lodging Association, said in a statement.

Adding that the record numbers demonstrate 'indisputable evidence of the importance of major events and conventions to the citys economy.'

Taylor Swift performed her sell-out concert in Chicago over the weekend

The star has been credited with driving spending in local economies as fans spend thousands attending her shows

Chicago is also hosting this year's James Beard Awards, the so-called 'Oscars of the food world.'

The ceremony was held at the Lyric Opera House in Chicago on Monday night.

The Eras Tour could generate $4.6 billion in consumer spending in the US alone, research company QuestionPro estimates.

Swift's record-breaking 52-night, 20-city tour has led to a phenomenon called 'Swiftonomics' due to its infectious effect on local economies, as fans spend thousands of pounds on hotels, travel, food and drink and costumes in preparation for the event.

So-called 'Swifties' have paid as much as $42,000 resale tickets, $200 on costumes sold through Etsy and countless dollars travelling across the country for shows.

Hotels have raised their prices in response to the demand with the La Quinta Inn & Suites hotel in Nashville charging $1,150 for one night on the first Friday Swift arrived in town.

In Foxborough, Massachusetts, the price of a room in the Renaissance Hotel trebled during the weekend Swift played at the city's Gillette Stadium. The fee increased from $250 a night to $750, according to WBZ.

A slew of local restaurants and bars are also cashing in on the trend: in Arizona a bar called The Lola offered a pre-party to both of her tickets offering Eras-themed cocktails and food - for a $20 entrance fee.

In Philadelphia, a 'Tay-Gate' party at the venue Xfinity Live was selling tickets for $50.

Meanwhile in Florida, the Tampa Bay Times reported that car parking charges at the concert venue where Swift performed had swelled to $53 for the event.

The Eras Tour could generate $4.6 billion in consumer spending in the US alone

Fans flocked to the Soldier Field venue in Chicago for three nights of the Eras tour

So-called 'Swifties' have paid as much as $42,000 resale tickets, $200 on costumes sold through Etsy and countless dollars travelling across the country for shows

Chicago saw hotels 97% full with an average of 44,383 hotel rooms occupied each night Swift played her concerts

Some fans have instead been turning to Etsy for costumes to wear to the event

Official Eras Tour merchandise includes $75 hoodies, $65 crewnecks and $45 T-Shirts.

But many fans have instead been turning to Etsy for costumes to wear to the event.

A search for 'Taylor Swift Eras Tour' on the crafts site reveals nearly 40,000 results, including outfits designed on costumes Swift has worn in the past.

Some are selling for as much as $200.

Hysteria around Swift's tour first broke out in November when tickets went on sale through Ticketmaster and the site instantly crashed.

The chaos led to an out-of-control resale market which saw passes to the concert go for tens of thousands of dollars.
A murder jury has been show a gun holster 'identical' to the one which was worn by the suspect who allegedly murdered a Met Police custody sergeant.

Louis De Zoysa, 25, is accused of shooting dead Sergeant Matt Ratana, 54, at a custody block in Croydon, south London, on September 25, 2020, while he was handcuffed.

Members of the jury in the trial at Northampton Crown Court watched while a copy of a gun holster was shown in the courtroom during a brief hearing on Friday.

Jocelyn Ledward, for the prosecution, said the holster shown to the jury was 'exactly identical' to the one owned by De Zoysa.

The prosecution alleges De Zoysa, who denies murder, 'pulled the trigger on purpose four times' while he was handcuffed in a holding room at the custody centre, the first and second shots hitting Sgt Ratana, the third hitting the wall during a struggle with officers, and a fourth hitting De Zoysa himself.

They say the gun and holster were 'probably concealed under one of his armpits'.

CCTV footage showed Louis De Zoysa being put into a police van before the incident

Sgt Ratana (right) was shot in the chest inside a custody block holding cell in Croydon, south London on September 25, 2020

He had been arrested on London Road in Norbury, south London, during the early hours of September 25, three years ago, after a stop and search by officers found he had cannabis and seven rounds of ammunition.

Officers did not know De Zoysa had a gun until it was used to shoot Sgt Ratana.

Sgt Ratana had five injuries caused by two bullets - a fatal gunshot wound to the chest, with the bullet going through his heart, and four other injuries caused by a second bullet.

The second bullet passed through the muscles of his thigh and buttocks.

Both the prosecution and the defence agree De Zoysa, who was 23 at the time of the incident, pulled the trigger on the first and second shot and that the gun was fired four times.

They also agreed the third shot was fired when the gun was still in De Zoysa's hand, and the fourth hit De Zoysa in the neck.

The trial continues on Monday.

A grab from the video showing the shocking moment Ratana is shot
Many questions are still unanswered with theories behind what could have occurred flooding the internet

A Las Vegas man who claimed to have witnessed two '8-foot creatures' with 'big shiny eyes' in his own backyard last month, spoke out about the mysterious encounter, explaining what he experienced the night of May 31.

The YouTube video posted Thursday presented further details about the alleged 'UFO crash' and the creatures the man called '100 percent not human.'

'I know some people are not going to believe this,' he begins 'but I just wanted to tell you about what happened to me and my family.'

The man then details the evenings developments, step-by-step.

'I hear something fall from the sky. I turn around. The only thing I see is a big light falling from the sky, and moments later I feel a big impact and a bang,' the man claimed in the now-viral YouTube video.

The potential UFO sighting has been caught on Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department bodycam footage

A Las Vegas man who claimed to have witnessed two '8-foot creatures' with 'big shiny eyes' in his own backyard shared new details about the May 31 evening in a YouTube video posted Thursday

In his explanation video, he also revealed new ring camera footage, allegedly from a neighbors security camera, which clearly shows a bright light with the sound of a massive bang.

'When that happened, the only thing I can see in the backyard is a tall creature. Probably around eight, ten feet tall. Very thin, he further added.

'So, I call my dad. He went to backyard, and he saw the same creature I saw. He told me to go inside the house. At this point, we're all freaking out me and my family.'

The man described the figure he supposedly saw as a 'tall, skinny, lengthy creature, and greyish green in color.'

'When I looked at it in the eyes, my body just froze. like the same experience of having sleep paralysis,' he said about the terrifying encounter.'

'I'm staring at him and I'm looking at his whole body and he has weird looking feet and a big face and eyes and you could see a big mouth,' he added.

'I could hear his loud deep breathing and I could see his stomach moving. He would just stare at me, seconds later I could start moving again. That's when I called 911,' he said, before playing the previously shared police call.

This comes after police bodycam of the Vegas officers who responded to the man's call was released, which showed their camera picking up the strange blue ball of light at about 11:50 pm on April 30.

Approximately 39 minutes after the first call, another resident contacted 911, saying that there were two unknown entities in his backyard after he saw an object fall from the sky.

The man's new video, posted June 8, has already reached 320,663 views and near 4,000 comments - with many skeptical of his story, while other thanking him for sharing it.

The clip, called 'I had aliens in my backyard part 1' is the first video on the man's new YouTube account 'Alien Society51'. It's unclear whether a part two will be coming soon.

Social media users were left stunned, sharing various theories and explanations for the man's bizarre story.

While many seem to be totally convinced of the veracity of the story, others are questioning why there are no photos of the creatures who supposedly spent some time in the family's backyard.

Witnesses described something '100 percent not human' falling from the sky

Responding officers expressed their trepidation at attending the scene

'I want to believe but its extremely suspicious that you recorded everything else surrounding the event, but didnt manage to take a single photo or video of the creatures or the supposed spacecraft. It just seems a bit hard to believe, no offense. Especially since you recorded everyone standing around looking at the back yard but didnt zoom in or try to get it on camera. The whole thing just seems a bit fishy to me,' one skeptical user wrote.

Despite speculation, the majority of users commenting are invested in the story and anticipating a part two.

One user said 'The ring video is intriguing.. I'm surprised not more people in the neighborhood were out trying to figure out the loud noise..? Looking forward to part 2 , thank you!!'

Others are calling the man 'brave' and sharing similar experiences.

'Im very interested in your encounter. Ive had a similar experience. One thing I can warn you about is that once youve had an encounter you will start to have other bizarre things happen. There will be a lot of people who will ridicule you. I honestly had more trauma inflicted on me by the UFO community than any alien beings ever did. Stay strong. Youre a brave young man,' one user wrote.

Some point to the fact that police admit to seeing something fall out of the sky too, as a sign that the man's story is believable or at least that something definitely crashed.

'... what I find more believable is the fact that it was not the kid only that saw it but their entire family it seems. I want to believe this one.'

The question is, if not 'aliens,' what did crash?

With two nearby Air Force Bases - Creech and Nellis - there is a theory that a piece of aircraft may be behind the crash

An 8 News NOW report which originally broke the story, shared the theory but the Air Forces Bases have denied being involved.

With two nearby Air Force Bases - Creech and Nellis - there is a theory that a piece of aircraft may be behind the crash.

An 8 News NOW report which originally broke the story, shared the theory but the Air Forces Bases have denied being involved.

The report also mentions a possible equipment malfunction, which the government collects.

Another plausible theory is simply that the man's story is an elaborate hoax.

Despite the unanswered questions, the man's testimony and the video footage has sent shockwaves across social media platforms, captivating users with its bewildering chain of events.
Armed police were today seen practising storming a ship in a second day of drills at a Dorset harbour that is set to host a barge housing 500 male asylum seekers.

Dozens of marine officers were pictured running drills in full combat gear at Portland Port, where the controversial Bibby Stockholm will arrive in around two weeks.

RFA Sir Tristram served as a Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship in the Falklands War but is now permanently based in Portland and used to train Royal Marines.

Today's operation appeared to mirror a similar exercise yesterday, with officers in boats marked 'police' were seen climbing aboard the 450ft-long ship using rope ladders before sweeping the deck.

This morning, the Met confirmed it was involved in the maritime drills - which it insisted were not linked to the arrival of the Bibby Stockholm.

Armed marine officers practice storming the RFA Sir Tristram, a training ship in Portland Port

Today's operation appeared to mirror a similar exercise yesterday, with officers in boats marked 'police' were seen climbing aboard the 450ft-long ship using rope ladders

Officers were seen moving around the ship with their guns raised as they practiced an operational manoeuvre

A spokesman said: 'We can confirm that officers from the Met Police and other UK police forces conducted maritime training in Portland Harbour, Dorset, on Thursday, 8 June.

'This training involved firearms and other specialist officers, and was arranged earlier this year. This area has long been used for police maritime training.

'Officers from across UK Policing conduct operational training all year round at a range of sites across the UK, to ensure they are well prepared for different types of incidents.

'This activity is not related to the Government plan to accommodate asylum seekers on the Bibby Stockholm barge at Portland Harbour.'

The Met declined to answer further questions about the nature of the training, what kind of incidents it is in preparation for, how many days it will carry on for, and which other forces are involved.

Dorset Police yesterday said it was not involved in the training but declined to provide any more details.



Today's activity follows a similar exercise yesterday (pictured)

RFA Sir Tristram (pictured yesterday) served as a Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship in the Falklands War but is now permanently based in Portland and used to train Royal Marines

As the local police service it would have been informed in advance of any training exercises that were due to take place. MailOnline contacted the force again today.

The Ministry of Defence - which owns the ship - did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication and Portland Port said it did not comment on 'security matters'.

Yesterday morning, people watched on as police boarded two speed boats and raced out to the RFA Sir Tristram before scaling its hull in what appeared to be a rehearsal for taking a vessel by force.

A witness, who wished to remain anonymous, said: 'The officers were dressed all in black and they all emerged from an old warehouse that looked like it had been abandoned.

'They marched to their boats in full gear and then they sped off towards the harbour entrance like they were practicing approaching from that side.

'I couldn't see them for a moment and then they zoomed at the ferry at full speed and surrounded it. It looked like they were practicing raiding it.'

It comes as local residents packed out a public meeting in Portland to express their concerns about 500 young male asylum seekers arriving in the area.

The Bibby Stockholm is set to arrive in Portland Port in around two weeks

The Bibby Stockholm was previously used to house offshore workers

Attempting to reassure locals, Home Office official Roy Payne said: 'Cultural awareness will be important, and we will explain to asylum seekers that a lot of young men in groups can be intimidating.

'We will teach British social behaviours and cultural norms and they will have to conform to them.

'We have seen evidence that this worked at the Napier facility in Kent where the asylum seekers do not pose a problem when they do go into town.'

The Bibby Stockholm is expected to be used for 18 months to help the government deal with the huge backlog of asylum claims.

Currently thousands of asylum seekers are being housed in hotels while their applications are processed, costing the taxpayer billions of pounds a year.

The Bibby Stockholm will be checked by inspectors from Portland town council before any migrants are allowed on board.

Superintendent Dean O'Connor, of Dorset police, told the meeting: 'This is not 500 criminals.

'If we see a change in crime levels, we will respond to that and deal with it as we always do.

'Everyone who will be on the barge will have been checked against a crime and immigration database and we will ensure we know who everyone is on that barge.'
GOP Rep. George Santos filed an appeal Friday to stop a judge from releasing the names of two people that helped him make his $500,000 bond.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Anne Shields had on Tuesday granted media organizations' request to make public the documents showing who exactly put up the money to keep the embattled congressman out of jail in his federal criminal fraud case.

Santos's attorney, Joseph Murray, in an eight-page letter Friday asked U.S. District Judge Joanna Seybert, a Clinton appointee, to review the order.

Murray argued a 'media frenzy' would likely cause the suretors, or guarantors, to withdraw from putting up his bond, thus subjecting Santos to pre-trial detention.

George Santos is seen speaking outside the Capitol on May 17, amid efforts to expel him from the House

'It is very likely that if the suretor's identities are released, that Defendant and the suretors will mutually decide that they shall have to withdraw from, serving as suretors,' Murray wrote.

'In that Defendant may be subject to more onerous conditions of release or may be subject to pretrial detention, presents as a potential countervailing factor to consider up against either the common law right of access to judicial records or the qualified First Amendment right to access,' he continued.

But, Murray signaled that those who posted bond were family. He said he would not object to the sealed records being unredacted to reveal the existence of a 'family' relationship.

Joseph Murray, lawyer for George Santos, is trying to stop the names of those who contributed to the $500,000 bond from being made public

'Defendant has essentially publicly revealed that the suretors are family members and not lobbyists, donors or others seeking to exert influence over the Defendant,' Murray wrote.

Santos, 34, pleaded not guilty on May 10 to a 13-count indictment charging that he duped donors, stole from his campaign, lied to Congress about being a millionaire and cheated to collect unemployment benefits he didn't deserve. He is due back in court on June 30.

The indictment includes seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives and one count of theft of public funds. He could face up to 20 years in prison for the most serious counts.

Murray previously suggested they could 'suffer great distress,' including possible job losses and physical harm, if they're identified publicly.

He said that Santos would rather go to jail than subject his suretors to public scrutiny.

'My client would rather surrender to pretrial detainment than subject these suretors to what will inevitably come,' Murray wrote in a letter earlier this week to the judge.

The lawyer said he, Santos and Santos' staff have been receiving threatening and harassing calls and messages, including death threats.

Murray said he received a call Friday from someone shouting: 'Who paid Santos' bond?' and said he worries Santos' critics 'are just waiting to pounce' on the people backing his release.

'We truly fear for their health, safety and well being,' Murray wrote.

In a letter last week, a lawyer for news outlets urged the judge to release the names of Santos' bond suretors, citing a 'compelling public interest in maintaining the greatest transparency possible in these proceedings.'

The New York Times first wrote to Shields on May 23 asking to unseal the names.

According to New York Daily News, Senior counsel for the New York Times Dana Green wrote: 'The public interest in openness is particularly strong in this case.

'The surety records relate to three individuals who have committed large sums of money to ensure that Rep. Santos can remain at liberty, pending further proceedings.

'This presents an obvious opportunity for political influence, given Rep. Santos's elected position and his dependence on these suretors.'

Other news outlets, including The Associated Press, joined the fight a few days later.

In a letter last week, a lawyer for news outlets urged the judge to release the names of Santos' bond suretors, citing a 'compelling public interest in maintaining the greatest transparency possible in these proceedings.'

The New York Times first wrote to Shields on May 23 asking to unseal the names.

Other news outlets, including The Associated Press, joined the fight a few days later.

Separately, the House Ethics Committee wrote to Santos on May 16 asking him to identify the people who cosigned his bond.

Murray said Santos originally lined up three financially responsible cosigners as suretors, but one backed out and the other two didn't show up to his arraignment.

That forced them to make 'other confidential arrangements' to ensure Santos' release, Murray said.

Santos' bond is unsecured. That means his cosigners didn't have put up any money up front, but could be forced to pay the full amount if he doesn't comply with his release conditions or fails to show up for court.

The 34-year-old, who represents parts of Queens and Long Island, has defied calls to resign and has said he won't drop his bid for a second term.
Over 70,000 people have fled the city since the pandemic due to rampant lawlessness and open-air drug taking

Gen Z activist Darren Stallcup said the West Coast hub is the epicenter of a 'fentanyl genocide' and it has become 'uninhabitable'

San Francisco officials have been slammed for allowing the city to descend into a 'fourth world country'

A Gen Z activist has slammed San Francisco's woke lawmakers for allowing the city to descend into a 'fourth world country'.

Soft-on-crime policies in the West Coast hub have allowed rampant lawlessness and open-air drug markets to take over the city, leading disgruntled resident Darren Mark Stallcup, 26, to admit he 'can't keep living this way'.

'We are witnessing the collapse of the Paris of the West and potentially the decline of Western civilization, with San Francisco being the first domino,' he told Fox News.

'I am personally witnessing a fentanyl genocide, every night I'm going to sleep to the sound of sirens and waking up to people screaming for their lives.'

His remarks come as over 70,000 residents have fled San Francisco since the start of the pandemic to escape the crumbling city's drug and crime crisis.

San Francisco has become overran with rampant crime and open-air drug taking

Stallcup, who recently launched a fundraiser to help him move from San Francisco after fentanyl made the city 'uninhabitable', frequently documents the ugly scenes on the streets to bring awareness to the issues.

His videos frequently show streets lined with tents, open-air drug taking and homeless addicts terrorizing people without consequence.

'When I go out every morning and count the bodies, when I'm documenting the fentanyl genocide happening in our community,' Stallcup said.

'My goal is to show the world what's really happening on the streets of San Francisco.'

Darren Stallcup said he is 'going to sleep to the sound of sirens' every night due to the city's untamed crime wave

Earlier this year, embattled California Governor Gavin Newsom pledged to crack down on the metro's untamed drug and crime wave.

But Stallcup said elected officials are to blame for the ongoing crisis, where lenient policies and underfunded police forces are unable to bring the city back to life.

'It seems as if local leaders and local news are working together to kind of just sweep this under the rug and pretend everything is fine and dandy, when in actuality thousands of people are dying from fentanyl,' the 26-year-old Bay Area native said

'We have a beautiful city. Generations of people, good men and women, built this city. Generations of blood, sweat and tears.

'And I hate to see it all crumble in a decade just because people can't stop voting for this chaos.'

Stallcup said he frequently witnesses crime in the city, where homeless rates have skyrocketed

Addicts openly smoke drugs on the sidewalk of the Tenderloin area of San Francisco, where overdose deaths have rocketed upwards in recent months

A drug addict is pictured strung-out in downtown San Francisco in April

Stallcup has focused his activism on tackling the effects of woke policy making, which he says has made his hometown unrecognizable.

In July, he launched a campaign to lobby officials to declare a state of emergency in San Francisco, feeling its drug and crime epidemic has become a 'humanitarian crisis'.

He said he frequently witnesses crime throughout the city, and claims he has even fought off robbers himself after falling victim to criminals three times in the last year.

'I want women and children to be safe again,' he continued.

'Children are having to walk to school and having to navigate the trenches of San Francisco, tripping over bodies, fecal matter, needles, crack pipes, you name it.

'These sidewalks are haunted with the spirits of lost souls.'

Drug addicts and the homeless in the Tenderloin District, San Francisco

Drug addicts litter the street in a stupor while soft-on-crime policies worsen the issue

The streets of San Francisco have become overran with lawlessness and drugs

Since the start of the year, San Francisco has seen a disturbing crime spike that looks set to continue through the summer.

According to official police statistics, homicides are up five percent on last year, while robberies are up a startling 16 percent.

Some indications show rates for crimes such as rape and larceny are down. However, a former prosecutor said last month the city's liberal DA's decision not to prosecute many crimes may have skewed the numbers.

San Francisco's drug deaths have also skyrocketed in the wake of the closure of the closure of a drug treatment center in the Tenderloin area.

The Californian coastal hub saw 200 people die due to overdoses between January and March, compared to 142 deaths in 2022, according to recent data from the city's medical examiner.

That amounts to one overdose death every 10 hours in a city that has seen its reputation as a coastal gem ravaged by worsening crime, drugs, and homelessness rates.

San Francisco saw a staggering 41 percent surge in the number of drug-related deaths in the first quarter of 2023

Despite struggling to clamp down on the spate of crimes plaguing the city, last month local leaders launched their most expensive campaign yet to try and lure people back to the city.

The campaign, called 'Always San Francisco' cost a whopping $6million and is being spearheaded by the city's tourism bureau.

Officials decided to focus the advertising campaign on the quirkiness and diversity of the city, however businesses have flooded away from the crime hub in their droves.

In recent weeks, Nordstrom shuttered both its stores in the crime-ridden metro, joining other brands including Whole Foods, Anthropologie and Office Depot in abandoning the area.
Daily sign-ups for Netflix surged in the first few days after the streaming giant's password-sharing crackdown came into effect, new data show.

After it began alerting subscribers of the crackdown on May 23, Netflix had the four single largest days of US user acquisition on record, according to research firm Antenna, which has been tracking the data since 2019.

On both May 26 and May 27, Netflix had nearly 100,000 daily sign-ups, and over the four-day period, average daily sign-ups reached 73,000, an increase of 102 percent from the prior 60-day average.

The news sent shares of the company up nearly 3 percent, to $421.50, in afternoon trading on Friday.

Daily sign-ups for Netflix surged in the first few days after the streaming giant's password-sharing crackdown came into effect, new data show

Arnold Schwarzenegger is seen in the new Netflix action series Fubar, one of the top 10 shows on the streaming service currently

Prior to the crackdown, Netflix had estimated that more than 100 million households had supplied their log-in credentials to people outside their homes.

Seeking to boost revenue in a saturated streaming market, Netflix last month launched its password-sharing crackdown -- a drastic turnaround for a company that once tweeted 'Love is sharing a password'.

Under the new rules, US users can add a member outside of their homes for an additional fee of $8 per month.

The strategy seems to have paid off, as new sign-ups surged in late May, even topping the prior record numbers seen in the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, according to the data from Antenna.

Antenna noted that while account cancellations also increased during the period from May 24-27, they did not rise as quickly as new signups.

The ratio of signups to cancels since May 23 is up 25.6 percent compared to the previous 60-day period, the firm said.

Seeking to boost revenue in a saturated streaming market, Netflix last month launched its password-sharing crackdown

Netflix has certainly changed its tune since tweeting 'Love is sharing a password' in 2017

Antenna sources its signup data from third-party data collectors that track online purchase receipts, credit, debit and banking data details with customer permissions.

Netflix, which has expanded its crackdown to more than 100 other countries, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Netflix last year said it was going to limit account sharing and was testing various approaches in some markets.

In January, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters also acknowledged that the crackdown might risk more subscriber cancellations.

'It's worth noting that this will not be a universally popular move,' Peters advised investors.

As of the end of March, Netflix's paying customers totaled 232.5 million globally.
A Northern California woman lost her life savings while having heart surgery after she was directed to a fake customer service number when trying to return an Etsy purchase.

Tracy Jones was duped by so-called 'number spoofing' where fraudsters impersonate a trusted brand and then convince victims to part with their money.

Jones made the call just as she was about to go to the hospital to have a stent placed in her heart and only discovered she had been scammed after the surgery. She lost $5,000 outright - and later had her entire bank account drained.

The Northern California native was trying to return some grilling baskets from Etsy which had arrived crushed and damaged before being embroiled in a convoluted gift card scam.

She Googled a number for Etsy's customer service and the top result pulled up a fake number.

Scammers told Jones to download an app which gave them control of her phone before informing her she had been hacked and had to buy $5,000 worth of Apple and Target gift vouchers to stop the hackers

After dialing the number, a man on the phone told her to download an app to process the refund. But the app was actually designed to give hackers full access to her phone which it then scanned for her bank account and pin numbers.

In the meantime, scammers also convinced her to buy $5,000 worth of gift cards.

She told ABC7: 'As we were talking, he said, 'It looks like you've been hacked.

'Someone was trying to use my account to buy an iPhone and iPads.'

The fraudster directed her to purchase Apple gift cards as he claimed the numbers on the back would block the hack. He added he would deposit money into her account.

She said: 'He sent me to Lowes first. He said: 'I've deposited $1,000 into your account.

'And when you get the gift cards you need to sit in the car so you can use Lowes' WiFi and you take a picture of the receipt.'

Jones then drove to nearby Lowes, Target and Raley's grocery stores. In all she bought Apple and Target gift cards worth $5,000.

In the meantime, the scammer texted her to say he had deposited money into her account - along with supposed transaction numbers.

As instructed, she scratched off the backs of the gift cards, took pictures of the numbers and sent them back to 'the manager'.

When she went to the hospital to undergo surgery, she was told the rouse hadn't worked and she needed to buy more cards.

At which point she told them she couldn't as she was about to have surgery.

Afterwards, she explained: 'I stopped by the bank on the way home from the hospital. That's when I found out ... there was no money in my account.'

She added it was 'the worst day of my life.'

When ABC7 called the number, it still rang through and a man picked up saying 'support.'

They were directed to download an app called 'AnyDesk.'

AnyDesk is legitimate software program that allows somebody to take control of your computer or phone.

Data from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) shows consumers reported losing nearly $8.8 billion to fraud in 2022, up 30 percent on the previous year

Jones believed she was speaking to a customer service representative from Etsy

However it has increasingly been exploited by scammers as the tech can scan your computer for sensitive data such as bank accounts and PINs, and transfer them to fraudsters. AnyDesk warns of such scams on its website.

Separately criminals also ask people to buy gift cards as they tend to have fewer protections for buyers compared to other payment options

For example, if Jones had been transferring such large sums between accounts she would have likely been met with fraud warnings from her bank.

Once a victim sends over the digits on the back of the card, they will use it to buy products online instantly - before they realize they have been scammed.

The FTC states that if anybody calls and asks you pay them with gift cards, it is definitely a scammer.

In these instances, they will often specify exactly where you need to buy the gift card for.

The scam number purporting to be Etsy has now been removed from Google, ABC7 reported.

Experts advise that you can tell a number is authentic if the URL starts with 'https://'

When you click onto the site, you should also see a tiny lock icon next to the URL.

Data from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) shows consumers reported losing nearly $8.8 billion to fraud in 2022, up 30 percent on the previous year.

And Google has also come under fire for failing to clamp down on so-called 'lookalike websites' which impersonate trusted brands and often usurp them on search rankings.

FTC data shows that the most commonly reported category was imposter scams, with consumers losing more than $2.3 billion to them each year.

Dailymail.com reached out to Etsy, Google and AnyDesk for comment.
His defence is that a medical condition causes him to emit semen on the toilet

A GP accused of putting his semen into cups of coffee that he made for a woman told a jury today that he did not do it and he had no sexual interest in her.

Dr Nicholas Chapman, 55, of Taunton, has pleaded not guilty at Gloucester Crown Court to two charges of trying to engage a woman in sexual activity without her consent between September 12, 2020 and September 12, 2021.

His defence is that he has a medical condition causes him to emit semen when he defecates.

It is his case that he might have got semen on his hands while using the toilet and this could have transferred to the women's cup.

Asked by his barrister Virginia Cornwall if he had put his ejaculate into the cup he said: 'No, I did not place anything in the woman's coffee. I had no sexual interest in her.'

Dr Nicholas Chapman (pictured arriving at court), 55, of Taunton, Somerset, denies two charges of trying to engage a woman in sexual activity without her consent

His defence is that he has a medical condition causes him to emit semen when he defecates

At the start of the trial prosecutor Richard Posner said the woman had contacted police after she discovered a 'suspicious gloopy substance' at the bottom of her cup after the doctor made her a coffee.

'The woman became concerned about the taste of the coffee that Dr Chapman had made her on a number of occasions and she recalls spitting it out,' said Mr Posner.

'On September 13, 2021 she was throwing away the contents when she saw a gloopy substance in the bottom of the cup.'

The prosecutor told the jury that the woman contacted the police and was told to put the evidence in the freezer.

She handed it over to the police three days later to an officer who put the contents into specialised containers. A subsequent laboratory test confirmed that the substance was semen and the DNA evidence led back to Dr Chapman, said the prosecutor.

The woman then told the police that it was not the first occasion when a cup of coffee made for her by Dr Chapman had 'tasted funny'.

The jury was told that Dr Chapman was arrested on September 27, 2021 and in response he said: 'That is one hell of an allegation to make.'

He denied making the woman a cup of coffee that day.

Mr Chapman (pictured) is accused of giving a woman a cup of coffee that contained his semen

In an interview Dr Chapman stated that despite washing his hands in the toilet after he had produced his semen, remnants often remained on his skin and he suggested that the semen could have been unintentionally transferred in this way.

Ms Cornwall told the jury: 'Dr Chapman did not have any sexual interest in this woman and did not behave inappropriately towards her. He denies making the woman her coffee on that day and states that he denies putting anything in her coffee at any time.'

Ms Cornwall concluded: 'Dr Chapman can only assume that somebody else put his semen into the coffee as he collects it on a regular basis and places the contents in plastic bottles and undertakes his own testing of it.'

Dr Chapman went on to tell the jury about his life and career.

'I was born in South Africa and being a doctor was all I ever wanted to do. I was 12 or 13 when I made this decision. I trained to become a GP in this country in 1998 and based myself in Somerset,' he said.

'The discharge when I was defecating began when I was about 16. I thought it was normal.

'But when I had some residue on my trousers, my mother commented about it. She told me it was something I needed to take care of in future.

'In 2013, my partner at that time commented on the smear on the toilet seat that I had left after defecating. Prior to this I would just wipe the residue away.

Gloucester Crown Court (pictured, file image) heard that the woman contacted the police after she found a 'gloopy' substance in her coffee

Dr Chapman was then asked what he believed the fluid he produced actually was.

He replied: 'I thought it was a by-product of defecating. I didn't have a word for it.

He went on: 'I get pain which I describe as being hit in the testicles with a significant pain. I urinate and feel sick and feel hot and cold at the same time. It was diagnosed in 2015 as chronic prostatitis.

'When it first happened I thought I had a urine infection and tested for this. I just knew there was something odd going on down there.

'I then collected the fluid in specimen tubs and tested it using the urine dip sticks. The results stated I had an infection when I felt these types of pains in my body.

'On September 15, 2021, I went to visit friends in Oxford and used a specimen pot while showering and toileting the following day, before heading home that day. This was specimen bottle that police found in my rucksack.'

The trial continues on Monday, June 12.
A 33-year-old woman was found stabbed to death, with her head nearly severed, inside a duffel bag in a Chicago apartment a week after she vanished.

Brittany Battaglia's boyfriend Genesis Silva, 35, has been charged with concealing a homicide as well as a misdemeanor for obstructing an officer in connection to her murder.

Her body was found on Sunday in Silva's bedroom, a block away from her home, according to Cook County prosecutors.

Trace amounts of suspected blood were also found at the home, as well as on a machete owned by Silva, who is a registered sex offender.

Police also reportedly discovered a tarp and garbage bags laid out in the kitchen, cleaning supplies, a paint suit and a note that read: 'Can you ask average time until smell.'

Brittany Battaglia, 33, was found dead on Sunday, a week after going missing when she said she was going to her boyfriend's house

Her boyfriend boyfriend Genesis Silva, 35, has been charged with concealing a homicide as well as a misdemeanor for obstructing an officer in connection to her murder

Her body was found on Sunday stuffed inside a duffel bag in Silva's bedroom in his apartment (pictured), a block away from her home

Two days before Battaglia's body was found, she had told her roommate Quamieshia Greathouse she was going to Silva's house to cook him dinner, as reported by ABC Chicago.

Battaglia's brother AJ told the outlet his sister's phone location was turned off that night, and she was never heard from again.

Greathouse added that she became concerned when Battaglia did not show up to a party she had planned on attending that night.

The couple had been dating for more than a year, she said.

Police stopped Silva near his home on Sunday for a traffic stop and walked him back to his apartment.

Detectives declared it a possible crime scene and instructed Silva to wait outside the apartment while they obtained a search warrant.

He was taken into custody when he tried to get inside the apartment through a rear interior stairway, per police, who say they found two cellphones, two small pocket knives and an ice pick on him.

Battaglia's brother AJ said his sister's phone location was turned off on Friday night, and she was never heard from again

Silva, a convicted sex offender, has been arrested at least five times since 2010

The machete that had blood on it was found in his backpack, and a second machete was found in his car. As a convicted felon, Silva is not allowed to have a machete.

Police say they discovered the body in his bedroom after obtaining the warrant.

Silva pleaded guilty in 2009 to aggravated criminal sexual abuse - a charge that was downgraded from attempted murder and aggravated criminal sexual assault charges.

He has been arrested at least five times since 2010.

Silva has not been charged with murder but prosecutors have not ruled out additional charges.

A public defender assigned to Silva argued the pocket knives and machetes allegedly found on the suspect don't qualify as weapons under state law, and that the items had not been linked to the crime.

He was denied bond during his first court appearance on Thursday and is expected in court again on June 20.

A GoFundMe page set up for Battaglia's family has raised more than $12,000.
A reporter provoked uncontrollable laughter on air when he accidentally told a radio host 'I love you' while he was texting his mother during a live broadcast.

Philip Wegmann, who covers the White House for independent news site RealClearPolitics, appeared on WMAL radio station in Washington D.C. on Thursday afternoon.

The Indiana-native was signing off from an interview with host Chris Stigall, who was promoting one of Wegmann's recent articles when he responded: 'I love you. Thank you.'

Stigall was left shocked and began asking if that really happened before he erupted in laughter and said he had no idea Wegmann was such a 'big fan' and joked that the 'smoke was getting to everybody.'

Wegmann took to Twitter to explain he got a text from his mother Elizabeth while the segment was wrapping up and he accidently said what he was typing out loud.

Reporter Philip Wegmann provoked uncontrollable laughter on air when he accidentally told a radio host 'I love you' while he was texting his mother during a live broadcast

Wegmann was texting his mother Elizabeth when he told WMAL radio host Chris Stigall 'I love you' and he erupted with laughter and said he had no idea Wegmann was such a 'big fan'

The reporter was discussing politics news stories on the radio show before the slip.

Stigall was sharing his latest article and said: 'And the most recent piece today went to print, "Mike Pence takes the fight to Trump. Thank you, Phil, very much. Great to catch up.'

But Wegmann, who was in the middle of texting his mother Elizabeth, responded: 'I love you. Thank you,' before their call ended.

The radio host was left shocked and confused and he said: ' Uh did he just say he loved me, Dave?

'Did I just hear Philip say he loved me? Did he think he was talking to his wife for a minute?

'I could swear I just heard him say, I love you. Did he not just say that? Must be a big fan. I had no idea Philip Wegmann was such a Chris Stigall fan.'

Wegmann then pointed to the huge cloud of smoke from the Canadian wildfires which have engulfed cities in America as one reason for the reporter's declaration of love.

He joked: 'Its the smoke. I think the smokes getting to everybody. Seriously, could we get the tape of that?

'I wanna replayIve never had a guest actually say that in closing. I love you. Sorry, Phil. Im married. This is very uncomfortable.'

Wegmann took to Twitter to explain his choice of words and revealed he was texting his mother at the time and accidently read what he was typing out loud.

Wegmann took to Twitter to explain his choice of words and revealed he was texting his mother at the time and accidently read what he was typing out loud

'During a radio interview, as the show was wrapping, I got a text from my mother,' he wrote.

'The host started to say "thanks for joining us," and rather than going with the usual "thanks for having me," I accidentally said what I was texting...

'Out loud, on air, I replied, "Love you too."

'I am a very serious journalist.'

Stigall then addressed it again after a break for the traffic and weather reports and said he spoke with Wegmann about it.

'What I didnt know, Philip Wegmann, who we were just talking to a little while ago from RealClearPolitics, my guest, hes apparently an enormous fan,' he said.

'And I was a little taken aback, wasnt sure how to respond when he shared with me very candidly his open feelings for me here live moments ago on WMAL. Take a listen again.'

He then played Wegmann's outburst again and burst out laughing.

'During the break we checked in with Phil to make sure we heard him correctly,' Stigall explained to listeners.

'He texted an expletive and then said, "I was reading a text from my mother!"'

The radio host began to laugh even more and said: 'Its all right, Phil. I am a married man, but I love you too.'
Bosses at the Coconut Tree restaurant chain have failed to pay their 200 staff this month after they were unable to increase the company's overdraft balance.

An email sent to staff said the company was struggling with the high cost of goods and had 'exhausted all UK borrowing options' after 'accruing losses', according to the BBC.

Payments to workers are expected to be paid by 12 June after they were delayed due to 'unforeseen costs to the business'.

The company is now working on new funding options after a 'final battle with the bank to increase the overdraft ended in vain,' the email said.

One employee told the BBC he is owed more than 1,500, which has made him 'extremely stressed'.

Bosses at the Coconut Tree restaurant chain have failed to pay their 200 staff this month after they were unable to increase the company's overdraft balance

He added that staff were not notified about the delay in wages until the day after pay day and he is worried it won't be paid 'for some time'.

The Coconut Tree is a Sri Lankan restaurant chain with nine restaurants around the UK in Reading, Oxford, Cheltenham, Cardiff, Bristol, Bournemouth, Bath and Birmingham.

Its restaurants have won a number of awards including Best Bar 2021/22 in the Bristol Life Awards and Best Restaurant and Bar in 2018 at the Cheltenham Business Awards.
The victim was rushed to hospital where he was pronounced dead, and the other assailant has been charged with murder

Two men broke out into a frantic melee in the Chelsea district, where one of the men was stabbed in the chest

A man was fatally stabbed in a horror street brawl in the middle of a Manhattan street Friday morning

A frantic brawl on the streets of Manhattan ended in bloodshed when a man was stabbed to death by a homeless sex offender Friday morning, police said.

The horror unfolded at around 8am in the popular Chelsea neighborhood, where two men violently clashed on the street surrounded by morning commuters.

The attacker, Nisean Graves, 34, was seen in the furious melee grappling with an unnamed victim, 36, moments before he stabbed him to death.

At some point during the fighting, a knife was pulled and Graves stabbed the other man in the chest. Paramedics rushed him to nearby Bellevue Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The victim was stabbed in the chest several times after a wild brawl on the streets of New York

Manhattan's Seventh Avenue was rocked by a fatal stabbing Friday morning

Police said Graves was arrested without incident and taken into custody, where he was charged with murder.

The 34-year-old is a registered sex offender who spent nine years in prison for attempted rape, according to prison records.

The fighting broke out at the crosswalk of West 29th Street and Seventh Avenue. It is unclear what caused the brawl to begin.

Police believe the victim had been in a separate altercation with another man moments before the stabbing ensued, according to AMNY.

Eyewitness Angel Aviles told ABC7: 'When I went to the corner, the guy was already on the floor bleeding. And the cops were trying to resuscitate him.'

Cops have a suspect in custody while investigations into the horror stabbing are ongoing

Morning commuters watched on in horror as the fighting broke out at around 8am

Police treated the victim at the scene, but he was later pronounced dead in hospital

Witnesses to the tragedy described seeing the attack unfold before their eyes.

'The homeless man had a knife and the other gentleman without the shirt was just ducking the knife,' a local told the New York Post.

'It wasnt a very big knife. But the guy [victim] wasnt holding anything back he was standing his ground.'

A laundromat worker who witnessed the stabbing said the victim died in the middle of the street.

'He was already dead before he could get to the hospital,' he said.

'Blood poured out... he fell down in seconds and lots of police showed up. I've never seen blood like that, it was like a movie.'

At the time the stabbing erupted, police were already investigating a separate incident on Seventh Avenue and arrived on the scene quickly.

Investigations into the incident are ongoing.
A physics lesson in Norway where teachers encouraged teenage pupils to walk barefoot across hot coals went disastrously wrong when seven children ended up in hospital with burns.

An investigation has been launched after the fire-walking 'experiment' during a physics class, which parents say they were never consulted about.

Some of the injured students  all boys  had to be given morphine for the pain following the stunt, which their physics teacher and headmaster also participated in.

One parent of a 17-year-old student told MailOnline that the first they knew of the fire walk was when their son called from the school and had to be taken to hospital for 2nd degree burns and heavy blistering on the soles of his feet after walking on the 500C embers.

'We were never consulted about this,' said the parent, who declined to be named, 'and the school seemed to brush off our objections by saying 'the pupils all agreed', which is not good enough.'

An investigation has been launched after the fire-walking 'experiment' during a physics class, which parents say they were never consulted about

Some of the injured students  all boys  had to be given morphine for the pain following the stunt, which their physics teacher and headmaster also participated in

Physics teacher Vidar Furholt (pictured) also participated in the fire-walking 'experiment'

The headmaster Karl Roar Vigmostad (pictured), has announced an inquiry  into the fire walk he personally took part in

Now the headmaster of St Olav's secondary school in Stavanger, Norway, Karl Roar Vigmostad, has announced an inquiry  into the fire walk he personally took part in.

A group of boys in the mixed physics class proposed the experiment to test a scientific phenomenon called the Leidenfrost effect, which some scientists believe occurs during firewalking.

At high temperatures, water vapour is said to form a protective layer, lessening the chance of injury but other experts believe water can make pieces of the burning embers stick to the soles of the feet.

In any case, according to one parent, the boys' suggestion that they should dip their feet in cold water before stepping onto the coals was overruled at the last minute by physics teacher Vidar Furholt.

According to the parent, Mr Furholt, who performed the fire walk last, along with Mr Vigmostad, received blisters himself as a result, but made light of them the next day.

'They also suggested in their proposal that a first aid kit should be on hand, but it wasn't,' said the parent. 'The nearest one was in the headmaster's office. We had to find a doctor to get approval to take our son to the hospital's burns unit, where he was given a double dose of morphine.

'The doctors said the blisters should heal, but the biggest fear is that they might become infected. In my opinion the school behaved very irresponsibly. It's all been very upsetting.'

Headmaster Mr Vigmostad told local paper Stavanger Aftenblad following the incident on Thursday: 'This went wrong  it's not good. We take this episode seriously'.

He added: 'It's too early to say what happened. Our first priority was taking care of and following up the students.

'We will investigate more closely and discover why it ended the way it did. There is much to learn from such an incident. '

He told the newspaper that no ambulance was called to the school and students were encouraged to see a doctor themselves and the school helped to facilitate that by contacting the local hospital.'

MailOnline contacted Mr Vigmostad for comment.
A Texas businessman at the center of the scandal that led to the historic impeachment of state Attorney General Ken Paxton has been hit with a federal indictment.

Real estate developer Nate Paul, 36, was charged Friday with eight counts of making false statements while seeking loans from mortgage lenders in 2017 and 2018.

The federal indictment of Paul is the result of a years-long FBI investigation - a probe Paxton involved his office in, setting off a chain of events that ultimately led to his impeachment and suspension from office last month.

Paxton, a Republican, was impeached on 20 articles last month by the state's GOP-led House, amid allegations that he took bribes and abused his powers to assist Paul in a variety of ways.

Paul did not enter a plea during his initial appearance in an Austin federal court nor visibly react as the charges against him were read.

Texas real estate developer Nate Paul, 36, was charged Friday with eight counts of making false statements while seeking loans from mortgage lenders in 2017 and 2018

Ken Paxton, a Republican, was impeached on 20 articles last month by the state's GOP-led House, amid allegations that he took bribes and abused his powers to assist Paul

He entered the federal courtroom shackled and wearing jeans, a blue shirt and Nikes, and was released ahead of trial, but ordered to surrender his passport and inform the court of any travel outside Texas.

One of Paul's lawyers, David Gerger, said his client may comment after his court appearance. Dan Cogdell, a defense attorney for Paxton, said Thursday that he had no information on the arrest.

Paul is accused of overstating his assets and understating his liabilities while seeking loans. In some cases, prosecutors said, Paul told banks he had $18 million in an account when he had less than $13,000.

In another case laid out in the 23-page indictment, Paul is accused of having $28 million in liabilities but giving a credit union in 2018 a far lower number,

FBI agents examining Pauls troubled real estate empire searched his Austin offices and palatial home in 2019.

The next year, eight of Paxton's top deputies reported the attorney general to the FBI on allegations of bribery and abuse of office, including for hiring an outside lawyer to examine the developers claims of wrongdoing by federal agents.

The allegations by Paxtons staff prompted an FBI investigation, which remains ongoing, and are central to 20 articles of impeachment overwhelmingly approved by the GOP-led state House of Representatives. They include abuse of public trust, unfitness for office and bribery.

The impeachment accuses Paxton of using his office to help Paul over his unproven claims of an elaborate conspiracy to steal $200 million of the developers properties.

Nate Paul, right, attends the 2011 Texas Inaugural Celebration at the Palmer Events Center in Austin, Texas. Paul was charged in a federal indictment unsealed on Friday

Nate Paul allegedly employed a woman with whom Paxton had an extramarital affair and paid for expensive renovations to the attorney general's million-dollar Austin home

The bribery counts say that in return the developer employed a woman with whom Paxton had an extramarital affair and paid for expensive renovations to the attorney generals million-dollar Austin home.

Paxton's lawyers sought to rebut the latter claim this week by releasing a bank statement that included a 2020 wire transfer purportedly showing Paxton, and not a donor, paying more than $120,000 for a home renovation. But the document raised new questions about the mens dealings.

The wire transfer was dated Oct. 1, 2020 - the same day Paxtons deputies signed a letter informing the head of human resources at the Texas attorney generals office that they had reported their boss to the FBI.

The $121,000 payment was to Cupertino Builders, whose manager had done work for Paul and had an email address with his company, state corporation and court records show.

Paul has faced numerous lawsuits from creditors and business partners over the years, with several of his companies filing for bankruptcy or being placed under the supervision of court-appointed overseers.

The impeachment accuses Paxton of using his office to help Paul over his unproven claims of an elaborate conspiracy to steal $200 million of the developers properties

Last year, one of those receivers wrote in a report that Cupertino Builders was used for 'fraudulent transfers' from Paul's business.

Paul has denied bribing Paxton. The attorney general has also broadly denied wrongdoing and said he expects to be acquitted during an impeachment trial in the state Senate, where his wife is a member.

The Senate will set its own rules for a trial that has little precedent, given that Paxton is just the third sitting official in Texas history to be impeached. The proceeding is set begin no later than Aug. 28.

Paxton was separately indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, though he has yet to stand trial.
Vladimir Putin has reportedly cancelled a major press conference until the Russian military situation is 'more stable' - as a huge Ukrainian counter attack gets under away.

The Russian president was set to carry out the annual conversation in June but is said to have pushed it back for months.

Russian news source Kommersant cited sources within the Kremlin alleging the chat could be postponed until December.

They said the live forum would be delayed until the 'Russian military situation is more stable'.

Putin was set to hold the news conference early this month after Russian forces allegedly captured Bakhmut, analysts at the institute for the Study of War think-tank told Sky News.

Putin has reportedly cancelled a major press conference until the Russian military situation is 'more stable' - as a huge Ukrainian counter attack gets under away

The postponement of the press conference reportedly comes after Ukraine launched its counteroffensive (File image)

But the planned attack in the eastern region failed and became drawn out until Wagner thugs intervened.

READ MORE: Putin reveals he will deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus in less than a month as he tells Lukashenko 'everything is going to plan' Advertisement

'It indicates that the Kremlin may perceive the capture of Bakhmut as an insufficient informational victory to compensate for the overall unstable Russian military situation in Ukraine,' the experts said.

'It further illustrates Putin's decline from a seemingly involved and strong leader to one more often portrayed as minutely involved in small infrastructure projects.'

Meanwhile, anti-Putin rebels have been causing havoc in the leader's backyard. His occupied cities in Ukraine have also come under attack.

A possible British-supplied Storm Shadow missile is said to have hit the Berdiansk port in Russian-occupied Ukraine, causing 'destruction'.

Now Putin's once unshakable grip on power is in question - with potential successors starting to close in on him.

Battles began raging across Ukraine's front lines this week, suggesting Ukraine's long-awaited counter-offensive was finally underway.

The new wave of attacks could significantly undermine Putin as fear starts to spread among the Russian elite and the people who previously considered themselves protected.
A back bear spotted wondering the streets of residential Washington DC on Friday morning has been tranquilized and safely removed by animal experts.

The black bear, nicknamed Franklin, who had caused chaos in Brookland, Northeast Washington, was tranquilized by a Humane Rescue Alliance employee around 10:20 Friday morning.

The black bear, more frequently found in the more rural parts of Maryland and Virginia, was spotted by residents wandering the streets and climbing the trees of their neighborhoods.

Sightings were reported to law enforcement, who arrived at the bear's location around 9am, before asking neighbors to keep their distance to half a street back, according to the Washington Post.

Franklin was sat in a tree and scratching his back on a branch, while police and the fire service waited for him to come down.

The black bear, nicknamed Franklin, caused chaos in Brookland, Northeast Washington

'Yall about to get him?' one neighbor is reported to have asked a D.C. police officer.

'Well,' the officer replied, 'were going to try to get him down.'

At around 9:50 Franklin decided to leave the tree, police blared their sirens in an attempt to keep him in eyesight.

Police then scrambled to get intrigued onlookers to safety telling neighbors: 'Its time to go. Secure yourselves in your homes,' he said. 'The bear is loose.'

He was soon tranquilized in a local's front yard, and placed in a secure cage after falling asleep.

Chris Schindler, vice president of field services at Humane Rescue Alliance said the bear was male and likely weighs more than 200 pounds.

He praised authorities for handling the situation successfully including waiting for the correct equipment including the cage to arrive before tranquilizing.

'I think it was incredibly successful. We had a great turn out and show from a multitude of district agencies,' he said.

Sightings were reported to law enforcement, who arrived at the bear's location around 9am

Franklin was soon tranquilized in a local's front yard, and placed in a secure cage

Black bears are more populous in rural areas of Maryland and Virginia

Black bears but are occasionally seen in suburbs especially in the summer months as youngster search for food and new territory

'Without all of those pieces, we would have had an issue.'

One resident, Miss Lilly, who saw the bear posted a video of him running across the street and behind a home to Twitter.

'I just saw a Black Bear in DC. 14 St, NE and Monroe.Please be careful!!!! I call[ed] 911 to make them aware and they were calling pest control' she wrote.

Paige Pearson, a spokeswoman with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, said the bear was 'probably out looking for food or his mom and just got a little turned around.'

'I would assume it just got confused and walked away,' she said.

Then 'when everybody started showing up, he probably got scared and ran up in the tree.'

Black bears are more populous in rural areas of Maryland and Virginia but are occasionally seen in suburbs in the summer months as youngster search for food and new territory.
Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan said Friday an FBI agent had voiced 'strong concerns' and revealed 'several unusual features' in the Department of Justice's raid on Mar-a-Lago.

The DOJ indicted Donald Trump on Thursday on charges related to his handling of classified documents. Three days earlier the committee did a transcribed interview with Steven D'Antuono, the former assistant director in charge of the FBI's Washington field office.

D'Antuono, one of the most senior agents in charge' of the raid told the committee he was frustrated the FBI was going to be left 'holding the bag again' with the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago.

Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan said Friday an FBI agent had voiced 'strong concerns' and revealed 'several unusual features' in the Department of Justice's raid on Mar-a-Lago

D'Antuono laid out several abnormalities in the raid, including first that the Miami field office did not handle it - headquarters instead assigned the Washington, D.C., Field Office to carry out the warrant.

D'Antuono said he had 'absolutely no idea' why the decision was made. He also noted that the FBI would not wait for Trump's attorney to show up before conducting the search. He said the FBI should have tried to work with the attorney to get consent to search the residence before conducting the search.

D'Antuono said he believed either Attorney General Merrick Garland or FBI Director Christopher Wray made the decision to seek the warrant 'despite opposition from the line agents' working the case.

D'Antuono also noted the FBI did not assign a U.S. attorney's office to the matter.

Trump has been indicted on seven federal charges - including conspiracy, a violation of the Espionage Act, and classified documents retention - related to the documents he took with him after the left the White House.

Trump's most recent charge - which he has called a persecution - marks the first time in U.S. history that a former president has faced federal charges.

As Republicans insist the indictment is politically motivated, the White House insisted Friday that it had no prior knowledge of the indictment and President Biden said he had not spoken to Garland about the matter.

'I have not spoken to him at all and I'm not going to speak with him. And I have no comment on that.'

The charges against Trump include: conspiracy to obstruct justice; withholding a document or record; corruptly concealing a document or record; and concealing a document in a federal investigation.

Some of the charges have a maximum sentence of 20 years.
President Joe Biden gave a 'no comment' when peppered with questions about former President Donald Trump's federal indictment during a community college tour in North Carolina Friday.

Biden was getting a tour of the robotics lab at Nash Community College when he made his first remark on the history-making indictment that Trump himself revealed Thursday night.

'I have no comment at all,' Biden said, as reporters were being rushed out of the room. He had ignored several shouted questions earlier in the day.

The president later said he had not spoken to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who handed over two Trump-related probes to Special Counsel Jack Smith.

'I have not spoken to him at all and Im not going to speak with him. And I have no comment on that,' Biden said.

Earlier, his deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton also gave an assortment of no comments on board Air Force One en route to his two North Carolina stops.

She also revealed that Biden learned about the Trump news just like every other Americans - by watching the news.

President Joe Biden gave a 'no comment' when peppered with questions about former President Donald Trump's federal indictment during a community college tour in North Carolina Friday

DailyMail.com had asked her if she could comment on Republican concerns about the Trump indictment coming out the same day House Republicans were given access to an FBI document in which a source alleged a Burisma executive said Biden and his son Hunter were paid $5 million each to get an investigation dropped.

'Again, we're not going to comment on this,' she said. 'I will tell you, though, that - and confirm, as we've said overnight, that the president, senior staff found out just like everybody else last night.'

'No advance knowledge that this was coming. Found out from news reports, just like everybody else across America,' she added.

As soon as Dalton appeared on the plane to gaggle with reporters she was asked about the indictment news.

'We are just not going to comment on this case and would refer you to the DOJ, which runs its criminal investigations independently,' she said.

She also wouldn't comment on GOP concerns that the Department of Justice has become politicized under Biden.

'Look, this is a president who respects the rule of law and has said that since day one,' she noted. 'That's precisely why we're not commenting here. He believes in respecting the independence of the DOJ and protecting the integrity of their processes. And that's, again, why we'll leave it there.'

Dalton also wouldn't comment on whether the president was comfortable with Democrats fundraising off the Trump news.

'I'm simply not going to commet on this,' she said, with DailyMail.com referencing a tweet from Hillary Clinton sent out earlier today.

The former Democratic nominee was raising money by selling hats that said 'But Her Emails,' a reference to her own scandal involving classified documents, in which the FBI left her uncharged.
A judge has blasted the 'staggering' lack of insight of a group of climate protesters over the effects of their protests and accused them of alienating people from their cause.

Judge Stephen Mooney made the comments as he handed out suspended jail sentences to four climate protesters who brought a busy interchange of the M25 to a standstill on 13 September 2021.

The judge also ordered them to pay 1,800 in costs and carry out up to 150 hours of unpaid work for their actions.

The four activists, including Cathy Eastburn, 55, the wife of a former Transport for London (TfL) boss, Benedict Plowden, were convicted of causing a public nuisance after they walked out into a carriageway at the Swanley interchange.

Eastburn, along with Insulate Britain spokesperson, Cameron Ford, 32, Alexander Rodger, 33, and Venetia Carter, 58 were arrested at the scene.

A judge has blasted the 'staggering' lack of insight of a group of climate protesters, which included Cathy Eastburn (pictured), 55, the wife of a former Transport for London (TfL) boss, Benedict Plowden

Eastburn and three others were convicted of causing a public nuisance after they walked out into a carriageway at the Swanley interchange

Venetia Carter, Cathy Eastburn, Alexander Rodger and Cameron Ford, pictured outside Hove Crown Court, were arrested at the scene on 13 September 2021

The chaos at Junction 3 left drivers during the height of rush hour furious and upset and caused huge backlog of traffic on roads for miles around.

The group unfurled banners and then sat down in the road while two went and handed out leaflets explaining their actions to angry motorists.

At one stage a distraught woman who was on her way to hospital to visit a dying loved one broke down in tears and pleaded to be let through the blockade.

Eastburn later described the distress caused to motorists as 'collateral damage.'

Sentencing them Judge Mooney said he found their lack of insight into the effect their protest had on people 'staggering'.

'Whilst I do not doubt the sincerity of your beliefs I cannot help to observe that you all lack any degree of insight as to how your behaviour is regarded by those whose lives you affect.

'It is simply staggering to hear your answer to the question of how you felt about preventing people from being able to see their dying relatives in hospital, or keeping important appointments namely that they were effectively collateral damage and your treatment of them was equivalent to breaking of ribs when administering CPR.

'I would be surprised if that approach has in any way encouraged support for your cause amongst those who might otherwise have been sympathetic to it.'

The protest was planned to coincide with the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow.

As traffic slowed at a red lights at Junction 3 a group of a dozen protesters walked out into the carriageway.

Protest group Insulate Britain stopping traffic at Junction 3 of the M25 in Swanley in 2021

Cathy Eastburn being arrested on Junction 3 of the M25 in September 2021

Protestors sat in the back of a police van after being arrested during the M25 protest

Kent Police was hugely stretched on the day with just five police officers available to deal with the incident.

Due to the immediate impact on traffic police officers were hugely delayed in responding to the incident.

Motorists were left shouting in anger and others broke down in tears as they tried to get children to school.

Others screamed insults at the group branding them 'pr***s' and 'f***ing idiots' as they were trapped at the interchange.

As a result the four protesters were not arrested and removed from the road for almost three hours.

At the trial the court was told the protesters chose the Interchange to cause 'maximum disruption' during rush hour.

Alex Young, prosecuting, said: 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions. For these protestors their good intentions and their view of the world and what needed to be done trumped all other considerations.

'The protesters did not have a mandate. No-one had voted for it. They did not give people at the roadside a choice.

'They could have handed out leaflets and asked people if they wanted to join protest but they didn't. They decided that they knew best and no democratic society can tolerate that.'

A jury took less than 30 minutes to find the group of four guilty of causing a public nuisance after a trial in May.

Today the four protesters were all handed suspended prison sentences, ordered to each pay pay 1,800 costs and told carry out unpaid work.

Police speaking to one another as protesters block an M25 junction in 2021

Police arresting a member of the protest group on the M25

Speaking in court Ford said: 'By stepping onto the motorway, it showed how terribly this government has failed to care for us.

'By stepping onto the M25 it showed how desperate we were for change. Right or wrong we tried something and it will be for future generations to judge us.'

Carter said: 'Peaceful protest is a vital part of a functioning democracy. With an increasingly hostile legal climate for protest, I believe the manifest failure of the government to safeguard citizens from present and future harm caused by climate breakdown is in danger of going substantially unchallenged.'

Rodgers and Ford were both jailed for six months suspended for 18 months, told to pay 1,800 in costs and ordered to carry out 150 hours of unpaid after they both admitted a further offence on September 15 2021.

Carter and Eastburn were both sentenced to two months imprisonment suspended for 18 months, told to pay 1,800 in costs and to carry out 100 hours of unpaid work.

Hove Crown Court heard all the activists were serial offenders and had carried out a number of previous protests.

Eastburn, a part-time musician and sound therapist, already has convictions for trespass, obstructing and a railway engine, interrupting court proceedings and criminal damage.

Rodger also had four previous convictions while Ford and Carter each had one previous conviction.

Judge Mooney told them: 'I told all of you from the very beginning that if you chose to use the criminal courts as a forum to publicise your view it would come at a cost.'
Police said it did not appear that someone tampered with the room, but everyone in the building has access to it

A woman was found dead inside a trash compactor inside a residential building in the Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem.

The unidentified woman was found inside a second-floor room where the compactor was located shortly before 10am Friday, a New York Police Department (NYPD) spokesperson told DailyMail.com.

The victim was found naked, the spokesperson said, it is unclear if she was a resident of the building. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

It is also unclear who found the woman who was in her 30s.

She was found with no signs of trauma and police told DailyMail.com it did not appear that someone tampered with the room, but everyone in the building has access to the room.

The NYPD said the investigation is ongoing.

The unidentified woman was found inside a second-floor room where a trash compactor was located shortly before 10am, a New York Police Department (NYPD) spokesperson told DailyMail.com on Friday

Police where seen taking pictures of the outside of the building. The victim was found naked, the spokesperson said, it is unclear if she was a resident of the building. She was pronounced dead at the scene

She was found with no signs of trauma and police told DailyMail.com it did not appear that someone tampered with the room, but everyone in the building has access to the room

The forensic team and the Medical Examiner's Officer were seen on the scene

She was found inside the room with a compactor (stock image)

The woman's cause of death will be determined by the city's Medical Examiner's Office.

Crime is up 1.4 percent in the Big Apple. Felony assaults and grand larceny auto are also up 8.3 and 16.5 percent, respectively.

The 126th Street building was built in 1980 and has 255 units. It currently has 347 open violations against it, including complaints for pests, mold, and hot water, according to Who Owns What in NYC.

DaliyMail.com has attempted to contact Manhattan North Management Company, which owns the building, for comment.

Earlier this month in a nearby area of Harlem, a group of men were pictured taking drugs out in the open near La Marqueta marketplace.

Photos and video of the men lying on Park Avenue between 115th E Street and 116 E Street outside the small but popular marketplace show them casually using needles to inject drugs into their arms and over the weekend.

Earlier this month in a nearby area of Harlem, a group of men were pictured taking drugs out in the open near La Marqueta marketplace

One of the men removed his shoe so he could inject his foot in order to get high at the small but popular marketplace

The following day, seven other men were pictured at the same spot taking drugs together

The men sit underneath the railway surrounded by bags of their belongings and an overturned Citi bike, and photos of the block the following day show even more men shooting up drugs at the site.

Although the area is primarily a shopping district, many families pass by the marketplace as it borders the Cooke School Institute, which teaches special education students from ages 5 to 21, as well as the P.S. 57 and and P.S. 155 Elementary Schools.

The marketplace is also nearby the New York City Housing Authority's East Harlem office and the East Harlem Neighborhood Health Action Center.

The scene comes despite NYC Mayor Eric Adam's vow to crackdown on homelessness and crime in the city, which is up nearly 40 percent from last year.
An explosive court document contains blistering allegations against former President Donald Trump, who has been indicted on 37 counts for alleged federal crimes related to his mishandling of classified documents he kept in the bathrooms, ballrooms and other nooks of his Mar-a-Lago estate.

According to the indictment, Trump allegedly instructed his attorneys to hide information from the Department of Justice, suggesting they 'pluck out' damaging classified documents.

It also reveals a bombshell recounting of a conversation during which Trump showed members of his staff a highly-sensitive military 'plan of attack' document given to the former president by a senior military official.

The indictment goes on to allege Trump instructed his closest aide to lie, admitted that some of the documents in his possession were in fact not declassified and more. The former president is expected in federal court next week regarding the matter that Special Counsel Jack Smith said Friday will move quickly through a 'speedy trial.'

DailyMail.com breaks down some of the most stunning revelations included in the unsealed document.

Trump 'stored his boxes containing classified documents .. in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room,' according to the indictment which contains pictures

In the Mar-a-Lago storage room, there were 11 documents marked 'Top Secret,' 36 with 'Secret' markings and 28 were labeled as 'Confidential'

'Isn't it better if there are no documents'

'I don't want anybody looking, I don't want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don't, I don't want you looking through my boxes,' a conversation by Trump included in the indictment states.

'Well what if we, what happens if we just don't respond at all or don't play ball with them?' Trump allegedly said, referring to the Department of Justice.

'Wouldn't it be better if we just told them we don't have anything here?' Trump is alleged to have continued according to the document.

'Well look isn't it better if there are no documents.'

Details on highly confidential military 'plan of attack'

According to the indictment, Trump shared a military 'plan of attack' with aides and an outside writer and publisher in July 2021, all who did not hold security clearances at the time, and despite knowing it should not be publicized.

'Look what I found, this was [the Senior Military Official's] plan of attack, read it and just show...it's interesting,' Trump said according to the court document.

'I'll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack [Country A]. Isn't it amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look - This was him. They presented me this - this is off the record, but - they presented me this. This was him,' the indictment recounts.

'This totally wins my case, you know,' he continued.

He also admitted that the document he was showing was 'highly confidential.'

'See as president I could have declassified it,' Trump continued.

'Now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret,' the former president admitted.

The indictment also states that in September 2021 at the Bedminster Club, Trump showed 'a representative of his political action committee who did not possess a security clearance a classified map related to a military operation and told the representative that he should not be showing it to the representative.'

He also said that the PAC representative should 'not get too close.'

'If there's anything really bad in there, pluck it out'

The indictment contains a passage recounting a conversation between Trump and one of his attorneys during which he seemingly instructed him to throw out 'bad' documents.

According to the indictment, Trump 'made a funny motion as though - well okay why don't you take them with you to your hotel room and if there's anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.'

'And that was the motion that he made. He didn't say that,' the attorney allegedly said in the recount of the conversation.

Trump suggested his lawyers 'hide or destroy' documents

According to the court document, Trump strongly suggested that his lawyers 'hide or destroy documents' sought by the Florida grand jury subpoena for information in March 2022.

Prosecutors write in the indictment that the former president told his lawyers to tell the DOJ that they 'didn't have' the specific documents that were detailed in the subpoena.

Documents about key allies, including the U.K., spilled on bathroom floor

According to the indictment, Trump's alleged co-conspirator Nauta texted a different Trump staffer a picture of documents containing classified information that were spewed all over a bathroom floor.

'I opened the door and found this,' including two photographs of the spilled documents, at least one of which contained classified documents.

The indictment states that the specific documents were related to intelligence between the 'Five Eyes' countries.

Those countries represent an 'intelligence-sharing alliance' between the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Trump is shown golfing with Rep. Carlos Gimenez in the first picture of the former president since the unsealing of the indictment Friday

Trump allegedly stored boxes of classified documents in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom

Documents stacked up by a toilet in the ballroom bathroom

Trump stored boxes of classified documents all around his Mar-a-Lago home.

He 'stored his boxes containing classified documents .. in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room,' according to the indictment which contains pictures.

'From January through March 15, 2021, some of Trump's boxes were stored in the Mar-a-Lago Club's White and Gold Ballroom, in which events and gatherings took place. Trump's boxes were for a time stacked on the ballroom's stage,' the indictment states.

17 documents were marked 'Top Secret'

According to the indictment, FBI agents seized a total of 102 documents from Mar-a-Lago last August.

In the Storage Room, there were 11 were marked 'Top Secret,' 36 with 'Secret' markings and 28 were labeled as 'Confidential.'

In addition, a total of 27 documents were taken from Trump's office - including six marked 'Top Secret,' 18 'Secret' and three 'Confidential.'

'Nuclear capability' document found

One of the top secret documents from June 2020 contained information 'concerning nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,' according to the indictment.

Trump's aide lied to the FBI about moving boxes

The indictment states that Trump's White House aide Walt Nauta falsely stated to the FBI in a May 2022 interview that he was not aware of Trump's boxes of classified documents.

When asked directly about whether he knew where Trump's boxes were stored, Nauta replied: 'I wish, I wish I could tell you. I don't know. I don't - I honestly just don't know.'

The indictment goes on to state that Nauta removed 'approximately 64 boxes' from the storage room to Trump's residence.

It also incriminates Trump for directing Nauta to move the boxes from the Storage Room himself, before his attorney could conduct a search.

Nauta 'did in fact know that the boxed in Pine Hall had come from the Storage Room, as Nauta himself, with the assistance of Trump Employee 2, had moved the boxes from the Storage Room to Pine hall,' the indictment states.

'Nauta had observed the boxed in and moved them to various locations at the Mar-a-Lago Club,' it continues.

Praising Hillary Clinton's lawyer

The document claims Trump praised the attorney who deleted 30,000 of Hillary Clinton's emails.

During the 2016 election campaign, Trump repeatedly demanded that Clinton be locked up for deleting the emails from her private server.

An FBI investigation found her handling of classified information to have been 'extremely careless', but not criminal.

'He was great, he did a great job,' Trump allegedly said of her lawyer, adding 'because they basically dealt with her scheduling and her going to the gym and her beauty appointments. And he was great.'

'She didn't get in any trouble because he said that he was the one who deleted him.'

The indictment states that Trump's White House aide Walt Nauta falsely stated to the FBI in a May 2022 interview that he was not aware of Trump's boxes of classified documents

Special Counsel Jack Smith said Friday the case against Trump will move quickly through a 'speedy trial'

What are 'the beautiful mind paper boxes'?

While discussing where to move Trump's boxes to make room for office space, one employee texted another: 'Anything that's not the beautiful mind paper boxes can definitely go to storage'.

It may be a reference to the 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind, a biopic of the math genius John Nash.

Nash analyzes enemy communications for the U.S. government and is handed a secret mission to find patterns or messages in documents.

He becomes obsessive and increasingly paranoid in his quest, covering his wall in papers, and is eventually committed to a psychiatric facility. Later in his career, he wins a Nobel Prize.

Prosecutors throw Trump's previous statements on transparency back at him

Prosecutors write that in August 2016 while on the campaign trail, Trump stated: 'In my administration, I'm going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information.

He made another similar statement in September 2016, saying 'we can't have someone in the Oval Office who doesn't understand the meaning of confidential or classified.'

It it likely the prosecutors included Trump's previous statements on transparency to establish his intent.

Former President Trump is facing 31 counts of charges related to the withholding of national defense information, five counts of concealing the possession of classified documents and two counts - one of which includes his aide Nauta - of making false statements to the FBI.

He called Special Counsel Jack Smith 'Deranged Jack Smith' in a post to his Truth Social following the unsealing.

The former president also suggested the FBI staged a photo-op of the boxes all over Mar-a-Lago.

'Strange! Everything about the boxes was so neat, orderly, and clean. Did the FBI tip over the one box the way they 'staged' the papers on the floor during the raid of Mar-a-Lago, only to apologize after getting caught?'

Trump was golfing Friday with Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., according to the GOP congressman.

Gimenez tweeted out the first picture of the former president since the unsealing of the indictment Friday.
But their emails show them often using racist, homophobic and sexist terms

One of the nation's largest law firms, with past celebrity clients like Kathy Griffin, has released troves of emails that show two of their former partners regularly using racist, homophobic and misogynist language.

Lawyers John Barber, 55, and Jeff Ranen, 45, said they were leaving the Los Angeles law firm Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith last month to build their own 'compassionate firm,' and would be taking over a hundred colleagues with them.

In a press spree, the lawyers portrayed their former firm as a profit-focused business where they were forced to compromise on their values, and said their new office would focus on 'paying it forward.'

The megafirm then hit back last weekend, releasing emails between Barber and Ranen where they repeatedly used inflammatory comments against women, black and Jewish people and gay men, among others.

The emails, seen by the New York Post, stretch back 15 years and show a Superior Court judge being called 'Sugar T***' by Barber and multiple women referred to as 'c****' by Ranen.

The LA law firm where John Barber (left) and Jeff Ranen were once partners released emails showing them repeatedly use vile language over 15 years

When an attorney requested overtime in June 2012, Barber wrote: 'Kill her by anal penetration'

The emails, seen by the New York Post, stretch back 15 years and show a Superior Court judge being called 'Sugar T***' by Barber

The disgraced pair also discussed denying an Asian applicant a job because of his alleged penis size and dismissed another candidate with, 'How about someone whos not a Jew.'

When an attorney requested overtime in June 2012, Barber wrote: 'Kill her by anal penetration.'

In November 2012, Ranen sent an email to Barber noting another partner's 'huge t***.' That partner was one of the lawyers that followed the pair to their new firm, as reported by the Post.

Earlier the same year, Ranen wrote to Barber: 'Gypsy is my new word to describe about half of the minorities in California.'

When Barber was told in November 2013 that a colleague was upset because of a case witness frequent use of the N-word, he replied: 'Got it. N*****. Dont use.' Barber reportedly spelled out the full slur.

Barber used the full slur again in October 2012, and the partners also made frequent use of 'f*****' and other anti LGBT terms.

After the death of George Floyd sparked protests nationally, Ranen emailed Barber saying: 'F****** looters came within a mile and a half. I cant even imagine what it was like living in Larchmont [Los Angeles] in 1992 when the savages decimated Koreatown.'

When Barber was told in November 2013 that a colleague was upset because of a case witness frequent use of the N-word, he replied: 'Got it. N*****. Dont use'

The top LA firm has previously represented celebrity clients like Salt Bae and Kathy Griffin

'The last 72 hours have been the most difficult of our lives, as we have had to acknowledge and reckon with those emails,' Barber and Ranen said in a joint statement where they announced their resignations from the new firm.

'We are ashamed of the words we wrote, and we are deeply sorry.'

Barber and Ranen's planned firm, Barber Ranen, seems to have collapsed following the release of their emails, with chief executive Tim Graves saying the remaining partners will form a new firm.

DailyMail.com has reached out to Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith for comment on this story.

Barber had spent over 25 years at the firm, and Ranen had been there for 20.

The top LA firm has more than 1,600 attorneys in offices around the world; it has previously represented celebrity clients like Salt Bae and Kathy Griffin.
A woman was reportedly dragged by her hair from her car during a terrifying hijacking in Belfast today - before the vehicle was later found on fire.

A young child was in the car during the incident in the Markets area of south Belfast on Friday.

A man reportedly flagged down a woman driving a cream Renault Captur with a black roof on Stewart Street, indicating that she had an issue with her car.

When the driver pulled over to check, she was dragged by her hair from the vehicle by the man.

She and her child were ordered to get out of the car before the man drove off in the direction of the Ormeau Road.

A woman was reportedly dragged by her hair from her car during a terrifying hijacking on Stewart Street (pictured, file image), in the Markets area of Belfast today

The vehicle was found on fire a short time later at nearby Raphael Street.

The man has been described as being about 5ft 6ins tall, of stocky build and was wearing a dark hooded top with the hood up, black trousers and white trainers.

Detective Sergeant David Kitchen said it had been a terrifying experience for the woman and her passengers.

'We have been conducting inquiries in the area and would appeal to anyone with any information or who captured dash-cam footage which could be of assistance to our investigation to contact detectives in Musgrave on 101, quoting reference number 870 09/06/23,' he said.

'A report can be submitted online using our non-emergency reporting form via http://www.psni.police.uk/makeareport/ or you can also contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 or online at http://crimestoppers-uk.org/.'

MailOnline has contacted the Police Service of Northern Ireland for comment.
In the historic federal indictment of Donald Trump unsealed on Friday, prosecutors laid out detailed allegations about how boxes filled with classified information were shuffled around his Mar-a-Lago residence after he left the presidency.

At various times between January 2021 and last August, when the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, the boxes were stored in ballroom, a bathroom, an office space, Trump's bedroom and a storage room, prosecutors say.

The sweeping 37-count indictment paints a grim portrait of Trump's treatment of sensitive information, accusing him of intentionally defying Justice Department demands to return documents he had taken from the White House.

Trump was charged alongside Walt Nauta, an aide and close adviser whom prosecutors say ferried boxes of classified information around Mar-a-Lago, and later lied to investigators about the movement.

The indictment points out that, during the 19 months over which the boxes were moved, stacked, spilled, and shuffled, tens of thousands of guests attended more than 150 events at the Mar-a-Lago club, including weddings, fundraisers and parties.

Prosecutors laid out detailed allegations about how boxes filled with classified information were shuffled around Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence after he left the presidency. At different times, the boxes were stored in the club's ballroom, a storage room, the Pine Room - an entry room in Trump's residence , the business center and the bathroom of the Lake Room

Prosecutors laid out detailed allegations about how boxes filled with classified information were shuffled around his Mar-a-Lago residence after Trump left the presidency

The sweeping 37-count indictment paints a grim portrait of Trump's treatment of sensitive information

Trump has vehemently denied any wrongdoing, and is due to make his first court appearance on Tuesday in federal court in Miami, where the case was filed.

Here is the timeline of the Mar-a-Lago boxes, according to prosecutors:

January 20, 2021

Trump's term as president ended at noon.

As he left office, Trump ordered scores of boxes to be sent from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, his personal residence in Palm Beach, Florida.

Prosecutors say that many of those boxes contained classified documents that he was not authorized to possess after leaving office.

They also note that Mar-a-Lago, in addition to being Trump's residence, is an 'active social club' filled with the comings and goings of thousands of members, employees and guests.

'The Mar-a-Lago Club was not an authorized location for the storage, possession, review, display, or discussion of classified documents,' the indictment states.

'Nevertheless, Trump stored his boxes containing classified documents in various locations at the Mar-a-Lago Club -- including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage space,' it adds.

January 20 to March 15, 2021

'Some' of Trump's boxes were stored in Mar-a-Lago's White and Gold Ballroom, where an evidence photo shows them stacked on the ballroom's stage.

The club's website describes the 'elegant' White & Gold Ballroom as being ideal for 'smaller soirees'.

From January 20 to March 15, 2021 some of Trump's boxes were stored in Mar-a-Lago's White and Gold Ballroom, where this evidence photo shows them stacked on the ballroom's stage

Trump was charged alongside Walt Nauta (above), an aide and close adviser who prosecutors say ferried boxes of classified information around Mar-a-Lago

March 2021

For reasons unspecified in the indictment, Nauta and other employees moved Trump's boxes from the ballroom to the business center at the Mar-a-Lago Club.

April 5, 2021

In a text message, a Trump employee asked another employee about the possibility of moving boxes from business center to storage, so staff could use the business center as an office.

The second employee responded with concern, writing: 'Whoa!! Ok so potus specifically asked Walt for those boxes to be in the business center because they are his 'papers.''

In further text exchanges, the employees agreed to move some of the boxes into 'a little room in the shower where his other stuff is' off the club's Lake Room.

Some of the boxes were then moved from the business center to a bathroom and shower in Mar-a-Lago's Lake Room.

In April 2021, boxes were moved into a bathroom and shower in Mar-a-Lago's Lake Room

May 2021

Trump ordered that a storage room on ground floor of Mar-a-Lago club be cleaned out to store the boxes

The storage room has multiple entries, including one from a hallway that opened on the Mar-a-Lago Club pool patio, through a door that was often unlocked.

The storage room was located near the liquor supply closet, linen room, lock shop and various other rooms.

Also at this point, some boxes are moved to Trump's Bedminster Club in New Jersey, where he typically spends his summers.

Prosecutors say that the Bedminster Club is where Trump displayed and discussed classified records with visitors on two occasions, on July 21, 2021, and again that August or September.

Also in May 2021, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) began demanding Trump turn over presidential records that he had kept after his presidency.

The Presidential Records Act requires that all records created by presidents, as well as vice-presidents, be turned over to NARA immediately at the end of their administrations.

June 24, 2021

Trump's boxes in the bathroom of the Lake Room are moved into the storage room.

More than 80 boxes were kept in the storage room after the move.

On June 24, 2021 Trump's boxes in the bathroom of the Lake Room are moved into this storage room on the first floor of the Mar-a-Lago club

The storage room (above) was located near the liquor supply closet, linen room, lock shop and various other rooms

November 12, 2021

A Trump employee provided Trump a photograph of the Mar-a-Lago storage room so he could see how many of his boxes were stacked against the wall.

November 25, 2021

A Trump employee sent a text to Nauta asking about Trump's work reviewing his boxes in Pine Hall, a room in his private residence at Mar-a-Lago.

'Has he mentioned boxes to you? I delivered some, but I think he may need more. Could you ask if he'd like more in pine hall?' the worker texted.

Nauta replied in three short messages:

'Nothing about boxes yet

He has one he's working on in pine hall

Knocked out 2 boxes yesterday.'

November 29 2021-January 15, 2022

Nauta and other Trump employees are involved in a number of text message conversations about the 'boxes'.

The conversations include discussion about Trump reviewing the contents, and how many of the boxes should be handed over to the National Archives.

On November 21, 2021 a Trump employee provided Trump this photograph of the Mar-a-Lago storage room so he could see how many of his boxes were stacked against the wall.

December 7, 2021

Nauta found boxes spilled in the storage room, including documents with classification markings.

'I opened the door and found this...' Nauta wrote in a text message to another Trump employee, attaching photos of the spilled boxes.

'Oh no oh no,' the other employee replied, adding 'I'm sorry potus had my phone.'

One document bore the header SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY, indicating that the document was only releasable to the Five Eyes intelligence community of the USA, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

December 7, 2021, Nauta found these boxes spilled in the storage room, and texted this photo of the incident to a fellow staffer. Visible classified information was redacted from this photo by the DOJ prior to its release

January 17, 2022

A Trump employee and and Nauta gathered 15 boxes from Trump's residence and took them to a commercial truck for delivery to NARA.

Trump provided only 15 boxes, of which 14 contained a total of 197 documents with classification markings.

They included 98 documents marked Secret, 30 marked Top Secret, and the remainder were marked Confidential.

NARA contacted the Justice Department on February 9 to report the discovery of the classified documents.

On March 30, the FBI opened a criminal investigation into the unlawful retention of classified documents at the Mar-a-Lago Club.

A federal grand jury investigation began the following month and issued a subpoena on May 11.

On March 30, 2022, the FBI opened a criminal investigation into the unlawful retention of classified documents at the Mar-a-Lago Club. A federal grand jury issued a subpoena on May 11

May 22, 2022

Nauta entered the storage room and left approximately 34 minutes later, carrying one of Trump's boxes.

The following day, Trump met with his attorneys to discuss the grand jury subpoena.

According to notes taken by one of the attorneys, Trump made remarks including:

'I don't want anybody looking, I don't want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don't, I don't want you looking through my boxes.'

'What happens if we just don't respond at all or don't play ball with them?'

'Wouldn't it be better if we just told them we don't have anything here?'

Between the May 23 meeting with attorneys and June 2, prosecutors say that Nauta transported 64 boxes from the storage room to Trump's residence.

During the same period, Nauta moved about 30 boxes from the residence to the storage room.

On June 2, one of Trump's attorney's arrived at Mar-a-Lago and reviewed the boxes in the storage room for classified material.

June 3, 2022

After completing his review of the storage room boxes, Trump's attorney handed over to the FBI 38 more documents with classification markings.

But according to the indictment, many of the boxes that Nauta moved out of the storage room prior to the attorney's search were not searched at all for documents responsive to the May 11 subpoena.

At Trump's attorney's handed over the classified documents they found to the FBI, Nauta and other Trump employees were loading some of the boxes onto a plane for Trump's trip north to Bedminster for the summer.

August 8, 2022

Acting on a court-authorized search warrant, an FBI raid recovered 102 more documents with classified markings from Trump's office and a storage room at Mar-a-Lago Club.

The FBI seized 27 documents from Trump's office, including six marked Top Secret, 18 marked Secret, and 3 marked confidential.

From the storage room, the FBI seized another 75 documents, including 11 marked Top Secret, 36 marked Secret, and 28 marked Confidential.
A California realtor has made an incredible discovery of one million pennies while cleaning out his late father-in-law's former home in Los Angeles.

John Reyes and his wife Elizabeth found the pennies in a crawlspace in the basement of her late father Fritz's home in the Pico-Union neighborhood of the city last year.

The family had been cleaning out the home, which had decades-worth of belongings stored in it, for a year before they made the discovery, Reyes told DailyMail.com.

After struggling to find a bank willing to exchange them for cash, he was urged by one manager to look into whether he had a stash of rare pennies worth more than their dollar value.

Reyes has now listed the coins on OfferUp, a popular resale app and website, asking for $25,000 - more than double the $10,000 value in normal currency. 'Someone can buy them and they can go penny hunting,' he said.

Reyes has now listed the coins on OfferUp, a popular resale app and website, asking for $25,000

Realtor John Reyes made the discovery when cleaning out his late father-in-law's former home in Los Angeles, California

Rare coins can make a mint. Last month a coin expert revealed the most valuable pieces he has ever sold at auction include a $12million silver dollar and a set of Lincoln pennies which fetched $7.7 million.

Reyes has had piecemeal offers, but is waiting for someone to take them completely off his hands.

Fritz and his brother, who were both German immigrants, lived in the home for decades until he passed and his brother moved away.

Reyes told DailyMail.com how he is sure Fritz had kept the coins because of their copper value.

In the 1980s, the US Mint anticipated an increase in the price of copper, and so switched to making coins out of zinc in a money-saving move.

'The moment that my father-in-law knew that they were switching over to zinc, then he would have started collecting. That's just the kind of man he was,' said Reyes.

'He never told us they were there but he always said that whenever his time came that we should make sure to go through the house and take our time with it. So he at least gave some hints on some things!'

Reyes said that the family had left the basement until last when cleaning out the home as everyone was tentative to go down there and it was 'full of spiderwebs.'

The house was on a raised foundation, he said, with a crawlspace beneath which was filled with heavy items.

It was when he was pulling out a heavy carpet from inside the crawlspace that he made the discovery.

In the 1980s, the US Mint anticipated an increase in the price of copper, and so switched to making coins out of zinc

Reyes said he is sure his father-in-law had kept the coins because of their copper value



'That's when I saw some rolls of pennies,' he said. 'And as I started to move more stuff out, that's when I found boxes of pennies, and then crates of pennies.'

These crates were so heavy that it took them half a day just to move them to the ground, but beneath they also found old bank bags also filled with coins.

Some of the bags were even lead-sealed by the banks - a handful of which do not even exist anymore.

'I've been told by coin experts not to open the bags as they themselves are valuable,' he told DailyMail.com.

After making the discovery, the family thought they would just cash out and be done with it.

'When I called banks in LA nobody wanted to take them. I thought it would be easy and I would just take a few wheelbarrows in at a time,' Reyes said.

One Wells Fargo branch said they could not accommodate them as it would not fit in the vault.

Their local bank in Ontario, California, did not want to take the pennies either, and urged Reyes and his extended family to go through them and search for any rarities.

'The value is in the uniqueness,' Reyes told KTLA, adding that taking less than their full value would go against the ideals of his father-in-law.
Boris Johnson has quit as an MP tonight over the findings of an investigation into Partygate lawbreaking in Downing Street during the pandemic.

The former Prime Minister, 58, has resigned his seat in Westminster with immediate effect, triggering a by-election.

In his resignation letter he took aim at the Privileges Committee, led by Labour's Harriet Harman, which investigated whether he misled MPs over Partygate.

In a furious 1034-word statement, he slammed the 'kangaroo court' and said he was 'very sorry' to be leaving his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency, which he has represented since 2015.

He added that he believes the outcome means that a 'dangerous and unsettling precedent is being set'.

He also reflected on his time as Mayor of London and Prime Minister, including his pride in 'getting Brexit done'.

Boris Johnson has quit as an MP tonight over the findings of an investigation into Partygate (pictured in September)

Below is Boris Johnson's resignation letter in full.

I have received a letter from the Privileges Committee making it clear - much to my amazement - that they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of parliament.

They have still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons.

They know perfectly well that when I spoke in the Commons I was saying what I believed sincerely to be true and what I had been briefed to say, like any other minister. They know that I corrected the record as soon as possible; and they know that I and every other senior official and minister - including the current Prime Minister and then occupant of the same building, Rishi Sunak - believed that we were working lawfully together.

I have been an MP since 2001. I take my responsibilities seriously. I did not lie, and I believe that in their hearts the Committee know it. But they have wilfully chosen to ignore the truth because from the outset their purpose has not been to discover the truth, or genuinely to understand what was in my mind when I spoke in the Commons.

Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts. This is the very definition of a kangaroo court.

Most members of the Committee - especially the chair - had already expressed deeply prejudicial remarks about my guilt before they had even seen the evidence. They should have recused themselves.

In retrospect it was naive and trusting of me to think that these proceedings could be remotely useful or fair. But I was determined to believe in the system, and in justice, and to vindicate what I knew to be the truth.

The former Prime Minister, 58, has resigned his seat in Westminster with immediate effect, triggering a by-election (pictured in 2019)

It was the same faith in the impartiality of our systems that led me to commission Sue Gray. It is clear that my faith has been misplaced. Of course, it suits the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, and the SNP to do whatever they can to remove me from parliament.

Sadly, as we saw in July last year, there are currently some Tory MPs who share that view. I am not alone in thinking that there is a witch hunt underway, to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result.

My removal is the necessary first step, and I believe there has been a concerted attempt to bring it about. I am afraid I no longer believe that it is any coincidence that Sue Gray - who investigated gatherings in Number 10 - is now the chief of staff designate of the Labour leader.

Nor do I believe that it is any coincidence that her supposedly impartial chief counsel, Daniel Stilitz KC, turned out to be a strong Labour supporter who repeatedly tweeted personal attacks on me and the government.

When I left office last year the government was only a handful of points behind in the polls. That gap has now massively widened.

Just a few years after winning the biggest majority in almost half a century, that majority is now clearly at risk.

Our party needs urgently to recapture its sense of momentum and its belief in what this country can do.

We need to show how we are making the most of Brexit and we need in the next months to be setting out a pro-growth and pro-investment agenda. We need to cut business and personal taxes  and not just as pre-election gimmicks  rather than endlessly putting them up.

We must not be afraid to be a properly Conservative government.

Why have we so passively abandoned the prospect of a Free Trade Deal with the US? Why have we junked measures to help people into housing or to scrap EU directives or to promote animal welfare?

We need to deliver on the 2019 manifesto, which was endorsed by 14 million people. We should remember that more than 17 million voted for Brexit.

I am now being forced out of parliament by a tiny handful of people, with no evidence to back up their assertions, and without the approval even of Conservative party members let alone the wider electorate.

I believe that a dangerous and unsettling precedent is being set.

The Conservative Party has the time to recover its mojo and its ambition and to win the next election. I had looked forward to providing enthusiastic support as a backbench MP. Harriet Harman's committee has set out to make that objective completely untenable.

The Committee's report is riddled with inaccuracies and reeks of prejudice but under their absurd and unjust process I have no formal ability to challenge anything they say.

The Privileges Committee is there to protect the privileges of parliament. That is a very important job. They should not be using their powers  which have only been very recently designed  to mount what is plainly a political hitjob on someone they oppose.

It is in no one's interest, however, that the process the Committee has launched should continue for a single day further.

So I have today written to my Association in Uxbridge and South Ruislip to say that I am stepping down forthwith and triggering an immediate by-election.

I am very sorry to leave my wonderful constituency. It has been a huge honour to serve them, both as Mayor and MP.

But I am proud that after what is cumulatively a 15 year stint I have helped to deliver among other things a vast new railway in the Elizabeth Line and full funding for a wonderful new state of the art hospital for Hillingdon, where enabling works have already begun.

I also remain hugely proud of all that we achieved in my time in office as Prime Minister: getting Brexit done, winning the biggest majority for 40 years and delivering the fastest vaccine roll out of any major European country, as well as leading global support for Ukraine.

It is very sad to be leaving parliament - at least for now - but above all I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out, anti-democratically, by a committee chaired and managed, by Harriet Harman, with such egregious bias.
Three men from Huyton, 25, 28 and 36, were all arrested on suspicion of murder

The family of a 'beautiful' man have paid tribute to him after he was found dead in a house in Huyton - as police arrest three men on suspicion of murder.

Joseph Holland, 25, was pronounced dead at the scene after officers were called to a report of concern for the safety of a man in his 20s at around 3.30pm on Thursday.

In a moving tribute, his family said: 'No words could ever describe the loss of our beautiful son, brother, uncle and friend to many. He was loved by everybody.'

Three men from Huyton, 25, 28 and 36, who were all arrested yesterday on suspicion of murder, remain in police custody.

Police said they are still in the early stages of investigating the circumstances of the tragedy and are appealing for anyone with information to get in touch.

The family of Joseph Holland, 25, have paid tribute to him after he was found dead in a house in Huyton - as police arrest three men on suspicion of murder

Officers remain in the area to carry out CCTV, forensic and house-to-house enquiries.

Detective Chief Inspector John Fitzgerald said: 'Our thoughts are very much with Joseph's family and all those affected by this tragic incident yesterday. His family continue to be supported by specially trained family liaison officers.

'We are still appealing for information to help our ongoing investigation so please come forward with any information you have, no matter how small or insignificant you think it is.

'Tell us what you know, directly or anonymously, and let us judge how important that information is. Something you might think inconsequential could prove absolutely pivotal in our work, so don't assume we don't need to hear it.

'If you live in the area, please check your CCTV or smart doorbell footage to see if you captured anything suspicious and if you were driving in the area please review your dashcam footage.'

Superintendent for Knowsley Karl Baldwin said: 'This incident has understandably caused a lot of concern for the local community and officers remain in the area not only to carry out enquiries but also to provide a visible reassurance for residents who live in the area.

Mr Holland was pronounced dead at the scene in Huyton (pictured) after officers were called to a report of concern for the safety of a man in his 20s at around 3.30pm on Thursday (File image)

Merseyside Police shared the family's moving tribute on Twitter

'The Knowsley Policing Team's Mobile Police Station will be in the area of Huyton House Road and Jubilee Park over the coming days, for anyone from the community to call in and talk to us about your concerns.

'Officers will also continue their regular foot and mobile patrols around the area.'A Community Policing Surgery will take place at Huyton Police Station on Monday 12 June from 1pm and no appointment is necessary.

'Officers will be on hand to speak to residents, offer advice and take information.'If you have any information, contact our social media desk on Twitter @MerPolCC or Facebook 'Merseyside Police Contact Centre' with any information with reference 23000495217.
The cries of terror are faint at first. Then slowly they grow. From a small rectangular hole that was once the ground floor window of a family home, a small child emerges, his face contorted with fear.

He is being pulled to safety by a neighbour, on to whom he clings for dear life. The two begin to wade through the dank, brown water towards some kind of safety.

This is the city of Kherson, southern Ukraine, large parts of which are underwater after Wednesdays explosion, which destroyed the Kakhovka Dam, controlled by Russia since early last year, flooding more than 40 towns and villages.

It is a crime of epic proportions. The reservoir behind the dam held 18 cubic kilometres of water, equivalent to Great Salt Lake in the U.S..

The water is used to cool the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe, 93 miles upstream. It also irrigates large swathes of southern Ukraine as well as Crimea. The south is farming land  and soil is key to survival here.

Streets are flooded in Kherson, Ukraine, Wednesday, June 7, 2023 after the walls of the Kakhovka dam collapsed

Kakhovka hydroelectric dam which was damaged in Nova Kakhovka, near Kherson, on Wednesday

Ukrainian servicemen help to unload a disabled local resident from a boat during an evacuation from a flooded area in Kherson

David Patrikarakos in Bakhmut

This is a crime not just against Ukraine and the environment, but humanity, too. The people here can no longer live and work in the area.

Thousands are trapped in the flood zone  an estimated 230 square miles  and thousands of animals are dead. It is the single most damaging act of the war so far.

This is hell  but instead of fire we have water, a local told me yesterday, before adding, as the people here so often do: F****** Russians.

Reports of fresh horrors reach me almost hourly. Contacts send videos and images of everything from sofas to the corpses of pets floating through towns and cities. Many of the elderly, disabled and those with large families, are trapped.

Some are contemplating the prospect of either a quick death by drowning, or the agony of a slower end if no one can reach them.

Even by the standards of this war, what is unfolding out here is horrific.

But who is responsible remains a subject of debate  at least as far as Moscow is concerned.

Kyiv is adamant that after mining the dam to cover their retreat from Kherson city late last year, Russian forces blew it up to try to slow down the Ukrainian counteroffensive that has already begun in certain areas, by preventing military operations across the Dnieper River.

U.S. intelligence says it has clear evidence the culprit is Russia, a view shared by its diplomats. Why would Ukraine do this to its own territory and people, flood its land, force tens of thousands of people to leave their homes  it doesnt make sense, deputy U.S. ambassador to the UN, Robert Wood, said.

For its part, Russia has accused Ukrainian saboteurs of blowing up the dam to deny Russian-controlled Crimea fresh reservoir water.

A residents of Kherson is covered in a warming blanket after being helped from floodwaters by rescue workers

Volunteers carry local residents on inflatable boats during an evacuation

Volunteers evacuate a dog from a flooded area

However, no one beyond Russian state media, and extreme fringes of social media, gives credence to such claims. In the meantime, Ukrainians are once again fighting for their lives  and dying in their droves.

Natalya Kozova, in a pink sweatshirt and leopard pants, scrambles out of a rescue boat in her bare feet and with her dog on a leash.

Clutching a few plastic bags, she is one of the lucky ones who found safety  and starts to tell her story.

The water began rising last night. By this morning it had flooded the first floor completely. We live on the third floor, so we waited until the very last minute to leave.

There are still five people left in the apartment block. They dont want to leave  mainly because they are old. We will now go and stay with our son in Kherson. Well see how it goes from there.

Meanwhile, Serhiy and Igor are swimming back and forth in the Shuminsky district of Kherson along a row of submerged houses looking for anyone who might need help escaping.

Kherson has become Venice, they say, managing a laugh. The men are locals  Kherson is their favourite city. Except the city they know and love has gone.

We just have to be careful that neither a mine, nor some other debris in the water hits us. Do you see the towel? they ask, pointing at a house partially submerged.

Towels hanging out of windows mean there is someone inside who needs help evacuating.

Conversation flows along with the brown water. The men are manual workers: Igor used to work at a car wash, Serhiy laid pavements. Now, though, there is no work in the city. And yet they refuse to leave. Where would we go?

Local residents sail on boats at a flooded street during an evacuation from a flooded area after the Nova Kakhovka dam breach

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy visits flood-hit Kherson region

Volunteers evacuate a disabled elderly woman from a flooded neighborhood in Kherson

Local authorities have created nine shelters for those who have been evacuated but they are finding the same problem. People simply dont want to leave Kherson. They want to stay  either in a shelter or a friends house.

The men swim to an apartment block and go up to the ninth floor, knocking on all the doors. On the top floor, a woman in a nightie comes out. She wont leave either.

Where would we go? We have cats, parrots  and children, she says. This refrain is heard over and over from Ukrainians across the country.

Before they suffered under Russian bombs and rockets and the brutality of its soldiers. Now, it seems, Moscow has weaponised even the elements against them.

People dont want to sleep among strangers in a hostel; many have pets, Serhiy continues, and at the end of the day: your home is a home.

Hundreds of thousands in the Kherson region have been left without drinking water. I dont know what will happen with water now, Sergei adds, motioning at the surrounding flood. It is not possible to drink this. Do you see the bubbles there? Its the sewage coming out.

If the people are suffering on Khersons right bank, which was liberated by the Ukrainian army late last year, it is on the left bank of the city, which the Russians still hold, that the situation is truly dire.

Reporting from inside Russian-controlled territory is almost impossible but through contacts on the ground I heard from Ludmilla, a 48-year-old mother of three.

Its hell here, she says. I am seeing bodies float past me in the street. People cry out for help, but no one comes. I have relatives across the river who are willing to try to come and get me, but I am being told the authorities here will not allow it.

The first night was the worst. I was terrified for my children. I screamed for help over and over again but none came. I clutched my youngest tight to me and prayed.

'My neighbours, those who are young or dont have children, tried their best to comfort me, but there was nothing they could do. I am lucky, I live on the sixth floor. The water has not reached me yet. I do not know what has happened to the people who live down below.

Residents evacuate from their building in a flooded area of Kherson

Volunteers attempt to help a cat in a flooded area of Kherson

People walk along a flooded road, that submerged in water following the collapse of the dam

According to Oksana Hliebushkina, Executive director of Kherson NGO New Generation, Ludmillas story is typical.

She has been helping to coordinate aid going to those in need and tells me that the occupied left bank is the worst affected. There we have a dangerous situation as the people are without any support, she says.

Worse, it seems, that the quisling authorities there are determined to make matters worse for many of the people they are supposedly employed to protect.

Some of our brave volunteers who have a boat tried to get families with kids over into the Ukrainian side. But they are being prevented  the Russians are only helping those who have opted to take Russian passports.

Many people and animals have died. The Russians are even stopping people from fleeing to safety in Crimea. Cars are turned back at the checkpoint. Most of those left are old or disabled, but sometimes its a family with children.

And now those who are volunteering and trying to help are being shelled by the Russians. One person has died already, while two have been wounded, including a policeman. I think we will see much more horror to come.

As ever, it seems the Russians are happy to shell civilian targets everywhere. On Thursday afternoon there were reports of multiple casualties in Kherson school Number 2 where people made homeless by the flooding were sheltering.

In another part of the city an evacuation point was shelled. A fearful 96-year-old grandma, screaming in pain as she was helped on to a stretcher and into an ambulance, is typical of the terror everywhere here.

A policeman and a woman help evacuate an elderly local resident from a flooded area in Kherson

Police evacuate local residents from a flooded area

Police evacuate local residents from a flooded area

Ukraine has been gripped by the story of Maksym, a young boy given water dropped from a drone into the skylight, while he was trapped on the roof of his house. As he was led away to safety, he gratefully called one of his rescuers Santa.

For many, the explosion of the dam is just another symptom of Russias barbarity  wanton destruction for its own sake.

Its not enough that they try to destroy our state and its people, but now our ecology, too, said a Ukrainian friend to me over dinner on the evening of the explosion.

Each hour seems to bring a new low. And its not just the physical effects of it all. Oksana Hliebushkina is worried about the psychological fallout of the flooding. We are dealing with people who have lost everything, she tells me.

Volunteers on the ground are telling me that what they need are psychologists to deal with the emotional trauma people are going through. But we dont have any in Kherson at the moment.

I want to say to the world  the Nato Summit is coming up next month [July] in Vilnius. Please let us join Nato. The bombing of the dam showed, yet again, that we must be able to defend ourselves. This is about our very survival now.

Shes not wrong. If the war has taught the people here one thing its that they must be strong to survive.

On Friday morning Ukraine stepped up its counter-offensive, deploying armoured personnel carriers and drones directing artillery fire around the area between Orikhiv and Tokmak, key cities as military chiefs seek to advance south to the Sea of Azov.

What is most striking is that while the world looks on in shock and horror, many Ukrainians, especially those who have lived through Russian occupation, are unsurprised.

We knew the Russians were capable of anything, my friend Anton told me, and we have been able to spring into action, very quickly.

Now all eyes here are on Ukraines General Oleksandr Syrsky, the man leading the counter-offensive.

Whether the country can push Russian forces back from territory they have occupied will rely, in large part, on his skills as a commander. He has become a national hero and the people are behind him.

This speaks to a wider truth the Russians have never understood. They believe they will terrify the Ukrainians into submission.

They believe their brutality will break them. They are wrong. Every crime their soldiers commit, every barbaric act they wreak on Ukraine, and its civilians, serves only to strengthen the peoples resolve here.

Putin wanted a weak and pliant Ukraine in hock to Russian influence. Instead, he has united a strong and independent country as never before, one that reviles the malignity of the Kremlin.

It is a lesson he still has to learn, and out here as the country endures continued tragedy, the people are more determined than ever that he finally understands that no matter what terror he unleashes, Russia will never win in Ukraine.

David Patrikarakos is UnHerd's foreign correspondent and the author of War In 140 Characters, How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict In The 21st Century.
The wide-ranging indictment against Donald Trump over his handling of top secret official documents represents a seminal episode in American political history.

Trump's career has been full of legal challenges, but never before has a former president been charged with crimes at a federal level.

Indeed, so serious are the seven charges against Trump  including obstruction of justice and the wilful retention of national defence information  that he could in theory receive a 100-year jail term.

Even if that is improbable, the clear strength of the case against him deals a blow to both his crumbling reputation and his chances of regaining the White House.

Trump's ugly past is catching up with him and, while some of his defenders pretend the case against him amounts to nothing more than defective filing or disorganisation, nothing could be further from the truth.

Trump's career has been full of legal challenges, but never before has a former president been charged with crimes at a federal level

The seven charges against Trump include obstruction of justice and the wilful retention of national defence information and could in theory see him serve a 100-year jail term

After all, other leading US politicians, including presidents Obama and Biden , held on to classified documents but escaped prosecution because they gave them up as soon as they were found

Trump's former vice-president Mike Pence also had classified documents but like Obama and Biden he escaped prosecution because he gave them up as soon as they were found

Trump was caught on tape boasting that he had in his hands a plan drawn up by General Mark Milley, the US military chief of staff, (pictured), for an invasion of Iran

After all, other leading US politicians, including presidents Obama and Biden and former vice-president Mike Pence, held on to classified documents but escaped prosecution because they gave them up as soon as they were found. The crucial difference is that Trump, through his lawyers, denied having documents stored in his resort of Mar-a-Largo in Florida.

And what a hoard  11,000 documents, many of which were classified top secret, containing details of US agents abroad.

Trump clearly knew he should not have held on to this material. That is shown by a secret tape-recording of a meeting at which he boasted that he had in his hands a plan drawn up General Mark Milley, the US military chief of staff, for an invasion of Iran.

In it, Trump says he could not show it to anyone because of its national security implications. So he was obviously aware of the sensitivity of the documentation.

Just as incriminating was his excuse that he could not hand back some of the files because they had been damaged in a flood  exactly the excuse he used when he was investigated by New York authorities over the financial operations of a Hyatt Hotel.

Trump's prospects are bleak. He is up against a crack prosecution team led by indefatigable special counsel Jack Smith, the thoroughness of whose approach is reflected in the way he ensured that every chambermaid and cleaner at Mar-a-Lago was interviewed under oath so they would be in no position to change their story when the case came to the trial. Trump also suffered a devastating setback when his lawyers lost their right to plead attorney-client privilege because they provided false information about the classified material to the Justice Department. Their testimony will now form part of the prosecution.

There are other problems for Trump. One is that charges have been filed in Miami rather than Washington DC, where there would have been scope for endless wrangles over jurisdiction.

The judge will also be on the lookout for any 'ringers' among the jury who lied about their motivations and allegiances in the hope of delivering a biased verdict in favour of Trump.

Unlike in Britain, where majority verdicts are accepted, the decision of a US jury has to be unanimous. But there will probably be four alternate jurors, any of whom will be ready to step up and replace a politically motivated disruptor.

Trump's usual tactic in legal actions is to delay, delay and delay. In this case he might hope to string out the proceedings until the formal end of the US presidential campaign, but that would achieve nothing.

There is no clause in US law that requires a prosecution to be halted because the defendant is running for office. In fact, we could end up with the bizarre spectacle of Trump campaigning by night for the presidency and sitting in a courtroom by day.

Even if he were convicted on serious criminal charges, there isn't anything to stop him entering the White House if he wins the election. That said, the House of Representatives would be likely to move to impeach him and the Senate would be likely to convict, removing him from office.

Some Republicans would defend Trump even in such circumstances, but that just illustrates how low the Grand Old Party has sunk under his influence. If the looming court actions are disastrous for Trump, they are equally damaging for his party. The Republicans once postured as the defenders of 'law and order', but have now been dragged to the fringes by The Donald and his acolytes.

Extremism helped Trump win over the hard core of activists on the Right, but it holds little appeal to mainstream American opinion. It should be remembered that not only did he lose the election by a wide margin in 2020, but in 2016 he also lost the popular vote, only scraping home thanks to his votes in the electoral college.

Whatever the outcome, Trump's presence at the top has been an indictment of the American political system, which is now increasingly run by a gerontocracy, with Biden, ex-speaker Nancy Pelosi, Republican leader Mitch McConnell, leading senator Bernie Sanders, and Trump himself are decades older than many of their aides.

It can only be hoped that if this case does signal Trump's political end, it will also usher in a generation of Republicans with fresh ideas and the energy to carry them through.
Charges are child molestation sex assault, and enticement of a person under 16

eleased for a June court appearance, he's now been arrested for another crime

Republican Councilman Matthew Reilly was arrested in May for drug possession

A former Republican councilman cuffed last month on drug charges has been arrested again at his Rhode Island home for first-degree child molestation.

Out on bail for a June 15 court appearance, Republican Councilman Matthew Reilly was arrested Thursday at his Rhode Island home before appearing before a court.

He's now being held without bail on several more sex charges including the first-degree child molestation charge, as well as second-degree child molestation and enticing a person younger than 16 - for crimes that allegedly took place May 3.

They involve an unnamed 12-year-old girl police sources said Reilly met online.

He appeared in court for an arraignment hearing Thursday, donning a hooded sweatshirt and handcuffs before being led away to a Cranston lockup.

He is still facing an unrelated drug charge that saw him resign last month, three days after cops released bodycam video of him high on what they confirmed to be a cocktail of crack and fentanyl, laid out in the driver's seat of his car.

Scroll down for video:

Previously out on bail for a June 15 court appearance, ex-Rhode Island Councilman Matthew Reilly appeared in court Thursday after being arrested for several unrelated sex charges - which allege he molested a 12-year-old girl

Reilly, 41, resigned from his seat last month after police released body camera footage showing him high on what cops later confirmed to be crack and fentanyl

'The arrest warrant resulted from an investigation by Detectives from the Cranston Police Special Victims Unit and the prosecutors from the Office of the Rhode Island Attorney General that began on May 7, 2023,' Cranston cops wrote in a press release of Reilly's Thursday arrest.

They added that the month-long investigation was launched after the department a complaint filed by 'the legal guardian of a twelve-year-old girl' who they added was 'unrelated to Reilly'.

The guardian, who was not named, filed the complaint at the Cranston Police Department Headquarters police said in the release.

Court records show the incident in question took place on May 3, and sources told WJAR the allegations involve a young girl Reilly met online.

Prior to resigning, Reilly - who has two young daughter himself - had been in the midst of a messy divorce, during which he a legal battle with his wife over his kids' custody.

According to multiple sources, at least two attorneys and a family court judge notified the court during those proceedings about Reilly's drug use, while claiming engaging in sordid trysts with some of this clients.

Text messages produced by his wifes attorney claimed the then rep was also medicating his own children with drugs like melatonin in order to go to meet with a client for sex late at night, and even conspired to frame his wife of violating a court-mandated no contact order.

The children's mother added in her own statement: 'In numerous occasions, I received phone calls from our eldest daughter in the middle of the night upset that she woke up and her father was not home.'

Despite this alleged evidence, no action was taken against Reilly.

Reilly appeared in court for an arraignment hearing Thursday, donning a hooded sweatshirt and handcuffs before being led away to a Cranston lockup

His second arrest comes after a the month-long investigation launched after a complaint filed by 'the legal guardian of a twelve-year-old girl' cops confirmed was 'unrelated to 'Reilly'

The guardian, who was not named, filed the complaint at the Cranston Police Department Headquarters, seen here

The ex-rep was arrested Thursday at his North Kingston home over the sex charges, for which he has plead not guilty

It was this divorce that would Reilly would later use to deflect responsibility for his recently recorded episode this May, in which he told police he relapsed after 13 years of sobriety

This was after police said they discovered the then councilman pulled over at the side of a road with drug paraphernalia and a 'white, rock-like substance' that onsite tests revealed to be crack cocaine and fentanyl

Moreover, Reilly was asleep when officers came into contact with him, with video showing them attempt to wake Reilly, while he is the midst of what was assumed to be medical episode.

He was charged with possession of Schedule II narcotics - a charge he still faces as of Thursday

It was this divorce that would Reilly would later use to deflect responsibility for his recently recorded episode this May, in which he told police he relapsed after 13 years of sobriety.

This was after police said they discovered the then councilman pulled over at the side of a road with drug paraphernalia and a 'white, rock-like substance' that onsite tests revealed to be crack cocaine and fentanyl.

Moreover, Reilly was asleep when officers came into contact with him, with video showing them attempt to wake Reilly, while he is the midst of what was assumed to be medical episode.

He was charged with possession of Schedule II narcotics.

Cranston police have released body cam footage from the incident, showing Reilly completely passed out, while holding a crack pipe containing the aforementioned illegal substances.

Three days later, Reilly was forced to resign. The now viral bodycamera footage showed him high on what cops confirmed to be a cocktail of crack and fentanyl, mouth agape in the backseat of his car.

'You were literally choking in your sleep. Someone was flagging me down about it,' one of the officers can be heard saying in the clip after cuffing the Republican rep.

'I have sleep apnea. I'm sorry,' Reilly argues - to which the officer responds: 'Well, you have a crack pipe in your hands.'

The councilman from Cranston, Rhode Island, has since resigned from his position of chairman of the Cranston Republican Party, eventually stepping down from the city council a few days later.

Recently divorced, the disgraced rep has two young daughters of his own, Lena and Gracelyn, whom he recently sought to keep custody of

Prior to resigning, Reilly had been in the midst of a messy divorce, during which hewaged legal war with his wife over his kids' custody

Text messages produced by his wifes attorney claimed the then rep was also medicating his own children with drugs like melatonin in order to go to meet with a client for sex late at night, and even conspired to frame his wife of violating a court-mandated no contact order

In an email Thursday evening, Reillys attorney said his client had entered a not guilty plea to the molestation charges

He is due back in court on June 15

At the time, Cranston Mayor Ken Hopkins decried Reilly's behavior, saying she hoped he 'is able to find a path to recovery and the help that he needs.'

He was charged with one count of drug possession and arraigned with a bail commissioner before being quickly released on bail

He is now being held on the aforementioned sex charges, which Cranston Police Chief Michael J. Winquist on Thursday declined to provide any further details on.

In an email Thursday evening to The Daily Beast, Reillys attorney, Michael J. Lepizzera, Jr., wrote his client had entered a not guilty plea to the molestation charges.

'With these types of charges, I can see the general public and even close friends instantaneously turning their back on Mr. Reilly and drawing knee jerk conclusions,' Lepizzera said.

'I simply ask everyone to refrain from public ridicule and gossip and allow the legal process to unfold in the ordinary course.

'While we may not have a perfect system of justice in this country (as nothing is perfect), my 30 years as a lawyer allows me to state that we have as near perfect judicial system as could exist and we should trust in the system to be the final adjudicator of the facts, the law, and any legal outcome.'

Reilly is due back in court on June 15.
Former President Donald Trump praised Hillary Clinton's lawyer for deleting 30,000 of her emails in Friday's unsealed federal indictment said.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump went after Clinton for her emails scandal, as the FBI investigated whether she mishandled classified documents by using a private email account and server during her time serving as secretary of State.

But behind closed doors, Trump thought it was 'great' that Clinton's lawyer deleted the messages - allowing her to get off the hook from potential federal charges.

An individual labeled as Trump Attorney 1 in the indictment 'memorialised' a conversation that happened last year, saying that Trump applauded Clinton's unnamed attorney saying, 'he was great, he did a great job.

'You know what? He said, he said that it ... was him. That he was the one who deleted all of her emails, the 30,000 emails, because they basically dealt with her scheduling and her going to the gym and her having beauty appointments,' Trump allegedly said. 'And he was great. And he, so she didn't get in any trouble because he said he was the one who deleted them.'

Former President Donald Trump praised Hillary Clinton's lawyer for deleting 30,000 of her emails in Friday's unsealed federal indictment said

Hillary Clinton tweeted Friday and said people should buy 'But Her Emails' hats and money would go toward her political group

The conversation came after one on May 23, 2022 in which Trump talked with individuals labeled Trump Attorney 1 and Trump Attorney 2 asking them if he needed to comply with the subpoena to turn classified materials over to the National Archives.

'Well what happens if we just dont respond at all or dont play ball with them?' the former president asked then.

Trump was charged with 37 counts in the federal indictment released Friday

Earlier in the day, Clinton tweeted that she was selling 'But Her Emails' hats to raise funds, a reference to the email scandal that helped to derail her 2016 presidential campaign against Trump.

Deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton was asked by DailyMail.com if President Joe Biden was comfortable with Democrats raising funds off of Trump's indictment, naming Clinton, and she responded with a no comment.

'I'm simply not going to comment on this,' she said.
Where did it all go wrong for Dick and Angel? As the Escape To The Chateau couple shut up shop, a look at how their halo slipped
An eruption could be comparable to the one that destroyed Pompeii in AD 79

A 'supervolcano' in a densely populated part of Italy could be on the verge of its first eruption since 1538, researchers have warned.

The Campi Flegrei volcano near Naples, southern Italy, has become weaker and more prone to rupturing, making an eruption more likely, the experts say.

Located about nine miles (14.5 km) to the west of Naples, it is one of the few active supervolcanoes in the world.

Around 360,000 people live at Campi Flegrei and may need to evacuate if experts think it's in immediate danger of an eruption, although scientists say there's no guarantee one will occur anytime soon.

When the volcano eventually blows it is likely to be comparable in size to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79.

The Campi Flegrei volcano in southern Italy has become weaker and more prone to rupturing, making an eruption more likely, experts say. Pictured is Solfatara, a shallow volcanic crater that's part of Campi Flegrei. Note the Yellow rocks made by sulphur gases

Campi Flegrei is about nine miles (14.5 km) to the west of Naples and is one of the few active supervolcanoes in the world

The study has been conducted by experts at Italy's National Research Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) and University College London (UCL).

Italy's supervolcano: Campi Flegrei The Campi Flegrei crater was formed 39,000 years ago in a blast that threw hundreds of cubic kilometres of lava, rock and debris into the air. It was the largest eruption in Europe in the past 200,000 years, according to scientists. Campi Flegrei last erupted in 1538, though on a much smaller scale. Nearby Mount Vesuvius, whose massive eruption just over 2,000 years ago buried several Roman settlements in the area, including Pompeii, is also classified as an active volcano. Advertisement

Lead author Professor Christopher Kilburn at UCL's Earth Sciences department said that Campi Flegrei is more prone to a 'rupture'  a break or fracture through the rock that makes up the body of the volcano.

'It's a natural result when the volcano is stretched as pressure builds up underground,' Professor Kilburn told MailOnline.

'Once a rupture has occurred, it will be easier for volcanic fluids to escape.

'This does not mean that they will escape  only that it will be easier to do so than before.'

A rupture could open a crack through the Earth's crust, although the magma still needs to be pushing up at the right location for an eruption to occur.

Campi Flegrei's large, eight-mile-wide caldera  its basin-like depression resulting from prior explosion  is located under the western outskirts of the city of Naples.

About a third of the caldera is partially submerged beneath the Bay of Pozzuoli, but the remaining two-thirds is land that's home to more than 360,000 people.

Campi Flegrei (or 'burning fields') is defined as a supervolcano because it has the potential to produce a magnitude eight eruption, capable of discharging more than 200 cubic miles of material.

About 7 to 9 miles (12 to 15 km) across, Campi Flegrei is the largest active caldera in Europe and extends west from the outskirts of Naples to the Tyrrhenian Sea. About a third is partially submerged beneath the Bay of Pozzuoli; the remaining two-thirds are home to more than 360,000 people. The caldera is marked by the yellow dashed line; ground movement has occurred across the central region marked in blue

Image from the research paper depicts cutaway of Campi Flegrei's large, eight-mile-wide caldera. Persistent small earthquakes have been registered there since the mid-1980s. Red dots mark seismicity between 1982 and 1984, while green dots mark seismicity since 2005

READ MORE: Eruption of Mount Vesuvius turned its victims' brains to GLASS Bodies of Pompeii victims were preserved in ash before they decayed. Voids that they left behind were later filled with plaster Advertisement

People live in the area and would be in danger if the volcano erupted again and shot out 'pyroclastic currents'  hot and fast-moving flows of gas and solidified lava particles.

Campi Flegrei last erupted when Henry VIII was last on the English throne, and this event came following an interval of about 3,000 years.

But the researchers warn that large calderas of this sort frequently pass through several decades of unrest before they erupt.

Campi Flegrei has been restless since the middle of the 20th century, which is of a particular worry to scientists.

It's had several two-year periods of unrest in the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s causing small, local earthquakes and ground uplift due to movement of magma beneath the surface.

However, Campi Flegrei's current tensile strength  the maximum stress a material can bear before breaking when it is stretched  is likely to be about a third of what it was in 1984, the researchers said.

What's more, for the past decade, the ground below Pozzuoli has been creeping upwards at about four inches per year, as gas increases pressure in the magma, causing the ground surface to bulge and deform.

The new study used a model of volcano fracturing, developed at UCL, to interpret the patterns of earthquakes and ground uplift, and concluded that parts of the volcano had been stretched nearly to breaking point.

About 360,000 people live at Campi Flegrei (pictured), according to the London researchers

'This is the first time we have applied our model, which is based on the physics of how rocks break, in real-time to any volcano,' said Professor Kilburn.

Even minor volcanic eruptions 'could cascade into global catastrophe' - READ MORE Researchers identified seven 'pinch points' made up of volcanic clusters in the world Advertisement

'Our first use of the model was in 2017 and since then Campi Flegrei has behaved as we predicted, with an increasing number of small earthquakes indicating pressure from below.

'We will now have to adjust our procedures for estimating the chances of new routes being opened for magma or gas to reach the surface.'

Worryingly, an eventual eruption could be preceded by relatively weak signals such as a smaller rate of ground uplift and fewer earthquakes.

This was the case for the eruption of the Rabaul caldera in Papua New Guinea in 1994, which killed only five people, largely due to good disaster planning.

The eruption was preceded by small earthquakes occurring at a tenth of the rate than had occurred during a crisis a decade earlier.

Professor Kilburn said authorities are well-prepared in case an emergency develops, although 'there is no reason to believe that they are needed now'.

Immediate signs that a volcano is about to erupt include cracks in the ground and dark streams of volcanic gases being emitted, although Campi Flegrei is not at this stage.

'The volcano is showing signs that the crust is weakening as it continues to stretch, Professor Kilburn told MailOnline.

'Its a natural process, but at last we are able to recognise it while it is happening.

'This will help provide clearer assessments of the volcano's future behaviour.'

The team will now apply the model of volcano fracturing to other volcanoes that have reawakened after a long period of time, to help 'establish more reliable criteria for deciding if an eruption is likely'.

The study has been published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
Some Brits may also have their fridge set at the wrong temperature

Storing milk deeper inside the a fridge near the back can extend its shelf life

An expert warns milk is one of many products we're storing in the wrong place

Storing milk in the fridge door may seem like a no-brainer, with a perfectly-sized ledge that seems almost designed for milk cartons.

But experts warn that we're actually slashing the shelf life of milk by keeping it in the fridge door - and it instead belongs deeper inside where the temperature is colder.

Confusion about where to store milk has been rife on Twitter this week after farmer Ceri Cryer urged BBC Breakfast viewers not to keep it in the fridge door.

'You've got to make sure that when you're taking it home after purchasing it that you're keeping it cold, putting it with other cold produce,' she told the show.

Storing milk in the fridge door can slash its shelf life, as this is the warmest spot

WHERE SHOULD YOU STORE MAYONNAISE AND KETCHUP? Dr Christian Reynolds claims this can vary based on your location. If you live in a hotter country, like Australia, you might consider storing this in the fridge. But some products are also very 'shelf stable' meaning they are safe to consume after being stored in the fridge. Dr Reynolds recommends consumers to check the back of the label for the best advice. Advertisement

'You need to put it in the main part of the fridge at the back and not in the front of the fridge, in the door of the fridge, which is the warmest part of the fridge.'

But some viewers were skeptical, pointing out that milk bottles are often too big to store standing up on a fridge shelf and they're likely to leak if laid down.

Scientists have since backed Ms Cryer's view, adding that cheese, yoghurts and other dairy products should also be kept deeper inside the fridge.

Dr Christian Reynolds from City, University of London, told MailOnline: 'Milk is a perishable commodity so where you store it and the temperature you store it at in the fridge affects its shelf life.

'It's not just milk either - think about cheese, meat and all dairy products. Storing it the right way gets you better bang for your buck.'

Around 490million pints of milk are tipped down the sink every year, according to the Sustainable Food Trust.

While milk can expire sooner than it should, this level of waste is also driven by consumers throwing it out too soon.

Storing milk at the bottom of a fridge near the back can extend its shelf life by two days

Twitter has been bombarded with confusion over the correct way to store milk product

This is because households often rely on the use-by date to tell them when milk is no longer safe to consume, rather than sniffing it or having a small taste to check.

This week M&S joined many supermarkets in removing use-by labels in the belief that an old fashioned sniff test is a better way to judge the safety of food.

The change was driven by research projects, such as Dr Reynolds', that seek to help Brits make better use of their food.

'We have this thing called the Household Simulation Model that looks at dates over five to six years, looking at how people use milk,' he said.

'Somewhere between 30 to 60 per cent don't engage, they just look at the milk and throw it out. They often don't see the difference between "use-by" and "best before" dates.'

He also advises that consumers check their fridge is set between 0-5C (32-41F) to extend the life of products as much as possible.

'If you have your fridge below 5C (41F), you can extend [milk's] shelf life by one to days.

'You can freeze cheese and milk to make it last longer too. It's not just storing it in the right place, but being canny.'
Flying cars and Martian holidays are perhaps among the things we dream of when looking ahead to the year 2100.

But it may surprise you to know that dogs could undergo a huge transformation too, as they adapt amid the crippling impacts of climate change.

Experts at Love Your Dog asked artificial intelligence (AI) to envision what future pooches could like based on predictions of canine evolution.

The results may just surprise you, as dogs are expected to be far more fox-like one day with huge ears and even hairless legs.

'Physically, we can expect dogs that resemble the famous Chinese Crested Dog, with a small size, little or almost no hair (considered hypoallergenic), and a calm and friendly temperament,' said Jessica D'avilia and Brenda Vitorino, of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

Bigger ears: Predictions suggest these could soon be larger as a way of shedding excess heat

Furry feet: A thicker coat may protect dogs from the hot ground amidst rising temperatures

HOW WILL DOGS LOOK IN THE YEAR 2100? Love Your Dog predicts that canines will evolve to have new characteristics as a way of coping with climate change. These include: Bigger ears

Shorter snout

Thicker fur on feet

Lighter fur

Fox-like and Chinese Crested Dog appearance

Potentially thicker fur in some cases as a way of protecting against the sun's radiation Advertisement

'Physical and behavioral modifications will be selected gradually and artificially.

'That is, dog breeders will set traits of commercial interest to "improve" the breed to satisfy human needs.'

The AI platforms of Midjourney and Gencraft were used to depict future visions of man's best friend.

It's claimed that dogs will weigh between 8.8-22Ibs on average (4-10kg), with a short snout and large pointy ears.

This backs previous research led by Australia's Deakin University which suggests that many warm-blooded animals will evolve to have bigger ears to shed excess heat.

Size increases such as this are already starting to occur, but Sara Ryding, an author of the study, claims these are currently 'less than 10 per cent'.

'The increases in appendage size we see so far are quite small  less than 10 percent  so the changes are unlikely to be immediately noticeable,' she said.

'However, prominent appendages such as ears are predicted to increase  so we might end up with a live-action Dumbo in the not-so-distant future.'

With rising temperatures in mind, you may also expect that any hair on dogs will be a lot thinner.

Pooches may look more like the Chinese Crested Dog as they evolve amidst climate change (file image)

Fox-like appearance: Dogs may have more pointy ears and a shorter snout by the year 2100

Shorter snout: This could help retain moisture in hotter temperatures, Love Your Dog claims

But Ms D'avilia and Ms Vitorino claim that some breeds may have thicker hair on their feet to better protect paws on the hot ground.

Meanwhile, lighter fur may help dogs reflect heat away, while a shorter, more fox-like snout could help them retain moisture.

'We must also remember that these modifications for changes in characteristics take time (about eight generations) to be "fixed" in the breeds,' the researchers added.

'In addition, adding to the current trend towards longer working hours, dog owners are expected to opt for animals that take up little space and require less maintenance and care.'

MailOnline has also approached the British Veterinary Association to comment on these findings.
Tutankhamun was a battle-hardened warrior and not the sickly boy-king of legend, experts have claimed.

It has entered historical folklore that Egypt's most famous king was frail and deformed, with a club foot.

He was buried with around 130 complete and fragmented sticks of various shapes and designs, which have been suggested to be walking sticks to help with his mobility.

But three experts on ancient Egypt have told Cheltenham Science Festival this week that such an assumption could be wrong.

Sofia Aziz, a biomedical Egyptologist, said: 'When I studied Tutankhamun, I personally don't think there was any evidence he was disabled, because I have seen mummies where it looks like there is a club foot.

Tutankhamun was a warrior and not the sickly boy-king of legend, experts have claimed

Tutankhamun was buried with around 130 complete and fragmented sticks of various shapes and designs, which have been suggested to be walking sticks to help with his mobility

'We call these pseudo-pathological changes. The walking sticks were just a sign of royalty.'

The expert argues that the 'club foot' may in fact have been caused during the mummification process, where applying resin and tight bandaging can distort the shape of the foot.

A much-remarked upon missing middle bone in the second toe of his left foot, she says, could have gone missing after his remains were transferred into a sand box, or simply been taken by someone as a souvenir.

Speaking after the talk, the Egyptologist, who has studied more than 50 mummies in depth, said: 'His legs were aligned so well - if he did have a deformity, and if he had a club foot, he would have had difficulty walking, but the long bones just don't show any evidence of that.'

The leg bones would show signs of stress if someone had spent years hobbling.

Tutankhamun is so famous because his body lay undisturbed for almost 3,000 years after his death, without the tomb being ransacked by grave-robbers like those of many other pharaohs.

Discovered by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, the tomb revealed tantalising clues about a child who became pharaoh in 1336 BCE, at just nine years old, before dying suddenly at the age of 19.

It has entered historical legend that the Egypt's most famous king was frail and deformed, with a club foot (reconstruction made in 2005)

Tutankhamun is so famous because his body lay undisturbed for almost 3,000 years after his death, without the tomb being ransacked by grave-robbers like those of many other pharaohs

The view of Tutankhamun as a feeble king has been challenged by a minority of experts, but the idea that he was far more warrior-like is supported by items found in his tomb, such as armour made out of leather and various weapons.

Dr Campbell Price, curator of Egypt at Manchester Museum, who also spoke about Tutankhamun at the science festival, supports the idea that the sickly boy-king notion is most likely a myth.

After the talk, he said: 'We have this sympathy for Tutankhamun, he's not what you would expect from the golden mask.

'And I would totally agree that anything in Pharaonic art is not what people looked like, because it's the world of the gods.

'But it's gone the other way where we have a view of him as this poor creature.'

Dr Campbell Price, curator of Egypt at Manchester Museum, supports the idea that the sickly boy-king notion is most likely a myth

Dr Price added: 'You've got to remember that when Tutankhamun was found, it was the immediate aftermath of the First World War and people had lost young men in the trenches, so there was this collective pathos for young men who had died, perhaps in battle, which plays into this fantasy, this myth of this supposedly feeble boy.'

The curator argues that Tutankhamun's 'walking sticks' were signs of status, as they were emblazoned with pictures of his enemies, such as the neighbouring Nubians.

Raksha Dave, honorary president of the Council for British Archaeology, who chaired the science festival talk on the boy-king, described the debunking of a sickly Tutankhamun as 'amazing', adding: 'It's definitely a more rigorous, scientific and also refreshingly modern viewpoint on a story that is 100 years old, and how you can actually approach it in a different way.'
Women seeking a relationship have revealed which messages a prospective partner should definitely not send on dating apps.

Researchers led by Purdue University, Indiana, found that among 275 participants  mostly female  starting a conversation with a sexually explicit message was the biggest turn-off, especially for people looking for a long-term relationship.

Conversely, someone whose initial message included a greeting and a question was more likely to get a positive response.

It comes as a separate group of scientists also revealed that tall men would prioritize tall women for relationships, but see short ones as just a fling.

Women seeking a long-term relationship on dating apps find a sexually explicit opening line surprising and a violation, according to new research. The study surveyed 275 undergraduate students at a public university in the Midwest between the ages of 18 and 29 years old

Amanda Lilly, a PhD student who led the research, and others noted in the study: 'Online daters might choose to reserve sending sexually explicit content until they are sure the recipient would appreciate that kind of communication.'

They added: 'Online daters who understand when it is and is not appropriate to use sexually explicit messages may be more effective at attaining their goals.'

For the study, published in the journal Personal Relationships, researchers surveyed 275 undergraduate students.

Of these, about 66 percent were women. The majority were also heterosexual  79 percent  and all were aged between 18 and 29 years old. Some 64 percent were also white.

Each completed an online survey with personal details about themselves and were presented with scenarios where they had received questions from a match on a dating app.

They were also asked whether they were looking for a long-term or casual relationship.

Participants were told to 'imagine that you have just received a message from someone that you have been matched with as a potential partner on the online dating app/site of your choice'.

Then some were told that the first message they received was a greeting including a question mark and asked to imagine how they responded.

The others were told they had received a message that was 'sexually explicit' in nature as the first contact.

Scientists did not detail what the explicit message may be, saying that they did not want to cause offense or upset to the participants. Instead, they gave them a description of the message.

Results showed that participants were more likely to respond favorably to the greeting and question mark than the sexually explicit message. This held true even if they were looking for casual flings rather than a long-term relationship.

Ultimately, they found that even men and women looking for casual hook-ups did not especially appreciate it when someone came out too strong right out of the gate. All groups preferred a traditional greeting best.

Although a sexy opening pick-up line 'is becoming a common tactic utilized by some when trying to start a romantic relationship,' the scientists wrote, 'the current study indicates that these types of messages tend to violate recipients' expectations in a relationship.'
Brno, the Czech Republic's second city, has 'irresistible charm'

Not many people make it to the Czech Republics second city, yet its charm is irresistible.

While Prague is packed with stag dos and Irish pubs, Brno (pronounced bruh-no) has modern art galleries, higgledy-piggeldy narrow streets with historic buildings and endless restaurants serving traditional potato dumplings, goulash and local beers. Its vibrant, affordable and compact  youre never much more than a 20-minute walk from anywhere.

Where to stay

Grandezza

The hand-painted glass ceilings in the lobby of this former bank make a grand first impression. Its now a boutique hotel with smart, cosy rooms as well as spa treatments and pleasant views across the market square. Doubles from 87 (grandezzahotel.com).

Base yourself at Grandezza, a boutique hotel housed in a former bank

Anybody Hotel

Despite its name, this hotel may not be for everybody. A whirlwind of neon and storytelling, it describes itself as 20 per cent hotel, 80 per cent experience and has cinematic-themed rooms with iPads which narrate a story played on speakers.

Rooms also have bubble machines, picnic baskets and swings. Doubles from 100, when quoting Daily Mail (anybody.cz).

Avion Hotel

Enjoy spectacular views of the Cathedral of St Peter and Paul (pictured background) from the Art Deco Avion Hotel

A short wander from Freedom Square, this Art Deco boutique hotel has spectacular views of Spilberk Castle and the Cathedral of St Peter and Paul on the Petrov hill, which can be seen from the terrace. Beds are comfortable, breakfast generous and the staff friendly. Doubles from 86 (avion-hotel.cz).

10-z Bunker

Built during World War II, this air raid shelter and unused nuclear bunker is now a 50-bed hostel near the city centre. It may be a rather peculiar place to stay on a weekend break, but its history and friendly staff make up for any austerity. B&B doubles from 55 (10-z.cz, booking.com).

What to see & do

Visit the castle

Take a guided tour around Castle Spilberk, pictured, to learn about its 'harrowing' history

The history of Castle Spilberk is harrowing. Take a guided tour to learn all about its troubled past, including its use as a brutal prison in the 13th century and as a Nazi barracks during the World War II German occupation. Take a break at the castles hilltop cafe afterwards. Admission free; tours 3-6, spilberk.cz.

Scary ossuary

Even more harrowing is the underground ossuary at the Church of St James, which was rediscovered in 2001. It contains the bones of more than 50,000 victims of plague, cholera and war. Entry 5, gotobrno.cz.

Feeling arty

The Museum of Applied Arts houses an architecture and design exhibition but also showcases a vast collection of art from the present back to the Middle Ages. Dont miss the Robot Cafe which recreates a portrait of you in your cup of coffee. (moravska-galerie.cz).

Best views

Take in the best views of the city from the Old Town Halls tower, which can be found near the imposing Freedom Square (pictured)

Straddling the citys most imposing square Namesti Svobody (Freedom Square) and the cabbage market, the Old Town Halls tower has the best views of the city. Entry costs 2.50 and its open until 10pm. Afterwards, take a wander through the cabbage markets wooden chalets, which also sell artisanal crafts and street food. (gotobrno.cz).

Where to eat

Lokal u Caipla

This restaurant is the place to sample giant portions of schnitzel for about 7 along with a local beer. Note the hungover diners if you visit on a Sunday. (lokal-ucaipla.ambi.cz).

Element Restaurant

A strong contender for the best restaurant in the whole of Brno, its menu focuses on a fusion of European and Asian cuisine.

Fine dining at a fantastic price, a three-course meal with a cocktail will set you back about 30. I suggest going for the tender pork belly followed by soft and warm chestnut cake. (elementbrno.com).

The Bar That Doesnt Exist

Enjoy a cocktail at The Bar That Doesnt Exist, which has a 'relaxed speakeasy' vibe

More than 1,000 bottles of spirit perch proudly on the ceiling-high glass bar in this relaxed speakeasy. Packed with leather sofas, chandeliers and guests sipping on delicious cocktails for just 7. (barkteryneexistuje.cz).

Forkys

This vegan bistro in the old part of the city will make you forget youre eating only plant-based food. Head to the upstairs restaurant if youre sitting in or grab and go downstairs. About 7.20 buys a range of delicious dishes like shwarma, rice bowls, burgers and curries. (forkys.eu).

Getting there

Return London-Brno flights are priced from 52 (ryanair.com). For more tourist information go to: visitczechrepublic.com.
The open road, jaw-dropping scenery and the freedom to stop at any surf spot, vineyard or outback town that takes your fancy. There's nothing better than a great Australian road trip.

Whether heading off on a wildlife-spotting adventure or following the pristine coast, taking to the tarmac is a great way to discover authentic Australia, meet friendly locals and connect incredibly varied destinations.

With wide, traffic-free roads, easy-to-follow routes and a mix of accommodations ranging from luxury spa resorts to wild campsites, you'll enjoy new experiences every day.

And with Aussies driving on the left, the only thing you'll need to get used to is the dazzling scenery outside.

Here are some of the best road trips you can take in this unforgettable land. For each, you can easily chose to either do the whole route, or just pick part of it.

Great Ocean Road: Victoria

From Torquay to Port Fairy

Three days in total

The Great Ocean Road is dotted with must-see attractions and unforgettable vistas

Hugging the coast as it wends its way alongside the wild Southern Ocean, Victoria's Great Ocean Road offers unforgettable vistas and fascinating native wildlife, from koalas to kangaroos.

Dotted with must-see attractions, award-winning restaurants, and cascading waterfalls, it's the perfect speedy trip for those in a crunch. Make it a round trip from Melbourne and you can still complete the whole route in three days, with stop-offs along the way.

The route officially begins in Melbourne, and a first day of driving will see you travel 116 miles to the the wild beaches and cliffs of Apollo Bay, where you can stop overnight. Driving on, head to Otway National Park, where you can stroll the lush rainforest, try a tree-top canopy walk and see where the Bass Strait meets the Southern Ocean.

You'll marvel at the magnificent Twelve Apostles, immense limestone stacks that keep guard on the coast of Port Campbell National Park, explore the Bay of Islands and make your way to the historic fishing village of Port Fairy.

Here, a second overnight stay will set you up for the journey back to Melbourne, stopping off to enjoy sights you haven't yet seen - a perfect medley of windswept beaches, whale-watching, volcanic craters and enticing hot springs.

The Legendary Pacific Coast touring route: New South Wales and Queensland

From Sydney to Brisbane

Nine days in total

Cape Byron Lighthouse, in Byron Bay, is just one of the sights the Pacific Coast touring route offers

Set out from the cosmopolitan hub of Sydney in search of adventure and excitement along the Pacific Coast on this nine-day itinerary.

From canopy walks above the lush Gondwana rainforests to the exhilarating waves of Byron Bay and dolphins of Port Stephens, the Pacific Coast touring route offers the ultimate exploration of these memorable shores.

After an initial drive from Sydney to Newcastle, via lovely lunch spots and Wyrrabalong National Park, you can step into world-class wine cellars peppered along the banks of Hunter River on day two, en-route to Pokolbin.

Submerge yourself in the crystalline waters of sparkling bays and scale the vast dunes of Port Stephens on day three.

Over the next three days you'll explore white sands and incredible marine life as you drive north to Coffs Harbour and then on to Byron Bay, where an extra day gives you time to explore farmers' markets, incredible eateries and bohemian bliss.

On day seven, you can take to the road again to the Gold Coast, stopping off to spot migrating whales if you're travelling between May and November, and enjoying bushwalks in the verdant hinterland.

After an overnight stay, you'll head on to visit Surfer's Paradise, where you can soak up the buzzing beach lifestyle, visit theme parks and take in the views from the SkyPoint Climb.

Your final day brings you to Brisbane, just 62 miles north and an exciting city where you can combine riverside picnics with art galleries and Aboriginal experiences, before heading out tot snorkel around the city's islands.

The Explorers Way: South Australia and The Northern Territory

Adelaide to Darwin

14 days in total

Soak up the best of the Australian outback as you drive straight through the heart of the country

Following the route of explorer John McDouall Stuart, the first European to traverse Australia south to north, this epic route takes around 14 days, or you can simply tackle a section of it.

It is a road trip that helps you soak up the best of the Australian outback as you drive straight through the heart of the country.

Go hiking in the extraterrestrial landscapes of Flinders Ranges, 236 miles north of Adelaide, then travel to Uluru over four or five days to admire the terracotta hues of the spiritual monolith and its ancient rock art sites. In the heart of the Red Centre, you can embark on the unforgettable Kings Canyon Rim Walk in neighbouring Watarrka National Park.

On day seven, continue through Alice Springs, the second largest city in the Northern Territory, then drive on towards the rugged peaks of West MacDonnell Ranges and the Karlu Karlu, also known as the Devil's Marbles of Tennant Creek, a sacred area strewn with ancient granite boulders.

Over three days you'll pass through Daly Waters and have the opportunity to bathe in the rejuvenating waters of Mataranka Thermal Pool as you head towards the vibrant city of Katherine, just 200 miles south of Darwin.

Then, before your final approach into the multicultural melting pot of Darwin, spend a day exploring the walking tracks, waterfalls and swimming holes of Litchfield National Park.

Sydney to Melbourne Touring Route: New South Wales and Victoria

Two fascinating routes from Sydney to Melbourne

Six to nine days total (depending on route chosen)

On the interior route, diverse landscapes open up to cultural exploration with the thriving capital of Canberra (pictured)

Choose between two epic driving routes, each offering a unique Australian experience.

On the Coastal Discovery route, you'll follow the turquoise coast past picturesque seaside towns, ancient wine valleys, and beaches hosting sunshine-dwelling kangaroos for nine leisurely days, while the six-day Inland Discovery itinerary promises the gold rush ruins and pioneering history,

This route allows you to explore the white-sand beaches of Jervis Bay, go whale watching in Merimbula to spot killer whales and make a splash in Gippsland, Australia's largest inland waterway. Driving Wilsons Promontory, you'll also head to Philip Island to see the famous Penguin Parade at sunset, before driving on to Melbourne.

Alternatively, head out from Sydney along the interior route to take in emerald hills to rugged peaks, the diverse landscapes open up to cultural exploration with the thriving capital of Canberra, 400 miles southwest of Sydney.

After exploring the galleries, parks, and museums of the capital, escape to rural adventure where old Gold Rush towns such as Gundagai blend with the picturesque townships of Victoria's 'spa country'. A final stop in historic waterfront city Geelong is just a short drive from Melbourne.

A self-guided Tasmania tour: Tasmania

Strahan and Gordon River to Freycinet National Park

13 days total

Horseshoe Bend, Strahan, in Tasmania, gives you a glimpse of a road trip across this wild island

The last Australian outpost before the frigid ice fields of Antarctica, some 3,300 miles further south, Tasmania is the world's 26th largest island, and it has the diversity to show for it. From the world's tallest flowering plant to the world's cleanest air, it's a land of superlatives waiting to be explored.

Criss-cross this wild island and take in its natural riches on an immersive route planning by Audley Travel. Catch a flight from the charming capital Hobart to rugged Strahan to begin your adventure in style.

Equipped with a fully insured vehicle and all accommodations arranged for you, this 13-day epic will take you through the stunning scenery of Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park, the exquisite wineries around pretty Launceston and the wild coast of Freycinet National Park.

No matter how long you have or the dazzling destinations you have in mind, a road trip is the perfect way to get to the heart of Australia.

Find out more and book your holiday at audleytravel.com
DEAD RINGERS

Amazon Prime video

Rating:

This is very explicit: no holds barred, if you know what I mean. But its also slick, clever and darkly addictive, thanks largely to the mesmerising screen presence of Rachel Weisz in the role of twin gynaecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle.

Based on the 1988 David Cronenberg film of the same name (and not, as UK viewers might assume, a remake of the hit BBC impressions show), its essentially a modern-day Jekyll and Hyde tale.

Sister Elliot  the older of the two  is a hard-drinking, cocaine-sniffing borderline psychopath sex addict; Beverly is a shy, rather emotional lesbian with a strong social conscience.

Weisz plays the latter with her hair up, minimal make-up; her opposing twin is all tumbling raven locks and crimson lips. Its not an especially sophisticated conceit, but it works well as far as the viewer is concerned.

Weisz inhabits each one with admirable intensity, utterly believable as both. This is really her show  although there is a great cast of strange peripheral characters, including Poppy Liu as the sisters somewhat sinister housekeeper and Jennifer Ehle as a philanthropist with all the moral fibre of a used tissue.

Rachel Weisz stars as the Mantle twins in the showb Based on the 1988 David Cronenberg film of the same name

Its her decision to fund the twins new centre for womens health that triggers their descent into darkness.

Elliot  insatiable, amoral, brilliant  embodies the seductive power of technology, our desire to bend nature to our will regardless of consequences; Beverly is her conscience. She knows what theyre doing is wrong. She loves her sister, but she also hates her, and the hold she has over her.

The sisters have a game: when the shyer twin, Beverly, fancies someone, Elliot will seduce them  and then swap identities. It works fine until Beverly falls in love with one of their conquests, a successful young actress called Genevieve (Britne Oldford).

At first Elliot is incredulous, then jealous. Madly so. This feeling is new, strange, frightening  like the illegal babies she grows in her test tubes. Shes losing her power over her little sister, and she doesnt like it one little bit.

UK writer Sarah Vine praised Rachel Weisz's double performance as twin sisters Elliot and Beverly Mantle

As Beverly and Genevieves relationship begins to blossom, Elliot unravels. No amount of short-term gratification can fill the void. Her behaviour is despicable, yet somehow you feel sorry for her, lost in her misery.

Theres a heartbreaking scene towards the end that illustrates the depth of her descent, as out of self-loathing she seduces a man who, in her earlier pomp, repulsed her. Its almost Hogarthian.

Indeed, there are some wonderful visual touches: a Damien Hirst-style line up in the lab of lamb embryos at various stages of development; baroque, dreamlike settings which add to the extravagant darkness of the plot.

And blood, a lot of blood: the agony and ecstasy of birth and motherhood at its most visceral, portrayed unflinchingly in all its gory glory. Not an easy watch; but worth it.

This cheeky sitcom's alive with laughs

NOT DEAD YET

Disney+

Rating:

In Not Dead Yet, based on Alexandra Potter's book Confessions Of A Forty-Something F*** Up, Gina Rodriguez (pictured left) plays Nell Serrano, a talented US journalist who, having left her job to move to the UK to be with her boyfriend, finds herself back home and alone trying to get her life back on track

If youre in the market for a fun, sassy little show, look no further. I started watching this because I met the author of the book its based on, Alexandra Potter (the books title, Confessions Of A Forty-Something F*** Up, was deemed a bit strong for TV audiences), and she made me laugh so much I thought there was a decent bet this would be good. And it is.

Gina Rodriguez is Nell Serrano, a talented US journalist who, having given up her job to move to the UK to be with her boyfriend, finds herself single, broke and back home trying to piece her life together again.

In the show shes 37, which made me grimace somewhat: if thats what passes for old these days, then heaven help us. But once Id overcome that perceived slight, I happily settled in.

Its quite cheeky in parts, with plenty of jokes at everyones expense (theres even a gag about Aspergers, which in this day and age is quite daring).

And it has a quirky conceit: Nell is relegated to writing the obituaries at the newspaper where shed worked before, which sounds quite dull but is in fact a source of endless fun and games, since her subjects haunt her in ghost form (including influencer Piper, near left, with Nell) until she submits her story.

Nell negotiates the pitfalls of a post-relationship, post-youth, post-death landscape with humour and warmth. Its not deep  but it is fun.

Dont be a pill, Davina

Davina McCall (pictured) hosts Pill Revolution on Channel 4

Picking up this weeks gynaecological theme, I was looking forward to Davina McCalls Pill Revolution (Channel 4).

Davina has done a great job helping to debunk menopause myths; the pill seemed a natural follow-up. But then she started talking about canvassing women and people assigned female at birth and the red mist got me.

No, Davina. Its just women. Period. Only women have to stuff themselves full of drugs that make them cranky, fat, spotty, grumpy etc just so they dont end up permanently pregnant. This is biology: cant we leave the woke politics out of it?

I have mixed feelings about Sandi Toksvig. I used to think she was cool, until she described the father of my children as looking like a foetus in a jar (there really is a gynaecological theme here, isnt there?).

But in her Extraordinary Escapes (Channel 4) shes in a more loveable mode with Suzy Izzard (nee Eddie) in Ireland. The landscapes breathtaking, but its not really about that.

As Eddie, Suzy was a razor-sharp comedian; quick, witty and savage. As Suzy shes softer, more hesitant, even vulnerable. Fascinating.
Ariana DeBose has candidly confessed that she has 'developed a little bit of stage fright' after being mocked for her opening act at the BAFTAs.

The Academy-Award recipient, 32, gave a behind-the-scenes look into how she is feeling following the widespread backlash over her performance.

She has transparently admitted that the criticism which spewed on social media left her in tears.

'I didn't always enjoy how I felt during that moment, and I don't wish it on somebody else,' Ariana revealed.

Ariana DeBose has candidly confessed that she has 'developed a little bit of stage fright' after being mocked for her opening act at the BAFTAs

The Academy-Award recipient, 32, gave a behind-the-scenes look into how she is feeling following the widespread backlash over her performance

She has transparently admitted that the criticism which spewed on social media left her in tears

Ariana admitted that she was most upset that her grandma had witnessed the online hatred.

'I did cry once, but it was because I felt so bad that my grandmother was seeing the really horrible things that were being said, that had actually nothing to do with the performance, that were just ripping me apart.

'That's when I cried, because my grandmother loves me, and she doesn't want to read that,' she told Marie Claire.

Speaking about taking to the stage again, Ariana confessed: 'Have I developed a little bit of stage fright? I would be lying if I said no. But I also challenge myself, and I do scary things every day. And if I'm afraid of something, I should probably do it.

'Lessons were learned. Every time you step out on a stage, there's a chance it's not going to go well for either you or for the audience for whatever reason.

'And it seems that that was one of those performances. You win some, you lose some.'

And, despite the challenges she's faced, the star believes her appearance was a success: 'That was the assignment, like come celebrate women, and I was like "absolutely!"

'And we did that and it was fun, not going to lie, I had a blast. So awesome.'

The performer, who will host the Tony Awards on June 11, has been quick to transform any negativity into something more positive - and is now selling merchandise with the quirky rap lyrics that were mocked

The performer, who will host the Tony Awards on June 11, has been quick to transform any negativity into something more positive - and is now selling merchandise with the quirky rap lyrics that were mocked.

She donated all the proceeds to a UK-based charity called Mermaids which provides services for LGBTQ + children.

Ariana still has her Twitter account deactivated due to the trolls, and called the platform, 'hater Olympics.'

She has been left perplexed by the cynics: 'I don't understand that part of society. I don't understand why we use social media to just straight up pick on people.'

During her notorious BAFTAs opening performance, she presented a rap song about the female nominees, that mentioned 64-year-olds, Angela Bassett and Jamie Lee Curtis and more.

Her fun song featured the rap lyrics, 'Angela Bassett did the thing, Viola Davis, my woman king Jamie Lee, you are all of us!'

Ariana still has her Twitter account deactivated due to the trolls, and called the platform, 'hater Olympics'

Social media called the performance 'painful' and 'awkward' before a whole host of memes ridiculed the act.

Angela took the time to message Ariana to make sure she was doing okay, stating: 'I just wanted to make sure she was okay because, you know, it's a lot of attention. And she is A-Okay,' according to Variety.

As the online frenzy took over, Jamie broke their silence and desperately came to Ariana's defense.

The Oscar recipient stated: 'I'm unclear as to what the f*** people are on about. She is a fantastic talent.

'These people should shut the f*** up, back the f*** off, and let this woman just shine her light because she is fantastic. SHE IS FAN-TAS-TIC,' Deadline reported.
David 'Kochie' Koch was treated with several surprises during his last day as Sunrise host, including a confession about his wife's ex-lover.

The TV veteran, who has been the face of the top-rating morning program for 21 years, sat in the studio on Friday morning with his fellow colleagues while weatherman Sam Mac crossed live from hair and makeup with Kochie's wife, Libby, and their grandkids.

In a bid to make the breakfast TV presenter tear up, Sam asked Libby what made her 'fall in love' with the 67-year-old.

'Well, I loved his character,' she answered. 'He was a bit different to the other boys.'

'Who were the other boys, Lib?' Sam asked, before Libby dropped her bombshell.

David 'Kochie' Koch was treated with several surprises during his last day as Sunrise host, including a confession about his wife's ex-lover

'Oh, just one or two...' Libby replied, before Kochie shouted from the studio, 'Tell them about Bruce!'

The married couple's granddaughter Matilda then chimed and explained that the mystery man named Bruce was Libby's boyfriend when she met Kochie.

But it's evident Kochie stole Libby's heart - the longtime couple have been married 44 years.

In a bid to make the breakfast TV presenter tear up, weatherman Sam Mac asked Kochie's wife Libby what made her 'fall in love' with the 67-year-old

However, Kochie later revealed that he often teases Libby that Bruce 'still holds a torch for her.'

'At our engagement party, Lib's mum said to my mum, "Bruce still holds a torch for Lib."'

'So we've never let her forget that,' said Kochie, to laughter from his colleagues.

On Thursday, Libby appeared on Sunrise and revealed the real reason why the TV star decided to leave Sunrise after 21 years of hosting the morning show.

'Well, I loved his character,' she answered. 'He was a bit different to the other boys'

Libby, who shares four grown up children with Koch, explained it got harder for her husband to put his all into his television gig while also spending time with his children and grandchildren.

After noticing how tired he was she sat him down to have a chat and they decided it was time for him to leave his much-loved television gig.

'As much as he loved Sunrise he realised it's time to start cutting back and we talked about that together, he was getting really tired,' she said.

'Its really quite sort of sad (to see him leave) but then itll become exciting, but Im never very good with goodbyes.'

'Who were the other boys, Lib?' Sam asked, before their granddaughter Matilda explained that the mystery man named Bruce was Libby's boyfriend when she met Kochie

The tears were flowing on Friday morning the minute Kochie walked on set after he hugged his colleagues who had formed a guard of honour in the studio for his final day.

'Thank you for everything. Thank you. Oh dear. Quick, Ive got to [read] the news,' Kochie said as he prepared to read the news for the last time.

It wasn't long before Kochie was getting text messages from friends and TV rivals, including Today show host Karl Stefanovic.

'Karl and I are texting,' he told Natalie.

'I asked him if he had a Sportsbet booked on me crying on the show, and he said, "No, my missus closed my account last year when I bet on the camel races in Dubai."'

The TV veteran, who has been the face of the top-rating morning program for 21 years, sat in the studio on Friday morning with his fellow colleagues for his final day

'Well, as we walked in, you were already crying, so someone won some money,' Natalie said with a laugh.

Earlier, Kochie also welled up when his grandchildren appeared on-air to pay tribute to their 'Poppy'.

'He is always very kind and always gives us advice and tactics for our sport game and the eyespot assemblies. Always supportive and he has taught us to have half glassful perspective,' they said.

Kochie's last day started out hilariously, with weatherman Sam Mac taking a pot shot at the outgoing host.

During his weather segment, Mac pointed out that the Sunrise offices were almost completely empty for Koch's farewell.

Earlier the show, the 67-year-old got teary when his grandchildren appeared on-air to pay tribute to their grandad

'Very exciting day, emotional, a real testament to how much you are loved, Kochie, looking at all the staff here,' joked Mac as the camera panned across the darkened office.

The sledges didn't end there, with Mac then pointing out a hilarious sign on the door of Koch's office.

'Olympians Only' read the sign, a nod to the fact the 67-year-old was to be replaced by Olympic sprinter Matt Shirvington.

'This is your office, or it was, someone has already taken it over,' said Mac, before leading the camera crew into the room.

The 67-year-old's last day started out hilariously, with Sam Mac taking a pot shot at the outgoing host

During his weather segment, Mac pointed out that the Sunrise offices were almost completely empty for Koch's farewell

Inside, the word 'SHIRVONATOR' had been plastered across the wall.

Kochie stunned his colleagues on Monday, May 29, when he announced his resignation from the hit breakfast show after 21 years.

During his on air announcement, Natalie looked heartbroken when Kochie said he had spent more time with her over the past few years than with members of his own family.

On a desk was a 'to-do' list, purportedly written by Shirvington himself

He said he was leaving the hit show to focus on his own businesses and to enjoy more flexible work hours to spend time with his growing family.

Kochie joined Sunrise to present finance reports in 2002 and in October that year became Chris Reason's replacement when the journalist was diagnosed with cancer.

Matt Shirvington, 44, who will replace Kochie, said he was feeling 'mixed emotions' about the new gig.
Mariska Hargitay brought back memories of her pinup mother Jayne Mansfield when she debuted a new blonde hairdo Thursday.

The 59-year-old unveiled the look with celebrity hairstylist Chris McMillan, who created 'The Rachel' for Jennifer Aniston in the 1990s.

Jayne was one of the reigning sex symbols of the 1950s, a screen siren and Playboy Playmate who with Promises! Promises! became the first star actress to feature naked in an American movie since the advent of talkies.

Her saucy career ran alongside a tempestuous personal life that included a spiraling drinking problem and affairs with men as prominent as John F. Kennedy.

She was tragically killed at the age of 34 in a grisly car accident - with three of her children, including three-year-old Mariska, in the backseat.

Resemblance: Mariska Hargitay (left) brought back memories of her pinup mother Jayne Mansfield (right) when she debuted a new blonde hairdo Thursday

Connections: The 59-year-old unveiled the look with celebrity hairstylist Chris McMillan, who created 'The Rachel' for Jennifer Aniston in the 1990s

Mariska however clearly had her mind on happier subjects when she posed for the new Instagram album she posted Thursday.

Chris, a longtime pal of hers, pulled a few wacky faces while Mariska beamed and pouted in celebration of her new hairdo.

'He did it again! @mrchrismcmillan,' wrote Mariska, adding the hashtags: '#HappyTogether #HairFun #EveryoneNeedsALittlePretty #HappyHargiBangs #CharliesAngelsVibes #McMillanMagic.'

Jayne's movie roles were eclipsed by a whirlwind love life that included three failed marriages, the second of which brought her Mariska.

Mariska's father was the Hungarian heartthrob Mickey Hargitay, who earned the bodybuilding title Mr. Universe in 1955.

One year later, Jayne saw Mickey performing backup in Mae West's nightclub act and told the waiter: 'I'll have a steak and the man on the left.'

They married in 1958, with Jayne in a pink sequin bridal gown, and he promptly began appearing in her movies like Primitive Love and The Loves Of Hercules.

Offscreen their marriage was infamously turbulent, rocked by Jayne's affair with Italian producer Enrico Bomba, which unfolded in the headlines.

Sultry: With Promises! Promises! she became the first star actress to feature naked in an American movie since the advent of talkies; she is pictured in a photo-shoot at home

Siren: Her saucy career ran alongside a tempestuous personal life that included a spiraling drinking problem and affairs with men as prominent as John F. Kennedy

Troubled: Jayne's movie roles were eclipsed by a whirlwind love life that included three failed marriages, the second of which brought her Mariska

Family matters: Jayne is pictured with her second husband Mickey Hargitay, her daughter Jayne Marie and her baby son Milkos in 1959, a few years before Mariska was born

Having a ball: Mariska however clearly had her mind on happier subjects than her mother's troubled life when she posed for the new Instagram album she posted Thursday

Such fun: Chris, a longtime pal of hers, pulled a few wacky faces while Mariska beamed and pouted in celebration of her new hairdo

Feeling fab: 'He did it again! @mrchrismcmillan,' wrote Mariska, adding the hashtags: '#HappyTogether #HairFun'

Instagram escapades: Mariska's string of hashtags included '#EveryoneNeedsALittlePretty #HappyHargiBangs #CharliesAngelsVibes #McMillanMagic'

By the time Jayne discovered she was pregnant with Mariska, she and Mickey had already procured a quickie divorce in Juarez, Mexico.

In order to avoid the opprobrium of having a baby out of wedlock, Jayne and Mickey briefly kept up the appearance of being married stateside, but once Mariska was born Mickey had the Mexican officially recognized by a California court.

As the years went by, Jayne's career deteriorated and her personal life was scarred by a third divorce and a descent into alcoholism.

Reduced to playing the nightclub circuit, the woman once touted as 'the working man's Marilyn Monroe' found herself staging 'wardrobe malfunctions' for publicity and barreling into drunken brawls.

After Jayne's tragic death, Mariska moved in with her father, who was able to provide her with a stable upbringing until she ventured into acting herself, most famously with her popular role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

'I think I learned about crisis very young,' she told Glamour while reflecting on her mother's death: 'and I learned very young that s*** happens and theres no guarantees, and we keep going. And then we transform it.'

She added: 'Thats been kind of my superpower, and the gift of having trauma early in life. Ive spent the last 50 - how old am I? - 57, so 54 years sort of trying to figure out what happened and why, and what am I supposed to do with it?'

Mariska recalled: 'I clearly was in that frozen place for a lot of my childhoodof trying to survive, actually trying to survive. My life has been a process of unpeeling the layers and trust and trusting again.'
Netflix released an action-packed trailer for the highly-anticipated third season of The Witcher, starring Henry Cavill, on Thursday - with the Hollywood heartthrob reprising his role as Geralt of Rivia for the final time.

The series - recently renewed for a fifth season - will release volume one of season three on June 29, with volume two streaming on July 27.

This season marks the Superman star's final outing as the beast hunter before Liam Hemsworth takes over the lead role for season four.

The beloved series follows the journey of a mutated monster and witch hunter as he travels across mythical lands to slay supernatural beasts.

Geralt is one of the few remaining Witchers on the continent, and he struggles to find his way in the wicked world as others often misunderstand him.

Exciting: Netflix released the highly-anticipated third season trailer of The Witcher, starring Henry Cavill, on Thursday

They clean up nicely: The series will release volume one of season three on June 29 , with volume two streaming on July 27

Iconic: Season 3 marks Cavill's final outing as Geralt of Rivia before Liam Hemsworth takes over lead role for season four

The trailer begins with a voiceover of Geralt saying, 'Neutrality, it won't help get you a statue, but it will certainly help in keeping you alive.'

The Witcher is shown traveling by horseback alongside characters Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), and Ciri (Freya Allan), as they adjust to their new life together as a family.

The trio is shown journeying through barren landscapes as they share tender moments mixed with daring sword fights and dangerous obstacles.

The scenes flash in quick edits between multiple battles with enemies and monsters who possess other-worldly powers.

In an ominous voiceover, the Witcher reveals 'the dangers we've seen foretell an even more menacing future.'

The fearless warrior is then shown kissing Chalotra's character in a forest before he admits, 'For the first time, I understand real fear.'

In season three, as monarchs, mages, and beasts of the Continent compete to capture her, Geralt takes Ciri into hiding, determined to protect his newly-reunited family against those threatening to destroy it.

Entrusted with Ciri's magical training, Yennefer leads them to the protected fortress of Aretuza, where they hope to uncover more about the girl's untapped powers.

Protecting those he loves: The Witcher is shown traveling by horseback alongside characters Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), and Ciri (Freya Allan), as they adjust to their new life together as a family

Ominous: The trailer begins with a voiceover of Geralt saying, 'neutrality, it won't help get you a statue, but it will certainly help in keeping you alive'

The plot: The thrilling series follows the journey of a mutated monster and witch hunter as he travels across mythical lands to slay supernatural beasts

Supernatural: Geralt is one of the few remaining Witchers on the continent, and struggles to find his way in the wicked world as others often misunderstand him

Magic: In a foretelling voiceover, the Witcher reveals 'the dangers we've seen foretell an even more menacing future'

Sweet moments: The trio is shown journeying through barren landscapes as they share tender moments mixed with daring swordfights and dangerous obstacles

Instead, they discover they've landed on a battlefield of political corruption, dark magic, and treachery.

They must fight back, put everything on the line  or risk losing each other forever.

Joey Batey returns as Jaskier, Royce Pierreson as Istredd, Anna Shaffer as Triss, and Kim Bodnia as Vesemir.

The Witcher's Twitter account posted alongside the trailer: 'Chaos is coming. The Witcher Season 3 begins on the 29th of June #thewitcher.'

It was announced that Hemsworth, 33, would replace Cavill in the Netflix series in October 2022.

Season four of the show will continue progressing as planned initially, with Hemsworth starring in the series.

It came after Cavill stepped down from his role of Superman amid a massive shake-up at Warner Bros.

The British actor most recently appeared as Superman at the end of Warner Bros. Black Adam, teasing a showdown between Superman and Dwayne Johnson's Black Adam.

Changes: In season three, as monarchs, mages, and beasts of the Continent compete to capture her, Geralt takes Ciri into hiding, determined to protect his newly-reunited family against those threatening to destroy it

In tune: Entrusted with Ciri's magical training, Yennefer leads them to the protected fortress of Aretuza, where they hope to uncover more about the girl's untapped powers

Higher stakes: The fearless warrior admits, 'For the first time, I understand real fear'

Foes: The trio discover they've landed on a battlefield of political corruption, dark magic, and treachery

Suspenseful: The Witcher's Twitter account posted alongside the trailer: 'Chaos is coming. The Witcher Season 3 begins on the 29th of June'

Studio change-ups: Cavill also stepped down from his role of Superman amid a massive shake-up at Warner Bros

Love interest: The Witcher is shown kissing Chalotra's character Yennefer in a forest

Interesting: The British actor most recently has a cameo appearance as Superman at the end of Warner Bros. Black Adam, teasing a showdown between Superman and Dwayne Johnson's Black Adam

Cavill's departure came just days before James Gunn and Peter Safran were brought on as the new heads of DC Films.

'I have just had a meeting with James Gunn and Peter Safran and it's sad news, everyone. I will, after all, not be returning as Superman,' Cavill wrote on Instagram.

The actor went on to address the future of the franchise, writing, 'But then we must remember.... Superman is still around. Everything he stands for still exists, and the examples he sets for us are still there!'

Fans have now been gunning for Cavill to play another iconic role - James Bond. Cavill previously revealed he was in contention for the role back in 2005 but lost out to Daniel Craig.
Rising Sun Karate, a karate school once owned by late Power Rangers star Jason David Frank, is being sued for $47,347 in rent that has not been paid.

The Valencia, California-based karate dojo, according to TMZ, faces a lawsuit from the landlord, the Valencia Marketplace, claiming that the rent has not been paid in the months since Frank's November 19, 2022 death.

According to legal docs reviewed by the outlet, the Valencia Marketplace, the mall where the school is located, says that leases for the dojo were initially signed 25 years ago, in 1998.

The Valencia Marketplace said that tenants ceased paying rent in late 2022, around the time of Frank's tragic suicide at the age of 49.

Marketplace officials said in legal docs that the dojo was served with documents in March detailing the delinquent balance, but no money has been paid.

The latest: Rising Sun Karate, a karate school once owned by late Power Rangers star Jason David Frank, is being sued for $47,347 in rent that has not been paid. Frank was pictured in Las Vegas in June of 2019

Following Frank's death, TMZ reported in November that the dojo's co-founder Sam Sprague, a senior instructor at the school, pledged to keep the school open in an effort to preserve Frank's legacy.

In November, the outlet reported that the school operated two California locations and one in Texas, teaching a style called Toso Kune Do, which Frank was instrumental in putting together.

Following Frank's death in November, the school held a celebration of his life that was streamed on his official Facebook page.

Frank's confidante Mike Bronzoulis told TMZ in the wake of the actor's death that he kept his battle with mental health issues and depression under wraps.

Bronzoulis, an MMA fighter who had known Frank for 12 years, said that the Power Rangers alum was impacted by a family history of suicide, and had lost his mother years ago to cancer.

According to legal docs reviewed by the outlet, the Valencia Marketplace, the mall where the school is located, says that leases for the dojo were initially signed 25 years ago, in 1998

Following Frank's death in November, the school held a celebration of his life that was streamed on his official Facebook page

Bronzoulis said that he had chat with Frank a week before he died, and found a message in his voicemail after his death in which Frank said he was dealing with 'a lot' of issues and wanted to talk with him.

Frank was found dead via hanging in a Texas hotel room following an argument with his wife Tammie, who subsequently called police out of concern for Frank's safety.

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, help is available by dialing 988, texting 'STRENGTH' to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or going to 988lifeline.org to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.
David 'Kochie' Koch was given an emotional send-off on Friday morning as he celebrated his final day as the host of Sunrise.

The veteran television presenter, 67, was supported by his wife Libby, 66, and his four grown-up children and his grandkids in the studio.

And Kochie's 'hot son', Alexander 'AJ' Kochie, was on hand to support his dad.

In the midst of his final send off, AJ was seen holding his 18-month-old daughter Catalina as the pair leant over to Kochie who sat on the couch surrounded by family.

Little Catalina beamed as her grandad gave her a tickle on her stomach before AJ, 35, sat down beside his family.

David 'Kochie' Koch was met with a solid farewell on Friday morning as he celebrated his final day as the host of Sunrise

The veteran television presenter, 67, was supported by his wife Libby, 66, and his four grown-up children and his grandkids in the studio

The tears were flowing on Friday morning the minute Kochie walked on set after he hugged his colleagues who had formed a guard of honour in the studio for his final day.

'Thank you for everything. Thank you. Oh dear. Quick, Ive got to [read] the news,' Kochie said as he prepared to read the news for the last time.

'Well, as we walked in, you were already crying, so someone won some money,' Natalie said with a laugh.

AJ then sat down with the rest of his family on the couch

Kochie's 'hot son', Alexander 'AJ' Kochie (pictured with daughter Catalina), was also there to support his dad

Little Catalina beamed as her grandad Kochie gave her a tickle on her stomach

Earlier, Kochie also welled up when his grandchildren appeared on-air to pay tribute to their 'Poppy'.

'He is always very kind and always gives us advice and tactics for our sport game and the eyespot assemblies. Always supportive and he has taught us to have half glassful perspective,' they said.

Kochie stunned his colleagues on Monday, May 29, when he announced his resignation from the hit breakfast show after 21 years to spend more time with his family.

He has four children with his wife of 44 years, Libby, daughters Samantha, 42, Bree, 38, and Georgina, 32, and son Alexander.

AJ is just as business savvy as his iconic father, but is happy to work from behind the scenes rather than in front of the camera

David's hot son AJ is just as business savvy as his iconic father, but is happy to work from behind the scenes rather than in front of the camera.

He has worked as the general manager for the Kochie-founded Pinstripe Media, a popular financial publisher and content agency, for 12 years.

With a full head of jet-black hair and matching beard, AJ is the spitting image of his father at a younger age.

Pictured: David and his wife Libby with their son AJ on his wedding day in 2018

He has his social media set to private and rarely makes public appearances, although Kochie proudly posted some heartwarming snaps to Facebook of his son's wedding in 2018.

AJ cut a dashing figure on his wedding day in a smart tailored grey suit as he married his fiancee Carrie, in an intimate ceremony that Kochie and his family attended.

It comes after Kochie shocked viewers when he announced on Monday morning that he's leaving the breakfast show after 21 years.

With a full head of jet-black hair and matching beard, AJ is the spitting image of his father at a younger age

He has worked as the general manager for the Kochie-founded Pinstripe Media, a popular financial publisher and content agency, for 12 years

After making the surprise announcement, the 67-year-old revealed he's walking away from the hit show to focus on his own businesses.

He also wants to enjoy more flexible work hours to spend time with his growing family.

'It's time for me to work business hours and for [wife] Libby and I to have a bit more flexibility to enjoy our burgeoning family, to travel and focus on our family business interests in Pinstripe Media and the Ausbiz business channel,' he told viewers.

He has his social media set to private and rarely makes public appearances, although Kochie proudly posted some heartwarming snaps to Facebook of his son's wedding in 2018

'As everyone knows, I'm a finance nerd so you'll still see me pop up every so often on RBA board meeting days or covering other big financial news, but as a guest rather than host.'

Kochie struggled to hold back the tears during his goodbye speech.

The longest-serving TV host in Australian history made the shock announcement, beside his emotional co-host Natalie Barr.

'I have loved every single minute of it and I'm incredibly proud of what we've achieved here over the last 21 years,' Kochie told viewers.

AJ cut a dashing figure on his wedding day in a smart tailored grey suit as he married his fiancee Carrie, in an intimate ceremony that Kochie and his family attended
Samantha Armytage finally returned to the show she hosted for eight years on Friday.

The 46-year-old sat down with David 'Kochie' Koch and Natalie Barr on Friday's Sunrise to farewell retiring host Koch.

It marked her first return to the show since her tearful departure in 2021, citing media 'scrutiny, snarkiness and bullying' as reasons for leaving at the time.

And on Friday, Armytage admitted the real story behind her abrupt exit more than two years ago.

'This job is so incredibly difficult, and you can't say it when you're in the job, because no one wants to hear you complaining,' she told Kochie and Nat.

Then and now: Samantha Armytage seen during her tearful 2021 Sunrise exit [left] and during her return to the show on Friday [right]

Sam continued, 'But when you're not in the job anymore, you can say how hard this is. There is so much scrutiny.'

'To get up day after day and do this: the resilience, the drive, the ability, the energy to just keep coming in here every day and do that is extraordinary.'

She told her former colleague, 'I absolutely salute you. After eight years, I couldn't do it anymore. 21 [years] I just think is extraordinary.'

Armytage is still employed by the Seven Network, most recently taking over as host of Farmer Wants A Wife.

While Koch smiled happily at his former colleague's return on Friday, Armytage's successor Natalie Barr seemed less pleased.

Barr appeared to shuffle uncomfortably on the couch as Armytage sat quite a distance from her.

As Armytage walked on set, the two women did however share a quick hug as fans peered into the studios from Martin Place.

Samantha Armytage [centre] has returned to the Sunrise set for the first time since walking away from the top-rating breakfast show in 2021. Pictured with Natalie Barr and David 'Kochie' Koch

The interview was over shortly after it began, lasting just five minutes before Koch and Barr moved onto other guests.

Samantha famously 'upset' Barr with a snarky tweet after departing the show in March, 2021.

Sam tweeted: 'Look, I'm out. Nat's wanted the job forever... and she's finally got it. She just needs to get on and enjoy it - and forget about me (even though I'm unforgettable).'

Barr was reportedly 'gutted' by her predecessor's hurtful tweet months after her 2021 departure, suggesting she was desperate for the top job.

Barr was reportedly 'gutted' by her predecessor's hurtful tweet months after her 2021 departure, suggesting she was desperate for the top job

But on Friday, Barr appeared to put on a happy face, with the two women hugging off-camera in photos obtained by Daily Mail Australia

The 55-year-old was not expecting the former anchor, 46, to be so 'snarky' after they'd worked together on Seven's breakfast show for years, a source told New Idea.

'No one was more shocked and saddened over Sam's comments than Nat,' the insider claimed. 'She is gutted and has no idea why the snarkiness continues, even though Sam has been gone [from Sunrise] for months.'

But on Friday, Barr appeared to put on a happy face, with the two women hugging off-camera in photos obtained by Daily Mail Australia.

'Look, I'm out. Nat's wanted the job forever... and she's finally got it. She just needs to get on and enjoy it - and forget about me (even though I'm unforgettable),' Sam previously tweeted

Nat vs Sam: a timeline of their feud July 2019: Nat jokingly calls Sam 'a b***h-faced moll' when asked if she's as 'nice' as she appears to be on Sunrise. March 2021: Sunrise co-host David Koch reveals he and Nat weren't told about Sam's star-studded farewell lunch at Catalina restaurant in Sydney's Rose Bay. March 2021: Nat is rankled by Sam's claims that married women with children aren't expected to work as hard in their careers. April 2021: Sam reveals she hasn't spoken to any of her former colleagues since leaving Sunrise a month earlier. May 2021: It's discovered that Sam doesn't follow Nat or Kochie on Instagram, despite following many other former Seven colleagues. June 17, 2021: Nat tells The Australian Women's Weekly she and Sam were never friends outside of Sunrise. June 21, 2021: Sam refuses to answer a question about their rumoured feud during an interview on The Kyle and Jackie O Show, and simply says: 'It's better to be talked about than not.' June 21, 2021: Sam later tweets that Nat has 'wanted her job forever' and urges her to 'just get on and enjoy it - and forget about me'. Advertisement

'No one was more shocked and saddened over Sam's comments than Nat,' an insider previously claimed. 'She is gutted and has no idea why the snarkiness continues, even though Sam has been gone [from Sunrise] for months'

Shortly after Samantha appeared on Sunrise for Kochie's final day on Friday, his former co-host Mel Doyle also appeared live on the show to bid him a fond farewell.

Mel, 53, gave both Kochie and Nat warm hugs as she appeared live in the Martin Place studio.

Mel hosted Sunrise from 2002 until 2013, when she was replaced by Sam Armytage.

Shortly after Samantha appeared on Sunrise for Kochie's final day on Friday, his former co-host Mel Doyle also appeared live on the show to bid him a fond farewell

Mel, 53, gave both Kochie and Nat warm hugs as she appeared live in the Martin Place studio

Mel hosted Sunrise from 2002 until 2013, when she was replaced by Sam Armytage

During the chat, Mel recalled her fond memories of hosting the show alongside Kochie and paid tribute to him

During the chat, which lasted for about six and a half minutes, Mel recalled her fond memories of hosting the show alongside Kochie and paid tribute to him.

Mel appeared teary as she spoke about her time on the show.

'We did have a few daggy moments down memory lane,' Kochie said as throwback footage aired.

'Getting your nights back is the best thing. Going out at night and not having to do the 5:30pm dinner booking,' Mel said as she told Kochie about how to adjust to life post-Sunrise.

'Have fun and enjoy especially Granddad time, that's going to be the most precious, I'm just so excited for you,' she added.

'Have fun and enjoy especially Granddad time, that's going to be the most precious, I'm just so excited for you,' she added

Sunrise star Koch was treated to a special breakfast on his last day hosting the breakfast show on Friday.

The TV veteran, who has been the face of the top-rating morning program for 21 years, was seen tucking into a tasty egg and bacon roll in-between takes, before washing it down with a milky coffee.

Kochie leaned over the news desk as his munched on the greasy sandwich to avoid getting any food on his pristine suit while his co-host Natalie Barr practised her lines.

Earlier, the 67-year-old got teary when his grandchildren appeared on-air to pay tribute to their grandad.

'He is always very kind and always gives us advice and tactics for our sport game and the eyespot assemblies. Always supportive and he has taught us to have half glassful perspective,' they said.

Sunrise host David 'Kochie' Koch was treated to a special breakfast on his very last day hosting the breakfast show

Earlier, the 67-year-old got teary when his grandchildren appeared on-air to pay tribute to their grandad

'He is always very kind and always gives us advice and tactics for our sport game and the eyespot assemblies. Always supportive and he has taught us to have half glassful perspective,' they said

Kochie's last day started out hilariously, with weatherman Sam Mac taking a pot shot at the outgoing host.

During his weather segment, Mac pointed out that the Sunrise offices were almost completely empty for Koch's farewell.

'Very exciting day, emotional, a real testament to how much you are loved, Kochie, looking at all the staff here,' joked Mac as the camera panned across the darkened office.

The sledges didn't end there, with Mac then pointing out a hilarious sign on the door of Koch's office.

'Olympians Only' read the sign, a nod to the fact the 67-year-old was to be replaced by Olympic sprinter Matt Shirvington.

The TV veteran, who has been the face of the top-rating morning program for 21 years, was seen tucking into a tasty egg and bacon roll in-between takes, before washing it down with a milky coffee

The 67-year-old's last day started out hilariously, with Sam Mac taking a pot shot at the outgoing host

'This is your office, or it was, someone has already taken it over,' said Mac, before leading the camera crew into the room.

Inside, the word 'SHIRVONATOR' had been plastered across the wall.

Below it were several of Shirvington's famous magazine covers over the years, including one of the former Olympian riding a horse in his underwear.

During his weather segment, Mac pointed out that the Sunrise offices were almost completely empty for Koch's farewell

'It said in the weekend paper that publicity tried to bury that [image] of him,' said a laughing Natalie Barr.

On a desk was a 'to-do' list, purportedly written by Shirvington himself.

One of the points posed on the whiteboard read, 'Do we need weather????'

'Yes we do, Matt,' joked Mac.

'Credit to the man, he moves fast and well,' said the weather presenter.

On a desk was a 'to-do' list, purportedly written by Shirvington himself

At one point, Kochie was seen on air being given a guard of honour as he walked through the Sunrise studios for the very last time.

He was was greeted with applause, hugs and well wishes from the Sunrise team and his family.

Kochie jokingly 'snubbed' his replacement Matt Shirvington as he stepped onto the set of Sunrise for the final time on Friday.

Kochie jokingly 'snubbed' his replacement Matt Shirvington as he stepped onto the set of Sunrise for the final time on Friday, after hosting the show for 21 years

Kochie was greeted with applause and cheers as he made his way through the studio

In a cheeky dig at the moment Tracy Grimshaw awkwardly snubbed her ACA replacement Allison Langdon last year, Kochie pretended not to see Matt, 44, who is taking over the top job as co-host of Sunrise from next Monday.

After he kissed his wife Libby, Kochie jokingly blanked former Olympian Matt who appeared crestfallen after he tried to hug Kochie.

'Just joking, just joking. I got you an Ally Langdon!' Kochie said while laughing and embracing Matt.

'You almost got me, you almost got me!' Matt replied with a laugh.

In was a cheeky dig at the moment Tracy Grimshaw awkwardly snubbed her ACA replacement Allison Langdon last year, Kochie pretended not to see Matt, 44, who is taking over the top job as co-host of Sunrise from next Monday

He was later given a cake, hilariously decorated with a figure of himself in icing sugar, as he signed off air for the very last time.

'It's been a buzz, a spectacular job,' Kochie said as he got emotional while cutting a cake while surrounded by the Sunrise team and his family.

'This family, they've been with me through the best and worst times. Thank you for having me,' he said.

Kochie stunned his colleagues on Monday when he announced his resignation from the hit breakfast show after 21 years.

During his on air announcement, Natalie looked heartbroken when Kochie said he had spent more time with her over the past few years than with members of his own family.

He said he was leaving the hit show to focus on his own businesses and to enjoy more flexible work hours to spend time with his growing family.

Kochie joined Sunrise to present finance reports in 2002 and in October that year became Chris Reason's replacement when the journalist was diagnosed with cancer.

Matt Shirvington, 44, who will replace Kochie, said he was feeling 'mixed emotions' about the new gig.
Zendaya and Priyanka Chopra were among the glamorous arrivals for the glitzy opening of the Bulgari Hotel Roma in Italy on Thursday.

The actress, 26, set pulses racing in an eye-catching black sheer mesh bodysuit as she posed for snaps at the swanky launch.

Showing off her svelte physique, Zendaya teamed her revealing one-piece with a matching black trouser suit with a white speckled print.

She accessorised her look with simple pointed-toe heels as she and Priyanka posed for snaps together at the opening.

Zendaya also continued to show off her sleek brunette bob, which was styled into sophisticated waves.

Here they are! Zendaya and Priyanka Chopra were among the glamorous arrivals for the glitzy opening of the Bulgari Hotel Roma in Italy on Thursday

Stunner! The actress set pulses racing in an eye-catching black sheer mesh bodysuit as she posed snaps at the swanky launch

Stunner! Showing off her svelte physique, Zendaya teamed her revealing one-piece with a matching black trouser suit

Meanwhile, Priyanka, 40, was every inch the glamorous Hollywood star, arriving for the opening in a dramatic white feathered gown.

The dress boasted a plunging front and a daring thigh-split with a feathered trim, and she completed her outfit with a green jewelled necklace.

Adding a fun twist to her look, Priyanka styled her brunette tresses into cute long pigtails, with herself and Zendaya joined by fellow guest Lucia Silvestri.

Ahead of attending the launch, Priyanka and Zendaya were seen arriving at the hotel, with the actress sporting a far more low-key look.

Priyanka sported a relaxed purple printed co-ord consisting of an oversized shirt and loose-fitting trousers, teamed with a black crop top.

Last week, Zendaya celebrated her boyfriend Tom Holland's 27th birthday with two sweet Instagram story posts.

One image showed the English hunk swimming in the ocean with his head dunked in the water and his hands making a heart sign; she added a heart within his hands.

Another showed Tom smiling in her direction while climbing rocks at the beach with her adding a heart eye emoji.

A vision! Zendaya's stunning suit was covered with a white speckled print

Flawless: Her look was perfectly accessorised with beautiful diamond drop earrings

Grand entrance! Meanwhile, Priyanka was every inch the glamorous Hollywood star, arriving for the opening in a dramatic white feathered gown

Revealing: The dress boasted a plunging front and a daring thigh-split with a feathered trim

Say cheese: Upon arriving at the launch event, Priyanka was joined by Bulgari's CEO Jean-Christophe Babin

Flawless: Adding a fun twist to her look, Priyanka styled her tresses into cute long pigtails

Pose it up! Once they arrived on the red carpet for the opening, Priyanka and Zendaya were joined by fellow guest Lucia Silvestri

Gorgeous! The two actresses stunned in their gorgeous looks

Tom also posted a snap of himself in a helmet and putting on a pair of water shoes, with a cheeky caption that said: 'Thank you for all the wonderful birthday messages. A gift from me to you. I thought I'd share possibly the sexiest picture ever taken of me! #sexyiestmanalive.'

Tom and Zendaya, who met in 2016, first played Peter Parker/Spider-Man and MJ in 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming and reprised those roles in 2019's Spider-Man: Far From Home.

The actors denied any romance between them for four years, with each star fueling the rumors via social media as they commented on each other's posts.

In a birthday tribute in 2017 to Tom, Zendaya shared a snap of him and wrote: 'Pretty glad you were born... happy birthday @tomholland2013.

In that same year, People's source reported that were were dating but being 'super careful to keep it private.'

The insider said: 'They started seeing each other while they were filming Spider-Man. They've been super careful to keep it private and out of the public eye but they've gone on vacations with each other and try and spend as much time as possible with one another.'

In August 2017, Zendaya told Variety that Tom is 'literally one of my best friends,' adding: 'This past how many months we've had to do press tours together. There's very few people that will understand what that's like at 20 years old.'

In 2019, however Zendaya was linked to Euphoria co-star Jacob Elordi, who went on to date Kaia Gerber and now Olivia Jade; Zendaya and Jacob never confirmed their romance.

Tom was linked to a woman named Olivia Bolton but reportedly split in April 2020.

While there had been rumors about their romance for months - they finally confirmed their romance in July 2021, after they were seen kissing in their car in LA.

Here she comes! Ahead of the red carpet, Priyanka was seen making her way into the event in her gorgeous white gown

Grand arrival! Zendaya was also spotted at the opening in her eye-catching suit

Low-key: Priyanka sported a relaxed purple printed co-ord consisting of an oversized shirt and loose-fitting trousers, teamed with a black crop top

Colourful: Her look was accessorised with slip-on black sandals and a matching handbag

In late 2021, the couple promoted their third film together - Spider-Man: No Way Home together, and were often seen affectionately posing together or having a tender moment on the red carpet.

In January 2021, Zendaya spent time with Tom and his family in London.

In 2018, she tied the night with Nick Jonas, and the couple welcomed their daughter, Malti, via surrogate in January 2022.

Their baby girl initially spent 100 days in the NICU, but was able to go home shortly before Mother's Day.
Noel, you're not louche enough to be a real duke

Now 56, Noel Gallagher evidently feels ready to be elevated to the peerage. 'I wouldn't mind being the Duke of Manchester,' says the Oasis star. 'If there's any of that s*** knocking about, that would be good.'

He has already tried out his preferred title at 'some f****** posh gaffe'. 'This guy said to me, 'Where do I recognise you from?', he explains. 'And I said, 'I'm the Duke of Manchester!'

Alas, I fear he lacks the requisite credentials. Thrice-married bigamist Alexander Montagu, 13th Duke of Manchester, 60, has variously been deported from Canada, fired a speargun at his first wife, been jailed in Australia (twice) and the U.S., and worked for underworld 'fixer' Tom Erickson. (The latter expired on the day he was due to face 11 charges of threatening to kill.)

Carole admits she was 'naive' as party firm goes bust owing millions

The Princess of Wales's mother, Carole Middleton, has been left deeply 'upset' by the collapse of her mail-order business, a close friend tells me. Yesterday, I reported that she was accused of 'betrayal' after Party Pieces went bust, owing 2.6million.

'Carole is understandably upset and deeply disappointed in this situation,' the pal says. 'Over the past five months she really has done her best to find a buyer, who not only would take the business forward, but would also honour any outstanding debts.

'Carole believes in accountability and accepts she had been a little naive to step back and trust someone else to run the business she had spent decades nurturing and it's been desperately sad to see the company sold off in this way.'

The friend claims: 'The truth is Carole had stepped back from the business over three years ago, trusting the day-to-day running to a new management team. Sadly the business took a turn for the worse and by the time she realised, it was just too late.'

However, one of her suppliers told me yesterday that Mrs Middleton had been giving personal assurances that debts owed by Party Pieces would be repaid in full earlier this year.

Awkard timing for Prince William, who, I hear, held his first private talks at Kensington Palace on Wednesday with Sir Keir Starmer. The previous day, Prince Harry had breached royal convention at the High Court by making an extraordinary attack on Rishi Sunak's Government. 'The timing was pure coincidence,' a royal source insists.

Patsy Kensit wants to become a granny. 'I'm not sure how I'd like to celebrate my birthday but hopefully with my family and maybe a grandchild,' says the actress, 55, who's engaged to property tycoon Patric Cassidy. She has two sons: James Kerr, 29; and Lennon Gallagher, 23. 'I keep saying to Lennon, 'Just have a baby'. 'And I tell Issy [his girlfriend], 'I'll look after it. Just do it for me'.'

Roger drums up his girls' support for Queen show

Roger Taylor's children have a bit of a love-hate relationship with his band Queen, but they were prepared to join him at the gala night of We Will Rock You nevertheless.

The drummer's daughters, models Lola, 22, and Tigerlily, 28 (above left and right), watched the jukebox musical, based on the group's hits, at London's Coliseum Theatre, before larking around with him at the party afterwards. Tigerlily, whose mother is Taylor's ex-wife Debbie Leng, admits she was once embarrassed by her father's band.

'I used to listen to them so much when I was younger, but I strayed away because I used to get bullied at school. People would put them on at a party and be like, 'Ha! Ha!', so I kind of developed a bit of an aversion to them for a while.'
David 'Kochie' Koch marked his final day on Sunrise on Friday, after an incredible 21 years in the job.

And at the Channel Seven Sunrise studios in Sydney's Martin Place, Kochie was greeted with a handmade sign by a diehard fan as viewers watched the TV veteran sign off for the final time.

One punter proudly held the sign up to the studio's glass windows as Kochie was farewelled on air.

The man appeared to be channeling Instagram sensation Seth from the hit account, Dude With a Sign.

Alongside a series of pictures of Kochie and co-host Natalie Barr, the poster read: 'We will miss you!'

David 'Kochie' Koch marked his final day on Sunrise on Friday, after an incredible 21 years in the job. And at the Channel Seven Sunrise studios in Sydney's Martin Place, Kochie was greeted with a handmade sign by a diehard fan

The collage of pictures included on set shenanigans and a picture of Kochie, 67, dressed up as Elvis.

Kochie celebrated his final Sunrise show on Friday, after resigning from the show earlier this week.

At one point, Kochie was seen on air being given a guard of honour as he walked through the Sunrise studios for the very last time.

Kochie celebrated his final Sunrise show on Friday, after resigning from the show earlier this week

Kochie was seen happily posing with the diehard fan outside the Seven studios

He was was greeted with applause, hugs and well wishes from the Sunrise team and his family.

Kochie jokingly 'snubbed' his replacement Matt Shirvington as he stepped onto the set of Sunrise for the final time on Friday.

In a cheeky dig at the moment Tracy Grimshaw awkwardly snubbed her ACA replacement Allison Langdon last year, Kochie pretended not to see Matt, 44, who is taking over the top job as co-host of Sunrise from next Monday.

Alongside a series of pictures of Kochie and co-host Natalie Barr, the poster read: 'We will miss you!'

At one point, Kochie was seen on air being given a guard of honour as he walked through the Sunrise studios for the very last time

After he kissed his wife Libby, Kochie jokingly blanked former Olympian Matt who appeared crestfallen after he tried to hug Kochie.

'Just joking, just joking. I got you an Ally Langdon!' Kochie said while laughing and embracing Matt.

'You almost got me, you almost got me!' Matt replied with a laugh.

'Just joking, just joking. I got you an Ally Langdon!' Kochie said while laughing and hugging Matt after pretending to 'snub' him

He was later given a cake, hilariously decorated with a figure of himself in icing sugar, as he signed off air for the very last time.

'It's been a buzz, a spectacular job,' Kochie said as he got emotional while cutting a cake while surrounded by the Sunrise team and his family.

'This family, they've been with me through the best and worst times. Thank you for having me,' he said.

Nat also shared a tribute to Kochie as she bid him farewell, breaking down in tears.

'For the last 20 years I have sat at that desk with him and watched as he gets to the core of an interview and cuts through all the PR and all the bull. And I have learned so much,' Nat said.

'We have travelled across Australia and we have gone around the world and through thousands and thousands of hours of live television and we have laughed and laughed and we have cried.'

He was later given a cake, hilariously decorated with a figure of himself in icing sugar, as he signed off air for the very last time

'What is he really like? He's one of the best friends that I will ever have in my life and I will treasure the years we have had on air. And I know we will have many more years, they will just look a little different. Congratulations.'

Kochie previously said he was leaving the hit show to focus on his own businesses and to enjoy more flexible work hours to spend time with his growing family.

He joined Sunrise to present finance reports in 2002 and in October that year became Chris Reason's replacement when the journalist was diagnosed with cancer.

Matt Shirvington, 44, who will replace Kochie, said he was feeling 'mixed emotions' about the new gig.
It's been a busy few weeks for Elliot Page, but he keeps moving forward.

The Canadian star, 36, was pictured arriving at LAX airport on Thursday holding his dog Mo, as he continues to make headlines amid revelations in his new memoir Pageboy.

The Oscar-nominated star, 36, who was once known as Ellen Page and came out as transgender in 2020, kept a low profile in a black hooded sweatshirt over a white shirt with blue jeans and black sneakers as he made his way through the terminal.

The Umbrella Academy star donned a black ballcap with black-rimmed glasses as he held a black travel bag in one hand and his pet in the other.

The Juno star has past featured his dog in social media posts, including one in April and one celebrating the holidays in 2021.

The latest: Elliot Page, 36, was pictured arriving at LAX airport on Thursday holding his dog Mo, as he continues to make headlines amid revelations in his new memoir Pageboy

Page in his new memoir graphically detailed his failed attempts to have sex with a man at age 16, as he battled with his sexuality years before coming out as gay.

Page revealed he once dated a classmate called Kenneth and repeatedly attempted to lose his virginity to him - to no avail.

Writing in his new memoir Pageboy, Page said the pair - who met in grade 10 at Queen Elizabeth High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia - would 'fool around upstairs' and engage in 'dry humping,' which did not arouse Page.

He wrote: 'Kenneth was sweet, sensitive and cute. A unique face with prominent cheekbones and electric eyes, his hair dark brown and floppy.

'We'd fool around upstairs. I didn't really like it but I didn't mind it either.

'The kissing, meh. The dry humping, alright. I would pretend to orgasm. Not that Kenneth wasn't or wouldn't be fantastic in bed. I am certain he would be a selfless and generous lover.'

Going into further explicit detail, Page said when they tried to have sex, Kenneth was unable to enter him, adding: 'That whole "wet" thing was not happening.

'We'd try and then stop, try and then stop, try and then stop, and then we stopped trying. I was lucky it was with someone as lovely as him, it could have ended a different way.'

Hands full: The Umbrella Academy star donned a black ballcap with black-rimmed glasses as he held a black travel bag in one hand and his pet in the other

Travel day: Page was pictured holding his pet dog at the baggage claim of the airport

Very candid: Page has graphically detailed his failed attempts to have sex with a man aged 16 - as he battled with his sexuality years before coming out as gay (pictured 2022)

The star added that due to suffering a tear in his private parts during a rollerblade accident, he had this 'idea that something had happened to my vagina - causing my body to refuse entry.

'Everyone was talking about "doing it" and "hooking up" and "virginity"... and I didn't get it. Was everyone also pretending?

'I avoided sex with guys and suppressed my real, unrequited crushes. My brain could not comprehend that I simply wasn't interested, that I just didn't want to go through with it, which would be a completely appropriate feeling and response.'

Page would come out as a lesbian in 2014 - and would transition from female to male six years later.

Elsewhere in the book Page revealed he developed stress-induced shingles on the set of Inception in 2010 after feeling 'out of place in a cast full of cis men.'

He wrote: 'Shingles communicated the stress my body felt. It popped out of my spine while filming Inception when I was twenty-two.

'Despite everyone being delightful to work with, I felt out of place. In a cast full of cis men, I did not understand the role I found myself in.

Elliot said that early on in filming he would joke that he'd be 'recast with Keira Knightley.'

Teen years: The Oscar-nominated star, 36, who was once known as Ellen Page and came out as transgender in 2020, revealed he once dated a classmate called Kenneth and repeatedly attempted to lose his virginity to him - to no avail (pictured 2004)

Fling: This comes after Page claimed he had sex with Juno co-star Olivia Thirlby 'all the time' while they filmed the hit 2007 movie - just days after revealing he had a secret romance with Kate Mara (pictured)

This comes after Page claimed he had sex with Juno co-star Olivia Thirlby 'all the time' while they filmed the hit 2007 movie - just days after revealing he had a secret romance with Kate Mara.

The star said he was instantly attracted to Thirlby, now 36, who played Juno's best friend Leah in the film, as he recounted their fling in Pageboy.

He said: 'I was taken aback the moment I saw Olivia Thirlby. She seemed so much older, capable, and centered.

'Sexually open, far removed from where I was at the time. But the chemistry was palpable, it pulled me in.'

Page - who played pregnant teen Juno MacGuff in the film - recounted how they started 'sucking face' in a hotel room after Thirlby confessed she was 'really attracted' to him, to which Page reciprocated her feelings.

He wrote: 'It was on. I had an all-encompassing desire for her, she made me want in a way that was new, hopeful.'

He added it was one of the first times someone would make him orgasm.

Page said he and Thirlby began having sex 'all the time', writing: 'Her hotel room, in our trailers at work, once in a tiny, private room in a restaurant  We thought we were being subtle. Being intimate with Olivia helped my shame dissipate. I didnt see a glint of it in her eyes and I wanted that  done feeling wretched about who I am.'

Tea spilled: He wrote: 'It was on. I had an all-encompassing desire for her, she made me want in a way that was new, hopeful.' He added it was one of the first times someone would make him orgasm' (pictured together in 2007)

Around the time Page and Thirlby filmed Juno, the pair were slated to star as the title characters in Jack & Diane - playing two young women who fall in love - but both dropped out before production, and the cast was replaced numerous times over.

Thirlby publicly came out as bisexual in 2011 - she has been married to Jacques Pienaar since 2014.

DailyMail.com has contacted representatives for Thirlby for comment.

This comes after Elliot revealed he had a secret relationship with Kate Mara after he came out as gay in 2014 - and while she was dating Max Minghella.

Page details in his memoir Pageboy how he and Kate, 40, struck up a romance as he filmed X-Men: Days of Future Past and that Kate was 'in love with two people.'

Kate and Max went their separate ways in 2014 after four years of dating. She is now married to actor Jamie Bell, with whom she shares two children.

In an excerpt from his memoir, obtained by People, Page writes: 'The first person I fell for after my heart was broken was Kate Mara. She had a boyfriend at the time, the lovely and talented Max Minghella.'

Sexuality battle: Writing in his new memoir Pageboy, Page said the pair - who met in grade 10 at Queen Elizabeth High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia - would 'fool around upstairs' and engage in 'dry humping' - which did not arouse Page (pictured 2006)

Racy: Page recounted how they started 'sucking face' in a hotel room after Thirlby confessed she was 'really attracted' to him - to which Page reciprocated her feelings (pictured in Juno with Allison Janney)

Coming out: Olivia came out as bisexual publicly in 2011 - she has been married to Jacques Pienaar since 2014 (pictured 2019)

'This was right after Id come out as gay [in 2014] and it was a time of exploration and also heartbreak. I think my relationship, or whatever you want to call it with Kate, very much encapsulates a certain dynamic that I consistently found myself in, which was falling for people that  I think a lot of us do this  who arent fully available.

'And the sort of safety in that and the highs and the lows and the serotonin bump, and then it goes away. And I think that is definitely a pattern in my life.

'I think the love and care that we have for each other is its very own special thing. Separate from the intimacy that I write about.'

Elliot said Max was supportive of Kate exploring their relationship - which was kept a secret from the world - and says Kate told him: 'I never thought I could be in love with two people and now I know I can.'

The pair played a couple in movie My Days of Mercy which premiered in 2017 and was released in 2019 - this was made after their romance.

Page added that Kate has read the book and will appear at a book event in LA in June to promote it.

Elliot publicly came out as a transgender man in December 2020 but revealed he began 'feeling like a boy' from the age of nine.

In an extract shared by People, Elliot recalled being in a gay bar just a few months before the premiere of his breakout 2008 movie Juno.

At the bar he met a woman named Paula, who unwittingly helped him address the feelings of 'shame' he had.

Heartbreak: This comes after Elliot revealed he had a secret relationship with Kate Mara after he came out as gay in 2014 - and while she was dating Max Minghella (pictured 2017)

Former couple: Kate and Max went their separate ways in 2014 after four years of dating (pictured 2014)

Ex; Elliot said Max was supportive of Kate exploring their relationship -which was kept a secret from the world and says Kate told him: 'I never thought I could be in love with two people and now I know I can' (pictured 2014)

Moved on: Kate is now married to actor Jamie Bell and the pair share two children (pictured January 2023)

He wrote: 'Dancing, sweat dripping down my back, down my chest. I watched Paula's hair twist and bounce as she moved effortlessly, chaotic but controlled, sensual and strong.

'I would catch her looking at me, or was it the other way around? We wanted to be caught. Deer in the headlights. Startled, but not breaking.'

Having asked if he could kiss her, he continued: 'And then I did. In a queer bar. In front of everyone around us. I was coming to understand what all those poems were about, what all the fuss was.

'Everything was cold before, motionless, emotionless. Any woman I had loved hadn't loved me back, and the one who maybe had, loved me the wrong way.

'But here I was, on a dance floor with a woman who wanted to kiss me and the antagonizing, cruel voice that flooded my head whenever I felt desire was silent.'

Elliot also looked at how the bar helped him address his feelings of shame.

He penned: 'Shame had been drilled into my bones since I was my tiniest self, and I struggled to rid my body of that old toxic and erosive marrow.

'But there was a joy in the room, it lifted me, forced a reaction in the jaw, an uncontrolled, steady smile.'

Elliot was paid 'north of $3M' to write his 288-page tell-all, which Flatiron Books will publish on June 6.

The two-time Emmy-nominated producer came out as a lesbian in 2014 during a speech at the Human Rights Campaign's 'Time to Thrive' conference in Las Vegas.

Elliot kicks off his nine-date international book tour on June 6 at The Town Hall in Midtown Manhattan, and future dates will be announced soon.

It's unclear if Elliot is still dating non-binary comedian Mae Martin after the pair got matching tattoos and suited up for the 11th Annual LACMA Art + Film Gala on November 5.

Elliot's divorce from Canadian dancer Emma Portner was finalized in 2021 after two years of marriage.
Vanessa Hudgens was a vision in all black while hitting the red carpet at the world premiere of her new film Downtown Owl.

The 34-year-old actress was all smiles while hitting the re carpet at the SVA Theatre in New York City on Thursday evening.

She was joined by writer-director Hamish Linklater, co-director/star Lily Rabe and David Harbour on the red carpet.

Hudgens - who made headlines late last month for performing Jennifer Lopez's I'm Real' with fiance Cole Tucker - stepped out in a unique charcoal cashmere bell-sleeve dress from the Fall/Winter 2023 Michael Kors Collection.

The low-cut dress featured cutouts on both sides with long oversized sleeves, with the dress falling to her ankles.

Vanessa: Vanessa Hudgens was a vision in all black while hitting the red carpet at the world premiere of her new film Downtown Owl

Premiere: The 34-year-old actress was all smiles while hitting the re carpet at the SVA Theatre in New York City on Thursday evening

She accessorized with gold earrings and three gold necklaces with small gold pendants.

The actress completed her look with black heels for the red carpet event on Thursday evening, the second night of the Tribeca Film Festival.

Downtown Owl is adapted from the Chuck Klosterman novel of the same name that was published in 2008 and marked his first fully-fictional book.

The story is set in the fictional town of Owl, North Dakota, following three characters in the small town leading up to a massive blizzard.

Hudgens stars alongside Lily Rabe, Jack Dylan Grazer, Ed Harris, Henry Golding and Finn Wittrock.

The film has its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday, though there's no word if the film has distribution in place or other festival runs locked in.

Hudgens also posed hand-in-hand with her co-star Lily Rabe, who opted for a lacy black dress and black platform heels.

Like Hudgens' gown, Rabe's black dress also had cutouts on the sides though more towards the back of the dress.

Vanessa's look: She accessorized with gold earrings and three gold necklaces with small gold pendants

Complete: The actress completed her look with black heels for the red carpet event on Thursday evening, the second night of the Tribeca Film Festival

Posing: She posed up a storm inside the event ahead of the movie's screening

The co-stars were also seen hugging on the red carpet before heading in to the premiere screening.

Rabe and her co-director Hamish Linkalter also posed on the red carpet with David Harbour.

Others in attendance included Finn Wittrock, who opted for a tie-less cobalt blue suit at the event.

Other cast members included Jeremy Kucharek, Alan Arias, Emma Halleen, Jack Dylan Grazer, August Rosenstein, Ariana Jaffier and Arden Michalec.

It comes after Vanessa and and her fiance Cole Tucker showed off their singing abilities in an adorable video shared to her Instagram.

Leggy: Vanessa (right) later posed alongside leggy actress Laura New (left)

Sizzle: The duo both looked gorgeous in all black

Lily and Vanessa: Hudgens also posed hand-in-hand with her co-star Lily Rabe, who opted for a lacy black dress and black platform heels

Cutouts: Like Hudgens' gown, Rabe's black dress also had cutouts on the sides though more towards the back of the dress

Hugs: The co-stars were also seen hugging on the red carpet before heading in to the premiere screening

Hand-in-hand: Lily Rabe and Vanessa Hudgens pose on the red carpet for Downtown Owl

Directors: Rabe and her co-director Hamish Linkalter also posed on the red carpet with David Harbour

Say cheese: (L-R) Hamish Linklater, Lily Rabe, David Harbour and Vanessa Hudgens

Beaming: The actors appeared over joyed to show off their brand new flick

Pals: (L-R) Finn Wittrock, Lily Rabe and Vanessa Hudgens

Confidence: Lily oozed confidence in front of the camera

Dapper: David cut a dapper figure in a dark ensemble which he layered over a crisp white shirt

Finn's look: Others in attendance included Finn Wittrock, who opted for a tie-less cobalt blue suit at the event

The beauty and the baseball player, 26, gave a fun performance of J.Lo's hit song 'I'm Real' during what appeared to be a party with their friends.

'Because im obsessed w me fiance and WERE REAL,' the actress  who recently spoke about her wedding plans  wrote in the caption of the post.

In the clip Hudgens is seen holding a microphone as she stands in the middle of the room looking stylish in a white bodysuit and a zebra print coat.

Meanwhile Cole is right next to her chiming in with the parts originally sang by rapper Ja Rule on the 2001 hit.

Arden: Arden Michalec poses in a stunning white dress at the Downtown Owl premiere

Sensational: Her frock hugged every inch of her jaw-dropping figure

Alan: Alan Arias (left) poses at the Downtown Owl premiere alongside Ariana Jaffier (right)

Smart: August Blanco Rosenstein cut a suave figure in a dark suite

Others: Other cast members included Jeremy Kucharek, Alan Arias, Emma Halleen, Jack Dylan Grazer, August Rosenstein, Ariana Jaffier and Arden Michalec

Vanessa wore her raven tresses in a chic bun and sported red lipstick on her pout.

Cole rocked an all-black look consisting of a coat over a t-shirt and jeans.

While the couple sang and entertained their friends the rest of the crowd enjoyed the performance while also singing along.

The original version of I'm Real was recorded by Lopez for her second studio album, J.Lo.

The hit album had a total of 14 other tracks that included Love Don't Cost A Thing and Come Over.

Vanessa also took to her Instagram Stories to share a snap of her beau during one of his games, sweetly captioning the post, 'My King.'
The stars of the new comedy-drama film The Good Half hit the red carpet for the world premiere screening on day two of the Tribeca Festival in New York City.

Brittany Snow, Nick Jonas and Elisabeth Shue were among the cast to show off their fashion sense while slipping into promo mode for the latest production from filmmaker Robert Schwartzman.

Directed by Schwartzman from a script by Brett Ryland, The Good Half focuses on Renn Wheeland (Jonas), an emotionally distant writer who returns to his hometown of Cleveland to attend his beloved mothers funeral after having spent years avoiding his sister (Snow), father (Matt Walsh) and step-father (David Arquette), according to Tribeca Festival website.

During his time at home Renn forges new relationships, including a 'charming and energetic stranger (Alexandra Shipp), while healing old ones, all while learning he can't continue on avoiding conflict in his life.

Shue's husband Davis Guggenheim, along with cast members David Arquette and Matt Walsh were also on hand for the promotional event.

Promo mode: Brittany Snow, Nick Jonas and Elisabeth Shue were among the main cast to hit the red carpet at the world premiere of the comedy-drama film The Good Half at the Tribeca Festival in New York City on Thursday

As photographers snapped away along the red carpet, Snow, 37, showed off her womanly curves in a dark blue sequin gown.

The striking number included a plunging and shoulder-less design that showcased her cleavage, and a slit on the left side that allowed the actress to flaunt her legs at a moments notice.

The former John Tucker Must Die star also wore a pair of strappy heels the wound up around her ankles, and had her dark tresses styled long and straight, just past her shoulders, with a part in the middle.

Jonas, 30, looked stylish in a gray double-breasted suit that came complete with added fabric that hung down several inches below the front of the blazer.

Opting to go with an added casual touch, the Jonas Brothers star rounded out his ensemble with a white t-shirt and matching sneakers.

Shue, 59, went for a more casual look in blue jeans with a white blouse, a brown leather jacket and matching brown leather boots.

The Melrose Place alum had her blonde locks styled long with a healthy dose of volume and a center part.

At one point, Shue's husband Davis Guggenheim joined her on the red carpet for a round of photos together.

The writer, director and producer, 59, looked handsome in a black suit with a burgundy dress shirt and black shoes, as he snuggled up next to his wife.

Eye-catcher: Snow's striking number included a plunging and shoulder-less design

Leggy: Snow's gown also had a slit on the left allowing her to flaunt her legs at a moments notice

Leading man: The Good Half focuses on Renn Wheeland (Jonas), an emotionally distant writer who returns to his hometown of Cleveland to attend his beloved mothers funeral after having spent years avoiding his sister (Snow), father (Matt Walsh) and step-father (David Arquette)

Family matters: Jonas, who plays the lead male role of Renn, would also strike a pose with co-star David Arquette, who plays his step-father in the film

Man in black: Arquette, 51, attended the world premiere in an all-black ensemble

Team pose: Jonas, Shue and Arquette also struck a pose with director Robert Schwartzman

Arquette, 51, would strike a few poses both by himself and alongside the film's leading man, Jonas, dressed in an all-black ensemble.

The Scream star would also joined Jonas, Shue and Schwartzman on the red carpet for a picture or two.

Schwartzman who's best known for directing the films Dreamland (2016), The Unicorn (2018), and The Argument (2020), looked stylish in a classic black suit and tie with a white dress shirt.

Walsh, 58, went for some contrast in the fashion department by wearing black pants with a white jacket and shirt, and black leather shoes.

The actor and comedian is best known for his roles in Bad Santa (2003), The Hangover (2009), and as a correspondent on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart (2001-2002).

On-screen family: Shue plays Jonas's beloved mother in The Good Half

Item: Shue and shared the red carpet spotlight with her husband Davis Guggenheim

TV man: Guggenheim is a writer, director and producer, whose Hollywood credits include NYPD Blue, ER, 24, Deadwood and the documentary An Inconvenient Truth

Fellow cast member: Matt Walsh, 58, went for some contrast in the fashion department by wearing black pants with a white jacket and shirt, and black leather shoes

Promo mode: Ahead of the world premiere, Jonas promoted the film on his Instagram page

Family support: Jonas's wife, Priyanka Chopra, jumped into the conversation on Instagram about The Good Half premiere

Ahead of the world premiere of The Good Half, Jonas took to his Instagram page to promote the first screenings of the film.

'The World Premiere of my new movie The Good Half will be at the @tribeca Film Festival starting with three screenings on June 8th. Excited to be alongside this incredible cast! @brittanysnow @alexandrashipppp @davidarquette @mrmattwalsh Elisabeth Shue,' he shared in the caption.

The actor and musician's wife, Priyanka Chopra, jumped into the conversation and commented: 'Lets gooooo.'

Founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff in 2002, the Tribeca Festival (formerly Tribeca Film Festival) showcases a diverse selection of film, episodic, talks, music, games, art, and immersive programming, each spring in New York City.

This go-around the festival kicked-off on June 7 and goes through until June 18.
Chris Hemsworth was busted with Spanish words scribbled on the palm of his left hand when he stepped out at the red carpet premiere of his film Extraction 2 in Madrid on Wednesday.

The Bryon Bay-based hunk, 39, hit the red carpet alongside his Spanish wife Elsa Pataky, 46, where they were mobbed by hundreds of adoring fans.

But as Chris waved and happily signed autographs for the crowd, he was seen with Spanish words scrawled in blue pen on the inside of his hand.

The Hollywood actor has been married to his wife, who was born in Madrid, for 13 years - but it appears he's yet to learn the language.

The Thor star took the blunder in good humour, addressing it in an Instagram post on Thursday.

Chris Hemsworth was busted with Spanish words scribbled on the palm of his left hand when he stepped out at the red carpet premiere of his film Extraction 2 in Madrid on Wednesday

'After years of coming to Spain and being asked 'has my Spanish improved' I can safely say it's in the palm of my hand,' he said.

The sweet message on his hand reads: 'Estoy muy feliz de estar en Espana' which translates to: 'I'm very happy to be in Spain'.

'Elsa wrote it for me,' Chris told Spanish TV program El Hormiguero (The Anthill).

Chris, who portrays black market mercenary Tyler Rake in the films, looked sharp in a black suit and a crisp white shirt at the event.

Extraction 2, the follow up to 2020's smash hit Extraction, is set to be released on June 16.

Chris Hemsworth looked sharp in a suit as he attended the premiere of Extraction 2 in Spain on Wednesday

Chris, who portrays black market mercenary Tyler Rake in the films, looked every inch the Hollywood star as he posed for photos and met his adoring fans

Chris' character Tyler Rake is back and ready for his next mission in the film, which also stars Idris Elba.

Back in 2020, Extraction became the number one film on Netflix and had 90 million households in its first four weeks.

Extraction follows former SASR operator-turned-mercenary Tyler Rake as he is recruited to rescue the son of India's biggest drug lord.

Chris was mobbed by fans and happily signed autographs for the crowd

Chris was mobbed by fans and happily signed autographs for the crowd

The Bryon Bay-based hunk, 39, hit the red carpet in Madrid wearing a black blazer and trousers and a crisp white shirt

Chris hit the red carpet with director Sam Hargrave, actress Rahavard Farahani and co-star Olga Kurylenko (all pictured)

The son - played by actor Rudhraksh Jaiswal - is being held for hefty ransom by a rival drug lord in Bangladesh.

But when Rake attempts to complete the mission, things go terribly awry as corruption and greed come to light.

Chris is in Spain with wife Elsa Pataky, 46, who hails from Madrid, but she was not believed to be in attendance at the premiere.

Elsa looked incredible in a flowing red dress as she hit the red carpet at the Elle Eco Awards in Madrid on Wednesday.

Extraction 2, the follow up to 2020's smash hit Extraction, is set to be released on June 16

Chris' character Tyler Rake is back and ready for his next mission in the film, which also stars Idris Elba

Back in 2020, Extraction became the number one film on Netflix and had 90 million households in its first four weeks

The work trip comes after the actor announced that his film career will take a back seat following a discovery he's at risk of Alzheimer's disease.

Chris, who recently lost his grandfather Martin to Alzheimer's at age 83, and spoke to British GQ magazine this week about how he wants to be remembered when it's his time to go.

Hemsworth said he was touched to hear people talking fondly about Martin at his funeral, and hopes the same will happen for him when he dies.

'My uncle specifically said, 'he's remembered as a good bloke'. And if he knew, or if someone told him that's how he would be remembered, how incredibly proud he would feel,' the Thor star explained.

'It made me think about my own life. And it wasn't about career or anything. It was about being remembered as someone who was good and kind and contributed something of value.'

The Rush actor told Vanity Fair last November he has decided to take 'time off' after filming a confronting episode about death on his new Disney+ docu-series Limitless.

Chris is in Spain with wife Elsa Pataky, 46, who hails from Madrid, but she was not believed to be in attendance at the premiere. Elsa looked incredible in a flowing red dress as she hit the red carpet at the Elle Eco Awards in Madrid on Wednesday

She looked like the ultimate blonde bombshell with her long locks out and over her shoulders

The work trip comes after the actor announced that his film career will take a back seat following a discovery he's at risk of Alzheimer's disease

After having bloodwork done for the program, he was informed he is 'between eight and 10 times' likelier to develop Alzheimer's than the general population, because he is one of only two to three percent of people with two copies of the gene APOE4.

However, there are evidently a number of steps that people in his position can take to reduce their level of risk, such as ensuring they get a good night's sleep, curbing their alcohol intake and cutting out cigarettes, according to the CDC.

As a result, Chris reacted to the news of his own predisposition to Alzheimer's by cultivating a healthier lifestyle.

'Doing an episode on death and facing your own mortality made me go, 'Oh God, I'm not ready to go yet',' he told the publication.

'I want to sit and be in this space with a greater sense of stillness and gratitude. And then you start talking about kids and family... It really triggered something in me to want to take some time off.'

Playing on Chris' stardom through superhero movies, Limitless follows him as he pushes up against the boundaries of what his body can do.

He is seen on the Disney+ program pursuing various physical goals, such as what Variety reports was 40lbs (18kg) of weight gain for a Thor film.
Shanina Shaik got caught out by the sun on Thursday when her light pink dress went see-through at a glamorous Los Angeles event.

The Australian model, 32, turned heads in the ankle-length sequin gown that showed off her amazing figure.

With a wide smile on her face, she looked excited to attend a soiree for FRWD fashion.

The Victoria's Secret model didn't seem to mind the sun sending her frock sheer, beaming as she walked into the venue.

She kept her dark shoulder length locks down and straight and opted for a glowy makeup look with a nude lip.

Shanina Shaik got caught out by the sun on Thursday when her light pink dress went see-through at a glamorous Los Angeles event

To finish off the look, she wore a pair of silver stilettos and a simple silver bracelet.

Shanina gave birth to her first child with her partner Matthew Adesuyan nine months ago.

The Melbourne native lives in Los Angeles with her beau and their son Zai.

The Australian model, 32, turned heads in the ankle-length sequin gown that showed off her amazing figure

The Victoria's Secret model didn't seem to mind the sun sending her frock sheer, beaming as she walked into the venue

A few days after his birth last September, the model shared a photo of the newborn on Instagram.

In the caption, she wrote: 'Welcome to the world baby Zai Adesuyan'.

She added: 'Matthew and I are so in love!!! I have taken this time to adjust to my baby's schedule and to understand the role of being a mother. Bringing life into this world is a beautiful challenge.'

She kept her dark shoulder length locks down and straight and opted for a glowy makeup look with a nude lip

She flew her mother Kim Shaik to Los Angeles for the birth of Zai and said that she is her biggest inspiration of how to be a good mom.

Speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald last year, the US-based catwalk star said it's hard being so far away from family, but the move was needed to progress her career.

'I think its quite scary for any parent to see their kid move to the other side of the world, but Im very grateful to have supportive parents who allowed me to go on my journey,' she said.

'My dad and mum always tell me to do what makes me happy, because that will make them happy. They know I am very hard-working and dedicated to my career.'
The White Lotus star Jennifer Coolidge was spotted enjoying a spot of brunch in Sydney on Friday with a friend.

The actress, 61, looked incredibly stylish as she made her way around The Harbour.

Jennifer kept warm in a chic camel coat worn underneath a black outfit and teamed with a fedora and sunglasses.

The blonde had her long locks neatly styled, out and around her face and her youthful visage was made up with matte foundation and a nude lip.

She was seen chatting away to her friend as they stopped for a spot of brunch.

The White Lotus star Jennifer Coolidge was spotted enjoying a spot of brunch in Sydney on Friday with a friend

Jennifer is in Australia to headline an exciting evening as part of Vivid Sydney.

She will be bringing her eclectic personality on stage at the International Convention Centre (ICC) in Darling Harbour on June 10.

The American star will speak about her decades of experience in Hollywood, give the audience a glimpse into her glamorous life and talk about the huge success of The White Lotus along with its writer and director Mike White.

She was seen chatting away to her friend as they stopped for a spot of brunch

Jennifer kept warm in a chic camel coat worn underneath a black outfit and teamed with a fedora and sunglasses

The blonde had her long locks neatly styled, out and around her face and her youthful visage was made up with matte foundation and a nude lip

'Hey Australia, it's Jennifer Coolidge and I just got really exciting news, Mike White and I are coming to Vivid Sydney on June 10, see you there!' she said in a fun clip promoting her visit.

Featuring in movies such as Legally Blonde and American Pie, Jennifer has been a household name for comedy lovers, but her role in The White Lotus has further catapulted her fame.

Her role as Tanya McQuoid in the parody series of the luxury class has been globally recognised as she won awards at the Golden Globes, Emmys, Critics Choice Awards and SAG Awards.

The star is in Australia to headline an exciting evening as part of Vivid Sydney. The 61-year-old actress will be bringing her eclectic personality on-stage at the International Convention Centre (ICC) in Darling Harbour on June 10

Jen and her friend tucked into some healthy dishes while dining at The Rocks

Jennifer is known for starring in The White Lotus (pictured). Her role as Tanya McQuoid in the parody series of the luxury class has been globally recognised as she won awards at the Golden Globes, Emmys, Critics Choice Awards and SAG Awards

Jennifer, who was slated to host Saturday Night Live before the writers strike - recently sat down with The Bear star Jeremy Allen White as part of Variety's Actors on Actors interview series.

She got candid about her career as she reflected on what she described as her 'fatal flaw' in the days of her early success in the late 1990s through early 2000s.

Asked if she had had a plan going into her acting career with a view to longevity, she admitted that she had not.

'Now that I'm old enough to really look back at my life and certainly my mistakes, I see a lot of those. But I never had any strategy. I just went job to job,' she explained.

'Hey Australia, it's Jennifer Coolidge and I just got really exciting news, Mike White and I are coming to Vivid Sydney on June 10, see you there!' Jen said in a fun clip promoting her visit

Jennifer, who was slated to host Saturday Night Live before the writers strike - recently sat down with The Bear star Jeremy Allen White as part of Variety's Actors on Actors interview series

She got candid about her career as she reflected on what she described as her 'fatal flaw' in the days of her early success in the late 1990s through early 2000s

Jennifer went on: 'I have to say I made the terrible mistake of not riding the wave that I had early on. It was sort of in the '90s when I had Legally Blonde, Best in Show and American Pie. And then there was Cinderella Story and stuff like that.

'But there was a moment. There was a wave I really could have ridden but I got really distracted.'

As for the distraction? 'I started pursuing guys,' she said.

'I wasn't paying attention. I just thought I had my whole life. I did get some jobs, but I didn't have a plan. And I think that was a fatal flaw of mine, because it took so long to get anything going later.'

Asked if she had had a plan going into her acting career with a view to longevity, she admitted that she had not
Melissa Doyle looked incredibly youthful on Friday as she stepped out to lunch with David 'Kochie' Koch, Natalie Barr and Larry Emdur.

The former Sunrise host, 53, bid her final farewells to ex co-host Kochie, 67, after he filmed his final day on the breakfast show set.

Garbed in an eye-catching red top with extravagant feathered cuffs, Melissa looked half her age with long golden locks framing her flawless complexion.

She elevated her sprightly look with a long black skirt and glossy black pumps as she clutched a designer bag between her hands.

Accessorising with a set of silver hoop earrings, the television presenter slicked on some red lipstick before letting her natural beauty shine through with a dewy base.

Melissa Doyle, 53, (pictured) stepped out looking incredibly youthful on Friday as she went out to lunch with David 'Kochie' Koch, 67, Natalie Barr, 55, and Larry Emdur. Pictured right in 2003

Melissa was spotted sliding into a car as she set off for lunch with Natalie and Larry and bid a final farewell to Kochie who attended with his wife Libby.

Kochie - who co-hosted Sunrise with Melissa from 2002 to 2013 - finished up his last day on set Friday morning as Natalie, 55, cried uncontrollably on live television.

Her long-time friend and colleague walked through a guard of honour comprised of crew members, producers and fellow presenters at Channel Seven before they delivered the news together for the final time.

The former Sunrise host bid her final farewells to ex co-host Kochie after he filmed his final day on the breakfast show set. Pictured with Kochie's wife Libby and Sunrise host Natalie

Garbed in an eye-catching red top with extravagant feathered cuffs, Melissa looked half her age with long golden locks framing her flawless complexion

She elevated her sprightly look with a long black skirt and glossy black pumps as she clutched a designer bag between her hands

Accessorising with a set of silver hoop earrings, the television presenter slicked on some red lipstick before letting her natural beauty shine through with a dewy base

Natalie struggled to fight back tears as she said goodbye to one of her 'best friends' with a heartfelt tribute, telling her co-anchor he had taught her so much.

'I've been at Channel Seven for 28 years, and for 20 of those, I've sat at the same desk as you, at the Sunrise desk,' she said, while immediately breaking down into tears.

She continued: 'In a world that tells us every day how to act and what to say, you have shown Australia that what is important is being yourself.'

Kochie pulled his teary co-host into a tight embrace as his visibly emotional wife, Libby and fellow presenters, applauded the heartfelt farewell.

Melissa was spotted sliding into a car as she set off for lunch with Natalie and Larry and bid a final farewell to Kochie who attended with his wife Libby
David Koch appeared in excellent spirits as he enjoyed a farewell lunch on Friday.

The departing Sunrise host was accompanied by fellow Seven stars Natalie Barr, Mel Doyle and Larry Emdur at Granna restaurant in Sydney.

The television host, 67, beamed as he headed to a waiting car with Natalie, Mel and Larry in tow.

Missing from the shindig was former Sunrise star Samantha Armytage who was noticeably absent from the festivities.

David looked chic in a sleek black suit with a white dress shirt and kept things casual by skipping the tie.

David Koch (pictured) appeared in excellent spirits as he enjoyed a farewell lunch on Friday with many of his past and present Channel Seven colleagues

Kochie's former Sunrise co-host Sam Armytage skipped the lunch, despite being in the studio that morning to film Kochie's farewell episode

Natalie looked gorgeous in a fitted white maxi dress with long sleeves that sat close to her figure.

Mel opted for a bright red blouse with dramatic feathered sleeves and a black pencil skirt.

Larry meanwhile was dapper in a navy blue blazer and black trousers as well as white shirt and pocket square.

Also attending was David's wife, Libby, who wore a camel toned coat and pale pink blouse along with black pants.

It comes after Sam returned to the Sunrise set for the first time since walking away from the top-rating breakfast show in 2021.

The departing Sunrise host was accompanied by fellow Seven stars Natalie Barr, Mel Doyle and Larry Emdur at Granna restaurant in Sydney

The television host, 67, beamed as he headed to a waiting car with Natalie, Mel and Larry in tow

Missing from the shindig was former Sunrise star Armytage who was missing from the festivities amid rumours of a feud with Barr

Armytage sat on the couch she had owned for several years during her own reign as co-host of the show to farewell departing host Kochie on Friday.

While Koch smiled happily at his former colleague's return, Armytage's successor Natalie Barr seemed less pleased.

The pair looked uncomfortable as Armytage sat down and left a large space between them.

However the two women did share a quick hug as Armytage walked on set while fans peered into the studio from Martin Place.

During the interview, Armytage referenced her own acrimonious departure from the show, telling Koch, 'I, after eight years, couldn't do [the job] any more.'

David looked chic in a sleek black suit with a white dress shirt and kept things casual by skipping the tie

Natalie (right) looked gorgeous in a fitted white maxi dress with long sleeves that sat close to her figure

Also attending was David's wife, Libby (left), who wore a camel toned coat and pale pink blouse along with black pants

Larry (pictured) meanwhile was dapper in a navy blue blazer and black trousers as well as white shirt and pocket square

Mel (right) opted for a bright red blouse with dramatic feathered sleeves and a black pencil skirt

'21 years [of hosting] I just think is an extraordinary effort.'

The interview was over shortly after it began, lasting just five minutes before Koch and Barr moved onto other guests.

Samantha famously 'upset' Barr with a snarky tweet after departing the show in March, 2021.

Sam tweeted: 'Look, I'm out. Nat's wanted the job forever... and she's finally got it. She just needs to get on and enjoy it - and forget about me (even though I'm unforgettable).'

The friendly Channel Seven crew appeared to dine and dash as they made their way into a large SUV

Doyle was all smiles as she waited to get in the car after celebrating Kochie's exit from the morning show

Barr was reportedly 'gutted' by her predecessor's hurtful tweet months after her 2021 departure, suggesting she was desperate for the top job.

The 55-year-old was not expecting the former anchor, 46, to be so 'snarky' after they'd worked together on Seven's breakfast show for years, a source told New Idea at the time.

'No one was more shocked and saddened over Sam's comments than Nat,' the insider claimed. 'She is gutted and has no idea why the snarkiness continues, even though Sam has been gone [from Sunrise] for months.'

But on Friday, Barr appeared to put on a happy face, with the two women hugging off-camera in photos obtained by Daily Mail Australia.

Kochie placed a protective hand on Doyle's back as he guided her into the vehicle

Kochie stunned his colleagues on Monday when he announced his resignation from the hit breakfast show after 21 years

Shortly after Samantha appeared on Sunrise for Kochie's final day on Friday, his former co-host Mel Doyle also appeared live on the show to bid him a fond farewell.

Mel, 53, gave both Kochie and Nat warm hugs as she appeared live in the Martin Place studio.

Mel hosted Sunrise from 2002 until 2013, when she was replaced by Sam Armytage.

Kochie stunned his colleagues on Monday when he announced his resignation from the hit breakfast show after 21 years.
Jonas Armstrong and Sophie Rundle immersed themselves into character while filming dramatic rescue scenes for new ITV mystery After The Flood in Teesside on Thursday.

Robin Hood star Jonas, 42, was seen battling the currents after plunging into the River Tees to rescue a baby strapped in their car seat.

The actor, who portrays a seemingly heroic local man called Lee, certainly threw himself into filming as he swam towards the car seat before dragging it to safety alongside rescue officers.

Meanwhile, Sophie, 35, who plays PC Joanna Marshall in the drama, was on hand to rescue the tot - with it assumed that a prop baby was used for filming.

The Peaky Blinders star was in full costume for the scenes, donning a high-vis jacket over black overalls as well as a police cap.

Wow: Jonas Armstrong (pictured) and Sophie Rundle immersed themselves into character while filming dramatic rescue scenes for new ITV mystery After The Flood in Teesside on Thursday

Character: Sophie, 35, who plays PC Joanna Marshall in the drama, was on hand to rescue the tot - with it assumed that a prop baby was used for filming

Action man: Robin Hood star Jonas, 42, was seen battling the currents after plunging into the River Tees to rescue a baby strapped in their car seat

Amid filming the action-packed rescue scenes, the actress was also seen taking a break in between filming.

Sophie was seen having a giggle on set while showing off the prosthetic bump she wears for her pregnant character.

With the stars filming out in the elements in the North of England, they were also seen wrapped up in long, blue padded coats.

Sophie looked rather cosy in her fleece-lined outerwear, with the beauty seen clutching a water bottle while chatting to other team members.

Sophie plays the lead in ITV mystery After The Flood, in which the discovery of a man's body after a natural disaster is not all it seems.

She also stars in the crime thriller alongside her husband Matt Stokoe, 34, and the couple were previously seen shooting scenes together.

In a case of life imitating art, Matt plays Sophie's character Jo's husband Pat.

An onlooker watching them on location in Glossop, Derbyshire, recently said: 'It's a beautiful part of the world but there was so much rain that on occasion they had to take a break in filming.

Heroic: The actor, who portrays a seemingly heroic local man called Lee, certainly threw himself into filming as he swam towards the car seat before dragging it to safety alongside rescue officers

Dramatic: Jonas is seen wading into the water to rescue the baby while filming the action scenes

Here I come: A member of the rescue team was seen diving into the water after the car seat

What a scene: The car seat was seen being dragged along by the strong current of the River Tees

I've got you: Jonas was seen swimming the baby to the edge with the help of a rescue officer

Team work: Jonas' character was seen passing the baby to Sophie's character in the thrilling scene

Thrilling: The actors fully immersed themselves in the rescue scene

Rescued: However, Jonas' character needed rescuing himself at one point

Saviours: He was seen having a giggle as he was dragged to safety by two burly men

All good: The actor gave the thumbs up as he stood in the chilly water

Job well done: Jonas high-fived a crew member following his scenes

What a day: The Bay star dried off with a blue towel following his water scenes

Relaxed: He appeared happy with his scenes as he took a breather bwteen filming

'But that didn't seem to stop the joy on set. Sophie and Matt had some great interaction with each other as they were waiting to shoot their scenes. It was such a relaxed environment and everyone looked like they were enjoying working together.'

Although Sophie's husband Matt didn't appear to be filming the recent scenes with her, her co-star Tripti Tripuraneni was also present, playing another police officer.

The six-part drama also features actor Nicholas Gleaves, who was recently spotted on set in a forensic suit.

While other stars in the drama written by BAFTA nominated writer and actor Mick Ford include Philip Glenister, Lorraine Ashbourne, Jacqueline Boatswain and Anita Adam Gabay.

Safe and sound: Sophie's was seen handing the baby to another police officer in the show

Let's get dry: The actress emerged from the river while a co-star clutched the tot

Whoops: At one point the actress displayed her prosthetic bump as she adjusted her costume

Uniform: The Peaky Blinders star was in full costume for the scenes, donning a high-vis jacket over black overalls as well as a police cap

Rest: Amid filming the action-packed rescue scenes, the actress was also seen taking a break in between filming

Bumping along nicely: Sophie was seen having a giggle on set while showing off the prosthetic bump she wears for her pregnant character

On set: Sophie was seen chatting to co-stars and crew members between scenes

That's a wrap: With the stars filming out in the elements in the North of England, they were also seen wrapped up in long, blue padded coats

Keeping warm: Sophie looked rather cosy in her fleece-lined outerwear, with the beauty seen clutching a water bottle while chatting to other team members

Co-stars: Sophie's co-star Tripti Tripuraneni was also present, playing another police officer

Catch-up: The ladies were seen chatting on set alongside another team member

Lunch time: Jonas, Sophie and Tripti were seen enjoying a lunch break by the river

Fun times: The thespians enjoyed a giggle as they chilled out between scenes

Tasty: Sophie tucked into her lunch while Jonas opted not to eat

Behind the scenes: Things looked rather relaxed as the stars took a break amid the dramatic scenes

An official synopsis for the series reads: 'After the Flood is a mystery thriller set in a town hit by a devastating flood.

'When an unidentified man is found dead in a lift in an underground car park police assume he became trapped as the waters rose, and as the investigation unfolds PC Joanna Marshall, played by Sophie Rundle, becomes obsessed with discovering what happened to him.

'How did he get in the lift and why does no one know who he is?

'The mystery unfolds across the series while we also see the real impact of climate change on the lives of residents in this small town.

'The floods threaten to expose secrets, and fortunes and reputations are at stake. But how far will people go to protect themselves?'
Interview: Kakhovka dam breach to have disastrous economic, ecological consequences, says Ukrainian expert

Xinhua) 14:26, June 09, 2023

KIEV, June 9 (Xinhua) -- The dam breach, coupled with the collapse of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant, will lead to devastating economic and ecological consequences, a Ukrainian expert has said.

"Up to 1 million people may face drinking water problems," Oleksii Kushch, an economist at "United Ukraine" think-tank, told Xinhua in an interview Wednesday.

The Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant in southern Ukraine was destroyed on Tuesday, causing a decrease in the dam water level and massive flooding in the nearby areas.

Local authorities said at least 30 settlements have already been affected by the flooding, displacing thousands of people.

Apart from the humanitarian consequences, the catastrophe will take a heavy toll on the economic development of Ukraine's central Dnipropetrovsk and southern Mykolayiv, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions, Kushch said.

"The water use intensity in the regional gross domestic product will change significantly -- industrial enterprises will lack water. These are mainly enterprises in the processing industry and metallurgy," Kushch said, citing the industrial cities of Kryvyi Rih and Nikopol among those to be severely hit by the water crisis.

In addition, the Kakhovka disaster will stop the water supplies to about 30 irrigation systems, which irrigated about 1 million hectares of agricultural fields, the expert said, adding as a result, Ukraine may lose 10-15 percent of its agricultural potential due to indirect or direct influence (of the Kakhovka incident).

Consequently, Ukraine's southern regions, where vegetable growing and horticulture were concentrated, may soon turn into semi-deserted areas. "The land use in this region will be changed. Instead of vegetables and moisture-loving plants, mostly unpretentious plants, primarily sunflowers, will be grown in the region," Kushch said.

As the Kakhovka plant destruction would cause the loss of approximately 60 percent of water resources in the regional water balance of Mykolayiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, soil salinazation may become another environmental disaster, posing risks to people's health, he warned.

"In the absence of water and irrigation, groundwaters, which consist primarily of salt marshes in this region, will rise ... Some salt marshes in the region contain heavy metals and harmful substances that could be spread by the wind. They enter the human body through the respiratory system. This can lead to an increase in serious diseases and abnormalities in the development of children," Kushch said.

The expert estimated that the restoration of the Kakhovka plant and its structures would take about five years and require about 2 billion U.S. dollars in investment.

The attack on the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant is possibly the most significant damage to civilian infrastructure since the start of the Ukraine crisis in February 2022, according to UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths.

"The sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realized in the coming days. But it is already clear that it will have grave and far-reaching consequences for thousands of people in southern Ukraine," he told an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.

The United Nations, Russia and Ukraine have all condemned the incident, while Russia and Ukraine have traded accusations over the responsibility for the attack.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry strongly condemned the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant "by the armed forces of Ukraine," calling on the international community "to condemn the criminal acts of the Ukrainian authorities." Earlier in the day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russian forces had destroyed the Kakhovka dam.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
Jennifer Coolidge has admitted that her 'immaturity' has prevented her from starting a family.

The actress, 61, who is currently enjoying a currently enjoying a career resurgence thanks to her role in HBO's The White Lotus, opened up about her choice in a new interview with British GQ - which which she stars on their final all-star GQ Heroes cover.

Reflecting on her choice to not have children, Jennifer told how her friends had encouraged her to adopt, but she believes she'd make a better step-mother instead.

The star puts it down to eagerness to remain young at heart, admitting that if she had welcomed children into her life it means she would have had to have 'grown up'.

She explained to the publication: 'Im very, very immature, I think that has kept me from having children, because Im sort of a child. Maybe if I had kids, I wouldve had to have grown up .Maybe if I had kids, I wouldve had to have grown up.'

Candid: Jennifer Coolidge has admitted that her 'immaturity' has prevented her from starting a family

Open: The actress, 61, who is currently enjoying a currently enjoying a career resurgence thanks to her role in HBO's The White Lotus, opened up about her choice in a new interview with British GQ - which which she stars on their final all-star GQ Heroes cover

The star also told how she would also 'appreciate' her life in Los Angeles more if she had children, remarking that she's 'bored' with where she lives.

Meanwhile, Jennifer, who is currently single, also attributed her lack of children to her habit of dating intense men.

She shared: 'Ive never had, like, a laid back boyfriend that was just full of joy, you know? Like, someone who laughs at all your shortcomings. Thats never who I choose for myself.'

Despite this, the actress has never lacked attention from the opposite sex, with Jennifer admitting last year that she slept with 200 people thanks to her infamous role as Stifler's Mom in American Pie over two decades ago.

Featuring in movies such as Legally Blonde and American Pie, Jennifer has been a household name for comedy lovers, but her role in The White Lotus has further catapulted her fame.

Her role as Tanya McQuoid in the parody series of the luxury class has been globally recognised as she won awards at the Golden Globes, Emmys, Critics Choice Awards and SAG Awards.

However, Jennifer admits she almost didn't take the part due to mental health reasons.

She told the publication: I was, like, not in the mood. [Was it fear of failure - or possibly success?] I was depressed, I was very depressed.'

Decision: Reflecting on her choice to not have children, Jennifer told how her friends had encouraged her to adopt, but she believes she'd make a better step-mother instead

Choice: The star puts it down to eagerness to remain young at heart, admitting that if she had welcomed children into her life it means she would have had to have 'grown up'

She went on to reflect on the demise of her character in Season Two of the show, adding that it was her 'fantasy' that may have contributed to the end of Tanya.

Jennifer explained: 'I had encouraged Mike to tell an Italian story, I said I would love to be in Italy or something, riding around on a Vespa with all these men reaching out and trying to light my cigarette. Thats my fantasy. But then I guess that suggestion got me killed.'

Jennifer Coolidge will be speaking at the GQ Heroes conference in association with BMW, taking place at Soho Farmhouse, Oxfordshire from the 19th - 21st of July.

Meanwhile, Jennifer, who was slated to host Saturday Night Live before the writers strike - recently sat down with The Bear star Jeremy Allen White as part of Variety's Actors on Actors interview series.

She got candid about her career as she reflected on what she described as her 'fatal flaw' in the days of her early success in the late 1990s through early 2000s.

Asked if she had had a plan going into her acting career with a view to longevity, she admitted that she had not.

Role: Featuring in movies such as Legally Blonde and American Pie, Jennifer has been a household name for comedy lovers, but her role in The White Lotus has further catapulted her fame (pictured)

Close call: However, Jennifer admits she almost didn't take the part due to mental health reasons

'Now that I'm old enough to really look back at my life and certainly my mistakes, I see a lot of those. But I never had any strategy. I just went job to job,' she explained.

Jennifer went on: 'I have to say I made the terrible mistake of not riding the wave that I had early on. It was sort of in the '90s when I had Legally Blonde, Best in Show and American Pie. And then there was Cinderella Story and stuff like that.

'But there was a moment. There was a wave I really could have ridden but I got really distracted.'

As for the distraction? 'I started pursuing guys,' she said.

'I wasn't paying attention. I just thought I had my whole life. I did get some jobs, but I didn't have a plan. And I think that was a fatal flaw of mine, because it took so long to get anything going later.'
In the midst of their career-shattering scandal, Dick and Angel Strawbridge have applied to shut their castle company Chateau-de-la-Motte Husson Limited.

But what went SO wrong for the once-beloved couple, who have graced Channel 4 screens in Escape To The Chateau since 2016?

Last month, Channel 4 confirmed it is no longer working with Dick and Angel following an independent investigation into their conduct.

Sources claimed Two Rivers Media, the company that produces Escape To The Chateau, raised concerns about Dick, 63, and Angel, 45. and they will not be working on any new productions 'following a review'.

Since the split, it can be revealed that their company, which was set up in 2017, has been put forward for a 'voluntary strike off' from the register at Companies House.

The application was signed on May 9 by both directors, Dick and Angel, real name Angela. First notice of the strike off was given in the Gazette on May 23, and the company will be dissolved within two months of that date.

The latest news comes two years after the popular couple first brushed off bullying claims, which they vehemently denied at the time.

So what happened to the Strawbridges and how did it go wrong?

Unhappy ending? The ninth and final series aired in late 2022, but spin-off travel show Escape To The Chateau: Secret France was already in the works

What's become of the company?

The application was signed on May 9 by both directors. First notice of the strike off was given in the Gazette on May 23, and the company will be dissolved within two months of that date.

Its last accounts, filed in June 2022 for the period up to September 2021, show net liabilities of 19,230.

Meanwhile change is also afoot at Chateau Television Limited. Dick and Angel have stopped running the company, which was incorporated in 2020, and appointed Da2AD limited, which is run by an accountant.

That entity is now a shareholder, according to documents at Companies House which show that Dick and Angel no longer have 'control' at the company.

What caused Channel 4 to cut ties with the popular duo?

The exact nature of the allegations is not known, but Deadline reported that three of their former colleagues alleged the couple have clashed with producers.

A source told the site: 'There has been a deteriorating relationship between Two Rivers and Dick and Angel's Chateau TV for various reasons and it all came to a head.'

Were there any other signs of conflict?

In 2021, it was reported that sources close to Spark Media had accused Dick and Angel of bullying.

Dick was accused of pushing one crew member around a room, and threatening to throw another 'out the f*****g window' while brandishing a hammer. Both were also said to have sworn at TV staff.

Meanwhile, the show apparently haemorrhaged producer directors (PDs) during the first four series, as it was claimed three out of six left prematurely following rows.

Dick and Angel categorically denied the accusations at the time.

In testimony via their representative at the time, the couple emphasised the warm atmosphere among the team, but also their long-held, high professional standards, which they say have helped bring their chateau fantasy to successful fruition.

Their representative said production members associated with the couple over many years found 'working with our clients at the chateau is a lovely experience'.

They also made accusations of their own of outrageous behaviour among the Spark's production team.

At the time, Channel 4 denied all knowledge of the row: 'Channel 4 does not tolerate bullying or abusive behaviour in any of its productions.'

Hit show: Their show Escape to the Chateau became one of the channel's biggest hits when it started airing in 2016

Dick told Daily Mail at the time: Its not even worth investigating. We dont talk about it because its not worth worrying about.

He points out that they have a very low turnover of crew, most of whom have stayed for years and were so annoyed about the gossip that they were all saying they wanted to sell their happy story, as it were, to put the truth across.

I would say that we are loving and open  what you see is what you get. If you come into our home  and its our home, not a TV set  and maybe treat us in a certain way, then we may reciprocate, added Angel, firmly.

We have so many people coming through, and we always like having selfies and everything like that. There is a line, though, and if you cross it end of.

Will they return to screens in the face of things?

The ninth and final series aired in late 2022, but spin-off travel show Escape To The Chateau: Secret France was already in the works.

The programme has reportedly wrapped and is currently being edited, but Channel 4 has not yet confirmed whether it will be broadcast.

Sharing a sneak-peek of filming for the spin-off in January, former engineer Dick and designer Angel previously wrote on Instagram: 'We are busy filming our new series for Channel 4.

'Escape to the Chateau: Secret France will be on your screens later this year  we can't wait to share our discoveries with you!'

In 2021, the couple were asked if they ever considered just disappearing from public view and never doing another series of the show? We consider it every year, Dick said. Its always a choice.

The ninth and final series aired in late 2022, but spin-off travel show Escape To The Chateau: Secret France was already in the works

What's the show all about?

Escape To The Chateau became one of the channel's biggest hits when it started airing in 2016, with many tuning in to see Dick's handiwork and Angel's creativity when transforming their home.

The couple bought the run-down 45-room chateau for just 280,000 in 2015, with Channel 4 launching a popular series following the transformation in 2016.

The villa is called Chateau-de-la-Motte Husson and it is in the picturesque Loire region of North West France around 200 miles from Paris.

Dick and Angel previously worked with Spark Media Partners, which launched Escape To The Chateau back in 2016 and produced its first four series.

The series was full of arguments and tiffs over stressful renovations, precious moments with their children Arthur, nine, and Dorothy, eight, and creating happy memories with newlyweds.

The chateau has since been valued at 2million but the couple have also cashed in through TV rights from Channel 4 for the series.

How long have the couple been together?

Dick and Angel had two children before marrying in 2015.

Almost immediately the pair decided to uproot their young family for a new adventure in France.

Dick has a daughter called Charlotte, 35, from his first marriage, to environmental activist Brigit Weiner  the pair wed in 1982 and divorced in 2010 after 28 years.

They also have a son  James, 37  a chef who has appeared on Escape to the Chateau.

Dick, a former lieutenant colonel and engineer, met second wife Angel, 43, in 2010 at a mutual friends 40th birthday party.

Partners: Dick a former lieutenant colonel and engineer, met second wife Angel, 43, in 2010 at a mutual friends 40th birthday party

What do Dick and Angel argue about?

In 2021, the couple spoke to the Daily Mail about life during the pandemic and homeschooling. Angel said: ' Im too much of a rebel.'

Angel joked that she joined her children in Dick's homeschooling class and said: Lets hope we never have to do that again, as I thought daddys school was too strict.

And talking about their career side projects, such as a book they created called Living The Chateau Dream, they were asked if they had spectacular rows.

No! This is the nice thing, Angel said.

We definitely have disagreements Dick interjected, and then Angel goes and gets an email that proves she was right!

I do, laughs Angel, Theres no limit to what Ill do to prove Im right about something.
Amanda Holden put on a very leggy display on Friday after breaking her silence on the reported feud with This Morning's Holly Willoughby.

The BGT judge, 52, stunned in tailored pink shorts and a matching blazer from high-street brand Reiss as she strutted her stuff out of the Heart FM studio in London following her radio show.

Amanda layered the jacket over a plunging white blouse and slipped her feet into a pair of towering heels.

The TV personality opted for gold accessories with aviator sunglasses, dainty jewellery as well as a pink Louis Vuitton bag costing a cool 4,000.

She accentuated her age defying features with a light dusting of make-up and wore her blonde tresses loose.

Strut: Amanda Holden, 52, put on a very leggy display on Friday after breaking her silence on the reported feud with This Morning's Holly Willoughby

Sensational: The BGT judge stunned in tailored pink shorts and a matching blazer from high-street brand Reiss as she strutted her stuff out of the Heart FM studio in London following her radio show

On Thursday in a lengthy statement posted on her Instagram page, Amanda addressed reports that have claimed she and Holly, 42, have been pitted against each other for several jobs, and their rivalry has bubbled to the surface in the wake of Phillip Schofield's affair scandal on This Morning.

'Sadly strong and intelligent women have for far too long been pitted against one other when we should all be celebrated in our own right,' Amanda wrote.

'Women are still expected to say nothing, suffer silently and just get on with it. And we do... mostly.

On Wednesday, reports emerged that the two were locked in a feud - but Amanda has said this is simply not true.

Amanda was in fact embroiled in a feud with Holly's co-star Phillip which began back in 2018, when she claimed he sabotaged her chance to fill for Holly as host of This Morning.

The Britain's Got Talent star raised eyebrows this week when she appeared to mock Holly's return to This Morning in an Instagram video mimicking her opening phrase: 'Are you OK?'

Returning to the show for the first time since Schofield's sacking following his affair with a younger male colleague, Holly, 42, asked viewers: 'Right, deep breath. Firstly, are you OK? I hope so.'

Amanda posted a video on Instagram wearing an angelic white ensemble from Me + Em which was similar to the Reiss one worn by Holly, saying: 'Hello, it is Tuesday. Are you OK?'

Claims:In a lengthy statement Amanda addressed reports that have claimed she and Holly, 42, have been pitted against each other for several jobs, and their rivalry has bubbled to the surface in the wake of the Phillip Schofield scandal (pictured together in 2012)

Chic: Amanda layered the jacket over a plunging white blouse and slipped her feet into a pair of towering heels

Stylish: The TV personality opted for gold accessories with aviator sunglasses, dainty jewellery as well as a pink Louis Vuitton bag costing a cool 4,000

And, just in case anyone missed the point, she had another pop at Holly on the radio.

When talking about doing the show hungover, the day before, co-host Jamie Theakston, 52, asked her how she was feeling.

She said: 'I got home, got straight into bed with my dog and cat. I got up, cooked the tea and went back to bed again at 8.

'I did that thing where you wake up at 2 and you have to talk yourself back into going to sleep.'

Jamie interjected: 'We're worried about your well-being,' while talking to another guest.

Amanda replied: 'I'm OK people, are you OK?' before cackling loudly.

A spokesperson for Amanda told MailOnline: 'Amanda has always made it clear in the past she has no issues with Holly. Today's video has been taken out of context.'

Holly's said in the original statement that it: 'feels very strange indeed sitting here without Phil and I imagine that you might have been feeling a lot like I have.

Fun times: She later took to her social media as she posed up a storm in the stylish ensemble

Pose: She accentuated her age defying features with a light dusting of make-up and wore her blonde tresses loose

Claims: The Britain's Got Talent star raised eyebrows when she appeared to mock Holly's recent return to This Morning in an Instagram video

'Shaken, troubled, let down, worried for the wellbeing of people on all sides of what's been going on and full of questions'.

'All of us at This Morning gave our love and support to someone who was not telling the truth, who acted in a way that they themselves felt they had to resign from ITV and step down from a career that they loved. That is a lot to process'.

She added: 'It's equally hard to see the toll it's taken on their own mental health. I think what unites us all now is a desire to heal for the health and wellbeing of everyone.

'I hope that as we start this new chapter and get back to a place of warmth and magic that the show holds for all of us, we can find strength in each other.

Amanda previously said she believes that in 2018, Phillip sabotaged her chances of filling in on This Morning while Holly hosted I'm A Celeb.

Rochelle Humes landed the presenting job while Phillip's regular co-host Holly took over Ant McPartlin's hosting duties for I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here.

In a resurfaced video, Amanda was questioned about her feud with Phil by her Heart Radio co-star Jamie.

As he tried to approach the subject, Amanda told him: 'I've moved on from it, Jamie, you need to move on from it.'

Pressing further, he quizzed: 'You might have moved on but I just wanted to know, is there any more to the story?'

Amanda told Jamie she had tried to reach out to Phil, but her attempts to arrange a meet up to clear the air were ignored.

She said: 'I did offer to meet him for a coffee months ago, he didn't reply to my text. What can I say?'

'The olive branch had been extended?', Jamie asked.

According to The Sun, Amanda reportedly expressed she felt 'let down' by her friend Phillip when she found out she didn't get the position and it went to Rochelle.

She had previously filled in for Holly when the This Morning star took a year off the show to have her third child, Chester, now seven, in October 2014.

Similar outfit: Holly opened her comeback monologue on This Morning on Monday by asking viewers if they were OK, and was accused of being melodramatic

Shocking: It came after Phillip's shocking affair scandal on This Morning. Amanda has been embroiled in a feud with the presenter since 2018

A former daytime TV executive previously told The Sun: 'Phillip actively campaigned for Rochelle to get the job despite Amanda being more experienced - and having been told privately shed got the gig.'

An ITV spokesperson later insisted that Rochelle's casting was a decision made by producers, telling MailOnline: 'Presenter line ups on This Morning change regularly and final decisions on these line ups are made by producers and not the presenters.

They said at the time: 'Phillip Schofield is a much loved broadcaster and part of the ITV family. He is a consummate professional and held in high regard at ITV. Amanda is also held in high regard as a judge on one of our biggest shows.'

During their time co-hosting the morning show, Phillip confessed he found working alongside Amanda was 'occasionally quite scary'.

He told Heat magazine at the time: 'Amanda kept me on my toes. She has a faulty edit button and she forgets shes on the telly, which is enormously endearing and funny, but occasionally quite scary.'

After Phil stepped down from This Morning, Amanda posted a strongman emoji on Instagram in what appeared to be a sign of celebration.

She did not caption the post as she remained mysterious about its meaning.
Russell Crowe welcomed a new addition to his family as he continued to mourn the tragic death of his 16-month-old dog Louis.

The tiny black and white Papillon passed away in the Hollywood star's arms after a shock accident in which the pooch was hit by a truck.

Devastated by the sudden loss, the Gladiator star announced on The Kyle and Jackie O Show on Friday he had eased the mourning process by getting an identical puppy.

'This is Ezekiel. Say hello to everybody,' he said as he lifted the excited black and white spaniel into his lap during a video interview.

Ezekiel, also a Papillon, looked to be the spitting image of Russell's last puppy which he co-owned with girlfriend Britney Theriot, with all the same facial markings and colouring.

Russell Crowe, 59, (pictured) welcomed a new addition (left) to his family as he continued to mourn the tragic death of his 16-month-old dog Louis (right)

'At first, we were both like, "Well, he's irreplaceable." We put so much emotion into that little dog, and then he died as tragically as he did,' he said.

'The only way we could really stop that from being so harsh was to get another puppy. The grief is still there.'

Russell and Britney's beloved puppy Louis died suddenly at just 16 months old.

The movie star posted a photo of the Papillon to Twitter in March and captioned it with some heartbreaking words.

The tiny black and white Papillon (pictured) passed away in the Hollywood star's arms after a shock accident in which it was hit by a truck. Louis pictured as a young puppy

Devastated by the sudden loss, the Gladiator star announced on The Kyle and Jackie O Show on Friday he had eased the mourning process by getting an identical puppy named Ezekiel

'This is Louis. 16 months old. Tiny, cheeky, brave. He won my heart. Unfortunately today, on the 2nd anniversary of my fathers passing, he was hit by a truck,' he wrote.

'We tried to get him to the vet, but he died in my arms while I was telling him how much we loved him.'

Tragically, the puppy died on the two-year anniversary of the death of Russell's 85-year-old father, John Alexander Crowe.

Crowe broke down in tears as he spoke out about the tragic death of his puppy Louis on The Kyle and Jackie O Show in March

Tragically, the puppy died on the two-year anniversary of the death of Russell's 85-year-old father, John Alexander Crowe (pictured)

The Proof of Life actor later broke down in tears over the dog's death during an emotional appearance on The Kyle and Jackie O Show.

Host Kyle Sandilands began by offering Crowe his condolences, agreeing that dogs are 'like family members'.

'Are you alright? Is everything alright there?' Kyle asked the grieving A-lister.

'No, we're actually a little devastated,' Crowe replied with tears in his eyes.

'He was such a beautiful little pup you know and kind of wrapped us around him and shaped our lives around him. So it's gonna take a little time to get past.'
Sarah Jayne Dunn has unleashed her sexy side as she tried out some stunts on a pole in a slew of Instagram snaps.

The Hollyoaks star, 41, was modelling a neon pink and leopard print sportswear from Pole Junkie, which is billed as 'the biggest pole wear collection in the world'.

Flexing her legs as she twirled upside down on the pole, Sarah declared that she'd found her 'happy place'.

The barefooted star showed off suspender underwear and a multi-coloured leopard bralet during the intensive exercise session.

'Countdown to our pole shoot with @polegym_alex is on so we're working on some nice shapes,' she explained in her caption.

Twirling: Sarah Jayne Dunn showed off her toned figure in a skimpy pink two-piece as she showed off her pole dancing skills in a slew of Instagram snaps on Thursday

Sexy: The actress was modelling for a clothing campaign by Pole Junkie - apparently the largest collection of pole wear in the world

The star is now said to make a lucrative living through selling sexy content on the subscription site OnlyFans, which she supplements with promotions on Instagram.

She hasn't been shy about modelling provocative pole wear in the past either, on one occasion flaunting a bright red G-string leotard with patent thigh-high boots.

'Part of the obsession with pole is the outfits,' she revealed after one shoot, explaining that the sexy clothing had been 'very kindly gifted' to her by a brand.

It comes after Sarah Jayne was axed by Hollyoaks due to her increasingly raunchy image back in 2021.

While Sarah said she'd found earning money through OnlyFans 'empowering', she was given an ultimatum to remove herself from the site or say goodbye to Hollyoaks.

She left the show she'd been a part of since the 1990s over freedom of expression, while bosses had released a statement saying they'd been unable to find a 'resolution'.

Sarah explained at the time: 'This is a decision I've thought long and hard about, not one I've taken lightly or on a whim.

'It's about taking back control, about empowerment and confidence and having full power over my choices,' she continued.

Flexible: Sarah isn't new to pole dancing and has posted numerous photos of her daring poses in the past

Versatile: Her pole outfits have ranged from sexy leotards and patent PVC boots to more casual gym wear

Well off: Sarah has made a lucrative income from OnlyFans after opting to leave Hollyoaks for greater freedom of expression

Luscious in lime: Sarah recently posted a photo of herself preparing for a soak in the hot tub while clad in a green bikini

Meanwhile, she added in defiance that she 'loves' doing sexy, scantily clad photoshoots and 'always will'.

On Thursday, fans delivered their support for her snaps, with one wowed Instagrammer joking of her pose: 'I'd snap me neck if I tried to do that!'

Another wrote appreciatively: 'Looking amazing Sarah Jayne and very comfortable and confident in yourself - well done me lovely and keep on trucking love!'
Keira Maguire will face court later this year on multiple assault charges.

The reality star has been ordered to appear at Melbourne Magistrates' Court on August 3, the Herald Sun reported.

Maguire, 37, was reported to have been allegedly involved in an altercation in March that saw a drink get thrown over a customer at The Osborne Rooftop and Bar in South Yarra, Melbourne.

Anna McEvoy, a former Love Island contestant, said on her podcast Where's Your Head At? that she witnessed the aftermath of the alleged altercation.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Maguire for comment.

Keira Maguire (pictured) is set to face court in August

The reality star is due to Melbourne Magistrates' Court for a hearing on August 3

Maguire rose to fame on Richie Strahan's season of The Bachelor in 2016, before appearing on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! and Bachelor in Paradise.

In 2021, she revealed Instagram was her only source of income during an SBS program.

Keira has almost 135,000 Instagram followers, and regularly uses the social media app to promote brands and products.
Depp and Beck, who the movie star called a 'brother' and close friend, met in 2016 and bonded over their shared love of music and cars

'I should dedicate this song to one of all of our heroes, Mr. Jeff Beck,' he told the audience, who roared in applause

Johnny Depp made an emotional return to the stage this week, just ahead of this 60th birthday.

On Thursday, the Hollywood icon dedicated his performance of the David Bowie song, Heroes, to his late friend, Jeff Beck, who died after contracting bacterial meningitis earlier year at 78.

'I should dedicate this song to one of all of our heroes, Mr. Jeff Beck.' he told the audience, in a video captured by one attendee.

Social media users were quick to praise his moving tribute, which left them in awe as he pushed through his grief to pay homage to his pal.

Still grieving: Johnny Depp celebrated a bittersweet birthday this week, as he made an emotional return to the stage ahead of this 60th birthday; seen last month

On Thursday, the Hollywood icon (seen during the tribute) dedicated the David Bowie's song, Heroes, to his late friend, Jeff Beck, who died after contracting bacterial meningitis , earlier year, at 78

'I should dedicate this song to one of all of our heroes, Mr. Jeff Beck.' he told the audience, in a video captured by one attendee

'My eyes filled with tears listening to his voice singing such beautiful words,' one wrote under footage of Depp's performance, which was uploaded to YouTube.

'I could feel the sorrow, the honor and the true emptiness Johnnys feeling with his dear, dear friend not on stage with him.'

Social media users were quick to praise his moving tribute, which left them in awe as he pushed through his grief to pay homage to his pal. Jeff is seen in 2018

Another commented: 'I know Jeff is with you!! He will always be in your heart.'

Depp and Beck met in 2016 and became good friends, bonding over their shared love of music and cars.

They eventually started playing music together in 2019, and toured in Europe ahead of their first US tour.

The pair most recently collaborated on their 13-track album, 18, which they released last summer, and went on to perform at a handful of concerts together in late 2022.

Earlier this year, it was reported that the actor was 'totally devastated' over his bandmate's death, as they 'were extremely close' and had a 'really tight friendship.'

'The sickness came on really quickly and it all deteriorated rapidly,' a source told People, at the time. 'Johnny is still processing this news. He's devastated.'

Depp and Beck met in 2016 and became good friends, bonding over their shared love of music and cars. Depp (R) seen performing on stage with Beck (L) in 2022

Sad: Earlier this year, it was reported that the actor was 'totally devastated' over his bandmate's death as they 'were extremely close' and had a 'really tight friendship' (seen in October 2022)

Before his death, Beck raved that hadn't had 'another creative partner' like Depp 'for ages.'

'He was a major force on this record. I just hope people will take him seriously as a musician because it's a hard thing for some people to accept that Johnny Depp can sing rock and roll,' the English guitarist said in a 2022 statement.

In the same release, Depp added that it was 'an extraordinary honor to play and write music with Jeff,' who he gushed he was 'now privileged enough' to call his 'brother.'

His latest film Jeanne du Barry was a hit at Cannes Film Festival

The Pirates Of The Caribbean actor's milestone birthday comes after a major comeback during the Cannes Film Festival in France that took place in late May.

At the festival, the father-of-two was greeted with open arms by his fans.

Depp and his castmates received a seven-minute standing ovation during the screening of the French-language film Jeanne du Barry.

The former 21 Jump Street heartthrob became teary-eyed during the praise.

This comes after years of battling his ex-wife Amber Heard over abuse claims. He was also involved in a very public defamation trial with the actress last year, which he won.

He recently spoke out about his past comments about feeling 'boycotted' amid his legal battle with ex-wife Amber Heard

The actor recently addressed his past comments, made in 2021, in which he claimed he felt 'boycotted' by the industry.

While speaking in a press conference at Cannes Film Festival last month, he said: 'Did I feel boycotted by Hollywood? Well, you'd have to not have a pulse to feel at that point like this was all just a weird joke.

'Of course, when you're asked to resign from a film you're doing because of something that's merely a bunch of vowels and consonants floating in the air Do I feel boycotted now? No, not at all.

'But I don't feel boycotted, because I don't think about Hollywood. I don't feel much further need for Hollywood  I don't know about you.'

His career ambitions changed after winning his defamation trial

Depp - who admitted it had been tough for him to move on as a public figure due to the legal battle - also suggested he was disillusioned with Hollywood as a whole.

'It's a very strange, funny time when everyone would love to be themselves, but they can't because they must fall in line with the person in front of them. If you want to follow that line, be my guest. I'll be on the other side,' he explained.

Johnny successfully sued Amber for defamation in a lawsuit relating to an op-ed she had written about being a victim of domestic abuse.

In his early days: The artist seen in a film still for the 1990 movie Cry-Baby, which launched his film career

Good work: At the festival the father of two was greeted with open arms. Depp and his castmates received a seven-minute standing ovation during the screening of the French-language film Jeanne du Barry. The former 21 Jump Street heartthrob became teary-eyed during the praise

Painful past: This comes after years of battling his ex-wife Amber Heard over savage abuse claims and a defamation case that he won. Seen with his lawyer in May 2022

His band postponed a number of tour dates due to an injury

In late May, Depp rescheduled a series of concerts after suffering an ankle fracture.

The star recently took to social media to reveal news of his injury and to confirm rescheduled dates for the Hollywood Vampires' tour of the US.

Johnny - who stars in the band alongside Alice Cooper and Joe Perry - wrote on Instagram: 'My dear friends, I am sorry to say that I have fractured my ankle, which is a drag.

'It began as a hairline break but somewhere between Cannes and the Royal Albert Hall it got worse rather than better.

'Several medical professionals have strongly suggested I avoid any and all activity for the moment and so am sadly unable to travel at this time.

'To that end, the guys and I are very sorry to miss you in New Hampshire, Boston and New York but fear not, I promise we will bring an amazing show to all of you in Europe and bring our absolute best to the East Coast later this summer and make it up to those who have paid for those shows.'

Ex files: This comes after years of battling his ex-wife Amber Heard over savage abuse claims. He was also involved in a very public defamation trial with the actress, which he won. Seen in May 2014 in NYC

How the star-studded relationship between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp fell apart amid claims of violence and abuse Johnny Depp's high-profile libel claim against the publisher of The Sun is over allegations he was violent towards his ex-wife Amber Heard during their relationship - claims the Hollywood star vehemently denies. The pair met in around 2011 on the set of The Rum Diary, a film adaption of a novel by Depp's friend Hunter S Thompson, before they started living together in around 2012. Here is a timeline of the key events in their relationship and the bitter legal battle that has ensued. Battle: Johnny Depp and Amber Heard (both pictured at court in London) went to war in a very nasty court case 2013 - March 8: Depp allegedly tries to set fire to a painting by Heard's ex-partner Tasya van Ree before he is said to have attacked her for the first time, which the actor denies. 2015 - February 3: The couple marry in a private ceremony at their home in Los Angeles. - March 3-5: The key incident in The Sun's defence, the three-day trip to Australia has been described by Heard as a 'three-day hostage situation' in which Depp was allegedly physically and verbally abusive while drinking heavily and taking drugs. Depp denies the allegations and says Heard lost her temper after a conversation about a post-nuptial agreement. - April 21: The couple arrive in Australia with their pet Yorkshire Terriers Boo and Pistol, which they did not declare to customs officials in Queensland. Heard was charged later with bringing the dogs into the country illegally - the charges were later dropped and the pair later recorded a bizarre video apologising for bringing their dogs to Australia. 2016 - Around May 22: The pair separated, Heard claims after an incident at their LA penthouse in which Depp allegedly became very angry and destroyed property with a bottle of champagne. - May 23: Heard files petition for the dissolution of their marriage. - May 27: Heard applies for a temporary domestic violence restraining order, which prevents Depp from contacting her. - August 16: The estranged couple reach an agreement concerning the dissolution of their marriage. Heard later donates her seven million US dollar (5.5 million) settlement to charity. 2017 - January 13: The couple are formally divorced. 2018 - April 27: The column by The Sun's then executive editor Dan Wootton is published online at around 10pm. Under the headline 'Gone Potty - How can JK Rowling be 'genuinely happy' casting wife beater Johnny Depp in the new Fantastic Beasts film?', Mr Wootton asked if the Harry Potter author had been 'blinded by a personal friendship' with Depp. The piece also quoted two alleged victims of disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein, which Depp says was included to 'finish his career'. - April 28: The following day, the online article is amended to remove the words 'wife beater' from the headline, which was not included in the print edition. - June 1: Depp files claim his libel against News Group Newspapers. His written claim, filed a few weeks later, claims the article 'caused serious harm to (his) personal and professional reputation' and also caused him 'significant distress and embarrassment'. - December 18: The Washington Post publishes an op-ed by Heard which did not mention Depp by name, but said that the actress 'became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture's wrath for women who speak out'. 2019 - February 27: Depp fights off a bid to halt his English legal action after The Sun applies for his claim to be 'stayed unless and until' the star confirmed in writing that he would not sue Heard if she participated in a forthcoming trial. - March 1: Depp files a libel case against Heard in Virginia, blaming the Washington Post piece for Depp being dropped from the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise and claiming that Heard was the one who had been abusive towards him. 2020 - February 26: Johnny Depp attends the High Court in London for a preliminary hearing ahead of a trial which was due to begin the following month. The star heard NGN's barrister Adam Wolanski read out texts sent by Depp, including one from November 2013 to actor Paul Bettany, in which Depp wrote: 'Let's burn Amber.' He also wrote: 'Let's drown her before we burn her!!! I will f*** her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she is dead.' - March 20: The trial, which was due to begin on March 23, is postponed due to the global coronavirus crisis. NGN's lawyers had claimed Depp wanted to delay the trial 'because he's a coward and because he knows he's going to lose', which was denied by Depp's legal team. - April 8: Mr. Justice Nicol rules that parts of Heard's evidence, relating to allegations of sexual violence, will be heard in private. - May 13: The court gives permission for Depp's former partners Vanessa Paradis and Winona Ryder - who both say Depp was 'never violent' to them - to give evidence. Heard's former personal assistant Kate James is also permitted to give evidence. - June 25: NGN asks the court to throw out Depp's claim just two weeks before trial over the star's failure to disclose text messages of him apparently trying to buy drugs in Australia in 2015. The publisher's lawyers say Depp deliberately withheld text messages they say show him trying to obtain 'MDMA and other narcotics'. - June 29: Mr. Justice Nicol rules that Depp did breach a court order by not disclosing documents from separate libel proceedings against Heard in the US - which include the text messages. But Depp's lawyers argue that it would be 'wholly disproportionate' to strike out the actor's libel claim. - July 2: The High Court rules Depp's claim can go ahead after granting his application for 'relief from sanctions' for the breach of a court order. - July 4: The trial judge, Mr. Justice Nicol refuses an application by Depp's lawyers to exclude Heard from court until she gives evidence. - July 7: The three-week trial finally begins at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, with witnesses set to include Depp's former partners Vanessa Paradis and Winona Ryder as well as several of Heard's friends who say they were present when Depp was abusive. - July 28: The trial ends after 16 days. - November 2: Depp loses his High Court libel action with Mr. Justice Nicol ruling that NGN had proved what was in the article to be 'substantially true'. - November 6: Depp announces that he has been asked by Warner Bros. to resign from Fantastic Beasts 3 and he has 'respected that and agreed to that request'. - November 25: Mr. Justice Nicol denies Depp's request for permission to appeal against his ruling at the Court of Appeal. The judge also orders the actor to make an initial payment of almost 630,000 (around $850,000) to NGN for the publisher's legal fees. - December 7: Lawyers for Depp file grounds of appeal with the Court of Appeal arguing that the Hollywood star 'did not receive a fair trial' and asking for the judgement to be 'set aside' and a new trial ordered. 2021  February 1: The Court of Appeal orders Depp's application for permission to appeal should be considered at a hearing in March. - March 18  Depp's application for permission to appeal will be heard by the Court of Appeal - March 25 - The Court of Appeal refuses permission to appeal the ruling stating that Depp's attempt to overturn the decision had 'no real prospect of success.' - July 1: Heard announces she has become a mother to a baby girl born using a surrogate. The actress reveals her daughter Oonagh Paige was born on April 8 2022 - Depp's defamation case against Heard over her Washington Post Op-Ed is scheduled to go to trial in April Advertisement

He has no plans to reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean

Disney has not ruled out a potential Pirates of the Caribbean return for Depp.

The actor was axed as Captain Jack Sparrow by the company in 2018 in a bid to bring a 'new energy' to the franchise, but Disney Studios Motion Picture president Sean Bailey said he hasn't shut down the prospect of the actor coming back for a sixth movie.

In an interview with The New York Times newspaper, Bailey said: 'We think we have a really good, exciting story that honors the films that have come before but also has something new to say.'

Quizzed on whether Depp would be part of the movie, Bailey answered by saying that the studio was 'noncommittal at this point.'

Jerry Bruckheimer produced all the movies in the franchise and revealed last year that he would 'love' to see Depp return to the series after winning his defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife Heard  although he insisted that Disney would have the final say on the decision.

The 79-year-old movie producer told The Hollywood Reporter: 'You'd have to ask them. I can't answer that question. I really don't know.

'I would love to have him in the movie. He's a friend, a terrific actor, and it's unfortunate that personal lives creep into everything we do.'

Bruckheimer  who has produced blockbusters including Beverly Hills Cop and Top Gun  also confirmed that the character of Captain Jack Sparrow would never be killed off.

He said: 'You can't. We tried to kill him. It didn't work.'

Depp had mentioned during last year's trial that he was saddened not to get the chance to say farewell to Jack Sparrow after almost 20 years of playing the pirate.

The Edward Scissorhands star said: 'My feeling was that these characters should be able to have their proper goodbye, as it were.

'A franchise can only last for so long, and there's a way to end a franchise like that, and I thought that the characters deserved to have their way out, to end the franchise on a very good note. I planned on continuing until it was time to stop.'

But sources have told DailyMail.com that he really is not interested at this point in returning to the role.

NOT rocking on: Depp recently rescheduled a series of concerts after suffering an ankle fracture. The star has taken to social media to reveal news of his injury and to confirm rescheduled dates for the Hollywood Vampires' tour of the US. Seen in June 2022

Will Jack come back? Disney has not ruled out a potential Pirates of the Caribbean return for Depp, but sources have told DailyMail.com that he really is not interested at this point in returning to the role; seen here in 2015

Star power: Depp made his acting debut, at 21, in the hit 1984 slasher film, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and later starred in the 1990 film Edward Scissorhands (seen above as the iconic character)

Milestone moment: Depp (pictured with mother Betty Sue Wells, father John Depp and then-girlfriend Vanessa Paradis) received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1999

Doting dad: In 1998, while filming The Ninth Gate in in France, he went on to meet his longtime partner, Vanessa Paradis, who he dated from 1998 to 2012. The pair share his two children, Lily-Rose Depp, 24, and Jack Depp, 21

Johnny Depp's unconventional upbringing like and rise to fame

Born in Kentucky and brought up all over the US, Depp is one of four children of John Christopher Depp Sr., an itinerant civil engineer, and Betty Sue Palmer, who passed away in 2016.

The star made his acting debut, at 21, in the hit 1984 slasher film, A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Following the film's success, he went on to score leading roles in Cry Baby, Edward Scissorhands, Blow, The Tourist, Alice in Wonderland, and more.

Despite becoming a bona fide movie star, the father-of-two revealed last summer that he only took up acting to pay his rent and that his true dream was to become a musician.

Four years after receiving a guitar as a 12th birthday present from his mom, the performer said he dropped out of high school to become a rocker.

During a 2011 interview with DailyMail.com, he recalled talking his mother into buying him 'a Decca electric guitar for $25.'

'I stole a chord book from a store  I slipped it down my trousers  and then I locked myself in my room, played the guitar and didnt come out for years. I dont recall puberty or anything else. Just playing the guitar,' he admitted.

He eventually joined a band called The Kids in 1980, which was later renamed Six Gun Method.

At age 20, he packed his bags and moved to Los Angeles with the group, following years of playing in clubs in Florida as a young teen.

'I needed to pay rent and somebody told me, "Why dont you go meet an agent, my agent is with Nick Cage." So she sent me in an audition for something and I got it,' he recalled during a radio interview on Jonesys Jukebox.

That year, he wed his first wife, Lori Anne Allison, a well-known makeup artist in Hollywood.

The duo's short-lived marriage only lasted two years, but they have remained amicable.

In April, she made a rare remark about her former spouse, in regards to his legal battle against Heard, which she said made her break 'down several times.'

'It just broke my heart that somebody could do that to him,' she said on an episode of Popcorned Planet, after noting that he 'is very private, which is why' she doesn't typically do interviews.

He did not initially enjoy becoming a teen heartthrob

His fame grew quickly when, in 1987, he was cast as a baby-faced police officer posing as a teenager to investigate crimes in high schools and colleges in the TV crime series 21 Jump Street.

The series was a smash hit and, at 24, Johnny found himself a teen idol. But this was not a happy state of affairs for him.

If the choice is to be gawked at constantly or to sit in a dark room, Id choose the dark room, he once said. 'I felt as if I had been turned into a novelty, and it was mortifying.'

When I was in a social situation, I was nervous and uncomfortable. The only way I could get through it was to drink my guts out! I wasted a lot of years.

Away from Hollywood: Johnny Depp currently prefers his quieter life in Somerset, where he resides on an 850-acre estate, complete with a 19th-century mansion

He met his longtime partner Vanessa Paradis while filming a movie in France

He got the wild days out of his system by 1998 when he accepted an invitation to go to France to make a film with Roman Polanski, The Ninth Gate, in 1998,

While shooting the neo-noir horror thriller in France, he met his longtime partner, Vanessa Paradis, who he dated from 1998 to 2012.

She is the mother of his two children, Lily-Rose Depp, 24, and Jack Depp, 21.

A year before their split, he recalled to DailyMail.com that they met at the Hotel Costes.

She was wearing a dress with an exposed back and I saw that back and that neck, and then she turned around and I saw those eyes, and  boom! he remembered. My life as a single man was done.'

You have this feeling  I cant really explain what it was, but I had it when I met her. I saw her across a room and thought: Whats happening to me?

It was Vanessa who insisted he clean up his act, cutting down on the drinking and smoking, taking up exercise and healthy eating.

He is currently living a quieter life in Somerset

Earlier this year, the star revealed that he is happiest residing on his 850-acre estate, complete with a 19th-century mansion, in Somerset.

'I just love places with character. British people are cool and will greet you as if you are a neighbor  without going over the top. I like going to places, seeing things and meeting people  but I'm not the great extrovert that people think,' he told Somerset Life magazine in March.

He added: 'In truth, I'm quite a shy person. That's one of the great things about Britain, and especially Somerset. I can just be me  and that's nice.

'I can go into shops without being surrounded by people wanting selfies. I don't mind that up to a point, but sometimes it gets a little too crowded.'

Is he single or in a relationship?

As of April, it was reported that he has been 'focused on work' and 'living in Europe since the trial ended.'

'He has been dating, but doesn't have a girlfriend,' a source told People of the performer, who previously dated Winona Ryder, Kate Moss and Jennifer Grey.
Bam Margera's family drama continues, even as he has entered into rehab at a center owned by Lamar Odom.

The Jackass star, 43, entered into treatment after being placed on a psychiatric hold in California following a threat to 'smoke crack until I'm dead' unless his estranged wife, Nikki Boyd, allowed him to see their five-year-old son, Phoenix.

Now Nikki's attorney has claimed the MTV alum sent her some angry texts after he was released from custody.

'Bam has started texting since his release from the 5150 hold, but the content quickly turned abusive, calling Nikki awful names, saying she is the cause of all his problems, even saying shes a "gold digger"', lawyer David Glass told TMZ.

He added it's Nikki's hope treatment will not only get Bam off drugs, but help him take responsibility for himself and learn how to communicate without being abusive.

Texts: Bam Margera's estranged wife Nikki Boyd claims she received angry texts from the Jackass star after he was released from a psychiatric hold in California and before he entered rehab at a Lamar Odom facility earlier this week, according to TMZ (Pictured in Los Angeles in January 2013)

Bam's attorney, Peter Thompson, countered the claims contending the angry texts were sparked by Nikki's request for $15,377 in child support, spousal support and $50K in attorney's fees.

'Bam continues to support her and Phoenix even though she wont even allow a phone call or FaceTime with Phoenix,' said Thompson.

'He just wants to see his son and continues to come up against a brick wall on that. Contact would go a long way in getting this resolved.'

Nikki filed for legal separation from Bam in February after nine years of marriage.

She listed their date of separation as September 2021 and cited irreconcilable differences as the reason for the marital split.

Nikki asked for legal and physical custody of Phoenix, with Bam allowed supervised visits on condition they happen in LA County and he pays the expenses.

Boyd also asked the court for spousal support.

In May, the stunt performer filed court documents claiming the couple were never legally married.

In documents obtained by People , Bam alleged they pair had walked down the aisle in a 'faux ceremony' in Reykjavik, Iceland, on Oct. 5, 2013.

Trigger: Bam's attorney said the texts were triggered by Nikki's request for some $65,377 in child support, spousal support and attorney's fees. Bam threatened to 'smoke crack until I'm dead' unless allowed to see their five-year-old son, Phoenix prior to the psychiatric hold

Detox: Bam was taken for detox at one of the facilities owned by former LA Laker Lamar Odom. He will be moved to another center once that process is complete.

Never married: In court papers filed in May, the Jackass star claimed he and Nikki were never legally married when they walked down the aisle in a 'faux ceremony' in Iceland in October 2013. Nikki's attorney said she entered the marriage in 'good faith'

Legal troubles: In May, Bam surrendered to Pennsylvania State Police on assault charges after allegedly getting into a physical altercation with his brother

The ceremony was featured in a now-deleted video on Bam's YouTube channel.

'I fully knew and understood that Boyd and I were not married. Boyd told me that she also knew and understood that we were not married,' Minghags writer said in the court papers.

He claimed further proof was that 'To my knowledge, Boyd has never legally changed her name in any state to "Nicole Margera." Every driver's license or other form of identification I have seen Boyd possess bears the name "Nicole Boyd"'.

Nikki's attorney told Page Six his client entered the marriage in good faith and under California law, should be entitled to 'division of property and spousal support, in addition to child custody and support.

'She was told that the wedding would occur in Iceland and that it was all taken care of. She had a wedding ceremony, and then returned to the U.S. and lived like a married couple with Bam for years.'

In May, Bam surrendered to Pennsylvania State Police on assault charges after allegedly getting into a physical altercation with his brother.
Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter Laura has made it clear she is as much of a showperson as her iconic grandfather.

Earlier this month, the artist, 36, was escorted down the aisle not by her father, Chaplins son Eugene, but by her horse, when she married lawyer Etienne Monnier in Spain, having previously exchanged vows in Switzerland.

Her sister, Kiera, 40, a model and producer, shared a slew of incredible videos of the day in a montage - including an image of Laura arriving on the horse - while also revealing their brother Spencer had performed the music for the day.

In the caption, she wrote: 'My sister @laura_chaplinart got married this weekend to the best brother in law you could ask for @etiennemonnier...

'In true Laura fashion she had all her friends, family who flew in from around the world and who we had not seen for way to long, and of course all of her pets: 3 dogs and two horses. After riding down the isle we had a great dinner...

Wow! Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter Laura has made it clear she is as much of a showperson as her iconic grandfather after she arrived at her second wedding on a horse

Stunner: Laura looked sensational as she tied the knot

'Followed by music by @spencerchaplin1 of course, first dance with dad and impromptu song by mom. At the end, the final survivors of the party where all thrown in the pool. Cheers again to you both!!! Love you'

Back in May during her Swiss wedding, Laura wore eye-catching purple suede boots.

Laura never met her grandfather, who died ten years before she was born, but says she has always felt a close connection with him.

'I've inherited his artistic and creative genes, and his perfectionism,' she explained. 'He also gave me the importance of laughter. I've seen how it affects people and like him, feel the need to make people smile.'

Laura has long-honoured her grandfather through her work by painting pictures of the movie legend - which fetch up to 10k a time.

Yay! Earlier this month, the artist, 36, was escorted down the aisle not by her father, Chaplins son Eugene, but by her horse, when she married lawyer Etienne Monnier in Spain, having previously exchanged vows in Switzerland

Nice! Laura has long-honoured her grandfather through her work by painting pictures of the movie legend - which fetch up to 10k a time

She told Hello! in 2018: 'I've been drawing my grandfather ever since I can remember. We used to have a lot of visitors when I was a little girl and they would buy my sketches for a few francs...

'Now it's my passion, my vocation, and I paint every day. I would love to show my portraits in the UK...

'Although I never got the chance to meet my grandfather  he died ten years before I was born - I feel a close connection with him...

'I've inherited his artistic and creative genes, and his perfectionism. He also gave me the importance of laughter. I've seen how it affects people and like him, feel the need to make people smile.'
She's never been the shy and retiring type.

And Charlotte Crosby showcased her silly side as she larked around in the swimming pool inside her Newcastle mansion.

Going topless, the mother-of-one sported just a tiny pair of bikini briefs while reclining on pink and white pool floats.

Throwing her arms up in the air, the Geordie Shore star, 33, poked her tongue out for the camera while strategically placing the pool floats to cover her modesty.

In another snap, Charlotte posed with her legs akimbo while cupping her bare breasts, adding emojis to further hide her nudity.

Crikey: Charlotte Crosby showcased her silly side as she larked around topless in the swimming pool inside her Newcastle mansion

Charlotte's racy snaps come after she revealed she feels like a 'sexy MILF' after welcoming daughter Alba Jean with her boyfriend Jake Ankers last October.

After releasing a new collection with In The Style she shared a snap of herself and penned: 'Im Not afraid to say it!!! right here in this moment I felt a MILF a massive SEXY MILF. SOMEBODY STOP ME.'

The term MILF was famously coined in teen movie American Pie over two decades ago in 1999, referring to Stifler's Mom, played by Jennifer Coolidge, now 61.

The star revealed being a mother 'is the best job she ever had', after she appeared on Steph's Packed Lunch in March 2023.

Discussing being a parent, Charlotte gushed: 'I absolutely love it. This is by far the best job I have ever had in my whole entire life. Honestly, there's no feeling like it.'

She said she gets more sleep as a parent then she did before, adding: 'I've got a baby that loves to sleep.'

Shortly after giving birth, Charlotte decided to dissolve her statement lip filler for good.

In January she revealed that she decided to go through with the procedure due to pregnancy swelling, which made her lips a lot bigger than she had intended.

Cheeky: Throwing her arms up in the air, the Geordie Shore star, 33, poked her tongue out for the camera while strategically placing the pool floats to cover her modesty

Posting to her Instagram stories in May, Charlotte was horrified when she realised just how big her lips had become.

She said: 'Just been looking through old pics and I actually CANNOT believe how big my lips got towards the end of my pregnancy!

'That is truly awful. I actually look ridiculous.'

She continued: 'It was really hard to get used to having all of my lips dissolved.

'But my god looking at my old lips compared to my lips now has made me realise I never ever wanna go back!'

The TV personality then added a poll, asking her fans if they agreed with her decision to reverse her surgery.

And the results were almost unanimous - with 98 per cent of fans in agreement.
Nicolas Cage's son has accused 'various materialistic people' of trying to exploit him and his family's fame and fortune.

Weston Cage Coppola, 32, who his Face/Off actor dad, 59, had with actress Christina Fulton, 55, made the accusation while opening up about his life, sobriety, and a bitter spousal and child support court battle with the mother of his twin daughters.

He said on his Instagram in a long post titled 'Justice For Weston Starts Now', which featured an image of him with his famous father: 'Various materialistic people and those who are insidiously inspired by my fame and the fame of my family have ceaselessly tried to destroy me.'

Weston  whose great-uncle is Oscar-winning Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola, 84, added: 'People that meet us have a false fantasy that my father, uncles, and I will be catering to their dreams of making people famous or that we have money growing on trees to hand out.'

He also revealed in his self-declaration that his famous father Nicolas gives him $7,300 a month.

Voicing his concerns: Nicolas Cage's son has accused 'various materialistic people' of trying to exploit him and his family's fame and fortune. Seen in 2016

With mom: Weston Cage Coppola, 32, who his Face/Off actor dad, 59, had with actress Christina Fulton, 55, made the accusation while opening up about his life, sobriety, and a bitter spousal and child support court battle with the mother of his twin daughters. Seen with mom in 2006

'When their fantasies are squashed, they hold us hostage with smear campaigns that certain journalists live to be the "first to cover the drama,"' he added.

Weston did not specifically name his ex-wife Hila Coppola Cage in the post.

He married real estate broker Hila in 2018.

Weston was also wed to Danielle Cage (20132016) and Nikki Williams (20112012).

This comes after Hila filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court seeking additional spousal and child support.

She also wants $30,000 in legal fees to hire a leading lawyer to help in the case.

The former couple's legal clash started earlier this year when Hila filed a claim demanding $4,634 in monthly support to help raise her and musician Weston's two-year-old twins, Venice and Cyress.

In earlier court filings, she claimed her ex-partner maintains a 'lavish lifestyle' and is flush with cash from monthly trust fund payments of $16,666, along with money he receives from acting gigs.

With pops:He said on his Instagram in a long post titled 'Justice For Weston Starts Now', which featured an image of him with his famous father: 'Various materialistic people and those who are insidiously inspired by my fame and the fame of my family have ceaselessly tried to destroy me'

His ex: Weston did not specifically name his ex-wife Hila Coppola Cage in the post. This comes after she filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court seeking additional spousal and child support. She also wants $30,000 in legal fees to hire a leading lawyer to help in the case. Seen in 2018

He has insisted in his self-declaration that he only receives $7,300 a month from his famous five-times married dad  who has two other children by two of his wives including his current partner Riko Shibata.

And he claimed around $1,500 of it goes to the mother of his two sons.

He also declared he 'voluntarily' paid Hila $2,000 per month.

Weston also used his Instagram post to compare himself to Johnny Depp, 60.

The Pirates of The Caribbean recently won his defamation claim against ex-wife Amber Heard, 37.

Weston said: 'This is why Johnny Depp had to prove himself innocent in the unconstitutional state of California.

Weston  whose great-uncle is Oscar-winning Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola, 84, added: 'People that meet us have a false fantasy that my father, uncles, and I will be catering to their dreams of making people famous or that we have money growing on trees to hand out: seen in 2008

'It's all guilty until proven innocent.'

He also claimed his mental health and sobriety is in a 'perfect' place.

And said he is planning to set the record straight about his life in a documentary that will expose people he says have entered his life with an 'agenda'.

Weston said: 'I will have a documentary and biopic that will feature evidence of who I am, my talents and all the wrongdoings and wrongdoers of my life by shining light to the truth and no longer the myth.'
It comes after her ex Charles Saatchi, 79, enjoyed a cosy lunch with Martha Sitwell, 43, at London eatery Scotts

The TV star said her arm is 'finally healing' after being involved in a 'silly' car accident in LA

Trinny Woodall has revealed she has been left bruised and battered after crashing her car last week in LA.

The TV star, 59, took to her Instagram on Friday as she shared with followers an insight into her recovery.

Trinny could be seen in white lingerie as she stood in front of her bathroom mirror, displaying her taut physique.

The make-up and fashion expert told followers she was suffering from a real lack of sleep as she admitted: 'I have not been exciting for a while because that silly little car accident in LA slightly knocked me for six I have to say and my arm is finally healing.'

She also told her followers on her Instagram live: 'I am still feeling a bit battered and bruised' following the incident.

Smoking hot: Trinny Woodall, 59, has revealed she has been left bruised and battered after crashing her car last week in LA

Insight: The TV star took to her Instagram on Friday as she shared with followers an insight into her recovery

MailOnline have contacted Trinny's reps for further comment.

She later posted a story in her underwear as she revealed she was much too hot to stay clothed.

During her lunch break Trinny took the opportunity to share with followers a glimpse of her supplement supplies that were stored in huge boxes.

She said: 'I'm in my bra and pants because it's hot. I've got an hours lunch break and I'm just sorting out what I've wanted to do forever.

'Pain medication, allergy, sleep, sleep and relaxation, mood and joint mobility, immunity, salves, brain omegas, hair supplements. There a lot of really good supplements in there and you all ask me about things I use.'

It comes after her ex Charles Saatchi , 79, enjoyed a cosy lunch with Martha Sitwell, 43, at London eatery Scotts - a haunt where he has previously taken Trinny and his ex-wife Nigella Lawson, 63.

'He was canoodling with Martha in his usual corner table. He's still got it at 80,' an impressed fellow diner told the Daily Mail's Richard Eden.

Lady Sitwell confirmed: 'Yes, we met for lunch', telling Richard: 'Charles is a very clever, very funny man.'

On the mend: The make-up and fashion expert told followers she was suffering from a real lack of sleep as she admitted: 'I have not been exciting for a while because that silly little car accident in LA slightly knocked me for six I have to say and my arm is finally healing.'

Helathy: During her lunch break Trinny took the opportunity to share with followers a glimpse of her supplement supplies that were stored in huge boxes

The former 'face' of Royal Ascot, she takes issue with her fellow diner's use of the word 'canoodling', insisting: 'We were not "canoodling"; we were making each other laugh.'

Charles is understood to have split earlier this year from Trinny, who made her name giving style tips on the hit BBC show What Not To Wear before becoming a successful beauty entrepreneur.

The couple had been together for a decade.

Last month, Trinny fuelled speculation that the relationship was over by revealing, in an emotional post online, that she had 'moved house'.

The couple had lived together in London. Sources close to the pair claimed that the 20-year age gap was problematic, with Charles favouring quiet evenings while Trinny preferred to be more sociable.

Nigella divorced him 10 years ago on the grounds of 'unreasonable behaviour' following an argument at Scott's, where he was seen 'tweaking' her nose and holding his hands around her throat.

Ex: It comes after her ex Charles Saatchi , 79, enjoyed a cosy lunch with Martha Sitwell, 43, at London eatery Scotts (Trinny and Charles pictured together in 2015)

The Domestic Goddess, who was his third wife, reportedly did not seek any financial settlement, merely requesting to take her cooking appliances.

Martha, the daughter of late gastronome Justin de Blank, married film-producing baronet Sir George Sitwell in 2007 and they lived at his family's 3.25 million Grade II-listed home, Weston Hall in Northamptonshire.

She held a 'divorce party' in 2017 to mark the end of their marriage.

She once described matrimony in general as 'pure misery', explaining: 'It sucks all the energy from you, sucks your youth and all the fun from your life.'

Elsewhere, make-up and beauty mogul Trinny said on Instagram last month that she was moving forward after her split from Charles.

She posted: 'It's a new day, it's a new dawn, it's a new life.' She added: 'I have been moving but now I have moved.'

An emotional sounding Trinny said: 'I have looked out at this view for the last 30 years of my life. It's the one consistent view I have ever had.'

'Recently with the big life change and moving house it was important for me to come back here with (daughter) Lyla and family just to have that moment, listen to the birds, be at one with nature. Very healing.'
Cher and her son Chaz Bono have teamed up to work on a new fright flick.

The Oscar winner, 77, who recently opened up about her final visit to the late Tina Turner, will executive produce Little Bites, along with Chaz, 54, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

In addition to his behind-the-scenes role, Chaz will star in the horror movie alongside Krsy Fox and horror icons Barbara Crampton, Heather Langenkamp and Bonnie Aarons.

The script was written by Spider One, who will also direct.

The Powerman 5000 frontman has also co-written and directed the horror hit Bury the Bride, which Chaz starred in and executive produced.

Teaming up: Cher and her son Chaz Bono have teamed up to work on a new fright flick. The Oscar winner, 77, will executive produce Little Bites, along with Chaz, 54, according to The Hollywood Reporter (Pictured in Washington, DC in January 2017)

Bury the Bride won the Best of the Fest award at the Panic Film Fest in April.

Celebrating the win on social media, Chaz wrote, 'Im so thrilled that Bury The Bride, the film that produced and am in, won Best of the Fest at @panicfest.

'Thank you to Panic Fest, and all the fans who voted for our movie,' he continued. 'You can now watch Bury The Bride on @tubi, which is totally free.'

Chaz has a history of starring in projects in the horror genre.

He spent two seasons on American Horror Story and in the 2018 thriller Reborn, along with other hair raising projects.

In an interview with Pink News in May, the actor who is transexual, said he's been a fan of spooky fun since he was a kid.

'I started liking horror as a kid,' he said. 'The first horror-adjacent, horror comedy that I saw as a kid that I fell in love with was Young Frankenstein. That was kind of my gateway as a young person.'

The Reboot Camp actor explained the attraction of fright films for him and others in the LGBTQ+ community.

Starring role: Chaz will also star in Little Bites alongside horror icons Bonnie Aarons (seen here), Krsy Fox, Barbara Crampton, Heather Langenkamp

Horror genre: Chaz, seen here with his wife Shara, has starred in several hair raising projects, including two seasons on American Horror Story (Pictured June 1 in West Hollywood, CA)

Off beat: 'I really enjoy playing off beat, slightly suspect or downright horrible characters. Thats really whats fun for me as an actor,' Chaz , seen here in a scene from Bury the Bride told Pink News in May

'Horror has always been slightly marginalized as a genre. I think its that outsider status of the horror movie, the horror fan  its very similar. LGBTQI people just gravitate to horror.'

'I can only speak for myself,' he continued, ' but I do think that the storytelling opportunities, the opportunities to play the different types of characters, the intensity of it  I think its just something that we can relate to in a different way.

'I really enjoy playing off beat, slightly suspect or downright horrible characters. Thats really whats fun for me as an actor.'

Deluxe Edition: Cher is releasing a Deluxe Edition of her 1995 album A Man's World July 14 which includes 'The Newly Remastered Record And A Selection Of Rare Remixes On Physical And Digital Formats (4LP & 2CD)' according to a post on Instagram

Cher releasing a Deluxe Edition of her 1995 album A Man's World.

She shared the news on Instagram June 1 writing the collection was 'A Celebration Of Chers Timeless 1995 Album Featuring The Hits Walking In Memphis & One By One.'

'The Deluxe Set Contains The Newly Remastered Record And A Selection Of Rare Remixes On Physical And Digital Formats (4LP & 2CD).'

'The Limited-Edition LP Box - With The Albums First-Ever Vinyl Pressing - Includes 4 LPs On Red, Blue, Green & Yellow Vinyl Plus Two Exclusive, Numbered Lithographs For Retail And Cher's Webstore Respectively.'

The set will be released on July 14.
She's currently starring in this year's Love Island, but it seems Molly Marsh, 24, isn't the only star in her family.

After it was revealed that her mum Janet Marsh, has appeared on several soaps, including Coronation Street, fans of the dating show started calling her out as a Corrie star.

Speaking to The Sun about the time she appeared on the cobbles, Janet said: 'I was a receptionist at an abortion clinic, with Michelle Keegan when she first started out.

'It was one of her first jobs, but she was lovely, really really nice.

Janet, who has worked on other prime time shows like Where The Heart Is, and Hollyoaks, also teaches drama and owns her own performing arts school.

Screen queen: Love Island's Molly Marsh, 24, boasts an unlikely connection to Coronation Street star Michelle Keegan

Lovely lady: The West End star's mother Janet Marsh, revealed she worked with the actress (pictured) when she was on Coronation Street,

The proud mother went onto defend her daughter, after it was discovered that Molly had already visited the villa a few times before this year's show.

Insisting that she had won her place fair and square and that it was nothing to do with her claim to fame, Janet said: 'When [Molly] went to the villa before, that was as her job, there was no other reason, it was just her job, doing what she'd been asked to do.'

Molly  who hails from Yorkshire and was an instant hit with fans  had previously visited the ITV2 show's villas in Majorca and South Africa on trips organised for social media influencers.

Last summer, she posted a string of images from her trip to Spain, which impressed producers and resulted in them inviting her to audition for the show.

Molly has followed in her famous mums acting footsteps and has appeared in a number of pantomimes.

Last year she played the fairy in Snow White in Middleton, Greater Manchester.

In 2021 she was the understudy to EastEnders star Rita Simons as the evil queen in Sleeping Beauty, and in 2020, she played a mermaid in Peter Pan.

Molly still lives with her family and is very close to mum, Janet.

Knows the score: It has been revealed that Molly had previously visited the ITV2 show's villas in Majorca and South Africa on trips organised for social media influencers

Familiar face: Mum Janet Marsh has had quite the TV career, having bagged other credits in shows such as Where The Heart Is, Bodies, In The Dark, Love, Lies and Records

Blonde bond: Molly (pictured right) who has revealed that she still lives at home is very close to mum Janet (pictured left) and together they often filmTikTok videos of them trying on clothes or doing dances

The duo often film fun TikTok videos together, which consist of trying on outfits or performing dance routines.

Molly's dad and her sister Maisie, 15, are often brought in on the action too.

The Love Islander is very open about what her and her family get up to, sharing photographs from their family holidays onto her socials.

Molly became an instant show favourite within days of entering the villa thanks to her down-to-earth personality, which is something she clearly shares with her mother.
An animated reboot of the classic sitcom Bewitched is in the works at Sony Pictures Television.

The news about the project was revealed by The Hollywood Reporter, and it was also announced that the new version of the program would be aimed at children.

The show, which is also being adapted into a film, was also described by Sony Pictures Television-Kids' Executive Vice President and general manager Joe D'Ambrosia as 'Hannah Montana meets Harry Potter.'

According to the media outlet, the new version of Bewitched would be centered on 13-year-old Tabitha Stevens, whose parents, Samantha and Darrin Stephens, were the focus of the original program.

The series would follow the character as she juggles her life as a middle schooler with her time spent learning magic at a secret institution run by her grandmother, Endora.

Back for more: An animated reboot of the classic sitcom Bewitched is in the works at Sony Pictures Television

An animated series based on The Partridge Family, as well as youth-oriented versions of Wheel Of Fortune and Shark Tank, are also currently being developed.

D'Ambrosia went on to speak about the potential of reviving older series as children-oriented programs during his interview with the media outlet.

'There's such a vast history at Sony Pictures Television with properties that we could play around with and reinvent, introducing a whole new generation of kids to them,' he said.

Bewitched initially premiered on ABC in September of 1964 and ran for a total of eight seasons, the last of which aired in 1972.

The show was centered on a witch who married into a non-magical family and attempted to learn how to become a housewife.

The program starred Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha Stephens, and Agnes Moorehead portrayed her mother, Einora.

Dick York portrayed Darrin Stephens for the show's first five seasons, although he left the program to focus on his health and was replaced by Dick Sargent.

Bewitched was met with positive reviews throughout its run, although it was eventually canceled in 1973 due to low ratings.

Storyline: According to the media outlet, the new version of Bewitched would be centered on 13-year-old Tabitha Stevens, whose parents, Samantha and Darrin Stephens, were the focus of the original program

Mashup: The program was also described by Sony Pictures Television-Kids' Executive Vice President and general manager Joe D'Ambrosia as 'Hannah Montana meets Harry Potter'

On the big screen: A movie based on the program, which starred Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, was released in 2005, although it was not a hit with either critics or audiences

The show has since been remade in various countries, including Argentina and Japan.

A spinoff series centered on Tabitha premiered in 1977 and aired for a single season, which concluded the following year.

A movie based on the program, which starred Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, was released in 2005, although it was not a hit with either critics or audiences.

The upcoming animated reboot of Bewitched does not have a prospective release date as of yet.
Breaking Bad star Mike Batayeh has died aged 52 after suffering a heart attack in his sleep.

The actor, who played Dennis Markowski - the manager at Gustavo's laundromat in three episodes of the show from 2011-2012, passed away suddenly on June 1, his family told TMZ.

The actor died while at his Michigan home, with his sister Diane telling the publication he didn't have a history of heart issues.

A family statement about his passing read: 'He will be greatly missed by those who loved him and his great ability to bring laughter and joy to so many.'

Batayeh is survived by his five sisters and many nieces and nephews.

The Lavanderia Brillante industrial laundromat which Batayeh's character managed served as a front for the meth lab used by Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul.)

Tragic loss: Breaking Bad star Mike Batayeh has died aged 52 after suffering a heart attack in his sleep (pictured as laundromat manager Dennis Markowski in the show)

Devastating: The actor , who played Dennis Markowski - the manager at Gustavo's laundromat in three episodes of the show from 2011-2012, passed away suddenly on June 1, his family told TMZ (pictured 2012)

Batayeh was a native of Detroit and resided in Los Angeles.

He had appeared on many prominent shows including Everybody Loves Raymond, The Shield, and Sleeper Cell.

His film work included roles in American Dreams, Gas, American East, Don't Mess With The Zohan and Detroit Unleaded.

He was also a successful comedian, voiceover artist (including for 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past) and made appearances on CSI: Miami and Boy Meets World.

He was part of the first wave of western comics to perform for local audiences in the Middle East in places such as Dubai, where he filmed a comedy special for Showtime.

His last on-screen role is listed as 2018 TV movie, Prank of America in which he played the role of Nacho.

His final Instagram post was on May 24 and showed the actor doing stand-up comedy.

The Lavanderia Brillante industrial laundromat which Batayeh's character managed served as a front for the meth lab used by Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul.)
Kendall Jenner stunned in a white one shoulder mini dress on Thursday evening in Los Angeles.

The 27-year-old showcased her taut curves and toned arms and legs as she joined other celebs including Olivia Culpo and Shanina Shaik at a FWRD pop-up store event.

Kendall has been the creative director for the high-end online retailer since September 2021.

The company opened its first in-person location to the general public Friday.

The reality star pulled her long, dark hair back into a sleek pony tail.

Stunning: Kendall Jenner stunned in a white one shoulder mini dress Thursday evening in Los Angeles. The 27-year-old showcased her taut curves and toned arms and legs as she joined other celebs including Olivia Culpo and Shanina Shaik at a FWRD pop-up store event

She wore transparent mid-heel sandals which made the 5ft10in model's legs seem even longer.

The Kardashians star's makeup looked natural and was finished with a rose gold lip.

The 818 Tequila founder kept her accessories simple, wearing only silver earrings and carrying a small white shoulder bag.

She added a pop of color with dark red polish on her nails.

Kendall seemed to have fun trying on sunglasses with friends during the exclusive first look at the store.

The fashionista often promotes pieces from her 'edit' on social media.

The collection includes styles from Bottega Veneta, Prada, Peter Do, Burberry and more.

Prices on her picks range from about $70 to $2,000.

Sleek: The reality star pulled her long, dark hair back into a sleek pony tail. Her makeup looked natural and was finished with a rose gold lip

Accessories: The 818 Tequila founder kept her accessories simple, wearing only silver earrings and carrying a small white shoulder bag

Shades: Kendall seemed to have fun trying on sunglasses with friends during the exclusive first look at the store

Earlier in the day, the influencer was wearing a comfortable pair of jeans, a white crop T-shirt and oversized brown leather jacket as she enjoyed lunch with her rumored boyfriend, Bad Bunny, aka Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, 29.

Neither Kendall nor the Puerto Rican rapper has spoken publicly about their relationship, but a source told People in May, the pair were 'getting more serious.'

'They are very cute together. Kendall is happy,' the insider claimed.

'He is a fun guy. Very much a gentleman and charming. She likes his vibe. He is very chill.

The source also revealed 'it was a slow start,' to the relationship, 'but they spend almost every day together now.'
Garth Brooks said he will serve 'every brand of beer' at his new bar, Friends In Low Places Bar & Honky Tonk, which is set to open soon in Nashville's South Broadway District.

While country music star John Rich and Kid Rock have been vocal about boycotting Bud Light over their partnership with transgender social media influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, the superstar, 61, does not want to alienate the LGBTQIA+ community.

'I know this sounds corny,' the father-of-three told Billboard. 'I want it to be the Chick-fil-A of honky-tonks I want it to be a place you feel safe in, I want it to be a place where you feel like there are manners and people like one another.'

He continued: 'And yes, were going to serve every brand of beer. We just are. Its not our decision to make. Our thing is this, if you [are let] into this house, love one another.'

He then stated: 'If youre an a**hole, there are plenty of other places on lower Broadway.'

Inclusive: Garth Brooks said he plans to serve 'every brand of beer' at his new bar, Friends In Low Places Bar & Honky Tonk, which is set to open soon in Nashville's famous South Broadway District; seen in 2023

The choice came after Rich, 49, and Kid Rock, 52, both pulled Bud Light from their respective bars, following backlash from customers over the largest brewing company's disastrous partnership with Mulvaney.

Sales of the beer dropped 23.9 percent for the week ending May 27 compared to the same time last year - though that was a slight improvement from last week when sales were down 25.7 percent.

Bud Light also lost nearly 28 percent in year-on-year volume for the week ending May 27.

The smaller decline in Bud Light sales could be a sign that the 'bottom has been hit' for the company and it could see a 'turn-around in performance,' according to Bumps Williams Consulting's monthly industry report.

The beer company saw sales begin to plummet in early April after Mulvaney, 26, appeared on a beer can to celebrate her 365th day of girlhood - a TikTok series she became popularized by.

Mulvaney posted a video on April 1 of herself cracking open a Bud Light on her Instagram page.

She showed off the customized can with her face on it - one of many corporate freebies she gets and promotes to her millions of followers.

Bud Light was accused of driving away their traditional customer base by partnering with Mulvaney, which led many conservatives to boycott the brand.

An ally: While country music star John Rich and Kid Rock have been vocal about boycotting Bud Light over their partnership with transgender social media influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, the superstar, 61, does not want to alienate the LGBTQIA+ community

Controversial: The choice came after Rich, 49, and Kid Rock, 52, both pulled Bud Light from their respective bars, following backlash from customers over the largest brewing company's disastrous partnership with Mulvaney

Bud Light's CEO for North America, Brendan Whitworth, said on April 14: 'We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.'

Whitworth also said he would continue to focus on 'building and protecting our remarkable history and heritage.'

Bud Light's parent company said last month it will triple its marketing spending in the US this summer as it tries to boost ailing sales.

Bud Light was accused of alienating their traditional customer base by partnering with Mulvaney, which led many conservatives to boycott the brand

Three days after Mulvaney's post, Kid Rock posted a video of himself shooting cases of Bud Light, and country music stars John Rich and Travis Tritt publicly denounced the brand.

Within weeks, two marketing executives at Anheuser-Busch took a leave of absence. It's unclear whether they have returned to work yet.

After Anheuser-Busch tried to distance itself from the Mulvaney promotion, Bud Light also faced backlash from the opposite direction, with pro-LGBTQ groups accusing the company of abandoning the transgender influencer.

Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Michel Doukeris has downplayed the impact of the backlash, saying Bud Light's US sales declines in the first three weeks of April represented only one percent of InBev's global volumes.

'We believe we have the experience, the resources and the partners to manage this,' Doukeris said during a conference call with investors in May.
Katie Holmes looked stylish as always on her latest red carpet.

The 44-year-old actress - who recently talked about the possibility of a Dawson's Creek revival - led the star parade at the Chanel Women's Luncheon during Tribeca Film Festival in New York City on Friday.

She donned a pair of on-trend baggy light blue jeans with a white polka dot and Chanel pattern all over them along with a plain white top.

Katie dressed the look up a bit in the form of a dark navy knit button-down jacket and a pair of black quilted Chanel heels.

She accessorized with one large jeweled dangling earring featuring a Chanel logo pendant at the end along with a nose ring and multiple gold necklaces.

Stunner: Katie Holmes looked stylish as always as she led the star parade at the Chanel Women's Luncheon during Tribeca Film Festival in New York City on Friday

In the details: The 44-year-old actress donned a pair of on-trend baggy light blue jeans with a white polka dot and Chanel pattern all over them along with a plain white top

Her signature brunette tresses were worn down as she showcased her natural looks with complementary make-up topped off with shiny pink lip.

Katie was not the only stunning star at the gala event as recent Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu also hit the red carpet.

The 32-year-old Torrance, California native looked casual chic in a short-sleeved patterned navy blue Chanel top tucked into printed blue jeans.

She finished off the look with classic beige and black Chanel heels along with a small white bag draped over her shoulder

Stephanie's brunette tresses were worn down in a middle part as her make-up was topped off with red lip.

Nina Dobrev sported a couture take on the Canadian tuxedo as she sported a matching Chanel denim jacket and trousers combo which featured prints all over it.

The 34-year-old actress accessorized with a white quilted Chanel bag along with dangling Chanel logo earrings.

Her long brunette tresses were worn down as they flowed like waves over her shoulder as she accentuated her natural looks with complementary make-up.

Simply stunning: Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu looked casual chic in a short-sleeved patterned navy blue Chanel top tucked into printed blue jeans

Rocking it: Nina Dobrev sported a couture take on the Canadian tuxedo as she sported a matching Chanel denim jacket and trousers combo which featured prints all over it

Exuding elegance: Dianna Agron donned a look much like Katie's as she sported baggy blue jeans, a white top, and shimmering black cardigan, and strappy heels

Colorful character: Piper Perabo sported a patterned jacket over white dress shirt and black trousers

Wow factor: Chelsea Peretti showed off plenty of cleavage by going shirtless under a light blue suit

Pretty in pink: Greta Lee (pictured left) and Zoey Deutch sported pink looks

Back in black: Jemima Kirke sported a black top with matching polka dot shorts

Wonder in white: Lily Rabe looked ethereal in a sleeveless white number

Gorgeous: Alysia Reiner (pictured left) and Hari Nef sported jacket and trouser combinations

Beauty in blue: Francesca Scorsese donned a blue sweater with black trousers for the occasion

Supportive: Holmes and Deutch were seen while applauding for one of the event's guests

Good company: Agron appeared to be enjoying her time at the event, during which she posed for a photo with Zazie Beetz and A.V. Rockwell

Making an impression: The Deadpool 2 actress showed off her toned midsection while wearing a knitted pink sweater

Color coordination: Deutch's bright pink outfit paired perfectly with Dobrev's denim jacket

Gorgeous: The Not Okay star opted for a sleeveless button-up jacket that was worn on top of wide-legged pants

Flowing: Lily Rabe wore an eye-catching white dress while posing for a photo with Peretti

Beautiful: Kirke's gorgeous blonde locks contrasted perfectly with the dark tones of her clothing

Staying warm: Holmes donned a dark navy knit button-down jacket that paired well with her light top and jeans

Dianna Agron donned a look much like Katie's as she sported baggy blue jeans, a white top, and shimmering black cardigan, and strappy heels.

It was quite the glam parade as they were joined by the likes of Piper Perabo, Chelsea Peretti, Greta Lee, Zooey Deutch, Alysia Reiner, Jemima Kirke, and Lily Rabe.

Meanwhile last month, Katie revealed that a possible revival of her iconic WB series Dawson's Creek has been discussed 'many' times in recent years during her recent visit to the Cannes Film Festival.

The star said that there has been continued interest in brining back the show while sitting down for a chat with Variety last month.

Although she seemed intrigued by the concept of bringing Dawson's Creek back, she also worried that the culture might have changed too much from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when it initially aired, which could sap some of the original's sweetness.

The series helped make Katie a star, and it also cemented the careers of her costars, including Michelle Williams, Joshua Jackson, James Van Der Beek and Busy Philipps.

'There have been many discussions over the years. We all loved the experience,' Holmes said when quizzed about bringing back the six-season series.

But she also worried that Dawson's Creek might have been too delicate for today's particularly online culture.

Watch the iconic series, Dawson's Creek available now only on Stan.

Bringing it back? Last month Katie revealed 'there have been many discussions' about a Dawson's Creek revival while chatting with Variety at the Cannes Film Festival last week

Out of time: However, she worried that the show might not hold up in 2023, especially with the change to a more aggressive internet culture. ''To put it into today's world might tarnish it a little bit,' she said; seen with James Van Der Beek, Michelle Williams and Joshua Jackson

'There's a protection that comes along with the discussion. The show was a time capsule,' she continued. 'To put it into today's world might tarnish it a little bit.

'It was right before everyone had a phone and social media and all of that, so there was an innocence that was there between the characters that was one of the things I think people liked about the show. To put it into the setting of todays world, Im not sure,' Holmes mused.

Ultimately, it seemed to be a lack of a strong enough argument for getting the gang back together that stopped the original cast from moving forward with a revival.

'Weve often talked about it,' the Batman Begins actress added. 'For now, we kind of just keeping saying that until there is a real reason to do it, it hasnt been something where people have said, "This is the take on it."'
Victoria Secret model Josephine Skriver showed off her growing baby bump on Thursday night as she attended a private event to celebrate the grand opening of the FWRD pop-up in Los Angeles.

At the event the pregnant cover girl posed for photos in front of a white wall with the fashion brands name carved out in white.

The 30-year-old star wore a white, knitted, long sleeve midi dress which she paired with white open-toed heels.

The Danish model completed her look with a small, brown Bottega Veneta purse, a few rings, and a pair of gold earrings.

She opted to have her blonde hair slicked back and parted in the middle into an up-do.

Say cheese: Victoria Secret model Josephine Skriver showed off her growing baby bump on Thursday night as she attended a private event to celebrate the grand opening of the FWRD pop-up in Los Angeles

Bumpy: At the event the pregnant cover girl posed for photos in front of a white wall with the fashion brands name carved out in white

Skriver was also seen arriving at and leaving the event.

The models appearance at the event comes just a month after she and her husband, Alexander DeLeon, who goes by the stage name Bohnes, announced in a joint Instagram post, that they were expecting their first child.

2+1 ,' the couple, who dated for nine years before getting married in 2022, captioned the May 9 Instagram post.

The private event was hosted by model Kendall Jenner, who has been a creative director for FWRD since September 2021. FWRD is owned by the Revolve Group.

Jenner wore an off-white skintight mini dress which she paired with strappy nude heels and a white purse.

Guests enjoyed drinks from Jenners tequila line, Tequila 818, and a DJ set from Pedro.

The private event was attended by celebrities, other FWRD creatives, leading Hollywood stylists and emerging luxury designers.

In addition to Skriver and host Jenner, other celebrities in attendance included Lori Harvey, Olivia Culpo, Benny Drama, Landon Barker, and Charlie DAmelio and Dixie DAmelio.

My plus-one: The 30-year-old star wore a white, knitted, long sleeve midi dress which she paired with white open-toed heels

Smile: The Danish model completed her look with a small, brown Bottega Veneta purse, a few rings, and a pair of gold earrings

The host: The private event to celebrate the opening of the FWRD pop-up was hosted by model Kendall Jenner, who has been a creative director for FWRD since September 2021

The private event was held a day ahead of the pop-ups Friday, June 9, grand opening to the general public. The store is slated to remain open through August 13.

The FWRD pop-up store, which is situated on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, will be the luxury e-commerce brands first-ever, in-person experience.

The 4,000 square feet space will feature clothing, accessories, homeware, and beauty products from both established and emerging designers.

Through the FWRD Renew platform, the store will offer exclusive vintage items from Dior, Chanel, Gucci, and Jean Paul Gaultier.

According to FWRD's website, the in-person pop-up will also provide customers have the opportunity to try on items from the website via in-store fittings prior to making purchases.

Private and complimentary styling sessions can be scheduled by appointment.
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Sami Sheen, the daughter of Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards shared a TikTok getting ready for her 'sex worker' job on Thursday.

Sheen's daughter spoke about a 'big reveal' after her fans had been asking her to share topless photos - and celebrated the one year anniversary of her OnlyFans account.

The model, who turned 19 in March, told fans: 'I know youre probably thinking: "How the hell are you a sex worker if you keep [your breasts] censored?" But trust me, I have my ways. I still show pretty much everything.'

She also shared her plans to undergo breast implant surgery and marked the one-year anniversary of her OnlyFans account.

She said: 'I just want to wait until the girls are done so Im fully confident with everything Im showing.'

She has a new job: Sami Sheen, the daughter of Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards shared a TikTok getting ready for her 'sex worker' job on Thursday. Seen in Hawaii last year

Big reveal: Sheen's daughter spoke about a 'big reveal' after her fans had been asking her to share topless photos - and celebrated the one year anniversary of her OnlyFans account

Going into further personal detail, the star said: 'Im starting laser hair removal soon so thats gonna be a huge game-changer. I just cant stand shaving my whole entire body every time I need to work! Its so annoying!

'I just get all pretty and then see what happens' before adding that video content is her 'least favorite' to make because shes 'so awkward.'

The shock comments come after the young star joined OnlyFans last year.

Sami has been posting on the content subscription service since last year.

She made headlines for posting images alongside her Bond girl mom Denise, who posed for Playboy almost 20 years ago.

Sami previously faced opposition from her actor dad Charlie Sheen, who wasn't happy with her decision to join OnlyFans, and she recently revealed he still hasn't been won over.

The teenager told TMZ: '(My mom) has been incredibly supportive from the jump. I'm grateful to have to her in my corner. But my dad hasn't seen the light yet. '

But Denise has been far more supportive of her daughter's OnlyFans endeavors.

Next venture: The model, who turned 19 in March, told fans: 'I know youre probably thinking: "How the hell are you a sex worker if you keep [your breasts] censored?" But trust me, I have my ways. I still show pretty much everything'

She loves her look: She also shared her plans to undergo breast implant surgery and marked the one-year anniversary of her OnlyFans account. Seen in May

Cheeky: Sami is known for showing off her frame on social media; here she is seen this week in Hawaii

She feels her best in a bikini: The budding stat even posed in the ocean as it began to rain in Hawaii

Wow: The model said: 'I just want to wait until the girls are done so Im fully confident with everything Im showing'

Going into further personal detail, the star said: 'Im starting laser hair removal soon so thats gonna be a huge game-changer. I just cant stand shaving my whole entire body every time I need to work! Its so annoying!

Denise, who was married to Charlie from 2002 to 2006, jumped to social media to defend her daughter's decision and said, 'Lots of negative comments on my social this past week. I have to say, I wish I had the confidence my 18 yr old daughter has. And I also can't be judgemental of her choices. I did Wild Things & Playboy, quite frankly her father shouldn't be either.'

In regards to the backlash, the actress added, 'I'm in awe of her ability to shut out the noise. Because it can destroy you...I recently learned about @onlyfans in the last few months. The judgement because women & men of the adult film industry are on there. I imagine they're on IG & Twitter as well.'

She then questioned if there was, 'a difference posting a picture of [ourselves] in a bikini on IG? We've all done it. Because you get paid on Only Fans? I'm pretty sure IG & Twitter & Facebook do quite well off of all of us.' Denise later added, 'Perhaps I should open my own account...'

Denise ended up joining OnlyFans just days after her daughter started her own account.

Happier times: Sami's mom Denise Richards, who was married to Charlie Sheen from 2002 to 2006, jumped to social media to defend her daughter's decision to join OnlyFans last year

Denise with her new man: The Playboy cover girl with her husband Aaron Phypers at the Race To Erase MS 30th Anniversary Gala at Fairmont Century Plaza on June 2 in Los Angeles

Meanwhile, Sami has been in Hawaii all week. She posted a slew of snaps chronicling her getaway to paradise in Honolulu.

Whether she was splashing around the ocean blue or striking a pose by the sunset in an ab-baring outfit, Sami looked like she was having the time of her life. 'My second home at this point,' she captioned the snaps.

The posts began with video of Sami diving into the tranquil waters, before emerging to slick the water out of her face.

In one picture, Sami wore a cheeky thong bikini bottom as she explored the rocky terrain with her tattooed back on display. She also shared a snap of herself soaking in the tub beside a candlelight.

In a stunning shot, Sami posed on the beach at sunset in a white tube top and flowing tiered skirt.

She also appeared to take a snap at magic hour, as she posed in the sunlight with her blonde hair cascading atop her grey sweatshirt in one golden shot.

There was also plenty of adventuring to be had. Sami also enjoyed some zip lining, a bike ride around the beach, and a close encounter with a tortoise.
Kate Bosworth showed off her toned abs in a black and blue bikini top during a trip to the Galapagos Islands with her husband Justin Long.

She paired her summery look with a pair of black shorts that were lined with the same material as her bikini top.

The Blue Crush actress was all smiles in the photo, wrapping her arm around Justin, who wore a pair of blue swim trunks without a shirt.

The superstar couple both wore a pair of sunglasses to shade their eyes from the relentless Galapagos Island sun rays.

Kate and Justin's trip to the Galapagos Islands took place shortly after their May nuptials at the Rockaway Hotel in Queens.

Hot in the tropics: Kate Bosworth showed off her toned abs in black and blue bikini during trip to the Galapagos Islands with husband Justin Long

Honeymoon phase: The couple went to the Galapagos Islands to fulfill Justin's childhood dream

The two actors were officially confirmed to be an item back in January 2022.

However, an insider told US Weekly that the pair had been dating for a few months before making it official in January 2022.

Romantic rumors had been swirling around the A-list duo ever since they worked on an untitled film project together in 2021.

The Superman Returns starlet wrote of her appreciation for Justin on the project via her Instagram, 'THANK YOU for lifting us up ... you kept it light & full of laughter daily, even through the toughest moments.'

Justin reciprocated with an equally affectionate post, writing, 'People should know what a rare gem you are - all the things you said about me but a little bit (or a lot) more. It was a true joy to be in your glow.'

In August 2021, Kate announced that she and her husband at the time, Michael Polish, were divorcing.

The 40 year old actress had been married to her first husband since 2013.

The Immaculate Room star had no children with Michael during the span of their 8-year marriage.

No trouble in paradise: Kate was glowing during her honeymoon trip to the Galapagos Islands with Justin

Intrepid explorer: Kate snapped a photo of Justin pointing ahead at the crystalline blue waters in the Galapagos Islands

Although Kate and her comedian of a husband currently don't have any kids together either, the pair have made their dedication to nature publicly known.

After all, the vacation pics Kate posted of her and Justin at the Galapagos Islands were inspired by a charitable cause near and dear to both of their hearts.

'We are honoring #worldoceansday by supporting The Charles Darwin Foundation. Since 1959 the Charles Darwin Foundation has been a guardian of the Galapagos uniqueness and protected species,' Kate wrote.

'We recently experienced this magnificent wildlife up close (there are only 4,000 Galapagos penguins in existence!)' the newlywed actress added.

She added that both her and Justin were 'more inspired than ever' to help protect the oceans and 'the species that depend on them for their survival.'
The set of Gladiator 2 has been thrown into chaos after crew members were reportedly injured in an explosion.

Six crew members had to be rushed to a hospital after they were engulfed in a fireball, The Sun reported on Friday.

The highly anticipated sequel has been shooting in Morocco and the neighboring Sahara desert.

There are still few details available about the incident, but it appears to have been a special effects shot that went wrong, causing the dangerous explosion.

One on-set source shared their hopes that the injured crew members would make a full recovery, though their condition is unclear.

Inferno: The set of Gladiator 2 was thrown into chaos after six crew members were injured in an unintended explosion, according to The Sun; Russell Crowe seen in Gladiator (2000)

Witnesses: Paul Mescal and Denzel Washington were reportedly on set and watch the blaze in horror; seen in April in London

'It was terrifying  a huge ball of fire flew up and caught several crew members in its path,' the source recalled. 'In years of filming Ive never seen an accident so scary.'

The explosion is reportedly being investigated, and witnesses to the explosion have reportedly speculated that it may have been caused by a gas pipe rupture on set.

'Six production staff had to be rushed to hospital for treatment,' they said, and it appears that no actors on the film were injured in the inferno.

'Hopefully everyone will be OK, but it was a serious accident,' the source added. 'Everyone involved, from the lowliest runners to the star names, has been shaken up by this.'

The upcoming film is a sequel to Ridley Scott's 2000 film Gladiator, which was a critical and commercial hit.

The historical epic grossed five times its budget, and it helped cement the stardom of Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix.

Gladiator won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Crowe.

While the new film brings back director Ridley Scott, Crowe won't be featured, as his character died at the end of the original film.

Paul Mescal will be leading the new film as Lucius, the nephew of the emperor Commodus (Phoenix) and the secret son of Crowe's character Maximus, who was saved in the original film by his father.

He was played as a child in the first film by Spencer Treat Clark, but the Irish actor will be taking over the part.

Horrific: 'It was terrifying  a huge ball of fire flew up and caught several crew members in its path,' a source recalled. 'Six production staff had to be rushed to hospital for treatment,' they said, and their condition is currently unknown; Washington seen in March 2022 in La

The boss: The sequel is directed by original helmer Ridley Scott (2nd to L). He has been shooting in Morocco and the neighboring Sahara desert; seen with (LR) Matt Damon, Jodie Comer, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener in Venice in 2021

Accident? Witnesses speculated that a gas pip ruptured during a special effects sequence. The film is a sequel to 2000's Gladiator, though original stars Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix will not be featured

Connie Neilsen will reprise her role as Lucilla, his mother, while Derek Jacobi will also return as a Roman senator and Djimon Hounsou will be back playing a former gladiator and friend of Maximus.

Denzel Washington has joined the cast in an important role, though his character has not yet been revealed.

Pedro Pascal and Matt Lucas are among the new cast members, and Stranger Things' breakout star Joseph Quinn will play Emperor Caracalla, who has often been painted as a tyrant in histories of the era.

Gladiator 2 is expected to debut in theaters in late 2024.
Emma Watson took to her Instagram on Friday to post a slew of stunning snaps from her latest shoot with Prada.

The Harry Potter actress, 33, posed up a storm in a revealing black bandeau top and a bright orange skirt.

In the stunning snap, the brunette beauty was clad in Prada from head to toe as she posed in a black bandeau top, an orange waterfall mini skirt, and white mules.

Emma also had her curly locks styled in loose natural wet-looking waves for the Mediterranean-themed shoot.

She captioned the snaps:: 'Never the same, always myself. @pradabeauty #pradabeauty #pradaparadoxe #pradabeautypartner'.

Sensational: Emma Watson took to her Instagram on Friday to post a slew of stunning snaps from her latest shoot with Prada

In another close-up snap for Prada, the beauty can be seen posing head-on looking into the camera.

She also further accessorised the look with a large shell necklace and a pair of large shell earrings, before adding a leather jacket to complement the ensemble.

She went on to caption the stunning beachy snaps with 'Our best memories are yet to come..Never the same, always myself.'

She also touched on how she went against the 'grain' with this Mediterranean shoot.

'Go against the grain. Never the same, always myself.' She added.

The snaps come after Emma was spotted spending some quality time with a mystery man in Venice, Italy last week.

And the name of Emma Watson's friend was revealed as American businessman Ryan Walsh, The Sun reports.

It came just days after it was reported she'd split from the son of retail tycoon Sir Philip Green, Brandon, and Emma could be seen smiling as she walked alongside Ryan.

Wow! In another close-up snap, the beauty can be seen posing head-on looking into the camera for the beachy snap

Beach vibes: Emma styled her hair in bold voluminous waves and donned a natural makeup look in the images, which she shared on Instagram

The pair rode in one of the city's water taxis and dined at a restaurant on the tiny island of La Certosa, where they were joined by two others.

It comes after Emma was with Brandon for 18 months, and it was also in Venice where their relationship became public after they were spotted affectionately holding hands.

However, for her visit with Ryan, the actress wore a silk summer dress and oversized white shirt, while her companion dressed down in a black T-shirt and black linen shorts.

The film star is believed to have been pictured with her friend in 2019, and also in Venice  but that time it was Venice, California.

MailOnline has contacted a representative for Emma for comment.

Emma and Brandon are said to have split sometime after Christmas - following a 'serious' romance which lasted around 18 months.

Brandon had a reputation as a party-lover and previously dated several models. He was once caught patting Kate Moss' bottom on holiday in St Barths.

Raised in the tax haven of Monaco his Bar Mitzvah, at the fabled Hotel Du Cap, included performances by Beyonce and Andrea Bocelli.

However, more recently he demonstrated an interest in good works including biodiversity and the oceans and was described as 'polite and smart' by friends.

Quality time: The snaps come after Emma was spotted spending time with a mystery man in Venice, Italy last week, who was later revealed as American businessman Ryan Walsh

With a fledgling tech investments company, Brandon had seemed a good match for Watson, a serious-minded woman who took a degree at Brown University post-Potter.

She now harbours ambitions behind the camera, having set up two film production companies and directed herself in a Prada commercial.

She has also developed a grape-based gin, Renais  some of the grapes for it come from her father's vineyard in France.

Emma famously remarked during a period when she was single that she was 'self-partnered' but by more conventional standards she has been a serial monogamist  and serially unlucky in love.
Al Pacino, 83, appeared exhausted as he stepped out with his son Anton James, 22, to watch Transformers: Rise of the Beasts ahead of the birth of his fourth child.

The 83-year-old Godfather star skirted around questions surrounding the future of his relationship with Noor Alfallah, 29, who revealed she's pregnant with his fourth child.

When walking into the cinema Pacino took the outing as a moment to spend quality time with his son and said 'I'm with my son now so if you don't mind I really don't talk about that stuff,' when asked about his relationship.

Pacino wore a navy coat, black hat, sweat pants and sneakers tying the casual outfit together with a black V-neck shirt as he held his scarf, car keys, sunglasses and headphones.

James wore a similarly casual outfit, but was dressed with fewer layers - sporting navy shorts, sneakers, a black shirt and hat.

Al Pacino, 83, appeared exhausted as he stepped out with his son Anton James, 22, to watch Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

The 83-year-old Godfather star skirted around questions surrounding the future of his relationship with Noor Alfallah, 29, who revealed she's pregnant with his fourth child

22-year-old James appeared to watch his father carefully step onto the curb as they made their way into the cinema

Despite brushing off questions about his relationship with Alfallah, the 83-year-old this week revealed he is 'excited' about the pregnancy, quashing rumors about his demands for a DNA test and claims that he'd been 'hoodwinked' by his girlfriend.

The iconic movie star shared his true thoughts about the impending arrival of his fourth child - his first with girlfriend Noor Alfallah - while out for a stroll in Los Angeles on Monday.

Pacino was who has three other children by two women, was quick to make clear just how significant this pregnancy is for him - because it has come so late in his life.

'It's very special,' he said when asked by a photographer if he is 'excited' to be welcoming another baby.

'It always has been. I've got many kids. But this is really special coming at this time.'

In the exclusive video obtained by DailyMail.com, the star added that he does not yet know the gender of the baby.

Pacino wore a navy coat, black hat, sweat pants and sneakers tying the casual outfit together with a black V-neck shirt as his scarf, car keys, sunglasses and headphones

James wore a similarly casual outfit, but was dressed with fewer layers - wearing navy shorts, sneakers, a black shirt and hat - he appeared to ignore the photographers while looking at his phone

When walking into the cinema Pacino took the outing as a moment to spend quality time with his son and said 'I'm with my son now so if you don't mind I really don't talk about that stuff,' when asked about his relationship

Al's joyful response to his girlfriend's baby news came amid furious speculation and rumor about the circumstances of the pregnancy.

Since the news about Al and Noor's upcoming arrival was revealed, numerous rumors have swirled suggesting that the Scarface star demanded a DNA test - and that he had been 'hoodwinked' by his partner.

However, someone close to Al called these rumors 'complete and utter bulls**t' exclusively to DailyMail.com, insisting that the 83-year-old 'could not be happier' over the news - something he has now confirmed himself.

Pacino and Alfallah - who is allegedly eight months along - have been romantically linked since April 2022, and were last seen together in May, while grabbing dinner at the upscale Los Angeles eatery E Baldi (pictured)

Pacino already shares 22-year-old twins Olivia Pacino and Anton James Pacino with his ex, Beverly D'Angelo, as well as 33-year-old daughter Julie Pacino with Jan Tarrant.

He and Alfallah - who is allegedly eight months pregnant - have been romantically linked since April 2022, and were last seen together in May, while grabbing dinner at the upscale Los Angeles eatery E Baldi.

Following the announcement, TMZ reported that Al did not believe the child was his at first and claimed he cited medical issues that would 'commonly prevent a man from impregnating a woman.'

A source told the outlet that the 'shocked' actor had demanded the expecting mother to take a prenatal DNA test to ensure the baby was his.

The insider added that she didn't tell him she was expecting until months into the pregnancy, the outlet claimed.

It added that she had allegedly agreed to get the DNA test - confirming that he is the father.

Sources also told Showbiz11 that Pacino thought their relationship was over a 'long time ago,' while describing the situation as a 'mess.'

However, someone close to the couple slammed suggestions that the pregnancy news was anything but blissful when speaking to Dailymail.com.

Beverly D'Angelo and Al Pacino parent James and his twin sister Olivia - the pair welcomed the twins in 2001 following an IVF journey that began in 1997

The Oscar-winner already shares three children with two different women. He has twins Anton and Olivia, 22, with actress Beverly D'Angelo, 71 - as well as older daughter Julie, 33 (R) with ex Jan Tarrant they're pictured here in 2020

They said that while Pacino was 'surprised' by the news, he 'could not be happier' about the impending arrival.

They also claimed that he and Alfallah are still very much 'in love,' despite their 54-year age gap, and that he had not been kept in the dark about the baby news.

'She's wanted to have a baby for years and Al could not be happier. He loves Noor and the feeling is mutual,' said the insider.

They said the baby was conceived naturally and that Al is 'still very able.'

They also addressed accusations that Kuwaiti-American film producer, Alfallah - who was previously linked to Rolling Stone front-man Mick Jagger and billionaire philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen - is a 'gold digger,' calling the claims 'complete and utter bulls**t.'

'Not only does Noor come from an extremely wealthy family, but she has also worked to obtain her own wealth,' they continued.
BONN, Germany (AP) - The United Arab Emirates official tapped to head the next global climate summit pledged Thursday to listen to young people demanding a place at the table when negotiators gather in the Gulf nation this fall, but offered no response to criticism of his links with fossil fuel interests.

In his first appearance at a United Nations climate meeting this year, the UAE's Minister of Industry Sultan al-Jaber said he wants the COP28 summit in Dubai to be "inclusive" and deliver a "game-changing outcome" for international efforts to tackle climate change.

"Im determined to make your participation successful," he said in a brief speech to delegates from youth activist groups that have been clamoring for leaders to take drastic action against global warming.

The comments by al-Jaber in Bonn, Germany, drew a wary response from his audience.

"Many people, including children and youth all over the world, are rightly concerned about your ties and links to the fossil fuel industry and thereby the integrity of the (U.N. talks)," Clara von Glasow of the Youth Climate Movement, an international network of more than 1000 campaign groups, told al-Jaber. "This is your time to prove them wrong and show that indeed you are serious."

"You have the unique opportunity, a huge chance to demonstrate leadership," she said. "You can become the champion of change and make sure we phase out fossil fuels immediately."

Sultan al-Jaber, center, who will preside over the next UN global climate summit in Dubai, talks to delegates at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, Thursday, June 8, 2023. Al-Jaber said he wants the COP28 summit in Dubai to be "inclusive" and deliver a "game-changing outcome" for international efforts to tackle climate change. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

Al-Jaber, who is also chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, has resisted calls for an end to fossil fuels.

Speaking later Thursday at a diplomatic reception, al-Jaber called for "a just and balanced energy transition that leaves no one behind."

"The phasedown of fossil fuels is inevitable," he said, going further than countries agreed in Glasgow two years ago when the focus was coal, but still stopping short of advocating a complete ban.

The goal should be a global energy system "free of unabated fossil fuels," he said. The term abated refers to measures taken to reduce or capture greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, an idea that experts say is technically challenging and very expensive.

"There is no such thing as an emissions-free fossil fuel," said Hanna Fekete of the NewClimate think tank. "It is always more efficient to produce renewable energy and to use that directly."

Fekete published a report Thursday with the group Climate Action Tracker showing that many major producers of oil and gas, including the UAE and the United States, are currently increasing production.

"The sector is acting like theres a gold rush, not a climate crisis," the authors warned.

That runs counter to countries' pledge at a 2015 summit in Paris to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) compared with pre-industrial times. Scientists say that in order to achieve that goal, carbon emissions need to be halved by 2030 and reach `net zero by mid-century.

Much of the task of coralling countries into making painful but necessary cuts to their emissions will fall to al-Jaber during the Nov. 30-Dec. 12 talks, when negotiators are due to approve the first global assessment of what's been done since Paris and which gaps still need to be closed. Preliminary talks attended by al-Jaber in Bonn, Germany, have so far failed even to agree on a formal agenda.

Outside the venue, bus stops were plastered with posters highlighting al-Jaber's ties to the oil industry. Inside, activists dropped a huge banner that read "End Fossil Fuels."

Alden Meyer, a long-time observer of climate negotiations now with the Brussels-based group E3G, said past summit chairs have succeeded best when they've set aside their own national interests to find agreements acceptable to all the nearly 200 countries taking part in the talks.

"Theres a real question whether Dr. al-Jaber wants to do that, is able to do that and is being given permission from the UAE leadership to do that," said Meyer. "He needs to disassociate himself from the UAE as a major oil and gas producer that wants to expand production if he wants to have a successful COP."

Still, al-Jaber's acknowledgement of the need to "phase down" fossil fuels was a useful first step, Meyer said, adding that a discussion about this needs to happen in Dubai.

His comments were echoed by Mohamed Adow, who runs the Nairobi-based group Power Shift Africa.

"Al-Jaber is right to acknowledge that a phasedown of fossil fuels is inevitable," he said.

"Doing this in a managed way would be good news for the UAE," he said, noting the Gulf nation has ample sun and wind for renewable energy.

"The clean energy wave is coming," Adow said. "Countries can either surf the wave or get washed away by it."

Posters depicting Sultan al-Jaber, who will preside over the next UN global climate summit in Dubai, are displayed at a bus stop outside the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, Thursday, June 8, 2023. Al-Jaber said he wants the COP28 summit in Dubai to be "inclusive" and deliver a "game-changing outcome" for international efforts to tackle climate change. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

Sultan al-Jaber, who will preside over the next UN global climate summit in Dubai, right, leaves a meeting at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, Thursday, June 8, 2023. Al-Jaber said he wants the COP28 summit in Dubai to be "inclusive" and deliver a "game-changing outcome" for international efforts to tackle climate change. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

Participants meet at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, Thursday, June 8, 2023. Al-Jaber said he wants the COP28 summit in Dubai to be "inclusive" and deliver a "game-changing outcome" for international efforts to tackle climate change. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

FILE - Youth activists hold signs encouraging world leaders to maintain policies that limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times and provide reparations for loss and damage at the COP27 U.N. Climate Summit, Nov. 19, 2022, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. The United Arab Emirates official tapped to head the next global climate summit, Sultan al-Jaber, pledged Thursday, June 8, 2023, to listen to young people demanding a place at the table when negotiators gather in the Gulf nation this fall. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty, File)

Steam rises from the coal-fired power plant in Neurath, Germany, Thursday, June 8, 2023. The United Nations Climate Change Conference, takes place in the German city of Bonn from June 5 until June 15 to prepare the COP28 climate summit in Dubai. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Places of religious and pilgrimage importance also have their own economics and their contribution to society and the country cant be taken for granted

Sam Pitroda, a technocrat who had been very close to the government during the Congress rule, and who currently accompanied Rahul Gandhi on his US trip, has said that temples do not generate employment. Naturally, his comment must have been in the context of the attention being given to temples by the present central government. No matter what Sam Pitroda says, there is a great need to understand the economics of the temples and places of pilgrimage. It is true that agriculture, industry and services have their own economics, on the basis of which governments make policies for the development of the country. But we have to understand that temples, places of religious and pilgrimage importance also have their own economics and their contribution to the society and the country is no less. Employment is created through temples also. Innumerable people make their living around temples and through modernization and development of infrastructure at the places of pilgrimage and temple cities, not only the standard of services can be improved, but their contribution to GDP can also be increased. That's why it is necessary to think seriously and sincerely about the temple economy like other sectors of the economy.

We see that a large population in many cities and towns in India depends only on temples and places of pilgrimage for their livelihood. Varanasi, Mathura-Vrindavan, Ayodhya, Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh; Haridwar, Rishikesh, Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri, Yamunotri in Uttarakhand are not only places of pilgrimage since ancient days, but their importance has also been increasing day by day. If we look around we see one or more religious centres in almost all the states. In Tamilnadu, we have Madurai, Rameshwaram and many more temples. In Odisha, we have Jagannath Temple in Puri; Somnath and Dwarka in Gujrat, In Punjab Golden Temple is a major centre of faith representing Sikhism; in Jharkhand, we have Baidyanath Temple at Deoghar and Jagannath Temple in Ranchi, which is of world fame; in Madhya Pradesh Ujjains Mahakal Temple and many more temple cities are found on every nook and corner of India.

Tourism potential

The cities where such temples are located, attract a large number of tourists. There are many places where lakhs of devotees gather in a single day. In the year 2022 alone, 36.4 lakh devotees visited the Vaishno Devi shrine located in Katra near Jammu. In 2022, 3 crore devotees visited the Tirupati temple located in Andhra Pradesh near Tamil Nadu. Similarly, crores of people visit different temples every year. This natural religious tourism is a major part of our total tourism business, thereby creating a huge demand in the country apart from other economic benefits. It is estimated that the share of total religious tourism in India is 60 per cent of total domestic tourism, while 11 per cent of foreign tourists in India, come for religious and pilgrimage purposes. Significantly, the share of tourism in India's GDP is about 7 percent and its share in the total employment is 8 percent. That is, this sector gives employment to 39 million people. In such a situation, there can be no doubt about the contribution of temples to the Indian economy due to the contribution of religious and pilgrimage tourism, as a huge chunk of tourism is coming from this segment.

Development of Pilgrimage Boosts Economy

Although it is believed that there is a lot of room for improvement in the maintenance of temples and places of pilgrimage in India. Similarly, it is necessary to improve the infrastructure of religious tourist places. In that case, it is expected that more devotees will come to these places with the development taking place at the grand Shri Ram temple, Kashi Vishwanath temple complex and its surrounding areas and Ujjain's Mahakal temple. In the past due to improvement in the Vaishno Devi shrine by the then Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Jagmohan, the number of devotees visiting there has gone manifold. Temples are beneficial not only for themselves but also for the surrounding areas.

Due to these religious centres, a lot of economic activities are conducted in all these cities. Most of the trade, transport, religious rituals and related activities are conducted at these centres because of these temples. Not only for the priests who offer prayers in the temples but a large quantum of employment is generated in trade, transport and industries associated with places of religious importance. Most of the markets in these cities are the center of tourist attraction. Similarly, most of the transport of that city is now around these temples. Due to religious rituals in these temples, a large number of employment and business opportunities are created. In many cases, these religious cities are marriage destinations as well, which is another source of employment and income for residents of these cities.

Religious Tourisms Contribution to the Economy

According to the Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, where in the last year 2022, 14.33 crore Indian people visited temples and pilgrimages, and 64.4 lakh foreign tourists visited these places. In the year 2022, an income of 1.35 lakh crore was generated at these pilgrimage places, while the total contribution of religious and pilgrimage tourism, which constitutes 60 per cent of total domestic tourism, was nearly Rs 11 lakh crores, given a total contribution of more than Rs19 lakh crores in 2022-23 (That is, 7 per cent of GDP at current prices in 2022-23) by tourism. It can be understood that those who say that temples do not create employment or that temples do not contribute to the Indian economy are ignorant of these facts.

Contribution to the Society

We have several examples showing that many temples, places of pilgrimage and religious and spiritual leaders are doing exemplary work in the establishment of educational institutions and health centres. The Hindu Mission Hospital in Vellore, Tamil Nadu was founded by the Hindu Mission Society in 1894. It is one of the oldest and most well-known hospitals in the country. The Ramakrishna Mission runs a number of educational institutions and health centers across India. The Arya Samaj also runs a number of educational institutions and health centres across India. These include schools, colleges, and hospitals.

The Jain temples in India have traditionally been centres of learning. Many Jain temples have libraries, schools, and even universities.

The Sikh Gurudwaras in India also provides free education and healthcare to the country.

These are just a few examples of the many educational institutions and health centres that have been developed by temples and religious leaders in India. These institutions play an important role in providing education and healthcare to the people of India.

Today, it is imperative that by developing these areas of religious and pilgrimage tourism, their contribution to the development of the country be further increased. For this, apart from the renovation of old temples, construction of all types of economy and luxury hotels, expansion of infrastructure and civic amenities and establishment of tourist information centres in these religious and pilgrimage places; and their connectivity with different parts of the country to reach these places, are some of the initiatives through which their (pilgrimage places and temples) contribution to the national economy can be strengthened.

(The author is Professor, PGDAV College, University of Delhi)
The US Defence Secretarys India visit is of vital importance for regional security

US Defence Secretary Llyod J Austin III, travelled to India earlier this week, after confronting one of the most significant geo-political rivals, faced by America in recent times, China, at the prestigious Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore. All through his trip to New Delhi from Japan and Singapore, Austin continued to emphasise the centrality of the Indo-Pacific to USs military strategy and continued to remind the pacing challenge from China.

Austin during the Shangrila Dialogue in Singapore (of the marquee platforms for defence ministers of the region to interact) mentioned, that budgetary constraints would not come in the way of the US putting the right amount of money towards strategic projects in the region. Later, the press statement from the Department of Defence outlined that the US sends the most advanced weapons system to the Indo-Pacific and that his department had approved $9bn towards the Pacific deterrence initiative. The US defence secretary was speaking after his Chinese counterpart Li Shangfu accused the US of Spreading the cold war mentality which was greatly increasing security risks. The Shangrila dialogue coincided with a dangerous manoeuvre in the South China Sea where the US accused a Chinese ship of coming near the US and Canadian vessel crossing the Taiwan Strait. Freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, and the status of Taiwan are some thorny issues, hounding the Washington-Beijing relationship, with no signs of abatement.

The Chinese defence minister meanwhile tried to paint himself, as the picture of a tall statesman by insisting that his country sought dialogue over confrontation, the world was big enough for both countries to co coexist and a conflict would bring in unbearable disaster for the globe. However, the Chinese side refused to sit down for a bilateral talk with the US on key security concerns. The Chinese defence minister mentioned that they would not allow freedom of navigation patrols by the US and its allies in the region (Taiwan Strait and South China Sea), as they alleged that it was a deliberate provocation.

The US and China didnt have a cordial dialogue in Singapore, which leads to Mr Austins next destination, New Delhi. India and China are going through one of the worst military confrontations, with thousands of armed soldiers from both countries staring at each other along Indias North Eastern borders, after China unilaterally tried to change the boundaries. Indias growing proximity to the US and its Western allies, with its rising voice as a key economic player not just in the region, but at a global level, is also a concern for China.

A press statement released after Austin visits New Delhi highlighted the major defence partnership, and advance cooperation in critical domains ahead of Prime Minister Modi's official state visit to Washington. The two sides welcomed the conclusion of a new Roadmap for U.S.-India Defense Industrial Cooperation, which will fast-track technology cooperation and co-production in areas such as air combat and land mobility systems; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; munitions; and the undersea domain. This initiative aims to change the paradigm for cooperation between U.S. and Indian defence sectors, including a set of specific proposals that could provide India access to cutting-edge technologies and support India's defence modernization plans. The Secretary and his counterparts also discussed the growing importance of defence innovation and cooperation in emerging domains such as space, cyberspace, and artificial intelligence.

India is hoping to procure the technology for manufacturing advanced fighter jet engines from the US, which will provide a major muscle to its air power. Mr Austins visit in the middle of escalating tensions with Russia and China, to the Indo-Pacific region and having separate bilateral with India, suggests an upgradation of Indo-US bilateral ties.

(The writer is a policy analyst. The views expressed are personal.)
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has arrested a close aide of two foreign-based operatives of the banned Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF)  Canada-based Arshdeep Singh alias Arsh Dala and Philippines-based Manpreet Singh alias Peeta. Gagandeep Singh alias Miti, who was nabbed by the NIA on Tuesday during raids in Haryana and Punjab, is the fifth person to be arrested as part of NIAs sustained crackdown on the organised crime syndicate and network being operated by the two terrorists in Punjab, Haryana, Delhi and Rajasthan, a spokesperson of the federal agency said.

The official said Singh was arrested in a case related to the terror activities of chiefs and members of proscribed pro-Khalistan terrorist organizations. The case was registered suo-moto by the NIA on August 20 last year. The NIA had earlier arrested Lucky Khokhar alias Denis from Ganganagar in February, Jassa Singh of Moga on May 18, as well as Amritpal Singh alias Ammy of Moga and Amrik Singh of Firozpur, who were picked up from the IGI Airport, New Delhi on May 19.

While Peeta has been living in the Philippines, Dala, currently based in Canada, was declared a Proclaimed Offender by the NIA Special Court, Mohali, on Monday in a priest murder conspiracy case. According to NIA investigations, Singh had been working for Dala and Peeta and was supporting them in smuggling weapons from across the border. He was also part of an extortion racket for raising funds for the banned KTF. Dala and Peeta have been continuously recruiting new cadres in India to carry out the activities of the terror group, the spokesperson said.

The NIA spokesperson said all the accused are working at the behest of KTFs self-styled chief Harjit Nijjar, currently based in Canada, who was also designated as an individual terrorist by the Ministry of Home Affairs in July 2020. They are raising funds through extortion and other means, and carrying out smuggling of arms, ammunition and explosives across the border, the official said.

The spokesperson said KTF, as well as other proscribed terrorist organisations such as Khalistan Liberation Force, Babbar Khalsa International, International Sikh Youth Federation and Khalistan Tiger Force, have been engaged in promoting terror across India.
The Indian Government is taking steps to address the predicament of over 700 Indian students, primarily from Punjab, who are facing the possibility of deportation from Canada. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Wednesday assured that his Ministry and the Indian High Commission are actively engaged in finding a resolution to this pressing issue.

Punjab NRI Affairs Minister Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal on Thursday said the State Government will provide free legal assistance to Indian students who are facing deportation from Canada.

Besides, Dhaliwal has also written to all MPs of Punjab origin in Canada to solve the issue of these students so that the future of the children can be secured.

The matter has also reached the Canadian Parliament, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed his focus on identifying the culprits responsible for the fraudulent admission letters, rather than penalising the victims.

Trudeau emphasised that the affected students would have an opportunity to present evidence to support their case, acknowledging the significant contributions made by international students to Canada.

The predicament unfolded when Canadian authorities discovered that the admission offer letters provided to these students for Canadian educational institutions were fake. This revelation came to light in March when the students applied for permanent residency in Canada, leading to the current situation.

In response to appeals from Dhaliwal and the students themselves, Jaishankar highlighted the Ministrys active involvement in pursuing a fair resolution. He stated that the Canadian authorities recognise the unfairness of penalising innocent students and are committed to finding a solution. Jaishankar commended the fairness of the Canadian system in dealing with the matter.

Dhaliwal, in his letter to Jaishankar, emphasised the students innocence and requested personal intervention in the matter.

He urged the External Affairs Minister to engage with the High Commission of Canada and the Canadian Government to prevent the deportation of the students. Dhaliwal proposed granting work permits to the students, considering their valid visas.

He also urged citizens of Punjab to exercise caution and verify the authenticity of colleges and travel agents before making plans to study abroad.

Scores of Indian students in Canada have taken to the streets in protest against the possibility of deportation.

These students claim that they were unaware of the fraudulent nature of their admission letters when they arrived in Canada several years ago. The revelation of the fraudulent letters only occurred when they applied for permanent residency, leaving them vulnerable to deportation.

The mental health of the affected students has significantly deteriorated, with some even expressing thoughts of suicide. Lovepreet Singh, a protesting student, stressed the need for the Indian Government to raise the issue with the Canadian Government, highlighting the innocence of the students who fell victim to the scam.

The issue has gained attention in the Canadian Parliament as well, with NDP leader Jagmeet Singh calling on Prime Minister Trudeau to halt the deportation of these students.

In response, Trudeau reiterated the governments commitment to identifying the culprits behind the fraud and stated that the victims would be given an opportunity to present their case.
With the gory murder of Shraddha Walkar, a woman from Vasai town, by her live-in partner, still fresh in mind, one more macabre homicide has come to light in the neighbouring Mira Road in Thane district, where the police have arrested a 56-year-old Manoj Sane for killing his 36- year-old live-in partner in his flat, cutting her body into pieces, mincing body parts, cooking the same to prevent foul smell spreading.

After they found him living in a rental flat with several parts of the body of his live-in partner Saraswati Vaidya whom he had killed recently, the Naya Nagar police arrested Sane late on Wednesday night. The police on Thursday produced him before a Thane court which remanded him in police custody till June 16.

Sane  who had been living in with Saraswati in a 7th floor flat of the Akashganga building at Mira Roads Geeta Nagar locality for the past three years  has been booked under sections 302 (murder) and 201(causing disappearance of evidence) of the IPC.

Having collected body parts of Saraswati lying strewn in plastic bags in Sanes seventh floor flat, the police have sent the mortal remains of the victim to the State-run JJ Hospital in Mumbai for a forensic examination. While the motive behind the gruesome murder has not been established yet, the police are interrogating the arrested accused to ascertain the circumstances leading to the killing of the woman

Preliminary investigations have recalled that the murder must have taken place on June 4. Since the day of murder, Sane was allegedly engaged in disposing of parts of Saraswatis body and in the process to destroy the evidence.

The hidden crime began to unfold on Wednesday afternoon after a resident living in a flat opposite to that of Sane experienced foul smell emanating from Sanes flat.

He met Sane and asked him as to what was the foul smell that was coming out from his flat. Sane appeared disturbed and told his neighbour that he would look into the reason for the foul smell. Later, he left saying he would return home by 10.30 pm.

Sensing that there was something amiss, the neighbour alerted the Naya Nagar police later in the evening. The police arrived at the crime scene on Wednesday night.

That it was a ghastly murder became evident the moment the investigators entered Sanes flat. The moment our men entered the crime scene, they realised that it was a gruesome murder. We arrested the accused immediately after that, Deputy Commissioner of Police Jayant Bajwale said.

After entering the flat, the investigators first found a big plastic bag on his bed with a see-saw machine lying next to it.

Inside the kitchen, the police found clumps of cut hair of a woman on the ground. Shockingly enough, they found a cooker with human flesh in it. The investigators also found several vessels containing cooked human flesh.

In the kitchen wash basin and the area down under it, the police found half burnt bones and half burnt human flesh in a bucket and in the tubs.

The investigators suspect that Sane might have disposed of some missing parts of Saraswatis body by flushing down the toilet drain or might have fed them to the stray dogs or thrown them in the nearby mangroves. Some local residents have told the police that they had seen Sane feeding the stray dogs in the neighbourhood.

Talking to media persons, DCP Bajwale said that the accused might have used a see-saw to cut Saraswatis body, especially her heavy limbs.

The investigators suspect that Sane might have killed his live-in partner in a fit of rage after a fight with her. We have not yet established the exact motive behind the murder, a senior police officer said.

Sane is a shopkeeper in north Mumbai. He had taken the flat on lease through a property agent three years ago. It was an unsold flat which the builder had leased out through an agent.

Saraswatis ghastly murder is akin to that of Shraddha Walkar, a woman from Vasai town, that took place in New Delhi, where her live-in partner Aftab Poonawala had taken her, killed her and cut her into 35 pieces and threw the parts of her across the national Capital.
In a major reshuffle following the notification of the Centres ordinance on Delhi administrative services, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on Thursday effected transfer of 59 Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territory (AGMUT) or Central cadre officers, including 32 IAS and 27 IPS officials.

The reshuffle entails the transfer of six IAS and seven IPS officers, while 11 IAS and 16 IPS officers have been assigned new postings in Delhi. This reallocation affects the cadre spanning across five States and four Union Territories.

Among the officers involved, IAS officers Vivek Pandey, Garimal Gupta, Sanjay Goel, and Pawan Kumar Sain have been relocated to Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Goa, and Delhi, respectively. Similarly, Ajay Bisht, Anil Kumar Singh, Pankaj Jha, and Ajay Chagti are being reassigned to Delhi from Arunachal Pradesh.

Other officers, including Rahul Singh, Ankita Mishra, Nandini Maharaj, and Kale Amit, currently stationed in Delhi, are being sent to States such as Arunachal Pradesh, Ladakh, and Chandigarh.

While the MHA has labeled these transfers as routine and some pending, they are viewed in the context of the Centres ordinance, which aims to prevent the Delhi Government from imposing transfers on the Delhi UT bureaucracy.

In addition, B Srinivasan, a senior IPS officer known for his efforts in strengthening the intelligence wing of the Jammu & Kashmir Police, has been appointed as the Director General of Puducherry Police. Another IPS officer, Anil Shukla, has been assigned the role of police chief in Mizoram.

Srinivasan, a 1990 batch IPS officer who previously served as the intelligence chief during the abrogation of Jammu & Kashmirs special status, becomes the second officer to be transferred out of the Union Territory following the merger of the Jammu and Kashmir cadre with the AGMUT cadre.

Previously, Lalatendu Mohanty was transferred to the Delhi Police. Srinivasan replaces Manoj Kumar Lal, who has been called to Delhi for further assignment.

Meanwhile, Shukla, a 1996 batch IPS officer of the AGMUT cadre, has assumed the position of Director General of Mizoram Police. He previously held the post of Inspector General of Police in Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

During his tenure at the National Investigation Agency, Shukla led investigations into several terror-related crimes in Jammu & Kashmir and played a crucial role in a major crackdown on separatists. He takes over from Devesh Chandra Srivastava, who has been reassigned as the Director General of Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
India has expressed its strong objection to a float in the Canadian city of Brampton that celebrated the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The Indian Government has labeled it as vote bank politics and criticised Canada for providing space to separatists and extremist elements. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has tersely urged Canadian authorities to address the issue firmly.

The Congress party has also called on Jaishankar to take decisive action by raising the matter with Canadian authorities. In response, the Canadian High Commissioner to India, Cameron MacKay, expressed his dismay over the float, stating that there is no place in Canada for hate or for the glorification of violence.

India formally conveyed its displeasure to the Canadian Government on Wednesday through a note sent by the Indian High Commission in Ottawa to Global Affairs Canada (GAC). The incident was described as not acceptable in the note.

Minister Jaishankar emphasised that Canadas allowance of anti-India elements operating within its borders is detrimental to the bilateral relationship and Canada itself. He expressed confusion over Canadas motivations, highlighting the need for the country to learn from history and avoid repeating such incidents. The controversial float, depicting the assassination of Indira Gandhi, came to light through a video shared on social media. The footage indicated that the float was part of a parade organised by alleged Khalistani elements in Brampton. However, the authenticity of the video is yet to be verified.

The parade, reportedly stretching over 5 kilometre, was orchestrated by Khalistani supporters just days before the 39th anniversary of Operation Blue Star. Congress leader Milind Deora shared the video on social media, expressing his shock and emphasising the importance of respecting a nations history and the pain caused by the assassination of its Prime Minister. Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh and senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor echoed Deoras sentiments, calling for united condemnation of the incident.

Congress spokesperson Supriya Srinate highlighted the glorification of Indira Gandhis assassination by pro-Khalistan extremists in Canada. She criticised the Indian Government for making only a general comment without even mentioning Indira Gandhi by name. Shrinate urged the Indian Government to officially address the issue with the Canadian authorities, stressing that national interests and security should take precedence over political concerns.

This extremist act has sparked outrage in India, with calls for a united response to condemn such actions that disrespect a nations history and promote violence. The Indian Government is expected to pursue the matter further with the Canadian Government to address the concerns raised.
At least 14 persons, including 3 women, were arrested for running a fake call centre in a house in Sector 49. The accused were duping foreign nationals on the pretext of providing technical support services.

Total 14 laptops and five mobiles were recovered from their possession, police said. According to police, they got a tip off about a fake call centre being run in a house in Universal trade tower, wherein American nationals were being defrauded on the pretext of technical support service. Following the tip off, a raid was conducted by the team of cybercrime at the east police station on Wednesday night at the house where more than 10 men and women were busy on computers and laptops, they said, adding that most of them were making calls in English using their headphones and working on their systems.

They could not show any valid other service providers (OSP) licences of the Department of Telecommunications or any other agreement or memorandum of understanding (MoU) related to their work to police team, they said. Police have arrested fake call centre owner Aditya and his team members identified as Ankit Chaddha, Aakash Sen, Suraj Mishra, Ayush Saxena, Hemant Sharma, Sanjeev Shukla, Ajay Kumar, Ashutosh Sharma, Pankaj Kumar, Tushar Kumar, Rajdeepa Das Gupta alias Jenny, Devika Purande and Manisha.

During investigation, it was revealed that these accused first used to gain the trust of customers on the pretext of solving their problem and get remote access of their systems via Anydesk, TeamViewer and Ultra Viewer applications, cyber crime Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Vipin Ahlawat said.
NABARD is organising the 'Aam Mahotsav' annually with the objective of encouraging tribal farmers by providing them a marketing platform for the mangoes produced under the NABARD's Wadi intervention.

In its sixth Year the 'Aam Mahotsav 6.0' is held from June 08 to 12 across 12 districts of the State. The event was formally inaugurated on Thursday at NABARD Office Bhopal, Hemant Kumar Soni Incharge-General Manager- incharge, Reserve Bank of India graced the occasion as Chief guest, and in the august prescence of Sunil Kumar, CGM NABARD MPRO; Binod Kumar Mishra, Chief General Manager, State Bank of India - Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh; Tarsem Singh Jeera, SLBC Convenor; PS Tiwari, Managing Director, Apex Bank. Besides the dignitaries froim the Banking Sector, the event was attend by NABARD Senior officials, WADI- Farmers (Mango Growers), NGO organisation.

The Chief guest Hemant Kumar Soni,GM-RBI in his address highly appreciated the efforts of NABARD for providing an urban marketing platform to the tribal WADI farmers ie the "Aam Mahotsav".

Alongside, he laid special emphasis on financial inclusion. In his speech he also encourage the farmers to establish banking linkages as a farmers collective and indivdial account. He advised the farmers to look ahead and add value to their products by way of primary and secondary processing so that the remuneration will be higher and sustainable. For example, he talked about mango juice, which can bring more income. Farmers were encouraged to take advantage of various insurance schemes such as Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana and Atal Pension Yojana.

Sunil Kumar, Chief General Manager, NABARD, Madhya Pradesh Regional Office in his key note addressed briefed the gathering on the various interventions of NABARD in its effort to not only provide sustainable livelihood to tribal farmers but also it is an example of climate change mitigation measure. NABARD remains committed and dedicated to make the country's agricultural and rural economy sustainable, resilient and remunerative.

PS Tiwari, Managing Director, Apex Bank appreciated this effort of NABARD. He also described the Wadi project as important for the environment because the more trees we plant, the more we will be saved from the problem of global warming. NABARD is not only implementing Wadi project but also running Rural Godown and many other schemes for the development of rural India. He also prayed for prosperity in the lives of the farmers.

Binod Kumar Mishra, Chief General Manager, State Bank of India in his address said that this unique initiative of NABARD is eagerly awaited by the residents of Madhya Pradesh and especially Bhopal. NABARD has made efforts to ensure market availability to these tribal farmers for their products for which he praised NABARD efforts. City dwellers getting chemical free mangoes directly from the farm at very reasonable price.
The two-day Behind The Teachers Desk (BTTD-2023), a national level student seminar on Materials and Metallurgical Engineering, is being organised from June 8-9 by the Indian Institute of Metals (IIM) Jamshedpur Chapter in association with CSIR-National Metallurgical Laboratory (NML), Tata Steel Limited; National Institute of Technology (NIT) Jamshedpur and Academy of Scientific & Innovative Research (AcSIR).

The seminar was formally inaugurated with the release of seminar souvenirs by the chief guest Prof. Goutam Sutradhar, Director, NIT Jamshedpur and Guest of Honor, Dr. A.K. Srivastava, Director, NML, Jamshedpur along with Dr. Sandip Ghosh Chowdhury, Chairman, BTTD programme, Dr. A.N. Bhagat, Chairman, IIM Jamshedpur and Dr. Ammasi A., convener of the BTTD-2023

The aim of the seminar is to provide a common platform for promising and aspiring metallurgists to interact with the pool of experts from industries, R&D centres and academia. The student participants of this event will get an opportunity to update their current knowledgebase, and share their academic achievements, innovative thoughts and new ideas in the field of metallurgy and materials technology.

Since its inception in the year 2011, the seminar "Behind the Teacher's Desk (BTTD) has blossomed into one of the most sought after events among the student fraternity of India.

Dr. A.K. Srivastava, Director of CSIR-NML, Jamshedpur welcomed the Chief Guest, delegates, and speakers. He said BTTD is a unique programme for the undergraduate, post-graduate and Doctorate students in India and also dedicated to the young professionals working in the fields of materials science and metallurgy, enabling them with the chance to network with and learn from their peers.

Prof. Goutam Sutradhar, Director, NIT Jamshedpur was the chief guest of the inaugural function and addressed the student participants. He said such events organised by the pioneer institutes of metallurgical field will certainly enhance the creativity of young minds and also help in developing interpersonal skills. Prof. Sutradhar added, this junction will provide ample opportunities for students to express their ideas, skills and will be their foundation stone for the future course. He also directed students to focus their research on additive manufacturing, reviving foundry based technology and incorporating the use of IOT, Artificial Intelligence in the manufacturing processes.

Dr. A.N. Bhagat, Chairman, IIM Jamshedpur Chapter briefed about the activities and the national & international event being organised by IIM Jamshedpur. Dr. Bhagat spoke about the global concern of CO2 emission in the steel & automotive sector and asked students to initiate study to overcome this.

Dr. Sandip Ghosh Chowdhury, Chairman of BTTD programme briefed, like previous years, this year around 100 students and speakers from 25 engineering colleges/institutes from different parts of the country are participating, and around 37 technical papers and 23 e-posters are to be presented in three parallel sessions.
Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel on Thursday denounced Union Minister Giriraj Singh over his MSP claims.

"We accept the challenge on the comparison on paddy MSP hike during the 10-year UPA government and the NDA government," said Baghel.

Citing that the number of farmers and acreage in Chhattisgarh had doubled, Baghel defended that pro-farmer policy and the launch of the Rajiv Gandhi Kisan Nyay Yojana to promote agriculture.

The Union government cheated by not implementing its election promise of following the Swaminathan Committee report "but we in Chhattisgarh are providing the paddy price to farmers at par", he said.

Singh, an MP from Begusarai in Bihar, earlier said that during the Manmohan Singh government the MSP was Rs 1,300 which has now been hiked by the NDA government to Rs 2,200.
TSR versus TSR

The high pitch to which the former chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat has taken his political activities in recent days has made his detractors within the saffron party alert. Roaming in political wilderness ever since he was asked by the BJP high command to step down in March 2021 to pave the way for coronation (albeit for a short period of time) of another TSR (Tirath Singh Rawat), Trivendra is eager to make a comeback at the political centrestage. His recent visit to New Delhi where he met the partys senior leaders followed by the partys decision to hand over the responsibility of five Lok Sabha constituencies of politically crucial Uttar Pradesh for the mega outreach programme suggest that the BJP has some plans in store for him. Trivendra is learnt to have conveyed his willingness to contest the forthcoming Lok Sabha election from either Garhwal or Haridwar which rings a warning bell for Tirath Singh Rawat, the sitting MP from Garhwal. Tiraths predicament is understandable since in both instances, he is in a lose-lose situation. A ticket to Trivendra from Haridwar could make the party shift Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, the sitting MP from Haridwar, to Garhwal while Trivendras selection for Garhwal would mean the end of the electoral road for Teerath.

New Chakrata

In tune with its high-quality town planning skills and other expertise, the Pushkar Singh Dhami government has entrusted the task of developing and building the New Chakrata township in Dehradun district with the Mussoorie- Dehradun Development Authority (MDDA). The denizens of Doon would vouch for the proficiency of MDDA which in the last couple of decades has transformed a lush green valley famous for its Basmati rice fields, tea estates and orchards of juicy litchis into a concrete jungle best described as an urban mess. The government should send the students of urban planning to visit Dehradun city to understand what should not be done while developing a township. After the decision of the State Cabinet to hand over the task of building a New Chakrata township to the MDDA, the mood in the office of the development authority is upbeat. Having invincible faith in their abilities, the babus of the authority are now confident that they would develop the area which covers 40 villages of serene Chakrata on the lines of Dehradun.

Doughty duo

The exuberance of youth is clearly on display in the functioning of the Health department of the Himalayan State. The young duo- the minister Dhan Singh Rawat and Secretary R Rajesh Kumar- is putting efforts to revamp the department plagued by multiple issues ranging from shortage of staff and equipment to the static mindset of its employees. The verve of the minister was on display when he kept giving directions to the departments headed by him while remaining engaged in the high- octane electoral battle in the southern State of Karnataka where he was sent on election duty by the BJP last month. Later the officers of the department felt a tad relieved as the energetic secretary had gone on one months training leave at LBSNAA, Mussoorie. However, the perky officer hit the ground immediately after his return to duty with a whirlwind tour of the Kumaon region. Here while inspecting the district hospital of Nainital, he gave a severe dressing down to the officers concerned on finding discrepancies in functioning of the hospital. Interestingly, the staffers of the minister and secretary duo also match their bosses with agility, circulating their decisions and actions promptly.
Delhi Lieutenant Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena on Thursday inaugurated the Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha Universitys East Delhi campus despite a controversy with the Arvind Kejriwal government as to who would do the honours.

The AAP government said the Chief Minister dedicated the new campus to the country and termed it one of the best the country has.

Both Kejriwal and Saxena met with hostile crowd on Thursday as they took turns to speak at the inaugural event. While the inauguration event was underway, there was sloganeering outside the campus as well between AAP and BJP workers.

Inaugurated the East Delhi Campus of GGSIP University. Built at a cost of Rs 387 cr, primarily through self-financing by GGSIPU (Rs 346 cr) & Rs 41 cr from Govt, the project was initiated in 2013 & foundation stone was laid in Dec 2014 by the then Union HRD Minister, he tweeted.

Replete with state-of-art infrastructure, the new campus will offer futuristic courses like AI, Robotics, Automation & Design Innovation, among others to thousands of students. An exemplary model of self-sufficiency, GGSIPU has come a long way since 1998 when it was established, he said in another tweet. Saxenas address was interrupted twice by slogans of Kejriwal Zindabad and Modi ji ka dhanyawad. Saxena said that the varsity campus was built at a cost of Rs 387 crore, with Rs 346 crore of it coming through self-financing, and the remaining sum staked by the Delhi government. Other universities should learn from this. It also shows that the universities can work independently, he said. Saxena was talking about how universities could reverse the brain drain, when he was disrupted with shouts of Arvind Kejriwal Zinadabad, Modi ji ka dhanyawad, and Bhrashtachar ka ek hi kaal Kejriwal. The chief ministers address at the event was interrupted by chants of Modi, Modi, with the ruling AAP accusing the BJP of creating a ruckus at the event. However, his speech at the event was marked by multiple interruptions and sloganeering by supporters of both the AAP and BJP. Some audience present at the event objected to claims made by the AAP supremo while others hailed him, resulting in interruptions, after which Kejriwal appealed to them to listen to him first. Speaker Ram Niwas Goel, BJP MP Gautam Gambhir, and Education Minister Atishi and BJP MLA OP Sharma were present on the inauguration. The first interruption took place after 4 minutes of the chief ministers speech. He was claiming that the Delhi government has improved the government schools a lot, and the results were also visible. To this, someone in the audience objected.

Kejriwal paused his speech, and asked him to raise any objections later. With folded hands, he requested to be allowed to continue. To this, AAP supporters started chanting Arvind Kejriwal Zindabad slogans, interrupting the speech of their own leader.

In response, others in the audience, apparently BJP supporters, started chanting Modi Zinadabad slogans, resulting a commutation at the event. After the noise came down, Kejriwal said, had education system improved by such slogans, lots would have been done in 70 years.I requested you with folded hands, people from both parties, please listen to me for 5 minutes. I know you might not like my ideas and thoughts. You can make comments but this is not right. Everyone has the right to speak in this democracy. If you dont like my comments than you can chant slogans later also, Kejriwal begged the audience to keep calm and listen to his speech.

The second interruption took place after around 11 mins of the speech, when he was talking about the Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum scheme of the Delhi government.

However, someone from the audience interrupted by making some comments. After that, several members of the audience started doing a lot of noise. Arvind Kejriwal was visibly angry at this time, and he blasted a female official, questioning why he was invited if nobody is willing to listen to him. When the official said that AAP supporters are also making noises, Kejriwal said that they are doing it in response to the interruptions by the other section of the audience. In his address, Kejriwal accused the British of destroying the Indian education system and turning it into an assembly-line of clerk making, as he called on students to train to become job givers, not seekers.

The CM slammed British bureaucrat Lord Macaulay for creating an education system in the 1830s that still exists, merely to churn out educated clerks. They destroyed the education system of India to prepare clerks.

We didnt make changes in this system. We have to do something to give education that provides employment.

Earlier, Education Minister Atishi addressed the gathering and even her speech was interrupted by sloganeering.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Thursday directed further strengthening of security in court premises to avert any untoward incident.

He also asked officials to call meetings of the bar associations under the leadership of district judges to chalk out a security plan and to take necessary measures for its strict compliance.

The chief minister also asked officials to take necessary action for declaring subordinate courts as firearm-free zones under Rule 46 of the Arms Rule, 2016 after holding talks and coordinating with district judges.

Similarly, a meeting should be held with the registrar general for better security arrangements in the High Court in Prayagraj and its Lucknow bench, he said.

Giving this information here on Thursday, Principal Secretary (Home) Sanjay Prasad said that he along with Director General of Police Vijay Kumar interacted with all senior administrative and police officers through video conferencing and instructed them to take all measures as per the direction issued by the chief minister.

He asked the officers to ensure that no untoward incident takes place in any court premises in future.

He said that SOP (special operation procedure) had been prepared by the state government for the security of district courts. In the district courts of the state, 71 security in-charge inspectors/sub-inspectors, 22 inspectors, 240 sub-inspectors, 522 head constables and 1,772 constables are appointed. Apart from this, QRT (Quick Response Team) has also been deployed in which 60 sub-inspectors, 112 head constables and 256 constables are appointed.

Prasad has given instructions that the functionality of the equipment installed for security in the court premises must be checked regularly. He said that if any equipment was found defective after checking, it should be rectified/changed immediately.

He also directed that arrangements be made for regular checking of litigants, lawyers and visitors by holding a meeting with the members of the bar for better security so that no suspicious person enters the court premises at all.

He also directed that in district courts where CCTV cameras are not installed in the court premises, CCTV cameras should be installed on priority basis in the court premises besides courtrooms.

He also issued a directive that along with regular checking of equipment, trained personnel be deployed for better use of the equipment installed in the court premises.

DGP Vijay Kumar said that keeping in view festivals like Shrawan Mela, Jagannath Rath Yatra, Morharam, Bakrid etc., meetings with the peace committees constituted at the local level must be held well in time to ensure necessary arrangements.

He said that neither permission should be given for sacrifice in public places nor any kind of animal should be sacrificed apart from the laid tradition.

Special Director General of Police (Law and Order) Prashant Kumar said that all necessary measures had been taken in Wednesdays incident and they would ensure severe punishment for all those involved in the killing.
Delhi chief minister and AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday appealed to people of Haryana to give one chance to his party in the next year's assembly polls in the state, promising to give better education and healthcare facilities.



Accompanied by his Punjab counterpart Bhagwant Mann and AAP's Haryana unit chief Sushil Kumar Gupta, he was addressing a gathering during ''Tiranga Yatra'' in Haryana's Jind.



Kejriwal, who hails from Haryana, while seeking to strike an emotional chord with the people during the roadshow, said, ''Haryana is my 'janmabhoomi' while Delhi is my 'Karam Bhoomi'''. Projecting the AAP as the only viable alternative before people of Haryana, Kejriwal asked the gathering that the Congress and the BJP have ruled the state over the years, ''but tell me one thing they did right''.



''Any schools, roads they build...did they give jobs to your children? Then why do you vote for them,'' he said, adding, ''Give me one chance, we will give good education to your children and build good healthcare facilities.''.



AAP leaders Ashok Tanwar, Anurag Dhanda and Chitra Sarwara were also present in the roadshow. Taking a dig at the BJP-led dispensation, the Delhi CM said government schools are in a bad shape in Haryana and promised to set right both government and private schools when the AAP comes to power in the state.



Pointing towards the crowds present, Kejriwal asked, ''who are unemployed, kindly raise your hands'' and then added, ''See how many are unemployed''. ''We have given jobs to 12 lakh youths (in Delhi). In Punjab, 30,000 government jobs have been given so far..,'' he said.
People the world over have not recovered from the devastating triple-train accident shock. A staggering 288 are dead for sure. The many gravely injured ones are battling for life. The statistics are too well-known.

Most sadly, it occurred in the State of Odisha where the invincible Naveen Patnaik has been ruling for nearly 24 years without losing one election for the people-centric works he has been doing. Naveen has gained the rare reputation of crushing all erring, nonperforming and unethical politicians ever since he was made the boss of BJD he cofounded with several others. He cannot be held responsible for the gravest accident on any count. He can only be praised for the prompt response of his people and the trained rescue team built with utmost care.

The Union Government manages and controls the railways in totality. Coincidentally, the incumbent Railway Minister is a BJP MP who made it to the Rajya Sabha with critical support from the BJD. Naveen recognised AshwiniVaishnaw as an achiever par excellence in several fields including engineering, top bureaucracy, corporate governance and social work. Naveen never hesitated to dispatch him from the State despite bitter battles are constantly on between the BJP and BJD front-liners in Odisha. Vaishnaw is a top-grade IITian who made into the IAS to serve for only a few years to join the corporate world as a biggie for his ingenious knowledge and skills in solving all kinds of problems.

June 2 evening rendered most Indians speechless due to shock as the news of the terrible train accident in north Odisha reached them and that happened most unexpectedly just as the post-sunset dark had set in. One speeding train was diverted on the wrong tracks to hit a waiting goods train on the loop line and got derailed sideways so violently as to skid and hit the tail-end of another express train rushing from the opposite direction at high speed. As survivors were screaming for help from the wreckage, locals from the nearby station bazaar, as messiah, rushed with the dim mobile torch lights to make rescue history. They have proven that humanity is still existent and unbelievably so. The State help too reached soon. The renowned Odisha disaster management team has done wonders as always.

The whole two nights and days following were moments of grave anxiety and fear as rescuing people from under the heavy metal wreckage was Herculean task. The Railway Minister had arrived there without losing one moment. Naveen Patnaik too had reached the spot and ensured his team was not lax or casual on any front of the rescue operation. Prime Minister Modi too landed there dropping all other engagements. Most sensible politicians rushed in there to monitor the rescue work only to save maximum number of lives. Naveen's team did commendable job. Modi's visit boosted the spirit of all who were engaged in saving lives. Blood donors came from all domains including women groups and poor communities. Show of human compassion was at its touching' best.

After the shock subsided a little, expert comments and remarks started flowing out. They talked of machine failure, human error and also sabotage. But until now, nothing much has come clear. Some fellows also spread the rumour that the loco pilots were careless and had slept off, which is ruled out wholly as unlike any other vehicle, the train drivers have absolutely no control over the path they would take. They can only start and stop the engine, speed up and bring the trains to halt by applying brakes. Pathways are set by control rooms at all stations, whether a stopover one or pass-by. The little station is a nondescript passenger halt called Bahanaga' between Baleswar and Soro stations. High-speed express trains pass by at the usual permitted speeds. Like every other station in India, Bahanaga too has a fully-equipped control room with best failsafe modern gadgets like in Delhi, Mumbai, Lucknow or Pune to be equally capable of setting the tracks right and flashing the right signal. The latest safety gadgets are so sensitive as to guide even dullest minds to wake up to the real-time situations and take steps in case of an emergency. If there is any mechanical failure despite right command or electronic mess-up by some confusion, all signals would automatically go red' thereby forcing trains to stop. This did not happen for the ill-fated Coromandel Express that was given green signal for the main tracks but the interlocking system had made it for the loop line at a curvature. No one knows until now how the supposedly failsafe system did not raise alarm or turn all signals red. The CBI is now put on the job. But the agency does not look fit for a perfect probe which can be best performed by high class railway engineers who lay tracks and install safety devices. The CBI is essentially equipped to crack human crime mysteries. At the most, they may be able only to look for the sabotage angle.

Now, there is a heartrending thing to share: As the whole world was in a state of shock and countless people including Railway Minister Vaishnaw were having sleepless as well as foodless hours day and night, some BJD brutes packed bags for a fun time in Singapore to celebrate a direct flight service commencing a day after the horrific accident. On June 3 evening or so, Minister Rohit Pujari, Mayors of Cuttack and Bhubaneswar Subash Singh and Sulochana Das, respectively, and most hurting the accident constituency MLA of Soro Parsuram Dhada flew off for merrymaking at a glamorous hotel in Singapore, particularly when Naveen Patnaik had declared State Mourning on that day. Equally shockingly, three MLAs of Bhubaneswar, one Minister among them, also had dared shamelessly to attend a Bollywood musical show when the whole country was in tears. The black sheep team comprised Minister Ashok Panda, legislators Ananta Jena and Sushant Rout.

The social media is roasting these brutish creatures like never before. Obviously, they have not sought Naveen's permission to fly away to Singapore to have some fun time when the rest of the country was mourning the death of so many people in the deadliest train accident. The other three shameless creatures may have imagined that they would not be marked as heartless rogues if seen by the crowd at the Bollywood event in Bhubaneswar.

Naveen Patnaik better have these black sheep dismissed for all times before there is State-wide uproar against his most-adored party.
In an interim relief to AAP MP Raghav Chadha, a city court has directed the Rajya Sabha secretariat to not evict him of a Type-7 bungalow in Lutyens Delhi, which is usually allotted to lawmakers who are former ministers, chief ministers or governors, till the pendency of his application and without following the due process of law.

The court will now decide the maintainability of Chadhas application against the March 3, 2023 order of the Rajya Sabha secretariat cancelling the allotment of the bungalow to him on July 10. Nobody from the Rajya Sabha secretariat was immediately available for comments on the judicial order and the MPs petition.

During the proceedings, the counsel for the RS secretariat objected to the maintainability of the application. Additional District Judge Sudhanshu Kaushik had on June 1, after hearing the arguments from both sides on the issue of maintainability, fixed the matter for July 10 for order.

The court had in April directed the secretariat not to dispossess Chadha of the bungalow till the pendency of the application without due process of law. At this stage, I do not deem it expedient to comment on the arguments raised by the plaintiff that the allotment once made by the secretariat cannot be cancelled under any circumstances during the entire tenure of a Member of Parliament, the judge had said.

However, I do find force in the second limb of the argument advanced on behalf of the plaintiff that a person cannot be dispossessed except by following the due process of law, the judge said. Since, the plaintiff (Chadha) is occupying an accommodation, which falls under the category of public premises, the defendant (Rajya Sabha Secretariat) is obligated to follow the due process of law, he said.
Dr Varun Malhotra, Associate Professor, Department of Physiology, AIIMS Bhopal, has been awarded with the ISSN award. Dr. Malhotra received the "International Best Researcher Award" by the ISSN Society International Science and Technology Awards (IIRA2023) in association with the World Research Council. AIIMS Bhopal Executive Director Prof. Dr. Ajai Singh congratulated and blessed Dr. Varun Malhotra.

The award was given for his research work "Study of immediate neurological and autonomic changes during Kapalbhati Pranayama in yoga practitioners".

Dr. Danish Javed, Dr. Santosh Wakode, Dr. Rajya Bharshankar, Dr. Neha Soni and Dr. Patrick K. Porter were the co-author in this research work. Research has found that vigorous breathing exercises such as Kapalbhati Pranayama have similar benefits to exercise on heart rate and the body's metabolism (sympathetic autonomic system).

Slow deep breathing, on the other hand, helps with the quality of heart rate conduction, promotes parasympathetic balance, and may lead to longevity.
The Bharatiya Janata Party has strongly objected to former chief minister and senior Congress leader Harish Rawat stating Hey Musalmanay Namah. The BJP has stated that in following his partys policy of appeasement, Rawat has insulted Sanatan Dharma and the beliefs of its followers.

Talking to media persons, the BJP State media in-charge Manveer Singh Chauhan said that the former CM will not be able to distort religious verses of Islam and other religions in a similar manner because he has been insulting Sanatan Dharma conveniently and without hesitation. The State government headed by chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami is working to implement strict laws to maintain the cultural, religious and spiritual identity along with the demography of the State. However, those who support land and love Jihad from behind the curtain are unable to digest this. Statements like Hey Musalmanay Namah make it clear that Harish Rawat and the Congress are among such supporters. Distorting sacred Hindu mantras just to criticise the BJP is not justified. Rawats statement clearly shows that the Sanatan culture has been insulted to appease a particular community. Such thoughts of Congress leaders who are Hindu by convenience clearly show how much respect they have for Sanatan culture and its sacred mantras, said Chauhan.

Chauhan further said that those who promise to establish a Muslim university behind closed doors take pride in denigrating Sanatan culture from public platforms. It would be better if all political parties support the efforts of the State government to maintain the authentic form of Uttarakhand. The people of the State will not tolerate the open humiliation of Sanatan culture, stressed the BJP State media in-charge.
Haryana is set to host a two-day G-20 Conference on Crime and Security in the Age of NFTs, AI, and Metaverse, scheduled to take place on July 13 at Gurugram.



Chief Secretary Sanjeev Kaushal on Thursday reviewed the preparations for the event in collaboration with senior officers from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and the State Government. During the meeting, he highlighted various initiatives to enhance the delegates' experience, including an exhibition showcasing Haryana's journey of progress and cultural heritage, as well as a captivating cultural programme.



Kaushal said that an exhibition will be organized to provide the delegates with a deeper understanding of Haryana's vibrant history and its path towards progress and development.



In addition, the Higher Education Department has planned a series of seminars, essay writing competitions, and other engaging events in colleges and universities across the state. These activities will encourage scholarly discussions and critical thinking among students, fostering intellectual growth and knowledge exchange.



This conference is being organized by MHA in collaboration with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS). The International Partners will be Interpol, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) while National Partners will include Data Security Council of India (DSCI), Rashtriya Raksha University (RRU), National Forensic Science University (NFSU), National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham.
Hry CM to launch the Water Resources Action Plan-2023-25 on June 9



Chandigarh: In the series of efforts being made by the Haryana government towards conserving water resources, Chief Minister, Manohar Lal Khattar will launch integrated Water Resources Action Plan-2023-25 under Amrit Jal Kranti which will be a bold step towards conserving water resources. An official spokesperson said that the programme will be organized at Chandigarh on June 9. On the initiative of the Chief Minister, a two-day water conservation seminar was organized in Panchkula on April 26-27 under Amrit Jal Kranti, in which many departments of Haryana, including experts from India and abroad doing research on water conservation participated in the seminar. Based on the various suggestions received in the seminar, an action plan has been prepared by all the departments for water conservation.



SGPC objects to 'Gadar-2' scene shot in gurdwara



Chandigarh: The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee has raised strong objection to the shooting of a scene of Sunny Deol starrer ''Gadar-2'' on the premises of a gurdwara. The general secretary of the apex gurdwara body, Gurcharan Singh Grewal, said the movie's hero and heroine can be seen in a particular act in the gurdwara which was objectionable. ''Flower petals are being showered (on the actors). Moreover, 'Gatka' (a Sikh martial art) Singhs could be seen performing around them,'' said Grewal in a tweet. Expressing displeasure, Grewal said Deol and the director of the movie should understand that a gurdwara is not a place for shooting such a scene. ''We want to say that such pictures (a video clip) which are appearing is shameful for the Sikh community,'' the SGPC general secretary said. In a clip that surfaced online, Deol, who is also a BJP MP, and actress Ameesha Patel can be seen standing arm in arm and looking at each other at the gurdwara while ''Gatka'' experts are performing around them.



Two SGPC members, who supported Bibi Jagir Kaurs candidature, join SAD



Chandigarh: SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal on Thursday welcomed two Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) members who had supported the candidature of Bibi Jagir Kaur for the post of SGPC president  Harpal Singh Jalla from Payal and Amrik Singh Janaitpur from Ambala  into the SAD. Another 10-15 SGPC members, who had supported Bibi Jagir Kaur, would rejoin SAD in the coming days, he said while appealing to all leaders who had left SAD during the last few years to rejoin the mother party. If I am at fault anywhere, I apologize for the same but we must all unite to defeat the forces who want to weaken the panth, he added.



Fatehgarh Sahib youth leader appointed YAD chief



Chandigarh: SAD on Thursday appointed Fatehgarh Sahib youth leader Sarbjit Singh Jhinjar, belonging to an ordinary agriculturist family, as the president of Youth Akali Dal (YAD). Im confident Sarbjit Singh Jhinjar will take forward SADs rich traditions and culture and work assiduously for the welfare of the Panth and Punjab. Jhinjar has already proved himself as an astute organization man who has made significant contributions to the YAD and is known as a grass root worker. I wish him the very best in his present assignment, said SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal.



Punjab VB nabs sanitary inspector for taking Rs 4k bribe from ragpicker



Chandigarh: Punjab Vigilance Bureau on Thursday arrested a Sanitary inspector Jatinder Vij, posted at Zone-D, Ludhiana Municipal Corporation, for accepting a bribe of Rs 4,000. The official has been arrested on the complaint of Mahi Ram of Hindbathi village in Damo district of Madhya Pradesh. The complainant informed that he used to collect waste items like glass bottles, plastic and iron materials from the garbage dump near Bus Stand Ludhiana but the Sanitary Inspector was demanding Rs 15,000 monthly as bribe from him to pick waste materials. Inspector had already taken Rs 8,000 from me as a first installment of bribe and demanding more money, alleged the complainant.



JJP MLA decides to quit as Haryana Sugarfed chairman after police action against farmers



Kurukshetra: Jannayak Janata Party MLA Ram Karan Kala on Thursday said that he was resigning from the post of Haryana Sugarfed chairperson protesting the lathicharge on farmers who blocked a highway a couple of days ago demanding MSP for sunflower seeds. Kala, whose party is a partner of the BJP-led ruling alliance in Haryana, said that he has had a long association with the farmers of his Shahabad assembly segment and the police action was like an attack on him. Farmers led by BKU (Charuni) chief Gurnam Singh Charuni had on Tuesday blocked the national highway near Shahabad for over six hours demanding that the government procure sunflower seeds at minimum support price (MSP). Police used water cannons and resorted to lathicharge to disperse the protesters.



NGO holds blood test camp



Chandigarh: Bharat Vikas Parishad East-1, in association with Society for Divine Reiki Meditation (NGO) and support from Fire and Security Association of India Chandigarh Chapter, organized a free blood test camp in Sector 27D Park. City Mayor Anup Gupta also attended the camp, in which 88 persons were benefited. Blood Tests for HB, sugar, cholesterol, uric acid were also done free of cost.
Bharatiya Janata Party state president Bhupendra Singh Chaudhry said that the programs organised under Jan Sampark Abhiyan, on the achievements of the Central governments 9 years, were becoming a major medium of public relations and dialogue.

The prabudh samagam (enlightened conference) organised under the campaign has become a medium of dialogue between enlightened citizens of the society, who have given directions to the society through their hard work, Chaudhry said in a meeting here on Wednesday.

BJP state general secretary Sanjay Rai said that through enlightened conference party leaders had met lyricists, musicians, painters, craftsmen, folk artists, sportspersons, and distinguished people in social, business, education, and medical fields across 80 Lok Sabha constituencies.

State president, Deputy Chief Ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Brajesh Pathak along with union ministers, ministers of the state government, and senior leaders of the party will interact with the enlightened people, he said.

Rai further said that the state president would interact with the enlightened people of Shravasti on June 9 and Ambedkar Nagar Lok Sabha constituency on June 10. On June 10, Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak would address the enlightened conference of Gorakhpur Lok Sabha constituency, while Union Minister Narendra Singh Tomar would interact with intellectuals in Rae Bareli on June 13.

Union minister SP Singh Baghel will reach out to enlightened people of Chandauli parliamentary constituency on June 20. Many leaders like Union Minister Jitendra Singh, Meenakshi Lekhi, former Chief Minister of Uttarakhand Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, Trivendra Singh Rawat, national vice president Rekha Verma, national spokesperson Shahnawaz Hussain and others have already addressed such meetings in different districts, Rai said.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has raised serious concerns over the interference of LG Vinai Kumar Saxena in the inauguration ceremony of the East Campus of IP University (IPU).

According to the AAP, the LG threatened various individuals, including the Vice Chancellor and officials of IP University, to secure an invitation to the event.

Highlighting the significance of the issue, the AAP stated that the LGs involvement in inaugurating an educational institute is unprecedented since independence.

Traditionally, such ceremonies have been presided over by Chief Ministers and Education Ministers.

The party also questioned the LGs authority to interfere in programs related to education, a transferred subject under the Delhi government.

Earlier, Delhi Ministers Atishi and Saurabh Bharadwaj on Thursday alleged that Lieutenant Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena pressured the officials ofGuru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University (GGSIPU) and her department to take charge of inauguration of the east Delhi campus of the varsity, threatening them with suspension.

They accused the Centre of failing on all fronts and claimed that their eagerness to claim credit for the accomplishments of the Kejriwal government is a result of their shortcomings. The newly built campus of GGSIPU in east Delhi became the latest flashpoint between the AAP government and Saxena on Wednesday, with both sides claiming the right to its inauguration.

Addressing a press conference Thursday, Atishi said the GGSIPU is a state university which was planned and constructed by the Delhi government.

Why did you pressure officials of the university and education department officials to get the campus inaugurated by you? Isnt he aware that higher education is the responsibility of the Delhi government?

Why does the Lt Governor want to take credit for all the work done by the Delhi government in the last eight years?

Why was he there to inaugurate the new GGSIPU campus, a state university, when the Kejriwal Government is the one who planned its new campus and the courses? she asked.

Atishi also pointed out that the LG assumed office just a few months ago and questioned his desperation to take credit for the work done by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal over the past eight years.

She also highlighted the exposure of Prime Minister Modis failures by the LG. She said that the absence of a single university built by the BJP, where the Prime Ministers photo could be displayed, highlights the partys lack of contribution in the education sector.

During the same event, Atishi too was repeatedly interrupted by BJPs hooligans. In response, she remarked, This is why education is important  so that people dont interrupt academic events.
Monsoon has entered Kerala, it is likely to arrive in the state after June 20 usually it arrives in the state by June 15, but this time it will be delayed. However, meteorologists have predicted good rains.

Earlier, unseasonal rains continued in the state on Thursday, it started raining in Sehore after noon with strong winds.

In the current weather conditions Madhya Pradesh is receiving rainfall and at the same time it is scorching hot. Met said that due to the formation of a cyclone in the Arabian Sea, moisture is coming into the state, but its effect is less. This is the reason why the weather has become like this. Especially in many areas including Damoh, Khajuraho, Chhatarpur, the effect of heat has increased.

The mood of the weather keeps changing in Bhopal as bright sunshine till afternoon and clouds in the evening and it will persist as per Met. The day temperature was recorded at 40.6 degree celsius. It rained in Indore, Khajuraho, Mandla and Seoni during the day on Wednesday. At the same time, after the scorching heat, it rained in Ujjain in the evening as well.

On the other hand, Damoh recorded the highest temperature of 43 degrees Celsius, while it was 42.6 degrees in Malajkhand. In more than 20 cities of the state including Bhopal, Gwalior, Jabalpur, Khajuraho, the mercury remained 40 or more.

Met has issued warning of thundery activities and gusty winds in over 16 districts. Rainfall might occur which was reported at very few places in the past 24 hours.
The Chhattisgarh government has announced a prize of Rs 1 lakh for giving a new name for the land rights or loan booklet or Kisan Kitab. The last date for submission is June 30.

The Revenue and Disaster Management Department has invited proposals from the public, an official communication said.

Kisan Kitab or loan booklet or land rights document in the form of a book has been an integral part of the life of every landowner/landholder farmer. It is an integral part of all the agricultural and financial related work of the farmer.

Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, at an event in village Kadar in Baloda Bazar-Bhatapara constituency, urged the people to give a new name to the official document held by farmers and land owners. He pledged Rs 1 lakh as award to the person giving an appropriate name.

The suggestion can be forwarded to https://revenue.cg.nic.in/rinpustika.

A tradition of revenue record

During the time of Malguzari (land revenue settlement system), traditionally details of every farmer holding the land were noted in the form of a book.

The farmers were issued a red colour booklet with the picture of a bullock pair called Asli Ryotwari Rasid Bahi. Later, it was given a legal form under the Land Revenue Code.

After the Land Revenue Code came into force in 1972-73, the booklet was renamed as Bhu Adhikar Evam Rin Pustika (Land Rights and Loan Book).

This book was the record of all the details regarding various land plots held and the land revenue paid as well as the short and long term loans taken by the farmer.

After the formation of Chhattisgarh, the loan book was renamed Kisan Kitab in 2003 but there was no change in its objectives and usage.
Opposition parties targeted the Yogi Adityanath government over the deteriorating law and order in Uttar Pradesh with Mayawati asking for a better supervision and the Congress calling the Bharatiya Janata Party government criminal friendly which is giving a free hand to goons to operate even in high security places.

Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati said in her tweet that Wednesdays sensational firing in the Lucknow court premises and broad daylight murder was a big challenge for the government in terms of law and order and crime control in UP.

There is a lot of panic among the general public due to such incidents, she said and demanded that the government take stern steps regarding this incident so that people could feel safe.

Reacting to the sensational killing in the court premises, Uttar Pradesh Congress president Brijlal Khabri said that the Yogi government, which claimed zero tolerance towards crime, had proved to be a complete failure in crime control.

This government has become a criminal-friendly government, Khabri said, adding that the murder of two criminals (Atiq Ahmad and Ashraf) in police custody in Prayagraj was still fresh in the minds of people and now notorious criminal Sanjeev Maheshwari aka Jeeva was shot dead in police custody in the court premises in the state capital.

These incidents are examples of the diminishing fear of the khaki in the minds of criminals, he added.

Raising questions on the law and order situation in the state, Khabri, while addressing media persons here on Thursday, said the BJP government in the state had completely failed to control law and order.

The spate of crimes in the state shows that the morale of criminals has increased in the BJP government to such an extent that murders are taking place openly in police custody and criminals do not hesitate to kill someone even in a courtroom, Khabri said.

The UPCC chief said he wanted the rule of law to be established in the state, and stern and quick punishment to every criminal. The government should make such arrangements that the criminals fear the law, he said.

Meanwhile, Khabri welcomed senior leader and one of the founder members of Samajwadi Party, CP Rai, into the Congress fold.

Rai joined Congress along with former BJP MLA Rakesh Rathore and national general secretary of Bharatiya Kisan Union, Sarvesh Sharma, and hundreds of their supporters on Thursday afternoon.
Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann on Thursday announced to hold the next meeting of the Council of Ministers in Mansa on June 10 (Saturday), under the Governments ambitious Sarkar Tuhade Dwar programme.



This would be the third Cabinet meeting, under the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-led State government, to be held outside the state capital.



Under the new initiative and taking the government at peoples doorstep, the Chief Minister had announced holding the Cabinet meetings not in the Civil Secretariat, but in various cities of the State.



As per the Chief Ministers announcement, the Cabinet Ministers, after holding the meeting, would stay in the same city for the day virtually bringing the entire government at the people doorstep  listening to the peoples complaints and resolving the same at the earliest.



Under the same initiative, the previous Cabinet meetings were held in Ludhiana on April 28, and in Jalandhar on May 17.
Punjab Government will provide free legal assistance to around 700 students facing deportation from Canada. Most of these students belong to Punjab and they will be assisted by lawyers who are experts in immigration laws in Canada, said Punjab NRI Affairs Minister Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal on Thursday.

Along with this, Dhaliwal has also written a letter to all MPs of Punjab origin in Canada to solve the issue of these students so that the future of the children can be secured.

The Minister, presiding over a high-level meeting with Civil and Police officers associated with NRI Department at Punjab Bhawan, issued instructions to all Deputy Commissioners and SSPs to scrutinize the documents of travel agents and immigration agencies and send a report by July 10. He also expressed concern that many travel agents are running immigration agencies illegally.

Dhaliwal said that the Chief Minister has already given clear instructions to improve the system. If the system would be transparent and clean, there will be less scope for human trafficking by illegal travel or immigration agencies. A special campaign against fake travel agents or immigration agencies would soon be launched in Punjab so that no one could be involved in human trafficking, he said.

In the last 10 years, if any immigrant Punjabi has been deliberately implicated in a wrong case, it should be brought to their attention. Such cases will be investigated and justice will be given to the victim, he added.

Taking an exclusive initiative, this time NRI meetings will be held for the first time in those villages of Punjab whose immigrants have done good work in their villages or earned the name at the national or international level.

Dhaliwal informed that NRI meetings will be held at the district level from July 15 to August 30. He invited all NRPs (Non-Resident Punjabis) to bring their problems during NRI meetings and efforts will be made to solve every problem on the spot.

He instructed the police and civil officials in strict words that the grievances of the migrant Punjabis, which have not been resolved so far, should be settled by June 30. A total of 609 complaints were received in the first NRI meeting, out of which 522 have been resolved while 87 complaints are pending.

Dhaliwal also informed that there is a plan to bring a new NRI policy by September 30 to resolve all kinds of problems and complaints of NRPs. The contribution of migrant Punjabis cannot be ignored in fulfilling the dream of making the state Rangla Punjab.

He said that Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann will soon launch the new and more convenient website of the NRI department.

 Punjab to provide free legal assistance to around 700 students facing deportation from Canada

 Minister wrote to all Canadian MPs of Punjabi origin to solve the deportation issue

 All DCs, SSPs asked to submit report by Jul 10 after scrutinizing documents of travel agents and immigration agencies

 To launch a special campaign against fake travel agents or immigration agencies

 Cases of immigrant Punjabi, deliberately implicated in wrong case, to be investigated

 NRI meetings to be held in villages of immigrants who have done good work in their villages or earned name at national or international level

 NRI meetings to be held at district level from July 15 to Aug 30

 Police, civil officials strictly directed to resolve grievances of migrant Punjabis by June 30

 New NRI policy by Sep 30

 CM to soon launch new and more convenient NRI departments website
Abandoned vehicles, which are left unattended at various public places, including market parking lots, residential areas, and vacant government lands in Chandigarh has now become a matter of concern for the administration as well as the residents. Keeping in view public safety and security, UT Home Secretary Nitin Yadav on Thursday directed the Chandigarh Police to launch a special campaign to address the issue of unclaimed and abandoned vehicles in the city. In addition to this, people of the city have also been urged to report any unclaimed or abandoned vehicles to the Police Control Room at No 112 or contact the Station House Officer (SHO) of the respective Police Station.



Yadav in a statement said that local law enforcement agencies will make diligent efforts to identify the registered owners of the abandoned vehicles found in public places. The registered owners will be notified to remove their vehicles from these locations. If the registered owner cannot be traced or remains unresponsive, the vehicles will be taken into police custody through a seizure memo under Section 102 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC). Subsequently, appropriate measures will be taken for the disposal of these vehicles, either through auction or scrapping, as deemed applicable, he added.



Chandigarh Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) has also directed the police officers to execute this special campaign effectively in the city. The police officers concerned have also been asked to submit regular progress reports on such actions on a monthly basis.
Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has said that Mukhyamantri Ladli Bahna Yojana will be a scheme to bring historical change in the lives of sisters. Team Madhya Pradesh has worked diligently for better implementation of the scheme. The efforts made in the districts to provide benefits of the scheme to about 1.25 crore sisters are commendable.

Social organisations, administrative officers and public representatives are giving a new dimension to the scheme. Eligible sisters should get the maximum benefit of the scheme, so that the work of transfer of funds for the scheme is done without any hindrance from the scheduled date of June 10 and the sisters start receiving funds, for this many innovations were also done in the districts. In the review meeting held on Wednesday late night, the public representatives and collectors apprised about the innovations made for the implementation of the scheme.

Collector Datia told that groups of Ladli Bahnas have also been formed on WhatsApp. After the gram sabha on June 8, the sisters should pledge to play a leadership role in the social sector, such a framework was made. The changes in the lives of the sisters from the scheme were mentioned on various forums. Similarly, on June 9, there will be Sitolia and local games in Datia district. They have been named as Anand Utsav. In this, groups of women will cook and bring dishes from homes and eat together. This will develop friendly relations between the beneficiary sisters. Bands and DJs will create a festive atmosphere in urban areas.

Public representatives of Ujjain district told that street plays were performed on the occasion of giving letters of acceptance to sisters in large panchayats. The scheme is being publicised by displaying the picture/flex of Ladli Bahna at the residence of the beneficiaries.

Collector and public representatives of Tikamgarh district informed that arrangements have been made for safas for the programme on June 10, which will be worn by the guests and dignitaries in the programme. Along with this, there will also be a programme of folk songs. Yellow rice is given to invite the sisters. Public representatives of Burhanpur district told that inspiring and encouraging slogans have been used in the district. The information about Ladli Bahna Yojana has reached the masses.

Mandsaur Collector informed about the innovations done in the district. MLA Yashpal Singh Sisodia said that initiatives have been taken for Kalash Yatra and Deepotsav in wards and villages. A large number of wall writing work has been done in the district.

MLA Umakant Sharma also informed about innovation in Vidisha district. He said that during the distribution of the approval letters of the scheme to the women, a safa was tied as a mark of respect. Feet were washed with turmeric and blessings were taken. In the village too, women were given safas to wear. Batashas were distributed. On coming 10th June also the feet of the sisters will be washed. There will be lightings and fireworks as well.

In the capital Bhopal too, the Mukhyamantri Ladli Bahna Yojana has been given a festive look. Among the innovations, preparations have been made to decorate various intersections on June 10.
Area General Manager and Regional Office, Ranchi, Union Bank of India organized a Customer Outreach Camp at BNR Chanakya on Thursday. Existing customers and prospective Government / PSU / Corporates registered their participation in the event. Arun Kumar, General Manager, Central Office of Union Bank of India attended the program as a special guest. Union Bank of India, Ranchi Deputy Zonal Heads (Alok Kumar and Vijay Kumar Roy) and Area Heads, Sonalika, Deputy Area Heads (Arun Kumar Mandal, Vibhash Kumar Mishra), Zonal Audit Head S.K. Das, Assistant General Managers (Sunita Kumari Yadav, Deepmala Lakda), RLP Heads, MLP Heads, Business Relationship Managers (BRMs), Branch Heads attended the programme.

Union Bank of India organized the program with the Government Departments / PSU / Corporate Heads with the objective of making the customers aware about the benefits available under various loan products. It was also discussed on this occasion to establish strong business relationship with them, understand their needs and tailor our product according to their needs. In the program, through Power point presentation by Rakesh Kumar, Head of MLP, discussing in detail about the special facilities and benefits being provided by the bank to the customers under various loan products, the customers were informed and motivated to take advantage of it.

Also, the special guest of the program, Arun Kumar, General Manager, while addressing the customers, shared its importance while discussing the features of various loan products. Their needs and expectations were also discussed through open forum discussion for question and answer with the customers present in the program. Loan sanction letters were also distributed to some of the customers present in the program by the present executives of the bank. Some of the customers who have benefitted from Union Bank's MSME facilities also shared their success stories.

At the end of the program Alok Kumar, Deputy Zonal Head expressed his gratitude to the present customers and assured that Union Bank of India will live up to the expectations of the customers and provide continuous cooperation in the development of Ranchi city.
Embarrassed by the "arbitrary" and "irrational" cuts in NCERT textbooks, Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav, who were chief advisors for the original Political Science books for classes 9 to 12, have written to NCERT saying the rationalisation exercise has "mutilated" the books and rendered them "academically dysfunctional".

The duo have also asked the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to drop their names as chief advisors from all Political Science textbooks.

"While the modifications have been justified in the name of rationalisation, we fail to see any pedagogic rationale at work here. We find that the text has been mutilated beyond recognition. There are innumerable and irrational cuts and large deletions without any attempts to fill the gaps created.

"We were never consulted or even informed of these changes. If NCERT did consult other experts for deciding on these cuts and deletions, we explicitly state that we fully disagree with them in this regard," according to the letter sent to NCERT Director Dinesh Saklani.

Palshikar, an academician and political scientist, and Yadav, political scientist and Swaraj India leader, were chief advisors for the Political Science books for classes 9 to 12 originally published in 2006-07 based on the 2005 version of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF).

Their names are mentioned in a "letter to students" and the list of textbook development team at the beginning of each book.

"We believe that any text has an internal logic and such arbitrary cuts and deletions violate the spirit of the text. The frequent and serial deletions do not seem to have any logic accept to please the powers that be.

"Textbooks cannot and should not be shaped in this blatantly partisan manner and should not quell the spirit of critique and questioning among students of social sciences. These textbooks as they stand now do not serve the purpose of training students of political science both the principles of politics and the broad patterns of political dynamics that have occurred over time," the letter said.

Dropping several topics and portions from the NCERT textbooks last month triggered a controversy, with the Opposition blaming the Centre for "whitewashing with vengeance".

At the heart of the controversy was the fact that while the changes made as part of the rationalisation exercise were notified, some of these controversial deletions were not mentioned. This led to allegations about a bid to delete these portions surreptitiously.

The NCERT had described the omissions as a possible oversight but refused to undo the deletions, saying they were based on the recommendations of experts. It also said the textbooks are anyway headed for revision in 2024 when the National Curriculum Framework kicks in. However, the NCERT later changed its stand and said "minor changes need not be notified".

Among the references dropped from the Class 12 History textbook were certain portions on Mahatma Gandhi and how his pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity "provoked Hindu extremists", and on a ban on the RSS.

"Gandhiji's death had magical effect on communal situation in the country", "Gandhi's pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity provoked Hindu extremists", and "organisations like RSS were banned for some time" are among the portions deleted.

The portions referring to the Gujarat riots were also dropped from the Class 11 Sociology textbook, months after the NCERT removed the reference to the 2022 communal violence in two class 12 textbooks.

In their letter, Palshikar and Yadav said, "As academics organically associated with the preparation of these textbooks, we are embarrassed that our names should be mentioned as chief advisors to these mutilated and academically dysfunctional textbooks. We wish to explicitly record our full disagreement with the entire process of reshaping the text in name of rationalisation."

"Both of us would like to disassociate ourselves from these textbooks and request the NCERT to drop our names....We request you to give effect to this request immediately and ensure that our names are not used in the soft copies of the textbooks available at the NCERT websites and also in the subsequent print editions," the letter read.
AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi has attacked the BJP on the issue of violence in Kolhapur, love jihad and others, alleging that the party sought to spread hatred and defame Muslims.

Addressing a public meeting here late on Thursday night, he referred to the violence in Kolhapur and said "RSS people" hit the streets in the city after "someone carried a photo of Tipu Sultan".

Taking a swipe, he said BJP and the Centre should release a list banning names like Tipu, Aurangzeb and Babur, like the ban on 44 organisations under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

Quoting a Maharashtra minister as having said that 21 people have been nabbed, he said: "If keeping a photo is a crime, say what section of IPC (it was)?"

Further attacking the BJP, he said the party should state that it will not include the names of Godse in the "prohibited list of names".

"Now, the matter has come to names also," he said.

Talking about 'love jihad', he said a number of such incidents and other details should be released if 'love jihad' is happening in Maharashtra.

"If love jihad is happening in Maharashtra, give an estimate, a number, that this (incident) happened in Ahmednagar, this is what happened in Kolhapur, Sangli, western Maharashtra, Marathwada. Say that. (But) nothing. Love jihad is happening. Where is it happening," he said.

"BJP government organised 50 meetings in Maharashtra only to spread hatred, to defame Muslims, Islam," he said.

Alleging a conspiracy to organise riots in Maharashtra before the parliament elections, he praised his party MP from Aurangabad (Sambhajinagar) Imtiaz Jaleel for reportedly "protecting" a temple by standing in front of it for three hours when there was an alleged attempt to trigger trouble in the town.

He said the Centre and BJP government in Maharashtra to stop such alleged incidents.

"It is another matter that you have to win parliament in Maharashtra. But, it will not be this way," he said.

Referring to Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis reportedly saying "Aurangzeb ki aulad" (children of Aurangzeb), Owaisi asked as to who is "Godse ki aulad".

The AIMIM president also attacked the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh for allegedly suspending a bus driver for halting a bus for "three minutes" to enable a Muslim man to perform prayer.

"If performing prayer is a crime, then there should not be religious symbols of anyone in total government offices," he said.

The BJP talks about 'sab ka saath, sab ka vikas, sab ka vishwas', but a bus driver is suspended for halting bus for two minutes, he said.
The BJP's claim that the 'Sengol' was a symbol of transfer of power from the British to former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru has been exposed, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said on Friday citing an interview quoting a Tamil Nadu-based religious body's chief.

Citing the interview in a daily that quoted the head Swamigal of the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam, he said neither Lord Mountbatten nor C Rajagopalachari were present at the handing over of the 'Sengol' to Nehru.

The ceremonial sceptre was presented to Nehru at 10 pm on August 14, 1947, at his residence.

Ahead of the inauguration of the new Parliament building and the installation of the 'Sengol' in Lok Sabha on May 28, the BJP had alleged that the Congress displayed disregard for Hindu traditions by calling the sacred 'Sengol' a "golden stick gifted" to India's first prime minister Nehru and tucking it away in a museum.

The vesting of the "sacred 'Sengol'" with Nehru, on the eve of India's Independence, was the exact moment of transfer of power from the British to India, BJP leader Amit Malviya had said on May 26.

Even then, Ramesh had said there is no documented evidence of Mountbatten, Rajagopalachari, and Nehru describing the 'Sengol' as a symbol of transfer of power by the British to India. Rajagopalachari was the first Indian-born Governor-General who succeeded Mountbatten.

In a tweet on Friday, the Congress leader said, "So the BJP's 'FakeFactory' stands exposed today by none other than the revered head Swamigal of the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam himself in The Hindu. No Mountbatten, no Rajaji, no part in official transfer of power on August 14, 1947. But yes, the majestic 'Sengol' was indeed presented to Nehru as I have been saying all along."

"Here are some more facts to nail the lies of today's Raja and his drumbeaters," he said citing an advertisement dated August 29, 1947, on the presentation of the ceremonial sceptre to Nehru at 10 pm on August 14, 1947, at his residence. "It was clearly an initiative of the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam itself," he said.

In the photo, he said, the famed Nagaswaram virtuoso TN Rajaratnam Pillai is marked.

"Here is what is said on him in an article on a website of the Union Ministry of Culture: When India attained independence Rajaratnam was sent to Delhi by the Pandarasannadhi of the Tiruvaduturai Matam to present on his behalf a mace of solid gold senkol (symbol of righteous administration). Rajaratnam was thrilled by this proud privilege. It was Dr P Subbaroyan who introduced him to prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to whom Rajaratnam played the Nagaswaram before handing over the mace," Ramesh tweeted.

"There is no mention of Mountbatten or even Rajaji. Rajaratnam Pillai is himself the subject of a fascinating new biography by an eminent Japanese ethnomusicologist in which the August 14, 1947, episode is mentioned," the Congress leader said on Twitter.

The Congress general secretary has been claiming that the Sengol was never presented before Mountbatten or Rajagopalachari.
China, Pakistan and Iran held their first meeting on counter-terrorism and security here during which they discussed joint efforts to deal with the cross-border movement of terrorists apparently emanating from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.The meeting between the senior security officials of the three countries was held on Wednesday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told media here on Thursday.

The first meeting of the three countries which are neighbours of Afghanistan was held in the backdrop of persistent complaints by Pakistan against the periodic terrorist attacks by the militants of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a Pakistani militant group which shares close ties with Taliban as well as Baloch militants from Iran.

China has also been pressing the Taliban interim administration to crack down on the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) which is active in its Uygur Muslim majority Xinjiang province, neighbouring Afghanistan.

Militants of the ETIM, a separatist militant outfit in Xinjiang allegedly have links with radical outfits like Al Qaeda and Islamic State reportedly regrouped in Afghanistan after the Taliban came to power in 2021.

Wang said during the trilateral meeting Three sides held an in-depth exchange of views on the regional counter-terrorism situation and joint efforts to tackle the cross-border movement of terrorists, among other issues, and decided to institutionalise the trilateral consultation on counter-terrorism and security.

The meeting was a successful step taken by the three countries to act on the Global Security Initiative (GSI) initiated by Chinese President Xi Jinping and enhance regional security and stability, he said.

Terrorism is a common enemy of humanity. China firmly opposes and strongly condemns terrorism in all its manifestations, he said.

We stand ready to work in close collaboration with Pakistan, Iran and other regional countries to resolutely crack down on terrorist forces that endanger the interests of the three countries and regional security, he said.

Commenting on the trilateral meeting, Pakistans Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said the Pakistani delegation held detailed discussions on the regional security situation, particularly the threat of terrorism faced by the region.

Based on the outcome of these consultations, the three sides have decided to institutionalise the Trilateral Consultations on counter-terrorism and security, she said in Islamabad on Thursday.

Pakistan which had celebrated the Talibans takeover of Afghanistan after the sudden pull out of the US troops faced a piquant situation as the Afghan militant group heading the interim administration declined Islamabad repeated pleas to crackdown on TTP whose terrorist attacks were adding to Pakistans economic woes. China and Pakistan have been vocal in highlighting their security concerns over the militant groups from Afghanistan.
Citigroup (NYSE:C  Get Rating) had its price target boosted by Bank of America from $58.00 to $60.00 in a research report sent to investors on Monday morning, The Fly reports.

Several other equities analysts also recently commented on C. Royal Bank of Canada decreased their price target on shares of Citigroup from $55.00 to $51.00 and set an outperform rating on the stock in a research note on Friday, March 24th. BMO Capital Markets raised their price target on shares of Citigroup from $56.00 to $68.00 and gave the stock an outperform rating in a report on Monday, April 17th. Piper Sandler raised their price objective on shares of Citigroup from $47.00 to $53.00 and gave the stock a neutral rating in a research report on Monday, April 17th. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods reduced their price objective on shares of Citigroup from $50.00 to $48.00 in a research report on Thursday, May 25th. Finally, TheStreet raised shares of Citigroup from a c+ rating to a b- rating in a research report on Monday, March 6th. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, ten have assigned a hold rating and seven have given a buy rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat.com, Citigroup currently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $54.79.

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Citigroup Price Performance

Shares of Citigroup stock opened at $48.09 on Monday. Citigroup has a fifty-two week low of $40.01 and a fifty-two week high of $54.56. The company has a market cap of $93.62 billion, a PE ratio of 6.71, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.78 and a beta of 1.57. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.48, a current ratio of 0.95 and a quick ratio of 0.95. The firm has a fifty day moving average price of $46.64 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $47.58.

Citigroup Dividend Announcement

Citigroup ( NYSE:C Get Rating ) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Friday, April 14th. The company reported $2.19 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $1.66 by $0.53. The firm had revenue of $21.40 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $20.07 billion. Citigroup had a net margin of 12.96% and a return on equity of 7.84%. The companys quarterly revenue was up 11.5% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same quarter last year, the company posted $2.02 EPS. Analysts expect that Citigroup will post 5.99 EPS for the current year.

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, May 26th. Shareholders of record on Monday, May 1st were given a dividend of $0.51 per share. The ex-dividend date was Friday, April 28th. This represents a $2.04 annualized dividend and a yield of 4.24%. Citigroups payout ratio is presently 28.45%.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In related news, insider Zdenek Turek sold 12,000 shares of Citigroup stock in a transaction on Tuesday, April 18th. The shares were sold at an average price of $49.87, for a total value of $598,440.00. Following the sale, the insider now owns 155,979 shares in the company, valued at $7,778,672.73. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is accessible through this hyperlink. Insiders own 0.09% of the companys stock.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in C. Panagora Asset Management Inc. boosted its holdings in Citigroup by 24.5% in the first quarter. Panagora Asset Management Inc. now owns 29,752 shares of the companys stock worth $1,589,000 after acquiring an additional 5,853 shares in the last quarter. Zions Bancorporation N.A. boosted its holdings in Citigroup by 50.5% in the first quarter. Zions Bancorporation N.A. now owns 6,256 shares of the companys stock worth $334,000 after acquiring an additional 2,100 shares in the last quarter. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. boosted its holdings in Citigroup by 20.8% in the first quarter. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. now owns 5,274 shares of the companys stock worth $282,000 after acquiring an additional 907 shares in the last quarter. Ergoteles LLC acquired a new stake in Citigroup in the first quarter worth about $761,000. Finally, Halbert Hargrove Global Advisors LLC boosted its holdings in Citigroup by 7.0% in the first quarter. Halbert Hargrove Global Advisors LLC now owns 4,077 shares of the companys stock worth $218,000 after acquiring an additional 268 shares in the last quarter. 70.90% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

About Citigroup

(Get Rating)

Citigroup Inc, a diversified financial services holding company, provides various financial products and services to consumers, corporations, governments, and institutions in North America, Latin America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. It operates through three segments: Institutional Clients Group (ICG), Personal Banking and Wealth Management (PBWM), and Legacy Franchises.

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Bank of Queensland Limited (OTCMKTS:BKQNY  Get Rating) traded down 2% during mid-day trading on Thursday . The stock traded as low as $7.18 and last traded at $7.27. 1,072 shares changed hands during trading, a decline of 2% from the average session volume of 1,098 shares. The stock had previously closed at $7.42.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

Separately, JPMorgan Chase & Co. upgraded shares of Bank of Queensland from an underweight rating to a neutral rating in a research report on Thursday, May 18th.

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Bank of Queensland Trading Down 2.0 %

The companys 50-day moving average is $8.12 and its 200-day moving average is $9.07.

Bank of Queensland Cuts Dividend

About Bank of Queensland

The business also recently disclosed a dividend, which will be paid on Friday, June 16th. Investors of record on Wednesday, May 10th will be paid a $0.2369 dividend. This represents a yield of 6.2%. The ex-dividend date is Tuesday, May 9th. Bank of Queenslands payout ratio is 75.18%.

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Bank of Queensland Ltd. engages in the provision of financial services to the community. It operates through the following segments: Retail Banking, BOQ Business, and Other. The Retail Banking segment offers retail banking solutions to customers managed through its owner managed and corporate branch network, ME Bank and Virgin Money distribution channels, and third-party intermediaries.

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Bunzl plc (LON:BNZL  Get Rating) crossed above its 200-day moving average during trading on Tuesday . The stock has a 200-day moving average of GBX 3,027.47 ($37.64) and traded as high as GBX 3,137.65 ($39.01). Bunzl shares last traded at GBX 3,122 ($38.81), with a volume of 419,650 shares changing hands.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

A number of research analysts have recently issued reports on BNZL shares. Jefferies Financial Group reiterated a hold rating and set a GBX 2,950 ($36.67) price objective on shares of Bunzl in a research note on Monday, May 22nd. Barclays reissued an underweight rating and issued a GBX 2,750 ($34.19) price objective on shares of Bunzl in a research report on Thursday, April 27th. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft restated a hold rating and set a GBX 3,060 ($38.04) target price on shares of Bunzl in a research note on Tuesday, February 28th. Shore Capital reiterated a buy rating on shares of Bunzl in a research note on Tuesday, May 30th. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. upgraded Bunzl to an overweight rating and boosted their price target for the stock from GBX 3,250 ($40.40) to GBX 3,375 ($41.96) in a research note on Monday, March 13th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, five have assigned a hold rating and two have issued a buy rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat.com, Bunzl has an average rating of Hold and an average price target of GBX 2,955 ($36.74).

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Bunzl Stock Performance

The company has a current ratio of 1.40, a quick ratio of 0.73 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 118.76. The firms fifty day moving average is GBX 3,138.54 and its 200 day moving average is GBX 3,028.76. The company has a market cap of 10.53 billion, a PE ratio of 2,211.35, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 5.40 and a beta of 0.47.

Insider Activity

About Bunzl

In other Bunzl news, insider Frank van Zanten sold 21,307 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, April 11th. The stock was sold at an average price of GBX 3,066 ($38.12), for a total transaction of 653,272.62 ($812,124.09). Company insiders own 0.87% of the companys stock.

(Get Rating)

Bunzl plc operates as a distribution and services company in the North America, Continental Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and internationally. The company offers food packaging, films, labels, cleaning and hygiene supplies, and personal protection equipment to grocery stores, supermarkets, and convenience stores.

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Ashtead Group (LON:AHT  Get Rating)s stock had its hold rating restated by stock analysts at Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft in a research report issued to clients and investors on Wednesday, MarketBeat Ratings reports. They currently have a GBX 4,460 ($55.45) target price on the stock. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschafts price objective would suggest a potential downside of 16.32% from the stocks current price.

A number of other brokerages also recently weighed in on AHT. Barclays restated an overweight rating and set a GBX 6,300 ($78.32) target price on shares of Ashtead Group in a report on Monday, April 24th. Numis Securities reiterated a buy rating and issued a GBX 7,000 ($87.02) price objective on shares of Ashtead Group in a report on Thursday, February 9th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. upped their price objective on shares of Ashtead Group from GBX 5,500 ($68.37) to GBX 6,000 ($74.59) and gave the stock an overweight rating in a research report on Monday, February 13th. Peel Hunt reiterated a buy rating and issued a GBX 5,200 ($64.64) price objective on shares of Ashtead Group in a report on Tuesday, March 7th. Finally, Jefferies Financial Group boosted their target price on shares of Ashtead Group from GBX 6,000 ($74.59) to GBX 7,000 ($87.02) and gave the company a buy rating in a report on Wednesday, March 8th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating and six have given a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the company presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of GBX 5,826.43 ($72.43).

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Ashtead Group Stock Performance

Shares of AHT stock opened at GBX 5,330 ($66.26) on Wednesday. The companys fifty day simple moving average is GBX 4,766.58 and its 200-day simple moving average is GBX 5,024.88. The company has a quick ratio of 1.13, a current ratio of 1.22 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 154.56. The firm has a market cap of 23.37 billion, a PE ratio of 1,863.64, a P/E/G ratio of 1.61 and a beta of 1.45. Ashtead Group has a 12 month low of GBX 3,269 ($40.64) and a 12 month high of GBX 6,012 ($74.74).

About Ashtead Group

Ashtead Group plc, together with its subsidiaries, engages in the construction, industrial, and general equipment rental business in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. It provides pumps, power generation, heating, cooling, scaffolding, traffic management, temporary flooring, trench shoring, and lifting services.

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Dutch Bros Inc. (NYSE:BROS  Get Rating) shares rose 6.9% during trading on Thursday . The stock traded as high as $30.11 and last traded at $30.07. Approximately 1,118,095 shares changed hands during trading, an increase of 4% from the average daily volume of 1,079,556 shares. The stock had previously closed at $28.13.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

A number of analysts have weighed in on BROS shares. Guggenheim started coverage on shares of Dutch Bros in a research note on Thursday, February 16th. They set a neutral rating and a $37.00 target price on the stock. TD Cowen cut shares of Dutch Bros from an outperform rating to a market perform rating and reduced their price objective for the stock from $39.00 to $33.00 in a research note on Wednesday, May 10th. Wedbush raised shares of Dutch Bros from a neutral rating to an outperform rating and set a $37.00 price objective on the stock in a research note on Wednesday, April 5th. Stifel Nicolaus reduced their price objective on shares of Dutch Bros from $37.00 to $36.00 and set a hold rating on the stock in a research note on Tuesday, April 4th. Finally, Cowen restated an outperform rating and issued a $43.00 target price on shares of Dutch Bros in a report on Thursday, February 23rd. Six research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and four have given a buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, Dutch Bros currently has a consensus rating of Hold and an average target price of $37.73.

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Dutch Bros Stock Up 7.5 %

The firms fifty day moving average price is $30.09 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $32.30. The stock has a market cap of $1.38 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of -426.14 and a beta of 2.64. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.49, a current ratio of 0.32 and a quick ratio of 0.15.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Dutch Bros

Dutch Bros Company Profile

A number of institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the business. Ameriprise Financial Inc. grew its position in Dutch Bros by 63.1% in the 1st quarter. Ameriprise Financial Inc. now owns 25,552 shares of the companys stock worth $808,000 after purchasing an additional 9,887 shares in the last quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. grew its position in Dutch Bros by 13.6% in the 1st quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. now owns 15,020 shares of the companys stock worth $475,000 after purchasing an additional 1,803 shares in the last quarter. Rockefeller Capital Management L.P. grew its position in Dutch Bros by 363.7% in the 1st quarter. Rockefeller Capital Management L.P. now owns 7,234 shares of the companys stock worth $228,000 after purchasing an additional 5,674 shares in the last quarter. IMA Wealth Inc. bought a new stake in Dutch Bros in the 1st quarter worth about $1,612,000. Finally, State Street Corp grew its position in Dutch Bros by 19.8% in the 1st quarter. State Street Corp now owns 148,808 shares of the companys stock worth $4,707,000 after purchasing an additional 24,546 shares in the last quarter.

(Get Rating)

Dutch Bros Inc operates and franchises drive-thru shops. It offers Dutch Bros hot and cold espresso-based beverages, and cold brew coffee products, as well as Blue Rebel energy drinks, tea, lemonade, smoothies, and other beverages through company-operated shops and online channels. As of May 11, 2022, it operated 572 drive-thru coffee locations across 12 states in the United States.

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Kincora Copper Limited (CVE:KCC  Get Rating) shares traded down 16.7% on Tuesday . The stock traded as low as C$0.05 and last traded at C$0.05. 237,000 shares changed hands during mid-day trading, an increase of 828% from the average session volume of 25,536 shares. The stock had previously closed at C$0.06.

Kincora Copper Stock Down 16.7 %

The businesss fifty day moving average is C$0.07 and its two-hundred day moving average is C$0.07. The firm has a market cap of C$8.33 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -5.00 and a beta of 1.55.

About Kincora Copper

(Get Rating)

Kincora Copper Limited acquires, explores for, and develops mineral properties in Mongolia and Australia. It primarily explores for copper and gold deposits. The company holds interests in the Trundle, Fairholme, Northern Junee-Narromine Belt, Jemalong, Cundumbul, and Condobolin projects located in the New South Wales, Australia.

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Malaga Financial Co. (OTCMKTS:MLGF  Get Rating) fell 0.2% during mid-day trading on Tuesday . The company traded as low as $22.95 and last traded at $22.95. 805 shares were traded during trading, a decline of 82% from the average session volume of 4,431 shares. The stock had previously closed at $23.00.

Malaga Financial Stock Performance

The firm has a market cap of $196.22 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of 8.73 and a beta of 0.52. The stocks fifty day moving average price is $22.11 and its 200-day moving average price is $23.03.

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Malaga Financial (OTCMKTS:MLGF  Get Rating) last posted its earnings results on Wednesday, April 19th. The company reported $0.69 EPS for the quarter.

About Malaga Financial

Malaga Financial Corporation operates as the holding company for Malaga Bank that provides various community banking products and services to personal and business customers. It offers checking, savings, NOW, and money market accounts, certificates of deposits, and demand deposits. The company also provides commercial real estate, land, business banking, consumer, and personal loans, as well as single and multi-family residential mortgage loans.

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Olo Inc. (NYSE:OLO  Get Rating) CRO Diego Panama sold 2,785 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, June 6th. The stock was sold at an average price of $7.29, for a total value of $20,302.65. Following the transaction, the executive now directly owns 675,001 shares in the company, valued at approximately $4,920,757.29. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available at this link.

OLO Trading Down 3.1 %

NYSE OLO traded down $0.23 on Thursday, hitting $7.08. 615,019 shares of the stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 963,773. The stock has a 50-day moving average of $7.32 and a 200 day moving average of $7.35. Olo Inc. has a twelve month low of $5.74 and a twelve month high of $14.08. The company has a market capitalization of $1.15 billion, a P/E ratio of -24.41 and a beta of 1.20.

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Institutional Trading of OLO

A number of institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the stock. Lazard Asset Management LLC bought a new position in OLO in the 4th quarter worth approximately $29,000. State of Wyoming grew its holdings in OLO by 41.7% in the 4th quarter. State of Wyoming now owns 5,317 shares of the companys stock worth $33,000 after buying an additional 1,566 shares in the last quarter. Dark Forest Capital Management LP grew its holdings in OLO by 485.3% in the 1st quarter. Dark Forest Capital Management LP now owns 5,508 shares of the companys stock worth $45,000 after buying an additional 4,567 shares in the last quarter. Clear Street Markets LLC bought a new position in OLO in the 4th quarter worth approximately $40,000. Finally, Point72 Hong Kong Ltd bought a new position in OLO in the 3rd quarter worth approximately $64,000. 80.93% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

OLO Company Profile

Several brokerages have recently weighed in on OLO. Stifel Nicolaus cut their target price on OLO from $10.00 to $9.00 in a research report on Wednesday, May 10th. StockNews.com started coverage on OLO in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating on the stock. Royal Bank of Canada lifted their price target on OLO from $9.00 to $10.00 and gave the company an outperform rating in a research note on Thursday, February 23rd. Finally, Piper Sandler restated a neutral rating and issued a $9.00 price target on shares of OLO in a research note on Tuesday, March 7th. Four research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and two have given a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company currently has a consensus rating of Hold and an average target price of $11.58.

(Get Rating)

Olo Inc provides software-as-a-service platform for multi-location restaurants in the United States. The company's platform enables on-demand commerce operations, which cover digital ordering and delivery through online and mobile ordering modules. Its modules include Order Management, an on-demand digital commerce and channel management solutions that enables consumers to order directly from and pay restaurants via mobile, web, kiosk, voice, and other digital channels; and Delivery Enablement, a fulfillment network, as well as a network aggregator and channel management solution, which enables restaurants to offer, manage, and expand direct delivery, as well as allows restaurants to control and syndicate menu, pricing, location data, and availability, while directly integrating and optimizing orders from third-parties into the restaurants' point-of-sale and systems.

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Sendas Distribuidora S.A. (NYSE:ASAI  Get Rating) was up 10.4% on Tuesday . The stock traded as high as $12.58 and last traded at $12.50. Approximately 1,437,794 shares were traded during trading, an increase of 173% from the average daily volume of 527,586 shares. The stock had previously closed at $11.32.

Sendas Distribuidora Price Performance

The company has a market capitalization of $3.45 billion, a PE ratio of 16.56, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.62 and a beta of 0.77. The firms 50 day simple moving average is $12.48 and its 200 day simple moving average is $16.09. The company has a quick ratio of 0.40, a current ratio of 0.81 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 4.89.

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Sendas Distribuidora Increases Dividend

The business also recently announced a  dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 3rd. Stockholders of record on Monday, May 1st will be paid a dividend of $0.0506 per share. This is a positive change from Sendas Distribuidoras previous  dividend of $0.04. This represents a dividend yield of 1.1%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Friday, April 28th. Sendas Distribuidoras payout ratio is currently 10.26%.

Institutional Trading of Sendas Distribuidora

About Sendas Distribuidora

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently modified their holdings of ASAI. Raymond James & Associates purchased a new position in shares of Sendas Distribuidora during the first quarter valued at $584,000. American Century Companies Inc. increased its stake in shares of Sendas Distribuidora by 15.6% during the first quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 54,597 shares of the companys stock valued at $938,000 after buying an additional 7,368 shares during the period. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP increased its stake in shares of Sendas Distribuidora by 9.0% during the first quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP now owns 108,752 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,868,000 after buying an additional 9,002 shares during the period. Ruane Cunniff & Goldfarb L.P. boosted its stake in shares of Sendas Distribuidora by 1.6% during the first quarter. Ruane Cunniff & Goldfarb L.P. now owns 98,082 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,685,000 after purchasing an additional 1,557 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Renaissance Group LLC bought a new position in shares of Sendas Distribuidora during the first quarter valued at approximately $1,583,000. Institutional investors own 4.45% of the companys stock.

(Get Rating)

Sendas Distribuidora SA engages in the retail and wholesale sale of food products, bazaar items, and other products in Brazil. The company serves restaurants, pizzerias, snack bars, schools, small businesses, religious institutions, hospitals, hotels, grocery stores, neighborhood supermarkets, and individuals.

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Beverly Hills Private Wealth LLC bought a new position in The Travelers Companies, Inc. (NYSE:TRV  Get Rating) in the 4th quarter, according to its most recent disclosure with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm bought 2,128 shares of the insurance providers stock, valued at approximately $399,000.

Several other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also recently bought and sold shares of TRV. Fairfield Bush & CO. bought a new position in Travelers Companies in the first quarter worth $160,000. Cibc World Market Inc. lifted its position in Travelers Companies by 28.8% in the first quarter. Cibc World Market Inc. now owns 5,934 shares of the insurance providers stock worth $1,084,000 after purchasing an additional 1,327 shares during the period. Vontobel Holding Ltd. raised its stake in Travelers Companies by 1.0% during the first quarter. Vontobel Holding Ltd. now owns 11,905 shares of the insurance providers stock worth $2,210,000 after acquiring an additional 115 shares in the last quarter. Blair William & Co. IL raised its stake in Travelers Companies by 40.6% during the first quarter. Blair William & Co. IL now owns 51,551 shares of the insurance providers stock worth $9,420,000 after acquiring an additional 14,873 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Sei Investments Co. raised its stake in Travelers Companies by 5.0% during the first quarter. Sei Investments Co. now owns 27,212 shares of the insurance providers stock worth $4,952,000 after acquiring an additional 1,286 shares in the last quarter. 81.59% of the stock is owned by institutional investors.

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Analysts Set New Price Targets

Several research analysts have issued reports on TRV shares. Citigroup increased their price objective on Travelers Companies from $182.00 to $186.00 and gave the stock a neutral rating in a research note on Friday, April 21st. Barclays increased their price objective on Travelers Companies from $179.00 to $185.00 in a research note on Thursday, April 20th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased their price objective on Travelers Companies from $180.00 to $185.00 and gave the stock an overweight rating in a research note on Friday, March 31st. Piper Sandler raised their target price on Travelers Companies from $196.00 to $204.00 and gave the company a neutral rating in a research note on Tuesday, April 4th. Finally, Wells Fargo & Company raised their target price on Travelers Companies from $181.00 to $182.00 and gave the company an equal weight rating in a research note on Wednesday, April 5th. Nine investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, six have assigned a buy rating and one has given a strong buy rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat, the stock presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $193.29.

Insider Activity

Travelers Companies Trading Up 0.4 %

In related news, EVP Andy F. Bessette sold 11,572 shares of Travelers Companies stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, April 25th. The stock was sold at an average price of $178.14, for a total value of $2,061,436.08. Following the sale, the executive vice president now owns 17,361 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $3,092,688.54. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through this link . In other Travelers Companies news, EVP Michael Frederick Klein sold 10,246 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, May 10th. The stock was sold at an average price of $182.85, for a total transaction of $1,873,481.10. Following the transaction, the executive vice president now owns 14,080 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $2,574,528. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through the SEC website . Also, EVP Andy F. Bessette sold 11,572 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, April 25th. The stock was sold at an average price of $178.14, for a total value of $2,061,436.08. Following the transaction, the executive vice president now directly owns 17,361 shares in the company, valued at approximately $3,092,688.54. The disclosure for this sale can be found here . Insiders have sold 59,134 shares of company stock worth $10,617,466 in the last 90 days. Corporate insiders own 1.29% of the companys stock.

TRV traded up $0.73 during midday trading on Friday, reaching $175.64. 128,216 shares of the company were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 1,392,240. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.32, a quick ratio of 0.33 and a current ratio of 0.33. The Travelers Companies, Inc. has a one year low of $149.65 and a one year high of $194.51. The stock has a market capitalization of $40.57 billion, a P/E ratio of 14.91, a PEG ratio of 1.32 and a beta of 0.61. The stocks 50-day simple moving average is $176.80 and its 200 day simple moving average is $181.49.

Travelers Companies (NYSE:TRV  Get Rating) last released its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, April 19th. The insurance provider reported $4.11 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $3.64 by $0.47. Travelers Companies had a return on equity of 13.41% and a net margin of 7.41%. The business had revenue of $9.70 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $8.98 billion. During the same quarter in the previous year, the business posted $4.22 EPS. Travelers Companiess revenue for the quarter was up 10.2% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, analysts forecast that The Travelers Companies, Inc. will post 14.31 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Travelers Companies Increases Dividend

The firm also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, June 30th. Stockholders of record on Friday, June 9th will be issued a dividend of $1.00 per share. This represents a $4.00 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 2.28%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, June 8th. This is a boost from Travelers Companiess previous quarterly dividend of $0.93. Travelers Companiess payout ratio is 31.71%.

Travelers Companies declared that its board has authorized a stock buyback program on Wednesday, April 19th that authorizes the company to buyback $5.00 billion in outstanding shares. This buyback authorization authorizes the insurance provider to reacquire up to 12.2% of its shares through open market purchases. Shares buyback programs are generally a sign that the companys leadership believes its shares are undervalued.

Travelers Companies Profile

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The Travelers Cos., Inc is a holding company, which engages in the provision of commercial and personal property and casualty insurance products and services. It operates through the following business segments: Business Insurance, Bond and Specialty Insurance, and Personal Insurance. The Business Insurance segment provides an array of property and casualty insurance, and insurance related services to its customers primarily in the U.S., as well as in Canada, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and throughout other parts of the world as a corporate member of Lloyds.

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AFT Pharmaceuticals Limited (ASX:AFP  Get Rating) announced a final dividend on Wednesday, June 7th, MarketIndexAU reports. Stockholders of record on Monday, July 3rd will be given a dividend of 0.007 per share on Monday, July 3rd. This represents a dividend yield of 0.19%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, June 15th.

AFT Pharmaceuticals Stock Performance

The company has a quick ratio of 0.61, a current ratio of 2.38 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 51.93.

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AFT Pharmaceuticals Company Profile

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AFT Pharmaceuticals Limited develops, licenses, distributes, and sells pharmaceutical products in New Zealand, Australia, Asia, and internationally. It offers products for use in the areas of allergy, cold and flu, eyecare, first aid, pain management, gastrointestinal, dermatology, and medicated vitamins.

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Wedbush began coverage on shares of Clear Secure (NYSE:YOU  Get Rating) in a report published on Monday morning, The Fly reports. The firm issued a neutral rating and a $27.00 price objective on the stock. Wedbush also issued estimates for Clear Secures Q2 2023 earnings at ($0.04) EPS, Q3 2023 earnings at ($0.01) EPS, Q4 2023 earnings at ($0.01) EPS, FY2023 earnings at ($0.11) EPS, FY2024 earnings at ($0.06) EPS and FY2025 earnings at $0.27 EPS.

Several other research analysts have also weighed in on the company. Stifel Nicolaus began coverage on Clear Secure in a research report on Thursday, May 25th. They issued a hold rating for the company. Needham & Company LLC reiterated a buy rating and issued a $40.00 price objective on shares of Clear Secure in a research report on Thursday, April 13th. Telsey Advisory Group reiterated an outperform rating and issued a $38.00 price objective on shares of Clear Secure in a research report on Thursday, March 2nd. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased their price objective on Clear Secure from $32.00 to $33.00 and gave the stock a neutral rating in a research report on Thursday, March 2nd. Three investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and two have given a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, Clear Secure presently has a consensus rating of Hold and an average price target of $34.50.

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Clear Secure Price Performance

YOU stock opened at $23.83 on Monday. The business has a 50 day simple moving average of $25.03 and a 200-day simple moving average of $27.50. The firm has a market capitalization of $3.65 billion, a PE ratio of -33.09 and a beta of 1.45. Clear Secure has a 1 year low of $18.94 and a 1 year high of $35.00.

Insider Transactions at Clear Secure

Clear Secure ( NYSE:YOU Get Rating ) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, May 9th. The company reported ($0.06) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of ($0.15) by $0.09. The business had revenue of $132.36 million during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $129.72 million. Clear Secure had a negative return on equity of 12.36% and a negative net margin of 12.62%. On average, equities research analysts expect that Clear Secure will post -0.06 EPS for the current year.

In other news, EVP Seyed Kasra Moshkani sold 1,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Wednesday, April 12th. The stock was sold at an average price of $27.29, for a total transaction of $27,290.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the executive vice president now directly owns 21,894 shares in the company, valued at $597,487.26. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available at this link. In other news, insider Richard N. Jr. Patterson sold 5,000 shares of the stock in a transaction on Tuesday, March 14th. The stock was sold at an average price of $27.13, for a total value of $135,650.00. Following the sale, the insider now directly owns 6,474 shares in the company, valued at $175,639.62. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through this hyperlink. Also, EVP Seyed Kasra Moshkani sold 1,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Wednesday, April 12th. The shares were sold at an average price of $27.29, for a total value of $27,290.00. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president now owns 21,894 shares in the company, valued at $597,487.26. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders sold a total of 7,000 shares of company stock worth $188,970 over the last ninety days. Company insiders own 42.06% of the companys stock.

Institutional Trading of Clear Secure

A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the business. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. increased its position in shares of Clear Secure by 12.9% during the first quarter. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. now owns 7,858 shares of the companys stock worth $210,000 after purchasing an additional 899 shares in the last quarter. Bank of New York Mellon Corp increased its position in shares of Clear Secure by 13.5% during the first quarter. Bank of New York Mellon Corp now owns 17,679 shares of the companys stock worth $475,000 after purchasing an additional 2,108 shares in the last quarter. Cambridge Investment Research Advisors Inc. purchased a new position in shares of Clear Secure during the first quarter worth about $209,000. BlackRock Inc. grew its holdings in shares of Clear Secure by 8.2% during the first quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 505,861 shares of the companys stock worth $13,598,000 after buying an additional 38,299 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Vanguard Group Inc. grew its holdings in shares of Clear Secure by 143.5% during the first quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 3,258,957 shares of the companys stock worth $87,601,000 after buying an additional 1,920,329 shares during the last quarter. 56.99% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

Clear Secure Company Profile

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Clear Secure, Inc provides a member-centric secure identity platform in the United States. The company's secure identity platform is a multi-layered infrastructure consisting of front-end, including enrollment, verification, and linking. It also offers CLEAR Plus, a consumer aviation subscription service, which enables access to predictable entry lanes in airport security checkpoints, as well as access to broader network; and CLEAR app, a consumer-facing digital product that facilitates new user enrollment and member engagement from their mobile device.

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Concentric Capital Strategies LP lessened its holdings in Vulcan Materials (NYSE:VMC  Get Rating) by 51.5% during the 4th quarter, HoldingsChannel reports. The institutional investor owned 15,435 shares of the construction companys stock after selling 16,382 shares during the period. Vulcan Materials makes up 1.2% of Concentric Capital Strategies LPs portfolio, making the stock its 15th biggest position. Concentric Capital Strategies LPs holdings in Vulcan Materials were worth $2,703,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

Several other large investors have also made changes to their positions in the company. Crossmark Global Holdings Inc. raised its position in shares of Vulcan Materials by 24.8% in the 4th quarter. Crossmark Global Holdings Inc. now owns 7,965 shares of the construction companys stock valued at $1,395,000 after acquiring an additional 1,583 shares during the period. Allianz Asset Management GmbH grew its stake in shares of Vulcan Materials by 4.8% during the 3rd quarter. Allianz Asset Management GmbH now owns 28,507 shares of the construction companys stock worth $4,496,000 after acquiring an additional 1,295 shares in the last quarter. M&G Investment Management Ltd. bought a new position in shares of Vulcan Materials during the 4th quarter worth approximately $6,048,000. DAVENPORT & Co LLC grew its stake in shares of Vulcan Materials by 15.1% during the 4th quarter. DAVENPORT & Co LLC now owns 5,095 shares of the construction companys stock worth $892,000 after acquiring an additional 667 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Raymond James & Associates grew its stake in shares of Vulcan Materials by 0.5% during the 4th quarter. Raymond James & Associates now owns 198,333 shares of the construction companys stock worth $34,730,000 after acquiring an additional 1,016 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors own 90.08% of the companys stock.

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Insiders Place Their Bets

In related news, CEO J Thomas Hill sold 4,695 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Wednesday, June 7th. The stock was sold at an average price of $201.79, for a total transaction of $947,404.05. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief executive officer now directly owns 80,039 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $16,151,069.81. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at the SEC website. In related news, CEO J Thomas Hill sold 4,695 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, June 7th. The stock was sold at an average price of $201.79, for a total value of $947,404.05. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 80,039 shares in the company, valued at approximately $16,151,069.81. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this hyperlink. Also, SVP David P. Clement sold 2,389 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Thursday, May 11th. The stock was sold at an average price of $196.00, for a total value of $468,244.00. Following the transaction, the senior vice president now owns 2,887 shares in the company, valued at approximately $565,852. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders sold a total of 7,644 shares of company stock valued at $1,529,014 over the last quarter. 0.62% of the stock is owned by insiders.

Vulcan Materials Stock Up 0.3 %

Vulcan Materials stock traded up $0.70 during midday trading on Friday, reaching $206.88. The companys stock had a trading volume of 406,186 shares, compared to its average volume of 783,536. The stocks 50-day simple moving average is $184.38 and its 200-day simple moving average is $180.44. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.55, a current ratio of 2.37 and a quick ratio of 1.59. Vulcan Materials has a 52-week low of $137.54 and a 52-week high of $207.38. The stock has a market capitalization of $27.53 billion, a P/E ratio of 45.61, a PEG ratio of 1.53 and a beta of 0.73.

Vulcan Materials (NYSE:VMC  Get Rating) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, May 4th. The construction company reported $0.95 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $0.64 by $0.31. The company had revenue of $1.65 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $1.57 billion. Vulcan Materials had a return on equity of 10.36% and a net margin of 8.14%. Vulcan Materialss revenue for the quarter was up 7.0% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter in the prior year, the business posted $0.73 earnings per share. On average, sell-side analysts expect that Vulcan Materials will post 6.45 EPS for the current year.

Vulcan Materials Announces Dividend

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, June 9th. Shareholders of record on Friday, May 26th will be paid a dividend of $0.43 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, May 25th. This represents a $1.72 annualized dividend and a yield of 0.83%. Vulcan Materialss dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 38.05%.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

Several equities analysts recently weighed in on the stock. DA Davidson raised their target price on shares of Vulcan Materials from $212.00 to $225.00 in a research note on Wednesday, May 10th. Royal Bank of Canada lifted their target price on Vulcan Materials from $191.00 to $193.00 and gave the company an outperform rating in a research report on Friday, February 17th. The Goldman Sachs Group upgraded Vulcan Materials from a neutral rating to a buy rating and boosted their price target for the stock from $188.00 to $212.00 in a report on Monday, April 3rd. Truist Financial upped their target price on Vulcan Materials from $210.00 to $225.00 in a report on Friday, February 17th. Finally, Seaport Res Ptn reissued a neutral rating on shares of Vulcan Materials in a research note on Friday, February 10th. Four equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and nine have issued a buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $208.08.

Vulcan Materials Company Profile

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Vulcan Materials Co engages in the production of construction aggregates. Its products include crushed stone, sand, and gravel. It operates through the following business segments: Aggregates, Asphalt, Concrete, and Calcium. The Aggregates segment produces and sells asphalt mix and ready-mixed concrete primarily in its mid-Atlantic, Georgia, Southwestern, Tennessee, and Western markets.

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Delaware Investments National Municipal Income Fund (NYSE:VFL  Get Rating) announced a monthly dividend on Friday, June 9th, Wall Street Journal reports. Stockholders of record on Friday, June 23rd will be paid a dividend of 0.0325 per share on Friday, June 30th. This represents a $0.39 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 3.89%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, June 22nd.

Delaware Investments National Municipal Income Fund Stock Performance

NYSE VFL traded up $0.03 on Friday, hitting $10.02. 20,282 shares of the stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 22,524. Delaware Investments National Municipal Income Fund has a 52 week low of $9.90 and a 52 week high of $12.70. The businesss fifty day moving average is $10.33 and its 200 day moving average is $10.66.

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Hedge Funds Weigh In On Delaware Investments National Municipal Income Fund

Several hedge funds have recently bought and sold shares of VFL. US Bancorp DE bought a new position in shares of Delaware Investments National Municipal Income Fund in the 1st quarter worth about $54,000. NewEdge Advisors LLC bought a new position in Delaware Investments National Municipal Income Fund in the second quarter worth approximately $114,000. Private Advisor Group LLC acquired a new stake in Delaware Investments National Municipal Income Fund in the first quarter valued at approximately $145,000. Susquehanna International Group LLP grew its stake in Delaware Investments National Municipal Income Fund by 15.5% in the first quarter. Susquehanna International Group LLP now owns 14,537 shares of the companys stock valued at $155,000 after acquiring an additional 1,956 shares during the period. Finally, Citadel Advisors LLC bought a new stake in shares of Delaware Investments National Municipal Income Fund during the second quarter valued at approximately $178,000.

Delaware Investments National Municipal Income Fund Company Profile

Delaware Investments National Municipal Income Fund is a closed-ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Delaware Management Holdings, Inc The fund is managed by Delaware Management Business Trust. It invests in the fixed income markets of the United States. The fund primarily invests in investment grade municipal obligations, the income from which is exempt from federal income taxes.

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Fundamental Research set a C$69.38 target price on Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (TSE:CM  Get Rating) (NYSE:CM) in a research note issued to investors on Tuesday morning, BayStreet.CA reports. The firm currently has a buy rating on the stock.

CM has been the topic of a number of other research reports. CSFB lowered their target price on shares of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce from C$65.00 to C$60.00 in a report on Tuesday, May 16th. Cormark boosted their target price on shares of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce from C$61.00 to C$64.00 in a report on Friday, May 26th. CIBC upped their price target on shares of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce from C$66.00 to C$66.50 in a report on Monday, February 27th. BMO Capital Markets decreased their price target on shares of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce from C$70.00 to C$69.00 in a report on Monday, February 27th. Finally, Canaccord Genuity Group upped their target price on shares of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce from C$66.00 to C$66.50 in a research report on Monday, February 27th. Eight equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and one has given a buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, the stock has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of C$64.80.

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Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Trading Down 0.1 %

TSE:CM opened at C$57.33 on Tuesday. The stock has a market capitalization of C$52.61 billion, a PE ratio of 11.33, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 27.22 and a beta of 1.04. The firms 50 day moving average is C$56.73 and its 200 day moving average is C$58.28. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce has a 12 month low of C$53.58 and a 12 month high of C$70.03.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Increases Dividend

Insider Buying and Selling at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, July 28th. Shareholders of record on Wednesday, June 28th will be paid a dividend of $0.87 per share. This is an increase from Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerces previous quarterly dividend of $0.85. The ex-dividend date is Tuesday, June 27th. This represents a $3.48 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 6.07%. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerces dividend payout ratio (DPR) is currently 68.77%.

In other Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce news, Director Victor George Dodig bought 34,850 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Thursday, March 16th. The stock was acquired at an average price of C$57.65 per share, with a total value of C$2,009,102.50. Insiders own 0.06% of the companys stock.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Company Profile

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Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, a diversified financial institution, provides various financial products and services to personal, business, public sector, and institutional clients in Canada, the United States, and internationally. The company operates through Canadian Personal and Business Banking; Canadian Commercial Banking and Wealth Management; U.S.

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2Xideas AG trimmed its position in shares of Gartner, Inc. (NYSE:IT  Get Rating) by 15.6% during the 4th quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm owned 31,051 shares of the information technology services providers stock after selling 5,749 shares during the period. Gartner makes up approximately 1.1% of 2Xideas AGs holdings, making the stock its 21st largest holding. 2Xideas AGs holdings in Gartner were worth $10,437,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Other institutional investors also recently modified their holdings of the company. Findlay Park Partners LLP acquired a new stake in shares of Gartner in the 3rd quarter valued at $145,262,000. Putnam Investments LLC increased its holdings in shares of Gartner by 254.0% during the third quarter. Putnam Investments LLC now owns 492,201 shares of the information technology services providers stock worth $136,187,000 after buying an additional 353,146 shares in the last quarter. Wellington Management Group LLP raised its stake in shares of Gartner by 20.3% in the first quarter. Wellington Management Group LLP now owns 2,029,738 shares of the information technology services providers stock valued at $603,766,000 after acquiring an additional 342,228 shares during the last quarter. Axiom Investors LLC DE boosted its holdings in shares of Gartner by 103.0% in the 3rd quarter. Axiom Investors LLC DE now owns 653,014 shares of the information technology services providers stock worth $180,682,000 after acquiring an additional 331,369 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Artemis Investment Management LLP increased its holdings in Gartner by 226.1% during the 4th quarter. Artemis Investment Management LLP now owns 310,866 shares of the information technology services providers stock valued at $104,943,000 after purchasing an additional 215,541 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 91.86% of the companys stock.

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Insider Buying and Selling at Gartner

In other Gartner news, EVP Alwyn Dawkins sold 1,000 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, May 16th. The stock was sold at an average price of $316.71, for a total transaction of $316,710.00. Following the transaction, the executive vice president now owns 44,915 shares of the companys stock, valued at $14,225,029.65. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available through this link. In other Gartner news, EVP Alwyn Dawkins sold 1,000 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Tuesday, May 16th. The shares were sold at an average price of $316.71, for a total value of $316,710.00. Following the transaction, the executive vice president now directly owns 44,915 shares in the company, valued at $14,225,029.65. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available through the SEC website. Also, EVP Robin B. Kranich sold 700 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, May 26th. The stock was sold at an average price of $342.19, for a total value of $239,533.00. Following the sale, the executive vice president now owns 13,911 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $4,760,205.09. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders sold a total of 7,209 shares of company stock worth $2,298,608 over the last quarter. 3.90% of the stock is currently owned by insiders.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

Gartner Stock Up 0.3 %

Several equities research analysts have weighed in on IT shares. Wells Fargo & Company lowered their price objective on shares of Gartner from $387.00 to $380.00 and set an overweight rating for the company in a research report on Wednesday, April 19th. StockNews.com cut Gartner from a buy rating to a hold rating in a report on Friday, May 26th. BMO Capital Markets reduced their target price on shares of Gartner from $357.00 to $337.00 and set a market perform rating on the stock in a research note on Friday, April 21st. Finally, UBS Group started coverage on shares of Gartner in a report on Wednesday, May 31st. They issued a neutral rating and a $368.00 price objective on the stock. Six equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and two have assigned a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat, Gartner currently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $359.13.

IT stock traded up $1.09 during midday trading on Friday, hitting $345.08. The companys stock had a trading volume of 331,008 shares, compared to its average volume of 494,147. The stock has a market capitalization of $27.28 billion, a P/E ratio of 29.69, a PEG ratio of 4.49 and a beta of 1.27. The companys fifty day moving average price is $319.19 and its 200 day moving average price is $329.35. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 5.19, a current ratio of 0.84 and a quick ratio of 0.84. Gartner, Inc. has a twelve month low of $221.39 and a twelve month high of $358.25.

Gartner (NYSE:IT  Get Rating) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday, May 2nd. The information technology services provider reported $2.88 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $2.04 by $0.84. Gartner had a return on equity of 772.55% and a net margin of 16.56%. The company had revenue of $1.41 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $1.37 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the business posted $2.33 EPS. The businesss revenue was up 11.6% compared to the same quarter last year. As a group, equities research analysts predict that Gartner, Inc. will post 10.05 EPS for the current year.

Gartner Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Gartner, Inc is a research and advisory company, which equips business leaders with insights, advice, and tools that help build organizations. It operates through the following segments: Research, Consulting, and Conferences. The Research segment provides executives with objective insights and advice through reports, briefings, proprietary tools, access to the firm?s research experts, peer networking services, and membership programs.

Further Reading

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Gyon Technologies Capital Management LP purchased a new stake in Kite Realty Group Trust (NYSE:KRG  Get Rating) in the 4th quarter, Holdings Channel.com reports. The firm purchased 28,479 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock, valued at approximately $599,000.

Several other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also modified their holdings of KRG. Accurate Wealth Management LLC acquired a new position in shares of Kite Realty Group Trust in the 4th quarter valued at about $27,000. CENTRAL TRUST Co boosted its holdings in shares of Kite Realty Group Trust by 91.4% in the 3rd quarter. CENTRAL TRUST Co now owns 1,675 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $29,000 after buying an additional 800 shares during the period. Covestor Ltd boosted its holdings in shares of Kite Realty Group Trust by 7,854.2% in the 1st quarter. Covestor Ltd now owns 1,909 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $43,000 after buying an additional 1,885 shares during the period. Belpointe Asset Management LLC acquired a new position in shares of Kite Realty Group Trust in the 4th quarter valued at about $46,000. Finally, Bessemer Group Inc. boosted its holdings in shares of Kite Realty Group Trust by 147.5% in the 4th quarter. Bessemer Group Inc. now owns 3,000 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $63,000 after buying an additional 1,788 shares during the period. 96.84% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

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Kite Realty Group Trust Price Performance

Shares of NYSE:KRG traded down $0.05 during trading on Friday, reaching $21.01. The company had a trading volume of 99,769 shares, compared to its average volume of 1,556,361. The firms fifty day moving average is $20.35 and its 200 day moving average is $20.96. The firm has a market capitalization of $4.61 billion, a PE ratio of 702.57, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.09 and a beta of 1.37. Kite Realty Group Trust has a twelve month low of $16.42 and a twelve month high of $23.10. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.80, a quick ratio of 0.92 and a current ratio of 0.92.

Kite Realty Group Trust Announces Dividend

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, July 14th. Investors of record on Friday, July 7th will be issued a $0.24 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, July 6th. This represents a $0.96 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 4.57%. Kite Realty Group Trusts payout ratio is currently 3,201.07%.

Several research analysts have recently commented on KRG shares. Wells Fargo & Company started coverage on shares of Kite Realty Group Trust in a report on Tuesday, May 23rd. They issued an underweight rating and a $20.00 price target for the company. JPMorgan Chase & Co. initiated coverage on shares of Kite Realty Group Trust in a research note on Monday, April 24th. They set a neutral rating and a $23.00 target price for the company. Piper Sandler boosted their target price on shares of Kite Realty Group Trust from $26.00 to $28.00 in a research note on Monday, May 8th. Finally, StockNews.com initiated coverage on shares of Kite Realty Group Trust in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They set a sell rating for the company. Two investment analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, three have issued a hold rating, five have assigned a buy rating and one has given a strong buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, Kite Realty Group Trust presently has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $24.78.

Kite Realty Group Trust Profile

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Kite Realty Group Trust operates as a real estate investment trust. It engages in the ownership, operation, acquisition, development, and redevelopment of neighborhood and community shopping centers in selected markets in the United States. The company was founded on August 16, 2004 and is headquartered in Indianapolis, IN.

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iShares IV Public Limited Company  iShares Edge MSCI World Momentum Factor UCITS ETF (OTCMKTS:IEMMF  Get Rating)s stock price traded down 1.3% on Wednesday . The stock traded as low as $54.30 and last traded at $54.30. 1,399 shares changed hands during trading, an increase of 37% from the average session volume of 1,020 shares. The stock had previously closed at $55.03.

iShares IV Public Limited Company  iShares Edge MSCI World Momentum Factor UCITS ETF Stock Performance

The business has a 50-day moving average price of $55.02 and a 200-day moving average price of $55.11.

Further Reading

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The Goldman Sachs Group lowered shares of Nissan Motor (OTCMKTS:NSANY  Get Rating) from a buy rating to a neutral rating in a research note published on Tuesday, The Fly reports.

Separately, Citigroup lowered Nissan Motor from a neutral rating to a sell rating in a research note on Monday, March 13th.

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Nissan Motor Stock Performance

Shares of Nissan Motor stock opened at $7.59 on Tuesday. Nissan Motor has a 52 week low of $5.81 and a 52 week high of $8.54. The businesss fifty day simple moving average is $7.46 and its 200-day simple moving average is $7.21. The firm has a market cap of $14.85 billion, a PE ratio of 9.03, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.24 and a beta of 1.04. The company has a quick ratio of 1.44, a current ratio of 1.73 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.73.

About Nissan Motor

Nissan Motor ( OTCMKTS:NSANY Get Rating ) last announced its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, May 11th. The company reported $0.41 EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.08 by $0.33. Nissan Motor had a return on equity of 6.10% and a net margin of 2.11%. The business had revenue of $23.42 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $21.93 billion. Equities analysts forecast that Nissan Motor will post 1.15 earnings per share for the current year.

(Get Rating)

Nissan Motor Co, Ltd. manufactures and sells vehicles and automotive parts worldwide. It sells vehicles under the Nissan and Infiniti brands. The company offers vehicle and vehicle parts; engines, manual transmissions, and multiplier/reducer units; automotive parts; axles; and other related components.

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Pekin Hardy Strauss Inc. decreased its position in shares of First Horizon Co. (NYSE:FHN  Get Rating) by 94.1% during the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent filing with the SEC. The institutional investor owned 24,005 shares of the financial services providers stock after selling 383,469 shares during the quarter. Pekin Hardy Strauss Inc.s holdings in First Horizon were worth $588,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

Other large investors have also recently bought and sold shares of the company. HBK Sorce Advisory LLC bought a new stake in shares of First Horizon in the 3rd quarter valued at $26,000. McElhenny Sheffield Capital Management LLC bought a new stake in shares of First Horizon in the 4th quarter valued at $30,000. Cubist Systematic Strategies LLC bought a new stake in shares of First Horizon in the 3rd quarter valued at $39,000. Concord Wealth Partners bought a new stake in shares of First Horizon in the 4th quarter valued at $40,000. Finally, Red Tortoise LLC bought a new position in First Horizon during the 4th quarter worth about $42,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 77.41% of the companys stock.

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First Horizon Price Performance

NYSE:FHN traded down $0.07 during mid-day trading on Friday, reaching $11.64. The stock had a trading volume of 1,331,640 shares, compared to its average volume of 10,344,836. The stock has a 50-day simple moving average of $14.09 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $19.97. The stock has a market capitalization of $6.26 billion, a PE ratio of 7.23, a P/E/G ratio of 2.86 and a beta of 0.89. First Horizon Co. has a 12 month low of $8.99 and a 12 month high of $24.92. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.20, a current ratio of 0.94 and a quick ratio of 0.93.

First Horizon Dividend Announcement

First Horizon ( NYSE:FHN Get Rating ) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, April 18th. The financial services provider reported $0.45 EPS for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $0.46 by ($0.01). The business had revenue of $863.00 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $871.36 million. First Horizon had a return on equity of 13.53% and a net margin of 24.76%. First Horizons revenue for the quarter was up 22.6% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter last year, the firm posted $0.38 EPS. On average, equities analysts anticipate that First Horizon Co. will post 1.68 earnings per share for the current year.

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 3rd. Stockholders of record on Friday, June 16th will be given a dividend of $0.15 per share. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, June 15th. This represents a $0.60 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 5.15%. First Horizons dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 37.04%.

Insider Transactions at First Horizon

In related news, Director William H. Fenstermaker acquired 2,950 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Friday, May 12th. The shares were bought at an average price of $9.56 per share, with a total value of $28,202.00. Following the transaction, the director now directly owns 246,312 shares of the companys stock, valued at $2,354,742.72. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available at the SEC website. In other news, Director William H. Fenstermaker acquired 10,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Wednesday, June 7th. The stock was purchased at an average price of $11.62 per share, for a total transaction of $116,200.00. Following the purchase, the director now owns 256,312 shares in the company, valued at approximately $2,978,345.44. The purchase was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available at the SEC website. Also, Director William H. Fenstermaker acquired 2,950 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Friday, May 12th. The stock was purchased at an average price of $9.56 per share, with a total value of $28,202.00. Following the purchase, the director now owns 246,312 shares in the company, valued at approximately $2,354,742.72. The disclosure for this purchase can be found here. Insiders have purchased 42,036 shares of company stock valued at $436,725 in the last 90 days. 1.55% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders.

Analyst Ratings Changes

A number of research firms have issued reports on FHN. StockNews.com cut First Horizon from a hold rating to a sell rating in a report on Saturday, May 13th. Royal Bank of Canada reiterated a sector perform rating and set a $25.00 target price on shares of First Horizon in a report on Wednesday, April 19th. TheStreet cut First Horizon from a b- rating to a c+ rating in a report on Thursday, June 1st. Wells Fargo & Company upgraded First Horizon from an equal weight rating to an overweight rating and set a $25.00 target price for the company in a report on Friday, March 24th. Finally, Bank of America lowered their target price on First Horizon from $14.00 to $13.00 in a report on Thursday. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, one has given a hold rating and three have issued a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat, First Horizon presently has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $21.00.

About First Horizon

(Get Rating)

First Horizon Corp. (Tennessee) operates as a financial holding company, which engages in the provision of checking accounts, savings products, mortgage banking, lending, and financing to individuals and businesses. It operates the business through three segments: Regional Banking, Specialty Banking, and Corporate.

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Ratan Capital Management LP grew its stake in Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA  Get Rating) by 3.3% in the 4th quarter, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The fund owned 3,100 shares of the credit services providers stock after purchasing an additional 100 shares during the period. Mastercard makes up about 0.7% of Ratan Capital Management LPs portfolio, making the stock its 18th biggest position. Ratan Capital Management LPs holdings in Mastercard were worth $1,078,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Other institutional investors have also modified their holdings of the company. Vanguard Group Inc. raised its position in Mastercard by 0.7% during the 3rd quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 77,259,535 shares of the credit services providers stock valued at $21,967,977,000 after purchasing an additional 568,155 shares in the last quarter. State Street Corp increased its holdings in shares of Mastercard by 0.4% in the 3rd quarter. State Street Corp now owns 33,865,057 shares of the credit services providers stock valued at $9,629,190,000 after acquiring an additional 138,753 shares during the period. Geode Capital Management LLC increased its holdings in shares of Mastercard by 1.3% in the 4th quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 16,306,214 shares of the credit services providers stock valued at $5,660,950,000 after acquiring an additional 208,671 shares during the period. American Century Companies Inc. increased its holdings in shares of Mastercard by 0.8% in the 4th quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 5,345,179 shares of the credit services providers stock valued at $1,858,679,000 after acquiring an additional 40,394 shares during the period. Finally, Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc. increased its holdings in shares of Mastercard by 2.4% in the 4th quarter. Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc. now owns 4,508,640 shares of the credit services providers stock valued at $1,567,789,000 after acquiring an additional 107,240 shares during the period. 74.51% of the stock is owned by institutional investors.

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Insider Buying and Selling

In other news, insider Timothy H. Murphy sold 27,417 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, May 2nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $374.49, for a total value of $10,267,392.33. Following the transaction, the insider now directly owns 39,263 shares of the companys stock, valued at $14,703,600.87. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. In other Mastercard news, insider Timothy H. Murphy sold 27,417 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, May 2nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $374.49, for a total value of $10,267,392.33. Following the transaction, the insider now directly owns 39,263 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $14,703,600.87. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available through this link. Also, major shareholder Foundation Mastercard sold 125,816 shares of Mastercard stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, May 12th. The stock was sold at an average price of $381.15, for a total transaction of $47,954,768.40. Following the sale, the insider now owns 99,934,013 shares in the company, valued at $38,089,849,054.95. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Over the last 90 days, insiders sold 542,079 shares of company stock worth $207,174,711. 0.13% of the stock is owned by insiders.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Mastercard Price Performance

MA has been the subject of several research reports. BMO Capital Markets boosted their price objective on Mastercard from $414.00 to $442.00 in a research note on Friday, April 28th. Royal Bank of Canada upped their price target on Mastercard from $392.00 to $404.00 in a research report on Friday, April 28th. Robert W. Baird upped their price target on Mastercard from $410.00 to $435.00 in a research report on Friday, April 28th. KeyCorp upped their price target on Mastercard from $425.00 to $430.00 in a research report on Monday, April 24th. Finally, StockNews.com started coverage on Mastercard in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a buy rating for the company. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, two have issued a hold rating and nineteen have issued a buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, Mastercard has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $417.27.

Shares of Mastercard stock traded up $1.76 during trading on Friday, hitting $369.35. 1,392,536 shares of the companys stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 2,820,622. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 2.84, a current ratio of 1.20 and a quick ratio of 1.20. The firms fifty day moving average price is $373.77 and its 200 day moving average price is $363.78. Mastercard Incorporated has a twelve month low of $276.87 and a twelve month high of $392.20. The company has a market cap of $350.09 billion, a PE ratio of 36.72, a PEG ratio of 1.73 and a beta of 1.11.

Mastercard (NYSE:MA  Get Rating) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The credit services provider reported $2.80 earnings per share for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $2.71 by $0.09. Mastercard had a net margin of 42.33% and a return on equity of 169.12%. The business had revenue of $5.75 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $5.64 billion. During the same period in the previous year, the firm posted $2.76 earnings per share. Mastercards revenue for the quarter was up 11.2% compared to the same quarter last year. Analysts forecast that Mastercard Incorporated will post 12.25 earnings per share for the current year.

Mastercard Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Mastercard, Inc is a technology company, which engages in the payments industry that connects consumers, financial institutions, merchants, governments, and business. It offers payment solutions for the development and implementation of credit, debit, prepaid, commercial, and payment programs. The company was founded in November 1966 and is headquartered in Purchase, NY.

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Oxbow Capital Management HK Ltd grew its position in shares of Scorpio Tankers Inc. (NYSE:STNG  Get Rating) by 11.5% in the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund owned 886,628 shares of the shipping companys stock after acquiring an additional 91,603 shares during the period. Scorpio Tankers comprises 16.0% of Oxbow Capital Management HK Ltds portfolio, making the stock its 4th largest position. Oxbow Capital Management HK Ltds holdings in Scorpio Tankers were worth $47,674,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

Several other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also recently modified their holdings of STNG. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. raised its stake in shares of Scorpio Tankers by 263.9% during the first quarter. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. now owns 13,495 shares of the shipping companys stock valued at $287,000 after acquiring an additional 9,787 shares during the last quarter. Rhumbline Advisers raised its stake in Scorpio Tankers by 7.0% in the first quarter. Rhumbline Advisers now owns 99,744 shares of the shipping companys stock worth $2,133,000 after buying an additional 6,505 shares in the last quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP raised its stake in Scorpio Tankers by 2.3% in the first quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP now owns 2,578,947 shares of the shipping companys stock worth $55,136,000 after buying an additional 57,184 shares in the last quarter. Sei Investments Co. raised its stake in Scorpio Tankers by 15.8% in the first quarter. Sei Investments Co. now owns 155,472 shares of the shipping companys stock worth $3,324,000 after buying an additional 21,160 shares in the last quarter. Finally, First Trust Advisors LP raised its stake in Scorpio Tankers by 3.6% in the first quarter. First Trust Advisors LP now owns 12,099 shares of the shipping companys stock worth $259,000 after buying an additional 418 shares in the last quarter. 54.53% of the stock is owned by institutional investors.

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Analysts Set New Price Targets

A number of research firms recently issued reports on STNG. JPMorgan Chase & Co. started coverage on shares of Scorpio Tankers in a research note on Wednesday, March 8th. They issued an overweight rating and a $87.00 price target for the company. Jefferies Financial Group reaffirmed a buy rating and set a $76.00 target price on shares of Scorpio Tankers in a research note on Tuesday, March 21st. Stifel Nicolaus raised their target price on shares of Scorpio Tankers from $68.00 to $77.00 in a research note on Tuesday, April 25th. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft cut their price target on shares of Scorpio Tankers from $65.00 to $55.00 in a report on Wednesday, May 3rd. Finally, StockNews.com initiated coverage on shares of Scorpio Tankers in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a buy rating on the stock. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating and seven have issued a buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $74.17.

Scorpio Tankers Stock Performance

STNG stock traded down $0.11 on Friday, hitting $44.76. The company had a trading volume of 1,126,678 shares, compared to its average volume of 1,417,484. Scorpio Tankers Inc. has a 12-month low of $28.50 and a 12-month high of $64.20. The company has a current ratio of 1.70, a quick ratio of 1.68 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.32. The stocks 50-day simple moving average is $51.13 and its 200 day simple moving average is $53.15. The stock has a market cap of $2.67 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 2.99, a P/E/G ratio of 0.13 and a beta of 0.38.

Scorpio Tankers (NYSE:STNG  Get Rating) last issued its earnings results on Tuesday, May 2nd. The shipping company reported $3.31 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $2.92 by $0.39. The company had revenue of $377.16 million for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $387.37 million. Scorpio Tankers had a net margin of 51.60% and a return on equity of 40.01%. The firms quarterly revenue was up 119.3% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter last year, the company posted ($0.27) earnings per share. As a group, equities research analysts expect that Scorpio Tankers Inc. will post 10.42 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Scorpio Tankers Increases Dividend

The firm also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, June 30th. Stockholders of record on Tuesday, June 13th will be paid a dividend of $0.25 per share. This represents a $1.00 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 2.23%. The ex-dividend date is Monday, June 12th. This is a boost from Scorpio Tankerss previous quarterly dividend of $0.20. Scorpio Tankerss dividend payout ratio (DPR) is currently 5.33%.

About Scorpio Tankers

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Scorpio Tankers, Inc engages in the provision of marine transportation of petroleum products. Its consists of wholly owned, finance leased, and bareboat chartered-in tankers. It operates through the following segments: MR, LR2, Handymax, and LR1. The company was founded by Emanuele A. Lauro on July 1, 2009 and is headquartered in Monaco.

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Townsquare Capital LLC boosted its holdings in shares of Williams-Sonoma, Inc. (NYSE:WSM  Get Rating) by 24.6% in the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 44,732 shares of the specialty retailers stock after acquiring an additional 8,825 shares during the period. Townsquare Capital LLC owned 0.07% of Williams-Sonoma worth $5,141,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Several other large investors also recently bought and sold shares of WSM. Bessemer Group Inc. boosted its holdings in Williams-Sonoma by 863.6% in the 4th quarter. Bessemer Group Inc. now owns 212 shares of the specialty retailers stock valued at $25,000 after purchasing an additional 190 shares during the last quarter. Whittier Trust Co. lifted its holdings in shares of Williams-Sonoma by 210.0% in the 4th quarter. Whittier Trust Co. now owns 310 shares of the specialty retailers stock worth $36,000 after acquiring an additional 210 shares during the last quarter. CoreCap Advisors LLC acquired a new position in shares of Williams-Sonoma in the 4th quarter worth approximately $43,000. IFP Advisors Inc lifted its holdings in shares of Williams-Sonoma by 44.7% in the 3rd quarter. IFP Advisors Inc now owns 812 shares of the specialty retailers stock worth $47,000 after acquiring an additional 251 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Kistler Tiffany Companies LLC acquired a new position in shares of Williams-Sonoma in the 4th quarter worth approximately $47,000. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 99.49% of the companys stock.

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Williams-Sonoma Stock Performance

Shares of NYSE:WSM traded down $0.04 during trading hours on Friday, reaching $126.12. The stock had a trading volume of 245,714 shares, compared to its average volume of 1,048,648. Williams-Sonoma, Inc. has a 1 year low of $106.66 and a 1 year high of $176.89. The firms 50 day moving average is $117.57 and its 200-day moving average is $120.73. The stock has a market capitalization of $8.10 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 8.29, a P/E/G ratio of 0.96 and a beta of 1.61.

Williams-Sonoma Increases Dividend

Williams-Sonoma ( NYSE:WSM Get Rating ) last posted its earnings results on Tuesday, May 23rd. The specialty retailer reported $2.64 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $2.41 by $0.23. The firm had revenue of $1.76 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $1.80 billion. Williams-Sonoma had a net margin of 12.07% and a return on equity of 72.68%. The companys revenue was down 7.2% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period last year, the firm posted $3.50 EPS. Analysts forecast that Williams-Sonoma, Inc. will post 13.48 EPS for the current year.

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, May 26th. Investors of record on Friday, April 21st were given a $0.90 dividend. This represents a $3.60 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 2.85%. This is an increase from Williams-Sonomas previous quarterly dividend of $0.78. The ex-dividend date was Thursday, April 20th. Williams-Sonomas dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 23.65%.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

WSM has been the topic of several recent analyst reports. Guggenheim restated a neutral rating on shares of Williams-Sonoma in a report on Tuesday, March 21st. Citigroup decreased their price objective on shares of Williams-Sonoma from $127.00 to $123.00 in a report on Thursday, May 18th. Barclays decreased their price objective on shares of Williams-Sonoma from $135.00 to $126.00 in a report on Wednesday, May 24th. Loop Capital reduced their target price on shares of Williams-Sonoma from $205.00 to $185.00 in a report on Friday, March 17th. Finally, Telsey Advisory Group reduced their target price on shares of Williams-Sonoma from $155.00 to $142.00 and set an outperform rating on the stock in a report on Tuesday, March 14th. Four analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, seven have given a hold rating and four have assigned a buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company presently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $127.18.

Williams-Sonoma Company Profile

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Williams-Sonoma, Inc engages in the retailing of home products. It operates through the following segments: Pottery Barn, West Elm, Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn Kids and Teen and Other. The Other segment includes net revenues from international franchise operations, Rejuvenation and Mark and Graham.

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Urstadt Biddle Properties (NYSE:UBP  Get Rating) announced its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday. The real estate investment trust reported $0.14 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $0.20 by ($0.06), MarketWatch Earnings reports. Urstadt Biddle Properties had a return on equity of 11.28% and a net margin of 27.05%. The firm had revenue of $35.07 million during the quarter.

Urstadt Biddle Properties Stock Performance

Shares of NYSE:UBP traded up $0.08 during trading on Friday, hitting $20.57. The stock had a trading volume of 219 shares, compared to its average volume of 7,277. The stock has a market capitalization of $809.02 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of 30.46 and a beta of 0.86. Urstadt Biddle Properties has a 12-month low of $14.76 and a 12-month high of $20.73. The stock has a 50-day simple moving average of $16.80 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $17.08. The company has a quick ratio of 3.96, a current ratio of 3.96 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.00.

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Urstadt Biddle Properties Cuts Dividend

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, July 6th. Stockholders of record on Wednesday, June 14th will be paid a $0.1875 dividend. This represents a $0.75 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 3.65%. The ex-dividend date is Tuesday, June 13th. Urstadt Biddle Propertiess payout ratio is 134.33%.

Institutional Trading of Urstadt Biddle Properties

Urstadt Biddle Properties Company Profile

Several hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the stock. BNP Paribas Arbitrage SNC grew its holdings in Urstadt Biddle Properties by 28,510.4% in the third quarter. BNP Paribas Arbitrage SNC now owns 13,733 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $213,000 after purchasing an additional 13,685 shares during the period. Vanguard Group Inc. grew its holdings in Urstadt Biddle Properties by 15.1% in the third quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 353,937 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $5,585,000 after purchasing an additional 46,533 shares during the period. First Manhattan Co. grew its holdings in Urstadt Biddle Properties by 400.0% in the first quarter. First Manhattan Co. now owns 5,000 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $86,000 after purchasing an additional 4,000 shares during the period. Finally, Dimensional Fund Advisors LP grew its holdings in Urstadt Biddle Properties by 1.3% in the first quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP now owns 60,975 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $1,059,000 after purchasing an additional 772 shares during the period. 2.01% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

(Get Rating)

Urstadt Biddle Properties, Inc operates as a real estate investment trust, which engages in the acquisition, ownership, and management of commercial properties. It operates through the Ridgeway and All Other Operating segments. The company was founded on July 7, 1969 and is headquartered in Greenwich, CT.

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Walmart Inc. (NYSE:WMT  Get Rating) Director S Robson Walton sold 170,587 shares of the stock in a transaction on Thursday, June 8th. The stock was sold at an average price of $150.12, for a total transaction of $25,608,520.44. Following the completion of the sale, the director now owns 244,364,516 shares in the company, valued at approximately $36,684,001,141.92. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website.

S Robson Walton also recently made the following trade(s):

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On Thursday, March 30th, S Robson Walton sold 1,504,039 shares of Walmart stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $145.51, for a total transaction of $218,852,714.89.

On Tuesday, March 28th, S Robson Walton sold 1,601,000 shares of Walmart stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $143.82, for a total transaction of $230,255,820.00.

On Thursday, March 23rd, S Robson Walton sold 875,436 shares of Walmart stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $140.87, for a total transaction of $123,322,669.32.

On Tuesday, March 21st, S Robson Walton sold 600,749 shares of Walmart stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $140.46, for a total transaction of $84,381,204.54.

On Wednesday, March 15th, S Robson Walton sold 1,550,332 shares of Walmart stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $138.21, for a total transaction of $214,271,385.72.

On Monday, March 13th, S Robson Walton sold 368,514 shares of Walmart stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $138.13, for a total transaction of $50,902,838.82.

Walmart Stock Performance

WMT stock traded up $0.92 on Friday, hitting $153.09. The companys stock had a trading volume of 5,182,823 shares, compared to its average volume of 6,225,303. The firm has a 50 day moving average of $149.99 and a two-hundred day moving average of $146.16. Walmart Inc. has a 1 year low of $117.90 and a 1 year high of $154.64. The stock has a market cap of $412.25 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 36.58, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 4.39 and a beta of 0.49. The company has a current ratio of 0.82, a quick ratio of 0.23 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.54.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Walmart

Walmart ( NYSE:WMT Get Rating ) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, May 18th. The retailer reported $1.47 EPS for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $1.32 by $0.15. The company had revenue of $152.30 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $147.91 billion. Walmart had a net margin of 1.82% and a return on equity of 21.30%. Walmarts quarterly revenue was up 7.6% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter in the prior year, the firm earned $1.30 EPS. Equities analysts predict that Walmart Inc. will post 6.21 EPS for the current fiscal year.

A number of large investors have recently bought and sold shares of the company. Vanguard Group Inc. grew its stake in shares of Walmart by 1.4% during the 3rd quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 130,176,496 shares of the retailers stock worth $16,883,890,000 after purchasing an additional 1,832,388 shares during the period. BlackRock Inc. grew its stake in Walmart by 2.9% in the 3rd quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 96,570,711 shares of the retailers stock valued at $12,525,224,000 after acquiring an additional 2,712,886 shares during the last quarter. State Street Corp grew its stake in Walmart by 1.2% in the 3rd quarter. State Street Corp now owns 60,659,193 shares of the retailers stock valued at $7,867,497,000 after acquiring an additional 701,415 shares during the last quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC grew its stake in Walmart by 1.0% in the 1st quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 25,104,994 shares of the retailers stock valued at $3,691,763,000 after acquiring an additional 249,501 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC grew its stake in Walmart by 112,181.6% in the 4th quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC now owns 22,854,919 shares of the retailers stock valued at $3,240,599,000 after acquiring an additional 22,834,564 shares during the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 31.27% of the companys stock.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

WMT has been the topic of several research reports. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft raised their price target on shares of Walmart from $164.00 to $169.00 in a research note on Wednesday, February 22nd. Roth Capital reissued a buy rating on shares of Walmart in a research note on Tuesday, February 14th. Royal Bank of Canada raised their price target on shares of Walmart from $160.00 to $164.00 in a research note on Friday, May 19th. Morgan Stanley decreased their price target on shares of Walmart from $161.00 to $160.00 and set an overweight rating on the stock in a research note on Wednesday, February 22nd. Finally, Wells Fargo & Company lifted their target price on shares of Walmart from $155.00 to $170.00 and gave the stock an overweight rating in a research note on Thursday, April 6th. Five investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and twenty-five have issued a buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $166.31.

About Walmart

(Get Rating)

Walmart, Inc engages in retail and wholesale business. The company offers an assortment of merchandise and services at everyday low prices. It operates through the following business segments: Walmart U.S., Walmart International, and Sams Club. The Walmart U.S. segment operates as a merchandiser of consumer products, operating under the Walmart, Wal-Mart, and Walmart Neighborhood Market brands, as well as walmart.com and other eCommerce brands.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the US this month will set new benchmarks for bilateral ties and some "really big, historic and exciting" announcements are likely to be made on defence cooperation and boosting India's indigenous military industrial base, the Pentagon has said.

Prime Minister Modi will embark on his first state visit to the US at the invitation of President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden this month. During his four-day visit starting on June 21, the US president and the First Lady will host Modi for a state dinner on June 22.

When Prime Minister Modi comes here to Washington for a State Visit later in the month, I think it will be a historic visit setting new benchmarks for the relationship, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner said during a panel discussion at the Center for New American Security on Thursday.

Also Read | India, US launch trade dialogue on sidelines of Modi-Biden meet

I think it (the visit) will be looked back upon similar to how the Japan two plus two earlier this year was a pivotal moment in the relationship. People will be looking back on this visit by Prime Minister Modi as a real springboard for the US-India relationship, he said.

Ratner said US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited India recently to advance a number of bilateral issues and prepare the ground for the prime minister's visit to Washington by finalising particular agreements and initiatives that the two countries are working on.

Among the priorities are clear strategic alignment around the question of co-development and co-production between the United States and India on the defence side. This is a priority for Prime Minister Modi to strengthen India's indigenous defence industrial base, as well as advancing the military modernisation, he said.

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and his Indian Indian counterpart Ajit Doval here in January launched the initiative for critical and emerging technology (iCET) to try to bolster technology cooperation between the US and India and there is a very strong defence component of that that the two countries are looking to advance.

I know there have been efforts at this in the past. Sometimes there's skepticism around, is it going to be real this time? And my answer is, I think, all signs are pointing toward yes, it's going to be real and we're going to have some really big, historic, exciting announcements out of the prime minister's visit in terms of particular projects around defence industrial cooperation, Ratner said.

We are also enhancing our operational coordination in a number of different places. A lot of focus on the Indian Ocean, a lot of focus on the undersea domain, as well as new domains, space and cyber and new efforts around information sharing, he said.

If you look at the development of the US-India relationship, it's really unbelievable how far the relationship has moved over the last couple of decades. Thats true now more than ever, he said.

Ratner said the two countries are seeing increasing strategic alignment.

From our perspective, from India's perspective, we do share a vision again for a free and open Indo-Pacific. A strong US-India partnership is a critical ingredient to realising that vision. That's what both sides have understood that from India's perspective and from the US perspective, that a closer partnership is going to be essential to the manifestation of that vision, he said.

The US, India and several other world powers have been talking about the need to ensure a free, open and thriving Indo-Pacific in the backdrop of China's rising military manoeuvring in the region.

China claims nearly all of the disputed South China Sea, though Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all claim parts of it. Beijing has built artificial islands and military installations in the South China Sea.

One of the major thrusts of the bilateral defence relationship and one of the things we were talking about, while we were in Delhi, is this ongoing US effort to support India's military modernisation," Ratner said.

"The integration of our defence industrial base is more co-production, co-development, and I think that is based upon the belief that a stronger India that can defend its own interest and its sovereignty is good for the United States, he said.
Russia is receiving materials from Iran to build a drone factory on its territory that "could be fully operational early next year," White House national security spokesman John Kirby warned Friday.

The White House released a satellite image of the location of the prospective plant in the Alabuga special economic zone, some 900 kilometers (560 miles) east of Moscow.

"The Russia-Iran military partnership appears to be deepening," Kirby said in a statement, citing US intelligence information.

Also Read: US announces sanctions on Iran drone procurement network

The White House said it would release a new government advisory to assist businesses and governments "to ensure they are not inadvertently contributing to Iran's (drone) program."

Washington estimates that Russia has received hundreds of attack drones as well as related equipment from Iran to aid Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

According to US data, the drones are built in Iran, shipped across the Caspian Sea "and then used operationally by Russian forces against Ukraine," Kirby said.

"Russia has been using Iranian UAVs in recent weeks to strike Kyiv and terrorize the Ukrainian population," he added, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones.

Washington sounded the alarm on what it says are Moscow's efforts to begin manufacturing Iranian drones itself.

"We have information that Russia is receiving materials from Iran needed to build a UAV manufacturing plant inside Russia," Kirby said.

In turn, Iran is seeking to purchase Su-35 fighter jets, attack helicopters, radars, and YAK-130 combat trainer aircraft from Russia, according to the White House.

"We will continue to impose sanctions on the actors involved in the transfer of Iranian military equipment to Russia for use in Ukraine," Kirby said.

Iran has repeatedly denied US accusations of sending military supplies to Russia during its war against Ukraine, now into its second year.

The war has revived cooperation between Moscow and Tehran, both facing growing international isolation.

The two countries recently announced the construction of a rail link aimed at circumventing traditional sea routes and international sanctions.
Sudan's warring sides have agreed on a nationwide ceasefire for 24 hours from 6 am (0400 GMT) on Saturday, Saudi Arabia and the US who have been brokering talks said in a joint statement.

Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support forces (RSF) agreed "they will refrain from prohibited movements, attacks, use of aircraft or drones, aerial bombardment, artillery strikes, reinforcement of positions and resupply of forces, and will refrain from seeking military advantage during the ceasefire," the statement read.

Also Read | PM Modi thanks Saudi Crown Prince for help during evacuation of Indians from Sudan

If the parties fail to observe the ceasefire, "facilitators will be compelled to consider adjourning the Jeddah talks", the US and Saudi joint statement added, referring to negotiations to try to end almost two months of clashes in Sudan.

"We have provided both parties numerous opportunities to end this senseless war," the US State Department's Bureau of African Affairs said on Twitter.

"We call on both sides to adhere to the commitment made today for a 24-hour ceasefire, which would allow Sudanese people to receive critical humanitarian assistance."

Both sides have broken a string of ceasefire agreements, though a recent truce deal did let in limited amounts of humanitarian aid, humanitarian agencies said.

The conflict in Sudan derailed the launch of a transition towards civilian rule four years after a popular uprising ousted strongman President Omar al-Bashir.

Sudan's army and the RSF fell out over the chain of command and military restructuring plans under the transition.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Friday hit out at the Modi government over reports of fresh Chinese military constructions along the LAC in Uttarakhand, and demanded that China should be confronted strategically and not by "hollow boasts". The nation is paying a heavy price for the prime minister's "clean chit" to China, he charged.

"Our Territorial Integrity is being impinged upon by audacious Chinese military construction at the LAC, now in Uttarakhand," Kharge said on Twitter, sharing satellite images showing Chinese constructions at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) bordering Uttarakhand.

Also Read | Opposition meet in Patna on June 23; Rahul, Kharge to attend

"The nation is paying a heavy price for Modi ji's clean chit to China. China should be confronted strategically together, and not by making hollow boasts!" he also said.

Our Territorial Integrity is being impinged upon by audacious Chinese military construction at the LAC, now in Uttrakhand! The nation is paying a heavy price for Modi ji's CLEAN CHIT to China. China should be confronted strategically together, and not by making hollow boasts! pic.twitter.com/JAVV57awtk  Mallikarjun Kharge (@kharge) June 9, 2023

The Congress has been attacking the government over its policy with China and has asked why it does not confront Beijing. In clear message to Beijing, India on Thursday said any expectation of normalisation of its ties with China when the border situation in eastern Ladakh is not normal is unfounded.

At a special media briefing on the Modi government's foreign policy in the last nine years, Jaishankar had said China is the only leading country with which India's relations have not advanced in the last few years as it violated border agreements in 2020 and deployed large numbers of troops along the frontier.
The Supreme Court on Friday directed the Madras High Court registry to file a detailed report on measures taken to address the lack of toilets for women lawyers in the Nilgiris Court Complex in Tamil Nadu's Ooty.

The apex court said the earlier report of the registrar general does not explain in detail about the facilities for women lawyers in the new court complex and as to whether there was any shrinkage of such facilities which were earlier available.

Also Read: Supreme Court declines urgent hearing on internet shutdown in Manipur

A vacation bench of Justices Aniruddha Bose and Rajesh Bindal asked the registry to file the report by Sunday.

"Let a detailed report be filed by the high court administration through the registrar general. Such report should reach the registry of this court by Sunday through electronic mode and this matter shall be listed on June 12, Monday," the bench said.

The top court was hearing a plea by Women Lawyers' Association of Nilgiris alleging lack of toilet facilities for female advocates at the recently inaugurated combined court complex in Ooty.

National Commission for Women (NCW) chairperson Rekha Sharma had written a letter on June 7 to the Registrar General of the Madras High Court seeking measures to address the lack of toilets for women lawyers in the Nilgiris Court Complex.
The Supreme Court on Friday modified the Delhi High Court's June 7 order granting 15-day interim bail granted to Raghav Magunta, son of YSRCP MP Magunta Srinivasulu in the Delhi liquor scam case by telling him to surrender on June 12, 2023.

A bench of Justices Aniruddha Bose and Rajesh Bindal passed the order, cutting short the period of interim bail.

Additional Solicitor General S V Raju on behalf of the Enforcement Directorate which claimed "this is a case of fraud".

Also Read: Supreme Court declines urgent hearing on internet shutdown in Manipur

Senior advocates Amit Desai and Siddharth Dave, appearing for Mungta, defended the High Court's contending there was no one in the family to look after the maternal grandmother admitted to Apollo hospital in Andhra Pradesh's Nellore. The bail was granted on humanitarian grounds, they said.

"Having considered the respective submissions, and also, on going through the medical documents of the ailing lady, the purpose for which the respondent has been released on bail, could be served, if he is asked to surrender on June 12, 2023. We accordingly modify the impugned order," the bench said.

In his submission, Raju contended that the accused claimed before High Court that it was paternal grandmother, who was in the ICU for a long period but it turned out that she is maternal grandmother, who just fell down and there was nothing serious.

"They are all scamsters, there is a history of tampering. Sufficient time has been given, he has seen his grandmother, now he can come back. These are all tricks, he has not got regular bail, that is why he applied for interim bail on these grounds. Earlier, he sought bail saying his wife is sick, medical report was sought, then he withdrew it," he said.

Referring to the case of former Delhi Minister Satyendar Jain he said nowadays everyone is falling in the bathroom and filing for an interim bail, all this is just a ploy to get out of jail.

ED had arrested him in February 2023 in connection with the Delhi liquor policy scam.
UCB (OTCMKTS:UCBJY  Get Rating) is one of 351 public companies in the Biotechnology industry, but how does it contrast to its peers? We will compare UCB to related businesses based on the strength of its profitability, analyst recommendations, risk, earnings, institutional ownership, dividends and valuation.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of current ratings and price targets for UCB and its peers, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

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Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score UCB 0 0 2 0 3.00 UCB Competitors 204 1251 3362 25 2.66

UCB presently has a consensus price target of $96.50, indicating a potential upside of 108.78%. As a group, Biotechnology companies have a potential upside of 83.86%. Given UCBs stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, analysts clearly believe UCB is more favorable than its peers.

Valuation and Earnings

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio UCB N/A N/A 60.54 UCB Competitors $265.53 million $74.46 million 64.65

This table compares UCB and its peers top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

UCBs peers have higher revenue and earnings than UCB. UCB is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than its peers, indicating that it is currently more affordable than other companies in its industry.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

22.3% of shares of all Biotechnology companies are held by institutional investors. 25.8% of shares of all Biotechnology companies are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Dividends

UCB pays an annual dividend of $0.36 per share and has a dividend yield of 0.8%. UCB pays out 46.6% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, Biotechnology companies pay a dividend yield of 2.7% and pay out 1,846.6% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

Profitability

This table compares UCB and its peers net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets UCB N/A N/A N/A UCB Competitors -8,934.43% -61.18% -14.38%

Summary

UCB beats its peers on 7 of the 13 factors compared.

About UCB

(Get Rating)

UCB SA engages in the research and development biopharmaceuticals products. It offers medicinal products such as briviact, keppra, vimpat, neupro, cimzia, nootropil, xyrem, xyzal, and zyrtec. The company was founded by Emmanuel Janssen on January 18, 1928 and is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium.

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Novozymes A/S (OTCMKTS:NVZMF  Get Rating) is one of 351 publicly-traded companies in the Biotechnology industry, but how does it weigh in compared to its rivals? We will compare Novozymes A/S to similar businesses based on the strength of its analyst recommendations, valuation, risk, earnings, institutional ownership, dividends and profitability.

Dividends

Novozymes A/S pays an annual dividend of $1.80 per share and has a dividend yield of 3.6%. Novozymes A/S pays out 22.4% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, Biotechnology companies pay a dividend yield of 2.7% and pay out 1,846.6% of their earnings in the form of a dividend. Novozymes A/S is clearly a better dividend stock than its rivals, given its higher yield and lower payout ratio.

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Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Novozymes A/S and its rivals gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio Novozymes A/S N/A N/A 6.17 Novozymes A/S Competitors $265.53 million $74.46 million 64.65

Analyst Ratings

Novozymes A/Ss rivals have higher revenue and earnings than Novozymes A/S. Novozymes A/S is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than its rivals, indicating that it is currently more affordable than other companies in its industry.

This is a breakdown of recent ratings for Novozymes A/S and its rivals, as reported by MarketBeat.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Novozymes A/S 0 0 0 0 N/A Novozymes A/S Competitors 204 1251 3362 25 2.66

As a group, Biotechnology companies have a potential upside of 84.07%. Given Novozymes A/Ss rivals higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Novozymes A/S has less favorable growth aspects than its rivals.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

20.4% of Novozymes A/S shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 22.3% of shares of all Biotechnology companies are owned by institutional investors. 25.8% of shares of all Biotechnology companies are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Profitability

This table compares Novozymes A/S and its rivals net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Novozymes A/S N/A N/A N/A Novozymes A/S Competitors -8,934.43% -61.18% -14.38%

About Novozymes A/S

(Get Rating)

Novozymes A/S engages in the research and development of biotechnology solutions, which produces industrial enzymes and microorganisms. Its business areas include agriculture, bioenergy, biopharma, food and beverage, household care, leather, pulp and paper, textile and wastewater solutions. The company was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark.

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Eldorado Gold (TSE:ELD  Get Rating) (NYSE:EGO) was upgraded by investment analysts at National Bank Financial from a sector perform spec overwgt rating to an outperform spec overweight rating in a research note issued on Wednesday. National Bank Financial also issued estimates for Eldorado Golds FY2024 earnings at $0.62 EPS.

Several other analysts also recently issued reports on the company. National Bankshares set a C$17.00 price target on Eldorado Gold and gave the company an outperform rating in a research note on Thursday. Stifel Nicolaus lowered Eldorado Gold from a buy rating to a hold rating and raised their price objective for the company from C$16.00 to C$16.50 in a research note on Thursday, April 20th. Finally, BMO Capital Markets increased their target price on Eldorado Gold from C$12.00 to C$14.00 in a research report on Friday, February 24th.

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Eldorado Gold Stock Performance

ELD opened at C$13.16 on Wednesday. The business has a fifty day simple moving average of C$14.56 and a 200 day simple moving average of C$12.89. The company has a market capitalization of C$2.43 billion, a PE ratio of 131.60, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 56.20 and a beta of 1.34. Eldorado Gold has a 1 year low of C$6.87 and a 1 year high of C$16.40. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 15.71, a current ratio of 2.92 and a quick ratio of 2.28.

Eldorado Gold Company Profile

Eldorado Gold Corporation, together with its subsidiaries, engages in the mining, exploration, development, and sale of mineral products primarily in Turkey, Canada, Greece, and Romania. The company primarily produces gold, as well as silver, lead, and zinc. It holds a 100% interest in the Kisladag and Efemcukuru gold mines located in western Turkey; 100% interest in Lamaque gold mines located in Canada; and Olympias, Stratoni, Skouries, Perama Hill, and Sapes gold mines located in Greece, as well as the 80.5% interest in Certej development projects located in Romania.

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In Your Space Circus (IYSC) has announced the award of a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant of 140,000 for an exciting heritage project that will reinvigorate the former school on London Street, just outside the grounds of St Columbs Cathedral.

As new custodians of the Old Cathedral School, the money will facilitate the Derry-based arts charity to develop plans for the use of the building as a circus school and performance venue, deliver community and volunteer engagement programmes, build the capacity of IYSCs board of Directors, secure professional advice and guidance, and fundraise for the capital elements of the project required to fit-out the buildings interior.

This work will ultimately transform the stunning historic building into a flagship circus arts venue in the City.

The funding was announced at a launch event held at the Cathedral School involving The National Lottery Heritage Fund alongside support funders Arts & Business NI and the Architectural Heritage Fund. The event also featured performances by local circus artists, Cikada Circus, and participants from IYSCs Youth Circus.

Both In Your Space Circus and St Columbs Cathedral are committed to breathing life back into the building and reinstating it as a school, offering access to children, young people and adults from across the City and region to learn, play and create. It will also support IYSCs ambition to nurture local talent and attract artists from outside of the City in their new circus arts venue.

The project will mark a significant milestone in the history of IYSC allowing the organisation to reach its full potential. Using circus as the vehicle, there will be exciting opportunities to explore the heritage of the building, the city and the circus art form.

Commenting on the award, Cath McBride, Company Director said: We have been searching for a suitable home for the past 10 years; which has been challenging due to the unique requirements of circus.

The Cathedral School is perfect for our work and our future aspirations for people of all ages to engage with our impactful work.

We feel privileged to have become the custodians of one of Derrys most stunning heritage assets. We could not be more delighted with this opportunity and the support received thanks to National Lottery players!

Youth Circus participant Guillermo and Eve and performance artist Candie, with from left, Robert McGonigle, Cathedral Administrator, Cath McBride, company director, IYSC and Olive Hill, NI Committee member, The National Lottery Heritage Fund. (Photo: Lorcan Doherty)

Olive Hill, Northern Ireland Committee Member at The National Lottery Heritage Fund added: This award of 140,000 is part of our ongoing investment to help unlock a sustainable use for the former Cathedral School, one of the few buildings with direct access to the Citys walls.

In Your Space Circus vision to reinvigorate the space will add to the cultural life of the City, ignite imaginations, inspire creativity and offer a space for all to access and enjoy. We wish them every success as they put in place their plans which have been made possible thanks to National Lottery players.

Robert McGonigle, Parish Administrator of St Columbs Cathedral said: St Columbs Cathedral is thrilled to be entering into a new and exciting era in the life of one of the most iconic buildings in the city, with In Your Space Circus.

The Old Cathedral School has gone through quite a few years of uncertainty since completion of phase 1 of its restoration, and it is with great expectation that we have agreed this lease with IYSC as our tenant and we're confident it has the potential to secure the future of the building.

This is a very important milestone for both organisations and we will give them every support and encouragement as they progress the project and inject life back into the building.
SDLP Foyle MLA Sinead McLaughlin this week visited Washington D.C. to take part in a global summit of the Women, Peace and Security Focal Points Network.

The group brings together women parliamentarians, academics and experts from countries around the world to discuss common challenges on gender equality.

As part of the summit organised by the US State Department, Ms McLaughlin participated in a series of high-level engagements on how gender equality can be used as a framework to advance peace around the world, including through sessions with senior figures in civic society and leading women parliamentarians from a diverse range of countries.

Ms McLaughlin said: As Chair of the All-Party Group on Women, Peace and Security, it was a privilege to be invited to Washington D.C. this week to meet with women from around the world who are leading on gender equality in post-conflict societies.

Although the nature of the conflicts we face are very different, it is clear that challenges including the economic exclusion of women as well as their marginalisation in public life, are common to almost all the countries who participate in the Women, Peace and Security Focal Points Network.

This network is demonstrating how international solidarity, collaboration and co-operation are fundamental to our efforts to create peaceful, just and reconciled societies, where women have equal participation in public life and a real voice in peace-building.

I was pleased to have the opportunity this week to meet with dozens of women parliamentarians and experts from around the globe to share experiences on our common challenges, including in implementing the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on gender equality.

The delivery of this resolution within our context in Northern Ireland could make a huge difference in breaking down all the barriers that are still faced by too many women in our society.

Unfortunately, while the south of Ireland and Great Britain both have National Action Plans to implement it, Northern Ireland is still caught in an unacceptable limbo.

I am not prepared to allow women in Northern Ireland to be left behind forever and will be holding any restored Executive accountable to a high-level, public commitment to implement this resolution.

We deserve a government that is working to dismantle gender inequality in all its forms, whether encouraging the greater participation of women in public and political life, tackling gender-based violence or advancing access to healthcare.
A man has been given a suspended sentence at Derry Magistrate's Court today for sending messages that could be deemed as menacing to the then Minister of Justice Naomi Long and a local Alliance Party councillor.

Ronald George McElwee (29) of Rossnagalliagh in Derry had denied the two charges of improper use of the communication network on June 21 last year.

He had denied the charges but was convicted after a contest on the papers.

The court heard that police were informed by Ms Long about a message she deemed as menacing in relation to a Derry dissident republican whose prison licence had been revoked.

The message from McElwee said there were people 'compliant with British internment and treated as such.'

A further message the came to light to local Alliance councillor Rachel Ferguson relating to the same issue.

McElwee admitted sending the messages but stated he did not think they were menacing.

The court heard that the defendant had 8 previous convictions and an application was made for a restraining order.

Defence counsel Michael Donaghey said there was no dispute that McElwee had sent the messages but he maintained they had been 'misconstrued'.

The barrister said that no one had been called to give evidence in the case.

He described McElwee's record as consisting of 'low level public order offences.'

District Judge Barney McElholm said there is no justification for violence especially politics.

He said these were attitudes 'should have been left in the last century.'

McElwee was given a 4 month sentence suspended for 3 years and a Restraining Order was imposed.

Following the sentence of Ronald McElwee, Detective Inspector McCallum said: Police were notified of the emails on 21st June 2022. McElwee was arrested on suspicion of two counts of improper use of a public electronic communications network.

He was later released pending a report to the Public Prosecution Service, who subsequently made a decision to prosecute.

I want to assure everyone  all members of the public  that we take crime of this nature extremely seriously. Such actions, without doubt, cause unacceptable distress to all concerned.

If you are the victim of similar, or indeed of any crime, please contact police on 101, or in an emergency call 999.

Alternatively, information can be provided to Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 or online at www.crimestoppers-uk.org
The proposed changes to a controversial Government Bill on the legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles have been slammed by Amnesty International as doing nothing to address the fundamental flaws with the bill.

Responding to the publication, Grainne Teggart, Amnesty International UKs Northern Ireland Deputy Director, said: The UK government is treating Troubles victims with contempt - these amendments do nothing to address the fundamental flaws with the bill.

No-one is fooled by these changes and the Government is still clearly intent on denying victims their basic rights and pressing ahead with a bill only it wants.

The amendments follow the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers issuing a resolution expressing their serious concern about the bills compatibility with the Governments human rights obligations.

Its time the Government halted the passage of this profoundly unjust bill through Parliament and instead committed to an agreed way forward to deal with the legacy of the Troubles that protects and prioritises victims.

Earlier this week, ahead of his meeting with Rishi Sunak in Washington, Amnesty called on US president Joe Biden to reiterate his administrations strong support for the Good Friday Agreement and use the meeting to relay US concerns at how the Troubles bill represents a serious violation of the agreement and risks undermining the delicate peace settlement in Northern Ireland.

Social Democratic and Labour Party Leader Colum Eastwood MP has said that no amendments can fix the British government's broken Legacy Bill.

Mr Eastwood was speaking after a series of new amendments to the legislation were published.

He called on the British government to listen to the widespread opposition to the Bill.

Foyle MP Mr Eastwood said: The amendments from the British government to their Legacy Bill are no more than an attempt to paper over the cracks of ill-thought out and totally irreparable legislation.

This is one of the few issues that unites everyone in the North from political parties to victims groups, there is nothing that can be done to make this legislation palatable and we will oppose it at every turn.

There can be no hiding place for those who committed the most unspeakable crimes during our troubled past, whether they be state forces or paramilitaries. This legislation seeks to provide the British government with an opportunity to cover up their own murky past, while closing down routes to victims and survivors who still hold out hope of attaining truth and justice.

We need to be strong and united in our opposition to this Bill, I welcome the commitment from Tanaiste Micheal Martin that the Irish government will consider taking the matter to Europe if the British government proceeds with these plans.

The SDLP has also secured a commitment from Labour Leader Kier Starmer that his government will repeal this legislation should he win the next General Election.

The only way we are going to deal with our past is through cooperation, engagement and agreement on all sides. Its deeply disappointing that repeated opportunities to find an agreed way forward, including at Stormont House, have been missed.

The British government cannot be allowed to trample over the human rights of victims and survivors and the SDLP will continue to fight alongside them until this legislation is defeated.
A UK Government fund of 150 million to help Ukrainians into their own homes and to continue sponsorship arrangements has been announced.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year, more than 124,000 people have arrived in the UK under the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

The new money will go to councils to help Ukrainian families into private rented accommodation and find work.

It will also go towards continuing sponsorship arrangements, as many guests are in their second year in the UK.

The funding is being divided according to the number of Ukrainians in each nation  England will receive around 109 million, Scotland 30 million, Wales 8 million and Northern Ireland 2 million.

Those hosting Ukrainians will continue to receive a monthly 350 thank-you payment during guests first 12 months, rising to 500 a month during the following year.

In March, the Red Cross warned many Ukrainians are staying in inappropriate accommodation.

UK housing minister Felicity Buchan said: The UK has an honourable tradition of offering shelter to those fleeing the horrors of war.

Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of hosts in this country, over 124,000 Ukrainians have now found safety in the UK.

Sadly, the fighting in Ukraine shows no sign of ending soon, so we are appealing for more people to become hosts while providing councils with this additional funding to support guests into long-term housing.

In Scotland, more than 24,000 displaced Ukrainians have arrived through an individual sponsor or the Scottish Governments super-sponsor scheme.

Thousands remain in temporary accommodation while waiting for a permanent home.

Scotland Office minister John Lamont said: The UK has a long, proud history of helping those fleeing danger or persecution and we will continue to help the Ukrainians whose lives were thrown into turmoil when Russia illegally invaded their country.

Todays announcement of a further 30 million for Scotland to help rehome people from Ukraine brings a welcome boost to the great effort already made.

I want to thank everyone who has helped support Ukraine for more than a year now, including all those who have helped Ukrainian refugees make new lives in Scotland.

Petro Rewko, of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, said his organisation welcomes the funding commitment during difficult economic times.

He added: Ukrainians everywhere are grateful to the Government and the British people for opening their homes and hearts to Ukrainians fleeing their homes as a result of Russias illegal invasion of Ukraine.
The newly launched WhatsApp feature called Channels could be dangerous if not regulated properly. WhatsApp Channels looks inspired by the Telegram feature with a similar name. So you see the concern buds from the way some Telegram Channels propagate illegal and copyright-infringing content. Bots and misinformation are also problem areas that WhatsApp should pay attention to.

Lets first understand how WhatsApp Channels work and in what way it is similar to Telegram Channels.

What is WhatsApp Channels? How is it similar to Telegram Channels?

WhatsApp Channels is described as a private broadcast service to follow all topics you care about. Well, the channels around the themes you like could be run by people or organizations. These WhatsApp Channel admins will get to monetize the service they provide thanks to the integration of WhatsApp Pay.

Also Read: WhatsApp HD image sharing is in the works: 5 ways it can be useful

This is similar to how the Telegram Channels work in some respects. There is the broadcast part and the Telegram Payments 2.0 part.

However, Telegram Channels has been around since 2015 and over the years, scores of Channels around a myriad of topics and themes have cropped up. While many of these are useful and indulge in fair content and practices, there are some that dont.

One could easily find Telegram Channels that distribute pirated content, bots and shortcuts for growth hacks on social media platforms like Instagram. In the even darker alleys of Telegram, you may come across extremist groups and dangerous elements.

Also Read: WhatsApp banned 74 lakh accounts in India over safety concerns

In 2022, the Indian judiciary mandated Telegram to disclose the channels that are involved in copyright infringement. Time and again, the app has faced the ire of authorities across the world including India, Brazil, etc.

Even when it claims it has banned a channel, its not known whether that means it has taken down the content also or not. You can read more about this in Yale Universitys The Tale of Telegram Governance report.

So, it seems WhatsApp can look to Telegram for lessons on regulation: Both what to do and what not to do.
A radio DJ is to be sentenced later this year after she admitted money laundering 10,000 through her bank account.

Nikki Hayes (44), real name Eimear Black OKeeffe, pleaded guilty to possessing the money as the proceeds of crime in a Permanent TSB bank account at an unknown location within the State on November 5, 2020.

The bank account was in the name of Eimear Black, with an address at The Way, Hunters Run, Dublin 15.

The former RTE 2FM and Classic Hits DJ was remanded on continuing bail at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Thursday, June 8 after Judge Orla Crowe directed that a probation report be prepared.

Keith Spencer BL, defending OKeeffe, told the court that his client has a nine-year-old daughter and has no previous convictions.

Mr Spencer described OKeeffe as particularly vulnerable at the time of the offence and said he will be making the case that "her moral culpability was low.

Judge Crowe adjourned the case for sentencing on October 25 this year.
Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT) says it is delighted to report that Geordan Richardson, a 2nd year student, Bachelor of Business (Hons) has recently published another book.

The latest publication, called How to Improve Your Social Media Habits, is aimed at Generation Z (Gen Z, are people born mid-to-late 1990 to the 2010s).

This book addresses how Gen Z or zoomers have an overreliance on the virtual world and their existence in it. It has become apparent that one of the negatives of this virtual existence is you cant delete everything posted on all online platforms once it is posted. This book by Geordan is all about how to learn to use social media properly and to your advantage.

Geordan, who has already published six books, feels he has learnt a lot in the last 24 months whilst studying for his degree, publishing his books, and working a 16-hour part-time job in Centra in Blackrock.

Ive had to become a master of my own time management over the last two years, he comments. With my degree, you are in control of your own time between work, personal life and learning, and you need to be on top of it as you dont have the same structure as secondary school.

In terms of my course content, Ive really found the knowledge gained on the Applied Market Research module has been extremely beneficial as it has helped me properly research topics before I launch into writing a book.

Geordan also added that his degree in business has helped him in a myriad of ways on his publishing journey, as it covers everything business related and gave him a good broad basis of knowledge, from marketing, sales and entrepreneurship.

Whilst he has learnt a lot on his burgeoning publishing journey, Geordan recognises he still has a lot to learn about the industry.

He hopes to keep publishing whilst finishing his degree and his intention is to focus on higher content books in different niches, as he feels there is a potential for more sales, than through the light-content books he started with.

Geordan said I have now written six books, and fiction is my favourite genre. Im learning to adapt my writing depending on the type of book and the audience. Im also acquiring the skills to become more conversational if the book requires. I want my books to be readable for Gen Z and bring my own personal experience to my writing.

The second year student is also investigating other supports in DkIT for his publishing business. He said, I want to explore the help that the Regional Development Centre in DkIT could give me as a fledgling business, as I know there are avenues of support available to small businesses and startups like me.

Geordan is already looking forward to the future and hopes to work in Marketing and Sales after graduating while keeping his publishing business going on a part-time basis.
The Creative Spark Enterprise FabLab, was formally launched yesterday afternoon in Dundalk.

The Enterprise FabLab aims to provide professionals, SMEs, innovators and makers in the Northeast region with access to equipment, support and training in digital design and advanced fabrication.

By connecting with the global FabLab community, spanning 100 countries, Creative Spark Enterprise FabLab serves as a centre for digital design and fabrication knowledge-sharing and innovation.

Creative Spark Enterprise FabLab provides:

l Cutting-Edge Workspace: offering state-of-the-art technologies, including laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC routers, electronics workbenches, and power tools. Members can design, prototype, and fabricate under one roof, fostering creativity and collaboration.

l Comprehensive Training: The FabLab leads in delivering innovation, design, and Industry 4.0 training. It offers courses in digital design, fabrication, manufacturing, electronics, programming, and prototyping. The training aligns with the global FabLab network.

l Access to Equipment: Enterprise FabLab provides members with state-of-the-art equipment, software, and shared working space. Memberships are available at daily, monthly, or annual rates, enabling members to work on their projects and prototypes efficiently.

l Mobile FabLab Extension: Creative Spark Enterprise FabLab extends its reach through a fully equipped Mobile FabLab. This mobile unit can visit offices, studios, and business parks, engaging the community in digital prototyping and manufacturing.

l Building a Design Cluster: The FabLab aims to develop a community of stakeholders from the design, creative industries, innovation, manufacturing, and enterprise sectors. Collaboration at regional and national levels will foster the establishment of a Product Design Cluster.

Welcoming the launch of the new Creative Spark Enterprise FabLab, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Simon Coveney, TD said:

I want to commend the entire team behind this fantastic new facility that my Department has been delighted to support with over 770,000 in funding through the Regional Enterprise Development Fund and the Regional Enterprise Transition Scheme.

The Creative Spark FabLab is focused on nurturing the next generation of Irish innovation that can compete and win in global markets. It has the capacity to make a tremendous impact on the manufacturing and design ecosystem in the North-East and act as a creative hub for the talents across the region and facilitate collaboration.

Today is the culmination of an exciting journey that will deliver real benefits to enterprises across the North-East and contribute to the creation of high-quality jobs in innovative companies.

"We are excited to launch Creative Spark Enterprise FabLab, offering professionals and makers access to cutting-edge digital fabrication technology and a highly-skilled team," said Sarah Daly, Executive Director of Creative Spark. "Our goal is to foster a vibrant community of creators, designers, and innovators while driving collaboration and establishing a Product Design Cluster."

Aidan McKenna, Enterprise Ireland Regional Manager for the North East said,

Enterprise Ireland has been proud to support Creative Spark on both its Downtown co-working hub and the new state-of-the-art Enterprise FabLab. The team at Creative Spark are committed to supporting innovation and creative skill development in the North-East region and ensuring that they have the facilities necessary to drive their ambition.

The Regional Enterprise Development Fund, administered by Enterprise Ireland, is designed to support that goal and we are delighted to see the new Enterprise FabLab formally opened today.
 

EBRD lends 200 million to Ukrainian Railways

100 million for emergency capex financing, 100 million for working capital support

Company plans to improve railway corridors with European Union, mitigate war impact

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) will lend 200 million to Ukrainian Railways (Ukrzaliznytsya or UZ) to upgrade the countrys railway links with the European Union to its west. This follows 150 of emergency liquidity finance to UZ last year to help Ukraine keep its trains running.

Since Russias invasion of Ukraine last February, uncertainty about sea routes that traditionally carry most of the countrys imports and exports  including exports of grain vital for global food security - has prompted improvements to rail, road and river links with other countries.

This sovereign loan  100 million for emergency finance and 100 million for working capital support  will mitigate the impact of the war by facilitating the expansion of cross-border capacity and improving railway connectivity with the EU. It will allow UZ to continue to provide vital services to people and businesses as well as to rehabilitate key rail corridors on its border with the EU and buy rolling stock.

The EBRD shares risks on its Ukraine investments with donors and shareholders. This loan is to be supported by guarantees of up to 50 per cent, with 60 million coming from the United States of America and 40 million from The Netherlands. France and the European Union, through its European Fund for Sustainable Development, provided guarantees for the EBRDs earlier finance for UZ.

In addition, the project is expected to be financed by an investment grant of up to 10 million from a bilateral or multilateral donors, to cover investment in communications equipment, energy-efficient lighting and step-free access at several major railway stations, fulfilling the projects resilience and inclusivity objectives.

Despite the impact of the war, Ukrzaliznytsya has maintained cargo and passenger transportation operations if at reduced capacity. The EBRD has been working with UZ since before the war and has stood firmly by the rail company since Russias invasion.

Loans to UZ form part of the EBRDs five-pronged approach to supporting Ukraines real economy, which focuses on vital infrastructure, energy and food security, trade finance and support for the private sector. The EBRD, Ukraines largest institutional investor, has pledged 3 billion of investments in Ukraine in 2022-23, and in 2022 deployed 1.7 billion and mobilised a further 200 million through partner financial institutions.
I encountered a perfect morning rainbow over the harbour of Adrigole as I was headed towards the tip of the Beara Peninsula. So perfect I had to pull over for a closer inspection.

The road on Beara is a pleasure to drive with winding smooth roads that feel like new tarmacadam and rich views around every bend.

As I approached Dursey Island a small box could be seen hovering and slowly moving laterally above the wild waters - Irelands one and only cable car. Two great stanchions could be seen from which the cables were attached, one on the mainland and one on the island, and one little box sliding in between them.

Richard had a bit of a waiting game, as the cable car was maintained.

I was expecting large crowds so I got there fine and early as it opens at 9.30am hoping to be first in the queue. Maintenance was being carried out so I had to wait longer than expected and the crowds were not what I thought theyd be, it was actually really quiet.

The morning forecast had not turned out how Id hoped, instead it was extremely blustery with thick and low hanging grey clouds.

It all felt a bit Father Ted-ish, as I sat there on my holidays waiting for the cable car, looking out onto the island, surrounded by rural fields, gale force winds around my face and shrouded in drizzling mist, This is great, Ted!.

Luckily I could see some break in the sky and it seemed to be travelling in my direction.

Travelling over on the cable car I met a lady called Mairead who knew the island intimately. We chatted about how they used to carry sheep across on the car. The inside was made up of wooden floors, wooden benches and a bottle of holy water hanging on the wall. The two rickety doors shut with the help of a little hooked latch. As the car lifted up and the pressure was exerted onto the cables, the force could be heard whipping its way through the metal fibres like firing electricity.

Once I reached the island I walked for a short while and noticed an old ruin down by the waters edge, a cottage of some kind that was now being used as a graveyard. There was an only sheep standing on one of the walls of the ruin bleating its lungs out. The little fella clearly wanted to be heard as the rest of the herd were quietly pottering around chewing on grass. Its bleating echoed through the air as the light was falling through the clouds and shimmering over the steely, blue bay, as Crow Head peninsula placidly lay in the distance.

Narrow roadways wind around the island - with 100km speed limits.

There are three villages on the island and they get more ancient and ruined the further you walk along.

I met a man called John at the second village who was born on the island and is now the only year-round resident of the island. We chatted about all sorts and he filled me in on the news. At one point he mentioned how cars get quickly damaged by the salty sea air and if part-time residents leave their cars on the island for too long their handbrakes will often rust solid and seize up. This made sense as it was incredibly windy and everything metal I saw seemed to be rusted, which added to the feel of antiquated Ireland on the island.

I was admiring the views at one point, looking down over steep cliffs and into the waters, watching the lobster fisherman circulate the island collecting their pots from the buoyed orange dots that appear at intervals in the water.

Then I heard a high-pitched buzz from a distance that was charging towards me. I turned to see a man on a small motorbike flying up the bohereen wearing his goggles and a massive smile, waving to me and clearly loving life. Morning! he bellowed as he zipped past me.

Interestingly, the cliffside roads, which have no barriers or protection at all from sheer drops, apart from some tall and beautiful foxglove flowers, limit the drivers of the island to 100 km/h which seems a stretch. Good old Irish main roads with their highly ambitious speed limits.

The Dursey Cable Car, Irelands only cable car.

The visibility was so poor I decided not to hike to the peaks of the island but the views nonetheless were incredible, with a little lighthouse sitting just beyond the main island.

I brought my swimming gear and figured if I felt crazy enough to get into the water I would but I later learned that there are no swimming spots.

The island is a steep dollop of land with cliff edge perimeters almost all the way around.

A highly recommended, stunning hike and beautiful day out for those who can brave the powerful Atlantic air.

You can catch up on Richards 12-part series, Exploring Natural Cork, on EchoLive.ie
ITALY has aways been a draw for writers and artists, who replenish their senses from the unique perfume of life which it exudes.

One Cork writer who has had a long-standing affair with the country is William Wall, who grew up in Whitegate, and went on to became the first Poet Laureate for Cork city.

He is a prolific prize-winning author, not just of poetry, but also of novels and short stories, and his novel This Is Country was long-listed for the Booker prize.

Wall spoke to me from his base in Camogli Liguria, where his latest book Empty Bed Blues is set.

The book recounts the tale of Kate Holohan, who flees to Italy in the aftermath of her husbands sudden death, and is grappling with the revelations of the extent of his disastrous financial speculation, his secret mistress, and his love nest in the pretty Italian fishing village.

As her new life unfolds in Italy, the betrayed Kate is befriended by an older woman, Anna Ferrara, a former Resistance fighter and journalist, and this friendship is at the core of the book.

First published in Italy as La Ballata Del Letto Vuoto, Empty Bed Blues has been very well received by the Italian reading public, and gives more than a subtle nod to another Irish writer who previously spent long sunny days in Italy - James Joyce.

The occupation given by writer William to his character of Kate is that of Joyce scholar.

I was beginning to write the book when I was in Trieste and surrounded by Joycean scholars, so making Kate a Joycean was a kind of tribute to them, he reflected.

Trieste is a beautiful city, and still is, as in Joyces time, a melting pot of several cultures. Most notably, it is close to the border with Slovenia and you feel the Slovenian influence everywhere.

In Joyces day, of course, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Joyces legacy can be found everywhere in Trieste, and when I was there for the summer school there was no escaping him.

It was a wonderful experience, but I dont feel as if Ive gone into exile as Joyce did.

William Walls latest novel

I come and go, and thats something he could almost never do. My feet are still firmly planted in Cork.

Its not only Dubliners, but Corkonians also like to claim Joyce as being one of their own. His father John Stanislaus Joyce, was born in Cork city, the only son of a corporation official from Fermoy, where John later attended school.

Funnily enough, I think Joyce is more of a European writer than a Dubliner, and I think Cork is a very European city, said William. That said, we shouldnt exaggerate our claims.

It was Dublin, after all, that he celebrated in his writing. We have a modest claim to his family, and that is worth celebrating.

Cities all over the world celebrate Joyce on Bloomsday, and Ive been involved in some of those celebrations in Italy.

Im inclined to think of Ulysses as a blend of Trieste and Dublin.

I feel very strongly that the character of Bloom was influenced by what his good friend and fellow writer Italo Svevo told him about Jewish life and thought. I dont think Joyce could have written Bloom if he hadnt become friends with Svevo, this is clear from John McCourts book about Joyce and the city.

Italians are crazy abut Joyce. Im rarely at an event at which someone doesnt come up to me to tell me that they are reading, or have read Ulysses, and love it.

Im not really sure why they have such a strong connection with what is, after all, an Ireland of a hundred years ago.

Recently, a couple at a party told me that they had read Ulysses together five times and only on the fifth reading did they understand it, which I remarked was a heroic commitment to literature!

When I was young, Joyce was somewhat resented. He had written nasty stuff about Ireland and had rejected it.

He had left Ireland in her hour of need and gone off to be a vagabond around Europe. Ulysses was a dirty book and there were dirty bits in his other books too.

It was a pathetic, narrow-minded nationalist viewpoint. I think we needed to work through our post-colonial resentment to come to terms with what he had to say.

On the other hand, there are things about the adulation he gets that irritate me too.

He did have harsh things to say, and he was very much a European writer. Hes become a national icon, exploited for tourism, and treated like a daft old chap in the corner. Theres a lot of shallow adulation which ignores his criticism of Irish society.

Nowadays, with the rise of the far right, we see the very things he satirised being parroted all over again - the narrow-minded nationalism, the hostility to foreigners, the fake patriotism, the racism.

We ignore Joyces political message in favour of his detailed depiction of Dublin in the rare oul times - but we ignore it at our loss.

William also spent many years as an English teacher in Presentation College Cork, where he nurtured the talents of another famous son of the rebel city - the actor Cillian Murphy.

 I had the pleasure of teaching Cillian English. He was a natural student with an instinctive understanding of literature. He credits me with encouraging him into acting, but Im quite certain hed have found his way there anyway. Ive followed is career with interest, and Im a big fan of his work.

I often think that teaching is one of the few jobs where every day is one where you can change someones life. It doesnt always happen of course, not even often, but it does happen.

Teaching is, or should be, about making people think and challenging their perceptions of the world.

I suppose that happens one day in a hundred, but that one day is worth all the rest.

William Wall will be at the West Cork Literary Festival on July 12 at 1pm in Bantry Library.

His latest novel, Empty Bed Blues, is published by New Island Books.
Fifty-three students from St Peters Community School in Passage West recently held their graduation ceremony in the school.

The day started with a graduation mass and ceremony before the students, along with their families and staff members, enjoyed a post-graduation reception in the school.

St Peters Community School principal Tony McSweeney said it was a fantastic day.

Leaving Cert students Cian Linehan and Brooke Matthews with principal Tony McSweeney at the Leaving Cert graduation at St Peter's Community School in Passage West. Picture: David Creedon

We celebrated a wonderful occasion for our graduating class of 2023 who had represented themselves, their families, and the school with great distinction over the last six years.

It was a fantastic day. They are generally a great group of young men and young women who personify all the positive aspects of what we do and expect of our students in a fantastic school, he said.

The secondary school principal said there was a lovely atmosphere in the Passage West secondary school for the graduation ceremony.

Sixth year students Vlad Onyshchenko and Lena Frohlich bring the offertory gifts during the mass for the Leaving Cert graduation at St Peter's Community School in Passage West. Picture: David Creedon

The graduation was co-ordinated by a steering committee from sixth year students, but a lot of work was put into it by Maeve McGovern who is our school chaplain.

53 students graduated in total. As a school community it was so much more.

We had over 250 people in the school. All the family members were so proud of the students achievements.

The pride both I and all the staff in the school have in the graduating students is also immeasurable.

There was a lovely and celebratory atmosphere on the day.

There were tears shed, but this time they were happy ones. We as a school community are proud of all our graduates.

It wasnt a farewell. It was more of a goodbye for now because we look forward to following and supporting all our graduates on their future endeavours and celebrating all their future successes, he added.

Leaving Cert student Isabella Omoba sings during the mass at the Leaving Cert graduation in St Peter's Community School in Passage West. Picture: David Creedon

We had a wonderful post-graduation reception in the school, said Mr McSweeney.

One of our long serving ancillary staff members Siobhan Miller-Stone worked tirelessly with a group of fifth year students to prepare food and refreshments for all the graduates, their families, and staff. That is very reflective of the school community.

The PE Hall was transformed for the day into the reception area and our general-purpose area held the reception after the graduation ceremony and mass ceremony.

Mr McSweeney said this years Leaving Certificate class are great ambassadors for the school.

Sixth Year students, Baha Al Staif, Ava-Rose Ryan Jennifer Creedon, Year Tutor, Aine Hurley and Sean Long at the Leaving Cert graduation at St Peter's Community School in Passage West. Picture: David Creedon

While a large portion will elect to go to university, others will pursue alternative pathways such as apprenticeships.

We are very confident that they will have the knowledge, skills, and attributes to be successes in whatever aspects they choose to pursue afterwards.

They are great ambassadors for the school. We do look forward to watching them succeed in life.

While they are gone from school, they will always be a part of St Peters.

A graduation video was also made on the day and a copy has been emailed to every students family said the principal.

Marcia D'Alton gives the parents speech during the mass for the Leaving Cert graduation at St Peter's Community School in Passage West. Picture: David Creedon

We had different aspects to the graduation. We also had a welcome for the students and they got their final roll call by their year head.

Students also performed music pieces and songs as a group.

A graduation video was made by Olivia Walsh who is a past pupil and each family was emailed a copy of that video.

Mr McSweeney said he will miss this years Leaving Certificate students.

For me as a principal in my first year at St Peters Community School, it was a great honour to oversee the graduation of these students. I genuinely couldnt have wished for a better bunch.

I would have taught and been a year head previously to these students. I will miss them.
A man was struck with a pint glass in the back of the head during an altercation between groups drinking in Crosshaven.

Now this assailant has been warned that if he fails to gather compensation, he will be putting himself in jail for this and another assault carried out on the same night.

Sergeant Pat Lyons outlined the background to the assaults carried out by 22-year-old Jack OConnell of 11 Carrig Lawn, Waterpark, Carrigaline, Co Cork, almost two years ago.

Sgt Lyons said he was one of a number of people charged in relation to an incident late on September 7, 2021, in the public area outside Buckleys Bar, Lower Rd, Crosshaven, Co Cork, where there was an incident between two groups sitting at public seating.

During the evening, words were exchanged between the groups. Jack OConnell was not involved in this.

At a later stage, Jack OConnell reached over and hit a man in the back of the head with a glass which smashed off his head. Jack OConnell then started punching another man a number of times and knocked him to the ground and kicked him a number of times also. The parties dispersed but a short distance away the second injured party and Jack OConnell had another altercation where Jack OConnell struck him again.

The case had been adjourned for the accused to gather compensation but he came to court saying that he had been unable to raise any money for the injured parties.

Frank Buttimer, solicitor, said: He has tried but his circumstances are against him. He knows the injured parties. They are all from the same general area. There are no victim impact statements.

They decided not to make any victim statements. He has met and spoken to the injured parties and they have spoken to him  the accused apologised and there is no animus between the parties.

On the night there were some words and he considered the words to be threatening and directed at him. He accepts he made physical contact with the two parties. The most serious aspect is that he had a pint glass in his hand. It was not intentional  he swung his hand with the glass in it.

Judge Olann Kelleher said that because of the absence of similar convictions, he would put sentencing back for a probation report.

If he pays compensation I will take it into consideration. If there is no compensation, he will put himself in jail, Judge Kelleher said as he adjourned sentencing until September 26.
A man who sustained extensive burn and blast injuries in an industrial accident at a Stryker plant in Carrigtwohill in April has died in hospital.

It is understood that employees of Stryker in Cork were informed of the death of 41-year-old John Murphy this morning.

In their staff briefing, Stryker described Mr Murphy as "a friend to many and a valued colleague".

They offered their heartfelt condolences to the family of the deceased.

The family of Mr Murphy, contacted the Neil Prendeville show on Cork's Red FM in the aftermath of the incident in April.

They released a statement in which they said that they were writing with a "heavy heart" after their family received the "worst news" of an accident at the plant in Anngrove, Carrigtwohill.

"A close family member was the chap who was very seriously injured during the incident and he has sustained massive burns.

"Though I cannot divulge any specific personal information, I would like to ask the good people of Cork and beyond, for their heartfelt prayers.

"He is a kind, mild-mannered family man, 41 years old, with a loving wife, a baby, a young child and a stepson - who are his world.

"He was living the perfect life until 1 oclock, yesterday.

"His devoted parents, wife and siblings are devastated and keeping vigil at the hospital. He was in surgery until late last night and is on life support."

The statement added that they were "heartbroken" at this shocking turn of events.

The incident occurred at the premises of the medical equipment manufacturer in the east of the county at 1.09pm on April 18.

Two men suffered burns while working on the roof when a mini explosion occurred. John Murphy was seriously injured.

Three units of the Cork County Fire Service attended the scene alongside the emergency services and members of Stryker's trained fire fighting force. Gardai were also in attendance. They had received a 999 call in relation to the incident.

The Health and Safety Authority (HSA) is continuing to investigate the incident.

It is understood that workers were evacuated from the building. An inquest is expected to be heard later this year in relation to the tragedy.

Stryker, which employs around 4,000 people at six locations in Cork, established a base in Cork in 1998.

The US multinational medical company was named Cork company of the year in February of this year at a function in Cork City Hall.

Cork is a manufacturing, supply chain and R&D hub for Stryker.

Following the accident Stryker issued a statement in which it expressed its commitment to a "safe and healthy work environment at all of their facilities."

The company is working closely with the authorities to investigate the incident.

Two years ago the Irish Examiner revealed that six Stryker workers from three sites in East Cork made a protected disclosure to the HSA in 2020 in which they listed safety concerns.
A new Cork heritage portal has been launched encouraging the public to explore, contribute and to get involved with their existing local archives.

Cork County Council is the latest local authority to partner with the Irish Community Archive Network (iCAN), the leading organisation supporting community archives in Ireland.

The Heritage Council has announced it is iCANs new funding partner, which will facilitate an expansion of the iCAN team.

Since 2009, iCAN has supported the creation of 33 online digital archives, including in Cork.

Having joined the network last year and taken part in training over the last few months, the new portal for County Cork was unveiled on Wednesday.

The website www.heritagecork.org will be home to four digital community archives supported by iCAN: Bere Island Projects Group, Kilmurry Heritage Group, Kilshannig Heritage Society and Youghal Community Archives.

iCAN community archive websites are contributory, which means that anyone in the world can contribute their photos, maps, letters, records, stories and documents to help build the collections.

The archives are also a valuable source for genealogy and ancestry projects.

Helen Riddell, of the Bere Island Projects Group in Cork, said: Being on an island, we can be geographically isolated, but now that were a part of a larger network, its great to share our stories and our history."

Mayor of County Cork, Cllr Danny Collins said:

This website will be home to the four digital community archives in Cork that are part of the iCAN network which not only provides a secure and permanent online presence but also gives deserved recognition to the tremendous work being done by these groups to document and preserve their local heritage.

Members of the public are also invited to visit, contribute to and to volunteer with the digital archives, available at www.ouririshheritage.org.
A SMALL community with a big heart, Mahon is ready to welcome Ukrainian families into the first dedicated modular home development for refugees.

The site of 64 housing units at Ballinure Way is set to welcome families within the coming days, the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY) confirmed today.

The kitchen area in one of the Rapid Build Homes for housing Ukrainians at Mahon, Cork. Picture: David Keane.

The rapid-build housing programme was rolled out by the Government to provide accommodation for families fleeing the war in Ukraine. The programme aims to provide short-term accommodation to 2,000 Ukrainians at several sites across Ireland.

The living area in one of the Rapid Build Homes for housing Ukrainians at Mahon, Cork. Picture: David Keane.

Each site will have roads, footpaths, street lighting, and community facilities, including a play area and green spaces, in line with local authority planning guidance.

One of the bedrooms in one of the Rapid Build Homes for housing Ukrainians at Mahon, Cork. Picture: David Keane.

The rapid-build homes will be energy efficient and durable and the sites will be developed in a way that enhances the local area, with the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth providing for the management and maintenance of the homes and sites, it said.

The 64 units at the site in Mahon are the first completed of a total of 700 units that will house Ukrainian families.

One of the bedrooms in one of the Rapid Build Homes for housing Ukrainians at Mahon, Cork. Picture: David Keane.

Local resident and Foroige youth leader Michelle Buckley said the families, most of whom are already living in emergency accommodation in the area, will be welcomed into the community with open arms.

We have all the services for the youth that are coming here. We have youth clubs, we have girl guides, we have a community centre that runs bingo, theres the Mahon CDP who do a lot of activities and programmes as well; you have Mahon Rangers, and we are a very welcoming and open community, she said.

The bathroom of one of the Rapid Build Homes for housing Ukrainians at Mahon, Cork. Picture: David Keane.

A Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth spokesperson said families have been identified and will begin moving into their new homes in the coming days. They confirmed that the families will be moving from emergency accommodation in hotels and B&Bs locally and that those places that become available in emergency accommodation will, where necessary, be reused amid the continuing accommodation crisis.

Some of the Rapid Build Homes for housing Ukrainians at Mahon, Cork. Picture: David Keane.

These are going to be peoples homes and will be very much part of the local community, which is very important, that once we all move out of here this becomes a road just like any other, the spokesperson said.
A Galway man on a drinking session in Cork who was seen snooping around the car park of Mayfield Garda Station has said he did not know where he was and only wanted a taxi.

Justin Mulhall, of Boireann Bheag, Roscam, Co Galway, pleaded guilty to being drunk and a danger, but denied the charge of trespassing with intent to commit an offence.

Garda Dermot Broughton went out to get his lunchbox from his car at 3.30am that morning and was surprised to see the young man snooping between two parked cars. He said he was crouched down at the time.

Gda Broughton said there is a barrier by the car park, and it is clearly a private area.

He offered no excuse for being there, Gda Broughton said during this contested part of the case at Cork District Court.

Frank Buttimer, solicitor, said the accused had been on a drinking session and he was approaching a state of senseless intoxication.

The 21-year-old said he had not taken a drink for two and a half years but went drinking that night  St Patricks Night 2022.

He said: I kept walking and walking and walking. I ended up in a garda station. I saw lights, I saw cars.

"I definitely dont remember trying to run away. I had never been to Mayfield in my life. I just wanted to get home. I had no reason to be in Mayfield Garda Station. It is pretty straightforward, like.

Judge Olann Kelleher said: I find the guards evidence scrupulously fair. The inference is that he was interfering with cars. It is an unusual case. I will give him the benefit of the doubt.

Judge Kelleher dismissed the trespassing charge. On the count of being drunk and a danger  to which Mulhall pleaded guilty  the judge fined him 300.
Housing and public transport, including Corks proposed light rail system, topped the agenda at a meeting between Cork Chamber of Commerce and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar during a visit to Cork on Friday.

The focus of the meeting was to identify solutions that would enable Cork to deliver housing for its growing population and employment base.

We held a very constructive meeting with An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar TD, at which we brought together representatives from our diverse membership, who shared their experiences, said Ronan Murray, Cork Chamber President. Cork is in a very positive place but to remain competitive and ensure continued economic growth, areas such as housing, infrastructure and public transport need continued collective investment and focus.

"We welcome the Governments support to date in these areas, and following the meeting we are hopeful further necessary supports will be put in place to increase housing supply."

Conor Healy, CEO of Cork Chamber, said housing remains the 'number one priority' for businesses as an economic enabler.

Viability of apartment construction has been highlighted in our reports as a key barrier to economic growth and we have again called on Government to consider targeted and time-bound tax-based measures including accelerated capital allowances and VAT reductions to make high density and brownfield development viable in line with international best practice," he said. Previous steps by government are welcome but we need to see a step change, and quickly, in order to relieve some of the pressure in the market.

We also highlighted the need to increase the income threshold for the cost-rental scheme to allow more people to access it.

"In addition, we have asked government to revisit the qualifying criteria for the Croi Conaithe Cities scheme, specifically to remove the 100 per cent owner occupier condition to encourage investment and increase rental availability.

The acceleration of the timeline for delivery of Cork Light Rail was also raised with the Taoiseach.

Foreign direct investment and talent attraction are dependent on an efficient high functioning city, in order to achieve this we have to aim to provide the same offering as other major European cities," Mr Healy said. There is potential to accelerate the delivery timeline of Cork Light Rail and this will also prove crucial in meeting our climate targets. We spoke to the Taoiseach about the necessity to shorten the current projected timelines for the project.

Other items at Fridays meeting included energy security and renewables deployment, and Corks climate neutral journey to 2030.
THE Dursey Island Cable Car, the only cable car in Europe that crosses open seawater, has officially reopened after an extensive 1.6m upgrade.

The old cable car was taken out of use in March 2022 following storm damage and an interim ferry service was provided in its place. It was initially planned that the old cable car would be out of use for nine months, but, due to delays in reparation works, the cable car was out of use for 15 months.

The reopening of the service yesterday was welcomed by both locals and tourists.

Farmer Denis Healy who has livestock on the island was born on Dursey and now lives in Castletownbere. While repair works were under way, he used his own boat to access the island.

It was tricky at times; very tricky. But today is something special. Its like a new lease of life. We can come and go any day now.

Visiting tourists from London, Harry Mugglestone and partner Harriott Marchant and newborn baby Joseph, were among the attendees waiting to take a trip across to the island.

We are taking a three-week trip around the south coast of Ireland, and we heard the cable car was opening today and we were excited to come along and get over to the island if possible, said Harry.

We realise it was not accessible for a long period, this is obviously one of the most westerly points you can get to, so we are very excited.

The cable car, located on the Beara Peninsula, West Cork, was originally opened on December 5, 1969, by then Taoiseach Jack Lynch. The service was established in support of islanders who often faced isolation during inclement weather conditions due to the hazardous tidal race in the Dursey Sound.

Independent councillor Danny Collins, the mayor of Co Cork, said: The Dursey Island Cable Car is truly unique and holds immense historical and cultural significance for the people of Cork county.

"I am delighted to reopen the cable car which ensures the safety and accessibility of this iconic landmark.

This service is not only an important transport link, but also a cherished attraction that adds to the natural beauty and tourism potential of our region.
Boris Johnson is resigning as a British MP after accusing a Commons investigation into whether he misled parliament over partygate of attempting to drive me out.

The former British prime minister, in a statement to the media, compared the Privileges Committee probe to a kangaroo court as he announced his intention to step down as MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip.

He said, after receiving a letter from the committee, he believed it was determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of Parliament.

It is very sad to be leaving Parliament  at least for now  but above all I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out, anti-democratically, by a committee chaired and managed, by Harriet Harman, with such egregious bias, he said.
A SMALL idea can make a big difference. This is a common theme which has been running through this series on the female winners of the Sprint Awards at UCC.

This is certainly true of Shivani Pathanias innovative idea. It involves a seemingly tiny change in packaging, but has the potential to both enhance the productivity and reduce the waste of small and medium scale food businesses in Ireland.

Dr Pathanias life story carries a similar message. Throughout our chat she emphasises how the daily support of her family, the small nudges of encouragement, helped her to do big things. She credits her childhood family, and later her husband Puneet Parmar, for her capacity to carry out innovative work in creating cleaner, greener food packaging.

Trailblazer

The impressive researcher grew up in a small village in India, where she completed a Masters and Ph.D in food science before moving to Europe.

There were no independent women where I grew up, but my family gave me the freedom to study whatever I wanted to study and take ownership of my decisions, she said.

I am where I am today because my family supported me. And then my husband supported me. My father has passed away, but I like to think he would be very proud of me today.

Dr Pathania first landed in Portugal, working as a post doc researcher, before finding herself in Teagasc at the Dairy Processing Technology Centre in Moorepark.

Since March, 2018, she has worked in the Food Industry Development department in Teagasc. Working with food businesses has had a huge impact on her and guides her current research.

In this role, because Im engaging with industries, more than 100 consumer industries, I identified a gap in the market. I could see that small and medium food businesses face a huge issue with food waste and that packaging solutions at that scale werent as good, as efficient or affordable as it should be. Thats where my idea came from, just observing the realities on the ground.

More than 90% of the food businesses in Ireland are small and medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), and, as Dr Pathania discovered, they face multiple challenges such as food waste reduction, operational efficiency, and production automation. Some 68% of SMEs are working towards reducing packaging use.

She knew that packaging could be better and soon came up with a clean, green packaging technology that could provide an eco-friendly, sustainable packaging solution for gas-flushed ready-to-eat/heated (RTE/RTH) products.

She tells me that it is the size of a microwave to which a gas cylinder can be attached. It is user-friendly; a couple of pushes of buttons and the job is done.

Our semi-automatic machine features a novel nozzle design that can introduce modified atmosphere (MA) into the plastic pots, preserving and extending the shelf life of the food products, without the use of plastic film/sleeve.

To us common consumers, it is a simple change. Lets say we buy a small tub of hummus. Well, instead of removing a lid and then a sleeve, we would only remove the lid. But this small difference makes packaging far easier and less wasteful.

Smaller companies in particular currently use the plastic film to seal in a gas mix to preserve the product. Dr Pathanias technology means the gas mix can be created without the sleeve. It is chemical-free, sustainable and still extends the shelf life of the product.

Next Steps

Having conceived the idea, Dr Pathania began by looking for an engineer to turn it into a reality.

Ciara McDonagh and Miriam Walsh at Teagasc encouraged her to apply for a Start Fund award to develop the technology. Miriam was also the person to put her in touch with Myriam Cronin and the UCC Sprint programme.

Miriam Walsh recognised that I was in a great position. I was in contact with industry but I also have a research background. She recognised the potential for a business in what I was doing.

The SPRINT programme completely changed my mind-set in terms of business. A huge thanks to Myriam Cronin that I now understand the value of pitching. She identified my needs and offered valuable suggestions throughout the Sprint journey.

I know what lies ahead and I am aware of it. During the programme we got access to a lot of entrepreneurs and they helped us to understand the journey. I know now that it is difficult but you still have to keep going. You have to do it.

She explains that, although she worked with people in the food industry before, that work was about helping them with the technological side of things. SPRINT offered her a whole other insight.

Following the programme, she now feels she has a firm grasp of the whole life cycle of a product, and how a company functions best on a business level.

I used to help companies identify technology to develop product to scale and to eliminate any technological hindrances. My help was always technical, not business orientated. But now I understand the complete picture, what they go through overall.

This has had a wonderful effect on her.

I feel more confident. I feel more informed. The first time when I was asked to give a statement about my product I struggled. But now there is a huge contrast. Academia is so different because you must give every single detail and really look very intensively at everything.

In business, you also have to cover everything, but you only have a sentence or two in which to grab peoples attention.

What is key, says the astute academic and businessperson, is not to bore anyone, to generate their interest.

Research and Technology

Dr Pathania is keen to explain the product in more detail and to elaborate on just how significant a change it could bring about in the industry. My technology will gas flush the product. This means putting a modified atmosphere into the product, preserving and extending the life of the product.

The advantage, she highlights, is that this technology is not usually available to small companies.

Food waste is a huge problem, there is so much methane from food waste. My technology reduces food waste, reduces plastic waste. Most companies use a plastic sleeve to modify the atmosphere. I dont use a sleeve, I use the lid itself.

The fact that the gas mix is chemical-free means that the air can go back to the environment. The technology offers a solution that addresses these issues and aligns with the United Nations Sustainability Development Goal 12 and EU plastic Strategy on zero landfill waste by 2025.

Future Plans

Dr Pathania plans to target the Irish market first. She will then look to the global market. She is certain that her home country will also benefit from the technology  even more so, in fact.

Convenience food is gaining momentum in India, but due to the temperatures, the shelf life is shorter there than in Ireland. Anything that can extend shelf life whilst being chemical-free is going to be welcomed there.

She hopes it will be on the market in Ireland in two to three years.

At the very end of our chat, Dr Pathania returns to the importance of family in everything she does. This time round she wants to mention her daughter.

My daughter made me realise I am stronger than I ever thought I was. Our daughter was born during Covid times, we never imagined that we would be able to raise a child without family support. Our daughter has truly transformed us into proud and dedicated parents.
Since ChatGPT took the world by storm this year, other forms of AI creeping into popularity seem to have been slightly forgotten. However, AI and automation capabilities will become even more essential in retail.

McKinsey in 2017 found that only 20% of organizations reported using AI in their businesses, but by 2022, that amount more than doubled. The World Economic Forum this year said that AI services in the retail sector are predicted to increase from $5 billion to above $31 billion by 2028.

AI is becoming more necessary just to stay competitive in the retail industry. AI in retail involves using automation, data, and technologies such as machine learning (ML) algorithms to deliver highly personalized shopping experiences to consumers. One of AI technologys significant uses is self-checkout innovation, where offering a secure scanning method also helps prevent shoplifting.

These AI retail platforms can run without human assistance to give customers more control over their shopping process. As a loss prevention incentive, new systems with AI authentication will be used to log data on suspicious shoplifters.

A Key Ingredient for Modern Retail Success

E-commerce merchandising teams also have their hands full, trying to keep up with the demands of modern digital merchandising. Using AI to automate manual tasks will be a big time-saver.

Artificial intelligence will also become a competitive advantage. AI can provide data-backed insights to support more effective product recommendations, omnichannel engagement strategies, and long-term business goals.

But OpenAIs ChatGPT code is not the only tool for retailers to consider. ChatGPT does not make other forms of AI unnecessary, according to Eli Finkelshteyn, co-founder and CEO of Constructor, a product search and discovery platform for retail companies. Contrary to growing public opinion, ChatGPT is not totally pushing other forms of AI out of the way.

If you ask ChatGPT itself, you will receive the same response. A good analogy is thinking about how often you want to speak to a store associate in a physical store. ChatGPT creates this type of back-and-forth dialogue online, Finkelshteyn told the E-Commerce Times.

Balancing AI Tools for Detailed Product Discovery

Definitely, there are situations when talking to an associate online proves useful and appropriate. However, he offered, its not necessary for every product you intend to buy. When you are shopping online, if you know exactly what you are looking for, search is still  and will remain  a better tool, he argued.

If you just want to browse an aisle digitally and see the different shirts, electronics, or snacks a retailer carries, a category page is still a better tool. However, some amount of the time, maybe 5% to 10%, you would like to speak to an expert store associate and explain to them in detail what you are looking for.

This is where ChatGPT can do a much better job for e-commerce than anything we have available today, he admitted. That is when understanding your long-form query, answering your questions, and helping you find what you need can close the deal.

Leveraging AI for Customized Shopping Experiences

AI can rank and personalize search results based on what it knows about trends in the product catalog, and it can tap into what it knows about a shopper from that persons behavior on their site and across the brands other channels.

So when someone searches for shirts, for instance, the results could prioritize shirts in the shoppers favorite brands and colors and at their preferred price points. It does that while also optimizing for the retailers KPIs, such as revenue, conversions, and profit.

For instance, Constructors platform uses AI and machine learning to glean details from every user query. It also can include the feedback given to the system after the query via interactions with results, hundreds of millions of times each day, to continually refine results and experiences like these, according to Finkelshteyn.

A Conversation on AIs Role in E-Commerce

The E-Commerce Times asked Eli Finkelshteyn to discuss what e-commerce companies can expect from AI in the next few years. He also knows what traps retailers should avoid when considering AI.

E-Commerce Times: How else can these other AI options continue to succeed in the shadows of ChatGPT?

Eli Finkelshteyn: As amazing as ChatGPT is, it is not meant to be the best tool for every AI problem. For example, it is not the best tool for areas like returning large sets of results and filters like in a typical e-commerce search.

Also, it is not the best tool for appropriately using site traffic and clickstream [behavioral] data to rank all of those results, or properly learning from an e-commerce sites specific user base and clickstream data to determine how rankings should change over time or be personalized to a particular shopper. That makes sense because these are not problems ChatGPT is trying to solve.

Instead, these are use cases where clickstream-based AI trained on an e-commerce sites own traffic will continue to be a much better fit so retailers can improve the shopper journey and create cohesive omnichannel experiences.

What can retailers expect as the two sides of AI continue to progress?

Finkelshteyn: They both promise an exciting future. With ChatGPT and existing forms of especially clickstream-based AI comes the new possibilities of combining them to make incredible new user interfaces and experiences.

For example, if you need to explain on an e-commerce website that you are looking for products for a specific purpose or event  like clothes to wear for your friends engagement party or ingredients to make a casserole  that is currently difficult. The available forms of product discovery, such as searching and browsing category pages, do not provide a great way to ask about and look for this sort of thing.

But incorporating ChatGPT to help retailers understand shoppers quests in this long-form and abstract asks will bring innovations. Using clickstream-based product discovery AI to show trending, personalized results that fit the users needs is an exciting proposition.

How have the popularity or technological advances of ChatGPT impacted Constructors product search and discovery platform for retail companies?

Finkelshteyn: Generally speaking, everyone is still trying to figure out ChatGPTs place within e-commerce. Finding the right use cases and interfaces requires experimentation and flexibility. In particular, it is also essential to ensure that the ChatGPT-based technologies you roll out to users are genuinely helpful.

What is Constructor doing to advance such innovations?

Finkelshteyn: We offer an AI-based platform for product search and discovery to help retailers deliver highly personalized experiences across channels that also reflect their KPIs. The impact of ChatGPT on our work at Constructor is that many of our retail partners are excited to try our prototypes in this space and are willing to devote development resources to integrating them faster than for previous new technologies we rolled out.

Our company believed for years that product discovery can be much better than what shoppers are currently used to getting. ChatGPT is making retailers even more open to experimenting with new forms of product discovery and seeing which their shoppers most appreciate.

With all of this experimentation, how can retailers keep real utility for the shopper in mind?

Finkelshteyn: Unfortunately, many of the efforts we see so far in the space  integrating ChatGPT with other retail technologies  have been gimmicks. They look cool the first time you play with them but are useless to the shopper.

One company rolled out a chatbot that uses ChatGPT, but it basically just pushes the user to phrase their need in the form of a search and then searches for the product. It is actually less useful than just using a search bar. It does not provide real value, and so the sites that implement it will likely see shoppers try it once or twice and then not return to it again.

ChatGPT and the energy around it are giving all of us in the product discovery space the opportunity to revolutionize how people find products with new interfaces and technologies. Our goal at Constructor is to use that energy and excitement to create technology shoppers will want to use again and again and not waste the excitement on gimmicks shoppers will only try once.

What can e-commerce companies expect from AI in the next few years?

Finkelshteyn: Expect a lot of experimentation. ChatGPT and, generally speaking, the technologies behind it  transformers and large language models (LLMs)  make a lot possible that was not possible previously. But just because something is possible does not necessarily mean it is valuable for an e-commerce company or its shoppers.

So, expect experimentation to find the most valuable places to apply this new technology. At Constructor, were already using it underneath the hood to make the results returned to users more contextually aware and attractive to them. But this is still just scratching the surface.

What should retailers consider when implementing AI tools, and what traps should they avoid?

Finkelshteyn: Above all else, make sure what you are doing has the potential to be valuable enough to you and your shoppers to be worth it. There are already a ton of gimmicks built around ChatGPT that will fizzle out, and there will be more.

So, think carefully about the value that ChatGPT and other AI-based technologies can bring before you commit. Think, too, about the problems and pain points you are looking to solve.

These might be things like connecting data across channels, reducing manual work involved in merchandising tasks, decreasing search abandonment, etc. Consider your best use cases for AI.

Where can ChatGPT add value, and where can clickstream-based AI be a better fit? And where might something other than AI, like an intuitive tool for merchandisers and business users, be more appropriate?

Valuable tech in this space will arrive. But also expect to see far more so-called innovations that look cool but are not helpful enough to move the needle or be worth the effort. Those retailers who can spot the difference will be the most successful.

What issues do you see with safety or ethical concerns related to the increased use of AI? For instance, several European countries recently banned using ChatGPT.

Finkelshteyn: Some forms of artificial intelligence, such as conversational AI, can lie and deceive confidently. The advance of generative AI, including AI used in deepfakes, is already making it harder and harder for people to believe their eyes and ears, and this is only going to become a bigger problem as technology improves.

Should governments be more involved in monitoring AI technology?

Finkelshteyn: Governments cannot and should not rely on AI companies to legislate themselves, and they should act to protect and educate their citizens as best they can. It is critical that those of us in positions of power at companies at the forefront of AI do the right thing and act ethically in our use of AI. But it is also very reasonable for governments to make sure that happens.

How might government intervention affect the future development of AI?

Finkelshteyn: The flip side of this is that we live in a globalized world where the internet is accessible to billions of people across almost every country. That makes AI difficult to police. If a government slows down the AI research done by companies under its jurisdiction, that may help protect its citizens in the short term but hurt them in the long run.

Companies in countries that fail to make the same decisions will get a head start and a significant advantage because of how rapid advances in AI have been coming. We are all still connected to the internet. AI developed in less scrupulous places will still affect people the world over.

Finding the right balance will be an important challenge for world leaders and one I hope our leaders are up to. In the meantime, for those of us leading AI companies, I recommend constantly examining what were working on, ensuring its ethical, and pushing our peers to do the same.

Editors note: For a further discussion on the issues related to regulating or pausing Ai development, see The AI Revolution Is at a Tipping Point.
Nominations open for The King's Award for Voluntary Service 2024

Nominations have opened for The Kings Award for Voluntary Service (KAVS) for 2024.

Sometimes described as the MBE for Volunteer Groups, the award is for exceptional groups of volunteers who are making a positive impact in their local community and benefiting others through their work.

Created in 2002 to celebrate the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II Coronation, it is the highest award given to volunteer groups and is awarded for life. Any volunteer-led group undertaking work in their local community can be nominated; however, they must meet some basic criteria:

Be made up of three or more people

Be based in the UK, Channel Islands or the Isle of Man

Have been in operation for at least three years before nomination

Have over half its volunteers eligible to reside in the UK

Be led by volunteers, not by paid staff

Provide specific and direct benefit to the local community

All nominations must be submitted through the KAVS website. Nominators must be independent from the group and the nomination form must not be written or submitted by a volunteer, employee or trustee or anyone involved with the running of the group. Nominations should be submitted with two letters of support.



Volunteer groups on the Island who have received the award in recent years include Manx Breast Cancer Support Group (2019), Friends of Nobles Hospital (2011), Southern Befrienders and Live at Home (2010), Isle of Man Anti-Cancer Association (2009) and Breast Cancer Now (2008).
The US Department of Justice announced today that it charged two Russian nationals for crimes related to the 2011 hacking of Mt. Gox, the now-defunct crypto exchange that was one of the worlds largest at the time. Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner are accused in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) of laundering about 647,000 bitcoins connected to the heist. In addition, Bilyuchenko faces separate charges in the Northern District of California (NDCA) related to running the infamous Russian crypto exchange BTC-e.

The pair are being charged in SDNY for conspiracy to commit money laundering. Meanwhile, the NDCA charges are for conspiracy to commit money laundering and operating an unlicensed money services business. The SDNY charges carry a maximum sentencing of 20 years for each defendant, while Bilyuchenko faces a maximum of 25 years in prison in the NDCA indictment.

The DOJ says Bilyuchenko, Verner and co-conspirators gained access to the server storing Mt. Goxs crypto wallets in or about September 2011. Once they infiltrated the servers, the pair and their partners allegedly initiated the transfer of customers bitcoins to accounts they controlled. In addition, theyre accused of laundering the stolen bitcoins to accounts on other crypto exchanges also controlled by the group.

The conspirators allegedly negotiated and entered into a fraudulent advertising contract with a New York bitcoin brokerage service, a relationship they used to request regular transfers to various offshore bank accounts, including in the names of shell corporations, controlled by Bilyuchenko, Verner, and their co-conspirators. The DOJ says the group transferred over $6.6 million from March 2012 to April 2013.

This announcement marks an important milestone in two major cryptocurrency investigations, said US Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. As alleged in the indictments, starting in 2011, Bilyuchenko and Verner stole a massive amount of cryptocurrency from Mt. Gox, contributing to the exchanges ultimate insolvency. Armed with the ill-gotten gains from Mt. Gox, Bilyuchenko allegedly went on to help set up the notorious BTC-e virtual currency exchange, which laundered funds for cyber criminals worldwide. These indictments highlight the departments unwavering commitment to bring to justice bad actors in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and prevent the abuse of the financial system.
Logitech is getting rid of the Blue microphone brand, and will now sell the products under the Logitech G gaming brand  only keeping the Blue name to "describe our technologies," it said. Blue has been removed from Logitech's "brands" section on its website, and the Bluemic.com domain now directs to Logitech. All Blue products, including the Yeti, Snowball and others, are now found only on the Logitech G section of its website.

The company has also moved its Astro high-end gaming headsets, mixers and more over to Logitech G, but will keep that brand, The Verge reported. "The Astro brand will continue to live on as a premium console audio product series underneath the Logitech G brand. Stay tuned for more information regarding ASTRO including a launch that we think our community will be very excited about," the company said in a FAQ on Reddit.

 gamers and creators! We have an update on our upcoming brand merger between Logitech G, @ASTROGaming, @BlueMicrophones and @logitechc! pic.twitter.com/qPPT36sJr6  Logitech G (@LogitechG) June 8, 2023

Logitech already hinted that it might scuttle the Blue brand, having released the Blue Sona streaming mic under Logitech G late last year. It also changed its description of the Yeti mic a while back, describing it as the Yeti microphone with Blue VO!CE technology.

Logitech purchased Blue in 2018 for $117 million. However, Blue Microphones has a history beyond what you may expect, having originally created the "Bottle" microphone before ever developing any streaming products (Blue also stands for "Baltic Latvian Universal Electronics," according to Wikipedia). Its first microphone designed for streaming audio was the Snowball, still available on Logitech as the Snowball Ice for $50.

Given that the Blue brand is highly respected in podcasting, streaming and other areas, it seems an odd choice to kill it off in favor of its own brand, which has far less cachet. The company is promising a "deeper integration" with all its Logitech G products, promising that you'll be able to configure them "all in one place," presumably its G HUB app. If that's the plan, then Logitech may need to address criticism with that app, if the comments on its Reddit FAQ post are anything to go by.

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The DeSantis campaign used AI-generated images to attack Trump It shows how candidates could use AI as a tool to attack each other at next year's presidential elections.

The 2024 US Presidential race is heating up, and the candidates along with their supporters have a new weapon at their disposal: Artificial intelligence tools, which can easily generate realistic images and voices. As Semafor reports, the DeSantis War Room has shared images showing Donald Trump embracing Dr. Anthony Fauci, who became a controversial figure to conservatives following the COVID-19 pandemic. The short clip compares Trump as a reality TV star firing people in The Apprentice with the "real life Trump" who apparently refused to fire the doctor.

While the video was marked on Twitter with a warning that says three of the still shots showing Trump embracing Fauci are "AI generated images," some people could believe they were real. DeSantis' camp didn't deny that they weren't real photos, but it didn't explicitly say that either. Someone familiar with DeSantis' political campaign told Semafor that the video was a "social media post" and not an ad, though it's unclear if that's the reason why the images were not clearly marked as computer-generated.

The DeSantis camp isn't the only group using AI-generated images this election, though. When President Joe Biden officially announced his re-election bid, the Republican National Committee (RNC) released video ads created entirely using artificial intelligence. The video shows Biden and Kamala Harris at a victory party followed by several domestic and international incidents the RNC says might happen if they win. Donald Trump, Jr. also reportedly shared a video swapping DeSantis' face and voice over a scene from The Office in the past. Meanwhile, former President Trump shared a video mocking DeSantis' Twitter Spaces launch with AI voices that featured figures, such as Adolf Hitler. Clearly, Americans will be bombarded with AI-generated images and voices this election, and it's up to them to figure out what's real and what's not.
(Informacion remitida por la empresa firmante)

LONDON, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Comac Medical (Comac or the Company) announced today that funds advised by EdgeCap Partners (EdgeCap) acquired a majority equity interest in the Company. Comac's founder and CEO, Dr. Milen Vrabevski, as well as other shareholders, retain a significant minority stake and will continue in their current roles as executive managers, thereby providing continuity to all its clients and partners.

Headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria, and established in 1997, Comac Medical is the leading full-service clinical research organisation (CRO) in Southern Eastern Europe, present in more than 30 countries and providing a comprehensive range of early to late-phase drug development services to the global pharmaceutical and biotech industries across a variety of therapeutic areas.

Chris Backes, EdgeCap's co-founder, said: "We are excited to invest in Comac Medical, which over the past 25 years has grown under Milen's leadership into an outstanding business that customers overwhelmingly praise for its quality of service, deep medical expertise in early phase clinical development as well as its speed and agility, specifically with regards to patient recruitment across therapeutic areas and rare indications. We think Comac is uniquely positioned to capitalise on the CRO market's favourable growth prospects and untapped potential."

Kristjan Piilmann, EdgeCap's co-founder, said: "Our investment in Comac reflects EdgeCap's thematic focus on the healthcare & life sciences industry, as well as our commitment to partner with exceptional founders and management teams. We look forward to working alongside Milen and his team to accelerate the Company's growth organically and to drive consolidation in the CRO space via a targeted buy-and-build strategy."

Dr. Milen Vrabevski, Comac Medical's founder, said: "This transaction is a significant milestone for Comac Medical and its over 350 employees who contribute to our success daily. To continue our strong growth trajectory in the years to come and to meet our customers' needs, we are looking to significantly expand operations while preserving our unique culture that has served as the foundation of our success. EdgeCap supports this vision and is committed to investing significant resources to capitalise on an exciting opportunity ahead. I am thrilled to start this next chapter in our journey and partner with Kristjan and Chris as we work towards the growth and success of Comac Medical."

The transaction has been completed in June 2023. Kristjan Piilmann, Chris Backes, and Dr. Gunter Schmid, Senior Operating Partner for EdgeCap, will join Comac's Board of Directors.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

WOLF THEISS provided legal counsel to EdgeCap, and Kingsley Napley LLP provided legal counsel to the shareholders of Comac Medical in connection with the transaction. Deloitte LLP conducted financial and tax due diligence, and Health Advances LLC conducted commercial due diligence for EdgeCap.

About Comac Medical

Comac Medical, established in 1997 in Sofia, Bulgaria, is one of the largest full-service clinical research organisations (CRO) in South-Eastern Europe, present in more than 30 countries, providing a comprehensive range of early to late-phase drug development services to the global pharmaceutical and biotech industries across a variety of therapeutic areas with a differentiated expertise and track record for indications within oncology, dermatology, gastroenterology, and respiratory diseases.

The Company has a global customer base consisting of emerging biotech and established pharmaceutical companies, offering full outsourced clinical trial support across the entire clinical development timeline. Comac Medical's FDA and EMA-inspected Clinical Research Unit (CRU) for Phase I, Bioavailability and Bioequivalence studies has 18 years of experience in early phase clinical research and counting over 260 completed clinical trials to date. The facility is the largest in the region and comprises 42 beds, an on-site pharmacy as well as a clinical and bioanalytical laboratory.

Visit our company website.

About EdgeCap Partners

EdgeCap is a London- and Tallinn-based private equity and growth capital firm focused on investing in high-quality European mid-market companies. Founded by Kristjan Piilmann and Chris Backes, EdgeCap is backed by family capital and seeks to deploy between EUR 10-100 million per investment.

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View original content: https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/edgecap-acquires-majority-stake-in-comac-medical-founder-and-management-retain-significant-minority-interest-301847039.html
Officials warned residents to limit outdoor activities Thursday as a thick, hazardous haze of wildfire smoke loomed over daily life for millions of people across the U.S. and Canada for a third day and was expected to persist into the weekend.
US electric car manufacturer Tesla is in talks with the leaders of the regional government of Valencia in Spain to build a car factory, sources said.
You have spent over two decades working with agencies and corporates. Tell us about your journey - the challenges you overcame and the lessons you have learnt along the way.

I started my career with such award-winning international agencies as Leo Burnett and Impact BBDO. I then moved to the client side, bringing agency-level expertise into my work in marketing and corporate communication. Along the way, I gained experience across multiple industries, including energy, manufacturing, automotive, airlines, banking, FMCGs, F&B, construction and retail. This versatile background led me to become a nimble marketer; someone who can quickly assess the status quo and project a vision of an achievable future.

The journey has had its peaks and troughs, with a lot of lessons learnt. The challenge you face in this field is coming to terms with the accelerated change in customer sentiment and behaviour. The COVID pandemic accelerated digital transformation for most industries which meant marketers found themselves in an urgent need to digitise and revisit their entire journey mapping.

From the media standpoint, India is a progressive market, and our understanding is that the UAE is still a controlled market. What have been your learning and / experiences there?

Its not a question of progressive versus controlled but rather a question of cultural diversity and differing values. And contrary to what is believed, the UAE is a liberal market when it comes to customer communications. The UAE is home to over 200 nationalities, all which come with their own unique shopping behavior, languages and cultural nuances. Of course, this is in addition to the UAEs own nationals. We are free to communicate and market to all these groups, provided that our communications are honest, not misleading, and respects all the cultural differences and the overall UAE culture. This ends up with us communicating our campaigns more tactically to the different groups - while ensuring that our message is the same  in order to appeal to the different demographics.

And this approach works. The UAE is currently hosts the most winning agencies in the Middle East  a testament of how we, as marketers, are able to adapt to market subtleties.

What inspired you to write Marketing and Communications on the Job?

There are numerous books on marketing in every library and bookstore in the world, and they all have one thing in common  they are filled with theories that sound good on paper but cannot be implemented by everyone. Many of these books are authored by university professors or chief marketing officers of the world's largest and most prestigious brands. They derive insights from best-in-class companies in an admirable manner, but their points may not be applicable to the remaining 90 per cent of businesses, which lack the resources and time to create case studies on award-winning work. This book is not a work of literature; rather, it is a practical guide with tried-and-true frameworks and checklists that can assist any business in conducting marketing on a holistic scale.

Let's acknowledge a universal truth  economies all over the world are driven by SMEs and small businesses, the majority of which lack sophisticated marketing departments and rely heavily on market knowledge to decipher their own disciplines. This book makes marketing and corporate communications accessible to these small business owners, CEOs and other executives transitioning into marketing from sales or another field.

You are an advocate of health and financial literacy. What steps have you taken to support these social causes?

I believe that these are more than social causes; but rather, personal imperatives. The world around us is fluid and quickly changing, and that changing world will not change for us, but rather, we have to adapt for the change. That is why Ive been a strong proponent of both physical and mental health  something I strongly advocate within my own peer groups  as only through building these strengths can we adapt  and address  real-world dynamism. It is similar with financial literacy. As a single mother, the oneness of taking care of my children has fallen solely on me. With economic uncertainty, is crucial that we take it upon ourselves to understand the markets and wealth-creating opportunities. The average financial literacy rate in the UAE hovers around 30 per cent, according to recent reports; women in the country fall lower. This proved to be a driver for me to understand the financial world  a topic, that again, I advocate within my professional and personal peer groups.

Tell us about your participation at the IPRCCC.

During my participation at the IPRCCC, I had a chance to speak about the indivisible forces that shape the journey of a marketer. For me, it was curiosity and owning your own script. It is high time for marketers to be free to explore all fields on the spectrum of marcomms. I also touched upon the liberty to grow in many disciplines at once, for example, you can excel at the comms game while you build great skills in lead generation. It is okay to experiment with multiple industries and learn new segments. With every new experience, you open up to a collective of possibilities.
From: Peggy Sealfon -- Mind Body Fitness For Life Naples-Marco Island , FL Friday, June 9, 2023



Personal Development Coach Peggy Sealfon Video Clip: Click to Watch In the fast-paced and demanding world of work, fostering a positive and unified workplace culture is crucial for organizational success. One element at the heart of cultivating such a culture is the practice of gratitude, which not only enhances employee satisfaction but also stimulates creativity and improves overall productivity. Recognizing the significance of gratitude in the workplace, renowned wellness expert Peggy Sealfon incorporates strategies into her transformative Mind Body Fitness for Life Program. This comprehensive program offers practical skill-building that integrates gratitude into the workplace, ultimately leading to increased unity, personal fulfillment, and enhanced productivity. As a starting point on this transformative journey, Peggy Sealfon is offering a free gratitude meditation to individuals seeking to develop a personally positive mindset and experience the many expansive benefits of gratitude. Gratitude has been scientifically proven to yield numerous benefits, including reduced stress, improved mental well-being, and stronger interpersonal connections. By embracing gratitude in the workplace, organizations can create an atmosphere of appreciation that significantly enhances employee engagement, motivation, and overall job satisfaction. Peggy Sealfon's Mind Body Fitness for Life Program empowers businesses to instigate positive changes in their workplace culture. This integrative program combines mindfulness techniques, stress reduction strategies, healthy lifestyle choices, physical exercises, and gratitude experiences to promote well-being, personal fulfillment, and increase productivity among employees. "Gratitude is a powerful practice that can transform the workplace environment and positively impact both individuals and teams," says Peggy Sealfon. "By consciously integrating gratitude into daily routines, businesses create an environment where employees feel valued, motivated, and inspired to contribute their best." Here are a few key reasons why gratitude belongs in the workplace: Increased Employee Happiness: Expressing gratitude towards employees acknowledges their efforts and contributions, making them feel valued and appreciated. This boosts overall job satisfaction, leading to higher levels of happiness and motivation. Enhanced Team Dynamics: Gratitude helps build strong relationships and promotes a sense of camaraderie among team members. When employees feel appreciated, they are more likely to support and collaborate with one another, leading to better teamwork and cooperation. Improved Employee Engagement: Cultivating a culture of gratitude encourages employees to actively participate and engage in their work. They feel more connected to the organization's mission and are motivated to go the extra mile to achieve shared goals. Stimulated Creativity and Innovation: Gratitude creates an open and positive mindset, which is conducive to creativity and innovation. When employees feel appreciated, they are more willing to share ideas, take risks, and think outside the box. Implementing the Mind Body Fitness for Life Program not only fosters gratitude for employees but also enhances individual self-awareness and purposeful commitment to improving personal lives as well as the work environment. When staff members feel happier and more fulfilled, companies prosper. As part of this initiative, Peggy Sealfon is providing individuals with a complimentary gratitude meditation. This guided meditation serves as a valuable starting point for individuals to develop a positive mental attitude and experience the numerous benefits associated with this transformative practice. To access the free gratitude meditation, please visit https://www.peggysealfon.com/Gratitude_Meditation.php To learn more about Peggy Sealfon's Mind Body Fitness for Life Program visit MindBodyFitnessforLife.com


As smoke from Canadian wildfires caused the most hazardous air conditions on record in the Washington, D.C., area on Thursday, members of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee said that Congress should lift federal firefighter pay and encourage logging to reduce the risk of future blazes.

Smoke from the wildfires burning right now in Canada has been affecting the skies, as you can see outside, committee Chairman Joe Manchin III, a West Virginia Democrat, said. And if youve been outside, you can sure taste it.

Administration officials at the hearing, which was scheduled before massive fires in southeastern Canada drifted to major East Coast cities this week, appealed for more funding for federal wildland firefighters.

Members of both parties on the committee also pushed for allowing more logging to reduce fire risk in overgrown forests.

Several members of the panel commented on the timing of the hearing as a haze descended on the nations capital. The meeting was scheduled before smoke moved into East Coast cities, creating eerie images and putting more than 100 million people in the U.S. under Air Quality Index alerts, according to a White House fact sheet.

While smoky conditions are more common in the Western U.S. and Canada, the more densely populated East Coast is rarely affected. Smoke this week has lingered from New England to North Carolina.

Some members from Western states said the experience should help people in Washington and New York understand common conditions in Western summers.

I think America is waking up  at least on the East Coast  to this problem, Washington state Democrat Maria Cantwell said. And we certainly have known all about it on the West Coast for some time now.

Its really appropriate to be holding this hearing, Idaho Republican Jim Risch said. For those of you who live on the East Coast, welcome to our air in the West. This is common. I dont remember a summer in Boise when we havent had smoke.

In a written statement, President Joe Biden called the smoke another stark reminder of the impacts of climate change.

Biden has sent U.S. firefighting personnel and equipment to help with the fires, especially in Quebec, he said. He also spoke Wednesday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to offer more support, he said.

The president said the U.S. Transportation Department was watching impacts on commercial flights.

In addition, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was monitoring air quality in affected areas. Biden noted citizens can see readings at the ZIP code level at airnow.gov and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was updating public health guidance.

Firefighter pay cliff

Biden has also pushed for a permanent pay raise for federal wildland firefighters.

The bipartisan infrastructure law that he championed and signed in 2021 included a two-year raise, but agencies are now facing a pay cliff, Jeffrey Rupert, the director of the U.S. Interior Departments Office of Wildland Management, told the Senate panel.

The bill funding is estimated to run out at the end of this fiscal year, Rupert said. That could have a devastating effect on not only our firefighter morale, but certainly our ability to recruit and retain firefighters.

More than 4,000 firefighters at Interior received a boost in pay from the infrastructure laws temporary supplement, Rupert said. Interior employs more than 5,000 wildland firefighters, making it the second-largest federal firefighting workforce behind the U.S. Forest Services 10,000 firefighters.

The Forest Service aspires to hire nearly 1,000 more firefighters in the next fiscal year, Jaelith Hall-Rivera, the agencys deputy chief of state, private, and tribal forestry, said at the hearing.

Having the supplemental pay expire would be absolutely catastrophic, Hall-Rivera told Nevada Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto. A union representing Forest Service workers has said as many as 30% to 50% of Forest Service firefighters would leave to find better wages elsewhere, Hall-Rivera said.

Lets harvest forests

But some Republicans said the administration has already spent too much ineffectively and indicated they opposed further funding increases, saying federal efforts should instead be on overhauling policy to allow more tree harvesting.

It is unsustainable to keep throwing more and more money and resources at suppression without dramatically increasing mitigation, ranking Republican John Barrasso of Wyoming said. Americas wildfire crisis will continue to escalate until our forests are properly managed. Our forests are overgrown and they are unhealthy.

Barrasso did say wildland firefighters have been asked to do too much for too little in return and should be fully supported and compensated.

House Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman, a Republican from Arkansas, used similar critiques of the Biden administrations approach in a June 2 statement on the approaching 2023 fire season.

It is encouraging to see that President Biden and some in his administration are recognizing the need for forest management, Westerman said. Until we make these long-term changes, land managers will continue having to sacrifice ounces of prevention for pounds of cure, all of which costs more and more money while doing nothing to mitigate the underlying issues.

Barrasso said Thursday more trees should be removed from overgrown forests. Crowded forests can fuel more intense fires that spread more rapidly.

Hall-Rivera and Wyoming interim State Forester Kelly Norris agreed that forests should see more active management, which includes cutting down some trees.

Manchin, a centrist Democrat, agreed, saying that overgrown forests should be used for timber products.

Lets harvest, he said near the end of the hearing. It doesnt cost anything. We make money and we solve both problems.

Climate connection

Forest overgrowth, the product of a century of aggressive fire suppression, has contributed to worsening wildfires, experts say.

A changing climate, largely the product of carbon emissions from fossil fuels and other sources, has also worsened conditions.

Periods of lengthy, extreme drought have dried forests, Rupert said. Drier trees are more susceptible to fire.

That absolutely is a huge part of driving these catastrophic megafires that were experiencing, he said

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico, which saw record wildfires last year, said effects of the drier climate are noticeable.

There are times when theres more moisture in a two-by-four at Home Depot than there is in a standing live ponderosa pine in our forests in New Mexico, he said.

Heinrich also said he supported active management, but said to be effective, such treatments should focus on removing smaller trees that can be ladder fuels and leave the large standing trees that sequester carbon.

The post On a record day in D.C. for smoke pollution, U.S. Senate panel debates wildfire strategy appeared first on Missouri Independent.
Bison walking through deep snow near Tower Jct.; Jim Peaco; March 2008; Catalog #19246d; Original #IMG_8146 (National Park Service)

Many of the federal, state, and tribal representatives of the Interagency Bison Management Plan described this winters hunt of Yellowstone National Park bison  the deadliest winter for the herds in 15 years  as a success, and the biannual meeting showed there is still some disagreement when it comes to management of the animals.

The group met for its meeting Wednesday about 10 miles north of Gardiner and Beattie Gulch, where hundreds of bison were shot and killed this winter, primarily by tribal hunters, as they moved out of Yellowstone National Park looking for food during one of the coldest and snowiest winters in recent years.

It was the hardest winter in over a decade, said Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Cam Sholly.

At the meeting, the group was initially told that 1,186 bison were killed in tribal and state hunts, and 1,223 bison total were lost due to hunting or other reasons, which drew some gasps from members of the public in attendance.

But before the meeting had ended, Chris Geremia, the senior bison biologist at the park, told the Daily Montanan that new data showed there were 1,551 lost this winter from the Yellowstone herds  most of which died just north of the parks boundaries. A Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks spokesperson did not return messages seeking confirmation of that number on Thursday.

To start the winter, there were just more than an estimated 6,000 bison in the Yellowstone population after a 27% increase since 2020  mostly in the northern herd that includes around 4,400 bison because of warmer and less snowy winters the past two years.

A status report from last September last year showed the National Park Service recommended capping the removal this winter at 1,500 through hunting, quarantines and transfers to tribes. The same report, written by Geremia, recommended removing 800 bison this past winter to stabilize the population and cease current exponential growth. At last falls meeting, there was disagreement about whether around 800 or 1,100 bison should be removed.

The IBMP, formed in 2002, has a goal of maintaining a wild and free-ranging bison population in the park, which recent estimates showed could hold 5,000 bison in the northern area of the park and 10,000 across it.

Last Septembers report said that removing more than 25% of the population was not recommended due to unintended consequences on population conservation, reducing tribal hunting opportunities, and reducing future transfers of live bison to tribes.

For 10 years, the IBMP has aimed to maintain a population around 5,100 bison after starting with a target population of 3,000 in 2002, the report said.

After only 50 bison were removed during the 2021-22 winter, including 13 that were harvested outside of the park boundaries, several environmental groups balked at this years hunting and removal numbers as they skyrocketed from February into April.

Roam Free Nation and Alliance for the Wild Rockies took out billboards across Montana calling the hunt, which includes eight sovereign tribal nations who have hunting rights under treaties as well as the state of Montana, a slaughter and saying the firing line of hunters in Beattie Gulch did not abide by fair-chase practices.

The park did capture 1,213 bison this winter that it prevented from leaving the boundary, park officials said, and released 837 of them back into the park in April. Another 282 were quarantined for the Bison Conservation and Transfer Program that sends the animals to tribal lands once they are proven free of brucellosis, a disease the bison can spread to cattle.

The group determined at its meeting last fall it wanted to move away from slaughter and focus on transferring more of the bison to tribal lands.

Another 88 were sent to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes for a program to feed tribal families, which were slaughtered. Another 200 remain at the Stephens Creek holding facility, park rangers said.

IBMP members  including representatives from Yellowstone National Park; the InterTribal Buffalo Council; the Montana Department of Livestock; Fish, Wildlife and Parks; CSKT; the Nez Perce Tribe; Custer Gallatin National Forest; and U.S. Department of Agriculture  largely said Wednesday they were happy with the harvest and saw few issues with hunter infractions.

Among the descriptions of the hunt were a banner year, one that went well and saw few issues. The tribes that have treaty hunting rights have different seasons, some longer than others, and different ideologies regarding the hunting and preservation of bison.

The Nez Perce Tribe harvested 417 bison this winter, which Natural Resource Chairman Quincy Ellenwood said showed respect to the ancestors and benefitted the tribe. But a representative for the Crow tribe said members harvested 36 bison, adding that the tribe would rather have them live than dead.

Montana hunters took 75 bison this winter, according to FWP. The department works with hunters outside of the park to ensure they are following state law and helps move the animals when needed. An officer said at Wednesdays meeting there were only slight impacts to law violations, public safety and property issues.

It went well considering there was such a large migration, said FWPs Adam Pankratz.

But during public comment, outfitters, environmentalists, people who live in Beattie Gulch, and others told the IBMP officials they felt the number of bison killed and the manner in which they were taken was disrespectful. Some believe the bison should be listed under the Endangered Species Act,

In the northern zone, mid-April data showed 340 adult females had been killed along with 243 calves and 142 bison of an unknown sex and age. Many of the females were pregnant and set to deliver calves later in the spring, several people said, which they worried would constrain efforts to bolster genetic diversity among the bison.

This hunt was a killing frenzy. There was no restraint. There were so many babies and gut piles, said Stephany Seay with the Buffalo Field Campaign, who also wrote opinion articles this winter about the hunt published by the Daily Montanan. I walked Beattie Gulch and it was just littered with babies and gut piles. There shouldnt be anything left up there. There shouldnt be any need for a cleanup of gut piles. And that were even having these discussions is a testament to how wrong this hunt is.

Others said the number of bison taken, combined with the winter kill, could put the bison population down below where it has been during the past several years. Several also lamented the small area the bison have to roam outside of the park and suggested expanding tolerance zones and accounting for the fetuses of pregnant females.

U.S. Forest Service officials said that one thing the group could have been better prepared for was the carcass cleanup that followed the hunt. A slide the USFS presented at the meeting showed it cleaned up and hauled off 53,000 pounds of carcasses in two days in late February and early March.

While none of the partners were assigned to coordinate the cleanup, USFS officials said the partners were able to communicate and get the work done. But that conversation also showed some of the hurdles the group faces as it tries to come up with a plan for next winter that each partner can agree on.

Not all of the members signed off on the operations plans the past two years because the group could not find a consensus on things including the number of animals that would be allowed to be taken. Much of the discussion at Wednesdays meeting was about whether the group could craft a plan that would get signed by all involved and what should go in that plan versus the adaptive management plans.

Most of the partners said despite not having a fully agreed upon plan, the tribes, state and federal agencies worked well together to coordinate the bison removal through hazing, capture, or hunting. Most of the tribes reported few hunting violations and said FWP and the Department of Livestock had been helpful ensuring tribal hunters were following the rules and boundaries.

Department of Livestock Executive Director Mike Honeycutt, whose department is this years lead partner, said statutory constrictions and regulations meant the partners would all have to cooperate with one another to ensure each obligation is being met by the right partner.

Sholly, the Yellowstone superintendent, said, for instance, that once the bison leave the park boundaries, they are out of the National Park Services hands and the state of Montana and the tribal hunters have to regulate the bison removal from there. In a year in which most bison left the park, he said there was little the park could do beyond holding some of them inside the park so they were not subject to the hunt.

The group agreed that the partners would build a plan to work collaboratively by identifying their specific roles and requests, perhaps with a separate section for each partners role and time allowed for the tribes to take their pieces through their respective tribal councils. They also hope to have biweekly or weekly calls among the tribes that hunt the area to be sure they are all on the same page.

The partners agreed to work on what the plans look like, and questions about other tribes hoping to hunt the area, during the coming months and to better communicate their wishes ahead of the next season. The National Park Service is also working on an Environmental Impact Statement for its Bison Management Plan that could be released this fall, officials said.

The group is also hoping for new timelines on quarantines for bison so they can be transferred to tribes more quickly and updated plans surrounding captures, transfers, releases and harvests that they will discuss ahead of the fall meeting, which is scheduled for Oct. 31 at Chico Hot Springs.

The post Bison management group discusses deadly winter for Yellowstone bison, plans for next season appeared first on Daily Montanan.
The United States Supreme Court (Photo courtesy of The Nevada Current).

The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday upheld a lower court ruling that Alabamas 2022 congressional maps violated the Voting Rights Act, a ruling that preserves a major part of the law and could lead to new congressional maps in Alabama.

A three-judge panel in January 2022 ruled that maps approved by the Alabama Legislature in 2021 that had a single majority-Black congressional district violated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate based on race, color or membership in certain language groups.

Plaintiffs in the case argued the approach packed Black voters, who tend to vote Democratic, into a single district and made it difficult for those outside the district to elect leaders of their choosing or participate meaningfully in the political process.

The lower court ordered the state to develop a remedy that included a second district with a significant Black population.

Alabama appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Alabamas approach to redistricting, which it called race-neutral, matched the text of the law. The state argued that it generated millions of potential maps without referencing race, and could glean from that a median number of majority-minority districts.

In a 5-4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected the states argument, as well as arguments from the state that Section 2 did not apply to single-member districts, writing that the state misunderstands (Section) 2 and our decisions implementing it.

A district is not equally open  when minority voters faceunlike their majority peersbloc voting along racial lines, arising against the backdrop of substantial racial discrimination within the State, that renders a minority vote unequal to a vote by a nonminority voter, Roberts wrote.

Bobby Singleton, the Alabama Senate Minority Leader and a plaintiff in the case, said in a phone interview Thursday he was surprised by the ruling but said it was the right thing to do.

The African-American community is grossly underrepresented in Congress, Singleton said. This is something that is quite a victory today.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement Thursday that the decision was disappointing, but this case is not over.

A message seeking comment was left with Rep. Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, who helped lead redistricting efforts in the Alabama Legislature in 2021.

Gina Maiola, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kay Ivey, said in a statement Thursday her office was reviewing the outcome.

Abha Khanna, who argued the case for the plaintiffs before the U.S. Supreme Court, said in a statement that the Supreme Court made the right decision today.

Alabamas current congressional map systematically dilutes the voting power of Black Alabamians, in clear violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the statement said. Thankfully, the Court today identified Alabamas redistricting scheme as a textbook violation of the landmark civil rights law.

The plaintiffs in the case Thursday released a joint statement through their attorneys that said the Alabama lawmakers had tried to shirk their responsibility to ensure communities of color are given an equal opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.

Today, the Supreme Court reminded them of that responsibility by affirming the district courts order that a new map be drawn that complies with federal law  one that recognizes the diversity in our state rather than erasing it, the statement said. This fight was won through generations of Black leaders who refused to be silent, and while much work is left, today we can move forward with these reaffirmed protections civil rights leaders fought and died for.

Alabama has had a single majority-minority congressional district, taking in most of the western Black Belt in the state, since 1992. It is represented by U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, the only Democrat in Alabamas seven-member U.S. House delegation.

Plaintiffs argued that a House delegation that was 14% Black meant Black Alabamians, who make up about 26% of the state population, were underrepresented.

During the lower court hearing, plaintiffs proposed creating two new congressional districts that would be 41% to 45% Black.

Bernard Simelton, the president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, said in an interview Thursday that the decision was the biggest since 2013s Shelby County v. Holder. That ruling struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required the U.S. Department of Justice to review changes to voting laws in states with a history of discrimination, like Alabama.

For Black voters, this means that your voice is still important, he said. And that if we continue to work to get more voters out, we will be able to elect more people to positions of our choice.

In a dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the question was whether the state had to draw districts proportional to the Black share of the population.

Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it, he wrote.

Roberts wrote that the court was only reaffirming prior precedents.

The concern that Section 2 may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States is, of course, not new, Roberts wrote. Our opinion today does not diminish or disregard these concerns. It simply holds that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not bear them out here.

This story was originally produced by the Alabama Reflector which is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus, including the Daily Montanan, supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

The post U.S. Supreme Court rules Alabamas congressional maps violate Voting Rights Act appeared first on Daily Montanan.
COLUMBUS  Observers reported 357 sandhill cranes in Ohio during the volunteer-driven 2023 Midwest Crane Count, April 15, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife. The count was coordinated by the Division of Wildlife, International Crane Foundation, and Ohio Bird Conservation Initiative.

The survey was conducted in 30 pre-selected counties during the cranes nesting season to monitor Ohios growing breeding population of sandhill cranes. Cranes were observed in 24 of those counties. Counties were selected based on the availability of wetland habitat that cranes use for nesting.

The six counties with the most crane sightings during this years count were Wayne (96), Lucas (77), Geauga (63), Ottawa (18), Logan (15), and Williams (15). Killbuck Marsh and Funk Bottoms wildlife areas in Wayne County are preferred nesting locations for sandhills. Volunteers searched crane habitat within a 10-square mile survey block. Results were reported via eBird.

This years count was the third annual event tracking the status of sandhill cranes in the Buckeye State. During the surveys inaugural year in 2021, Ohio volunteers observed 160 sandhill cranes across five counties. An expanded count last year recorded 311 sandhills in 26 counties.

Sandhill cranes

A sandhill crane is a tall wading bird characterized by a long neck and bill. It is mostly gray in plumage with a red patch on its forehead. It is often recognized by its rolling bugle call. During the breeding season, sandhills can be secretive and take on a rusty color from muddy environments. Sandhills are migratory, breeding in wetlands across the northern U.S. and Canada and wintering farther south in North America.

These regal birds were once extirpated from Ohio. They returned to Wayne County in 1987 to breed and have been slowly expanding since. They are still listed as a threatened species in Ohio.

Stamp support

Wildlife enthusiasts can support sandhill cranes by purchasing an Ohio Wildlife Legacy Stamp. Fourteen dollars of every $15 Ohio Wildlife Legacy Stamp sold are invested in the states Wildlife Diversity Fund. This fund supports habitat restoration, wildlife and habitat research projects, creation of free wildlife educational materials, as well as efforts to restore and conserve endangered and threatened species.

The legacy stamp can be purchased online through Ohios Wildlife Licensing System and at any location that sells hunting and fishing licenses. Learn more about sandhill cranes and the Division of Wildlifes research at wildohio.gov.

A list of sandhill cranes found in each of the 30 counties surveyed during Ohios 2023 count is shown below. The first number following the countys name shows the number of cranes reported in 2023, and the countys result from 2022 is shown in parentheses. Counties without parentheses were not previously surveyed. The numbers below are preliminary.

Ashland 1 (7); Columbiana 1 (1); Delaware 4 (5); Erie 0 (1); Fairfield 1; Franklin 10 (2); Fulton 6; Geauga 63 (45); Hardin 2 (4); Holmes 7 (15); Knox 11 (2); Lake 0 (2); Licking 2 (2); Logan 15 (9); Lorain 0 (1); Lucas 77 (47); Mahoning 0 (1); Marion 5 (11); Medina 1; Morrow 2; Ottawa 18 (17); Pickaway 4 (1); Portage 6 (3); Richland 0 (4); Summit 4 (2); Trumbull 3 (22); Tuscarawas 0 (2); Wayne 96 (83); Williams 15 (5); and Wyandot 3 (17).

The total for 2023 was 357, and the total for 2022 was 311.
An emergency authorisation for the inclusion of four cobalt salts in livestock feed has been granted in Scotland.

The Scottish government has granted the authorisation, which comes into force from 30 June, due to the risk of cobalt deficiency faced by cattle and sheep.

The emergency authorisation period commences on 15 July and expires in July 2026.

Cobalt supplementation is essential to the livestock industry, in particular for the sheep sector, as deficiency can result in debilitation, anaemia, emaciation and stunted growth.

Last month, NFU Scotland wrote to the government to underline the importance of cobalt, particularly highlighting the animal health and welfare implications if cobalt was not authorised for use.

It is estimated that almost two-thirds of Scotlands land is at high risk of cobalt deficiency, making cobalt supplementation particularly significant for the health of Scotlands sheep flock.

NFU Scotlands livestock policy manager Lisa Hislop said: With 63% of Scotlands land at high risk of cobalt deficiency, it is estimated that 75% of Scottish lambs and 40% of breeding ewes are regularly given cobalt.

The potential loss of the use of cobalt in July this year would have coincided with the peak demand for cobalt supplementation in spring born lambs grazing hill pasture.

"We welcome the prompt decision from Scottish Government to allow emergency reauthorisation of cobalt to maintain good animal health in Scotland.

James McCulloch, the Agricultural Industries Confederation's (AIC) head of feed, said this decision would be especially welcome news for sheep farmers in Scotland wanting to supplement spring born lambs with cobalt.

He said: "We hope that a similar decision will soon be taken by the FSA so that these important feed additives remain available to livestock farmers in England and Wales too."
NFU Scotland has called on the Scottish government to 'rebase' less favoured support to make it better targeted at those keeping beef cattle and sheep in uplands and islands.

Scotlands Less Favoured Areas Support Scheme (LFASS) is set to continue until at least 2026, but new conditions on delivery could be rolled out from 2025.

NFU Scotland has argued that more effective targeting of LFASS funding could be achieved if it were "rebased" in the interest of creating a fairer system.

The upland support scheme is currently run on historic livestock numbers based on cattle and sheep being kept in 2009.

However, over the past 13 years, many agricultural businesses have restructured, with some having increased eligible livestock numbers, and some reducing them.

To address this flaw, given the intention to now retain LFASS to 2026, NFU Scotland said the Scottish government should "rebase LFASS using more contemporary livestock data".

The union added that the scheme should be based on information on cattle and sheep already gathered for 2022 as the most recent closed year.

NFU Scotland also seeks the retention of the current 65.5m LFASS budget and that any underspend as a result of the rebasing exercise be recycled back into LFASS through increased payment rates.

The union's LFA Committee chair, Peter Kennedy said rebasing would provide "greater fairness and equality" to the support scheme.

He warned that the scheme's real value had "eroded over time" as input costs for farmers and crofters had soared.

Rebasing and a retention of the existing 65.5m budget could enable increases in the current payment rates, as well as ensuring this support is more effectively targeted at those actively keeping cattle and sheep.

"The Scottish government set the precedent for this in 2009 when rebasing lead to significant uplifts in payment rates," Mr Kennedy explained.

In addition, rebasing of LFASS should also account for new and developing businesses and would avoid creating so-called anomaly cases as has happened with previous rebasing exercises.

"NFU Scotland would like to see an effective and accessible appeals mechanism for any agricultural business that might be frozen out or significantly disadvantaged as a result of restructuring or being a new entrant.
Young farmers are experiencing 'continued anxiety' around the future of farming, according to a new survey, with the industry calling for more training and support to aid new entrants.

Frustration with regulation and concerns about the prospects are among the key issues impacting the next generation of farmers, NFYFC has said.

Without an injection of new ideas, the young farmers' federation warned that UK farming would "miss out on a generation of talent and enthusiasm".

Finance and access to land continue to top the barriers facing new entrants, with 72% of respondents thinking it will be difficult or impossible to move into farming.

Young farmers want to continue to produce food, but the survey indicates that new entrants cant access the support required to break into the industry.

When questioned about the new Defra environment schemes, 75% of respondents were either not sure or felt the schemes were not affecting them at all.

Only 10% of respondents felt they had a good understanding of emerging Defra land management schemes.

Respondents identified grants (68%), as the most important aspect of support required for delivering environmental schemes.

This follows business support (55%), encouragement of new entrants (56%) and training (54%) also ranking highly.

Soil health and business management are the two areas, followed by financial management, where respondents feel the greatest need for development.

NFYFCs agriculture and rural issues manager, Sarah Palmer said young farmers desperately needed additional skills and training.

Positive action from three years of surveying is welcome to address the concern raised for prospects and opportunities for next generation farmers and land managers.

A higher percentage of survey respondents felt they were positively rather than negatively affected by the new policy framework and recognised the need for additional skills and training.

This research, combined with the learning from the recent Defra new entrant pilots for the design of a future scheme, will provide much-needed support for next generation aspirations.

NFYFC's research was conducted earlier this year and surveyed 511 people, with the average age of respondents being 22 years old.

Of those surveyed, 45% live or work in a farming household and 31% are students.
A-Plan Rural Insurance have set up a Rural Community blog as part of their work on social media to contribute to farmers' efforts in showcasing British farming.

The blog invites farmers to give their experiences in the industry, sharing their contributions to over 120,000 followers on Instagram.

Bridging the gap between farm and the consumer is something that lots of farmers are trying to do in an effort to help more people understand the reality of what goes into producing their food.

Since starting the blog, A-Plan Rural have worked with a great variety of farmers from differing backgrounds and locations all over the UK.

They previously spoke with Millie, a sheep farmer based in Kent, who used to work in the public services but is now a shepherdess. She was featured in the blog.

Sophie Mitchell-Smith, a cattle hoof trimmer based around Manchester who works with her father, starred in it recently.

The latest blogs included Rhi Pinches, a suckler beef and sheep farmer based in the Shropshire Hills, who works with her father on their family farm, and Shirley McNiven, who runs a sheep and cattle farm in Aberdeenshire.

Now in A-Plan Rural's latest, they spoke with Matt, a sheep farmer based in England, who runs his own flock of 50 ewes over 100 acres whilst also contracting for local farmers.

Hes a 4th generation farmer, who took the decision to start his own farm from scratch with his wife.

They asked Matt some questions around his journey in farming, his life as a shepherd, and the challenges he faces with the rising costs, climate change and food security.

Read the full blog here.
A nutrient found in meat and fish could be an "elixir of life".

A nutrient found in meat could extend life

Scientists say that taurine extends lifespan and boosts health in a range of animal species.

Experiments conducted on middle-aged animals showed that a taurine boost extended life by over 10 per cent and improve both physical and brain health.

However, tests have not been carried out on people and the team at Columbia University in New York recommends against buying taurine supplements in an attempt to live longer.

A daily dose of taurine was given to 14-month-old mice, the equivalent to the age of 45 in humans, and the data showed the male mice lived 10 per cent longer while females had a 12 per cent life extension.

Researcher Dr. Vijay Yadav said: "Whatever we checked, taurine-supplemented mice were healthier and appeared younger.

"They were leaner, had an increased energy expenditure, increased bone density, improved memory and a younger-looking immune system."
A Russian colonel has made the extraordinary claim that Wagner mercenaries are raping, kidnapping and torturing Vladimir Putin's troops.

Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner group have been accused of raping and torturing Russian soldiers

Lieutenant colonel Roman Venevitin, who was captured near the besieged Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, has claimed that he was tortured by mercenaries from the Wagner group even though they are on the same side in the war.

Venevitin said: "Wagner mercenaries stole two T-80 tanks, 4 cannons, a KAMAZ truck and armoured vehicles.

"The Wagner mercenaries took them as war trophies (even though we are supposed to be on the same side).

"There were kidnappings of our servicemen, when they were physically abused and humiliated. One of our battalion's petty officers was kidnapped and tortured.

"He was kept naked on a cold floor in a basement."

The colonel continued: "They sprayed acid into his eyes, so he temporarily lost vision, he was doused with petrol and (they) tried to burn him.

"One of the servicemen was beaten up and raped by Wagner mercenaries. He couldn't survive the humiliation, and killed himself."

In a video orchestrated by Putin's top officials, Venevitin accused Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin of discrediting the Russian army - a crime that could see him imprisoned.

The allegation hints that the Kremlin is preparing to charge Prigozhin for his increasingly vehement attacks on Moscow's handling of the war.
Vladimir Putin could drop a nuclear bomb on Russia to fight "invading partisans".

Vladimir Putin may drop a nuclear bomb on Russian territory

Wagner Group mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin made the chilling prediction in his latest rant as he continues his criticism of the Kremlin amid Russia's struggles on the battlefield in Ukraine.

In his latest rambling statement, Prigozhin said: "Could they (Russia) have the vile idea of dropping a tactical nuclear bomb on their own territory?

"Is that why we are retreating in the Belgorod region, allowing them to advance, because it's frightening to throw (a bomb) at someone else's territory but we'll throw one on our own.

"It's a big question if the (nuclear bomb) would work properly."

Last month, Russians who are against the war in Ukraine launched a raid in the Belgorod region, marking the first invasion into Russian land since World War II.

Moscow officials have voiced their concern over the armed incursion that has led to civilians fleeing the region.

Despite the advances of the pro-Ukraine fighters, Moscow released a statement claiming that the military had killed "1500 servicemen" and destroyed "100 armoured vehicles" but Prigozhin has questioned the validity of the claims.

The warlord said: "To destroy one and a half thousand people, it must be such a massacre, within one day, over 150 kilometres, one hell of a massacre.

"Therefore, I think that these are just some wild fantasies."
Vladimir Putin's advisers have stopped giving him bad news.

Vladimir Putin's advisers no longer tell the despot of bad news

A new claim from the Telegram channel VCHK-OGPU reveals that Putin is no longer told of any bad news from the conflict with Ukraine as it makes him "extremely annoyed".

Citing a source "familiar with the situation", the tyrant even blames "Western media" for the bad news rather than any of Russia's own failings.

The source claims: "Putin reacted to reports about the real situation in something like this: in an annoyed manner.

"He told the speaker (the person telling him bad news) that he was currently under the influence of 'Western propaganda'.

"Putin himself (thinks he) has more reliable information from other sources, which does not coincide with the information of the speakers."

The reaction to bad news from the battlefield has even led Putin to ban individuals from his circle with only those giving him positive information rewarded with full access.

The insider added: "At the same time, the speaker himself for a long time fell out of the list of people who have access to the President of the Russian Federation, but those who reported only successes had constant access, and defeats and failures were reduced to minor troubles that did not play a significant role."
Ariana Madix has released a new t-shirt mocking Tom Sandoval's bedroom criticism.

Ariana Madix has released a new T-shirt

The 39-year-old businessman was branded a "d***" by his 'Vanderpump Rules' co-stars on this week's reunion episode when he tried to shame his former girlfriend for keeping her top on during sex, but she's had the last laugh after quickly capitalising on the controversy and bringing out new merchandise.

The dark grey tee is being sold on Ariana and Katie Maloneys Something About Her shop for $34.99 and features a cartoon version of the 37-year-old star pulling apart a grilled cheese toastie alongside the red-lettered slogan: F*** Me in This Shirt.

Before announcing the release of the shirt, fans of the show had called for Ariana to make the merchandise move.

One had tweeted: Of all the ways this cast has capitalized off on scandoval, if Ariana doesnt instantly have I f*** in this t shirt shirts made immediately then what was it all for!? (sic)"

Another posted: "if Ariana comes out with a shirt that says i f*** in this, im buying it.(sic)"

Tom had hit out at his former partner - who he split from after it emerged he'd been having an affair with Raquel Leviss - when being quizzed on his personal life.

Host Andy Cohen asked Tom if he'd slept with anyone else since embarking on his affair with Raquel and he insisted he hadn't, denying rumours he hooked up with a woman in Chicago last year.

Ariana said: "Well, you know who he did sleep with after he and Raquel started sleeping together? Me."

Tom sarcastically replied: "She kept her T-shirt on, it was really hot."

The group then all fell silent before Lala Kent said: "You're such a f****** d***."

James Kennedy asked: "What the f*** dude? You're f****** disgusting."

Tom's best friend, Tom Schwartz, shook his head in embarassment and muttered: "Don't say that, dude. Don't say that."

Lala then pointedly said: "This is your future Raquel. Hes gonna talk to you like this too."

Tom issued a half-hearted apology, but failed to win back any support.
Ioan Gruffudds teenage daughter claims she is afraid of the actor.

Ioan Gruffudds teenage daughter claims she is afraid of the actor

Ella Evans, 13, made the claim in publicly-available legal documents as part of a domestic violence restraining order application against her dad, 49, which she lodged on 31 May  the same day she filed a temporary restraining order at the Los Angeles Superior Court against his 29-year-old girlfriend Bianca Wallace.

She said in the documents, seen by the Daily Mail: I am afraid of the Respondent for my personal safety, and respectfully ask the Court to issue a Restraining Order for five years.

The teen also asked in the papers, seen by the Daily Mail, that Ioan is forced to undergo a batterer intervention program to stop abuse.

Ella is also requesting a restraining order against Bianca for five years for both herself and her nine-year-old sister Elsie  who her mum Alice Evans, 54, had with Liar actor Ioan before he walked out on Alice after a 14-year marriage before he moved in with Bianca.

In her filing against her dad Ella also asks that he keeps at least 100 yards away from her and not contact her for five years.

She adds in her papers her dad has allegedly called her a liar and a gaslighter when she has aired her feelings or opinions to the actor.

She also says he has threatened to call the police on her anytime she misbehaves during his visitation time in the past two years.

Ellas request for the five-year restraining order against Bianca would stop the actress from going within 100 yards of the teen, her sister, their home, their schools, and their vehicle.

The temporary restraining order has not yet been granted and will be put before a court on 23 June.

Her filing against Bianca says the actress slammed a door on her head and left her bruised as she tried to escape their home following a blazing argument.

Ioan and Alice are locked in a bitter custody battle over Ella and Elsie.

The actor announced their marriage was over in January 2021 and he went public with his new romance in October that year, and filed for joint custody of his two daughters last July after Alice filed for sole custody.

Alice last year risked violating her restraining order by appearing to mention Bianca in a social media post that said she was being gaslit and saying B is so slim.

Ioan has accused her in court papers of verbally abusing him during their 14-year marriage, and said Alice made fun of my appearance by telling him he was losing his hair and telling him he had saggy-vagina eyes.

Both Ioan and Alice say they are struggling for money, and their $2 million marital home in Los Angeles was last month sold at the actors request after he said he no longer had the funds to pay for it  leaving Alice and the children to move to a new rented address.

Ioan now lives in Los Angeles with Bianca, who has multiple sclerosis.
Jennifer Coolidge is too "immature" to have had children.

Jennifer Coolidge covers British GQ (Photo by Charlotte Rutherford )

The 61-year-old actress admitted her friends have encouraged her to adopt but she thinks she'd have made a better stepmother, and she's theorised as to whether having a family of her own would have made her "grow up".

She told the summer issue of Britain's GQ magazine: Im very, very immature. I think that has kept me from having children, because Im sort of a child. Maybe if I had kids, I wouldve had to have grown up.

Jennifer also admitted she has a habit of dating intense men.

She said: Ive never had, like, a laid back boyfriend that was just full of joy, you know? Like, someone who laughs at all your shortcomings. Thats never who I choose for myself.

The last few years have seen a career resurgence for the 'American Pie' star thanks to her role as Tanya McQuoid in both series of 'The White Lotus' but she admitted she nearly turned down the award-winning role because of her mental health struggles.

She said: I was, like, not in the mood. [Was it fear of failure - or possibly success?] I was depressed, I was very depressed.

But after the first series, Jennifer got involved in coming up with ideas for the show with creator Mike White - and she joked her pitch "got [her] killed".

She explained: I had encouraged Mike to tell an Italian story, I said I would love to be in Italy or something, riding around on a Vespa with all these men reaching out and trying to light my cigarette. Thats my fantasy. But then I guess that suggestion got me killed.

Jennifer will be speaking at the GQ Heroes conference in association with BMW, taking place at Soho Farmhouse, Oxfordshire from 19- 21 of July. Read the full interview at https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/jennifer-coolidge-interview-2023 or buy GQ from 13 June.
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of Diors womens collections andof Chanakya School of Craft have worked together symbiotically and in their individual capacities to bring the works of other women to the fore. They help Ashwini Arun Kumar explore the power of true collaboration that underlines both their work, in this exclusive interview about their associationMaria Grazia Chiuri has been working in fashion since she was 20. She spent 10 years at Fendi after joining the brand as a designer in the accessories department in 1989. (The Baguette? She was quintessential to its making.) She was handpicked by Valentino Garavani himself in 1999, along with Pier Paolo Piccioli (Valentinos current creative director)  he worked alongside her at Fendi, too  to design accessories for his eponymous Italian design house. In 2008, the duo became co-creative directors of Valentino, and were responsible for taking the heritage brand to even greater heights and restoring it to its past glory. Despite years of being at the crux of several such seminal fashion moments, fame  in colossal magnitude  came only in 2016 when, at 52, she was appointed to lead the House of Dior. This time without a co-creative partner. It was the first time in the houses illustrious history of making clothes for women that a woman was actually in charge of designing them (after founder-couturier Christian Dior, and following Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferre, John Galliano, Bill Gaytten and Raf Simons). This itself warrants a conversation about women occupying positions of power in fashion.On another continent, Vinod Maganlal Shah founded Chanakya in 1986, with the objective of sharing Indias finest craftsmanship with the world. He brought 13th-generation custodians of heritage crafts to Mumbai and formed a craft collective that became the go-to for many international fashion houses and their creative directors for embroideries and surface embellishments  including Dior and Maria Grazia Chiuri, who has worked with the atelier since her Fendi days. When his daughter Karishma Swali took over Chanakya in 1998, not only did she want to perpetuate Indian craft, but also to revive its various forms so they wouldnt become obsolete. The fact that, in the more patriarchal setting of India, a majority of the karigars were still men was not lost on her. In 2016, Karishma co-founded the Chanakya School of Craft  a non-profit where women, especially from a lower socio-economic section of society, could learn various embroidery techniques and become financially self-sufficient. In the six years since its inception, over a thousand women have graduated from the Chanakya School of Craft, and contributed to fashions landscape  especially the shows at Dior.When taking over the reins of a fashion house that gave you the wasp-waisted, full-skirted silhouette (Christian Diors New Look from in his first-ever collection in 1947 is still somewhat fantastical to many), for its debut collection at least, it is expected of a designer to reference the archives. To do an homage, to borrow from fashions parlance. Instead, for SS17, Maria Grazia turned to the combat sport of fencing. Models strutted down the runway in quilted fencing jackets over shirts and knickerbockers. And then came the look worn by model Amanda Googe  a perfectly-tailored crew-neck T-shirt emblazoned with We Should All Be Feminists, the title of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies book and TED talk. I approached this as an opportunity to redefine the notion of femininity which the House of Dior is built on, says Maria Grazia. It has been crucial to me to look back at the legacy of the couturier and to explore, with my female gaze, his sometimes-misinterpreted idea of womanhood. I have sought to connect Dior women in a different way. Its obvious that, for her, feminism and femininity are not mutually exclusive, so dont come looking for romantic silhouettes that do very little for the women of today. A move we applaud.For me, craft, culture and creating autonomy for women have always been interlinked, says Karishma Swali who has been doing her bit to subvert patriarchy at the grassroots level by empowering women to develop their skills, adding, It was important to provide women with an inclusive environment and equal opportunities. For Maria Grazia, this sentiment was particularly important. She grew up in the 70s, at the height of second-wave feminism. Her headline-making appointment at Dior, too, was trumped only by the #MeToo movement and The Womens March, a protest against the then US President Donald Trumps inauguration. So, when Karishma was establishing the Chanakya School of Craft, support came from the creative director both individually and via Dior. I was thrilled with Karishmas project to create the Chanakya School of Craft, and her idea of doing this to empower women made it even more meaningful to me, she recounts, stating, The education of women and the safeguarding of artisanal techniques are possibly two of the most important causes I wish to defend.Seven years ago, some could have confused Maria Grazias feminist approach with tokenism (and how wrong they would be). She was designing solo after nearly three decades and at a design house that was always inspired by women but never led by one. But, at her Dior, feminism ran deeper than just putting on a show. It was about forming meaningful associations with female artists and academicians. I truly believe in collaborative projects  it is an important part of my creative process, she explains. Establishing dialogues with other creatives from different fields and practices is a challenging and enriching adventure. Almost every collection in the last seven years has been a result of a creative partnership with inspirational women. And for the scenography  defiles, as the French like to call it  in many of these shows, art works of female artists such as Judy Chicago (Spring 2020 couture), Eva Josphin (Fall 2021 couture), Olesia Trofymenko (Fall 2022 couture) and Mikalene Thomas (Spring 2023 couture) were transformed into immense hand-embroidered panels by the women students at Chanakya School of Craft.This opportunity to showcase their art was presented to the students of Chanakya School at a relatively nascent stage of their careers. And while bold moves like this are reserved for the leftist, avant garde designers, the fact that it was sanctioned by a creative director of one of the most commercially successful design houses in the world is especially moving. The students at Chanakya School of Crafts are taught the techniques but also to reflect on the value of craft, observes Maria Grazia. In this context, it felt very relevant to connect with the art world, especially with women artists who have demonstrated, over the last decades, that textiles and embroideries can be used to create art pieces with the same symbolic and aesthetic value as painting or sculpture. This was the starting point of our collaborations around the Dior shows. For the Fall 2023 preservation that took place at the Gateway of India, Mumbai, ladies of the school created an embroidered patchwork toran that moonlighted as the entry point for models to enter the ramp. This was an important representation of the power of community, a collaboration across cultures to welcome our friends at Dior and from across the world, highlighting the power of craft and the virtuosity of Indian craftsmanship, states Karishma.Its interesting to learn firsthand about the curriculum of the school. Though India is famous for its embroideries, seldom has the craft been taught in a state-of-the-art facility that is also a non-profit. Karishmas only reference: her own 25-year-long career, dotted with the experience of working with a bevy of curators, artists, and, of course, design houses. We teach almost 300 types of crafts at the school, she explains. The curriculum encourages students to not only learn the technical aspects of embroidery and craft but also to try and open their minds to culture and design from India and across the world. The approximate 950 hours of syllabus, she says, are drawn out over a year and a half where they learn necessary embroidery skills for the first six months, advanced techniques in the next six, and participate in a six-month internship programme before finally graduating. The school is a non-profit so all materials and the tuition are provided by the foundation. Obviously free. For Maria Grazia, whose love for clothes originally stemmed from watching her seamstress mother, women learning the necessary know-how to work in ateliers is special. Ahead of her debut collection, a series of short films featuring women in the Dior atelier was released on Instagram with the hashtag #TheWomenBehindMyDress. In my country, Italy, and also in France, embroidery has historically been considered domestic work for women overlooked in a way. So, to see how the legacy of this craft can be perpetuated by women and how they can become professionals and financially independent through this knowledge is really inspiring. Having visited Chanakya several times, she says she is especially impressed with how the women are taught not only Indian embroideries but also varieties from across the world.Basic research shows how scores of European design houses have outsourced their embroidery work to ateliers in India since the 80s. While they pay lip service to giving these karigars their due credit, the House of Dior launched an India-inspired collection, unfurled it in the heart of Mumbai, and put the men and women who made the clothes front and centre. Our relationship with Dior is an intimate one, reveals Karishma. Time after time, we are inspired by how the House of Dior continues to be invested in craft, culture and womens empowerment. Through a contemplative dialogue with Dior and Maria Grazia Chiuri, artists, creators and artisans explore the possibilities of craft and couture  indeed a deeply rewarding process for us. Maria Grazia elaborates, Craft and embroidery are rooted in my creative process and in my understanding of fashion, so we are really just beginning with the ateliers and the school to imagine what we can truly do together. I am thrilled by the perspective of all that is possible for us to achieve collectively.Also Read: A Look At Anushka Sharmas Love For Dior Through The Years
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Joyeeta Gupta, an accomplished scientist and professor of Indian origin, has been awarded the prestigious Spinoza Prize, more popularly known as the Dutch Nobel Prize. This award recognises Joyeeta's outstanding contribution to science and global research.Joyeeta received her PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam after studying at Delhi University, Gujarat University and Harvard Law School. Currently professor of Environment and Development in the Global South at the University of Amsterdam, she is also the co-chair of the Earth Commission. She also works as an instructor at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education.The University has officially announced that Joyeeta has been honoured with the prestigious Spinoza Prize by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) selection committee. The coveted recognition comes to her in recognition of her "exceptional, groundbreaking, and inspiring scientific contributions", with a specific focus on promoting a sustainable world. As part of the award, she will receive a grant of 1.5 million Euros. The amount will be allocated towards furthering her scientific research and activities related to knowledge utilisation. The scientist intends to utilise the prize money to implement the ideas she presented in her inaugural lecture back in 2014, which revolve around fostering global sharing of the 'eco-space' or environmental utilisation space.According to Peter-Paul Verbeek, Rector Magnificus of the University of Amsterdam, Justice for both people and the planet is the common thread in Joyeetas work. She is relentlessly committed to climate justice, always looking beyond the boundaries of disciplines, realising that this is the only way to approach the climate issue.Joyeeta, the University of Amsterdam's twelfth recipient of the award, will be officially recognised on October 4 at a presentation ceremony.Also Read: Shalini Singh Is The 1st Woman NCC Cadet To Conquer A Challenging Course
The UK government have launched the Developing Countries Trading Scheme (DCTS) in Manila, Philippines. The scheme was launched in the wake of a record 2.4 billion worth of trade between the Philippines and the UK in 2022. The DCTS offers sizeable tariff reductions on a variety of high-value products exported from the Philippines to the UK, including tuna, shirts, and starch.

Projections indicate that the DCTS could save the Philippines' businesses over 20 million a year on UK export tariffs, the UK government said in a press release.

UK has launched the Developing Countries Trading Scheme (DCTS) in Manila, boosting trade with the Philippines. The DCTS offers sizeable tariff reductions on high-value products exported from the Philippines to the UK. The scheme is projected to save the Philippines' businesses over 20 million annually in export tariffs, aiding a wide range of industries.

The launch event, executed in collaboration with the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and the British Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (BCCP), was spearheaded by the UKs ambassador to the Philippines, Laure Beaufils. Representatives from the Philippine government, exporters to the UK, and key industry associations were in attendance at the event. The guest of honour was Alfredo Pascual, secretary of the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry.

I am delighted to announce that the UKs new unilateral preferences scheme, the Developing Countries Trading Scheme (DCTS), will come into effect on 19 June 2023. The DCTS will cut tariff, remove conditions and simplify trading rules. It will increase trade and strengthen the trade relationship between the UK and the Philippines. I strongly encourage businesses to take full advantage of this new scheme, said Laure Beaufils.

Sabiha Ahmed, Trade Preferences Policy Advisor, delivered a keynote that outlined high-potential value chains and products that are set to benefit from the DCTS. Her presentation was grounded in a comprehensive study of buying habits of UK retailers and consumers, as well as valuable insights sourced from Filipino producers, financiers, trade programmes, and policymakers.

Beyond existing benefits, the Philippines' exports to the UK could also gain from an additional 150-plus tariff cuts under the DCTS. These enhanced preferences offered by DCTS promise substantial tariff preferences and facilitate access to the UK market for Philippine businesses across an extensive range of industries, the release added.

As part of the British government's strategy to grow free and fair trade with selected countries, the DCTS was designed to replace the Generalised Scheme of Preferences. It offers generous sets of trading preferences globally.

In addition to the launch, Ahmed also led information sessions for the DTI, BCCP, and other industry associations. The sessions provided insights on current trends, UK market purchasing criteria, and trade barriers, offering suggestions to unlock the Philippines' trade and investment potential. Participants also had the opportunity to learn about quality certification and customs requirements among other key trade-related information.

The UK-DCTS, as one of the most generous trade preference schemes in the world, enables the Philippines to have continued access to enhanced preferences. We look forward to our country having access to duty-free, quota-free trade on 92 per cent of our eligible goodsor 99 per cent of our exports to the UK, said Fred Pascual.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DP)
US imports of textiles and apparel have continued to decrease in value terms, falling by 22.05 per cent to $33.780 billion in the first four months of 2023, compared to $43.333 billion during the same period in 2022. China remains the largest supplier of textiles and clothing to the US, holding a 23.93 per cent market share, followed by Vietnam with a 14.64 per cent share.

In January-April 2023, the bulk of US textile imports consisted of apparel, amounting to $25.212 billion, while non-apparel imports accounted for $8.567 billion, according to the latest Major Shippers Report released by the US department of commerce. Both segments experienced a decline in inbound shipments.

Apparel imports dropped by 22.15 per cent compared to the $32.388 billion traded in January-April 2022, while non-apparel imports fell by 21.72 per cent from $10.945 billion in the same period of the previous year.

US imports of textiles and apparel have declined by 22.05 per cent to $33.780 billion in the first four months of 2023. China remains the largest supplier with a 23.93 per cent market share, followed by Vietnam with 14.64 per cent. Among the top suppliers, imports from China, Cambodia, Pakistan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Honduras, Bangladesh, and India decreased.

Among the top ten apparel suppliers to the US, the import from any country did not register a rise. The imports from China and Cambodia declined by 32.45 per cent and 34.53 per cent, respectively. The import from Pakistan dropped 29.73 per cent, Vietnam 27.33 per cent, Indonesia 25.57 per cent, Honduras 20.61 per cent, Bangladesh 17.77 per cent and India 16.59 per cent.

Among the top ten suppliers in the non-apparel category, imports from Mexico experienced a year-on-year growth of 9.07 per cent. Imports from no other country rose in this period. Imports from China, on the other hand, declined by 31.53 per cent. Inbound shipments from other countries, such as Vietnam, Turkey, Pakistan, and Canada also decreased. Specifically, imports from South Korea decreased by 21.36 per cent and from India by 26.33 per cent.

During the period under review, US textile and apparel imports totalled $33.780 billion. Man-made fibre products accounted for $17.375 billion, while cotton products were valued at $14.135 billion. Wool products made up $1,004.673 million, and products from silk and vegetable fibres were worth $1,264.533 million.

In 2022, US imports of textiles and apparel continued to rise, reaching $132.201 billion, up from $113.938 billion in 2021. This increase followed a sharp decline in 2020 when the country's inbound shipments dropped to $89.596 billion, compared to imports of $111.033 billion in 2019.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (KUL)


While May is well behind us, it has been raining films in the month gone by. Some of the most exceptional movies from both the Hollywood and Bollywood space that have had OTT and theatrical releases have made quite the buzz. The OTT space saw some interesting content being released with films like Kathal and Bandaa while the theatres were thronged by cinemagoers to watch their favourite franchises making their bag to the silver screen with their sequels.



Films like Fast X and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 where their loyal fanbases cheered on for the glorious experience that it serves, May 2023 releases have been exciting and special for more reasons than one.





Heres glancing through some of the most trending theatrical and OTT releases in May 2023.





An extraordinary tale with some extraordinary performances. This is yet another true-events-inspired film with Sanya Malhotra in the lead. Helmed by Yashowardhan Mishra, this investigative satire coalesced with humour is a story about missing jackfruits and follows a committed cop who diligently works to solve the case. The movie highlights the earnest attempts of the cop to do her work sincerely and prove she's worthy of the position. It is set in the fictional town of Moba and Sanya's performance is indeed commendable.



Release Date: May 19, 2023

Helmed by Sudhir Mishra and exceptional performers like Bhumi Pednekar, Nawazudin Siddiqui and Summet Vyas headlining it, Afwaah found its niche audience. It was hailed for its gripping storyline and stunning cast. The film addresses the reality of the socio-political scenario one faces every day where facts are manipulated for personal and professional vendetta. The story revolves around an advertising clerk and political heiress who gets embroiled in a chaotic mess because of social media humour.



Release Date: May 5, 2023





The Mother



Jennifer Lopez makes a fierce comeback with her OTT release The Mother. She essays the role of a former assassin who is now a protective mother. She comes out of hiding in Alaska to safeguard her daughter who had to part ways with her much earlier in life. The film also features Gael, Garcia Bernal, Joseph Fiennes, Paul Raci and Omari Hardwick essaying key roles adding to the storyline.



Release Date: May 12, 2023





Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai



When it's Manoj Bajpayee headlining a project, there are hardly any disappointments you'll find lurking. A powerful portrayal yet again in the courtroom drama titled Bandaa. To those unaware, the film is inspired by true events and Manoj Bajpayee essays the role of an honest lawyer who fights for the truth. Helmed by Apoorv Singh Karki, this film revolves around a lawyer who fought solely for 5 long years to bring justice to all those girls who have been sexually assaulted by a godman. The case was also escalated to Session Court before reaching an ultimatum.



Release Date: May 23, 2023



The Little Mermaid





It goes without saying how excited Cinephiles were with the release of The Little Mermaid. The tale is about a beautiful mermaid named Ariel who is King Tritons youngest daughter. Being the adventurous kind, she seeks to experience the world and life that exists beyond the sea. As she surfaces on the land, she falls head over heels in love with Prince Eric. The story then goes on to unravel how she makes a pact with the vile sea witch called Ursula to let her be on land and make a life there. Halle Bailey leaves a lasting impression with her portrayal of Ariel as one of the most loved Disney characters ever.





Release Date: May 26, 2023

It is a sequel to F9, technically the 10th instalment and the 11th instalment overall to the massive Fast & Furious franchise. Helmed by Louis Leterrier, the film revolves around Dante Reyes Plates by Jason Mamoa seeking vengeance for his fathers death. Cyberterrorist Cipher essayed by Charlize Theron joins him in this mission. Enter Dominic Torreto played by Vin Diesel who must protect his family at all costs from Dante and Cipher and the adventure continues. The film also features Brie Larson, Nathalie Emmanuel, John Cena, Jason Statham, Tyrese Gibson, Chris Bridges and Michelle Rodrigues in key roles.



Release Date: May 19, 2023

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3





The third instalment of the film is helmed by James Gunn. The film sees the A-team getting attuned to their lives on Knowhere while Chris Pratts character Star-Lord continues with his task of finding his way to Gamora played by Zoe Saldana. Soon they come across a scientist called High Evolutionary played by Chukwudi Iwuji who gets versed in the tragic past of Rocket Raccoon dubbed by Bradley Cooper. The story then follows Star-Lord a.k.a. Peter Quill who rolls out a mission to ensure Rockets protection. The mission can prove to be fatal for the guardians if not successful and they might have to cross paths with Adam Warlock played by Will Poulter whose purpose is the destruction of the team. The film also features Sylvester Stallone, Elizabeth Debicki and Maria Bakalova.





Release Date: May 5, 2023





May 2023 has been replete with some edge-of-the-seat films as well as a few emotionally-laden ones. Here are our top picks that have managed to keep our attention hooked to the screen with their heart-touching storylines and some of the best star casts out there. As we look forward to the new month, here are some recommendations from May that you should catch up on if youve missed out. Be it OTT or the big screen, content truly has been the king in the last few days. With more and more binge-worthy content making its way towards us, it is going to get increasingly difficult to pick one. However, these are a selected few which managed to make quite the buzz and kept audiences hooked to their screens throughout its impressive runtime and it is indeed worth your attention.
2000 was a wild year for Bollywood. Mohabbatein came out and we witnessed just how explosive Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan's combined star power can be, Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai dropped and Hrithik Roshan started a frenzy (and a dance revolution) with his criminally smooth moves and Hera Pheri led by Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty and Paresh Rawal launched as comedy gold. As if that isn't enough range, Hindi cinema also got Josh that year. Directed by Mansoor Khan, the film saw a headband-wearing Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai play a brother-sister duo, twins at that. While that could have been the most interesting move Josh pulled off, the movie did not stop there. It was also an adaptation that liberally drew inspiration from the American musical West Side Story. Yup, before we had Spielberg's ambitious Oscar-nominated 2021 film, we had Josh.As Josh completes 23 years, here's a breakdown of how the film Indianised West Side Story, gave us the banger that is Apun Bola and made Bollywood buffs fall in love with a rowdy (and slightly problematic) Shah Rukh Khan.The plot of the timeless musical West Side Story revolves around the rivalry between the Jets, a street gang led by Riff and the Puerto Rican Sharks led by Bernardo. The largely white Jets clash with the new immigrants in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Between their rumbles for dominance, Tony - a former Jets member spots Maria, Bernardo's younger sister at a local dance and sparks fly. Later he finds out that she is related to Bernardo. Of course, Bernardo wants Tony to stay away from Maria. As if that was going to stop them. While this sounds like a quintessential star-crossed lovers' story, West Side Story is full of socio-political truths about living in America. Josh takes this narrative and grounds it in the streets of Goa. The Bollywood film opens with Goa's liberation from the Portuguese. Years after the historic event, the fictional Vasco Town in the '80s had a real estate crisis with frequent issues between tenants and corrupt landlords. Very early in the movie, we see locals getting evicted and insidious scam deals being made over properties. This results in two warring street gangs - the Eagle gang and the Bichhoo gang.The Bichhoos are led by Prakash Sharma (Sharad Kapoor) and the Eagles are led by Max Dias (Shah Rukh Khan). The town is divided in half with a maidan serving as a partition. The rivalry gets worse when Prakash's brother Rahul (Chandrachur Singh) shows up and decides to move from Mumbai to Goa. He not only wants to settle down and open a pastry shop, but he also ends up falling in love with Max's sister Shirley (because how could you not fall in love with biker-chic Aishwarya Rai?). Of course, he must tread lightly across gang borders. Josh romanticised Goa on screen before Dil Chahta Hai. Between the What mans, and the Konkani dialogues, the film immersed in Goan culture effectively localised West Side Story for the Indian audience. It was quite the feat. Moreover, the originals melodramatic themes found the perfect outlet in Bollywood with romance, drama and old family secrets creeping up later in the movie.The most memorable part of Josh (apart from Shah Rukh Khan's tiny yet badass ear cuff) is arguably Apun Bola sung by Hema Sardesai and SRK. The song revolves around Max trying to woo Rosanne (Priya Gill), his love interest with Shirley playing wing girl. It isn't just an earworm featuring SRK's own voice, it is a solid nod to Romeo and Juliet. One thing you need to know about West Side Story, if you haven't guessed it yet, is that it draws heavily from the Shakespearean classic. So "Apun bola, tu meri Laila" is a direct reference to the source material that the movie derives its plot lines from. In the song, Max refers to Rosanne as his Laila/Juliet. Meanwhile, the movie finds a heroine in the stunning Aishwarya Rai. With her girl-next-door charm mixed and her rowdy demeanour, the actress played a magnetic Juliet. Chandrachur Singh made for an unconventional Romeo - a romantic hero in a movie that already stars Shah Rukh Khan. Slow claps.Moreover, the Sharks and the Jets or the Bichhoos and Eagles are basically the Montagues and Capulets. The Romeo and Juliet references do not stop there. If this movie was trying to be subtle about its influences, it wasn't doing a very good job because it has lines like this - "Woh tera fruit salad banayega Romeo..." a dialogue between Shirley and Rahul while they're home together and Max is away. Fearing what Max would do if he finds out that Rahul is in his home making fruit salad, Shirley tries to warn him about what could happen if he doesn't leave soon enough.West Side Story is a musical and if any film industry gets the essence of musicals it's Bollywood. So it comes as no surprise that Josh with music composition by Anu Malik had some great dance numbers. For starters, the rumble sequence in Sailaru Sailare by Mano and Suresh Peters which sees the Eagle gang and Bichhoo gang face off does a great job of setting up the rivalry between the gangs. The choreography by Farah Khan keeps it fun while the actors reportedly delivered the dance sequence in a single take. Later, we see a stunning sequence in the movie's version of the neighbourhood dance. In it, a masked-up Rahul dances with Shirley right under Max's nose. The film's song and dance scenes remain memorable to this date.While the original stays true to Romeo and Juliet's tragedy roots, Josh being a Bollywood movie, opts for a happy ending. It is revealed that Max and Shirley are illegitimate children of the town's original owner Alberto Vasco. Upon getting this information, Rahul tries to relay the news to Shirley but it ends up in his brother Prakash's hands who wants to get Rahul married to Shirley and put Max behind bars. Max's arrest strains Rahul and Shirley's relationship but all ends well when the former admits his brother's wrongdoings. By the climax, Rahul and Shirley get married while Max ties the knot with Rosanne.Over the years, many parallels between West Side Story and Josh have been found. However, the films makers havent officially addressed this. The film opened to packed theatres and went on to become the 6th highest-grossing movie of 2000. And to think we have Shakespeare and West Side Story to thank for the perfectly goonish Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai.
Karolina Bielawska, the Miss World 2022, is a die-hard Priyanka Chopra Jonas fan. At the Miss World 2023 press conference in New Delhi, where it was revealed that India would host the 71st Miss World Final, the reigning beauty queen shared her respect for Priyanka. Karolina will crown her successor in the Miss World 2023 Final, which is likely to happen in November or December 2023. In an interview, Karolina spoke about her love for India and Bollywood. The divas named Priyanka Chopra Jonas as her role model and added that she is an inspiration to her when asked which Indian actor she would like to work with in a film.

I am a true fan of Priyanka Chopra. Not only because of her acting skills, but she is an icon to me. When I was learning for the competition and aspiring to be the Miss World, I was really looking up to her for what she has done for her career, how she not only handles her acting life but also how she is truly continuing the mission of beauty with purpose and supporting children while working with UNICEF. She is an amazing person and working with her would be an honour, Karolina revealed.

She named Shah Rukh Khan as the Indian actor she would most like to collaborate with. The Polish model continued by saying how much she yearned to work in Bollywood. Bollywood is something I would really love to be part of because it is so vibrant and passionate, she said.
Priyanka Chopra Jonas is leaving her mark on the world arena and is a great source of pride for her native land. She was recently spotted in Rome attending an Bulgari event, and she looked lovely in a chic white suit. She has made a name for herself as a true global fashion star because of her flawless sense of style. She was joined at the event by Zendaya, the well-known Spider-Man actor, who looked stunning in a cool pantsuit. Earlier, the two actresses were also spotted together at the Bulgari event.





Priyanka Chopra Jonas outfit at the occasion made a splash on social media and captivated viewers everywhere. This time, her ensemble bravely displayed a fondness for voluminous and grandiose trends by embracing whimsical and adventurous features. The actress chose a striking and dramatic dress with full sleeves embellished with long feathers. Priyanka added a distinctive dark green necklace to finish off her look. As for her hair, the actress was in an experimental mood, opting for a charming pigtail hairstyle with her gorgeous locks cascading down her shoulders.

Last month in Venice, Italy, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Zendaya were also spotted at the Bulgari event. In contrast, Priyanka Chopra looked lovely in a floral-detailed skirt and bright pink co-ord set. With a big fishtail and a black velvet gown that was belted at the waist, Zendaya opted for vintage Hollywood glam.




Johnny Depp's legendary role as Captain Jack Sparrow in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" film trilogy gained his enormous wealth and recognition. However, his affiliation with Disney came to an end after the Amber Heard legal battle.As per numerous media reports, Johnny Depp won't be returning to play his iconic character of Captain Jack Sparrow in Disney's new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. In response to how he was treated during the Amber Heard controversy, Johnny Depp has "no intention of working with Disney ever again." It is also reported that Johnny is so adamant about his choice that he won't play Jack Sparrow again, even if doing so means forgoing a $20 million salary for a sixth movie.Depp declared that his partnership with Disney had come to an unambiguous conclusion even during the defamation trial. After Heard's accusations, Disney dropped Depp from the sixth Pirates film.The producer of the "Pirates" movies, Jerry Bruckheimer, expressed his wish for Depp to return but acknowledged that Disney ultimately has the final say. In a 2022 interview with a leading news portal, he said,"You'd have to ask them. I can't answer that question. I would love to have him in the movie. He's a friend, a terrific actor, and it's unfortunate that personal lives creep into everything we do."However, the sixth instalment in the Pirates of the Caribbean series might not draw a sizable audience if Johnny Depp decides not to return as Jack Sparrow.
Rashmika Mandanna is one actress who shares great chemistry with her fans. The national crush loves to keep in touch with her fans and always makes sure she is checking up on them and engaging with them via different mediums. She is a social media queen and enjoys a huge following making her some of the high-ticket accounts on social media. While her fans always look forward to interacting with the actress, Rashmika recently came live from her Instagram account to have a fun chit-chat session with her fans.

Rashmika's live session witnessed a huge crowd of her fans dropping their questions in the comment box. As the actress was seen talking to her fans in Telugu, she read a question asking who the favorite person in her life, to which Rashmika pointed out at the screen referring it to her fans. Then came the next question, asking her dream destination, to which the actress mentioned, South Korea, Japan, and most of Asian countries. Then ahead of it, the actress also shared what's her favorite place in the world to which she replied, 'I love Coorg, I am from Karnataka, I love Karnataka and right now I am in Hyderabad and I love Hyderabad as well'. Ahead of this, the actress also expressed her love for Anime when a fan asked who is your favorite art anime, and Rashmika said, 'Naruto Uzumaki has been my crush since I was in school'. Then a fan asked Did you watch Demon Slayer to this, the national crush replied, 'I don't know, I must have but yes I have.'

The excited fan also asked her about her next movie to which Rashmika said, 'Animal, Pushpa 2, Rainbow and VNR'. During the live session, Rashmika also mentioned her favorite song as she said, Premisthunna, O Rendu Prema Meghaalila, and Na Roja Nuvve. Moreover, the actress also raised concern for her fans about this scorching heat as she said, "It's been extremely hot, so I hope you guys all have been taking care of yourself and keeping yourself hydrated and still there is so much heat even now."

Meanwhile, on the professional front, Rashmika has 'Animal' co-starring Ranbir Kapoor, 'Pushpa: The Rule' alongside Allu Arjun, 'VNR Trio', and 'Rainbow' in her kitty.
Ridhi Dogra is a talented actor who has shown her versatility both in films and OTT series. She gained a lot of appreciation earlier this year for her outstanding performance in the movie Lakdabaggha.

Riddhi was recently seen in the sequel to her much-awaited show Asur 2 where her turn as Nusrat Saeed was praised by the masses and the critics alike. As the actor continues to bask in the love and appreciation she is receiving for her performance in Asur 2, she has already into her next release.

She is seen playing Liz in Badtameez Dil. The romantic drama sees her paired opposite her Asur co-star Barun Sobti.

Taking to her social media, Ridhi posted a series of cute pictures from the show Badtameez Dil and called the character of Liz as one of her favourites. Sharing the pictures, the actress captioned, "I love Liz. Hope you love her too! Liz and her world is yours now. #badtameezdilonamazonminitv all episodes out now @amazonminitv @hereishowweding @altt.in Waiting to read all your feedback."

This year is going to be an exciting one for Ridhi as she has an interesting line-up of big movies including Tiger 3 and Jawan.
Chris Hemsworth: Chris Hemsworth, a well-known Hollywood actor, has joined the chorus of adoration by openly expressing his enthusiasm for NTR Jr.'s performance in RRR.

Hemsworth recognised his admiration for NTR Jr.'s abilities after seeing the movie and indicated his desire to collaborate with him in the future.

Hemsworth's remarks reflected those of other people in the foreign cinema business who have been charmed by NTR Jr.'s attraction on screen and his range of acting skills.

Chris Hemsworth shows a desire to work with Jr NTR

In a recent interview with one of the publications where he expressed his desire to work with NTR Jr, he said, "I just watched RRR recently, and I thought the film was incredible. NTR Jr was so amazing, if I was lucky to work with him. It would be fantastic."

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Many well-known Hollywood filmmakers and actors have expressed their desire to work with NTR Jr. because they understand the potential for creating artistic masterpieces by fusing his exceptional acting talent with their unique storytelling.

The skillful fusion of NTR Jr.'s versatility and Hollywood's universal appeal promises an exciting synergy that has the potential to enthral audiences everywhere.

The powerhouse performer of the Indian film industry, NTR Jr., has an outstanding line-up of upcoming films that are building anticipation from both critics and fans.

Expectations are extremely high for the upcoming films Devara, which marks his reunion with Janatha Garage director Kortala Siva, and another with Prashanth Neel temporarily titled NTR 31, which are expected to be huge successes.

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Nayanthara and Vignesh Celebrate Their First Wedding Anniversary: In a heartwarming celebration, the Tamil film industry's beloved couple, Vignesh Shivan and Nayanthara, marked their first wedding anniversary on June 9. The occasion became even more special as they shared it with their two adorable sons, Uyir and Ulag.

Filmmaker Vignesh Shivan took to Instagram to express his love and gratitude to his wife and sons. He shared unseen pictures of Nayanthara with their kids, capturing precious family moments.

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On June 8, Vignesh Shivan delighted fans by sharing romantic pictures with Nayanthara, accompanied by a heartfelt message. He wrote, "Got married to you yesterday! suddenly my friends are texting me saying "Happy First year marriage anniversary "! Theory of relativity is true! Love you #Thangamey! Jus starting our life with all the love and blessings! Long way to go! Lots to accomplish together! With all the good will of all the good people in our lives and the abundant blessings of GodAlmighty. bringing in the second year of our marriage with the greatest blessings of our lives Our babies Uyir & Ulagam (sic)."

To commemorate the anniversary day, Vignesh shared more unseen pictures of Nayanthara and their sons on June 9. He expressed his love, saying, "En uyiroda Aadharam neengaldhaneyyy. 1 year filled with a lotta moments! Lotta Ups and downs. Unexpected setbacks! Testing times! But coming home to see a blessed family with immense love and affection reinstates soo much confidence and gives all the energy to keep running towards all the dreams and goals already manifested! (sic)."

Vignesh's heartfelt message continued, "Holding everything together, together with my - My Uyirs & Ulagams. The strength given by the family makes all the difference ! blessed with the best of people striving to give them a good life is all the motivation that's needed for hustlers like me. Thank you for the wonderful clicks @josephradhik @storiesbyjosephradhik Ps : Negative comment addicts kindly excuse may be u should try to ignore positivity (sic)."

Vignesh Shivan and Nayanthara's love story blossomed on the sets of "Naanum Rowdy Dhaan" in 2015. After spending quality time together during the film's production, they started dating. The couple tied the knot on June 9, 2022, in a grand ceremony in Mahabalipuram, Chennai. The wedding was graced by esteemed guests, including Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin, Rajinikanth, Shah Rukh Khan, and Mani Ratnam, making it a memorable celebration in South India.
Ankit Gupta and Priyanka Choudhary have been all over the headlines today courtesy of their recent appearance at an award show. The power couple was seen making a stunning entry at the International Iconic Awards 2023 and graced the red carpet hand in hand.

While Ankit looked dapper in a black suit paired with a white shirt, Priyanka made a statement in a shimmery royal blue thigh high slit saree paired with a stylish blouse. She had her make up game on point and her panache left everyone in awe.

And while Priyanka and Ankit's sizzling chemistry had set the red carpet on fire, it was the Junooniyatt actor's special gesture for his rumoured ladylove that made everyone skip a heartbeat. After all, he dished out perfect boyfriend goals.

In the video going viral on social media, Ankit was seen helping Priyanka manage her saree. This happened when Priyanka greeted Sreejita De on the red carpet. While Ankit was seen standing next to Priyanka he was seen helping her manage the saree.

This isn't all. Ankit was seen leading Priyanka to the car post the event and he even opened the car's door for his Udaariyaan actress. Isn't it sweet?

Well Ankit's love filled gestures for Priyanka have certainly made us go aww.

Meanwhile, Priyanka and Ankit were also quizzed about their wedding plans during the event. Talking about it, Ankit said, "Main to humesha yahi bolta hu ki hum dono aapko aise ache nhi lagte? Kitne khush rehte hain. Kya shaadi shaadi?".

On the work front, Ankit is currently seen playing the lead role in Junooniyatt along with Gautam Vig and Neha Rana. Besides, he will also be seen in a new music video Baarish Aayi Hai which will be sung by Rito Riba. The song will also feature Shivangi Joshi and will mark the actress' first collaboration with Ankit and he is all praises for her. To note, the teaser of Baarish Aayi Hai will be out on June 10, 2023. Priyanka, on the other hand, is yet to announce her next project.
It has been a while since Aishwarya Sharma and Ayesha Singh have been making the headlines. The divas, who became a household name with their stints in Ghum Hai Kisikey Pyaar Meiin, have been making the headlines for their rumoured fallout.

To note, the reports about Aishwarya and Ayesha's came to light after they unfollowed each other on Instagram. Later, it was reported that the ladies have been at loggerheads, for months now. In fact, their co-star Kishori Shahane also confirmed the news of their rift. And while the reports have got the tongues wagging, Ayesha has now reacted to the reports about her tiff with her Ghum Hai Kisikey Pyaar Meiin.

Talking about it to Telly Masala during the International Icon Awards 2023, Ayesha said, "Koi andar ki baat nahi hai. I am absolutely not commenting on this. Maine us cheez ko read bhi nahi kia and main us cheez ko fuel bhi nahi de rahi hu". She also stated that she doesn't pay heed to the negativity around and is happy in her space.

Apparently, not just Aishwarya, there are reports that Ayesha is also at loggerheads with Neil Bhatt who plays the lead role in Ghum Hai Kisikey Pyaar Meiin.

Meanwhile, Ayesha and Aishwarya's co-star Sheetal Maulik has reacted to the reports. "Even two sisters fight and to be honest, there is no fight between them. We used to shoot somewhere and Ayesha used to shoot somewhere else as her story was taking place separately. Obviously, if you don't talk or meet everyday, you do not tend to be very close to that person," she told Telly Chakkar. Sheetal emphasised that Neil, Aishwarya and Ayesha are professional actors and they never let their personal differences affect their work.

To note, Aishwarya Sharma has lately quit Ghum Hai Kisikey Pyaar Meiin and is currently shooting for Khatron Ke Khiladi 13 in South Africa's Cape Town.
PriyAnkit video: Priyanka Choudhary and Ankit Gupta have been winning hearts ever since they participated in Bigg Boss 16. The two celebrities hogged all the limelight when they were locked inside the BB 16 house. Be it their nok-jhok or sizzling chemistry, the duo created ripples during their stint in Salman Khan's show.

PRIYANKIT ARE HERE TO ROCK N ROLL

Fans revolted when Ankit Gupta got eliminated from Bigg Boss 16 as they believed that he was evicted unfairly. They expressed their displeasure on social media, running a campaign to bring him back as a wildcard contestant.

Priyanka Choudhary's eviction during the BB 16 grand finale also became the talk of the town. As Ankit Gupta broke down into tears after she finished as the second runner-up, PriyAnkit fans also got emotional while sharing their thoughts.

PRIYANKA CHOUDHARY WINS AT INTERNATIONAL ICONIC AWARDS 2023

Filmibeat was the first portal to inform the fans about Priyankit making a grand appearance at International Iconic Awards 2023. The gala event was memorable as Priyanka Chahar Choudhary won the Iconice Face Female Award while Ankit bagged the Star of India award at the ceremony that was held in Mumbai on June 8, 2023.

A source close to the two had exclusively told Filmibeat, "Priyanka and Ankit will be attending the International Iconic Awards 2023 in Mumbai. The two celebrities will make a grand appearance on the red carpet. One needs to wait for the stunning look that has been specially created just for them. Priyanka and Ankit's OOTD will definitely leave their fans awestruck."

PRIYANKIT FANS SURPRISE DUO- VIRAL VIDEO

Guess what? The fans surprised Priyanka and Ankit with their sweet gesture after they won trophies at the International Iconic Awards 2023. We all know that fans love showering Priyankit with blessings and wishes and their new gesture is proof of the fame.

Priyankit warriors created a specially curated magazine featuring their favourite moments of Priyanka and Ankit in it. The magazine not only featured photos but also heartwarming quotes that depicted the Udaariyaan co-stars' journey and friendship.

It was indeed a special surprise as Priyankit fans had earlier gifted them a piece of land on Moon to the duo. They have the most adorable fans ever, isn't it?

Ankit is gearing up for the release of Baarish Aayi Hai, where he will be seen romancing Shivangi Joshi aka Naira from Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai. Priyanka Chahar Choudhary turned cheerleader for her former co-star as he shared the first look of his new music video.

Keep watching this space for more updates.
Sumbul Touqeer Khan is an actress who clearly aces the art of making the headlines be it on the professional front. After a successful stint in Bigg Boss 16, Sumbul recently made heads turn for her fallout with rumoured beau Fahmaan Khan. And now, she is making the headlines once again and this time because of her father.

According to media reports, Sumbul's father Touqeer Hassan Khan is set to tie

the knot once again. Reportedly, Khan will be marrying Nilofer who is a divorcee and has a daughter from her first marriage. The wedding is likely to take place next week and Sumbul can't keep calm about welcoming the new members in the family.

Sharing her excitement about her father's second marriage, the Imlie actress told the Times of India that they are looking forward to their new sister joining the family and are quite excited about it. "Our father has been our greatest source of inspiration and support for the last many years. Saniya and I are very happy for him," she was quote saying.

For the uninitiated, Sumbul's parents parted ways when she was six and ever since then Khan had raised both daughters single-handedly. The former Bigg Boss 16 contestant even spoke about how she tried looking for a bride for her father. "I have tried finding a bride for my dad once but the experience wasn't a good one. So as much as I would like him to be remarried, I would want him to be ready for it too," she told TOI.

Recently, Sumbul made the headlines for her massive fallout with rumoured beau Fahmaan Khan. While Fahmaan confessed their fallout in the media, he revealed that Sumbul's father influenced her and even had an issue with the actress working with him on Tabish Pasha's song Beirada


Photo of a group tour at The Expo at World Market Center Las Vegas





LAS VEGAS, NV, June 9, 2023 - (ACN Newswire) - BREATHE! Convention, BREATHE! Appreciation & Mixer event, which took place from May 3-5, 2023, at the Renaissance Hotel in Las Vegas, was met with an overwhelmingly positive reception as more than one hundred pioneers and emerging tech leaders shook hands, exchanged ideas, and built business relationships in anticipation for the upcoming BREATHE! Convention.Within attendance of this 3-day networking event included Web3 artists, blockchain developers and startups, venture capitalists, and other business leaders transforming the space of Web3, Blockchain, AI, Crypto, NFTs, Metaverse, DeFi, AR, VR, and other emerging technologies."I just want to thank the team for making this one of the most memorable times, not just in Web3 and in this space, but also in my life.. I am extremely inspired and cannot wait to bring all of our artists and talents to the forefront in resting immersive, unique, and bespoke experiences for this event," said Keith Botha, Chief Creative Officer at The Art Department, a Web3 creative agency.Professionals and pioneers at this event experienced a plethora of unique networking opportunities and previews to BREATHE! Convention taking place later this year, September 13-15 at The Expo at World Market Center Las Vegas.Professionals at the Appreciation & Mixer engaged in multiple activities, including:- A networking meet-and-greet dinner- Official previews of BREATHE! Convention, its floor plan, overall message, and goals- Tours of the showfloor space at The Expo at World Market Center Las Vegas- A live pitch session, led by Kurt Walker, Co-Founder at Captal PlatformsA supermajority of emerging tech professionals and pioneers expressed how BREATHE! has opened a pathway for many businesses, groups, and individuals to adopt and thrive on advancements in this space. See below for a video published on the official BREATHE! YouTube Channel capturing attendees' reactions to the Appreciation & Mixer event.Some advancements discussed at this event include using Web3 based platforms to produce and distribute art around the world, utilizing blockchain to provide better safety and accuracy in day-to-day business operations, and making use of advancements in virtual reality and digital ownership."BREATHE! Appreciation & Mixer was a beacon illuminating the bright and boundless possibilities of emerging technologies," stated Stormie Andrews, Co-Founder of BREATHE!. "This was just a taste of the synergy we're bringing together at the convention later this year. We saw a cross-pollination of ideas and potentials, with industry trailblazers working towards shaping the future of work and humanity."A milestone during the Appreciation & Mixer event came with the solidification of the strategic alliance between BREATHE! Convention and The Green Label Expo, a partnership forged with the shared objective of leading innovative and sustainable practices within the tech sector.As the countdown to the main event continues, the BREATHE! team gears up to reveal more networking opportunities, unveil renowned keynote speakers, offer cutting-edge breakout sessions, and provide immersive experiences. Moreover, a new digital platform undergoes development to encourage more in-depth connections, dialogue, and collaboration among attendees before the main event.Visit www.breatheconvention.com for more information on how to register to attend this empowering experience to prepare for the future of work and humanity.About BREATHE!Taking place on September 13-15, 2023 at The Expo at World Market Center Las Vegas, BREATHE! Convention is an emerging tech event designed to empower you to learn, apply, and thrive with digital transformations in Web3, AI, Blockchain, Metaverse, AR/VR, NFT technology, and more!Visit www.breatheconvention.com to secure your ticket to attend and inquire for exhibiting and sponsoring opportunities. BREATHE! is active on social media, providing the latest news and updates to the event.Produced by 5AM GlobalVisit us on social media:BREATHEConLVFacebook - www.facebook.com/BREATHEConLVTwitter - https://twitter.com/BREATHEConLVLinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/company/breathe-convention/Instagram - www.instagram.com/breatheconvention/YouTube - www.youtube.com/channel/UC_XwQVFnEwcF0V1Vv4pnYrAPress Contact: Brian Edmiston+1 833-931-3128Ext. 710Press@5AMGlobal.com5AM Global8275 S. Eastern Ave, Suite 200Las Vegas, NV 89123USASource: BREATHE!Copyright 2023 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved.
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Healthcare investment company Syncona Limited (SYNC.L) announced Friday that Quell Therapeutics, a developer of engineered T-regulatory (Treg) cell therapies for serious medical conditions, has entered into a collaboration with British drug major AstraZeneca Plc (AZN, AZN.L). The collaboration, exclusive option and license agreement between the companies is to develop, manufacture and commercialise autologous, engineered T-regulatory (Treg) cell therapies for two autoimmune disease indications - type 1 diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease. Under the deal terms, Quell will receive $85 million upfront from AstraZeneca that comprises a predominant cash payment and an equity investment. Quell will be eligible to receive potential payments of over $2 billion contingent on development and commercial milestones, plus tiered royalties. In the deal, Quell's proprietary toolbox of Treg cell engineering modules, including its Foxp3 Phenotype Lock, will be leveraged to develop autologous multi-modular Treg cell therapy candidates for both type 1 diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease. AstraZeneca will have the option to further develop and commercialise successful candidates, while Quell will be responsible for the process development and manufacturing of clinical candidates through to the end of the first-in-human clinical study. Further, Quell will continue to retain full ownership of its lead programme QEL-001, which is a Treg cell therapy candidate being developed for liver transplant patients to prevent organ rejection and the life-long need for immunosuppression. Following the signing of the agreement, Syncona's ownership stake in Quell is 33.7 percent,and its valuation is unchanged at $107.0 million or 86.7 million pounds. For More Such Health News, visit rttnews.com Copyright(c) 2023 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.


LA DEFENSE (dpa-AFX) - Multi energy company TotalEnergies (TTE), announced on Friday that it has signed a power purchase agreement or PPA for the Mirny project. The project aims to build a 1 GW onshore wind farm along with a 600 MWh battery energy storage system in the Zhambyl region. The investment is around $1.4 billion.



It is the largest wind energy initiative undertaken in Kazakhstan as per the company.



The entire electricity produced from this project will be sold to the Government of Kazakhstan, for the supply of the national grid. Mirny project will provide electricity to one million people.



'TotalEnergies will develop the Mirny project in partnership with the National Wealth Fund Samruk-Kazyna and the National Company KazMunayGas, which will each own a 20% stake in the project.', the company stated.



The project will consist of around 200 turbines and will be supported by both the Kazakh and French authorities. It is expected to help the Kazakh Government in achieving its target of 15% of electricity from renewable sources by 2030. It will also avoid the emission of CO2 by approximately 3.5 million tons annually.



On Thursday, shares of TotalEnergies closed at $54.49, up 0.93% or $0.55 on the New York Stock Exchange.



Copyright(c) 2023 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Das sind die KI-Gewinner Der kostenlose Report zur KI-Revolution: Diese 5 Aktien mussen auf Ihre Watchlist! Hier klicken
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Specialty chemicals company Croda International Plc (CRDA.L) Friday said it expects profit before tax in the range of 370 million pounds- 400 million pounds for the year 2023. This is lower than statutory profit before tax of 780 million pounds as well as adjusted profit before tax of 496 million pounds reported in 2022, primarily impacted by customer destocking . 'With customer destocking in consumer and industrial end-markets now expected to continue into the second half year and momentum moderating in Crop Protection, full year 2023 Group profit before tax is now expected to be between 370m and 400m,' Croda said. Copyright(c) 2023 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.
ASLEEP, a sleep technology company, announced on9 that it will participate in Viva Technology 2023 in Paris, France from June 14 to showcase an application program interface (API) based on the AI sleep monitoring technology delivering world-class accuracy and an application-based service 'Sleep Routine'.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005011/en/

(Graphic: ASLEEP)

ASLEEP offers an API that can be combined with various improvement services by using AI technology that monitoring sleep stages through breathing sounds during sleep. ASLEEP's sleep monitoring technology is characterized by its ability to measure sleep stages in any environment only with microphone-equipped devices such as smartphones, smart TVs, or speakers.

ASLEEP's sleep monitoring technology provides the highest accuracy even without using a wearable device such as a smartwatch. Especially when it comes to measuring REM sleep, non-REM sleep, and wake, ASLEEP's technology shows 15% higher accuracy on average than those of comparable smartwatches within the industry.

Going beyond simple sleep stage monitoring, ASLEEP has published in various academic journals the world's first technology for detecting sleep-related respiratory problems in real-time, regardless of age, gender, race, or environment including home environment which is recognized as an optimal solution for a real environment.

After unveiling a smart bedroom system that incorporates its sleep AI technology with home appliances from LG Electronics at CES 2023 in January 2023, ASLEEP has received attention from various global IT and beauty companies at home and abroad, expanding its business relationships. The company also joined the Korea-US summit in May 2023 as a member of the visiting U.S. delegation and further broadened its cooperation with global partners by signing MOUs and strengthening collaborative ties with Stanford University School of Medicine and the US National Sleep Foundation.

In recognition of such competency and achievements, ASLEEP was selected as a Korean-leading start-up in Viva Technology 2023 by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and KISED.

Lee Dong-heon, CEO of ASLEEP, said, "During CES 2023 held in Las Vegas in January, and the economic delegation's visit to the US for the Korea-US summit in May 2023, ASLEEP gained great interest from the local market. With the aim of growing into a global company, we will attend Viva Technology 2023 and seek possible collaborations with various business partners not only in the US market but also in the European market."

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005011/en/

Contacts:

Don Jung

call@ASLEEP.ai
Perfuze, a medical device company developing next-generation "super-bore" catheter technology to treat acute ischemic stroke, is pleased to announce the appointment of Hooman Hakami as the new Chair of the Board. This appointment reflects Perfuze's commitment to bring devices to market that have the potential to transform the treatment of acute ischemic stroke. Hooman brings a wealth of experience and expertise to Perfuze, making him an invaluable addition to the company's leadership team. With an impressive track record in the medical device industry, Hooman has held prominent leadership positions within Medtronic and GE Healthcare, driving innovation, growth, and profitability.

As the new Chair of the Board, Hooman will play a pivotal role in guiding Perfuze's strategic direction and spearheading the company's mission to transform the treatment landscape for acute ischemic stroke. His previous Board experience and strategic insights will be instrumental in supporting the advance of Perfuze's groundbreaking technologies and therapies, ultimately improving patient outcomes. "I am honored to join Perfuze as the Chair of the Board," said Hooman. "Perfuze's commitment to developing innovative solutions for stroke aligns perfectly with my enthusiasm for advancing medical technologies that have the potential to significantly impact patients' lives. I am joining at an exciting time in the company's development, as we move towards enrolling our first patient in our upcoming pivotal US IDE clinical study. I look forward to collaborating closely with the talented team at Perfuze to achieve our shared vision."

Perfuze's CEO, Wayne Allen, expressed his enthusiasm about the appointment, stating, "We are delighted to welcome Hooman to Perfuze. His exceptional leadership qualities and extensive industry experience will undoubtedly strengthen our board and accelerate our journey towards redefining stroke treatment. We believe that Hooman's guidance will be invaluable as we continue to push the boundaries of medical innovation."

About Perfuze

Based in Galway, Ireland, Perfuze is a dynamic medical device company that has developed super-bore diameter aspiration technology that is designed to navigate complex neurovascular anatomy. The company's pipeline of products is designed to facilitate fast, complete clot removal following acute ischemic stroke. Perfuze is committed to continuing its research and development efforts to advance the field of neurovascular care and aims to provide neurointerventional physicians with advanced tools to restore blood flow, minimize brain damage, and improve patient outcomes.

For more information, please visit www.perfuze.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005018/en/

Contacts:

Wayne Allen, CEO

Perfuze

Email: wayne@perfuze.com
AMSTERDAM, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Turkish Payment and Electronic Money Institutions Association (TODEB) with its 8 members established the first-ever Turkish pavilion at Money 20/20, Amsterdam; one of the most prestigious fairs in the fintech world.

At Money 20/20 - Amsterdam, one of the most prestigious fairs in the fintech world that hosts top-level executives and investors from around the globe, the pavilion established by the Turkish Payment and Electronic Money Institutions Association (TODEB) with its 8 members, along with the participation of numerous financial institutions from Turkiye, received significant attention.

Considered as one of the most prestigious fairs in the fintech world, the exhibition provided an opportunity for PayTR Electronic Money and Payment Services Inc., Hizlipara Payment Services and Electronic Money Inc., Klon Payment Institution Inc., Moka Payment and Electronic Money Institution Inc., Odeal Payment Institution Inc., Paragram Payment Institution Inc., Pay Fix Electronic Money and Payment Services Inc., and Sipay Electronic Money and Payment Services Inc. to come together under the leadership of TODEB and establish the first Turkish pavilion.

TODEB members also visited Askin PEKEL, Deputy Commercial Counselor of the Embassy of the Republic of Turkey in The Hague, and Selcuk UNAL, the Ambassador of the Republic of Turkey in The Hague.

Speaking at the high-profile fair, which is considered as the most prestigious event in the fintech world, Ufuk Bilgetekin, Chairman of the Board of Directors of TODEB, expressed his satisfaction with the interest in the pavilion. He stated, "We will continue our efforts without interruption to further strengthen Turkish fintech companies internationally."

Erkan Kork, CEO of Payfix and one of the participating members, emphasized that there are no obstacles for Turkiye to become a fintech hub. He stated, "Under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan esteemed n, Turkiye stands on the threshold of a historic opportunity."

About TODEB:

The Turkish Payment and Electronic Money Institutions Association (TODEB) was established in 2020 in accordance with the provisions of the Law on Payment and Securities Settlement Systems, Payment Services and Electronic Money Institutions. TODEB, which is a professional organization with legal personality and the status of a public institution, has a total of 75 members as of 2023, including 29 payment institutions and 46 electronic money institutions. The association's headquarters are located in Istanbul.

https://todeb.org.tr/en/

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2097322/Turkish_pavilion.jpg

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/first-turkish-fintech-pavilion-at-money-2020-301846713.html
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.
A research group in Ghana has conducted a series of tests to assess the performance of polycrystalline solar modules in PV systems operating in their home country for at least 5 years. They found that the vast majority of the panels may "fail" before 20 years in operation under outdoor conditions.Researchers at the University of Energy and Natural Resources (UENR) have assessed the performance of different polycrystalline solar modules coming from 11 undisclosed manufacturers and installed under the same warm and humid climatic conditions in Kumasi, Ghana. Their work analyzed, in particular, 48 ...

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.
PARIS (dpa-AFX) - Italian natural gas distributor Italgas S.p.A. announced Friday a sale and purchase agreement with French resource management firm Veolia Environnement (VE). The deal is regarding stakes held by Veolia in three companies active in the water sector in the regions of Lazio, Campania and Sicily. For the acquisition, Italgas will recognize Veolia a total of around 115 million euros, partially depending upon certain targets of the operational companies. The agreement includes Veolia's 100 percent stake in Acqua S.r.l., which in turn directly holds 98.7 percent of Idrosicilia S.p.A. and, indirectly, 75 percent of the equity of Siciliacque S.p.A; 100 percent of Idrolatina S.r.l., which in turn holds about 49 percent of Acqualatina S.p.A; and 9 percent of Acqua Campania S.p.A. The holding companies Acqua, Idrosicilia and Idrolatina hold the stakes in the operational companies Siciliacque and Acqualatina. The closing of the deal is subject to the fulfillment of certain conditions precedent, including the involvement or approval by the Public Bodies which awarded the water service concession. Copyright(c) 2023 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.
Company Taking Strategic Actions to Prioritize Clinic Expansion, Enhance Operational Effectiveness and Right Size Cost Structure

Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - Braxia Scientific Corp. (CSE: BRAX) (OTC Pink: BRAXF) (FSE: 4960) ("Braxia", or the "Company"), a medical research company with mental health clinics providing innovative ketamine and psilocybin treatments for depression and related disorders, is pleased to report treatment volumes across its clinics increased 26.2% to 3,516 from 2,785 treatments on a year-over-year basis in Fiscal 2023. The Company continues to experience increased demand across all of it 5 clinics. At its new Ottawa clinic, treatment volumes increased 87.2% to 571 from 305 treatments on a year-over-year basis following the completion of construction and opening of its expanded purpose-built clinic in late 2022. Additionally, its Kitchener-Waterloo clinic, opened in mid-2022, continues to see rapid increases in treatment volume, reaching 214 treatments in its first 8 months of operation.

"Over the last few years, Braxia has built a tremendous patient base and reputation for providing innovative, life-saving treatments for people suffering from major depressive disorder, among other mental health conditions. We have seen record levels of referrals which we expect to continue and convert to treatments as we realign and refocus resources to our clinics," said Dr. Roger McIntyre, CEO, Braxia Scientific.

The Company also reported its current clinic volumes continued to trend up over the last four months through May 2023, with total average monthly treatments up to 307 treatments per month compared with 293 for fiscal 2023. Clinic treatment volumes continue to trend upwards despite executing very little marketing. In the near term, the Company expects to continue to increase its volumes by ramping up direct marketing efforts and improving efficiency with additional capacity planned to come online in September 2023.

Dr. McIntyre added, "To date, patient acquisition growth has largely been driven by our medical team's reputation, relationships and educational programs with primary care physicians and other healthcare providers within the communities we serve versus direct marketing efforts. Looking ahead, we are extremely well positioned to rapidly grow volumes and revenues by expanding our flagship clinic in the Greater Toronto Area, which remains a highly underserved market, and expanding in other major urban centres."

Cost Improvements

Additionally, the Company announced it is taking strategic actions as part of a restructuring plan that prioritizes the growth of its brick-and-mortar clinics while also reducing and rightsizing its cost structure including the slowdown of its US based telemedicine business, KetaMD, Inc. (KetaMD).

The restructuring plan includes a reorganization of its clinic operations, a reduction in certain management positions, and voluntary salary reductions to preserve cash as it works through challenging market conditions and recent potential regulatory changes with respect to virtual at home treatments. As part of the restructuring plan, the Braxia senior management team, including Dr. McIntyre, has voluntarily agreed to reduce cash compensation by an aggregate of $113,000 per month.

"We embarked on an ambitious plan to quickly expand and bring our expertise across North America to reach millions more in need. However, in the last few months we've seen our environment significantly change and as a result we must focus on refining our strategy and potential other structural changes to take us through to the next phase of accelerated growth of our clinics and better execute our strategy."

Update on KetaMD

The Company is reviewing the request for comment and recent announcement by the Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) of a proposed policy which will limit the supply to patients of certain controlled medications, including ketamine, to 30 days without an in-person or in-clinic assessment. The rule changes could require KetaMD to either own or have an association with physical clinics to build out its business. While the DEA recently extended the COVID-19 health emergency flexibilities that permitted the remote prescribing of controlled substances until November 11, 2023, it is unclear what happens after this temporary rule expires. While the Company reviews the proposed policy changes, Braxia management is also taking steps to review its longer-term US strategy and planned rollout. During its strategy review, Braxia has slowed down the ramp up of KetaMD to reduce costs and preserve capital. The Company is also focused on searching for strategic partners and additional capital to rollout and offer this technology platform to over 600 hundred Ketamine clinics operating in the US today, of which the large majority currently do not HIPPA compliant virtual capabilities provided by KetaMD.

Also, as part of its strategy review, Warren Gumpel, has stepped down as CEO of KetaMD, but will remain as a special advisor to KetaMD as Dr. McIntyre assumes the roll of KetaMD CEO. KetaMD will still be taking treatment requests but will not be conducting any new patient treatments at this time.

Dr McIntyre said: "We remain committed to the use of telemedicine to reach patients with treatment-resistant depression and believe KetaMD has the right technology and model to do this. While the telemedicine environment may become more challenging, we are seeking to identify the right partners to assist us in further developing this business quickly. We are hopeful to continue to build this business."

About Braxia Scientific Corp.

Braxia is a medical research and telemedicine company with clinics that provide innovative ketamine treatments for persons with depression and related disorders. Braxia also launched its U.S. based end-to-end telemedicine platform KetaMD, that utilizes leading technology to provide access to safe, affordable, and potentially life-changing at-home ketamine treatments for people living with depression and related mental health conditions. Through its medical solutions, Braxia aims to reduce the illness burden of brain-based disorders, such as major depressive disorder among others. Braxia is primarily focused on (i) owning and operating multidisciplinary clinics, providing treatments in-person and virtually for mental health disorders, and (ii) research activities related to discovering and commercializing novel drugs and delivery methods. Braxia seeks to develop ketamine and derivatives and other psychedelic products from its IP development platform. Through its wholly owned subsidiary the Canadian Rapid Treatment Center of Excellence Inc., carrying on business as Braxia Health, the Company operates multidisciplinary community-based clinics offering rapid-acting treatments for depression located in Mississauga, Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ottawa, and Montreal.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

Braxia Scientific Corp.

Tel: 416-762-2138

Email: info@braxiascientific.com

Website: www.braxiascientific.com

The CSE has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the accuracy or adequacy of this release.

Forward-looking Information Cautionary Statement

This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements that are not historical facts, future estimates, plans, programs, forecasts, projections, objectives, assumptions, expectations, or beliefs of future performance are "forward-looking statements."

Forward-looking statements include statements about the intended promise of ketamine-based treatments for depression, the potential for ketamine or other psychedelics to treat other mental health conditions, the ability of telemedicine to address the unmet need for mental health disorders or expand or accelerate the growth of Braxia, the Company's strategy of developing its clinical operations in Canada while building out its strategic and highly scalable telemedicine business with KetaMD, Inc. in the United States and the build out of Company's CRO business of providing capabilities and research services to pharmaceutical companies. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, events, or developments to be materially different from any future results, events or developments expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, among others, the failure of ketamine, psilocybin and other psychedelics to provide the expected health benefits and unanticipated side effects, dependence on obtaining and maintaining regulatory approvals, including acquiring and renewing federal, provincial, municipal, local or other licenses and engaging in activities that could be later determined to be illegal under domestic or international laws. Ketamine and psilocybin are currently Schedule I and Schedule III controlled substances, respectively, under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, S.C. 1996, c. 19 (the "CDSA") and it is a criminal offence to possess such substances under the CDSA without a prescription or a legal exemption. Health Canada has not approved psilocybin as a drug for any indication, however ketamine is a legally permissible medication for the treatment of certain psychological conditions. It is illegal to possess such substances in Canada without a prescription.

These factors should be considered carefully, and readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements.

Although the Company has attempted to identify important risk factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other risk factors that cause actions, events or results to differ from those anticipated, estimated or intended. Additional information identifying risks and uncertainties that could affect financial results is contained in the Company's filings with Canadian securities regulators, including the Amended and Restated Listing Statement dated April 15, 2021 and its most recent MD&A, which are available at www.sedar.com. 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 forward-looking statements.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169407
MONTREAL, QC / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / VIOR INC. ( Vior  or the  Corporation ), (TSX-V:VIO)(OTCQB:VIORF)(FRANKFURT:VL51) - is pleased to provide an update on the Corporation's Spring/Summer 2023 field exploration programs and corporate strategy across its three key exploration projects: Belleterre Gold Project, Belleterre Critical Minerals Project (Lithium) and Skyfall Nickel Project. Vior and its funding partners will spend approximately C$2.5 million in direct exploration costs over the Spring/Summer 2023 period.

Mark Fedosiewich, Vior's President and CEO commented, "This will be a very busy and exciting year for Vior, as we rapidly advance three of our district-scale projects in Quebec, including our flagship Belleterre Gold Project, the recently generated Belleterre Critical Minerals Project (Lithium) and our Skyfall Nickel Project. Each of these distinct projects offer exposure to a different key and highly sought after metal, representing tremendous value creation opportunities for Vior shareholders."

Highlights:

Extensive field exploration programs have begun at Belleterre and Skyfall that will continue into Fall 2023. This work will include: stripping, channel sampling, and a backpack drilling to investigate near surface geological continuity at the Belleterre Gold Project; first reconnaissance program for lithium-bearing pegmatites at Belleterre Critical Minerals Project (Lithium) and near surface geological backpack drilling to investigate geological continuity. Field crews have located pegmatite dyke swarms with Two-Mica and Beryl; district-scale helicopter-borne High Definition VTEM survey has been completed at the Skyfall Nickel Project, contributing to an in-depth interpretation of numerous high potential nickel targets. These targets will be validated in the field with the first-ever large-scale field reconnaissance program for nickel.



Belleterre Gold Project

Vior began field work in early May at the Belleterre Gold Project, deploying two dedicated crews with the objective of validating the revised regional mineralization model. This validation program follows the comprehensive update to the geochemical and litho-structure analysis undertaken over Winter 2022-2023.

This initial field work has helped to better identify key targets with known mineralization for overburden stripping, channel sampling and near surface investigatory backpack drilling.

Vior continues to finalize these key targets, including the recognition of new mineralized QFP intrusives frequently associated with gold mineralization throughout the region.

Upon completion of the stripping, channel sampling, and mapping program, Vior will finalize and prioritize its drill targets, and then embark on a significant drilling campaign encompassing an estimated 30,000 metres.

Belleterre Critical Minerals Project (Lithium)

A comprehensive field program at the Belleterre Critical Minerals Project (Lithium) began in May with three crews and will resume through this Summer.

The teams are focused on validating all available exploration data, including geochemical, geophysical, and regional geological mapping.

The primary objective is to thoroughly map and sample the highly prospective lithium-bearing corridor, spanning a length of 90 kilometres and flanking the Reservoir Decelles Batholith (RDB) contact. Initial findings have already indicated the occurrence of two-mica granites, a significant precursor for the formation of lithium-cesium-tantalum (LCT) pegmatites. Access for prospecting in the region is exceptionally favourable, facilitated by the presence of multiple all-season logging roads and ATV trails.

Vior is employing portable X-ray fluorescence ("pXRF") field measurements to enhance the accuracy of identifying evolved LCT pegmatites. Once selected locations have undergone analytical confirmation, Vior will proceed with mechanical stripping to uncover and expose cross-sections of promising pegmatite areas. In addition, the exploration team will also undertake some channel sampling, near surface backpack drilling, and subsequent assays of prospective lithium bearing pegmatites.

Skyfall Nickel Project

Vior has just initiated its first-ever comprehensive and targeted validation field program for nickel-sulphide bearing horizons at the Skyfall Nickel Project. This work follows the completion of a 3,636 line-kilometre airborne VTEM survey (with a 100m spacing per line), where final results have been received and interpretations are being integrated.

The project area benefits from extensive access through a network of logging roads and ATV trails. In line with Vior's systematic exploration approach, the initial prospecting efforts of the crews will encompass sampling of VTEM targets in areas with exposed bedrock and manually stripped areas where shallow overburden is present.

Advanced field technologies will be used, including portable pXRF measurements, to effectively identify and assess elevated concentrations of nickel, copper, cobalt, and/or platinum group elements ("PGE"s).

NOTICE: Due to forest fire activity and in compliance with a directive from the Ministere des Ressources naturelles et des Forets (MRNF), exploration activities have been temporarily suspended in Quebec. As such, Vior has temporarily suspended its field operations and will resume its field exploration programs as soon as access is restored. Vior is actively monitoring the situation and does not foresee any impact at this point to its overall 2023 exploration plans and objectives.

Figure 1 - BELLETERRE GOLD - A - City Showing Area - Southwest of Village Showing (Vior surface sample: 175 g/t Au; see press release Jan. 28, 2022). B - Newly Discovered Mineralized Quartz-Feldspar Porphyry (Assay Pending). C - Village Showing Area (Vior surface sample: 61.2 g/t Au; see press release Sept. 17, 2021).

Figure 2 - BELLETERRE LITHIUM - A - Two-Mica Pegmatite with Beryl (Assay Pending). B - Two-Mica Pegmatite Outcrop

Figure 3 - SKYFALL - Exposed VTEM Conductor

Qualified Person

The technical content disclosed in this press release was reviewed and approved by Laurent Eustache, Executive Vice-President for Vior and Qualified Person as per NI 43-101.

About Vior

Vior is a junior mining exploration corporation based in Quebec whose corporate strategy is to generate, explore, and develop high quality projects in proven and favourable mining jurisdictions in North America. Through the years, Vior's management and technical team have demonstrated their ability to discover several gold deposits and many high-quality mineral prospects. Vior is rapidly advancing three district-scale projects in Quebec, which include its flagship Belleterre Gold Project, the Belleterre Critical Minerals Project (Lithium) and its Skyfall Nickel Project.

For further information, please contact:

Mark Fedosiewich

President and CEO

613-898-5052

mfedosiewich@vior.ca

Laurent Eustache

Executive Vice-President

514-442-7707

Website: www.vior.ca

leustache@vior.ca

SEDAR: Vior Inc.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its regulation services provider (as that term is defined in the Policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements. All statements, other than of historical facts, that address activities, events or developments that the Corporation believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future including, without limitation, the planned exploration program on the Belleterre project, the expected positive exploration results, the timing of the exploration results, the ability of the Corporation to continue with the exploration program, the availability of the required funds to continue with the exploration and the approval from the Ministere de l'energie et des ressources naturelle ("MERN") of the request for abandonment of the two mining concessions filed by 9293-0122 Quebec Inc. are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are generally identifiable by use of the words "will", "should", "continue", "expect", "anticipate", "estimate", "believe", "intend", "to earn", "to have', "plan" or "project" or the negative of these words or other variations on these words or comparable terminology. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Corporation's ability to control or predict, that may cause the actual results of the Corporation to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, failure to meet expected, estimated or planned exploration expenditures, the possibility that future exploration results will not be consistent with the Corporation's expectations, general business and economic conditions, changes in world gold markets, sufficient labour and equipment being available, changes in laws and permitting requirements, unanticipated weather changes, title disputes and claims, environmental risks, the refusal by the MERN to approve the request for abandonment of the two mining concessions held by 9293-0122 Quebec Inc. as well as those risks identified in the Corporation's annual Management's Discussion and Analysis. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking statements prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described and accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Although the Corporation has attempted to identify important risks, uncertainties and factors which could cause actual results to differ materially, there may be others that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. The Corporation does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements except as otherwise required by applicable law.

SOURCE: Vior Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/760264/VIOR-Details-Its-SpringSummer-2023-Exploration-Plans
TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / Mr. Xiao Hua Gong, an esteemed entrepreneur and community leader, has officially announced his bid for the position of Mayor of Toronto in the upcoming elections this May. With a strong focus on multi-dimensional progress and the well-being of Toronto residents, Mr. Gong has unveiled a comprehensive seven-point campaign platform aimed at transforming the city into a global exemplar of safety, cultural diversity, technological advancement, livability, and affordability.

Mr. Xiao Hua Gong

Recognizing the challenges faced by Toronto in recent years, including social security concerns, rising living costs exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and economic hardships, Mr. Gong's campaign platform represents a visionary blueprint for change. His deep appreciation for the multicultural fabric of Toronto, cultivated during his years as an immigrant, drives his passion to elevate the city's standing and improve the lives of its residents.

Central to Mr. Gong's campaign is his pledge to reduce the tax burden on Toronto's residents, aiming to alleviate financial strain and promote economic growth. He firmly believes that by fostering an environment that encourages businesses to thrive, Toronto can overcome its economic challenges and create sustainable job opportunities for its diverse population.

"With a dynamic and prosperous Toronto as our collective goal, I am committed to serving as a groundbreaking leader and transformative force for positive change," expressed Mr. Gong. "Through my extensive experience as an entrepreneur and community organizer, I have honed the skills, foresight, and business acumen necessary to break the status quo and inject vitality into our beloved city."

Mr. Gong's accomplishments in the business realm speak to his dedication and success as a visionary leader. Having pioneered and operated several businesses over the past two decades, including television, hotel, and health product companies in Canada and the United States, Mr. Gong has demonstrated his ability to create jobs and contribute to the economic fabric of the region.

Furthermore, his contributions to Toronto's cultural landscape through large-scale shows, televised galas, and community events have garnered significant admiration from the public. These initiatives not only entertain and inspire but also foster multicultural integration, making Toronto a beacon of diversity and cultural evolution.

In addition to his professional achievements, Mr. Gong is actively involved in charitable endeavors. He has organized numerous donation galas, initiated a charity show in response to the 2016 Fort McMurray Wildfire, and hosted earthquake fundraising and disaster relief events. Through these philanthropic efforts, Mr. Gong has demonstrated his commitment to supporting those in need and building a stronger, more compassionate community.

Contact: Steven Zhao

Email: zhao@canadanewsreport.com

SOURCE: Xiao Hua Gong campaign team

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/760238/Mayoral-Candidate-Xiao-Hua-Gong-Unveils-Visionary-Campaign-Platform-for-a-Thriving-Toronto
SAO PAULO, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Traive, a Brazilian fintech specializing in agri-business, together with embassies and other companies that support the sector in the country, is participating in meetings in London (06/07), Berlin (06/09) and The Hague (06/12) with attendees from investment funds, venture capitals and banks.

One of the most biodiverse nations on the planet, Brazil is a benchmark in sustainable agriculture, with regulations for the protection of the environment throughout the entire production chain. However, the business potential of this segment is not always widely disseminated to potential investors, while it simultaneously supports guidelines for global preservation of natural resources. "The European market tends to have a lot of interest in knowing how the Brazilian agro market operates, its capacity and how it is incorporated into the ESG agenda. With excellent statistics in sustainable management that involve the preservation, conservation and development of the use of bio-inputs, Brazilian agri-business is also showing solid results, having started 2023 with a surplus of US$ 8.69 billion *, which is appealing to investors who are looking to invest capital in the Green Bond segment with social-environmental assurance and a financial return," says Fabricio Pezente, CEO of Traive.

In 2022, the Responsible Commodities Facility (RCF) initiative run by Traive, in partnership with SIM and OPEA, raised US$ 11M in investments from British chains Tesco, Sainsbury's and Waitrose to support deforestation and DCF-free soy farming in the Brazilian Cerrado. Traive's technology was responsible for leading investors to carry out a transparent analysis of the risk of credit and operation monitoring. Through the stimulus driven by social-environmental criteria, the initiative has a 0% non-compliance rate on the part of the 32 financed farms, who produced 42,400 tons of soy, 27,000 tons of maize and 3,200 tons of cotton, all deforestation-free, preserving 8,541 hectares of forest. This pioneering financing in the country also led to talks with the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, and was named the "2022 Initiative of the Year - Green Bonds" by Environmental Finance.

About Traive

With its head office in the USA and operating in Brazil, Traive is a technology platform that uses Artificial Intelligence and data to develop risk-analysis solutions that cover the entire agricultural credit journey. Connecting retailers, cooperatives and industries to the capital market, allowing access to financial resources, data, scalability and sustainability in their businesses.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/meeting-presents-sustainable-brazilian-agri-business-projects-for-investors-301847135.html
The "Europe Green Data Center Market Industry Analysis Outlook 2023-2028" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The Europe green data center is expected to reach a value of $12.25 billion in 2028 from $7.94 billion in 2022, growing at a CAGR of 7.49%

Hyperscale players such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Meta, and Microsoft are procuring renewable energy for their data centers.

AWS meets 85% of its energy requirements from renewable energy. Google and Meta meet 100% of their energy requirements for data centers from renewable energy. Microsoft will power all data centers with 100% renewable energy by 2025.

Colocation operators in the Europe green data center market such as Equinix, Digital Realty, CyrusOne, Vantage Data Centers, OVHcloud, VIRTUS Data Centres, QTS Realty Trust, and others are proactively signing PPAs and procuring renewable energy to power their facilities to meet their sustainability goals.

In September 2022, OVHcloud started constructing a new facility in Germany, renewable energy will be procured from Energieversorgung Limburg (EVL).

GEOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS

The Nordic region is the most suitable region for green data center development as there is no need for water cooling. Nordic countries also source the maximum power supply from renewable energy.

Site selection for data centers across Europe will mostly depend on access to renewable energy. There is continuous investment in renewable energy projects across Nordics and Western Europe, where data center companies also participate.

KEY MARKET PARTICIPANTS

Renewable energy companies like Engie, TotalEnergies, EDF Renewables, ENEL Group, Orsted, and much more supply renewable energy to European green data center market operators. These companies are setting up new plants exclusively for data center companies, thus providing clean power sources for companies.

Key Attributes:

Report Attribute Details No. of Pages 259 Forecast Period 2022 2028 Estimated Market Value (USD) in 2022 $7.94 Billion Forecasted Market Value (USD) by 2028 $12.25 Billion Compound Annual Growth Rate 7.4% Regions Covered Europe

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

Climate Neutral Data Center Pact has played a major role in increasing the sustainability of European data centers as all the signatories will be relying on renewable energy for their facilities by 2030.

As of October 2022, over 100 companies have signed the Climate Neutral Data Center Pact, which operates more than 90% of data center capacity across Europe.

Hyperscale operators in the Europe green data center market like AWS and Microsoft and colocation operators like Kao Data, NorthC Datacenters, and Data4 are taking multiple steps to improve their sustainability credentials.

A few of the initiatives taken by major operators are: Replacing diesel with HVO (Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil) Use of recycled construction material Use of Fuel cells, vegetable oil, and other sustainable fuel sources Replacement of VRLA batteries with Lithium-ion batteries

Data Center investors are moving to new locations like Spain, Portugal, Greece, and other sites where the availability of renewable energy is high with average land prices.

Europe is at the forefront of renewable energy adoption. Europe's commitment to adopting renewable energy and phasing out fossil fuels will promote the growth of renewable energy adoption by data center companies.

SEGMENTATION INSIGHTS

Electrical Infrastructure: Efficient and sustainable power infrastructure replacing traditional power systems.

The increasing demand for efficiency in data centers has fueled the growth of efficient infrastructure such as lithium-ion UPS systems, fuel cells, HVO, Natural Gas generators, nuclear energy reactors, and more.

AWS will use HVO across all of its European facilities. It has already replaced diesel with HVO in Ireland facility.

Companies are using Microgrids and Smart grids to further stabilize power supply to the data center and back to the grid in the hour of need.

Microsoft has partnered with Eaton, which will outfit all of Microsoft's data centers with grid-interactive UPS.

Mechanical Infrastructure: Europe is to witness an increase in advanced cooling technologies.

Most companies have deployed free cooling, and zero-water cooling, leveraging the cold temperature of the region.

Colt Data Centre Services uses free cooling most of the year in the Paris Southwest data center; the same will be used in the announced expansion of this data center.

DigiPlex has deployed air-free cooling in Sweden's Stockholm 1 data center.

General Construction: Adopting sustainable and innovative construction design/material in Europe in data centers.

Hyperscale operators like AWS, Microsoft, Apple, and Google are leading in using sustainable materials to construct facilities.

Companies introduce technologies like green concrete, modular data centers, and more in their data center construction.

Data4 has been using low-carbon concrete in its data centers since 2021.

Zetto, a TV streaming service provider, placed its servers in windmills of WestfalenWind from where it has been streaming.

Companies are investing in additional infrastructure like Aquifer Thermal Storage Systems to conserve heat.

Key Vendors

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Atman

Beyond.pl

Bulk Infrastructure

CyrusOne

Data4

Digital Realty

EdgeConneX

Equinix

Google

Green Mountain

Iron Mountain

Kao Data

Keppel Data Centres

LCL Data Centers

Microsoft

Nautilus Data Technologies

NorthC Datacenters

NTT Global Data Centers

OVHcloud

Switch Datacenters

STACK Infrastructure

Serverfarm

Scaleway

Telehouse

Vantage Data Centers

VIRTUS Data Centers

Verne Global

Renewable Energy Providers

ACCONIA Energia

Better Energy

Bryt Energy

Conrad Energy

Datafarm Energy

Eneco

Enel Group

Engie

ERG

GreenYellow

HDF Energy

Ilmatar Energy

Neoen

NTR

Orsted

RWE Renewables

ScottishPower

Shell

TotalEnergies

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/zczcj0

About ResearchAndMarkets.com

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Samara Asset Group PLC Sliema, Malta ISIN MT0001770107 / WKN A2JDEW To the Shareholders of Samara Asset Group PLC NOTICE TO CONVENE SAMARA ASSET GROUP PLC'S

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING (AGM) OF SHAREHOLDERS.

QUOTE It is being announced (pursuant to Articles 164 and 165 of the Articles of Association) that the Company Samara Asset Group PLC (C 84355) shall be holding its Annual General Meeting ("AGM"), on Wednesday 28th of June 2023 at 17:00 hours (CET). The Annual General Meeting shall be held 'in person' at the Registered Office of the Company, this being 66/67, "Beatrice", Amery Street, Sliema SLM 1707 Malta. The following resolutions will be tabled for the consideration of the shareholders at the Annual General Meeting (AGM): Ordinary Resolutions - Ordinary Business 1. That the audited financial statements of the Company for the financial year ended 31st December 2022 and the directors' and auditors' report thereon as set out in the Annual Report be and are hereby approved; 2. That the appointment of auditors of the Company for the next financial year 2023 be hereby approved and that the directors be and are hereby authorised to determine their remuneration (auditor's fee);

Ordinary Resolutions - Special Business Appointment of Directors. 3. The term of office of the directors, appointed pursuant to clause 112 of the Company's articles of association, currently in office shall expire at the forthcoming annual general meeting and the current directors will be subject to re-election accordingly. All directors have expressed their willingness to be re-appointed in terms of the Company's Statutory Documents. 4. That the Directors' fees for year 2023 be reconfirmed & remain unchanged accordingly;

UNQUOTE This notice is dated the 6th of June 2023 By order of the Board of Directors. Tuesday 6th day of June 2023 Dr. Michael Calleja

Company Secretary

Annual General Meeting (AGM) AGENDA

At the AGM of the Shareholders, the following matters will be considered: I. Opening of the Meeting. II. Calling the Meeting to Order. III. Nomination and Appointment of a Chairman. Mr. Jefim Gewiet (Director) will serve as Chairperson of the General Meeting. If Mr. Gewiet is prevented from serving as the chairperson for a weighty reason, the Board of Directors will appoint a person they deem most suitable to serve as the Chairperson. IV. Confirmation of Quorum (not less than 51% of the members holding an equivalent paid-up voting share capital of the company). V. Recording the Attendance at the Meeting and Adoption of the List of Votes. Shareholders who have voted in advance within the advance voting period and who are entitled to participate in the General Meeting will be deemed shareholders participating in the meeting. VI. Election of one or two persons to verify the minutes. During the Meeting, a person will be chosen to scrutinise the minutes. VII. Presentation of two sets of audited accounts (both audited and consolidated). VIII. Ordinary Resolution: Receipt and approval of both the Audited Financial Statements and the Audited Consolidated Financial Statements of Cryptology Asset Group PLC (Annual Report) of the Company for the year ended 31st December 2022 and the Directors' Report for the year ending 31st December 2022 and the Auditors' Report for the year ending 31st December 2022. IX. Ordinary Resolution: To appoint the auditors of the Company and to authorise the Board of Directors to fix their remuneration. X. Election and composition of the new Board of Directors and Chairman of the Board of Directors. XI. Any other matters arising. XII. Closing of the Meeting. By order of the Board of Directors. Tuesday, June 6th 2023. Dr. Michael Calleja

Company Secretary

Guidance Notes & Ancillary Provisions.

A. Record Date This notice has been mailed to the Members registered as at close of business on the 28th of May 2023. Only such Members shall be entitled to attend and vote at the Annual General Meeting. B. Participation and voting by Members A shareholder may participate and vote at the meeting in any of the following ways: (a) by personally attending the meeting; or

(b) by submitting a proxy form to the company. i) Personal Attendance A Member may participate at the meeting personally by physically attending the meeting on the appointed day and time at the venue where the meeting is held. (See "Admission to Meeting"). ii) Participation by Proxy In terms of Clause 96 of the Articles of Association, a Member may participate by proxy by completing and signing the proxy form dispatched to all Members together with this notice and sending same to the Office of the Company Secretary not less than 24 hours before the time appointed for the meeting. A proxy form may be sent to the Company either: (a) by mail to The Company Secretary; or

(b) by electronic means to: calleja@drwerner.com In case of proxies sent by email to the email address above set out, the email should have attached thereto a copy of the Proxy Form duly completed and signed by the shareholder or a duly authorised person on behalf of a corporate/institutional Member. C. Completing the Proxy Form A Member wishing to participate at the meeting by proxy is to complete all details required on the proxy form fully, clearly and accurately. This includes: a) Indicating whether the Member wishes to appoint as proxy the Chairman of the meeting or another person. In the case that a member wishes to appoint a person other than the Chairman of the meeting as proxy, the full name, address and I.D. Card number of the proxy are to be clearly and legibly inserted in the appropriate space; b) Indicating whether the Member wishes the proxy to vote as the appointed proxy wishes or whether the Member wishes to instruct the proxy how to vote. In either case a mark ought to be made in the appropriate box indicated in the proxy form. In the event that no indication is made it shall be deemed that the Member authorises the proxy to vote as the proxy wishes, unless the Member indicates how he/ she wishes the shares held to be voted by inserting the number of shares or another appropriate mark against the relevant resolutions, in which case the proxy shall be deemed authorised to vote only as indicated by the Member in the proxy form; c) Where a Member wishes to have his/her proxy vote in a particular manner then he/she should indicate his/ her voting preference appropriately against each resolution. The procedure for voting is established and governed in terms of Clause G of this Notice accordingly. If a cross or a mark is placed in any two of the three boxes for the same resolution, then the Member's vote on that particular resolution will be invalid. Any resolution remaining unmarked on the ballot paper will be treated as authorizing the appointed proxy to vote as he/she wishes.

D. Participation and Voting A Member wishing to participate simply by having their votes taken into account at the meeting must (i) Fill in the proxy form in favour of the Chairman of the meeting (ii) Concurrently submit proof of their number of shares held in the Dusseldorf Stock Exchange to the Company Secretary and (iii) proceed to instruct the Chairman how to vote on each resolution to be taken at the meeting by completing the 'FOR', 'AGAINST' or 'ABSTAIN' boxes in the proxy form.

E. Admission to the Meeting a) In order to be admitted, a Member is to present his Identity Card and the Admission Form enclosed with this notice. b) In the case of shares held jointly by several persons, except in the case of shares held jointly by a married couple, the first named joint holder on the Register of Members shall be eligible to attend and vote at the Meeting. c) A single representative of a joint shareholding, who is not the first named on the Register, will only be eligible to attend and vote at the Meeting if a Form of Proxy has been duly executed in his favour by all other joint holders. d) In the case of shares held jointly by a married couple, both spouses, or either of them, may attend the Meeting. Provided that: i. irrespective of whether both spouses, or either of them, attend the Meeting, only one voting document will be issued and only one of them shall be entitled to vote; and ii. if they wish to appoint a proxy, the Form of Proxy must be signed and executed by both spouses. e) When a Member is a body corporate, association of persons, foundation or other collective entity, a representative thereof will only be eligible to attend and vote at the Meeting if the Form of Proxy has been duly executed in his favour by the competent organ of the entity which he represents. f) Admission to the Meeting will be commenced 30 minutes before the advertised time. g) After the Meeting has proceeded to business, voting documents will continue to be issued until such time as the Meeting proceeds to vote on the first item of the Agenda whether by show of hands or by poll. Thereafter no further voting documents will be issued and admission to the Meeting shall be discontinued.

F. Draft Resolutions and Documents The draft resolutions to be considered and voted upon at the meeting are included as an integral part of this notice. The full unabridged text of any documents submitted to the meeting shall, unless dispatched to shareholders, be available at the registered office of the Company and on samara-ag.com G. Procedure for Voting during the AGM. A. Voting by show of hands. I. Chairman requests those voting in favour of the motion to raise a hand. II. Procedure is repeated for those voting against the motion. III. A count is taken in each case and the Chairman will determine the outcome. IV. The result is recorded in the Minutes by the Company Secretary. V. The counting of hands is necessary particularly when a specific resolution to pass requires a specific majority proportion of the members present. VI. A record is necessary to be kept in the Minutes and if decided by the Chairman, the names of the members voting will also be kept on record.

B. Voting by Ballot/Poll. Voting by ballot (or poll) may become necessary when there are members who hold a number of proxies but have different voting-entitlements. Such an instance would call for correctness in carrying out the method diligently. I. In such a scenario, the Company Secretary would have pre-prepared a voting paper containing the salient but relevant details of the matter being voted on. II. Such voting document is distributed to each of the members present that are eligible to vote. III. Company Secretary will keep a written record showing: the name of the person to whom the voting document was distributed to and how many voting papers were distributed to each person. This becomes relevant since one same person may hold various proxies. IV. The voting document should request a voting member to insert a "FOR" or a ''AGAINST" or an 'ABSTAIN'. V. Should there be any votes that are doubtful, the Chairman will be the person to determine and take a ruling.

H. Right to ask questions Members (whether personally or by proxy) are reminded that they are entitled to ask questions which are pertinent and related to any item on the agenda of the meeting - and to have such questions answered by the directors or such person(s) as the directors may delegate for that purpose. To ensure efficient proceedings at the meeting the directors invite Members to submit in writing any questions related to the resolutions to be sent to the Company Secretary either by mail to the Company Secretary or email on calleja@drwerner.com by not later than 24 hours before the meeting. Whilst the directors shall endeavour to reply to all questions that may be raised at the meeting only questions that shall have been submitted to them as aforesaid shall be entitled to a reply, provided that any questions raised for the first time at the meeting and to which the directors are not able to provide an immediate reply, shall, subsequent to the meeting be answered by the directors by posting a reply on the Company's website. ANNEX A - PROXY FORM 1

FORM OF PROXY VOTING PREFERENCES As a Shareholder of Samara Asset Group PLC (C 84355), I hereby appoint the duly appointed Chairman of the AGM as my proxy to vote on my behalf, at the Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) and at any adjournment thereof:





Date _____________ Name of Shareholder ___________________________





Signature of Shareholder __________________________________________ FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES THE CHAIRMAN IS AUTHORISED TO VOTE AS HE DEEMS FIT [ ] THE CHAIRMAN WILL VOTE AS INDICATED IN THE HEREUNDER RESOLUTIONS PANEL [ ]

PROXY FORM BY ELECTRONIC MEANS VOTING PREFERENCES

To be completed when sending Proxy Form by electronic means

Name of Shareholder ___________________________________________

Signature of Shareholder _________________________________________

Telephone/Mobile Phone Number __________________________________

E-mail address _________________________________________________

A proxy form sent by electronic means is only valid upon confirmation by the Company Secretary. ORDINARY RESOLUTIONS VOTING PREFERENCES FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES FOR AGAINST ABSTAIN AUDITED ACCOUNTS [ ] [ ] [ ] APPOINTMENT OF AUDITORS [ ] [ ] [ ]

ORDINAY RESOLUTION VOTING PREFERENCES FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES FOR AGAINST ABSTAIN CONFIRMATION OF DIRECTORS' FEES/EMOLUMENTS [ ] [ ] [ ]

ELECTION OF DIRECTORS In terms of Article 110, 'An election of Directors shall take place at every annual general meeting of the Company. All Directors, except a Managing Director, shall retire from office at least once every three (3) years. The following Directors are eligible for re-election: FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES FOR AGAINST ABSTAIN MR. JEFIM GEWIET [ ] [ ] [ ] DR. JOERG WERNER [ ] [ ] [ ]

ANNEX B - PROXY FORM 2

Where a Member holds Shares for and on behalf of third parties, such Member is entitled to grant a proxy to each such third party or other persons designated by the third party, and the instrument appointing the proxies shall, to permit votes attaching to Shares to be cast differently than others, be in the following form or in a form as near thereto as circumstances permit: FORM OF PROXY VOTING PREFERENCES As a Member holding Shares for and on behalf of third parties in Samara Asset Group PLC (C 84355), I hereby appoint the duly appointed Chairman of the AGM as my proxy to vote on my behalf, at the Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) and at any adjournment thereof:



Date _____________ Name of Shareholder ___________________________





Signature of Shareholder __________________________________________ FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES THE CHAIRMAN IS AUTHORISED TO VOTE AS HE DEEMS FIT [ ] THE CHAIRMAN WILL VOTE AS INDICATED IN THE HEREUNDER RESOLUTIONS PANEL [ ]

PROXY FORM BY ELECTRONIC MEANS VOTING PREFERENCES

To be completed when sending Proxy Form by electronic means

Name of Shareholder ____________________________________________

Signature of Shareholder _________________________________________

Telephone/Mobile Phone Number __________________________________

E-mail address _________________________________________________

A proxy form sent by electronic means is only valid upon confirmation by the Company Secretary. ORDINARY RESOLUTIONS VOTING PREFERENCES FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES FOR AGAINST ABSTAIN AUDITED ACCOUNTS [ ] [ ] [ ] APPOINTMENT OF AUDITORS [ ] [ ] [ ]

ORDINARY RESOLUTION VOTING PREFERENCES FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES FOR AGAINST ABSTAIN CONFIRMATION OF DIRECTORS' FEES/EMOLUMENTS [ ] [ ] [ ]

ELECTION OF DIRECTORS In terms of Article 110, 'An election of Directors shall take place at every annual general meeting of the Company. All Directors, except a Managing Director, shall retire from office at least once every three (3) years. The following Directors are eligible for re-election: FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES FOR AGAINST ABSTAIN MR. JEFIM GEWIET [ ] [ ] [ ] DR. JOERG WERNER [ ] [ ] [ ]


Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - Goldsource Mines Inc. (TSXV: GXS) (OTCQX: GXSFF) (FSE: G5MA) ("Goldsource" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that at the 2023 Annual General Meeting held on June 8, 2023 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Goldsource's shareholders voted in favour of all items of business.

The Company's Stock Option Plan (the "Option Plan") was also approved by a majority of the shareholders. The Option Plan must be re-approved on an annual basis by the shareholders at each annual general meeting of the Company as required by the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange. The Option Plan is a "rolling 10%" stock option plan whereby the Company may issue, pursuant to options granted to eligible persons, up to maximum of 10% of the issued and outstanding common shares of the Company determined at the time of grant. As there are 59,796,680 common shares of the Company issued and outstanding as of today's date, a maximum of 5,979,668 common shares are issuable under the Option Plan. The Option Plan remains subject to final TSX-V approval.

Incumbent directors Drew Anwyll, Eric Fier, Haytham Hodaly, Graham Thody, and Yannis Tsitos were re-elected to serve on the Company's Board of Directors for the ensuing year, and new director nominee, Laurie Gaborit, was also elected.

Ms. Gaborit has over 30 years of combined work experience in mineral exploration, investor relations and corporate communications. She is currently Vice-President Investor Relations for Dore Copper Mining Corporation and serves on the board of directors for Monarch Gold Corporation and Gold Terra Resource Corporation. Ms. Gaborit was Vice-President Investor Relations for Detour Gold Corp, where she was a key member of the management team from the company's initial public offering in 2007 to its successful transformation to intermediate gold producer. Prior to this, Ms. Gaborit provided strategic investor relations and corporate communications services to a number of junior mining companies. In 2019, she was the recipient of the CIRI Belle Mulligan Award for leadership in investor relations. Ms. Gaborit started her career as a geologist for Aur Resources, Cambior, and Romarco Minerals. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Geology (Honours).

ABOUT GOLDSOURCE MINES INC.

Goldsource Mines Inc. (www.goldsourcemines.com) is a Canadian exploration company focussed on the 100%-owned Eagle Mountain gold project in Guyana, South America. The Company is led by an experienced management team, proven in making precious metals exploration discoveries and executing on phased project development in the Americas.

Steve Parsons

CEO

Goldsource Mines Inc.

For Further Information:

Goldsource Mines Inc.

Contact: Steve Parsons, CEO

Telephone: +1 (604) 694-1760

Fax: +1 (604) 357-1313

Toll Free: 1-866-691-1760 (Canada & USA)

Email: info@goldsourcemines.com

Website: www.goldsourcemines.com

570 Granville Street, Suite 501

Vancouver, British Columbia V6C 3P1

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/169421
ZURICH (dpa-AFX) - UBS AG (UBS) and the Swiss Government have signed a Loss Protection Agreement or LPA, through which the Government will bear potential realized losses upon the completion of the acquisition of Credit Suisse Group (CS). The acquisition is expected to be completed as early as June 12. With this, the Government guarantees losses of up to CHF 9 billion, if realized on a designated portfolio of Credit Suisse non-core assets once UBS bears the first CHF 5 billion of any realized losses. The LPA will remain in effect until the realization of all assets covered by the guarantee, or until it is terminated by UBS. On June 5, UBS said it is expecting to complete the acquisition of CS as early as June 12. Upon completion, Credit Suisse shares and ADS will be delisted from the SIX Swiss Exchange and New York Stock Exchanges. Post transaction, CS shareholders will receive one UBS share for every 22.48 outstanding shares held. Copyright(c) 2023 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.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - Westmount Minerals Corp. (CSE: WMC) ("Westmount" or the "Company") is pleased to announce a fully subscribed, non-brokered, private placement financing of $250,000 priced at $0.05 per Unit. Each Unit will consist of one common share and one share purchase warrant, with each warrant exercisable into a common share for a period of 24 months at an exercise price of $0.075 for the first year and $0.10 for the second year following the Closing Date.

Proceeds from the financing shall be used for exploration activities on Westmount's Ontario lithium projects as well as working capital and general corporate activities. Initial exploration focus will be on Westmount's recently acquired, Kaba Lithium Project, located in the Georgia Lake area of Northwestern Ontario. Closing will be subject to the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) approval, and any shares issued will be subject to a four-month hold period.

About Westmount Minerals Corp.

Westmount is focused on mineral exploration in the Americas and is well positioned in the emerging world-class critical minerals district of NW Ontario. Its 3,486 hectares, Kaba lithium property is located in the Georgia Lake, lithium-pegmatite region in close proximity to Rock Tech Lithium Inc. Multiple pegmatite showings have been documented and mapped on the Property by the Ontario Geological survey. Additionally, Westmount can earn a 100% interest in the 5,002 hectare lithium-pegmatite bearing, Otatakan and Pilot East Lithium properties located near Ear Falls, Ontario. The properties are just south of Green Technologies' expanding Root deposit.

The Company has advanced the Douay East gold property located within the greater Abitibi Greenstone Belt region in Quebec to the drill-ready stage.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

David Tafel

Chief Executive Officer and Director

For further information, please contact:

David Tafel

Chief Executive Officer and Director

(604) 683-1991

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements:

This news release includes certain forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, statements regarding future capital expenditures, anticipated content, commencement, and cost of exploration programs in respect of the Company's projects and mineral properties, anticipated exploration program results from exploration activities, resources and/or reserves on the Company's projects and mineral properties, and the anticipated business plans and timing of future activities of the Company, are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Often, but not always, forward looking information can be identified by words such as "pro forma", "plans", "expects", "will", "may", "should", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", "believes", "potential" or variations of such words including negative variations thereof, and phrases that refer to certain actions, events or results that may, could, would, might or will occur or be taken or achieved. In making the forward-looking statements in this news release, the Company has applied several material assumptions, including without limitation, that market fundamentals will result in sustained precious and base metals demand and prices, the receipt of any necessary permits, licenses and regulatory approvals in connection with the future exploration of the Company's properties, that the COVID-19 global pandemic will not affect the ability of the Company to conduct future exploration of the Company's properties, the availability of financing on suitable terms, and the Company's ability to comply with environmental, health and safety laws.

Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such risks and other factors include, among others, statements as to the anticipated business plans and timing of future activities of the Company, including the Company's option to acquire the Douay East Project, the proposed expenditures for exploration work thereon, the ability of the Company to obtain sufficient financing to fund its business activities and plans, delays in obtaining governmental and regulatory approvals (including of the Canadian Securities Exchange), permits or financing, changes in laws, regulations and policies affecting mining operations, risks relating to epidemics or pandemics such as COVID-19, including the impact of COVID-19 on the Company's business, financial condition and results of operations, the Company's limited operating history, currency fluctuations, title disputes or claims, environmental issues and liabilities, as well as those factors discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's prospectus dated February 14, 2022, and other filings of the Company with the Canadian Securities Authorities, copies of which can be found under the Company's profile on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com.

Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements in this news release except as otherwise required by law.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169425
First online gallery reflects Tezos' global and diverse community

Today, the Tezos Foundation, which promotes development on the Tezos blockchain, and Misan Harriman, the world-renowned photographer and activist, announced the first presentation of the Tezos Foundation Permanent Art Collection to celebrate artists and creators in the Tezos ecosystem. These works will be on display in a Digital Art Gallery, to be revealed on June 16 on the Collection's website for public viewing.

The initial presentation is just a fraction of the overall collection of over 2,000 works acquired between May 2022-2023 with a $1.2M USD endowment from the Tezos Foundation to Misan Harriman. Spearheaded by the Tezos Foundation and driven by Harriman, the initiative reflects the diversity of the digital art community in the Tezos ecosystem and showcases works by artists who span five continents and more than two dozen nationalities.

The first online gallery is separated into three rooms Who We Are, What We Become, and Tracks of Existence which highlight important themes around digital identity which emerged from research of the overall collection earlier this year. The works showcase themes of solitude and transcendence, with each piece reflecting the artists' culture, environment, and individual experiences, exploring three intertwined levels of creative digital identity.

"It has been such a great honor curating the Permanent Art Collection for the Tezos Foundation," said Harriman. "For me, I've wanted to see how inclusive the talent pool could be in a collection like this, and I've been endlessly amazed by the broad range of storytelling that I've seen across all mediums in the Contemporary Art Space. What makes this Permanent Art Collection so unique is that we have artists from Iran, from Argentina, from India, whom I believe would never have been seen, and they now know that their story, their point of view as creators, matters. To plant those seeds at the scale we have done is an extraordinary achievement and, for me, shows the world what blockchain technology, when married with intentionality and purpose, can do in actually changing people's lives in a borderless world."

The completion of this first chapter of the Tezos Foundation Permanent Art Collection allows for new perspectives to take hold on the expansive combination of digital artworks. From poetry and photography to generative art and digital sculpture, the collection allows viewers to interpret new themes on a more global, inclusive scale than most other traditional collections across the globe.

"The Tezos Foundation has always had a deep commitment to its community and to elevating the artists who want to share their work with the world," said Arthur Breitman, co-founder of Tezos. "Misan Harriman's expertise and creativity allowed us to honor their art in a first-of-its-kind format, and we're excited to share these pieces with the public."

Creators in the First Display of the Tezos Foundation Permanent Art Collection

Amirhfallah Twitter Geo Portal, 2022

Andreasrau X msoriaro Twitter (andreasrau) Twitter (msoriaro) Toccata #40, 2022

Anibal_Ar13 Twitter Reading is the refuge, 2021, Disco Nights, 2021

Barbara Bezina Twitter Vacio Azulado, 2021

Blessing Atas Twitter Lilac Wine, 2022

Bomfha Twitter Supermarket Day, 2021

Bumbletheb33 Twitter Midnight Sonder, 2022

Caesuras Twitter CSRSNT-ZAAI-32-of-64.png, 2021

Diane Drubay Twitter Ardens 1, 2021

fdilekyurdakul Twitter Dusty Journey, 2022

Gorkem Keser Twitter Lux Aeterna, 2022

I am the Astra Twitter The Birth of Venus in Modern Times, 2022

Juki Twitter Drifters, 2021, Dreaming an Apple Tree, 2021

Karoline Georges Twitter Concordia, 2022

Katya Kanke Twitter Lucy, 2016

Kopfgestaltung Twitter It came from the dark, 2022

La Delmas Twitter Nena Trampa N.7, 2021

Manuel Michael Twitter Realm, 2022

Natalie Shau Twitter figure 014, 2022

Omentejovem Twitter UNTITLED, 2021

Patrick Amadon Twitter Static Glitch 2014, 2021

Sutu Twitter Artist Burden, 2022

Tan-Tan Twitter House Made of Glass, 2021, East of Eden, 2022

Thomas Lin Pedersen Twitter Genuary13, 2021

Tomislav Twitter Encounter, 2021

Violet Forest Twitter - Just an AI girl 37, 2021

Youngkevarts Twitter The Tempest, 2022

Zancan Twitter Lushtemples Mint, 2021

About The Tezos Foundation

The Tezos Foundation is a Swiss non-profit foundation that supports the development of the Tezos blockchain, an energy-efficient network leveraged by art institutions and artists worldwide for digital art and NFTs. The Foundation is committed to expanding opportunities for digital artists, providing affordable, sustainable, and accessible NFT infrastructure. Artists using Tezos encompass a global community one that elevates digital artists in all geographies to share their art with the world. For more information, please visit www.tezos.foundation.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005280/en/

Contacts:

Randall Woods

Senior Vice President, SBS Comms

tezos@sbscomms.com
Article 223-16 of the General Regulations of the Financial Markets Authority (AMF Autorite des Marches Financiers)

Regulatory News:

MaaT Pharma (EURONEXT: MAAT the "Company"), a clinical-stage biotechnology company and a leader in the development of Microbiome Ecosystem TherapiesTM (MET) dedicated to improving survival outcomes for patients with cancer, today published the number of shares comprising the share capital and the total number of voting rights (Article L. 233-8 of the French Commercial Code (Code de commerce) and Article 223-16 of the General Regulations of French Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF)) on May 31, 2023.

Listing place: Euronext Paris

ISIN code: FR0012634822

Website: www.maatpharma.com

Date Total number of shares

comprising the share capital Total number of

theoretical voting rights (1) Total number of effective

voting rights (2) 05/31/2023 11 555 123 11 555 123 11 540 912

(1) In accordance with Article 223-11 of the AMF General Regulation, this number is calculated on the basis of all shares to which voting rights are attached, including shares whose voting rights have been suspended.

(2) Effective voting rights correspond to the total number of voting rights that may be used at a General Meeting. The total number of effective voting rights is calculated without taking into account the shares with suspended voting rights.

About MaaT Pharma

MaaT Pharma, a clinical stage biotechnology company, has established a complete approach to restoring patient-microbiome symbiosis in oncology. Committed to treating cancer and graft-versus-host disease (GvHD), a serious complication of allogeneic stem cell transplantation, MaaT Pharma has launched, in March 2022, a Phase 3 clinical trial for patients with acute GvHD, following the achievement of its proof of concept in a Phase 2 trial. Its powerful discovery and analysis platform, gutPrint, supports the development and expansion of its pipeline by determining novel disease targets, evaluating drug candidates, and identifying biomarkers for microbiome-related conditions. The company's Microbiome Ecosystem Therapies are produced through a standardized cGMP manufacturing and quality control process to safely deliver the full diversity of the microbiome, in liquid and oral formulations. MaaT Pharma benefits from the commitment of world-leading scientists and established relationships with regulators to support the integration of the use of microbiome therapies in clinical practice.

MaaT Pharma is listed on Euronext Paris (ticker: MAAT).

Forward-looking Statements

All statements other than statements of historical fact included in this press release about future events are subject to (i) change without notice and (ii) factors beyond the Company's control. These statements may include, without limitation, any statements preceded by, followed by or including words such as "target," "believe," "expect," "aim," "intend," "may," "anticipate," "estimate," "plan," "project," "will," "can have," "likely," "should," "would," "could" and other words and terms of similar meaning or the negative thereof. Forward-looking statements are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties beyond the Company's control that could cause the Company's actual results or performance to be materially different from the expected results or performance expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005179/en/

Contacts:

MaaT Pharma Investor Relations

Herve AFFAGARD

Co-Founder and CEO

Sian Crouzet, COO/ CFO

+33 4 28 29 14 00

invest@maat-pharma.com

MaaT Pharma Media Relations

Pauline RICHAUD

Senior PR Corporate Communications Manager

+33 6 14 06 45 92

media@maat-pharma.com

Trophic Communications Corporate Communications

Stephanie MAY or

Charlotte SPITZ

+49 171 351 2733

maat@trophic.eu
CHICAGO, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The immunohistochemistry (IHC) industry is poised for remarkable growth and advancements in the near future. With increasing demand for precise and personalized diagnostics, coupled with ongoing developments in technology and biomarker research, the IHC market is set to witness significant expansion. Immunohistochemistry techniques enable the visualization and analysis of specific antigens within tissue samples, providing critical information for disease diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment selection. In the coming years, the industry will experience advancements in antibody specificity, sensitivity, and multiplexing capabilities, allowing for more accurate and comprehensive analysis of tissue specimens. Moreover, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and machine learning techniques will streamline the interpretation and analysis of IHC results, enhancing efficiency and reducing subjectivity. The adoption of digital pathology and telepathology solutions will further facilitate remote collaboration, consultation, and data sharing among pathologists and researchers worldwide. Additionally, the expanding application of IHC in areas such as oncology, neuroscience, immunology, and infectious diseases will contribute to the market's growth. As a result, the IHC industry will play a pivotal role in advancing precision medicine, improving patient outcomes, and driving scientific discoveries in the field of pathology in the near future.

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) Market in terms of revenue was estimated to be worth $3.2 billion in 2023 and is poised to reach $4.7 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 7.4% from 2023 to 2028 according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets. Market growth is largely driven by the increased population of geriatric and the increased incidence of cancer cases, technological advancement of IHC, and availability of reimbursements for IHC tests. However, the presence of alternative test, and the high degree of consolidation in the market by the major market players is expected to restrain the growth of this market during the forecast period.

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Browse in-depth TOC on "Immunohistochemistry (IHC) Market"

342 - Tables

48 - Figures

352 - Pages

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) Market Scope:

Report Coverage Details Market Revenue in 2023 $3.2 billion Estimated Value by 2028 $4.7 billion Growth Rate Poised to grow at a CAGR of 7.4% Market Size Available for 2021-2028 Forecast Period 2023-2028 Forecast Units Value (USD Billion) Report Coverage Revenue Forecast, Competitive Landscape, Growth Factors, and Trends Segments Covered Product, Application, End- User and Region Geographies Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East & Africa Report Highlights Updated financial information / product portfolio of players Key Market Opportunities Growing significance of companion diagnostics Key Market Drivers Adoption of Digital Pathology Fueling Market Growth

The Kits product segment accounted for the highest growth rate in the immunohistochemistry market, by product, during the forecast period

In 2022, the Kits product segment accounted for the highest growth rate of the immunohistochemistry market. The demand for complete solutions from a single reliable product provider, like closed-system reagents with calibrated measurements of the required test quantity of reagents and controls among diagnostic laboratories, hospitals, research institutes, and other end users, is growing. Moreover, ready-to-use kits simplify the IHC process by rectifying the initial time-consuming selections of primary antibodies and appropriate stains. This is rapidly increasing the growth of the immunohistochemistry kits market.

Forensics applications segment accounted for the smallest share of the application segment

Based on application, the IHC market is segmented into diagnostic, research, and forensic applications. The forensics application segment accounted for the smallest this market in 2022. In forensics, IHC can play an important role in determining the cause of death. Immunohistochemistry carried out on post-mortem samples helps in determining age-related brain disease (Alzheimer's, strokes) and trauma (often accidental, from falls) and their respective roles in the cause of death. However, its applications in forensic pathology are generally limited to ruling in or out natural disease. This is due to degradation of tissue of a body where the time from death to autopsy is several days.

Hospitals & Diagnostic Laboratories segment accounted for the largest share of the end user segment

Based on end user, the IHC market is segmented into hospitals & diagnostic laboratories, academic & research institutes, and other end users. The hospitals & diagnostic laboratories segment accounted for the largest share of the IHC market in 2022. The growing number of specialty diagnostic tests performed in hospital laboratories, the increasing number of in-house diagnostic procedures in hospitals, and the rising trend of establishing in-house diagnostic capabilities in hospitals to provide time-bound and affordable patient services are factors driving the growth of this market segment.

Asia Pacific: The fastest-growing region in the immunohistochemistry market.

Based on the region, the immunohistochemistry market is broadly segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East & Africa. APAC is expected to register the fastest growth rate during the forecast period. The economic growth in the countries of this region, large population base, the rising prevalence of chronic diseases, the rising standard of living, growing demand for quality medical care, increasing healthcare spending, increasing government initiatives, and rising awareness regarding the use of IHC test are the major factors driving the growth of the Immunohistochemistry market in the Asia Pacific region.

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Immunohistochemistry (IHC) Market Dynamics:

Drivers:

Rising geriatric population and subsequent growth in prevalence of chronic and infectious diseases Technological advancements in IHC Availability of reimbursements for IHC tests

Restraints:

High degree of consolidation

Opportunities:

Increasing demand for personalized medicine Growing significance of companion diagnostics Growth opportunities in emerging countries

Challenges:

Dearth of skilled professionals Product failures and recalls

Key Market Players:

Prominent players operating in the global immunohistochemistry market include F. Hoffman-La Roche AG (Switzerland), Danaher Corporation (US), and Agilent Technologies, Inc. (US).

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Recent Developments:

In February 2023, F. Hoffman-La Roche AG (Switzerland) launched IDH1 R132H (MRQ-67) Rabbit Monoclonal Antibody and the ATRX Rabbit Polyclonal Antibody for use in BenchMark series of instrument for detection of brain cancer.

In October 2022, F. Hoffman-La Roche AG (Switzerland) received US FDA approval for PATHWAY anti-HER2/neu (4B5) Rabbit Monoclonal Primary Antibody use as companion diagnostic test to identify metastatic breast cancer patients with low HER2 expression.

In April 2023, Danaher Corporation (US), subsidiary Leica Biosystems received FDA clearance for BOND MMR Antibody Panel, for detection of colorectal cancer.

In November 2022, Danaher Corporation (US), subsidiary Leica Biosystems Nussloch GmbH acquired Cell IDx, Inc. an immunodiagnostic company offering chromogenic and fluorescent multiplex IHC biomarker profiling products.

In January 2023, Agilent Technologies, Inc. (US) signed a partnership deal with Akoya Biosciences for developing chromogenic and immunofluorescent multiplex assays. These assays will be used for immunohistochemistry diagnostic solutions.

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) Market Advantages:

Accurate and Specific Diagnosis: IHC techniques provide high specificity and sensitivity in detecting specific antigens within tissue samples. This enables precise and accurate diagnosis of various diseases, including cancers, infectious diseases, autoimmune disorders, and neurological conditions. IHC helps pathologists identify and characterize specific biomarkers, facilitating targeted therapies and personalized treatment plans.

Comprehensive Tissue Analysis: IHC allows for a comprehensive analysis of tissue samples, providing insights into cellular localization, protein expression, and tissue architecture. This information is crucial in understanding disease mechanisms, predicting patient outcomes, and determining optimal treatment strategies. IHC enables pathologists and researchers to assess biomarker expression patterns, tumor heterogeneity, and immune cell infiltration within the tissue microenvironment.

Quantitative and Qualitative Data: Immunohistochemistry techniques provide both quantitative and qualitative data. By evaluating the intensity, distribution, and localization of protein expression, IHC enables the measurement of biomarker levels and the identification of cellular interactions within tissues. This quantitative and qualitative data aids in research, clinical decision-making, and drug development.

Complementary to Molecular Techniques: IHC is often used in conjunction with molecular techniques, such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH). By combining these methods, IHC can validate molecular findings, confirm genetic alterations, and provide visual confirmation of molecular changes in tissue samples. This integration enhances the reliability and accuracy of diagnostic and research findings.

Research and Drug Development: The IHC market plays a vital role in research and drug development. It enables researchers to investigate protein expression patterns, validate potential drug targets, and assess therapeutic responses in preclinical and clinical studies. IHC helps identify novel biomarkers, evaluate drug efficacy, and monitor treatment outcomes, accelerating the development of targeted therapies and precision medicine approaches.

Prognostic and Predictive Value: Immunohistochemistry has proven to be valuable in predicting patient outcomes and prognosis. By evaluating specific biomarkers associated with disease progression, metastasis, or treatment response, IHC assists in risk stratification, treatment selection, and monitoring disease recurrence. This prognostic and predictive information aids clinicians in making informed decisions and optimizing patient care.

Standardization and Automation: The IHC market has seen advancements in standardization protocols and automation technologies, improving consistency, reproducibility, and workflow efficiency. Standardized staining protocols, automated slide processing, and digital imaging systems enhance the reliability and scalability of IHC techniques. This promotes consistency across laboratories, reduces inter-laboratory variability, and facilitates data sharing and collaboration.

Overall, the immunohistochemistry market offers significant advantages in accurate diagnosis, comprehensive tissue analysis, quantitative and qualitative data generation, synergy with molecular techniques, research and drug development, prognostic value, and standardization. These advantages contribute to its widespread adoption in clinical diagnostics, research laboratories, and pharmaceutical companies, ultimately leading to improved patient care, personalized medicine, and advancements in biomedical research.

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) Market - Report Highlights:

Changes in the market scope: The existing report includes an analysis of the impact of recession on the overall immunohistochemistry market.

New and improved representation of financial information: The new edition of the report provides updated financial information till 2022 for each listed company in a graphical representation in a single diagram (instead of multiple tables). This would help in the easy analysis of the present status of profiled companies in terms of their financial strength, profitability, key revenue-generating region/country, and business segment focus in terms of the highest revenue-generating segment.

Recent market developments: Recent developments are helpful to know the market trends and growth strategies adopted by players in the market.

Latest product portfolio: Tracking product portfolios helps analyze the immunohistochemistry product offerings in the market. The new edition of the report provides an updated product portfolio of the companies profiled in the report.

The new version of the report includes the ranges/scenarios, pricing analysis, value chain analysis, an ecosystem of the market, technology analysis, patent analysis, trends and disruptions impacting customers, Porter's five forces analysis, a region-wise regulatory landscape, key buying criteria analysis.

Regional level (country-wise) market data has been added wherever applicable for the segments and subsegments of the market.

Company evaluation quadrant: This new section is an output of a comprehensive study of the key vendors offering products in the immunohistochemistry market.

Market evaluation framework, market share analysis, and competitive leadership mapping have been updated in the competitive landscape chapter of the report.

The current edition of this report provides updated financial information/product portfolios of players and updated developments of profiled players from January 2020 to May 2023.

In the earlier version of the report, 25 companies were profiled. In the updated version, a total of 27 companies have been profiled.

The competitive landscape chapter has been updated with the market evaluation matrix and start-up/SME evaluation matrix. The competitive landscape also includes market share and revenue analysis, updated competitive leadership mapping, competitive mapping of Start up and SME's, and competitive situations and trends.

Related Reports:

Immunoassay Market - Global Forecasts to 2027

In Vitro Diagnostics Market - Global Forecasts to 2027

Tissue Diagnostics Market - Global Forecasts to 2027

Cancer Diagnostics Market - Global Forecasts to 2026

Anatomic Pathology Market - Global Forecasts to 2026

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WASHINGTON, June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- EB5 Capital announced today that investors in its Downtown Los Angeles Proper Hotel (JF12) project have begun receiving I-829 approvals from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). USCIS issues I-829 approvals, or permanent residency, to investors who have demonstrated that their EB-5 investment resulted in the creation of at least ten full-time jobs, and who have also completed their two-year conditional residency period.



"An I-829 approval is a major milestone in the EB-5 immigration and investment process," said Mariana Gomez, Senior Vice President of Operations and Compliance. "It officially completes the immigration process for an EB-5 investor and confirms that a project has fulfilled all the requirements under the Program, including job creation."

Proper Hotel (JF12) is a 13-story, 148-room luxury lifestyle hotel in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles. This historical building was initially a private club in the 1920s frequented by members of Hollywood. The property now features three distinct food and beverage spaces operating in partnership with James Beard Foundation award winners Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne of The Lucques Group. It also has 14,000 square feet of meeting space and a rooftop pool with unobstructed panoramic views of the city. The hotel opened to the public in October 2021 and the redevelopment created over 1,000 EB-5 qualifying jobs, more than enough jobs to cover all the EB-5 investors who invested in the project.

"A regional center's proven success to help investors achieve permanent residency in the United States should be a key requirement for someone new who is considering an EB-5 investment," said Natalia Pronina, Vice President of Investor Relations at EB5 Capital. "We look forward to seeing additional I-829 approval notices for this project in the coming weeks."

About EB5 Capital

EB5 Capital provides qualified foreign investors with opportunities to invest in job-creating commercial real estate projects under the United States Immigrant Investor Program for more information.

Contact:

Katherine Willis

Director, Marketing & Communications

media@eb5capital.com
Originally published by Ericsson

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / Welcome to the latest edition of our Diversity & Inclusion News Round-Up. Today we are talking about the impact of AI on D&I, a BBC initiative supporting girls in Afghanistan, gender roles around the world, and Catholics nuns making a stand for transgender rights.

Discrimination

What is the impact of AI on D&I? This article gives a good background about the recent developments in AI and what this means for D&I, especially looking at discrimination and algorithmic bias.

Gender roles

Interesting read/photo story! Six women from around the world share more about their lives, and how they divide household duties in their families.

Girls empowerment

Great initiative from the BBC! Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan, teenage girls have been unable to go to school. The BBC is now offering classes via traditional and social media, so children can continue with their education. Watch the video!

LGBTQ+

March 31st was International Transgender Day of Visibility - and thousands of Catholic nuns united to issue a statement of solidarity with the transgender community. Read more here.

View additional multimedia and more ESG storytelling from Ericsson on 3blmedia.com.

Contact Info:

Spokesperson: Ericsson

Website: https://www.3blmedia.com/profiles/ericsson

Email: info@3blmedia.com

SOURCE: Ericsson

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/760326/DI-Weekly-News-Round-Up-Girls-Empowerment-LGBTQ-and-More


BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - The major European markets closed slightly lower on Friday, maintaining their trend of little movement as France and Germany reversed Thursday's slim gains while the UK was down for the third straight session.



The markets opened barely in the green but quickly headed south in a morning that saw them bounce back and forth across the unchanged line - but they turned lower for good in the afternoon and ended in the red.



Investors were unimpressed with the latest batch of economic data, and they remain nervous about the Federal Reserve's rate decision next week - although it is widely expected that the Fed will leave rates unchanged.



The DAX in Germany shed 40.12 points or 0.12 percent to finish at 15,949.84, while FTSE in London sank 37.38 points or 0.49 percent to close at 7,562.36 and the CAC 40 in France eased 9.01 points or 0.12 percent to end at 7,213.14.



In Germany, Symrise plummeted 4.34 percent, while Vonovia surged 3.15 percent, BASF tumbled 1.80 percent, Bayer retreated 1.54 percent, Deutsche Post declined 1.48 percent, Deutsche Telekom jumped 1.00 percent, Heidelberg Materials lost 0.72 percent, Deutsche Borse rose 0.52 percent, Infineon Technologies gains 0.49 percent and Deutsche Bank fell 0.20 percent.



In London, Experian stumbled 1.65 percent, while Auto Trader rallied 1.28 percent, Haleon slumped 1.17 percent, Rentokil skidded 1.11 percent, Vodafone jumped 0.98 percent, Prudential sank 0.93 percent, Shell lost 0.63 percent, British American Tobacco added 0.35 percent, Centrica fell 0.21 percent and Rightmove rose 0.19 percent.



In France, Vivendi plunged 2.35 percent, while Societe Generale spiked 1.97 percent, Danone declined 1.94 percent, BNP Paribas surrendered 1.65 percent, Veolia Environment advanced 0.98 percent, Credit Agricole dropped 0.91 percent, Orange sank 0.64 percent, Engie added 0.32 percent and Sanofi eased 0.04 percent.



In economic news, Italy's industrial production declined for the fourth successive month in April and at the steepest pace in seven months, the statistical office ISTAT showed Friday. Industrial production fell 1.9 percent month-over-month in April, following a 0.6 percent drop in March.



Sweden's economy remained unchanged in April after contracting in the previous two months, data from Statistics Sweden showed on Friday. Separate official data showed that industrial production advanced for the fifth straight month in April and at a faster pace. Gross domestic product flattened in April after falling slightly by 0.1 percent in March.



Slovakia's industrial production declined in April, data from the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic showed on Friday. Separate data from the statistical office showed that the trade surplus decreased in April, following a gain in the previous month. Industrial production fell a working day adjusted 2.0 percent year-on-year in April, following a 2.6 percent growth in March.



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Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - PesoRama Inc. (TSXV: PESO) (OTCQB: PSSOF) ("PesoRama" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that, today, it has entered into a binding senior secured revolving credit facility (the "Loan Agreement") for up to $20M (the "Loan") with Third Eye Capital Corporation (the "Agent") on behalf of certain lenders (the "Lenders"). The Loan will support the Company's continued expansion through the construction of new JOi Dollar Plus Stores in Mexico and the expansion of the Company's inventory and product offerings.

The Loan matures in three years and will be made available subject to a borrowing base up to a maximum of $20M. The Loan will bear interest equal to the greater of: (i) 13.5%; and (ii) 7.55% above the Prime Rate posted by the Royal Bank of Canada ("Interest"). The Interest is compounded and payable monthly in arrears and subject to interest reserve requirements.

"Today is a day of celebration as we reach this milestone and closing of this new credit facility," said Rahim Bhaloo, Founder and Executive Chairman. "The successful establishment of this facility demonstrates the effectiveness of our business model, strong market demand and the overall opportunity that the Mexican market presents. I am incredibly proud of everything our team has been able to achieve and will build on this growing momentum as we strategically expand throughout Mexico. Congratulations and thank you to the whole PesoRama and Third Eye teams, our loyal customers and our shareholders who got us here."

"After several months of due diligence with both Canadian and Mexican management and shareholders, which included physical visits to multiple stores and inventory locations, we are pleased to structure a financing specifically tailored to meet PesoRama's growth plans," commented Omar Murad, Director of Special Situations at Third Eye Capital. "We look forward to helping spread 'JOi' across Mexico."

The Loan is subject to a closing fee of $800,000 to be paid in two installments to the Agent, for the rateable benefit of the Lenders. A standby fee equal to 1% will be paid annually by the Company to the Agent, for the account of the Lenders, calculated and payable quarterly in arrears, of the difference between the daily revolver advances outstanding and the revolver limit during such quarter. An annual monitoring fee of $50,000 will be paid by the Company to the Agent, which fee will be paid in quarterly instalments beginning today and each three-month anniversary thereafter.

As partial consideration for entering into the Loan Agreement, the Company issued 15,060,838 non-transferable warrants to the Lenders (the "Warrants") to purchase up to an aggregate of 15,060,838 common shares of the Company. Each Warrant has an exercise price equal to $0.14 and is exercisable for five years.

The Lenders are not Non-Arm's Length Parties of the Company as defined pursuant to the policies of the TSXV. The Lenders do not own nor have any beneficial ownership of any securities of the Company other than the Warrants granted pursuant to the Loan Agreement.

The Loan was approved by the TSXV.

About PesoRama Inc.

PesoRama, operating under the JOi Dollar Plus brand, is a Mexican value dollar store retailer. PesoRama launched operations in 2019 in Mexico City and the surrounding areas targeting high-density, high-traffic locations. PesoRama's 21 stores offer consistent merchandise offerings which include items in the following categories: household goods, pet supplies, seasonal products, party supplies, health and beauty, snack food items, confectionery and more. For more information visit: http://pesorama.ca/.

For further information please contact:

Rahim Bhaloo

Founder & Executive Chairman

rahim@rahimbhaloo.com

416-816-3291



Erica Fattore

President & Chief Executive Officer

erica@joi.mx

In this press release, all references to "$" are to Canadian dollars.

* * *

Notice regarding forward-looking statements:

This press release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including, among other things, statements regarding the Company's proposed construction of new stores, the Company's proposed purchase of inventory, the amount that will be made available per advance pursuant to the Loan Agreement, the calculation of Interest, the payment of a standby fee, and the payment of an annual monitoring fee. While the Company believes that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. 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, including due to changes in consumer behaviour, general economic factors, changes in the Interest, the ability of the Company to execute its strategies, the availability of capital and the risk factors which are discussed in greater detail in the "Risk Factors" section of the Company's prospectus dated January 31, 2022 and filed under the Company's profile on www.sedar.com. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this release. PesoRama undertakes no obligation to comment on analyses, expectations or statements made by third-parties in respect of PesoRama, its securities, or its financial or operating results (as applicable).

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.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169478


WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Netflix's stock witnessed a notable rise as analysts commended the streaming giant's recent crackdown on password sharing.



The positive response from Wall Street follows an analyst from Pivotal research group raising the price target for Netflix shares from $425 to $535, citing various factors, including the password sharing clampdown. Notably, this new target represents the highest on the street, indicating the growing optimism surrounding the company.



Data provided by Antenna, a company that monitors subscriber growth, supports the bullish sentiment. According to Antenna, since the announcement of Netflix's intentions to tackle password sharing, the streaming platform has experienced its four largest days of user acquisition in the past four and a half years. This surge in subscriber sign-ups is a clear validation of analysts' predictions, such as those from Pivotal, that the password sharing crackdown will benefit Netflix significantly.



Antenna's data reveals that on May 26 and May 27, Netflix witnessed nearly 100,000 new sign-ups per day in the United States alone. The statistics further reinforce the belief that this move will drive growth and bolster Netflix's position in the market. Consequently, Netflix's stock has experienced an upward trajectory in response to these developments.



Pivotal, in justifying its increased price target, highlighted the potential positive impact of improved free cash flow expectations in this year and beyond. However, the key driver behind the revised target was the firm's belief that Netflix represents a unique tech growth story. Pivotal emphasized that the company remains well-positioned to sustain solid subscriber, revenue, and free cash flow growth, even in a potential global recessionary environment. This outlook is bolstered by the better monetization of the over 100 million households currently using Netflix through password sharing.



Interestingly, the Pivotal note also reiterates a view previously expressed by the firm, suggesting that Microsoft may eventually step in and acquire Netflix. According to the analysts, they believe that after a strong performance in this year and next year, Netflix's management may consider selling the company in 2025, with Microsoft being the most logical acquirer.



The positive response from analysts and the surge in subscriber acquisition following the password sharing crackdown highlight the confidence in Netflix's growth potential. While the company faces challenges in curbing unauthorized account sharing, its proactive measures have resonated with investors and analysts alike, driving a renewed wave of optimism surrounding the streaming giant's future.



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West Coast IT Services Provider Participates in Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony Commemorating Their New Space

VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / Securus Systems - a managed services provider (MSP) serving businesses by providing cybersecurity and other IT services - proudly announces that they recently hosted a ribbon-cutting event. This was in celebration of their one-year anniversary in their new office space.

Cutting Ribbon

Celebrating 1 year anniversary

The Securus Systems team is proud to partner with small to medium-sized businesses to help them grow through innovative solutions and reliable services-a task that can be accomplished in their new space. The Vancouver Chamber of Commerce was in attendance to commemorate the occasion.

"I'm happy to say I reached my goal of creating the company I set out to build," said Justin Hayden, the President of Securus Systems. The IT services company has been providing the West Coast with security-centric IT care for more than 10 years.

"We offer effortless IT support for businesses throughout the West Coast, so companies can focus on what matters to them-their business." If your company is in need of IT and cybersecurity services, email the team at Securus Systems.

About Securus Solutions

Securus Solutions has been the West Coast leader in cybersecurity since 2011. We take the stress out of tech by providing security and IT support to any business, regardless of size or industry. Our dedicated team of engineers loves seeing our clients succeed-because your success means our success. For more information, visit our website. Or contact us at 503-966-5892 or at support@securuscorp.com.

Contact Information

Ginille Forest

Manager

gforest@securuscorp.com

503-218-3883

SOURCE: Securus Systems

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/760310/Securus-Systems-Celebrates-One-Year-Anniversary
The agency was recognized as a Platinum Super Bell Award finalist for the fourth year in a row.

PROVIDENCE, RI / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / Duffy & Shanley, a full-service communications agency based in Providence, earned 14 awards at the 55th Bell Ringer Awards Ceremony on Thursday, June 8. The annual event celebrates the work of public relations and communications professionals from across New England and was hosted by the PR Club, the region's leading communications trade organization.

Honored alongside hundreds of New England-based industry professionals, the Duffy & Shanley team received awards in multiple categories across a diverse range of business sectors. Duffy & Shanley's 2023 Bell Ringer awards include:

Gold Bell Award - Digital/Printed Collateral, for How Hanes Nabbed Major Press Interest With the Health of a Custom Media Gift

- Digital/Printed Collateral, for How Hanes Nabbed Major Press Interest With the Health of a Custom Media Gift Gold Bell Award - Paid Media, for "Reasons to Believe" - BJ's Membership Campaign

- Paid Media, for "Reasons to Believe" - BJ's Membership Campaign Gold Bell Award - National Media Placement, for Showcasing Rhode Island's Offshore Wind Leadership in The New York Times

- National Media Placement, for Showcasing Rhode Island's Offshore Wind Leadership in The New York Times Gold Bell Award - Vertical/Trade Media Placement, for E&E News: "Inside America's Offshore Wind Hub"

- Vertical/Trade Media Placement, for E&E News: "Inside America's Offshore Wind Hub" Gold Bell Award - Integrated Marketing Communications, for Talking Student Loans - Four Different Ways

- Integrated Marketing Communications, for Talking Student Loans - Four Different Ways Gold Bell Award - Micro/Nano Influencer Campaign, for RI Seafood Find Your Fresh

- Micro/Nano Influencer Campaign, for RI Seafood Find Your Fresh Silver Bell Award - Social Media Platform Excellence, for @BjsWholesale: Utilizing Instagram as a Vehicle for Brand Growth Through Audience Connection

- Social Media Platform Excellence, for @BjsWholesale: Utilizing Instagram as a Vehicle for Brand Growth Through Audience Connection Silver Bell Award - Content Marketing, for Ready, Set, Click: Starting the Customer Journey with Content

- Content Marketing, for Ready, Set, Click: Starting the Customer Journey with Content Bronze Bell Award - Paid Media, for Decoding the Crystal Ball: The Future of Student Loan Refinancing

- Paid Media, for Decoding the Crystal Ball: The Future of Student Loan Refinancing Bronze Bell Award - Single Video, for Paying for College? Watch This Video for 5 Expert Tips

- Single Video, for Paying for College? Watch This Video for 5 Expert Tips Bronze Bell Award - National Media Placement, for Fast Company: "Hanes undies gets a colorful redesign to win over Gen Z"

- National Media Placement, for Fast Company: "Hanes undies gets a colorful redesign to win over Gen Z" Bronze Bell Award - Regional Media Placement, for Boston Globe: "BJ's Wholesale Club to open new concept 'BJ's market' in Warwick, R.I."

- Regional Media Placement, for Boston Globe: "BJ's Wholesale Club to open new concept 'BJ's market' in Warwick, R.I." Bronze Bell Award - High Tech, for "Hi, Jill!": Ships Ahoy for New York's First Offshore Wind Farm

- High Tech, for "Hi, Jill!": Ships Ahoy for New York's First Offshore Wind Farm Merit Bell Award - One-Time Special Event, for A Holiday for a Cause

Duffy's Integrated Marketing Communication Campaign entry for College Ave Student Loans, "Talking Student Loans - Four Different Ways", was recognized during the ceremony as a finalist for the prestigious Platinum Super Bell Award which honors the overall top PR campaign of the evening.

"We are proud of the work we do on behalf of our clients, and honored to have that work recognized in the form of more than a dozen Bell Ringer awards," said Jon Duffy, president, Duffy & Shanley. "This year marks the 50th anniversary of Duffy & Shanley and these awards are another example of our growth and evolution over the course of a half century in business. Our work extends far beyond the walls of our Providence office, and we strive every day to create impactful campaigns that our clients are proud to call their own."

A full list of all winners is available here, and a full winner's gallery is located here.

About Duffy & Shanley, Inc.

Based in Providence, R.I., Duffy & Shanley is one of New England's largest independently-owned communication firms. A uniquely integrated, full-service agency, Duffy & Shanley develops breakthrough campaigns for Fortune 500 companies and leading brands, including AT&T, BJ's Wholesale Club, College Ave, Dunkin', Foster Grant, rsted and Hanesbrands. Visit duffyshanley.com, or Duffy & Shanley's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn for more information.

About PR Club

Founded in 1948, PR Club (formerly the Publicity Club of New England) strives to promote and encourage involvement in the communications industry and specifically the professions of public relations, promotions, and marketing. Get additional information about monthly PR Club programs, social and networking events, the "Bell Ringer" blog, and the Bell Ringer Awards Ceremony at www.PRClub.org. Follow them on Twitter @PRClubofNE.

About the Bell Ringer Awards

The Bell Ringer Awards recognize public relations and communications work that demonstrates excellence in creative planning and superior execution to achieve a high degree of success in reaching predetermined objectives. Open to all New England practitioners, the program, now in its 54th year, celebrates the extraordinary work of the region's communications professionals.

Media Contact: Annette Maggiacomo; Amaggiacomo@duffyshanley.com

SOURCE: Duffy & Shanley, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/760362/Duffy-Shanley-Named-Top-Winner-at-55th-Bell-Ringer-Award-Ceremony
Dawda Mann recognized for more than 20 years by Chambers USA for Real Estate Practice

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MI / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / Dawda Mann, a leading full-service business law firm, is pleased to announce that it has once again secured its position among the nation's leading law firms for real estate practice, as reflected in the 2023 Chambers USA rankings.





Dawda Mann 2023 Chambers USA

Dawda Mann 2023 Chambers USA

This accolade is a testament to the firm's unwavering commitment to providing exceptional legal services and innovative solutions to its clients in the real estate industry. The firm's comprehensive expertise in commercial real estate transactions, leasing, land use, zoning, and commercial and residential development matters continues to set a benchmark for excellence.

In addition, two of Dawda Mann's attorneys, Ed Dawda and Tyler Tennent, have been recognized by Chambers and Partners in the highly regarded Chambers USA rankings for their outstanding contributions to the real estate practice area.

Ed Dawda, a co-founder of Dawda Mann, has once again earned a well-deserved Band 1 Ranking in Real Estate in the Chambers USA rankings. With over three decades of experience in real estate law, Dawda has established himself as a trusted advisor and advocate for his clients. In addition, his exceptional knowledge of real estate transactions, development, and land use matters has consistently positioned him as a leading practitioner.

Tyler Tennent, a member at Dawda Mann, has been recognized by Chambers and Partners for his exemplary work in the Real Estate: Land Use area. Tennent's keen understanding of complex land use matters and his ability to navigate intricate legal issues have earned him the respect of clients and peers.

"We are thrilled to be recognized by Chambers and Partners for our firms' contributions to the real estate practice area," said Dawda. "Our inclusion in the 2023 Chambers USA rankings is a testament to Dawda Mann's dedication, extensive knowledge, and outstanding client service. We are immensely proud of our attorney's achievements and the recognition of our firm as a leader in real estate law."

Chambers and Partners, a renowned global legal research and ranking organization, conducts an extensive assessment of law firms and attorneys based on various factors, including legal expertise, client service, technical capabilities, and notable achievements within specific practice areas. As a result, the Chambers USA rankings are widely regarded as a prominent benchmark for excellence in the legal industry.

About Dawda Mann:

Dawda Mann is a full-service business law firm headquartered in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. With a strong commitment to delivering exceptional legal services and a client-centric approach, the firm has built a solid reputation as a trusted advisor to businesses and individuals across various industries. Dawda Mann's team of highly skilled attorneys provides comprehensive legal solutions in real estate, corporate law, litigation, employment law, estate planning, and more. For more information, visit dawdamann.com.

Contact Information:

Andrea Walker-Leidy

Publicity

andrea@walkerpublicity.com

248-606-5288

SOURCE: Walker Publicity Consulting

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/760386/Bloomfield-Hills-Law-Firm-Dawda-Mann-Recognized-by-Chambers-in-the-Prestigious-Chambers-USA-Rankings-for-Real-Estate-Practice-Area-20-Years
NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / For decades, the visits of global icons of cinema, music, fashion and art to the famous MARTINI Terrazza have been immortalized through photography in the MARTINI Archive collection. Now, thanks to a new partnership, these images are among the 15,000 that will be digitized by the end of June as part of ongoing efforts to preserve special moments in time of the 160-year-old Italian vermouth and sparkling wine brand.

The MARTINI Archives has partnered with Italgas Heritage Lab to digitize images of Terrazza MARTINI Milan - a stunning terrace and event space overlooking the spiers of the Duomo of Milano which has hosted private events for celebrities and influencers since opening its doors in 1958. In addition to depicting the iconic figures who visited Terrazza MARTINI, the photographs illustrate the evolution of MARTINI as a lifestyle brand and showcase cocktail and fashion trends through the decades.

"As we celebrate the 160th anniversary of MARTINI this year, it is a moment to reflect on the incredible history of the company," says Anna Scudellari, MARTINI Heritage Curator. "The collaboration between MARTINI and Italgas Heritage Lab is the result of a shared commitment to preserve and celebrate heritage so that we can breathe new life into our cherished artifacts and ensure they will be available for generations to come. This project showcases archival preservation and how digital innovation can play a transformative role in advancing cultural heritage initiatives."

The project uses cutting-edge technology for 2D and 3D digitization and marks the first time that Heritage Lab has extended its expertise and resources to digitize a brand archive collection, receiving special recognition at the Spina Awards 2023 in Italy and a prize for digital innovation in cultural heritage. In addition to the digitization efforts, the original photos are being catalogued and packed in archive paper to preserve them for future generations to enjoy.

With a history spanning more than 160 years, the MARTINI Archives in Pessione, Italy, is home to a stunning heritage collection of more than 30,000 photographs, letters, awards, MARTINI bottles and historic artefacts that share the history of the iconic Italian brand.

Watch the video on YouTube

View additional multimedia and more ESG storytelling from Bacardi Limited on 3blmedia.com.

Contact Info:

Spokesperson: Bacardi Limited

Website: https://www.3blmedia.com/profiles/bacardi-limited

Email: info@3blmedia.com

SOURCE: Bacardi Limited

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/760391/MARTINI-Archive-Partners-With-Italgas-Heritage-Lab-in-Photograph-Digitization-Project


MOUNTAIN VIEW (dpa-AFX) - Google has made an official announcement indicating a change in its stance on remote work, joining a growing list of major tech companies reverting to in-person work policies. Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi outlined the new directive in an internal memo obtained by news outlets this week, emphasizing the importance of office presence for fostering connectivity within Google's community. Going forward, remote work requests will only be considered under exceptional circumstances, with non-remote employees expected to spend three days per week in the office, monitored through badge swipes that may impact performance reviews.



The decision by big tech companies, which possess the resources and tools to facilitate effective remote work, signals a departure from the widespread adoption of remote work policies seen during the pandemic. These companies, which were at the forefront of enabling remote work globally, now appear to have shifted their belief in its efficacy.



Google, which initially mandated a return to the office in April of last year, is now cracking down on in-person attendance. This shift aligns with other major tech firms that have recently implemented stricter policies, effectively reversing their previous support for remote work.



Tech companies were once trailblazers in offering flexible work arrangements, using enticing in-office perks to attract top talent. However, when the pandemic hit the US, these same companies swiftly transitioned to remote work. They became active recruiters of remote employees until approximately the last year, when industry leaders such as Apple, Amazon, and Meta started to scale back their remote work policies.



Interestingly, the companies that now resist remote work are the very ones that enable and support it. Google, with its suite of cloud-based tools like Google Meet, Gmail, and G Suite, revolutionized remote collaboration and played a pivotal role in empowering distributed teams. Similarly, Salesforce, which owns Slack, and Meta, with its focus on virtual spaces, provide platforms for remote work and communication.



The recent shift away from remote work policies raises questions about the alignment between big tech's beliefs and the products they offer. The decision to prioritize in-person collaboration suggests that tech companies view increased office time as vital for fostering a sense of connection among employees. However, research from the Pew Research Center indicates that over half of Americans who work from home feel that remote work hampers their ability to establish connections with colleagues.



Google and Meta's memos specifically reference the importance of physical presence for enhancing connectivity and trust-building within teams. Nevertheless, Pew's findings indicate that most hybrid employees actually desire more time working remotely than they currently have. This contrast raises questions about the beliefs held by company leaders and their alignment with the preferences of their workforce.



The shift away from remote work policies by tech giants like Google underscores a broader trend in the industry. While remote work was widely embraced during the pandemic, companies are now reassessing the value of in-person collaboration, potentially signaling a new phase in the future of work.



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TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / Tsodilo Resources Limited ("Tsodilo" or the "Company") (TSXV:TSD)(OTCQB:TSDRF)(FSE:TZO) is pleased to announce that at its Annual Meeting of shareholders held on June 9, 2023, the following directors were elected: James M. Bruchs, Thomas S. Bruington, Jonathan R. Kelafant, Blackie Marole and Mark Scowcroft.

Appointment of Auditors

The shareholders also approved the appointment of Crowe MacKay LLP, Vancouver, Canada, as auditors of the Company.

Grant of Stock Options

Under the terms of its Stock Option Plan, Tsodilo granted incentive stock options to five directors, two employees and an advisor to purchase an aggregate of 950,000 common shares of Tsodilo exercisable at CDN$ 0.21. These options vest as to 25% effective June 12, 2023, and 25% on each of the sixth, twelfth and eighteenth-month anniversaries of the date of the grant. The options are valid for five years.

About Tsodilo Resources Limited

Tsodilo Resources Limited is an international resource exploration company engaged in the search for economic metal and diamond deposits at its Gcwihaba Resources (Pty) Limited ("Gcwihaba") and Bosoto (Pty) Ltd. ("Bosoto) projects in Botswana. The Company has a 100% stake in its Gcwihaba project area consisting of five metal (base, precious, platinum group, and rare earth) prospecting licenses all located in the North-West district of Botswana. The Company has a 100% stake in Bosoto (Pty) Ltd. which holds the BK16 kimberlite project in the Orapa Kimberlite Field (OKF) in Botswana. Tsodilo manages the exploration of the Gcwihaba and Bosoto projects.

This press release may contain forward-looking statements. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, that address activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future (including, without limitation, statements pertaining to the use of proceeds, the impact of strategic partnerships and statements that describe the Company's future plans, objectives or goals) are forward- looking statements. These forward-looking statements reflect the current expectations or beliefs of the Company based on information currently available to the Company. Forward- looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results of the Company to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements, and even if such actual results are realized or substantially realized, there can be no assurance that they will have the expected consequences to, or effects on the Company. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, changes in equity markets, changes in general economic conditions, market volatility, political developments in Botswana and surrounding countries, changes to regulations affecting the Company's activities, uncertainties relating to the availability and costs of financing needed in the future, exploration and development risks, the uncertainties involved in interpreting exploration results and the other risks involved in the mineral exploration business. 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. Although the Company believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, 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 therein.

Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results of the Company to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements and, even if such actual results are realized or substantially realized, there can be no assurance that they will have the expected consequences to, or effects on, the Company. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, uncertainties relating to availability and cost of funds, timing and content of work programs, results of exploration activities, interpretation of drilling results and other geological data, risks relating to variations in the diamond grade and kimberlite lithologies; variations in rates of recovery and breakage; estimates of grade and quality of diamonds, variations in diamond valuations and future diamond prices; the state of world diamond markets, reliability of mineral property titles, changes to regulations affecting the Company's activities, delays in obtaining or failure to obtain required project approvals, operational and infrastructure risk and other risks involved in the diamond exploration and development business. 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. Although the Company believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward- looking statements are reasonable, forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to their inherent uncertainty.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange ("TSXV") nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release. This news release may contain assumptions, estimates, and other forward-looking statements regarding future events. Such forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties and are subject to factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control, which may cause actual results or performance to differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

James M. Bruchs Chairman and Chief Executive Officer JBruchs@TsodiloResources.com Head Office Telephone +1 416 572 2033 Facsimile + 1 416 987 4369 Website http://www.TsodiloResources.com

SOURCE: Tsodilo Resources Limited

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/760397/Tsodilo-Resources-Limited-Annual-Meeting-Results


BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - The Swiss stock market finished lower on Friday for the third straight session, dropping more than 210 points or 1.9 percent in that span.



The SMI opened slightly higher but quickly turned lower, spending the rest of the day well beneath the unchanged line - in line with most other European markets.



Investors were unimpressed with the latest batch of European economic data, and they remain nervous about the Federal Reserve's rate decision next week - although it is widely expected that the Fed will leave rates unchanged.



For the day, the index shed 54.48 points or 0.48 percent to finish at 11,254.42 after trading between 11,238.63 and 11,321.23.



Among the actives, Givaudan plummeted 3.08 percent, while Lonza Group tanked 2.63 percent, Swiss Re tumbled 1.74 percent, Swatch Group advanced 0.99 percent, ABB added 0.76 percent, Roche Holding dropped 0.65 percent, Swisscom gained 0.51 percent, Credit Suisse slumped 0.37 percent, UBS sank 0.30 percent, Swiss Life collected 0.30 percent, Novartis dipped 0.22 percent and Zurich Insurance eased 0.12 percent.



In corporate news, UBS AG (UBS) and the Swiss government have signed a Loss Protection Agreement (LPA), through which the government will bear potential realized losses upon the completion of the acquisition of Credit Suisse Group (CS). The acquisition is expected to be completed as early as June 12.



With this, the government guarantees losses of up to CHF 9 billion, if realized on a designated portfolio of Credit Suisse non-core assets once UBS bears the first CHF 5 billion of any realized losses. The LPA will remain in effect until the realization of all assets covered by the guarantee, or until it is terminated by UBS.



On June 5, UBS said it is expecting to complete the acquisition of CS as early as June 12. Upon completion, Credit Suisse shares and ADS will be delisted from the SIX Swiss Exchange and New York Stock Exchanges.



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PHILADELPHIA, PA / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / The Board of Trustees of abrdn Income Credit Strategies Fund (the "Fund"), has declared a cash distribution of $0.328125 per share of the Fund's 5.250% Series A Perpetual Preferred Shares (NYSE:ACP PRA) ("Series A Preferred Shares"). The distribution is payable on June 30, 2023 to holders of Series A Preferred Shares of record on June 20, 2023 (ex-dividend date June 16, 2023).

The Series A Preferred Shares trade on the NYSE under the symbol "ACP PRA", are rated "A2" by Moody's Investors Service and have an annual dividend rate of $1.3125 per share. The Series A Preferred Shares were issued on May 10, 2021 at $25.00 per share and pay distributions quarterly.

Distributions may be paid from sources of income other than ordinary income, such as net realized short-term capital gains, net realized long-term capital gains and return of capital. The actual amounts and sources of the amounts for tax reporting purposes will depend upon the Fund's investment experience during the remainder of its fiscal year and may be subject to changes based on tax regulations. In January 2024, a Form 1099-DIV will be sent to shareholders, which will state the amount and composition of distributions and provide information with respect to their appropriate tax treatment for the 2023 calendar year.

You should not draw any conclusions about the Fund's investment performance from the amount of this distribution.

In the United States, abrdn is the marketing name for the following affiliated, registered investment advisers: abrdn Inc., abrdn Investments Limited, abrdn Australia Limited, abrdn Asia Limited, Aberdeen Capital Management, LLC, abrdn ETFs Advisors LLC and abrdn Alternative Funds Limited.

Closed-end funds are traded on the secondary market through one of the stock exchanges. The Fund's investment return and principal value will fluctuate so that an investor's shares may be worth more or less than the original cost. Shares of closed-end funds may trade above (a premium) or below (a discount) the net asset value (NAV) of the fund's portfolio. There is no assurance that the Fund will achieve its investment objective.

www.abrdn.com/en-us/cefinvestorcenter

###

For More Information Contact:

abrdn Inc.

Investor Relations

1-800-522-5465

Investor.Relations@abrdn.com

SOURCE: abrdn Income Credit Strategies Fund 5.25% Series a Perpetual Preferred Shares

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/760373/abrdn-Income-Credit-Strategies-Fund525-Series-A-Perpetual-Preferred-Shares-Declares-Quarterly-Dividend
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - 1844 RESOURCES Inc. (TSXV: EFF) (the "Company" or "1844") due to market conditions, 1844 announces amended pricing to its previously announced non-brokered private placement (the "Offering"). Pursuant to the amended pricing, the Company is increasing the number of units (the "Units") to be issued from up to 40,000,000 Units to up to 57,142,858 Units and has amended the Unit pricing from $0.05 per Unit to $0.035 per Unit. The gross proceeds for the Offering will continue to be for gross proceeds of up to $2,000,000.

The Units will consist of one common share of the Company and one common share purchase warrant (a "Warrant"). The Warrants are exercisable for a period of 36 months from closing and the exercise price of the Warrants was reduced from $0.075 per warrant to $0.055 per Warrant.

In connection with the Offering, the Company will pay 8% cash finders fee and 8% non-transferable share purchase warrants, each warrant entitling the holder thereof to purchase one common share of the Company at a price of $0.05 per share for a period of 12 months from closing.

Insiders of the Company are expected to participate in the Offering to the extent of up to 2,500,000 Units. This participation by insiders in the Offering constitutes a related party transaction as defined under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"). However, the Company considers such participation would be exempt from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101, as the fair market value of the Units subscribed for by the insiders and the consideration for the Units paid by such insiders, would not exceed 25 per cent of the Company's market capitalization.

1844 will use the net proceeds from the Offering in connection with its option to acquire the Hawk Ridge Project, for exploration on the Hawk Ridge Project and for general corporate purposes. Mr. Sylvain Laberge, President and CEO of the Company commented: "The option to acquire a 100% interest in the Hawk Ridge Project is transformational for 1844. Hawk Ridge is expected to become one of the flagship properties of the Company and is expected to add to our existing portfolio of copper and other critical mineral projects in coastal Quebec."

The Offering will be conducted under available exemptions from the prospectus requirements of applicable securities legislation and participation in the Offering will be available to existing shareholders in qualifying jurisdictions in Canada in accordance with BC Instrument 45-534 - Prospectus Exemption for Distributions to Existing Security Holders and the corresponding blanket orders and rules implementing CSA Notice 45-313 - Prospectus Exemption for Distributions to Existing Security Holders in the participating jurisdictions in respect thereof (collectively, the "Existing Security Holder Exemption").

The Company has set June 1st, 2023 as the record date for the purpose of determining shareholders entitled to participate in the Offering in reliance on the Existing Security Holder Exemption. Qualifying shareholders who wish to participate in the Offering should contact the Company at the contact information set forth below no later than June 20, 2023. If the Offering is over-subscribed for, Units will be allocated pro-rata amongst all subscribers. All subscription materials must be provided to the Company no later than June 23, 2023. The Company may close the Offering in several tranches during the Offering, the first of which the Company intends to close no later than June 30, 2023. In addition to conducting the Offering pursuant to the Existing Shareholder Exemption, the Offering will also be conducted pursuant to other available prospectus exemptions. Insiders may participate in the Offering.

The aggregate acquisition cost to a subscriber under the Existing Security Holder Exemption cannot exceed $15,000, unless that subscriber has obtained advice regarding the suitability of the investment and, if the subscriber is resident in a jurisdiction of Canada, such advice is obtained from a person that is registered as an investment dealer in the subscriber's jurisdiction.

In addition to the Existing Security Holder Exemption and other available prospectus exemptions, a portion or all of the Offering may be completed pursuant to Multilateral CSA Notice 45-318 - Prospectus Exemption for Certain Distributions through an Investment Dealer ("CSA 45-318") and the corresponding blanket orders and rules implementing CSA 45-318 in the participating jurisdictions in respect thereof in the participating jurisdictions (collectively with CSA 45-318, the "Investment Dealer Exemption"). Pursuant to CSA 45-318, each subscriber relying on the Investment Dealer Exemption must obtain advice regarding the suitability of the investment from a registered investment dealer. There is no material fact or material change of the Company that has not been generally disclosed.

All securities issued pursuant to the Offering will be subject to a statutory hold period expiring four months and one day after closing of the Offering. Completion of the Offering is subject to a number of conditions, including, without limitation, receipt of all regulatory approvals, including approval of the TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange").

None of the securities issued in the Offering will be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "1933 Act"), and none of them may be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements of the 1933 Act. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of the securities in any state where such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful.

For more details on the Company's option to acquire the Hawk Ridge Project see the Company's news releases dated March 6 and 7, 2023. The Company originally announced the Offering on April 12, 2023. Copies of the Company's news releases are available under the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. The Company's option to acquire the Hawk Ridge Project remains subject to Exchange approval.

About 1844 Resources Inc.: 1844 is an exploration company with a focus in strategic and energetic metals and underexplored regions "Gaspe, Nunavik Quebec". With a dedicated management team, the Company's goal is to create shareholder value through the discovery of new deposits.

1844 RESOURCES INC.

(signed) "Sylvain Laberge"

Sylvain Laberge

President and CEO

514.702.9841

Slaberge@1844 resources.com

FORWARD LOOKING INFORMATION

This news release includes "forward-looking statements" and "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. All statements included in this news release, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements including, without limitation, statements with respect to the Company's option on the Hawk Ridge Project and the Offering. Forward-looking statements include predictions, projections and forecasts and are often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", "potential", "target", "budget" and "intend" and statements that an event or result "may", "will", "should", "could" or "might" occur or be achieved and other similar expressions and includes the negatives thereof.

Forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by management based on the business and markets in which the Company operates, are inherently subject to significant operational, economic, and competitive uncertainties, risks and contingencies. These include assumptions regarding, among other things: general business and economic conditions; the availability of additional exploration and mineral project financing; and Exchange approval.

There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate and actual results, and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations include exploration or other risks detailed from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulators, including those described under the heading "Risks and Uncertainties" in the Company's most recently filed MD&A. The Company does not undertake to update or revise any forward-looking statements, except in accordance with applicable law.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169491
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - Graph Blockchain Inc. (CSE: GBLC) (OTC Pink: REGRF) (FSE: RT50) ("GBLC" or "Graph Blockchain" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that the Board of Directors has approved the grant of an aggregate of 2,200,000 restricted share units ("RSUs") under the Company's omnibus incentive plan (the "Plan") to employees, directors, and consultants of the Company. The RSUs vest immediately and expire on June 9, 2024. The Plan was approved by the shareholders of the Company on July 28, 2022.

About Graph Blockchain

Graph Blockchain provides exposure to various areas of Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Focusing on altcoins through its wholly-owned subsidiaries Babbage Mining Corp., a Proof of Stake ("POS") miner, and Beyond the Moon Inc. an IDO-focused company, Graph gives investors exposure to the vast emerging market of cryptocurrencies with the significant technological disruption and potential gains altcoins represent. Through its strategic acquisitions, Graph is assembling a collection of products and technologies that will lead the DeFi market and offer an unprecedented investment for shareholders.

For additional information on Graph Blockchain and other corporate information, please visit the Company website at www.graphblockchain.com.

For further information, please contact:

Paul Haber, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman of the Company

Phone: (416) 318- 6501

Email: phaber@graphblockchain.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements contained herein that are not clearly historical in nature may constitute forward-looking statements.

Generally, such forward-looking information or forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or may contain statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "will continue", "will occur" or "will be achieved". Forward-looking information in this news release is based on certain assumptions and expected future events. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, which may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements, including but not limited to the potential inability of the Company to continue as a going concern; the risks associated with the blockchain in general. Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list is not exhaustive. Readers are further cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, as there can be no assurance that the plans, intentions, or expectations upon which they are placed will occur. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated.

Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement and reflect the Company's expectations as of the date hereof and are subject to change thereafter. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, estimates or opinions, future events or results, or otherwise or to explain any material difference between subsequent actual events and such forward-looking information, except as required by applicable law.

The CSE does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

###

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169477
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - Resouro Gold Inc. (TSXV: RAU) (FSE: BU9) ("Resouro" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that its shares are now trading on Germany's Tradegate Exchange under the ticker "BU9", and the Company has appointed DGWA as European corporate advisor.

Tradegate is a fully regulated German trading exchange, 60% owned by Deutsche Borse AG. The exchange facilitates trading in over 10,000 securities from around the world. It is the primary exchange for the retail share trading for large German and French banks such as Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, and BNP and many of the European online brokers.

This listing complements the trading on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and facilitates European investors being able to purchase and trade Resouro's shares with low transaction costs.

To enhance its European efforts, Resouro has appointed Frankfurt-based DGWA, the German Institute for Asset and Equity Allocation and Valuation, as its investor relations and corporate advisor in Europe.

DGWA will assist the Company to engage with retail, institutional and large private investors in the German-speaking DACH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) with a population of close to 100 million people, as well as the rest of Europe and the United Kingdom.

The European advisor will also assist Resouro with expanding its European profile for investor and stakeholder awareness of the exploration activities on the Company's Tiros Titanium-REE Project and Novo Mundo Gold Project in Brazil.

The latest company presentation can be downloaded from the German webpage: https://resouro.com/deutsch/

Stefan Muller, CEO of DGWA, comments: "We are excited to be partnering with Resouro Gold to introduce the company to European investors and corporates. The global demand for rare earths, which are used in a range of applications from permanent magnets for EVs to renewable energy devices, has increased significantly in recent years. To meet the worldwide decarbonization goals, the demand for rare earth elements may see as much as a 300 - 700% increase by 2040. Resouro is well positioned with its Tiros Titanium and Rare Earth project to benefit from this demand increase, with the project's near surface mineralization and excellent infrastructure."

About DGWA

DGWA, the German Institute for Asset and Equity Allocation and Valuation ("Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Wertpapieranalyse GmbH"), is a European Investment Banking Boutique based in Frankfurt, Germany. The management team has a 25-year track record in trading, investing, and analysing SMEs around the world. DGWA has been involved in over 250 IPOs, financings, bond issues, dual listings, and corporate finance transactions as well as corresponding road shows and awareness campaigns.

About Resouro Gold Inc.

Resouro is a Canadian-based mineral exploration and development company focused on the discovery and advancement of economic mineral projects in Brazil, including the Novo Mundo Gold Project in Mato Grosso and the Tiros Titanium-REE Project in Minas Gerais. Learn more about the Company on its website: https://resouro.com.

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

Chris Eager, President & CEO

RESOURO GOLD INC.

For further information, please contact the Company at:

Chris Eager, CEO

chris.eager@resouro.com

For Investor inquiries

nick@grovecorp.ca

416-642-1807

Disclaimer

This news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. In particular, forward-looking information in this press release includes, but is not limited to, statements with respect to the completion of the titanium-REE project acquisition, closing of the placement, expected terms of the placement, the number of securities of Resouro that may be issued in connection with the transaction, and the parties' ability to satisfy closing conditions and receive necessary approvals. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. We cannot guarantee future results, performance or achievements. Consequently, there is no representation that the actual results achieved will be the same, in whole or in part, as those set out in the forward-looking information.

Forward-looking information is 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 anticipated in the forward-looking information. Some of the risks and other factors that could cause the results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information include, but are not limited to: general economic conditions in Canada and globally; industry conditions, including governmental regulation and environmental regulation; failure to obtain industry partner and other third party consents and approvals, if and when required; the availability of capital on acceptable terms; the need to obtain required approvals from regulatory authorities; stock market volatility; liabilities inherent in the mining industry; competition for, among other things, skilled personnel and supplies; incorrect assessments of the value of acquisitions; geological, technical, processing and transportation problems; changes in tax laws and incentive programs; failure to realize the anticipated benefits of acquisitions and dispositions; and the other factors. Readers are cautioned that this list of risk factors should not be construed as exhaustive.

The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. We undertake no duty to update any of the forward-looking information to conform such information to actual results or to changes in our expectations except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information.

The TSX Venture Exchange has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169447
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - Tincorp Metals Inc. (TSXV: TIN) (OTCQX: TINFF) ("Tincorp" or the "Company") is pleased to report that all resolutions were approved at the Company's Annual General Meeting of shareholders held on June 9, 2023. The voting results are as follows:

Total issued and outstanding Common Shares as at Record Date: 66,557,423

Total percentage of Common Shares voted: 52.90%

Matter Voted Upon Voting Result Fixing the number of directors of the Company at six (6)





The number of directors of the Company for the ensuing year was fixed at six (6), by a majority of shareholders : Votes For

Votes against

33,539,795 (99.89%) 36,075 (0.11%) Election of Directors





















The following nominees were elected as directors of the Company until the next annual meeting of shareholders of the Company, by a majority of shareholders:

Votes For Votes Withheld Non Vote Gordon Neal 32,736,428 (97.50%) 839,442 (2.5%) 1,633,290 Lorne Waldman 33,542,676 (99.90%) 33,194 (0.1%) 1,633,290 Dr. Rui Feng 33,221,064 (98.94%) 354,806 (1.06%) 1,633,290 Bhakti Pavani 33,222,785 (98.95%) 353,085 (1.05%) 1,633,290 Alex Zhang

Hernan Uribe-Zeballos 33,222,151

33,223,012 (98.95%)

(98.95%) 353,719

352,858 (1.05%)

(1.05%) 1,633,290

1,633,290 Appointment of Deloitte LLP, as auditors of the Company







Deloitte LLP, Chartered Professional Accountants, was reappointed as the Company's auditors for the ensuing year, and the directors were authorized to fix their remuneration, by a majority of shareholders: Votes For Votes Withheld 35,183,495 (99.93%) 25,665 (0.07%) Approval of Amended and Restated 10% Rolling Stock Option Plan (the "Plan")



The Plan was approved by a majority of shareholders:

Votes For Votes Against Non Vote 33,055,857 (98.45%) 520,013 (1.55%) 1,633,290

Appointment of CFO

Ms. Jean Zhang resigned from her position as Chief Financial Officer of the Company effectively immediately to pursue other career opportunities. The Company would like to thank Ms. Zhang for her efforts and wishes her success in her future endeavours.

The Company has appointed Mr. Derek Liu, CPA, CGA as its new Chief Financial Officer effective immediately. Mr. Liu has extensive experience in finance and accounting. He has held senior accounting positions, such as corporate controller and chief financial officer in several public Canadian mining companies, and currently is also the Chief Financial Officer of Silvercorp Metals Inc.

About Tincorp

Tincorp Metals Inc. is a mineral exploration company focusing on tin projects in Bolivia and a gold project near Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. The Company has signed agreements to acquire up to a 100% interest in the Porvenir Project and SF Tin Project, which are 70 km southeast of Oruro, Bolivia. The Company's 100% owned Skukum Gold Project is approximately 84 km south of Whitehorse by road. An independent mineral resource estimate update in respect of the Skukum Gold Project was completed in October 2022.

On Behalf of Tincorp Metals Inc.

signed "Gordon Neal"

Gordon Neal, CEO & Director

For further information, please contact:

Investor Relations, Tincorp Metals Inc.

Phone: +1 (604)-336-5919

Email: info@tincorp.com

www.tincorp.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169479
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - AXMIN Inc. (TSXV: AXM) ("AXMIN" or the "Company") is providing the following corporate update.

Private Placement

In connection with the non-brokered private placement of up to 10,000,000 common shares at C$0.05 per share (the "Offering") previously disclosed in the Company's new releases dated March 28, 2023 and May 11, 2023, the Company has applied to the TSX Venture Exchange for a further 30-day extension of price protection in order to complete the Offering.

Closing of the Offering is subject to receipt of all necessary corporate and regulatory approvals, including the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. All securities issued in connection with the Offering will be subject to a hold period of four months plus a day from the date of issuance and to the resale rules of applicable securities legislation.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of any of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), or the securities laws of any state of the United States (as defined in Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act) and may not be offered or sold within the United States unless such securities have been registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or pursuant to exemptions from such registration requirements.

Binding International Arbitration Process

Further to the Company's news release dated February 10, 2023 and as disclosed in the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis for the three months ended March 31, 2023 and 2022 filed on SEDAR, during March 2023, the Company engaged White & Case LLP, a leading international law firm with extensive experience in both commercial and investor state international arbitration, to take appropriate steps vis-a-vis the Government of the Central African Republic ("CAR") in relation to the cancellation of the Company's mining license and two exploration permits for the Passendro Gold Project.

Under the CAR's Mining Convention of 2006 and the addendum thereto concluded in August 2010, the Company can bring their claim against the CAR in international arbitration in Paris before the Chambre Arbitrale Internationale de Paris. The Company intends in due course to initiate the binding international arbitration process against the government of CAR.

The Company has determined that the sunk costs incurred in connection with the Passendro Gold Project to be in the region of US$148.6 million. In 2011, the Company conducted a National Instrument 43-101-compliant Bankable Feasibility Study, which assessed the net present value at over US$340 million, assuming a gold price of US$1,100.

Board of Directors Change

Effective June 9, 2023, Terry Wong resigned as a director of the Company. The board of directors of the Company would like to thank Terry for her years of service to the Company and wish her well in her future endeavours. The Company is in the process of selecting a replacement director.

About AXMIN

AXMIN is a Canadian exploration and development company with a strong focus on central and West Africa. For more information regarding AXMIN, visit our website at www.axmininc.com.

Please follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/axmininc.

This press release includes certain "Forward-Looking Statements." All statements, other than statements of historical fact included herein, including without limitation, statements regarding future plans and objectives of AXMIN and statements regarding the ability to develop and achieve production at the Passendro Gold Project, are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties.

There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from AXMIN's expectations have been disclosed under the heading "Risk Factors" and elsewhere in AXMIN's documents filed from time-to-time with the TSX Venture Exchange and other regulatory authorities. AXMIN disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether resulting from new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Lucy Yan

CEO and Chairman 604 488-8878

ceo@axmininc.com

General Enquiries

Investor Relations

ir@axmininc.com

www.axmininc.com

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169482
Valo Holdings Group and SurgeTrader select a charitable organization to support on each leg of the Gold Rush Rally, furthering their mission of community support and philanthropy.

NAPLES, FL / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / Valo Holdings Group and SurgeTrader, prominent companies in the investment and trading sectors, are excited to announce their participation in the highly anticipated 2023 Gold Rush Rally. Led by their CEO, Jana Seaman, the companies have committed to supporting charitable organizations at each stop of the rally, covering various cities across the western United States. This collaborative effort reflects their dedication to corporate social responsibility and making a positive impact in the communities they serve.









The Gold Rush Rally serves as a platform for Valo Holdings Group and SurgeTrader to showcase their commitment to philanthropy while enjoying the thrill of the rally. With each leg of the race, the companies will meet with a designated charitable organization to pledge their support and make a donation. The following are the dates, locations, and the respective organizations being supported:

June 9th: 3rd Ave Charitable Organization. The team will be hosting a meet-and-greet at 11 a.m. at The Intercontinental Hotel, located at 901 Bayfront Ct, San Diego, CA 92101.

June 10th: The Just One Project. The team will be hosting a meet-and-greet at 5 p.m. at Encore at Wynn, situated at 3131 Las Vegas Blvd S, Las Vegas, NV 89109.

June 11th: Hope Women's Center. The team will meet at a time to be determined at the Enchantment Resort, situated at 525 Boynton Canyon Rd, Sedona, AZ 86336.

June 12th: The Veterans Integration Center. The meeting will take place at 4:30 p.m. at Sandia Resort & Casino, located at 30 Rainbow Rd, Albuquerque, NM 87113.

June 13th: Mountain Valley Horse Rescue. The team will be hosting a meet-and-greet at 4:30 p.m. at the Ritz Carlton Bachelor Gulch, located at 0130 Daybreak Ridge Rd, Avon, CO 81620.

June 14th: Canines with a Cause. The meeting will take place at 4 p.m. at The Grand American Hotel, situated at 555 Main St, Salt Lake City, UT 84111.

June 15th: Higher Ground. The team will meet at 4 p.m. at Sun Valley Resort, located at 1 Sun Valley Road, Sun Valley, ID 83353.

June 16th: Big Sky Bravery. The team will meet at 4:30 p.m. at The Summit Hotel, situated at 60 Big Sky Resort Rd, Big Sky, MT 59716.

June 17th: The Autism Society of Idaho will be the final stop and beneficiary of Valo Holdings and SurgeTrader's support. The team will be hosting a meet-and-greet at 6 p.m. at the Coeur d'Alene Resort, located at 115 S 2nd St, Coeur d'Alene, ID 83814.

CEO Jana Seaman expressed her enthusiasm for the Gold Rush Rally and the opportunity to contribute to these deserving organizations. "We are thrilled to be part of the Gold Rush Rally and to support these incredible charitable organizations," she said. "Through our collaboration with Valo Holdings, we aim to make a lasting impact and inspire others to join us in giving back to our communities. We invite everyone to join us at each stop, meet our team, and learn more about the exceptional work being done by these organizations."

Valo Holdings and SurgeTrader's commitment to nine charitable organizations along the Gold Rush Rally route exemplifies their unwavering pledge to corporate social responsibility and their dedication to making a positive difference. By supporting these charitable organizations, they hope to inspire others to contribute to the well-being and empowerment of individuals in need.

About Valo Holdings Group:

Valo Holdings Group is a leading global investment firm with a diverse portfolio of businesses spanning various industries. Committed to creating positive change, Valo Holdings Group focuses on strategic investments and philanthropic efforts that empower communities and drive innovation. More at https://www.valoholdings.com/

About SurgeTrader:

SurgeTrader, LLC is a U.S.-based proprietary trading - or prop trading - firm, with a mission to accelerate trader funding and provide capital to profitable traders. Once traders have proven they can be profitable by passing an Audition, they become a part of the SurgeTrader funded trader community, with access to an account funded with up to $10 million in buying power. For more information on SurgeTrader or how to become a funded trader, visit https://www.surgetrader.com.

Contact Information

Chrissa Alghini

Marketing Director

info@surgetrader.com

239-944-5317

SOURCE: SurgeTrader, LLC

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/760411/Valo-Holdings-and-SurgeTrader-Join-Forces-in-the-2023-Gold-Rush-Rally-to-Support-Charitable-Organizations-Across-the-Western-United-States
Ovi Hamama and Kfir Kachlon (Credit: Shlomi Perry)

Ovi Hamama and Kfir Kachlon have officially launched 91 Ventures, a $30M fund with the purpose of investing in Israeli startups through pre-seed and seed rounds.

The fund has raised half of its funding from private investors and is actively working towards completing the final fundraising round. The funds LPs come from varied backgrounds, including business professionals, family-office investors, and leading tech entrepreneurs.

The fund is focused on backing and supporting outlier entrepreneurs, who bring innovative approaches to their respective fields, offering sophisticated software solutions, technology, and demonstrating significant market potential. While the vehicle primarily targets Israeli entrepreneurs, it is open to exploring promising opportunities from other regions.

Ovi Hamama is a veteran early-stage investor. His track record includes early investments in eToro, NanoRep, Inneractive, and YouAppi.

Kfir Kachlon, formerly a senior member on OurCrowds investments team, has led numerous deals with technology-rich startups. His previous investments include companies like BlueNalu, Ludeo, and Kahoona.

FinSMEs

09/06/2023
For the promotions of Adipurush, the entire team is leaving no stones unturned. Recently, director Om Raut and actor Kriti Sanon visited Lord Venkateswara Swamy Temple in Tirumala to seek blessings for the films success and a lot of pictures and videos went viral on social media. Before leaving Raut hugged and gave a peck to Sanon that sparked outrage.

Dipika Chiklia, who played Sita in Ramanand Sagars Ramayan has now reacted to the video. Speaking to AajTak, she said, I believe this is a big problem with actors of this generation, as they neither get into the character nor understand its emotions. For them, Ramayana must have been just a film. Perhaps they havent connected with it spiritually. Kriti is an actress of todays generation. In todays era, kissing or hugging someone is considered a sweet gesture.

She added, She must have never thought of herself as Sita Ji. It becomes a matter of emotions. I have lived the character of Sita, while todays actresses just consider it a role. After the film or project is over, they dont care anymore.

On difference between them and todays actors

No one dared to call us by our names on the set. When we were in our characters, many people would come and touch our feet right on the set. It was a different era. At that time, they didnt see us as actors; they considered us Gods. We couldnt even hug anyone, let alone a kiss. Adipurush actors will get busy with their next projects after the release (of the film) and might forget about their characters. But such a thing never happened to us. We were treated as if we were gods who descended from above and lived in this world. This is why we never did anything that would hurt peoples sentiments

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Hansal Mehta and Netflixs Scoop is a gaze at the sensationalism that has crept in in the world of journalism and simultaneously an account of the arrest of journalist Jigna Vora, who was the one of the prime accused in the assassination of senior journalist Jyotirmoy Dey. Deys character is played by veteran actor Prosenjit Chatterjee and Vora is essayed by Karishma Tanna.

Who was Jyotirmoy Dey aka J Day?

Dey was an Indian journalist and crime and investigations editor of the Mumbai-based tabloid Midday, and also an expert on the Mumbai underworld. He started off with the publication Hindustan Times reporting on wildlife and man-animal conflict at Borivali National Park. He has written two books on Indian underworld- Zero Dial: The Dangerous World of Informers and Khallas. He has also reported multiple pieces on underworld dons Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan.

The Assassination

It was June 11, 2011, when Dey was shot dead at 3 pm by four unidentified assailants at Hiranandani Park, Powai. He was reported dead at the Hiranandani Hospital, with nine exit wounds on his body. The case was handed over to the Crime Branch, Mumbai, and 16 days after the investigation, they claimed they had cracked the case. Multiple suspects were arrested from different cities across the country and it was alleged the conspirators belonged to Rajans gang Nana Company.

The arrest of Jigna Vora

On February 21, 2012, a chargesheet was filed against journalist Jigna Vora under Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act. The police alleged that Vora had supplied address and licence plate number of Deys motorcycle to Chhota Rajan. Police claimed Voras professional rivalry was the reason for Deys murder. After seven years, she was acquired due to lack of concrete evidence.

About Jigna Vora

Vora was the deputy bureau chief of the Asian Age newspapers Mumbai bureau at the time, and was 37 years old. She was charged with giving Rajan vital details about Dey, including his residence and the license plate number of his bike. She was said to have links with underworld gangster Chhota Rajan. Vora, was accused by the police of orchestrating the murder of Mid-Day journalist J Dey in 2011, was granted bail by a special MCOCA court later.

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Donald Trumps legal troubles continue to grow. He has now been charged over the handling of classified documents after he left the White House. This is the first-ever federal indictment for a former US president.

The 76-year-old is facing seven charges including unauthorised retention of secret documents. The charges, however, are not public yet.

This is Trumps second indictment after the hush-money case, as he campaigns to make a comeback to the White House in 2024.

Trump, however, has maintained that he is innocent. On his Truth Social app, he called it a DARK DAY for the United States of America. The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, he wrote.

In a video post, he said, Im innocent and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly.

What is the case against Trump?

In 2021, officials of the US National Archives and Records Administration released that some important documents and other material were missing from his time in office and reached out to representatives of Trump.

White House documents are considered property of the US government and must be preserved, according to the Presidential Records Act.

A Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida estate of the Republican leader. In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trumps house, later telling the US justice department officials that they contained a lot of classified material, reports The Associated Press (AP).

That May, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the justice department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Trumps possession. Investigators, who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records, were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Trumps lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.

But that assertion turned out to be false. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totalling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents, the report says.

In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings  including some at the top-secret level  were recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021.

Also read: FBI raids Mar-a-Lago: A look at history and controversies of Donald Trumps Winter White House

What do we know about the investigation?

Last year, US Attorney General Merrick Garland picked Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor with a background in public corruption probes, to lead investigations into the presence of classified documents at the Florida estate, as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the 6 January 2021 insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.

Smiths appointment was a recognition by Garland of the politics involved in an investigation into a former president and current White House candidate. Garland himself was selected by Democratic president Joe Biden, whom Trump is seeking to challenge for the White House in 2024.

Special counsels are appointed in cases in which the US justice department perceives itself as having a conflict or where its deemed to be in the public interest to have someone outside the government come in and take responsibility for a matter, reports AP.

On 7 June, Trumps legal team was notified that he is a target of a federal investigation, which indicates that Smiths investigation is likely nearing a conclusion.

What are the charges against Trump?

The former president has been indicted on seven counts in the classified documents probe.

According to Trumps lawyer James Trusty, he has been served a summons document that contains some language in it that suggests what the seven charges would be, but they had not seen the actual indictment.

Trusty told CNN that Trump is facing a charge under the Espionage Act. The indictment also includes charges of willful retention of national defence information, obstruction of justice, false statements and conspiracy.

While the term espionage brings to mind spying but the US law covers more than its citizens working on behalf of a foreign government.

According to MSNBC, a part of the act prohibits unauthorised possession of national defence-related documents that are willfully retained and not delivered to the government officer or employee entitled to receive them. It carries a possible 10-year sentence.

Trusty has described the charges as a crazy stretch and said the espionage charge was ludicrous under the facts of this case.

What happens next?

After a person is indicted, they must appear in court for an arraignment. The indictment papers will then be unsealed and the judge will ask for a plea.

Trump will appear in a Miami court on Tuesday. The US Secret Service agents assigned to the former president will make a plan for his travel and appearance in court.

In court, Trump will be asked to enter a plea of guilty and not guilty. The former president is expected to plead not guilty after which the judge will set bail or other conditions for his release.

Will Trump be arrested?

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, told the BBC that Trumps arrest would likely follow a similar pattern to his arrest in April on charges of falsifying business records linked to the alleged hush-money payments made to Stormy Daniels.

When he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney in the New York case, Trump surrendered to authorities, where he was booked behind closed doors and appeared in the courtroom, sitting with his lawyers at the defence table. Back then, he was fingerprinted but he was not handcuffed and his mugshot was not taken.

Does a federal indiction stop him from running for president?

No. Neither the indictment nor a conviction would prevent Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

And as the New York case showed, criminal charges have historically been a boon to his fundraising. The campaign announced that it had raised over $4 million in the 24 hours after that indictment became public, far smashing its previous record after the FBI search of Trumps Mar-a-Lago club, reports AP.

With inputs from agencies

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A Gujarat High Court judge invoked Manusmriti to support his remarks that girls used to get married at the age of 14-15 and give birth by the age of 17 in the past. The single-judge bench of Justice Samir JJ Dave made the comments orally on Thursday (8 June) while hearing the abortion plea of a minor rape survivor.

Because we are living in the 21st century, go and ask your mother or great-grandmother. They will tell you that in the past, 14 to 16 years was the normal age for girls to get married. By the time they [the girls] attain 17 years, they would deliver at least one child, he told the lawyer appearing for the 17-year-old girls father  the petitioner in the case.

Four or five months here and there doesnt make a difference. You will not read it, but do read Manusmruti once for this, Justice Dave said, as per Hindustan Times (HT).

Directing the medical superintendent of Rajkot Civil Hospital to form a panel of doctors to ascertain if abortion of the seven-month foetus was advisable, Justice Dave said it would be very difficult for the court to allow termination if both mother and child are found to be healthy, reported PTI.

Girls used to get married by age of 14, deliver child before 17 years: Gujarat High Court invokes Manusmriti in pregnancy termination matter Read more here: https://t.co/MIvA7btFHJ pic.twitter.com/fBNjUOGLbX  Bar & Bench (@barandbench) June 9, 2023

This is not the first time that a judge in India has referred to Manusmriti while hearing cases. What is this book and how it continues to make headlines? We explain.

What is the Manusmriti?

Manusmriti, or the Laws of Manu, is an ancient legal text or dharmashastra of Hinduism. This Sanskrit text, written in sloka verses, is believed to have been composed sometime between the 2nd Century BCE and 3rd Century CE, as per an Indian Express report.

Famous mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik wrote for DailyO news outlet in 2017: Manusmriti or Manava-dharmashastra, is a smriti (that which is recollected): the work of man, subject to change with time (kala), place (sthan) and participants (patra).

Manusmriti is credited to Manu  the first human created by God according to Hindu mythology.

Although some scholars have argued the text was created by several Brahmin scholars over a period of time, others say it is the work of a single individual.

The text lays down a code of conduct covering myriad subjects, including duties of the several castes, the suitable social and sexual relations of men and women of different castes, tackling everyday adversities, and so on, noted Indian Express.

According to Wendy Doniger and Brian Smith, the authors of The Laws of Manu, Manusmriti is about dharma or duty, religion, law and practice. Moreover, it touches upon Arthashashtra by discussing issues such as statecraft, the report added.

As per Indologist Patrick Olivelle, Manusmriti provides a blueprint for a properly ordered society under the sovereignty of the king and the guidance of Brahmins.

According to Pattanaiks article in DailyO, out of the nearly 2,500 verses in Mansmriti, over a thousand are for Brahmins, kings, statecraft and governance, just eight for vaishyas and two for shudras.

As per Indian Express, Doniger and Smith say that by the early centuries of the Common Era, Manu had become, and remained, the standard source of authority in the orthodox tradition for that centrepiece of Hinduism, varnasrama-dharma (social and religious duties tied to class and stage of life).

When judges referred to Manusmriti

The ancient text has been criticised widely for its treatment of Shudras and women. As The Wire noted, women were considered subordinate to men in all respects at the time. Thus, even today, a positive or negative reference to Manusmriti creates a stir in several quarters.

Last August, Delhi High Court judge Justice Prathiba M Singh courted controversy when she said that Indian women are a blessed lot since scriptures like Manusmriti have always given a respectable position to women, Bar and Bench reported.

Taking objection to her remarks on Manusmriti, National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW) general secretary Annie Raja had said in a statement, as per PTI: Her reading of the Manusmriti willfully chooses to ignore the institutionalised prescriptions of the absolute disciplining and punishing of women bodies and ideas. This is in addition to the despicable ascriptive norms of caste that is encoded in the said text.

While refusing to disqualify Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK) leader Thol Thirumavalavan as member of Parliament (MP), the Madras High Court observed in November 2020 that Manusmriti is not a statute book to be read only in a specific manner, adding that the ancient text can be interpreted differently, reported The Times of India (TOI).

The politician had called for a ban on the ancient text, arguing it demeans women, Dalits, underprivileged and indigenous people.

In the 2018 Sabarimala case, the Supreme Court pointed to Manusmriti, saying in these ancient religious texts and customs, menstruating women have been considered as polluting the surroundings.

As per The Hindu, the apex court further noted that practices which legitimise menstrual taboos, due to notions of purity and pollution, limit the ability of menstruating women to attain the freedom of movement, the right to education and the right of entry to places of worship and, eventually, their access to the public sphere.

With inputs from agencies

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Donald Trump has made history yet again by becoming the first former US president to be federally indicted.

Trump, who was indicted for mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate, took to his platform on Truth Social and lashed out at the US government.

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, Trump wrote.

Trump said on Truth Social that he was summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.

Thats the day before his 77th birthday.

Also read: Donald Trump is indicted again: What is the classified documents case?

Trump attorney Jim Trusty told CNN that his client has been indicted on seven charges including the willful retention of documents in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements, obstruction of justice and a count of conspiracy.

Lets take a closer look at the charges in detail:

Illegally keeping documents

Trump has been charged with illegally keeping documents under the Espionage Act, which polices the handling of government secrets.

According to MSNBC, federal law 18 USC 793(e) (gathering, transmitting or losing defence information), comes under the Espionage Act that Congress enacted during the first World War.

According to The New York Times, taking documents pertaining to national security without permission and not turning them over to a government official authorised to take custody of them is a crime under this Act.

Prosecutors need to demonstrate that Trump was aware he had the documents after leaving office and then did not return them after being asked and subpoenaed by the government.

In Trumps potential case, the National Archives and Records Administration was entitled to receive the records Trump kept at Mar-a-Lago and failed to deliver. That section of the Espionage Act wouldnt require Trump, for example, to share the documents with a foreign government in order to be charged, Jordan Rubin wrote for MSNBC.

The justice department first began investigating after the 15 boxes were found to contain national defense information, including 184 documents marked as confidential, secret or top secret.

A violation of this law carries a 10-year prison sentence.

However, violators in similar cases have received much less prison time than the maximum, as per The New York Times.

While this comes under the Espionage Act, it is important to note it does not pertain specifically to the act of spying.

if you see a Trump indictment containing Espionage Act charges, it wont necessarily be an allegation  and therefore wont be a requirement to prove  that he was working as a spy, Rubin noted for MSNBC.

Making false statements

According to The New York Times, lying to an investigating officer about a material fact is a crime.

The maximum sentence for this offence is five years.

The newspaper noted that though Trump is not known to have directly made such statements to the federal government, he could be charged if they can show he conspired with or induced another person to lie to the justice department about there being no further documents responsive to the subpoena.

Trump could also be charged if he led his lawyers to lie to the justice department.

The law states whoever willfully causes an act to be done which if directly performed by him or another would be an offense against the United States, is punishable as a principal, as per The New York Times.

Obstruction of justice

According to CNN, obstruction of justice is covered by federal law 18 USC 1519.

This law states: Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

According to CNN, defendants are charged under this law when prosecutors believe their probe was intentionally hindered  for example by moving evidence from one place to another, by possibly questioning complying with issued subpoenas, failing to fully cooperate with a subpoena or falsely telling prosecutors the files had been given back.

According to MSNBC, the prosecution would need to show that Trump knew he had the documents that the National Archives and Record Administration were attempting to take into their possession.

They would also need to show he deliberately defied the justice departments subpoena for files marked classified and that he purposefully led his aides to fail to turn them over.

All this, while claiming to officials that they had in fact done so.

Conspiracy

According to The New York Times, deciding to break the law in concert with another person is a crime.

All conspiracy means is an agreement between two or more people to violate the law, a meeting of the minds, CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig explained.

Prosecutors need to demonstrate such a meeting of the minds between the former president and another individual and that they actually took some action to achieving the same.

The maximum prison time a conspiracy charge can fetch is five years, as per the newspaper.

People familiar with the matter told The New York Times the conspiracy charge was related to obstruction of justice.

While the other charges remain unknown, the newspaper speculated that they could possibly be mishandling official documents and contempt of court.

Even more trouble on horizon

The case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years  as president and private citizen  but had never before charged him with a crime. The most notable investigation was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, but prosecutors in that probe cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president.

Once he left office, though, he lost that protection.

The inquiry took a major step forward last November when Attorney General Merrick Garland, a soft-spoken former federal judge who has long stated that no person should be regarded as above the law, appointed Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation to lead both the documents probe as well as a separate investigation into efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

But Trumps legal troubles extend beyond the New York indictment and classified documents case.

Smith is separately investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. And the district attorney in Georgias Fulton County is investigating Trump over alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election in that state.

Signs had mounted for weeks that an indictment was near, including a Monday meeting between Trumps lawyers and Justice Department officials. His lawyers had also recently been notified that he was the target of the investigation, the clearest sign yet that an indictment was looming.

Though the bulk of the investigative work had been handled in Washington, with a grand jury meeting there for months, it recently emerged that prosecutors were presenting evidence before a separate panel in Florida, where many of the alleged acts of obstruction scrutinized by prosecutors took place.

It remains unclear how much it will damage Trumps standing given that his first indictment generated millions of dollars in contributions from angry supporters and didnt weaken him in the polls.

But no matter what, the indictment  and legal fight that follows  will throw Trump back into the spotlight, sucking attention away from the other candidates who are trying to build momentum in the race.

With inputs from agencies

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A school in Jammu and Kashmirs Srinagar is facing flak for allegedly not allowing entry to girl students wearing abayas. The incident triggered a row after videos of the students protesting outside their school went viral on social media.

The alleged ban also courted reactions from political parties in the Union Territory. The school has denied the allegations of the protesting students.

What led to the students protest, what has the school said and how have political parties reacted? Lets take a closer look.

Students protest against abaya ban

Some students of Class 11 and 12 of Vishwa Bharti Higher Secondary School in Srinagar hit the streets on Thursday (8 June) alleging that the principal was forcing them to remove abayas, reported Hindustan Times (HT).

Abaya is a loose-fitting robe worn by Muslim women.

According to the protesting students, the principal on Wednesday asked them to come to school without wearing an abaya.

When I turned up at school on Thursday morning, the gatekeeper didnt allow us inside. He told us that if we insist on wearing hijab, we should go to darasgah (Islamic seminary), a class 11 student told The Wire.

Vishwa Bharti Higher Sec Schools principal wholeheartedly apologises for hurting the sentiments of the society. pic.twitter.com/90NnAq3yCf  kamran yousuf (@kamranyousuf_) June 8, 2023

The students said they were not comfortable without abayas, especially after the school was converted into a co-education institute.

As per HT, a protesting student claimed the school was discriminating against students wearing abayas for the past few days. Our principal says that we should move on and remove abaya. How is abaya a hindrance to education? We are school toppers, and we just want to study in peace, she added.

A Class 11 student told The Wire that there was no dress code at the school. She also questioned the principal for allegedly stopping them from entering the school wearing abayas.

Students in foreign universities wear hijabs. The Indian Constitution gives us this freedom. Who is she to tell us what we should or should not wear? Under which rules are we stopped from entering the school? the student was quoted as saying by The Wire.

School denies imposing abaya ban

After the issue snowballed, the school authorities clarified their stance, saying no ban has been imposed on wearing abayas.

According to The Wire, Nimroz Shafi, the school principal, initially admitted that students were asked to remove abayas. However, in a statement later she called the allegations of the students totally baseless and misrepresented.

The principal told mediapersons previously that students were asked to don white coloured hijab (headscarf) at school.

Some girl students come to school in multi-coloured abayas with different designs, which is against the rules. Hijab is included in school uniform and a student is bound to wear uniform at school. I have given them three choices. No one is removing their abayas but they have been asked to wear hijab or headscarf at school, The Wire quoted the Shafi as saying.

After the matter escalated, a terror group threatened to target the principal, reported NDTV.

Later on Thursday, the principal released a statement and apologised for unintentionally hurting sentiments.

That it has been running on social media that female students have been directed not to wear abaya (long robe) which is totally baseless and misrepresented. The school management always respects the sentiments of all the sections of society vis a vis the dress code. It is clarified that no ban has been imposed by the school principal or the management on wearing abaya but it was politely conveyed to the students to wear school uniform underneath the abaya, the statement read, as per HT.

The principal also said there wasno higher authority involved in the matter.

Batting for a proper dress code, she said the school will lay down the guidelines for those who want to wear abayas.

I believe a proper dress code should be followed by all. We will announce a proper colour and pattern of abaya for all those students who want to come to school wearing it, the principal was quoted as saying by The Hindu.

Political parties react

The school also received backlash from political parties in Jammu and Kashmir.

Condemning the alleged ban, Peoples Democratic Party president Mehbooba Mufti, as per The Hindu, said: There should be no imposition of a dress code. Students should be free to wear what they want. They (the BJP) started it in Karnataka, now they are trying to implement a dress code in Kashmir. Its like waging war against a particular community.

Jammu and Kashmir National Conferences (JKNC) chief spokesperson Tanvir Sadiq supported the students, saying wearing a hijab should be a personal choice.

It is unfortunate to witness such incidents in a Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir. We strongly oppose this and urge for immediate corrective action. This is the Vishwa Bharti Higher Secondary School Rainawari Srinagar, he said in a tweet.

Wearing a Hijab should be a personal choice, and there should be no interference in matters of religious attire. It is unfortunate to witness such incidents in a Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir. We strongly oppose this and urge for immediate corrective action. This is the pic.twitter.com/eOqjCBYOw4  Tanvir Sadiq (@tanvirsadiq) June 8, 2023

BJP Youth leader Manzoor Bhat also backed the students who want to wear abayas and said their voices will be heard and duly considered. If girls choose to wear an abaya over their uniform for religious reasons, they should be allowed to do so. It is important to respect individuals religious rights as enshrined in Indian law. There has been no order issued by the administration regarding the banning of abaya in schools, The Hindu quoted Bhat as saying.

J&K Waqf Board chairperson and BJP leader Darakshan Andrabi insisted that uniform was a must in educational institutions as it maintains uniformity, reported HT.

With inputs from agencies

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Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharamans daughter Parakala Vangamayi tied the knot with Pratik Doshi on Wednesday in a low-key ceremony at a hotel in Bengalurus Jayanagar area.

The modest wedding, which reportedly excluded any political officials, was only attended by close family and friends.

Sitharaman may be seen standing behind the bride in a video of the event while Hindu priests perform the ceremonies, which has been widely circulated on social media.

Union Finance Minister Smt Nirmala Sitharaman jis daughter wedding took place few days back. Wedding took place in Bangaluru.

Nice to see the marriage held in a simple traditional way

May God bless the newlyweds  pic.twitter.com/cCdN2Pagva  Adarsh Hegde (@adarshahgd) June 9, 2023

Also read: India, US working together to build foundations of peaceful global community, says FM Nirmala Sitharaman

Who is Pratik Doshi?

As per DNA, Pratik Doshi, a top advisor to Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is from Gujarat, and former writer for The Hindu, Parakala Vangamayi exchanged vows on 7 June.

According to the PMO website, Pratik Doshi is an officer on special duty (OSD) who plays a significant role in the research and strategy wing.

In accordance with the government of India (allocation of business) rules, 1961, Pratik Doshi provides secretarial assistance to the PM on topics like research and strategy.

Doshi, a graduate of the Singapore Management School, has worked as a research assistant in the Gujarat top Ministers Office (CMO) before, most recently when Narendra Modi was the states top executive.

In June 2019, he was promoted to the position of joint secretary after moving to Delhi in 2014 when Modi became prime minister.

Doshi is regarded as Prime Minister Narendra Modis ears and eyes, according to The Print. Prior to PM Modis approval of the files, he offers input to him regarding appointments.

He maintains a modest profile. He is not active on any social media platforms. Wangmayi, who was born in Chennai on May 20, 1991, similarly avoids the spotlight.

Also read: Indian markets are well regulated: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to Network18

About Parkala Vangmayi

A journalist and a columnist, Parkala Vangmayi writes on art, books, lifestyle and technology.

She graduated from Delhi University with a BA in English Literature. She completed a Master of Science in journalism. She has worked with The Hindu and is currently associated with Mint Lounge.

Sitharaman had shared a throwback picture with Parakala on Daughters Day in September 2019. She described her as a friend, philosopher, and guide, by saying, Can say so much and more about daughters. A #throwbackpic with my daughter. A friend, philosopher and guide. Heres this on #DaughtersDay.

Can say so much and more about daughters. A #throwbackpic with my daughter. A friend, philosopher and a guide. Heres this on #DaughtersDay pic.twitter.com/640XrUqm2n  Nirmala Sitharaman (@nsitharaman) September 22, 2019

Political economist Parakala Prabhakar, Sitharamans spouse, was a communications advisor and a cabinet-rank position in the Andhra Pradesh government from July 2014 and June 2018.

Also read: There is a rule of law in India, business heads dont disappear overnight: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman

The highly-intimate wedding

According to Brahmin tradition, the marriage was solemnised. Without extravagant decorations or high-profile guests, the wedding was held in the Vedic order of Adamaru Mutt, reported CNBC-TV18.

The wedding and groom received blessings from seers from the Udupi Adamaru Mutt. The wedding was conducted in accordance with Adamaru Mutts Vedic order.

With inputs from agencies

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The United States is currently facing a shortage of cancer drugs.

So much so that some treatment centres have been forced to switch medication for patients and even delay care in some instances.

But why is this happening? And whats the fallout?

Lets take a closer look:

What happened?

According to NBC, the United States in recent months has witnessed a shortage of over a dozen drugs.

These include cisplatin and carboplatin  which treat several varieties of cancer including testicular, gynecologic, breast, bladder, head and neck as well as non-small-cell lung cancers.

Cisplatin and drugs like it are used to treat 10 to 20 per cent of all cancer patients, as per NBC.

A survey last month by the National Comprehensive Cancer found that nearly all the centers faced a shortage of carboplatin and cisplatin.

Some are no longer able to treat patients receiving carboplatin at the intended dose or schedule.

A cancer patient from California told Financial Times his insurance company denied access to cisplatin in April as a result of the shortage.

Cisplatin is now under protocol reserved for curable cancers. And since mine is not curable, its not something Ive qualified for at the moment, Michael Griffith, a 51-year-old father of three, said.

CNN quoted the University of Utah Drug Information Service as saying that around two dozen chemo drugs were hard to get at the end of March.

Ongoing and active shortages were the highest since 2014.

Dr Robert Carlson, National Comprehensive Cancer CEO, was quoted as saying by CNN, This is an unacceptable situation. We are hearing from oncologists and pharmacists across the country who have to scramble to find appropriate alternatives for treating their patients with cancer right now.

Of the 27 cancer centers that responded to the networks survey, 25 reported a shortage of carboplatin.

Among the cancer centers with shortages of carboplatin, more than a third said they were unable to treat all patients according to the intended dose and schedule.

Nineteen hospitals also reported cisplatin shortages, but all said they were able to maintain the treatments for existing patients.

We were relieved by survey results that show patients are still able to get life-saving care, but it comes at a burden to our overtaxed medical facilities, Carlson added. We need to work together to improve the current situation and prevent it from happening again in the future.

Meanwhile, switching out cancer drugs has real-world implications.

Jennifer Rubatt, an oncology specialist in Denver, Colorado, told Financial Times, In late April and May for newly diagnosed ovarian cancer patients I had to make drug substitutions because we did not have the sort of first-choice drugs available, said

Added Julie Gralow, chief medical officer at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, The concern there, of course, on the part of patients and their clinicians is: are we sure this [substitute drug] is equally effective? Are we potentially in some way reducing the chance for cure? I dont think we have solid data on that but that is a serious concern.

Why is this happening?

The problem started developing earlier this year, said Mike Ganio, who studies drug shortages at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

I think it went from being a shortage to being a really bad shortage really quickly, he said.

Theres not a whole lot of room for it to get worse.

Ganios society reported the cisplatin shortage in January and then carboplatin in late March, months after a factory in India that makes both drugs paused production following an inspection that raised quality concerns.

Erin Fox, senior pharmacy director at University of Utah Health and an expert on drug shortages, told USA Today the manufacturer Intas Pharmaceuticals provides around half the market share of cisplatin.

Whats the fallout?

The US Food and Drug Administration has taken some steps to try to ease the chemotherapy shortage.

The agency is allowing the temporary importation of some foreign-approved versions of cisplatin from factories registered with the FDA.

According to CNBC, the FDA has allowed cisplatin manufacturer Qilu Pharmaceutical permission to export the drug to the United States.

Qilu and Canadian drugmaker Apotex will export the drug  which comes in 50-milligram vials  to the United States and handle its distribution, as per NBC.

The outlet quoted Eric Tichy, board chair of the End Drug Shortages Alliance, as saying this was a good plan.

Fox told USA Today, It will hopefully help more patients access product and not have their treatments delayed.

FDA commissioner Dr Robert Califf tweeted, The public should rest assured that we will continue all efforts within our authority to help the industry that manufactures and distributes these drugs meet all patient needs for the oncology drugs impacted by shortages.

While Ganio said that while that should help, the big factor will be getting the factory in India back up to full production.

According to USA Today, the US Food and Drug Administration last week sent Intas a letter allowing it to resume shipping certain drugs including cisplatin and carboplatin.

The FDA said Intas will be mandated to hold a third-party review and test its products.

Gano also noted that drug supply shortages are a decades-old problem.

We really need to get at the root causes of these shortages or theyre going to continue happening, he said.

Need to rethink market for generics

Manufacturing problems, unexpected demand spikes and tight ingredient supplies have all contributed to a growing number of prescription drug shortages in the United States.

Many patients with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder have had a hard time filling prescriptions for Adderall this year, and drugstores ran out of childrens medicines during last winters cold-and-flu season.

There were 301 active national drug shortages through this years first quarter, according to the University of Utah Drug Information Service.

This is a public health crisis. We have never seen a shortage like this one, Angeles Alvarez Secord, president of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology, told Financial Times.

We need to rethink the entire marketplace for generics, which is where most of the shortages can be found, Laura Bray, founder of Angels for Change, told the outlet.

With inputs from agencies

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A growing blind spot in womens health was brought to light in 2019 when the problem of needless hysterectomies among female sugarcane cutters in Maharashtras Beed district first surfaced.

Since then, several regions of India have seen an increase in the number of these procedures.

The most recent National Family Health Survey indicates that 3.3 per cent of all women in the country between the ages of 15 and 49 have had a hysterectomy.

Thus, in April this year, the Supreme Court ordered the government to take strict action against medical professionals who perform unnecessary hysterectomies in hospitals and clinics, according to The Hindu.

But what is a hysterectomy? What are the issues around it? Why are the numbers increasing in India? Lets look more closely.

The procedure of hysterectomy

A hysterectomy is a surgical procedure to remove the womb (uterus) and the cervix, according to the National Health Service (NHS) of the United Kingdom.

Women who undergo this surgery dont experience menstruation or pregnancy as a result. It is also referred to as surgical menopause in medical terminology.

Hysterectomies are performed to treat conditions affecting the female reproductive system, such as heavy periods, chronic pelvic pain, non-cancerous tumours (fibroids), ovarian cancer, womb cancer, cervical cancer, or fallopian tube cancer.

It is a serious procedure with a lengthy recovery time and ought to only be performed as a last option when all alternatives have failed.

When women are pregnant, a baby develops in the womb. The health of the woman is negatively impacted by hysterectomy since it may cause, among other things, hormonal imbalance, calcium deficiencies, and chronic bodily aches, according to India Times.

The figures are increasing

In 2019, reports of unjustified hysterectomies from several states, particularly Maharashtras Beed, shocked the nation. After three years, there is still no change.

Over 3.3 per cent of all Indian women between the ages of 15 and 49 had undergone hysterectomies, according to the National Family Health Survey.

Andhra Pradesh (nine per cent) and Telangana (eight per cent) had the highest rates of hysterectomy, respectively, according to NFHS data. Sikkim and Meghalaya have the lowest rates with 0.8 per cent and 0.7 per cent, respectively.

The Eastern area of India has the second-highest prevalence of hysterectomy with 3.8 per cent, trailing only the Southern region with 4.2 per cent. With a rate of just 1.2 per cent, the Northeast has the lowest rate.

Concerning tendencies have been observed over time in terms of age, region, social and economic background, and aim, according to health professionals.

According to surveys performed in the community, Indian women undergo hysterectomies on average at the age of 34. Hysterectomies are normally performed on premenopausal women aged 45 and older in industrialised nations, but community-based research in India has found a rising trend of hysterectomies in younger women, between the ages of 28 and 36, according to Times of India.

The Times of India reports that the government has authorised 45,434 hospital admissions totalling Rs 126 crore for hysterectomy-related treatment since the worlds largest publicly funded health assurance scheme, Ayushman Bharat PM-Jan Arogya Yojna, was introduced in 2018. It offers health coverage of Rs 5 lakh per family per year to 12 crore families.

Surprisingly, the Union Government said private hospitals do 33,559 more surgeries than government hospitals do (11.875), as of March this year.

70 per cent of women who get hysterectomies in private medical facilities were discovered to be involved in these unneeded treatments, according to research on private hospitals. The exploitation of the process was also noted, as medical facilities took advantage of it to demand higher insurance premiums under various government healthcare programmes, according to The Hindu.

The appeal to the Supreme Court contended that most of the women belonged to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, or Other Backward Communities.

According to The Hindu, the procedure is also easily abused, either by contractors working in unorganised industries like the cutting of sugar cane, where wombless women are the norm to eliminate the need for workers to take care of their periods and practise proper hygiene, or by private clinics looking to profit from insurance money.

Many influences

In a 2020 study titled Crushed Hopes on Beed hysterectomies, the authors highlighted that rules governing private clinics, particularly in remote regions, were not well-implemented, that awareness of the technique for removing the uterus was low, that gynaecological services were lacking, and that there were no established protocols.

The Hindu cited a 2017 study titled Incidence and determinants of hysterectomy in a low-income setting in Gujarat, India noting that the majority of the women believed that removing their uteruses would cure their health problems because the uterus had no function other than pregnancy. While a different 2019 study discovered that women from rural areas view hysterectomies as a means to lengthen their productive workweeks and increase their pay.

The district is primarily populated by migrant workers, sugarcane cutters, and small-scale farmers. These folks move seasonally in the direction of the sugar belt. According to Saroj Shindes Insights on the Practice of Hysterectomy among the Women Sugarcane Cutters in Maharashtra (India), they, particularly women, encounter various issues after migrating and working in the fields for more than 12 to 13 hours a day.

As shown in ARTEs Hysterectomies in India documentary, the women frequently complain of stomach aches as a result of their heavy loads, prolonged work in direct sunlight or bad weather, poor nutrition, lack of access to hygienic care while they are menstruating, and inadequate postpartum care. The women must constantly overwork as a result of the severe financial situation in order to survive.

The surgeries are generally conducted by the women out of fear and to relieve their agony, but this frequently leads to major health risks like abdominal pain, vaginal infections, cervical issues, and cancers at the tender age of 20 to 30.

In 2015, it was discovered that four hospitals were involved in a large scam involving the removal of the uteri of over 2,200 women from underprivileged communities in Karnataka. The health department then claimed in a report that the hysterectomies were unnecessary.

Serious consequences of removing the uterus

According to The Hindu, there are significant medical and economic repercussions associated with uterine loss.

Unnecessary hysterectomies cause premature menopause, which frequently renders women disabled and unable to work. They also place a tremendous financial burden on the families of the women.

As per NHS, other possible complications include general anaesthetic complications, bleeding, ureter damage, bladder or bowel damage, infection, blood clots, vaginal problems, and ovary failure.

Studies looking at whether having a hysterectomy increases your chance of developing conditions like heart disease and diabetes have produced conflicting findings, with some pointing to potential associations and others stating that more study is required to draw firm conclusions.

The Hindu reported, following a hysterectomy, women typically gain weight and many of them will also have had their ovaries removed, which causes significant post-menopausal symptoms.

Also read: Committee set up to probe hysterectomies in Maharashtras Beed; 4,600 women in district underwent womb removal surgery since 2016

The action

The government was compelled to take action by establishing several monitoring committees as a result of Dr Narendra Gupta v. Union of India lawsuit that was brought before the Supreme Court in April, notably by doctors who were abusing women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

This isnt the first time the issue came to light, as a public interest litigation (PIL) was also filed in 2013. According to the PIL, women in the states of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan were forced to have needless hysterectomies, endangering their health.

According to Livelaw, in response to the PIL which alleged forcible hysterectomy procedures being carried out in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan, the Supreme Court ordered the states and union territories to implement the health regulations developed by the Centre to oversee and obstruct such practices. These recommendations must be put into effect within three months, according to the courts order.

In accordance with Article 21 of the Constitution, it acknowledged that unnecessary hysterectomies are a violation of womens fundamental rights and that the right to health is a crucial component of the right to life, according to India Times.

It also directed that stringent action should be taken to blacklist hospitals once it is detected that any unnecessary hysterectomy was carried out or that the procedure was taken recourse to without the informed consent of the patient, reported Livelaw.

In addition, the Court recommended a course of action that included the formation of hysterectomy monitoring committees at the federal, state, and local levels as well as a complaints site.

Additionally, the Health Ministry released guidelines in 2022 to prevent unnecessary surgeries, ordering states to follow them to ensure proper utilisation of hysterectomies.

For those who had hysterectomy benefits, the government also suggested a complaints site that would be overseen by the National Hysterectomy Monitoring Committee.

Recently, the ministry ordered states to exchange information regarding hysterectomies carried out by healthcare facilities. The ministry has also recommended requiring mandatory audits for all hysterectomies, much as the audits being carried out for maternal mortality, as per India Times.

These regulations are designed to encourage responsibility and guarantee the proper and justifiable use of hysterectomy operations.

With inputs from agencies

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There is a palpable concern among most people who are aware of AI and its capabilities. While most AI experts have warned that humanity has never seen a challenge as big as AI, most people are worried that they will lose their jobs to AI.

Businesses from all around the world are increasingly turning to AI, sometimes even replacing human beings with AI algorithms and chatbots. However, Union IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar believes that there is much ado about nothing and an unnecessary fear-mongering about AI stealing human jobs.

On the recent layoffs in the Indian tech industry

At a recent press conference, the minister was asked about the recent layoffs in the tech space, and if AI is going to exacerbate the situation, given the fact that there are little to no jobs in the tech industry.

Minister Chandrasekhar responded by saying that the premise that there are no jobs in the tech space is wrong. He said In the digital and tech space we are creating jobs at an unprecedented rateWe have created almost a crore jobs in the last 4-5 years alone.

Noise around AI taking human jobs

When asked if something as disruptive as AI will make humans redundant, the IT minister responded by saying, There is some melodrama around AI and then there is reality. It is possible that over the next 5-10 years, AI becomes intelligent enough that it will replace jobs, which is quite possible. Today, the application of AI is focused on tasks, creating more efficiency. However, AI is not there yet that it will replace people in their jobs.

He continued, Yes, there is a possibility that at very low levels, where tasks usually involve low intelligence and are repetitive in nature, AI can replace jobs. But I can assure you that while AI is disruptive, we do not see in the next few years the threat of AI replacing jobs.

AI is not logic-oriented as of now

Minister Chandrasekhar continued, explaining, The current state of development of AI is that it is very task-oriented, not very reasoning or logic oriented. Most jobs usually have some level of reasoning and logic attached to them. AI is not that sophisticated at this stage of its development.

However, people cannot be complacent about it. The IT Minister concluded by saying, This is not to say that it (AI replacing human jobs) will never happen.

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Ahead of the scheduled Amarnath Yatra which will begin on July 1 and continue till August 31, the Union Home Minister Amit Shah will chair a high-level meeting today to check the preparedness.

Shah will review the preparedness in a series of meetings that include security as well as other aspects linked to the annual pilgrimage. The meeting on Friday will take place around 4 pm.

Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla, Intelligence Bureau chief Tapan Deka, Central Reserve Police Force Director General SL Thaosen and officers concerned in the Ministry of Home Affairs as well as those from Jammu and Kashmir Police and administration will also attend the meeting to be held in the Ministry of Home Affairs.

After the success of the G20 tourism working group meeting held in Srinagar, the Jammu and Kashmir administration is busy making arrangements for the upcoming Amarnath Yatra amid intelligence inputs of possible attempts by Pakistan-based terror outfits to disrupt the pilgrimage.

The annual pilgrimage to the holy cave shrine of Amarnath, located at a height of 3,880 metres in the south Kashmir Himalayas, will begin on July 1 and continue till August 31.

With inputs from ANI

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A day after Congress announced that it would drop chapters on RSS founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar as part of its school textbook revision drive, a row has erupted between BJP and the ruling party in Karnataka.

Karnataka Primary and Secondary Education Minister Madhu Bangarappa on Thursday said that keeping the interests of students in mind, the department will revise school textbooks this year itself.

Notably, Congress had promised in its manifesto to undo the changes made by BJP when it was in power and had also vowed to scrap National Education Policy (NEP).

The Chief Minister is personally interested in this, it was also clearly mentioned in our manifesto  of which I was the vice president  that we will revise the textbook in the interest of the students. The same thing will stand. As we are implementing the guarantees, in the same way in my department we will fulfill what he had said, Bangarappa told PTI.

There are reports in the media that we may not revise this year as the textbooks have already reached the students. No, we will do it this year itself by introducing whatever is necessary as a supplementary. There is such a system and it has been done several times in the past. We have already begun the work in this regard, he added.

Specifically, Congress decision to drop chapters on the RSS founder has caused a stir among BJP members in the southern state.

Who was Keshav Baliram Hedgewar?

Born in a Telegu family in 1889, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar founded the Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh in 1925.

By profession, Hedgewar was a physician who lived in Maharashtra. He was famously called Doctor ji and was inspired by the heroic fights and bravery of Shivaji.

He was a freedom fighter whose participation in the Non-Cooperation Movement led to his incarceration for one year.

Congress vs BJP

Congress MLC BK Hari Prasad defended the partys decision to remove chapters on Hedgewar.

Meanwhile, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar called the decision a bizarre censoring of Indian history. The Bhartiya Janata Party has also demanded an apology from the Karnataka government for trying to distort history.

Karnataka BJP MLA & former state minister CN Ashwath Narayan said, These kinds of hasty decisions are not appreciated. Dr Hedgewar is a founder of national cultural building, nationalismHe was a medical practitioner with a good background. We should not ignore and disrespect such a towering personality. We should have the courtesy to respect him.

BJP leader CT Ravi slammed Congress by saying They (the Congress) can change syllabus but they cant change the history. Everyone knows about Sangh Parivaars patriotism everywhere Sangh Parivaars ideology is getting stronger that cant be changed.

Our ideology is patriotism does the Congress want to eliminate patriotism and want to make this Mughalistaan? he said.
Two days after Devendra Fadnavis said Maharashtra me achanak kuch jilo me Aurangzeb ki auladien paida hui hain (In some districts of Maharashtra, some children of Aurangzeb have suddenly appeared) referring to massive clashes in Kohlapur, AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi on Friday hit back saying that if Maharashtra Deputy CM is such an expert he should then call out Godses and Aptes offsprings too.

Addressing a gathering in Hyderabad on Friday, Owaisi said, Maharashtras Home Minister Devendra Fadnavis said Aurangzeb ke aulaad. Do you know everything? I didnt know you (Devendra Fadnavis) were such an expert. Then call out Godses & Aptes offspring, who are they?

#WATCH | Hyderabad, Telangana | Maharashtras Home Minister Devendra Fadnavis said Aurangzeb ke aulaad. Do you know everything? I didnt know you (Devendra Fadnavis) were such an expert. Then call out Godses & Aptes offspring, who are they?, says AIMIM chief Asaduddin pic.twitter.com/vrnCH7g4eq  ANI (@ANI) June 9, 2023

On Wednesday, Fadnavis had said that strict action will be taken against those who take the law into their own hands after massive protests broke out in Kolhapur against a social media post that allegedly glorified Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and disrespected a Maratha national icon.

Maharashtra me achanak kuch jilo me Aurangzeb ki auladien paida hui hain (In some districts of Maharashtra, some children of Aurangzeb have suddenly appeared). They are posting pictures and status on social media of Aurangzeb, which is causing ill-will in society, he said.

The question is where have Aurangzebs children suddenly come from, where were they born, and who is behind this? he said.

Kolhapur saw massive protests on Wednesday morning, as people from some right-wing outfits gathered at the Shivaji Maharaj Chowk and started raising slogans against the two accused who posted a status glorifying Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.

With inputs from agencies

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Hitting out at the Congress government in Karnataka over reports about it removing a lesson on RSS founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar from school textbooks, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrashekar said that the partys views on history are limited to the Nehru-Gandhi family.

Terming the reported move as Congress antics to grab attention, the senior BJP leader alleged that it has a long history of rewriting the countrys history to remove those who are not part of a dynasty.

On Thursday, Karnataka Primary and Secondary Education Minister Madhu Bangarappa said the revision of school textbooks will be done this year itself in the interest of students.

Bangarappa, while talking to reporters in Bengaluru, had also indicated that the proposal on the textbook revision will be placed before the Cabinet probably when it meets next.

He, however, did not wish to go into details, when asked about reports stating that plans are on to remove some lessons from textbooks introduced by the previous BJP government, including one on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) founder.

Addressing a press conference here, Chandrashekar, a Rajya Sabha member from Karnataka, said, I dont have control on them what they do or say Its (move to remove a lesson) absolutely wrong. It is in their DNA and intent to take out from history whosoever is not part of dynasty.

Their prism of looking at history is limited to the Nehru-Gandhi family, he said.

Chandrashekar also described the reported move of the Karnataka government to remove a lesson on Hedgewar as a crime against the youth of India and said people will respond to the Congress for depriving students of the truth about India.

The Congress in its manifesto for the recently concluded Karnataka assembly polls had promised to undo the changes made to school textbooks when the BJP was in power and had also promised to scrap the National Education Policy-2020 in the state.

With inputs from agencies

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External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Thursday met the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhis Tilak Vihar area and assured them of all possible help from the central government.

Jaishankar made the visit as part of the BJPs nationwide outreach ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and to mark nine years in government.

We heard the problems of the victims of the 1984 riots. We have assured them that all their problems will be addressed, he said.

The external affairs minister had also met a student who had returned from war-torn Ukraine.

I met a student who returned from Ukraine. He wanted to go back and complete his studies there but the situation in Ukraine is not under control yet. It will be beneficial for the students if the exams are conducted in India. He said that they were always in touch with the Embassy and they supported them a lot during difficult times, the minister said.

Earlier this year, the Ukrainian government had informed India that the medical students who were evacuated due to the war will be able to appear for their final or qualification examination in India.

Earlier in the day, Jaishankar also met Sikhs who had come to India from Afghanistan and expressed the nations help to them regarding citizenship and visas.

I wanted to meet the Sikhs who have come to India from Afghanistan and understand their issues. They have some problems regarding visas and citizenship. We will address the issues that they have discussed with us. Some people are still waiting to get their citizenship. We will provide all possible help regarding citizenship and visas. It is our responsibility to help them out, he said.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on 20 May filed a chargesheet in a case related to the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

The chargesheet was filed by the CBI in Rouse Avenue Court in Delhi.

Justice Nanavati Commission of Inquiry was set up in the year 2000 by the Government of India to inquire into the incidents of anti-Sikh riots in 1984 in Delhi.

CBI also named Congress leader Jagdish Tytler in its chargesheet as an accused in the riots.

In a statement, CBI mentioned that the agency had registered the instant case in November 2005 on an incident wherein Gurudwara Pul Bangash at Azad Market, Bara Hindu Rao, Delhi was set on fire by a mob and three persons namely Sardar Thakur Singh, Badal Singh and Gurcharan Singh were burnt to death on 1 November, 1984, near Gurudwara Pul Bangash.

With inputs from agencies

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According to a new World Health Organisation study, nearly 4 lakh diarrhoeal disease fatalities could be avoided if the Jal Jeevan Mission accomplishes its goal of delivering clean water to all rural households.

The government began the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) in 2019, a state-wide campaign that aims to deliver clean and adequate drinking water to all rural households through individual tap connections by next year.

The World Health Organization (WHO) was requested by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation to conduct a study to assess potential health gains and associated cost savings due to increased access to safely-managed drinking water services in India.

The study found that, on an estimate, if the Jal Jeevan Mission provided safely-managed drinking water to all of India, this would result in averting almost 4 lakh deaths caused by diarrhoeal disease.

According to official figures, till now 62 per cent of rural households have been provided with tap water connection.

With universal coverage of safely-managed drinking water in India, almost 14 million DALYs (Disability-adjusted life years) from the diarrhoeal disease are estimated to be averted, resulting in estimated cost savings of up to USD 101 billion, the study said.

Also, the study said that providing a tap connection to every household would save significant time on water collection (66.6 million hours each day), especially among women.

Presenting the research findings, Richard Johnston, co-lead of WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene, said if the world achieves its Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) targets of drinking water and sanitation, it will be because of India.

There are two reasons for it  population and size  as India is the country with the largest population in the world so what happens in India is important for the world but it is also because India is demonstrating what can be done and what is possible when it makes commitments and investments, he said.

Dr Rajiv Bahl, Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research, said these findings are plausible.

We must understand that these are gross underestimates of the total benefits of providing safe water not only because these benefits go beyond health and affect many communicable and non-communicable diseases. And even malnutrition, which is a big issue for us as they are all related to water, so we must consider these just modest assumptions and tip of the iceberg, Bahl said.

WHO estimation of health impacts is based on comparative risk assessment (CRA) methods, which are used extensively in the burden of disease assessments (Ezzati 2002, Pruss-Ustun 2019).

The analysis estimated potential health gains from the Mission by comparing two scenarios.

The JJM scenario assumed that coverage of safely managed drinking water services in India increases linearly from baseline levels to 100 per cent coverage at the end of the programme, whereas, the business-as-usual scenario assumed improvements in coverage rates are in line with historical annual rates of 0.5 percentage points change per year.

For the economic analysis, the value per DALY averted from the JJM initiative was based on an approach described in the 2001 report of the WHOs Commission on Macroeconomics and Health which assigned each life year a value of three times the GDP per capita.

The Har Ghar Jal programme, implemented by the Jal Jeevan Mission under the Ministry of Jal Shakti, was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on August 15, 2019. The program aims to provide every rural household with affordable and regular access to an adequate supply of safe drinking water through taps. The programs components align with the WHO/UNICEF joint monitoring programme for water supply, sanitation and hygiene to monitor progress on SDG 6.1 for safely managed drinking water services

With inputs from agencies

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External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Friday that the G20 Summit is about getting India ready for the world and the world ready for India.

He added that the international event will spur tourism growth in the country.

Jaishankars comment came during an address at Delhi Universitys Aryabhatta College which was part of of a BJP outreach campaign underway to highlight the nine years achievement of the Narendra Modi government.

This India which we are getting ready for the world is very important for all of you because this India that we are getting ready for the world is your India, he said.

Whatever we are doing right now regarding G-20 is in a way India laying the foundation for what Modiji has called Amrit Kal, the next 25 years before us and those are your years. Our job is to lay the foundation and it is our hope that you will build on that foundation to realise the dream of making India a developed country by 2047, the minister said.

The foreign minister added that India is one of the first countries to hold over 200 meetings in 60 cities across the country.

We have done it so that the world could see the full diversity and richness of India, he said.

These meetings would be attended by at least 200-300 people and when these people will go back to their home, they will talk about India and share their experiences of places like Varanasi and Kashmir with their friends and families, said the former bureaucrat.

Jaishankar also said that currently India is number one in the world in terms of attracting foreign investment but it is not satisfactory because it can go up further.

He said globalisation has opened up doors of opportunities for the youth but they must also be prepared to manage its challenges.

With inputs from PTI

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Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde on Friday said that the government has taken serious note of the death threat received by senior leader Sharad Pawar on Twitter, adding that he has personally spoken to senior police officers and given them instructions for investigation.

Sharad Pawar is a senior leader and we all respect him. His safety will be fully taken care of. Instructions have been given to the police to increase security if necessary, said the Maharashtra Chief Minister.

The government has taken serious note of the threat received by senior leader Sharad Pawar on Twitter and I have personally spoken to senior police officers and have given instructions for investigation. Sharad Pawar is a senior leader and we all respect him. Their safety will be https://t.co/sO4h12AXIS pic.twitter.com/d9qBaBcsqE  ANI (@ANI) June 9, 2023

Earlier in the day, NCP had claimed that their party chief Sharad Pawar has received a death threat on social media and appealed to party workers to maintain peace at all costs.

A delegation of NCP workers led by Pawars daughter and Lok Sabha member Supriya Sule met Mumbai police chief Vivek Phansalkar demanding action.

I received a message on WhatsApp for Pawar Sahab. He has been threatened through a website. So, I have come to the Police demanding justice. I urge Maharashtra Home Minister and Union Home Minister. Such actions are low-level politics and this should stop.., said Sule.

#WATCH | Mumbai | I received a message on WhatsApp for Pawar Sahab. He has been threatened through a website. So, I have come to the Police demanding justice. I urge Maharashtra Home Minister and Union Home Minister. Such actions are low-level politics and this should stop.., pic.twitter.com/C7zwuJlzQq  ANI (@ANI) June 9, 2023

The NCP leaders told the police that 82-year-old Pawar received a message on social media that read he will meet the same fate as (Narendra) Dabholkar soon.

Taking cognisance of the matter, Mumbai police are in the process of registering a first information report, a senior police official told PTI.

Narendra Dabholkar, who fought against superstitious beliefs, was shot dead by two bike-borne assailants during his morning walk in Pune on 20 August, 2013.

Sule submitted printouts of the screenshots of the death threat to the police.

A senior police official said that they have been informed about the threat to the NCP chief on a social media platform.

We are looking into it. We have started a probe, the official said.

NCP had sent a representative to lodge a police complaint, the official said.

The police are in the process of registering an FIR in this connection at South Region Cyber police station, he added.

Meanwhile, senior NCP leader Ajit Pawar said the threat message was sent by one Saurav Pimpalkar whose social medial profile says he is a BJP supporter.

Instead of misusing the freedom of expression, one should fight the ideological battle in a dignified manner, he said talking to reporters.

Ajit Pawar, who is the Leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra Assembly, said social media platforms are being deliberately misused to malign political leaders, post fake news and create divisions in society.

As the news about the threat to Pawar saheb spread, anxious NCP workers began calling senior leaders about his safety, said party spokesperson Mahesh Tapase. He said that a threat to the NCP chief is a threat to secularism.

We have instructed our workers to maintain peace at all costs, he said.

Secularism is the soul of Pawar saheb. Nobody can force saheb to change his secular stand and he is not at all affected by such threats, Tapase said.

Now, the onus is on the government, he said. It is to be seen whether the government will promote secularism and uphold the Constitution or give a free hand to the killers of Dabholkar, said the NCP leader.

With inputs from agencies

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Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann on Friday announced the construction of a High-Security digital jail in the state to be spread over 50 acres of land for the hearing of cases related to dreaded criminals within the jail complex only.

Addressing the gathering after handing over appointment letters to the newly recruited Jail Warders here today, Chief Minister Mann said, Rs 100 crore has been approved by the Government of India to set up this digital jail near Ludhiana for hearing of cases pertaining to the hardcore criminals in the state within the jail complex.

Judges will have separate cabins in the jail for special hearings of such dreaded criminals who are a major threat to the state so that they should not be moved out of jail for this purpose, he added.

Bhagwant Mann also said that the jail department will soon have its ultra-modern office in Mohali for which land has been identified.

On the occasion, Punjab CM mentioned that efforts are being made to modernize the police force on scientific lines.Punjab Police is being updated to tackle cybercrime in the state and various new reforms are being introduced. High-tech jammers and other equipment are being installed in jails to check the use of mobile phones from inside the prison, he said.

Chief Minister Mann also made an announcement regarding an anti-drone technology that is being introduced by the Punjab Police to check the infiltration through drones from across the border.

Massive efforts are being made to transform the Police stations of the state by pumping in a number of resources adding that infrastructure in terms of vehicles, weapons and others are also being spruced up in the department, CM Mann said.

The Chief Minister also mentioned that Punjab will be soon joining hands with multinational Google to update the state Police on modern lines.

He said, Comprehensive blueprint has already been prepared in this regard and the formal agreement will be signed soon. Bhagwant Mann said that it will help in enhancing the efficiency of the Punjab Police to tackle any sort of unforeseen challenge in the state.Chief Minister said that several initiatives are being taken for reforming the inmates in jails so that they can learn something in life.

He also said that Rs 4.5 crore will be given for laying synthetic tracks on the campus and an ultramodern hostel will come up at Rs 3 crore within the campus along with Rs 25 lakh for a firing range in the complex.

On the occasion, Bhagwant Mann also announced Rs 25 lakh for the construction of roads on the campus.

The Chief Minister also said that Rs 10 crore will be spent on providing raw materials for various training to inmates and 351 new posts will be created in the jail department along with the construction of a Special Womens Jail in the state.

Bhagwant Mann said, There is no dearth of funds in the state and every effort will be made to strengthen, modernize and upgrade jails in Punjab.Congratulating the new recruits, the Chief Minister expressed hope that they will discharge their duty with utmost commitment and dedication.

Cops deliver their duty even in hostile conditions to ensure that peace prevails in the state. Duty cannot be measured in money as it is one of the most important services to the nation and its people, Punjab CM said.

On the occasion, the Chief Minister also felicitated the recruited warders for outstanding performance during their training.

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During his visit to India, Sam Altman revealed that he is pleasantly surprised in the way India has adopted AI, and believes that the country is at the centre of innovation when it comes to AI. As a result, the OpenAI CEO and the inventor of ChatGPT plans on investing in several startups in India, that are working on AI, and on technology in education.

Speaking about OpenAIs venture capital arm investing in Indian startups, the OpenAI CEO said, We had some discussions yesterday (about investing in Indian startups) and we would love to invest in Indian startups.

Surprised by Indias startup ecosystem

Altman also revealed that he and his team were amazed by the way startups function in India. We were always amazed by the quality of Indian startups. The energy we are seeing in Indian startups, we are looking to fund them, he said.

Altman also expressed that India has one of the largest startup ecosystems globally.

Having previously served as the president of Y Combinator, an early-stage startup accelerator program based in the United States in 2014, Altman brings prior experience in working with startups in their initial stages.

It is worth mentioning that OpenAI introduced its venture capital division, OpenAI Startup Fund, in the latter part of the previous year. According to their website, they are seeking to collaborate with a select group of early-stage startups in areas where artificial intelligence can bring about a transformative impact, such as healthcare, climate change, and education. They aim to empower individuals by utilizing AI tools to enhance productivity.

Altman shared during an interaction with students that earlier in the day, he had a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

He mentioned that their discussions revolved around establishing global regulations for artificial intelligence and collaborating with stakeholders in the country to leverage the technology for educational purposes.

Altmans experiences as an investor

When a student asked Altman for his advice to startups, he humorously remarked that some of the suggestions he provided to young companies during his time as the head of Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator (YC) turned out to be incorrect.

I genuinely feel regretful about the advice I gave at YC. I might even consider removing my blog. OpenAI managed to secure one billion dollars in funding even before launching a product This serves as definitive evidence that my advice doesnt always hold true, he explained.

He further added, The unconventional path we took to achieve the concept of making something people want, which we proudly display on YC T-shirts, demonstrates our unique approach.

Altmans India trip is part of a multi-leg tour which will also include visits to countries such as Israel, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE and South Korea. Altman hopes that he is able to help these countries to be a part of a universal organisation that can decide the future of AI, rather than make contradictory and sometimes conflicting regulations that would stymie the development of AI.

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Money matters and friendships dont generally go well together. India and all-weather ally Russia are sparring over the control of a rail joint venture that has bagged the contract for manufacturing 120 Vande Bharat trains and their maintenance for 35 years.

Metrowagonmash, part of Transmashholding, Russias largest transport engineering company, in partnership with Indian public sector undertaking Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd (RVNL) had bagged an approximately Rs 30,000-crore contract.

While RVNL owns 20 per cent and Metrowagonmash 80 per cent of the company that won the contract, RVNL now wants a majority share of 69 per cent, leaving 26 per cent for Metrowagonmash. According to reports, RVNL also wants to include a third partner, Locomotive Electronic Systems (LES) with 5 per cent share.

In a letter to Metrowagonmash, dated April 25, 2023, RVNL said it has incorporated a fully owned private company by the name of Kinet Railway Solutions Ltd (KRSL).

The letter further stated this company will act as the SPV (special purpose vehicle) that will sign the Manufacturing-cum-Maintenance Agreement (MCMA) with the Ministry of Railways and thereby, implement the project.

The RVNL further said being a government company it was better placed to handle issues like getting clearances and engaging local manpower.

Given the present geo-political situation and the fact that the RVNL is a trustworthy public sector unit having robust standing with public financial institutions, it will be easier for the SPV to mobilise funding from the domestic market at the most competitive rates, RVNL said in its letter.

It will be a win-win situation for all partners if RVNL plays the primary role in this initiative the PSU said.

RVNL asked Metrowagonmash to provide its approval for the proposed shareholding, but it protested and took up the matter with the Russian government.

A Note Verbale was then sent by the trade representative of the Russian Federation to the Indian government of India on 8 May asking it to direct RVNL to stick to the original contract.

As per a report by New Indian Express, the conflict over the issue between the two companies is continuing and the matter is now likely to be settled at the top level of the two governments.

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US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti said on Friday that the bilateral trade relationship between the two nations plays a key role in addressing global economic challenges.

The #USIndiaTrade relationship is crucial, and bilateral trade plays a key role in addressing shared challenges in the global economy. I look forward to focusing on strengthening trade ties & advancing our economic relationship, Garcetti said in a tweet.

The #USIndiaTrade relationship is crucial, and bilateral trade plays a key role in addressing shared challenges in the global economy. I look forward to focusing on strengthening trade ties & advancing our economic relationship. https://t.co/DaFrH5Ttpq  U.S. Ambassador Eric Garcetti (@USAmbIndia) June 9, 2023

On Thursday, the envoy met Piyush Goyal, the Union Minister of Consumer Affairs, to discuss ways in enhancing collaboration across various sectors to give a further push to the growing India-US strategic partnership.

Delighted to meet US Ambassador Eric Garcetti today. Discussed ways to enhance collaboration across various sectors to give further impetus to our growing strategic partnership, Goyal tweeted on Thursday.

Yesterday, Garcetti congratulated the consular teams in Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and New Delhi for issuing the highest number of student visas in 2022.

A huge shoutout to my incredible consular teams in Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and New Delhi for their exceptional efforts in issuing the highest number of student visas globally in 2022! Garcetti said in a tweet.

On Wednesday, the envoy said that India accounted for one out of every five US student visas issued last year.

His comments came during an address on the seventh annual Student Visa Day organised by the US Mission in India. He also highlighted that Indians arrive in America more than students from any other country. In terms of student visas issued by the US, India has also surpassed the global average.

Garcetti also expressed his commitment to processing the highest number of visas in the coming years.

With inputs from agencies

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As many as 125 immovable properties including land and buildings located at 83 locations have been attached by the Jammu and Kashmir Police after they were found to be the proceed of terrorism.

Police informed that these properties were identified to be used for the purpose of Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI).

The properties were identified as a result of terrorism-related investigations by the State Investigation Agency (SIA) and executive wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Police. They have been attached under Sections 8 and 25 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

An advisory issued by the Jammu and Kashmir Police asked people to refrain from being associated with the sale, purchase, tenancy, lease or any other type of transaction with respect to the notified attached properties.

In May this year, property held by or linked to banned Jamaat-e-Islami in Jammu and Kashmir worth Rs 3 crores (approx) was sealed to dismantle the ecosystem of anti-national elements and terror networks hostile to Indias national security.

The property is a shopping complex comprising 20 shops along with appurtenant land falling under survey number 2990/2666/270 and survey number 3551/2979/263 has been sealed and entry/usage barred has been prohibited, an official statement read.

Additionally, Red entry to this effect has been made in the relevant revenue records. With this SIA Kashmir has got 57 properties of JeI notified to date, it further added.

The action, it is expected, would significantly dent terror funding in J-K besides being another major step in restoring the rule of law and a society without fear.

Pertinently, SIA has identified as many as 188 JeI properties across the Union Territory of J-K which have either been notified or are under the process of being notified for further legal action.

With inputs from ANI

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The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has registered as many as six cases related to the violence in Manipur and has also set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to ascertain the cause of the violence.

The police said on Thursday that two bike-borne miscreants allegedly hurled a low-intensity Improvised explosive device (IED) at the gate of MLA Soraisam Kebis residence.

There were no casualties in the incident. Except for a few holes in the ground, the blast did not cause any major damage, an officer said.

A total of 903 arms and 11,518 ammunition have been recovered to date from different areas in violence-hit Manipur.

At least 35 weapons and warlike stores were recovered on Thursday during joint combing operations by security forces in ethnic violence-affected Manipur, an official said.

Domination of the arterial national highway 37, connecting capital Imphal with Assam and other parts of the country, was carried out to ensure free movement of essential goods to and from Manipur as part of the operations, he said.

Stating that 35 weapons of different types, ammunition and warlike stores were recovered on the second day of joint combing operations on Thursday in the hills and valley sector, the official said that the security forces are adopting confidence-building measures and a people-centric approach to alleviating the hardships of the people, affected by the month-long ethnic strife in the northeastern state.

On the first day of the joint combing operations on Wednesday, the security forces recovered 29 weapons, mostly automatic, mortar, hand grenades, small arms, ammunition and warlike stores.

Meanwhile, on Thursday Kuldiep Singh, advisor (Security) to the Manipur government announced that the state remained peaceful for as no incident of violence was reported in the last 48 hours.

To provide relief to the displaced people of Manipur, Singh said the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has approved a relief package worth Rs 101.75 crore.

The MHAs approval of the relief package for the displaced in Manipur followed Union Home Minister Amit Shahs direction to the state government to send a request to his ministry for such a package.

With inputs from agencies

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Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday said the Narendra Modi governments priority is to ensure that Amarnath pilgrims have a comfortable visit and directed officials to make adequate security arrangements along the entire pilgrimage route in Jammu and Kashmir.

The home minister said this while chairing a high-level meeting where he took stock of the preparations for the Amarnath pilgrimage with top officials of the central government, Army and the Jammu and Kashmir administration.

The 62-day-long annual pilgrimage to the cave shrine of Amarnath, located at a height of 3,880 metres in the south Kashmir Himalayas, will begin on July 1 and continue till August 31.

The pilgrims travel through two routes  Baltal and Pahalgam  in Jammu and Kashmir.

At the meeting, it was apprised that all the pilgrims will be given RFID cards so that their real-time location can be traced and everyone will be given Rs 5 lakh insurance cover. There will be insurance coverage of Rs 50,000 for each animal carrying pilgrims.

Shah stressed providing smooth arrangements on the route from the airport and railway station to the pilgrimage base camp and directed to making available air service from Srinagar and Jammu at night for the convenience of the pilgrims.

The home minister also directed to ensure adequate stock of oxygen cylinders and their refilling and asked for the availability of additional teams of doctors.

He directed to ensure an adequate number of medical beds and the deployment of ambulances and helicopters to meet any medical emergency.

Shah gave instructions to make proper arrangements for all necessary facilities for the pilgrims and that includes travel, stay, electricity, water, communication and health. He directed to ensure a better communication system on the pilgrimage routes and the deployment of machines to immediately open routes in case of a landslide.

Besides, arrangements for tent city, Wi-Fi hotspots and proper lighting will be made on the travel routes. Additionally, online-live Darshan of Baba Barfani, live telecast of morning and evening aarti in the holy Amarnath cave and religious and cultural programmes will be organised at the base camps, the statement said.

Jammu and Kashmir Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha, the Armys Northern Command chief

Lieutenant General Upendra Dwivedi, Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla, Director of Intelligence Bureau Tapan Deka were among the top functionaries who attended the meeting.

Sources said all stakeholders of the pilgrimage have taken part in the meeting and all issues relating to arrangements being made for it have been discussed.

Last year, 3.45 lakh people visited the holy cave and this year, the figure could go up to 5

lakh, they said.

The sources said that to avoid any incident like last years flash flood which claimed 16 lives near the shrine, the National Disaster Response Force has started identifying ideal locations for setting up pilgrim camps keeping in mind any possible unforeseen natural disaster.

Indian Air Force helicopters are expected to be deployed to carry out aerial sorties in the upper reaches of the holy cave to check for glacial events and the formation of lakes that may trigger flash floods downhill.

Last year, such sorties were conducted only after the flash floods occurred in June, but this year, the exercise will be undertaken before the start of the pilgrimage and at continuous intervals during the two-month yatra, the sources said.

The aerial surveys may be conducted by a team with expertise in remote sensing and satellite, hydrology and disaster response. Once a dangerous water build-up is spotted, contingency measures will be taken all along the pilgrimage route, especially in the areas near the cave shrine, they added.

Recently, a lot of snow has been found along both the routes  Baltal and Pahalgam  leading to the holy cave and therefore the Border Roads Organisation has been given the task to clear the snow by June 15, the sources said.
Saraswati Vaidya, an orphan who was allegedly murdered by her live-in partner in Maharashtras Thane, had told an orphanage in Ahmednagar, where she grew up, that she was living with her uncle.

Mumbai continues to reel under shock after the news of 56-year-old Manoj Sane brutally chopping body of Vaidya, who was staying with her for nine years.

He also boiled her body parts in a pressure cooker, while crushed some in a mixer and fed them to stray dogs.

According to NDTV, a worker at the Jankibai Apte Balikashram in Ahmednagar, where Saraswati stayed, saying that 32-year-old Mumbai murder victim told them that she was living with her uncle who owned is a clothes merchant and is extremely rich.

She told us that her uncle stays in Mumbai, and I stay with him. She told us that the man is a clothes merchant and is extremely rich, the report quoted Anu Salve a saying.

Salve further informed that Saraswati last visited the orphanage two years ago and she seemed extremely unhappy during that visit.

During interrogation, Manoj told the police that he never had any physical relationship with Saraswati as he is HIV positive.

He also told the cops that Saraswati was like his daughter.

Manoj further told the police that Saraswati was very possessive in nature and suspected that he was being unfaithful to her whenever he returned home late.

The accused also said that Saraswati was planning to appear for Class 10 SSC exams and he was teaching her maths.

Saraswati was living in Borivali when she met Manoj at a ration shop where he worked in 2014. They both were single and belonged to the same community. They started meeting often.

She was a school dropout and became increasingly dependent on Manoj. They both moved to Mira Road flat three years ago.

Manoj was arrested after a neighbour noticed a foul smell emitting from Manojs flat and alerted the authorities.

Meanwhile, Manoj has been giving contradictory statements to the police. He initially claimed that his partner died by suicide on 4 June by consuming poison.

He further claimed that he tried to dispose of the body fearing he might be charged with abetment.

Manoj later cooked up another story and alleged that he had a fight with Saraswati as he suspected her of having affairs.

With inputs from agencies

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Mumbai Police have nabbed two people in connection with Uddhav Thackeray faction leader and MP Sanjay Rauts death threat messages that he received earlier today.

Mumbai police detained two people for threatening Uddhav faction leader and MP Sanjay Raut, Mumbai Police said in a statement.

The police are currently questioning the two people in question.

Uddhav Thackeray faction MLA Sunil Raut said, Uddhav Thackeray faction MP Sanjay Raut and I have received death threat calls since yesterday, asking them not to talk to the media in the morning. Mumbai Police Commissioner and state Home Minister have been informed regarding the incident.

Police register cases against two people for threatening Sharad Pawar

Interestingly, NCP leader Sharad Pawar also received a life-threatening message on social media.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde on Friday said that the government has taken serious note of the death threat received by senior leader Sharad Pawar on Twitter, adding that he has personally spoken to senior police officers and given them instructions for investigation.

Sharad Pawar is a senior leader and we all respect him. His safety will be fully taken care of. Instructions have been given to the police to increase security if necessary, said the Maharashtra Chief Minister.

Meanwhile, Mumbai Police have registered a case under section 153A, 504, 506(2) of IPC against two people who are believed to be connected to the threats.

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) MP Supriya Sule earlier today said she received a threatening message on her WhatsApp for her father, Sharad Pawar and also met Mumbai Police Commissioner.

She further said that if justice is not served then the Centre and State Home departments will be responsible. The police have been informed, the home department needs to pay attention. Politics should be kept aside. Threatening messages have come through a website today, there are also threats through Twitter I dont know who is who, I have come to seek justice, she added.

With inputs from agencies

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The opposition leaders meeting called by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in Patna seemed to have gained momentum, with Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal confirming that party president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi will attend a meeting of the top opposition leaders.

Speaking to ANI, KC Venugopal said, Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge will attend the opposition meeting in Patna He further said that it is high time to have unity between the opposition parties to fight against these forces who are ruining the country.

Nationalist Congress Party Chief Sharad Pawar on Thursday confirmed that he would participate in the meeting of the Opposition parties. The meeting aims to mobilise the opposition ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

Addressing the media in Patna on Thursday, Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav said that almost 15 parties will attend the meeting. However, the presence of Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao was not confirmed as Tejashwi Yadav did not have a chance to speak with him.

The meeting, aimed at laying the groundwork for the coming together of like-minded Opposition parties against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP government at the Centre, was originally scheduled to be held on June 12.

However, the meeting was pushed back after several Opposition leaders, including Congress national president Mallikarjun Kharge and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin, expressed their inability to attend the meeting on June 12, citing prior engagements and preoccupations.

After JDU had announced the meeting of Opposition parties on June 12, earlier, DMK chief Stalin said he had sought to postpone the June 12 meeting, as he would be busy attending an inaugural ceremony on the same date.

Nitish Kumar has been rooting for Opposition unity since he left the National Democratic Alliance and joined the Grand Alliance to form a new government in August last year.

With inputs from agencies

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A male passenger, who was onboard a Vistara flight to Dubai, was arrested at Delhi airport on a complaint by a woman co-passenger. The woman had complained to a flight crew that she heard the man speak of a bomb over the phone.

The man was later handed over to CISF and then arrested by the Delhi Police. The incident happened on 7 June but nothing was found after the investigation, according to the police.

The man has been given a notice and allowed to go as nothing suspicious was found on him. The police said, if needed, he will have to join the investigation in the future, reported ANI.

The police stated that the man was speaking to his mother on the phone. He reportedly told his mother that the CISF didnt allow a coconut in his bag, as they feared that it could be a bomb, but they allowed pan masala that was kept in his bag.

Upon hearing the word, the woman immediately raised the alarm. After this, both the passengers were asked to disembark from the flight. The man was handed over to the police, while the woman chose to take another flight. The plane was thoroughly searched, delaying the flight by two hours.

With inputs from agencies

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Punjab Governor Banwarilal Purohit on Thursday slammed Pakistan for pushing drugs into India and pitched for conducting one or two surgical strikes against the neighbouring country to teach it a lesson.

The governor, who was on a two-day visit to the border districts of the state, also had a word of praise for the Punjab government over the issue of drug seizure and tackling drones being used to send narcotics from across the border.

To ensure the next generation dont become drug addicts, Purohit said it was imperative to conduct one or two surgical strikes against Pakistan to stop its nefarious objectives.

Purohit expressed satisfaction over the coordination among central agencies, such as the Border Security Force (BSF), Army and Intelligence Bureau, and the Punjab Police.

Addressing the media, the governor came down heavily on Pakistan for launching a hidden war against India, saying it is doing so as it could not engage in a direct fight against the country.

He also expressed concern over the use of drones by Pakistan for pushing drugs and weapons into India and laid an emphasis on effectively countering the same.

Pakistan has started a hidden war (against India), PTI quoted Purohit as saying while expressing concern over a large number of drones being sent by the neighbouring country to smuggle drugs.

He said he was 101 per cent confident that the use of drones was not be possible without the involvement of the Pakistani government or its army.

They have their involvement in it and they want to destablise us, he said.

Purohit accused the Pakistani establishment of trying to make our next generation drug addicts, adding that he had received complaints that drugs had reached schools and students were becoming addicts and stealing money from home to support their addiction.

Come what may, it (drugs) has to be stopped, the governor asserted.

He said surgical strikes should be conducted against Pakistan.

Till now, India has not retaliated. I am not the authority, but it comes to mind that Pakistan is playing mischief with us. One or two surgical strikes should be conducted against it. It should be taught a lesson to set it right. Something must be done, Purohit said.

India had conducted surgical strikes across the Line of Control (LoC) on September 29, 2016 as a response to a terror attack on an Army base in Jammu and Kashmirs Uri sector.

Purohit appreciated the efforts of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Punjab and also of central agencies in tackling cross-border drugs smuggling.

As a government, on this issue, it is making an effort that is commendable. The entire team is working with dedication. DCs (deputy commissioners) and SSPs (senior superintendents of police) are working with full dedication, he said.

Overall, after pursuing a lot of things, I must appreciate the state government and its officers, the governor added.

Replying to a question on some AAP leaders questioning his visit to the border districts, Purohit said he is a governor who is never involved in politics.

What I feel is good, I appreciate. I again say that I praise police and the state government. The way (radical preacher) Amritpal (Singh) was arrested, it is appreciable, he said.

What is the meaning of criticism? My job is to appreciate. I do not criticise, Purohit said.

However, he also said if the state government deviates from the Constitution, he will point it out and whether they are happy or upset, I do not bother.

It is my duty (to point out) if the government goes out of the ambit of the Constitution. It is my job and I swore to protect the Constitution. By all means, I will protect the Constitution. Whether the government likes it or not is immaterial for me. I do not have to see their faces. My job is to see whether the government is run as per the Constitution, he said.

But as of now, with regards to drug seizure, border security and tackling the issue of drones, a lot of efforts are being made, he added.

Purohit also emphasised that village defence committees are being formed in all the six border districts and they would be operational within a 10-kilometre area with the help of the state police.

He said the committees will work on a war footing to stop drugs smuggling from Pakistan.

Purohit further said on next years Republic Day, a reward will be given to three members each from the village defence committees of the six border districts.

A reward of Rs 3 lakh will be given for the first position, Rs 2 lakh for the second and Rs 1 lakh for the third position, he said.

With inputs from agencies

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For quite some time now, Sam Altman has been vocal about the need to regulate AI on a global level, and how heads of state should focus on creating regulations that are universal and uniform all over the world. To that effect, Altman earlier had a meeting with PM Modi.

Altman accepts that it is possible that most governments will have roughly the same sort of regulations that will guide AI in to a certain direction and ensure that it is developed for the good. However, he believes that it will be much better and easier, if there is a global body that governs the development and deployment of AI, much like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for nuclear power.

For this reason, Altman is on a tour of several countries including Israel, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE and South Korea. Altman hopes that during his visit, he will be able to convince the leadership of these countries to form an international body, a United Nations of AI, or something similar that will dictate how AI is developed.

Failing that, Altman hopes that he is at least able to influence how AI regulations are developed in each country in a way, that doesnt stifle the growth of the technology while ensuring it is developed in a safe and ethical manner.

Last month, when asked about the regulations on AI and how Sam Altman could influence Indias AI regulations, Union IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar stated that, Sam Altman is obviously a smart man. He has his own ideas about how AI should be regulated. We certainly think we have some smart brains in India as well and we have our own views on how AI should have guardrails.

He added, If there is eventually a United Nations of AI  as Sam Altman wants  more power to it. But that does not stop us from doing what is right for our digital nagriks (citizens) and keeping the internet safe and trusted.

In a press conference from earlier today, Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar reiterated his stand and said, Sam Altmans visit in the last two days, in itself is a sign, that one of the key figures, in International AI looks at India and wants to create partnerships and sees India as a promising space for AI, that itself is a good thing, he said.

However, our approach towards AI regulation or any regulation will be regulated through the prism of user harm. This is a philosophy that the government of India has been following since 2014, that we will protect digital nagriks, from user harm or derived user harm, Minister Chandrasekhar added. He went on to add that the Indian government wont let digital platforms operating in India, whether they are a domestic or foreign-based entity to harm Indias digital citizens.

We will regulate AI, web3 or any other emerging technologies so that they do not harm digital nagriks.

Consultations regarding the Digital India Bill are set to commence this month, as confirmed by Minister Chandrasekhar, who holds the position of Minister of State for Entrepreneurship, Skill Development, Electronics & Technology. Furthermore, the introduction of the personal data protection bill in Parliament is imminent.

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The Kerala Story is making waves globally. The film, which was made on a shoestring budget of Rs 30 crore has already raked in over Rs 200 crore globally, becoming one of the bigger hits of 2023.

The film, however, is not an easy watch. Made on a controversial subject of forced conversions of Hindu and Christian women to Islam with an ulterior motive of brainwashing them into joining ISIS.

So how does one create enough buzz around a film like this and create a meaningful global impact? This is where Priya Samant comes in.

Samant is an Impact Advisor for cause-based films, such as The Kashmir Files, and the more recent The Kerala Story. Known for being an expert in creating a meaningful impact on the global community, Priya, in an interaction with Firstpost has shared how she created a buzz around the controversial films.

The Kerala Story starts discourse

Speaking to Firstpost, Priya said films like The Kerala Story open discourses towards a positive future through screenings, panel discussions and special events.

Films like The Kerala Story 100 per cent open a discourse towards a positive future. Cinema is a great tool to touch masses globally. So films like The Kerala Story become a very significant medium to educate the audience of what is happening in the world, Priya explained.

Is The Kerala Story changing audience perception?

When we asked Priya that with films like The Kerala Story and The Kashmir Files gaining prominence in a country like India which survives on cinema if the mind-set of people are changing, Priya explained that films like The Kerala Story and The Kashmir Files are bringing to light some of critical issues humanity is facing.

Films like these are creating awareness and educating audiences globally about historical events and current issues. The mind-set of todays generation is more open and curious as they are becoming more understanding and mindful of their surroundings and the world at large, she added.

Creating a buzz around The Kerala Story was not easy

However, Priya elaborated that for The Kerala Story, she did not have enough time to create an elaborate plan. The Impact Advisor devised a strategy to host online impact events in the US and UK, which turned into huge successes.

I worked with community leaders who came on board at a very short notice and every event was hosted in a very short amount of time with cast and crew joining us from India and also having a guest speaker to give remarks as it relates to narrative of the story, she revealed

Priya added that they also had a lawyer working with the survivors from Kerala as well as a former Kerala police official among others who gave their views and thoughts to the audience, thus helping create a positive buzz around the film.

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At least three people have died and several others are feared trapped after an illegal coal mine collapsed near Jharkhands Dhanbad on Friday.

The mine at Bhowra Colliery Area of Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), about 21 km from Dhanbad collapsed around 10:30 am.

Portion of BCCL open mine collapsed. A number of deaths are being verified. We are waiting for BCCLs report. Action will be taken according to the report, news agency ANI quoted Sanjeev Kumar, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Dhanbad as saying.

#WATCH | Jharkhand: A portion of BCCL (Bharat Coking Coal Limited) open mine collapsed in Dhanbad. One body has been recovered. Further details awaited. pic.twitter.com/ykcOzcSKEV  ANI (@ANI) June 9, 2023

Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP), Sindri, Abhishek Kuma, told news agency PTI that the exact number of people killed and feared trapped or injured would be known after rescuers are able to locate the victims.

VIDEO | Visuals from the site in Jharkhand's Dhanbad where at least three people died and many feared trapped after an illegal coal mine collapsed earlier today. pic.twitter.com/ak05QjHouX  Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) June 9, 2023

As per an eyewitness, many local villagers were engaged in illegal mining when the mine caved in.

"With the help of the locals, three people were brought out from the debris and taken to a hospital where doctors declared them dead," PTI report quoted an eyewitness as saying.

With inputs from agencies

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Uttarakhand CM Pushkar Singh Dhami on Friday said that the love jihad cases that have come to the light in the state will be dealt with an iron fist.

We have called for strict probe and action against love jihad cases. Today, we will chair a high-level meeting with DGP and other officials, Dhami said.

#WATCH | Dehradun: We have called for strict probe and action against love jihad cases. Today we will chair a high-level meeting also with DGP and other officials: Uttarakhand CM Pushkar Singh Dhami pic.twitter.com/JVeSCMagE6  ANI UP/Uttarakhand (@ANINewsUP) June 9, 2023

Several cases of love jihad have come to light in the state of late and the unrest over the issue is refusing to die down.

In one such case from Uttarkashis Purola town, two youths allegedly attempted to abduct a local Hindu girl. Two boys namely Obaid, a Muslim, and another Jitender Saini were caught by locals with a Class IX local girl on 27 May.

An FIR was lodged against them under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, on the complaint of the girls family, and they were sent to jail the same day.

However, the right-wing Hindu bodies charged the youth with enticing away a minor girl and called it a case of love jihad prompting bandhs, demonstrations, and protests across the district.

The markets remained closed in Barkot, Naogaon, Purola, and Damta in protest against the incident on a call given by the Yamuna Valley Hindu Jagriti Sangathan for a few days.

Later, posters appeared in the shops owned by minority community members to vacate and leave before 15 June in Purola. The posters put up on behalf of Devbhoomi Raksha Abhiyan warned love jehadis to vacate their shops by 15 June when a Mahapanchayat on the issue has been called by Hindu outfits, according to a report in The Statesman.

The shops were also marked with crosses with black paint (a cross marking signifies elimination). The boards of the shops owned by Muslims were also broken.

According to locals, nine shop owners had asked their Muslim tenants to vacate their premises on the reported persuasion of Swami Darshan Bharati, a right-wing Hindu leader who had been vocal against the minority community. Seven of these shopkeepers have packed their goods and are awaiting transport, said the report.

The cases of Muslim youths luring Hindu girls into love trap have also come to the fore in Chamoli districts Gauchar and Haridwar.

With inputs from agencies

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A controversial six-second clip is being shared widely on social media these days. It features a float being paraded on streets of Canada depicting Indias former Prime Minister Indira Gandhis assassination in the year 1984. This parade was organised by Khalistani elements in Brampton city of Canada to mark the 39th anniversary of Operation Bluestar.

Operation Bluestar was a military action sanctioned by PM Indira Gandhi to eliminate Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a Khalistani radical in Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab. It was just two months after this operation that she was assassinated in revenge violence by her own security guards.

The parade by Khalistani elements in Canada and the celebration of Indira Gandhis assassination are not the only cases of these radicals targeting India on a foreign soil. They have organised anti-India referendums, events, indulged in defacing of Hindu temples and sometimes indulged in blatant violence against Indians in countries such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK. All these countries are home to a sizeable Indian diaspora, including the people of the Sikh community, thus proving to be a fertile ground for the Khalistani separatists to indulge in anti-India activities. However, this time they have pushed it too far.

Canada is home to a large Sikh population that constitutes 2 percent of the total population. This community enjoys a significant clout in the countrys politics. In 2019, Canada had 18 Sikh members of Parliament as against just 13 in Indias Lok Sabha. Jagmeet Singh, a young Sikh lawyer, also leads the New Democratic Party, a major political party in the country that had emerged as a kingmaker in the last federal elections. Jagmeet Singh often tweets in defence of Khalistanis, including during the action on Amritpal Singh last month by India. PM Justin Trudeau himself has been accused of playing to the Sikh gallery for votes where he has gone to the extent of purging references to Khalistani terrorism from official reports in the past. The gurdwara committees in Canada are as powerful as they are in Indias Punjab.

Trudeaus brand of politics is characteristic of the typical liberal paradox where he is willing to surrender to the will of the Khalistanis even if it means compromising with Canadas own national interest and national security in the long run. There is a precedent for this in the past. In 1985, Khalistani terrorists bombed an Air India flight that took-off from Toronto killing all the 329 people on board. Although most of the people who died in the attack were Canadian citizens, Canada still considers it as an Indian tragedy. Trudeau is so blinded with his vote-bank politics that on a visit to India, he even posed with a Khalistani terrorist accused of attempting assassination of an Indian minister in the 1980s.

Even as Canadian politicians indulge in blatant appeasement of the Khalistani elements, Canadas National Security Adviser Jody Thomas dropped a bomb this week by accusing India of meddling in Canadas internal affairs. He even put India in the league of authoritarian states such as Iran. The Khalistan issue is proving to be a huge thorn in India-Canada ties. The Khalistanis are not only considered separatists by India threatening its territorial integrity, but they have also become a rallying point for anti-India forces. Their links with the deep state in Pakistan often surface; they have, in fact, become part of Rawalpindis bleeding India by thousand cuts design.

While Pakistan is a failed state waiting to collapse under its own weight, the Canada-India relationship has a lot of potential. Canada has outlined its Indo-Pacific strategy which interestingly has a key role for India. While identifying its shared values of democracy and pluralism, Canada is looking to deepen economic ties with India. It is also seeking to conclude an early trade deal to this effect. Indias growth and its geopolitical rise will make it an even more important partner for any country to expand its engagement in the Indo-Pacific.

The appeasement of Khalistanis on the other hand would lead Canada down to the path of Indias neighbour. In the 21st century, there is no place for celebration of assassinations of key political leaders of a fellow democracy. There is just too much nuisance by Khalistanis that Trudeau has allowed on his watch in the name of freedom of expression. He even expressed concern over Indias crackdown on the farmers protest even as he himself opted for an iron hand when a truckers protest struck back home. This hypocrisy is nauseating.

Canada has expressed regret over this recent incident of parade by Khalistanis, but it clearly needs to do a lot more if it actually wants a fruitful relationship with India.

The author is a PhD from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. She writes on Indias foreign policy. Views expressed are personal.
Challenges faced by opposition parties in Assam regarding the delimitation exercise in the state can be comprehended by analysing their dilemma between prioritising their vote bank or considering the overall welfare of voters. The latter option poses a difficult decision for them, as their pursuit of political power often takes precedence over broader public interests.

On 7 May of this year, a collective memorandum was submitted by 11 opposition parties in Assam to the Chief Electoral Officer of the state, expressing their concerns regarding the delimitation process of Assembly and Lok Sabha constituencies. These political parties encompassed prominent entities such as the Congress, CPM, Raijor Dal, Assam Jatiya Parishad, Jatiya Dal Asom, CPI, NCP, CPI(ML), RJD, JD(U) and Trinamool Congress. The memorandum raised a range of points highlighting their reservations and objections to the ongoing delimitation exercise.

The opposition parties in Assam have expressed their opposition to the implementation of the delimitation exercise based on the 2001 Census data, as outlined in the Delimitation Act of 2002. They have appealed to the Election Commission to postpone the process until the updated National Register of Citizens (NRC) is officially notified. Their request stems from the belief that utilising the most recent NRC data would provide a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of the states population, thus ensuring a fair and equitable delimitation process.

On 27 December of the previous year, the Election Commission issued a formal notification to initiate the delimitation process. Subsequently, on 1 January, 2023, the implementation of the delimitation exercise officially commenced.

Previously, the President of India had postponed the delimitation exercise in four northeastern states, namely Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Manipur, citing concerns related to security. However, the specific order pertaining to Assam was revoked on 28 February 2020:

And whereas there is a significant improvement in the security situation in the State of Assam. There is also reduction in insurgency incidents and improvement in law and order of these States making the situation conducive for carrying out the delimitation exercise which was deferred in the State in the year 2008. Therefore, it appears that the circumstances that led to the deferring of the delimitation exercise in the State of Assam have ceased to exist and that the delimitation of the constituencies as envisaged under the Delimitation Act, 2002 could be carried out now.

Now, the President, being satisfied that the circumstances that led to the deferring of the delimitation exercise in the State of Assam have ceased to exist, is pleased to rescind the notification number S.O. 283(E), dated the 8th February, 2008 so as to readjust the division of the State of Assam into territorial constituencies for the purpose of elections to the House of the People and to the State Legislative Assembly in accordance with the provisions of the Delimitation Act, 2002 (33 of 2002).

Subsequently, the Delimitation Commission for the aforementioned four northeastern states, along with the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, was reconstituted by the Central government, led by former Supreme Court judge Ranjana Prakash Desai, on 6 March, 2020. However, in March 2021, the four northeastern states were subsequently excluded from the jurisdiction of the reconstituted Delimitation Commission.

Why opposition parties are wary of the delimitation exercise?

While the opposition parties attempt to highlight procedural irregularities in the delimitation exercise, their primary concern lies in a different realm. These 11 opposition parties heavily rely on the support of Muslim voters, which presents a demographic anomaly that the delimitation exercise seeks to address. The outcome of the delimitation process will directly influence the consolidation efforts of the Muslim electorate, subsequently impacting the electoral performance of these parties, including prominent ones such as the Congress and Badruddin Ajmals AIUDF.

According to a post-election survey conducted by Lokniti-CSDS after the 2019 General Election, it was revealed that approximately 70 per cent of Assams Muslim voters supported the Congress party, with the AIUDF receiving around 20 per cent of the Muslim vote share. Comparatively, in the three previous elections (2011 and 2016 Assembly Elections, and the 2014 Lok Sabha Election), the Congress managed to secure a little over 40 per cent of the Muslim votes in the state. Notably, Muslim voters wield considerable influence in no less than 33 of the 126 Assembly constituencies in Assam.

In the 2021 Assam Assembly election, an unprecedented occurrence took place as none of the eight Muslim candidates nominated by the ruling BJP-led alliance were successful in securing victory. This marked the first time in at least 50 years that the state treasury bench had no representation from the Muslim community. Presently, all 31 Muslim MLAs in the Assam Assembly belong to opposition parties. This scenario highlights the opposition parties significant reliance on the Muslim vote bank, which they are striving to secure through various means. The approaching Lok Sabha Election, scheduled to take place within a year as the tenure of the present Lok Sabha ends on 16 June, 2024, has undoubtedly amplified the concerns and unease among the opposition parties.

According to a tweet by senior journalist Atanu Bhuyan, it is anticipated that the delimitation exercise in Assam will result in a reduction of Muslim representation in the states seats from the current 45 to 25, thereby allocating approximately 82 per cent of the seats to the indigenous people of Assam. This projection suggests a significant shift in the distribution of seats, potentially impacting the political dynamics and representation of various communities in the state.

On 7 June, 2023, the Chief Minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma, held a meeting with the Union home minister Amit Shah, where he requested the expeditious completion of the delimitation exercise. The chief minister expressed concern that if the delimitation draft is not prepared before 15 August of the current year, it would be challenging to complete the entire exercise prior to the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections in the following year. He emphasized the presence of several formalities that require attention after the draft stage, further contributing to the time constraints faced in the process.

In the ongoing delimitation exercise, it has been determined that the total number of Assembly constituencies in Assam will remain unchanged at 126. However, a significant outcome of the exercise is the expected discontinuation of several existing constituencies, which will be replaced by newly formed ones. This development has instilled a sense of apprehension among MLAs and MPs, as they are concerned about the potential impact on their respective constituencies and subsequently, their political careers.

The government is anticipating significant challenges in ensuring a smooth and legally unambiguous delimitation exercise. The opposition parties are expected to make extensive efforts to impede the process, aiming to delay it until the next General Election. Moreover, there are emerging allegations concerning the involvement of a specific Assam minister in the delimitation process, although the opposition parties have refrained from publicly disclosing the ministers identity. These allegations further contribute to the complexity and potential controversies surrounding the delimitation exercise in Assam.

Rapid rise of Muslim population in Assam

In March 2022, Sarma made an explicit statement during a session of the state Assembly, highlighting that Muslims account for 35 per cent of Assams total population of 3.12 crore as per the 2011 Census. He emphasised that referring to the Muslim community as a minority would be inappropriate and further expressed concerns about the apprehensions and anxieties of the Assamese people regarding the preservation of their culture and civilisation. Acknowledging the growing Muslim population in Assam, he emphasised the collective responsibility to safeguard the states Sankari and Sattriya cultural heritage.

Within the 35 per cent Muslim population in Assam, it is notable that 31 per cent are Bengali-speaking, while the remaining 4 per cent use Assamese as their primary language. This Bengali-speaking segment constitutes a substantial and influential vote bank for the opposition parties. It is important to acknowledge that, from a technical standpoint, the Muslim community comprises approximately one-third of Assams total population. However, it is worth noting that this population includes individuals with uncertain or questionable nationality backgrounds.

The 1976 delimitation exercise in Assam

The delimitation exercise in Assam in 1976 was a significant event in the states political history. During that time, Assam was grappling with social and political tensions arising from issues such as immigration, linguistic and cultural diversity and regional aspirations. The delimitation exercise aimed to address these concerns by creating constituencies that would ensure equitable representation and give voice to different communities and regions.

The 1976 delimitation exercise resulted in significant changes to the electoral map of Assam. The number of constituencies increased from 114 to 126, accommodating the changing population dynamics and ensuring more inclusive representation. The exercise also considered the unique aspects of the state, such as the presence of tribal areas and areas affected by insurgency, while redrawing the boundaries.

BJP sounds poll bugle ahead of Lok Sabha election

The BJP has sounded the poll bugle in Assam along with Haryana and Andhra Pradesh preparing for the Lok Sabha election next year.

As part of the Assam BJPs Maha Janasampark Abhiyan, Union home minister Amit Shah is scheduled to participate in a meeting taking place in Hojai, situated within the Nagaon Lok Sabha constituency, on 27 June. Additionally, BJP national president JP Nadda is set to address a rally in Sivasagar, falling under the Jorhat Lok Sabha constituency, on 19 June. In an effort to showcase the policies and initiatives implemented by the Central government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the state BJP has organised significant public gatherings from 11 June to 30 June across all 14 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state.

The upcoming rallies organised by the state BJP will witness the presence of Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, former state chief minister and Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, BJP national vice president Baijayant Jay Panda, Union Minister Kiren Rijiju as well as several other ministers and party leaders. These prominent figures are expected to actively participate in the rallies, contributing to the partys campaign efforts in Assam.

Delimitation, a big limitation for opposition parties in Assam

Under the combined influence of Prime Minister Modis stature and the efficient governance of Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, opposition parties in Assam find themselves in a challenging position as they strive to maintain relevance in the forthcoming elections. Faced with the task of countering the positive performance record of both the Central and state governments, the opposition parties are confronted with the potential obstacles stemming from the delimitation process. In the absence of a favourable anti-incumbency sentiment, the opposition is compelled to search desperately for legal loopholes that may be exploited. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that if the government adheres to proper procedures, the judiciary is unlikely to deviate from the established norms. Consequently, apprehension pervades the hearts of every opposition member in Assam.

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Time used to be when the Indian strategic community would urge their American counterparts that for bilateral relations to improve, Washington should de-hyphenate the nations India-Pakistan equations. Once done, India-US ties have sort of hit the zenith and are still going up.

Today, India faces a similar problem in relations with immediate neighbours, vis-a-vis their China ties. However, the very same strategic community in Delhi that advised Americans and other Westerners one day has a different prescription for neighbours on such occasions. In short, they want neighbours not to identify too close to China, especially in ways that make India uncomfortable. Counterparts in those nations use terms ranging from suspicious to hegemonic to describe relations with India especially in the China context  and such free advice, said and heard condescendingly.

India cannot be blamed for developing such suspicions in the past, suspicions that used to border on anxiety and fear, but not anymore. A new generation of Indians, starting with policymakers, have been born, bred and tutored in modern diplomatic and strategic approaches, with the result the Ghost of 62 war defeat against China does not bother them too much.

Of course, it owes also to the intervening changes in the post-Cold War global dynamics and its influence on Indias policy-making. It is more so in the background of economic reforms, which in turn ushered in a new thought-process, increasingly unbridled by the past. But then, the nations geo-political and geo-strategic priorities are determined and are addressed in the context of an inherited past, which cannot be ignored either. India has been making the required adjustments to make the grade. There it faces the inevitable dichotomy that every other nation in its place had faced in their time.

Inherited history

It is thus that the de-hyphenation dogma continues to haunt New Delhi even when it has been freed of the same in relation to Western views viz neighbourhood equations in the subcontinent. It pertains especially to the Wests relations with India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers with legacy issues dating back to seven-plus decades of intertwined history.

Under the present Narendra Modi government in India, the inherited past may go back by centuries, at times close to a millennia  as much nearer home as elsewhere, both in Pakistan and in Western capitals.

From an Indian outlook, first, it was Pakistan, then it was China, then it was Pakistan and China, all in the first few decades of Independence. It is noteworthy that in the last of military adversities between India and Pakistan, Gen Pervez Musharraf flew down to Beijing in the midst of the war, to be told that it was Pakistans war, or the generals war, and China would have none of it. In Washington, where he was summoned, Musharraf got an earful.

A decade later, when Nepals left-leaning Prime Minister Pushpa Kumar Dahal Prachanda visited Beijing after being sworn in on Indias Independence Day in 2008, he was told that his problems with India were his and his nations, and they were not that of Chinas. That is what Prachanda told his nation publicly on his return to Kathmandu after going to China on his maiden visit as PM, as if to pay obeisance.

Today, when Prachanda chose India as his first overseas destination after taking over the PMs job for the third time  he did a second short stint in 2016-17  he at least seems to be clear about his and his nations priorities. Maybe, like all good small nations, especially in Indias neighbourhood, Nepal too may continue to play India against China. But it is not unique to India or the subcontinent, as is being made out to be.

In the larger South Asian context, it used to be India and Pakistan, now it is India and China. The change of contestant in the neighbourhood perceptions has nothing to do with the economic crisis which is currently haunting Pakistan as is the case with most other smaller neighbours of India. You can blame it on the global Covid lockdown and structural deficiencies in individual nations (and the region, too?), or both.

India-China comparisons began capturing neighbourhood imagination at least a decade back. This was oiled and fuelled more by the Indian strategic community, through its suspicion-ridden approach to neighbourhood study and policies, inherited from the post-Independence Pakistani adversary.

From a purely academic construct, it can even be argued that the hyphenated equation that neighbouring nations hold good in their relations with India and China separately has other potentials too. For instance, without possibly meaning it, constant consideration of the hyphenated equation between India and China that South Asian other nations hold has the potential to bring down China to the regional level, where Beijing wants to confine and consign India alone.

In Beijings personal perspective they are the only global player from Asia, and they alone should be. But while dealing with South Asian nations in the India context, China tends to bring itself down, without acknowledging it.

All-weather friend

This does not mean that Nepal as a nation and even Prachanda as Prime Minister is going to dump China as a regional and international partner for good, and in favour of India. But the fact is that little Nepal too has been able to de-hyphenate its ties with India and China, forming borders on either side of the land-locked Himalayan nation.

Looking around, Bhutan, Indias one and only all-weather friend in the region too has started making independent assessments of the nations China relations without intending to adversely impact the age-old political, economic and cultural ties with India. The recent revival of Sino-Bhutan talks to resolve bilateral border disputes without continuing to hinge it on to the larger India-China border issues have to be understood in this context.

In a way, both Nepal and Bhutan have learnt to de-hyphenate their respective bilateral relations with India and China. It occurred in the case of Sri Lanka a decade and more ago but once again the Indian strategic community and at times, the policymakers misread it and misunderstood it. The same cannot be said of another Ocean neighbour in Maldives, where the domestic dynamics and a greater perception of hurt caused purportedly by Indias alleged interference in internal matters carry a greater weight than anywhere else in the neighbourhood.

To a greater extent, Bangladesh seems to have beautifully designed a foreign policy which does not compromise on the nations sovereignty to choose its global partners even while continuing to be a trusted friend of India. Here again, as elsewhere in the neighbourhood, especially on the Ocean front, Indias comfort-level owes more to the personality and politics of the leader that the local people elect than at the institutional levels. There is thus a danger of slip-ups, derailment and re-alignment in the future, near and/or distant.

Mural row and more

It is not as if China is the only irritant in bilateral relations between India and its neighbours. In the case of Nepal for instance there are trade issues and more so political problems, which are influenced by domestic politics. It is like anywhere else in the neighbourhood.

India has a larger-than-life presence and predominance in domestic political perceptions in these countries, often for no fault of Indias. Yes, there are some missteps that India too tends to take on occasions that tend to mar the atmosphere for a longer time. Some of it, for want of application of timely correctives, blows out of proportions, to embarrass India.

The latest in a series in the larger neighbourhood context is the Akhand Bharat mural displayed on the inner walls of the new Parliament Building which Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated, the other day. It may or may not have made so much news in Nepal for two reasons.

One, PM Prachanda was in New Delhi, talking to Modi and his team, and also signed a host of bilateral MoUs  all going to indicate that the two nations and possibly the leaderships too have become warming up to each other once again. Not to miss a chance to target Prachanda nearer home, his domestic adversaries have blown it out of proportion.

This is what often happens in individual neighbourhood nations. If individual ruling party and leader are seen as being favourable to India, then their domestic politico-electoral rivals package it as a crime, sin and anti-nationalism of the highest order. If the government in any of those countries is perceived as being unfriendly to India, then the latter tends to be sympathetic to the political Opposition there.

With every election in each of those countries, Indias stakes go higher and higher, at times to a point of no return. The dynamics is daunting but it remains. Managing this dynamics is a full time job for the government in India (whoever, whenever). Though India has had the best of the diplomatic representation in each of these countries, increasingly since the days of Jawaharlal Nehru, and more so post-Cold War, New Delhi is more tuned to the West than the neighbourhood, which is at the top of the Global South in New Delhis larger world view.

Going back to the mural issue, domestic politics and the ruling dispensations political and foreign policy ideologies in India too has a nasty habit of visiting on neighbourhood relations in obtuse ways. Though the ruling BJP has stopped making constant references to Akhand Bharat, with particular reference to post-Partition Pakistan than even breakaway Bangladesh, the past imagery still remains.

When it suits them, critics of the domestic government in countries such as Nepal have no problem picking it up and throwing it up at the government of the day, and more so India, without considering the possible consequences over the medium and long terms. What may have embarrassed the guest even more is the way New Delhi reacted to it all, as if in a casual fashion.

Indias spokesman said that it was possibly a cultural representation of a distant past, and not contemporary. That is precisely the point from the Nepalese view. Neighbouring nations do not want such cultural references, that too at a time when the ruling BJP is seeking a cultural unification of the Indian nation in the place of the existing constitutional unification.

For them, such expressions are only a reminder of what may be in store for them, in the future, where someone in Delhi would go back and declare that culturally, Nepal too used to be a part of ancient India, and should be culturally re-united with Bharat.

The writer is a policy analyst & political commentator, based in Chennai, India. Views expressed are personal.

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The Sahel, Africas vast semi-arid region separating the Sahara Desert to the north and tropical savannas to the south, extends by the Red Sea from the west coast to the east coast. It is a land full of possibilities as well as complexities. Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad, Sudan and Senegal are all part of the Sahel region. The region is rich in mineral resources including bauxite, manganese, phosphates, iron ore, gold and petroleum.

Nonetheless, the Sahel is currently one of the worlds poorest regions today. Poor governance, corruption, and violent extremism are some of the major reasons why the region has not been able to fully leverage its natural resources. The developed world, particularly ex-colonisers, has also played a role in keeping the regions countries perpetually poor. For example, uranium, a critical component in the production of nuclear energy, is abundant in Niger. Despite having the fourth-largest global uranium stockpile, it lacks a nuclear power plant to generate nuclear energy. On the other hand, the French state-owned company Areva continues to use it to generate electricity for the country.

While Nigers uranium powers the Eiffel Tower and one-third of French households, the people of Niger stay in the dark, suffering from chronic hunger and malnutrition. The anguish doesnt cease there. Large number of poor Nigerien kids is constantly exposed to uranium as a result of large-scale uranium mining, putting their own lives in danger. There have been cases of children being born with four legs and four eyes, no eyes, or an enlarged head. Villagers sought spiritual interventions in response to the high rate of death, miscarriage, and deformed babies. Regrettably, uranium accounts for roughly 70 per cent of Nigers exports but only accounts for 5 per cent of the countrys GDP. Unable to detect the reason of high rate of death, miscarriage, and deformed babies, villagers often sought spiritual interventions. As a result, while Areva earns billions from uranium mining, Niger has seen little profit, and this comes at the expense of ever-increasing pollution and health problems among local communities.

Droughts are a recurring feature of the region, as is an increase in conflict over depleted resources such as water and pasture. Three Sahel countries, Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad have experienced coups in the last two years. And Mali has had two coups in two years. The rise of transnational criminal organisations, as well as the rapid rise of Islamist extremist groups and movements, is constantly fuelling the conflict. Terrorist groups have plagued Sub-Saharan nations, not only destabilising mostly Western-style democracies, but also revealing a vast area for involvement in Sahel security. Furthermore, it has resulted in a massive loss of human life.

Geopolitically, it is a crowded and complex region. It is a congested zone from a geopolitical standpoint. Security and development initiatives involve more than seven nations, and there are numerous distinct international military missions. France is the regions most powerful entity, followed by the United States. Russia recently entered the region via Wagner, a private military firm. Turkey is another major player in the Sahel looking to capitalise on the situation. Last but not least, despite increasing its involvement in the Sahel, China still maintains a comparatively low-key policy in the region.

Chinas resource interest in the region

Chads most valuable export is crude oil, which it sells primarily to China. Since 2003, the China National Petroleum Company has managed the oil production in Chad. Furthermore, the region contains significant amounts of uranium, particularly in Niger. China has made substantial investments in the oil industry in Niger alone. China is constructing a crude oil pipeline connecting the Agadem Rift Basin oilfield in Niger to the Seme-Krake port in Benin. China is also launching a number of uranium extraction-related construction projects. For example, the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) and the Niger government are working together to operate the Azelik mine.

The Goulamina mine in Mali is one of the worlds largest spodumene resources and it is 50 per cent owned by Chinas Ganfeng Lithium. Mali is also rich in gold, iron ore, phosphates, uranium, manganese, and bauxite. As part of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in 2021, China provided Mali with 60 million Yuan (more than $9 million) in supplies, including weapons, ammunition, trucks, transport equipment and security.

Mauritania is another important country in the region. Chinas interest in Mauritanias fish, mineral, and energy resources is growing. Poly Hong Dong Fishery Company, accused of depleting local fish populations, operates a $200 million fishing facility in Nouadhibou. Mauritania received 500,000 Sinopharm vaccines in March, followed by a second shipment in May. Burkina Faso renounced its recognition of Taiwan and established diplomatic relations with China in 2018. Following that, Wang Yi travelled to Burkina Faso in 2019, depicting the strength of chequebook diplomacy. During the COVID-19 epidemic, China increased its influence in the region through the so-called Health Silk Road and its mask and vaccine diplomacy, providing 400,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine to Niger.

Chinas growing engagement in the region

China maintains a low profile in the Sahel. Its primary concern is the protection of millions of Chinese citizens living and working in the region, as well as the protection of its investments (such as BRI access points). For the time being, Chinas primary focus in the region seems to be trade. Meanwhile, China is associated in International Community-supported initiatives such as MINUSMA. Despite massive expenditure and an increasing number of Chinese citizens facing security risks, Chinese policymakers have been keen to maintain a restricted military presence. The recent appointment of Chinas first special ambassador to the Horn of Africa, however, indicates a shift in Chinas approach to African policy. And, given Chinas interest in a variety of strategic resource acquisitions in the region, in the coming days, China is likely to participate in the regions security more directly.

The Eighth Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) was held in Dakar, Senegal, on 29-30 November 2021 where China expressed its desire to participate in the Sahel conflict resolution process. If China succeeds in controlling the conflict in the region, it will undoubtedly raise Chinas profile as a peace and security provider for the Sahel. And China is up to the task, as President Xi Jinping demonstrated in his FOCAC speech by announcing ten new peace and security initiatives for the region. This is in addition to Chinas ongoing military assistance to the African Union (AU). Furthermore, China promised to assist African nations in their efforts to independently maintain regional security and combat terrorism and hold joint peacekeeping exercises.

China is also actively supporting G5 Sahel security and counterterrorism operations, collaborating with Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, and providing $45.56 million in financial support to their Joint Forces and $1.5 million for permanent secretariat operations in 2019. Thus, within a decade, China has assumed a significant role in the regions security.

Indias interest in the region

This resource-rich region is critical to Indias energy security. Around 20 per cent of the crude oil purchased by India comes from Africa, and roughly half of that oil is produced there. Nigeria is Africas largest oil supplier to India. India first took an interest in Nigerian oil in 2001, and now it imports more Nigerian oil than the United States. In addition to Nigeria, India is considering energy diplomacy with Ghana and Niger.

India requires uranium in order to increase its nuclear energy production capacity. India currently sources uranium fuel from Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, France and Canada. In the future, India intends to buy 100 tonnes of uranium in FY23 to boost its nuclear power plants. Niger, with its abundant supply of Uranium, would be an ideal country for India to further its nuclear ambitions. Lithium, a critical component in battery production, is plentiful in Mali. As India gradually transitions to electric vehicles, securing a consistent source of lithium is critical to advancing its green industry without relying on imports. It is critical that India prioritise trade in this region, particularly resource-based trade.

Why the World must support India

Chinas chequebook diplomacy is clearly succeeding in the Sahel and defeating India in another African region. Chinas increasing power and influence in the Sahel region, a considerable mineral resource hotspot that was once deemed Frances domain, has restructured the regions geopolitics, and the Sahel has become the stage for a New Great Game. The end of Frances military presence in Mali has significantly reduced Frances role as a geopolitical counterweight to China and Russia. However, against the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis and a series of Russian army defeats, China gained a clear advantage over Russia.

China has little military experience in Africa as of yet. It still lacks robust expeditionary capabilities abroad. China is focusing on peacekeeping missions to acquire knowledge on the ground. Beijing, without a doubt, has a lot riding on the regions stability because it wants to stay and play a much larger role. As Chinas stature in the region expands, the US and the rest of the West will face challenges. The US and its allies have long sought Indias assistance in confronting China. India, still, may not be at par with China with regard to military and economic power. This is probably the reason India going soft on China, in that region. The international community should support India to become more active in the region and to continue to provide a democratic counterbalance to China.

The author is a Senior Research Associate with the Vivekananda International Foundation and doctoral scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Views expressed are personal.

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Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday that Japan will offer emergency humanitarian aid worth about $5 million after the bursting of the Nova Kakhovka dam, a Japanese government spokesperson said.

The two leaders spoke by phone as Russia and Ukraine trade blame for the collapse of the dam, which sent waters cascading across the war zone of southern Ukraine this week, forcing tens of thousands to flee.

Kishida also told Zelenskiy that Japan is ready to host a conference on Ukraines reconstruction early next year, according to the official website of the Ukrainian president.

Many Ukrainian citizens fell victim to the long-running Russian invasion, and civilian facilities including power plants

were damaged, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told a regular news conference following the phone talks.

This can never be justified, and we strongly condemn this anew.

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Russias foreign ministry said on Friday that it had summoned the Japanese ambassador over Tokyos decision to supply military equipment to Ukraine.

Japan  which has backed Western sanctions against its long-time antagonist in east Asia in response to Moscows military campaign in Ukraine  last month promised Ukraine around 100 military-use vehicles such as trucks, having previously given protective equipment such as helmets and bullet-proof vests.

However, Russia said Japan was supplying armoured vehicles as well as all-terrain vehicles to Ukraine.

The Japanese side was told that this step would lead to an escalation of hostilities and a further increase in the number of human casualties of the Kyiv regime, the ministry said in a statement.

Japans export rules ban its companies from selling lethal items overseas.

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Two lawyers defending Donald Trump on federal charges of illegally retaining classified documents quit the case on Friday and a former aide was charged as well in surprise developments one day after the former U.S. president was indicted.

Trump said on his Truth Social platform that his former military valet, Walt Nauta, had been charged in the case. Nauta went to work at Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort after working in the Trump White House. It was unclear what his charges were.

Nautas lawyer, Stanley Woodward, declined to comment. A spokesperson for Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the prosecution, could not be reached immediately.

Nauta served proudly with me in the White House, retired as Senior Chief, and then transitioned into private life as a personal aide, Trump wrote on Truth Social.

In an earlier post, Trump said he would be represented in the case by white collar defense lawyer Todd Blanche, who is representing him in a separate criminal case in Manhattan.

Trump made that announcement after his lawyers John Rowley and Jim Trusty quit the case for reasons that were not immediately clear.

This morning we tendered our resignations as counsel to President Trump, the two lawyers said in a statement. It has been an honor to have spent the last year defending him, and we know he will be vindicated.

Trump faces seven criminal counts related to his treatment of sensitive government materials he took with him when he left the White House in January 2021, according to a source familiar with the matter.

He is due to appear in the Florida court on Tuesday, a day before his 77th birthday.

The indictment of a former U.S. president on federal charges is unprecedented in American history and emerges at a time when Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination next year.

The case does not prevent Trump from campaigning or taking office if he were to win the November 2024 presidential election. Legal experts say there would be no basis to block his swearing-in even if he were convicted and sent to prison.

Investigators seized roughly 13,000 documents from Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, nearly a year ago. One hundred were marked as classified, even though one of Trumps lawyers had previously said all records with classified markings had been returned to the government.

I AM AN INNOCENT MAN! Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Thursday after announcing he had been indicted.

Trump has previously said he declassified those documents while president, but his attorneys have declined to make that argument in court filings.

CNN reported on Friday that Trump said after leaving office that he had retained military information that he had not declassified. Those comments, captured on audio, could be a key piece of evidence in the case.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has been initially assigned to oversee the case, according to a separate source who was briefed on the matter. She could preside over the trial as well, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Cannon, appointed by Trump in 2019, made headlines last year when she decided in favor of the former U.S. president at a pivotal stage of the case and was later reversed on appeal.

Cannon would determine, among other things, when a trial would take place and what Trumps sentence would be if he were found guilty.

Trusty told CNN on Thursday that the charges include conspiracy, false statements, obstruction of justice, and illegally retaining classified documents under the Espionage Act.

It is the second criminal case for Trump, who is due to go on trial in New York next March in a state case stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star.

If he wins the presidency again, Trump, as head of the federal government, would be in a position to derail the federal case, but not the state one in New York.

Trumps legal woes have not dented his popularity with Republican voters, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling. His main Republican rivals have so far lined up behind him to criticize the case as politically motivated.

Trump served as president from 2017 to 2021, and he has so far managed to weather controversies that might torpedo other politicians. He describes himself as the victim of a witch hunt and accuses the Justice Department of partisan bias.

Special Counsel Smith, who is heading the investigation, is leading a second criminal probe into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

Smith has been given a degree of independence from Justice Department leadership to pursue the politically sensitive cases.

President Joe Biden found out about the indictment like everyone else and did not have advance knowledge of it, the White House said on Friday.

Trump also faces a separate criminal probe in Georgia related to efforts to overturn his loss to Biden in that state.

Smith convened grand juries in both Washington and Miami to hear evidence, but has opted to bring the case in the politically competitive state of Florida, rather than the U.S. capital, where any jury would likely be heavily Democratic.

Under federal law, defendants have a right to be charged where the activity in question took place. A Florida prosecution, legal experts say, could head off a drawn-out legal challenge from Trumps team over the proper venue.

The Republican state-by-state presidential nominating contest kicks off early next year, and the party is due to choose its nominee for the November 2024 election in July of that year.
A friend in need is a friend indeed, said Russian diplomat Dmitry Solovdov after Indian passengers stranded in Magadan expressed gratitude to Moscows authorities for ensuring a safe flight to San Francisco.

On Tuesday, a San Francisco-bound Air India flight from New Delhi with 216 passengers and 16 crew was diverted to Magadan in Russia after the aircraft suffered technical issues with one of its engines.

A friend in need is a friend indeed  https://t.co/c9M0GRv3Fk  Dmitry Solodov  (@SolodovDmitry) June 9, 2023

Two days later, a ferry Air India flight moved from Mumbai to pick up passengers from Magadan and landed safely in San Francisco.

After a technical problem forced an @airindia plane to make an emergency landing in #Magadan, a reserve flight transported all passengers and crew to #SanFrancisco. Passengers from #India expressed their gratitude for the assistance provided by the #Russian people, the Russian Embassy in India tweeted.

After a technical problem forced an @airindia plane to make an emergency landing in #Magadan, a reserve flight transported all passengers and crew to #SanFrancisco. Passengers from #India expressed their gratitude for the assistance provided by the #Russian people  pic.twitter.com/3AH0khrvxT  Russia in India  (@RusEmbIndia) June 9, 2023

The Embassy also posted a video where a passenger can be heard saying, So, we have safely boarded the flight, and the flight is about to leave and all the passengers are very happy that we are going to meet our families soon. And I would especially like to thank the Russian government and the Russian people and the place where we stayed.

From the bottom of my heart and on behalf of all our passengers, I would like to thank each and every one for providing their support and all the services. And really I am very happy to meet my family. So, hope everything goes well. And thank you so much for having us here. And I really appreciate it. From all the passengers, I would like to say thank you. Thank you so much, the passenger added.

On Thursday, Air India also announced that it will fully refund all passengers and provide a voucher for future travel to passengers who were stranded for nearly two days in Magadan after their New Delhi-San Francisco flight was diverted to the Russian city following a technical snag in one of its engines.

With inputs from agencies

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Russias strong military partnership with China provides stability across the world, the Russian armed forces chief of staff Valery Gerasimov said on Friday.

Notably, Gerasimov is also commanding Russias military operations in Ukraine. His comments came during a videoconference with his Chinese counterpart, Liu Zhenli.

As per a video published by the Russian defence ministry, Gerasimov told Zhenli, The coordination of Russian and Chinese efforts on the international stage has a stabilising effect on the global situation.

I am convinced todays meetings will help us continue to strengthen the strategic Russia-China defence partnership, he continued.

He added that joint military exercises by Russia and China should remain an important axis of this partnership.

During the video conference, Gerasimov also extended an invitation to his Chinese counterpart to visit Moscow.

China and Russia are strategic allies, with both sides frequently touting their no limits partnership and cooperation in the economic and military spheres.

Their ties became even closer after Russia began its military campaign in Ukraine in February 2022 and the Western economic sanctions that ensued.

Beijing has pointedly declined to condemn Russias offensive against its neighbour.

Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Moscow in March and declared relations between the two countries were entering a new era.

With inputs from AFP

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After Wall Street Journal reported that Cuba has agreed to allow China to construct a surveillance facility on the island, the US on Thursday dismissed the report saying its not accurate while Cuba termed it totally mendacious and unfounded.

Such a spy installation would allow Beijing to gather electronic communications from the southeastern US, which houses many US military bases, as well as monitor ship traffic, the newspaper reported, citing US officials familiar with classified intelligence.

The region includes the US Southern and Central Command headquarters, both in Florida.

China will pay Cuba several billion dollars to be able to construct the facility, the Journal said, citing unnamed US officials.

We have seen the report. Its not accurate, John Kirby, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, told Reuters. But he did not specify what he thought was incorrect.

What I can tell you is that we have been concerned since day one of this administration about Chinas influence activities around the world, certainly in this hemisphere and in this region, Kirby told MSNBC.

We are watching this very closely, he added.

Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder also called the Journal report inaccurate.

We are not aware of China and Cuba developing any type of spy station, Ryder said, adding, The relationship that those two countries share is something that we continuously monitor.

In Havana, Cuban Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio dismissed the report as totally mendacious and unfounded, calling it a US fabrication meant to justify Washingtons decades-old economic embargo against the island, according to Reuters.

He said Cuba rejects all foreign military presence in Latin America and the Caribbean.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington told Reuters, We are not aware of the case and as a result we cant give a comment right now.

But Democratic Senator Mark Warner and Republican Marco Rubio, who head the Senate Intelligence Committee and are usually briefed on important security matters, said in a statement that they were deeply disturbed by the Journal report.

The United States must respond to Chinas ongoing and brazen attacks on our nations security, they said.

We must be clear that it would be unacceptable for China to establish an intelligence facility within 100 miles of Florida and the United States.

Strained relations

The Journal report came amid strained relations between Washington and Beijing over a range of issues that include US support for self-ruled Taiwan, which China says it is determined to reunite with the mainland.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pushed a rapid expansion of the countrys security presence around the world, aiming to match the broad presence of the US military on all the continents.

A base in Cuba, which lies 90 miles (150 kilometers) off the southern tip of Florida, would present the most direct challenge yet to the continental United States.

The Soviet Union had electronic spying facilities in communist Cuba to monitor the United States.

But in 1962 when Moscow moved to base nuclear missiles on Cuba, the US declared a quarantine of the island in a crisis that threatened to bring the two superpowers to war, until Moscow backed down.

Washington then removed its nuclear-capable missiles from Turkey, which the Soviets viewed as a threat to them.

China sent what the US called a high-altitude surveillance balloon across the United States earlier this year. It floated from west to east above sensitive military installations before it was shot down just off the east coast by a US fighter jet.

With inputs from agencies

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This week, Chinese entrepreneurs and investors are coming to Riyadh for a business conference that will bring together company and government executives to explore expansion and financing opportunities as diplomatic relations strengthen.

The 10th Arab-China Business Conference will be held in Saudi Arabia, the first such event following Chinese President Xi Jinpings epoch-making visit to the Gulf state, which Beijing billed as the Arab worlds largest diplomatic initiative.

The meeting on Sunday and Monday comes just two days after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Saudi Arabia in an effort to repair ties with its closest Middle Eastern partner.

Deepening cooperation between Riyadh and Beijing in security and sensitive high-tech has been a key source of concern in the United States.

The business conference will draw about 2,000 attendees from Greater China, in what will be one of the regions biggest-yet business delegations to Saudi Arabia, according to one person with direct knowledge of the matter.

The gathering between the worlds second-largest economy and Gulf energy giants comes as economic slowdown and geopolitical tensions have made fundraising and expansion challenging for many Chinese funds and companies.

From the perspective of both capital and new market, the Middle East, Saudi Arabia are really good new choices for Chinese companies and investors, said Henry Zhang, president of Hong Kong-based private equity firm Hermitage Capital.

Zhang, who will travel to Riyadh and attend the conference for the first time along with a number of portfolio companies, said he hopes the trip can help his investees explore the local market and help himself understand the real demands of Middle Eastern investors for Chinese funds.

Since late last year, a large number of Chinese funds have rushed to the Middle East looking for new investors. In light of this, what we have to think about is what the potential investors want and how we can differentiate ourselves.

The event also comes as Saudi Arabia, the worlds top crude exporter and largest Arab economy, aims to cut oil dependence and modernise the country with new industries under its economic agenda  Vision 2030 while deepening ties with Beijing.

MORE COOPERATION

China is Saudi Arabias top trading partner globally with bilateral trade worth $87.3 billion in 2021. While economic ties remain anchored by energy interests, bilateral relations have expanded under the latters infrastructure and technology push.

Robert Mogielnicki, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, said one key reason for Saudi-Chinese linkages strengthening is that the Arab country is looking for major growth areas via international partnerships.

The calculation here is that there (is) much to gain from more cooperation with China, he said.

Chinese technology firms have read the writing on the wall and see the Saudi Vision 2030 transformation agenda as an invitation for longer-term commercial engagement with Saudi customers.

For the upcoming conference, Chinese entrepreneurs in attendance represent a range of industries  from renewable energy and artificial intelligence to biotech, finance and tourism.

According to Edison Gao, China-based group vice president of Saudi conglomerate Ajlan & Brothers, the attitude of Chinese enterprises towards expanding in the Gulf state has also undergone tremendous changes.

Ive never seen Chinese companies being so interested in and committed to the Saudi market, said Gao, who joined Ajlan in 2017 and has since been helping attract Chinese firms to expand locally.

Previously, I had to actively pitch Chinese companies to consider Saudi Arabia as their destination of outbound investment and overseas expansion. But its the other way around recently, Ive received many business proposals from them.

With inputs from agencies

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Ahead of Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wus visit to Europe next week, China has urged leaders of the continent not to share any official exchanges with the country or support its independence forces.

Wu will be visiting Prague next week on a planned trip to Europe, Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky confirmed on Friday. She also added that the state has no plan to shift its current policy towards Taiwan.

Taiwan, which is claimed by China, has no formal diplomatic ties with any European country except the Vatican. Beijing regularly denounces any form of contact between Taiwanese and foreign officials, viewing it as encouraging global recognition of Taiwans separate status from China.

Wus trip has, however, not been officially confirmed by the Taiwan government. He is expected to speak at a think-tank event in Prague immediately after Czech President Petr Pavel, according to Reuters.

Of course, the Czech government has a fairly clear policy on how we maintain relations with Taiwan, so I dont expect us to veer from this in any way, Czech Minister Lipavsky said adding that he has been informed about Wus visit.

China has claimed Taiwan as its own territory and demands other countries recognise its sovereignty.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said in a news briefing that Taiwan does not have a foreign affairs minister but only a head of the regions local foreign affairs department.

The one China principle is a prerequisite and the political basis for China to develop friendly relations with all countries in the world, Wang said.

We urge the European side to understand the essence of the Taiwan issue, to abide by the solemn commitments made to China on the one China principle, not to support Taiwan independence forces, and not to conduct official exchanges with Taiwan under any name, he said.

We also want to tell the Taiwan Democratic Progressive Party authorities that any separatist acts and attempts to gain self-respect from foreigners are doomed to end in failure, Wang added, referring to Taiwans ruling party.

The Taiwan Foreign Minister is also expected to visit Brussels, the European Unions capital, sources told Reuters.

With inputs from agencies

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The Pentagon is expected to announce a long-term arms deal for Ukraine as soon as Friday that would include a lot of air defence missiles and is worth more than $2 billion, according to a Bloomberg report, citing administration officials.

The money will be used to purchase two different types of cutting-edge Patriot air defence missiles as well as Hawk missile launchers and missiles under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, added the report.

One is the Pac-3 Patriot Advanced Capability Missile, made by Lockheed Martin Corporation. The other is a missile developed by Raytheon Technologies Corp. dubbed the Guidance Enhanced Missile, or GEM-T, which, according to its description, provides improved ability to defeat tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, or enemy aircraft in complement to the PAC-3 missile.

In order to combat the recent withering barrages of air- and ground-launched cruise and ballistic missiles on cities and to offer cover from Russian aircraft in the long-awaited counteroffensive, air defence has been a primary priority for Ukraine.

The impending announcement will be made as military analysts say that Ukraines long-anticipated counteroffensive is getting underway.

Ukraine counteroffensive on?

Meanwhile, several reports suggested Ukraines military has launched its long-awaited counteroffensive against Russian forces

According to an NBC News report, citing a senior officer and a soldier near the front lines, after months of buildup to a campaign that could prove crucial in Kyivs bid to reclaim occupied territory, a wave of attacks Thursday focused on the wars southeastern front lines and appeared to represent a significant new push.

Many see this new phase of the war as crucial to persuading Western allies to renew their support as Ukraine grapples with the fallout from the destruction of a critical dam in the region, added the report.

While Ukraines government has consistently said there would be no public announcement of the start of the offensive, Russian officials and the countrys cadre of influential military bloggers, who have been sounding the alarm for days, reported a sudden intensification of attacks in the southern Zaporizhzhia region on Thursday.

The Russian Defence Ministry said its forces had beaten back a large overnight offensive, inflicting heavy losses.

With inputs from agencies

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According to a report, a group of hackers supporting Ukraine has successfully brought down several Russian websites and displayed banners expressing their endorsement of Kyivs counteroffensive operation.

One of the targeted sites was Infotel JVC, a Moscow-based banking service and internet service provider.

Russias banking system comes to a screeching halt

Infotel JVC is responsible for facilitating communication between the Central Bank of Russia and various legal entities such as banks, online stores, and credit institutions.

Russia: The entire banking system is at a standstill nationwide because the ISP used for banking communication with the Russian Central Bank is down. Infotel, the ISP, is suspected to have been hacked by a pro-Ukraine group. Sberbanks online services also down. pic.twitter.com/OFjmW8zjLl  Igor Sushko (@igorsushko) June 9, 2023



As a result of the hacking, major banks and credit institutions in Russia lost access to their banking systems, rendering them unable to process payments.

The pro-Ukraine hackers targeted a total of 15 Russian websites, including Infotel JVC, where they posted banners showing solidarity with Ukraines counteroffensive.

The banner displayed on the hacked websites conveyed support for the counteroffensive and referenced the Patriarch of Moscow Kirills Metochion, urging the Armed Forces of Ukraine to carry out the operation.

Courage and Salvation

The banner also included a prayer for Gods intervention and protection against the enemies. Additionally, the hackers referenced Moses words about courage and salvation, emphasizing the need for divine assistance in the face of the ongoing conflict.

The banner concluded with the phrase Glory to Ukraine!

This recent hacking incident occurred less than a month after another group of hackers took control of the official website of Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirills residence in Peredelkino.

Similar to the recent incident, the hackers used the compromised platform to convey messages supporting Ukraines counteroffensive.

Ukraines counteroffensive

NBC News reported that Ukraines military is believed to have initiated its highly anticipated counteroffensive against Russian troops.

The attacks reportedly focused on the southeastern front lines, as confirmed by a senior officer and a soldier near the combat zones. Its important to note that Ukraine has consistently stated its intention not to publicly announce the commencement of its counter-offensive.

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In a rather bizarre confession that is both surprising and extremely confusing, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the man who made ChatGPT and has then gone on to become the modern face of AI has stated that he doesnt trust anything that his LLM chatbot, ChatGPT says.

Users began utilizing ChatGPT for various purposes and enthusiastically shared their experiences on social media platforms. As a result, Sam Altman, the mastermind behind this innovation, gained significant recognition. However, there have been many instances when ChatGPT and other similar AI bots have just made stuff up from thin air.

Also read: ChatGPT sued: Australian Mayor to sue OpenAI in worlds first defamation lawsuit against AI

This, along with ChatGPTs actual ability to write practically anything, is what made the chatbot as well as its creator, Sam Altman

Unlike most other tech startups, Altman got picked up by the media, for his product. The fact that he also likes to interact with the press, was an added bonus.

Altman doesnt trust his own chatbot, not even one bit

At a recent event during his visit to India, Altman stated, I trust answers generated by ChatGPT less than anybody else on Earth. ChatGPT has faced criticism for its tendency to provide inaccurate responses. It has been known to hallucinate and create fictional scenarios on multiple occasions.

In one instance in April, the chatbot wrongly accused a professor in the US of sexually harassing a student, despite no such incident occurring. More recently, last week, OpenAIs chatbot falsely claimed that a popular radio host from Georgia, US embezzled money from a non-profit organisation. The AI chatbot went further by fabricating entire passages, making stuff up to support its claims.

Also read: AI Hallucinates, Falsely Implicates: Man sues OpenAI after ChatGPT claimed he embezzled money

Altman further commented that AI is currently constrained by hardware limitations. ChatGPT requires extensive resources for training. Previous reports revealed that OpenAI utilized approximately 10,000 GPUs developed by NVIDIA for training ChatGPT.

The need to regulate AI

Altman expressed his belief that AI will be the most transformative technology, highlighting its immense potential. However, he also emphasized the significance of implementing guardrails on open-source projects due to their rapid and exponential evolution.

This is also the main reason why Altman is visiting India. He is on a tour of countries such as Israel, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE and South Korea where he hopes to convince heads of state to form an international body to govern AI, something along the lines of the United Nations of AI.

Altman acknowledged that it would be a significant challenge for governments, policymakers, and regulators to effectively regulate AI. Nevertheless, Altman stressed the importance of striking a balance, ensuring that innovation is not hindered in the long term by excessive regulation.

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Sudans warring parties have agreed to a 24-hour ceasefire from Saturday, according to a joint statement by US and Saudi mediators who have brokered previous abortive truces.

Representatives of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) agreed to a 24-hour countrywide ceasefire beginning on June 10 at 6:00 am (0400 GMT), said the statement released by the Saudi foreign ministry on Friday.

Multiple ceasefires have been agreed and broken, and Washington has slapped sanctions on the two warring generals, blaming both sides for the appalling bloodshed.

Should the parties fail to observe the 24-hour ceasefire, facilitators will be compelled to consider adjourning talks in the Saudi city of Jeddah which have been suspended since late last month, the mediators said.

Since April, fighting between the regular army and the paramilitary RSF has gripped Khartoum and the flashpoint western region of Darfur, defying a series of truces.

Upwards of 1,800 people have been killed, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, and the UN says nearly two million people have been displaced, including 476,000 who have sought refuge in neighbouring countries.

The Saudi and US mediators said they share the frustration of the Sudanese people about the uneven implementation of previous ceasefires.

If observed, the 24-hour ceasefire will provide an important opportunityfor the parties to undertake confidence-building measures which could permit resumption of the Jeddah talks, the statement said.

Fridays announcement comes a day after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrapped up a three-day visit to Saudi Arabia, where he held discussions on Sudan with top Saudi officials.

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Russian forces shelled a southern Ukrainian city inundated by flooding in a catastrophic dam collapse, Ukrainian officials said, forcing a suspension of some rescue efforts hours after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy went to the area to assess the damage.

Ukraine and Russia accused each other of shelling rescuers and evacuees in the flood-hit Kherson region as Moscow said its forces fought off a Ukrainian offensive in another part of the front line.

Emergency services were still racing to rescue people stranded by the flood-swollen waters of the Dnipro River, which have forced thousands to flee.

The destruction of a major Russian-held dam on the river on Tuesday left 600 square kilometres of the region under water.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the area on Thursday after floods inundated dozens of villages and parts of the regional capital, Kherson.

I thank the rescuers and volunteers! I thank everyone involved in this work! wrote Zelensky, who also visited survivors in the hospital.

Shortly after the visit, Kyiv said Russian strikes in the centre of Kherson and the surrounding region killed one person and injured 18 more, including emergency services staff.

Moscow-installed authorities on the other bank of the Dnipro River, which is controlled by Russian forces, said two evacuees were killed by Ukrainian shelling.

The death toll from the flooding reached six as the Moscow-backed administration of Nova Kakhovka, where the dam is located, said five people had died and 41 admitted in hospital.

Ukrainian police said one man had died in a riverside village in the neighbouring Mykolaiv region, also affected by rising water levels.

US President Joe Biden said Washington would provide long-term military support to Kyiv as long as it takes, while the Netherlands said it was sending rescue boats and water pumps.

Two-hour battle

In the neighbouring Zaporizhzhia region, Russia said its forces had fought a two-hour battle with Ukrainian troops in the early hours of Thursday.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the Ukrainian offensive involved 1,500 soldiers and 150 armoured vehicles.

The enemy was stopped and retreated after heavy losses, he said.

Ukrainian officials have said their forces are ready for a long-expected counteroffensive but that there would be no formal announcement when it begins.

Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Ganna Maliar said only that Russia was conducting defensive actions near the town of Orikhiv in the Zaporizhzhia region.

In another development, Ukrainian authorities said water levels in a reservoir which had been created by the Kahovka dam had fallen below the critical point of 12.7 metres (42 feet). This meant the reservoir was no longer able to supply households and the cooling ponds at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, Europes largest.

However late Thursday the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said he nuclear plant was continuing to receive water from the reservoir after the dam was damaged.

The plants six reactors have been shut down but they still need cooling water to ensure there is no nuclear disaster.

Ukraine meanwhile called on Europe to double power supplies to two gigawatts.

Still people in there

In the Kherson region, Ukrainian rescuers said they were venturing into Russian-controlled areas to save civilians despite the danger.

The area is the estuary of the Dnipro River and is dotted with islands and marshland where the precise location of the front line is sometimes unclear.

Ukrainian authorities have said 30 settlements were flooded, 10 of which lie in territory controlled by Russia on the Dnipros eastern bank.

Rescuers used boats and amphibious vehicles to pluck people from flooded areas. Some volunteers were also going out to rescue stranded animals and birds.

One woman, Tetiana Omelchenko, 65, said she had waited two days to be evacuated from her block of flats in Kherson and had to climb through a broken window to reach a rescue boat.

In my building, the water has reached the third floor and there are still people in there, she said.

Outrageous destruction

In Brussels on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg urged members of the alliance to speed up humanitarian assistance to Ukraine after the destruction of the dam.

The World Health Organization sounded a grim warning. The impact on the regions water supply, sanitation systems and public health services cannot be underestimated, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.

WHO has rushed in to support the authorities and health care workers in preventive measures against waterborne diseases and to improve disease surveillance, he said.

Ukraine accuses Russia, whose forces control the dam area, of blowing up the dam, while Russia accuses Ukraine hitting it with artillery.

Ukrhydroenergo, the dams operator, said it was most likely mined from the inside. The emergency service has warned the flood water has dislodged land mines that pose a threat to civilians.

The government has also sounded the alarm over the environmental impact, calling it a crime of ecocide.

A Greenpeace campaigner in Kyiv, Denys Tsutsaiev, warned that it could take a decade for some species to recover from the catastrophe and some may not recover at all. According to the latest information, at least 500 tonnes of oil was released due to the dam destruction, the campaigner said, posing a threat to sea mammals and birds.

With inputs from agencies

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Ukraines long-awaited counter-offensive against Russia has appeared to begin as Kyiv attempts to break through Moscows defences and take back its territory.

Till now, Kyiv has maintained radio silence over its plans on launching a full-fledged counter-offensive against Moscow. However, Ukraines defence ministry posted a video of 4 June showing soldiers in fatigues putting their fingers to their lips.

Plans love silence, said the video, widely believed to be about the counteroffensive.

On Thursday, the Washington-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) on Twitter said, The Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun.

The Ukrainian #counteroffensive has begun. Activity throughout #Ukraine is consistent with a variety of indicators that Ukrainian counteroffensive operations are underway across the theater. on what were seeing & how to evaluate this activity  https://t.co/hwgxTnU2Tr  ISW (@TheStudyofWar) June 8, 2023

Ukraines initial counteroffensive operations may be the most difficult and slowest, as they involve penetrating prepared defensive positions, the ISW said.

It added, This phase may also see the highest Ukrainian losses.

Putin says counter-offensives have already failed

Russian President Vladimir Putin was quick to comment on Ukraines possible counter-offensive strikes against the country.

He said Kyiv had so far failed to reach its goals.

We can definitely state that this Ukrainian offensive has begun, Putin said in a video interview published on Telegram by a Russian journalist.

He added, But the Ukrainian troops did not reach their aims in any area of combat.

All counter-offensive efforts so far have failed, but the offensive potential of the Kyiv regime still remains, he continued.

Meanwhile, Moscow on Thursday confirmed that clashes between Russian and Ukrainian forces have intensified in the Zaporizhzhia region, particularly around the small town of Orikhiv and towards the larger city of Tokmak, around 40 kilometres (25 miles) to the south in Russian-occupied territory.

US announces arms package for Ukraine

On Friday, the US announced a $2.1-billion military aid package moments before Kyiv opened its counter-offensive against Russia.

Included in the package are Patriot air defense systems, artillery rounds, drones and laser-guided rocket system munitions.

The Pentagon said in a statement, The new arms, illustrate the continued commitment to both Ukraines critical near-term capabilities as well as the enduring capacity of Ukraines Armed Forces to defend its territory and deter Russian aggression over the long term.

With inputs from agencies

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Jody Thomas, National Security and Intelligence Advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was slammed by External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar for accusing India of meddling in Canadas affairs.

Canada, despite repeated exhortations from India to act, has failed to take any action against the menace of Khalistani activism emanating from its soil. In fact, the Trudeaus regime has been providing safe haven of refuge to Khalistani sympathisers and activists.

Recently, Canadas Brampton celebrated the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi via a float that enacted the circumstances of her murder.

Ulta chor kotwal ko daantey

Indias External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar drew on an oft-quoted Hindi phrase to take on Judy Thomas.

Thomas had, earlier this month, put the worlds biggest democracy India in the league of authoritarian nations such as China, Russia and Iran.

Also Read: WATCH: Indias foreign minister S Jaishankar takes on Canadian NSA and HOW

In a strong retort, Jaishankar said: I was what shall I say, the phrase which came to my mind was actually a Hindi phrase which was Ulta chor kotwal ko daantey (the pot calling the kettle black) 

But, who is Jody Thomas?

Jody Thomas, her son crippling Canadas defence?

In 2021, Jody warned defence industry executives about raising concerns over a controversial $77-billion warship project. It was so because her son works for the company, Lockheed Martin, that submitted the winning bid.

Jodys son Andrew Coates has been working with the company since March 2019. The company was selected on 8 February the same year for its proposal for the Canadian Surface Combatant fleet.

When the issue surfaced of Jodys son working with the company, Canadas National Defence denied to outline guidelines were put in place by the department to deal with her interactions on the on the Canadian Surface Combatant project, the Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ships or other defence projects Lockheed Martin is involved with.

In 2021, Jody admonished industry executives who were complaining to politicians and media outlets that the Canadian Surface Combatant project had fallen far short on its promises of creating domestic employment. Another company is in the middle of a lawsuit over the Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC), even alleged that the procurement was bungled.

A few other industry executives also warned that politicians increasing price tag for CSC will jeopardize funding for other equally important military equipment projects.

Instead of addressing the concerns, Jody had alleged that the executives were hindering the project, and she characterised their efforts as being those of sore losers. I think theres still too much noise from unsuccessful bidders that makes my job and Bills job very difficult, she said.

Perjury in Parliament

While Jody has made it a point to indulge in repeated virtue signalling and finger-raising at India, it must be pointed out that her own tenure as NSA, which started in 2022, has been fraught. It seems Jody runs her office, and therefore, Canadas security, as and when warned and exposed by the Canadian media.

In recent months, Canadian media has often pointed at Chinese interference in the countrys affairs, so much so, that China has been accused of funding several candidates in 2019 and 2021 elections in Canada. In this regard, Globe News broke a story, based on its access to two intelligence reports.

The news report also cited a special report made up for Trudeau and his senior officials, saying: A large clandestine transfer of funds earmarked for the federal election from the PRC consulate in Toronto was transferred to an elected provincial government official via a staff member of a 2019 federal candidate.

Jody Thomas then, apparently, lied to the Canadian Parliament on the matter.

When questioned by the House of Commons defence committee, she brushed aside the Globe News story as just a news story.

But, when the matter was pursued by Opposition Conservative MP Michael Cooper, she even forgot what she had said earlier! I cant confirm that was my exact quote, she told Cooper.

Moreover, Globe News claimed that when it reached out for a comment, Privy Council Office spokesman Stephane Shank said: Ms. Thomas will not comment on information that was inappropriately obtained.

Oblivious Jody master in shifting blame

Not just in case of India, but Jody Thomas seems to be gathering her intelligence not from intelligence sources, but from media exposes.

And, then she doesnt own up to her mistakes too.

After a Globe and Mail story earlier this year that pointed at China running a full-fledged surveillance op in the country, spying on MPs no less, Jody in her usual way pointed somewhere else, this time in complete darkness.

There is no one person. There is no single point of failure, Jody Thomas told a parliamentary committee. There is a flaw in the process, she said, shifting the goalpost out of the very ground.

She accepted, though, that PM Trudeau and she had come to know of the spying ring only after the media reports.

But, her denial was sapped by another media report from CBC. In a report released last week, former governor general David Johnston  appointed by Trudeau as a special rapporteur on foreign interference  found evidence that Chinese officials contemplated taking unspecified action against (MP Michael Chong) Chong in 2021 and sought to build a profile on him, the CBC report noted.

Canada-haven of refuge for Khalistanis

In Canada, Trudeau is leading a minority government which is backed by the New Democratic Party (NDP). Interestingly, NDP is headed by Jagmeet Singh who is an arch-Khalistani separatist.

The Canadian government would not be able to survive without NDP that has 24 seats in the parliament. Jody has been shifting blame to India, rather than blaming their own alliance partner.

With his backing from Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh has gone into an overdrive against India and has been extending support to the Khalistani cause.

Jagmeet Singh sought support of Trudeau when police were searching for Khalistani separatist Amritpal Singh in Punjab and had temporarily suspended the internet in some districts.

Jody should be reminded here that not India, but lawmakers from her own country have been interfering in Indias internal affairs.

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Amid increasing concerns and a need to address the challenges associated with artificial intelligence (AI), US senators introduced two bipartisan bills on Thursday.

The first bill aims to ensure transparency from the US government when utilizing AI to interact with individuals. It seeks to establish clear guidelines and requirements for government agencies to disclose their use of AI in human interactions.

The second bill proposes the creation of an office tasked with assessing the United States competitiveness in emerging technologies. This office would monitor and evaluate the countrys standing in the latest advancements, ensuring the nation remains at the forefront of technological innovation.

As AI continues to rise in prominence, lawmakers are actively considering the need for new regulations to govern its use. Earlier this year, the public release of ChatGPT, an AI program capable of generating written responses to questions, garnered significant attention and emphasized the urgency of addressing AIs impact.

In a bipartisan effort, Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat who chairs the Homeland Security committee, collaborated with Republican Senators Mike Braun and James Lankford to introduce a bill. This bill aims to establish a requirement for US government agencies to inform individuals when they employ AI for interactions.

Furthermore, the proposed legislation mandates agencies to establish a mechanism that allows individuals to appeal decisions made by AI. This provision aims to ensure accountability and provide individuals with a means to challenge AI-generated outcomes.

Senator Braun emphasized the importance of proactive transparency and human involvement in AI utilization within the federal government. He stressed the need to prevent decisions from being made solely by AI, emphasizing the essential role of humans in the decision-making process.

Senators Michael Bennet and Mark Warner, both Democrats, joined forces with Republican Senator Todd Young to introduce a measure aimed at establishing an Office of Global Competition Analysis. The purpose of this office would be to ensure that the United States maintains its leadership position in the development of artificial intelligence (AI).

Senator Bennet expressed concerns about the potential loss of the United States competitive edge in crucial technologies such as semiconductors, quantum computing, and AI, particularly in the face of competition from countries like China.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently announced that he has scheduled three briefings for senators on the topic of AI. These briefings include a general overview of AI, discussions on strategies to achieve American leadership in the field, and a classified session focusing on defence and intelligence issues related to AI and their implications.

The aim of these briefings is to provide lawmakers with the necessary education and understanding of AI, enabling them to make informed decisions and policies in this rapidly evolving field.

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Hongkongers are in a hurry to download a popular protest anthem after the Chinese territorys government filed a court injunction that could in all possibility compel US tech giants Google and Meta to block access to it.

The song in question, Glory to Hong Kong was written in 2019 became a rage in the citywide pro-democracy protest movement, going on to top the local iTune chart for two days despite warnings from pro-Beijing politicians to delete the song from residents devices. In fact, Glory to Hong Kong is a part of 32 YouTube videos, which could now be blocked and considered seditious after the governments filing on Monday.

The song drew ire from the Hong Kong government after it was uploaded to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and got repeatedly played in error at international sporting events instead of March of the Volunteers, the Chinese national anthem.

According to a report by The Strait Times, the justice department applied for a court injunction to ban anyone with criminal intent from broadcasting, performing, printing, publishing, selling, offering for sale, distributing, disseminating, displaying or reproducing the song.

As per a report in Financial Times, a local resident in her 20s who downloaded the song on Wednesday, following news of the governments court request said she wanted to keep a record and was more concerned whether big companies would act in subservient manner to the court order.

Notably, the FT report states that as Hong Kong seeks to revive its status as a global financial hub, the governments filing has revived growing liability concerns for foreign tech companies operating in the territory.

George Chen, Metas former head of public policy for greater China and now managing director for Hong Kong and Taiwan at the Asia Group in Washington was quoted as saying that tech companies like Google and Meta dont have too many options in hand to deal with a court injunction and that they can fully comply, or partially comply with, or ignore, the order. Chen added, Partial compliance usually means you block something only for local users.

Meanwhile, YouTube parent company Google and Facebook parent Meta declined a request for comment. Apple and Twitter did not respond to a request for comment from the publication either.

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Happy Brew Cafe brews 'poss-abilities' thanks to Flagler's Missing Voices Project

When Flagler Colleges Missing Voices Project was founded in 2019, Director Justin Forbes had a vision of empowering communities of faith to become better equipped in welcoming youth on the margins.

The idea of the Missing Voices Project is that we recognize these young peoples voices are missing in society and in the church, and we want to do something about that, Associate Director of the Missing Voices Project, Mary Scine said.

After receiving a $1M grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., the Missing Voices Project was established and a cohort of 12 congregations from across the state of Florida was formed. Together they all embarked on a learning journey, taking in the theories of asset-based community development (ABCD) along with human centered design thinking and innovation.

The Missing Voices Project is an integral part of the Youth Ministry Program at Flagler College, a program within the Humanities Department where students can earn an academic minor. In addition to course material, the program focuses on empowering young people through open dialogue, faith-based mentorship, and fostering opportunities for community engagement.

The motivation for such a project came from the realization that youth ministry tends to exclude certain groups of young people on the margins for whom God cares deeply. As one of the 12 cohort churches, Southside United Methodist Church in Jacksonville has found their purpose in serving one such group- youth with intellectual and developmental differences (IDD).

We have missed these young people and their voices are missing in our communities of worship, the mission of the project states. We have a few ideas about who this might be, but the beauty of this project is that we will help our grant participants discern who has been overlooked in their community, how they can love and serve them, and ultimately be transformed by their presence.

In pursuit of this goal, Southside United Methodist Church, created the idea for Happy Brew Cafe. Happy Brew was founded as a coffee shop established to employ and support young people with intellectual and developmental differences (IDD) and is set to open its doors to the public in the fall.

Happy Brew coffee bag

The team from Southside United Methodist Church recognized the setbacks those with IDD face once they enter adulthood. They deserve a place of belonging, Scine said.

Happy Brews visionaries realized the best way to empower young people with IDD is to give them a space to be fully integrated into the community.

They have abilities and gifts that are able to be used and received by others, Scine said.

The team at Southside United Methodist Church wanted to go beyond advocating for the acceptance and inclusion of young people with IDD and move towards a complete embrace of these amazing individuals with all they have to offer their communities.

We recognized that individuals with IDD are not only capable of meaningful work, but we believe that their skill sets add immense value to the workplace, Amy Franks, Director of Happy Brew said.

Their tagline is: WE BREW POSSABILITIES.

Not only does their tagline work as a clever pun, but it also celebrates what people with all abilities have to offer the community.

Our shop aims to be a safe place for community building as well as on-the-job training for young adults with intellectual or developmental differences, Franks said.

Their plan was to create a community of joy and acceptance where abilities and friendships can grow one conversation and cup of coffee at a time. Franks said this was made possible all thanks to the support and guidance of Flagler Colleges Missing Voices Project.

Its been an incredible journey that began with the Missing Voices Project out of Flagler College, Franks said.

When Forbes and Scine launched the Missing Voices Project, Scine said representation was at the core of their mission, both in the community and on their team.

If a leadership team was making decisions about a particular community of people, we believed those folks needed to be represented and have a voice at the table, Scine said.

With the resources of the Missing Voices Project, Southside United Methodist was able to collect feedback from dozens of young people with IDD and their families to better understand how to make Happy Brew an accessible space.

Our best ideas came from them Franks said.

Thanks to the feedback Happy Brew has received so far, they have been able to turn their coffee shop into a welcoming space of belonging. Eager to continue learning from the community, Franks encourages others to submit their ideas to Happy Brews website.

Having consulted with families, Franks said they included things like a no-step entry with wide automatic doors, tables that can adjust to wheelchair heights, braille signage, a sensory room, ample wheelchair accessible parking, as well as bathrooms that will accommodate wheelchair radius and height with automatic doors and adult-sized changing tables.

Happy Brew architects created a facility that exceeds ADA standards to accommodate both physical and sensory impairments for both employees and customers, Franks said.

Happy Brew has also left a huge mark on the volunteers who have been involved in the project. Volunteers like Henry Cosper, a tenth grader at Wolfson High School.

The Missing Voices Project really opened my mind to all the underlying problems occurring around us every day, Cosper said. From my church involvement alongside children and adults with IDD, I was pushed out of my comfort zone a little to reach those voices and help bring awareness. The Missing Voices Project has not only made an impact in my life but those all around me.

First-year student at Liberty University Lucy Glover shares a similarly impactful experience after volunteering at Happy Brew.

Through the Missing Voices Project, the Lord showed me how essential it is for students with IDD to have a voice in the church, Glover said. When I worked one on one with these students, they taught me how to better love people unapologetically. I know that without them, the church would be missing some powerful and beautiful stories.

Happy Brew family

Happy Brew invites customers to visit them when their doors open in the fall of 2023.

As for the Missing Voices Project, Happy Brew is just the beginning of what they aim to offer the community.

We were invited to write a follow-up grant to continue to receive funding from the Lilly Endowment, Scine said. We wrote a proposal for a 1.25 million grant, and we were awarded funding at the end of 2022 to continue this work for the next three years from January 2023 through December 2025.

Next in their efforts, is the beginning of the Missing Voices 2.0 launch, where their goal is to deepen the work by creating scalable resources from what they learned in hopes of serving additional communities of faith.

The Missing Voices Project aims to continue their research, listening to and learning from young people on the margins, finding ways to create safer, more accessible communities of faith for everyone.

Tagged As
June 08 2023

The Honorable Samantha Power

Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development



Dear Madam Ambassador,

The Rwanda Bridge Builders (RBB) a platform of Rwandan civil society organizations and opposition political parties in exile has followed with keen attention your statement on violence in Eastern DRC and would like to express its heartfelt admiration for your recent condemnation of the appalling massacre of civilians perpetrated by the Rwandan Defense Forces under the disguise of M23 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Your public denouncement of the heinous acts committed against innocent civilians reflects not only your moral compass but also your unwavering dedication to promoting peace, justice, and the well-being of all people.

The RBB takes this opportunity to extend its deepest solidarity and unwavering support to you.

Your condemnation should send a powerful message not only to the International Community, so that it can take action and hold accountable those responsible for such acts of violence, but also to the Rwandan regime under the leadership of Paul Kagame to give priority to dialogue in order to resolve any differences and disputes by peaceful means.

The RBB is not at all surprised by the arrogant response from the Kigali regime through its spokesperson, Mrs. Yolande Makolo, criticizing you for failing to address the real causes of insecurity in the DRC. The RPF regime has always resorted to intimidations and violence to resolve conflicts because of the tacit support from the International Community that has turned a blind eye to atrocities committed by RPF in Rwanda and in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The RBB would like to echo the response of His Excellency President Felix Antoine Tshisekedi to a Rwandan journalist, in which he said that the real cause of insecurity in the DRC is the current Rwandan regime because in the past, Zaire has enjoyed good relationship with previous Rwandan governments.

The RBB considers that it is high time for the International Community to put an end to the endless suffering endured by Congolese people, the people inside Rwanda and Rwandan refugees that the Kigali regime continues to use as scapegoat to invade the DRC. In the same vein, RBB would like to call upon countries that continue to support the dictatorial regime in Kigali to apply the necessary pressure on Kagame to engage in an inclusive dialogue with his opposition in order to resolve the thorny problem of Rwandan Refugees.

Once again, The Rwanda Bridge Builders (RBB) thanks you for your resolute stance against this terrible Rwandan proxy war. May your efforts continue to shed light on the darkest corners and bring about the change we so desperately need.

With deepest respect and support,

June 08 2023

Ambassador Jean Marie Ndagijimana

The RBB Coordination committee
Iti doresti o presa libera si independenta, care nu da inapoi cand vine vorba de respectarea standardelor profesionale, refuza sa se lase cenzurata, sustine independenta justitiei, transparenta decizionala si valorile democratice. Alege sa o sustii.
Instagram algorithms promote vast pedophile network on the platform: Report News oi -Carlsen Martin

Instagram's recommendation algorithms are actively promoting pedophilia, according to a joint investigation from The Wall Street Journal and academics at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The report notes that Instagram's algorithms connect and promote a "vast network" of pedophiles interested in "underage sex content." The investigation reveals the terrifying extent of Instagram's recommendations, which "connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers."

Child-Sex Abuse on Instagram

The researchers found that the Meta-owned social media platform allowed users to search hashtags related to child-sex abuse, including graphic terms such as #pedowhore, #preteensex, #pedobait and #mnsfw (minors not safe for work).

The platform offers "menus" of content users to purchase or sell and distribute videos and imagery of self-harm and bestiality. When the researchers set up a test account to access such explicit content on the network, the account was immediately recommended more accounts to follow.

Darkside of Instagram's Recommendations

However, the report found; "Following just a handful of these recommendations was enough to flood a test account with content that sexualizes children." The WSJ report also noted that some accounts allowed buyers to "commission specific acts" or arrange "meet ups.

"Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn't merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them," the report noted.

This means Instagram goes beyond the regular search and recommends users illicit content related to children. According to the WSJ report, "Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests."

Instagram's Efforts to Combat Pedophilia

Meta didn't acknowledge the findings of the report and a spokesperson for the company said that it would be a setting up an internal task force to investigate the child-sex abuse on the platform. The spokesperson said, "Child exploitation is a horrific crime", and that the company was investigating ways to actively defend against it.

Meta also noted that it took down 490,000 accounts that violated its child safety guidelines in January alone. And in the last two years, it removed 27 pedophile networks. Instagram also blocked thousands of hashtags associated with the sexualization of children and restricted terms from users' searches.

But are those Efforts Enough?

However, Alex Stamos, head of Stanford's Internet Observatory and former chief security officer for Meta, told the Wall Street Journal that Meta's efforts were not enough to tackle the issue of child-sex abuse on the platform.

Stamos noted that alarm bells should be ringing at Instagram as only a team of three academics with limited access was able to access such a vast network. Stamos also showed a lack of confidence in the platform's algorithms to tackle the issue, saying "I hope the company reinvests in human investigators."

The WSJ also recounted incidents where Instagram users reported posts and accounts suspected of child-sex abuse, only for them to be cleared by platform's review team. However, Meta claimed that it was unable to act on these reports due to their high volumes. You can check out the full WSJ report here.

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Samsung's Upcoming Galaxy Z Fold5 and Z Flip5 Rumored to Receive IP58 Rating News oi -Kabir Jain

Samsung's highly anticipated Galaxy Unpacked event, scheduled for the final week of July, is expected to unveil exciting new products from the South Korean brand. Among the rumored releases are the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5, two foldable smartphones that have garnered considerable attention in recent times.

While Samsung has not officially confirmed the specifications, various leaks and rumors have provided insights into what we can expect from these devices.

IP Rating: Explained

When it comes to electronic devices, such as smartphones, protecting them against solid particles and liquid ingress is crucial. This is where IP ratings, also known as Ingress Protection ratings, play a significant role. The IP rating standard indicates the level of protection offered by a device against dust and water. It consists of two digits, with the first representing dust protection and the second representing water protection. Higher digit values indicate a higher level of protection.

Improved IP Ratings for the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5

Rumors suggest that both the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5 will feature improved IP ratings compared to their predecessors. This means that these devices will offer enhanced water resistance capabilities, which is particularly noteworthy considering the complex and sensitive hinge mechanism of foldable smartphones. Achieving an IP58 rating would be a significant achievement, as it would provide users with confidence in using their devices in various environments.

Rumored Specifications of the Galaxy Z Fold 5

According to leaks and rumors, the Galaxy Z Fold 5 is expected to come with several notable upgrades. One of the anticipated improvements is the introduction of a new waterdrop hinge design. This design aims to eliminate any visible gaps when the phone is closed, further enhancing the overall aesthetics and user experience.

In terms of photography capabilities, the Galaxy Z Fold 5 might feature a 50MP main camera, a 12MP ultra-wide camera, and a 10MP telephoto camera, providing users with a versatile photography toolkit.

Under the hood, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC has been confirmed by a Geekbench listing, ensuring powerful performance and smooth multitasking. The phone is also expected to offer two internal storage options: 256GB and 512GB, catering to users' varying storage needs.

A 4400mAh battery is rumored to power the device, complemented by 45W fast charging and 25W wireless charging capabilities. Additionally, the Galaxy Z Fold 5 is said to be available in three stylish color options: Beige, Black, and Light Blue.

Rumored Specifications of the Galaxy Z Flip 5

The Galaxy Z Flip 5 is speculated to bring significant improvements over its predecessor as well. One notable enhancement is the larger cover display, which is rumored to measure 3.4 inches compared to the previous model's 1.9-inch cover screen.

This expanded screen real estate provides users with more information at a glance, enhancing convenience and usability. The inner display is expected to measure 6.7 inches and feature an AMOLED panel with a smooth 120Hz refresh rate, delivering vibrant visuals and fluid scrolling.

The Galaxy Z Flip 5 might also adopt a punch-hole notch at the top of the display to accommodate the selfie camera. This design choice allows for maximum screen space and a more immersive viewing experience. Powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, the device ensures efficient performance and snappy responsiveness.

When unfolded, the Galaxy Z Flip 5 is rumored to have dimensions of 165 x 71.8 x 6.7mm, making it a compact and pocketable device. Furthermore, there have been discussions about a new waterdrop hinge design that aims to minimize the visibility of the crease on the display, enhancing the overall visual appeal of the device.

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Trump Says He's Been Indicted Over Mar-a-Lago Docs, Told to Appear Tuesday in Court

Sputnik News

20230608

Ian DeMartino

The announcement comes a day after reports revealed that Trump's legal team had been notified they were the subject of an investigation over the doc seizures. The former president is now expected to appear in court on June 13.

Former US President Donald Trump revealed late Thursday that his legal camp has been informed he's been indicted over classified documents retrieved by FBI agents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

Trump made the announcement on his Truth Social account, a social media site he owns. Spanning over three posts, Trump railed against the indictment, calling it politically motivated and a "DARK DAY" for the United States.

"The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware," Trump wrote. "I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States."

The one-time commander-in-chief went on to underscore that he is "an innocent man," adding that he has been summoned to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami, Florida, on Tuesday at 3 p.m. local time.

In a video posted to Truth Social about 40 minutes after his first post, Trump called the indictment "election interference of the highest level. There has never been anything like what's happening. I'm an innocent man, I'm an innocent person."

"I am innocent and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly," he stressed.

Trump is being investigated for his handling of classified documents after he left the White House and obstruction of justice. Last year, the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate, seizing thousands of documents, including about 100 that had classified markings.

Court documents also showed that the FBI had subpoenaed security footage from Mar-a-Lago, and alleged that he moved the documents out of a storage room at the estate in an effort to obstruct the investigation.

Trump has claimed that he declassified the documents through the use of his then-presidential powers; however, a recently released audio tape saw Trump in 2021 discussing a Pentagon document that he said was still classified.

Unconfirmed early reports have suggested that Trump has been indicted on seven charges, some of which are said to include the willful retention of national defense information, corruptly concealing documents, conspiracy to obstruct justice and false statements.

The US Department of Justice has not confirmed Trump's indictment, nor offered any confirmation on what specific charges Trump may face.

Trump further asserted in his social media posts that he received "far more votes than any sitting president in the history of our country," adding that he is leading in the polls against "all candidates, both Democrat and Republican."

His comments echo Newsmax columnist Michael Shannon, who told Sputnik earlier Thursday that the indictment and everything surrounding it was politically motivated.

"This is all part of the process to indict Trump and make it difficult a if not impossible a for him to run for reelection," Shannon told Sputnik. "The entire investigation, raid on Mar-a-Lago and subsequent developments are entirely political and constitute a genuine attack on democracy."

Like Trump, Shannon also pointed out that US President Joe Biden also retained classified documents at his residences and offices from his time as vice president during the Obama administration.

"This is indeed a DARK DAY for the United States of America," Trump wrote. "We are a Country in serious and rapid Decline, but together we will Make America Great Again!"

The former president has faced multiple and piling legal issues since leaving office in 2021. In late March, he was indicted in New York on more than 30 counts related to business fraud. He was also found liable of sexual assault in a civil case stemming from an encounter with a New York City columnist in the early 1990s.

There are other cases that are still under investigation which may result in more charges for Trump. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is looking into his role in providing hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who alleged she had an affair with Trump.

Prosecutors are looking into those payments to see if they violated campaign finance regulations.

Additionally, Atlanta-area District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating alleged efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 presidential election in that state.

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Pentagon: Media Reports on China Spy Station in Cuba Are 'Not Accurate'

By Ken Bredemeier, Carla Babb June 08, 2023

The Pentagon says reports that China and Cuba have reached a secret pact allowing Beijing to build an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island that is 160 kilometers from the United States are "not accurate."

"I can tell you, based on the information that we have, that that is not accurate - that we are not aware of China and Cuba developing any type of spy station," Brigadier General Pat Ryder, the Pentagon's press secretary, told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday.

According to the reports, which first appeared in The Wall Street Journal citing unnamed intelligence officials, China had agreed to pay financially hard-pressed Cuba several billion dollars for the spy facility, which would allow China to collect electronic communications from throughout the southeastern United States, where numerous military bases are located.

Ryder added that the Pentagon was not aware of China setting up any type of military base in Cuba or elsewhere in the region.

However, he cautioned that the relationship between Cuba and China is something that the Pentagon monitors, along with any type of "coercive activity or belligerent activity" by China in the Western Hemisphere.

A senior White House official also described the media reports as "not accurate."

'We are very aware'

A Defense Department official, who declined to comment directly on the reports, told VOA the U.S. was still "able to meet all our security commitments at home and across the region."

"On a broader level, we are very aware of [China's] attempts to invest in infrastructure around the world that may have military purposes, including in the Western Hemisphere," the official said.

Asked about the report, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington told Reuters, "We are not aware of the case, and as a result, we can't give a comment right now."

A spokesperson at the Cuban Embassy in Washington told VOA that the Journal's report was "false."

Earlier Thursday, Cuba's deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, said the report was "totally false and unfounded."

"Slanders like this have frequently been fabricated by United States officials," he added.

Nicholas Eftimiades, a retired intelligence officer, told VOA Mandarin that Cuba "certainly falls within the footprint to be able to collect the U.S. military communications from some geostationary satellites."

"This is an intelligence collection program. It's not unexpected. I would think that this has been coming for quite some period of time," he added. "It's another threat to national security that we have to contend with."

Few options seen

James Andrew Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, told VOA Mandarin that the U.S. has few options in response.

"Because Cuba is so close to the United States, it's like being part of the American phone network," he said. "If they decide they want to have a Chinese listening station, there's not a lot we can do."

The White House and many lawmakers in Congress consider China to be the chief U.S. economic and military rival. The U.S. is the world's biggest economy, and China is the second largest.

Earlier this year, the U.S. shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic Ocean, but not before it traversed the breadth of the United States and flew over numerous military bases. Last weekend, a Chinese warship abruptly sailed across the bow of a U.S. destroyer as it passed through international waters in the Taiwan Strait. The U.S. said the incident forced the American ship to slow down to avoid a collision.

Republican opponents of Biden were quick to attack the administration about the reported Chinese venture into the Western Hemisphere, although it was unclear what, if anything, the U.S. could do to stop it.

"Joe Biden needs to wake up to the real Chinese threats on our doorstep," Nikki Haley, a former U.N. ambassador and a current Republican presidential candidate, wrote on Twitter.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the closest U.S. state to Cuba, said on Twitter, "The threat to America from Cuba isn't just real, it is far worse than this."

VOA Mandarin contributed to this report.

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June 8, 2023

Transcript

Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder Holds a Press Briefing

BRIGADIER GENERAL PAT RYDER: All right, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for your patience.

First off, let me say it's great to be back in the Press Briefing Room. I would like to thank Mr. Tom Masten and the Defense Press Operations team here for all their hard work over the past four months to enable us to implement the long-needed renovations to the briefing room while also enabling us to continue our briefing cadence without missing a beat. Needless to say, there's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes, so I know I speak for many here at OSD Public Affairs when I say how grateful we are for their efforts.

I'd also like to thank our Pentagon Press Corps for your patience and flexibility. And we understand all of the logistical challenges that this renovation presented, and so we appreciate your understanding throughout the process.

And finally, a huge thanks to the Department of the Air Force for allowing us to use the Airman's Hall as our temporary briefing space.

Turning to today's briefing, I do have quite a few items to pass along on the top, so once again, I will ask for your patience while I kick things off and then be -- I'll be happy to take your questions.

First, at the direction of the Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks, the DOD's Internal Review Team on racial disparities in the investigative and military justice systems, or IRT, has completed and delivered its report to the Deputy Secretary.

The IRT was charged with addressing root causes of racial disparities in the investigative and military justice systems and providing actionable recommendations to improve department policies, processes and resources to address such disparities.

The IRT's report details a total of 17 recommendations based on three lines of effort, which include training and education, service member protections, oversight and transparency. The IRT also found that additional data and research are warranted to identify and address root causes, mitigate bias and eliminate disparities.

The Department of Defense is taking a deliberate approach to the implementation of the IRT's recommendations with the launch of a 120-day assessment that will be led by the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness.

Taking care of our military community is a top priority for the department and we remain determined to eliminate racial disparities throughout our Armed Forces. DOD will continue to work to identify the causes of any racial, ethnic or gender disparities in the military justice system and the IRT memo and report will be available later today on Defense.gov.

Separately, earlier this week, Secretary Austin concluded a successful trip to the Indo-Pacific region and to Europe, during which he -- during which he made stops in Japan, Singapore, India and France. Each stop afforded the opportunity to meet with counterparts to discuss our continued focus and shared vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific region at a time of real momentum in our key relationships.

As highlighted in his speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue, more and more the countries of the Indo-Pacific have come together around this shared vision of the future in which all nations are free to thrive on their own terms without coercion or intimidation or bullying.

To quote Secretary Austin, quote, "it's a vision of a free and open and secure Indo-Pacific within a world of rules and rights, and that vision is anchored in some key principles, to include respect for sovereignty, adherence to international law, transparency and openness, the free flow of commerce and ideas, human rights and human dignity, equal rights for all states, large and small, and resolving disputes through peaceful dialogue and not coercion or conquest."

Of note, on the heels of Secretary Austin's travel to the Indo-Pacific, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Dr. Colin Kahl will depart this weekend for a series of engagements in Hawaii, Korea and Japan. During the visit, he'll meet with senior INDOPACOM military leaders and conduct various counterpart visits in Japan and Korea that will further strengthen our ironclad alliances and partnerships in the region. Readouts from the Undersecretary's engagements will be posted on the DOD website.

And in other travel news, Secretary Austin will travel again next week to Brussels, where he and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley will host an in-person meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on June 15th, followed by the NATO Defense Ministers Meeting on June 16th. We'll provide additional details regarding the trip in the near future.

Shifting gears in the Middle East region, this week marks the second week for U.S. participation in Exercise Eagle Resolve '23. For the first time, this multi-domain exercise, focused primarily on integrated air and missile defense and maritime interdiction, is being hosted in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and includes participation from all six Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

Separately, nearly a half dozen partner nation Air Forces from across the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility came together today in support of a B-1 bomber-led U.S. Strategic Command Bomber Task Force mission that culminated in a pair of live fire events on ranges in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Taken together, these activities reinforce the U.S. commitment to contributing to the security and stability of the Middle East region and demonstrate the increasing complexity, deepening military interoperability and strength of our shared defense capabilities. And I would refer you to U.S. Central Command for additional details.

Meanwhile, in the European region, the 52nd iteration of Baltic Operations, also known as BALTOPS, began this week, with 19 NATO allies, one NATO partner nation, 50 ships and more than 45 aircraft, and approximately 6,000 personnel participating through June 16th.

This annual maritime-focused exercise provides a unique training opportunity to strengthen the combined response capability critical to preserving freedom of navigation and security in the Baltic Sea. Participating nations will exercise a myriad of capabilities demonstrating the flexibility of maritime forces.

For more information, please visit the U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa and U.S. Sixth Fleet website and social media platforms for the latest on the exercise.

And finally, on Monday morning, June 12, Secretary Austin and Deputy Secretary Hicks will lead a Pentagon ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Women's Armed Forces Integration Act of 1948, to celebrate the enormous contributions that women have made to U.S. national security over the last seven and a half decades. The Pentagon courtyard ceremony begins at 10:30 and will be broadcast on Defense.gov.

And with that, I will take your questions. All right, Tara Copp, let's go to the Associate Press.

Q: Kicking it off with a bang there aren't you?

GEN. RYDER: That's right. Welcome back to the briefing room.

Q: It's good to be back. I wanted to start off with Ukraine, particularly the dam break and the catastrophic flooding that's going on. Typically in humanitarian disasters of this size there's a role for DOD to play, whether it's flying in humanitarian aid, assisting with evacuations, dose the ongoing conflict make that impossible?

GEN. RYDER: Sure. So -- so as it pertains to aid, right now I don't have anything to announce in terms of what DOD is providing. You know as you all know our current focus is on security assistance.

I would highlight that you may have heard the White House talk today about USAID working with local agencies and international agencies that are on the ground to provide some humanitarian assistance, which includes things like transportation for people away from the flooding, distributing water purification equipment, water pumps, boat motors, other rescue gear.

So I would refer you to USAID to talk about those particular efforts. But when it comes to DOD right now, I don't have anything to announce.

Q: Just a quick follow-up and then so that -- sometimes DOD aircraft are used to fly in that aid too. Is that -- can that not even be?

GEN. RYDER: It's not something that -- that we're currently looking at. Again, if that changes we'll be sure to let you know.

Q: And then secondly there's a lot of reporting right now that the counter offensive has begun based on activity your seeing on the banks of the river, in (inaudible). What can you say about that?

GEN. RYDER: Yes. So we're certainly monitoring reports of increased fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces at various locations across the front lines in Ukraine. But when it comes to characterizing those particular operations or talking about those operations, that's really something that's best left to the Ukrainians.

Okay. Jennifer.

Q: Have you assessed who is responsible for blowing up the dam?

GEN. RYDER: We have not at this time. We're still continuing to look at that.

Q: And there are two reports today suggesting that the Chinese have a new agreement with Cuba to set up a listening post in Cuba. Are those reports accurate? What is the extent? Is there a new listening post in Cuba that effects the United States?

GEN. RYDER: Yes, so -- so I've seen that -- that reporting. I can tell you based on the information that we have that that is not accurate. That -- that we are not aware of China and Cuba developing any type of spy stations separately. I would say that the relationship that those two countries share is something that we continuously monitor.

I would say that -- that as you've heard us say many times, China's activities both in our hemisphere and around the world, any concerning activities are something that we will continue to watch closely.

But in terms of that -- that particular report, no it's not accurate.

Q: Have you seen China set up any military base in Cuba or is there any plans a foot we're seeing elsewhere in the region that they have?

GEN. RYDER: Yes. None that I'm aware of at this time.

Yes, Tom.

Q: Getting back to Ukraine. You can't talk about what Ukraine's doing, what about what Russia is doing? Are you seeing any movements of troops -- shifts of troops, additional forces coming in along the frontline?

GEN. RYDER: Yes, Tom, so I appreciate the question. What I'm not going to do today is provide an operational update on -- ongoing developments on the battlefield. Clearly Russia for sometime has been building it's defenses in Ukraine and in anticipation of a Ukrainian counter offensive and so that's about as far as I'll go right now.

Q: (Inaudible) as far as additional troops coming in, can you at least say you're seeing some --

GEN. RYDER: Beyond what we've seen in terms of, you know, replacement forces, I'm not aware of any significant large number of additional Russian forces coming in but of course that's something we'll continue to keep an eye on. OK. Yes, ma'am.

Q: Thank you so much, sir. First for you, there has been some reporting that DOD and DTIC are experimenting with open A.I. and so I wanted to hear a little bit more about how they're experimenting with those large language models and how they're managing the risks that we continue to hear about those emerging capabilities.

GEN. RYDER: Yes, sure. So I don't have anything specific to provide on that. So let me take that question and we'll -- we'll come back to you.

Q: Or you can tell your CDAO to respond that would be great.

GEN. RYDER: OK.

Q: Second line of question, on the Balt typhoon China linked cyber attack that we've been hearing a lot about. How is DOD responding if at all and at this point is it your assessment that it was contained to Guam?

GEN. RYDER: Yes, when it -- when it comes to those kinds of activities as a matter of policy and for operation security we're just not going to talk about what actions we may or may not be taking.

Obviously we take cyber security very seriously but I'm just not going to go into details.

Yes, ma'am?

Q: Thank you. And very happy to be back in here.

GEN. RYDER: It's good to be back.

Q: I just wanted to follow up on Jen -- on your response to Jen's question. So you said it's not accurate that China and Cuba are developing a spying base here. Is -- are you aware of discussions about this or are their -- is the report -- are those reports completely just not accurate?

GEN. RYDER: Again, based on the information that we have, the report is in accurate. Certainly we -- we know that -- that China and Cuba maintain a -- a relationship of sorts but when it comes to the specific activities outlined in the press reporting, again, based on the information we have that is not accurate.

Q: And then one questions just on the F-16 training. I'm just wondering if you have any update on which countries are going to be providing support for training Ukrainian pilots on F-16s and there was some reporting that F-18s may be involved as well. Are there any -- is there any truth to that and can you kind of give us an update?

GEN. RYDER: Yes, in terms of any additional types of aircraft, nothing to announce on that front. As far as F-16 pilot training goes, no new updates to provide today. You know as we've talked about in the past, the Netherlands and Denmark have agreed to take the lead in terms of developing a training plan for Ukrainian pilots and maintainers. We do have several other allies who have said that they are interested in participating in that training.

And so I think the last time we talked from the briefing room, that was a topic of discussion -- or excuse actually that was before. So at the last Ukraine defense contact group that was a topic of discussion. We've got a contact group next week. I expect it will be discussed there as well. And so we should have more details in a relatively near future in terms of when, where, how. But at this time nothing new to provide.

Q: Have any countries requested that they be able to transfer F-16s to Ukraine?

GEN. RYDER: Again, much more to follow in the future. Thanks. Going to go over here to Dan.

Q: Thank you. There's a -- there's a new letter, a new push bipartisan on the Hill kind of circling back to the Pentagon asking about ATACMS, trying to expedite Abrams moves, trying to expedite F-16 moves. Any reaction to that in general.

And then separately, we're all watching obviously the wild fire's effect a good portion of East Coast at this point. Senate Majority Leader Schumer raised the point of having additional American firefighting troop abilities assist Canada if they ask for it.

Do you see a role for DOD in that particularly possibly with the guard that already does that on a state level?

GEN. RYDER: Yes, thanks, Dan. So last question first. I'm not aware of any specific requests at this time. Obviously, you know, firefighting is a capability that some of our forces -- as you highlight, the Guard -- have provided support for in the past, but I'm not aware of any specific asks at this time.

In terms of congressional requests for or, you know, highlighting additional capabilities for Ukraine, I -- you know, I'm not going to get into specific conversations or requests between the Hill and the Pentagon, and we'll respond appropriately to -- to Congress when -- when and as those requests come in.

But more broadly speaking, what I would tell you is nothing new to announce today in that regard. As we have been from the very beginning, we'll continue to talk very closely with our Ukrainian partners, with our allies, on what (Ukrainians ?) most pressing needs are.

And so, you know, as -- as we've talked about many times, we are committed to supporting them both in the near term and in the long term, and we'll continue to keep you updated as there are new developments on that front. Thank you.

Yes, sir?

Q: Thanks. Liam Cosgrove with The Grayzone. A quick question on the Kakhovka Dam explosion. So several European politicians have come out and were -- were quick to blame Russia, saying, you know, this is an example of Russian terrorism, but if you look at the context -- the dam was in Russian-occupied territory -- the Ukrainian Ecological League said this could leave Crimea without water for over a decade.

And there were reports in The Washington Post last year that Ukrainian soldiers were explicitly looking at targeting this dam -- dam as part of a strategy to flood the region and prevent further Russian advancements, and they even fired a couple of HIMAR missiles into it to test that theory.

So can the DOD share any evidence as to who might have done this? And are you entertaining the possibility that it might have been Ukraine?

GEN. RYDER: Yeah, well, like -- like, as you heard us say, I mean, we're continuing to assess how this could have happened. So, you know, all great questions, but at this point, it's all speculation, and so, you know, I'm not going to get into hypotheticals or -- or speculate. I -- I think it's very clear, however, the reason we're in this situation is because Russia invaded Ukraine.

And -- and so it's a -- obviously a terrible humanitarian tragedy, and you -- you heard me talk here a little bit ago about how the U.S. government is attempting to assist the Ukrainians on the humanitarian front, but in terms of how this dam could have been destroyed, you know, again, it's something that we're continuing to look into. Thanks.

Q: And then more broadly, we have seen before where Ukraine, you know, avoids culpability and is quick to blame Russia, like that missile that went into Poland that they said was Russia, turned out it was actually Ukraine by accident.

So is there a concern that they're not being totally transparent with us and that, you know, efforts like this, with the dam -- you know, putting the dam aside, cause we don't know who did it -- but that, you know, an effort like that, with the missile in Poland and perhaps the dam, are attempting to draw us deeper into the conflict by blaming Russia, you know, when we don't know yet?

GEN. RYDER: Yeah, so I -- I -- you know, you -- you started your question with a, you know, "more broadly" speaking, so I'll -- I'll do the same, I'll talk more broadly here. I mean, as -- as we say in the Air Force, from 10,000 feet, again, why are we in this situation? In February of 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and attempted to eliminate it as a country. So the Ukrainians naturally have a right to defend themselves and we have a right to be able to support them to defend themselves.

I'm not going to speak for the Ukrainians in terms of their various activities, you know, when it -- when it comes to the things that you highlight, other than to say it's very clear that, on a daily basis, there are Russian forces attempting to kill innocent Ukrainians.

And so we, the United States government, are going to work with the international community to do everything we can to help them defend their country and take back sovereign territory.

So let me go to Ryo behind you there.

Q: Thank -- thank you very much, General. On NATO, NATO is considering a new office in Tokyo, Japan to show its alignment with the Indo-Pacific region but the -- France is opposing this initiative. Does the Pentagon support a new NATO office in Tokyo?

GEN. RYDER: Ryo, what I would tell you is that, you know, we certainly welcome the increasing cooperation between NATO and our -- and our Asian allies. Japan is a cornerstone of our security in the Indo-Pacific region, our shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific, and we certainly welcome them as a NATO global partner, but when it comes to whether or not NATO is going to open an office in Japan, that's really a -- a question for NATO and Japan, and France, in this case, to address.

Q: Just a follow-up -- when the Secretary was in France this week, did the Secretary have a chance to discuss this issue with -- with his French counterpart?

GEN. RYDER: This particular issue did not come up. OK.

Yes, ma'am?

Q: Thank you. My name is Hariana from TPA Angola. So can you tell us what could be the consequences if China and Cuba indeed build a -- a more stronger relationship other than the one that you are aware of?

GEN. RYDER: Well, you know, without getting into, you know, hypothetical situations, I think, broadly speaking, as I mentioned before, any type of activity, coercive activity or belligerent activity within our hemisphere is something that we're watching very closely. When it comes to China, it's something that we've been concerned about for a while, it's something that we continue to work with our allies and partners to counter in the hemisphere.

And so again, without getting into hypothetical situations, it's something that we'll continue to take very seriously.

Q: In the beginning, you mentioned a few trip -- successful trip made by the Secretary. Is any upcoming visit of the Secretary to Africa?

GEN. RYDER: I don't have anything to announce on that front. Obviously, Africa continues to play a very important role when it comes to our partnerships and our -- our national security interests. You know, we have a lot of very valued partners throughout the African continent. And so when the opportunity presents itself, you know, the Secretary certainly will look forward to that, but I don't have anything to announce right now. Thank you very much.

Tony?

Q: While you were traveling last week, the -- the nation came together on a debt ceiling agreement. Afterwards, Mr. McCarthy, the House Speaker, threw cold water on the idea of defense supplemental to overcome the $886 billion national security cap. He became the latest politician to invoke the fact that the Pentagon has failed five audits in a row. His point was it failed five audits in a row, if you don't think there's (waste ?) -- this has become a recurring theme among members. He's the highest ranking to bring it up again.

What -- how do you respond to that, that the Pentagon can't -- they failed five audits. Is there a correlation between the failure of the audits and effectively spending appropriated dollars from Congress? Should I be concerned, if I don't live in Washington, if you fail five audits and you're wasting my money, you're getting -- and you're getting more money every year?

GEN. RYDER: Yeah, thanks, Tony. So a couple of things. So first of all, when it comes to audits, I would tell you that the department welcomes the scrutiny and the transparency that -- that audits provide. These audits are a part of a long term effort to transform and modernize the -- the DOD and help us transform, you know, in -- in terms of providing the kinds of capabilities that the country expects.

Any entity as large as the department, there's going to be challenges, in terms of when you conduct these types of audits -- audits, it's going to take time and it's going to take investment. While we currently fall short of having a clean audit of our financial statements, we do receive favorable audit opinions on a significant amount of our resources, and there are controls in place to help ensure that taxpayer resources are being spent as intended by Congress.

So this is something that we're going to continue to take very seriously. We understand what we've been charged with as a department, in terms of national security and the -- and the appropriate use of taxpayer resources, and so we'll continue to stay after it.

Q: So if I listen to you here correctly, there's not a real correlation between failed audits and effectively spending, obligating dollars Congress authorized and appropriates every year? They're two different entities, two different mechanisms?

GEN. RYDER: Right. I mean, again, when it comes to managing the resources of the department, again, we're going to do everything we can to effectively manage and spend those -- those dollars. When it comes to the audit, again, that's something that we're going to continue to work very hard, in terms of ensuring that we can track where those dollars are being spent and how they're being spent.

Q: May I ask you one transparency question too? A couple -- about a week and a half ago, the department disclosed that SpaceX received a contract for Starlink terminals. They refused your body refused to even allow how much of the -- was -- the contract was worth. Can you go back and revisit that? These are white systems, it's not classified, and I think the public's got a right to know roughly how much money is being spent by its -- on these Starlink terminals for Ukraine.

GEN. RYDER: Yeah, I'll -- I'll take your question. You know, as you've heard us talk about, for reasons of operational security and -- and due to the critical nature of satellite communications systems, it's just something that we're just not able to get into -- to details at -- at this time.

Q: Yeah but dollars are different than technologies and how many and where they're being placed. That's all I want to ...

GEN. RYDER: Yeah -- nope, understand. Thank you.

OK, time for a few more. Let me go to Tom.

Q: Hi, thanks. Welcome back -- back from your trip. Two follow-up questions please.

Putting on your Air Force hat again, as you said, from 10,000 feet, a follow-up on Lara's question regarding F-18s. From a Air Force point of view, what would they bring to a conflict like Ukraine?

GEN. RYDER: I appreciate the question, Tom, but I don't want to get into hypothetical discussions about capabilities that ...

(CROSSTALK)

... yeah -- no, I understand. I -- I just -- by me answering that question though, it implies that we're now going to, you know, go down a fictional road where -- yeah -- no, I understand -- yeah, so.

Q: My second follow-up was to Brandi's question about the attack on Guam, and one of the parts you didn't respond to was whether it was beyond Guam, that cyberattack. Could you address that point?

GEN. RYDER: Again, I'm not going to talk about, you know, whether or not there are particular attacks or vulnerabilities. That -- that's our policy when it comes to any type of cyber activities in -- yeah. Thanks very much.

Yes, sir?

Q: Noah Robertson, I'm with the Christian Science Monitor. Thank you. President Zelenskyy said earlier in an interview that humanitarian rescue workers were being shot at by Russians. They tried to do work in the flooded area in the south of the country. Can you confirm that and offer any more details of ...

GEN. RYDER: I unfortunately, I can't. I just don't have that level of detail. Thank you very much.

OK, go to the last two questions. Yeah?

Q: Thank you. A quick question on North Korean so-called space launch. What is the current view, analysis, assessment on how soon North Korea is prepared for -- conduct the next launch? I mean, does DOD assess that it's technically possible for them to launch -- conduct the next launch very soon?

GEN. RYDER: Yeah, so -- so I'm not going to get into any discussion of intelligence that -- that we may or may not have on that front. I mean, as you know, the North Koreans have stated their intent to do that. You heard multiple leaders, to include U.S. and international leaders, to include Secretary Austin from Singapore, condemn North Korea's recent launch. It's destabilizing, it is in violation of UN Security Council Resolutions.

And so again, we'll continue to stay in close consultation with our Republic of Korea and Japanese allies, as well as other allies and partners throughout the region, to continue to discuss this situation and continue to work together to deter potential aggression.

Yes, sir? Last question.

Q: Thanks. So last week, the Pentagon rolled out a policy that aimed at -- that was aimed at banning drag shows on military installations. You know, what message does the Secretary hope service members take away from this policy change, especially in light of the fact that it came at the start of Pride Month?

GEN. RYDER: Yeah, so first let me just reiterate upfront that DOD recognizes June as LGBTQI-Plus Pride month, and that we are very grateful for and acknowledge the many contributions of service members and DOD civilian employees from the LGBTQI-Plus community who serve our country.

And as you well know, those of you who've covered DOD, we conduct special observance to recognize the continuous achievements of all Americans and to American culture for increased awareness, mutual respect and understanding, to include Pride Month.

When it comes to drag shows, however, you know, I -- I would take exception. This has been a longstanding policy, in terms of -- of activities like this, that DOD will not host drag events at U.S. military installations or facilities.

We became aware of the drag events during an April congressional hearing -- at that -- that -- there were a -- drag events scheduled to take place at DOD installations and facilities, and so again, the Secretary advised that the department will not host such events.

Q: And, you know, drawing on my -- you know, just as a quick follow-up, draw -- drawing on my own Navy background, I know, you know, crossing the lines ceremonies, for example, feature -- one of the elements is often times male sailors dressing in female garb. It -- is there -- does the policy go so far as to address activities like that at the unit level?

GEN. RYDER: So -- so again, what we're talking about here is using DOD installations and facilities to host these type of events. And so per DOD joint ethics regulations, certain criteria must be met for persons or for organizations acting in a non-federal capacity to use DOD facilities and equipment.

So hosting these types of events in federally-funded facilities is inconsistent with regulations regarding the use of DOD resources.

OK, thank you very much, everybody. Appreciate it.

https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3422384/

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June 8, 2023

By Jim Garamone , DOD News

Pentagon Spokesman Addresses Indo-Pacific, Ukraine and Race

Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder resumed briefing today after a grueling around-the-world trip with Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III.

Ryder addressed the trip, the release of a report compiled by a DOD internal review team on racial disparities in the investigative and military justice systems and answered reporters' questions on Ukraine during the briefing in the Pentagon's newly refurbished briefing room.

Austin finished the trip, which took him from Japan to Singapore to India in the Indo-Pacific region, in France where he met with European leaders and participated in the D-Day Remembrance Ceremony in Normandy.

"Each stop afforded [the secretary] the opportunity to meet with counterparts to discuss our continued focus and shared vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific region at a time of real momentum in our key relationships," Ryder said.

He said the nations of the region are coming together with the shared vision of the region for the future. Ryder said this shared vision encompasses the ideas that "all nations are free to thrive on their own terms without coercion or intimidation or bullying."

He quoted Austin's speech to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore saying "It's a vision of a free and open and secure Indo-Pacific within a world of rules and rights. And that vision is anchored in some key principles to include respect for sovereignty, adherence to international law, transparency and openness, the free flow of commerce and ideas, human rights and human dignity, equal rights for all states large and small and resolving disputes through peaceful dialogue and not coercion or conquest."

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl is following the secretary's footsteps in a visit to the region for a series of engagements in Hawaii, Korea and Japan, the press secretary said. "During the visit, he'll meet with senior Indo-Pacom military leaders and conduct various counterpart visits in Japan and Korea that will further strengthen our ironclad alliances and partnerships in the region," Ryder said.

Ryder also spoke of the Defense Department Internal Review Team on Racial Disparities in the Investigative and Military Justice System. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks formed the team, and the report has been delivered to her. "The [team] was charged with addressing root causes of racial disparities in the investigative and military justice systems, and providing actionable recommendations to improve department policies, processes and resources to address such disparities," Ryder said.

The report details 17 recommendations, based on three lines of effort. These are: training and education, service member protections, and oversight and transparency. "The [team] also found that additional data and research are warranted to identify and address root causes, mitigate bias and eliminate disparities," he said.

DOD is launching a 120-day assessment of the recommendations to be led by the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. "We remain determined to eliminate racial disparities throughout our armed forces," Ryder said. "DOD will continue to work to identify the causes of any racial, ethnic or gender disparities in the military justice system."

Ryder also announced that Secretary Austin will journey to Europe next week where he and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark A. Milley will host an in-person meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on June 15, followed by the NATO Defense Ministers meeting on June 16.

Ryder told reporters that DOD is aware of increased fighting in Ukraine. "When it comes to characterizing those particular operations, or talking about those operations, that's really something that's best left to the Ukrainians," he said.

Ryder said the department is examining the breach of the Dnipro River dam that is causing hardship, suffering and death in the region. "We're continuing to assess how this could have happened," Ryder said. "I'm not going to get into hypotheticals or speculate. I think it's very clear, however, the reason we're in this situation is because Russia invaded Ukraine. It's obviously a terrible humanitarian tragedy."

Ryder said that Russia has the power to end this suffering. "Again, why are we in this situation? In February of 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and attempted to eliminate it as a country," he said. "So, the Ukrainians naturally have a right to defend themselves. And we have a right to be able to support them to defend themselves.

"It's very clear that on a daily basis, there are Russian forces attempting to kill innocent Ukrainians. And we  the United States government  are going to work with the international community to do everything we can to help them defend their country and take back sovereign territory."

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June 8, 2023

By David Vergun , DOD News

Indo-Pacific Nations Bolstering Defense Ties, Capabilities

Nations in the Indo-Pacific want a continued strong U.S. presence and they are increasing their military capabilities and improving interoperability and training with U.S. and regional partners, said the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs.

Ely Ratner discussed "Building a Networked Security Architecture in the Indo-Pacific" at the Center for a New American Security National Security Conference on "American Power and Purpose."

While continued support of Ukraine is vital to regional security, the Indo-Pacific remains the No. 1 priority, as China is the Defense Department's pacing challenge, he said.

Ratner outlined some of the Indo-Pacific partnerships.

Philippines

Remarkable progress has taken place over the last year or so, with the agreement for access to four additional Philippine bases which will host rotational U.S. forces, he said.

These bases will provide an ability for the U.S. to respond to a number of regional contingencies, including humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, he said.

The department is also working with the Philippines on a new security assistance roadmap to try to help them develop some of the asymmetric capabilities that will be most important for the types of challenges that they're facing, particularly around their maritime periphery, Ratner said.

"It's no secret that China's assertiveness and coercion has really underscored the importance of working together to strive toward that outcome in the context of the Philippines," he said, the outcome referring to the shared vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific.

"We are conceiving of the Philippines as one of our most important alliances in the region. ... The Philippines-U.S. alliance is now rising to be on par with those other major alliances in the region. It's something we're very invested in," he said.

Japan

Japan is putting unprecedented resources into boosting its military capability, he said.

The U.S. and Japan are increasing the number of exercises, Ratner said, particularly in the vicinity of the first island chain which runs from northern Japan to the Philippines.

More importantly, Japan is increasing cooperation with South Korea, he said, mentioning the two nations sharing early warning data of North Korean missile launches as one example.

India

The U.S.-India relationship is seeing an increasing strategic alignment, Ratner said.

The department supports New Delhi's military modernization and co-development and -production of the U.S. defense industrial base with India's.

The department also welcomes India's participation in multinational exercises in the region, he added.

"A stronger India that can defend its own interests, and defend its own sovereignty is good for the United States," he said.

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June 8, 2023

By Jim Garamone , DOD News

Defense Leaders See Increase in Risky Chinese Intercepts

U.S. forces operating in international waterways or airspace are seeing an alarming increase in the number of risky aerial intercepts and confrontations at sea by Chinese aircraft and vessels, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said he's worried over chances of miscalculation at a conference in Singapore last week.

U.S. military aircraft and ships operate throughout the world in international waters and airspace. These "freedom of navigation" operations ensure crucial transportation routes remain open to all nations.

Military aircraft interactions occur throughout the world on a regular basis, Defense Department officials said. The vast majority of these interactions are safe and professional. Many of these safe and professional interactions occur between U.S. and Chinese forces.

But there has been an increase in unsafe and unprofessional intercepts of U.S. and allied forces lawfully operating in international zones throughout the Indo-Pacific region, said U.S. Indo-Pacific Command officials.

The officials said there have been "scores of dangerous incidents in the air and at sea over the past 18 months alone." They include:

In February 2022, a Chinese naval ship directed a laser at an Australian P-8A Poseidon aircraft operating in Australia's exclusive economic zone, endangering the health of Australian airmen.

In June 2022, a Chinese J-16 fighter cut across the nose of another Australian P-8A Poseidon that was operating in international airspace over the South China Sea. The Chinese jet released a round of chaff, which was ingested into the Australian aircraft's engine.

Recently, the Chinese coast guard employed water cannons, military-grade lasers and erratic conduct to try and intimidate the Philippines from lawful operations within that country's exclusive economic zone, Indo-Pacific officials said.

In December 2022, a Chinese Navy J-11 pilot flew in front of  and within 20 feet of  the nose of a U.S. Air Force RC-135, which had to maneuver away to avoid a collision. The Air Force jet was lawfully conducting routine operations over the South China Sea in international airspace.

Just last month, a Chinese J-16 fighter pilot performed an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver during the intercept of a U.S. Air Force RC-135 aircraft. "The PRC pilot flew directly in front of the nose of the RC-135, forcing the U.S. aircraft to fly through its wake turbulence," Indo-Pacific Command officials said.

In June, the American destroyer USS Chung-Hoon and Canadian frigate HMCS Montreal conducted a routine transit from south to north through the Taiwan Strait when the Chinese destroyer Luyang III executed unsafe maneuvers in the vicinity of Chung-Hoon. The Chinese vessel overtook Chung-Hoon on its port side and crossed the Chung-Hoon's bow at 150 yards.

"These are not isolated incidents, but patterns of behavior that significantly increases the risk of accidents and constitute a grave threat to regional security," Indo-Pacific Command officials said.

U.S. officials use communication channels to discuss these dangerous encounters with the Chinese military. Still, the Chinese have limited contact between U.S. and Chinese military officials. "The Department of Defense is committed to opening lines of military-to-military communication with the PRC in order to responsibly manage the defense relationship between the two countries," DOD officials said.

In the meantime, the United States will continue to fly, sail and operate - safely and responsibly - wherever international law allows. U.S. forces "will continue to fly in international airspace with due regard for the safety of all vessels and aircraft under international law," DOD officials said. "We expect all countries in the Indo-Pacific region to use international airspace safely and in accordance with international law."

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The Goverment issued a decree on the NATO Ottawa Agreement

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland

8.6.2023

The Government plenary session issued a decree on the Agreement on the Status of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, National Representatives and International Staff, also known as the Ottawa Agreement on 8 June.

The Government decree brings into force the Ottawa Agreement and the act on bringing into force the provisions of a legislative nature in the Agreement.

The Ottawa Agreement concerns the privileges and immunities of national representatives to NATO and NATO's international staff. It also defines the status of NATO as a legal person.

Finland became a member of NATO on 4 April 2023 upon depositing its instrument of accession to the North Atlantic Treaty with the United States Government. As a member, Finland is expected to accede to a number of NATO agreements, Ottawa Agreement being one of them.

Parliament accepted Finland's accession to the Ottawa Agreement on 1 March 2023 as part of the Government proposal on Finland's accession to the North Atlantic Treaty. The President of the Republic confirmed the act bringing into force the Ottawa Agreement on 23 March, and Finland signed the Agreement on 11 May. The Agreement entered into force internationally in respect of Finland when Finland deposited its instrument of ratification in Washington on 7 June.

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Rule of Law: Commission launches infringement procedure against POLAND for violating EU law with the new law establishing a special committee

Republic of Poland

Press release

8 June 2023

Brussels

Today, the European Commission opened an infringement procedure by sending a letter of formal notice to Poland for violations of EU law. This decision follows a thorough assessment by the Commission of the new law in Poland on the State Committee for the Examination of Russian influence on the internal security of Poland between 2007 and 2022, which is in force since 31 May 2023.

The Commission considers that the new law violates:

- the principle of democracy (Articles 2 and 10 TEU);

- the principles of legality and non-retroactivity of sanctions (Article 49 Charter) and general principles of legal certainty and res judicata;

- the rights to effective judicial protection (Article 47 Charter), ne bis in idem and the protection of professional secrecy (Article 7 Charter);

- the requirements of EU law relating to data protection (GDPR and Article 8 Charter).

More concretely, the Commission considers that the new law unduly interferes with the democratic process. The activities of the committee, e.g., investigations and public hearings, risking to create grave reputational damage for candidates in elections and, by finding that a person acted under Russian influence, could limit the effectiveness of the political rights of persons elected in democratic elections.

The new law provides a very broad and unspecified definition of "Russian influence" and "activities". The Committee may impose sanctions prohibiting a public official to hold functions relating to the use of public funds for a period of up to 10 years. This is similar in nature to measures provided for in the Criminal Code. These sanctions are applicable also to behaviour which was legal at the time of conduct. Thereby the law violates the principles of legality and of non-retroactivity.

The Committee's decisions are subject to review only by administrative courts which is limited to the requirement of respect of the law and cannot review the correctness of the assessment of facts and the weighing of evidence as conducted by the Committee.

Finally, as regards the processing of personal data, the new law does not provide for a proper legal basis for the processing nor the necessary safeguards for sensitive data. It is incompatible with EU data protection rules.

Next steps

Poland has 21 calendar days to reply to the letter of formal notice. If it does not address the Commission's grievances, the Commission may decide to send a reasoned opinion as the next step in the infringement procedure.

Background

Democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights are among the founding values of the European Union (Article 2 TEU). They are essential for the functioning of the EU as a whole.

On 26 May 2023, the Sejm, the lower house of the national legislature of Poland, adopted a law empowering an administrative committee, whose members would be appointed by the Sejm, to assess and decide whether individuals should be deprived of the right to hold public office. The new law, signed by the President of the Republic on 29 May 2023, sets up a special state committee, as part of the public administration, tasked with conducting inquiries determining whether senior public officials acted in the period of 2007-2022 under Russian influence to the detriment of the public interest. The committee is empowered to, amongst others, obtain classified information, change or repeal administrative decisions, even if such decisions were confirmed by an administrative court, and deprive individuals, by means of an administrative decision, of the right to hold public office related to the handling of public funds for up to 10 years.

On 30 May, the Commission issued a statement expressing concerns on the possible violations constituted by this law and committing to its careful analysis. The next day, Commissioner Reynders sent a letter to the Minister for European Affairs of Poland, asking for more information about the new law without delay. On 1 June the Commission received a reply by Poland to the Commissioner's letter, which further contributed to the analysis of the law. On 2 June 2023, the President of the Republic tabled some amendments to the law, however the legal situation remains unchanged.

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Bomb kills 11, injures 30 inside mosque in northern Afghanistan

Iran Press TV

Thursday, 08 June 2023 6:23 PM

Eleven people have been killed in a bomb explosion inside a mosque in Afghanistan's northern province of Badakhshan.

The interior ministry run by the Taliban said in a statement 30 people were also injured in the bombing at Nabawi Mosque n the Hesa-e-Awal area of Fayzabad district on Thursday.

There are concerns the number of casualties could rise.

The former police commander of the northern province of Baghlan, Safiullah Samim, was among the dead.

"The Ministry of Interior of the IEA condemns this brutality of the disgraced enemies," said the statement.

The blast came as "a great number of compatriots" had gathered for a funeral service for Taliban's deputy governor of Badakhshan, Nisar Ahmad Ahmadi, who was killed in an attack earlier this week, the ministry said. The Daesh Takfiri terrorist group claimed responsibility for the bombing in Badakhshan, which also killed the deputy governor's driver and wounded 10 other people.

The Taliban government has been carrying out raids against members of the terrorist group, which has targeted Taliban administration officials.

They also claimed the killing of the governor of Balkh province in an attack in March.

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US defense official: China's maneuvers risk conflict

'Dangerous' incidents in South China Sea and Taiwan Strait made worse by Beijing's refusal to talk, official says.

Alex Willemyns for RFA 2023.06.08 -- A rise in "dangerous maneuvers" by China's military risks "a crisis or conflict" in the South China Sea or Taiwan Strait, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense responsible for the region said Thursday.

The Pentagon has in the past two weeks released footage of two incidents of near-accidents involving Chinese vessels.

The first, from May 26, shows a Chinese jet veering suddenly in front of a U.S. reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea. The second, from June 2, shows a similar maneuver from a Chinese warship.

It's part of a "steep rise" in "aggressive, unprofessional, risky, unsafe behavior" that has also included the release of flares and chaff - clusters of metal pieces - at U.S.-allied aircraft, said Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs.

"It's dangerous, it's risky, and it tempts an incident that could lead to some kind of crisis or conflict," Ratner said at an event at the Center for a New American Security, adding that it was made worse by a breakdown in communications between the two militaries.

"It's happening in the context of [China's military] being unwilling to engage with the United States in military-to-military communications - not just crisis communications, but dialogue as well," he said.

American defense officials have complained about their Chinese counterparts' refusal to speak on the phone since U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken nixed a February trip to Beijing after an alleged Chinese spy balloon was discovered over the United States.

China's new defense minister, Li Shangfu, also declined an invitation to meet with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin when they were in Singapore last weekend for the annual Shangri-La Dialogue.

"We think that's really problematic," Ratner said.

Cold thaw

Ratner's comments come amid strained efforts by U.S. diplomats to re-engage with China after nearly a year of rising tensions that began with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's August visit to Taiwan.

The relationship has been further strained by the spy balloon, Blinken's canceled Beijing trip, an unofficial visit to the United States by Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and U.S. efforts to cut China's technology sector off from high-end American microchips.

Meanwhile, there has also been no shortage of warnings from U.S. generals of an imminent invasion of Taiwan by China as early as later this year, and Republican and Democratic lawmakers have seized on China policy as a rare area of bipartisan unity.

However, two senior U.S. officials were in Beijing on Monday in an attempt to pave the way for a new Blinken visit to Beijing, and there have been reports the U.S. secretary of state will make the trip within weeks. President Joe Biden has also predicted a thaw.

But such efforts to move toward a thaw in relations are being complicated by the rise in near-accidents between the two militaries, which Chinese officials have blamed on the U.S. side.

Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told Radio Free Asia last month that the "provocative and dangerous moves" by American military vessels in their "close-in reconnaissance on China" was the ultimate cause of the recent near-accidents.

Ratner told the CNAS conference any suggestion that the U.S. military was even partly to blame in the incidents "makes me want to tear my hair out" given the aggressive maneuvers from China.

"We're going to continue to fly, sail and operate safely and responsibly, in accordance with international law, as we have been doing," he said Thursday. "This is a major problem."

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Copyright 1998-2023, RFA. Used with the permission of Radio Free Asia, 2025 M St. NW, Suite 300, Washington DC 20036. For any commercial use of RFA content please send an email to: mahajanr@rfa.org. RFA content June not be used in a manner which would give the appearance of any endorsement of any product or support of any issue or political position. Please read the full text of our Terms of Use.

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ASEAN members to hold first joint drills in contested South China Sea

The non-combat drills will take place near Indonesia's Natuna Islands in September.

By Tria Dianti for BenarNews 2023.06.08 -- Southeast Asian nations will hold their first joint military exercises in the South China Sea, ASEAN chair Indonesia said Thursday, amid rising tensions between Beijing and Washington in the disputed waterway and Taiwan Strait.

The non-combat drills will take place near Indonesia's Natuna Islands in September as a show of unity among the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Indonesian military officials said.

"All [ASEAN countries] have confirmed that they will attend," Julius Widjojono, a spokesman for Indonesia's armed forces, told BenarNews, adding the drill would be an annual event. However, there had been no confirmation from Myanmar on whether it would take part, Julius said. Strife-torn Myanmar is persona non grata at major ASEAN meetings.

China claims nearly the entire South China Sea, including waters within the exclusive economic zones of Taiwan and ASEAN member-states Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. While Indonesia does not regard itself as a party to the South China Sea dispute, Beijing claims historic rights to parts of that sea overlapping Indonesia's exclusive economic zone in and around the Natunas.

Indonesia's military commander Adm. Yudo Margono, who proposed the ASEAN drill during a meeting of the bloc's defense forces chiefs on Wednesday in Bali, said the exercises would enhance regional stability.

"Indonesia will continue to promote a safe, peaceful and stable region free from any threats and disturbances that threaten the sovereignty of the states," Yudo said in a statement Wednesday.

"A safe sea will automatically boost our countries' economy."

'Strong message to the major powers'

The ASEAN drill, dubbed ASEAN Solidity Exercise, or Asec01N, will involve army, navy and air force units from the member-states, and Timor Leste, an observer state. The exercises will focus on maritime security and search-and-rescue operations.

Khairul Fahmi, a military and security analyst at the Jakarta-based Institute for Security and Strategic Studies, said the exercise was a good initiative by Indonesia.

"This is a concrete form of defense diplomacy to build trust, reduce concerns and misunderstandings between countries, especially ASEAN. Plus, there will be many challenges and threats to Indonesia's national interests," Fahmi said.

He said Indonesia's initiative also affirmed its sovereign rights in the North Natuna Sea, which China claims as part of its historical rights marked by a nine-dash line that overlaps with other countries' exclusive economic zones.

"This is part of ASEAN's efforts to jointly play a more strategic role in maintaining regional stability," Fahmi said.

"At the same time, it sends a strong message to the major powers that have interests in the region, especially in the North Natuna Sea, not to ignore ASEAN."

China has built military installations on some of the islands and reefs it controls in the South China Sea. In 2016, an international tribunal ruled that China's claims had no legal basis under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), but Beijing rejected the ruling and continues to assert its presence.

Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia have accused China of disrupting their oil and gas exploration activities with frequent incursions by Chinese coast guard and maritime militia ships, leading to confrontations. ASEAN and China have been negotiating a code of conduct for years to manage disputes peacefully, but progress has been glacial.

The United States, which is not a claimant but is in a defense treaty with the Philippines, has challenged China's claims by conducting "freedom of navigation" operations in the waterway.

While officials from some ASEAN states have expressed worry about the possibility of war breaking out between the superpowers over Taiwan, Washington and Manila earlier this year struck a deal to give U.S. forces expanded access to military bases in the Philippines - a move that angered China.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news organization.

Copyright 1998-2023, RFA. Used with the permission of Radio Free Asia, 2025 M St. NW, Suite 300, Washington DC 20036. For any commercial use of RFA content please send an email to: mahajanr@rfa.org. RFA content June not be used in a manner which would give the appearance of any endorsement of any product or support of any issue or political position. Please read the full text of our Terms of Use.

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Laos to proceed with seventh Mekong dam despite impact concerns

Affected residents of Laos and Thailand have had little say in the planning process.

By RFA Lao -- Pressing ahead with its vision to become the "Battery of Southeast Asia," the government of Laos is going forward with plans to build its seventh of nine mainstream dams on the Mekong River, despite widespread concerns that it could inflict social and environmental damage.

The 728-megawatt Phou Ngoy Dam, with a projected completion date of 2029, would join the currently operational Xayaburi and Don Sahong Dams as well as the Pak Beng, Pak Lay, Luang Prabang and Sanakham Dams, in various stages of planning. Two others, Pak Chom and Ban Koum, will follow.

The US$2.4 billion dam is a joint investment between the Charoen Energy and Water Asia Company of Thailand and the Lao government, and will be constructed through a partnership between South Korea's Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction and Korea Western Power.

Electricity generated by the dam will mostly be sold to Thailand, although it will also be used to power parts of southern Laos.

Laos has built dozens of hydropower dams on the Mekong and its tributaries under its "Battery of Southeast Asia" vision, with ultimate plans for scores more hoping to export the electricity they generate to other countries in the region.

Though the Lao government sees power generation as a way to boost the country's economy, the projects are controversial because of their environmental impact, displacement of villagers without adequate compensation, and questionable financial and power demand arrangements.

'Villagers don't need the dam'

Plans for the project are currently in the last stage of discussions between investors and related sectors, after which they will be submitted to the Mekong River Commission to undergo a six-month Prior Consultation and Agreement, or PNPCA, process.

The Mekong River Commission is an inter-government agency that works with regional governments to manage the Mekong's resources.

While the government is prepared to press ahead with the project, the more than 7,000 residents of 86 villages in Laos' Champasak province and inhabitants of six villages in neighboring Thailand's Ubon Ratchathani province who will be forced to relocate for its construction aren't so sure.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal, they told RFA Lao that the current proposal for the dam will impact their livelihoods and destroy the Mekong ecosystem that their families have relied on for generations.

"A dam affects everything, like fishing," said a Ubon Ratchathani resident. "When the dam releases water, the level of water is high. It's unusual. It's not a phenomenon. The truth is, villagers don't need the dam, period."

The resident said the dam will lead to flooding and landslides along the Mekong, interrupt transportation routes, and cause drought when water is stored.

A second resident of Ubon Ratchathani expressed frustration that villagers who will be affected by the dam have been left out of the decision-making process.

"Before construction, the dam developers and the government should consult with villagers - they can't just go ahead and build it," they said. "Villagers need to know how much the dam will affect them because their livelihoods depend on the Mekong River."

'Nothing we can do to resist'

A villager in Laos' Champasak province said residents don't want to move, but if they must, they should be involved in discussions about compensation.

"No official came to talk with us about whether we will be evacuated or not," he said. "We have lived in this village for many years. We have a stable life, but if we have to move we don't know where we will go."

A resident of Champasak's Pakse district bemoaned the lack of recourse for Lao villagers impacted by the government's dam-building spree.

"Villagers can't do anything to stop dam building in Laos," he said. "If the government wants to build one, there is nothing we can do to resist."

Activists say that more than 1 million people will be directly or indirectly affected by the Phu Ngoy dam due to its impact on the environment, navigation, fishing, and water flow.

In March, Thai and Chinese investors signed a power purchase agreement that paves the way for the construction of the Pak Lay Dam, the third dam to be built on the Mekong in Laos.

The project in the Pak Lay district of northern Laos' Xayaburi province - delayed for several years - could see work on basic infrastructure like a bridge and road access start immediately, according to an official from the Ministry of Energy and Mines.

Construction on the main structure is scheduled to begin early next year and the dam is expected to be open for business by 2032.

Translated by Sidney Khotpanya. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

Copyright 1998-2023, RFA. Used with the permission of Radio Free Asia, 2025 M St. NW, Suite 300, Washington DC 20036. For any commercial use of RFA content please send an email to: mahajanr@rfa.org. RFA content June not be used in a manner which would give the appearance of any endorsement of any product or support of any issue or political position. Please read the full text of our Terms of Use.

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'In Dire Straits': Taliban's Alleged Interference In Foreign Aid Deprives Afghans Of Lifesaving Help

By Mansoor Khosrow, Fayeza Ibrahimi, Abubakar Siddique June 08, 2023

Ghulam Haider has depended on food and cash handouts from international aid agencies in order to survive.

He is among the millions of people who have received lifesaving aid in Afghanistan, where the Taliban's takeover in 2021 worsened a devastating humanitarian crisis and triggered an economic collapse.

But tens of thousands of Afghans have been forced to fend for themselves after aid agencies, including the UN's World Food Program (WFP), recently suspended their operations in several provinces.

The move came amid U.S. fears that funds it provided to UN aid agencies that are distributing aid in Afghanistan were ending up in the hands of the Taliban. Afghans and aid workers have accused the militant group of interfering in the delivery of foreign assistance.

The suspension of aid operations in the provinces of Ghor, Uruzgan, and parts of Ghazni appears to be already pushing more people toward starvation.

"People are miserable," Haider, a resident of Ghor, in Afghanistan's remote central highlands, told RFE/RL's Radio Azadi. "People here are destitute."

He said the WFP suspended its delivery of food, cash, and other assistance in April. "There has been no help for a month," Haider said. "People are in trouble."

Wahidullah Amani, a spokesman for the WFP in Afghanistan, said the UN food agency stopped distributing food aid, including meals to schools, in late April. Amani estimated that nearly 500,000 people in Ghor now faced food insecurity.

"Families who expected to receive food aid will now be deprived of assistance until these interventions by the local authorities are resolved," Amani told Radio Azadi.

The United Nations estimates that two-thirds of Afghanistan's 40 million people, or more than 28 million, need humanitarian assistance this year. At least 6 million of them are on the brink of starvation.

Hikmat Laali, an activist in Ghor, said the humanitarian situation in Ghor was rapidly deteriorating. "The poorest are in dire straits," he told Radio Azadi. "Their miseries will increase if the people continue to be deprived of food aid."

Locals in Ghor have accused Taliban militants of confiscating food, money, and other assistance they received from NGOs. Observers have also accused the Taliban of trying to channel aid to its own fighters or communities that support the group.

"People were left with little food during the winter and had little fuel," Mohammad Hassan Hakimi, an activist in Ghor, told Radio Azadi.

'Funding For The Taliban'

Last month, the United States said its NGO partners had suspended aid in several Afghan provinces following "evidence of continued attempts by the Taliban" to divert assistance.

"We do not provide funding for the Taliban," Matthew Miller, a U.S. State Department spokesman, told journalists in Washington on May 24. "We require all of our partners that we work with to have safeguards in place to assure the assistance reaches those who need it."

Miller said that the WFP had halted operations in two districts of the southeastern province of Ghazni from January to April because local Taliban officials attempted to direct the delivery of aid.

He added that an aid organization that received funding from Washington suspended its activities in the southern province of Uruzgan in April "after the Taliban issued demands to provide transportation support to Taliban representatives and otherwise interfered in staff recruitment processes."

Miller's comments came after John Sopko, the U.S. special inspector-general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), a government watchdog, said that "it is clear from our work that the Taliban is using various methods to divert U.S. aid dollars."

"Unfortunately, as I sit here today, I cannot assure this committee or the American taxpayer we are not currently funding the Taliban," Sopko told the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on April 19. "Nor can I assure you that the Taliban are not diverting the money we are sending for the intended recipients, which are the poor Afghan people."

Sopko added that the "Taliban generate income from U.S. aid by imposing customs charges on shipments coming into the country and charging taxes and fees directly on NGOs."

'Devastating Impact'

Philippe Kropf, the head of communications at WFP, said the United Nations briefly halted aid distribution in Ghor in January. Weeks later, the agency resumed its operations after Taliban assurances that its fighters would not interfere in the delivery of aid. But continued Taliban meddling, he said, forced the WFP to suspend its activities.

Kropf said the WFP did not channel funds or food aid through the militant group. "Our operations are guided by the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality, humanity, and independence," he said, adding that the WFP assists people directly through its vetted partners based on independent needs assessments.

"Any instance where interference with WFP assistance is detected that cannot be resolved locally will result in the suspension of deliveries," he said.

The Taliban has rejected allegations that it is interfering in aid deliveries. Chief Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the Taliban's Economy Ministry had formed joint operational procedures with agencies to ensure that aid distribution is transparent.

"If any problems are detected, the government will have to intervene to address those," he told Radio Azadi. "But such issues are rare."

The Taliban's ban on Afghan women working for local and foreign NGOs has also adversely affected the delivery of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan.

That decision in December led major international humanitarian organizations to halt or reduce their operations, including emergency food distribution, health services, and education. In April, the ban was expanded to include the United Nations.

On June 5, the United Nations revised its annual aid budget for Afghanistan from $4.6 billion to $3.2 billion this year, citing reduced funding from international donors. It said in a statement that a "changing operating context" in the wake of the Taliban's ban on female aid workers had contributed to the revised plan.

Kropf said the lack of funding had prompted the WFP to cut emergency assistance to some 8 million highly vulnerable Afghans this year.

"Such cutbacks in humanitarian food assistance will have a devastating impact on women, young children, and the elderly in particular," he said.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-aid- stopped-taliban-interference/32450825.html

Copyright (c) 2023. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Explosion Rips Through Mosque In Northern Afghanistan During Funeral, At Least 19 Dead

By RFE/RL's Radio Azadi June 08, 2023

An explosion has torn through a mosque in the northern Afghan province of Badakhshan during a funeral service for a Taliban official, killing at least 19 people, including the former Taliban security commander in the city of Baghlan, and wounding 38 others.

Moazuddin Ahmadi, the head of information and culture of Badakhshan Province, told RFE/RL's Radio Azadi that the explosion took place on June 8 in the city of Faizabad during the ceremony for a Taliban deputy governor, Nissar Ahmad Ahmadi, who himself was killed along with his driver in a suicide car bomb attack three days earlier.

"In this incident...the former police commander in Baghlan, was martyred," he said.

He later issued an appeal for local citizens to donate blood to help treat the victims.

No individuals or groups have taken responsibility for the attack, though the Khorasan Province branch of Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the attack on Ahmadi on June 6.

The United Nations mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) said the attack was "deeply disturbing."

"UNAMA unequivocally condemns this and a recent spate of appalling and indiscriminate attacks that have shown a total disregard for civilian lives," it said in a tweet.

Islamic State-Khorasan has been the key rival of the Taliban-led government since the group seized power in Afghanistan in August 2021. It recently increased its attacks, targeting both Taliban patrols and members of Afghanistan's Shi'ite minority.

Taliban forces have responded by carrying out military operations this month against the IS group in several provinces of Afghanistan.

The UN Security Council warned in March about an increase in the number of militants and the threat of IS in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Central Command has estimated that 2,250 IS militants are in Afghanistan. It has also said that it is possible they would target American assets and those of their allies.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/north-afghanistan- explosion-mosque-casualties/32450429.html

Copyright (c) 2023. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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US, Japan & Taiwan to Integrate Real-Time Drone Data As Tensions Mount Over 'China Threat'

Sputnik News

20230608

Svetlana Ekimenko

The US has been claiming that China - dubbed a security challenge last year by the NATO alliance - is preparing to take control of Taiwan, which Beijing sees as its rogue province, by military force. Washington and its NATO allies have been building up their presence in the Indo-Pacific, and further ratcheting up tensions.

The US, Japan, and Taiwan are planning to begin sharing real-time data from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) as part of a plan to enhance interoperability in the Indo-Pacific, a US report stated.

Washington is purportedly determined to boost military coordination between its allies under the pretext that if China were to attack Taiwan, such a scenario would call for building a "common operational picture" using reconnaissance drones' capability.

Four MQ-9B SeaGuardian drones - a maritime version of the American Reaper UAV - are to be delivered to Taipei by the US defense contractor General Atomics Aeronautical Systems some time in 2025, sources were cited as saying. The drones, which can be configured with cross-domain capabilities for a broad range of maritime surveillance, are said to have been successful in locating, tracking, and targeting enemy ships and radars. The UAVs, once they arrive in Taiwan, would be allowed to integrate into the system deployed by the US military and the Japanese Self-Defense Force in the region. Accordingly, reconnaissance information gathered simultaneously by the drones would be available to all partners in the system.

Taiwan's military would then be taught how to operate the new drone system, in conjunction with US and Japanese counterparts, the report added.

"We will be taking a practical approach to ensuring that integration is done as quickly as possible," a source told the report.

Lt-Gen Steven Rudder, former head of the US Marine Corps forces in the Indo-Pacific, explained:

"The MQ-9 is a relatively new system to this theatre, and we have tried very hard to begin to develop an M-Q9 web of orbits with our partners out here - much like we have in the Middle East, Africa and other places in Europe."

Washington is reportedly making this move despite the fact that it will be seen as a provocation by the Chinese and bound to inflate tensions even further.

"The sharing of data between Japan and Taiwan, between Taiwan and the Philippines, between the US and all three of them, is so crucial, but it's also one of the big taboos because China will see it as escalatory," a senior US military official was cited as admitting.

There has not yet been any comment on the report from the Pentagon, or Taiwan's presidential office.

The United States is officially committed to a "one-China" policy, which concedes that Taiwan is part of China. However, the United States has kept informal relations with Taipei and provides arms to its government, despite the fact that Beijing considers any relations between foreign nations and Taipei to be meddling in China's domestic affairs.

The report comes as NATO allies have been building up their presence in the Indo-Pacific, with the US-led military bloc labeling China a security challenge last year. Japan, the United States, Australia and Canada conducted joint naval exercises over three days in the East China Sea this month, aimed at strengthening interoperability.

Peddling the 'China threat' narrative, Washington has been resorting to tactics of intimidation, such as sending warships and military aircraft, engaging in close-in reconnaissance and generally flexing its military muscles near China's territorial sea and airspace. As part of this policy, in the first quarter of 2023, Washington proposed $9.1Bln for military investments in the Asia-Pacific within the framework of its Pacific Deterrence Initiative.

In addition to the US being part of several alliances and partnerships throughout the region at present - such as AUKUS, which groups it with Australia and the UK, and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) with Australia, India, and Japan - Washington has also opened four new military bases in the Philippines. Earlier this year, the US also signed a defense and maritime surveillance pact with Papua New Guinea.

In response, China has warned that to push for "such alliances in the region" is "a way of kidnapping regional countries and fuelling confrontation, which will only plunge the Asia-Pacific into a whirlpool of disputes and conflicts". China's minister of national defense, General Li Shangfu, speaking at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue defense summit in Singapore recently, warned of the dangers of a severe conflict breaking out between Beijing and Washington.

"It is undeniable that a severe conflict or confrontation between China and the US would be an unbearable disaster for the world," Li stated.

The minister also noted that, "we, the Chinese, will decide how to solve the Taiwan issue. This issue does not tolerate the intervention of foreign forces."

However, the Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense (MND) on Thursday denied media reports about plans to exchange real-time data from naval reconnaissance drones with Japan and the United States.

"The MND has not yet been informed of plans to share real-time data from naval reconnaissance drones with the US and Japan as has been reported by some media outlets. We would like to kindly request that due diligence be exercised in verifying the source of information to prevent misleading the public," the ministry said on Twitter.

The the situation over the island has been escalating recently after Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in April

 Sputnik

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Secretary Antony J. Blinken With Hiba Nasr of Asharq News

US Department of State

Interview

Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State

Intercontinental Hotel

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

June 8, 2023

QUESTION: (In Arabic.) Mr. Secretary, thanks for sitting down with us.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: It's good to be with you.

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, since we are in Saudi Arabia, I have to start by asking about the relationship with Saudi Arabia. We saw this drama in October over OPEC+ decision, and you said at that time that you would review the relationship. Also you said that at the beginning of the first term of the administration. You kept saying as well that this relationship is strategic. But does a strategic relationship or partnership require periodic reviews? And if I may ask, is it a strategic relationship or a transactional?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, it is a strategic relationship. And, so you see, we had a difference in views in October over the OPEC+ decision, but I think what we're seeing is an increasing convergence in our partnership to advance in issues of mutual interest to Saudi Arabia, to the United States, and, for that matter, to countries in the region and beyond. Look, we've had a partnership together for decades that was grounded in security, in cooperation, energy, and, in recent years, counterterrorism. And that foundation remains.

But what we're also seeing - and what this visit reconfirms - is that there are important opportunities for our two countries to work together to advance some very positive issues, very positive trends. De-escalation of tensions in the region - that's important, and we're working together on that. Greater integration of the region - there are real opportunities that we're working on together. Collaboration between our countries in addressing some of the challenges that not only are of concern to our people, but to people around the world, from health security to climate security to energy security to food security. And of course, the transition to clean energy, working on emerging technologies.

So there's a longstanding foundation, but there are also increasingly areas where we have convergence, and we're working together to advance the mutual interests of our people. So in that sense it is strategic, and I think that's important.

Second, I think if you look at the work that we've been doing together - just to cite two examples, Yemen, ending a horrific war, Saudi Arabia is playing a critical and very positive role in trying to bring that war to an end, and then just in recent weeks, the partnership we've had in Sudan in trying to end the violence that's emerged there.

So I see this as being a positive trajectory based on the interests that we share. And as I said, it's happening in a - almost in a broader terrain than just, as important as they are, the military, energy, and counterterrorism cooperation we've had for decades.

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, you arrived here on Tuesday, the same day the Iranians - they opened their embassy in Riyadh. And it was the outcome of a deal brokered by the Chinese. I know people are realistic about the deal and the expectations, but would it (inaudible) to see this move by the Chinese - does it concern you to see in this region this assertive diplomacy by the Chinese?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: We applaud what happened. Anything that de-escalates tensions, that takes at least one problem off of the agenda, and in this case also may have the additional benefit of helping to advance a peace in Yemen, we think is a good thing.

QUESTION: Even if the Chinese have a role in Yemen, you don't mind that?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: If countries, whoever they are, can play a positive role in helping to advance peace, de-escalate tensions, again, we think that's a good thing. And of course, the Saudis and Iranians have been talking together for at least a couple of years to get to this place. We'll see what happens now. But again, if it reduces tensions, if it at least takes one problem off of the board, that's very positive.

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, I'm asking here about the Chinese role in the region. It's growing. We're noticing that. Everybody is saying that. Does it concern the U.S.?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: If countries can play - including China - can play a positive role wherever it is in helping to advance peace, to reduce tensions then, again, I think that's positive. That's what we should all be trying to do. And more broadly, any actions that major powers, including China, take that are positive, that advance peace, reconciliation, that's good.

QUESTION: Are you trying to revive the negotiations over the JCPOA?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: So we, from day one, sought to determine whether a return to mutual compliance with the JCPOA was possible, and we made a significant effort in that direction, as did the European partners, and, for that matter, Russia and China. But Iran either couldn't or wouldn't do what was necessary to get back into compliance with the JCPOA. So the JCPOA is not our focus.

We continue to believe that diplomacy is the best way more generally to sustainably, verifiably, and effectively ensure that Iran doesn't acquire a nuclear weapon. So we remain open to diplomacy, and that is clearly the best path. At the same time, we're also very determined to stand against the actions that Iran takes that are dangerous, destabilizing, and that was very much the - part of the conversation that we had yesterday with our colleagues at the Gulf Cooperation Council.

QUESTION: You said many times - and the President as well said - that you will do what it takes to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. The Israelis are currently promoting a military option. Is this option on the table?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: President Biden has been very clear - repeatedly, consistently - that, again, all options are on the table to ensure that Iran doesn't get a nuclear weapon.

QUESTION: Are you trying to get Israel and Saudi Arabia closer for this purpose, for preventing (inaudible)?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: So what we've seen in the region is greater integration, and we've seen that in part through the process of normalization between Israel and its neighbors, between Arab countries, Muslim-majority countries beyond the region. And that's a very positive trend. It's something that we've been determined to help work on, both to deepen some of the existing agreements and also to broaden the effort. So if there are things we could do to support further normalization, the further integration of the region, we will.

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, you spoke about Sudan, and the negotiations are now suspended. You imposed sanctions, but what's next? What tools are you going to use to bring the parties, again, to the table? And how do you respond to the critics that say the conflict could have been avoided, had you decided to engage with (inaudible)?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, second part first, we've been engaged from day one on Sudan. And in fact, until the generals decided to go to war with each other, we were on a positive track in advancing a transition to the civilian-led government. That had made significant progress, including as a result of our very engaged diplomacy.

But tragically, the two generals in question decided to go at each other and inflict terrible violence on the entire country. And even then, we immediately engaged to try to stop the violence, to try to get ceasefires, to get humanitarian assistance flowing, and to get Sudan back on the track it had been on - toward a transition to a civilian-led government. We had working - by the way, in very close partnership with Saudi Arabia, we had some success in getting very limited ceasefires that were highly imperfect, but did allow more humanitarian assistance to get in and reach about 2 million people that otherwise would not have had this assistance provided to them.

But we've also reached a pointed where increasingly both sides are not respecting the commitments they make in terms of these ceasefires. So we're really looking to see, in the days ahead, whether they are serious about this process, serious about a hearing to the ceasefires that they commit to, and serious about them, hopefully, broadening that to get back to looking at a broader cessation of hostiles and a transition process. If not, we will have to look at other options for dealing with the situation.

QUESTION: Are sanctions an option?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Again, we'll - we have various tools at our disposal. I think we've made that clear in recent days. I'm not going to get ahead of ourselves. First, we want to see if they're genuinely serious about a ceasefire process. And if they're not, we have tools at our disposal to try to move this in another way.

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, you said, and everybody in this administration is saying, that you will support Ukraine as long as it takes; it's an open-ended commitment. I mean, can you elaborate a little bit about the outcome acceptable to you and Ukraine as well?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, first, I think it's important to note that the outcome that Vladmir Putin sought is already, for him, unachievable. He's already failed in what he was trying to accomplish, which was to erase Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its independence, to absorb it into Russia. That has failed; it can't succeed. Where exactly this settles and under what conditions and when, that does remain to be determined.

And I think what we've heard, not just from us, not just from the more than 50 countries that are actively supporting Ukraine in helping it to defend itself, but from more than 140 countries at the United Nations, multiple occasions, in resolutions at the Security - at the General Assembly, are a commitment that countries want to see peace, but they want to see a peace that is consistent with the principles of the United Nations Charter, notably territorial integrity and sovereignty.

So this is not just us. This is countries around the world saying yes, we want peace; we want to see this aggression end; we want to see it settled in a good place, and that means a just and durable peace. And a just peace means it has to be consistent with the principles of the United Nations Charter. A durable peace means one in which we don't simply press the pause button, allow Russia to rearm and rest and then reattack, and repeat this exercise in six months or a year.

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, I have to ask two quick questions, and we know we're running out of time. On Syria, I watched your interview in 2021. You said you weren't able to prevent a big loss of life there, and you will take this with you for the rest of your life. What's your thoughts (inaudible)?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: What has happened, what Assad has inflicted on his own country and on his own people, is a tragedy. And as someone who was in a previous administration - the Obama administration at the time that this happened - yes, I very much regret that we couldn't do more - couldn't do more effectively to stop the killing, to stop the slaughter of the Syrian people, to stop the abuses being committed against them. And so that is something that I feel very, very strongly. Our policy remains to see the actual application of the relevant UN Security Council Resolution 2254 so that there is a genuine political transition in Syria that reflects the rights and aspirations of the Syrian people.

But short of that and until then, there are a number of things that are absolutely critical that would actually improve the lives of Syrians. One is greater access to humanitarian assistance. We go through this exercise every few months of renewing the United Nations mandate for that. We need to see that renewed for a much longer period of time, and we need to see a greater number of crossings allowed so humanitarian assistance can flow into Syria to all communities on all sides, particularly in the wake of the earthquake. We need to have - see an environment in which it would be possible for people to return to Syria, but under the right conditions where they're safe and protected. We need to see access to the prisons, to the detention centers. We need accountability for what's happened to tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people.

And, of course, we also need to see Syria take responsible action to end the trade in Captagon which is devastating communities throughout the region. Synthetic opioids are having a horrific effect here in the Middle East - and in this case, Captagon originating in Syria - also, by the way, in the United States, where a different synthetic opioid, fentanyl, is doing tremendous damage to the United States. It's one of the reasons we'll be bringing countries together in an effort to form a coalition to deal with synthetic opioids, but in this case, this is something that Syria and the Saudis will take action on.

QUESTION: One final question: Mr. Secretary, I am from this region. In 1991, the U.S. convened Tel Aviv peace conference between the Israeli and the Palestinians. (Inaudible) was on the table. And the U.S. was the sole superpower in the Middle East and beyond. More than three decades, the Chinese are here. The Russians are here. Are you leaving this region? What happened to the superpower in the Middle East?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, I think modestly, I would say that my presence here over the last three days is one element to demonstrate that, no, we're certainly not leaving. We're here to stay. President Biden, of course, was here last year and (inaudible) brought together the GCC and many other countries. Day-in, day-out, we're working with partners throughout the region. And what I hear in almost all of my engagements is the United States remains the number-one partner of choice. That is clear in what I hear, what we hear from all of our partners.

And we're engaging with them, working with them both to deal with many of the challenges that you just talked about, which are real and urgent and acute, but also - and this is so important - on an affirmative agenda for the future, not just dealing with the crisis, but actually trying together to build a better future for our people in the United States and for people throughout this region.

And you see that in the collaboration that I noted earlier that we have that's growing stronger and stronger in dealing with issues like food insecurity, like the transition to clean energy, like how to deal and make sure that emerging technologies are used for the good, like addressing climate change - COP 28 will be here in the region, in the Emirates in just a few months  making sure that we have investments in infrastructure, for example, that are a race to the top that protect the rights of workers, the environment, and really address the needs of local communities. These are the kinds of things that we're working on together, and that's incredibly positive and incredibly affirmative for the future.

So, yes, we're dealing with crises, we're dealing with security challenges, but we're also dealing with an affirmative agenda. And across the board on all of that, as I said, what I hear again and again is the United States is our preferred partner. We are a partner, and we're here.

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, 10 minutes - 15 minutes are not enough. Thank you. Thanks for sitting down with us today.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: My pleasure. Thank you.

QUESTION: Thank you.

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Joint Communique by Ministers of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS

US Department of State

Media Note

Office of the Spokesperson

June 8, 2023

The following statement was released by Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud and United States Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and the Foreign Ministers of the Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS following today's meeting.

Begin text:

Foreign Ministers of the Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS convened in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, today at the invitation of Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud and United States Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. The Ministers welcomed the Republic of Togo as the newest member of the Coalition, bringing the total number of members to 86. Coalition partners confirmed their continued support for counterterrorism programming in Africa, Iraq, Syria, and South and Central Asia, demonstrating the Coalition's wide reach and sustained commitment to diminishing ISIS's capabilities.

Member states and international organizations continue to make unique contributions to the robust campaign to support stabilization efforts in areas liberated from Daesh/ISIS in Iraq and Syria and to counter Daesh/ISIS financing, travel, and propaganda. The Ministers confirmed their commitment to enhance the civilian-led counterterrorism capacities of Coalition members from Iraq to Africa, to South and Central Asia, emphasizing border and internal security, judicial reform, and intelligence and law enforcement information sharing via bilateral and multilateral platforms. Border security requires the preservation and sharing of battlefield evidence as appropriate with law enforcement, and the collection and sharing of terrorist and terrorist suspect biometrics via bilateral and multilateral platforms such as INTERPOL channels.

Ministers of the Coalition reconfirmed that the fight against Daesh/ISIS in Iraq and Syria remains the number one priority of the Coalition. They reiterated the importance of allocating adequate resources to sustain Coalition and legitimate partners. Additionally, ministers of the Coalition announced the launch of its Stabilization Pledge Drive, with a goal of raising $601 million for areas liberated from Daesh/ISIS in Iraq and Syria - toward which eight members have already announced pledges more than $300 million.

Regarding Iraq, the Ministers underscored the need to enhance civilian-led counterterrorism and counter terrorist financing capabilities in Iraq in the long term, along with stabilization efforts in areas liberated from Daesh/ISIS, and to support the Iraqi government and the Iraqi Security Forces, including the Kurdish Peshmerga. They lauded Iraq's progress in repatriating its nationals from northeast Syria, and Iraqi efforts to implement sustainable long-term solutions, including appropriate legal procedures to ensure those guilty of crimes are held accountable and those victims of Daesh/ISIS seeking to reintegrate into communities of origin are able to do so.

Regarding Syria, the Coalition stands with the Syrian people in support of a lasting political settlement in line with UN Security Council Resolution 2254. The Coalition continues to support stabilization in areas liberated from Daesh/ISIS and reconciliation and reintegration efforts to foster conditions conducive to a Syria-wide political resolution to the conflict.

The Ministers reaffirmed the importance of durable solutions for remaining populations in northeast Syria, including ensuring that Daesh/ISIS terrorists detained in Syria are housed securely and humanely, and improving the security conditions and humanitarian access for family members residing in al-Hol and Roj displaced persons camps. The Coalition will work with the international community to identify opportunities to best contribute to the continued basic needs for humanitarian aid, reintegration assistance for returnees, security measures, and stabilization for communities liberated from Daesh/ISIS throughout northeast Syria.

Regarding sub-Saharan Africa, the Ministers discussed the emergence of Daesh/ISIS affiliates which operate in West Africa, the Sahel, East Africa, and Central and southern Africa. The Ministers lauded the work of the Global Coalition's Africa Focus Group, and highlighted the fact that it convened in Niamey, Niger in March 2023 - the first Coalition event in the sub-Saharan African region. The Ministers similarly endorsed the Africa Focus Group Action Plan, adopted in Niamey, that calls on members to cooperate in improving African member civilian-led counterterrorism and strategic communication capacities, as well as the imperative to counter malign, separatist, and non-state military actors which undercut counterterrorism cooperation and destabilize regional security.

Regarding the threat that ISIS-Khorasan poses in the region surrounding Afghanistan, as well as to the global community, the Ministers underscored the importance of the Coalition's intensified focus and alignment of efforts to monitor ISIS-Khorasan and prevent its ability to raise funds, travel, and spread propaganda. Coalition members remain committed to ensuring Afghanistan never again becomes a safe haven for terrorists.

The Ministers welcomed the participation of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as observers in Riyadh and emphasized the need for Coalition members to increase engagement with Central Asia to enhance their respective counterterrorism capacities. The Ministers affirmed the Coalition's commitment to the survivors and families of victims of Daesh/ISIS crimes that perpetrators must be held accountable. The atrocities carried out by Daesh/ISIS are an offense to humanity, and the Coalition remains united in its determination to prevent future generations from enduring the suffering created by Daesh/ISIS.

The Ministers recognized that extremism and terrorism, in all forms and manifestations, cannot and should not be associated with any religion, nationality, or ethnic group, and noted the urgent need to vigorously counter such activities.

The Ministers agreed to update the current Guiding Principles of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS/Daesh, last endorsed by ministers in 2018, to reflect the growth of the Coalition in membership from different regions, priorities, and the work of its thematic working groups and geographic-based focus and standalone groups.

The responsibility and momentum of the international community against this shared adversary was evident today. The Global Coalition is the largest international coalition and remains intent on defeating Daesh/ISIS anywhere it operates.

End text

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Secretary Antony J. Blinken and Ethiopian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Demeke Mekonnen Before Their Meeting

US Department of State

Remarks

Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State

Intercontinental Hotel

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

June 8, 2023

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, good afternoon, everyone. I'm very pleased for this opportunity to discuss the very important relationship between the United States and Ethiopia. I had a very good visit just last March, and again I want to thank our colleagues not only for their hospitality but also for the very, very good and important conversations that we had. We've been impressed with the progress that's been made in implementing the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement and the very powerfully changed situation in Tigray as a result of implementing that agreement. And we look forward today to discussing how we can secure the peace together and how we can continue to strengthen the relationship between the United States and Ethiopia.

So very good to see you again. Thanks for taking this time today.

FOREIGN MINISTER MEKONNEN: Oh, thank you very much (inaudible), sir. This is really a privilege to meet you here on this special occasion. I would like to express my profound appreciation for this special summit with (inaudible) that's very timely and important (inaudible). Yeah, after you - your visit at this (inaudible) promising progress in the peace processes (inaudible) and we're working to consolidate and to address different outstanding issues.

The (inaudible) government is working closely with the federal government, and the new rehabilitation commission is still working to expedite the reintegration and related activities. So all of the environment is very, very encouraging and promising. Perhaps to consolidate this peace process, as you mentioned last time, and we are in discussions with (inaudible) 

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Joint Statement Following the Ministerial Meeting of the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)

US Department of State

Media Note

Office of the Spokesperson

June 8, 2023

The text of the following statement was released by the Governments of the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states.

Begin Text:

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Foreign Ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council member states, and the GCC Secretary General Jasem Albudaiwi met in Riyadh on June 7, 2023, to celebrate the strategic importance of the historic ties among their countries. The Ministers underscored their shared commitment to build upon the achievements of previous ministerial meetings and the Jeddah Summit on July 16, 2022 to strengthen consultation, coordination, and cooperation in all fields.

The Ministers highlighted the strategic, ambitious, and growing partnerships between the United States and the GCC and its member states to promote peace, security, stability, integration, and economic prosperity in the Middle East. The Ministers affirmed the importance of common efforts to advance de-escalation and underlined their joint commitment to support diplomacy to achieve these efforts. They underscored the importance and promise of infrastructure projects to promote regional integration and interconnectivity, contributing to regional stability and prosperity. The Ministers also underscored the importance of upholding navigational rights and freedoms and of collective efforts to address threats to the security of vessels traveling through the region's waterways. The Ministers underscored the importance of confronting terrorism and violent extremism worldwide and welcomed the next Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS ministerial meeting, to be held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on June 8, 2023. Secretary Blinken reaffirmed the United States' enduring commitment to the security of the region, recognizing the region's vital role in the global economy and international trade.

Iran

The GCC Council and the United States reiterated their commitment to freedom of navigation and maritime security in the region and their determination to counter aggressive and illegal actions at sea or elsewhere that might threaten the shipping lanes, international trade, and oil installations in the GCC states. The Ministers reaffirmed their support for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and renewed their call for Iran to fully cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Ministers welcomed the decision by Saudi Arabia and Iran to resume diplomatic relations and stressed the importance of adherence to international law, including the UN Charter, by states of the region.

Yemen

The Ministers underscored the importance of the ongoing, UN-led peace effort in Yemen following the April 2022 truce and ensuing calm. They expressed their high appreciation of the efforts of Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UN and U.S. envoys to this end. They also expressed their hope to see an inclusive, Yemeni-Yemeni political process that results in a lasting end to the conflict, which addresses Yemenis' calls for justice, accountability, and redress for human rights violations and abuses, and places the country on the path towards recovery. They reaffirmed their support for Yemeni sovereignty, independence, unity, and territorial integrity and for the Presidential Leadership Council in Yemen and urged the Houthis to seize this opportunity and build on the past 14 months of calm to bring relief to millions of Yemenis. The Ministers affirmed the importance of continuing to address the humanitarian needs of people in all areas of Yemen and provide economic and developmental support across the country. They also reaffirmed support for UN-led efforts to address the environmental and economic threat posed by the Safer oil tanker off the coast of Yemen.

Israeli-Palestinian Issues

The Ministers underscored their commitment to reach a just, lasting and comprehensive peace in the Middle East in accordance with the two-state solution, along 1967 borders with mutually agreed swaps consistent with internationally recognized parameters and the Arab Peace Initiative. They stressed the need to refrain from all unilateral measures that undermine a two-state solution and escalate tensions, to preserve the historic status quo in Jerusalem's holy sites, recognizing the special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in this regard. The Ministers expressed appreciation for Egypt's critical role mediating between Israel and Gaza armed factions during recent hostilities. The Ministers also emphasized the importance of bolstering the Palestinian Authority and improving the everyday lives of Palestinians including through humanitarian assistance and efforts to bolster the Palestinian economy. The Ministers reaffirmed their support for the Palestinian Authority.

Syria

On Syria, the Ministers reaffirmed their commitment to reaching a political solution to the Syrian crisis in a manner that preserves Syria's unity and sovereignty, meets the aspirations of its people, is consistent with international humanitarian law, and is in line with UN Security Council Resolution 2254 (2015). In that regard, the Ministers welcomed Arab efforts to resolve the crisis in a step-for-step manner, consistent with UNSCR 2254, as agreed during the Amman consultative meeting of the Arab Ministerial Contact Group on Syria on May 1, 2023. The Ministers reaffirmed support for U.S. and Coalition forces, who are working to achieve the enduring defeat of ISIS in Syria. Ministers further condemned all actions that threaten the safety and security of these forces. They stressed the need to create secure conditions for the safe, dignified, and voluntary return of refugees and internally displaced persons consistent with UNHCR standards, and the importance of providing the necessary support to Syrian refugees and to the countries hosting them. The Ministers reiterated their call for a nationwide ceasefire. They welcomed the UN Secretary General's call for a 12-month renewal of the Security Council authorization to operate the cross-border mechanism and expressed support for including all currently open border crossing points (Bab al-Hawa, Bab al-Salaam, and al-Rai) in a Security Council resolution to be passed this July. Furthermore, they discussed enhancing cooperation to address the issue of arbitrarily detained and missing persons - as outlined in the Amman Communique and UNSCR 2254 - in coordination with all concerned parties.

Iraq

The Ministers noted the positive and growing partnership between the GCC and Iraq and welcomed continued progress on the GGC Interconnection Authority project to link Iraq to the GCC electricity grid. This project represents years of diplomatic efforts in pursuit of greater regional integration and interdependence to benefit the people of Iraq and the region. Once complete, the project will provide much-needed power to the Iraqi people and set the stage for greater economic cooperation down the road. The Ministers discussed the importance of civilian-led efforts in Iraq, including economic reforms to ensure Iraq's people benefit from the country's natural resources, stabilization to ensure communities can recover from conflict and ISIS violence, measures to prevent the financing of terrorism, and efforts to counter ISIS narratives, which complement ongoing work to enhance the Government of Iraq's counterterrorism capabilities. The Ministers highlighted their support for a stable, sovereign, and secure Iraq.

Sudan

Expressing grave concern regarding the recent outbreak of fighting in Sudan, the Ministers underlined the GCC's support for diplomatic efforts led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States in Jeddah to achieve agreement by the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces to fully implement a short-term ceasefire and enable unhindered humanitarian access. They reiterated their support for diplomatic efforts to achieve a permanent cessation of hostilities in Sudan, which is urgently needed. The Ministers affirmed their conviction that no acceptable military solution exists that will settle the conflict. They called on the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces to silence their guns.

War in Ukraine

The Ministers reaffirmed the importance of respecting the principle of sovereignty and international law, including the UN Charter and the obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The Ministers urged all countries and the international community to intensify their efforts aimed at achieving a peaceful solution, ending the humanitarian crisis, and supporting refugees, displaced persons and others affected by the war in Ukraine, as well as facilitating the export of grain and other food supplies, and supporting food security in affected countries.

GCC-U.S. Strategic Partnership

The Ministers affirmed their shared determination to contribute to regional security and stability under the framework of the GCC-U.S. Strategic Partnership. The Ministers commended the outcomes of the GCC-U.S. working groups on integrated air and missile defense, maritime security, and Iran in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on February 13 and 15, 2023. They commended the deliberations of the Fourth GCC-U.S. Trade and Investment Dialogue meeting that was held on March 9, 2023, also in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. They took note of the joint military exercises taken place between their armed forces and their close cooperation within the Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) framework. The Ministers decided to convene a meeting of the GCC-U.S. cyber security working group later this year. The Ministers affirmed the importance of continuing periodic working groups to discuss defense issues and decided to hold another round of the GCC-U.S. integrated air and missile defense and maritime security working groups later this year. The Ministers will also explore the possibility of holding working groups later this year on military preparedness and training and streamlining the transfer of critical defense capabilities.

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Secretary Antony J. Blinken and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud at the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS Ministerial Opening Session

US Department of State

Remarks

Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State

Intercontinental Hotel

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

June 8, 2023

FOREIGN MINISTER AL SAUD: (Via translation) At the beginning, it is a great pleasure to welcome you to Riyadh, the capital of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And I am confident that our meetings will be crowned with success by building on what we have achieved together in our alliance against ISIS and continuing our concerted, integrated and coordinated efforts in the coming days.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has always believed that the best path to security, stability, development, and prosperity requires the continuation of our collective efforts in combating terrorism and its criminal groups and confronting extremist ideology that contradicts all religious, human, and moral values.

My country will continue to make every possible effort in cooperation with all of you to support the efforts of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, to eliminate all its criminal activities and extensions wherever they are, and to confront its satanic attempts to exploit and recruit children and youth, and to dry up its sources of funding and support.

The Kingdom is also very keen on the independence of the countries whose territories has been exploited by ISIS to implement its destructive plans, including Syria and Iraq.

We commend the decisive efforts made by Iraq and the continuous coordination with the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. In appreciation of the efforts of our brothers in Iraq, the Kingdom has contributed to financing reconstruction projects in Iraq.

We also extend our thanks and appreciation to the working groups of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS terrorist organization for their efforts in combating ISIS and preventing its spread.

I am pleased to announce that the Kingdom has joined the presidency of the Coalition's Africa Focus Group, to confront the dangers of ISIS, joining the United States, Morocco, Italy, and Niger. I also welcome the establishment of a focus group concerned with combating ISIS in Khorasan Province in Afghanistan, as this group will constitute a focus for limiting the presence and spread of the terrorist organization in those areas.

Your Highnesses, and Excellencies. As the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia believes fighting ideology through ideas, uprooting the scourge of terrorism from its roots, and rejecting hatred and extremism, the Kingdom has established several centers to combat terrorism and extremist ideas. The most important of which is the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology, Etidal, which aims to combat extremist ideology and its messages, spread the principles of tolerance, promote a culture of moderation, combat activities and limit their effects, and provide media campaigns to mitigate the media influence of ISIS, in cooperation with our partners at the regional and international levels.

Dear attendees, we must all work to block any opportunity that this organization can exploit to co-opt and recruit new followers. Therefore, I call on the Defeat ISIS Action Group to focus, during its campaigns, on combating everything that would insult religious symbols and sanctities, deliberate provocative actions, and all practices that destabilize security and stability that ISIS and extremist groups may exploit to implement their propaganda, at a time when the world needs to work together to reject extremism, while spreading the values of dialogue and tolerance.

Our battle against extremism and terrorism requires additional efforts to win minds and hearts, not only through media, cultural and educational tools with their supreme importance, but also by presenting a live practical model for a better future based on tolerance, openness, sustainable development, and prosperity, which is embodied in the vision of the Kingdom, vision 2030, where our sons and daughters create the future and celebrate life. They are the goals of the vision, and they are also the pillars of achieving it.

In conclusion, thank you all for coming and participating in this meeting, through which we hope to contribute to achieving security, stability, and prosperity to build a great future for our future generations. Thank you.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Faisal, thank you so much. Thank you for hosting us today and thank you - and thanks to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for its significant contributions to our shared work to defeat ISIS as a founding member of this coalition and through its leadership today. And it's so good to see so many colleagues here with us in Riyadh.

Since we came together in 2014, our coalition has grown into an 86-member force, bringing together countries and organizations from every part of the world.

Together, we have achieved the territorial defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. We've taken out or captured its leadership. We've prevented large-scale attacks. And we've invested billions in stabilizing liberated areas and rebuilding the region.

Our progress is a testament to the strength of this coalition - and the courage of our partners on the ground.

But for all our progress, the fight is not yet done. So today, I'd like to briefly focus on what we see as the most urgent areas for focus to achieve the enduring defeat of ISIS.

First: stabilization assistance across Iraq and Syria. Poor security and humanitarian conditions, lack of economic opportunity - these are the fuel for the kind of desperation on which ISIS feeds and recruits. So we have to stay as committed to our stabilization goals as we've been to our military campaign that resulted in the victory on the battlefield.

Today, we're announcing a funding goal for the Stabilization Pledge Drive of just over $601 million - and I'm announcing that the United States is committing $148.7 million to that fund. This support will meet critical needs that Syrians and Iraqis themselves have identified, addressing vulnerabilities previously exploited by ISIS, closing gaps in local needs, including for essential services, education, community reintegration, accountability for crimes.

Second: repatriations of foreign terrorist fighters and their family members. Repatriation is critical to reducing the populations of both displaced persons camps, like al-Hol, and detention centers holding nearly 10,000 ISIS fighters, 2,000 of whom are from countries other than Syria and Iraq.

Failure to repatriate foreign terrorist fighters risks the possibility that they could again take up arms and attempt to restore ISIS's so-called "caliphate," terrorize communities that we're working to stabilize and rebuild, and potentially threaten our homelands.

Al-Hol currently hosts 50,000 displaced persons, most of whom are women and children, half of whom are under the age of 12. Some of these children know nothing other than life in al-Hol. Leaving these children in camps condemns them to lives marked by danger, the denial of basic health care, the denial of education - the denial of hope. So even as we prioritize addressing the serious security and humanitarian needs at al-Hol and other camps, we know that repatriation is the only durable solution.

We are, fortunately, making some progress. Last year, more foreign nationals were repatriated from northeast Syria than in the previous two years combined. So far in 2023, 14 countries have repatriated over 2,000 of their nationals - including hundreds of children who are now able to have a new chance at life.

We're grateful to the many countries who have stepped up: the Iraqi Government, which since 2021 has led the way, bringing home nearly 5,000 of its nationals from northeast Syria, including hundreds of fighters; countries, including in Central Asia, which have brought home many of their nationals; Kuwait, which serves as a critical transit hub for these repatriations.

The United States stands ready to assist with repatriation, providing diplomatic and logistical assistance, as well as aiding with rehabilitation, reintegration, and, where applicable, investigation and efforts to ensure accountability through prosecution.

Our third area of focus as a coalition must be keeping pace with the evolving threat. The security situation throughout the Sahel and much of West Africa has deteriorated significantly over the past several years. (Inaudible) farmers ambushed in North Kivu province. Today, Africa is home to nearly half of global terrorism deaths.

Our Africa Focus Group - joined today by the newest member of the coalition, Togo - is helping crystalize our focus on the terrorist threat in the region. That was very much on display in Niamey, where 38 coalition members and observers recently came together to boost regional collaboration, including by endorsing the Focus Group Action Plan. That will strengthen border security, collect biometrics of terrorists, counter ISIS propaganda and financing, and more. The United States is supporting these efforts - and has just pledged $130 million to enhance civilian counterterrorism capacity in sub-Saharan Africa, including over $22 million for partnerships with Coastal West Africa.

At the same time, we remain vigilant against the evolving threat posed by ISIS-Khorasan. All of us are determined to see to it that Afghanistan never again becomes a safe haven for terrorists. I'm grateful to the United Kingdom for its work on this front. The United States is bolstering our collective efforts with over $30 million in new counterterrorism programming for Central Asia, coming on top of $50 million we've invested in capacity building for the region.

Finally, we remain focused on cutting off ISIS's ability to raise and move funds across multiple jurisdictions, including the General Directorate of Provinces. Today, I'm announcing the designation of two ISIS GDP leaders as Specially Designated Global Terrorists - the Iraq-based Bilad al-Rafidayn Office emir and a Sahel-based al-Furqan Office senior leader.

The global community - so much of it represented here today - faces no shortage of security challenges. Recent years have demonstrated the progress that we can achieve with steadfast determination. I'm confident that today will advance the collective commitment to defeat ISIS and finally eliminate the scourge of terrorism around the world.

Thank you very much.





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Daily Press Briefing by the Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General

Department of Public Information . News and Media Division . New York

8 June 2023

The following is a near-verbatim transcript of today's noon briefing by Stephane Dujarric, Spokesman for the Secretary-General.

** Security Council

Good day to all. This morning, Rosemary DiCarlo, the Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, addressed the Security Council at a meeting on the UN's cooperation with the League of Arab States.

She talked about Libya, about Syria, the Israel-Palestine issue as well as Sudan. On Sudan, she noted the cooperation between the UN and the League of Arab States, where the Jeddah Agreement gave rise to much hope. Unfortunately, she said, the parties have failed to implement the Agreement. Furthermore, she added, the Sudanese Armed Forces announced the suspension of their participation in the talks, citing the Rapid Support Forces' violations of the ceasefire.

Her remarks were shared with you.

Just on Sudan itself, I had a note on Sudan, maybe I can find it. The later I am, the more disorganized I am. But I am sure one of my colleagues will bring me my note on Sudan.

** South Sudan

In the meantime, moving to South Sudan. The Mission (UNMISS) today said that it is gravely concerned about an eruption in tensions and deadly intercommunal fighting that took place this morning in the UN protection of civilians site in Malakal.

The UN Mission notes that initial reports indicate that at least three people have been killed as of early this afternoon, and more than 20 people have been injured. Some of those injured are receiving treatment at the UN Mission's hospital.

The violence flared up in the early hours today following a stabbing incident.

The Mission regrets the loss of lives and injuries to civilians and calls for an immediate halt to the fighting. The Mission has deployed reinforcements including military and police personnel  in the area, in close collaboration with State authorities and the South Sudan People's Defence Forces.

The Mission is also engaging with leaders of the various communities in the UN protection of civilians site, as well as the state government, to restore calm and order.

** Sudan

Heading back North to Sudan: The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) told us that nearly 300 children were safely relocated from the Mygoma orphanage in the capital, Khartoum, to a transit centre in a safer location. That took place late yesterday afternoon. The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) facilitated that critical evacuation of children and dozens of caretakers. You'll remember that at least 70 children had reportedly died at that orphanage since this present round of the conflict began in Sudan.

UNICEF is providing support for the children's medical care, feeding, and other needs. They're currently under the care of the Social Welfare and Health Ministries, and UNICEF is working with authorities to identify foster families.

Meanwhile, millions of children in the country at large remain threatened by the continued fighting and the secondary impacts of that fighting. A record number of children in Sudan  that is more than 13.6 million children  now need humanitarian assistance.

Meanwhile our colleagues at the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) continue to communicate with the parties in Sudan to resolve access challenges and facilitate the movement of lifesaving supplies.

Between 21 May and 7 June, that is yesterday, at least 188 trucks carrying humanitarian aid reached states across the country  including Khartoum, Al Jazirah, Red Sea, Kassala, Gedaref, Sennar, River Nile, Blue Nile and Northern State. Partners are planning 41 additional truck movements in the days ahead.

** Libya

In a statement that was issued by the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL). It says it took note of the outcome of the work of the 6+6 Committee, which met in Morocco to develop draft electoral laws for the presidential and parliamentary elections.

The UN Mission recognizes that important elements of the electoral laws and associated issues require buy-in and support from a broad range of Libyan institutions, including civil society representatives, as well as women and youth, and political and security actors. That is to allow for inclusive, credible and successful elections to actually take place.

As such, the Mission will continue to work with all relevant Libyan institutions to facilitate a process to address the contested elements of the electoral framework, secure the necessary political agreement on the path to elections, and enable a level playing field for all candidates.

The UN Mission urges all involved to refrain from delay tactics aimed at prolonging the current stalemate, which has caused so much suffering to people in Libya.

** Lebanon

The Force Commander for the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), Major General Aroldo Lazaro, chaired one of the regular Tripartite meetings with senior officers of the Lebanese Armed Forces and the Israel Defense Forces at the usual UN position in Ras al-Naqoura.

The General said that during the last couple of months there have been a number of concerning developments along the Blue Line. He strongly encouraged the parties to continue to use UNIFIL's liaison and coordination mechanisms to avoid unilateral actions.

** Ukraine

Moving back to Europe: Humanitarians in Ukraine are helping people to get to safer areas, access clean water and food, and getting cash assistance to meet their most urgent needs.

The World Food Programme (WFP), together with its national partner Tarilka, already delivered ready-to-eat food to 18,000 people affected by flooding or evacuated to other parts of the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions.

Drinking water remains the most pressing need and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN Children's Fund, Save the Children and other partners organized water trucking and delivered more than 100,000 bottles of drinking water, as well as water purification tablets and jerrycans to the impacted communities in the Kherson region.

UNICEF is also working with the Government and partners to develop short-term and longer-term solutions to repair water and wastewater infrastructure, which is critical for preventing the spread of waterborne diseases.

Thousands of people also received hygiene kits, delivered by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).

More than 30 humanitarian organizations are present at train, bus stations, and transit centres to support people forced to leave their homes because of the flooding. This includes women with children, older people and people with disabilities, which is particularly challenging under these circumstances. Partners across Ukraine also offer medical and psychosocial support to people on the move and evacuees arriving in Mykolaiv, Odesa and other cities.

Some 3,500 people have already received cash assistance from UNICEF while registration continues.

We are also extremely concerned about the plight of civilians stranded in areas under Russian military control, and we will continue our efforts to assist.

** World Oceans Day

Today is World Oceans Day. This year's theme is "Planet Ocean: tides are changing."

In his message, the Secretary-General says the ocean is the foundation of life, and that humanity counts on the ocean. However, he says, humanity right now is the ocean's worst enemy, as we are polluting our waters, overfishing and heating our planet.

He calls for action to achieve the global target to conserve and manage 30 per cent of land and marine and coastal areas by 2030 and implement the recent agreement on fisheries subsidies.

Right now, a hybrid event to mark the Day is taking place in Conference Room 4. The event is hosted by the Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea of the Office of Legal Affairs, in partnership with the non-profit Oceanic Global, and supported by Panerai.

** Climate

I also want to flag that tomorrow, at 10 a.m. in Conference Room 1, the Deputy Secretary-General, Amina Mohammed, and the Secretary-General's Climate Action Team will brief Member States on the Secretary-General's Climate Ambition Summit, to be held on 20 September.

The briefing will not be webcast, but you are welcome to physically attend, should you be interested.

** Information Integrity on Digital Platforms

I also want to flag that, on Monday at 10:15 a.m., the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, will be here in this very room to talk to you about his brief on Information Integrity on Digital Platforms. And, in advance of that [tomorrow], at 10:30 a.m., Melissa Fleming [the Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications] will be giving you a background briefing on this same topic, and we will be sending out the brief.

[question, inaudible]

What I said, or at least, what has been written for me to say, which is what I hope I said is that on Monday at 10:15 a.m., the Secretary-General and tomorrow, at 10:30 a.m., which is not Monday, Melissa Fleming will be here for a background briefing.

And lastly, I just want to flag that we have a very special visitor in this room today and that's Dezhi Xu's own mother, who is here in the back row, making sure her son behaves.

** Questions and Answers

Spokesman : James and then Edie.

Question : Yeah. So first, Secretary-General on the 30th floor, normally has a pretty good view of the iconic skyline of New York. We've seen his tweet. The UN Headquarters is surrounded by smog. Does the Secretary-General see this as a symbol of the climate crisis enveloping the world? You must have spoken to him about it. What are his thoughts about it?

Spokesman : Obviously, it is symbolic and symbolic of so many places around the world that have to deal with bad air, due often to manmade events. I think in terms of what we're seeing in Canada, there's been no attribution or study yet taking place to link it to humans, to link the Canadian fires to human-caused climate change, but I think the... How should I put it, the conditions that we're seeing in Canada are consistent with what climate experts and scientists have been warning of, which is that given the temperature changes, the dry season, we are now in a heightened state of fires that can be linked to climate change. And the spring, I think, has been drier and harder in Canada, in Western Canada, and other places than before.

Question : With regards to the dam, in the German newspaper Bild, President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy in an interview said he was in shock over the international response to the catastrophe, specifically mentioning the United Nations and the Red Cross: "They are not here. They're not here. They're supposed to be first to save lives." What's the United Nations response to the fact that he's criticizing your response?

Spokesman : I mean, the response is that we are there, and I think we've been flagging it from day one. I've been listing everything that we are doing, colleagues that are physically there, water that's been distributed, hygiene kits that have been distributed and other things, psychosocial support. So we are there as we've been since the start of the conflict. And before this start of the conflict and before in terms of humanitarian support, I know there have been discussions between our colleagues in Kyiv with Ukrainian Government officials to highlight what we've been doing.

Edie?

Question : Thank you, Steph. Two questions. First, UNICEF has expressed concern that the Taliban is pushing out international organizations from Afghanistan's education sector. Is this something that the UN overall is concerned about? Is the Mission doing anything? Have any protests been sent?

Spokesman : I can tell you they were, of course, extremely concerned by these reports. If this would come to pass, this would be another horrendous step backwards for the people of Afghanistan and especially for women in girls and youth in general in Afghanistan and by definition for the future of the country. Our colleagues in Kabul are speaking to the de facto authorities. We're trying to ascertain exactly what is being planned. We have not got anything official or anything in writing. The message that we are also passing directly to the authorities is to reiterate yet again that every person has a right to an education, and we want to make sure that de facto authorities guarantee access to education for children and young adults.

Question : Am I right to assume that this is about education for girls and boys up through sixth grade, which is still permitted?

Spokesman : Again, your colleagues would have to speak to the de facto authorities about what they're really planning. I mean, we've seen the public reporting and others.

Question : My second question is about the ammonia pipeline between Russia and Ukraine ending at the Black Sea port of Yuzhny. The Russians said today that this will seriously impact the Black Sea Grain Initiative, and I would like to know what the Secretary-General and Rebeca Grynspan are doing to try and ensure that the initiative is extended when it expires in July?

Spokesman : Well, we're continuing our discussion with all the parties. I think, as you've seen, Rebeca Grynspan will be meeting with a Russian delegation in Geneva tomorrow. It is part of our routine contacts on our efforts to facilitate the trade in Russian fertilizer and Russian grain. Our colleagues at the Joint Coordination Centre (JCC) are also continuing their discussions. The export of ammonia is dealt with under the Black Sea Initiative. I mean, we are continuing efforts through as many avenues as we can, given the importance of all of this to the fight against global hunger and ensuring that the prices of food do not spike on the global market.

Dezhi, then Abdelhamid, then Benno.

Question : Thank you for introducing my mom. I first have two follow-ups on James' question. The first one about the dam. Has the UN now have any negotiation or communication or coordination with the Russian side to go on site that dam, to check the damage or to fix the dam?

Spokesman : In terms of fixing the dam, no. We continue our efforts, our principled efforts to reach everyone in Ukraine, whether under control of Ukraine or under Russian control, to make sure they get humanitarian aid. But in terms of repairs to the damage, it's not something we are... No.

Question : Not the technical issues about the dam. So my second follow-ups on James' question is on the orange sky we all saw yesterday. You just mentioned about the temperature increase. Actually, there are many reports suggesting that 2024 would be first year ever that the global warming first surpassed the 1.5C. That would be a big problem. Right? Because that's the degree that everybody agreed eight years ago. Has the effort of stopping the climate change failed? I asked that question last year  about how to strike a balance between adaptation and mitigation? Is this still...

Spokesman : Well, I mean, we need... not to be glib, but we need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. It's not either/or. I think the Secretary-General has been consistently reminding all of us, reminding the global public on their need to phase out fossil fuel, starting with no new coal mines, no new coal plants, no new digging for fossil fuel or gas and move to a transition with cleaner energy, if we are to be able to keep that goal of 1.5C.

Question : So now my question. Actually, that's follow-ups. Right?

Spokesman : But that's okay.

Question : Okay. So anyway, my question it's actually my question of yesterday, the Fukushima nuclear contaminated water, any position from...

Spokesman : That is something you need to reach out to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). They are in the lead on this in terms of technical and positions for the UN system.

Question : But let me ask you this way, because recently, Japan just released those seawater into the tunnel, which they're going to release the contaminated water. But we know that the final report of IAEA is due in late June. It seems like they're synchronizing the move.

Spokesman : I think, again, IAEA is the part of the UN that is in the lead, because they have the know-how, and they will speak to this and we fully back them in whatever they say.

Question : So if they... If they said it's safe...

Spokesman : What I'm saying to you is that they have the technical know-how to access this, and I would ask you to refer you questions to them. Okay. Thank you.

Abdelhamid?

Question : Thank you, Stephane. The Spokesperson for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, Ahmed Abu Zeid, was commenting on what happened in the dam Karkhovka and then he switched to talk about the Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia, and he said, this situation is unsustainable. No country can control the water of a river that passes through ten countries. And he was in a threatening tone, as the press said. Do you have any comment on the failure of reaching any agreement between Ethiopia and the others?

Spokesman : We still remain hopeful that an agreement between all the parties can be found on the Renaissance Dam issue.

Question : My second question, the Palestinian journalist Momen Samreen was shot in the head while covering the IDF forming a place in Ramallah. Do you have any comment on that?

Spokesman : I've seen, I was watching as I was preparing for the briefing, I've seen the reports of journalists being shot or shot at. That is something of great concern to us. We've spoken out about the increased risks that journalists are facing around the world. We'll follow up with our colleagues in the region.

Benno?

Question : I have two follow-ups. One, to Jame's question about Mr. Zelenskyy's interview to German newspapers Bild and Welt, so your response is now we are there. He said they are not there. I wonder, like, did you reach out to him did he reach out to you...? Was there any communication to clarify... [cross-talk]

Spokesman : I mean, we are in constant touch with the Government in Kyiv, and I know our colleagues spoke to them about this very issue.

Question : And did they clarify what they meant?

Spokesman : I don't know if they clarified, but I think they know very well. I mean, they... I think things have been clarified. I mean, I'm not interested in getting to a tit-for-tat from here. What is clear is that our UN team, led by Denise Brown, has been focused from minute one once this came into... When this became clear on getting as much humanitarian aid with our humanitarian partners to those who need it and they need it now. And I think as I've been saying, and you could take that as the record, we've been very active really since the very beginning.

Question : And then about climate change, the climate crisis. Does the Secretary-General still believe that the 1.5C goal can be met?

Spokesman : I think we still have to keep the hope alive. But yeah, but that demands redoubling efforts and political commitment by Governments and by the private sector.

Yvonne Murray?

Question : Thank you. Does the Secretary-General feel that this kind of pollution event, the "airpocalypse" we're living through this week, it helps to redouble efforts and concentrate minds amongst people who are responsible making decisions on things like the energy transition?

Spokesman : Well, this kind of event in what one could argue is the media capital of the world, these events are seen everywhere, I think would help hopefully help focus minds. But it's kind of sad that we need to go through an event like that, which is an inconvenience for us, but can be deadly for a lot of people who have respiratory problems, who have disabilities, and it's tragic. We should not have to look at the fire and feel the fire to understand that there is a fire.

Question : I haven't quite finished. [laughter]

Spokesman : Yeah. I'm sorry. Not finished with me yet. Yeah.

Question : Second question. Oh, yes. The flags outside have been taken down today. So I just wanted to ask, is that to protect the security personnel who are responsible for putting the flags up and down? Or is it to protect the flags, as well?

Spokesman : Yeah, I mean, it is the... There are procedures in place for decisions taken not to put up the flag. One is you've seen heavy rain, heavy winds, cold temperature, air quality is definitely one of them. But this is the first time in my memory  I'm a little younger than the UN, but it's in my 20 years here that we've ever had that because of air quality issues. We do not want to put the security officers at unnecessary risks. It's the people. I mean, the flags, they need to be washed, can be washed, but people need to be kept clean.

Linda, then we'll go to Maggie on the screen.

Question : Thank you, Stephane. This is going back a day or two. There were reports that a few or certain number of Ukrainian soldiers were wearing some kind of Nazi symbols and I was wondering if the SG had... it was from New York Times, actually. SG has responded to that or has any thoughts about that...?

Spokesman : We stand against Nazis and symbols of Nazis. I have no way to verify these reports and I mean, but I mean, as a principled stand, I think, I can safely say that.

Maggie?

Question : On Ethiopia, please. The United States is suspending food aid because food was being stolen and misappropriated that US aid had sent. And I'm just wondering how this may or may not impact the 524 million dollars they pledged last month, Horn of Africa pledging conference. Are you still getting the money? And there in the reports, some of the food aid was WFP-related, like grain that had been donated to WFP from other countries. They investigated and found was also among stuff that was stolen. So what can you tell us about how this is impacting?

Spokesman : Well, I mean, I think yeah. On the first part of your question, you'd have to ask USAID and the US Government. The US made a large contribution to our efforts. We hope that money will be disbursed. On the actual issue and especially regarding WFP, I would ask you to speak to our WFP colleagues either here or in Rome, I think they will have some public statements coming out soon on this very issue.

Question : But the fact that the US hasn't indicated... [cross-talk]

Spokesman : I'm not aware that they have or we'll check with our humanitarian colleagues.

Evelyn?

Question : Yes. Thank you, Steph. I'm a bit short of breath. Can you hear me?

Spokesman : Yes, ma'am.

Question : Oh, okay. I assume there's still people in the flooding in Sudan and Sudan, sorry, in Ukraine who need rescuing  who are the Russians rescuing them or the UN involved?

Spokesman : I mean, we are not as far as I know, involved in physical rescuing as we don't have the capacity and the equipment to do so on a massive scale. From what I've seen, it is mostly military police and other emergency services doing that.

Okay. Thank you all. We'll talk to... You will talk to Paulina [Kubiak] now. And, Paulina, we'll talk to you.

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The rights of civil society members are being violated by all entities in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, UN Commission of Inquiry says; Israeli Government restrictions intrinsically linked to occupation

United Nations Human Rights Council

GENEVA (8 June 2023) - The rights of civil society members in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory are being violated by authorities in all areas through harassment, threats, arrests, interrogations, arbitrary detention, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, according to a report to the Human Rights Council issued today by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.

The report examined attacks, restrictions and harassment of civil society actors in Israel, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory including East Jerusalem. It found that the majority of violations are being committed by Israeli authorities as part of the Israeli Government's goal of ensuring and enshrining its permanent occupation at the expense of the rights of the Palestinian people.

The report found that the Israeli Government has increasingly restricted civic space through a strategy of delegitimizing and silencing civil society. This includes criminalizing Palestinian civil society organizations and their members by labelling them as "terrorists," pressuring and threatening institutions that give a platform for civil society discourse, actively lobbying donors, and implementing measures intended to cut sources of funding and support.

This strategy is being implemented in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory against Israeli and Palestinian civil society organizations and activists, and internationally against international advocates of Palestinian rights.

The report determined that the designations by Israeli authorities of six Palestinian NGOs as "terrorist" organizations and a seventh Palestinian NGO as unlawful were unjustified and violated fundamental human rights, including the rights to freedom of association, expression, opinion, peaceful assembly, privacy and the right to a fair trial.

Palestinian authorities in both the occupied West Bank and in Gaza were also found to be targeting Palestinian human rights defenders and civil society activists with the aim of silencing dissenting opinions. The arrest and detention of Palestinian activists by both Israeli and Palestinian authorities was noted as a particularly harsh reality for many Palestinian activists.

"Today we issued a report that focuses on the silencing of civil society in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, and we concluded that all duty bearers are engaged in limiting the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful association," said Navi Pillay, Chair of the Commission. "We were particularly alarmed by the situation of Palestinian human rights defenders, who are routinely subject to a range of punitive measures as part of the occupation regime. These measures also have far-reaching consequences for children, contributing to family fragmentation and to increased psychological trauma and fear."

The Commission conducted more than 127 interviews with victims and witnesses, experts and others for the report; these included public and closed hearings in Geneva held in November 2022 and March 2023. Its call for submissions issued on 2 November 2022 resulted in 21 submissions being received.

The Commission dedicated a significant part of the report to reviewing restrictive policies and practices, and their impact on different civil society groups, including journalists, women human rights defenders, artists and cultural activists and Palestinian cultural centres promoting diversity and the inclusion of LGBTQ persons.

The report found that Palestinian journalists are particularly targeted and subjected to frequent harassment and punitive measures, seemingly as part of an effort to deter them from continuing their work. Israeli journalists are also being monitored and harassed, and increasingly practise self-censorship out of fear of attacks and losing employment.

Women human rights defenders face significant and distinct risks due to their visibility and role in fighting for societal and political change. They have been specifically targeted by Palestinian State actors and anti-gender rights groups because they are perceived as challenging religious and cultural norms and the status quo.

The report also found that actions by Israeli and Palestinian authorities that shrink freedom of expression in the cultural space, affecting artists and cultural activists, constitute violations of cultural rights.

"We assigned significant importance to understanding the impact of the shrinking civic space on specific groups of activists, some of whom are more vulnerable to attacks and have suffered substantial personal harm as a result of being targeted," said Commissioner Miloon Kothari.

"Women human rights advocates and protesters have been subjected to distinct gender-based stigmatization and isolation compared to their male counterparts, including sexual and gender-based violence during protests and online harassment and smear campaigns with the sole intent to discredit them and deter them from activism in public places," Kothari said. "We are also troubled with restrictions imposed on the right to cultural life and cultural and artistic expression which we outlined in our report, and we are extremely concerned with statements made by Israeli politicians aimed at erasing elements of Palestinian culture and identity."

Although the report focused primarily on actions undertaken by authorities, it also found that certain non-governmental organizations play key roles in silencing civil society in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel and pressuring those advocating for Palestinian rights around the world. Right-wing organizations operating in Israel and abroad effectively implement and promote the Israeli Government's strategy against civil society. Palestinian anti-gender rights groups operating in the occupied West Bank, have targeted Palestinian women human rights defenders. Both Israeli and Palestinian authorities allow, and in some cases encourage and support, the actions of non-governmental organizations targeting civil society actors.

The report found reasonable grounds to conclude that several Israeli actions undertaken against civil society organizations amount to violations of international human rights and humanitarian law and may constitute crimes under international law. These include the arbitrary detention of civil society organization members and their forcible transfer from the Occupied Palestinian Territory to Israel, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the revocation of East Jerusalem residency permits and the deportation of a human rights defender from East Jerusalem.

"We have no doubt that the revocation of Salah Hammouri's East Jerusalem residency permit based on an alleged 'breach of allegiance' to the State of Israel constitutes a war crime," said Commissioner Chris Sidoti. "Demanding allegiance from protected people in occupied territory is a reprehensible violation of international humanitarian law. We have preserved information about the individuals who bear responsibility for what may amount to the war crime of unlawful deportation, including third parties such as airlines and their staff that assisted in the deportation."

The report recommended that all duty bearers ensure that the rights to freedoms of association, expression and opinion and peaceful assembly, and economic, social and cultural rights including health, housing and education, are respected and protected and that civil society actors, including human rights defenders, journalists and women human rights defenders, are able to conduct their activities safely, freely and without harassment or retribution.

The report also recommended that the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court prioritize the investigation into the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including the identification of direct perpetrators, those exercising command responsibility and individuals who aid or abet the commission of crimes under the Court's jurisdiction.

The Commission's 22-page report will be complemented by a more detailed document in the form of a conference room paper (CRP), to be distributed during the upcoming 53rd session of the Council in June.

ENDS

Read the full report here, and the detailed findings of the Conference Room Paper here.

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USAFCENT flexes air-to-ground capabilities in historic first for BTF

Published June 8, 2023

By Master Sgt. Amanda Sampson

Ninth Air Force (Air Forces Central) Public Affairs

AL UDEID AIR BASE, Qatar (AFNS) -- Ninth Air Force (Air Forces Central) aircraft joined two B-1B Lancers over the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, along with five partner nations and other coalition forces, during a Bomber Task Force mission, June 8.

This particular BTF mission was historic in that it was the first time AFCENT flew multiple weapons types and practiced employment against multiple simulated targets during single bomber task force mission.

The B-1Bs, assigned to Dyess Air Force Base, Texas' 9th Bomb Squadron and currently forward deployed to the U.S. European Command area of responsibility, took off from RAF Fairford, United Kingdom to join various fighter coalition forces throughout the CENTCOM region.

During the BTF, the bombers employed live GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munitions, as well as a live AGM-158A Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile.

"These bomber missions represent the U.S.'s commitment to our partners and showcase our ability to deliver overwhelming power at a moment's notice," said U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, Ninth Air Force (Air Forces Central) commander, and Combined Forces Air Component Commander for U.S. Central Command. "Together, we are operationalizing concepts designed to make us more agile in our execution, more strategic in our deterrence and more resilient in our capability.

"Today was a demonstration of that capability and the strength of our partnerships."

Exercises like the BTF enhance U.S. interoperability with partner nations to deter regional aggression while promoting peace and stability in the Middle East.

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NATO MCM Demonstrates Readiness with Real-World Benefit in BALTOPS 23

US Navy

08 June 2023

From Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Matthew Fink

Ships and ashore units from 11 NATO Ally nations commenced the mine countermeasures (MCM) phase of exercise Baltic Operations 2023 (BALTOPS 23) in Germany, Poland and in the Baltic Sea, June 5.

The purpose of mine countermeasures is to hunt, identify and neutralize underwater mines to ensure freedom of navigation at sea for all. Worldwide Navies employ MCM procedures, ships, and technology to clear lanes for ships to access strategic waterways and conduct amphibious landings on contested beaches. One key initiative that delivers training to the crews of the MCM while delivering real-world positive impact throughout BALTOPS 23 is the clearance of unexploded ordnance and remnants of war littering the bottom of the Baltic Sea to this day.

Under the command of NATO Commander Task Group 162.40, there are four units participating in the MCM portion of the exercise: Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group 1 (SNMCMG1), Baltic Naval Squadron (BALTRON), Task Unit 30 and Task Unit 40. In all, the group comprises 12 ships and over 1,000 personnel.

"The mission of our task group is to maintain, sustain, and improve MCM readiness," said U.S. Navy Capt. Ryan Ventresca, Commodore, Mine Countermeasures Group (MCMGRU) 3, which is overall in charge of MCM evolutions for BALTOPS 23. "This is a way for us to coordinate and collaborate with the best in the world."

Spanning World War I and II, the waterways of the Baltic Sea were often mined to prevent the passage of enemy ships. As peace settled over Europe post-wars, many of the nations disposed of ammunition and explosive ordnance in the ocean - at the time, a safer alternative. Today, there is believed to be more than 80,000 mines and other unexploded remnants of war across the Baltic Sea, making certain areas unfishable due to the danger of reeling in explosives, while other areas become hot-zones of rapid evacuation when a decades-old unexploded explosive washes ashore.

Throughout the year, many Baltic navies' peacetime mission are mine clearance - the Estonian Navy even prioritizes it, due to the large number of mines lying dormant in territorial waters. But exercises like BALTOPS 23, a platform primarily used for training interoperability, give the NATO alliance a chance to make a real-world positive impact in the Baltic.

During the exercise, MCM ships are actively hunting for mines in the Irbe Strait, which connects the Baltic Sea to the Gulf of Riga, as well as the territorial waters of Germany and Estonia. They will also hunt for mines prior to an amphibious landing in Utska, Poland. Closer to land, small boat and diving exercises are taking place in Putlos, Germany. The 11 nations participating in MCM operations will have hands-on work in removing, transporting, and destroying historical and rusted mines.

To assist in searching for mines, units employ unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) that travel with a pre-programmed course and use sonar to search the sea floor for objects, which divers later inspect and identify for possible mine neutralization and recovery. Experimentation is also being conducted off the coast of Germany on unmanned surface vehicles (USV), which have the potential to patrol designated areas, recover personnel and deploy UUVs autonomously.

"One of our lines of effort is to experiment with tactical and technical advances in weapons systems," said Ventresca. "We are looking for ways to improve our capability to implement these technologies for future real-world employment."

BALTOPS, which began in 1972 and is now in its 52nd iteration, continues to be an excellent opportunity for NATO and regional partners to strengthen interoperability through a series of combined tactical maneuvers and scenarios.

"Exercises like BALTOPS are a crucial part of training, and training is a crucial part of NATO as a whole," said German Navy Cmdr. Philipp Klimmek, the MCM syndicate leader for the exercise. "It is always an honor to work with our Allies and partners."

BALTOPS 23 is the premier annual maritime-focused exercise in the Baltic Region, in which NATO Allies and Partners are the main participants. BALTOPS brings together both NATO and non-NATO countries to exercise largescale interoperability. U.S. European Command and Naval Forces Europe have promoted the traditional U.S.-led or bi-lateral exercises as opportunities for NATO to improve interoperability as a collective force, using NATO command and control systems as a foundation for the exercise design.

For over 80 years, NAVEUR-NAVAF forged strategic relationships with our Allies and Partners, leveraging a foundation of shared values to preserve security and stability.

Headquartered in Naples, Italy, NAVEUR-NAVAF operates U.S. naval forces in the U.S. European Command (USEUCOM) and U.S. Africa Command (USAFRICOM) areas of responsibility. SIXTHFLT is permanently assigned to NAVEUR-NAVAF, and employs maritime forces through the full spectrum of joint and naval operations.

STRIKFORNATO, headquartered in Oeiras, Portugal, is Supreme Allied Commander Europe's (SACEUR) premier, rapidly deployable and flexible, maritime power projection Headquarters, capable of planning and executing full spectrum joint maritime operations.

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US Sees Islamic State Affiliates Pooling Resources, Growing Capabilities

By Jeff Seldin June 08, 2023

U.S. officials tasked with tracking Islamic State are seeing worrisome signs that the terror group's core leadership is strengthening control over its global network of affiliates despite a series of key losses.

Specifically, the United States is raising concerns about the group's General Directorate of Provinces, a series of nine regional offices set up over the past several years to sustain the group's reputation and global capabilities.

The U.S. State Department on Thursday highlighted the threat posed by these regional offices, designating the leaders of the offices in Iraq and in Africa's Sahel region as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

'Not yet done'

"We remain focused on cutting off ISIS's ability to raise and move funds across multiple jurisdictions," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, speaking to a meeting in Riyadh of the global coalition that has been working to defeat Islamic State, also known as ISIS, IS or Daesh.

"For all our progress, the fight is not yet done," Blinken added.

A separate State Department statement Thursday noted the terror group maintains connections to the global financial system and that IS's core leadership has "relied on its regional General Directorate of Provinces offices to provide operational guidance and funding around the world."

The new designations specifically name Abdallah Makki Muslih al-Rufay'I, the former emir of IS's Iraq province, as the leader of the Iraq-based Bilad al-Rafidayn Office, and Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad ibn 'Ali al-Mainuki as the leader of the al-Furqan office, which oversees operations in the Sahel.

Concern about the regional offices has been growing for more than a year, with a U.N. report warning in July 2022 that the offices were key to the terror group's plans for "reviving its external operational capability."

The U.N. report cited the al-Furqan office, located in the Lake Chad Basin and charged with overseeing the terror group's efforts in and around Nigeria and the western Sahel, as one of "the most vigorous and best-established [ISIS] regional networks."

The report further warned that the Al-Siddiq office in Afghanistan and the Al-Karrar office in Somalia were likewise playing critical roles in Islamic State's expansion.

Intelligence shared by U.N. member states at the time, however, suggested some of the other regional offices, including those in Turkey, Libya, Yemen and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, were struggling, and in some cases nonfunctional.

And despite a series of high-profile leadership losses, including the deaths or captures of at least 13 senior officials since early 2022, time seems to have worked in the terror group's favor.

The regional office model, answering to the group's core leadership, "has really enabled a lot of these groups to rapidly gain capability," said Anand Arun, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency senior officer and analyst.

"They're pooling resources. They're sharing TTP [tactics, techniques and procedures]. They're sharing guidance," Arun told a forum hosted by George Washington University's Program on Extremism on Wednesday. "We're seeing ISIS's local and regional attack capabilities in Africa increase."

Enhanced internet ties

Others are also seeing IS affiliates, like IS West Africa Province, maximize these connections by using enhanced internet connections for what one expert described as "real-time communication."

"We also saw conference calls, sometimes conference calls between ISIS central and African groups but also amongst African groups," said Bulama Bukarti, a researcher and vice president at the Bridgeway Foundation, a charity that aims to prevent mass atrocities.

"They also share intelligence information, best practices," he said, speaking at the same forum as Arun. "So, for example, if one affiliate looted a particular weapon they don't know how to operate, they just would take a photo of it, put it in the group [chat], and then someone would send them instructions, would send them a YouTube link with instructions on how to operate it."

Bukarti also warned that IS's adoption of advanced technologies has extended to other areas, with IS West Africa Province conducting trials on how to arm commercial drones to be used in attacks.

U.S. officials share the concern.

"I'm very much concerned about that and kind of the trajectory," said the DIA's Arun, calling the possibilities "exponential."

"I think there's a lot of ways that they can harness what's coming with AI [artificial intelligence] and drones and other things," he said.

Already, the United States has been leading efforts to crack down on these networks.

Last November, the Treasury Department sanctioned a smuggling network in Somalia that may have been linked to IS's Al-Karrar regional office.

And in January, U.S. special operations forces killed Bilal al-Sudani, a key IS financial facilitator, during a raid on a mountainous cave complex in a remote part of northern Somalia.

But some of the information turned up during that operation has given U.S. officials cause to worry about IS's growing technological prowess.

"If Bilal al-Sudani can access the internet from a cave in the Puntland of Somalia, I think they can figure it out," Arun said.

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Blinken: Islamic State Fight 'Not Yet Done'

By VOA News June 08, 2023

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday that when it comes to defeating the Islamic State militant group, the "fight is not yet done."

Speaking in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at the start of a ministerial meeting of the 80-member Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, Blinken said the group has achieved territorial defeat of the group in Iraq and Syria, taken out its leaders and prevent large-scale attacks.

But Blinken highlighted several areas of focus to achieve what he called the "enduring end" of the Islamic State group.

He announced a goal for commitments of $600 million to help with programs in Iraq and Syria to address areas that militants exploit to recruit fighters, including funding for social services and ensuring accountability for crimes.

Blinken also discussed repatriations from the region, saying it is particularly important for countries to take back their nationals who traveled to Iraq and Syria to fight with the Islamic State group and are now in detention centers. Not doing so, he said, risked those fighters one day being freed and returning to militant activities.

He also said civilians, especially children, need to be taken back to their home countries in order to have hope and opportunities.

Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the Saudi foreign minister, told the meeting that while it is admirable that many countries, including smaller nations, have stepped forward and carried out repatriations, a number of wealthy countries he did not name have not done so. He called that lack of action "unacceptable" and said that being part of a coalition means "you must take your responsibility."

Blinken also discussed the threat of Islamic State affiliates, including those in the Sahel region in Africa and in Afghanistan. He said there is a need to keep up with evolving threats and to also remain vigilant and ensure that Afghanistan does not become a safe haven for terrorists.



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Deadly Blast Hits Afghan Mosque During Memorial Service For Taliban Official

By Ayaz Gul June 08, 2023

A bomb blast ripped through a mosque in Afghanistan's northeastern Badakhshan province during a memorial ceremony Thursday for the Taliban provincial deputy governor who was assassinated in an Islamic State group attack this week.

The explosion in the provincial capital of Faizabad killed at least 11 worshipers and wounded more than 30 others, the Taliban-led Afghan interior ministry said on Twitter. Moazuddin Ahmadi, the head of the area information office, told VOA by phone that a former Taliban police chief of the nearby northern Baghlan province was also among the dead.

Witnesses reported that the powerful blast had inflicted many casualties on the worshipers inside the packed mosque, fearing a much higher death toll.

A mainstream Afghan news channel, TOLO news, reported that at least 15 bodies and about 50 wounded were brought to the main hospital in Faizabad.



On Tuesday, Badakhshan's deputy governor, Molvi Nisar Ahmad Ahmadi, was being driven to work in Faizabad when a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden car into his vehicle. The ensuing blast killed Ahmadi and his driver, while 10 people were injured.

The Islamic State group claimed the car bomb attack was carried out by its Afghan affiliate, Islamic State Khorasan. The mountainous Afghan province borders China, Tajikistan and Pakistan.

Several top Taliban leaders have been killed in IS Khorasan-claimed attacks since the hardline group retook control of Afghanistan nearly two years ago.

A car bombing last December, claimed by IS Khorasan, killed the Taliban police chief of Badakhshan.

In March, a suicide bomber assassinated the governor of northern Balkh province, Mohammad Dawood Muzammil. IS Khorasan took credit for killing one of the most senior Taliban leaders.

The Taliban are sworn enemies of IS Khorasan and have routinely conducted operations against its hideouts in Afghanistan, killing high-profile operatives of the terror group.

Islamic State launched its operations in the conflict-torn South Asian nation in 2015 from bases in eastern Nangarhar province, which borders Pakistan. It has since expanded the violence to other parts of Afghanistan.





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Azerbaijan Asks for Postponement of US-Hosted Talks with Armenia

By Nike Ching June 08, 2023

The timing of new U.S.-sponsored peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which had been expected to start Monday, is now uncertain despite the U.S. administration's conviction that direct dialogue between the two nations is key to any stable peace agreement.

"At the request of the Azerbaijani side, the next round of discussions planned to take place next week in Washington D.C. is postponed," Armenia's foreign ministry spokesperson Ani Badalyan said in a statement Thursday on social media. "The public will be duly informed on the new timeframes of the meeting."

Badalyan had previously stated that foreign ministerial talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan scheduled for June 12 would be aimed at stabilizing relations between the neighboring rivals and reaching a peace treaty.

The countries have had a decades-long conflict involving the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which is inside Azerbaijan but populated predominantly by ethnic Armenians.

When asked Thursday whether the talks have been postponed, a State Department spokesman told VOA, "Regarding the date of the next round of talks, we don't have any specific dates to announce at this time."

Experts predict difficult talks whenever they begin, saying there are many obstacles to a durable peace deal between the two countries.

"Even though the [Nagorno-Karabakh] region is recognized as a part of Azerbaijan, the Armenia government will likely not sign a peace treaty with Azerbaijan unless the Azerbaijan government provides assurances about the security and safety of the Karabakh Armenians," said Heather Ashby, acting director for U.S. Institute of Peace's Center for Russia and Europe program.

"Azerbaijan's plan for incorporating Karabakh Armenians into Azerbaijan will play an important role in the peace talks," Ashby told VOA on Thursday.

Armenia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on June 6 tweeted that Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and the State Department's principal deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian affairs, Dereck Hogan, had "discussed key issues of normalization process" of Armenia-Azerbaijan relations ahead of the talks.

They discussed "border delimitation and security" as well as the "rights and security" of people living in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, the ministry tweeted.

Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov had acknowledged the coming meetings and the need to prepare an agreement to normalize relations with Armenia, while expressing uncertainty about the duration of the peace process, according to VOA's Azerbaijani service.

At the State Department, deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters during a briefing this week that the United States looks "forward to hosting another round of talks in Washington as the parties continue to pursue a peaceful future in the South Caucasus region."

"We continue to believe that direct dialogue is key towards reaching a durable and dignified peace," said Patel, while declining to confirm the date that Secretary of State Antony Blinken would host the peace talks.

If the meetings take place next week, they will follow peace talks hosted by the State Department in early May, when Blinken said "tangible progress" had been made toward an agreement.

The top U.S. diplomat said he believed a peace deal was "within sight, within reach" at that time.

Meanwhile, tensions remain high between the two former Soviet republics over Azerbaijan's blockade of the Lachin Corridor, which is the only land route giving Armenia direct access to Nagorno-Karabakh.

"As a starting point for improving security, we call on Azerbaijan to take steps to ensure constant gas and electricity supplies to Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as to ensure the free flow and movement of goods and people, including through the Lachin Corridor," said Ambassador Michael Carpenter, the U.S. envoy to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, on June 6.

He urged all sides to "refrain from provocative, threatening, or hostile actions or rhetoric," while pledging Washington's support for "a durable and sustainable peace agreement."

The Lachin Corridor allows supplies from Armenia to reach the 120,000 ethnic Armenians in the mountainous enclave. The corridor has been policed by Russian peacekeepers since December 2020.

The blockade has left those ethnic Armenian residents in Nagorno-Karabakh without access to essential goods and services, including life-saving medication and health care, according to Amnesty International.

The rights group said Azerbaijan's government has failed its human rights obligations by taking no action to lift the blockade.

Azerbaijan maintains the land route is open for humanitarian deliveries, emergency services and peacekeepers.

In November 2022, Blinken hosted foreign ministers from Armenia and Azerbaijan for peace negotiations at Blair House in Washington.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev held face-to-face meetings hosted by Blinken on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in February.

"For any sustainable peace, the populations of Armenia and Azerbaijan also need to see the value of peace," USIP's Heather Ashby told VOA.

"For 30 years, they have lived through violence and conflict between the two countries. A peace agreement will have a significant impact on the populations of both countries and it is important not to lose sight on how they may respond and accept a treaty."

VOA Armenian and Azerbaijan services contributed to this report.

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Background Press Call Previewing the Vice President's Travel to the Bahamas

June 08, 2023

Via Teleconference

6:34 P.M. EDT

MODERATOR: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. This is [redacted] from the Vice President's communications team.

On this call today, we are going to be previewing the Vice President's visit to the Bahamas tomorrow. This call is on background, attributed to "senior administration officials." The contents will be embargoed until tomorrow, June 8th, at 5:00 a.m. Eastern.

We've sent everyone who's RSVP'd a factsheet. That factsheet is under the same embargo of tomorrow at 5:00 a.m. Eastern Time.

Today we are joined by [senior administration official]. We're also joined by [senior administration official].

[Senior administration official] will deliver opening remarks, and then we will take your questions.

And with that, I'll turn it over to [senior administration official].

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Thanks, [moderator]. And thanks to everyone for being here this evening. We're pleased to do this call to talk about the Vice President's travel to the Bahamas tomorrow. It is a historic visit because she is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the Bahamas since its independence in 1973.

And, in fact, the last high-level White House visitor was President John F. Kennedy in 1962, which, of course, was before the Bahamas had actually gained its independence.

This visit comes a month before the 50th anniversary of the Bahamas independence and the 50th anniversary of CARICOM, so it is very well timed.

In terms of the schedule for tomorrow, the Vice President will arrive in the Bahamas midday and will be greeted upon arrival by members of various Bahamas civil society organizations. She will then have a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Davis of the Bahamas.

She will then co-host the U.S.-Caribbean Leaders Meeting, which includes leaders from CARICOM nations, the Dominican Republic, and the CARICOM Secretary-General.

This engagement will have a few components. She will greet each leader individually upon arrival. She will then have a private engagement with just the leaders. The leaders will take a family photo. And then the leaders will have a long multilateral meeting where the Vice President will deliver remarks at the top to press. And finally, the Vice President will have a meet-and-greet with staff and families of U.S. Embassy Nassau.

We view the U.S.-Caribbean relationship as significantly strengthened under our administration, thanks in large part to the leadership of the Vice President. This will be her fourth multilateral meeting with Caribbean leaders, which I think is a really acute demonstration of how important she sees this partnership and how important she sees leader-level engagement with Caribbean counterparts.

The Vice President has repeatedly made clear in her prior engagements that, as neighbors, we share common bonds and interests with the Caribbean, and she views strengthening our partnership as key to our shared prosperity and security.

So in terms of how this meeting came about: From the beginning of our administration, the Vice President has been very clear that we needed to elevate our engagement with the Caribbean. And, really, she has delivered on that commitment.

In April of 2022, the Vice President convened the CARICOM leaders, plus the Dominican Republic, virtually. They had a long discussion about economic growth, COVID, security, and especially on efforts to address the climate crisis. And at that meeting, the Vice President committed to convene that group, CARICOM plus DR, annually. So this meeting in the Bahamas tomorrow is a fulfillment of that commitment for the year 2023.

Following the April '22 meeting, the Vice President galvanized the U.S. interagency to put together an initiative on the climate crisis, the result of which was the U.S.-Caribbean Partnership to Address the Climate Crisis 2030, or PACC 2030, which they can conceived in that first meeting.

After that, the Vice President convened Caribbean leaders in Los Angeles at the Summit of the Americas and officially launched PACC 2030 in June of last year. At that meeting, the Vice President also launched three committees of U.S. and Caribbean representatives to make short-term progress on three key priorities: energy security, food security, and access to financing.

She then convened the Caribbean and U.S. co-chairs of these committees at the Blair House in Washington in September 2022, and they put in place action plans on each of those areas.

And now, tomorrow, the Vice President is convening Caribbean leaders again for her fourth multilateral meeting in a little over a year to make further progress.

So in terms of the progress that we expect to see  take stock of and report on tomorrow in the multilateral meeting  first, let me just say a few words on PACC 2030.

So a primary focus of the U.S.-Caribbean Leaders Meeting will be on our shared efforts to address the climate crisis through PACC 2030. Under the Vice President's leadership, our administration has made significant progress, which is outlined in the factsheet that you all will have received already. The Vice President will discuss the steps we've taken thus far on PACC 2030.

For example, throughout the region, we are now facilitating clean energy infrastructure development, climate adaptation projects, and technical assistance projects. We have provided assistance to deploy solar microgrids, to develop geothermal power projects, to train a clean energy workforce, and to support battery storage and energy grids, among other projects.

We built Caribbean capacity with regard to disaster preparedness, and we have worked to bring investors to the Caribbean to identify and develop new clean energy projects.

At this meeting, the Vice President will announce significant new investments through PACC 2030. And let me just highlight two quickly here. The first is a $20 million investment in the Caribbean Climate Investment Program, which will mobilize the private sector to deploy new technologies to help with climate adaptation. And the second is a $15 million investment to support disaster risk reduction and emergency response efforts.

And building off the Vice President's meeting tomorrow, on Friday, the Atlantic Council and RMI  formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute  will host in Nassau a PACC 2030 summit. Senior members of the Vice President's office and our administration will participate, and the intention is to facilitate connections between Caribbean governments, our government, the private sector, NGOs, and philanthropies to identify, build, and operate new clean energy projects in the region.

Next, just a minute on MDB reform. A big priority for Caribbean leaders has been increasing access to development financing and specifically doing so to support climate projects. Now, the Vice President has heard this loud and clear throughout her engagements with Caribbean leaders, and has worked in Washington and with other global leaders on this issue. And it's a key pillar of PACC 2030.

As many of you will have seen, earlier this week, the Vice President met with the new president of the World Bank, Ajay Banga, and laid out the U.S. policy position for reform of multilateral development banks. Our position was informed by her conversations with Caribbean leaders, and we're aiming to achieve these reforms by the time of the G20 this fall, which will have a major impact on Caribbean nations.

More specifically, the Vice President and our administration are advocating for: One, significant new concessional financing delivered through a new window or other innovative mechanism to incentivize action on global challenges such as the climate crisis. Two, focus on the climate crisis and the mission of the World Bank. And three, renewed focus on mobilizing the private sector in support of these aims.

Now, tomorrow, the Vice President has invited President Banga to participate in part of the multilateral meeting on development financing to help advance these reforms and discuss how they can best meet the needs of the Caribbean.

Now, just on a few other topics that we anticipate the Vice President will raise and discuss with the leaders tomorrow.

Another issue that Vice President Harris has heard from Caribbean leaders on is firearms trafficking, and we expect this will be a topic of discussion.

Disrupting illicit firearms trafficking in the Caribbean is a shared priority for the United States and our Caribbean partners and an important aspect of our cooperation to address rising levels of crime and violence in the region.

President Biden signed into law last year the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which increases penalties for straw purchases and firearms trafficking. And the Vice President will discuss implementation of this law.

In addition, we're announcing the creation of a new position at the Department of Justice, the Coordinator for Caribbean Firearms Prosecutions, which will increase information sharing as traffickers are prosecuted.

And we're also investing new funds in various initiatives that will help Caribbean investigator-  investigations and prosecutions.

Now, on Haiti, we expect the leaders to have a conversation on the humanitarian and security crisis. The United States continues to increase our support for the Haitian National Police, but the worsening security situation requires an international response, which is why the United States strongly supports the deployment of a multinational force to Haiti, which the Vice President will make clear to the Caribbean leaders.

She will also announce more than $50 million in new humanitarian aid, and she will announce our support for the extension of the HOPE-HELP trade preferences for Haiti, which are due for renewal in 2025.

At this critical time, it's important that producers and investors in Haiti  those they do business with and the workers upon which they rely  have certainty about the uninterrupted continuation of the HOPE-HELP program.

Lastly, another major priority for the Caribbean had been diplomatic presence. And to that end, the Vice President will announce that our administration has begun the process to establish two new embassies and additional diplomatic support presence in the Eastern Caribbean.

So with that, I will open it up and look forward to your questions.

MODERATOR: Great, thank you so much, [senior administration official]. Thank you all again for joining. Just a reminder that this call is attributed to "senior administration officials" and is embargoed until tomorrow at 5:00 a.m. Eastern.

With that, we're ready to take your questions. Please use the "raise hand" function and we will call on you.

First question we'll go to Jacqueline Charles. Jacqueline, your line should be unmuted.

Q Can you hear me?

MODERATOR: Yes.

Q Okay. Hi. Thanks for doing this. I have two questions. The first has to do with the concessional financing. You know, Caribbean countries have always talked about the fact that they've been considered middle income on paper, but reality, that is not the case. So I'm just wondering what the administration is promoting. Is it only concessional and new financing as it relates to climate change initiatives? Or is there a change in the formula that would allow Caribbean countries to tap concessional financing in a new way that would be beneficial?

And the second question, particularly on Haiti: You know, the Vice President is going to renew the position in terms of a multinational force, but you're going into an environment where, just a few months ago, Caribbean leaders basically said that they were not going to support an international force and that they were going to work with the police.

So I'm just wondering, in terms of her conversations with Caribbean leaders, following that meeting with Canada, is there going to be more of a push to get them to support a multinational force? What can we expect in terms of that discussion with her and Caribbean leaders on this issue?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Thanks, Jacqueline, for both of those questions. I guess I'll start off with the question on concessional financing. It may be helpful  I'd also refer you to the readout of the Vice President's meeting with World Bank President Banga, which is a pretty good exposition of our position on this.

But I would say that our goal is to work with World Bank shareholders and with President Banga in order to take actions that will deliver, as I said, this new concessional financing. We're still working through a lot of the details, whether that will look like a new window or a different kind of innovative mechanism.

But the idea is to incentivize action on a range of global challenges to include climate change, but certainly not exclusively climate change, across all borrower countries.

And the intent of all borrower countries is  to gesture at the other part of your question  which is, of course, we seek to increase access to concessional financing to countries in a range of income brackets and, in that sense, expand the access to financing for countries in the Caribbean and elsewhere who have the need for these types of concessional resources and where it will have the highest impact.

With respect to Haiti, I will just say  I mean, not wanting to get ahead of the conversation tomorrow  as I said before, the United States is continuing to increase our support for the Haitian National Police. We have continued to make clear that we believe that the security and the humanitarian situation in Haiti is worsening, and the situation on the ground will not improve without armed security assistance from international partners.

So it remains our view that any decision about military force would be done in consultation with the U.N. and with the Haitian government. Those discussions are still ongoing and certainly will continue tomorrow when Prime Minister Henry will be in the room with Vice President Harris and the other Caribbean leaders.

And I would just say, in the meantime, as we continue to work through the details, again, we continue to support the HNP, and the United States is also supporting the people of Haiti by providing humanitarian assistance, including the more than $50 million of new assistance the Vice President will be announcing tomorrow.

MODERATOR: Our next question will go to Akayla Gardner. Your line should be unmuted.

Q Hey, guys. I just wanted to ask about the funding for PACC 2030. Is this the first funding that's going towards that initiative? And if not, how much funding was already allocated?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Hey, Akayla. Thanks for the question. We don't have an accounting of the precise amount that has been dedicated to PACC 2030 thus far, although I would just draw your attention to the factsheet and the very robust suite of activities that have already happened under the auspices of PACC 2030.

I would note, of course, that the goals of PACC 2030 are multifaceted. And so pillar one, for example, is about access to development, finance. And to the question that Jacqueline just raised, of course, that's not something that you would put a monetary value on but is of great significance to the Caribbean countries.

Similarly, the fourth pillar of PACC 2030 is about elevating U.S.-Caribbean cooperation and engagement. Again, not something that you can put a dollar value on but something that's of significant diplomatic and geopolitical import to both the Caribbean and to us. And as I mentioned at the top, this being the Vice President's fourth multilateral meeting with Caribbean leaders, I think it just speaks to the progress we're making.

But in terms of more concrete actions  again, sort of referring to some of the details at the bottom of the factsheet  I would say the U.S. is providing support for the Barbados Blue-Green Investment Corporation. We have also facilitated clean energy projects across a wide range of Caribbean countries, ranging from training and clean energy workforce in Antigua and Barbuda; to new geothermal development in Dominica and Saint Kitts and Nevis; to Dominican Republic energy storage support, specifically focused on battery storage; to St. Lucia solar-plus microgrid support.

And so the totality of it is quite impressive. As you heard, there will be new announcements on the order of tens of millions of dollars tomorrow. But we don't have a sort of grand total in terms of all the different effort across the U.S. interagency that has gone under this program thus far.

MODERATOR: Thank you. Our next question will go to Brendan O'Boyle. Brendan, your line should be unmuted.

Brendan? Your line should be unmuted.

Q Can you hear me?

MODERATOR: Yes, we can. Go ahead.

Q Do you have any more details on the expanded diplomatic presence in the Eastern Caribbean and where these two new embassies will be and what they will be working on? Or  yeah.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Yeah. So, the Vice President is going to announce that the U.S. Department of State has begun the process to establish two new embassies and an additional diplomatic support presence in the Eastern Caribbean.

Five countries in the Eastern Caribbean do not currently have a physical U.S. diplomatic presence. And so, we will engage with Congress and the governments of the countries in the Eastern Caribbean on the topic of expanding our physical diplomatic presence, but we don't have specific locations to announce today.

Q Okay.

MODERATOR: Great. Thank you. If anyone else has questions, please use the "raise hand" function. We'll give it a couple seconds to see if any queue in.

And our final question will go to Pearl Matibe. Pearl, your line should be unmuted.

Q Hello. You know, issues that have been in one region often affect another region. So, I'm with Premium Times Nigeria. And while Africa may not be your top on the agenda, you just mentioned the trafficking and arms  firearms trafficking, which are usually connected with transnational criminal organization and networks who have been taking advantage of that part of the world and coming across into South Africa, going to Asia and other parts. Do you think that aspects of that type of  those types of linkages might be threaded into discussions with these leaders?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Thanks, Pearl. I would say the focus of the conversation tomorrow will really be primarily on the Caribbean and U.S.-Caribbean issues. But, of course, to the extent that that affects other regions and has global implications, that could be a subject of conversation as well.

But, again, you know, primarily, we anticipate the Vice President will be focusing with Caribbean leaders on the immediate and urgent needs of their own region.

MODERATOR: Great. Thank you, everyone, for joining. As a reminder, the contents of this call are embargoed until tomorrow at 5:00 a.m., as is the factsheet.

Talk to you all soon.

END 6:54 P.M. EDT

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Readout of Vice President Harris's Meeting with Prime Minister Davis of The Bahamas

June 08, 2023

Vice President Kamala Harris today met with Prime Minister Philip Davis of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas in Nassau, in advance of the U.S.-Caribbean Leaders Meeting, which the Vice President co-hosted with Prime Minister Davis, current chair of the Caribbean Community. The Vice President welcomed the upcoming celebration of the 50-year anniversary of the independence of The Bahamas and of diplomatic relations between the United States and The Bahamas. The Vice President and Prime Minister Davis discussed our shared efforts to address the climate crisis, including through the U.S.-Caribbean Partnership to Address the Climate Crisis 2030, which the Vice President launched in June 2022 at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. They discussed accelerating the transition to clean energy, strengthening climate resilience and disaster preparedness.

The Vice President welcomed Prime Minister Davis's commitment to join the Green Shipping Challenge. The Vice President and Prime Minister Davis discussed the security and humanitarian crisis in Haiti and efforts underway to address firearms trafficking in the region. In recognition that June is LGBTQI+ Pride Month, the Vice President underscored the Biden-Harris Administration's continued support for human rights and LGBTQI+ rights and inclusive democracy around the world, including in The Bahamas.

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Remarks by Vice President Harris at U.S.-Caribbean Leaders Meeting

June 08, 2023

Atlantis Conference Center

Paradise Island, Bahamas

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Prime Minister Davis. And I congratulate you and your country on its upcoming 50th anniversary of independence.

It is my understanding, to your point, that I am the highest elected official from the United States to visit the Bahamas since you gained independence 50 years ago. And it is truly my honor to be here and co-host this convening with you.

And to all of the CARICOM and Caribbean leaders who are here today, I thank you for the work that we have done over the last couple of years. And congratulations on the 50th anniversary of CARICOM.

As neighbors, the United States shares common bonds and interests with the Caribbean nations. Our partnership, we strongly believe, is essential to our mutual security and prosperity.

Our nations have extensive people-to-people ties. In fact, in the United States this month, we celebrate Caribbean American Heritage Month.

Strengthening the U.S.-Caribbean relationship is a priority for me, as it is for President Joe Biden. And these meetings have proven  I believe, at a leader level, have proven to be very important and essential to the strength of these relationships.

This, in fact, is the fourth multilateral meeting I have hosted with Caribbean leaders. I first convened this group and asked them to join me virtually in April of 2022, where I committed to the leaders here that we would meet at least once a year. We then met in person in Los Angeles in June of last year at the Summit of the Americas. And last September, a smaller group of us met in Washington, D.C.

Throughout all of these engagements, we have discussed the priorities of the leaders at this table and identified specific areas of collaboration. I have then, after those conversations, often raised the issues that we have discussed with other world leaders and  outside of the Caribbean  and worked on these priorities in Washington, D.C.

Since we last met, I do believe we have made significant progress.

Regarding the existential threat of the climate crisis, Caribbean nations are on the front lines. We have discussed, for example, powerful storms that can wipe out economic progress; low-lying islands that face erosion, flooding, and deadly storm surge from rising seas.

These discussions resulted in the launch of our U.S.-Caribbean Partnership to Address the Climate Crisis  or, as we call it, PACC 2030  last year at the Summit of the Americas. PACC 2030 is designed to help accelerate the Caribbean's transition to clean energy and to promote energy security and climate resilience.

Since we last met in Los Angeles, the United States has helped to facilitate clean energy projects throughout the region.

I'll offer some examples: in St. Lucia, the work that we have done thus far to deploy solar microgrids to power schools, hospitals, and water treatment plants; Dominica and St. Kitts, to develop commercial geothermal power projects; Antigua and Barbuda, to train a clean energy workforce; and the Dominican Republic, to integrate battery storage in their energy grid.

Our work together has also helped build capacity for disaster preparedness. For example, the administrator of NOAA led a group of U.S. export  experts to Barbados to support regional resilience, including early warning systems and sharing climate information with communities.

We established a network of Caribbean-based scientific experts to create new climate mitigation and adaptation methods.

And in Jamaica, we are helping develop a national emergency commercial infrastructure and commu-  communications  pardon  infrastructure.

Since we last met, we have also worked to bring investors to the Caribbean to identify new opportunities for clean energy infrastructure, including through trade missions. We have provided $28 million in food security assistance. And we have invested in the Blue-Green Investment Corporation, spearheaded by Barbados, which we expect to unlock up to $210 million over three years.

And today, it is my pleasure to announce additional PACC 2030 investments.

One, specifically, a $20 million investment in the Caribbean Climate Investment Program to help incentivize the private sector to partner with Caribbean nations to develop more clean energy technologies, like microgrids and energy storage systems, and to help businesses become more energy efficient in their operations.

And, second, a $15 million investment to support emergency response efforts and strengthen the capacity of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency. This investment is intended to help develop new early warning systems and pre-position first aid equipment and generators.

As a follow-up to this convening, in fact, tomorrow the Atlantic Council and RMI are hosting a PACC 2030 summit here in Nassau. There, we will work with these and other organizations to facilitate connections between the United States government, the private sector, NGOs, and philanthropic organizations, and officials here in the Caribbean to identify, build, and operate new clean energy projects.

Another key area of our work with the Caribbean, through PACC 2030, is to increase access to development financing. To that end, earlier this week, I met with the new President of the World Bank, Ajay Banga, and informed him that the United States will lead a diplomatic campaign on multilateral development bank reform.

My conversations with the leaders at this table helped inform our administration's approach. We seek more available and  availability of low-cost concessional financing to nations in the Caribbean. And we believe addressing the climate crisis should be a critical part of the mission of the World Bank.

More broadly, new debt must include disaster clauses to allow a pause on debt payments immediately following a natural disaster.

And, three, we want the bank to better mobilize the private sector in support of these goals.

Implementation of these reforms will have a major impact on countries in the Caribbean, and we aim to achieve these key reforms by the G20 meeting this fall.

At my invitation, President Banga will join our meeting today virtually in just a few minutes.

On the issue of security, too many people in all of our countries are dying from gun violence. I will reiterate that our administration is committed to disrupt gun trafficking. We are committed to interdict shipments of arms and ammunition and hold traffickers accountable.

And today, I am pleased to announce that the United States Department of Justice will create a new position, a Coordinator for Caribbean Firearms Prosecutions, which will help maximize information sharing between our countries to support the prosecution of traffickers.

This effort will be aided by the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which President Biden signed last year, and includes new federal criminal offenses for firearms trafficking and straw purchases.

In addition, through the U.S. law enforcement agencies, we are supporting a recently established Caribbean Crime Gun Intelligence Unit in Trinidad and Tobago to train officials in firearms investigations and help bring criminals to justice.

And we will stand up a Haiti Transnational Criminal Investigative Unit in collaboration with the Haitian National Police to facilitate investigation and prosecution of firearms and human trafficking, which affects the entire region.

More broadly on the issue of Haiti: First, I will say that our hearts go out to those who have lost loved ones and all who have been impacted by, just this week alone, the flooding and the earthquake. The international community must continue to support the Haitian people in light of the devastating humanitarian and security crisis in that country.

The United States supports the development of a multinational force to Haiti. And today I'm pleased to announce $53.7 million in new humanitarian aid for Haiti. In addition, our administration will support the extension of HOPE-HELP trade preferences for Haiti, which are due for renewal in 2025.

Finally, in response to longstanding requests from our Caribbean partners, I am pleased to announce that the Biden-Harris administration has begun to process to establish an expanded diplomatic presence in the Eastern Caribbean, including two new embassies.

In conclusion: From the climate crisis, to development financing, to security, and Haiti and diplomatic presence, we have achieved substantial progress in the last two years based on shared priorities, many of which have been formed and discussed through these convenings that we have had over the last two years.

We are neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. And the security and prosperity of this region requires the type of collaboration and partnership that we have developed and continued to grow over the last two years.

It is the full intention of our administration and the United States to continue this good work, knowing, of course, there is more to do but that progress has been made.

And so, again, I thank the leaders at this table and, Mr. Prime Minister, you, again, for hosting us.

END

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Letter to the Speaker of the House and President pro tempore of the Senate on War Powers Report

June 08, 2023

Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Madam President:)

I am providing this supplemental consolidated report, prepared by my Administration and consistent with the War Powers Resolution (Public Law 93-148), as part of my efforts to keep the Congress informed about deployments of United States Armed Forces equipped for combat.

MILITARY OPERATIONS IN SUPPORT OF UNITED STATES COUNTERTERRORISM EFFORTS

In furtherance of counterterrorism efforts, the United States continues to work with partners around the globe, with a particular focus on the United States Central and Africa Commands' areas of responsibility. In this context, the United States has deployed forces to conduct counterterrorism operations and to advise, assist, and accompany security forces of select foreign partners on counterterrorism operations. In the majority of these locations, the mission of United States military personnel is to facilitate counterterrorism operations of foreign partner forces and does not include routine engagement in combat. In many of these locations, the security environment is such that United States military personnel may be required to defend themselves against threats or attacks, and, to that end, the United States may deploy United States military personnel with weapons and other appropriate equipment for force protection. Specific information about counterterrorism deployments to select countries is provided below, and a classified annex to this report provides further information.

Military Operations Conducted Pursuant to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force and in Support of Related United States Counterterrorism Objectives

Since October 7, 2001, United States Armed Forces, including Special Operations Forces, have conducted counterterrorism combat operations, including against al-Qa'ida and associated forces. Since August 2014, these operations have included targeting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which was formerly known as al-Qa'ida in Iraq. In support of these and other overseas operations, the United States has deployed combat-equipped forces to several locations in the United States Central, European, Africa, Southern, and Indo-Pacific Commands' areas of responsibility. Such operations and deployments have been reported previously, consistent with Public Law 107-40, Public Law 107-243, the War Powers Resolution, and other statutes. These ongoing operations, which the United States has carried out with the assistance of numerous international partners, have been successful in seriously degrading ISIS capabilities in Syria and Iraq. If necessary, in response to terrorist threats, I will direct additional measures to protect the people and interests of the United States. It is not possible to know at this time the precise scope or the duration of the deployments of United States Armed Forces that are or will be necessary to counter terrorist threats to the United States.

Afghanistan. United States military personnel remain postured outside Afghanistan to address threats to the United States homeland and United States interests that may arise from inside Afghanistan.

Iraq and Syria. As part of a comprehensive strategy to defeat ISIS, United States Armed Forces are working by, with, and through local partners to conduct operations against ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria and against al-Qa'ida in Syria to limit the potential for resurgence of these groups and to mitigate threats to the United States homeland. A small presence of United States Armed Forces remains in strategically significant locations in Syria to conduct operations, in partnership with local, vetted ground forces, to address continuing terrorist threats emanating from Syria. United States Armed Forces in Iraq continue to advise, assist, and enable select elements of the Iraqi security forces, including Iraqi Kurdish security forces. United States Armed Forces also provide limited support to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization mission in Iraq. United States Armed Forces, as part of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, remain present in Iraq at the invitation of the Government of Iraq.

As reported on March 25, 2023, I directed United States forces to conduct precision strikes on March 23, 2023, against facilities in eastern Syria used by groups affiliated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for command and control, munitions storage, and other purposes. This followed a series of attacks against United States personnel and facilities in Iraq and Syria that threatened the lives of United States and Coalition personnel and that were perpetrated by militia groups affiliated with the IRGC. One such attack, on March 23, 2023, tragically killed one American contractor supporting the United States military, and wounded six others, including five United States service members. I directed this discrete military action consistent with my responsibility to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive and to conduct United States foreign relations.

Arabian Peninsula Region. A small number of United States military personnel are deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS. The United States military continues to work closely with the Republic of Yemen government and regional partner forces to degrade the terrorist threat posed by those groups.

United States Armed Forces, in a non-combat role, continue to provide military advice and limited information to the Saudi-led Coalition for defensive and training purposes only as they relate to territorial defense. Such support does not involve United States Armed Forces in hostilities with the Houthis for the purposes of the War Powers Resolution.

United States Armed Forces are deployed to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to protect United States forces and interests in the region against hostile action by Iran and Iran-backed groups. These forces, operating in coordination with the Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, provide air and missile defense capabilities and support the operation of United States military aircraft. The total number of United States forces in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is approximately 2,657.

Jordan. At the request of the Government of Jordan, approximately 2,936 United States military personnel are deployed to Jordan to support Defeat-ISIS operations, to enhance Jordan's security, and to promote regional stability.

Lebanon. At the request of the Government of Lebanon, approximately 89 United States military personnel are deployed to Lebanon to enhance the government's counterterrorism capabilities and to support the counterterrorism operations of Lebanese security forces.

Turkey. United States Armed Forces remain deployed to Turkey, at the Turkish government's request, to support Defeat-ISIS operations and to enhance Turkey's security.

East Africa Region. United States Armed Forces continue to counter the terrorist threat posed by ISIS and al-Shabaab, an associated force of al-Qa'ida. United States Armed Forces remain prepared to conduct airstrikes in Somalia against ISIS and al-Shabaab terrorists. United States military personnel conduct periodic engagements in Somalia to train, advise, and assist regional forces, including Somali and African Union Transition Mission in Somalia forces, during counterterrorism operations. Since the last periodic report, United States Armed Forces have conducted a number of airstrikes in Somalia against al-Shabaab in defense of our Somali partner forces. Additionally, I directed a direct action raid on January 25, 2023, at a remote location in northern Somalia to capture Bilal al-Sudani, an ISIS leader in Somalia and key facilitator of ISIS's global network. Approximately 11 ISIS operatives, including al-Sudani, were killed during the operation. United States military personnel are deployed to Kenya to support counterterrorism operations in East Africa. On January 10, 2023, United States Armed Forces acted in self-defense using small arms and mortar fire during an al-Shabaab attack on United States and Kenyan forces at a forward operating base in Kenya near the Kenya-Somalia border. No United States or Kenyan personnel were killed or injured during the engagement. United States military personnel continue to partner with the Government of Djibouti, which has permitted use of Djiboutian territory for basing of United States Armed Forces. United States military personnel remain deployed to Djibouti, including for purposes of staging for counterterrorism and counter-piracy operations in the vicinity of the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and to provide contingency support for embassy security augmentation in East Africa, as necessary.

Lake Chad Basin and Sahel Region. United States military personnel in the Lake Chad Basin and Sahel Region continue to conduct airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations and to provide support to African and European partners conducting counterterrorism operations in the region, including by advising, assisting, and accompanying these partner forces. Approximately 1,016 United States military personnel remain deployed to Niger.

Cuba. United States Armed Forces continue to conduct humane and secure detention operations for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under the authority provided by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40), as informed by the law of war. There are 30 such detainees as of the date of this report.

Philippines. United States military personnel deployed to the Philippines are providing support to the counterterrorism operations of the armed forces of the Philippines.

MILITARY OPERATIONS IN EGYPT IN SUPPORT OF THE MULTINATIONAL FORCE AND OBSERVERS

Approximately 451 United States military personnel are assigned to or are supporting the United States contingent of the Multinational Force and Observers, which have been present in Egypt since 1981.

UNITED STATES AND NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION OPERATIONS IN KOSOVO

The United States continues to contribute forces to the Kosovo Force (KFOR), led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in cooperation with local authorities, bilateral partners, and international institutions, to deter renewed hostilities in Kosovo. Approximately 591 United States military personnel are among KFOR's approximately 3,800 personnel.

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES IN NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION COUNTRIES

Approximately 80,000 United States Armed Forces personnel are assigned or deployed to North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries in Europe, including those deployed to reassure our allies and to deter further Russian aggression.

MILITARY OPERATIONS IN SUDAN IN SUPPORT OF THE EVACUATION OF UNITED STATES PERSONNEL AND OTHERS

As reported on April 23, 2023, I directed United States Armed Forces personnel to conduct an operation to evacuate United States personnel and others from Khartoum, Sudan, in response to the deteriorating security situation in Sudan. To conduct and support this operation, United States Armed Forces personnel with appropriate combat equipment deployed to Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Sudan. I directed this action consistent with my responsibility to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive and to conduct United States foreign relations.

I have directed the participation of United States Armed Forces in all of the above-described operations pursuant to my constitutional and statutory authority as Commander in Chief and as Chief Executive (including the authority to carry out Public Law 107-40, Public Law 107-243, and other statutes), as well as my constitutional and statutory authority to conduct the foreign relations of the United States. Officials of my Administration and I communicate regularly with congressional leadership, relevant congressional committees, and other Members of Congress with regard to these deployments, and we will continue to do so.

Sincerely,

JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

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Russo-Ukraine War - 08 June 2023 - Day 470

Su M Tu W Th F Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

A number of claims and counterclaims are being made on the Ukraine-Russia conflict on the ground and online. While GlobalSecurity.org takes utmost care to accurately report this news story, we cannot independently verify the authenticity of all statements, photos and videos.

On 24 February 2022, Ukraine was suddenly and deliberately attacked by land, naval and air forces of Russia, igniting the largest European war since the Great Patriotic War. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a "special military operation" (SVO - spetsialnaya voennaya operatsiya) in Ukraine in response to the appeal of the leaders of the "Donbass republics" for help. That attack is a blatant violation of the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine. Putin stressed that Moscow's goal is the demilitarization and denazification of the country. The military buildup in preceeding months makes it obvious that the unprovoked and dastardly Russian attack was deliberately planned long in advance. During the intervening time, the Russian government had deliberately sought to deceive the world by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

"To initiate a war of aggression... is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." [Judgment of the International Military Tribunal]

The UK Ministry of Defence reported that amidst a highly complex operational picture, heavy fighting continues along multiple sectors of the front. In most areas Ukraine holds the initiative.

Russian forces are likely still being ordered to return to the offensive as soon as possible: Chechen units have led an unsuccessful attempt to take the town of Marivka, near Donetsk city, where the front line has changed little since 2015.

Through 07 June 2023, flood levels continued to rise in the lower Dnipro, following the collapse of the Kakhovka Dam, but will likely start to recede during 08 June 2023. Shelling has complicated some attempts to evacuate displaced civilians from inundated areas.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported that during the day of June 8, Russian forces launched 1x missile, 27x air strikes, around 30x MLRS attacks at the positions of Ukrainian troops and various settlements.

The likelihood of missile and air strikes across Ukraine remains very high.

Russia focuses its main efforts on Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Mar'inka axes, heavy fighting for every square meter of land is ongoing. During the day of June 8, 26x combat engagements took place in the above-mentioned areas of the frontline.

Volyn and Polissya axes: no significant changes. No signs of the formation of Russian offensive groups were found. Certain units of the Russian Armed Forces continue their deployment at the training grounds of the Republic of Belarus.

Sivershchyna and Slobozhanshchyna axes: Russia maintains its military presence in the areas of Russia bordering Ukraine. Russia reinforces its group engaged in border protection with units of territorial troops. During the day of June 8, Russian forces launched air strikes on the settlements of Myropillya, Sinne, and Severynivka (Sumy oblast). The Russian invaders fired mortars and artillery at the settlements of Atyns'ke, Bezsalivka, Myropillya, Ponomarenky (Sumy oblast), Krasne, Morokhovets', Luk'yantsi, Starytsya, Hatyshche, Vovchans'k, and Chuhunivka (Kharkiv oblast).

Kup'yans'k axis: the Russian adversary fired artillery and mortars at Kam'yanka, Krasne Pershe, Novomlyns'k, Dvorichna, Kyslivka, Tabaivka, Berestove (Kharkiv oblast), and Novoselivs'ke (Luhansk oblast).

Lyman axis: during the day of June 8, the Russian adversary conducted unsuccessful offensives in the vicinity of Vesele (Donetsk oblast). Makiivka, Nevs'ke, Bilohorivka (Luhansk oblast), Verkhn'okam'yans'ke, Tors'ke, Spirne, and Rozdolivka (Donetsk oblast) were shelled with artillery.

Bakhmut axis: the Russian adversary attempted to improve its tactical situation and conducted offensive operations towards Ivanivske. To no success. The Russian adversary launched an air strike in the vicinity of settlement of Bila Hora (Donetsk region). Vasyukivka, Min'kivka, Orikhovo-Vasylivka, Hryhorivka, Bohdanivka, Ivanivske, Stupochky, Oleksandro-Shul'tyne, Bila Hora, Druzhba, Toretsk, and Pivnichne (Donetsk oblast) came under Russian artillery fire.

Avdiivka axis: the Russian adversary made unsuccessful attempts to advance near the settlements of Sjeverne and Opytne. Russian forces launched air strikes in the vicinity of Avdiivka. The Russian occupant forces fired artillery at the vicinities of settlements of Novokalynove, Avdiivka, Tonen'ke, Pervomais'ke, and Karlivka (Donetsk oblast).

Mar'inka axis: Ukrainian defenders repelled all Russian attacks in the vicinity of the city of Mar'inka. Russian forces suffered losses. At the same time, Russian forces fired artillery in the vicinities of Mar'inka, Pobjeda, and Novomykhailivka (Donetsk oblast).

Shakhtars'ke axis: Russian forces shelled the settlements of Vuhledar, Shakhtars'ke, Zolota Nyva, and Vremivka (Donetsk Oblast).

Zaporizhzhia and Kherson axes: the Russian adversary stays on the defensive. Russians launched an air strike in the vicinity of Hulyaipole (Zaporizhzhia oblast). The Russian invaders fired artillery at Burlats'ke, Zelene Pole, Novosilka, Novopil', Temyrivka (Donetsk oblast), Ol'hivs'ke, Hulyaipole, Zaliznychne, Bilohir'ya, Kam'yans'ke (Zaporizhzhia oblast), Beryslav, Antonivka (Kherson oblast), and the city of Kherson.

In the settlements of the temporarily occupied territory of Kherson oblast, the Russian occupiers continue to leverage the aftermath of their crime. In particular, evacuees from the flooded settlements are being accommodated in boarding houses and recreation centers where military units are already deployed. This is the invaders' attempt to protect themselves by hiding behind civilians.

According to the available information, the Russian military leadership has significant problems with the supply of materiel for its troops. Soldiers who have recently signed contracts in military units stationed in Volgograd (Russia) have been issued boots instead of high ankle boots. In addition, contract service soldiers are being forced to buy uniforms at their own expense.

During the day of June 8, Ukrainian Air Force launched 18x air strikes at the concentrations of troops and 2x - at the anti-aircraft missile system of the Russian adversary.

During the day of June 8, the Ukrainian missile and artillery troops hit 5x command posts, 6x concentrations of troops, weapons, and military equipment, 2x anti-aircraft missile systems, 8x artillery units at firing positions and 2x other important Russian targets.





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Second Meeting of the Counterterrorism Law Enforcement Forum

US Department of State

Media Note

Office of the Spokesperson

June 7, 2023

The U.S. Departments of State and Justice held the second meeting of the Counterterrorism Law Enforcement Forum (CTLEF), co-hosted by the Government of Norway, in Oslo on June 6-7. The CTLEF, which focuses on countering the global threat of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism (REMVE), brought together law enforcement, prosecutors, and other criminal justice practitioners from Europe and North and South America, alongside representatives from INTERPOL, Europol, the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law, and other multilateral organizations.

At the CTLEF meeting, State Department Deputy Coordinator for Counterterrorism Ian Moss highlighted Russia's damaging role, including in allowing REMVE actors to operate in the country, having REMVE groups fight alongside Russian troops in Ukraine, promoting a false narrative that Ukraine is a Nazi hotbed, and thus citing "de-Nazification" as one of the primary pretexts for its full-scale invasion. Deputy Coordinator Moss announced that the Bureau of Counterterrorism is awarding $2 million for new projects designed to counter Russian disinformation and publicize Russia's hypocrisy on this front.

The CTLEF meeting also focused on increasing awareness and information sharing among law enforcement and criminal justice partners about global REMVE activity, including the transnational linkages between and among REMVE actors. Additionally, participants discussed recent law enforcement actions that governments have taken to disrupt REMVE actors' global activity and best practices in this challenging area.

In addition to the Departments of State and Justice, officials from the Department of the Treasury, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, also participated in this meeting. The CTLEF will convene again in spring 2024.

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China, Pakistan and Iran hold first meeting of trilateral consultation on counter-terrorism, security

Global Times

By Global Times Published: Jun 08, 2023 01:35 PM Updated: Jun 08, 2023 11:59 PM

China on Wednesday held a consultation meeting in Beijing with Pakistan and Iran on counter-terrorism and security, marking the first meeting of its kind.

The meeting creates a more profound institutional mechanism for long-term counter-terrorism cooperation among the three countries, and is likely to also establish a very important foundation for future cooperation in other security areas, experts told the Global Times on Thursday.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at the routine press conference on Thursday that "Terrorism is a common enemy of humanity. China firmly opposes and strongly condemns terrorism in all its manifestations. We stand ready to work in close collaboration with Pakistan, Iran and other regional countries to resolutely crack down on terrorist forces that endanger the interests of the three countries and regional security."

During the first meeting of the China-Pakistan-Iran Trilateral Consultation on counter-terrorism and security, which was held at Directors General level, in-depth discussions were held on the regional anti-terrorism situation and joint crackdown on cross-border terrorists, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry in a statement on Wednesday night.

Based on the outcome of the consultations, the three sides decided to institutionalize the trilateral consultation on counter-terrorism and security.

Bai Tian, director-general of the Department of External Security Affairs of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Abdul Hameed, director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan, and Seyed Rasoul Mosavi, assistant to the foreign minister and director-general of the South Asia Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Iran jointly held the meeting.

On the same day, Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs of China Nong Rong met with Mosavi and Hameed. China also held separate bilateral consultation and exchange on anti-terrorism with Pakistan and Iran.

This trilateral meeting marks an expansion of China's multinational security cooperation mechanisms in the neighboring region, Zhu Yongbiao, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at Lanzhou University, told the Global Times on Thursday.

The participation of Iran in such mechanisms is greatly important for the continuation and further deepening of the mechanisms, he said.

In May, China also held trilateral talks with Pakistan and Afghanistan in Islamabad on the 5th China-Afghanistan-Pakistan Foreign Ministers' Dialogue, during which cooperation on counter-terrorism was also discussed.

Zhu noted that the addition of Iran to the cooperation mechanisms is significant from a geographical perspective, as the counter-terrorism situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan could also affect Iran.

"For example, terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been crossing borders to hide in Iran, which also poses a threat to Iran itself," he said. "In the face of the current, more complex needs of fighting terrorism in South and Central Asia, it is natural for the three countries to strengthen cooperation."

The agenda of Wednesday's meeting is likely to have included issues regarding the security situation in and around Afghanistan, which is of great regional and international concern, and the situation on the Pak-Iran border in the Balochistan region, observers noted.

According to the Samarkand Declaration issued in April at the 4th Foreign Ministers' Meeting of neighboring countries of Afghanistan in Samarkand, the Republic of Uzbekistan, all parties acknowledged that the security situation related to terrorism in Afghanistan remains grave, pointing out that terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, including "Islamic State," the "East Turkestan Islamic Movement" and "Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan" continue to pose serious threats to regional and global security, and agree that anti-terrorism security cooperation among neighboring countries of Afghanistan should be strengthened and that a united front against terrorism should be established.

Zhu said that China, Pakistan and Iran are likely to reach many common positions on counter-terrorism, such as joint identification of some terrorist organizations and enhanced cooperation in combating cross-border terrorist operations.

"There could also be more integrated and practical cooperation exercises, such as training and exercises for counter-terrorism technicians," he said.

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Foreign Minister Announces that Kingdom Joined Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh Africa Focus Group

Saudi Press Agency

Riyadh, June 8, 2023, SPA -- Prince Faisal bin Farhan bin Abdullah, Minister for Foreign Affairs and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken chaired today the Riyadh-hosted ministerial meeting of the Global Coalition against Daesh.

In his address to the meeting, the minister announced that the Kingdom joined the presidency of the Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh Africa Focus Group, along with the US, Morocco, Italy and Niger. He also welcomed establishing a focus group to combat Daesh in the Khorasan Province in Afghanistan, where this group will be an essential pillar for reducing the presence and spread of the terrorist organization in the area.

Prince Farhan explained that the fight against extremism and terrorism requires all to make additional efforts to win the minds and hearts. Media, cultural and educational tools can combat their influence, and their paramount importance can be utilized to provide a vibrant, practical model for a better future based on tolerance, openness, sustainable development and prosperity, as exemplified by the Saudi Vision 2030 and similar initiatives. Such initiatives and education allow young people to become the makers of the future, as they are the Saudi Vision's goal and the pillars of its achievements.

The minister stressed that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has always believed that the path to security, stability, development and prosperity requires permanent collective efforts to combat terrorism and its criminal groups and confront extremist ideology that contradicts all religious, human and moral values.

He said: "Out of the belief of the Kingdom in fighting deviated ideologies, uprooting terrorism and renouncing hatred and extremism, the Kingdom has embarked on establishing several centres to combat terrorism and extremist ideologies, the most important of which is the Global Centre for Combating Extremist Ideology (Etidal), which aims to combat extremist ideology and its messages, spread the principles of tolerance, promote a culture of moderation, combat extremist activities and reduce their effects, and organize media campaigns to reduce the media impact of Daesh, in cooperation with our regional and international partners."

--SPA

16:15 LOCAL TIME 13:15 GMT

0028

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3 mln more doses of Chinese COVID-19 vaccines arrive in Myanmar

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 10:41, June 09, 2023

YANGON, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Three million more doses of COVID-19 vaccines provided by China arrived in Myanmar's Yangon on Wednesday, according to a statement from the Chinese Embassy in Myanmar.

China has directly or indirectly supplied 64 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines and a large amount of anti-pandemic supplies to Myanmar since the start of the pandemic, the statement said.

It helped Myanmar reduce the rate of COVID-19 infection, severe disease and mortality, the embassy said, adding that it has also played an active role in building a China-Myanmar community with a shared future.

The new batch of COVID-19 vaccines was delivered after the Myanmar government recently requested China for additional assistance of COVID-19 vaccines, it said. The Chinese vaccines are likely to be used for vulnerable groups such as the elderly, it said.

China's vaccine assistance this time is a positive response to Myanmar's needs, the embassy said in the statement.

In Myanmar, over 38.5 million people across the Southeast Asian country have been fully vaccinated as of May 2 this year. Among them, over 31.65 million were adults aged 18 and above, while more than 6.84 million were under the age of 18, the health ministry's figures showed.

As of June 7, Myanmar has recorded a total of 639,379 COVID-19 infections with 19,494 deaths and 618,363 recoveries since the beginning of the pandemic in the country in March 2020, the ministry's figures showed.

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New UK sanctions legislation allows the government to target Belarus exports, internet propaganda, and crack down on circumvention

New sanctions legislation allows the UK to target exports from Belarus funding the Lukashenko regime and crack down on Russia's efforts to circumvent sanctions.

8 June 2023

further sanctions against the Belarusian regime for continuing to actively facilitate Russia's invasion of Ukraine

includes export bans on sources of revenue to Belarus, cracks down on sanctions circumvention and provides grounds so that Belarusian organisations cannot spread propaganda in the UK

also expands sanctions criteria, giving the government the basis to sanction a broader range of people such as aides, advisers and government ministers who facilitate the operation of the Belarusian regime

New sanctions legislation allowing the UK government to target exports from Belarus funding the Lukashenko regime and crack down on Russia's efforts to circumvent sanctions, have been announced today (8 June 2023).

The measures also give the government grounds to prevent designated Belarusian media organisations from spreading propaganda in the UK, including over the internet, as the regime continues to actively facilitate Russia's invasion of Ukraine and spread false narratives.

The Belarusian regime has permitted the use of its territory and airspace by Russia to conduct missile and drone strikes against Ukraine in addition to the provision of significant training and logistical support to Russian forces.

Foreign Secretary James Cleverly says:

This new package ratchets up the economic pressure on Lukashenko and his regime which actively facilitates the Russian war effort and ignores Ukraine's territorial integrity. Our support for Ukraine will remain resolute for as long as it takes and the UK will not hesitate to introduce further measures against those who prop up Putin's war.

The UK is banning the import of gold, cement, wood and rubber to the UK from Belarus, which are sources of revenue for the Lukashenko regime, building on measures introduced last July to ban the import and export of goods worth around A60 million from Belarus.

We are also blocking exports to Belarus from the UK of banknotes and machinery, alongside goods, technologies and materials that could be used to produce chemical and biological weapons.

Our online measures provide the government with the ability to prevent designated Belarusian media companies from spreading propaganda in the UK. That means social media companies and internet service providers will restrict access to the websites of sanctioned Belarusian media organisations, as is already the case for sanctioned Russian organisations.

We have also expanded the designation criteria for Belarus allowing the government to sanction a broader range of people who prop up the regime. This means we have the basis, where appropriate, to target close family members of those already sanctioned.

In addition, our measures in this package crack down on those circumventing sanctions given the close links between the Belarusian and Russian economies, applying measures to Belarus which we have already applied to Russia to close loopholes and address sanctions circumvention.

This includes through limiting the funds that Belarus is able to raise by further restricting Belarusian access to UK financial markets and preventing the import of goods such as gold which may have originated in Russia.

This also reflects the UK's wider work bearing down on those who prop up Putin's war in Ukraine, coming down hard on sanctions evaders; closing loopholes; and working with our international partners to undermine attempts to build global resilience to Western sanctions.

This latest package builds upon the significant sanctions against Belarus already in place, including last year banning the import and export of goods worth around A60 million for the regime's active support of Putin's war. That covers bans from Belarus to the UK on the export of oil refining goods, advanced technology components, luxury goods and imports to the UK of Belarusian iron and steel.

The UK has also targeted people and companies who have engaged in, supported or promoted the repression of fundamental human rights and freedoms in Belarus. That includes sanctioning more than 100 people and organisations, such as freezing the assets of major Belarusian state-owned enterprises which are significant sources of revenue and foreign currency for the Lukashenko regime.

The UK is resolute in condemning the brutal campaign by the regime against the human rights and fundamental freedoms of the Belarusian people - such as routinely subjecting citizens to inhumane and degrading treatment and hindering any form of opposition. With over 1,400 political prisoners in Belarus, the UK calls for their immediate and unconditional release.

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PLA holds large-scale drills around Taiwan island after record-breaking China-Russia joint patrol in Asia-Pacific

Global Times

By Liu Xuanzun Published: Jun 08, 2023 09:20 PM

Right after a two-day China-Russia joint aerial strategic patrol in the Asia-Pacific region, which set a record in the number of warplanes involved, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) on Thursday launched what appeared to be a large-scale exercise around the island of Taiwan.

The recent patrols and exercise served as deterrence against the rising tensions following US provocations in the region, analysts said.

Some 37 PLA aircraft, including J-11 and J-16 fighter jets, H-6 bombers, YU-20 tanker aircraft and unidentified early warning aircraft, were successively observed over waters to the southwest of the island of Taiwan on Thursday morning. Some of them entered the West Pacific through the Bashi Channel to the east side of the island, according to a press release issued by the defense authority on the island.

This is well above the daily average for the PLA's routine patrols and drills around the island of Taiwan, marking a probable large-scale exercise following the China-Russia joint aerial strategic patrol in the Asia-Pacific region over the previous two days, observers said.

After two Chinese H-6 bombers and two Russian Tu-95 bombers flew together on Tuesday over the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan, escorted by two Chinese fighter jets, the same number of bombers from the two countries flew across the Miyako Strait into the West Pacific on Wednesday, escorted by 18 additional aircraft in the process, Japan's Ministry of Defense Joint Staff said in a press release late on Wednesday.

In all, 22 Chinese and Russian aircraft participated in Wednesday's joint patrol, which is an irregular number, leading the Japanese government to voice "serious concerns" to China and Russia via diplomatic channels, Japanese news outlet The Sankei News reported on Wednesday.

The China-Russia joint aerial strategic patrol was conducted in accordance with international law and practice and did not target any specific country, Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a press release on Thursday, in response to the Japanese concerns.

According to statements by China's Ministry of National Defense on Tuesday and Wednesday, the joint patrol was carried out in two phases based on an annual cooperation schedule, the first phase in the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea on Tuesday, and the second phase in the West Pacific on Wednesday.

This was the first time the joint patrol was divided into two phases and extended to two days since such missions began in 2019.

China Central Television reported on Thursday that the PLA Air Force's J-11 and J-16 fighter jets escorted the two countries' bombers in the mission, while Russia's Defense Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that the Russian Aerospace Forces' Su-30 and Su-35 fighter jets provided air cover.

A map showing the flight paths of the Chinese and Russian aircraft provided by the Japanese Defense Ministry indicated that the bombers flew beyond the range of Japanese monitoring after they entered deep into the West Pacific in the approximate direction of Guam, a major US military node on the second island chain.

The Russian statement said that during the joint aerial patrol, Russian aircraft also landed and took off from an airfield in China, which analysts said allowed the Russian bombers to refuel and receive maintenance.

The consecutive record-breaking China-Russia joint strategic aerial patrol and large-scale PLA exercise around the island of Taiwan can deter any party that stirs up trouble, and they contribute to the safeguarding of peace and stability in the region, a Chinese military expert who requested anonymity told the Global Times on Thursday.

Major directions in the Asia-Pacific along the first and the second island chains, including South Korea, Japan, the island of Taiwan and Guam, were all covered in the patrol and the exercise, the expert said.

Such missions are becoming more combat-oriented, with naval forces joining in sea-air integrated operations, Wei Dongxu, a Beijing-based military expert, told the Global Times, citing simultaneous PLA warship activities in the same regions.

A Type 055 large destroyer and a Type 054A frigate was spotted in the Sea of Japan on Tuesday, while a Type 052D destroyer and another Type 054A frigate was spotted in the West Pacific on Wednesday, coinciding with the Chinese and Russian joint aerial patrols, according to press releases from Japan's Ministry of Defense Joint Staff.

More similar patrols and training missions in the region will likely take place, observers said.

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US Not Asking Nations to Choose Sides, Blinken Says Ahead of China Trip

By Nike Ching June 08, 2023

The U.S. is not asking anyone to choose between the United States and China, but it is demonstrating the benefits of partnership, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday while visiting Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud, the Saudi foreign minister, said his country's partnership with China "is likely to grow."

"The United States remains the number one partner of choice" for most countries in the Persian Gulf region, Blinken said during a joint press conference in Riyadh.

Prince Faisal said that while China is his nation's largest trading partner, his country's "security partnership" with the U.S. "is refreshed on an almost daily basis."

Blinken's remarks came as Washington and Beijing are preparing for the top U.S. diplomat's upcoming trip to China. The trip was rescheduled from February after the U.S. military shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon that had drifted over the continental United States.

In a tweet this week, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns cited White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan's remarks that the U.S. hopes "Beijing will be willing to include substantive engagement on strategic nuclear issues."

Burns has postponed in-person events previously scheduled to be hosted by the Washington-based Hudson Institute on June 12 and the Center for Strategic and International Studies on June 16.

A U.S. official declined to say whether the postponement was related to Blinken's expected trip to Beijing.

During a press briefing earlier this week, VOA asked State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel whether Washington views Beijing as ready to stabilize bilateral ties.

"The international community expects us to manage our relationship with the PRC [People's Republic of China] responsibly," he said, regardless of whether it is "addressing the climate crisis, a significant portion of the world's trade flows through the Taiwan Strait, or addressing fentanyl precursors."

Chilly reception

In Beijing, China responded with a cold shoulder.

"The U.S. needs to respect China's core interests and major concerns," said Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Wang Wenbin during a briefing on Wednesday, urging Washington to "stop calling for communication on the one hand and making provocations on the other."

Ties between the world's two largest economies have been increasingly strained in recent months over issues including trade, technology and regional security. But U.S. agricultural exports to China continue to grow. China is the largest export market for U.S. agricultural products, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture.

It's an indication of what trade associations such as the U.S.-China Business Council said both economies should take into account - namely, "the stabilizing and beneficial role of trade."

But critics are skeptical that Blinken's trip can fundamentally change fraught relations over differences such as human rights.

"How [do U.S. President Joe Biden and Blinken] plan to 'thaw' with a [Chinese government] they have accused of committing genocide, #crimesagainsthumanity?" tweeted Human Rights Watch China Director Sophie Richardson. "What kind of cooperation can they expect?"

Some in Congress say Washington is acceding to Beijing's demands.

"The Biden administration so desperately wants to meet with top Chinese officials that it is complying with Beijing's demand to bury an FBI report" on the suspected Chinese spy balloon, tweeted Republican Senator Bill Hagerty, who is ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee panel on national security and international trade and finance.

The State Department's Patel on Monday told reporters there was no public update on Blinken's China trip but that the United States looked forward to rescheduling that visit "when conditions allow."

The Financial Times reported the visit could come this month.

'Candid, constructive and fruitful'

The State Department's top official for East Asia, Daniel Kritenbrink, and the National Security Council's senior director for China, Sarah Beran, were in China earlier this week for what Patel described as "candid and productive discussions" with Chinese officials.

China's foreign ministry called those talks "candid, constructive and fruitful communication on promoting the improvement of China-U.S. relations and properly managing differences."

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stressed the need for major powers to have open lines of communication last week ahead of a security conference in Singapore. His Chinese counterpart, General Li Shangfu, declined to meet with Austin on the sidelines of the conference, and while the two did shake hands at the forum, Austin said that was "no substitute for a substantive engagement."

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Iran, Azerbaijan seek resolution of existing misunderstandings

Iran Press TV

Thursday, 08 June 2023 10:11 PM

Iran and Azerbaijan have laid emphasis on the need for the resolution of existing misunderstandings between the countries towards the alignment of their mutual ties in their natural course.

Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and his Azeri counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov made the remarks during a telephone conversation on Thursday as they examined the latest state of the bilateral ties.

The top diplomats stressed that the quality of the countries' relations had to befit the principle of good neighborliness and correspond to the countries' mutual interests.

The officials insisted on the need for a continuation of consultations between the two sides, adding that the countries had to exchange technical and specialized teams that would address the elimination of their standing differences.

They also highlighted the need for proper management of each side's media outlets' coverage of their relations.

The relations became strained in January when the Eurasian country's Embassy in the Iranian capital of Tehran came under an attack.

Azerbaijan termed the attack as a "terrorist" incident, although, a probe has shown that the attacker had been motivated by "personal and family-related problems."

Azeri President Ilham Aliyev also blamed the incident on the "Iranian establishment."

Later, Baku expelled four Iranian diplomats, prompting Tehran to respond with a similar move.

Azerbaijan has, at the same time, been boosting its ties with the Israeli regime.

Late last month, Israeli president Isaac Herzog traveled to Azerbaijan. After a meeting with Aliyev, Herzog said the two had spoken in depth about global and regional security, claiming that it was "endangered and threatened by Iran."

Earlier this year, the Israeli regime's foreign minister Eli Cohen claimed he had agreed with Bayramov on an anti-Iranian posture.

Tehran has slammed Baku for its partnership with the occupying regime towards the establishment of a united front against the Islamic Republic.

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Iran says missile activities 'legitimate' as West raises 'invalid' concerns

Iran Press TV

Thursday, 08 June 2023 10:14 AM

Iran has dismissed as "invalid" the meddlesome statements released by certain Western countries on its first hypersonic missile, saying the Islamic Republic's missile activities are "conventional" based on international law.

Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan'ani made the remarks on Thursday after the US, Britain and France expressed concerns over the unveiling of Iran's first hypersonic missile named Fattah.

"The missile activities of the Islamic Republic of Iran are conventional, defensive and completely legitimate based on international law," he said.

"Hosting nuclear missiles and playing a destructive role in regional and international issues, these countries, which have a long and clear history of violating their international obligations in various fields, including nuclear tests and the non-proliferation regime, have no right to comment on the legitimate and completely legal defense capabilities of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Fattah was put on show on Tuesday by the Aerospace Force of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). The hypersonic missile has a range of 1,400 kilometers, can travel at up to 15 times the speed of sound and bypass air defense systems.

Addressing the unveiling ceremony, Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi said the new missile would boost Iran's "power of deterrence" and "bring peace and stability to the countries of the region."

Reacting to the development, principal deputy spokesperson for the US State Department Vedant Patel said Washington's "concerns about Iran's missile program are well-established."

France said that it notes with concern Iran's development of its new missile, claiming that it is "yet another breach of UN Security Council Resolution 2231."

The UK Foreign Office alleged that the missile unveiling further proves Iran's "continued disregard of international restrictions."

Also in his remarks, Kan'ani said the signing of the AUKUS pact by the US, the UK and Australia is "a clear example of nuclear powers' political and discriminatory approach on transferring technology and highly-enriched uranium to a non-nuclear country in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)."

The core of the tripartite deal is a pledge by America and Britain to help Australia build at least eight nuclear-powered, not nuclear-armed, submarines.

The spokesman hailed the continuous efforts of the Iranian Armed Forces and their strategic achievements in strengthening the country's defense might.

Such efforts, he noted, are a correct and effective measure in creating deterrence against foreign threats and defending Iran's national security.

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Iran's Relations With Azerbaijan Get Heated Over Attacks, Baku's Ties To Israel

By Michael Scollon June 08, 2023

For the second time in just months, Baku has warned its citizens against traveling to Iran in the wake of a deadly attack on the Azerbaijani Embassy in Tehran in January that it blamed on the "unstable situation in the Islamic republic."

In what has become a habit in recent weeks, Iranian officials have been angered over the perceived obstinacy of its northwestern neighbor and the encroachment of regional adversaries on what Tehran believes to be its backyard.

Azerbaijan's increasingly cozy relations with Iran's archfoe, Israel -- highlighted by defense deals, the opening of an embassy in Tel Aviv in March, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog's first visit to Azerbaijan last month -- has become a reliable trigger for Tehran as its own ties with Baku hit new lows.

Tehran does not officially recognize Israel, which it refers to disparagingly as a Palestinian-killing "Zionist regime" and accuses of having designs on sabotage and unrest within Iran's borders.

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan has warned against the travel of its citizens to Iran! This is the same policy that the president of the fake, child-killing, and occupying Zionist regime took during his recent trip to Baku," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani tweeted on June 5. "What should scare the people of Azerbaijan is the Zionist regime, not civilized and Islamic Iran."

Complicated Relationship

Herzog's visit, during which he said he and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev discussed in depth "the regional security structure that is threatened by Iran," appeared to have struck a nerve in Tehran.

"From the standpoint of the Islamic republic, the close relations of Azerbaijan with Israel is a major problem, [as is] the active presence of Israel in the military sphere [of Azerbaijan] and providing it with weaponry and the tight economic and security ties between the two countries," Iran analyst Touraj Atabaki, professor emeritus and chairman of the social history of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University, told RFE/RL's Radio Farda.

But Baku's budding ties with Israel are just one among many factors straining Iran's relationship with Azerbaijan, a fellow Shi'a-majority country.

Observers say the relationship has been complicated ever since Azerbaijan became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991. But things became even more problematic when Baku retook territory along Iran's border during its 2020 war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.

While Tehran supported Azerbaijan's claim to territory occupied by Iranian ally Armenia, it has strongly opposed Baku's intention to use the retaken lands to build the east-west Zangezur Corridor, which would connect mainland Azerbaijan to its Naxcivan exclave and open a long-sought trade route to Tehran's rival, Turkey, and beyond.

The plan was boosted by the Russian-brokered cease-fire that ended the war over Nagorno-Karabakh and called for "all economic and transport connections in the region to be unblocked."

While Iran launched large-scale military exercises dubbed "Mighty Iran" along its border with Naxcivan in October 2022 -- a show of force to underscore that it would not "permit the blockage" of its trade and transport links to Armenia -- the initiative has moved forward.

As talk of a possible peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan pick up steam, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksei Overchuk announced on May 31 that the two sides were close to an agreement that would pave the way for the route through Armenia and Azerbaijani territory previously occupied by Yerevan, and "open the road to Russia, the countries of the European Union, and Iran."

As Iran seeks to boost its sanctions-circumventing trade with Russia, including with the completion of a second north-south route that would also pass through Azerbaijan, the prospect of seeing a trade route crossing its passage to Armenia remains a serious bone of contention.

"Iran doesn't like this corridor because in the larger competition and struggle between Tehran and Baku it weakens Iran if this corridor is created, because right now Azerbaijan has to use Iranian airspace or territory to resupply Naxcivan," said Luke Coffey, a foreign policy expert at the Washington-based Hudson Institute think tank.

The Zangezur Corridor, if completed, would mean that "Iran will become less important in the eyes of policymakers in Baku, and perhaps Azerbaijan would feel emboldened to take a more hard line against Iran," Coffey told RFE/RL.

'Mighty Iran' And Shi'ite Brotherhood

Such a scenario does not sit well with Iran, which has worked to exert its influence in Azerbaijan.

"A significant segment of the Azerbaijani population is Shi'a and since the creation of the independent Republic of Azerbaijan, the Islamic republic has considered Azerbaijan as the backyard for the [expansion] of the influence of its brand of Shi'ism," Atabaki said.

Tehran is also wary of the effects the loss of influence on Baku will have on Iran's large ethnic Azeri population, separated from Azerbaijan by the Aras River and located primarily in Iran's East and West Azerbaijan provinces.

During the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh, Coffey said, images emerged on social media of ethnic Azeris in Iran "waving Azerbaijani flags on the other side of the river, literally cheering on, like a spectator event, the advancements of the Azerbaijani armed forces."

In November 2022, Baku stoked tensions with Iran by staging its own military exercises along the Iranian border, with Aliyev saying they were necessary to show Tehran that "we are not afraid of them."

"We will do our best to protect the secular lifestyle of Azerbaijan and Azeris around the world, including in Iran," Aliyev added. "They are part of our people."

A Turning Point

Amid the continuing back and forth, the January attack on the Azerbaijani Embassy in Tehran was seen by some observers as a turning point in bilateral relations.

Azerbaijan evacuated its embassy staff following the January 27 attack, in which a security guard was killed and two others injured when a gunman stormed the complex and opened fire. Baku blamed the attack on the Iranian secret service and called it an "act of terrorism."

In February, the Azerbaijani authorities said that they had detained nearly 40 people on suspicion of spying for Iran.

The fray worsened in March with the alleged assassination attempt on Fazil Mustafa, an Azerbaijani lawmaker who had been critical of Iran. Following the arrest in April of four people in connection with the incident, Baku accused Tehran of orchestrating the plot.

Two weeks later, Azerbaijani media reported the arrest of 20 people allegedly affiliated with Iran's Intelligence Ministry who were accused of promoting "the Islamic republic's propaganda, spreading religious superstitions, [and] attempting to overthrow the secular government of Baku."

In a tit-for-tat move, Tehran and Baku expelled four of each other's diplomats in April. And while diplomatic relations continued, the strains were evident as the two countries' foreign ministers held a series of phone calls that month in which Iran made clear that Tehran did not approve of Baku's relations with Israel.

"Only enemies benefit from the existence of differences" between the two countries, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian was quoted as saying by Iran's Shargh daily.

Iran's vice president in charge of economic affairs, Mohsen Rezaei, went a step further while addressing members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in the western Lorestan Province.

"The incitement of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the signing of arms contracts between Israel and the Republic of Azerbaijan was aimed at creating riots in the north of Iran, and to shift the thinking and focus of the army, the IRGC and the government of Iran to the north so that Israel can bomb Iran's nuclear sites," Shargh quoted Rezaei as saying.

On May 16, the Azerbaijani authorities announced another haul of individuals it said were recruited by Iran to disrupt Azerbaijan's constitutional order and establish Islamic law. This time, Baku claimed, the seven men detained had allegedly planned to assassinate Azerbaijani public figures.

The Feud Continues

That set the scene for the visit to Baku by Herzog in late May, held under strict security out of fear of Iranian retaliation.

After meeting Herzog, Aliyev lauded the boost that Israeli weaponry had given his country "to modernize our defense capability and allow us to defend our statehood, our national interests, and our territorial integrity."

Nearly 70 percent of Azerbaijan's arms imports between 2016 and 2020 were from Israel, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Herzog, in his comments after meeting Aliyev, said that "we expect to develop cooperation between us in many fields."

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Kanaani again took to Twitter to air Tehran's views on the development, writing on March 31 that "none of the regional moves of the Zionist regime remain hidden from the penetrating eyes of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

The next day, an Iranian opposition hacking group released alleged classified Iranian government documents that appeared to shed light on the January embassy attack and indicated the need to reevaluate Tehran's diplomatic ties with Azerbaijan.

The documents, purportedly distributed among top Iranian officials, included advice on how to distance Azerbaijani society from its government and attributed Baku's policies to "Zionist" influence.

That potential bombshell was followed by Azerbaijan's announcement on June 2 that it had closed Iran's cultural attache office in Baku, citing "recent disagreements" between the two countries.

And on June 3 came the spark for Kanaani's latest Twitter outburst: Azerbaijan's renewed travel warning advising its citizens not to travel to Iran and for those who are already there to be vigilant.

Within seconds of blasting Azerbaijan and its ties with Israel in his first tweet on June 5, Kanaani took a softer line, writing that Iran would still "open our arms to our Azerbaijani brothers and sisters," with the goal of continued "mutual respect and respect for neighborhood customs."

But in his comments to Radio Farda on June 7, Iran expert Atabaki expressed skepticism, saying that "the Islamic republic is not planning to see its ties with Azerbaijan as an equal relationship."

And that mindset, Atabaki said, had allowed relations to reach their current low.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-azerbaijan- fraying-relations/32450502.html

Copyright (c) 2023. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Conclusion of the "Firm Hand" Exercise - The IDF's Main General Staff Exercise

Israel Defense Forces

08.06.2023

The exercise tested the IDF's operational capabilities in a multi-arena campaign.

The IDF's "Firm Hand" Exercise has concluded. Over the past two weeks, IDF soldiers in active and reserve duty, from the general headquarters to the operational units, in all commands, branches and directorates, participated in the exercise. The "Firm Hand" exercise simulated dealing with operational challenges in all operational arenas and in a multitude of arenas simultaneously.

The exercise took place over the course of two weeks. During the first week, the 91st Galilee Division conducted a divisional exercise which consisted of two parts. The first part consisted of training in defense scenarios in large numbers along the Lebanese Front, and in the second part, the division practiced wide-ranging offensive scenarios. Simultaneously, the Israeli Air Force trained in the opening of intense combat, complex aerial defense scenarios that included thousands of interceptions, outlining strategic strikes deep in enemy territory, achieving aerial superiority in the region and extensive striking of thousands of targets using hundreds of aircraft from all arrays.

During the second week, a multidivisional exercise of the 36th Ga'ash Division and the 91st Galilee Division took place. As part of this exercise, a multi-branch battlefield combat exercise was conducted. This included the participation of soldiers from the Infantry, Armored, Combat Engineering and Artillery Corps in cooperation with the IAF, the Intelligence Directorate and the J6 and Cyber Defense Directorate. During this week, the IAF focused on assisting and cooperating in maneuvering and practiced aerial mobilization of forces, supplying logistical means by air and artillery support for the purpose of maneuvering. Throughout the week, the IAF continued to practice extensive strikes in several arenas.

All of the main force operation headquarters in the IDF practiced war plans throughout the exercise.

The Northern Command trained the command and control system through maneuvering efforts, intelligence gathering, multi-branch fire, the home front and the administration, while testing innovative technological means.

The Israeli Navy carried out a combat exercise in a multi-arena format, in which dozens of vessels took part. The emphasis was on offensive and defensive capabilities, the defense of Israel's maritime borders and the maintenance of its sovereignty and the security of the sea lanes.

In the Intelligence Directorate (J2), the effort to collect and produce means of intelligence was practiced and the full circle capabilities of intelligence were challenged in a multi-arena manner, in order to allow maximum effectiveness. In the exercise, hundreds of new real targets were outlined in the combat arenas.

The J6 and Cyber Defense Directorate practiced fighting in the spectrum and cyber dimensions. In the field of cyber defense, attacks simulating relevant cyber threats on IDF networks and assets were practiced.

The Home Front Command practiced operative plans in civilian areas, the effort to maintain functional continuity and save lives on the home front. During the exercise, the feature of distributing life-saving instructions using "Cell Broadcast" technology was tested for the first time.

The Strategic Planning and Cooperation Directorate (J5) practiced the strategic planning of the campaign, the international coordination with foreign militaries.

During the exercise, the Operations Directorate (J3) managed the combat schedule and commanded over the operational processes in the General Staff's main administrative headquarters as part of improving the operational system and its readiness.

The Central Command and Southern Command practiced a variety of intensive operational scenarios and counterterrorism activities, such as shooting attacks and terrorist infiltration. During the exercise, the Central Command emphasized the efforts to strengthen the security of residents in Judea and Samaria.

Moreover, as part of the cooperation of the IDF Ground Forces Training Center and the U.S. Armed Forces, soldiers from the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) participated in the exercise alongside IDF soldiers. A U.S. ARCENT battalion joined forces with the IDF's 7th Armored Brigade for the first time, and had a significant part in the exercise under the command of the commanding officer of the brigade with IDF soldiers.

Throughout the planning and implementation of the exercise, an examination and study process took place with the goal of improving the IDF's operational activities and readiness. The process included the participation of commanders of all ranks and headquarters, as well as weekly General Staff study sessions and the establishment of examination teams led by senior commanders. As part of the exercise, two examinations led by the Chief of the General Staff tested the IDF's capabilities and readiness.

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Argentine court to investigate Myanmar genocide against Rohingya Muslims

Iran Press TV

Thursday, 08 June 2023 7:38 AM

Members of the Rohingya Muslim minority have testified in person for the first time in an Argentine court on genocide and war crimes committed by Myanmar military officials, in a "historic fight for justice."

A hearing opened on Wednesday in Buenos Aires, with Rohingya Muslims appearing in person to provide eyewitness testimony about accounts of genocide and war crimes by the Myanmar military.

The week-long hearing will call witnesses to testify before federal prosecutor Guillermo Marijuan, who is gathering evidence in the case.

"This is a historic fight for justice," said Maung Tun Khin, president of the British-based Burmese Rohingya Organization UK, or BROUK, which filed the complaint with the Federal Criminal Correctional Court in Buenos Aires in 2019.

"Finally in-person hearings are taking place and strong evidence" is being produced in a court of law, he said, adding that "holding the military accountable for genocide of the Rohingya will benefit everyone in Burma."

Tun Khin did not specify the identity or the number of "survivors" who had testified for "security reasons."

Witnesses coming to court have taken strict measures to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation by agents of Myanmar's military government. The hearings are being held behind closed doors.

Rohingya Muslims are represented in court by Tomas Ojea Quintana, a prominent Argentine attorney and professor of law who served as the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar between 2008 and 2014.

Argentina's justice system in 2021 responded to a complaint, announcing it was opening an investigation into crimes by Myanmar soldiers against the Rohingya, under the principle of "universal jurisdiction" enshrined in the constitution.

The legal premise of "universal justice" holds that some acts - including war crimes and crimes against humanity - are so horrific they are not specific to one nation and can be tried anywhere, regardless of their nationality or where the crimes were committed.

The 46-page criminal complaint centers on violence from 2012 till 2018 that caused about 1 million Rohingya to fled Myanmar, mostly to neighboring Bangladesh, as they came under violent attack and their villages were razed.

Among military officials named in the court file are Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar's military ruler, senior officials in the police and border guard, and radical Buddhist monks.

The accusation also names Aung San Suu Kyi, the ousted leader between 2016 and 2021, as being complicit in the genocide.

In addition to the courtroom testimony, detailed information collected by a 2017-2019 UN-backed Independent International Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar is among the evidence.

The UN-backed report includes interviews with hundreds of witnesses in Myanmar and Bangladesh.

The United Nations has described the Rohingya people as the most persecuted minority in the world. In 2016 and 2017, thousands of Rohingya people were killed, raped, tortured, or arrested by the military.

The Rohingya are still denied citizenship and freedom of movement in Myanmar. Tens of thousands have now been confined to squalid displacement camps for a decade.

Nearly one million Rohingya refugees have fled to neighboring Bangladesh since August 2017 from a wave of deadly violence and persecution by the Myanmar military. Rohingya refugees remain completely aid dependent.

The Rohingya case is now the subject of separate proceedings before the International Criminal Court and for "acts of genocide" before the International Court of Justice.

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Myanmar junta shuts down NGO access to cyclone-hit Rakhine state

Aid groups had obtained permission to travel in the state only a day earlier.

By RFA Burmese 2023.06.08 -- Myanmar's junta has issued a blanket ban on transportation for aid groups operating in Rakhine state only a day after granting them permission to assist victims of one of the worst cyclones to hit the country in a decade.

The Central Committee for the Rakhine state government on Wednesday approved transportation access to domestic and international aid groups assisting in the aftermath of Cyclone Mocha, which made landfall on May 14 with sustained winds reaching over 220 kilometers per hour (137 mph), killing more than 400 people and decimating much of the state.

On Thursday, Rakhine State Minister of Security and Border Affairs Colonel Kyaw Thura issued a letter saying that the junta had suspended the order. No explanation was provided.

Aid workers have told RFA that In northern Rakhine, more than 90% of houses and buildings were damaged by the storm, but more than two weeks later, many people have yet to receive aid. The situation prompted several Rakhine humanitarian organizations to issue a joint statement last week urging junta authorities to speed up relief efforts and not to restrict the work of civil society groups.

An official with an international aid group, who declined to be named for security reasons, told RFA that the flip-flop had delayed urgently needed supplies from reaching at-risk populations.

"Aid groups such as the U.N., INGOs [international NGOs] and NGOs had applied for access to help the cyclone victims and the state government approved it yesterday, but the junta overrode it," he said. "I've heard that the ban was imposed by the union-level junta in Naypyidaw."

A domestic NGO official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, called the junta's rescinding of access to cyclone victims "unacceptable."

"People are starving and some have to live out in the open without a roof or walls," he said. "The military's ban of international humanitarian assistance at such a critical moment when the victims are facing various hardships proves that we are living under an inhumane government."

The official noted that with the disaster so recent, it is too early to focus on rebuilding Rakhine state.

"It's still an emergency situation when urgent help and rescue are of vital importance," he said, calling for an immediate lift to the ban.

'Not a political issue'

Pe Than, an ethnic Rakhine politician and former lawmaker in Naypyidaw's Lower House, went further, saying the junta's ban is the same as inflicting harm on cyclone victims.

"At a time when we are in need of a lot of domestic and foreign aid ... I can't understand [the junta] closing off access like this," he said. "This issue is not a political one, nor is it related to the military. It is humanitarian, which is simply a matter of welcoming those who will help. I was shocked to see that what is happening is the reverse."

Attempts by RFA to contact Hla Thein, the junta's spokesman and attorney general for Rakhine state, by telephone regarding the ban rang unanswered Thursday.

The junta announced on May 21 that a total of 148 Rakhine and Rohingya people died in Sittwe, Rathedaung, Ponnagyun and Myebon townships due to Cyclone Mocha.

Emergency assistance is needed in cyclone-affected townships of Sittwe, Rathedaung, Kyauktaw, Ponnagyun, Pauktaw, Myebon and Mrauk-U, where many residential homes have been damaged and food and drinking water are in short supply.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

Copyright 1998-2023, RFA. Used with the permission of Radio Free Asia, 2025 M St. NW, Suite 300, Washington DC 20036. For any commercial use of RFA content please send an email to: mahajanr@rfa.org. RFA content June not be used in a manner which would give the appearance of any endorsement of any product or support of any issue or political position. Please read the full text of our Terms of Use.

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Myanmar military kills 6 people in raid on Sagaing region village

Locals say troops shot 4 People's Defense Force members and 2 civilians.

By RFA Burmese 2023.06.08 -- Junta troops have shot dead six people in a raid on a village in Myanmar's northern Sagaing region, residents and People's Defense Force officials told RFA Thursday.

They entered Monywa's Yae Kan Su village on Wednesday morning, killing four anti-regime soldiers, two of them still in their teens.

Troops then shot dead two civilians as they tried to run away, according to locals.

Soe Gyi, acting battalion commander of Monywa District Defense Force Battalion-27 identified the dead members of his group as 20-year-old Khin Yadanar Oo, 18-year-old Zin Zin Soe, 17-year-old Ah Thay Lay, and a 24-year old known by the initials B.E.

He said a junta column with about 80 soldiers suddenly arrived in the village at dawn, taking his troops by surprise.

"[The camp] was raided when the patrol had withdrawn for physical training," he said.

"Four PDF [People's Defense Force] members were arrested, shot dead on the spot and burned."

Defense force members fired back but then had to retreat due to lack of support and weapons, he said, adding that troops seized hand-made guns, bullets, communication equipment, uniforms and nine motorbikes.

Residents said troops killed a 50-year-old and an 18-year-old who tried to flee during the raid. They didn't name the two men.

Pro-junta social media channels said troops killed five People's Defense Force members, not four, and didn't mention the civilians. They said the three men and two women were hiding in a village school.

The Telegram channels also confirmed reports that junta troops seized weapons and ammunition.

Locals said junta troops have raided five villages near Monywa in recent days, forcing around 2,000 people to flee Yae Kan Su village. The number driven out of the other four villages is not yet known.

Nearly 750,000 people have been forced to abandon their homes in Sagaing due to fighting since the Feb. 2021 coup, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).

RFA's calls to Sagaing region's junta spokesperson and social affairs minister, Aing Hlang, went unanswered Thursday.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

Copyright 1998-2023, RFA. Used with the permission of Radio Free Asia, 2025 M St. NW, Suite 300, Washington DC 20036. For any commercial use of RFA content please send an email to: mahajanr@rfa.org. RFA content June not be used in a manner which would give the appearance of any endorsement of any product or support of any issue or political position. Please read the full text of our Terms of Use.

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Bangladesh must suspend plans to return Rohingya refugees to Myanmar: Rights expert

8 June 2023 - Bangladesh must "immediately suspend" a pilot repatriation project for Rohingya refugees to return to Myanmar, where they face "serious risks" to their lives and freedom, a UN-appointed independent rights expert said on Thursday.

Tom Andrews, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, insisted that current conditions there were "anything but conducive" for the return of Rohingya refugees.

Death trap

He stressed that the very generals who had launched "genocidal" attacks against the Rohingya, causing hundreds of thousands to flee the country, were now in power and "attacking civilian populations while denying the Rohingya citizenship and other basic rights".

According to Mr. Andrews' statement, Bangladesh officials have been planning to send back to Myanmar, potentially very soon, an initial group of 1,140 Rohingya refugees, using a combination of threats and financial rewards.

Confined to 'designated area'

The returnees would reportedly pass through "transit" centres in Rakhine state before being resettled in a "designated area of 15 newly constructed villages" which they will "not be allowed to leave freely".

"The return of Rohingya refugees under these conditions would likely violate Bangladesh's obligations under international law and expose Rohingya to gross human rights violations and, potentially, future atrocity crimes," Mr. Andrews said.

In March, Bangladesh authorities facilitated two visits by Myanmar junta authorities to the Bangladesh camps, said the UN rights office OHCHR.

According to reports, at least some of the refugees were coerced into participating in so-called 'verification' interviews with junta officials. Bangladesh and the military regime's officials also coordinated a 'go see' visit to Rakhine State for some Rohingya refugees.

Bangladeshi officials said the refugees had expressed "general satisfaction" with the arrangements being made for their return, but these assurances were contradicted by reports that those who participated in the trip had unequivocally rejected the repatriation plans, OHCHR said.

"I implore Bangladesh to immediately suspend the repatriation pilot programme," Mr. Andrews said.

Stand with Rohingya

"I also urge the international community to stand with Rohingya refugees in both word and deed", he added.

"This must include reversing the failure to provide a humane level of support for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh who are unable to pursue livelihoods, continue to face hunger and malnutrition, and whose children have very limited educational opportunities".

Tom Andrews and other independent human rights experts are appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, in Geneva, under its Special Procedures.

They are mandated to monitor and report on specific thematic issues or country situations. They are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work.

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Foreign Secretary's Roundtable Meeting with ASEAN Committee in Islamabad, Thursday 8th June 2023

Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Foreign Secretary Dr. Asad Majeed Khan held a roundtable meeting with the resident ASEAN Heads of Missions today. The meeting was held as part of Pakistan's continued engagement with ASEAN. The Foreign Secretary reaffirmed Pakistan's commitment to fortifying the partnership between Pakistan and ASEAN in all spheres, in line with its East Asia Vision.

The Foreign Secretary underlined Pakistan's policy of proactive engagement with the ASEAN member states both bilaterally, and in the multilateral context. Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari's participation in the ASEAN Regional Forum in Cambodia in 2022, his visits to Indonesia and Singapore in December 2022, and Pakistan's participation and support for various ASEAN specific initiatives show Pakistan's commitment to the ASEAN and its processes. He outlined actions taken by Pakistan to enhance engagement with ASEAN and reiterated the importance of making the best use of institutional tools available on bilateral and ASEAN-wide level.

The Foreign Secretary also briefed the Heads of Missions on the projects proposed and implemented by Pakistan with ASEAN during 2021-2023, in line with the ASEAN-Pakistan Practical Areas of Cooperation agreed between the two sides. These include the already executed Diplomatic courses for ASEAN diplomats and Training program in Banking and Finance for the central bank officials of the ASEAN member states and the training program on Cyber Security and a Pakistan-ASEAN Business Opportunities Conference scheduled in the later half of this year.

ASEAN member states shared valuable inputs for the enhancement of Pakistan-ASEAN relations. High Commissioner of Malaysia, and the chair of ASEAN Committee in Islamabad, H.E Azhar Bin Mazlan shared a plan of action for the year 2023 including projects and events to be implemented in Pakistan during 2023.

Pakistan is a Sectoral Dialogue Partner of ASEAN since 1993 and is also a member of ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) since 2004.

Islamabad

8 June 2023

108/2023

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Transcript of the Media Briefing by the Spokesperson Thursday, 08 June 2023

Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs

[This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated]

Bismillahi-Rehman-ur-Raheem, Assalam-o-Alaikum,

And thank you for joining us for the Weekly Briefing.

aForeign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari concluded his visit to Iraq yesterday.

aAs Foreign Minister's first visit to Iraq, the visit carried special significance. His programme had three key components - meetings with the political leadership and senior officials in Iraq; engagements with the business community and focus on expansion of bilateral trade; and visits to religious sites and promotion of people-to-people contacts.

aThe Foreign Minister held meetings with Iraqi leadership and held wide-ranging consultations with Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein and Minister of Interior Lt. Gen. Abdulamir Kamel Al-Shammari. He met Governor of Karbala, Nassif Al-Khattabi. In Najaf he called on Grand Ayatollah Sheikh Bashir Al-Najafi.

aThe two sides agreed to further strengthen bilateral relations and explore cooperation in the areas of water management, agriculture, textile, climate change, education, health, defence production, pharmaceutical industry, and labor mobility. The two sides also agreed on establishing sister port cities relations between Basra and Karachi and Gwadar. The Foreign Minister reaffirmed Pakistan's support for reconstruction and rehabilitation of Iraq's infrastructure.

aThree MOUs were signed during the visit. These included MOU on cultural cooperation; MoU on visa abolition on diplomatic and official passports; and an MoU on cooperation between Chambers of commerce of Pakistan and Iraq.

aForeign Minister met local entrepreneurs and addressed the inaugural session of the Pakistan-Iraq Business Forum where he highlighted the potential for cooperation in fields of IT, construction, food security, energy, and medicine. He also announced creation of Pakistan - Iraq Business Council to further augment trade ties between the two countries.

a

aAs announced during the visit, Pakistan will establish a Pakistani Pilgrim Centre in Karbala and open its Consulate in Najaf to facilitate Pakistani zaireen and businessmen.

aFor the first time in history of bilateral relations, the two sides have also agreed on a Joint Statement.

aAs you are aware, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Ms. Hina Rabbani Khar is on official visits to Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium from 5th to 13th June 2023.

aShe arrived in Sweden yesterday from Norway. Today she will address the European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR) Annual Council Meeting 2023 as a keynote speaker. She will present Pakistan's perspective on challenges to regional and global security, their implications for international political order and Pakistan's security outlook.

aDuring the course of next week, the Minister of State will be proceeding to Denmark and Belgium.

a

aThe Chairman Senate of Pakistan, Muhammad Sadiq Sanjrani, is leading a delegation of the Senate of Pakistan on a four-day visit to Russia at the invitation of the Speaker of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, Valentina Mativenko.

aIn Moscow, Chairman Senate has held meetings with the Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak and Chairman of the Russian Duma Mr. Volodin. Yesterday, he addressed the members of the Russian Federation Council during the Plenary Session.

aDuring the talks the two sides agreed to further enhance parliamentary exchanges and cooperation, and strengthen mutually beneficial cooperation especially in trade, investment and energy. The two sides will continue cooperation in international forums including UN and SCO.

aIn his address to the Plenary Session of the Russian Federation Council, Chairman Senate, underscored the positive momentum in Pakistan-Russia relations and mutual desire to expand cooperation in trade, economy, security, defense, culture, education, and people-to-people contacts. He emphasized the vital role of parliamentary cooperation and effective diplomacy in strengthening bilateral relations and resolving regional and global challenges.

aThe visit constitutes celebrations to commemorate the 75th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic ties between Pakistan and Russia.

aThe first Pakistan-China-Iran Trilateral Consultation Meeting on Counter Terrorism and Security was held at Director General Level yesterday in Beijing. Director General (Counter Terrorism), Abdul Hameed, of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, led the Pakistan delegation.

aThe delegations held detailed discussions on the regional security situation, particularly the threat of terrorism faced by the region. Based on the outcome of these consultations, the three sides have decided to institutionalize the Trilateral Consultations on counter terrorism and security. Further details will be worked out in due course.

aA high-level delegation from Turkmenistan, led by Minister of State and Chairman of Turkmen gas, arrived in Pakistan yesterday on a three-day visit. Talks will focus on bilateral cooperation in the energy sector including on Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) Gas Pipeline and Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAP) Power Transmission Line Project. The two sides are expected to finalize the "Joint Implementation Plan (JIP) for the Expedited Implementation of the TAPI Pipeline Project". By setting milestones to complete the project, the JIP will signal Pakistan's commitment to the TAPI project and its journey for affordable, reliable and sustainable energy.

aThe Second Round of Pakistan-U.S. Health Dialogue is being held today in Islamabad. Minister for National Health Services and Regulation, Abdul Qadir Patel, and Deputy Administrator USAID Isabel Coleman, are leading the two delegations.

aThe two sides will review the progress made since the First round of the Health Dialogue held last year in Washington DC. This year's agenda includes Pakistan's Universal Health Coverage (UHC), Malnutrition, Infectious Diseases and Global Health Security (GHS), Pakistan-U.S. "Green Alliance": Nexus of Climate Change, Environment and Health. The Pakistan-U.S. Health Dialogue is a manifestation of strong understanding and cooperation between Pakistan and the United States and provides a framework for cooperation in the health domain.

aEarlier this week, the International Day for Innocent Children Victims of Aggression was observed on the 4th of June 2023. We are reminded of the plight of the Kashmiri children who continue to suffer because of continued siege and brutal oppression by the Indian forces. An entire generation of Kashmiri children has grown up in a climate of fear, violence and repression. Kashmiri orphans suffer in economic hardship, isolation and psychological trauma. Scores of school children have been injured by pellets, bullets and teargas shells fired by the Indian forces. Many of them have lost their eye sight, fully or partially.

aThe United Nations has called on India to take preventive measures to protect children, including by ending the use of pellets against children. We urge India to heed this call and to protect the children of Kashmir from violence, displacement and trauma.

aPakistan will continue to extend political, diplomatic and moral support to our Kashmiri brothers and sisters for the just and peaceful settlement of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute in accordance with the UN Security Council Resolutions.

aI thank you!

**

Question:a My question is about the plea made by the US State Department Spokesman about provision of Consular Access to the suspect of 9th May, Khadija Shah. Whether the government of Pakistan is willing to provide Consular Access to her and any other person because many dual nationals are involved in the unfortunate incidents of 9th May.

Secondly, many suspects of 9th May either fled the country or are hiding abroad in some unknown places because of being dual nationals. Whether Pakistan is also seeking their custody or any access to those who have fled this country? (Shaukat Piracha, AAJ News)

Answer:a On both your questions, I would like to underline that Pakistan will follow its laws and its international obligations in bringing to justice individuals responsible for the events of 9th May. We have received the requests that you have mentioned, and those requests have been sent from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Ministry of Interior, which takes final decision in such cases.

Question:a My question is related to Iranian embassy which has been reopened in Riyadh. I would like to have your comments on how Pakistan sees this development. (Saima Shabir, Arab News)

Answer:a Opening of the Iranian embassy in Riyadh is a welcome and important development in pursuance of normalization of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Reopening of diplomatic missions by both sides, in our view, forms a tangible confidence building measure. It will not only contribute significantly towards positive relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, but also have a salutary impact on peace and stability in the region. Pakistan has a history of actively supporting diplomatic and peaceful efforts of bridging gaps between our friends and brotherly countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Question:a Dr. Aafia Siddiqui's sister met her in jail. Has Pakistan officially raised the issue of her release at any forum or with American authorities? If yes then what was their response? (Khawaja Nayyar Iqbal, Media Today)

Supplementary Question:aRegarding the meeting with Dr. Aafia Siddiqi, Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan has said multiple times that he visited America on personal expense, and he also thanked the Foreign Office for its efforts. But if he went there on his own what were the efforts of Foreign Office and Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari in this. What is the role of Government of Pakistan in this matter? (Sardar Awais, Daily Haqeeqat)

Answer:a This is an old case and the Government of Pakistan has been seized of this case for several years now. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has played its role in making Dr. Fowzia Siddiqui's visit to the United States possible. She was facilitated in obtaining the US visa and was extended courtesies on arrival at the airport. We requested the US authorities that Dr. Fowzia should be allowed to meet her sister, even though she is not on Dr. Aafia's accepted list of visitors. Consequently, Dr. Fowzia was allowed to meet her sister three times when she recently visited the United States. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and our Missions in Washington and Houston have consistently raised with the US authorities issues relating to the respect for human and legal rights of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. Our Consulate General in Houston, United States regularly visits Dr. Aafia Siddiqui to inquire about her well-being.

Question:a Being spokesperson of the Foreign Office how would you like to respond to international media and international community regarding human rights situation in Pakistan, which a particular political party is portraying in a negative way? So, what is the situation of human rights situation? Is there is any custodial torture of those who are in the custody of police in connection with 9th May? Also, what is the status of freedom of speech, freedom of press, and freedom of political gathering in Pakistan? (Mateen Haider, G News)

Answer:a I think the question that you have asked is more political in nature than a question for the Spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I would like to reiterate what we have said in the past, that Pakistan is a country of laws, it is a country which has constitutionally guaranteed human rights and fundamental freedoms and we are a democratic setup with free and independent judiciary. The Government of Pakistan will continue to follow its obligations under the law, under the Constitution.

Question:a We've seen that last week you raised the matter of the controversial mural in the new Parliament of India. Nepal and Bangladesh have officially raised the matter with India. Has Pakistan also raised the matter diplomatically except for making that statement that you made last week? (Anas Mallick, Capital TV)

Answer:a We have expressed our concerns on this matter and our statement of last week speaks for itself. Pakistan rejects the revisionist and expansionist vision displayed in the Indian parliament in the form of this mural and the statements by the leaders of the ruling party in India. Such statements reflect India's hegemonic ambitions in the region are a concern for countries in South Asia.

Question:a My question is related to the reports that discussion is undergoing between Saudi and Pakistani authorities for the renewal of passports of around 250,000 Rohingya who are residing in Saudi Arabia for the last several years. Whether the foreign office is in loop, and could you also please comment when these passports were issued earlier, on what grounds and what conditions were they issued and now what will be the decision of Pakistan when Saudi Arabia has requested for renewal? (Jaleel Akhtar, VOA)

Supplementary Question:a My colleague has just raised an issue related to 0.25 million Rohingya. Some of the reports suggest that Pakistani mission in Riyadh issued passports to those people along with their families. They are residing in Saudi Arabia and the report also suggests that those were issued in 2012 and now after 10 years they are going to be renewed at the request of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. So how do you see this?

Secondly, Iranian Naval Chief, Rear Admiral Shahram Irani has proposed an Indian Ocean Naval Alliance including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE and India and Pakistan. So how do you see this development. Whether Pakistan is going to respond to this proposal from Iran? (Faisal Raza Khan, 92 News)

Answer: Regarding your second question, we have seen that statement and we will examine any proposal when it comes to Pakistan. At this stage, we are not in a position to comment on a statement which has been made.

On the question raised by the Voice of America and supplemented by you, I would like to say that this is a complex issue and it has a history. Many of the questions that you have raised are under consideration in the Ministry of Interior. I would advise you to refer your question to the Ministry of Interior, about the exact nature and status of the talks.

Question:a Recently India has given an award to Abhinandan, with which they are trying to make him a hero and build a narrative that he destroyed Pakistan's F-16 in Indian territory and while chasing the other aircraft he entered Pakistani territory where his plane crashed. What is the response from Pakistan on this? (Czechangez Khan Jadoon, Daily Payam-e-Khyber)

Answer:a Well. I think I don't have much to say. He was a pilot who was captured in Pakistan when Indian took an ill-considered action in February 2019 and violated Pakistan's territorial integrity. His plane was taken down by our valiant Air Force when we acted in self defence. He was returned after Pakistan's decision to deescalate the situation that had arisen in February 2019 because of India's impudence. We do not want to go into details of what India is saying or doing now as we are not following his career path.

Question: You talked about free media but there are purportedly directions to ban telecast of Imran Khan's name in media. Other than this, has Pakistan contacted France regarding the humiliation faced by Ex-Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa in France? Similarly, has Afghan Government made a contact with Pakistan to release Afghans involved in the incident of 9th May? (Allah Noor, Mashriq Tv)

Answer: I shall start from your third question as I have answered that question in the past as well. There are some reports that some Afghan nationals could have been arrested during the events of May 9. These reports are being verified and in case of their involvement in subversive activities, the law of Pakistan will take its course.

With regard to the second question, there is a video has been circulating the media. We have not confirmed the veracity of that video. For any further information ISPR would be the right forum to approach.

Question:a General Bajwa's Kashmir policy is being criticized these days. What was that policy? Secondly, what is Pakistan's policy on Kashmir? Is it still General Bajwa's policy or someone else's? (Luqman Shah, Daily Azkar)

Answer: aI think we should be very clear. There is a policy of Pakistan and the Government of Pakistan; there is no policy of any individual on Kashmir. And, we should be very clear about this policy. Pakistan has had a consistent policy for the last 70 years on Kashmir which affirms it as a disputed territory, that states that India is illegally occupying the land of the Kashmiri people. The solution of the Kashmir dispute lies in the UN Security Council resolutions and steps must be taken to resolve this dispute in accordance with the wishes of the Kashmiri people and the UN Security Council resolutions.

Question:a The Government is prioritizing increase in exports as a policy measure. Commercial Attaches play a vital role in the increase of exports. In how many of Pakistan's missions abroad are these Commercial Attaches deputed? Secondly, what is the policy of the Foreign Office in deploying them to various countries? (Raheel Nawaz Swati, Daily Awaz-e-Riasat)

Supplementary Question:a Currently Pakistan is going through one of the toughest economic times. Successive governments have given targets to the Foreign Office that economic diplomacy must be pursued by all of our foreign missions. Would you like to share the tangible performance of Foreign Office in connection with economic diplomacy? Are these missions following this economic diplomacy? a(Mateen Haider, G News)

Answer:a Okay, I think both questions are related. Yes, economic diplomacy is a key pillar of Pakistan's Foreign Policy. In our engagements with countries around the world promotion of economic ties is a priority. You must have seen that even yesterday when the Minister for Foreign Affairs was in Iraq, economic agenda was on the top of his engagements with the Iraqi leadership. Similarly, whenever our leaders undertake foreign visit, economic and trade issues are on the agenda of the talks. Our missions abroad are under clear instructions to promote economic ties and to find opportunities for Pakistan's exports and investment. Some Missions have, depending on the volume of trade and economic activity, full-fledged commercial officers; while others do not. In such Missions, officers from the Foreign Office are charged with economic diplomacy portfolio. I would like to underline here that economic diplomacy is the collective responsibility of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Commerce; as the Ministry of Commerce outlines the commercial policies of Pakistan. In that context, this Ministry remains closely engaged with the Ministry of Commerce, to pursue our foreign policy objectives and to fulfill our economic diplomacy mandate.

Question:a What are the developments regarding the visit of Bilawal Bhutto Zardari to Iran? Secondly, how much amount is to be paid by NAB to the Pakistani High Commission, London? (Anwar Abbas, Bol News)

Answer:a I do not have information regarding your second question. On your first question as I have said in the past at this stage there is no such decision and no dates have been set. Whenever the two sides agree to a visit, it will take place.

Question: For several days, some videos are being highlighted on social media and some channels are also broadcasting these videos showing that some people went from Pakistan to Malaysia legally with E-Visa but they were mistreated at the airport. Cash was taken from them and they were kept in confinement for two to three days. Their families said that they are trying to contact those people and the Foreign Office but are unable to reach them. What is your comment on this? (Isma Shaukat, Public News)

Answer:a This issue has been brought to the notice of our High Commission in Kuala Lumpur. It has contacted the local authorities to seek clarification in the matter. The Malaysian authorities have confirmed that there is no discrimination against Pakistanis and that Pakistanis are not being singled out on arrival in Malaysia. Malaysia has a specific policy with regard to E-visas. Malaysian immigration authorities verify on arrival the E-visa that the individuals have. Sometimes during the E-visa issuance process, the applicants are not interviewed. In those cases, the interviews are conducted on arrival. This is their policy and it is not just for Pakistan. They conduct interviews of E-visa holders when they land at the Kuala Lumpur airport; and establish the credentials of the visitors. Those who are unable to satisfy the immigration authorities are declared "not-to-land" or NTL and repatriated by the next available flight. Pakistanis constitute 5% of those NTLs. I would also like to inform here that our Mission in Kuala Lumpur has been raising this issue with the local authorities. It has also been in touch with Pakistani passengers in difficulty and facilitate them at the KL airport. Lastly, we will continue to work with the relevant authorities both in Pakistan and Malaysia to find workable solutions for visitors who travel on E-visa.

Question:a Reportedly, last month the Petroleum Minister, Musadik Malik, visited United States to discuss the future of the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline, because, in case of failure, we will pay $18 billion to Iran. So, what are the updates on this Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project? What is the United States' opinion on this? Will you comment on this issue? (Abdullah Momin, Dawn TV)

Answer: As we have said in the past, for Pakistan the IP Project is an important project and we remain committed to it. There are certain complications with regards to its implementation. In that context, we remain engaged with both Iran and the United States. Exact details of the meetings that the Minister of State for Petroleum held in the United States may be ascertained from the concerned Ministry.

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Comment by Foreign Minister Tsahkna on the decision by the EU to impose sanctions on individuals linked to the persecution of Russian dissident Kara-Murza and agreeing on a criterion for adding the family members of Russian oligarchs to sanctions lists

Republic of Estonia - Ministry of Foreign Affairs

07.06.2023

"I welcome yesterday evening's decision by the European Union to impose sanctions on the nine individuals linked to the persecution of Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza and establishing the criterion that makes it easier to add family members of Russian oligarchs to sanctions lists.

It is Estonia's position that those who persecuted and imprisoned Kara-Murza must be added to the global human rights sanctions regime and we have repeatedly stated this at meetings in the EU. The common position of the EU is that the systematic persecution of the civil society and human rights activists is unacceptable.

However, our work is not done. We are standing up for the unconditional and immediate release of all political prisoners in Russia and holding the organisers of repressions to account.

At the EU yesterday evening, we also took a step towards preventing the evasion of sanctions imposed on individuals connected to Russia's war in Ukraine. Russian oligarchs are systematically using their family members and other close ones to circumvent sanctions. At Estonia's proposal, a criterion was added to the EU's regulation today that makes it easier to apply sanctions to the family members of Russian oligarchs, as they are clearly accomplices in the evasion of sanctions and making a profit, and therefore, they are supporting Russia's inhuman war in Ukraine. We will continue raising the cost of the war for Russia for as long as necessary."

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Council of Europe leaders profoundly concerned about Russia's non-execution of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, including the non-payment of just satisfaction

Council of Europe

Council of Europe

Strasbourg

8 June 2023

The Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers has reiterated the Russian Federation's unconditional legal obligation to implement judgments of the European Court of Human Rights and to pay 'just satisfaction' awarded by the Court.

The President of the Committee of Ministers made a statement on this issue, and the Council of Europe Secretary General sent a further letter to the Russian Foreign Minister, following the Committee's latest quarterly meeting on the execution of judgments from the European Court.

Four groups of Russian cases and two Georgia v. Russia interstate cases were examined by the Committee at the meeting. They concerned violations found in the Transdniestrian region of the Republic of Moldova and inadequate preparation of hostage-rescue operations resulting in loss of life and injuries in both the Dubrovka Theatre and in the hostage-taking crisis in Beslan in 2004, as well as criminal convictions based on an unfair trial and an arbitrary application of criminal law in cases concerning Aleksey Navalnyy.

Following the examination of the Georgia v. Russia (I) case, which concerns the arrest, detention and expulsion from the Russian Federation of large numbers of Georgian nationals in 2006-2007, the President of the Committee of Ministers, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Latvia, Edgars Rinkevics, said:

"The Russian authorities must heed the Committee's call and comply with their unconditional obligations under international law to pay these sums and fully abide by the judgments of the European Court.

"The default interest on the amount awarded by the Court in Georgia v. Russia (I) continues to accrue and on 5 June 2023, the total amount owed by the Russian Federation in this case was EUR 11,525,068.49. Russia's delay in fulfilling this obligation deprives the individual victims of the violations from receiving compensation for the damages they suffered," he stressed.

At the request of the Committee of Ministers, and now also reflecting the recent judgment of the European Court awarding just satisfaction in the case of Georgia v Russia (II), a Register of just satisfaction concerning the Russian Federation has been created, which shows the millions of euros owed by the Russian Federation in all inter-state cases.

There is currently a total of 2,454 cases under the supervision of the Committee of Ministers, pending full implementation by the Russian authorities. Information is currently awaited on the payment of just satisfaction in some 1,200 cases. As of 5 June 2023, the outstanding amount stood at slightly over 2.2 billion euros, including roughly 1.87 billion euros in the case of OAO Neftyanaya Kompaniya Yukos.

The Russian Federation was excluded from the Council of Europe on 16 March 2022. However, Russia is still obliged to implement judgments of the European Court related to its actions and omissions up until 16 September 2022. The European Court has continued delivering judgments concerning Russia, and the Committee of Ministers continues to supervise their implementation.

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Russia points finger at 'Anglo-Saxons' in 2022 Nord Stream blasts

Iran Press TV

Thursday, 08 June 2023 6:17 PM

The Kremlin says the United States and some of its allies were aware of a Ukrainian plan last year to blow up the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines that connect Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea.

"We have already talked about the data we have about the possible involvement of the Anglo-Saxons in this terrorist attack against international energy infrastructure," the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday.

"All other details should be revealed in the course of a transparent international investigation, which is not currently taking place, and the Russian side is not allowed to join any attempted investigation."

The Kremlin uses the term Anglo-Saxons to refer to the United States and Britain.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post, citing leaked information, reported that the CIA learned in June 2022 through a European spy agency that a six-person Ukrainian special forces team intended to blow up the pipelines.

The explosions ruptured both Nord Stream 1 and the newly built Nord Stream 2 pipelines on September 26, 2022. Following the blasts, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden conducted investigations. Russia was barred from participating.

The preliminary results of a joint probe by Sweden and Denmark showed the blasts had been "intentional sabotage," but the responsibility was not assigned to any party.

Russia accused the investigators of foot-dragging in specifying who was behind the attack.

Veteran American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in a detailed report published on his blog earlier this year, claimed the bombing had been directly ordered by US President Joe Biden and carried out by the CIA with the help of the US Navy.

In an interview with Russia's state-run RIA-Novosti news agency in March, Dmitry Birichevsky, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's department for economic cooperation, said Moscow also intended to open an international probe into the act of sabotage.

Russia: Ammonia pipeline blast may end grain deal with Ukraine

Elsewhere in his remarks on Thursday, Peskov blamed Ukraine for a blast on a key ammonia pipeline, saying it may have a negative impact on efforts to renew a landmark Black Sea grain export deal.

Before the war, the 2,500-kilometer pipeline, which runs from the Russian city of Togliatti to three Black Sea ports in southern and western Ukraine, exported 2.5 million tonnes of ammonia annually. But operations on the pipeline ceased after the war broke out in February 2022.

Peskov said the blast "can only have a negative impact" on talks to renew the deal.

"You know that this topic figured as an integral part of the half of the deal that concerned us, so this is yet another complication in terms of extending the deal."

"We don't know what kind of destruction there is, we don't know what the Ukrainian side is going to do next."

Russian Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov said earlier on Thursday that Moscow had no access to the damaged part of the pipeline.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday repair would take one to three months.

Russia accuses Ukrainian forces of blowing up a part of the pipeline in Ukraine's Kharkiv region on June 5.

Ukraine denies being behind the blast. The regional Ukrainian governor said Russia was the one who had shelled the pipeline on June 6.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told reporters the attack had been carried out in a "gray zone" between territory controlled by Ukraine and Russia. "It's one story when it is the consequences of war. Yes, the Russian Federation is to blame, but those are the consequences of war."

During talks to ensure the export of grain from Ukraine last year, Kiev and Moscow struck a deal to ensure the safe passage of ammonia through the pipeline, which is a key ingredient in the production of fertilizers.

The landmark deal brokered by the United Nations and Turkey was initially agreed in June 2022 for 120 days, and has been extended three times since. The current agreement is set to expire on July 17.

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Russia's Putin, Saudi crown prince discuss bilateral ties, cooperation within OPEC+: Kremlin

Iran Press TV

Thursday, 08 June 2023 7:57 AM

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have discussed cooperation within the OPEC+ and bilateral ties between the two countries.

In a telephone conversation, the two praised Moscow-Riyadh cooperation within the context of the OPEC+, the Kremlin said in a statement.

"Both sides praised the level of cooperation within the OPEC+, which make it possible to take timely and efficient steps in order to maintain the balance of oil demand and supply. The sides noted the importance of the agreements in this regard, achieved during the recent ministerial meeting in Riyadh," read the statement, which was carried by TASS news agency.

OPEC+, which groups the 13 members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and 10 non-OPEC allies, provides some 40 percent of the world's crude oil, meaning that its policy decisions can have a major impact on oil prices. Saudi Arabia is a top producer in OPEC+.

The call came as Saudi Arabia plans to make a sharp cut in its output in July on top of a broader OPEC+ deal to limit supply into 2024 as the group strives to increase collapsing oil prices.

Saudi Arabia's official SPA news agency also announced the report, saying Putin and bin Salman discussed relations between the two countries and means of developing cooperation in various fields. It added that bin Salman received the phone call from Putin.

According to TASS, the two sides also touched upon the topic of boosting trade and economic ties between their countries, and an implementation of "perspective joint projects in investments, transportation logistics and energy."

In addition, bin Salman and Putin "substantially reviewed the issue of ensuring stability on the global energy market," according to the statement.

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Russian Officer Accuses Wagner Group Of Abductions, Torture Of Russian Military Personnel

By RFE/RL's Russian Service June 08, 2023

Russian Colonel Roman Vinivitin, who was captured by Wagner fighters in eastern Ukraine issued a video on June 8 accusing the private mercenary company of abducting Russian armed forces personnel and torturing them.

On June 4, Wagner issued a video with Vinivitin, who appears to have an injured nose, saying that he had ordered his troops to open fire at Wagner troops aboard the truck while being under influence of alcohol and apologizing to Wagner for his actions.

In a new video issued by the Ostorozhno Telegram channel on June 8, Vinivitin claimed that Wagner forcibly took military equipment and vehicles from Russian troops and kidnapped Russian soldiers, forcing them to sign contracts with the mercenary fighters.

According to Vinivitin, Wagner tortured some of the abducted Russian soldiers and one serviceman committed suicide after Wagner troops raped him.

"These actions by Wagner weakened our positions on flanks on the line in Bakhmut, while Wagner was accusing Russian armed forces of being unable to hold the positions on the flanks," Vinivitin said.

The accusations could not immediately be verified.

Talking about his own ordeal after he was "captured" by Wagner for refusing to follow their command, Vinivitin said he was kept in a basement and tortured.

"They deprived me of sleep, and three times during one night took me out to imitate my execution by shooting," Vinivitin said.

Vinivitin also accused Wagner's chief Yevgeny Prigozhin of "discrediting Russia's armed forces" and said his previous video statement issued by Wagner four days earlier "was the result of the pressure" he was put under.

The two videos are a sign of ongoing deep problems between Wagner and Russia's Defense Ministry. Prigozhin has several times openly criticized the ministry's efforts during the war against Ukraine that has followed Russia's full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.

Wagner troops were seen as being instrumental in Russia's assault to take Ukraine's eastern city of Bakhmut, which was the epicenter of heavy fighting in the past several months, and Prigozhin's stature as a major player in the war appeared to grow as his fighters took territory -- albeit with heavy losses -- regular forces seemed unable to grab.

The city now appears to be controlled by Russia, though Kyiv says the battle continues.

International military experts have also stressed that military units involved in the invasion have regularly lacked a joint command and very often conflicted with each other.

Prigozhin, considered to be a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has accused Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the chief of the Russian armed forces' General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, of corruption, unprofessionalism, and high treason for months.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-wagner- accused-abductions-vinivitin/32450565.html

Copyright (c) 2023. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Council Of Europe Envoy Calls Russian Rights Defender Oleg Orlov's Trial 'Travesty Of Justice'

By RFE/RL's Russian Service June 08, 2023

The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatovic has called the trial of Oleg Orlov, a leader of the liquidated Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow, over the alleged discrediting of Russian forces involved in Kremlin's ongoing invasion of Ukraine "a travesty of justice."

Orlov, whose trial began on June 8, was detained for questioning and charged with the repetitive discrediting of Russian armed forces after his home was searched in March. The charge stems from Orlov's online article condemning Russia's full-scale aggression against Ukraine. He faces several years in prison in convicted.

"Oleg Orlov's courage and dedication to human rights are crucial to speaking truth to power," Mijatovic said in a statement on June 7.

"Like many other activists serving time in prison or otherwise sanctioned on similar grounds, he should never have been charged in the first place. I stand in solidarity with Oleg Orlov and many other human rights defenders, independent journalists, and civil society activists in Russia who carry the torch of human rights in these challenging times," she added.

A member of the directorate of the German Sakharov Society, Peter Frank, also criticized Russian authorities for what he called "brutally acting" against Russians who have spoken out against the "aggression and war crimes related to it."

He added that the increased pressure and persecution of the country's leading rights defenders indicate that Russia is sliding into a "new totalitarianism."

The Memorial Human Rights Center was shut down by a Moscow court decision in December 2021 at the request of Moscow prosecutors who accused one of the country's most-respected human rights organizations of violating the law on "foreign agents."

In a parallel case at the time, the Supreme Court ruled that Memorial International, a standalone group and the umbrella organization for many regional branches and the Memorial Human Rights Center, should be liquidated on the same charge.

Memorial and its supporters have called the move by the Russian authorities politically motivated.

Memorial was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year together with jailed Belarusian dissident Ales Byalyatski and Ukraine's Center for Civil Liberties.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/europe-russia-memorial- trial-oleg-orlov-human-rights/32450260.html

Copyright (c) 2023. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation General of the Army Sergei Shoygu makes a working visit to the troops of the Western Military District

08.06.2023

At the arsenals and storage bases of the Western Military District, Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation General of the Army Sergei Shoygu inspected the preparation of hardware and weapons for shipment to the zone of the special military operation.

While working at one of the reserve bases, the Russian Defence Minister checked the organisation of measures to receive and maintain armoured hardware, as well as preparations for their dispatch to the troops.

General of the Army Sergei Shoigu ordered that the time restrictions for accepting vehicles from enterprises be decreased and that they be ready to be transferred to units of the Russian Armed Forces in the shortest possible time.

Also, Sergei Shoigu drew the attention of the base command and the leadership of the Defence Ministry's Main Armoured Vehicle Directorate to the installation of additional protection taking into account the experience of the special military operation before sending the armoured vehicles to military units.

The Reserve Base Chief reported to the Minister of Defence on the efforts taken by staff to shorten the time required to prepare equipment, noting that the efficiency of certain types of work had improved several times.

At the artillery ammunition and missile depot, the head of the Russian military department checked the organisation of routine maintenance, repairs, and ammunition filling.

Sergei Shoigu drew particular attention to the quality preparation and timely dispatch of ammunition and missiles to units involved in the special military operation and also undergoing combat readiness as part of combat training.

[??] During a meeting with industry officials, the Russian Defence Minister emphasized the need of expediting the supply of all sorts of military hardware to the zone of the special military operation, so that the Russian troops can successfully fight against foreign armoured vehicles.

[??] 'The enemy tried to advance today. In two hours of the first battle alone, Russian troops destroyed 30 tanks and 10 IFVs. In two hours of combat, since morning. So this equipment is needed, let's hurry up,' stressed Sergei Shoigu.

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Russian Trade Rises Despite Sanctions, as NATO Member Turkey Offers 'Critical Lifeline'

By Henry Ridgwell June 08, 2023

Despite Western attempts to stifle Russia's economy through sanctions following its invasion of Ukraine last year, Russian trade volumes with dozens of countries have actually increased since the war began a with NATO member Turkey providing a "critical" economic lifeline for Moscow, according to an analysis by the Washington-based Atlantic Council.

The countries that have increased trade since the February 2022 invasion include several European Union and NATO members, according to the analysis.

"Such surges in trade, however, are not necessarily an indicator of support" for the war launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the report says. "Instead, it is more likely they are predominantly the result of companies a and countries a pursuing legal opportunities for cheaper exports and new gaps in the Russian market."

China

It notes that China's trade with Russia had already been increasing at an average annual rate of 23% over the past five years, excluding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It said China's trade with Russia has jumped by another 27% since the Ukraine invasion.

Other countries have seen a far greater increase in trade with Russia since February 2022.

"We see increases of trade across a range of different countries, with places like India and Greece, for example, importing cheap Russian oil at below market prices. And this is what's causing the surge of trade there," said Niels Graham, a co-author of the Atlantic Council report, in an interview this week with VOA.

"But we also see other countries like Turkey, for example, exporting a lot of electronics as well as chemical industrial goods to Russia to take advantage of the holes in the Russian market that have been caused by the sort of G7 statecraft response," he said.

He said that Beijing is actually showing signs of "restraint" since Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

"China is certainly engaging with Russia, certainly increasing its trade overall, but doing so very much in line overwhelmingly with the red lines the West has drawn a for fear of Western retaliation against China, cutting it off from a much more important Western market," Graham told VOA.

Russian Oil

India's trade with Russia has soared by 250% since 2021, the biggest increase by far among Russia's trading partners.

China and India imported record volumes of Russian oil in May, according to Reuters, totaling about 110 million barrels for the month. Analysts say the world's two biggest buyers of Russian oil are capitalizing on discounted prices after the G7 group of rich nations imposed a price cap of $60 per barrel in December.

Washington has warned that Moscow is seeking to circumvent the price cap by using the Eastern Siberia Pacific Ocean pipeline along with ports in eastern Russia, where there may be less Western oversight of trading activities.

The West never intended to completely block Russia oil sales, said Graham.

"Doing so against an oil producer as large as Russia would have skyrocketed global oil prices, would have likely tipped the global economy into recession, and would have made a lot of countries angry against Western actions," he said.

Turkish lifeline

The Atlantic Council report says NATO member Turkey also provides a vital lifeline for Russia's economy, with trade volumes increasing by some 93% since the invasion.

It said Turkey has sold Russia sensitive material like integrated circuits and semiconductors which could be used in weapons systems.

"Although Turkish exports of electronic machinery, including critical integrated circuits, fell in the immediate aftermath of Russia's full-scale invasion, they have since recovered and grown well beyond the pre-invasion average. From March 2022 to March 2023, Turkish electronic exports to Russia jumped by about 85%," the Atlantic Council report said.

"To Ankara's credit, following pressure from the Group of Seven [G7], Turkey has agreed to halt its transit of sanctioned goods to Russia," the report added. "However, its trade with Russia remains a vital economic lifeline for its businesses as the country recovers and reconstructs from a devastating earthquake earlier this year."

Turkey assured the European Union in March that it would no longer ship or transit goods to Russia that are subject to sanctions or export controls, according to an EU official quoted by Reuters.

Ankara has denied exporting goods to Russia that could have military applications.

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Telephone conversation with Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud

Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud.

June 7, 2023

22:20

The leaders discussed current aspects of multifaceted Russia-Saudi cooperation, in particular, ways to build up trade and economic ties and implement ambitious joint projects in investment, transport logistics and energy.

They held an in-depth discussion of ensuring stability on the global energy market. Both sides expressed their appreciation of the high level of cooperation within the framework of OPEC Plus, which allows them to take prompt and effective measures to maintain the balance of oil demand and supply. They noted the importance of the agreements to this effect attained at the recent ministerial meeting in Riyadh.

The sides also talked about various aspects of Russia-Saudi interaction at other multilateral organisations.

They agreed to maintain contacts at different levels.

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Saudis snub US push on Tel Aviv ties, oil prices, Syria during Blinken's high-profile visit

Iran Press TV

Thursday, 08 June 2023 7:07 PM

Saudi officials have snubbed US Secretary of State's latest push for the Kingdom's normalization of relations with the Israeli regime and his bid to win further concessions on oil prices and Riyadh's recent resumption of ties with Syria and Iran during his high-profile visit to Saudi Arabia.

Speaking in a news conference alongside Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud in Riyadh on Thursday, the visiting Antony Blinken reiterated that Washington will continue to play an integral role in expanding normalization between the Tel Aviv regime and Saudi Arabia.

Blinken, who was in the kingdom as part of a US push to defuse rows that have touched on oil prices, and Riyadh's opening to Iran, further insisted that normalizing relations between Israeli regime and its neighbors was a priority for Washington.

The Saudi foreign minister, however, rebuffed his American counterpart, saying that the kingdom believes "normalization of ties with Israel will have limited benefit without a pathway to peace for the Palestinians."

"The Palestinian issue was and remains the central issue for Arab countries, and it is at the top of the kingdom's priorities," Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had also underlined during the Arab League summit in Jeddah on May 19.

"We will not delay in providing assistance to the Palestinian people in recovering their lands, restoring their legitimate rights and establishing an independent state on the 1967 borders with East al-Quds as its capital," he further noted at the time.

Blinken also reiterated on Thursday that Washington will not normalize relations with Syria and does not support other nation's normalization of ties with the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

For his part, Prince Faisal defended the landmark decision to lift Syria's Arab League suspension, which came shortly after the start of the country's foreign-sponsored conflict 12 years ago.

"Syria made very clear commitments to address concerns of the international community," the chief Saudi diplomat said.

"We have differences of opinion but we're working on finding a mechanism for us to be able to work together," the Saudi foreign minister also pointed out during the press conference with the US secretary of state.

The Saudi foreign minister also highlighted that China and Saudi Arabia are close and strategic allies and have been increasing cooperation in the energy and financial sectors, and that "cooperation is likely to grow."

Saudi ties with US, China not a 'Zero-sum game'

He said Saudi Arabia's ties with the United States and China were not a "zero-sum game."

"I don't ascribe to this zero-sum game," Prince Faisal said in Riyadh. "We are all capable of having multiple partnerships and multiple engagements and the US does the same in many instances.

"So I'm not caught up in this really negative view of this. I think we can actually build a partnership that crosses these borders," the top Saudi diplomat said.

Riyadh's strengthening its commercial and security ties with Beijing comes as US influence wanes in the Middle East region.

Blinken was the second top US official to visit Saudi Arabia in less than a month, following a May 7 trip by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

However, Blinken's meetings with bin Salman and Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) foreign ministers were relegated to the inside pages of Al-Watan and Okaz, the two major newspapers in Saudi Arabia.

Blinken and the crown prince had "open, candid" talks for an hour and 40 minutes, a US official said, covering topics including the conflict in neighboring Yemen, the war in Sudan, Israel, and human rights.

Riyadh has also leveraged its growing relationships with Russia and China as the Biden administration has pushed back against some Saudi demands including lifting restrictions on arms sales and help with sensitive high-tech industries.

Riyadh has clashed repeatedly with US President Joe Biden on its supply of crude oil to global markets, its willingness to partner with Russia in OPEC+ and its decision to restore full diplomatic relations with Iran in a deal brokered by China.

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Secretary Antony J. Blinken and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud at a Joint Press Availability

US Department of State

Remarks

Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State

Intercontinental Hotel

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

June 8, 2023

MODERATOR: (In progress) (Via interpreter) press conference for the minister of foreign affairs of Saudi Arabia and also Mr. Antony Blinken, the minister of foreign affairs from the USA.

FOREIGN MINISTER AL SAUD: (Via interpreter) In the name of God, we shall start. Hello, everyone. Greetings to you. First of all, I would like to welcome His Excellency Mr. Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State of the U.S. I would like also to welcome all of the observers and our distinguished guests today. I would like also to welcome Togo as our newest member amongst the 86 members of the global coalition, which is the biggest of its kind against terrorism.

In our meeting, we spoke about the liberated areas in Iraq and Syria, and we reiterated the priorities and the continuity of our efforts and endeavors in that direction, and to prevent further spread of the - of ISIS and prevent financing from reaching ISIS. And we have capitalized all of the efforts made by countries against ISIS. We spoke about the fight against armed militias and terrorist groups in west of Africa and the African region in general, which are spreading panic in Africa. And we have also focused on the importance of the role played by the global coalition against terrorism (inaudible) the Sahel countries but (inaudible) reiterate again as the threat of terrorism against Africa and that we are working on further cooperation in the face of this challenge.

We would like also to reiterate that we need to focus our work more in Afghanistan so that Afghanistan cannot be a safe haven again for terrorist groups. We need to work together on common challenges and provide the right environment for the - the repatriation of IDPs to Iraq and Syria, and to also recover the citizens or the diaspora in other countries.

And we have been working with countries that rejected to retrieve their nationals and are keeping this burden on the affected countries and areas and did not delve into rehabilitation. However, it - we recommended is that the relevant countries should work on retrieving those nationals and working on their rehabilitation instead of leaving them in the affected areas and affected countries where the burden of handling them will be on them.

We are also - were also focused on the different manners of multilateral collaboration within the framework of the global coalition, and we are going to continue, of course, in enriching the collaboration between us and the U.S.

And in the end, I would like to say that terrorism in all of its forms should never be associated with a specific religion or a specific race or ethnicity and should not result in any segregation or discrimination against any racial group. And Muslims should not be harassed because of their religion, for instance. And this is, of course, relevant and true for all other ethnicities.

Now, I give the floor to His Excellency the secretary general, Mr. Antony Blinken.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, first of all, Foreign Minister Faisal, thank you. Thank you for your hospitality, thank you for bringing all of our regional and global partners together here in Riyadh.

When President Biden traveled to Jeddah last summer, he affirmed the importance of the Middle East to the long-term security and economic interests of the United States. And he made clear that we're committed to continuing and deepening our partnerships in the region. Together, we can drive real progress for all our people, not only to address the challenges or crises of the moment, but to chart an affirmative vision for our shared future.

Over the last few days, we have advanced that progress on several fronts, working with our Saudi partners, working with the Gulf Cooperation Council, working today with the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.

The foreign minister and I just finished a productive meeting of the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS. The United States very much appreciates the leadership of Saudi Arabia not only in hosting this meeting, but for its contributions - constant contributions and crucial contributions - day-in, day-out to our mission. While our coalition has taken back the territory that ISIS once controlled and inflicted severe losses on its leadership, ISIS nonetheless remains an active threat.

This ministerial that we just had focused on several key areas of need. Those include stabilizing areas liberated from ISIS so that the group can't exploit poor security, economic, or humanitarian conditions that leave people desperate; and also, as you heard from the foreign minister, repatriating foreign terrorist fighters and their families from al-Hol and other displaced persons camps. We're also working to keep pace with evolving threats, including ISIS's expanding efforts across sub-Saharan Africa and ISIS-Khorasan. Our 86-member coalition leaves this ministerial better focused and equipped to continue the mission to eradicate ISIS.

The United States and Saudi Arabia, both as bilateral partners and through the GCC, are working closely together to address several other challenges in the region.

In Yemen, when President Biden took office, war was raging. The country was experiencing the arguably the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Now we're working intensively with Saudi Arabia and other partners to further consolidate what has been a 14-month long truce that we helped to achieve. This was a central issue in my discussions with the Saudi crown prince and the foreign minister, and today I had an opportunity as well to meet with Yemen's President al-Alimi to discuss the path forward.

Our objectives are a durable ceasefire and an inclusive, Yemeni-led process mediated by the UN - one that meets Yemenis' calls for justice, for accountability, for redress for abuses, and ultimately leads to a political resolution of differences in Yemen. Our Special Envoy Tim Lenderking will continue to work with the parties and partners in the region in the days and weeks ahead to resolve issues standing in the way of a lasting peace.

The United States and Saudi Arabia, together with the GCC, are also focused on Iran's destabilizing influence in the region, including its support for terrorism and violent militia groups, the seizure of tankers transiting international waters, and nuclear escalation. The United States continues to believe that diplomacy, backed by economic pressure, by deterrence, and by strong defense cooperation, is the best way to avoid counter these dangerous actions. We support efforts by Saudi Arabia to de-escalate tension and stabilize relations.

The United States and our Gulf partners are working closely on the crisis in Sudan. Our two countries - the United States and Saudi Arabia - have been leading an intensive diplomatic campaign to get the two sides to agree to and comply with a ceasefire and to allow humanitarian assistance to reach the people of Sudan. We will keep working toward a durable cessation of hostilities and the swift formation of a civilian-led transitional government together with our partners in the Gulf and Africa and with the United Nations.

I also discussed with GCC partners increasing our joint efforts to combat illicit synthetic drugs like Captagon, which is having a devastating impact on young people throughout this region, just as fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are doing the same in the United States. This partnership will be an important part of our diplomacy to strengthen global cooperation on the growing challenge posed by illicit synthetic drugs.

Alongside my GCC and D-ISIS engagements, I also met with the Ethiopian Deputy Prime Minister Mekonnen to review the ongoing implementation of the November 2 Cessation of Hostilities Agreement. That agreement ended the horrific crisis in Tigray. For peace to endure, the parties must acknowledge the atrocities committed and pursue accountability together with reconciliation. The United States will continue to partner with Ethiopia as it builds a credible transitional justice process to break the cycle of ethnic and political violence that has gripped Ethiopia and prevented it from reaching its potential for far too long.

The U.S. partnership with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf extends far beyond addressing challenges and crises in the region. It is critical for expanding opportunity and driving progress for our people and for people around the world.

Through the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, the United States and Saudi Arabia are working together to deliver quality, sustainable infrastructure to benefit people in low and middle-income countries.

We're expanding digital connectivity, including by using new mobile telecommunications technology like open, cloud-based radio access networks that are both secure and affordable.

We're combating the climate crisis and accelerating the region's clean energy transition through our bilateral Partnership Framework for Advancing Clean Energy that we signed last summer and that can unlock new solar, green hydrogen, and other renewable energy investments.

A key part of our strategy to advance a more prosperous, stable, and secure region is regional integration and de-escalation. The Gulf is more connected then ever - both as a region and with countries in the broader Middle East, including Israel. The United States will continue to play an integral role in deepening and expanding normalization.

As President Biden said in Jeddah, universal rights and freedoms - and the protections they bring - are a core priority for the United States. And the U.S.-Saudi partnership can be deepened by progress on human rights. That's why we strongly welcome and support historic steps to increase women's participation in public life in the workforce, to expand interfaith tolerance, among other reforms in the country's ambitious modernization agenda. And that's why we'll continue to keep human rights firmly fixed on our bilateral agenda - a point I made clear in our meetings this week.

Last week, U.S. and Saudi astronauts returned to Earth after spending ten days together on a mission to the International Space Station. That mission included Rayyanah Barnawi, the first female Arab astronaut to ever go to space. In her first message from space, Rayyanah predicted that "the future is very bright." To that, I say: let's make it so, together.

Thank you.

QUESTION: (In Arabic.)

FOREIGN MINISTER AL SAUD: (Via Interpreter) (Inaudible) these challenges or - that are represented by the actions of Daesh brought the Kingdom to chair the particular group under the state minister of - Secretary of State of (inaudible) the United States. And I have already qualified the meeting as a meeting that lasts for hours, where we discuss many files. Actually, we reviewed these files in detail, and we shall continue to do so along with our brothers, the Americans. Thank you. Thank you.

The Kingdom actually joined the group in its firm belief in our partnership with the African continent, which we consider as a source - a particular source of particular importance of cooperation and coordination with the various African states, which all have links with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

We are copartners in development, and we feel our responsibility to preserve the achievements of those countries and particularly our common action in the face of the challenges for the stability of the continent. And this will reflect on the stability and security of the Kingdom itself and its neighbors. We feel the shared responsibility towards the African states that need capacities and (inaudible) in this area. And we have always stood up against Daesh in Syria and Iraq as a collective international community with the full cooperation and coordination. We shall continue to do so in supporting all international efforts in this sphere.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Really, I can only reiterate what the foreign minister has said. And, again, just as a reminder, this coalition - that is now 86 countries and organization strong, by our count is the largest coalition in the world - has had remarkable success since 2014 in taking back the territory that Daesh had seized in Iraq and Syria, in eliminating its senior leadership, and in minimizing the threat. But the threat remains. And beyond that, it is moving to other places, notably to parts of Africa, which is why we've had to focus today and in our coalition on some of the challenges being faced by African partners, notably in the Sahel and in West Africa.

So what's notable about the coalition is the fact that it adapts. It's flexible. And even as we keep the focus on Iraq and Syria to make sure that the Daesh threat doesn't re-emerge in a meaningful way, we also have to make sure that we're focused on areas where it may be more active. And as we've noted, right now that's in Africa, and that's why we have the focus of this coalition on Africa, in full partnership with African countries.

Last thing to mention. What is very notable from our discussions, today and in the all the work that we've been doing on this, is the imperative of having a comprehensive approach. Security is a necessary but insufficient element of dealing with the challenge posed by Daesh. And we heard, from partner after partner, the imperative of dealing with the concerns, the needs of marginalized communities, bringing economic opportunities, making sure that there is good governance and a transparent political approach. All of these things are critical to having success against Daesh, preventing it from recruiting and expanding in other places.

MODERATOR: The second question for Reuters.

QUESTION: Thank you, gentlemen. Mr. Foreign Minister, Your Highness, is Saudi Arabia seeking U.S. support to develop its own civil nuclear program in exchange for normalizing ties with Israel, like it's been reported? And would you say that that is a nonnegotiable condition for you to normalize?

And then separately, Saudi Arabia in recent years has carried out many reforms, but rights groups also report increased repression. What is your response to that? And how big of a pressure do you face from your American counterparts on this issue?

Mr. Secretary, you discussed with Saudi Crown Prince the normalization issue. What progress can you report? How feasible is such a deal, given concerns that it might accelerate an arms deal, arms race with Iran? And on human rights issues, I'm wondering if you were able to receive any assurances from the Crown Prince towards the release of political prisoners and any U.S. citizens who are subject to travel bans. Thank you.

FOREIGN MINISTER AL SAUD: Thank you very much. First, on the issue of nuclear cooperation, it's no secret that we are developing our domestic, civilian nuclear program. We would very much prefer to be able to have the U.S. as one of the bidders for that program. There are others that are bidding, and obviously we would like to build our program with the best technology in the world, and that will require a certain agreement to be in place. We have differences of opinion, so we're working on finding a mechanism for us to be able to work together on civilian nuclear technology. But we intend to move forward on that program.

Normalization, I have said before and it's quite clear that we believe that normalization is in the interest of the region, that it would bring significant benefits to all. But without finding a pathway to peace for the Palestinian people, without addressing that challenge, any normalization will have limited benefits. And therefore, I think we should continue to focus on finding a pathway towards a two-state solution, on finding a pathway towards giving the Palestinians dignity and justice. And I think the U.S. has a similar view, that it's important to continue on those efforts.

You asked about human rights. You asked about reform. And I think it's well known that we have gone through significant reform progress in the Kingdom. What we do in the Kingdom, we do based on our assessment of what's in the best interest of our country, and it's driven really by the needs and desires of the Saudi people.

You have had a few days here. I hope you have been able to see the significant changes happening in the Kingdom. However, we are always open to having a dialogue with our friends, but we don't respond to pressure. When we do anything, we do it in our own interests. And I don't think that anybody believes that pressure is useful or helpful, and therefore that's not something that we are going to even consider.

But the priority, as I said, is achieving the goals that we have for our country. We are very focused on building a pathway towards a sustainable prosperity for the Saudi people. And I encourage you and anyone who has an interest and has a curiosity about it to spend some time in the Kingdom, to interact with the people of the Kingdom, and make your own judgment and your own assessment.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thanks, Humeyra. On the normalization question, first - as you know - we fully support Israel's integration into the Middle East. And from day one, we have been working, both to deepen some of the existing agreements and also expand them to other countries. That includes Saudi Arabia. I think this would be a very important step forward, and it would certainly be a priority - and is a priority - for us. Integration is good for the region, for all concerned, and we will continue to pursue it. We discussed it here, and we will continue to work at it, to advance it in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

On the question of U.S. citizens and human rights more broadly, let me just say this. First, human rights are always on the agenda for the United States. It's who we are. And indeed, I discussed human rights in our meetings with our Saudi counterparts over the past few days, and also made clear that progress on human rights strengthens our relationship. We will continue to underscore, both publicly and privately, the importance that we place on human rights and fundamental freedoms.

There's something else that's very important, and the foreign minister alluded to it. Saudi Arabia has embarked on a major effort, a historic effort to modernize its economy, to modernize its society. And part of that is going to be attracting to Saudi Arabia the best talent from around the world to visit, to pursue education, to invest, to partner, to work alongside Saudis. In our judgment, Vision 2030, as this initiative is called, will be a much more successful effort if Saudi Arabia is the most attractive place possible for people around the world to come to. And so I think it's on its own merits and in Saudi Arabia's interests to continue to pursue this modernization, including the expansion of human rights.

With regard to American citizens, as you know, and as you've heard me say many times, the welfare, the security of American citizens everywhere around the world is my number-one priority and responsibility. And that's the focus of the Department of State as well. We continue to advocate on behalf of individuals to the greatest extent possible. I had the opportunity to raise specific cases. And beyond that, I won't go into details.

MODERATOR: Sky News, (inaudible).

QUESTION: (Via interpreter) First question may be addressed to His Highness, His Royal Highness Prince. With all the efforts carried out, undertaken by Saudi Arabia - the efforts to conclude all these agreements regarding this - the Saudi territories.

Mr. Blinken, you said this morning that you do not want Afghanistan to become a safe haven for terrorists. So how can you reconcile this and with the withdrawal of America from Afghanistan, which has opened the floor for terrorists, likes of which took place this morning in Afghanistan with many victims? So how can you reconcile? Thank you.

FOREIGN MINISTER AL SAUD: (Via interpreter) With regard to Afghanistan, I would like to express our heartfelt thanks for the good care and attention that we have had from the American side.

In dealing with the situation in Sudan, we have achieved a certain success. It has not been a complete success because the parties did not commit fully to the agreement. We shall do everything possible to alleviate the situation in Sudan and to reach agreements between the concerned parties. There are various legal issues that are underway; we may reach additional mechanism that would help us resolve the situation and to penalize any party that may deviate.

And we address our talk once again to our brother in Sudan, all of them, to spare the blood of the Sudanese and that we may work together to address this crisis through dialogue, away from armament, for that will not lead to any positive results. It will only result in further victims. Let's therefore move towards dialogue and towards dealing with the situation in peaceful manners such as to spare the citizens the dangers of such crises. I am fully confident that our brothers in Sudan will rise up to the responsibility and respond positively to spare the citizens further demolitions and further hardships. We shall rely on our brothers in America and all other partners to move towards that solution. Thank you.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thank you. With regard to Afghanistan, we've made clear and we've demonstrated since ending America's longest war that we would continue to be focused on our core national security interest in preventing the resurgence of terrorism emanating from Afghanistan, and if necessary, taking action to deal with it. I think we've demonstrated quite clearly in recent months our ability to do just that, including eliminating a senior leader of al-Qaida, who was resident in Afghanistan. In addition, we're working with partners, with neighbors to strengthen the capacity to deal with any terrorism that may be located in Afghanistan and emanating from there.

At the same time, of course, the Taliban is an implacable enemy of ISIS-Khorasan and is itself taking action against that group. But regardless of that, we've been very clear, and as I said, we've demonstrated our ongoing enduring capacity to take necessary actions to protect our security against any terrorism that may be emanating from Afghanistan.

MODERATOR: (Via interpreter) (Inaudible) the last question. Yes, you have the floor.

(In English) Al-Monitor, please.

QUESTION: Mr. Foreign Minister, has America's reduced military footprint in the region created opportunities for China to forge deeper relationships with Saudi Arabia and others? And second, critics of Syria's regional reintegration say Bashar al-Assad has done nothing to merit it. Does Saudi Arabia - sorry, did Saudi Arabia set any conditions in exchange for a serious return to the Arab fold? And Mr. Secretary, do you fear that China is seen as a more reliable partner in the region than the U.S.? And on Syria, the U.S. has asked countries who normalize to get something in exchange from Assad for their re-engagement. Do you have any evidence that normalization has yet resulted in any meaningful concessions?

FOREIGN MINISTER AL SAUD: So China is the world's second-largest economy. China is our largest trading partner. So naturally, there is a lot of interaction and intersection with China. China is an important partner for the kingdom and most countries in the region, and I think that partnership has given us and China significant benefits. And that cooperation is likely to grow just because of China's economic impact in the region and beyond is likely to grow as its economy continues to grow.

But we still have a robust security partnership with the U.S. That security partnership is refreshed on an almost daily basis. We have military exercises that are almost constantly going on, so we have cooperation, intelligence-sharing, et cetera, as we see in the effort in Sudan, as we see in what we're doing together in Yemen. The partnership with the U.S. remains robust and strong, especially in those areas.

So I don't ascribe to this zero-sum game. I think we are all capable of having multiple partnerships and multiple engagements, and the U.S. does the same in many instances. So I am not caught up in this really negative view of this. I think we can - we can actually build a partnership that crosses these borders. I think I've heard statements also from the U.S. about a desire to find pathways to better cooperation, even with China. So I think the - we can only encourage that, because we see the future in cooperation, we see the future in collaboration, and that means between everybody.

On Syria, it's very important that we understand the context. The context is that the status quo was not working and was generating an ever-increasing burden on countries of the region and on the people of Syria. Regardless of what one thinks about Bashar al-Assad, we - the only pathway to resolving the humanitarian challenges that we face in the aftermath of the Syrian crisis is to find a pathway to addressing the main issues, and for our perspective, the humanitarian are the main concern. How do we ensure that there is a safe pathway for refugees to return? How do we ensure that there is some political reconciliation? How do we address the issue of drugs? All of these things require a dialogue with Damascus.

And you will have seen the statement issued after our meeting in Amman, which we held before the return to the Arab League, in which Syria made very clear commitments on all of those fronts to work with us to address them in a way that meets the expectations not just of us in the region, but of the international community. And we are now going to pursue those commitments made by Damascus.

In the end, we have to think about the humanitarian issue. We have to think about the people of Syria and how do we alleviate the situation that they're living in. And we believe that this is the best pathway forward. The other efforts that had been ongoing have shown no progress for many years and only increased the difficulty of the situation. I mean, if you look at Lebanon, which is already in a very, very difficult economic situation, they cannot carry this burden of two million Syrian refugees for much longer. And in order to avoid a situation where they are at risk, we need to find a way for them to return safely.

So we believe that this path can deliver results where others have not, and we will work very closely with the U.S. and others to ensure that that is within the expectations of the international community, including in line with the United Nations Security Council resolutions that are relevant to the situation.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: So with regard to China, I would give almost the identical answer to the foreign minister.

First, our engagement in the region, our partnerships in the region, our work in the region is not about any other country. It's about these partnerships and the benefits that we can bring by working together - benefits we can bring to our people, benefits in many cases that we can bring to people around the world - and I described some of those earlier.

At the same time and more specifically, with regard to China, we've also been very clear we're not asking anyone to choose between the United States and China. We are simply trying to demonstrate the benefits of our partnership and the affirmative agenda that we bring in what we're trying to do. In everything that I've heard over the last two-and-a-half years and over the last three days from partners throughout the region - again, many of whom were here in Riyadh - the United States remains the number one partner of choice for, I think, most countries in the region.

With regard to Syria, again, no secret that we did not think that Syria merited readmission to the Arab League, but at the same time, we also see that we have the same goals when it comes to what we're trying to achieve. Now, our position has been very clear: We're not going to be in the business of normalizing relations with Assad, with that regime. It has not earned that step toward recognition, toward acceptance. But because the goals are very much the same, I think moving forward, and, as the foreign minister described, we'll see if we can achieve some progress.

We all want to reach a solution in Syria that's consistent with the key United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254. We want to expand humanitarian access for the people of Syria. We want to ensure, of course, that ISIS can't re-emerge. We want safe conditions for the eventual return of refugees. We want to counter Captagon trafficking, which is doing so much damage in the region. We want to reduce Iranian influence.

So what we've heard and what you just heard again from the foreign minister is the intent of our partners to use direct engagement with the Assad regime to further demand progress in these areas and other areas over the coming months. Now, I have to admit we are skeptical of Assad's willingness to take the necessary steps, but we're aligned with our partners here on what those steps are and on the ultimate objectives.

FOREIGN MINISTER AL SAUD: Thank you very much.

MODERATOR: Thank you very much.

(Via interpreter) This will conclude this press conference, so thank you, Your Highnesses, and all the participants.

(In English) Thank you so much for joining us here in Riyadh.

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Eagle Resolve 23 Military Drill Concludes at Air Warfare Center in Dhahran

Saudi Press Agency

Dhahran, Jun 9, 2023, SPA -- The "Eagle Resolve 23" drill, which was launched at the Air Warfare Center in the Eastern region and in several regions across the Kingdom, concluded on Thursday with the participation of forces from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states and the United States of America.

The drill, which was conducted under the Command of the Saudi Armed Forces, saw the implementation of several theoretical and practical exercises, including air and missile operations with live ammunition, defensive counter-air operations, air-to-air refueling operations, surface-to-naval warfare operations, electronic warfare, naval incursions, and defense against weapons of mass destruction and mass casualties.

Chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. Fayyad Bin Hamed Al-Ruwaili, Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces of the participating countries, Commander of the Royal Saudi Air Forces Turki bin Bandar bin Abdulaziz, and several high-ranking officers from the Saudi Armed Forces attended the concluding drill on Thursday.

The drill aimed to enhance military cooperation among participating countries, exchange expertise in missile air defense, and unify the planning and implementation of procedures.

--SPA

01:44 LOCAL TIME 22:44 GMT

0002

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PM and President Biden of the USA meeting: 8 June 2023

The Prime Minister met US President Biden at the White House today.

8 June 2023

The Prime Minister met US President Biden at the White House today.

The leaders welcomed the agreement of the Atlantic Declaration, a new approach to the economic relationship between our countries. This plan will see us embark on the deepest level of economic cooperation either of our two countries have ever had with another country.

The Prime Minister and President Biden both agreed that, as likeminded countries with deeply interconnected advanced economies, the UK and US are perfectly placed to take on the challenges of the future.

The first agreements under the Atlantic Declaration include new commitments on supporting one another's critical supply chains, developing new, clean technologies and removing barriers to the uninterrupted exchange of goods and services between our economies.

The leaders agreed that accelerating international cooperation on safe and responsible AI development is one of the pressing issues of our age. As frontier nations, the UK and US will be a crucial part of these efforts alongside international partners.

The Prime Minister and President Biden agreed that our economic cooperation forms a fundamental part of the UK-US relationship, complementing our incredibly strong defence and security alliance.

The leaders welcomed ongoing progress on AUKUS, as well as UK and US leadership in NATO.

They agreed that the UK and US continue to have an important role to play in bringing stability in regions throughout the world, and countering state and non-state hostile activity. This includes supporting Ukraine in their fight against Putin's illegal invasion.

The leaders looked forward to seeing one another again at next month's NATO Summit in Vilnius.

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PM opening remarks at the White House: Thursday 8 June

The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak makes opening remarks at the White House press conference.

8 June 2023

Thank you, Mr President -

Before I begin my remarks - a word if I may on what happened in France this morning.

All our thoughts are with those affected by this unfathomable attack, including a British child and with their families.

I've been in touch with President Macron.

And we stand ready to offer any assistance that we can.

Mr President, Joe, it's an honour to be here at the White House and thank you for your warm welcome.

Not for decades has the relationship between our two nations been so important.

The values we share - our belief in freedom, democracy, and the rule of law - have never changed.

They never will.

But what has changed, are the challenges we face.

And standing here together, as our predecessors have done for generations...

...I feel confident that through the strength of our relationship...

...we can shape the world once again in our pursuit of liberty, prosperity, and the possibilities of a new age.

That begins with our highest priority - national security.

Last time I was here in the US, we signed AUKUS - the most significant defence partnership in generations.

Because we recognise that the security of the Atlantic and Pacific regions are indivisible. And just a fortnight ago, in Hiroshima, President Biden and I stood with President Zelenskyy and our G7 allies in a powerful display of unity.

The UK is proud of our contribution - including providing tanks, long-range weapons, and training Ukrainian soldiers.

But let no one doubt: US leadership and resources are the decisive contribution allowing the forces of democracy and freedom to prevail.

As I said in Congress, and I say again now to President Biden - and to the American people - thank you.

And just as we collaborate to protect our national security - so we must increasingly do the same to protect our economic security, on which our prosperity depends.

Countries like China and Russia are willing to manipulate and exploit our openness...

...steal our intellectual property, use technology for authoritarian ends, or withdraw crucial resources, like energy.

They will not succeed.

Today we have agreed the Atlantic Declaration - a new economic partnership for a new age, of a kind that has never been agreed before.

Yes, a partnership that protects our citizens.

But more than that, ...a test case for the kind of reimagined alliances President has spoken so eloquently about.

That means new investment.

This week alone, A14bn of new American investment has been committed into the UK, creating thousands of jobs.

It means stronger supply chains, with a new action plan on clean energy.

And it means reducing trade barriers in the technologies of the future.

With a new, secure UK-US Data Bridge - helping tens of thousands of small businesses.

An agreement to work towards mutual recognition of more professional qualifications in areas like engineering...

And we're launching negotiations on a new Critical Minerals Agreement.

Once concluded, this will give UK companies stronger access to the US market.

And we're building on our extraordinary, shared strengths in cutting edge future technologies...

...with joint research collaborations in areas like quantum, semiconductors, and AI.

And our job as leaders is to ensure that this technological revolution makes us more secure and not less.

Last week, the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence warned us about the scale of the challenge, as well as the opportunity.

The US and the UK are the world's foremost democratic AI powers.

So today, President Biden and I have agreed to work together on AI safety, including multilaterally.

The UK looks forward to hosting the first global summit on AI safety, later this year.

So that we can seize the extraordinary possibilities of this new technological age - and do so, with confidence.

And we are well placed to do so.

I know some people have wondered what kind of partner Britain would be after we left the EU.

I'd say: judge us by our actions.

We're as committed to our values as ever, as reliable an ally as ever, as attractive an investment destination as ever.

But we're changing, too.

We're strengthening our relationships not just with old friends like America and in Europe...

...but with new friends in the Indo-Pacific, too.

And we now have the freedom to regulate the new technologies that will shape our economic future - like AI - more quickly and flexibly.

That is the future we are creating in Britain - confident, proud, and free.



Let me close, with a personal reflection.

As Joe mentioned, he and I have seen quite a lot of each other in recent months. I gather our wives have even started to take spin classes together.

We were talking earlier about our hometowns.

Joe is very rightly proud of Scranton.

And I was telling him a bit about Southampton in England, where I'm from.

Not everyone knows this, but it was in a church in Southampton where...

...in the days before he set sail for these shores...

...that John Winthrop first spoke about his dream of building a city on a hill.

And that reminds us that the relationship between our two nations is unlike any other.

Our alliance is so strong because it is not abstract - it is rooted in our people.

And it's never been about our history alone, but our ability to grasp the future.

We share the same beliefs, pursue the same purpose, and act according to the same ideals.

And that's why today, as we meet the challenges of our time, we can depend upon each other with absolute conviction.

When the United States and the United Kingdom stand together, the world is a safer, better, and more prosperous place.

That's why ours is the indispensable alliance.

Thank you.

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Remarks by President Biden and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the United Kingdom in Joint Press Conference

June 08, 2023

East Room

2:16 P.M. EDT

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, good afternoon. Please have a please be seated.

I'd like to start, with the permission of my British friends, to just say a few words about the wildfires in Canada and the quality of the air here in the East Coast that's blanketed the communities in the East Coast and a and the smoke this past few days.

I just put out a more detailed statement, so a for the press and for the people to see. But I spoke yesterday with Prime Minister Trudeau, and I've decided a I dictated a National Interagency Fire Center response to Ca- a Canada's request for additional firefighters and the fire suppression assets, such as airtankers.

We already have 600 American firefighters on the ground that have been there for a while in Canada, including Hotshots and the Smokejumper crews.

And it's very important that affected communities listen to the guidance of their state and local officials from this point forward.

To keep up to date on the air quality in real time, go to the app that we provided. It's called AirNow.gov. And check on one another.

And, by the way, what you'll get is something that looks like this a (holds up graphic) a with a a with a calibrated piece that says when the air is clean and when the air is dangerous and hazardous. And it dictates what a will tell you the air quality in your neighborhood.

Now, it's a it's my honor a my honor to welcome Prime Minister Sunak to the White House.

Rishi, we've a you're probably tired of meeting. We met in March in a in San Diego to discuss AUKUS and a with the Prime Minister of Australia. In April, we were there for the 25th Anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in Belfast. We met and discussed again today the a the need to get the Stormont institution in Northern Ireland up and running.

Last month, together with our G7 partners in Hiroshima, we drove progress on everything from our shared support for the brave people of Ukraine to the common principles of engaging with China.

And today in Washington, we've had important and positive discussions to deepen our bilateral economic relationship and expand our cooperation to shape the challenges and future for this a remainder of this century.

It's a testament to the depth, breadth, and, I would argue, the intensity of our cooperation and coordination, which has existed a continues to exist between the United Kingdom and the United States. There's no issue of global impoi- a of importance, none, that a where our nations are not leading together and where we're not sharing our common values to make things better.

In our conversations today, we continued to build on all that we've achieved over these past months.

We discussed how we can continue to adapt and upgrade our partnership to ensure our countries remain at the cutting edge of a rapidly changing world.

Our economic partnership is an enormous strength and source of strength. It anchors everything that we do together.

We want to harness that power to make sure we're creating good jobs and supporting working-class families in both our countries and that growth is shared broadly and no one gets left behind.

So today, we're releasing a new plan to equip our economic partnership for the 21st century. It outlines how we can enhance our cooperation to accelerate the clean energy transition that must take place and is taking place, lead the development of a on a of emerging technologies that are going to shape so much of our future, and protect technologies critical to our national security.

And a key piece of that is working together to strengthen our critical mineral supply chains and to make them more resilient so we're not dependent on any one country to meet our goals.

When it came a when it comes to technology that will shape the future a like semiconductors, quantum computing, artificial intelligence a the UK and the U.S. are working together to make sure they are developed safely and responsibly and jointly.

We're going to do more on joint research and development to ensure the future we're building remains fundamentally aligned with our value set in both our countries.

And we're doing more to prevent technologies that are a are invented and developed in our countries from being used for a for military or intelligence purposes by countries that do not share our values.

Today, we're a also discussed our unwavering support for the people of Ukraine and defend a who are defending themselves against the most brutal aggression we've seen in a long time, at the hands of Russia and Putin.

The UK and the United States, together with more than 50 partners, have committed historic levels of security assistance to Ukraine. And I want to thank the Prime Minister for his strong, strong leadership, contributing significant amounts of security assistance and training Ukrainian troops so they can effectively use the equipment and ammunition we've collectively provided them, and in bringing the world together later this month to drive support for Ukraine's long-term economic recovery.

You're doing a great deal.

So, Mr. Prime Minister, I thank you for making the journey to Washington.

Earlier this week, we marked the 79th anniversary of D-Day, and a a timely reminder of the proud history of a our nations share and the values a the values that we have long stood together to defend.

That's the unshakable foundation of this special relationship. And it is a special relationship. There's no country closer to us than Great Britain.

Today, as NATO Allies, partners in innovation, as friends in a shared vision of the future, and the two nations a our two nations are ready to meet the challenges of our time and meet them together.

And I'm confident the United Kingdom and the United States will continue to lead the world toward greater peace, prosperity, and security for all.

So thank you again, Mr. Prime Minister. And the floor is yours.

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: Thank you, Mr. President. And before I begin my remarks, a word, if I may, on what happened in France this morning.

All our thoughts are with those affected by this unfathomable attack, including a British child, and with their families. I've been in touch with President Macron. We stand ready to offer any assistance that we can.

Mr. President, Joe, it is an honor to be here at the White House, and thank you for your very warm welcome.

Not for decades has the relationship between our two nations been so important. The values we share, our belief in freedom, democracy, and the rule of law have never changed. They never will.

But what has changed are the challenges that we face. And standing here together, as our predecessors have done for generations, I feel confident that through the strength of our relationship, we can shape the world once again in our pursuit of liberty, prosperity, and the possibilities of a new age.

And that begins with our highest priority: national security.

Last time I was here in the U.S., we signed AUKUS, the most significant defense partnership in generations, because we recognize that the security of the Atlantic and Pacific regions are indivisible.

And just a fortnight ago, in Hiroshima, President Biden and I stood with President Zelenskyy and our G7 allies in a powerful display of unity. The UK is proud of our contribution, including providing tanks, long-range weapons, and training Ukrainian soldiers.

But let no one doubt U.S. leadership and resources are the decisive contribution allowing the forces of democracy and freedom to prevail.

As I said in Congress, and I say again now to President Biden and to the American people: Thank you.

And just as we collaborate to protect our national security, so must we increasingly do the same to protect our economic security on which our prosperity depends.

Countries like China and Russia are willing to manipulate and exploit our openness, steal our intellectual property, use technology for authoritarian ends, or withdraw crucial resources like energy. They will not succeed.

Today we have agreed the Atlantic Declaration, a new economic partnership for a new age, of a kind that has never been agreed before. Yes, a partnership that protects our citizens, but more than that, a test case for the kind of reimagined alliances President Biden has spoken so eloquently about.

And that means new investment. This week alone, 14 billion pounds of new American investment has been committed into the UK, creating thousands of jobs. It means stronger supply chains with a new action plan on clean energy. And it means reducing trade barriers in the technologies of the future with a new secure UK-U.S. data bridge, helping tens of thousands of small businesses. An agreement to work towards mutual recognition of more professional qualifications in areas like engineering.

And we're launching negotiations on a new critical minerals agreement. Once concluded, this will give UK companies stronger access to the U.S. market.

And we're building on our extraordinary shared strengths in cutting-edge future technologies, with joint research collaborations in areas like quantum, semiconductors, and AI.

Now, our job as leaders is to ensure that this technological revolution makes us more secure and not less. Last week, the pioneers of artificial intelligence warned us about the scale of the challenge, as well as the opportunity.

The U.S. and the UK are the world's foremost democratic AI powers. So today, President and I agreed to work together on AI safety, including multilaterally.

Now, the UK looks forward to hosting the first global summit on AI safety later this year so that we can seize the extraordinary possibilities of this new technological age and do so with confidence. And we are well placed to do so.

I know some people have wondered what kind of partner Britain would be after we left the EU. I'd say: Judge us by our actions. We're committed to our values as ever, as reliable an ally as ever, as attractive an investment destination as ever.

But we're changing too. We're strengthening our relationships, not just with old friends like America or in Europe, but with new friends in the Indo-Pacific, too.

And we now have the freedom to regulate the new technologies that will shape our economic future, like AI, more quickly and flexibly.

That is the future that we are creating in Britain: confident, proud, and free.

And let me close with a personal reflection.

As Joe mentioned, he and I have seen quite a lot of each other in recent months. I gather our wives have even started to take spin classes together. And we were talking earlier about our hometowns. Joe is very rightly proud of Scranton. And I was telling him a little bit about Southampton, in England, where I'm from.

Now, not everyone knows this, but it was in a church in Southampton, where in the days before he set sail for these shores, that John Winthrop first spoke about his dream of building "a city on a hill."

And that reminds us that the relationship between our two nations is unlike any other. Our alliance is so strong because it is not abstract. It is rooted in our people. And it's never been about our history alone, but about our ability to grasp the future.

We share the same beliefs, pursue the same purpose, and act according to the same ideals. And that's why today, as we meet the challenges of our time, we can depend on each other with absolute conviction.

When the United States and the United Kingdom stand together, the world is a safer, better, and more prosperous place. And that's why ours is the indispensable alliance.

Thank you.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister.

All right. First question goes to James of the Financial Times. Unless he left.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. I appreciate the question. With a you spoke about your unwavering support for the people of Ukraine. So much of that depends on funding from the U.S. Congress. And now with the counteroffensive underway, when do you expect to return to Congress and ask for new funding? And how much do you expect you will need? And do you think that Speaker McCarthy will agree to it, given some skeptical comments that we heard earlier this week?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: No, not sure. And yes.

Q And a and to Prime Minister Sunak, you spoke earlier this week about the importance of finding long-term security arrangements and agreements for the defense of Ukraine for many years ahead. Do you think that a have you found a common position with President Biden on that issue? What's your preferred model for a long-term security agreement with respect to Ukraine? And does it need to be sorted out before the Vilnius summit?

Thank you.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Let me begin by answering your question. First of all, the Ukrainians should speak to the military operations; I won't do that from here. We've done everything we could collectively, but individually in the United States, to make them ready, to support that it will a that it's going to continue, and an evolving situation that we're a where we're very optimistic.

In talks with the Ukraine a and Ukrainians and particularly with Zelenskyy and our allies and partners, on commitments to Ukraine, long-term security a long-term security to deter future aggression after this war ends is a is the goal. And we're advancing this goal by providing them the support Ukraine needs now on the battlefield and helping them strengthen their military over the long term.

The fact of the matter is that I believe we'll have the funding necessary to support Ukraine as long as it takes. And I believe that we're going to a that that support will be real, even though there are a you hear some voices today on Capitol Hill about whether or not we should continue to support Ukraine and for how long we should support them.

The fact of the matter is I asked people to picture what would happen if we were not supporting Ukraine. Do we think Russia would stop in Kyiv? Do you think that's all there would be happening? I think not, and I think the vast majority of my colleagues, even the critics, think that would not be the case as well.

There's much more to say about Ukraine, but I hope that answers your direct question.

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: James, thank you for the question. If I a if I might actually touch on your first question first.

And a and so it's actually entirely reasonable for the American people to hear what I say and hopefully acknowledge the thanks that we have for their support of the situation in Ukraine, but also ask if everyone is doing their bit. And that's why, as I said, the UK is proud to be, behind the U.S., the biggest contributor to the military effort in Ukraine.

And I think it's right that other countries also step up and do their part. We're lucky to have America's investment in European security, but we need to share the burden alongside you, which is why defense spending in the UK has a was a been above the 2 percent NATO benchmark. It's on an increasing trajectory, and we would encourage other countries to follow the lead that the U.S. and a and the UK set, because our security is collective.

I think the other thing for you to know about us as an ally is we also view security as indivisible between the Euro-Atlantic region and the Pacific. That's why the AUKUS partnership is so important. That's why we're strengthening our engagement and alliances in that region, too, so that the U.S. can count on the UK as a partner and an ally, sharing the burden but also working together in every sphere that it matters.

And on your latter question, I agree with what the President said: It's about deterrence. President Putin will be thinking that he can wait us out, that the Alliance will tire, we'll get fatigued, and we'll give up.

Now, that is not the case. And the more we can put in place support for Ukraine a not just in the here and now, but support that will last for a time and for years to come a I think it sends a strong signal to him that there is no point in trying to wait us out. We're not going anywhere. We will be here for as long as it takes. And hopefully that will speed up the calculation in his mind that he should withdraw his forces and stop what is an illegal and unprovoked act of aggression.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Also, if you don't mind my making an addendum, I'd point out that not only do we have Europe responding a I spent a lot of time in Japan a the Japanese have stepped up. They've stepped up in terms of their budget. They've stepped up in terms of their involvement. They've stepped in a stepped up in terms of their support for Ukraine, realizing that an inva- a a a a glaring invasion, with no pretext by anything other than conquering land, occurring in the 21st century is a danger not only in Europe but everywhere in the world.

The next question from a from the PBS NewsHour. Laura.

Q Thank you, Mr. President.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: I think you're going to steal the mic. That's why they're a

Q (Laughs.) Yeah, they're holding on to it.

Laura BarrAn-LApez with the PBS NewsHour. All over the country, Mr. President, Republican-led states are passing laws a passing anti-LGBTQ, anti-transgender laws that restrict rights and medical care. Intimidation is on the rise. This week, anti-LGBTQ protestors turned violent in California.

And also recently, I spoke to the parents of a transgender girl in Texas who told me that they're afraid and that they are considering leaving not just their state, but the country.

Sir, why do you think this is happening? And what do you say to parents, like the ones that I spoke to, to those families who are contemplating leaving the country because they don't feel safe anymore?

And then, Prime a Prime Minister Sunak, thank you. You mentioned that AI has been a key part of your visit. What are the U.S. and the UK a what is the UK doing with the U.S. to protect elections and democracy from AI-generated disinformation campaigns waged at scale by foreign actors?

And you also mentioned the warning letter sent by AI leaders about the potential threat that this technology, if misused, can pose to humanity. How is regulating artificial intelligence going to be any different than what has been done at the global scale, so far, to deal with climate change, another existential threat?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Let me answer your first question.

First of all, maybe quietly when we finish this, you can give me the number of that family, and I will call them and let them know that the President and this administration has their back. And I mean that.

Look, as President, I was proud to end the ban on te- a transgender troops in our military, sign the Respect for Marriage Act, strengthen the civil rights protections for LBG- a LBGT Americans, and advance LGBT human rights around the globe.

But our fight is far, far from over because we have some hysterical and, I would argue, prejudiced people who are engaged in all of what you see going on around the country. It's a it's an appeal to fear, and it's an appeal that is totally, thoroughly unjustified and ugly.

It's wrong for a that a person can be married in the morning in the United States and fired in the afternoon by their employer because they are a they're gay.

It's wrong that the violence and hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people is rising. It's wrong that extreme officials are pushing hateful bills targeting transgender children, terrifying families, and criminalizing doctors.

These are our kids. These are our neighbors. It's cruel and it's callous. Not somebody else's kids; they're all our kids. They're the kids a and our children are the kite strings that hold our national ambitions aloft. It matters a great deal how we treat everyone in this country.

And the fact is that I'm announcing today a series of new initiatives that we're taking to protect the LGBT community. I was going to do this at the fore out on South Lawn. We're having Pride Day, but we're going to have to postpone it because of the a the climate, because of the weather and the pollution out there because of the fires.

But number one, we're going to strengthen the physical safety, dedicated resources, the federal coordination to better protect Pride celebrations, marches, community centers, healthcare providers, and small businesses.

Secondly, we're addressing civil rights violations, a new coordinator to protect LGBT students from book bans, which make it harder for kids to learn and may violate their civil rights at the same time.

We're also engaging in mental health and a and other supports, more mental health resources and funding to help families support their kids, new efforts to protect LGBTQ kids in foster care, and steps to end a the absolute end of LGBTQ homelessness.

Congress has to pass a and I'm not giving up on this. Just like they told me we couldn't get Marriage Act passed. Congress must pass a must pass the Equality Act and send it to my desk.

LGBTQ Americans, especially children: You're loved, you're heard, and this administration has your back a and I mean it. We are not relenting one single second to make sure that they're protected.

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: Laura, on your question, it's clear that AI can bring incredible and will bring incredible benefits to society, our economies, to all of us. And actually, one of your leading venture capitalists just published a a an essay on this, which made the point very eloquently yesterday.

And it's also clear, though, that it does pose very real risks that we, as leaders, need to be cognizant of and put in place the guardrails to mitigate against.

Actually, President Biden and I had a very good conversation on this just a couple of weeks ago in Japan in one of our sessions in Hiroshima. And we are aligned in wanting to discuss with other countries what those guardrails should be.

I think here in the U.S., you've convened all the companies together recently; we've done the same in Downing Street just a couple of weeks ago. And I think there are a series of measures that we can implement working cooperatively, as we have been discussing, that will ensure that we can enjoy the benefits of this technology whilst mitigating against their risks. That's what our citizens would expect.

And you talk about climate change. You know, we come together at COP to work multilaterally across multiple countries to bring down carbon emissions, to get funding to the countries that need it, to share research on how we can develop the green technologies of the future.

Indeed, that's part of our conversations and agreement today: that we need to bring that same spirit of urgency, I think, to the challenges and opportunities that AI poses, because the pace of the technological change is faster than people had anticipated. And I think the letter that you mentioned kind of reminded us that we do need to work urgently to address this issue.

And I'm delighted that Joe and I and others will be doing that with all great haste.

And I think a couple of questions on our end. Could I call on the BBC?

Q Thank you. Chris Mason from BBC News.

Prime Minister, your aim as the Conservative Party at the last general election was a full free trade deal with America. Isn't the simple truth of what's been announced today an acknowledgement of a failure to do that?

And to the President, why won't you do a full trade agreement with the UK? Thank you.

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: So if you a if you look at what we've announced today, what it does is respond to the particular opportunities and challenges that we face right now and into the future. And it asked the question: What do we need to do, working together, that can bring most benefit to our citizens as quickly as possible?

And our agreement does that. It's a first-of-a-kind agreement that's ambitious in what it seeks to achieve.

I think that I've structured around a couple of different areas. The first is economic security, because the challenges we face are much more economic in nature a a big subject of our discussions at the G7 recently a and the only way we're going to meet those challenges is to work together to strengthen the resilience of our supply chains, to research the technologies of the future together.

And that's what we've announced today, is a partnership that will deepen our cooperation to strengthen the economic security. And that's good for all our citizens at home.

And those risks have intensified in the past couple of years. I think that's very evident. But it also seeks to build prosperity and create jobs in both of our countries.

We've announced billions of pounds of investment into the UK, which is going to support thousands of jobs. And the agreement that we've struck today will continue to do that. It will support tens of thousands of small businesses in the UK, removing unnecessary red tape so that they can trade and do business in the U.S. far easier.

And I think those types of specific, targeted measures that will deliver real benefits to people as quickly as possible are the right things for us to be focused on.

But I think be in no doubt, as Joe and I were discussing earlier, the economic relationship between our two countries has never been stronger. The trade is worth hundreds of billions of pounds, or dollars, a year. Over a million of our citizens in each other's countries work in each other's companies. We are one of the largest investors in each other's countries, and that trade is growing at something like 20 percent last year.

So the relationship is strong; it's booming. But our agreement today focuses on the particular challenges, opportunities of the moment we're in. And I think that's the right thing for us both to be focused on.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: I think we had a really good discussion today about our economic relationship. And we've launched negotiations on critical materials and an agreement to deal with climate crisis.

For example, there is no reason why Great Britain will not play a major role in not only critical materials but in investing in the United States of America and all of our initiatives relating to the need for critical materials, including battery technology and a whole range of things. Number one.

Number two: cooperating on data and AI. It is a limitless capacity and possibility. We a but we have to do it with great care, not relative to one another but relative to the issue. Because when I convened the leaders in AI about a I think there were 13 a here in the United States, the very architects of this a AI a they're also very concerned about it getting out of hand, and we got to make sure we're all on the same page.

And we're looking to Great Britain to lead that effort this fall in putting together a proposal a a group of nations to deal with how do we deal with this. It not only has the potential to a to cure cancer and many other things that are just beyond our comprehension, but it has the potential to do great damage if it's not controlled.

And so we a we're looking for a I'll overstate it: We're looking for watermarks on everything that has to do with a "produced by AI" so we know from whence it comes. But there's a lot we have to do.

And we're also addressing the national security risk posed by certain types of outbound investments.

I had a discussion with a with Xi Jinping in China: Why was I not transferring certain technological capabilities? And I said, very simply, "Because you're using them for weapons of mass destruction and intelligence intervention." And I said, "If we can work out something on that, we'd have a very different relationship."

So what we're trying to do is figure out how together we can make sure that we have the a let me back up and say it this way: I don't think ever in the history of human endeavor has there been as fundamental potential technological change as is presented by artificial intelligence. It is staggering. It is staggering.

You have some of these leaders in the industry talking about how they're concerned whether a machine will be able to begin to think for itself, not need to be programmed. I mean, it's just a I know it sounds like science fiction, but it is close to science fiction, some of the things. It has enormous potential.

And we're looking to Great Britain to help lead that effort, to figure out a way through this. So we're in full a total cooperation, because there's no one, no country we have greater faith in being able to negotiate this a no a not negotiate with individuals, negotiate our way through this a than a than the Prime Minister. And so, we a we are in lockstep.

MODERATOR: Last question.

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: Thank you. Last question is the Times.

Q Thank you. Chris Smyth from The Times. Prime Minister, you've made clear your support for free trade, but is today's agreement essentially a recognition that in light of COVID, the growing threat of China, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that the era of unfettered globalization is over? And if so, the U.S. has made clear that it thinks that requires a much more interventionist industrial policy to respond to that. Why do you think that approach is wrong for the UK?

And, Mr. President, what do you say to those abroad who say that your new Washington Consensus is simply a fancier way of saying "America first"? And in light of the warm words just now about UK-U.S. defense collaboration, particularly in Ukraine, do you think it's time for the first British NATO Secretary General in two decades?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: What's the last part of your question? I'm sorry.

Q Is it time for a British NATO Secretary General?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Maybe. That remains to be seen. We're going to have to get a consensus within NATO to see that happen. They have a candidate who's a very qualified individual. But we're going to have a we have a lot of discussion, not between us, but in NATO, to determine what the outcome of that will be.

And with regard to the first part of your question you wanted me to respond to?

Q It was about: Is the new Washington Consensus that you and your National Security Advisor set out simply another way of saying "America first," which some overseas think it is?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, look, my economic policy is totally consistent with what I think is in the interest of our NATO Allies and our allies around the world.

One of the things that I decided to do a and I find that the Wall Street Journal a and I'm sure there is someone here from the Wall Street Journal and other publications that are talking about Bidenomics. I didn't realize it was a I had Bidenomics going.

But the bottom line was this: that the fundamental changes taking place in terms of international trade, nobody in a at least very few people in United States, and I suspect around the world, knew what a supply chain meant, what they're talking about, the supply chain.

When we found out during the pandemic that the reason why we couldn't build automobiles was because the outfit that we got our semiconductors from in Southeast Asia had shut down because of the pandemic, we realized that a I decided that no longer would we rely on one center of support for any of the things that are needed for our economic growth.

And I made it clear to all our NATO Allies and our partners, as well, that although we were going to generate a a for example, an AI capacity here a I mean, excuse me, a semiconductor capacity here in the United States, attracting literally several hundred billion dollars in investment, that that was available to all of our a all of our allies, all of our friends. And they're investing as they a as we are and benefiting in a similar way.

The bottom line here for me is that I think that the world is changing in a way that globalization is still real. But the measure of what we used to call in the United States trickle-down economics, where if the a if the a tri- a trickle-down economics resulted in a in bo- a in Democratic and Republican administrations for generations a in making sure we found the cheapest labor in the world, sent the product to a sent the work to those a to that neighbor or those neighbors who have the cheapest labor, and they send back their products.

Well, I'm not doing that anymore. We're going to make sure that we, in fact, have a flip of that. We're sending capacity a here in the United States, we're attracting capacity to build here in the United States to send product overseas, not a not the reverse.

And I know it sounds simplistic, but it's working so far. And it's not going to hurt any of our allies or friends in terms of the trade piece of this.

Matter of fact, I'm finding they're benefiting from it as well, because they're engaging in it with us. And at home they're doing similar things.

So that's why we talked about the need to have relationships in terms of certain materials a the battery technologies, to share. We rely on Great Britain to produce a lot of that for us.

So it is increasing trade. But right now it looks like it is a because the United States is doing so incredibly well, it makes it looks like it's only the United States. It's not. It's just a change in direction in terms of how we view generating economic growth.

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: And just to add to that, I'd say I'm absolutely of the view that the United States, this President does not believe in zero-sum competition amongst allies. That's what we declared together with our G7 partners just a few weeks ago in Hiroshima. This is a President and an administration that is completely attuned to the needs and concerns of its allies on these issues. And you can see that.

Today, as the President said, we are launching negotiations between the UK and the U.S. on a critical minerals agreement so that the U.S. can provide us with that interaction and cooperation we need.

And the Atlantic Declaration that we've announced today just talks about strengthening, deepening our cooperation. It's not about looking in and being protection; it's about the exact opposite of that.

And it's about strengthening that cooperation across the full spectrum of economic, technological, and other spheres. And that's what you will see. You'll see that from the President. You'll see it from me. You'll see the UK and the U.S. working even more closely together on all the big economic issues of our time, because that's what the moment demands, and that's what our citizens need us to do. And that's what the President and I plan to deliver.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: And it's not just our citizens. Look, the Global South a there are going to be a billion people in Africa very shortly. One billion.

At the G7, it was originally called Build Back Better World, but we were talking about a there's a new PPI [PGII] a anyway a an industrial policy that we're all signed on to to provide the countries in Africa and in the a in the Global South an opportunity to grow, significantly grow, which benefits the United States, benefits Europe, benefits every country.

Because the reverse is true: If we don't figure a way in which these countries can grow and participate and have to a and be able to build infrastructure a you know, the Canadians a the a excuse me, the Chinese have a pa- a have a Belt and Road Initiative. Well, the Be- a Belt and Road Initiative turns out to be a debt and confiscation program. Not going very far.

But what we're doing a and we're going to be doing with our NATO Allies, with the G7 a is providing opportunities. For example, Angola a I a should be in a position very soon to have the largest glo- a the largest solar facility in the world, generating significant amounts of energy. It benefits us, benefits them, brings them into the 21st century in a way that they'd never been before.

We're talking about building a and I had my team putting together with other countries as well a to build a railroad from the Pacific Ocean a from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Indian Ocean. Never occurred before. How a we're a we're a our Departments of Agriculture are working with these countries.

So there's a significant amount of cooperation, not to hoard capacity, but to expand capacity to further expand opportunity, because we all benefit from it.

And one thing I've learned is that we are not going to be able to deal with the global warming, which is a consequential a single-most consequential threat to humanity if we don't do it, unless we engage more together, not fewer a not less together.

And so the United States will do what it can do well and invite all of our partners to be part of it if we can.

Thank you.

(Cross-talk.)

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, please remain in your seats as the principals and official delegations depart the East Room.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: I'm supposed to walk off the stage now. (Laughter.)

Q Can you comment on the bribery allegations against you, President Biden?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: But wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Q The bribery allegation. Congresswoman Nancy Mace says there's damning evidence in the FBI file that you sold out the country. Do you have a response to the congressional Republicans?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Where's the money? I'm joking. It's a

Q Mr. President a

Q Mr. President a

PRESIDENT BIDEN: It's a bunch of malarkey.

Q Mr. President, what do you say to Americans to convince them that they should trust the independence and fairness of the Justice Department when your predecessor, Donald Trump, repeatedly attacks it?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Because you notice I have never once a not one single time a suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do, relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge. I'm honest.

Thank you.

2:57 P.M. EDT

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Remarks by President Biden and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the United Kingdom Before Bilateral Meeting

June 08, 2023

Oval Office

11:44 A.M. EDT

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, Mr. Presi- a "Mr. President." Just a I just promoted you.

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: (Laughs.)

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Mr. Prime Minister, it's great to have you back. And, you know, in the past few months, we've met each other in San Diego and then we met in Belfast, and we met Hiroshima and now we're here. And we're going to solve all the problems in the world right in this next 20 minutes.

But, you know, Prime Minister Churchill and Roosevelt met here a little over 70 years ago, and they asserted that the strength of the partnership between Great Britain and the United States was the strength of the free world. I still think there's truth to that assertion.

And together, we're providing economic and humanitarian aid and security assistance to Ukraine in their fight against a brutal invasion of the Russians. And we've worked out an arrangement with AUKUS, with Australia, to make the Indian Ocean and that whole area safer and more secure. And a and, you know, we're building on the Good Friday Agreement a 25 years a and keep that going. We can talk about that a little bit.

As NATO Allies, we're a we're working together to help provide the collective defense of a of all of us. And we're going to further a I hope we can a we're going to discuss today plans to further strengthen our economic relationship.

And the global economy is undergoing, I think, the greatest transformation that's occurred since the Industrial Revolution. And something you know a lot about, AI, is going to play a big part in that, and I want to hear your views on that as well.

And we don't have a closer ally than Great Britain. And I'm delighted that you're here.

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: Mr. President, thank you. Thank you for the warm words. But also thank you for welcoming me to the White House and for allowing me to stay in Blair House, which, I've got to say, the spare room in the flat in Number 10 Downing Street doesn't quite compare. So it's been a real privilege.

And as you said, it's daunting to think of the conversations that our predecessors had in this room when they had to speak of wars that they fought together, peace won together, and incredible change in the lives of our citizens.

And again, for the first time in over half a century, we face a war on the European continent. And as we've done before, the U.S. and the UK have stood together to support Ukraine and stand up for the values of democracy and freedom and make sure that they prevail, as I know we will.

But also, I completely agree with what you said: Our economies are seeing perhaps the biggest transformation since the Industrial Revolution as new technologies provide incredible opportunities but also give our adversaries more tools for harm.

The one thing I know won't change a I'm confident won't change is the strength of our partnership and our friendship. And we will put our values front and center, as we've always done, to deliver for the British and American people.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, if we had time, I'd take you over to the Residence where I live. And when you were over in Blair House, the a President Truman was there because they were redoing the White House. He put a whole a the Truman Balcony exists now because of Blair House being available. The bal- a that second balcony you see a the first balcony you see going up.

So, any rate, and there's an awful lot of stories that are told a probably a bunch, a pocketful a about the former Prime Minister liked to take baths up the a anyway.

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: Wandering around at three in the morning.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: That's right. (Laughs.)

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: Yeah, Winston Churchill was bothering a bothering Mrs. Roosevelt. Yes. So you won't a don't worry, you won't see me there at a (laughter) a

PRESIDENT BIDEN: All right.

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: a bothering you and the First Lady.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Anyway, welcome, welcome, welcome.

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: Well, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Joe.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Thank you. Good to be with you.

Thanks, everybody.

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: Thank you.

Q Is the special relationship in good shape, Mr. President? Is it in good shape?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Thumbs up.) In real good shape.

Q Any response a federal response to the smoke, Mr. President?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: You're going to get a chance to ask me questions at the press conference.

(Cross-talk.)

PRIME MINISTER SUNAK: As the President said, you'll have a chance to ask us questions later on.

11:49 A.M. EDT

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Congressman Crow Leads Bipartisan Coalition Calling for Fourth Gen Fighter Aircraft, ATACMS to be Sent to Ukraine

Office of Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO-06)

June 8, 2023

Press Release

Crow: "Now is the time to lean in and make sure Ukraine has the tools it needs in this fight."

WASHINGTON -- Today, Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO-06), co-chair of the For Country Caucus and former Army Ranger, led a coalition of For Country Caucus members in sending a bipartisan letter to President Biden calling for the United States to send fourth generation fighter aircraft and ATACMS to Ukraine. The letter also calls for an expedited transfer of Abrams tanks and additional air defense capabilities to improve Ukraine's ability to defend their sovereign territory.

"Ukraine needs advanced capabilities like these to help sustain their efforts in the long term and control the skies. Air superiority with modern fighters and the ability to strike long range targets are essential," said Congressman Jason Crow. "Now is the time to lean in and make sure Ukraine has the tools it needs to win."

The letter builds on Congressman Crow's ongoing efforts to support Ukraine's fight against Russia, including urging additional US military and humanitarian aid throughout the war and calling for the US to provide F-16 fighter jets

to bolster Ukraine's air defense capabilities. This week, Crow led a bipartisan coalition of veterans in sending a letter urging President Biden to share further information and evidence on Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the International Criminal Court (ICC) to hold Vladimir Putin and his enablers accountable.

A PDF of the letter can be found here , with text appearing below:

President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

The White House

600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

We write to demonstrate overwhelming bipartisan support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia and urge new action by the United States to provide or accelerate the provision of new capabilities for the Ukrainian military. With the war now entering its 16th month, we must show a united front across both Congress and the Administration to ensure Ukraine has the tools to expel Russia from its sovereign territory in the coming counteroffensive. Helping Ukraine fight and win is a U.S. national security imperative and signals to the world that the U.S. will stand by our fellow democracies. We believe there are four categories of military assistance that will be decisive in the months ahead and the U.S. should provide without delay:

Transfer of Fourth-Generation Fighter Aircraft : We applaud the Administration's recent decision to assist in the training of Ukrainian pilots in advanced fighters. For Ukraine to fight and win on the ground, it must be able to contest the skies. To supplement Ukraine's dwindling fleet of Soviet-era fighter jets, the U.S. must seek to further strengthen Ukrainian air power by rapidly transferring or facilitating the transfer of fourth-generation fighter aircraft. Fighter aircraft could be transferred from existing inventory, or from willing allies with your approval. Modern aircraft would provide the Ukrainian forces with asymmetric advantages over Russian ground forces, expand their capabilities along the line of contact, strengthen their ability to target Russia's long-range fires, and improve their ability to protect civilians. In addition, we encourage the Administration to rapidly assist Ukraine in training aircraft maintenance personnel; work with contractors to establish the necessary maintenance and logistics infrastructure; and develop a plan for providing a flow of advanced munitions for these aircraft. Transfer of ATACMS : Ukrainian defenders are far more effective on the ground when they are able to target deep supply lines and Russian command and control centers. Ukraine has used HIMARS systems to devastating effect, but Russian forces have adapted to ensure key assets are outside their range. Russia will continue to move high payoff targets outside of the scope and reach of Ukrainian systems until we can extend those ranges. Therefore, we urge you to transfer ATACMS to Ukraine from existing U.S. stocks or approve transfers from our allies. These surface-to-surface missiles provide a long-range capability that will significantly improve Ukraine's ability to target Russian troops and equipment in Ukrainian sovereign territory. We're encouraged that the United Kingdom has delivered its Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine with reported assurances from Ukrainian officials that they would only be used to attack Russian positions in Ukrainian territory. We believe similar assurances for these systems would alleviate potential concerns regarding escalation. We also understand the administration's stated desire to maintain U.S. stockpiles for future fights, but Ukraine is currently on the front lines in a fight for freedom in a war with immediate and long-term U.S. national security implications. The fight for global peace and security is playing out in Ukraine and we believe this merits a drawdown from our existing stocks of this important capability. Expedited Abrams Tank Transfer : To win this war Ukraine must recapture and hold territory, and they will need more advanced armor to do it. We were encouraged by your decision to provide 31 M1A1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. However, we are concerned both by the number of tanks provided and that the tanks will not reach the battlefield until early fall. Throughout our history, when the U.S. has placed its full industrial might behind a cause it has succeeded. For example, during World War II, the U.S. built entire Liberty ships in less than four days. In the 80 years since then the U.S. has developed the most advanced industrial base and military in the world and must have the ability to refurbish, refit, and deliver a limited number of tanks faster than the current timeline. We strongly urge you to do everything in your power to accelerate this timeline, whether that be through the Defense Production Act, expended contracts, or pulling from different stocks to provide Ukrainian troops the tactical equipment needed to mount their counter-offensive. Additional Air Defense Capabilities : In order to defend its people, critical infrastructure, and vital military assets, Ukraine urgently needs additional air defense systems and munitions. Putin continues to aggressively target civilian critical infrastructure and population centers, which has resulted in thousands of civilian casualties and disruptions to utilities that threaten their war effort. We welcomed your decision to provide our Patriot air defense system to Ukraine. However, one Patriot battery is not enough. The Ukrainians have demonstrated their ability to successfully leverage these systems and even intercepted hypersonic missiles aimed at destroying the battery. We urge you to prioritize transferring additional Patriot systems and munitions as we continue to look at short, medium, and long-term air defense requirements in this conflict.

The war in Ukraine has become a conflict of grinding attrition. We can and must help break this stalemate. By swiftly providing the Ukrainian forces with these additional capabilities, we can significantly improve their chances of victory, restore peace to Europe, and ensure a more stable and prosperous world. It is in the interest of the U.S. and our allies across the world to see the Ukrainian people and democracy prevail. Thank you for your consideration and continued leadership. We look forward to working with your administration on these critical matters.

Sincerely,

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Iran concerned about collapse of Kakhovka dam in Ukraine

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Jun 8, 2023

Tehran, IRNA -- Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Nasser Kanaani has voiced Iran's concern about an explosion that has destroyed a major dam and its hydroelectric power plant in southern Ukraine while calling for an investigation that could clarify the issue.

In a statement on Thursday, Kanaani described the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka reservoir as a horrible tragedy while expressing profound concern about the humanitarian, environmental, and economic repercussions of the incident.

The Iranian diplomat also stressed the need for an investigation into the incident that could identify the perpetrators of the crime.

He also reiterated the Islamic Republic of Iran's opposition to war in Ukraine which he said has led to destruction of the infrastructure in the country and has put the lives of civilians at great risk, as he urged the warring parties in the conflict to respect international law concerning the safety of civilians.

4208**7129**4261

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Telephone conversation with Acting Governor of the Kherson Region Vladimir Saldo

June 8, 2023

17:00

The President spoke by telephone with Acting Governor of the Kherson Region Vladimir Saldo to discuss the situation in the region after the collapse of the sabotaged Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power plant.

Following the conversation, Vladimir Putin instructed the Emergencies Ministry to provide all necessary assistance to households affected by the flood, in full compliance with the standards of the Russian Federation. The President also instructed officials to identify the entire scope of additional needs that may arise in the region in the aftermath of this act of sabotage and the flooding it caused.

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NATO-Ukraine Commission meets with Ukrainian Foreign Minister, addresses destruction of Kakhovka dam

NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

08 Jun. 2023

Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg chaired a meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Commission on Thursday (8 June 2023), bringing together Allied ambassadors with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. Participating virtually, Minister Kuleba briefed Allies on the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine, outlining the devastation it has caused.

Mr Stoltenberg said the consequences for thousands of people and for the environment are dramatic, and he urged Allies to provide support expeditiously. Allies expressed strong solidarity with Ukraine, and many are already providing critical aid, including water filters, pumps, generators, and shelter equipment. NATO's Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre, the Alliance's civil emergency response mechanism, has shared a detailed list of Ukraine's most urgent needs with NATO Allies and partners.

The Secretary General stressed the importance of immediate, medium and long-term support to Ukraine, saying that this will be a key topic for next week's meetings of NATO Defence Ministers and the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, as well as the Vilnius Summit in July.

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The OSCE stands ready to support Ukraine in addressing the consequences of Nova Kakhovka dam destruction

OSCE | Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

VIENNA 8 June 2023

VIENNA, 8 June 2023 -- In line with the mandate of the Organization, and through the particular efforts of the Office of the Co-ordinator for Economic and Environmental Activities, the OSCE has been working on addressing environmental and security impacts and challenges of the war in Ukraine, in partnership with UN agencies and field operations. The recent destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in Kherson oblast creates additional challenges, dramatically increasing threats to livelihoods and intensifying economic risks for the populations concerned.

Ukrainian authorities have solicited support from the OSCE to further monitor and address these challenges.

OSCE experts underline the immediate and long-term implications of the destruction of the dam, both in the immediate surroundings, as well as further downstream and at the trans-national level, with serious dangers to public health, economic activities, energy security and ecosystem integrity.

The flooding of land and farms is threatening to compromise agricultural outputs and the collapse of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric power plant could trigger a massive disruption of electricity supply in the region. Furthermore, nuclear security could be compromised, as decreased water levels in the reservoir serving the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) could affect the functioning of the plant, a situation that is being closely monitored by Ukraine's National Nuclear Energy Generating Company, Energoatom, and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Finally, extensive pollution, both hazardous and non-hazardous, threaten to plague vast downstream areas with the destruction of industrial infrastructures. This is all in addition to the plight of tens of thousands facing evacuation and displacement due to the destruction of the dam.

The consequences are significant and will need to be assessed fully.

The OSCE stands ready to continue supporting Ukraine and will coordinate modalities with national authorities in the coming days.

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TArkiye's Erdogan discusses Ukrainian crisis with Putin

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 14:13, June 08, 2023

ANKARA, June 7 (Xinhua) -- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a phone talk with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Wednesday and discussed the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

Erdogan stressed that the continuation of consultations with the United Nations to remove obstacles to the export of Russian grain and fertilizer would be beneficial, said a statement published by Erdogan's office.

The Turkish president said the whole world attaches importance to the continuation of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which allows the export of Ukrainian grain to world markets, underlining that the agreement they established through joint efforts plays a vital role in tackling the global food crisis.

Erdogan emphasized that TArkiye is determined to continue to make necessary efforts to establish a just peace between Russia and Ukraine.

Earlier in the day, Erdogan also spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, offering aid to investigate the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam in southern Ukraine.

In July 2022, Russia and Ukraine separately signed a document in Istanbul with TArkiye and the United Nations on grain and fertilizer exports from Ukraine and Russia to ensure supplies to global markets amid the Ukraine crisis.

The memorandum of understanding between Russia and the United Nations on the facilitation of exports of Russian food and fertilizer is a parallel agreement with the Black Sea Grain Initiative.

While the exports of Ukrainian grain have made strides, Russia has constantly expressed displeasure with the lack of progress in the facilitation of exports of Russian food and fertilizer.

The initiative, initially in effect for 120 days, was extended in mid-November 2022 for another 120 days till March 18, 2023. At that point, Russia only agreed to extend the deal for 60 days, till May 18, 2023. On May 17, Russia agreed to extend the deal for another 60 days.

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Iran expresses opposition to war in Ukraine

Iran Press TV

Thursday, 08 June 2023 10:51 PM

Iran has expressed opposition to the war in Ukraine and called for identifying the main cause and perpetrators of the destruction of a dam in the country's Kherson region.

In a tweet on Thursday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan'ani reiterated Tehran's opposition to the war in Ukraine, the destruction of civilian infrastructure and threatening the lives of civilians.

He called on both sides to adhere to internationally recognized principles and urged them to find out the main cause and perpetrators of the destruction of the dam.

Russia and Ukraine have traded blame for the bursting of the Soviet-era Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, which sent waters cascading across the war zone of southern Ukraine in the early hours of Tuesday, forcing tens of thousands to flee.

Russia said Ukraine deliberately destroyed the dam using massive artillery strikes.

Kiev claimed Moscow was behind the burst.

Russia's ambassador to the Netherlands, Alexander Shulgin, has said Kiev deliberately raised the water level at the reservoir to a critical point before conducting the attack.

The Russian-held Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River burst on Tuesday, triggering floods that inundated the entire region and prompted the evacuation of thousands of people from areas controlled by Russia and Ukraine.

A total of 600 square kilometers of the Kherson region is underwater, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on social media.

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Russia tells UN court Ukraine shelled Kherson dam

Iran Press TV

Thursday, 08 June 2023 4:00 PM

Russia and Ukraine have traded blame for the bursting of the Soviet-era Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, which sent waters cascading across the war zone of southern Ukraine in the early hours of Tuesday, forcing tens of thousands to flee.

Kiev "has declared that Russia blew up the large dam at Nova Kakhovka. In fact, it's Ukraine that did it", Alexander Shulgin told the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Thursday.

"The Kiev regime not only launched massive artillery attacks against the dam on the night of June 6, but it also deliberately raised the water level of the Kakhovka reservoir to a critical level" by opening sluice gates at a hydroelectric plant beforehand, he said.

The Russian envoy also told the court that Kiev had "no moral authority" and was oppressing people in eastern Ukraine.

"This regime rose to power on the back of a violent coup in 2014 on the shoulders of nationalists who were the direct descendants of the Nazi collaborators in World War II," Shulgin said.

President Vlodymir Zelensky's government had "neo-Nazis" in key posts including in the armed forces, the Russian diplomat said, accusing them of "brutal repression" in the Donbas region.

The dam was destroyed on Tuesday, forcing thousands to flee their homes as water surged into the Dnipro River, flooding dozens of villages and parts of the regional capital Kherson.

The environmental impact is grave, NGOs have warned.

A total of 600 square kilometers of the Kherson region is underwater, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on social media.

The Moscow-installed head of the Kherson region, Vladimir Saldo, said Ukrainian strikes killed two people at an evacuation point for civilians.

"Fighters from the Kiev regime committed a heinous crime. They shelled a civilian evacuation point in Gola Prystan. Two people were killed, including a 33-year-old pregnant woman. Two more people were wounded."

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday denounced the attack on the dam as a ''barbaric act that led to a large-scale environmental and humanitarian catastrophe."

Currently, nearly 42,000 people are reportedly at risk of being affected by the flooding in Russian and Ukrainian-controlled areas along the Dnipro River after the dam collapsed.

Ukraine also blamed Russia for the dam's destruction, describing it as the result of "Russian act of terrorism."

On Thursday, hundreds of Ukrainians were rescued from rooftops in the flood-stricken region of Kherson, as Kiev dismissed reports a counteroffensive had begun.

The dam collapse happened as Ukraine prepared a counteroffensive.

NBC news, citing a senior officer and a soldier near the front lines, said the offensive had begun. The Washington Post cited "four individuals" in the armed forces saying the same thing.

Asked about the reports, a Ukrainian armed forces general staff spokesperson said: "We have no such information."

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Around 600 sq km in Ukraine's Kherson region submerged by floodwater from destroyed dam: Governor

Iran Press TV

Thursday, 08 June 2023 10:59 AM

Around 600 square kilometers of Kherson region in Ukraine has been submerged by floodwater caused as a result of the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, the regional governor says.

The Nova Kakhovka dam was destroyed early on Tuesday, with satellite images and videos on social media showing a series of intense explosions around the dam as flood water was unleashed across the war zone.

Both Russia and Ukraine have traded blame over the alleged explosion that destroyed the key dam and forced the evacuation of thousands of people.

The dam was the largest reservoir in Ukraine in terms of volume and used to hold an estimated 18 cubic kilometers of water. It supplied water for much of southeastern Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, and the Crimean peninsula that joined the Russian Federation in 2014.

Sixty-eight percent of the flooded territory was on the Russian-controlled left bank of the Dnipro River, said Governor Oleksandr Prokudin, adding that the "average level of flooding" in Kherson region on Thursday morning was 5.61 meters (18.41 ft).

"We're already working. We will help everyone that has ended up in trouble," the governor further said in a video statement, noting, "Despite the immense danger and constant Russian shelling, evacuation from zones of flooding is continuing."

According to Prokudin, around 2,000 people have already left flooded territory as of Thursday morning.

In his first reaction to the incident, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday denounced the attack on the Nova Kakhovka dam as a ''barbaric act that led to a large-scale environmental and humanitarian catastrophe."

Earlier on Wednesday, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that the explosion was the result of "Russian act of terrorism."

He further claimed that Russia-backed forces were failing in their dam evacuation efforts, saying the provision of drinking water and resettlement should be prioritized.

Separately on Thursday, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov slammed what he called a targeted campaign by US media regarding the destruction of the massive dam to purportedly shift the Ukrainian responsibility on Russia and to "whitewash" the government in Kiev.

"There is a targeted disinformation campaign going on in the US media around the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant. There are many insinuations about the fact that Russia allegedly has blown up the most important infrastructure facility," he said, stressing, "Administration officials have framed their rhetoric as if the Russian Federation were in any case responsible for all incidents that occur during the Ukrainian conflict."

Antonov also noted that the destruction of the dam was the result of "a terrorist attack" by Kiev that violated "international humanitarian law."

"Washington patrons never criticize Kiev. All actions of the regime are approved of, while any strikes, that Russians suffer from, are encouraged," the ambassador further said.

Throughout the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, both Moscow and Kiev have accused each other of plotting to blow up the Nova Kakhovka dam several times.

Currently, nearly 42,000 people are reportedly at risk of being affected by the flooding in Russian and Ukrainian-controlled areas along the Dnipro River after the dam collapsed.

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Breathing Under Water: Some Orthodox Priests In Russia Quietly Oppose The War Against Ukraine

By RFE/RL's North.Realities June 08, 2023

Father Grigory, a Russian Orthodox priest serving a village outside of St. Petersburg, views his current situation as akin to that of the early Christians who were persecuted by the Romans.

"A prefect and some Christian could live on the same street, and nothing would happen to the Christian until the prefect writes on an official form that the man is a Christian," explained Grigory, who requested that his real name be withheld for fear of repercussions. "Then a case would be opened. That is how it is now. Until someone writes, nothing happens. But as soon as there is a denunciation, they go through your finances and visit your workplace. Then you are charged with 'discrediting the Russian authorities.'"

"When we discuss what is happening these days, we speak like in the Harry Potter books - about 'he who must not be named,'" he added, referring to Russian President Vladmir Putin.

Grigory is one of an unknown number of Russian priests who quietly oppose Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and Putin's increasingly authoritarian and jingoistic policies. They are struggling to keep their positions and their ties to their communities even as their consciences push them to oppose the Russian Orthodox Church's official support for the war and for Putin -- whose rule the church's leader, Patriarch Kirill, once called a "miracle of God.

"I act as a partisan whenever I can," Grigory said.

Belarusian theologian Natallya Vasilevich -- the founder of Christians Against War, which monitors repressions against Christians of all confessions in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus for their anti-war positions and provides assistance to victims -- says there are "many" such priests in Russia.

"When priests speak out against war, they do it without attracting attention," she said. "They are simply trying to save their church and their community from this virus, the infection of misanthropy."

"Under these circumstances, nonparticipation in evil has become a very important act," Vasilevich added.

'It Was My Duty'

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has long been a champion of the war and a close ally of Putin's, turning a blind eye to his authoritarian ways while relishing his promotion of social conservatism. In the early days of the war, the Patriarchate ordered priests to pray for peace, but in September it reworded the prayer to instead appeal for Russia's victory. Priests have been encouraged to help muster troops and to bless them as they head for the front.

Kirill has said "sacrifice in the course of carrying out your military duty washes away all sins."

Archpriest Andrei Tkachev, for example, has developed a massive social media following -- more than 1.5 million followers on Telegram -- with his fiery support of the war and his insistence that Russia is "the new Israel" which is "hated by God's enemies."

But in March 2022, a group of Orthodox priests issued an open letter calling for an end to the war. Since then, nearly 300 have signed it.

Father Aleksandr, who also leads a rural church about an hour and a half outside of St. Petersburg and who also asked that his name be changed for this story, was among the original signatories.

"As a priest, as a person with a certain public role, I had to announce my position," Aleksandr told RFE/RL about the letter. "It was my duty."

After the letter was published, Aleksandr said, he was summoned to a private meeting at which he was pressured to give his word that he would not sign any more letters. He was also instructed not to make public statements about the war.

"I gave my word," he said. "And there have been no more meetings since."

Some priests, however, have been swept up in the general crackdown on dissent that has been ratcheted up as the war has dragged on. In March 2022, Father Ioann Burdin was fined after state authorities claimed he "discredited the armed forces," becoming the first Russian punished under a law that was hastily adopted in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion and that has become a key element in the crackdown since. Afterward, Burdin was removed from his post following denunciations by conservative Orthodox activists.

Aleksandr said a local resident has launched a similar effort to pressure the church to remove him.

"A person whom I do not know has been collecting signatures in our little village against me," Aleksandr said. "Some parishioners told me that such a letter exists. But as far as I know, no one has signed it."

'His Brain Finally Kicked In'

Since 2014, when Moscow occupied the Ukrainian region of Crimea and fomented a separatist conflict in parts of eastern Ukraine, parishioners have been coming to Grigory, seeking his blessing for their plans to volunteer to fight in Ukraine's Donbas region.

The priest said he tries to convince them to change their minds instead.

"I definitely saved one," Grigory told RFE/RL. "And I'm proud of that. He has five children, and he was going to volunteer! He'd already submitted his documents, but he took them back. His brain finally kicked in."

"The main reason why they go to the war is because they don't have jobs," he added.

Aleksandr says he does not bless volunteers because such rites are for people who are in the throes of making a decision, rather than those who have already chosen their path.

Priests who oppose the war live in constant fear of being defrocked, said Aleksandr, which can happen "at the stroke of a pen."

"My job as a priest is to give people, as best as I can, direction on how to save their souls under the present conditions," he mused. "If a person is constantly angry at others and the world around him, if he is gnawed by feelings of envy, oppressed by despondency, if he is frightened or oppressed, then it is my job to somehow, as they say, raise him up off his knees."

'How To Breathe Under Water'

Andrei Kordochkin is a Russian Orthodox priest at a church in Madrid, Spain, who has also been denounced and reprimanded for his anti-war statements.

Kordochkin was a co-author of the 2022 letter against the war, which he says has been criticized from being "insufficiently radical" in its condemnation of the war and avoids terms like "aggression" and "invasion."

"But the goal of the church is always fostering repentance," he said in defense of its message. "It can't be offensive or degrading. It can't stand as a judge over people because ultimately we all stand before God."

Kordochkin believes there is a significant number of anti-war clerics working in Russia.

"I know many of them personally," he said. "They are absolutely against the war, but they face a hard choice: In order to speak publicly, they would have to emigrate."

Otherwise, he said, they could face arrest and prison like Father Ioann Kurmoyarov, who has been held in St. Petersburg since July 2022 on charges of "discrediting" the Russian armed forces.

Kordochkin added that priests have been chastened by the case of Father Ioann Koval, a Moscow priest who was defrocked in May for changing the text of the obligatory prayer On Holy Rus to plead for "peace" instead of for "victory."

"In that case, it wasn't just a judgment of him," Kordochkin said. "It was a judgment on all of us. We all were made to understand what is allowed and what is forbidden."

The plight of anti-war Orthodox priests in Russia is reminiscent of a lyric by Russian rock legend Boris Grebenshchikov in which he asks God to "teach us how to breathe under water," Kordochkin said.

"These words perfectly convey the current situation," he said. "There are no right decisions under these circumstances. We are experiencing the rapid radicalization of society, so there is no public place left for dissent. And this is true both of society and of the church."

Written by RFE/RL's Robert Coalson based on reporting from Russia by RFE/RL's North.Realities

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-orthodox-priests- oppose-ukraine-war/32448751.html

Copyright (c) 2023. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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As Ukraine Assesses Flood Damage After Dam Breach, IAEA Says Nuclear Plant Still Getting Cooling Water It Needs

By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service June 08, 2023

The Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in Ukraine is still receiving water needed to cool its reactors despite the rupture of the Kakhovka dam, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on June 8 as Ukraine assessed the damage caused by flooding and as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy addressed activists about the environmental impact.

"Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is continuing to pump cooling water from the Kakhovka reservoir," the IAEA said in a statement.

The statement came after the head of Ukraine's Ukrhydroenerho energy company, Ihor Syrota, said the water level at the reservoir had gone "below the critical point of 12.7 meters."

This means the reservoir could no longer supply "the ponds at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power station to cool the plant," he said on Ukrainian television.

But the IAEA said its experts had been informed that the plant had assessed that it should be able to pump water from the reservoir after its level falls below 12.7 meters.

"So far, the results indicate that the pumps can likely still be operated even if the level drops to around 11 meters or possibly lower," the IAEA said.

The dam on the Dnieper River forms a reservoir that provides the cooling water for the nuclear power station located about 150 kilometers upstream. The plant's reactors have been shut down, but they still need water to keep them cool and prevent a nuclear disaster.

Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of being behind the breach that both say was caused by an explosion. The dam has been under Russian control since the early days of the invasion.

IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi said in the statement that alternatives to the reservoir, including a large pond next to the plant, can provide the required cooling water for the plant "for several months."

Grossi, who plans to travel to the plant next week, added however that the general safety and security situation around the plant remains "very precarious and potentially dangerous."

The Ukrainian Interior Ministry said on June 8 that a total of 32 settlements and 3,625 houses were flooded in southern Ukraine on the right bank of the Dnieper River due to the destruction of the dam.

According to the ministry, 2,339 people, including 120 children, have been evacuated, while another 563 people were rescued, including 28 children.

As the water level began to decrease, Zelenskiy addressed more than 30 global environmental activists and international experts regarding the consequences of the destruction of the dam and hydroelectric power plant.

The disaster "is not a natural disaster or a manifestation of the climate crisis. This disaster is Putin," Zelenskiy told the meeting, referring to the Russian president.

"For hundreds and thousands of people in many cities and villages, access to drinking water has been significantly complicated due to the destruction of the dam, fuel storage facilities, chemical warehouses, fertilizer warehouses, and animal burial grounds have been flooded," Zelenskiy said.

Zelenskiy told the meeting that a special expert group will be created in Ukraine to deal with the issues of bringing Russia to justice for crimes of ecocide on Ukrainian territory.

Among the participants in the online meeting was Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who posted her reaction to the destruction of the dam on Twitter.

The Russians "must be held accountable for their crimes," she said.

With reporting by AFP and Reuters

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/zaporizhzhya-nuclear-grossi-dam- kakhovka-ukraine-russia-flooding/32450992.html

Copyright (c) 2023. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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NATO Officials 'Committed' To Ukraine Victory Ahead Of Alliance Summit Set To Discuss Enlargement

By RFE/RL June 08, 2023

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said on June 7 that NATO funding will be a major topic at the military alliance's summit next month in Vilnius along with enlargement and security guarantees.

Smith and Stoltenberg, who took part virtually in a conference sponsored by the Center for New American Security, said members will discuss the 2 percent of GDP defense spending threshold and the need to recognize that it is a minimum for member states.

Smith vowed to continue U.S. pressure to ensure members are committing at least 2 percent of their GDP toward defense spending as agreed in the Defense Investment Pledge (DIP) created in 2014, which calls for countries to meet the 2 percent threshold by 2024.

Additionally, Smith said 2 percent "is a floor, not a ceiling," and that future NATO plans may require further increases.

The United States is "planning roll out DIP 2.0" at the summit, Smith said, with continued pressure on NATO allies to meet and surpass the 2 percent threshold within the next few years.

The leaders of the 31 NATO countries, who are scheduled to gather July 11-12 in the Lithuanian capital, are expected also to hold critical conversations about the future of NATO, membership, and enlargement.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who has pressed NATO to allow Ukraine to join, is expected to attend the summit. He said earlier this week that Ukraine is "ready to join" and the alliance needs to make a decision about Ukrainian membership at the summit.

On NATO enlargement, Smith and Stoltenberg made it clear that there is a wide range of potential models for continued NATO contributions to Ukraine, but that the solution will likely be a compromise between the varied opinions among the allies.

"We are looking at an array of options to signal that Ukraine is advancing in its relationship with NATO," Smith said.

Stoltenberg agreed that until Ukraine joins the alliance some discussion of security arrangements would be necessary, though he did not provide specifics on what the arrangements would be.

The NATO chief clarified that it is up to the allies and Ukraine to make the ultimate decision on when Ukraine should be allowed to join. However, he reaffirmed the NATO's ultimate commitment to make Ukraine a member after the war.

"When this war ends, we have the framework in place to...prevent further attacks on Ukraine," he said.

An additional area of focus at the summit will be the resource commitment for NATO allies.

The new DIP and new U.S. regional defense and deterrence plans expected to be on the summit's agenda would result in "a whole new world" for NATO allies' clarity and level of responsibility, he said.

Both officials also emphasized the NATO commitment to Ukraine's victory.

Asked about an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive, Stoltenberg said a Ukrainian victory as an independent, sovereign nation is a top priority of NATO, but he would not say more about Ukraine's plans for the much-discussed counteroffensive beyond saying that the Ukrainians "have the capability to liberate Russian held lands."

With reporting by Shelby Rayer in Washington, Reuters, and The Guardian

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/nato-summit-ukraine-victory- russia-/32449840.html

Copyright (c) 2023. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Swiss Lower House Votes Against Providing $5.5Bln Aid Package to Ukraine

Sputnik News

20230608

ZURICH (Sputnik) - The Swiss National Council, the lower house of the country's parliament, voted Thursday against providing Ukraine with a 5 billion Swiss franc ($5.5 billion) aid package for humanitarian assistance, civilian protection and mine clearance, saying various issues related to the country's reconstruction need clarification.

"The National Council is currently opposed to providing Ukraine with the 5 billion franc aid program. On Thursday it rejected the proposal of the Foreign Affairs Committee to grant the aid package for a period of five to 10 years. The proposal has been withdrawn," the statement, published by the Swiss parliament, read.

The funds were earmarked for humanitarian aid, protection of civilians, mine clearance and "peace consolidation," the document said.

Meanwhile, Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis told a parliamentary session that the country would continue to help rebuild Ukraine, but that it was necessary to clarify various issues related to the country's reconstruction and international cooperation in this area.

The Council of States, the upper house of parliament, will discuss a similar proposal to send Ukraine a 5 billion franc package on June 12, the document added.

Western countries have been supplying Ukraine with progressively heavier sorts of weapons since the start of hostilities with Russia in February 2022. In May, Switzerland's permanent representative to the United Nations, Pascale Baeriswyl, said the re-export of Swiss weapons to Ukraine was impossible without a change in the law.

The Alpine nation has repeatedly rejected requests from Germany, Spain, and Denmark to re-export Swiss-made ammunition to Kiev, citing the nation's principle of military neutrality. According to Switzerland's authorities, Bern can refuse to re-export military materials if the country to which they are destined is involved in an international armed conflict.

A Sputnik

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Shoigu: Ukraine Loses 350 Troops After Failing to Break Russian Defense

Sputnik News

20230608

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Up to 1,500 Ukrainian military attempted to break through Russian defense lines on Wednesday night, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Thursday.

"Today at 1:30 a.m. [local time, 22:30 GMT on Wednesday], the enemy totaling up to 1,500 military and 150 armored vehicles attempted to break through our defense in the Zaporozhye direction," Shoigu told reporters.

Ukraine lost up to 350 military, as well as 30 tanks and 11 infantry fighting vehicles as a result of a two-hour battle, the minister said.

"The reconnaissance forces detected the enemy in a timely manner, delivered a preventive strike by artillery, aviation and anti-tank weapons," Shoigu said.

Kiev has been promising a "counter-offensive" for the past month, but Ukrainian troops have failed to advance, only losing several key positions, including the city of Artemovsk in the DPR. However, Ukraine has boosted its activity on the frontlines following Kiev's attack on the Novaya Kakhovka dam, which led to the flooding of a major area in Russia's Kherson region.

A Sputnik

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DPR Head Pushilin Reveals How Far Kiev's Forces Must Be Pushed Back From Russia's Border

Sputnik News

20230608

Svetlana Ekimenko

Civilians in Russia's territories bordering Ukraine, like the Belgorod Region, have also been suffering shelling attacks and incursions by Ukraine's forces. Russian troops repelled three Ukrainian cross-border attacks in the Belgorod Region on June 4, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

Ukrainian troops must be pushed back to a distance of at least 500 kilometers from the borders of Russia, Denis Pushilin told Sputnik.

"How far back should we push [Ukraine's troops] so that our settlements are not shelled? ... At least 500 kilometers. We understand the map of Ukraine and understand where the border could be. Well, probably along the Dnepr, along a natural barrier," Russia's Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) acting head said.

Pushilin was making reference to the terror that the Kiev regime has relied on, consistently shelling civilian areas of Donbass, as well as the Russian regions bordering Ukraine.

However, after Ukraine's troops were shoved back from Russia's border, there would be a pause in the fighting, which the Kiev regime would use to regroup troops, rearm, and brainwash remaining citizens, the DPR acting head underscored.

The only solution is to push Ukraine's Armed Forces even further, Pushilin believed, "until Ukraine is completely liberated, moreover, without variations along the lines of, some region [of Ukraine] going to Poland, some other region going to Romania, another going to Hungary, the situation will not change."

The acting head of the DPR explained that the republic understands full well who they are up against.

"We are dealing, alas, with the Ukrainian puppet regime. And, in general, the West, which controls all the ongoing processes [in Ukraine] completely, does not set itself the goal of a free, prosperous Ukraine," Pushilin said.

Thus, he pointed out, liberation of the new Russian regions which within their administrative boundaries is no longer enough, because the shelling from the Kiev regime will continue.

He was referring to the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, which declared its sovereignty after 2014 saw the legitimately-elected president of Ukraine toppled by a bloody US-backed coup. In October 2022, the Donbass, Zaporozhye, and Kherson regions officially joined the Russian Federation after a series of referendums, carried out amid the ongoing Russian special military operation.

Their citizens have been feeling the brunt of deliberate shelling by Kiev's forces, armed with NATO weaponry. Civilians populating Russia's territories bordering on Ukraine, like Belgorod region, have also been suffering shelling attacks and incursions, like the one on May 22 by a group of Ukrainian saboteurs. That attack was quashed, like the more recent, June 4, attempt by a sabotage and reconnaissance group of Ukrainian terrorists to cross a river near the village of Novaya Tavolzhanka, in the Belgorod Region.

Another aspect that the DPR Acting Head Pushilin touched upon on Thursday was the situation in Artemovsk. The narrative spread by the Kiev regime about "Ukraine's presence" in Artemovsk is not true, Pushilin said. Slamming Kiev's dissemination of falsehoods for the sake of propaganda, he stated:

"There is not a single Ukrainian criminal in the city, [Artemovsk] is completely under the control of the Russian Federation."

Russian forces gained control of Artemovsk, also known as Bakhmut, a northeastern city in the Donetsk People's Republic, on May 20, after 224 days of house-to-house fighting. Kiev's militants withdrew from the city, losing 30,000 or more troops and foreign mercenaries.

After the restoration of Artemovsk, an official referendum on the name of the city could be held, but there is already an understanding that local residents support the currently used name, Pushilin said.

A Sputnik

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Putin Controlling Situation in Kherson Region After Destruction of Kakhovka HPP - Kremlin

Sputnik News

20230608

MOSCOW, (Sputnik) - Russian President Vladimir Putin is keeping the situation in the Kherson Region under control after the sabotage at the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant (HPP), Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday.

"He [Putin] keeps the situation in the Kherson Region under control after the sabotage and the explosion of the dam. Yesterday, as you know, he instructed the Ministry of Emergency Situations to strengthen its presence there and provide assistance to people and also actively engage in work to eliminate the consequences of this disaster," Peskov told reporters.

Putin has not current plans of holding a meeting in the Kherson Region after the sabotage, Peskov added.

Emergency teams are selflessly working in the region to deal with the aftermath of the destruction of Kakhovka HPP, even under the conditions of ongoing shelling, the spokesman underscored.

Kremlin spokesman also commented the recent explosion at the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline, naming it another issue that complicates the extension of the grain deal.

On Wednesday, the Russian Defense Ministry said that a Ukrainian sabotage group had blown up the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline in the Kharkov region, adding that there are casualties among the civilian population.

"We do not know what kind of destruction there is, we do not know what the Ukrainian side is going to do with this line. But you know that this topic was mentioned as an integral part of the part of the deal that concerned us. Therefore, let's just say, this is another aspect that complicates the situation in terms of prolonging the deal," Peskov told reporters.

A Sputnik

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IAEA to Continue Inspections of Zaporozhye Nuclear Plant Until Situation is Stable

Sputnik News

20230608

Svetlana Ekimenko

The Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant dam was struck by Ukrainian military forces early on Tuesday, with water uncontrollably discharged, flooding settlements below it. As water from the Kakhovka reservoir is used to cool the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, the IAEA is currently monitoring the situation around the ZNPP.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will continue inspections of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) until the situation around it stabilizes, including following the recent attack on the Kakhovka dam, Director General Rafael Grossi told Sputnik.

"The Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant is on the front line. And we are in charge of an important effort to try to prevent a nuclear accident... I believe that, as the head of the IAEA, I should not be simply talking about it [securing the ZNPP], but going there assessing for myself what is going on, talking to the current management there, talking to the operators there, talking to everybody, having an assessment," Grossi said.

Grossi underscored that he will focus on the consequences of the attack on the Kakhovka dam during his upcoming visit to the Zaporozhye NPP, adding, "basically this is the reason [for the visit]."

The Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, Europe's largest, uses water from the Kakhovka reservoir for cooling purposes. The Kakhovka dam suffered heavy damage in an attack on Tuesday morning, causing an uncontrollable outflow of water to towns downstream. If the cooling capability of the NPP is affected, possible risks include a meltdown, damage to the reactors themselves, radiological consequences, etc.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has said Ukrainian Armed Forces attacked the dam, qualifying it as a "terrorist act" against civilian infrastructure launched as part of Ukraine's so-called counteroffensive. Kiev, in turn, blamed Moscow for the attack.

Zaporozhye NPP 'Safety Plan'

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi also applauded the fact that his five-point plan to prevent a nuclear accident at the Zaporozhye NPP has sufficient support from the international community. Last week, Grossi proposed five principles to ensure nuclear safety and security at the NPP, which came under the control of Russian forces in March 2022, but has been the focus of nuclear safety concerns for months as it has been repeatedly shelled amid ongoing hostilities. While failing, as usual, to attribute responsibility for the deterioration of the security situation around the plant, Grossi told the UN Security Council:

"I have identified the following concrete principles to help ensure nuclear safety and security at ZNPP in order to prevent a nuclear accident and ensure the integrity of the plant. There should be no attack of any kind from or against the plant, in particular targeting the reactors, spent fuel storage, other critical infrastructure, or personnel; ZNPP should not be used as storage or a base for heavy weapons (i.e. multiple rocket launchers, artillery systems and munitions, and tanks) or military personnel that could be used for an attack from the plant."

He also underscored that "all structures, systems and components essential to the safe and secure operation of ZNPP should be protected from attacks or acts of sabotage," and "no action should be taken that undermines these principles."

Talking to Sputnik, the IAEA chief stated that he had "sufficient backing of the international community, including by Russia and Ukraine, to deploy these functions or to make them operational." Furthermore, Grossi said he had discussed China's proposals regarding nuclear security at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant during his trip to Beijing in May. The visit was the official's first to China since his appointment as IAEA chief in 2019.

"In my conversations in Beijing, the state councilor and minister of foreign affairs and other high-ranking officials from China reiterated that, in line with the positions presented by President Xi Jinping, they believe that there are certain ideas that they have, and mind you, in those [China's Ukraine peace] plans, the issue of nuclear safety is included as one of the first or high on the list," Grossi said.

While "encouraged" by the reaction that his plan has received, Grossi stressed the need to be cautious.

"Of course, we have to deal with this with extreme care. Because given the circumstances and that it is an open conflict, war ... So, the important thing for me is that they have taken note of it," the IAEA chief said.

The plan, he continued, will require IAEA experts to adjust their mission at the ZNPP, since they will be "monitoring things that they were not monitoring before." The IAEA chief expressed hope that his visit to the plant will be "useful" for making the plan operational.

Rafael Grossi also revealed that he plans to raise with Ukrainian authorities Russia's concerns over Kiev blocking the agency's initiatives on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said earlier on Wednesday that Kiev had blocked all the initiatives proposed by Grossi regarding strengthening the safety of the ZNPP. Ukrainian authorities also rejected the proposal of the IAEA chief to create an operational and nuclear security protection zone at the station.

"Yes, I will be discussing everything with everybody. Next week, I will be in Zaporozhye, probably. I am going to be seeing the President of Ukraine [Volodymyr Zelensky]. I discussed [it] with him last night. Even he himself announced it," Grossi told Sputnik.

Fully justified international concerns about the Zaporozhye plant's safety have been raised since last year. After the ZNPP came under Russian control in early March 2022 during Russia's special military operation, it has been shelled by Ukrainian forces several times, triggering fears over the possibility of a nuclear accident. Moscow's envoy to the UN Vassily Nebenzya recently told a meeting of the UN Security Council that "there have never been any attacks from the territory of the ZNPP [by Russia]."

"The plant has never seen any heavy weapons or their munitions placed on its territory, nor is there any military personnel present at the power plant that could be used to carry out an attack from the plant's territory," Nebenzya said.

According to the Russian permanent representative to the UN, the Russian side is already in compliance with Grossi's recommendations, having implemented them independently "in accordance with decisions taken at the national level."

Overall, amid the Ukraine conflagration, the IAEA has been trying to act as "an intermediary." "So far, we have been able to avoid major problems, but there have been tensions, and I think we have to deal with this. It's a reality and I think it wouldn't be correct for me to pretend that there are none," Grossi said.

Rafael Grossi said that after his visit to the Zaporozhye NPP, it would be logical for him to go to "Moscow or any other part in Russia, in order to continue this very relevant conversation that we are having."

"The main task for me is to prevent a nuclear catastrophe. This is my main goal. And this requires a lot of effort. And I will continue to work in this direction."

A Sputnik

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President held a meeting on water supply of Dnipropetrovsk region in Kryvyi Rih

President of Ukraine

8 June 2023 - 23:06

During a working trip to Dnipropetrovsk region, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a meeting on the construction of water mains to replace those supplied from the Kakhovka reservoir to provide water to the region's residents.

Head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Military Administration Serhiy Lysak reported that the blasting of the dam at the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant caused problems with the supply of drinking water to residents of Kryvyi Rih, Marhanets, Pokrov and Nikopol. In particular, the water utilities in Pokrov and Marhanets have stopped working. Water is now being delivered to these cities by rail and road.

Deputy Prime Minister for Restoration of Ukraine - Minister for Communities, Territories and Infrastructure Development of Ukraine Oleksandr Kubrakov informed about the projects of construction of the following water pipelines: Karachunivka reservoir - Kryvyi Rih - Pivdenne reservoir, Marhanets - Nikopol and Khortytsia - Tomakivka. According to him, the implementation of these projects will provide high-quality drinking water to people in the affected areas.

In addition, there are plans to expand the network of wells in Dnipropetrovsk region and reconstruct existing water pipelines.

The parties also heard information from Head of the Kryvyi Rih Defense Council Oleksandr Vilkul, mayor of Marhanets Hennadiy Borovyk, mayor of Nikopol Oleksandr Sayuk and mayor of Pokrovsk Oleksandr Shapoval on water supply.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy instructed to work on the issue of attracting additional equipment for water supply to settlements.

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Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a video call with representatives of the global environmental protection community in Kryvyi Rih and invited them to join the international working group on countering Russia's environmental crimes

President of Ukraine

8 June 2023 - 22:58

During a working trip to Dnipropetrovsk region, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a video call with representatives of the global community of political and public figures, opinion leaders and environmental experts.

The meeting was joined by more than 60 world political and public figures, including Vice-President of the European Parliament Heidi Hautala, environmental activist Greta Thunberg, former Deputy Prime Minister and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden Margot WallstrAm, President of Ireland in 1990-1997 Mary Robinson, Head of the Ukraine Department of the European External Action Service Petra Gombalova, Secretary General of the European Environment Bureau Patrick Ten Brink, Regional CEO for Central and Eastern Europe of the World Wildlife Fund Andreas Beckmann, former French Ambassador for Climate Change and CEO of the European Climate Foundation Laurence Tubiana, Ambassador of the European Climate Pact (Nigeria) Aniebiet Inyang Ntui, as well as environmental activists and journalists covering environmental issues.

In his speech, the President of Ukraine emphasized that the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant disaster is not a natural disaster or a manifestation of the climate crisis, but a disaster ordered by Putin personally.

"This Russian crime of ecocide is the largest in Europe in decades, but apparently, the Russian occupiers have decided to further aggravate its consequences. In the occupied part of the territory, where about a dozen settlements are flooded, no evacuation is carried out at all. People have been staying on rooftops, trapped in water for two days, without drinking water, without food or medical care. We do not know the number of dead and injured yet," Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted.

The Head of State also drew attention to the fact that due to the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam, fuel storage facilities, warehouses with chemicals and fertilizers, animal burial grounds, including two "anthrax burials" on the temporarily occupied territory, were flooded; sewage got into the water.

"More than fifty thousand hectares of forests have been flooded, and at least half of them will die. Tens of thousands of birds and at least twenty thousand wild animals are at risk of death. Obviously, the Kakhovka reservoir has been turned into a large grave for millions of living beings," the President said.

He called on the international community to facilitate in drawing the attention of international organizations to help people who remained in the temporarily occupied territory affected by the flooding.

In addition, Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the creation of a high-level international working group that will consolidate worldwide efforts to bring Russia to justice for the ecocide in Ukraine.

"So that our country is not left alone with this tragedy - the ecocide. I am sure that with sufficient leadership in the world, the appropriate tools can be created," the Head of State emphasized.

The President also stressed the importance of providing assistance to Ukraine in eliminating the consequences of the Kakhovka HPP disaster.

"We need to make sure that there is not a single desert or ruin or dead zone left after this disaster. And this can only be ensured by joint efforts, together with the global environmental protection community, together with policy makers, together with leaders and states, together with international organizations," he said.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for spreading the truth about the Russian ecocide and encouraging leaders, states and international organizations to take action.

"Please, let's work together to make sure that there are no more ecocides. Join our community, which I mentioned, our platform, our specialists. We are in constant touch," the Head of State noted.

Margot WallstrAm, former Deputy Prime Minister and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, noted that one of the ten points of the Peace Formula proposed by the President of Ukraine is the fight against ecocide and urgent measures to protect nature.

"We need a joint response to these threats to our environment. We need mechanisms to punish these crimes against humanity and against nature. And, of course, we need support - with funds, knowledge, experience, technology," she said.

Margot WallstrAm expressed her belief that all environmental activists stand in solidarity with Ukraine and are ready to help our country in every way possible with concrete actions.

Vice-President of the European Parliament Heidi Hautala, for her part, noted that the EP should help bring those responsible for the destruction of the Kakhovka HPP dam to justice, which, in her opinion, is the most serious environmental crime of this war.

"It's not just the tragic loss of civilian lives, it's the long-term environmental consequences, it's a war crime, and I think the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court is already collecting evidence without any delay. Russian aggression also falls under the definition of ecocide, and the European Parliament has already called for the recognition of ecocide and the condemnation of this crime under international law," she said.

Heidi Hautala assured that the European Parliament will continue to support Ukraine in its fight for freedom for as long as it takes.

Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, former head of the International Institute for Environment and Development, expressed her conviction that it is necessary to act decisively to bring to justice all those responsible for war crimes, including the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant disaster.

"We support an independent tribunal for the crime of aggression, we stand in full solidarity with you and the Ukrainian people," she said.

Former French Ambassador for Climate Change and CEO of the European Climate Foundation Laurence Tubiana emphasized that Ukrainians are currently experiencing ecocide in the broadest sense of the word. In her opinion, the environmental community should respond to Volodymyr Zelenskyy's call to put pressure on international organizations to gain access to the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.

"It is necessary to support communities by rebuilding your country. To support you in these efforts by helping scientists, researchers to assess what has happened to water resources, food resources, and biodiversity. This is a human tragedy, but it is also a disaster for agriculture, water management, and the energy sector," Laurence Tubiana emphasized.

Environmental activist Greta Thunberg expressed her condolences to all Ukrainians over the events that have been taking place for more than a year, as well as the environmental disaster caused by the blasting of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. She expressed readiness to put pressure on the relevant organizations and looks forward to receiving recommendations on how exactly she can help.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for a meeting at the President's Office to discuss the proposals of environmental activists and present a detailed action plan.

"Of course, I would like to invite you to Ukraine to make the meeting very practical and professional. We need an action plan to restore the reservoir, rebuild the dam and overcome the consequences of this disaster," the Head of State said.

The President also invited representatives of the environmental community to join the issue of overcoming the shortage of water - both drinking and technical - in the regions of Ukraine affected by the disaster. He noted that the lack of water could result in a shortage of agricultural products, which would affect the countries of the Global South and some European countries.

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It is necessary to consolidate the world for Russia to bear responsibility for ecocide and for Ukraine not to be left alone with this tragedy - President's address to the representatives of the world environmental protection community

President of Ukraine

8 June 2023 - 21:20

Good evening!

Greetings to all of you!

All of you who did not remain indifferent when you saw this man-made disaster at the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant.

This is not a natural disaster, not a manifestation of the climate crisis. This disaster is Putin. What he does. What he personally orders to do.

The situation is extremely difficult. Russian troops do not stop artillery strikes at the very territory where people are being evacuated. Unfortunately, there are wounded from these terrorist attacks. People who are rescuing and evacuating from the Russian ecocide are also forced to flee from Russian fire! Right at the evacuation points... This Russian crime of ecocide is the largest in Europe in decades, but apparently, the Russian occupiers have decided to further aggravate its consequences.

In the occupied part of the territory, where about a dozen settlements are flooded, no evacuation is carried out at all. People have been staying on rooftops, trapped in water for two days, without drinking water, without food or medical care. We do not know the number of dead and injured yet.

Literally every hour we are establishing more and more details about the damage Russia has caused by this disaster. In more than thirty settlements, life is ruined. For hundreds of thousands of people in many towns and villages, access to drinking water has been greatly impeded. Due to the destruction of the dam, fuel storages, warehouses with chemicals, warehouses with fertilizers, animal burial grounds, including at least two "anthrax burials" - both in the temporarily occupied territory - were flooded. We do not know what happened to them now. Where there was no centralized sewage system, sewage is already in the water that covers everything...

The number of ecosystems that have been destroyed or pushed to the brink of extinction by this Russian terrorist act is already measured in thousands. More than fifty thousand hectares of forests have been flooded, and at least half of them will die. Tens of thousands of birds and at least twenty thousand wild animals are at risk of death. Obviously, the Kakhovka reservoir has been turned into a large grave for millions of living beings.

No nation should be left to face such challenges alone! But there is no answer yet to how we can overcome all this together.

First. Of course, we will continue to do everything possible to save as many people as possible. And we need the world's support in this. And not just with rhetoric, but with actions.

International organizations have started to help on the territory we control. I am grateful. On the occupied territory, there is zero support. And the longer this goes on, the more victims there will be, unfortunately.

There is virtually no attention of international organizations to the occupied territory, which is flooded. And we need, in particular, your pressure on them! Please!

Second. All this we have faced is a deliberate crime of the occupier. There are many questions about what happened. But it happened in the occupied territory. But last year we warned about the occupiers mining the dam and other structures of the plant. But Russian troops are now shelling the areas where the evacuation is underway. Obviously, it is Russia that is interested in the disaster.

Just as we have established special Expert Groups to promote sanctions and security guarantees for Ukraine, we are establishing an Expert Group that will primarily focus on consolidating the world so that Russia is fully responsible for the ecocide and so that our country is not left alone with this tragedy - the ecocide. I am sure that with sufficient leadership in the world, the appropriate tools can be created.

Third. Any terrorist counts on only a few forms of results for himself: the suffering of people, the intimidation of people, and the ruins that terror leaves behind. This is exactly how Russia is acting in this case as well.

Of course, we will do everything to guarantee people a basis for life even after this disaster. But we need to make sure that there is not a single desert or ruin or dead zone left after this disaster. And this can only be ensured by joint efforts, together with the global environmental protection community, together with policy makers, together with leaders and states, together with international organizations.

Pollution and poison from the flooded area quickly gets into the groundwater, poisons the rivers, and from there it enters the Black Sea basin. That is, there is no destruction of nature "somewhere out there" - everything in the world is very interconnected.

So please spread the truth about this Russian ecocide. Please urge leaders, states and international organizations to act. It is no coincidence that one of the key points in our proposed Peace Formula is to combat ecocide. Please, let's work together to make sure that there are no more ecocides. Join our community, which I mentioned, our platform, our specialists. We are in constant touch.

Thank you for your attention!

Glory to Ukraine!

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In Mykolaiv region, the President was briefed on the progress of liquidation of the consequences of the destruction of the Kakhovka HPP dam

President of Ukraine

8 June 2023 - 15:14

During a working visit to Mykolaiv region, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy inspected the condition of the main pumping station of the Inhulets River Canal Management, which was flooded due to the blasting of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam.

The Head of State was briefed on the measures taken by local authorities to meet the urgent needs of local residents for drinking water.

They also discussed long-term solutions to provide drinking water to the city of Mykolaiv.

In addition, the President got acquainted with the current state of affairs in the region given the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam.

Head of the Mykolaiv Regional Military Administration Vitalii Kim reported on the situation with flooding in the region's settlements.

Due to the flooding, citizens have been evacuated, and rescuers and authorities are working on the ground. People are being provided with essential food. In particular, a disaster relief headquarters has been set up in the Snihurivka community, which operates around the clock.

Reception centers for citizens evacuated from Kherson region have been set up in Mykolaiv.

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President visits evacuation point for victims of Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant destruction in Kherson

President of Ukraine

8 June 2023 - 11:56

During a working trip to Kherson region, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the evacuation point for residents affected by the flooding caused by the blasting of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant.

The evacuation point is set up at a medical facility in Kherson. Here, people can undergo examination and receive appropriate treatment. The Head of State was informed that citizens are provided with food.

The President talked to people and asked about their health conditions.

"You are going through a difficult time. We will help you and rebuild everything that needs to be restored. I thank you and wish you good health," the Head of State said.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy emphasized the importance of solving the problems faced by the hospital and expressed gratitude to the staff of the medical institution.

"I want to thank you all for the important work you do even under fire. You are heroic people," the President emphasized.

In Kherson, the Head of State also visited one of the points of evacuation from the flooded territories. The President examined the equipment used for evacuation measures and observed the work of rescuers and volunteers.

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GLOBALlink| Foreign exhibitors express high expectations for China's cultural industries fair Pub Date:23-06-09 09:28 Source:Xinhua SHENZHEN, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Foreign exhibitors attending the ongoing 19th China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industries Fair expressed high expectations for this year's expo. Produced by Xinhua Global Service Editor:Zheng Chen

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President held a meeting on the liquidation of consequences of the explosion of the Kakhovka HPP dam in Kherson

President of Ukraine

8 June 2023 - 11:44

During a working visit to Kherson region, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a coordination meeting on the liquidation of consequences of the emergency caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam, the organization of life support in the flooded areas and the restoration of the region's ecosystem.

Ihor Klymenko, Minister of Internal Affairs and headquarters chief for the liquidation of consequences of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant explosion, reported on the operational situation in the region as a result of the disaster and the evacuation of the population from the flooded areas. According to him, the losses as a result of the terrorist act were assessed, the probable risks were calculated, and the tasks of providing the affected population with water and electricity, overcoming possible sanitary and epidemic threats, and evacuation measures were defined. Rail and road transport has been prepared for the evacuation of people. Residents of the flooded settlements are provided with food in full. Work is underway to supply drinking water. Evacuation points have been set up at selected healthcare facilities.

Head of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine Serhiy Kruk and CEO of Ukrhydroenergo Ihor Syrota reported on the progress of the emergency response to the dam explosion.

The parties also heard a report from Oleksandr Prokudin, Head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, on the organization of life support in the flooded areas.

Ruslan Strilets, Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, told the meeting participants about the prospects for restoring the region's ecosystem.

Mykhailo Drapaty, Commander of the Kherson operational group of troops, informed about the operational military situation in the man-made disaster area.

The President instructed to fairly calculate the losses and allocate funds to compensate the residents affected by the disaster. In addition, the Head of State instructed to develop a program to compensate for losses or relocate enterprises within Kherson region.

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UN support to Ukraine in the face of the Kakhovka Dam disaster

UNOCHA - United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

8 Jun 2023

UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator Denise Brown today met with Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, reassuring him of the United Nations' support in the face of the Kakhovka Dam disaster, and that UN teams have been on the ground since the first day.

UN and humanitarian partners have been delivering water, food and cash to people affected by floods in Kherson and Mykolaiv oblasts in partnership with the local authorities since the first day of this disaster.

Plans are now being made, also in partnership with oblast authorities, to reach the wider flood affected areas as soon as possible, once the military deems it safe, given the risks as fast-moving water shifts mines and unexploded ordnance to areas previously assessed as cleared.

The UN is committed to reaching all Ukrainians in need on both sides of the river bank. We have repeatedly requested access and safety guarantees, in particular to the left bank, from the Russian Federation authorities that are in temporary military control of these areas. We have not received that access, nor the necessary safety guarantees for humanitarian staff and the people they would help there.

The UN is also working with all relevant Ukrainian government ministries on the assessment of longer-term damage caused by this disaster.

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Latest in Ukraine: Kyiv's Long-Awaited Counteroffensive Under Way

By VOA News June 08, 2023

Latest developments:

U.S. President Joe Biden will host NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg for talks Monday with support for Ukraine at the top of the agenda ahead of next month's NATO summit.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa's office said Thursday that he'd spoken by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the upcoming visits to Russia and Ukraine by a delegation of African leaders who are seeking to help resolve the conflict.

Ukraine on Thursday appeared to be launching its long-anticipated counteroffensive to try to recapture land in the eastern and southern parts of the country that Russia seized in the earliest weeks of the war more than a year ago.

The Kyiv government made no announcement of its battlefield movements, but its forces mounted a major attack with tanks and armored vehicles in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia. Russia said it thwarted Ukraine's initial advance, maintaining the territorial status quo.

Ukrainian officials have for months talked about a counteroffensive as they mobilized units trained by the West and collected new weaponry from the U.S. and European allies. Russia has reported that in recent days Ukraine has attacked front lines held by Moscow's troops in the east and south in intensified fighting.

Ukraine could be involved in a monthslong effort to recapture the 20% of its country controlled by Russia.

It appears one direction of the attacks is southward toward the Sea of Azov, an effort to knock out a bridge that links mainland Russia with the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized in 2014 and is a critical base for its military operations.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that he visited the Kherson region where thousands of people are coping with flooding following the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.

Zelenskyy shared a video on Telegram of him meeting with officials and said they discussed evacuations, restoration of the region's ecosystem and the military situation in the area.

That followed his nightly address on Wednesday in which he called for a "clear and quick response from the world."

He said "large-scale efforts are needed," including the help of such groups as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

In his nightly video message, Zelenskyy praised results in heavy fighting in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region.

"There is very heavy fighting in Donetsk region," he said in the video, which he delivered from a train after visiting areas affected by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.

"But there are results and I am grateful to those who achieved these results. Well done in Bakhmut. Step by step," he said.

The ICRC said earlier Wednesday that it was closely coordinating with the Ukrainian Red Cross to support the humanitarian response to the dam's destruction.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg "promised NATO mechanisms will be used to provide humanitarian assistance."

The governor of the Kherson region said Thursday that about 600 square kilometers were under water.

Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said about two-thirds of the flooded land was on the side of the Dnipro River occupied by Russia, while one-third was on the side still under Ukrainian control.

Prokudin said efforts to evacuate people from flooded areas were ongoing.

The hydroelectric dam collapsed Tuesday, with Russia and Ukraine blaming each other for the destruction.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.

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Kakhovka Dam Collapse is Only Second Nord Stream Case: Int'l Affairs Analyst of DPRK

Korean Central News Agency of DPRK

Pyongyang, June 9 (KCNA) -- O Song Jin, a researcher at the Institute of International Studies of the DPRK, issued the following article titled "The collapse of the Kakhovka dam is only the second Nord Stream case" on Friday:

The dam of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant on the lower River Dnipro in Ukraine collapsed on June 6, sparking off great uneasiness and concern of the international community.

More than half of the floodgates of the dam of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant were severely damaged and a large amount of water in the reservoir was discharged, resulting in over 10 meters rise in the water level of the River Dnipro, inundating thousands of houses and causing over 20 000 flood victims.

The international community is expressing serious concern, saying that the principal dam, which had been used to supply drinking and irrigational water to one of the three main granaries of the world, was destroyed to cause serious humanitarian and ecological environment damage and that it might trigger the worldwide increase of grain prices.

At the time when the whole world is concerned about human and material losses caused by the dam's collapse, Ukraine and the U.S. and other Western countries are basely moving to shift all responsibilities onto Russia.

The Zelenskiy authorities are trying to shift the blame for the collapse of the Kakhovka dam onto Russia, claiming that Russia exploded the dam from its inside. And the U.S. and Western media are spreading the absurd rumor that the recent incident was a deliberate destruction by Russia aimed at checking the Ukrainian army's counterattack expected in the southern region.

But the awl in the sack can never be hidden.

Zelenskiy, who likes to bluff, said that the collapse of the dam would have no effect on Ukraine's efforts for restoring its territory, only to self-deny the assertion that Russia had destroyed the dam to prevent the advance of the Ukrainian troops.

As for the Ukrainian army's counterattack the Kiev clique is loudly talking about, it is not so great for Russia to take such clumsy measures as destroying the dam in its hands.

Although the Ukrainian army launched a large-scale ground attack some days ago, it is only losing thousands of troops, tens of tanks, armored cars and many other weapons and equipment every day, far from breaking through the Russian armed forces' defense line.

This shows that the counteroffensive operations of the Zelenskiy clique, which had been allegedly prepared for a long time under the military support of the United States and the West, are being frustrated before the impregnable defence line of the heroic Russian army.

Under such circumstances, the assertion of the Kiev authorities and the West that Russia is trying to inundate by itself the areas of the powerful defense zone built with much effort and greet the Ukrainian army's counterattack cannot be viewed otherwise than invalid sophism.

On the other hand, taking into account the fact that the explosion of the dam caused the paralysis of Russia's drinking water supply system for the Republic of Crimea and inflicted huge material damage on the peaceable residents in the region that was newly integrated into Russia, the Zelenskiy authorities are fully motivated to commit such hideous crimes with the connivance of the U.S.

It is not fortuitous that on the day when the dam of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant collapsed, The Washington Post reported that CIA had known about the plan of the Ukrainian special operation group to blow up gas pipelines three months before the underwater explosion of a "Nord Stream" gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea last year, the cause of which has not yet been clarified.

This is undeniable evidence proving the international community's view that the U.S. and Ukraine were behind the case of the explosion of the "Nord Stream" gas pipeline which had been used to supply Russian natural gas to Western Europe.

It is self-evident who is vitally interested in the recent humanitarian disaster, in the light of the sinister intention of Ukraine making desperate efforts to accuse Russia of war crimes by employing all means and methods and of the intention of Russia adjusting the intensity of its military operations to prevent damage to peaceable residents as much as possible.

The case of the collapsed Kakhovka dam is, after all, nothing but another farce and the second "Nord Stream" case cooked up by the U.S. and Ukraine in cahoots to shift the blame for humanitarian disaster onto Russia and create a political and military environment favorable for the so-called counteroffensive operation of Ukraine.

All facts go to prove once again before the world that the Zelenskiy clique is the horde of hooligans who unhesitatingly sacrifice the lives of innocent peaceable residents to prolong their political remaining days.

So, it doesn't matter to say that the responsibility for all the sudden cases that would occur in relation with the Ukrainian situation in the future rests, in any case, with the Ukrainian authorities and the U.S. controlling them.

No matter how hard the U.S. and the Zelenskiy authorities try to confuse right and wrong, their trick can never blind the stern eyes of the international community.

The unethical crimes of the U.S. and the Kiev authorities that caused a grave humanitarian disaster to gratify their unjust interests should be certainly punished by justice.

The Zelenskiy clique, which has driven the destiny of the country and nation into the mire of war with the backing of foreign forces, is bound to meet doom in "Noah's flood". -0-

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Russia is ruled by savages who themselves are the biggest disaster on the planet - address by the President of Ukraine

President of Ukraine

9 June 2023 - 00:32

Fellow Ukrainians!

Today was a very long, hard day. Kherson and the region, Mykolaiv region, cities and communities of our Dnipropetrovsk region. Conversations, meetings, evacuation centers, an international appeal.

First. We are working at all levels of state and local authorities to rescue as many people as possible from the flooded areas. The evacuation is ongoing. Wherever we can get people out of the flood zone, we do so. The State Emergency Service, police and military are doing a great job! I want to thank each and every one of you who are involved!

Second. There is a presence of international organizations on our free territory, and concrete assistance. In particular, it is the Ukrainian Red Cross and many others. I am grateful to every organization, every volunteer, every company that has really joined the rescue operation.

And it is obvious that the absence of some international organizations, such as the International Red Cross, in the disaster zone in the occupied territory, the absence of their assistance to our people in the occupied territory is wrong and is simply self-destruction for such organizations to my mind.

Third. Russian terrorists are trying to further aggravate the situation they have caused with their ecocide. This is absolutely deliberate. They continue to shell Kherson and the communities of the region, which have already been flooded by terrorists. They are even shelling evacuation points, which is a manifestation of evil that perhaps no terrorists in the world, except for Russian ones, have ever done.

The occupiers have completely abandoned people on the left bank of Kherson region to their fate. The catastrophe has been expanding there for two days now. And this is also an absolutely conscious choice of the Russian leadership. There is no one left in the world today who does not see that Russia is ruled by savages. Savages who themselves are the biggest disaster on the planet today.

Together with our partners, we must do everything for the world to prove that it can cope with such disasters, with such terrorists.

The situation with drinking water in our cities and communities. Leaders on the ground and in the government know the drill. We have solutions, resources and funds. We will do everything to provide people with drinking water despite this disaster. There may be inconvenience, but we will do everything. Today, I held a separate meeting on water supply and safety of people in the cities and communities of Dnipropetrovsk region - I was there personally. Kryvyi Rih, Marhanets, Nikopol, Pokrov and other communities - we talked about it.

The situation with infrastructure and environmental damage. The damage caused by the Russian act of terrorism is very significant, this is clear to everyone. But it should also be clear that there are no alternatives other than maximum recovery and maximum reconstruction. It may be Russia that will be left devastated after Putin, but not Ukraine.

And one more thing. Mandatory. Security. I am in constant communication with our military. The commanders of Khortytsia, Tavria, all those involved in the hottest areas. Donetsk region - very tough battles. But there is a result, and I am grateful to everyone who ensures this result! Bakhmut - well done. Step by step. I thank each of our warriors! Avdiivka, Maryinka, the entire east, the situation in the south, the situation after the Russians blew up the dam of our native Kakhovka - we see every detail. But it's not time to talk about it today.

Thank you to our people!

Glory to Ukraine!

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CALGARY, June 08, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Condor Energies Inc. (TSX: CPI), a Canadian based energy transition company, is pleased to announce that the following four director nominees were elected at the Annual Meeting of Shareholders held on June 8, 2023:



Name of Nominee Votes For Percent Votes Withheld Percent Donald Streu 24,819,117 100.00% 500 0.00% Dennis Balderston 24,819,117 100.00% 500 0.00% Werner Zoellner 24,819,117 100.00% 500 0.00% Andrew Judson 24,814,117 99.98% 5,500 0.02%

The TSX does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

For further information, please contact Don Streu, President and CEO or Sandy Quilty, Vice President, Finance & CFO at 403-201-9694.
English French

EDF announces the success of its hybrid notes issue for a nominal amount of $1.5 billion and the ongoing tender offer to purchase notes for cash announced on 6 June 2023 (1)

On 8 June 2023, EDF (BBB stable S&P / Baa1 stable Moodys / BBB+ stable Fitch) successfully priced a US dollar-denominated 1.5 billion issuance of perpetual subordinated notes, at an initial 9.125% coupon until 2033 with a 10-year first call date at EDFs discretion (the New Notes).

EDF will be able to redeem the New Notes for cash (i) at any time during the 3-month period preceding the first interest reset date, which is expected to be in 10 years, and on every 5 years thereafter, (ii) for rating methodology or accounting events, or certain changes of tax regime, or (iii) at any time pursuant to the make-whole call(2).

EDF confirms that hybrid securities are a permanent part of its capital structure. This transaction is part of EDF's pro-active management of its outstanding hybrid notes: the proceeds resulting from this offering will be allocated for the redemption, in whole or in part, of its US dollar-denominated perpetual subordinated notes (144A / Reg. S ISIN: US268317AM62 / USF2893TAM83)(1) and for general corporate purposes of the Group.

Settlement and delivery of the New Notes will take place on 15 June 2023, the date on which they will be admitted to trading on the multilateral trading facility operated by the Luxembourg Stock Exchange (Euro MTF). It is also expected that the rating agencies will assign the New Notes a rating of B+/Ba1/ /BBB- (S&P/ Moodys/Fitch) and an equity content of 50%.

Disclaimers

This press release does not constitute an invitation to participate in the tender offer announced on 6 June 2023 (the Offer) in or from any jurisdiction in or from which, or to or from any person to or from whom, it is unlawful to make such invitation under applicable securities laws. The distribution of this press release in certain jurisdictions may be restricted by law. Persons into whose possession this press release comes are required to inform themselves about, and to observe, any such restrictions.

This press release is an advertisement and not a prospectus within the meaning of the Prospectus Regulation and does not constitute an offer to acquire securities. Any offer to acquire securities will be made, and any investor should make its investment, solely on the basis of information that will be contained in the offering document that has been made generally available in connection with the offering. Copies of the offering document may be obtained at no cost from EDF or through the website of EDF. No Prospectus Regulation compliant prospectus, subject to the approval of the French Autorite des Marches Financiers or any other Member States regulator, has been or will be published. The information in this press release is subject to change.

This press release must be read in conjunction with the documentation relating to the Offer (the Offer to Purchase). Tenders of notes for purchase in the Offer (the Notes) will not be accepted from qualifying holders in any circumstances in which such offer or solicitation is unlawful. EDF does not make any recommendation as to whether or not qualifying holders should participate in the Offer. This press release and the Offer to Purchase contain important information which should be read carefully before any decision is made with respect to the New Notes or the Offer. If any holder of the Notes has any doubt as to the contents of the Offer to Purchase, or the action it should take, it is recommended to seek its own financial advice, including in respect of any tax consequences, from its broker, bank manager, solicitor, accountant or other independent financial, tax or legal adviser.

Neither this press release nor the Offer to Purchase constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities, and shall not constitute an offer, solicitation or sale, in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of that jurisdiction. The New Notes have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and may not be offered or sold in the United States of America absent registration under, or pursuant to an applicable exemption from, the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended and in compliance with any relevant state securities laws. There will be no public offer of the New Notes in the United States

EDF has not authorized any offer of New Notes to retail investors in any member state of the European Economic Area (a Member State). No action has been undertaken or will be undertaken to make an offer of New Notes to retail investors requiring publication of a prospectus in any Member State. As a result, the New Notes may only be offered in Member States (i) to any legal entity that is a qualified investor as defined in the Prospectus Regulation or (ii) in any other circumstances falling within Article 1(4) of the Prospectus Regulation. For the purpose of this paragraph, the expression an offer means the communication in any form and by any means of sufficient information on the terms of the offer and the Securities to be offered so as to enable the investor to decide to exercise, purchase or subscribe for the Securities, the expression Prospectus Regulation means Regulation (EU) No 2017/1129, as amended, and the expression retail investor means a person who is one (or more) of the following: (i) a retail client as defined in point (11) of Article 4(1) of Directive 2014/65/EU, as amended (MiFID II); or (ii) a customer within the meaning of Directive (EU) 2016/97, where that customer would not qualify as a professional client as defined in point (10) of Article 4(1) of MiFID II; or (iii) not a qualified investor as defined in the Prospectus Regulation.

This announcement, the Offer to Purchase and any other documents or materials relating to the Offer or to the issuance of the New Notes have not been approved by an authorized person for the purposes of section 21(1) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (the FSMA). This press release, the Offer to Purchase or any other document or material relating to the Offer or to the issuance of the New Notes may in the United Kingdom only be distributed to, and is only directed at, persons who are qualified investors within the meaning of Article 2 of Regulation (EU) 2017/1129 as it forms part of domestic law by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, and who are also (i) investment professionals falling within Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005, as amended (the Order), or (ii) persons falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) of the Order (high net worth companies, unincorporated associations, etc.) (all such persons together being referred to as Relevant Persons). This press release is directed only at Relevant Persons and must not be acted on or relied on by persons who are not Relevant Persons. Any investment or investment activity in securities of EDF is available only to Relevant Persons and will be engaged in only with Relevant Persons.

This press release is certified. Check its authenticity on medias.edf.com

About EDF

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 40.3 million customers (1), of whom 30.3 million in France (2).

(1) 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 See the press release dated 6 June 2023

2 The make-whole call enables the early redemption by EDF of the outstanding New Notes, in whole, at a price which depends on the make-whole redemption date.

Attachment
English French

PRESS RELEASE





Technicolor Creative Studios

Update on the Company's Refinancing

Paris (France), June 9, 2023 - Technicolor Creative Studios (Euronext Paris: symbol TCHCS) (the "Company") announces today the successful completion of the main steps required under the conciliation protocol entered into in March 2023 (the Conciliation Protocol).

As a reminder, and as described in the Company's press release dated April 3, 2023, the Conciliation Protocol provides that the refinancing consists of (i) a new money financing for a total principal amount, net of commissions, original issue discount and underwriting fees, of approximately 170 million euros, including (x) a first refinancing tranche for a total principal amount of 85,000,000 euros granted at the beginning of April and (y) a second refinancing tranche for a total principal amount of 85,000,000 euros drawn yesterday and (ii) the reinstatement of existing indebtedness (the Refinancing).

Availability of the second tranche of refinancing for a n aggregate principal amount of 85,000,000 euros



The drawdown of the second tranche of the super senior credit facility fully underwritten by the principal lenders (the  New Money Lenders ) for an amount of approximately fifty million euros (50,000,000) increased by an amount of approximately five million dollars ($5,000,000) (in each case, after deduction of the original issue discount) was completed yesterday.



The Company issued yesterday 300,675,053 notes convertible into shares (the  Convertible Notes ) subscribed by its main shareholders: Angelo Gordon, Bpifrance Participations, Briarwood, Barclays and Vantiva S.A. (the  Beneficiaries ) 1 , for a total amount of sixty million euros (60,000,000) (net of OID) through (i) a cash payment of 30,000,000 and (ii) a set-off against certain, liquid and due receivables of 30,000,000 held by the Beneficiaries (excluding Vantiva S.A.) against the Company pursuant to the bridge bonds made available under the first tranche of the refinancing.



The Company also allocated yesterday 501,125,088 warrants giving the right to subscribe to a maximum number of 501,125,088 new shares, at a price of one euro cent (0.01 euro) per new share to the New Money Lenders (the  New Money Warrants ).





Implementation of the restructuring of the Company's existing debt



The Company finalized and signed yesterday a subordinated debt agreement under which a portion of first lien facility of c. 621 million euros (the " First Lien Facility" ) is converted into a subordinated instrument stapled with the First Lien Facility for a total amount of c. 170 million euros.



In addition, the Company yesterday converted into equity part of the receivables held by the lenders under the First Lien Facility, for a total amount of 29,999,999.88 euros by means of a share capital increase reserved for these lenders, for a total amount (including nominal value and issue premium) of 29,999,999.88 euros, consisting of the issuance of 2,004,500.355 new ordinary shares with a par value of 0.01 euro each, at a subscription price of 0.014966323057 euro each, subscribed by way of set-off of receivables (the  Reserved Share Capital Increase ).







For further details concerning the terms and conditions of the Reserved Share Capital Increase, the Convertible Notes issuance and the issuance and allocation of the New Money Warrants, please refer to the prospectus consisting of the Company's universal registration document, approved by the Autorite des marches financiers (the AMF) on April 21, 2023 under number R.23-013, the securities note (note doperation), and the summary of the prospectus (included in the securities note), approved by the AMF on May 2, 2023 under number 23-139 (the Prospectus). The Reserved Share Capital Increase, the issuance of the Convertible Notes and the issuance and allocation of the New Money Warrants were authorized by the Company's general shareholders meeting of May 15, 2023 (the General Meeting).

A reverse share split was decided by the Chief Executive Officer on May 30, 2023, following sub-delegation by the Board of Directors on May 15, 2023, in accordance with the twenty-sixth resolution of the General Meeting, subject to the completion, on the date of commencement of the reverse share split operations set on June 16, 2023, of the share capital reduction through decrease of the shares par value pursuant to the thirteenth resolution of the General Meeting and of the Reserved Share Capital Increase. Following the fulfillment of these two conditions2, the reverse share split will take place in accordance with the timeline provided in the Company's press release dated May 31, 2023.

***

ABOUT TECHNICOLOR CREATIVE STUDIOS

Technicolor Creative Studios shares are admitted to trading on the regulated market of Euronext Paris (TCHCS)

Technicolor Creative Studios is a creative technology company providing world-class production expertise driven by one purpose: The realization of ambitious and extraordinary ideas. Home to a network of award-winning studios, MPC, The Mill, Mikros Animation and Technicolor Games, we inspire creative companies across the world to produce their most iconic work.

Our global teams of artists and technologists partner with the creative community across film, television, animation, gaming, brand experience and advertising to bring the universal art of storytelling to audiences everywhere.

www.technicolorcreative.com

***

Investor Relations Contact:

investor.relations@technicolor.com

Corporate press:

Image 7: Technicolorcreative@image7.fr

1 Details of the breakdown of the Beneficiaries subscriptions are given in the Prospectus and in the notice of meeting brochure of the General Meeting.

2 On the completion of the share capital reduction, please refer to the Company's press release dated May 31, 2023, available at www.technicolorcreative.com .

Attachment
Dublin, June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Dermal Fillers Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Product (Hyaluronic Acid, PLLA), By Type (Biodegradable, Non-biodegradable), By End-use (Hospitals, MedSpa), By Application, By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2023 - 2030" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



The global dermal fillers market size is anticipated to reach USD 12.2 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 8.7% over the forecast period.

Companies Mentioned

Merz Pharma

Suneva Medical, Inc.

Medytox Inc.

Sinclair Pharma

Prollenium Medical Technologies

Galderma

Allergan, Inc.

Revance Therapeutics Inc

Bioplus Co. Ltd

Bioaxis Pharmaceuticals

Teoxane Laboratories.

Huadong Medicine Co., Ltd

Marllor Biomedical Srl

Dermal fillers are soft tissue injectables that are injected into different depths of the skin and assist in treating signs of aging, loss of volume, facial contouring, etc.

The ever-rising demand for aesthetic treatments that are safe and effective, increasing focus on appearance, rising disposable income, and growing geriatric population are expected to boost the market growth. As per the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, dermal fillers differ in chemical makeup and longevity and have varying degrees of softness.



For example, softer fillers are used on the lips, while sturdier fillers areused to enhance cheekbones. The ASPS reported that in 2020, around 2, 619, 650 hyaluronic acid dermal filler treatments were carried out in the U.S, and brands like Juvederm Ultra, Juvederm Ultra Plus, Perlane, Restylane, Belotero were the most preferred. The product demand is expected to increase significantly due to the fact that it provides desired results for individuals and can also be reversed if the patient is not satisfied with the results.



Growing social media influence, high consciousness about aesthetic appearance, and its association with self-confidence and self-image by an individual are some of the factors driving the market growth. In light of COVID-19. The market was hampered as the footfall of patient appointments for aesthetic treatments was temporarily suspended during the first half of 2020.

However. The demand has been on the rise post-pandemic. Moreover, according to the BBC network, inquiries and appointments for many surgical and non-surgical cosmetic treatments have seen a surge following the pandemic and are thus expected to boost the market growth.



Dermal Fillers Market Report Highlights

The hyaluronic acid dermal filler segment held the largest share and is expected to witness the highest growth rate during the forecast period

The biodegradable type segment held the largest revenue share in 2022 as this is the most adopted filler-type product used by professionals and individuals

The wrinkle correction application segment held the largest market share in 2022 due to an increasing focus on looking younger and treating signs of aging

The MedSpa segment was the largest in 2022 due to the fact that MedSpa provides aesthetic treatments under the supervision of a licensed medical practitioner

North America dominated the market in 2022 due to the rising awareness about such procedures and the presence of skilled aesthetic professionals

Key Attributes:

Report Attribute Details No. of Pages 110 Forecast Period 2022 - 2030 Estimated Market Value (USD) in 2022 $6.34 Billion Forecasted Market Value (USD) by 2030 $12.2 Billion Compound Annual Growth Rate 8.7% Regions Covered Global

Key Topics Covered:



Chapter 1 Report Scope And Objectives



Chapter 2 Methodology

Chapter 3 Executive Summary



Chapter 4 Market Variables, Trends & Scope

4.1 Market Lineage Outlook

4.1.1 Parent Market Outlook

4.2 Dermal Fillers Market Dynamics

4.2.1 Market Driver Analysis

4.2.1.1 Rising Demand For Minimally Invasive Aesthetic Procedures

4.2.1.2 Growing Trend Of Age-Less Beauty

4.2.1.3 Technological Developments In Medical Aesthetic Products

4.2.2 Market Restraint Analysis

4.2.2.1 High Costs Associated To The Aesthetic Procedures

4.3 Dermal Fillers Market: Business Environment Analysis Tools

4.4 Penetration & Growth Prospect Mapping

4.5 Technology Trend Analysis

4.6 Regulatory Framework

4.7 Impact Of Covid-19 On Dermal Fillers Market



Chapter 5 Dermal Fillers Market: Product Analysis

5.1 Dermal Fillers Product Market Share Analysis, 2022 & 2030

5.2 Dermal Fillers, Product, Market: Segment Dashboard:

5.3 Market Size & Forecasts And Trend Analyses, 2018 To 2030 For The Product Segment

5.3.1 Hyaluronic Acid

5.3.1.1 Hyaluronic Acid Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)

5.3.2 Calcium Hydroxylapatite

5.3.2.1 Calcium Hydroxylapatite Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)

5.3.3 Polylactic Acid (Plla)

5.3.3.1 Polylactic Acid (Plla) Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)

5.3.4 Polymethyl-Methacrylate Microspheres

5.3.4.1 Polymethyl-Methacrylate Microspheres Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)

5.3.5 Others

5.3.5.1 Others Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)



Chapter 6 Dermal Fillers Market: Type Analysis

6.1 Dermal Fillers Type Market Share Analysis, 2022 & 2030

6.2 Dermal Fillers, Type, Market: Segment Dashboard:

6.3 Market Size & Forecasts And Trend Analyses, 2018 To 2030 For The Type Segment

6.3.1 Biodegradable

6.3.1.1 Biodegradable Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)

6.3.2 Non-Biodegradable

6.3.2.1 Non-Biodegradable Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)



Chapter 7 Dermal Fillers Market: Application Analysis

7.1 Dermal Fillers Application Market Share Analysis, 2022 & 2030

7.2 Dermal Fillers Application Market: Segment Dashboard

7.3 Market Size & Forecasts And Trend Analyses, 2017 To 2030 For The Application Segment

7.3.1 Wrinkle Correction

7.3.1.1 Wrinkle Correction Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)

7.3.2 Facial Contouring

7.3.2.1 Facial Contouring Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)

7.3.3 Scar Treatment

7.3.3.1 Scar Treatment Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)

7.3.4 Lip Enhancement

7.3.4.1 Lip Enhancement Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)

7.3.5 Others

7.3.5.1 Others Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)



Chapter 8 Dermal Fillers Market: End-Use Analysis

8.1 Dermal Fillers End-Use Market Share Analysis, 2022 & 2030

8.2 Dermal Fillers End-Use Market: Segment Dashboard

8.3 Market Size & Forecasts And Trend Analyses, 2017 To 2030 For The End-Use Segment

8.3.1 Medspa

8.3.1.1 Medspa Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)

8.3.2 Cosmetic Surgery Clinics

8.3.2.1 Cosmetic Surgery Clinics Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)

8.3.3 Hospitals

8.3.3.1 Hospitals Market, 2018 - 2030 (USD Million)



Chapter 9 Dermal Fillers Market: Regional Analysis



Chapter 10 Competitive Analysis

10.1 Recent Developments & Impact Analysis, By Key Market Participants

10.2 Company Profiles

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/dusc3h

About ResearchAndMarkets.com

ResearchAndMarkets.com is the world's leading source for international market research reports and market data. We provide you with the latest data on international and regional markets, key industries, the top companies, new products and the latest trends.

Attachment
English French

Press Release

June 9, 2023 - N 13

SCOR pays tribute to its Chairman Denis Kessler

It is with great sadness that we have learned of the passing of Denis Kessler on June 9, 2023, at the age of 71.

An economist and an iconic figure of the insurance and reinsurance world, and more widely of the French business world, Denis Kessler devoted his entire life to business, first within employer and trade organizations, and then at SCOR, which he joined as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer on November 4, 2002. With his cutting-edge vision, his outstanding commitment and his leadership, Denis Kessler turned the Group around in spectacular fashion over a period of more than two decades, enabling it to become a leading global reinsurer. He became non-executive Chairman of SCOR on June 30, 2021.

A member of the Institut de France, Denis Kessler was also a man of culture, firmly committed to the spread and transfer of knowledge. His own breadth of knowledge ranged from economics to philosophy, literature and music. His vision and the depth of his analyses have made a lasting impact on the organizations and bodies he has led and to which he has contributed.

The members of the Board and all of SCORs employees share the sorrow of his family and friends, and offer them their condolences.

In accordance with the internal regulations of the Board of Directors, Vice-Chairman Augustin de Romanet will chair the Board for an interim period, until a new Chairman is appointed as part of the ongoing process.

The SCOR directors comment: We are deeply saddened by the passing of Denis Kessler, with whom we have been fortunate enough to work for many years. He was an exceptional individual, with visionary leadership and incredible intelligence. We have lost a friend. We salute the memory of a great man and an extraordinary leader, who was passionate about the insurance and reinsurance industries, their techniques, their values and their philosophy. Denis has made a tremendous contribution to SCORs development over the past 21 years, and more widely to public debate on major contemporary economic and social policy issues. He has left a profound imprint on the Group, with the double hallmark of high standards and excellence, which the teams he built will perpetuate. To his family and friends, our company expresses its deepest sympathy, gratitude and support."

Thierry Leger, Chief Executive Officer of SCOR, comments: Over the past two decades, Denis Kessler has been the architect behind SCORs success and reputation throughout the world. His passion for reinsurance was unparalleled, and his ambition to make SCOR an industry leader never left him. It has been the driving force behind all his actions at the head of the Group over the past 21 years. I am privileged to have had the opportunity to work alongside Denis. He leaves us an extraordinary legacy. It is now up to us to carry on his work. The strong foundations on which he rebuilt the Group enable us to look to the future with total confidence.

Biography

Denis Kessler was born on March 25, 1952, in Mulhouse, in Frances Haut-Rhin region. After completing his secondary education at the Albert Schweitzer high school in Mulhouse and then the Kleber high school in Strasbourg, he began studying at HEC Paris in 1973, graduating in 1976. Following his studies, he joined the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) as a research associate (1976-1977). Having obtained his agregation in social sciences, he taught for a year in secondary school (1977-1978). He then embarked on a career as an economics researcher, working from 1978 to 1985 as an assistant lecturer in economics at Paris X-Nanterre University. He chaired CEREPI, the Center for Study and Research on Savings, Wealth and Inequalities, from 1982 to 1990. In 1985, he became a research fellow at CNRS. Obtaining advanced degrees in economics and social sciences in 1988, he was made a professor at the University of Nancy II in the same year. In 1990, he became a professor at EHESS, the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. From 1984 onwards, he was a member of the National Accounts Commission. He chaired the Foundation for Economic and Financial Research from 1985 to 1992.

In 1983, he was appointed to the Board of Directors of UAP (Union des assurances de Paris). He sat on the board until 1986, and again from 1988 to 1990. In 1985, he was appointed Chairman of the Banking Services Users Committee at the French National Credit Council, remaining in the post until 1990. In the same year, he became Chairman of the French Federation of Insurance Companies (FFSA), a position he held until 1997, and then again from 1998 to 2002. He then joined the Executive Committee of the National Council of French Employers (CNPF), becoming its Executive Vice-Chairman under Jean Gandois in 1994, as well as Vice-Chairman and Chairman of the Economic Commission. Appointed Senior Executive Vice-President and Executive Committee Member of AXA in 1997, he left this position to support the Chairman of the CNPF, Ernest-Antoine Seilliere. He was First Executive Vice-Chairman of the Mouvement des Entreprises de France, or the MEDEF (ex-CNPF), from 1999 to 2002. In 2002, he left the MEDEF to become Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the SCOR group, turning it in just a few years into one of the reinsurance industrys leading players.

Denis Kessler was a member of Frances Economic, Social and Environmental Council (ESEC) from 1993 to 2010.

He was a board member of several companies: Dexia (1999-2009), Bollore (1999-2013), BNP Paribas (2000-2022), Invesco (since 2002) and Dassault Aviation (2003-2014). He also joined Dassaults Committee of Wise Men in 2013.

In 2016, he was elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (ASMP) of the Institut de France.

*

* *

Contact details

Media Relations

Alexandre Garcia

media@scor.com

Investor Relations

Yves Cormier

ycormier@scor.com

www.scor.com

LinkedIn: SCOR | Twitter: @SCOR_SE

SCOR, a Global Tier 1 Reinsurer

SCOR, a leading global reinsurer, offers its clients a diversified and innovative range of reinsurance and insurance solutions and services to control and manage risk. Applying The Art & Science of Risk, SCOR uses its industry-recognized expertise and cutting-edge financial solutions to serve its clients and contribute to the welfare and resilience of society.

SCOR offers its clients a Tier 1 reinsurer rating from Standard & Poors, AM Best, Moodys and Fitch.

The Group generated premiums of EUR 19.7 billion in 2022 and serves clients in more than 160 countries from its 35 offices worldwide.

For more information, visit: www.scor.com





Attachment
Dublin, June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Middle East and Africa Tractor Market - Industry Analysis & Forecast 2023-2028" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



The Middle East and Africa tractor market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.77% from 2022-2028.



KEY HIGHLIGHTS

The Middle East & Africa has over 578 million food consumers. The region witnessed a massive increase in farm mechanization in terms of agricultural and industrial productivity.

The Middle East and Africa tractor market is highly concentrated, with the top players controlling most of the market. Domestic and global brands, on the other hand, are equally represented in the industry.

The Middle East and Africa tractor market increased by 4.0% in 2022 from 2021. The increase in crop production and tractor sales was due to favorable climate conditions and government support to farmers.

Several Middle East & African countries' governments plan to double the number of agricultural products and revenue from exporting these products by 2030.

The Middle East & African government plans schemes and initiatives to facilitate credit and improve agriculture-related operations, which will contribute to the growth of the overall value chain of the industry.

MARKET TRENDS & OPPORTUNITIES

Use of Energy-efficient Agri Equipment



The Middle East & African countries' governments aim to improve the living conditions of those in the agricultural supply chain and to provide essential equipment sustainably. This aim joins an already announced objective to reduce total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 30-40% by 2030 and zero emissions by 2040. The adoption of energy-efficient agricultural equipment will enable the fulfillment of these objectives.



Technological Advances in Tractor Technology



A new frontier of innovation emerged as agriculture met digital technology, opening various paths to a smart agricultural future. Tractor manufacturers are competitive, and companies constantly strive to innovate and ensure product differentiation at affordable prices. State-of-the-art technology-based tractors are currently available in the market. GPS and remote sensing make farming more accurate and productive.

COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE



John Deere, New Holland, Massey Ferguson, and Mahindra dominated the Middle East and Africa tractor market with a collective industry share of over 40% in 2022. These brands have adopted several strategies to gain traction in the industry. These players are thriving on innovation in the tractor industry. They are increasingly investing in developing advanced agricultural tractor technology for precision farming and machine automation.



Key Company Profiles

John Deere

CNH Industrial

AGCO

Kubota

Other Prominent Vendors

Mahindra

Deutz-Fahr

Claas

TAFE

V.S.T. Tillers Tractors Limited

ISEKI & Co., Ltd.

KIOTI

Escorts

Yanmar

Recent Developments

In March 2023, John Deere announced MY24 updates for its 7, 8, and 9 Series Tractors lineup that will help prepare them for the future of precision agriculture.

John Deere launched the new electric variable transmission (EVT) in March 2022 for select 8 Series Tractors and a new JD14X engine for 9 Series.

Massey Ferguson launched the MF 6S series tractors in February 2022. This machine provides up to 180 HP with advanced technology.

In February 2022, New Holland North America, CNH industrial brand, announced the launch of the world's first production T6 Methane Power tractor in the US.

CNH Industrial partnered with Monarch Tractors in March 2021, a US-based agri-technology company, to improve long-term sustainability and raise awareness of the importance of zero-emission agriculture among farmers.

KEY QUESTIONS ANSWERED:

What are the expected units sold in the Middle East and Africa tractor market by 2028?

What is the growth rate of the Middle East and Africa tractor market?

How big is the Middle East and Africa tractor market?

Who are the key companies in the Middle East and Africa tractor market?

Which region holds the largest Middle East and Africa tractor market share?

Key Attributes:

Report Attribute Details No. of Pages 162 Forecast Period 2022 - 2028 Estimated Market Value in 2022 83146 Units Forecasted Market Value by 2028 109974 Units Compound Annual Growth Rate 4.7% Regions Covered Africa, Middle East

Key Topics Covered:



1 Research Methodology



2 Research Objectives



3 Research Process



4 Scope & Coverage

4.1 Market Definition

4.1.1 Inclusions

4.1.2 Exclusions

4.1.3 Market Estimation Caveats

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 Premium Insights



7 Market at a Glance



8 Introduction

8.1 Overview

8.1 Value Chain Analysis

8.1.1 Overview

8.1.2 Raw Material & Component Suppliers

8.1.3 Manufacturers

8.1.4 Dealers/Distributors

8.1.5 Retailers

8.1.6 End-Users

8.2 Technological Advances



9 Market Opportunities & Trends

9.1 Technological Advances in Tractor Technology

9.1.1 Swath Control and Variable Rate Technology

9.1.2 High Demand for Autonomous Equipment

9.2 Shortage of Agricultural Laborers

9.3 Use of Energy-Efficient Agri Tractors



10 Market Growth Enablers

10.1 Assistance to Farmers Through Loans & Subsidies

10.2 Increased Agricultural Productivity & Exports

10.3 Increased Farm Mechanization



11 Market Restraints

11.1 Lack of Awareness of Latest Innovations in Agricultural Tractor

11.1.1 Low Levels of Education Among Farmers in Emerging Countries

11.1.2 Resource Scarcity of Small and Medium Farmers

11.2 High Demand for Used & Rental Tractors

11.3 Climate Change Adversely Affecting Agricultural Activities



12 Market Landscape

12.1 Market Overview

12.2 Market Size & Forecast

12.3 Five Forces Analysis

12.3.1 Threat of New Entrants

12.3.2 Bargaining Power of Suppliers

12.3.3 Bargaining Power of Buyers

12.3.4 Threat of Substitutes

12.3.5 Competitive Rivalry



13 Horsepower

13.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

13.2 Market Overview

13.3 Less Than 50 Hp

13.3.1 Market Overview

13.3.2 Market Size & Forecast

13.3.3 Market by Geography

13.4 50 Hp-100 Hp

13.4.1 Market Overview

13.4.2 Market Size & Forecast

13.4.3 Market by Geography

13.5 Above 100 Hp

13.5.1 Market Overview

13.5.2 Market Size & Forecast

13.5.3 Market by Geography



14 Wheel-Drive

14.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

14.2 Market Overview

14.3 2-Wheel-Drive

14.3.1 Market Overview

14.3.2 Market Size & Forecast

14.3.3 Market by Geography

14.4 4-Wheel-Drive

14.4.1 Market Overview

14.4.2 Market Size & Forecast

14.4.3 Market by Geography



15 Geography

16 Competitive Landscape



17 Key Company Profiles



18 Other Prominent Vendors



19 Report Summary

20 Quantitative Summary



21 Appendix

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/7b87zv

About ResearchAndMarkets.com

ResearchAndMarkets.com is the world's leading source for international market research reports and market data. We provide you with the latest data on international and regional markets, key industries, the top companies, new products and the latest trends.

Attachment
GREENWICH, Conn., June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- American Battery Materials, Inc. (OTC Pink: BLTH) (ABM, the Company), an environmentally responsible minerals exploration and development company focused on direct lithium extraction (DLE) and other critical minerals for the global energy transition, today announced the release of a new Technical Report Summary focused on ABMs Lisbon Valley Project, located in San Juan County, Utah.

Technical Report Highlights:

There are substantial indications that lithium mineralization occurs beneath the subject property.





Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) remains a viable methodology for the property site in exploration and processing.





ABM claims are currently in good standing according to Bureau of Land Management (BLM) records.





ABMs target deposit model is similar in substantially all respects to that of Anson Resources Limited, an Australian-based company focused on lithium exploration in the Paradox Basin, which is located 50 miles northwest of ABMs claim block.



This latest technical report summary highlights the scope of the opportunity and the progress we are making towards direct lithium extraction related to our Lisbon Valley Project, said Sebastian Lux, Co-CEO of ABM. We enter the next phase of development with all key indicators pointing strongly in the right direction and look forward to our upcoming test drilling to drive further technical validation, added Lux.

The effective date of the Report is May 15, 2023, and was authored by Bradley C. Peek MSc., CPG with Peek Consulting, Inc., to document the progress on the property. The 74 page Report has been written in accordance with the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commissions Subpart 1300 of Regulation S-K for a Technical Report Summary, and can be viewed here: https://docsend.com/view/h9px3qvkn3emebhy.

Summary Highlights from American Battery Materials, Inc. May 15, 2023, Technical Report

The Lisbon Lithium Project property consists of 120 placer mining claims staked on U. S. Government land administered by the U. S. Bureau of Land Management. All 120 claims are in good standing with the BLM.





From the ABM Technical Report authors review of the data, it is believed that there is a substantial indication that lithium mineralization in brines occurs beneath the subject property. The existing evidence is based on ABMs well log analysis as well as a substantial number of other studies with lithium analyses from the Paradox Basin.





It is anticipated that the target grades and tonnages for the Lisbon Lithium Project will be similar to those reported by Anson, i.e., approximately one billion tonnes of brine at +100 ppm Li for a potential one million tonnes of LCE. There is also substantial evidence that other valuable minerals besides lithium, such as potassium, magnesium, calcium chloride, iodine, bromine, and boron, may be recoverable from the brines, as well.





The Company has identified an appraisal and development program for its claims that is proprietary. This information will be disclosed in an advanced technical report after the appraisal wells are drilled and individual zones are identified and fully evaluated. ABM has retained a third-party consulting firm to assist with drilling, completion, and review of test results for the two appraisal wells.



ABOUT AMERICAN BATTERY MATERIALS, INC.

American Battery Materials, Inc., (OTC Pink: BLTH), is a US-based environmentally responsible critical minerals exploration and development company focused on direct lithium extraction (DLE) as well as other minerals for refining, processing, and distribution to support the countrys urgent critical minerals need to bolster long-term energy transition and the electrification of the US domestic and global economy. For more information, visit www.americanbatterymaterials.com.

To receive American Battery materials, Inc. company updates via email, visit the Contact page of our web site, www.americanbatterymaterials.com/contact.

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Corporate Presentation: Extracting American Lithium

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and which are based on the Companys beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management. All statements contained in this release other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements regarding the potential benefits of the name change; the Companys ability to develop and commercialize its mineral rights; the Companys planned research and development efforts; and, other matters regarding the Companys business strategies, use of capital, results of operations and financial position, and plans and objectives for future operations. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the 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 forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from the information expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. These risks, uncertainties, and other factors include, without limitation, the important risk factors described more fully in our reports and other documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC), including under (i) Part I, Item 1A. Risk Factors, in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year-ending December 31, 2022, filed with the SEC on April 21, 2023; and (ii) subsequent filings. Undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements in this news release, which are based on information available to us on the date hereof. The Company does not undertake any duty to update or revise forward-looking statements except as required by federal securities laws. Any distribution of this news release after the date hereof is not intended and should not be construed as updating or confirming such information.

More information:

American Battery Materials, Inc.

Investor Relations

Email: ir@americanbatterymaterials.com

Tel: (800) 998-7962

or

MZ Group

Michael Kim

(737) 289-0835

michael.kim@mzgroup.us




Old Toronto, June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Old Toronto, Ontario -

Shield K9 Dog Training Toronto provides dogs with a stress-free and engaging home-away-from-home experience, offering socialization, exercise, and mental stimulation in a safe, clean environment.

As dog owners increasingly seek reliable and exceptional care for their beloved companions, Shield K9 Dog Training Toronto is proud to introduce its doggy daycare service. Combining the expertise of their highly skilled trainers with a safe and stimulating environment, Shield K9's doggy daycare is designed to meet the unique needs of dogs and provide them with a day full of fun, socialization, and enrichment.

Shield K9 Dog Training Toronto has expanded its services to include a comprehensive doggy daycare program catering to the growing needs of pet owners in Guelph, Woodstock, and Toronto. With a team of highly skilled trainers and a focus on excellence, it sets the standard for superior care and enrichment.

The dogs enjoy supervised play sessions that promote socialization and healthy interactions with other dogs. The centre's experienced staff members carefully assess each dog's temperament and play style to ensure compatibility and a positive social experience. This approach fosters the development of proper social skills and allows dogs to build confidence in a controlled and safe environment.

Physical exercise and mental stimulation are integral components of daycare services. Dogs engage in various activities, including group play, interactive toys, and agility equipment designed to keep them active, engaged, and mentally stimulated throughout the day. Regular exercise helps dogs maintain a healthy weight, supports cardiovascular health, and reduces the risk of behavioural issues resulting from pent-up energy.

For more information, visit https://www.shieldk9.ca/dog-trainer-toronto-ontario-canada.

The team understands the importance of individual attention and care in an enriching setting. With a low staff-to-dog ratio, each dog receives personalized attention and supervision, ensuring a safe and enjoyable experience. The staff members are trained in canine body language and behaviour, enabling them to recognize and respond appropriately to any signs of distress or discomfort. With their expertise, dogs are in the hands of caring professionals who prioritize their well-being and safety.

The facilities are designed with the utmost care and attention to create a comfortable and enjoyable experience for dogs. The centre has spacious indoor and outdoor play areas, securely fenced to ensure the safety and security of all dogs. With meticulous cleanliness standards and a focus on providing a stress-free environment, it offers a home-away-from-home experience for the dogs.

Convenience is a key aspect, and pet owners can take advantage of flexible drop-off and pick-up times, allowing them to customize their schedules and focus on their commitments with peace of mind. Whether a full day or just a few hours, the daycare ensures dogs receive exceptional care, attention, and engagement throughout their time at the centre.

Shield K9 Dog Training Toronto's doggy daycare service offers dog owners a nurturing environment that prioritizes the well-being of their pets. With a team of expert trainers and its focus on socialization, exercise, and mental stimulation, it is committed to ensuring that all dogs have a fun-filled day while their owners are away.

About the Company:

Shield K9 Dog Training Toronto offers exceptional dog training and daycare services focusing on socialization, exercise, and mental stimulation. The expert trainers provide a safe and engaging environment for dogs to thrive and enjoy supervised play sessions, physical activities, and interactive toys to keep them active and mentally stimulated. With flexible scheduling options and a low staff-to-dog ratio, Shield K9 ensures personalized attention and a stress-free experience.

###

For more information about Shield K9 Dog Training Toronto, contact the company here:



Shield K9 Dog Training Toronto

HAZ OTHMAN

+16474662286

info@shieldk9.ca

1110 Dupont St, Toronto, ON M6H 2A2, Canada


New York, June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A bloodcurdling sermon filled with disinformation and hate against Yemens Bahai community was delivered at Friday prayers on 2 June, in the capital Sanaa, by the Houthis Grand Mufti Shams al-Din Sharaf al-Din. The sermon, which lasted for more than an hour and which focused in large part on castigating the Bahais, was also published on the internet.

The sermon came after armed and masked Houthi gunmen stormed a peaceful Bahai gathering, on 25 May, where they detained 17 people, including 5 women, and took them to unknown locations managed by the Houthi security services. One individual has since been released. The Bahai International Community (BIC) has reason to believe that the detainees are being mistreated in custody.

The Grand Mufti confirmed the arrest of the 17 Bahais by security services before leveling several false and incendiary allegations, claiming that the Bahai community is supported by foreign powers and had plans to harm the country.

What does it say about the intentions of the Houthis when their Grand Mufti devotes an entire Friday prayer sermon to denouncing, demonizing and spreading vicious disinformation about the peaceful Bahai community? said Bani Dugal, the BICs Principal Representative to the United Nations. We know from history that hate speech is the first step when those in power wish to incite violence against at-risk minorities.

The Mufti claimed that the Bahai Faith spreads thanks to the generous support of Britain, America and the Jews, before insisting that the Bahais are dangerous and secretly mislead the people and corrupt young men and women.

He also impugned the moral integrity of Bahais in family and financial matters. Both claims are absurd and intended to incite hatred and suspicion about the Bahais in the minds of the congregants and the people of Yemen.

The Grand Mufti further emphasized that anyone who changes their religion from Islam should be killed.

The latest outpouring hate speech follows 2018 public remarks by the Houthi leader, Abdel-Malek al-Houthi, in which he warned Yemenis of the satanic Bahai movement that was waging a war of doctrine against Islam. Mr. al-Houthi urged Yemenis to defend their country from the Bahais under the pretext that those who destroy the faith in people are no less evil and dangerous than those who kill people with their bombs.

The de facto Houthi authorities are stoking insecurity and instability in Yemen by inciting their own long-suffering people against the innocent Bahais, and ignoring real issues that need to be addressed in Yemen, Ms. Dugal added. The allegations made by the Houthis mirror those same threadbare accusations made over the past 44 years in Iran which no one any longer believes. While governments across the Arab region are striving for peace and looking to the future, the Houthis continue to violate the rights of the Bahais and many others in Yemen, and by inciting their people against minorities they are driving them into the past and into the ground. The international community responded to last weeks arrests of the Bahais with outrage; this must now be doubled, tripled and intensified without pause, until all detained Bahais are freed.

Background and response to Houthi disinformation
NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa., June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ernst & Young LLP (EY US) today announced that CEO Patti Brennan of Key Financial, Inc. was named an Entrepreneur Of The Year 2023 Greater Philadelphia Award winner. The Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards program is one of the preeminent competitive awards for entrepreneurs and leaders of high-growth companies. Brennan was selected by an independent judging panel made up of previous award winners, leading CEOs, investors and other regional business leaders. The candidates were evaluated based on their demonstration of building long-term value through entrepreneurial spirit, purpose, growth and impact, among other core contributions and attributes.



For nearly 40 years, the award recognizes leaders who are creating long-term value through their entrepreneurial spirit, purpose, growth and impact. Leaders who are always testing the limits of what is possible. The independent panel of judges look for entrepreneurs who are pacesetters lifting up their employees and entire communities. Im so honored to be recognized by a program with this legacy, said Brennan.

As the CEO of Key Financial for over 30 years, Patti Brennan provides comprehensive wealth management with integrated strategies that are unique to each client. Known for her ability to see the impact of the little details on the big picture, Brennan is known for communicating complex financial concepts in simple, understandable and meaningful terms. Brennan has guided standing room only audiences with her wisdom, perspective and practical advice through some of the most challenging times in our country. Brennan and her team also produce The Patti Brennan Show, a podcast dedicated to helping improve the listener's net worth. It can be found on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and Spotify. The show is biweekly and covers timely financial topics as well as economic forecasts and market discussions. With assets under management of just under $2 billion as of June 2023, Key Financial, Inc. provides comprehensive financial planning and wealth management services and is located at 1045 Andrew Drive Suite A West Chester, PA. For information about the firm's planning services or to speak with Patti Brennan, call (610) 429-9050 or visit www.keyfinancialinc.com.

For nearly four decades, EY US has honored entrepreneurs whose ambition, courage and ingenuity have driven their companies success, transformed their industries and made a positive impact on their communities. Entrepreneur Of The Year Award winners become lifetime members of a global, multi-industry community of entrepreneurs, with exclusive, ongoing access to the experience, insight and wisdom of program alumni and other ecosystem members in over 60 countries  all supported by vast EY resources. Since 1986, the Entrepreneur Of The Year program has recognized more than 11,000 US executives.

As a Greater Philadelphia award winner, Brennan is now eligible for consideration for the Entrepreneur Of The Year 2023 National Awards. The National Award winners including the Entrepreneur Of The Year National Overall Award winner will be announced in November at the Strategic Growth Forum, one of the nations most prestigious gatherings of high-growth, market-leading companies. The Entrepreneur Of The Year National Overall Award winner will then move on to compete for the World Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in June 2024.

The Entrepreneur Of The Year program has honored the inspirational leadership of entrepreneurs such as:

Andreas Bechtolsheim and Jayshree Ullal of Arista Networks

Daymond John of FUBU

Hamdi Ulukaya of Chobani, Inc.

Holly Thaggard and Amanda Baldwin of Supergoop!

Howard Schultz of Starbucks Coffee Company

James Park of Fitbit

Jodi Berg of Vitamix

Joe DeSimone of Carbon, Inc.

Kendra Scott of Kendra Scott LLC

Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn Corporation

Sheila Mikhail of AskBio

Sponsors

Founded and produced by Ernst & Young LLP, the Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards include presenting sponsors PNC Bank, N.A.; SAP America; and the Kauffman Foundation. In Greater Philadelphia, sponsors also include CRESA; Donnelley Financial Solutions (DFIN); Lockton; Ballard Spahr LLP; Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP; and Troutman Pepper LLP.

About Entrepreneur Of The Year

Entrepreneur Of The Year is the worlds most prestigious business awards program for unstoppable entrepreneurs. These visionary leaders deliver innovation, growth and prosperity that transform our world. The program engages entrepreneurs with insights and experiences that foster growth. It connects them with their peers to strengthen entrepreneurship around the world. Entrepreneur Of The Year is the first and only truly global awards program of its kind. It celebrates entrepreneurs through regional and national awards programs in more than 145 cities in over 60 countries. National Overall Award winners go on to compete for the World Entrepreneur Of The Year title. Visit ey.com/us/eoy .

About EY Private

As Advisors to the ambitious, EY Private professionals possess the experience and passion to support private businesses and their owners in unlocking the full potential of their ambitions. EY Private teams offer distinct insights born from the long EY history of working with business owners and entrepreneurs. These teams support the full spectrum of private enterprises including private capital managers and investors and the portfolio businesses they fund, business owners, family businesses, family offices and entrepreneurs. Visit ey.com/us/private .

About EY

EY exists to build a better working world, helping create long-term value for clients, people and society and build trust in the capital markets.

Enabled by data and technology, diverse EY teams in over 150 countries provide trust through assurance and help clients grow, transform and operate.

Working across assurance, consulting, law, strategy, tax and transactions, EY teams ask better questions to find new answers for the complex issues facing our world today.

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. Information about how EY collects and uses personal data and a description of the rights individuals have under data protection legislation are available via ey.com/privacy. EY member firms do not practice law where prohibited by local laws. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com.

Securities offered through Royal Alliance Associates, Inc., member FINRA/SIPC. Insurance services offered through Patricia Brennan are independent of Royal Alliance Associates, Inc. Advisory services offered through Key Financial, Inc., a registered investment advisor not affiliated with Royal Alliance Associates, Inc.

The Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award has recognized the endeavors of exceptional men and women who create the products and services that keep our worldwide economy moving forward.

Photos accompanying this announcement are available at:

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/2a9efa50-27bb-440e-b18b-539a3953801c

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/38c3f85e-f6be-49bd-943c-435a0ff34605
Belleville, Illinois, June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Allsup, a leading provider of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) representation, return to work, veterans disability appeals, and healthcare insurance services, is excited to sponsor Cancer and Careers 13th Annual National Conference on Work & Cancer, scheduled for Friday, June 23, 2023. This free virtual event brings together cancer patients, survivors, healthcare professionals, employers and advocates to discuss effective management of treatment, recovery and employment for individuals who have cancer.

Cancer and Careers is an organization that truly understands and demonstrates the importance of supporting individuals with cancer at any stage of their disease while they work or seek employment, said T.J. Geist, Allsup Principal Advocate. Allsup has been a longtime supporter of Cancer and Careers, and our experts help many individuals with cancer understand the value of seeking SSDI benefits, which includes free help to go back to work through the Ticket to Work Program.

With a history spanning 39 years, Allsup has helped more than 375,000 individuals with disabilities receive SSDI benefits when they can no longer work due to a disability or serious illness such as cancer. The SSDI process can be lengthy and involve multiple appeals at the Social Security Administration.

While claimants await approval, a process that can take several months or more, they may also rely on our new exclusive offering, Disability Financial SolutionsSM , for help with financial issues such as household living expenses, credit card debt, and even mortgage or rent payment, Geist added.

Later, when an SSDI beneficiary is considering a return to work, Allsup Employment Services (AES), a subsidiary and Social Security-authorized Employment Network, offers free assistance and a network of resources through Social Securitys Ticket to Work Program.

Cancer and Careers 2023 national conference will feature several accomplished individuals in the fields of oncology, nutrition, social work and business. They will address topics, including:

Working through treatment.

Making disclosure decisions.

Managing treatment side effects.

Communicating effectively.

Engaging HR.

Doctor's perspective.

Nutrition.

Managing stress.

Credit hours will be available for participating nurses, social workers and human resources professionals. Visit here to learn more about accreditation requirements.

For more information or to register for the virtual event, visit CancerAndCareers.org.

ABOUT CANCER AND CAREERS

Cancer and Careers empowers and educates people with cancer to thrive in their workplace, by providing expert advice, interactive tools and educational events. Cancer and Careers helps more than 455,000 people each year  online, in print and in person.

ABOUT ALLSUP

Allsup and its subsidiaries provide nationwide Social Security disability, veterans disability appeal, return to work, and healthcare benefits services for individuals, their employers and insurance carriers. Allsup professionals deliver specialized services supporting people with disabilities and seniors so they may lead lives that are as financially secure and as healthy as possible. Founded in 1984, the company is based in Belleville, Illinois, near St. Louis. Learn more at Allsup.com and @Allsup or download a free PDF of Applying for Social Security Disability Insurance: Getting It Right The First Time.

Attachment
English French

TORONTO, June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sunwing is pleased to shine a light on resort partners Blue Diamond Resorts and RIU Hotels & Resorts for receiving a number of well-deserved accolades presented by TripAdvisor and Forbes. As two of the most respected and globally recognized platforms beloved by the travel community, the TripAdvisor Travellers Choice Awards and Forbes recognize excellence in the tourism and hospitality industry. This year, 45 properties under the Royalton Luxury Resorts, Planet Hollywood Hotels & Resorts, Mystique by Royalton, Memories Resorts & Spa, Grand Memories Resorts & Spa, Starfish Resorts, RIU Hotels & Resorts and RIU Palace Resorts brands were acknowledged, some of which earned the Best of the Best Award, the highest honour from Travellers Choice.



Set within multiple sought-after destinations accessible to Sunwing travellers this summer and upcoming winter season, from Mexico to the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba, Central American hot spots and more, these world-renowned resorts have been recognized by travellers and industry experts for offering quality service and consistently delivering incredible vacation experiences to customers around the globe.

Were thrilled to celebrate our valued partners at Blue Diamond Resorts and RIU Hotels & Resorts who continue to receive recognition from our customers, which is reflected in this years Forbes and TripAdvisor Travellers Choice Awards, says Samantha Taylor, Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at Sunwing. These resort brands are adored for their prime locations, top-notch service, thoughtful amenities and incredible experiences offered at exceptional value, and with an exciting line-up of summer deals at Sunwing such as our Get MORE Out of Summer Sale on now, theres no question our customers can find everything they need for the ultimate feel-good summer.

For a full list of accolades, see below:

Blue Diamond Resorts award-winning properties include:

TripAdvisor Travellers' Choice Best of the Best:

Memories Jibacoa  Top All Inclusive Resorts in the region

Mystique Casa Perla by Royalton  Hottest New Hotels in the World

Planet Hollywood Costa Rica An Autograph Collection All Inclusive Resort  Luxury Resort in Central America

Royalton Cayo Santa Maria  (#1) All Inclusive Resorts in the Caribbean, Top All Inclusive Resorts Worldwide, Top Hotels in the Caribbean, Luxury Caribbean Resorts

TripAdvisor Travellers Choice Awards:

Grand Lido Negril Au-Naturel An Autograph Collection All Inclusive Resort - Adults Only

Grand Memories Santa Maria

Hideaway at Royalton Negril An Autograph Collection All Inclusive Resort - Adults Only

Hideaway at Royalton Riviera Cancun An Autograph Collection All Inclusive Resort - Adults Only

Memories Flamenco

Memories Miramar Habana

Mystique Holbox by Royalton A Tribute Portfolio Resort

Royalton Antigua An Autograph Collection All Inclusive Resort

Royalton CHIC Cancun An Autograph Collection All Inclusive Resort - Adults Only

Royalton CHIC Punta Cana An Autograph Collection All Inclusive Resort and Casino - Adults Only

Royalton Grenada An Autograph Collection All Inclusive Resort

Royalton Habana

Royalton Negril An Autograph Collection All Inclusive Resort

Royalton Riviera Cancun An Autograph Collection All Inclusive Resort and Casino

Starfish Cayo Guillermo

Starfish Cayo Santa Maria

Starfish Cuatro Palmas

Starfish Las Palmas

Starfish Varadero



Forbes:

Royalton CHIC Punta Cana An Autograph Collection All Inclusive Resort and Casino - Adults Only  Best All Inclusive Resort in Punta Cana

Royalton Riviera Cancun An Autograph Collection All Inclusive Resort and Casino  10 Best Hotels in Cancun for Families

Royalton Saint Lucia An Autograph Collection All Inclusive Resort  Resort with the Best Amenities in Saint Lucia



RIU Hotels & Resorts award-winning properties include:

TripAdvisor Travellers' Choice Best of the Best:

Riu Playa Blanca

Riu Plaza Panama

TripAdvisor Travellers Choice Awards:

Riu Lupita

Riu Negril

Riu Ocho Rios

Riu Palace Antillas

Riu Palace Baja California

Riu Palace Cabo San Lucas

Riu Palace Costa Mujeres

Riu Palace Jamaica

Riu Palace Las Americas

Riu Palace Mexico

Riu Palace Pacifico

Riu Palace Peninsula

Riu Palace Punta Cana

Riu Palace Tropical Bay

Riu Playacar

Riu Reggae

Riu Yucatan



From world-renowned white-sand beaches to unlimited opportunities for exploration, resorts at an unbeatable price, convenient flight routes and travellers first checked bag free with Sunwing vacation packages on board Sunwing Airlines, feel-good vacations in paradise have never been more accessible  its the Sunwing Guarantee. Whats more, this years extensive list of award-winning resorts offers a wide range of adults only, group and family-friendly travel experiences that Sunwing customers can enjoy.

To discover more fun-filled adventures in the destinations beloved by Canadians, visit Sunwing.ca.

About Sunwing

The largest integrated travel company in North America, Sunwing has more flights to the south than any other leisure carrier with convenient direct service from airports across Canada to popular sun destinations across the U.S.A., Caribbean, Mexico and Central America. This scale enables Sunwing to offer customers exclusive deals at top-rated resorts in the most popular vacation destinations as well as cruise packages and seasonal domestic flight service. Sunwing customers benefit from the assistance of the companys own knowledgeable destination representatives, who greet them upon arrival and support them throughout their vacation journey. The company supports the communities where it operates through the Sunwing Foundation, a charitable initiative focused on the support and development of youth and humanitarian aid.

For more information:

Melanie Anne Filipp

Senior Director, Corporate Communications & Media Relations

Sunwing Travel Group

1-800-387-5602 | media@sunwing.ca

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/758876f4-525d-42f2-853b-f7ab037237e8
EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn., June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Winnebago Industries, Inc. (NYSE: WGO), a leading outdoor lifestyle product manufacturer, is pleased to announce that President and CEO, Michael Happe, has been named a winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of The Year Heartland Award.



Honored for bringing a bold vision to Winnebago Industries when he joined the company in 2016, Happe has led the company through a significant evolution driven by organic and inorganic growth. The acquisitions of Grand Design, Chris-Craft, Newmar, and Barletta, as well as major growth of flagship brand, Winnebago, has created a leading company in the outdoor recreation industry.

Im humbled and honored to be recognized among such a strong group of business leaders from across the region, said Michael Happe, president and CEO of Winnebago Industries. This award really speaks to the collective effort of the incredible team of employees we have at Winnebago industries who work tirelessly to create lasting memories for families and friends, connecting them with the outdoors, one great adventure at a time.

Happe has championed moving the company from a product-oriented manufacturer to an enabler of outdoor experiences that puts customers, employees and the community at the center. During his tenure, he has revitalized the Winnebago Industries Foundation, with community giving growing 20x since 2016. Happe has also been committed to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, by transforming the makeup of the board of directors and hiring the companys first DEI leader.

Every year, we are completely blown away by the accomplishments of our Entrepreneur Of The Year Regional Award winners, and 2023 is no different, said AJ Jordan, EY Americas Entrepreneur Of The Year Program Director. They are change-makers and champions of business and community, and we are so proud to be honoring them. We cant wait to see how these leaders will continue to improve lives and disrupt industries.

Winners of the award are selected by an independent judging panel made up of previous award winners, leading CEOs, investors and other regional business leaders. The candidates were evaluated based on their demonstration of building long-term value through entrepreneurial spirit, purpose, growth and impact, among other core contributions and attributes.

The Heartland program includes entrepreneurs and leaders from Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. As a regional winner, Happe will next be considered for the Entrepreneur of The Year National Awards, which will be presented in November at the annual Ernst & Young Strategic Growth Forum, a preeminent meeting of high-growth, market-leading companies.

About Winnebago Industries

Winnebago Industries, Inc. is a leading North American manufacturer of outdoor lifestyle products under the Winnebago, Grand Design, Chris-Craft, Newmar and Barletta brands, which are used primarily in leisure travel and outdoor recreation activities. The Company builds quality motorhomes, travel trailers, fifth-wheel products, outboard and sterndrive powerboats, pontoons, and commercial community outreach vehicles. Winnebago Industries has multiple facilities in Iowa, Indiana, Minnesota, and Florida. The Company's common stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and traded under the symbol WGO. For access to Winnebago Industries' investor relations material or to add your name to an automatic email list for Company news releases, visit http://investor.wgo.net.
Vancouver, June 08, 2023 - Terra Balcanica Resources Corp. ("Terra" or the "Company") (CSE:TERA) has agreed to settle outstanding debt in the amount of CDN$77,923 (the "Debt") owing to an arm's length creditor by issuing an aggregate of 916,749 common shares in the capital of the Company (the "Common Shares") at a price of $0.085 per Common Share (the "Shares for Debt Transaction"). The Board of Directors has determined it is in the best interests of the Company to settle the outstanding Debt by the issuance of the Common Shares in order to preserve the Company's cash for ongoing operations.



Closing of the Shares for Debt Transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and intends to close as soon as practicable. The Common Shares to be issued pursuant to the Shares for Debt Transaction will be subject to a hold period of four (4) months and one (1) day from the date of issuance.

About the Company

Terra Balcanica is a polymetallic exploration company targeting large-scale mineral systems in the Balkans of southeastern Europe. The Company has 90% interest in the Viogor-Zanik Project in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, 100% of the Kaludra and Ceovishte mineral exploration licences in Serbia. The Company emphasizes responsible engagement with local communities and stakeholders. It is committed to proactively implementing Good International Industry Practice (GIIP) and sustainable health, safety and environmental management.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Terra Balcanica Resources Corp.

Aleksandar (Alex) Miskovi?

President and CEO

For further information, please contact amiskovic@terrabresources.com, or visit our website at www.terrabresources.com.

Cautionary Statement

This news release contains certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation (collectively "forward-looking statements"). The use of any of the words "will", "intends" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements should not be unduly relied upon. Actual results achieved may vary from the information provided herein as a result of numerous known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors. The Company believes the expectations reflected in those forward-looking statements are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct. The Company does not undertake to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.
VANCOUVER, June 8, 2023 -

TSX VENTURE COMPANIES

NEWSTRIKE BRANDS LTD. ("HIP.WT.A")

BULLETIN TYPE: Warrant Expiry-Delist

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 1 Company

Effective at the opening, June 15, 2023 , the Share Purchase Warrants of the Company will trade for cash. The Warrants expire June 19, 2023 and will therefore be halted at Noon E.T. and delisted at the close of business June 19, 2023 .

TRADE DATES

June 15, 2023 - TO SETTLE - June 16, 2023

June 16, 2023 - TO SETTLE - June 19, 2023

June 19, 2023 - TO SETTLE - June 19, 2023

The above is in compliance with Trading Rule C.2.18 - Expiry Date:

Trading in the warrants shall be for cash for the two trading days preceding the expiry date and cash same day on expiry date. On the expiry date, trading shall cease at 12 o'clock noon E.T. and no transactions shall take place thereafter except with permission of the Exchange.

________________________________________

Foran Mining Corp. ("FOM")

BULLETIN TYPE: Graduation

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

TSX Venture Exchange has been advised that the Company's shares will be listed and commence trading on Toronto Stock Exchange at the opening on June 12, 2023, under the symbol "FOM".

As a result of this Graduation, there will be no further trading under the symbol "FOM" on TSX Venture Exchange after June 9, 2023, and its common shares will be delisted from TSX Venture Exchange at the commencement of trading on Toronto Stock Exchange.

________________________________________

SEVEN OAKS CAPITAL CORP. ("SEVN.P")

BULLETIN TYPE: Resume Trading

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

Further to the TSX Venture Exchange Bulletin dated January 30, 2023, and the news release issued by Seven Oaks Capital Corp. (the "Company") on June 5, 2023, effective at the opening, Monday, June 12, 2023, the securities of the Company will resume trading.

_______________________________________

NEX COMPANY

Pure Gold Mining Inc. ("PGM.H")

BULLETIN TYPE: Delist

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

NEX Company

Further the Company's news release dated June 6, 2023, effective at the close of business Friday June 9, 2023, the common shares of Pure Gold Mining Inc. will be delisted from TSX Venture Exchange at the request of the Company.

________________________________________

23/06/08 - TSX Venture Exchange Bulletins

TSX VENTURE COMPANIES

FINLAY MINERALS LTD. ("FYL")

BULLETIN TYPE: Warrant Price Amendment

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

TSX Venture Exchange has consented to the reduction in the exercise price of the following warrants:

Private Placement:

# of Warrants: 26,444,748

Expiry Date of Warrants: July 9, 2023 (Unchanged)

Original Exercise Price of Warrants: $0.135

New Exercise Price of Warrants: $0.05

These warrants were issued pursuant to a private placement of 26,444,748 shares (17,653,081 Non-Flow-Through shares and 8,791,667 Flow-Through shares) with 26,444,748 share purchase warrants attached, which was accepted for filing by the Exchange effective July 15, 2021.

________________________________________

Goliath Resources Ltd. ("GOT")

BULLETIN TYPE: Private Placement-Brokered

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

TSX Venture Exchange has accepted for filing documentation with respect to a Brokered Private Placement announced April 26 and May 2, 2023:

Number of Shares: 9,650,000 flow-through common shares

Purchase Price: $1.00 per common share

Warrants: 4,825,000 share purchase warrants to purchase 4,825,000 shares

Warrant Exercise Price: $0.92 for a period of two years

Number of Placees: 31 Placees

Broker/Finder's Fee: Eligible broker and finder received an aggregate of $527,250 in cash and 527,250 compensation warrants. Each compensation warrant is exercisable into one common share at $0.75 for a period of 2 years.

The Company has issued a new release announcing the closing of the private placement and setting out the expiry dates of the hold period(s). Note that in certain circumstances the Exchange may later extend the expiry date of the warrants, if they are less than the maximum permitted term.

________________________________________

K9 GOLD CORP. ("KNC")

BULLETIN TYPE: Property-Asset or Share Purchase Agreement

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

TSX Venture Exchange has accepted for filing documentation with respect to the acquisition of 1415322 B.C. Ltd. ("141 B.C.") from certain arm's length shareholders ("Vendors"). Pursuant to the terms of a share exchange agreement ("Agreement") dated May 24, 2023, the Company will provide the Vendors with an aggregate consideration consisting of 3,000,000 common shares in the capital of the Company at the deemed price of $0.035 per common share and a cash payment of $25,000 to acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares in the capital of 141 B.C.

141 B.C. is a party to an option agreement ("Option Agreement") to acquire a 100% undivided interest in the sixty-four (64) mining claims (the "Property"), covering approximately 3,200 hectares, located in the James Bay Region of Quebec. As per the terms of the Option Agreement, the optionee will need to provide the optionor with an aggregate of $495,000 in cash payments over a three-year period of which $445,000 may be settled by the optionee through the issuance of up to 12,714,285 common shares in the capital of the Company, if elected, at a deemed price of $0.035 per common share.

Upon exercising the option to obtain the Property, the optionor will retain a 2% net smelter returns royalty ("NSR) on the Property with the optionee also having the right to buy back 1.5% of the 2% NSR for a $2,000,000 payment. As per the terms of the Option Agreement, the optionor will also be entitled to an additional $1,000,000 payment in the event a National Instrument 43-101 compliant mineral resource on the Property is completed and valued at over $100,000,000.

For further details, please refer to the Company's news releases dated May 24, 2023 and June 5, 2023.

________________________________________

ROYAL HELIUM LTD. ("RHC.WT")

BULLETIN TYPE: Halt

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

Effective at 9:00 a.m. PST, June 8, 2023, trading in the shares of the Company was halted, pending delisting; this regulatory halt is imposed by Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada, the Market Regulator of the Exchange pursuant to the provisions of Section 10.9(1) of the Universal Market Integrity Rules.

________________________________________

RUSORO MINING LTD. ("RML")

BULLETIN TYPE: Shares for Bonuses

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

Further to TSX Venture Exchange bulletin on April 10, 2023, TSX Venture Exchange has accepted for filing the Company's proposal to issue additional 3,132,500 bonus warrants (the "Bonus Warrants") in consideration of US$2,055,000 unsecured, non-interest bearing, promissory notes (the "Notes"). The principal amount payable is US$8,220,000 and will only be payable upon successful enforcement of an arbitration award against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

Each Bonus Warrant will entitle the holder to purchase one (1) common share of the Company at an exercise price of US$0.10 on or before the earlier of: (i) April 4, 2028; and (ii) 30 days from the date of repayment of the principal amount of the Notes. If the principal amount of the Notes is repaid in part, the number of Bonus Warrants subject to the accelerated expiry date will be calculated on the basis that the amount repaid bears to the original principal amount of the Notes.

For more details, please see the Company's news releases dated March 24, 2023, April 4, and June 7, 2023.

________________________________________

SOLIS MINERALS LTD. ("SLMN")

BULLETIN TYPE: Resume Trading

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

Effective at 10:45 a.m. PST, June 8, 2023, shares of the Company resumed trading, an announcement having been made.

________________________________________

UNIGOLD INC. ("UGD")

BULLETIN TYPE: Private Placement- Non-Brokered

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

TSX Venture Exchange has accepted for filing documentation with respect to a Non-Brokered Private Placement announced on May 3, 2023:

Number of Shares: 48,125,000 common shares

Purchase Price: $0.08 per common share

Warrants: 24,062,500 share purchase warrants to purchase 24,062,500 shares

Warrant Exercise Price: $0.30 for a period of one year following the date of issue, subject to an acceleration of the expiry date in certain circumstances

Number of Placees: 7 Placees

Insider / Pro Group Participation:









Placees # of Placee (s) Aggregate # of Units





Aggregate Existing Insider Involvement: 3 2,757,500



Pursuant to Corporate Finance Policy 4.1, Section 1.11(d), the Company has issued news releases dated May 11, 2023 and May 16, 2023, announcing the closing of the private placement and setting out the expiry dates of the hold period(s). Note that in certain circumstances the Exchange may later extend the expiry date of the warrants, if they are less than the maximum permitted term.

________________________________________

THE PLANTING HOPE COMPANY INC. ("MYLK")

BULLETIN TYPE: Shares for Debt

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

Pursuant to the press release dated May 17, 2023, TSX Venture Exchange has accepted for filing the Company's proposal to issue an aggregate of 137,049 subordinate voting shares of the Company ("Shares"), at a deemed price of $0.375 per Share, to settle outstanding interest payments under a convertible debenture for an aggregate amount of $51,393.62:

Number of Creditors: 2 Creditors.

Non-Arm's Length Party /

Pro Group Participation:

Creditors # of Creditors Amount Owing Deemed Price per Share Aggregate # of Shares









Pro Group member: 1 $433,158.00 $0.375 115,088

The Company issued a news release on June 8, 2023, to disclose that the shares are issued and the debt is extinguished.

________________________________________

TNR GOLD CORP. ("TNR")

BULLETIN TYPE: Normal Course Issuer Bid

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

TSX Venture Exchange has been advised by the Company that pursuant to a Notice of Intention to make a Normal Course Issuer Bid dated May 30, 2023, it may repurchase up to 9,548,639 common shares in its own capital stock, which will be returned to treasury as authorized and unissued shares. The purchases are to be made through the facilities of TSX Venture Exchange or other recognized marketplaces during the period of June 5, 2023 to June 8, 2024. Purchases pursuant to the bid will be made by PI Financial Corp. (Chris Wahlroth) on behalf of the Company.

________________________________________

VVC Exploration Corp. ("VVC")

BULLETIN TYPE: Warrant Term Extension

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

TSX Venture Exchange has consented to the extension of the expiry date of the following warrants:

Private Placement:

# of Warrants: 11,799,000

Original Expiry Date of Warrants: June 8, 2023

New Expiry Date of Warrants: June 8, 2025

Exercise Price of Warrants: $0.06

These warrants were issued pursuant to a private placement of 23,598,000 common shares with 11,799,000 share purchase warrants attached, which was accepted for filing by the Exchange effective June 9, 2020.

For further details, please refer to the Company's news release dated May 31, 2023.

________________________________________

VICINITY MOTOR CORP. ("VMC")

BULLETIN TYPE: Prospectus-Share Offering

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

The Company's Short Form Base Shelf Prospectus dated April 19, 2021, was filed with and accepted by TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange"), and filed with and receipted by British Columbia and the Ontario Securities Commissions. Under Multilateral Instrument 11-102 - Passport System the Prospectus is deemed to have been filed with and receipted by the securities regulators for each of the Alberta and Manitoba Securities Commissions, on April 20, 2021. A receipt for the Prospectus is deemed to be issued by the regulators in each of those jurisdictions if the conditions of the Instrument have been satisfied.

Further to an at-the-market offering of shares ("ATM Distribution") made pursuant to a Prospectus Supplement dated August 27, 2022, to the Company's Short Form Base Shelf Prospectus dated April 19, 2021, the Exchange has accepted for filing documentation with respect to the sales set out below under the ATM Distribution. The Company raised aggregate gross proceeds of $866,903.56 USD pursuant to the ATM Distribution from January 1, 2023, to March 31, 2023, as set out below.

The Exchange has been advised by the Company that sales under the ATM Distribution during the quarter ended March 31, 2023, occurred for gross proceeds of $866,906.56 USD.

Agents: B. Riley Securities Inc., as representatives for Spartan Capital Securities LLC.

Offering: 925,667 common shares ("Shares") in aggregate during the quarter ended March 31, 2023.

Share Price: Varying prices during the quarter ended March 31, 2023, with an average sale price of $0.9374 USD per Share.

Over-allotment Option: None.

Agents' Commission: 3.5% of the gross proceeds of the Offering, being $30,361.58 in cash in aggregate for the quarter ended March 31, 2023.

For further information, please refer to the Company's Short Form Base Shelf Prospectus dated April 19, 2021, the Prospectus Supplement dated August 27, 2022, and the news release dated May 17, 2023, which are available under the Company's SEDAR profile.

________________________________________

WHATCOM CAPITAL II CORP. ("WAT.P")

BULLETIN TYPE: Resume Trading

BULLETIN DATE: June 8, 2023

TSX Venture Tier 2 Company

Effective at 6:30 a.m. PST, June 8, 2023, shares of the Company resumed trading, an announcement having been made.

________________________________________

SOURCE TSX Venture Exchange
TSXV: ARTG

VANCOUVER, June 9, 2023 - Artemis Gold Inc. (TSXV: ARTG) ("Artemis Gold" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has received its first US$35.2 million deposit under the Silver Stream agreement (the "Silver Stream") concluded on December 13, 2021 with Wheaton Precious Metals Corp. ("Wheaton"). The initial deposit forms part of the US$140.8 million that Wheaton has committed to fund toward construction of the Blackwater Gold Mine ("Blackwater"). Construction activities at Blackwater are underway and progressing in accordance with the Company's project development plan.

More details of the Silver Stream are contained in the Company's most recent Annual Information Form that is filed on the Company's profile on www.sedar.com.

Steven Dean, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Artemis Gold, said "The receipt of the first funding under the Silver Stream is an important milestone as it represents the first external funding being advanced toward Blackwater's construction and reflects our financing partners' confidence in the strong progress achieved to date."

About Artemis Gold Inc.

Artemis Gold Inc. is a well-financed, growth-oriented gold development company with a strong financial capacity aimed at creating shareholder value through the identification, acquisition, and development of gold properties in mining-friendly jurisdictions. The company's current focus is construction of the Blackwater Mine project in central British Columbia approximately 160km southwest of Prince George and 450km northeast of Vancouver. The project is one of the largest capital investments in the Bulkley-Nechako, Fraser-Fort George and Cariboo regions of B.C. in the last decade. The first pour of gold and silver from Blackwater Mine is expected H2 2024 and the mine is expected to be in production for a minimum of 22 years. Artemis trades on the TSX-V under the symbol "ARTG". For more information visit: www.artemisgoldinc.com

Qualified Person

Jeremy Langford, FAUSIMM, a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed, and approved the scientific and technical information in this news release.

Artemis Gold Inc.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

"Steven Dean"

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

+1 604 558 1107

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This news release contains certain "forward looking statements" and certain "forward-looking information" as defined under applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws. Forward-looking statements and information can generally be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "may", "will", "expect", "intend", "estimate", "anticipate", "believe", "continue", "plans", "potential" or similar terminology. Forward-looking statements and information are not historical facts, are made as of the date of this news release, and include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the potential of the Project; the jobs to be created in connection with the Project; the contribution of the Project to the economy; opinions of the Province of British Columbia regarding the Project and the region; agreements and relationships with Indigenous partners; the future of mining in British Columbia; the plans of the Company with respect to the Project, including construction, site preparation, clearing, consultation with indigenous groups ;; and other plans and expectations of the Company with respect to the Project. These forward-looking statements involve numerous risks and uncertainties and actual results may vary. Important factors that may cause actual results to vary include without limitation, risks related to the ability of the Company to accomplish its plans and objectives with respect to the development of the Project within the expected timing or at all, the timing and receipt of certain required approvals, changes in commodity prices, changes in interest and currency exchange rates, risks inherent in exploration and development activities, changes in development or mining plans due to changes in logistical, technical or other factors, unanticipated operational difficulties (including failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate in accordance with specifications, cost escalation, unavailability of materials, equipment or third party contractors, delays in the receipt of government approvals, industrial disturbances, job action, and unanticipated events related to heath, safety and environmental matters), the COVID-19 pandemic, political risk, social unrest, changes in general economic conditions or conditions in the financial markets, and other risks related to the ability of the Company to proceed with its plans for the Project and other risks set out in the Company's most recent MD&A. In making the forward-looking statements in this news release, the Company has applied several material assumptions, including without limitation, the assumptions that: (1) market fundamentals will result in sustained mineral demand and prices; (2) the receipt of any necessary approvals and consents in connection with the development of the Project; (3) the availability of financing on suitable terms for the development, construction and continued operation of the Project; (4) sustained commodity prices such that the Project remains economically viable; and (5) that the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions related thereto will not materially impact the Company or prevent the Company from operating its business as planned. The actual results or performance by the Company could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, any forward-looking statements. Accordingly, no assurances can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur, or if any of them do so, what impact they will have on the results of operations or financial condition of the Company. Except as required by law, the Company is under no obligation, and expressly disclaim any obligation, to update, alter or otherwise revise any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities laws.

SOURCE Artemis Gold Inc.
Organisers of the Belgian and Dutch grands prix have played down reports they will be forced to annually alternate their events from as early as next year.

According to the Belgian broadcaster Sporza, Belgian GP promoter Vanessa Maes will meet in London with Formula 1 CEO Stefano Domenicali on Monday to discuss the future of the fabled Spa-Francorchamps race.

But Maes played down speculation the subject of their conversation will be the rumoured alternation deal with Zandvoort rather than a standard new contract.

"Nothing has been confirmed yet. These are pure speculations," she insisted.

"I only have a hunch why those messages are being spread just now," said Maes. "And that could have to do with the news about South Africa in particular."

It is rumoured that F1 has had to abandon its plans for a 2024 South African GP at Kyalami due to the country's supposed ties with Vladimir Putin.

Maes says it's all just rumours.

"It is FOM that communicates about the calendar in F1 and no one else," she said. "We would prefer to sign a multi-year contract as before, but we will always be happy with what we get.

"Last year we proved that we can organise a grand prix according to current standards and conditions as much as possible and as a reward we received not only congratulations, but also a one-year contract extension," Maes explained.

"We will have to wait and see what FOM decides now."

As for the Dutch GP, the rumours said Zandvoort may in fact be missing from the 2024 calendar as the Spa alternation deal begins - despite the circuit's existing contract.

"Like our colleagues in Francorchamps, we were also surprised by the recent speculation," said Dutch GP chief and former F1 driver Jan Lammers.

"This literally fell from the sky and it's hot air."

Lammers particularly denied the claims that F1 may not go to Zandvoort at all next year.

"We still have 2023, 2024 and 2025 to finish on the contract. We still have a lot to look forward to in Zandvoort," he said.

When asked if it would be a 'pity' if the Dutch GP had to take a back seat to F1's calendar pressures, Lammers insisted: "This is the same as saying that it would be a pity that Max Verstappen retires."

Another pity would be if Spa-Francorchamps dropped off the schedule.

"Look, Francorchamps is one of the most beautiful circuits in the world," Lammers said. "I've always raced there myself with great pleasure.

"But again, I'm not deciding on that. It's just something that's not on the agenda right now."

(GMM)
Formula 1 has played down suggestions next weekend's Canadian GP might have to be cancelled.

On Wednesday, we reported that local forest fires had blown a blanket of smoke over the greater Montreal area - where F1 will gather at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.

"Those with respiratory issues, such as children with asthma, are advised to avoid strong physical activities outdoors until the warning is lifted," the report said.

The sheer amount of smoke was so extreme as it drifted south that tens of millions of US residents were also issued alerts about the quality of the air.

However, by Thursday, Environment Canada had lifted the smog warning for Montreal, adding that the air quality should return to "low risk" by Friday.

"The event is not at risk," a spokesman for Formula 1 was quoted as saying by various international sources.

"We have been assured that the situation in Montreal is different to other parts of the country and northern US.

"Risks remain low and Montreal's air quality is assessed as good," he added. "At no time was there any requirement for residents to stay indoors or restrict their movements outdoors.

"These fires are 800km from the circuit and do not pose any risk on their own, but the winds have carried the smoke to other parts of the region."

(GMM
Nikita Mazepin's quest to return to Formula 1 has been dealt a fresh blow by London's High Court.

The ousted Haas driver and Russian has achieved some legal victories recently against western sanctions that ended his Formula 1 career at the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict.

However, a British judge on Thursday dismissed the 24-year-old's push to be allowed to enter the United Kingdom for potential talks with F1 teams at the forthcoming British GP in July.

That is despite the fact that his full court challenge against the British sanctions will take place later that month, which Mazepin's lawyers argued is "too late" to enable talks about his return to F1 for 2024 to happen.

"Today's interim decision on interim measures, although disappointing, does not affect the fate of our claim as a whole," Mazepin's lawyers said in a statement published by Tass news agency.

"We expect that the claim will be heard on the merits in July, and we have every reason to hope for an honest and fair outcome of the case, which will allow Nikita to fully return to international motorsport," they added.

(GMM)
The woman at the centre of a Formula 1 sexism scandal has played down the incident that occurred in the Spanish GP paddock last weekend.

Former drivers Davide Valsecchi and Matteo Bobbi have reportedly been suspended for at least the upcoming race in Montreal after making sexist remarks about an attractive woman who was in the background during the live Sky Italia broadcast.

"I want to tell Davide that behind him there is a nice package of updates, if he turns around," 44-year-old Bobbi, who was a Minardi test driver, said.

Turning around, 2012 GP2 champion Valsecchi replied: "Unfortunately they told me that you can't test them."

The pair subsequently apologised for offending "women and Sky" - but the woman involved has now emerged to support Italians Valsecchi and Bobbi.

"When I read about their suspension I thought it was a joke," Christine Giampaoli Zonca, a rally driver, told Corriere della Sera newspaper.

"I wasn't offended. It was a joke. This all seems so over the top."

In fact, she is vowing to do what she can to clear the Sky presenters' names.

"At the next race, I'll send a video together with Bobbi and Valsecchi so maybe this time I'll be the one to make a couple of jokes about them."

Zonca says she knows Valsecchi and Bobbi and finds them to be polite.

She also said another woman she was standing with in the paddock at the time "doesn't want to talk but she too didn't take it badly.

"When I found out about this and discovered that what I heard was true, I was sorry. They are two good commentators. It all seems so exaggerated to me.

"I know them and I wrote to them right away," Zonca added.

Zonca insists not only that Valsecchi and Bobbi are not sexist, but that she has "never" been offended by the comments of men.

"As in all industries, there are those who make a comment that maybe can be annoying but I've never had any problems," she told. "I've always had a good relationship with everyone."

(GMM)
Clamp down illegal tree felling - Chief of Staff charges Forestry Commission

Juliet Akyaa Safo Jun - 09 - 2023 , 19:06

The Chief of Staff at the Presidency, Akosua Frema Osei-Opare, has charged the Forestry Commission (FC) to clamp down on illegal felling of trees in Ghana.

She also urged district, municipal and metropolitan security councils and security agencies to support the commission in its activities.

Mrs Osei-Opare urged the public to report any unlawful felling of trees to the police, saying that it would be of no use if the nation kept planting trees but not protecting the forest cover.

Mrs Osei-Opare said this when she joined the Municipal Chief Executive of the Ga West Municipal Assembly (GWMA), Clement Wilkinson, to plant trees at the Achaiman Basic School as part of activities marking this year's Green Ghana Day in Accra on Friday.

The assembly intends to plant 70,000 trees in schools within the community by the end of June 2023.

Plant seven trees each

Addressing staff and students of the schools in the municipality, the Chief of Staff urged each person to plant at least seven trees so that the future generation would benefit from them.

She explained that the Green Ghana Day was instituted to address the substantial decline of Ghanas forest cover caused by human activities and other climatic conditions.

It is significant to stand up and engage in a nationwide tree planting exercise to reduce health and environmental threats posed by deforestation, Osei-Opare said.

She said this could be achieved through concerted efforts and broader stakeholder involvement, adding the set target is to plant 10 million trees across the country.

The Chief of Staff commended the Amasaman community for a good work done as she observed that trees planted in the municipality last year were blossoming.

Partisan politics

Mr Wilkinson said seedlings would be given to assembly members to distribute to interested persons within their respective electoral areas.

We will then monitor and advice them as to how to take care of the seedlings to grow, he said.

He, however, entreated the people to desist from associating partisan politics with the exercise and rather focus on the significance of the trees.
Dr Bawumia lauds Taptap Send for supporting growth in remittances

Daily Graphic Jun - 09 - 2023 , 09:14

The Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has commended Taptap Send Africa, an international money transfer company currently operating in Ghana for its commitment in driving digital growth in remittances into Ghana.

This was when he visited the companys booth at the just ended 2023 Ghana Investment and Opportunities Summit in London.

It was under the auspices of the Ghana Investment Promotion Authority.

Summit

The third edition of the Ghana Investment and Opportunities Summit (GHIOS), which took place at the London Hilton on Park Lane, on June 6 and 7, 2023, saw captains of industry and business leaders showcasing Ghana to the world as the choicest investment destination in Africa.

Responding to the remarks by the Vice-President, the Growth Director in charge of Africa for Taptap Send Africa, Darryl Abraham Mawutor, said his outfit had been motivated to do more in their operations to increase remittances to the country.

He pledged that Taptap Send would intensity its public outreach on financial literacy, while improving customer experience across the world by addressing challenges that people faced in transferring money to the country.

Taptap Send has established a call centre with a staff strength of 29 persons that speak Ghanaian and other international languages to help satisfy the needs of customers in a marker of growing cybersecurity concerns.

Efforts

Mr Mawutor said the effort by the company was to increase the confidence of customers and help increase remittances into the country which stood at $4.7 billion in 2022 and projected to reach $5 billion by the end of 2023.

Global remittances account for more than $500 billion annually, most of which moves into developing countries, with a market dominated by traditional services, which he said caused delays and limited reach.

We are, therefore, helping people to send money instantly and securely at a fraction cost by deepening our connections in Ghana and positioning our operations to attract more remittances to support economic growth by making money transfer seamless and safe, he said.

The basis upon which we are doing this is to create employment by increasing access to financial technology services, get people to make money and grow the Ghanaian economy, he said.

The growth director said he was confident that when the government and all stakeholders in the finance and technology sectors worked more collaboratively, the country would become a hub to attract more fintech companies and remittances.

Skills

There are a lot of people with the requisite skills who only need the opportunity to work with global companies with the right policies and conducive environment and support systems, and once we have this, Ghanas finctech sector will transform, Mr Mawutor said.

Taptap Send, which operates in the United Kingdom, United States and supports payments into African countries including, Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Kenya,Cote dIvoire, and Zambia, as well as Asia.

The venture-backed company has investors Reid Hoffman  an American internet entrepreneur and former co-founder of LinkedIn, the Omidyar Network  a social change investment firm and Helois  a private investment firm.
Ghana Hajj boss warns against using tourist visa for Hajj and imposters at Ghana camp in Saudi Arabia

GraphicOnline Jun - 09 - 2023 , 15:32

The Chairman of the Ghana Hajj Board, Ben Abdallah Banda, has cautioned prospective Ghanaian Muslims to beware of scammers who offer tourist visas to unsuspecting pilgrims, with the assurance of offering them Hajj services.

The Chairman also warned that those with either a tourist visa or Hajj visas who did not pay through the Hajj Board or its accredited agents, and intend to access Ghana's facilities in Saudi Arabia during the Hajj, should halt their plans because they will be fished out.

Issuing the caution, the Ghana Hajj Board boss explained that some, knowingly and unknowingly, attempt to perform the Hajj using tourist visas instead of the required Hajj Visa, warning that Saudi authorities have said they will be very strict in applying the law, adding that culprits could end up being prosecuted.

"I want to sound this caution to my brothers and sisters, who may have paid some money to some fake agents who can only get them tourist visas not Hajj visas. You cannot perform the Hajj with a tourist visa and if you attempt to do that, you will be arrested and prosecuted and you may be jailed, deported and even suffer a ban from entering Saudi Arabia for years," Mr. Banda warned.

He added: "there are also those with these same tourist visas, who did not pay to the Hajj Board or our accredited agents, but they will also show up at our camp in Saudi as if they are part of us and attempt to use our facilities, since they are also Ghanaians. We will not accept that and again, I want to caution those who intend to do so to desist from that to avoid any inconvenience and embarrassment."

On preparations for this years Hajj, Chairman Banda revealed that the first batch of Ghanaian pilgrims will depart Tamale to Saudi Arabia today, Friday June 9, adding that the airlifting of pilgrims frommthe northern sector of the country will continue until June 16, where the airlifting of pilgrims from the Southern sector begins.

About 4000 Ghanaian pilgrims are expected to be airlifted to Saudi Arabia for the 2023 Hajj, which is the first time Saudi authorities will be allowing a full-capacity Hajj since the outbreak of Covid-19 global pandemic in 2019.
Opuni challenges fresh trial appeal records

Emmanuel Ebo Hawkson Jun - 09 - 2023 , 08:58

Former boss of the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), Dr Stephen Kwabena Opuni, has objected to the record of appeal filed by the Attorney General (A-G) seeking to overturn the decision by the High Court to start the six year-old trial afresh.

Counsel for Opuni, Samuel Cudjoe, made an oral application before the Court of Appeal last Wednesday arguing that the record of appeal had some missing pages which could negatively affect the determination of the appeal.

According to him, it should not be the case that an accused person would face injustice and be sent to prison because of incomplete record of appeal

He ,therefore, prayed the court to direct the registrar of the High Court to compile the entire record of appeal and transmit same to the Court of Appeal.

We submit that the Court of Appeal does not have the full records to make an informed decision with respect to the appeal, he said.

Benson Nutsukpui, counsel for the second accused person, Seidu Agongo, associated himself with the submissions of Mr Cudjoe and added that the record of appeal was also saddled with mistakes.

An incomplete record, counsel said, would not allow justice to be done as required by law.

A-Gs opposition

The A-G, Godfred Yeboah Dame, opposed the application on the basis that it was unknown to the rules of court.

It was the contention of the A-G that the rules of court allowed the registrar to transmit only relevant materials as record of appeal.

According to Mr Dame, all the relevant materials needed for the appeal, including the ruling by the High Court to start the case afresh, the arguments by the lawyers, the charge sheet and other pieces of records, were part of the record of appeal.

The A-G further said only 25 pages out of the 4,000 pages forming the record of appeal were omitted, but the lawyers for Opuni and Agongo had failed to demonstrate how that omission would negatively affect the ability of their clients to respond to the appeal.

The material part of the record is not faulty with errors or omissions, there can ,therefore, not be any prejudice to the accused persons, Mr Dame submitted.

A three-member panel of the Court of Appeal, presided over by Justice Philip Bright Mensah, Justices Jennifer Dadzie and Dr Ernest Owusu-Dapaa, adjourned the case to June 14 to rule on the application.

The trial High Court judge, Justice Kwasi Anokye Gyimah, on April 4, this year, ruled that the trial which had been ongoing for the past five years would restart from scratch.

Justice Gyimah is a new judge assigned to the case by the Chief Justice following the retirement of Justice Clemence Honyenuga, a Justice of the Supreme Court with additional responsibility as a High Court judge.

With the new development, the prosecution filed an application urging the High Court to adopt the previous proceedings of the case before Justice Honyenuga, which had been ongoing for five years.

However, in a ruling, Justice Gyimah said the trial must start afresh because it would be unfair for him to adopt the proceedings of Justice Honyenuga, which had been saddled with numerous allegations.

The A-G then filed an appeal at the Court of Appeal challenging the decision of the High Court to start the trial afresh, with a case that the decision was against the tenets of fair trial.

It is the case of the A-G that Justice Gyimah misdirected himself by the manner in which he refused to adopt the evidence already adduced at the trial.

Not guilty

Dr Opuni is standing trial with Agongo, the CEO of Agricult Ghana Limited, an agrochemical company.

State prosecutors have accused the two of causing financial loss of more than GH271 million to the state in a series of Lithovit Foliar fertiliser transactions.

It is the case of the prosecution that the fertiliser was substandard and has accused Agongo of allegedly using fraudulent means to sell the fertiliser to COCOBOD for onward distribution to cocoa farmers.
President commends Graphic for essay competition on SDGs

Chris Nunoo Jun - 09 - 2023 , 07:48

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has commended the Junior Graphic newspaper published by the Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCGL) for instituting a National Essay Competition on the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs).

He said it was a noteworthy initiative which must be maintained.

President Akufo-Addo, who was speaking after presenting certificates to 10 finalists of the 2022 edition of the competition at the Jubilee House in Accra yesterday, said the finalists had harnessed the power of education to express their thoughts, ignite change and paved the way for a brighter future.

He added that the essays demonstrated the dearth of knowledge, creativity of thought and the passion of the youth in the country.

The winners of the competition delved into a wide array of topics of significant national and global interest from eradication of poverty and hunger to ensuring quality education, gender equality and combating climate change.

Each essay provided a unique perspective, a fresh voice and an opportunity to learn from the minds of our future leaders, President Akufo-Addo added.

The competition was organised for upper primary and junior high school pupils.

Fifty best essays were picked to compete in the final essay after which 10 students were selected for the awards.

Last years edition was sponsored by BiG, Beta Malt, IMPC and McVities and partnered by the SDGs Advisory Unit of the Office of the President.

Winners

Adwoa Nyameyie Fletcher of Pere Planque School in Cape Coast in the Central Region was the Overall Winner, while Amanda Osei Owusu Fosu of the Ebenezer Memorial Educational Centre in Winneba, also in the Central Region, was adjudged the first runner-up.

The second runner-up position went to Esinam Oppong of Unique Child International School at Teshie in the Greater Accra Region.

Commendation

President Akufo-Addo acknowledged the roles played by parents, teachers and mentors of the winners and commended them for nurturing and guiding the pupils to the path of victory.

He also extended the gratitude of the government to the educators for instilling in the pupils the love for learning, writing and reading, as well as critical thinking.

You must all be proud of yourselves for the determination, passion and hard work you put into being named as the best. A little progress each day adds up to big results and this is just a beginning of your success story.

Your dedication and commitment have been pivotal in shaping the minds of these remarkable individuals.

You have taken the first steps towards becoming change makers and leaders in your own way. Remember that education is a lifelong journey. Embrace the thirst for knowledge, never stop questioning and seeking to understand the diverse perspectives of the world, the President added.

The SDGs Advisor at the Office of the President, Dr Eugene Owusu, said SDGs were about the future the world was yearning for and that children were the centre of the agenda because the future belonged to them.

He said the experience of meeting the President must spark inspiration and ignite the fire within them to continue their pursuit of knowledge and action.

Appreciation

The Managing Director of the GCGL, Ato Afful, expressed appreciation to the President for his encouragement and support for the programme.

Through the SDGs Unit, under the Office of the President, you have lent stature to the Junior Graphic National Essay Competition, he added.
President pledges more support for Prisons Service

Mary Anane-Amponsah Jun - 09 - 2023 , 09:05

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has said that the government will continue to improve the working conditions of the Prisons Service to enable it to deliver its functions effectively.

He said over the years, the government had made significant effort to improve on the manpower needs of the service which had resulted in the enlistment of more officers from various professional backgrounds.

Addressing the graduation parade of Cadet Course Intake 31 in Accra Thursday, the President, who was the Reviewing Officer, charged the officers to be practical, innovative and perform their function with integrity and compassion at all times.

Graduated Senior Officers

In all, 450 graduates, including 176 females passed out from the Prison Officers Training School (POT) in Accra after about five months of training.

They comprised both direct entrants and serving officers who were equipped with higher administrative skills to continue their career in the service.

The officer cadet training was aimed at providing the requisite intellectual, physical and regimental preparation and mental resilience to officer cadets to enable them to take up leadership positions and exercise effective and efficient command in the Ghana Prisons Service.

Intake 31 had young men and women from different academic and professional backgrounds, including Business Administration, Accounting, Agriculture, Law, Nursing and Allied Health Services, Engineering and Building construction, among other qualifications.

The officers for the first time were taken through rigorous high-risk and counter-terrorism training at the Ankaful Prisons Complex in the Central Region for a period of three weeks.

Three officers were presented with awards for distinguishing themselves.

They are Senior Under Officer Kwaku Baffour Baah Akyamfuor, who received the Sword of Honour award, Junior Under Officer Vida Dampo, the Commandant award and Junior Officer Charles Leander Amuna picked up the Academic Cane award.

Treatment of prisoners

Congratulating the graduates, President Akufo-Addo entreated them to carry forward the ideals of the Prisons Service that they received during the training and exude discipline and professionalism at all times.

He urged prison officers to treat inmates with the respect and dignity they deserved and also ensure their welfare.

As prison officers and security personnel of the state, you will be called upon to serve in prison establishments all over the country.

You must show utmost respect for the laws of the land and for the rights of prisoners committed to prison custody under your care, the President added.

Also, in line with the mandate to ensure their welfare, rehabilitation and reformation, the President said the government and prison authorities had put in place pragmatic interventions in health care, food security, education and skills training, among others, to improve the conditions of the inmates progressively.

Paradigm shift

The time, President Akufo-Addo said, had come for a paradigm shift that would lead to the building of strong independent state institutions, which did not only excel in delivering their mandates, but were ready to deliver their capacity to work with income generated internally.

The President thus commended the Prison Service for its effort to increase its agricultural activities to boost food security for the well-being of inmates and also generate revenue for the running of the administration.

He, however, encouraged the Prison Service to embark on mechanisation and also involve the participation of established and reliable private partners in this direction.
Commemoration of World Clubfoot Day: Parents advised to report early cases of clubfoot condition

Elizabeth Konadu-Boakye Health Jun - 09 - 2023 , 07:58

Parents with children suffering from clubfoot conditions have been advised to seek early treatment to correct the deformity.

According to the Head of Orthopaedics and Trauma at the 37 Military Hospital in Accra, Lt Col Delali Adzigbli, over time, society had made most parents believe that the condition was incurable, leading to many children becoming deformed when indeed the condition could have been corrected at an early stage.

Lt Col Adzigbli, who gave the advice at a function organised by Hope Walks, an NGO, to commemorate this years World Clubfoot Day, added that people must do away with the stigma and other myths surrounding the condition and seek help right after birth.

"Clubfoot is a very correctable deformity; it is a condition that if properly managed could be corrected. It is not a condition that happens because you were cursed. It happens spontaneously but it can be corrected.

"Do not hide your child, bring them over to the hospital and let us assess them and give them the right treatment," he said.

According to him, a child as old as 12 years could be assessed and put on the right treatment procedure.



Clubfoot

Clubfoot is a deformity present at birth that causes a baby's foot to turn inward and downward.

On average, there are almost 180,000 children born with the deformity around the world every year and if not treated it can cause severe disability.

The Programs Manager of Christian Health Association Ghana (CHAG), and Hope Walk Footclub Project, Nana Afua Adutwumaa Adjeitey, said through the collaboration of the two organisations, children in the country could now have access to free clubfoot condition treatment at the 37 Military Hospital, Gbawe SDA Hospital, Accra, St John of God Hospital at Duayaw-Nkwanta in the Bono-Ahafo Region, the SDA Hospital in Kwadaso-Kumasi and the Tamale Teaching Hospital.

"So we are encouraging the public that they should not stay at home or stigmatise against somebody who has clubfoot," she said.

Ms Adjeitey further encouraged parents to be consistent with the treatment process for better results so that the condition does not lead to a relapse which could have a negative impact on the child.

Clubfoot not a curse

The Parent Advisor at the 37 Military Hospital Children's Ward, Joseph Andrews, said although many babies suffered the condition annually, parents did not know where to seek treatment.

That, he said, had caused separation in some families with some parents abandoning their babies.

"Some of the many excuses some parents give is that they believe it is a curse. Maybe the mother abused someone verbally and as a result, the person cast a spell on the baby.

But it is important to say that we do not only treat babies but give them all the emotional support they need to correct their mindsets," Mr Andrews added.
Expunging Quaysons name: Sharp division in Parliament

Daniel Kenu Politics Jun - 09 - 2023 , 07:37

Parliament was sharply divided over the expungement of James Gyakye Quaysons name from the records of the House yesterday as agitated lawmakers from both sides debated the Supreme Court order, leaving the Speaker at the centre.

In sheer defiance, the MP for Bawku Central, Mahama Ayariga, contended that per the recent ruling of the Supreme Court, it was only the name of the former Member of Parliament (MP) for Assin North which was to be expunged from the records and not all records or whatever contributions he had made to Parliament.

The heated debate was born out of a detection in the Votes and Proceedings for yesterdays business by the MP for North Tongu, Okudzeto Ablakwa, that Mr Quaysons name had been removed.

Mr Ayariga maintained that since the Speaker, Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, had directed the leadership of the House to devise a process to expunge the former MPs name, it was wrong for the Table Office to delete his name when such exercise had not taken place yet.

Debate

The views of Mr Ayariga were strongly affirmed by the MP for Zebilla, Cletus Avoka, who said the Constitution was a living document and must be interpreted to reflect the current situation.

Mr Avoka said it was unwise and impracticable for Parliament to go back to January 7, 2021, to remove all the records of Mr Quayson.

However, the Speaker insisted that since that was a novelty not captured by the Standing Orders, it was still important for both sides of the House to take a decision on it.

"I don't want to assume powers that is not backed by law. The ruling said Parliament should expunge and not the Speaker. The Speaker is not Parliament," the Speaker stated.

The former Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu, quoting Article 2 (1a), and the Majority Leader, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, also relying on Article 94, both gave varied interpretations to the ruling.

Following their separate views, the Speaker insisted that the House should stick to its earlier directive for the leadership of both sides of the House to design the modality for expunging Mr Quaysons name.

Unconstitutional act

The Supreme Court in its ruling on May 17, 2023, declared the election of James Gyakye Quayson as unconstitutional by holding that by law, the former MP was not qualified to contest the Assin North seat in 2020.

Parliament is ordered to expunge the name of first defendant (James Gyakye Quayson) as Member of Parliament for Assin North Constituency, the court ruled.

It was the considered view of the court that Article 94(2) (a) of the 1992 Constitution, which bars a person who owes allegiance to another country from becoming an MP takes effect at the time the Electoral Commission (EC) opens nomination and not during the election or the swearing-in of MPs in Parliament.

In view of that, the court held that Mr Quayson was constitutionally barred from contesting the Assin North seat because in October 2020 when the EC opened nominations for persons to file to contest, he failed to renounce his Canadian citizenship before filing to contest.

We state without any equivocation that Article 94(2) (a) means that to be qualified to be a Member of Parliament, a citizen of Ghana must not hold any other citizenship at the time when nominations are opened by the Electoral Commission for registration of candidates for election as Members of Parliament, the court held.

The unanimous decision of the seven-member panel was authored by Justice Nene Amegatcher, with Justice Jones Dotse presiding and Justices Mariama Owusu, Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey Torkornoo, Prof. Henrietta Mensa-Bonsu, Emmanuel Yonny Kulendi and Barbara Ackah-Yensu, as members.
Vice President Bawumia dismisses claims of British citizenship - Gideon Boako

Kweku Zurek Politics Jun - 09 - 2023 , 20:34

Dr. Gideon Boako, the spokesperson for Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, has refuted allegations circulating on social media that the Vice President holds British citizenship while serving as the Vice President of Ghana.

In a post shared on his Facebook page on Friday evening, Dr. Gideon Boako stated that Dr. Bawumia has never possessed British citizenship or any other citizenship throughout his life.

"We have taken notice of a baseless accusation circulating on social media, claiming that the Vice President holds British citizenship while occupying the position of Vice President, which is contrary to the laws of Ghana," the statement on his page read.

"We want to make it abundantly clear that Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia is a Ghanaian citizen and has never held British citizenship or any other citizenship. This allegation should be disregarded as it lacks credibility. Thank you."
The Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) has issued its third funding opportunity for the SCALEUP (Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential) program. (Earlier post.)

The objective of the $100-million ARPA-E SCALEUP 2023 FOA (DE-FOA-0003100) is to support the scaling of high-risk and potentially disruptive new technologies across the full spectrum of energy applications. This FOA focuses only on scale-up and pre-pilot projects of promising technologies that ARPA-E has previously funded and for which the scale-up award would substantially build upon innovations achieved under the original ARPA-E award.

Only organizations leveraging subject inventions that were created during an ARPA-E award and reported in the iEdison system are eligible for funding under this program. SCALEUP 2023 applicants are not required to have participated within the original ARPA-E award; applicants may have licensed or purchased the relevant intellectual property rights to such subject inventions, and thereby become eligible under the SCALEUP 2023 FOA.

Because of the breadth of energy technologies solicited under the SCALEUP 2023 FOA, specific technical and project targets are not specified. Therefore, ARPA-E asks each applicant to address how its proposed SCALEUP project will sufficiently advance the technology to enable a viable path to market and ultimately lead to successful commercialization and the anticipated impact.

In 2019, ARPA-E issued its first SCALEUP funding opportunity, which paved the way for advancing technologies aimed at improving the electric grids reliability and resiliency; changing the way methane emissions are discovered and mitigated; creating next generation battery technology; and accelerating grid storage and electric vehicle adoption.

One of the project teams from the initial SCALEUPSila, a next-generation battery materials companywas later selected for $100 million in funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) to support the build-out of a facility in Moses Lake, Washington.

Early ARPA-E funding and SCALEUP support were instrumental in the companys success.

In 2021, ARPA-E issued the second iteration of SCALEUP, which supported work in hybrid electric aircraft; high-power density magnetic components; efficient, cost-effective and compact US-manufactured electric vehicle charging equipment; wood as strong as steel; and geomechanical pumped storage.
Toyota Motor North America, Inc. (Toyota) will invest nearly $50 million to construct a new laboratory facility at its North American R&D headquarters in York Township, Mich. to evaluate batteries for electric and electrified vehicles in North America.

As part of its evaluation process, the new Michigan battery lab will ensure that Toyotas batteries meet North American customer requirements by confirming performance, quality and durability of automotive batteries made by Toyota. Operations at the new battery lab are expected to begin in 2025.

This new investment in our North American R&D operation, which has been a key pillar of the Michigan automotive industry for more than 50 years, shows Toyotas directional shift towards electrification for all. By adding these critical evaluation capabilities around automotive batteries, our team is positioned to better serve the needs of our customers, including Toyota Battery Manufacturing North Carolina and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, the latter of which will soon be assembling the recently announced all-new, three-row, battery electric SUV. Shinichi Yasui, executive vice president of Toyota Motor North America (TMNA), Research and Development

The team will also work with other North American partner suppliers to incorporate locally-produced battery parts and materials in support of Toyotas multi-pathway approach to reducing carbon emissions through its portfolio of hybrid, plug-in hybrid, fuel cell and battery electric product offerings.

Beyond battery development, other lab activities are expected to include evaluations using Level 2 and Level 3 charging as well as connectivity to power sources and infrastructure. Further, chassis dynamometers at both Toyota R&D campuses in York Township and Ann Arbor are being upgraded to accommodate full battery-electric vehicle evaluations.

In addition to working with current battery production, lab engineers will explore new battery configurations for future products. Their research may also contribute to Toyotas development of new electrified vehicle architectures. Toyota will explore further expansion of the labs capabilities and opportunities for supporting the needs of the battery and BEV ecosystem.

The new facility will be included in Toyotas enrollment in DTE Energys MIGreenPower program. This voluntary renewable energy program enables all of Toyotas Research and Development operations in Michigan to attribute 100% of its electricity use to renewable energy projects starting in 2026.
After Oppo and OnePlus stopped sales in Germany last summer, following a lawsuit from Nokia, vivo is now closing down its online store as well. Back in April, the German court ruled in favor of Nokia as vivo has apparently infringed a Nokia patent related to the WLAN connections in vivo's smartphones. The same reason why Oppo and OnePlus had to temporarily pull out from the German market.

Without much of a warning, vivo's website is now closed and German consumers can no longer buy a vivo smartphone in the country. The German branch now greets you with a short statement that vivo's products are not available at the moment, but existing vivo smartphone owners will still get customer service and software updates.

Notably, the patent lawsuit comes from the Finnish branch of Nokia related to the equipment supplier and not HMD Global, which now runs Nokia's smartphone business.

Source | Via




Haiti - USA : Aid of $100 million from USAID for Haiti





Thursday, June 8, 2023, US Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the United States is investing more than $100 million in the Caribbean region to suppress arms trafficking and support initiatives to fight climate change.



The announcement came ahead of an official trip to the Bahamas for a meeting of Caribbean and United States leaders hosted by Harris and Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis.



As part of these initiatives, the US Department of Justice plans to appoint a coordinator to oversee illegal arms smuggling cases in the Caribbean as island nations report an increase in violent crime. Additionally, the Department of State has pledged to help improve forensic work in the region, strengthen local police departments, and support a Trinidad and Tobago-based unit aimed at helping the islands resolving firearms cases and providing training for the collection and analysis of related intelligence.



The United States, with assistance from the United Kingdom, will also establish a program in the Eastern Caribbean to mentor local judges and prosecutors in an effort to improve the prosecution of gun crimes as island nations are struggling with a backlog of cases.



The State Department also plans to work with the severely underfunded and understaffed Haitian National Police (PNH), which is struggling to quell an upsurge in gang violence, to help investigate and prosecute crimes linked to the United States that involve gangs, arms smuggling and human trafficking.



This initiative is considered essential given that gangs are estimated to control up to 80% of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince as killings and kidnappings soar in the metropolitan area and beyond.



Senior US administration officials have said the deteriorating security situation requires an international response and that the United States strongly supports the deployment of a multinational force in Haiti.



Senior US administration officials said discussions were ongoing and any decision on military force would be made in consultation with the UN and the Haitian government.



100 million for Haiti :

In addition, Kamala Harris announced that the United States Agency for International Development USAID will invest nearly $54 million in Haiti to help combat a sharp increase in the risk of famine and provide access to drinking water and health care.



An additional $10.5 million will go to supporting Haiti's agricultural sector as poverty deepens.



USAID also plans to invest $20 million to help Caribbean companies using renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies.



About an additional $15 million will be used to strengthen emergency response and preparedness across the region.



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - News : Zapping...





Reinforcement of the security of the residences of Prime Minister

The head of the Prime Minister's Security Unit in a letter addressed to the Central Director of the Administrative Police (DCPA) dated June 5, 2023, requests the strengthening of the security system of the external perimeter of the Official and Private Residences of the Prime Minister, day and night, for the period from June 8 to 18, 2023.



Naive art and repression in Haiti

The Centre d'Art offers this Saturday, June 10, 2023, at 2 p.m., on its premises, the screening of the film "Naive Art and Repression in Haiti" (Art naif et repression en Haiti). This film by director Arnold Antonin deals with a triple exploitation of naive art by the Duvalier dictatorship. At the end of the screening, a talk about the Haitian art market will be hosted by the cultural animator, Delano Morel. Centre d'Art #58, Rue Roy, Port-au-Prince



Distribution of rations to 47,965 people

In the West Department, the World Food Program (WFP) is providing hot meals, ready-to-eat rations and dry rations to 47,965 people, many of whom have already been affected by gang violence. The distributions have already started and will continue for about 15 days.



Rise in cholera cases, PAHO provides support

PAHO is supporting the MSPP/DSSE to increase the capacity to treat suspected cholera cases at St Michel Hospital in Jacmel, faced an increase in cases in the locality of Meyer.



Strong winds expected, be careful

An area of high pressure in the northeast Atlantic and a depression north of Colombia will create sustained winds over the central and eastern Caribbean. Gusty winds are forecast for Thursday June 8 and Friday June 9 in many parts of the country. Be careful and take the necessary precautions !



Precautions to take;



- Stay at home as much as possible

- Follow the weather forecast

- Watch out for falling trees or objects

- Avoid working on roofs during gusts of wind

- Store objects exposed to the wind.



Be careful



CARICOM Summit on the Haitian Crisis

Two days before the CARICOM summit on the Haitian crisis, several actors have already confirmed their participation in these meetings which will be held on June 11, 12 and 13 in Jamaica. Thirty actors were invited. The High Transitional Council has officially declined the invitation



CARICOM concerned

"The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has noted with deep concern reports of death, injuries and displacement in our sister Member State, Haiti, as a result of heavy rains and flooding over the past weekend https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-39716-haiti-flood-flash-51-dead-18-people-missing-and-nearly-40-000-families-affected-provisional-report-updated.html and the earthquake of June 6, 2023 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-39715-haiti-flash-first-provisional-assessment-of-the-earthquake-of-june-6-2023-grand-anse.html Our sincere condolences go out to those who now grieve the loss of loved ones, homes and livelihoods."



HL/ HaitiLibre


















Published on 2023/06/08 | Source

The movie "Opposition" has confirmed its major casting and is preparing for full-fledged filming.

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"Opposition" revolves around an insider who shakes the drug world by moving between the Korean drug market and investigative agencies.

Kang Ha-neul will play the role of the "Opposition" Kang-soo, an insider who secretly provides information on the drug world to national investigative agencies. In addition, Yoo Hae-jin plays Goo Gwan-hee, an ambitious prosecutor from the bottom. He is terribly intertwined with "Opposition" Lee Kang-soo, with his unique charm and acting skills. On top of that, Park Hae-joon will play Oh Sang-jae, the head of the drug investigation team, who never misses a criminal, and will form a triangular structure with Kang Ha-neul and Yoo Hae-jin.

"Opposition" will be joined by veteran staff members, including director Hwang Byeng-gug, who directed "SIU" and "Wedding Campaign", and director Lee Mo-gae of "Hunt", "Emergency Declaration" and "The Battleship Island". Hive MediaCorp, which has presented bold films that combine fun and workmanship, such as "Insiders", "The Man Standing Next" and "Deliver Us From Evil" will be in charge of production. Cranking is scheduled for the second half of this year.
Published on 2023/06/08 | Source

New stills added for the upcoming Korean movie "Ransomed" (2019)

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Directed by Kim Seong-hun

With Ha Jung-woo, Ju Ji-hoon,...

Synopsis

In Beirut 1986, during the Lebanese civil war a Korean diplomat is taken hostage without a trace. Two years pass and long forgotten, a young diplomat Min-joon receives a phone call proving that the hostage is still alive. With the given mission, Min-joon is sent to Beirut to save the hostage with a bag of ransom money. However, Min-joon gets into trouble as soon as he sets foot in Beirut. As luck would have it, Min-joon manages to flee from the airport with help from a local taxi driver Pan-soo who he stumbles across. Despite the distrust toward Pan-soo of his obvious mischievousness, the two unlikely allies must navigate the demolished, war-raging streets of Beirut to bring the long-awaited hostage back home.

Release date in Korea : 2023/08
Coming to Blowing Rock this week? Two artists are in residence this week at Edgewood Cottage: Jack Hamrick, who works in oils, and watercolorist JoAnn Pippin, both would enjoy discussing their art with you.

Art history, life experience, nature and fellow artists are ready sources of inspiration for Jacks vividly expressive paintings, many inspired by the Appalachian mountains. Having painted all around the world, Jack finds western North Carolinas High Country to be the perfect muse by which to paint and live. Come learn more about Jacks paintings and his work with children using art as therapy.





Fellow artist JoAnn Pippin feels painting helps her escape from everyday stress into a thoroughly focused, creative state of mind. JoAnn paints exclusively in watercolor because she loves interacting with the transparency and spontaneous color-mixing that watercolor allows. Her paintings arent strictly representational, rather she sets up compositions, such as landscapes, architecture, interiors, that portray her reaction to a scene or subject.





Come meet Jack and JoAnn at Edgewood Cottage from June 5 through June 11.

Courtesy of Edgewood Cottage.

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(CNBC) Former President Donald Trump has been indicted on seven federal criminal charges in connection with hundreds of classified government documents he retained at his Florida home after leaving the White House. Trump himself disclosed the indictment in a series of posts on his Truth Social social media site on Thursday evening. He also said he has been summoned to appear in court in Miami on Tuesday.

To read this article:
AN ice cream parlour in Henley has celebrated its first anniversary.

The Scoop Room in Duke Street marked the occasion by inviting entertainer Bertie Slippers to do some balloon modelling outside for passing families.

Brigitte Dowsett, a director of the company, said: It was a really lovely day  we were all on the street chatting with the locals.

Jo Bausor, who dressed as the queen for our opening last year, came as herself this year with a few friends and some valued local customers. It has been an interesting year with some ups and down but it is amazing how popular ice cream is in Henley.

We have some amazing regulars who come every day; weve created a real following. Last Friday I met a man who comes from Beaconsfield every weekend to have our ice cream.

Phoebe Bisdee, 19, who is manager of the parlour, said: Now that the weather is nicer it has been really busy.

There have been loads of people with queuing down the road for 20 minutes. Ryan Barlow and Katrina Minoletti started Gelato Henley eight years ago after visiting Ms Minolettis home town on Lake Maggiore, Italy.

The couple, who met at Reading Festival, create all the ice cream.

The parlour always has about 17 flavours on display and rotates these between 50 and 60 flavours depending what produce is in season.

Miss Bisdee said: The flavours are constantly changing as we have so many different ones.

Katrina and Ryan are inventing new flavours all the time.
BUSINESSES fear that a two-week road closure in the centre of Caversham will cost them trade.

Thames Water shut part of Church Street for 14 days from Monday in order to repair a collapsed sewer.

Business owners and traders had feared that the traffic diversions would lead to congestion but the opposite has happened and the usually busy shopping area is quiet.

Jude Chapman, owner of dancewear retailer Dancia International in Prospect Street, said she had felt the effect immediately.

It is incredibly quiet, she said. We have had it before with a cable company and with Thames Water and it hit the business really hard. I think this time will be the worst.

Ms Chapman, who is vice-chairwoman of the Caversham Traders Association, said: We dont rely on passing trade but are more of a specialist destination business which people drive to, sometimes from a long way away.

As soon as they get wind of a traffic problem, they just dont come. For example, no one has made any pointe shoe fitting appointments this week. Last week, when it was half term, we had 13 and I would usually expect about eight to 10.

Altin Ismaili, director of the Alternate Salon in Church Street, said that warnings about the road closure on social media had limited footfall and traffic.

He said: Everybody has stayed away. There are no people and the car park is empty so businesses are suffering. Footfall is important and its usually busy here. I spoke to some other salons and they said the same thing. People are scared.

Chris Walton, who chairs the trade association and owns Walton Jewellers in Prospect Street, said footfall was severely down and businesses had suffered enough.

He said: When we had Thames Water here last time, between April 12 and 17, they put up traffic lights but only did work for two out of the five days and I moaned to the council because this wasnt fair to traders. It felt like they were singlehandedly trying to close the town as they also dug up parts of Caversham Bridge for two days from April 19.

I think they listened this time as they have gone around and handed out loss of earning forms, as they expect it is going to hit hard, so at least thats in place.

We are manufacturers so it doesnt affect us as hard but hairdressers are going to be so down as people are avoiding Caversham, which is understandable.

I understand they have to do the work and why but I want to make sure people return to Caversham afterwards as it is a great place.

Alex Forbes, owner of Fourbears Books in Prospect Street, said We fear business will be quite heavily impacted as it has been on previous occasions when the road was closed.

It is all just quite frustrating as it seems we cant go a decent stretch without the road closing.

The day to day impact is bad as I know some people will go elsewhere for their shopping. Then, they might not come back to Caversham. I know of someone who started going to Didcot after the last closure.

But Katie Upton, assistant manager at the Alto Lounge in Church Street, said: I really dont think its that big of a deal, personally.

I understand peoples frustration. However, its obviously essential work theyre doing and its better that it happens now than it becomes an issue.

People know they cant come through here, so its not a big deal. I think maybe if they hadnt warned us beforehand it might have been a problem but Thames Water has been really efficient.

I had a guy come in and speak to us who was really kind and told us who to contact if our business was affected and he has done that to all the local businesses.

Thames Water said: We are sorry to residents of Caversham for any inconvenience caused while we carry out necessary sewer repair on Church Street. Our teams identified a collapsed sewer pipe with requires an emergency permit to repair.

The tankers are in place to ensure residents can continue to flush their loos and to protect them from flooding. We have delivered letters to residents in the area to make them aware of the repair work and the road diversions.
Tale of the tuskers HTs pick of interesting reads includes a book on eight women who recorded the birth of India and its aftermath, another that presents the true spirit of Islam, and an elephantine story about friendship, courage and human greed. (HT Team)

120pp, Rs250; Eka (A story about friendship and courage, human greed and hubris.)

Lightning Tusker is tranquilised and corralled with the help of Dr Tharappan. This is no ordinary elephant; hes the embodiment of Elephantam, the very essence of all that is good in the universe. His captors are filled with its nemesis, the dark energy known as Misophantam. It permeates men like Gunner Chandy who had killed Lightning Tuskers father, Peacock Plum, for his tusks the colour of peacock feathers.

Granny Elephant knows this. She also knows how the universe originated: the tussle between Elephantam and Misophantam, good and evil, how they crashed into one another, caused the Big Bang. She tells the baby elephants in her herd that Elephantam and Misophantam have existed in the sky and on this earth ever since. She can also sense that an elephant in their midst, known to be weak and reclusive  and tuskless  is in fact magical.

This is the story of two brothers: Lightning Tusker, the bravest young elephant in the forest, and Tuskless Tusker, written off by everyone as a lost cause. Its also a story about friendship and courage, about human greed and hubris. From one of Malayalams most celebrated young writers, comes a tale that moves and entertains in equal measure.*

The essence of the religion

364pp, 399; HarperCollins (Examining the true spirit of the religion based on its original scripture.)

Most of the great religions of the world began with the need to reform individuals and society, especially when there was large-scale moral degeneration. But over time, their essence became obscured by politics and rhetoric, leading to misinterpretation and fundamentalism. Islam is no exception.

Understanding Islam examines the true spirit and essence of the religion based on its original scripture, the Holy Quran, and how far it has moved away from its spirit and values. Using Abdullah Yusuf Alis translation, The Meaning of Glorious Quran: Text, Translation and Commentary, as well as Wahiduddin Khan and Farida Khanams translation, The Quran, the author discusses the Quranic invalidity of the interpretation of the religion by hardliners and counters prevailing distortions in the interpretation of some of the verses that only serve divisive and extremist agendas. The book also sheds light on simple yet profound questions of right and wrong, divine mercy and wrath, trials and prayer, life and the afterlife.

A moving and deeply spiritual read, Understanding Islam is a must-read to comprehend the true nature of Islam.*

Eight ideas Of India

144 pp, Rs399; Women Unlimited (Eight women who observed the birth of the nation and recorded that epochal moment and its aftermath.)

Anniversaries are markers, and a countrys 75th anniversary commemorating its independence from colonial rule, is certainly special. But an anniversary can also offer an opportunity for reflection, reassessment, and even introspection on that defining moment in a countrys, and a peoples, lives. The eight women in this slim volume are among the many who witnessed, and participated in, the events leading up to the independence of India and who wrote about both, the events, as well as their impact on individual lives. They observed the birth of the nation and recorded that epochal moment, as well as its aftermath, in short story, novel, essay, memoir and autobiography. How did they think of themselves, or of their relationship, with their country? What was nation or nationalism for them? Did they see them as linked, or as discrete? How did they locate themselves in both nation and country  as participants, interlocutors, commentators, and actors, yes, but always, although not always statedly, as women. What better way to mark the 75th anniversary of Indian independence than to offer up these eight womens ideas of India in a consideration of, and through, their own words and writing.*

*All copy from book flap.
Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], June 5: Demiluxe, a premier custom silver jewellery brand, is revolutionizing the industry with its exquisite craftsmanship, commitment to sustainability, and a wide range of meaningful designs. Offering personalized and enduring pieces, Demiluxe empowers individuals to express their unique style and create lasting memories.

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Disclaimer: This article is a paid publication and does not have journalistic/editorial involvement of Hindustan Times. Hindustan Times does not endorse/subscribe to the content(s) of the article/advertisement and/or view(s) expressed herein. Hindustan Times shall not in any manner, be responsible and/or liable in any manner whatsoever for all that is stated in the article and/or also with regard to the view(s), opinion(s), announcement(s), declaration(s), affirmation(s) etc., stated/featured in the same.
India, 09 June 2023: One of India's most acclaimed and eminent universities, Parul University is embracing the shift towards online education by offering a two-year Online MBA program that can be pursued entirely in a digital mode. The program is designed to provide students with a deep understanding and comprehensive knowledge of business education and management. The curriculum has been carefully crafted to offer flexibility and convenience while also emphasizing the crucial aspect of networking.

The Online MBA program spans four semesters over two years, with students selecting a specialization in the second year. Parul University offers a wide range of 20 specializations, catering to individual interests and the need for knowledge in specific sectors. These specializations include Agricultural Management, Banking and Financial Services, Digital Marketing and Sales Management, Entrepreneurship & Innovation Development, Family-Managed Business, Healthcare Management, International Trade & Business, Logistics & Supply Chain Management, Pharmaceutical Management, Project Management, Public Policy, Retail Management, Tourism & Event Management, Operation Management, Forensic Accounting & Corporate Fraud Investigation, Business Analytics Information Technology, Human Resource Management, Finance Management, and Marketing Management.

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Parul University is the ideal destination for those seeking to pursue an Online MBA program. With its renowned reputation, the university ensures that the online programs offered hold significant value in the professional field. The emphasis on affordability and educational scholarships makes Parul University accessible to aspiring students, while the program's focus on mentorship, career support, practical learning, and entrepreneurship skills, sets it apart from others. As the demand for online learning continues to grow, Parul University remains at the forefront of providing a comprehensive and enriching educational experience that equips students with the knowledge, skills, and network necessary to excel in today's competitive business world.

Disclaimer: This article is a paid publication and does not have journalistic/editorial involvement of Hindustan Times. Hindustan Times does not endorse/subscribe to the content(s) of the article/advertisement and/or view(s) expressed herein. Hindustan Times shall not in any manner, be responsible and/or liable in any manner whatsoever for all that is stated in the article and/or also with regard to the view(s), opinion(s), announcement(s), declaration(s), affirmation(s) etc., stated/featured in the same.
Amid Byjus escalating tensions with its creditors, the company is looking to cut at least 1,000 more jobs six months after a massive round of layoffs, the Economic Times and The Morning Context (articles under paywall) reported. The edtech majors latest move to bring down expenses and streamline operations will reportedly impact employees in the sales and marketing teams the most. Byju Raveendran, CEO of education technology giant Byjus.(File)

Managers have been directed to sack two employees each from sales and marketing teams of its 280 tuition centres in India. Nearly 150 marketing managers may also be handed the pink slip. The report added that two months of salary will be given out as severance pay amidst a severe cash crunch, while many senior managers and assistant general managers have already left the firm headquartered in Bengaluru.

The news comes amid Byjus suing the lenders, led by American investment management firm Redwood, of its $1.2 billion term loan B, which it raised in November 2021. After refusing to pay $40 million in interest due Monday, the company said that it will not be making any further payments until the case is resolved.

The Byju Raveendran-led companys efforts to restructure the loan after the digital education boom fizzled out post-Covid19, failed after the creditors accelerated the repayment.

The company rejected rumours of financial difficulties by stating, "Byju's remains financially robust with significant cash reserves. It remains open to discussions with the TLB lenders."

Byjus had fired 2,500 staff last year followed by 1,500 employees this year. CEO Raveendran had earlier announced that no further layoffs will be undertaken.

Worth $22 billion in its last round of funding, US-based asset manager BlackRock reduced the startups valuation to $8.29 billion in May.

The Enforcement Directorate in April had also conducted searches at the premises of Raveendran for alleged violations of foreign funding laws.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ritu Maria Johny Multimedia journalist with Hindustan Times. Covers India, world, business and tech news with a keen eye for human-interest stories rooted in gender and culture. ...view detail
Along with "internal injury" caused by the internal reservation and people voting for Congress believing in its poll guarantees, a negative narrative setting in against the BJP because of its failure in effectively countering certain issues, led to its defeat in the recent Assembly polls in Karnataka, according to party MLAs. BJP leader CT Ravi.(ANI)

A meeting of BJP MLAs elected to the 16th Assembly convened by state BJP president Nalin Kumar Kateel here, also decided to take the achievements of nine years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government to every house, and to work towards ensuring a hundred per cent win for the party in all 28 Lok Sabha seats in the state.

BJP had won 25 of the 28 Lok Sabha seats in Karnataka in 2019.

READ | Cong high command reprimands Karnataka minister for his views on state's anti-cow slaughter law

"Along with introducing 22 legislators who have been elected for the first time, the meeting today tried to instill confidence among the legislators to work as a constructive opposition by extending all necessary cooperation to the new government to serve the people of the state," BJP national general secretary C T Ravi said.

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, he said, "If the government indulges in anti-people activities, if it takes decisions that are detrimental to the state with a hidden agenda, it was decided at the meeting to fight against it both inside and outside the legislature."

Former Chief Ministers B S Yediyurappa, Basavaraj Bommai and Sadananda Gowda, national general secretary in-charge of Karnataka Arun Singh among other senior leaders attended the meeting.

Stating that the meeting also analysed the political situation in the state, the party general secretary said that no ruling party has won a second consecutive term since 1985 in Karnataka.

READ | Karnataka: Caste census may impact political contours, say experts

"There seems to be a natural trend that has set in Karnataka in the last four decades to change the government once in five years, despite that we have won 36 per cent votes, we have got similar vote share we got in 2018, but we lagged behind in gaining seats," he said.

Ravi said, "Along with internal injury caused by the internal reservation and people voting for Congress believing in its guarantees, a negative narrative setting in because of BJP's failure in effectively countering certain issues, led to his party's defeat, was the general opinion expressed in today's meeting."

The BJP will not lose heart with the results and will certainly bounce back as it has done in the past. Our role might have changed from ruling party to opposition, but our commitment towards serving the society has not changed and it will continue to work in that direction, he said.

Regarding who will be the Leader of Opposition in the Assembly and also in the Council, Ravi said general secretary Arun Singh is gathering the opinion of the legislators. On the basis of it and in consultation with the party leadership, a decision will be taken at the earliest, he said.
Union Minister Rajeev Chandrashekar on Friday responded to questions about Karnataka Minister Dinesh Gundu Rao's claim that govt properties have been handed over to many institutions belonging to the Sangh Parivar. Reacting to Gundu Rao's statements, Chandrashekar said, "I don't want to get into a debate. I seldom get into a debate with Congress because either they are lying through their teeth or they make no sense. So, Gundu Rao is in one of those categories. He should figure out which category". Rajeev Chandrashekar (ANI)

Karnataka Minister Dinesh Gundu Rao said earlier, "...a lot of Govt properties have been handed over to many institutions belonging to the Sangh Parivar. So, we have to look at all those things, see if they have been done properly, legally and what we can do on those issues. But definitely, a lot of State Govt properties have been given to institutions & organisations which are closely connected to the RSS and BJP."

Former Karnataka Congress president Dinesh Gundu Rao retained his Gandhi Nagar Assembly constituency seat in a close battle with the Bharatiya Janata Party rival Sapthagiri Gowda in the state assembly elections held in May. In the past too, he has made statements against Prime Minister Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Before the elections in Karnataka, Rao said, there were enough burning issues in the country. Leaving all that aside, the PM is roaming the streets of Karnataka seeking votes for the BJP. Even the public has begun to ask why Modi is frequenting the state. His frequent visits are are working to the advantage of Congress.

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Former Karnataka education minister BC Nagesh on Friday slammed the Congress over the row of syllabus change and said though the party was in power at the Centre for several years, it was not bothered about nationalism. Congress leaders were communists and didn't encourage nationalistic views, the former minister said amid the row over Karnataka textbook revision by the Congress in which chapters on RSS founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar may get axed from books. Former Karnataka Education Minister BC Nagesh (File)

Speaking to news agency ANI, Nagesh said, They have now come to the textbooks to divert people's attention. They always give false statements to divert people's attention. Siddaramaiah is a so-called self-declared educationalist, basically, they are communists...They don't encourage any nationalistic views.

Nagesh further spoke about the Congress government's decision to revise school textbooks for this year. He said, We made changes (in the textbooks) by taking these people into confidence. But they were hurt by these changes, we removed the lessons on Nehru & reduced the lessons on Tipu Sultan. We brought such lessons that develops a feeling of nationalism among students. Though Congress ruled the country and the state for many years but they are not bothered about the education system. We were practising the same system framed by Macaulay.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader CT Ravi slammed Karnataka's Congress government Friday, declaring 'they're in power... but they can't change history' as the row over the ruling party's decision to revise school textbooks intensified. "They (the Congress) can change syllabus... but they can't change the history. Everyone knows about Sangh Parivaar's patriotism... everywhere Sangh Parivaar's ideology is getting stronger... that can't be changed."

Karnataka government's decision

Karnataka primary and secondary education minister Madhu Bangarappa on Thursday said that school textbooks in the state will be revised this year. He said experts would revise textbooks this year to keep in check what should be there in the books and what not. A similar decision will be made in the cabinet.

Initially, the minister said there will be Setu Bandha project which will help in teaching lessons that the students have missed due to no-attending of physical classes.

"The experts will also decide what should be there in a textbook and what should be removed. Moreover. there has been an additional revision in the past as well," Bangarappa said.

"We had said in the manifesto that we will revise the textbook and we will do it", he added. The minister further said that the actions will be taken in the interest of the children.

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HOHHOT, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, has called on north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to adhere to its strategic position, pursue green development, and strive to write a new chapter of Chinese modernization. Xi, also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks during an inspection tour in Hohhot, the capital of the autonomous region, on Wednesday and Thursday. During his visit to the Zhonghuan industrial park on Wednesday afternoon, Xi said green development is the path that must be taken. The top priority of Inner Mongolia's development lies in transforming and upgrading the traditional energy industry, vigorously developing green energy, and strengthening the country's major energy base. Xi also stressed the need to carry out high-level opening up and engage in win-win cooperation with the rest of the world. On Thursday morning, Xi heard a work report from the Party committee and government of Inner Mongolia and spoke approvingly of their achievements. Inner Mongolia is the country's important base of energy and strategic resources, its important production base of agricultural and livestock products, and a vital gateway for opening up to countries and regions north of China, Xi said. Inner Mongolia should improve its industrial structure based on these characteristics and strategic positioning, strengthen its distinctive industries, explore new paths of transformation and development suitable for resource-rich regions, and speed up the construction of a modern industrial system that displays its unique features and advantages, Xi said. The autonomous region should take an active part in the joint development of the Belt and Road Initiative as well as the China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor, and elevate the level of opening up, Xi said. He also urged Inner Mongolia to boost its connectivity with the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and China's northeastern provinces. On the ecology front, Inner Mongolia must consolidate its role as a vital ecological barrier in northern China, with efforts to facilitate major ecological projects, including the Beijing-Tianjin sandstorm source control project and the Three-North Shelterbelt Forest Program, and ensure tougher management of ecological red lines, according to Xi. More efforts should go into the conservation of natural forests as well as soil and water, the fight against desertification, and the conservation of wetlands, Xi said, also calling on the autonomous region to sustain the positive trend of expanding afforestation and curbing desertification. Xi stressed that the most arduous task in bringing prosperity to all the people nationwide remains in some border areas with mainly ethnic minority populations. These areas must not be left behind on the way to common prosperity, he said. He emphasized the significance of a people-centered approach, urging efforts to ensure and improve the people's well-being in the course of pursuing development. Xi stressed the full implementation of the employment-first policy, urging targeted and effective implementation of measures and policies to ease corporate burdens and stabilize and expand employment. He also called for efforts to expand employment channels and provide more assistance for those experiencing difficulties. It is important to improve the multi-tiered social security system, ramp up social and medical assistance, increase support for households receiving subsistence allowances or in difficulties, and develop elderly care programs and services, said Xi. Xi urged efforts to consolidate and expand the achievements in poverty alleviation and forestall any large-scale relapse into poverty. He also stressed the importance of workplace safety, saying the utmost efforts should be made to prevent various types of major accidents. Xi said the Party's work on ethnic affairs in the new era should focus on forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation. The introduction of laws, regulations, policies and measures should be conducive to strengthening the commonalities of the Chinese nation and enhancing the sense of community for the Chinese nation, he added. Concerning the ongoing Party education campaign, Xi called for solid efforts to improve Party conduct through the campaign, stay focused on solving problems and achieving goals, and see that follow-up rectifications are made effectively. Cai Qi, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee, accompanied Xi on the visits.
It was the promise of a better life and secure future abroad that led Gurdev Singh, a farmer from Peer Mohammad village in Ferozepur district, to use up all his lifes savings to send his son to Canada on a student visa in 2018. But little did he know that five years on, his son would be facing deportation. Students have been protesting in Canada against the deportation notice severed by the government after their documents were found to be fake. (HT Photo)

Read here: Punjab to extend legal aid to students facing deportation in Canada

Gurdevs son is among the 700-odd students who have been served deportation notices by the Canadian authorities over fraudulent documents.

All of them have one person to blame -- Brijesh Mishra, a Jalandhar-based consultant who sent them to Canada on the basis of fake offer letters from prominent colleges and universities. Their stories are the samethe offer letters seemed so genuine that even the embassy officials could not detect it. It was only upon their arrival in Canada and a subsequent visit to their respective colleges and universities that they found out that they had not been registered in these institutions.

The students said that when contacted Mishra after finding out their names hadnt been registered in colleges, he made up excuses and convinced them to get enrolled in other colleges or wait for a semester. Mishra continued to dupe multiple Canada aspirants and their families until the students who had arrived in the country in 2016 applied for permanent residency and found out that their documents were fake.

It was then that the Canadian Border Security Agency (CBSA) conducted a detailed investigation and zeroed in on Brijesh Mishras firm Education and Migration Services.

The CBSA found that nearly 700 students who had come through Mishras firm between 2016 and 2020 had secured their visas on the basis of bogus offer letters. All of them were then served deportation notices.

We are being punished for no fault of ours. It was Mishra who provided us the fraudulent documents, says Gurdev.

Another complainant, Baldev Raj of Jalandhars Songowal village, whose daughter had gone to Canada in 2016 through Mishras immigration firm to pursue a degree in business management, says, After spending seven years in Canada, my daughter came to know that the offer letter on the basis of which she was granted a Canadian study visa was fake.

Mishra provided us with an offer letter from Sheridan College in Brampton but after reaching there, we found that there was no registration in my daughters name. Later, my daughter got enrolled with another Toronto-based college and completed her studies, said Raj. He alleged that Mishra duped him of nearly 9.5 lakh.

Read here: Culprits will be penalised: Canada PM Justin Trudeau over deportation of Indian students

It is important to deal with this matter sensitively as the future of our children is at stake. They have gone through a lot of trauma, he added.

Another parent from Malerkotla said there is a deeper conspiracy at play. One person alone cannot run such a scam. There must be a whole nexus, including travel agents to officials in Canadian colleges and university, running this scam.

All angles must be probed, he said.

A lucky escape for one

A Ferozepur resident, Jugraj Singh, who is the complainant in FIR Number-47 registered against Mishra, said he came to know about the latters fraudulent activities months after he approached him for his sons study permit.

I immediately inquired about the offer letter and found it to be fake, following which I withdrew my sons file for study permit and approached another consultant, he said.

Punjab cabinet minister for NRI affairs Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal said the state government has not only taken up the matter with the ministry of external affairs but also written to Canadian MPs having association with Punjab to take up the issue with the Canadian government so as to secure the future of these students.

We will go all out to provide all kind of assistance to the affected students. I have personally interacted with a few students and given them assurances, he said.

3 FIRs registered, LOC issued against Mishra

The Jalandhar Commissionerate police registered three FIRs against Brijesh Mishra and his two accomplices Rahul Bhargav and Gurnam Singh on March 17 and 27. Police had arrested Rahul, a Jalandhar resident, on March 27, while Brijesh and Gurnam remain on the run.

The cases were registered under Sections 420 (cheating), 406 (criminal breach of trust), 465 (for making forged documents), 467 (forgery), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 471 (using as genuine a forged) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code.

Jalandhar police commissioner Kuldeep Singh Chahal said they have received only three to four complaints against Mishra so far and three cases have already been registered.

Read here: After float on Indiras assassination, Jaishankar cautions Canada, Australia, UK

We have already issued a Look out Circular (LOC) against Mishra, who is evading arrest. As per our information, Mishra had shut all his operations and fled several months ago, said Chahal.

Meanwhile, the Jalandhar district administration has already cancelled the licence of Mishras immigration firm under Section 4 and 6 of the Punjab Travel Professionals Regulation Act 2014, which invokes cancellation of license, if found involved in any criminal activity.

Who is Brijesh Mishra?

Hailing from Thalwada in Darbhanga, Bihar, Brijesh Mishra owned the Education and Migration Services. More than 10 FIRs were registered against Mishra in different police stations mainly in Jalandhar, Faridkot and Malerkotla.

As per available information, Mishra started his consultancy firm, named Easy Way immigration consultancy, in 2013. Months later in 2014, he was caught committing fraud with students. His clout could be gauged from the fact that he either managed to strike a compromise with the complainant or ensure no action was taken against him. He was booked at Jaito in Faridkot and Malerkotla in 2021 and 2022, respectively, but no action was taken against him.

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Inaugurating a three-day national conference on Recent advances in school education (RASE-2023) at Dr Ambedkar National Institute of Technology on Friday, Union minister of information, broadcasting, youth affairs and sports, Anurag Singh Thakur, said the Mughals and Britishers had destroyed Indias education system while the New Education Policy 2020 (NEP) will set it right. Union minister of information, broadcasting, youth affairs and sports, Anurag Singh Thakur inaugurated a three-day national conference on Recent advances in school education (RASE-2023) at Dr Ambedkar National Institute of Technology on Friday. (HT File)

In his inaugural address, Thakur said the NEP-2020 is a comprehensive set of guidelines and recommendations for the Indian education system.

It aims to make education more inclusive, engaging, development-oriented, useful and fulfilling to learners, he said.

The union minister added that the policy is to ensure universal access at all levels of school education.

The NEP, which has been brought after 75 years of Indias independence, has not been drafted by a few western-minded people sitting in air-conditioned rooms. In fact, suggestions of over 6 lakh people from across the nation have been included in it to make it a comprehensive one, he said.

The minister added that an Indianness is necessary in the Indian education which was not visible in the education policy made after Independence.

Proper discussion is required to know why we were not taught about our actual ancient history. Mughals and Britishers destroyed our education system, culture and values but now in this 75th year of Indias Independence, we have to come out of that mindset, he asserted.

Professor Binod Kumar Kanaujia, director Dr B R Ambedkar NIT Jalandhar, in his inaugural address, highlighted the recent achievements of the institute.
The Punjab and Haryana high court has ruled against DNA test demand from a Mansa girl, who had demanded the same in order to prove paternity from her mothers live-in partner. The Punjab and Haryana high court has ruled against DNA test demand from a Mansa girl, who had demanded the same in order to prove paternity from her mothers live-in partner. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

The burden lies on the litigating party to prove his or her case by adducing evidence in support of his or her plea and a party cannot be compelled to prove the case in the manner as suggested by the contesting party. A DNA test cannot be ordered so as to lead to a roving inquiry, the bench of justice Alka Sarin observed.

The court was hearing a plea from a Mansa man, who had challenged a family court order, which had allowed application of his live-in partners daughter for a DNA test of him, in a suit filed by her seeking declaration as his daughter.

A family court had ordered for the same in December 2022. It was this order that he had challenged in high court submitting that despite the entire evidence having been led, not a single document has been filed in evidence which would even remotely show the girl being his biological daughter. It was further argued that a person cannot be compelled to undergo a DNA test.

The girl, on the other hand, had argued that she was his daughter and no prejudice would be caused in case the DNA test is carried out to prove her parentage and rather the said test would enable the trial court to decide the suit properly.

The court observed that courts in India cannot order DNA test as a matter of course. In the present case, the parties have admittedly already led their evidence in support of their respective stands as taken in the court. The petitioner father cannot be compelled to adduce evidence in support of the case set up by the girl, it said adding that the girl has failed to make out a strong prima facie case for ordering the DNA test.

The court took note of SC judgments wherein it was held the court should order a DNA test if the applicant has a strong prima facie case and there is sufficient material before the court. The court should therefore examine the proportionality of the legitimate aims being pursued i.e. whether the same are not arbitrary or discriminatory whether they may have an adverse impact on the person and that they justify the encroachment upon the privacy and personal autonomy of the person, being subjected to the DNA test, it had added.

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Against 71 to 74 lakh acres that would go under paddy cultivation this time, Punjab government has set a target of five lakh acres to be sown under direct seeded rice (DSR) method of paddy cultivation this kharif season, out of which 25,000 acres have already been sown. Paddy cultivation by DSR method is seen as a major step towards conserving underground water and checking stubble burning in the harvest months of October and November. (HT File)

The DSR target this season is 2.5 times more than what was achieved (2.12 lakh acres) in the last season.

Paddy cultivation by DSR method is seen as a major step towards conserving underground water and checking stubble burning in the harvest months of October and November.

As per the figures released from the commission for agricultural costs and prices (CACP), which fixes the minimum support price (MSP) on crops, particularly wheat and paddy, a kilogram of rice by conventional method guzzles 3,367 litres of water.

However, by DSR method, at least 20% of the total water usage is saved, said Punjab Agricultural University vice chancellor SS Gosal. He added that attempts are being made to conserve more water but the crop by this method is sown in peak summers (May-June) when evaporation is maximum due to extreme summers, so there are constraints, he added.

According to Makhan Singh Bhullar, head of the department of agronomy, PAU, short duration varieties such as 126, 128 and 131 are recommended for DSR as it produces lesser crop residue and matures early, thus giving a longer window before wheat cultivation in the subsequent rabi season.

This would lead to lesser burning of the paddy residue as farmers get more time to remove the crop residue from the fields, added Bhullar.

Five years ago in 2018, the Centre had launched a scheme for in-situ management of paddy stubble for which 1,370 crore was given for supplying subsidised machines to paddy growers.

Gosal said that through DSR method, farmers can save 3,000 per acre as transplantation of saplings in puddled fields is done manually.

In Punjab, paddy is sown over 29-30 lakh hectares (71 to 74 lakh acres), out of which, about five lakh hectares (12.5 lakh acres) is covered under the premium aromatic basmati variety, a major portion of which is exported to nations such as Europe, middle east and north America, where rice is a staple food and consumers prefer high quality grain.

The sowing by DSR method, wherein paddy seeds are directly planted into wet soil, started on May 25 while the sowing by conventional method in puddled fields (water accumulated up to 6 inches) started from June 10.

We are hopeful of meeting the target this season as all measures to promote it have been taken this time, said additional chief secretary agriculture KAP Sinha.

The state government has offered farmers who adopt DSR technique a sum of 1,500 per acre which was started from the previous season.

The transplantation of paddy by conventional method has been staggered to four phases and the first phase would begin from June 10 (Friday), which would cover 25,000 hectares across the border fence.

The second phase would begin on June 16, covering Majha belt and later to Doaba and Malwa regions. The mechanism was devised from the last kharif season when Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) took over in 2022, so as to make available adequate power supply to all 14 lakh agriculture tube-wells which pumps put water for paddy transplantation. We have chosen 14 blocks across the state where we feel DSR is best suited in these areas, informed director agriculture Gurvinder Singh. He said these blocks are Suman, Barnala, Moga-I, Patiala, Bassi Pathana, Sultanpur Lodhi, Phool, Raikot, Mansa, Patti, Ajnala, Kotkapura, Ghal Khurd, Fazilka, Gidderbaha and Dera Baba Nanak.

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Nineteen newborns were rescued after a fire broke out in the early hours of Friday in the basement of a four-storey building, from which a hospital specialising in neonatal care also operated, in west Delhis Vaishali Colony in Dabri near Janakpuri, the Delhi Police said on Friday. A view of the hospital where 19 newborns were rescued from a fire in the early hours of the morning at Vaishali Colony, in New Delhi on Friday. (Vipin Kumar/HT)

Read here: 19 newborns rescued from blaze at west Delhi hospital after short circuit

A total of 45 firefighters in nine fire tenders were rushed to the spot, and no casualty was reported, said Atul Garg, director of Delhi Fire Services. Police said that no arrests have been made so far.

According to M Harsha Vardhan, deputy commissioner of police (DCP) (Dwarka), the fire was caused by a short circuit in the basement of the building.

While all 19 babies were reported safe and were either undergoing treatment at other hospitals or were discharged, Friday mornings fire was a close shave for them, fire officials said. It was a miracle that all the children were rescued safely. Even a 10-minute delay, which would have been the case if the blaze occurred during the day, could have been catastrophic, Garg said. Fire officials said even though the blaze contained itself to the basement, the building was rapidly heating up, which was a challenge for firefighters.

DCP Vardhan said that the legalities concerning the hospitals operations were being investigated. We have asked the hospital owner to produce the license, registration, and other documents, said the DCP.

Garg, however, said that prima facie the hospital did not require a no-objection certificate (NOC) from the fire department.

The hospital  Nest Newborn and Child Hospital  operated out of the first floor of the building, covered an area of 180 square yards. Though the hospital did not handle childbirth, it provided neonatal intensive care units (NICU) and other neonatal services. While the basement of the building served as the office and waiting area of the hospital, the ground floor was occupied by a few shops. The top two floors served as private offices.

Meanwhile, police registered a case against the hospital owner and the building owner at Dabri police station. The case was registered under sections 285 (negligent conduct concerning fire) and 336 (rash or negligent act that endangers human life) of the IPC, said Vardhan.

We lock the basement by 8pm. The hospital also had about 10 staff at the time of the incident, said Akash Solanki who introduced himself as the owner of the building and the hospital. However, the DCP said that the hospital was owned by a doctor, Yaten Agrawal. Our hospital was registered as per law, said Agrawal, who did not comment further.

The call about the blaze was made at 1.35am, said Mukul Bhardwaj, station officer of Dwarka fire station. It took the firefighters five minutes to arrive at the site. The DCP said the fire was doused by 2.15am.

Fire officials said the firefighters divided themselves into two teams to douse the blaze and rescue the occupants. The furniture in the basement was burning rapidly, leaving the lower parts of the building extremely hot, said Bhardwaj, adding that the firefighters put on breathing apparatus before entering the hospital. The hospital staff had unplugged the medical apparatus and were breaking the window panes to escape since the main staircase was engulfed in smoke, Bhardwaj added.

Read here: Fire breaks out at west Delhi hospital; 20 newborn babies rescued

The children were moved one by one to a restaurant in the neighbouring building through a narrow gallery bridged by an iron mesh found at the hospital, said the fire officer. Time was of utmost importance since some babies were on medical support. We reached out to different hospitals in the area and called CATS ambulances which moved the babies, Bhardwaj added.

A dozen children were moved to a hospital in Janakpuri and two each to three other hospitals in the area. Police said two of the children were discharged soon after. Since NICU requires children to be kept in safe spaces for fear of infection, there were no parents at the time of the blaze.

I was told about my baby being shifted to another hospital at 8am. They said there was smoke in the building, said Vandana, the mother of a baby boy. While the police and the fire department said that they were still investigating if the layout of the building had provisions for an emergency exit, Solanki said that the rear portion of the hospital had an emergency window.
A 42-year-old man, who claimed that his late mother had died in last weeks triple-train accident at Odishas Balasore in order to land a government job, has been apprehended by the Railway Board, officials aware of the matter said on Thursday. The suspect Sanjay Kumar. (HT Photo)

Read here: Seeing blood every time: NDRF personnel traumatised after Odisha train crash

The officials identified the man as Sanjay Kumar, a resident of Patna, adding that his mother had actually died in 2018. They said that after the Balasore accident, he travelled to Delhi with an aim to meet railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and seek a job for himself.

Officials told HT that Kumar, who was caught on Thursday, had not only been to the ministers residence with his claim but also had visited the Rail Bhawan on two separate days. When Kumar reached Vaishnaws residence, he was directed to Rail Bhawan in order to meet the minister. It was then that he approached the ministers office and was apprehended after he kept changing his statements, a railways official told HT.

Giving details of the case, one Railway Board official said, Kumar approached officials, claiming that his mother was a passenger on the ill-fated Coromandel Express that crashed into a goods train and died in the accident. However, we got suspicious when we found that he did not have any proof of his mothers travel.

A second Railway Board official told HT that when Kumar was asked to show information related to his mothers travel, he could not answer. He claimed that he booked the ticket via a travel agent but did not remember his name. He could also not prove that his mother was on the waiting list.

The second official said that Kumar did provide his mothers photograph. We started searching for his mother at all the stations at which the train had halted before the accident. Our aim was to locate her with facial recognition technology. However, when we could not locate her at any of the stations, we grew more suspicious.

It was then, a senior official handling the case, said that Kumar confessed that he was lying about his mothers death. His mother had died in 2018, but after the Balasore accident when the railway ministry announced ex-gratia payment to the family of passengers who had lost their lives, Kumar decided to approach the minister and ask him to give a job rather than the compensation amount, the official said, declining to be named.

Read here: Odisha train accident: Shrieks, screams ensued as Coromandel Express crashed. Video

Kumar, the senior official said, has claimed that he was unemployed for a long time and was depressed about it. We are investigating to understand if employment was the only aim for him to have details of the ministers residence and office, he said.

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Twenty newborn babies were rescued after a fire broke out at a hospital in west Delhis Vaishali Colony in the early hours of Friday, said the fire department. The hospital operated from the first floor of a four-storey building. (Sourced)

No one was hurt in the blaze. ...nine fire units were dispatched to the site, said Delhi fire services director Atul Garg. All the babies were moved to four different hospitals in west Delhi from where three of them were discharged.

Garg said that they were informed about the blaze at the hospital in Vaishali Colony around 1.35am. The hospital operated from the first floor of a four-storey building constructed over a 180 square yard plot, said Garg.

He added that prima facie it appeared that the fire broke out at a shop located in the basement of the building. Garg said that the smoke soon engulfed the hospital.
Police arrested a female IT employee on charges of extorting a man by making false allegations of molestation against him, police said on Thursday. According to the police, the accused are identified as Binita Kumari (27), a native of Bihar.

The woman demanded 2 lakh from the complainant, who she befriended on a dating app, with the help of an accomplice, police said. Cops caught the the woman's accomplice red-handed during the exchange of money on Wednesday, they said.

Police said an FIR was registered against the duo at DLF Phase 3 Police Station. The duo have duped 12 other people so far, and had made false rape and molestation charges against five people in the past, they said.

According to the police, the accused are identified as Binita Kumari (27), a native of Bihar, and Mahesh Phogat (30), a resident of Bhaloth village in Rohtak district.

Also Read: Two held for extorting money from men after getting them booked in fake rape cases

The accused woman is an employee of a IT company in the city, while Phogat worked at an NGO, police said. According to police, the two connected over dating app Bumble. On May 28, the woman took the victim to a hotel in Sector 23 area. She forced him to drink beer, but feeling like something was wrong, he refused to drink and left the hotel. Later, the woman called him and said he misbehaved with her and molested her. She also threatened to lodge a police complaint against him. Phogat, then, called the victim and demanded 5 lakh to settle the issue but agreed for a payment of 2 lakh, police said.

The victim gave the duo 50,000, assured to give the rest of the money soon, and approached the police for help, they said. City police laid a trap to nab the duo.

"As per the plan the victim called the woman to take the rest of the money at Maulsari Market near Sai Temple where Mahesh Phogat was caught red handed accepting money. Later, the woman Binita Kumari was arrested from U block in DLF-3, Gurugram," ACP Kaushik said.

50,000 paid by the victim as part of the extortion deal and two mobiles were recovered from the duo's possession, the officer said.

"She has registered four false cases of rape and molestation in the past. Both were produced in a city court today and sent into judicial custody," he said. SKY

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HT Correspondent olice foiled the alleged suicide bid of the farmer, who hails from Unnao district, and his wife, children, mother and sister near the Vidhan Sabha, police officials said. (For representationP)

letters@htlive.com

LUCKNOW: A farmer, along with his family members, and a Chinhat resident reportedly attempted self-immolation in separate incidents in Lucknow on Friday.

In one of the incidents, police foiled the alleged suicide bid of the farmer, who hails from Unnao district, and his wife, children, mother and sister near the Vidhan Sabha, police officials said.

The farmer alleged that a few men had attempted to sexually assault his two daughters when they were headed to their family farm on Wednesday. The assaulters also hit one of his two daughters with an iron rod, he claimed. The family alleged that police took no action despite them registering a complaint with the Maurawan police in Unnao against the incident.

Deputy commissioner of police (Lucknow Central) Manisha Singh said the family was assured that appropriate action would be taken after a fair inquiry.

In another incident, one Sunil Kumar Rawat from Lucknows Chinhat area tried to set himself on fire near the chief ministers Kalidas Marg residence. He alleged that police were apathetic to his complaint lodged a few days ago. He was also assured of fair inquiry into his complaint.
Everyone entering the court premises will be frisked and none will be allowed to carry firearms inside the court campus. These are among the elements of the security plan for the Lucknow district court that was discussed at a meeting on Friday between lawyers organisations and the special investigation team (SIT) constituted to probe the murder of gangster Sanjeev Maheshwari in a courtroom on June 7. Security personnel on the Lucknow district court campus. (HT Photo)

Members of both the Lucknow Bar Association and the Central Bar Association of the district court were present in the meeting at the police lines.

The lawyers assured the police full cooperation in implementing the security plan.

No one will be allowed to carry firearms on the court campus. A cloakroom will be set up where all firearms will be deposited before entering the court campus, said Kuldeep Narain Mishra, general secretary, Lucknow Bar Association.

It was also decided that identity cards will be issued to lawyers along with car passes to make sure no unwarranted element enters the court campus.

The height of the court campus boundary wall will be increased to keep intruders at bay.

There will be separate entry gates for lawyers and litigants to restrict entry of unwanted elements, Mishra said.

Multiple meetings will be convened between lawyers and police to implement the security plan.

SECURITY INCHARGE APPOINTED

Inspector Ramphal Prajapati has been appointed as security incharge of the old high court campus and the district court.

Joint commissioner of police (law and order) Upendra Agarwal said Prajapatis appointment is with immediate effect.

BAR COUNCIL OF UP STRESSES ON SECURITY

The Bar Council of Uttar Pradesh has demanded adequate security measures in district courts across the state.

Co-chairman of the Bar Council of U.P. Prashant Singh Atal stated that soon the Bar Council will take up the issue with the authorities concerned.
The Lucknow Police has refuted claims of rape of a 14-year-old Dalit girl of Tikrohi village under India Nagar Police station limit. The minor was allegedly sexually molested and murdered by a 16-year-old Muslim boy from a nearby locality on Wednesday afternoon. For representation only (HT File Photo)

On Thursday, after the body of the victim was handed over to the family after the post-mortem examination, the family of the deceased protested at the crossing demanding immediate action against the accused before cremation.

After a few hours, the family acceded to the local administrations request with the promise that a case will be investigated in a fast-track court.

However, the police ruled out the rape on Friday. The post-mortem examination of the girl was conducted by a panel of doctors and was also videographed, which revealed death due to strangulation and ruled out rape, said DCP North Qasim Abidi.

On the other hand, the family of the victim alleged that the police are trying to bury the matter. I was personally told by the doctor undertaking the post-mortem examination that the girl had been raped. The footage from the CCTV camera is there in the hospital. Then how are the police saying rape was not committed, said the victims father.

We are getting whispers that the accused family will do the same with my other daughter. Were scared. Last night, we had demanded police protection, but they did not send even a single cop, he further alleged.

On Wednesday, a 14-year-old Dalit girl was allegedly killed by a 16-year-old boy. Following the murder, the teenage accused, a Muslim, hanged the body of the girl to mislead the police and make it seem like a suicide.

According to the family, the incident took place when the girls parents, who run a small shop near Munshipulia, were out for work. The accused locked the two siblings of the victim  a 10-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl  in a room while perpetrating the crime.

The girls mother spotted the boy coming out of the house as she returned home around 1:30 pm and later found the girl hanging from a ceiling fan.
A public interest litigation (PIL) petition has been filed in the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court seeking a CBI probe into the murder of gangster Sanjeev Maheshwari alias Jeeva inside a courtroom in the district court here on June 7. The PIL, which was filed in the Lucknow bench of Allahabad HC on June 8, is likely to come up for hearing on June 12. (HT file)

The PIL, which was filed on Thursday (June 8), is likely to come up for hearing on June 12. A local advocate has filed the PIL raising a question mark on security of district courts across the state. The lawyer has also sought directives from the court for a CBI probe in the murder of gangster Sanjeev Maheshwari.

The Allahabad high court had taken suo moto cognizance of the shootout in a courtroom in Bijnor district court on December 17, 2019. During several hearings of the PIL, the court had issued several directives to the state government related with security of district courts. All those directives are yet to be implemented by the state government.

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Lucknow Six people, including inspector in-charge of a Kanpur Dehat police station and a sub-inspector of the same police station were arrested by the Aurraiya police in connection with the loot of 50 kg of silver from a Banda jeweller while he was travelling in his car from Banda to Aurraiya on Bundelkhand Expressway on Tuesday. The SUV and rifle used to commit the crime were also recovered from the accused. (Pic for representation)

The press note from UP police stated that those arrested included Kanpur Dehats Bhoganipur police station inspector-in charge Ajay Pal Singh Katheria, sub-inspector Chintan Kaushik of the same police station and four other people, including the jewellers ex-employee Sanjay Chikwa alias Sanjay Topi, his friends Jamaludeen Sheikh alias Jameel Sheikh, Rafat Khan and Rakesh Dixit. The police also recovered 30 silver bars weighing around 50 kg from the room of sub-inspector Chintan Kaushik. The SUV and rifle used to commit the crime were also recovered from the accused.

It added that three more people, including head constable of Bhoganipur police station Ram Shankar Yadav and Tajudeen alias Baddu and Gabbu were also allegedly involved in the incident and were presently on the run. The police investigation revealed that the head constable was the key conspirator and planned the loot after getting information about the jewellers movement with silver from Sanjay Chikwa, who was sacked by the jeweller earlier this year. The head constable roped in the inspector in-charge and a sub-inspector.

The police said the inspector and the sub-inspector were under the impression that the jeweller was carrying the silver without proper documents, so he would not approach the local police to register an FIR. The inspector delayed distribution of silver among all accused after coming to know that the jeweller had lodged an FIR at Aurraiya city police station. He had planned to distribute the silver on Friday when the Aurraiya police arrested him and the others.

The FIR was initially lodged under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 379 for theft and 420 for fraud against unknown people, including two in police uniforms. Aurraiya superintendent of police (SP) Charu Nigam said the IPC sections of loot and criminal conspiracy as well as other severe sections would added into the FIR after it was discovered that cops were involved in the incident.

The note stated that Manish Soni alias Sagar of Banda district was robbed when he along with his cousin Ravi Soni, his wife Sonali and daughter Aashi was travelling in a car on Bundelkhand Express from Banda to Aurraiya at around 2.30 pm on Tuesday. Four people, including two men in police uniforms riding in an SUV intercepted their vehicle and on the pretext of checking, took 50 kilogrammes of silver that he had with him. The accused also took along the jewellers driver Jagnandan Pal on the pretext of further enquiry and later left him on a deserted stretch after thrashing him.

The SP said the loot was executed by the sub-inspector and the head constable along with Jamaludeen and Tajudeen and three others, including Sanjay Topi, the informer in the incident, were travelling in a separate car behind the jewellers car while the inspector coordinated with them over phone. She said the report regarding the suspension and departmental enquiry against the three cops involved in the incident had been sent to the SP of Kanpur Dehat.
MUMBAI: Maharashtra chief minister Eknath Shinde on Friday ordered police officers to investigate threats received by Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar on social media after the veteran politician and his family made it clear that it was the state governments responsibility to ensure he was safe. NCP president Sharad Pawar meets Maharashtra chief minister Eknath Shinde in Mumbai on June 1. (PTI/Twitter/@mieknathshinde)

I am not concerned about threats to me. Those who are in charge of handling law and order in the state cannot shirk their responsibility, Sharad Pawar said, responding to mounting concern within the family and the NCP over his safety after a threat on social media that he will meet the same fate as Dabholkar. Narendra Dabholkar, a rationalist, was shot dead on the morning of August 20, 2013, on the Omkareshwar bridge in Pune.

Pawars daughter and NCP MP Supriya Sule lodged a complaint with Mumbai police commissioner Vivek Phansalkar about the threat and demanded a thorough probe. I hope the home department will take immediate action If anything happens to him (Pawar), state and central home ministers will be responsible, she said after meeting the police commissioner.

Sule also alleged that an atmosphere of hatred was being spread. There can be differences but so much hatred is being spread. What kind of culture is being encouraged in Maharashtra, she remarked.

Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Sanjay Rauts brother Sunil said they also received three-four threat calls on Thursday between 4pm and 4.15pm. He threatened to kill me and MP Sanjay Raut. He said that in a month we will shoot you and send you to the graveyard. Stop the morning press conferences, otherwise, we will kill both of you, said Sunil Raut.

We have informed Mumbai Police Commissioner and state Home Minister Devendra Fadnavis about the threat calls, he added.

In a post on Twitter on Friday, chief minister Shinde only referred to the threats received by Sharad Pawar and promised action. I personally spoke with senior police officers and instructed them to investigate the matter Pawar is a senior leader and all of us respect him. If necessary, his security will be enhanced, the chief minister said.

Shinde also alleged that some people have been deliberately trying to vitiate the atmosphere in Maharashtra. Some people are disturbed since the Supreme Court delivered its verdict (on the split in Shiv Sena). Since then, attempts are being made to create disturbances in the state. Efforts are being made to create communal trouble by glorifying Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan. We wont let it succeed and would ensure law and order is maintained in the state, Shinde said.

Sanjay Raut said deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, who heads the home department, was not taking the threats seriously. In the past too, I had complained to Fadnavis but instead of action, that criminal (who was allegedly involved in threat) got police protection, Raut said, insisting that the threats that he and Pawar had received were government-sponsored.
The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on Thursday criticised Bharatiya Janata Party leader Nilesh Rane for his tweet calling Sharad Pawar a reincarnation of Aurangzeb and said it would hold a protest against the former Lok Sabha member's statement shared with malicious intent. NCP spokesperson Mahesh Tapase said that Rane must delete the tweet in 24 hours, and sought clarification from senior party functionaries on whether they agree with his statement. NCP chief president Sharad Pawar addresses the media, at Silver Oak, in Mumbai, India, on Thursday.(HT PHOTO)

The political controversy erupted following the Kolhapur violence in Maharashtra on Wednesday, in which a rally by Hindu organisations at Shivaji Chowk to protest some social media posts allegedly glorifying Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan turned sour. Following the conclusion of the rally , some miscreants started pelting stones at homes and business establishments owned by the Muslim community, turning the protests violent.

Also Read: Kolhapur violence sparks political blame game

Nilesh Rane's controversial tweet against Sharad Pawar which has irked NCP.(Twitter)

Ranes tweet still online

Ranes controversial remarks were in response to a media report about Pawar expressing concern for the minority communities such as Muslims and Christians in Maharashtra. Pawar Saheb gets worried for the Muslim community as the election approaches. Sometimes it seems that Sharad Pawar is the reincarnation of Aurangzeb, he tweeted. Though NCP has called for Rane to delete the tweet, the BJP leader has not budged from his stance so far as the tweet can still be seen on his profile.

NCP to hold protest

Tapase said that the NCP would protest with a "jail bharo andolan" at MRA Marg police station in south Mumbai at 11 am on Friday against Ranes tweet. Meanwhile, another party leader Clyde Crasto sought action from Twitter over the "malicious" tweet defaming Pawar. FYI @TwitterIndia, You are aware there is prevailing tension in Kolhapur city, Maharashtra due to the name 'Aurangzeb'. The handle @meNeeleshNRane is using the same name against Padma Vibhushan Mr Sharad Pawar, MP -Rajya Sabha. This tweet has malicious intent, please take action, Crasto tweeted.

NCP leaders objected to Rane's tweet Thursday and demanded it be bought down within 24 hours.(Twitter)

Dozens arrested for violence

As many as 36 people have been arrested so far and three juveniles were detained in connection with Wednesdays violence. Kolhapur superintendent of police (SP) Mahendra Pandit said CCTV footage was being scanned to identify the perpetrators and indicated that they were locals.

A total of four criminal cases have been registered in the matter so far. About 400 people had been booked in the three first information reports (FIR) registered for the violence. The fourth case has been registered over the alleged WhatsApp status glorifying Tipu Sultan and Aurangzeb which triggered the violence and five juveniles have been detained in this context, Pandit added.

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A 60-year-old villager in Meghalaya who went to watch five elephants including two calves rest in a paddy field was chased and trampled to death by one from the herd, police said on Friday. For representational purposes only. (File Photo)

The incident took place on Thursday.

According to residents of the West Garo Hills district, the elephants had crossed over from Bangladesh in the Killapara area of Dalu earlier in the day.

As word got around that three adult elephants and two calves had entered the village and were in a paddy field, many villagers went to watch the animals. Ohindro Dalu was among them.

It is not clear what the trigger was, but one of the elephants charged towards the villagers, chased 60-year-old Dalu and trampled him.

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A total of 44 new dedicated cyber police stations, one in each of the 38 districts in the state, besides in two police and four rail districts, went functional on Friday, officials familiar with the matter said. During the inauguration of the Patna Cyber Police Station on Friday. (Santosh Kumar/Ht Photo)

Cybercrime victims can lodge their complaints personally, through email or sent their complaints through postal service. If the victim is a woman or a child, police would visit their places to probe the incident. They will not be summoned to the police station, said an official, who did not wish to be named.

Additional director general (ADG) of police (economic offence unit) N H Khan said cybercrime has increased significantly in Bihar post-Covid 19 pandemic. Keeping this in mind, the state government approved cyber police station in all the districts. The EoU, which is functioning as a cyber nodal agency, has saved 7 crore after receiving complaints on helpline number 1930 during the first three months of this year. As many as 600 FIRs were registered during this period, Khan said.

As per official data, in 2022, Bihar Police registered 1,500 cybercrime cases. Till May 31 this year, police have registered 1,200 cases. At present, more than 1,500 calls are received on 1930 daily in the state.

The phenomenal increase in use of computers, smartphones and the internet in recent times has also led to a sharp rise in cases of cyber frauds, the ADG said.

Cybercrimes prevalent in the state include email frauds, mobile app related crimes, ransom, net banking/ATM frauds, insurance fraud, lottery scam, bitcoin and sextortion, among others.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Avinash Kumar Avinash, a senior correspondent, reports on crime, railways, defence and social sector, with specialisation in police, home department and other investigation agencies. ...view detail
Pune: Amid high night temperatures in the city, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has issued a yellow alert for thunderstorms warning for all four divisions of Maharashtra. Accordingly, the state is likely to experience thunderstorms along with lightning and rain till June 13. Cloudy sky at Baner in Pune, on Friday. Amid high night temperatures in the city, IMD issues yellow alert for thunderstorms warning for all four divisions of Maharashtra. (KALPESH NUKTE/HT)

Shilpa Apte, meteorologist, weather and forecasting department, said, All four meteorological subdivisions, including Konkan and Goa, Central Maharashtra, Marathwada, and Vidarbha will experience thunderstorms with lightning, gusty winds and rains in some areas. In Pune, the sky will be mainly clear in the morning hours, however, there will be partly cloudy weather, and light rainfall might be experienced in the afternoon /evening time.

Higher night temperatures

As the city has been experiencing dry weather since the beginning of June, the minimum night temperature is recorded on the higher side in many areas, including Wadgaonsheri, Hadapsar, Shivajinagar, and Pashan.

According to IMD data, the mean minimum temperature is considered 22 degrees Celsius. However, the mercury is noted between 25 to 26 degrees in the eastern parts of the city. While in some areas across the city, it is recorded between 22- 24 degrees Celsius.

KS Hosalikar, head, climate research and services, IMD, Pune said, As per the forecast models, the temperature is expected to increase in isolated areas of Maharashtra in the upcoming days.

No advancement of monsoon

The IMD observed that there was no advancement in monsoon on Friday. However, the condition is favourable for its advancement and the monsoon might cover some more areas in the next 48 hours. Anupam Kashyapi, head, weather and forecasting department, IMD, Pune said, Conditions are favourable for further advance of the Southwest monsoon into some more parts of the central Arabian Sea, the remaining parts of Kerala, some more parts of Tamil Nadu, some parts of Karnataka and some more parts of the southwest, central and northeast Bay of Bengal, some parts of northeastern states during next 24 hours. Similarly, conditions are also becoming favourable for the advance of Southwest Monsoon over the remaining parts of northeastern states and some parts of Sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim during the subsequent 48 hours.

Meanwhile, on Friday, IMD recorded a 37.4 degrees Celsius maximum temperature in the Shivajinagar, and the minimum temperature was noted as 23.8 degrees Celsius.
Companies face several challenges when it comes to hiring. This not only leads to inefficiencies but also results in a significant waste of time and resources. Another issue that companies face is incorrect or misleading information in their resumes. The repercussions of such a misalignment can be detrimental to productivity, team dynamics, and overall organisational success. From a candidates perspective information on their work profiles and resumes is disorganised, hard to spot, and spread across the internet. This makes it difficult for their peers and recruiters to discover and interpret them. Sensing this gap in the market, Akash Bhadange and Yogini Bende, founded Peerlist in August 2021, a professional network with robust and verified work profiles. Akash Bhadange and Yogini Bende, co-founders of Peerlist. (HT PHOTO)

Resume builder

Coming from Akola, a tier-3 small town in Maharashtra, Yogini landed in Pune in August 2017. She met Akash online while working on a project and the duo started working together.

Says Yogini, We both were working remotely and I thought there would be better job opportunities in Pune. Before relocating, I had got a job in service-based startups where I got the understanding of how this new world works and got good experience of how to build things from scratch and to work in the company environment.

Akash recalls, After Yogini relocated to Pune, we got married in March 2018. I am a designer by profession and pursuing this field after completing my electronics engineering from MIT College in Pune. After marriage, we were thinking of doing something on our own. Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdown provided us with the opportunity to explore certain things. Yogini had started a side project as a resume builder. It was a simple drag-and-drop feature to show everything under one single profile.

Building in public

I had no idea about product design and all and I used to show to Akash who would suggest some changes in the product design aspect. Soon the product started evolving, said Yogini.

Akash said, Since I was a product designer, I had the habit of taking feedback from 500 people, we did the same with our resume builder project. We created a prototype and got a good response. People said we would like to have something like this which further boosted our confidence.

Akash and Yogini launched a simple beta product on August 5, 2021. Akash stated, We were aware that we had a very popular professional networking platform in front of us as a competitor. However, that platform has not evolved much in recent years. We thought we can add some features which are missing in that platform to our project. It was this simple problem statement for us. It resonated with a lot of people who started requesting features which were not available elsewhere.

Beta launch and funding

Akash said, We both were in full-time jobs working from home when the beta version was launched. We were happy with our job as well as this project. In September 2021, Vishwesh Jirgale, founder of Sifar Ventures and head of engineering at ModernLoop, messaged us on Twitter asking to send an invite to create his profile. We got on a call and Vishwesh, along with Akshay Deo, cofounder of Sifar Ventures and Head of Engineering and Product  Importers at Postman, offered to invest 20 lakh.

Vishwesh and Akshay were happy that we were building something from Pune. They both had a strong conviction before investing in us. It also happened that we found out some common connections with Vishwesh through our design and developer communities, Akash added.

They both gave us confidence and told us to focus more on the product and give more time to it. Since we were working jobs, it meant we had to leave our jobs. We never had any doubt about our product but it was not an easy decision to make. Married co-founders have their own set of problems. We did some risk mitigation and sorted out our personal finances and runway. Yogini resigned on October 14, 2021, and we got our first cheque of investment from Sifar, recalled Akash.

Investor experience

Says Akash, We focussed on building our product for the entire year 2022. We went from 3,000 users to 23,000 users, all word of mouth and organic growth.

Yogini said, We had launched Peerlist on Product Hunt. Investors started noticing it. Dharmesh Shah, cofounder and CTO at HubSpot reached out to us. We also had written blogs about us, our journey and why we were building Peerlist etc. Dharmesh had done his prior research and created a profile on Peerlist too. Akash and Dharmesh connected over a call and during the discussion, Akash mentioned our willingness to raise another round of 8 crore (  1.5 crore for angel investors and  6.5 crore for institutional investors). Akash had asked him to review our deck and he agreed. Dharmesh then emailed us and asked us to pencil down his investment of 1.5 crore. We later got to know that Dharmesh usually does not invest in early-stage startups and in those who pitch for investment. He prefers to do his own research and then send out offers to founders.

Dharmesh was in constant communication with us. He would pose all kinds of questions to us including our go-to-market strategy from 10,000 users to 1 million users, what technologies are we using to build the product, our decision-making process, etc. This helped us because Dharmesh got more conviction in us and our product during this period. While we were waiting for a response from certain institutional investors, Dharmesh offered to invest the entire amount  8 crore and asked us to speed up the product development process, stated Yogini.

Our previous managers had also committed to us and hence we had to increase the round size to 9 crore. All of this was based on trust, Yogini added.

Quick onboarding

At present, we are focussing only on tech companies and startups. Since we belong to tech, we can understand the problems of tech companies and candidates better. Rather than solving for everybody and for people whom we cannot relate their problems to, it is better to solve only for the tech community including product managers, developers, designers, founders, and investors, Akash added.

Work experience verification

Peerlist has now introduced a feature for verifying a candidates work experience. Explaining this further Akash said, Initially we thought we are adding just another feature not present in LinkedIn. As we delved deep into this, we realised there are a lot more issues in the hiring process including the proof of work (verification) and thought of how to shorten this hiring cycle. When a candidate submits his or her work email, it is verified through our database. We identify authentic email addresses or aliases of companies and send a password to that email address. Once the candidate receives the password, his work experience gets verified. At present, we can verify only current working email addresses, but we are in the process of launching a past work verification feature too. We have also introduced a student education verification feature.

Yogini says, A recruiter on average spends only six seconds to scan one resume. We thought from a candidates perspective about creating the best pitch for them. Every candidate can then have their best shot. We built the product by keeping the candidate as our hero. After solving most of their problems, we are now thinking from the founders or companys perspective. Founders were looking at Peerlist to help them hire people within a shortened time span. We realised this is also an opportunity to monetise and hence we introduced Peerlist job listings, company profiles, etc.

Roadmap ahead

Sharing their plans for the near future, Akash and Yogini said, We are now completely focussing on company profiles to enable companies to easily post jobs; and on the other side, make it easy for the candidates to search for jobs. With artificial intelligence (AI) emerging, a lot of things would become easy. Our goal is to showcase the best five profiles or users which will help us monetise the platform.

At present, we are in the beta stage and hence company profiles and all offerings are available free of cost to any user. Within six months we will start monetising. We want to be prepared when the market is ready and normalised, the duo said adding further that a mobile app of Peerlist will be launched soon.
After a struggle of over a decade the state-of-the-art Metro Blood Bank, at Aundh District Hospital (ADH) campus is finally able to complete the compliance required to get a licence to function. The licence will be issued by the FDA by Tuesday, said the officials. The licence will be issued by the FDA by Tuesday, said the officials. (REPRESENTATIVE PHOTO)

A meeting was held between the FDA officials and the District Health officials on June 8. During the meeting, the final pending documents required for the licences were submitted. The Metro blood bank permission has been pending since 2012.

S V Pratapwar, Joint commissioner of FDA (Drug), Pune region, said, the compliance for the blood bank has been completed and the pending documents were submitted to us yesterday. The licence will be issued by us to the hospital by Tuesday. After the licence is issued a final signature from the CDSCO will be done. Once the signature process is completed, the Metro Blood Bank can start functioning, he said.

Dr Nisha Teli, BTO, at ADH, said, now we have met the entire criteria required for the licences and both FDA and CDSCO have agreed to it. The compliance was completed last month but there was a problem with the documents. The FDA will issue the licence and the signature will be given by the CDSCO officials, she said.

Dr Nagnath Yempalay, civil surgeon of Pune district and head of ADH, said, Metro blood bank has been stuck in the hiccups of approvals for over a decade currently the Blood bank is only collecting and providing whole blood.

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Pune: The University Grants Commission (UGC) has initiated stringent measures to curb counterfeiting, ranging from plagiarism to forging PhD certification. Stringent measures initiated to curb counterfeiting, ranging from plagiarism to forging PhD certification, said UGC chairperson prof M Jagdish Kumar. (HT)

According to UGC chairperson Prof M Jagdish Kumar, an independent verification committee would be created to check the actual status of fake PhD degrees.

Prof Jagdish gave the information when journalists visited the UGC office in New Delhi recently.

 Many pursue PhD only to secure a better position with a multinational company (MNC) and a big paycheck. As a result, hardcore research takes a backseat. Similarly, the number of bogus PhD scholars is also on the rise. When asked about the steps being taken to curb the malpractice, Prof Jagdish Kumar stated, A quality controller-like structure will be established for PhD. In which a high-level committee will select the colleges and review the PhD theses.

Appropriate action will be taken against the research students who violate the rules in this verification. The new academic policy is research-oriented, and the quality of research papers and the credibility of the PhD should be nurtured. This can be checked through software. However, there is no mechanism to detect plagiarism in theses in Indian languages. The tools in Indian languages should be developed to curb foul practices, he added.
In a hyper-connected world, ideologies and politics often spill beyond national borders. But even by the standards of a globalised order, the events in Canada this week were beyond the pale, and represented an impulse so extremist that Indias external affairs minister, S Jaishankar, had to officially step in. To mark the 39th anniversary of Operation Bluestar, pro-Khalistani groups put together a tableau depicting the assassination of former prime minister (PM) Indira Gandhi as part of an event organised in the Greater Toronto Area of Canada. PREMIUM Parade float depicting Indira Gandhi's assassination in Canada.(HT File)

The float depicted the assassination as revenge for Operation Bluestar, the military action ordered by Mrs Gandhi in 1984 to flush out separatist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his supporters from the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar. The so-called shaheedi float had a sign that said the assassination was revenge for attack on Shri Darbar Sahib, referencing the controversial storming of the Golden Temple complex. This unacceptable glorification of the assassination of a PM would rile any country, and India immediately reacted.

On Wednesday, Indias high commission in Ottawa sent a formal note to Canadas foreign ministry to express displeasure. A day later, Dr Jaishankar cautioned the Canadian government that the activities of Khalistani elements on their territory could impact bilateral relations and have security implications. The foreign minister also mentioned Australia and the United Kingdom. The import of his address was clear  though Khalistani supporters are a vanishingly small constituency in India and increasingly marginalised abroad  New Delhi took a stern view of foreign governments continuing to provide space to these extremist elements, and that this will inevitably have an adverse impact on bilateral ties.

This is but expected. No country in the world will sit idly by if crimes committed in its jurisdiction are extolled beyond its frontiers, potentially fanning the flames of an extremist ideology that once waged war against the State. There is legitimate criticism of Operation Bluestar and the Indian governments handling of Punjab in the 1980s  including human rights excesses  but these have been expressed eloquently through the countrys democratic systems, and many spouts of literature, poetry and music. The tableau was the macabre celebration of an illegal, violent act  plain and simple. It is unacceptable in any civilised society. Khalistani extremism in Canada dates back to the post-1984 period. In 1985, a Canada-based extremist outfit, Babbar Khalsa, plotted and executed the mid-air bombing of an Air India flight. The ideology saw a marked resurgence in the past decade, stoked by some religious outfits and patronised by local politicians looking to secure votes in elections. In 2018, Canada listed Khalistani extremism as a possible terror threat on its soil. Yet, to New Delhis exasperation, the Canadian governments soft pedalling on pro-Khalistan lobbies hasnt stopped.

After the appalling tableau, however, New Delhi appears to have drawn a line in the sand. Ottawa must look beyond myopic political considerations and towards the larger goal of bilateral cooperation and signal no tolerance for violent ideologies. After all, Khalistani extremism holds an equally menacing threat to a countrys internal security. Its a lesson that Canada should take note of.
While well-made crime shows and films based on drug mafias have been keeping us hooked to the big screen and on streaming platforms, we are served a half-baked and bland Bloody Daddy. Right from sketchy characters with absolutely no back stories, a wafer-thin plot to a screenplay that unfolds like scattered pieces of a puzzle and a climax that takes no NASA brains to decode, this Ali Abbas Zafar directed film makes you wonder if he rushed to make it, write it, edit it and release it, basically faltering in every aspect of filmmaking. Also read: Shahid Kapoor jokes how he picks films like Bloody Daddy to take out frustration on set: Been married for eight years Shahid Kapoor in a still from Bloody Daddy.

An adaptation of French film Sleepless Night (2011), the film has average dialogues and mediocre action scenes clubbed with uncooked characters that needed way more depth and detailing to leave a lasting impact. If anything works, its Shahid Kapoors heroic screen presence, but unfortunately, he also disappoints in the acting department this time. Maybe its got to do with his recent choices of playing angry men. I mean, we have seen him being needlessly broody, alcoholic, picking fights, and being eccentric a bit too much now. We have had enough of that crazy streak in Kabir Singh, and saw some glimpses of it Jersey and Farzi, too. So seeing Shahid do that same stuff, all over again in Bloody Daddy, wasn't really inviting.

Plot

Bloody Daddy chronicles the story of one night when NCB officer Sumair Azad (Shahid Kapoor) goes to meet drug lord Sikander Choudhary (Ronit Bose Roy) in his club to return a bag of cocaine in exchange for his kidnapped teenage son. But things dont go as per plan and what ensues is a 'bloody' fight. It all starts when one morning, Sumair nabs drug dealers along with his colleague Jaggi (Zeishan Quadri), and seizes cocaine worth 50 crore. While Sumair somehow manages to retrieve the bag from NCB office to be able to keep his son safe, hes oblivious to the fact that hes being shortchanged at multiple levels within NCB. He ends up in fights with his colleagues Aditi Rawat (Diana Penty) and senior Sameer Singh (Rajeev Khandelwal). At one point, everyone is a suspect, and ahead of the climax, things become clear and its a cakewalk to figure how the end will eventually pan out.

Review

With a runtime of two hours, its fast paced and well-edited but never rises beyond being a cat and mouse chase and fight. The action thriller that Zafar has co-written with Aditya Basu and SiddharthGarima kicks off on a high note and in no time, nosedives into being a bland unfolding of events that doesnt offer any adrenaline rush.

Given that the film was shot in 36 days during the Covid-19 pandemic, it opens with quite a few warnings regarding the initial lockdown, the second wave claiming lives, people rendered jobless, the increase in crime rate ahead of the third wave and everyone used to the new normal. And I expected Zafar to build the premise on these lines, however, I see nothing of this translate into the actual script, other than a few superficial scenes where we see people masked up, guests at a high-profile wedding being tested and criminals talking about how the pandemic has doomed their hotel and drug business, so they need to resurrect it.

Ronit Roy in a still from Bloody Daddy.

Performance of supporting cast

For once I thought if not the screenplay, the casting would do some wonders, alas, its rather disappointing how every single actor has been made to look like a sidekick with nobody getting to showcase their acting chops to the best of their ability. Ronit Roy, a delight to watch on screen, doesnt have a clear direction between being a good cop or a bad cop. Rajeev Khandelwal struggles in action sequences and never looks convincing enough. Sanjay Kapoor comes as a stylised villain only to vanish in thin air once his part is done. Ankur Bhatia and Vivaan Bhatena as bad guys, do a decent job but have too little to do. Lost in this male-dominated cast, we get Diana Penty trying to hold her ground and she isnt that bad, actually. She doesnt go overboard and maintains a calming balance. In fact, the young boy who plays Shahids onscreen son, Atharva, is quite good and refreshing.

The biggest joke of Bloody Daddy is in the title itself. After each action sequence, we see Shahid and Rajeevs characters covered in blood stains, and the next moment, its all gone. They just start afresh from where they left the fight but, no blood on their faces or clothes. Its actually difficult to digest such bad continuity breaks.

Overall, Bloody Daddy might keep you hooked only for the sheer thrill of watching Shahid do some action and stunts on screen, but it falls prey to its own cliches and tropes. The film is now streaming on Jio Cinemas.

Bloody Daddy

Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Ronit Roy, Rajeev Khandelwal, Diana Penty, Vivan Bhatena, Sanjay Kapoor, Ankur Bhatia

Director: Ali Abbas Zafar
Kajol took her fans by surprise when she announced on Instagram and Twitter that shes taking a break from social media. She posted a picture with a black background and text that read, Facing one of the toughest trials of my life. (Also read: Kajol shares hilarious before and after pics of her night out) Kajol has not revealed why she quit social media.(PTI)

Kajol has been quite active on Instagram, particularly in posting pictures with her family, including husband Ajay Devgn, daughter Nysa and son Yug. She also frequently posts throwback memories of her popular films like Gupt and Bekhudi, that recently hit milestone anniversaries.

Kajol deleted all her posts from IG.

The comments by her fans on the posts were a mix of concern and disappointment. While one user commented, Its okay not to be okay and take your time, another wrote, You are strong enough to face any problem.

Last week, Kajol posted about the crime thriller Dushman turning 25. She shared, "#25years to Dushman. One of the scariest films I have ever said yes to or even watched for that matter. #AshutoshRana scared the crap out of me on screen and Im sure out of all of you guys as well. And a big thanks till today to #PoojaBhatt and #TanujaChandra for making me so comfortable with such an uncomfortable topic. It is still such an uncomfortable film for me to watch! #WomenRock #StillWorking #SanjayDutt #FabFilm."

The actor has been in the film industry since 1992 when she made her debut with Bekhudi alongside Kamal Sadanah. Her mother Tanuja and aunt Nutan are also actors, as is her grandmother Shobhana Samarth. Her father Shomu Mukherjee was a film director and producer. Her younger sister Tanishaa Mukerji also joined the film industry as an actor.

Kajol will next be seen in Netflix Indias Lust Stories 2, an anthology directed by Sujoy Ghosh, Konkona Sensharma, R Balki and Amit R Sharma. Shell also be seen in the Indian adaptation of popular CBS show The Good Wife, directed by Suparn S Varma, that will premiere soon on Disney+ Hotstar. She was last seen in Revathys emotional drama Salaam Venky, that is streaming on ZEE5.

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Naseeruddin Shah in a recent interview had claimed that the Sindhi language isnt spoken in Pakistan anymore. However, on Thursday, the veteran actor apologised for his 'error' after being called out by Sindhi speakers, including many celebs, in Pakistan. The veteran actors apology was lauded by Pakistani actor Adnan Siddiqui. Also read: Pakistani actor Mansha Pasha reacts to Naseeruddin Shah's Sindhi no longer spoken in Pakistan comment After Naseeruddin Shah apologised for saying Sindhi is no longer spoken in Pakistan statement, Pakistani actor Adnan Siddiqui lauded him.

Adnan Siddiqui's reaction

In an official statement released on his Facebook page, Naseeruddin Shah spoke about how his remarks on the Sindhi and Marathi languages led to 'two completely unnecessary controversies'.

Adnan, who has often slammed Bollywood films for misrepresentation of Pakistanis, has reacted to Naseeruddin Shah's Facebook post. Adnan, who had called Sidharth Malhotra-starrer Mission Majnu 'distasteful' and 'factually incorrect', was all praises for Naseeruddin.

He took to Twitter on Thursday and along with a screenshot of Naseeruddin Shahs apology note wrote, Apologising for a mistake is indeed a true testament to a person's character and intellect. Naseer sahabs recent gesture has only deepened my admiration for him. It takes strength and humility to acknowledge one's errors and take responsibility for them.

What Naseeruddin Shah said in his post

Naseeruddin Shah responded to the recent controversies surrounding his remarks on the Sindhi and Marathi languages. In his latest post, he acknowledged his misstatements and clarified his intentions. He wrote, "Two completely unnecessary controversies seem to have erupted. over things Ive said recently. One regarding my mis-statement about the Sindhi language in Pakistan. I was in error there."

He also clarified his remarks about the relationship between Marathi and Farsi languages, further writing in his post, "The second over what Im supposed to have said about the relationship between Marathi and Farsi. My exact words were many Marathi words are of Farsi origin. My intention was not to run down the Marathi language but to talk of how diversity enriches all cultures Urdu itself is a mix of Hindi Farsi Turkish and Arabic. English has borrowed words from all European languages not to mention Hindustani and I suppose that is true of every language spoken on earth.

Naseeruddin Shah issued an apology for his recent comments on Sindhi and Marathi languages.

Naseeruddin Shah's remark about Sindhi language

During recent promotions of his web series Taj: Divided By Blood season 2, Naseeruddin talked about various languages that are spoken in Pakistan. The actor claimed Sindhi is no longer spoken in Pakistan.

He had said during an interview with Tried and Refused Productions' YouTube channel, They have Balochi, they have Bari, they have Siraiki and they have Pushto. Sindhi is, of course, no longer spoken in Pakistan.

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Sonam Kapoor celebrated her 38th birthday on June 9. This marks the actor's first birthday as a mom. Celebs, such as Malaika Arora and Kareena Kapoor, have been wishing her with sweet birthday messages on social media. Sonam also took to Instagram Stories on Friday to share a glimpse of the balloon decorations and flowers gifted to her by businessman-husband Anand Ahuja ahead of her birthday celebrations in London. In an old interview, Sonam had opened up about Anand, and said he saw her for who she really was. Also read: Sonam Kapoor plays with Vayu in adorable video shared by Anand Ahuja Sonam Kapoor and Anand Ahuja married in 2018.

Sonam had said Anand Ahuja 'knows exactly who she is' as she spoke about what prompted her to choose him as her life partner. The actor said he knows she is 'the least competitive and ambitious' person, and is also 'extremely naive'.

Sonam on Anand's love for her

Sonam told Filmfare in 2020, "He loved me even though I was nuts. He knows exactly who I am. I say whatever comes to my mind with no filter. He saw the person in me and not some glamorous heroine. He saw me as Sonam, someone whos extremely naive and moohfat (frank). And also, someone least competitive and ambitious."

Anand was surprised by Sonam's lack of ambition

The actor further said, He said I cannot understand that being in the film industry youre not ambitious. I was like being ambitious is not a bad thing. But Im not ambitious to be No. 1. Im more ambitious to do good work and work with the right people. When you work in the film industry your world becomes small. I didnt want that to happen. Ive had the same friends in the industry from the beginning. Ive had the same friends through ups and downs. Not fair-weather friends.

Sonam Kapoor and Anand Ahuja in a photo with their son Vayu.

Sonam and Anand's relationship timeline

Just days before she left for the 71st Cannes Film Festival, Sonam Kapoor tied the knot with businessman Anand Ahuja in 2018 after dating for a few years. Anand had proposed to Sonam during a holiday in New York.

From their star-studded wedding that was graced by everyone from Kareena Kapoor to Janhvi Kapoor to their sweet social media PDA with their hashtag 'everyday phenomenal', Sonam and Anand often make news for their romance. They welcomed their baby boy Vayu Kapoor Ahuja last year in August.

Sonam's comeback film

After her long break from Bollywood, Sonam is making her comeback with Shome Makhijas Blind. This will be her first film since she gave birth to son Vayu in August last year. In an interview with The Indian Express in January this year, Sonam had spoken about her maternity break. She had said, "I think it was the best decision as I got to take some time off..."

Sonam was last seen in a cameo appearance in Netflix's AK vs AK (2020). Before that she featured in two films that were released in 2019, The Zoya Factor alongside Dulquer Salmaan and Angad Bedi, and Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, in which she co-starred alongside father-actor Anil Kapoor.

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Noor Alfallah, the 29-year-old girlfriend of veteran Hollywood actor Al Pacino, was spotted for the first time since the news of her pregnancy surfaced on May 31. In pictures obtained by Page Six, she was accompanied by her mother while exiting a medical health facility in Los Angeles on Monday. Reportedly eight months pregnant, she seemed to try her best to conceal her baby bump with an oversized black leather fur-trimmed coat, as her mother escorted her to their black SUV. (Also read: Al Pacino breaks silence on 29-year-old girlfriend Noor Alfallah's pregnancy) Al Pacino is happy to be expecting his fourth child with Noor Alfallah.

Al Pacinos absence

The 83-year-old actor wasnt spotted with his girlfriend, with whom hes going to be a father for the fourth time. He already has three children: Julie, 33, with Jan Tarrant, and twins Olivia and Ashton, with Beverly DAngelo.

Pacino was reportedly upset with the news of Alfallahs pregnancy as he didnt want more kids. As per reports, he also asked her to get a paternity test. However, Pacino broke his silence on these rumours in a video on Wednesday, in which he said that this child is really special coming at this time.

Pacino and Alfallahs dating history

The couple was first spotted in April 2022, stepping out for dinner in Venice, California. But theyve been reportedly dating since the COVID-19 lockdown. Reports suggest that Alfallah doesnt mind the age gap even though Pacino is older than her father.

Who is Noor Alfallah?

A Kuwait-born TV producer and executive, Alfallah has previously dated Rock n Roll legend Mick Jagger, Hollywood producer Eli Roth, and billionaire investor Nicolas Berggruen. She was also spotted with legendary Hollywood actor-filmmaker Clint Eastwood in 2019, but she later clarified that hes just a family friend.

Not just Al Pacino

Pacinos The Irishman co-star Robert DeNiro, 79, welcomed his seventh child, a daughter named Gia, with his 45-year-old girlfriend Tiffany Chen on April 6.

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Its been over a month since writers in Hollywood declared a strike, and as the stalemate continues, echoes of the protest can be sensed in the industry, with work getting affected. The strike began on May 2, with multiple productions halting work, in solidarity with the demonstrations. The writers are demanding better pay, and protection against AI as a replacement tool for their work, among other concerns. The WGA strike was a result of six weeks of unsuccessful negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, representing several studios and streaming houses. Heres a lowdown of the recent projects, which had to be suspended as an aftermath of the strike. The fourth season of Emily in Paris will be delayed because of the ongoing strike

Spider-Man 4

Actor Tom Holland has revealed that work on Spider-Man 4 was in early stages, but is on pause at the moment. Weve put the meetings on pause in solidarity with the writers. Heres been multiple conversations, but at this point its very, very early stages, Holland told Variety.

Deadpool 3

The the much-awaited third part of Deadpool franchise has also suffered major hinderance. According to a recent Yahoo story, actor Ryan Reynolds, who is seen as the titular character, is unable to improvise or vary from the script due to the strike. Reynolds, as a producer, may, however, make modifications, but the association has requested that producers refrain from engaging in writing practices. It is not clear if the delay will push the release of the film or not.

Concerts postponed

Rapper Snoop Dogg has pushed his upcoming Hollywood Bowl show. Due to the ongoing WGA strike and the DGA and SAG/AFTRA negotiations, we have decided to postpone the shows scheduled for June 27 and June 28 at the Hollywood Bowl. We stand in solidarity with the unions and are hopeful that the AMPTP will negotiate fair deals as soon as possible and everybody can get back to work, the rapper wrote on Instagram. Dr. Dre, who is billed as the shows producer, was also set to take the stage alongside Snoop for the June 27 and 28 shows. The concert will now reportedly take place on October 20 and 21.

Unstoppable

Jennifer Lopezs Unstoppable, backed by her husband and actor Ben Affleck, is the latest film to shut down indefinitely. The film was being shot in Los Angeles and was disrupted by strikers earlier this week. Now, the makers hope to resume the shoot at a later date when things get settled.

Good Fortune

Sometime back, Aziz Ansaris Good Fortune, starring Seth Rogen and Keanu Reeves, was suspended. In fact, it was the protesters who forced a shutdown of the film, which was being shot in Los Angeles Koreatown. There is no clarity on when the film is likely to resume shooting.

Thunderbolts

The shoot of upcoming film Thunderbolts has also taken a hit. As per Deadline, the studio has suspended production on the film, which was due to begin principal photography in Atlanta. The decision comes after pausing pre-production on Mahershala Ali film Blade.

The Old Man

The filming of the second season of The Old Man, starring Jeff Bridges, is suspended. According to Deadline, strikers forced the production of the drama series to stop. The production is on pause for the foreseeable future. It will resume sometime after the strike is over.

Stranger Things

Plans for filming the fifth and final season of Stranger Things have been paused for the time being . Writing does not stop when filming begins. While were excited to start production with our amazing cast and crew, it is not possible during this strike. We hope a fair deal is reached soon so we can all get back to work. Until then  over and out, tweeted co-creators and co-showrunners Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer.

The Batmans Penguin spinoff

The Penguin, spin-off of The Batman, has also become casualty during the strike as production of the Colin Farrell-led series was halted. According to Deadline, the production was suspended on May 16 as they were set to film in New York. It is still unclear when the makers will return to set to resume the shoot.

Emily in Paris

The fourth season of Emily in Paris will be delayed because of the ongoing strike. According to Variety, the show was initially set to start filming in late summer or early fall in Paris, but filming has been delayed by two months. While there is no official word on the same, it is believed that the delay could stretch further.

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Chris Hemsworth watched RRR recently, and thought the film was 'incredible'. He also gushed about actors Ram Charan and Jr NTR, calling them 'amazing'. Chris, who will soon be seen in Extraction 2, the the sequel to the 2020 action film Extraction, said he would be 'lucky' if he got to work with Ram Charan and Jr NTR. Also read: RRR beats Top Gun Maverick, wins 4 trophies at Hollywood Critics Association awards. Watch SS Rajamouli's speech Chris Hemsworth said he would like to work with Jr NTR and Ram Charan.

Chris Hemsworth on working with Indian actors

The original Extraction (2020) marked Chris Hemsworths first collaboration with Bollywood actor Randeep Hooda. The film was largely shot in India, which is reportedly one of Chris' favourite places. The actor has even named his daughter India. While talking about Extraction 3, Chris Hemsworth expressed his desire to work with Indian actors, again.

"I just watched RRR recently, and I thought the film was incredible. Ram Charan and Jr NTR are amazing, so, if was lucky to work with them, that would be fantastic," Chris Hemsworth told News18.

About RRR

A period drama directed by SS Rajamouli, featuring Telugu actors Ram Charan and Jr NTR in lead roles, RRR tells the fictional story of two revolutionaries, who fought against British rule in India. RRR follows the two characters loosely based on the real-life Telugu revolutionary leaders Komaram Bheem (Jr NTR) and Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan), as they team up to challenge British officials.

At Oscars 2023 on March 12 (March 13 in India), RRR's Naatu Naatu became the first song from an Indian production to bag an Oscar. It was also performed live and the performance earned a standing ovation after actor Deepika Padukone had introduced the performance.

About Extraction 2

Chris Hemsworth's Extraction 2 will premiere on Netflix on June 16, 2023. Netflix released a trailer for the movie on May 16, and it teased how Chris' Tyler Rake, an Australian black ops mercenary, will be going to a lot of extremes in the film. From coming back to life after being deemed clinically dead to fighting inmates, while literally on fire, all for the sake of his latest deadly mission: rescuing the battered family of a Georgian gangster.

The first film ended with Chris's Tyler Rake mourning the death of his son. while he rescued the kidnapped son of an imprisoned Indian drug lord. Actors Rudhraksh Jaiswal, Randeep Hooda, Pankaj Tripathi and Priyanshu Painyuli were part of the first film, which released on Netflix on April 24, 2020.

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Actor Sumbul Touqeer Khan, who shot to fame with her participation on Bigg Boss 16, is all set to welcome her father's second wife in their home. Her father Touqeer Hasan Khan will soon get married for the second time. Sumbul currently lives with her father and sister Saniya and are happy to welcome their step-sister as well. Also read: Sumbul Touqeer recalls father guided her through first period: I never felt uncomfortable Sumbul Touqeer Khan (left) with her father and sister.

Sumbul had received immense support from her father who visited her on Bigg Boss 16 and kept on boosting her fan base on social media. He is a choreographer and had once brought his students on DID Doubles 11 years ago.

Sumbul on her father's second marriage

Expressing her happiness on the second marriage of her father, Sumbul told Bombay Times, "We are very happy and looking forward to welcoming them into our family. Along with our father's wife, a new sister will also join our family and we are extremely excited about it. Our father has been our greatest source of inspiration and support for the last many years. Saniya and I are very happy for him. Our bade papa lqbal Hussain Khan (he was seen on Bigg Boss 16 during the family week) played an instrumental role in this marriage. I am grateful to him."

Sumbul's body of work

Sumbul's father has been a support system through out her career. She began her journey with 2013 show Jodha Akbar and was also seen in Chandragupta Maurya in 2018. She went on to play the titular role in 2020 show Imlie. Sumbul's father occasionally shares pictures and videos of the actor on Instagram.

Sumbul and her father's bond

Last year, Sumbul had shared a video from Bigg Boss 16 along with a note of appreciation for her father. She had recited a poem on Bigg Boss 16 and was joined by his father on stage. They went on to recite the last lines of the poem together. She wrote along with the video, A daughter's biggest strength is her father and her father's most priced possession is his daughter! The way Sumbul's father has set an example for all the father's out there is commendable @touqeerhasankhan.

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The latest addition to the growing list of mainstream actors foraying into the OTT space, Prosenjit Chatterjee made his web debut with Jubilee, and followed it Hansal Mehtas investigative drama, Scoop. Calling it the right time to explore the digital space, the actor feels the medium has moved on from the sex and violence phase  that it heavily relied on initially  and is now embracing wholesome stories. Prosenjit Chatterjee made his OTT debut with Jubilee

In Jubilee, the actor, mainly known for his work in Bengali cinema, essayed the role of a fictional yesteryear film tycoon, Srikant Roy  a ruthless, ambitious yet vulnerable movie maker. Meanwhile, in Scoop, he portrays the character based on late journalist Jyotirmoy Dey, whose murder in 2011 shook the entire media fraternity. Here, the actor clarifies that he is not looking at breaking any image through this medium. OTT lets you try out a lot of interesting things. People saw me do different roles and they liked both.

In a candid chat, Chatterjee opens up about his journey so far and comparisons with other mediums thats inevitable.

No, it wasnt. While Jubilee was a very planned thing, I did not know Scoop would be out so soon. Jubilee was pushed almost by a year because of the pandemic. Such decisions are not in my hands. Also, I did Scoop only for Hansal, who is a dear friend.

We cant sit and plan such things. Like, we didnt know OTT platforms would be so big in India, or Jubilee would become this big  critically, technically, and commercially. I started my career through Bengali films, and have seen the industry change in the last 40 years. Im always keen on working with new directors. As an actor, it allows me scope to reinvent. And both these OTT shows did that.

When it comes to Jubilee, was it your love for cinema which pushed you to dive into the space?

Yes, I am a cinema buff. I have studied cinema as Im from the industry. I understood where my character is coming from and all his actions. There is no positive, no negative, no villains, everybody has their own journey. That is what was the best thing about the series. They were real.

When we say India produces the largest number of films and shows, we are not just talking about Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, or Marathi. But collective projects. With OTT platforms coming in, the best thing we all can say is that we are making Indian content. I might be sitting in Mumbai or Punjab, and making content that will be watched across the country. We are pan India in the true sense because of the medium. In terms of the storytelling, too, there are some stories which directors cant do [justice to] in cinemas, but digital is a great platform to tell those stories. Not to forget documentation, which isnt there is case of theatrical releases. For instance, Jubilee, even after 20 years, if somebody wants to watch the show, they can watch it.

Not censorship, but there has to be a way similar to television. The small screen has some rules and regulations. They should be for the OTT world, too. Also, the responsibility lies with the makers about the content they put out. However, I feel that phase has gone. Initially, it was [all] about sex and violence, which is not the case any more, at least not as much as it was earlier. Thats the reason why people are now watching [shows such as] Rocket Boys, Jubilee or Scam 1992. Audiences have also started watching content from a different perspective, which is great.

OTT reaches out to a wider audience base. The vision is the same as television, though it will take some more time to get there.
Security forces in Manipur have recovered 11,763 pieces of ammunition, 896 weapons and 200 bombs so far, security adviser to the state government Kuldiep Singh said on Thursday, roughly a week after personnel started a combing operation to retrieve weapons stolen by mobs during clashes that roiled the state last month. Security personnel conduct Joint Combing Operations in sensitive areas both the Hills and Valley sectors of Manipur on Thursday. (Pitamber Newar)

Read here: After three days of fragile peace, fresh attack hits Manipur

Though no official estimate of the quantum of weapons stolen exists, officials had earlier said that at least 500,000 pieces of ammunition, including grenades and mortars, and around 3,500 weapons were stolen in the riot-hit state.

Local residents started returning weapons roughly a week ago, after a June 1 appeal from Union home minister Amit Shah, who visited the strife-torn state for four days last month as part of efforts to pacify tensions and reach settlements between sparring groups.

Between then and June 8, officials recovered 144 weapons, while 750 were recovered before Shahs visit, the officials cited above added.

Senior officials in the Manipur administration said they were confident of recovering a bulk of the stolen weapons, taken largely by rioting mobs. However, they warned that the entire process will take time, as clashes continued between Kukis and Meiteis, the two main warring communities. We will be successful in recovering all the items. It will happen eventually, said a state official, requesting anonymity.

Another official said the armys recovery efforts were guided by technical inputs, as well as intelligence from informants. The combing operation is carried out in pockets after receiving intelligence. It is not that every house is checked, the second official said.

Since May 3, the northeastern state has been roiled by ethnic clashes largely between the Meitei and Kuki communities. At least 105 people have died, over 300 injured and nearly 40,000 displaced.

A third official said the recovery process may be protracted because some weapons were stolen by residents unaffiliated with militant groups.

Read here: CBI forms SIT, files 6 FIRs to probe Manipur violence

Even people who have no record or have links to militant groups took the ammunition taking advantage of being in a mob when violence was at its peak. Because the incidents of violence are still happening, it is possible most are not surrendering them, said the official.

The stolen ammunitions included grenades, mortars and grenade launchers, said the official. It is likely that the state administration will take stern steps if people do not recover the weaponIt may lead to passports being cancelled, their names removed from government programmes, or monetary losses recovered from them, the third official added.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Prawesh Lama Prawesh Lama covers crime, policing, and issues of security in Delhi. Raised in Darjeeling, educated in Mumbai, he also looks at special features on social welfare in the National Capital. ...view detail
At least 127 residents  including 88 children  fell sick allegedly after drinking water supplied to their apartment complex by a water tanker supply service in Electronic City on Monday, officials said on Friday. A team from Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike health department visited the residential society to take stock of the situation after the residents complained of sickness. (HT Archives)

Four children were admitted to the Motherhood Hospital in Electronic City on Tuesday after they complained of vomiting and diarrhoea, said officials of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP). Two of the kids have been discharged, while the other two will be discharged soon, officials said.

This is the fourth such incident in Karnataka in a month. On May 24, a three-year-old died and 26 people fell ill after drinking contaminated water in Rekalmardi village in Raichur district, officials said. Chief minister Siddaramaiah had taken serious note of the incident and directed officials to take immediate measures for proper treatment.

On Thursday, a nine-year-old girl died after she was rushed to the hospital due to vomiting and diarrhoea, caused by drinking contaminated water in Koppal district, officials said. On June 5, a nine-month-old infant and a 60-year-old woman died following consumption of contaminated water in Basarihala village in the district.

On Monday, residents of the Mahaveer Ranches apartment complex, which has 1,000 flats, on Hosa Road complained of sickness, following which a team from BBMP health department visit the residential society to take stock of the situation, officials said.

The apartment building  which is still under construction  has been involved in a dispute between the builder and the apartment owners about the provision of facilities, officials said, adding that the apartment complex uses water for daily needs from four borewells, along with private tankers.

According to BBMP officials, the apartment which is still under construction, has disputes between the builder and the apartment owners about the provision of facilities. The apartment uses water from four borewells, along with private tankers.

They are getting water through the four borewells which are on the premises. This water is being used for drinking and other purposes. If there is dearth of borewell water, the residents are supplied water through tankers. The residents were supplied with tanker water on June 5 ( Monday) and that night several people started complaining of vomiting and diarrhoea, said chief health officer, BBMP, Dr AS Balasundar.

On the morning of June 6, some children also complained of vomiting and diarrhea. The authorities were alerted after this, and we rushed to the spot. Over 120 residents including 88 children and 39 adults have been affected. Of these, four are admitted to the hospital. Two were discharged yesterday and two more will be discharged soon, Balasundar said.

BBMP officials said, authorities have cleared all the water from the tankers and chlorination of the supply line has been done at the apartment. We are also supplying water to the apartment complex temporarily, he added.

BBMP has meanwhile filed a complaint against the builder at Parappana Agrahara police station, alleging that the water tank was not cleaned. An FIR has been registered under sections 277 (fouling water of public spring or reservoir), 338 (causing grievous hurt by act endangering life or personal safety of others) and others of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

Balasundar said that the situation is currently under control. It is usually due to bacterial contamination. We have sent samples to the lab for testing. No new cases have been reported in the past 48 hours. We have also opened a clinic at the apartment and all doctors including general physicians are there to assist them in case of further complication or rise in cases.

Doctors pointed out that contaminated water can lead to various gastrointestinal infections and urged residents to take precautionary measures while consuming water.

Dr Prashanth P N, Consultant- Gastroenterologist at Manipal Hospital, said that contaminated water can transmit bacteria, virus and protozoa leading to various gastrointestinal infections. Infected persons usually presents with pain abdomen, loose stools, fever and vomiting. Sometimes these infections are fatal due to severe dehydration leading to hypovolemia and septic shock.

Dr. Basavaraj Kuntoji, Consultant - Internal Medicine, Manipal Hospital said that prevention is mainly by drinking portable water and wherever it is not possible or there is doubt about clean potable water, one needs to boil the water, cool it, and then drink it. I would advise them to use water filters which are present in most of our homes, but these water filters should be regularly checked with respect to their filtration, Dr Kuntoji said.
Three people were killed and at least one injured in the fresh flare-up in a tribal Kuki-dominated village in ethnic violence-hit Manipur on Friday, people aware of the matter said. Security forces conducting a combing operation in Manipur on Friday. (ANI)

A police officer said that two people died at the spot while the third succumbed to injuries later. We are yet to reach the village..., the officer said. He added the bodies will be sent for autopsy.

A leader of the Indigenous Tribal Leaders Forum (ITLF), a conglomerate of Kuki groups in the Churachandpur district, said the attackers were dressed in olive green fatigues.

The villagers assumed that security personnel were there to conduct a combing operation. They co-operated and moved away to let the security forces perform their duty but suddenly the village was attacked, said the leader, speaking on condition of anonymity. He added security personnel patrolling nearby rushed to the scene and triggered a gunfight.

Two attackers on a motorcycle separately hurled a grenade at the house of ruling Bharatiya Janata Party lawmaker S Kebi in the Imphal West district late on Thursday. The gate of the house was damaged but no one was injured in the incident.

At least 105 people have died and another 40,000 displaced since violence between the tribal Kukis, who mostly reside in the hill districts, and the Meiteis, the dominant community in Imphal Valley, erupted on May 3.

The violence was triggered during a protest against a court order for granting scheduled tribe status to Meities. Violence quickly engulfed the state. The authorities clamped a curfew and suspended the internet. Additional security forces were rushed to the state amid spiraling clashes but tensions simmered.

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NEW DELHI: Air India cancelled its Mumbai-bound flight from San Francisco due to an unforeseen technical issue after an eight-hour delay, the airline said on Friday. An Air India flight halts at the San Francisco International Airport (PTI File Photo)

Read here: Air India announces refunds, vouchers as 216 passengers reach San Francisco

People familiar with the matter said the Air India flight AI 180 was scheduled to depart at about 9pm on Thursday from San Francisco (Friday, 9.30am IST) and was to land in Mumbai at around 2.50am. The flight was first delayed citing technical reasons and was later cancelled, leaving the passengers stranded at the boarding gate.

Air India flight AI180, scheduled to operate from San Francisco (SFO) to Mumbai (BOM) on 8 June 2023, was cancelled due to an unforeseen technical issue. Affected guests have been offered the option of alternative flights or a full refund for the cancelled flight, an Air India spokesperson said.

We will also reimburse all expenses that our guests may incur towards hotel accommodation and transportation until they take flight, the spokesperson added.

However, passengers took to social media to express their anger.

A passengers relative Kajal Brahmkstri said in a post on Twitter: @airindia my sister is stranded @ SFO airport for her flight which after a wait of almost 8 hours at the airport stands cancelled. You guys issue a notice asking for customers to reschedule their flight by giving a full refund. My sister managed to do so but now you are refusing. This is such a torture. Please follow your set of rules mentioned on the notice given to customers. And issue whatever refund required (sic)

Read here: Air India flight carrying stranded passengers from Russias Magadan lands in SFO

Officials close to the matter said that the flight was cancelled due to issues with one of the tyres of the aircraft.

The airline, in a communication to the passengers, asked the passengers to book themselves on their own but assured full refund. ..We assure you that we will reimburse the fare in case you book yourself on another airline. In this case the refund of the Air India ticket will be the difference of the fares, the internal communication accessed by HT read.

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In the last 24 hours, the Manipur Police has recovered 57 arms, 1,588 ammunition and 23 bombs in Imphal East, Kakching, Tengnoupal and Bishnupur districts of Manipur. Security personnel display recovered snatched weapons during a Joint Combing Operations in sensitive areas both the Hills and Valley sectors of Manipur on Thursday.(ANI)

New agency ANI reported that so far a total of 953 arms, 13,351 ammunitions and 223 bombs of different kinds have been recovered.

The move came after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) under DIG-rank officer and registered six cases to probe the ethnic clashes in Manipur.

CBI forms special team to investigate Manipur violence

Home minister Amit Shah, during his recent visit to the state, had announced a CBI probe to investigate six FIRs -- five on alleged criminal conspiracy and one on general conspiracy behind the violence.

Three people were killed and at least one injured in a fresh flare-up at a tribal Kuki-dominated village on Friday, people aware of the matter said.

Manipur violence

The move comes amid reports of at least 105 deaths and another 40,000 displaced since violence between the tribal Kukis and the Meiteis, the dominant community in Imphal Valley, erupted on May 3.

The violence was triggered during a protest against a court order for granting scheduled tribe status to Meities. The authorities later imposed a curfew and banned the internet.

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Birsa Munda, the legendary freedom fighter, social reformer and a revered tribal leader sacrificed his life for the nation on this day in 1900. Hailing from the Munda tribe, he had spearheaded the tribal indigenous religious millenarian movement and his determination and will power remains an inspiration for the people across the country. June 9 marks the death anniversary of Birsa Munda, an iconic freedom fighter and social reformer.

On the occasion of his 123rd death anniversary, Birsa Munda was commemorated by the politicians and the common people alike, as posts remembering his invaluable contribution to the freedom struggle and the emancipation of the tribal people were widely shared on social media platforms.

Leaders including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren, as well social media handles of several political parties including the Bharatiya Janata Party, Congress and others paid tribute to the leader.

Taking to Twitter, PM Modi remembered the leader's sacrifice and said, a grateful nation will always remember his dedication and service for the upliftment of the tribal community.

Rahul Gandhi paid his tributes in a tweet in Hindi saying, Tributes to the great freedom fighter and revered hero of tribal society, Bhagwan Birsa Munda Ji on his death anniversary. Their courage and sacrifice will continue to inspire the entire nation to fight against injustice. Similar sentiments were poured by Kejriwal, Union minister of tribal affairs Arjun Munda and other leaders.

Birsa Munda, born on November 15, 1875, hailed from Khunti in Jharkhand. In 2021, the government declared that the day of his birth anniversary would be observed as Janjatiya Gaurav Divas  a day dedicated to remembering the tribal freedom fighters of India.

The 19th century leader is often referred to as Bhagwan. He gave a call for Ulgulan (Revolt) to the tribal people and encouraged them to embrace their roots and unify in a bid to break away from the shackles of British colonial rule. He was arrested by the British government in March 1900 and was imprisoned in the Ranchi central jail, where he died on June 9 at the age of 25 years.

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New Delhi: Its an anniversary that came and went almost unnoticed. In early 1998, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was formed. And it came to power in March that year, after the general elections. PREMIUM The SAD walked out of the NDA in 2020 in protest against the proposed farm laws which were subsequently retracted by the Modi government (PTI)

Read here: 'Nitish will do same to Modi': Tejashwi's big claim ahead of Lok Sabha polls

Now, 25 years later, there appears to be an effort to bring back some of the original constituents of the alliance  not out of sentimentalism, but the cold calculus of electoral logic. Which would also mean that the opposition parties arent the only ones working on a grouping. HT has learnt that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the core and leader of the NDA, has been talking to the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), both constituents of the original alliance that have since exited it.

The TDP left the NDA in 2018 and the SAD exited the grouping in 2020. The SAD, in fact, was one of the earliest allies of the BJP  from 1996. HT learns that at Prime Minister Narendra Modis request, talks are being conducted by Union home minister Amit Shah along with party president JP Nadda and organisation head BL Santhosh. HT also learns that the BJP has reached out or plans to reach out to other constituents of the original NDA.

Last weekend TDP chief N Chandrababu Naidu met Shah, although neither side issued a statement on what transpired.

But a BJP office-bearer confirmed that the party is in talks with potential allies, although this person added that it is too early to say anything . The discussions began earlier in the year, ahead of the 25th anniversary, stalled during the Karnataka elections, but have picked up pace since, said the person quoted above. A joint event to mark the anniversary belatedly may happen, the BJP office bearer added.

To be sure, that will require the presence of at least a handful of parties, some of whom are now markedly in opposition to the BJP. The 1998 NDA had, among others, the Shiv Sena, the Bjiu Janata Dal, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the Samata Party that merged to create the Janata Dal (United), the Haryana Vikas Party that merged with the Congress, the TDP, the Akalis, and even the Trinamool Congress.

All told, there were 20 constituents in the NDA then, including the BJP. Today, though NDA still has 16constituents, only two major parties from that day remain -- the AIADMK and the Shiv Sena (minus the Uddhav Thackeray faction).

If the BJP manages to convince some of its erstwhile partners to return, the leader said, it could announce a proper revival of the NDA  perhaps on the death anniversary of Vajpayee on August 16, or in October, closer to the state polls later this year. Alliances are unlikely to matter in the four state elections scheduled towards the end of 2023. Three are direct contests between the BJP and the Congress.

Read here: Number theory: Charts that explain NDA govts tax performance

The BJP won 282 seats on its own in 2014, and the NDA together, 336; in 2019, the BJP won 303 and the NDA 352. The numbers indicate that the BJP doesnt really need allies any more. But political scientist Sandeep Shastri said the objective behind BJPs move may be linked to recent events, particularly the electoral setback in Karnataka.

Does the BJP see that the developments in the recent past have put it on the back foot? Are they apprehensive about the strike rate not being achieved and they need more allies? Or is it a strategy to prevent their former allies from going over to the other side? he said.

An office-bearer of SAD confirmed that there have been talks between the BJP and his party. It cant be taken for granted that we will go back to the NDA, this person added. There are many issues to be sorted out like the issue of the split in the SGPC. Till these issues are sorted out, nothing is for certain.

The SAD walked out of the NDA in 2020 in protest against the proposed farm laws which were subsequently retracted by the Modi government.

The SAD was shrouded in an internal rift last year and had to expel Bibi Jagir Kaur from the party as she refused to back down from her decision of contesting the SGPC presidential poll after the party fielded incumbent Harjinder Singh Dhami for the post . The party also wants the Centre to push for a review of the Haryana Sikh Gurdwara Committee Act, 2014, which was brought in by the Hooda government, as they feel that it interferes with the committees work.

What we understand is that some of the parties that were with Atalji are being invited to come back to NDA. You can already see the plan in motion as many were present at the new Parliament opening, said a person aware of details. The reopening of Parliament was attended by 25 parties which other than the NDA, had the Biju Janata Dal, the TDP, the Sena rebel faction, the Akalis, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party (YSRCP). Interestingly, the BJP has also been speaking to the Janata Dal (S), a party formed by HD Deve Gowda when he split from the Lok Shakti Party, one of the original founders of the NDA. His logic at the time was that he wanted to stay equidistant from both the BJP and the Congress.

The BJP-led NDA has seen the exit of many parties, but while it has 16 members now (including the BJP), many are small regional formations. A new grouping, analysts said, could address this criticism.

Read here: Govts achievements strengthened peoples faith in Narendra Modi

The NDA of 1998 and the NDA of 2014 onwards are very different. The one of 1998 was the one where BJP didnt have a majority but made it up with allies. The BJP of 2014 didnt need but accommodated allies. Their outreach right now, ahead of 2024, may be for states where they are willing to be a junior partner like Andhra Pradesh and even Punjab, said Shastri.
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The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday re-registered six First Information Reports (FIR) and set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to look into criminal conspiracy, as it took over the probe into Manipurs ethnic violence that has claimed 105 lives since May 3, officials familiar with the matter said. Security personnel during a combing operation in Manipur. (PTI)

Read here: After three days of fragile peace, fresh attack hits Manipur

Nearly 40,000 people have also been displaced in the clashes between the tribal Kukis, who mostly reside in the hill districts, and the Meiteis, the dominant community in Imphal Valley.

During his visit to the northeastern state last week, Union home minister Amit Shah announced a CBI probe into six of the 3,700 FIRs lodged in connection with the violence. The cases to be taken up include five on criminal conspiracy and one on general conspiracy behind the clashes.

Confirming the development, a CBI spokesperson said on Friday: CBI has today registered six cases transferred by the state of Manipur pertaining to incidents of large-scale violence leading to destruction and looting of properties, arson, looting/snatching of arms/ammunition, loss of human lives etc. in various districts of Manipur.

A Special Investigation Team (SIT) has also been constituted for a thorough probe in the said six cases and to unearth criminal conspiracy behind the unfortunate incidents, he added.

A deputy inspector general (DIG)-rank officer is set to lead the 10-member SIT that will look into all aspects related to the conspiracy behind over month-long violence, a CBI officer familiar with the matter said.

Clashes between the Kukis and Meiteis first erupted on May 3 during a protest against a court-ordered tweak to the states reservation matrix, granting scheduled tribe (ST) status to the latter. Violence quickly engulfed the state where ethnic fault lines run deep, displacing tens of thousands of people who fled burning homes and neighbourhoods into jungles, often across state borders.

The authorities clamped a curfew and suspended internet, pumping in additional security forces to force a break in the spiraling clashes. Internet is still not back in the state.

Read here: 11,763 ammo, 896 weapons, 200 bombs recovered in Manipur: Singh

But tensions were simmering for much longer, owing to the state governments decision to exit the tripartite accord and move against some forest dwelling groups it termed as encroachers.

On June 4, the Union government formed a three-member judicial inquiry panel to probe the ethnic violence in Manipur on the recommendation of the state government.

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The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) under DIG-rank officer and registered six cases to probe the ethnic clashes in Manipur, news agency PTI reported. Security forces conducting a combing operation in Manipur on Friday. (ANI)(HT_PRINT)

Home minister Amit Shah, during his recent visit to the state, had announced a CBI probe to investigate six FIRs -- five on alleged criminal conspiracy and one on general conspiracy behind the violence.

Three people were killed and at least one injured in a fresh flare-up at a tribal Kuki-dominated village on Friday, people aware of the matter said.

The move comes amid reports of at least 105 deaths and another 40,000 displaced since violence between the tribal Kukis and the Meiteis, the dominant community in Imphal Valley, erupted on May 3.

The violence was triggered during a protest against a court order for granting scheduled tribe status to Meities. The authorities later imposed a curfew and banned the internet.

At least 35 weapons were recovered on Friday during joint combing operations by security forces, PTI reported quoting an official.

Earlier on Friday, the Supreme Court refused to urgently hear a petition challenging the internet shutdown order in the northeastern state. When the high court is already seized of the matter, why duplicate the plea here? said a vacation bench of justices Aniruddha Bose and Rajesh Bindal.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma will meet his Manipur counterpart N Biren Singh and others on Saturday in the backdrop of the ongoing tense situation in the state.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR HT News Desk Follow the latest breaking news and developments from India and around the world with Hindustan Times' newsdesk. From politics and policies to the economy and the environment, from local issues to national events and global affairs, we've got you covered. ...view detail
The 56-year-old man in suburban Mumbai accused of killing his live-in partner and hacking her body into pieces offered contradicting stories to the police. Manoj Sane initially claimed that his partner, Saraswati Vaidya, had died by suicide by consuming poison on June 3 and he only tried to get rid of the body fearing he might be charged with abetment. Manoj Sane, 56, has been remanded to police custody till June 16.(Azim Tamboli)

Sane tried to dispose of the body by hacking it into so many pieces that the police couldnt pin a number and then boiling some of them, roasting others, grounding some more in a mixer and feeding them to stray dogs. The accused told the police that he boiled the body parts in a pressure cooker to avoid the stench.

During the interrogation, Sane also said he had decided to end his life after disposing of the body and doesn't regret any of it, reported ANI quoting police.

Police said they are verifying his suicide claim as they have doubts about it.

Investigation is underway and the pieces of the body recovered from the house have been sent to JJ Hospital for postmortem. We have doubts about his claim of suicide, police said.

Sane, however, later told police that the two of them had had a fight as he suspected her of infidelity, and he stabbed her with a knife and then used the electric saw to cut her up.

On Thursday, the police gathered Vaidyas body parts in multiple polythene bags and sent them to JJ Hospital for post-mortem to ascertain the cause and time of her death, said Jayant Bajbale, deputy commissioner of police, Mira-Bhayander.

The crime has brought the spotlight on the growing number of cases involving violence against women at the hands of their intimate partners. The chairperson of the National Commission for Women, meanwhile, expressed concern over the recent surge in such spine-chilling killings and said that people are taking clues from past incidents to commit such heinous crimes.

"I have seen people now taking clues from past incidents which are very gruesome and heinous. These kinds of crimes against live-in partners have increased in the recent past. Society needs to think about how to control it, especially the families of both, and how we are raising our children who are doing such crimes," NCW Chairperson Rekha Sharma told ANI.

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A man travelling to Dubai was arrested at Delhi airport on Thursday evening after he was overheard referring to a 'bomb' in his bag. Vistara flight(HT Photo)

The man was taken into custody by the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) from on board a Delhi-Mumbai Vistara flight after a female co-passenger said she overheard him saying 'bomb' during a telephone conversation.

The incident happened at 4.55 pm and the flight was delayed by two hours.

A senior police official said the passenger was travelling to Dubai and had been speaking to his mother. The official said the passenger had told his mother that the airport security had stopped him from carrying a coconut in his bag for fear it could contain explosives.

The female co-passenger panicked on hearing the word 'bomb' and raised an alarm.

Both passengers were then deboarded and the plane was checked thoroughly but nothing was found. The male passenger was then handed over to local police officials.

With input from ANI
The protesting wrestlers seeking action against former Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh over alleged harassment charges did not make hate speeches or commit any cognisable offence, the Delhi Police told a local court on Friday. The wrestlers camped at New Delhis protest site Jantar Mantar for 38 days. (PTI)

The police filed an action taken report before the court in response to one Bam Bam Maharaj Nauhatiyas criminal complaint seeking a First Information Report (FIR) against top wrestlers Vinesh Phogat, Bajrang Punia, and Sakshi Malik for alleged hate speech and making false allegations against Singh.

In his complaint, Nauhatiya said slogans raised against Prime Minister Narendra Modi at New Delhis protest site Jantar Mantar constituted hate speech while seeking a high-level investigation. He added allegations made against Singh are wrong and practically unfeasible and that it is hard to believe that the wrestlers were harassed by a 66-year-old man.

The police cited a video the complainant provided and said the wrestlers did not raise slogans or make hate speeches at Jantar Mantar while urging the court to dismiss Nauhatiyas plea. The court, which listed the plea for further arguments on July 7, on May 25 sought the report from the police on it.

From the contents of the complaint and video clip provided by the complainant, no cognizable offence of hate speech is made out. The protester wrestlers...are not seen raising any such slogan in this clip, the report said.

It cited the scrutiny of the video clip and said some unknown Sikh protestors were seen raising slogans against Modi at Jantar Mantar.

The court on May 25 agreed to hear the matter and sought the report from the Delhi Police. The complainant told the court that hate speeches made at Jantar Mantar against Modi and Singh prompted him to file two police complaints.

The wrestlers on Wednesday suspended their protest until June 15 following a six-hour meeting with Union minister Anurag Thakur after a months-long deadlock in talks. They said the government agreed on issues including the withdrawal of all criminal cases against them. Thakur said police will file a charge sheet against Singh by June 15.

Singh, a Bharatiya Janata Party parliamentarian who headed WFI for 12 years, faces charges of sexual harassment of athletes, including at least one minor.

The wrestlers camped at Jantar Mantar for 38 days demanding Singhs immediate arrest until the Delhi Police uprooted their tents there on May 28. They were manhandled, stopped, and detained as they sought to march to the new Parliament building during its inauguration that day.

The wrestlers later held off on immersing their medals in the Ganga as part of their protest against Singh and broke down in a huddle played out on live television.
The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) on Friday said that temperatures in Delhi are set to soar in the coming days. The weather agency has forecast drier days and clear skies ahead for the national capital. Though no heatwave warning has been issued, isolated places may face it. People make their way through a street on a hot sunny day in the old quarters of New Delhi.(AFP)

Monsoon predictions

According to the IMD, the southwest monsoon will advance further into Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the next 48 hours. Due to a low-pressure area over the northeast Bay of Bengal, northeastern states will also receive monsoon showers in the next two days.

The Met offices extended range model guidance shows improved rainfall activity in northwest India in the fourth week of June and the first week of July.

Know weather updates for next 5 days in these regions:

Northeast India:

Manipur, Mizoram, and Tripura will likely witness heavy downpour on Friday while the region will experience rainfall with thunderstorms and lightning in the coming week.

Heavy rainfall has been predicted over Assam and Meghalaya on Monday and Tuesday. Manipur and Mizoram will have similar weather conditions on Saturday and Monday.

South India:

Kerala and coastal Karnataka will experience heavy rains during the next three days, while similar conditions will prevail over Lakshadweep in the next two days.

Overall, the region will witness rainfall with thunderstorms, lightning, and gusty winds in the next week.

East India:

Extremely heavy downpour lasting from Sunday to Tuesday will occur over Sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim. Andaman and Nicobar islands will receive significant rainfall from Friday to Sunday. The rest of India will not undergo any drastic weather changes in the coming week, IMD added.

Heatwaves

The central regions of India will witness a drop in maximum temperatures by 2-3C in the next two days. Certain parts of Bihar will face severe heat waves from Friday till Tuesday. The region over Gangetic West Bengal will also experience similar conditions during the same days.

Odisha, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh may experience heat waves for the next three days while Sub-Himalayan West Bengal, Sikkim, Andhra Pradesh will face the same on Friday and Saturday.

Delhi weather

The national capital's primary weather station, Safdarjung Observatory, recorded a minimum of 27.3 degrees Celsius on Friday, normal for this time of the year. The maximum temperature is likely to settle around 41 degrees Celsius.

Strong surface winds during the day and very light rains are likely at night.

The monsoon hit the Indian mainland on Thursday, with the IMD declaring onset over Kerala a week after the usual date of June 1.

(With inputs from PTI)

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A special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in Hyderabad on Friday dismissed the petition of Y S Bhaskar Reddy, father of YSR Congress party MP from Kadapa Y S Avinash Reddy, seeking bail in a case related to the murder of former Andhra Pradesh minister Y S Vivekananda Reddy, people familiar with the matter said. YSRCP MP YS Avinash Reddy speaks with the media as he arrives at CBI office in connection with Vivekananda Reddy murder case (PTI)

The CBI court agreed with the arguments of the CBI counsel and Vivekananda Reddys daughter Narreddy Sunitha that granting bail to Bhaskar Reddy at this crucial stage might create hurdles in the investigation into the murder case.

The CBI counsel argued that there was enough evidence to prove that Bhaskar Reddy was a co-conspirator in the murder case of Vivekananda Reddy. He explained in detail how there was a possibility of Bhaskar Reddy tampering with the evidence and influencing the witnesses.

The CBI has already named Bhaskar Reddy as accused no. 7 (A-7) in the Vivekananda Reddy murder case. On June 3, it also named Avinash Reddy as A-8, stating that he was also a co-conspirator in the case, mainly in destroying the evidence after the murder.

At a time when the investigation is at a crucial stage, granting bail to Bhaskar Reddy will affect the prosecution, the CBI counsel argued.

On June 1, Bhaskar Reddy filed a petition in the CBI court, seeking bail on health grounds, as he had been suffering from heart ailments and hypotension.

Bhaskar Reddy, who was arrested by the CBI authorities from his residence at Pulivendula in Kadapa town on April 16, had been lodged in Chanchalguda jail on judicial remand. On May 26, he fell sick due to a sudden drop in blood pressure.

After being examined at Osmania General Hospital, he was shifted to the Nizams Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS) for specialised treatment for heart ailments. He is presently undergoing treatment at the NIMS.

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The Special Investigation Team (SIT) of Hyderabad Police on Friday filed a preliminary charge sheet in a local court in connection with the leakage of question papers of various recruitment examinations conducted by the Telangana State Public Service Commission (TSPSC). YSRTP president YS Sharmila speaks to police as they stopped her from holding a protest over the alleged TSPSC paper leak. (ANI)

Additional commissioner of police (crimes) A R Srinivas, who is heading the SIT probing the TSPSC question paper leak case, said 49 persons were arrested in the case, and another individual, who was involved in the case, was still at large, residing in New Zealand.

The total money transacted in buying and selling various TSPSC question papers is around 1.63 crore. All the material evidence seized during the arrest of the accused persons was sent to Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), Ramanthapur. After obtaining forensic experts opinion and also legal opinion, a preliminary charge sheet was filed on Friday in the jurisdictional court, Srinivas said.

Srinivas said the question paper leakage surfaced following a complaint from TSPSC assistant secretary Satyanarayana, and a case was registered in the Begum Bazar police station. The case was later transferred to the Central Crime Station, Hyderabad.

During the investigation, it was revealed that an assistant section officer in TSPSC, Pulidindi, Praveen Kumar (accused no. 1), who is also a personal assistant TSPSC Secretary, along with an outsourcing employee Atla Raja Shekar, who was working as a system and network administrator in the TSPSC, were the main conspirators in the case.

They gained unauthorized access to the confidential sections computer, which stored and compiled question papers for various exams. They downloaded and copied the question papers of Group-I, Divisional Accounts Officer (DAO), Assistant Executive Engineer (AEE), and Assistant Engineer (AE) exams onto their pen drives. Subsequently, they shared these question papers with multiple candidates through intermediaries to make illicit profits.

The investigation revealed that among the 49 persons arrested in the case, 16 persons were identified as mediators. They provided the AEE question paper to 7 candidates, the AE question paper to 13 candidates and the DAO question paper to 8 candidates.

Additionally, three of the four accused TSPSC employees  Pulidindi Praveen Kumar, Shameem and Damera Ramesh Kumar), had written the Group-I examination, and the fourth accused employee Atla Raja Shekar acted as a mediator.

Besides, one more person, Nalagoppula Suresh, a former outsourced employee of the TSPSC wrote the Group-I exam. Furthermore, three candidates were apprehended for engaging in malpractice during the AEE exam by using a battery-operated device, the SIT chief added.

On May 27, the SIT authorities arrested Poola Ramesh, a divisional engineer with Telangana State Northern Power Distribution Company Limited (TSNPDCL) at Peddapalli, who had allegedly purchased question papers of three examinations and sold them to at least 80 people.

During the interrogation of Ramesh, the SIT authorities found that for two of the examinations for recruitment of AEE and DAO, held on January 22 and February 26, respectively, he had arranged answers to some of the candidates using ChatGPT and electronic devices.

At least seven candidates had entered the examination hall carrying micro-Bluetooth devices, through which Ramesh had allegedly shared the answers, which he had obtained using ChatGPT, a police official familiar with the matter said, adding that the SIT authorities were questioning the examiner, who allegedly helped the candidates enter the hall carrying electronic devices and captured the images of the question paper and sending it to Ramesh through WhatsApp.

Meanwhile, Telangana high court on Thursday refused to grant an interim stay on the conduct of the re-examination of Group-I prelims, scheduled to be held on June 11. Acting on a petition filed by as many as 36 Group-I aspirants, the court issued notices to the respondents, including the TSPSC, to file a counter and posted the case for hearing on June 20.

The Group-1 prelims exams of the TSPSC were originally held on October 16, 2022, but when the SIT probe revealed that the question paper was leaked, the TSPSC cancelled the exam. Subsequently, it was rescheduled for June 11.

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India has a much higher burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and dyslipidemia, a cross-sectional and population-based survey of 33,537 people aged over 20 in urban and 79,506 in rural areas across 31 states and Union Territories has found. The study was published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal on Thursday. (Shutterstock)

The study published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal on Thursday found the overall weighted prevalence of diabetes was 114%, 153% prediabetes, 355% hypertension and abdominal obesity a risk factor for diabetes 39.5%.

The survey of 1,13,043 individuals used a stratified and multistage sampling design and found urban regions had higher rates of all metabolic NCDs than rural areas, with the exception of prediabetes.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the Union health and family welfare ministry funded the study conducted by Dr Mohans Diabetes Specialities Centre (DMDSC).

Dr V Mohan, DMDSC chairman and the senior author of the study, said the survey results have multiple implications for the planning and provision of health care in India. State governments in India, which are primarily in charge of providing healthcare in their respective regions, will be especially interested in the detailed state-level data on these NCDs. He added it will allow the state governments to develop evidence-based interventions to successfully halt the progression of NCDs and manage their complications.

DMDSC managing director and Madras Diabetes Research Foundation president RM Anjana the in-depth report is likely to have a huge impact on the healthcare policies for the country-specific to NCDs. The findings of this study are very significant as they provide robust estimates of NCDs for the nation.

Anjana said that compared to earlier estimates, India has a substantially greater prevalence of metabolic NCDs. In India, the diabetes epidemic is in transition, with some states having already reached their peak rates while others are just getting started.

Anjana said the study also demonstrates that despite the fact that all metabolic NCDs are more common in urban regions, rural areas have significantly greater prevalence rates than that reported previously.

The study found diabetes is still increasing in most other states while it is stabilising in the more developed ones. It underlined serious implications for the nation, warranting urgent state-specific policies and interventions to arrest the rapidly rising epidemic of metabolic NCDs in India.

Dr RS Dhaliwal, who heads ICMRs non-communicable disease division, said it is quite evident from the study results that India has a substantial population at risk of cardiovascular disease and other long-term organ complications due to metabolic NCDs.
Indias big defence indigenisation push has brought into focus how the country was thus far importing even basic items such as aircraft paint, cargo nets and slings for helicopters, anti-collision lights for fighter jets, landing lights for trainer aircraft and LED lights for warships, which now figure on a list of hundreds of military components that are being made in India, people aware of the matter said on Friday. India has set a defence export target of  35,000 crore by 2024-25. (PTI File Photo)

Read here: India draws a line in the sand

These are small steps on the long road to indigenisation that is being pursued by the defence ministry through a layered approach focusing on both big defence platforms and their smaller parts and components.

We cant be building fighter jets but importing aircraft grade paint or manufacturing helicopters but depending on foreign sources for cargo nets or building warships but not LED lights for flight deck applications, said one of the officials cited above, asking not to be named.

These items are among the 4,666 including replacement units, subsystems, spares and components that have been placed under a phased import ban by the defence ministry which has published four positive indigenisation lists during the last one and a half years. The fourth list of 928 items was published in May.

Of these, 2,736 items have been indigenised so far in a fresh push for self-reliance and the remaining will be manufactured in India in line with the prescribed timelines between December 2023 and December 2029. These items are used in military platforms including fighter planes, helicopters, trainer aircraft, warships, tanks, infantry combat vehicles, high-mobility trucks, defence electronics and different types of ammunition.

Other items that are now being manufactured in the country include missile approach warning sensors for helicopters, laser warning systems for armoured fighting vehicles, firefighting systems for warships, electronic warfare systems, and naval fire control systems, the officials said.

The indigenisation has been achieved by various defence public sector undertakings either through industry partners, including micro, small & medium enterprises (MSMEs), or in-house, said another official. The total import substitution value of the 2,736 items indigenised so far stands at 2,570 crore, according to defence ministry data.

Read here: India, US are firming up a counter to China

In India, the private sector has been making components for foreign military contractors for years. The expertise is there, and it is high time that it is tapped to power the indigenisation drive at the lower end of the spectrum, which is subsystems, spares and components, while simultaneously focusing on the big platforms. Theres immense scope to further expand the two types of positive indigenisation lists, said Air Marshal Anil Chopra (retd), director general, Centre for Air Power Studies.

India has employed a two-pronged approach to achieve indigenisation through import bans.

One approach relates to banning the import of platforms such as fighter jets, warships, helicopters and artillery guns, while the other covers sub-systems, spares and components.

As part of the former, India has published four other lists that have imposed a phased import ban on 411 different types of weapons and platforms including light weight tanks, naval utility helicopters, artillery guns, missiles, destroyers, ship-borne cruise missiles, light combat aircraft (LCA), light transport aircraft, long-range land-attack cruise missiles, basic trainer aircraft, airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) systems, and multi-barrel rocket launchers. These platforms are expected to be indigenised during the next five to six years.

These lists were announced during the last three years --- in August 2020, May 2021, April 2022 and October 2022. Import substitution of ammunition, which is a recurring requirement, has been given special emphasis in these lists.

India has taken measures over the last four to five years to boost self-reliance in defence. Apart from a series of phased import bans, these steps include creating a separate budget for buying locally made military hardware, increasing foreign direct investment (FDI) from 49% to 74% and improving ease of doing business.

India had on May 19 announced that the value of defence production in the country crossed 1 lakh crore for the first time on the back of key reforms to spur growth in the sector. The figure stood at 1,06,800 crore in FY 2022-23 compared to 95,000 crore in FY 2021-22 and 54,951 crore five years ago.

India produces a raft of weapons and systems including the LCA, different types of helicopters, warships, tanks, artillery guns, warships, missiles, rockets and a variety of military vehicles. It is eyeing a turnover of 1,75,000 lakh crore in defence manufacturing by 2024-25.

The countrys focus is not only on cutting dependence on imports, but also on boosting exports.

Read here: No normalisation of ties without peace on LAC: EAM Jaishankar tells China

India is currently exporting military hardware to around 85 countries, with around 100 firms involved in the exports. It includes missiles, artillery guns, rockets, armoured vehicles, offshore patrol vessels, personal protective gear, a variety of radars, surveillance systems and ammunition.

India has set a defence export target of 35,000 crore by 2024-25.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rahul Singh On a perpetual voyage of learning so that I can write stories that make sense ...view detail
The Canadian town of Brampton - at the centre of a growing political storm after a parade float depicted the assassination of former prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards - is home to the largest Sikh population in any city or town in that country. Parade float depicting Indira Gandhi's assassination in Canada.

Brampton's Sikhs constitute nearly 25 per cent, or a quarter, of the town's population, according to Canadian government data. Data from the 2021 census says there are over 1.6 lakh Sikhs in Brampton, which is located in the Greater Toronto Area and in Ontario province.

Overall, Canada has the highest Sikh population outside their home state of Punjab.

Additionally, Brampton is also the town that held a 'referendum' by separatist outfit Sikhs For Justice (which is banned in India) - on the creation of a Khalistan state - in September last year. The Indian government had warned its Canadian counterpart against allowing the illegal exercise but the latter declined to interfere citing freedom of speech for those participating.

Notably, the town appointed a well-known community leader Harkirat Singh as its first ever turbaned Sikh deputy mayor last year. Previously on city Council, Singh will serve deputy to Mayor Patrick Brown till 2026.

Earlier this year the Indian government called Canada's High Commissioner to flag pro-Khalistan protesters breaching security of its diplomatic mission and consulates.

What happened in Brampton?

The controversy erupted after a video was widely circulated on social media of a parade float depicting late prime minister Indira Gandhi's assassination in Canada. The parade led by pro-Khalistan radicals was held on Sunday, days before the 39th anniversary of Operation Bluestar.

The operation, carried out by the Indian armed forces in 1984, was aimed at eliminating Damdami Taksal leader and separatist Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale and his supporters from the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Three months after the military operation, Indira Gandhi was assassinated on October 31. The viral video depicted the incident, showing the late PM and her killers. The parade also had a sign that said the assassination was revenge for attack on Shri Darbar Sahib.

Indian govt reacts strongly to controversy

Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar on Thursday condemned the Canadian governments apparent tolerance towards the rise of anti-India elements. He cited the influence of vote bank politics as a possible reason behind the PM Justin Trudeau's government's inaction and cautioned that this stance would have negative consequences for Canada's relationship with India.

On Wednesday, Indias High Commission in Ottawa also sent a formal note to Global Affairs Canada, expressing its displeasure to the Canadian government over the incident.

Canada engages in damage control

A member of parliament belonging to Canada's ruling Liberal Party, Chandra Arya, who is of Indo-Canadian descent, called for action on the incident in a tweet. He stressed that the supporters of Khalistan movement have crossed a line. He also asserted that glorification of violence and public promotion of hate goes against the values of Canada. This sentiment was also echoed by the top Canadian envoy in India Cameron MacKay, who condemned the incident on Thursday.

Taking to Twitter MacKay said, I am appalled by reports of an event in Canada that celebrated the assassination of late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. There is no place in Canada for hate or for the glorification of violence. I categorically condemn these activities."

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An Indo-Canadian Member of Parliament (MP) from the ruling Liberal Party has called for action over the depiction of the assassination of late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at an event in Canadas Greater Toronto Area, stressing that supporters of Khalistan have crossed a line. Indo-Canadian Member of Parliament Chandra Arya. (Twitter)

In a tweet on Thursday, Chandra Arya, the MP, said, Khalistan supporters in Canada have reached new low with a despicable float [depicting the assassination] in a recent Brampton parade. He added the float celebrated the assassination with her cutout in a white saree soaked in blood and cutouts of her bodyguard turned killers brandishing and pointing guns. This is not what our country Canada stands for. Tolerating glorification of violence and public promotion of hate goes against everything our country believes in. Khalistan supporters have crossed a line and Canada should and must respond.

The float depicted the assassination as revenge for Operation Bluestar, the military action Indira Gandhi ordered in 1984 to flush out separatist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale and his supporters from the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar. Other tableaux at the event featured posters of Bhindranwale and sparked anger and outrage in India.

On Thursday, external affairs minister S Jaishankar cautioned the Canadian government that the activities of Khalistani elements and violent extremists on their territory could impact bilateral relations and have security implications.

Jaishankar said the float is linked to the bigger issue of the space that Canada has continuously provided to Khalistani elements.

The remarks came after Indias high commission in Ottawa sent a note to Canadas foreign ministry on Wednesday expressing displeasure over the float.

An Indian official described the depiction as not acceptable. You cannot exceed freedom of expression like this, glorifying the assassination of the leader of a democratic nation. The message conveyed to Canada was that such a development cannot be allowed to recur.

Indo-Canadian organisations also expressed outrage. The National Alliance of Indo-Canadians tweeted, Why celebrate violence in Canada? The Overseas Friends of India Canada tweeted it was appalled by this glorification of extremism and violence.

Brampton municipal authorities granted permission for the parade, which was also a build-up towards the next phase of secessionist group Sikhs for Justices so-called Punjab Referendum in the Greater Toronto Area in July, before moving to Vancouver in September.

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The Congress party launched a blistering attack on external affairs minister S Jaishankar for targeting Rahul Gandhi over his statements criticising the Narendra Modi government abroad. Congress media and publicity department head Pawan Khera said he hopes the minister was able the block the transmission of news reports that showed the government in a poor light. Congress leader Pawan Khera and external affairs minister S Jaishankar.

I hope Mr Jaishankar was able to block the transmission of Hathras, Lakhimpur, farmers protests, wrestlers protests, news on Kathua, Unnao, Ankita Bhandari, Manipur, etc across the world, Khera said in a tweet.

In a stinging jibe at Jaishankar, the Congress functionary said, And he is supposed to be educated. Precondition to joining the Sangh brigade - travel light, leave your brains behind.

Khera was referring to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fountainhead of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Jaishankar had blasted Rahul Gandhi for his "habit of criticising India" abroad and said taking national politics out of the country is not in its interest. The minister said he does not have a problem with whatever is done within India, but asserted that taking internal issues aboard was not appropriate.

"Rahul Gandhi has a habit of criticising the country and making comments on our politics whenever he goes abroad. The world is looking at us and what the world is seeing? Elections are held in the country and sometimes one party wins and at times the other party wins," Jaishankar said at a press conference.

"If there is no democracy in the country such changes should not come....2024 ka result toh wahi hoga, hamein pata hai," the minister added.

If you see all the narratives (against the government), they are made within the country. If a narrative does not work or is less effective, then it is taken abroad. They expect that the outside support will work in India.

Reacting to Jaishankar's remarks, senior Congress Jairam Ramesh said it was Prime Minister Modi who started the practice of taking national politics outside the country.

Without naming the top BJP leader, Ramesh tweeted, The man who started the practice of taking national politics outside the country is none other than the man who gave you your ministerial position. You know it but you cannot acknowledge it Dr. Minister.

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Bengaluru Karnataka primary and secondary education minister Madhu Bangarappa said a decision will be taken soon on removal of controversial chapters in the interest of the children. (HT Archives)

Karnataka primary and secondary education minister Madhu Bangarappa on Friday said a professional committee has been formed to remove the controversial chapters introduced in school textbooks by the previous Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state, underlining that a decision will be taken soon in the interest of the children. The minister, however, refused to give details on the specific chapters that would be dropped.

BJP is so corrupt in their mind that they wanted to infuse in the system of studies which are against it. We are not doing anything for the Congress or against the BJP. We will do whatever is possible in the interest of the children. Our chief minister has clearly mentioned and we have mentioned in our manifesto also whatever corrections we are going to do, Bangarappa said.

Since the books have already reached children, there is a way to do it with the least cost. It will be done soon and will be handled by a professional team who are very well-versed with education policies and the need of the children, he added.

The Congress in its manifesto had promised to undo the changes made to school textbooks when the BJP was in power, and also promised to scrap the National Education Policy (NEP).

Last month, about 30 academicians and writers had met chief minister Siddaramaiah in Bengaluru and submitted a memorandum with demands to reform the education sector, including the controversial revisions in textbooks and ban on hijab in educational institutions.

In the memorandum submitted under the banner Samaanda Manaskara Okkoota - Karnataka, they said, The anti-constitutional, communal textbooks should be amended immediately and the bad effect on the minds of children should be prevented. The textbooks should be revised by next year.

While the education minister refused to divulge details on plans to remove some lessons from textbooks, including one on RSS founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, senior Congress leader and MLC BK Hariprasad said the government cannot keep chapters on Hedgewar who sought an apology to the British.

BJP and RSS claim that Hedgewar is a freedom fighter. If that is the case, they need to clearly tell why he gave apology letters to the British six times. Hedgewar himself has written in a book Chitragupta why he sought an apology. We cant keep stories of such cowards in our textbooks, Hariprasad said.

Last year, the revised textbooks had triggered opposition from various quarters for distortion of history and pushing a pro-Hindutva ideology. Among the objections raised include omission of chapters on social reformer Narayana Guru, freedom fighter Bhagat Singh, and works of progressive writers such as Sara Aboobacker and P Lankesh. Chapters on Hedgewar, works of right-wing ideologues such as Chakravarti Sulibele, Govinda Pai and Bannanje Govindacharya, among others, were included.

Karnataka health minister Dinesh Gundu Rao on Friday said the textbooks must contain stories of people who contributed to nation-building. IT and BT minister Priyank Kharge said the chapters which were included in an attempt to twist the history would be removed, one such chapter is written by Sulibele.

BJP national general secretary CT Ravi said the Congress government can change the syllabus but not the history. They (Congress) can change syllabus, theyre in power. But they cant change the history. Everyone knows about Sangh Parivars patriotism. Everywhere Sangh Parivaars ideology is getting stronger, that cant be changed. Our ideology is patriotism and does Congress want to eliminate patriotism and want to make this Mughalistaan? he questioned.

Never suggested complete recall of textbooks

Educationist V P Niranjanaradhya, who has been at the forefront of the agitation against the controversial revisions, clarified on Friday that the writers and academicians havent suggested the state government to go for a full revision of textbooks, but only the controversial chapters be dropped from the curriculum.

We never suggested the complete recall of textbooks. We have only suggested that an erratum be issued in both Kannada and social sciences where changes were made. Teachers will be instructed not to consider chapters or texts that are derogatory for learning and evaluation, Niranjanaradhya said.

We have given our suggestions on the chapters and texts, which have incorrect and misleading information and might have an impact on the childrens minds, to be removed. We have also urged the government to frame textbooks based on the principles outlined in section 29 of the RTE Act, so that its in place for the next 10 years, Niranjanaradhya added.

Meanwhile, as schools across Karnataka have reopened on May 31, confusion surrounds the textbook revision in some parents, while others are hopeful that the problematic chapters are dropped in the interest of the children.

The schools have started and the textbooks will be distributed soon. At this point, why are they thinking of revising the textbooks? a parent said on condition of anonymity.

Victor Hirekoppa, whose two children are in Class 1 and 6, however, denounced the saffronisation of textbooks.

My son who is studying in 1st standard used to come home and discuss about the religion of his classmates. This shows how the minds of such young children are being polluted in the name of saffronisation which is being done through textbooks and other means. It is very dangerous to the society, he said.

Children should study what is useful for them. Instead, excluding certain chapters on leaders and including those from the RSS and who are controversial is uncalled for. They are disturbing their minds. History should be something the children can learn from. It shouldnt be used to promote certain religious activities, Hirekoppa added.
Lal Bahadur Shastri was on June 2 chosen as Jawaharlal Nehrus successor. Following a formal invitation from President S Radhakrishnan to form a new government, he becomes the Prime Minister-designate. Soon after his meeting with the President, Shastri told newsmen that he expected the new government to take office on June 9. Lal Bahadur Shastri with President S Radhakrishnan. (HT Archive)

Read here: In Nehrus death, a precedent for rectitude was set

The meeting of the Congress parliamentary party at which Shastri was unanimously elected leader lasted barely 40 minutes, and was marked by an atmosphere of remarkable accord and goodwill.

Senior party leaders vied with each other in pledging their support to the new leader. Most of them appeared to do so with deep feelings. Gulzari Lal Nanda, who had proposed Shastris name for leadership, said they would stand by him through thick and thin.

Congress president K Kamaraj, who played a notable role in preventing an unseemly tussle for power, also promised him unstinted support. Others to felicitate the leader were Morarji Desai, who till last evening, was himself contending for the honour, Jagjiwan Ram, SK Patil and KC Reddy.

In a speech that he had prepared shortly before coming to the meeting, Shastri displayed characteristic simplicity and a sense of humility while thanking the party and its leaders for their confidence in him.

The hurriedly drafted speech was not intended to be a formal statement of the new governments policy, but Shastri made a brief reference in it to the need to combat our enemies, poverty and unemployment.

Shastri broke down when he came to the portion of the address relating to the great personal loss that Indira Gandhi suffered. He had to interrupt his speech for some moments and later, in a voice choked with emotion, he expressed the view that Gandhis continued associations with us will be a source of strength to us.

Within minutes of the end of the meeting, the partys deputy leader, KC Reddy, went to Rashtrapati Bhavan with a formal communication informing President Radhakrishnan of the partys choice.

The venue of the historic meeting was the Central Hall of Parliament House. It was in this hall that Indian independence was ushered in on August 15, 1947, and later the countrys Constitution was shaped and signed.

Long before the meeting was due to begin, a crowd of political workers had gathered at the gate of Parliament House to greet leaders arriving to take part in it.

Nanda proposed Shastris name while Desai supported it. Seven minutes after the meeting had been called to order, there were thunderous cheers indicating that Shastris election was through. Pressmen and photographers were then permitted to enter the hall and be present while senior Congressmen felicitated the new leader.

Read here: 'Did your aunt resign for Jnaneswari?': BJP leader backs IITian Ashwini Vaishnaw

The tone for the speeches was set by Kamaraj who while announcing the consensus to the party spoke of the need for collective responsibility, collective leadership and collective approach in the new situation before the party and the country.

The Congress president, after announcing to the assembled leaders, that the consensus on the choice of the leader was in favour of Shastri, appealed for unity which, he said, was essential for the countrys progress. He asked the party to give its unstinted cooperation to the leader whom we are electing today.
On April 20, Goas official gazette notified the correction of an inadvertent error in the Goa Regional Plan 2021, a policy document that lays out the contours of development in the state over a 10-year period and correspondingly demarcates different zones  agricultural, settlement (residential & commercial), industrial, and eco-sensitive. Through the notification, an area of more than 62,000 square metres across seven contiguous plots of land in Morjim, a coastal village in North Goa popular among tourists and known for wellness tourism, was changed from orchard to settlement. In effect, this land, on a sea-facing hill, became open for construction. PREMIUM Land is a scarce resource in Goa and hence hotly contested.(Istock)

Read here: Preserve the unique aspects of Goan life

The rectification was made possible due to an amendment in the Goa Town and Country Planning Act 1974, passed by the Goa legislative assembly this January, barely six months after the new Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government headed by chief minister Pramod Sawant took oath, which gave the government executive powers to make changes in the decadal regional plan if the claim is made that they are inadvertent errors.

Except that those that designed the regional plan in the first place do not believe this was an inadvertent error at all. Architect and urban planner Dean DCruz, who was part of the 11-member team that drafted Goas regional plan in 2011 that is now being corrected, is adamant that there was no need for any rectification in Morjim. The seven plots are not contiguous with existing settlement areas. With being over 60,000 square metres, these are not minor in nature. The plots fall between no-development slopes and forested areas, DCruz said.

Any land with an incline of 1:10 or more is considered a hill slope and also a no development zone.

The outrage notwithstanding, on May 25, two further changes plots were corrected  a verdant 4,000 square metres (sq m) paddy field in the vicinity of the capital city of Panaji, and an 16,500 sq m orchard in the coastal village of Salcete were also notified to be settlement land.

Goas Town and Country Planning (TCP) minister Vishwajit Rane has doubled down on the claim that the green zones marked on the plan were a mistake and an injustice to our people. He said his department was in the process of changing 60 million sq metres of land from green to settlement. Large properties and settlement lands, some belonging to poor people, have been converted from settlement to natural cover, orchards, and non-development slopes in the name of rationalisation, depriving them of their right to put their land to developable use, Rane said in a statement.

Meanwhile, this debate has now turned the spotlight to a series of amendments made to the Goa Town and Country Planning Act over the past five years which experts say dilute safeguards and introduce discretionary powers for the executive who can now make changes to Goas maps.

On the other hand, the debate also captures a growing conflict in Goa  between the desire to retain the states character, and this unique character creating a massive surge in demand for new housing as people from other parts of the country look to migrate to the state or set up holiday or retirements homes there, boosting the states economy.

Between January 2019 and 2023, official records show that 156,674 sale deeds for immovable property have been registered, averaging around 39,000 sale deeds per year including pandemic years. By comparison, the number of sale deeds registered for three years between 2012 to 2015 stood at 44,717  an average of around 15,000 per year.

Experts say that post the pandemic, a time when people have started to re-examine their lives in packed urban sprawls, the demand for space in Goa has grown. K Kulashekhar, a real-estate agent in Goa, says that over the past three years, the sector has seen property prices rise between 40% and 100%, with premium properties rapidly selling out. The demand is essentially for premium villas and gated complexes while the mid to budget sector has been priced out, Kulashekhar said.

Land is a scarce resource in Goa with environment minister Nilesh Cabral, in a recent statement before the Goa legislative assembly, revealing that only 9.25% of the state is available for growth and development.

Out of the total geographical area of 3,702 sq km of Goa, the state is hardly left with just 342 sq km area (only 9.25%), which can be made use for growth and development. The rest is Forest (Protected/Reserve/Private) including National Park & Wildlife sanctuaries amounting to 1,250 sq kms or 34.63% of Goa, Coastal Regulation Zone which amounts of 400 sq km or 10.8% of Goa, water bodies including rivers, lakes which is 216 sq km or 5.32%, and agriculture land which is 1,480 sq km or 40% of Goa, he said.

Land rates, especially along some coastal villages, range between 50,000 to 60,000 per sq m, while in rural Goa depending on the zoning of the land, rates range from 10-12,000 per sq m up to 40,000 per sq m for settlement land.

According to global property consultant Savills, Goa has become a favourite destination for people planning to buy second homes due to high rental yields and the ease with which they can be offered to hotel aggregator websites for short-term stays for high returns.

Changes in the act

Between 2018 and 2023, several amendments have been made to Goas Town and Country Planning Act, which governs urban and rural planning and development in the state  all of which have served to dilute its provisions and introduce discretionary powers to officials and planning boards. The amendments include one in 2022 that gave the government powers to create zoning plans in rural towns and villages currently not covered under planning areas. With this amendment, planning authorities have been given powers to draw up detailed development of specific areas for housing, shopping centres, industrial areas, civic centres, educational and cultural institutions and decide on comprehensive land allocation of areas or zones for residential, commercial, industrial, public utilities, agricultural and other purposes.

Read here: Portuguese destroyed temples, wipe away their signs: Goa CM Pramod Sawant

Activists say this amendment gives the executive a wider range of powers to expand Goas high-density zones and effectively take away the holistic, consultative planning process and allegedly replace it with a system of deciding planning areas based on commissions.

Basically the changes are being made to suit the builders lobby and the speculators. They are destroying the eco-sensitive zones of Goa the zones that play an important role and help us cope with climate stresses, leaving us at the mercy of the vagaries of nature, similar to what happened in Uttarakhand, said Sabina Martins of the Goa Bachao Abhiyan, a civil society collective.

The chief town planner at the Goa Town and Country Planning department did not respond to requests for comment.

Another amendment to the Act in 2020 saw mining and quarrying exempted from provisions of the planning Act. The amendments made these two activities exempt from being in conformity with the regional plan, and from otherwise prohibited activities including slicing and burying agricultural lands. Mining activities can now override green areas of Goas regional plan.

But perhaps the most controversial of these amendments was carried out in 2018, allowing the government to make such changes in such Regional Plan as may be necessary based on a written request from any person seeking a change of zone of his land. Such changes, the amendment states, could be carried out at any time provided that they had prior approval of the government and were notified to the public. Prior to this, changes to the decadal regional plan could only be done via revisions which meant redrawing the map at a holistic level and not plot by plot changes based on individual requests.

The Goa government informed the legislative assembly that it received 6,239 requests from landowners since January 2019 to January 2023 that the zoning of their land be changed.

According to data submitted before the high court of Bombay at Goa in 2021, most of the zone changes imply converting agricultural land for settlement purposes. The data said 94% of all changes sought were for converting agricultural land (including orchards).There were also claims that sought the conversion of natural cover or non-notified forest land to settlement; a change which would open up these areas for construction.

Changes outside the act

This is in addition to the loss of agricultural land and natural cover that Goa has already seen through changes in Regional Plans. Goas orchard lands which once comprised 23.15% of the state in 1986 reduced to 15.58% of the state by 2011 while cultivable land fell from being 19.32% to 13.38%, when one compares the Regional Plan 2001 (drafted in 1986) and the Regional Plan 2021 (drafted in 2010-11).

DCruz said the system of allowing changes in land zoning to allow large-scale development based on who wants to build what, where is not only against the spirit of equitable planning but threatened to overburden a villages limited resources with higher urban density than it has the capacity for. When one thinks of planning, one needs to consider the overall needs of the village. The kind of resources that are available in the village as well as an equitable planning process so that everyone can benefit and not just particular landowners, DCruz said.

Speaking at the launch of The Great Goa Land Grab, a book about changes in Goas land-use over time in February this year, Peter Ronald de Souza, who was co-director of the Lokniti Programme of Comparative Democracy at the Centre for Study of Developing Societies, said market factors were the driving force behind the changes. What we are witnessing is a transformation in the nature of land. Land has moved from being an instrument of production to a commodity. As a commodity it now becomes available for sale. It has no other value as production, as agriculture or horticulture or even culture, De Souza said.

The changes are taking effect on the ground with apartment complexes and villas dotting the landscape in what were once wild hillsides. Ten years ago, Census 2011 revealed that 21% of houses in the state were empty. Since land zoned for settlement has continually increased  even after 21% of the habitats are lying empty  it is legitimate to ask why every government pursues land conversion and who actually benefits from this, said Solano da Silva, a researcher who has been tracking Goas land use changes and who co-authored the The Great Goa Land Grab.

Real-estate developers, on their part, have welcomed the changes. We at CREDAI see this as a positive sign and believe that this will give a boost to Ease of Doing Business. The amendments are proactively devised by taking inputs from industry associations and other stakeholders, Avez Shaikh, the secretary of CREDAI-Goa, said.

Still more changes

The Goa Land Development and Building Construction Regulations 2010, a set of rules that determine what kinds of construction can be allowed in each zone, are also being amended. In late April, the department of Town and Country Planning issued a notification in the official gazette notifying a draft of the proposed changes and seeking objections and suggestions from the general public. The proposed changes will allow for yoga and meditation centres, open air sports, religious structures, and agricultural research centres etc to be set up in agricultural lands -- lands that include salt pans, khazans (low lying paddy fields), fish farms, mudflats, and orchards among others.

The existing regulations allow agricultural zones to be used only for agricultural, forestry, and fisheries. Other activities permitted are only those ancillary to agriculture such as irrigation, pump installations, biogas plants, farm houses, poultry, dairy and roads for agricultural purposes only.

The subject amendments propose to allow numerous massive constructions for non-agricultural uses within ecologically sensitive zones in violation of the land use restrictions, Abhijit Prabhudesai, an activist said. Similar changes sought to be brought in a previous version of the amendment were hastily withdrawn after public pressure in September last year.

Read here: Goa CM Pramod Sawant flags off 20 more electric buses

The Opposition has attacked the government on this issue.

These changes completely negate participatory process to planning as enshrined in the constitution and are being made only to secure the interests of the builders lobby and not the people of Goa. As a consequence of these changes, the heritage and character of Goa will completely change, Congress leader Elvis Gomes said.

The government has reasoned that the changes were being brought about because the current regulations were too restrictive and that the changes were being introduced in part because other states have other uses permitted in agricultural zones and that farmers need to be able to live on their lands. It has also said that an expert committee will review all cases individually.
Hitting out at a school administration in Rainawari here for allegedly not allowing 'Abaya'-wearing girl students to enter the school premises, Jammu and Kashmir Peoples' Democratic Party (PDP) chief Mehbooba Mufti said it was an attack on religious freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. Mehbooba Mufti (PTI)

Abaya is a loose-fitting, full-length robe worn by Muslim women.

"It is our personal right to decide what to wear and what not to wear. Don't force us to do anything which is against our religion. It is our constitutional right what we wear or eat", Mufti told media here on Thursday.

She further said, "Earlier we saw such incidents in Karnataka and now we are seeing this being implemented in Kashmir. We will never accept this and there will be strong reactions to this incident."

"They want to turn this country into Godse's country and Jammu and Kashmir have become a laboratory for that", she said.

She further alleged, "They are now harassing Islamic scholars like Dawoodi, Veeri. Last day NIA summoned senior Islamic scholar Rehmat-ullah of Bandipora which is unacceptable. If the situation is normal after the abrogation of Article 370 why Islamic scholars are being summoned by NIA."

Earlier on Thursday, students of Vishwa Bharati School, Rainawari staged a protest after the school administration allegedly disallowed Abaya-wearing students from entering the school premises.

"We were not allowed to enter the school saying that if we can't wear 'Abaya' to school. They closed the gates on us. Then when it became an issue after the police and media arrived, they changed their statements", one of the protesting students said.

Responding to the allegations, the school administration told the media that the students were asked to follow the school dress-code, adding that, the school is not against any religious beliefs or Hijab.

Earlier in January this year, a Hijab row erupted in Government PU College in Karnataka's Udupi after the college administration allegedly barred six girls wearing the Hijab from entering. Following this, the girls sat in protest outside the college over being denied entry.

After this, boys of several colleges in Udupi started attending classes wearing saffron scarves. This protest spread to other parts of the state as well leading to protests and agitations in several places in Karnataka.

As a result, the Karnataka government said that all students must adhere to the uniform and banned both Hijab and saffron scarves till an expert committee decided on the issue.

On February 5, the pre-University education board released a circular stating that the students could only wear the uniform approved by the school administration and no other religious attire would be allowed in colleges.
After attending the State Dinner at the White House on June 22, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet top US business honchos and the Indian diaspora in Washington on the next day before embarking on an official visit to Cairo on the invitation of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. US President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

According to diplomats based in Washington, General Electrics proposal to manufacture F-414 aircraft engines under 100 per cent transfer of technology in India has also recorded a forward momentum with the deal bound for Capitol Hill for Congressional approval. PM Modi is slated to address the joint sitting of the US Congress on June 22.

With PM Modi and President Joe Biden both focused on the content of the visit and deliverables, the last-minute negotiations and work on a joint statement will take place after US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan holds a meeting with his Indian counterpart Ajit Doval on June 13. Indications are that the visit will yield positive results for both sides and further deepen ties across the board.

It is understood that PM Modi will be addressing the chairman and CEOs of top US companies at John F Kennedy Centre in Washington in the morning and devote the first half of the day towards economic cooperation between the two countries and then go on to address the Indian diaspora at Ronald Reagan Center in DC in the evening. The Ronald Reagan Center has a standing capacity of 5000 and a sitting capacity of 3000 people. Another plan on PM Modi doing a diaspora event in Chicago was dropped due to logistics.

Simply put, PM Modi will focus on Yoga on June 21 at United Nations with UN Secretary-General joining the event, bilateral relationship, global politics, and Indo-Pacific on day two and on economy and diaspora on day three. He will embark on the journey to Egypt on June 23 evening immediately after the diaspora event at the Ronald Reagan Center.

While the US visit is first on PM Modis agenda, the visit to Egypt is no less important as Cairo is the heart of the Arab world and the seat of Islamic learning over the ages. Both Sisi and Modi are against religious radicalization and terrorism and converge on the economic and infrastructure growth of the Middle East.

While Egypt has been invited as Indias guest for the G-20 summit, President Sisi was the 2023 Republic Day guest in India with the two countries having civilizational ties. Even though Egypt was absent at the G-20 Tourism event in Srinagar along with Oman, India and Egypt are both against pan-Islamic radical groups like Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State and Al Qaeda.

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Manoj Sane, the accused of the grisly murder of Mumbai Mira Road, told the Police that he never had any physical relationship with his live-in partner 32-year-old Saraswati Vaidya as he is HIV positive, an Indian Express report said. Manoj has been accused of killing Saraswati, chopping up her body into parts and then boiling them in a pressure cooker for disposal. They have been living together at the Mira Road flat for the past three years though they knew each other since 2014. Manoj told police he met Saraswati 16 years ago at a ration shop where he used to work at that time. Manoj Sane told police Saraswati was like his 'daughter'.

Sane told police he was diagnosed as HIV+ in 2008 and has been on medication since then. He said he had met an accident for which he underwent a long treatment. He suspected to have contracted HIV during that treatment, Sane told police. Read | Living with uncleowns cloth mills': What Mumbai murder victim told orphanage

Manoj Sane says Saraswati was possessive

Manoj told police Saraswati was like 'his daughter' and was very possessive about him. As the cops found a board on one of the walls of the flat where the couple lived, Manoj Sane said he taught Saraswati Maths as the 32-year-old was planning to appear for Class 10 SSC exams.

Dubious relationship, no involvement of relatives: New twist in Mumbai Mira Road murder case

Police on Thursday said victim Saraswati Vaidya was an orphan and she had no relatives. However, on Friday, Saraswati's three sisters reached the Naya Nagar Police station to record their statements.

While Manoj Sane and Saraswati Vaidya were known to be a live-in couple to their neighbours, Saraswati's version was similar to Manoj's. A worker at the orphanage where Saraswati grew up said she told them that she was staying with her uncle.

Saraswati Vaidya murder: Here is what we know so far

1. Cops were alerted by the neighbours of Vaidya and Sane of a foul smell coming from their flat on Wednesday evening.

2. As cops reached the Mira Nagar flat, they found Manoj Sane in the kitchen, about to boil the feet of Saraswati Vaidya, his live-in partner.

3. The remains of Saraswati's body parts were found across the flat wrapped in plastic bags. Manoj Sane reportedly cut Saraswari's body into pieces with a tree cutter and then roasted and boiled them.

4. Accused Manoj Sane was arrested. He admitted to having cut the body to get rid of it, but he claimed Saraswati consumed poison. Manoj Sane said she had poison on June 4. When Sane found her body, he was scared and wanted to get rid of the body.

5. Sane and Vaidya knew each other since 2014. They met at a ration shop where Sane used to work.

6. Sane told police Vaidya was like his daughter and he never had any physical relationship with her as he is HIV+.

7. Vaidya grew up in an orphanage where she informed that she was living with her uncle.

8. Manoj Sane told police that he had an industrial training institute certificate but got no decent job and continued working in the ration shop. Vaidya told her orphanage that her uncle' Sane was very rich and owned a cloth mill.

9. Since Saraswati Vaidya grew up in an orphanage, earlier cops ruled out the possibility of any relatives being there. On Friday, however, three sisters of Saraswati Vaidya reached the police station to record their statements.

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As Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar intensifies his effort to forge a united opposition ahead of the crucial 2024 Lok Sabha polls, his deputy Tejashwi Yadav on Thursday claimed that the state's ruling grand alliance would stop Narendra Modi's chariot like his father Lalu Prasad had halted Advani's yatra. The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader accused the ruling BJP at the Centre of failing to fulfil promises and raising the Hindu versus Muslim binary whenever its shortcomings were pointed out. Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi. (Photo by Santosh Kumar / Hindustan Times)

"Be it Hindus, Muslims or any other religious community, all had fought for the country's Independence," said Yadav, adding that we hear outrageous remarks from some quarters, suggesting that Muslims be deprived of their voting rights.

"But rest assured, as long as leaders like Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar are around, nobody can dare do anything of the sort.. The country is not the property of anybody's father," said Yadav, evoking wild applause.

"Lalu had stopped the rath (chariot) of L K Advani. Now, the 'Mahagathbandhan', led by Nitish Kumar, will stop the rath of (Narendra Modi)," said the Bihar deputy CM.

Tejashwi was speaking at a function in Patna organised by the state's handloom weavers' cooperative union.

In 1990, then Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav shot to fame by halting Lal Krishna Advani's nationwide rath yatra in Sitamarhi district at the peak of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement. From the states the rath yatra passed, several incidents of communal violence had been reported.

Referring to Kumar's opposition unity drive, Tejashwi said they were trying to ensure that Congress and regional parties come together.

"If these people (BJP) return to power, this country will be ruined," he said.

Yadav alleged that attempts were being made to rewrite the country's history.

"It seems as if a dictator is in the seat of power and we are compelled to obey his commands. The Constitution is being tinkered with. Nothing worthwhile has been achieved," he claimed.

Promises had been made (by those in power) like two crore jobs, 15 lakh in every bank account, doubling of farmers' incomes by the year 2022.. none of these was fulfilled. When we raise questions on these failed promises, they try to divert public attention by talking about Hindus versus Muslims, temples versus mosques," the RJD leader said.

The much-anticipated strategy meeting of Opposition parties for 2024 will take place in Patna on June 23 in which Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and senior party leader Rahul Gandhi are also expected to participate.

(With PTI inputs)

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All India Majilis-e-Ittehadul-Muslimeen (AIMIM) president Asaduddin Owaisi on Thursday took a swipe at Maharashtra deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis over his sons of Aurangzeb remark in the aftermath of violence in Kolhapur city. Owaisi said he didn't know the BJP leader was an expert in figuring out such relationships and asked him to call out the offsprings of Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi. Maharashtra deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis and AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi.

Fadnavis had earlier slammed the supporters of Aurangzeb after violence in Kolhapur during a protest by Hindutva outfits against some social media posts allegedly glorifying the erstwhile Mughal ruler. While the state home minister appealed for peace, he defended the aggression of the right-wing outfits.

There is bound to be a reaction if Aurangzeb is glorified, he said. We will not tolerate it. This is Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharajs Maharashtra.

"Suddenly, in some districts of Maharashtra, sons of Aurangzeb took birth. They keep the status of Aurangzeb and show their posters. Because of this, there are tensions. Questions arise, where do these sons of Aurangzeb come from? Who are behind this? We will find this out," Fadnavis later told ANI in Nagpur.

Reacting to his remarks, Owaisi said, Maharashtra's home minister Devendra Fadnavis said Aurangzeb ke aulaad. Do you know everything? I didn't know you were such an expert. Then tell me who are the offsprings of (Nathuram) Godse and (Babasaheb) Apte.

The Lok Sabha member was referring to Godse's links with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological fountainhead of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

A separate row erupted after Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former Lok Sabha member Nilesh Rane termed NCP chief Sharad Pawar Aurangzeb. NCP spokesperson Mahesh Tapase said Rane must delete the tweet in 24 hours, while BJP national president JP Nadda and state unit chief Chandrashekhar Bawankule should clarify if they agree with Rane.

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Two policemen and four others were arrested in Uttar Pradeshs Kanpur Dehat district on Friday for allegedly looting 50kg of silver, worth  38 lakh, from a Banda jewelers car, while he was driving on the Bundelkhand Expressway on Tuesday, police said. Earlier a case had been registered under sections 379 (theft) and 420 (fraud) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) against unknown people, including two men in police uniforms (File photo)

One constable, said to be the key conspirator, and two others, also accused in the case, are on the run, police said.

A press release by the UP Police said those arrested include Kanpur Dehats Bhoganipur police station incharge inspector Ajay Pal Singh Katheria, sub inspector of the same police station Chintan Kaushisk and four other people  including a former employee of the jeweler, Sanjay Chikwa, and Chikwas (friends Jamaludeen Sheikh, Rafat Khan and Rakesh Dixit. Cops also recovered 30 silver bars, weighing around 50kg, from sub-inspector Kaushiks house, police said. The vehicle and the rifle used to commit the crime were also recovered from the accused, police said.

Three more people -- including Bhoganipur police station head constable Ram Shankar Yadav  and Tajudeen and Gabbu were also allegedly involved in the incident and are on the run. Police investigation suggests that the head constable was the key conspirator and planned the loot after getting information about the jewelers movement from Chikwa, who was sacked by the jeweler earlier this year. The head constable roped in inspector incharge and sub inspector in the scheme, the press release said.

The jeweler, Manish Soni, was looted when he, his cousin Ravi Soni, Ravis wife Sonali and daughter Aashi were travelling in a car from Banda to Aurraiya at 2.30pm on Tuesday. Four people, including two men in police uniforms driving an SUV intercepted their vehicle on the pretext of conducting checking and took the 50kg of silver bars he had in his car. The accused also detained the jewelers driver Jagnandan Pal for further questioning and then later abandoned him on a deserted stretch after thrashing him, said the press note.

The cops were under the impression that the jeweler was moving the silver from Banda to Aurraiya without proper documentation, and hence he would not approach the local police to register a first information report (FIR) in case of theft, said police.

Earlier a case had been registered under sections 379 (theft) and 420 (fraud) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) against unknown people, including two men in police uniforms.

Aurraiya superintendent of police (SP) Charu Nigam said, sections of 394(loot) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) under the IPC will be added now that there is proof of involvement of cops in the crime. The report on suspension and departmental enquiry against the three cops involved in the incident has been forwarded to the SP of Kanpur Dehat, said Nigam. DGP Vijay Kumar said the process of termination from service would be initiated against three cops involved in the incident.
The Bengaluru traffic police have decided to take a tougher stance on traffic violations by booking cases under stringent sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) instead of relying on mere fines prescribed by the Motor Vehicle Act. The city traffic police will specifically target three major offencesdriving or riding against the flow of traffic, riding on the footpath, and wrongful parkingfor prosecution under IPC sections. MN Anucheth, Joint Commissioner of Police (traffic), said that While Motor Vehicle Act imposes only fines for traffic offences, the cases under IPC sections allow traffic police to impound vehicles, with violators having to seek court intervention for their release. (ANI)

MN Anucheth, Joint Commissioner of Police (traffic), said that these three violations have been identified as major culprits behind traffic snarls and incidents of injuries. While the Motor Vehicle Act imposes only fines for such offences, the cases under IPC sections allows the traffic police to impound vehicles, with the violators having to seek court intervention for their release.

The cases will be registered under Section 283 of the IPC, which deals with danger or obstruction in a public way or line of navigation. This provision empowers the police to seize vehicles, and only a court can authorize their release, Anucheth explained.

Ever since assuming independent charge of the department following the transfer of the special commissioner for traffic, MA Saleem, to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), Anucheth revealed that the police have been experimenting with this new approach since January. Since January, we have recorded 4,200 cases under this section. We have observed that despite increased fines, they fail to serve as a deterrent. However, impounding the vehicle proves to be more effective, particularly due to the requirement of appearing before a court. We intend to expand this initiative extensively in the near future, he added.

In November of the previous year, then-Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai appointed Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) MA Saleem as the special commissioner of police traffic. To accommodate Saleems role, the position of the Bengaluru city traffic police chief was upgraded to the rank of ADGP, on par with the city police commissioner. Among the first changes Saleem introduced was a shift in focus from enforcement of violations to traffic regulation.

Saleem instructed the police to discontinue spot-checking for violations and redeployed them to regulate traffic. However, for the three aforementioned offences, Anucheth, who assumed the traffic chief position after Saleems transfer, emphasised that the police will now be required to book cases on the spot. For all other violations, as before, we will continue utilising cameras for contactless enforcement, Anucheth stated.

While the traffic police are intensifying efforts to crack down on illegal parking, there are no plans to reintroduce vehicle towing. Last year, on February 3, the towing of vehicles parked in non-designated areas was halted by then Home Minister Araga Jnanendra until new guidelines for enforcement methods are established.

The suspension of towing was prompted by an incident in which a Bengaluru traffic police officer physically and verbally assaulted a differently-abled woman during a towing operation. The incident, captured on video and widely shared on social media, fueled public outrage against law enforcement officials in Bengaluru and other parts of Karnataka.

Additionally, there have been numerous complaints of private contractors, employed by the Bengaluru police, demanding bribes for releasing impounded vehicles and exhibiting inappropriate behaviour towards drivers.

A senior officer clarified that there are no plans to reinstate the controversial towing practice. Instead, vehicles will be locked by the traffic police prior to impounding them.

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A rationalisation process carried out by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has mutilated textbooks beyond recognition and rendered them academically dysfunctional, Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav told the council while opting out as chief advisers for political science books for classes 9 to 12. 'Mutilated beyond recognition...remove our names': Experts to NCERT on textbook revision.(File)

Read here: 'Mutilated beyond recognition...remove our names': Experts to NCERT on textbook revision

In a letter to NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani on Thursday, Palshikar and Yadav asked the council to drop their names from the textbooks that were originally published in 2006-07 on the basis of the 2005 version of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF). Their names are mentioned in a letter to students, and in the textbook development team mentioned at the beginning of each book.

Palshikar is chief editor of the journal Studies in Indian Politics and a former political science professor at Savitribai Phule Pune University in Pune, and Yadav is the founder of Swaraj India.

Their letter to NCERT came amid a controversy over the removal of several topics from the syllabus in 2022, including passages on the theory of evolution, references to the Cold War, the Mughal courts, and industrial revolution, the 2002 Gujarat riots, the contribution of agriculture to the Indian economy, and a section on challenges to democracy.

Among topics removed from the political science textbooks are the position of Hindu extremists on Mahatma Gandhis pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity, and the ban on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh after his assassination.

NCERT officials have said the changes were made to reduce content load on students in view of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2022. The changes were reflected in new textbooks published earlier this year.

In April, the council described the omissions in political science textbooks as a possible oversight, and said that minor changes need not be notified and that they were made on the recommendation of the experts.

In their letter, Palshikar and Yadav said they failed to see any pedagogical rationale in the modifications in NCERT textbooks.

Read here: NCERT drops chapters on Periodic Table, Challenges to Democracy, others from class 10 textbooks

While the modifications have been justified on grounds of rationalisation, we fail to see any pedagogical rationale at work here. We find that the text has been mutilated beyond recognition. There are innumerable and irrational cuts, and large deletions often without any attempt to fill the gaps thus created. We were never consulted or even informed of these changes, they said.

If NCERT did consult other experts for deciding on these cuts and deletions, we explicitly state that we fully disagree with them in this regard, they added.

Palshikar and Yadav also said that as academics organically associated with the preparation of these textbooks, we are embarrassed that our names should be mentioned as chief advisors to these mutilated and academically dysfunctional textbooks.

We wish to explicitly record our full disagreement with the entire process of reshaping the text in the name of rationalisation. Both of us would like to dissociate ourselves from these textbooks and request the NCERT to drop our names as chief advisors from all political science textbooks of classes 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th, mentioned in the letter of the students and also in the list of textbook development team at the beginning of each textbook, they added.

Despite repeated attempts, NCERT director Saklani did not respond to HTs calls and messages for a comment on the letter.

Read here: NCERT drops references to Khalistan demand from class 12 political science textbook

Last year, NCERT said that several factors  overlapping topics, topics not relevant or outdated in the present context, or topics that were difficult or easily accessible to children and can be learned through self-learning or peer-learning  were taken into account during the rationalisation process.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Fareeha Iftikhar Fareeha Iftikhar is a principal correspondent with the national political bureau of the Hindustan Times. She tracks the education ministry, and covers the beat at the national level for the newspaper. She also writes on issues related to gender, human rights and different policy matters. ...view detail
An IAS officer of Madhya Pradesh Cadre, Niyaz Khan on Thursday said that Bollywood is responsible for conversions and it all started from there. IAS officer of Madhya Pradesh Cadre, Niyaz Khan.

Speaking to ANI about religious conversion, the IAS officer said, "Conversion is not right at all. The conversion started from Bollywood. Where big film stars got Hindus converted to Muslims, it is happening there even today. Conversion is wrong because we consider one religion to be above all other religions and call other religions to join their religion by thinking the other as small, it is basically very wrong."

"Our nation is a democratic country, here all religions are equal. How can we say that one should convert to my religion after marriage. Both people should follow their own religions. If there is so much love and it is their compulsion, then both should follow their respective religions, I think conversion is not appropriate," the officer said.

When asked whether bollywood is responsible for conversion, he said, "100 percent Bollywood is responsible for conversions. Bollywood has been the role model of our country, people even consider artists as god-like figures. People imitate Western culture, resulting in movies that depict nudity and explicit scenes, which are deteriorating our civilization and ruining the younger generation."

If Bollywood stops imitating Hollywood and embraces the spirit of patriotism, it will become evident that Bollywood is the source of these vices. People import movies from Hollywood. Bollywood is tarnishing the culture of our country and negatively influencing the children. So Bollywood needs to be tightened that it should act as a guiding force or the country such as sadhus or sanyasi, the officer added.

Besides, talking about his tweet, Khan further said, "There are three things that I have tweeted. First, Muslim brothers should become a cow protector, the second is that they should try to become a vegetarian, though there is no compulsion, it is voluntary and the third is to develop good relations with Brahmins."

He further explained his logic behind his remark that although Muslims respect cow protectors. Even many Muslims also feed cows and give water to them. It is also seen that there are a few selected persons who do such incidents (cow slaughter), if Muslims also become cow protectors, then the cow will be protected.

Secondly, the practice of vegetarianism is going on all over the world. It is being adopted to save the earth, which is good to adopt, but no one can be forced to decide what to eat. Thirdly, to have good relations with Brahmins. The Brahmin, always following the path of truth, guiding the country, has been giving guidance for 3000 years. Even today when there is a program of saints, lakhs of people gathered. Brahmins are guides even today. With the blessings of Brahmins, peace has been maintained in our place till now. A Brahmin like Kautilya has been a great example for India, IAS officer Khan further said.

"My tweet is not political. I am independent and it is completely my personal opinion," Khan said.

Responding to a question asked that he is inspired by hinduism, will he adopt hinduism, the officer said, "Never, I have two idols, Mohammad Saab is my idol and the other is Great Chanakya. I am in Islam and will remain so. Mohammad Saab is my idol. It is a different matter that people think something else about me regarding my tweets."
The previous Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments introduction of a safe harbour provision in the Information Technology (IT) Act allowed big tech such as Facebook (now Meta), Twitter, and Google to evade responsibility for cyber harm inflicted on users, Union minister of state for electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Friday. Union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar. (PTI)

He promised the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led government will undo the damage done when the Congress was in power from 2004 to 2014. Chandrasekhar said the amendments including Section 79 for immunity to intermediaries from persecution for third-party content in 2008 expanded the scope of the IT Act and provided greater protection to them. UPA let big tech get away with user harm by introducing safe harbour...elaborated in section 79 of the IT Act... brought in as amendment in 2008, Chandrasekhar said at a press conference.

HT reached out to Congress leader Jairam Ramesh for a response to Chandrasekhars comments but he was not immediately available.

Chandrasekhar, who has repeatedly questioned the need for a safe harbour, said the government is working on legislation that will form a holistic regulatory space to ensure user safety. He referred to the Data Protection Bill and said that the earlier version was dropped because it was too complex and a new simpler will be introduced in Parliament soon.

Chandrasekhar said amendments to the IT Act, which will now be part of the new Digital India Bill, have been in the pipeline for over two years. The bill will be finalised only after several rounds of discussions and consultations.

He said artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools need to ensure user safety and those found in violation will not be allowed to operate in India. We will regulate AI the same way we regulate any emerging tech. Either they will mitigate user harm or they will not be allowed to operate, he said. He added while AI may lead to job losses, the focus right now was on task-oriented AI.

Experts have called for the Digital India Bill to factor in AI. The bill will replace the IT Act as the main legislation.

At a public consultation in Mumbai last month, Chandrasekhar said the bill drafted after several rounds of discussions will address expanding the number of categories of intermediaries and differentiating between them on the basis of risk of user harm and the number of users.

Chandrasekhar said the bill will harmonise separate legislation. He said it will consider whether there is a need for a safe harbour to counter potential user harms, ensure an open, safe, and trusted internet, grievance redressal, formulate global standard cyber laws, and address challenges thrown up by emerging technologies.

The bill proposes ways to deal with things that could harm users such as revenge porn, cyber flashing, defamation, cyberbullying, and doxxing. It suggests age-gating addictive technologies and protecting the data of minors on social media and gaming applications.

It may also contain ownership standards for anonymised data stored by intermediaries, disclosure norms for the data collected, and monetisation rules for user and platform-generated content.
The Supreme Court on Friday refused to pass any urgent order on a plea by the wife of gangster Sanjeev Maheshwari Jeeva who was shot dead in a dramatic shooting inside a courtroom in Lucknow on Wednesday, seeking protection from arrest in a criminal case lodged against her in Uttar Pradesh. Lawyers staged protest after the killing of Sanjeev Jeeva inside the Lucknow court. (HT Photo)(HT_PRINT)

A vacation bench of justices Aniruddha Bose and Rajesh Bindal took note of the state governments submissions that Jeevas funeral was performed on Thursday and that his son attended the last rites while the slain gangsters wife, Payal Maheshwari, chose to stay away.

While Payals lawyer urged the bench to examine her plea for protection against arrest, the bench declined to entertain her plea, saying the petition was granted an urgent hearing only in view of the impending funeral of her husband.

The stand is continuously shifting...let the matter be listed after vacation. There is no urgency for a hearing during the vacation, added the bench.

Appearing for the Uttar Pradesh government, additional advocate general Garima Prashad informed the bench that Payal chose not to attend the funeral of her husband despite the states undertaking to the court a day ago that she will not be arrested.

She is the leader of the gang. Her husband was lodged in jail, but she is running the gang from outside, Prashad said.

A total of 26 cases, ranging from murder and extortion to robbery and cheating, were registered against 48-year-old Jeeva. These include the murder of two BJP leaders, Brahm Dutt Dwivedi and Krishna Nand Rai. He was convicted in the 1997 murder case of Dwivedi and was serving a life sentence in the case.

Along with gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari who mentored him, Jeeva was an accused in the murder of BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai, who was sprayed with bullets by a gang of assailants armed with assault weapons in Ghazipur district on November 29, 2005. officers said that Maheshwari was a close aide of Ansari, who helped him climb up the ranks in the world of crime.
The Supreme Court on Friday refused to pass any urgent order on a plea filed by the wife of gangster-politician Mukhtar Ansaris aide Sanjeev Maheshwari Jeeva, who was shot dead on Lucknow court premises on Wednesday, seeking protection from arrest in a criminal case lodged against her in Uttar Pradesh. Additional advocate general Garima Prashad informed the bench that Payal chose not to attend the funeral of her husband despite the states undertaking to the court a day ago that she would not be arrested (ANI)

Read here: Supreme Court declines interim relief on plea by wife of gangster shot dead in UP court

A vacation bench of justices Aniruddha Bose and Rajesh Bindal took note of the submissions of the state government that Jeevas funeral was performed on Thursday and that his son attended the last rites while the slain gangsters wife, Payal Maheshwari, chose to stay away.

While Payals lawyer urged the bench to examine her plea for protection against arrest, the bench declined to entertain her plea, saying the petitioner was granted an urgent hearing only in view of the impending funeral of her husband.

The stand is continuously shifting...let the matter be listed after vacation. There is no urgency for a hearing during the vacation, added the bench.

Appearing for the Uttar Pradesh government, its additional advocate general Garima Prashad informed the bench that Payal chose not to attend the funeral of her husband despite the states undertaking to the court a day ago that she would not be arrested. She is the leader of the gang. Her husband was lodged in jail, but she is running the gang from outside, Prashad said.

Read here: Jeevas wife was on the run in Gangsters Act case lodged in Muzaffarnagar

Jeeva was shot dead in Lucknow Civil Court on Wednesday. Jeeva, 48, had been accused in several criminal cases, including the murder of two BJP leaders, Brahm Dutt Dwivedi and Krishna Nand Rai. While he was convicted in the 1997 murder case of Dwivedi, he was acquitted in the 2005 murder of Rai.
The Supreme Court on Friday refused to urgently hear a petition challenging the internet shutdown order in ethnic violence-hit Manipur. When the high court is already seized of the matter, why duplicate the plea here? Let it come before the regular bench after reopening of the court, said a vacation bench of justices Aniruddha Bose and Rajesh Bindal. The petition said the residents of the state experienced feelings of fear, anxiety, helplessness, and frustration as a result of the shutdown.

The bench turned down the request to list the petition during the summer break. The apex court is due to reopen on July 3 after the break. Vacation benches are hearing urgent matters during the break.

Read | At least 35 weapons, ammunition recovered in violence-hit Manipur on 2nd day of joint operation by security forces

Advocate Shadan Farasat, appearing for the petitioners, mentioned the matter before the vacation bench, complaining the internet has been shut down for 35 days.

Representing the state, advocate Pukhrambam Ramesh Kumar said five petitions pending before the Manipur high court have also challenged the internet ban. The bench then said that the fresh petition should come up only in due course.

At least 102 people have been killed, over 300 injured, and nearly 40,000 displaced in Manipur since May 3 when ethnic violence erupted in the northeastern state between the Meitei and Kuki communities. The Manipur government on Tuesday extended the ban on internet services until June 10.

Read | Manipur violence: Almost all arms of Kuki militants still intact in camps, says army

In their plea filed before the Supreme Court, Manipur residents Chongtham Victor Singh and Mayengbam James said the shutdown was grossly disproportionate in its interference with the constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression and to carry on any trade or business using the constitutionally protected medium of the internet. It said the measure has had a significant economic, humanitarian, social, and psychological impact on both the petitioners and their families.

The petition said the residents of the state experienced feelings of fear, anxiety, helplessness, and frustration as a result of the shutdown. It added they have been unable to communicate with their loved ones or office colleagues.

Continued suspension of the internet for the purpose of preventing rumour-mongering and the spread of misinformation does not pass the threshold prescribed by the Telecom Suspension Rules 2017, the plea said.
Nationalist Congress Party MP Supriya Sule on Friday demanded the Maharashtra government and union home minister Amit Shah ensure the security of NCP boss Sharad Pawar. Sule told reporters she had received a threat aimed at Pawar and slammed such actions as 'low-level politics'. "I received a message on WhatsApp for Pawar Sahab. He has been threatened through a website. So, I have come to the police demanding justice." Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Supriya Sule(ANI)

"This should stop. The responsibility of Pawar Sahab's security lies with the home ministry. The home minister should intervene. Sharad Pawar is the leader of the country. I told the police the NCP chief received a threat and cops have said they will take action," Sule said.

Sule and a delegation of NCP leaders met Mumbai Police chief Vivek Phansalkar earlier today, following which a senior police officer told news agency PTI a FIR will be registered.

What is the NCP's complaint?

The NCP has alleged that Pawar, 82, received a Facebook message, copies of which have been submitted to the police - that read - 'he (Pawar) will meet the same fate as (Narendra) Dabholkar soon'. Dabholkar - a prominent civil activist - was murdered in Pune in 2013.

Who else has received threats?

Threats have reportedly also been made against Shiv Sena (Thackeray faction) leaders Sanjay Raut and Sunil Raut; "Sanjay and I have received death threat calls..." MLA Sunil Raut told news agency ANI. Raut said Mumbai Police and the state government had been notified.

'Pawar a reincarnation of Aurangzeb'

The alleged threats against Pawar and the Rauts come amid tension over violence in Maharashtra's Kolhapur this week after social media posts allegedly glorified Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and Mysuru ruler Tipu Sultan. Pawar deplored violence that he said was 'not in line with the culture of Maharashtra'.

"Maharashtra is known as a peace-loving and patient state, and people here do not have a tendency to take the law into their own hands."

Bharatiya Janata Party leader Nilesh Rane hit back at the NCP boss and called him a 'reincarnation of Aurangzeb'

READ | Not in line with Maharashtra's culture: Sharad Pawar on Kolhapur violence

Fallout of Kolhapur violence

As many as 36 people have been arrested so far and three juveniles were detained in connection with Wednesdays violence. Kolhapur superintendent of police (SP) Mahendra Pandit said CCTV footage was being scanned to identify the perpetrators and indicated that they were locals.

A total of four criminal cases have been registered in the matter so far. About 400 people had been booked in the three first information reports (FIR) registered for the violence. The fourth case has been registered over the alleged WhatsApp status glorifying Tipu Sultan and Aurangzeb which triggered the violence and five juveniles have been detained in this context, Pandit added.
National Commission for Women (NCW) chairperson Rekha Sharma on Friday expressed concern recent surge in gruesome killings, including Mumbai's Mira Road murder. Sharma said that perpetrators seem to be drawing inspiration from past cases to commit heinous crimes. National Commission for Women (NCW) chairperson Rekha Sharma.(Twitter)

On Wednesday, a 56-year-old man from Mumbai was arrested for killing her live-in partner, which seemed eerily similar to the Shraddha Walkar murder case. Manoj Sane allegedly killed his live-in partner Saraswati Vaidya and chopped her body into dozens of pieces.

"I have seen people now taking clues from past incidents which are very gruesome and heinous. These kinds of crimes against live-in partners have increased in the recent past. Society needs to think about how to control it, especially the families of both, and how we are raising our children who are doing such crimes," Sharma said.

She further stated that the women's commission has taken suo moto cognizance of the incident.

Mumbai murder: Here's what we know so far

Manoj Sane, accused of killing his live-in partner Saraswati Vaidya, was arrested on Wednesday by the police for killing his girlfriend and cutting her body into dozens of pieces, and then boiling it in a pressure cooker to dissolve them before disposal. Police were alerted by building residents, who complained of a foul smell emanating from flat number 704. (Read | Foul smell, pieces lying: How Mumbai cops discovered Shraddha Walkar re-run) On reaching the spot police recovered several body pieces in utensils. The accused had killed her live-in partner and chopped her into pieces using a tree cutter. Body parts were sent to JJ Hospital for further investigation.

Why did Manoj chop her body parts?

Manoj Sane claimed Saraswati consumed poison on June 4. When foam started coming from her mouth, he said he was scared that he would be booked for abetment to suicide and hence he bought a tree-cutter to chop her body.

The reason behind the murder is said to be a fight between the couple. The 56-year-old accused was in a live-in relationship with 32-year-old Saraswati who was an orphan, and had been staying together at the Mira Road flat for the past three years.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kanishka Singharia Kanishka is a journalist at Hindustan Times news desk. When not in newsroom, you will find her on streets of Delhi exploring food cafes or capturing world through her lens. ...view detail
When J Josephraja, a 49-year-old pastor, sought bail after being charged with sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl in a church in Tamil Nadus Rajapalayam, her voice would have gone unheard if not for the intervention of a compassionate trial monitoring officer. The trial monitoring officers assist victims during the entirety of the Pocso case. (Agencies/Representative use)

The special court in Virudhunagar district for the trial of cases under (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act 2012) Pocso Act rejected his bail and convicted him last month of rigorous life imprisonment.

While thousands of cases under Pocso are pending across Tamil Nadu, a clutch of districts in the southern jurisdiction of the police have collectively devised a system by appointing one of their own as a trial monitoring officer for each case in the past few months.

The trial monitoring officers assist victims from the time of filing an FIR, liaison between their department and the public prosecutor and witnesses until the case is disposed of in tight timelines.

This is to bring a systemic change, says Asra Garg, inspector-general of police, south zone of Tamil Nadu. Victims usually have no role after a case is registered, whereas the accused is aware of every development. So the trial monitoring officer keeps the victims informed.

An SMS in Tamil is usually sent to the victims family to keep them informed of what transpired during court hearings.

And most crucially, Garg says, these officers alert the victims family about upcoming bail petitions before the chargesheet is filed. This has helped in several cases for bail to be rejected.

This system has been applied in all ten districts of the states southern zone including Tenkasi and Tirunelveli city. All these steps are being taken so that the victims and their families do not feel re-victimised and we can enable them to be empowered in the process of the criminal justice system, says Garg. It is victim centric, timeline driven, socially sensitive and legally compliant. The government of Tamil Nadu has directed us to enforce POCSO with due caution and to fast track investigation. The chief minister has also created a separate fund for providing assistance to victims. And our officers are ensuring that victims also receive compensation.

In the case of the pastor, police said, the court rejected the bail because the survivors mother, the complainant, opposed it accompanied by the public prosecutors argument that the accused being more powerful would tamper with evidence and threaten the victim.

In child sex abuse cases, if the victim is above 14, they can oppose bail applications, but since the victim had a mental disability, her mother came to court to oppose the bail, says R Srinivasaperumal, superintendent of police (SP), Virudhunagar. A maximum number of convictions are happening because of the appointment of the trial monitoring officers.

This year, 48 cases booked under Pocso have ended in conviction in Virudhunagar district, says Srinivasaperumal.

On May 31, the special Pocso court in Virudhunagar convicted a 32-year-old man for raping a 15-year-old girl with mental retardation and physical disabilities.

Police said the incident occurred on February 27, and it ensured conviction in 94 days. On June 1, judge K Poorana Jeya Anand found the accused guilty and sentenced him to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment.

The court also ordered 10 lakh in compensation for the victim.

A 68-year-old man from Sivakasi was also awarded life imprisonment on June 6 after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting two minor girls. The chargesheet was filed within 39 days in this case.

In neighbouring Dindigul district, 33 cases have ended in conviction this year. . This year until March, the victims have received 1.96 crore as compensation. A minor girl was found four months pregnant, and her neighbour, a 43-year-old man, was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a special court in Dindigul in May.

A sub-inspector or inspector is appointed as the trail monitoring officer so senior officials are also able to keenly watch how a Pocso case is unfolding, says V Baskaran, SP, Dindigul district.

For instance, if a witness is not strong enough during a hearing, the officer brings it to us, and we issue a memo for it to be corrected.

However, the trial monitoring officers role is one of the many efforts that the police are making. Officers have been instructed to file the chargesheet within 60 days by prioritising heinous crimes, he says.

Even if DNA reports are pending, we file a preliminary charge sheet and update it, says Baskaran.

Another aspect is streamlining Pocso cases by not making arrests of boys in cases of elopement, or mutual romantic relationships, which activists for years have said results in a high pendency rate and higher acquittals, thus taking away attention from the real cases of rape, sexual assault of children.

If you look at the pattern of Pocso in Dindigul, reported cases have increased from 47 in 2008 to 97 in 2022, the SP adds. Of the 97 cases, 61 are of those who eloped, 22 also under Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006. Only 14 are real Pocso cases, the SP says.

To streamline Pocso cases, the south zone police have implemented the instructions of Tamil Nadus Director General of Police (DGP) Sylendra Babu, who called for consultation with senior officials before arresting boys involved in cases related to mutual romantic relationships.

This directive, issued in December 2022 following a meeting of the Pocso and Juvenile Justice Committee of the Madras high court, seeks to ensure a fair and balanced approach that upholds the spirit of the law.

80% of the Pocso cases booked in Tamil Nadu are elopement cases, a senior official said, not wishing to be named.

Justice N Anand Venkatesh of the Madras high court had said that Pocso Act was not intended to penalise adolescents or teenagers in romantic relationships while quashing a case of a young couple in 2021 who had eloped.

Child rights activist and former convener of Tamil Nadu Child Rights Watch, S Andrew says that victim assistance is crucial. In fact, POCSO Act mandates that there should be a support person for children to understand court procedure so it is a good model to have a police personnel supporting the victims and their families but they should be well trained to handle children and not visit them wearing uniform so that the families are not identifies, says Andrew. In 2019, Chennai police had assigned 70 women officers who wore pink sarees under the Thozhi (friend) programme to assist POCSO case victims until trial is complete. In several POCSO cases the victim and perpetrator live in the same locality which has resulted in victims dropping the cases out of fear. Only 30-40% POCSO cases end in conviction in Tamil Nadu so such support is important.

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Telangana chief minister Chandrasekhar Rao on Friday announced a hike of 1,000 per month in the pension for physically challenged persons. Announcing this at a public meeting in Mancherial, the CM said the physically challenged people in the state would now get Rs. 4,116 per month. KCR added that the BRS government stood for welfare and aimed to expand the Singareni coal mining activity. (HT)

KCR added that the BRS government stood for welfare and aimed to expand the Singareni coal mining activity in all the mineral reserves in the state. KCR accused the Congress and BJP of trying to trim the collieries for their vested interests.

While the Congress sold 49 per cent of the company share to the Centre, the BJP is trying to dump it further by contemplating a privatisation mode, he alleged. Stating that the mining unit under Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) is forging ahead with profits, he reasoned that post the creation of a separate Telangana state, the company has been garnering huge revenue which touched 2,164 crores this year.

Maintaining that the mining of coal is helping thermal power produce to expand, the CM said that the three hundred billion tonnes of coal production would support the thermal power sector to meet the challenges on the power supply front. BRS' aim in the country is to make the power supply system a positive point and viable to suffice the country needs," he declared.

The governments at the Centre were trying to rely on coal imports from other countries whereas the coal mining in the country will suffice the requirements, he said. KCR also detailed the salient features of the Dharani portal and mentioned how the portal was useful for farmers to get the benefit of protecting his land.

On the controversial comments of the Congress leaders about the dumping of Dharani portal in Bay of Bengal, the chief minister made a clarion call to the public to dump those leaders in Bay of Bengal if they continue to make similar statements.

The chief minister spoke about the welfare programmes such as Dalit Bandhu, BC welfare programme for artisans, sheep rearing scheme and cautioned the people not to fall prey to the gimmicks and false promises of other parties.

State ministers Vemula Prashant Reddy, Indrakaran Reddy, Koppula Eeshwar, Gangula Kamalakar , chief whip Balka Suman, MP Santhosh Rao, MLCs, MLA Divakar Rao and other corporation chairpersons attended the public meeting .

Earlier, KCR inaugurated the integrated collectorate complex in Mancherial. He detailed how the government was employee-friendly and how the schemes and service matters were streamlined in the government services.

He also launched the second phase of the sheep rearing scheme and the one lakh rupee support to artisan families. The CM then laid the foundation stone for the palm oil industry and inaugurated the BRS district office during the visit to Mancherial.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR HT News Desk Follow the latest breaking news and developments from India and around the world with Hindustan Times' newsdesk. From politics and policies to the economy and the environment, from local issues to national events and global affairs, we've got you covered. ...view detail
The US department of justice (DOJ) charged Donald Trump, the 45th president of the country, with federal crimes for mishandling classified documents on Thursday. A grand jury in Florida handed the indictment which includes 38 counts of crimes and 31 separate counts of violations of the Espionage Act, adding a new dimension to the 2024 presidential race where Trump leads the race for the Republican nomination. Former US President Donald Trump.(AP)

Read here: Trumps indictment, and its impact on the 2024 race for White House

This is the first time in American history that a former president faces federal criminal charges. The charges were made public on Friday, and include unauthorised retention of national security documents in violation of the Espionage Act, false statements, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. Trump, the indictment alleges, had illegally kept documents concerning USs nuclear programmes, its potential vulnerabilities to a military attack, retaliation in case of a foreign attack.

The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, the justice department said.

Trump, who insisted on his innocence and charged the administration with weaponising the justice system, will be arraigned in a Miami court on Tuesday.

The case deals with Trump having taken classified files with him after demitting office in January 2021. After a prolonged push by the National Archives and Records Administration, Trumps team returned 15 boxes of documents in January 2022, 14 of which had classified documents. In response to a subpoena, Trumps lawyers returned an additional set of documents during the summer. But unconvinced that the former president had returned all the documents that were in his possession, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted a raid at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida, residence in August 2022, discovering 100 more classified documents including national security secrets.

Trump, who has claimed that he had declassified the documents as was his right as president before taking them, responded to the charges by declaring his innocence on social media, both through a post and a video, and saying that America was a nation going to hell.

He called it election interference at the highest level; claimed he had been charged because he had been doing well in polls; termed the charges boxes hoax, in line with the Russia hoax, referring to the charges of colluding with Russia during the 2016 elections; declared he was an innocent person who would fight out the charges, and claimed that President Joe Biden had many more classified documents in his possession from his stint as vice-president which has not been investigated. Bidens team has claimed that as soon as his office had discovered classified documents, unlike Trump, they had returned the documents and cooperated with relevant authorities.

Hours before the news of the indictment became public, when asked about Trumps allegations about the misuse of the justice system, Biden told reporters in White House on Thursday, I have never once  not one single time  suggested to the justice department what they should do or not do, relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge. I am honest.

The charges unified the otherwise divided Republican Party, with even Trumps rivals for the presidential nomination rallying behind him and accusing the administration of weaponising the justice system. Florida governor Ron DeSantis tweeted, The weaponisation of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?

DeSantiss reference was to Republican claims that Hillary Clinton used her private email for official purposes during her stint as secretary of state, and its allegations of corruption against the presidents son, Hunter Biden.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy termed it a dark day, claiming it was unconscionable for a president to indict the leading candidate opposing him. Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades. I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponisation of power accountable.

Read here: Ex-US President Donald Trump indicted on 37 counts in secret documents case

This is just one of the four cases that Trump is embroiled in. Earlier this year, New York prosecutors charged Trump on the grounds of falsifying business records in order to pay hush money to an adult film actress to keep an affair quiet during the 2016 elections. Trump is on the verge of being indicted in Georgia, for his efforts to overturn the states electoral results in 2020, while the DOJ is also investigating him for his role in seeking to subvert the 2020 electoral results that led up to the January 6, 2021 mob attack on Capitol Hill.

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For the first time in American history, the US department of justice (DOJ) has charged a former president with federal crimes. PREMIUM Former US President Donald Trump (Getty Images via AFP)

Read here: No contact with Justice department over Trump case: Joe Biden

Donald Trumps alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office not only leaves him in a legally vulnerable position ahead of the 2024 presidential polls, but also adds a new dimension to what promises to be among the most turbulent elections in the history of the US.

Heres what we know about the background of the case, the legal architecture governing it, Trumps other legal challenges and how the indictment may affect the battle for the White House next year.

The indictment

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 governs the management of all presidential records. It says that the US shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records. The Act also states, Upon the conclusion of a Presidents term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.

Trump left office in January 2021 and shifted to Mar-a-Lago, his private resort-residence in Florida. In the summer of that year, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) reached out to Trumps team asking them to hand over any other documents that may still be in the former presidents possession. In January 2022, Trumps team finally handed over 15 boxes of documents to NARA, many of which contained classified documents, but the archive agency suspected there remained gaps. In May, the DOJ issued a subpoena asking Trump to hand over any classified documents that were still in his possession. The following month, a lawyer for Trump handed over 38 more classified documents to NARA.

Unconvinced that Trump had indeed handed over all documents, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) secured a search warrant and, in August 2022, raided Mar-a-Lago, where agents discovered more than 100 additional classified documents. In November, the justice department appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to investigate the case. It is based on Smiths investigation  which has uncovered audio recordings as well as notes from Trumps lawyers that suggest that, despite his public denial, the former president was aware of the illegality of his actions  that the department has charged Trump with mishandling classified documents on June 8.

Read here: Donald Trump first US ex-President to face federal indictment

Whats next?

The exact charges were publicly revealed on Friday and included 38 criminal counts, and 31 separate counts of violation under the Espionage Act. Trump has been charged, among other things, for false statements, conspiracy and obstruction of justice, among other counts. The indictment says that the documents Trump had included information regarding defence and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.

The unauthorised disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods, it added.

Trump will now submit himself to a Miami court on Tuesday. However, it will be months before a trial commences. Trumps own defence revolves around the fact that, as president, he had the right to declassify documents and he had done so already.

Trump already faces three other legal challenges. In New York, prosecutors have charged Trump with felony for falsifying business records in a case related to hush payments he made to an adult film actress in the run-up to the 2016 elections. The trial for the case will begin next year. Later this summer, a grand jury in Georgia is expected to charge Trump over his efforts to illegally overturn the states electoral results in the 2020 polls by putting pressure on the states authorities. And the DOJ, under Smith, is also investigating the former presidents role in his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results which led to the January 6, 2021 mob attack on the US Capitol.

Bidens files

One of the allegations that Trump has made is the weaponisation of the justice system and the FBI, and to back his point, he has accused federal authorities of turning a blind eye to President Joe Bidens mishandling of classified files from his time as vice-president.

At the end of 2022, Bidens lawyers discovered a set of classified files in his old office at the Penn Biden Centre, where he worked after demitting office as vice-president, and immediately handed it over to NARA. In following months, both Bidens lawyers and justice department found other documents in Bidens residence in Delaware. The FBI also conducted a search of Bidens residence. And the DOJ appointed a special counsel to investigate the case.

Bidens entire defence, however, has rested on the fact that he has made no effort to hide the documents: the documents were immediately handed over to NARA once they were discovered; his team has fully cooperated with the justice department; there has been no obstruction of the investigation and in all these respects, his case is unlike that of Trump, who, they allege, made a deliberate decision to take away files, refused to hand them over despite repeated pleas, and obstructed justice.

Eye on 2024 polls

After the Republicans faced a setback in the 2022 midterm elections, there was a brief period when it appeared that Trumps electoral prospects for the partys nomination were bleak. His favoured candidates had lost House and Senate elections, his extremism during the 2020 elections was seen as having put off supporters, and the Republican donor and media ecosystem appeared to be moving towards Florida governor Ron DeSantis. But Trump confounded pundits yet again, as he raced up the Republican ladder to become the frontrunner for the nomination. Criminal charges against Trump, paradoxically, have helped increase his support among core Republican supporters who see the cases as vendetta by the Democratic administration.

Read here: Ex-US President Donald Trump indicted on 37 counts in secret documents case

Against this backdrop, even as Trumps legal troubles mount, Thursdays charges appear to be unifying the Republican base behind him. Even Trumps foremost rivals for the nomination, including DeSantis, have criticised the administration for, what they term, the weaponisation of the justice system and come to Trumps defence. Trumps team is also looking to exploit the moment by playing the victim card and raise more funds for his presidential campaign. An indictment, and even a conviction, does not bar Trump from contesting in the elections.

At the same time, Democrats believe that even if Trumps core base remains loyal, the legal charges will alienate moderate Republicans and independent voters away from Trump, raising Bidens prospects in 2024. What is certain is that irrespective of how the legal charges eventually play out, next years presidential polls will be the most unique in American electoral history, where an incumbent president may battle a former president charged with federal crimes.
Theres trouble in the dollhouse. PREMIUM Stills from Greta Gerwigs Barbie and Rhys Frake-Waterfield's Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. Also coming soon, Tinker Bell as a recovering addict battling obesity, and a Barney the dinosaur in two minds about his love-all philosophy.

A wave of anti-nostalgia is hitting childhood idols. It started in February, when the large-hearted teddy bear Winnie the Pooh starred as a feral monster, in Blood and Honey (2023; directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield).

In July, Barbie leaves Barbie Land in a Greta Gerwig retelling of the dolls adventures. Its a film based in part on Mary Piphers 1994 book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, which explores the loss of identity girls face as they approach their teens.

Everything that was once unique about them is planed away, and the focus shifts almost entirely to surface attributes such as appearance and popularity; the result is that each girl is left wondering whether shes good enough. And those that can confidently say they meet the metric must then worry how long it will be before they fall below it.

From that candy-coloured dystopia to a purple-hued one, theres a more realistic Barney coming soon. Oscar-winning actor Daniel Kaluuya has said that his live-action movie will explore whether the beloved dinosaurs message of I love you, you love me can stand the test of time. Interestingly, both Barbie and Barney are being produced in partnership with Mattel Films.

Meanwhile, the British indie-horror movie-maker Frake-Waterfield is by no means done. He is planning a horror universe full of twisted adaptations. In the upcoming Bambi: The Reckoning, the once-beloved Disneyfied deer sets off on a rage-fuelled quest to avenge the death of its mother, who was killed by a hunter in the original tale by Felix Salten.

And in Peter Pans Neverland Nightmare, based on the JM Barrie stories, the fairy Tinker Bell is a recovering drug addict struggling with obesity.

No release dates have been announced yet, for these or the Barney film, but there is a possibility of crossovers, Frake-Waterfield has said. People have been saying they really want to see Bambi versus Pooh, he told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year.

One of the reasons for the sudden onslaught is a technical one: a number of Disney icons, including Pooh, Peter and Bambi, were released from their 95-year copyright protection in 2022 and are now in the public domain.

Why the dark direction? Mattel Films offers an explainer, in a statement by executive vice-president Robbie Brenner: Working with Daniel Kaluuya will enable us to take a completely new approach to Barney that will surprise audiences and subvert expectations. The project will speak to the nostalgia of the brand in a way that will resonate with adults, while entertaining todays kids.

That last bit holds the key: why would todays young people presumably appreciate these specific takes on these tales? Thats where anti-nostalgia comes in.

These movies likely represent a reaction against the cultural totems of the Boomer generation; a way of saying: Your nostalgia masks nightmares, says film journalist K Narayanan.

This reckoning comes at a time when people are re-examining the stories that shaped the worldview of a generation that still holds positions of power and makes the laws today, says New York-based film critic Devika Girish. Theres a strong desire to acknowledge and correct the mistakes of this generations  the idealisation of certain stereotypes and the problematic depictions of others  because we have started to recognise their impact on society.

Theyre not twists, then, but a reversion, from falsely saccharine-sweet tales to the dark truths they sought to conceal. There is no Teddy Bears Picnic; I-love-you-you-love-me is not a viable philosophy; and there should be no such thing as the perfect girl.

If the fairy-tale forest is a place of anything, it is  as in the original folk tales  a place of danger, where hunters may seem friendly but remain armed, and a predator may be lurking in your grandmothers home.

So many fairy tales were polished and sanitised, Girish says. Today, if storytellers are tapping into core ideas for dark, fantastical themes, it is a reversal of that process.

And so, in Blood and Honey, AA Milnes Winnie the Pooh is abandoned by his friend, a college-bound Christopher Robin. Forgotten and hungry, the veil is ripped off their idealised bond, to reveal the transactional equations beneath it (and beneath so many kinds of love).

Long-dormant instincts kick in, and the bear and piglet revert to the carnivorous survivors that they always, deep down, were. Pooh and Piglet first kill and eat their friend, the gloomy donkey Eeyore, then set out on a spree that ends with 13 dead.

As with so much in art, society and popular culture, we have been here before. As far back as 1726, Jonathan Swift was ripping the veils off a complacent and self-absorbed generation, with tales of fetidness hidden behind perfumed cravats; gluttony among aristocrats; and much, much worse, all disguised as a light-hearted tale of adventure, Gullivers Travels, about a young man touring odd new worlds.

Film critic Baradwaj Rangan argues that Barbie, Barney and the rest may not, in fact, be taking things far enough.

To deconstruct the story of a toy that has been the symbol of female perfection in society is a big task but for it to truly be anti-nostalgia, we would need to see how Barbie navigates more realistic territories, he says. I would like to see a Barbie who binges on burgers, puts on the pounds and deals with real life and real challenges.
Manmade music has been shaping our world for tens of thousands of years, long before writing, its arguably-more-tangible cousin, was born. And for thousands of years, humans have been trying to decode our response to this kind of created sound. PREMIUM A lyre depicted on a 3rd millennium BCE Sumerian artifact - essentially an engraved box - called the Standard of Ur. (Wikimedia Commons)

The earliest efforts to explain musics power were tied up in overlapping ideas of religion and magic. So were the earliest songs.

The oldest surviving piece of recorded music is a hymn to the Mesopotamian goddess of fertility Nikkal, written in cuneiform on a clay tablet dating to about 1400 BCE.

Across Ancient Egypt, India, China, Greece and Mesopotamia, songs that served important ceremonial functions survived in similar fashion, preserved on clay tablets, papyrus, and eventually paper. Like so much of music today, these ancient songs praise the Gods, invoke supernatural forces, deify those in power.

While the earliest purposes of music were likely propitiation and celebration, ideas of the place of music in the universe have varied widely.

In Ancient Greece, the 6th-century BCE mathematician Pythagoras argued that music was a reflection of cosmic harmony. In its tendency towards symmetry and unity, he argued, it was not that different from math.

A century later, Plato and then his disciple Aristotle would reject this idea of cosmic harmony, and argue that the true purposes of music was social, educational and personal. Plato argued that music was a great pedagogical tool, and was essential to the correct functioning of society.

Incidentally, the idea of music as a corrupting influence can be traced all the way back here. The wrong kind of music could be a gateway to moral corruption, Plato argued. He even wrote that the cultural influence of new music that became popular in Greece amid the Persian wars was to blame for the younger generations revolt against authority and social unrest in Athens. (Isnt it uncanny, how ideas echo through millennia?)

In China, Confucius and other thinkers divided music into forms, with some considered vernacular and less valued. In India, the Natya Shastra, compiled by the sage Bharata Muni sometime between 200 BCE and 200 CE, proposed that great music could cause in the listener a state of divine ecstasy, thus laying the foundation for a tradition of devotional music that endures.

The idea of Satanic music can be traced to the era of the Crusades. An increasingly rigid form of Christianity took root in Europe and the Levant, as wars were fought between soldiers of Christ and those of Islam from the 11th to 13th centuries. On both sides, music created and listened to for sensuous pleasure was declared vulgar by the establishment (the practice never really died out, across eras and regions).

Certain chord progressions were said to be associated with evil and with Satan (another echo that carries into our times). Some of these arrangements, including the infamous Diabolus in Musica or Devil in the Music, are still used in horror and heavy metal today, as well as in other settings helped by such a combination of chords and intervals designed to be unsettling.

Meanwhile, in the Islamic world, the Sufis challenged implicit and explicit bans on music, and developed a musical philosophy of the body and soul that still thrives across the Indian subcontinent, the Levant and Africa. Through songs of peace, love and coexistence, these mystics encourage people to use music to connect with the Divine.

All this time, though, high art fell into roughly two categories: devotion, or the imitation of nature.

This would change with the Renaissance, when 15th-century artists and philosophers began to argue that high art could have a personal purpose too: as a means of expression for the artist, and a resonant reflection of the everyday.

With that, the floodgates were opened. Each generation would craft its riffs. Elders would complain of the noise.
FICTION Were teasing 10 new reads from Indias most exciting authors. A RAW hitman tells his fiery tale, the Sultans of Oman open up, short stories are translated into English for the first time. (Illustration by Malay Karmakar)

How to Fall Out of Love Madly

Jana Casale

This is for anyone looking for a book thats funny, smart and hard-hitting, and enjoys reading about women and their many relationshipswith one another, their mothers, work, men, and themselves.

Let me tell you something about my stomach. Its big and I hate it. I think about it all the time. I think about the way it looks in shirts and dresses, the way it sits over my jeans and hangs over the edge. When Im sitting, it juts out in the most hideous way with big folds. Theres no flattering way for me to sit with it so I think about ways to not sit, and I think about sucking it in whenever it is that I am sitting.

I think about what other people think about it, and what they think of me because of it. I never want to look at it, but I cant stop staring at it in the mirror whenever I get the chance. I would love to tell you that it doesnt define how I think of myself, but those are just words and theyre not making me feel what it is I want to feel and what it is that I want to feel is thinner. I cry about it a lot, mostly to myself and sometimes to my mom. She usually tells me Im crazy and that I should stop obsessing. One time, just once, when Id called and started in on the same conversation about my weight and how fat I am, she said as I was sobbing.

NON-FICTION

Sovereigns of the Sea

Seema Alavi

This is for anyone with an interest in the history of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East and South Asia. This historical account of the Sultans of Oman details their battles, daring expeditions, epic triumphs and ingenious politics in the nineteenth century.

In 1842, Sayyid Said (17911856), the Sultan of Oman and Zanzibar, checked with the British Consul at Muscat if it would be disrespectful to recycle to the Nizam of Hyderabad, in India, a carriage and harness that was gifted to him by Queen Victoria. He said he had not made any use of it, as there were no roads of any description in Zanzibar where he could use it. As a result, the carriage remained in its packing case. He once got it taken out to have a look at it and then got it repacked.

FICTION

Unspoken

Sharmishta Gooptu

This is for anyone wanting to go on a journey to the past with the protagonist as she tries to figure out a mystery amid the secrets her dementia-afflicted mother has started to spill.

June 2024.

Miu, you really shouldnt say such things, you know, Aisha gently scolded her mother.

Miu had wanted an alphonso mango gateau and she was finishing the top layering of the fresh cream before she put the last of the mango slices on the cake. Her mother liked fruity desserts the best.

Did you understand what I said? she asked her mother who was hungrily watching the cake getting finished.

Miu nodded. Then said. You remember Baby aunty, who used to make those lovely cakes, when you were little? I once took one for him. One like this one, with mangoes in it. She stopped, and licked her lip. No, not for him, for everybody. But he had a piece.

Aisha made a face. What him? Who?

NON-FICTION

Eating the Present, Tasting the Future

Charmaine OBrien

This is for anyone looking for interesting insights into our relationship with eating, and wants to read more about what, how and where Indians are producing and trading food.

It was a Monday when I met restaurant entrepreneur Rohit Khattar for lunch at Indian Accent, the pre-eminent eatery in his Delhi portfolio, esteemed for its menu of contemporary interpretations of classic Indian dishes and regional specialities served in chic surroundings. The elegant dining room was respectably patronized on what is the quietest day of the week for the hospitality industry, and with the socially fabulous (usually prominent here) at home recovering from the weekend, this left Khattar free to give our conversation his undivided attention.

FICTION

The Coincidence Plot

Anil Menon

This for you if, like this author, you believe that everything happens for a reason, his characters, who meet through subtle parallels and strange coincidences will strike a chord. Pick this one up to examine the question, How free are we, truly?

WELCOME MY FRIEND, WHAT CHANCE HAS BROUGHT YOU HERE?

The question on the screen was starkly lit against the velvet darkness of the cinema hall. When Saki had told me about the screening of A Throw of Dice, I was enthusiastic. I had always been curious to learn more about the Hindus conception of chance and destiny. So far I had seen a tiger, coiling snakes, an elephant-shikar, a turbaned sage and an unusually fair Indien princess. All in under three minutes or so. I checked my pocketwatch. There was one hour and twelve minutes left of this oriental spectacle. Saki turned her head, smiled, and snuggled closer.

FICTION

Imaginary Rain

Vikas Khanna

This for you if you would like to follow an immigrants story of survival, forgiveness and moving on. And anyone who wants to read the Michelin-starred chefs new book before the movie (with Shabana Azmi and Prateik Babbar) comes out.

Dust swirled around the sandstone pillars of the Jama Masjid, as the sun made its white domes glow. It was 1975 in Old Delhi, and an excitable crowd stood huddled around a transistor radio, waiting to hear whether India had successfully launched its first satellite, Aryabhata, named after the Indian astronomer, into space. Amid the traffic and flag-waving throngs, a young girl, who couldnt have been older than ten, with the complexion of dried sugarcane and the rounded, hopeful features of a cherub, held a ragged bouquet of orange paper flowers in her hands.

NON-FICTION

Welcome to Aaraampur: A Sleepy Little Hill Town

Dhruv Nath

This is for you if you enjoy Ruskin Bond and want to immerse themselves in a quick, easy read that will transport them to a time that was simpler and slower, with characters that are quirky yet lovable.

Dear reader, welcome to this book. Where I will take you to a sleepy little town, tucked away in the majestic hills of Himachal. The town is called Aaraampur. And no, thats not a spelling mistake. Its not Rampur.

It is Aaraampur.

What did you say? You havent been there? You havent even heard of it? Ah, my friend, youve missed something in life. Its a truly wonderful place. If you happen to live in one of our huge, congested cities like Delhi or Mumbai or Bangalore, you must visit Aaraampur. And discover for yourself just how peaceful life in these small towns can be.

FICTION

RAW Hitman: The real story of Agent Lima

S Hussain Zaidi

This is for you if intrigue and deceit sound like great hooks, and if true stories seem better than fiction. It is based upon the double murder of gangsters Raju Pargai and Amit Arya in Uttarakhand, in September 2011.

6th September 2011, Nainital, Uttarakhand

Half an hour past midnight, raindrops pelted the roof of the Ford which was speeding past the jungles of Bhowali. The car was being driven by Rajendra Pargai aka Raju Pargaithe most dreaded criminal of Uttarakhand. Pargais love for speed was at its peak as the speedometer flickered around the seventy kmph mark. It was as fast as one could drive on these mountainous roads.

FICTION

Feeling Kerala

Translated by J Devika

This is for Anyone looking for a solid anthology of contemporary Malayalam stories, which have finally been translated into English. The stories move in and out of homes and take readers into convents and panchayats, airports and tourist resorts, from the highlands to coastal areas and the urban cities.

Yama

The antstrapped in the blob of mucous fallen on the hollow, termite-eaten windowsillstopped struggling. She was weeping, chin pressed against arms crossed on the ledge; once or twice, her mothers curses fell on her ears like meteorsfalling, helpless, exploding. It wasnt clear who she aimed them at. It seemed from the racket that the misshapen pots and pans in the kitchen were changing shape again. Her thin hands must be searching desperately for unbroken things now. Her mother, cursing death that slid away without bowing to her. Life, like a sharp spike of iron that the years could not corrode or waste away. Their relatives knew well how to keep a safe distance so that they would not fall on it . . .

From HT Brunch, June 10, 2023

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Jack Pearson; This Is Us Viewers know from the very beginning of this weepy family drama that Jack (Milo Ventimiglia), the good dad, is missing, likely dead.

Viewers know from the very beginning of this weepy family drama that Jack (Milo Ventimiglia), the good dad, is missing, likely dead. Its what makes his absence and its effect on the surviving wife and three children all the more painful to watch. It was a cardiac arrest from smoke inhalation off a burning Crockpot that did Jack in. Frankly, every episode of this show hurts (helped by the background score). But Jack flashbacks hurt the most.

Love Quinn; You

Love Quinn was a manipulative murderer with a huge ego and a short temper. Her death is shocking only because no one saw it coming.

Love Quinn was not a good person. She was a manipulative murderer with a huge ego and a short temper. Her death is shocking only because no one saw it coming. After poisoning her husband Joe Goldberg, she advances towards him with a knife, but he injects her with his own lethal dose of aconite first. Joe who had the antidote ready for himself, survives yet again. RiP, Love.

Ashtray; Euphoria

Ashtray, a drug dealer and the youngest character, dies protecting his brother Fezco from a SWAT team.

Unexpected deaths hit bad when its a character everyone loves. They hit worse when they happen quickly in a show that is already fast paced. Ashtray, a drug dealer and the youngest character, dies protecting his brother Fezco from a SWAT team. For someone whod only known violence and trauma, this death of a key character was a powerful way to re-arrange the stakes.

Michael Cordero Jr; Jane The Virgin

Janes screams, as she hears of the collapse of her husband, Michael Cordero Jr, of a few hours from a fatal blow, is the twist viewers feel in their guts.

Jane had planned her wedding night with much anticipation and excitement. Nothing prepared her for her husband being shot. Like any good telenovela, this one had drama. But Janes screams, as she hears of the collapse of her husband of a few hours from a fatal blow, is the twist viewers feel in their guts. He is, after all, the man who rendered the shows title obsolete.

Logan Roy; Succession

Logan Roy almost died in the opening episode of Succession.

He almost died in the opening episode. But he roared, thundered and held on to his billion-dollar empire for four seasons. Viewers knew he had to give up the throne (the title of the show is Succession, after all). But the heart-attack, sudden, off-camera, was devastating. As his not-serious kids take over, his legacy crumbles, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Sarah Lynn; Bojack Horseman

Sarah Lynn, self-destructive, with help from Bojack over the years, dies unsurprisingly of a drug overdose.

Fans of the show that walks the line between tragedy and comedy know that living can often be worse than death. Sarah Lynn, self-destructive, with help from Bojack over the years, dies unsurprisingly of a drug overdose. Her last words are I wanna be an architect, a nod to her unfulfilled dreams and stolen promises. Impactful, isnt it?

Hodor; Game of Thrones

The death that hurts is Hodor in Game of Thrones, the gentle, slow, bear of a protector, whos capable only of saying Hodor.

Ned Stark isnt on this list. Nor are the key characters that dropped like flies over eight seasons. The death that hurts is Hodor, the gentle, slow, bear of a protector, whos capable only of saying Hodor. Theyre his last words too. He mutters Hodor over and over, when he means Hold the door against the enemies, giving up his life in a self-fulfilling prophecy, so someone else can rise to power.

Lady Sybil Crawley; Downton Abbey

In Downton Abbey, when the sweet, rebellious youngest daughter dies in childbirth, as so many women did in the 1920s, its devastating.

When death accompanies good tidings, it leaves the viewers shocked. In Downton Abbey, when the sweet, rebellious youngest daughter dies in childbirth, as so many women did in the 1920s, its devastating. She was the fun one, bored by wealth, who wore harem pants, fell in love with the chauffeur and represented a brighter future. What a loss!

Poussey Washington; Orange Is The New Black

The death of Poussey Washington at the hands of a brutal prison guard arrangement hurts more because its dismissed as an accidental.

Bad things do happen to good people. And the death of the benevolent inmate at the hands of a brutal prison guard arrangement hurts more because its dismissed as an accidental. Her body is literally left on the cafeteria floor for a day until the coroner arrives. Does anyone deserve this pointless, ruthless death? It is even more agonising when we find out that she was in prison only for a non-violent crime.

Kenny; South Park

Poor Kenny died 97 times over 26 seasons.

How could we not include him? Poor Kenny died 97 times over 26 seasons, turning death itself into a complete joke. He was struck by lightning, gets destroyed by a snow speeder and even gets drowned and mauled by an evil goldfish. When the creators finally killed off Kenny for good, viewers hardly noticed.

From HT Brunch, June 10, 2023

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Priyanka Chopra, the beloved "desi girl" of India, continues to make her mark on the international stage, bringing immense pride to her home country. Recently, she was seen in Rome, attending the opening of the Bulgari Hotel, and she looked stunning in an elegant white outfit. With her impeccable fashion sense and a bold willingness to experiment, she has established herself as a truly global fashion icon. During the event, she was accompanied by Zendaya, the popular Spider-Man actor, who also made a statement in a dazzling pantsuit. The two actresses were earlier seen together at the Bulgari party. To learn more about their appearances, continue reading. (Also read: Loved Priyanka Chopra's black crop top and thigh-slit skirt for Beyonce's London concert? Here's what it costs ) Priyanka Chopra and Zendaya at in Rome, attending the opening of the Bulgari Hotel. (Instagram )

Priyanka Chopra stuns in white dress at Bulgari Hotel opening

Priyanka Chopra stuns in white gown, radiating elegance at Rome. (Instagram )

Priyanka Chopra Jonas' recent fashion choices at the event made a splash on social media, captivating audiences worldwide. This time, her wardrobe embraced daring and playful elements, fearlessly showcasing a love for voluminous and extravagant styles. The actress opted for a breathtaking gown by Giambattista Valli Couture. The gown boasted a plunging V neckline and dramatic full sleeves adorned with long feathers, creating a striking and theatrical look. The flared bottom featured a high slit and a trailing train, evoking an image of a wealthy aristocrat gliding down her opulent marble hallway. To complete her ensemble, Priyanka accessorized with a unique dark green necklace featuring multiple layers of green beads and a large pendant with intricate white and green detailing, accentuated by a silver circle at the centre.

When it came to her makeup, the actress embraced a bold approach. She chose to enhance her eyes with brown eyeshadow, winged eyeliner, and mascara to accentuate her lashes. Her cheeks were perfectly contoured and adorned with a hint of blush, while her lips sported a stunning burgundy shade of lipstick. As for her hair, the actress was in an experimental mood, opting for a charming pigtail hairstyle with her gorgeous locks cascading down her shoulders.

Meanwhile, Zendaya, the talented actress known for her role in Euphoria, made a striking appearance on the carpet. She exuded glamour and confidence in a black Valentino suit, which had a relaxed fit and was adorned with shimmering iridescent glitter. Accompanied by her image architect, Law Roach, Zendaya completed her sparkling ensemble with a fishnet top embellished with reflective rhinestones and completed the look with pointed-toe stilettos, adding a touch of elegance to her overall appearance.

Priyanka Chopra and Zendaya were also seen attending the Bulgari event in Venice, Italy last month. Where Priyanka Chopra looked stunning in a bright pink co-ord outfit with a floral detail on her skirt. She paired it with a matching crop top and accessorized with a diamond choker and drop earrings. Zendaya opted for classic Hollywood glamour with a black velvet gown cinched at the waist and a dramatic fishtail. She wore her hair in a bun and adorned it with a Bulgari serpenti necklace, completing her look with dark lipstick and smoky eyes.

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A day to be dedicated to the most important person in your life, National Bae Day is celebrated on June 10 every year. This isn't an official observance and the day was created on the internet as per reports. According to Oxford dictionary, bae refers to a person's boyfriend or girlfriend. Many people consider bae as a slang term that originated from the acronym 'before anyone else', while more reliable sources say that the term is an abbreviation for baby or babe. However, the disputed meaning could hold more significance for singles. In case, you do not have a special someone in your life, it is possible that your best buddy could be your bae and your topmost priority. There are people in our lives we put before anyone else and for whom in a moment of need we can drop everything to reach out. (Also read: National Brother's Day: Date, history, wishes, quotes, and how to celebrate) Many people consider bae as a slang term that originated from the acronym 'before anyone else', while more reliable sources say that the term is an abbreviation for baby or babe. (Freepik)

History and significance of National Bae Day

The term bae became popular around a decade back in years 2013 and 2014 all thanks to social media and hip-hop, R&B lyrics. The term originated as an abbreviation of the word baby or babe and is mostly seen on various social networking sites and used by teenagers.

According to reports, in 2013, Grant Barrett, a lexicographer, nominated the word bae for the American Dialect Societys Word of the Year. The term bae was also used by Pharell Williams in his single Come Get It Bae. It is in 2015 that National Bae Day shot to popularity on social media.

How to celebrate National Bae Day

If you are single and have a crush on someone, it is the best time to confess to your feelings and tell your bae how much they mean to you.

Take them out to a lavish candle-light dinner, order dishes of their choice and share a hand-written note.

Make a greeting card for them writing all that you feel about them and wait for them to respond with a warm and long hug.

Drop everything and spend the day in their company

Wishes, quotes, images, messages for your bae

"I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, and all that you are yet to be."

"I thought you were perfect, so I loved you. I found out you werent perfect and loved you even more."

"I can conquer the world with one hand as long you so hold the other."

"You know youre in love when you cant fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams. Dr. Seuss

"I am who I am because of you. You are every reason, every hope, and every dream Ive ever had." The Notebook

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you. A. A. Milne
Westernised lifestyle Is a major contributor to the rise in cases of diabetes in Goa, which has recorded the highest prevalence of the disorder in the country, experts said on Friday. As per a study conducted by the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and other institutes, Goa has recorded the highest prevalence of diabetes in the country with 26.4 per cent of its population suffering from the disorder. The study was published in the UKs The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal. (Also read: Diabetes crisis deepens in India: Top 10 worst-affected states and UTs) Goa has recorded the highest prevalence of diabetes in the country with 26.4 per cent of its population suffering from the disorder. (Unsplash)

While the state has taken necessary initiatives to provide help to patients of diabetes, prevention is solely in the hands of individuals as medical intervention begins only once the disease is detected, a senior official said.

The Goa BJP's medical cell convenor Dr Shekhar Salkar said that the increasing westernised lifestyle is a cause for many non-communicable diseases in the coastal state. "Goa is completely westernised in its eating and lifestyle habits. Which is why even the instances of breast cancer have shown a significant rise," he said, pointing out that the state has also seen an increase in cases of obesity, which is also one of the causes for diabetes.

"There is nothing wrong in western eating habits, but our (Indian) body is not attuned to it," said Salkar said. He further said that a suggestion has been given to the state government to conduct a study on the prevalence of non-communicable diseases in the state.

"The study can go up to 20 years, but in the first five years, we will be able to get the results for diseases such as diabetes," he said. While director of health services Dr Geeta Kakodkar was unavailable for comment, a senior official from the department said the "changing diabetic barometer (CDB)" programme is implemented in every state-run primary health centre and community health centre in Goa.

The state government has signed an agreement with a global healthcare company Novo Nordisk and the Embassy of Denmark for a diabetes treatment programme, he said. Community diabetes centres have been set up for testing and treatment under this programme, which also provides free insulin to patients, he said. "There are dedicated counsellors who help diabetics with their medication. A separate diabetes registry is also being maintained in the state since 2011," the official said.
Indonesias paradise island teeming with beaches and lush rice fields wants to refocus its tourism away from guests who tend to misbehave and instead lure talented nomads, retirees and health buffs. Bali seeks to lure talented nomads, retirees and health buffs after kicking out 136 unruly tourists this year (Unsplash)

The local government has deported 136 foreigners since the start of the year for various misconduct including indecent exposure, rowdy behavior and rule breaking, according to the Bali immigration office.

Just in the past month, a German tourist crashed a show at an Ubud temple by walking naked on stage, while a Danish woman was detained for exposing her genitals in public. A British man is facing trial after assaulting a police officer after refusing to pay his bill at a bar.

The incidents left Bali Governor I Wayan Koster with a dilemma; to either keep on accepting all tourists or be more discriminating while risking the islands nascent recovery. Then theres another option: reinvent the island into a health hub and research center.

Indonesia is looking to partner with Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic to build a medical center in Sanur, a quiet town on the eastern coast, that will also feature luxury hotels and care facilities for seniors. In Serangan, Bali will develop a research hub to join Tsinghua Universitys Southeast Asia Center, according to the coordinating ministry for economic affairs.

Like neighboring travel destinations, the tourism-reliant island was devastated by the pandemic as many hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops shuttered. While overseas visitors rebounded to 2.16 million last year, from less than 60 in 2021, its still just a third of the more than 6 million who came in 2019.

As foreign guests return, Koster is seeking a new tourism blueprint that will limit the entry of the undesirables and attract the ones that tend to spend more, energize the local economy and behave well.

Tourism remains a mainstay, but it will be in a much different position than before, Koster said in an interview. This push will encourage the transformation of Bali, from mass tourism to quality tourism.

Bali is rolling out the red carpet for potential investors, offering tax breaks as well as easier employment rules and licensing, to deliver 477 trillion rupiah ($32 billion) of foreign-currency earnings through 2052. A recently passed law grants the island more autonomy to let Koster plan out its economic development.

Misbehaving tourists wont find the same welcome. Bali is considering imposing an entry tax and a quota for visitors, while banning them from climbing mountains, touching sacred trees or renting motorbikes.

The island is now requiring licensed tour guides to accompany foreigners that are expected to wear modest clothing and abide by the rules.

Foreigners skilled in digital, health, research and technology sectors could qualify for golden visas that allow them to own assets and fast-track citizenship. Guests with the equivalent of at least 2 billion rupiah in their bank accounts could get a second home visa to stay for up to 10 years.

Many countries have issued golden visas because they provide many benefits by increasing investment. said Tourism Minister Sandiaga Uno on Monday. The rules on the long stay visas will be issued soon, he added.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
Hawaii tourism officials urged tourists to be respectful when flocking to a national park on the Big Island to get a glimpse of the latest eruption of Kilauea, one of the world's most active volcanoes. Visitors line the side of an overlook to view the Kilauea eruption in Hawaii. Hawaii tourism officials are urging tourists to be respectful when flocking to a national park on the Big Island to get a glimpse of the latest eruption of Kilauea. It's one of the world's most active volcanoes and began erupting after a three-month pause. (Kelsey Walling/Hawaii Tribune-Herald via AP)

Kilauea, Hawaiis second-largest volcano, began erupting Wednesday after a three-month pause.

The US Geological Surveys Hawaiian Volcano Observatory on Thursday lowered Kilaueas alert level from warning to watch because the rate of lava input declined, and no infrastructure is threatened. The eruption activity is confined to the closed area of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

Out of respect for the cultural and spiritual significance of a volcanic eruption and the crater area for many kamaaina, the Hawaii Tourism Authority urges mindfulness when planning a visit to the volcano, the agency said in a statement Wednesday night, using a Hawaiian word often used for Hawaii residents.

For many Native Hawaiians, an eruption of a volcano has a deep yet very personal cultural significance. Some may chant, some may pray to ancestors, and some may honor the moment with hula, or dance. Hawaiians ask that people keep a respectful distance.

Don't just get out your camera and take photos. Stop and be still and take it in," said Cyrus Johnasen, a spokesperson for Hawaii County who is Hawaiian. It's something that you can't pay for. In that moment, you are one with Hawaii.

In recognizing the sacredness of the area, he also urged visitors to not take rocks, refrain from horseplay and leave plants alone.

A lot of plants up there are native, he said. Just be mindful that you will leave a footprint. The idea is you leave one thats small as possible.

Word of Kilauea's lava fountains spread quickly, bringing crowds to the park. Expect major delays and limited parking due to high visitation, said a warning on the park's website Thursday.

There was no exact count available, but officials estimated the first day and night of the eruption brought more than 10,000 people, which is more than triple the number of visitors on a normal day when Kilauea isn't erupting, park spokesperson Jessica Ferracane said.

Several thousand viewers were watching the USGS's livestream showing red pockets of moving lava Thursday morning.

We were on social media, and we saw that it was actually going off while were here, so we made the drive from the Kona side," Andrew Choi, visiting with his family from Orange County, California, told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald. This feels so ridiculously lucky. Weve never seen anything like this.

Park officials suggested visiting at less-crowded times before 9 a.m. or after 9 p.m.

Scientists expect the eruption to continue and remain confined to the Halemaumau crater in the park.

Early Wednesday, lava fountains were as high as 200 feet (60 meters) and decreased to 13 feet to 30 feet (4 meters to 9 meters) in the afternoon, according to the observatory.

People here on Hawaii Island are getting a spectacular show, Mayor Mitch Roth said. And it's happening in a safe place that was built for people to come view it.
A study funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Thursday revealed that astronauts who travelled on the International Space Station (ISS) or NASA space shuttle on missions lasting at least six months experienced significant expansion of the cerebral ventricles  spaces in the middle of the brain containing cerebrospinal fluid. The study concluded that longer missions, multiple flights, and shorter inter-mission recovery time induce greater intracranial fluid changes.(REUTERS)

Spaceflight imposes multiple hazards on the human body including increased radiation, microgravity exposure, and social isolation and confinement in a closed environment, among other factors, the study published in the journal Scientific Reports said.

Recovery time

Based on brain scans of 30 astronauts, the researchers found that it took three years for the ventricles to fully recover after such journeys, suggesting that an interval of at least that duration would be advisable between longer space missions.

If the ventricles dont have sufficient time to recover between back-to-back missions, this may impact the brains ability to cope with fluid shifts in microgravity. For example, if the ventricles are already enlarged from a previous mission, they may be less compliant and/or have less space to expand and accommodate fluid shifts during the next mission, University of Florida neuroscientist Heather McGregor, lead author of the study told Reuters.

Impact

The impact of ventricular expansion in space travellers is not currently known. More long-term health follow-up is needed. This ventricular expansion likely compresses the surrounding brain tissue, theUniversity of Florida applied physiology and kinesiology professor and study senior author Rachael Seidler said.

The study concluded that longer missions, multiple flights, and shorter inter-mission recovery time induce greater intracranial fluid changes.

(With agency inputs)
Lawyers are a conservative bunch, befitting a profession that rewards preparedness, sagacity and respect for precedent. No doubt many enjoyed a chuckle at the tale of Steven Schwartz, a personal-injury lawyer at the New York firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, who last month used ChatGPT to help him prepare a court filing. He relied a bit too heavily on the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. It created a motion replete with made-up cases, rulings and quotes, which Mr Schwartz promptly filed after the bot assured him that the cases I provided are real and can be found in reputable legal databases (they were not, and cannot). Lesson learned, a tech-sceptic lawyer might conclude: the old ways are the best. PREMIUM Generative AIs such as ChatGPT are powerful. Could they replace lawyers?(Shutterstock)

That is the wrong lesson. Blaming AI for Mr Schwartzs error-filled brief makes no more sense than blaming the printing press for mistakes in a typed one. In both cases, fault lies with the lawyer who failed to check the motion before filing it, not the tool that helped produce it. For that is what AI is: neither a fad nor an apocalypse, but a tool in its infancyand one that could radically change how lawyers work and law firms make money. The legal profession is hardly the only field about which one could say that. But few combine as clear a use case with so high a risk. Firms that get it right stand to reap rewards. Laggards risk going the way of typesetters.

According to a recent report from Goldman Sachs, a bank, 44% of legal tasks could be performed by AI, more than in any occupation surveyed except for clerical and administrative support. Lawyers spend an awful lot of time scrutinising tedious documentsthe sort of thing that AI has already demonstrated it can do well. Lawyers use AI for a variety of tasks, including due diligence, research and data analytics. These applications have largely relied on extractive AI, which, as the name suggests, extracts information from a text, answering specific questions about its contents.

Generative AIs such as ChatGPT are far more powerful. Part of that power can be used to improve legal research and document review. As Pablo Arredondo, creator of a generative-AI legal assistant called CoCounsel, explains, using it removes the tyranny of the keywordIt can tell that We reverse Jenkins [a fictional legal case] and We regretfully consign Jenkins to the dustbin of history are the same thing. Allen & Overy, a large firm based in London, has integrated a legal AI tool called Harvey into its practice, using it for contract analysis, due diligence and litigation prep.

Not all lawyers are convinced. One recent survey found that 82% of them believe generative AI can be used for legal work but just 51% thought it should. Many worry about hallucinations (as AI boffins refer to chatbots tendency to present falsehoods with aplomb, as in Mr Schwartzs case) and about inadvertently feeding information subject to attorney-client privilege into algorithms. Yet if these challenges can be tackledand they can, with better technology and careful humans in the loopthen the misgivings of the doubting 49% may pass. After news of Mr Schwartzs debacle broke, for example, a federal judge in Texas told attorneys appearing before him to file a certificate attesting that they either did not use generative AI at all or that, if they did, they checked the final result. Much as it made little sense for lawyers to insist on doing legal research in libraries once the vastly larger and more easily searched databases of Westlaw and LexisNexis were a click away, when a critical mass of firms embraces generative AI, more will follow.

AI has the potential to transform the legal profession in three big ways. First, it could reduce big firms manpower advantage. In large, complex lawsuits, these firms tell dozens of associates to read millions of pages of documents looking for answers to senior lawyers questions and hunches. Now a single lawyer or small firm will be able to upload these documents into a litigation-prep AI and begin querying them. As Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School notes, You can be a smaller, leaner specialised firm and have the capacity to process these sorts of cases.

Billable powers

Second, AI could change how firms make money. Richard Susskind, technology adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England, argues that firms profit by having armies of young lawyers to whom they pay less than they charge clients. If AI can do the work of those armies in seconds, firms will need to change their billing practices. Some may move to charging flat fees based on the service provided, rather than for the amount of time spent providing it. Stephen Wu of Silicon Valley Law Group speculates that firms may charge a technology fee, so that clients dont expect to get generative AI for nothing.

Third, AI could change how many lawyers exist and where they work. Eventually, Mr Lessig argues, it is hard to see how AI doesnt dramatically reduce the number of lawyers the world needs. If AI can do in 20 seconds a task that would have taken a dozen associates 50 hours each, then why would big firms continue hiring dozens of associates? A veteran partner at a prestigious corporate-law firm in New York expects the ratio of associates to partners to decline from todays average of perhaps seven to one at the top firms to closer to parity. If associates arent worried about their jobs, he says, they should be.

That may not happen for a while, however. Moreover, AI could make legal services cheaper and thus more widely available, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses that currently often struggle to afford them. Ambitious law-school graduates may find that AI provides an easier path to starting a solo practice. If so, then AI could actually lead to an increase in the overall number of lawyers, as well as changing the sort of tasks they performjust as the ATM led to an increase in the number of human bank employees rather than their replacement.

Ultimately this will be good news for clients. People who go to lawyers dont want lawyers: they want resolutions to their problems or the avoidance of problems altogether, explains Mr Susskind. If AI can provide those outcomes then people will use AI. Many people already use software to do their taxes rather than rely on professionals; Very few of them are complaining about the lack of social interaction with their tax advisers.

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 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com
When you think of Jodhpur, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Is it the forts, the hot winds, the deserts, or the famous blue houses? While any of these could be your initial thoughts, seeing a snow-covered Jodhpur surely isn't one of them. However, recently, Jodhpur was seen covered in 'snow,' all thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). AI generated pictures of snow in Jodhpur.(Reddit/@ezio98475)

Also Read: US woman marries chatbot she created using AI

Jodhpur covered with snow (Created by Bing AI) wrote Redditor @ezio98475. In the photos they shared, you can see the blue houses and forts of Jodhpur covered in snow.

Take a look at the post below:

This post was shared two days ago. Since being shared it has raked up over 1300 times. Many have also shared comments on the post.

Check out a few reactions below:

An individual wrote, "Going to Jodhpur for college in a month and what I wouldn't give to have this weather over there." A second added, "That's some fantastic pictures." "It looks so real that at first, I thought it was true," posted a third. A fourth expressed, "It's giving when winter finally came to King's Landing."
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recruiters set their sights on Sacred Heart Catholic Church in the Texas border city of El Paso in search of asylum-seekers they could take from its bustling migrant shelter to California's capital on taxpayer-funded private jets. FILE - Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a campaign event on May 31, 2023, in Salix, Iowa. Mark Seitz, the Roman Catholic bishop of El Paso, Texas, tells The Associated Press that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' flights of migrants from the Texas border to California are "reprehensible" and "not morally acceptable." (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)(AP)

Intentionally or not, envoys for Florida's Catholic governor and Republican presidential candidate infused an element of his own religion into his latest move on immigration, which has drawn sharp criticism from El Pasos Catholic bishop.

Without going into the details of the politics of it, it does seem clear that they were being used not out of concern for the migrants but in an effort to make a political point," Bishop Mark Seitz told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Seitz said many migrants arriving in the U.S. don't know the geography, including how far cities and states are from one another, and are just anxious to move on.

If you're seeking to help a person who needs to get to a certain destination where they have a sponsor, where they have a job or something like that, that is a commendable act," Seitz said. "But if they are being moved simply in order to use them to make a political point, that is reprehensible. It is taking person who already has lost everything  everything. They have nothing, not even a nation they can really call their own because they have had to flee that nation. And then using them for your own purposes: That is not morally acceptable.

ALSO READ| Donald Trump's lawyers seek to cut sex abuse award from $5 million to under $1 million

DeSantis has acknowledged that Florida paid to transport 36 mostly Venezuelan migrants from Republican-led Texas to Sacramento on charter flights last Friday and on Monday. The first group was dropped off in front of the Roman Catholic Diocese in Sacramento, also the headquarters of Catholic Charities, apparently without warning. Local advocates and officials met the second group at the airport after learning of their arrival.

The governor says they made the trip voluntarily  a claim that some migrant advocates challenge. He also says they signed waivers to that effect and that California effectively invited them with its welcoming policies.

I think the border should be closed. I dont think we should have any of this. But if theres a policy to have an open border, then I think the sanctuary jurisdictions should be the ones that have to bear that, DeSantis said Wednesday at an event for law enforcement officials in Sierra Vista, Arizona.

Asked about the bishop's criticism, DeSantis spokesman Jeremy Redfern said the governor's previous comments stand on their own.

In May, DeSantis signed a law allocating up to $12 million for migrant flights, like two that Florida funded last year from San Antonio to the pricey Massachusetts island of Marthas Vineyard.

References to the Marthas Vineyard flights have become a staple in DeSantis presidential stump speech and often draw hearty applause from Republican primary voters. The Sacramento flights are part of a broader effort by certain Republican-led states to send migrants to Democratic-leaning parts of the country, including New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

President Joe Biden is also Catholic and, like DeSantis, he has clashed with bishops, though in Biden's case over LGBTQ rights and abortion. In addition to immigration, DeSantis has split with bishops over the death penalty, which the governor supports and the church doesn't.

ALSO READ| 'These are our kids': Biden condemns wave of legislations restricting LGBTQ rights

Seitz, who chairs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops migration committee, has been bishop for a decade in heavily Catholic El Paso, which sits in one of the busiest corridors for illegal border crossings. Sacred Heart is downtown, a few blocks from Mexico.

Two men and a woman working for the Florida government recruited migrants outside Sacred Heart with promises of jobs and housing in California, said Imelda Maynard, director of legal services at Diocesan Migrant & Refugee Services Inc., which is part of the Diocese of El Paso.

A Venezuelan man said he was lured to a distant motel with his wife and four children for three days, Maynard said. He became suspicious and pulled out after being told he would have to fly separately and the rest of his family would follow on a different flight because there wasn't enough room for them to go together.

The man didn't know where the motel was, but Maynard suspects it was in Deming, New Mexico, which was where the charter flights departed for Sacramento. The family hitchhiked back to Sacred Heart.

A passenger who was on the first flight called the Venezuelan migrant to say he had been duped, Maynard said.

"Dont come. Its a scam. There are no jobs here, there is no room and board. They just dumped us in the middle of nowhere at this church and no one knows whats going on, the Venezuelan migrant recounted being told.

Sacred Heart is a well-known shelter, particularly among Venezuelans. It is indicative of the many Catholic charities along the southern border from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, that provide food, showers, housing and transportation to migrants seeking a rest stop before leaving for their final destinations in the United States.

It is unclear if Sacred Heart was the only place that DeSantis' recruiters targeted. Maynard said she didn't know of any others.

Maynard said standing outside a shelter promising jobs that don't exist was gross. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, DeSantis' perennial Democratic rival, has suggested it may be criminal.

ALSO READ| From drag performer to critic - Republican Congressman George Santos's bizarre Twitter rant against 'Drag Nuns'

Its really dehumanizing to have someone play with you that way because no one took into account these are human beings and they were toyed with, Maynard said.

DeSantis office has emphasized that its contractor safely delivered migrants to Catholic Charities of Sacramento Inc., which is located at the California diocese. The Sacramento charity has not responded to the APs requests for comment.

Seitz applauded Catholic Charities response.

Im inspired by the way I see people received here on the border, and, Im hearing reports, by the way they were received in Sacramento by Catholic Charities, he said. Catholic Charities was not informed, but they stepped up and received them, and thats the good news in all of this.
Donald Trump's indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate has brought renewed attention to one of the most notable cases in Justice Department history. Former President Donald Trump.(AP)

The federal charges represent the biggest legal jeopardy so far for Trump, coming less than three months after he was charged in New York with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Here's a look at the charges, the special counsel's investigation and how Trump's case differs from those of other politicians known to be in possession of classified documents:

WHAT ARE THE CHARGES?

Trump has been charged with seven counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, according to two people familiar with the indictment but not authorized to speak publicly about it. The charges themselves are unclear and remain under seal, one person said.

Also Read: Donald Trump barred from using evidence to attack witnesses in hush money case

Trump announced on his social media site Truth Social on Thursday night that DOJ lawyers had informed his legal team that he had been indicted. He said he is due in court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon.

It was not immediately clear if anyone else would be charged in the case.

HOW DID THIS CASE COME ABOUT?

Officials with the National Archives and Records Administration reached out to representatives for Trump in the spring of 2021 when they realized that important material from his time in office was missing from their collection.

According to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents are considered property of the U.S. government and must be preserved.

A Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago. In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trumps Florida home, later telling Justice Department officials that they contained a lot of classified material.

That May, the FBI and Justice Department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Trumps possession. Investigators who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Trumps lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.

But that assertion turned out to be false. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents.

In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings  including some at the top secret level  have been recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021.

HOW DID A SPECIAL COUNSEL GET INVOLVED?

Last year, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland picked Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor with a background in public corruption probes, to lead investigations into the presence of classified documents at Trumps Florida estate, as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.

Smith's appointment was a recognition by Garland of the politics involved in an investigation into a former president and current White House candidate. Garland himself was selected by Democratic President Joe Biden, whom Trump is seeking to challenge for the White House in 2024.

Special counsels are appointed in cases in which the Justice Department perceives itself as having a conflict or where its deemed to be in the public interest to have someone outside the government come in and take responsibility for a matter.

According to the Code of Federal Regulations, a special counsel must have a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking, as well as an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies.

WHAT'S AN INDICTMENT?

An indictment is the formal charge brought against someone after a grand jury  which is made up of members of the community  votes and enough members agree theres sufficient evidence to charge someone with a crime.

The indictment against Trump remains sealed. But once the document is made public, it will lay out the crime or crimes that Trump is accused of committing. Sometimes indictments include a lengthy narrative with lots of details about the allegations, while others are more basic and just outline the charges a defendant is facing.

DIDN'T BIDEN AND FORMER VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE HAVE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS, TOO?

Yes, but the circumstances of their cases are vastly different from the situation involving Trump.

After classified documents were found at Biden's think tank and Pence's Indiana home, their lawyers notified authorities and quickly arranged for them to be handed over. They also authorized other searches by federal authorities to search for additional documents.

There is no indication either was aware of the existence of the records before they were found, and no evidence has so far emerged that Biden or Pence sought to conceal the discoveries. Thats important because the Justice Department historically looks for willfulness in deciding whether to bring criminal charges.

A special counsel was appointed earlier this year to probe how classified materials ended up at Bidens Delaware home and former office. But even if the Justice Department were to find Bidens case prosecutable on the evidence, its Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a president is immune from prosecution during his time in office.

As for Pence, the Justice Department informed his legal team earlier this month that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against him over his handling of the documents.

DOES A FEDERAL INDICTMENT PREVENT TRUMP FROM RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT?

No. Neither the indictment itself nor a conviction would prevent Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

And as the New York case showed, criminal charges have historically been a boon to his fundraising. The campaign announced that it had raised over $4 million in the 24 hours after that indictment became public, far smashing its previous record after the FBI search of Trumps Mar-a-Lago club.
Over 12 million American adults or 4.4% of the adult population still believe violence is justified to restore former US president Donald Trump to the White House, finds a survey by the University of Chicago. Former US president Donald Trump.(AFP)

Also Read| What is classified documents case in which Donald Trump has been indicted

Though the number of adults who believe this has declined since the Capitol insurrection in 2021, recent survey data reveals alarming and dangerous levels of support for political violence and conspiracy theories across the United States, reported The Guardian.

The researchers at the universitys Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) found continued support for violence to achieve one's political goals and a general distrust for democracy.

Were heading into an extremely tumultuous election season, Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago, told The Guardian. Whats happening in the United States is political violence is going from the fringe to the mainstream.

Survey statistics

The survey from April found that an estimated 142 million Americans believe that elections wont solve Americas most fundamental problems. Moreover, one in five adults in the US still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

The survey found that almost 14%  a minority of Americans, but still a significant number  believe the use of force is justified to achieve political goals that I support. More specifically, 12.4% believe the use of force is justified to restore the federal right to abortion, 8.4% believe its use is justified to ensure members of Congress and other government officials do the right thing, 6.3% think its justified to preserve the rights of white Americans, and 6.1% believe its justified to prevent the prosecution of Trump.

Earlier findings

In September 2022, the same survey found that 13 million US adults, or 5% of the adult population, agree that force would be justified to restore Trump and an estimated 15 million Americans believed its use would be justified to prevent him from being prosecuted. Meanwhile, in September 2021, the number of supporters of the use of force in favor of Trump stood at 21 million.
The German Defence Ministry has expressed concern that its retired air force pilots, lured by private training contracts, are sharing their unique skills with China, reported Deutsche Welle (DW). China and Germany have previously participated in official military training programmes, the report noted, adding that military organisations frequently share their technical and tactical expertise. (File)

China and Germany have previously participated in official military training programmes, the report noted, adding that military organisations frequently share their technical and tactical expertise. However, it is uncommon for retired army people to share their specialised skills with the commercial sector.

But these norms are now being examined more closely when it comes to China. The same was recently demonstrated by the strong response in Germany to a report, shedding light on a routine practice: According to the publication, Spiegel and the public broadcaster ZDF, as cited by DW, a "handful" of retired German air force pilots have relocated to China on highly lucrative private training contracts, as per DW.

DW is Germany's international broadcaster which provides news and information.

German Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, was attending a high-level defence summit in Singapore when the story broke. He told his Chinese counterpart, Li Shangfu, that he expected "this practice to be stopped immediately."

This development came at the time when the German government, at the request of the United States, reevaluated its economic and strategic relationship with China, the report said.

Marcus Faber, a lawmaker who sits on the parliamentary defence committee, told DW in a statement, "The (defence) ministry must now do everything possible to end this practice. The rules for people who, due to their world for the German state, have access to security-relevant information need to be urgently tightened."

There are no legal violations inherent in the work. However, because of the legal grey zone, the German government has little power to halt this form of knowledge transfer, the report noted.

However, a representative for the German defence ministry told DW that short of a clear case of disclosing state secrets, former military personnel and other government employees are generally free to exploit their skills. They are liable for "retroactive service obligations", the statement said. In accordance with that, they must disclose their job and "maintain secrecy about matters that he or she became aware of". The ministry then does a "conflict of interest check" and has the right to reject an application if it uncovers any.

The ministry has voiced concern about the fact that Chinese pilots are being taught the fundamentals of flying, including information on NATO operational strategies. But it's not clear if doing that would violate the confidentiality agreement.

The South African school, TFASA, which was mentioned in the Spiegel investigation, denied endangering the national security of any nation in a statement to DW.

A London-based communications consultancy representing TFASA said, "All training aspects and material are strictly unclassified, and provided either from open source or the clients themselves."

According to analysts of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), China's armed force, the practice of using veteran NATO pilots to teach Chinese airmen may go back almost a decade. That was long before the US national security policy referred to China as the "only competitor" with the ability and intention to "reshape the international order" and the European Union labelled China as a "systemic rival."

But China has a long history of successfully using foreign know-how to accelerate its domestic prowess. Western advances in academia and research, industry, technology, and intellectual property have all found their way into Chinese equivalents, the report noted, adding that it is not a big leap to apply these efforts to the defence sector.

Tzu-Yun Su, a research fellow at the Institute for National Defence and Security Research (INDSR) in Taiwan, told DW, "For the PLA, working with retired Western pilots allows them to refine their doctrine, and it's essentially stealing secrets of Western countries' military exercises."

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In a shocking revelation, a newly released trove of photos from Hunter Biden's controversial laptop exposes a world of debauchery, blending explicit images with snapshots of his family life. Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, talks with his sister Ashley Biden.(AP)

The Dark Side: Naked Women and Drug-Fueled Nights

As the laptop's secrets unfold, the images paint a vivid picture of Hunter's hedonistic past. Among the provocative snapshots, we witness the first son, now 53, surrounded by a bevy of nude women, lounging in hotel rooms adorned with drug paraphernalia. One photo captures Hunter with a tattooed woman clad in bedazzled mesh lingerie, while another showcases him seemingly naked behind a hotel desk, engaged in conversation with undressed women nearby.

Hunter Biden appeared nude in several of the images from his infamous laptop.

Hunter's Struggles with Addiction

Amidst the scandalous scenes, we encounter glimpses of Hunter's personal battles. Admitting to a long-standing struggle with crack cocaine addiction, he candidly displays a marijuana vape pen to the camera lens. The trove offers a window into the turbulent journey of a man grappling with his demons.

Hunter Biden admitted to struggling with addiction issues for several years.

Wholesome Moments Amidst the Chaos

Surprisingly, amidst the scandalous chaos, the collection also features wholesome family snapshots, including endearing photos of Joe Biden, now the President of the United States. In one heartwarming image, we see Joe embracing his wife, Jill Biden, against a backdrop of blue sky and fluffy clouds. Another captures the Biden family's joyous moments, from trips to the Colosseum in Rome to lively backyard pool parties.

Geographical Trail: Hunter's International Escapades

The trove reveals a globetrotting side to Hunter's life, with photos taken in various corners of the world. From Cabo San Lucas to Kosovo, the Dominican Republic to China, London to Paris, and Belgrade to the US, Hunter's journey spans continents. The geographic coordinates attached to the photos provide a captivating glimpse into his international adventures.

The nearly 10,000-image catalog was published last week by a former Trump White House aide.

Redacted Secrets: Censored Content and Hidden Stories

While the trove offers unprecedented access into Hunter's life, some images have been redacted due to private information, such as credit card numbers. Other photos remain completely concealed, including explicit images of Hallie Biden, Hunter's former sister-in-law-turned-lover. The enigmatic nature of these sealed images leaves us wondering what untold stories lie within.

Legal Troubles Loom: Investigations and Inquiries

As the scandal unfolds, Hunter finds himself embroiled in ongoing investigations into his overseas business affairs and alleged crimes. The specter of tax fraud and accusations of lying on a gun purchase form about drug use hang over him. Federal prosecutors remain undecided on potential charges, while the House Oversight Committee conducts a separate inquiry into his international business dealings, examining claims of influence-peddling within the first family.

Also read | | Republicans threaten contempt of Congress proceedings as FBI withholds alleged Biden bribery document

Unveiling the truth behind Hunter Biden's photo trove takes us on a rollercoaster ride of scandal, family dynamics, and personal struggles. As the world grapples with the fallout, one question lingers: What other secrets might be hidden within the shadows of Hunter's controversial past?
With the United States officially declaring the end of the Covid-19 public health emergency in May, Ashish Jha, the Indian-origin White House Covid-19 response coordinator, has stepped down from his position to return to his academic role at Brown University. White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Thursday, Dec. 15, 2022. (AP)

Announcing Jhas departure, President Joe Biden said that when he had taken over the presidency, the nation was facing a once-in-a-generation pandemic but with the administrations whole-of-government approach, the US now had tools to manage Covid-19 and ensure that virus did not control the daily lives of Americans.

For the last year, I have relied on Dr. Ashish Jha to help me do just that as the White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator. As one of the leading public health experts in America, he has effectively translated and communicated complex scientific challenges into concrete actions that helped save and improve the lives of millions of Americans, said Biden in a statement. He thanked Jha for his service and said that the US was a stronger and healthier nation due to Jhas contributions.

In a set of tweets, Jha said that it had been the honour of his life to serve the President in the battle against Covid-19.

We have some of the lowest rates of hospitalizations and deaths since COVID first appeared. We have tests, vaccines and treatments now widely available to the American people to help manage the virus. We built up our surveillance systems and our stockpiles and are better prepared for the future. The Public Health Emergency is over but COVID isnt. The work continues, said Jha.

While serving as the White Houses top Covid-19 official, Jha spoke at the HT Leadership Summit in 2022 about the lessons from the pandemic, the American and Indian experiences of battling the virus and the challenges that remained.

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A 17-year-old girl has been arrested in Iowa for allegedly attempting to hire a hitman to kill a seven-year-old child. The girl tried to hire a hitman using a bogus site called RentAHitman.com. She was unaware that the site was a parody, according to The Des Moines Register. She is now in custody. The girl tried to hire a hitman using a bogus site called RentAHitman.com (Getty Images)

The girl reportedly provided the seven-year-olds name on the website, mentioned where the child lived and could be found. The websites owner approached police, who later arrested her. Reportedly, an undercover officer posing as the supposed hitman contacted her.

According to KCCI, the girl is now facing a felony charge of solicitation to commit murder. Her name has been withheld as she is a minor.

Bob Innes, the owner of RentAHitman.com, is an IT programmer who coined the name of the site humorously to advertise a computer security company. The company was set up by him and his college friends.

The company website says, It's common knowledge that the Dark & Deep webs are not safe marketplaces for carrying out nefarious deeds. These sites are often fraught with potential risks, including viruses, and fraud is rampant. There's no guarantee of privacy, and your information could be leaked to less than reputable websites, including law enforcement agencies, and that's no fun!

It adds, The good news is that RENT-A-HITMAN is a safe and secure option that's easily accessible on the World Wide Web. We place great importance on maintaining the confidentiality of our clients and ensuring their privacy is protected under HIPPA, the Hitman Information Privacy & Protection Act of 1964.

The company, however, never took off. Innes eventually forgot about it, only to later discover that criminals-in-the-making have been using the site to try to hire hitmen, or become one themselves.

Innes then began using the website to turn over to police requests that came across as suspicious. This is how the 17-year-old girl was nabbed.

"There's a lot of beneficial information that can be shared to tell adults and children that the internet is certainly not a safe place," Innes told PEOPLE last year. "There are bad people out there."

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Evidence was growing on Friday that there was an explosion at the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine around the time it collapsed, according to Ukrainian and U.S. intelligence reports and seismic data from Norway. Volunteers evacuate dogs on a boat from a flooded neighbourhood in Kherson, Ukraine, Thursday. (AP)

Ukraine's security service said it had intercepted a telephone call proving a Russian "sabotage group" blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric station and dam early on Tuesday in the Kherson region.

ALSO READ: Nova Kakhovka Dam collapse: Blame game, relief aids, Nuclear plant impact | 5 points

Norway's research foundation Norsar said that data collected from regional seismic stations showed clear signals of an explosion.

And U.S. spy satellites detected an explosion at the dam, a U.S. official was quoted as saying by the New York Times.

The destruction early on Tuesday of the facility - which had been in Russian hands since shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 - unleashed mass flooding, forcing thousands of residents to flee and wreaking environmental havoc.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) posted a one-and-a-half minute audio clip on its Telegram channel of the alleged conversation, which featured two men who appeared to be discussing the fallout from the disaster in Russian.

Reuters could not independently verify the recording.

Russia has accused Kyiv of destroying the dam. The Russian foreign ministry did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment on the SBU statement.

ALSO READ: Russia vs Ukraine war of words at UN over Nova Kahovka dam destruction | Watch Faceoff

"They (the Ukrainians) didn't strike it. That was our sabotage group," said one of the men on the recording, described by the SBU as a Russian soldier. "They wanted to, like, scare (people) with that dam."

"It didn't go according to plan, and (they did) more than what they planned for."

The man also said "thousands" of animals had been killed at a "safari park" downstream as a result.

The other man on the line expressed surprise at the soldier's assertion that Russian forces had destroyed the dam.

The SBU offered no further details of the conversation or its participants. It said it had opened a criminal investigation into war crimes and "ecocide".

"The interception by the SBU confirms that the Kakhovskaya HPP (Hydroelectric Power Plant) was blown up by a sabotage group of the occupiers," the SBU said in a statement. "The invaders wanted to blackmail Ukraine by blowing up the dam and staged a man-made disaster in the south of our country."

The U.S. official said that satellites equipped with infrared sensors detected a heat signature consistent with a major explosion.

Norsar said in a statement that the data from one seismic

station in Romania showed activity at 02:54 a.m. local time on Tuesday, indicating an explosion, and the timing coincides with media reports of the dam collapse.

Together with the power station, the dam helped provide electricity, irrigation and drinking water to southern Ukraine, including Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.

Water levels were high in the reservoir in the buildup to the explosion, media reported.

Hundreds of Ukrainians were rescued from rooftops in the flooded areas during the week. The governor of the southern region of Kherson said some 600 square kilometres, or 230 square miles, were under water.

"By blowing up the Kakhovskaya HPP dam, the Russian Federation definitively proved that it is a threat to the entire civilised world," SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk was quoted as saying in the statement.

"Our task is to bring to justice not only the leaders of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's regime, but also the ordinary perpetrators of crimes," he said.
Randy R Dub! Williams, a late-night slow jams DJ from San Diego has created his own land-locked country in the US and now refers to himself as the Sultan of Slowjamastan." On why he decided to form his own country, Williams told CNN, "I like to put it simply, I ran out of countries, so I created my own. The time zone of the country is SST (Slowjamastan Standard Time).(Slowjamastan.org)

With just a single UN recognised nation left to visit, he decided to buy an 11.07-acre plot of empty arid land in the California desert to make a country. A broadcaster by night, Williams has spent his life attempting to visit every country in the world, the outlet reported.

The official name of his country, which is named after his radio show, is The United Territories of the Sovereign Nation of The Peoples Republic of Slowjamastan.

Slowjamastan officially declared independence from the United States of America at 12:26pm on December 1, 2021, as Williams broadcasted the secession live from his open-air government office in Dublandia, the capital of his country.

The bizarre rules

One can not wear Crocs in this country. Punishment for violation: We will forcibly remove a Croc and beat you over the head with it, reads the micronation's website.

All citizens and visitors must know the difference between your and youre, it further adds. People are also not allowed to put their feet on the dashboard.

Slowjamastan's citizens

The Republic of Slowjamastan claims over 500 registered citizens, while 4,500 more are said to have been conditionally approved or are waiting in line for citizenship.

Williams said he is working on creating diplomatic ties with other countries, and hes had his Slowjamastan passport stamped by 16 different countries on his recent travels, including South Africa, New Zealand, Vanuatu, and the United States.

Ambitious plans

He said plans to raise enough funds to build a lazy river, an armadillo farm, an all-you-can-eat Mongolian BBQ establishment and, of course, a giant statue/monument of The Great Leader (me).

According to Williams, Slowjamastan technically meets the criteria for a sovereign nation-state as defined by the 1933 Montevideo Convention, which is typically cited as the best definition of a country.
Russia will begin moving tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus next month, President Vladimir Putin told his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko on Friday. Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with his Belarus' counterpart Alexander Lukashenko in Sochi on June 9, 2023. (AFP)

Construction of storage facilities in Belarus will be completed by July 7-8, allowing the transfer of the weapons to begin, Putin said in televised comments at the meeting in Russias Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Putin announced in March that hed deploy the weapons in Belarus for the first time, ramping up a confrontation with the US and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies that have sent Ukraine billions of dollars in arms to help it fight Russias invasion.

Putin Says Russia to Place Tactical Nuclear Arms in Belarus

He insists the Kremlin is upholding its non-proliferation obligations by retaining control over the weapons, though Russia has trained Belarusian troops on the storage and use of tactical special munitions for Iskander short-range missiles as part of the initiative.

Russia has repeatedly suggested it may use nuclear weapons as its war in Ukraine has foundered, drawing criticism from the US and Europe, as well as countries including China and India that have generally been more supportive of Russia in the conflict.
Obstruction. Retaining classified records. Conspiracy. False statements. Donald Trump is the first former US president to face federal criminal charges. Former US president Donald Trump (AFP)

Here is what we know about the charges facing the 76-year-old Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and what happens next:

- The charges -

The legally and politically explosive case stems from Trump's retention of classified documents after he left the White House in January 2021.

Hundreds of documents were recovered by the FBI in a raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida after he failed to comply with a subpoena to hand them over.

The twice-impeached Trump was indicted by a grand jury in Florida following an investigation by special counsel Jack Smith.

The indictment has not been unsealed yet -- Trump is to appear in a Miami court on Tuesday -- but according to one of his lawyers, Trump faces seven charges.

Read Here: What is classified documents case in which Donald Trump has been indicted

Jim Trusty, in an interview with CNN, said that while Trump is not accused of spying, some of the charges involve alleged violations of the Espionage Act.

These include unlawful retention of "national defense information" and concealing records with the intent to obstruct or impede a federal investigation.

Other charges include conspiracy, making false statements to the FBI and witness tampering, Trusty said without providing further details.

According to The New York Times, Trump may also be charged with mishandling official documents and contempt of court for failing to heed the subpoena to hand over the records to the National Archives.

A conviction for retaining classified documents carries a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison while obstruction is punishable by up to 20 years in jail.

Conspiracy and making false statements each carry sentences of up to five years while mishandling official documents is punishable by up to three years in prison and contempt of court by six months.

- What happens next -

Trump is to appear in federal court in Miami at 3:00 pm (1900 GMT) on Tuesday, when the indictment will be unsealed unless it is released earlier.

Trusty, Trump's lawyer, said the logistics of the former president's appearance in court were being worked out with the US Marshals Service and the Secret Service to "make this as smooth as possible."

"He's going to show up," Trusty said. "He knows he's innocent. He knows this is garbage."

Trump is likely to enter a plea of not guilty at Tuesday's hearing before a federal judge.

The judge would then come up with a schedule for pretrial hearings and the process known as discovery, in which prosecutors turn over evidence to the defense.

The discovery process could be particularly complicated in the case, legal analysts said, because it involves documents which allegedly involve some of the country's most tightly held secrets.

According to The New York Times and Washington Post, the case will initially be handled by Aileen Cannon, 42, a Trump-appointed judge who made rulings favorable to the former president during a court review of documents seized in the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

An actual trial is not expected to begin for several months and there is nothing to prevent Trump from pursuing a second term in the White House while under indictment.

- Trump's other legal woes -

The documents case is not the only legal challenge facing Trump.

The real estate tycoon was indicted in New York in March on charges of falsifying business records related to hush money payments to a former porn star.

Smith, the special counsel, is also looking at whether Trump should face charges over the January 2021 assault on the US Capitol by his supporters.

Prosecutors in Georgia are also investigating whether Trump illegally attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election outcome in the southern state.
The body cam footage of a Las Vegas police officer has revealed a bright light streak across the sky. That same night, a resident reported sightings of aliens. Still from the viral video in which the object that resembles a UFO is seen.(Screengrab of Twitter video)

On April 30, at around 11:50 p.m. in Las Vegas, Nevada, a citizen informed a police officer of a bright streak of light across the night sky.

The unidentified fly object (UFO) reportedly shined brightly and moved through the sky. Following this, the police launched an investigation.

8News Now reported that within an hour, the police received a call. The man claimed that he saw something fall from the sky and reported the movement of two figures in his backyard. He described the figures as 8 feet tall and10 feet tall, each with big shiny eyes and a large mouth.

There's like an 8-foot person beside it and another one is inside and it has big eyes and it's looking at usand it's still there, reported the caller, They're very large. They're like 8 foot, 9 feet, 10 foot. They look like aliens to us. Big eyes. They have big eyes. Like, I can't explain it, and big mouth. They're shiny eyes and they're not human. They're 100% not human.

In my backyard. I swear to God this is not a joke, this is actually, we're terrified, the caller told the dispatcher.

The police then approached the complainant in search of more details. The explained that their colleague had also witnessed a bright suspicious object flying in the sky. Two of the four family members also reported of similar sightings. The family once again described what they believed to have seen with one member repeating, big creature, 10 feet tall.

According to the body cam footage, the police further attempted to investigate by questioning a motorist. Unfortunately, the investigation has yielded inconclusive results.

Recently, a former intelligence official, David Charles Grusch, revealed classified information to the Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General. He claimed the existence of deeply covert programs that are in possession of intact and partially intact vehicles of non-human origin. Following this, the US is being urged to disclose its evidence of UFO.

A year after launching a study on unexplained sightings, NASA held its first public meeting on the topic earlier this month. The panelists are glad their work is being treated seriously. Numerous people have alleged witnessing what they claim are UFOs and aliens. Moreover, sensors have produced inexplicable reports. The panelists believe that whether or not these incidents are extra-terrestrial does not matter. Something interesting might be happening and they want to conduct more extensive research to understand these phenomena.
The International Court of Justice has accepted requests from 32 countries to back Ukraine in a genocide case against Russia, the United Nations' highest court said Friday. Ukrainian students hold placards denouncing an ecocide during their rally outside of United Nations (UN) office in Kyiv on June 8 on day after thousands fled their homes following the destruction of a Russian-held dam in Ukraine flooded dozens of villages and parts of a nearby city, sparking fears of a humanitarian disaster.(AFP)

It's the largest number of countries to join another nation's complaint at the world court based in The Hague, Netherlands.

Ukraine's government filed the legally creative case days after Russia invaded its neighbor in February 2022. The Kremlin snubbed hearings held the next month, while protesters holding Ukrainian flags chanted antiwar slogans outside the court building's gates.

Latvia was the first country to intervene in the complaint, which alleges Russia violated the 1948 Genocide Convention by falsely accusing Ukraine of committing genocide in its eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and using that as a pretext for the invasion.

A record 33 countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia and every European Union member nation except Hungary requested to participate on Ukraine's side in the case. However, the U.N. court's judges rejected the U.S. request on a technicality.

"The court concludes that the declarations of intervention filed in this case, except for the declaration submitted by the United States, are admissible, they said.

Any country that has signed the post-World War II treaty criminalizing genocide is allowed to file for intervention in cases brought under the accord. The United States did not accept part of the Genocide Convention when it signed the treaty, so the judges determined the country wasn't entitled to participate.

Countries and organizations not directly involved in legal proceedings often ask courts if they can submit arguments in a case, particularly if the outcome might impact them in some way.

Experts see the petitions in the pending case as attempts to demonstrate support for Ukraine and to condemn Russia's war rather than countries seeking opportunities to advocate particular legal positions or arguments.

The countries are expressing solidarity with Ukraine, Ori Pomson, a legal scholar at the University of Cambridge whose research focuses on the International Court of Justice, told the Associated Press.

In March 2022, the court ordered Russia to stop hostilities in Ukraine, but Moscow has failed to comply.

The world court is hearing a separate case brought earlier by Ukraine linked to Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russian funding of separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine.

A similar group of countries also asked the European Court of Human Rights to intervene in a group of cases Ukraine brought against Russia over the war. In March, the Strasbourg-based court granted 31 groups the right to back Ukraine in those proceedings.

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US President Joe Biden said on Friday that he has had no contact with Attorney General Merrick Garland regarding the indictment of Donald Trump over the handling of classified documents. US President Joe Biden(AP)

"I have not spoken to him at all and I'm not going to speak with him. And I have no comment on that (case)," Biden told reporters, underlining that the White House was not involved in the judicial process.
President Xi Jinping has proposed the three principles of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence and win-win cooperation. They represent the fundamental and right way for the two countries to get along in the new era. Among them, mutual respect comes first, peaceful co-existence is the red line and win-win cooperation is the goal, said Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng. WASHINGTON, June 7 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng said here Wednesday that the two countries need to uphold the principles of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence and win-win cooperation and explore the right way to get along in the new era. Xie gave those remarks when delivering a keynote speech at an event hosted by the U.S.-China Business Council to welcome him as China's new ambassador to the United States. Noting that China-U.S. relations face challenges, Xie said Chinese President Xi Jinping has made it clear that getting the relationship right is not optional, but something the two countries must do and must do well. The world is big enough for the two countries to develop themselves and prosper together. President Xi has proposed the three principles of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence and win-win cooperation. They represent the fundamental and right way for the two countries to get along in the new era. Among them, mutual respect comes first, peaceful co-existence is the red line and win-win cooperation is the goal, said Xie. China has always placed importance on its relationship with the United States, said Xie, noting that China is ready to work with the U.S. side to follow the right direction, enhance dialogue and cooperation, defuse flashpoints and take concrete actions to deliver on the common understandings between the two presidents, so as to bring this relationship back to the right track at an early date. Xie said that the U.S. should respect China's choice of development path and social system, the Chinese people's right to a better life, and China's core interests and major concerns. These are essential for this relationship to advance in the right direction, with no conflict, no confrontation or no new Cold War. A pressing task is to bring the Taiwan question, the most significant risk, under control, said Xie. "No one wants peaceful reunification more than China does. We are also the last that wants tensions or warfare across the Taiwan Strait." The Chinese side has not simulated war games, changed the status quo or stoked any crisis. The Taiwan authorities are seeking U.S. support for their independence agenda, while some in the United States propose using Taiwan to contain China. Xie said these are the biggest threats to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. At present, the most fundamental thing is to fully and faithfully adhere to the one-China principle; the most important is to abide by the three joint communiques with real actions; and the most pressing is to match words with deeds and oppose adventurism and provocation by the "Taiwan independence" forces, he noted. Xie said the biggest concern of many Americans is that China and the United States slip into conflict and confrontation. Their greatest hope is for this relationship to stabilize. If the world is to become better, the China-U.S. relationship must stop getting worse. "We are all stakeholders. None of us shall sit idly by. Every one of us needs to take actions, speak up for free trade and open market, as this serves our common interests and the stability of global industrial and supply chains," he said. Xie called on the business community to stay fair and pragmatic, be committed to cooperation with China and avoid politicizing economic issues. Doing so will bring more positive energy to the bilateral relationship and help both peoples live better lives. China and the United States have a lot to offer each other in terms of industrial strength. In the last five years, the return rate of foreign direct investment in China reached 9.1 percent. Of the over 70,000 American companies doing business in China, nearly 90 percent are earning profits, he said. Today's China-U.S. relationship bears on not only the well-being of the 1.7 billion Chinese and American people but also the world's future. Forestalling conflict and confrontation and upholding a stable China-U.S. relationship will promote the common interests of both countries and contribute to world peace and prosperity, Xie said.
Buckle up, flyers, as flights including the U.S. have become bumpier over the past four decades, and researchers now attribute the intensifying turbulence to global warming, according to a recent study. A JetBlue plane departs LaGuardia Airport (LGA) in the Queens borough of New York, US, on Thursday, June 8, 2023. The Federal Aviation Administration said LaGuardia Airport flights have now been placed under a ground delay program after being grounded due to poor visibility. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg(Bloomberg)

The study, published on Thursday, highlights that a specific type of flight turbulence known as clean air turbulence has increased by 55% from 1979 to 2020, with expectations of further escalation as climate change worsens.

Clear air turbulence, unlike turbulence caused by visible factors such as clouds or storms, is more challenging to detect and track, making it harder for pilots to navigate and avoid.

The recent study indicates that the most significant increases in turbulence were observed over busy flight regions like the USA and North Atlantic.

Ramalingam Saravanan, head of Texas A&M Universitys Department of Atmospheric Sciences, explained the causes of flight turbulence to KXAN, stating, "There are several causes of flight turbulence. One is things like clouds that you can see, and they create turbulence. There are also waves created by mountains when wind flows over them, and they create turbulence.

The last two types, you cannot see as you can a cloud. You see clear air, and a plane flies through it, then you feel turbulent. That's why it's called clear air turbulence," he continued

The study suggests that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide and methane, has contributed to warming the atmosphere and cooling the stratosphere over the poles.

Consequently, a phenomenon called "wind shear" occurs, which refers to a change in wind speed and direction over a short distance.

This change in wind patterns leads to bumpier flights.

Computer models have been utilized to predict the impact of future greenhouse gas increases on turbulence. Saravanan noted that these models demonstrate a likely increase in wind shear and subsequently, turbulence.

We can show with computer models that if you put an increase in greenhouse gases into the future, the wind shear is going to increaseUsing [those models], we can predict the turbulence is likely to increase, Saravanan told.

.The drastic climate change has also affected wind speeds globally, potentially impacting flight times.

ALSO READ| Canadian wildfire smoke forces Broadway shows to cancel performances, safety of the cast and audience prioritised

Saravanan mentioned that turbulence wouldn't typically be among the top concerns related to climate change, but it remains an interesting effect worth noting.

If you asked me to list the top things to worry about with climate change, turbulence wouldnt be in the top five, he stated.

As the aviation industry continues to grapple with the challenges posed by climate change, the study serves as a reminder of the need for ongoing research and mitigation strategies.
In a sharp attack on Chinas belt and road initiative (BRI), President Joe Biden has termed it a debt and confiscation programme and defended Americas economic strategy of encouraging domestic manufacturing and diversifying supply chains. US President Joe Biden meets with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on June 8, 2023. (AFP)

Speaking at a joint press appearance with visiting British prime minister Rishi Sunak in the White House on Thursday afternoon eastern time, Biden also said that artificial intelligence (AI) represented the most fundamental technological challenge ever posed in the history of human endeavour, and he was looking forward to the United Kingdom (UK)s leadership in finding ways to regulate the domain. Sunak has made AI regulation a top international priority and convened an international summit on the subject later this year.

The US and UK have also issued a new Atlantic Declaration focused on economic, technological and defence partnership. In 1941, an Atlantic Charter between the US and UK formed the basis for their partnership during the Second World War and laid out a vision for the post-War order.

In recent months, Biden and Sunak have engaged regularly. They met in March in San Diego to operationalise AUKUS (the Australia-UK-US nuclear submarine deal), in Ireland in April during Bidens visit to mark 25 years of the peace accord in the land where he traces his origins to, in Hiroshima in May during the G7 summit and now in Washington DC during Sunaks bilateral visit. Both countries are working closely together in offering Ukraine military and diplomatic support in the war against Russia, and have increasing convergence on their positions on China and, in Sunaks words, the indivisibility of security in the Euro-Atlantic and Pacific regions.

Explaining the importance of the Atlantic declaration, Sunak said, Just as we collaborate to protect our national security, so must we increasingly do the same to protect our economic security on which our prosperity depends. Countries like China and Russia are willing to manipulate and exploit our openness, steal our intellectual property, use technology for authoritarian ends, or withdraw crucial resources like energy. They will not succeed.

Biden also said that the US and UK will do more to prevent technologies that are invented and developed in our countries from being used for military or intelligence purposes by countries that do not share our values. He claimed that Chinas president Xi Jinping had asked him why the US was not transferring certain tech capabilities to Beijing. And I said, very simply, Because you are using them for weapons of mass destruction and intelligence intervention. And I said, If we can work out something on that, wed have a very different relationship.

When asked if the US was returning to a form of economic protectionism, Biden said that the pandemic had made everyone realise the importance of supply chains.

I decided that no longer would we rely on one center of support for any of the things that are needed for our economic growthwe are attracting capacity to build here in the United States to send product overseas, not the reverse. He then spoke of US efforts to boost infrastructure in the global south, comparing it to BRI. Well, the Belt and Road Initiative turns out to be a debt and confiscation program.

On AI, Biden said, I dont think ever in the history of human endeavour has there been as fundamental potential technological change as is presented by artificial intelligence. It is staggering. It is staggering.. we are looking to Great Britain to help lead that effort, to figure out a way through this.

Sunak warned that AI posed significant risks, and it was the duty of leaders to install guardrails against it.

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The United States on Friday banned imports from China-based printer maker Ninestar Corp and a chemical company over alleged human rights abuses in China, according to a post for the Federal Register. US President Joe Biden with Chinese President Xi Jinping.(REUTERS)

Ninestar, whose website says it is the world's fourth-largest laser printer manufacturer, and Xingjang Zhongtai Chemical Co Ltd, are being kept out of the U.S. supply chain for participating in business practices that target China's Uyghurs and other persecuted groups, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement.

The companies could not immediately be reached for comment.

U.N. experts and rights groups estimate that over a million people, mainly Uyghurs and Muslim minorities, have been detained in camps in China's western Xinjiang region in recent years, with many saying they were subject to ideological training and abuse.

China has denied all accusations of abuse.

DHS said the actions were taken as part of the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act (UFLPA), which was signed into law in December 2021. The act prohibits imports into the U.S. that are either produced in Xinjiang or by companies identified on an UFLPA Entity List, unless the importer can prove the goods were not produced with forced labor.

Twenty-two companies are now on the list, and DHS said it has examined over $1.3 billion worth of goods likely manufactured with forced labor nearly a year after the UFLPA was implemented.

Ninestar and its eight Zhuhai-based subsidiaries, along with Xinjiang Zhongtai Chemical, were added to the list for working with the government of Xinjiang to recruit, transport, transfer, harbor or receive forced labor of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, or members of other persecuted groups, out of Xinjiang, according to the posting.

The Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force will continue to hold companies accountable for perpetuating human rights violations in Xinjiang, DHS Under Secretary for Policy Robert Silvers, who chairs the task force, said in a statement.
As New York City finds itself engulfed in a thick haze from Canadian wildfires, residents are facing a severe air quality crisis. The eerie orange skyline, reminiscent of Mars, is a stark reminder of the urgent need to address pollution. In this hazardous situation, New York can look east to find solutions to the current crisis. Delhi, a city notorious for its pollution levels, can serve as an inspiration for New Yorkers on how to combat smog and improve air quality. As New Yorkers (right) struggles with smog filled skyline, New Delhi (left) can offer some lessons to the the dwellers of Big Apple.

Understanding the Delhi Air Pollution Crisis

Thick smog envelops New Delhi every year, especially around the Diwali festival, as the capital witnesses the worst spell of smog caused by cracker burning, stubble burning, and unfavorable atmospheric conditions. Similarly, New York is facing a similar kind of situation as the smoke from Canadian wildfires preys upon the Big Apple's skyline. The air quality has reached "severe" levels, with pollution levels exceeding 15 times the safety limit in some areas.

Measures taken by Delhites that New Yorkers can take a lesson from

Delhites followed a number of measures to tackle the air pollution crisis and New Yorkers can learn valuable lessons from Delhi's battle against pollution.

Calls for wearing N95 masks

Delhiites have been encouraged to wear N95 masks as a means of protection against the harmful pollutants present in the air. This practice can be adopted by New Yorkers as well, especially during periods of high pollution. N95 masks are designed to filter out fine particles and pollutants, providing a higher level of respiratory protection. By promoting the use of such masks, New Yorkers can reduce their exposure to harmful pollutants and safeguard their health.

Restrictions on outdoor activities

Delhi has implemented restrictions on outdoor activities during severe pollution episodes. This approach can be replicated in New York City as pollution levels are alarmingly high. By advising residents to limit their time outdoors, particularly during peak pollution hours, the city can reduce the overall exposure to pollutants. This step is particularly crucial for vulnerable groups such as children, the elderly, and individuals with respiratory conditions.

Install air purifiers to protect against pollutants

In Delhi, there has been a significant increase in the demand for air purifiers as people seek to improve indoor air quality. Similarly, New Yorkers can consider installing air purifiers in their homes, offices, and other indoor spaces to filter out pollutants and improve the overall air quality indoors. Air purifiers equipped with high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters can effectively capture fine particles, allergens, and pollutants, providing cleaner and healthier indoor environments.

Planting pollution-resistant and pollution-combating plants in homes

Another measure that can be adopted from Delhi is the use of plants to combat pollution. Certain plants, such as spider plants, snake plants, and peace lilies, have been found to be effective in removing pollutants from the air and improving indoor air quality. New Yorkers can incorporate these plants into their homes, offices, and public spaces to enhance air purification.

As New York City grapples with severe air pollution caused by Canadian wildfires, it is essential to learn from the experiences of cities like Delhi that have faced similar challenges. By implementing measures like those taken in Delhi, New York can combat smog and improve air quality for the well-being of its residents.

Also read | | Big apple in big trouble! Here's how New York City can learn a lesson or two from New Delhi's pollution battle

The fight against pollution requires collective effort, proactive action, and the adoption of innovative solutions. Let us hope that New York City takes inspiration from Delhi's battle against pollution and emerges as a cleaner and healthier city for its residents.
NEOM has a new head of tourism. Niall Gibbons has joined the US$500bn project from Tourism Ireland and fills a role that has been empty for over two years, last filled by Andrew McEvoy, who has since returned to Australia.

Gibbons takes on one of the most high-profile positions in the company, leading the giga-roject's tourism vision, which spans developments such as Sindalah and The Line.

NEOM is expected to help turn tourism into one of KSA's top economic drivers.

With a career spanning more than 35 years, Gibbons has been spent the entire time in his native Ireland.

His most recent role was CEO of Tourism Ireland, a position he held for 14 years. From 2002 to 2009, he was the company's director of corporate services.

He is also an honorary fellow of the Irish Hospitality Institute.
Hamburg - By the end of 2024, all 25hours Hotels are to receive a sustainability certification from an external institute. The course for this has been set since 2022 with various initiatives. For example, the hotel group cooperates with tree planting projects to contribute to the preservation of global biodiversity and to invest saved resources sensibly. New concepts in the food and beverage sector are aimed at increasing regional and organic offerings. More vegetarian and purely plant-based options are also being made available for the guests. Further goals are the reduction of food surpluses and plastic products. In the area of mobility, 25hours Hotels also offer sustainable solutions with different sharing concepts.

Already 34,000 25hours trees planted

As part of its environmental measures, 25hours Hotels supports various tree planting initiatives. Trees, or forests, absorb billions of tonnes of CO 2 worldwide and are essential for a stable climate. For the hotels in the German-speaking countries, the hotel group cooperates with the Hamburg-based non-profit organisation Aktion Baum, which implements tree planting projects in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. As part of the cooperation, 25hours employees broke ground for an own 25hours forest near Frankfurt in spring and planted around 250 maple trees. The aim of the action is to contribute to the long-term recovery of nature, CO 2 compensation and the preservation of global biodiversity. As far as possible, Aktion Baum therefore plants mixed forests that have a good potential to cope with difficult climatic conditions and which also promote maximum biodiversity. Aktion Baum works together with local foresters, forestry experts, researchers, and scientists to find a functional and efficient solution for native forests.

Nadja Krawetz, Director of Brand & Communication at 25hours Hotels, explains how the cooperation works exactly: Guests who stay longer than one night at a 25hours Hotel have the option to waive the daily room cleaning when they check-in. However, we dont want to make profit with the saved resources but do something good for the environment. Therefore, we support different tree-planting initiatives at each of our locations. In addition to Aktion Baum, these are Plant et Tr in Copenhagen, treedom in Florence and the Emirates Environmental Group in Dubai. Simply said, our goal is to turn as many room cleanings as possible into trees, helping our 25hours Hotels forest to grow.

Those who support the initiative receive small pin needles at the reception with which they can mark an imaginary forest. At the end of the month, all pins are counted and the corresponding amount is transferred to the local initiative. Since April 2022, almost 34,000 donated trees have been collected with the support of the guests.

Eating and drinking more sustainably

In 2023, there will also be a focus on further developing the food & beverage concepts of all 25hours Hotels. Under the internal working title Happy Chicken, we are working on making the offer for our guests even more regional and are integrating more organic products, says Bruno Marti, Executive VP of Brand Marketing at 25hours Hotels. It is a fact that those who buy regional, seasonal and increasingly organic products support local producers and protect the environment through shorter transport routes, among other things. Especially in the hotel industry, creative solutions are needed so that a somewhat smaller but finer selection of dishes scores with the guests. Its about making our offer even more conscious, more consistent and at the same time offering an excellent taste experience, Marti continues.

Part of the food & beverage Initiative is to also expand the range of vegetarian and plant-based alternatives. After all, the way people eat has a significant impact on their carbon footprint. For example, a vegetarian meal has on average three times less impact on the climate than an equivalent meal with meat. Food specialist Lauren Wildbolz knows how the transformation to a plant-based cuisine can succeed. Together with Sebastian Haase, Head Chef at 25hours Hotel Langstrasse, she created plant-based bar food alternatives for the Cinchona Bar, for example. As a pioneer of the plant-based gastronomy in Switzerland, Wildbolz not only opened the first vegan restaurant in Zurich in 2010, but also advises restaurants that want to change their offering. The newly created menu offers versatility and authenticity at the same time with hearty dishes such as Good Fortune Bao Buns with Thai basil mayonnaise or Panko Fried Magic Mushrooms also with a lemongrass mayonnaise. The breakfast offer has evolved, too. For example, the 25hours Hotel The Circle in Cologne now serves vegan egg dishes for guests. Even without a hotel stay, the plant-based egg alternatives can be consumed as scrambled eggs, breakfast burritos or French toast in the hotels co-working area.

Plastic-free hotel experience

Another big issue is working to reduce and avoid single-use plastic products. Not only does the production of plastic items consume enormous resources and release harmful greenhouse gases to the environment, but often plastic items are also only used once and then thrown away directly. As they are chemically very stable and poorly degradable, plastic-free alternatives are needed. At 25hours Hotels, this process was initiated early on. Social and environmental sustainability were already among the most important driving forces when it came to product change for us before the pandemic, explains Katherina Klimke, VP of Operations at 25hours Hotels. We were already able to offer 80 percent plastic-free alternatives in our hotels. The step to become almost 100 percent plastic-free was therefore not so difficult. Since mid-2022, all hotels are mostly free of single-use plastic products in the guest areas. There are no more rubbish bags in the rubbish bin. Plastic-free laundry bags, shaving sets or toothbrushes are handed out on request at the reception. For 15 hotels with a total of 2,730 rooms and two rubbish bags per room, this results in a hypothetical saving of over 1.5 million rubbish bags per year at an eighty percent occupancy rate. Due to the lack of alternatives, we currently still have a few exceptions for the minibar snacks and our coffee set-up in the rooms. But we are working on solutions. We also participate in the RECUP and REBOWL returnable systems. The to-go deposit system is currently available in all hotels in the German-speaking countries, adds Klimke. At the same time, so-called water fountains (water dispensers) are being installed in all 25hours Hotels. This way, guests can fill up their drinking bottle free of charge and thus support the zero-waste principle.

Avoiding food surpluses

In addition to revising the food and beverage offer, initiatives to reduce food waste were also launched by 25hours Hotels. At almost all properties, the hotel group cooperates with Too Good To Go, for example, which helps to save food with its app. After breakfast, interested parties can purchase a discounted breakfast bag. Through this campaign, food from more than 865 hotels across Europe can be saved every day.

In Zurich, the 25hours Hotel Langstrasse as well as the 25hours Hotel Zurich West are working together with the Swiss start-up KITRO, which is also committed to sustainable change in the food industry. Using a smart bin system that measures all food waste throughout the day, the software then generates detailed reports that help restaurants reduce food waste. As a result, the WPG (waste per guest) has already been reduced by 30 percent. The pilot project is to be introduced in other 25hours properties in the future.

Flexible mobility

Furthermore, 25hours Hotels are committed to sustainable mobility through their collaborations with Schindelhauer Bikes and SHARE NOW. During their stay, guests are able to use urban city bikes as well as the sustainable car sharing service of SHARE NOW in Germany and Austria as a convenient and sustainable mobility solution. In addition, there are e-charging stations e.g., at the hotels in Cologne and Dusseldorf. The two Zurich properties as well as the 25hours Hotel One Central in Dubai offer e-speedsters for trips through the city in cooperation with MINI.

To ensure that the sustainable projects continue to flourish, the so-called Green Ambassadors have been in place at all 25hours Hotels for a year now. The team of almost 30 employees from different departments also takes care of the digitalisation and upcoming certification process or the conversion to renewable energies in small groups. The 25hours Hotel The Circle in Cologne plays a pioneering role in this. Both the cooperation with Aktion Baum and the use of green electricity were introduced here first.

ABOUT ENNISMORE

Ennismore is a creative hospitality company with a global collective of entrepreneurial and founder-built brands with purpose at their heart. It curates and manages unique properties and experiences in some of the most exciting destinations worldwide.

Founded in 2011 by entrepreneur Sharan Pasricha, Ennismore and Accor entered a joint venture in 2021 to create a new autonomous entity, with Accor holding a majority shareholding. Creating the world's fastest-growing lifestyle hospitality company, it brings together Ennismore's know-how in building brands with creative storytelling, design, and authentic experiences, with Accor's wealth of knowledge in delivering scale, network growth and distribution.

Under Sharan Pasricha, Founder & Co-CEO, and Gaurav Bhushan, Co-CEO, Ennismore comprises 14 brands - with over 100 operating properties and a further 140+ in the pipeline - and a collection of over 190 culturally relevant and diverse restaurants and nightlife destinations.

Ennismore puts innovation at the center of everything it does, with four dedicated in-house specialist studios, which obsess every guest touchpoint, including Carte Blanched  a fully integrated F&B concept platform; a creative studio of interior and graphic designers; a digital product and tech innovation lab, and a partnerships and collaborations division.

Ennismore has been included in Fast Company's World's Most Innovative Companies lists in 2020 and 2021; ranked#29 in FT1000: Europe's Fastest-Growing Companies; and is part of FT Future 100 - the UK's fastest-growing businesses that are shaping the future of their sector.

The Ennismore brands: 21c Museum Hotel, 25hours Hotels, Delano, Gleneagles, Hyde, JO&JOE, Mama Shelter, Mondrian, Morgans Originals, SLS, SO/, The Hoxton, TRIBE and Working From.
The 49th meeting of the UNWTO Regional Commission for the Middle East brought high-level delegations from 12 countries together at the Dead Sea, in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, to assess the current state of tourism in the region and advance shared plans for its future.

Middle East: First Region to Exceed Pre-Pandemic Levels

According to UNWTO data, the Middle East is the first global region to exceed pre-pandemic numbers of international tourist arrivals so far in 2023.

Overall, international arrivals to destinations in the Middle East during the first quarter of 2023 were 15% higher than in the same period of 2019

than in the same period of 2019 Jordan welcomed 4.6 million tourists in 2022, close to the 4.8 million recorded in 2019, with receipts from tourism totaling US$5.8 billion for the year

On the eve of the Regional Commission meeting, UNWTO Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili met with HRH Crown Prince Al Hussein to congratulate him on the "rapid and remarkable" recovery of Jordanian tourism. The Secretary-General also commended the strong support shown to tourism by the Jordanian Royal Family and the Government, including for ongoing work to diversify the sector.

Tourism has shown its resilience in the face of crisis. And now, recovery is well underway  with all the challenges and opportunities this brings. For the Middle East, tourism represents an unrivalled driver of employment and opportunity, as well as economic diversification and resilience. UNWTO Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili

UNWTO Supports Members' Priorities in the Middle East

Participants, representing 12 of the 13 UNWTO Member States in the region, and including 7 Ministers of Tourism, benefitted from a comprehensive overview of the Organization's progress achieving its Programme of Work.:

Education: Members were given an overview of UNWTO's work to advance one of its key priorities for tourism. Key achievements include an agreement signed with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to develop tourism education, including through online courses with the potential to reach up to 300 million people worldwide, and the Jobs Factory, linking 50 employers with 100,000 jobseekers. UNWTO is also launching a first Undergraduate Degree in Sustainable Tourism Management and developing plans to make tourism a high school subject.

Members were given an overview of UNWTO's work to advance one of its key priorities for tourism. Key achievements include an agreement signed with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to develop tourism education, including through online courses with the potential to reach up to 300 million people worldwide, and the Jobs Factory, linking 50 employers with 100,000 jobseekers. UNWTO is also launching a first Undergraduate Degree in Sustainable Tourism Management and developing plans to make tourism a high school subject. Tourism for Rural Development: The UNWTO Regional Office for the Middle East (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) is growing as a global hub of tourism for rural development. Members were updated on its work, including the Best Tourism Villages initiative, which is welcoming applications for its third edition.

The UNWTO Regional Office for the Middle East (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) is growing as a global hub of tourism for rural development. Members were updated on its work, including the initiative, which is welcoming applications for its third edition. Innovation: UNWTO is working with its Members to make the Middle East a hub of tourism innovation. Recent initiatives include the Women in Tech Start-Up Competition for the Middle East, aimed at supporting female entrepreneurs across the region, and the Tourism Tech Adventures forum held in Qatar.

Looking Ahead

In line with UNWTO's statutory obligations, Members from the Middle East agreed:

Jordan will serve as the Chair of the Commission for the Middle East for the period 2023 to 2025. Egypt and Kuwait will serve as the Vice Chairs.

The Commission will meet in Oman for its 50th meeting.

RELATED LINKS

About The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO)

The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) is the United Nations specialized agency fostering tourism as a vehicle for equal, inclusive and sustainable development. Working with its Member States, international organizations and the private sector, UNWTO promotes safe and seamless travel for all. UNWTO also works to make tourism the foundation of trust and international cooperation and a central pillar of recovery. As part of the wider UN system, UNWTO is at the forefront of global efforts to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including through its ability to create decent jobs, promote equality and preserve natural and cultural heritage.

Follow UNWTO on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin.

UNWTO Communications Department

+34 91 567 8100

UNWTO
Magnuson Hotels is pleased to announce the promotion of Laura White to the position of Director of Revenue Managament. Previously serving as Client Services Director, White is now responsible for overseeing the revenue strategy implementation for the groups portfolio.

With a background in hotel management and expertise in strategic revenue management, Laura has been able to make a strong impact on the success of hotels under her direction. Most recently, Magnuson Hotels announced a 77.83% growth in RevPAR since pre-pandemic (2019) for its Independent Group hotels, a growth rate 10 times the USA industry average of 7.6% as reported by STR.

From her first day with us, Laura has emerged as a motivated team player and a natural leader focused on providing our clients with the best support possible. She is a strong communicator and a thorough professional with 12 years of hotel industry experience. With her knowledge of Revenue Management and experience as a General Manager, we believe Laura will be an excellent Director of Revenue Management. Thomas Magnuson, CEO of Magnuson Hotels

This new responsibility presents a tremendous opportunity to contribute to Magnuson Hotels vision of creating freedom, opportunity, and growth for hotel owners. I am excited to continue to support the success of our valued clients. Laura White

White joined the company as Revenue Manager in 2019 and simultaneously took on many additional roles including supporting Business Development and monitoring corporate compliance efforts. Prior to joining Magnuson Hotels, White served as General Manager at Ramada Inn and Woodbridge Hotels.

About Magnuson Hotels

Magnuson Hotels has championed the cause of fair franchising for hotel owners since its inception in 2003, helping over 2000 hotels in the USA and UK succeed against some of the biggest brands in the hospitality industry. The group offers affiliation with brands that do not require mandatory renovations and procurements, long-term contracts, or excessive commissions, as well as representation as part of Magnuson Independent Group. The Magnuson Hotels platform achieves a non-seasonal 52-week occupancy strategy with comprehensive human support and an OTA-alternative distribution.

Contact for more information
Rendering of the InterContinental San Antonio Hotel

IHG Hotels & Resorts (IHG) and Scarlett Hotel Group (SHG) announced the onset of construction of InterContinental San Antonio, a 391-room hotel located on the celebrated San Antonio River Walk at 111 East Pecan Street. Trailbreak Partners, a real estate investment and development firm based in Denver, worked with SHG to secure the $158 million in financing that will completely transform the property into a luxurious, first-class destination serving visitors to San Antonio as well as the citys robust business and convention industry.

Matt Frankiewicz, SVP, Development, Americas for IHG Hotels & Resorts, said: We are delighted to enhance our growing luxury and lifestyle portfolio in the Americas with the addition of InterContinental San Antonio. InterContinental Hotels & Resorts is the worlds first and largest international luxury hotel brand with 211 open properties and 93 in the global pipeline, and this property is an exciting addition to the brand portfolio. The energizing spirit of San Antonio coupled with the unrivaled experiences, inspiring design and personalized service for which InterContinental Hotels & Resorts is globally celebrated will undoubtedly create a memorable experience for visitors and locals alike.

Zio Pekovic, Principal and Co-Founder of SHG, said: Its an honor to work with our partners at Trailbreak and IHG to bring a storied luxury hotel brand like InterContinental Hotels & Resorts to the city of San Antonio. We cant wait for the public and convention planners to experience the incredible space and amenities that this property will add to the community.

Construction is expected to be complete by late 2024.

About the Propertys $158 Million Renovation

The structure for InterContinental San Antonio originally opened as an office building in 1958. Sitting adjacent to the Weston Centre in the heart of San Antonio, the 21-story building features a rooftop pool with downtown views as well as direct access to the River Walk and river taxi landing area.

Following a complete transformation, InterContinental San Antonio will include 40,000 square feet of meeting space, world-class restaurant and bar experiences, and luxury rooftop amenities. The hotel represents the first property for the InterContinental brand in San Antonio, catering to the citys strong convention and business travel market, as well as expanding the citys presence in the high-end leisure market. IHG has the second largest luxury and lifestyle portfolio in the hospitality industry, with more than 450 hotels open globally across six distinct brands, including InterContinental Hotels & Resorts.

Guests will discover touches of subtle luxury and a refined ambiance throughout their experience. Bespoke paintings, sculptures and furniture will enhance the lobby and guest rooms. A new rooftop design will maximize the expansive and distinctive outdoor space, creating a feeling of openness. In addition to the outdoor pool, multiple levels of dining and gathering spaces will allow guests to meet, eat and relax.

An array of flexible indoor spaces will allow for small groups and meetings to take place almost anywhere on the property. Co-working spaces during the day can transform into private dining spaces at night. Major glass exposures in meeting rooms will be constructed with electrochromic glass, also known as smart or dynamic glass, making it easy to control backlighting or maximize daylight for events and presentations.
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About This Property Contractors special. Unlimited potential given close proximity to Williams College, Williamstown Theater Festival, Mass MoCA, and all other cultural events.



Land Details Community Details Acres Apx: 0.28

Parking Spaces: 2

Parking Type: Off Street

Lot Description: Irregular Shape

Region: North Registry

Elem School: Greylock

Middle School: Drury

High School: Drury

Exterior Details Interior Details Color: Blue

Style: Cape

Construction: Concrete,Wood Frame

Exterior: Vinyl

Water: Public

Sewer: Public

Underground Oil Tank: No

Views: Distant,Hill/Mountain

Waterfront: Brook

Garage: None

Total Rooms: 8

Total Full Baths: 2

Fuel: None

Hot Water: None

Electric: 100 Amp

Floor: Ceramic Tile,Linoleum,Wood

Lead Paint: Unk

Heat/Cool: Other

Insulation: Unknown

Appliances Incl: None

Accessibility: 1st Fl Bdrm,1st Flr Full Bath



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An apartment house on Morgan Avenue in North Adams burns on May 17. The owner is being charged with arson.

North Adams Building Owner to Be Charged With Arson in May Fire

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.  The owner of the apartment building that burned down on May 17 is expected to be charged with arson and conspiracy along with an alleged accomplice.

Police say Brandon Navom, 42, of State Road hired 19-year-old Gabriel McLenithan, a former tenant, to torch the condemned building that was insured for $1.2 million.

Two witnesses, including a woman who had had a relationship with McLenithan, say McLenithan had told them he started the fire for a $10,000 payment and an apartment outside the area, according to the arrest warrant.

An arrest warrant was issued this week for both Navom and McLenithan.

McLenithan was taken into custody on Wednesday in Dudley by North Adams Police detectives with assistance by Dudley and State Police. He was held without the right to bail by the Dudley District Court and is awaiting transport back to Berkshire County.

Firefighters responded to 28 Morgan Ave. around 11 p.m. on May 17 to find the 1880-circa building fully engulfed. Flames could be seen throughout the downtown. Residents at a nearby State Street house were evacuated for several hours.

Fire officials and the State Fire Marshal's Office had deemed the blaze "suspicious."

Navom purchased the eight-apartment building in January 2022 for $100,000. At the time of the fire, no one was living there. The 1880 building had been condemned as being uninhabitable and structurally unsafe.

According to the report filed with the warrant by Detective Tyler Drewnowski, Navom the following morning suggested that an evicted tenant or possibly a squatter might be responsible. He declined on the advice of his attorney to state where he had been the prior day following a Zoom meeting with the Board of Health over another building he had an interest in. He told the detective he was unsure if the Morgan Avenue building was insured, according to the report.

Investigators say they learned Navom had taken out a $300,000 mortgage on the property and an insurance policy for $1.2 million through Hartford Insurance Co.

McLenithan's former girlfriend, with whom he is having a child, contacted police and later provided them with text messages from McLenithan in which he says he is "doing something to make it so we have money to raise our child." In the text messages, there's a reference to $10,000 and an offer to buy her a car. He insists she call him and during that conversation, and she told police that he said the business he was referring to was burning the building.

Another witness told police that McLenithan had been bragging about starting the fire and had told her he would bail out his friend (her ex-boyfriend) who was currently being held. According to this witness, Navom had picked up McLenithan from where he was living in Webster and then drove him back after the fire.

McLenithan had apparently lived for some time at Navom's apartment building at 680 State Road including as Navom's roommate there. A witness says McLenithan was at Navom's house the day of the fire.
BCC Presents Physical Therapist Assistant Clinical Faculty Award

PITTSFIELD, Mass  Berkshire Community College (BCC) presented the New England Physical Therapist Assistant (PTA) Consortium Clinical Faculty Award to Cheryl Reynolds of Fairview Hospital in Great Barrington, on Wednesday, April 26.

Presenting the award were BCC PTA Program Coordinators Michele Darroch and Nicole Tucker, and Clinical Education Coordinator Judy Gawron. Victoria Guy, Director of Rehabilitation Services at Fairview Hospital, joined other rehabilitation staff in attendance for the recognition.

Reynolds has been a physical therapist assistant clinician for 39 years and a clinical instructor for 30 years at Fairview Hospital. As such, she has worked closely with BCC PTA students for decades, providing meaningful and challenging clinical experiences while adapting to the specific learning needs of each student. She has guided students at each level of clinical education and is known for excelling in matching the expected performance to the individual student.

As a PTA in both the hospital's acute care department and outpatient clinic, Reynolds provides opportunities for students to work with a variety of patients and alongside acute care occupational therapists, and, in the outpatient clinic, observe and assist physical therapists with patient treatments.

Dr. Guy credits Reynolds for being influential in advancing her own curiosity about physical therapy, inspiring her to attend the PTA program at BCC, then to continue on

to a doctorate in physical therapy.

"Cheryl, and her vast knowledge of everything PTA-related, has helped many students over the years. She is always cool, calm and collected," Dr. Guy said. "As the lead therapist and student coordinator here for the last few years, I have counted on Cheryl's skills in acute care, outpatient care, clinical instructor and community programs .Fairview Hospital and Berkshire Community College are fortunate to have her."
WCMA Announces 'Construct Your Own Meaning' Summer Series

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.  The Williams College Museum of Art will present "Construct Your Own Meaning," a series of summer programs that invites the community to interpret WCMA's permanent collection installation Remixing the Hall from their unique perspectives.

Borrowing a term from DJ culture, "Remixing" describes WCMA curators' process of selecting objects from the collection that highlight multivalent correspondences between form and meaning in art.

"By giving a diverse set of people outside the museum the agency and platform to share their personal connections to artwork in our collection, we are broadening who the museum is for," said Roz Crews, WCMA's Associate Curator of Programs. "This series asks audiences to see relationships between disparate objects and experiences, interweaving the present and the past."

Each event will be two hours on Thursdays throughout the summer: a 5 to 6 p.m. presentation and a 6 to 7 p.m. reception with celebratory food and drinks.

The series kicked off on July 6 with a program featuring beer inspired by artwork from WCMA's Remixing the Hall exhibition. Artist and seasoned beer industry expert Eric Steen has invited Bright Ideas Brewing (North Adams, Mass.), Hot Plate Brewing (Pittsfield, Mass.), and Rare Form Brewing (Troy, N.Y.) to interact with the art collection, dialogue with museum staff about the collection, select one or more artworks for inspiration, and brew new beers. During the public event, Steen will give an abbreviated artist talk and open up the conversation with the participating brewers before a reception where the new art-inspired beers will be served to visitors with special glassware.

The series continues July 20 with musicians taking center stage. In collaboration with museum staff, Andrea Belair (Co-Owner of Belltower Records, North Adams, Mass.) has curated a set of musicians from a range of musical backgrounds who will each compose five- to 10-minute pieces inspired by an artwork in Remixing the Hall. Featured musicians include: Mirabel Thompson Boyer (Williamstown, Mass.), Wednesday Knudsen (Austerlitz, N.Y.), Lemuel Marc (Boston), Father Hotep (Hadley, Mass.), Luis Granda (Williamstown, Mass.), and Carlos / REC  Humble Monarch Media (Amherst, Mass.). Together the musicians will make a collective concert for the audience as they guide visitors through the exhibition. A DJ reception featuring a playlist inspired by the exhibition shared by Taraka Larson (Wassaic, N.Y.) will follow from 6 to 7 p.m.

On August 3, a group of youths from the community will present a public tour of Remixing the Hall. Leading up to Aug. 3, WCMA will host a week-long intensive fellowship for these youths, who will get a behind the scenes look at the museum's collection, hear about different careers in the arts, and learn various methods for interpreting artwork. At the end of the program, the fellows will give a collaborative guided tour of Remixing the Hall designed for kids and adults from their communities. Opening remarks from the fellows and tour from 5 to 6 p.m, reception featuring foods selected by the fellows in collaboration with Anne Kennedy from 6 to 7 p.m.

The series concludes on Aug. 17 with bakers showcasing their cakes, designed and produced to interpret an artwork in Remixing the Hall. Featured artists include Edward Cabral (New York City), Cakes For No Occasion (New York City), Magnet (New York City), and Alli Gelles of cakes4sport (New York City). From 5 to 6 p.m., the cake artists will share about their selection and creation process alongside their creations and the artworks that inspired the cakes. From 6 to 7 p.m., there will be a reception to taste the cakes alongside iced coffee and tea.

For more information, contact the museum at 413-597-2429 or visit artmuseum.williams.edu.

WCMA is open to the public Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.
Page Content

ICAO Council President Salvatore Sciacchitano (front right) met with the Prime Minister of Azerbaijan Ali Asadov (front left) in Baku on 7 June.





During the bilateral meeting with the head of government, the President expressed ICAOs congratulations to Azerbaijan following its successful efforts to enhance implementation of ICAOs safety related standards and recommended practices (SARPs). The discussion between the President and the Prime Minister focussed on the importance of civil aviation for the sustainable socio-economic development of Azerbaijan, and on the contributions of Azerbaijans civil aviation in the region.





The Presidents mission to Azerbaijan also included meetings with the leadership of AZANS, the States Air Navigation Service Provider, and the National Aviation Academy (NAA) of Azerbaijan, where he delivered a lecture to the students. The exchanges encompassed all ICAO strategic objectives and highlighted once again the key role of innovation to address current and future needs.





The President was accompanied throughout his mission by ICAO Regional Director for the European and the North Atlantic Regions, Mr. Nicolas Rallo.


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In a matter of hours, tens of thousands of people will descend upon Barcelonas Parc del Forum for the 2023 edition of Primavera Sound. Depeche Mode, Blur, Rosalia, New Order, Caroline Polachek and Kendrick Lamar are among the acts set to perform this weekend. The latter is, in fact, right now conducting soundcheck in the sweltering Spanish sun. The instantly recognisable bass notes of his 2013 hit Swimming Pool reverberate across the park. But while Primavera will welcome approximately 70,000 revellers to its stages each day, countless others will be joining the festivities online.

Like banana bread and virtual wine clubs, live-streaming is one of those concepts that seemed specific to the pandemic but here we are, post-Covid and people are still tuning into the virtual party. The Barcelona edition of Primavera Sound was aired over Prime Video and Twitch last weekend, with the Madrid festival being broadcast on Twitch over the next few days. The company has aired many live-streams over the years, with artists including Tyler, the Creator, Kanye West, Drake, J Cole, Megan Thee Stallion and Latin pop sensation Anitta all having participated. What was once a lifeline for a music industry in crisis mode is now turning out to be a potential bedrock of its success.

I think we all thought that people were going to go back outside after Covid and no one would stay home to watch the live-streams anymore says Kirdis Postelle, the global head of artist marketing at Amazon Music who, together with Claire Imoucha, head of the music industry at Amazon Music Spain, is coordinating the broadcast of Primavera Sound this year. Yet even after venues reopened, people didnt lose interest. If anything, the future of live-streaming only came into sharper focus in the next coming months. In April last year, Amazon Music live-streamed Colombian superstar Mulumas homecoming concert in Medellin. A few months later, they broadcast Kendrick Lamars 10th anniversary show for his album Good Kid MAAD City from Paris. We realised OK, this is something we can continue to invest in because the artists want it and the fans do, too.

And invest, they have. Few companies can commit the resources that Amazon can in order to ensure the continued high standard of their live-streams. The fact were doing Primavera Sound shows how definitely dedicated we are to it, says Imoucha. Its only the third festival  but by far, the biggest  that Amazon Music has broadcast, but already theyre in the swing of it. Artists, too, have certainly come around to the idea  which hasnt always been the case.

Naturally with artists, when they think about performing, they think about performing in real life, but I think when they start to think about all the additional fans who are able to tune in because of the live-stream, that changes things, she says, adding with a laugh, Its gotten easier, but it took a minute. More than anything, a good live-stream needs a willing, excited performer. You need an artist that is really passionate and committed to delivering for their fans, says Postelle, pointing to Malums 2019 hometown concert as a prime example. He knew he wasnt just performing for the stadium; he was performing for his fans globally and so he took that to heart and into consideration in the production and his performance. Take any of this weekends headline acts and youll notice that they possess that same awareness and special attention to the camera work.

Live-streams by nature are a more intimate experience than a real life festival, but community is very much still on Postelle and Imouchas minds. The social capabilities of Twitch, a platform that allows users to communicate seamlessly with one another, means there is a community being built at the same time users are watching the live-stream. Community isnt restricted to real life interactions. You can be there in person, sure, but you can also see it online and feel like you were part of a community as if you were there. Its a global approach, she adds. You could be chatting to someone whos in Argentina while youre in Leeds, but youre all fans of the same artist and connect through this unique experience.

The demographic for these live-streams is fans, say Postelle and Imoucha. Simple as that. If there continue to be fans, there will continue to be demand. Its not difficult to imagine a future in which live-streaming will become a natural part of any music event. If Postelle and Imoucha have anything to say about it, that future will arrive sooner rather than later.
Curator Max Donnelly is glad that, after working for two and a half years, an exhibition introducing the British Arts and Crafts movement has opened in Nanjing, East Chinas Jiangsu province, in May, 2023.

Nanjing Museum is the first venue for Beyond William Morris  British Arts and Crafts 1890-1920. Its China tour, which will also include Hebei Museum, Chengdu Museum and two more venues, will run until 2025.

Im particularly excited to see the exhibition is opening in Nanjing, because I understand that it is one of the largest museums in China, and one of the oldest, celebrating 90 years this year, says Donnelly, curator of furniture and woodwork 1800-1915 at the Victoria and Albert Museum (the V&A) in London.

The exhibition explores the movement in Britain, which was inspired by renowned decorative art designer William Morris (1834-96), showcasing signature works by the most talented designers, craftspeople and manufacturers involved in the movement from 1890 to 1920.

The 100-plus exhibits, some of which are rarely seen in public, are carefully selected from the collections of the V&A Museum.

Visitors are able to see designs, wallpapers, textiles, furniture, ceramics, metalwork, jewellery and stained glass created by Morris and his daughter May, an embroidery designer and jeweller; English architects and designers C.F.A. Voysey and C.R. Ashbee; artist and book illustrator Walter Crane and Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, among others.

Its the first time for the classic work of William Morris and his followers to be exhibited in China. Im sure it will be an artistic feast for the eyes of Chinese visitors, says Tan Ping, director of Art Exhibitions China, adding that the exhibition will play a role in deepening cultural exchanges between China and the United Kingdom.

The Strawberry Thief textile pattern, designed by Morris and made around 1883, on indigo-discharged and block-printed cotton. (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Nick Marchand, head of International Programmes at the V&A, takes Beyond William Morris as a good example of the institutions history.

We are excited about it connecting with new audiences in China, as well as the opportunity to visit cities and provinces weve not had the chance to take exhibitions to in the past, he says.

For Chen Li, a curator at the Nanjing Museum, the main challenges during the planning and design of the exhibition concern exhibit protection and lighting.

Many of the exhibits are designs and textiles, which are sensitive to light and can only be exposed to light level below 50 lux.

To best protect the exhibits, a label with a light box is especially designed to provide required light level for the exhibits as well as for visitors to be able to read, Chen says. During the setup, a Chinese lighting designer worked together with a representative from the V&A. As its well-designed, everything went well.

Morris was among those who, along with John Ruskin, a famous English art critic during the Victorian era, helped formulate the ideas behind the movement, which revolved around the idea of the pleasure of making things, despite the Victorian eras focus on industrial progress.

But Morris was different, because he not only preached the message, he practised it.

Morris combined theory with practice, says Donnelly.

Morris founded his own company in 1861, which later became known as Morris & Co. It was important, because he employed both artists and makers to design and make things, including wallpaper, furniture, stained glass, textiles, interior and exterior decor and printing limited-edition books.

While Donnelly mentions that Asian ceramics were a source of inspiration for the artists at the time, Chen says that, when Morriss contagious ideas and work entered China through Japan in the early 20th century, Morris became one of the most well-known British cultural figures during that time.

Chen Zhifo, a modern art educator, painter and designer, was so deeply inspired by Morris, as well as the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, that he called for merging arts and crafts with industry and manufacturers to provide products that meet the needs of peoples daily lives, Chen Li cites as an example.

Acclaimed Chinese artists and designers including Pang Xunqin, Lei Guiyuan and Zhang Guangyu were also inspired to design many classic works for commercial purposes, and publish relevant books, laying the foundation for the development of modern architecture, furniture, interior design, graphic design and commercial art, says Chen Li.
The vocation of astronaut had for a long time seemed sacred and distant to Gui Haichao until the researcher became a member of the Astronaut Centre of China. The 36-year-old from Yunnan province became the first Chinese civilian to fly in space.

Aboard the Shenzhou XVI spacecraft, Gui, his commander Major General Jing Haipeng and fellow astronaut Colonel Zhu Yangzhu were launched by a 20-storey-tall Long March 2F carrier rocket that blasted off at 9:31 am on May 30, 2023, from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwestern Chinas Gobi Desert.

Within hours of the launch, the Shenzhou XVI mission crew reached orbit and started work in the Tiangong space station.

Fifteen years ago, Gui was a senior at the School of Astronautics under Beihang University, majoring in spacecraft design and engineering. When Jing Haipeng was flying onboard the Shenzhou VII spaceship in September 2008, I was still a university student. I watched the live broadcast of our nations first spacewalk that was carried out by the Shenzhou VII crew, he said during a recent interview. The Shenzhou XVI mission is Jings fourth spaceflight.

I just couldnt even imagine at that time that I would become a colleague of his and train and live in the same place. And now I am an astronaut in his crew and we will fly together to the space station, Gui said.

The Shenzhou XV and Shenzhou XVI crews pose in the Tianhe core module of the Tiangong space station on May 30, 2023, marking the start of the in-orbit crew handover. (LI JIE / XINHUA)

In the following years, Gui continued his study at Beihang and graduated in the summer of 2014 with a doctorate in spacecraft design. The young researcher then spent two years in a post-doctoral programme working on integrated directional and orbital control technology for sophisticated spacecraft at the Department of Earth and Space Science and Engineering at York University in Toronto.

In the summer of 2016, Gui undertook post-doctoral research on the detection of small celestial bodies and high-precision forecast technology for spacecraft movement at the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Ryerson University, which was later renamed Toronto Metropolitan University.

He returned to Beihang in September 2017 after receiving the universitys invitation to teach as an associate professor at the School of Astronautics.

At Beihang, the researchers academic interests included spacecraft dynamics, guidance, navigation and control technology for aerospace systems. He has published more than 50 journal articles and academic conference papers.

In the spring of 2018, Gui and his colleagues were told by the schools president that Chinas manned space authorities had decided to select the third batch of astronauts, including the first spaceflight engineers and science payloads specialists.

The president told us that the posts of spaceflight engineer and science payloads specialist would be open to civilians working for non-military research entities. He said this was a very precious opportunity and encouraged those interested to apply.

I have been a fan of space exploration for many years and sometimes dreamed about doing my research in space, so I was excited hearing this news and immediately came to the schools administrative office to fill in the application form, he said.

After rounds of physical checks and professional tests, Gui earned a place in the elite club and started training at the Astronaut Centre of China. Thanks to his perseverance and diligence, Gui progressed rapidly in every training course and was chosen for the Shenzhou XVI mission.

The Shenzhou XVI crew members will stay in Tiangong for around five months and are scheduled to return to Earth in November. They will carry out several spacewalks during the mission to mount equipment outside the station and also conduct maintenance work, Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency, said on May 29.

According to Lin, China now has all prerequisites for sending foreign astronauts into space  a well-constructed space station, a reliable astronaut transportation system, and mature methods for astronauts training and support.

We are actively working on this matter. I very much welcome and look forward to foreign astronauts flying on board our space station, he said.
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China has lashed out at the US for spreading rumours and slander and described Washington as the most powerful hacker empire in a denial of reports that it had inked a secret deal with Cuba to set up a spy station.

Citing US officials with classified intelligence, American media claimed China had reached a deal with cash-strapped Cuba to establish an electronic eavesdropping facility that would allow Beijing to gather electronic communications on US military bases and monitor ship traffic.

China would pay Cuba several billion dollars to allow the eavesdropping station, in an agreement reached in principle, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing officials.

Another report by CNN said the US learnt about the deal in the last several weeks, citing two US officials.

The US and Cuba have both denied the reports.

Chinese foreign minister spokesperson Wang Wenbin on Friday avoided directly answering questions on the reports and addressing the alleged plans for opening a spy base in Cuba, saying Beijing was not aware of the situation.

As we all know, spreading rumours and slander is a common tactic of the United States, he said.

The United States is also the most powerful hacker empire in the world, and also veritably a major monitoring nation.

Mr Wangs comments came despite the White House denying the report.

John Kirby, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, told Reuters on Thursday that the report was not accurate, but did not say what he thought was inaccurate.

What I can tell you is that we have been concerned since day one of this administration about Chinas influence activities around the world, certainly in this hemisphere and in this region, Mr Kirby told MSNBC. Were watching this very, very closely.

The proximity of the alleged facility  roughly 100 miles (160km) from Florida  raised concerns as the report claimed it would allow Chinese intelligence to scoop up electronic communications throughout the southeastern US.

Cuban deputy foreign minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio also denied the reports in a press conference in Havana.

He said the reports are totally untrue and slanders, adding that Cuba rejects all foreign military presence in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Slander like this has been fabricated frequently by US officials, he said, adding that the rumours were being used to legitimise US sanctions on Cuba.

The revelations come as another road block in US-China ties. Beijing has rebuffed Washingtons attempts to resume high-level dialogue at crucial military and diplomatic events following several missteps in their bilateral relationship.

Mr Blinken is reportedly expected to travel to Beijing in the coming weeks to meet senior Communist Party officials, including president Xi Jinping.

An earlier planned visit by the senior diplomat was cancelled after the US shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon earlier this year. The incident had further soured an already strained relationship with China.

A visit by former House speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan last year sparked a diplomatic row between the two before the spy balloon incident.

China also declined a meeting with US secretary of defence Lloyd Austin last week at the Shangri-La security dialogue in Singapore.

Washington had issued an invite for talks between Mr Austin and his Chinese counterpart Li Shangfu for the summit but the two only ended up shaking hands without holding any bilateral talks.
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South Korea has not taken kindly to recent remarks by Chinas ambassador to the Korean nation in which he warned that Seoul was making wrong bets by increasingly aligning itself with the US.

Xing Haiming made the remarks during a meeting with South Korean main opposition party leader Lee Jae-myung on Thursday, where he called on Seoul to stop decoupling from Beijing.

The remarks, made in the backdrop of a continuing Sino-US rivalry, led to the issuance of a summons by the Korean nations foreign ministry on Friday.

Mr Xing had warned South Korea against making the wrong judgement on China because of the interference of external factors such as US pressure.

I can assure you, those who bet on Chinas defeat will definitely regret it, Mr Xing said late on Thursday.

He further blamed Seoul for creating difficulties in bilateral ties by not respecting Beijings core interests, including over self-governed island Taiwan which China claims it can take with force, while being influenced by the US.

China-South Korea relations face many difficulties. Frankly, the blame does not lie with China, Mr Xing said, according to a statement released by the embassy. We hope that the South Korean side will faithfully keep its promise and clearly respect Chinas core concerns, such as the Taiwan issue.

The diplomat also urged South Korea to restore its economic and diplomatic ties with China.

Mr Xing said South Koreas trade deficits worsened because of its efforts to decouple from China. He said South Korea could enjoy the bonus from Chinese economic growth if its confidence in bilateral ties are restored.

The two countries have built an inextricable economic structure in which their industrial and supply chains are closely connected, he said.

In retaliation, South Koreas foreign ministry on Friday said the countrys first vice foreign minister Chang Ho-jin summoned Mr Xing against what he said were provocative remarks and expressed strong regret.

Mr Chang said openly criticising Seouls policy with untrue content and intolerable expressions could constitute an act of interfering in the Korean countrys domestic politics.

Vice minister Chang clearly warned Ambassador Xing... that he will be responsible for all the consequences, the ministry said in a statement.

The South Korean opposition party has criticised president Yoon Suk-yeol and his administration for what it called the lopsided diplomacy toward the US alliance at the expense of ties with China, its top trading partner.
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Rishi Sunaks government has vowed to end the windfall tax on oil and gas companies if prices continue to fall, in a move branded premature while millions across Britain continue to struggle with the cost of living.

Ministers said the tax has raised 2.8bn, and that it will soon have saved a typical household 1,500 on energy bills since it was imposed last May to fund support for consumers and businesses as prices rocketed following the pandemic and Russias invasion of Ukraine.

But despite the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, raising the tax to 35 per cent and extending it until 2028 just months ago  a move he claimed would raise 40bn  the government appeared to bow to industry pressure on Friday as it announced a plan to end its energy profits levy.

Under the new plans, ministers will now axe the levy if the average price of oil falls below $71.41 (about 57) per barrel for two consecutive quarters and the average price of gas falls below 54p per therm.

The decision was met with criticism on both sides. The fossil fuel industry, which has enjoyed record profits in recent months, said it did not go far enough, while poverty campaigners and opposition MPs lamented the potential loss of the tax  which they said already contains more loopholes than a block of Swiss cheese.

But the government insisted that, despite its inclusion of a controversial investment allowance aimed at encouraging further fossil-fuel extraction in the UK, a blanket imposition of the levy until 2028 poses a threat to the long-term future of the UKs domestic energy supply as firms threaten to cut back investment.

However, if the Office for Budget Responsibilitys energy price forecasts prove to be accurate, the windfall tax will still remain in place for five years as planned, according to the government.

On Friday morning, Brent crude oil was trading at $75.38 dollars per barrel, while UK gas prices were at around 64p per therm  down from a 14-year high of nearly $140 per barrel and 8 per therm last March.

Petrol prices at forecourts hit nearly 2 per litre last June (PA)

That spike saw petrol prices at forecourts hit what was then a record high of 1.67 per litre. They now sit at 1.43, down from nearly 2 last June.

Meanwhile, UK regulator Ofgems energy price cap is set to return to 2,074 in July, after soaring from 1,277 in August 2021 to a high of 4,279 for a typical household, during which time consumers were shielded slightly by government support  partly funded by the windfall tax  which has now been wound down.

Defending the levys new floor, the exchequer secretary to the Treasury, Gareth Davies, said it was so important that we secure investment in our own domestic supply to protect jobs, as he warned that never again can our energy supplies be at the whim of petrostate despots like Putin.

But campaigners argued that ministers should keep all options on the table to bolster Britains energy security and help struggling households.

Energy bills are predicted to remain high, and levels of household energy debt are still surging, said Simon Francis of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, which described the decision to end the windfall tax as shortsighted.

Any talk of reducing or ending the windfall tax while millions still struggle through the energy bills crisis is premature. The government should keep all options on the table to ensure the funding is available to fix Britains broken energy system into the long term.

The move is shortsighted given uncertainty over how long Vladimir Putins war in Ukraine will rage and the state of the energy market (Sputnik)

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey MP warned that families and businesses still suffering so much from high energy bills will not forget the Tories failure to properly tax oil and gas profits.

This out-of-touch government has shown yet again that it doesnt care about people struggling just to get by, or the small business clinging on, he said. This energy tax failure ranks as one of Rishi Sunaks biggest personal failures.

Despite the concession, which was pushed for by firms eyeing investment in the governments controversial decision to develop Rosebank, the UKs largest untouched oilfield, industry body Offshore Energies UK said it was not enough to restore confidence.

Weve always been clear that when the windfall conditions go, the windfall tax should go, its chief executive David Whitehouse said. This is a step in the right direction, but many more will need to be taken to restore confidence to our sector.

We will now work closely with government and lenders to understand the detail of the measure and its effectiveness at unlocking investment.

Climate campaigners are starkly opposed to developing the Rosebank oil field (Getty)

Labour, which has pledged to honour any new oil and gas licences if they are granted  but opposes new developments  insisted that the UK needs a proper windfall tax on the enormous profits of oil and gas giants to help ease the cost of living crisis.

We will look at the detail of this change, a spokesperson said. Of course, if the windfalls of war disappear, then well look at what the right long-term tax position should be for the North Sea.

More than 10 million people in the UK are now struggling to pay their bills, according to a recent Financial Conduct Authority study, with some eating less and cancelling insurance policies in order to get by.

While the government wound down its energy bill support scheme in April, millions of households on low incomes are to receive further support to meet the cost of living, worth up to 1,350 in total this year. You can read about the help available in June here.
The Beach Boy Mike Love was not a happy surfer in early 1967. Brian Wilsons new-found urge to fiddle with the formula of surfing, girls and cars that had made the bands name was bothering him. Loves main bone of contention was the experimental material his cousin had recorded for Smile, The Beach Boys intended follow-up to Pet Sounds. It was abandoned soon afterwards, and is still unreleased as a full work, but Smiles painstakingly constructed soundscapes make it one of pops legendary lost masterpieces.

Salvaged from the Smile flotsam, Surfs Up became the title track of The Beach Boys renaissance album, released in 1971. Recorded some five years earlier, it is one of their most intriguing songs. Its unsettling tempo changes, swelling harmonies and abstruse imagery cast a curious magic, especially in lines such as: Dove nested towers the hour was/ Strike the street quicksilver moon/ Carriage across the fog/ Two-step to lamp lights cellar tune.

The lyrics were penned by the maverick producer and musician Van Dyke Parks. The bespectacled 24-year-old had no track record as a lyricist, but he had helped to arrange the music for the Disney animated film The Jungle Book and he told stories of how, as a junior chorister, he was once accompanied on violin by an elderly Albert Einstein. That was enough for Brian. He had a good personality and I thought maybe he could be a good writer, he said. The two collaborators bedded down in Brians sandbox - a low-walled, sand-filled enclosure in the dining room of his California home - and worked away on Wilson's Chickering piano.
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Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has urged the Anglican Church of Uganda to reject the countrys new anti-homosexuality law, saying its support for the legislation was a fundamental departure from the global Anglican movements commitment to protect the dignity of all people.

The spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion said he had written to Ugandan Archbishop Stephen Kaziimba to express his "grief and dismay" over the Ugandan churchs position on the law.

Supporting such legislation is a fundamental departure from our commitment to uphold the freedom and dignity of all people, Welby said in a statement. There is no justification for any province of the Anglican Communion to support such laws: not in our resolutions, not in our teachings, and not in the gospel we share.

Uganda president Yoweri Museveni late last month signed legislation that includes the death penalty for aggravated homosexuality, defined as sexual relations involving people infected with HIV. Those convicted of "promoting" homosexuality, a broad category covering everyone from journalists to human rights campaigners, face up to 20 years in prison.

While Welby joined world leaders such as US President Joe Biden and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in opposing the legislation, his intervention highlights deep divisions within the global Anglican movement over its teachings on marriage and sexuality.

Many Anglican leaders in the southern hemisphere continue to teach that homosexuality is contrary to Gods design and oppose moves to recognize same-sex marriage. That has created tensions with more liberal churches in Europe and North America.

The Anglican Communion is the umbrella organisation for 46 autonomous churches that trace their roots to the Church of England, a Protestant denomination that split from the Catholic Church in the 16th century.

While there is no central authority, the member churches recognize the archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the Church of England, as their spiritual head and take guidance from periodic meetings of archbishops and other church leaders.

Anglicans account for about a third of Ugandas population, making it the countrys second-biggest religion behind Catholicism, according to the most recent census.

Welby said he was "deeply aware" of the history of colonial rule in Uganda and wasnt trying to impose Western values on the people of Uganda.

But he said that despite their disagreements, Anglican leaders worldwide had agreed to condemn homophobia and oppose criminal sanctions against LGBTQ+ people.

These statements and commitments are the common mind of the Anglican Communion on the essential dignity and value of every person, Welby said. I therefore urge Archbishop Kaziimba and the Church of Uganda - a country and church I love dearly, and to which I owe so much - to reconsider their support for this legislation and reject the criminalization of LGBTQ people.

Associated Press contributed to this report
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A representative for Jamie Foxx has shut down conspiracy theories that the actors recent hospitalisation was due to the Covid-19 vaccine leaving him partially paralyzed and blind.

In a statement to NBC News, Foxxs representatives called the claims completely inaccurate.

The conspiracy theory began on 30 May, when Hollywood gossip columnist AJ Benza made the unsubstantiated claim on Ask Dr Drew, hosted by reality TV host Dr Drew Pinsky. During the podcast episode, Benza alleged that Foxx was forced to get the Covid-19 vaccine while he was working on a film, citing a source in the room with Foxx when he was hospitalised.

Benza claimed Foxx developed a blood clot in the brain after receiving the vaccine, which caused him at that point to be partially paralyzed and blind.

Despite Foxxs representatives refuting Benzas claims, it hasnt stopped far-right commentators from spreading the anti-vaccination conspiracy theory on the internet.

Political commentator Candace Owens peddled the theory on her YouTube-based podcast, where she has 1.67m subscribers, on 6 June. In the video, titled Whats Going On With Jamie Foxx?, Owens suggested there may be some veracity to Benzas claim because nobody in Foxxs family had denied it at the time.

Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk also weighed in on the claim, tweeting on 1 June that he was infuriated a decent person like Jamie Foxx fell victim to Big Pharma because a movie set is still dumb enough to mandate their cash cow clot shot.

Theres been much speculation surrounding Jamie Foxxs health after the 55-year-old actor was hospitalised in April following a medical complication. On 12 April, his daughter Corinne Foxx shared in a social media statement that the Django Unchained star experienced a medical complication yesterday.

Luckily, due to quick action and great care, he is already on his way to recovery. We know how beloved he is and appreciate your prayers, she said. The family asks for privacy during this time.

Foxx was filming the forthcoming Netflix film Back in Action in Georgia when he was taken to a medical facility. Many rumours soon emerged about Foxxs health. While most reports suggested that the actor was recovering, one source told Radar that his friends and family were hoping for the best  but preparing for the worst.

On 3 May, Jamie Foxx broke his silence on social media when he thanked fans for their support. Appreciate all the love!!! Feeling blessed [prayer, heart and fox emoji], the actor shared on his Instagram Story.

Meanwhile, his daughter Corinne later rebuked claims that his family were preparing for the worst and revealed that the actor had been out of the hospital for weeks.

Update from the family: Sad to see how the media runs wild. My Dad has been out of the hospital for weeks, recuperating, she shared on her Instagram on 12 May. In fact, she continued, he was playing pickleball yesterday! Thanks for everyones prayers and support! We have an exciting work announcement coming next week too!
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Tiger King star and convicted felon Joe Exotic has formally asked former President Donald Trump to join his upcoming 2024 presidential campaign.

The former zoo owner and TV personality, who is currently serving a 21-year prison sentence for 17 federal charges of animal abuse and two counts of attempted murder, took to Twitter on 8 June to ask the 45th president of the US to be his running mate.

His plea comes on the same day that Donald Trump was indicted for a second time on seven charges relating to the storage of classified national defense documents dating from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.

Former President Trump, Exotics message began. Now that you have been indicted  welcome to the party. Now will you help me #FixThisS***.

The tweet also included the hashtag #JoeExotic2024 and a link to his campaign website JoeExotic2024.com.

Exotic  real name Joseph Allen Maldonado  rose to fame through Netflixs 2020 true-crime documentary Tiger King, which focused on his rivalry with wildlife activist Carol Baskin. In 2019, he was found guilty on two counts of hiring hitmen to murder Baskin, along with eight counts of violating the Lacey Act by forging wildlife records, and nine more counts for killing five tigers and selling tigers across state lines.

He was sentenced to 22 years in prison, which was later reduced to 21 years during a 2022 re-sentencing trial.

Joe Exotic announced his candidacy for the 2024 US Presidential Election in March 2023. Its official! I am now a candidate for President of the United States in 2024, he shared on social media at the time. He clarified: Yes, I know I am in federal prison and you might think this is a joke but its not. It is my Constitutional right to do this even from here.

Exotic also accused the Department of Justice of perjury for his imprisonment, adding: The only thing I did was put five very old, crippled tigers to sleep in the most humane way possible and it was approved by my USDA Inspector, so its time to get over it.

Peta [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] kills thousands of animals a year. Carole has killed over 226 big cats and most of you eat some kind of animal everyday, so its time to move past this issue.

Much like Trump, Exotic has the legal right to run for President of the United States. There are no restrictions in the US Constitution preventing anyone indicted or convicted of a crime, or currently serving prison time, from running for or winning the presidency.

The former president announced on Truth Social on 8 June that he has been indicted by a grand jury over his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House. In August 2022, the Department of Justice found a cache of secret papers from his time as president at his home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.

Last March, a Manhattan grand jury also voted to indict Trump on criminal charges over hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the days before the 2016 presidential election.

President Donald Trump will appear in federal court in Miami on 13 June, his lawyer has since confirmed. Should he be convicted, he could face a maximum combined sentence of 100 years in prison.
 Close Prince Harry arrives at High Court for battle with MGN over phone hacking

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Soap actress Nikki Sanderson said her hair was set on fire by a group of girls after Mirror articles painted her as a stuck up, nasty, party girl.

She said in her witness statement: People would elbow me, push me and, on one occasion, a group of girls even set my hair on fire. This particular incident happened in the toilets of a club and the group of girls had been bothering me all night.

I had gone to the toilets on my own and I was washing my hands and I smelt burning. I looked down and they had set fire to the back of my hair. Fortunately, I wasnt wearing any hair product, otherwise, my hair would have gone up in flames.

She added: Its because of this narrative created and repeated by MGN that I was stuck up, nasty, rude, promiscuous, and a party girl. It feels like character assassination.

Meanwhile, the Duke of Sussex has landed back in Los Angeles, after a flying visit to the UK to give evidence in his High Court phone hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN).
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The Duke of Sussex has landed back in Los Angeles, after a flying visit to the UK to give evidence in his High Court phone hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN).

Prince Harry, 38, is not thought to have seen his father, the King, or his brother, the Prince of Wales, during his brief trip, despite reportedly staying at royal residence Frogmore Cottage.

Harry flew from Los Angeles to London overnight on Sunday (4 June), after spending the day celebrating his daughter Princess Lilbets second birthday.

This meant he missed the opening day of his claim against MGN in court, and the judge gave him a rebuke. Justice Fancourt said he was a "little surprised" that the Duke of Sussex was not in court for the first day, according to the BBC.

According to The Telegraph, Harry stayed at Frogmore Cottage in Windsor for what is likely to be the last time, since his father King Charles asked the Sussexes to vacate the property just weeks after the publication of Harrys tell-all memoir, Spare.

In January, it was reported that Charles was evicting the couple from their UK residence, where they had lived as newly weds, and would be offering up the cottage to Prince Andrew instead.

The Duke of York, who has resided at his home Royal Lodge with ex-wife Sarah Ferguson for more than 20 years, is said to be resisting the move. According to sources, the move to Frogmore Cottage is thought to be a downgrade from his current home, which boasts seven bedrooms, a large drawing room and a conservatory.

It comes after Harry laid bare his grievances with the royal family in his memoir, which was released in early January. Among the revelations in the book, he alleged that his brother, the Prince of Wales, physically attacked him while Charles pleaded with them not to make my final years a misery with their feud.

Harry and his wife Meghan Markle moved into the residence after their wedding but it is thought that they will vacate the cottage this Summer.

Prince Harry leaves the High Court in London after he finished giving evidence (PA)

When visiting the UK for his fathers coronation last month, Harry left for the US shortly after the ceremony finished, heading straight to Heathrow Airport and arriving back at Los Angeles International Airport that evening. Harry was not seen speaking to interacting with his brother William during the days events.

The strained relationship between the Sussexes and senior members of the royal family grew more apparent last weekend (6 June) when none of the official Twitter accounts belonging to King Charles and Prince William wished Harrys daughter Lilibet a happy second birthday.

It was a stark contrast to the mood of last years celebrations, when the official Twitter accounts for the royal family, King Charles and Queen Camilla, plus that of the Prince and Princess of Wales, all wished Lilibet a happy first birthday.

A royal expert suggested that the radio silence from senior members of the royal family reflected the strained relationship between the King and Lilibets parents, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

RS Locke, a royal commentator and freelance writer, told The Independent: King Charless decision not to publicly acknowledge his granddaughters birthday, nor Prince Archies last month, is a reflection of their strained relationship and likely an indication of the social media practices going forward.
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Boris Johnson has called time on his political career by lambasting a committee of MPs whom he claims were biased and determined to see him go.

Mr Johnson, 58, announced he was stepping down as MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip  and compared the Privileges Committee probe into whether he lied to Parliament over partygate to a kangaroo court.

His resignation statement on Friday, which was sent to the media just hours after the Government published his long-awaited resignation honours list, came after he received a letter from the Privileges Committee which Mr Johnson says made it clear they were determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of Parliament.

Mr Johnson wrote: I have been an MP since 2001. I take my responsibilities seriously.

I did not lie, and I believe that in their hearts the Committee know it.

Mr Johnson led the Conservatives to a landslide election victory in 2019  but was given a fixed penalty notice over Downing Street lockdown parties and then forced out by his own MPs after three years in office, following a string of scandals.

He resigned in July 2022 and his final speech in Downing Street appeared to hint at a comeback  including a reference to Cincinnatus, who was recalled from his farm to save ancient Rome from crisis.

Just months later, he emerged as an early front-runner to be the next prime minister.

His replacement Liz Truss crashed and burned after 45 days in the job, and had resigned after her policy programme spooked the financial markets.

At the time polling suggested he was still deeply unpopular with the public at large, although not as unpopular as Ms Truss and he had significant support among Tory members.

Mr Johnson largely kept a low profile following his resignation, apart from a tribute to the late Queen and continuing his steadfast support for Ukraine until in March, he found his political future was in the hands of the Privileges Committee.

He faced a grilling which lasted more than three hours from the committee where he insisted he did not lie to the House over his reassurances about Covid guidance being followed in Downing Street during the pandemic.

He told the panel it would have been utterly insane for him to have misled Parliament.

But even before becoming prime minister, he had been accused of racism and homophobia, as well as multiple affairs, and was forced to apologise to Parliament for failing to properly declare outside earnings totalling more than 50,000 on several occasions.

Despite this he seemed to continue defying political gravity, rising ever upwards from MP to mayor of London to foreign secretary and, eventually, into Number 10 itself.

He even built up a reputation for being able to win in unexpected places, starting with his bid for the London mayoralty in 2008.

Although not quite the Labour stronghold it is now, the capital was still a daunting prospect for a Conservative after two terms of Red Ken Livingstone, but Mr Johnson managed not only to win but then retain the mayoralty in 2012.

And then, in December 2019, his promise to Get Brexit done saw him lead the Conservatives to a landslide victory, picking up swathes of traditionally Labour territory.

But even with his majority, Mr Johnson was confronted by significant challenges.

He did manage to secure a Brexit deal, but his decision to reopen the question of the Northern Ireland Protocol suggested Brexit was not done while also opening him to accusations he was reneging on an agreement with the UKs international partners.

Then came the pandemic, derailing many of his plans to level up the country and seeing him admitted to an intensive care unit as he was struck down with Covid.

MPs became rebellious as he broke manifesto pledges on tax rises, U-turned on social care, backtracked on rail promises and continued to impose Covid restrictions that some felt draconian.

And still scandal dogged him. Just as he appeared unassailable  leading in the polls, presiding over a successful Cop26 and a triumphant Tory conference  it all started to fall apart.

First came the Owen Paterson affair and then the revelations of partygate that saw him become the first prime minister to receive a criminal penalty while in office, before finally the Chris Pincher scandal brought an avalanche of ministerial resignations and his exit from Downing Street.
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A Tory MP has accused Boris Johnson of orchestrating a mutiny and said he should not be allowed to stand as an MP again until he shows commitment to the party.

Tobias Ellwood, who chairs the defence select committee, told The Independent that adulation for Mr Johnson had been replaced by total indignation after his actions triggered three by-elections.

Mr Johnson dramatically resigned as MP on Friday over the outcome of the Partygate inquiry, with two of his allies  Nadine Dorries and Nigel Adams  also quitting with immediate effect.

It comes as senior Cabinet minister Grant Shapps said the world has moved on and that Tories did not miss the drama of a Johnson administration. One senior MP, who is close to Mr Sunak, told The Independent: Good riddance.

Senior Tories accused the former PM and his allies of a coordinated attempt to damage the Sunak government.

But Sunak loyalists have attempted to play down the row, insisting the PM will be relieved at having a chance to draw a line under the Boris madness.
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Boris Johnsons resignation honours list has finally been confirmed by the government, after months of wrangling.

Below is the full list of gongs handed out to those favoured by the prime minister.

Peerages

Mr Shaun Stephen Bailey

Current Conservative member of the London Assembly

Mr Benjamin Gascogne

Former Political Secretary and Deputy Chief of Staff to the former Prime Minister Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP

Mr Benjamin Houchen

Current Tees Valley Mayor

Mr Ross John Kempsell

Political Director of the Conservative Party and Director of the Conservative Research Department

Miss Charlotte Katherine Tranter Owen

Former Special Advisor to the former Prime Minister Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP

Mr Kulveer Singh Ranger

Formerly Director of Transport for Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP whilst Mayor of London, and Special Adviser to UK Government on digital strategy

Mr Daniel Robert Rosenfield

Former Downing Street Chief of Staff for the Former Prime Minister Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP

Order of the Companions of Honour

Members of the Order of the Companions of Honour

Sir William Nigel Paul Cash

Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee. For political and public service.

Order of the British Empire

Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire

Andrea Marie Jenkyns MP

Former Assistant Whip and Minister for Skills. For political and public service

The Right Honourable Amanda Anne Milling MP

Former Minister without Portfolio. For political and public service.

The Right Honourable Priti Patel MP

Former Home Secretary. For political and public service.

Ann Sindall

Personal Assistant to the Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP. For political and public service.

Michelle Williams-Walker

Former Special Adviser and Head of Operations for the Prime Minister. For political and public service.

Knights Bachelor Knighthood

The Right Honourable Conor Burns MP

Former Minister of State at the Northern Ireland Office. For political and public service.

The Right Honourable Simon Richard Clarke MP

Former Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Chief Secretary to the Treasury. For political and public service.

Benjamin William Elliot

Former Co-Chair of the Conservative Party. For political and public service.

Michael Louis David Fabricant MP

Conservative MP for Lichfield. For political and public service.

William John Lewis

Political Adviser to the Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP. For political and public service.

The Right Honourable Jacob William Rees-Mogg MP

Former Minister of State for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency. For political and public service.

Order of the Bath

Companion of the Bath

Martin Alexander Baillie Reynolds

Former Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister. For public service.

Order of the British Empire

Commanders of the Order of the British Empire

Guto Harri

Former Director of Communications at Downing Street and London City Hall. For political and public service.

Rosemary Bate-Williams

Former Press Secretary to the Prime Minister. For political and public service.

David Joseph Blair

Former Foreign Affairs Speechwriter to the Prime Minister and Former Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. For public service.

Colin Cromarty Bloom

Former Faith Engagement Advisor to the Prime Minister. For political and public service.

Henry Charles Rixar Cook

Former Special Adviser to the Prime Minister. For political and public service.

Jack Doyle

Former Downing Street Director of Communications. For political and public service.

Roisha Maria Hughes

Former Principal Private Secretary to the Mayor of London. For public service.

Ray Arthur Lewis

Former Deputy Mayor of London. For political and public service.

Order of the British Empire

Officers of the Order of the British Empire

David Bruno John Canzini

Former Political Advisor to the Prime Minister. For political and public service.

Samantha Helen Cohen CVO

Former Director of the Office of the Prime Minister. For political and public service.

Alexander Karczewski Crowley

Former Political Adviser to the Prime Minister. For political and public service.

Rebecca Rose Haggar Kaikitis

Councillor, London Borough of Hillingdon. For political and public service.

Samantha Geraldine Harrison

Former interim Permanent Secretary and Chief Operating Officer of the Office of the Prime Minister. For public service.

Benjamin Robert Mallet

Former Strategy Director for the General Election and London Campaign Director. For political and public service.

Robert Mark Raymond Oxley

Former Press Secretary at Downing Street. For political and public service.

Daniel James Ritterband

Former Head of the Mayor of London Campaign. For political and public service.

Sarah Elizabeth Rebecca Vaughan-Brown

Former Personal Adviser to Carrie Johnson. For political and public service.

Dr William Gerald Winter Warr

Senior Vice President, Global Health Strategy at BioNTech, former Senior Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Health, Social Care and Life Sciences. For political and public service.

Catherine Grace Rostron OBE

Senior Parliamentary Assistant and Special Adviser to the Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP. For political and public service.

Order of the British Empire

Members of the Order of the British Empire

Kelly Jo Dodge

Long-time Parliamentary hairdresser. For Parliamentary service.

Andrea Laybourne

Former Parliamentary Secretary to the Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP. For political and public service.

Richard John Mark

Senior Parliamentary Assistant to the Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP. For political and public service.

Gregory Alexander Munro

Senior Assistant and Adviser to the Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP. For political and public service.

Alexander Joseph Bryan Simpson

Former Parliamentary and Constituency Secretary to the Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP. For political and public service.

Lynda Teresa Summers

Former London Borough of Hillingdon. For public service.
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Boris Johnson has sensationally announced he is quitting as an MP  plunging the Conservatives into fresh chaos and launching an all-out assault on Rishi Sunaks leadership.

In a bid to rally supporters the former prime minister claimed he was a victim of a Partygate and Brexit witch-hunt, as he faced a damning verdict following a parliamentary inquiry into his conduct during the Covid pandemic.

In a 1,000 word resignation statement branded Trumpian by former allies Mr Johnson said he would trigger a by-election in his London seat  causing a major political headache for Mr Sunak.

The ex PM announced his decision to stand down amid growing speculation that the conclusions of the Commons privileges committee could lead to his being kicked out as the MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip.

He claimed his political enemies had sought revenge on him ever since he led the campaign to take the UK out of the EU in 2016.

The shock move is bound to lead to speculation that Mr Johnson  who has been made aware of the as yet unpublished findings of the committees inquiry  jumped before he was pushed.

Mr Johnsons resignation statement also pointedly said he was leaving parliament for now  and laid out an alternative vision for a proper Conservative government  raising the prospect that he could already be preparing a comeback.

Will Walden, who was chief of staff and spokesperson to Boris Johnson as foreign secretary told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "He's convinced by his own truth in his own righteousness. There's no apology, no taking responsibility. It all feels very Trumpian."

He added: "He had seen the writing on the wall, he knew he probably would lose a by-election in his marginal seat. His primary motivation here, as it has been for the last year or so, is protecting his version of the narrative.

So by going, as he has, all guns blazing, he is able to avoid defeat, he is able to blame pretty much everyone else, including it seems anyone that voted Remain in 2016.

There is no plan but he is preparing himself for what might be next without the humiliation of being kicked out.

But it is so Boris. He told the committee that if they found against him, he wouldnt respect the outcome  and so it has proved, there is no great surprise here.

It comes after Mr Johnson was accused of cronyism for handing out peerages, knighthoods and other honours to his closest allies, including Jacob Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel as well as aides linked to the Partygate scandal.

His surprise departure was announced only hours after his most loyal former cabinet ally, Nadine Dorries, also announced her decision to leave the Commons after Mr Johnsons bid to award her a peerage was effectively blocked.

Boris Johnson made the shock announcement on Friday evening (AP)

Mr Johnson also used his bombshell resignation statement to launch a devastating political and personal attack on his successor.

Allied to a thinly veiled threat to return to the political fray, it will be seen by some as a personal manifesto and the platform for a possible future leadership challenge against the embattled Rishi Sunak.

Mr Johnson accused Mr Sunaks government of endlessly putting up taxes, not being properly Conservative, and appearing to forget about Brexit voters.

Our party needs urgently to recapture its sense of momentum and its belief in what this country can do, he said.

Mr Johnson launched a broadside at Rishi Sunak  and hinted at a comeback (PA Archive)

In an apparent bid to rally his supporters, he also sought to tie the investigation against him to Brexit  claiming his removal as an MP was the necessary first step to reversing Britains exit from the EU.

I am not alone in thinking that there is a witch-hunt under way, to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result, he said.

In an extraordinary 1,034-word statement, he accused the Commons investigation into whether he misled parliament over Partygate of attempting to drive me out and compared it to a kangaroo court.

And he accused the cross-party Commons privileges committee, which carried out the inquiry, of bias against him.

It is very sad to be leaving parliament  at least for now  but above all I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out, anti-democratically, by a committee chaired and managed, by Harriet Harman, with such egregious bias, he said.

His resignation came hours after his staunch ally Nadine Dorries also stood down as an MP (Getty)

The Commons Privileges Committee said the cross-party panel of MPs will meet on Monday to complete its inquiry and that the report would be published promptly.

Opposition parties said Mr Johnson would not be missed.

Labours deputy leader Angela Rayner said the public were sick to the back teeth of this never-ending Tory soap opera played out at their expense. Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper added: Good riddance.

Earlier he was accused of delivering a sickening insult to those bereaved by Covid, after he gave honours to allies embroiled in the Partygate scandal, including one dubbed Party Marty.

Martin Reynolds, his former principal private secretary who boasted we seem to have got away with the bring your own booze garden party during coronavirus restrictions, received a gong.

There were also honours for Dan Rosenfield, his ex-chief of staff, and Jack Doyle, his former director of communications, both of whom were in office during some of the rule-breaking.

Those put forward for a knighthood included staunch loyalist Mr Rees-Mogg, former housing secretary Simon Clarke, and MPs Conor Burns and Michael Fabricant.

Former home secretary Ms Patel was nominated for a damehood, along with former ministers Andrea Jenkyns and Amanda Milling.
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Boris Johnsons resignation honours list could be published as soon as Friday, according to reports that also suggest two Tory MPs have been struck from it to avoid potentially damaging by-elections.

An opposition party urged Rishi Sunak to put the list through the shredder following reports the Prime Minister has accepted his predecessors recommendations for peerages.

But the Times reported that the long-awaited list has been trimmed, with casualties including former culture secretary Nadine Dorries and Sir Alok Sharma, president of the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow.

The buck stops with Sunak - he must ensure that Johnson's honours list is put through the shredder Daisy Cooper, deputy Lib Dem leader

The pair were expected to stand down to take peerages, which would have left Mr Sunak facing two early electoral battles in their seats.

Sir Alok holds a 4,000-vote majority over Labour in his Reading West constituency and a by-election would likely be closely fought by Sir Keir Starmers party, which is well ahead of the Tories in the polls.

Ms Dorries, who has already announced her plan to quit as the MP for Mid Bedfordshire at the next election, has a majority of more than 24,600 over the main Opposition party.

Ms Dorries and Sir Aloks names have been resubmitted to the House of Lords Appointments Committee for vetting and their peerages could be granted further down the line, according to the Times.

Mr Johnsons father, Stanley Johnson, has also been taken off the list, the newspaper said.

The nomination prompted accusations of cronyism, after Mr Johnson already nominated his brother Jo Johnson for a peerage in 2020.

It also drew criticism after senior Tory MP Caroline Nokes and a journalist in 2021 publicly accused Stanley Johnson, a former MEP, of touching them at Conservative party conferences.

Ms Nokes, chairwoman of the Commons Women and Equalities Committee, accused Stanley Johnson of forcefully smacking her on the backside and making a vulgar comment at the Conservative Party conference in 2003.

Stanley Johnson said after that he had no recollection of either incident.

The Times reported earlier that Mr Sunak is hoping to clear the decks by signing off the awards, which are said to have been a source of contention between the two figures.

The Prime Minister, asked about the reports during his trip to the US, said he could not comment on his predecessors submission.

Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper accused Mr Sunak of rewarding failure by allegedly giving the list the green light.

The fact that one of the most scandal-ridden prime ministers is now allowed to stuff his cronies in the Lords after a failed premiership tells the British public everything they need to know about this Conservative Party, she said.

Boris Johnson caused crisis after crisis in this country  if Rishi Sunak rewards his failure its just proof it is one rule for the Conservatives and another for everyone else.

The buck stops with Sunak  he must ensure that Johnsons honours list is put through the shredder.

Mr Sunak remained tight-lipped about whether he had accepted the nominations list, which is said to contain about 50 names, when quizzed in Washington DC on Thursday.

The Prime Minister said: I can completely understand the interest in this topic.

All I can say is there is a process that is currently under way. It has not concluded yet and until it does, it would not be right for me to comment any further.

His rival Sir Keir suggested the Conservative Party leader was having to appease different bits of the governing party with his handling of the honours roll.

Whether its Boris Johnsons WhatsApp messages, Boris Johnsons peerages, all the Prime Minister is doing is managing his own party instead of running the country, the Labour leader said during a visit to a steelworks in Scunthorpe.

Scottish Secretary Alister Jack is also reportedly set to be offered a peerage by Mr Johnson.

The Cabinet minister has announced he will stand down at the next national poll but has ruled out triggering a by-election in his Dumfries and Galloway constituency to take up a seat in the House of Lords before then.

Nigel Adams, another close ally of Mr Johnson who also is not planning on standing again, is also said to be keen to avoid a by-election.

Mr Johnsons spokesman said: We strictly do not comment on honours.

Former prime minister Liz Truss, despite being the shortest serving prime minister in modern British political history, has also reportedly submitted a short resignation honours list.
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Boris Johnson has used his resignation statement to launch an all-out assault on Rishi Sunak  amid speculation that he could try and make a comeback.

The former prime minister, who quit over a watchdog investigation into his conduct, said he was leaving parliament, but qualified the decision as being for now.

He blasted Mr Sunaks leadership, suggesting that the prime ministers administration was afraid to be a properly Conservative government.

And he criticised decisions taken by the PM, including the move to row back on plans to scrap EU laws and seek a free trade agreement with the US.

Mr Johnsons statement  which ran to more than 1,000 words  will be seen by some as a personal manifesto and the platform for a possible future leadership challenge against the embattled Mr Sunak.

Our party needs urgently to recapture its sense of momentum and its belief in what this country can do, Mr Johnson said.

We need to show how we are making the most of Brexit, and we need in the next months to be setting out a pro-growth and pro-investment agenda. We need to cut business and personal taxes  and not just as pre-election gimmicks  rather than endlessly putting them up.

We must not be afraid to be a properly Conservative government.

Why have we so passively abandoned the prospect of a free trade deal with the US? Why have we junked measures to help people into housing or to scrap EU directives or to promote animal welfare?

We need to deliver on the 2019 manifesto, which was endorsed by 14 million people. We should remember that more than 17 million voted for Brexit.

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But to challenge Mr Sunak for the leadership of the Tories, Mr Johnson would have to return as an MP  either at the next election or at a by-election.

His former seat of Henley, which he represented from 2001 to 2008, has been left vacant after its MP John Howell announced he would not be standing again in 2024.

There has been speculation in recent months that Mr Johnson could try to make the switch from his Uxbridge and West Ruislip seat, which is more marginal and potentially vulnerable to a challenge by Labour.

Mr Sunak was partly responsible for the downfall of Mr Johnsons administration, after he sensationally quit over the PMs handling of sleaze, triggering the resignation of other ministers.
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A British girl who was one of four children stabbed in a knife attack in the French Alps was on holiday in the area.

The knifeman attacked the group of children  aged between 22 months and three years  and two adults at a lakeside park in Annecy on Thursday.

French interior minister Gerald Darmanin said the suspect, a 31-year-old Syrian man, had tried to claim asylum in France but it was refused on Sunday because he had previously been granted asylum in Sweden 10 years ago.

The British girl is three years old and was taken to hospital in Grenoble, a city around an hour-and-a-half from Annecy by car.

French President Emmanuel Macron travelled to the Alps on Friday to meet families and witnesses who have been left traumatised by the attack, his office said.

Mr Macron and his wife Brigitte flew to Grenoble where they met three of the children injured in the attack before heading to Annecy.

French prime minister Elisabeth Borne confirmed all four children underwent surgery and are under constant medical surveillance.

Ms Borne also confirmed all four children are in a stable condition in hospital.

The public prosecutor of Annecy confirmed the suspects custody had been extended on Friday morning.

Translated to English, a tweet said: Stab attack in Annecy. The defendants custody is extended. No other communication planned for this day in the state.

Tearful well-wishers have visited the playground where the children were stabbed.

Flowers and messages were laid at the scene, with messages including Love Annecy, and Children I dont know you but in this hour you are fighting.

A British mother of two, Katie Jackson, 39, was in tears as she said her son had asked to visit the park on the day of the attack.

Ms Jackson moved to the town three years ago with her husband. She has two sons, Rudy, five, and Vinnie, nine months.

She said: Locally we call this the pirate playground, because it has a pirate ship in it, its a place that our kids know and love.

It was my sons fifth birthday yesterday and he had mentioned he would be interested in going to the pirate place, but he was at school.

Its a local treasure, thats why its so shocking. I dont know anyone who hasnt visited the pirate playground.

The Swedish Migration Agency has confirmed the suspect was granted permanent residency in 2013 and although the agency did not identify him, it said he subsequently sought Swedish citizenship in 2017 and 2018, both denied, and applied again in August last year.

Mr Darmanin said the suspect entered France legally, adding: For some reasons we dont really understand, he applied for asylum in Switzerland, in Italy and in France, which he didnt need to do as he already had asylum in Sweden for the past 10 years.

Local prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said one of the adults was seriously injured by both a knife wound from the attacker and a bullet wound from police as officers shot at the knifeman while trying to detain him.

The Telegraph reported the gunshot victim is a 78-year-old man who is now in a life-threatening condition in hospital after also being stabbed six times.

Witnesses said the knifeman shouted in the name of Jesus Christ as he launched the attack, including stabbing a child in a pushchair repeatedly as bystanders screamed for help.

Ms Bonnet-Mathis told a press conference on Thursday afternoon the attackers motives were unclear, but they did not appear to be related to terrorism.

Footage of the attack shared on the internet shows a man in dark glasses and with a blue scarf covering his head brandishing a blade as people screamed for help.

In another video, the man appears to shout in the name of Jesus Christ while waving the knife in the air, with people nearby screaming for police.

He then slashed at a man carrying a rucksack who attempted to approach him.

The video then shows a woman frantically pushing a stroller inside the play area of the park as the attacker approached her while she screamed for help.

She attempted to fend off the attacker before he leaned forward and stabbed down into the pushchair.

PM Ms Borne said the suspect had no criminal or psychiatric record and appeared to have acted alone.

We are talking here about infants, very young infants who have been very seriously injured, she told a press conference, according to a translation.

We are absolutely shaken by all this and we are standing firm by the people of Annecy.

Speaking at a press conference at the White House on Thursday evening alongside US President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described the attack as unfathomable.

He said: All our thoughts are with those who were affected in this unfathomable attack, including a British child, and their families.

I have been in touch with President Macron. We stand ready to offer any assistance that we can.
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A woman was raped by a stranger with a knife after she hid from him in a nature reserve.

Police have launched an investigation after the woman in her 20s reported she had been raped between 9:30pm and 10:15pm on Friday, 26 May in Burgess Park, London.

The victim reported she had been approached by a man as she sat on a bench in the park. The man asked the victim personal questions before making sexual comments.

The victim tried to walk away but the man followed her. She then ran from the man and attempted to hide in a nearby Coburg nature reserve.

The man, who said he had a knife, followed her into the nature reserve where the assault took place.

The man is described as black, in his late 20s to early 30s and had a scar under his eye on the left side of his face. He had dark eyes, bushy eyebrows and was of a larger build. He spoke with a deep voice and had a London accent. He had a close cut beard. At the time of the incident he was wearing a black durag type cap/hat wieth black jogging bottoms with no visible logo with zips on the pockets.

Detective Constable Timea Fazekas, leading the investigation, said: This was a truly horrific incident for the victim and she is being fully supported by officers specially trained to investigate sexual offences.

Despite this undoubtedly terrifying ordeal the victim is able to recall significant details about the attacker. I ask members of the public to consider this description and speak to us if you think you know who the man could be.

Similarly, if you were in the park at the time and perhaps and remember seeing a man matching this description, or anything out of the ordinary, please get in touch with us without delay.

Anyone who has information that could help the investigation is asked to call police on 101 or via Twitter @MetCC. And give reference CAD 2579/26MAY.

To give information anonymously contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 or online at crimestoppers-uk.org.
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Julian Assange has lost the latest stage of his bid to appeal against a judges ruling over whether he should be extradited to the US.

The WikiLeaks founder is wanted in the United States over an alleged conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information following the publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

In a January 2021 ruling, then-district judge Vanessa Baraitser said that Assange should not be sent to the US, citing a real and oppressive risk of suicide, while ruling against the 51-year-old on all other issues.

US authorities subsequently brought a successful High Court challenge against this decision, paving the way for Assanges extradition.

The proposed appeal comes to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made to and rejected by the district judge Mr Justice Swift

Assange, who remains in Belmarsh prison in south-east London, previously indicated that he wants to challenge the original judges dismissal of the other parts of his case.

However, in a decision this week, a High Court judge said all eight parts of Assanges potential appeal were not arguable and should not be heard.

In a three-page ruling obtained by the PA news agency on Friday, Mr Justice Swift said: The proposed appeal comes to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made to and rejected by the district judge.

In a separate decision, Mr Justice Swift also refused Assange permission to challenge then-home secretary Priti Patels decision to approve his extradition in June 2022.

On Thursday, Stella Assange said that her husband would have a High Court hearing on June 13 to renew his appeal bid.

Mrs Assange tweeted: We remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the US government.

During their earlier successful challenge, lawyers for the US authorities said Judge Baraitsers decision risked becoming a trump card for anyone who wanted to oppose their extradition.

They also said that four binding diplomatic assurances had been made, including that the US would consent to Assange being transferred to Australia, where he was born, to serve any prison sentence he may be given.

The Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett, sitting with Lord Justice Holroyde, ruled in favour of the US in December 2021.

The senior judges found that Judge Baraitser had based her decision on the risk of Assange being held in highly restrictive prison conditions if extradited.

Lord Burnett previously said that if the original judge had been given the assurances from the US at the time of her ruling, she would have answered the relevant question differently.

The WikiLeaks founders lawyers had sought to appeal against this decision at the Supreme Court but were denied the opportunity in March 2022 as the bid did not raise an arguable point of law.

His extradition order was formally sent to Ms Patel the following month.
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Actress Nikki Sanderson lost some of her sparkle because of the Mirrors publisher, her mother has told the High Court as part of the actresss phone hacking claim.

Hollyoaks star Ms Sanderson is suing Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) for damages, claiming journalists at its titles  which also include the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People  were linked to methods including phone hacking, so-called blagging or gaining information by deception, and use of private investigators for unlawful activities.

Ms Sanderson, who played Candice Stowe in Coronation Street between 1999 and 2005, entered the witness box in the High Court in London on Friday to give evidence in her representative claim, part of a trial that has also featured the Duke of Sussex.

In the end, Nikki was very depressed. She lost confidence and became very unsure of herself Judith Sanderson

As well as the actress, several other people have given written evidence in support of her case  including her mother Judith Sanderson, ex-boyfriend Danny Young and former co-star Tina OBrien  who have each previously settled their own claims with MGN.

In written evidence before the court, her mother said that when her daughter began working on the soap as a 15-year-old, she was one of the nicest children you could wish for.

Judith Sanderson said in her witness statement: We were expecting some changes, but we werent expecting for Nikki to have to deal with grown-up issues.

She said her daughter very quickly turned from being a carefree, happy girl with her friends who she loved dearly into somebody who was very suspicious.

Judith Sanderson said that her daughter was worried about going out because members of the public would attack her.

The drama school receptionist continued: MGN wrote such horrible things about Nikki and she was not able to defend herself.

In the end, Nikki was very depressed. She lost confidence and became very unsure of herself.

She was paranoid as she felt like she had to watch out all the time, and she dreaded going out because of the reaction she got from the public.

She lost some of her sparkle which, as her mum, was very painful to see.

Judith Sanderson also said in her written evidence, which has not been challenged by MGNs lawyers, that she did not know about phone hacking at the time because I thought that things like that only happened to royalty and American movie stars.

I never saw Nikki as being mega; shes not Hollywood, so I didnt think they would have been interested in her as a normal person, she added. I still find it very strange.

Fellow actress Ms OBrien, who started playing Sarah Platt in Coronation Street in 1999, described Ms Sanderson as very private in her written evidence.

However, she said the press made up their little show about Ms Sanderson falsely being a party girl.

Ms OBrien said in her witness statement: It made her feel very uncomfortable to see these articles and not to know where the information was coming from or how to stop them.

The result of all these doubts and suspicions was that Nikki was sometimes very lonely and she always had this low-level anxiety as she didnt know what was coming next.

It kind of feels like a toxic relationship; that we deserved that treatment from the media as we had gone into this job, she added.

Ms OBrien later said that while her own claim against MGN was settled in December 2016, she had not told anyone about it because of how traumatic it was.

I felt like someone had taken my private diary and opened it up for the world to see, Ms OBrien added.

We stopped going to certain places because we were paranoid about things ending up in the papers Danny Young

Ms Sandersons former partner Danny Young has also provided written evidence in support of the 39-year-olds claim.

In his witness statement, Mr Young said that Ms Sanderson was essentially used as tabloid fodder during her time on Coronation Street and that the pair changed their behaviour because of press intrusion.

I can recall going for dinner at random locations and the press would be there  We stopped going to certain places because we were paranoid about things ending up in the papers, he said.

He also said that he could remember hearing clicking noises on his phone line and that he would miss voicemail messages he was left.

MGN says Ms Sandersons claim has been brought too late and denies unlawful activity save for four occasions in 2004 and 2005 when its journalists instructed private investigators to obtain information about her.
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Actress Nikki Sanderson has told the High Court that Mirror Group journalists abused her when she was a child as she gave evidence in her claim against the publisher for alleged unlawful information gathering.

Former Coronation Street star Ms Sanderson, 39, is suing Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) for damages, claiming journalists at its titles  The Daily and Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People  were linked to methods including phone hacking, so-called blagging or gaining information by deception, and use of private investigators for unlawful activities.

Her case is one of four representative claims being heard in London, alongside similar claims brought by the Duke of Sussex, Coronation Street actor Michael Turner, known professionally as Michael Le Vell, and comedian Paul Whitehouses ex-wife Fiona Wightman.

MGN says Ms Sandersons claim has been brought too late and denies unlawful activity save for four occasions in 2004 and 2005 when its journalists instructed private investigators to obtain information about her.

MGN abused me when I was a child and they continue to abuse me now by dragging this out Nikki Sanderson

Andrew Green KC, for the publisher, told Ms Sanderson on Friday that MGN unequivocally apologises to her for those incidents.

Ms Sanderson, who played Candice Stowe in Coronation Street between 1999 and 2005, began giving evidence on Friday.

In a witness statement prepared for the trial, Ms Sanderson said MGN was continuing the abuse through its conduct of the litigation since she filed her claim in 2020.

She said: I have used the word abuse a number of times throughout this statement, and I do not use it lightly, but the fact is these people were in positions of power and I was a child and a young female, and I was attacked by people who were more powerful than me.

I did nothing to deserve this treatment.

Ms Sanderson, who has played Maxine Minniver in the Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks since 2012, added: The last three years have been extra victimisation and have caused so much more anger, hurt and frustration.

MGN abused me when I was a child and they continue to abuse me now by dragging this out.

Asked by Mr Green about this part of her statement in court on Friday, the actress told the court: The behaviour has been horrific, the gas lighting I feel has gone on with me.

The fact that Im having to do this today is traumatic.

But Mr Green asked her: If you consider your treatment by MGN to be tantamount to child abuse  why were you giving an interview to the Daily Mirror in 2019?

Ms Sanderson said it was a planned piece for Valentines Day and later told the court there was a difference with prepared interviews which were under her control.

Ms Sanderson said in her written evidence that she was shocked to learn she had a claim against MGN from lawyers after she spoke about hacking to her then-Hollyoaks co-star Gary Lucy and her friend and former Coronation Street colleague Tina OBrien.

She said that, after her conversation with Mr Lucy: I remember thinking why on earth would the press have been interested in me?

Im a girl from Bury, not an A-list celebrity.

Describing the impact of the alleged unlawful information gathering, she said it has had a huge impact on how I navigated my life both at the time and to this day.

I have spent the last 20 years of my life being hyper-aware ofcertain things, she added.

She said she had suspected friends, people working on Coronation Street and members of the public of selling stories about her, but now believed it was the result of unlawful activities.

Her mother Judith Sanderson said in a witness statement that it was hard to see her daughter lose her sparkle as she became suspicious of people following press coverage.

She lost some of her sparkle which, as her mum, was very painful to see Judith Sanderson

She said: MGN wrote such horrible things about Nikki and she was not able to defend herself.

In the end, Nikki was very depressed. She lost confidence and became very unsure of herself.

She was paranoid as she felt like she had to watch out all the time, and she dreaded going out because of the reaction she got from the public.

She lost some of her sparkle which, as her mum, was very painful to see.

Ms Sanderson was questioned by Mr Green about a May 2003 People article featuring a photo of her and then Coronation Street co-star Tina OBrien out shopping and asked if seeing it caused her distress.

It does, she replied, adding that it showed we were being followed consistently and that it caused distrust in the public.

Its distressing to know that this type of thing is being done, Ms Sanderson said of the suspicious article.

Especially being a young woman. A young woman being followed around is distressing.

At one point during her cross-examination, Ms Sanderson became emotional and asked for a tissue after being shown an old interview she had given to the Sunday Mirror.

It actually makes me a bit sad, she said, adding that it was upsetting to read about her late grandmother.

She said she believed the alleged unlawful activities of MGN journalists had contributed to a backlash against her and negative opinions about her among the public.

In her statement she said: The backlash from the public was also very difficult and I was subjected to both mental and physical abuse. People would shout at me in the street, calling me a whore, a slag or a slut.

People would elbow me, push me and, on one occasion, a group of girls even set my hair on fire.

She said that an earlier bid by MGN to have her case thrown out  which was rejected in a May 2022 ruling, was horrific and belittling.

In her statement, she said: MGNs actions throughout the course of my claim have made a traumatic experience even more traumatising.

I sat through a three-day court hearing in April 2022 in which MGN tried to make out that I was the problem because I didnt know about my claim sooner.

The whole process was horrific and belittling.

I was not rummaging around newspapers like The Guardian or The Independent to work out if I had been hacked by a multimillion-pound paper because I truly had no idea about any of this, but MGN is gaslighting me and trying to put the blame back on me.

MGNs tactics feel like another type of character assassination.

Ms Sanderson says she had never heard about the Leveson Inquiry into press standards, knew that the News Of The World had closed but not why, and had no knowledge of the previous High Court phone-hacking trial in 2015.

The actress is bringing her claim in relation to 37 articles published in Mirror titles between 1999 and 2009.

MGN has previously denied that 35 of the 37 articles involved phone hacking or unlawful information gathering, with one article being not admitted.

In its trial defence, the publisher says Ms Sandersons claim is brought too late, but unreservedly apologises over four payments made to private investigators which it admits are evidence of instructions to unlawfully obtain her private information.

The publisher also claims that evidence does not suggest Ms Sandersons phone was successfully hacked.

Mr Green told the court on Friday that the evidence in Ms Sandersons case is weak and that the publisher does not accept that it establishes a case of voicemail interception and does not show systemic hacking of her phone.

He said that MGN does not know whether her phone was ever hacked, and, therefore, in relation to some of the period covered by her claim it was neither denied nor admitted, but not admitted.

He added: But it is certainly not accepted that her voicemails were intercepted to any significant extent.

The actress is due to continue giving evidence on Monday.
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Actress Nikki Sanderson has told the High Court she was harassed by the public  including by once having her hair set on fire  due to her portrayal in papers published by Mirror Group Newspapers.

Former Coronation Street star Ms Sanderson, 39, is suing Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) for damages, claiming journalists at its titles  The Daily and Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People  were linked to methods including phone hacking, so-called blagging or gaining information by deception, and use of private investigators for unlawful activities.

In a 28-page witness statement in support of her claim, the actress said that MGN created and repeated a narrative that she was stuck up, nasty, rude, promiscuous, and a party girl.

It feels like character assassination, she said.

No wonder people threw drinks over me when this is how I was portrayed in the media Nikki Sanderson

Ms Sanderson claimed that in articles published in November 2004, The Mirror suggested she was bed-hopping and having sex with three people in one week, which was so upsetting as it was so far removed from the truth.

She continued: The backlash from the public was also very difficult and I was subjected to both mental and physical abuse.

People would shout at me in the street, calling me a whore, a slag or a slut.

People would elbow me, push me and, on one occasion, a group of girls even set my hair on fire.

The actress said she was in the toilets of a club and smelled burning as she washed her hands.

I looked down and they had set fire to the back of my hair, she continued.

She also added: No wonder people threw drinks over me when this is how I was portrayed in the media.

Ms Sanderson, who played Candice Stowe in Coronation Street between 1999 and 2005, also said MGN had a frightening amount of access to her and her whereabouts due to surveillance allegedly commissioned by the publisher.

She said: Learning about MGNs surveillance of me through my claim makes me so angry as I was a young girl at the time and they were hiring random men to follow me  they could have done anything to me.

How did MGN know that they hadnt hired someone who was capable of rape or murder? It has been particularly distressing to learn that these illegal activities continued for a period of many years.

The actress also said that having people in bushes watching her was creepy, like those things you see on serial killer dramas.

Ms Sanderson later described how she was self-conscious about going out because she believed random people were tipping off newspapers about what she was doing.

She continued: The reality is nobody was ringing up the papers with this information; the defendants journalists were hacking into my phone and carrying out surveillance on me.

Its really upsetting now to find out the reality of what actually went on.

Ms Sanderson concluded: Of course being in the public eye means that there will be some level of scrutiny but I dont believe that it means that your whole life has to be laid bare; that is not my job.

My job is to portray characters on screen and on stage, but Nikki is not a character; Nikki is me.

MGN says Ms Sandersons claim has been brought too late and denies unlawful activity save for four occasions in 2004 and 2005 when its journalists instructed private investigators to obtain information about her.
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Topical news comedy show Have I Got News For You has joked it needs to start recording episodes on Fridays, after Boris Johnsons surprise resignation as an MP.

This weeks episode featured comedian Harry Hill as host  his first ever appearance on the show  and was recorded on Thursday.

The former PM announced on Friday he would be stepping down as an MP after accusing a Commons investigation into whether he misled Parliament over partygate of attempting to drive me out.

The announcement came shortly after 8pm, with Have I Got New For You set to air at 9pm.

Shortly after the news, the shows Twitter account wrote: Perhaps we need to start recording the show on a Friday

Comedian Richard Osman, who has previously guest hosted the show, expressed sympathy with those involved.

My thoughts and prayers with everyone who had to record Have I Got News For You last night, he said.

Johnson has appeared several times on Have I Got News For You, both as guest panellist and host.

He was often the subject of ridicule on the show from team captains Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, who poked fun at his politics, posh accent, and controversial moments.

Fridays episode saw Hill joined by comedian Jack Dee and editor-in-chief of Vice UK Zing Tsjeng, alongside Hislop and Merton.

It followed a week of major news stories, including the fallout from Phillip Schofields secret, Prime Minister Rishi Sunaks US trip, and the Duke of Sussexs legal battle with the owners of the Daily Mirror.

Last year, the final regular episode of rival topical new programme Mock The Week aired amid similar political chaos in the UK.

The episode, which was aired after 17 years and 21 series, was not re-recorded despite the subsequent resignation of former prime minister Liz Truss.

Following the news about Ms Trusss exit from Downing Street, the shows official Twitter account tweeted: I know there are bigger ramifications to the Prime Minister resigning but that has really messed up Mock the Week this week.

Comedian Angela Barnes added: Liz Truss has done some terrible things, but resigning the day after we record the last ever episode of Mock The Week is up there.

Elsewhere on Friday, members of the studio audience on the BBCs topical discussion programme Any Questions cheered as the news was read out during the live recording in Pembrokeshire.
BEIJING, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice President Han Zheng met with Nicholas Lyons, Lord Mayor of the City of London, in Beijing on Thursday.

Noting that the economic and trade ties between China and Britain enjoy sound momentum and huge potential, Han said financial cooperation has increasingly become a new driving force for bilateral practical cooperation.

London is one of the most internationalized financial hubs in the world, and the City of London is not only the "heart" of London's economic development but also a world-renowned financial center, Han said.

At present, China is unswervingly expanding its high-level opening-up in various fields, including the financial industry, Han said, adding that China is willing to deepen mutually beneficial cooperation with the British financial community and promote the sustained and healthy development of bilateral economic and trade relations.

China has made massive achievements in economic and social development, and its future development goals will be achieved, Lyons said, adding that Britain and China share broad common interests and enjoy promising prospects for financial cooperation.

The City of London is willing to deepen cooperation with the Chinese government, enterprises, and financial institutions to achieve win-win development, Lyons said.
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A man who spoke almost no English when he arrived in the UK has revealed how he learned the language by studying Dominos pizza menus  pronouncing words like chicken and anchovies

Now, hes opening up his own pizza franchise.

Alok Yadav, 36, first took a job at the chain 16 years ago as an in-store cleaner while studying for a year-long placement at university.

Originally from India, the former student arrived in Britain in 2007 and only knew basic phrases such as please and thank you. Now, hes opening up his own pizza franchise.

Determined to move up at Dominos, he spent hours upon hours learning how to pronounce words like chicken, anchovies, and pineapple.

Downtime outside of work was also spent role-playing with his colleagues until he mastered the phrase Thank you for choosing Dominos pizza, my name is Alok, how can I help, so he could answer the phone and take orders.

The Delhi native excelled and was soon promoted to store manager, running the Portsmouth North End Dominos branch.

This Monday (5 June) he realised another dream through the companys Homegrown Heroes programme, opening his very own franchise in Swaffham, Norfolk.

(Jam Press/Dominoas)

I knew I had to learn the language quickly if I wanted to progress, but it was really hard, said Alok.

It was tricky when someone ordered a Meatilicious pizza because I couldnt say it.

As I was young, Id only heard of onions and tomatoes, so I had to learn the names of the other toppings and how to say them.

It wasnt easy. My colleagues were great in helping me learn and I was determined to do it as I really enjoyed working in Dominos.

We spent hours in the flat above the shop going through the phone greeting and working on the toppings

So that was how I learned English.

I then had more confidence and I quickly rose from team member to supervisor, to store manager all within a year.

Alok even met his partner, Rachel Yadav, while working in a Dominos store, having fallen for her while they were colleagues in Farnham.

Eventually rising up through the ranks to area manager, Alok began to get itchy feet and yearned to run his own franchise.

He had already become an extremely successful entrepreneur in his own right, opening over 40 outlets, including coffee shops and other pizza stores.

But there was always a special place in his heart for Dominos, so when the opportunity came to have his own shop via the Homegrown Heroes programme, he grabbed it with both hands.

Alok said: I was always in contact with my ex-colleagues at Dominos so when I heard that Dominos was onboarding new franchise partners through the Homegrown Heroes programme I just had to get involved.

It was special for me. Working at Dominos gave me the business acumen that has served me so well over the years.

Its a great place to build a career and provided me with opportunities and valuable skills.

It was my first love as they gave me my first job, so I have really come full circle now.

Its been an incredible journey for me and I couldnt be happier.

(Jam Press/Dominoas)

Dan Maund, franchise development manager at Dominos UK & Ireland, said: Alok was one of the first people to apply to the Homegrown Heroes programme, reinforcing his commitment to the brand.

His entrepreneurial mindset and determination that was developed through his time at Dominos has empowered him to open several successful businesses over the years.

Were proud to have Alok come the full circle and open his first Dominos store in Swaffham.

What is Dominos homegrown hero programme?

Franchising enables entrepreneurs or budding businesspeople to start a new venture from the ground up, with the backing of a household brand.

According to NatWest, in 2018 the UK franchise market was worth 17billion.

Dominos Homegrown Heroes programme offers driven, entrepreneurial people with experience working in the Dominos network, the opportunity to own their own store and become a Dominos Franchise Partner.

The programme provides tailored support to successful applicants, helping them every step of the way before they run their own store and have their very own slice of the business.

Apart from brand experience, a minimum of 70,000 is required to get started and the process takes between six and 14 months.
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Households with traditional prepayment meters have been urged to avoid missing out on 400 worth of help with their bills by June 30, with 130 million still available to be claimed.

The Claim Your Energy Voucher Day is a final push to encourage the remaining households to claim their vouchers before the scheme ends in a month.

All households were eligible for the Governments Energy Bills Support Scheme, which paid 400 in six instalments of 66 or 67 over the winter.

However prepayment customers  often some of the most vulnerable  were paid in vouchers and millions remain unclaimed.

We urge anyone who hasn't yet claimed their vouchers to do so before the June 30 deadline and if you have friends and family that may not have used their vouchers, spread the word Adam Scorer, National Energy Action

Some customers did not receive them, while others have struggled to redeem them.

Customers need to visit a post office or PayPoint with their Energy Bills Support vouchers and identification before June 30.

Any lost, missing or expired vouchers can be reissued, as long as they are redeemed by June 30.

Those on a traditional prepayment meter who have not received the vouchers, or are unsure of how to redeem them, or need a voucher to be reissued, should contact their supplier.

Only around a quarter of the Governments energy bills vouchers have been claimed in December, as postal strikes have left households across the country waiting on payments amid plunging temperatures (Danny Lawson/ PA) (PA Wire)

Latest figures show the number of vouchers cashed in has reached an all-time high of 83%, with prepayment meter users so far claiming nearly 650 million under the scheme.

The figures, published earlier this month, show that for the sixth month in a row London had the lowest redemption rate, with more than 650,000 vouchers still unused at the end of March.

Around 25% of vouchers in both Scotland and the south-east of England are also yet to be claimed.

Energy minister Amanda Solloway said: Weve made huge strides in getting nearly 650 million from our Energy Bills Support Scheme out to prepayment meter customers, often in the homes that need it most.

Whatever the reason, we want to reassure people that if they havent claimed their voucher, there is still time to do so Matthew Cole, Fuel Bank Foundation

Today we are redoubling our efforts to reach anyone who still hasnt claimed this help, and its fantastic to see so many join our final push to spread the word.

Tell friends and family or anyone on a traditional prepayment meter to use their vouchers for up to 400 off bills before June 30  there is still 130 million out there to claim.

Adam Scorer, chief executive at National Energy Action, said: We urge anyone who hasnt yet claimed their vouchers to do so before the June 30 deadline and if you have friends and family that may not have used their vouchers, spread the word.

It may be the support that keeps their lights on, their oven cooking, their hot showers running, through the summer. Its vital money at a time when its never been needed more.

Matthew Cole, head of Fuel Bank Foundation, the national charity that provides emergency fuel vouchers to prepayment meter customers, said: Were really concerned that hundreds of thousands of people with traditional prepayment meters are going to miss out on this vital financial support.

PayPoint has been sending out thousands of energy vouchers in recent months (Steve Parsons/PA) (PA Wire)

As part of our own campaigning on this issue, we found that other reasons why vouchers havent been redeemed included not receiving them, due to incorrect details or the person having moved house and their records havent been updated, or they lost or deleted the voucher.

However, whatever the reason, we want to reassure people that if they havent claimed their voucher, there is still time to do so.

Households using prepayment meters who use alternative fuels such as LPG, heating oil or biomass as the main way they heat their homes also have until June 30 to use their vouchers worth up to 200 in energy bills support.

Customers will have received these vouchers in the post from their supplier and should contact them if they have any questions.
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A 14-year-old boy who died following an incident at Lewis Capaldis former school passed away from natural causes, police have confirmed.

Hamdan Aslam was attending St Kentigerns Academy in Blackburn, West Lothian on Tuesday, 6 June when police were called. He was taken by ambulance to hospital, but died a short time later.

A post-mortem examination has confirmed that Hamdan died from natural causes. However, reports earlier this week had suggested the boy had died in a chokehold, with social media speculating the incident was tied to an online challenge known as the tap out game.

Police were called to St Kentigerns Academy on Tuesday, 6 June (Google)

But Hamdans family have now said that there is no one to blame for his loss, and revealed he had a pre-existing heart condition that had previously been undetected.

As with any sudden death, a report has been sent to the Procurator Fiscal, with Police Scotland describing the incident as deeply affecting everyone at the school.

Our family is left devastated by the sudden and tragic loss of our beautiful boy Hamdan who brought so much joy to our lives, a family statement issued through their solicitor Aamer Anwar said.

We want to assure Hamdans friends and our community that this was an entirely natural death and could not have been predicted.

A full police investigation is being carried out, but we can confirm that Hamdan had a pre-existing heart condition that had never been detected, and sadly his death could have occurred at any time.

St Kentigerns Academy in Blackburn, West Lothian is where musician Lewis Capaldi studied (PA)

There is no one to blame for his loss, it was Gods will, the family continued. We know that Hamdans loss is being deeply felt by his friends and teachers and we would urge those who have engaged in rumours on social media to stop, it is untruthful and compounding our grief.

Please take down the posts, the running commentary is unhelpful to the children, teachers and our family who have been left deeply traumatised and devastated.

We know that Hamdans teachers and friends did everything possible to save his life and for that our family will for ever be grateful to them.

Chief Inspector Jocelyn OConnor said: This has been a tragic incident which has deeply affected everyone at the school.

Our thoughts remain with Hamdans family and friends at this very difficult time and we are providing our support to them. They have requested privacy and I would ask their wishes are respected.
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Madeleine McCann, a three-year-old girl from Rothley, Leicestershire, was reported missing from the Portuguese holiday resort of Praia da Luz on the Algarve on 3 May 2007, a case still unsolved and still the subject of intense interest among the public and press.

Follow all the latest updates on The Independents live blog

Her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, posted a statement on the Find Madeleine website on 3 May 2023 marking the latest anniversary of their daughters disappearance, reiterating their hopes of being reunited with her one day and posting a poem, The Contradiction by Clare Pollard, to express their feelings.

Today marks the 16th anniversary of Madeleines abduction. Still missing... still very much missed, they wrote.

The police investigation continues, and we await a breakthrough. Thank you to everyone for your support- it really helps.

Here is a reminder of the events of the case.

The story began when the McCanns  affluent doctors Kate and Gerry, their three-year-old daughter Madeleine and her two-year-old twin siblings  joined a group of seven family friends and their five children on holiday at the Ocean Club in the village of Praia da Luz on the southwestern tip of Portugal on 28 April 2007.

After a pleasant spring break by the sea, the adults in the party went out for dinner at the resorts open-air tapas bar on 3 May, gathering at 8.30pm. The children were left behind sleeping in their respective apartments with the doors unlocked and a rota system in place among the parents to ensure that someone returned every half-hour to check on them.

When Kate McCann took her turn and returned to her apartment at 10pm, she raced back to the restaurant screaming Madeleines gone! Someones taken her! The police were quickly called and 60 staff and fellow guests searched the complex, calling out the girls name in vain until daybreak the following morning.

Border police and airport staff were put on alert and hundreds of volunteers joined the efforts to find the missing girl over the coming days, the case fast becoming a sensation.

Madeleine McCann (PA)

The Portuguese authorities would later attract criticism over their conduct in the crucial earliest hours of the investigation when the trail might still have been warm, accused of making rudimentary mistakes like failing to conduct a house-by-house search of every local residence or interview all of the other guests at the resort, acting slowly to erect roadblocks and potentially compromising forensic evidence at the crime scene.

The police initially stated that they believed Madeleine was still alive and had been abducted from the room by a stranger as the parents described their anguish and despair over her vanishing, a worst fear realised for any parent.

On 26 May, police issued a description of a suspicious man seen on the night of the girls disappearance. The individual in question was spotted by Jane Tanner, one of the McCanns dining companions, who said she had seen a Mediterranean man with dark hair and beige trousers carrying a child close to the apartment when she went to check in on her own children. Scotland Yard would later come to dismiss the sighting as a red herring.

The search continued as the summer progressed amid a wild media circus and with huge fundraising activities underway, the McCanns setting up Madeleines Fund on 15 May to raise cash to support further investigation and keep the profile of the case high, attracting generous donations from celebrities like Richard Branson, Simon Cowell, JK Rowling and Coleen Rooney. By 30 May, the case was such a cause celebre that they were being flown out to meet the Pope at the Vatican in Sir Phillip Greens Learjet.

A local man, Robert Murat, subsequently became its first suspect and had his house and car searched, his swimming pool drained and his electronic devices confiscated but no evidence was found to link him to Madeleine and the matter was soon dropped.

By June, the Portuguese police admitted that they had failed to protect potentially useful evidence at the scene as frustration with the lack of developments grew and the media began to question whether the McCanns themselves had been involved in the matter.

Lurid tabloid allegations suggested the couple and their friends might have been swingers and that the McCanns, as physicians, might have been in the habit of sedating their children, while others claimed inconsistencies in their version of events.

Gerry and Kate McCann (AP)

The intensity of the hostility towards the parents would later be described by Roy Greenslade of The Guardian as no journalistic accident, but a sustained campaign of vitriol against a grief-stricken family, singling out The Daily Express and Daily Star for particular condemnation.

In July, assistance offered by former South African police officer Danie Krugel  who claimed his handheld matter orientation system could help to find Madeleine  was rubbished, while British police sent over two springer spaniel sniffer dogs to search for DNA.

Relations with the local authorities would ultimately sour as the latter came to resent British intrusion into a Portuguese inquiry, according to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swans book Looking for Madeleine (2014).

By August, Madeleine has been missing for 100 days and police admitted for the first time that she may never be found. They also told the McCanns that they were no longer considering the matter an abduction case but, rather, a murder inquiry.

The McCanns themselves were interviewed as arguidos (suspects) by Portuguese police in September, with the parents told that the dogs had discovered DNA evidence from the missing girl in the boot of their holiday rental car, lines of inquiry that had already been leaked to the British press. They vehemently denied having any part in her disappearance.

Despite being listed as suspects (a designation that would linger until the following July), the McCanns were allowed to return to Britain on 9 September. A day later, chief inspector Tavares de Almeida of the Policia Judiciaria in Portimao signed a nine-page report concluding that Madeleine McCann had died in their apartment as a result of an accident, that the tapas dinner and rota checks on the McCann children had been part of a planned cover-up, that the familys friends had helped to mislead the police and that the McCanns had concealed the body and then faked an abduction. A public prosecutor subsequently applied for the confiscation of Kate McCanns diary and Gerry McCanns laptop plus the groups phone records.

On 2 October, chief inspector Goncalo Amaral was removed from the case and transferred after alleging that the British police were only interested in pursuing leads favourable to the McCanns. He would later publish a book, Maddie: The Truth of the Lie, the following summer, resulting in a lengthy libel battle with the McCanns that would run back and forth through the courts until March 2017.

Back in Britain, Gerry McCann issued a video that November in which he speculated that his family had been watched by a predator during their stay at Praia da Luz. His wife had come to believe that a potential perpetrator could have seen a note in the resorts guest book visible to all in reception noting their dining arrangements on the evening of Madeleines disappearance. The couple followed up on 20 January 2008 by releasing a sketch of a creepy man they said other holidaymakers had said they had seen loitering at the Ocean Club.

In April, a month before the one-year anniversary of the fateful night, Portuguese police travelled to Leicestershire to conduct further interviews with the McCanns friends.

Then, on 21 July, Portugals attorney general, Fernando Jose Pinto Monteiro, announced that there was no evidence to link either the McCanns or Robert Murat to the disappearance and closed the case, unsolved.

With the trail cold and no closure in sight, the McCanns continued to publicise their cause, issuing computer-generated images of how Madeleine might look now that she had aged on 3 November 2009 and condemning the release of previously unseen Portuguese police files  detailing possible sightings of their daughter  to British newspapers in March 2010.

The McCanns published a book of their own about their ordeal in May 2011, entitled simply Madeleine, which was serialised in The Sun as the newspaper led a campaign calling on British prime minister David Cameron to launch a new inquiry. He did so.

Commenced by then-home secretary Theresa May, the Metropolitan Polices Operation Grange would be led by commander Simon Foy and comprise a team of three detective inspectors, five detective sergeants, 19 detective constables and six civilian staff.

It began to yield results in 2013, with Scotland Yard formally announcing a new investigation in July and saying in October it had identified 41 potential suspects. That same month, BBC Crimewatch released an e-fit image of a man of particular interest who had been seen in Praia da Luz with a child matching Madeleines description in May 2007.

Detectives arrived in Portugal in January 2014 promising new arrests and finally searched the village in June, interviewing four people the following month but without unearthing new information. The quartet would be definitively ruled out in April 2017, before the UK government said it would continue to fund the investigation until 2020, having already admitted it had cost 10m in its first four years of operation.

That investment had enabled detectives to have tens of thousands of documents translated, investigate over 8,000 potential sightings, take 1,338 statements, collect 1,027 exhibits and investigate 650 sex offenders and 60 persons of interest, all without definitively establishing the truth.

The Madeline McCann case lay dormant before suddenly exploding into life in June 2020 when German media revealed that Christian Brueckner, a 43-year-old prisoner with a track record of child abuse and drug trafficking, had been identified as a new suspect by the public prosecutor of the German city of Braunschweig.

Christian Brueckner (Italian Carabinieri)

He had reportedly been living in a Volkswagen camper van in the Algarve at the time of Madeleines disappearance and one woman has since come forward to suggest she saw a girl that might have been Madeleine speaking German in a supermarket in Portugal in 2017.

German investigators classified their probe into his movements as a murder inquiry, saying they were working on the assumption that Madeleine is dead and reporting in July 2021 that they had found an abandoned cellar beneath his former allotment near Hanover where she could, theoretically, have been held captive.

Hans Christian Wolters, the prosecutor leading the investigation into Brueckner, has said he was very confident the inmate is responsible for kidnapping her.

If you knew the evidence we had you would come to the same conclusion as I do but I cant give you details because we dont want the accused to know what we have on him  these are tactical considerations, he told the BBC.

It was subsequently revealed that Madeleines Fund still had 773,629 to spend as of 31 March 2020, meaning the McCanns can continue to bankroll a private investigation to find their daughter long after the police hunt is finally drawn to a close, should they choose to.

Brueckner was formally made a arguido in relation to the case on 21 April 2022.

On 19 September, the McCanns lost their libel case against Mr Amaral, the former chief inspector who had investigated the disappearance, before the European Court of Human Rights.

The couple had attempted to argue that Mr Amaral was responsible for damaging their reputation and breaching their rights to respect for their private life and to be presumed innocent after taking exception to his book and associated media appearances in which he had repeatedly suggested they were responsible for the vanishing.

Their complaint also argued that Portugals Supreme Court had failed to allow them proper redress over the alleged libel by Mr Amaral after judges threw out their earlier claim in 2017.

The verdict left the McCanns with three months to appeal against the decision.

In February 2023, a Polish woman called Julia Faustyna made headlines by claiming she was Madeleine, using the Instagram name @iammadeleinemccann.

Ms Faustyna, 21, did not provide any supporting evidence but sought DNA tests to prove her origins. The results ultimately revealed that she was entirely of Polish origin, with no British heritage, disproving her claims for good.

In April 2023, a court in Braunschweig dropped a rape charge against Brueckner, unrelated to the Madeleine McCann case, concluding it did not have jurisdiction.

Police in Germany continue to claim they have concrete evidence that Madeleine is dead but this has still not been confirmed and their investigation is ongoing, with Brueckner still not charged in the McCann case.

Like her parents, Madeleines sister Amelie, now 18, observed the 16th anniversary of her disappearance in May 2023.

Speaking publicly for the first time at a prayer meeting in Rothley, she said: Its nice that everyone is here together but its a sad occasion.

Amelie McCann reportedly joined in with chants including Never never give up, leave no stone unturned, dont forget about me and still missing, still missed.
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One in five fathers are not taking any paternity leave, mainly because they cannot afford to reduce their income, damning new research suggests.

A study by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) also found half of families struggle with money when fathers go on paternity leave. Another half said they did not feel able to take enough time off work to support their families.

Campaigners have called for an overhaul of the system, which they say sets up mothers as the default carer and drives womens economic inequality.

Paul Nowak, general secretary of the TUC, said: Its not right that so many dads cant afford to take time off work when their babies are born.

The arrival of a newborn is one of the most special moments in life. No parent should miss out on these precious first days. The UKs parental leave and pay system needs an overhaul.

Without better rights to well-paid leave, too many new parents will still miss out on spending time with their babies. And mums will continue to take on the bulk of caring.

Mr Nowak called for the government to give all dads better-paid paternity leave and create a new right to well-paid parental leave just for dads, that doesnt rely on mums giving up some of their maternity leave.

Parents in Britain can choose to take shared parental leave of up to 50 weeks, while paternity pay is currently 172.48 per week, or 90 per cent of your average weekly earnings - whatever amount is lower. Statutory paternity leave only lasts for one or two weeks.

Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson, director of the Women's Budget Group, told The Independent the findings demonstrate the major problems with our system of maternity, paternity and parental leave.

Dr Stephenson said it was a particular problem when there are rising costs of living.

Paternity leave is about bonding with kids but also about helping mothers when they have just given birth, she added.

Dr Stephenson said: The experience of pregnancy and childbirth is draining. A high proportion of women have caesareans. There is no other situation where someone would be sent home from major abdominal surgery to then have to care for another human being.

The problem is we have a system that sets up mothers as the default carers by giving appallingly low sums for fathers and second parents. This pattern - where women are responsible for unpaid care - is at the heart of womens economic inequality.

Around one in four of the parents who were not taking any paternity leave cited financial reasons.

Researchers also found just three in ten self-employed partners or fathers took time off when their partner had a child. Self-employed workers cannot access statutory paternity pay.

While almost nine in 10 parents where household income is over 60,000 were found to take statutory paternity leave offered by the employer, this plummeted to two-thirds when the household income was below 25,000.

Joeli Brearley, chief executive and founder of prominent campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed, said: Paternity leave is not a luxury, but a necessity. The fact that dads and partners are forced to return to work within two weeks of being a parent is devastating for families.

The government needs to urgently address the many issues with our parental leave system; we are so far behind other countries on this its embarrassing.
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RAF Typhoons have intercepted Russian planes flying close to Nato member airspace twice in the past 24 hours.

The initial incident unfolded when the British jets took off from the Amari airbase in Estonia on Thursday evening.

They were accompanied by Swedish Air Force Gripens which scrambled to intercept a Russian Air Force IL-20 COOT A and Su-27 FLANKER B flying close to Nato and Swedish airspace, the RAF said.

The initial incident unfolded when the British jets took off from the Amari airbase in Estonia (RAF)

Russian aircraft were not complying with international norms by failing to communicate with the relevant flight information, a statement from the Royal Air Force continued.

However, the RAF confirmed the planes remained in international airspace and flew in a professional manner.

Typhoons were again scrambled to intercept one AN12 CUB and one AN72 COALER flying south from mainland Russia towards the Kaliningrad Oblast on Friday morning.

The RAF planes also intercepted two Tupolev Tu-22M BACKFIRES and two Su-30 SM FLANKER H, also flying south from mainland Russia over the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea.

Typhoons were again scrambled on Friday morning to intercept one AN12 CUB and one AN72 COALER flying south from mainland Russia towards the Kaliningrad Oblast (RAF)

One of the pilots involved in the scramble told the airforce how the incident unfolded.

Although there is an apparent increase in regional activity, these intercepts remain normal jogging for us and we are ready to respond to any task that may pose a threat to regional security, he said in a statement.

Both Swedish and British planes were involved in the incident on Thursday (RAF)

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the incidents were proof of how countries can work together to patrol each others regions.

These intercepts are a stark reminder that the RAF is always ready to defend our skies and those of our allies, he said.

The coordinated action by several air forces serves as a clear demonstration of the value of our international alliances.
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Tributes have been paid to a teenager who died after crashing into a parked ambulance while on his electric bike in a police chase.

Saul Cookson, 15, was being followed by traffic officers in Salford on Thursday afternoon before the fatal collision happened.

Emergency services scrambled to the scene and Saul was taken to hospital but died a short time later.

Pictures show an ambulance with a shattered windscreen within the police cordon on Thursday.

Sauls cousin Jack Pennington posted a photograph of the teenager alongside an emotional tribute on Instagram.

He said: Everyone who knew Saul knew he was the nicest lad about, had a good heart, polite and have u like no tomorrow.

Cant believe Im writing this, no other word describes it other than shock. Dont feel real in the slightest one of the best lads you could meet and I feel lucky to have called u my cousin.

Had some good times growing up me u r tom n Jacob n I cant believe thats just it. Shows wat a cruel world were living in.

Tributes poured in for the schoolboy and a gofundme page was set up to help with funeral costs (gofundme)

Miss u forever my brother. Cant say goodbye just see you later my mate love you RIP Saul my brother.

Officers began following Saul along Fitzwarren Street and Lower Seedley Road at around 2pm on Thursday, but bollards prevented the chase from proceeding any further.

Moments later, the schoolboy crashed into an ambulance on nearby Langworthy Road, according to Greater Manchester Police (GMP).

Sauls parents attended the scene on the evening of the crash as devastated friends and family paid tribute to the teenager.

Flower tributes and cards were left near the scene, with one reading Saul gone but never forgotten. RIP I love you always keep smiling your cheeky smile.

A view of the scene at Langworthy Road in Salford, where the teenager died after his e-bike collided with an ambulance (PA)

A cardboard sign, left tied to a fence, read: Kids on bikes dont kill.

A gofundme page was launched to help raise funds for Sauls funeral, so far raising almost half of its 2,000 target.

It reads: No parents should bury their child especially in these circumstances, this family is one of our own so lets dig deep and help as much as we can.

GMP has referred the incident to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), which is leading an investigation into the crash.

A spokesperson for the IOPC said: We are independently investigating the circumstances of a serious collision involving an e-bike and an ambulance in Salford on Thursday, 8 June.

The rider of the bike, a 15-year-old boy, was taken to hospital where he sadly died. Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones, as well as all those affected by this tragedy.

We were notified by GMP due to the fact a police vehicle had been following the e-bike shortly before the collision.

We have sent investigators to the scene of the collision, at the junction of Langworthy Road and Lower Seedley Road, as well as to the police post-incident procedures, to begin gathering evidence.

Our investigation is at a very early stage and we will provide further details once we are in a position to do so.

In Wales, an investigation by the IOPC was launched after two teenagers on ebikes were killed in a road traffic accident last month, sparking riots where cars were torched and officers were injured.

Footage shows a police van following Kyrees Sullivan, 16, and Harvey Evans, 15, as they rode on ebikes along a residential road in Cardiff.

The force has insisted no police vehicle was present when the pair were fatally injured.

It is not known why police were following the boys and the investigation is being handled by the IOPC.
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New laws compelling failing police forces to improve must be brought in to keep the public safe after a series of scandals that have beset UK policing, a watchdog has said.

HM Inspectorate of Constabulary wants Suella Braverman to move quickly to introduce new legislation, warning that reforms demanded by the watchdog seven years ago are only happening now in the wake of horrific acts by Met predators Wayne Couzens and David Carrick.

A scathing report said urgent legal changes are needed and that the watchdogs existing powers have been proved to be insufficient by too many occasions where forces failed to act.

It warned: There are only so many times we can say the same thing in different words.

Andy Cooke, HM chief inspector of constabulary, said concerns about officers abusing their position of authority to prey on women sexually were raised formally by the inspectorate way back in 2016, but only two forces had followed its recommendations.

The time for talking has passed and it is now time for action, he told a press conference.

The report also found:

British policing is at a major turning point as trust hangs by a thread

Forces must focus on issues that matter most to the public and get the basics right

Police are hampered by a dysfunctional and defective wider justice system

Demand is being driven up by mental health calls and the failure of other public sector organisations

In his first annual report as head of the police watchdog, Mr Cooke said warnings were issued repeatedly that police forces were not doing enough to stop officers taking advantage of women  for example, by targeting victims of domestic violence for sex while investigating their abuse.

David Carrick: Rishi Sunak says police 'must address failings' to protect women

Mr Cooke said that only following a wave of inquiries and reviews, sparked by the murder of Sarah Everard and the horrific crimes carried out by serial rapist Carrick, were forces getting to where they should be.

This is seven years later, and in those seven years, weve had some truly horrendous acts by police officers, Mr Cooke said.

Im not sitting here saying that wouldnt have happened if theyd acted on our recommendations earlier, but surely, if I could direct action on those issues as opposed to recommending, a lot more would have been done a lot quicker.

The inspectorate is calling for new laws to be introduced that would allow it to issue directions to police forces on significant risks to public safety, and for parliament to then decide on sanctions in the event of a breach.

It also wants the power to issue orders to the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing in limited circumstances, and to compel other authorities to follow its recommendations.

The watchdog is calling for involvement in the appointment of chief constables, saying it was a mistake by the government to remove it from the process when politically elected police and crime commissioners were created in 2012.

The inspectorate is formally calling for the home secretary to review its powers and decide whether to create any new laws by the end of this year.

Mr Cooke said: The government must act now to stop this leaking of public confidence and to reset the compass. Arguably, people are safer now than weve ever been, and most crime is down, but people do not feel safer.

Rotten apples placed outside New Scotland Yard as part of a protest (PA Wire)

It comes as six police forces, including the scandal-plagued Metropolitan Police, remain in the watchdogs equivalent of special measures.

The watchdog said that, aside from the damage done by high-profile crimes committed by police officers and scandals around misogyny and racism, trust was falling because people do not see police addressing the problems they experience.

They need to get back to doing jobs that the public would expect  properly investigating crime, reinvigorating neighbourhood policing, answering 999 calls quickly, added Mr Cooke.

A lot of demand is coming from mental health issues and picking up issues that other public authorities should be dealing with. Thirty per cent of the time they are doing things that the public wouldnt really expect them to be doing.

The report also contained warnings about police resources, saying that the governments current funding model was not fit for purpose and Boris Johnsons drive to recruit 20,000 extra police officers had not replaced the experience lost during the austerity years.

It found that, since 2014, charge rates had plummeted by two-thirds and other sanctions had halved, meaning fewer criminals are being caught.

Yvette Cooper, Labours shadow home secretary, said the report revealed the scale of the damage wrought by Conservative governments.

These include systemic failings in policing and a totally dysfunctional criminal justice system, with more criminals getting away with crimes, victims let down, vital neighbourhood policing devastated, record numbers of forces in special measures, and confidence in policing falling, she added. Labour agrees with the inspectorate that urgent reforms are needed.

The call for new laws was backed by Paul Fotheringham, president of the Police Superintendents Association, who said: There are clear issues with the lack of consistency demonstrated across policing when it comes to the acceptance and implementation of national guidance. Stronger national legislation, supported by greater accountability, is essential in achieving this.

The Home Office said it would carefully consider the reports recommendations and respond formally in due course.

Ms Braverman said she shared the concern that policing needs strong leaders, a greater focus on the basics and issues that matter most to the public  and to be more visible in communities.

Gavin Stephens, chair of the NPCC, said: We are also very determined to ensure the highest standards of professional behaviour, acting in the public interest to maintain the vital support of communities so we can police by consent. I am committed to ensuring that the NPCC works alongside our partners to secure the right level of investment in policing and bring about meaningful change.
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Tesco has urged its 20 million Clubcard customers to cash in their rewards over the next fortnight before they are cut from three times to two times their value.

The UKs biggest supermarket announced in March that its Clubcard points will be worth twice their value when customers cash them in, rather than three times as they are now, from June 14.

Rewards ordered up to and including June 13 will continue to be valid for one year from the date of issue.

The popular scheme enables shoppers to collect points for money spent at Tesco and exchange them for vouchers which can be used in store or for excursions to locations such as Pizza Express, Legoland and Alton Towers.

The grocer first introduced Clubcard in 1995 and promptly saw a 28% spending uplift.

Tescos chief customer officer Alessandra Bellini said: While we are making a change to how members can use their vouchers with our reward partners, we want to remind millions of Clubcard holders to redeem their vouchers at three times the value until June 13 so they can use their reward partner codes to give themselves and their families a well-deserved treat.

We have extended the validity of redeemed codes at the 3x rate, so if swapped before the deadline, they will be valid for a year, instead of six months, to give customers even more time to enjoy them.

Customers expressed their disappointment at the change, pointing out it came as the cost-of-living crisis was already placing pressure on household budgets.

One shopper posted: Tesco #clubcard now only worth x2  gee thanks #Tesco  you really care about your loyal customers  not. Maybe time to shop elsewhere.

A second Clubcard user wrote: We were always grateful for the @Tesco Clubcard X4 when our kids were younger, it helped out massively on days out, we used our vouchers to buy towards Merlin passes which saved us so much money.

We use it now for ourselves and X3 is good, but what an insult #X2 is to customers!

A third wrote: Dear @tesco Just got your email re clubcard voucher exchange value changing to 2x, not 3x the value.

Really disappointing! Not that long ago they were worth 4x the value. Are you not making enough profit already?

One woman tweeted Tesco that its Clubcard scheme had kept me shopping with you but now with your prices soaring and the announcement about the points changes Ill be looking elsewhere.

I bet a lot will do the same. It really helped us all out. Disappointed in you Tesco, she added.

Sainsburys and Boots also cut the value of their loyalty schemes recently.

From May, Boots Advantage Card holders have received 25% less for every 1 they spend in store, earning 3p rather than 4p.

In November Sainsburys Bank cut the amount of Nectar points customers could earn by 75%, from two points for every 1 spent to one point for every 2.
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West Ham fans have banded together to fundraise for a teenager who sustained horror injuries in a freak accident after the teams Europa Conference League victory.

Connor Reid, 19, joined thousands of other supporters in Prague this week to watch his club nab a victory over Fiorentina.

However, tragedy struck shortly afterward when the teenager fell off a wall that had a five-metre drop while waiting for an Uber.

The 19-year-old was injured after the win. (Go Fund Me)

Connors aunt Georgina Chalmers set up a GoFundMe in the wake of his injuries which included a fractured skull, bleed on the brain and the removal of his spleen.

Ms Chalmers said Connors dad Alex also remained in Prague and the funds are intended to help (Connor) get home.

Supporters have already donated more than 4,700, eclipsing the initial target of 1,000.

Mr Reid later took to social media to plead with fans to help donate to his sons cause.

So after last nights great performance, my son had a bad fall and is currently in hospital in Prague, he wrote.

Broken ribs fractured Skull and has his spline removed. Was due to come home tomorrow but dont know what we will do now.

West Ham fans celebrated in their thousands in Prague this week (REUTERS)

Send him some love please #westhamfamily.

Mr Reid went on to explain how the accident took place when quizzed by curious fans.

(Connor) was sitting on a wall waiting for his Uber home not realising there was a five-metre drop the other side and lost his balance, he wrote.

The league victory marks West Hams first major European title since the 1964-65 European Cup Winners Cup and first major trophy since winning the FA Cup in 1980.

Jarrod Bowens 89th-minute goal gave the Hammers a memorable of 2-1 wins and with celebrity supporters included James Corden and Danny Dyer.

However, supporters clashed with riot police in Prague that evening after setting off flares in celebration of victory.

A scuffle broke out after police officers tried to confiscate a lit flare in the Old Town area of the city.

Back home, jubilant supporters of the club decked out in the famous claret and blue on Thursday evening to welcome the team home to east London.

More than 70,000 people lined the streets to welcome the team back in an open top bus as the Hammers paraded their silverware.
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A smelly seaweed barrier is turning tourists away from a popular beach in droves as the local council refuses to remove the kelp.

The large mass washed up on Weymouth Beach in Dorset last month before warm temperatures caused it to dry and emit a stench.

Strong easterly winds have also been blamed for blowing the heap towards the shoreline.

A large mass of seaweed has taken over Weymouth Beach (Dorset Live)

Beachgoers reported having to wade through metres of the seaweed to reach Weymouths famed waters and were covered in it when they returned to the sand.

One man said his memories of the beach had been shattered with the state the council have decided to leave it in.

The vast quantities of wet and drying piles of seaweed had to be walked over if you want to get to the sea, he wrote on TripAdvisor.

Saw children crying as they didnt like walking on it and the days of seeing clear blue clean water where, if you were lucky you could see shoals of baby fish, have gone.

Another disgruntled tourist complained that the thick matt of rotting seaweed had left the beachs water completed discoloured.

The sea is brown because it is full of small pieces of seaweed that is washing ashore, she wrote.

A third tourist, who visited in May, labelled the mass smelly and slimy.

However, the Weymouth Town Council was quick to defend its decision to not remove the seaweed mass.

Weymouth Beach is typically a favourite seaside spot for thousands (Alamy)

We appreciate that the seaweed might be unsightly until it is washed back out into the bay but as caretakers of this beautiful and diverse coastal environment, we have made a conscious decision not to routinely remove any animals or plants, a spokeswoman said in a statement.

This decision supports our commitment to preserving the ecosystems integrity and avoiding any potential harm that may arise from interfering with its natural course.

Seaweed is an important resource for marine invertebrates and a food source for many species.

While we understand that our approach may not align with some personal preferences, it is important to note that we are not striving to provide a synthetic, controlled swimming pool experience.

Weymouth Beach is often listed amoung the UKs top seaside spots and was awarded a Blue Flag for its water quality by charity Keep Britain Tidy last month.
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A Canadian government appointee looking into allegations of Chinese interference in Canada announced Friday that he is stepping down from his role, citing the highly partisan atmosphere around his work.

Former Governor General David Johnston said in a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that his leadership of the governments probe into purported meddling by China has not helped build trust in democratic institutions because of partisanship.

The appointment of Johnston, who said he would release a brief final report, was contentious, with opposition Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre accusing him of being too close to Trudeaus family.

All opposition parties in the House of Commons have called for the government to hold a public inquiry into the allegations of foreign interference, but Johnston recently released a report recommending against that.

Johnston said he encourages Trudeau to appoint a respected person, with national security experience to finish the inquiry and to consult with opposition parties on who that should be.

Then Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed Johnston as governor general in 2010 and his term was extended under Trudeau until 2017. The governor general is the representative of Britains monarch as head of state, a mostly ceremonial and symbolic position.

Johnston is also a former member of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.

Trudeau has said he had full confidence in Johnstons handling of the inquiry and played down the importance of any family connections.

Earlier this year, Canada expelled a Chinese diplomat alleged by Canadas spy agency to have been involved in a plot to intimidate an opposition Conservative lawmaker and his relatives in Hong Kong. The lawmaker had criticized Beijings human rights record. China expelled a Canadian diplomat in retaliation this month.

China regularly uses threats against family members to intimidate critics in the Chinese diaspora.

China-Canada relations nosedived after China detained former diplomat Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor. That came shortly after Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of telecoms giant Huawei and the daughter of the companys founder, at the behest of U.S. authorities who accused her of fraud.
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Boris Johnson has been accused of a sickening insult to the bereaved after he gave honours to allies embroiled in the Partygate scandal, including one dubbed party Marty.

Martin Reynolds, his former principal private secretary who boasted we seem to have got away with the bring your own booze garden party during coronavirus restrictions, has been nominated for a peerage.

There were also honours for Dan Rosenfield, his ex-chief of staff, and Jack Doyle, his former director of communications, both of whom were in office during some of the rule-breaking.

Former No 10 head of operations Shelley Williams-Walker  allegedly nicknamed DJ SWW after playing tunes from a laptop during a No 10 party on the eve of Prince Philips funeral  was given a damehood.

Boris Johnson pictured when prime minister with his then-principal private secretary Martin Reynolds (PA Wire)

And there was a peerage for one-time London mayoral contender Shaun Bailey, who was photographed at an apparent lockdown Christmas party at Conservative Party headquarters in 2020.

Labour said it was a sickening insult that those who planned Covid parties and held boozy lockdown bashes while families were unable to mourn loved ones are now set to be handed gongs by Rishi Sunak.

The party also denounced the list as a carousel of Boris Johnsons cronies.

Those elevated to the House of Lords include Ross Kempsell, in his early 30s, his spokesperson and tennis partner and a close friend of Mr Johnsons wife, Carrie.

Former No 10 head of operations Shelley Williams-Walker was given a damehood (PA)

As a journalist with TalkRadio, Mr Kempsell secured the infamous interview with Mr Johnson in which he revealed he paints buses as a hobby.

He was subsequently given a No 10 post by Mr Johnson and appointed head of Tory research with a salary of 90,000 despite protests that he was too inexperienced to do the job.

Charlotte Owen, a former assistant to Mr Johnson, is set to become the youngest person to be awarded a life peerage. It means that Ms Owen, who graduated from university in 2015, will sit in the Upper House after serving less than two years in the No 10 policy unit.

Longtime ally Conor Burns, who infamously claimed Mr Johnson had been ambushed by a cake during a rule-breaking birthday party has also been given a knighthood. Others honoured include the former business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, awarded a knighthood, and Mr Johnsons home secretary Priti Patel, given a damehood.

It comes as former culture secretary Nadine Dorries has stood down as an MP with immediate effect (PA)

The long-awaited list reignited bitter infighting within the Tory party. One senior Tory MP described the list as even worse than I thought it would be.

Fervent pro-Brexit Johnson supporter Nadine Dorries appeared to take revenge on Rishi Sunak over her omission, quitting as an MP, triggering a by-election in her constituency.

There had been much wrangling behind the scenes over a possible peerage for Ms Dorries. She had been expected to stand down as an MP to enter the Lords. But she said her nomination had gone back to Holac (House of Lords Appointments Commission) which vets MPs and she quit anyway. The by-election in her Mid Bedfordshire seat could be just as hazardous for Rishi Sunak as Boris Johnsons marginal Uxbridge constituency.

Another significant ommission from the list was Mr Johnsons father Stanley, who at one point was expected to be handed a knighthood. The Independent called on Mr Sunak to block that plan and a petition reached 308,000 signatures. Mr Sunak had said at the time of the row, in a swipe at his predecessor, said he would get his own dad a fathers day card, not a knighthood.

Mr Johnsons father Stanley Johnson has also been dropped from the list (PA)

Stanley Johnsons nomination had prompted accusations of further cronyism, after Mr Johnson already nominated his brother Jo Johnson for a peerage in 2020.

It also drew criticism after senior Tory MP Caroline Nokes and a journalist in 2021 publicly accused Stanley Johnson, a former MEP, of touching them at Conservative party conferences.

Ms Nokes, chairperson of the Commons women and equalities committee, accused Stanley Johnson of forcefully smacking her on the backside and making a vulgar comment at the Conservative Party conference in 2003.

Stanley Johnson said after that he had no recollection of either incident.

Jacob Rees-Mogg is among those being rewarded on the list (Getty)

Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper accused Mr Sunak of rewarding failure, by not blocking the list.

The fact that one of the most scandal-ridden prime ministers is now allowed to stuff his cronies in the Lords after a failed premiership tells the British public everything they need to know about this Conservative Party, she said.

Boris Johnson caused crisis after crisis in this country  if Rishi Sunak rewards his failure its just proof it is one rule for the Conservatives and another for everyone else. The buck stops with Sunak  he must ensure that Johnsons honours list is put through the shredder.
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Boris Johnson has sensationally resigned as an MP over an investigation into his conduct by the Privileges Committee.

The former prime minister claims he has been anti-democratically forced out of parliament, branding the probe a hitjob.

His full resignation statement is below:

I have received a letter from the Privileges Committee making it clear - much to my amazement - that they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of parliament.

They have still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons.

They know perfectly well that when I spoke in the Commons I was saying what I believed sincerely to be true and what I had been briefed to say, like any other minister. They know that I corrected the record as soon as possible; and they know that I and every other senior official and minister - including the current Prime Minister and then occupant of the same building, Rishi Sunak - believed that we were working lawfully together.

I have been an MP since 2001. I take my responsibilities seriously. I did not lie, and I believe that in their hearts the Committee know it. But they have wilfully chosen to ignore the truth because from the outset their purpose has not been to discover the truth, or genuinely to understand what was in my mind when I spoke in the Commons.

Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts. This is the very definition of a kangaroo court.

Most members of the Committee - especially the chair - had already expressed deeply prejudicial remarks about my guilt before they had even seen the evidence. They should have recused themselves.

In retrospect it was naive and trusting of me to think that these proceedings could be remotely useful or fair. But I was determined to believe in the system, and in justice, and to vindicate what I knew to be the truth.

It was the same faith in the impartiality of our systems that led me to commission Sue Gray. It is clear that my faith has been misplaced. Of course, it suits the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, and the SNP to do whatever they can to remove me from parliament.

Sadly, as we saw in July last year, there are currently some Tory MPs who share that view. I am not alone in thinking that there is a witch hunt underway, to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result.

My removal is the necessary first step, and I believe there has been a concerted attempt to bring it about. I am afraid I no longer believe that it is any coincidence that Sue Gray - who investigated gatherings in Number 10 - is now the chief of staff designate of the Labour leader.

Nor do I believe that it is any coincidence that her supposedly impartial chief counsel, Daniel Stilitz KC, turned out to be a strong Labour supporter who repeatedly tweeted personal attacks on me and the government.

When I left office last year the government was only a handful of points behind in the polls. That gap has now massively widened.

Just a few years after winning the biggest majority in almost half a century, that majority is now clearly at risk.

Our party needs urgently to recapture its sense of momentum and its belief in what this country can do.

We need to show how we are making the most of Brexit and we need in the next months to be setting out a pro-growth and pro-investment agenda. We need to cut business and personal taxes  and not just as pre-election gimmicks  rather than endlessly putting them up.

We must not be afraid to be a properly Conservative government.

Why have we so passively abandoned the prospect of a Free Trade Deal with the US? Why have we junked measures to help people into housing or to scrap EU directives or to promote animal welfare?

We need to deliver on the 2019 manifesto, which was endorsed by 14 million people. We should remember that more than 17 million voted for Brexit.

I am now being forced out of parliament by a tiny handful of people, with no evidence to back up their assertions, and without the approval even of Conservative party members let alone the wider electorate.

I believe that a dangerous and unsettling precedent is being set.

The Conservative Party has the time to recover its mojo and its ambition and to win the next election. I had looked forward to providing enthusiastic support as a backbench MP. Harriet Harmans committee has set out to make that objective completely untenable.

The Committees report is riddled with inaccuracies and reeks of prejudice but under their absurd and unjust process I have no formal ability to challenge anything they say.

The Privileges Committee is there to protect the privileges of parliament. That is a very important job. They should not be using their powers  which have only been very recently designed  to mount what is plainly a political hitjob on someone they oppose.

It is in no ones interest, however, that the process the Committee has launched should continue for a single day further.

So I have today written to my Association in Uxbridge and South Ruislip to say that I am stepping down forthwith and triggering an immediate by-election.

I am very sorry to leave my wonderful constituency. It has been a huge honour to serve them, both as Mayor and MP.

But I am proud that after what is cumulatively a 15 year stint I have helped to deliver among other things a vast new railway in the Elizabeth Line and full funding for a wonderful new state of the art hospital for Hillingdon, where enabling works have already begun.

I also remain hugely proud of all that we achieved in my time in office as Prime Minister: getting Brexit done, winning the biggest majority for 40 years and delivering the fastest vaccine roll out of any major European country, as well as leading global support for Ukraine.

It is very sad to be leaving parliament - at least for now - but above all I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out, anti-democratically, by a committee chaired and managed, by Harriet Harman, with such egregious bias.
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He was the London mayor who basked in the glory of the 2012 Olympics, before leading the Conservatives to a landmark election victory on the back of his promise to get Brexit done.

But Boris Johnsons career will perhaps best be remembered for being peppered with scandal - primarily the lockdown-busting parties which cast a shadow over his political future.

Its perhaps, then, no surprise that it was the Partygate scandal which ultimately led to him announcing he would quit as MP, as he accused the Commons investigation looking into whether he misled Parliament over the issue of attempting to drive me out.

The former prime minister was forced out of Downing Street by a landslide of Conservative resignations in summer 2022, but he had been dogged for months by allegations about a string of rule-breaking social events that took place at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

He had emphatically assured the Commons that the official guidance had been observed at all times, only for investigations by senior civil servant Sue Gray and the Metropolitan Police to conclude otherwise.

The ex-PM later gave evidence, saying he would never have dreamed of intentionally lying about his conduct.

But, as his critics and allies alike waited for the outcome of that investigation, he announced he would quit as MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, accusing the committee of producing a yet-to-be-published report riddled with inaccuracies and reeks of prejudice.

He said he thought their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts.

He went on to say it was sad to be leaving Parliament, but also hinted that he could consider a potential return.

Heres a look back at the undeniably extraordinary career of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

19 June 1964: Born in New York City, the son of Stanley Johnson and Charlotte Fawcett. He is educated at the prestigious Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he studies classics, gains popularity (or notoriety) as a member of the Bullingdon Club and serves as both secretary and then president of the Oxford Union. He then commences a career in journalism, first with The Times and Telegraph before being appointed editor of The Spectator in 1999. As a columnist, he attracts attention for his fruity, flippant and frequently offensive turns of phrase, which he capitalises on through a string of appearances on the BBCs satrical quiz show Have I Got News For You, beginning in April 1998. He marries Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1987 before divorcing her and marrying Marina Wheeler in 1993.

2001-2008: Commences his political career in earnest when he is elected as MP for the constituency of Henley in Oxfordshire.

2008-2016: Serves as mayor of London, overseeing the Boris Bike scheme and the 2012 London Olympic Games. He is elected as MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip in the May 2015 general election, paving the way for his eventual return to the Commons.

2016: Becomes co-leader of the Leave campaign lobbying to take Britain out of the European Union (EU), putting him at odds with then-prime minister and fellow Bullingdonian David Cameron. When the British public votes for Brexit by a narrow margin on 23 June 2016, Mr Cameron resigns.

2016-2018: Serves as foreign secretary under Mr Camerons successor, Theresa May. Careless comments he makes in November 2017 about British national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, imprisoned on spurious charges in Iran, thwart her immediate hopes of release and bring a storm of condemnation for which he only belatedly apologises. Mr Johnson resigns in July 2018 in opposition to Ms Mays strategy for a soft Brexit that would maintain close ties with the EU.

8 April 2019: Accused by the Commons Standards Committee of displaying an over-casual attitude towards obeying the rules of the House by failing to declare a financial interest in a property within the appropriate time frame, a verdict coming just four months after he was made to apologise for breaching the rules by failing to declare more than 52,000 of outside earnings.

7 June 2019: Ms May resigns as Conservative leader over her failure to persuade Parliament to back the Brexit agreement she had negotiated with the EU. The party is split between those who back her and hard-liners, led by Mr Johnson, who are willing to risk a no-deal Brexit in order to wring concessions from the EU.

23 July 2019: Mr Johnson is elected Tory leader in a vote by party members. He takes office as PM the next day, inheriting a minority government that relies on votes from Northern Irelands Democratic Unionist Party to pass legislation. Mr Johnson insists Britain will leave the EU on 31 October, with or without a deal.

Boris Johnson signs the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement at 10 Downing Street as UK chief trade negotiator David Frost looks on (Leon Neal/PA)

28 August 2019: Mr Johnson announces he will shut down Parliament until mid-October, giving opponents less time to thwart a no-deal Brexit.

3 September 2019: Twenty-one rebel Conservative MPs support legislation requiring the government to seek an extension to Brexit negotiations if it cant negotiate an agreement with the EU. The measure passes and the rebels are expelled from the party.

5 September 2019: Mr Johnson asserts he would rather be dead in a ditch than ask the EU for another extension.

24 September 2019: The UKs Supreme Court rules that the governments proroguing of Parliament was unlawful.

19 October 2019: Mr Johnson does ask the EU to delay Brexit again. A new deadline is set for 31 January 2020.

6 November 2019: Parliament is dissolved and early elections are set for mid-December as Mr Johnson pursues a mandate for his Brexit strategy.

12 December 2019: Mr Johnson wins an 80-seat majority in the general election, giving him the backing to push through his Brexit legislation. The scale of the victory over Jeremy Corbyns Labour makes him the most electorally successful Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher.

23 January 2020: The Brexit deal becomes law after approval by the UK Parliament. The European Parliament approves the deal six days later.

23 March 2020: Mr Johnson places Britain in lockdown in response to the Covid-19 global pandemic, having initially been keen to dismiss the threat posed by the virus.

5 April 2020: Mr Johnson is hospitalised and later moved to intensive care after contracting the coronavirus. He is released from hospital on 12 April, thanking the nurses who sat with him through the night to make sure he kept breathing.

Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings leave Downing Street (AFP/Getty)

3-4 November 2021: Mr Johnsons government orders Conservative MPs to support a change in ethics rules to delay the suspension of Owen Paterson, a supporter of the PM who had been censured for breaching lobbying rules. The measure passes. A day later, facing an angry backlash from all sides, Mr Johnson changes course and allows MPs to vote on Mr Patersons suspension. Mr Paterson resigns.

30 November 2021: Allegations first surface that government officials attended parties in government offices during November and December 2020 in violation of Covid lockdown rules imposed by Mr Johnsons own administration. The scandal grows as more and more parties are reported by the press. Mr Johnson denies the allegations but opposition leaders criticise the government for breaking the law while people across the country made sacrifices to combat the pandemic, staying indoors, not seeing loved ones in person for months on end and even missing funerals in order to adhere to the rules.

8 December 2021: Mr Johnson authorises an investigation into the scandal, now dubbed Partygate, to be overseen by veteran civil servant Sue Gray. Pressure builds for a leadership challenge, with popular chancellor Rishi Sunak rumoured to be plotting a bid, but gradually fizzles out.

3 February 2022: Mr Johnsons long-time aide, Munira Mirza, quits Downing Street, followed by three other top aides in protest against a smear the PM had made against Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.

24 February 2022: Mr Johnson repeals the last of the Covid restrictions placed on the British public after the success of the vaccine rollout enables the country to see off the threat posed by the Omicron variant over the winter season. On the same day, Russia invades neighbouring Ukraine, commencing a whole new international political crisis.

9 April 2022: Mr Johnson meets Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv in a show of solidarity following Russias invasion, pledging a new package of military and economic support. The move helps bolster Mr Johnson and his supporters, who argue the government should focus on the war rather than domestic political strife.

Boris Johnson walks the streets of Kyiv with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky (Ukrainian President Press)

12 April 2022: Mr Johnson is fined 50 by the Metropolitan Police for attending one of the lockdown parties. Opposition parties characterise him as the first PM in history shown to have broken the law while in office. He apologises but insists he did not know he was breaking the rules.

22 May 2022: Findings from Ms Grays Partygate investigation are published, detailing 16 gatherings at Mr Johnsons home and office and other government offices between May 2020 and April 2021. The report recounts tales of excessive drinking among some of Mr Johnsons staff at a time when millions of people were unable to see friends and family because of the virus.

6 June 2022: Mr Johnson narrowly wins a vote of no confidence, with Conservative MPs voting 211 to 148 to back him. But the scale of the revolt  some 41 per cent voted against him  shakes his grip on power.

15 June 2022: Lord Geidt quits as ethics adviser to Mr Johnson, accusing the Conservative government of planning to flout conduct rules.

24 June 2022: Mr Johnsons Conservatives lose two former strongholds to opposition parties in special elections held in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton.

29 June 2022: Parliaments cross-party Privileges Committee issues a call for evidence for a probe into whether Mr Johnson intentionally misled Parliament with his statements regarding the lockdown parties.

30 June 2022: Chris Pincher resigns as Conservative deputy chief whip amid allegations that he assaulted two guests at a private members club in London. Previous sexual misconduct allegations emerge about Pincher. Questions swirl over whether Mr Johnson knew about the claims when Pincher was given the job.

5 July 2022: Mr Johnson apologises for his handling of the Pincher affair and says he had forgotten about being told of the allegations. Two of his most senior Cabinet ministers, Mr Sunak and health secretary Sajid Javid, quit the government.

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak (Leon Neal/PA)

6 July 2022: Some three dozen junior ministers resign from the government, attacking Mr Johnsons leadership. He briefly attempts to steady the ship by appointing Nadhim Zahawi as his new chancellor on a day of chaos and high drama in Westminster.

7 July 2022: Mr Johnson finally agrees to resign as Conservative Party leader and PM, firing the starting pistol on a summer-long Tory leadership race between Mr Sunak and foreign secretary Liz Truss.

6 September 2022: Mr Johnson leaves office to make way for the ill-fated Ms Truss, likening himself to the Roman statesman Cinncinatus in his farewell address outside No 10, seen by many as a veiled pledge to mount a comeback.

23 October 2022: Following Ms Trusss announcement of her resignation as leader after just 46 days in response to the market turmoil caused by her uncosted mini-Budget and growth, growth, growth economic stimulus agenda, Mr Johnson races back to Britain from a Caribbean holiday to sound out support for a possible renewed bid for the Tory leadership. He ultimately concludes he does not have sufficient backing and announces that he will not stand after all. Mr Sunak gets the top job.

23 January 2023: Allegations surface that BBC chairman Richard Sharp, who had been appointed during Mr Johnsons tenure as PM, had helped him arrange a guarantor on a loan of up to 800,000 in late 2020. Mr Sharp duly announces that he has requested a scrutiny panel to examine potential conflicts of interest while Mr Johnson insists the story is a load of complete nonsense.

22 March 2023: Mr Johnson finally appears before the Privileges Committee to deny he knowingly or recklessly misled Parliament over Partygate or had been tardy in amending the record in a tense and ill-tempered encounter. Prior to his appearance, Mr Johnsons closest supporters had attempted to brand the panel as biased against him, despite its having a Conservative majority. On the same day, Mr Johnsons attempt to lead a revolt against Mr Sunaks Windsor Framework amendment to the Brexit agreement ends in humiliation.

9 June 2023: MrJohnson announces he is resigning as an MP after accusing a Commons investigation into whether he misled Parliament over partygate of attempting to drive me out. The former prime minister, in a statement to the media, compared the Privileges Committee probe to a kangaroo court as he announced his intention to step down as MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip. He said, after receiving a letter from the committee, he believed it was determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of Parliament.

Additional reporting by agencies
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Conservatives need to stop blaming "the blob"  an imagined cabal of enemies embedded in British society  for failures of government, George Osborne has said.

In a speech on Friday the former chancellor said the Tories had been in government for 11 years and that they were "in charge of our country's destiny".

Some Tories have claimed an amorphous "blob" of political opponents in civil society and government are obstructing their policies  often blaming it when things go wrong.

The blob is poorly defined but has been said to include civil servants, parts of the legal system, charities, trade unions and remainers.

It has been blamed for all manner of government failures ranging from immigration policy, to Brexit, to Liz Truss's mini budget.

But critics say the concept is meaningless and at best simply refers to the existence of different viewpoints in the country.

There are some Conservatives who blame the blob and the civil servants and the establishment," Mr Osborne told the Northern Research Group Conference in Doncaster on Friday.

"Weve been in office since 2010, were in charge of our countrys destiny, and we should stop blaming others if we dont get things right.

Mr Osborne, whose comments were not met with applause in the room, was talking in the context of devolution of power to local areas, which he said Conservatives should be more "ambitious" about.

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Recent users of the concept include Home Secretary Suella Braverman, whose name was put to an email to Tory members warning that "an activist blob of left-wing lawyers, civil servants and the Labour Party blocked us" from tackling small boat crossings. She later distanced himself from the missive.

Michael Gove previously popularised the term when he was education secretary, to refer to institutional resistance in the civil service and teaching profession to his reform plans.

Tory peer Daniel Finkelstein last month wrote in his Times column of his distaste for the term, warning that "Tories have turned a critique of institutional resistance into an all-purpose conspiracy theory that reeks of defeatism".
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One of Americas oldest restaurant chains has stood by its decision to launch a new campaign to celebrate Pride Month amid a deluge of bigoted attacks.

Despite its infamous past of openly discriminating against its gay employees in the 1990s, Cracker Barrel has moved towards inclusivity and diversity over the past decade.

On Thursday, the company, which is headquartered in Lebanon, Tennessee, took many by surprise and shock after it posted an image on Instagram of one of its restaurants with a rainbow-coloured chair to announce the celebration of Pride Month.

We are excited to celebrate Pride Month with our employees and guests. Everyone is always welcome at our table (and our [rainbow emoji] rocker). Happy Pride! the post read.

The company has been celebrating the month over the past few years while pushing for rainbow-themed souvenirs in its popular quirky gift shops.

However, the companys transformation towards inclusivity has sparked anger among critics, who have criticised the restaurant chain for being too woke.

These woke companies are hell bent on destroying themselves, a Twitter user said, slamming the company for its campaign.

Sad that they care more about money and themselves than their customers. Oh well, another place never to give my hard earned money to! Enjoy going broke @CrackerBarrel, another user tweeted.

Several people, however, welcomed the change and said it was heartwarming to see a company embracing change.

Love that. Ive always loved Cracker Barrel. Love them even more now. Its a small gesture, but you know what? Its those small gestures of kindness that matter the most. Responding to only positive posts by users, Cracker Barrel has thanked people for their support, a user said.

Wonderful news! Ive avoided Cracker Barrel for as long as I can remember, not knowing if my family was truly welcome. Well be sure to stop by our local location soon! another said.

The company is still remembered by many for its intolerant past, when it the restaurant fired several gay employees.

The company had said it would no longer employ anybody from the gay community after dismissing at least nine gay employees in 1991. The policy was rescinded the following year.

Coming a long way from its previous stance, Cracker Barrel said it had a zero-discrimination policy in 2019 after it again landed in controversy over an anti-LGBT+ pastor saying he would hold an event in one of its stores.

We take pride in serving as a home away from home for all guests and in showing our communities and our country that the hospitality we practice is open for everyone, the company said.

Amid the backlash, Cracker Barrel has reiterated its support for the LGBTQ+ community. On the companys Facebook page, where many customers have applauded the chain for its support, Cracker Barrel wrote: We will always choose to stand for whats right no matter what.

The Independent has contacted Cracker Barrel for comment.
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A judge overseeing the case against Bryan Kohberger, charged with killing four University of Idaho students last fall, is set to hear arguments Friday over a gag order that largely bars attorneys and other parties in the case from speaking with news reporters.

A coalition of more than 30 media organisations has challenged the order, saying it violates the Constitutions guarantees of free speech and a free press, as has a lawyer for one of the victim's families. But prosecutors and the defendant's lawyers insist it's needed to prevent prejudicial news coverage that could damage Mr Kohberger's right to a fair trial.

It remains appropriate to have an Order reminding lawyers and their agents of the rules of engagement in this country and that we try cases in court, not in the press, one of Mr Kohberger's attorneys, Jay Weston Logsdon, wrote in a memo to the court this week.

Mr Kohberger, 28, is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and burglary in connection with the stabbing deaths in Moscow, Idaho, on 13 November 2022. Second District Judge John C. Judge entered not guilty pleas on his behalf last month. Prosecutors have not said if they will seek the death penalty.

The bodies of Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were found at a rental home across the street from the University of Idaho campus. The slayings shocked the rural Idaho community and neighboring Pullman, Washington, where Kohberger was a graduate student studying criminology at Washington State University.

The case has garnered widespread publicity, and in January Latah County Magistrate Judge Megan Marshall issued a nondissemination order barring attorneys, law enforcement agencies and others associated with the case from talking with the press or issuing statements unless they are quoting directly from a court document.

The Idaho Supreme Court in April declined to vacate the gag order, saying the news organisations, including The Associated Press, should have first asked the lower court to lift the order. The justices did not weigh in on whether the gag order violates First Amendment rights.

The news organisations subsequently did ask the lower court to revoke the order, and Judge scheduled arguments for Friday. The media coalition says that while it respects the defendant's right to a fair trial under the Sixth Amendment, the court should not have issued a gag order without evidence that right would be infringed by their ability to speak with attorneys involved in the case.

Intervenors agree that there has been, and will continue to be, great publicity surrounding this case, the coalition's attorneys wrote. But publicity alone is not prejudicial. ... The States and Mr. Kohbergers failure to present any evidence of prejudicial news coverage, and the Courts failure to consider alternative measures, means the competing constitutional rights here were improperly balanced and the Gag Order should be vacated."

Shanon Gray, an attorney for the Goncalves family, has also asked the judge to lift the gag order, saying he should be allowed to speak on the family's behalf.

Gag orders that prohibit journalists from writing about certain cases are considered to be severely problematic under the First Amendment. But the US Supreme Court and other appeals courts have upheld some that prohibit attorneys, police or others involved in a case  those with privileged information about it  from speaking with reporters to begin with, as a way to avoid influencing potential jurors or otherwise jeopardising a defendant's right to a fair trial.
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The main suspect in the disappearance of American student Natalee Holloway has departed Peru on an extradition flight to the US, where he will face charges over an alleged fraud scheme against her parents.

Holloway, who lived in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, was 18 years old when she vanished during a trip with classmates to Aruba in 2005. She was last seen leaving a bar with Dutch citizen Joran van der Sloot, then a 17-year-old student at an international school on the island.

Two weeks after Holloway vanished, van der Sloot was identified as a suspect and detained along with two of his friends. The trio gave ever-changing accounts of the moments leading up to Holloways disappearance but were eventually released after investigators failed to find Holloways body.

A judge later declared the teen dead and the investigation stalled for years. But in May, US prosecutors announced they had secured an extradition deal with Peru in connection with van der Sloots alleged money extortion of the Holloway family in 2010 for information about the location of their daughters remains.

Van der Sloot, who was facing a mountain of legal issues in his native Holland and then South Asia, moved to Peru five years after Holloways disappearance. In the South American country, he was convicted for the 2010 murder of a local woman and sentenced to serve 28 years in jail.

His extradition moved forward after a Peruvian judge on Tuesday confirmed the governments decision to temporarily transfer custody to US authorities so van der Sloots could face charges of wire fraud and extortion in Alabama.

Footage from NBC showed the suspect wearing jeans and a black puffer jacket while handcuffed.

On Monday, the convicted killers attorneys filed a writ of habeas corpus challenging extradition efforts, which a judge then ruled against.

This handout picture released by Interpol Peru shows Peruvian police and Interpol agents handing over Dutch Joran Van der Sloot (Interpol Peru/AFP/Getty)

Van der Sloot was serving a 28-year sentence in Peru after confessing to killing a 21-year-old woman (Reuters)

The time that van der Sloot ends up spending in the US will be extended until the conclusion of the criminal proceedings, including the appeal process should there be one, according to a resolution published in Perus federal register. He will then return to Peru to continue his sentence.

Peruvian authorities over the weekend moved van der Sloot from a maximum-security prison in the Andes to a detention facility in the capital, Lima, from which he was due to be taken to the airport sometime on Thursday. It is not immediately clear when he is expected to make his first court appearance in the US.

A sign of Natalee Holloway, an Alabama high school graduate who disappeared while on a graduation trip to Aruba (AP2005)

Holloways disappearance made international headlines and sparked a furore in the US. The teenagers parents went to the island to pass out fliers and monitor searches, also appearing on national television shows to maintain pressure on investigators.

Van der Sloot initially claimed that he left Holloway drunk and sleeping on a beach, but has since made and retracted a series of claims, including that he got a friend to dump her dead or unconscious body in the sea and even that he sold the teenager into sex slavery.

He pleaded guilty in 2012 to murdering 21-year-old Stephany Flores, a business student from a prominent Peruvian family. Flores was killed on 30 May 2010, exactly five years to the day of Holloways disappearance.

Flores beaten body was found hours later in van der Sloots hotel room after hed checked out without returning his key. Days after the discovery, prosecutors revealed that van der Sloot had allegedly solicited money on promises he would reveal the location of Holloways remains in Aruba.

Joran van der Sloot arrives to the courtroom for his sentence at San Pedro prison in Lima, Peru, Friday Jan. 13 (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Holloways mother Beth Holloway reportedly made a $25,000 down payment and arranged for an attorney to travel to Aruba, only for the information to prove to be false.

Van der Sloot was arrested in Chile and extradited back to Peru, later confessing he killed Flores in a fit of rage after she found out his connection to the Holloway case. Earlier this year, he was sentenced to an additional 18 years in prison for drug smuggling, according to the Telegraaf.

The maximum sentence for the charges he faces in Alabama is 20 years for extortion and 30 years for wire fraud.
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A woman who had her leg amputated when she was rescued from the rubble of her collapsed building in Iowa has opened up about her fight for survival.

For the first six hours after an apartment complex in Davenport, Iowa, came crashing down, Qaunishia Peach White Berry was trapped under the wreckage. Her wife Lexus Berry narrowly escaped the 28 May collapse but remained at the site of the tragedy, hoping to hear news of a miracle rescue.

In an interview from her hospital bed with CNN, Ms White Berry recalled fruitlessly yelling her wifes name amid the confusion. Only four other people remained trapped in the building at that time; another woman who was rescued 24 hours after the collapse and three men whose bodies were recovered days later.

I was so scared. I was just like, What just took place? Ms White Berry said. [I thought], I have to make it, especially for (Lexus). I have to be able to tell this story.

When search crews finally located Ms White Berry, they realised her left leg was trapped between a large concrete block and a steel girder. The decision was made right then and there that she would only have a chance at survival if her leg was amputated.

When she was unresponsive, we just made a decision: Lets get her out of here, Dr Calvin Atwell, a trauma surgeon who responded to the tragedy, told CNN. We knew that shed been trapped for six hours, and we knew that she wasnt going to survive much longer.

Ms Berry had a chance to comfort her wife before Dr Atwell performed the procedure. But the void space available was so small that only the surgeon could stay with Ms White Berry for the remainder of the operation.

Ms White Berry was eventually airlifted to an area hospital, where she is still recovering from the emotional and physical wounds she experienced.

Quanishia Peach White Berry (right) lost her leg during her rescue from the rubble at the site of a building collapse in Davenport, Iowa (CNN)

She is now determined to regain her life.

The couple lost their home, their belongings and their two cats. A GoFundMe page has been created by friends to help cover costs that incur as Ms White Berry and her wife search for a new home that is accessible.

Im looking forward to healing and getting good treatment, good care. Im already seeing myself walking again. I dont feel stopped by any means, Ms White Berry told CNN.

The couple has also filed a lawsuit against the City of Davenport and building owner Andrew Wold for permanent and catastrophic personal injuries.

Their attorney told CNN that the defendants had allegedly failed to act on multiple warnings that the buildings structural integrity was compromised.

Workers move debris at the site of a building collapse, Monday, June 5, 2023, in Davenport, Iowa (AP)

While trapped she was terrified, not sure if she would survive or be found, all the while enduring water and structural debris raining down on top of her, an excerpt of the suit read. The only way the emergency responders could extricate Peach was to amputate her left leg above the knee.

Last weekend, city officials announced they had recovered the remains of three previously missing tenants: Branden Colvin Sr, 42, Daniel Prien, 60, and Ryan Hitchcock, 51.

Despite a myriad of reports from past and current tenants that the buildings conditions were unsafe, a structural engineer hired by the owner deemed the structure safe, officials said.

The building was undergoing permitted repairs at the time of the collapse. Last year, nearly 20 permits were filed, mainly for plumbing or electrical issues, according to the Associated Press.

A look at The Davenport, one week after the building partially collapsed (Quad City Times)

Months before the incident, city officials and the buildings owner were warned that parts of The Davenport were unstable. One former maintenance employee also told The Independent he warned the owner of the buildings deteriorating conditions.

Iowa court records reviewed by The Independent show that Mr Wold and Davenport Hotel LLC are listed as defendants in a civil enforcement action brought by the City of Davenport on 30 May.

Mr Wold is facing a $300 fine for failing to keep the building in a safe, sanitary and structurally sound condition.

The Independents attempts to contact Mr Wold have been unsuccessful.
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Iran is providing Russia with materials to build a drone manufacturing plant near Moscow, according to a newly-declassified US intelligence report released by the White House on Friday.

The plant in the Alabuga special economic zone several hundred miles east of the Russian capital will be used to counter Ukraines latest offensive and could be operational early next year, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.

The White House released declassified satellite imagery from April of the industrial location where it believes the plant will probably be built.

The White House also described how drones are being shipped across the Caspian Sea from the Iranian city of Amirabad to Makhachkala, in Russia, and then transferred to two air bases to be deployed in attacks on civilian populations in Ukraine.

This is a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful to Ukraine, to Irans neighbors, and to the international community, Mr Kirby said, according to the Associated Press.

We are continuing to use all the tools at our disposal to expose and disrupt these activities including by sharing this with the public  and we are prepared to do more.

The latest declassified report is a continuation of the USs strategy to publicise ties between the two countries to undermine Russias invasion.

The US has previously warned of deepening military ties between Tehran and Moscow.

This image provided by Maxar Technologies and released by The White House shows an industrial site several hundred miles east of Moscow where US intelligence officials believe Russia is building a drone factory with Irans help, (Maxar Technologies via AP)

In December, the Biden administration said it believed Tehran and Moscow were considering standing up a drone assembly line in Russia for to support its illegal invasion of Ukraine.

In exchange, Russia offered Iran unprecedented defense cooperation including missiles, electronics and air defences, Mr Kirby said in February.

Russia has also provided the Tehran regime with tactical support as it tries to stamp out a popular uprising at home

Russian forces have been terrorising Ukraine since the fall of 2022 with attacks from Iranian-made suicide drones.

Russia has used them to target residential buildings, playgrounds, power stations and bridges resulting in dozens of civilian deaths, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said.

The White House is preparing to release a new advisory for businesses and governments to ensure they are not inadvertently aiding the Iranian-Russian nexus, Mr Kirby added.

The US and its European allies have issued new rules in recent months to attempt to cut the flow of drone parts to the two countries, he said.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin announced Russia will begin deploying tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus in months.
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Wisconsin police are searching for a six-year-old girl who was last seen by her family when she was put to bed and found missing the following morning.

The Cudahy Police Department issued a critical alert on Friday for missing youngster Madelyn Chitwood, who goes by Maddie.

Maddie is white, stands 4 feet tall, and weighs approximately 60 pounds. Police say she has short blonde hair and blue eyes. Her front teeth are missing and she was wearing her underwear last night when she went to bed.

Authorities say that she was last seen in her home shortly after 9pm on Thursday, and police were contacted on Friday morning when her sister noticed that she was not in her room or anywhere else in the house.

Cudahy residents around East Whittaker Avenue, if you have video surveillance such as a Ring Door Bell camera, we ask that you please check any recent alerts, police said in a statement.

Officials say that it is unknown what time she left or where she would have gone.

The FBI took part in the investigation into her disappearance, alongside local police departments and a K-9 unit.

Authorities say that at around 12.39pm CDT, the youngster was found safe at a home in the neighbourhood.
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Scientists are trying to track down a man in Ohio who appears to be the only person carrying a particular "cryptic" strain of Covid.

Marc Johnson, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, captivated his Twitter followers earlier this year when he asked for help tracking down the provenance of the unique variant.

"Help me solve a COVID cryptic lineage mystery," he wrote at the time.

He discovered the new lineage of the virus while reviewing a database of Covid samples, he told Insider. More than that, he learned that all instances of the unique strain appeared to be coming from a single person in Ohio.

People suffering from infections shed viral material when they cough, sneeze, or through defecation. Mr Johnson found that the majority of the viral material detected has been found in Columbus, Ohio's capital, and the city of Washington Court House.

He believes the infected individual likely lives in one place and works in the other.

Mr Johnson said the rogue variant living in a single sick person in Ohio doesn't warrant immediate public health concerns, but did say that the infected individual is likely suffering from long Covid and could probably use help.

He and his Twitter followers used US Census Data to determine that approximately 1,600 people make a commute between Washington Court House and Columbus. Someone among those 1,600 is likely carrying the cryptic lineage.

The professor noted that whoever the mystery carrier is, they could be helpful to researchers seeking to better understand how the virus changes and how individuals become super-shedders of the virus.

He also assured readers that there was "no manhunt" for the infected individual, and that he was not trying to violate the individual's medical privacy. Mr Johnson said he wanted to make the search public in hopes someone who has been feeling bad for some time may recognize themselves as a potential candidate.

The professor told Insider that there are no tests for detecting Covid-19 in stool, so it is highly unlikely the infected person will figure out on their own that they have the virus. He said he hopes the sick individual sees the post and is able to connect the dots between their likely symptoms and their location.

He said the infected individual likely is experiencing some kind of gastrointestinal symptoms, and may be completely unaware they have long Covid.

"I would love to know the details, [but] mostly I want them to seek treatment," he said.

This isn't the first cryptic Covid strain Mr Johnson has identified; he has been studying viral lineages found in wastewater since 2021, and may hold clues to potential future variants of the virus.

That was the case during the pandemic, when researchers realized that the Omicron variant looked very similar to the cryptic lineages they had previously discovered in wastewater.
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Donald Trump has been indicted on federal charges relating to the storage of classified national defence documents dating from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.

The 45th president of the United States will now appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday 13 June, his lawyer has since confirmed. Should he ultimately be convicted, he could face a maximum combined sentence of 100 years in prison.

His resort home was raided by the FBI in August 2022 as part of a hunt for search papers and other government records that should never have left the White House when his presidency ended in January 2021, a dramatic move that came as a surprise to the general public.

However, legal filings have since shown that the investigation into possible violations of the Espionage Act that triggered that unprecedented action was months in the making.

The documents made clear that Trump had ample opportunity to return the material the government requested  and then subpoenaed  and revealed the sheer quantity of highly-sensitive documents he was keeping at the club.

A 49-page, 37-count indictment unsealed on 9 June revealed Mr Trump allegedly showed highly-classified documents to unauthorised persons on two separate occasions.

Here is a timeline of notable developments in the case so far.

20 January 2021

Then-president Donald Trump left the White House for Florida ahead of President-elect Joe Bidens inauguration. According to the General Services Administration (GSA), members of Trump's transition team were responsible for packing items into boxes, putting boxes on pallets and shrink-wrapping those pallets so they could be transported.

Prior to shipping, GSA said it required the outgoing transition team to certify in writing that the items being shipped were required to wind down the Office of the Former President and would be utilised as the Office transitioned to its new location in Florida.

GSA did not examine the contents of the boxes and had no knowledge of the contents prior to shipping, according to an agency spokesperson. GSA was also not responsible for the former presidents personal belongings, which were transported by a private moving company.

May 2021

After the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) realised that documents from Trumps presidency were missing from the material that it received as he left office, the agency requested the records from Trump on or about 6 May 2021.

December 2021

NARA continued to make requests for records it believed to be missing for several months.

Around late December 2021, a Trump representative informed the agency that an additional 12 boxes of records that should have been turned over had been found at the former presidents Mar-a-Lago club and residence and were ready to be retrieved.

18 January 2022

NARA received 15 boxes of presidential records that had been stored at Mar-a-Lago  14 of which, it would later be revealed, contained classified documents. The documents were found mixed in with an assortment of other material, including newspapers, magazines, photos and personal correspondence.

In total, the boxes were found to contain 184 documents with classified markings, including 67 marked confidential, 92 secret and 25 top secret.

Agents who inspected the boxes also found special markings suggesting they included information from highly sensitive human sources or the collection of electronic signals authorised by a court under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

9 February 2022

The special agent in charge of NARAs Office of the Inspector General sent a referral to the Justice Department (DOJ) via email after a preliminary review of the boxes revealed numerous classified documents.

Of most significant concern," they wrote, according to a heavily-redacted affidavit released last week, was that highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly [sic] identified."

After an initial review of the NARA referral, the FBI opened a criminal investigation into the matter.

10 February 2022

Trump's Save America PAC released a statement insisting the return of the documents had been as routine and no big deal.

Trump insisted the papers were given easily and without conflict and on a very friendly basis and added: It was a great honor to work with NARA to help formally preserve the Trump Legacy.

18 February 2022

NARA revealed in a letter to a congressional oversight committee that classified information was found in the 15 recovered boxes and confirmed the Justice Department referral.

Trumps Save America PAC released another statement insisting: The National Archives did not find anything but "were given, upon request, Presidential Records in an ordinary and routine process to ensure the preservation of my legacy and in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.

12 April 2022

NARA informed Trump of its intent to provide the documents to the FBI, at the request of the Justice Department. A Trump representative requested an extension until 29 April.

Donald Trump has continued to protest his innocence throughout the affair (AP)

29 April 2022

The Justice Department sent a letter to Trumps lawyers seeking immediate access to the material citing important national security interest.

Access to the materials is not only necessary for purposes of our ongoing criminal investigation, but the Executive Branch must also conduct an assessment of the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported and take any necessary remedial steps, the department wrote.

Trump's lawyers requested an additional extension.

10 May 2022

NARA informed Trumps lawyers that it will provide the FBI access to the records as soon as 12 May.

11 May 2022

The Justice Department issued a subpoena for additional records.

3 June 2022

Three FBI agents and a DOJ attorney went to Mar-a-Lago to collect additional material offered by a Trump attorney in response to the subpoena. They were given a single Redweld envelope, double-wrapped in tape, containing the documents, according to a 30 August filing.

That envelope, it was later found, contained 38 documents with classification markings, including five documents marked confidential, 16 marked secret and 17 marked top secret.

During the visit, the filing said: Counsel for the former President offered no explanation as to why boxes of government records, including 38 documents with classification markings, remained at the Premises nearly five months after the production of the Fifteen Boxes and nearly one-and-a-half years after the end of the Administration.

Trumps lawyers also told investigators that all of the records that had come from the White House were stored in one location  a Mar-a-Lago storage room. Investigators were permitted to visit the room, but were explicitly prohibited from opening or looking inside any of the boxes, they reported, giving no opportunity for the government to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained.

The Justice Department was also given a signed certification letter stating that a diligent search had been completed and that no documents remained.

8 June 2022

The Justice Department sent a letter to Trumps lawyer requesting that the storage room be secured and that all of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago (along with any other items in that room) be preserved in that room in their current condition until farther notice.

5 August 2022

The Justice Department filed an application for a search and seizure warrant of Mar-a-Lago, citing probable cause" that additional presidential records and records containing classified information remained in various parts of the club.

There is also probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction would be found, read a heavily-redacted copy of the affidavit laying out the FBIs rationale for the search.

The Justice Department also revealed in the 30 August filing that it had found evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the governments investigation.

US magistrate judge Bruce Reinhart in South Florida approved the application that same day.

8 August 2022

The FBI executed the search at Mar-a-Lago, seizing 36 items of evidence, including boxes and containers holding more than 100 classified records, an order pardoning Trump ally Roger Stone and information about the President of France.

Agents found classified documents both in the storage room as well as in the former presidents office  including three classified documents found not in boxes, but in office desks.

They included items so sensitive that, In some instances, even the FBI counterintelligence personnel and DOJ attorneys conducting the review required additional clearances before they were permitted to review certain documents.

That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the diligent search that the former Presidents counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the 3 June certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter, the Justice Department wrote.

Trump and his allies, meanwhile, cast the search as a weaponisation of the criminal justice system aimed at damaging him politically as he prepares for another potential White House run.

Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida (AP)

12 August 2022

Judge Reinhart unsealed the warrant that authorized the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago, which details that federal agents were investigating potential violations of three federal laws, including the Espionage Act.

26 August 2022

A highly redacted version of the affidavit laying out the FBIs rationale for searching Mar-a-Lago was released.

30 August 2022

The Justice Department responded to Trump's request for a special master in a filing that included new details about the investigation, including an assertion that classified documents were likely concealed and removed from a storage room at Mar-a-Lago as part of an effort to obstruct the probe.

It included a photograph of some the material found at the club, including cover pages of paperclip-bound documents  some marked as TOP SECRET//SCI with bright yellow borders and one marked as SECRET//SCI with a rust-colored border  splayed out on a carpet at Mar-a-Lago.

Terrible the way the FBI, during the Raid of Mar-a-Lago, threw documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending it was me that did it!), and then started taking pictures of them for the public to see, Trump responded. Thought they wanted them kept Secret?

6 September 2022

US district judge Aileen Cannon grants Trumps request for a special master over DOJ objections, an action that delays the investigation. Senior US district judge Raymond Dearie of Brooklyn is later named to run that third-party review.

15 September 2022

The Justice Department seeks to access the classified materials taken in the search. Cannon rejects the bid, but the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals later allows DOJ to review the documents.

16 November 2022

Trump announces he will run for the Republican nomination in the 2024 US presidential election.

22 November 2022

US attorney general Merrick Garland appoints US special counsel Jack Smith to preside over criminal matters relating to Trump, including the classified documents investigation.

Trump addressing his supporters (AFP/Getty)

1 December 2022

A federal appeals court reverses Cannons appointment of a special master in the case, finding she lacked the authority to appoint one. The ruling gives the Justice Department access to all materials seized in the search of Trumps property.

7 December 2022

At least two classified records are found during a further search of Trumps properties, a source says.

December 2022

Trump lawyer Tim Parlatore appears before a federal grand jury in Washington to describe efforts to search Trump properties for any remaining government documents.

24 March 2023

Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran appears before a federal grand jury in Washington after a federal judge finds Smiths team made a sufficient showing that Trump may have deceived his attorneys in furtherance of a crime.

17 May 2023

Parlatore confirms he has left Trumps legal team. He later says on CNN that he exited over disagreements with others over handling of the probe, claiming Trump aide Boris Epshteyn prevented attorneys from properly defending the former president. A Trump spokesperson denies the claims.

8 June 2023

Trump fumes on Truth Social that he has been indicted over the case, insisting: I am an innocent man.

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, he seethed in a separate post.

9 June 2023

The 37-count indictment against Mr Trump is unsealed, revealing he allegedly showed classified documents to unauthorised individuals on two separate occasions.

The charges include: willful retention of national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.

Additional reporting by agencies
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The historic federal criminal case against former President Donald Trump has been assigned to a judge he appointed who faced blistering criticism over her decision to grant his request for an independent arbiter to review documents obtained during an FBI search of his Florida estate.

A person familiar with the development confirmed Friday that the case was assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon, a former federal prosecutor who was nominated to the bench by Trump in 2020 and sits in Fort Pierce, about an hour's drive north of Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence.

The indictment makes Trump the first former president in U.S. history to be charged with federal crimes. Trump said he has been ordered to appear in court in Miami on Tuesday.

While the indictment remained under seal Friday, two people familiar with the situation, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly by name, said that it included seven criminal charges. Those include willful retention of national defense information  a crime under the Espionage Act  and obstruction of justice, according to Trumps attorney.

Cannon was thrust into the spotlight last year when she issued what many legal experts saw as an extraordinary and unusually broad decision to appoint a special master to review the documents seized by the FBI.

As part of that case, Cannon temporarily barred federal agents and prosecutors from reviewing a batch of classified documents seized during the search. Her order was ultimately thrown out by a federal appeals court, which found she had overstepped.

Trumps supporters had cheered her ruling as a check on what they viewed as a politically motivated probe. His lawyers had argued that a special master was necessary to ensure an independent review of records taken during the search and so that any personal information or documents could be filtered out and returned to Trump.

But some experts said the judge gave undue deference to the former president and unnecessarily put on hold certain investigative work by the Justice Department.

Cannon previously worked as an assistant U.S. attorney, mainly out of the federal prosecutors office in Fort Pierce, Florida, which is part of the same federal district as Miami but about 130 miles (209 kilometers) to the north. Beginning in 2013, Cannon prosecuted 41 cases as part of the Major Crimes Division, later handling appeals of criminal convictions and sentences.

She has also been a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that has championed judges appointed by Trump, including Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Born in Cali, Colombia, in 1981, Cannon came to the United States as a child, ultimately graduating from Duke University in 2003.

One of her cases as a prosecutor involved a defendant in a major $800 million Ponzi scheme who unsuccessfully appealed his numerous fraud convictions to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Her opposing counsel in that case, longtime Miami defense attorney Richard Klugh, described Cannon as very bright and talented and fair to the defense.

I didnt see anything I could characterize as anything other than good lawyering, and no political bias whatsoever, Klugh said, adding that he has worked on cases handled by Judge Cannon, although he has not appeared in her courtroom.

Shes known for affording fair process and hearings. You like somebody who actually hears you out, he said.

She was asked during her 2020 Senate confirmation process whether she had any discussions with anyone, including people at the White House or the Justice Department, about loyalty to President Trump. In a written response, she replied: No.

During her college years, Cannon wrote a series of articles for El Nuevo Herald, a Spanish-language newspaper in southern Florida owned by The Miami Herald. According to a list of articles provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Cannon wrote primarily about health- and culture-related topics.

After earning a degree from the University of Michigan in 2007, Cannon clerked for U.S. District Judge Steven M. Colloton on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit. She next worked in private practice in Washington for three years with the prominent international law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher.

During her July 2020 confirmation hearing, the then-prosecutor noted that her mother had to flee the repressive Castro regime in search of freedom and security, leaving Cuba at the age of 7.

Thank you for teaching me about the blessing that is this country and the importance of securing the rule of law for generations to come, Cannon said, addressing her mother.

___

Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.

___

Kinnard reported from Columbia, South Carolina and Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Jonathan J. Cooper contributed from Phoenix.

___

More on Donald Trump-related investigations: https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump
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The federal judge who will initially preside over Donald Trumps criminal indictment in the classified documents case was appointed by the former president and delivered him a series of controversial and favourable rulings during the investigation.

US District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to the bench in 2020 during Mr Trumps final year in office, is scheduled to preside over his federal court case in Miami when he faces seven counts in an indictment involving his alleged mishandling of sensitive records removed from the White House and kept at his Mar-a-Lago property. ABC News first reported the development.

Last year, Judge Cannon appointed a special master to review materials seized by federal law enforcement and restricted the FBI from using those documents as part of the investigation until she completed a review, effectively freezing the US Department of Justice probe.

That order was ultimately thrown out entirely by a federal appeals court.

The three-judge panel sharply criticised Judge Cannons order, writing that it is extraordinary for a warrant to be executed at the home of a former president  but not in a way that affects our legal analysis or otherwise gives the judiciary license to interfere in an ongoing investigation.

The law is clear, the panel wrote. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.

Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who signed a warrant for federal authorities to search Mar-a-Lago in August 2021, will preside over Mr Trumps first court appearance in Miami on 13 June.

With a relatively brief career before her federal appointment, Judge Cannon, among a crowd of Federal Society acolytes who have reshaped the federal judiciary, was confirmed by the US Senate by a vote of 56-21.

She previously served as an assistant US attorney for the Justice Department in the Southern District of Florida.

If she does not recuse herself from the case and she remains a trial judge, she could play a potentially critical role in the cases development, including whether to set a trial before or after presidential primary elections and the general election in 2024. Mr Trump is seeking the Republican nomination for president.

She also could determine whether to admit certain evidence, decide on motions or dismiss arguments entirely. She also would preside over sentencing, if there is a conviction. Her decisions also would be subject to the review of a federal appellate court.

An investigation from special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed to lead the Justice Department probe into the former presidents alleged mishandling of documents after leaving the White House, reportedly is looking into whether his lawyers falsely certified that he returned classified records to the government, or whether he concealed them, illegally, and lied to his legal team

Mr Trump is expected to surrender, face arrest, and be formally charged as soon as next week, after a federal grand jury believed there was enough evidence to bring charges against him.

Federal prosecutors are expected to charge him with the willful retention of national defence secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements, obstruction and witness tampering. A potential sentence, if convicted, could include decades in prison.

The exact charges against Mr Trump have not been announced, and it is unclear whether an indictment against him will remain sealed until it is formally presented in federal court.
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Former president Donald Trumps attorney Alina Habba said on Fox News that she is ashamed and embarrassed to be a lawyer after the former president was indicted.

Ms Habba spoke on Jesse Watters show amid news that a federal grand jury indicted Mr Trump on charges related to his allegedly unlawful retention of national defence information.

Mr Trumps attorney said the indictment was a distraction from supposed impropriety on behalf of President Joe Biden, pointing to the fact that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer was planning to hold FBI Director Christoper Wray, whom Mr Trump nominated to lead the bureau in 2017, in contempt of Congress for supposedly withholding documents. House Republicans have so far come up short in their accusations against Mr Biden.

Mr Comer retracted the contempt vote after the FBI agreed to share documents, The New York Times reported.

House Republicans have so far come up short in their accusations against Mr Biden.

Every single time there is a coordinated dance that is becoming obvious to the American people because they are smart, Ms Habba said.

The Trump attorney added that the indictments of the twice-impeached former president were the equivalent of a shiny ball meant to distract the American public.

I'm embarrassed to be a lawyer at this moment, she said. Honestly, I am ashamed. I'm ashamed to be a lawyer. I'm ashamed that this is the state of our country.

Ms Habba claimed the indictment showed the United States had a two-tiered system of justice.

And it is so obvious that there's this dual system of justice, she said. This is selective prosecution, selective persecution. It is absolute persecution. It is Russia third world stuff, and it should not be happening.

Mr Trump first broadcast the indictment on his Truth Social networking platform on Thursday, one day after The Independent had reported that federal prosecutors planned to ask a grand jury to indict Mr Trump.

I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election, Mr Trump said, denying his guilt and proclaiming he is an innocent man.

Mr Trump said he has been summoned to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday by 3 pm ET.

The 49-page indictment was unsealed on Friday afternoon, revealing Mr Trump allegedly showed classified documents to unauthorised people on two separate occasions.

The 37 counts against him include: willful retention of national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.
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While many Republicans in the presidential field remain hestitant to criticise Donald Trump over his various indictments, one candidate has gone so far as to say he should drop out of the Republican nominating contest.

Donald Trumps actions  from his willful [sic] disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of law  should not define our nation or the Republican Party, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson said in a statement.

This is a sad day for our country. While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.

Mr Hutchinson, who is trailing far behind the likes of Mr Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis in early polls of the Republican race, has long voiced his opposition to Mr Trumps style and disregard for democracy.

Now, with Mr Trump becoming the first ever former US president to be federally indicted, Mr Hutchinson has taken his feelings a step further.

In different times, the idea that a candidate could survive a federal indictment for mishandling classified documents and obstructing justice would be difficult to believe.

But these times, and this candidate, may be different.

Mr Trump has already been indicted once this year, in New York, for his alleged role in facilitating a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels, and has remained the favoured to win the Republican nomination regardless.

While Mr Hutchinson called on Mr Trump to leave the race, others of Mr Trumps primary opponents took a different tack. The entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, for instance, said in a statement that he would pardon Mr Trump if elected president.

It would be much easier for me to win this election if Trump werent in the race, but I stand for principles over politics, Mr Ramaswamy said. I commit to pardon Trump promptly on January 20, 2025 and to restore the rule of law in our country.

Mr DeSantis, meanwhile, vowed to bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias, and end weaponisation once and for all.

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina sounded a similar note, arguing on Fox News that what weve seen over the last several years is the weaponization of the department of justice against the former president.

Mr Trumps comments in the aftermath of his indictment were, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most strident of all.

Were leading against Biden by a lot, a tremendous amount, Mr Trump said in a video posted to Truth Social.

And we went up to a level where they figured the way theyre going to stop us is by using whats called warfare. And thats what it is. This is warfare for the law. And we cant let it happen. We cant let it happen. Our country is going to hell, and they come after Donald Trump.
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What do the transgender whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the 1950s Soviet spy Julius Rosenberg and former president Donald Trump all have in common?

The answer, following the indictment arising from the discovery of classified documents at Mr Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, is that all four have been investigated under suspicion of violating the Espionage Act of 1917.

When the FBI raided Mr Trumps property last August, they were looking for items that might violate the Act, which regulates the handling of confidential documents relating to national security.

Most often used against spies, whistleblowers and government employees who leak documents to journalists, the Espionage Act carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison.

So what exactly is Mr Trump being investigated for?

A contentious law with roots in First World War paranoia

The Espionage Act is a controversial and often contested law that dates from Americas entry into the First World War against Germany in 1917.

Even before joining the conflict, President Woodrow Wilson had urged Congress to crack down on immigrant groups and radical political movements that he claimed had poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.

At the time, German-Americans were a large and influential ethnic group, with those born in Germany comprising 2.7 per cent of the US population and 18.5 per cent of the foreign-born population, according to the census of 1910.

Over 27 per cent of the nations foreign white stock spoke German as their mother tongue. There were German-language schools, churches, and newspapers throughout the country, which faced backlash from English-speaking groups.

Passed just two months after Wilson joined the war and bolstered one year later in 1918, the Espionage Act criminalised many forms of dissent against the war, leading to jail sentences against speech-makers, leafleteers, film-makers and newspaper editors.

The acts more radical provisions were dismantled after the war, but other parts remain in force  including those listed in Section 793 of the US Code of Laws, which bans citizens from leaking or mishandling information relating to national defence.

Since then, the Act has been used to prosecute the Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, National Security Agency leakers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and various other people who leaked US government secrets to journalists, the public or other nation states.

What does the Espionage Act ban?

US Code Section 793 forbids various forms of obtaining, leaking or failing to properly look after information respecting the national defence.

For example, it forbids anyone to acquire any information about US national security facilities if they intend or have reason to believe that the information might be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of any foreign nation.

The Act also bans people lawfully entrusted with defence information that could harm the US from giving it to any unauthorised person, or from wilfully retaining it and failing to deliver it to the officer entitled to receive it.

Another provision, wider in scope, makes it a crime for anyone trusted with such information (such as presidents) to let it be removed from its proper place of custody, lost, stolen, or otherwise waylaid through gross negligence.

The same provision requires officials who become aware of such an incident to make prompt report to his superior officer, although it is unclear who Mr Trumps superior officer would be in this case.

According to the search warrant issued to agents last summer, the FBI seized various boxes and folders described as including miscellaneous secret documents and miscellaneous top secret documents.

What could happen to Donald Trump now?

Mr Trump has claimed he is being wrongly persecuted since the investigation began, just as he did throughout his presidency when his election campaigns possible ties to Russia were closely examined.

This raid of President Trumps home was not just unprecedented, but unnecessary  and now they are leaking lies and innuendos to try to explain away the weaponisation of government against their dominant political opponent, a spokesman said in response to Augusts raid.

In response to his indictment on Thursday (8 June), Mr Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform: The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax.

I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!

If he is ultimately prosecuted and convicted, Mr Trump could be fined or imprisoned for up to 10 years, as well as forfeiting any property bought with proceeds of the crime.

A conviction could potentially prevent him from holding political office again, not only because of the reputational damage but because the Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution bans candidates who have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against [the US], or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

When the Socialist German-American journalist and former congressman Victor Berger was elected to a second term in 1918, Congress refused to seat him because he had been sentenced to 20 years in jail under the Espionage Act.

However, with Mr Trumps Republican allies rallying to his defence  and promising to investigate the way the FBI have treated him  who knows where this saga could end?
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Donald Trump has been hit with a second sweeping indictment  at a time when he is hot on the trail for another stint in the White House.

The former president announced on Truth Social on 8 June that he has been indicted by a federal grand jury over his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House - less than a year after the Department of Justice found a cache of secret papers at his home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. The DoJ later unsealed a 49-page, 37-count indictment accusing Mr Trump of showed highly-classified information to unauthorised persons on two separate occasions - among many other allegations.

Less than two months ago, he became the first former or current president to face criminal charges on 30 March when a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict him on criminal charges over the hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the days before the 2016 presidential election. He pleaded not guilty in that case to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in order to conceal an alleged scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by suppressing negative stories about him.

And less than one month ago, a Manhattan federal jury found on 9 May that Mr Trump sexually abused Elle magazine columnist E Jean Carroll in a dressing room in Manhattans Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s. Ms Carroll, 79, sued the former president for raping her and then destroying her reputation when he accused of lying about the encounter, claiming that she was not his type.

Now that Mr Trump has not one but two indictments on top of his loss in Ms Carrolls case, what does his political future look like?

Can Trump still run for president?

In short, yes. There are no restrictions in the US Constitution preventing anyone indicted or convicted of a crime, or even currently serving prison time, from running for or winning the presidency.

Even if Mr Trump were to be tried and convicted in one of the so-called quick trials he has repeatedly cheered Chinas government for operating in cases of drug offences, he could still run the entirety of his presidential campaign from a prison cell.

What is far less clear is what would happen were he to win in that scenario.

Just as there are no restrictions in the Constitution on a person running while under indictment, there is no explanation for what should occur in the event that they win.

There is nothing in the document that would automatically grant Mr Trump a reprieve from prison time, save for the likelihood that any charges brought by federal authorities, were they still being litigated at the point when he assumed the presidency for a second time, would be dropped due to the Justice Departments refusal to prosecute a sitting president.

In Ms Carrolls case, Mr Trump did not face any jail time because it was a civil trial.

State-level charges like the ones being filed by Mr Bragg in the Manhattan case are far trickier and would fall outside of Mr Trumps prospective presidential pardon power were they to conclude in a conviction.

Were conviction on state charges to occur alongside a Trump election victory, it would likely lead to a massive legal fight to determine whether there was a way for the former president to worm his way out of serving time.

If Mr Trump was unable to avoid that outcome, it would almost certainly lead to his impeachment (for a historic third time) or removal via the 25th Amendment, which allows the Cabinet to remove a president who is unable to perform their duties.

There are many duties and trappings of the presidency that he would simply be unable to fulfill from a prison cell, the viewing of classified materials to name just one.

Any potential conviction of Mr Trump is still a long way off and little more than a distant possibility.

But the conversations he has started with his bid for the presidency, despite facing two indictments and multiple criminal investigations, have already pushed parts of theoretical US constitutional law into a much realer place than many experts ever believed they would live to see.

This story was updated on 8 June 2023 to reflect new developments
 Close Defiant Donald Trump attacks nasty Pence and deranged special consul Jack Smith

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Former president Donald Trump gave defiant speeches at two Republican state conventions on Saturday in Georgia and North Carolina , just one day after he was indicted for keeping highly-classified information at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.

The 49-page, 38-count indictment was unsealed after Mr Trump released a series of social media posts revealing that he has been indicted by a grand jury under the supervision of Special Counsel Jack Smith.

The former president has fumed online about the charges and lashed out at Mr Smith calling him a deranged lunatic. The special counsel for his part gave a brief explanation of the sweeping indictment and reiterated that in America, the law applies to everyone. It appears Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon will remain on the case unless she recuses herself.

Mr Trump repeated his attacks on Mr Smith onstage over the weekend and on Roger Stones radio show. He also told Politico he would not quit the 2024 primary race even if convicted.

Meanwhile, the Sunday morning political talk shows were stacked with both Mr Trumps defenders and detractors, with notable appearances by Jim Jordan and Lindsey Graham, and a particularly devastating analysis by former attorney general Bill Barr.
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Donald Trump made the stunning admission that he held onto secret military information that he hadnt declassified in a bombshell tape believed to be at the heart of his indictment on federal charges.

A transcript of the 2021 tape was revealed by CNN on Friday morning, hours after news emerged that Mr Trump had been indicted on federal charges relating to the storage of classified national defence documents dating from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.

In the tape, first reported last week, the ex-president speaks about retaining information that he says as president, I could have declassified, but now I cant.

He specifically referenced a classified Department of Defense document regarding an attack on Iran, according to the transcript.

The new indictment was unsealed on Friday afternoon, revealing that Mr Trump has in fact been charged over the incident captured on the tape.

The 49-page document lays out the two instances on which Mr Trump showed classified papers to unauthorised persons at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club.

The first, in July 2021, was during an interview with a writer and a publisher who were working on a book by his ex-chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Those are the voices allegedly heard on the tape.

According to the indictment, Mr Trump showed the writer, the book publisher, and two staff members who lacked security clearances a plan of attack put together by General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had recently been reported as criticising Mr Trump by the New Yorker.

The recording showed that Mr Trump was aware that the documents he had brought with him from the White House after leaving office on 20 January that year were still classified.

In public, Mr Trump has argued that all of the files he took to Florida had been declassified and he has claimed that the investigation is a witch hunt and an attempt to hinder his 2024 campaign to return to the White House.

It was reported last week that prosecutors had procured the audio recording - the transcript of which implies that Mr Trump is showing the document hes speaking about during the conversation.

CNN reported that several sources have said that the sound from the recording includes the rustling of papers, indicating that Mr Trump may have been moving the document around. But its not clear if it was the document regarding Iran.

Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, Mr Trump said. This was done by the military and given to me.

At the time, Mr Trump was complaining about Gen Milley. The meeting took place not long after a story published by The New Yorker outlined how Gen Milley told the Joint Chiefs during the last days of Mr Trumps time in office to make sure that the then-president not give any illegal orders and that Gen Milley should be made aware if there were any concerns.

Well, with Milley  uh, let me see that, Ill show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isnt that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him, Mr Trump said, the transcript shows. They presented me this  this is off the record, but  they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasnt done by me, this was him.

All sorts of stuff  pages long, look. Wait a minute, lets see here. I just found, isnt that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, Mr Trump added.

Secret and confidential are both degrees of classified information.

Special Counsel Jack Smith has led the federal probe into Mr Trumps handling of classified information and his obstruction of the investigation. Mr Trumps attorney said the 45th president was summoned by the Department of Justice to appear in court on Tuesday in Miami.

The indictment features 38 counts, including: willful retention of national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.

Mr Smith is also investigating Mr Trumps attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Mr Smith was appointed in November to lead the Department of Justices documents and election probes by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
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Two lawyers working for former President Donald Trump have quit his legal team just a day after he was indicted on federal charges in connection to his handling of classified information.

For purposes of fighting the Greatest Witch Hunt of all time, now moving to the Florida Courts, I will be represented by Todd Blanche, Esq., and a firm to be named later, Mr Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday.

I want to thank Jim Trusty and John Rowley for their work, but they were up against a very dishonest, corrupt, evil, and sick group of people, the likes of which has not been seen before. We will be announcing additional lawyers in the coming days, he added.

Mr Rowley and Mr Trusty issued a joint statement in which they said that they had tendered our resignations as counsel to President Trump, and we will no longer represent him on either the indicted case or the January 6 investigation.

They noted that the indictment against Mr Trump has been filed in Miami, saying that this is a logical moment for us to step aside and let others carry the cases through to completion.

They added that it had been an honor to have spent the last year defending him, and we know he will be vindicated in his battle against the Biden Administrations partisan weaponization of the American justice system.

Mr Trusty and Mr Rowley now join Timothy Parlatore in the growing ranks of lawyers who have departed Mr Trumps legal teams.

Shortly after leaving, Mr Parlatore spoke to CNN, sharing allegations that another lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, had created discord within the group of attorneys.

Mr Trusty appeared on cable news on Thursday evening and on Friday morning defending Mr Trump before issuing his resignation statement alongside Mr Rowley later on Friday.

Three days before Mr Trump was indicted, Mr Trusty and Mr Rowley were two out of the three Trump lawyers who met with Justice Department officials, including Special Counsel Jack Smith, as they attempted to evade further legal action against the former president.

Two sources told The New York Times that Mr Trusty and Mr Rowley complained on several occasions about working alongside Mr Epshteyn. One person said this was part of the reasoning behind the lawyers leaving the legal team, adding that Mr Trusty and Mr Rowley are still on good terms with Mr Trump.

We have no plans to hold media appearances that address our withdrawals or any other confidential communications weve had with the president or his legal team, Mr Trusty and Mr Rowley said.

Unlike Mr Trusty and Mr Rowley, Mr Parlatore appeared on CNN to blame Mr Epshteyn following his departure.

The 37-count indictment against Mr Trump was unsealed on Friday afternoon, revealing that Mr Trump allegedly shared classified documents with unauthorised persons on two separate occasions.

The charges against him include: willful retention of national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.
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Elon Musk was derided on Twitter after he said there is far higher political interest in pursuing Donald Trump than other politicians after the former president was indicted for the second time.

The Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter tech tycoon on Thursday called Mr Trumps indictment differential enforcement, suggesting he was unfairly targeted by law enforcement based on political biases.

There does seem to be far higher interest in pursuing Trump compared to other people in politics, Mr Musk said, reacting to a tweet by a pro-Trump user.

Very important that the justice system rebut what appears to be differential enforcement or they will lose public trust.

Mr Musk, who has declared his support to the Republican party, has courted several prominent right-wing figures in politics and media.

Mr Musk also recently oversaw the launch of Florida governor Ron DeSantiss official 2024 campaign announcement to seek the Republican presidential nomination.

Following his takeover of Twitter last year, he had also reinstated suspended accounts of several controversial figures, including Mr Trump and other Republicans.

Several users on Mr Musks platform commented sarcastically on his support for the twice impeached former president.

Could it be that they have evidence Trump committed crimes? Its not a real endearing defense to cry out loud what about my political adversaries? a user Marc said.

Isnt the rebuttal commonly known as a trial? asked another user sarcastically.

Differential Treatment? Like when poor people get higher/worse sentences because they cant afford representation? another user asked.

Twitter adviser and close associate of Mr Musk, David Sacks, also weighed in over Mr Trumps indictment.

He referred to allegations by officials that Joe Biden kept government documents in the garage of his Delaware home.

Trump has been indicted for keeping documents in his basement. Makes sense. Everyone knows youre supposed to keep them in your Corvette, Mr Shacks said.

Mr Trump was indicted on charges of retaining classified government documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence and obstruction of justice, according to a lawyer for the former US president.

He is facing seven criminal counts in the federal case, including one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, one count of making false statements and at least one count of unlawful retention of national defence information.

The case by the Justice Department has come as another legal setback for Mr Trump, who seeks a return to the White House in 2024.

This is the second indictment against Mr Trump after he faced charges over a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Mr Trump has claimed innocence in both cases.
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Embattled congressman George Santos has launched an appeal after he was told by a judge that the identities of the trio who paid his $500,000 bail must be publicly revealed.

Mr Santos, a Republican from New York, pleaded not guilty last month to federal charges of defrauding his campaign supporters, lying to obtain unemployment money and making false statements on congressional disclosure forms.

Magistrate Judge Anne Shields ruled on Tuesday that Mr Santos has until 12pm on Friday to appeal her decision at which point the names would be unsealed. She also sealed her decision, keeping the names a secret until the deadline.

On Friday morning, Mr Santos filed an eight-page appeal against the decision, arguing that if the three people involved were identified they may have to withdraw from acting as his guarantors, CBS News reported.

Lawyers for Mr Santos had argued on Monday that the names should not be made public, stating that they truly fear for their health, safety and well being.

The lawmakers attorney, Joseph Murray previously said that Mr Santos would rather go to jail ahead of his criminal trial than let the names become public.

My client would rather surrender to pretrial detainment than subject these suretors to what will inevitably come, Mr Murray had said.

The charges against Mr Santos include seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives.

Prosecutors allege he lied on financial forms submitted as part of his House candidacy, failed to disclose forms of income, overstated earnings, and used donations from his political campaign for personal purposes, including thousands of dollars of the solicited funds on personal expenses, including luxury designer clothing and credit card payments.

Mr Santos, who beat an incumbent Democrat to win his Long Island seat in 2022, has refused to resign despite the controversies he has become embroiled in.

Following his indictment, House Democrats introduced a resolution to have him expelled from the chamber. The House voted along party lines on Thursday to refer the resolution to the House Ethics Committee, with Mr Santos himself voting against his explosion.
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Donald Trump is on his way to a second arrest in less than three months.

A federal grand jury indicted the former president on 8 June on charges stemming from his alleged unlawful retention of national defence information, adding another criminal case to the legal pressure against the twice-impeached former president as he seeks to win his partys nomination in next years Republican presidential primary.

Mr Trump himself first revealed the indictment in a series of posts on his Truth Social platform, just one day after The Independent reported that federal prosecutors had planned to ask a grand jury to return an indictment against him on Thursday.

The 49-page indictment was unsealed on Friday (9 June), revealing 37 counts against the ex-president. They include: willful retention of national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.

A potential sentence, if convicted, could include decades in prison.

Following his indictment, Mr Trump declared that he was an innocent man. This is election interference and continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time, he ranted.

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, he wrote, using the phrase he has frequently used to describe the long-running probe.

In a subsequent post, Mr Trump said he had been summoned to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, 13 June, at 3pm ET.

At that time, Mr Trump is expected to be placed under arrest and booked before appearing before a judge.

It is unlikely that Mr Trump will be jailed following the arraignment. Instead, the proceedings are expected to follow what happened in early April when Mr Trump appeared in Manhattan court to face criminal criminal charges following Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Braggs investigation into hush payments leading up to the 2016 presidential election.

The charges come just days after a last-ditch attempt by his legal team to convince Department of Justice officials not to seek charges against him in the classified documents probe, which began early last year after National Archives and Records Administration officials discovered more than 100 documents bearing classification markings while inventorying a group of 15 boxes that were retrieved from Mr Trumps Palm Beach, Florida residence.

That discovery led Nara officials to notify the Department of Justice, which kicked off an investigation into how the documents ended up at Mr Trumps property.

Throughout the investigation, prosecutors and investigators harboured concerns that the ex-president was not being truthful about whether he had returned any and all classified documents in his possession to government custody as required under the Presidential Records Act, a post-Watergate-era law which states that all records of a presidential administration are the property of the government and must be turned over to Nara when a president leaves office.

But the classified nature of the records at issue added another wrinkle to the dispute between Mr Trump and the government he led from January 2017 to January 2021.

At times, the ex-president has claimed that he had used the sweeping classification and declassification authority afforded to the American chief executive to declassify any record he took with him to his Palm Beach home at Mar-a-Lago, the 1920s-era mansion he purchased in the 1990s and subsequently turned into a private social club.

No evidence has emerged that any such order was ever issued, and in audio recordings obtained by prosecutors, Mr Trump is said to have acknowledged that he did not declassify certain records that were in his possession long after his authority to possess them expired.

The Department of Justice is likely to attempt to have former President Donald Trump incarcerated if hes convicted following the indictment laying out 37 charges against him in relation to his handling of classified national defence information, a national security attorney has said.

National security lawyer and George Washington University law professor Kel McClanahan said that the department will probably want to go for incarceration in the case of Mr Trump, according to Insider.

Mr McClanahan said that the evidence in the indictment that was unsealed on Friday afternoon is intended to show that Mr Trump is a kingpin who knowingly broke the law, endangered national security, endangered nuclear weapon security, [and] endangered other countries national security.

The consensus among most legal experts commenting on the indictment appears to be that Mr Trump is in serious legal jeopardy.

A former assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York, Sarah Krissoff, told Insider that to the extent that theres a conviction here, the Department of Justice is going to want to be seeking a real sentence because of the nature of the conduct, how long it lasted, his involvement, the involvement of other people, working allegedly at Trumps direction.

She noted that if Mr Trump is convicted, the sentence would depend on the judge, which seems likely to be Trump-appointee Aileen Cannon in the District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Mr McClanahan noted the novelty of possibly having to find a proper way to put a former president behind bars.

He questioned how the authorities would go about imprisoning someone who has a Secret Service detail and who has national security secrets bouncing around his brain, such that if someone holds a shiv to his neck, hell reveal the location of our missile bases.

He added that Mr Trump might become a foreign intelligence gold mine for most countries on earth if hes imprisoned. Mr McClanahan sees it as more likely that if Mr Trump is convicted, he would be sentenced to house arrest with an ankle monitor.

But Ms Krissoff told the outlet that Trump can share that information that is in his head whether he is incarcerated or not incarcerated. So Im not particularly concerned that, as a citizen, the incarceration will trigger the sharing of information that wouldnt be shared otherwise.

Fox News legal commentator Jonathan Turley didnt hold back after the indictment was unsealed.

Mr Turley, the Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, said on Fox News on Friday afternoon that it is an extremely damning indictment.

There are indictments that are sometimes called narrative or speaking indictments. These are indictments that are really meant to make a point as to the depth of the evidence, there are some indictments that are just bare bones, he added.

This is not one of those indictments, Mr Turley said.

The Special Counsel knew that there would be a lot of people who were going to allege that the Department of Justice was acting in a biased or politically motivated way. This is clearly an indictment that was drafted to answer those questions. Its overwhelming in detail, he continued. The Trump team should not fool itself. These are hits below the waterline. These are witnesses who apparently testified under oath [and] gave statements to federal investigators, both of which can be criminally charged, if theyre false.

Those witnesses are directly quoting the president in encouraging others not to look for documents or allegedly to conceal them. Its damaging, Mr Turley said.

This is not an indictment that you can dismiss. There are a lot of people who are testifying under oath, and theyre saying highly incriminating things, the attorney added.

In this handout photo provided by the U.S. Department of Justice, stacks of boxes can be observed in the White and Gold Ballroom of former U.S. President Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida (Getty Images)

A photo published by the U.S. Justice Department in their charging document against former U.S. President Donald Trump shows boxes of documents stored in a bathroom at Trumps Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in early 2021 (Justice Department via REUTERS)

Speaking about the images from Mar-a-Lago of the boxes of documents found in a ballroom and a bathroom, in addition to other less-than-ideal places, Mr Turley said, Its really breathtaking. Obviously, this is mishandling. Putting the classified documents into ballrooms and bathrooms borders on the bizarre. And these are the types of pictures that hit you below the waterline in a trial.

Its hard to show a picture of these boxes surrounding a toilet and saying we really acted responsibly, he added, going on to note that the government is bringing dozens of counts  they only have to land one of those punches.

Keep in mind that every one of these counts is coming with a substantial potential sentence, Mr Turley said.

The lawyer said that the Trump legal team has to run the table, they have to take out every single count, or youve got a 76-year-old man looking at a potentially terminal sentence.
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President Joe Biden on Friday will sign an executive order that aims to bolster job opportunities for military and veteran spouses whose careers are often disrupted by their loved ones' deployments.

Biden is using a visit to the recently renamed Fort Liberty in North Carolina to highlight the order. The order directs agencies to develop a federal government-wide strategic plan on hiring and job retention for military spouses; bolster child care options; improve the collection of data on military and veteran spouses, caregivers and survivors in the federal workforce; and more than a dozen additional actions.

First lady Jill Biden, in a call with reporters to preview the action, said the order was largely framed by conversations through the White House's Joining Forces initiative, which looks to support families, caregivers and survivors of members of the U.S. military. The Democratic president is expected to sign the order during his visit to the base.

With nearly one in five military families citing challenges with spousal employment as a reason for considering leaving active-duty service, the issue is no small matter for the military's recruitment and training efforts, according to the White House. More than 16,000 military spouses work within the federal government.

Were asking agencies to make it easier for spouses employed by the federal government to take administrative leave, telework and move offices, the first lady said. Were creating resources to support entrepreneurs. And the executive order helps agencies and companies retain military spouses through telework or when they move abroad.

The president is unveiling the order at the Army's recently renamed Fort Liberty. His visit comes a week after military officials at the base, formerly known as Fort Bragg, held a ceremony at which it officially shed its Confederate name.

The base was originally named in 1918 for Gen. Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general from Warrenton, North Carolina, who was known for owning slaves and losing key Civil War battles that contributed to the Confederacys downfall.

The recent renaming of the installation  the largest U.S. Army base by population, with roughly 47,000 active-duty soldiers  didn't play a role in selecting the base to serve as a backdrop for Biden to announce his executive order, according to an administration official who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity. It was unclear if Biden would address the base renaming during his visit.

Before their visit to Fort Liberty, the Bidens will meet with students at Nash Community College in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The historically black community college received $23.7 million to train students for clean energy jobs from Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.

The Biden administration has put an emphasis on funding programs that help prepare workers for jobs that require some post-secondary education but not necessarily a four-year degree.

Biden's trip to North Carolina comes as some of the Republican Partys top presidential contenders gather to address delegates at the state convention in Greensboro, less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) from his stop at Fort Liberty. On Friday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is headlining a dinner, fresh off his campaign tour to a trio of early voting states, where thousands gathered to hear him castigate Biden and pledge to reverse the Democratic incumbent's disastrous economic policies if elected.

On Saturday, former Vice President Mike Pence and former President Donald Trump, the current GOP front-runner, will speak to delegates in separate appearances. Earlier Saturday, Trump, who has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate, is to address the Georgia Republican Partys convention in Columbus, Georgia.

___

Associated Pres writer Meg Kinnard in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.
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Wednesdays edition of The Borowitz Report in The New Yorker seems to have gotten a laugh from an unlikely source: Republican presidential candidate Mike Pence.

Mr Pence was the object of satire in writer Andy Borowitzs column on Wednesday, which was titled Pence Flees in Terror After No One but One Woman Shows Up at Rally  a riff on Mr Pences statement several years ago that he does not dine alone with women who are not his wife and does not attend events where alcohol is being served without his wife either.

Mr Pences response Borowitzs work gained him plaudits.

Ok, this one made me laugh, the former vice president tweeted above a link to the article.

Several Twitter users complimented the often buttoned-up Republican on his unexpected show of humour.

Mike Pence demonstrating a meaningful sense of humor was NOT on my bingo card today, but I am here for it and thankful! Howard Forman wrote.

The Harvard constitutional law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe was similarly impressed with the former vice presidents response.

OMG! Mr Tribe wrote. Now @BorowitzReport can finally retire  something I thought I could do by taking emeritus status, but that just made me busier than ever.

The Borowitz article is far from the first time late night hosts or satirists have mocked Mr Pences rules for engagement with women. In 2017, The Onion ran an article titled Mike Pence Asks Waiter To Remove Mrs. Butterworth From Table Until Wife Arrives.

Mr Pence launched his campaign for the presidency with a rally in Iowa earlier this week but faces long odds of beating his former running mate Donald Trump and a bevy of other Republican candidates including Gov Ron DeSantis of Florida.

In the first days of his nascent campaign, Mr Pence has pitched himself as a staunch conservative who supports the entirety of Mr Trumps platform but who also stood up for democracy when he refused to support efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election on January 6, 2021.

Whether that pitch connects with Republican primary voters, many of whom may not see Mr Pences defence of democracy as a positive, remains to be seen. Mr Pences relationship with Mr Trump has long since soured to the point where Mr Pence is not expected to be under consideration for the vice presidential spot on the GOP ticket should Mr Trump triumph in the primary.

Mr Pences politics are aligned with his born-again evangelical Christianity. He is a longtime opponent of abortion rights, and one of the few Republican candidates who has voiced total support for a national abortion ban in the aftermath of the end of Roe v Wade.
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Republican US Senator Mitt Romney said that former president Donald Trump had brought an indictment upon himself for his taking classified documents and refusing to return them.

Mr Romney released a statement on Friday after news that a grand jury indicted Mr Trump for his alleged unlawful of retention of national defence information at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Mr Trump said he must report to a court in Miami by Tuesday at 3pm ET.

Like all Americans, Mr Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence. The government has the burden of proving its charges beyond a reasonable doubt and securing a unanimous verdict by a South Florida jury, Mr Romney said.

By all appearances, the Justice Department and special counsel have exercised due care, affording Mr Trump the time and opportunity to avoid charges that would not generally have been afforded to others, he said. Mr Trump brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities to do so.

The 2012 Republican presidential nominee, whom Mr Trump endorsed in that election, has since emerged as one of the GOPs most outspoken critics of the former president. Mr Romney voted to convict Mr Trump in his first impeachment trial in 2020, the only Republican Senator to do so, for attempting to withhold aid for Ukraine in exchange for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky investigating Joe Bidens son when Mr Trump was running for re-election.

In 2021, six other Republicans joined Mr Romney to convict Mr Trump for his incitement of the January 6 riot. Mr Romney alluded to those cases in his statement.

These allegations are serious and if proven, would be consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest, such as withholding defensive weapons from Ukraine for political reasons and failing to defend the Capitol from violent attack and insurrection, he said.

The statement stands in contrast to Mr Romneys statement after a New York grand jury indicted Mr Trump in April, when Mr Romney expressed some scepticism. New York County District Attorney Alvin Braggs office charged Mr Trump on 34 counts related to his allegedly making hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

Even so, I believe the New York prosecutor has stretched to reach felony criminal charges in order to fit a political agenda, Mr Romney said at the time. No one is above the law, not even former presidents, but everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the law. The prosecutors overreach sets a dangerous precedent for criminalizing political opponents and damages the publics faith in our justice system.
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As Ron DeSantis wrapped up a 12-stop campaign tour that began in an Iowa evangelical church and ended here in a South Carolina convention center, dozens of pastors met backstage to pray for the presidential candidate. Later, to the 1,500 people in the auditorium, DeSantis closed out his speech with a paraphrased Bible verse: I will fight the good fight, I will finish the race, and I will keep the faith.

The governors religious rhetoric and hard-charging policies are at the center of his outreach to white evangelicals  an important voting bloc in the early GOP nominating contests. When it comes to his own Catholicism, DeSantis is more guarded, rarely mentioning his specific faith practices.

I dont think hes a wear-your-religion-on-your-sleeve kind of guy, said Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote, a conservative advocacy organization that hosted a fall rally for DeSantis.

Burch argue DeSantis policies are the true measure of his faith, from Floridas six-week abortion ban to a spate of laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights: Perhaps a good Scripture reference that may describe him is, By their fruits you shall know them.

DeSantis officially entered the race last month and is the leading alternative to former President Donald Trump. If the Florida governor captures the Republican nomination and takes on Joe Biden, two Catholic presidential candidates will face off for the first time in U.S. history.

Both have publicly clashed with Catholic bishops: DeSantis over immigration and the death penalty; Biden over abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. The current president, though, speaks often about being Catholic. He is known to wear a rosary and is regularly photographed attending Mass  in contrast to DeSantis, who is intensely private.

Hes nominally Catholic, according to a New York Times essay from the conservative writer Nate Hochman, who later joined the DeSantis campaign. Last year, Hochman wrote that DeSantis is politically friendly to conservative Christians. But he rarely discusses his religion publicly and almost never in the context of politics.

The campaign did not respond directly to questions about Hochmans essay or where the DeSantises go to church. A spokesperson for Never Back Down, the DeSantis super PAC, did not have information about his current church attendance.

Maria Sullivan, a DeSantis supporter, remembers worshipping regularly with DeSantis and his wife at Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church when they lived in Northeast Florida. Hes a very low-key man, not looking for attention, just there with his family, she said.

Sullivan said she attended the baptism of DeSantis older daughter at the church. The parish also was a polling place in 2018 and where DeSantis cast his own ballot when he was first elected governor.

DeSantis grew up Catholic. He attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School in Dunedin, Florida, and his political memoir says he was expected at church every Sunday. His mother counts a nun and a priest among her siblings.

His uncle figures into one of the few religious anecdotes he shares on the campaign trail. After his first inauguration, his uncle baptized their son at the governors mansion, using water the DeSantises collected from the Sea of Galilee.

Its during the rare instances when DeSantis talks about trials that he gives his most revealing faith responses. He has spoken of the power of prayer in helping his family through his wifes breast cancer diagnosis. In March, he agreed with the journalist Piers Morgan when asked if he leaned on his faith after his sisters death.

You start to question things that are unjust, like Why did this have to happen? DeSantis said. You just have to have faith that theres a plan in place, trust in God, theres no guarantee that youre going to have a life without challenges and without heartbreak.

In his stump speeches, though, DeSantis sticks to general God-and-country fare, occasionally referencing the Bible and often in ways bolstering his fighter persona, such as telling audiences to put on the full armor of God.

He deals in vague platitudes about faith  and he very much downplays his Catholicism, said Cary McMullen, the former religion editor of The Ledger in Lakeland, Florida.

In 1960, when anti-Catholic sentiment was more prevalent, then-candidate John F. Kennedy gave a landmark speech to a group of Protestant ministers, pledging he would not take orders from the Catholic Church if elected. DeSantis has already defied the Catholic hierarchy on policy.

In 2022, DeSantis attended Mass and met with most of Floridas bishops, who urged him to reconsider his objection to unaccompanied minors, which the Catholic Church cares for in one of its Florida shelters.

It was a frank exchange, said Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, the highest-ranking Catholic official in Florida.

DeSantis doubled down in opposition after the meeting, which devolved into competing press conferences by him and Wenski.

The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops has praised the DeSantis administration on its anti-abortion, school choice and anti-LGBTQ+ policies, while criticizing its death penalty support.

No political party is totally consistent with the gamut of our Catholic interests, Wenski said.

Biden makes a bigger deal of his Catholicism than DeSantis does, Wenski added, noting that it gives all us bishops heartburn because of his radical abortion stance.

For now, the DeSantis team appears to be focusing their faith outreach on white evangelicals, who vote overwhelmingly Republican. Catholics are swing voters. Never Back Down, the DeSantis super PAC, has brought on adviser David Polyansky in part to coordinate faith outreach  efforts he also led for Ted Cruz, who won the 2016 Iowa caucus thanks to evangelicals.

Bob Vander Plaats, head of The Family Leader and a coveted evangelical endorsement in Iowa, was impressed when he and his wife had lunch with the DeSantises recently. When asked if the governor talked about his own Catholic faith, Vander Plaats demurred: No, we really didnt get into a lot of that, other than what we believe are our core values.

Presidential candidates have long shared personal faith stories, which used to be integral to courting evangelicals, but Trump helped change that calculus.

DeSantis offers fewer scandals and more religious literacy than Trump, who won over record numbers of evangelical voters. Even if DeSantis doesnt share his personal faith easily, he still can appeal to them.

You dont have to be Pat Robertson in order to win those votes because Trump isnt, said Michael Binder, a political scientist at the University of North Florida.

After the Greenville rally, a group of four friends and former Trump supporters said DeSantis won them over.

Hes more palatable, said Tom OShields from Easley, S.C. Mr. DeSantis seems to have what those Christian voters are going to want without the baggage of Mr. Trump.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the APs collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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The New York State Legislature has passed a bill clearing the way for the creation of a commission to consider the enduring legacy of slavery on the Black community, with a view to potentially pay reparations.

The bill passed through the Assembly Chamber in Albany after three hours of debate on Thursday, swiftly followed by the Senate a matter of hours later.

It now makes its way to the desk of New York Governor Kathy Hochul for her signature.

New York is following the example of California, which became the first state to form a reparations task force in 2020.

That group recommended that California issue a formal apology for the lasting legacy of racism and discriminatory policies  from over-policing to mass incarceration and redlining  and the creation of an agency to provide a wide range of services for Black residents.

It stopped short of recommending the precise value of reparations payments that might be made to citizens, however, although it did hear analysis from economists who suggested that the states Black residents could be owed as much as $800bn in compensation, a preliminary estimate more than 2.5 times larger than Californias annual budget of $300bn.

The commission created by New Yorks legislation would be tasked with examining the extent to which the federal and state government had supported the institution of slavery and address persistent economic, political and educational disparities experienced by the Black community in the state today.

It would be required to deliver a report one year on from its first meeting and any recommendations it might make regarding compensation payments would be non-binding, with the Legislature not compelled to take them to a vote.

The bill takes as its starting point the arrival of the first enslaved Africans arriving on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, then a Dutch settlement, in the 1620s, noting that they were thereafter deployed in helping build the infrastructure of what became New York City.

The state Legislature finally enacted a statute in 1827 to free New Yorks slaves, although it was not implemented until 1837.

Prior to Thursdays floor debate, New York Assembly speaker Carl Heastie, the first Black person to hold that position, took a moment to acknowledge how historic the legislation was and the gravity of the subject up for consideration.

Making the case for the bill, assemblywoman Michaelle Solages said: We want to make sure we are looking at slavery and its legacies.

This is about beginning the process of healing our communities. There still is generational trauma that people are experiencing. This is just one step forward.

On the other side of the debate and voicing opposition was assemblyman Andy Gooddell, who said: Im concerned were opening a door that was closed in New York State almost 200 years ago.

Mr Gooddell added that he believed in pursuing contemporary equal opportunities measures and said he preferred to continue on that path rather than focus on reparations.

Following its passage, Speaker Heasie, Senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Governor Hochul will each appoint three qualified members to the commission.

Other state legislatures that have considered examining the complex questions of reparations include New Jersey and Vermont but neither has yet passed legislation.

Nor, for that matter, has Congress, although the creation of an equivalent commission in DC has long been mooted.

A Chicago suburb in Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to effectively make reparations available to Black residents through a $10 million housing project in 2021.

While few would argue that the idea of paying compensation is well-intentioned, some critics have dismissed it as misguided.

William Darity, a professor of public policy and African and African American Studies at Duke University, has said that even calling proposed payouts reparations is presumptuous because it is virtually impossible for states to actually afford the huge costs involved.

Professor Darity believes only the federal government has the capacity to realise the money required.

My deeper fear with all of these piecemeal projects is that they actually will become a block against federal action because there will be a number of people who will say theres no need for a federal program, he said.

If you end up settling for state and local initiatives, you settle for much less than what is owed.

Additional reporting by agencies
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Stephen Miller whined that the indictment of his former boss Donald Trump was a sad day for him personally.

The former Trump White House official went on Fox News shortly after news of the indictment broke on Thursday night to claim the indictment would be looked back on as the moment that the United States ceased to be a democratic republic.

As someone that was there with President Trump in 2016 flying all around the country, going state to state, that served in the White House every single day for all four years of the administration, this is a sad day for me personally, he said.

Mr Miller baselessly claimed that the indictment was a distraction from unverified allegations by House Republicans that Joe Biden had accepted bribes while vice president.

It is a message saying, We run the show, not you. This is our country, not yours. We make the decisions and we get to decide who runs this government, he said.

I believe history will record today as the day that we ceased to be a democratic republic and we became a people ruled by an unelected government bureaucracy.

Mr Trump revealed he had been indicted on seven separate federal counts understood to include conspiracy to obstruct justice, making false statements, and unlawful retention of national defence information on Thursday night.

He will make a first court appearance in Miami on Tuesday.

The charges come nine months after FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago and seized more than a hundred classified materials.

On Friday, Mr Trumps longtime personal valet Walt Nauta was also indicted, Mr Trump confirmed in a Truth Social post.

Mr Miller masterminded the Trump administrations cruel immigrant child separation policies before going on to establish the America First Legal Foundation.
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Texas Governor Greg Abbott has said his administration will deploy an inflatable border composed of floating barriers along the Rio Grande as part of its bid to deter migrants from attempting illegal crossings into the state.

The new policy was quickly slammed by some mocking the idea and others who said that Texas taxes could be better spent on other initiatives.

The barriers, seen in concept art presented at the state Capitol in Austin on Thursday as the governor signed six new border security bills into law, are effectively a string of interconnected buoys that spin when someone attempts to scale them, making them difficult to pass.

Below the waterline, a web of netting weighed down by anchors will prevent anyone from simply swimming underneath

The barriers will be placed along known hotspots for attempted crossings, with the first 1,000 feet to be situated near Eagle Pass, where Texas National Guardsman Bishop E Evans, 22, tragically drowned last year while attempting to rescue migrants from the river.

The governors office said in a statement that the strategy was intended to proactively prevent illegal crossings between ports of entry by making it more difficult to cross the Rio Grande and reach the Texas side of the southern border.

Continuing to blame President Joe Biden for the perceived failure to secure the US-Mexico border, Governor Abbott said his latest package of bills is aimed at ensuring his state can hold the line against illegal immigrants, drugs and weapons entering the United States from the south.

They grant the Texas military the authority to use unmanned aircraft in search and recovery missions, authorise trained US Border Patrol agents to carry out arrest, search and seizure operations at checkpoints and compensate rural landowners whose property is damaged by illegal immigration-related activities.

They also designate Mexican drug cartels and criminal gangs as foreign terrorist organisations and increase the penalties for those caught destroying illegal drugs and those who operate stash houses.

Texas plans to deploy an inflatable barrier along the Rio Grande River to deter illegal immigrants (Texas Department of Public Safety)

Speaking at Thursdays signing, Governor Abbott said: Thanks to the leadership and hard work of [Texas Department of Public Safety] Director [Steve] McCraw, General Thomas Suelzer and their teams, Texas has pushed back against the swell of migrants and held the line to keep people out of Texas  but theres more that needs to be done.

The Texas Legislature has stepped up to make sure we continue to robustly respond to President Bidens growing border crisis, including allocating $5.1bn for border security.

Today, I am signing six bills from this years regular session to ensure that Texas can continue to do even more to stop illegal immigration at our southern border and provide new tools to the brave men and women along the southern border to protect Texans and Americans from the chaos and crisis of the border.

Regarding the barriers specifically, the governor said: What were doing right now, were securing the border at the border.

What these buoys will allow us to do is to prevent people from even getting to the border.

Director McCraw added: We dont want people to come across and continue to put their lives at risk when they come between the points of entry.

He explained that the barriers are currently being tested by specialists and will be moveable so that they can be quickly relocated to new areas as needed.

Of their role as a deterrent, he said: You could sit there for a couple of days and hold onto it, but eventually youre going to get tired and want to go back. Youll get hungry.

Rodolfo Rosales, director of the Texas chapter of the League of United Latin Americans Citizens, has condemned Mr Abbotts latest approach to the situation as inhumane.

We view it as a chilling reminder of the extreme measures used throughout history by elected leaders against those they do not regard as human beings, seeking only to exterminate them, regardless of the means employed, he told CBS.

It is with profound horror and shame that we bear witness to the consideration of these measures, which are evidently intended as political theatre but will undoubtedly result in the loss of innocent lives among the refugees seeking asylum in the United States.

Social media users were quick to respond to Mr Abbott on Twitter.

Texas will deploy new marine floating barriers to deter illegal border crossings between ports of entry. We continue to hold the line in Bidens absence, the governor tweeted on Friday.

You know they can swim under it right? one Twitter user said.

The director of the Central America and Mexico Policy Initiative at the Strauss Center at The University of Texas at Austin, Stephanie Leutert, wrote: Some places of the Rio Grande will be shallow enough that this wont be effective. And smugglers moving people across in rafts will quickly figure out how to cut these apart or hoist people over them from raft to raft. But... they will 100 percent cause more drowning deaths.

I bet they didnt think about sharp objects that can penetrate said buoys or holding ones breath. Also this seems like a waste of money, time & labor, one account holder added.

Several Twitter users compared the barrier to objects used in the NBC show American Ninja Warrior and Wipeout on TBS.

Welcome to Wipeout: Illegal Immigration special! one Twitter user said.

Gustaf Kilander contributed to this report
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Once would be happenstance. Twice might be coincidence. But what would it mean if three separate former United States office-holders turned out to be harbouring classified contraband from their time in power?

That is the question people all over Washington DC have been asking ever since attorneys for former vice president Mike Pence discovered a small number of documents bearing classified markings left at his Indiana home at the end of the Trump-Pence administration.

Hot on the heels of similar discoveries at the houses of Joe Biden and, allegedly, Donald Trump, it raised concerns about how well America is keeping track of its classified materials. Now, following federal prosecutors unveiling of a 37-count criminal indictment against Mr Trump for allegedly mishandling secret files, the issue may take on new urgency.

The leftovers at Mr Pences house became known in January 2023 after Greg Jacob, his former top White House lawyer and current representative to the National Archives, sent a letter to the National Archives and Records Administration (Nara).

Mr Jacob told Nara officials that Mr Pences personal lawyer had facilitated the transfer of documents with classification markings to FBI agents on 19 January, three days after Mr Pence discovered the documents and secured them in a safe at his home.

The news that the former vice president had found classified papers among boxes filled with what Mr Jacob described as courtesy copies of Trump-era records was met with some surprise from Senate Intelligence Committee chair Mark Warner. Mr Warner suggested to reporter outside his office in the Hart Senate Office Building this week that anyone who served in any of these roles as president and vice president that are still living should go check your closets.

A Democratic member of the House of Representatives, Richie Torres, said in a statement shared with The Independent that he was introducing legislation to require former federal elected officials to certify, in writing, that they had no classified documents in their possession within a month after they leave office.

Top archivists at Nara may have had similar thoughts to Mr Warner and Mr Torres. Archives leaders are considering whether to ask living former presidents and vice presidents to search their personal papers and certify that they havent inadvertently been holding onto any classified documents, according to one Nara official.

(AP)

The internal discussions at Nara over whether to ask the former presidents and vice presidents to do as Mr Warner suggested was first reported by The Washington Post.

The request under consideration would only apply to three of the five living former vice presidents  Dick Cheney, Al Gore and Dan Quayle  and four of the five living former presidents, George W Bush, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

The other two former vice presidents are Mr Pence and President Joe Biden, who, according to a statement from his personal attorney Robert Bauer, authorised Department of Justice personnel to search his Wilmington, Delaware home on 20 January.

After an all-day scouring of the sitting presidents longtime home, Mr Bauer said DOJ officials removed six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the Presidents service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President as well as personally handwritten notes from Mr Bidens time in the Obama administration.

One former president, Donald Trump, is already embroiled in a federal criminal prosecution over his alleged unlawful retention of hundreds of classified documents. A recently unsealed indictment alleges that Mr Trump kept the documents, as well as thousands of other government-owned presidential records, in a ballroom and then a shower at the Palm Beach, Florida beach club where he maintains his primary residence.

Biden Classified Documents Strategy (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

But even though special counsels have been probing how sensitive documents got to the private homes of both Mr Biden and Mr Trump, experts say Mr Biden is unlikely to face similar legal repercussions as a result of the document discoveries.

Nick Akerman, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Watergate special counsel probe in the 1970s and as an assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York, told The Independent in a phone interview that Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating Mr Biden, will face two nearly insurmountable hurdles in his way if he were to seek an indictment.

The first, Mr Akerman said, is establishing that the president had any criminal intent in keeping the Obama-era records in unauthorised locations.

He pointed out that the FBI search of Mr Trumps estate followed nearly a year and a half of negotiations between the ex-president and the government he once led, including the issuing of a grand jury subpoena compelling Mr Trump to return the classified records.

If Trump had just given all his stuff back when he was asked, there would never have been an issue there. The issue is when he lied about it and concealed it. And that's what that case is about. It's completely different, Mr Akerman said.

Mike Pence: Classified documents found at home of former US vice president

Mr Akerman added that there is a separate roadblock to a prosecution of Mr Biden that has nothing to do with his current role as president. A section of the federal criminal code, known as Section 3282, states that no person shall be prosecuted, tried, or punished for any non-capital crime unless charges are brought within five years of the crime being committed.

The ex-prosecutor said the crime  if there was a crime committed  of removing the classified documents from their proper place would have taken place in January 2017, when Mr Bidens vice presidential office was packed up at the close of the Obama administration.

Even if there were evidence supporting a criminal case against the president, Mr Akerman stressed that the crime took place far too long ago to prosecute.

While Mr Biden and Mr Pence are dealing with the fallout from the discovery of documents with classified markings at their respective homes, some of Mr Trumps predecessors appear to have already checked under the bed and in their kitchen drawers for the sorts of records that have now allegedly caused 45th president to become the first ex-chief executive to be on the receiving end of a federal indictment.

Biden Classified Documents (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

One of them, Bill Clinton, has most likely had ample reason to be wary of keeping old classified documents around. His wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, spent years as the target of an FBI probe looking into her use of a private email server, including whether classified data was improperly stored on it.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr Clintons post-presidential office told The Independent: All of President Clintons classified materials were properly turned over to Nara in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.

A spokesperson for Mr Clintons vice president Al Gore also offered assurances that no classified papers were mistakenly tucked into any moving boxes when he vacated his West Wing office at the turn of the millennium.

When leaving the White House in January 2001, Vice President Gore and his staff turned over materials to Nara in accordance with the Presidential Records Act [PRA], the spokesperson said via email to The Independent. No classified materials have been discovered in the 22 years since VP Gore left public office.

Since it became known that Mr Trumps Mar-a-Lago property was searched by FBI agents on 8 August of last year, the twice-impeached ex-president has suggested that other former presidents made a habit of taking material that was, by law, supposed to reside with the National Archives once their terms were over.

In particular, he has alleged that Mr Obama violated the law by storing his former administrations records at a warehouse in Illinois,

But in a statement, a spokesperson for the 44th president said his records have been handled properly.

Consistent with the Presidential Records Act, all of President Obamas classified records were submitted to the National Archives upon leaving office. Nara continues to assume physical and legal custody of President Obamas materials to date, the spokesperson told The Independent.

The Archives also denied that Mr Obama had hoarded any records in a statement made four days after the FBI searched Mr Trumps property.

Nara moved approximately 30 million pages of unclassified records to a Nara facility in the Chicago area where they are maintained exclusively by NARA. Additionally, Nara maintains the classified Obama Presidential records in a Nara facility in the Washington, DC, area, the agency told The Independent.

As required by the PRA, former President Obama has no control over where and how Nara stores the Presidential records of his administration.

This article was originally published on 26 January 2023 and has been updated since with details of the federal indictment against Mr Trump.
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Critics of Donald Trump mocked the former president on Twitter on Thursday night after it was revealed a grand jury chose to indict him on charges stemming from a Department of Justice investigation into his handling of classified materials.

Trump will cry witch-hunt, and play the victim again. He is not, former Illinois representative Adam Kinizinger tweeted.

He added: He is corrupt If in fact he was the victim (hes not) he would be one of the weakest men ever, since he just continually gets victimized and cant stop it. But hes a criminal not a victim.

Mr Kinzingers tweet came shortly after Mr Trump revealed he was being indicted in a Truth Social post where he asserted he was an innocent man.

Mr Trump wrote: I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election.

This is the second time Mr Trump has been indicted but the first time he will face a federal indictment. According to reports, Mr Trump will face seven charges.

The indictment is related to charges stemming from his alleged illegal retention of national defence information.

Peter Strzok, the former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who led the investigation into Russias interference in the 2016 election tweeted a photo of handcuffs following the news.

Michael Steele, the former chairperson for the Republican National Committee, tweeted: Remember: he is in this position because of his own actions; there was no witch-hunt; a federal judge ruled there was probable cause Trump committed a crime. HE owns this.

One thing is sure  Trump is an absolute DISGRACE to our nation! Jon Cooper wrote.

The indictment comes as Mr Trump is seeking a third bid for the White House.

In statements sent to supporters, Mr Trump sought fundraising to peacefully stand with me.
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Allies of former president Donald Trump quickly came to his defence on Thursday after he revealed he was facing a federal indictment related to a Department of Justice investigation into his mishandling of classified documents.

The indictment comes after a months-long investigation into whether Mr Trump knowingly kept sensitive materials at his Mar-a-Lago home and / or misled investigators looking into the matter.

According to reports, Mr Trump will face seven charges related to the federal indictment.

On Twitter, allies of Mr Trump remained loyal to him and downplayed the severity of the indictment.

Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) claimed the indictment was a form of election interference on Twitter

This phony Boxes Hoax indictment against President Trump reflects the most severe election interference on the part of the federal government that we have EVER seen! he tweeted.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said the indictment came because Democrats fear Mr Trump will win re-election.

"Democrats must literally shake with sweats when they see amazing packed out Trump rallies and overwhelming winning poll numbers week after week," she tweeted. "They must awake in the night with panic at the thoughts of us winning in 2024."

Ms Greene added that the indictment was meant to distract from Mr Bidens supposed crimes, for which she provided debunked claims or those with little evidence. She also noted how Mr Biden currently faces an investigation from Special Counsel Robert Hur for having classified documents at multiple locations, including his private residence.

"Joe Biden has classified documents everywhere," she tweeted. "Literally on the garage floor next to the garage door that opens and closes, but the corrupt and complicit FBI and DOJ do nothing."

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) tweeted: "There is no limit to what these people will do to protect their power & destroy those who threaten it, even if it means ripping our country apart & shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together.

In a statement posted to her Twitter, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) echoed other GOP congressional members statements, saying the indictment was an interference with Mr Trumps campaign.

Right-wing activist Mike Cernovich tweeted: This is the JFK assassination all over again - they are killing Trump by other means.

In another post he said: The deep state killed JFK with bullets. Now they are using briefcases to assassinate those who stand in their way.

The indictment comes as Mr Trump is seeking a third bid for the White House.

Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ), one of the leaders of the insurgent House Freedom Caucus, railed against the Justice Department for the indictment

"We ought to defund and dismantle the DOJ," he tweeted. "I stand with President Trump."

Additional reporting by Eric Garcia
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The Independent has learned that a federal grand jury has indicted former president Donald Trump on charges stemming from his alleged unlawful retention of national defence information, adding another criminal case to the legal pressure against the twice-impeached former president as he seeks to win his partys nomination in next years Republican presidential primary.

Mr Trump himself first revealed his newfound status as a federal criminal defendant in a series of posts on his Truth Social platform, just one day after The Independent reported that federal prosecutors had planned to ask a grand jury to return an indictment against him on Thursday.

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, he wrote, using the phrase he has frequently used to describe the long-running probe.

The ex-president followed the bombshell claim with a series of allegations against his successor in the White House, President Joe Biden, stemming from the discovery of documents bearing classification markings at several locations linked to the sitting president.

In a subsequent post, Mr Trump said he had been summoned to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, 13 June, at 3pm ET.

I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election, he said, adding that he is an innocent man.

This is indeed a DARK DAY for the United States of America. We are a Country in serious and rapid Decline, but together we will Make America Great Again! he added.

The indictment against Mr Trump is understood to include seven separate counts, including one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, one count of making false statements, and at least one count of unlawful retention of national defence information.

One of Mr Trumps attorneys, James Trusty, said on CNN that one count of the indictment involves a violation of Section 1512 of the US criminal code, the portion of US law which lays out the offence of witness tampering.

A conviction under the federal conspiracy statute carries a maximum 20 year sentence, as does a conviction for witness tampering. If Mr Trump is convicted for violating the Espionage Act, those charges could carry a 10-year prison sentence.

The charges come just days after a last-ditch attempt by his legal team to convince Department of Justice officials not to seek charges against him in the classified documents probe, which began early last year after National Archives and Records Administration officials discovered more than 100 documents bearing classification markings while inventorying a group of 15 boxes that were retrieved from Mr Trumps Palm Beach, Florida residence.

That discovery led National Archives and Records Administration (Nara) officials to notify the Department of Justice, which kicked off an investigation into how the documents ended up at Mr Trumps property.

Some of the papers found at Mar-a-Lago (AP)

Throughout the investigation, prosecutors and investigators harboured concerns that the ex-president was not being truthful about whether he had returned any and all classified documents in his possession to government custody as required under the Presidential Records Act, a post-Watergate-era law which states that all records of a presidential administration are the property of the government and must be turned over to Nara when a president leaves office.

But the classified nature of the records at issue added another wrinkle to the dispute between Mr Trump and the government he led from January 2017 to January 2021.

At times, the ex-president has claimed that he had used the sweeping classification and declassification authority afforded to the American chief executive to declassify any record he took with him to his Palm Beach home at Mar-a-Lago, the 1920s-era mansion he purchased in the 1990s and subsequently turned into a private social club.

No evidence has emerged that any such order was ever issued, and in audio recordings obtained by prosecutors, Mr Trump is said to have acknowledged that he did not declassify certain records that were in his possession long after his authority to possess them expired.

Moreover, the statutes under which the ex-president is facing charges arent impacted by any declassification order, real or otherwise. Instead, the laws as written speak to the wilful retention of information relating to the national defence.

They essentially say that a person has committed a crime by possessing such information and not returning it to the government upon request.

For Mr Trump, such a request came last year when he was served with a grand jury subpoena compelling him to produce any classified documents in his possession and turn them over to the Department of Justice.

In response, one of his attorneys, Evan Corcoran, claimed to have conducted a search for documents in a storage area at Mar-a-Lago where Mr Trumps aides said all the records taken from the White House at the end of his presidency had been stored.

That search turned up 38 classified records, which Mr Corcoran and another Trump attorney, Christina Bob, turned over to investigators when they visited Mar-a-Lago in June 2022.

Following that meeting, the FBI began to develop evidence showing that Mr Trump or his aides had taken actions to obstruct their investigation, including by moving records out of the storage room prior to Mr Corcorans search.

That evidence, including surveillance footage showing Mr Trumps personal aide, Walt Nauta, moving boxes after the receipt of the grand jury subpoena, was used to obtain a search warrant for the ex-presidents Palm Beach property, during which FBI agents found more than 100 more classified documents, including some in Mr Trumps office.

Mr Nauta, a former Navy Chief Petty Officer who served as Mr Trumps White House valet and followed him to Florida at the end of his presidency, was questioned by investigators about the footage, but he ceased communication with the Justice Department after prosecutors suggested he could be charged with a crime as a result of his work for Mr Trump.

Prosecutors have also questioned Mar-a-Lago and Trump Organization employees about the capabilities of the surveillance system at Mr Trumps property, and about conversations between Mr Nauta and Trump Organization security director Matthew Calamari Sr which they believe pertained to the footage.

According to multiple reports, there has been concern among investigators about alleged gaps in the footage, as well as what prosecutors believe may have been an attempt by a Mar-a-Lago employee to damage the surveillance system by flooding a room where computer servers were kept on the property.

Mr Trump has also repeatedly expressed outrage that the government he once led would seek to reclaim documents he considers his own property. He has also suggested that he should be paid for returning the documents, citing a multimillion-dollar settlement the government once reached with former president Richard Nixon over records from his administration.

Yet the documents at issue are not his own. In the case of Mr Nixon, who resigned in disgrace in 1974 and died two decades later, the monetary settlement was compensation paid to him because the government seized all records from his administration under the first version of the Presidential Records Act, which was enacted after he sought to destroy records from his time in office.

Prior to that 1978 law, a presidents records were considered his own property even though most former presidents opted to donate them to presidential libraries or other institutions.

But since that law came into force, no president has had a right to keep records from his administration for his own use.
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Donald Trump has been mocked for praising an attorney who deleted 30,000 of Hillary Clintons emails, according to the unsealed indictment from special counsel Jack Smith.

As a candidate and president, Mr Trump repeatedly called for his 2016 presidential opponent to be locked up after she was found to have been extremely careless in using a private server for official communications as secretary of state.

Privately, he joked about how her lawyers had done a great job deleting the emails and in his telling, protecting her from scrutiny, according to the indictment.

The unsealed indictment details a conversation Mr Trump held with two lawyers, listed as Trump Attorney 1 and Trump Attorney 2, on 23 May 2022.

The lawyers informed Mr Trump he would have to comply with a Department of Justice subpoena to turn over any classified materials to the National Archive.

I dont want anyone looking through my boxes, I really dont, I dont want you looking through my boxes, Mr Trump said, according to the indictment.

Mr Trump later asked: Well, what happens if we just dont respond at all or dont play ball with them?

In a subsequent conversation, memorialised by Attorney 1, Mr Trump praised Ms Clintons lawyers for deleting the emails.

He was great, he did a great job, Mr Trump allegedly said.

He said that it... was him. That he was the one who deleted all of her emails, the 30,000 emails because they basically dealt with her scheduling and her going to the gym and her having beauty appointments.

So she didnt get in any trouble because he said that he was the one who deleted him.

Photo of document boxes in Former President Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago residence released by US Justice Department. (US Justice Department)

The identity of the attorney who supposedly deleted Ms Clintons emails was redacted. Trump Attorney 1, who was apparently recording the conversation, was said to be Evan Corcoran, according to CNN.

The indictment, released a day after Mr Trump announced its existence, revealed that he has been charged with 37 counts including conspiracy to obstruct justice and scheme to conceal that laid bare for the first time the vast scope of the classified document investigation.

Special Counsel Jack Smith alleges that he took classified documents containing nuclear secrets and military invasion plans, and stored them in rooms at Mar-a-Lago.

According to the indictment, FBI agents collected a total of 102 classified documents during a search of Mar-a-Lago last August.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at a presidential campaign debate in October 2016 (Getty)

Ms Clintons use of a personal email system was the subject of two FBI probes during the height of the 2016 presidential campaign.

In July of that year, an FBI investigation concluded that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case against Ms Clinton.

The FBI said that she and her aides had been extremely careless in their handling of classified information.

Then 11 days before the election, then-FBI director James Comey sensationally announced he was reopening the case after discovering new emails, which turned out to be duplicates of the ones the FBI had already examined.

The investigation was widely blamed for tilting the election in Mr Trumps favour.

After the indictment was announced, Ms Clinton trolled her former opponent on Twitter.

Bringing this back in light of recent news: Get a limited-edition But Her Emails hat and support @onwardtogether groups working to strengthen our democracy.

Twitter users were quick to comment on Mr Trump praising Ms Clintons aide.

The indictment made clear an abiding Trump trait: his admiration for people who exhibit gamesmanship w authorities. He allegedly praised an unnamed Hillary Clinton aide who deleted her emails. Why? Because, in Mr. Trumps account, the aide ensured that Mrs. Clinton didnt get in any trouble, Maggie Haberman of The New York Times tweeted.

Remember when he bragged about avoiding payment of taxes during a debate? Weve known this for a while, consultant Joni Kletter responded.

And was praised for having done so. Presumably by people who will never have the $ to hire the accountants and lawyers that can save them should they be audited, one Twitter user added.

Does he have any redeeming qualities. Does he really love golf, because he cheats. So no, another account holder said.

Hes such a two-bit criminal, a third wrote.

That he idolized Roy Cohn should have been enough long ago, Roger Schwab said.

He was literally raised on deceit, Jessica Heintz added.
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An indicted Mar-a-Lago staff member texted photos of top secret documents scattered on the floor of a storage room at Donald Trumps Florida club, according to bombshell indictment unsealed on Friday.

I opened the door and found this, Mr Trumps bag man Walt Nauta texted an unknown Trump staffer in December 2021, along with two photos of the classified files sprawled on the floor.

At least one document was marked Secret//Rel to USA, FVEY, signifying that it was only meant to be viewed by the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The photo was among several contained in the 49-page indictment against Mr Trump, which laid out in stunning detail the 15-month investigation into his reckless mishandling of top secret material after leaving office.

One image showed about 30 boxes of classified documents in a bathroom haphazardly crammed around a toilet next to a shower curtain. A silver chandelier can be seen above the boxes.

Another picture showed piles of classified documents on the stage at the Mar-a-Lago ballroom, where they had allegedly been left for two months.

Other photos released by the Department of Justice show boxes of top secret material crammed into storage rooms around the Florida residence.

Walt Nauta texted a Mar-a-Lago staffer a photo of secret documents sprawl on the floor: I opened the door and found this (US Justice Department)

Dozens of boxes were stored on a stage at the Mar-a-Lago ballroom for months (US Justice Department)

Towers of boxes containing classified material in a bathroom underneath a chandelier (US Justice Department)

Classified material was left in unsecure storage rooms, (US Justice Department)

After leaving the White House, Mr Trumps private club at Palm Beach became his main residence.

It also became a magnet for foreign spies, former intelligence officials warned.

In August 2022, a Ukrainian woman posing as a member of the Rothschild family gained access to the club, according to reports.

Inna Yashchyshyn mingled at Mar-a-Lago functions with Mr Trump and South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, according to an article from the Organized Crime & Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

(US Justice Department)

During Mr Trumps presidency, a suspected Chinese spy was arrested and sentenced to eight months prison after being found guilty of trespassing and lying to Secret Service agents about why she was at the property.

Mr Trump also welcomed Kanye West and known white supremacist Nick Fuentes to the club.

The former president has been indicted on 37 counts of willful retention of national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.

Special Counsel Jack Smith delivers remarks on a recently unsealed indictment against former President Donald Trump (Getty Images)

The indictment accuses Mr Trump of illegally holding onto materials on US nuclear programmes, potential vulnerabilities to the US and its allies to military attack, and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.

Mr Nauta, a former Navy officier and longtime Trump aide, has also been indicted on six felonies, after he allegedly removed 64 boxes from Mar-a-Lago to his home.

(US Justice Department)

The unsealed indictment also details a conversation Mr Trump held with two lawyers in May 2023, in which the former president asks: Wouldnt it be better if we just told them we dont have anything here?

In his first public remarks, Special Counsel Jack Smith said he wanted all Americans to read the indictment in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.

We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone, Mr Smith told a press conference on Friday afternoon.

Mr Trump, who will appear in court in Miami on Tuesday, faces up to 100 years in prison if convicted. He has angrily protested his innocence in a series of Truth Social posts.
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In March, when Donald Trump became the first former president in US history indicted on criminal charges, his reelection campaign saw a huge surge in donations. Even political rivals rushed to support him. There was no dent in his front-runner status after the state charges in New York.

Thursday's news that Mr Trump has been indicted again, this time on federal charges related to his handling of classified documents, may offer a repeat.

Mr Trump faces seven criminal charges, including the willful retention of national defense information, obstruction of justice and conspiracy, though the scope of the evidence remains unclear because the indictment is under seal. But the day after the indictment became public, there were clear signs that Republican voters may be willing to entrust him again with access to the nations biggest secrets and authority over the very laws prosecutors say he defied.

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said the indictment would not fundamentally change Mr Trumps standing in the GOP or his advantage in the crowded 2024 Republican primary.

In any other decade, this would be more than enough to kill a presidential contender in the crib. Thats no longer the case  particularly for Donald Trump, Mr Newhouse said. He argued Mr Trump has been effectively setting expectations for more charges for months.

This comes as a surprise to very few Republicans, Mr Newhouse said. Trumps been saying hed get indicted. He got indicted. The sense from many Republican voters is that this is all about politics.

The prospect that someone under indictment  twice  could somehow still be considered a viable presidential candidate underscores Mr Trump's grip on the Republican Party and the ways that he has fundamentally transformed democratic norms in America.

It also illustrates just how effective he has become at inoculating himself against political fallout by setting expectations and controlling the narrative. And it reflects growing Republican hostility toward the federal government and particularly the Justice Department, which Mr Trump has now spent the better part of a decade maligning.

But even if the indictment doesn't hurt Mr Trump's standing with Republican primary voters, it's far from certain that the broader set of general election voters, which includes independents and moderates in both parties, will be as forgiving next fall in a prospective matchup against President Joe Biden.

The Democratic president beat Mr Trump in 2020 with a promise to restore a sense of normalcy to Washington after Mr Trump's drama-filled presidency. With these new charges, Mr Trump's baggage is only growing heavier.

The former president faces the possibility of still more indictments in Georgia and Washington, DC, a prospect that could see him facing trial in four separate jurisdictions while running to return to the highest office in the land.

For now, the new indictment throws Mr Trump back into the spotlight, dominating every news cycle and denying his rivals space to break through to voters, just as many have formally launched their campaigns.

Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, a fierce Trump critic and founder of the Republican Accountability Project, acknowledged the indictment might ultimately help Trump seize the GOP nomination.

Ive certainly seen a rally around Trump effect every time Trump is impeached or indicted, she said, adding that much depends on the reaction of his Republican 2024 challengers.

Does anyone have the political talent to seize this as an opportunity? Or will they all line up behind Trump? she said. Because if they all defend him, they will relegate themselves to bit players in Trumps drama and never get around to making an affirmative case for themselves.

Still, Doug Heye, another Republican strategist, said Mr Trump's primary opponents do have a major opportunity to argue that the former president cannot win in 2024 because of his baggage.

This should be gold for Republican presidential candidates, should they choose to use it, Mr Heye said.

So far Mr Trump's rivals instead seem to be rallying to his side  an acknowledgment of his enduring popularity with the GOP voters they need to win over in order to snag the nomination.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who received backlash after he briefly knocked Mr Trump over the New York case, lashed out at the Justice Department in a tweet Thursday night. The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, he wrote.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott used similar language in an appearance on Fox News, decrying the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president."

Others, including Trump's former Vice President Mike Pence, were silent post-indictment. Earlier Thursday, Mr Pence had said he hoped that, if the government did bring charges, the Justice Department had strong enough evidence to justify the expected impact.

Only former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot candidate and frequent Trump critic, offered a rebuke. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign, he said.

Republican leaders in Congress, as they have time after time, sprang to Mr Trump's defense as if in choreographed unison.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said the indictment marked a dark day for the United States of America" and a grave injustice.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise accused President Biden of weaponizing his Department of Justice against his own political rival" with a sham indictment that was "the continuation of the endless political persecution of Donald Trump.

Mr Trump and his allies had been bracing for a federal indictment since the presidents lawyers were informed he was a target of the investigation, believing it was a matter of if  not when  charges would be brought.

Mr Trump received word of the indictment Thursday evening while huddled with advisers at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he is spending the summer. He broke the news to the world himself on his Truth Social platform.

His team  well practiced in crisis response  had already asked allies to have supportive statements at the ready, and quickly reacted with a fundraising solicitation and opposition research targeting special counsel Jack Smith. As political donations poured in, Mr Trump ended the night playing DJ at dinner with a mix that included songs from Elvis Presley, Pavarotti and James Brown.

Trump lawyer Jim Trusty, appearing on ABC on Friday morning, said Mr Trump was upset by the notion of this indictment but ready to fight.

Hes a pretty resilient guy," he said. Hes not crumbling in fear or anything remotely like that.

Trusty said on CNN that Mr Trump will appear in court Tuesday, as requested.

Hes not shrinking from the fight," he said. Youre not going to see him hide in Scotland. Hes going to be ready to handle this case and help his attorneys fight it.

People close to Mr Trump have long seen the Mar-a-Lago case as far more serious than the charges he faces in New York in connection to hush money payments made to women who accused him of affairs. Conviction of the federal charges would be expected to carry far steeper legal consequences, and Mr Smith is generally viewed as more difficult to malign than Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat.

Mr Trump's first indictment failed to hurt his support, and polls suggest his position among Republicans has, if anything, grown stronger in the months since.

An April poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that nearly half of Americans (47%) said they believe Mr Trump did something illegal in the classified documents case, slightly more than the 41% who said he did something illegal in the New York hush money case.

New York-based Republican donor Eric Levine, who has emerged as a vocal Trump critic in recent months, acknowledged that, regardless of how serious the charges may be, the Trump faithful will rally behind the former president no matter what.

But for people who were on the fence about Trump, this may push them away, he said. Enough of the chaos and craziness.
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The federal indictment against Donald Trump outlines 37 counts related to retaining classified information, willfully retaining national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice and more.

The indictment was unsealed on Friday (9 June) afternoon, revealing the Department of Justices findings after a nearly year-long investigation into Mr Trump retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Last August, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seized boxes of documents from Mr Trumps home, some of which included top secret records detailing a foreign nations nuclear capabilities, via a search warrant.

The search warrant was executed after the National Archives made multiple attempts to obtain classified documents that Mr Trump allegedly took with him when he left office in 2021.

The indictment lays out various allegations against Mr Trump and names his aide Walt Nauta as a co-conspirator.

Here are key points from the indictment:

Trump allegedly kept documents containing top secrets of US military and other national defence information

The indictment outlines 31 pieces of national defence information, labelled as Top Secret and Secret, that contained information about the military and nuclear capabilities of other countries, as well as the US military.

One document, dated from June 2020, contained information concerning nuclear capabilities of a foreign country.

Another, from an unknown date, had information concerning nuclear weaponry of the United States.

The indictment includes that the 31 documents are all in violation of Title 18, US Code Section 793(e) otherwise known as the Espionage Act.

Trump allegedly kept classified documents in his bathroom, bedroom and more

Photos included in the indictment show several rooms in Mr Trumps Mar-a-Lago home where he allegedly kept boxes containing classified documents.

This includes the bathroom and shower at the Mar-a-Lago Clubs Lake Room, the White and Gold Ballroom where events took place, the business center at Mar-a-Lago, a storage room and his residence at The Bedminster Club.

Trump allegedly described a Pentagon classified plan of attack to a book writer and staff

The indictment alleges the former president told a writer and publication in connection with a then-forthcoming book about a senior military officials plan of attack against a foreign country.

Mr Trump allegedly showed the writer the supposed plan of attack with two other staffers in the room.

The interview was also recorded with Mr Trumps knowledge and consent.

Trump allegedly showed a classified map of a country to a PAC representative

According to the indictment, Mr Trump commented on an ongoing military operation in a country while meeting with a representative of his political action committee at The Bedminster Club.

Mr Trump then showed the PAC representative a classified map of the country.

Trump allegedly suggested lawyers ignore a federal subpoena

When issued with a federal subpoena in May 2022 to hand over documents with classification markings, Mr Trump allegedly suggested to his lawyers to ignore the subpoena or tell the government there were no documents.

Mr Trump allegedly said he did not want anybody looking through my boxes, according to one of Mr Trumps attorneys who remembered the statement in summary.

Instead, Mr Trump allegedly suggested: What happens if we just dont respond at all or dont play ball with them in response to the federal subpoena by a grand jury.

He also allegedly said: Wouldnt it be better if we just told them we dont have anything here? and Isnt it better if there are no documents?

Trump allegedly directed Mr Nauta to remove boxes before an attorney could search them

After the subpoena, an attorney for Mr Trump made it clear to the former president that he would search boxes at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents to hand over to the government. The two coordinated a specific date and time to do so.

But when the attorney went to search the boxes, stored in the Mar-a-Lago storage room, 64 were gone and allegedly removed by Mr Nauta  at Mr Trumps direction

Mr Nauta allegedly brought the boxes to Mr Trumps residence and later loaded them onto a plane to fly with Mr Trump to The Bedminster Club.

Nauta allegedly made false statements to the FBI about the boxes at Mr Trumps home

During an interview with the FBI in May 2022, Mr Nauta allegedly made false statements to agents, claiming he did not know where boxes were being stored at Mar-a-Lago and did not know they were being stored in storage before moving them to Mr Trumps room.

Each one of Mr Trumps 37 counts carries a $250,000 fine and potential prison sentence

Mr Trump was indicted on 31 hours of willful retention of national defence information, one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, one count of withholding a document or record, one count of corruptly concealing a document or record, one count of concealing a document in a federal investigation, one count of scheming to conceal and one count of false statements and representations.

Each one carries a fine of $250,000 as well as maximum sentences ranging from five years to 20 years in prison.
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A Donald Trump body man has been indicted in Special Counsel Jack Smiths investigation into the former presidents mishandling of classified documents.

Walt Nauta, a longtime Trump aide, is the second person to be indicted in the investigation, according to a Wall Street Journal report that was soon confirmed by other media.

Mr Trump immediately weighed in via a Truth Social post.

I have just learned that the Thugs from the Department of Injustice will be Indicting a wonderful man, Walt Nauta, a member of the U.S. Navy, who served proudly with me in the White House, retired as Senior Chief, and then transitioned into private life as a personal aide, he ranted.

Mr Trump added that federal investigators were trying to destroy his life.

He is strong, brave, and a Great Patriot. The FBI and DOJ are CORRUPT!

Details of the indictment were not immediately known.

Mr Nauta, a former White House aide who later joined Mr Trumps staff at Mar-a-Lago, was with the former president at his Bedminster private club when news of the indictment broke on Thursday, according to CNN.

The former military valets involvement in shifting boxes of classified material from Mr Trumps Florida resort had been under scrutiny for months, according to the CNN report.

Mr Nauta, 40, emerged as an important witness in the special counsels classified documents investigation last year.

He reportedly helped a maintenance worker move boxes after a subpoena had been issued, prior to an FBI raid last August.

According to the Washington Post, Mr Nauta initially denied knowledge of classified materials being kept at Mar-a-Lago when questioned by investigators.

However after surveillance footage seized by the FBI reportedly contradicted his account, Mr Nauta reportedly admitted in a second interview that he had moved boxes at Mr Trumps direction.

He later stopped cooperating with investigators, according to CNN.

Mr Trump was indicted on seven separate federal counts understood to include conspiracy to obstruct justice, making false statements, and unlawful retention of national defence information on Thursday night.

He will appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday. If convicted, he could face a maximum combined sentence of 100 years in prison.

Mr Trump has continued to claim his innocence in a series of Truth Social posts.

Mr Nauta, who grew up in Guam, remained close to Mr Trump even after he became a target of the DOJs investigation.

In an interview in March, his aunt Elly Nauta said he had told his mother there was nothing to worry about.

He didnt do anything wrong. All he was instructed was to put the boxes where they were supposed to go, Elly Nauta said.

Meanwhile two of Mr Trumps lawyers, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, resigned on Friday.
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Donald Trump has lashed out at special counsel Jack Smith, branding the federal prosecutor a deranged lunatic and psycho for indicting him over mishandling of secret national security papers.

The former president attacked Mr Smith on his Truth Social platform after the Department of Justices 49-page, 37-count indictment against him was unsealed on Friday.

This is the man who caused the Lois Lerner catastrophe with the IRS. He went after Evangelicals and Great Americans of Faith. The United States had to apologize, and pay major damages for what this deranged lunatic did, stated twice-impeached Mr Trump.

He had a unanimous loss in the Supreme Court. His wife is a Trump Hater, just as he is a Trump Hatera deranged psycho that shouldnt be involved in any case having to do with Justice, other than to look at Biden as a criminal, which he is!

The indictment details the charges against Mr Trump and Walt Nauta, a former US Navy noncommissioned officer who left government service to work for Mr Trump after his term ended in January 2021.

Donald Trump attacks DoJ special counsel Jack Smith after indictment made public (Getty Images)

According to the indictment, the 37 charges against Mr Trump and Mr Nauta include willful retention of national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.

The first 31 counts of the indictment concern Mr Trumps willful retention of national defence information at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Florida home.

The indictment states that Mr Trump kept the classified documents from seven agencies after leaving the White House.

The agencies include the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Department of Energy, and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
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Donald Trump on Thursday broke another legal barrier when he became the first former US president ever to be federally indicted.

A federal grand jury indicted Mr Trump in the investigation into his alleged improper retention of classified documents. The indictment unsealed on Friday revealed 37 counts against the former president, including conspiracy to obstruct, willful retention of documents, and false statements.

He was already under indictment for his role in an alleged scheme to make a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the buildup to the 2016 election.

Now, Mr Trump is facing yet more legal headaches. In a post to Truth Social, he wrote that he has been summoned to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami to be arraigned next Tuesday at 3pm ET.

Heres a rundown of what all the legal terminology means and how we might see Mr Trumps case progress through the criminal justice system.

What is an indictment?

In the American legal system, an indictment is a formal notice that the state believes a person has committed a crime.

A prosecutor secures an indictment by presenting their case to a grand jury, which then votes on whether it believes there is enough evidence to charge a person with a crime.

All proceedings surrounding grand juries are sealed, and the burden of proof for prosecutors is lower than it is at a trial. Typically on 12 of the 16 to 23 grand jurors need to vote to indict a person as opposed to a trial where unanimous verdicts are often required.

An indictment does not determine guilt or innocence, but is a required procedural step in a criminal proceeding.

What is an arraignment?

After the state secures an indictment, it can take a case forward to an arraignment.

At an arraignment hearing, which takes place before a judge, defendants are read the charges facing them and the maximum penalties they carry and then are offered the opportunity to make a plea  either not guilty, no contest, or guilty.

If the defendant pleads guilty or no contest, the case most frequently moves to sentencing. If the defendant pleads not guilty, the judge will set the terms of bail for the defendant and the dates for subsequent events in the case including any pre-trial hearings and an eventual trial, which can sometimes occur months or years after the initial charging date.

So where is Trump in all of this?

The former president has now been indicted twice  once by the Manhattan District Attorney for his role in the alleged hush money scheme, and now by the US Justice Department in Florida for his alleged mishandling of classified documents and obstruction of justice.

Mr Trump was arraigned in New York in the former case in April, and will reportedly be arraigned in Miami in the federal case next Tuesday 13 June. Mr Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges in New York and will enter his plea in Florida when he makes his courthouse appearance there.

Though Mr Trump was arrested in the former case and will be arrested in the coming days in the federal case, he is not expected to be held in jail while awaiting a potential trial. Mr Trump is, of course, running for president again and is the current polling leader for the Republican nomination.

This might not be the last time Mr Trump is indicted this year, either: the former president and several of his advisers are also currently under investigation in Georgia for interfering in the 2020 election.

What happens next?

Former US Attorney Jeffrey Sloman who was a prosecutor for the Southern District of Florida, where Mr Trump is set to be arraigned on Tuesday, told MSNBC that if normal procedures are adhered to, the former president could spend hours in a jail cell before he enters the courtroom.

Mr Sloman said it was unclear if Mr Trump would be handcuffed.

For regular people, when you voluntarily surrender, at about eight or nine in the morning, an agent who is in charge of the case takes the defendant into custody. The pretrial services department does a full and complete history of the defendant for the three PM arraignment, he said.

During that period the defendant sits in a jail cell for the four or five hours, awaiting the appearance, he added. I dont know whether the same is going to be true for Mr Trump but for regular people that is the way it works.

Much like Mr Trumps New York City court appearance, theres likely to be a large media presence and possibly protesters and Trump supporters at the courthouse.

The Secret Service started meeting with federal court marshals and Miami Police on Friday morning regarding the security for the event. In New York, the courthouse was shut down to be inspected by the Secret Service and there was also a large impact on the traffic on the way from the airport to the court.

But the Secret Service is expecting that the court appearance at the Miami courthouse will be easier to carry out, according to The Washington Post.

The preliminary plan is that Mr Trump will fly to Florida to stay at Mar-a-Lago on Monday night. The court is almost 70 miles from Mr Trumps Florida residence and the Secret Service has mentioned concerns about getting him there and back in a motorcade. They see Mr Trump possibly making a public address at the court as too dangerous. The Secret Service is set to work on possible routes through the weekend.

Spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi told The Post that While operational security precludes us from going into specifics, the Secret Service will not seek any special accommodations outside of what would be required to ensure the former presidents continued safety.

As with any site visited by a protectee, the Secret Service is in constant coordination with the necessary entities to ensure protective requirements are met. We have the utmost confidence in the professionalism and commitment to security shared by our law enforcement partners in Florida, he added.
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Jack Smith, the experienced war crimes prosecutor who unveiled an unprecedented federal indictment against former US president Donald J Trump on Friday 9 June, is no stranger to high-profile probes of public figures.

The Department of Justice veteran returned to the US last November after being appointed a special counsel on Friday by Attorney General Merrick Garland, who charged him conducting two probes into Mr Trumps behaviour.

The first mission was to consider whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification of the Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021.

The second, which bore fruit in June with the unsealing of 37 criminal charges against Mr Trump, was about whether the former president had violated US laws prohibiting unlawful retention of national defence information and obstruction of justice.

Jack Smith presiding during a war crimes court hearing at The Hague on November 2020 (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

It marks the first time in US history that an ex-president  let alone one who is a declared candidate in the next presidential election  faces criminal charges. But Mr Trump will not be first public figure who Mr Smith has put in the dock.

From 2010 to 2015,. he oversaw anti-corruption prosecutions against multiple US politicians in his role as the head of the Department of Justice public integrity section.

One of those cases was against former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell, a Republican against whom he secured a conviction on bribery charges, though the case was later thrown out by the US Supreme Court.

He also won a conviction of former GOP Representative Rick Renzi of Arizona, who recieved a sentence of three years in prison before being pardoned by Mr Trump.

A Harvard Law School graduate, Mr Smith also served in prosecutorial roles in US Attorney offices in the Middle District of Tennessee and the Eastern District of New York.

Prior to his appointment by Mr Garland, Mr Smith lived in the Dutch city of The Hague, where he has been serving as a specialist prosecutor overseeing investigations into war crimes in Kosovo since 2018.

He also served as a coordinator of investigations for the prosecutors office at the International Criminal Court from 2008 to 2010, where he worked on cases against foreign government officials and members of militias accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

Yet will even that be ample preparation for the punishing national spotlight to which he will now be subjected, including Mr Trumps infamous social media broadsides?

Following the indictment in June, Mr Trump lashed out at Mr Smith, accusing him of being a Trump hater and a deranged psycho that shouldnt be involved in any case having to do with justice, other than to look at Biden as a criminal  which he is!

Mr Smith kept an even keel in his response. Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice, and our nations commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world, he told reporters later that day. We have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everyone.

This article was originally published on 18 November 2022, and has been updated since with details of the federal indictment against Mr Trump.
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A young girl who was stranded alone in the Washington state wilderness for more than a day has been praised for her courage and resourcefulness.

Ten-year-old Shunghla Mashwani went missing on 4 June while her family members walked back across the river to a parking area at the Cathedral Pass Trailhead in the Cle Elum River Valley, according to the Kittitas County Sheriff. When the group of around 20 adults realised theyd lost Shunghla, they immediately went back and started searching.

Shunghla told her family and rescuers she found herself suddenly separated and alone when the family was travelling back toward the footbridge and couldnt find the bridge on her own, a statement by the sheriffs office read.

The family, who like to spend time in the no-cell area because it reminds them of their native Afghanistan, looked for Shunghla for two hours before a passerby offered to use the Starlink phone at their neighbouring cabin to call 911.

Local authorities and search crews launched a massive search for Shunghla using drones, helicopters and K-9 units. According to CNN, Shunghlas father also recorded a message that was broadcasted over the wooded area, as concern grew over its steep and rugged conditions.

First responders from neighbouring counties joined the search and swift water teams also searched the river, fearing the worst.

On the evening of 5 June, roughly 25 hours after Shunghla went missing, two volunteers found her just one mile and a half from where she was last seen. Another team used an inflatable rescue watercraft to bring her to the other side of the river, where she arrived with only a few scrapes.

Shunghla was found by two volunteers who had been looking for her after she went missing in the Washington wilderness (Kittitas County Sheriffs Office )

Images shared by the Kittitas County Sheriffs Office show Shunghla and her father sharing an emotional embrace after being reunited (Kittitas County Sheriffs Office )

I was thinking, I will find my dad and keep walking in the forest to find my dad, Shunghla told local news station KING. ...I was thinking I would go to sleep and wake up and find my mom and dad in the forest.

Images shared by the Kittitas County Sheriffs Office show Shunghla and her father sharing an emotional embrace after being reunited. Authorities have praised Shunghla for being brave and for sleeping between two trees to protect herself from the cold night.

Shungla said she was thinking about reuniting with he rparents before beign rescued (Kittitas County Sheriffs Office )

The prospect of a little girl being out there alone in the woods is terrifying, Kittitas County inspector Chris Whitsett also told KING. She was a remarkably composed and resilient little girl. Were ecstatic that we were able to find the result that we did instead of the result that we feared.
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A Russian man has died after being mauled by a tiger shark off one of Egypts Red Sea resorts, with disturbing video taken from the beach appearing to show him screaming papa as the attack unfolded.

The 23-year-old Russian national had gone swimming in the waters off his resort near the city of Hurghada when a shark emerged underwater and grabbed him.

The attack forced the Egyptian authorities to close off a 74-kilometre (46-mile) stretch of the coastline, announcing it will remain off limits until Sunday.

Officials from the Russian Consulate in Hurghada identified the man as a Russian citizen. He has been name locally as Vladimir Popov.

His dad has since spoken of watching the attack from the shore.

We went to the beach to relax, Mr Popov, originally from Russia, told the 112 media outlet. My son was attacked by a shark, it all happened in seconds.

What kind of help can you give? This meat grinder happened in 20 seconds, he was just dragged under the water.

He added: This is an absolutely ridiculous coincidence, because it is a safe beach. There are ships and yachts around. Its never happened there. They usually attack on wild beaches. Its just some kind of evil fate.

A nearly minute-long video appearing to be of the brutal shark attack shows the man being suddenly pulled down into the water, only for him to resurface and desperately fight off the shark when suddenly the water around him goes red.

He also screams out papa and cries out loudly as the shark repeatedly circles and comes back in to attack. Later in the video a witness is heard saying it is eating his remains now as a small ship sails in the distance.

The environment ministry in Egypt later said it had caught the shark and was examining it in a laboratory to try to determine the reasons for the rare attack.

Images shared on social media showed the body of the bloodied shark lying on a sheet on land.

Shark attacks are rare in the Red Sea coastal regions. In 2022, two fatal attacks were seen in Hurghada within days, killing an Austrian and a Romanian tourist.

Tiger sharks are a large species that resides in tropical and temperate waters and are among the sharks most cited by the International Shark Attack File for unprovoked attacks on humans.

Additional reporting by agencies
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Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Moscow will deploy some of its tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus next month, a move that the Belarusian opposition described as an attempt to blackmail the West.

Putin said during a meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that work on building facilities for the nuclear weapons will be completed by July 7-8, and they will be moved to the territory of Russia's neighbor and ally quickly after that.

The move comes as Ukraine has stepped up attacks in several sectors of the front line in what some observers see as the start of its long-expected counteroffensive.

Russia used Belarus territory to send its troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and has kept forces and weapons on the territory of its ally.

Everything is proceeding as planned, Putin said in televised remarks as he hosted Lukashenko at his residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. On July 7-8 the preparations of the relevant facilities will be completed and we will immediately start the activities linked to the deployment of those weapons on your territory.

Tactical nuclear weapons are intended to destroy enemy troops and weapons on the battlefield. They have a relatively short range and a much lower yield than nuclear warheads fitted to long-range strategic missiles that are capable of obliterating whole cities.

Putin announced the planned deployment of the short-range nuclear weapons in Belarus earlier this year in a move widely seen as a warning to the West as it stepped up military support for Ukraine. He has emphasized that Russia will retain control of them.

Russia didn't say how many nuclear weapons would be sent to Belarus. The U.S. government believes Russia has about 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, which include bombs that can be carried by aircraft, warheads for short-range missiles and artillery rounds.

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya strongly condemned the move.

Putin and his puppet Lukashenko are planning to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus immediately before NATO's summit in Vilnius in July, Tsikhanouskaya told The Associated Press. "This is a rude blackmail, an attempt to force Europe to back down, but we can't allow dictators to dodge punishment for the nuclear blackmail.

Lukashenko, who has been in power for 29 years, has relied on Russia's political and economic support to survive months of protests, mass arrests and Western sanctions following an election in 2020 that kept him in power but was widely seen at home and abroad as rigged.

___

Yuras Karmanau in Tallinn, Estonia contributed to this report.
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Watch as people lay flowers in tribute after four children and two adults were stabbed and injured in a knife attack in the French Alps.

The incident happened on Thursday 8 June at a lakeside park in Anney.

Police say they have arrested a suspect, a 31-year-old Syrian and according to reports, the alleged knifeman had been denied asylum in France just days before the attack.

A British child is among the victims injured in the attack, foreign secretary James Cleverly has confirmed.

Our thoughts are with the victims and the families and we stand ready to support the French authorities in whichever way we can, he said on Thursday.

We have already deployed British consulate officials travelling to the area to make themselves available to support the family. And, of course, we stand in strong solidarity with the people of France.

Ahead of Friday mornings tributes, flowers, teddy bears, candles and written messages were left at the park overnight.
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A picturesque French town has been left reeling after four children were stabbed in a playground horror attack.

Two adults were also injured in the attack in Annecy in the French Alps on Thursday morning. All of the youngsters - who were aged between 22 months and three - were transferred to hospitals in the French Alps and across the Swiss border in Geneva.

One of the injured children is British, the UK foreign secretary James Cleverly confirmed and is believed to have been on holiday at the time.

The horrific attack was caught on camera (Twitter)

A 70-year-old man was also seriously injured  first by the knifeman and then by police fire during the attack which took place at around 7.45am local time in Le Paquier park in Annecy. A second adult was treated for injuries not believed to be life-threatening.

Have you been affected by this story? If so email tara.cobham@independent.co.uk

Horrifying footage posted on social media appeared to show a knifeman running around the area while being pursued by several onlookers.

French police said they later arrested a man in his early 30s over the attack. Below we look at everything we know about the suspect so far.

Four children were rushed to hospital following the attack (EPA)

What happened during the attack?

The suspect - wearing a blue-chequered headscarf and sunglasses - was allegedly seen shouting before he began attacking small children in the playground with a four-inch blade.

In horrifying footage, the assailant jumps over a low wall and repeatedly lunges at a child in a stroller, pushing aside a woman who tries to fend him off.

One bystander is later seen trying to stop him as other parents flee with their children.

Within minutes, the attacker was pursued by police. He then attacked an elderly man in a different part of the park. Police fired shots and detained the attacker, who was unharmed, and is now being questioned by police.

What do we know about the suspect?

French prime minister Elisabeth Borne said the suspected attacker, who was in police custody, was a 31-year-old Syrian national who was granted asylum in Sweden 10 years ago.

She confirmed that he had entered France legally and was carrying Swedish identity documents plus a Swedish driving license. Ms Borne also said he was homeless and an isolated individual.

He had asked for asylum in France, which had not been processed because he already had refugee status in Sweden. Because he had EU refugee status, he was free to travel legally to France, she said.

Police sources told the French Le Monde newspaper the man had declared himself to be a Syrian Christian in his French asylum application.

The publication also reported that he had been wearing a Christian cross on a chain around his neck when arrested.

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the suspected was an isolated individual (AFP via Getty Images)

What do we know about the possible motive behind the attack?

Annecy public prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said there was "no evidence" of a terrorist motive.

Instead, the prosecutor said an inquiry was underway for attempted murder. National police, rather than anti-terrorist investigators, are heading the investigation.

Ms Borne said French authorities had contacted international security and intelligence agencies and the man was unknown to any French, European or other foreign security service. He had no criminal record, and no apparent psychiatric record, she said.

What have the authorities said?

Ms Borne described the attack as savage and said the whole of France had been shaken by this hateful, indescribable act.

French president Emmanuel Macron tweeted that it was an act of absolute cowardice and that the nation was in shock.

"Nothing more abominable than to attack children," National Assembly speaker Yael Braun-Pivet said on Twitter. Parliament observed a minute of silence to mark the incident.

Mr Cleverly said the UKs thoughts are with the victims and their families and we stand ready to support in whichever way we can".

The attack took place in Annecy, a town in the east of the country (The Independent/Datawrapper)

He added: "We have already deployed British consular officials who are travelling to the area to make themselves available to support the family.

And, of course, we stand in strong solidarity with the people of France at this very terrible time."

Home secretary Suella Braverman said she was in touch with her French counterpart, Gerald Darmanin, adding that she was appalled by the attack.

Prime minster Rishi Sunak tweeted: My thoughts are with all of those affected by the shocking attack in Annecy this morning.

As @EmmanuelMacron has said, it was a truly cowardly act. The UK and France have always stood together against acts of violence, and we do so again today.
 Close Flowers and toys laid in tribute at Annecy park after knifeman stabbed children and adults

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Locals have attended a mass for the victims of an unfathomable knife attack at a lakeside playpark in southeastern France.

Father Didier Milani and Bishop Yves Le Saux were pictured hosting the service in Annecy on Friday, one day after the incident in which four young children and two pensioners were injured, to a church packed full of people praying for the victims.

On Friday afternoon the Mayor of Annecy said he was confident about the condition of the children involved in the attack.

Francois Astorg told reporters close to the scene: The children are stable right now, the adults are much better.

A suspect has been arrested and identified as a 31-year-old Syrian refugee, who authorities say had been refused asylum in France days earlier, as he had been granted refugee status in Sweden earlier this year.

Well-wishers continued to visit the park on Friday morning to lay flowers and other tributes for those injured in the attack. The children are between 22 months and three years old.
 Close Police were scouring the remote Barragem do Arade reservoir in the Algarve, Portugal last week, around 35 miles from where the then-three-year-old went missing in 2007 while on a family holiday in Praia da Luz

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Soil from a reservoir in Portugal searched by police last month is being compared with samples from main suspect Christian Brueckners camper van, it has been reported.

Detectives believe Brueckner visited the remote Barragem do Arade reservoir in Portugals Algarve region days after Madeleine disappeared.

Officials now believe they can prove that Brueckners van was in the area at the time the three-year-old was abducted , sources told The Daily Mirror.

The insider claimed that if the soil sample analysis reveals a positive match, police may be able to further close the net around Brueckner, 45, who has not yet been charged.

Earlier, a forensics expert warned that traditional evidence will be difficult to find after 16 years have passed since Madeleine McCanns disappearance.

Dan Matthews said that investigators would have searched the remote reservoir in Portugal for things that couldve stood the test of time and not been destroyed by its passage, such as clothing fragments or jewelry.
 Close Ukraine: Soviet-era dam destroyed near Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant

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Ukraines military has claimed to have recaptured their first village since launching counter-offensive actions against Russia.

Ukrainian soldiers were filmed hoisting their blue and yellow flag at a damaged building in what the army said was the village of Blahodatne, in the partially occupied eastern Donetsk region in the southeast of the country.

The unverified video was published by the 68th Separate Hunting Brigade of the Armed Forces. It comes after president Volodymyr Zelensky said that counter-offensive and defensive actions are under way against Russian forces in an apparent confirmation of the long-awaited pushback of Putins troops.

The Russian Defence Ministry has continued to insist that it is repelling Ukrainian attacks in the Donetsk region. It said in a statement that Ukrainian attempts at offensive operations on the southern Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia axes of the frontline over the past 24 hours have been unsuccesful.
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Seismic data suggests the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine was blown up  with an explosion detected around the time it collapsed

Ukraine's security service claims to have intercepted a telephone call proving a Russian "sabotage group" blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric station and dam early on Tuesday in the Kherson region.

Norway's research foundation Norsar said that data collected from regional seismic stations showed clear signals of an explosion. And US spy satellites detected an explosion at the dam, a US official was quoted as saying by The New York Times.

The destruction early on Tuesday of the facility - which had been in Russian hands since shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 - unleashed mass flooding, forcing thousands of residents to flee and wreaking environmental havoc.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) posted a one-and-a-half minute audio clip on its Telegram channel of the alleged conversation, which featured two men who appeared to be discussing the fallout from the disaster in Russian.

The recording could not be independently verified.

Russia has accused Kyiv of destroying the dam. The Russian foreign ministry did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment on the SBU statement.

"They [The Ukrainians] didn't strike it. That was our sabotage group," said one of the men on the recording, described by the SBU as a Russian soldier. "They wanted to, like, scare [people] with that dam."

"It didn't go according to plan, and (they did) more than what they planned for."

The man also said "thousands" of animals had been killed at a "safari park" downstream as a result. The other man on the line expressed surprise at the soldier's assertion that Russian forces had destroyed the dam.

The SBU offered no further details of the conversation or its participants. It said it had opened a criminal investigation into war crimes and "ecocide".

"The interception by the SBU confirms that the Kakhovskaya HPP (Hydroelectric Power Plant) was blown up by a sabotage group of the occupiers," the SBU said in a statement. "The invaders wanted to blackmail Ukraine by blowing up the dam and staged a man-made disaster in the south of our country."

The US official said that satellites equipped with infrared sensors detected a heat signature consistent with a major explosion.

Norsar said in a statement that the data from one seismic station in Romania showed activity at 02:54 a.m. local time on Tuesday, indicating an explosion, and the timing coincides with media reports of the dam collapse.

Together with the power station, the dam helped provide electricity, irrigation and drinking water to southern Ukraine, including Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.

Water levels were high in the reservoir in the buildup to the explosion.

"By blowing up the Kakhovskaya HPP dam, the Russian Federation definitively proved that it is a threat to the entire civilised world," SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk was quoted as saying in its statement.

"Our task is to bring to justice not only the leaders of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's regime, but also the ordinary perpetrators of crimes," he said.

Western countries say they are still gathering evidence but argue that Ukraine would have no reason to inflict such a devastating disaster on itself, especially right as its forces were shifting onto the attack.

Thousands of people have been forced to evacuate homes flooded in the wake of the dam's collapse. Vast nature preserves have been wiped out and the destruction to irrigation systems is likely to cripple agriculture across much of southern Ukraine for decades. Kyiv said at least four people had died and 13 were missing.

In Hola Prystan on the Russian-occupied side of the river, rescuers evacuated residents in rubber dinghies. Villagers carried pets or small children to safety.

"Our house was carried away by a torrent of water," said a woman who gave her name as Oksana, being evacuated in a boat with her teenage daughter and their two dogs.

Some relatives of people in Russian-controlled flooded areas said their loved ones were still stuck on roofs with dwindling food supplies. The United Nations has no access to those areas, its Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine Denise Brown said, adding that some 17,000 people were affected in Ukrainian-controlled areas, with numbers changing "by the minute".

The river divides the two sides, which accuse each other of shelling across it, interfering with rescue efforts. The Kremlin said Ukrainian shelling had killed people including a pregnant woman. It provided no evidence.

Reuters
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A significant Ukrainian force has launched an assault on Russian lines in the southern Zaporizhzhia region  with a surge in attacks that points towards its counteroffensive shifting into high gear.

A number of US and Ukrainian officials suggested this was the start in earnest of Kyiv's bid to reclaim territory lost to Russian occupation during Moscow's invasion. Ukraine's commanders and government have always said there would be no official announcement of the start of the counteroffensive and there has already been an increase in military activity all week.

The combat against Russian positions  including intense fighting outside of the town of Tokmak, a Russian logistical hub  is said to involve Western-supplied tanks, armoured vehicles and infantry backed by artillery.

The Kremlin has repeatedly claimed to have repelled Ukrainian attacks  that it calls the counteroffensive  across various points of the war's frontlines for a number of days, but Russian military bloggers noted an increase in clashes overnight Wednesday and into Thursday. One said: Wave after wave of the enemy is trying to break through our defence."

Appearing to confirm an operation was underway, the Ukrainian deputy defence minister, Hanna Maliar, said Russia was actively on the defensive in the Orihiv area of Zaporizhzhia region.

Citing two unnamed Ukrainian officials, including a source close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, ABC News reported that the offensive was truly beginning. Reports from other US outlets citing both Ukrainian and US officials, all speaking anonymously, said similar things. But when asked about these reports, a spokesperson for the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces told Reuters: "We have no such information."

Video footage appearing on social media appeared to suggest that that German-made Leopard 2 tanks were involved in the battle. Russian Colonel General Alexander Romanchuk claimed, without providing evidence, that Moscow's forces had destroyed three Leopard tanks. The officer also said that the general in charge of Russias troops in Ukraine, chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov, briefed President Vladimir Putin on the battles in Zaporizhzhia.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu also claimed that country's forces had driven back Ukrainian troops trying to punch through defensive lines in the Zaporizhzhia region  after a two-hour battle involving what he said was up to 1,500 Ukrainian soldiers and 150 armored vehicles. The Kremlin has a habit of inflating such numbers and the fog of war obscures a significant proportion of what happens on the frontlines.

Zaporizhzhia  one of four partly occupied regions illegally annexed by the Kremlin  has long been seen as a likely point of a main Ukrainian strike, but Kyiv has worked to mask its plans by launching attacks on multiple points across the vast frontlines.

Zaporizhzhia is part of the land corridor that Moscow has sought to create between Ukrainian's industrial heartland and the Crimean Peninsula, which the Kremlin annexed in 2014. For Ukraine, breaking or disrupting that land bridge will likely be one of the main aims of the offensive.

The Institute for the Study of War, a US-based thinktank that tracks the war in daily updates, said it had concluded on Thursday that the Ukrainian counteroffensive "has begun".

Activity throughout Ukraine is consistent with a variety of indicators that Ukrainian counteroffensive operations are under way across the theatre, the organisation tweeted.

Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report
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Some 40 kilometres of white sand lined with hotels stretches along Egypts Red Sea coast, making up the picturesque beach resort town of Hurghada, where tourists flock to dive in its sparkling blue sea.

But beachgoers relaxing in the sun were jolted out of their contented torpor by a bloodcurdling scream of papa! coming from someone swimming out in the water.

Horror descended on this peaceful scene as the blue waters of the Red Sea, just off Dream Beach, appeared to suddenly turn the colour of its name.

Some 40 kilometres of white sand lined with hotels stretches along Egypts Red Sea coast, making up the picturesque beach resort town of Hurghada (Andrew Eames)

A man, latterly identified as a 23-year-old Russian national, seemed to be thrashing about as he was pulled down into the water and then resurfaced, desperately fighting off a tiger shark in a brutal attack.

In the disturbing nearly minute-long video taken from the beach, he also appears to scream out papa and cry out loudly as the shark repeatedly circles and comes back in to attack. Later in the footage, a witness is heard saying it is eating his remains now as a small ship sails in the distance.

Tiger sharks are large species that reside in tropical and temperate waters and are among sharks most cited by the Florida Museum of Natural History in its International Shark Attack File (ISAF) for unprovoked attacks on humans.

But shark attacks are generally rare overall, with confirmed unprovoked cases totalling 57 worldwide in 2022, according to the ISAF, which is lower than the most recent five-year (2017-21) average of 70 incidents annually.

Shark attacks are generally rare overall, with confirmed unprovoked cases totalling 57 worldwide in 2022, according to the ISAF (The Independent/Datawrapper)

Meanwhile, the database suggests those that end in a fatality are even rarer, numbering just five of last years figure, which is roughly in line with the five-year global average of six unprovoked fatalities per year. It adds there were an additional four shark-related deaths in 2022 that were classed as provoked.

However, the ISAF notes two of those unprovoked killings happened in Egypts waters, making it the highest, joint with South Africa, for fatal cases last year. It states two was also the countrys total figure for unprovoked shark bites, which means all attacks there resulted in death. Although there were 41 unprovoked shark bites in the USA in 2022, the database shows only one resulted in death, while of the nine people who were bitten in Australia, all survived.

The ISAF notes two of the global total of unprovoked killings last year happened in Egypts waters, making it the highest, joint with South Africa, for fatal cases (The Independent / Datawrapper)

Egypts Red Sea resorts, including Hurghada and Sharm El-Sheikh, boast some of the countrys most renowned beach destinations and are popular with European tourists. Divers are attracted by the steep drop-offs of coral reefs just offshore, which offer a rich and colourful sea life.

Yet these tourist hotspots also seem to attract aggressive sharks. The two unprovoked fatal attacks that happened in Egypt in 2022 both took place in Hurghada, when an Austrian and a Romanian tourist were killed within days of each other.

Tiger sharks are large species that reside in tropical and temperate waters and are among sharks most cited by the International Shark Attack File (ISAF) for unprovoked attacks on humans (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

In July last year, 68-year-old Austrian Elisabeth Sauer, a former councillor, was snorkelling when she was believed to have been attacked by a Mako or Oceanic whitetip shark in front of horrified onlookers, telling her husband Ill go back in for a moment just before she was mauled.

The second woman, identified as a Romanian national aged in her 40s, is believed to have been similarly killed just 650ft away, with reports her terribly disfigured remains were found on a nearby reef the same day.

Former Austrian councillor Elisabeth Sauer, 68, died in a shark attack while snorkelling near Hurghada in Egypt (Die Grunen Kramsach)

And, in previous years, a Czech tourist was killed by a shark off a Red Sea beach in 2018, while a German tourist was similarly killed in 2015.

A particularly frightening spate of attacks was the five that happened in five days in 2010, unusually close to the shore of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing one German and maiming four other foreign tourists.

Then there was the shark attack in 2020 when a young Ukrainian boy lost an arm and an Egyptian tour guide lost a leg.

Tourists flock to Hurghada to dive in its sparkling blue sea (AFP via Getty Images)

In the most recent shark attack on Thursday that killed the young Russian, authorities closed off a 74-kilometre (46-mile) stretch of the coastline, announcing it will remain off limits until Sunday.

The ministry later said it had caught the shark and was examining it in a laboratory to try to determine the reasons for the rare attack.

A gory video circulating online appears to show the Egyptian authorities capturing the shark in the water with nets and dragging it ashore for inspection, with crowds gathering around to watch as the predator bleeds from where someone has hooked its nose.

Egypt has in recent years sought to revive the vital tourism sector, which has been hurt by years of political instability, the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

The countrys tourism industry has also suffered from the fallout of a number of terrorist attacks. In 2005, bombings in Sharm el-Sheikh killed dozens in one of Egypts deadliest militant attacks. And in 2017, two German tourists were stabbed to death and at least four others injured at a hotel beach in the popular Red Sea resort of Hurghada in Egypt.

In a bid to restore confidence, Egyptian authorities built a 22-mile long concrete and wire wall around the tourist resort of Sharm El-Sheikh in 2021. Those entering the city by road are now required to pass through one of four gates equipped with cameras and scanners. Officials say the structure will protect tourism at the Red Sea resort on the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula.

After visits to Egypt decreased over the period between 2012 to 2019, according to Statista, the UK government reports an estimated half a million British nationals made a trip to the country last year, adding: Most visits are trouble free.
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Instagram has stopped working properly, with the websites app refusing to load properly.

The desktop version of the app went offline on Friday morning, with an array of users unable to get online.

But the problems appeared to be focused on that website, rather than the more popular mobile app.

Shortly after, the website was working again as usual, with users able to load posts.

Instagrams website is far less popular than its mobile app, which remains the primary way of both posting and viewing other peoples posts.

The website is however useful to those who are unable to download the app, which includes people attempting to use the social network on tablets and desktop.
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In the elegant Town Hall Square in the old town of Tartu, Estonias second biggest city and site of the countrys oldest, most important university, stands a statue in the middle of a fountain.

The Kissing Students portrays a young man and woman in a passionate, eternal lip-on-lip embrace, sheltered under an umbrella. On a date to be decided  Valentines Day would seem appropriate  the statue will be the focus of what will probably be one of the most publicised events in the 2024 European Capital of Culture programme when Tartu takes on the role.

The occasion invites residents and visitors to replicate the sculptures pose as one of a variety of kissing activities extolling the values of openness, humanity and respect. The main, mass kissing event in the square promises unprecedented simultaneous kissing action, organisers say, following a concert of Eurovision tunes, all of it broadcast live on TV.

Read more Europe travel:

In case youre either licking your lips or outraged at the prospect of a wild 1960s-style speed-dating snogathon, thats not quite what the organisers have in mind. Pecks on the cheek, or even on the hand, are as much a part of kissing culture as a meeting of lips, and there will also be a First Kiss educational element for schools to enhance sexual health and safety.

The embracing couple have stood in Tartus central square for more than 70 years (Tim Bird)

Such an open and communal display of affection is bound to attract attention, but this will be only one of the eye-catching items on an imaginative agenda for 2024. Visitors to Estonia, one of the three Baltic republics (along with Latvia and Lithuania), often head to the charming old town in the capital Tallinn, on the Baltic coast, without venturing much further. Tartu, a two-hour train ride from Tallinn to the south-east, intends to exploit its cultural capital status to attract visitors and acquaint them with its own considerable delights, as well as those of the surrounding region.

Top of the list of Tartu attractions at any time is the Estonian National Museum, whose sleek glass edifice, gradually sloping towards the ground from its towering triangular entrance, is an architectural statement of this small nations pride and independence. Thats before you even go in to marvel at the displays, with texts digitally translated at an interactive flash of your smart ticket, drawn from a collection of artefacts and documents numbering more than a million. Topics range through Estonian ethnology up to and beyond the years of Soviet rule from 1944 to 1991.

At the end of my own visit, I collared university student Katrin Alekand, finishing her shift as a museum guide, and ask her what she expects from the upcoming cultural capital programme.

What I really like is that well be focusing also on the areas around Tartu, on the historic town of Viljandi and the shores of Lake Peipsi, she said, referring to the enormous body of water to the east of Tartu, slashed down the middle by the border with Russia.

The Estonian National Museum is a must-see in Tartu (Tim Bird)

The lake shore is home to communities of Orthodox Old Believers, whose annual autumn Onion Festival will feature on the 2024 cultural calendar as one of many nods to the regions diversity. Estonia is predominantly Lutheran and has a sizeable Russian-speaking population of Orthodox persuasion, although it is sometimes described as of the worlds most atheist country.

The Emajogi river running through Tartu links Peipsi with Vortsjarv, another smaller but substantial lake to the west. The river will feature in next years plans, not least in the role played by the traditional  and unique  rounded timber-hull barges, such as the replica vessel Jommu, which is already a familiar sight on the Emajogi. Jommus big sister is under construction at the Lodjakoda riverside shipyard under the supervision of the Emajoe Barge Society, using original designs and craftsmanship. The barge, whose name will be chosen in a competition, will be launched in time for the next years programme.

As of spring 2023, details of the programme and events are still being finalised and due to be revealed in October, building up to the grand opening on 26 January 2024. However, in addition to the kissing event, its agreed that a Hybrid Democracy festival is on the list, as is Hidden Worlds Expanding, an outdoor art show focusing on the needs of people with intellectual disabilities. The town of Viljandi is know for its song and music festivals, so its no surprise that it will bring those elements to the party.

The years itinerary will follow the theme Arts of Survival.

Top of the list of Tartu attractions at any time is the Estonian National Museum... an architectural statement of this small nations pride and independence.

Its prophetic that we chose this theme, because in 2019 when we made our pitch there was no Covid pandemic, no war in Ukraine and climate change was still not as urgent as it has become, said Oliver Berg, line manager for the Europe component of the programme, one of four thematic threads along with Earth, Humanity and Universe.

The Arts of Survival theme seems even more poignant.

Legacy is always a priority for this kind of event, and Tartus big year is no exception. One central aim is to create a model for other international events in terms of sustainability in all its aspects, from waste management to energy consumption, and from catering and water usage to transportation.

CoC 2024 is going to be Estonias main event next year, adds Berg. It will be the best-known brand in Estonia next year. Our mission is to have at least a million visitors, with something sparkling going on the whole time in this city of only 100,000 people.

Tartu will be on everyones lips, then  in more ways than one.

Air Baltic flies from Gatwick to Tallinn, from which its a two-hour train or bus ride to Tartu.

Read more on the best hotels in Europe
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Disney has relaunched one of its most premium products: a round the world private jet tour calling at all 12 of its parks, a costing a whopping $115,000 (91,665).

Adventures by Disney, Disneys guided trip provider, has announced the return of the costly and exclusive trip, entitled Disney Parks Around the World  A Private Jet Adventure.

It offers 75 VIP Disney fans a 24-day experience calling at six countries, 12 parks and staying at nine different accommodations, from Tokyo to Paris, departing summer 2024.

An action-packed itinerary boasts VIP studio tours, early park access, reserved seating and exclusive behind-the-scenes tours.

According to the Adventures by Disney website, guests will travel with an in-flight chef and physician in luxury aboard a VIP-configured Boeing 757, operated by Icelandair, with long-range capabilities that allow for direct flights to maximize your time in each destination.

Guests who splash out on tickets will also have bucket-list opportunities to visit landmarks at non-Disney destinations, including the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, the Taj Mahal in India and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

The $115,000 per ticket price tag is based on two passengers sharing double occupancy rooms. Guests travelling solo will incur a singles supplement of almost $11,500 (9,165).

A minimum age restriction of 12 applies, with the tour operator suggesting travellers are over the age of 14  childrens tickets are not discounted.

The prices do not include airfare to the departure airport, California, or the return airport, Florida.

Two journeys are scheduled for 2024, departing 16 June and 28 July, and each accommodates 75 people. There is expected to be a high level of demand for the 150 seats.

Last year the company offered a similar, albeit $5,000 cheaper, around-the-world Disney excursion. The inaugural voyage sold out before general public sales.

Bookings for the trip open to the general public on 19 June, with tickets on sale for regular Adventures by Disney customers and members of Disneys exclusive Golden Oak community from 12 June.
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As fans of Manchester City and the Italian side Inter converge on Istanbul for Saturdays Champions League final, there are still flights available at fares way below the usual peak pricing for key sporting events.

Pegasus Airlines has a one-way overnight flight on Friday night from Manchester, arriving at 8.35am, for just 263  comparable with normal fares for very short-notice bookings.

The final kicks off at 10pm local time (8pm UK time) at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium on the west side of the city.

Compared with the prices paid by West Ham United fans who went to Prague for the Europa Conference final on Wednesday, Manchester City supporters have plenty of choice at lower fares  even though Istanbul is twice as far.

Heres our guide to booking a last-minute Turkey trip to see the final.

How much are air fares to the host city?

Manchester to Istanbul is almost 1,700 miles, and a four-hour flight. The demand for seats has pushed up fares. But the aviation analyst Cirium has identified 13 extra scheduled flights between Manchester and Istanbul, with additional charter flights. The extra flights add around 2,500 extra seats to normal capacity.

The Turkish carrier Pegasus is scheduled to be the largest airline between the two cities this week, followed by Turkish Airlines and easyJet. Pegasus has a departure at 2.35am on Saturday that arrives at 8.35am for 263.

Passengers who are prepared to travel overnight via Dalaman will pay even less: 151 one-way.

There is even a flight for 111 that arrives in Istanbul at 7.55pm, two hours before kick off. But those flights touch down at Sabiha Gokcen airport on the Asian side of the city, with difficult transport direct to the stadium.

Flying into Istanbuls vast new airport on the European side of the Bosphorus, fares are generally much higher. But there is one Turkish Airlines flight from Manchester at 209 on Saturday that arrives three hours before the final begins.

Returning home?

While some Manchester City fans have been in the city for days, it appears that everyone wants to come home on Sunday. Turkish Airlines has just a few seats available at 858 one way, with some flights offering business-class only at 1,536.

But anyone who waits until Monday will find much cheaper deals  especially if they are prepared to fly to one of the London airports. Seats at below 300 one way are widely available.

This compares with over 1,000 return for West Ham fans flying from London to Prague this week.

What about accommodation?

Rates are surging in the city centre, especially for Saturday night. One quote for an upmarket hotel is 3,835 for Saturday night, and city-centre three-star hotels are selling for around 300 for a double. But Istanbul is vast, with tens of thousands of hotel rooms. Staying on the Asian side and taking the ferry across should work out at around 100 a night for a double room.

What about safety?

The UK government is saying: Plan your movement around the city to arrive at the Manchester City dedicated fanzone or stadium well in advance of the match kick-off, follow the instructions of the local authorities, take care of your personal possessions including passports, especially in crowds and on public transport.

There are warnings of terrorism from the Foreign Office, which says: There is a potential that citizens from western countries may be targets or caught up in attacks.

Should I stay longer?

Yes. Istanbul is one of the greatest cities in the world, and extending a stay by 48 hours to make the most of the history, gastronomy and atmosphere in Istanbul would be an excellent move.

Read our latest 48 Hours guide to Istanbul
Footage circulating on social media shows a black bear running through a residential street and climbing into a tree in Washington DC on Friday, 9 June.

The animal has been safely captured and is expected to be released back into the wild.

DC Police confirmed the bear was tranquillised by the Human Rescue Alliance in a backyard on Franklin Street in the Brentwood-Brookland neighbourhood shortly after 10:15 a.m

Officials loaded the bear into a steel cage and placed it on to an animal rescue truck.
Rishi Sunak described the stabbing attack in the French Alpine town of Annecy as unfathomable, adding that his thoughts were with all those affected.

Four toddlers, including a British child, and two adults were stabbed in a knife attack in Pasquier Park on Thursday 8 June.

The French government said the suspected assailant was a Syrian refugee.

All our thoughts are with those affected by this unfathomable attack - including a British child, Mr Sunak said, during a press conference alongside Joe Biden at the White House.

We stand ready to offer any assistance that we can.
Donald Trump was indicted on Thursday night (8 June) over his handling of classified documents after he left the White House.

The former US president, 76, faces seven charges that relate to the storage of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.

If convicted, the charges - which have not been made public - could carry a maximum combined sentence of 100 years in prison.

Following the historic federal indictment, Mr Trump insisted on his Truth Social platform: I am an innocent man.
A video of a woman hitting a lamp post during her driving test in Argentina on Wednesday (7 June) has gone viral on social media.

The ill-fated test, taken by a 63-year-old, was caught on CCTV camera in the eastern city of Lanus.

Footage shows her mounting the curb as she drives around a circuit, before speeding up and crashing into a lamp post.

Civil Defense teams and firefighters were called to assist her to get out of the vehicle after it tipped over, and she was taken for treatment after suffering minor injuries.

The video has since gone viral in Argentina.
Dozens of tributes including flowers, teddy bears, candles and written messages were left at a park in the French Alps following the stabbing attack that left four children - including a British girl - and two adults injured.

The area, which has a number of wooden structures for children to play on, was open to the public but empty at 12pm local time.

One of the messages left said: Love Annecy.

Police say they have arrested a suspect, a 31-year-old Syrian, following the attack.
Terrifying footage shows three masked robbers burst into a shop and threaten a female worker with an axe during a terrifying raid in Grimsby.

Despite the danger, the woman continues to struggle against her attackers - even after shes put in a headlock and has a hatchet held close to her throat.

The trio later try to smash open the shops till with their weapon, but the store worker manages to shove them out of the door before they flee.

Benjamin Allen, 20, and Cameron Fitzgerald, 19, were part of the gang that burst into the shop.

They have both been jailed for three years after pleading guilty to armed robbery, while a third person involved was not charged.

The woman was not seriously hurt but the trauma of the experience has remained with her, Humberside Police said.
The Israeli army said on Thursday (8 June) that it demolished the West Bank home of a Palestinian involved in twin bombings in Jerusalem that killed two and wounded at least 18 others in November 2022.

Israeli authorities arrested Islam Faroukh in December on suspicion of carrying out the bombings, part of a more than year-long surge in violence in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

The army released video footage showing troops closing off the area and carrying out controlled explosions, destroying an apartment in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah early on Thursday.
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Happy days. Donald Trump could be in jail for 100 years, if you tot up all the latest charges against him for unlawfully holding classified documents and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

No doubt his supporters will already be making preparations for the Trump 2124 presidential bid, such is his perceived immortality. Trump, even if he died in jail, could be cryogenically frozen, ready for a run a century or so, perhaps against some descendant of the Clinton, Obama or Biden families. But, snarking aside, this is a grim moment for Trump, and will prove troubling for America.

Most worryingly for Trump, things in this case are moving extremely fast. The special counsel, meaning the federal prosecuting lawyer, is Jack Smith, a former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, of all things.

Before that, he was in charge of public integrity unit at the US Department of Justice. His appointment is open-ended, but that doesnt of course mean that the prosecution will meander along at leisure.

The directive establishing his investigation into Trump and the missing official papers notes that Trump is a current candidate for president, and the clear inference of that is that Smith and his team will want to complete as much of the process before the campaigning for the 2024 contest begins.

All the wisecracks about Trump conducting his campaign from a jail cell, or even moving the Oval Office into a penitentiary have a serious point  the convention is that public prosecutors must avoid interference in the democratic process. Hence Smith wanting to get this out of the way rapidly. That sense of urgency doesnt seem to be quite the same for some of the parallel cases into Trumps alleged interference with the 2020 election results, the transition of power in 2021 and the attempted insurrection at the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Those would be even more protracted than the present one.

Hence the fast pace of developments now, and Trump will apparently surrender to the authorities to face charges as early as Tuesday, his second time in a court room since the beginning of April (though that time not on federal charges  this is another order of judicial first). In April, Trump was arraigned and pleaded not guilty to 34 New York State felony charges relating to falsifying business records, stemming from supposed hush money payments made to the adult actress Stormy Daniels at the time of the presidential campaign in 2016.

Now, in Miami, he faces a similar ritual. There may well be many more to come, given the array of legal actions against him, including a potentially explosive one in Georgia, where the district attorney in Fulton County is mulling charges around efforts by the former president and his allies to overturn the 2020 election there. And, only last Thursday, Trumps lawyers requested a federal court in New York to reduce the penalty awarded against him in the sexual assault and defamation civil case won by writer E Jean Carroll, from $5m down to $1m, or else grant him a new trial. Last month a jury found the ex-president liable for sexually abusing and defaming her.

Behind the arraignment in Miami on Tuesday  another media circus  its not clear how quickly things will proceed, but it may be that the latest case runs into the earliest stages of the Republican primaries, which begin voting in February. The pace of events is already picking up, with the declaration by former vice-president Mike Pence that he is going to run for the White House.

Will the welter of legal cases against him damage Trump? The short answer is that they wont within his own party, where the base think him innocent and the victim of conspiracies. But for the wider electorate, voters may think more carefully about whether they want such a volatile personality back in the White House  from where he pledges to enact retribution against his enemies.

In the primaries, where mostly registered Republicans will choose their partys candidate, there can be upsets, but Trump presently holds a commanding lead among Republicans, and looks unstoppable. Indeed, after the Manhattan indictment (related to the Stormy Daniels affair), Trumps popularity actually rose among Republicans.

It seems that the more and the worse the changes against Trump grow, the more he looks the victim, persecuted by a vindictive Establishment run by radical Democrats and RINOs (Republicans in name only). Trump denies all, and says that Im an innocent man. Im an innocent personthe corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been indicted. His supporters are inclined to believe him: eight in ten believe he is being victimised.

Of the many charges approved by a grand jury to be levelled against Trump, the ones that are the most grievous, politically dangerous, and intriguing, are the ones relating to him obstructing justice. Of course, no ones surprised that Trump has this one on his charge sheet, because weve become so inured to his unorthodox ways and his utter contempt for the law  that is not the least of the damage he has inflicted on American democracy. But its still a sobering, unprecedented moment, and an historic one for a former president to be faced with such a federal indictment. Just for the record, as they say, the full gamut of offences reportedly runs as follows: wilful retention of national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document, corruptly concealing a document, concealing a document in a federal investigation, and engaging in a scheme to conceal and false statements.

The conspiracy to obstruct justice is one that will surely offend many Americans the most. Any president or other official might end up with some official sensitive or even top secret documents at their home if they were granted sufficient clearance. Jo Biden infamously ended up with some such material form his time as vice president under Barack Obama dumped in his garage. In electronic form, funnily enough, Trump alway accused Hilary Clinton of doing much the same, via her notorious use of a private email account. Indeed, Trump approved a 2018 law to upgrade such offences from a misdemeanour to a felony, a move which has comeback to bite him.

But the question is - what was he doing with these documents concerning national defence and relations with North Korea, Russia and others. Why keep them, and refuse to hand them back? What possible us could they be? No doubt more will emerge during the legal proceedings. Even Trump might not survive such revelations.
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Twice-impeached, now twice-indicted.

According to multiple news reports and the man himself, a federal grand jury has officially indicted former President Donald Trump over his mishandling of classified documents. This comes one day after The Independent was first to report that DOJ prosecutors were ready to ask grand jurors to indict Trump for Espionage Act violations and obstruction of justice on Thursday. Thats exactly what has happened.

The indictment is still under seal, but heres what we know so far: Trumps attorney has confirmed that the former president is facing seven counts and reporting indicates the charges include wilfully retaining national defence secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, conspiracy to obstruct, and making false statements. This is the second time Donald Trump has been indicted in less than three months.

Donald Trump is now the first President to face federal charges, the first President to face state charges, the first President to be indicted twice, the first president to be impeached twice, and the first President to be held civilly liable for sexual assault. There has never been a more corrupt President in United States history than Donald Trump. That resounding truth has been reaffirmed once again.

This is the culmination of Special Counsel Jack Smiths probe which has been ongoing since last November. This comes days after Trumps lawyers frantically met with the DOJ on Monday. Amid the avalanche of news stories in recent days, it was clear something was coming. When it comes to the case against Trump, its strong.

After being informed of the seven-count indictment, Trump claimed hes received a summons to appear in federal court on Tuesday, 13 June. Trump released a video claiming hes innocent and pushing his familiar witch hunt narrative. But the evidence indicates otherwise. The DOJ seized over 100 classified documents that Trump unlawfully took to Mar-a-Lago after he left office. Trump and his attorneys then misled the DOJ, claiming Trump had no more documents in his possession. Trump held on to the documents for over a year and a half before a search warrant was executed last Summer to retrieve the documents.

One of the most damning leaks about the case came just last week. There is reportedly a Summer 2021 tape of Trump bragging about having classified Pentagon documents. The tape not only indicated Trump was aware the docs were classified, but that he was aware post-Presidency he doesnt have the power to declassify them. That is key because it undercuts his core claim that he declassified these documents, apparently telepathically since there was no documentation of him doing so. That tape is also key because it proves he knowingly took classified documents. Thats a consciousness of guilt, a major component of establishing criminal intent.

A lot of questions remain. How will the case proceed? We know that it will be adjudicated in Florida. Interesting choice from Special Counsel Jack Smith, which projects confidence in his case. Who else will be charged? Conspiracy to obstruct charges means that there is at least one co-conspirator. Will Donald Trump actually be convicted? Of all the charges Trump faces, these are the most clear-cut. At the bare minimum, its illegal to steal classified documents. That appears clearly demonstrated here.

This indictment, of course, comes with wider ramifications. This is a good day for democracy amid a season of accountability for Donald Trump. So far this year, Trump has already been indicted in the hush money case in Manhattan with a March 2024 court date. Hes been found civilly liable for sexual assault in the E Jean Carroll case. Now, hes facing federal charges in a case with national security ramifications. The DOJ and Georgia both have separate probes into the efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

This is not happening in a vacuum. Were in a moment where the 2024 GOP primary is in full swing. Just this week, Chris Christie and Mike Pence have joined an increasingly crowded field that includes Governor Ron DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott, Asa Hutchinson, Nikki Haley, and more. This second indictment will surely further shake up the race, forcing Trumps opponents to take a clear stance on whether they will defend the rule of law or the rule of Trump over their party.

At a CNN town hall this week, Mike Pence defended Trump and said he shouldnt be indicted over the classified document probe. Thursday night, Tim Scott decided to defend Donald Trump. Asa Hutchinson took another approach, calling on Trump to "end his campaign."

Well see how this impacts his campaign. These classified document charges, Trumps civil rape trial, his hush-money case, and probes into the insurrection all paint the picture of a disgraced wannabe authoritarian who has no respect for the rule of law, American democracy, national security, women, or basic human decency. Republican voters will have to decide whether they want to nominate a candidate who is so plagued by depravity ... again.

One thing is for sure: Trumps troubles are just beginning.
The Russian state-owned aircraft and shipping leasing firms are worth an estimated $4.5bn. Photo: NurPhoto via Getty Images

The joint liquidators of two Irish-based Russian state-owned aircraft and shipping leasing firms have asked the High Court for orders which they say they need to effectively wind up the companies.

Late last month the High Court appointed Damien Murran and Julian Moroney of Teneo Restructuring Ireland as joint liquidators to GTLK Europe DAC, and GTLK Europe Captial DAC after Mr Justice Conor Dignam dismissed the firms application to be placed into examinership.

The companies are worth an estimated $4.5bn (4.11bn) and their liquidations has been described as the biggest in the history of the State.

The firms financial difficulties arise from the economic sanctions imposed on Russian entities following last years invasion of Ukraine.

In this jurisdiction the Central Bank of Ireland is the official body tasked with overseeing the sanction regime.

When the liquidation was mentioned before Mr Justice Rory Mulcahy on Thursday, James Doherty SC for the liquidators said that while there have been good and generally positive exchanges between his clients and the Central Bank regarding the liquidation, several complex matters of concern remain.

Due to the sanctions the liquidators need to apply to the Central Bank for permission, or a derogation, to allow them carry out transactions involving the firms.

As a result, the liquidators, in order to progress the winding up in an efficient manner, have asked the court to fix a date for the hearing of its application for various orders and declarations that formally recognise that the liquidators, and not any Russian entities, have effective control of the companies.

Counsel said that there was added urgency to the application as following the courts decision to wind up the firms. a director of the companies, Mr Roman Lyadov, who had sworn statements on behalf of the firms in various proceedings before the courts, appears to have left Ireland and returned to Russia.

Counsel added that the firms computer server had crashed shortly after the court made the orders appointing the liquidators.

This he said made the liquidators ability to access the firms books and records extremely difficult.

In reply, lawyers for the Central Bank said it required time to reply to the liquidators application.

The matter raised complex and novel issues concerning insolvency of corporate entities that are subject to sanctions.

The European Commission would also need to be consulted about the matter, which would also take time, the court also heard.

Kelley Smith SC, for the four creditors that sought the winding up orders expressed her clients concerns about any delay to the winding up process.

Counsel said that this was particularly so where the location and status of many of the GTLKs assets, including aircraft, remains unknown to her clients.

Mr Justice Mulcahy acknowledged the complexity of the litigation.

He put a timetable in place for the exchange of legal documents and adjourned the matter for two weeks.

The judge said that he hoped a date for the hearing of the liquidators application could be fixed on that date.

The four creditors which successfully obtained the winding up orders are Trinity investments DAC and an associated entity Allestor Europe Multi Asset Portfolio which is a sub fund of Allestor Capital ICAV.

The other two creditors are Ben Oldman Special Situations Fund LP and Sona Credit Master Fund Limited which are both registered in the Caymen Islands.

The creditors claim they are owed US$178m by the GTLK Europe group, and that debt was rising,

The creditors claim they entered into a series of agreements to refinance the respondent firms debts, where they advanced significant funds to GTLK Europe Captial, of which GTLK was a co-guarantor.

After the sanctions were imposed the creditors claim there has been significant default by GTLK Europe Capital regarding its repayment obligations, specifically the requirement to repay interest due on the loans.

GTLK is Russias largest leasing business in the transport sector, and leases ships and aircraft to customers all over the world.

GTLKs Europe Groups international leasing business is headquartered in Dublin, and the firms that are sought to be wound up are at the top of the groups structure.

Several directors of GTLKs ultimate parent are government ministers or deputy ministers in the Kremlin.
Airline agrees to pay $5m following mediation to settle long-running legal action taken by pension fund

Ryanair has agreed to pay $5m to settle the near five-year-old legal action. Photo: Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Eligible participants in a US class action suit against Ryanair and Michael OLeary will get an average of just 13 cents  at most  for every American Depository Share they bought or acquired in the carrier during the relevant period, court filings have revealed.

The airlines shares in the US are currently trading at more than $106 each.

The lawyers that pursued the case against Ryanair and its group chief executive, Michael OLeary, are set to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees from the settlement amount.

Ryanair has agreed to pay $5m (4.6m) to settle the near five-year-old legal action in the United States that was taken by a pension fund in 2018 against the carrier and Mr OLeary after the airline recognised trade unions in 2017.

The City of Birmingham Firemens and Policemens Supplemental Pension System, a fund based in Alabama, sued Ryanair and Mr OLeary in 2018 as the lead in a class action, claiming they had made false and misleading statements to shareholders regarding employment issues at the airline  allegations that were strenuously denied.

The pension funds lawyers alleged in the action against the airline and its boss that increased costs as a result of unionisation at Ryanair, as well as lower profits, wiped out millions in shareholder value.

Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary. Photo: Thierry Monasse/Getty Images

Those claims were denied.

The airline said the case has been settled with the Alabama-based pension fund following mediation.

Ryanair has insisted that there was no lawful basis for this claim made by the fund.

Lawyers for the pension fund are set to take a big chunk of the settlement in fees, subject to court approval.

Lead counsel have not received any payment for their services in pursuing the claims against the defendants on behalf of the class since the action was commenced in 2018, nor have they been paid to this point for any of their litigation expenses, a proposed settlement notice of the class action filed in court notes.

Lead counsel have not received any payment for their services in pursuing the claims

It adds that at a settlement hearing with the court, the lead counsel will ask the court to award them up to 18pc of the settlement amount and litigation expenses they have incurred in pursuing the action in an amount not to exceed $600,000, plus interest.

The document also confirms the amount likely to be paid to any eligible person or entities as part of the action.

Based on the plan of allocation being proposed, the estimated average recovery for Ryanair ADSs in the class is $0.13 per share before deduction of court-approved fees and expenses, it adds.

The estimated average recovery for Ryanair ADSs in the class is $0.13 per share

It stresses the actual amount paid to each eligible person will also depend on the number of claims filed and how many shares they owned.

Individuals or entities who purchased or acquired Ryanair ADS shares between May 30, 2017 and September 28, 2018 are eligible to make a claim from the settlement fund.

Ryanair said the $5m that it has agreed to pay to settle the case is considerably less than the legal costs that would have been incurred had the case gone to trial.
The advocate generals opinion, although not binding, is a preliminary win for the Dublin-based tech giants Google, Meta and TikTok

The case concerned an attempt by the Austrian government to make big tech firms such as Google, Meta and TikTok more responsible for illegal content posted on their platforms

Google, Meta and TikTok have scored an initial legal victory against attempts by other EU countries to bypass Irelands regulators.

In an opinion given by EU advocate general Maciej Szpunar this week, Austria should not be allowed to impose tougher liability rules on big tech companies than are set down by Irish authorities.

The case in question concerned an attempt by the Austrian government to make big tech firms such as Google, Meta and TikTok more responsible for illegal content posted on their platforms. But this effort falls foul of EU information and e-commerce laws, the advocate general found.

The advocate general notes that, within the coordinated field, the directive on electronic commerce prohibits member states from restricting the freedom to provide information society services from another member state, said a spokesperson.

That directive in principle precludes, subject to derogations, a provider of an electronic commerce service from being made subject to stricter requirements than those provided for by the law in its member state of origin.

Within the EU legal system, although the advocate generals opinion is not binding, it is considered persuasive and is usually followed by European courts.

The advocate general said that EU laws sought to eliminate legal obstacles to the proper functioning of the internal market. Any divergences in legislation, he said, could result in legal uncertainty as to which national rules apply to such services Allowing different laws to apply to a provider or to its service would run counter to that objective, he said.

Under EU law, exceptions and derogations to the country-of-origin principle of regulation are allowed for countries to apply varying rules.

But a member state other than the member state of origin can derogate from the free movement of information society services only by measures taken on a case-by-case basis, following prior notification to the Commission and after asking the member state of origin to take measures in respect of information society services, which did not occur in this case.

Furthermore, to take the view that a general and abstract provision applying to any provider of a category of information society services constitutes a measure would be tantamount to authorising the fragmentation of the internal market by national regulations.

The Irish Independent has contacted spokespeople from Meta, Google and TikTok for a response.
Hayden Christensen reluctant to have his daughter see him as Darth Vader

Hayden Christensen says he is reluctant for his eight-year-old daughter to see him onscreen as the villainous Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise.

The Canadian actor, 42, said he had been dragging his feet with introducing his daughter to the character, who often appears in disturbing scenes.

Christensen first appeared in 2002s Star Wars: Episode II  Attack Of The Clones as young jedi Anakin Skywalker, who goes on to become the sci-fi supervillain.

Christensen recently reprised the role for spin-off series Obi-Wan Kenobi, alongside his friend and colleague Ewan McGregor (Ian West/PA)

After starring in the 2005 follow-up, Revenge Of The Sith, he recently reprised the role for Disney+ spin-off series Obi-Wan Kenobi, alongside his friend and colleague Ewan McGregor.

Speaking to Rogue One star Diego Luna as part of Varietys actors on actors series, Christensen said his daughter had yet to watch the films.

Shes eight now. I dont know if I can wait much longer, he said.

I know Ive been dragging my feet a little bit. She knows that Im in Star Wars and that I played this character, but shes never seen it yet.

Im getting to that. Im trying to figure out the best sort of point of entry. There are some disturbing scenes Im reluctant for her to see at this age.

Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen starred together in the Star Wars franchise (Anthony Harvey/PA)

Christensen added that he had brought his daughter on set while shooting Obi-Wan Kenobi, but that she had only seen him play Anakin during filming of a flashback sequence.

She got to see me swing a lightsaber with Ewan. She was very concerned for my wellbeing. She was afraid that one of us was going to get hurt, he said.

Christensen said the Star Wars franchise held a very special place in my heart and that the chance to reprise his famous role had been a thrilling invitation.

Luna stars as rebel fighter Cassian Andor in both Rogue One and TV series Andor, the second season of which is due to arrive in August 2024.
Also reviewed this week: War Pony and Medusa Deluxe

All the characters are unlikeable in Medusa Deluxe

Jojo Bapteise Whiting (right) as Bill in War Pony

Bologne draws the attentions of Marie Antoinette, played by Lucy Boynton. Photo: Larry Horricks/Searchlight Pictures

Joseph Bologne was a master swordsman among many other things. Photo: Larry Horricks/Searchlight Pictures

If Chevalier proves one thing, its this: you can make a mess of telling any story, no matter how good it is.

Chevalier (12A, 107mins)

The Chevalier de Saint-Georges was a real person, a mixed-race man from Guadeloupe named Joseph Bologne, who survived a Jesuit boarding school in 1750s France, emerged a master swordsman, became a favourite of Marie Antoinettes and enchanted Parisian society with his musical compositions and virtuoso violin playing.

At his creative peak, Bologne wrote 12 concertos, two symphonies, eight short symphonies and as many as six operas, most of which have been lost.

The chevalier was flying high, but fell from the queens favour, was imprisoned during the Reign of Terror and died in the Marais in 1799, having observed Napoleons rise.

An epic life by any standard, and in Chevalier, which is directed by Stephen Williams from a screenplay by Stefani Robinson, American actor Kelvin Harrison Jr plays the charismatic Renaissance man.

The illegitimate child of French planter Georges de Bologne Saint-Georges (Jim High) and enslaved Senegalese woman Nanon (Ronke Adekoluejo), young Joseph is dumped in a Parisian boarding school by his father at seven, where he endures constant racism and develops a thick skin.

Joseph Bologne was a master swordsman among many other things. Photo: Larry Horricks/Searchlight Pictures

At 15, he defeats Frances best fencer and is made a chevalier (knight) by a doting Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton).

Admitted to the queens inner circle, Joseph becomes a rising talent on the French musical scene.

In Chevaliers absurd but enjoyable opening sequence, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Joseph Prowen) is visiting Paris to wow the city with his preening virtuoso playing when a handsome man emerges from the audience to challenge the Austrian to a duel by fiddle.

Its Joseph of course and the chevalier outdoes Mozart to the home crowds evident delight.

News of his success reaches the queen, who lets it be known that Joseph is now in the running for European musics top job  director of the Paris Opera.

In his way stands German composer C.W. Gluck (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), who has been promised the position himself.

Instead, Antoinette proposes a contest: both men will write and perform operas and the best one will win the job.

Brimming with confidence, the chevalier gets to work, dashes off an opera and persuades society woman Marie-Josephine de Montalembert (Samara Weaving) to sing the lead role.

She does this in defiance of her much older husband, the bellicose Marquis de Montalembert (Marton Csokas), who does not want his wife making an exhibition of herself cavorting across a stage.

But Montalembert has more than that to worry about, for Marie-Josephine and Joseph soon get frisky.

Bologne draws the attentions of Marie Antoinette, played by Lucy Boynton. Photo: Larry Horricks/Searchlight Pictures

An action-packed scenario then, but Williams biopic can never quite decide if its a drama or a farce.

That opening scene evokes the spirit of Amadeus, the daft but entertaining 80s film which turned the life of Mozart into a pantomime.

Chevalier finds echoes of that levity, but also expects us to take the drama seriously, a task that ultimately proves impossible.

Harrison Jr, who so excelled in Trey Edward Shults Waves, here adopts the vaguely British accent American actors always resort to when they catch sight of a powdered wig.

As a result, he seems ill at ease, unsure of his characterisation.

Hes not alone: Minnie Driver lays it on pretty thick as fading opera star Marie-Madeleine Guimard, and Csokas, who always looks like hes eaten a bad clam, is never a subtle villain.

Only Weaving succeeds in persuading us that she may be real and might come from the 18th century.

Chevaliers attention to detail is sporadic: when the widely hated Marie Antoinette attends a concert as the storm clouds of revolution gather, only a smattering of soldiers separate her from a surprisingly mannerly mob.

Gluck, a key figure in the development of opera, is here presented as a waddling hack.

Worst of all, the film fails Joseph Bologne, a fascinating character who deserves better.

Rating: Two stars

Jojo Bapteise Whiting (right) as Bill in War Pony

War Pony (15A, 115mins)

As shes proved in films like American Honey and Logan Lucky, Riley Keough is a very talented actress.

With War Pony, she turns to direction, and shows a natural flair for unvarnished storytelling.

The film is set on the Oglala Lakota reservation of Pine Ridge in South Dakota, where the descendants of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull live hard lives with grim prospects.

Like most reservations, Pine Ridge has all the social problems of wider US society, but none of the capitalist perks. Two enterprising boys, however, see opportunities everywhere.

Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder) is a 12-year-old from an abusive home sent to live with a relative who manufactures meth. Determined to get ahead, Matho starts selling it at his school.

Nineteen-year-old Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) finds himself equally compromised when a wealthy white man starts paying him to ferry young Lakota women to his farm for sex.

All of this makes War Pony sound grim, but Bill and Matho are ultimately kind-hearted, and Keough and co-director Gina Gammell evocatively capture the wide-open feeling of life on the Dakota plains.

Rating: Four stars

All the characters are unlikeable in Medusa Deluxe

Medusa Deluxe (15A, 101mins)

All were missing in Thomas Hardimans skittish murder mystery Medusa Deluxe is someone to like.

The models, coiffeurs and flunkies that lurk behind the scenes of a prestigious London hairdressing contest are scheming and uncharitable, and when competition favourite Mosca is found murdered, they jostle to succeed him.

As the drama opens, Cleve (Claire Perkins), a foul-mouthed hair-artist, completes a gravity-defying do while explaining Moscas death.

Contest organiser Rene (Darrell DSilva) is rattled, as Mosca was a former lover and possible suspects are legion, as rival salon owners Divine (Kayla Meikle) and Kendra (Harriet Webb) battle with Cleve to achieve the upper hand.

Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan does a brilliant job of orchestrating what is effectively a faux one-shot movie, his camera weaving through corridors and dressing rooms to eavesdrop on schemes and tall stories.

But Hardimans screenplay is heavy-handed at times, too fond of florid Tarantino-esque monologues, and some of the performances verge on the overripe.

Rating: Three stars
Angus Woods: End the costly double standards of banning farm products in the EU but exporting them to our competitors

Why should EU companies be making profits on pesticides and growth promoters that are destroying the incomes of Europes farmers?

Different rules: A large-scale feedlot in the USA, where cattle can be given growth promoters that are banned in the EU. Photo: Getty

Angus Woods Fri 9 Jun 2023 at 07:55
Sinn Fein will now support the proposed EU Nature Restoration law after it said additions to the legislation's text should alleviate concerns expressed by Irish farmers and rural communities.

Brussels is on the defensive over its plans to restore Europe's natural habitats - 81% of which are classed as in poor health - after the law drew opposition from some governments and lawmakers.

Sinn Fein MEP Chris MacManus has welcomed the recent progress made on the Nature Restoration Law in the European Parliaments Environment committee describing text additions as an important step forward for both nature and farming communities.

The Midlands Northwest MEP said that, since the AGRI opinion vote on the 23rd May, the issues we raised directly with negotiators on behalf of farmers have now been added to the text.

He said a notable number of items which Sinn Fein had sought to be included in the text have now been added, including:

a definition of rewetting and an explicit obligation that it must be voluntary for farmers.

that national restoration plans must provide for an estimated socio-economic impact of the implementation of the restoration measures.

compensation schemes for farmers and others who choose to undertake nature restoration measures.

a new chapter on funding, including a mandate for a permanent dedicated nature restoration fund (outside of CAP) to provide additional financial support for farmers and others involved in nature restoration.

a new chapter on public participation, meaning farmer, fishers, foresters, business community, civil society organisations, landowners, land users and the general public must be engaged in the preparation, review and implementation of Irelands national restoration plan.

MacManus said the recent 'progress' in the negotiations reflects the concerns he raised on behalf of farmers.

"The new additions are sensible and practical and have helped achieve a compromise on the legislation, which secures vital progress in terms of nature protection and restoration.

"The addition of a new chapter on funding will be welcome news for many land owners in rural Ireland, especially now that it includes a mandate for a permanent dedicated nature restoration fund within the MFF (outside of CAP) to provide predictable and additional financial support to farmers and others involved in nature restoration. It is also very heartening to see that the ambition of the targets in the regulation is kept intact, despite attempts to weaken it on all fronts from EPP.

McManus said that according to the new text, rewetting will be voluntary, targets will be flexible, there will be a national socio-economic impact assessment, and a new dedicated nature restoration fund outside CAP that farmers, foresters and fishers and others could avail of.

Regarding decision-making on restoration plans and measures, he said the public and stakeholders must be involved in all phases.

We voiced the concerns of Irelands rural communities at an EU level and the new nature restoration law text shows that weve been listened to. A balance has now been struck that works for all stakeholders.

The onus is now very much on Fine Gael and Fianna Fail to clarify to the public if they would support the new negotiated text in ENVI and in plenary, and influence their groups to support the vote on the law in the ENVI committee on the 15th June.
Machinery theft in England and Wales soared by more than 300pc in the first quarter of the year, and has also risen in the rest of Europe. Image: Getty.

The war in Ukraine is causing a crime wave in rural Britain as gangs steal farm machinery investigators believe is being sent to Russia.

Moscow was hit by western sanctions after Vladimir Putins illegal invasion, which has created a thriving black market for the equipment, police said.

Gangs used to target arable regions in eastern England, but are now also casing farms in the north and Scotland, as rural crime has skyrocketed this year.

In my professional opinion, without doubt the war in Ukraine and the sanctions imposed on Russia are having an impact on rural crime in the UK, said Supt Andy Huddleston, the head of the National Rural Crime Unit.

Whenever you have a country that cannot import machinery and equipment, the black market will flourish, he said.

Machinery theft in England and Wales soared by more than 300pc in the first quarter of 2023 and also rose in the rest of Europe.

Supt Huddleston said: We would normally expect to see around 70 high-value agricultural vehicles being stolen across the country each month, but in March we recorded the theft of 180.

Agricultural and construction machines such as excavators, and expensive and portable GPS units for mapping out fields and more efficient crop-planting are prized by the raiders, who send their spoils to Eastern Europe for smuggling into Russia.

Agricultural machinery giants such as John Deere and Dutch company Lely stopped shipments to Russia and Belarus after Putins invasion.

The Russian army raided a John Deere factory in Ukraine in the first weeks of the war as farmers struggled to get spare parts.

Rural crime was already a problem in Britain, with the lions share of stolen equipment sold abroad, but the increase in numbers and the fact organised criminals now travel the length and breadth of Britain are recent developments.

The numbers that we are seeing at the moment are way beyond what has gone on in the past and so it is clear in my view that what is happening in Ukraine is driving it, Supt Huddleston said.

NFU Mutual has issued a warning ahead of the harvest season, when equipment is often left overnight in fields and is more vulnerable to thefts.

Intelligence suggests these criminal gangs are watching farms and using drones in some cases to identify farm equipment fitted with GPS and return at night, said Rebecca Davidson, rural affairs specialist at NFU Mutual.

Reports of GPS thefts to the rural insurance company hit their second-highest monthly level on record in April.

The cost of such thefts has doubled to more than half a million pounds in the first four months of the year, compared to the same period last year.

Last week, the National Farmers Union (NFU), NFU Mutual and representatives from 40 police forces met to discuss the crime wave sweeping rural Britain.

As well as the surge in machinery and equipment thefts, there have been reports of livestock rustling and industrial fly-tipping.

NFU Vice-President David Exwood said that the highly organised gangs were hurting farm businesses, farming families and rural communities, both financially and emotionally.

The National Rural Crime Unit is designed to improve coordination between forces and farmers at regional and national level.
All rest days for gardai in a Dublin division have been cancelled to ensure several major concerts can go ahead.

Marlay Park will host a number of events in the coming weeks including two Dermot Kennedy concerts and the Longitude music festival.

They require a large policing presence due to the volume of people in attendance.

However, sources have told Independent.ie that gardai had been struggling to fill the requirements needed to adequately police the event.

Local garda management have now ordered that all rest days are cancelled for gardai in the Dublin Metropolitan Region (DMR) South division to ensure there are enough members on duty for the concerts.

Gardai were today informed that days off are restricted over six days in June and July "due to the requirements for Marlay Park Concerts".

The only exception, according to an email sent to gardai, is for appointed detectives.

Days off have been cancelled for the Dermot Kennedy concerts on June 23 and 24, as well as June 28 when the Weeknd is due to perform at Marlay Park.

Similar directives have also been issued for July 1 and 2, the day of the Longitude festival, and July 4 for the Def Leppard gig.

Over 250,000 people are expected to attend the various different events taking place at Marlay Park in the coming weeks.

A source told Independent.ie: "The fact that gardai are once again being directed to work on their days off shows how low numbers are in the division, and it's a wider problem across the organisation.

"The overtime requirement couldn't be filled in part because so many people have already reached their cap of 50-hours per roster, which is happening to fill the shortfall on units.

"These concerts are events that happens every year, and for this announcement to be made just weeks beforehand has caused a lot of anger," the source added.

The DMR South division covers a large part of the city from Rathmines to Tallaght.

A nationwide ban on garda leave was previously put in place for the visit of US President Joe Biden in April.

Gardai were informed weeks before the landmark event that rest days and time-off would be restricted over a six-day period.

Recent figures show that the Garda expenditure on overtime was 13.18 million, and 48.97m in the first four months of the year.

Commissioner Drew Harris, in his monthly report, said that this was 11.45 million over budget profile.

"Overall, pay and overtime is over profiled budget at the end of April 2023 by 6.01m," Mr Harris said.
Families of residents at a Cork nursing home involved in a Fair Deal row have pleaded with politicians to intervene.

Beaumont Residential Care in Cork city announced its plan to withdraw from the state scheme last month, citing extreme financial pressure and low funding rates.

Family members will stage protests today outside the Cork constituency offices of Tanaiste Micheal Martin, Enterprise Minister Simon Coveney and Finance Minister Michael McGrath.

The relatives said they are seeking urgent help to keep their vulnerable loved ones in the home at the end of this month when it will no longer accept Fair Deal rates. It will revert to private fees of around 1,300 a week.

Rosie Roccaforte, whose 69-year-old mother is one of the residents at risk, said she and other vulnerable residents should be treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.

Ms Roccaforte said families are concerned that their loved ones will be rehomed in a nursing facility miles away.

She said there has been no meaningful action by politicians, and despite a welcome phone call from Mr Martin last week, she has received no updates since.

Ms Roccaforte, whose mother was diagnosed with dementia, said she is only just comfortable at Beaumont, having arrived six months ago after a long period of upheaval.

Weve gone through a couple of years  maybe even more  of a lot of upheaval with my mother going in and out of hospital, she said.

For her, as quite a young woman, she had to come around to the idea that, OK, she needs long-term care. Everything was only just getting settled.

From what I can gather, we will basically have to get beds in other care homes, but currently there really isnt enough beds in the vicinity available for them, so some will be waiting.

They could be moved somewhere far away from their home at Beaumont and also from where their family is.

The families are calling on Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to intervene, saying they have no faith at all in Minister for Older People Mary Butler to resolve the issue and are now refusing to meet her.

Ms Roccaforte said Ms Butler has made vague promises to residents and their family members, leaving them with no choice but to take this to the Taoiseach directly.

What we want from these protests is to keep pressure on the ministers, she said.

We want family members to stay. We want to push the Government to provide the funding and to treat our vulnerable loved ones with respect and dignity.

The owners of the home, which is part of the CareChoice Group, have said the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF), which negotiates rates, was refusing to deliver cost-of-living increases for our residents and its charges are lower than those for other Cork nursing homes.

Families said management recently told them they receive an extra 16 per resident per week, while nearby publicly-run nursing homes operating under the HSE get an extra 183 extra per resident per week.

Ms Roccaforte said current government policy is discrim- inatory and disappointing as it has left many vulnerable residents in limbo.

A spokesperson for Ms Butler said engagement between the nursing home provider and the NTPF is the only way to resolve this issue.

The spokesperson added that should services no longer be available under the Fair Deal scheme, residents will either be cared for within the existing system or, ultimately, the HSE will step in as the statutory provider of last resort.
A 26-year-old man has been arrested in Lurgan

Chloe Mitchell (21) has been missing since Friday, June 2, 2023.

Searches are continuing in Co Antrim on Friday morning for Chloe Mitchell, a 21-year-old woman that was last seen in Ballymena a week ago.

A 26-year-old man was arrested in Lurgan yesterday afternoon in relation to the case.

The PSNI and forensics teams further searched a property in the James Street area of the town on Thursday evening.

Community Rescue Service volunteers were tasked by police to the Ballymena area from early on Thursday morning to search for Chloe.

The group said that targeted searches have been carried out across a wide area including woodlands, buildings, and in and around a large stretch of the River Braid.

Searches continued throughout the day until well after dark and are continuing today.

Chloe Mitchell (21) has been missing since Friday, June 2, 2023.

PSNI Chief Inspector Arnie ONeill said: We are now aware that Chloe was last seen in the late hours of Friday June 2nd into the early hours of Saturday 3rd in Ballymena town centre.

"She was seen on CCTV walking in the direction of James Street.

Chloe was wearing a green and black North Face style jacket, a white t-shirt, leggings and Nike trainers."

The Harryville Residents Association also carried out a search from a car park in the area on Wednesday evening.

Ballykeel and District Community Association also helped search for the young woman and said on social media they were praying (she) is found safe and well soon.

Her family have made a series of appeals on social media, asking anyone who may have information on Chloes location or who may have seen her over the weekend to get in touch with them.
Cartel in crisis: Kinahans may face Eddie Hutch murder charges and extradition to US could be on the cards
The Junior Cycle maths higher level paper was far too wordy, according to teacher Stephen Begley.

He said while the exam was accessible and diverse, many questions contained multiple sentences and contexts surrounding them, with very few just straight up maths questions.

Mr Begley of the Studyclix website and Dundalk Grammar School, Co Louth said there were mixed reactions from students.

The variety of topics covered allowed many to showcase their ability and skill, but not without challenging them, he said.

Those seeking a top grade would have to have left no stone unturned, as most of the course was examined and trapdoors were certainly set in some questions.

He said the examiner pushed to squeeze in almost every topic on the course, although, notably, number patterns did not appear on the paper.

Mr Begley said the questions on statistics, trigonometry, co-ordinate geometry and algebra will have surely delighted students, while geometry, financial maths and functions "pushed students to really think.

Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) subject representative Niall Duddy said his students seemed happy enough, although three questions were highlighted as causing some issues.

These were questions 10 , 13 and 14,the first two dealing algebra and, the other, a geometry question. Mr Duddy, of Presentation College, Athenry, Co Galway, said it could have been that the students were coming towards the end of the paper and were running out of time.

This is the second year of the new Junior Cycle maths exams and, again, the paper did not specify how many marks were on available for individual questions.

Mr Duddy said they had raised their concerns about this with the State Examinations Commission (SEC).

Mr Begley said all eyes will be on the marking scheme to see how the examiner awards their marks, as last year a distance, speed and time question was worth almost 17pc, while the algebra question was worth only 9pc.

Mr Begley described the ordinary level paper as overall quite nice. Questions were presented in a well-guided and encouraging manner and spanned much of the course.
Tiring, challenging and unsettling were the among views expressed by teachers about Leaving Cert maths higher level Paper 1. Some students used stronger language.

Brendan OSullivan, a Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) maths representative, said It started ok, with some nice algebra questions to ease them in but after the opening part there were challenging, abstract things.

Those abstract things are aimed at the very able, but everyone is trying to have their go, so it can be hard going, he said.

Mr OSullivan said there was a focus on topics that, traditionally students wouldnt like, such as limits, logs and integration involving volume. He said integration is usually associated with area, so seeing volume would be a bit disconcerting.

It is a reminder to students that these topics are still there and, even if they dont like them, they can be examined said Mr OSullivan, who teaches at Davis College, Mallow.

On the other hand, he said the complex numbers was not too bad and financial maths would have been ok.

Overall, he felt it was a tiring paper.

Niall Duddy, an Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) representative agreed that some students were very tired coming out.

He described it as a paper of two halves, with a very tough section at the start. Students were glad of the choice here, but the way questions were posed would have caught some of them out

He referred to difficulties with Q3, which featured logs, while he said Q4c(iii) on complex numbers caused a bit of hassle. On the flipside, he said Q8 , on financial maths, was well received.

He said the trend of traditional Paper 2 topics turning up in Paper 1 has continued

Mr Duddy said he spoke to colleagues in other schools and they agreed there was a lot of disappointment among higher level students about the paper. Maybe it will balance out on Monday he said, referring to Paper 2.

Aidan Roantree of the Institute of Education, described it as a challenging paper with some low hanging fruit where students can accumulate significant marks.

There were ways for students to accrue necessary marks, but few will leave the exam hall feeling triumphant.

He said the paper continued a recent trend towards asking questions which probe students understanding of concepts.

There was also tendency to scour the syllabus for topics which have not been asked previously continues, he said.

Students hoping to go through the motions will likely be unsettled by this paper as those setting the exam strive to be as novel as possible.

While some questions contained pleasantly simple demands, the phrasing of the questions would have given students a cause for pause. Once overcoming the initial wow reaction, they could really get to grips with the questions.

Among his comment on individual questions, Mr Roantree said Section B, Q7 had an accessible beginning, but two of the final stages were where the highest achievers would distinguish themselves.

He added that Q9 was by far the most approachable but again has an unusual start that requires the student to take a moment of pause before progressing..

Meanwhile, he said Q 10, after an easy part (a), quickly descended into a tricky mix of sequences, series and geometry that would challenge most students.

Stephen Begley of the Studyclix website, and a teacher at Dundalk Grammar School, Co. Louth, met a mixed reaction from students.

The consensus is that the paper was busy and diverse, and while the short questions were accessible, the long questions proved tricky in parts.

He said students would have benefitted from the choice offered in the short questions in Section A, covering algebra, functions, logs, complex numbers, differentiation and integration, though parts of some would have tasked students.

He noted that limits appeared on the exam for the first time alongside the proof that root 2 is irrational, which featured in 2019.

Commenting the paper overall, Mr Begley felt there were no surprises in the topics that appeared, and no notable topics were absent.

All in all, those comfortable with calculus would have had the upper hand. As always, calculus dominated with half of the short and long questions featuring it in some respect.
A former senior garda who was being questioned today on allegations of rape was released without charge tonight.

"This male has been released from detention.

"Investigations are ongoing and a file will be prepared for the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions," a garda spokesman said.

It previously emerged he was involved in many cases in which he investigated multiple high profile sexual abuse cases.

He was arrested this morning in Dublin and was held at a south inner city garda station in the capital for around 12 hours.

He was being questioned by specialist detectives on allegations of rape and sexual abuse.

It is understood that the investigation into the former garda has been ongoing for over a year and relates to his time working in the force.

A garda spokesperson confirmed the arrest and said that the man was arrested for alleged offences contrary to the Criminal Law (Rape) Amendment Act 1990.

In a statement the Garda Press Office also confirmed the man was a former member of An Garda Siochana but is now a private citizen.

He was detained under Section 4 of Criminal Justice Act.

Senior sources say that the news of the mans arrest has sent shockwaves through the force.

Many members of all ranks are shocked about this arrest, one source said.

The former officer served at a senior level in An Garda Siochana for many years but he has been under investigation now for some time.
The presence of giant stinging jellyfish in the waters off one of Co Clares most popular beaches has forced lifeguards to erect the Red Flag there again today.

It is the fourth day this week that council-employed lifeguards have put up the Red Flag at Fanore. The Red Flag was flying on parts of Monday, Tuesday and Thursday this week at the beach due to the presence of the Lions Mane jellyfish.

The Lion's Mane jellyfish is one of the largest jellyfish species. measuring up to three metres. Its tentacles are full of stinging cells used to capture fish and other prey.

A sting to a human from a Lions Mane can cause nausea, sweating, cramps, headaches and other symptoms and those with severe stings should seek urgent medical attention.

According to the Wildlife Trusts' website, "it's easy to see where the Lion's Mane jellyfish gets its name from: the long flowing tentacles that surround the bell have all the beauty and bite of a lion".

A spokesman for Clare County Council said lifeguards would put up the Red Flag only if they spotted multiple Lions Mane jellyfish in the waters and on the beach.

The council spokesman said on Friday the Red Flag has been erected at Fanore again today due to the presence of the Lions Mane.

He said that between five and 15 Lions Mane jellyfish had washed up on Fanore beach on any of the days this week lifeguards had erected the Red Flag.

He stressed that the people could still use the beach but are advised not to enter the waters.

He said: The area is checked daily by lifeguards when they start duty. The beach is open  the Red Flag is to advise the public of the possible danger.

Cllr Joe Garrihy (FG), a member of Clare County Council for the north Clare area, said it was disappointing for beachgoers to see the red flag erected. He added: It is a serious issue. The last thing in the world you want is someone stung by a jellyfish and they can give you a very, very bad sting, and you dont know how people with allergies might react, so we have to be guided by the health and safety in those circumstances.

The very first priority for lifeguards is peoples safety, and it is good to see the lifeguards being vigilant and having the knowledge there to protect the general public.

Meanwhile, jellyfish expert Tom Doyle said on Friday: We have no evidence of Lions Mane becoming more abundant in Irish waters as we have no time series for them. Anecdotally, there have been more reports of them in Galway and Clare over the past few years, but not huge numbers.

The UCC-based lecturer in Zoology at the colleges School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences said: Lions Mane are more abundant in the Irish sea, within Dublin Bay and north along Meath and Louth coastlines.
A 62-year-old man is due to appear before court in Dublin later charged in connection with an extensive insider trading investigation.

It is understood this is the first prosecution in Ireland for this alleged crime.

The suspect is based in Northern Ireland but was arrested this morning by appointment by detectives from the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau (GNECB).

The GNECB launched the investigation following a report from the Central Bank of Ireland in February 2021 and the suspect was first arrested last September.

The alleged offence happened in May 2020 and gardai have been investigating whether he used inside information to sell or buy shares for his own financial benefit.

Last September when the suspect was first arrested, a Garda spokesperson said: "The extensive investigation carried out by GNECB has progressed with the assistance of personnel attached to the Central Bank of Ireland and their expertise and experience has been invaluable."

They said this was one of several GNECB investigations that were ongoing to tackle market abuse in Ireland.

A statement released read: "Detectives from the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau today arrested a male for the offence of insider trading contrary to Regulation 5, European Union Market Abuse Regulations 2016, S.I. No 349 of 2016.

"The investigation commenced following a report to the GNECB from the Central Bank of Ireland pursuant to Section 33AK of the Central Bank Act 1942 as amended.

The arrested man was previously detained in a south Dublin garda station in accordance with the provisions of Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act 1984.

After his release from garda custody, a file was prepared for the DPP who recently directed that he be charged with the offence that is contrary to European Union (Market Abuse) Regulations 2016.
Hong Kong: Algernon Yau lauds HK in Hungary

Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development Algernon Yau highlighted Hong Kong's unique advantages and vast potential for Hungarian companies and entrepreneurs during his two-day visit to Budapest, Hungary, that began on June 8.



After attending the Ministerial Council Meeting of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development in Paris, France, Mr Yau proceeded to Budapest to meet Hungarian government officials and the business community to update them on Hong Kong's latest trade and economic developments, and exchange views on further collaboration in various areas.



The commerce chief pointed out that Hong Kong has all along maintained close bilateral trade relations with Hungary.



In 2022, bilateral merchandise trade between Hong Kong and Hungary amounted to HK$17.8 billion. Hungary was Hong Kong's seventh largest trading partner among the European Union member states. Around 11.4% of the total merchandise trade between Hungary and Mainland China is routed through Hong Kong.



Mr Yau stressed that with Hong Kong's unique advantages under one country, two systems, the city is an ideal gateway for Hungarian companies to tap into the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area markets and participate in the Belt & Road Initiative.



He also briefed officials and business leaders there about Hong Kong's new initiatives on attracting enterprises and investments to create a strong impetus for growth.



Mr Yau today met Hungarian National Bank Deputy Governor Csaba Kandracs, Hungarian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs & Trade Levente Magyar and Hungarian State Secretary for Economic Development & National Financial Services Mate Loga to learn more about the country's economic development and monetary and fiscal policy.



He also took the opportunity to visit Q Contemporary, which is an art museum founded by a Hong Kong-born businesswoman.



On June 8, apart from attending a roundtable luncheon with members of the Hungary-Hong Kong Business Association, Mr Yau had meetings with Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary Istvan Jakab and President of Hungarian Chamber of Commerce & Industry Laszlo Parragh to exchange views on fostering closer economic and trade co-operation between the two places.



Later in the day, he seized the occasion to meet Acting Chinese Ambassador to Hungary Yang Chao during a dinner engagement to keep him abreast of the latest developments in Hong Kong.

This story has been published on: 2023-06-09. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
On June 9th and 10th, 2023, the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) Local Governments and Friendship Cities Cooperation (Huangshan) Forum was held in Huangshan City, Anhui Province. With the theme of "Regional Cooperation for a Win-Win Future," about 500 Chinese and foreign guests gathered to discuss new opportunities for RCEP economic and trade cooperation, and seek a new future of mutual benefit and development. At the opening ceremony, leaders from Laos, China, Thailand, and ASEAN delivered speeches, and representative from Anhui Province presided over the opening ceremony. Government officials and responsible persons from friendly provinces and states of RCEP member countries, executives of Fortune 500 companies and well-known corporate leaders, heads of domestic and foreign chambers of commerce and investment institutions, and well-known experts and scholars at home and abroad attended the opening ceremony. During the opening ceremony, the business community of all parties issued the "2023 RCEP Huangshan Forum Initiative," aiming to integrate RCEP local governments and friendly cities, take the successful holding of this forum as a new opportunity, create new platforms, jointly promote consultation, construction and sharing, and promote local governments and enterprises to fully integrate into the RCEP market at a higher level, achieve mutual benefit and common development at a higher level, and inject more certainty into world peace and development. Jia Kang, former director of the Fiscal Science Research Institute, Ministry of Finance, and founding president of the China Academy of New Supply-side Economics, said in his keynote speech at the opening ceremony that cooperation among different local governments can form a strong development momentum of "sharing resources, complementing each other's strengths, and achieving win-win results." This forum will promote understanding, communication, and cooperation among governments of RCEP member countries and jointly create a human community of shared destiny to enhance the well-being of people in all countries. The first RCEP Local Governments and Friendship Cities Cooperation Forum was hosted by the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and the Anhui Provincial People's Government, with the China-ASEAN Center as a supporting unit. Participants discussed many themes, including deepening friendly exchanges between governments, developing economic, trade, cultural, and tourism industries, and the fields of life, health, and medical care. They provided suggestions on how to fully and effectively implement RCEP and help more enterprises participate in RCEP regional economic and trade cooperation on a larger scale, in a wider range, and at a deeper level.

Edited and translated by Zheng Chen
Sparks were seen coming from the ceiling of the Stardust nightclub during concerts up to a month before the blaze, an inquest has heard, with one witness describing it as being like something out of a disaster movie.

The jury at the Dublin District Coroners Court in the Pillar Room of the Rotunda Hospital on Thursday heard evidence from two witnesses who said they saw sparks coming down from the ceiling during live music concerts in the weeks before the fire that killed 48 people when it swept through the Stardust in the early hours of February 14, 1981.

Patrick ODriscoll gave evidence that he was part of an Elvis Presley tribute band that was playing in the Stardust the week before the fire. He said he saw a shower of sparks coming from the ceiling at the backstage area.

It was one quick shower. I kept playing, as I thought it was just a power surge, he said.

He described the sparks as whitish with a yellowish tint that came out in an arc of three to four feet.

It was just a shower. If you were passing a building site and saw a welder and he was welding, that kind of shower, or maybe watching a disaster movie, something like that, he said.

The jury heard evidence from Suzanne McCluskey, who attended a concert at the Stardust on January 15, 1981. In her original statement made after the Stardust fire, Ms McCluskey, who was still at school at the time, said that during the concert she noticed sparks flash down from the ceiling. She said the interval between flashes was about a minute to two minutes, and she noticed it for about ten minutes in total.

The flashes I saw were a purple colour, they were not a series of flashes, just an odd purple flash, she said.

Brenda Campbell, representing nine of the families of the deceased, said that an inspection of the Stardust was carried out that night and the inspector felt that the maximum number of 1,400 people permitted under the licence had been exceeded. She asked the witness if this was consistent with her memory, and Ms McCluskey replied that it was.

Edward Woods, a radio telephone operator with Dublin Corporation, gave evidence that on August 29, 1980, he was approached in a pub by a man he knew, Willie Basset. He said Mr Basset told him that he had seen an emergency door locked and chained in the Stardust. Mr Woods said he passed this report on to the relevant person in his department.

I never carried out an inspection, I just passed it on to the necessary people. I never saw any chained doors, said Mr Woods.

He confirmed to barrister Simon Mills, a member of the coroners legal team, that the report was of a single emergency door that was seen to be locked on a single occasion. Mr Woods said that in his report, he indicated doors because an inspector would not come out to look at one door.

I reported one door padlocked but said that they needed to look at them all, he said.

In response to a question from the coroner, Dr Myra Cullinane, Mr Woods said he assumed that when he reported the complaint, it would be dealt with.

Ms Campbell asked Mr Woods about an inspection carried out on September 4, 1980, in which an inspector found an exit door in the Silver Swan area of the Stardust chained and locked. She asked Mr Woods if he would consider this a matter of concern.

Id be very concerned if I saw that, he said.

The statement of an unavailable witness, Martin Donoghue, an electrical inspector with Dublin Corporation, was read out by Mr Mills. Mr Donoghue inspected the Stardust premises on several occasions between 1979 and 1981.

On one occasion he noted that a door in the Lantern Room was not opening fully, and another time loose tables were obstructing a passageway to an exit. On another occasion, he found that a panic bar on an exit door was sticking, preventing it from opening easily, and at another time he found that an exit door in the Silver Swan bar was chained and locked. He once again visited the Stardust and found an exit door chained and locked, with the panic bolt broken and a piece hanging loose.

Mr Donoghue said he inspected the Stardust during a concert on January 15, 1981, and he believed the number of people present was in excess of the 1,400 permitted by the licence. He said in his experience, the number was nearer to 2,000, and he found it difficult to move from one exit to another due to the large number of people present.

The jury also heard evidence from Declan Conway, a sales representative for the company that provided the carpet tiles for the Stardust. In his statement, Mr Conway said that drapes for the walls were discussed, but ultimately wall carpet tiles were used. He said he spoke to the manager of the Stardust, Eamon Butterly, who requested that Mr Conway obtain a fire certificate from the manufacturer of the tiles. Mr Conway said he was able to get the certificate that met the British standard specification.

Ms Campbell said that in the original planning for the Stardust, a requirement from the chief fire officer was for all internal wall and ceiling linings to have a minimum of class 1 surface spread of flame rating. Ms Campbell said that during a 1981 inquiry into the fire under Mr Justice Ronan Keane, evidence was given that the thing that contributed most to the spread of the fire was the carpet tiles on the walls. She said that a surface spread of flame test was carried out and these tiles were class 4, not class 1.

Im not aware of that, and I can only reiterate that the specification, as far as I was aware and told, met the British standard specification, said Mr Conway.

Did anyone say to you, Are we sure this is appropriate if these things are placed on walls? asked Ms Campbell.

No, it never crossed my mind, said Mr Conway.

The inquest continues today, when Mr Conway will continue his evidence.
Tributes are being paid to former Irish Press journalist Ken Whelan (71), well-known for his work with the Evening Press in the 1980s, who has died.

Mr Whelan attended OConnell School CBS and studied journalism at the College of Commerce, in Rathmines.

He completed some training with the Drogheda Independent and freelanced for a time with various Dublin publications before joining the Irish Press Group where he mainly worked for the famed Evening Press.

Ken Whelan came of age as a scenes of crime reporter in Dublin which made him well known in media circles.

He later moved towards writing about politics, consumer affairs, and later still agriculture when he contributed to the Farming Independent.

He was a leader in the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) through troubled years at the Irish Press Group which finally closed in 1995 due to financial difficulties.

After that landmark closure he worked in public relations for the ESB and others, including the Rose of Tralee festival.

Later, he did press relations for Fianna Fails successful 1997 general election campaign and made many future government contacts there.

After that he began writing about politics for the now defunct Ireland on Sunday newspaper, while also co-writing a controversial biography of the then-new taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, along with fellow journalist Eugene Masterson, who now works for the Sunday World.

Later, Mr Whelan worked for a variety of other publications, turning to writing about farming and rural affairs for magazines including the Farming Independent and the Farmers Journal.

Ken Whelan lived for many years in Wicklow, but more than a decade ago moved to Virginia, Co Cavan, where he lived with his partner Kathleen.

He died peacefully in the Mater Hospital in Dublin this morning.

Among those paying tribute this evening was NUJ Irish Secretary Seamus Dooley who said Mr Whelan's death marks another break in the link with the Irish Press chapel, where he served as Father of the chapel.

He said that Mr Whelan successfully negotiated changes to working practices which staved off closure of the group for a number of years.

He also served as secretary of the Dublin Newspapers Branch for a period, and represented Republic of Ireland members on the NEC from 1992 to 1994.

Mr Dooley said: "Ken was a committed and engaging journalist, a political biographer, a former political advisor and a shrewd observer of current affairs. Despite failing health he maintained a keen interest in the NUJ in retirement and was proud of the history of the Irish Press.

He added: Ken was a man of strong views and principles. He will also be remembered for his humour and ability as a storyteller.

Mr Whelan passed away peacefully, at the Mater Hospital, Dublin, surrounded by his loving family.

He was predeceased by his son Donnacha and parents Jack and Kay.

Ken will be deeply missed and remembered with great love and affection by his partner Kathleen, his brother Ian, his sisters Diane and Linda, brother in law, Michael, Donnacha's mom Orla, Sue, his nieces, nephews, grand nieces and grand nephews, the extended Smith family, his cousins, neighbours and many friends, his death notice said.

His family have thanked the staff at the Mater Hospital.

Special thanks to those in the High Dependency Unit, who took such good care of Ken in his final days, we will be forever grateful. And for all those who lend their support in this difficult time.

His removal will take place from his home on Sunday.

Requiem Mass will then take place at 3pm, Mary Immaculate Church, Virginia, Co Cavan, followed by cremation in Lakelands Crematorium.
Around 80,000 fans will be at the sold-out gig tomorrow.

Four opening acts will take to the stage at Slane Castle ahead of Harry Styles tomorrow including Inhaler, the band fronted by Bonos son Elijah Hewson.

Around 80,000 fans will be at the sold-out gig that will be kicked off by Mitch Rowland at 2.30pm followed by DJ Annie Mac, Inhaler and Wet Leg,

Heres what you need to know about each act:

Mitch Rowland

The American guitarist is best known for his work on all of Harry Styles solo albums and is credited with co-writing the chart hit Watermelon Sugar.

Normally, Rowland joins Styles on stage as his touring guitarist and also helped pen the tracks Keep Driving and Golden.

He recently told Instagram followers that he is honoured to be part of the gig at Slane.

DJ Annie Mac

Dublin-born Annie Mac is a former BBC Radio 1 DJ with almost 45,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.

Her top track Feel About You boasts over 1 million listens on the streaming platform.

Inhaler

Frontman of Inhaler Elijah Hewson is the son of U2 legend Bono, though the four school friends have a huge listenership all on their own.

With over one million monthly Spotify listeners, their top hits include My Honest Face, Love Will Get You There and These Are The Days.

The band  Josh Jenkins, Ryan McMahon, Elijah Hewson, and Robert Keating  already have two releases, with Hewson previously telling the BBC that having a famous father definitely allowed a lot of doors to be opened.

He added: "But I think those doors shut just as fast because some people may have had pre-biases to the band.

Wet Leg

British band Wet Leg was founded by Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers and boasts almost 3 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Their top track Wet Dream has been played over 70 million times on the platform.

Other big hits include Chaise Longue, Being in Love and Angelica.

Harry Styles performed a cover of their single Wet Dream last year, with the pop duo saying the experience was really cool.

Teasdale told NME: "I really wish that we could hear his rendition of all of our songs. It was really all glossy and beautiful. Yeah, it was really fun.

The majority of buses heading to Slane are sold out ahead of the concert tomorrow, with gates opening at 2pm.

Gardai have already issued advice and key information that fans should know when travelling to the concert.

Harry Styles: Gardai release key information video ahead of Slane 2023

An additional three hours should be given to travel to and from the gig.

The gig is completely sold-out and there will be no tickets on sale at the venue.

People have been warned not to travel without a ticket as there will be checks on all approach routes.
Sixteen years ago this month Irish firm Kingspan launched its utterly revolutionary Lighthouse, Mark Keenan argues that this remarkable home today shines a light on how to provide truly affordable and energy-efficient dream homes for all

Innovation and imagination is the name of the game. This is a stretching challenge but one that is necessary if we are to tackle the problems we face in terms of housing shortage and buyers being priced out of the market. Twinned with that, I want to stimulate fresh thinking in the (homebuilding) industry with the UK becoming world leaders in terms of construction methods and design excellence.

The words of then British deputy prime minister John Prescott back in April 2005 at the launch of his new initiative for ultra-affordable, energy-efficient and fast-build housing as a solution to Britains then housing crisis.

The Lighthouse exterior

The abrasively uncouth son of a Welsh railwayman was the most unlikely candidate to come up with what turned out to be the most exciting and forward thinking idea to combat a housing crisis that has been tabled in these islands in the last 50 years.

John Prescotts big plan was rather boringly called the Design For Manufacture Initiative, relecting Prescotts belief that cheap housing should be made in a factory rather than built on site in the traditional way. In these islands that was a wholly revolutionary idea back in 2005.

The fact that it was to be run by the department of the deputy prime minister showed that the rest of Prescotts Labour Party government colleagues, including Prime Minister Tony Blair, were 100pc distancing themselves for what his cabinet colleagues regarded as an indulgent solo run.

Old Two Jags as he was known (the nuts and bolts Labour MP famously owned two Jaguar cars) had deported himself with the gait of an aged nightclub bouncer with gout. Prescott was regarded as a token retention of old Labour to help keep the old grassroots on board and he wasnt renowned for his innovation and imagination, rather for his ham-fisted and curt approach to politics and occasionally punching people in public.

During a famous radio interview he was asked about housing development on the green belt and replied unknowingly Its a Labour achievement and we mean to build on it. But among the wishy-washy floss and dross that largely made up the emerging New Labour, John Prescott was admired by many for his unflinching principles and his brutal honesty.

A cross section of the interior

Massively frustrated with the lack of affordable British housing for ordinary people and a finance-to-build model that saddled them with huge mortgages for life (if they could get a mortgage), Prescott had become utterly convinced (rightly it would emerge) that pure laziness was the reason why Britain was saddled with costly housing with developers churning out much the same costly block-build estate home models through the same outmoded and costly processes that they had been for the previous 50 years.

Prescott had a firm personal belief that a decent-sized family home could be constructed, using emerging modern technologies not only for the unbelievably low sum of STG60k (ex land costs), but could also be so well insulated that it could be heated for a pittance and would have zero carbon emissions. Almost two decades ago, this was truly stirring stuff.

The very tangible carrot incentive from Prescott for successful entrants was the promise of big contracts to build thousands of the emergent 60k homes on state owned sites all over Britain.

Unexpectedly Prescotts plan instantly caught the imagination of the British media who adored the idea and tagged it the 60k House competition. And it would turn out that one emerging Irish company would become pivotal in making Two Jagss housing dream come true.

The Lighthouse interior

The response from the industry was massive. Most of the big British home builders took a stab at it including the likes of Barratt and Wimpey. Among the entrants was the Sixtyk consortium which comprised British home company Crest and Irelands own Kingspan, fronted by Jonathan Jennings (now of Dimplex).

Using Kingspans revolutionary factory made TEK system (comprising thick insulation foam boards sandwiched with plywood), the British/ Irish team came up with The Sixtyk Lighthouse, a remarkably stylish (to this day), modern, dazzling, and intrinsically elegant two-bedroom terrace home of two and a half floors, measuring 1,001 sq ft inside; the equivalent floor space of a typical Irish three-bed semi detached.

It was characterised by swept svelte looks provided by its characteristally exotic crested roofline.

Thirty firms made it to the short list in the design competition and The Lighthouse was one of them. Its built equivalent was launched 16 years ago this month in Watford.

The press reaction was incredible. It appeared on every news programme, in every paper, on loads of trendy web sites. The house looked amazing inside and out. It had an open-plan living arrangement on an upper floor with the bedrooms below.

It cost 30 to heat for the year using a biomass boiler system, a mechanical ventilation system and achieved zero emissions, generating electricity from solar panels. It has a grey water system which recycled water from the washing machine and the sink into the toilet flush.

Three winners, including Kingspan, achieved British Government contracts to build housing all over Britain. While only 30pc of the homes would truly be built for under 60k, that didnt matter so much.

Prescotts competition ultimately concentrated the minds of builders, architects and product makers and its results would have a remarkable influence on emerging housing both in the UK and in Ireland. It proved that old building techniques were outmoded and overly expensive.

While some of its emergent systems (like wood chip stoves) have fallen from favour, others have gone on to become mainstream components of modern housing including mechanical ventilation systems, ultra air-tight build and improved insulations. Kingspan of course, has gone on to become a market leader and its products vital component in Irelands modern retrofitting campaign.

The Renny Lodge scheme was built as a result of the competition

The Lighthouse (albeit less flashy than the original) went on to be constructed on sites across Britain including the 2008 Renny Lodge scheme in Newport Pagnell in Milton Keynes which saw more than 60 constructed. Later in 2008, in a demonstration, a 60k home was erected in the centre of London from scratch in six weeks flat.

But while the components that emerged have become mainstream, Prescotts ultimate dream of a house that cost less than a hundred grand, that everyone could afford, has fallen by the wayside. Industry absorbed the savings and added them to their profits.

But this loses sight of this vital fact: Prescott and Kingspan proved that ultimately affordable family homes are wholly possible, with innovation and imagination from industry and support from genuine politicians in Government with genuine incentives.

More than ever today we need the modern Irish equivalent of the 60k House competition. Today maybe it would be the 180k House initiative. We need an event like this to concentrate the minds of Irelands designers, architects, builders and manufacturers, to rethink everything like the Brits did in 2005/2006.

Because 16 years ago, when it came to an affordability in housing crisis, Old Two Jags and his competition and one Irish firm proved that the impossible was possible. The Lighthouse shows us today that much of what the modern Irish housing industry tells us: that truly affordable Irish housing is a pipe dream (because of this cost and that cost) cost, is ultimate faff.

An Irish 180k family home of 1,000 sq ft, built in six weeks, to zero carbon emissions and A1 standards? By the tens of thousands. Can you imagine? Can they imagine? Prescott and Kingspan imagined. And they did it.
For most of the year, were sun-deprived on this rainy little island  no wonder we throw caution to the winds, along with our anoraks, and bare our pale Irish flesh at the first blink of sunshine. And what a burst of glorious weather weve been enjoying lately.
Editorial

Any challenge may try us, but when dealing with humanitarian issues there is an imperative to raise our game. If we can help, there is a moral compunction to do so; if we no longer can, there is an equal onus to say so.

Having admitted 100,000 people  mainly from Ukraine but also from other countries  the Government says it can no longer meet an agreement to admit a further 350 people from Mediterranean countries experiencing a migration crisis.

We will pay 1.5m to a European relocation system instead, because we have run out of space. Stated or not, we have come to an inflection point.

Some might argue that, being unable to hold up our end of a deal, we are simply shelling out conscience money .

But it is only fair to point out the situation was radically altered by Russias declaration of war; 85,000 people are currently accommodated here, almost 10 times the number in February 2022, before the start of the invasion.

As Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said, we too are now under pressure.

But he also said we would not be putting limits on the number of people we admit. For one, he added, it would be illegal to do so, and for another, it would be impractical.

He accepted however, that we can manage the flows better. Not only can we, but we must.

In recent months, about 900 applicants for international protection here found themselves on the streets and homeless.

The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatovic, even raised concerns about the issue with the Government.

She called for a whole of government approach to help solve the problem. In a letter sent to Mr Varadkar, she raised fears that Ireland may very well also fall short of the minimum standards under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. So yes, we have to be better.

True, there is little point in being delusional and pretending we can do everything required; but given the scale of want and need, it behoves us to do all we can.

One man recently told CNN how, after escaping from the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, he flew to Dublin, where he sought asylum. He was relieved to have found refuge with such great people.

However, a month-and-a-half after arriving, he was still waiting for more permanent accommodation and camping on the streets.

Tented accommodation is to be set up on the grounds of the former Central Mental Hospital in south Dublin. This is anything but ideal, but at least it should be safe.

We are obliged to provide shelter and protection to those who need our care. On too many occasions we have failed.

If reality decrees that we must accept the unchangeable, decency demands we guard against the unacceptable. Material responses may have to be proportional, but our compassion ought not to be arbitrary. Where we can help, we must continue to do so, and always in a humane manner.
Host: Fionnan Sheahan, Guest: Ralph Riegel

John Richards Jnr (centre) with his father John Snr and his mother Sheila on his wedding day in 1973.

A man whose father abandoned his Irish family almost 50 years ago and vanished without trace, believes the mystery over his fate has been solved thanks to a newspaper article four months ago.

Nestled on the banks of the Blackwater River, the picturesque market town of Fermoy would become the unlikely scene of a curious double vanishing of the same man.

Now, half a century later, an abandoned son is seeking to unravel the secrets of fathers second life.

Fionnan Sheahan is joined by Ralph Riegel, Southern Correspondent with the Irish Independent, to tell the story of a family searching for answers.
The land at the back of St Paul's College, Raheny, which has now been rezoned for recreational use. Pic: Gerry Mooney

Dublin City Council will spend the funds they earn from St Annes Park gigs on park improvements, it has been confirmed.

The 240-acre public park and former home of the Guinness family hosted an array of summer concerts over the June Bank Holiday weekend.

The Lumineers, Soft Cell, Lionel Richie, The 1975 and more have performed in the Raheny park in the past week. Pulp is set to perform tonight, Friday June 9th.

So far, the Parks, Biodiversity and Landscape Services have received just one written complaint due to these events.

A spokesperson from Dublin City Council told Independent.ie that all funds received in relation to these concerts will be used to fund the councils annual works programme for parks improvements.

Dublin City Parks host a number of summer time concerts each year.

MCD Productions organise and promote these events and are responsible for the management of the events including security, communications, littering picking, noise control, reinstatement works and associated costs, the spokesperson said.

The events are licensed under a statutory event planning license which requires a comprehensive event management plan to be put in place in consultation with stakeholders.

These summer time events are enjoyed by thousands of concert goers each year and are a popular event on many people's social calendar.

All funding received by Parks, Biodiversity and Landscape Services in relation to these concerts is used to fund our annual works programme for parks improvements.

The Parks, Biodiversity and Landscape Services have received one written complaint in relation to a concert at St Annes Park held in early June.
The backlog for an NCT appointment is set to be reduced by the end of June. Photo: Getty Images

So why is Junior Transport Minister Jack Chambers going through a political version of road rage?

Because the National Car Test Service (NCTS) has got stuck in a jam.

On RTE radio last Monday, Chambers strongly criticised Spanish company Applus, which runs this service, and called for serious penalties to be slapped on it.

The delays are absolutely unacceptable, Chambers said. Its a complete failure by Applus. The minister also said he has written to the Road Safety Authority (RSA) which outsources the NCTS, expressing my ongoing annoyance with this dysfunction.

Why is the NCTS so important?

Because when this system works properly, its the most effective way of getting dangerous bangers off Irish roads.

All cars aged between four and 10 have to get an NCT every two years, while any vehicles older than that must be tested annually. The process typically lasts 40 to 60 minutes and costs 55.

Around 1.5 million vehicles go for an NCT in a typical year and the failure rate is usually just above or below 50pc. If youre caught driving without a valid NCT disc, the punishments can include a 2,000 fine and/or three months behind bars.

The NCTS was introduced in 2000. A decade later, the RSA hired Applus to operate it. Appluss current contract runs until 2030 and one of its key provisions is that the standard waiting time for a test should be 12 days.

And Applus is currently failing to meet that target?

Its not even close. According to Chambers, the average waiting time has drifted out to 30 days. Some test centres contacted by Independent.ie recently could offer nothing before January 2024.

On May 11, the testing backlog stood at 414,000 vehicles. Thats a slight reduction from the 425,000 overdue an NCT in March, but well up on the 375,000 recorded in January. Dublin accounts for roughly a third of all these figures.

One ray of hope is that since most cars are bought earlier in the year, most test dates fall around then too and so later months tend to be less busy.

Were starting to get a handle on it, an NCTS spokesman insisted in early February. We will be back to a normal level of service in June. That optimism is now starting to ring quite hollow.

Whats to blame for clogging up the NCTS?

Applus representatives gave several reasons when they appeared at the Oireachtas Transport Committee last February.

One is that around 2,500 drivers per week are simply not showing up for NCTS appointments. Another 1,000 cancel at short notice, making it difficult or impossible to schedule a replacement.

These figures are roughly double what they were before the pandemic. Covid-19 reduced the number of new cars sold, which meant an older national fleet and extra work for the NCTS.

Appluss biggest challenge, however, is what its Irish manager Mark Synnott calls the great resignation.

Mechanics have recently been leaving in their droves and the company is running to stand still. Last year, for example, it hired 125 new testers but 113 others quit.

Many are ageing out of the trade, Synnott reported, and many more have taken advantage of opportunities to use their transferable skills in non-automotive sectors.

How does Applus plan to get back on top of the situation?

By extending opening hours, increasing overtime and looking abroad. The company has recently been boosting its workforce by organising a recruitment campaign in the Philippines and bringing mechanics over from Spain.

However, Applus says Irelands housing crisis is making it very cautious about pushing this policy too far and constantly hiring overseas is not a sustainable model.

Questions have also been raised about whether Applus is making its NCTS jobs attractive enough. The salary range advertised is 35,000-42,000, but most traditional mechanics can command 50,000 or more.

By its own admission, the NCTS has been going through tough financial times and last Christmas it offered employees a 10 lunch voucher instead of a party. As Fianna Fail TD James OConnor noted: One would not go into a filling station and buy a wrap and a bottle of Coke for that.

What should I do if I cant get an NCT before my discs expiry date?

Ask to be put on the priority waiting list. The vast majority of people who do this will get an appointment within four weeks.

An Garda Siochana, meanwhile, recently said it will go easy on drivers who have out-of-date NCT discs but can produce evidence of a scheduled test date.

Motorists should also be aware that if theyre still waiting for an appointment 28 days after applying, theyre legally entitled to a free test (apart from certain exceptions). This rule had to be relaxed during the pandemic, but it was reinstated last October.

More than 4,200 people have claimed free NCTs so far this year and Chambers has predicted there will be many more because of the current dysfunction  which wont do Appluss balance sheet any good.

What about the driving test system?

This is also moving at a desperately sluggish pace.

Around 60,000 learner drivers are looking for a test and their average waiting time is 22 weeks, over twice the systems official target. Dublin test centres have been worst affected, with Dun Laoghaire/Deansgrange backed up until next February.

There is a knock-on effect from the NCTS crisis, since last March trade union Forsa told its members to only carry out test drives in cars with a valid cert.

The driving test system also got some unwelcome publicity this week over some recent complaints made about rude, abusive or racist instructors. One allegedly told a 28-year-old woman she was drop-dead gorgeous, asked if she was single and said Whos your daddy? 15 times.

Finally, what impact is all this going to have on road safety?

Thats the biggest worry. The NCTS isnt foolproof anyway, since last year operators received more than 200 formal complaints about problems that werent caught, such as loose wheels and failing brakes. If fewer tests are being carried out, the result will almost certainly be more accidents.

There are already statistics to back this up. Road deaths began plummeting after the NCTS was introduced, aided by other measures such as drink-driving tests and road upgrades. Now theyre going in the wrong direction again, with 78 fatalities so far this year  14 more than the same period in 2022.

Ireland is part of the Vision Zero campaign, which aims to eliminate all road deaths by 2050. We have the potential to spare hundreds of families from grief and suffering, the RSAs chief executive Sam Waide has said. The prize is immense.

We can only hope that the NCTSs current logjam is just a bump in the road.
An elderly man has been airlifted to hospital after sustaining a head injury in a fall in West Kerry.

The man, originally from the UK, is aged in his late 70s and fell at An Dun Mor (Dunmore Head) at the very western edge of Corca Dhuibhne at approximately 3.45pm.

He has been airlifted to hospital, and The Kerryman understands he was talking and in relatively good spirits when emergency services attended to him.

He had been fishing at the time with two colleagues, and two medics happened to be nearby when the incident occurred. They attended to him before emergency services arrived at the scene.

Valentia Coastguard co-ordinated the response to the call-out and tasked Dingle Coast Guard to the scene, where they attended to the man before he was airlifted by Shannon Rescue Helicopter 115.

An ambulance was also tasked to the site but wasnt needed.

While the circumstances that led to this particular fall are not known at this time, emergency services have advised members of the public in recent weeks that the fine weather has made rocks looser and, therefore, underfoot conditions more challenging in places.
Local Drogheda based TD, Fergus ODowd, has said that Irish Waters continued failure to deal with the appalling malodours in the town warrants severe consequences, fines and possibly legal action if not addressed.

ODowd received an update from the EPAs Inspector of the Urban Waste Water Enforcement Team which stated that following extensive engagement between the EPA and Irish Water that Irish Water has now brought forward the timeframes to cover the primary settlement tanks.

ODowd said Last year Irish Water informed me that they planned to cover the primary settlement tanks in 2027. I informed them in no uncertain terms that this would not be acceptable to the people of Drogheda.

Read more Risk of odour from treatment plant during works in Drogheda

The fact that Irish Water had issued such a long lead in time for works shocked me at the time and I pressed the EPA to take a leading role in compelling Irish Water to fast track this timeframe.

ODowd added The EPA have now stated Irish Water have brought forward their time frame for works on the settlement tanks to Q3 2024, despite the reduction this remains unacceptable to me and to the EPA.

Its quite clear at this point that the plant is not fit for purpose, Irish Water need to be held to account for their continued failures and severe penalties at this stage may be required to ensure accountability into the future.
Sean Creamer was presented with his award in Dublin by Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Pippa Hackett and Dr Stan Lalor, Teagasc Director of Knowledge Transfer.

Farming full-time on 53 hectares in Ballinamore, Sean Creamer manages a suckler herd and a young mixed forestry enterprise. In 2016, Sean decided to plant forestry along the recently re-developed Shannon Erne waterway on land, which had become challenging for farming. He identified forestry as a steady and reliable income stream but also an opportunity to grow quality timber and enhance local biodiversity and landscape.

Today, his diverse forest of nine different types of conifer and native broadleaf trees is growing very well on land that he struggled to farm and provides important additional farm income. As a strong advocate of farmers working with the environment, Sean sees the impact of the forest going far beyond the financial gain with real benefits for biodiversity, animal welfare, water quality and carbon storage.

Sean said: I am delighted to receive this award. Not only is the forest allowing our farm to be more financially sustainable but is also really helping environmentally which is something I strongly believe in.

The RDS Teagasc Farm Forestry Award category recognises working farmers who follow a whole farm planning approach to successfully integrate their farm and forestry enterprises and contribute to farming sustainability.

Congratulating Sean Creamer, Dr Stan Lalor, Teagasc Director of Knowledge Transfer said: The award acknowledges Seans successful diversification into forestry and the sustainable integration of his forestry and farming enterprises.

"With farmers facing many challenges, the need to forward plan and explore possibilities to innovate and diversify is central to a sustainable and resilient agricultural sector. Sean is an excellent example of a farmer whose vision and positive actions are contributing to the economic and environmental sustainability of Irish Agriculture. Teagasc is delighted to be associated with the RDS Forestry Awards through our sponsorship of the Farm Forestry Award Category.

RDS President, John Dardis said: It is more important than ever to recognise the work of our farmers, foresters and agri-entrepreneurs, who are contributing to the sustainable development of Irish agriculture, which remains the most important industry in rural Ireland. This years Spring Agriculture and Forestry Award winners have achieved a balance between the economic and environmental needs of the sector and are highlighting what is possible when experience is combined with innovation and dedication.

Noel Kennedy, Teagasc Forestry Advisor said: Seans award is well deserved and his successful diversification into forestry highlights how farms and forests can work so well together with strong economic, practical, social and environmental benefits. His success is a great example for others to aspire to.

For more information on all aspects of forest creation, management and training visit www.teagasc.ie/forestry.
The family and friends of cancer campaigner Trina Cleary piled into Ryans Funeral Home in the small village of Wellingtonbridge, Co Wexford on Thursday evening.

Although theyll have known this day was coming and prepared for it, it wont have made it any easier on the 38 year-olds heartbroken family  husband Stuuy, son Corey, stepchildren Cyan, Kyle, Shola and Regan, parents John and Deirdre, her sister Karen, nephews and extended family.

Aware of the severity of her illness though, Trina bravely planned for her untimely passing. The celebration of life which took place in the rural Wexford funeral home was meticulously mapped out in advance, as was the goodbye message posted to her 23,000 followers on Instagram hours after she succumbed to illness on Wednesday morning.

In fact, speaking previously in an interview with The Irish Independent in 2021 in advance of her wedding to Stuuy, Trina said:

I want to ask the lady who is doing our wedding to do my funeral as well. Its going to be a tough conversation to have, but I want someone to have my wishes so it takes pressure off everyone and lets them grieve, look after themselves and each other, and celebrate my life instead of worrying about having to plan the perfect day for me.

It was further evidence of a selflessness which saw Trina use her own cancer diagnosis and experiences to raise public awareness of the importance of early detection through her Instagram, Facebook and a blog called A Day in the Life of Tri.

Trinas words were recalled by friend Diana Goff who spoke next to her coffin in the cramped funeral home. She stressed that this was to be a celebration of the wonderful, funny, loving and inspiringly determined woman that Trina was.

Diana noted that she had been honoured to have been at three of the most prominent moments in Trinas life.

"We were both expecting our baby boys at the same time, she recalled. She was so excited back then and in awe of the day she gave birth to her precious son Corey.

"I was the chosen celebrant on the day she married Stuuy, the love of her life. And today, not one of us want to be here, but she chose me to celebrate the end of her life with you all. She wanted me to keep it upbeat, easier said than done Tri, she smiled, glancing towards the beautiful framed photo of her friend.

Tributes had come in from all over the country since Trinas passing. The Wexford woman, through her dogged determination and unshakeable optimism, had really struck a chord with people right across Ireland and further afield and had become a de facto spokesperson for womens health.

She candidly documented her own breast cancer journey to encourage women around Ireland to check themselves, to be aware of the signs and not to have to go through what she was having to go through.

"We are all truly blessed to have known her, Diana said, frankly. She was held in such high regard as a young womans voice, an ambassador for womens health in Ireland.

In advance of the service, Diana described her late friend as a beacon of light for so many.

"She lived out every minute to the best of her ability and has saved other peoples lives along the way by promoting self-checking and awareness of womens health. This is what she is leaving behind.

The public, ambassadorial Trina just part of the Trina that was recalled at the special service in Wellingtonbridge, however. She was remembered for her fun-loving, bubbly character. She was remembered as a devoted mother, a loving wife, a beloved daughter and sister and a great friend to many.

Her favourite karaoke song, Everytime by Britney Spears was played, holidays to Puerta Rico recalled and memories of office fun at work in Equifax shared.

While it was acknowledged that Trinas life was not always a bed of roses, those present were urged to look back and remember her best bits.

Today is not the end, Diane stressed. Her memory will remain in our minds and hearts forever and she can still make you smile every single day.

"It is her wish for her people left behind to continue to live their best lives, just like she wouldve wanted to.

Following a moving ceremony, Trinas remains will be taken for a private cremation.

Trina was the beloved daughter of John and Deirdre, wife of Stuuy, mother of Corey, stepmother to Cyan, Kyle, Shola and Regan, She was a loving sister of Karen and aunt to Ryan, Tadhg and Caolan. Sadly missed by Karen's fiancee Darren, her nanny Annie, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends.
Just over three months after a major fire ripped through Wexford General Hospital, resulting in the indefinite closure of the Emergency Department (ED) there, hospital management have finally been able to reveal a date by which services will be restored.

While Wexford General has offered a Minor Injuries Unit and an Acute Medical Assessment Unit in the interim, all emergency cases have been diverted to neighbouring hospitals in Waterford or Kilkenny, or as far as Dublin, creating massive pressure on the system. In particular, University Hospital Waterford has had a tremendously difficult few weeks as management have struggled to cope with a huge increase in the volume of patients arriving through the doors of the ED.

However, an end is now in sight as it was confirmed that Wexford Generals ED will finally re-open its doors on Tuesday, July 25, much to the relief of the entire county.

However, Wexford General Hospital Manager Linda OLeary has stressed that the hospital will not be back to full capacity on that date.

Im delighted to advise you that the Emergency Department will reopen on Tuesday, July 25, 2023, she said.

Although the ED service will be reinstated, the hospital will not have returned to full bed capacity on this date. This means that there will be greater pressure on the ED service when it reopens and the wider hospital. Contingency plans however will be in place to mitigate the shortfall.

Work continues to expedite the full reopening of all wards and beds. It is expected that full bed capacity will be returned by the end of August.

In the meantime, we are working to continue with contingency arrangements established since the fire, which have proved very successful and provided services to the population of County Wexford.

Once again, Ms OLeary thanked her loyal and dedicated staff at Wexford General Hospital for their work in the most trying of times.

I would like to express my thanks to everyone here at Wexford General Hospital for their commitment, hard work and support since the fire, she said. We have had some challenging days but we have found time to have a chat and giggle too! As we get closer to the re-opening of our services it is important we stay kind and patient with ourselves and our colleagues.

Ms OLeary also sought to thank HSE Capital & Estates and the contractors who continue their phenomenal work daily on site.

Finally, there was a special word of thanks to other hospitals and services in the region who have provided assistance to Wexford General and the people of Co Wexford in their hour of need.

The Ireland East Hospital Group, The National Ambulance Service, St Lukes General Hospital, University Hospital Waterford, St Vincents University Hospital and South East Community Healthcare (CHO5) have all been and continue to be exceptional in their support to Wexford General Hospital and have gone above and beyond to provide treatment and care for the patients from Wexford, Ms OLeary concluded.
The Irish Street Arts, Circus and Spectacle Network (ISACS), which has its headquarters in Wexford town, is distributing 4,000 spinning plates to every library in Ireland as part of a project called Circus Explored, honouring the memory of the late Irish world record holding plate spinner David Spathaky.

Children all over the country are being offered the the opportunity to learn the skill of plate spinning by picking up free plates from their local library and tapping into special teaching tutorials.

ISACS is a partner with Creative Ireland and is presenting the Circus Explored project as part of Cruinniu na nOg  Irelands National day of Creativity for young people on Saturday, June 10. Free spinning plates are available from Wexford Library and county libraries throughout the country.

In promoting the initiative, ISACS is also taking the opportunity to remember the legendary David Spathaky, the Guinness world record holder in plate spinning, who lived in Castletownbere, Co Cork and died earlier this year.

In 1991, Spathaky and Sue Broadway set themselves the challenge of becoming record breakers by spinning plates live on television in Tokyo. They managed to spin 91 plates, a record that was only beaten once, in 1991, again by David, this time assisted by Debbie Wooley in Bangkok, Thailand, where they spun a phenomenal 108 plates and the record stands to this day.

David Spathaky was born in Portadown, Co Armagh and settled in West Cork after travelling the world. He was not oblivious to the differences between North and South and the desire for political will and change was something very close to his heart, according to ISACS director Lucy Medleycott.

"He was a natural innovator, a maverick, an agitator and a subversive. All these traits made him a radical pioneer in circus which he used as a way to influence change, she said.

The Circus Explored project is supported through the Shared Island initiative and includes a North South Youth circus exchange with Young people from In Your Space in Derry and Circusful in Belfast having just returned from a visit to the Mayhem Youth Circus Festival led by Galway Community Circus.

David Spathaky sadly passed away in February of this year and the Circus Explored project aims to honour his legacy and inspire the circus artists of the future, north and south of the border.
The South East Venue Network (SEVN) has announced details of its Arts Council-funded Artist Bursary for 2023-24, which will include access to facilities, supports and mentoring from the Courthouse Arts Centre in Tinahely and the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray.

The award is open to artists of all disciplines, living and making work in the region who have presented or exhibited work in a professional context within the last five years and includes 14,000 in financial support to help develop their art practice.

Aside from financial supports, the recipient will also receive support in-kind and - where relevant and possible - access to facilities, technical, management and communications supports, as well as mentoring from the most suitable participating arts centres within the network.

These venues are Wexford Arts Centre, Theatre Royal Waterford, Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely, Co. Wicklow, Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Wicklow, Garter Lane, Waterford, National Opera House, Wexford, Visual, Carlow and Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny.

The bursary was developed to provide an opportunity for venues across the region to collaboratively support a professional arts practitioner with the time and resources to think, research, reflect and critically engage with their art, explained Mary Boland, Theatre Royal Waterford Director and SEVN co-ordinator.

As equal opportunities employers, we encourage and welcome applications from people of all genders, nationalities, races, cultural backgrounds, ages, religions, languages, abilities, sexual orientations and socio-economic statuses.

A spokesperson for the Courthouse Arts Centre in Tinahely said: "The Courthouse Arts Centre is delighted to be part of this latest bursary for 2023-2024

Waterford-based dance theatre artist Rachel Ni Bhraonain, the bursarys 2022-23 recipient, said the award provided her with the space and resources to develop new work and engage with contemporary arts audiences.
Wicklow County Council is seeking a new Creative Community Engagement Officer to work with the Culture and Creativity Team in delivering the strategic priorities of the local authoritys Culture and Creativity Strategy 2023-2027.

The new role is becoming a feature in many local authorities across Ireland, with Creative Ireland reportedly providing funding toward starting salaries of no less than 47,339 as part of the programmes commitment to enhancing access to, engagement with, and enjoyment of Irelands culture and creativity.

The vision of the Creative Ireland Programme 2023 - 2027 is to mainstream creativity in the life of the nation so that individually and collectively, in our personal lives and institutions, we can realise our full creative potential thereby promoting individual, community and national wellbeing.

The job with Wicklow County Council will involve liaising with local creatives, artists, organisations and staff and managing the development and delivery of a programme of projects and events with the aim of encouraging increased participation in creative and cultural activities.

The role will be a five-year, fixed-term contract and will be managed by the Creative Ireland Coordinator from the Arts Office, Bray Municipal District Offices.

An ordinary degree, clean driving licence and significant work experience in a role relevant to the position in the public sector or independent creative sector are among the pre-requisites for applicants.

Candidates must also have satisfactory knowledge and understanding of the County Wicklow region and its socio-economic make-up.

Applications close on June 15 at wicklow.ie/Living/Your-Council/Job-Vacancies
An Irish casting agency has put a call out for a female body double for a film shooting in Wicklow and Dublin that is believed to be starring Dakota Fanning.

The advert from Celtic Casting asks for applications from Caucasian females aged 20 to 35 with a shoe size of 6-6.5, natural blonde hair or highlights, and a dress size of 8.

The person must also be between 54 and 56 in height and be available for film shooting in Wicklow and Dublin between mid June and late August of this year.

It does not state what film or actor the body double is for, but asks those fitting the bill to email recent photos with hair down to thewatchersextas@gmail.com, suggesting the casting is for The Watchers, which is set to star blonde, petite, 29-year-old actress Dakota Fanning, who is reportedly 54 tall.

The War of the Worlds and The Secret Life Of Bees star is set to play Mina, a 28-year-old artist who gets stranded in an untouched forest in Ireland, trapped alongside three strangers that are watched and stalked by mysterious creatures each night.

The film is due to be released in June 2024.

Celtic Casting would not be drawn on who they were seeking a body double for, and said they could not release any more details about the production at this time.
Wicklow County Council has welcomed a 75,000 funding boost under the Healthy Ireland Fund (HIF) announced by Minister for Public Health, Wellbeing and the National Drugs Strategy, Hildegarde Naughton.

Wicklow County Council has a long-standing partnership with Healthy Ireland and has worked collaboratively to improve the health and well-being of everyone living in the county.

The award came following an extensive public consultation to identify key priority areas and at risk groups.

The funds will be allocated to initiatives that support both positive mental health and decrease those at risk of poverty and basic deprivation and targeted at all age groups, particularly children, adolescents and young people, older people, those living in disadvantaged communities and people with disabilities.

Emer OGorman, Chief Executive of Wicklow County Council, stated: "This is very positive news for county Wicklow and will greatly support individuals and communities in looking after their own health and wellbeing."

Michael Nicholson, Director of Service, Wicklow County Council, commented: It is very heartening to see such a variety of projects, illustrating that the design has been tailored locally to meet the needs of the local areas."

Cathaoirleach of Wicklow County Cllr Tommy Annesley, added: We welcome this funding announcement which demonstrates a targeted approach to address health inequalities.

Lorraine Dunne, Healthy Ireland Co-ordinator, Wicklow County Council, explained: Healthy Wicklow recognises that locally led initiatives are key to enhancing wellbeing among the population and this boost of funding will continue to build on the great work we are already doing to support the physical, mental and social wellbeing of everyone living in Wicklow.
More than 270 local groups and organisations have been awarded grants by Wicklow County Council as part of the Community Awards Scheme 2023, representing an increase of almost 21 per cent on the number of grants awarded last year.

Wicklow County Council operates the Community Awards scheme as part of its commitment to supporting local community development and available as grant aid to successful community groups and local organisations wishing to undertake community projects in their area.

Among the Arklow District groups and organisations awarded the maximum grant of 500 to assist with small projects and group running costs were Arklow Community Action Resource Centre, Arklow Springboard Family Support Services, Aughrim & District Active Retirement, Friends in Community, National Disabled Angling Facility, Rathdrum Cancer Support Group and Release Wellness.

In the Baltinglass District, Carnew Community Care CLG, St. John's Caring Centre, West Wicklow Cancer Support, West Wicklow Dogs for Friends CLG all received 500, along with Bray Travellers Community Development Group, Festina Lente Enterprises, Happy Hooves Therapeutic Riding, Lakers Social & Recreational Club, Open Door Day Care Centre, Soroptimist International Bray & District and Sunbeam House Services (Music Programme) in Bray all received 500.

In Greystones, Charlesland Mini League, Friends of St Colmcilles Hospital and Greystones Peoples Project (Greystones Family Resource Centre) received the maximum grant, while Blue Dolphins Special Olympics Club, Foroige WAY Project Wicklow Town, Friends of Wicklow Community Services, Ukrainian Hub Palyanytsya in Republic of Ireland CLG, Wicklow Cancer Support, Wicklow Child & Family Project, Wicklow Parkinsons Choir and Wicklow Travellers Group in the Wicklow District also all received 500.

Countywide organisations DCD Dyspraxia CLG and East Coast Samaritans were others to receive the maximum grant.

Cathaoirleach of Wicklow County Council, Cllr Tommy Annesley, welcomed the announcement stating: This scheme recognises the strong and active community spirit here in Wicklow. The recipients of these grants are volunteers who give their own time for the benefit of their communities. This is our way of thanking them for their efforts.

Chief Executive of Wicklow County Council, Emer OGorman, added her own thanks and stated: Wicklow County Council is proud to support groups and organisations engaging in local community activities and services. Almost 80,000 has been allocated this year, and the support of the members in providing a budget for these grants every year is welcomed.

Director of Services for Community, Cultural and Social Development, Michael Nicholson said that the funding was vital for the groups working hard at grassroots level to develop community activities and foster community spirit.
Nine groups in County Wicklow registered to get involved in clean-ups as part of World Ocean Day, with Clean Coasts North Wicklow co-ordinator and Green Party Councillor Lourda Scott taking the opportunity to reiterate the vital message to leave no trace on our beaches.

The Clean Coasts organisation celebrated its 20th anniversary this year, as over 100 volunteers from coastal areas around Wicklow, including Brittas Bay, Greystones North Beach, Bray, Blessington Lakes and Arklow South Beach met on Thursday, June 8, to collect the rubbish that accumulates every day on our shores.

Commenting on the clean-up operations in Greystones and the need to protect the coastal areas beyond World Ocean Day, Cllr Scott said: The theme for World Ocean Day 2023, is Planet Ocean: Tides are Changing. We hope that by taking our own actions locally that we can change the tide of rubbish on our own piece of the coast and help keep our beaches clean.

I encourage everyone to leave no trace by bringing all rubbish home and remembering to pick up after our dogs and bin it. We often find pieces of clothing when we do a beach clean, so even taking an extra minute to check that you have packed everything away securely can help reduce litter. All of these small actions can have a big impact, she added.

Junior Tidy Towns Greystones co-ordinator Rebecca Gill said the group were excited to celebrate 20 Years of Clean Coasts Ireland and take part in World Ocean Day for an After School Beach Clean

For its clean-up, Biodiversity Identification kits were handed out to help volunteers explore the shore and discover what wildflowers, shells, crabs and birds are inhabiting the local beaches. In fact, following the clean-up, the group said: We had some interesting litter and biodiversity finds, including cuttlefish bone and some Colpomenia tuberculata seaweed!

For 2023, the focus of World Ocean Day was on the 3030 campaign, meaning to create a healthy ocean with abundant wildlife and to stabilize our climate, its crucial that 30% of our planets lands, waters, and ocean are protected by the year 2030.
Have I Got New For You jokes about recording on Friday after Johnson resignation (Hat Trick Productions/PA)

Topical news comedy show Have I Got News For You has joked it needs to start recording episodes on Fridays, after Boris Johnsons surprise resignation as an MP.

This weeks episode featured comedian Harry Hill as host  his first ever appearance on the show  and was recorded on Thursday.

The former PM announced on Friday he would be stepping down as an MP after accusing a Commons investigation into whether he misled Parliament over partygate of attempting to drive me out.

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The announcement came shortly after 8pm, with Have I Got New For You set to air at 9pm.

Shortly after the news, the shows Twitter account wrote: Perhaps we need to start recording the show on a Friday

Comedian Richard Osman, who has previously guest hosted the show, expressed sympathy with those involved.

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My thoughts and prayers with everyone who had to record Have I Got News For You last night, he said.

Johnson has appeared several times on Have I Got News For You, both as guest panellist and host.

He was often the subject of ridicule on the show from team captains Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, who poked fun at his politics, posh accent, and controversial moments.

Fridays episode saw Hill joined by comedian Jack Dee and editor-in-chief of Vice UK Zing Tsjeng, alongside Hislop and Merton.

It followed a week of major news stories, including the fallout from Phillip Schofields secret, Prime Minister Rishi Sunaks US trip, and the Duke of Sussexs legal battle with the owners of the Daily Mirror.

Last year, the final regular episode of rival topical new programme Mock The Week aired amid similar political chaos in the UK.

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The episode, which was aired after 17 years and 21 series, was not re-recorded despite the subsequent resignation of former prime minister Liz Truss.

Following the news about Ms Trusss exit from Downing Street, the shows official Twitter account tweeted: I know there are bigger ramifications to the Prime Minister resigning but that has really messed up Mock the Week this week.

Comedian Angela Barnes added: Liz Truss has done some terrible things, but resigning the day after we record the last ever episode of Mock The Week is up there.

Elsewhere on Friday, members of the studio audience on the BBCs topical discussion programme Any Questions cheered as the news was read out during the live recording in Pembrokeshire.
The Estrela de Fura ruby fetched more than 27 million at auction in New York (Sothebys/PA)

A 52 carat ruby and a pink diamond have set two world auction records after they went under the hammer for nearly 28 million each.

The 55.22 carat Mozambique ruby, named the Estrela de Fura 55.22, sold for 34.8 million dollars (27,723,420) during Sothebys Magnificent Jewels sale in New York on Thursday  setting a new world auction record for a ruby as well as for any coloured gemstone.

The record was previously held by the Sunrise Ruby, a 25.59 carat Burmese stone, which sold for 30.3 million dollars (24,148,191) at Sothebys Geneva in May 2015.

The Estrela de Fura 55.22 set a new world auction record for a ruby (Sothebys/PA)

The ruby was recently cut from a 101 carat rough discovered at a ruby mine in Mozambique in July 2022, one of the largest ruby deposits in the world.

The auction house has said that rubies of this magnitude are exceedingly rare, with only two examples previously hitting the 15 million dollar (11,951, 250) mark.

A 10.57 carat pink diamond, dubbed The Eternal Pink, also achieved 34.8 million dollars at auction on Thursday, establishing a world auction record for a fancy purplish-pink diamond.

Sothebys has described it as the most vivid pink diamond to ever come to market.

The record was previously held by a 10.64 carat fancy vivid purplish-pink diamond which sold for 19.9 million dollars (15,857,116) at Sothebys Hong Kong in 2019.

The Eternal Pink sold for more than 27 million (Sothebys/PA)

Quig Bruning, head of Sothebys Jewellery in the Americas, said: Today, we witnessed the historic sale of not one, but two of the most exquisite and important diamonds and gemstones to ever hit the auction block.

Its difficult to express the range of emotions I felt when I first laid eyes on the Estrela de Fura 55.22, but to put it simply, I was entranced.

With its unprecedented size, piercing colour and rare degree of optical transparency and clarity, it truly deserved the record-breaking price today, as it now joins the ranks of the worlds most legendary gemstones.

Reflecting on the pink diamonds achievement, he added: It was equally an honour to have handled a diamond as breathtaking and extraordinary in nature as The Eternal Pink, and its price today reaffirms that Sothebys is the premier destination for the worlds rarest diamond creations.

I proudly speak on behalf of the global jewellery department at Sothebys when I say how truly privileged we are to have been a steward of these ultra-rare gems and todays results are further proof that there is continued demand for the finest diamonds and gemstones of the very highest order.
Samuel Fishwick: More like a boy than a man  Prince Harry crumpled in the witness box

Harry has never been very good at exams and this was certainly a cross one: the masterly Andrew Green KC peering down sternly, taking off his glasses to jab home his points, popping them back on again to peer incredulously at the prince whenever he said something silly, writes Samuel Fishwick

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Samuel Fishwick UK Independent Fri 9 Jun 2023 at 02:00
Security forces gather in a playground at the scene of a knife attack in Annecy in the French Alps. Photo: Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone via AP

Four toddlers and two pensioners were stabbed in a knife attack in the tranquil French mountain town of Annecy yesterday. T he government said the suspected assailant was a Syrian refugee.
A man weeps in front of messages and floral tributes at the children's playground the day after several children and adults were injured in a knife attack at the Le Paquier park near the lake in Annecy, in the French Alps. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
Cuba does secret deal with China to establish spy centre

The country is said to be establishing a facility to eavesdrop on the US

China is said to be establishing an eavesdropping base on the island of Cuba. Photo: Stock image

Matt Spetalnick Fri 9 Jun 2023 at 03:30






US President Joe Biden and British prime minister Rishi Sunak launched wide-ranging talks at the White House yesterday by vowing to work in lockstep as the globe tries to adapt to a period of rapid economic, political and technological change.
The Indo Daily: The mystery of the father who disappeared twice
Image Credit: PIB

New Delhi: Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) has launched a pilot study on vehicles using E27 fuel and Ethanol Blended Diesel Fuel.

HPCL has become the first Oil Marketing Company in India to initiate such a comprehensive research program, in line with the "Roadmap for Ethanol Blending in India by 2025," which aims to promote the adoption of Ethanol Blending in gasoline, the Petroleum & Natural Gas Ministry said in a statement.

The roadmap designed for the adoption of green and sustainable energy outlines a phased rollout plan for achieving 20% Ethanol Blended Gasoline (E20) by April 2023 and ensuring its widespread availability by April 2025.

It further emphasizes the introduction of E20 material-compliant and E10 engine-tuned vehicles starting from April 2023, followed by the production of E20-tuned engine vehicles from April 2025.

Dedicated efforts are underway at HPCL state-of-the-art R&D Centre in Devanagunthi, Bengaluru for conducting comprehensive research on biofuels.

The Centres proficient team is evaluating the effects and performance of different blends of ethanol-gasoline, ranging from 10% to 27%, as well as various blends of ethanol-diesel, on different categories of test vehicles at the Engine Research laboratory, said the statement.

Preliminary studies conducted on vehicles fueled with E27 have shown remarkable reductions in emissions like CO and THC when compared to traditional gasoline, it said.

As part of the pilot launch, HPCL will also be evaluating ethanol-diesel trials on passenger cars, aiming for a targeted mileage accumulation of 20,000 km initially.

The pilot study of E27 fuel will focus on assessing its performance and emissions in engines and vehicles through extended mileage accumulation.

Mileage accumulation of up to 10,000 km for two-wheelers and 20,000 km for passenger cars using E27 fuel is planned for this phase.

Ethanol trials, in accordance with IS 1460:2017 fuel specifications, will also be conducted in conjunction with biodiesel-diesel.

Looking ahead, India's next milestone in the Ethanol blending program is achieving 27% Ethanol blending beyond E20 fuel.

With the success of the ongoing trials and the achievement of E27 fuel, India will proudly stand side by side with Brazil on the global platform in the Ethanol blending program.

HPCL successfully launched E20 fuel on February 6th, 2023, at 23 retail outlets (ROs) across the country.

The current number of E20 ROs is 350, spread across 21 states in the country.

The company has already reduced approximately 3000 MT of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to date. It is projected that by 2025, the use of E20 fuel will contribute to the reduction of more than 200 lakh MT of GHG emissions.
Image:  Unsplash/Alec Douglas

New York: Over a third of global fish stocks are being harvested at unsustainable levels  just one example of how human activity is harming oceans, which cover more than 70 per cent of the Earths surface.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for greater action to protect oceans in his message to mark World Oceans Day on Thursday.

The ocean is the foundation of life. It supplies the air we breathe and food we eat. It regulates our climate and weather. The ocean is our planets greatest reservoir of biodiversity, he said.

Worst enemy

Besides these benefits, the ocean also produces resources that sustain communities, prosperity and health. Worldwide, more than a billion people alone rely on fish as their main source of protein.

We should be the oceans best friend. But right now, humanity is its worst enemy, he said, pointing to the evidence.

The UN chief said human-induced climate change is heating the planet, disrupting weather patterns and ocean currents, and altering marine ecosystems and the species living there.

Marine biodiversity is also under attack from overfishing, over-exploitation and ocean acidification, fish stocks are being depleted, and coastal waters have been polluted with chemicals, plastics and human wastes.

Tides are turning

But this years World Oceans Day reminds us that the tides are changing, he said.

Mr. Guterres recalled that last December, countries adopted an ambitious global target to conserve and manage 30 per cent of land, and marine and coastal areas, by the end of the decade.

The past year also saw a landmark agreement on fisheries subsidies, and the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, where the world agreed to push for more positive action.

Realize the promise

Negotiations for a global, legally binding treaty to end plastic pollutions are currently underway, and in March, countries agreed the historic High Seas Treaty on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

Realizing the great promise of these initiatives requires collective commitment, Mr. Guterres said.

This World Oceans Day lets keep pushing for action. Today and every day, lets put the ocean first.

Crucial to food security: FAO

There is not a single global problem today, be it climate change, food security or poverty, that can be solved without considering the ocean as part of the solution.

Thats the message from the UNs Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), ahead of World Oceans Day on Thursday.

The ocean is already the main source of protein for more than a billion people around the world and offers many opportunities to help feed the growing global population.

Manuel Barange, FAOs Director of Fisheries and Aquaculture Policy and Resources, highlighted the rapid development of aquaculture - the farming of fish and aquatic plants:

Aquaculture has been the fastest growing food production system for the last five decades, from virtually zero three or four decades ago, to now virtually the same production as capture fisheries, he said.

We expect aquaculture to grow by about 25 per cent between now and the end of this decade.

FAO has spearheaded a Blue Transformation Initiative which promotes aquatic foods as part of the solution to hunger and malnutrition.

It aims to ensure that fisheries are managed effectively and sustainably, and that the value chain of aquatic foods is transparent to the consumer.

The agency says that about 600 million people depend on fisheries and aquaculture for their livelihoods.
Image Credit: Northeast Today

Agartala/IBNS: The 'Yapiry Village Organization', a self-help group (SHG) of women, has achieved remarkable success by cultivating five different varieties of maize in a one-hectare plot at Tripura's Bashram Para.

This initiative, supported by the Tripura Rural Livelihood Mission (TRLM) and the Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare department, holds promising prospects for the state's agricultural sector, reported Northeast Today.

Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare Minister Ratan Lal Nath, accompanied by key officials, recently visited the maize cultivable land at Basharam Para to witness the positive outcomes of this women-led SHG project.

Minister Nath highlighted that maize cultivation has yielded higher profits compared to rice production due to lower expenses and increased demand for maize in Tripura.

By cultivating maize locally, the state can reduce its dependence on imported poultry feed and foster self-sufficiency.

Minister Nath further emphasized the government's commitment to doubling farmers' income and praised the cooperative efforts of elected representatives from different political parties.

The successful maize cultivation by the SHG serves as a shining example of the government's dedication to rural development.

The minister also announced upcoming initiatives, including the visit of Tripura Renewable Energy Development Agency (TREDA) officials to set up a solar-powered water supply system using nearby streams for the SHG's agricultural needs.

Additionally, the government aims to expand maize cultivation across hundreds of hectares, leading to increased food grain production and potential opportunities for industrial agriculture and processing.

To promote maize cultivation, Minister Nath requested the TRLM CEO to provide sweet corn for the cabinet meeting, showcasing the quality and potential of this crop.

Furthermore, plans are underway to construct an Animal Resource Development (ARD) Centre near Lefunga Hospital, along with providing subsidies for purchasing tractors and distributing power tillers to farmers.

With its focus on empowering women and enhancing agricultural productivity, Tripura's maize cultivation initiative sets a positive precedent for farmers' self-reliance and income growth.
Representational image on Unsplash

Padu Ebeng/Assam: College of Horticulture & Forestry (CHF) and Digital India Corporation joined forces to boost agricultural practices in Arunachal Pradesh's Upper Siang district. A training program on 'Good Agricultural Practices on Assam Lemon' was held, with 53 farmers from Ebeng village actively participating. The aim was to empower farmers and enhance their knowledge.

Under the guidance of CHF Dean Prof. B.N. Hazarika, the farmers were provided with valuable insights into the scientific production technology of Assam Lemon, reported Arunacal 24.

The training covered various aspects including modern nursery management, planting methods, spacing, intercropping, and integrated disease and pest management. Prof. Hazarika encouraged the farmers to consider starting horticulture-based enterprises and forming Farmers Producer Organizations (FPOs).

He highlighted the favorable agro-climatic conditions in the Upper Siang district, which are conducive to the proper growth and high yield of Assam lemon.

The overarching objective of the M4 agri project, as outlined by Prof. Hazarika, is to equip farmers with timely and accurate information, empowering them to make informed decisions. Through mobile-based agro-advisory services offered in the local dialect, the project aims to improve farmers' livelihoods.

Dr. Lakshmi Dhar Hatai, the Head of Social Science at CHF, briefed the farmers on the project's key focus areas and objectives, emphasizing that the Arik-Abik-Lunom region would be covered under the initiative. The M4 agri project is currently being implemented in nine districts of Arunachal Pradesh.

Dr. Hatai also enlightened the farmers about the economic feasibility and potential returns associated with Assam Lemon production. He highlighted the significance of lemon nursery seedlings and the efficient marketing system for fresh lemon and value-added products. The aim is to enhance farmers' income and ensure sustainable livelihoods for small and marginal farmers.

During the training program, Agro Associate Vijay Saroh, along with the Arik-Abik-Lunom project Field Manager Ojing Tayeng and Field Coordinator Nung Tayeng, provided hands-on training to the farmers on using the M4-agri and UMANG apps.

These digital tools play a crucial role in delivering agricultural information and advisory services to farmers.

The training program on 'Good Agricultural Practices on Assam Lemon' conducted by CHF in collaboration with the Digital India Corporation has equipped farmers with the necessary knowledge and tools to maximize the productivity of their Assam Lemon crops.

It is expected that this initiative will not only improve agricultural practices but also contribute to the economic growth and prosperity of the farming community in the Upper Siang district.
Representational image by Saksham Gangwar on Unsplash

Guwahati/Assam: Anvi Nagori, an 11-year-old Kathak dancer from Guwahati, has made history by setting a new record for performing 100 spins in a minute, as recognized by the Assam Book of Records.

The remarkable achievement took place on June 5, with Anvi's mother, Puja Nagori, and her dance teacher, Debasish Saha, enthusiastically cheering her on, reported EastMojo.

Anvi, who aspires to become a contemporary and hip-hop dancer, attributed her success to her mother, whom she considers her inspiration and role model. The young dancer expressed her excitement, stating, "It is a special moment for me and has boosted my confidence immensely."

The path to this accomplishment required two years of preparation for Anvi. She diligently practiced the Kathak Chakradhar, a famous spinning technique, before attaining recognition from the Assam Book of Records.

Anvi's mother, Puja, came up with the idea of setting a record for 100 spins in a minute, and since then, it became Anvi's immediate goal, leading to regular and focused practice sessions.

Anvi's journey in dance began at the tender age of 4, with unwavering support from her father, Kamal Nagori, and her brother, Nishit. Their encouragement and belief in her talent have been instrumental in her progress.

The certificate issued by the Assam Book of Records described Anvi as a student in the sixth grade at Sarala Birla Gyan Jyoti School in Guwahati. It acknowledged her achievement of performing the fastest 100 Kathak Chakradhar spins in one minute, which took place at her residence in Guwahati on June 5, 2023.

The Assam Book of Records (ABR) recognized Anvi's exceptional skills and officially placed her name in the state record category.

Kathak Chakradhar is a significant step in Kathak, one of the eight major forms of Indian classical dance. Puja Nagori, Anvi's mother, expressed her joy and pride at this turning point for their family.

She shared, "It has brought positive vibes in me to take my daughter ahead. I am joyous and proud." Furthermore, Puja mentioned that Anvi became the first person in their family to hold a state record.

Looking forward, Anvi's next target is to secure a place in the Guinness Book of World Records by achieving 120 spins in a minute.

Currently, the world record for the maximum number of spins in a minute is held by Gatha Raut, a 9-year-old Kathak dancer from Pune, who achieved 116 spins in 2017.

Anvi Nagori's remarkable feat in the field of Kathak dance is a testament to her dedication, hard work, and exceptional talent. Her achievement not only sets a new record but also inspires young dancers across the nation.
Pixabay

Imphal: A bomb blasted on Thursday night at the gate of S Kebi BJP MLA of Naoriya Pakhanglakpa assembly constituency.

Police rushed in to investigate the incident at the residence of the MLA at Ningthemcha Karong , Imphal West.

The impact of the blast damaged the gate however there was no casualty. When CCTV footage was checked it was suspected that two persons in a bike could have thrown the bomb.

(With UNI inputs)
Image: UNI

New Delhi: Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia Thursday said the airfares on specific routes from Delhi have witnessed a significant reduction of 14 to 61 percent, as announced during the airlines' advisory group meeting on June 6, news agency ANI reported.

Scindia highlighted the monitoring initiatives undertaken by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the Ministry, expressing contentment with the lowered maximum fares for flights connecting Delhi with destinations like Srinagar, Leh, Pune, and Mumbai.

"The airlines have been given rights to fix airfares which are market controlled. The aviation market in the country is season based. The rates are also fixed accordingly. If capacity is low and demand is high and input costs are not reduced, then rates will be high. There is an algorithm to decide the fare," he said, reported ANI.

He emphasized that private airline companies should recognize their social responsibility and exercise restraint in raising fares across various sectors.

Furthermore, he clarified the role of the aviation Ministry, stating that it acts as a facilitator rather than a regulator, said the report.

Scindia, who presided over the high-level meeting of the airlines advisory group on Monday, urged airlines to self-regulate airfares and ensure that prices remain reasonable.

"There have been some unforeseen incidents in Manipur and now in Odisha, fare rates should be taken care of. Apart from these, the fare rate remains maximum from Delhi to cities like Srinagar, Leh, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Bengaluru," the minister had said in the meeting.
New Delhi/UNI: The Supreme Court on Friday refused to list the matter for urgent hearing on the petition filed by lawyer Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay during the summer break in connection with his plea to exchange Rs 2000 currency notes without identification slips.

The top Indian Court asked the petitioner, Upadhyay, to mention the plea before the Chief Justice Court (CJI ) when the court reopens after summer vacation, after July 2.

"A coordinate bench had already directed for mentioning it before the CJI after summer vacations. Sorry, we cannot list out for hearing," the two-judge vacation bench of the Apex Indian Court, headed by Justice Aniruddha Bose and also comprising Justice Rajesh Bindal said.

Upadhyay has filed an appeal in the Supreme Court against the Delhi High Court's order that affirmed RBI's decision on an exchange of Rs 2,000 currency notes.

The lawyer, Upadhyay, had filed the appeal in the Top Court challenging RBIs decision permitting citizens to exchange Rs 2000 banknotes, which are being pulled out of circulation, without any requisition slip and ID proof.

The lawyer, also a leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said that there was a press conference. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor said that Rs 1.8 lakh crore notes were exchanged, but there was no answer on how much went into accounts.

"In 10 days, 1.8 lakh crores were exchanged. All black money will become white money," Upadhyay said and pleaded for an urgent hearing into the matter.

The apex court observed that everyone pays tax, GST etc. This is a court, not a public platform. The matter has to end somewhere and refused to list it for urgent hearing.

Upadhyay had initially filed the PIL in the Delhi HC challenging RBI's notification of May 19 and SBI's of May 20, allowing an exchange of Rs 2000 currency notes without any identity slips. But he did not get any relief from it.

Upadhyay had challenged the notification from RBI and SBI that Rs 2,000 currency notes can be exchanged without identity proof.

"All the black money by drug mafias, smugglers, murderers is being exchanged, no requisition slip etc needed, Rs 50,000 crore has been exchanged in 3 days. This is happening for the first time in the world," Upadhyay had told the Supreme Court.

Delhi High Court in its order on May 29, had dismissed the PIL filed by advocate Upadhyay, challenging RBI's notification of May 19 and SBI's of May 20, allowing an exchange of Rs 2000 currency notes without any identity slips.

The Delhi High Court did not find any merit in Upadhyay's petition and thereby dismissed it.

The Delhi High Court bench led by Chief Justice Satish Chandra, who had reserved its order last week on May 23 after hearing from Upadhyay and RBI, pronounced the order on May 29 on Upadhyay's plea.

Appearing in person, lawyer Upadhyay filed the plea and claimed before the Delhi High Court that the notifications issued by the RBI and SBI in this regard are arbitrary, irrational and offend Article 14 of the Constitution of India.

Appearing for RBI, senior advocate, Parag Tripathi, had told the bench of the Delhi High Court to dismiss the plea on the ground that the constitution bench of the SC has time and again reiterated that they cannot interfere in the nations economic policies.

Tripathi further argued before the Delhi High Court that withdrawing Rs 2,000 notes is not demonetisation but a statutory exercise, hence it is not a public issue.
Image Credit: UNI

Washington/UNI: George Abraham, a founding member of the Indian Overseas Congress (IOC) and the vice chairman of the American chapter, was honoured.

According to Indica news, Rahul Gandhi, the president of the Congress, presented Abraham with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Abraham received the honour for his many years of dedication to the company. During a celebration in Queens, New York, Gandhi gave Abraham the medal during a recent trip to the country.

Sam Pitroda, the head of IOC Global, announced the prize and invited Gandhi to give the plaque honouring Abraham's dedication to the IOC.

"The award was a deserving honour for a person's vision, commitment, and labour of love. His wife, Lona Abraham, also worked for the company with him," the IOC said in a statement.

As a teenager in India, Abraham got involved with the party, and he helped form the IOC USA.

In a statement released by the IOC, Abraham said that his involvement with the Congress Party began in his school years.

He worked for the youth group "All Kerala Balajana Sakhyam" and rose to the position of state treasurer.

Before relocating to the US, he later worked for the Kerala Students Union (KSU).

Abraham also had a key role in establishing a foreign organisation to help the party.

His New York flat served as the location of the initial planning session for the IOC.

On June 25, 2001, Sonia Gandhi, a former leader of the All India Congress Committee, inaugurated the group.
Image Credit: Twitter/Sharad Pawar

Pune/UNI: The workers of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) made a strong protest in Pune against former MP and present MLA Nilesh Rane for his disparaging remarks against party supremo Sharad Pawar constantly.

The protest March carried out by NCP spokesperson Pradeep Deshmukh along with Party workers Santosh Nangre, Nitin Kadam, Kishore Kamble, Amol Nanavare, Ajinkya Palkar, Munalini Vani, Sasikala Kumhar, Sushant Dhamdere, Mangesh Jaghav, Sanket Shinde, Pratik Kamble and Balasaheb Atal Samir Pawar. A large number of party workers were present during the protest.

Making frontal attacks on Rane brothers, spokesperson Deshmukh said that Rane family is constantly using very low language against our respected leader Pawar Saheb which will not be tolerated again.

In democracy, the opposition has the right to criticise and they must use it, but Rane brothers who use unethical language should at least be ashamed while criticizing those at whose feet even their fathers bow down, said Deshmukh.

The NCP workers shouted slogans against rane brothers for repeatedly using low languages against Pawar Saheb on many occasions specially at public platforms, alleged Deshmukh.

Sending a strong message to Rane brothers, Deshmukh said that the NCP worker is calm only because of adhering to the culture of parliamentary democracy while warning to rane's brothers that they should not compelled us to take further action.

Taking the dig on rane Deshmukh further said that "Human goodness has limits, but depravity has none".
Image Credit: Image tweeted by @sama

New Delhi: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and discussed how India can benefit from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and framing global regulations for the technology.

Altman shared a photograph from his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his India visit.

Great conversation with @narendramodi discussing India's incredible tech ecosystem and how the country can benefit from AI. Really enjoyed all my meetings with people in the @PMOIndia, he tweeted with the picture.

great conversation with @narendramodi discussing india's incredible tech ecosystem and how the country can benefit from ai.



really enjoyed all my meetings with people in the @PMOIndia. pic.twitter.com/EzxVD0UMDM  Sam Altman (@sama) June 9, 2023

Earlier Altman had said that the meeting with PM Modi was great and he was enthusiastic about AI. Altman said he gave interesting answers to the question about Indias early adoption of ChatGPT.

It was great. It was really fun. He was so enthusiastic, really thoughtful about AI, and the benefits of it. We asked why India has embraced ChatGPT so much and so early. Its really been fun for us to watch. He had great answers about that, he revealed at the Digital India Dialogues.

Altman said he discussed with PM Modi about framing global regulations for artificial intelligence and working with stakeholders on using the technology for education with PM Modi.

We talked about the opportunities in front for the country, what the country should do, also the need to think about global regulation to make sure we prevent some of the downsides from happening  but it was a great hour, the OpenAI CEO said.

Altmans company has created ChatGPT, which has triggered debate across the world over the negative impact of the uncontrolled use of AI, especially on students.

He said OpenAI is looking to fund Indian startups and has held some discussions on it.

"We were always amazed by the quality of Indian startups. The energy we are seeing in Indian startups, we are looking to fund them... We had some conversations yesterday on funding startups in India," Altman said.

His visit to India was part of a world tour and countries like UAE, Israel, Jordon, Qatar and South Korea are on his list this week.
Pixabay

Paris: A man on Thursday stabbed people with a knife in a park in the city of Annecy, southeast France, injuring several of them, including nursery children, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin confirmed.

While speaking to the press with French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, the Annecy prosecutor said there was no "apparent terrorist motive" at the current stage of investigation.

"The motive remains to be determined," the prosecutor said, adding that investigation was opened for "attempted murder."

The prosecutor confirmed that six people were severely injured and at present, three victims are in life-threatening condition.

Among the injured were four children and two of them were foreign nationals, one Dutch and one British, according to the prosecutor.

The suspect, homeless, has refugee status obtained in Sweden ten years ago, the prosecutor noted.

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the suspect had no criminal record and was not on the surveillance list of the intelligence service.

In a press release, the Prefecture of Haute-Savoie said the attack, which took place Thursday morning, injured a total of six people, including two adults and four nursery children.

A police source told French news channel BFMTV that the victims were all severely injured, while two children and one adult were in life-threatening condition.

French President Emmanuel Macron called the act an "attack of absolute cowardice."

"Children and one adult are between life and death. The nation is in shock," he added on his social media.

(With UNI Inputs)
Image:  UNICEF/Alessio Romenzi

New York: Competent courts, admissible and reliable evidence, and an appropriate legal framework are needed to ensure that ISIL extremist militants can be prosecuted for the atrocities they committed during their reign of terror in Iraq, the UN Security Council heard on Wednesday.

Ambassadors were briefed by Christian Ritscher, Special Adviser and Head of the UN Investigative Team to promote accountability for these crimes, UNITAD, established five years ago.

The Islamist group declared a self-styled caliphate across parts of Iraq and northern Syria in 2014, before being militarily defeated and driven from Iraq in December 2017.

Commitment stronger than ever

Presenting UNITAD's 10th report, he informed of progress to date, including supporting the digitization of millions of documents which are now in the possession of the Iraqi judiciary.

Investigators have also produced a case-assessment on ISILs development and use of chemical weapons. Further details will be outlined during an event at UN Headquarters in New York on Thursday, co-hosted alongside Iraq and India.

Today, the commitment of the Iraqi Government, in partnership with UNITAD, to advance the fight against impunity, seek justice in the name of victims and survivors - most of whom are Iraqis - and to address the remaining threat posed by ISIL, is stronger than ever, he said.

Mission not over

However, the mission is far from over. Mr. Ritscher stressed that UNITADs work is to not simply establish a record for ISIL crimes, but to hold ISIL members who committed such heinous international crimes accountable, through evidence-based trials and before competent courts.

International crimes refers to the serious violations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The UN team is already working closely with competent Iraqi investigative judges who support their investigations, he said.

In turn, UNITAD is enhancing their capacities and ensuring that Iraqi courts are ready to hold ISIL perpetrators accountable for their international crimes, when the moment comes, he added.

Mountains of evidence

Mr. Ritscher assured the Council that there is no shortage of evidence of ISIL crimes, describing the terrorist group as a large-scale bureaucracy that documented and maintained a State-like administrative system.

What we aim to do is to ensure that this evidence is admissible before any competent court, whether in Iraq or in other States where prosecutions of ISIL members for international crimes are taking place, he said.

Archiving digitized documents

In this regard, UNITAD has been leading a largescale project to digitize considerable volumes of ISIL records and battlefield evidence. So far, eight million pages from the holdings of the Iraqi and Kurdish authorities have been digitized.

Senior Iraqi Judges have informed me that their response times in relation to case files and requests for information have significantly improved, signalling lasting change because of these innovative efforts, he said.

As a next step, UNITAD is establishing a central archive that will be the unified repository of all digitized evidence against ISIL. The archive will be located at the Supreme Judicial Council of Iraq and launched in the coming days.

This central repository will play a key role to support prosecutions of ISIL perpetrators for their international crimes in Iraq. Moreover, it could be a milestone to founding a comprehensive e-justice system in Iraq, which can be upheld as a leading example, not only in the region, but also globally, he said.

Legal framework key

Meanwhile, adopting an appropriate domestic legal framework remains the main challenge, Mr. Ritscher told the Council.

He underlined UNITADs committed to supporting the Iraqi-led process towards a legal framework that enables national courts to prosecute ISIL criminal acts as international crimes.

He pointed to the recent establishment of a joint working group bringing together Government, legal and judicial representatives, as well as key parliamentarians, as an important step forward.

Once an appropriate domestic legislation on international criminal law has been adopted, the way forward will be clearer. I remain hopeful that this will happen sooner rather than later, he said.

Preparing for future trials

In parallel, UNITAD has already begun to contribute to the preparation of future trials.

The Team has intensified cooperation with counterparts in the Iraqi judiciary, to jointly build cases against specific persons of interest and alleged perpetrators, prioritizing those living outside Iraq.

Investigators are currently supporting some 17 countries, by conducting witness interviews, as well as providing expert testimonies and technical analysis in criminal proceedings against alleged ISIL members and supporte
Image: UNICEF/Suman Paul Himu

Bangladesh must immediately suspend a pilot repatriation project for Rohingya refugees to return to Myanmar, where they face serious risks to their lives and freedom, a UN-appointed independent rights expert said on Thursday.

Tom Andrews, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, insisted that current conditions there were anything but conducive for the return of Rohingya refugees.

Death trap

He stressed that the very generals who had launched genocidal attacks against the Rohingya, causing hundreds of thousands to flee the country, were now in power and attacking civilian populations while denying the Rohingya citizenship and other basic rights.

According to Mr. Andrews statement, Bangladesh officials have been planning to send back to Myanmar, potentially very soon, an initial group of 1,140 Rohingya refugees, using a combination of threats and financial rewards.

Confined to designated area

The returnees would reportedly pass through transit centres in Rakhine state before being resettled in a designated area of 15 newly constructed villages which they will not be allowed to leave freely.

The return of Rohingya refugees under these conditions would likely violate Bangladeshs obligations under international law and expose Rohingya to gross human rights violations and, potentially, future atrocity crimes, Mr. Andrews said.

In March, Bangladesh authorities facilitated two visits by Myanmar junta authorities to the Bangladesh camps, said the UN rights office OHCHR.

According to reports, at least some of the refugees were coerced into participating in so-called verification interviews with junta officials. Bangladesh and the military regimes officials also coordinated a go see visit to Rakhine State for some Rohingya refugees.

Bangladeshi officials said the refugees had expressed general satisfaction with the arrangements being made for their return, but these assurances were contradicted by reports that those who participated in the trip had unequivocally rejected the repatriation plans, OHCHR said.

I implore Bangladesh to immediately suspend the repatriation pilot programme, Mr. Andrews said.

Stand with Rohingya

I also urge the international community to stand with Rohingya refugees in both word and deed, he added.

This must include reversing the failure to provide a humane level of support for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh who are unable to pursue livelihoods, continue to face hunger and malnutrition, and whose children have very limited educational opportunities.

Tom Andrews and other independent human rights experts are appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, in Geneva, under its Special Procedures.

They are mandated to monitor and report on specific thematic issues or country situations. They are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work.
Image: Pixabay

Karachi: The Sindh assembly in Pakistan on Thursday saw lawmakers expressing concern over the abduction of a Hindu teenage girl as they demanded exemplary punishment for the abductors, media reports said.

Pakistan Peoples Party MPA Lal Chand Ukrani rose with the permission of Speaker Agha Siraj Durrani and expressed his anger and grief over the abduction of the minority girl, reports Dawn News.

He said the entire community was in a state of shock and distressed over the kidnapping of the teenage girl.

Speaker Durrani intercepted him reminding that he could speak on the issue on a point of order and asked him to sit on his seat, reports Dawn News.

Later, speaking on the point of order, he termed the incident a cruelty and said no religion permitted forced marriages and conversions.

He told the House that a 14-year-old girl belonging to the Hindu community was abducted in Qazi Ahmad and later her marriage certificate was presented.

We respect every religion, but it is not appropriate to change someones religion by force, he said adding that there was wide protest across the province over the incident.

Provincial Minister Giyan Chand Essrani described the incident as sad.
Image: Unsplash

Bhutan's childrens literature stands as a beacon of the nations heritage and spirituality of the Himalayan nation.

This unique genre of storytelling, deeply rooted in the principles of Buddhism, has been significant in sharing the values of compassion, wisdom, and mindfulness with young people. Oral storytelling has remained a staple of Bhutanese culture for centuries, reports ANI.

Tales of mythical creatures, courageous heroes, and enlightened sages have been transmitted from one generation to another, entertaining children and teaching them the virtues of kindness, honesty, and generosity, The Bhutan Live reported as quoted by ANI.

These stories are being recorded in childrens books, preserving them for future generations and enabling them to reach a wider audience. The themes found in Bhutanese childrens literature demonstrate Buddhism. Karma, reincarnation, and the impermanence of life are commonly explored topics in the literature.
Image: Pixabay

Quetta: The Pakistan Coal Suppliers Association and Good Transport Association has announced it would stop supply of coal in the entire nation from Balochistan if they were not provided with adequate protection, media reports said.

Speaking at a joint press conference, the President of Balochistan Goods Transport Association Noor Ahmed Kakar, and the General Secretary of Coal Suppliers Association Muhammad Din Sanzarkhail, told Dawn News that unknown armed men punctured the tyres of 42 trucks carrying coal from Harnai and Duki coal fields to Punjab and other areas of the country.

The armed men held up all 42 trucks at gunpoint in the Charat area on Harnai road and opened fire, reports the newspaper.

They not only punctured tyres but also damaged the trucks.

They said that coal suppliers and transporters were paying Rs230 per tonne to the Frontier Corps for providing security to the trucks transporting coal to other cities.

The firing incidents took place on June 1 on Harnai road, not far from a security checkpoint, they said, adding that the government has failed to provide security to the trucks and coal suppliers.
Image: Pixabay

London: Britain has decided to announce the removal of Chinese-made surveillance equipment from sensitive government sites as part of plans to address concerns they could be used for spying by China, media reports said.

The government told its departments last year to stop installing Chinese-linked CCTV cameras in sensitive buildings, South China Morning Post reported.

In an announcement about a tightening of procurement rules, the Cabinet Office was quoted as saying by the newspaper: We will also commit to publish a timeline for the removal of surveillance equipment produced by companies subject to Chinas National Intelligence Law from sensitive central government sites.

The statement did not name specific companies but MPs have previously called for a ban on the sale and use of security cameras made by Hikvision and Dahua, two partly state-owned Chinese firms, over privacy concerns about their products being linked to human rights abuses in China.

Prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has cast China as the worlds greatest challenge to security and prosperity, the newspaper reported.

Hikvision said in a statement: We believe that the possible action by the UK government is a further step up of the mounting geopolitical tensions being expressed through technology bans, which by no means relates to the security of Hikvisions products.
Seoul: The South Korean Foreign Ministry said on Friday it had summoned the Chinese Ambassador to Seoul Xing Haiming over his remarks that relations between the two countries should not be influenced from outside.

On Thursday, Xing urged Seoul to get rid of the influence of foreign factors while building ties with Beijing during a meeting with the leader of the South Korean opposition Democratic Party of Korea, Lee Jae-myung. He also said that those who "bet" on China losing to the United States "will surely regret it." In addition, the diplomat asked for Seoul's support for the one-China policy.

"South Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Chang Ho-jin summoned Chinese Ambassador Xing Haiming to the Foreign Ministry and expressed strong regret and a stern warning over the ambassador's unreasonable and provocative words and actions during the meeting with the opposition leader on June 8, which contradict diplomatic tradition," the ministry said in a statement.

Chang said the ambassador's actions violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and could be seen as interference in South Korea's domestic affairs. He added that Xing's actions contradict the desire of the Chinese and South Korean governments and people to cherish and develop bilateral relations based on mutual respect and that the ambassador's behavior is hard to understand and causes mistrust. Chang also said that Xing had "gone too far."

(With UNI/Sputnik inputs)
1. 'This Is Insane, What A Look', Fans Can't Wait To Watch Akshay Kumar As Lord Shiva In 'OMG 2'

Twitter

Sharing an update on the movie, Akki shared a new poster of the film which looks unrecognisable as Lord Shiva with dreadlocks. He also announced the release date of the film as August 12.



2. Here's How 'Messiah Of The Needy' Sonu Sood Will Rebuild Lives Of Odisha Train Accident Victims

BCCL

"The idea is to help these families get back on their feet. We will help them set up small businesses, and provide employment. We will also take care of their childrens education, and their elderly parents," Sonu Sood was quoted as saying by Mid-Day.



3. 'New Sister Will Also Join Us', Bigg Boss Fame Sumbul Touqeer Confirms Father's Second Marriage

Instagram

Touqeer Khan will get married to Nilofer, who is a divorcee with a daughter named Izra next week. How did they meet? Her uncle Iqbal Hussain Khan, who was seen on Bigg Boss 16, apparently played cupid.



4. 'Was Supposed To Be Positive': Aditya Lakhia AKA Lagaan's Kachra On Highly Criticised Zomato Ad

Twitter

"It was supposed to be a positive concept, the way we all looked at it was Kachra promoting anti-plastic and to recycle garbage. But it took another turn. It became controversial so now its banned," he was quoted as saying by News 18.



5. 29-Year-Old Actor Saran Raj Passes Away After Drunk Actor Reportedly Hit His Bike With Car

Twitter

He lived in Dhanalakshmi Street in Maduravoyal. He was at Arcot Road in KK Nagar when the accident took place at around 11:30 pm. The actor-assistant director was 29 years old. He was immediately rushed to Government Royapettah Hospital (GRH) where he was declared dead upon arrival.



For more news and updates from the world of celebrities from Bollywood and Hollywood, keep reading Indiatimes Entertainment.


In 2021, the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment initiated 13 pilot shelter homes known as Garima Greh for transgender persons. The Covid-19 pandemic hindered the smooth functioning of one of the Garima Greh homes in Manipur, but the remaining 12 shelter homes were successfully established in nine states including Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu, and Odisha. These shelter homes were set up under the SMILE (Support for Marginalised Individuals for Livelihood and Enterprise) scheme in accordance with The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019.

The scheme allocated 365 crores over a span of five years, providing each Garima Greh with a yearly grant of 36,46,500. However, the funds have not been released by the centre since March 2022. As a result, several Garima Greh have faced closure or are on the verge of shutting down. The Garima Greh in Mumbai has urgently appealed for funds on an online crowd-funding platform.

Transmens dormitory at the Garima Greh now remains closed / Indiatimes

Delhis Garima Grehs programme manager Bella Sharma has also informed of the lack of funds, resulting in the closure of the transmens dormitory. Amidst this challenging situation, Krishna Singh, a 27-year-old trans man, and a resident of Delhis Garima Greh, finds himself grappling with the circumstances.



Krishna Singh in the Transwomens dormitory at Delhis Garima Greh / Indiatimes

Singh left his home in 2014 and came to Delhis Garima Greh in 2021. There was only one reason: unacceptance from my family, who wanted me to live how I was born. I couldnt do that; I felt suffocated. They wanted me to live like a woman, Singh explained, sharing his reasons for leaving home.

Singh relaxes on his bed as he returns after a long day of work / Indiatimes

Also read: How College Queer Collectives In India Are Creating Inclusive Spaces On Campus

In Singhs case, Delhis Garima Greh played a crucial role in helping him discover his true identity. The dawning that similar people with similar problems exist in a world which accepts us the way we are was ecstatic It was only after I came to Garima Greh that I learnt Im a trans man. Soon, I picked up the technicalities of the LGBTQIA+ community, he expressed.

Indiatimes

Garima Greh, under the SMILE scheme empowers the residents through skill development and enhancement programmes, enabling them to secure sustainable employment. However, due to the lack of funds, it has been a task to keep such programmes running. Despite this, Rudrani Chhetri, the project director of Delhis Garima Greh, has reassured the residents of her commitment to keep this shelter home operational. At a time when it can barely keep a person for a day, she [Rudrani] has withheld us all. She even promised that no matter how many Garima Grehs across the country shut down, she wont let this one follow suit, said Singh.

Singh shows photos from past events and celebrations at the Garima Greh / Indiatimes

Also read: Quest For The West: Why Does The Indian Queer Population Want To Move Out?

Nonetheless, the fear of closure looms over Singh and other residents of Garima Greh. Singh expressed his concerns stating, not a [single] fund penny has come in the last one-and-a-half year. It is Rudrani maam running it allShes the force behind the sustenance. The government merely paid us lip service.

Singh likes to workout but lack of funds have led to the shutting down of the gym / Indiatimes

He fears that if Delhis Garima Greh shuts down, it will significantly impact his life and the lives of many others like him, leaving them without avenues for empowerment and forcing them to live a life devoid of dignity.

Entrance to the main office space of Garima Greh / Indiatimes

Also read: Resilience And Glamour: Unveiling The Tapestry Of Indian Drag Queens

A trans woman can make money via other means, she can join the toli, but a trans man has nothing but his job. Our body build is the same. We have to endure obscene, repetitive questions. Even our parents would throw us an I-told-you-so.



Indiatimes

For more stories on the LGBTQIA+ community and queerness in India, keep reading Spectrum on Indiatimes.
A Kerala-based startup, Farmers Fresh Zone (FarmersFZ), has made the nation proud by being selected for the United Nations' 'Accelerator Programme,' organised by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN.

Only 12 Startups Selected In The World

indiatimes

FarmersFZ has figured in the list of 12 agri-food startups around the world selected by the UN body to develop businesses. The Kochi-based multichannel marketplace platform, which functions under the Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM), ultimately aims to attain the UN Sustainable Development Goals.



Kerala Startup Mission is the nodal agency of the Kerala government for entrepreneurship development and incubation activities in the state.

Startup's CEO To Attend UN Event In Rome

entrepreneur

Pradeep P.S., who is the CEO of the agritech D2C startup, will attend the UN event in Rome next month. He said that the UN programme will enable FarmersFZ to present its model to countries across continents, as per the IANS report. The 'UN Food Systems Summit Stocktaking Moment' will take place in Rome, Italy, from July 2426, 2023, at the premises of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

"The model would require alterations based on the nature of the markets in each economy. For that, we need funds, which will come through the accelerator," said Pradeep.

FarmersFZ bridges the gap between rural farmers and urban consumers by providing healthy, premium-quality, and pesticide-free vegetables from the fields to the table within 24 hours of harvest. It connects more than three lakh consumers and 2,000 farmers in Kerala.

Also Read: UAE To Invest $2 Billion For Setting Up Food Parks in India

shutterstock

Idea Behind The The Kochi Startup

After completing his BTech from the University of Calicut, the startup's CEO, Pradeep P.S., researched the actual issues facing farmers in the agricultural sector. Some of the problems he identified were that small-scale farmers did not get the intended price for their products in the market, as per a report in Yourstory.

"Even if they have to get the right price, they will have to go behind the merchants. They dont even get receipts for the items sold," CEO Pradeep had said. He then went around and spoke to farmers to learn more about their problems. Pradeep realised there was a lack of marketing in the space, and the possibilities of an e-commerce platform came to his mind.

Out of curiosity to learn more, he joined as a web developer at Fingent, a New York-based custom software development company in Kochi.

Also Read: Kerala Man Wins Rs 1 Crore Lottery Just Before House Sale

How The Startup Was Launched



During his time at the New York-based company, the Kerala startup's CEO developed and launched the website for FarmersFZ, and in eight months, he was able to convince around 52 people to buy from his startup. With this confidence in mind, he went back to his hometown, spoke to eight farmers, and assured them of a good price for their produce. The farmers cultivated 21 crops, including ladies finger, yam, snake gourd, etc., the report mentioned.

"Initially, we used to sell outside our workplace in Infopark, Kochi, after my work hours. Even then, we were confident about the platform. We took orders mostly online. This was in 2015. We were also able to get more reach with the support of companies such as UST Global and TCS. We could develop a corporate model with them where they allowed us to set up stalls within their office premises," recollects Pradeep. The team was soon incubated by Nasscom.

In 2016, CEO Pradeep left his job and decided to focus on FarmersFZ completely. In just three months, Pradeep says, they started generating profits.

Growing From Strength To Strength

yourstory

Besides ensuring a fair price for farmers produce, the Kochi startup has also reportedly developed a tech-based algorithm for yield prediction and profit calculation, depending on the data collected from them. According to the startup, this helps them know about each farmer's experience with land and crops. Pradeep says this will also help the team understand the farming techniques and help farmers by encouraging them to deploy organic practises.

In 2016, the CEO said, "Our aim is to create profitable farmers. Currently, they earn about Rs 20,000 a year. Our aim is to make it Rs. 1.2 lakh. The base price is designed in such a way that a farmer with an acre of land should earn more than Rs 10,000 in profits."

In 2018, the startup raised Rs 2.5 crore from the Indian Angel Network, Malabar Angels, and Nativelead Foundation, as per the report. The investment round was led by Nagaraja Prakasam and PK Gopalakrishnan, along with Malabar Angels and Native Lead.

And now, being chosen among the world's only 12 startups for the UN's accelerator programme is another big step in the startup's journey to further grow and flourish.

Also Read: Woman's Brutally Honest Answer To Startup's Job Offer Goes Viral

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Socio-political commentator and former lawmaker representing Kaduna Central, Shehu Sani has cautioned the All Progressives Congress (APC) to put its house in order concerning consultations over the leadership of the incoming 10th National Assembly (NASS) or expect the 2015 scenario.

Information Nigeria reports that, Bukola Saraki, a former governor of Kwara State, in 2015 became the Senate President against the plan of the ruling party, after he formed an alliance with Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) senators.

The former lawmaker who made the submission on Channels Televisions Politics Today on Thursday, said if proper care is not taken with appropriate consultations made by the party and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the same scenario might occur at the 10th NASS that would be inaugurated next week.

According to Sani, it was the lack of proper consultations on the part of former President Muhammadu Buhari that resulted in the emergence of Saraki in 2015 instead of Ahmed Lawan.

READ ALSO: 10th Senate: Tinubus Choice Is Akpabio, President Ordered Me To Lead His Campaign  Ndume

The human rights activist said, I have no doubt that from now to Monday, if there is no serious consultation, appeasement and horse-trading, one thing I know very well is that if the APC goes to the floor without putting its house in order, the 2015 scenario will reenact itself especially if there is a secret voting.

If you go back to 2015, one of the mistakes that President Buhari made was that he never consulted the Senators-elect when it comes to the issue of his candidate, he simply wants Lawan to be Senate President without consultations.

As the president of the country, you have a lot of leverage, there is no way a president will invite Senators-elect many of whom are coming for the first time and say this is the person I want to work with, I need your support and I want you to support him, I mean 99 per cent of them will accede to it.

But if you simply go into a room and decide that out of 109 that it is one person who you believe will be loyal to you and others will not be and you are also doubting the sincerity, loyalty and solidarity of others, you are going to have a problem with others.
Socio-political commentator and former lawmaker representing Kaduna Central, Shehu Sani has expressed concern on the continuous detention of Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra in the custody of the Department of State Services.

Sani, who spoke on Thursday while featuring on Channels Television, hinted he had stayed in a prison for a long time, and would for no reason support the Federal Governments action of keeping the separatist despite court order.

He furthered that, if the country was law abiding, the order of the court acquitting Kanu should have been respected.

READ ALSO: El-Rufai A Bigot  Shehu Sani Laments Ex-Governors Lackadaisical Attitude Towards Kaduna Killings

As a prisoner who has stayed so long in prison, there is no way a person like me will support an open breach of the constitution and a violation of fundamental human rights.

A court has given an order for the release of Nnamdi Kanu, and if we are a law abiding country and committed to rule of law, we should respect the law.

One of the problems we have in Nigeria today is the separatists agitation in the South Eastern part of Nigeria. If you go to the background of all those separatists, you will see that there was a time in their history when they believed in the indivisibility of the country. Something must have happened along the way, he said.
A 44-year-old man, simply identified as Siyaka Mohammed has reportedly stabbed his girlfriend, Aisha Aminu, to death over a misunderstanding.

The 30-year-old deceased, who was a physically challenged woman, was tragically murdered by her boyfriend on Wednesday in Obehira Okene Local Government Area of Kogi State.

The suspect was said to have stabbed his girlfriend severally in the early hours of Wednesday and fled the scene after committing the offense.

READ ALSO: Police Rescue Two Suspected Ritual Killers From Lynching In Anambra

An eyewitness who spoke to The Punch said, The suspected murderer visited the deceased shop a few minutes before 6 am, dragged her from the inner chamber, repeatedly stabbed her until she succumbed to death following the injuries she sustained from her injuries.

Siyaka, who hails from Obehira in Okene Local Government Area of Kogi state, has since absconded from town and has been declared wanted.

Aishas body was subsequently deposited at Okengwe General Hospital mortuary.

It was alleged that the deceased and her boyfriend had an ongoing dispute that had been previously reported to both the Vigilante Group of Nigeria and the community head, but the issue remained unresolved.

The state Police Command Public Relations Officer, SP William Ayah, confirmed the incident.

Ayah said that the command was on the trail of the suspect with the view to arresting him for prosecution.
Omoyele Sowore, the February 25 presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC) has slammed Nyesom Wike, the former governor of Rivers State, and other G-5 members over their Thursday meeting with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

Recall that the Peoples Democratic Party members who are now called the G-String, met with the president in Abuja as reported by Information Nigeria.

The G-5 is made up of Oyo Governor Seyi Makinde; former Governors Nyesom Wike (Rivers); Okezie Ikpeazu (Abia); Ifeanyi Ugwuwanyi (Enugu) and Samuel Ortom (Benue).

READ ALSO: PDP G-5 In Closed-Door Meeting With Tinubu

Sowore in reaction via Twitter on Thursday nicknamed the former governors Hustlers United, alleging that Wike is now dealing with the reality of his wicked and corrupt existence.

He tweeted, FROM G-5 TO G-STRING: HUSTLERS UNITED! From so-called Powerful G-5 Governors to Perforated G-String Ex-Governors (except for Makinde who is a serving governor).

The hustle is real. @GovWike is now dealing with the reality of his wicked and corrupt existence, just like the ex-Abia Gov. Isi-Slippers, and that loudspeaker and Mr. Do-Nothing from Benue who used Fulani as an excuse to never get anything done, not even salaries of his workers. Like the Bourbons of France, They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
President Bola Tinubu will on Friday meet with leading traditional rulers from the six geo-political zones of the country.

It was gathered that the meeting with monarchs from across Nigeria will be held at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

INFORMATION NIGERIA reports that the meeting today at the State House with the traditional rulers is at the instance of the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi.

President Tinubu is expected to rally the traditional rulers to support the fuel subsidy removal. He is also expected to plead with them to educate their subjects on the economic reasons behind his decision.

Sources at the Villa told WESTERNPOST that the former Lagos State Governor will also share his vision for the country with the traditional rulers and how he plans to govern the country by doing justice to every part of the country.

READ MORE: Ooni Of Ife Calls For End To Human Trafficking

Since Tinubu assumed the presidency on May 29, 2023, he has been meeting various leaders across in a move to build national consensus around some of the socio-economic problems confronting the country.

After announcing fuel subsidy removal which triggered disruption in fuel supply last week as a result of hoarding by fuel stations, Tinubu has meet governors elected on the platform of his party, the All Progressives Congress, and met all the 36 state governors under the platform of the Nigerian Governors Forum.
An orderly to a former speaker of the Imo State House of Assembly, Chiji Collins, has been found dead in the Oguta Local Government Area.

The victim, identified as Charles, was found dead in a jungle in the states Oguta Local Government Area.

INFORMATION NIGERIA gathered that a driver and Charles, an Inspector of Police, were abducted in Ohaji/Egbema council area of the state a few weeks ago.

The drivers lifeless body was found shortly after the incident, while the search for Charles continued. Tragically, Charles decomposed body was later found in a secluded bush.

Colleagues of Charles expressed deep sorrow over the cruel killing of the inspector, who hailed from the Mbaise area of the state.

READ MORE: Imo Varsity Suspends Lecturer For Slapping Pregnant Student

A source that spoke with PUNCH NEWSPAPPER lamented, Charles body was found in a bush in the Oguta area. He was killed in such an unfortunate manner. He was given a cut on the neck. This is so disgusting.

The police spokesperson for the state, Henry Okoye confirmed the incident, stating that the state Commissioner of Police, Muhammed Berde, had commissioned a team to investigate and bring the killers to justice.

Okoye assured that the perpetrators would face the full wrath of the law.
Controversial socio-political writer and former presidential aide, Reno Omokiri has responded to the Lagos State House of Assemblys announcement that it will soon introduce legislation to protect the interests of the states indigenous people.

Recall that speaker Mudashiru Obasa, made the controversial statement during his acceptance speech, said that lawmakers would do whatever it takes to protect the state indigenes even if it meant reversing existing law.

He said, Lagos is a Yoruba land as against the assertions of some people that it is a no mans land.

Therefore, part of our legislative agenda is to ensure the translation of laws passed by this House to the Yoruba Language. We also aim at achieving our collective goals of creating a robust legislative framework that protects the interest of our people.

READ MORE: Lagos Is Not No-Mans Land  Well Make Laws To Protect Indigenes Properties  Obasa

Going forward in this wise, we are going to employ all legislative instruments for the support of the indigenes of Lagos. There would be laws and resolutions in the areas of economy and commerce, property and titles.

Omokri, while reacting to the backlash, condemned those challenging the measures the lawmakers were planning to put in place.

He wrote, Attacking the Lagos State House of Assembly for wanting to enact laws to protect indigenous Lagosians and labelling it ethnic dog whistling is grandstanding. Should indigenous Lagosians sleep on their rights when people they welcome into their communities provocatively and ungratefully call their land No Mans Land, and falsely alleged that they built Lagos with their sweat? Never!

Many states passed laws rejecting Buharis Ruga settlements for Fulani herders, and we celebrated. Now that Lagos wants to pass laws to protect itself from people who wish to Ruga Lagos, you are complaining. How is that different? What is sauce for Greece is good for Uganda!

Every nation on Earth is entitled to have laws to protect indigenous peoples. Even America, which many like to cite as a bastion of democracy, has laws protecting Native Americans and recognising their status as original indigenes. Canada has such regulations as do Scandinavian and Nordic nations.

If those laws are made, and any group of people do not like them, they have two options. Challenge them in court, or leave Lagos and go to a place you feel is better for you than Lagos. Lagosians are very welcoming people. But it is outrageous to expect them to give up their rights as indigenous peoples because they want new residents to feel at home.
Following the controversial statement by Lagos State House of Assembly speaker, Mudashiru Obasa, a Labour Party (LP) chieftain, Babatunde Gbadamosi, has condemned the proposed new property law.

It was gathered that Obasa, on Tuesday, disclosed that the state would pass new laws for the protection of its indigenes.

Recall that INFORMATION NIGERIA reported that Obasa who was elected as speaker of the Lagos Assembly for the third consecutive term, said as part of its legislative agenda, there would be laws and resolutions in the areas of economy and commerce, property and titles, and reversal of all that are reversible to protect the interest of the indigenes.

Obasa, who hinted at some of the controversies in the build-up to the 2023 elections, including the argument that non-indigenes wanted to take over the state, declared that Lagos is a Yoruba land.

READ MORE: Lagos Is Not No-Mans Land  Well Make Laws To Protect Indigenes Properties  Obasa

According to Gbadamosi, Obasa and his cohorts dispose of the Lagos indigenes lands and right to rule themselves and turn around with claims that they are protecting them.

He tweeted, Only an omo-ale, atonhunrinwa, ojuorolari would come up with such a stupid and insane law. Many current members of the Lagos State House of Assembly, including the gbewiri speaker, are in the aforesaid category.

They dispossess the Indigenes of their lands and the right to rule themselves, then turn around to claim that theyre fighting for the same Indigenes. Okan gbogbo yin o ma de ni bale
Governor Hyacinth Alia of Benue State, has lamented the alleged looting of the government house in Makurdi by the immediate past administration led by Samuel Ortom, noting that he was left with no single official car.

According to Alia, he inherited an empty treasury and a whooping huge debt profile of N187.56 billion accompanied by accumulated months of unpaid salaries and entitlements of civil servants and pensioners in the state.

The Governors Chief Press Secretary, Tersoo Kula disclosed this in a statement in response to calls by the States Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that he should reverse his decision that led to the nullification of all last-minute appointments made by his predecessor.

Information Nigeria reports that the governor also demoted some permanent secretaries appointed by the immediate past administration, saying they should revert to their previous positions.

All appointments into the state civil service made by the outgone administration from May 2022 to date are hereby nullified with immediate effect, Tersoo said in a statement on Wednesday.

The governor also ordered all those who had retired but had yet to vacate their offices or duty posts, either because of extension or contract appointment, to proceed on retirement forthwith.

All civil servants due for retirement but are yet to tender their letters of retirement or notice of retirement should do so forthwith and proceed on retirement immediately.

All civil servants and or persons appointed Permanent Secretaries from the month of January 2023 to date should revert to their previous positions forthwith.

READ ALSO: Benue Assembly Refuses To Assent Ortoms Pension Bill Over Lawmakers Unpaid Allowances

All the postings and transfers made in the state civil service from October 2022, to date are hereby nullified. The affected staff should revert to their former ranks, stations, or offices with immediate effect, the statement added.

But in reaction to the calls, the governor noted that, The PDP looted Government House to a point that the new government under governor Hyacinth Alia, met no single car or truck in government house. The governors visits to agencies and parastatals have uncovered the highest level of rot ever witnessed in the history of Benue State.

The same party that left an empty treasury in the state and ripped off the economic system of the people is now claiming to be standing on high moral grounds to offer untenable and ill-motivated criticisms to undermine the collective wisdom of the Benue populace.

Alia further regretted that Ortom left the government owing salary arrears of civil servants, arguing that the PDP should apologise to the people of the State.

The PDP is not ignorant of the fact that all the appointments and recruitments that were carried out by former governor Samuel Ortom at the twilight of his administration were not done in good faith.

Is it not curious that for more than seven years, Ortom could not employ indigents of the state into the civil service, until a few months before the expiration of his tenure?

It is even more ironic that the PDP, which is now a crying wolf, left the government house owing salaries of Benue Civil Servants from December 2022 to May 2023. The same PDP administration left salary arrears of five months for state government workers in 2017; 10 months for local government workers in the same year, 2017. Under this same PDP government, pensions were last paid in the year 2021, the statement said.
Anambra State chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Chief Ndubisi Nwobu, who is a witness in the ongoing Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, has denied reports that he told the tribunal that the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, LP, Mr Peter Obi rigged the February 25 presidential election in the state, saying his statement was twisted to divert attention.

In a statement by Uloka Chibuike, the deputy director of media and publicity of the Atiku/Okowa Presidential Campaign Committee, Nwobu insisted that the petition filed by his party at the tribunal was against the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), not the Labour Party or Peter Obi.

The statement read,  The attention of the Peoples Democratic Party and Atiku/Okowa Presidential Campaign Committee in Anambra State has been drawn to a publication in the public space where the purveyors of fake news alleged that Chief Ndubisi Nwobu claimed that Peter Obi rigged the presidential election in Anambra State at the ongoing Presidential Election Petition Court.

This is not only false, wicked and devilish, but also a deliberate attempt by a few innuendos to discredit and blackmail Chief Nwobus person.

We wish to state unequivocally and for the record that the Peoples Democratic Party did not file a petition against the Labour Party, nor did the PDP name the Labour Party as a respondent in her suits at the ongoing Presidential Election Petition Court; rather, our petitions are against the All Progressives Congress Party (APC) and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

Chief Ndubisi Nwobu was at the Tribunal on the 7th day of June, 2023, as the 11th witness of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and the Peoples Democratic Party, to testify against INECs refusal to adhere to its own election guidelines, which states that polling unit results are to be electronically transmitted with the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) directly and in real-time to the IREV portal.

READ MORE: Peter Obi Has Been Rendered Politically Impotent In Nigeria  Reno Omokri

Chief Ndubisi Nwobu did not, by any means or disguise states that Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, rigged the presidential election in Anambra State or anywhere else.

The tribunal went further to ask Chief Nwobu who won the election in Anambra State; he responded explicitly that the Labour Party won the presidential election in the state and that his party is not in court with the Labour Party, but with INEC, having reneged on her own guidelines.
An American Airlines plane, about to land, at Philadelphia International Airport. American is rethinking its approach to business travel. Read more

American Airlines, a large employer at Philadelphia International Airport, is shifting how it manages corporate travel.

The company, which operates out of five of PHLs seven terminals, saw 30% of its revenue come from business travel at the beginning of this year, down from 40% in 2019, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

The company is changing how business travelers book flights and has cut 40% of the 350-person sales team that deals with agents and corporate partners.

In the past, customers who booked travel through third-party distribution partners may have had subpar booking and travel management experiences with limited access to fares and packages, reads a note on American Airlines website.

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American is implementing new technology that will more seamlessly allow customers to book travel, choose seats, and make changes. Theyre also cutting down on flights along some travel routes known for business day trips. Those include flights from New York to Chicago and Boston to Washington, D.C.

Its too early to say how Americans shift in business travel will affect Philadelphia.

Evolving travelers at PHL

About 30% of the flights out of PHL today are business travel. At one point, Philadelphia had about 55% business travel and 45% leisure travel, said Jim Tyrrell, chief revenue officer of the Philadelphia Airport. That has shifted significantly over the years.

The road warriors arent back. You know, those people who were leaving on Mondays coming back on Thursdays, theyre just not here today, said Tyrrell.

Instead, people are mixing business with leisure, maybe booking an extra day at the hotel where they attended a work conference. Tyrrell and his team have been able to gather this information by paying attention to parking trends at the airport.

Pre-pandemic, cars were parked in PHL lots for an average of three days. Now the average is 4.5 days.

When you think about who parks in our garages  because its a premium-priced product, as opposed to an economy parking lot or off-airport parking lot, where you see most of your leisure travelers park  theyre the business guys, said Tyrrell.

The state of air travel

Philadelphia International Airport is doing about 80% of the travel it did pre-pandemic with about 350 flights a day, Tyrrell said. That compares to about 500 flights a day 10 years ago, and around 430 in 2019.

As a major carrier for the airport, American flies to around 109 destinations from PHL, with 84 domestic destinations and 25 international ones.

The pandemic was an opportunity for airlines, including American, to change how they operate. Some companies retired old aircrafts that were less cost efficient and replaced them with newer planes. American retired most of their large wide-body A330s and their older 767s and 757s, said Tyrrell. Not all of the retired planes were replaced.

In addition to having fewer planes, many airlines also face staffing shortages. According to management consulting firm Oliver Wyman, the U.S. aviation industry is facing a deficit of about 8,000 pilots, or 11% of the total workforce.

The aviation industry is still recovering from the effects of the pandemic, not necessarily just the downturn in business, but also some of the steps that were taken during the pandemic to help them survive, said Tyrrell.

While airlines figure out how to get back up to speed, demand for business travel is not going away in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia is really lucky because were not only the home to many Fortune 500 companies, but we also have a lot of small midsize businesses who depend on that face-to-face client business model, said Tyrrell.

While some of those employees might have flown with other airlines in the past, Tyrrell said those people might choose to fly American today because of this change in the way the company manages corporate travel.

I dont think anybody knows yet whether Americans change will have an impact on PHL, Tyrrell said. But, you know, we certainly hope American is right.
David Danon, a former Vanguard tax lawyer, who alleges the mutual fund giant fired him after he contacted federal agencies about potential tax fraud at the company. Read more

Ten years after lawyer David Danon says he was fired after reporting illegal tax-avoidance schemes to his supervisors at the Vanguard Group, he and the company have agreed to mediation to try to settle his wrongful termination lawsuit.

A May 26 order by U.S. District Judge Berle M. Schiller requires the two sides to update him June 16 on their efforts with an independent mediator and to keep updating him once a month. As mediation goes forward, testimony in Danons lawsuit, some of which was to be completed this month, has been suspended.

Danon has said in court filings that starting in 2013, he reported to his Vanguard supervisors that he had found two potentially billion-dollar tax frauds at the Malvern-based investment giant:

Setting fees the companys investor funds paid its own management company, so as to reduce its annual income tax obligations, which he said broke federal tax rules requiring a company to pay market prices for services from its own affiliates. Stashing cash in a $2 billion contingency reserve that was neither shared with investors nor subjected to income taxes.

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According to Danons court statements, after the company declined to change its practices, he reached out in 2014 to the Internal Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission. He also contacted state tax authorities.

Danon said he was fired by Vanguard in retaliation, less than a month after contacting federal agencies. The Fordham law grad joined Vanguard in 2008 after working at two big New York law firms. He has not worked as a tax lawyer since. He sued the company the year after he was fired, first in state court in New York, then in federal court in Philadelphia, where the case was thrown out at one point, but reinstated on appeal.

In court filings, Vanguard has denied wrongdoing and called Danons firing justified, saying he failed to do his job as assigned. The company said his departure was not a result of his tax claims.

As we have maintained from the outset, allegations raised by this former Vanguard employee a decade ago are without merit, a company spokesperson told The Inquirer.

After Danons lawyer Anthony J. Bolognese died last year and was succeeded by attorneys at the Philadelphia firm Kang Haggerty, the case was reassigned to Judge Schiller, who in March denied Vanguards motion to dismiss the wrongful-termination complaint and ordered discovery on Danons firing.

As the court noted in the order denying Vanguards motion for dismissal, the case would turn on when Mr. Danon was terminated by Vanguard, Danons current lawyer, Edward T. Kang, said in a statement.

If the court found Danon went to the SEC with allegations of illegal practices before he was fired, Danon would have viable claims under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, which includes hefty rewards for whistleblowers, according to Kang.

Danon remains confident that he will prevail at trial, Kang said, but agreed with Vanguard to try to resolve the matter through mediation, which could let the parties move on.

A Vanguard lawyer confirmed the mediation effort in a letter to the judge.

Vanguard firing Danon around the time he was complaining about this tax stuff wasnt a good look. There have been a lot of headlines. This looks like a way to put it to bed, said Jeff DeMaso, founder and editor at the Independent Vanguard Adviser, a Brooklyn publication that reports on Vanguard funds.

Danon cited The Inquirers reporting on changes at Vanguard and reporting by the Advisers predecessor publication documenting the reduction and elimination of the contingency reserves in Vanguards SEC reports from 2015 to 2020 to suggest the government has used Danons information to pressure Vanguard to eliminate the reserve and pay its proper taxes.

Danon last year asked a federal court to compel the SEC to explain why the agency had not designated him a whistleblower in the Vanguard case after he gave agents information at their request for several years after he was fired by Vanguard. The court declined.

As The Inquirer reported, Vanguard also changed language about the private, for-profit companys structure that Danon had challenged, including ending recurring claims that the company was managed at cost, for no profit, a designation that had potential tax implications.

The company has said the old language was outdated and has not confirmed any changes or payments in response to Danons claims.

Danon had asked the agencies to recognize him as a whistleblower, which could qualify Danon for millions in payments as his share of any money the government recovered from the company.

In 2015 the state of Texas paid Danon $117,000 after he gave that states tax agency a report on Vanguard tax avoidance. No other payments have become public.

The IRS does not comment on taxpayer disputes, which typically remain private unless they become the subject of public court proceedings.
Ice cream is a staple to birthdays, holidays, and breakups, and its also a staple of Philly, seeing that were known for practically starting the American ice cream business in the 1800s.

From Bassetts, considered to be the oldest ice cream parlor in the country, to small-batch artisans like Harpers, Philadelphias ice cream landscape is vast and highly talented. Stroll down South Street, through Midtown Village or Old City, and youll find purveyors of some of the best dense custardy creams and lighter, refreshing frozen treats.

Whether it be the presentation, expansive flavor menus, or sourcing of ingredients, here are a few of the best spots in Philly to pick up a pint.

 READ MORE: Best ice cream in Philadelphia: Where to get the best scoops, soft serve, water ice and other frozen treats

For some of the citys most photogenic ice cream treats, Arctic Scoop doesnt disappoint with decadent desserts featuring Asian-inspired flavors served in Thai coconut bowls, Hong Kong-style egg waffles, or flavored cones. Arctic Scoop focuses its menu on interesting flavors Philly has come to enjoy, like lychee rose, matcha green tea Oreo, and mint chip, plus limited offerings like Vietnamese coffee and red bean ice cream. Pick up a $12 pint of something new at its East Passyunk storefront.

 1812 E. Passyunk Ave.  917-607-0616  arcticscoopphilly.com

A pint with peanut butter swirl and chocolate fudge brownie at Bassetts Ice Cream in the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, Pa. on Thursday, June 1, 2023. Read more Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer

This sixth-generation ice cream maker, and one of the original vendors of the Reading Terminal Market, still reigns supreme. Whether you visit its stall in the market or happen upon its ice cream through the hundreds of shops, restaurants, and cafes that use its ice cream (like Thirsty Dices milkshakes), Bassetts serves up a light and refreshing ice cream. Choose among dozens of flavors like peanut butter swirl, butterscotch vanilla, and coffee fudge truffle to be hand-packed into a $9.50 pint. According to Alex Bassett Strange, a sixth-generation Bassett ice cream connoisseur, the ice cream is produced using a perfected Philadelphia-style (a.k.a. American-style) technique, which doesnt use eggs in its mixture. This allows for an ice cream with a light, creamy density.

 45 N. 12th St.  215-925-4315  bassettsicecream.com

Franklin Fountain may have opened its doors in 2004, but its refined ice cream and vintage shop interiors will have you believe its been around since 1904  even the shops namesake, the Franklin soda fountain (which it still uses), is from the early 20th century and workers wear old-timey soda bar outfits. The Fountain pairs Philadelphia-style ice cream with traditional and must-have flavors, like sea salt caramel and fudge brownie to deliver ice cream classics. Visit the East Market Street shop to be transported back in time. Next door, the Franklin Ice Cream Bar offers grab-and-go freezers filled with ice cream sandwiches, house-made toppings, and $13 pints.

 116 Market St.  215-627-1899  franklinfountain.com

Nestled among the small businesses and eateries along Brewerytowns stretch of Girard Avenue, Harpers Ice Cream is a small-batch ice cream joint that takes community seriously, especially in its ingredients. From Pennsylvania dairy from three farms out of Chambersburg, locally sourced fruit, and no artificial sweeteners or syrups, Harpers leans into all-natural goodness. Its rotating menu keeps the flavors fresh and leaves you wondering what next weeks batch has in store, like lemon sponge pie or carrot cake. The best part? Everything is made in-house, including all the cookies, pies, jams, and toppings for the ice cream. Stop by the Brewerytown shop for a $10 pint, order online, or find it in local grocery stores.

 2827 W. Girard Ave.  215-789-6597  harpersicecream.com

An ice cream purveyor in the city since 2020, Milk Jawn uses 16% butterfat for a rich and creamy base, studded with fresh fruits, homemade chocolates, and other toppings to deliver interesting flavors. Milk Jawn is passionate about its flavor combinations, from tahini fudge swirl and Earl Grey honeycomb to strawberry rhubarb crisp and lemon curd with a blueberry basil swirl. In fact, its Earl Grey honeycomb won a North American Ice Cream Association award for best new flavor in 2021. Pick up a $12 pint at its East Passyunk scoop shop, order pints for delivery, or find it at your local grocer.

 1439 E. Passyunk Ave.  milkjawn@gmail.com  milkjawn.com

Pints of ice cream at Scoop DeVille at the Walnut Street shop, in Philadelphia, Wednesday, May 31, 2023. Read more Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer

At Scoop DeVille, you likely wont hear, Sorry, we dont have that, when asking about ice cream flavors. The local mad scientists of sugar-coated flavor explosions developed a soft-serve ice cream that allows them to create up to 14 million flavors, according to owner Spencer Philips. Besides custom ice cream, there are Scoop DeVilles signature flavors like Parking Twix-et, a chocolate ice cream with rice krispies and Nilla wafers, to a simple vanilla ice cream with rainbow sprinkles (or is it jimmies?) called What Are You 5? Whether you like to go big or keep it low-key, Scoop DeVille has everything. Grab a pint for $8.50 to $12 from its shops in Midtown Village and on South Street.

 1109 Walnut St. / 538 South St.  215-988-9992 / 267-639-4565  scoopdevilleicecream.com

From classic chunky chocolates and vanilla bean to natural floral flavors, Weckerlys broke into the local ice cream scene with its large and beautifully designed ice cream sandwiches but won our hearts by scooping up consistently delicious small-batch ice cream. Jen Weckerle, Weckerlys owner and a local pastry chef, is as connected to bold, exciting ice cream flavors as she is to sourcing locally, like coffee beans from Kensington-based Caphe Roasters. Stop by its Fishtown or West Philly scoop shops to pick up a $10 pint of small-batch ice cream, with a rotating flavor menu and new flavors being created frequently.

 9 W. Girard Ave. / 265 S. 44th St.  215-423-2000 / 215-222-5829  weckerlys.com

Zsas takes the cake when it comes to local small ice cream makers. It has a distinctive ice cream style and creativity, with banger ice cream cakes, ice cream pies, and cake ice cream cones. While most scoop shops focus on a specific style, Danielle Jowdy of Zsas strikes a balance between the lighter American-style ice cream with techniques used to make gelato, a denser treat. Together, Zsas ice cream is dense and flavorful but wont leave you with a heavy ice cream hangover. Try the crowd favorites like double chocolate peanut butter chunk, time-honored classics like cookies and cream, or a refreshing vegan chocolate sorbet. Pints are available at $11 to $12 for pickup at its Mount Airy shop, and you can order ahead online.

 6616 Germantown Ave.  215-848-7215  zsasicecream.com
Technical staff at the Fox Chase Cancer Center voted to unionize and will be represented by the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, or PASNAP. Read more

Technical staff at the Fox Chase Cancer Center voted to unionize on Wednesday, becoming the latest group of health-care workers in Philadelphia to start negotiating with a hospital for a collective bargaining agreement.

More than three-quarters of the group voted in Wednesdays election, which was administered by the National Labor Relations Board, and 74% voted in favor of unionization. The 125 techs  including X-ray techs and therapists, surgical techs, and licensed practical nurses  will be represented by the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, or PASNAP.

We couldnt be happier, said Nancy McIntyre, an X-ray tech who has worked at Fox Chase for more than 20 years. Now we have a voice.

 READ MORE: Heres what will revolutionize cancer care in the next 10 years, according to Fox Chase Cancer Center CEO Robert Uzzo

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PASNAP also represents nurses at Temple University Hospital and the Jeanes Campus, as well as a joint unit of certified registered nurse anesthetists who work at both Fox Chase and Jeanes. Temples Jeanes Campus is adjacent to Fox Chase in Northeast Philly.

Roughly 400 nurses who work at Fox Chase are expected to vote on whether to unionize later this month.

Jeremy Moore, a Fox Chase spokesperson, acknowledged the techs vote in an emailed statement.

We respect their decision and look forward to a fruitful negotiation as we work toward a contract that will benefit both the mission and patients at Fox Chase Cancer Center, Moore said.

Its been an active year for labor organizing in the Philadelphia region, and nationally, including in the medical field. High demand for health-care staffers during a workforce shortage have given motivation to workers who are trying to unionize and leverage to already unionized workers trying to negotiate better contracts.

In November, unionized nurses and technical workers at Temple University won a three-year contract that included new staffing standards and security requirements at Temple hospital entrances. Other nurses in Pennsylvania reportedly took note, with intention to make similar demands next time they sat at the bargaining table.

 READ MORE: Penn Medicine residents voted to unionize, creating the biggest new union in Philadelphia in more than 50 years

The nurses at Einstein Medical Center, which is part of Jefferson Health, have been without a contract since the end of April. They have been holding pickets and negotiating since.

Resident physicians at the University of Pennsylvania Health System made history in May when they became the first group of training doctors  referred to in the industry as house staff  in Pennsylvania to form a union. Their bargaining unit also became the largest new union in Philadelphia since the 1970s.

Nurses and techs in solidarity

Fox Chase is one of two National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer centers in Philadelphia and has been part of the Temple University Health System since 2012.

As the institution has grown, its character as a community hospital has changed, McIntyre said. The number of patients that techs and nurses see increased while the number of full-time workers declined, she said, which meant staff were less able to form meaningful bonds with patients. Both the techs and the nurses worry that lower staffing levels will increase the risk of errors and reduce the quality of care patients receive.

Our workload has gotten a lot more, and we seem to be losing techs, McIntyre said. We want a competitive wage so techs will stay.

The techs and nurses began discussing unionizing as a way to address their concerns last summer.

 READ MORE: Pennsylvania takes step to become the second state to require nurse staffing minimums in hospitals

Temple is like a big corporation, and we felt like we kind of got lost in the system, said Heather Davis, an interventional radiology nurse at Fox Chase. We had frustrations and concerns, and we felt that they were falling on deaf ears.

Fox Chase pushed back against unionization and argued that problems could be addressed without organizing, McIntyre and Davis said.

On Wednesday night, after the techs union vote results were announced, McIntyre went with other techs to have a celebratory drink. As she left the bar, she saw a mass email from Fox Chase CEO Robert Uzzo acknowledging the vote and saying he looks forward to working together as a team on the next steps.

Hopefully thats true, she said.
A Largo High School English teacher wears a shirt against banning books at the Pinellas County School Board meeting in Largo, Fla., Feb. 14, 2023. Read more

Amid a growing national battle over censorship and parental rights, New Jersey legislators are taking steps to discourage public schools and libraries from banning books by withholding state aid from those who dont comply.

A bill proposed recently by two Democratic lawmakers could make the state one of the first in the country to consider a measure that would bar school boards and public libraries from restricting or banning access to certain books.

The legislation is in response to a growing movement that has targeted books across the country, most frequently those about race, racism, gender, or sexuality.

 READ MORE: Another author visits Central Bucks to speak out against potential book bans

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I wish we didnt have to do this. Its really discouraging to see the number of attempts going on in New Jersey and around the country, said state Sen. Andrew Zwicker (D., Middlesex), the bills main sponsor. Its so unbelievable divisive and just wrong.

In 2022, there were 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources nationwide, the most attempted book bans since the American Library Associations Office for Intellectual Freedom began compiling such statistics more than 20 years ago. There were 729 challenges reported in 2021.

In New Jersey, there were 13 attempts to restrict access to books last year, according to the Library Association. Zwicker believes the number may be higher, with school boards or libraries quietly removing books without a public debate.

The Washington Township Public School District in Gloucester County made headlines this year when it removed Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye from the curriculum after a parent complained, and the Hamilton Township School District was asked to remove Gender Queer, which chronicles the authors sexual identity journey. Book challenges also have been controversial in Pennsylvania schools: In Central Bucks, challenges are pending against 65 books.

Clearly, weve seen this movement, said Senate Majority Leader Teresa Ruiz (D., Essex), another bill sponsor. The bigger and larger issue is that this is not something I think school boards should be dealing with. Libraries are sacred.

If adopted, the measure, S3907, would direct the state Department of Treasury to withhold state aid from districts that dont comply. Zwicker said he hopes districts will avoid putting their funding at risk. Details about how much money would be in jeopardy would be determined later.

Zwicker plans to meet with librarians and school officials to tweak the proposal. He expects to hold hearings on the bill in the fall and bring it for a vote by January, when the legislative session ends. He believes there will be bipartisan support for it and Gov. Phil Murphy would sign it.

Murphy and nine other governors sent a letter last month to publishers urging them to avoid political pressure to censor textbooks, saying our countrys future is on the line. Murphy cited a law signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis giving parents more rights to challenge books and materials.

Republican lawmakers say they want to make sure books distributed in public schools and libraries are age-appropriate. State Sen. Ed Durr (R., Gloucester) is drafting a bill that would require an age-rating system for books in school libraries, similar to that used for movies, to determine appropriate reading materials.

Its a total misrepresentation for Democrats to say that parents are looking to ban books simply for expressing their concerns about the unrestricted availability of content thats not age-appropriate in their school libraries, Durr said.

Nikki Stouffer, leader of the NJ Fresh Faced Schools group, opposes the measure and dismissed it as the porn bill. A mother of two, she has shared graphic content from books that her group says should be pulled from schools.

This isnt education at this point, said Stouffer, of Medford, a bio statistician. It is not really appropriate for school.

 READ MORE: Central Bucks released the reports on books its banned and kept. Heres what they show.

Zwicker said he was inspired by Illinois legislation and a decision by a school in Florida last month to restrict poet Amanda Gormans poem and book, The Hill We Climb. Gorman read the poem at President Joe Bidens inauguration in 2021.

It truly is needed, said Olga Polites, a retired school librarian and leader of the New Jersey Chapter of Media Literacy Now. It almost feels like, Did we learn nothing from previous decades?

Librarians have been vilified for book selections and some have left the profession, said Ewa Elliott, president of the New Jersey Association of School Librarians. Her organization supports the bill.

Elliott said her organization supports the rights of parents to make decisions about what their children read, but that doesnt outweigh the rights of other parents. Her group is working with lawmakers to tweak the bill.

They have rights to take care of their own children. They shouldnt be pushing the same rules on everybodys children, she said.
Osayi Osunde, owner of Fitness Academy in Brewerytown, was one of the first recipients of a Comcast RISE grant in 2020. Read more

The City Controllers office estimated 63% of the citys 28,000 small businesses were dealt a devastating blow when the state issued its stay-at-home orders in March 2020. Lives may have been saved, but businesses teetered on the brink of death.

The pandemic was a tough time, said Osayi Osunde, owner of Fitness Academy in Brewerytown. One out of four fitness firms closed for good. When you are Black owned, it is always a challenge. The pandemic made it harder than ever.

Comcast RISE was one of the programs that stepped in with cash and resources to help stanch the bleeding during the pandemic, and Osunde was one of the first recipients of a RISE grant in 2020.

We survived and thrived though the effects are still there. COVID is still around, he said, adding that 2023 has probably been his most normal business year since the pandemic began.

We survived and thrived though the effects are still there. Osayi Osunde

While COVID-19 is no longer considered a global or local health emergency and many pandemic-related business resources have disappeared, Comcast has not ended the program. Applications for the next round of RISE grants of $5,000 this year are due by midnight on June 30.

Romona Mercer, owner of Aunt Verleas Pound Cake Experience, lost all of her restaurant clients when the pandemic struck  which left her struggling to pay her monthly $600 rent for her commercial kitchen. In 2021 she was awarded a RISE grant, and she is just spending the last of the award.

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It helped us tremendously, she said. That [money] took us a long way.

Small business is the citys economic engine. According to the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, small businesses employ the majority of the citys workers, producing over a billion dollars in wage tax revenues. Comcast RISE, which stands for Representation, Investment, Strength, and Empowerment, has awarded 13,000 small businesses over $110 million in monetary, marketing, and technology grants.

After this round of awards, nearly 1,000 Philadelphia business owners will be touched by the Comcast RISE program and helped in their recovery and rebuilding from the last few years so they can move forward in a stronger position than ever, said Philadelphia Councilmember Curtis Jones, Jr. who was at the grant announcement.

 READ MORE: David Beys business was hit hard by the pandemic. But with a Comcast RISE grant, he now hopes to hire assistants

The last couple of years have been unsettling. We had to close our doors and learn to operate in a new normal just like every other school, said Renee Harris, CEO of STEM Prep Academy, an independent preschool and kindergarten. She received a Comcast RISE Investment Fund Grant in 2022.

The Comcast RISE Investment Fund grant was a lifesaver. It went directly to paying our dedicated staff who work so hard for our families, she said.

Comcast will award 500 recipients in Philadelphia and four other cities: Baltimore, Detroit, Memphis, and Portland. In addition to originality and persuasiveness, Comcast RISE judges will be looking for how their business contributes to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) objectives and advances the economic health of their local community.

Along with money, the grant award winners will receive business consultation services, educational resources, creative production support, and a technology makeover.

For an online application go to www.ComcastRISE.com
A new bill in Harrisburg would require private insurers to pay for Pennsylvanians virtual doctor visits, as well as establishing quality standards for telemedicine visits.

Pennsylvania is one of just five states in the country that does not require insurers to pay for virtual doctors appointments, according to the National Consortium of Telehealth Resource Centers, a collection of national and regional resource groups focused on expanding access to telehealth.

While insurance companies generally do cover virtual doctor visits, industry representatives have said, there is nothing in Pennsylvania law requiring it. Other states have reported insurers scaling back on their coverage of virtual visits, national experts have said, and the lack of a legal requirement could allow insurers to be selective about what types of telemedicine visits theyll cover, or require telemedicine appointments only be conducted through certain doctors or using specific technological platforms.

 READ MORE: Pa. legislators say its time to require insurers to pay for virtual health care

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A spokesperson for the Insurance Federation of Pennsylvania, a state trade organization, said in a March interview that the industry wouldnt be opposed to legislation mandating coverage as long as it did not impede growth.

The bill, sponsored by Republican State Sen. Elder Vogel (R., Allegheny) and currently in the Banking and Insurance Committee, would not allow insurers to withhold payment for virtual visits that would otherwise be covered if they happened in person. The bill does not, however, require insurers to cover telemedicine sessions at the same rate as an in-person appointment.

The bill also requires Medicaid and the Childrens Health Insurance Program known as CHIP to cover virtual visits, and would make the states licensing boards responsible for ensuring online visits provide the same quality of care as appointments in doctors offices.

Vogel has wanted to guarantee telemedicine insurance coverage for Pennsylvanians since 2016, he said, framing it as an important tool to help people in rural parts of the state access health care.

Having broader access to this critical form of health care allows residents to fit their doctors appointments into their busy schedules and save money on travel during a time where we are seeing inflated costs, Vogel said in an emailed statement.

 READ MORE: How the FBIs rules are making it harder for Pa. doctors to have virtual visits with patients in other states

Twice before the pandemic, and once during, the state General Assembly was unable to pass an insurance mandate. The Democratic majority in the House, though, makes legislators hopeful this bill could move forward.

Virtual visits, once rare, have become vastly more common since the pandemic. Nationally, 28% of Medicare recipients had at least one telehealth visit in 2021, compared with 1% in 2019. Locally, doctors at Jefferson Health have said they used to conduct roughly 50 telemedicine appointments daily before COVID-19. The hospital system now conducts three times as many virtual visits a day.
Tire marks show on I-95 near Walnut Street in Philadelphia near where a Pennsylvania State Police trooper shot and killed 18-year-old Anthony Allegrini Jr., of Glenn Mills, during a street-racing incident. Read more

Police have arrested a Delaware man they say assaulted a pedestrian during an illegal car meetup in Northeast Philadelphia last weekend.

Philadelphia police say Aki J. Newman, 21, assaulted a male pedestrian while a large crowd drifted and did doughnuts in the middle of the intersection of Bustleton and Philmont Avenues.

Earlier this week, police asked for the publics assistance in identifying the pedestrian, who has not been named.

Police said the illegal car meetup Newman attended was one of several that night, one of which resulted in a Pennsylvania State Police trooper fatally shooting Anthony Allegrini Jr., 18, of Glen Mills, on I-95 near Penns Landing in Philadelphia. Allegrini, who was driving an Audi A4, was shot after authorities say he failed to yield and struck two troopers shortly after 3:30 a.m. Sunday.

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In the meetup at Bustleton and Philmont, motorists took over the intersection along with a crowd of hundreds shortly after 1 a.m., police said. Dozens in the crowd threw bricks and other objects at police vehicles that arrived on the scene, police said. No officers were injured.

 READ MORE: A Night of Drag Racing and Auto Meet-Ups

During a news conference this week about the car meets, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw mentioned the pedestrian assault, explaining that the suspect involved was also believed to have attended an earlier meetup.

An attorney for Allegrinis family said Outlaw grouping all the car meetups together was offensive. The family is calling for a thorough and transparent investigation into his death.
Dogs and their owners enjoy the sand and water at the Malibu Beach Wildlife Management area in Egg Harbor Township at the Shore in the middle of the Memorial Day weekend Sunday, May 28, 2023. The off-leash dog beach is also known as Longport Dog Beach, ,Somers Point Dog Beach, or just Dog Beach) and is located on the Longport side of the Ocean Drive Bridge that goes between Longport and Ocean City. Read more

After some strange days of smoke over the sand and ocean, officials at the Jersey Shore say the beaches and boardwalks are quickly clearing for the weekend.

Its a real bluebird day down here, Marty Frank, captain of the Cape May Beach Patrol, told The Inquirer Friday morning. Were expecting crowds.

Jim Eberwine, a retired marine meteorologist with the National Weather Service office and an Atlantic County resident said things are improving, quickly at the Jersey Shore after very smoky conditions Thursday.

There was smoke on the water, like a fog bank, he said. This is probably the longest, extended period of these smoky conditions Ive seen in our area in 30 to 40 years.

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The National Weather Service weekend forecast for most Shore towns, including Sea Isle City and Beach Haven, called for some haze on Saturday morning then mostly sunny through Sunday. On Friday morning, most of South Jerseys air quality was fair to poor.

Air at the Shore, specifically on the beach, will always be slightly better because of the Atlantic Ocean. Beachgoers should check air quality numbers and plan their day accordingly.

Youre always going to be getting some ventilation at the beach, Eberwine said.

In Avalon, Cape May County, borough administrator Scott Wahl said tag checkers were pulled from their posts Thursday to limit particulate exposure. Lifeguards, Wahl said, were rotated in and out of the air conditioned lifeguard buildings.

Wahl and Frank, in Cape May, said both towns beaches were open Friday without limitations.

North Wildwood Mayor Patrick Rosenello also noted a dramatic change in the last 24 hours, though he expected crowds this weekend regardless of the smoke conditions.

We have a lot of bars and restaurants so I just figured they would be more crowded, he said.

Eberwine said the smoke is coming down from Canada because upper level low pressure systems are stalling out in the atmosphere above us. That upper low is dissipating, he said, but more could form in coming weeks to bring smoke back to our region.

Theyre mostly letting these fires burn themselves out, he said. So theres going to be smoke in the Northeast for a while.
Across Philadelphia, more than 200,000 rowhouses and twins are close to a century old. These aging homes were designed to stand together  which makes them susceptible to damage when demolition knocks out part of an intact rowhouse block, excavation undermines old rubble foundations, or new construction occurs at the property line.

As an Inquirer report detailed recently, in the 10 years since the collapse of a Salvation Army building killed seven people, Philadelphia continues to have problems with work being done on attached houses that weakens the adjoining structures, sometimes even causing structural problems to those adjoining properties. (See inquirer.com/collapse.)

If you see a for-sale sign on the house next door, or get an initial notice from the builder, youll want to pay attention. Here are steps you can take to protect yourself.

 READ MORE: 'The house is gonna fall on us': What happens when Philadelphia's aging rowhouses meet new construction

Get informed

Dont wait until construction breaks ground to learn about planned development, advises Kevin B. Watson, a lawyer with the firm Clark Hill.

Attend any community zoning meetings at which plans are discussed, and request information, including all plans from the development team  including the developer, architect, structural engineer, and contractor. The developer, under a recent law, must provide initial notice before requesting permits and then 10 days final notice before starting work that could impact adjacent properties, but youll want to proactively seek information as soon as possible.

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Contact the Philadelphia Department of Licenses & Inspections (L&I) by calling 311, try to find out which inspector is overseeing the work, and let that inspector know of your interest in the project. (If you cant get the phone number, try emailing, using the format Firstname.Lastname@phila.gov.)

Search the property on Atlas.phila.gov, LI.phila.gov, and eCLIPSE.phila.gov to find zoning plans and permits. You can also contact the City Council member who represents your district.

As soon as possible, file a Right to Know request to L&Is open records officer, Tia Platts (tia.platts@phila.gov), for all permit applications; construction, demolition or excavation plans; and any other documents submitted for work on the property. File it using the standard form available at OpenRecords.pa.gov, and be sure your request is clear and specific.

Assess your home

Before work that can impact your property starts, a developer must provide you with a preconstruction survey of current property conditions, and a plan to monitor and protect your property. You should request a copy of that survey, review it carefully, and supplement it with your own photos documenting the state of your property.

Consider hiring your own structural engineer or architect to make sure the developers assessment is accurate and thorough. The engineer may identify vulnerabilities in your home that could be simple to proactively address, such as making sure your facade is attached securely to the house before disruptive work occurs next door. Or, the person may review the developers plans and propose modifications or additional protections.

Consider legal counsel

Right now, no legal aid service is dedicated to helping homeowners. (Community Legal Services of Philadelphia has proposed such an initiative, but the city has not yet funded it.) If you have significant concerns, consider retaining a lawyer versed in construction issues to advocate on your behalf before any damage occurs.

Negotiate access

Construction running up to your property line will in most cases require access to your property, whether to underpin your foundation or to seal the connection between roofs. For homeowners, a written access agreement can be an essential point of leverage in negotiating terms with a contractor.

Venise Castaneda-Whitaker  who runs a Facebook group, River Wards L+I Coalition, where neighbors help one another navigate construction issues  advises posting a No Trespassing sign right away, because Pennsylvania law provides for enhanced penalties for defiant trespass where notice is posted. If a contractor is on your property anyway, call 911.

Then, proceed with negotiating the written access agreement, preferably communicating in writing, such as by email. Make sure its as detailed as possible, including the parameters of the work and the work schedule. Volunteers have developed a template for this agreement with a wish list of crucial concessions, such as requiring the developer to pay for a third-party engineers review, specifying that all contractors are to be licensed and insured, and demanding that the neighboring home is to be added to the developers insurance.

Contact L&I and your insurance  with caveats

If concerns about construction damage arise, Watson advised contacting both L&I and the developer simultaneously. You should also contact your homeowners insurance, though many policies refuse to cover damage in such cases.

But nonprofit lawyers also caution to think through the situation, since contacting L&I can sometimes backfire.

People will contact L&I because they think theyre contacting the property police, and L&I will come out and inspect their property and they will give them a violation  because all L&I does is determine whether or not there is a dangerous or out-of-compliance condition going on, said Andria Bibiloni of Philadelphia Legal Assistance. Its not their role to assign fault.

However, some homeowners reported that L&I was able to step in and get the contractor to address damage.

Who else to contact

For work without a permit, or beyond the scope of the permit: Call 311 or visit phila.gov/departments/philly311/

For work before 7 a.m. or after 8 p.m.: Call 215-685-7580 or email dphams_service_requests@phila.gov

For dust and noise complaints: Call 215-685-7580 or email dphams_service_requests@phila.gov

For work on a weekend: weekendworkLI@phila.gov, or 911.

To report property damage by city demolition contractors and others: Call L&Is Emergency Response Unit at 215-686-2583 or 215-685-3055.

For work that poses an imminent danger, such as excavation undermining your house: Leave the house immediately and call 911.
President Donald Trump's shadow is seen on the driveway as he waves and walks to board Marine One in May 2017. Read more

Only in Donald Trumps warped reality show world does the one-term, twice-impeached former president take to social media to announce he has been indicted (again) and then fundraise off his alleged crimes.

Trump used his well-worn playbook to delegitimize the investigation, claim its a political witch hunt, and declare his innocence in ALL CAPS. Its a tired act the country has endured before and will likely continue to experience when the next potential indictments drop.

Trumps troubles are self-inflicted. Sadly, Trumps cult-like followers continue to fall for his lies and lawlessness. Even more disturbing, many Republican elected officials continue to put Trump above the rule of law and their duty to the country.

The federal indictment remains sealed, so the full details of Trumps alleged mishandling of classified documents and obstruction of the governments efforts to reclaim them remain unknown. But the reported charges against him are serious and include violations of the Espionage Act and a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Prosecutors would not move forward with the first-ever federal indictment of a former president without believing they have a strong case.

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That has not stopped GOP officials from shamelessly rushing to Trumps defense.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) called the indictment unconscionable and said he stand[s] with President Trump against this grave injustice. Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) tweeted, God bless President Trump.

Several other prominent GOP lawmakers, including Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, played follow-the-leader by mimicking Trumps talking points of the so-called boxes hoax and attacked the legitimacy of the indictment.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida showed his unfitness for president. Without seeing the indictment, he declared that the weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society.

Time and again, GOP leaders have stood by Trump and on the wrong side of history. Their subservience has enabled Trump to trample presidential norms, attack democratic institutions, cozy up to dictators, mismanage a deadly pandemic, divide the country, incite a violent coup attempt, and encourage racism, sexism, and hate.

At Trumps every turn, the American republic has been put to its biggest test since the Civil War.

For decades, Trump bullied his way through life, suing adversaries, stiffing businesses, dodging taxes, and avoiding criminal charges despite persistent scrutiny and repeated investigations.

But the law is finally catching up to the lawbreaker.

In December, Trumps real estate company  that fueled his wealth and celebrity  was found guilty of a long-running tax fraud scheme. In March, a Manhattan grand jury indicted Trump for paying off an adult film star, a move that may have helped him win election in 2016. Last month, Trump was found guilty of sexually abusing magazine writer E. Jean Carroll 27 years ago, a verdict that branded him a sexual predator.

On Tuesday, Trump is expected to appear in federal court in Miami to face charges for his handling of classified documents he took when he left the White House.

Trumps biggest legal challenges are just beginning. He may also get indicted in August by prosecutors in Atlanta for his role in trying to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia, where he pressured state election officials to find him more votes.

Jack Smith, the no-nonsense special counsel leading the documents investigation, is also probing Trumps efforts to overturn the 2020 election and incite the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

A House committee released an 845-page report in December that accused Trump of inciting the deadly insurrection and a conspiracy to defraud the United States, among other federal crimes, and referred him to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.

Trump and his allies have already politicized the indictment, claiming the Biden administration is out to jail a rival who is running for president in 2024. Cue the cries about Hillary Clintons emails and Hunter Bidens laptop.

But unlike Trump  who ran the White House like a mob boss  there is no indication President Joe Biden has had any involvement in the investigation. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith to further insulate the White House from the claims of politics. Even former Attorney General Bill Barr, who knows a thing or two about politicizing the Justice Department, said the documents investigation is not a witch hunt.

Prosecutors were right to follow the facts and hold Trump accountable. No amount of whining by Trump and his supporters can stop the wheels of justice from turning.
Advocates for the homeless, including Bill England (right), filled Norristown Borough Council chambers on Tuesday after council president Thomas Lepera proposed busing people who are homeless in Norristown to Villanova University. Read more

When Montgomery County officials conducted a census of residents who were experiencing homelessness in January 2022, it confirmed what many already feared  the problem is getting worse.

Workers with the countys Office of Housing and Community Development found 568 homeless residents, more than twice as many as in a similar survey conducted in 2019.

Norristown, the county seat, a working-class city and the headquarters of many of the social services and resources that vulnerable populations need, has roughly 20 homeless encampments  a number that has increased because of Hurricane Ida in 2021, which destroyed dozens of affordable rental homes in the county, and the economic woes precipitated by pandemic before it.

In response, Norristowns council president, Thomas Lepera, planned a stunt. Although Lepera is a Democrat (and the political director for Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers), he wanted to borrow a page from Republican Govs. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida.

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Abbott and DeSantis sent migrants from their states to Northern cities. Lepera said that he wanted to send busloads of homeless people to the campus of Villanova University, in part to spite an activist professor there that he had clashed with. (At a council meeting Tuesday, Lepera said that his proposal was misunderstood. Im not trying to start a war with poor people, he said. Im not anti-homeless.)

This move comes after Norristown, led by Lepera, closed the countys only dedicated shelter for single homeless adults. At the time, service providers expressed concern over the countys capacity to house residents, considering the tight real estate market and lack of available affordable housing.

Lepera is frustrated that people from more affluent areas are telling Norristown how to deal with a situation that doesnt exist within their own communities. When Lepera spearheaded the closing of the homeless shelter, he complained that therere 53 municipalities, townships, and boroughs in Montgomery County. Why does it have to be in Norristown?

Norristown is also not the only Montgomery County community thats essentially seeking to criminalize homelessness and poverty. Pottstown, another working-class community, has penalized churches for feeding needy residents and tried to use rental inspections to skirt the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures and Pennsylvanias own constitutional protections.

Whatever the frustrations of leaders like Lepera and those Montgomery County communities may be, the forced busing of homeless people is not a fair, humane, or equitable response. Nor is it a solution.

Organizations that support homeless populations refer to this practice as Greyhound therapy. Communities hope that by cutting off all forms of support and providing a one-way ticket out of town, they can fix homelessness.

Sending people further away from friends, family, and trusted connections can make their situation worse and constrain their ability to regain a stable income and home. It compounds homelessness over time.

What would help is investing in smart, equitable growth and allowing for more affordable housing across the county. Research has shown increasingly that homelessness is a housing problem, and many towns are not doing their share to provide shelter.

Like many communities across the country, most municipalities in Montgomery County maintain exclusionary, or so-called snob zoning, which ensures high housing costs that effectively price out lower-income residents. These communities also strictly separate residential and commercial uses, at least outside of their iconic Main Streets, meaning residents need access to a car for more basic necessities, another step that tends to exclude those with lower incomes.

While the county is encouraging towns to embrace development oriented around public transit, it has proven to be a hard sell. Ardmore recently rejected an attempt to raise height limits on new buildings, while Upper Gwynedd residents have repeatedly objected to a proposed apartment complex with subsidized units.

Land-use reform has become a necessity in high-cost areas across the country. States as disparate as Montana and Massachusetts have pushed to lower costs. Massachusetts MBTA Communities Action Plan could represent a key blueprint for Southeastern Pennsylvania. The Massachusetts proposal ensures that every town does its fair share, rather than pushing demand to just one or two communities.

By raising their drawbridges in the face of minor change, Montgomery County municipalities make urban life less manageable for places like Norristown and Philadelphia. Like Greyhound therapy, restrictive zoning prioritizes the desires of individual towns over the needs of the region as a whole, making the underlying problem worse.

With so many towns blocking downtown development, apartments that do get built in Montgomery County tend to be alongside highways near the King of Prussia Mall. Living in that new construction can also be quite pricey. A studio at The George apartment complex in King of Prussia costs nearly $2,000 a month, while a two-bedroom costs over $3,000. Thats more expensive than iconic Center City locations like The Drake.

There is some hope for change. Housing and homelessness were major issues in the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners primary last month. While the commissioners lack direct authority to tackle housing issues  with zoning and land-use decisions often left to townships and boroughs  they can weigh in indirectly, using grant funding and other resources as a carrot to motivate reluctant residents.

Unless they succeed, the inhumane stunts are likely to continue.
From the streets of Philadelphia to the boardwalks of New Jersey and beyond, weve identified a new common menace: young people.

And rather than react thoughtfully or creatively, weve essentially demonized a whole generation.

Weve banned them from stores and malls and boardwalks, at least without supervision.

And every time they try to tell us what they want, we come back with more supervision, more scheduling, more programs, and more organizations. And while some of that is great  and necessary  what is also necessary for young people is the space to be, to breathe.

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To do what so many of us who were teens long ago got to do.

We played outside until the streetlights went on. But we impose curfews on them.

We hung out at the mall with friends. But now they can barely roam anywhere without an adult in tow.

We spent whole summer days and nights at the beach.

And yeah, we were not always where we said wed be, or where we should be, and when we got caught or things went left, there was often hell to pay.

Which was fair.

What isnt fair is that older generations, those who benefited from those very same youthful freedoms, now seem to be punishing younger generations for their own failures to create an infrastructure for young people to be, well, young people.

In April, after hundreds of teenagers rampaged through downtown Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson sounded like a lot of other public officials whove been dealing with similar incidents in their cities  with one key difference.

In no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and lakefront this weekend, Johnson said, referring to two Chicago neighborhoods we could compare with Center City and Penns Landing. It is unacceptable and has no place in our city.

However, he added, urging a comprehensive approach, it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.

As you might expect, Johnson got a lot of grief for that. Its much easier, and politically safer, to give the appearance of addressing a complicated issue by blaming  and penalizing  everyone for the actions of a few.

That is not to say that there is no reason to sound the alarm for some of the damaging, dangerous, and even deadly behavior lately. Theres a difference between youthful indiscretions and illegal activity, especially when property is damaged and others are placed in danger. I dont care how young or bored or rebellious you are: Rage against the machine on your own dime and without hurting others.

But this kind of one-size-fits-all oppressive approach is just not the answer.

Scholars say that because of the lack of appropriate play environments and countless distracting screens, many children have less access to playtime and play spaces than children in the past. And that lack of access leads to all kinds of problems: stress, anxiety, disconnection, depression. And as with most everything else, its even worse for children living in poverty, often Black and brown children who often have less access to school and community-based programs, and who are not just demonized but criminalized for their behavior.

Black boys, for instance, often face being judged as more dangerous and more violent than their peers of other backgrounds, racial equity scholar Altheria Caldera told me when we talked this week.

Behavior is racialized, she said. Some people can just get away with things that other people cannot. And the way we determine who can get away with what in our country is largely dependent upon race.

And that has proven to have deadly consequences, for which we in the media share in the responsibility when we make some people victims and other villains.

Weve definitely overscheduled and oversupervised our young, and weve projected the fears of generations who have been unable  or unwilling  to protect their young people onto them with all kinds of consequences.

But its even more than that. In a 2019 op-ed in the New York Times, author Kim Brooks blamed a fundamental shift in the way we view children and child-rearing, and the way this shift has transformed our schools, our neighborhoods and our relationships to one another and our communities.

It reminded me of a revealing comment from a high school student in an article by my colleague Nate File about young people seeking safe and accessible places where they actually want to hang. Spoiler alert: Its rarely the hyper-structured settings we choose for them.

I think that a lot of times, the police cant really distinguish between a cool hangout, a safe hangout ... and then just kids looking to cause trouble, Sizwe Morris-Louis, a high school senior from Mount Airy, told File.

Hes right, but I think it goes beyond the police.

Brooks wrote, In many ways, America has given up on childhood, and on children.

The proof is all around us, and it predates a pandemic that made life even smaller and more treacherous for young people.

We are supposed to keep young people safe, but we owe them the same freedom to experience their youth as we had.

Safe and free, Brooks said.

And here in Philadelphia, we are failing spectacularly on both fronts.
During the pandemic, the number of people looking for a pet outnumbered the amount of pets in shelters. Over 23 million households nationwide welcomed a pet in 2020, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animalsbut that trend is over, The Inquirer reported.

According to the Shelter Animals Count, 69% of dogs and 72% of cats in Pennsylvanias shelters have been adopted this year. Liberty Britton,the Philadelphia Animal Welfare Society communications and grants manager, says shelters are seeing the normal intake to shelter numbers, but we have a drop in people fostering and adopting.

This results in hard decisions for organizations like the Animal Care and Control Team of Philadelphia, the regions largest animal care and control provider. Last year, [ACCT Philly] had to start euthanizing for space, something we havent done in many years, said executive director Sarah Barnett. We never thought we would be in this place again.

If you have been considering adopting for a while, this is your sign. Shelters and rescuers are looking for homes, and if they cant find a place for pets to go, they cant continue to save others.

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The Inquirer spoke to PAWS, ACCT Philly, the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals , and Green Street Rescue to see how you can help pets in need. All are open seven days a week.

Adoption fees, applications, and process

Last year, PAWS rescued 2,309 animals, 91% were cats  many were likely surrendered by their owners. Which is the first piece of advice for pet ownership: As you mull adoption, consider whether you can bear the responsibility of a pet.

Green Street Rescue founder Kathy Jordan wants folks to remember cats can live up to 20 years. Its not something you buy, its a pet you adopt. You cant just return it because your new boyfriend is allergic,Jordan emphasized.

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Adoption fees vary depending on the organization, but costs cover spaying or neutering, deworming, flea and tick prevention, microchip, vaccines, and ID tag. If you are adopting a dog in Philly, dont forget to secure a dog license, required by the city.

ACCT takes in all animals. On a recent week, the shelter had 111 dogs, 139 cats, a couple of guinea pigs, plus rabbits, birds, and snakes looking for a home. People who wanting large dogs, which have a harder time being adopted, are especially needed, Barnett said.

When pets with medical or behavioral conditions cant find a home or a foster placement, they become at risk of euthanization. If you are looking for a four-legged friend, check the time-stamped section first. Cant adopt? Request to foster or donate to help cover the cost of keeping them alive.

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To adopt: If your soon-to-be fur baby is at a foster home, contact the foster by email. Otherwise, schedule an online appointment to visit. To expedite the process and help the shelter know what youre looking for, file a digital application beforehand. Walk-ins should sign up for the waiting list 30 minutes before your arrival time. Same-day adoptions are available.

Fees: Adoption costs depends on the species. Fees for cats and dogs over 7 are $25, dogs younger than 7 are $70 and cats $45 (if under 2 years old, add $10 to the fee), and $105 per kitten and $255 per puppy (6 months or younger).

111 W. Hunting Park Ave.,  10 a.m. to 6 p.m.,  apply and schedule an appointment online,  email adopt@acctphilly.org

PAWS works to make Philly a no-kill city, taking in pets from shelters like ACCT Philly, finding fosters, and giving animals a chance to find a family. This year PAWS is having a harder time getting cats adopted.

To adopt: Check the website for availability and keep an eye on the Urgent Animal section, with animals that have been waiting the longest. File online for cats, dogs, and other small animals, mentioning the specific pet you want to adopt. If they are in foster care, contact the foster directly.

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Fees: Cat adoption fees are $60, $100 for a kitten under 6 months, and $150 for a pair of kittens. If you are looking for hamsters or rabbits, the fee is $25. Expect to pay $150 for large doggies, $250 for small adult pups, and $250 for a puppy of any size.

100 N. 2nd St.,  noon to 6 p.m. (opens 11 a.m. on weekends).,  apply online,  call 215-238-9901, phillypaws.org

Green Street Rescue saves over 600 homeless cats from Philly streets every year. Some of them await adoption at foster homes, in the window of the Fairmount Pet Shoppe, or at Le Cat Cafe in Brewerytown.

Created in 2016, the cafe offers cat lovers a space to hang out with the little balls of fur. Theres no human food for sale, but you can cozy up with up to 12 kitties (due to occupancy laws) for possible adoption.

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To adopt: Apply online or at Le Cat Cafe. Green Street Rescue asks for two references, a veterinarian contact (if you have other pets), and your landlords number to confirm pet policy. The rescue doesnt do same-day adoptions and the process can take up to five days. Once approved, you have three days to pick up the kitty.

Fees: Visit the cafe for $17 an hour, $15 for students, military, and seniors with ID. Adopting one cat costs $140, $200 for a pair.

2713 W. Girard,  11 a.m. to 6 p.m. (closes at 5 p.m. on Sunday and 7 p.m. on Wednesday),  apply in-person and online,  call 267-800-7877, greenstreetrescue.org

SPCA is an open-intake shelter for rescued animals that have experienced abuse and neglect. Before adopting, ensure your house can provide the patience, care, and cuddles needed to make them feel at home. Currently, 100 dogs and 50 cats are looking for a family.

To adopt: You must visit in-person to fill out an application; same-day adoption is an option. For fosters, complete an online form, schedule a visit, and finalize the process with an adoption counselor. No matter the method, you will need proof of address if different from your photo ID.

Fees: $85 for a cat, $150 for a kitten, $300 for a dog, and $450 for a puppy. Some animals are sponsored  you can adopt them for free because someone else volunteered to pay the fee. They also host special events when adoption fees are waived.

350 E. Erie Ave.,  noon to 6:30 p.m.,  apply in-person,  email adoptions@pspca.org, pspca.org

Foster

If you are not ready to adopt, fostering is a great way to assist. You will be responsible for food and water, but the shelter covers all veterinarian needs and meds. PAWS, for instance, sends its fosters home with a bag of food, toys, and a leash or crate. If we dont have foster homes, we just cant take the next pet in need, Brittonsaid.

PAWS fosterer Alyssa Jacoby began fostering in 2022, after her beloved cat passed. Since then, Jacoby has provided a temporary home for 14 pets, a cat and a dog at at time. Her instagram account Philly Fur Foster helps pets find homes.

The length of stay of each animal depends on multiple factors, such as age, size, and health condition. But the waiting isnt heavy on Jacoby. They [pets] are in shock, and we can help them break down that wall, become comfortable, and feel safe again, she said.
Former President Donald Trump listens as Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel speaks during a 2018 rally in Cape Girardeau, Mo. Read more

The Republican National Committee launched a persuasion campaign this week to convince the partys voters to use mail ballots in 2024, after four years of GOP candidates  including a president  falsely claiming that route inevitably leads to election fraud.

The effort had a distinct take-your-medicine flavor. And party leaders winced while swallowing it.

RNC chair Ronna McDaniel spent 30 minutes Wednesday pitching mail ballots and harvesting  ballots collected by a third party for delivery to election officials. She was joined by Republican congressional leaders hoping to expand the partys majority in the U.S. House and take control of the Senate.

Then she said this: Im not going to lie. I do not like ballot harvesting. I dont think its a good practice. I dont like having an election month.

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Shes not alone.

McDaniel acknowledged that Republicans  most notably former President Donald Trump before the 2020 election and after he lost  convinced a big chunk of the partys base to distrust mail ballots.

That certainly is a challenge, if you have people in your ecosystem saying dont vote early or dont vote by mail, she said. Those cross-messages do have an impact.

Thats as close as she came to acknowledging that Republicans dug the hole they are now trying, reluctantly, to emerge from.

McDaniel said mail ballots give Democrat a head start in elections, leaving Republicans trying to catch up during in-person voting.

In the 2022 general election, with the jobs of Pennsylvania governor and senator on the line, just 11% of Republicans who voted cast mail ballots while 35% of Democratic voters used them.

We have to change the culture among Republican voters, McDaniel said.

Try that with the partys politicians first.

Republican legislators in Harrisburg still cast mail ballots as a looming liability rather than a legitimate tactic.

Legislation that would help speed the process of counting mail ballots is pending in the Democrat-controlled state House, but it has little interest in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Republicans on the Senate State Government Committee in a hearing last month, while considering former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidts nomination to be secretary of state, seemed more interested in talking about mail ballot security than usage.

This mail-ballot two-step makes it easy to trip.

Lawrence Tabas, chair of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, told the state Senate in an April 2020 hearing that mail ballots were both an important option and an increased risk of fraud.

He said that while the RNC was running a persuasion campaign, urging party voters to cast mail ballots.

President Joe Biden won three out of four mail ballots cast in Pennsylvania in 2020.

Local 98 election goes to runoff

Former electrician union leader John Johnny Doc Dougherty came oh-so-close Saturday to unseating the man he backed 18 months ago to replace him atop Local 98, Mark Lynch Jr.

Lynch won 48% of the vote in an election for a full term as the politically influential unions business manager, while Todd Neilson, with Doughertys backing, took 46%.

A third candidate, Tim Browne, received 6%.

Local 98 will hold a June 24 runoff election between Lynch and Neilson.

Expect Dougherty and Neilson to court Browne and his supporters. Odds are Browne will lean Neilsons way, since Lynch fired him shortly after taking over. Brownes campaign included a fusillade of newsletters focused on what he saw as Lynchs shortcomings as a leader.

Browne said he will make a decision on endorsing before the runoff.

Neilson, the brother of State Rep. Ed Neilson, a former Local 98 political director, was fired by Lynch earlier this year as a Local 98 business agent.

More than 50% of our membership cast their ballot for a change and I believe that change begins at the top, Neilson told Clout. I would welcome any opportunity to debate Mr. Lynch in the upcoming weeks so the members can decide who is best prepared to address the issues facing our union.

Dougherty, who backed Lynch after being convicted on federal bribery charges, fell out with him during a dispute with Local 98s insurance carrier about paying his legal bills. Dougherty still faces two more trials, including one where he and other Local 98 officials are accused of embezzling $600,000 from the union.

The election winner takes control of a union with seriously deep pockets, including a political action committee that had $13.8 million in the bank on May 1.

Lynch, in a statement, noted that he took more votes than Neilson. Now he needs to whip up voter turnout for the runoff.

Ive since received a ton of calls from members asking how they can help me win on June 24th, Lynch said. Im currently working hard to convince those members who didnt vote on Saturday to make sure they vote in the run-off election.

Quotable

Its a family decision. Last time we had a family vote. We have six daughters. And my wife, we had a family vote. It was 7-1 against, and I did it anyway. So were now in the middle of further negotiations.

 Dave McCormick, asked this week by the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association if he will compete for the 2024 Republican nomination to challenge U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat. McCormick finished a close second in the 2022 Senate primary to Mehmet Oz.

Clout provides often irreverent news and analysis about people, power, and politics.
President Joe Biden unveils his budget proposal at the Finishing Trades Institute in Northeast Philadelphia on March 9, 2023. Read more

President Joe Biden will return to Philadelphia next Saturday to rally with union members in his first political event since announcing reelection, campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz told The Inquirer.

The rally is set to take place at the Convention Center, with doors opening sometime in the morning, according to a source with knowledge of the event plans.

Biden announced that he and Vice President Kamala Harris would seek reelection in a video released online in April. Since then hes held fundraisers and traveled the country in his official capacity as president, touting the impact of construction projects funded by the infrastructure bill and other achievements from his first term.

The June 17 event, hosted by labor leaders and featuring Biden, will be the presidents first political event since his announcement. Specific logistics were not released.

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The event is characteristic for Biden, who has roots in Scranton and has made frequent visits, both political and personal, to Philadelphia. It also reflects the emphasis his administration has put on labor.

Harris was in Philadelphia on Tuesday to meet with labor leaders from SEIU, which represents service employees in Philadelphia and across the country. The vice president, who heads a White House Task Force on labor, called for increasing wages for care workers and making it easier for workers to organize.

Joe Biden lives, breathes, and cares so deeply about the importance of strengthening and uplifting working people, through strengthening and uplifting labor unions, she said at the event.

Biden has frequently highlighted his ties to and support for labor unions, and has said a number of times that he intends to be the most pro-union president in history. Hes issued executive orders to promote labor agreements and access to unions. In March, the administration announced that the number of federal employees in a union increased by nearly 20% from September 2021 to September 2022. However, Biden was also criticized last December after signing legislation to block a national U.S. railroad strike that could have had a dire impact on the economy.

Support from unions was key to his win in key swing states in the 2020 election.

In March, he broke form and delivered his budget address from a union hall in Northeast Philadelphia instead of from Washington.

Last June, he headlined the AFL-CIO convention in Philadelphia. Youre a gigantic reason why Im standing here, he told the crowd then.

Labor backed him heavily in his 2020 run. The AFL-CIO, SEIU, and the American Federation of Teachers were among some of the big unions who endorsed his first run.

Danny Bauder, president of the Philadelphia Council AFL-CIO, called the citys labor movement a microcosm of the labor movement nationally.

Its a great location to highlight the history of our labor movement collectively.

Bauder said Biden has stayed true to his promise to be a pro-labor president through his appointments to the U.S. Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board. Labor leaders would like to see more people with worker-side labor law experience in the federal courts as well, he said. Those judges are appointed by the president.

The stakes are very high for labor in the 2024 election, Bauder said. Theres still a lot of things we need to fix to make it a more equitable playing field.

Biden based his 2020 election campaign in Philadelphia and spent a lot of time in the state, even as the coronavirus restricted campaign travel. His reelection campaign is expected to be headquartered in Wilmington but will no doubt again run directly through Pennsylvania. The state, which he won by 1.2 percentage points in 2020, will be critical again.

Biden so far has two announced primary opponents: former candidate and author Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., though neither is expected to mount a serious challenge. The DNC has already announced it wont hold debates in the Democratic contest.

The Republican presidential primary field swelled this week, with former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie joining an already crowded field.
A federal court in Miami has unsealed a seven-count indictment of former President Donald Trump and a top aide, with counts including conspiracy to obstruct justice and concealing documents.

The document details allegations against Trump and former White House valet Walt Nauta, who later worked for the former president as a personal aide. The charges in the 38-count indictment allege that Trump illegally retained dozens of classified documents and then engaged in a conspiracy with Nauta to try to cover-up those crimes. The pair are accused of crimes that carry a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.

Trump is scheduled to appear on the charges before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Miami Tuesday afternoon.

Read the indictment below:

The charges, explained

Here is a breakdown of the charges Trump is facing:

31 counts of willful retention of national defense information, a charge that carries a maximum prison term of 10 years and a $250,000 fine. Each of these counts is tied to a specific document containing defense information from the United States and its allies found in Trumps possession. One count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, which carries a maximum prison term of 20 years and a maximum fine of $250,000. This charge alleges Trump worked with Nauta to mislead or corruptly persuade others to withhold documents from the grand jury by allegedly hiding boxes filled with White House materials from his own lawyers and allegedly suggesting to one of the lawyers that he hide or destroy certain documents called for by a grand jury subpoena. One count of withholding a document or record, which carries a maximum punishment of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. This count is also tied to Trumps efforts to mislead his attorneys or persuade them to withhold documents from the grand jury. One count of corruptly concealing a document or record, which carries a maximum punishment of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. This count is tied to the allegation that Trump and Nauta hid boxes containing classified material from one of the former presidents lawyers who had arrived at Mar-a-Lago on June 2, 2022, to search for classified documents requested by the grand jury. One count of concealing a document in a federal investigation, which carries a maximum punishment of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. One count of scheming to conceal, which carries a maximum prison term of five years and a maximum fine of $250,000, tied to Trump and Nautas alleged efforts to trick the grand jury into believing theyd handed over all of the classified documents in the former presidents possession. One count of false statements, which carries a maximum prison term of five years and a maximum fine of $250,000. This count is tied to various false statements Trump is said to have made to the FBI in sworn certifications including that a diligent serach was conducted of boxes removed from the White House, and that all documents sought in a May 11, 2022, grand jury subpoena had been turned over. The charge asserts that Trump knew those statements were false at the time.

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Nauta faces the same counts as the former president, except for the 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information. He faces an additional count of making false statements tied to a May 26 interview with the FBI, in which investigators say he falsely stated he was unaware of efforts to move various boxes at Mar-a-Lago that were later found to contain classified documents.

How much prison time could Trump face?

Should Trump be convicted on each of the 37 counts he is facing, the absolute maximum punishment he could face under the law is 400 years in prison and $9.5 million fines.

But it is highly unlikely any sentence he might face would come anywhere near that stiff penalty.

Under federal sentencing law, judges can stack the sentences for crimes so they run consecutively  leading to a much longer prison term than any individual count would carry. But most of the time, federal judges opt instead to set sentences to run concurrently  or at the same time  for the counts on which a defendant is convicted.

In Trumps case, the most serious counts he is facing each carry a maximum prison term of 20 years and a fine of up to $250,000.

Before he would be sentenced, the court would also order what is known as a pre-sentence investigation report that provides a recommended punishment under federal sentencing guidelines that falls within that 20 year maximum.

Those recommendations are determined by factors including a defendants past criminal history, acceptance of responsibility, and other criteria. Judges are not bound by those recommendations but the vast majority of federal sentences imposed fall within the range suggested by federal sentencing guidelines.
Many of Pennsylvanias elected Republicans have spent the last several years trying to distance themselves from former President Donald Trump.

And theyve reacted no differently to news that Trump has been indicted again  this time federally, over allegations that he mishandled classified documents.

Of the 17 members of the U.S. House from Pennsylvania  nine Democrats and eight Republicans  only two Republicans came to Trumps defense. State GOP representatives were similarly quiet about the indictment, which was unsealed Friday afternoon. The states GOP party was also mum. That remained the case even after the indictment was unsealed around 2 p.m. Friday.

News of a second indictment comes as Trump has consistently topped a growing field in the GOP presidential primary but has trailed in most head-to-head matchup polls with President Joe Biden. Some Republicans have soured on Trump in the last year, blaming him in part for midterm losses.

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Running out in front to defend Trump has burned a lot of people many times, said Pennsylvania GOP strategist Chris Nicholas, before the indictment was released. So I think some folks are like  Not again, and theres also always more to the story.

 READ MORE: Donald Trump federal indictment: News, meaning, charges, lawyers

U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser, a central Pennsylvania Republican, accused the U.S. Department of Justice of using a double standard for Trump and Biden, whose aides reported finding classified documents from his time as vice president at his Delaware home and at his former office at the Penn Biden Center last year. Meuser also referenced unsubstantiated claims of corruption about Biden.

Biden kept classified documents for decades, and the enormous evidence of foreign payoffs is mounting  yet he goes uncharged, Meuser tweeted. Now, hes weaponized the DOJ against his leading competitor for the presidency. Its a sad day in America.

U.S. Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, a Western Pennsylvania Republican, echoed Trumps repeated claims that he is the victim of a long-running conspiracy.

The Deep State, Democrats, and Mainstream Media have relentlessly attacked President Trump for the past seven years in a disgraceful effort to stonewall his America First agenda and stop him from making America great, Reschenthaler tweeted. This time is no different.

Business as usual in Harrisburg

In Harrisburg, Republican leaders were much more quiet.

Asked for comment on Trumps latest indictment, a spokesperson for Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland) said Ward is focused on making sure Pennsylvanians know we have their backs by advancing a budget ahead of the June 30 budget deadline.

Other top Republican state lawmakers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Lawrence Tabas, chair of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, did not respond when asked about the indictment and any role it might play in elections this year and next. The party issued no statements and did not respond to a request for comment.

The moment is reminiscent of late March, when a New York grand jury indicted Trump on charges related to a 2016 hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Reschenthaler and Meuser were out with early support then, too, but few other Pennsylvania Republicans issued statements.

Trumps indictment and the 2024 presidential election

How the dual indictments affect Trumps candidacy remains murky. Both allies and critics have said the indictments  unprecedented in American history  could either galvanize Republican voters who see the prosecution as overtly political or offer another reason to those looking for a party reboot to abandon the scandal-prone former president.

Trump is also facing a federal probe of his actions to challenge the 2020 election.

Some of his GOP opponents weighed in.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tweeted. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary [Clinton] or Hunter [Biden]?

 READ MORE: Five things Chris Christies presidential announcement tells us about his campaign

Pence on Friday morning, in an interview on the Hugh Hewitt radio show hours before the indictment was released, called on the U.S. attorney general to unseal it to determine whether this is just the latest incident of weaponization and politicization at the Justice Department, or if its something different.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor who has signaled hell be a more aggressive challenger to Trump, called the facts of the case against Trump devastating, on CNN.

You have a president who, according to the indictment, directed the packing of those boxes in terms of what to take, directed where they should go to Mar-a-lago, directed where they went while they were inside Mar-a-lago Christie told Jake Tapper. The bigger issue for our country is, is this the type of conduct that we want from someone who wants to be president of the United States?

What Democrats are saying

Pennsylvanias Democratic lawmakers in Washington and Harrisburg seized the moment to criticize Trump and Republicans who have backed him.

As Trumps legal problems get worse, the Republican candidates for President will try to distance themselves, State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D., Philadelphia) tweeted. But lets be very clear. They ALL support his radical MAGA agenda. They ALL defended his criminality until it wasnt in their self interest.

U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, a Delaware County Democrat, noted Trumps second chapter in his criminal troubles while calling him disgraced and twice-impeached in a tweet. Scanlon also knocked House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, for criticizing the indictment.

The Speaker calls the indictments unconscionable  what is unconscionable is the alleged criminal conduct, Scanlon tweeted.
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New York Citys reliance on the tactic known as stop and frisk as part of a new initiative to combat gun violence is harming communities of color and running afoul of the law, a court-appointed federal monitor reported this week.

Monitor Mylan Denerstein said the NYPDs Neighborhood Safety Teams  special units deployed in the past 14 months to seize guns in high-crime areas  were engaging in unconstitutional policing by stopping and frisking too many people without justification.

In one police precinct, Denerstein said, only 41 percent of stops, 32 percent of frisks and 26 percent of searches were lawful.

The Neighborhood Safety Teams, a replacement for the anti-crime units that the NYPD disbanded in 2021, operate in 34 areas that account for 80% of the citys violent crime  largely communities of color. Of the people the teams have stopped, Denerstein said, 97% are Black or Hispanic.

A spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams said city officials have serious concerns with Denersteins methodology and that they only learned of her findings after news outlets reported on them.

The spokesperson, Fabien Levy, said shootings have fallen since the Neighborhood Safety Teams were created.

Officers assigned to the units have enhanced training and oversight to ensure we are not only keeping New Yorkers safe, but protecting their civil liberties as well, Levy said, adding that any unconstitutional stop is unacceptable, and we will strive to do better for New Yorkers every day.

Unlawful Searches

Denerstein said she began her review after Adams announced in March 2022 that the NYPD was deploying Neighborhood Safety Teams in some precincts to combat gun violence. Team members, wearing modified uniforms and driving unmarked cars, conduct stops, frisks and searches in their assigned neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, the results are disappointing, Denerstein wrote.

Despite their training and experience, officers assigned to Neighborhood Safety Teams overall appear to be stopping, frisking, and searching individuals at an unsatisfactory level of compliance. Too many people are stopped, frisked, and searched unlawfully.

In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the NYPD had violated the civil rights of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers with stop and frisk, which was part of an effort to get guns and drugs off the street by frequently stopping and searching people on the street.

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled the stops were a form of indirect racial profiling. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, once a champion of the tactic, has since apologized for its use.

Since the ruling, the department claimed a sharp drop in stops, reporting an average of around 11,730 per year from 2016 to 2022, compared with a high of nearly 686,000 stops in 2011.

Black and Hispanic people continue to be the targets of the vast majority of stops, accounting for 89% of all stops in 2022, according to NYPD data compiled by the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The NYPD eliminated its plainclothes anti-crime units in 2021 police amid a nationwide reckoning over police brutality sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.

The disbanded NYPD units, responsible for a disproportionate number of shootings and complaints, were involved in the 2014 death of Eric Garner and have long been criticized for aggressive tactics.

Samah Sisay, a Center for Constitutional Rights lawyer who represented plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led to Scheindlins ruling, said the Neighborhood Safety Teams should also be eliminated.

Anti-crime units rebranded as neighborhood safety teams are not a real solution to creating the safe communities that New Yorkers desire and should be disbanded,  Sisay said. These units are almost exclusively deployed into Black and Latinx communities where they are conducting unlawful stops and engaged in the same racial profiling that New Yorkers have been organizing against for decades.

Photo: A police officer sits in a car near the Brooklyn Bridge, Friday, Dec. 16, 2022, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson)

Related:

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics New York
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Connecticut lawmakers, still grieving the death of a fellow legislator killed in a wrong-way crash in January, have given final legislative approval to a bill that attempts to address the large increase in wrong- way crashes on the states roads.

The bill, which previously passed the House of Representatives, cleared the state Senate unanimously about six months after Rep. Quentin Williams death. It now heads to Democratic Gov. Ned Lamonts desk.

It also comes as wrong-way crashes have become more prevalent and deadly in Connecticut. There were two crashes in 2020, four in 2021, 13 in 2022 resulting in 23 fatalities, and 27 so far in 2023 resulting in 15 deaths, said Democratic Sen. Christine Cohen.

Sadly, we all know this all too well, the pain and anguish that is felt by family and friends and loved ones who lose somebody, she said. We lost a colleague here in January. I know it has shook this chamber, shook the House chamber, all of us to our very core.

Williams, a 39-year-old Democrat from Middletown, died in a wrong-way crash as he returned home from the governors inaugural ball, state police said. The other driver also died.

The bill requires the states Department of Transportation to install wrong-way driving detection and notification systems on at least 120 high-risk highway exit ramps throughout Connecticut. Such systems could include flashing lights that alert drivers when theyre heading in the wrong direction, while also alerting police.

Also under the bill, the University of Connecticut will test the use of directional rumble strips. Theres also a new pilot program involving certain high-risk exit ramps where alerts about a wrong-way driver will appear on electronic highway message boards. Additionally, the bill calls for a wrong-way driver public awareness campaign.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Legislation Personal Auto Connecticut
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A well servicing company that damaged 53 natural gas wells by using a defective chemical during a hydrofracking operation is not entitled to insurance coverage for a $13 million jury verdict because there was no accident, a panel of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday.

The appellate panel reversed a US District Court decision that found American Home Assurance Co. liable under a general liability insurance policy it issued to Superior Well Service. Even though a jury did not use the exact words faulty workmanship in its award, the verdict did say that Superiors failure to act in a workman like manner caused the damage, which means there was no occurrence that triggered coverage, the panel said.

The opinion said under Pennsylvania law, faulty workmanship, such as rendering a substandard service or causing damage by use of an unsuitable product, as was the case here, does not constitute an occurrence when an insurance policy defines an occurrence as an accident.'

In 2007, US Energy Development Corp. contracted with Superior Well Service to use a process known as hydrofracturing to extract natural gas from 97 wells it owned in western New York state. The fracturing, or fracking process involves the use of various chemicals, including liquid emulsions, to stimulate wells so that they produce more gas.

US Energy alleged that Superior used a type of liquid emulsion that was not suitable for its wells. It filed a lawsuit in New York state court alleging that it lost at least $17 million in revenues because its wells did not produce as much natural gas as they should have.

In May 2018, a jury determined that Superior had damaged 53 of US Energys wells and awarded approximately $6.2 million in damages. With interest calculated by the state court, the total award amounted to $13.2 million.

Before the jury returned its verdict, American Home filed a lawsuit seeking a declaration from the US District Court for the District of Western Pennsylvania that there was no coverage for damage to the wells. The insurer cited a 2006 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision that held faulty workmanship is not an occurrence that triggers coverage from an insurance policy that defines occurrence as an accident.

The District Court, however, granted summary judgment in favor of Superior. Judge David S. Cercone noted in his order that the jury did not use the term faulty workmanship in its ruling. Whats more, the judge said an underground resources and equipment coverage endorsement in the liability policy superseded or expanded the definition of occurrence and provided coverage even if Superiors own failure to perform the contract in a workman like manner caused the damage.

The appellate panel didnt see it that way. The panel said an endorsement can supersede other policy language only if it conflicts with that language. There was nothing in the endorsement that conflicted with the occurrence requirement, the opinion says.

The opinion says the Pennsylvania Supreme Courts ruling established that poor workmanship is too forseeable to be considered an accident.

The phrases faulty workmanship and failure to perform in a workman like manner are equivalent in this respect, the opinion says.

The 3rd Circuit panel reversed the District Court and remanded the case with instructions to enter judgment in favor of American Home.

Topics Carriers Pennsylvania
Denis Kessler, 71, non-executive chairman of SCOR and the reinsurers former chief executive, died Friday, the company said.

Over the past two decades, Denis Kessler has been the architect behind SCORs success and reputation throughout the world, said Thierry Leger, CEO of SCOR. His passion for reinsurance was unparalleled, and his ambition to make SCOR an industry leader never left him. It has been the driving force behind all his actions at the head of the group over the past 21 years.

I am privileged to have had the opportunity to work alongside Denis. He leaves us an extraordinary legacy. It is now up to us to carry on his work. The strong foundations on which he rebuilt the group enable us to look to the future with total confidence.

Kessler joined SCOR as its chairman and CEO on Nov. 4, 2022 and is credited by the company with turning the group around, enabling it to become a leading global reinsurer.

SCOR said vice-chairman Augustin de Romanet will chair the board for an interim period, until a new chairman is appointed.

A member of the Institut de France, Kessler was a man of culture, firmly committed to the spread and transfer of knowledge. His own breadth of knowledge ranged from economics to philosophy, literature and music, SCOR said.

Kessler Biography

Denis Kessler was born on March 25, 1952, in Mulhouse, in Frances Haut-Rhin region. After completing his secondary education at the Albert Schweitzer high school in Mulhouse and then the Kleber high school in Strasbourg, he began studying at HEC Paris in 1973, graduating in 1976. Following his studies, he joined the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) as a research associate (1976-1977). Having obtained his agregation in social sciences, he taught for a year in secondary school (1977-1978). He then embarked on a career as an economics researcher, working from 1978 to 1985 as an assistant lecturer in economics at Paris X-Nanterre University. He chaired CEREPI, the Center for Study and Research on Savings, Wealth and Inequalities, from 1982 to 1990. In 1985, he became a research fellow at CNRS. Obtaining advanced degrees in economics and social sciences in 1988, he was made a professor at the University of Nancy II in the same year. In 1990, he became a professor at EHESS, the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. From 1984 onwards, he was a member of the National Accounts Commission. He chaired the Foundation for Economic and Financial Research from 1985 to 1992.

In 1983, he was appointed to the Board of Directors of UAP (Union des assurances de Paris). He sat on the board until 1986, and again from 1988 to 1990. In 1985, he was appointed Chairman of the Banking Services Users Committee at the French National Credit Council, remaining in the post until 1990. In the same year, he became Chairman of the French Federation of Insurance Companies (FFSA), a position he held until 1997, and then again from 1998 to 2002. He then joined the Executive Committee of the National Council of French Employers (CNPF), becoming its Executive Vice-Chairman under Jean Gandois in 1994, as well as Vice-Chairman and Chairman of the Economic Commission. Appointed Senior Executive Vice-President and Executive Committee Member of AXA in 1997, he left this position to support the Chairman of the CNPF, Ernest-Antoine Seilliere. He was First Executive Vice-Chairman of the Mouvement des Entreprises de France, or the MEDEF (ex-CNPF), from 1999 to 2002. In 2002, he left the MEDEF to become Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the SCOR group, turning it in just a few years into one of the reinsurance industrys leading players.

Denis Kessler was a member of Frances Economic, Social and Environmental Council (ESEC) from 1993 to 2010.

He was a board member of several companies: Dexia (1999-2009), Bollore (1999-2013), BNP Paribas (2000-2022), Invesco (since 2002) and Dassault Aviation (2003-2014). He also joined Dassaults Committee of Wise Men in 2013.

(provided by SCOR)
Insify, an insurtech for SMEs, has raised an additional 10 million, bringing its total Series A funding to 25 million.

Munich Re Ventures led the extension round and was joined by existing investors including global venture fund Accel  who led Insifys Series A  Frontline Ventures and Berlins Visionaries Club, as well as new investors including Formula 1 World Champion Nico Rosberg and Opera Tech Ventures, the VC arm of BNP Paribas Group. The fresh funding will be used to continue expanding Insifys suite of products while expanding into additional European markets.

Insify, founded in 2020 by former Bloomon and Rocket Internet executive Koen Thijssen, allows SMEs to receive a business insurance quote in as little as two minutes, rather than weeks or months.

The companys innovative platform utilises enhanced data analytics drawing on dozens of signals, as opposed to stale questionnaires, to ensure that coverage is tailored and individually priced for each business. Policies are refreshed regularly through automated checks and underwriting, evolving as SMEs themselves scale.

Since raising a 15 million Series A funding round in 2022, the Amsterdam-headquartered startup has grown its customer base from 1,500 to over 10,000, expanded into France and Germany, and launched its own disability insurance product in the Netherlands.

Insify will use the capital injection primarily to expand further across the continent, with an initial focus on doubling down in Germany and France. The company will also use the additional funding to further develop and consolidate its suite of insurance products and to grow its team of 55 employees.

SOURCE: Insify

Topics Funding
The UK is drawing up a war-risk insurance scheme that it hopes will convince investment companies as well as tech, energy and defense firms to back Ukraines reconstruction with billions in aid, people familiar with the plans said.

Britain is hosting a Ukraine Recovery Conference in London on June 21-22, aiming to secure the backing of world leaders and executives for proposals to fund the rebuilding of the country after the war. Discussions between the UK and Ukraines allies in the run-up to the meeting have focused on how to encourage investment by getting governments to take on the cost of war risk insurance, the people said.

The Russian invasion, in its 16th month, has devastated Ukraines infrastructure, strangled the nations export economy and killed or displaced millions of people. This week a dam breach triggered catastrophic flooding just as authorities in Kyiv were turning to a counteroffensive to retake Russias territorial gains.

The danger of war damage, as well as longer-term political and economic instability, have seen the costs of insuring investments in Ukraine shoot up, often pricing out both investors and private insurers. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has called on allies to come up with a mechanism to underwrite investment.

The World Bank has estimated the cost of reconstruction for Ukraine will be some $411 billion, with $14 billion needed for critical spending in 2023. That figure may climb after intensified fighting and dam break this week.

The UK wants to demonstrate progress on an insurance scheme this month, the people familiar said. While governments are likely to pledge some new direct financing for Ukraine, private investments underwritten by governments would be a cheaper way to raise additional funds.

Efforts are also underway to lobby countries that are not directly aligned with Ukraine to help with reconstruction. The UK is trying to convince Saudi Arabia and Turkey to take part in the conference, according to the people, believing that would represent a diplomatic win and send a message to Moscow.

Saudi Arabia hasnt joined the west in imposing sanctions on Russia, though Zelenskiy attended an Arab summit in the nation in May as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attempts to make the country a major diplomatic power. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to be a mediator for peace in Ukraine, though has also stayed out of the sanctions push.

Japan is keen to play a significant role in terms of both financing and technical expertise following its own natural disasters, especially given its lack of military donations, another person familiar said.

However, it hasnt been easy to secure concrete commitments or financial pledges for the conference, with officials working down to the wire to convince other governments and private companies to take part, the people familiar added.

Britains Foreign Office didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

Britain wants private-sector firms to sign a business compact agreeing to invest in Ukraine, although it will likely stop short of each signatory making a definitive cash commitment, the people said.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has signaled it is planning to boost capital for Ukraine by as much as 5 billion ($5.4 billion) by the end of this year.

With assistance from Daryna Krasnolutska.

Copyright 2023 Bloomberg.

Topics Ukraine
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)  Thousands of dollars raised by a charity that falsely claimed it would help residents affected by a train derailment on the Ohio- Pennsylvania border earlier this year will be turned over to a food bank serving the area, Ohios attorney general announced Wednesday.

The Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine spilled hazardous chemicals into nearby creeks and rivers. It led to the evacuation of half of the 5,000 residents when responders intentionally burned toxic chemicals in some of the derailed cars from the Norfolk Southern train to prevent an uncontrolled explosion.

Following the accident, authorities say the Ohio Clean Water Fund sent text messages to solicit contributions, claiming it had partnered with the Second Harvest Food Bank of the Mahoning Valley to collect donations for bottled water. The charity raised $141,000 from roughly 3,200 donors, but eventually spent more than $100,000 on fees and gave just $10,000 to the food bank.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said food bank representatives complained to his office, saying they had not authorized a partnership with the charitys founder, Mike Peppel. Yosts office filed a lawsuit in April against Peppel and the charity.

The agreement calls for the charity to dissolve and pay more than $131,000 in restitution and civil penalties. Roughly $117,000 of that amount will go to the food bank for bottled water and other emergency aid for East Palestine, while the $15,000 civil penalty will go into the attorney generals charitable law fund.

The lawsuit against Peppel is still ongoing, authorities said. Peppels lawyer has previously declined to comment on the litigation.

Peppel is a former congressional and state legislative staffer for some area lawmakers.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Claims Ohio
LANSING, Mich. (AP)  Michigan lawmakers introduced bipartisan legislation Tuesday that would give victims of sexual abuse more time to sue for damages as the state again looks to overhaul laws following multiple sexual abuse scandals.

The legislation, which appeared before a committee Tuesday afternoon, would expand the civil statute of limitations for sex abuse victims from age 28 to 52. If enacted, victims would also have a two-year window to sue retroactively, regardless of the time limit.

The new measures would allow victims of the late Dr. Robert Anderson at the University of Michigan and others additional time to bring lawsuits that have previously been barred by the statute of limitations. Government entities could not use the immunity defense if they knew or should have known of an accuseds prior sexual misconduct and failed to intervene.

In 2018, Michigan increased the statute of limitations to 28 years old following the conviction of Larry Nassar, who sexually abused hundreds of female athletes under the guise of medical treatment, including at Michigan State University.

Advocates say the time limit still denies delayed justice for many victims who often keep trauma to themselves, citing research that shows many victims dont come forward until their 50s. Vermont, Maine and Maryland have removed the statute of limitations for child sex crime lawsuits.

Much of the reform began after reports across the U.S. of abuse dating back decades by Roman Catholic clergy. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel opened an investigation into sexual abuse by clergy in the Roman Catholic Church in 2019, which has resulted in eight criminal convictions to date.

Greg DAlessandro and Brian Hurtekant spoke publicly for the first time Monday with The Associated Press about abuse they had suffered decades before at the hands of Catholic priests. Both men have been unable to bring civil lawsuits because of Michigans statute of limitations.

DAlessandro, who is now 45 years old, has accused two priests of sexually abusing him between the age of 9 and 13 while he was a student in metro Detroit. DAlessandro said he had repressed memories of the abuse for years and only recently, through hours of therapy, began to understand what happened to him as a child.

If its not the worst thing that one human being can do to another, especially a child in the name of God, then I dont know what is, DAlessandro said in a phone interview.

Both priests, Lawrence Ventline and Timothy Szott, have been identified by the Archdiocese of Detroit as having been credibly accused. Szott, who was sentenced to 18 months probation after pleading no contest to possession of child pornography in 2003, is now deceased.

Ventlines educationally limited counselors license was revoked by a state board in 2019. But Nessel said at the time that the statute of limitations bars us from prosecuting Mr. Ventline for any crimes we believe he may have committed. 

The Associated Press was unable to reach Ventline for comment about the allegations.

Hurtekant, who is now 56, said his abuse began at the age of 13 following the death of his brother. The priest, James Martin Novak, had overseen his brothers funeral and acted as his therapist as he processed the grief. The sexual abuse began in the sixth grade and continued until the ninth grade, Hurtekant said.

In 2019, the St. Therese Church in Lansing published a list of 17 priests, including Novak, who had been credibly accused of abusing minors. There were 73 allegations against the priests. Novak could not be reached for comment by the AP.

We were children that were raised in sexual abuse, Hurtekant said. We deserve our day in court and for justice to be served.

The House committee did not vote on the package Tuesday after several Democratic lawmakers expressed a desire to amend the legislation to completely eliminate the civil statute of limitations. Jamie White, an attorney representing Hurtekant and DAlessandro, said they hope to continuing working with lawmakers to make the change.

The package would also create a Survivors Bill of Rights, that would, among other things, require that survivors are informed of their right to access advocates, attorneys, counselors and other supports as they navigate through the reporting process.

This will be the third time the legislation is introduced in the Michigan Legislature but the first since Democrats took full control of the Legislature and governors office this year.

Pushback has previously come from universities, schools, municipalities, businesses and the Catholic Church over the financial implications of facing an unknown number of lawsuits for old allegations.

In a statement provided to the AP, the Michigan Catholic Conference, the churchs voice in the state for public policy, said it opposed the legislation, explaining it would unjustly require public and private entities to defend claims from many decades past.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Legislation Michigan
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A significant number of Americans ages 44 and younger show a high level of tolerance for insurance fraud, according to a new survey of insurance consumers by Verisk and the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud.

The accompanying study found that while nearly all Americans over age 55 view insurance fraud as a crime, about 75% of those between 25 and 44 consider it a crime  and the percentage skewed down to 64% for those between ages 18 and 24.

This study should sound the alarm for insurers, consumer activists, regulators, and legislators on the state of fraud in America, said Matthew Smith, executive director of the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud. While its marginally reassuring that 84% of Americans in the survey consider insurance fraud a crime, the 16% that do not consider it a crime potentially represent more than 53 million Americans.

The study collected more than 1,500 responses from a group of insurance-purchasing consumers matching the demographic standards identified in the 2020 U.S. Census. It analyzes how American policy purchasers view insurance fraud and insurance crime. The study also explores the psychology of insurance fraud through in-depth interviews with those convicted of insurance fraud to understand their motivations and justifications.

The authors note that in recent years, insurers have increasingly cut, outsourced and paired down their anti-fraud efforts  making the information especially timely. The spread between attitudes and acceptance of fraud by those under age 45 should be a warning call that such actions, if they continue, may cause great peril and harm in the ability to effectively fight insurance fraud in the decades ahead, the study reads.

Notable findings include:

Over 30% of 25-34-year-olds definitely would submit a fraudulent property damage claim.

About 27% of those ages 18-24 would commit workers compensation fraud, compared to less than 10% of those 45 and older.

Over a quarter of those 18-34 are motivated to commit insurance fraud compared to less than 7% of those over 45.

Key Finding

Above any other piece of individual or collective data in this study, we learned a clear line of demarcation exists in our nation between older and younger Americans in how they perceive insurance fraud, the study reads.

About 96% of those surveyed who are older than 65 consider insurance fraud to be a crime. That number was about 95% for those between the ages of 55-64 and about 88% for those ages 45-54.

The apparently most honest of policyholders (ages 55 and above) in future decades will continue to be a decreasing percentage of our population and our collective anti-fraud conscience. In their place will be those respondents who appear quite eager to be willing participants in the commission of insurance crimes, even when it requires implicating their employers or colluding with their doctors, the study reads.

Nearly 20% of survey respondents between the ages of 18 and 24 justified insurance fraud because they believe insurance companies rip people off, so its fair.

The full study includes graphs, deep data exploration and detailed case studies. It can be downloaded from insurancefraud.org.

The results prove the continued need for insurers to be hypervigilant about the impact of fraud on their book of business, said Maroun Mourad, president of Verisk Claims Solutions. The fact that younger generations are more tolerant and motivated to commit claims fraud indicates that this problem is not going away and is likely to persist in the future. Carriers would be wise to set up a strong perimeter defense to ensure they are adequately and accurately detecting potential fraud throughout the policy life cycle.

Topics Trends Fraud
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The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday narrowed when identity theft can be included as part of federal criminal charges.

In the case (Dubin v. U.S.), the high court found that not every use of anothers identification means there has been an identity theft crime; rather the use of the false identification must be central to the underlying criminal activity.

The court heavily criticized the government for its sweeping and implausible interpretation of the law that it said would automatically attach aggravated ID theft charges to ordinary billing or payment fraud cases.

The ruling is important because the ID theft law adds a two-year mandatory prison sentence onto underlying offenses that do not impose a mandatory prison sentence of any kind. Sentencing judges may not consider the severity of the offense, even if the amount of money involved is quite small or there are other mitigating factors.

David Dubin was convicted under the federal healthcare fraud law for overbilling Medicaid for psychological testing performed by the Texas company he helped manage. The question before the court was whether, in defrauding Medicaid, he also committed aggravated identity theft under the federal identify theft law, 1028A(a)(1). This ID theft law applies and increases prison time if someone during and in relation to any predicate offense, such as healthcare fraud, knowingly transfers, possesses, or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person.

The government argued that the ID theft law was automatically satisfied because Dubins fraudulent Medicaid billing included the patients Medicaid reimbursement numbera means of identification. The District Court allowed Dubins conviction for aggravated identity theft to stand, even though, in the District Courts view, the crux of the case was fraudulent billing, not identity theft.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district courts ruling in a fractured decision, with five concurring judges acknowledging that under the governments reading of the law, the elements of the offense are not captured or even fairly described by the words identity theft. 

This case turned on the scope of two of the ID theft laws elements: Dubin was convicted for using a patients means of identification in relation to healthcare fraud. In the governments view, a defendant uses a means of identification in relation to an offense if the defendant employs that means of identification to facilitate or further the underlying offense in some way.

But the high court objected to that broad interpretation. Instead it held that someone uses another persons means of identification in relation to another offense when the use is at the crux of what makes the conduct criminal.

Otherwise, following the governments reading, aggravated ID theft would apply automatically any time a name or other means of identification happens to be part of the payment or billing method used in the commission of a long list of predicate offenses. The court backed a more targeted reading requiring that the use of a means of identification have a genuine nexus to the other offense.

When the underlying crime involves fraud or deceit, as many do, this entails using a means of identification specifically in a fraudulent or deceitful manner, not as a mere ancillary feature of a payment or billing method, the court explained.

Dubins use of the patients name was not at the crux of what made the underlying overbilling fraudulent, the court stated. The crux of the healthcare fraud was a misrepresentation about the qualifications of petitioners employee. The patients name was an ancillary feature of the billing method employed.

The court criticized the staggering breadth of the governments understanding of identity theft. It noted that it has traditionally exercised restraint in assessing the reach of a federal criminal statute but the opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor showed little restraint in dismissing the governments position:

The Governments reading would sweep in the hour-inflating lawyer, the steak-switching waiter, the building contractor who tacks an extra $10 onto the price of the paint he purchased. So long as they used various common billing methods, they would all be subject to a mandatory two years in federal prison. To say that such a result is implausible would be an understatement.

The court noted that this type of prosecution is not uncommon. The government has, by its own admission, targeted with identity theft a defendant who made a counterfeit handgun permit for another person; unlicensed doctors who issued prescriptions that their actual patients would then fill at pharmacies; and a defendant who provided massage services to patients to treat their pain, but improperly billed this as a Medicare-eligible physical therapy service.

While the government promised that prosecutors would act responsibly in charging defendants under its sweeping reading, the court said it cannot construe a criminal statute on the assumption that the government will use it responsibly.

Chief Justice John Roberts and six other justices joined in Sotomayors opinion; Justice Neil Gorsuch filed a concurring opinion.

Topics Fraud
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A new scientific assessment of government commitments to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions found most lack credibility and would put the world on track to experience catastrophic global warming by the end of this century.

About 90% of net-zero plans by a group of about three dozen countries are unlikely to be achieved, with confidence levels of lower or much lower, according to a study published Thursday in Science. Among the laggards are India, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates, host of the upcoming United Nations climate summit. The worlds top two emitters, China and the US, ranked in the lower category.

Achieving net zero is difficult, but just looking at the near term and taking the first steps is not enough, said Joeri Rogelj, the papers lead author and a professor of climate science at Imperial College London. The hard steps in the long run need to be planned for today.

Only New Zealand, the European Union and the UK ranked in the higher confidence category, and big challenges remain despite better progress towards net zero. While Europes energy sector has gone a long way to reduce its emissions, carbon pollution has been more stubborn in the agricultural and industrial sectors.

Greenhouse gases emitted by human activities have caused the planet to warm by about 1.2C since pre-industrial times, altering weather patterns and intensifying deadly events like heat waves, wildfires and cyclones. Global temperatures will increase anywhere between 1.7C and 3C by 2100, depending on the level of emissions over the next few years, according to the study. Even the lower end of that range exceeds the 1.5C of warming that global leaders agreed to strive for when they committed to the Paris Agreement in 2015.

To assess countries emission-reduction goals, also known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, the researchers looked at whether they were legally binding, whether they had laid out credible policies for implementation and whether the countries near-term emissions are trending downwards. In most cases they found a gap.

For the lowest-ranking countries, Rogelj said that after they made a pledge or a promise, theres very little evidence on the ground that this translated into action.

Rogelj focused on the bottom-tier ranking of the UAE because of its crucial role as host of COP28, where every nation is expected to participate in a global stocktake on efforts to curb emissions. The countrys plan was given the lowest score because its target isnt legally binding, theres no policy plan to implement it and theres no indication that the countrys emissions are declining, the researchers wrote. The UAEs net-zero plan also doesnt clarify which greenhouse gases its target covers.

The UAE is planning to announce an updated, more ambitious NDC before the COP28 summit in Dubai, according to a spokesperson for the countrys Ministry of Climate Change and Environment. Representatives for COP28 did not reply to a request for comment.

A COP presidency, while hosted by a government, is expected to take a neutral stance during negotiations. Yet past COP presidencies have used an ambitious NDC from their host government as an example to showcase how to set credible targets, said Rogelj, and the fact that the UAE scores so low puts a very low credibility mark on their presidency as a whole.

Scientists ran projections of future temperature increases with and without policy changes. Under the most conservative scenario, which considers only policies that have been implemented and not pledges, global average temperatures would rise between 1.7C and 3C by the end of the century. Under the most optimistic scenario, where all country promises materialize, temperatures would rise between 1.6C and 2.1C.

But the window of achieving those goals is getting tighter. In a separate study also published on Thursday, Rogelj and his colleagues found that the carbon budget  the amount of carbon dioxide that can be dumped in the atmosphere without breaching temperature targets  is shrinking faster that previously thought. The updated numbers show that, if emissions continue at the current rate, the world will exhaust its budget for 1.5C before 2030. That means countries now need to make even steeper emissions cuts this decade if they want to avoid the worst impacts.

Every 0.1C of global warming matters. But scientists consider any warming above 2C to be disastrous for human life and the environment. Even below that threshold, some ecosystems will change irreversibly, altering natural resources and challenging human survival in many parts of the world.

Its not only that whatever we do now is not fast enough, Rogelj said. But that in some cases its hard to see any progress at all after pledges have been put forward, and thats really worrying.

Photo: Solar panels at the Cascadilla Community Solar Farm, owned by Cornell University, in Dryden, New York. (Bloomberg)

Copyright 2023 Bloomberg.
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New Farmers Group CEO Raul Vargas has reversed a prior company decision to allow most workers to do their jobs from home by instituting a hybrid work scheduling starting in September.

Despite some employees reportedly making major life changes  such as selling homes and relocating  after being told they could do their jobs from home, Vargas told employees theyd have to come to the office several days a week. The shift in thinking made national news, with the Wall Street Journal quoting outraged employees on company message boards.

Vargas took over as CEO at the start of the year after being promoted in October 2022.

As business conditions  such as emerging from the pandemic  change, so must business approaches, Carly Kraft, spokesperson for Los Angeles-based Farmers, said in an email to Insurance Journal.

Kraft said employees within 50-miles of a Farmers office must come in to work at least three day pers week.

Our intent is to foster greater collaboration, creativity, and innovation while also providing better opportunities for learning, training, mentoring, career development and organic interaction, Kraft said. Based on business need and different types of positions, roughly 60% of Farmers employees will be hybrid, while other roles will be either virtual or in-office.

Kraft said virtual work made sense during the pandemic but adopting a hybrid approach in September 2023 is what makes sense for our organization now.

While many employees are excited about the opportunities ahead, we recognize that not all business decisions will be supported by all employees, she added. However, we have approached this with a great deal of thoughtfulness, including giving employees three months advance notice so they have time to adjust and make arrangements.

According to data from Scoop Technologies, a software firm that said it has developed what it calls the Flex Index to monitor workplace strategies of thousands of companies, 52% of insurance companies mandated hybrid arrangements in May, up from 34% in February.

Topics Agribusiness
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The SECs new lawsuit against Coinbase Global Inc. appears best positioned among cryptocurrency cases to let the US Supreme Court finally decide if digital assets count as securities.

The crypto tokens traded by Coinbase users should be treated as unregistered securities, the US Securities and Exchange Commission said in the suit filed June 6 in federal court in New York. The importance of that issue, combined with the cases big actors and relatively clear-cut facts, makes it more likely to reach the nations high court than similar lawsuits against peers like Binance Holdings Ltd. and Ripple Labs Inc.

It goes to the heart of the nations market structure and our system of traditional finance, said Michael Pierson, managing partner of the global corporate practice at FisherBroyles LLP in New York.

The legal question could unlock the door to broad federal enforcement of the crypto industry under securities laws. Coinbase shares fell 12% on the day the SEC filed its lawsuit.

The SEC charged Coinbase with two big violations, selling unregistered securities and operating an unregistered exchange, according to professor Erik Gordon of the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

But youre only running an exchange if it deals in securities, he said. That will be the issue for the Supreme Court.

Coinbase is willing to take its legal fight with the SEC all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary, the company said on the day the lawsuit was filed.

Is This The One?

The Coinbase suit is uniquely well positioned among crypto lawsuits to reach the Supreme Court, BTIG analyst Isaac Boltansky said in a note on Tuesday.

Gordon agreed that SEC v. Coinbase Inc.is the one that looks most likely to go all the way up because some of the other cases were brought by state authorities or private parties.

Those arent as likely to go up the chain as one brought by the SECwhich is the preeminent securities regulator in the US, he said. The facts arent particularly disputed and theres nothing atypical about Coinbases assets, making it a good case for the justices, he said.

The Supreme Court prefers to take a case with broad applicability, Gordon said.

The SEC accuses Coinbase of operating an exchange while acting as a broker and as a clearing agency, three functions that are traditionally separated, said FisherBroyles Pierson.

Therefore, this could be a perfect case to consider the myriad issues related to market structure for digital assets, because it encapsulates all the issues that would have to be considered under the federal securities laws, he said.

Choosing a Hard or Interesting Case

Other securities experts see room for the justices to choose a different case.

The question of what is and what isnt a security is fundamental so I would think the Supreme Court would look for an opportunity to weigh in, said Kevin OBrien of Ford OBrien Landy LLP in New York, whos a former federal prosecutor.

But the court may prefer a case that more fully tests the limits of what constitutes a security in order to illustrate the exact boundary, he said.

Kiran Nasir Gore, who practices in Washington as a litigator and arbitrator working in crypto and is a lecturer at GW Law at George Washington University, said the high court might want a case with fraud allegations.

While other commentators have said that Coinbase is the best case for Supreme Court review, the Binance case is a little more interesting, she said. It includes allegations of bad actions, diverting customer funds, improperly commingling assets, failing to restrict U.S. customers from its platform, and misleading customers about its controls.

The SEC thrives on ferreting out these kinds of bad acts, and of course the policy reasoning is that this protects investors and the industry as a whole, she said. If were in a scenario where theres allegations of misconduct, then that truly gets to the heart of the activities the SEC is designed to protect investors from.

Time for Clarity

Attorneys said theres a need for the Supreme Court to weigh in.

The justices could apply a 1946 test, formulated in SEC v. W. J. Howey Co., or it could rewrite it entirely, attorneys say. Under Howey, an investment contractwhich would be considered a securityexists if theres an investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.

The lack of regulatory clarity is the real issue, Gore said. If the crypto industry is to have longevity and stability, the regulatory framework needs to be laid out. The industry isnt going away, its here to stay.

The question is, how does that regulatory framework get jump-started? From the SECs perspective, lawsuits can be an effective tool, she said.

OBrien said the Supreme Court could provide that guidance.

Its time for a new set of guidelines or standards or rules from the Supreme Court about what is and what is not a security, maybe with specific reference to the characteristics of this industry which are different than anything weve seen before, he said. Its a whole new world.

The case is SEC v. Coinbase Inc., S.D.N.Y., No. 1:23-cv-04738, complaint 6/6/23.

Photo: Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg

Copyright 2023 Bloomberg.

Topics Lawsuits New York
The New Orleans Steamboat Company (NOSC) was charged on May 26, 2023 with violating the Clean Water Act (CWA) in connection with a discharge of excess ballast material into the Industrial Canal in New Orleans in 2019, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office, Eastern District of Louisiana.

According to the bill of information, NOSC negligently discharged, without the knowledge of the Board of Directors, and caused to be discharged a quantity of a substance into a navigable water of the United States, upon adjoining shorelines, and affecting the United States natural resources. The discharge took place on or around February 12, 2019, in the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal (IHNC), more commonly known as the Industrial Canal.

An employee of NOSC, Matt Dow, was charged with a misdemeanor violation of the CWA, punishable by up to one year in jail and $100,000 fine.

If convicted, NOSC faces a possible term of probation and a fine of up to $50,000 or twice the gross gain to the defendant or twice the gross loss to any victim as well as a mandatory $100 special assessment fee. A bill of information is merely a charge, and the guilt of the defendant must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Source: Eastern District of Louisiana
EW ORLEANS (AP)  The oxygen-depleted dead zone that forms each year in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana and Texas is forecast to cover about 4,155 square miles (10,761 square kilometers) this year.

Thats about 1,200 square miles (3,107 square kilometers) smaller than the average during the 36-year history of dead zone measurements in the Gulf, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Monday, but still more than twice as large as the long-term hypoxia-reduction goal set by a federal- state task force.

This years forecast would be about 1,000 square miles (2,589 square kilometers) larger than what was actually measured last year.

Scientists from Louisiana State University, the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, NOAA and other universities will travel along the coasts of Louisiana and Texas during the last week of July and first week of August to see if the estimate holds up.

But LSU marine biologist Nancy Rabalais, who has overseen the dead zone mapping cruises since they began in 1985, said theres a good chance the estimate could be high for a second straight year. The reason: Less rainfall in the Midwest is expected to again keep the flow of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers freshwater below normal levels well into the summer, The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate reported.

And while less river water means less nutrients that cause the dead zone, the low river flows are also likely to disrupt the process that causes the low- oxygen conditions.

The Gulf dead zone is largely created by urban and agricultural runoff and discharges of nitrogen and phosphorus to the Mississippi River, which drains 41% of the continental United States. In the Gulf, the nutrients feed an overgrowth of algae, which die and sink to the bottom, using up oxygen from the ocean floor as they decompose. Fish, shrimp and crabs can swim away. Animals that are slower or fixed to the bottom cannot.

But Rabalais said the smaller flow of freshwater this year means theres a good chance more oxygen will mix from the atmosphere through the thinner freshwater layer into the lower, saltier water, meaning less hypoxia.

This is the sixth year NOAA has produced its own dead zone forecast, using models jointly developed by the agency and by researchers at LSU, University of Michigan, the College of William and Marys Virginia Institute of Marine Science, North Carolina State University and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

If this years estimate is accurate, the dead zone would still be more than two times bigger than a goal set by a task force of federal agencies and states along the river to reduce its size to a five-year average of no more than 1,900 square miles (4.920 square kilometers) by 2035.

In 2001, the task force called for that goal to be met by 2015. But by 2016, it was clear that efforts to get Midwest farmers to reduce their fertilizer use was not working, and the task force pushed the goal date back to 2035. It also added a new goal to reduce the amount of phosphorus and nitrates in the river by 20% by 2025.

The action plan to reduce the size of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone has been in place for over two decades, but each year the size of the dead zone varies around the long-term average (of 5,364 square miles). That average is almost three times the goal set in 2001, said Don Scavia, a University of Michigan professor of environment and sustainability who leads one of several research teams partnering with the federal government on the annual forecast.

But Scavia said reductions in nutrients identified by United States Geological Survey in May also dont represent long-term reductions in total nutrients carried by the river year-round, as called for in the task force goals. And critics of the present voluntary system of projects aimed at reducing fertilizer use argue that only a move to set federal limits on nutrients in runoff from farmland will result in long-term reductions in the Mississippi River.

Still, federal officials remain hopeful that present efforts to install nutrient- reduction projects in the Midwest and elsewhere along the river will succeed, especially with recent funding made available by Congress.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Louisiana Mississippi Mexico
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A divided Alabama Supreme Court on Friday declined to lift a preliminary injunction blocking construction of a new coastal bridge.

Justices in a 5-3 decision declined the emergency request from the Alabama Department of Transportation to lift the injunction halting construction of a new bridge across the Intracoastal Waterway. The decision will leave the injunction in place as the legal fight goes forward over the project.

While we are disappointed the Court has left the halt to construction in place for now, we are optimistic that the final ruling on our appeal will be in favor of building the new, free bridge, Transportation Department spokesman Tony Harris said in a statement.

Montgomery Circuit Judge Jimmy Pool, siding with toll bridge operators that challenged the construction, last month issued a preliminary injunction ordering a halt to construction of the project.

Baldwin County Bridge Company, which operates the existing toll bridge to Gulf beaches, filed a lawsuit seeking to block construction of the new bridge that would be located just over 1 mile away from its existing toll bridge. The company argued that Transportation Director John Cooper acted in bad faith during negotiations on toll amounts and other operational changes, then pursued the new bridge project to financially damage the company.

Director Coopers outrageous conduct in embarking on spending more than $120 million of State funds, on a bridge that ALDOT does not need, for the purpose of putting a private company out of business shocks the conscience of the Court, Pool wrote.

Cooper had testified that the new bridge was needed to alleviate traffic congestion and give motorists a new route to state beaches.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Alabama
Kilauea, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, began erupting on Wednesday after a three-month pause, displaying spectacular fountains of mesmerizing, glowing lava thats a safe distance from people and structures in a national park on the Big Island.

A glow was detected in webcam images from Kilaueas summit early in the morning, indicating that an eruption was occurring within the Halemaumau crater in the summit caldera, the U.S. Geological Surveys Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said.

The images show fissures at the base of the crater generating lava flows on the crater floors surface, the observatory said.

Before issuing the eruption notice, the observatory said increased earthquake activity and changes in the patterns of ground deformation at the summit started Tuesday night, indicating the movement of magma in the subsurface.

Were not seeing any signs of activity out on the rift zones right now, said Mike Zoeller, a geologist with the observatory. Theres no reason to expect this to transition into a rift eruption that would threaten any communities here on the island with lava flows or anything like that.

All activity was within a closed area of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

The lava this morning is all confined within  the summit caldera. So plenty of room for it still to produce more without threatening any homes or infrastructure, said park spokesperson Jessica Ferracane. So thats the way we like our eruptions here.

She said park officials are bracing for crowds to arrive because visitors can see the eruption from many overlooks.

Kilauea overlook was spectacular this morning, she said of the vast lava lake. It was molten red lava. Theres several areas of pretty robust fountaining. Its just really, really pretty.

The lava lake, covering the crater floor over lava that remained from previous eruptions, measured about 371 acres (150 hectares) at about 6 a.m., Zoeller said. It measured about 4,300 feet wide.

Word was getting out and parking lots were starting to fill up at the park, Ferracane said, adding that she expected long lines getting into the park by evening.

Since the park is open 24 hours a day, visitors can beat the crowds by visiting between 9 p.m. and sunrise, Ferracane said.

She reminded visitors to stay out of closed areas and remain on marked trails for safety reasons, including avoiding gases from the eruption.

Two small earthquakes jolted Janice Wei awake. As a volunteer photographer for the park who lives in the nearby town of Volcano, she was able to see fountains she estimated to be 150 feet (46 meters) high at around 4:30 a.m.

She said she saw about 15 fountains, which were dying down by mid-morning.

The red bursts could be seen on the USGS livestream Wednesday afternoon.

The volcanos alert level was raised to warning status and the aviation color code went to red as scientists evaluate the eruption and associated hazards.

Kilauea, Hawaiis second largest volcano, erupted from September 2021 until last December. For about two weeks in December, Hawaiis biggest volcano, Mauna Loa, also was erupting on Hawaiis Big Island.

After a short pause, Kilauea began erupting again in January. That eruption lasted for 61 days, ending in March.

This eruption is looking very similar, Zoeller said: This eruption is following a very similar playbook to the last three that weve seen here since 2020.

A 2018 Kilauea eruption destroyed more than 700 homes.

Before the major 2018 eruption, Kilauea had been erupting since 1983, and streams of lava occasionally covered farms and homes. During that time, the lava sometimes reached the ocean, causing dramatic interactions with the water.

__

Thiessen reported from Anchorage, Alaska.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
New Mexicos attorney general and its Environment Department filed suit against the manufacturers of so-called forever chemicals, commonly referred to as PFAS, seeking monetary damages to defray the costs of environmental monitoring and cleanups that they say are inevitable.

Attorney General Raul Torrez said that 21 companies named in the lawsuit have contributed to environmental contamination in New Mexico through their production and distribution of the chemicals, despite knowing for decades that the compounds pose significant risk to human health.

We have to step forward and try to protect our community  to hold corporations accountable who have for too long placed their bottom line and placed quarterly profits ahead of the interests of our community, over our natural environment and over public health, Torrez said at a news conference Thursday in Albuquerque.

PFAS, which stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, have been linked to cancer and other health problems in humans. They are called forever chemicals because they dont degrade in the environment and remain in the bloodstream.

New Mexico environmental regulators say they are concerned about forever chemicals seeping into aquifers in a state where 80% of residents rely on underground water for household consumption.

These companies had knowledge that these chemicals cause harm and they still chose profit over people, state Environment Secretary James Kenney said.

In recent months, states from Rhode Island to California have filed similar lawsuits against major chemical manufacturers including 3M and DuPont on accusations of covering up harm caused to the environment and public health by forever chemicals.

In March, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed the first federal limits on forever chemicals in drinking water, limiting them to the lowest level that tests can detect. Kenney said that New Mexico previously petitioned the EPA to treat PFAS as hazardous.

Corporate and industry representatives could not immediately be reached for a response to the new lawsuit. The industry group American Chemistry Council has voiced support for strong, science-based regulation of PFAS chemistries while warning that overly broad restrictions could impact economic growth, employment and the resiliency of industrial supply chains.

3M announced in December that it will phase out the manufacturing of forever chemicals and try to get them out of all their products within two years.

The toxic industrial compounds have been used extensively in firefighting foam, resulting in environmental contamination at military installations and adjoining communities. The state of New Mexico and the U.S. Department of Defense are at odds over responsibilities for mitigating PFAS contamination at installations including Cannon Air Force Base and Holloman Air Force Base.

Near Cannon, the Highland Dairy in Clovis euthanized more than 3,000 cows in 2022 after confirmation of PFAS contamination in the herd  and the milk the cows produced.

Torrez said New Mexico officials are aware of corporate maneuvers aimed at shifting liability to shell companies and are determined to recover significant financial damages nonetheless.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Mexico New Mexico Manufacturing Chemicals
Source: Streetwise Reports

June 9, 2023 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Recently, Sierra Madre Gold and Silver announced it had resumed trading on the TSX Venture Exchange. Read here to see what experts are saying, and what the company has planned for the rest of the year.

As of June 5, 2023, Sierra Madre Gold and Silver Ltd. (SM:TSX.V) has resumed trading on the TSX Venture Exchange after its shares stopped trading once the company announced the definitive acquisition of La Guitarra project from First Majestic on May 25, 2022.

With the acquisition of La Guitarra closing in March 2023, the company has a 100%interest in a fully-permitted, past-producing silver and gold mine.

Now, Sierra Madre also plans to quickly take the steps to requalify for OTCQX in order to increase liquidity for shareholders in the U.S.

Speaking to the trade resumption, CEO of Sierra Madre, Alex Langer, said: "We are excited to be publicly traded once again and would like to thank existing shareholders, new shareholders, and First Majestic for their patience during the lengthy process to relist Sierra Madre on the TSX Venture."

He also went on to state that the company has a "lot of news to share over the coming months," including "drill results from both the Tepic and La Tigra projects in Nayarit, Mexico, and numerous updates from La Guitarra."

In addition to La Guitarra, the Canadian silver and gold-focused exploration and development company also holds the Tepic Project, 22km from Nayarit State capital Tepic City, and the La Tigra Project, 148km north of Tepic.

Preparing for District-Scale Exploration and Development

Sierra Madre's experienced management team includes CEO Alex Langer, Executive Chairman and COO Gregory Liller, Lead Director Jorge Ramiro Monroy, and Director Greg Smith. The company's management team has played key roles in managing the exploration and development of more than 22Moz gold and 600Moz silver in combined reserves and resources.

In a June 2023 interview with The Crux Investor, Executive Chairman and COO Gregory Liller spoke about the resources at La Guitarra, adding that he is looking for a "big increase" over what First Majestic had defined at the site. The major silver miner did not include material with the potential for bulk tonnage extraction or substantial resources at the Guitarra mine (current resources are centered at the Coloso and Nazareno mines).

Greg also added that "right now [the company is] focused on production" and that the district in which La Guitarra is located had largely been ignored until recently. He mentioned that the company has "mining concessions that cover the entire district."

Historic resources at the La Guitarra project include indicated mineral resources of approximately 7.45 million ounces of silver equivalent and 10.02 million ounces of silver equivalent, based on 128,671 meters of drilling.

The company has the complete project database, which includes 1,407 drill holes, production records for the 27 years the mine has been in operation, and a 3-D model of the underground workings of all three mines. It also includes survey data, actual operating cost data, and extensive metallurgical recovery data and tests.

The database, along with the existing processing plant and equipment on site, is expected to allow Sierra Madre to proceed swiftly with project development. The company will focus on three main avenues to development: resource and reserve estimations, advancing upgrades to the plant and mine, and exploration in the Eastern Temascaltepec district.

Other recent highlights for Sierra Madre include the closing of a CA$10.3 million financing in May 2023.

Why Focus on Silver and Gold in Mexico?

Executive chairman of Martin Place Securities, Barry Dawes, recently reported that gold is "still the all-time highs in many currencies' including in the U.S., where gold made an all-time high this month."

321 Gold reported that "Silver could be poised to stage quite a violent rally."

Proactive Investors wrote about gold stocks receiving a "boost" as oil prices reached a four-week low, the hope being that it would have a "positive impact on the margins of gold mining companies."

Silver production in Mexico in 2019 accounted for 23% of global production. Exploration potential is also at a high for Sierra Madre; its three under-explored projects in Mexico all have past production and are in proximity to infrastructure.

La Guitarra mineralization is open at depth, along strike in both directions, with multiple other targets within its projects. These

With the recent completion of the acquisition of La Guitarra, Sierra is planning to advance the mine toward mid-tier silver production, with a fast-track restart strategy based on a developed underground and an existing 500 t/d mill.

Upcoming Catalysts

At La Guitarra, Sierra Madre is planning on a two-year timeline for production. A new resource report is expected by the end of H2 2023, which would be followed by a Preliminary Economic Assessment - including a mine plan - three to six months after.

Sierra Madre is also looking to finalize its Phase One drill results from La Tigra and Phase Two results from Tepic by the end of H1 2023. By the end of H2 2023, a resource report is also expected on the Tepic project.

Ownership and Share Structure

According to the company, 21% of Sierra Madre's stock is held by management and insiders.

According to Reuters, CEO, President, and Director Alex Langer has 2.06%, with 2.94 million shares. Lead Director Jorge Ramiro Monroy has 1.42%, with 2.02 million.

Executive Chairman and COO Gregory Liller has 1.35%, with 1.92 million, and Director Alejandro Caraveo-Vallina has 1.24%, with 1.77 million.

47.7% is with strategic investor First Majestic Silver Corp, with 69.06 million shares.

1.37% is with institutional investor Commodity Capital AG, with 1.95 million shares.

The rest is in retail.

Headquartered in Vancouver, as of June 8, 2023, Sierra Madre Gold and Silver has a market cap of CA$61.2 million and 142.7 million shares, as well as 5.49 million options outstanding.

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Source: Streetwise Reports

June 9, 2023 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Results from four additional drill holes at its Richmond Hill Project in the historic Homestake District of South Dakota help Dakota Gold Corp. further outline a gold system described as more than a mile in strike length.

Results from four additional drill holes at its Richmond Hill Project in the historic Homestake District of South Dakota have helped Dakota Gold Corp. (DC:NYSE American) further outline a gold system described as more than a mile in strike length.

RH23C-017 continued to expand the mineral amounts of drilling at the Twin Tunnels Breccia by intersecting 0.99 grams per tonne gold (g/t Au) over 93.5 meters, including 1.65 g/t Au over 19.2 meters.

The hole was 500 feet northwest of RH22C-013, which intersected 5.98 g/t Au over 30 meters at the intersection of a dominant north-south structure, confirming the existence of higher-grade gold mineralization.

"Our drilling continues to expand the Richmond Hill mineralization," Vice President of Exploration James M. Berry said. "We are excited to continue the step-out into untested sections of the property, especially where our new geologic understanding of ore controls has greatly improved."

Other assay results included hole RH23C-029, which intersected 0.89 g/t Au over 12.2 meters; hole RH22C-032, which intersected 3.22 g/t Au over 8.3 meters; and hole RH23C-033, which intersected 1.58 g/t Au over 23.6 meters.

RH23C-029, RH23C-032, and RH23C033 were drilled for grade validation and metallurgical test work to support a maiden resource compilation in early 2024.

"Results to date bode well for the next resource update, with indications that Richmond Hill hosts a substantial high-grade gold orebody," Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Fairbairn wrote of results from the project.

The mineralization is open in all directions, the company said.

Richmond Hill is 2.3 miles west of another of the company's projects in the Homestake District, Maitland.

It's also 1.5 miles north of Coeur Mining Inc.'s (CDE:NYSE) Wharf Mine, which produced more than 79,000 ounces Au in 2022 and is the only current operating gold mine in South Dakota.

Dakota Gold continues to have four drills operating on its Homestake District properties, two at Richmond Hill and two at Maitland.

Robert Quartermain and Jonathan Awde head the company, which is exploring the 46,000 acres it has acquired and consolidated over the past decade surrounding the Homestake Mine. The historic Homestake Mine produced more than 40 million ounces (Moz) Au over its lifetime. Industry giant Barrick Gold Corp. (ABX:TSX; GOLD:NYSE) also backs the company.

"Results to date bode well for the next resource update, with indications that Richmond Hill hosts a substantial high-grade gold orebody," Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Fairbairn wrote of results from the project.

The Catalyst: Revitalizing a Legendary District

Much of the land owned by Dakota Gold has not been explored in nearly 30 years, leading experts toward the hope of a large discovery.

"Dakota Gold is now seeking to revitalize this legendary district in hopes of making a material discovery on its land package proximal to the mine," Fairbairn wrote.

The company said the geologic model for Richmond Hill is evolving as drilling continues.

"Significant gold mineralization is not constrained only to the breccia bodies but also thicker, higher-grade intervals in the Precambrian wall rocks in the form of replacements and in stockworks," it noted in its Thursday release.

The exploration at Richmond Hill continues with step-out drilling to expand the gold system around known breccia pipe bodies and other targets and infill drilling in historical resource areas, the company noted.

The three new infill drilling results were the first assays from more than 32 holes planned, Dakota Gold said. The grade validation/metallurgical drilling at Richmond Hill is now 70% complete and expected to be done in mid-July. Construction of the geologic model for resource estimation is in progress.

Looking to 'Ledges' at Maitland

The company announced last month that it was exploring two overlapping high-grade gold discoveries at the Maitland Gold project.

One of them, the JB Gold Zone, was found drilling hole MA23C-017, which intersected 12.51 g/t Au over 4.7 meters in the same mineralization style as the Homestake Mine.

Fairbairn wrote that Dakota Gold could advance the JB discovery to a "substantial, high-grade deposit" if additional drilling demonstrates it as a new "ledge."

"The majority of the production from the historic Homestake Mine came from long tube-like structures running along iron-formation hinges that the miners named 'Ledges,'" Fairbairn wrote. "Once high-grade mineralization was found in a hinge (or Ledge), the miners were able to follow it down plunge, often extracting material amounts of gold."

The JB Gold Zone could be Dakota Gold's "most significant discovery to date," wrote Fairbairn.

Ownership and Share Structure

According to the company, approximately 30% of the company's shares are with management and insiders. Out of management, Co-Chairman Robert Quartermain holds the most shares at 10% or 7.34 million shares. President and CEO Jonathan Awde is next at 9%, with 6.71 million, while COO Jerry Aberle holds 6%, with 4.21 million. The remainder of the 30% is held by other members of management and the board of directors.

According to Reuters, about 26.6% of the shares are with institutional investors, including Van Eck Associates with 3.8%, BlackRock Fund Advisors with 3.6%, CI Investments with 3.6%, Fidelity Management with 3.5%, The Vanguard Group with 3.2%, Barrick Gold Corporation with 3%, Medalist Capital with 2.4%, Delbrook Capital with 2%, and Sprott Asset Management with 2%.

About 27.4% is with strategic investors, Reuters said. The largest holding is with Marin Katusa + KCR LLC, which owns 4.9%.

Dakota Gold has a market cap of US$253.43 million, with 75.3 million shares outstanding and 56 million free-floating. It trades in a 52-week range of US$4.69 and US$2.61.

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June 9, 2023 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Semiconductors, or chips, should be included in your investment portfolio if you're serious about growing your wealth over the next decade, says the CEO and founder of one of the world's largest independent financial advisory, asset management and fintech organizations.

The observation from Nigel Green of deVere Group comes against an escalating, trillion-dollar chip battle between geopolitical superpower rivals, the US and China.

It also follows this week the Japanese government overhauling its chip strategy to triple sales of domestically produced semiconductors to over $108 billion by 2030; as France confirms it is to plough $3.1 billion of public money into a factory to make microchips; and as Europe and the United States have both passed so-called Chips Acts.

In addition, chipmaker Nvidia this week briefly broke into the club of companies with a $1 trillion market cap.

The deVere CEO says: "Semiconductors are tiny, but these mighty chips power our world. They are fuelling this current industrial revolution.

"Semiconductors are at the forefront of technological progress. As our reliance on electronic devices continues to grow, the demand for semiconductors is skyrocketing - and will continue to do.

"From smartphones and computers to automobiles and advanced infrastructure, semiconductors are indispensable in powering our daily lives. This ever-increasing demand has created a fiercely competitive market, with companies vying to capture larger market shares and gain technological superiority."

He continues: "Beyond their technological significance, semiconductors have also become critical strategic assets. They are vital for national security, defense applications, and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, 5G, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

"The ability to control semiconductor manufacturing and develop cutting-edge chip designs has become a matter of top level strategic importance for countries and companies alike."

Against this backdrop, Nigel Green says that investors looking to create and build wealth for the long-term should include exposure to chips in their portfolios.

"Their far-reaching - and growing - impact on our lives makes it a no-brainer for almost everyone to have semiconductors within a well-diversified portfolio."

However, his bullish approach does come with a warning.

"But, with every boom, there will be winners and losers. A good fund manager will be critical in helping you make informed decisions."

Seeking advice, it could be reasonably argued, is perhaps particularly important considering that semiconductors have become entangled in geopolitical tensions and economic considerations.

Major powers such as the US and China are engaged in a race for technological supremacy, with semiconductors at the forefront.

Concerns about intellectual property theft, national security risks, and economic dominance through control over semiconductor technology have prompted trade restrictions, export controls, and investment scrutiny, further fuelling the battleground.

"Semiconductors will remain a fiercely contested battleground for market dominance and technological advancements.

"Their strategic importance is what makes them such an attractive, a potentially hugely rewarding, proposition. Savvy investors keen to build wealth over the next decade will pile in," concludes the deVere Group CEO.

t: +44 207 1220 925

Twitter: @PriorConsults

deVere Group is one of the world's largest independent advisors of specialist global financial solutions to international, local mass affluent, and high-net-worth clients. It has a network of more than 70 offices across the world, over 80,000 clients and $12bn under advisement.

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Here is a selection of people starting new roles with Tourism Ireland, UPMC, Workvivo, Volkswagen, Global Innovators Ireland and Velo Coffee Roasters.

Alice Mansergh has been appointed as the new CEO designate with Tourism Ireland, effective in September. She has wide experience working with travel industry partners and has served on the board of Failte Ireland for the past five years. She is currently MD for Google customer solutions, UK & Ireland, and corporate reputation lead for Googles EMEA HQ, based in Dublin. She has 20 years strategic leadership experience, specialising in marketing, consumer brand engagement strategies and corporate responsibility. She joined Google in 2004 and has served in a range of senior roles. She holds a degree in Irish and English Literature from TCD and studied leadership development with IMI.

Eamonn Fitzgerald, managing director of healthcare business UPMC Ireland, has been appointed as president of the prestigious European Hospital and Healthcare Federation (HOPE). This role positions Mr Fitzgerald at the forefront of shaping healthcare policies and promoting excellence in healthcare delivery across Europe. As an accomplished leader in the healthcare industry, Eamonn Fitzgerald, in his capacity as MD of UPMC Ireland, has overseen the successful establishment and expansion of UPMC's presence in the country, fostering collaborations, and providing cutting-edge healthcare solutions to patients. He said that he is looking forward to working with his colleagues and the healthcare community to address the industrys challenges and opportunities.

Gillian French, chief people strategist at Workvivo, has been appointed as a non-executive director with Datalex, a digital airline retail products and software solutions company. She replaces Dermot Halpin on the board following his recent appointment as executive chair of Drake Software. Gillian is a veteran people leader, organisational behaviourist, senior executive coach, and HR strategist with over 20 years' experience, notably in the hotel industry with Jury Doyle Group, then as chief people officer for CarTrawler and for Cubic Telecom. She is passionate about people strategy, building resilient and sustainable organisational culture and improving global employee experience. She is also a board advisor with ReganWall law firm.

Alan Bateson has been appointed as the new brand director for Volkswagen Passenger Cars Ireland. He takes over from Rodolfo Calixto, who has moved to Volkswagen Group China. Alan will the brand in Ireland as it transitions towards emobility and strives to meet its ambitious sustainability goals. He brings a wealth of experience, joining from his previous role as brand director for Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles. Prior to that he was head of aftersales for Volkswagen Group Ireland from 2009. Last year, he led the introduction of the brands first electric vehicle, the Volkswagen ID. Buzz. Working closely with the Volkswagen team, Alan will ensure Volkswagen continues to innovate.

Dr Simon Boucher has been appointed as CEO with Global Innovators Ireland (GII), the company behind the Innovate for Ireland (I4I) initiative. He was previously CEO of the Irish Management Institute (IMI) for from 2013-22; he led IMIs historic merger with UCC, and doubled the scale of IMIs activities. He also established IMI in the global elite of leadership development, entering the prestigious Financial Times Global Top 50 Ranking and achieving AACSB accreditation. He was previously a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, and worked in the European Commission and Accenture. He has been recognised as one of the top 100 CEOs in Ireland on three occasions.

Tom Gannon, entrepreneur and strategic advisor, has been appointed as a non-executive director with Velo Coffee Roasters in Cork. He brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the organisation from his years of experience in the food industry. He helped deliver success across brands such as Red Bull, Fulfill and Cali Cali. His goal is to accelerate Velo Coffee's growth to the next level, expanding the brand across Ireland and internationally. Velo has grown its team every year as they work continually to build and improve the brand and the product. "I am delighted to join Velo and am looking forward to collaborating with the talented team here to drive the company forward," said Tom.
Daa has hit back at Ryanair for its simplistic view that it could solve its car parking problems at Dublin Airport by opening nearby fields so that passengers can park.

Dublin Airport recently issued another warning to passengers that demand for car parking remains very high with limited spaces available. It advised customers flying soon, and who havent booked parking spaces yet, to do so.

If your dates are sold out, you should consider an alternative way of travelling to the airport, the airport said.

This prompted budget airline Ryanair to call on daa to use the land it owns around the airport as temporary car parking this summer. A spokesperson for the airline said daa could solve the parking issue by simply parking cars on a temporary basis in the many fields and/or driving ranges it owns close to Dublin Airport.

Emergency times need emergency measures.

In addition, Ryanair claimed that the daa is using this situation to put pressure on the competition authority to wave through approval of its acquisition of the former QuickPark site near the airport.

However, daa has hit back at Ryanair calling the suggestion to use fields for car parking a simplistic view adding that car parking requires infrastructure which requires planning permission.

We are running the fifth largest transatlantic hub airport in Europe, not a county fair, a daa spokesman said. Our focus is ensuring that everyone has a positive passenger experience at our airports over the busy summer months ahead.

Airport charges

Ryanair also used the opportunity to claim daa is using its monopoly position to game the system to obtain price increases on its airport charges.

Daa took issue with the suggestion it was a monopoly saying it does not set its own charges as it is a regulated business unlike airlines who do set their own fares which have risen 30% in the past year.

We offer ultra-low-cost charges at Dublin Airport, the lowest of any capital city airport in Europe, which are set to decrease by 30% presently.

Daa have taken a High Court action against the Commission for Aviation Regulation in order to get an increase in the per passenger charge paid to it by airlines. It said an increase in the charge will allow it to hire more security staff and reduce waiting times.

Ryanair are opposing this action saying the Dublin Airport operator is using its own "mismanagement" of security waiting times last year to justify the charge increases.

Daa spokesman said many airlines have grown strongly at Dublin Airport over the past decade and we leave airlines, including a world class operator like Ryanair, to run their very profitable businesses while we continue to invest in vital strategic infrastructure to connect Ireland to the world.

Tanaiste Micheal Martin also addressed the parking issue. saying the loss of a private car park and the difficulty in having a replacement does create challenges and said it highlighted the need for alternative transport to the airport such as the long-planned metro. "The metro if you like, is something that we have to make sure it happens over time.

"Yes it was committed to decades ago but it wasnt followed through because of financial and economic issues, that is why Id like in the context of current surpluses and so on that wed be more strategic in the use of those surpluses that we could future-proof significant infrastructure projects like a metro."
Limerick Chamber has called for government to increase its targets for affordable housing in the next budget, as employers are concerned about the drought of housing to attract and retain workers.

Launching Limerick Chambers submission for Budget 2024 on Friday, Chamber Chief Executive Dee Ryan said that a shortage of affordable housing is inhibiting attraction and retention of workers and impacting on employees quality of life.

A shortage of skilled workers coupled with a drought of affordable housing is creating the perfect storm for employers, she said.

News of jobs announcements and investment have been warmly welcomed but employers are concerned about capacity to house workers. While Government focus on social housing targets has been understandable and justified we are calling for an equal emphasis to be placed on affordable housing delivery, she added.

Chief Executive Dee Ryan and Chief Economist Sean Golden, launching Limerick Chamber's submission for Budget 2024.

The largest business representative body in the Mid-West, Limerick Chamber has around 400 member organisations across Limerick, Clare and Tipperary, supporting approximately 50,000 jobs.

President of Limerick Chamber, Miriam OConnor, said that the next budget must also introduce measures and cost of living supports to attract Irish diaspora to return to Ireland, as well as retain Irish graduates in the workforce.

Irish educated and trained doctors, nurses, teachers and Gardai are amongst the best trained and sought after in the world. The loss of these highly skilled frontline workers is having an immediate and direct impact on our healthcare, education and policing systems, which are all struggling to meet the demands of our growing population, she said.

Chief Economist for Limerick Chamber, Sean Golden, said that the challenge for government in the upcoming budget will be to balance doing enough to address the current cost environment while also addressing key infrastructural gaps and providing a return for tax payers in the form of wrap around supports.

He suggested that one way to ease cost-of-living burdens for workers would be to index income tax, to provide a fairer tax system for employees and help to reduce wage demands and competitiveness for employers.

In its Budget submission, Our People, Our Place, Our Future, Limerick Chamber also called for investment in capital projects to support development of economic opportunities in the near future including Floating Offshore Wind from Irelands Atlantic coast.
A step change is needed quickly in how housing is delivered in Ireland in order to relieve some of the pressure in the market, Cork Chamber has told the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.

The magnitude of the housing shortage and its impact on economic growth was conveyed to the Taoiseach during his visit to the Chamber on Friday, which was attended by representatives from Cork industry including some of the regions largest employers as well as senior politicians including Enterprise Trade and Employment Minister Simon Coveney.

The purpose of the meeting was to identify solutions that would enable Cork to deliver housing for its growing population and employment base.

The Chamber also said progress was needed on the delivery of a light rail system for the city.

Enterprise, Trade and Employment Minister Simon Coveney, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Cork Chamber president Ronan Murray and Cork Chamber CEO Conor Healy at Fitzgerald House for Friday's meeting. Picture: Darragh Kane

We held a very constructive meeting today with An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, at which we brought together representatives from our diverse membership, who shared their experiences, said Cork Chamber president Ronan Murray.

"Cork is in a very positive place but to remain competitive and ensure continued economic growth, areas such as housing, infrastructure, and public transport need continued collective investment and focus.

Chamber CEO Conor Healy said: "Previous steps by Government are welcome but we need to see a step change, and quickly, in order to relieve some of the pressure in the market."

Read More First apartments slated for Cork city quays by OCP after objection withdrawn

"We also highlighted the need to increase the income threshold for the cost-rental scheme to allow more people to access it. In addition, we have asked government to revisit the qualifying criteria for the Croi Conaithe Cities scheme, specifically to remove the 100% owner-occupier condition to encourage investment and increase rental availability.

The acceleration of the timeline for delivery of Cork light rail was also raised with the Taoiseach.

Conor Healy said: FDI and talent attraction are dependent on an efficient high-functioning city, in order to achieve this we have to aim to provide the same offering as other major European cities.

There is potential to accelerate the delivery timeline of Cork light rail and this will also prove crucial in meeting our climate targets. We spoke to the Taoiseach about the necessity to shorten the current projected timelines for the project.
Former US vice president Al Gore has told a Cork conference the atmosphere is being treated like an "open sewer", as Irish and British scientists warn that greenhouse gas emissions are now at an all-time high.

Check out our Sustainability and Climate Change Hub where you will find the latest news, features, opinions and analysis on this topic from across the various Irish Examiner topic desks and their team of specialist writers and columnists.

Mr Gore, speaking to the Fair Seas World Ocean Day conference in Cork, said the current decade is the most crucial in combating the twin climate and biodiversity crises.

"Every day we're continuing to pump 162 million tons of global warming pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, into the atmosphere, as if the atmosphere was an open sewer," he said.

"The actions we take now will determine whether or not we're going to leave our children and grandchildren with a livable future and whether we can preserve the lives of the millions of species that are at risk and that actually help support our planet's thriving," Mr Gore, who served as Bill Clinton's vice president and narrowly lost the 2000 election to George W Bush, added.

Mr Gore's comments come on the same day that a team of 50 scientists warned that global warming brought on by human activity is continuing at an unprecedented rate over the past two years, with greenhouse gas emissions at an all-time high.

The team of 50 scientists, led by the University of Leeds, found that even since the last assessment two years ago, human-caused global warming has continued to gather pace.

A record level of greenhouse gases is being emitted each year, equivalent to 54 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, the researchers calculated.

Maynooth University professor of physical geography (climate change) Peter Thorne said it is a "timely wake-up call" that climate crisis action taken so far is not nearly enough.

It is critical that policy makers and the general public be made aware of how quickly we are changing the climate through our collective activities. Already since the IPCC assessment of the physical science basis in 2021, key numbers have changed markedly and we remain well off track globally to avert warming above 1.5C," he said.

The UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in August 2021 that it was "unequivocal" that human activity is warming the planet, causing rapid and widespread changes to land, atmosphere, and oceans. The changes, unprecedented for many centuries or even many thousands of years, have pushed up global temperatures by 1.1C.

The 1.5C temperature increase limit is needed to stave off the very worst climate change fall-out, according to scientific consensus.

As Canadian wildfire smoke continues to engulf the likes of New York City in an orange haze and heads towards Norway, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed that the El Nino ocean warming pattern has returned.

Scientists, including Prof. Thorne, have warned El Nino will now likely help break 2016's record as the hottest ever year sooner rather than later.
The Government believes theres a risk that the number of refugees arriving in Ireland will increase again over the summer months.

Hotel capacity is limited, with the State finalising contracts to secure an extra 1,500 beds. Some 6,418 beds have been procured so far this year to shelter refugees.

The Irish Examiner understands that ministers have also been warned that continued co-operation with An Garda Siochana is required to ensure protests do not prevent centres from opening.

Cabinet also agreed to give the EU 1.5m instead of taking in a further 350 refugees as part of a European solidarity agreement.

The move has been described as embarrassing by Labour leader Ivana Bacik, who said the State was essentially, paying its way out of the obligation to take in asylum seekers".

A Government spokesperson said the State intends to continue with pledged relocations once reception capacity allows. Tanaiste Micheal Martin said Ireland has to take care of Ukrainians and international protection (IP) applicants first before facilitating relocations.

Emergency shelter

It comes as around 176 international protection (IP) applicants are to be given emergency shelter in tented accommodation at the former Central Mental Hospital site in Dundrum, Dublin, in the coming weeks.

The site, which is owned by the Office of Public Works, is in the process of being transferred to the Land Development Agency, which has planning permission for 852 homes.

The Government now plans to erect tents, similar to what was used at Gormanstown army camp in Co Meath last year, on the site until at least September. A pre-existing building on the site will be used for showers, toilets, and a dining area. Sources were adamant it would not delay or put a halt to the planned housing development by the LDA.

Integration Minister Roderic O'Gorman told the Cabinet committee on Ukraine yesterday that the number of refugees who have not been offered State accommodation on their arrival here is now at its lowest level since early February. Picture: Niall Carson/PA Wire

Integration Minister Roderic OGorman informed the Cabinet committee on Ukraine yesterday that the number of refugees who have not been offered State accommodation on their arrival here has now fallen to 61, the lowest level since early February.

However, ministers were warned that while the accommodation situation for refugees has improved in the past month, the outlook remains uncertain because of the risk that arrival numbers will increase over the summer months if trends follow the arrivals pattern of last year.

Almost 10,000 asylum seekers arrived in Ireland from countries other than Ukraine in the first nine months of 2022 with a peak recorded in June with 1,605 applications.

A weekly average of 1,400 people fleeing war in Ukraine were arriving in Ireland at around the same time last year.

Currently, around 500 Ukrainians and 150 asylum seekers are arriving here every week but now the Government expects this may rise.

Unaccompanied children

There has also been a dramatic increase in the number of unaccompanied refugee minors being cared for by Tusla.

It is understood that 184 refugees, of which 72 are Ukrainian children, are being cared for by foster families or at small-scale residential premises.

There has been an increase of 500% in referrals between 2021 and 2022, according to sources.

The meeting also heard that the department plans to use up to 5,000 student accommodation beds over the summer period which will be used to house both Ukrainians and IP applicants.

Its also understood that proposals on longer-term accommodation options are in preparation and will be brought to Government before the summer recess next month.

Hundreds of Ukrainians were rescued from rooftops yesterday as the Kherson region deals with massive flooding from the destruction of a dam in Russian-held territory.

Waters have submerged villages, fields, and roads in the southern region as Kyiv dismissed reports its counteroffensive had begun.

Tanaiste Micheal Martin announced 1m in emergency assistance following the destruction of the dam.
Facebooks owner, Meta, has been granted a short stay by the High Court on a decision that it must suspend the transfer and storage of user data from Europe to the US.

Last month, the Data Protection Commission (DPC) fined Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd 1.2 billion and ordered it to cease unlawful processing and storage of personal data of millions of European Economic Area (EU countries along with Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein) Facebook users.

That decision followed a successful legal challenge by Austrian privacy campaigner, Max Schrems, over concerns that EEA users data is not sufficiently protected from US intelligence agencies when it is transferred across the Atlantic.

While Meta updated its contractual terms with users following the Schrems decision, the DPC found these arrangements did not address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms of data subjects in accordance with a European judgment in that case.

Following an inquiry, the DPC issued orders that Meta suspend the data transfers and to cease the processing and storage of the data. Meta says the decision means it will have to cease providing its Facebook service to EEA users by October 25 next and after that it will have to permanently delete all their accounts.

As a result, on Friday it sought leave from Mr Justice Denis McDonald, with only the Meta side represented, to bring judicial review proceedings challenging what it says is the DPC's unlawful decision.

The judge said that having read the papers in the case he was satisfied Meta had established arguable grounds for the relief sought. He was satisfied to grant leave to bring judicial review proceedings on notice to the DPC. He said the case could come back on June 19.

Declan McGrath SC, for Meta, then asked the judge for an interim stay on the DPC decision because of the financial losses his client will incur without it.

The judge said he was only prepared to grant a stay until June 19 but stressed that in doing so, it did not call into question the validity of the DPC. His order only meant Meta had established arguable grounds to suggest the decision is invalid, he said.

Meta affidavit

In an affidavit, Meta Ireland director and head of office, Anne O'Leary, said that suspending Facebook for hundreds of millions of EEA users  or even telling them suspension will occur  would result in the loss of a very significant number of users and advertisers to competing platforms.

She said the damage will begin to occur even before the October date when the orders are to take effect and will increase significantly once users are notified of the impending suspension and deletion of accounts. Without a stay, she said, the estimated revenue loss is around $714m (664m).

Ms O'Leary says the US government and the EU Commission have reached agreement on a new framework for transatlantic data flows (known as the Adequacy Decision) and it is likely the EU will have that framework in place shortly.

In the event of an unexpected delay in the Adequacy Decision coming into effect, Meta will find itself having to suspend and engage in the "irreversible bulk deletion" of user data which will have a massive impact on users, she said.

Without a stay on the DPC decision, she said millions of users will be unable to connect with friends and family across the globe and millions of business would no longer be able to use Facebook to sell goods and services. It would also have serious adverse consequences for Meta's 4,700 strong EU workforce, including 4,470 in Ireland, she said.

Ms O'Leary said a significant factor to the balance of interests in this matter is that Meta Ireland is just one of many communications and technology businesses and organisations which transfer EEA personal data to the US.

Despite this, as far as Meta is aware, the DPC has not commenced own-volition inquiries or taken any steps to prevent the transfer to the US by these other businesses, she said.
Leaving Cert geography offered plenty of options for well-prepared students, with a superb selection of fair questions and an appearance of data from Census 2022.

The 2023 State exams continued this Friday morning, with Leaving Cert geography and Junior Cycle history.

The 2023 Leaving Cert geography exam included questions based on topics such as a glacier avalanche in Italy, European air transport and Irish unemployment.

Meanwhile, the 2023 Junior Cycle history exam featured the story of concentration camp survivor Tomi Reichental, who was born in Slovakia in 1935 and came to live in Ireland in 1959.

Students were asked to read an extract of his memoir I Was a Boy in Belsen in which he describes how his family was transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944, and answer questions.

After prompting outrage last year, the new common-level paper again did not include the marks allocated for each question.

The 2023 higher-level geography exam was very fair and used clear concise language, according to Edmond Hussey, head of geography at Christian Brothers College, Cork, and subject representative for the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI).

Students had plenty of choice in all sections, and any reports I have heard back from students are resoundingly positive.

I was pleased to see data presented in a range of different ways, including Census 2022 preliminary results in short answer questions.

This data included an illustrated graph of housing, population, migration, and vacant housing stats.

This years short questions were very fair, Mr. Hussey added, and students would have been happy to see a landform development in question 2b, as well as the deposition process appear in a question in the physical geography section.

Students can sometimes be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of topics to be covered in the regional geography section, he said.

But on this paper, there was a superb selection of fair questions.

The choice in the Human Elective section was also excellent with some questions on land use, changing migration patterns to and from Ireland since 1950, and the impact of either the development of resources, income levels or technology.

The ordinary level exam was also very manageable for those happy to demonstrate the range of skills that were tested, Mr. Hussey said.

It contained no surprises, and also made good use of photos, he added.

The exam tried to be topical with articles on a recent earthquake in Afghanistan, Irish seafood data from 2021, the new solar farm in Ashford in Co. Wicklow, and the draft development plan 2022 for Dublin port.

I thought overall it was a fair paper. It would have suited a lot of students. A lot of them will be happy.

There were a lot of smiling students coming out of the exam centres today thanks to fair Leaving Cert geography papers, according to Marie Kennedy, subject representative with the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI).

The questions on both papers were wide-ranging, covering a range of skills and with great question choice due to the adjustment of the leaving certificate for 2023 which was welcomed.

If the student had covered the course options they selected and revised well, they would have been able to manage the questions with ease.

Meanwhile, the 2023 Junior Cycle common-level history paper again did not display each question's associated marks for the second year in a row.

The 2023 geography Junior Cycle exam was also missing the associated marks for each question.

However, the content of this year's exam was very fair, according to Niall Westman, a history teacher at Mountmellick Community School in Laois.

Student feedback from his own class indicates they are all very happy after the exam, he said.

Im happy with it as well, I think it's fair and theres a good mix of higher and ordinary level questions in it, which would suit the vast majority of students.

The document questions were very good, there were some good picture questions. There was one that I was a little bit disappointed with; I thought something on Good Friday might come up.

It didnt, the question was about the Troubles and what contributed to the outbreak of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

I still think students would be happy with that paper.
Students exiting the 2023 Leaving Cert higher level maths exam will be feeling pretty tired this evening, teachers believe, following a Jekyll and Hyde style exam that was far from a cake walk.

The 2023 State exams continued this Friday afternoon with both Leaving Cert and Junior Cycle maths exams taking place.

The higher level Leaving Cert exam tested students on topics like algebra, functions, logs, complex numbers, differentiation and integration, as well as calculus, financial maths, functions and sequences and series.

Some topics usually unpopular with students appeared on the Leaving Cert higher level exam, according to Brendan OSullivan, maths spokesperson with the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI).

Functions, logs, limits; They wouldn't be popular with them now. They didnt hit them with them directly but as the exam progressed through questions, they would have caused them difficulty.

Students would have been very busy throughout the paper, he added.

An intense exam

"There was a lot of working things out. I would be very anxious to see students being rewarded for any efforts that they made.

The higher-level paper needed a lot of higher-order thinking, he added.

Id say theyd be pretty tired after it now. It was an intense exam; it wasnt a cake walk.

It wasnt straightforward, no but the kids would have the work done and will be rewarded for what they put into it.

Im sure they kept going the whole way through and that will be rewarded in the marking scheme.

The first question on the higher-level paper was the nicest one, Mr. O'Sullivan said.

It was more standard stuff. After that, the nasty stuff starts creeping into the questions. All the questions start off ok, to give them a chance, but then they bring in stuff to really challenge them.

The ordinary level paper was quite number heavy, he believed.

Students were kept working. There were a few twists in the questions as well from what they would have been used to. It wouldnt have been a straightforward walk in the park either, they would have had to show their mettle.

Again, I think they would have gotten through it alright and there were topics there that they would recognise.

'It was a Jekyll and Hyde paper'

Niall Duddy, maths spokesperson with the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI), said students he spoke to after the exam were glad to have had choices.

Certainly at higher-level, where the big problems were in the first half of the paper.

A question on logs caused their usual mayhem, he added.

Its a tale as old as time, when there are logs on the paper they always seem to catch students unawares and this year is no different.

It was a Jekyll and Hyde paper; Section A caused trouble, section B they loved, question 8, in particular, was very well received.

A number of students reported feeling tired after the exam.

They are glad to have the weekend.

Students seemed happy enough with the ordinary-level paper.

The general consensus with my own students was that they were happy enough with it and happy it was over.

However, a recent trend could be seen again this year, where traditional Paper 2 topics appear on Paper 1.

Area, volume and probability appeared on the higher level Paper 1, and area and volume also appeared on the ordinary level paper.

You cant just dump the Paper 1 books over the weekend, you have to keep the whole thing revised, Mr Duddy said.

Doctor and presenter Dr Nina Byrnes, whose son is currently sitting the Leaving Cert, commented about the stress this afternoon's exam appeared to cause some students.

"Sitting outside the school watching child after child melting into parents arms after maths," she wrote on Twitter.

"Was not popular. Not sure we are really teaching our kids anything with that stress. Son's college friends yesterday telling me college maths is easier! Something amiss."

Junior certificate

Meanwhile, the second sitting of the new Junior Cycle higher-level maths paper saw a wordy exam for higher-level students, according to Studyclix subject spokesperson Stephen Begley.

Many questions contained multiple sentences and contexts surrounding them, with very few just straight up maths questions.

This would have surely swayed a few students in trying to unpack what was being asked of them.

The examiner pushed to squeeze in almost every topic on the course, with coordinate geometry, trigonometry, algebra, statistics, probability, geometry, financial maths, sets and number systems being examined, he added.

The questions on statistics, trigonometry, co-ordinate geometry, and algebra will have surely delighted students, while geometry, financial maths and functions pushed students to really think.

The ordinary level paper was overall quite nice, Mr Begley said.

It was a very fair paper overall, but indeed pushed students to really think in parts.

Working with graphs featured in several questions, similar to the higher-level paper, which tested students' conceptual knowledge around these.

The 2023 State exams continue on Monday, with Leaving Cert maths Paper 2 and Irish Paper 1, and Junior Cycle science and business studies.
An electrician who attended the Stardust complex on the night of the fatal fire noticed a neon roof sign dimming and flickering and believed it was due to an electrical fault which could cause a fire, an inquest has heard.

Stephen Byrne, who worked as an electrician at Cadbury's in Coolock at the time, said he attended the Silver Swan public house on the night of February 13, 1981 and noticed a neon strip at roof level which was dimming and appeared to have a short in it.

As soon as I heard about the fire I immediately thought of the short I noticed in the neon sign. From my experience as an electrician I know that it could cause a fire, Mr Bryne said in a deposition taken on February 16, 1981 and read to the inquest on Friday.

The inquest has heard that the Stardust had been open for three years as a venue for various music concerts and dances when the fire broke out in the early hours of Valentines Day 1981. There were three venues on the site, including another function area known as the Lantern Rooms and a bar known as the Silver Swan.

Electrician's second statement

In a second statement provided three days later, Mr Bryne said he had worked as an electrician for 20 years, including a number of years spent working for a company dealing exclusively with high-voltage neon signs.

He said when he saw the neon tube flickering on the night of February 13, he believed it could have been caused by a number of faults, including degassing, a faulty transformer or a faulty connection. He said a faulty connection would be the most likely fault which would cause the high voltage connection to arc which in turn could cause a fire.

The jury also heard on Friday how staff at the stardust noticed the smell of smoke months before the fire and how there were power outages at the facility just days before the blaze.

Statements from other unavailable witnesses were also heard, including Caitriona Ross, who worked as a waitress at the Stardust. She said part of her job was to check that the emergency exits were locked.

The inquest was told Ms Rosss statement was not a garda statement but was made specifically for the purpose of these proceedings.

Waitress came forward due to RTE programme

Ms Ross also said she believed the materials kept in a storeroom had been understated at the original inquest and said in a deposition that to the best of her recollection, the materials kept in the room would have included 40-50 five gallon drums of cooking oil, between 20 and 30 five gallon drums of cleaning fluids, several drums of liquid floor polish, several drums of detergents and dozens of boxes of plastic glasses, plastic knives and forks, as well as napkins and toilet rolls.

She said she had been prompted to come forward to make a statement and give the information she has following the broadcast of a documentary into the Stardust on RTE in February this year, which was first broadcast in 2006.

Ms Ross said she started work at the Stardust on a part time basis and worked there for about eight or nine months before leaving about three weeks before the fire to concentrate on training as a hair stylist.

She said it was a condition of the licence that meals were served at the Stardust and said upwards of 800 to 1,000 meals were served each night. The meals were cooked in two very large frying machines which would have been six to seven foot long, she said.

Checking that emergency exits were locked

She said part of her job was to check that the emergency exits were locked. Ms Ross said they were locked with chains and security would have the keys for them.

It was also her duty to go to the storeroom, which was located at the top of the steps at the end of the north alcove above and adjacent to the main bar, to collect plastic pint glasses and napkins.

In the statement, Ms Ross said she had been shown the list of the contents of the storeroom as set out in a letter from the solicitors of the owners of the Stardust ballroom sent to the Tribunal of inquiry dated September 1, 1981.

I completely disagree with that list, she said.

It entirely understates the quantity of material which was stored and does not mention some things which were stored there routinely, at least while I was working there.

The list furnished to the tribunal is completely unrealistic given the number of meals served, she said, adding the kitchen employed five cooks at any one time.

'Power failed twice' on February 11

In her witness statement, Doreen Delahunty, who worked as a cleaner at the Stardust complex at the time of the fire, said the power failed on two occasions while she was at work on February 11, 1981.

She said this was a complete breakdown of power, the lights went out and the power to the hoovers failed. The first time it happened the handyman went to see about it and after about ten minutes the power came on again but the lights kept flickering and power to the hoovers came and went down before going again completely 15 minutes later.

'Strong smell of burning' in 1980

James Murphy, who worked as a glass washer at the Stardust from October to December 1980 while studying for his Leaving Cert, said in his deposition that about a week before he stopped working at the Stardust, he noticed a strong smell of burning.

He said he was in the main bar getting things ready for the night with one of the barmen who asked him if he got a smell of smoke.

Mr Murphy said at this point he noticed a smell like rubber burning. He said he stood on a chair at the middle of the back balcony and could still get the smell. He then went up to the lighting room which was directly over the room where kegs were stored for the complex and when he opened the door he got a stronger smell. There were a number of large cables in the room, Mr Murphy said.

He said he went back to work and the smell faded away after a while.

Carpet tiles 'were not sold off'

On Friday morning, Declan Conway, a sales representative for the company that provided the carpet tiles for the Stardust, denied the carpet tiles used on the walls of the Stardust were a job lot that was being sold off on the cheap.

Mr Conway told Brenda Campbell, representing nine of the families of the deceased, that the tiles were made specifically for the Stardust and said there were production difficulties getting them into Dublin on time.

He denied assertions made by a representative of the English company who supplied the tiles, made during a 1981 inquiry into the fire under Mr Justice Ronan Keane, that this particular tile had reached the end of its life and the company was selling it off.

Ms Campbell put it to him that the company representative, Mr Graham Whitehead, had told Mr Justice Keane during the 1981 tribunal that what had been supplied for the Stardust was the remnants of the Stateroom tile and when asked if it was a clearing out of stock he replied: I assume so. The tiles went out at 1.28 originally and this was reduced to 77p.

He said the tile had been in production in 1977-78 and had reached the end of its life and as a result was being sold off.

What he told Mr Justice Keane was that it was being sold off as a job lot and it was being sold off on the cheap, said Ms Campbell.

Mr Conway denied this was the case. You would not be able to job lot that quantity of tiles, he said. The quantity was significant and they would never have had the stock.

'Sparks from ceiling' in January 1981

The jury in the inquest into the fire, which claimed the lives of 48 young people, also heard evidence on Friday morning from Fiona Doherty who told how she saw big sparks coming from the ceiling of the Stardust a month before the fire. She said this alarmed her so much she wanted to leave.

She told the jury the sparks made loud cracking noises and were so big she wanted to leave the venue because she was afraid a fire was going to break out.

She told Simon Mills, a member of the coroners legal team, that she could remember seeing the sparks as if it was yesterday and said she told her parents about what she had seen when she came home from the concert.

The sparks lasted for between 10 and 20 minutes, she said, and she told her friends she wanted to leave the concert but they were reluctant to leave so they stayed.

Ms Doherty said the sparks were like sparks you would see at bumper cars but much bigger and more substantial. She said:

When youre on a bumper car you can see the sparks but these particular sparks in the Stardust were much bigger.

She said there were so many and they were so big that she spent a lot of time watching the ceiling rather than watching her favourite bands on the stage.

Ms Doherty, who gave her evidence remotely from France, said she made her statement to gardai following the fire because she felt what she had seen that night was important and added she couldnt understand why no one had contacted her since 1981.

She agreed with counsel Sean Guerin, also acting on behalf of a number of families of the bereaved, that the club was crowded to the point of being uncomfortable and there was pushing and shoving.

She said she spent a large amount of time looking at the sparks coming from the ceiling and was afraid a fire was going to break out.

The witness added: They werent just tiny little lighting a match sparks, they were big sparks so big that I wanted to leave and they were my two favourite groups.
One of the findings of the recent census report is a decline of 10 percentage points in those identifying themselves as Catholic.

But for anyone observing attendances at Catholic Church events in recent times, both in terms of numbers and age, there might have been an expectation of an even greater decline.

How has this come about? The Catholic Church in Ireland in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries seemed to be a very solid edifice, built to endure. It had a clear top-down system of government, exclusively male and clerical, a rigid set of doctrines and teachings, all imposed under pain of sin and the threat of eternal damnation, and a strictly imposed set of practices.

The annual Eucharistic Procession passing through St Patrick's Street in 1928.

Over it all, we were told, was a male God in the heavens who would pass strict judgment on what was called, to emphasise the point, the Day of Judgment.

Fear played a big part in Catholic belief. The notion of a loving God, while it occasionally got lip service from the altar, was completely overshadowed by the sermons on hell and damnation.

Second Vatican Council

Most of us now regard an event that took place in the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council, as the most significant event in the Catholic Church for centuries. But, ironically, it was also what loosened some of the main block of this edifice.

Instead of defining the Church in terms of ranks of clerics, it referred to it as the People of God. It went on to state that the pre-eminent sacrament was Baptism, and as such all believers were equal.

Only in hindsight can we see how radical that was. It also re-affirmed and emphasised the primacy of the individual conscience, and when the Pope in the late 60s declared that the use of artificial contraception was always seriously sinful, people really began to exercise their conscience.

By then, the wave of freedom which had swept through the Western world in the 60s was prevalent in Ireland, and this coincided with a growth in the number of people receiving education.

So education, a new sense of freedom, and the teaching of the Vatican Council shook loose some of the core blocks of the old-style Church. As we saw with the collapse of the communist regime, once a rigid, controlling system begins to shake, begins to be successfully challenged in any one area, its collapse can be dramatic and speedy. Interference in any part of a tightly knit system can topple the whole edifice.

'Absolute control'

In the 1970s, I and my fellow missioners, in our work around the parishes of Ireland, began to hold open discussions in houses. In a sense it was some effort at the type of Synodal Church that Pope Francis is now promoting.

One of my clear memories from those meetings was that when ordinary Catholics got a forum where they could find their voice, a great deal of hurt and anger was expressed  some personal, a great deal inherited  against various priests, and this was well before stories of sexual abuse began to emerge.

We heard a lot about the absolute control that a priest could exercise in an area. Listening to these discussions began to open my eyes to the destruction that what we now call clericalism has done to the Church, and why Pope Francis is constantly railing against it.

The 93rd Cork Eucharistic Procession in 2018. Picture: Denis Minihane

Going back to the census, the decline can be seen as having two aspects. Some Catholics, while observing the rituals, had never internalised the message of Christ. The revelations of sexual abuse by priests and religious gave them a justification for walking away.

Others had struggled to practice faith according to the teachings of Vatican Two and had been stonewalled by a clerical Church. For them, the abuse scandal was the last straw. They had been hanging on by their fingers, but could do so no longer. They gave up.

Reports on life in orphanages and mother and baby homes added to the picture of a Church that exercised abusive forms of control and authoritarianism.

In that context, while I wouldnt for a moment try to defend what happened in some instances, I personally find it difficult to see and hear the widespread vilification of nuns. I think there is a lack of fairness at present, and I hope that eventually the evil that was done by some might be balanced against generations of nuns who educated Irish girls, and opened up to them the opportunity of living a fuller and more independent life.

A future for the Catholic Church

Where are we now in the Irish Catholic Church? By any standards, it is not in a good place, and all the indications are that the decline will continue for some time to come.

An aerial view of the crowd at Phoenix Park in Dublin as Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families in 2018. Picture: Liam McBurney/PA Wire

But I have hope that some good will come out of it all. Pope Francis has been a blessing. He recognises the problems and is gradually, and very courageously, trying to bring about the type of change that will develop a more credible and humble Church.

The clerical Church will have to come off its pedestal, and that applies at all levels, from the Pope to the priests and deacons in local parishes.

All forms of ministry in the Church will need to be open to all the baptised, and this raises the very thorny and difficult question of the Catholic Churchs attitude to women.

Pope Francis has said that women have 'legitimate claims' to seek more justice and equality in the Catholic Church, but has stopped short of endorsing calls to give women decision-making roles. Picture: Andrew Medichini/AP

It cannot continue to exclude women from ministry and decision-making if it wants to have any chance to attract young women into the Church. This wont be easy, and has the potential to cause serious divisions in the Church.

A divine reality, known traditionally as God, is central to Christian belief, though we are dealing here with a fundamental mystery that at best we can only glimpse.

But we need to rid ourselves of the image of a distant, judgmental God. I think that is happening.

More and more I am reading and hearing, and coming to my own awareness of, a divine presence that, far from being distant and remote, is a presence in the whole of creation, is at the heart of creation, at the heart of this broken world, is all around us and within us.

The word, more than any, that touches the nature of this presence is love. With this understanding, we are encouraged to live our lives, not in fear as in the past, but with a sense of joy and trust that, in spite of everything, all will be well.

Gerard Manley Hopkins sums it up beautifully:

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; 

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

* Tony Flannery is a Redemptorist priest and the founder of the Irish Association of Catholic Priests
Around two hundred former RIC men ended up working for the new British mandate in Palestine after the force was disbanded in 1922, according to a new documentary made by RTEs Tony Connelly.

Another 1300 men from the Royal Irish Constabulary moved north and joined the newly formed Royal Ulster Constabulary, including Connellys grandfather Michael, who was a native of East Galway.

Connelly, RTEs Europe Correspondent and a native of Derry, said he was prompted to explore his familys background after a controversy blew up in January 2020 about plans to commemorate the RIC as part of the Centenary programme.

That proposed event was scrapped after a major backlash and political scientists have suggested that it had an impact on the general election which was held the following month.

The documentary, A Hidden History, traces Michael Connellys roots in a small east Galway parish in a typically poor, rural family.

After joining the RIC he was relocated to Kerry where he met his wife and was then transferred to Carrick on Suir.

He became part of the community and was commended, along with a colleague for saving a family from a burning building. Everything changed after the 1916 Rising.

Within a very short period of time he and his colleagues went from being part of the fabric of small towns and suddenly they were outcast and many of them were killed, Connelly told the Mick Clifford podcast.

At one point there was an attempt on his (Michael Connellys) life. He was confronted in a shop in Carrick but somebody said youre not going to shoot him in front of his son because my uncle Matt was with him, Connelly says.

So the gunman backed off and said Im not going to kill you now but Ill get you, Connolly. Soon after the new state was established in 1922, Michael Connolly left with his wife and six children and joined the RUC.

He was posted early on to a staunchly loyalist enclave in Larne where he often found there was prejudice against him because of his religion.

At one point, Connelly relates, his Kerry-born grandmother refused to leave her home to go down the town afraid that she would be targeted.

Tony Connelly is this weeks guest on the Mick Clifford Podcast.

A Hidden History airs on RTE 1 Television on Monday, June 12.
Eamon Ryan, Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, outlines why confidence is at an all-time high in Ireland's offshore wind energy sector.

"Ireland's whole-of-Government approach is mobilising all relevant Departments and State agencies to maximise the potential economic and societal benefits of offshore wind," says Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Eamon Ryan, TD.

Irelands vast offshore wind resource means the potential of the renewable wind energy sector cannot be overlooked. The scale of this resource is huge. Our sea area is seven times that of our land area. Ireland's statutory climate objective is a 51% reduction in emissions by 2030 and net-zero emissions no later than 2050.

Increasing the share of renewable energy is a critical element of achieving this aim. Renewable energy use through offshore wind can eradicate our dependence on imported fossil fuels, and bring a vast reduction in CO2 emissions. At the same time, it will help us to create jobs, future-proof our businesses and sustain and develop local communities. We now have opportunity to become a world leader in renewable energy.

Maximising renewable wind energy is a significant priority for this Government. To increase the pace of delivery of our ocean energy potential in a responsible way, we are implementing a Government-wide delivery and acceleration plan via the Offshore Wind Delivery Taskforce. This whole-of-Government approach is mobilising all relevant Departments and State agencies ensuring we work together, so potential economic and societal benefits of offshore wind are maximised, through a number of simultaneous phases.

The first and second of our offshore wind phases focus on ensuring we meet the targets set out in our Climate Action Plan of producing at least 5 gigawatts (GW) of installed offshore wind capacity by 2030, with an additional 2GW earmarked to produce green hydrogen and other non-grid uses.

In addition, we are working on a post-2030 future framework for offshore wind which is expected to feature floating offshore wind. This plan-led approach means that we will achieve our renewable energy goals in a way that is both environmentally and economically sustainable.

Auction a clear boost for Irish offshore wind

The clearest signal yet that Ireland can become a renewables powerhouse arrived last month when the provisional results of our first offshore wind auction were announced. The auction invited renewable energy projects to compete against each other by bidding as low as possible to win contracts to provide electricity at the bid price for a 20-year period.

The auction results surpassed expectations, both in terms of the total volume of renewable energy procured and the low price at which it has been secured. The hugely-competitive price secured  at an average of 86.05/MWh (megawatt hour)  is one of the lowest prices paid by an emerging offshore wind market in the world. For comparison, the average wholesale electricity price in Ireland over the past 12 months was more than 200/MWh. This price will save Irish electricity consumers hundreds of millions of euros per year.

With a combined capacity of more than 3GW, this first auction has delivered sufficient offshore wind potential to power more than 2.5 million Irish homes. This is by far the largest volume of renewable energy Ireland has ever procured at auction and it shows that offshore wind will deliver a cheap, sustainable, and secure indigenous alternative to imported fossil fuels.

Maximising renewable wind energy is a priority for the Government, as evidenced by the Government-wide delivery and acceleration plan via the Offshore Wind Delivery Taskforce.

The development of these first offshore projects, three on the east coast and one on the west coast, will be overwhelmingly positive for rural, coastal and local communities. It will create sustainable local jobs, tens of billions of euros of inward investment and wholesale societal gains. Whats more, under the community benefit fund provisions of the auction, the successful projects will make payments to the local marine and coastal communities hosting offshore renewable energy projects. These communities will now benefit from over 24 million per year, beginning before construction and continuing for up to 20 years after a project begins to produce renewable energy.

We are also stepping up the delivery of the next phases of offshore renewables development in Ireland. As outlined in the Policy Statement on the Framework for Phase Two Offshore Wind, the Government is accelerating the establishment of Designated Maritime Area Plans (DMAPs), including an initial south coast plan which will enable the start of Irelands second offshore wind auction before the end of this year. This auction, and all subsequent phase two auctions, will result in the development of offshore wind capacity within 'Offshore Renewable Energy Designated Areas'.

These areas, which will be designated according to legislative provisions DMAPs in the Maritime Area Planning (MAP) Act, will guide investment and decision-making and will complement the forthcoming network of Marine Protected Areas. This plan-led approach will ensure that development is managed in a planned, strategic and sustainable way. Importantly, it will provide greater certainty for all maritime users as to where offshore wind projects will be situated.

Streamlined approach boosts investment certainty

The approach we have chosen streamlines the development process for offshore renewable energy by optimising the States consenting, planning and grid development resources. It represents the best opportunity to meet our ambitious 2030 climate and energy targets, while at the same time bolstering our security of supply. It will also provide additional certainty for investment in Irelands offshore renewables sector due to enhanced project delivery prospects.

To harness the renewable energy power of Irelands wind, waves and tides, we need to ensure we use the right offshore technologies in the right places. This will be guided by the Offshore Renewable Energy Development Plan (OREDP II) which is due to be published later this year. The plan sets out Irelands strategy for the future of offshore renewable energy in Ireland. It is one of the key building blocks being progressed now by Government to deliver on our ambition to develop 2GW of green hydrogen and at least 30GW of floating energy beyond 2030.

Momentum is building behind green hydrogen in Ireland, which produces energy through the electrolysis of water, while eliminating emissions by using renewable energy. Last week, my department signed a Joint Declaration of Intent on cooperation in the field of green hydrogen with the German Federal Research Ministry. This will formalise cooperation in respect of green hydrogen between Ireland and Germany and enable it to expand in the coming years.

When I started in Government in 2020, there were only a handful of people in the state working on offshore wind... Since then, we have vastly increased our human resources. Work is well underway to deliver significant benefits not only in the short-term, but also in securing our future for generations to come.  Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Eamon Ryan TD

We are prioritising the work of a new State agency, the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority, which will be formally established on 17th July. This prioritisation will follow through to An Bord Pleanala, where a dedicated marine section has been established to process applications from offshore wind projects. In addition, recognising the crucial future role that ports have in the delivery of offshore energy, the government is supporting the development of indigenous ports through a new National Ports Policy.

Offshore wind installation will ensure that Ireland is well positioned to seize new market opportunities. Just last week, an Irish-based offshore wind energy consultancy firm announced plans to create up to 500 jobs over the next five years. With our resources, it is of little surprise that this untapped opportunity is also attracting world-class companies looking to partner with local energy companies.

There is no doubt that we have made massive progress in realising Irelands offshore wind potential. When I started in Government in 2020, there were only a handful of people in the state working on offshore wind. There was no legislation governing the consenting of offshore wind, and only limited policy in place to guide either developers or planning authorities. Since then, we have vastly increased our human resources. Work is well underway to deliver significant benefits not only in the short-term, but also in securing our future for generations to come.

Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications
Donald Trump has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate, less than three months after he was charged in New York with 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Here is a look at the new charges, the special counsels investigation and how the ex-presidents case differs from those of other politicians known to be in possession of classified documents:

What are the charges and how is Mr Trump reacting?

Mr Trump has been charged with seven counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, sources have said.

Classified documents were found at Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate (Steve Helber/AP)

Mr Trumps lawyer James Trusty said on Thursday on CNN that the indictment includes charges of wilful retention of national defence information, obstruction of justice, false statements and conspiracy.

Mr Trump, on his Truth Social app, called it a DARK DAY for the United States of America.

In a video post, he said, Im innocent and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly.

Within 20 minutes of breaking the news, his 2024 presidential campaign sent out a fundraising missive telling his followers he had been indicted and asking for financial support.

What happens next?

The Justice Department has not confirmed the indictment, and any charges have not been publicly filed.

Mr Trump said he had been summoned to appear in court on Tuesday afternoon in Miami.

The Department of Justice carried out an investigation (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

When he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney in the New York case, Mr Trump surrendered to authorities, where he was booked behind closed doors and appeared in the courtroom, sitting with his lawyers at the defence table.

How did this case come about?

Officials with the National Archives and Records Administration reached out to representatives for Mr Trump in spring 2021 when they realised that important material from his time in office was missing from their collection.

According to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents are considered property of the US government and must be preserved.

A Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago.

In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Mr Trumps Florida home, later telling Justice Department officials that they contained a lot of classified material.

That May, the FBI and Justice Department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Mr Trumps possession. Investigators who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Mr Trumps lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.

But that assertion turned out to be false. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents.

In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings  including some at the top-secret level  have been recovered from Mr Trump since he left office in January 2021.

How did a special counsel get involved?

Last year, US attorney general Merrick Garland picked Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor with a background in public corruption probes, to lead investigations into the presence of classified documents at Mr Trumps Florida estate, as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Janurary 6 2021 insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel (Andrew Harnik/AP)

Mr Smiths appointment was a recognition by Mr Garland of the politics involved in an investigation into a former president and current White House candidate. Mr Garland himself was selected by President Joe Biden, whom Mr Trump is seeking to challenge for the White House in 2024.

Special counsels are appointed in cases in which the Justice Department perceives itself as having a conflict or where it is deemed to be in the public interest to have someone outside the government come in and take responsibility for a matter.

According to the Code of Federal Regulations, a special counsel must have a reputation for integrity and impartial decision-making, as well as an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies.

Did not Joe Biden and former vice president Mike Pence have classified documents too?

Yes, but the circumstances of their cases are vastly different from the situation involving Mr Trump.

After classified documents were found at Mr Bidens think tank and Mr Pences Indiana home, their lawyers notified authorities and quickly arranged for them to be handed over. They also authorised other searches by federal authorities to search for additional documents.

President Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the 2020 election (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

There is no indication either was aware of the existence of the records before they were found, and no evidence has so far emerged that Mr Biden or Mr Pence sought to conceal the discoveries. That is important because the Justice Department historically looks for wilfulness in deciding whether to bring criminal charges.

A special counsel was appointed earlier this year to probe how classified materials ended up at Mr Bidens Delaware home and former office.

But even if the Justice Department were to find Mr Bidens case prosecutable on the evidence, its Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a president is immune from prosecution during his time in office.

As for Mr Pence, the Justice Department informed his legal team earlier this month that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against him over his handling of the documents.

Does a federal indictment prevent Mr Trump from running for office?

No, neither the indictment nor a conviction would prevent Mr Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

And as the New York case showed, criminal charges have historically been a boost to his fundraising.

The campaign announced that it had raised more than 4 million dollars in the 24 hours after that indictment became public, beating its previous record after the FBI search of Mr Trumps Mar-a-Lago club.

How are Mr Trumps Republican rivals reacting to the news?

Many of M Trumps challengers for the Republican nomination jumped to his defence on Thursday night after news of the indictment broke.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis accused the Justice Department of political bias in charging the former president.

The weaponisation of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, Mr DeSantis tweeted. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.

He questioned why the Justice Department had been so zealous in bringing charges against Mr Trump and so passive about going after former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton or Mr Bidens son Hunter.

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said he felt the justice systems scales are weighted based on politics.

In America, every single person is presumed innocent, not guilty, Mr Scott said on Fox News, decrying the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president.

However, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who called for Mr Trump to drop out of the race after the New York charges were filed, said the federal indictment marked a sad day for our country and reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.
The United Nations envoy to Sudan, a key mediator in the countrys brutal conflict, is no longer welcome in the country, Sudanese authorities have said.

A terse statement issued by Sudans Foreign Ministry comes just weeks after the head of the countrys military, General Abdel Fattah Burhan, demanded in a letter to envoy Volker Perthes that he should be removed from his post.

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has been notified that Mr Perthes has been formally declared persona non grata, the Foreign Ministry said.

Since April 15, Sudans military, headed by Mr Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, have been locked in a violent power struggle that has killed more than 860 civilians, according to the Sudans Doctors Syndicate which tracks civilian casualties. The actual death tally is likely to be much higher.

General Abdel-Fattah Burhan visits troops in Khartoum (Sudanese Army via AP)

Mr Perthes has been a key mediator in Sudan since being appointed as special envoy in 2021, first during the countrys failed attempts to transition to democracy and then as relations between the military and the RSF deteriorated.

In recent months, the German diplomat has received death threats and numerous calls to resign.

In his letter last month, Mr Burhan accused Mr Perthes of being partisan and negatively contributing to pre-war talks between the generals and pro-democracy groups in the weeks building up to the conflict.

Responding to these allegations, Mr Volker told The Associated Press that those who threatened him were marginal extremists and that there is a wide appreciation of UN efforts in Sudan, which has relocated its headquarters to the coastal city of Port Sudan.

Children were evacuated from the Foster Home for Orphans in Khartoum (Nazim Sirag/AP)

The conflict between the two generals has reduced Khartoum to an urban battlefield, with many districts of the city without running water or electricity.

There have been reports of widespread looting and sexual violence, including the rape of women and girls in Khartoum and the western Darfur region, which have seen some of the worst fighting in the conflict.

Almost all reported cases of sexual attacks were blamed on the RSF.

On Wednesday, 297 children were rescued from an orphanage in Sudans capital after being trapped there while fighting raged outside, Unicef said. The evacuation came after 71 children had died from hunger and illness in the facility since mid-April.
A British girl who was one of four children stabbed in a knife attack in the French Alps was on holiday in the area.

The knifeman attacked the group of children  aged between 22 months and three years  and two adults at a lakeside park in Annecy on Thursday.

French interior minister Gerald Darmanin said the suspect, a 31-year-old Syrian man, had tried to claim asylum in France but it was refused on Sunday because he had previously been granted asylum in Sweden 10 years ago.

The British girl is three years old and was taken to hospital in Grenoble, a city around an hour-and-a-half from Annecy by car.

French President Emmanuel Macron travelled to the Alps on Friday to meet families and witnesses who have been left traumatised by the attack, his office said.

Mr Macron and his wife Brigitte flew to Grenoble where they met three of the children injured in the attack before heading to Annecy.

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne confirmed all four children underwent surgery and are under constant medical surveillance.

Tributes left near the scene at a lakeside park in Annecy, France (Peter Byrne/PA)

Two of the children remain in critical condition on Friday morning, government spokesman Olivier Veran said, but reports suggest the British girl is stable.

Tearful well-wishers have visited the playground where the children were stabbed.

Flowers and messages were laid at the scene, with messages including Love Annecy, and Children I dont know you but in this hour you are fighting.

The Swedish Migration Agency has confirmed the suspect was granted permanent residency in 2013 and although the agency did not identify him, it said he subsequently sought Swedish citizenship in 2017 and 2018, both denied, and applied again in August last year.

Mr Darmanin said the suspect entered France legally, adding: For some reasons we dont really understand, he applied for asylum in Switzerland, in Italy and in France, which he didnt need to do as he already had asylum in Sweden for the past 10 years.

(PA Graphics)

Local prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said one of the adults was seriously injured by both a knife wound from the attacker and a bullet wound from police as officers shot at the knifeman while trying to detain him.

The Telegraph reported the gunshot victim is a 78-year-old man who is now in a life-threatening condition in hospital after also being stabbed six times.

Witnesses said the knifeman shouted in the name of Jesus Christ as he launched the attack, including stabbing a child in a pushchair repeatedly as bystanders screamed for help.

Security forces examine the scene of knife attack in Annecy (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone/AP)

Ms Bonnet-Mathis told a press conference on Thursday afternoon the attackers motives were unclear, but they did not appear to be related to terrorism.

Footage of the attack shared on the internet shows a man in dark glasses and with a blue scarf covering his head brandishing a blade as people screamed for help.

In another video, the man appears to shout in the name of Jesus Christ while waving the knife in the air, with people nearby screaming for police.

He then slashed at a man carrying a rucksack who attempted to approach him.

The video then shows a woman frantically pushing a stroller inside the play area of the park as the attacker approached her while she screamed for help.

Local schools were locked down after the knife attack (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone via AP)

She attempted to fend off the attacker before he leaned forward and stabbed down into the pushchair.

French prime minister Elisabeth Borne said the suspect had no criminal or psychiatric record and appeared to have acted alone.

We are talking here about infants, very young infants who have been very seriously injured, she told a press conference, according to a translation.

We are absolutely shaken by all this and we are standing firm by the people of Annecy.

Flowers and teddy bears left at the childrens play area (Peter Byrne/PA)

Speaking at a press conference at the White House on Thursday evening alongside US President Joe Biden, British prime minister Rishi Sunak described the attack as unfathomable.

He said: All our thoughts are with those who were affected in this unfathomable attack, including a British child, and their families.

I have been in touch with President Macron. We stand ready to offer any assistance that we can.
Boris Johnson is resigning as an MP after accusing a Commons investigation into whether he misled Parliament over partygate of attempting to drive me out.

The former British prime minister, in a statement to the media, compared the Privileges Committee probe to a kangaroo court as he announced his intention to step down as MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip.

He said, after receiving a letter from the Conservative-majority committee, he believed it was determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of Parliament.

It is very sad to be leaving Parliament  at least for now  but above all I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out, anti-democratically, by a committee chaired and managed, by Harriet Harman, with such egregious bias, he said.

The announcement, coming only hours after his resignation honours list had been published, means the Conservatives are likely to face a tough battle to hold onto the London seat at a by-election.

It was the second by-election triggered on Friday following former culture secretary Nadine Dorries decision to quit the Commons immediately, rather than wait until the next election.

The Privileges Committee has been investigating whether Mr Johnson misled MPs when he assured them that Covid rules were followed in No 10 following allegations of lockdown-busting parties.

In a lengthy statement, he accused the committee of producing a yet-to-be-published report riddled with inaccuracies and reeks of prejudice while providing him with no formal ability to challenge anything they say.

He said the panel of MPs had still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons.

But he said he thought their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts.

They know that I corrected the record as soon as possible; and they know that I and every other senior official and minister  including the current prime minister and then occupant of the same building, Rishi Sunak  believed that we were working lawfully together, he said.

I did not lie, and I believe that in their hearts the committee know it.

He said: So I have today written to my association in Uxbridge and South Ruislip to say that I am stepping down forthwith and triggering an immediate by-election.

I am very sorry to leave my wonderful constituency. It has been a huge honour to serve them, both as mayor and MP.

He has called on the committees inquiry into his partygate comments to cease.

Mr Johnson returned to Parliament in 2015, having previously represented Henley in the Commons between 2001 and 2008 and serving two terms as mayor of London.

He was promoted to British foreign secretary by Theresa May when she took over from David Cameron, but he later resigned over her Brexit policy.

The 58-year-old succeeded her as British prime minister in 2019 and would go on to secure a landslide victory at that years snap winter general election.

He announced his resignation from No 10 in July 2022 after he lost the support of his party over his handling of sexual assault allegations against former deputy chief whip Chris Pincher.

In his statement on Friday, in which he appeared to leave the door open for a return to Westminster, Mr Johnson was critical of Mr Sunaks administration, questioning the decision to increase taxes and abandoning the prospect of a free trade deal with the US.

Boris Johnson said he thought their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts. Picture: Jonathan Brady/PA Wire

Mr Johnson held his Uxbridge seat with a majority of 7,200 votes at the 2019 contest, with Labour his closest rival.

The by-election is likely to be tricky for Mr Sunaks party, with Labour more than 10 points ahead of the Tories in most opinion polls.

Polling released by Savanta suggested Keir Starmers outfit currently holds a 14-point lead over the Tories in Mr Johnsons former west London constituency.

Richard Mills, chairman of the Uxbridge and South Ruislip Conservative Association, said Mr Johnson had been an outstanding advocate for the community contrary to external perception.

He said the local party respected his decision to stand down in response to what Mr Mills called a co-ordinated campaign against him by the Privileges Committee.

Mhairi Black, SNP deputy Westminster leader, said the former No 10 incumbent jumped before he was pushed.

Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner said the British public was sick to the back teeth of this never ending Tory soap opera played out at their expense as she urged voters to turn the page with a fresh start under a Labour government.

Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper said it was good riddance to Mr Johnson.
Burma Myanmar Junta Troops Slaughter Nine Villagers in Sagaing Killing Spree

Members of local resistance forces conduct military training in Kawlin Township, Sagaing Region. / Kawlin People Defense Force

Junta troops killed at least nine villagers during raids in Kawlin Township, Sagaing Region, between May 26 and June 4, according to local sources.

They also detained at least 18 villagers during the attacks, which targeted a dozen villages in the east of the township.

The Kawlin People Defense Force (PDF) said they found the bodies of seven detainees near Ngar Gyi Aing village on Wednesday.

Six of the victims were from Moke Wa village while the other was from Hpan Khar Kone, a spokesman for the group said.

Another seven villagers used as human shields by junta troops were released on June 3. However, four other detainees are still missing and presumed dead, according to the spokesman.

The four missing people are from Bant Pway Kone and Chat Kone villages. We havent found their bodies yet, he added.

Clashes between junta troops and local resistance forces broke out on June 2, killing at least three resistance members.

Two days later, a prolonged battle erupted when People Defense Force Battalion-1 attacked junta forces near Onh Pin Kone and Taung Ba Lu villages, where clashes lasted from 9am to 6pm on Sunday, according to sources.

A junta warplane dropped bombs on Chaung Kwayt and Inn Pin Thar villages on Sunday evening. There were no civilian casualties reported as many residents near the battle zone had fled their homes in advance.

A Kawlin PDF Facebook post announced that at least two junta soldiers were killed and 13 wounded during the clashes on June 4.

Another source said junta troops suffered heavy casualties and the number of troops had decreased significantly by the time they retreated to their base in Koe Taung Boet village in neighboring Kantbalu township on Monday.

Junta troops also killed a man from Nyaung Kone village during their raid on Kyauk Tan village on May 28.

They cut off his hand before killing him because he had a tattoo of Aung San Suu Kyi on his arm, said the PDF spokesman.

Five days later, a man from In Pin Hla village was killed when regime soldiers attacked Kyuak Pyin Thar village tract on June 3, according to sources.

Aung Nay Linn, 24 was killed and 11 villagers were arrested by junta troops on Saturday, said a local resident. Eleven detainees from Kyauk Pyin Thar were released later the same day, according to local sources.

Junta troops raided Moke Wa, Kyauk Pyin Thar, Khan Thar, Ka Nyoet Inn, Bant Pway Kone, Chat Kone, Kyauk Tan, Sin Kone, Ohn Pin Kone and Hpan Khar Kone villages in east Kawlin between May 26 and June 4.
Burma Myanmars Chin National Front Bars Outsiders From Entering State

Vehicles traveling in Chin State / The Chin Journal

The Chin National Front (CNF) on Thursday barred entry to people from outside the state, after the Myanmar military started using civilian public transport vehicles to move troops into Chin, a tactic adopted by regime forces after they were defeated in a series of clashes with local resistance forces.

The CNF is a Chin nationalist political organization whose armed wing, the Chin National Army (CNA), has been fighting against the Myanmar military in cooperation with the Chin Defense Forces for the past two years.

The CNA said that since last month, Myanmar regime soldiers have been entering Chin State with weapons and ammunition by pretending to be civilians on public transportation vehicles. Therefore, the CNF warned operators of such vehicles not to carry Myanmar military reinforcements and banned the entry of all travelers from outside Chin State.

Those with an urgent need to travel to Chin State will only be allowed to enter with the approval of the relevant Chin Defense Force or Peoples Defense Force authorities, the CNF said.

CAN spokesperson Salai Htet Ni said the announcement was made for the sake of the security of the people and territory.

People in Chin State are free to move about and do not need to worry. We have banned military reinforcements. We do not ban the use of cars for transport, Salai Htet Ni told The Irrawaddy.

Fierce fighting has been reported in both southern and northern Chin State since the last week of May. Clashes erupted near the Chin State capital Hakha on May 29 after 150 junta troops left Hakha and advanced on Thantlang, 35 km to the west. More than 50 regime troops have been killed during a dozen days of clashes. Meanwhile, 16 Chin resistance fighters have been killed and a dozen wounded, according to the CNA.

Salai Htet Ni said that clashes were being reported daily but the CNA wasnt able to verify military casualties for Wednesday and Thursday because of the weather.

The troops are currently near the Thee Mit Valley and we dont know their remaining strength. They might be sent reinforcements because the valley is not too far from Hakha, Salai Htet Ni told The Irrawaddy.

Although military fighter jets were flying over Hakha every day, there had been no air strikes this week, he added.

Clashes have been reported in Chin State since May 2021. The CNA claims to control more than 70 percent of the area covered by Chin States nine townships.
Burma Why Myanmars Junta Chief Turns Himself Into a Pallbearer at Monks Funerals

(Left) Min Aung Hlaing and other senior junta members carry the coffin of Bhamo Sayadaw at the monks funeral on June 6. (Right) Min Aung Hlaing and Soe Win carry the coffin of Zaygon Sayadaw at the monks funeral in June 2021. / cincds

At the funeral of highly revered Buddhist monk Bhamo Sayadaw Bhaddanta Kumara Bhivamsa on June 6, a solemn-faced Min Aung Hlaing was among those carrying the coffin, continuing the junta bosss efforts to portray himself as the protector of the religion in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.

Together with his deputy Soe Win, Min Aung Hlaing earlier carried the coffin of senior monk Zaygon Sayadaw from Naypyitaws Pyinmana at the monks funeral after he died in a military plane crash in June 2021.

Bhamo Sayadaw passed away on May 25 at the age of 94. He served as the ninth chairman of the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, known as Ma Ha Na, Myanmars highest Buddhist authority. Known as a guru of Buddhist teachings in Myanmar, the monk earned many religious titles during his life.

In 2017, under the now ousted National League for Democracy government, Bhamo Sayadaw, in his capacity as the Ma Ha Na chairman, decided to outlaw Ma Ba Tha, a nationalist association whose members were notorious for spreading hate speech against non-Buddhists. The monk also reclaimed 7 acres (about 3 hectares) of land grabbed by the Myanmar military on a religious site in Yangons Kabar Aye. Should someone use the land donated for the sake of religion for any other purpose, he may suffer negative consequences in his current and next existences, the monk said in a letter addressed to military chief Min Aung Hlaing.

A few days before the military seized power in February 2021, the authority on Pali also called on the Myanmar military not to stage a coup.

Despite turning a deaf ear to Bhamo Sayadaws request, Min Aung Hlaing continued to portray himself as a devoted disciple in order to exploit the monks image for the generals personal political gain.

Min Aung Hlaing did not stop exploiting the image of Bhamo Sayadaw even after his death. He He had the late monks head covered in gold leaf, in what he described as a gesture of respect in acknowledgement of the monks extensive knowledge of Buddhist teachings.

Also carrying the coffin were military intelligence chief and joint secretary of the juntas State Administration Council Ye Win Oothe man in charge of the juntas torture chambers, in which civilians and monks are being tortured and killed. Another pallbearer was Air Force chief Tun Aung, who has overseen deadly air strikes on civilian targets including schools, displacement camps and healthcare facilities.

Though Myanmars successive military leaders have been equally megalomaniacal, Min Aung Hlaing is the most hypocritical of them all. Setting aside Saw Maung, who ruled for just a few years after the pro-democracy uprising in 1988, Min Aung Hlaings predecessors as dictator, Ne Win and Than Shwe, did not bother to carry coffins.

Over the past two years, Min Aung Hlaing has had the worlds biggest sitting Buddha statue built in Naypyitaw, consecrated a number of pagodasincluding in the Russian capital, Moscowand has often presented offerings to senior monks. At the same time, he has ordered his forces to arrest and kill civilians and monks who oppose him, echoing Than Shwes bloody crackdowns on Buddhist monks during the 2007 Saffron Revolution.

Myanmar people are well aware that Min Aung Hlaings acts of piety are in fact yadayarituals based in a belief in magic, performed in the hope of conquering his enemies and ensuring that his rule will be a long one. Following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Min Aung Hlaing has also used rubies and white elephants to spread propaganda about his rule. Military generals tend to see the discovery of large rubies and albino elephants, among other rare things, as natures confirmation of their own greatness, and use them to justify their rule.

In early 2020, several months before the planned election in November of that year, Min Aung Hlaing placed a Hti umbrella atop Bagans ancient Htilominlo Temple, under the guidance of his astrological adviser Vasipeik Sayadaw. The name of the pagoda can be translated from Burmese as asking for Hti [one of the important symbols of the Burmese monarchy] and asking for kingship.

Over the past two years, Min Aung Hlaing has continued to consecrate pagodas, even flying to Moscow to consecrate one there, as he seeks divine blessings in the face of a nationwide armed resistance.

At the consecration ceremonies, he shouts three times Aung Pyi!a common phrase used to mark the successful conclusion of a religious ceremony. But in the mouth of Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar people are all too aware that the exclamation is intended as a yadaya invocation, shouted in the hope of conquering his enemies.

On May 13, one day before Cyclone Mocha devastated western Myanmars Rakhine State, Min Aung Hlaing spent the day consecrating a pagoda built by Vasipeik Sayadaw in eastern Shan State, instead of reviewing rescue and relief plans. People understand that he was performing yadaya for his own good while neglecting the lives of millions who were about to face the strongest storm to hit the country in decades.
War Against the Junta Nearly 40 Myanmar Junta Troops Killed in Three Days of Resistance attacks

Myaing Underground Defense Force, which joined resistance ambushes of regime targets in Pakokku Township on Wednesday / MUGDF

At least 38 Myanmar junta troops including pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia members and junta-appointed administrators were killed in the last three days as Peoples Defense Forces (PDFs) stepped up attacks on regime targets in some parts of the country.

Also, four resistance members and two civilians were killed by regime forces in Upper Myanmar.

Incidents were reported in Sagaing, Magwe and Bago regions.

The Irrawaddy has rounded up the following reports of significant attacks from PDFs.

Some military casualty figures could not be independently verified.

Resistance camp raided in Sagaing

Four resistance members including two women combatants and two civilians were shot dead in Monywa Township, Sagaing Region on Wednesday when a military detachment raided a camp of Monywa PDF Battalion 27, a resistance official told the media.

Five other resistance members suffered injuries.

Posting photos of killed resistance members and seized weapons, pro-junta Telegram channel The Fifty Two News reported that regime forces managed to seize a PDF base at Yay Kan Su Village in Monywa.

The photos show that the PDF members and civilians were all shot in the head.

Junta suffers losses in resistance land mine attacks in Sagaing

At least eight regime forces were killed in Kale Township, Sagaing Region on Wednesday when the Kale Urban Resistance group used land mines to ambush junta troops, said the Defense Ministry of the civilian National Unity Government, the political wing of the Peoples Defense Force (PDF).

First, the resistance group used land mines to ambush 22 troops traveling to a village from the town of Kale, killing three soldiers.

Five more soldiers were killed and four others injured as the resistance forces ambushed more regime troops who were trying to retrieve the bodies of killed soldiers.

Pro-regime militia bases raided in Sagaing

Combined resistance force members take part in a raid on the pro-regime Village of Tal Thee Taw in Shwebo Township on Wednesday. / Snake Eyes PDF

A two-hour-long clash broke out in Shwebo Township, Sagaing Region on Tuesday when five local resistance groups raided pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia bases in the pro-regime village of Tal Thee Taw, said Snake Eyes Peoples Defense Force, which joined the attack.

Fourteen militia members were killed in the clash, and another four regime soldiers were killed in land-mine ambushes against junta reinforcements from the nearby pro-junta village of Zee Phyu Kone.

Military training base bombed in Sagaing

Resistance members fire a 120-mm artillery round at Military Training Battalion 10 in Ayadaw Township on Wednesday. / Danger Force PDF

Local PDF group Danger Force said it used a 120-mm artillery round to shell Military Training Battalion 10 in Ayadaw Township, Sagaing Region on Wednesday. Many regime forces are thought to have been killed and injured.

After being attacked, the military base randomly responded with six heavy explosives. But there were no PDF casualties.

Regime forces bombed in Sagaing

Resistance members attack regime targets in Myinmu town on Wednesday. / MNRF

Local resistance group Moe Nyo Revolution Force said it used a grenade to bomb regime sentries near the township police station in the town of Myinmu, Sagaing Region on Wednesday evening.

After being attacked, the regime forces responded with firearms, leaving a resistance fighter with minor injuries. Many regime forces are thought to have been killed or injured.

Military checkpoint raided in Magwe

Combined resistance forces attack a military checkpoint in In Pin Village in Pakokku Township on Thursday. / Earthquake PDF

At least two junta soldiers were killed and three injured in Pakokku Township, Magwe Region on Thursday when three PDF groups raided a military checkpoint in In Pin Village, said Earthquake PDF, which joined the attack.

During the raid, a resistance drone unit conducted drone strikes on the checkpoint. There were no PDF casualties, though regime forces responded with firearms.

Resistance groups ambush regime forces in Magwe

At least six regime forces including pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia members were killed and many others injured in Pakokku Township, Magwe Region on Wednesday when combined PDF groups conducted five ambushes against regime targets throughout the day, said Myaing PDF, which coordinated the attacks.

Junta township and village officials, militia member assassinated in Bago

Bago Region Peoples Defense Force claimed to have killed army Major Nay Lin Oo, one of the heads of the junta-formed Kyauktaga Township Administration Council, along with a junta-appointed village administrator in Kyauktaga Township, Bago Region on Wednesday.

The two were shot by PDF fighters while travelling on a motorbike. After the assassination, regime forces shelled nearby villages on the bank of Sittaung River.

On Tuesday, members of Bago Region PDF also assassinated a junta-appointed 100 households administrator and a pro-regime Pyu Saw Htee militia member in Yedashe and Phyu townships in Bago Region.
With beautiful beaches, fun and rich culture, adventure spots including 27-waterfalls, not to mention a wide array of all-inclusive resorts, the Dominican Republic's has long been a popular tourist destination for South Floridians.

However, this week, citing violent crime, including armed robbery, homicide and sexual assault throughout the island nation, the United States State Department upgraded the safety risk of travel to the country to a level 2 - Exercise Increased Caution.

However, due to the flourishing tourist economy, the DR has implemented a tourist police corps to handle issues directly impacting travelers, according to Travel of Path.

What should travelers consider when planning travel to DR?

Tourists are advised to avoid traveling alone, especially in major cities. Resorts are safer, often carrying a larger police presence with them, so it's best to tread the well-beaten path.

Punta Cana is highly regarded as one of the safest places to travel. Abundant with restaurants, beaches, and resorts, the area is dense in tourists (purportedly 80%-90% of US tourists end up there), so its particularly secure and protected. While it is not the only option, be advised to stay in places frequented by tourists.

If you do, by chance, find yourself in danger, the U.S. State Department urges you not to resist a robbery and not to flash any valuables that you may be carrying. Be mindful and observant of where you are and who is around you.

The State Department also urges enrollment into the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program, which keeps travelers altered about safety conditions in their destination and helps the U.S. Embassy, as well as friends and family, contact participants in the case of an emergency.

The Travel Advisory is not a dramatic change, nor is it unprecedented considering recent headlines. Though it s always a good idea to practice mindfulness and safety, tourists shouldnt worry too much.

For more information, click here.
Friday, Jun 9th, 2023 (3:26 pm) - Score 3,456

The Trade Remedies Authority (TRA), which is an arms length body of the UK government that exists to tackle unfair import practices and unforeseen surges of imports, has today recommend the introduction of new trade remedies to protect the countrys optical fibre industry from harm caused by low-priced imports from China.

Optical fibre cables transmit data using laser light and come in all sorts of different sizes and designs. Some are used in the UKs Access Network to help bring gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband closer to homes, while others are used for core network connectivity, subsea links or high-capacity Ethernet connections (leased lines) for businesses and backhaul etc.

NOTE: Around 5.7 million fibre kilometres of optical fibre cable was sold in the UK in 2021, including UK producer sales and imported goods, and the UK market is expected to grow. UK-produced fibre accounts for around half of all UK consumption, with the rest supplied by imports from China, India, the US, Poland and Germany.

The cables themselves are fairly cheap, at least when compared with legacy copper lines, but they still attract a fair cost when deployed at scale  something a lot of networks operators are currently doing. Such cables can be purchased from various UK and European suppliers (e.g. Emtelle, Hexatronic, Prysmian etc.), but they may also be imported from countries like China.

Last year we reported that a complaint by Prysmian Cables & Systems Limited seemed to have prompted the TRA to open two investigations into imports of single-mode optical fibre cables from China. The first (AD0021) was an anti-dumping investigation to determine whether imports of these products are being dumped in the UK at prices below what they would sell for in their home country. The second (AS0022) was an anti-subsidy investigation to determine whether the Chinese imports entering the UK market are also benefiting from subsidies which lower their production costs.

The New Remedies

Overall, the TRA has determined that there is already damage to the UK industry, having found clear evidence of price undercutting, indicating that UK businesses are struggling to compete with the dumped imports. The TRA therefore recommended that the Secretary of State for International Trade put in place a provisional measure on these imports while it completes its investigation (details).

Under the new provisional measure, importers will need to provide a guarantee (in the form of cash, bond or bank guarantee) to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) that shows they can pay the duty that they may ultimately be required to pay on imports of these goods. This will help make sure UK businesses that make similar goods dont suffer further damage from these imports while the TRA completes its investigation.

Oliver Griffiths, TRA Chief Executive, said: Optical fibre cable provides higher speeds and bandwidth and as such plays an important role in meeting the UKs internet needs. The interim measures the TRA has recommended will ensure UK producers are able to compete with imports and are able to continue supplying this vital growth industry.

The TRA is also carrying out a separate investigation to determine whether the Chinese imports entering the UK market are also benefiting from subsidies which lower their production costs. This investigation will report its initial conclusions soon and both cases are expected to conclude this summer, once the TRAs final recommendations are submitted to the Secretary of State for Business & Trade.
Today

Clear. Windy this evening. Low 64F. W winds at 25 to 35 mph, decreasing to 10 to 15 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph.

Tonight

Clear. Windy this evening. Low 64F. W winds at 25 to 35 mph, decreasing to 10 to 15 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph.

Tomorrow

Mainly sunny. High 92F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph.
Today

Sunny skies with gusty winds developing later in the day. High 86F. Winds W at 20 to 30 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph.

Tonight

Clear skies. Gusty winds early. Low 63F. Winds W at 20 to 30 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph.

Tomorrow

Sunny skies. High 92F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph.
" " The vaquita (Phocoena sinus) is the smallest of the cetaceans  the order of mammals that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA-4.0)

Jacques Cousteau, renowned sea explorer and scuba pioneer, spent decades exploring oceans and rivers all across the globe, but few could match the rich biodiversity of the Gulf of California  a narrow 700-mile-long (1,126-kilometer) sea that separates the Baja California peninsula from mainland Mexico. Cousteau affectionately called it "the world's aquarium" due to its remarkable array of marine species. But today, the underwater masterpiece is in critical danger of losing one of its unique denizens forever  and scientists can't emphasize enough just how truly dire the situation has become for one of the world's most adorable mammals.

The total number of vaquita (Phocoena sinus), a small porpoise endemic to the Gulf of California, has dwindled down to just 10 as of this writing, making the vaquita the world's most endangered marine mammal. While not all hope is lost for their survival, it hinges on immediate action from the Mexican government and local fishermen.

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One of the six species of porpoises, the vaquita is also the world's smallest cetacean  the order of aquatic mammals that includes whales, porpoise and dolphins. They only grow up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) in length and weigh in at no more than 120 pounds (55 kilograms). Their faces are undeniably cute, with black rings around their eyes and lips that give the impression of a perpetual smile. Vaquitas have a rounded head, spade-shaped teeth and no beak. Despite their small stature, their triangular dorsal fin is larger than that of other porpoises, most likely to help them lower their body temperature in their warm water habitat.

If you've never heard of the vaquita, it's quite possibly due to the fact that they were only first identified and studied in the mid-20th century and are known to be quite shy. Even though they inhabit waters relatively close to shore and don't often swim deeper than 90 feet (28 meters), they only come to the surface every few minutes for 3 seconds at a time and tend to stay in small groups and away from motorized boats.

" " Cardboard vaquitas are seen during a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) demonstration aimed at protecting the endangered porpoise, outside the National Palace in Mexico City, Mexico, July 8, 2017. Manuel Velasquez/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
YEREVAN, JUNE 9, ARMENPRESS. The delegation led by the Speaker of Parliament of Armenia Alen Simonyan met with the Members of the delegation of Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

Simonyan noted that he has repeatedly witnessed the active work of the British group, which is a good example for the parliamentarians.

Alen Simonyan presented the post-war situation and detailed issues regarding the complex situation in the region. He mentioned that Armenia is following the developments taking place in the UK Parliament and the activities of all those parliamentarians who demonstrated the level of perception of the situation in our region after the 2020 war. We believe that the targeted statements and pressure of our international partners can prevent further aggression by Azerbaijan, as well as contribute to the elimination of the atmosphere of impunity, Alen Simonyan said, according to a readout.

The Members of the Armenian parliamentary delegation thoroughly informed their British colleagues about the blockade of Artsakh Armenians, the crisis of the Lachin Corridor and the encroachments of the Azerbaijani military forces against the territorial integrity of Armenia.

The sides stated that Armenia and the United Kingdom have formed an ambitious agenda for bilateral relations based on common values and principles, such as rule of law, the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the strengthening of democratic institutions.

They also discussed the necessity to have a common agenda within the framework of the Inter-Parliamentary Union at the meeting to support the strengthening of the democratic institutions of the countries.
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Ann Arbor (Informed Comment)  Donald John Trump (the newspapers always give all three names of criminals) has been indicted on 7 counts having to do with espionage and obstruction of justice arising from his removal of classified documents from the White House and his refusal to turn some of them over when the government demanded them. The insular American television news media keeps calling this indictment unprecedented. But lots of heads of state have been indicted, even indicted more than once, and tried and jailed. The U.S. has been peculiar in the degree to which it has neglected to treat ex-presidents the way ordinary citizens are treated.

In fact, in this case Trump was given enormous latitude, since he was allowed the opportunity to return the purloined classified documents. An ordinary person found with classified documents in their home would have been arrested on the spot.

Trump has been indicted, as well, for his pay-offs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougall on the eve of the 2016 election to hide his affairs with the women from the public .

France has put two former presidents on trial. Jacques Chirac, president 1995-2007, was found guilty in 2011 of having engaged in fraud to raise money for his center-right, Gaullist Rally for the Republic Party. One of the big differences between France and the U.S. is that here it isnt illegal to engage in fraud to raise money for political campaigns, or otherwise Trump would be indicted for that crime, too. Chirac was in poor health when found guilty and suffered from some form of dementia so that he could not remember things, so the court gave him a two-year suspended sentence.

Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France from 2007 to 2012, has just lost an appeal on his conviction in 2021 on charges of corruption and influence-peddling. He was sentenced to three years in prison, but two of those years were suspended and he is permitted to serve the remaining year under house arrest, wearing an electronic bracelet.

Sarkozy is the subject of several ongoing investigations into campaign finance violations. He was investigated for having allegedly taken money under the table from LOreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. Ironically, that charge has never been made to stick. But while the investigation was going on, Sarkozy and his lawyers wanted to know its status, and they promised senior magistrate Gilbert Azibert a cushy posting in Monaco if he would find out this information for them. This is the charge on which Sarkozy has been found guilty. It is not the last time hell have to go to trial  like Trump, he has been indicted on more than one charge.

Article continues after bonus IC video

MSNBC: Trump leaves trail of lawyers in difficult positions on road to indictment

The US Founding Fathers were deeply influenced by French political thinkers such as Montesquieu, who advocated the separation of powers, representative government and checks and balances, as well as by Voltaire and others. If France can indict and try its ex-presidents, why not the United States, as well?

Then there is Egypts Hosni Mubarak, who served as president 1981-2011. He was convicted in 2015 of embezzlement of government funds to build palaces for himself and his sons. He was sentenced to three years, but released because he had already spent three years imprisoned. He was heavily fined, in an attempt to recover the money he stole from the Egyptian people. Mubarak was also indicted for the murders of protesters in 2011, and was convicted, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. He died in 2020.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was convicted in 2014 of bribery, fraud, breach of trust and obstruction of justice. He served prison time 2015-2017 and then was released early.

Current Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is on trial for corruption, but is hoping to use his return to the prime ministers office from last December to avoid being convicted or going to jail. Aided by extremist, far-right allies, he is attempting to gut and politicize the Israeli judiciary, so that he can manipulate it into dropping the charges against him. This attempt to tinker with Israels structure of governance has caused enormous crowds to demonstrate against him every Saturday evening and some weekdays for the past several months.

Of all these other cases of indicted ex-presidents, it is the Netanyahu example that tells us most about what would happen if Trump is reelected in 2024. Like Netanyahu, he will try to tinker with the US justice system so as to shape it to please him and get himself off the hook.
( Middle East Monitor)  Dozens of Palestinian children rallied on Tuesday morning in front of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) headquarters in Gaza City to protest against the halt and suspension of the World Food Program (WFP) in the besieged Gaza Strip. The protesters called on the head of the UNDP to reverse the decision, holding the UNDP responsible for the struggles Palestinians will now face without this aid.

This week, some families who have benefitted from the programme received a message that their monthly food voucher from the WFP would be halted. Samah Azzam, 55, a mother of six, says the decision is disastrous for her family. Samahs husband suffers from a chronic illness and two of her sons and a daughter are studying at university. The family has relied on the WFP distribution for years.

The food voucher just covered our basic needs, she explains. Now the burden will be a mountain on us and I feel lost.

The Gaza Ministry of Social Development said the WFPs announcement that it intends to suspend most of its services in the Palestinian territories, including the Gaza Strip, came as a surprise as there had been no prior talk of this. Reasons behind the decision, it added, remain vague and it is a breach of the agreements made with local partners.

Only two months ago, the WFP increased the value of cash assistance to 42 shekels ($11) per person due to the global increase in commodity prices as a result of Russias war on Ukraine.
Vancouver, British Columbia  TheNewswire - June 8, 2023  Gold Lion Resources Inc. (Gold Lion or the Company) (CSE:GL) (OTC:GLIOF) (FWB:2BC) is pleased to announce it has appointed Sebastian Lowes as a director of the Company.

Mr. Lowes is a corporate securities lawyer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is a member of the Law Society of British Columbia and graduated with Canadian and American law degrees in 2018. He began his career at a top tier international law firm practicing in the securities and capital markets group. Sebastian has a broad private practice and advises public and private corporations, primarily in the natural resource, technology, biotech and energy sectors. Mr. Lowes has a depth of experience acting in complex transactions, including one of the biggest IPOs in Canadian biotech history ($555.5 million gross proceeds) and various business combinations in excess of $1 billion in the natural resource sector.

Furthermore, the Company announces that Lawrence Hay has resigned as a director of the Company. The Company thanks Mr. Hay for his service to date and wishes him the best of luck with his future endeavours.

About Gold Lion Resources Inc.

Gold Lion Resources Inc. is a mineral exploration company actively involved in the exploration of the Mia-3 Lithium Property located in the James Bay region of Quebec. For more information please visit: https://goldlionresources.com.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Mark Haywood Chief Executive Officer

Head Office 305-1770 Burrard St. Vancouver, British Columbia, V6J3G7

Telephone +1 (604) 416 0569

Website www.GoldLionResources.com

Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The CSE and Information Service Provider have not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the accuracy or adequacy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Often, but not always, forward-looking information and information can be identified by the use of words such as plans, expects or does not expect, is expected, estimates, intends, anticipates or does not anticipate, or believes, or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, might or will be taken, occur or be achieved. Actual future results may differ materially. In particular, this release contains forward-looking information relating to the Company's expected benefits of the Transaction and opportunities which will arise from the acquisition of the Property. The forward-looking information reflects management's current expectations based on information currently available and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause outcomes to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking information. Such risk factors may include, among others, but are not limited to: general economic conditions in Canada and globally; industry conditions, including governmental regulation and environmental regulation; the availability of capital on acceptable terms; the need to obtain required approvals from regulatory authorities; stock market volatility; competition for, among other things, skilled personnel and supplies; incorrect assessments of the value of acquisitions; geological, technical, processing and transportation problems; changes in tax laws and incentive programs; failure to realize the anticipated benefits of acquisitions and dispositions; and the other factors. Although the Company believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing the forward-looking information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on such information and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed time frames or at all. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include: (i) adverse market conditions; and (ii) other factors beyond the control of the Company. New risk factors emerge from time to time, and it is impossible for the Companys management to predict all risk factors, nor can the Company assess the impact of all factors on Companys business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ from those contained in any forward-looking information. The forward-looking information included in this news release are made as of the date of this news release and the Company expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. Additional information identifying risks and uncertainties that could affect financial results is contained in the Companys filings with Canadian securities regulators, which are available at www.sedar.com.
VANCOUVER, BC, June 9, 2023 /CNW/ - Artemis Gold Inc. (TSXV: ARTG) ("Artemis Gold" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has received its first US$35.2 million deposit under the Silver Stream agreement (the "Silver Stream") concluded on December 13, 2021 with Wheaton Precious Metals Corp. ("Wheaton"). The initial deposit forms part of the US$140.8 million that Wheaton has committed to fund toward construction of the Blackwater Gold Mine ("Blackwater"). Construction activities at Blackwater are underway and progressing in accordance with the Company's project development plan.

More details of the Silver Stream are contained in the Company's most recent Annual Information Form that is filed on the Company's profile on www.sedar.com.

Steven Dean, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Artemis Gold, said "The receipt of the first funding under the Silver Stream is an important milestone as it represents the first external funding being advanced toward Blackwater's construction and reflects our financing partners' confidence in the strong progress achieved to date."

About Artemis Gold Inc.

Artemis Gold Inc. is a well-financed, growth-oriented gold development company with a strong financial capacity aimed at creating shareholder value through the identification, acquisition, and development of gold properties in mining-friendly jurisdictions. The company's current focus is construction of the Blackwater Mine project in central British Columbia approximately 160km southwest of Prince George and 450km northeast of Vancouver. The project is one of the largest capital investments in the Bulkley-Nechako, Fraser-Fort George and Cariboo regions of B.C. in the last decade. The first pour of gold and silver from Blackwater Mine is expected H2 2024 and the mine is expected to be in production for a minimum of 22 years. Artemis trades on the TSX-V under the symbol "ARTG". For more information visit: www.artemisgoldinc.com

Qualified Person

Jeremy Langford, FAUSIMM, a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed, and approved the scientific and technical information in this news release.

ARTEMIS GOLD INC.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

"Steven Dean"

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

+1 604 558 1107

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This news release contains certain "forward looking statements" and certain "forward-looking information" as defined under applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws. Forward-looking statements and information can generally be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "may", "will", "expect", "intend", "estimate", "anticipate", "believe", "continue", "plans", "potential" or similar terminology. Forward-looking statements and information are not historical facts, are made as of the date of this news release, and include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the potential of the Project; the jobs to be created in connection with the Project; the contribution of the Project to the economy; opinions of the Province of British Columbia regarding the Project and the region; agreements and relationships with Indigenous partners; the future of mining in British Columbia; the plans of the Company with respect to the Project, including construction, site preparation, clearing, consultation with indigenous groups ;; and other plans and expectations of the Company with respect to the Project. These forward-looking statements involve numerous risks and uncertainties and actual results may vary. Important factors that may cause actual results to vary include without limitation, risks related to the ability of the Company to accomplish its plans and objectives with respect to the development of the Project within the expected timing or at all, the timing and receipt of certain required approvals, changes in commodity prices, changes in interest and currency exchange rates, risks inherent in exploration and development activities, changes in development or mining plans due to changes in logistical, technical or other factors, unanticipated operational difficulties (including failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate in accordance with specifications, cost escalation, unavailability of materials, equipment or third party contractors, delays in the receipt of government approvals, industrial disturbances, job action, and unanticipated events related to heath, safety and environmental matters), the COVID-19 pandemic, political risk, social unrest, changes in general economic conditions or conditions in the financial markets, and other risks related to the ability of the Company to proceed with its plans for the Project and other risks set out in the Company's most recent MD&A. In making the forward-looking statements in this news release, the Company has applied several material assumptions, including without limitation, the assumptions that: (1) market fundamentals will result in sustained mineral demand and prices; (2) the receipt of any necessary approvals and consents in connection with the development of the Project; (3) the availability of financing on suitable terms for the development, construction and continued operation of the Project; (4) sustained commodity prices such that the Project remains economically viable; and (5) that the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions related thereto will not materially impact the Company or prevent the Company from operating its business as planned. The actual results or performance by the Company could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, any forward-looking statements. Accordingly, no assurances can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur, or if any of them do so, what impact they will have on the results of operations or financial condition of the Company. Except as required by law, the Company is under no obligation, and expressly disclaim any obligation, to update, alter or otherwise revise any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities laws.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 8, 2023) - Lion Rock Resources Inc. (TSXV: ROAR) (FSE: KGB1) (the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has entered into an option agreement (the "Option Agreement") to acquire the Revell Lithium Project. The Project is located 25 km east of Ignace, Ontario and consists of 112 claims covering 2,350 ha. The Revell Lithium Project lies on trend of the Raleigh Lake pegmatite field, which hosts the Raleigh Lake Lithium-Rubidium deposit.

Acquisition Highlights

The Revell Lithium Property. The 2,350 ha property is located near the triple junction of the Western Wabigoon, Winnipeg River and Marmion Subprovinces. It is underlain by prospective S-Type granite and felsic to intermediate metavolcanics. The underexplored property is on trend with the Raleigh Lake pegmatite field.

Ontario's Lithium Exploration Boom. As a leading location for lithium exploration, Ontario has seen rapid advancement of early-stage projects with government support. Nearby projects include the Raleigh Lake Lithium Project, where a recently announced mineral resource estimate included 2.3 Mt at 0.64% Li 2 O (Measured and Indicated) and 3.9 Mt at 0.58% Li 2 O (Inferred).

Planned Work Program. In Summer 2023, the Company will commence a comprehensive exploration campaign, initially focusing on prospecting, mapping and sampling pegmatites at the Revell Lithium Property.

Figure 1. The Revell Project location map showing nearby claims and lithium occurrences.

About the Revell Lithium Project

The Revell Lithium Project is comprised of 112 claims covering 2,350 ha, approximately 25 km west of Ignace, Ontario. The Project is situated near the triple junction of the Western Wabigoon, Winnipeg River, and Marmion Subprovinces. It is underlain by prospective S-Type granite and felsic to intermediate metavolcanics. The property is accessible by road and strategically located with proximity to infrastructure and recent lithium discoveries.

Terms of Agreement

Under the terms of the Option Agreement, the Company must make payments and share issuances as follows:

1,600,000 common shares on acceptance of the Option Agreement by the TSX Venture Exchange ("TSXV Acceptance"); $150,000 on or before the date that is six months following TSXV Acceptance; and 2,000,000 common shares and $100,000 on or before the first anniversary to TSXV Acceptance.

Also under the terms of the Option Agreement, the property will be subject to a 2% net smelter returns royalty, one-half of which can be purchased by the Company for $500,000.

The above transaction is subject to the acceptance of the TSX Venture Exchange.

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Carl Ginn, P.Geo., consultant to the Company and a Qualified Person pursuant to National Instrument 43-101.

About Lion Rock Resources Inc.

Lion Rock Resources is northwestern Ontario's newest goldcopper explorer. The Company's flagship property, the Maybrun, is a pastproducing mine (Maybrun goldcopper deposit) that was placed on care and maintenance in 1974 for several years prior to an exploration program conducted by Opawica Explorations Inc. in 2005. The Maybrun project is located in the Atikwa Lake area of the Kenora Mining Division, approximately 80 kilometres southeast of Kenora, in northwestern Ontario.

On Behalf of the Board

R. Dale Ginn, President & Chief Executive Officer

O: 604-678-5308

E: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
IMC shares can be purchased under the symbol 3MX on the FRA, IMCX on the CSE and IMIMF on the OTC VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 3, 2020 / International Mining Corp ( CSE:IMCX ) ( OTC:IMIMF ) (FRA:3MX) (the " Company " or " IMC "), is pleased to announce it has received approval and is listed... Read More
UN investigators said Thursday they were gathering evidence that could potentially be used in future prosecutions of those involved in Israel's expulsion of a French-Palestinian human rights lawyer.

A high-level team of United Nations investigators said it was preserving a list of possible perpetrators behind Salah Hamouri's forced deportation, including the El-Al airline used for the expulsion and its staff.

The 38-year-old was long held without charge in Israel on accusations that he was a member of the Marxist-rooted Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), considered a terrorist organisation by the United States and European Union.

Hamouri, who denied that claim and has maintained his innocence in a slew of cases, was expelled after his East Jerusalem residency permit was revoked for an alleged "breach of allegiance" to Israel, in a move immediately decried by the UN rights office as a "war crime".

The UN Commission of Inquiry on the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) confirmed in a report published Thursday that his expulsion was "a grave breach of international humanitarian law".

"We have no doubt that the revocation of Salah Hamouri's East Jerusalem residency permit based on an alleged 'breach of allegiance' to the State of Israel constitutes a war crime," Chris Sidoti, one of the three commissioners, said in a statement.

"Demanding allegiance from protected people in occupied territory is a reprehensible violation of international humanitarian law."

In the commission's second report to the UN Human Rights Council since it was established in 2021, it said it had "preserved, on a list of possible perpetrators, information about the individuals who may bear criminal responsibility."

"The commission notes that Mr. Hamouri's deportation also raises the question of whether individuals within El-Al airlines had knowledge of his unlawful deportation and so may have committed the war crime of aiding, abetting or otherwise assisting in the commission of a war crime," the report said.

"The commission intends to explore further the criminal responsibility of all those involved in the forcible deportation."
YEREVAN, JUNE 9, ARMENPRESS. The Armenia-Azerbaijan relations were among the items on the agenda in the first post-election meeting of the Turkish Security Council, state media reports.

The Security Council meeting of Turkey discussed the crises in Syria, Kosovo and Sudan, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Syrian refugees and other topics.

Anadolu news agency cited a readout as saying that Ankara welcomes the peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan and wants a peace treaty to be signed as soon as possible, leading to lasting peace and stability on the Caucasian region.
The destruction of the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine is wreaking havoc on the environment with severe human consequences, experts say.

The dam was breached on Tuesday, forcing thousands to flee their homes as water surged into the Dnipro River, flooding dozens of villages and parts of the regional capital Kherson while sparking fears of a humanitarian disaster.

The environmental impact is grave, NGOs told AFP.

- 'Ecocide' -

Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of causing the breach.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said it was a "crime against humanity and an ecocide".

He called it "one of the most significant environmental catastrophes in Europe in recent decades" and accused Russia of detonating an "environmental bomb of mass destruction".

Earlier this year, Brussels paved the way for the recognition of "ecocide" in EU law.

- Risk to plants and animals -

After the release of 18 billion tonnes of water held back by the dam, ecosystems will suffer serious harm along the Dnipro, Europe's fourth-longest river.

The damage could extend to coastal areas of the Black Sea that might be temporarily desalinated in some areas, according to the Ukrainian NGO Ecoaction.

It warned of a potential "mass mortality" threatening fish, molluscs, crustaceans, microorganisms, aquatic plants and rodents. Some of these species are found only in the region and are already at risk.

The NGO also warned of a "deterioration in water quality due to the decomposition of dead organisms".

The Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group said the consequences for wildlife would be felt over an area of at least 5,000 square kilometres (almost 2,000 square miles).

"Some species may have suffered a greater blow in one day on June 6 than in the last 100 years," it said.

The group added that it could take a decade to make up for the impact on fish, and that some nesting birds would disappear from the area.

Domestic and captive animals are also in danger, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

"Shelters are already overwhelmed by requests for rescue," said Natalia Gozak, an IFAW official in Ukraine.

A zoo in flood-hit Nova Kakhovka has been completely inundated, Gozak said: "All the animals, except the swans, are dead."

Upstream, vegetation "will die as a result of drainage... while downstream areas will be flooded, including steppe and forest zones not adapted to flooding, leading to their waterlogging and destruction", Ecoaction warned.

Several of Ukraine's national parks, including the UNESCO-listed Black Sea Biosphere Reserve, are also directly threatened.

- Pollution -

Widespread pollution from the dam's breach is expected due to rubbish, agrochemicals, hazardous materials and the damage to wastewater treatment and sewage systems.

Ukrainian officials said Tuesday that 150 tonnes of engine oil had spilled into the Dnipro, with the risk of a further leakage of more than 300 tonnes. Zelensky said it posed "a threat to the unique flora and fauna."

Pollution is expected to reach the Black Sea and could affect organisms from plankton to dolphins.

- Flooding and water shortages -

Over 40,000 people are in danger of being flooded, Ukraine's prosecutor general Andriy Kostin warned Tuesday as he announced mass evacuations.

The damage is also likely to affect agriculture and livestock farming, sparking fears of a humanitarian disaster. Ukraine is one of the world's main suppliers of grain.

The Kakhovka dam provided drinking water and irrigation for southern Ukraine, one of the driest parts of the country, and its destruction represents a major risk to the water supply of millions of people.

IFAW said the water shortage could leave some areas parched.

"The rotting biomass of aquatic flora and fauna will be transformed into arid land, or even desert, in the coming months," Gozak said.

The damage will alter microclimates and temperatures, Gozak added, and could spark a wave of migration to other regions of Ukraine and Europe.
UN investigators said Thursday that they had drafted a list of people and groups who could potentially be prosecuted on war crime charges over Israel's expulsion of a French-Palestinian human rights lawyer.

The high-level United Nations team said in its second report that it had identified several possible perpetrators involved in Salah Hamouri's forced deportation, including Israel's El-Al airline and its staff.

Israel slammed the report, saying the commission set up two years ago by the UN Human Rights Council "has no legitimacy. It never had".

Hamouri, 38, was long held without charge in Israel on accusations that he was a member of the Marxist-rooted Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), considered a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Union.

Hamouri, who denied the claim and has maintained his innocence in a slew of cases, was expelled after his East Jerusalem residency permit was revoked for an alleged "breach of allegiance" to Israel, a move immediately denounced by the UN rights office as a "war crime".

The UN Commission of Inquiry on the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) confirmed in its report Thursday that his expulsion was "a grave breach of international humanitarian law".

"We have no doubt that the revocation of Salah Hamouri's East Jerusalem residency permit based on an alleged 'breach of allegiance' to the State of Israel constitutes a war crime," Chris Sidoti, one of the three commissioners, said in a statement.

"Demanding allegiance from protected people in occupied territory is a reprehensible violation of international humanitarian law," he said.

- 'No legitimacy' -

In its report, the commission said it had "preserved, on a list of possible perpetrators, information about the individuals who may bear criminal responsibility".

"The commission notes that Mr. Hamouri's deportation also raises the question of whether individuals within El-Al airlines had knowledge of his unlawful deportation and so may have committed the war crime of aiding, abetting or otherwise assisting in the commission of a war crime," the report said.

"The commission intends to explore further the criminal responsibility of all those involved in the forcible deportation."

The case was listed in the report as an example of increased restrictions allegedly being imposed to silence civil society in the occupied Palestinian territories, which the investigators said were part of the Israeli government's "goal of ensuring and enshrining its permanent occupation".

Israel's mission in Geneva, which has repeatedly criticised the commission for bias, denounced "the claims and false accusations against Israel presented in the latest report", which it said were widely based on "kangaroo trials".

The investigators said they had conducted 127 interviews with victims and witnesses as well as experts and others, including during a series of public hearings in Geneva.

Their report found that authorities both in Israel and the OPT were violating a range of rights of Palestinian civil society through harassment, threats, arrests, interrogations, detention and torture.

Israel's authorities were responsible for the majority of the violations, the investigators said, for example by increasing restrictions of civic space through "a strategy of delegitimising and silencing civil society", including by labelling Palestinian organisations and their members as "terrorists".

The report called on the International Criminal Court prosecutor to prioritise investigating the situation in the OPT, "including the identification of direct perpetrators, those exercising command responsibility and individuals who aid or abet" international crimes.
As Ben Roberts-Smith lay stretched out, sunning himself on a Bali pool deck Justice Anthony Besanko of the Federal Court of Australia was putting the finishing touches on a 726 page judgment, published on Monday June 5, that would confirm Roberts-Smiths fall from revered national hero to a callous and inhumane criminal, who disgraced his country by committing, on multiple occasions, the war crime of murder while deployed to Afghanistan with Australias special forces (SAS).

The proceedings, which were the equal longest in the Federal Courts history, concerned allegations made in three newspapers in 2018 that Roberts-Smith had, among other things, kicked a unarmed Afghan civilian off a cliff, and procured a soldier under his command to shoot him; pressured an inexperienced special forces soldier to execute an elderly, unarmed Afghan in order to blood the rookie; and had killed an unarmed prisoner with a prosthetic leg by machine-gunning him from close range.

While the verdict was a civil judgment in a defamation trial, criminal jeopardy remains for Roberts-Smith and the witnesses whose actions in Afghanistan were given a public airing at trial. Justice Besanko found that the Victoria Cross recipient was motivated to lie at trial to resist findings against him which may affect whether further action is taken against him, and noted that it is inherent in the finding of criminal conduct [at a civil trial] that that may increase the likelihood of the alleged actor being [criminally] charged.

Highest degree for a defamation case

Roberts-Smith argued that the articles published by the journalists conveyed various defamatory imputations, including that he committed murder on numerous occasions within the meaning of the Geneva Conventions and Australias complementary legislation, authorised unlawful killings and bashed an unarmed civilian. It was further pleaded by his lawyers that the articles conveyed the imputation that Roberts-Smith broke the moral and legal rules of military engagement and is therefore a criminal.

Roberts-Smith sought aggravated damages, the removal of the articles from medias websites and a permanent injunction restraining publication of the defamatory imputations, effectively gagging further reporting on war crimes allegations against the former soldier.

The newspapers defended the imputations on the basis that they were substantially true  a notoriously difficult defence to prove in Australian defamation law. The newspapers were required to prove on the balance of probabilities that every material part of the imputations were true. Given the gravity of the allegations, the degree of satisfaction required by the judge was high: where potential criminality is involved exactness of proof is required, said Besanko.

What is unusual in this case is not only did Roberts-Smith lead imputations of actual criminality rather than reasonable suspicion of criminality, it is also that the newspapers were able to establish the substantial truth of that conduct, explains Professor David Rolph, of the University of Sydney.

If youre proving actual criminal conduct, as [the newspapers] managed to do, they have to set out to prove to Ben Roberts-Smith actually murdered people, actually was complicit in the murder of people, and actually committed war crimes. Thats much more forensically onerous than merely demonstrating that there is a reasonable suspicion of these things.

Thats why, in ruling in favour of the newspapers, Justice Besanko made a finding that it was true that Roberts-Smith was a criminal who broke the legal rules of military engagement and committed multiple war crimes.

Blooding the Rookie

The civil judgment therefore includes a finding that war crimes were committed under Australian and international law.

On Easter Sunday 2009, Roberts-Smith and his troop were instructed to assault a compound code-named Whiskey 108. Persons 14 and 24 [the identities of SAS soldiers are protected] gave evidence for the newspapers that, in the lead up to the mission, they heard Person 5 (the troop commander and a close friend of Roberts-Smith) say in group settings that we were going to blood the rookie, referring to Person 4, a member Roberts-Smiths troop.

After securing the compound, the soldiers discovered a tunnel in a courtyard. Justice Besanko accepted the evidence of the newspapers witnesses that two Afghan men emerged from the tunnel, surrendered and were placed under the control of the Australian troops. One man was elderly and the other had a prosthetic leg.

Person 24 gave evidence that, around this time, he saw Roberts-Smith emerge from the compound holding the elderly man. He heard Person 5 shout at Person 4 saying get in here. Get in here now. At this point, Roberts-Smith approached Person 41, who was searching a room, and asked to borrow his silencer. He continued:

[Roberts-Smith] then walked down and grabbed the Afghan male by the scruff of the shirt, picked him up and marched him a couple of metres forward [so] he was in front of Person 4. He then kicked him in the back of the legs behind the knees until he was kneeling down in front of Person 4. He pointedto the Afghani [sic] and said to Person 4, Shoot him.

After averting his gaze, Person 41 looked back to see Person 4 standing in a bit of a state of shock, with a dead Afghan male at his feet.

Roberts-Smiths account highly improbable

Further, Person 41 told the court that, after leaving the compound to search another area, he observed Roberts-Smith walking towards him. He had his machine-gun held up with his right arm and was frog-marching [another] Afghan by the scruff of his neck with his left arm. This was the man with the prosthetic leg.

[BRS] then proceeded to throw the Afghan male down onto the ground. The Afghan male landed on his back. [BRS] then reached down, grabbed him by the shoulder, flipped him over onto his stomach, and then I observed him lower his machine gun and shoot approximately three to five rounds into the back of the Afghan male. After he had done that, he looked up and saw me standing there, and he looked at me and said, Are we all cool? Are we good? And I just replied, Yeah, mate, no worries.

The mans prosthetic leg later found its way to the SAS base, where it was mounted and used as a drinking vessel.

Former Australian Special Forces soldier Ben Roberts-Smith drinking with his comrades-in-arms. Here they are seen drinking from the prosthetic leg of an Afghan civilian allegedly killed by Roberts-Smith on Easter Sunday 2009.  DR.

Justice Besanko found that the version of events led by the newspapers and described above was truthful, and was highly critical of the evidence of Roberts-Smith and his witnesses. Through a loan from the newspapers media rival Kerry Stokes, Roberts-Smith was paying the legal fees of Persons 5, 29 and 35, who all gave evidence supporting his contradictory version of events. Besanko found that Roberts-Smiths account was highly improbable, and he had motives to lie, including to resist findings against him which may affect whether further action is taken against him.

The murder of Ali Jan

Another event is documented in detail in the ruling. On September 11 2012, Roberts-Smith participated in a mission to the village of Darwan, following up on intelligence that a rogue Afghan soldier was or had been in the village.

Towards the end of the mission, Roberts-Smith and others were clearing compounds in the area. In one, they found three fighting-age males, who were handcuffed and rendered hors de combat. One of the men was named Ali Jan.

An Afghan witness, Mohammed Hanifa, told the court from a secure location in Kabul that he was taken outside with Ali Jan and questioned by the Australians. He recalled being punched and kicked by the big soldier while pressed up against a wall. Another Afghan witness, Shahzada Faith described seeing the big soldier make Ali Jan stand up and walk over to the edge of an escarpment overlooking a dry creek bed.

Person 4 told the court that Ali Jan was made to stand with his back towards the large slope, and was held by Person 11. At this point, Roberts-Smith walked forward and kicked [Ali Jan] in the chest [he] was catapulted backwards and fell down the slope. Person 4 saw Ali Jans face strike a rock on the way down, causing him to lose a number of teeth. After Ali Jan was brought back to his feet, he then saw Person 11 have a quick conversation with Roberts-Smith. After hearing shots ring out, he turned back to see Person 11 with his rifle raised next to a dead body.

When Person 4 next saw the body, the handcuffs had been removed and a radio placed on the body in an effort to indicate that Ali Jan had been a combatant. It was photographed in this state and used to support an official report of events agreed upon by the soldiers after the mission.

As with the incidents at Whiskey 108, Justice Besanko found that Roberts-Smiths case contained a number of improbabilities and that he discussed his evidence at length with Person 11, his only supporting witness, prior to the trial.

The newspapers were also able to prove that Roberts-Smith committed another murder in an October 2012 mission to the village of Chinartu. The court found that through an interpreter [BRS] ordered Person 12 to shoot an Afghan male who was under detention  Roberts-Smith was complicit in and responsible for murder.

Ongoing war crimes reckoning

The defamation judgment marks the end of the beginning of Australias war crimes reckoning. The media reports which first brought allegations of war crimes into the public consciousness have been proven largely to be true, outing one of Australias most decorated soldiers as a war criminal and revealing the complicity of other members of the SAS.

Professor Melanie OBrien of the University of Western Australia says thats what makes this case so interesting, because [war crimes being contested in a civil trial] is something that hasnt been seen before.its certainly not the usual way to go about dealing with war crimes.

However, as the usually sensitive details of conflict incidents received a public and dramatic open court hearing, the official war crimes investigation continues. Representatives of the Federal Police and the Office of the Special Investigator (OSI) sat through the entirety of the trial, and it was revealed during the hearings that Roberts-Smith was being investigated by the OSI.

While the evidence given at the civil trial will not be directly admissible in criminal court, by launching the defamation case, Roberts-Smith has locked himself into a version of events found by a judge to be not credible, and the result of collusion. Efforts to conceal evidence and intimidate witnesses may also be led as evidence of consciousness of guilt. Indeed, as OBrien says, the first thing we may see is charges laid for threatening witnesses.

The investigation will continue outside of the public eye, but the very public civil case effectively implicates a number of other former soldiers who gave evidence. The OSI told the Senate in May that it was currently progressing approximately 40 matters.
YEREVAN, JUNE 9, ARMENPRESS. United States Senators Alex Padilla (D-CA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) have teamed up to introduce Anti-Blockade legislation, backed by the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), and supported by a wide array of American civil society coalition partners, calling for U.S. sanctions against Azerbaijani officials responsible for the Artsakh blockade and ongoing anti-Armenian human rights violations and urging the Biden Administration to stop all military aid to Azerbaijan by fully enforcing Section 907 sanctions.

The measure is similar to H.Res.108, a bipartisan resolution spearheaded by Congressional Armenian Caucus co-Chair Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and the Armenian Caucus leadership, which currently has 88 cosponsors, ANCA reported.

The Senate introduction  which is supported by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who is an original cosponsor of the measure  is timed with the next round of U.S.-mediated Armenia-Azerbaijan peace talks that was scheduled as early as next week in Washington DC but was postponed by Azerbaijan.

The measure specifically calls for U.S. sanctions against Azerbaijani officials responsible for the Artsakh blockade and ongoing anti-Armenian human rights violations and urges the Biden Administration to stop all military aid to Azerbaijan by fully enforcing Section 907 sanctions.

Armenian and allied Americans thank Senators Padilla, Rubio, and Menendez for enforcing concrete costs and real-world consequences on Azerbaijan over its six-month long blockade of Artsakh  starting with the immediate cut-off of all U.S. military aid to Baku, said ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian. American tax payers should not be asked to subsidize the armed forces of an authoritarian regime that neither needs nor deserves U.S. support.

Armenians and allied Americans can voice support for the Padilla-Rubio Anti-Blockade measure by visiting anca.org/resolution.

Azerbaijans blockade of the Lachin Corridorthe only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) to Armeniais inhumane and unacceptable, said Senator Padilla, upon introduction of the measure. This blockade has created a humanitarian crisis, rendering the 120,000 Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh without access to food, medicine, and other basic necessities. Our resolution would make it clear that the United States must take action to hold Azerbaijan accountable.

Rep. Pallone welcomed the Senate introduction of the measure, stating, I stand with my colleagues today in condemning Azerbaijans ongoing blockade of Artsakh. Its clear that Azerbaijans blockage of the Lachin Corridor is coordinated and intended to shut off the only supply route for much of Artsakhs food, medical supplies and transport, and other essential goods. We stand united in telling Azerbaijan to end this intentional humanitarian crisis.

In addition to clearly and unequivocally condemning Azerbaijans six-month blockade, the resolution would place the U.S. Senate on record in favor of five practical remedies to the worsening humanitarian crisis in Artsakh caused by Azerbaijans blockade of food, medicine, and other vital necessities:

(1) Encourages the United States Government and international community to petition the United Nations Security Council, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and other appropriate international bodies to investigate any and all war crimes committed by Azerbaijani forces against Armenian civilians;

(2) Calls for the deployment of international observers to the Lachin Corridor and Nagorno-Karabakh to explore opportunities for more effective and sustainable guarantees of security and peaceful development.

(3) calls on the President to immediately suspend any U.S. new, current, or pending military or security assistance to Azerbaijan, and to fully enforce Section 907 of the FREEDOM Support Act;

(4) supports U.S. sanctions under existing statutory authority against Azerbaijani officials responsible for the blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh and other well-documented human rights violations committed against Armenians in the region such as the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the destruction of historic, cultural, and places of worship of great significance to Armenians;

(5) supports efforts by the United States, the European Union, and the international community to provide humanitarian assistance to victims of Azerbaijani aggression in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The full text of the resolution is available here.
Kim Sejeong, Jo Byeong Gyu, and more "Uncanny Counter 2" cast excite fans after they showcase their chemistry through the recent script reading.

'Uncanny Counter 2' Cast Attend Script Reading

On June 8, tvN dropped the behind-the-scenes snippets of the "Uncanny Counter 2" script reading, featuring the old and new cast members of the much-anticipated action-fantasy series.

Based on the famous webtoon of the same name, with 160 million cumulative views, the "Uncanny Counter" series topped OCN's all-time drama ratings.

Furthermore, the major characters are about to reprise their roles, such as Jo Byeong Gyu, Kim Sejeong, Yoo Joon Sang, Yeon Hye Ram, and Ahn Seok Hwan.

On top of that, talented actors Jin Sun Kyu, Kang Ki Young, Kim Hieora, and Yoo In Soo has joined the lineup, which signals a more thrilling season 2.

At the script reading, producer Yoo Seon Dong and writer Kim Sae Bom, who worked on season 1 are also returning to produce another adventurous story. All the stars mentioned were present at the event.

Producer Yoo Seon Dong Shares Excitement for 'Uncanny Counter 2'

Yoo Seon Dong said that the event gave him a new feeling despite working with the same staff and actors.

"I am grateful for the counters and existing staff for coming together, and the newly joined actors and staff are warmly welcomed," said PD Yoo, which created a bright atmosphere.

Veteran actor Yoo Joon Sang drew laughter after he jokingly said that they should go until season 7, showing his enthusiasm to work with everyone for a long time.

With the start of script reading, the room was full of thrilling catharsis given by the unique sense of excitement and a good exchange of lines delivered by the cast.

Adding fun to the story are Jin Sun Kyu, Kang Ki Young, Kim Hieora, and Yoo In Soo, who showcased their charms and wit that drew laughter and tension to everyone.

What to Anticipate from 'Uncanny Counter 2'

The production team has spoiled the viewers, that since there will be new counters in the forthcoming season, a showdown between the new and original counters is possible.

"Uncanny Counter 2" is expected to premiere under tvN and is tentatively scheduled to air in July. It will occupy the Saturday and Sunday slots.

Meanwhile, after it concludes, the fantasy series, "Arthdal Chronicles," which is also returning with season 2, will air next in late September of this year.

What are you most excited about "Uncanny Counter 2"? Share your thoughts/replies in the comments!

For more K-Drama, K-Movie, and celebrity news, keep your tabs open here at KDramaStars.

KDramaStars owns this article.

Shai Collins wrote this.
"Siren: Survive the Island" director Lee Eun Kyung spilled some details regarding the hottest Netflix survival show, and the reason it didn't have a cash prize.

Following the massive success of "Physical: 100," the streaming giant introduced another all female survival show featuring 24 strong and powerful women that came from various fields and professions.

Consisting of police officers, bodyguards, soldiers, athletes, stuntwomen, and firefighters, each team must complete and win each round as they compete for survival on a remote island.

Basically, the new South Korean reality show is "Physical: 100," but without the men.

Here's Why 'Siren: Survive the Island' Has No Cash Prize

Interestingly, while most reality shows offer whopping prizes, "Siren: Survive the Island" veers away from the usual survival show.

During the interview of Na Young Seok with director Lee Eun Kyung and screenwriter Chae Jin Ah, as obtained by a media outlet, they explained the reasons behind the absence of a cash prize.

The director pointed out the true essence of the show, which is to highlight the empowerment of women in a male dominated field; hence, the participants were soldiers and women in uniform.

"The participants are public servants who have staked their professional honor on this competition," the PD explained, as obtained by a media outlet.

Moreover, Lee said that the majority of them joined not for the reward but for the honor and recognition in their line of work.

"From the start, they didn't come to fight for money but for honor. That's why there's no cash prize," the "Siren: Survive the Island" director added.

Despite the show having no cash prize, Lee Eun Kyung clarified that the participants were compensated for the effort and time that they've put in for the program.

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"We value the time and courage of everyone who participated in our show, so we decided to give an equal fee to all for the seven days," as explained by the director.

Furthermore, the director also mentioned that there is "a limit to how much public servants can receive due to the civil service law."

Normally, these types of shows would charge an appearance fee on a per-episode basis and no fee for participants who are eliminated right away, but in "Siren: Survive the Island," they considered the efforts that the participants gave to the show.

Why 'Siren: Survive the Island' is Must-Watch

Premiered on May 30, "Siren: Survive the Island" was divided into two parts; the first five episodes aired on the said date, and the second part was broadcast a week later.

In the 10-episode reality series, the 24 participants are divided into six groups according to their profession. One of the Team Soldier members includes "Physical: 100" season 1 contestant Kang Eun Mi.

In the newest Netflix reality show, the concept focuses on women's empowerment and shows the viewers that women can also do well in male-dominated fields.

For more K-Drama, K-Movie, and celebrity news, keep your tabs open here at KDramaStars.

KDramaStars owns this article

Written by Geca Wills
K-stars Song Hye Kyo and Cha Eun Woo showed off their brilliant visuals as they attended a famous brand event in Paris. Keep on reading to see more photos of these celebrities.

Song Hye Kyo & Cha Eun Woo Exhibit Royal Vibe in Paris

On June 8, Korean hairstylist Son Hye Jin posted some behind-the-scenes snaps of the French jewelry brand Chaumet event on Instagram. Elite stars Song Hye Kyo and Cha Eun Woo attended the gathering and stole the spotlight with their dazzling visuals.

They also shared a photo together and stood side by side ,where they gave off an elegant and unique aura. Cha Eun Woo dressed nicely in a black suit, captivating the audience with his princely visuals and manners. Song Hye Kyo, on the other hand, exhibited her pure beauty while clad in an all-white dreamy dress.

Fans Praise the K-Stars for Their Appearance at the Chaumet Event

Cha Eun Woo and Song Hye Kyo are also seen interacting with various international artists present at the event in Paris.

Fans of both celebrities showed their admiration and praised them for their global popularity and for exuding the royal vibe at the Chaumet event.

"They look like royal siblings."

"Isn't that the cover of a fantasy novel?"

"Song Hye Kyo is the princess who became a queen and Cha Eun Woo is her brother, the prince."

What's Next for Song Hye Kyo and Cha Eun Woo

After the success of Netflix's "The Glory," Song Hye Kyo is still considering her next work. In January, it was reported that the actress will headline a new mystery series "The Price of Confession" alongside breakout star Han So Hee.

The leading ladies even shared their chemistry and friendship on social media through their exchange of messages. Unfortunately, in May, the two shocked the public by announcing that they stepped down as lead stars for the upcoming drama.

Song Hye Kyo is focused on promoting various luxury brands and attending different fashion events in and outside South Korea, proving her global influence.

Cha Eun Woo, on the other hand, just attended the table reading of his new revenge drama "Wonderful World" along with "Misty" actress Kim Nam Joo.

The young actor is also booked to work with Park Gyu Young in the webtoon-based series "A Good Day to Be a Dog." The idol-actor will also resume his overseas activities to meet fans.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Cha Eun Woo's 'No Makeup' Look at the Airport Sets Internet Into Frenzy

What can you say about Song Hye Kyo and Cha Eun Woo's attendance at the Chaumet event? Share your thoughts/replies in the comments!

For more K-Drama, K-Movie, and celebrity news and updates, keep your tabs open here at Kdramastars.

Kdramastars owns this article.

Shai Collins wrote this.
The smash hit series "Doctor Cha" closed its curtains last week after eight lovely weeks, leaving a bittersweet feeling.

Despite being one of the best works this 2023, lead actor Kim Byung Chul has a lot of woes and regrets about the drama. Here's what he said.

Kim Byung Chul On 'Doctor Cha' Performance

JTBC's "Doctor Cha" wrapped up after decorating prime time with its engrossing premise for eight consecutive weeks.

Fans expressed their regrets about the ending as "Doctor Cha" had been their comfort series during the weekend. The series ended with great reviews and a significantly high score.

Following its conclusion, Kim Byung Chul spilled his honest feelings about the show. In the series, he played the role of Seo In Ho, Uhm Jung Hwa's Cha Jung Suk's cheating husband.

Despite his nasty affair, he was deeply loved by the public for his "meme worthy" reactions and great comedic timing. The actor was also shocked after his character was well-received by the public.

According to Kim Byung Chul, he even gets stressed whenever he sees his character on screen, expressing his disappointment with Seo In Ho's life choices.

He thanks the viewers who tuned in from the beginning until the end, making "Doctor Cha" a hit.

Kim Byung Chul Reveals Regrets About 'Doctor Cha'

Even though "Doctor Cha" soared to the top, the series had its fair share of controversies during its run.

One of them was about the Crohn's disease misinformation, which is the biggest controversy the drama experienced.

Kim Byung Chul somehow blames himself for what happened, saying, "I felt responsible as a member of the show. I sincerely apologize to everyone we have offended."

The "Doctor Cha" star stated that they should have been more careful especially with its themes involving medicine and health.

Thankfully, the issue was resolved even before "Doctor Cha" entered its second half. Moreover, the series remains as the fourth highest work in JTBC history, besting "Itaewon Class."

Kim Byung Chul Reacts To 'Doctor Cha' Conclusion

Among the characters in the series, Kim Byung Chul picks his own role as his most favorite person in "Doctor Cha."

He was able to challenge himself through the character, allowing him to take on the romance and comedy genres simultaneously with ease.

In addition, his character's development was also well-written, impressing the actor. Regarding the ending, Kim Byung Chul regrets that Cha Jung Suk didn't choose his character in the end.

"It's a shame but I understand," he said. "He has caused Cha Jung Suk great pain for 20 years and even though he was cute in the end, he shall perish."

As for his ideal type, Kim Byung Chul chooses Cha Jung Suk's personality over Choi Seung Hee's as his ideal type, saying that he prefers vivacious people who make him comfortable.

Have you watched "Doctor Cha" yet? Tell us what you think about it in the comments below!

KDramaStars owns this article.

Written by Elijah Mully.
While most viewers were thrilled to see updates regarding the much awaited K-drama "The Uncanny Counter" season 2, others seemed uninterested in the comeback of Jo Byeong Gyu.

tvN recently released behind-the-scenes during the show's script reading, featuring the returning and new cast members of the K-drama.

Interestingly, the original cast of "The Uncanny Counter" was complete, consisting of Yoo Joon Sang as Ga Mo Tak, Kim Se Jeong reprising her role as Do Ha Na, Yeom Hye Ran and Ahn Suk Hwan as Chu Mae Ok and Choi Jang Mool, and lastly, Jo Byeong Gyu as So Moon.

Adding to the list of new cast members is Kang Ki Young from "Extraordinary Attorney Woo" as Pil Kwang, "All of Us Are Dead" villain Yoo In Soo who takes on the role of Jeok Bong.

Meanwhile, "The Glory" actress Kim Hi Eo Ra and versatile star Jin Seon Kyu will be portraying the roles of Gelly and Joo Seok.

As tvN gears up for the highly anticipated return of the "counters," viewers seem disappointed with the return of Jo Byeong Gyu.

Jo Byeong Gyu's Comeback in 'The Uncanny Counter' Season 2 Sparks Dissapointment

Accordign to a media outlet, K-nets took to social media to express their honest thoughts about the cast lineup of "The Uncanny Counter" season 2.

Although others were thrilled to see the reunion between the cast and reprising their roles in the much awaited sequel, some appeared to be disheartened to see Jo Byeong Gyu.

As mentioned by the news portal, netizens lauded the amazing casting "except for one person," who seemed to be the 27-year-old actor.

READ MORE: 'Uncanny Counter' Season 2 Confirmed To Have Its Original Cast

Others expressed the same thought and mentioned how sorry they feel for the "amazing actors and actresses who have to work with him as the lead actor."

Meanwhile, the majority of them wanted to "replace" Jo Byeong Gyu as So Moon.

What Caused Jo Byeong Gyu's Hiatus?

Back in 2021, Jo Byeong Gyu got involved in a scandalous controversy due to bullying allegations.

It was after his former classmates from New Zealand exposed the actor and accused the actor of verbally abusing him and throwing filthy jokes.

A different person mentioned that he was bullied by Jo Byeong Gyu while they were still in elementary and middle school.

However, the actor responded to the accusation and took to social media to air his side.

He called the allegations as "malicious anonymous posts" and said that he "can't tolerate" them, which is why he is giving his two cents on the story.

"I'm not someone who has never hurt anyone, and I didn't get along with everyone like a saint while growing up," the post reads, as obtained by a media outlet, adding, " At times, people took my money away just because I was small, and there have been times when I was assaulted. Does that make me a victim now?

Months later, his agency gave updates, noting that the accusers had admitted to lying and apologized for their actions.

IN CASE YOU MISSED: Kim Sejeong's 'The Uncanny Counter 2' Confirms Premiere Date

For more K-Drama, K-Movie, and celebrity news, keep your tabs open here at KDramaStars.

KDramaStars owns this articleWritten by Geca Wills
YEREVAN, JUNE 9, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has described the future of artificial intelligence to be extremely attractive but warned that the ethical consequences must be taken into account and the useful and responsible development and use of AI must be ensured.

Pashinyan made the remarks at the Eurasian Congress in Russia.

PM Pashinyan said that the development of advanced digital tools and technologies is a key component for ensuring equal economic competition on the global level. The Armenian PM said that AI is developing rapidly and it could transform many areas of life.

He cited experts as saying that AI will become more individualized and integrated into the society in the future. Overall, the future of artificial intelligence is extremely attractive, but it is necessary to take into account the ethical consequences and ensure that AI gets developed and used responsibly and usefully, Pashinyan said.

At the same time, the Armenian PM said that people and their creative will and energy are behind every innovation, thus the development of human capital is highly important as well.

We can endlessly argue on the Future of Eurasia topic, which is very interesting and multifaceted, but overall, the future of Eurasia will most likely be determined by the combination of economic and technological trends, and our success will depend on our ability to orientate in these challenges and opportunities, Pashinyan added, noting that understanding of mutual interests, willingness to compromise, readiness to cooperate and engage in dialogue are the Eurasian regions characteristic features that could become the key to solving many problems in the future.
Kennesaw State faculty study shows potential effects of presidents use of Twitter

KENNESAW, Ga. | Jun 9, 2023

Twitter can influence American standing in the world when one of its 350 million users is the U.S. president, a study from Kennesaw State University suggests.

Political science professors Stephen Collins and Jeff DeWitt studied the influence of the tweets of former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump on U.S. image and soft power on the world stage. They were the first U.S. presidents to use the social media platform.

Stephen Collins and Jeff DeWitt

"While we are unable to demonstrate that presidential communication on Twitter is the sole explanation, our analysis shows that tweets published by Trump contained attributes, in terms of substance and tone, which would tend to jeopardize soft power, DeWitt said. At the same time, evidence from polls and independent organizations reveals a clear erosion of soft power during Trumps presidency relative to Obamas.

Soft power describes a nations ability to encourage and persuade other nations governments and people to support its objectives.

For their study, published recently in the quarterly World Affairs journal, the researchers categorized the content of tweets as statesmanlike, combative or neutral, as well as how the tweets discussed topics of global priority like the importance of democratic institutions and environmental awareness.

Collins and DeWitt examined the last six months of Obamas presidency and the first six months of Trumps term, using both their personal and presidential Twitter accounts. The researchers concluded that out of the more than 2,000 presidential tweets during the study period, more than 60% of Trumps tweets were likely to erode soft power, while about 35% supported it. By contrast, the study found nearly all Obama tweets supported soft power.

The study points out that the two presidents used Twitter in different ways. Obama tweeted as a means of promoting and supporting administration policies that had been reported by news outlets. Trump used Twitter to directly announce policy positions and his decisions to the public.

Also of note was the propensity for media to highlight Trump tweets more than Obama tweets during their respective presidencies, which the researchers said may have had an impact on soft power by sheer amount of coverage.

"We did not code tweets as building or eroding soft power based on how we think about the issues discussed, but rather on what the survey data - from Pew Research and the World Values Survey - reveals about world opinion on these matters, Collins said. One of the lessons that we hope is a takeaway from our paper is that presidents, when using social media, should pause and reflect upon the statements they make and how they are likely to be perceived by the world.

Collins and DeWitt said with a 2024 presidential election looming, they hope their paper can help leaders and citizens alike consider how statements made by those in power can influence prosperity and security.

 By Thomas Hartwell

Photos by Darnell Wilburn

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A leader in innovative teaching and learning, Kennesaw State University offers undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees to its more than 43,000 students. Kennesaw State is a member of the University System of Georgia with 11 academic colleges. The universitys vibrant campus culture, diverse population, strong global ties and entrepreneurial spirit draw students from throughout the country and the world. Kennesaw State is a Carnegie-designated doctoral research institution (R2), placing it among an elite group of only 7 percent of U.S. colleges and universities with an R1 or R2 status. For more information, visit kennesaw.edu.
YEREVAN, JUNE 9, ARMENPRESS. The woman suspected of attempting to kidnap Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyans son has been found guilty and given a 4-year suspended sentence. The judge ordered Gayane Hakobyan, a mother of an Armenian soldier killed in the Second Nagorno Karabakh War, who is suspected of attempting to kidnap Ashot Pashinyan, to 1 year probation. She was released from pre-trial detention.

The judge also ordered a travel ban for Hakobyan, banning her from exiting the country without probation officers.

Hakobyan was detained on suspicion of attempting to kidnap Ashot Pashinyan on May 17.
Anatoli Kirigwajjo, a Ugandan software engineer has been named among the top four finalists for this years Africa engineering innovation award which is worth 25,000 (about Shs 116 million).

The Africa Prize, founded by the UKs Royal Academy of Engineering in 2014, is Africas biggest prize dedicated to engineering innovation.

The four finalists were selected from a shortlist of 15 African innovators for their proven ability to harness engineering to address common problems faced by Africans across the continent.

The innovations tackle challenges central to the UNs Sustainable Development Goals, including good health and well-being, affordable and clean energy, peaceful and inclusive societies, and reduced inequalities.

The finalists were chosen by the Royal Academy of Engineering after receiving support over eight months to help them accelerate their businesses.

Kirigwajjo is the developer of YUNGA, a local digital security network that connects neighbours to each other and police within a 20km radius via a physical device, smartphone app, or SMS service, providing security at a low cost.

He says he developed a safety network after losing USD 1,300 worth of assets in a break-in, with little chance of the thieves being caught.

He has told KFM that participating in this competition has opened doors to both local and foreign investors expressing optimism that bagging the award will see more households added to their protection belt.

Weve been able to also get very interesting investors, weve been able to get investment even before the project ended. The training was well utilized and we got local investment from here, weve also managed to find in some Korea and also now having conversations with other investors in London, Kirigwajjo told KFM.

The ninth winner will be announced in Accra, Ghana, on July 6, 2023, and will be awarded 25,000, with the other three finalists receiving 10,000 each.

This years finalists are from Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda, each of which is home to a previous Africa Prize winner.
By Jane Nafula

Former Labour junior minister, Sam Engola and former peacekeeper and police commissioner Christine Alalo, are among the officers listed to be honoured during Heroes Day celebrations in Luweero district today.

Engola was shot dead by his bodyguard last month in Kampala, while Alalo was one of the passengers killed in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019.

They will be honoured with the Masaba Star Award and Personal Sacrifice Medals, respectively.

According to the minister for the presidency Milly Babalanda, a total of 51 Ugandans will today receive different categories of medals in recognition of their services.

These medals are to be presented by the Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja who will represent the president.

She is also expected to commission the long-awaited Luweero Butalangu road, whose implementation has been pending for the last 7 years.

The president announced on Wednesday that he had gone into self-isolation after he tested positive for Covid-19, delegating his tasks to the Prime Minister.

Seven of the awardees will receive Diamond Jubilee Medal for civilians, 17 will get the Nalubaale Medal, and four will be honored with the Diamond Jubilee Medal for UPDF, while 2 will receive the Masaba Star Medal for UPDF.

In addition, one civilian will receive the Luweero Triangle Medal, while 11 officers from the Uganda Prison Services and two police officers will walk away with Diamond Jubilee Medals.

Three police officers will be honored with long service gold medals while four others will receive the Personal Sacrifice Medal.

The National Heroes Day is observed on June 9th in remembrance of people who lost their lives during Ugandas bush war between 1981-1986 and this year, the focus is on the former Front for National Salvation (FRONASA) rebel fighters, who were violently murdered by public execution on the orders of President Idi Amin.

Under the leadership of Yoweri Museveni, FRONASA rebel outfit became the current National Resistance Movement (NRM).

This years Heroes Day is theme is; Arise Uganda, Our Heroes Sacrifices now bear fruit
Members of Parliament have expressed mixed feelings over the National Heroes Day celebrations that are underway in Luweero today, with some highlighting its importance to Ugandans, while others say it has completely lost meaning.

Addressing the media at Parliament, Mawogola North MP, Shartsi Musherure said the day is worth celebrating, urging leaders at all levels to emulate people that have contributed to the countrys development.

She adds that President Museveni will forever be a hero because of his continued efforts towards that countrys political and socio-economic development.

I pay homage, respect, and gratitude to President Yoweri Museveni, for me, hes my hero. This country is not perfect but he has shown what it means to get out of your comfort zone and to lead with consistency. I think he has consistently guided this country on what we should do, Musherure said.

However, some opposition MPs argue that the day lost meaning after the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government turned it from a national event to a party affair.

Katikamu North MP Denis Sekabira and his Bukoto Central counterpart Richard Sebamala say they are so many heroes in the country who have not been recognized yet the medals are only being given to bush war figures.

Heroes Day is not for those people who decided to team up in order to capture power and then give themselves presents like land, buildings, embezzlement of government funds, it is not for those people, Sekabira said.

NRMs Robert Kasolo, the Iki-Iki County MP says although this day is important to recognize the service and sacrifice of those who lost their lives during the bush war, the presidential awards committee should carefully select the people they give medals, claiming that some do not deserve them.

National Heroes Day celebrations have kicked off in Butuntumula sub-county, Luweero district under the theme; Arise Uganda, Our Heroes Sacrifices now bear fruit
President Yoweri Museveni has announced a fresh drive to ensure there are no charges in government schools.

In his Heroes Day address presented by Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja, President Museveni condemned the commercialisation of education and health which are minimum public services.

President Museveni delegated Nabbanja to officiate at this years Heroes Day having taken forced leave to isolate from the public after he tested positive for Covid-19.

The president has accused the greedy and rich individuals who are running education as a business of fueling the high school dropout rates.

The parasites who regard education and health as business, especially for the poor must be firmly opposed. The completion rate in primary schools is only 31%. This means that if 100 children start in primary one, by the end of primary seven, 69 in 2007 and 2013 will have dropped out, Museveni said in a speech read by Nabbanja.

51 medals have been given out at the event that has been running under the theme; Arise Uganda, our heroes sacrifices are now bearing fruits.

Among those awarded is the deceased former state minister for labor, Rtd Col Charles Engola who was shot dead by his security guard last month.
YEREVAN, JUNE 9, ARMENPRESS. Today Deputy Prime Minister of Armenia Tigran Khachatryan received World Banks regional director for South Caucasus Sebastian Molyneux, on the occasion of the end of his term of office, and Rolande Pryce, who replaced him in that position. Carolin Geginat, Country Manager of the World Bank for Armenia, also participated in the meeting, ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Government.

Thanking Mr. Molyneux for his active and effective activities in Armenia, Tigran Khachatryan referred to the important results recorded in the framework of cooperation with the World Bank in recent years.

Congratulating Rolande Pryce on her appointment, the Deputy Prime Minister expressed confidence that all the necessary prerequisites are in place to effectively implement current programs and promote new initiatives of bilateral interest.

Sebastian Molyneux commended the effective cooperation with the Armenian government in energy, education, social protection, healthcare and a number of other directions.

Expressing gratitude for the warm reception, the newly appointed regional director of the WB for South Caucasus assured that the World Bank will continue to support Armenia in implementing its reform agenda in the coming years.

During the meeting, the interlocutors also discussed a wide range of issues related to the current and perspective programs in the sidelines of the Armenian Government - World Bank cooperation.
By Elizabeth Murungi

The Speaker of Parliament Anita Among and her Deputy, Thomas Tayebwa who met and shook hands with President Museveni a day before he tested positive for Covid-19 will not go into self-isolation.

According to parliament spokesperson, Chris Obore, the duo posed no risk as they had tested negative for the virus ahead of the Presidents State of the Nation address at Kololo ceremonial grounds in Kampala on Wednesday.

According to the World Health Organisation, which has since downgraded Covid-19 as no longer a public health emergency of global concern, coronavirus takes a week to a fortnight before an infected person develops symptoms.

The world health body also notes that downgrading the status of Covid-19 does not mean the disease is over and caution should remain in place where infections are ongoing.
By Jackson Onyango

The Prime Minister of Uganda, Robinah Nabbanja has for the second consecutive time presided over the National Heroes Day celebrations organized at Kasaala Parish Grounds in Butuntumula sub-county, Luwero district.

Nabbanja officiated at a similar event in 2022 at Kololo ceremonial grounds in Kampala while the president was in Sebei and Karamoja sub-regions to address the insecurity occasioned by cattle rustlers.

President Yoweri Museveni delegated Nabbanja to officiate at the 34th Heroes Day having taken leave to isolate from the public after he tested positive for Covid-19.

Activities to mark the 34th HeroesDay celebrations commenced with the commissioning of the construction works for the 29.7-kilometre road from Luwero to Butalangu.

Nabbanja thereafter went on to lay a wreath on the mass grave at Kasaala village Butuntumula sub-county where an estimated 1,342 skulls are buried.

The grave is among the 34 government has okayed the Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities to takeover by constructing befitting structures.

The 34th anniversary of the Heroes Day marked annually on 9th June was declared a public holiday to coincide with the day Edidian Luttamaguzi was a collaborator of the National Resistance Army rebels was murdered by Milton Obote government forces, Uganda National Liberation Army.

The event will see 51 medalists decorated at the occasion marked under the theme; arise Uganda, our heroes sacrifices are now bearing fruits.

Mr George Willington Kiberu, a 99-year-old entrepreneur is among the awardees honoured for having been one of the first Ugandans to establish a private school in 1948.

Kiberu, a former teacher said he started teaching at the age of 14 before he would later on in life establish Light College Katikamu in Masulita, Wakiso district.

The entrepreneurial skills got imparted into his children who they have together founded more than 12 schools including Light High School Seguku.
By Barbra Nalweyiso

Police in Mityana have arrested two people (husband and wife) over alleged child trafficking. The suspects are residents of Bugabo in Tamu division, Mityana municipality.

According to the Wamala regional police spokesperson Racheal Kawala, the suspects were arrested in an intelligence-led operation.

She says they received information that there was a person trafficking children from Kampala in disguise that he will enroll them in his school located in Bugabo cell Tamu division in Mityana district.

That school is called Mujabi memorial primary school. Our teams jointly immediately responded to the scene. Six children three males and three females were found at the alleged school premises and have been rescued, Kawala said.

Kawala says the children are currently kept at Mityana police station awaiting handover to their relatives.

Preliminary findings indicate that the alleged school is not registered by the Ministry of Education and that there were no learning activities taking place at the said school.

Kawala says it has been established that instead of class work, the victims have always been subjected to bricklaying and looking after pigs.
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Between 5:35pm and 8:30pm Thursday, the armed forces of Azerbaijan violated the ceasefire in the eastern and northern direction of the line of contact with Artsakh Republic.

June 9, 2023, 09:29 Artsakh MoD: Azerbaijan fired at tractor doing agricultural work

STEPANAKERT, JUNE 9, ARTSAKHPRESS: Around 6:20pm, the Azerbaijani side opened firefrom a rifleat a tractor doing agricultural work in Karvin village, the Artsakh Ministry of Defense (MoD) reports.

The Armenian side has no losses.

This ceasefire violation was reported to the command of the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Artsakh.

As of 9am Friday, the situation on the line of contact is relatively stable.
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The foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Iran had a telephonic conversation, the Azerbaijani media reported, citing the press service of the Azerbaijani foreign ministry, news.am informs.

June 9, 2023, 14:27 Azerbaijan, Iran FMs exchange views on some regional matters

STEPANAKERT, JUNE 9, ARTSAKHPRESS: FMs Jeyhun Bayramov and Hossein Amir-Abdollahian discussed the current state of relations between Azerbaijan and Iran, as well as some problems in these relations and their solutions.

The FMs agreed to continue the talks and contacts between the respective agencies of the two countries.

During the telephone conversation, there was an exchange of views also on a number of regional matters.
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(Kitco News) - Binance.US, the American arm of the worlds largest crypto exchange, will no longer process U.S. currency, the company announced Friday.

On Monday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a 13-charge lawsuit against Binance and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao (CZ) accusing them of operating an illegal securities trading platform in the U.S. and misusing customer funds.

The following day, a United States District of Columbia court granted the SECs request for an emergency restraining order to freeze the assets of Binance.US. As a result of the freeze, Binance.US can no longer continue to process U.S. dollar deposits and withdrawals.

Binance.US published a post on Twitter late Thursday announcing that they would become a crypto-only exchange.

[I]n light of the Commission's increasingly aggressive tactics, our payment and banking partners have signaled their intent to pause USD fiat channels as early as June 13, 2023, meaning our ability to accept USD fiat deposits and process USD fiat withdrawals will be impacted, they wrote, adding that they are notifying users promptly so they can take necessary actions as we transition to a crypto-only exchange.

Binance.US has encouraged customers to withdraw their USD via bank transfer by June 13th, 2023. Due to elevated volumes and weekend bank closures, ACH withdrawals may take longer than usual to process, they said.

The exchange will also be suspending USD deposits and recurring buy orders effective immediately, though they said any deposits already initiated will be processed. Any USD balances remaining on the platform after June 15th, 2023 may be converted to stablecoin that can be withdrawn on-chain, they said.

Beginning June 12, the exchange will start delisting U.S. dollar-denominated trading pairs such as BTC-USD, but will continue to support stablecoin pairs such as BTC-USDT. Cryptocurrency services remain fully operational, including: crypto trading, staking, deposits and withdrawals, they wrote.

Until we secure more stable banking partners, Binance.US will remain a crypto-only exchange - at least for a time, they said. Thank you for your continued support as we fight for a path forward for those who want a thriving digital asset marketplace in America.

In its filing on Tuesday, the DC court wrote that they agreed with the SECs position that it was necessary to freeze all Binance.US funds on an emergency basis.

The Commission has made a sufficient and proper showing in support of the relief granted herein, the court wrote, by setting forth evidence from which an inference of a violation can be drawn and showing a likelihood that the Commission will prevail at trial on the merits and that the Defendants have engaged in and, unless temporarily restrained and enjoined by order of this Court, will continue to engage in acts, practices, and courses of business constituting violations of the Securities Act and the Exchange Act.

By granting the order, the court effectively froze the assets of Binance.US and its affiliated entities, preventing them from transferring the assets except to recognized third-party custodians. It also requires Binance to repatriate any assets held outside of the United States on behalf of Binance.US customers.

Binance has until Sunday to ensure that any and all access to Binance.US customers funds is limited to the U.S. entity, and 30 days to transfer to Binance.US any assets that it holds in offshore entities on behalf of U.S. customers.

Binance.US will face an uphill battle finding banking partners to support its U.S. dollar business in light of this weeks revelations. On Wednesday, Sachin Verma, Assistant Chief Accountant in the SECs Division of Enforcement, submitted a new court filing in support of their lawsuit detailing billions of dollars in transfers between the exchanges U.S. bank accounts, entities controlled by CZ, and other firms.

Verma said the information in the filing is based upon my personal review of financial records such as bank statements, deposits, canceled checks, wire transfers, signature cards, and other account documents produced to the SEC by the defendants, Silvergate Bank, Signature Bank, FedWire and other parties.

The filing mapped the complex flows between various Signature and Silvergate bank accounts, some ostensibly belonging to Binance.US and others directly controlled by Zhao, and a web of other offshore entities such as Merit Peak and Key Vision allegedly controlled by Zhao and his associates.

Verma alleges that the evidence shows customer funds were illegally diverted to Sigma Chain, a trading entity controlled by Zhao, and used to engage in fraudulent trades that inflated Binances true trading volume. The filing also says that Binance concealed the fact that it commingled billions of dollars in customer assets that were sent to Merit Peak, another third-party entity owned by Zhao.
June 8 (Reuters) - The U.S. affiliate of Binance said it was halting dollar deposits and gave customers until Tuesday to withdraw their dollar funds, after the U.S. securities regulator asked a court to freeze its assets.

Binance.US, the purportedly independent partner of Binance, said in a tweet on Thursday that its banking partners were preparing to stop dollar withdrawal channels as early as June 13.

The SEC sued Binance, its CEO and founder Changpeng Zhao, and Binance.US's operator on Monday, in a dramatic escalation of a crackdown on the industry by U.S. regulators. The SEC sued major U.S. exchange Coinbase (COIN.O) a day later.

Binance.US said in the tweeted customer notice that it would no longer accept dollar deposits as part of plans to change to a "crypto-only exchange". It called the SEC's civil charges "unjustified" and said it would "vigorously defend" itself.

The SEC alleged in 13 charges on Monday that Binance had in a "web of deception" artificially inflated trading volumes and diverted customer funds, as well as failing to restrict U.S. customers from its platform.

The SEC on Tuesday asked a federal court to freeze Binance's U.S. assets. Binance.US called the motion "unwarranted", saying it had addressed SEC concerns over the safety of customer assets.

The SEC said it had not received "sufficient reassurance" that Binance.US's customer assets were controlled by its operator, BAM Trading, "rather than under the control or influence of Binance or Zhao, a person who has openly expressed his desire to avoid compliance with U.S. law."

Zhao and Binance had "free reign" to handle Binance.US assets, the SEC said. "They have exercised this control over U.S. investor assets with no oversight or controls to ensure that those assets are properly secured," it added.

Binance did not immediately reply to a request for comment. It has said it would "defend our platform vigorously," saying the SEC was limited in reach as Binance was not a U.S. exchange.

Binance.US's customer assets total more than $2.2 billion held in crypto and some $377 million in U.S. dollar bank accounts, the SEC said.

'EXISTENTIAL THREAT'

BAM Trading holds customer's funds directly with California-based Axos Bank, according to a letter from lawyers for BAM Trading to the SEC dated May 26, which was made public by the SEC on Tuesday.

Axos did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent via email.

Binance.US had struggled to find banking partners after the failure of Signature Bank, the Wall Street Journal reported in April.

In its tweet on Thursday, Binance.US said crypto-denominated trading, deposits, withdrawals and "staking" - where users deposit cryptocurrencies for use in blockchain transactions - would remain fully operational.

"This is very serious for Binance.US because Americans cannot use Binance Global," said Clara Medalie, director of research at Kaiko.

"The inability for Binance.US to offer USD trading services in a region the exchange was specifically built to operate in is an existential threat."

Crypto prices barely reacted to the news, with bitcoin last trading up 0.4% at $26,610. It was headed for a weekly loss of about 1.9%, after having dipped to an over two-month low of $25,350 earlier in the week as the SEC crackdown stoked nerves.

Binance's BNB token, the world's fourth-largest, slid 0.4% to $261.74.
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(Kitco News) - Digital asset custodian BitGo has reached a preliminary agreement to purchase its rival Prime Trust amid rumors that the latters ability to service withdrawals has been limited due to the fallout from this weeks enforcement actions by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

According to a statement posted by BitGo on Thursday, the firm has signed a non-binding term sheet to acquire 100% of the equity of Prime Core Technologies, Inc., the parent company of Prime Trust, a leading provider of financial infrastructure for fintech and digital asset innovators. At this point, the deal still requires regulatory approval.

As part of the deal, Prime Trusts Nevada Trust Company would join BitGos existing global network of regulated trust companies in South Dakota, New York, Germany, and Switzerland; its fintech API infrastructure and exchange network would be used to reinforce BitGo Wallet Services and BitGos Go Network; and BitGo would incorporate Prime Trustss network of banking partners and payment rails, crypto IRA, and additional wealth management offerings.

This is a landmark transaction, leading a greater shift in the digital asset landscape toward a more secure and sustainable future, said Mike Belshe, CEO and co-founder of BitGo. With the expected acquisition of Prime Trust, BitGo is well positioned to enhance its best-in-class, trusted solutions and to service the combined customer base.

Prime Trust, a Nevada-based firm that custodies crypto and helps digital-asset companies park cash at network banks, had been trying to raise as much as $25 million in emergency funding in recent weeks amid rumors that it faced bankruptcy due to a cash crunch.

Earlier this week, customers at Binance.US, Abra, and Swan Bitcoin  which all used Prime Trust as their Bitcoin custodian  began complaining about delayed withdrawals.

A notice posted on Swans website says that the platform is undergoing a major system upgrade, and Cory Klippsten, the CEO of Swan Bitcoin, tweeted that all of the Bitcoin and U.S. dollars held by the platform's clients are now custodied with Fortress or BitGo.

On Wednesday, Bitcoin Magazine CEO David Bailey tweeted, Major custodian about to declare bankruptcy without last minute bailout. Take your Bitcoin off exchanges, even bitcoin-only platforms.

During a Twitter Spaces live audio event on Thursday, Bailey reiterated his claims that the firm was looking to raise $25 million in funding and said that recent actions by Prime Trust havent led him to feel confident about the company's long-term health.

All I can say is, were a media company, Bailey said. Theyre coming to us for funds? Thats not a positive sign, implying that the company may have asked Bitcoin Magazines team for financial assistance.

Prime Trust saw an influx of business following the collapse of Signature Bank, including taking on Binance.US as a customer, who used the firms network of banking partners to store its customers cash.

Binance.US has since announced that USD transfers to and from the exchange will be halted on June 13, as its banking partners have said they would temporarily suspend their services pending the outcome of the enforcement actions taken against the exchange, including the freezing of more than $2 billion worth of the platform's assets.

The deal with BitGo comes at a good time for Prime Trust, as its funding options were drying up and it risked leaving its users without a functioning custodian.

The combination of Prime Trust and BitGo would be a significant enhancement for the industry, said Jor Law, interim CEO and President of Prime Trust. No other company will have the breath of product and services nor depth of experience that this combined company would have. We are excited to offer our world-class infrastructure within a broader ecosystem and revolutionize the future of crypto.
Unprecedented forest fire outbreak in Quebec forced shut downs at several mining operations in the province, noted Kitco correspondent Paul Harris.

On Friday Harris recorded Kitco Roundtable with mining audiences manager Michael McCrae and CEO and Co-founder of VRIFY, Steve de Jong.

Unseasonably warm weather resulted in over 150 active fires in Quebec. The plight of the province gained international attention when smoke from the fire enveloped New York City in a deep haze.

Several miners, developers and juniors suspended operations due to operating hazards in Quebec. Wesdome Gold Mines (TSX: WDO) announced yesterday that it temporarily suspended underground activities and surface exploration activities at the Kiena Mine in Val dOr, Quebec. Earlier in the month Hecla Mining (NYSE: HL) suspended operations at its Casa Berardi mine.

Steve de Jong joined the podcast to talk about his company's recent raise, $6 million in Series A funding co-led by RCF Jolimont Innovation and Beedie Capital, with participation from Tiny.

In its press release the company said the money will be spent on developing better communication tools.

A strong critical mineral supply chain is essential for reaching our global energy transition targets, but without a significant shift in the way the mining sector communicates to investors, this is unlikely to happen, said Steve de Jong said in a news release announcing the investment. The raise will help us redefine how deals are shared, understood, and secured.
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(Kitco News) - Africa-focused gold producer Hummingbird Resources (AIM: HUM) today announced first gold pour at the Kouroussa gold mine in Guinea on 08 June 2023, ahead of the end of Q2 2023 schedule and on budget.

In a statement, the company said that commissioning at Kouroussa commenced early May 2023 and having achieved first gold pour, the mine is now expected to ramp up to commercial production during H2 2023.

The Kouroussa gold mine is a high grade, over 4 grammes per tonne, open pit operation, and is the company's second operating gold asset in West Africa.

The mine is expected to produce an average of 120,000 to 140,000 ounces of gold for the first three years of commercial production, and average 100,000 ounces per annum over the current life of mine at an all-in sustaining cost (AISC) profile of c.US$1,000 per ounce.

Hummingbird said that a more detailed update on the companys FY 2023 guidance to be provided once Kouroussa is ramping up.

CEO Dan Betts commented, "The achievement of first gold pour at our second operating mine, Kouroussa in Guinea, is a major strategic milestone for the Company, transforming Hummingbird into a multi-asset, multi-jurisdiction gold producer, that more than doubles our production profile to 200,000+ oz pa.

Kouroussa is the second mine Hummingbird has built on time and on budget, made up of a construction team of African and predominately (80%) Guinean personnel. I would like to thank all our dedicated Kouroussa project team and multiple construction partners in achieving this outstanding outcome. Our operations team is now focused on safely ramping up towards name plate production, expected during H2 2023."

Hummingbird currently has two core gold projects, the operational Yanfolila gold mine in Mali, and the Kouroussa gold mine in Guinea, which will more than double current gold production when at commercial production. The company also has a controlling interest in the Dugbe gold project in Liberia that is being developed by joint venture partners, Pasofino Gold Limited.
President Harutyunyan met with a group of members of the Union of Artsakh Freedom Fighters, the Union of Afghan War Veterans and the Union of Army Reserve Officers.

June 9, 2023, 13:40 President Harutyunyan meets with freedom fighters, Afghan War veterans, army reserve officers

STEPANAKERT, JUNE 9 , ARTSAKHPRESS: On June 8, the President of the Republic of Artsakh Arayik Harutyunyan met with a group of members of the Union of Artsakh Freedom Fighters, the Union of Afghan War Veterans and the Union of Army Reserve

Officers.

President Harutyunyan presented the current military and political situation, talked about the policy of the authorities in ensuring the security of Artsakh.

The Head of the State highly appreciated the contribution, knowledge and experience of the structures participating in the meeting in strengthening the defense and security of the homeland, expressing readiness to use it in areas of vital importance for Artsakh.
Shenandoah, IA (51601)

Today

Overcast. Slight chance of a rain shower. High near 70F. Winds NNE at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Some passing clouds. Low 47F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph.
Fairgoers will see more improvements to the fairgrounds when they attend the 2023 New York State Fair.

The projects are part of a nearly $35 million investment announced by Gov. Kathy Hochul last year. The funding was included in the 2022-23 state budget. Sean Hennessey, the state fair's interim director, provided an update on the improvements during an interview with The Citizen.

A streetscape beautification project to spruce up Restaurant Row will be finished before the fair. Restaurant Row features several popular food vendors, such as Basilio's and Bosco's.

A new concession stand has been constructed and will be open for this year's fair. The new facility, which is near The Eatery and Horticulture Building, will house Tully's Good Times, a restaurant chain and longtime fair vendor.

The fair will have a new goat pavilion near the goat barn. The pavilion will serve as a showplace for new goats, Hennessey said.

Other projects won't be completed this year, but should be ready for the 2024 fair. A new year-round greenhouse will be constructed near the Dairy Birthing Center. The greenhouse is currently in the design phase, according to Hennessey.

A new building will house the sheep and wool center. This will replace the existing Future Farmers of America Building. Hennessey told The Citizen that the current structure will be torn down after this year's fair.

New horse barns are also part of the fair's plans. The barns will be located behind the new sheep and wool center and give the fairgrounds additional capacity for horse shows.

Hennessey thanked Hochul and state legislators for allocating funding to support the projects at the fairgrounds.

"A lot of things to present to the public this year and then in the outer years, we have a lot, again, that's going to be coming with improvements on the grounds," he said.
BOONE COUNTY  A former Columbia resident who was scheduled to face a jury trial next week for the 2006 murder of his wife pleaded guilty Friday.

Keith Comfort, 41, appeared in-person for his pre-trial hearing and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and abandonment of a corpse. It was the first time Comfort appeared in court since his arrest in 2019.

Boone County Judge Jeff Harris sentenced Comfort to 22 years for the murder charge and four years for abandonment of a corpse.

A jury trial was scheduled to begin Monday.

Heather Crawford Gallatin, a friend of Shultz, addressed Comfort after the sentencing.

"To Keith I say this, what you took from us is more than you realize. Not only did you take a daughter, mother, sister, and friend, but you took a future," Crawford Gallatin said. "You took a future from us that will never be. You took away time that is priceless. Mom and dad will never have more time with their daughter, or more grandchildren. Kaylen will never know how much her mom loved her. Her siblings will never get to know her better and I will never get to make more memories with my best friend."

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In August 2019, Comfort confessed to Wisconsin law enforcement that he killed his wife, Megan Nicole Shultz, and dumped her body in a Columbia dumpster in August 2006.

Columbia police made successful efforts to recover Shultz's remains in the landfill a month later. A forensic anthropologist confirmed that the recovered remains were a 99.9% match to Shultz's DNA, according to the Missourian.

Keith Comfort Timeline: From death of Megan Shultz to trial Keith Comfort is charged with second-degree murder, in connection to the disappearance and death of his wife, Megan Shultz.

Shultz's mother reported her daughter missing in August 2006. Comfort originally told police that Shultz walked away from their home on Amelia Street after an argument and never came back.

He later told Wisconsin police that after an argument, he grabbed Shultz by the neck, took her to the ground and strangled her. He then said when he realized she wasn't breathing, he put her body in a garbage bag and "threw her into the...dumpster" of their apartment complex, according to previous KOMU 8 reporting.

Since his arrest, Comfort has been held at the Boone County Jail on a $5 million, cash-only bond. His trial was postponed several times while both parties collected evidence.
With Gasgoo Daily, we will offer daily important automotive news in China. For those we have reported, the title of the piece will include a hyperlink, which will provide detailed information.

First mass-produced ZEEKR Xs roll off line

On June 8, the first batch of mass-produced ZEEKR X SUVs officially rolled off the assembly line. With the new cars being gradually dispatched nationwide, it is expected that the delivery to the first group of customers will commence in mid-June.

Photo credit: ZEEKR

Cherys EXEED ships first 500 Yaoguang SUVs outside of China

On June 5, at Qingdao Port in Shandong province, 500 units of the Chery EXEED Yaoguang set sail, marking a significant step forward for EXEED brand in accelerating its global expansion and embarking on a new journey for Chery Group going global.

EVE Energys subsidiary to build PV-used cylindrical battery project in Hungary

On June 8, Chinese power battery maker EVE Energy announced that its board of directors has approved the full-owned subsidiary, EVE Hungary, to invest in the construction of a cylindrical battery project for passenger vehicles using its own and self-raised funds. The investment amount will not exceed 9.971 billion yuan.

NIOs Q1 2023 revenue rises 7.7% YoY, but dips 33.5% QoQ

NIO Inc., a Chinese front-runner in the high-end smart electric vehicle sector, reported a decrease in total revenues and vehicle sales for first quarter (Q1) 2023 compared to the previous quarter, but still recorded a year-on-year increase in total revenues. The unaudited results released today showed a 33.5% drop in revenues from Q4 2022 and a 7.7% increase from Q1 2022, totaling 10,676.5 million yuan (US$1,554.6 million).

BYD launches new brand FANG CHENG BAO dedicated to professional, personalized identities

In an official announcement today, BYD, the global leader in new energy vehicle manufacturing, unveiled its new sub-brand, FANG CHENG BAO. As the fifth addition to BYD's diversified brand portfolio, FANG CHENG BAO aims to cater to the increasingly personalized demands of consumers with a range of unique, professional-grade electric vehicle models.

AVATR to start ADS advanced driving system subscription on June 30

AVATR, the premium new energy vehicle brand jointly owned by Changan Automobile, Huawei, and CATL, announced today that its advanced driver assistance systems (ADS) premium package would be available for subscription to all users starting from June 30.

China posts double-digit YoY jump in auto output, sales in May 2023

In the fifth month of 2023, China produced 2.333 million vehicles in total, representing a 9.4% rise over the previous month, while reflecting a 21.1% jump over the previous year, according to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM).

Li Auto discontinues sales of Li ONE

Li Auto, the Chinese new energy vehicle (NEV) startup, took the sales and order portal of its first model, the Li ONE, off the company's official website and app. According to the companys customer service representatives, the Li ONE has sold out completely.

Dongfeng Motor Corporation posts 15% YoY jump in May new energy vehicle sales

Dongfeng Motor Corporation (DFMC) sold roughly 34,000 NEVs in the past month, marking a 15% year-on-year increase and a 14% month-on-month growth. Cumulatively, DFMC achieved a total NEV sales volume of about 127,000 units from January to May.

Automotive OS developer Arraymo partners with chip supplier SemiDrive

Arraymo, a subsidiary of ArcherMind and developer of intelligent automotive operating systems, on June 8 signed a strategic cooperation agreement with SemiDrive, Chinese automotive chip provider.

GAC Group's 5G V-Box development project to adopt ZTEs auto-grade 5G module first

Guangzhou Automobile Group Co., Ltd. Automotive Engineering Institute (referred as GAC Institute) recently announced that its 5G V-Box mass-production development project will be the first to adopt ZTE's automotive-grade 5G module, according to a WeChat public account post by ZTE Corporation, a global leader in telecommunications and information technology.

CATL partners with Thailands Arun Plus for CTP battery production

Recently, CATL entered into a partnership agreement with Thailand's Arun Plus Co., Ltd. (Arun Plus) for the cooperation on Cell-to-Pack (CTP) technology, the battery giant announced on June 8 via its WeChat account.
Shares of Bank of Cyprus Holdings Public Limited (LON:BOCH  Get Rating) rose 2% during trading on Thursday . The stock traded as high as GBX 250 ($3.11) and last traded at GBX 250 ($3.11). Approximately 121,264 shares changed hands during trading, a decline of 45% from the average daily volume of 221,135 shares. The stock had previously closed at GBX 245 ($3.05).

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Separately, Numis Securities began coverage on shares of Bank of Cyprus Holdings Public in a report on Wednesday, March 15th. They set a buy rating and a GBX 507 ($6.30) target price on the stock.

Get Bank of Cyprus Holdings Public alerts:

Bank of Cyprus Holdings Public Price Performance

The stocks 50-day simple moving average is GBX 221.21 and its 200 day simple moving average is GBX 196.64. The stock has a market capitalization of 1.12 billion, a P/E ratio of 25,000.00 and a beta of 0.72.

About Bank of Cyprus Holdings Public

Bank of Cyprus Holdings Public Limited Company, through its subsidiaries, engages in the provision of banking, financial, and insurance services. It offers current, demand, savings, time, notice, instant access, and fixed deposits; housing, student, vehicle, mortgage, consumer, business and business premises, term, and home or investment loans; and asset finance, factoring, trade facilities, European financial, project finance, shipping finance, and syndicated and corporate lending services, as well as hire purchase services for car and equipment.

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Baru Gold Corp. (EAS.V) (CVE:EAS  Get Rating) shares traded down 3.1% during mid-day trading on Thursday . The stock traded as low as C$0.15 and last traded at C$0.16. 136,956 shares changed hands during mid-day trading, a decline of 60% from the average session volume of 345,802 shares. The stock had previously closed at C$0.16.

Baru Gold Corp. (EAS.V) Stock Performance

The company has a 50-day moving average of C$0.16 and a 200-day moving average of C$0.16. The firm has a market capitalization of C$22.97 million and a price-to-earnings ratio of -15.50.

About Baru Gold Corp. (EAS.V)

(Get Rating)

East Asia Minerals Corporation engages in the exploration and development of mineral properties in Indonesia. It holds 70% interest in Sangihe gold-copper project, which is located on the island of Sangihe covering an area of 42,000 hectares; and the Miwah gold project that consists of three contiguous exploration mining business permits covering 30,000 hectares located southeast of Banda Aceh in Aceh Province.

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Builders FirstSource, Inc. (NYSE:BLDR  Get Rating) insider Jami Beckmann sold 2,000 shares of the stock in a transaction on Tuesday, June 6th. The shares were sold at an average price of $120.69, for a total value of $241,380.00. Following the sale, the insider now owns 41,262 shares in the company, valued at $4,979,910.78. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available at this hyperlink.

Builders FirstSource Trading Down 1.3 %

Shares of BLDR opened at $120.78 on Friday. Builders FirstSource, Inc. has a twelve month low of $48.91 and a twelve month high of $126.29. The firm has a market capitalization of $15.48 billion, a P/E ratio of 7.89 and a beta of 1.97. The company has a current ratio of 1.83, a quick ratio of 1.10 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.69. The firms 50-day moving average is $111.24 and its two-hundred day moving average is $90.83.

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Builders FirstSource (NYSE:BLDR  Get Rating) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, May 3rd. The company reported $2.96 earnings per share for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $1.63 by $1.33. Builders FirstSource had a net margin of 11.68% and a return on equity of 55.42%. The company had revenue of $3.88 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $3.57 billion. During the same quarter last year, the firm posted $3.90 earnings per share. Builders FirstSources revenue was down 31.6% on a year-over-year basis. On average, research analysts predict that Builders FirstSource, Inc. will post 9.62 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Institutional Trading of Builders FirstSource

Analysts Set New Price Targets

Several institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in BLDR. Altshuler Shaham Ltd lifted its position in Builders FirstSource by 5.2% during the 1st quarter. Altshuler Shaham Ltd now owns 1,759 shares of the companys stock worth $156,000 after buying an additional 87 shares in the last quarter. Macquarie Group Ltd. grew its stake in shares of Builders FirstSource by 5.4% during the 1st quarter. Macquarie Group Ltd. now owns 2,269 shares of the companys stock worth $201,000 after acquiring an additional 116 shares in the last quarter. Kingfisher Capital LLC grew its stake in shares of Builders FirstSource by 0.3% during the 1st quarter. Kingfisher Capital LLC now owns 45,746 shares of the companys stock worth $4,061,000 after acquiring an additional 134 shares in the last quarter. Fifth Third Bancorp boosted its holdings in shares of Builders FirstSource by 20.6% in the 1st quarter. Fifth Third Bancorp now owns 803 shares of the companys stock valued at $71,000 after buying an additional 137 shares during the last quarter. Finally, WASHINGTON TRUST Co boosted its holdings in shares of Builders FirstSource by 6.8% in the 4th quarter. WASHINGTON TRUST Co now owns 2,624 shares of the companys stock valued at $170,000 after buying an additional 166 shares during the last quarter. 94.71% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

BLDR has been the subject of a number of research analyst reports. Truist Financial raised their price objective on Builders FirstSource from $97.00 to $124.00 in a research report on Thursday, May 4th. StockNews.com initiated coverage on shares of Builders FirstSource in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a buy rating on the stock. Zelman & Associates raised shares of Builders FirstSource from a hold rating to a buy rating in a report on Monday, May 8th. Robert W. Baird lowered shares of Builders FirstSource from an outperform rating to a neutral rating and set a $96.00 price target on the stock. in a report on Thursday, May 4th. Finally, Wedbush boosted their price objective on shares of Builders FirstSource from $95.00 to $135.00 in a report on Thursday, May 4th. Five equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and ten have issued a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $112.25.

About Builders FirstSource

(Get Rating)

Builders FirstSource, Inc engages in the supply and manufacture of building materials, manufactured components and construction services to professional homebuilders, subcontractors, remodelers and consumers. Its products include factory-built roof and floor trusses, wall panels and stairs, vinyl windows, custom millwork and trim, and engineered wood.

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Shares of Farmers and Merchants Bancshares, Inc. (OTCMKTS:FMFG  Get Rating) traded down 0.2% during trading on Wednesday . The stock traded as low as $21.00 and last traded at $21.00. 200 shares were traded during mid-day trading, a decline of 84% from the average session volume of 1,227 shares. The stock had previously closed at $21.05.

Farmers and Merchants Bancshares Price Performance

The stocks 50 day simple moving average is $22.17 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is $21.77.

Farmers and Merchants Bancshares Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Farmers & Merchants Bancshares, Inc (Maryland) is a holding company, which engages in the provision of commercial and retail banking services. It offers checking accounts, savings accounts, money market accounts, certificates of deposit, and individual retirement accounts for local consumers. The firm also provides credit and deposit services for small to medium size businesses and the agricultural community.

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Tesco (LON:TSCO  Get Rating) had its target price cut by stock analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co. from GBX 290 ($3.61) to GBX 270 ($3.36) in a report released on Wednesday, Marketbeat.com reports. The firm currently has an overweight rating on the retailers stock. JPMorgan Chase & Co.s price target indicates a potential upside of 3.05% from the stocks previous close.

Several other brokerages have also commented on TSCO. Shore Capital reiterated a buy rating on shares of Tesco in a research report on Monday, May 22nd. Jefferies Financial Group upgraded Tesco to a buy rating and boosted their price objective for the company from GBX 260 ($3.23) to GBX 310 ($3.85) in a research report on Monday, March 6th. Six investment analysts have rated the stock with a buy rating, According to MarketBeat.com, the stock has an average rating of Buy and an average price target of GBX 308 ($3.83).

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Tesco Stock Down 0.4 %

TSCO stock opened at GBX 262 ($3.26) on Wednesday. Tesco has a 1-year low of GBX 194.35 ($2.42) and a 1-year high of GBX 285.30 ($3.55). The company has a current ratio of 0.72, a quick ratio of 0.60 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 123.29. The stocks fifty day simple moving average is GBX 270.68 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is GBX 252.26. The stock has a market cap of 19.00 billion, a P/E ratio of 2,620.00, a P/E/G ratio of 3.50 and a beta of 0.64.

Tesco Company Profile

Tesco PLC, together with its subsidiaries, operates as a grocery retailer in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. It offers grocery products through its stores, as well as online. The company is also involved in the food and drink wholesaling activities.

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Pro Medicus Limited (OTCMKTS:PMCUF  Get Rating) shares traded up 4.6% during mid-day trading on Tuesday . The company traded as high as $42.00 and last traded at $42.00. 100 shares traded hands during trading, a decline of 86% from the average session volume of 708 shares. The stock had previously closed at $40.15.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Separately, Citigroup raised Pro Medicus from a sell rating to a neutral rating in a research note on Monday, March 6th.

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Pro Medicus Stock Down 0.6 %

The stock has a 50 day simple moving average of $41.29 and a 200 day simple moving average of $41.19.

About Pro Medicus

Pro Medicus Limited engages in the development and supply of healthcare imaging software and services to hospitals, diagnostic imaging groups, and other related health entities in Australia, North America, and Europe. The company offers radiology information systems (RIS), a proprietary medical software for practice management, training, installation, professional services, and after-sale support and service products; and Promedicus.net, an e-health platform.

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Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft upgraded shares of Rio Tinto Group (LON:RIO  Get Rating) to a buy rating in a report released on Monday morning, MarketBeat Ratings reports. They currently have GBX 6,000 ($74.59) price objective on the stock, down from their previous price objective of GBX 6,200 ($77.08).

A number of other equities analysts have also recently commented on the company. Jefferies Financial Group set a GBX 7,500 ($93.24) target price on Rio Tinto Group in a report on Wednesday, February 22nd. JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased their target price on Rio Tinto Group from GBX 5,110 ($63.53) to GBX 5,250 ($65.27) in a report on Friday, April 28th. Berenberg Bank reissued a buy rating and set a GBX 6,600 ($82.05) target price on shares of Rio Tinto Group in a report on Thursday, May 25th. Morgan Stanley reduced their target price on Rio Tinto Group from GBX 5,840 ($72.60) to GBX 5,800 ($72.10) in a report on Monday, April 24th. Finally, UBS Group set a GBX 5,000 ($62.16) target price on Rio Tinto Group in a report on Wednesday, February 22nd. Two equities research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, two have assigned a hold rating and five have issued a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has a consensus rating of Hold and an average target price of GBX 6,119.23 ($76.07).

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Rio Tinto Group Stock Performance

Shares of RIO stock opened at GBX 5,127 ($63.74) on Monday. The company has a quick ratio of 1.34, a current ratio of 1.63 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 23.47. Rio Tinto Group has a 52-week low of GBX 4,424.50 ($55.00) and a 52-week high of GBX 6,406 ($79.64). The business has a 50-day simple moving average of GBX 5,108.96 and a 200-day simple moving average of GBX 5,571.59. The stock has a market cap of 64.09 billion, a PE ratio of 832.31, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of -0.64 and a beta of 0.68.

Insider Buying and Selling at Rio Tinto Group

Rio Tinto Group Company Profile

In other news, insider Simon Henry bought 500 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Monday, April 24th. The shares were acquired at an average price of GBX 5,221 ($64.91) per share, for a total transaction of 26,105 ($32,452.76). In other news, insider Peter Cunningham sold 5 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, April 17th. The stock was sold at an average price of GBX 5,586 ($69.44), for a total transaction of 279.30 ($347.22). Also, insider Simon Henry acquired 500 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, April 24th. The shares were bought at an average price of GBX 5,221 ($64.91) per share, with a total value of 26,105 ($32,452.76). Insiders have acquired a total of 1,910 shares of company stock worth $9,916,080 over the last ninety days. Corporate insiders own 14.67% of the companys stock.

(Get Rating)

Rio Tinto Group engages in exploring, mining, and processing mineral resources worldwide. The company offers aluminum, copper, diamonds, gold, borates, titanium dioxide, salt, iron ore, and lithium. It also owns and operates open pit and underground mines, mills, refineries, smelters, power stations, and research and service facilities.

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Indonesian Ambassador to Korea Gandi Sulistiyanto speaks during a media briefing announcing the collaboration between Indonesia's Surakarta City and Hyundai Motor Group to feature Indonesian batik design at Hyundai Motorstudio Goyang in northern Gyeonggi Province, Wednesday. Courtesy of Embassy of Indonesia in Korea



Indonesian ambassador underscores creative collaborations



By Kwon Mee-yoo



On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties between Korea and Indonesia, Hyundai Motor Group's flagship electric vehicle (EV) IONIQ 5 will feature Indonesia's iconic batik design.



Indonesian Ambassador to Korea Gandi Sulistiyanto announced the special collaboration between Hyundai and Surakarta City, also known as Solo, adding an Indonesian flair to the Korean EV.



"The city of Solo is chosen due to its close-knit history of batik development. Batik, the shirt that I am proudly wearing today, is the leading icon of the Indonesian creative industry. Batik reached its golden age in Indonesia, from generation to generation, Indonesians wear batik proudly. Batik is essentially Indonesian," Ambassador Sulistiyanto said during a media briefing at Hyundai Motorstudio Goyang in northern Gyeonggi Province, Wednesday.



"The Indonesian Embassy tries to facilitate collaboration between the Indonesian creative industry with the Korean automotive industry by the inception of this batik signature design by the Hyundai team."



Batik is a traditional Indonesian textile design that involves a wax-resist dyeing process. It is famous for its complex, detailed and symbolic patterns and each region of Indonesia has its unique batik patterns that reflect its particular cultural heritage. In 2019, UNESCO recognized Indonesian batik as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.



Batik designs can feature a variety of themes such as animals, people, nature, folklore and mythology and, among those, Solo batik carries a deep connection to the traditional Javanese culture.



The city of Surakarta, currently led by Mayor Gibran Rakabuming Raka, son of Indonesian President Joko Widodo, is renowned for its batik industry. The announcement was made during Gibran's visit to Korea.





Indonesian Ambassador to Korea Gandi Sulistiyanto, right, poses with his wife Susi Ardhani Sulistiyanto during their visit to Hyundai Motorstudio Goyang in northern Gyeonggi Province, Wednesday. Courtesy of Embassy of Indonesia in Korea
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Recently, CATL entered into a partnership agreement with Thailand's Arun Plus Co., Ltd. (Arun Plus) for the cooperation on Cell-to-Pack (CTP) technology, the battery giant announced on June 8 via its WeChat account.

Through the collaboration, both parties are committed to meeting local demand for electric vehicle production, with an aim to help Thailand become the battery production center of the Southeast Asian region.

Photo credit: CATL

Under this agreement, CATL will provide CTP battery pack production lines for Arun Plus and share with the latter corresponding manufacturing technologies.

Arun Plus is a wholly-owned subsidiary of PTT Public Company Limited (PTT), which has established a comprehensive energy infrastructure in Thailand. To cater to the growing electrification demands in Thailand and Southeast Asia, Arun Plus established a subsidiary dedicated to electric vehicle manufacturing in Nov. 2022.

Bearing a common vision of shaping a greener future through innovative technology, this partnership is poised to strengthen Arun Plus' capabilities in electric vehicle production, so as to propel the construction of power battery ecosystems in Thailand and Southeast Asia.

Additionally, this partnership represents a significant step in CATL's global strategy. It is expected to help the battery maker explore diverse collaboration models in Southeast Asian markets and further accelerate the global transition to electrification and clean energy.
Gov. Eric Holcomb, left, signed a bill by state Rep. Ben Smaltz, R-Auburn, to add transparency by boosting livestreaming and archiving of state and local public meetings. The new law will take effect in July 2025.
Kendallville, IN (46755)

Today

Cloudy skies this evening. A few showers developing late. Low near 50F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

Cloudy skies this evening. A few showers developing late. Low near 50F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
ASTRO's Cha Eun Woo recently captivated netizens with his striking transformation at the Chaumet event in Paris, leaving everyone in awe of his contrasting visuals.

The popular idol embarked on his journey to France on June 6, departing from Incheon Airport, and immediately caught the attention of fans and the media with his impeccable appearance before boarding the flight.

Cha Eun Woo at Incheon International Airport heading to Paris to attend "CHAUMET" event#CHAEUNWOO # pic.twitter.com/4R8Dniz1Oz  Nelson Obrador (@nelson_obrador) June 6, 2023

However, it was on June 7, during the event itself, that Cha Eun Woo truly showcased his ethereal charm.

IN CASE YOU MISSED: ASTRO Cha Eun Woo Honors Late Bandmate Moonbin With Emotional Cover of 'Stalker'

ASTRO Cha Eunwoo Striking Visuals

Stepping out of the hotel in a simple yet perfectly accessorized suit, he exuded an air of regality that left onlookers mesmerized. Guests, including renowned celebrities, were drawn to his presence as he engaged in conversations and posed for pictures with various media outlets.

Even a netizen who shared a video online confessed to initially failing to recognize the idol due to his remarkably small face, which they considered a compliment.

Cha Eunwoo himself shared several pictures from the event on Instagram, further magnifying his exceptional visuals and leaving no doubt about his status as an undeniable visual king.

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Fans Gone Wild

The online realm erupted with adoration as photos and videos of Cha Eun Woo circulated, with netizens expressing their admiration for his breathtaking looks and unparalleled charm. The term "CHAUMET PRINCE CHA EUNWOO" trended on social media for hours after the event, a testament to his enduring impact on fans and the general public alike.

What particularly struck netizens was the remarkable contrast observed throughout the night. While Cha Eun Woo initially embodied the elegance of a prince, he effortlessly transitioned into exuding a scorching, sexy aura as the event drew to a close.

Wearing a simple white shirt while bidding fans a good night, his appearance ignited a frenzy across the internet, further cementing his status as a visual icon.

Cha Eun Woo's ability to make a lasting impression at global events remains undeniable. While he is consistently lauded for his striking visuals, netizens also emphasize the allure of his charm and genuine personality when engaging with people on a global stage.

ALSO READ: Cha Eun Woo Getting Teary-Eyed While Singing THIS Song Breaks Hearts
ESPNs Stephen A. Smith has not endorsed Republican candidate Chris Christie for president. But he is supporting fundraising for Christies presidential campaign, which certainly seems like an endorsement. (Even if he claims thats only to get Christie to a threshold where hell receive debate invitations.)

Friday afternoon, Smith surprised some of his fans and social media followers by tweeting out a link for people to make financial contributions to Christies campaign.

Yes, I know the Gov. Yes, hes a friend. But this has nothing to do with endorsing him nor anyone else. This is about helping the Gov get on that debate stage so we can all see whos the best man or woman for the job. This is a way to make that happen: https://t.co/0yK1YnqHXj  Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) June 9, 2023

Yes, I know the Gov. Yes, hes a friend. But this has nothing to do with endorsing him nor anyone else, Smith tweeted. This is about helping the Gov get on that debate stage so we can all see whos the best man or woman for the job.

The First Take host recently spoke about the former New Jersey governor on his podcast The Stephen A. Smith Show. And he similarly touted Christie during a recent appearance with Sean Hannity on Fox News.

Id vote for [Christie] before Id vote for any of the Democratic candidates that Ive seen, Smith told Hannity earlier this week as he blasted the idea of current president Joe Biden earning a second term in the White House. Thats not the same with DeSantis or Trump, Smith added, to reaffirm that he wont be voting for just any Republican in the 2024 presidential election.

Smiths decision to ask his followers to support Christies presidential campaign might come as a bit of a surprise, considering ESPNs desire to avoid politics. The recent endorsements, albeit not official endorsements, of Christie were not made on ESPN platforms. Jemele Hill, however, during her tenure at the Worldwide Leader, was suspended in 2017 for violating ESPNs social media guidelines around her comments on Twitter saying Dallas Cowboys sponsors should boycott the team. Thats not to say Smith deserves a suspension, but ESPN has monitored the personal social media platforms of its talent in the past, and punished Hill and others for comments there.

Theres no question Smith receives freedoms at ESPN that arent necessarily afforded to all of the networks talent. Not everyone at ESPN would be allowed to go outside the company to host a more politically-driven podcast either. But even as Smith is afforded those freedoms, its reasonable to wonder whether ESPN appreciates their foremost talent publicly fundraising for Christie.

[Stephen A. Smith]
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Contribution by Luis de Guindos, Vice-President of the ECB, at Seminar on the Capital Requirements Regulation and Directive (CRR/CRD)

Madrid, 9 June 2023

CRR3/CRD6: key last step to fully leverage on the lessons learned from the global financial crisis

It is a great pleasure to take part in this seminar about the outstanding Basel III reforms in Europe.

These rules have been developed and agreed upon at international level by central banks and bank supervisors, in response to the lessons from the global financial crisis.

One important lesson has been that banks tend to downplay their risks using internal models. The core of the 2017 reforms  the output floor  ensures that a limit is established on how much banks can tweak their risk profile using their internal models. This is an essential achievement.

I will focus my remarks today on the fact that we need to protect this achievement, and we need to continue drawing lessons for our EU banking framework, including from the recent episode of bank stress.

Benefits of strong regulation and supervision

The recent episode of stress in the US and Swiss banking sectors reminded us of the importance of strong regulation and strong supervision. It was a wake-up call highlighting the merit of sticking to the agreed standards. There are many lessons that can be drawn from this episode. Let me focus on three in relation to finalising our banking framework, the CRR3 and CRD6.

First, we have seen that a strong regulatory framework eventually pays off. Euro area banks have been remarkably resilient in response to the pandemic, the Russian war and the recent episode of bank stress. Significant banks common equity tier one capital ratio stands at 15.3% on average, with liquidity well above regulatory minima. We have also seen improvements in the diversification of funding sources and bank profitability. At the same time, resilience of the euro area banking to the latest episode of stress should not lead to complacency.

Second, we have seen that weakening the regulatory framework can create systemic risks. Pockets of vulnerability can emerge easily, particularly where standards are not applied fully. And these vulnerabilities can quickly grow into broader financial stability risks. In this context, let me comment on the Liquidity Coverage Ratio, the LCR. Some attention has been paid to this element of the Basel framework and whether meeting the LCR would have helped the stressed banks. The LCR should not be considered a tool in isolation to measure and address liquidity and funding risks. To the contrary, the turbulence this spring shows that the Basel framework  which has regulatory and supervisory pillars  needs to be seen and be implemented, in its entirety. For example, in the ECB, the check of regulatory measures such as the LCR is complemented by additional supervisory liquidity risk monitoring.

A third and important lesson from the recent episode is that trust issues can develop and spread more quickly in the digital age. Bank runs can happen faster than in the past. This makes it even more important to have bank managers commitment to sound bank business models, because they are a precondition for trust. Bank management matters in establishing trust in business models. We need a tough rulebook which allows supervisors to check and react to bank management-related issues.

Priorities for the Banking Package

Coming to the topic of today, what should we focus on for finalising the EU banking package? Two key priorities emerge from the above learnings.

First, only strong rules will lead to strong banks. I am particularly concerned about those areas where the legislation proposals for the capital requirements regulation (CRR3) would deviate from Basel III  especially on the risk-weights for loans to unrated corporates. These deviations lower the impact of the output floor on banks required capital. In fact, on average, all proposed deviations together would more than halve the effect of the introduction of the output floor on banks required regulatory capital, and even lower the required regulatory capital for some banks compared to the status quo.

It is of particular concern that in some of the proposals these deviations are even suggested to be made permanent. Watering down the safeguards provided by agreed global standards now would send a detrimental message not only on the future resilience of EU banks, but also regarding the EUs commitment to international agreements.

A similarly concerning issue is the intention by some trilogue parties to reintroduce prudential filters on the accounting of unrealised losses on government bonds. These have been in place in the EU until the end of 2022 on account of a systemic exemption during the pandemic crisis. They need to be strictly limited to exceptional crises times and now is not the time to reintroduce them.

As a second priority, I call on you to empower and trust prudential authorities. Only strong supervisors can implement strong supervision and exercise the required scrutiny. Here I am concerned about the reluctance to grant the ECB a stronger and more adequate role as a gatekeeper in ensuring that only suitable and experienced managers can take up top positions at banks, especially at large ones. Ensuring that managers are fit and proper for their job is key for sound and robust governance. The recent episode of bank stress has shown that culture matters and that banks need to be properly managed, as otherwise trust erodes.

In addition, I am concerned that all proposals still impose freezes on the macroprudential buffers of a bank when the output floor becomes binding. This is allegedly to avoid double-counting of risks. But here again, legislators should trust the macroprudential authorities to ensure that both buffers are calibrated appropriately. Macroprudential buffers cater for system- or sector-wide risk, while the output floor caters for bank-specific risk.

On a positive note, we welcome the inclusion of environmental, social and governance risks more explicitly in banking regulation, as this will grant supervisors more adequate tools to require banks to address these risks more effectively. We also welcome the new rules on third-country branches, which aim to avoid unregulated and unsupervised activities that could pose risks to financial stability in the EU.

Conclusion

Let me conclude. Finalising Basel III in EU legislation is crucial to keep our banks safe in an ever-changing macro-financial environment. We should do so faithfully, without deviations, to underpin our commitment to a resilient banking sector in Europe. I strongly welcome the intention of the Swedish and Spanish Presidencies to finalise CRR3 and CRD6 still this year, to ensure an entry into force on 1 January 2025. Targeting this date will also keep the EU aligned with the plans in other major global jurisdictions, so that we cross the finishing line together after this over ten-year endeavour to strengthen the global banking system. Only by upholding strong regulation and powerful supervision, will we ensure strong and stable banks in the EU.
The nose of a brand-new white van pointed toward the sky, bursting from the rear end of an upturned tan train car, one of many piled one over the other and crushed to resemble accordions  the aftermath of a 167-car freight train's derailment overnight.

Some neighbors in Williams heard a terrible crashing sound in the late hours as at least 23 rail cars careened off the tracks around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) train appeared to be hauling vehicles as its cargo.

Coconino County Sheriffs Deputies responded to the derailment to assist the BNSF Police Department and personnel, making sure that no one was injured. According to Coconino County Sheriff's Office spokesperson Jon Paxton, there was no evidence of hazardous materials spilled.

BNSF has confirmed that no one was injured during the derailment.

On Thursday morning, a BNSF police officer was stationed by the nearest railroad crossing, keeping curious passers-by safely off of the tracks. Unable to comment on the incident himself, the police officer was one of many employees responding to the wreckage. Heavy equipment and cranes were being employed throughout the day Thursday, working to remove the overturned cars.

According to Lena Kent, the general director of public affairs at BNSF, crews are hoping to have the tracks clear enough to move freight by 2 a.m. Friday.

In the meantime, the incident cramped plans for travelers heading out of Los Angeles and Chicago.

According to Olivia Irvin, the senior public relations manager for Amtrak, the Amtrak Southwest Chief Train that departed from Las Angeles prior to the derailment was stopped and turned around in Needles, California. An Amtrak passenger train that departed from Chicago was turned around and sent back to the windy city from Albuquerque.

Trains that were scheduled to depart from Los Angeles and Chicago on Thursday had their trips canceled completely in both directions.

According to Irvin, in anticipation of increased passenger demand, Amtrak is adding additional cars to the Southwest Chief trains that are scheduled to depart on Friday.

Meanwhile on Thursday, a steady stream of side-by-sides and off-road vehicles trickled down Pinetree Drive in Williams, where one home stands just a few feet away from one of the wrecked train cars.

Most of those people are neighbors, such as Jan Larson, who lives close to the tracks but a safe distance from the derailment.

I heard a lot of weird noises at night, but Im a couple miles up the road, she said, marveling at the wreckage and how close one of her neighbors homes came to being crushed by an overturned train car.

Farther up Pinetree Drive, a Christian youth camp, the West Branch of the Bill Rice Ranch, is getting ready to receive campers. It opened in 2014 and is used to hearing the train.

Thursday morning, however, none of the staff noticed the derailment until they saw images on the news.

Almost nobody noticed until we pointed it out, said West Branch Camp Director Troy Carlson.

He said campers often ask jokingly if the train is derailing when its particularly loud, but he never imagined hed see wreckage right behind their property. Over Carlsons shoulder, a number of overturned cars were in view. Farther up the tracks, a single orange BNSF engine still stood erect ahead of the trail of cars.

Carlson said he was glad there didnt seem to be anything on fire or spilled.

For now, it appears that the derailment didnt damage any private property.

Gallery: BNSF train derails east of Williams, spilling 20+ cars Train Derails Near Williams Several cars of a BNSF freight train that was transporting a variety of new vehicles are damaged and off the rails Thursday morning after the  Train Derails Near Williams Several cars of a BNSF freight train that was transporting a variety of new vehicles are damaged and off the rails Thursday morning after the  Train De-Rails Near Williams, 23 Cars Off the Tracks Train De-Rails Near Williams Several cars of a BNSF freight train that was transporting a variety of new vehicles sit damaged and off the rails Thursday morning after the  Train De-Rails Near Williams Two BNSF freight train cars are off the track and on their sides Thursday morning after the train derailed near Williams late Wednesday evenin Train De-Rails Near Williams A BNSF freight train car sits precariously on one side of its wheels Thursday morning after the train derailed near Williams late Wednesday ev Local alert top story Train derails east of Williams A BNSF train with 20+ cars derailed overnight east of Williams. Train De-Rails Near Williams BNSF crews work to remove damaged freight train cars from the track after a train transporting new vehicles derailed near Williams late Wednes Train De-Rails Near Williams Several cars of a BNSF freight train that was transporting a variety of new vehicles are damaged and off the rails Thursday morning after the  Train De-Rails Near Williams A BNSF freight train transporting a variety of new vehicles sits derailed east of Williams Thursday. Train De-Rails Near Williams Cars of a BNSF freight train that derailed near Williams Wednesday evening sit on the track at its crossing with South Garland Prairie Road Th
A 35-year-old Ash Fork man was booked at the Coconino County Jail on two counts of unlawful imprisonment, two counts of disorderly conduct with a weapon, resisting arrest and aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer.

According to the Coconino County Sheriffs Office, Nicolas Barone might have been holding two victims against their will at his home in Kaibab Estates West, north of Ash Fork.

CCSO started looking into Barones activities on June 5, when someone called 911 and hung up at about 8:04 p.m.

The suspect, deputies said, appeared agitated and volatile when they arrived at his home, and he wouldnt let officers speak to the two alleged victims. Additional deputies from the Yavapai County Sheriffs Office and Troopers from the Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS) were also dispatched to the scene.

With additional backup, a deputy made contact with the two people who were allegedly being held inside the house. CCSO said the officer was able to get them out safely.

After that, according to CCSO, it was clear that the suspect was still inside his home. Deputies believed he had guns inside the house at the time.

Once the victims were removed from the situation, deputies decided to fall back, away from the house for the evening, in the interest of de-escalating the situation.

According to a press release from CCSO, deputies returned to Kaibab Estates West in the morning to investigate the situation further.

Barone, the suspect, appeared to have several felony charges pending over the weeks leading up to June 5, according to a statement from CCSO.

On the morning of June 6, CCSO detectives came back to Barones home on Quarry Road with a search warrant. They brought the Northern Arizona Regional Tactical Team with them, as well as negotiators, according to CCSO.

Officers could see the suspect inside the Ash Fork house and tried to call them via telephone. Officials said they eventually resorted to using non-lethal measures to get the suspect outside  including OC gas, K9 deployment, and a taser.

After four and a half hours, Barone was taken into custody. No officers were injured during the arrest, but the suspect was taken to Flagstaff Medical Center with minor injuries, deputies said.

According to CCSO, one functional firearm was found inside the house.
SRV Media

New Delhi [India], June 9: Wastech, a leading waste management company, has recently made an exciting announcement regarding its expansion plans. The company has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with ACC Cement Durg, Chhattisgarh, to establish a state-of-the-art pre-processing facility in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. This facility will play a crucial role in the efficient management of waste, as Wastech will supply Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) to ACC Cement. With this strategic partnership, Wastech aims to further enhance its waste processing capabilities and contribute to sustainable waste management practices in the region.

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The upcoming waste disposal facility in Raipur will employ advanced technology and processes in waste management. Types of machinery such as Shredders, Ballistic Separators, Traumeel, and Biomass cheapers will be utilized. The facility will also include sufficient storage areas for shredded RDF, with a capacity of 2,000 metric tons. The establishment of this waste disposal facility will bring several benefits to the local community. It will effectively address the waste disposal challenges faced by the nearby locations, ensuring that tons of waste are disposed of following government guidelines. Moreover, the facility will generate employment opportunities, contribute to the production of fuel for cement plants, and significantly reduce waste from the environment, leading to a cleaner and healthier surrounding.

The pre-processing plant facility will play a crucial role in tackling the issue of non-recyclable plastic waste. Through an innovative process, the facility will segregate impurities from the waste and convert it into Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF). This transformation increases the Gross Calorific Value (GCV) of the waste, turning it into a valuable fuel source. By implementing this process, Wastech will not only address the waste problem but also provide an alternative fuel (AFR) to cement plants. This sustainable solution will contribute to waste reduction and support the cement industry's energy needs.

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Wastech, a pioneer in waste management services, aspires to achieve zero waste living by diverting waste from landfills and utilizing it as an alternative fuel for the cement industry. Embracing the Waste to Wealth mission, Wastech focuses on scientific waste processing to establish zero waste landfills and contribute to a sustainable future. The company offers cost-effective solutions for urban, agricultural, and industrial waste management. Its comprehensive waste management solutions encompass not only sustainable waste disposal but also in-house waste processing infrastructure, supplying improved quality materials to target industries.

Lokesh Kumar Agrawal, CEO and Co-founder of Wastech expressed his enthusiasm about the collaboration, stating, "We are thrilled to collaborate with Adani Cement to establish this advanced waste disposal facility in Raipur. It is a significant step towards realizing our vision of zero-waste living and contributing to a sustainable future. Together, we aim to revolutionize waste as a resource and set new standards in waste management practices."

Sunil Sharma, Co-founder of Wastech, added, "Our tagline 'Aspiring to zero waste living' reflects our commitment to creating a world where waste is no longer seen as a burden but as a valuable resource. We are dedicated to delivering innovative and cost-effective waste management solutions to our clients while ensuring the highest standards of environmental sustainability."

Wastech has successfully served prime clientele such as Indian Oil Corporation Limited, Jaipur Dairy, Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilizers Ltd, Balmer Lawrie & Co Ltd, and many more, providing feasible end-to-end solutions for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) fulfillment. Additionally, Wastech has been entrusted by government clients such as Moradabad Municipal Corporation for Sanitary Landfill (SLF) work and is actively pursuing further opportunities, including a forthcoming government tender for Biomining work. The company's long-term associations with authorized coprocessors such as Dalmia Cement, Ambuja Cement, ACC, Nuvoco Cement, Ultratech Cement, and Shree Cement ensure a robust PAN India disposal and co-processing network.

In addition to waste disposal, Wastech offers various services, including:

* Biomass supply as Alternative Fuel and raw material: Providing agricultural processed wastes like Cashew Nut Shells, Rice Husk, Bagasse, Wood waste, and Bamboo chips to the Cement Industry as Alternative Fuel (AFR) with improved quality and high calorific value.

* Non-hazardous Industrial Waste (MSW/RDF/Plastic Waste) disposal: Ensuring safe and sustainable disposal of non-hazardous waste, including RDF and Plastic waste, through long-term associations with authorized coprocessors.

* End-to-end logistics: Offering a PAN India network of transportation and efficient customized solutions through in-house logistic infrastructure.

* Extended Producer Responsibility Service: Assisting in the fulfillment of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) obligations for all three categories of Plastic waste.

* Sanitary Landfill: Serving government clients with expertise in Sanitary Landfill (SLF) works, ensuring the proper isolation of waste from the environment.

* Biomining/Bioremediation of legacy waste: Providing systematic and scientific bioremediation work for legacy waste, unlocking the value of organic waste, and facilitating land reclamation.

Looking ahead, Wastech has plans to set up additional pre-processing facilities near cement clusters, enabling the company to expand its operations and serve more regions. With a firm belief that nothing is waste, Wastech aims to continue pioneering new approaches and ideas to transform waste into valuable resources, further promoting the Waste to Wealth mission.

In collaboration with Adani Cement, Wastech is poised to make a lasting impact on waste management in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, and beyond. Through its collective efforts, the startup is setting new benchmarks for waste disposal practices and will continue to drive the transformation of waste into valuable resources.

For more information, please visit: https://www.wastechindia.com/

(Disclaimer: The above press release has been provided by SRV Media. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Kohima, Jun 9 (PTI) Around 1,500 people from the ethnic violence-affected Manipur have taken refuge in different parts of neighbouring Nagaland, an official said on Friday.

While many of these people are staying with their relatives, others are in houses provided by villagers.

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The Nagaland government is yet to collect the accurate data. However, as per available reports, around 1,500 people from Manipur have taken shelter in various parts of the state, Home Commissioner Abhijit Sinha told PTI here.

The clashes between Meitei and Kuki tribes, which started early last month, have so far claimed over 100 lives and some 10,000 army and para-military personnel had to be deployed to bring back normalcy in the northeastern state.

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Meanwhile, the Chakhroma Public Organisation (CPO), a tribal body, on Friday visited six villages in Chumoukedima district, where the displaced people have taken refuge. The organisation distributed relief materials to them.

In a statement, the CPO said a total of 704 Kuki people have come to these villages from Manipur.

Clashes broke out in Manipur after a Tribal Solidarity March' was organised in the hill districts on May 3 to protest against the Meitei community's demand for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status.

The violence was preceded by tension over the eviction of Kuki villagers from reserve forest land, which had led to a series of smaller agitations.

Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley. Tribals  Nagas and Kukis  constitute another 40 per cent of the population and reside in the hill districts.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Sivasagar, June 9: At least two people were killed and five others injured after being struck by lightning in Assam's Sivasagar district on Friday, officials said. The incident took place at Chenimora Mishing village in the district on Friday morning. Aditya Vikram Yadav, Deputy Commissioner of Sivasagar district told ANI over phone that, two people died and five others were injured after being struck by lightning. Fire Video: Historic Church in Massachusetts Up in Flames After Getting Struck by Lightning During Storm.

The deceased persons were identified as Ajay Yein and Diganta Mili. The injured who were rushed to the hospital were identified as Bikram Singh Yein, Rumi Mili, Ganesh Mili, Putala Yein and Urmila Yein. Gujarat Weather Forecast: IMD Predicts Light Thunderstorms, Rainfall in Parts of State on June 3 and 4.

According to locals, they were hit by a lightning strike when they were working at their paddy field. "The injured persons have been admitted at hospital. This incident occurred today morning," Aditya Vikram Yadav said.

(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, June 9: Union Home Minister Amit Shah will be on a two-day visit to Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh from June 10. The Home Minister will attend various political events and public rallies during his visit to the four states. He will leave for Gujarat by late Friday and return back to the national capital by June 11 night.

Shah is expected to be engaged in political meetings with party workers in Gujarat's Ahmedabad in the first half of the day on Saturday. The Minister will then leave for Nanded in Maharashtra where he is reported to address first rally under Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJPs) special month-long campaign in Nanded city. Nanded is the home turf of Congress veteran and former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan. Madhya Pradesh: Home Minister Amit Shah Offers Prayers at Anchal Kund Dham in Chhindwara District (Watch Video).

Shah's program is part of the party's month-long campaign covering all Lok Sabha constituencies to mark the completion of nine years of Modi government in office. The Minister is learnt to address the rally in Abchalnagar ground in Nanded city-- the second largest city in the Marathwada region, which is one of the holy pilgrimage centres for Sikhs as Guru Gobind Singh had spent his last days in Nanded and passed his guruship to Guru Granth Sahib before his death. Makar Sankranti 2023: Home Minister Amit Shah Flies Kite in Ahmedabad (Watch Video).

Shah is also reported to hold a meeting with Nanded Gurdwara Committee members. The Home Minister will reach Tamil Nadu's capital Chennai by late Saturday and engage in a political meeting there with party workers on June 11.

He will also address a rally in Vellore in Tamil Nadu to highlight the achievements of the nine-year rule of the BJP government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Centre.

The rally is part of Tamil Nadu BJP's plan to hold 66 public meetings within a month to highlight the achievements of the BJP government. Several national leaders would address public meetings in Tamil Nadu. Minister of State for personnel and PMO Jitendra Singh addressed a meeting in Chennai last week on the 'achievements' of the BJP government.

On June 11, the Home Minister will also reach Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh where he will address a public meeting at the railway grounds in the evening as part of the nationwide celebrations being organised in every Parliamentary constituency on the occasion of Prime Minister Narendra Modi completing nine years in office.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Amritsar, June 9: The Border Security Force (BSF) recovered a Pakistani drone along the International Border near Rai village in the Amritsar sector in Punjab in the intervening night of Thursday and Friday.

"Depth deployed troops of @BSF_Punjab heard the sound of #Pakistani drone & dropping by it. On searching 1 big packet containing 5.260 kg heroin has been recovered near Village Rai, District- #Amritsar," it tweeted. Pakistani Drone Shot Down in Punjab: BSF Shoots Down Pakistan UAV Carrying Narcotics Across Wagah-Attari Border in Amritsar (See Pics).

BSF Intercepts Pakistani Drone at Amritsar

Punjab | Depth deployed troops of BSF heard the sound of a Pakistani drone & dropping by it. On searching, one big packet containing 5.260 kg heroin has been recovered near Rai village, Amritsar district: BSF Punjab Frontier pic.twitter.com/hhZt9zzeFc  ANI (@ANI) June 9, 2023

The BSF team was joined by the police in the search operation in which one large packet, suspected to be contraband, wrapped in a yellow-colored adhesive tape was recovered from the farming field on the outskirts of the Rear Kakkar village in Amritsar. A green colour nylon rope and a hook attached to the packet were also found. Punjab: More Than 5 kg Heroin Airdropped by Pakistani Drone Recovered Near International Border in Amritsar.

"During the search, 1 big packet, suspected to be contraband, wrapped in a yellow-coloured adhesive tape along with 1 green colour nylon rope and hook attached to the packet was recovered from the farming field on the outskirts of Rear Kakkar. On the opening of the packet, 5 packets of heroin with a gross weight of 5.260 kgs was found," the BSF Punjab Frontier said in a statement.

When the large packet was opened, five packets of heroin were found in it weighing 5.26 kilograms, the BSF said. "Another nefarious attempt of Pakistan to smuggle contraband item foiled due to timely joint efforts of BSF and Punjab Police in Amritsar Sector," the BSF said in an official statement.

Earlier on Wednesday, the BSF recovered a Pakistani drone along the International Border in the Amritsar sector. BSF troops heard a mild buzzing sound of a suspected drone near Bhaini Rajputana village of Amritsar district and immediately reacted to intercept it.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Ahmedabad, Jun 9 (PTI) Newly-appointed Gujarat Congress president Shaktisinh Gohil on Friday asserted the Opposition party will rise again under his leadership and reclaim its lost position with the blessings of people of the state, where the BJP has been in power for nearly three decades.

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Gohil, a Rajya Sabha member, was appointed the Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC) president by party chief Mallikarjun Kharge earlier in the day.

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The 63-year-old former state minister replaced Jagdish Thakor, who resigned after the party's rout in the last Assembly elections in Gujarat held in December 2022.

Taking everyone (in state Congress) together we will work with team spirit in Gujarat. I am a soldier of the party and whatever responsibility has been given to me by the party I have tried to fulfil it with dedication, Gohil told PTI soon after he was given the new role.

As far as the new responsibility is concerned, I will take along all (state leaders) and work hard with total dedication. I am confident the people of Gujarat will give blessings and support to the Congress, and the party will rise again with strength, he said.

Gohil, a four-time former MLA, was a minister in the Congress government between 1992 and 95, and also served as the Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly. In June, 2020 he was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Gujarat and is a member of various committees of the Upper House of Parliament.

The Congress, once a formidable political force and ruling party of Gujarat for years, faced its worst defeat in the 2022 Assembly elections where it got just 17 out of the total 182 seats. On the other hand, the ruling BJP bagged a staggering 156 seats, while the fledgling AAP, led by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, notched up victory in five Assembly segments.

Jagdish Thakor had stepped down as the state Congress president after the heavy election defeat.

The Congress hopes to put up a good show in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in Gujarat, where it drew a blank in 2019, and as a part of its preparation, has taken up an exercise to revamp the state unit.

As per political observers, the Congress suffered badly in the Assembly elections due to the entry of the AAP, which secured a respectable vote share of around 13 per cent in the state, dividing Opposition votes.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
MIAMI  Donald Trump improperly stored in his Florida estate sensitive documents on nuclear capabilities, repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a Pentagon plan of attack and classified map, according to a sweeping felony indictment that paints a damning portrait of the former presidents treatment of national security information.

The conduct alleged in the historic indictment  the first federal case against a former president  cuts to the heart of any presidents responsibility to safeguard the governments most valuable secrets. Prosecutors say the documents he stowed, refused to return and in some cases showed to visitors risked jeopardizing not only relations with foreign nations but also the safety of troops and confidential sources.

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Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced, Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case, said in his first public statements. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.

Trump, who is currently the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is due to make his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon in Miami. In a rare bit of good news for Trump, the judge initially assigned to the case is someone he appointed and who drew criticism for rulings in his favor during a dispute last year over a special master assigned to review the seized classified documents. Meanwhile, two lawyers who worked the case for months announced Friday that they had resigned from the legal team.

All told, Trump faces 37 felony counts  31 pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information, the balance relating to alleged conspiracy, obstruction and false statements  that could result in a substantial prison sentence in the event of a conviction. A Trump aide who prosecutors said moved dozens of boxes at his Florida estate at his direction, and then lied to investigators about it, was charged in the same indictment with conspiracy and other crimes.

Trump responded to the indictment Friday by falsely conflating his case with a separate classified documents investigation concerning President Joe Biden. Though classified records were found in a Biden home and office, there has been no indication that the president, unlike Trump, sought to conceal them or knew they were there.

Nobody said I wasnt allowed to look at the personal records that I brought with me from the White House. Theres nothing wrong with that, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. But among the various investigations he has faced, legal experts  as well as Trumps own aides  had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution. Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trumps attorneys were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.

The indictment arrives at a time when Trump is continuing to dominate the Republican presidential primary. Hes expected to make his first public appearance since the charges were made public on Saturday when he attends state GOP conventions in Georgia and North Carolina.

But the documents startling scope and breadth of allegations will almost certainly make it harder for Republicans to rail against than an earlier New York criminal case that many legal analysts had derided as weak.

The 49-page indictment centers on hundreds of classified documents that Trump took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving office in January 2021. Even as tens of thousands of members and guests visited Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trumps presidency and August 2022, when the FBI obtained a search warrant, documents were recklessly stored in spaces including a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room. A photograph included in the indictment shows several dozen file boxes stacked in a storage area.

The case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years  as president and private citizen  but had never before charged him with a crime. The most notable investigation was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, but prosecutors in that probe cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Once he left office, though, he lost that protection.

The inquiry took a major step forward last November when Attorney General Merrick Garland, a soft-spoken former federal judge who has long stated that no person should be regarded as above the law, appointed Smith, a war crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation, to lead both the documents probe as well as a separate investigation into efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

The indictment alleges that Trump, who claimed without evidence that he had declassified all the documents before leaving office, understood his duty to care for classified information but shirked it anyway. It details a July 2021 meeting in Bedminster in which he boasted about having held onto a classified document prepared by the military about a potential attack on another country.

Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, the indictment quotes him as saying, citing an audio recording. He also said he could have declassified the document but Now I cant, you know, but this is still a secret, according to the indictment.

Using Trumps own words and actions, as recounted to prosecutors by lawyers, aides and other witnesses, the indictment alleges both a refusal to return the documents despite more than a years worth of government demands but also steps that he encouraged others around him to take to conceal the records.

For instance, prosecutors say, after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for the records in May 2022, Trump asked his own lawyers if he could defy the request and said words to the effect of, I dont want anybody looking through my boxes.

Wouldnt it be better if we just told them we dont have anything here? one of his lawyers described him as saying.

But before his own lawyer searched the property for classified records, the indictment says, Trump directed aides to remove from the Mar-a-Lago storage room boxes of documents so that they would not be found during the search and therefore handed over to the government.

Weeks later, when Justice Department officials arrived at Mar-a-Lago to collect the records, they were handed a folder with only 38 documents and an untrue letter attesting that all documents responsive to the subpoena had been turned over.

But suspecting that many more remained inside, the FBI obtained a search warrant and returned in August to recover more than 100 additional documents. The Justice Department says Trump held onto more than 300 classified documents, including some at the top secret level.

Walt Nauta, one of the aides alleged to have transported the boxes around the boxes, lied to the FBI about the movement of the boxes and faces charges that he conspired to hide them. His lawyer declined to comment.

Photos: Donald Trump through the years Talking politics With Melania 'How to Get Rich' On the course At Doral Sarazen Cup With Serena USS Iowa Debating Jeb Bush In Biloxi Campaign rally Winning South Carolina She's with him Signing autographs Another debate Waving to supporters In Arizona The Trump family At the convention The nominee The ticket Showing her support In Mexico Debating Clinton Casting his vote Election Night In the Oval Office Mitt Romney The inauguration Thumbs up Taking the oath Waving goodbye Armed Forces Ball James Comey Trump to lay out his agenda to Congress Thanking school children Medal of Honor recipients Justice Anthony Kennedy swears in Neil Gorsuch Easter Egg Roll Super Bowl champs Little Sisters of the Poor Russian foreign minister, ambassador At the Western Wall Meeting the pope Wreath-laying ceremony in Arlington National champs Congressional shooting At the White House Congressional Picnic Go, Cubs, go Departing the White House USS Gerald R. Ford joins the Navy The eclipse 9/11 anniversary Trump addresses world leaders at U.N. General Assembly Las Vegas shooting Trump visits Puerto Rico Trump meets Kissinger With Trudeau Medal of Honor Happy Halloween National Christmas Tree Lighting Celebrating GOP tax plan March for Life State of the Union School shootings State dinner With Olympians Greeting a guest Freed Americans Historic summit With Kim Kardashian West In Washington Trump North Carolina Debating Joe Biden Election Night 2020 Jan. 6 Leaving the White House
New Delhi, Jun 9 (PTI) A Delhi court has sent a man, arrested in connection with a money laundering probe against the banned Popular Front of India (PFI), to 10-day ED custody, noting he was non-cooperative during the investigation.

Additional Sessions Judge Shailender Malik sent Sahul Hameed to the custody of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) till June 18. Hameed was arrested on June 7, 2023 in Madurai and was brought to Delhi.

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The judge passed the order on an ED application, which sought Hameed's custodial interrogation for 14 days.

"Having heard the submissions, taking into consideration totality of facts and the fact that since accused has been non-cooperative in the investigation up till now for enabling the ED to collect all relevant evidence, police custody of accused Sahul Hameed is given for 10 days," the judge said in an order passed on June 8.

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Special Public Prosecutor N K Matta, appearing for the ED along with advocate Faizan Khan, told the court the accused was in the process of collecting illegal money/terror funds from legitimate and illegitimate channels from Singapore and other places.

The central anti-money laundering probe agency said Hameed was deported to India.

Upon receipt of inputs, the accused was intercepted and could not give account of certain activities by him towards collection of funds for PFI, the agency told the court.

The statement of the accused was also recorded wherein he remained evasive in answering questions about certain material aspects collected during the investigation which led to his arrest, the federal agency said.

The ED had registered a case based on an FIR lodged by the NIA for alleged terrorism-related activities punishable under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).

The ED had alleged that the accused persons associated with the organisation indulged in collecting funds by way of donation, hawala, banking channels, etc. which were being used for unlawful activities and commission of various offences.

It alleged bogus cash donations and bank transfers were found during the probe, and that transfer of funds was done even from abroad to India through a clandestine channel under a conspiracy hatched by office bearers of the PFI over the years.

(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, Jun 9 (PTI) Citing a 2021 CAG report, the Congress on Friday claimed the central government "misused" funds meant for railway safety on crockery, car rentals, furniture, laptops and foot massagers.

"This is how funds specifically meant for railway safety were used. This is the CAG's finding," Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said on Twitter.

Also Read | Manipur Erupts Again: Three Killed, Two Injured in Shooting by Insurgents in Imphal Village.

Quoting the findings of the March 2021 CAG report, he alleged that the Narendra Modi government has been "misusing" Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh (RRSK) funds on crockery, car rentals, foot massagers, furniture and laptops.

According to an official document, the national transporter spent more than Rs 1 lakh crore on safety measures between 2017-2018 and 2021-22 with a steady growth in expenditure on track renewal.

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Government sources also indicated that the railways will soon reply to the same Comptroller and Auditor General of India's (CAG) report cited by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to attack the Centre over the recent triple train accident in Odisha's Balasore that claimed 275 lives and injured more than 1,000 people.

Kharge, in his letter to the prime minister, had said that all empty safety claims of Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw have been exposed.

He further pointed out that the CAG report titled 'Derailment in Indian Railways' highlighted that funding for the Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh had been reduced by a massive 79 per cent. It was claimed during the budget presentation that about Rs 20,000 crore would be available annually, but this was not done, Kharge had said and asked why were the required funds not allocated for track renewal work.

However, data in the document showed that from 2017-18 to 2021-22, the railways spent more than Rs 1 lakh crore on RRSK work. In February 2022, the government extended the validity of RRSK by another five years, starting 2022-23.

Report number 22 of the said CAG report was tabled in Parliament on December 21 last year.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Gulmarg (Jammu and Kashmir) [India], June 9 (ANI): Jammu and Kashmir's Baramulla police on Friday rescued nearly 250 tourists who got stuck during a Gondola ride to Gondola Phase 2 Affarwat.

According to the police, while on their return to the Gondola base, the tourists got stuck at Gondola Phase II Affarwat due to technical glitches in the cable car operations.

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After being rescued, the stranded tourists were brought back to the Gulmarg base safely, the police informed.

"On receiving information, police rescue teams of PS Gulmarg led by SHO PS Gulmarg Inspector Irshad Ahmad with the assistance of the staff of Gondola Car Corporation swung into action and after strenuous overnight efforts, they rescued the stranded tourists and brought them back to Gulmarg base safely", the police said.

Also Read | Philippines: Thousands Evacuated Around Mayon Volcano.

The police further said that the tourists expressed their gratitude towards Baramulla Police for their timely help.

Earlier in May this year, Jammu and Kashmir's police rescued a tourist family comprising four children stuck in the Kangdoori area of Gulmarg.

According to police, the tourists from Telangana arrived in Gulmarg recently and went for a Gondola ride to Kangdoori in Gulmarg.

The family while returning to Gondola phase two lost their way and got stuck in Kangdoori area, the police added.

"Police rescue teams of Gulmarg police station led by Station House Officer Inspector Irshad with the assistance of ATVs and Pony Walas were formed who followed around the Kangdoori area and finally reached the location of the tourist family and rescued them from the area and brought them back to Gulmarg safely," read the statement by Baramullah police. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Malappuram, June 9: Kerala's first women-only Hajj flight took off on Thursday from Calicut International Airport at Karipur after Union Minister of State for Minority Affairs John Barla flagged off the flight. Barla performed the symbolic flag-off ceremony and distribution of boarding passes for the first flight. This was the first time that only women's flight has been organised for Hajj in Kerala. The pilot and crew of the aircraft are all women.

The Air India Express flight left Karipur at 6.45 p.m. carrying 145 women pilgrims and six women crew marking the first such flight from Kerala for women pilgrims without mehram or a male companion. Barla said that the women-only flight marked a glorious step for women's empowerment in the country and requested the pilgrims to pray for the country's safety and security as well as progress. Haj 2023: Air India Express Operates India's First All-Women Flight From Kozhikode to Jeddah.

Kerala's First Women-Only Hajj Flight Take Off From Karipur:

#WATCH | Kerala: Union Minister of State for Minority Affairs John Barla flags off a special flight dedicated to women without Mehram for Haj from Karipur in Malappuram. (08.06) pic.twitter.com/OcJrA4fn7c  ANI (@ANI) June 8, 2023

Apart from the 145 women pilgrims travelling in the plane, the pilot who flew this plane and the other crew members of the plane, as well as the dispatch, flight operation, loading, cleaning, engineering, ground service and other related activities at all levels were done by women, making this trip different. Minister inaugurated the distribution of boarding passes by giving to 76-year-old Sulaikha, the senior most member of the team.

The minister expressed happiness over the arrangements being made for the pilgrims by the State Hajj Committee. Eleven flights have been scheduled till Monday only for women pilgrims leaving via Karipur airport. 1,595 women pilgrim belonging to the 'ladies without Mehram' category will depart on several days in eleven flights. The rest will travel on other flights. Hajj 2023: First Batch of 300 Pilgrims from UP Leaves for Hajj Today, Says Uttar Pradesh State Hajj Committee Chairman Mohsin Raza.

2,733 people are leaving this year from the state through the 'ladies without mehram' category. Out of this, 1718 people will depart via Karipur, 563 via Kochi and 452 via Kannur embarkation points. This year's oldest woman pilgrim, Khadiumma (87), a native of Nediyirup in Malappuram district, will depart on the 4.20 am flight on June 10. 69 men and 76 women took off from Karipur at nine o'clock in the morning on flight IX 3021 on Thursday.

71 men and 74 women travelled from Kannur airport today afternoon. The second flight from Kochi will leave from will leave at 11.30 tomorrow. In Andhra Pradesh, Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy who met the batch of Muslims leaving for Mecca at the Haj House here on Thursday said that the Government has appointed a Hajj Committee which is accompanying the pilgrims to ensure hassle-free journey.

This is the first time that pilgrims are leaving for Hajj from the Vijayawada embarkation point. "Deputy Chief Minister Amjad Basha, who is accompanying you, will take care of you and will inform me in case of any need," the CM said wishing pilgrims all the best. very year, millions of Muslims around the world embark on a sacred pilgrimage known as Hajj.

This spiritual journey holds immense significance in the lives of believers, offering an opportunity to connect with Allah, seek forgiveness, and strengthen their faith. The heartfelt desire to be among those walking to Mina, echoing the Labaik with the crowd, and performing the rituals of Hajj is a sentiment shared by countless individuals.

Hajj is a unique manifestation of unity, as Muslims from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and nations gather in the sacred land of Makkah to perform the rituals together. It is a remarkable sight to witness people from different walks of life converging towards a common purpose, setting aside their differences and embracing one another as equals before Allah.

(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, Jun 9 (PTI) The Supreme Court on Friday refused urgent hearing on a plea by the wife of gangster-politician Mukhtar Ansari's aide Sanjeev Maheshwari Jeeva, who was shot dead on Lucknow court premises, seeking anticipatory bail in a criminal case.

A vacation bench of Justices Aniruddha Bose and Rajesh Bindal noted that the funeral of Jeeva has already taken place and there is no urgency in the matter.

Also Read | Uttar Pradesh Shocker: Minor Girl Sets Herself on Fire After Constant Harassment by Youth in Jalaun.

"The petition was mentioned yesterday on grounds that funeral of the husband of the petitioner, Payal Maheshwari, was to take place. For that purpose, the petitioner sought protection from any coercive action in attending the funeral," the bench said.

"We are apprised by the UP Additional Advocate General that the funeral has already taken place and the petitioner did not attend it and the last rites were performed by her son. The AAG has submitted that police had ensured that no coercive steps would have been taken against the petitioner if she had attended the funeral. Therefore, we see no urgency to list the matter in the vacations," it said.

Also Read | Uttar Pradesh: Seven-Year-Old Boy Rudra Kapoor Sets Swimming Record in Prayagraj; Swam Across Yamuna River in Just 10.30 Minutes.

Payal Maheshwari's lawyer had told the bench that Jeeva was shot dead on Wednesday and sought protection from arrest to attend the last rites.

UP Additional Advocate General Garima Prashad had assured the court that the state would not take any action against Payal Maheshwari, who had sought interim protection from arrest in a Gangsters Act case and also bail to attend the last rites of her husband.

Jeeva (48), who was serving a life term in a Lucknow jail, was shot dead when he was brought to the Lucknow court for hearing in a case.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Amritsar, June 9: Amritsar Police on Friday arrested three accused persons in connection with the murder of gangster Jarnail Singh, an official said. According to the Director General of Police (DGP) Gaurav Yadav, the police arrested the three accused including Gurmej Singh, the driver of the car carrying the four assailants who shot dead gangster Jarnail Singh at his native Sathiala village in Baba Bakala sub-division of Amritsar district on May 24 this year.

"After further investigation of Jarnail Singh's murder at village Sathiala, Amritsar Police has arrested three accused including Gurmej Singh, the driver of the car carrying four shooters. Gurmej drove the car to the crime spot and left the shooters at different places after the incident," tweeted the DGP. Gangster Jarnail Singh Shot Dead in Broad Daylight in Amritsar, Horrifying CCTV Video of Murder Surfaces Online.

Earlier Punjab Police said that it had arrested one of the accused involved in the killing of the deceased gangster. The accused was identified as Gurveer Singh. DGP Gaurav Yadav stated that one pistol and seven live cartridges were seized from the possession of the accused.

"In a major breakthrough, AGTF Punjab has arrested Gurveer Singh @Guri, the shooter of the Bambiha Gang and one of the accused involved in the killing of Jarnail Singh at Village Sathiala, Amritsar Rural. One pistol and 7 live cartridges were recovered," DGP Yadav tweeted.

He further stated that the accused had been declared a proclaimed offender and was listed as wanted. "He has a criminal history with a number of criminal cases registered. He has been declared a proclaimed offender by the Hon'ble Courts and is wanted across the state and in Delhi," the DGP tweeted.

Earlier DGP Yadav had said that the police had begun a search operation after establishing the role of ten people accused in the murder of gangster Jarnail Singh. At the time of his killing, Singh, who belonged to the notorious Gopi Ganshampuriya gang, was out on bail.

(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, Jun 9 (PTI) The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday said it has issued show-cause notices to Chinese mobile manufacturer Xiaomi, its chief financial officer and director Sameer Rao, former MD Manu Jain and three foreign banks for alleged foreign exchange violation of more than Rs 5,551 crore.

The adjudicating authority under the Foreign Exchange Management Act has issued show-cause notices to Xiaomi Technology India Private Limited, the two executives, CITI Bank, HSBC Bank and Deutsche Bank AG, the agency said in a statement.

Also Read | Shiv Sena UBT Leader Sanjay Raut Says He, MLA Brother Received Death Threat Calls; Two Detained.

The federal probe agency had seized Rs 5,551.27 crore worth of funds of Xiaomi Technology India Private Limited lying in its bank accounts under the FEMA for "unauthorised" remittance of this amount in guise of royalty abroad.

"The competent authority, appointed under Section 37A of the FEMA, has confirmed the said seizure order.

Also Read | Manipur Erupts Again: Three Killed, Two Injured in Shooting by Insurgents in Imphal Village.

"The authority while confirming the seizure held that ED is right in holding that foreign exchange equivalent to Rs 5,551.27 crore has been transferred out of India by Xiaomi India in an unauthorised manner and is held outside India on behalf of the group entity in contravention of section 4 of FEMA, 1999 and the same is liable to be seized in terms of provisions of Section 37A of the FEMA," it said.

Under the FEMA, a show-cause notice is issued after the completion of the ED investigation and once it is settled, an accused is required to pay penalty.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Dehradun, June 9: Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Friday said that the State government has called for a strict probe and action against the 'love jihad' cases. Dhami also mentioned that he will be chairing a high-level meeting with the Director General of Police and other officials on the issue.

"We have called for strict probe and action against love jihad cases. Today we will chair a high-level meeting also with DGP and other officials," Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said. Uttarakhand: Commando Posted in Security of CM Pushkar Singh Dhami Shoots Self Dead With Service Weapon.

Uttarkashi town in the State recently witnessed tensions over an alleged abduction attempt on a 14-year-old girl by two men, including one from the minority community, last month, police said. Both men have been subsequently arrested. Uttarakhand Avalanche: CM Pushkar Singh Dhami Conducts Aerial Inspection of Rescue and Relief Operation (Watch Video).

Earlier this week BJP MP Sadhvi Paragya hit the headlines for saying that Hindu girls were being tricked by Muslim boys. "Hindu girls are being tricked under a conspiratorial mission. A minor girl was killed in Delhi. Girls need to be alert, their life is not safe. Hindus do not conspire against anyone."

Last month, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said that the State government took the issue of 'love jihad', 'religious conversion' and promotion of 'terrorist activities' seriously and will not allow such practices in the State.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had also stated last month that 'Love Jihad' is an agenda of "undeclared terrorism" against humanity. His remarks came after watching the special screening of 'The Kerala Story', a movie that stirred up a political storm in the country.

Adityanath had said, "The Kerala Story draws the attention of the entire nation to 'Love Jihad'. The entire society must be made aware of this menace. A commendable and brave effort has been made in this regard by the film's producer, director, and the entire team."

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Lucknow, June 9: Uttar Pradesh government on Friday announced that it has decided to cancel the pending challans on vehicles from the year 2017 to 2021. "The cancellation applies to all challans issued between January 1, 2017, and December 31, 2021, regardless of the vehicle type. This includes cases that are currently pending in various courts," the official statement said.

In this regard, Transport Commissioner Chandra Bhushan Singh has instructed all divisional transport officers to withdraw these challans from the portal once they receive the court's list of abated cases. Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath Asks Officials To Work in Mission Mode To Solve Peoples Problems.

Transport Commissioner Singh said, "This cancellation of old pending challans is in accordance with Uttar Pradesh Ordinance No. 2 of June 2023. This move paves the way for the waiver of crores of challans across Uttar Pradesh."

"Following the cancellation of old pending challans, the drivers should not panic after this period. They can fill online traffic challans while sitting at home. Detailed information can be obtained by visiting the official website of UP Traffic Police, and for this, only the vehicle number is required," he added. Tigers Death in Uttar Pradesh: CM Yogi Adityanath Takes Cognizance of Death of Big Cats in Dudhwa National Park, Constitutes Inquiry Committee.

He also mentioned that drivers can file a complaint if they believe that a wrong challan has been issued to them. "Moreover, if drivers believe that a wrong challan has been issued, they can also file a complaint directly on the website. A mobile notification is also sent when a vehicle's challan is deducted, ensuring prompt communication," he said.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Streaks of Light Seen in California. (Photo Credits: Video Grab)

Milan, Jun 9 (AP) Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was readmitted to a Milan hospital Friday for planned medical checks related to his chronic leukemia, his doctors said in a statement.

Berlusconi's doctors, Alberto Zangrillo and Fabio Ciceri, said the tests being conducted at San Raffaele Hospital had been moved up as part of normal practice in medicine, and that the timing didn't signal any criticality or alarm.

Also Read | Scotland Horror: 14-Year-Old Teenager Dies After Getting Beaten By School Bullies, Put in Chokehold at St Kentigerns Academy in Blackburn, Claims Family.

The 86-year-old media mogul and former three-time premier spent 45 days being treated for a lung infection and chronic leukemia at the same hospital, before being discharged exactly three weeks ago.

The Italian news agency La Presse said he was expected to spend at least one night in the hospital.

Also Read | Is Vietnam Backtracking on Environmental Promises?.

Berlusconi's Forza Italia Party is part of Premier Giorgia Meloni's right-wing coalition, but currently has no Cabinet posts.

Berlusconi holds a seat in the Italian Senate. (AP)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis kicked off his first visit to New Hampshire as a declared presidential candidate as former President Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail in Iowa, marking the first time both were pitching themselves before voters.
Washington, Jun 9 (PTI) US secretary of state Tony Blinken and commerce secretary Gina Raimondo along with top members of President Joe Biden administration, congressional leadership and corporate players from India and the United States are expected to join the India Ideas Summit next week.

The summit of the US India Business Council (USIBC) will discuss how to take this relationship for even greater realisation of happiness and prosperity between the two free peoples, organisers said on Thursday.

Also Read | Virgin Crocodile Gets Pregnant in Costa Rica Zoo: Crocodile Found to Have Made Herself Pregnant, Scientist Study Rare Case of Virgin Birth.

The theme for this year's summit on June 12 and 13 is 'Trust, Resilience, and Growth', and will focus on how these three organising principles underpin the US-India economic partnership across sectors.

The annual summit of USIBC, which is part of the US Chambers of Commerce, comes ahead of the official visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the US on June 22.

Also Read | China Forcibly Seizes Tibetan Farmers' Land To Build Hydropower Dam, Says Report.

"On Monday June 12th, we're gonna have the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, come and speak to our group. We are also gonna have a session with deputy secretary of state Rich Verma. We are looking to see how we can lift the ambitions of the United States and India for even greater realization of happiness and prosperity between our two free peoples," USIBC president Atul Keshap told PTI in an interview.

On Tuesday, the Ideas Summit will be addressed by commerce secretary Gina Raimondo along with deputy secretary of energy David Turk; Amos Hochstein, the president's advisor on energy issues; Lindsey Ford, deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia, Vivek Lall, chief executive, General Atomics Global Corporation; among others.

India's ambassador to the US Taranjit Singh Sandhu will share his perspectives from the government of India about ways to take the relationship forward.

"Indian and American companies who are members of USIBC are the world leaders in their fields. ...There are so many good stories about USIBC companies that are investing in people, in the United States and India, and we wanna showcase that," Keshap said.

The USIBC president also said that India's economic growth is deeply impressive.

"GDP is to a great extent, the marker by which we gauge the power and influence of nations and India's GDP is rising at really impressive rates. So, reasonable projections by very legitimate institutions estimate that India will be a five and 10 and 20 trillion (dollar) economies in a space of time that is really incredible to consider. You know, by 2047, India could stand transformed in world affairs. So that's incredibly good," he said.

"India's also a very sober and stable voice in international relations. It's a global net provider of security through UN peacekeeping, through its efforts to keep the sea lanes open in the Indian and Pacific oceans. It is a donor country to countries that need a lot of help, uh, and has helped greatly, even in its own neighborhood like with Afghanistan over the years and with Sri Lanka," he said.

Keshap said that the two democratic countries have a lot of affinity and "that affinity is now being expanded through the QUAD and through our global security partnership to ensure the peace and security and tranquility and happiness of people everywhere".

Responding to a question, Keshap said all the CEOs, who have come to India of late and have met with Prime Minister Modi, have committed to make major investments in India.

"That is a recognition that India's macroeconomic policy situation is getting better and better. There are a lot of economic innovations by the government of India that are capturing the interest of the global investment community. India has put a lot of homework and thought and effort into attracting certain sectors, like the electronics manufacturing sector, fintech sector, digital economy sector. So those are real growth engines of the Indian economy. They're gonna get even bigger," he said.

He also said that American companies want to ensure predictability, "and if given that predictability, they will invest very heavily wherever they feel protected, comfortable, stable and not subject to any arbitrary situations".

"India increasingly is that opportunity. Our companies are global. They look at every single place on earth, and they make their best decisions about where a long-term bet can be made," he added.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Calling Pawar a senior respected leader, Shinde said in a statement that all necessary precautions will be taken for his security. Police authorities have been asked to beef up Pawar's security if needed, the CM said. For the past few days, the chief minister said, deliberate attempts are being made to create tension in the state.
San Francisco, June 9: Meta will start testing a new artificial intelligence (AI)-generated stickers feature for the instant messaging platform Messenger.

During a company-wide meeting, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta's vice president of AI, said that the company will use its image generation model to allow users to make stickers based on text prompts, reported The Verge on Friday.

Before being made available to the public, employees will start testing this feature internally. Facebook, Instagram Verified Badge: Meta Blue Tick Subscription Arrives to India, Starts From Rs 699 Per Month.

"With AI-generated stickers, our users can have infinitely more options for self-expression, cultural representations, and even trend relevance," Al-Dahle said. "Of course, stickers are just the tip of the iceberg."

He also mentioned that the company is are working on AI models that are going to transform any image you want in any way you want", including doing things like "changing the aspect ratio of your picture" or turning a picture "into a painting."

Meanwhile, in February this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company was creating a new "top-level" product team which would be "focused" on generative AI. AI Summit: UK To Host First Global Summit on Artificial Intelligence Safety This Autumn, Announces PM Rishi Sunak.

Zuckerberg explained that in the short term, the company would focus on building creative and expressive tools. And over the longer term, the company would develop "AI personas" to help users in a variety of ways.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jun 09, 2023 11:16 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
On 8 June the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague,, visited Venezuela for talks with officials including President

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On 8 June Mexicos Presidentsaid he was expecting good news following a meeting with US Secretary of Transportationto discuss Mexicos air safety rating.

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On 8 June US and Cuban government officials denied a report published the same day by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) which, citing unnamed intelligence officials, claimed China and Cuba had reached a secret agreement whereby Beijing would pay Cuba several billion dollars for an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island.

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After receiving waves of criticism for sending flights of migrants to California and feuding with Gavin Newsom, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis finally broke his silence and also took a shot at the California governor.

During a campaign stop in Arizona, DeSantis blamed sanctuary cities. Almost five days after that first flight, DeSantis weighed in on the transports after he was asked about it in Arizona.

"These sanctuary jurisdictions are part of the reason we have this problem because they have endorsed and agitated for these types of open border policies," he said. "They have bragged they are sanctuary jurisdictions. They attack the previous admin efforts to try to have border security ... When they have to deal with some of the fruits of that they all of a sudden become very, very upset about that."

However, it had been fact-checked several times that the Biden administration does not have open border policies as DeSantis has claimed. During his Arizona campaign stop, the Florida governor also stated that the controversial policy had been "debated" and also "vetted" by Florida legislators who had agreed to fund the sending of migrants to Democrat-held cities using taxpayer money, according to Politico.

Now, Florida officials might face some legal consequences as Bexar County, Texas is filing a criminal case against them, and Gavin Newsom and California might do the same, threatening DeSantis with kidnapping charges.

While the migrants came willingly, they were all led with false promises of jobs and opportunities before getting shipped off to Sacramento and Martha's Vineyard to fend for themselves. Many legal experts agree that the fraudulent means of getting migrants to agree to be sent is the illegal part.

READ MORE: Florida Republican Seen Begging Latinos Not To Leave After Ron DeSantis Immigration Law Passes

Investigations in Texas and California into Ron DeSantis Migrant Stunts

California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar are leading investigations into DeSantis's possibly illegal actions, with Sheriff Salazar already recommending criminal charges as the migrants were lured into taking the flights under false pretenses.

Charges have been made in Texas, though no names of who were charged have been released yet. As for AG Bonta, he told The Hill, "I think deception is a key part of what's happened here."

The California AG also added that he is "glad the state of Florida is accepting blame for what they've done." He then stated that Florida really has no choice as all the evidence is pointing to them, as well as the DeSantis administration having a budget of $10 [million] to $12 million for these flights.

Ron DeSantis Fact-Checked for Claiming Martha's Vineyard Migrants Were Deported

Back in March, during a speech in Iowa when he was still hinting at running for the presidency, Ron DeSantis claimed that the Martha's Vineyard migrants were all deported.

"We even were able to deliver 50 illegal aliens to beautiful Martha's Vineyard. They said they were a sanctuary area. They had signs saying nobody is illegal. They said all the refugees and the illegals are welcome and then they deported them the next day. Are you kidding me?" He said.

However, Factcheck.org pointed out that the migrants were not deported, but relocated. The migrants were sent from an emergency shelter at Joint Base Cape Cod and were sent to long-term housing. Two of them then went to New York while others transferred to other towns and cities in Massachusetts. Four of the migrants are now living in Martha's Vineyard again and are being taken care of by a local family.

The nearly 50 Venezuelan migrants that DeSantis sent to Martha's Vineyard may be victims of a crime, which meant that they cannot be deported.

READ NEXT: Florida Could Face Mass Labor Shortage Due to Ron DeSantis' New Immigration Law

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Written by: Rick Martin

WATCH: Newsom slams DeSantis over migrant drop-off: 'You small, pathetic man' - ABC7 News Bay Area
The representative of renowned actor Jamie Foxx has firmly refuted claims that the COVID-19 vaccine he received left him "paralyzed and blind," dismissing such allegations as "completely inaccurate" on the latest Jamie Foxx health update, per Newsweek.

Foxx, best known for his stellar performance as Ray Charles in the Academy Award-winning film "Ray," was admitted to the hospital in early April due to an undisclosed "medical complication."

His daughter, Corinne Foxx, issued a statement confirming his release from the hospital and ongoing recovery, while details about his specific condition remained undisclosed.

Reports emerged in May suggesting that Foxx's family had visited him at a physical rehabilitation center in Chicago. A.J. Benza, a podcast host and gossip columnist, claimed to possess insider knowledge about Foxx's situation, attributing his information to an individual "present in the room."

During an appearance on the Ask Dr. Drew podcast, Benza alleged that Jamie Foxx experienced a blood clot in his brain after receiving the vaccine, adding that although he initially harbored reservations about getting vaccinated, the demands of his current film project coerced him into it. The resulting blood clot led to partial paralysis and vision impairment.

READ NEXT: Jamie Foxx Health Update

Speculations on Jamie Foxx Health Prompt Other Personalities to Weigh In

Despite strong denials from the actor's representatives regarding A.J. Benza's allegations, the anti-vaccination conspiracy surrounding Jamie Foxx condition has gained traction on various online platforms, according to the Independent.

Prominent political analyst Candace Owens, boasting a substantial following of 1.67 million subscribers on YouTube, perpetuated this notion during her podcast on June 6. While no member of Foxx's family has publicly refuted Benza's claim, Owens suggested in her video titled "What's Going On With Jamie Foxx?" that there could be some validity to the allegations.

Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk, co-founder of the Turning Point USA think tank, also added his voice to the controversy, taking to Twitter on June 1 to express his frustration.

Kirk wrote, "It's infuriating to see a respectable individual like Jamie Foxx fall victim to the pharmaceutical industry's influence, simply because a movie set foolishly mandated the administration of their cash cow clot shot."

Jamie Foxx Health Scare

During the production of his Netflix feature "Back in Action" in Atlanta, actor Jamie Foxx encountered health issues, leading to concerns among fans and the media.

Jamie Foxx's daughter, Corinne Foxx, released a statement addressing the situation on April 12.

"We wanted to share that my father, Jamie Foxx, experienced a medical complication yesterday," Corinne conveyed on behalf of the family. She further expressed gratitude for the swift response and excellent care Foxx received, assuring that he was already on the path to recovery. While acknowledging Foxx's widespread popularity, the family requested privacy.

Since then, people have been eagerly seeking updates on Jamie Foxx condition, with some expressing worries about his condition, Hollywood Unlocked noted.

Reports suggesting a deterioration in Jamie Foxx health surfaced, fueling concerns that his loved ones were "preparing for the worst." However, Corinne Foxx took to Instagram to refute these rumors.

In an Instagram story in May, she expressed her disappointment with the sensationalist media coverage, stating, "Sad to see how the media runs wild." Corinne confirmed that her father had been discharged from the hospital weeks ago and was recovering.

She even mentioned that Foxx had been engaged in activities like playing pickleball the day before. Corinne extended her gratitude for the prayers and support received during this challenging time.

Although Foxx has posted updates about his improving health on social media, he has not appeared publicly.

READ MORE: Michael Grimm Hospitalized Due to Mysterious Illness

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WATCH: Jamie Foxx's rep responds to rumor that COVID-19 vaccine caused hospitalization - From Page Six
Former president Donald Trump has been indicted again, this time over keeping classified documents in Mar-a-Lago after leaving office. The Ex-POTUS has maintained he did nothing wrong despite all the evidence presented against him.

This would be the second time a former president has been indicted in the history of the United States. The first time was against him as well, in connection to his hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels during the elections.

According to USA Today, the Justice Department investigation under Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump on seven charges. So far, what these charges exactly are remain sealed. However, legal experts have argued that the classified documents case is the most surefire way to land Trump in prison.

The case will be heard in a federal court in Miami, Florida, with the Department of Justice already moving additional resources to the city ahead of the former president's expected court appearance, which might draw protesters and might repeat the events of January 6.

Trump now faces criminal charges in two jurisdictions, with another two investigations, one federal over January 6 and one in Georgia over election interference, possibly indicting him as well. Over in New York, he was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business over his hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.

Donald Trump, Allies, Condemn Classified Documents Indictments

Donald Trump did not take the news of his being indicted again too well, as he immediately took to his social media site, Truth Social, to rant about it.

CNN reported that the ex-POTUS acknowledged that he had been indicted of a crime for the second time, saying that he had been "summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM." He then blamed the Biden administration, writing, "The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax."

READ NEXT: Donald Trump Caught On Tape Talking About Classified Document He Kept

Make America Great Again Inc. spokesperson Karoline Leavitt decried the charges, saying, "The Biden Regime, which is realizing they can't beat or cheat their way to another victory, has taken the unprecedented step to indict President Trump."

Meanwhile, House Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a staunch Trump ally and defender, wrote on social media "It's a sad day for America."

Alina Habba, a Trump lawyer, blamed the DOJ for "selective prosecution" and "selective persecution," calling the case "Russia third-world stuff" and noted that her client would be "vindicated."

What Is the Donald Trump Classified Documents Case?

After losing the 2020 election and leaving the White House, Donald Trump took home possibly hundreds of classified documents which may hold some very important national secrets, including ones for US allies.

The documents should have been handed to the National Archives, and the agency wanted them back. After filing a subpoena for their return, Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran returned a handful of these documents. According to ABC News, Trump may have lied to his attorney, thus not returning everything.

Officials grew suspicious that Trump did not return everything, leading to the raid on his Mar-a-Lago residence where authorities found hundreds of classified documents in an unsecured location. This then prompted to an investigation that led to even more classified documents being uncovered, with Jack Smith taking over the investigation as special counsel.

READ MORE; Donald Trump Suffers Another Legal Defeat as Judge Tosses Out Lawsuit Vs. New York Times

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WATCH: Trump indicted by federal grand jury in classified documents probe, sources say - 6abc Philadelphia
The case of the Mexico Migrant Center fire that killed nearly 40 people in Ciudad Juarez is finally moving forward as Mexico charges a second migrant who may have caused it as a result of a protest.

According to the Associated Press, the second migrant charged is a Venezuelan whom Mexican authorities identified as Carlos "C." The Mexico Prosecutor's Office has now also charged him with homicide, injuries, and damages caused by the fire he and another migrant caused.

The Mexico migrant center fire caused at least 40 deaths, all of whom were migrants. Dozens more were wounded in what was considered the deadliest incident to have ever happened at a Mexican immigration facility. It has since sparked a wave of criticisms against President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and the US government for the inhumane treatment that these migrants were getting, as well as the squalid conditions of these migrant detention centers.

Pressure from the United States led the Mexican government to send these migrants off to facilities such as the one that burned down in Ciudad Juarez, which is just across the border from El Paso, Texas.

Mexico Issued More Arrest Warrants to Individuals Relating to Deadly Migrant Center Fire

According to CNN, many of the migrants at the burned-out facility were not just from Venezuela, as some hailed from Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, Since the fire, the Mexican foreign ministry has been in contact with the governments of these countries in order to identify and repatriate them.

So far, Mexican authorities have identified eight people who could be responsible, including two federal agents, one state migration agent, and several employees from a private security company tasked with looking out for the migrants.

READ MORE: US-Mexico Border Fire Update: Charges for Immigration Chief, Revealed

Video evidence showed that none of the public officials at the prison, nor the private guards, made any effort to open a locked door holding detained migrants, leading to those 40 deaths. However, it was soon found that none of the guards had any keys in the first place and could not open the cell doors.

The fire itself was started to protest the conditions within the facility, where migrants were packed inside cramped cells in squalid conditions. They reportedly gathered mattresses before setting them on fire. However, the fire spread and led to the deaths of some of the people inside the facility.

New Migrant Center Opens at Ciudad Juarez Several Months After Deadly Fire

Last month, for the first time since the fire happened, a new migrant detention center opened in Ciudad Juarez. It is located near the e Zaragoza international bridge that connects Mexico to El Paso, Texas.

According to El Paso Matters, the new site will be used as a temporary detention site. It has a capacity for 80 people, with National Institute of Migration Minister Francisco Garduno Yanez stating that migrants detained there will only be staying for "no more than 36 hours while their immigration situation is reviewed."

The facility will indeed be the one designated to replace the building that burned down a few months prior.

READ MORE: Mexico Kidnapping: Mourners Gathered for American Man Killed by the Gulf Cartel

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Rick Martin

WATCH: Video shows detainees locked behind gates as fire breaks out in detention center - CNN
A draft guideline on fighting cyberbullying-related crimes and violations has begun soliciting public opinions on Friday, in a bid to effectively solve the problem that has become a big complaint..

The draft, which was jointly formulated by the Supreme People's Court - China's top court, the Ministry of Public Security and the Supreme People's Procuratorate - the country's top procuratorate, has been disclosed online.

The top court opened its postal and e-mail addresses on its website, welcoming individuals and departments to share ideas and raise suggestions about the legal document.

The deadline for opinion collection will end on June 25.

The draft introduces that online bullying, such as slandering or insulting others, or infringing on others' privacy or reputation, has brought serious consequences to the society. Some cases mortified victims, or even caused mental disorders or led them to commit suicide, the draft said.

Cyberbullying, a hot global issue, not only disturbs the cyberspace order, but also seriously affects the sense of security of the public, it said.

Compared with traditional bullying, online bullying mainly targets strangers, which means it is difficult for victims to find out their attackers and collect evidence, it said, calling for courts, procuratorates and public security departments nationwide to fully realize the social harm of cyberbullying, providing sufficient legal aids for victims and maintain the online environment.

The draft clarifies some behaviors that can be identified as cyberbullying and specifies what crimes should be charged.

For example, it states that those producing or spreading rumors to defame others or damage others' reputation, causing serious consequences, need to be charged with the crime of defamation in line with the Criminal Law.

It also stipulates that someone who organizes cyber manhunts, collecting personal data of others and sending them to more people, he or she will face the crime of infringing on said residents' personal information.

In addition, it requires judicial departments to give heavier punishments to perpetrators who bully children or the disabled.

Furthermore, those conducting organized bullying, falsifying sex-related topics to infringe upon others' dignity or using technologies - such as deep synthesis - to publish illegal or harmful information, in violation of public order, customs, ethics or morals, will also be harshly punished in accordance with the draft.
Natalee Holloway, a teenager from Alabama who went missing 18 years ago in Aruba, was last seen with Dutchman Joran van der Sloot and two others.

Van der Sloot, now suspected of extorting money from Holloway's mother, has arrived in the United States from Peru and was accompanied by FBI investigators on a US Department of Justice plane to Birmingham, Alabama, CNN reports.

Van der Sloot was transferred to a prison in Birmingham, close to Mountain Brook, where Holloway grew up. His arraignment is scheduled for Friday at 11 am CT in federal court in Birmingham.

The US federal government indicted van der Sloot on extortion and wire fraud charges related to a scheme involving selling information about Holloway's remains for $250,000 in 2010.

The indictment, issued in the Northern District of Alabama, alleges that Holloway's mother transferred $15,000 to van der Sloot's bank account in the Netherlands and gave him an additional $10,000 in person through an attorney. However, after receiving the initial payment, van der Sloot allegedly provided false information about the location of Holloway's remains.

Since Holloway's body has never been found, a court in Alabama declared her legally dead in 2012.

READ NEXT: El Chapo's Top Assassin Extradited From Mexico to U.S.

Joran van der Sloot Extradition

Joran van der Sloot, the Dutch national known for his involvement in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, has boarded an FBI plane departing Peru and is en route to the United States.

His attorney, Maximo Altez, said the plane departed from Jorge Chavez International Airport in Lima on Thursday morning.

Altez had previously made multiple appeals to halt van der Sloot's temporary extradition, but Peruvian courts only heard the pleas after his client's departure, per Fox News.

The attorney claimed that his client was not informed about the pending "temporary extradition" proceedings, calling it a violation of constitutional rights.

Van der Sloot will arrive in Birmingham, Alabama, on Thursday afternoon. He had been imprisoned in Peru for the murder of Stephany Flores in 2010 and received an extended sentence after being arrested for drug smuggling while in prison.

Joran van der Sloot was temporarily transferred to the United States after Peruvian authorities agreed to extradite him to face federal charges in May.

Natalee Holloway's mother, Beth Holloway, released a statement expressing her hope for justice after the Peruvian court announced the transfer of van der Sloot.

Natalee Holloway Disappearance and Joran van der Sloot Cases

The high-profile case of Natalee Holloway's disappearance in Aruba during a school trip garnered global attention.

The 18-year-old was last seen entering a car with Joran van der Sloot, a 17-year-old Dutch national, and Surinamese brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, according to BBC.

Following Holloway's disappearance, Van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers were arrested but released due to insufficient evidence. Tragically, Holloway's remains have never been found, leaving her fate unresolved.

Five years later, Van der Sloot encountered Stephany Flores, a Peruvian student, at a casino in Lima. After spending time together, Flores was found dead in Van der Sloot's hotel room the following morning.

Authorities eventually apprehended Van der Sloot in Chile, and upon being deported to Peru, he confessed to murdering Flores. He admitted to assaulting, strangling, and choking the young Peruvian, as she had reportedly discovered his connection to Holloway's disappearance.

READ MORE: Colombia Wiretapping Scandal

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Bert Hoover

WATCH: Joran van der Sloot arrives in U.S. to face extortion charges - From CBS Evening News
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is not only facing impeachment but also an investigation by the FBI. He is accused of being bribed by Texas businessman Nate Paul. Now, Paul has been arrested by federal authorities in Travis County while Paxton himself is suspended from his duties as Texas AG due to the impeachment.

Paul is an Austin real estate developer and a campaign donor to the embattled Texas AG. He is central to the allegations that Paxton is facing right now, and he may also be the key that may kick the suspended state AG out of office.

According to the Texas Tribune, Paul was booked into the Travis County Jail on Thursday on a federal warrant at around 4:25 pm. The outlet reached out to Paul's lawyers, the US Attorney's Office, the FBI, and Ken Paxton, but their calls were not returned immediately.

It was noted that it remains unclear whether his arrest by the FBI is related to the allegations that he paid off Paxton, who is also a personal friend of the Texas businessman.

Texas AG Ken Paxton's Connection To Arrested Texas Businessman Nate Paul

The arrest came after a yearslong federal investigation into Nate Paul, whom AG Paxton helped by using the resources of his public office in building his real estate empire.

Paxton's former deputies, whom the AG soon fired after they accused him of being bribed by his friend, claimed that their former boss used his power to order his own staffers to be involved in legal disputes related to Paul's businesses. At that time, the FBI, as well as several other law enforcement agencies, were already investigating the businessman.

In addition, Paul also employed a woman whom Paxton admitted to having an extramarital affair with.

READ MORE: Texas House Votes to Impeach Republican State AG Ken Paxton in Historic Vote

According to the Associated Press, authorities suspected that it was Paul who allegedly paid for the renovations at Paxton's Austin home. The timing of the payment, as well as who exactly paid for them, was not known before Paxton's legal team held a press conference regarding the matter.

The Paxton defense team stated that the one who paid $120,000 for his home renovation was not a donor. It was paid to Cupertino Builders, whose manager was an associate of Paul. However, the company reportedly did not incorporate as a business in Texas until more than three weeks after the transaction.

Paxton's lawyers also claimed that it was their clients who made those repairs.

Ken Paxton Impeachment Exposes Republican Infighting in Texas

Ken Paxton is a MAGA Republican, with his allegiance to former President Donald Trump running deep. However, the impeachment proceedings showed that even with a supermajority, a majority of Republicans voted for impeaching him, with only a few far-right allies sticking by the embattled AG.

The vote to impeach Paxton was bipartisan but it was led by the more moderate Republicans like House Speaker Dade Phelan, who is not only a critic of Paxton but also of Donald Trump.

Over the last few weeks, many state House Republicans have since spoken up about Paxton, but prominent MAGA Republicans like Ted Cruz and Trump himself showed their solidarity.

However, the impeachment showed that there is indeed infighting in Texas House Republicans as even with the supermajority, they failed to agree on taxes, school choice, stricter immigration laws, and other conservative priorities, according to the Texas Tribune.

READ NEXT: Ron DeSantis' 5 Controversial Policies As He Runs For President in 2024

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Rick Martin

WATCH: Ken Paxton associate Nate Paul arrested on federal charges - WFAA
After more than ten weeks of uncertainty and hope, a tragic conclusion has been reached in the case of the missing Minnesota mother, Madeline Kingsbury, per StarTribune.

The search for Kingsbury came to a devastating end on Wednesday when a body was found south of Winona by a deputy.

The body's identity has been confirmed by medical examiners, providing closure to the mystery surrounding Kingsbury's disappearance.

"While the discovery was not what we were hoping for, we are thankful to be able to bring Maddi home to her family," Winona Police Chief Tom Williams expressed the somber sentiment in a news conference on Thursday.

Adam Fravel, Kingsbury's ex-boyfriend and the father of her children, was taken into custody on Wednesday night and now faces murder charges.

The arrest came 69 days after Kingsbury went missing.

READ NEXT: Minnesota Mother Gone Missing Under 'Suspicious' Circumstances

Remains of Missing Minnesota Mother Madeline Kingsbury Found

The body of the missing Minnesota mother, Madeline Kingsbury, was discovered along Highway 43 in Fillmore County on Wednesday, CNN reported.

Authorities confirmed that the 26-year-old's body was found in the undergrowth on a property not owned by her ex-boyfriend, Adam Fravel, or his relatives.

Winona Police Chief Tom Williams acknowledged the difficult and distressing 69-day search during a news conference on Thursday, expressing the frustration, heartache, and pain experienced by the family, law enforcement, and the community.

Kingsbury was reported missing on March 31 after failing to show up for work, ignoring calls from loved ones, and neglecting to pick up her children from daycare. Authorities considered her absence involuntary and suspicious, raising concerns for her safety.

Fravel has vehemently denied any involvement in Kingsbury's disappearance. Following her vanishing, her children were placed under the custody of the Winona County Health and Human Services Department.

A judge later determined that the children, aged 5 and 2 at the time, could not be returned to their father and would remain in county custody.

Fravel did not have custody of the children before Kingsbury vanished, according to court documents.

Missing Minnesota Mother's Ex-Boyfriend Arrested

Adam Fravel was arrested on Wednesday evening concerning Madeline Kingsbury's disappearance.

Fravel was taken into custody without resistance at a residence in Mabel after authorities discovered Kingsbury's remains, KTTC noted.

Fravel is currently held by the Winona County Sheriff's Office, awaiting trial on charges of second-degree murder with intent but not premeditation.

Residents of Mabel, where Fravel grew up and attended high school, expressed shock and disbelief at the news.

While some were personally acquainted with him and described his upbringing as ordinary, others expressed concern over the presence of individuals capable of such acts in their small community.

Longtime Mabel resident Cathy Peterson lamented the situation, stating that it raises worries and emphasizes the importance of justice prevailing.

READ MORE: Pat Robertson Dies at 93

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Bert Hoover

WATCH: Body of missing Minnesota mother found; ex-boyfriend arrested - From NBC News


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A man is accused of exposing himself to a woman near a bus stop in Bethlehem, and then running away from officers trying to arrest him, the city police department said.

Police were called the morning of May 31 for a man exposing himself in the 1400 block of Stefko Boulevard in Bethelehem.

Officers said a 30-year-old Bethlehem Township man standing at the bus stop matched the description of the suspect.

When an officer got out of his police vehicle, the man took off on foot, police said. Officers were eventually able to arrest the man.

The victim said she was sitting outside near the bus stop, when she saw the man with his hands in his pants and appeared to be playing with his genitalia, according to court records.

When the man pulled his hand out, his genitalia came out, police said, and the man then put it back into his underwear.

The man faces charged of indecent exposure, open lewdness, evading arrest and summary disorderly conduct. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Aug. 15, court records say.

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Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com.
At long last, the Phillipsburg Union Train Station will reopen its doors and expose visitors to the glorious history of what was once one of the Northeasts most important transient junctions.

The Friends of the New Jersey Transportation Heritage Center announced it will host a ribbon cutting to officially dedicate the former train station as a museum at 5:30 p.m. on June 16 at 178 S. Main St.

Tickets to attend the grand opening are priced at $100 per person, with all proceeds going to further restoration efforts of the site, organizers said. A limited number of tickets are available.

Visit www.friendsnjthc.org to buy tickets or donate to restoration of the Phillipsburg Union Station.

Efforts to restore and reopen the historic site have been 25 years in the making, organizers said.

We are proud to have been a part of this restoration project, we believe in giving back to the community, and this was a great opportunity for us to make a positive impact, said Aaron Coleman, owner of Platinum Star Cleaning, who spearheaded the completion of the restoration project.

This building is not only a piece of our communitys history, but its also an important part of our countrys railroad history, Coleman said.

Coleman is probably best known for organizing last years Phillipsburg Railroad Festival, which drew hundreds from across the region in its first year to celebrate Phillipsburg Union Train Stations centennial anniversary.

He plans to bring the festival back again this year to become a regular, annual event on Sept. 23.

The grand opening of the Union Train Station museum on Friday will feature some valuable presentations on transportation and the stations history. Dozens of artifacts collected by historians over many years will also be showcased at the museum and offer visitors the chance to learn the history of how the small border/railroad town of Phillipsburg played a part in developing the regions role as a major transportation hub.

As part of the grand opening event, attendees will see the main floor has been restored to its original design and layout. New molding and partitions have been added to mimic the sites original design and the original ticket windows, counters, waiting room benches and pink marble bathrooms were all rebuilt. Phillipsburg High School Marching Band will also perform.

Volunteers cleared out more than 40 yards of garbage to get the museum ready for the reopening, Coleman said.

It is a testament to what can be accomplished when the community comes together to work toward a common goal, said Phillipsburg Mayor Todd Tersigni.

Phillipsburg Union Train Station opened in 1914. It was designed by Frank Nies, an architect who produced many of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad (DL&W) train stations now preserved as historic landmarks by the state and federal registries.

His design of the Phillipsburg station, however, stands out as an unusual example of his work, as the two-and a half-story, three-bay brick building follows early 20th century Prairie-style architecture, Coleman said.

We hope that this museum will be a source of pride for the community and a destination for visitors from near and far, President of the Friends of the New Jersey Transportation Heritage Center Tom Hellyer sad, We are excited to share the history of the town and the importance of the railroad with everyone who visits.

The ribbon cutting ceremony will also coincide with several other events also happening in Phillipsburg over Fathers Day weekend, including the Phillipsburg Ole Town Festival weekend (opening no June 17), the opening of Delaware River Excursions on June 17 and the launch of the Phillipsburg Open Air Market on June 18 and the opening of the more than 200-year-old Roseberry House, located at 540 Warren St., on June 17.

Its going to be a busy weekend, Coleman said.

Heres a schedule of whats planned for the Ole Town Festival weekend:

Friday, June 16

4:30 p.m. Launch of Audio Walking Tour along South Main Street (free). Starts at Riverside Way Parking Lot.

5:30 p.m. Grand Opening: Phillipsburg Union Train Station

6:30 p.m. Ice-cream social with Phillipsburg Railroad Historians (free). Featuring miniature train rides, museum visit and various collections.

Saturday, June 17

10 a.m. Delaware River Excursions opening

11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Open House at Roseberry House

12 p.m. Trolley Service to Ole Towne Festival (free). Featuring live music, food, craft vendors and fireworks.

12 p.m. Philipsburg Union Tower and Union Station Tour (free)

Sunday, June 18

10 a.m. Trolley Service to Phillipsburg Open Air Market (free). Featuring music, crafters and local artisans.

10 a.m. Delaware River Excursions

12 p.m. Phillipsburg Union Station tours (free)

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PHOENIX (AP)  Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs is urging President Joe Biden to use the Antiquities Act to designate the tribally proposed Baaj Nwaavjo Itah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument.

In a letter dated May 30, Hobbs told Biden that she is committed to preserving cultural and natural treasures throughout Arizona and said the Grand Canyon is a culturally sacred place stewarded by Indigenous Peoples for centuries.
Andrew Lewis pays $320 a month on his student loans.

Daniel Chung doesnt know how much debt hell end up with on top of the $7,500 he already has. The rising college senior plans to go to law school, and he said he will have to borrow to get there.

Its worse than debtors prison, said Smita Nadia Hussain, who owes $80,000 on her loans.

But not all borrowers, including New Jersey residents who overall owe more than $43 billion in federal student loans, some of it decades old, see their debt the same way. Some say they had no choice but to run up big bills for their educations, and that while they understood they would have to pay it back, they didnt realize how the crushing weight of monthly repayments could change the trajectory of their lives. Others, even those who owe money for student loans, say borrowers, and not taxpayers, need to take responsibility for their choices.

President Biden on Wednesday vetoed a bill that would have repealed his student loan forgiveness plan. More than 1.12 million borrowers in the state applied for the relief in late 2022. If the plan moves forward, it would eliminate up to $10,000 of federal debt for some borrowers and up to $20,000 for those who received Pell Grants.

However, the plans fate, and the finances of millions of people, remains uncertain.

The U.S. Supreme Court could sink the relief plan for good when it rules on two lawsuits challenging the forgiveness plan. The court is expected to issue its rulings in the coming weeks.

Whatever the court decides, federal loan repayments, which have been on pause since March 2020 because of the COVID pandemic, will restart by the end of August because of a provision in the debt ceiling bill passed by Congress last week.

Where we come from, its like, especially families that dont know as much about money, financial literacy and how the systems work, if they dont speak English, it is just a minefield for them. Its a way to go into modern debtors prison. Its an impossible situation for working families.  Smita Nadia Hussain

Extended eight times, the pause in payments is also the subject of a lawsuit filed in March by a private lender that offers student loan refinances. It alleges the payment pause extensions are unlawful.

When payments restart and interest kicks in, it could add a significant expense to personal budgets. Those who dont pay could damage their credit reports, which will make it harder to buy a home or a car or to get approval for a credit card.

Still, not all borrowers, including some who would benefit, agree with the forgiveness plan. They call it unfair to those who have already paid their loans and argue it eliminates any incentive for expensive colleges to lower their prices. Others say even if the plan wont help them, it will make a difference for borrowers who have overpaid for their educations.

Smita Nadia Hussain, 38, says she wouldnt have been able to get her undergraduate degree from Rutgers without student loans.

The mother of three has $80,000 remaining on her $100,000 debt, while her husband has another $30,000 left to pay from his education, she said.

Hussain hasnt been paying on her federal loans during the COVID pause, and shes concerned for when the $600 to $700 per month payments restart. That, along with the $300 per month due on her husbands loans, will hurt. Before the pandemic, they made the payments, she said, but they would sometimes skip a month but then double up the next month.

Where we come from, its like, especially families that dont know as much about money, financial literacy and how the systems work, if they dont speak English, it is just a minefield for them, and I believe the student loans companies know that and they dont care, she said.

Without a VA loan from her husbands service in the Marines, she said, they never would have been able to buy their Bloomingdale home.

Hussain said she supports any kind of relief on the loans, which she called a trap for people trying to get ahead.

Its a sweeping dragnet of preying on my generations desire to get a job and support a family and buy a home. We went to school with that promise, she said.

This is not about people being irresponsible, she said. Its a way to go into modern debtors prison. Its worse than debtors prison. Its an impossible situation for working families. Its killing our ability to support the economy.

Andrew Lewis, 33, makes his living as a student debt educator for the states largest teaching union.

He finished his education with a Masters in 2014 after getting his undergrad degree at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). He took about $25,000 in student loans, and he still has about $12,000 to pay off at a rate of $320 a month.

The reason that I paid off so much already is because I lived at home when I was younger, the Jackson man said.

Now married with a child who is nearly 3, he said hes used to making the payments as part of his regular bills.

Hes waiting for his debt to be forgiven as part of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which eliminates some loans for those who work for certain federal, state, local or tribal governments or not-for-profit organizations.

He says he worries about the future for current and prospective college students, but he also understands the Biden relief programs critics.

College is not affordable. I see the people who paid off their loans, the people who have a little or a lot left, but Im also looking down the road. I get what the $10,000 does for people now, but what about the person who is in college now?

He believes when the COVID pause ends, many borrowers will struggle to make their payments.

Payments havent been made since COVID. If I hadnt been making payments the whole time where I wouldnt be used to paying the $320 a month, and then I had to start paying again, that would be a big financial hardship, he said. Gas has gone up. Groceries have gone up. If youre on a tight income and you were not having to pay a bill, and suddenly you have to start paying it again?

I understand why its being done, but it isnt the most fair. I cant see the arguments of why people say its not fair, he said.

Daniel Chung has a few years to go before he finishes his higher education experience.

A rising senior at Rutgers in New Brunswick with a political science major, Chung, 21, is planning on law school.

So far, he has $7,500 in student loans, which he expects to be more than $10,000 by the time he completes his undergraduate work.

But law school costs?

No clue right now, he said. I just know its going to be a lot.

Even though hes going to rack up hefty student loan debt and most of his friends have some level of loans for school, Chung said he doesnt support the forgiveness plan.

I dont think its fair to everyone else who has had to pay off their debt, he said. My parents worked hard for many years to pay off their student loan debt. If everything is forgiven, why did they work so hard?

Chung said student loans should not be the responsibility of taxpayers, and forgiveness wont do anything to change the skyrocketing costs of education.

If the federal government does get rid of the loans like this, it really wont stop the price of colleges from increasing, Chung said. If they know these loans are going to get forgiven, they will keep raising their prices.

Everyone who took out loans, they knew the responsibilities would come in a few years and they took it out for a reason. Its not right to take it away like that, he said.

When the student loan pause ends, Christy Lazarow will have to pay about $950 per month on her $242,000 debt.

We havent made a payment that large. Last time I made a payment, it was a little over $500 a month, the 44-year-old West Caldwell woman said. Im not sure how were going to afford a payment that is now nearly double what it was last time we paid.

About $220,000 of the debt was accumulated for law school at J.D. Widener University/Delaware Law School, after she was already $22,000 in debt from a Masters at Seton Hall. Her parents helped with her undergrad studies at Lehigh University.

I thought Id be a high-paid attorney so it wouldnt be an issue, she said of the large debt. But she ended up going back to teaching instead, something that qualified her for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which she hopes will erase her debt.

She said while shes not personally counting on the Biden forgiveness plan to help her, she remains a supporter. In the meantime, she said she will be a nervous wreck about her monthly payments restarting at the end of August.

The balance continues to grow, and given that Im only pulling in a teachers salary, its just not feasible for our family to make a large payment every month, she said, adding she lives in a very average house that could use some work that has to wait until these loans are gone.

Ashley DeNegre, 45, just paid off her last two student loans.

Before that, she was paying about $300 a month on the $33,000 of debt she accumulated on her way to get a PhD at Rutgers.

Even though shes done paying, she said she supports the forgiveness plan.

I hope that others may also feel this same relief, the Martinsville woman said. I taught at Rutgers from 2009 to 2013 and many of my students  particularly those who were first-generation college students  would graduate with six-figure debt that would only increase if they chose to pursue graduate education.

She said the proposed plan is an important first step, but doesnt go far enough.

The cost of education has skyrocketed over the past two decades, far outpacing wage increases, which have largely stagnated since the 1970s. As a result, there is a generation of students who are faced with the choice to either forgo college or incur substantial debt  sometimes from predatory lenders  to attend, she said. Many of these students will not be able to contribute meaningfully to the economy, or achieve any level of financial security, as long as they are saddled by student debt.

Its not sustainable, DeNegre said.
Gov. Jim Pillen on Thursday welcomed Israeli Consul General Yinam Cohen to Nebraska with a proclamation celebrating the 75th anniversary of the State of Israel and pointing to "common strategic and economic interests" that the United States and Israel share.

"It's a special relationship," Pillen said, which spreads into tourism and trade as well as common strategic interests.

"We hope to welcome you to Jerusalem," Cohen said.

Bryan Slone of Omaha, president of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said Nebraska businesses want to "expand commercial relationships" with Israel along with cultural bonds.

Jewish community roots in Nebraska stretch back to 1855, Mike Siegel, president of the Jewish Federation of Omaha, said.

Dr. Jeffrey Gold, chancellor of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha and executive vice president and provost of the University of Nebraska, also welcomed Cohen to Nebraska during a brief ceremony in the Governor's Hearing Room.

Cohen represents the Israeli consulate in Chicago.

Israel's 75th anniversary was celebrated May 14.

Top Journal Star photos for June 2023
The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency (PHFA) announced Thursday that it has identified some 309 housing programs across the state to receive a portion of more than $61.5 million this year.

That money comes straight from the Pennsylvania Housing Affordability and Rehabilitation Enhancement (PHARE) program, which is supported by state and federal funds, as well as funds from other outside sources.

Six groups from the Lehigh Valley were approved to receive nearly $2 million from the fund.

Heres a summary of the programs in Lehigh County and Northampton County receiving PHARE funding in 2023:

Lehigh County

Valley Housing Development Corporation:

Project: Gordon Street Revamp

Allocation: $400,000

Program Details: Exterior and interior renovation of a 20-unit multifamily rental facility that has provided a permanent home to low-income persons afflicted with serious mental health conditions for the past 31 years. The physical rehab will install a fire sprinkler system and replace windows, doors, roof, siding, and lighting with 21st-century, energy efficient materials. The units will also receive new kitchens, baths, flooring and paint.

Community Options, Inc.

Project: Affordable Housing Preservation for Pennsylvanians with Disabilities

Allocation: $80,000

Program Details: Rehabilitation and preservation of supportive and affordable housing for people with disabilities who live in Lycoming and Lehigh Counties.

Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley, Inc:

Project: Housing Counseling Program: FirstTime Homebuyer Seminars

Allocation: $40,000

Program Details: To conduct First-Time Homebuyer Seminars in areas of greatest need, such as low-income communities. Seminars are offered in English and Spanish and feature speakers from local lending institutions, Realtors, home inspection agencies, insurance agencies and settlement companies.

Northampton County

Evergreen Village Cooperative, Inc.

Project: Evergreen Village Cooperative, Inc.- Community Wastewater System Improvements

Allocation: $300,000

Program Details: Repairs will prolong the systems useful life as it exists to provide waste treatment service to 158 homes in this community.

County of Northampton:

Project: Northampton County Lead Hazard Reduction Program Borough of Northampton

Allocation: $500,000

Program Details: To reduce residential lead hazards in the Borough of Northampton. The PHARE grant, in combination with matching CDBG, HOME, and county funds will maintain affordable housing units for low- and moderate-income households and reduce lead hazards throughout the county.

Valley Housing Development Corporation:

Project: Roofs for Seniors in Northampton County

Allocation: $450,000

Program Details: To preserve affordable housing by replacing six roofs at three sites that were built in the 1990s and still house 185 low-income senior households. Additional rehabilitation includes repairing and paving parking lots at two of the facilities, and replacing common area carpeting at one property.

Click here to learn more about the Pennsylvania Housing Affordability and Rehabilitation Fund program for 2023.

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Glenn Epps can be reached at gepps@lehighvalleylive.com or glenn_epps_on Twitter.
A wildlife habitat team with Grand Central Sanitary Landfill snatched some chicks out of their nest Thursday afternoon at the WM-run facility in Plainfield Township.

But the team did it to help, not hurt the young American kestrels.

The operation called for determining the chicks genders and banding them before returning them to their nest at the landfills environmental education center on site. Bird bander and WM employee Kevin Kelly performed the careful work.

The mission was to help wildlife experts track the kestrels, which Hawk Mountain in Kempton, Pennsylvania, says are the worlds smallest falcons. The species is listed as in decline.

Scroll through the gallery above to see photos from the operation.

WM, formerly Waste Management, says in a news release that three kestrel nest boxes have been in use at Grand Central since 2007 when the late Paul Birdman Karner placed the boxes on the property.

Nearly 100 American Kestrels have been banded at Grand Central over the last 16 years.

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Remote workers are doing the opposite of what they are used to and getting together at a huge networking conference in Portlaoise this week.

Some 350 people descended on Portlaoise, in the up and coming public space in the old fort, for the Grow Remote Summit 2023 on Thursday and Friday, June 15 and 16.

Businesses taking stands there ranged from multinationals like Ebay to local startups like Ion Oil from Portarlington.

Local remote workers told the Leinster Express / Laois Live what they thought of the summit.

Katelyn Roche from Portlaoise came with her boyfriend, Galway man Darren Higgins to suss out her options for remote working. Katelyn is completing a remote course in Dublin Business School in Project Management while she works part time in the capital. Darren already works remotely full time in the technology field, from their Portlaoise home.

"We came to see Paddy Jobsman, it was a very inspirational talk. It's nice to connect with like minded people," she said.

"We learned an awful lot in the 40 minutes. He is very funny and sold his ideas very effectively," Darren said.

Katelyn chatted to the Ebay staff about remote working, while Darren said he learned from speaker Eoin Byrne that 100,000 people are already working fully remotely in Ireland.

Laois remote worker Paolo Jacob (below) also came to the free talk by Paddy Jobsman. He is a Portuguese native settled in Mountrath with his local born wife and daughter. His job became fully remote just months before the pandemic, working for a US company as an IT systems administrator.

"I have been so lucky. I was working in Dublin city centre but I felt I was wasting my time commuting. By staying at home I can adjust my hours to the people I work with in the US. I love it, I don't have to meet people. The company I work for, Blue Fin, is very focused on more life than work balance, on wellbeing.

"I've been in Mountrath 15 years and its really up now since BloomHQ. It is a place where events can happen. You can see local shops and coffee shops benefiting, there was a time when a lot of shops had been closing," he said.

"I actually enjoyed the commute because I had me time in the car, I would listen to technical podcasts. But here our mortage got us a three bedroom house. In Dublin it was not enough to get a one bedroom apartment, we needed 100k more for that," he said.

Shane Walsh (below left) is a Dubliner also now settled in Mountrath. Working remotely as a team lead in the e-commerce company Shopify, he brought the team along with him to Grow Remote.

"I have followed Grow Remote for some years. Working from home opens your options dramatically. Before this I didn't drive and the jobs availability was just not there," he said.

His team who came from all over Ireland for the summit, were enjoying the social buzz around Portlaoise pubs and restaurants, promoted as part of the summit's community reachout.

Padraig Boland is a Further Education and Training Manager with Laois Offaly ETB, who invited the annual GrowRemote Summit to come to Portlaoise this year.

Pictured below with Joanne Mangan, Remote Transformation Manager at Grow Remote.

The LOETB were ahead of the curve in fostering remote working in the two counties, as he explained.

"We were looking at training programmes to develop sustainable rural communities and we got in touch with Tracy Keogh, a co-founder of Grow Remote. We developed a remote working traineeship but it sat on the shelf, there was no take-up on it. Then Covid arrived and suddenly SOLAS who fund the further education training, and the IDA said to run with it," he said.

They run two online courses, one for workers to transition to working from home, the second for managers to get used to their staff not sitting in front of them. The first has been run 50 times already, the second 38 times.

"We draw people from all over the country. We asked Grow Remote to consider Portlaoise because it is possibly the county with the most outward daily migration, we thought if we could get some of those people to live and work rurally, it would boost rural communities and even schools," he said.

The Portlaoise summit is a success said Joanne Mangan.

"We are really happy with the turnout, there's people from all over the EU here especially the speakers. The idea was to being everyone with stakes in making remote working available, who have the conviction to make it work. We picked Portlaoise because it is very easily accessible, we got a great welcome from the local community, and with 11,000 a day leaving for work, we wanted to highlight the impact that can be made if we can keep some of those workers here.

"Remote working is definitely here to stay. As we adjust and learn to do it well, it will continue to grow. There is a big demand from employeesa and companies see an increase in retention rates and better access to talent. Transport is a big contributor to carbon emissions too, and 53% of it is private cars. This is completely doable," Joanne said.
More than half of farmers and Laois and around Ireland have been the victims of crime but this might not reflect the full extent of the problem because nearly a third of victims did not report crimes, according to a new survey.

Researchers at Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin) studying farm-based crime in Laois and have found that about 55% of the 1,333 farmers surveyed had been victims of theft.

While most farmers (71%) reported thefts to An Garda Siochana, a proportion of those participating in the survey did not. Some 29% of participants did not report their experience of theft to An Garda Siochana, compared with 19% in national victim surveys.

TU Dublin survey found that the primary reasons given for not reporting were based on a belief that:

The incident was not serious enough;

That the police would do nothing about it;

That there was insufficient evidence to warrant police action.

Among the main findings, the research highlights that:

Farmers take routine and active crime prevention measures on their farms;

60% of participants believe that An Garda Siochana should have a dedicated unit to deal with farm thefts and rural crime;

Farmers are fearful of being burgled, but only one-third have an alarm on their dwelling

In the 12 months prior to the survey, 18% of participants reported that they had been a victim of theft from their farm

46% reported that they had been a victim of theft in the last five years.

Most stolen items are, equipment and tools (21%), machinery (18%), fuel (12%) and money and personal items (6%).

Burglary to home or farm buildings

Burglary to home or farm buildings 17% reported that their home had been burgled but that most burglaries were experienced (69%) more than five years ago.

The rate of burglary reported to sheds and farm buildings (28%) was higher than for houses, with 59% of these occurring in the last three years and 13% in the last year.

The research report was conducted by Dr Nicola Hughes and Dr Matt Bowden, criminologists at the School of Social Sciences, Law and Education at TU Dublin. They say the survey was conducted in Autumn 2022 and is based on a sample of 1,330 responses from the farming community.

Dr Bowden spoke about the findings from the survey which was the result of a collaboration between the University and the Irish Farmers Association (IFA).

"While there has been much attention to issues of rural crime in recent years, we have very little systematic data. This research highlights the Irish farming community's experience of crime and victimisation, and their perceptions of crime prevention, and helps us to better understand crimes committed against Irish farms and the measures farmers take to prevent their victimisation."

"This survey was made possible with the active engagement of the farming community through a very positive collaboration with the IFA, and we hope that this is the start of a more solid knowledge base on issues related to rural crime and crime prevention in Ireland, giving a voice to the farmers experience of crime," he said.

The report's co-author Dr Hughes also commented.

"Many victims of crime do not report it. If the true extent of crime and victimisation against the farming community is to be understood, then all victims should be encouraged to report the incident to An Garda Siochana," she said

The IFA Deputy President is Brian Rushe.

"I commend the team involved in developing this report, which is the first of its kind in Ireland".

"The underreporting of crime to An Garda Siochana is concerning. Anyone affected by crime should report it for the scale of the issue to be captured, and adequate policing resources be assigned."

The views expressed in the report that An Garda Siochana should have a dedicated unit specifically to deal with rural and farming crimes is supported by IFA. Such units or teams in other similar jurisdictions have proved to be a game-changer and have contributed significantly to reducing criminal activity, he concluded.

The research is part of a worldwide project studying aspects of rural crime in 18 participating countries.

https://www.kth.se/en/som/ avdelningar/urbana-studier/ forskning/urban-community-sa/ projects/rural-perspectives-o

TU Dublins survey builds on a similar study first carried out in Victoria, Australia.

The full report can be found at https://arrow.tudublin.ie/ aaschsslrep/41/
Stradbally's Electric Picnic is one of the world's most anticipated festivals according to research carried out for a leading hotel chain.

Premier Hotels says seeing your favourite artists live is a dream come true for many, so they decided to find out which festivals - and their respective line-ups - are receiving the most hype this year.

To do this, they analysed the top five headline acts for popular upcoming world festivals and their respective Spotify listeners and combined these with the average Google search data over the past 12 months. They then compared this data with the festivals disclosed capacity to achieve a final index score that reveals the most anticipated festivals around the world.

"Electric Picnic secures the third position on our list, with its enchanting location in Stradbally. The Irish festival has gained immense popularity over the years, demonstrated by its top-three ranking. Beyond an eclectic musical offering, the festival features various art installations, theatre performances, and culinary delights, creating a vibrant and immersive experience that appeals to the whole family," said the survey.

Polands Open'er Festival tops the list of the most anticipated music festivals in the world. Taking the second spot is the Roskilde Festival Denmark.

All three were also the top three ranking European festivals.

The Killers, Billy Eilish and Lewis Capaldi are among the headline acts confirmed for the Laois festival. Also on the bill are Tom ODell, Jamie XX, Niall Horan, Steve Lacey, Idles, Amyl & the Sniffers and Fred Again.

Electric Picnic 2023 will take place between September 1-3, returning to its home in the Cosby family's estate in Stradbally, Laois. Upwards of 75,000 are due to attend the sold-out festival
Laois is in the black, with money in the kitty despite a whopping 91.123 million spend in 2022 across the county on services and public housing.

The biggest amount ever was spent on social housing in Laois in 2022, at 33.5 million. That was an increase of 10.1m on 2021 and 17.9m on 2020.

The next biggest spend was almost 23m on maintaining and improving the county's road network.

The year ended with 77,351 still in the kitty.

However there were still areas where more money was spent than had been budgeted for.

Laois County Council's Director of Services for Finance is Gerry Murphy.

"There was additional expenditure over what was agreed at our budget meeting. We got extra grants for roads. One of the biggest overspends was in maintenance of houses, up by 207,000, and on relets up by 334,000.

"That was funded by the additional income from rents and savings in other areas. That could be things like staff leaving and a two or three month gap before the position was filled," he explained.

Other overspends included 208k to help resettle the Syrian community, totalling 4.116k under Community and Enterprise spending.

There was 93,361 on public toilets, 18,531 more than budgeted, funded by savings in the water services area.

The fire service cost 395k more than expected, at 4.62m. That overspend was on extra payroll, training, payments to other county's fire services for assistance, gratuities, equipment and higher energy and fuel costs.

The arts got 310k more than budgeted, at 1.2m in 2022. This was down to Local Live Performance Schemes and Creative Ireland funds all from the Department of Arts.

Covid costs were still impacting the county's budget in Spring 2022 he said.

"The hospitality sector rates was down 261,000," he said.

However Laois taxpayers are among the best behaved in Ireland.

"Our revenue collection rates are at 97%, that probably in the top five of the country. Our housing loan collections have increased to 81%," the finance director said.

Councillors had plenty of ideas on where to spend any extra money.

Cllr Catherine Fitzgerald asked for a special new budget ringfenced for fixing footpaths.

"That is one of the biggest problems we have as councillors," she said.

"Lights are a huge problem for us as as well. There's a few long lanes need to be done. When you go to mass there are two or three surrounding us asking when we are going to do them," said Cllr Ollie Clooney.

"The biggest thing I get is the LIS (Local Improvement Scheme laneway grants)," said Cllr Willie Aird.

"It's totally unacceptable that it can be four years before we get a lane done, when there's a 16bn surplus in Government," he said.

Cllr Ben Brennan wants more money for graveyards to add toilets and cut grass.

"I'm wondering is it gone to Offaly," he said.
Durrow is being promised a more reliable water supply as part of a significant project to upgrade pipes which will run for most of the summer in the Laois town.

Uisce Eireann / Irish Water says that working in partnership with Laois County Council, work will start on Monday,12 June to replace about 1.5km of aged water mains with new modern pipes along the R434 Swan Road (Ballincolla Road) going north to the junction with New Line and will continue onto New Line road.

The State-owned company says that when completed, the upgrade will provide a more reliable water supply and reduce the amount of treated drinking water lost to leakage. A statement said the works are a critical step in conserving water and reducing high levels of leaks which have been a significant source of disruption for customers.

Programme Manager, for Uisce Eireanns National Leakage Reduction Programme, Joe Carroll is looking forward to getting crews on site.

Old and damaged water mains remain a huge source of leakage and continue to impact communities right across Ireland, causing low pressure and supply disruption. Replacing these old water mains in poor condition will eliminate existing leaks and significantly reduce the amount of clean drinking water lost into the ground.

The delivery of these essential works will help provide a safer, more secure water supply for Durrow, by minimising the frequency of bursts and improving the resilience of the network.

We would like to thank the community in Durrow in advance for their patience and cooperation during the works, we know based on previous experiences that the short-term inconvenience will be overshadowed by the lasting benefits, he said.

Where water mains are being installed, traffic management will be in place however local and emergency access will always be maintained.

The works may involve some short-term water interruptions and the project team will ensure that customers are given a minimum of 48 hours notice prior to any planned water interruptions.

The project is being carried out by Ward & Burke Construction Ltd. on behalf of Uisce Eireann and is due to be completed by the end of August 2023.

Uisce Eireanns customer care helpline is open 24/7 on 1800 278 278 and customers can also contact us on Twitter @IWCare with any queries. For updates please visit the Water Supply Updates section of the Uisce Eireann website or set your location on our website www.water.ie

Uisce Eireann is responsible for delivering public drinking water and wastewater services for the people of Ireland.
Laois fire fighters are starting serious strike action from next Tuesday, June 20, over the poor pay and conditions.

Four out of the eight Laois fire stations will shut down each day, in continued action until the Government agrees with SIPTU union's demands. It is part of nationwide planned rolling strikes.

A local fire fighter who is a member of the Fire Service Strike Committee, says they fear what will happen locally if they cannot attend fires during the strikes.

"Nobody wants this strike, that is why we are trying to get Government to come into talks with us.

"It's hard for us if something happens in our towns. Our pager systems will be turned off, we won't get alerted. Other brigades in surrounding towns will have to respond to those areas where stations are closed. They will have to cover stations closed in nearby counties as well.

"If it goes into the third week, we will only be responding to life threatening calls like cardiac arrests. We will get those alerts to our phones because they come from the HSE.

In this dry weather, if the mountain goes on fire, or an empty office or house, we won't get called. But there is always that small chance someone there could be in danger," he said.

He described the problems fire fighters face which forced the union to take strike action.

"It's brutal. We can't get anyone into the service because the starting off money is so low. It's 8,500 a year for a retained fire fighter, going up to about 11,000. You get paid extra per callout but the calls aren't guaranteed to happen.

"I'm ok in that I got a mortgage before I joined but the banks don't look at the income from callouts, only the retainer," he said.

Because of staff shortages due to the low wage, any remaining staff must be on standby seven days a week, except for a few weeks of annual leave, and stay within 5km of their station at all times.

"You are married to your town," the Laois fire fighter said.

"It should be the way it is in Dublin, staying in the station for a week on, week off, on duty as a full time job," he said.

Laois should have eight crews of at least eight to 13 people per station.

"It has deteriorated since I started a few years ago. In Abbeyleix they are down to five or six people. Portarlington lost three or four. They were replaced but they left again after a few months.

"Every time someone leaves, it costs 50,000 to train a new fire fighter. That's a lot of money after being spent, going straight out the door after a couple of months," he said.

The Laois fire service strike action committee is meeting with Laois TDs to urge them to call for action.

That meeting will take place early on Monday morning, with Minister of State Sean Fleming, Deputy Charlie Flanagan and Deputy Brian Stanley all understood to be attending.

"We have suggested amalgamating Laois stations, and working a week on, week off, based in the stations. If they up the pay and station conditions, they will get more recruits.

"This is down to the Local Government Management Agency not upping the budget. They say we are tied into a pay agreement. But they won't tell us if our retainer payment is a wage or an allowance. If it is a wage, it is under the minimum wage. If it is an allowance, it's not part of the pay agreement.

"The strikes will stay going until the Goverment comes back with something," the Laois fire fighter said.
All children starting school in September 2023 can visit their local library to get a free My Little Library Bag at their local library.

This initiative, funded through Dormant Accounts Funding, offers a free book bag with storybooks for children and supportive information for parents for all children starting school in September 2023.

The aim of the initiative is that all children will start school with storybooks in their homes and as members of their local library.

This years initiative builds on the success of My Little Library 2022 when over 46,000 book bags were distributed to children starting school, in their local library. The initiative resulted in over 37,000, 4 and 5-year-old children joining the library.



Each My Little Library Book Bag contains:

Three books on starting school, making friends and being comfortable to be yourself

A story card on going to the library

A postcard the child can write or draw on and send to their new teacher, or bring to give to the teacher on their first day at school

Their very own library card and special My Little Library cardholder

Book bags are available in both Irish and English.

Inviting all children starting school this year to come and collect their Book Bag, Right to Read Coordinator, Amye Quigley said:

Kildare Libraries look forward to welcoming all 4 and 5-year-old children starting school and their families to collect their book bags and discover the benefits of library membership. Reading is so important for developing imagination, creativity, empathy and for supporting children as they grow. Stories can really help children to understand and deal with the stepping stones of life, such as starting school.

We hope that these new library members and their families will come back regularly to refill their book bags and take part in all the events and activities we have on offer at the library.

The My Little Library Book Bag initiative is a collaboration between libraries and the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth as part of the First 5 Strategy.

Children and their parents or guardians can collect the bags at any library throughout Kildare.
Ministers have agreed to pay out 1.5 million euro to a refugee relocation scheme instead of following through with a past commitment to take in 350 additional international protection applicants.

Ireland had agreed to take in the 350 applicants two years ago as part of a Europe-wide initiative to ease the burden on Mediterranean countries dealing with an influx of refugees from Africa.

The Government has now opted to make the financial contribution of 1.5 million euro to the Voluntary Solidarity Mechanism instead of taking in the refugees.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the move reflected how circumstances had changed fundamentally in two years, with Ireland now under intense pressure having taken in about 100,000 refugees, from Ukraine and other countries, in the last year.

About two years ago, we decided as a Government that we would help the countries in the Mediterranean, the Taoiseach told reporters outside Government Buildings in Dublin.

At the time, they were experiencing a migration crisis, huge numbers of people coming from Africa to the Mediterranean.

We decided that we would take 350 asylum seekers from those Mediterranean countries at the Council of Europe.

Things have changed fundamentally since then. Were now one of the countries under pressure because we have taken in nearly 100,000 people, mainly from Ukraine but also from other parts of the world.

That changes things and we are now no longer able to accept those 350 people from the Mediterranean. But we are going to make a financial contribution instead, which is allowed under the voluntary effort-sharing regulation.

Mr Varadkar insisted Ireland would not put a limit on the number of people seeking international protection in Ireland.

Thats not realistic, its not legal, its not practical, he said.

But we can manage the flows better and thats one thing that were trying to do.

Mr Varadkar expressed concern at the Biblical scenes of flooding in Ukraine following the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine.

He said the incident could see more Ukrainian refugees coming to Ireland from the affected areas.

We have to prepare for the possibility that well see an increase in Ukrainians to other parts of Europe, including Ireland, but also we need to make sure that Ukraine gets the humanitarian assistance that it needs, he said.
Nearly three years after then-President Donald Trump first rejected the upcoming results of the 2020 presidential election, the Ravalli County Commission hosted a panel of speakers questioning the outcome and integrity of elections in Ravalli County and across Montana.

While a crowd of nearly 400 people filled the Ravalli County Fairgrounds Events Center on Monday night for the meeting, few were left after it adjourned nearly five hours later. Former Ravalli County Sherriff Jay Printz described the event as a big old bitch session.

Jesus, its like mob rule here, Printz said after several speakers accused Ravalli County officials of numerous discredited claims of election fraud. Every one of these people I know are people of integrity. Youre lucky to have them. Not one of these guys here is corrupt, or dishonest, or doing anything illegal. These people are my neighbors for Christ's sake. I grew up in this county. I'm a fourth-generation Bitterrooter. How many of you in here can say that?

The organizers of the meeting were Tim and Patt Hancock of Stevensville, who had presented a petition alleging widespread election crimes signed by 350 people to the commissioners. The event was billed as a Special Ravalli County Commission Meeting and Public Forum on election integrity.

We believe the 2020 election was stolen said Tim Hancock in his opening remarks.

Ravalli County Clerk and Recorder Regina Plettenberg, Sherriff Steve Holton and Administrative Assistant Chris Taggart joined Ravalli County commissioners Dan Huls, Jeff Burrows and Greg Chilcott on the stage. Leaning against the table where county officials were seated was a sign stating that Montanas entire election infrastructure has been corrupted. The sign included references to Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg, phantom voters and harvested ballots. Similar signs questioning the outcome of the 2020 presidential election were propped up around the venue and tables lining the back of the room were filled with literature promoting beliefs prevalent in the election denial movement.

This meeting came about largely because of the Hancock family, Commissioner Dan Huls said in a brief introduction. Tim and Patt came and sat with us one day, and we discussed many of these issues. They invited us to host the meeting, and we thought that we would do that and hope that it will be a productive meeting.

Following Huls comments, the public platform was handed over to a panel of speakers who promoted theories of a stolen election. Most of the claims had been previously debunked over the years. Nevertheless, the speakers repeatedly accused both Plettenburg and the county commissioners of illegal activity related to the funding and certification of the 2020 election.

Montana Election Integrity Project President and panel speaker Jane Rectenwald accused Plettenberg and the Ravalli County Clerk and Recorders Office of illegally taking nearly $20,000 from Zuckerberg through an organization called the Center for Tech and Civic Life. The nonprofit distributed $350 million in donations from Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan to election offices across the U.S. in the form of COVID-response grants during the height of the pandemic.

The donations were intended to help elections officials prepare for the unprecedented challenge of administering an election in a pandemic, yet ended up inciting backlash from conservative groups suspicious that the contributions may have tilted the outcome of the 2020 presidential race. Many GOP-led states made moves to ban private donations to elections offices in the years following. The grant project has been pejoratively nicknamed Zuckerbucks by some on the right who have questioned the outcome of the 2020 election, a term Rectenwald used frequently throughout her presentation.

The Anti-Defamation League has denounced the use of the term as antisemitic. National Director of the Anti-Defamation League Jonathan Greenblatt condemned the use of the term by Republicans at a public town hall following the 2020 election.

The term Zuckerbucks is a revival of the antisemitic age-old stereotype that wealthy Jews maintain control over governments, Greenblatt said. Those who use the term Zuckerbucks are dangerously enabling (this) antisemitic trope.

Plettenberg defended the work of her office and explained how the chain-of-custody and audit process in the county work to audience members.

We are not your enemy, she said.

Ravalli County Sherriff Steve Holton defended Plettenberg and the commissioners when asked if he had seen evidence of illegal activity pertaining to the 2020 election in Ravalli County.

There's no evidence that an elected official in Ravalli County knowingly or purposely violated any Montana election laws, he said.

Rectenwald went on to accuse the commissioners of illegally certifying the 2020 election and questioned if signatures on the state canvass certification for 2020 and 2022 were fraudulent. Rectenwalds calls for the Ravalli County commissioners to decertify the 2020 election results elicited cheers from the crowd.

Rectenwald was also part of a group of Republicans that raised allegations of voting irregularities in Missoula County during the 2020 elections, resulting in a private audit of all the county's ballots. The Missoula County Republican Central Committee investigated the group's ballot audit and found no evidence of fraud.

When Holton was pushed further by an audience member as to whether he had seen evidence presented during the evenings presentation, Holton stated that based on the testimony given there, he did not see any evidence of illegal activity by any elected official in Ravalli County.

That's dangerous territory, Holton said. You do not want your sheriff to walk into any crime and collect evidence for what he already believes and disregarding everything else.

Missoula electrical engineer and army veteran Greg Woodward also spoke on the panel. Much of Woodwards presentation was predicated on previously debunked analysis by Ohio math teacher Douglas Frank, who Woodward referred to as a renowned physicist. The mathematical equation that Frank and his followers claim proves the 2020 election was stolen has been discredited by multiple mathematicians and election experts since the election, but that has not stopped the theory from gaining traction in the years since with those who believe the election was rigged.

Panel members claims also included allegations of illegal ballots being printed, ballot stuffing, voter fraud, inflated voter rolls and collusion among companies such as Dominion, Smartmatic, and voting tabulator manufacturer ES&S. The last speaker, a woman from Venezuela identified only as Vesna, even went so far as to call the 2020 election part of a world coup during her speech about living under former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez rule.

Audience member Mike Webber of Hamilton questioned the statements made throughout the night during the question-and-answer period and reminded the audience that Fox News had paid out a $787.5 million settlement to Dominion for broadcasting election fraud claims a Delaware Superior Court jury found defaming and false. Webber was shouted down by the audience.

I think I have freedom of speech too, Webber said before returning to his seat. This is pretty hostile.

Many in the audience disputed that Fox was held liable for defamation, shouting that there was no settlement.

Webber was later heard saying this is a disgrace as he got up to leave the event.
The Irish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ISPCA) has launched an Urgent National Emergency Appeal, Stop the Pain, in response to an 80% rise of animal cruelty cases across the nation.

The post-pandemic surge in cases has placed a significant financial burden and demand for space on the charity. More innocent animals are being abandoned, abused or neglected than ever before.

The most significant impact is the large number of cruelty cases being encountered by the ISPCA at this time, explains Dr. Pete Wedderburn, the veterinary surgeon, journalist, and trustee of the ISPCA. He emphasises the urgency of the situation explaining that the impact of the pandemic is going to stay for some time into the future.

To accommodate the growing number of animals rescued, the ISPCAs facilities are at full capacity and has been forced to install temporary facilities and utilise private kennels, leading to substantial, unforeseen costs.

The ISPCA has rescued almost 700 animals in the first quarter of 2023 alone, where dogs, in particular, have been at the forefront of cases of abandonment or cruelty since the pandemic. With more animals expected to be rescued, the financial strain on the ISPCA is expected to escalate further.

Consequently, their four centres in Donegal, Longford, Mallow and Wicklow have reached maximum occupancy levels. To meet the demand, the ISPCA has seen estimated annual costs rise to over 500,000 solely to house dogs in private kennels or temporary facilities.

Dr Cyril Sullivan, CEO of the ISPCA, said that the organisation is in crisis, seeing unprecedented numbers of animals being rescued from cruel situations.

Several factors have contributed to the surge in cruelty cases encountered by the ISPCA inspectorate since late 2022, continuing into 2023. Key among these factors is the significant slowdown in the response to rehoming healthy dogs, said Dr Sullivan.

When animals are found to be suffering, the Irish public and ISPCA supporters understand that the charity will take immediate action to ensure their safety. But the financial burden of providing secure housing and care for these animals has become overwhelming. Your support can make all the difference, animals need our help now, there is no time to waste. We need your support, added the CEO of the ISPCA.

Donations can be made at www.ispca.ie/donate. Follow the ISPCA on Instagram @ispca_official or Facebook @irish.spca to find out more about their work and their Stop the Pain campaign.
A secure supply of high-quality drinking water is essential for the health of every citizen and is critical for future economic growth and development. The population in Ireland is set to rise by up to 40% by 2050 yet Uisce Eireann states that 58% of water supply zones have a supply risk even at current levels of water demand.

After a few weeks of dry weather in May and June this year, water supplies are under increasing pressure due to increased water demand, over a period of warm, dry weather. The latest news on Uisce Eireanns website highlights many counties across Ireland are having supply issues, where Uisce Eireann is urging communities to conserve water.

There are many water supplies requiring localised water conservation measures, including overnight water restrictions in places in Tipperary, Cork, Kilkenny and Waterford, or tankering water to reservoirs in parts of Clare and Limerick.

In 2018 and 2020, we required national water restrictions in Ireland, including hosepipe bans following extended periods of dry weather. Climate change in Ireland will result in decreased rainfall in summer with longer dry and drought periods, adding additional pressure to water supply.

The Government has committed to building 33,000 homes every year for the next 10 years. This along with increasing population and greater economic activity will put additional demands on water resources.

Climate change is predicted to reduce water availability, particularly in the south and east of the country. Making new homes water efficient could reduce domestic water demand by 20% and thus provide water savings and reduce pressure on supplies.

We sometimes forget that the water from our taps has been taken from a local river, lake or well and undergone a costly process of treatment and pumping before it reaches our homes, says Dr Matt Crowe of the National Water Forum. We need to pay a lot more attention to conserving this precious and expensive resource so that there is an adequate supply available as our population increases and our climate changes. At a minimum, we need to ensure that all new homes are built to be water efficient, added.

Building Regulations should be updated to include mandatory water efficiency targets for new buildings, which could include water efficiency measures such as low flow showerheads, aerated taps, dual flush toilets, or Rainwater harvesting as a means of meeting those targets.

These could reduce water demand in new buildings and provide energy saving benefits, reduce costs to the taxpayer for abstracting and treating water, and help protect the aquatic environment from over-abstraction. Saving water will reduce demand and ease pressure on supplies.

The Water Forum believes that the Government needs a committed strategy for water conservation that includes a programme of actions to implement water saving measures nationally. A national water conservation team should be established to develop and implement this government-led water conservation strategy.
National Broadband Ireland (NBI), the company rolling out the new high speed fibre broadband network under the Governments National Broadband Plan (NBP) today announced that surveying works for just over 3,700 Leitrim premises in the Manorhamilton and Rooskey deployment areas are now completed.

In Leitrim, there are approximately 12,000 premises in the Intervention Area (IA), which includes homes, farms, commercial businesses, and schools. Under the National Broadband Plan, Leitrim will see an investment of 46M in the new high speed fibre network.

This will enable e-learning, remote monitoring of livestock or equipment, e-health initiatives, better energy efficiency in the home, and facilitate increased levels of remote working.

There are 2,532 premises in the Manorhamilton deployment area, which includes townlands and villages in the surrounds of Manorhamilton town, have recently completed surveying work. These initial works pave the way for the next stage of deploying fibre on poles/ducts and includes the erection of poles, unblocking of ducts, and the insertion of sub duct into existing ducts, for the fibre to be installed.

An additional 1,206 premises have also completed surveying works in the Rooskey deployment area. This area includes the village of Rooskey as well as nearby townlands such as Drumard and Beihy.

These vital survey works enable Fibre -to-the-Home" network designs to be completed for each of the 12,000 premises in the Intervention Area, as identified by the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications.

National Broadband Ireland contractors have been on the ground across the country and over 154,824 premises nationwide are available to order broadband with 42,805 homes and businesses connected to the NBI network so far.

Additionally, there are 895 homes, businesses, and farms in County Leitrim that can order or pre-order high-speed, reliable broadband. National Broadband Ireland is calling on people living in Leitrim to visit https://nbi.ie/eoi/ to sign up for updates on when they will be able to connect.

Our teams continue to work on the rollout plan and steady progress has been made from surveying, design, build to connection works in County Leitrim. We are acutely aware that people want access to high-speed broadband and our goal is to deliver that as quickly as possible, said NBI Chief Executive Peter Hendrick.

Momentum has been steadily building in the progression of the National Broadband Plan rollout, with homes across the country being connected to high-speed broadband. Survey and designs are an important part of mapping out how every home, farm and business will be connected, and they provide the blueprint for how the NBI fibre is laid.

The BCPs are also a key milestone in delivering access to high-speed internet in the Intervention Area, and were delighted to see these being connected for access - internally and externally - right across Leitrim.
Opposition leader, Ousmane Sonko, waves to his supporters during a meeting in Ziguinchor on May 24, 2023. MUHAMADOU BITTAYE / AFP

Senegalese opposition figure Ousmane Sonko, a confirmed candidate in the 2024 presidential election threatened with disqualification, issued a risky new challenge to those in power. On Wednesday, May 24, the politician announced his forthcoming return to Dakar at the head of a popular convoy  which he calls the "caravan of freedom"  across the country.

"I'll meet you in Dakar. Either (President) Macky Sall steps back, or we will face him to put an end to this," Sonko told hundreds of cheering supporters outside his home in the southern city of Ziguinchor after the second day of his  held in his absence  rape trial wrapped. "Where will the final battle take place?" he added. "It will happen in Dakar... If you are 2,000, let 1,500 go to Dakar to continue the fight."

Sonko declared his intention to return to the capital by road, turning the 500-kilometer journey into the "caravan of freedom." He then paraded the Senegalese flag amidst supporters chanting and singing his name. He later clarified on social networks that he intended to set off on Thursday and called on the Senegalese people to converge to Dakar.

This is a new act of defiance against the authorities on the part of the president of the Pastef-Les Patriotes party, who came in third in the 2019 presidential race, a divisive personality but popular with the under-20s who make up half of the Senegalese population.

Political and judicial tug of war

On Tuesday, Sonko was conspicuously absent from his rape trial, saying he feared for his safety and questioning the impartiality of the judiciary. He has always refuted the accusations and cried that the authorities are plotting to keep him out of the presidential election. Here, the stakes are higher than just morality: Sonko is risking his eligibility, already at risk following a six-month suspended sentence for defamation of a minister. The "caravan of freedom" promises to be a hazardous exercise, as it gates closer to the date of the verdict that's set for June 1.

Several days before his trial, Sonko took refuge in Ziguinchor, the town where he is mayor. His supporters set up a tight and threatening guard around his home to forestall any arrest attempt. The authorities and the justice system have decided not to seek his arrest. The mobilization of his supporters, particularly on the occasion of his appointments with the courts, has regularly given rise to incidents and disturbances, including fatalities.

In March 2021, Sonko's arrest as he traveled in procession to the court where he had been summoned when the alleged rape case had first broken, helped trigger several days of rioting that left at least a dozen people dead. Tensions are expected to run high again around June 1st. Withdrawing to Ziguinchor "bought some time" and "remobilized our forces everywhere," Sonko declared on Wednesday.

The political-judicial tug-of-war waged by this opposition figure has been making headlines since 2021. The soap opera reached a new climax on Tuesday with a fast-paced trial, where journalists shared the details in real-time with the general public via the Internet, breaking with Senegal's tradition of modesty.

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Adji Sarr under police protection

Prosecutor Abdou Karim Diop called for Sonko to be sentenced to ten years imprisonment for rape, or at least five years imprisonment for "corruption of the youth," as well as one year's imprisonment for the death threats he allegedly made against the complainant.

Sonko is the defendant in a complaint lodged by Adji Sarr, a 23-year-old former employee of the Sweet Beaute massage parlor. The young woman, who became a celebrity in her own right and has been placed under police protection, maintained at the trial that Sonko had abused her "five times" between 2020 and early 2021, and had threatened to kill her if she spoke out.

Sonko described her on Wednesday evening as a "young girl who has been manipulated, promised a diplomatic passport and exile abroad, as well as large sums of money," a "poor young lady who is not so innocent, as she could have retracted her statement a long time ago." "Sooner or later, she'll pay a high price for her crime," he added. Sarr has always persisted in demanding justice. The government denies any manipulation of the justice system, claiming that this is a private matter.

Le Monde with AFP Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.
A view shows a damaged multi-story apartment block following a reported drone attack in Voronezh, Russia, on June 9, 2023. VLADIMIR LAVROV / REUTERS

A drone hit a residential building in Russia's southern city of Voronezh on Friday, June 9, injuring two people, the local governor said.

Drone attacks have hit Russian cities  including the capital Moscow  often in recent months as Kyiv says it is preparing for a major counteroffensive. Friday's attack was the first in Voronezh, a city of some 1 million people that lies in a region deeper inside Russia than Belgorod, which has been heavily shelled in recent weeks.

"A drone fell on Belinsky Street in Voronezh," the governor of the region, Alexander Gusev, said on Telegram. He added that at least two people were injured in the attack, some 200 kilometers from the Ukraine border. Belinsky Street is in the center of the city, near Voronezh State University. The Kremlin said security services were working at the site.

"The Kyiv regime continues to attack civilian infrastructure, residential houses," its spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. "We will continue the fight and the special operation," he added, using Moscow's term for its offensive in Ukraine that was launched in February 2022.

Russian state media showed images of a building that had some shattered windows and part of its wall was blackened, where the drone had apparently hit. The announcement that Voronezh had been targeted came as the neighboring Belgorod region  which has seen thousands evacuated from border areas and an unprecedented incursion from Ukraine  continued to be shelled.

Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said the border district of Shebekino, which has been the most affected by the attacks, had been struck 195 times with "various ammunition" on Thursday.

"In the city of Shebekino, strikes were carried out in residential areas and the industrial zone," he added. Gladkov said the border village of Novaya Tavolzhanka was hit by at least 10 rocket attacks. Authorities have evacuated border towns and villages to the regional hub of Belgorod amid the increased shelling.

Drone attacks have hit Russian cities throughout Moscow's offensive in Ukraine but have in recent months intensified. Moscow was hit by an unprecedented drone attack late in May.

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At a gathering of Donald Trump supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, where former New Jersey governor Chris Christie announced his candidacy for president of the United States, on June 6, 2023. JOSEPH PREZIOSO / AFP

Is the future written in the past for the American right? The presidential election may still be a long way off, but with 17 months to go before the fateful day, the race for the Republican nomination is starting to look familiar. As in 2016, the number of contenders is swelling, and Donald Trump is delighted. This week, three names were added to the seven already in the running: former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former vice president Mike Pence and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

Experts all believe that the growing number of bids favors the former president, who managed to stay in the spotlight by rejecting the result of the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden. He has drawn part of the Republican base into this lie. Trump is more than 30 points ahead of Ron DeSantis in the polls. It is DeSantis' inability to establish himself as a credible alternative that has motivated the competition.

The Florida governor, backed by powerful donors, believes he can reverse the negative trend. He is secretly counting on the mounting number of legal proceedings against Trump. Other hopefuls, such as Senator Tim Scott, are waiting for the first televised debates in August to enter the electoral field. Some see their approach as a long-term investment. It's about making a name for themselves amongst the general public and the national media, or about already betting on a post-Trump era.

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Christie offers himself as a sacrifice to destroy Trump

Christie, for his part, is motivated by the hunt. A former Trump ally after having run in 2016, he has turned into a fierce critic over the past two years. Now he's back in the race. With his smooth talk and taste for political combat, he believes he's the only one capable of delivering brutal blows to the former president. Christie is offering himself as a sacrifice to destroy Trump. Success is far from guaranteed  unlike the spectacle  but he has nothing to lose.

"The reason I'm going after Trump is twofold," he explained on Tuesday to supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire. "One, he deserves it. And two, it's the way to win." A regular on television, Christie spoke without notes but with humor, making fun of himself, an insurmountable bar for DeSantis and Trump. Comparing the latter to Voldemort, the villain in the Harry Potter books whose name no one dares utter, the former governor portrayed him as someone "who is obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistake."

Others have decided to back away from diving into the race, like Chris Sununu. The long-anticipated New Hampshire governor intends to influence the campaign from the outside, but he shares Christie's analysis. In a Washington Post op-ed published on June 5, Sununu explained that the Grand Old Party must move beyond the so-called culture wars or risk alienating young voters, independents and suburban mothers. A Trump nomination would be a disaster. "If he is the nominee, Republicans will lose again," he stressed. "We must not be complacent, and candidates should not get into this race to further a vanity campaign, to sell books or to audition to serve as Donald Trump's vice president."

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Men from the Eastern Sudanese Beja tribe shout slogans as they reject the presence of Volker Perthes, UN Special Representative in Sudan, following the crisis in Sudan's capital Khartoum, in the city of Port Sudan, Sudan, May 17, 2023. REUTERS/Ibrahim Mohammed Ishak NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES STRINGER / REUTERS

"The Government of the Republic of Sudan has notified the Secretary-General of the United Nations that it has declared Mr. Volker Perthes (...) persona non grata as of today," the Sudanese ministry of foreign affairs said in a statement on Thursday. The declaration has been released just weeks after army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan accused Perthes of stoking the country's conflict and requested his removal.

Since late last year, Perthes and the UN-integrated transition assistance mission he heads in war-torn Sudan have been targeted by military and Islamist-backed protests denouncing perceived foreign interference. In a letter to the UN last month, Sudan's de facto leader Burhan blamed the envoy for exacerbating fighting between the army and the paramilitaries, accused him of not respecting "national sovereignty" and demanded he be replaced.

Volker Perthes was in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) for a series of diplomatic talks when the statement was released  according to the UN mission's Twitter feed. UN chief Antonio Guterres and members of the UN Security Council have stood by Perthes. But last week, the Security Council voted to extend the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS)'s mandate for just six months. Created in June 2020 to support Sudan's democratic transition after the fall of Omar al-Bashir a year earlier, UNITAMS had previously been renewed annually for a year.

Le Monde with AFP
The International Court of Justice in The Hague on June 6, 2023. REMKO DE WAAL / AFP

The International Court of Justice gave the green light Friday, June 9, to Ukraine's allies to support it in its legal fight against Russia. Judges issued an order Friday clearing 32 countries including France, the United Kingdom and Germany to support Ukraine. "The court concludes that the declarations of intervention filed in this case... are admissible," the court said. However, the ICJ dismissed a bid by the United States to join the case.

Ukraine dragged Moscow to the ICJ in The Hague shortly after the February 2022 invasion. Judges last year issued a preliminary order telling Moscow to suspend its military operations in Ukraine. Many of Ukraine's allies then asked to be allowed to "intervene" in the case, in which Kyiv accuses Moscow of falsely using allegations of genocide in eastern Ukraine to justify its invasion, and of planning genocide itself.

The allies' interventions mainly concern whether the ICJ has jurisdiction in the case, a process that could take months or even years. Ukraine has alleged that Russia broached the UN genocide convention by its stated justification early in the war that it invaded to halt what it called genocide in pro-Russian areas of eastern Ukraine. The ICJ's order in March last year that Russia must stop its invasion was just a preliminary ruling, pending a decision on whether it is competent to deal with it or not.

The ruling comes as the court is dealing with a separate case filed by Ukraine alleging that Russia backed separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine for years before the invasion.

The ICJ was created after World War II to deal with disputes between UN member states. Its decisions are binding although it has no means to enforce them.

Le Monde with AFP
OOLA farmer Martin Stapleton has officially confirmed his long-rumored intention to run for president of the Irish Farmers Association (IFA) in November.

He made the announcement at Wednesday night's monthly IFA county executive meeting

Mr Stapleton is following in the footsteps of superb farm leaders from Limerick - Paddy Fitzgerald, Munster vice-president and a founding member of IFA; Willie Staunton from Galbally, another Munster vice-president; Richard Kennedy from Clarina, deputy president, and John Dillon from Pallasgreen, IFA president 2002-2005.

Mr Stapleton is currently chair of IFAs Rules and Privileges Committee and National Returning Officer, previously he was chair of IFAs much respected and influential Farm Business Committee.

On the night Mr Stapleton's decision was welcomed by John Dillon, Richard Kennedy, Limerick IFA chairman Sean Lavery and former county chairs Mike OFlynn and Shay Galvin.

Every one of them felt that Martin Stapleton is a man for these challenging times for farmers and will make a great president. Their active support is guaranteed, and they urged Limerick farmers to get behind the election campaign when asked.

The first up to welcome Mr Stapleton's announcement was Oola IFA branch chair Mary Breen.

Mr Stapleton revealed a few key themes in his speech to the room.

Renewing respect for farmers and renewing the power of IFA will be the cornerstone of my presidential campaign," he said.

Mr Stapleton emphasised that unity, strength and delivery was an old IFA motto and that unity and cohesion can be our greatest assets in the farming sector"

"We can achieve a huge amount, by coming together as a strong, unified farming organization, representative of all farming enterprises and all farmers, full and part-time, rural and urban, big and small," he said

Mr Stapleton said Freedom to farm for ourselves was very important to Irish farmers but as custodians of the countryside, we understand the challenge of reducing emissions and that we have a part to play in protecting water quality and supporting biodiversity.

He also countered that our livelihoods must be protected and we will not put at risk any hard won economic and social gains that sustain rural families.

Mr Lavery urged Limerick farmers to "leave on the green jersey of Limerick after Sundays Munster final in the TUS Gaelic Grounds!" and get behind one of their own in the coming months during the long, tough and exhausting campaign.
As the debate rages over the killing of 1,100 Yellowstone National Park bison by tribal hunters this year theres plenty of finger-pointing to go around. But the bottom line is the buffalo are the true victims here.

Unfortunately, way too much human-centric drama is being played out in the name of rights and sovereignty and management by tribal nations, organizations, and individuals. Whats missing is attention to what the buffalo actually need, how that can be achieved, and the very real ecological impacts of the current mismanagement.

There is no doubt that Montanas livestock industrys intolerance of wild buffalo is at the core of this centuries-old tragedy. No one argues that. And if you dont think historic tribal treaties are being manipulated to facilitate the destruction of the last wild buffalo, think again. The Montana Department of Livestock is sitting back enjoying the spectacle of watching what should be natural allies  tribal nations and bison conservationists  attacking each other while tribal hunters do the agencys dirty work of keeping native bison penned up within Yellowstones borders.

But if you pull the trigger, can you blame someone else for making you do it? No, you cannot.

No one is forcing state or tribal hunters to participate in this sham of a hunt.

No one is making them kill entire family groups including pregnant females heavy with calves.

No one is forcing anyone to shoot at running buffalo, blowing off their jaws and legs.

No one is forcing anyone to participate in the very thing that is preventing restoration of the last wild buffalo. These are individuals making choices for themselves and they must take responsibility for their actions.

And finally, no one is scapegoating the tribal hunters who shot three-fourths of the bison killed this year, equaling one-fifth of all the Parks bison.

The question is, what are we going to do about it? Is it right and just to serve the livestock industry and kill as many buffalo as you can because you have a treaty right to do it?

Why not refuse to participate, instead? Why not work to demand that wild buffalo have an inherent right to roam freely throughout the lands that are their birthright, just like elk, deer, antelope and other native wildlife on this landscape?

The Montana Stockgrowers Association called buffalo advocates selfish. How absurd is that when its the livestock industry that wages the largest war against Western wildlife and wildlands? The livestock industry cuts up the land, kills the wildlife, fences it off, and cries mine! mine! mine! Yet accuses bison advocates of being the selfish ones.

The fact is ranchers cattle infected the native bison with brucellosis. Now, they say bison cannot live as free-roaming wildlife because they might spread brucellosis to cattle. But not one incident of bison-to-cattle disease transmission has ever happened in the wild, not one.

Yet, after killing one-fifth of Yellowstones bison, Montanas Governor Gianforte is threatening to sue the Park if it doesnt drive the population down to 3,000 animals, even though the Parks managers have stated Yellowstone can sustain 11,000 buffalo.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service recently conducted a status review after determining that petitions to list the Yellowstone herds under the Endangered Species Act "present substantial scientific or commercial information indicating that the petitioned actions may be warranted." Without this protection, there will be no end in sight to this continuing tragedy.
A LIMERICK judge and a TD highlighted delays in the court system within days of each other.

Judge Tom ODonnell, who has raised the time it takes for justice to be served on a number of occasions, was speaking during a case at Limerick Circuit Court,

The offences, which the defendant pleaded guilty to, date back to late 2017 / early 2018 - almost six years ago.

The garda who said Facebook messages were involved explained they had to apply to Facebook in America, which took two years to get the requested evidence.

There is no criticism. We are where we are, said Judge ODonnell. The judge spoke of the large passage of time when sentencing the guilty party.

It has taken so long to get here - it is May, 2023. Both parties have been living with the case, said Judge ODonnell, who added that it was most unfortunate for the victim they had to wait this long to deal with matters.

Days later Deputy Maurice Quinlivan said: We have a state-of-the-art courthouse opened in 2018 on Mulgrave Street, that is rarely if ever, fully occupied, despite a large backlog of cases, cases that need to be addressed. It has six courtrooms, and it would be quite unusual to see more than half of these courtrooms in operation on any given day.

Two weeks ago on the court roll over call there were 246 cases waiting in the circuit court. At present, those cases are all awaiting a trial by jury, those are just criminal cases. In the civil circuit court there are around 1,000 cases waiting.

The Sinn Fein deputy, who was speaking on the Court Proceedings (Delays) Bill 2023, said facing a court appearance be it as an accused, a witness or a victim is a stressful time in peoples lives.

Especially for the victim, assuming they have survived, it can often be worse for their families. Enacting this bill on its own will not ensure that trials are held promptly.

We have a shortage of judges that has impacted the ability to consistently deliver justice in a timely manner.

The recent commitment to 24 new judges in 2023 with a further 20 to follow is welcome. However, more needs to be done to ensure that trials are held in a fair and prompt manner. The backlog impacts countless lives, said Deputy Quinlivan.

The TD said it has been confirmed to him by members of the legal profession that the Central Criminal Court will not sit in Limerick again this year .

This must be reversed, and the court must sit in Limerick again in 2023 to try deal with some of the backlog which has accrued. The failure to sit locally has a huge knock-on financial impact for those involved and their families. Rather than travelling to the courthouse and home, many must embark on long journeys to and from Dublin, often for extended periods.

They often must travel up and down to Dublin many times in a month, at expense or spend days in expensive hotel rooms, the price of which are often beyond the means of many. I know one family who shared the same carriage as the accused on a train from Limerick to Dublin.

Deputy Quinlivan concluded: We need a permanent sitting of the central criminal court in Limerick.

We cannot accept having a specialist criminal courthouse where at present a number of courtrooms are unused every day.
THE DEVELOPER behind a part of a new neighbourhood in Limerick has issued a major update.

As revealed by the Limerick Leader / Limerick Live earlier this year, a new 600m scheme is being planned on a brownfield site at Towlerton, near Ballysimon.

Headed up by Rudi Butler, the son of prominent city developer Richard, 25 hectares of land has been acquired near an area where the M7 and N24 converge.

The development will contain a medical centre, and will be anchored by a new branch of discount retailer Lidl and the new Educate Together secondary school.

Now representatives of Lidl Ireland - which submitted parts of the original planning application to council - has provided more information on its side of it.

Given the size and scale of the new developments, a number of planning applications have been made.

Lidl's planning application envisages four buildings.

A new branch of the supermarket would be joined by a cafe, a three-storey building with space for six shops, or alternatively, office space or medical use.

Further to this, a six-storey building with space for four shops at ground level, and 38 apartments in the five floors above is planned.

Alternatively, the ground floor of this complex could be used for office space or medical use.

Some 42 new documents have been provided to city planners providing information on the environmental measures to be taken, predicted usage numbers of the new buildings and a retail impact assessment.

Although the application was lodged last year, it was in effect paused while the council awaited these documents.

Now it is once again active, and a decision is due to be made by August 1 next.

Construction of the new secondary school is well under way with students set to move from their temporary premises at Salesians in the city centre by in 2024

Elsewhere, Bons Secours also has permission for a private hospital.

To add to this, a masterplan has been developed which envisages 300 apartments, offices and a hotel to the site on the east of the city.

Speaking earlier this year, Mr Butler said the massive scheme is projected to deliver up to 4,000 jobs, and it's hoped it can be delivered over five years.

Healy Partners Architects have prepared the masterplan strategy for the overall site.

Mr Butler has previously spoken of how he hopes the new development can provide accommodation for up to 500 people.

The apartments would be split between one-bed, two-bed and three-bed, he added.
UISCE Eireann has moved to reassure thousands of Limerick households impacted by a boil water notice that it is continuing its efforts to resolve the issue.

Since last month, around 7,000 customers on the Foynes/Shannon Estuary public water supply have been been advised to boil their water before they consume it.

The areas impacted are Askeaton, Foynes, Ballyhahill, Loghill, Ballysteen, Pallaskenry, Kildimo and Shanagolden and surrounding areas.

In a statement, issued this Friday evening, Uisce Eireann says it in partnership with Limerick City and County Council, continue to progress works to lift the notice.

While drinking water experts from Uisce Eireann and Limerick City and County Council are working to rectify the issues at the treatment plant, all customers on this supply are advised to continue to boil their water before use until further notice, the statement explains.

Uisce Eireanns Duane OBrien said there is unfortunately no short term solution to a problem of this scale and explained the works which are being carried out to fix it.

We are progressing with plans to install an ultraviolet reactor at the Shannon Estuary Water Treatment Plant, Mr OBrien said.

This reactor will render any cryptosporidium in the water inactive and it is a large piece of equipment, bespoke to the site and it requires a significant amount of accommodation work in advance of its installation.

Uisce Eireanns drinking water standards, as per EU Drinking Water regulations, are strict and include wide safety margins.

Vulnerable customers who have registered with Uisce Eireann receive direct communication on such notices. Alternatively, the public can check if their property is included by visiting the website and entering the propertys Eircode or by calling the Uisce Eireann customer care helpline, open 24/7, on 1800 278 278.
As the Covid pandemic is almost over, tech Giant Google has become stricter regarding the attendance of its employees. According to a report by Bloomberg, Google has told its staff that their office attendance will now become part of 'performance reviews'.

The report said they viewed a mail sent by Google to its staff which mentioned the stricter in-office policies.

Google's Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told employees in the memo that employees who are willing to work remotely full-time will be considered "by exceptions only". Google has reversed the pandemic policy that previously allowed thousands of staff members to relocate away from company offices.

In April 2022, Google told its employees would be expected back in the office at least three days a week. However, now Google has made a new policy in which in-office attendance will be a key factor during the company's performance reviews.

The mail mentioned that managers will send reminders to staff who are "consistently absent from the office".

In February, Google Cloud staff were told to start sharing desks and attend office on alternate days.

In January, Alphabet enacted the largest job cuts in its history, slashing more than 6% of its workforce, or about 12,000 staffers. The company has also worked to reduce its real estate footprint after announcing a plan to spend $7 billion on new offices and data centers in 2021. In its first-quarter earnings report in April, Alphabet said it spent $564 million related to office-space reductions.

After the pandemic, tech companies are calling back employees to offices. Last week Meta told employees that they will be expected in the office three days a week.

Besides, JPMorgan Chase has also abandoned its hybrid attendance policy. E-commerce giant Amazon also told its employees in February to spend at least three days per week in the office. Apple Inc also asked its employees to be present in the office thrice a week. Disney, on the other hand, asked staff to return to the office four days a week.

The Alphabet Workers Union says it has 1,400-plus members. Google employed more than 190,000 people at year-end, along with contract staffers.
The shares of Aether Industries was up by nearly 4 per cent on Thursday after the company announced signed a licence agreement with Saudi Aramco Technologies Company for the commercialization of the sustainable Converge polyols technology.

The company's scrip rallied 7 per cent to touch a new-52 week high at 1,055.95 on BSE. Aether Industries stock closed 3.36 per cent up at 1,015 on BSE. On a year-to-date basis, the stock has surged 20 per cent , while it has gained 28 per cent in the past one year.

The agreement formally initiates Aethers activities towards the manufacturing and commercialization at Aether of the Converge polyols technology and product series, the manufacturing process for which has been previously jointly developed and validated at pre-commercial scale by Aramco and Aether.

We are excited to partner with Saudi Aramco Technologies Company to take the next step forward furthering commercialization of converge polyols. After working for several years collaboratively towards the development of the manufacturing technology for the Converge platform, we are happy to be chosen to commercialize the converge polyols,"said Aman Desai, promoter and director, Aether Industries.

"The Converge platform represents a novel and cutting-edge technology for the manufacture of more sustainable polyols that could contain up to 40 percent by weight carbon dioxide," he added.

On 7 May, Aether Industries signed a Letter of Intent (LoI) with one of the top 3 leading global Oil Field Services companies based in USA towards the finalization of a strategic supplier and contract manufacturing partnership.

The LoI paves the way for the execution of a Strategic Supply Agreement (SSA) between the two companies within 3 months of the LoI execution. The LoI specifies 4 strategic products of the new customer that will be contract manufactured by Aether as the first set of products in this new partnership
Government-backed largest aerospace and defense company, Hindustan Aeronautics witnessed a strong buying on Friday after it announced plans to consider a stock split. Today, the stock gained by more than 7% and also touched a new 52-week high. But the stock has been on a winning streak for six consecutive trading sessions. Overall, the June month has started on a bullish note for the stock.

At the time of writing, HAL traded at 3692.75 apiece, surging by 165.05 or 4.68%. However, the stock has zoomed by 7.3% with a new 52-week high of 3785 apiece in the second half of the current trading session.

On Thursday, in its regulatory filing, HAL said, a meeting of the board of directors of the company will be held on Tuesday, the 27th of June, 2023, to consider a proposal for the sub-division of equity shares.

Generally, in a stock split, the listed company increases the number of shares that are outstanding by issuing more shares to the current shareholders. The stock split also decreases the market price of the individual shares, however, does not result in changing the market capitalization of the company.

Read here: Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders share price up 272% in last one year; what should you do?

Among many benefits of the stock split, is also that these shares become more affordable for both existing and new investors. Additionally, the move boosts the listed company's liquidity.

HAL shares have been on a winning streak for six consecutive days now. The stock has advanced by 22.90% since June 2nd.

Earlier this week, in a research note dated June 7th, ICICI Securities highlighted that HAL's order book is likely to be boosted further.

The brokerage's note added, "HAL is optimistic on securing a contract worth Rs120bn for production of 12 additional Su-30MKI multirole fighters for the Indian Air Force by next year (FY25). Besides, management expects contract negotiation for 240 units of AL31FP engines at Rs260 billion to be concluded soon."

Further, the brokerage's note added, "HAL and General Electric are set to sign an agreement that will pave the way for development of infrastructure to support production and testing of new F414-INS6 engine for Tejas Mk2 fighter jet in India."

Finally, ICICI Securities said, It is anticipated that ToT and a percentage of local components will exceed 60%, thus, boosting domestic ecosystem. While baseline F414-INS6 engine (98KN) is also selected to power Twin-Engine Deck-Based Fighter (TEDBF) and AMCA Mk1, upgraded versions- F414-EPE and ceramic matrix composite enhanced core have the potential to cross 116KN and 130KN of thrust, respectively."

Know your inner investor Do you have the nerves of steel or do you get insomniac over your investments? Lets define your investment approach. Take the test
Stock market today: Amid Indian stock market sentiments turning cautious to weak as in last two sessions, some stocks have managed to outperform key benchmark indices and broad market indices. Mishtann Foods shares are one of them. This small-cap stock has been rising for the last four days, without being bothered by Dalal Street sentiments for last couple of sessions. The FMCG stock, in which Nomura Singapore owns 1.28 per cent stake or 1,28,25,854 company shares, witnessed buying interest in morning deals and hit intraday high of 8.71 apiece levels on BSE,, logging intraday rise of around 2.35 per cent.

Mishtann Foods Q4 results 2023

This small-cap Nomura Singapore-backed stock has been in uptrend after the announcement of Q4FY23 results. The small-cap company, which has a market cap of 861 crore, has reported near 10 per cent growth in revenue from operations to 168.89 crore, which stood at 153.47 crore in the corresponding period in previous fiscal. The FMCG company claimed this growth was primarily driven by various product launched by the company in domestic and international market.

Mishtann Foods claimed in its exchange communication that EBITDA increased by 4.57 per cent from 22.33 crore in Q4 FY22 to 23.35 crore in Q4 FY23. EBITDA margins decreased from 14.55 per cent in Q4 FY22 to 13.82 per cent in Q4 FY23 by 73 bps.

The company's PAT increased by 7.45 per cent from Rs. 13.15 crore in Q4 FY22 to Rs. 14.13 crore in Q4 FY23. PAT margins decreased from 8.57 per cent in Q4 FY22 to 8.36 per cent in Q4 FY23 by 21 bps.

Nomura Singapore shareholding

The FMCG company recently informed Indian exchange about Nomura Singapore raising its stake in the company to 1,28,25,854 Mishtann Foods shares, which is 1.28 per cent of total paid up capital of the company. As per the Mishtann Foods shareholding for January to March 2023 quarter, Nomura Singapore name is missing from the list of FIIs that owns more than 1 per cent stake in the company. This means, Nomura Singapore has bought shares in the company after the end of Q4FY23. However, it would be difficult to ascertain whether the FII bought all shares in Q1FY24 or it bought company shares to an extent that it came above 1 per cent of total paid up capital of the company.

As per the exchange rules, listed companies are bound to share names of all stakeholders who own more than one per cent share in the company. So, this is also a possibility that Nomura Singapore was owning stake in the small-cap FMCG company but its shareholding was below one per cent due to which its name was missing from the individual FIIs in the shareholding pattern of the company for Q4FY23.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD) on 9 June has said that Cyclone Biparjoy is set to intensify in the next 36 hours and will be heading north-northwestwards in the next two days.

The very severe cyclonic storm was located over the east-central Arabian Sea located 840-kilometer west-southwest of Goa and 870 km west-southwest of Mumbai at 11:30 pm on June 8, the IMD said. In a tweet, it wrote, Very severe cyclonic storm Biparjoy over east-central Arabian Sea at 2330 hours IST of 08th June, 2023 over about 840 km west-southwest of Goa, 870 km west-southwest of Mumbai. To intensify further gradually during next 36 hours and move nearly north-northwestwards in next 2 days."

The weather department has also advised fishermen not to venture into such cyclone-hit areas in the Arabian Sea. The Cyclone 'Biparjoy' got its name as suggested by Bangladesh. In Bengali, the word 'Biparjoy' holds the meaning of 'disaster' or calamity. The process of naming cyclones follows a rotational system among countries, adhering to specific guidelines that have been established.

Here's the list of city/states likely to be impacted by Cyclone Biparjoy

High-speed winds will affect weather in the Karnataka-Goa-Maharashtra coasts till June 10. Gale wind can reach a speed of 145-155 kmph gusting to 170 kmph over the central Arabian Sea.

The IMD has not yet predicted any major impact on countries adjoining the Arabian Sea, including India, Oman, Iran and Pakistan.

As per IMD, the most affected areas by the storm are expected to be the adjoining regions of the west-central and south Arabian Sea. Apart from this, coasts of north Kerala, Karnataka, and Goa is expected to be affected.

As per Skymet Weather, there will be a notable increase in rainfall along the Western Coast of India, spanning from Kerala to Maharashtra. The cyclone will facilitate the timely arrival of the monsoon in Mumbai. Between June 8 and 10, the sea conditions will be turbulent to extremely turbulent along the coasts of Karnataka and Maharashtra. Similarly, from June 9 to 12, the sea conditions will be rough along the Gujarat coast

The weather office has predicted heavy rainfall over Andaman & Nicobar Island, Kerala, South Interior Karnataka, Manipur, Mizoram, Assam, Meghalaya, and Arunachal Pradesh for the next three to four days.

As per IMD, Light/moderate fairly widespread rainfall with thunderstorm/lightning/gusty winds very likely over Kerala, Lakshadweep, Coastal & South Interior Karnataka; isolated to scattered activity over North Interior Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh during the week.

Moreover, IMD has also predicted heavy rainfall at isolated places over Andaman and Nicobar Islands during 8-10 June; Kerala during 8-12 June; Lakshadweep during 9th-11 June; and Coastal & South Interior Karnataka during 10-12 June.

IMD also said that Mumbai and Konkan regions are expected to receive rainfall till 12 June. The city of Mumbai is expected to witness strong winds and high waves along its coast and scattered rains are expected all over Maharashtra with Mumbai and Pune likely to receive some intense rainfall from 8 to 10 June.

According to Director of IMD's Meteorological Centre in Ahmedabad, Manorama Mohanty, the cyclone would bring light rains and thunderstorms in coastal regions, including south Gujarat and Saurashtra. All ports have been asked to hoist Distant Warning signal."

Jamnagar collector BA Shah said nearly 76,000 people reside in 22 villages situated on the coastline of the district and elaborate plans are in place to shift them to safer places if need arises. "In view of the formation of a cyclone in the Arabian Sea, all district as well as taluka officials have been asked to remain stationed at their headquarters until further orders. Fishermen registered in the district have already returned to the coast. If need arises, we will shift 76,000 people living near the coast to safer places," said Shah.

The IMD has also predicted light/moderate scattered to fairly widespread rainfall with thunderstorm/lightning very likely over the region during the week. Very Heavy rainfall very likely at isolated places over Manipur, Mizoram & Tripura on 09th and Assam & Meghalaya on 12 June; isolated heavy rainfall over Arunachal Pradesh and Assam and Meghalaya during 9-14 June; Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram & Tripura during 8-14 June.

In Northwest, light/moderate isolated to scattered rainfall with thunderstorm/lightning very likely over Western Himalayan Region& adjoining plains during 2nd half of the week.
India's External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar, on Friday clarified that India has no intention of joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), led by Western countries. Jaishankar stated that the military alliance is not suitable for India. NATO is an intergovernmental military alliance comprising 31 member states, primarily from Europe and North America, aimed at ensuring the freedom and security of its members through political and military cooperation.

India's stance comes in response to recent recommendations from a powerful Congressional Committee in the United States to strengthen NATO Plus by including India. NATO Plus is a security arrangement that brings together NATO and five aligned nations (Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, and South Korea) to enhance global defence cooperation. The proposal aimed to enable seamless intelligence sharing among these countries, allowing India to access advanced military technology without significant delays.

However, India rejected the suggestion, with Jaishankar stating that the NATO template does not apply to India". It is important to note that the proposal came ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the United States.

Why US invited India to join NATO?

The United States believes that India should join NATO to safeguard its borders from China and enhance global security to counter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region.

Winning the strategic competition with the Chinese Communist Party and ensuring the security of Taiwan demands the United States strengthen ties to our allies and security partners, including India. Including India in NATO Plus security arrangements would build upon the US and Indias close partnership to strengthen global security and deter the aggression of the CCP across the Indo-Pacific region," the Congressional Committee recommended.

According to the Congressional Committee recommendations, The United States should strengthen the NATO Plus arrangement to include India. The United States should also strengthen diplomatic deterrence by supporting Taiwans participation in international organizations and amending the TAIPEI Act to provide that the United States, alongside its allies and partners, should publicly oppose any attempts by the CCP to resolve the status of Taiwans sovereignty by intentionally misusing, misinterpreting, and misleading others on the underlying purpose of UN Resolution 2758 or the United States One China Policy."

Why India refused to join NATO?

On the contrary, India believes that it is capable of countering any Chinese aggression on its own. Moreover, the geographical separation between India and China by the Himalayan region makes it currently impossible for India to join an alliance with NATO.

Additionally, India highlights China's current economic crisis, as evidenced by declining exports and imports, which undermines the argument for joining NATO to counter Chinese aggression. India maintains that it can handle any challenges posed by China independently.

(LiveMint could not independently verify the report)
A man travelling to Dubai found himself in police custody after an incident at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi on June 7. The situation unfolded when a fellow passenger overheard him mentioning the word 'bomb' during a phone conversation.

The incident took place aboard a Vistara Airlines flight, numbered UK-941, scheduled to depart from Delhi to Mumbai at 4:55 pm. As the male passenger conversed with his mother, a lady seated nearby inadvertently caught snippets of his dialogue.

It appeared that the gentleman had mentioned the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) removing a coconut from his bag, suspecting it could be a potential explosive while simultaneously allowing a packet of gutkha, a kind of chewing tobacco, to remain in his possession.

Upon hearing the word 'bomb', the concerned lady promptly alerted the flight crew, who, in turn, notified the CISF. As a precautionary measure, both the male passenger and the woman who overheard the conversation were asked to disembark from the aircraft. The entire plane underwent a meticulous inspection, but no hazardous items were discovered. Despite this, the woman chose not to reboard the plane and made alternate travel arrangements to Mumbai.

The incident led to a two-hour delay before the flight was eventually cleared for departure. Subsequently, the male passenger was handed over to the IGI police, who have registered a case against him.

A false bomb threat earlier sent the Indian Railways into high alert when a hoax call was received regarding the presence of an explosive device on the Purushottam Express train at Dagmagpur station. The train was en route from Puri to Delhi when the incident unfolded.

The Station Superintendent (SS) at Dagmagpur received the hoax call, prompting immediate action and heightened security measures. Authorities swiftly initiated an investigation to ascertain the veracity of the threat.

After a thorough examination and verification process, it was confirmed that the bomb threat was indeed a malicious hoax. Consequently, the train, which had been halted as a precautionary measure, was given clearance to resume its journey.

(With ANI inputs)
The error that caused Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks to accidentally issue 60 more bighorn sheep and moose special hunting permits in its spring drawings was revealed on Thursday.

Someone had inadvertently copied the previous years quotas into the current years column, newly appointed FWP Director Dustin Temple told the Legislative Audit Committee. It was an innocuous mistake. It should not have happened. It is not an excuse, and I dont want the committee to think that it is one.

There should have been a control in place to make sure that didnt happen.

Temple was speaking to the committee regarding the Legislative Audit Divisions report following a review last fall of FWPs bonus point system. Bonus points can be purchased by hunters to increase their odds of drawing hard-to-get tags.

As a result of the recent error, most of the 60 hunters who were notified they had drawn their hunting permit had to be contacted and told they had not won. Five bighorn sheep hunters and two moose hunters were allowed to keep the accidentally awarded tags.

This is really important to lots of people. To myself included, Temple said, noting he had drawn an archery elk tag this spring in a coveted north-central Montana hunting district using his 21 bonus points.

Drawing

Temples success at drawing a tag, in a hunting district where last year the success rate for applicants was around 7%, comes after FWP changed how it was using bonus without notifying the public.

Up until this year, the department did not award bonus points purchased by hunters until the following years drawing. This year, the point was used immediately for the drawings, despite FWPs own regulations and online video tutorial saying the point would carry over to the next year.

Bonus points are squared prior to the drawing to give the hunter a better chance of receiving the tag they are seeking. That means if you already have three base bonus points, those will be squared and youll then have nine points going into the drawing. Once a hunter is successful, the bonus points zero out.

Notified

Three Forks hunter Tim Griffiths noted the alteration and contacted the department before the first drawing on April 6 to let agency officials know there was a problem. Initially he was told the point wouldnt be used. After the drawing, however, it was evident the newly purchased point was used.

To be honest, I am very concerned about the current affairs at FWP with respect to licensing, he told the committee at the end of their hearing. I feel that weve reached a point where the agency has demonstrated an inability to perform important functions relating to fair and equitable distribution of publicly owned resources.

Sen. Denise Hayman, D-Bozeman, and chair of the committee, thanked Griffiths for his testimony, although the error in this springs drawings, and the change in how the bonus points were used, were not part of the recent audit. Once FWP responds with its proposed actions regarding the audits suggestions at the next meeting in October, Hayman encouraged Griffiths to weigh in. She then added, We are paying attention.

Communications

In his written testimony to the committee, Griffiths addressed a concern raised in the audit: FWPs internal understanding of the bonus point system.

I have reached out to FWP repeatedly to alert them of this problem and to suggest steps they could take to avoid the potential impacts. Each time they have responded with additional misinformation and continually downplay their missteps, unwilling to ever admit any negative impacts to applicants or take corrective action. Most concerning to me is their propensity to continually and knowingly distribute misinformation to the public without pause.

One of the largest flaws cited by Sarah Carlson, program analyst for the audit division, was confusion among FWP staff about how the bonus point system functions.

This is a little outside our regular kind of fare, she said. But it became increasingly clear as we did this work last fall that there are communication problems within the department, for the public outside of the department and the guidance for communication of a government program, especially one that has a sort of complicated process. You need very clear understandable language that is repeated frequently. Everywhere you go you should find the same language about something.

And unfortunately, we found theres confusing information out there, she said. Theres a lack of understanding by hunters. They have unrealistic expectations because the drawing system is random.

The website GoHunt, which helps hunters understand license drawings in states around the country, said of Montanas bonus point system that it tends to reward long-term applicants but not in a predictable manner like with a preference point system. But, because of this, any tag can be drawn at any point level and at any time.

And maybe even more troubling, Carlson continued, we found that different members of FWP staff, and different parts of the department, were not clear on how some of the more basic parts of bonus points work. And theres a real possibility that theyre giving out incorrect information. And I think that this, in some ways, might be the genesis for this audit to begin with. Constituents were telling their legislators they dont understand how these bonus points work. They think theyre rigged because their uncle Richard hasnt won yet. And its just a real problem because of communication.

Not the first

Other recent FWP licensing errors have included incorrectly listing the opening day of the turkey season a week earlier than the actual date in the 2022 state regulations. Some archery-only permits were issued with incorrect dates making them appear to be valid only during the rifle season. Then the agency accidentally mailed out 1,200 additional nonresident elk and deer combination tags. The hunters were asked to voluntarily return them. Last year, almost 2,500 applicants for elk tags were kicked out of the drawings. The error also resulted in awarding more licenses than usual to nonresident elk hunters.

Audit committee member Sen. Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton, told Temple, Having consistency, its hard though when we start dealing with different personnel and changing our licensing system. So hopefully the department can accomplish that, but I can certainly understand their struggle.

Carlson said, It is tricky. I would concur with that.

New

FWP is in the process of installing a new computer system for its Automated Licensing System which conducts the bonus point drawings.

Temple said, As we move to the new XMT system, one of the things were going to be looking at is where can improve that in terms of efficiency, confidence and transparency so that as we architect the new system we are able to answer a whole bunch of these questions that weve heard today and execute our drawings in a more efficient fashion.

He also said the department is working to improve its communications with the public regarding the system, which will be in place before next years spring drawings.

We need to be upfront and honest with folks about how that works, he said. And hopefully we will improve public confidence in this  and we have to do a better job of making sure that those mistakes dont happen again.
Beleaguered Indian carrier Go First cancelled a fresh set of flights on Friday, thwarting travel plans till June 14. The company is currently going through the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process and cited operational reasons for the announcement.

Due to operational reasons, Go First flights until 14th June 2023 are cancelled. We apologise for the inconvenience caused and request customers to visit the website for more information. For any queries or concerns, please feel free to contact us," the company urged.

The company also assured that a full refund would be issued in the original mode of payment to affected travellers.

Due to operational reasons, Go First flights until 14th June 2023 are cancelled. We apologise for the inconvenience caused and request customers to visit https://t.co/FdMt1cRjeD for more information. For any queries or concerns, please feel free to contact us. pic.twitter.com/TZAHg07Mdu  GO FIRST (@GoFirstairways) June 9, 2023

Go First has been looking to resume flight operations in recent days and also assured travellers that they would soon reopen for bookings. According to reports, the carrier has sought DGCA permission to resume operations with 22 aircrafts and 152 daily flights. The revival plan once submitted by Go First shall be reviewed by the regulator for further appropriate action in the matter.

As you are aware the company has filed an application for immediate resolution and revival of operations. We will be able to resume bookings shortly," the statement added.

Go First has been non-operational since May 3. The NCLT on May 10 admitted the plea of Go First to initiate voluntary insolvency resolution proceedings and appointed Abhilash Lal of Alvarez and Marsal as IRP of the airline.

The developments come less than a day after the insolvency tribunal NCLT issued a notice to the Interim Resolution Professional of the crisis-hit airline over a plea filed by supply chain company Delhivery. The latter has alleged that the carrier's insolvency process is a sham. It said the airline took payments of 57 lakh from Delhivery on May 2 - the day it filed its request - despite knowing that it was filing for voluntary insolvency before NCLT.

(With inputs from agencies)
India and Nepal appear to be engaged in a cartographical conflict with the Kathmandu Metropolitan City mayor now installing a depiction of Greater Nepal in his chamber. The development comes as a symbolic counter to the purported Akhand Bharat mural in India's new parliamentary building.

According to local media reports, Balendra Shah had called aides on Thursday and asked them to place a map of Greater Nepal in his chamber. It was intended to be a response to the New Delhi mural, with an aide telling Kathmandu Post of the need to 'remember the proud history of Nepal'.

The development also came less than a day after Nepal Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal 'Prachanda' said that he had raised the issue during his recent visit to New Delhi and received a clarification. Addressing the parliament he however called for further study on the issue.

"While talking about the map during my India visit, the Indian side said it was a cultural map, not a political one. Further study should be carried out on the issue," he said while responding to the questions raised by the lawmakers.

Indian officials including Foreign Minister S Jaishankar have also reiterated that it is not a political issue.

"The mural in question depicts the spread of the Ashokan empire and the idea of responsible and people-oriented governance that he (Ashoka) adopted and propagated," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said recently.

(With inputs from agencies)
Internet services partially resumed on Friday in Kolhapur after two days. This week, objectionable social media posts concerning Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan sparked tensions in Maharashtra's Kolhapur.

Some youth allegedly posted objectionable posts on social media with a reference to Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan led to tension in the city.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde emphasized the government's responsibility for maintaining law and order in the state and appealed to the public for peace and calm.

On 7 June, violent activities took place in Kolhapur as scores of protestors hit the road and objected to the alleged use of Tipu Sultans image along with an objectionable audio message. A group of right-wing activists held a protest against the alleged use of Tipu Sultans image along with an objectionable audio message as social media status" by some people. Later, some people hurled stones, forcing police to use force against them

Police registered a case against four persons for allegedly carrying posters of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb during a procession in Ahmednagar district.

Meanwhile, the Kolhapur clashes have resulted in political bickering between the BJP and the opposition in Maharashtra.

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) president Sharad Pawar claimed "religious colour" was being given to some small issues.

In a veiled attack against the BJP, Pawar said, "The rulers are responsible to establish law and order in the state. If the ruling parties and their people come out on roads over it and create a rift between two religions, then it is not a good sign".

Pawar said riot-like incidents had taken place in the last few days in the state.

"But the good thing is that the tension is restricted to the areas concerned. But this is being done deliberately. For example, if someone has shown a photograph of Aurangzeb in Aurangabad, what is the reason to protest in Pune?" he asked.

Pawar also alleged churches are being attacked in Odisha and some other states.

On the other hand, Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said statements of some politicians fearing a riot-like situation in the state and a section of people of a particular community glorifying Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan cannot be a mere coincidence.

The BJP leader further said any kind of glorification of Aurangzeb would not be tolerated in Maharashtra.

Maharashtra follows the ideals of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. We all have seen some leaders attempting to show Aurangzeb as a patriot. We will have to inquire how some leaders talk the same language and how they receive a quick response," Fadnavis added.
The Central Bureau of Investigation took over six Manipur violence cases on Friday, forming a special investigation team under a DIG-rank officer. Six FIRs have been filed since violent clashes broke out in the north eastern state last month. Home Minister Amit Shah had also announced a CBI probe into the matter during his recent visit to Manipur.

Five FIRs had been filed for alleged criminal conspiracy while a sixth FIR was filed on general conspiracy behind the violence in Manipur. The CBI has now registered six cases in connection with the clashes and created an SIT of around 10 CBI personnel to investigate the matter.

Violence had erupted in the northeastern state on May 3 after a Tribal Solidarity March to protest against the Meitei community's demand for Scheduled Tribe status. So far, nearly 100 people have lost their lives and over 300 have been injured.

ALSO READ: SC declines urgent listing of plea challenging Internet ban in Manipur

The developments came even as three people were killed and two others injured in Manipur on Friday. The incident took place in a village in ethnic violence-hit Imphal West district. Officials said that a group of insurgents dressed as security personnel had called them out of their homes on the pretext of a combing operation and fired at them.

According to updates shared by news agency ANI, , 57 arms, 1,588 ammunition and 23 bombs have been recovered in Imphal East, Kakching, Tengnoupal and Bishnupur districts of Manipur in the last 24 hours. A total of 953 arms, 13,351 ammunitions and 223 bombs of different kinds have been recovered so far.

(With inputs from agencies)
NEW DELHI : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday met his economic advisory council (EAC-PM) led by Bibek Debroy, chairman of the council, to discuss the trajectory of the growth and evolving global and domestic factors influencing Indias performance, two persons with knowledge about the development said.

The meeting comes after official estimates showed last month FY23 economic growth beat expectations with a 7.2% expansion but risks such as a slowdown in developed markets and possibility of El Nino impact on monsoon showers could be a drag this fiscal.

The Modi administration, which took policy measures during the pandemic and afterwards with a focus on fiscal credibility and infrastructure creation rather than revenue spending in the form of tax cuts, is gearing up for national elections in less than a year and is on high alert about making policy interventions that may be needed in areas of rural incomes, jobs and price rise.

Earlier this week, the government raised the minimum support price for kharif crops for the FY24 marketing season as a safety net for farmers and last month it had announced a plan to help create a large number of decentralised grain storage capacity in the co-operative sector as part of efforts to improve the incomes of farmers. Farmers welfare is a key priority for the Modi administration.

EAC-PMs suggestions to the prime minister are confidential, said one of the persons quoted above.

The suggestions of the council, which has eight members in addition to the chairman, forms a significant input to the governments management of the economy.

Emails sent to the spokesperson for the Prime Ministers Office and to the EAC-PM chairman on Friday evening remained unanswered at the time of publishing.

Debroy had earlier highlighted the need for states to improve their efficiency including in areas like labour and land so that Indias economy could achieve its potential of growing at about 8-8.5%. Speaking at Mint India Investment Summit in May, Debroy said while the aspirational growth rate for India would be about 8-8.5%, the economy is expected to expand in the range of about 6.5% over the next two to three years, which could accelerate further to 7% as the impact of the supply side reforms already undertaken kicks in and if one were to be optimistic, the growth could inch up to 7.5%.

Former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India Rakesh Mohan, former principal economic adviser to the finance minister Sanjeev Sanyal and Neelkanth Mishra, managing director, co-head of Equity Strategy, Asia Pacific, and India Strategist for Credit Suisse are the other members of EAC-PM.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gireesh Chandra Prasad Gireesh has over 22 years of experience in business journalism covering diverse aspects of the economy, including finance, taxation, energy, aviation, corporate and bankruptcy laws, accounting and auditing. Read more from this author
New Delhi: The 49th Network Planning Group (NPG) meeting of PM GatiShakti National Master Plan (NMP) on Friday recommended a road project in Tripura, the ministry of commerce & industry said in a statement.

Sumita Dawra, Special Secretary, Logistics Division, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, chaired the meeting of the NPG.

The road section of Khowai-Teliamura-Harina with a total length of 134.9 kms was considered for its improvement and widening to two lanes with paved shoulder of NH-208 in Tripura. It is a brownfield project with total cost of 2,486 crore," the ministry said.

The project is planned with a multimodal connectivity approach, connectivity to industrial clusters and new SEZ namely Paschim Jalefa, efficient freight movement, reducing carbon footprint, optimized alignment and logistical efficiency, it added.

The road will pass through the districts of Khowai, Gomati, and South Tripura, connecting important locations such as Khowai, Teliamura, Twidu, Amarpur, Karbook, and Harina. Besides enhancing interstate connectivity between Assam and Tripura, the road project is expected to stimulate economic and industrial activities in Tripura.

According to the ministry, the project planning under the National Master Plan has yielded several key benefits. By utilizing the National Master Plan, the road length has been reduced by 28 kilometers, resulting in a saving of 2.5 hours of travel time. The project corridor will facilitate intermodal transport from Teliamura Railway Station and Manu Bazar Railway Station near Harina. It will also improve connectivity to Agartala Airport and the proposed Multi-Modal Logistics Park (MMLP) at Udaipur.

Furthermore, the project will enhance connectivity to four economic nodes, including industrial clusters around Agartala and FCI depot, as well as thirteen social nodes such as Matabari Temple, Neer Mahal, Pilak Civilization Museum, Jampui Hills, Ambassa Eco Park, and more. It will facilitate freight movement from Kolkata to North Eastern States, primarily Tripura, Mizoram, and Manipur, to Bangladesh.

Moreover, the project will facilitate the movement of raw materials for industry clusters in Tripura and the transportation of manufactured goods such as rubber, textiles, bamboo products, and food processing items from economic nodes like the SEZ located at Paschim Jalefa, Sabroom in South Tripura District, and industrial clusters/parks around Agartala and Udaipur. The proposed road will also connect North East India to Chittagong Port in Bangladesh, ensuring efficient EXIM connectivity.

The road project in Tripura is expected to contribute to the development of tribal areas, enhancing connectivity to three tribal districts - Khowai, Gomati, and South Tripura.

According to the ministry, the project will be implemented on an Engineering Procurement & Construction (EPC) basis, with support from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Official Development Assistance (ODA) Loan.

The principles of PM GatiShakti NMP have been adopted during the planning of the road alignment. Alignment of the road is superimposed with data layers available on NMP Portal like railway lines, forest, power lines, water bodies etc. The intersections will be seen with forest and other sensitive zones to minimize environmental disruptions," it added.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday engaged in a conversation with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, expressing his gratitude for the "excellent support" extended by Saudi Arabia during the evacuation of Indian nationals from Sudan in April, while also conveying best wishes for the upcoming Haj pilgrimage.

The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) stated that the leaders discussed a range of bilateral cooperation matters and exchanged views on various multilateral and global issues of mutual interest, in a telephone conversation.

PM Modi specifically thanked Saudi Arabian Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman for the exceptional assistance provided in evacuating Indian citizens from Sudan through Jeddah in April 2023. Additionally, Prime Minister Modi conveyed his best wishes for the forthcoming Haj pilgrimage.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman expressed his full support for India's initiatives during its ongoing G20 Presidency and expressed anticipation for his visit to India, as mentioned in the statement. Both leaders agreed to maintain regular communication.

In April, India established a transit facility in Jeddah to facilitate the safe evacuation of Indian nationals from the strife-torn region of Sudan. Under the mission named 'Operation Kaveri', India transported the evacuees from Sudan to Jeddah, from where they returned to their homeland.

India has initiated numerous such rescue missions to repatriate stranded citizens from various countries. One such operation, "Operation Ganga," was launched by the Modi government last year to evacuate a large number of Indian students from Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion.

Additionally, during the Taliban's attack on Afghanistan, India carried out "Operation Devi Shakti" to ensure the safe evacuation of its citizens from the conflict-stricken nation.

Likewise, at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic when countries were implementing widespread shutdowns, India executed "Operation Vande Bharat" to bring back millions of its citizens from different parts of the world.

(With inputs from PTI)
At least three people were killed and many others are feared trapped after a mine collapsed in Jharkhand. The incident took place in Dhanbad with officials adding that one body had been recovered. While some reports suggested that it was an illegal coal mine, others quoted officials to say that a part of a Bharat Coking Coal Limited open mine.

Portion of BCCL (Bharat Coking Coal Limited) open mine collapsed. One body has been recovered. A number of deaths are being verified. We are waiting for BCCL's report. Action will be taken according to the report," said Dhanbad SSP Sanjeev Kumar.

Officials from Jorapokhar Police Station said that an investigation was underway and the number of victims remained unclear.

This mine comes under Bhowra area. It seems that illegal mining was underway. We are investigating the matter," Sub-Inspector Binod Oraon said.

(With inputs from agencies)
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's daughter Parakala Vangamayi married Pratik Doshi on Thursday, sparking buzz about the government official. The low-key ceremony took place in Bengaluru with the only clear indication coming from a now viral video on social media. The wedding was reportedly attended by close friends and family.

Doshi is a special duty officer with the Prime Minister's Office who was elevated to the rank of joint secretary in June 2019. The low profile official currently looks after the research and strategy wing of the PMO. As per the government website his role is to provide secretarial assistance to the PM in terms of government of India (allocation of business) rules, 1961 with matters including but not limited to research and strategy."

The Singapore Management School graduate had previously worked as a research assistant in the Gujarat Chief Ministers Office (CMO) during Modis tenure as the chief minister. Doshi is not active on any social media.
A late-night slow jams DJ by profession, Randy "R Dub" Williams, has created his own country known as The Republic of Slowjamastan. According to a report by CNN Traveller, Williams said after visiting almost every country that is part of the United Nations, he decided to create his own country.

"I ran out of countries, so I created my own," Williams told CNN Traveller.

Williams is set to visit Turkmenistan, the final country on his list of 193 UN-recognised nations.

"One of the reasons I created Slowjamastan was because, after 193 countries, I wanted 194th".

Williams purchased an 11.07-acre plot of empty arid land in the California desert to build a new country", which is named after his radio show.

Williams, who is now the Sultan of Slowjamastan declared independence from the US on 1 December 2021 as he broadcasted the secession live from his office in Dublandia, the capital of the Republic of Slowjamastan.

This new country issues its own passports, flies its own flag, prints its own currency (the duble"), and has a national anthem thats played on state occasions.

CNN Traveller reported that The Republic of Slowjamastan has more than 500 registered citizens while 4,500 are waiting in line for citizenship.

Where is The Republic of Slowjamastan located?

American DJ's Micronation is located off California State Route 78, a 2.5 hours drive northwest of San Diego. Williams was inspired to create his own country after visiting various self-declared territories run by eccentric leaders.

Williams told CNN Traveller that in 2021 August he visited the Republic of Molassia, an 11.3-acre micronation in Nevada that declared independence from the US in 1998. He learned about the Republic of Molossia the how the local currency (the valora) is backed by chocolate chip cookie dough instead of gold and had his passport stamp and his photo taken on the "border" with the United States.

After returning to San Diego, Williams worked on a plan to set up his own country. In October 2021, he purchased a plot for $19,000 (INR 15,66,920) and by December had declared Slowjamastans independence.

Williams occasionally allows voting ceremonies in his country. He said that he allowed citizens to vote on what should be SLowjamastan's national fruit, sports, and national animal.

The Republic of Slowjamastan also enforces a list of prohibitions, CNN Traveller highlighted. Currently, these prohibitions include "Crocs" and "people who put their feet on the dashboard".

Williams revealed that his next grand plan is to raise funds to build a lazy river, an armadillo farm, an all-you-can-eat Mongolian BBQ establishment and, of course, a giant statue/monument of The Great Leader (me)," he told CNN Traveller.

Just like Williams, self-styled Godman Nithyananda also created his own country called the United States of Kailasa (USK). Accused of rape and kidnapping, Nithyananda fled from India in 2019 and emerged a year later with the claim of having established his own country. Nithyananda bought an island off the coast of Ecuador and named the country Kailasa.

What is a micronation?

According to Collins English Dictionary, a micronation is typically existing only on the internet or within the private property of its members. Such an area is claimed to have a sovereign status as an independent nation by its people. The status is unrecognised by real nations and global organisations.

Other micronations in the world:

Rajneesh Puram: This micronation could be found in Netflix's docu-series Wild Wild Country'. The micronation was formed by the followers of Osho, an Indian spiritual leader. Rajneesh Puram is located on 64,000 acres of the former Big Muddy Ranch in Oregon.

Liberland: This is located between Croatia and Serbia. This sovereign state is spread over an area of 7 km.

Asgardia: This country draws inspiration from Marvel's Asgard and claims to have a connection with freedom in space. Asgardia was founded by Igor Ashurbeyli and has a population of 10.95 lakhs and has its own parliament.
The U.S. Treasury Department has approved North Dakotas application for $68 million to help finance the construction of 13 career academies across the state.

Gov. Doug Burgum earlier this year signed House Bill 1199, providing for a $68 million line of credit from the state-owned-Bank of North Dakota for the academies -- a move to boost fields with workforce needs.

U.S. Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., on Friday announced the federal funding, saying it "means the short-term loan from the state can be promptly repaid and will enable construction to move forward.

Career academies help students prepare for careers in the trades, health care, technology and other industry sectors. All of those fields are in need of workers in North Dakota.

These career academies are a key component of our comprehensive efforts to address North Dakotas workforce shortage," Burgum said in a statement Friday after Hoeven's announcement.

State lawmakers during the Legislature's special session in November 2021 approved $88 million for career academies, including $20 million in state funds that have already been distributed and $68 million from Treasurys Coronavirus Capital Projects Fund. Legislators this past February approved the $68 million line of credit because the federal funding was still uncertain. It was the first bill of the session signed by Burgum, to avoid delaying construction of career academies.

Money is going to 13 projects, including the Heart River Career and Technical Education Center in Mandan and an expanded facility for the Bismarck Public Schools CTE program.

Other projects are in Dickinson, Watford City, Williston, Minot, Grand Forks, Fargo, Grafton, Wahpeton, Devils Lake, Jamestown and Valley City. Projects require a local dollar-for-dollar match.
Maharashtra MP Sanjay Raut on Friday claimed that the death threat received by Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar was government-sponsored threat. The Shiv Sena (UBT) leader claimed that he had received death threats at least 5-6 times in the last 7-8 months.

Sanjay Raut, a vocal critic of the Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde faction) and Devendra Fadnavis led Maharashtra government, said that he had earlier approached the Home Minister of Maharashtra and Chief Minister regarding the death threats he had received.

"I have received death threats 5-6 times in the last 7-8 months. I have also informed (Maharashtra) home minister and the chief minister about it. These are government-sponsored threats," says Shiv Sena (UBT) leader.

"There is an invisible force behind them which the 40 people (Sena MLAs including Chief Minister Eknath Shinde) used to call super power. It is destroying the state for political purposes," Raut said, a possible reference to the Bharatiya Janta Party.

VIDEO | "I have received death threats 5-6 times in the last 7-8 months. I have also informed (Maharashtra) home minister and the chief minister about it. These are government-sponsored threats," says Shiv Sena (UBT) leader @rautsanjay61. pic.twitter.com/ZpntfEDGB0  Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) June 9, 2023

After the incident was reported, Mumbai police detained two people for sendind death threats to Sanjay Raut. Mumbai Police officials have informed that interrogation of the two taken into custody is underway.

Raut's statements comes in the backdrop of 82 year old NCP chief Sharad Pawar receiving a message on Facebook threatening him with a fate similar to anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar, who was shot dead in Pune on 20 August 2013.

"The government should take it (threat calls to him and his brother) seriously and not me. The government wants such threats. The matter is with the police and they will have to look into it," he told reporters. "Sunil Raut received a threat. I didn't file any complaint. We are not worried about it," claimed Raut, who has received threats in the past as well.

Raut also said Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar getting a threat on social media was a serious issue, adding moves were afoot to instill fear in the opposition.

Meanwhile, NCP Chief Sharad Pawar commented on Sanjay Raut's claim that he too had received death threats. Pawar said that every citizen of this state has the right to express his view, hinting that fact that death threats were being issued to suppress opposition voices.

Every citizen of this state has the right to express his view on any party as per the constitution, in such situations if someone thinks that he can shut the voice by threats then it's a misunderstanding. I have full faith in the system and the capabilities of the Police who are responsible to maintain law and order so I am not worried about it", NCP Chief Sharad Pawar said.
Google employees are resisting the tech company's requirement for employees to work in the office for a minimum of three days each week, reported Bloomberg.

Bloomberg reported that according to a statement from the Alphabet Workers Union, representing both contract and direct employees at Google, Chris Schmidt, a software engineer at Google, expressed concerns about a sudden shift in prioritizing attendance tracking practices over employees' professionalism, which has occurred without clear guidelines and is now tied to their performance evaluations.

Reportedly, in an email sent on Wednesday, Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., informed its employees that the company anticipated the majority of staff members to resume regular office attendance.

"Not everyone believes in 'magical hallway conversations,' but there's no question that working together in the same room makes a positive difference," wrote Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi in the email, which was reviewed by Bloomberg.

According to Cicconi, numerous products showcased at Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference, and Google Marketing Live event in May were the result of collaborative efforts from teams working together in close proximity.

Cicconi further stated that attendance will now play a role in employees' performance evaluations, and teams will begin sending reminders to individuals who frequently miss office attendance, except in specific cases like air-quality-control warnings in Canada and the US East Coast this week. Google will now only consider new remote work requests in exceptional circumstances, as mentioned by Cicconi.

The Alphabet Workers Union has reported a membership of over 1,400 individuals. At the end of the year, Google had a workforce of over 190,000 employees, including both direct hires and contract workers.

In an earlier plan, Google had intended to have employees return to the office for three days a week in April of the previous year. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, the company announced that approximately 20% of its workforce would have the option to work remotely on a full-time basis.

In January, Alphabet implemented its most significant workforce reduction to date, eliminating over six percent of its employees, which amounted to approximately 12,000 staff members. Additionally, the company has been actively working on reducing its physical office space after revealing its intention to invest $7 billion in new offices and data centers in 2021. In its April first-quarter earnings report, Alphabet disclosed that it had incurred expenses of $564 million in connection with downsizing its office spaces.

"Our hybrid approach is designed to incorporate the best of being together in person with the benefits of working from home for part of the week," Ryan Lamont, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement.

Lamont added,"Now that we're more than a year into this way of working, we're formally integrating this approach into all of our workplace policies."

According to Schmidt, a software engineer at Google, implementing a uniform return-to-office policy disregards the unique life circumstances of employees. Schmidt emphasized the need for employees to have a say in shaping policies that affect their lives, aiming to establish working conditions that are equitable, transparent, and clearly defined for everyone involved.
Ahead of three months studying in Chicago, the home of Milton Friedman, I expected to be surrounded by anti-ESG, pro-capitalist supporters of the status quo in American finance. The University of Chicago has such a reputation as the bastion of free markets that the pure capitalism it espoused was dubbed freshwater economics" for the lakeside location.
A light-year is the distance light travels in a year. Specifically, the International Astronomical Union defines a light-year as the distance light travels through interstellar space over 365.25 days.

How much is that? The speed of light is 186,282 miles per second, or 299,792.5 kilometers per second. That's 670.6 million mph (170.9 million km/h). In comparison, the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light-years, or 24.7 trillion miles (39.8 trillion km).

It may seem odd to define a distance in terms of time, but in fact, humans do it frequently. For instance, people may describe a 60 mile-long trip on a highway as a 1-hour trip, taking into account the average speed a car travels on that road, or say "I'm 10 minutes away," for instance. The term "light-year" was invented because, simply put, the equivalent distances in miles, meters or kilometers were huge.

History of the light-year

The first mention of light-years dates back to 1838 and a German scientist named Friedrich Bessel. He measured the distance to a star called 61 Cygni, and got a distance of 660,000 times Earth's orbital radius. He noted that light would take about 10 years to get there, but he didn't like the term "light-year." (One reason was that at that time, it wasn't clear that light's speed was a fundamental constant of nature. In 1851, the term made a first appearance in Germany, in an astronomical publication known as Lichtjare. Later, astronomers adopted it and "light-years" are now a popular unit of measurement even in the scientific literature.

The light-year competes with the parsec, which stands for parallax-second, and is equal to 3.26 light-years, or nearly 19 trillion miles (31 trillion km). A parallax-second is the number of arcseconds (1/3600th of a degree) that a star's apparent position shifts when measuring its distance. British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, a prominent scientist in the early 20th century, preferred the parsec, calling the light-year "inconvenient." His was a losing battle, however.

Light-years can be divided into light-days, light-hours or even light-seconds, though those units are used less often. The sun is 8 light-minutes away, which means it takes light from the sun 8 minutes to reach Earth.

All this depends on knowing the speed of light, and that turns out to be hard to measure because it goes so fast. Galileo attempted it in 1638, and he described an experiment in which one person covers a lantern while another on a tower some distance away tries to time when the light gets there. The experiment failed, and Galileo could only answer that however fast light was, neither human reflexes nor the clocks at the time were speedy enough to catch it. (He did come up with an estimate of at least 10 times the speed of sound, but that was very much a guess.)

Danish astronomer Ole Rmer was able to make an estimate in 1676, using the timing of eclipses of Jupiter's moon Io. Later, in 1729, James Bradley used a phenomenon called stellar aberration, in which the apparent positions of stars in the sky seem to change slightly depending on the movement of the Earth, to get a closer estimate of light's velocity. Scientists kept refining these estimates, and by the 1860s, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell showed that electromagnetic waves travel at a certain speed in a vacuum. That speed is a constant, and at the time, most physicists thought of light as a pure wave. (We know now it can be a particle, too).

Finally, in 1905, Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity posited that light always travels at the same speed no matter where it is observed from. This was a big step because suddenly, the speed of light became one of the constants of the universe, and thus, more useful for measuring distances.
By Peter Brown

Princeton University Press. 736 pp. $45

- - -

Back in the 1970s, I was a graduate student in comparative literature at Cornell University enamored of medieval European literature. With excellent teachers, I studied Old and Middle English poetry, chivalric romances written in medieval French and Middle High German, Icelandic sagas - not the most obvious preparation for a future literary journalist. I even signed up for a seminar entirely devoted to Pope Gregory the Great's 4,000-page commentary on the Book of Job. Partly because of Gregory's sheer strangeness - in one memorable passage he compares the sinner to a testicle of the Antichrist - I found myself growing increasingly fascinated by the patristic era, the years between 200 and 700 AD when the Fathers of the Church, most notably Saint Augustine, were hammering out, explicating and defending the tenets of Christian doctrine.

Late antiquity, as it's more generally known, had long been painted as the period of Rome's decline and fall, Byzantium's stagnation, and classical culture's enfeeblement and eventual descent into monkishness and barbarism. By the 1960s that depiction of a supposedly crude and irrational age was at last questioned, then revised and finally dismissed, to a large degree because of a historian named Peter Brown.

In a brilliant, often thrilling biography, "Augustine of Hippo," pioneering essays such as "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," a remarkable introductory survey called "The World of Late Antiquity" and - as the years went by - a cluster of magisterial volumes such as "The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity" and "The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000," Brown focused his meticulous learning on this widely misunderstood and pivotal era. Rather than Greco-Roman civilization's decadence, he saw transformation and continuity; instead of stultification he discovered cultural fluidity. What's more, Brown simultaneously enlarged the period's geographical reach, extending its area of interest to embrace the ancient Near East and the pre-Islamic Persian Empire. How all this came about is the major theme of Brown's just-published intellectual autobiography, "Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History."

Whereas a show business memoir might be enlivened with the names of Hollywood or Broadway legends, Brown's 700-page career retrospective memorializes and celebrates the many great scholars he came to know, in particular superstars such as Arnaldo Momigliano and Henri-Irenee Marrou. In essence, "Journeys of the Mind" commemorates an immensely erudite academic community, a global Republic of Letters, drawn from many nations and disciplines. Now in his late 80s, Brown looks back on those years and the people he met with nostalgia and gratitude.

After some overlong chapters about his Protestant ancestors and his childhood in Catholic Ireland, Brown focuses almost exclusively on his academic life and what one might call "the growth of a scholar's mind." We follow him through an especially stellar career at Oxford (a "congratulated" first in history at New College, a prize fellowship to All Souls) on to his years teaching at London's Royal Holloway College, the University of California at Berkeley and finally Princeton. During holidays and sabbaticals he also made several eye-opening trips to Iran, Egypt and Afghanistan.

As a young hotshot, Brown fought to establish intellectual and religious history as a legitimate university subject, "to issue a challenge to the tweedy philistinism that (in my jaundiced eyes) appeared to dominate the Oxford History Schools." Rather than kings, wars and politics, he studied saints and sorcerers, arcane works of religious doctrine, the spiritual forces that energized people's lives. More and more, he also recognized that medieval studies, traditionally centered on Europe and the legacy of Rome, had shortchanged the Greek-oriented Fertile Crescent of the Near East.

In nearly all his work, Brown explores the complexities of late antiquity by asking seemingly simple questions with sometimes unexpected answers. Why, for instance, did a cult of the saints arise? To a large degree because saints "humanized the other world." Why were anchorites such as Simeon Stylites - who lived atop a pillar - regularly consulted on all sorts of practical problems? Because they were unconnected to normal society, above it all so to speak, and could thus render wholly impartial judgments. Why was virginity, among men as well as women, so prevalent among early Christians? Because to renounce sex was to free the body from the bonds of the secular world's marital and social obligations. "It was society, not sex, over which the detached virgin body was thought to have triumphed."

Besides being an enthralling account of an eminent scholar at work, "Journeys of the Mind" can also function as an annotated guide to dozens of important works of intellectual history. It will send at least a few readers back to older classics such as Johan Huizinga's "The Waning of the Middle Ages"; M. Rostovtzeff's "The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire"; Norman Baynes's history of ancient Judaism, "Israel Among the Nations"; Marc Bloch's "Feudal Society"; and R.W. Southern's "The Making of the Middle Ages." Brown also stresses how much he learned about societal and cultural dynamics by reading the works of anthropologists, notably E.E. Evans-Pritchard's groundbreaking "Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande" and Mary Douglas's "Natural Symbols." The late-in-life discovery of Pierre Hadot's "Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises From Socrates to Foucault" leads to his declaration that "I would never again read a text of ancient philosophy, or even the most banal ethical treatise, in the same way."

Even while tracing a trajectory of almost unbroken academic triumph, Brown nonetheless views himself as essentially a lifelong student, always learning, always modifying his views in light of new discoveries. In one mini-essay, he admits the limits of paideia - the classical education of antiquity - but nonetheless honors its beneficent "emphasis on poise, on self-control, and on gracious behavior," on becoming "a ceremonious and balanced person." After becoming a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, he grows to esteem its now-legendary editor, Robert Silvers, as his "ideal reader." Perhaps surprisingly, Brown also comes to deeply admire the controversial Michel Foucault, with whom, on one memorable occasion, he discussed sexuality at a Berkeley hangout. The contrarian philosopher argued that, compared with earlier periods of history, our era's emancipation from supposed sexual repression had actually led to sex being grossly distorted and granted undue prominence in modern lives.

As in all his books and essays, Brown's prose is pellucid, meditative, courteous. On the occasions when he uses a foreign phrase - and Brown can read all the major European languages as well as Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopic and a dozen others - he quickly translates it into English. When he refers to an important scholarly work, whether his own or someone else's, he always outlines its argument. Brown even reminds us that later printings of his own publications often contain new introductions or afterwords indicating those points about which he has since changed his mind.

Brown brings "Journeys of the Mind" to a close in the late 1980s. By then, he had made late antiquity one of the hottest fields in history, written paradigm-shifting articles and books, been awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant, and begun teaching at Princeton. Will some future volume cover the second half of his ongoing career? I hope so. I've read lots of autobiographies - the genre became the focus of my own studies back in those Cornell days - but none that quite so vividly depicts a life, a deeply enviable life, centered on humanistic research and the reading and writing of scholarly works. In its way, "Journeys of the Mind" may well be the most romantic book of the year.
Five people were sentenced to prison for their role in a meth smuggling conspiracy for the Michoacan drug cartel, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office.

Gerardo Martinez, 65, pleaded guilty on March 9. Maria Valdez, 30, and Rodrigo Sandoval, 31, both of Laredo, pleaded guilty on Sept. 13 as did Jose Alfredo Cruz-Salas, 37, of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico.

Karina Garcia, 27, of Laredo, pleaded guilty on Oct. 4. All admitted to conspiracy to transport a total of approximately 165 pounds of meth into the United States from Mexico.

On June 7, Martinez was sentenced to 240 months in prison while Sandoval, Garcia, and Cruz-Salas received 60, 36, and 72 months, respectively. Valdez received 188 months the day before. Cruz-Salas is expected to be deported after completing his sentence.

Martinez was hiding in plain sight, maintaining a front as a taxi driver while secretly doing the bidding of the Michoacan cartel on the streets of Laredo, said U.S. Attorney Alamdar S. Hamdani.

My late father was a taxi driver and the actions of Martinez simply offend me. He trafficked in pure meth and recruited multiple drivers. The seized drugs could have ruined countless lives. (Wednesdays) sentencings underscore the scope of the threat transnational drug cartels pose and our efforts to combat them.

This complex conspiracy began on Feb. 1, 2017, and continued through Sept. 29, 2018. Martinez assisted drug traffickers in Mexico by recruiting drivers willing to transport large quantities of high-purity meth through Laredo and further into the United States, authorities said.

Martinez was working on behalf of the Michoacan cartel while maintaining a front as an independent taxi driver. He further admitted to coordinating the distribution of meth through Laredo on five separate occasions, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Sandoval, Cruz-Salas, Valdez, and Garcia had previously pleaded guilty to conspiring to deliver and transport meth through Laredo while working for Martinez. All remain in custody except Garcia. She was permitted to self-surrender at a later date.

The Drug Enforcement Administration conducted the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces as part of Operation Codigo Siete with the assistance of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Laredo Police Department and Webb County Sheriffs Office.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Francisco J. Rodriguez is prosecuting the case.
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Laredo business incubator MileOne is hosting a brunch mixer featuring a panel of talented women entrepreneurs in June.

Locals are invited to attend the free mixer, which will feature three talented local boutique owners: Amber Unvalle of House of Heina, Melissa Infante of St. Mark's Place and Selina Sanchez of Dragonflies Boutique.

The three women will be on a panel sharing the stories behind starting their small businesses in Laredo. The panel will be moderated by local digital creator Marilyn Bautista.

The mixer is scheduled to take place in their downtown offices at 1312 Houston St. on Wednesday, June 21 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Locals interested in attending the event are asked to RSVP online at m1wersbrunch.eventbrite.com to ensure their seat for the event.

Laredo restaurant Bae Brunch Club, which itself is owned and operated by woman entrepreneur Valeria Contreras, will provide complimentary brunch at the event.

For more information on the event or MileOne, visit mileoneinc.com.
WASHINGTON (AP)  A Virginia man who told his wife  and a federal jury  that he had fun at the U.S. Capitol riot was sentenced on Friday to six years in prison for attacking police as he stormed the building.

Markus Maly's prison sentence is significantly lower than the punishment that prosecutors sought for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. The Justice Department had recommended a prison sentence of 15 years and eight months for Maly, a flooring installer.

A prosecutor described Maly, 49, as a lifelong criminal with 33 prior convictions on his record, including two for battery of a law enforcement officer. But the judge who sentenced Maly noted that most of his crimes date back to his 20s.

Maly told U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta that he regrets traveling to Washington and following the mob of then-President Donald Trump's supporters to the Capitol. But he insisted that he merely occupied space in the crowd and denied attacking and pepper-spraying police.

I went to a rally. That's what I did," he told the judge.

The judge said jurors had ample evidence to convict Maly of assaulting police.

"It's not that you were there and occupying space. It's that you did these things and kept doing them that day, the judge told him.

Prosecutors say Maly is one of many Capitol rioters who have tried to profit from their notoriety, portraying themselves as patriots, martyrs or political prisoners as they solicit donations from supporters. While prosecutors acknowledge that defendants have a right to raise money for legal defenses, they're increasingly asking judges to impose fines on top of prison terms to claw back donations used for personal expenses.

Maly has raised more than $16,500 through a GiveSendGo donation page, referring to himself as a January 6 P.O.W." Prosecutors asked the judge to fine him an amount commensurate with his fundraising haul, noting that he had a public defender and didn't owe any legal fees.

The judge declined to impose a fine. He said Maly's fundraising activities may have been unseemly, but he questioned whether there was a legal basis for clawing back the money.

Maly testified at his trial that participating in the Capitol riot was fun for him. He also described the events of Jan. 6 as fun and awesome in messages sent to his wife and others.

Maly admitted to being proud of what he had done at the Capitol and that he had bragged about it, prosecutor Stephen Rancourt wrote in a court filing. Despite seeing police officers assaulted, injured, and distressed on January 6, and knowing that it was a bad day for members of Congress and the police officers who had to live through the riot, Maly reiterated that his experience that day was fun.

The judge at Maly's trial previously handed down the longest sentence for a Capitol riot case: 18 years for Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of orchestrating a violent plot to keep Trump, a Republican, in the White House after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, a Democrat.

Maly has been jailed since a jury convicted him in December of all eight charges against him, including felony counts of civil disorder and assaulting, resisting or impeding police using a dangerous weapon.

On the morning of Jan. 6, Maly took a bus from his home in Fincastle, Virginia, to Washington to attend Trump's Stop the Steal rally. He later joined the mob that attacked police on the Capitol's Lower West Terrace, one of the most violent clashes of the day.

Maly sprayed a chemical, possibly pepper spray, at Metropolitan Police Department Officer Christopher Boyle as he and other officers retreated into a tunnel and guarded an entrance. Maly passed a spray cannister from one rioter to another, joined a coordinated heave ho push against police and left the tunnel with a stolen riot shield as a trophy, Rancourt said.

Maly was charged and tried with co-defendants Peter Schwartz and Jeffrey Scott Brown. Schwartz passed the spray canister to Maly, who passed it to Brown. The jurors who convicted Maly also found Schwartz and Brown guilty of related charges.

The judge sentenced Schwartz last month to 14 years and two months in prison, the longest for a Jan. 6 case before Rhodes, and sentenced Brown in April to four years and six months in prison.

Prosecutors say Maly lied on the witness stand when he testified that he only showed a cannister to Boyle but didnt spray the officer.

Maly claimed that the stream of liquid coming out of the canister was actually a piece of fringe on his hat. However, his hat didnt have a fringe, Rancourt wrote.

Defense attorney Benjamin Schiffelbein said Maly believed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.

He fervently believed that he was protesting in the name of liberty and freedom. His motives, however (factually) wrong they may have been, were based in values this country celebrates, Schiffelbein wrote. "What is more American than fervently defending democracy  even from ones own government  and perhaps especially then?"

More than 100 police officers were injured during the riot. More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes related to Jan. 6. Over 500 of them have been sentenced, with more than half getting terms of imprisonment, according to an Associated Press review of court records.

___

Follow the AP's coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection at https://apnews.com/hub/capitol-siege.
Nate Paul, the 36-year-old Austin real estate developer with ties to suspended Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, was charged with eight counts of felony financial crimes Friday morning.

According to federal prosecutors, Paul allegedly lied about his financial status to mislead partners in business deals from 2017 to 2018. The Texas Tribune's Zach Despart and Robert Downen reported Friday that Paul could owe the government $172 million in restitution. Paul was booked into FBI custody Thursday morning in Travis County after a federal warrant was issued for his arrest.

Although indicted and suspended attorney general Paxton was not named in Paul's Friday morning arraignment; the two are known associates. Paul is also listed as one of Paxton's political donors. During the attorney general's House impeachment trials in May, Paul's name was brought up continuously. Paxton was accused of allegedly using his office to help Paul in his business deals and lawsuits against his company.

Moreover, the 20 articles of impeachment levied against Paxton detail how the Republican leader allegedly used his office, staff, and political power to help Paul evade foreclosure sales, obtain undisclosed information for Paul, and an alleged bribery deal to employ a woman who was having an extramarital affair with Paxton.

Some of Paxton's staff members reported his actions to the FBI, where they accused their former boss of firing them in retaliation. Paxton then allegedly attempted to use taxpayer money to pay a $3.3 million whistleblower settlement to end an ensuing lawsuit brought against him, prompting the House investigation that found grounds for his impeachment.

So, who is Nate Paul?

Paul is a Texas native born in Victoria, Texas. Paul is known as a long-time businessman and real estate developer in the Austin area. According to Linkedin, Paul is the CEO, founder, and president of a private investment group and property company, World Class.

Since 2017, Paul has been the founder, CEO, and president of World Class Holdings, a multi-billion dollar holding company with a diverse portfolio of real estate and real estate, financial services, and credit businesses. Paul's portfolio also lists him as the founder, president, and CEO of World Class Property Company since 2007, when he created the company at 20 years old.

According to its website, World Class Property and Company is a privately-held, diversified real estate investment company that owns, operates, and develops office, retail, multifamily, industrial, mixed-use, hospitality and self-storage assets.

A 2017 Forbes feature report on Paul described him as a "Texas Tycoon building a real estate empire" and a "prodigy." At the time, Forbes listed Paul's company World Class as a billion-dollar business with real estate assets and, at one point, owned 10 million square feet of commercial space and over 120 properties in various states.

Paul and Paxton's history

Paul is one of Paxton's donors, and contributed $25,000 to the attorney general's 2018 campaign for reelection. The aforementioned whistleblower reports to the federal authorities prompted agents to search Paul's estate and businesses in 2019 and 2020. In response, Paul sued the FBI for "intentionally damaging" his business.

Paxton's Senate impeachment trial is set to start in August. Houston-area attorney Tony Buzbee will represent the indicted Texas attorney general while Houston attorney Rusty Hardin and longtime Texas attorney Dick DeGuerin have been tapped as lead prosecutors. On Friday, Buzbee said Paul's recent arrest and charges were in no way connected to his client, according The Texas Tribune's Patrick Svitek.

"The charges against Paul evidently have nothing to do with Attorney General Ken Paxton. Nothing whatsoever" Buzbee said in a statement, per Svitek. "Nothing whatsoever. That should speak volumes as to how weak this impeachment effort is."
SIOUX FALLS, S.D.  Officials in South Dakotas largest county dealt a blow to opponents of two carbon pipeline companies with a vote to set shorter-than-requested spaces between homes and pipelines in their first-ever set of rules for such projects.

Minnehaha County commissioners convened Tuesday to take up the issue of setbacks in a long-debated pipeline ordinance. It arose from the controversy surrounding efforts by Summit Carbon Solutions and Navigator CO2 Ventures to ship pressurized carbon dioxide from Midwestern ethanol plants to underground sequestration sites.

Just four Minnehaha County Commissioners were present two weeks ago for what was meant to be a final vote on a draft pipeline ordinance that passed the countys planning and zoning commission unanimously. That original version sought to put 750 feet between rural property lines and pipelines, with further setbacks from cities. Were a pipeline to meet those setbacks, it wouldnt need to request a special permit from the county -- and face a public hearing -- to build.

Company representatives opposed those setbacks. The 750-foot distance, they said, would make it all but impossible to place their pipelines in Minnehaha County in the face of whats become intense opposition to the projects, South Dakota Searchlight reported.

Distances debated

The commission never got to a final vote on its first set of pipeline siting rules at its May 23 meeting. Instead, it deadlocked on an amendment from Commissioner Joe Kippley that would have shortened that distance from property lines to 330 feet. Kippley pointed to federal guidelines that recommend evacuating areas 330 feet from toxic gases as a baseline for the figure.

Joining him was Commissioner Dean Karsky, with Commissioners Jen Bleyenberg and Gerald Beninga opposed.

That tie vote pushed a final vote back two weeks, at which point Commission Chair Jean Bender would be present to break the impasse.

After taking about 10 more minutes of testimony on Tuesday from landowners opposed to the shortened distance, Bender sided with Kippley and Karsky.

Opponents had argued that 750 feet was a minimum for safety and the promotion of continued economic development in the rapidly growing county.

Bender didnt buy those arguments. She told the packed commission room that her goal was never to shut down pipelines, and that the original ordinance would have done that.

Bender pointed to a pipeline on 12th Street in Sioux Falls built decades ago, when the city thats nearing 200,000 residents had just a fraction of the population.

Reasonable people can very much disagree on this, but I dont think pipelines hinder development, Bender said.

Carbon pipelines would allow ethanol producers to take advantage of federal tax credits meant to address climate change by keeping heat-trapping carbon out of the atmosphere. The pipelines would also help producers sell ethanol in states with tighter regulations for emissions.

Differing paths

Opponents of the projects cite safety concerns, pointing frequently to a carbon pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, that sickened dozens of people. On Tuesday, some pointed to a recent two-day meeting of the federal Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, at which experts talked about the safety and potential regulatory adjustments that might be necessary in the face of a rush to build carbon pipelines for sequestration purposes.

Backers of the projects point to the economic value to South Dakota corn producers, who sell the majority of their crop for the production of ethanol. A recent report from the Dakota Institute estimated that together, the pipelines represent $3.3 billion in value across the life of the two projects.

County commissions do not have authority to grant state-level permits to pipeline companies. They can, however, regulate zoning and development, which includes setting allowable distances between pipelines and cities, churches, schools and homes.

Prior to the discussions on a pipeline zoning ordinance commenced more than a year ago, Minnehaha County had no rules in place for pipeline placement.

Counties have taken differing approaches to writing such regulations in the face of the controversial projects. Brown County was sued over a pipeline ordinance more restrictive than the one on offer Tuesday in Minnehaha County. A week ago, Lake County commissioners in Madison shot down the possibility of any ordinance to regulate pipelines.

Given that Minnehaha County will have rules now and had none before, Bender said, passing something before the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) takes up the pipeline permits is important.

We need to get an ordinance in place before that PUC process begins so we know the rules of the road in Minnehaha County, Bender said.

The amendment to shorten the distance passed 3-2. Shortly thereafter, the entirety of the ordinance passed 4-1, with Beninga providing the dissenting vote.

Companies, opponents respond

After the vote, Navigator CO2 Ventures Vice President of Government and Public Affairs Elizabeth Burns-Thompson said the ordinance presents an opportunity for additional dialogue with the county.

It would be nearly impossible to get through the county at 750 feet, said Burns-Thompson, who was confronted and questioned by at least three opponents after the meeting.

In an emailed statement, Summit Carbon Solutions Director of Regulatory Affairs John Satterfield did not address any specifics on the ordinance, which his company spoke against two weeks ago -- even after the shortened setbacks were proposed.

The 3.3 million miles of pipelines in active service across the United States, including the nearly 12,000 miles in South Dakota, are extensively regulated at both the federal and state levels, and those regulations preempt ordinances at the county level, Satterfield said. Having a consistent process to oversee and regulate major infrastructure projects is important to ensure our economy continues to operate effectively.

Pipeline opponent Betty Strom, meanwhile, was unimpressed by the commissions final call. Strom is a Lake County landowner facing an eminent domain lawsuit from Summit. Strom, who also fought construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline that now runs beneath her property, has been engaged with the push for pipeline ordinances in multiple counties.

Strom spoke of her disappointment with her own county commissioners for their decision to avoid any kind of pipeline ordinance, then decried Minnehaha Countys officials for passing what she sees as a watered-down ruleset.

After what she described as a year and a half of discussion on the issue with Sioux Falls-area leaders, she said the amended setbacks negate the value of anything else in the ordinance.

Strom is concerned that lives will be at risk in the event of a rupture. The 330-foot setback, she said, isnt far enough to protect the families who live within a mile of her land or the volunteer firefighters who might respond to an incident.

It puts our emergency people in danger, Strom said.
On Thursday night, Houston Independent School District's new state-appointed board of managers conducted business amid a vocal crowd of local community members, parents, students, educators, and organizations who refuted the board's appointments and contract approval of interim HISD Superintendent Mike Miles.

The nine-member board voted to approve an interim contract for Miles, granting him $1,473 per day under a 21-day interim term totaling a salary of $360,000 and $25,000 in relocation expenses.

Miles's long-term contract will be up for a board vote on June 22 and equals a similar yearly salary as former HISD Superintendent Millard House II, who just secured a new top position in a Maryland-area school district.

The board approved Miles's contract and other board appointments amongst a crowd of outspoken audience members who drowned out the new board's conducting their agenda items at the Hattie Mae White Educational Center. Chants like "No justice, no peace," "TEA go away," and "F Mike Miles" was repeated regularly throughout the hour-and-a-half-long meeting.

The nine-member board also approved suspending regular meeting requirements for the body over the summer. It also approved $3 million in funding from the local education group Good Reason Houston. Good Reason told Chron the donation was "covering some consultant support as well as services provided by our staff, between June 1, 2023, and July 1, 2024." Moreover, Miles confirmed last week the district would be working with the education consulting group Kitamba in the transition process.

Miles's absence for most of the meeting was also noted by audience members, with one shouting, "Where is your boss?" at the board. Eventually, the interim superintendent joined the rest of the group in the last few minutes of the meeting. At one point, the board made an unsuccessful call to order to calm the crowd's commotion. The failed attempt only elicited even more resistance from the community.

Yi-Chin Lee/Staff photographer

One by one, local community members took the microphone to voice their demands for the state-appointed board and their concerns surrounding Miles' leadership, some noting his past work as Dallas Independent School District superintendent and new plans to reconstitute 29 schools, including Wheatley, Kashmere, and North Forest high schools and their feeder patterns under a program dubbed the "New Education Systems."

According to Miles, staff at those 29 campuses will have to reapply for their positions, librarians will be cut from their jobs, and teachers will be offered up to $95,000 based on a pay-per-performance system.

"Mike Miles is in the process of turning 29 schools into test prep factories," HISD teacher Sarah Rivlin told the board. "The only way to make kids sit through joyless test prep all day is by rigid control, intimidation, and force. When those 29 schools reopen, you're going to start hearing reports of abusive treatment of students, you don't have to believe me now, but when you see those headlines, I want you to remember this, and I want you to hold Mike Miles accountable."

President of the Houston Federation of Teachers Jackie Anderson also listed a few recommendations for the board.

"While you're here, use your gifted power to make an impact on HISD students, work for full funding, more meaningful instruction that is not tied to STAAR, smaller class sizes, stop applying for waivers, enhance wraparound services," Anderson said. "Work on improving the conditions in which children live and therefore learn."

Other speakers said Miles's plans for HISD have already been done.

"Any success these hostile takeover minions have will be on the backs of House administration and the elected board of trustees," University of Houston professor Pamela Boveland said. "I continue to be extremely disturbed by the lack of geographic diversity in this unelected group of managers. Finally, it is odd that these draconian strategies have been revived as a new vision for Houston students. Lipstick on a pig. Taxation without representation, the ghost of Hattie Mae White will haunt you."

One HISD parent and grandparent who asked to remain anonymous said she came to the meeting to hear from the board and Miles and their plans for the students.

"I really want to know what's going on with my kids," she said. "I just feel like everybody should just sit down and talk and not stand up and yell at each other."

Some speakers even traveled from Dallas to tell the board about their experiences with Miles as superintendent of DISD from 2012 to 2015. Dallas native and self-styled "Mike Miles hater," Robert Ceccarelli, said he thinks the interim superintendent is in Houston to redeem himself from his tenure in Dallas and add HISD to his charter school network. Until recently, Miles served as CEO and founder of Third Future Schools, a charter school consulting network based in Colorado.

"It's always the teachers and principals and never the children's fault," Ceccarelli said. "He has another agenda to get rid of the teachers to make more charter schools."

Ahead of the meeting, around 150 community members, including district students, parents, teachers, union groups, and local organizations and protested outside the Hattie Mae building alongside the former elected HISD trustees Kathy Blueford-Daniels and Elizabeth Santos.

"There is no accountability," Santos said. "I promise you this, Mike Miles, I was here before you got here, I will be here while you're here, and I will be here when you leave because we are the community."

After getting the board's initial approval, Miles said he looks forward to continuing his work as HISD Superintendent.

"On day one, we began the process of implementing system-wide reform to improve student outcomes for all HISD students," Miles said Thursday night. "We will continue to act boldly and with urgency to eliminate the decades-old achievement gaps for Black and Brown students and provide a diverse set of education experiences to prepare all HISD graduates for the year 2035 and beyond."
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LONDON (AP)  Former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson shocked Britain on Friday by quitting as a lawmaker after being told he will be sanctioned for misleading Parliament. He departed with a ferocious tirade at his political opponents  and at his successor, Rishi Sunak  that could blast open tensions within the governing Conservative Party.

Johnson resigned after receiving the results of an investigation by lawmakers into misleading statements he made to Parliament about partygate," a series of rule-breaking government parties during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a lengthy resignation statement, Johnson accused opponents of trying to drive him out  and hinted that his rollercoaster political career might not be over yet.

"It is very sad to be leaving Parliament  at least for now," he said.

Johnson, 58, said he had received a letter from the Privileges Committee making it clear  much to my amazement  that they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of Parliament.

He called the committee investigating him  which has members from both government and opposition parties  a kangaroo court.

"Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts," Johnson said.

The resignation will trigger a special election to replace Johnson as a lawmaker for a suburban London seat in the House of Commons.

Johnson, whose career has seen a series of scandals and comebacks, led the Conservatives to a landslide victory in 2019 but was forced out by his own party less than three years later.

He had been awaiting the outcome of an investigation by a House of Commons standards committee over misleading statements he made to Parliament about a slew of gatherings in government buildings in 2020 and 2021 that breached pandemic lockdown rules.

Police eventually issued 126 fines over the late-night soirees, boozy parties and wine time Fridays, including one to Johnson, and the scandal helped hasten the end of his premiership.

Johnson has acknowledged misleading Parliament when he assured lawmakers that no rules had been broken, but he said he didn't do so deliberately.

He told the committee he honestly believed the five events he attended, including a send-off for a staffer and his own surprise birthday party, were lawful work gatherings intended to boost morale among overworked staff members coping with a deadly pandemic.

The committee had been expected to publish its report in the next few weeks, and Johnson could have faced suspension from the House of Commons if he was found to have lied deliberately.

By quitting, he avoids a suspension that could have seen him ousted from his Commons seat by his constituents, leaving him free to run for Parliament again in future. His resignation statement suggested he was mulling that option. It was highly critical of Sunak, who served as Treasury chief in Johnson's government before jumping ship with many other colleagues in July 2022  resignations that forced Johnson out.

Johnson took aim at Sunak, who was chosen by the Conservatives in October to steady the government after the terms of Johnson and his briefly serving successor Liz Truss, who stepped down after six weeks when her tax-slashing policies caused financial turmoil.

Johnson claimed that when I left office last year the government was only a handful of points behind in the polls. That gap has now massively widened."

Conservative poll ratings went into decline during the turbulent final months of Johnson's term and have not recovered. Opinion polls regularly put the opposition Labour Party 20 points or more ahead. A national election must be held by the end of 2024.

"Just a few years after winning the biggest majority in almost half a century, that majority is now clearly at risk," Johnson said. Our party needs urgently to recapture its sense of momentum and its belief in what this country can do."

Johnson resigned hours after King Charles III rewarded dozens of his loyal aides and allies with knighthoods and other honors, a political tradition for former prime ministers that drew cries of cronyism from opponents of the ousted leader.

Johnson's dramatic exit is the latest  but maybe not the last  chapter in a career of extremes. The rumpled, Latin-spouting populist with a mop of blond hair had held major offices, including London mayor, but also spent periods on the political sidelines before Britain's exit from the European Union propelled him to the top.

Johnson's bullish boosterism helped persuade 52% of Britons to vote to leave the EU, and he was elected prime minister in 2019 on a vow to get Brexit done.

He was less suited to the hard work of governing, and the pandemic  which landed Johnson in intensive care with COVID-19  was a major challenge. Johnson's government won plaudits for its rapid vaccine rollout, but the U.K. also had one of the highest coronavirus death tolls in Europe, and some of the longest lockdowns.

The final straw came when details emerged of parties held in Johnsons Downing Street office and home while the country was in lockdown. Partygate caused outrage and finally pushed the Conservative Party to oust its election-winning but erratic leader.

Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the opposition Labour Party, responded to Johnson's resignation with: enough is enough.

The British public are sick to the back teeth of this never ending Tory soap opera played out at their expense," she said.
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ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates (AP)  On a boat off the coast of an island near Abu Dhabi, marine scientist Hamad al-Jailani feels the corals, picked from the reef nursery and packed in a box of seawater, and studies them carefully, making sure they havent lost their color.

The corals were once bleached. Now they're big, healthy and ready to be moved back to their original reefs in the hope they'll thrive once more.

We try to grow them from very small fragments up to  now some of them have reached  the size of my fist, al-Jailani said, who's part of the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi's coral restoration program.

The nursery gives corals the ideal conditions to recover: clear waters with strong currents and the right amount of sunlight. Al-Jailani periodically checks the corals' growth, removes any potentially harmful seaweed and seagrass, and even lets the fish feed off the corals to clean them, until they're healthy enough to be relocated.

The Environment Agency Abu Dhabi, or EAD, has been rehabilitating and restoring corals since 2021, when reefs off the United Arab Emirates' coast faced their second bleaching event in just five years. EAD's project is one of many initiatives  both public and private  across the country to protect the reefs and the marine life that depend on them in a nation that has come under fire for its large-scale developments and polluting industries that cause harm to underwater ecosystems. There's been some progress, but experts remain concerned for the future of the reefs in a warming world.

Coral bleaching occurs when sea temperatures rise and sun glares flush out algae that give the corals their color, turning them white. Corals can survive bleaching events, but cant effectively support marine life, threatening the populations that depend on them.

The UAE lost up to 70% of their corals, especially around Abu Dhabi, in 2017 when water temperatures reached 37 degrees Celsius (99 degrees Fahrenheit), according to EAD. But al-Jailani said 40-50% of corals survived the second bleaching event in 2021.

Although the bleaching events did wipe out a good portion of our corals, he said, it did also prove that the corals that we have are actually resilient ... these corals can actually withstand these kind of conditions."

Bleaching events are happening more frequently around the world as waters warm due to human-made climate change, caused by the burning of oil, coal and gas that emits heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Other coral reef systems around the world have suffered mass bleaching events, most notably Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

How to limit global warming and its effects will be discussed at length at the United Nations climate conference, which will be held in Dubai later this year.

The UAE is one of the worlds largest oil producers and has some of the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions globally. The country has pledged to have net zero carbon emissions by 2050, which means all carbon dioxide emissions are either slashed or canceled out somehow, but the goal has been met with skepticism from analysts.

But bleaching due to warming weather is not the only threat to coral reefs around the gulf. High oil tanker traffic, fossil-fuel related activities, offshore installations, and the exploitation of marine resources are all putting marine life under intense stress, according to the U.N. Environment Programme, causing them to degrade.

Environmentalists have also long criticized the UAE, and Dubai in particular, for its large-scale buildings and huge coastal developments.

The building of the Palm Jebel Ali, which began more than a decade ago and has been on hold since 2008, caused an outcry among conservationists after it reportedly destroyed about 8 square kilometers (5 square miles) of reef.

"More than 90 million cubic meters (23.8 billion gallons) of sediments were dredged and dropped, more or less on top of one of the remaining reefs near Dubai, said John Henrik Stahl, the dean of the College of Marine Sciences at Khorfakkan University in Sharjah, UAE.

The project was meant to be similar to the Palm Jumeirah  a collection of small, artificial islands off the coast of Dubai in the shape of a palm tree.

Still, environmental projects persist across the coastline and throughout the emirates.

Development company URB has announced it wants to grow 1 billion artificial corals over a 200-square-kilometer area (124 square miles) and 100 million mangrove trees on an 80-kilometer (50-mile) strip of beaches in Dubai by 2040.

Still in the research and development phase, the project hopes to create 3D technology to print materials that can host algae, much like corals.

Members of Dubai's diving community are also encouraging coral protection efforts.

Diving course director Amr Anwar is in the process of creating a certified coral restoration course that teaches divers how to collect and re-plant corals that have fallen after being knocked off by divers fins or a boats anchor.

I dont want people to see broken corals and just leave them like that," said Anwar. Through the training we give people, they would be able to take these broken corals that they find and plant them elsewhere, and then see them grow and watch their progress.

But experts say that unless the threat of overheating seas caused by climate change is addressed, coral bleaching events will continue to occur, damaging reefs worldwide.

Countries have pledged to limit the global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, after which scientists say the effects of warming on the planet could be much worse, and some even potentially irreversible. But analysts say most nations  including the UAE  are still way off that target.

You have to make sure that the cause for the degradation of the coral reefs in the first place is no longer a threat," said Stahl, the Khorfakkan University scientist. Otherwise the restoration effort may be for nothing.

___

Associated Press reporter Nick El Hajj in Dubai, UAE contributed to this report.

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about APs climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Yes, thats right. The North Dakota Ethics Commission is looking for prospects who may become members of the commission. Hurry, the filing deadline is June 30.

Now there were some folks  mostly legislators  who didnt think North Dakota had enough ethics to have a commission. Technically, it is not a commission but a board but the word commission is used to elevate its importance in the family of 120 boards, commissions, agencies, and whatever blocks out the sunlight.

It was not easy to get a commission to oversee ethics because everyone, including some in the state prison, thought we were ethical enough. But there were naysayers who worried about lobbyists, conflicts of interest, campaign funds and other illegal stuff that has been going on for decades.

Did you hear the story about the Louisiana Lottery that sought legality through the North Dakota Legislature in 1892? One of the plotters pulled out a gun and everyone ran for the hills. The O.K. Corral was busy at the time so the shooting was postponed until 1922.

As I was saying, the Legislature threw a fit in both the 2013 and 2015 sessions when bills were introduced to create a statutory ethics commission. Not seeing their own conflict of interest, legislators killed both measures.

So the folks who saw money moving in dark alleys decided to go around the Legislature by initiating a constitutional amendment. So the issue moved into the public arena where the Greater North Dakota Chamber of Commerce, the North Dakota Petroleum Council, Lignite Energy Council, and miscellaneous others put up $458,000 to defeat the measure.

According to Ballotpedia, several national organizations of a populist design raised a million dollars to pass the measure. Which happened by a vote of 169,676 YES and 146,709 NO, not a sweeping mandate but you only need one.

The people who have been around government for a couple of decades know in advance that passage is only one step and a mighty small one because the legislature is going to control this game no matter what the score.

Keep in mind that the mood of the legislators about ethics was not good. They killed the plan twice and then the arrogant public decides to ram it down their throats. That did smart some.

Unfortunately, the Legislature was waiting at the pass. It was important to dry gulch the ethics commission before it did any political damage. So the Legislature is doing its unethical best to control or administer the commission to death.

Now there are icebergs to be worried about whether you have the Queen Mary or a raft.

Without the benefit of the ethics commission, Forum News Service reporter Jeremy Turley put together an extensive report on retiring lawmakers burning the last bit of coal in the fireplace, reaching for the last banana in the bunch. Going on junkets where the shrimp are big.

Then another Forum reporter, Patrick Springer, reported that North Dakota lost $680 million when oil frackers flared 226 billion cubic feet of natural gas in the oil fields because it was cheaper for the companies.

But there is more  a lot more. The fracking companies have been getting away with murder when it comes to state regulation. Just about every violation is soft-peddled.

Initially, big fines are imposed but they are negotiated down in the dark; spills were reported as negligible but there is a lake in Olsons pasture and a black streak in the Little Missouri River. And we havent even brought up the purchase of legislators with campaign donations.

Where there is smoke, there is fire. Or is it flaring? It will be the reporters who find out.
MIAMI (AP)  Follow along for live updates on former President Donald Trump, who has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate. The indictment marks the first time in U.S. history that a former president faces criminal charges by the federal government he once oversaw. Trump faces the possibility of prison if convicted.

What to know:

 A timeline of events leading to Trumps indictment in the classified documents case

 Indictment accuses Trump of scheming and lying to keep secret papers

 A look at the charges, the special counsels investigation and whats next

 Trump faces a string of inquiries in various states and venues as he campaigns for a return to the White House

 Does the indictment stand to damage Trumps standing with voters?

STANDING OVATION FOR TRUMP AT NORTH CAROLINA GOP DINNER

An indictment by the Department of Justice is an attempt to thwart the will of the American people, former President Donald Trump said at a state GOP convention dinner in North Carolina.

I promise you this: If you put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and American will be a free nation once again," he said to a standing ovation.

The indictment is an attempt to damage his chances for a second term, he alleged.

Trump is accused of willfully defying Justice Department demands to return classified documents, enlisting aides in his efforts to hide the records and even telling his lawyers that he wanted to defy a subpoena for the materials stored at his residence.

In appearances at Republican state conventions in Georgia and North Carolina on Saturday, Trump sought to frame the 37 criminal charges hes facing as an attack on not just him but also his supporters.

In the end theyre not coming after me, theyre coming after you, and Im just standing in the way, he said in North Carolina.

TRUMP VOWS TO CONTINUE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN EVEN IF CONVICTED

Former President Donald Trump vowed Saturday to continue his bid for a second term even if he is convicted in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

Ill never leave, he told Politico in an interview aboard his plane after speaking at a Republican state convention in Georgia. He further predicted that he will not be convicted and sidestepped questions about whether he would pardon himself if elected.

I dont think Ill ever have to, Trump said. I didnt do anything wrong.

The indictment unsealed Friday accuses Trump of willfully defying Justice Department demands to return classified documents, enlisting aides in his efforts to hide the records and even telling his lawyers that he wanted to defy a subpoena for the materials stored at his residence.

MIKE PENCE DECLINES TO SHARE REACTION TO TRUMP INDICTMENT

Former Vice President Mike Pence said Saturday that he has read the indictment outlining federal charges against former President Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

But he declined to share his personal reaction to the content of the indictment, which included photographs of boxes with classified information stacked in a bathroom and on a ballroom stage, or to criticize Trump, whom he is challenging for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024.

Ive read the indictment, Pence said in an interview with The Associated Press in North Carolina, where he addressed state Republicans.

I also know that every Americans entitled to the presumption of innocence. And as I said today, we now know the Department of Justices view of these matters. But the former president is entitled to present his defense. And we dont know what the facts of that are.

That's why I said today Im going to urge patience, encourage people to be prayerful for the former president, but also for all those in authority and for the country going forward, said Pence, who formally launched his 2024 campaign this week.

TRUMP SIGNS AUTOGRAPHS AND POSES FOR PHOTOS AT LOCAL WAFFLE HOUSE

After speaking at the Georgia Republican Convention, Trump stopped by a local Waffle House, where he signed autographs, posed for photos and chatted with supporters.

We did absolutely nothing wrong, Trump said of federal authorities unsealing a lengthy indictment accusing him of mishandling national security secrets and then covering up his actions.

He is scheduled to speak to another Republican audience in North Carolina later Saturday.

TRUMP CALLS INDICTMENT AN ATTACK ON HIS CAMPAIGN

Speaking Saturday at the Georgia Republican Convention, Trump cast his federal indictment as an attempt to hurt his chances of returning to the White House as he campaigns for a second term in office.

In his first public appearance since the 37 felony counts against him were unsealed, Trump blasted the indictment as ridiculous and baseless."

Theyve launched one witch hunt after another to try and stop our movement, to thwart the will of the American people, Trump said, later adding, In the end, theyre not coming after me. Theyre coming after you.

The strategy is a well-worn one for Trump, who remains the front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination despite his mounting legal woes. He is scheduled to speak to another Republican audience in North Carolina later Saturday.

TRUMP ARRIVES IN GEORGIA FOR STATE GOP CONVENTION APPEARANCE

Former President Donald Trump arrived Saturday in Georgia to chants of Four more years! Four more years! from supporters waving signs that read, Witch Hunt.

About 100 eager supporters turned out at Columbus airfield for Trumps first public appearance since federal authorities unsealed a lengthy indictment accusing him of mishandling national security secrets and then covering up his actions.

Hes headed to Georgia Republicans' state convention, where hes expected to blast the prosecution as a political exercise because hes running for president again.

He doesnt have to convince his audiences Saturday.

Michael Sellers, a 67-year-old Trump backer who came to the airfield, said hed read the indictment and was aware of accusations that Trump sought to resist returning classified records, which previous presidents have routinely done when coming across such material in their possession.

Its criminal what theyre doing to him, Sellers said. Asked whether he believes Trump will win another term in 2024, Sellers said, He won the last time. He will win again.

TRUMP SUPPORTERS CHEER FORMER PRESIDENT IN GEORGIA

Scores of Trump supporters braved the beating sun to cheer the former presidents arrival in Columbus, Georgia, as he prepared to deliver two state GOP convention speeches Saturday in the wake of his federal criminal indictment.

Backers waved Witch Hunt signs, unbowed a day after federal authorities unsealed a lengthy charging document that depicted Trump as willfully mishandling national security secrets after leaving office and then covering up his actions.

Jan Plemmons, a 66-year-old Trump supporter, called the charges absolutely ridiculous and said shes ready to hit the campaign trail with Trump as he runs for another term in 2024.

I was watching Fox News this morning, and its just crazy, Plemmons said, as her oversized foam Make America Great Again hat bobbed with each emphasis. Its just to divert attention.

Plemmons said she does not dislike Trumps primary rivals but sees the former president as the man to put back in the White House and fix this mess that were in now.

 Bill Barrow

INDICTMENT EXPECTED TO ADD FUEL TO GOP CAMPAIGN AGAINST JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

Congressional Republicans have prepared an aggressive campaign against the Justice Department for months, a key part of former Trumps public defense against this weeks indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents.

The GOP counter-offensive against federal prosecutors and others who have investigated Trump avoids the substance of the charges facing the former president. Instead, they have tried to discredit law enforcement and President Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, for instance, has issued a series of letters to the Justice Department demanding documents related to special counsel Jack Smiths investigation of Trumps handling of classified records. Jordan has also aggressively sought to undercut Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who in April filed charges against Trump in a New York hush money investigation.

Democrats say Republicans are sowing conspiracy theories with potentially dangerous consequences.

NOT ALL PLAN WARM WELCOME FOR TRUMP IN GEORGIA

Although most of the GOP activists attending the Georgia Republican Party convention Saturday are voicing support for Trump, some are suggesting his indictment and record make him a bad choice for the party's presidential nominee in 2024.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who has called for Trump to drop out of the race, got a polite but reserved reception Saturday morning at a party breakfast where Hutchinson touted his bid for the Republican presidential nomination as a consistent conservative.

Hutchinson didnt mention Trump in his speech but told reporters that the Republican Party should not lose its soul in defending Trump, saying the evidence so far suggests he treated national secrets like entertainment tools.

 Jeff Amy

TRUMP HEADED TO GEORGIA, NORTH CAROLINA FOR CAMPAIGN APPEARANCES

Trump is set to campaign in Georgia and North Carolina on Saturday, making his first public appearances since his federal indictment on 37 counts of mishandling classified documents.

Friendly audiences are expected to welcome Trump at the two state party conventions.

Trump is a fighter, and the kinds of people that attend these conventions love a fighter, said Jack Kingston, a former Georgia congressman who supported Trump in 2016 and 2020.

A campaign official described Trump's mood as defiant Friday after the indictment was unsealed. Trump has insisted publicly that he committed no wrongdoing and is likely to repeat that theme during Saturday's appearances.

Trump remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. His rivals have handled news of his indictment cautiously, including former Vice President Mike Pence, who is also scheduled to address North Carolina Republicans on Saturday.

DEMOCRATS CALL FOR PEACEFUL PROCESS; GOP SPEAKER SAYS CASE MAY DISRUPT NATION

The Democratic leaders of both congressional chambers are urging supporters and detractors of Trump alike to let the case against him peacefully run its course in court.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries, also from New York, released a statement saying Trumps indictment must play out through the legal process, without any outside political or ideological interference.

We encourage Mr. Trumps supporters and critics alike to let this case proceed peacefully in court, Schumer and Jeffries said.

That was a departure from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, who suggested that the nations core legal values were being undermined.

This is going to disrupt this nation because it goes to the core of equal justice for all, which is not being seen today, McCarthy said in an interview with Fox News Digital. And were not going to stand for it.

SECRET SERVICE PREPARES FOR TRUMP COURT APPEARANCE

The U.S. Secret Service is preparing for Trumps appearance at a federal court in Miami on Tuesday after a grand jury indicted him on 37 felony counts related to his handling of classified documents.

Spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the agency will not seek any special accommodations outside of what would be required to ensure the former Presidents continued safety in connection with Trumps appearance.

He added: As with any site visited by a protectee, the Secret Service is in constant coordination with the necessary entities to ensure protective requirements are met. We have the utmost confidence in the professionalism and commitment to security shared by our law enforcement partners in Florida.

Trumps April 4 arraignment in his New York case, where he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, attracted a crush of media and protesters, involved multiple street closures, extra security screenings and shut down non-Trump court business for an afternoon.

TRUMP KEPT CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS IN BATHROOM, SHOWER OF CLUB, INDICTMENT SAYS

The indictment alleges Trump kept classified documents in the bathroom and shower at his Florida estate, as well as various other locations that included a ballroom, storeroom, office and bedroom.

Prosecutors noted that tens of thousands of members and guests visited the active social club of Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trumps presidency in January 2021 through the August 2022 search. They argued that nonetheless Trump stored documents in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

The indictment claims that, for a two-month period, some of Trumps boxes were stored in one of Mar-a-Lagos gilded ballrooms. A picture included in the indictment shows boxes stacked in rows on the ballrooms stage.

The indictment also shows photographs of boxes that spilled over in the storage room, including a document marked SECRET/REL TO USA, FVEY which means information releasable only to members of the intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. In the photo the classified document is redacted.

LAWYER SAID TRUMP SUGGESTED HE REMOVE DAMAGING DOCUMENTS

The indictment unsealed Friday also says that, unaware of any records being moved, Trumps attorney on June 2, 2022, identified 38 documents with classified markings and placed them in a folder, which he sealed with clear duct tape handed to him by Trump valet Walt Nauta. The valet then took the attorney to see the former president.

Did you find anything? Is it bad? ... Is it good? the lawyer said Trump asked.

The attorney told federal authorities that he discussed the folder of classified material with Trump and how the material should be handled. The attorney told authorities that as they discussed the attorney taking the materials with him, Trump gestured in a way that suggested he wanted the attorney to identify anything really bad and you know, pluck it out. The lawyer clarified that Trump did not articulate such instructions beyond making that plucking motion.

The attorney told authorities that he did not take anything out of the folder and that he instead immediately contacted the FBI and another Trump attorney. On June 3, according to the indictment, the second Trump attorney acted as the official custodian of records on Trumps behalf and turned the material to the FBI.

INDICTMENT ALLEGES VALET MOVED BOXES AT TRUMPS DIRECTION

The indictment alleges that Nauta acted at Trumps direction to move move approximately 64 boxes of documents from the Mar-a-Lago storage room to the former presidents residence. Nautas actions occurred between May 23, 2022, and June 2, 2022, according to the indictment.

That total includes approximately 30 boxes Nauta allegedly moved on June 2, the same day Trumps legal team was expected to examine the cache. Nautas actions that day came hours after he talked briefly via phone with Trump, prosecutors allege. Neither Trump nor Nauta, according to the indictment, disclosed to the former presidents attorneys that Nauta had moved any of the storage room contents.

According to prosecutors timeline, Trump met later that day with one of his attorneys and Nauta escorted the attorney to the storage room for his review of the documents
Former President Donald Trump has been indicted in the special counsels classified documents probe, sources familiar with the matter tells CNN. Mandatory Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
One of Longford's busiest towns could be in line for a relief road to be built to ease increasing traffic levels.

Granard has long been regarded as an urban centre in need of State backed intervention to free up access in and out of the town.

Now, thanks to a call by Cllr PJ Reilly those overtures could well become reality following recent face to face talks with Environment Minister Eamon Ryan.

I did raise it at a meeting we (councillors) had over the N4 and I suggested about the possibility of a relief road for Granard, he told the Leader.

Cllr Reilly said his decision was prefaced somewhat by concerns over ongoing funding issues concerning the proposed upgrade of the main N4 between Longford and Mullingar.

He (Mr Ryan) did say that is what they (government) are looking at in terms of spending money on relief roads in smaller towns.

He said Granard would be ideal for that and it was because f that I tabled a notice of motion at the last Granard Municipal District meeting to write to TII (Transport Infrastructure Ireland) for a relief road.

That letter is also expected to be formally sent to the Transport Minister over the coming days.
A Longford man alleged to be involved in a campaign of intimidation aimed at halting land sales has been ordered by a judge to complete a safer driving course after appearing in court charged with a string of road traffic offences.

Seamus Kane (53) Ardnagullion, Edgeworthstown, Co Longford was given the ultimatum at a recent District Court sitting where he faced charges for drink driving, no insurance and of driving without a licence on June 18, 2022 at Toneywarden, Granard, Co Longford.

Mr Kane has previously been jailed for contempt for breaching court orders and undertakings not to interfere with the the work of receiver Myles Kirby.



The court had previously heard of how gardai spotted a vehicle driving in an erratic manner and followed it before seeing it drive up on a grass verge.

When Mr Kane stepped out the car, he was found to be unsteady on his feet, leading to his arrest and transfer to Granard garda station.

A later blood sample taken from Mr Kane returned a reading of 236mg per 100ml of blood, showing the Edgeworthstown man to be over four times the legal limit to drive.

Mr Kane was less than halfway through a six year driving ban which was handed down in 2o2o for being caught at the wheel without insurance.

When Mr Kane last appeared before Longford District Court in February, Judge Bernadette Owens advised him she wanted to see evidence of that he was attempting to combat his dependency on alcohol.

A probation report was also directed, the contents of which were handed into the court when Mr Kane appeared in front of Judge Owens recently.

In asking his defence solicitor Brid Mimnagh had she read its findings, the local solicitor said she had and said while the commentary might not be great, her client was making progress.

Judge Owens asked Ms Mimnagh why Mr Kane did not show up at a pro social driving course.

The programme aims to target high risk groups of drivers who are initially identified through the justice and legal system.

Mr Kane replied, saying he had been at an auction in England at the time with Ms Mimnagh backing those remarks up by insisting Mr Kane did not go willy nilly to the UK.

In reading directly from the probation report, Judge Owens highlighted how Mr Kane had sought to minimise his offending.

Ms Mimnagh said Mr Kane had since reapplied to undergo the aforementioned driving course and was remorseful.

He accepts responsibility for his actions, she said, adding she had also spoken to Mr Kanes partner who confirmed he was not drinking at all now.

Ms Mimnagh said despite the charges he stands accused of, Mr Kane was someone who was attempting to try and start a fresh chapter in his life.

He is caught between a rock and a hard place, she said.

His job is as a mechanic and he cant test drive cars. He comes to the court as a man who left school in his early teens and has a very strong work ethic.

Mr Kane was remanded on bail to a sitting of Longford District Court on June 20, 2023 when it is anticipated that he will have completed the said pro social driving course.
Despite vehement local opposition and several submissions, including a lengthy 17-page objection from 'The Residents' signed by hundreds of people, Longford planners have given the go ahead for the construction of a 'massive' Edgeworthstown wind turbine development.

Natural Forces Renewable Energy Ltd (Natural Forces) propose to construct an Enercon E138 Wind Energy Converter on an 81m tower with an electrical rating of 4.2MW and an overall tip height of 149.38m at Lissanore, Co Longford.

Local authority planners published their decision, yesterday (Thursday, June 8), indicating that there were sixteen conditions attached to the granting of planning permission.

Lissanore is located between Edgeworthstown and Lisryan, and angry residents have expressed 'huge concern' about the proposal.

In a myriad of submissions, they expressed unhappiness with the 'excessive height' at 149.38m of the proposed wind turbine and the impact it will have visually and on property prices.

Issues of 'adverse health effects', 'noise pollution', 'shadow flicker', 'no public consultation' and 'proximity to property' were also highlighted by objectors to the planning application which was received by the County Council on April 19 last.

Residents stated that the 'massive' wind turbine being proposed will be significantly higher than the Dublin Spire which is 120 metres high.

They also pointed to the negative impact on local wildlife and believe a wind turbine on this scale isn't in keeping with the efforts to promote Edgeworthstown, the home of Maria Edgeworth, as a tourism destination.

The proposed development will also entail the installation of the hard standing area for the Wind Energy Converter and the installation of underground circuit cables which will run in underground cable trenches (c.1.2m deep), from the proposed Wind Energy Converter to the proposed substation building on the site.

Judge hits out at Longford man over driving course no show A Longford man alleged to be involved in a campaign of intimidation aimed at halting land sales has been ordered by a judge to complete a safer driving course after appearing in court charged with a string of road traffic offences.

Natural Forces Renewable Energy Ltd also intend to construct a substation building which will be located c. 98m from the proposed wind turbine and surrounded by stock proof fencing. It will be a single storey building, measuring 55m2 and c.4.8m in height. "Construction of proposed internal site access track, constructed from permeable material and which will run from the site entrance to the Wind Energy Converter hard standing area."

Also included in the planning application is all associated ancillary infrastructure and preparatory works such as provision of the site entrance.

On its website, Natural Forces says it is a private independent power producer that delivers renewable energy projects in partnership with local communities across Canada and Ireland.
Longford has a an impressive line up of events for Cruinniu na nOg, a national day set aside to encourage creativity in young people.

Backstage Theatre are teaming up with Creative Ireland to celebrate Cruinniu na nOg, which runs from June 10 2023 and will feature free creative activities for children and young people throughout the county.

Backstage is will host a diverse programme of free workshops for young people. The workshops cover a variety of genres and cater for budding artists from six to 16 years of age.The first workshop entitled 'Filmmaking' features the IFTA nominated writer director team of Robert Higgins and Patrick McGivney.

The creators of the recently released award winning film Lakelands will focus on the basics of filmmaking and screenwriting in a fun, practical and insightful look at the first steps needed to make a film. The world of theatre is explored with director Gea Gojak.

Through creative tasks children will share thoughts and ideas about their surroundings and everyday lives to find themes they are curious to talk about.

Budding musicians will get the chance to meet Rap Duo Kofi and ND, who recently came third in a bid to represent Ireland in the Eurovision Song Contest with their song Down in the Rain, a song that inspires its listeners to never give up on your aspirations no matter how tough the road may seem.

Orla Mc Carthy will lead a creative dance workshop. Coming from a background with lots of dance improvisation, Orla is keen to share the beauty of creating dance in the moment.

Workshops are all free but spaces are limited and booking is essential on 0433347888 or backstage.ie
The CIOs of today are the ones who are painting the business picture of the future, explains VMwares president.

So, how are the CIOs of today approaching their critical, ever-evolving role? To find out, Forbes Insights surveyed 603 CIOs about:

The multicloud opportunities that they embrace

Obstacles that they have encountered while modernizing their applications

Their hybrid workplace strategies

And more

Download this report to review 8 key findings.
Ealier today we shared the video of Steve Milloy being interviewed by Laura Ingraham on Fox News, where, during the entire conversation, Milloy tried to convince the audience that breathing the smoke-filled air that's plaguing so much of the US and Canada right now is perfectly healthy for you. Yup, that's right, there's nothing at all bad about breathing that air, according to Steve Milloy. To accompany this blatant disinformation, Fox News added these alarmist (absurdist?) chyrons:

"Radical Left Uses Wildfire Smoke as Climate Cudgel" "Climate Cult Use Canadian Fire to Co-Opt Freedom" "Masked Media Manipulation" "Dems Use Haze As Pretense for Mass Re-Masking"

If you want to learn more about Milloy, the lobbying group he works for, the "Energy and Environment Legal Institute," and other individuals and organizations who are on the frontlines of climate disinformation, get yourself over to DeSmog. It's a great critical media organization that has been recognized as "'the antidote' to the corporate smoke screen that surrounds climate and energy issues." Their website provides more information about the history and the mission of the organization:

DeSmog was founded in January 2006 to clear the PR pollution that is clouding the science and solutions to climate change. Our team quickly became the world's number one source for accurate, fact-based information regarding global warming misinformation campaigns. DeSmog continues to expand our focus to other areas where misinformation has eroded public understanding and political action to address critical societal challenges, such as meeting the world's energy needs, confronting environmental racism, and ensuring a just transition to a sustainable economic paradigm. Through hard-hitting investigative journalism, in-depth research, and collaborations with other investigative outlets, DeSmog works tirelessly to provide climate accountability and serve as an antidote to science denial and disinformation. Supported by science and dedicated to equity, our team is helping to clear the way for clean energy solutions, environmental justice, and the preservation of democracy. Now a global organization, with reporters and researchers spanning North America, Europe, Africa, and beyond, the DeSmog team works to expose corporate misinformation from major fossil fuel interests, including the likes of ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and others with a documented history of undermining climate science and action. We conduct original research and reporting on a range of issues in the broader energy policy dialogue. In many cases, we find the same tactics, and many of the same people, that DeSmog first began exposing in our early research into the climate denial industry, are now sitting alongside a new breed of lobbyist, downplaying potential solutions to climate change, and promoting questionable "silver-bullet" solutions. Our research databases provide vital information on over 800 organizations and individuals responsible for spreading misinformation on a range of energy and science topics. We first started reporting on Koch Industries' funding of climate denial in 2007, and continue to track Koch-linked groups and operatives in our Koch Network Database. In 2020, we added two new databases  the Air Pollution Lobbying Database and Agribusiness Database  showing how vested interests are working to slow action across multiple sectors.

DeSmog is a great go-to resource to learn more about pretty much anyone talking about the climate on Fox News or other right-wing "news" sources. For instance, DeSmog has pages dedicated to debunking both Milloy and the Energy and Environment Legal Institute. The Milloy page provides this background on Milloy, and then follows with dozens of damning facts about his involvement with disinformation campaigns:

Steve Milloy joined the Heartland Institute's board of directors in 2020.5 He previously worked as director of external policy and strategy at Murray Energy Corp, which claims to be the largest privately-owned coal producer in the United States.6 Milloy held that position from October 2013 until May 2015 according to LinkedIn. Milloy is the publisher of the website JunkScience.com, a former columnist for Fox News,7 co-creator and manager of the Free Enterprise Action Fund, a former adjunct scholar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the president of the business consulting firm Steven J. Milloy, Inc.8 Milloy is also a senior policy fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute.9 On his website, Steve "The Junkman" Milloy proclaims himself a pioneer fighting against "faulty scientific data used to advance special, and often hidden, agendas."10

DeSmog's page on the Energy and Environment Legal Institute includes this information:

So next time you suspect someone's spewing PR disinformation about environmental issues and climate change on right-wing media, head on over to DeSmog and find out the truth.
Banking

UBS merger with Credit Suisse set to create a financial titan twice the size of the Swiss economy

UBS Group AG sealed an agreement with the Swiss government to cover 9 billion francs (9.26 billion) of losses it could incur from the rescue of Credit Suisse Group AG, clearing the last major hurdle to closing the historic takeover.

The accord was signed on June 9 and will cover a specific portfolio of Credit Suisse assets, corresponding to about 3% of the merged banks combined assets, the government said in a statement on Friday. That represents about 44 billion (45.2 billion) francs.

The deal removes one of the final blockages to the $3.3 billion (3.06 billion) takeover, which was brokered by the government in March as Credit Suisse hurtled toward bankruptcy.

UBS had pushed for protection from hard-to-predict losses from a set of its former rivals assets it plans to wind down or sell. With the government accord now in place, the merger may close as soon as Monday, creating a financial titan twice the size of the Swiss economy.

Under the terms, UBS will assume the first 5 billion francs (5.14 billion) of losses, with the government stepping up to take on the next 9 billion (9.26 billion). The portfolio of assets to be covered includes primarily loans, derivatives, legacy assets and structured products from Credit Suisses non-core unit.

A net approach will be taken when calculating losses, meaning any profits from the portfolio will also be taken into account. The government said it and the banks priority is to minimise losses and avoid using the loss backstop as much as possible. UBS Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti also said recently that losses for the state in the deal are exceptionally unlikely.

Bumpy road ahead

Ermotti, speaking at an event in the Swiss town of Interlaken on Friday, said that the next few months will be bumpy as the lender begins the task of integrating Credit Suisse. He declined to comment on job cut numbers, saying that most staff at the former rival are good people.

The agreement remains in place until the final wind-up of the portfolio and will see UBS pay the government various fees for the backstop, including an initial set up fee of 40 million francs (41.18 million) as well as an annual fee of 0.4% of the 9 billion francs (9.26 billion).

UBS shares were down 0.2% at 18.22 francs (18.76) as of 12:40 p.m. local time.

Government role

The government is set to have some say in how the assets are managed, and will also have a seat on a newly-formed oversight committee, UBS said earlier this week. The bank has to keep its headquarters in Switzerland to receive payment under the loss protection deal.

UBS is also benefiting from a more than two year grace period before Switzerland imposes higher capital requirements related to the takeover. An increase in capital triggered by the combined banks larger size will be phased in from early 2026.

UBS is also receiving a number of other regulatory benefits, including temporarily being allowed to use some rulings that applied to Credit Suisse as well as keeping its current rules for liquidity. Both banks will be able to continue their current methods of calculating risk-weighted assets.

Plan due within 90 days

UBS has about three months to provide the government with a business plan proposal for how it will wind down the assets covered by the guarantees and the expected net loss amounts. The five-year plan needs to include financial projections, a capital plan with risk-weight asset forecasts, and exit and unwinding strategies.

The two parties also have 90 days after the deal closes to assess whether they need to add or remove items from the identified pool of assets for wind-down.

After that, UBS can submit a request to the government to remove other assets if it deems that there would be more value in keeping it and selling it or winding it down would bear a net loss. The government must agree.

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
Luxembourg meeting

Agreement reached after years of trying would let countries choose to take migrants or pay others to do it

Migrants wait in line prior to board a boat at the port of the Italian island of Lampedusa on Thursday.  Photo credit: AFP

European Union ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Thursday struck a hard-fought deal on how to approach migration and asylum policies after years of thorny negotiations.

The nations agreed on an asylum approach that would allow countries to make decisions about granting access to applicants and to ensure procedures to return migrants who dont qualify, Swedens migration minister, Maria Stenergard, told reporters. The ministers also agreed on providing EU support to the countries most exposed to migration, she added.

The result, she said, is grounded in European values and international law. Countries that dont agree to accept qualified migrants would have to contribute 20,000 ($21,559) per person to an EU refugee fund under the tentative agreement. Only two EU members voted against the deal, while four abstained.

Its clear we have made huge progress when it comes to building trust, EU home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson said at a news conference.

The EU has long struggled to reach a common approach on migration, particularly as successive crises have strained frontline countries. The entry of migrants  mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Tunisia  has been growing, even as 13 million Ukrainians sought shelter in member states after Russias invasion. Around 10 million Ukrainians also left the bloc during that time.

The flow of migrants through the western Balkans accounted for almost half of all illegal border crossings into the EU in 2022.

There are still a number of hurdles before anything is implemented. Thursdays deal clears the way for negotiations between member states and the European Parliament.

Earlier Thursday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he was ready to work with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to tackle the asylum question.

Migrants wait in line prior to board a boat at the port of the the Italian island of Lampedusa on Thursday.  Photo credit: AFP

All attempts to either leave the problems with someone else or to point the finger at others will fail, he said at a joint news conference in Rome. It is important to establish reliable cooperation with countries of origin and countries of transit.

Meloni, whose party has post-fascist roots, echoed her guest who is a center-left Social Democrat. There is now a consensus that a shift is needed on migration rules, and for this I want to thank Mr Scholz, Meloni said.

Based on jointly agreed EU rules, authorities are supposed to register asylum seekers in the country of arrival. But in practice, authorities often let migrants pass on to countries such as Germany, a practice which has caused some tensions among European countries. Germany exempts Ukrainian war refugees from having to apply for asylum status.

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
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Rizal Commercial Banking Corp.s MoneyBela Barangayan Banking boosted bank onboarding in rural areas by 210 percent, reached 13,116 barangays or 31 percent of the 42,000 total barangays nationwide, enabled millions of unbanked and underserved Filipinos to open their first basic deposit accounts and grew gross transaction volume by 103 percent.

This remarkable feat was accomplished in a record time of only six months since the flagship program was launched in November 2022.

The RCBC MoneyBela Barangayan Banking is a one-of-a-kind campaign and the first in the Philippines that hybridizes physical-digital or phygital banking services serving geographically distant and disadvantaged and conflict areas of the country. It fuses the best features of digital banking and human connection as it brings RCBCs award-winning and world-renowned digital solutions  RCBC DiskarTech and RCBC ATMGo, to marginalized and rural communities.

The Moneybela campaign also engaged micro, small, and medium enterprises through the RCBC NegosyanTech program which empowered sari-sari store owners, family-owned establishments, and grassroots businesses to earn additional income and capital by facilitating digital transactions such as cash deposits and withdrawals, bank transfers, bills payments, e-loading and availment of teleconsultation plans and microinsurance.

As a core component of Moneybela Barangayan Banking, RCBC ATMGo is the countrys first bank-agnostic, last mile, and grassroots-oriented mobile-point-of-service ATM service, to Filipinos in geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas such as Busuanga, Coron, and Cullon in Palawan province, and in armed conflict-prone areas such as Lake Sebu in South Cotabato, and all provinces under the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.

The residents are able to withdraw government benefits without having the need to travel far and spend on costly transportation. The presence of RCBC ATM Go also provided additional income to small entrepreneurs who became RCBCs ATM Go partner merchants and who then helped RCBC serve Filipinos in remote areas.

RCBC is the only private universal bank in the country with the most extensive reach through its RCBC ATM Go network covering all 82 provinces nationwide with over 1,400 terminals deployed at the end of 2022 and is poised to grow to 10,000 units or a projected year-on-year growth of 614%.

RCBC ATMGo now has over 1,200 partner-merchants.

More than 65 percent of ATM Gos financial transactions are social grants and cash withdrawals by household beneficiaries of the national government in geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas.

RCBC conceptualized the Moneybela Barangayan Campaign as a response to the call of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) to expand financial inclusion and literacy efforts, as well as the concerns of yet-to-be-banked Filipinos that they are not digitally literate and they need assistance in bank onboarding. RCBC had special launches of this initiative during the Kadayawan Festival in Davao City and Masskara Festival in Bacolod City in 2022, and early this year, in the Dinagyang Festival of Iloilo City and in the Pinya Festival of Calauan, Laguna recently.

Lito Villanueva, RCBC executive vice president and chief innovation and inclusion officer, said the campaign successfully targeted unbanked Filipinos who were reluctant to embrace digital finance because of lack of knowledge and underserved Filipinos who lived in areas wherein there are few or no banks and ATMs operating to cater to their daily needs

By combining the power of revolutionary digital solutions and the impact of meaningful human relationships, RCBC has successfully created a compelling case study of engaging Filipinos in remote, marginalized, distant, and conflict areas and provide them with financial and digital literacy, and access to a wide array of empowering products and services, said Villanueva.

The massive growth of our digital products and services can be attributed to our philosophy that Innovations should come with Empathy, and to the diligence and ingenuity of each RCBC employee whose dedication to finding and creating breakthroughs in finance is forever inspiring, he said.

RCBC MoneyBela, being the first of its kind, has earned commendations from none other than the Philippines finance leaders, BSP Governor and Monetary Board Chairman Felipe Medalla and Department of Finance Secretary Benjamin Diokno, during its official launch at the RCBC Plaza last year.

I am really so happy that if theres any bank that embodies the goal of bringing BSP closer to the people, it is RCBC. You [RCBC] deserve all the honors you are getting for combining old ideas like cash-lite banking, Medalla said.

Beyond bringing more Filipinos into the fold, your latest project [RCBC MoneyBela] shows that the future of banking requires human-centric and empathy-driven design. I am very pleased to see RCBC make significant headway in this area, Diokno said.

RCBC is one of the countrys fastest-growing banks, and the most awarded for its banking innovations. It is now the Philippines 5th largest privately-owned universal bank that breached the P1-Trillion asset mark by the end of June 2022 despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

RCBCs continuing digital and business transformation further enhanced its value and reach. With this, RCBC has become the most awarded bank in the Philippines. Among its global and local recognitions include a three-peat award as the Philippines Best Bank for Digital by Asiamoney, back-to-back wins for Best Financial Inclusion App by The Asian Bankers Financial Technology Innovations Awards, and the YouTube challenger award for its viral and out-of-the-box digital ad campaigns generating combined views of over 17 million.

Recently, RCBC was also hailed as Grand Champion for Digital Payments and Financial Inclusion by the Bankers Institute of the Philippines.

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DB Schenker, a leader in global logistics solutions and supply chain management, recently signed an agreement with AyalaLand Logistics Holdings Corp. (ALLHC) to lease the latters ready-built facility in ALogis Calamba in Laguna. The logistics company is set to take up 18,000 sqm of space which will be used primarily for contract logistics servicing an automotive company. The space has already been turned over and is expected to commence operations by June 2023. At the signing were (from left to right): DB Schenker Philippines Director for Contract Logistics/Supply Chain Management and National Distribution Irma Guevara; DB Schenker Cluster (PH-ID) Chief Executive Officer Andy Lim; DB Schenker Philippines Chief Executive Officer Thomas Ruelke; ALLHC Chief Operating Officer Patrick C. Avila; LCI Commercial Ventures, Inc. Chairman Ms. Rowena M. Tomeldan; and ALLHC Chief Finance Officer Francis M. Montojo.

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The Automotive Body Manufacturers Association of the Philippines (ABMAP) has expressed its full support for the governments Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program (PUVMP). According to ABMAP Executive Director Von Carlo Deveza, the program is essential for the improvement of the transportation system in the country.

ABMAP fully supports the PUVM program, as it is a vital step towards modernizing our transportation system, said Mr. Deveza. We believe that the program can bring significant benefits to both the transportation sector and the general public.

ABMAP, which represents the countrys automotive truck body manufacturing sector, recognizes the importance of the PUVMP and its potential to improve the quality of public transportation in the country. The program aims to replace the old and dilapidated jeepneys with safer, more comfortable, and eco-friendly vehicles. The program also promotes the organization of transport cooperatives as a way to improve the management and operation of public transportation.

ABMAP believes that the PUVM program can boost the local automotive industry, particularly the body manufacturing sector. The program can provide more opportunities for local manufacturers to produce modern and innovative vehicle bodies that comply with international standards.

ABMAP also sees the PUVM program as an opportunity to promote sustainable transportation in the country. By replacing the old and inefficient jeepneys with modern and eco-friendly vehicles, the program can contribute to reducing carbon emissions and promoting a cleaner environment.

ABMAPs support for the PUVM program, as emphasized by Mr. Deveza, is a step towards improving the countrys transportation system. With the increasing number of successful transport cooperatives already operating in the country, more operators are realizing the benefits of modernizing their vehicles. ABMAP believes that the PUVM program can provide significant benefits to both the transportation sector and the general public. By promoting sustainable transportation and boosting the local automotive industry, the program can contribute to the overall development of the country.

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A salon owner in San Francisco is bringing back "hair metal" in her own unique way. Our friend, Doctor Popular, recently interviewed Donnelle Malnik, the gal behind Hair and Heavy Metal Salon in the city's Mission District. Donnelle's parlor is not your typical oneit's actually inside a truck decorated with posters from metal bands like Dio and Iron Maiden. A longtime metal fan herself, most of the posters are replicas of ones she had when she 15 years old.

Donnelle shares how people react to seeing her unusual mobile salon for the first time:

"The reactions I get from people are what I like to call the "Unicorn effect." They are completely surprised when they turn around and see that it's a hair salon. Some of them initially think it's a tattoo shop or even a food truck, and they may be disappointed when they realize it's a hair salon. But most of the time, people's eyes light up, they get super excited, and they can't help but take out their phones to snap pictures. That's why I call it the "Unicorn effect" because they've never seen anything quite like it before, and it really gets them excited."

Donnelle also shared some interesting details about how her salon-on-wheels works. Since there's no running water, she uses a camping sink and has to be mindful of how much water she uses. She also has to plan her day differently than a regular salon because she needs to figure out how to get power for her tools and equipment.

Need a haircut by a rad lady in a rockin' truck? First, text for an appointment at (415) 948-1494. Then head to City Station, an outdoor community space at the corner of 18th & Valencia.
Dave & Busters has agreed to pay $275,000 in a settlement with the restaurant arcade company over claims it broke meal break and child labor laws, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbells office announced Friday.

The company will pay the $275,000 to compensate over 800 employees and accept three citations issued by Campbells office, according to the terms of the agreement. Dave & Busters has locations in Braintree, Natick and Woburn.

Dave & Busters received citations for violating state law by not providing meal breaks of at least 30 minutes to employees who worked shifts lasting longer than six hours, Campbells office said. It also did not obtain work permits for minors before they began employment, and the company also employed 16- or 17-year-old minors for later hours than permitted by law.

Campbells office began looking into the company after a parent filed a complaint that said their child was made to work past midnight on a weeknight, along with a complaint that said meal breaks were denied to workers. An ensuing investigation found that employees regularly worked shifts of more than six hours without taking meal breaks.

Her office also found that Dave & Busters employed young people without work permits and employed underage employees for later hours than permitted by state law. Teenagers 16 to 17 years old can only work 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. on nights preceding a regularly scheduled school day or until 11:30 p.m. on nights not preceding a regularly scheduled school day, according to state law.

Read more: Police say former deputy sheriff masturbated in parking lot of Enfield ice cream shop

Teenagers between the ages of 14 and 15 can only work between 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. during the school year or 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. during the summer, state law reads.

When companies violate our laws to protect workers, including meal break and child labor violations they create unfair and unsafe working environments, Campbell said in a statement. Ensuring that employers are in compliance with these laws and that all employees are compensated and treated justly is an important priority for my office, and we will do everything we can to uphold and protect the rights of workers in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts breaks and time off laws provide workers with a right to at least a 30-minute unpaid meal break for each six hours worked in a calendar day. Workers must be relieved of their duties during this meal break and be permitted to leave the workplace. Any requirement to remain on store premises is considered working time, and a violation of the law.

Campbells office said in February it previously cited USA Management, LLC, a Georgia-based company that provides pool repair and lifeguard services to clients in Massachusetts, for wage and hour violations. In April, Campbells office also cited two Dunkin franchisees in various locations across Massachusetts for child labor violations, resulting in citations totaling over $370,000.
The MBTA Blue Line will be free to commuters for two months this summer as officials make repairs to the Sumner Tunnel.

Bostons Sumner Tunnel is undergoing a major restoration project this summer. The throughway that connects East Boston and Logan International Airport to downtown Boston will shut down from July 5 through Aug. 31.

To assist commuters who may be inconvenienced by the major shutdown, Boston officials are allowing people to travel on the Blue Line for free during the Sumner Tunnels restoration project timeline.

The Blue Line connects downtown Boston, Logan Airport, Revere and East Boston. Commuters are also able to take the Blue Line from Wonderland to Bowdoin in less than 30 minutes.

A Blue Line train docks at a station every six to eight minutes during the morning and evening.

Travelers looking to park outside of downtown Boston will be able to leave their car at Beachmont, Orient Heights, Suffolk Downs and Wonderland MBTA parking lots for a discounted price of $2 per day.
HOLYOKE  Four nuns from Ontario, Canada traveled to Holyoke 150 years ago seeking to start a ministry to the immigrants working in the citys mills.

In the years since, the congregation of women religious became known for the Catholic hospitals it built and once staffed and ran in Western and Central Massachusetts. But in recent years, as its numbers have dwindled, its mission has changed.

On Sunday, the Sisters of Providence will celebrate their arrival here with an anniversary Mass and reception for several hundred invited guests.

It is a family gathering, said Sister Kathleen Popko, the congregations president. It is all the people who have been part of our ministry through the years or who are currently engaged in carrying out the work.

Its residences it founded for working girls, orphaned children and single mothers have been repurposed and for programs that helped expand health care to include such services as adult day care for individuals impaired in some way.

For instance, the congregations ministries have evolved with the times to provide 34 units of affordable housing for the elderly with complex medical needs on its West Springfield campus.

Popko acknowledged that the celebration comes at a time when congregations like the Sisters of Providence continue to shrink in numbers. Meanwhile, congregations have begun networking through the internet with other congregations across the world to address common goals surrounding, environmental issues or human trafficking, for instance.

We in religious life have talked for many years about connecting to the worldwide community of women religious and now we have the technology and the capability of doing that, Popko said.

She called this a new moment of transition that is both exciting and painful but that holds a lot of positive energy for what religious life can be for the Church in the future.

The fact that the anniversary festivities are being held in what is the former Mother House  built in 1932 and turned into apartments under the name Providence Place for independent senior living 23 years ago  highlights how the congregations vision has adapted. Popko is hoping to convert other buildings on its campus into affordable housing units.

The congregation was formally established several years after four Sisters from Canada committed in 1873 to establish a mission here at the request of a local parish priest. The Vatican granted a petition from the diocesan bishop to establish an independent congregation and 30 Sisters under foundress Mother Mary of Providence, known in secular life as Catherine Horan, agreed to stay and care for a population that included immigrants who worked in the citys mills and lived in impoverished conditions.

More than 780 Sisters became vowed members of the order over the decades. The congregation established hospitals in Springfield, Holyoke, Pittsfield, the Turners Falls section of Montague, and Worcester, often staffed by graduates of their hospital-based nursing schools. They also created orphanages and care homes for the elderly.

The Sisters of Providence have never worked alone except perhaps at the very beginning when they were trying to set up new ministries as best as they could, said Popko of what she called the congregations collaborative approach in building its ministries.

Bishop William Byrne, who will celebrate the anniversary Mass in the chapel at Providence Place, said a great legacy evolved from the arrival of those first four women of Providence in caring for the less fortunate with loving compassion.

His comments were echoed by Sister Elizabeth Sullivan, president of the Sisters of St. Joseph whose former mother house is a short drive from that of the Sisters of Providence.

The Sisters of Providence have responded generously to the signs of the times, have reached out to serving the poor, been involved in social justice issues, have committed to the principles of Pope Francis as stated in Laudato Si (On the Care of Our Common Home), and are proud caretakers of our earth, said Sullivan.

Popko served as president and chief executive of the Sisters of Providence Health and Human Service System from 1994 to 1997. She helped formed that system as well as its integration in 1998 with two other independent health care systems to form Catholic Health Care East. That system would eventually merge with Michigan-based Trinity Health, one of the largest health care systems in the country.

Today, the Sisters of Providence operate no independent hospitals. Popko said the merger with Trinity Health in 2013 was to collectively strengthen Catholic health care. At the time, it brought together 82 hospitals and 89 continuing care facilities and home health and hospice programs in 21 states.

The congregation also established in 2013 the Sisters of Providence Ministry Corporation to oversee the operations of its subsidiary corporations.

Popko chairs the corporations board. Other Sisters of Providence  who today number 15 in the congregation  also sit on the board, with lay people appointed by the congregation to serve, for instance, as the corporations chief operating officer.

We have lay people in leadership that helps support and oversee the ministry and eventually that board will be totally lay people to carry on our ministries and legacy, Popko said.
The regional school committee said late Wednesday night that it had reached a tentative agreement with teachers union  subject to membership ratification  on a new contract. This follows 18 months of arduous negotiations that included state mediation efforts to bridge the divide and numerous union protests.

In the agreement, the main points are 3% yearly raises, or cost of living adjustments, retroactive to when contract expired nearly a year ago, through 2025, when this agreement would expire, for a total of 9% over the span.

Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee said the new contract is subject to ratification by Amherst-Pelham Education Association members, the union representing teachers, paraeducators and most staff.

The Republican contacted the APEA by telephone and email seeking comment.

In a brief statement to school district families, the school board stated: We are pleased to report that after nearly 18 months of bargaining, we have reached a tentative agreement with the APEA, pending ratification.

The statement includes some data on salaries that were negotiated.

The parties have said great effort has been towards upping paraeducator salaries  with union strongly pushing for minimum of at least $20 per hour.

This threshold would be reached in final year of contract, at $20.22 per hour, with maximum, after 11 years on the job, at $28.79 per hour for paraeducators, according to contract information provided by school committee.

New starting teacher salaries, depending on education level, would now range from $45,582 to $55,326.

In academic year 2024-2025, maximum salary, depending on education, would be $80,629 after 13 years, to $99,121 after 16 years teaching in the Amherst regional school district, the information says.

Although the school board had stated earlier this spring it had provided its last best offer to the union  with the committees hope things would be wrapped up in May  in fact, the parties continued negotiating at the unions insistence, and tentatively came to an agreement instead.

Numerous job actions and union demonstrations occurred the past two years, including a decision to work to rule by the union, to pressure the school committee to bargain in good faith, according to the APEA.

Complaints against the district were filed with the state Department of Labor Relations, some of which are still pending.
Stable genius Marjorie Taylor Greene may have unwittingly confessed to misconduct  or a crime  last night on Fox News when she described how she mishandled sensitive material about the GOP's unproven bribery allegations against Joe Biden.

"The FBI is stonewalling us and they would only let us see a SCIF," the Georgia lawmaker told Fox host Laura Ingraham, referring to a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or highly secure room/area where lawmakers and other officials can view sensitive information but can't take the material out of the contained space (unless you have the likes of Marge on the premises).

Greene then described her misdeed: "What I did after reading the document is I made notes when I walked out and I went up to the table. I wrote down everything that I had just read so that I could come out and tell the American people what I read." (See video below, posted by Acyn.)

Although Greene claims the material is unclassified, SCIFs are usually set up for highly sensitive documents that are not meant for conspiracy theorists to leak.

As national security DC Attorney Mark S. Zaid tweeted, "If this information was classified, sounds to me like the Congresswoman committed a crime. And if it was not, Speaker McCarthy should remove her privileges for violating the trust she was afforded as a member of Congress to review sensitive information."

Greene: The FBI is stonewalling us and they would only let us see it in a scif. What I did after reading the document is made notes when I walked out and went to the table. I wrote down everything that I had just read. pic.twitter.com/NLYVM4Tn8z  Acyn (@Acyn) June 9, 2023

Hey @FBI, if this information was classified sounds to me like the Congresswoman is admitting to a crime.



And if it was not, @SpeakerMcCarthy should remove her privileges for violating the trust she was afforded as a Member of Congress to review sensitive information. https://t.co/96ul95DeO8  Mark S. Zaid (@MarkSZaidEsq) June 9, 2023

Front page thumbnail image: Fox News
After a Boston church was vandalized with anti-LGBTQ graffiti, local officials are speaking out against this homophobic act.

The steeple of the First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain was spray painted with homophobic language on Thursday, according to a Facebook post from the church.

The graffiti included God does not love you and Your God is a fraud, according to the Boston Globe.

This is just the latest reminder that homophobia remains rampant in our communities, as we understand that we are living in a time when racism, Christian nationalism, xenophobia, and other facets of white supremacy continue to be incubated and endorsed by politicians and preachers, and by complicity through silence, the churchs leaders wrote on Facebook.

Since then, local Boston-area leaders have condemned the graffiti.

This dangerous, hurtful messaging is an instant reminder of the hatred within too many hearts in our city and cities across the nation, Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden said in a statement. We will do everything possible to protect members of the LGBTQIA+ community in Boston and Suffolk County. But our efforts must be supported by national leaders in both parties speaking in unison against these insidious impulses in our society.

Read more: Boston Pride Parade to return for the first time since 2019

In a tweet, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu called the vandalism disgusting.

Disgusting acts of vandalism will not deter us from celebrating our LGBTQ+ residents, Wu tweeted. We stand with Bostons LGBTQ+ community & remain committed to ensuring that community members are safe & supported. We will not be intimidated in our work to make Boston a city for everyone.

Attorney General Andrea J. Campbell also spoke on the vandalism during an unrelated event, according to the Globe.

Were just getting some news on that, which looks like a hate crime or definitely an attack on folks in our LGBTQ+ community, and of course an attack on that community is an attack on all of us, Campbell told the Globe. Because its Pride month, I recognize that there is intense fear in the community about celebrating who one is in this moment in time. Were going to do everything we can of course to combat this hate.

Despite the homophobic graffiti, the church plans on moving forward with a Pride Worship Service at 11 a.m. on Sunday, according to the churchs Facebook post.

We are grateful for the many who have reached out and showered our church with help and support, the church said on Facebook. We receive your prayers and your love with gladness, and we are reminded of the eternal truth that goodness overpowers meanness, and love always overcomes hate. Your support motivates us to continue speaking out against all forms of violence through our Christian faith and Baptist tradition.
A car crashed into the woods off of Interstate 495 during the Friday-afternoon commute, injuring the driver and heavily delaying traffic, according to Massachusetts State Police.

The left lane of the highway headed south was closed as of 4:12 p.m., MassDOT said. Traffic was backed up at least 8 miles as of around 4:20 p.m., police stated.

Around 4:10 p.m. on June 9, a single car crashed into the woods off of I-495 on the southbound side of the highway, near exit 50 in Milford, MassDOT stated.

One person was brought to the hospital from the crash, police said. A specialized tow truck, called a rotator, was en route to the scene to remove the car from the woods as of 4:20 p.m., police said.

The circumstances surrounding the crash and the extent of the persons injuries was not immediately available, police said.
Sixteen Worcester residents have been selected to hear evidence in the case against Carlos Asencio, accused in the 2019 killing of Amanda Dabrowski at a Worcester restaurant.

Juror questioning began Thursday, a day that concluded with 15 members seated, but on Friday morning, Superior Court Judge Janet Kenton-Walker announced she had reevaluated her decision to bar the defense from using a peremptory challenge on one juror.

Prosecution and defense attorneys each were allowed 16 challenges to use against jurors who were not ruled indifferent by the court.

For parts of two days, Kenton-Walker, prosecutor Edward Karcasinas and defense attorney Robert Griffin questioned jurors individually over their answers on the juror questionnaires designed to detect any potential biases or conflicts that could hinder their ability to judge the case fairly.

Carlos Asencio, accused of stabbing his former girlfriend, Amanda Dabrowski, to death on July 3, 2019, appeared in Worcester Superior Court on Feb. 10, 2020, for arraignment.

Opening statements are scheduled for Monday, with the trial expected to last five to seven days.

Griffin has stated Asencio plans to pursue a defense strategy denying criminal responsibility - essentially an insanity defense. Some jurors were excused after indicating they would have a difficult time returning a not guilty verdict due to such a defense.

Asencio is accused of stabbing Dabrowski to death at OConnors Restaurant & Bar on July 3, 2019. She suffered 15-20 stab wounds, with a bystander who tried to help her also injured, according to court documents.

Amanda Dabrowski

Asencio faces one charge of murder and one charge of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.

Officials have said Asencio fled to Canada then Mexico after invading Dabrowskis home and attacking her on Easter morning of that same year, following a breakup. They have not released details of how they believe he reentered the country.

A homeless couple told MassLive that Asencio had stayed with them for a time while they lived on the streets of Worcester.
A Dorchester man died after he was struck by a train in Wareham on Thursday while he was fishing along the Mass Coastal railroad tracks, Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruzs office announced.

Christopher Cater, 56, was fishing along the tracks adjacent to Route 6 and Route 28 at around 2:19 p.m., Cruzs office said. The train, which moved at 25 mph, repeatedly blared its horn as it approached Caters location.

He was struck by a Mass Coastal trash train moving along the Narrows Crossing railroad bridge, Cruzs office said.

As a result of the collision the victim was pushed into the waterway below the bridge, Cruzs office said in a statement.

First responders pulled Cater from the water and he was taken to Tobey Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Cruzs office said. Construction worker Asa Irish and a coworker said they pulled Cater out of the water after Irish saw the train stop and heard a woman cry out that a man was in the water, according to Wareham Week.

Wareham police told residents on Facebook that they closed Sandwich Road near where Cater was struck. After the site of the incident was clear, the road reopened.

The train engineer and conductor were at the site where Cater was hit, Cruzs office said. All crossing barriers were properly working at the time of impact.

It appears to be a horrific accident, Cruz said at the site of the incident, WCVB reported.

This is a popular place to fish, especially early in the spring and this time of year, Jeff Pierce of Wareham told NBC 10 Boston. Its sad that it happened.
Donald Trumps indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate has brought renewed attention to one of the most notable cases in Justice Department history.

The federal charges represent the biggest legal jeopardy so far for Trump, coming less than three months after he was charged in New York with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Heres a look at the charges, the special counsels investigation and how Trumps case differs from those of other politicians known to be in possession of classified documents:

What are the charges, and how is Trump reacting?

Trump has been charged with seven counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, according to two people familiar with the indictment but not authorized to speak publicly about it.

Trumps lawyer James Trusty said Thursday on CNN that the indictment includes charges of willful retention of national defense information, obstruction of justice, false statements and conspiracy.

Trump, on his Truth Social app, called it a DARK DAY for the United States of America. In a video post, he said, Im innocent and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly. Within 20 minutes of breaking the news, his 2024 presidential campaign sent out a fundraising missive telling his followers hed been indicted and asking for financial support.

What happens next?

The Justice Department did not immediately publicly confirm the indictment, and any charges were not publicly filed.

Trump said hed been summoned to appear in court Tuesday afternoon in Miami. It wasnt immediately clear if Trump planned to make the appearance and what the procedure would look like.

When he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney in the New York case, Trump surrendered to authorities, where he was booked behind closed doors and appeared in the courtroom, sitting with his lawyers at the defense table.

How did this case come about?

Officials with the National Archives and Records Administration reached out to representatives for Trump in spring 2021 when they realized that important material from his time in office was missing from their collection.

According to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents are considered property of the U.S. government and must be preserved.

A Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago. In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trumps Florida home, later telling Justice Department officials that they contained a lot of classified material.

That May, the FBI and Justice Department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Trumps possession. Investigators who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Trumps lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.

But that assertion turned out to be false. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents.

In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings  including some at the top-secret level  have been recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021.

How did a special counsel get involved?

Last year, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland picked Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor with a background in public corruption probes, to lead investigations into the presence of classified documents at Trumps Florida estate, as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.

Smiths appointment was a recognition by Garland of the politics involved in an investigation into a former president and current White House candidate. Garland himself was selected by Democratic President Joe Biden, whom Trump is seeking to challenge for the White House in 2024.

Special counsels are appointed in cases in which the Justice Department perceives itself as having a conflict or where its deemed to be in the public interest to have someone outside the government come in and take responsibility for a matter.

According to the Code of Federal Regulations, a special counsel must have a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking, as well as an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies.

Didnt Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence have classified documents, too?

Yes, but the circumstances of their cases are vastly different from the situation involving Trump.

After classified documents were found at Bidens think tank and Pences Indiana home, their lawyers notified authorities and quickly arranged for them to be handed over. They also authorized other searches by federal authorities to search for additional documents.

There is no indication either was aware of the existence of the records before they were found, and no evidence has so far emerged that Biden or Pence sought to conceal the discoveries. Thats important because the Justice Department historically looks for willfulness in deciding whether to bring criminal charges.

A special counsel was appointed earlier this year to probe how classified materials ended up at Bidens Delaware home and former office. But even if the Justice Department were to find Bidens case prosecutable on the evidence, its Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a president is immune from prosecution during his time in office.

As for Pence, the Justice Department informed his legal team earlier this month that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against him over his handling of the documents.

Does a federal indictment prevent Trump from running for president?

No. Neither the indictment itself nor a conviction would prevent Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

And as the New York case showed, criminal charges have historically been a boon to his fundraising. The campaign announced that it had raised over $4 million in the 24 hours after that indictment became public, far smashing its previous record after the FBI search of Trumps Mar-a-Lago club.

How are Trumps Republican rivals reacting to the news?

Many of Trumps challengers for the GOP nomination jumped to his defense Thursday night after news of the indictment broke.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trumps top rival for the 2024 nomination, accused the Justice Department of political bias in charging the former president.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, DeSantis tweeted. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.

He questioned why the Justice Department had been so zealous in bringing charges against Trump and so passive about going after former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton or Bidens son Hunter.

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said he felt the justice systems scales are weighted based on politics. In America, every single person is presume innocent, not guilty, Scott said on Fox News, decrying the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president.

Biotech entrepreneur and anti-woke activist Vivek Ramaswamy said the federal case was part of an affront to every citizen. Reiterating his comments that he would pardon Trump, Ramaswamy called it hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden over his own classified documents case.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who called for Trump to drop out of the race after the New York charges were filed, said the federal indictment marked a sad day for our country and reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.

Former Vice President Mike Pence said earlier Thursday that if Trump were to be indicted, he would hope the Justice Department had strong evidence  a shift in tone from the night before, when he said he hoped Trump wouldnt be charged even if evidence is clear he committed a crime.
Parts of central Massachusetts are under a special weather advisory for hail, wind, lightning and thunderstorms until 3:30 p.m. Friday afternoon, according to the National Weather Service.

The statement was issued around 2:30 p.m. by the weather service, which stated Worcester, Newton and Framingham would be affected by the severe weather.

Strong thunderstorms will impact portions of southeastern Worcester, northwestern Norfolk and west central Suffolk and central Middlesex Counties through 3:30 p.m. EDT, stated the weather service.

Quincy, Randolph and Norwood are also under advisory, the National Weather Service stated.

Seek shelter in a sturdy structure until the storm passes.

The winds could reach gusts of up to 30 mph, and the hail will be pea-sized, the Weather Service said.

This weather pattern is very similar to the weather that predicated the deadly Worcester Tornado, the worst tornado to ever hit New England in history. It happened on June 9, 1953, originating near Worcester with a trajectory eastward, and forecasters at the time stated hail had begun in the state around 3 p.m. that day.
SPRINGFIELD  The PACT Act, signed by President Joe Biden in August 2022, is already helping more Western Massachusetts veterans claim Veterans Affairs benefits after exposure to toxic smoke from burn pits, Agent Orange or Camp Lejeune water.

Now, U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal wants even more veterans to learn of their eligibility.

This is groundbreaking legislation, Neal, D-Springfield, told veterans gathered for a cookout Friday at the Springfield VA Clinic at 25 Bond St. The PACT Act, as it implies, means there was a pact that was made with Americas veterans.

The acronym stands for Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics. The legislation received bipartisan support in Congress.

Neal plans other events raising awareness among veterans in the 1st Congressional District.

Albert Hill, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, listens to U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal speak Friday about the PACT Act, at the Springfield VA Clinic on Bond Street (Hoang 'Leon' Nguyen / The Republican)

The PACT Act represents the largest expansion of veteran health care and benefits in generations.

It extended coverage to 5 million veterans exposed to harmful chemicals during their service. The PACT Act added more than 20 new conditions presumed to be service-connected due to various toxic exposures. It requires the VA to provide a toxic exposure screening to every veteran enrolled in VA health care.

The PACT Act also provides resources to the VA to improve research, staff education and treatment related to toxic exposures.

The law applies to Vietnam veterans all the way up through the Gulf War and the post-9/11 era.

Veterans will receive screenings for toxic chemical exposure. Details are available at va.gov.

On Friday, Neal introduced Michelle Brown, a member of his staff who handles veterans affairs. Brown said she can help veterans overcome roadblocks, but said a veterans first step should be with the veterans service officer in their town or city.

Vietnam veteran Gumersindo Gomez, executive director of the Bilingual Veterans Outreach Centers of Massachusetts in Springfield, said making the conditions presumptive  or presumed to be service-connected  frees veterans from being forced to present mountains of paperwork in a long process in order to claim benefits.

Gomez said he recently used provisions of the new law to help a veteran qualify for a 100% disability claim from the VA.

It wouldnt have happened without this law, he said. It wouldnt have been possible.

Vietnam veteran Earl Godfrey listens as U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal highlights gains from the passage of the PACT Act. (Hoang 'Leon' Nguyen / The Republican)

Earl Godfrey of Longmeadow, veterans services officer for the Westover Disabled American Veterans Chapter 11, said he has also already helped veterans access benefits under the new rules.

It means veterans dont have to prove the connection, the nexus in VA language, to their service, he said. If you have (a covered condition) you get the benefits.
A wedding dress from Worcester was found hanging from a Natick telephone wire.

A frozen mattress was discovered in the Massachusetts Bay near Weymouth, Worcester apartment building blueprints were in Duxbury, and books and clothing stretched from Blue Hill Observatory in Milton to the outer sects of Cape Cod, such as Provincetown, Eastham and Chatham.
Thunder and rain may impact travel at Boston Logan International Airport on Friday, June 9, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

At around 9:40 a.m. on Friday, the FAA tweeted the current weather patterns could cause delays at several airports around the country, including at Boston Logan, LaGuardia Airport and JFK International Airport.

According to flightaware.com, a tracking site for airports in the U.S., as of 9:40 a.m., there were just 45 total delays at Boston Logan.

However, between noon and 10 p.m. Friday, forecasters anticipate scattered showers and thunderstorms to form over parts of the region.

Areas with heavy downpours could see well over an inch of rain and a low probability of isolated minor flooding in eastern Connecticut going into Rhode Island and in the southern parts of Eastern Massachusetts.

The strongest storms may contain small hail, brief heavy rain and gusty winds, the weather service tweeted.

The FAA stated to follow its site at fly.faa.gov for up-to-the-minute air traffic reports in its daily report.
The devastating wildfires that are burning out of control across the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Nova Scotia and weather patterns driving dense smoke into the northeastern states of the United States is causing respiratory distress for many people in New York, Pennsylvania and states along the Ohio River Valley. But New England, and Springfield in particular, has not dramatically suffered, local sources said.

According to spokespeople for the Springfield Police and Fire departments, neither saw an increase in service calls due to medical distress or other causes related to the dense smoke. Local ambulance transports did increase, however. Kimberly DAngelo, operations manager for American Medical Response, said the ambulance service saw a significant increase in calls for transportation related to breathing issues.

But those calls did not appear to translate into hospital admissions beyond the emergency rooms. Heather Duggan, public relations manager for the Baystate Medical Center, said the hospital saw few admissions attributable to the air quality.

In New York City, the Air Quality Index nearly exceeded the rating scale Wednesday when it reached 484 out of a possible 500. At the same time in the Pioneer Valley, the air quality rated a moderate 152 with the index dropping to 52 on Thursday and 19 on Friday.

According to www.iqair.com, which tracks the daily air quality ratings, Springfield will spike to 74 for Saturday then range from 40 to 60 through the weekend and into next week.
According to a police report filed in Enfield, Connecticut, customers at the Smyth Ice Cream plaza there heard a "loud moaning noise" coming from a silver Chevy truck with its door open and a leg draped out of it. Within was a Sheriff's deputy, named as Todd Lafond, allegedly having a wank.

Todd Lafond, 51, who was formerly employed as a contractual deputy at the Hampden County Sheriff's Office was arrested and charged with public indecency and breach of peace in the second degree in connection with the incident, according to an Enfield Police Department report.

According to the report, deputy sheriff Lafond told Enfield police that he was watching porn after getting dessert and "one thing led to another." Lafond was released on a $2,500 bond.
Sharp teeth, terrifying stares and interesting shark facts will return to Discovery Channel this summer for Shark Week. The network is reeling in the King of the Seven Seas  Jason Momoa  to host the 2023 program.

Shark Week is slated to air on Discovery Channel from July 11 to July 18. The weeklong programming block typically includes documentaries and series about the varied shark species.

Although theres no word on what docuseries or sharks are set to take the spotlight of this years Shark Week, the network announced that the King of Atlantis will host the 2023 Shark Week.

Jason Momoa, known for his live-action portrayal of DCs Aquaman, will be the host of this years Shark Week, Discovery Channel announced as part of a Warner Bros. event in May, Variety reported.

As the host of Shark Week, I am beyond excited to take you along on this journey, Momoa, a Hawaiian native, said during the announcement. This project means more to me than a week of talking about sharks. Its a chance for me to learn and share my connection to these amazing creatures. My love of sharks came long before my time as Aquaman  it began several generations before me.

Momoa will don the role of Aquaman once again later this year for the second movie in the DC franchise, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. The film is expected to hit theaters Dec. 20.
As we approach the Juneteenth holiday on June 19, MassLive asked readers and staff to identify people who are emerging Black leaders throughout the state, working to make a difference in their own area of interest, be it politics, education, business or the arts.

These are people our readers have identified as inspirational, who may be doing good acts for their communities. They are being recognized for their accomplishments, leadership and commitment to inspire change.

Somerville City Councilor-at-Large Willie Burnley Jr. (Courtesy photo)

Willie Burnley Jr.

Age: 29

Community: Somerville

His story: Somerville City Councilor-at-Large Willie Burnley Jr. only entered office last year, but he has already made significant changes in the city.

Burnley grew up in San Diego and came to Massachusetts to attend Emerson College, becoming the first person in his family to attain a college degree. The progressive leader has worked on various campaigns over the past decade, and has been on the front lines of Black Lives Matter protests as well as been arrested alongside other activists during a climate protest in support of the Green New Deal.

In 2018, Burnley worked on Sen. Elizabeth Warrens re-election campaign, and joined Sen. Ed Markeys re-election campaign two years later. That same year, he helped found Defund Somerville Police Department, which helped move more than $1 million from the citys police budget to jobs, healthcare and rental and food assistance programs.

After the success of Defund SPD, Burnley was encouraged by neighbors to run for City Council. Since his election, he has helped pass numerous laws protecting and expanding rights for rental tenants, workers and LGBTQ+ residents, including being one of the original proposers of an ordinance passed earlier this year giving protections to people in polyamorous relationships.

He has also helped pass or draft ordinances abolishing medical debt locally, establishing the first supervised consumption site in New England, creating unarmed alternative emergency response programs and expediting construction of protected bike lanes throughout the city.

(My) praxis is to do the work, at all levels, all the time, Burnley said.

In his words: We all have the capacity to contribute positively to our communities and to our planet. We simply need the time, support and patience necessary to find those issues or activities that we feel best suited for. Knowing how we want to make a difference opens us to the opportunity to build a community of support with people who share our interest. That support in turn is critical to pursuing your purpose, whatever it is.

Each day, we will introduce more of Massachusetts emerging Black leaders, and were always open to hear about more inspiring people. If youd like to suggest someone else who should be recognized, please fill out this form.
A Connecticut woman pleaded guilty to the role she played in the kidnapping and killing of a Chicopee father of three.

On Tuesday, Shamari Smith, 34, of Manchester, Connecticut, pleaded guilty to misprision of felony in connection with the 2020 kidnapping and killing of 28-year-old Francisco Roman Jr. of Chicopee, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office District of Connecticut.

On Dec. 24, 2020, Springfield men Calvin Roberson, 40, and Brandon Batiste, 34, kidnapped Roman at gunpoint in his Chicopee home, federal prosecutors said. The two handcuffed Roman and stole cash, marijuana and Christmas presents from the mans home.

Prosecutors said Roberson and Batiste forced Roman into the back of his own 2010 Acura ZDX and drove him to Connecticut with the stolen property.

When they reached Shultas Place in Hartford, Connecticut prosecutors said Batiste shot and killed Roman. Hartford police later found Romans body burning inside his car on Dec. 26, court records stated.

Francisco Roman

Roberson and Batiste drove to a Waterbury apartment Roberson shared with Smith and brought most of the stolen property into the apartment, officials stated.

At this time, according to prosecutors, Smith learned the property was stolen during a robbery and the victim was killed. Officials said Smith helped sell and dispose of the stolen property.

Smiths guilty plea carries a maximum three-year prison sentence. She was released on a $150,000 bond pending sentencing, officials said.

On April 27, Roberson previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit kidnapping and causing the death of a person through the use of a firearm in connection with Romans killing.

Roberson also pleaded guilty to two other killings that date back as early as 2006.

Read more: Springfield native Calvin Roberson pleads guilty to manslaughter in connection with 3 slayings

Batiste is still awaiting his trial date. He faces charges including kidnapping conspiracy, kidnapping resulting in death, firearm-related murder, obstruction of justice and interstate transportation of a stolen motor vehicle.
Residents are in for a very choppy summer as the states massive redetermination effort to gauge eligibility for 2.4 million MassHealth members unfolds, Health and Human Services Secretary Kate Walsh said Thursday.

People are going to show up for their kids school physical (examinations) and hear theyre not enrolled, and thats what were trying to avoid, Walsh said during a virtual Massachusetts Health Connector Board of Directors meeting.

The volume of residents enrolling in MassHealth coverage without needing direct member contact from state officials or from vendors is falling short of expectations so far, Walsh said.

To make the redetermination effort work in any reasonable kind of way, Walsh said, officials had estimated about 50% of people subject to review would need their MassHealth coverage to be automatically renewed. But at this point in the year-long process, Walsh said that figure is around 42%.

Instead of receiving blue envelopes in the mail asking about proof of income or other information, people are automatically renewed for MassHealth if they are well below the federal income threshold for Medicaid or are receiving assistance from a different government program that automatically makes them eligible for Medicaid, a Healey administration health official told the News Service.

The state is creating new parameters meant to increase the number of automatic MassHealth renewals, the official said, including using more data sets to ascertain eligibility.

Weve already seen in certain recent weeks that the auto-renewal rate is at least moving in the right direction, Mike Levine, assistant secretary for MassHealth, said in an interview after the board meeting. The reason you want that number to be high is because we want to reduce the burden on members eligible for coverage, we want to reduce the number of calls coming into our call center, we want to reduce the number of pieces of mail we are processing so that we are able to efficiently serve everyone else. So if there is a version of the world where you dont have to take action to keep coverage while being eligible, thats a better version.

Meanwhile, the on-the-ground campaign to inform residents about the redetermination process is very high touch, Walsh said as she acknowledged the efforts of volunteers from nonprofit Health Care For All and other community-based organizations.

Its almost absurdly high-touch  its almost torture because the forms are so hard, Walsh said at the meeting.

For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began, states across the country must figure out which members of their Medicaid programs are still eligible to receive the publicly funded health insurance coverage. Healey administration officials expect 300,000 to 400,000 people will fall off the MassHealth rolls, which combine Medicaid and the Childrens Health Insurance Program, over the course of the year-long redetermination process.

Nearly 8,000 people have joined the Health Connector since redetermination began in April, which is about 23% of the population that has lost MassHealth coverage but qualifies for a Health Connector plan, said Marissa Woltmann, chief of policy at the Health Connector. Woltmann described those individuals as a very proactive population.

Woltmann said staff wants to dive deeper into the other 71% of people who are eligible but havent selected a plan yet to understand what barriers they face and if they truly need coverage, including for residents who may have enrolled with employer-sponsored coverage. Its also still very early days for MassHealth, said Walsh, who added that the board may need to reconvene if there are surprises in the data.

Based on relatively aggressive estimates, Woltmann said the Health Connector could see a net growth of some 135,000 members by next June. Yet she cautioned that forecasts are highly uncertain due to the unprecedented process underway.

But this is consistent with our goal of helping individuals maintain coverage if they lose MassHealth, and were planning for outreach and member support that are commensurate with this level of growth, she said. As we move forward, well continue to monitor both enrollment gains, as well as look at whos not enrolling with us.

Anticipating swelling demand at the Health Connector call center, the board approved a six-month contract of up to $3 million with Maximus Human Services, which will be tasked with providing back-up support for paper processing and outbound calls, said Patricia Grant, the Health Connectors chief operating officer.

Board member Rina Vertes didnt support the contract, saying she needed a better understanding of enrollment projections and whether they were achievable. But board member Nancy Turnbull said choosing not to bolster call center capacity would be irresponsible and dangerous to our goal of keeping people in the coverage.

Public activities to raise awareness about the redetermination process are ramping up this month, including an enrollment event at Fenway Park this weekend, said Jason Lefferts, the Health Connectors director of communications and public affairs. Lefferts said paid media will also hit its full stride this month, with digital, print and radio advertisements already launched and television spots coming soon.

May marked the first month of robocalls, which will be used several times monthly moving forward. Emails are also seeing high open rates, Lefferts said.

The messaging is statewide and seeks to emphasize the Health Connector is the only place to get help paying for health insurance, as officials remain wary of potential scams.

Im not aware of any recently  it is a consistent issue for us, Lefferts said. We fight the good fight with search engine optimization to be first and high. If somebody went and Googled cheap health care Massachusetts or cheap health insurance Massachusetts, chances are the first four or five links are going to be sponsored by scam websites.
NEW YORK - The Red Sox moved Chris Sale to the 60-day injured list Friday prior to their game against the New York Yankees.

BetMGM Massachusetts BET $10, GET $200 BONUS BETS CLAIM OFFER Promo code: MASSLIVE 21+ and present in Massachusetts. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-Gambler.

The Boston left-hander has a stress reaction in the scapula bone (shoulder blade), MassLives Sean McAdam reported. It will not require surgery, but will require rest and rehab. Hell be re-evaluated in 3-4 weeks.

Sale will be eligible to come off the IL on Aug. 2. Hell get treatment and be able to exercise, but wont be allowed to perform baseball activities over the next few weeks.

Its not perfect, acknowledged Alex Cora, but we know its not a surgical procedure. Thats huge for us, right? Now, we just have to be patient, re-assess the situation in four or five weeks and see where were at.

Texas Rangers starter Jacob deGrom had a similar injury last season with the New York Mets and missed five months. If Sale has a similar timetable, theres no guarantee he pitches again in 2023.

We always have concerns, said Cora. But obviously, the hope is for him to go through his rehab and be ready to pitch at one point this season. Obviously, time-table wise, I cannot give you a day or whatever. But thats the hope. Weve been (down) this path before, being patient with him. Well do the same thing again and hopefully, he can perform this season again.

Sale and deGrom were in communication in the last week, with deGrom offering counsel on how to handle the shoulder setback, and days later, Sale returning the favor when deGrom discovered he would need Tommy John surgery.

Sale suffered the injury in the Red Soxs loss to the Cincinnati Reds last week and left in the fourth inning after two visits from the team trainer. He struck out six batters and gave up one earned run before his exit.

The Red Sox originally placed Sale on the 15-day IL with shoulder soreness while they waited for more tests. The day after the injury occurred, Sale met with reporters.

Its just kind of a gut punch. I hate feeling like this, Sale told reporters at Fenway Park on June 2. I started having fun playing baseball again, and now Im back to not having fun, and that sucks.

Its been a rough road for Sale in terms of injuries. He underwent Tommy John surgery in 2020 that wiped out most of his 2021 campaign, and suffered a stress fracture in his rib cage before spring training began last year.

He broke his pinky finger on a comebacker against the Yankees in July, and broke his wrist in a bicycle accident that ended his 2022 season prematurely.

Hes been through a lot since 2018, said Cora. The work that you put in to be able to pitch at this level, and, in his situation, the rehab process and all that, not being able to participate, not being able to be a big leaguer, hes said in the past it takes a toll. Its hard.

But I do believe in this situation, hes in a better frame of mind.

Sale began this year healthy, and despite struggling in his first few starts, he started to find his form. The southpaw pitched at least five innings in his last four starts, including an eight-inning outing on May 13 against the St. Louis Cardinals.

Sale was 5-2 with a 4.58 ERA before going on the IL.

I know in the beginning (of the season), it was a little bit rough, said Cora. But when he got going, he was very close (to being) the guy who pitched in 17 and 2018 here. The velocity was up, the slider was getting there and the changeup was a work in progress and he dominated big league lineups.
The Eras Tour is going international starting at the end summer.

Taylor Swift has announced nine international dates in Latin America on top of her 52-date, 17-state-wide U.S. tour. The international tour dates will span from Aug. 24 to Nov. 26, as she stops in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil.

Really thrilled to tell you this!! Mexico, Argentina and Brazil: We are bringing The Eras Tour to you this year! Swift wrote on Instagram. Joining her will be fellow artist Sabrina Carpenter.

New customers who purchase tickets through VividSeats can get $20 off a $200+ ticket order by using the promo code MassLive20 at checkout.

Looking to go? Heres how you can get tickets.

For the international dates in Latin America, fans would have had to register for Ticketmasters Verified Fan Sale through June 7 at 11:59 p.m. CDMX.

A limited number of Verified Fans will get access to the sale, with priority to residents of Mexico, and others will be put on the waitlist.

Fans will receive an email the day prior to the sale letting them know if they were selected for the on sale or placed on the waitlist. If selected, they will then receive a purchase link.

If fans missed the opportunity of registration, purchasing tickets on resale sites like VividSeats and StubHub are always an option.

Swifties who hope to see the 12-time Grammy Award-winning artist can shop around at VividSeats and StubHub when tickets go one sale. Currently, tickets for her U.S. tour are still available.

The tour features songs from her recent 10th studio album, Midnights, which launched back on October 21. It also will span a wide variety of her discography, including her country roots in Fearless, electropop beats from reputation and even slow ballads from sister albums evermore and folklore.

Below are the remaining tour schedule dates for the U.S. tour. Find tickets to shows close to you:
Two more cloudy days in Massachusetts are expected to produce some showers and thunderstorms, but warm weather is on the way and could remain even if clouds and rain do too.

The National Weather Service anticipated some partial sunshine Friday morning, seeing chilly temperatures in the 40s. These temperatures rebound into the 50s and are expected to increase to the 60s by the afternoon as cloud cover returns.

Between noon and 10 p.m. Friday, forecasters anticipate scattered showers and thunderstorms to form over parts of the region. Areas with heavy downpours could see well over an inch of rain and a low probability of isolated minor flooding in eastern Connecticut going into Rhode Island and in southern Eastern Massachusetts.

The strongest storms may contain small hail, brief heavy rain and gusty winds, the weather service tweeted.

[Scattered T-Storms between Noon & 10 PM] Dry weather dominates this morning, but scattered showers & thunderstorms develop this afternoon & evening. The strongest storms may contain small hail, brief heavy rain & gusty winds. Primary time of concern is between Noon & 10 pm. pic.twitter.com/lXZ9JOT1aI  NWS Boston (@NWSBoston) June 9, 2023

Throughout the afternoon, smoke from Quebecs wildfires is expected to continue southward to the coast and Cape areas, arching back toward the coast of Eastern Massachusetts. This will continue until 8 p.m., but past that the smoke is expected to dissipate over the weekend, weather service meteorologist Alan Dunham told MassLive.

Showers are expected to diminish going into Saturday, forecasters said, going into what they called the transition day toward milder and drier weather. Cyclonic winds and cold temperatures over Eastern Massachusetts are expected to yield more chances for scattered showers and thunderstorms. To the west, weather should be drier with warming temperatures between 70 and 75 degrees but with more clouds than sunshine.

An increase of sunshine is expected to be present on Sunday, as temperatures inch closer or blow past 80 degrees, forecasters said. Clouds are expected to be present all day, increasing from the west to the east as the afternoon progresses.

Cant rule out a spot shower across the western areas late Sunday, but most locations should stay dry, the weather service said.

Forecasters see clouds and daily chances of rain continue through next week as another storm rolls in toward southern New England around Monday night into Tuesday. At that time, rainfall could be substantial with an excess of one and a half inches. Another system coming from the Great Lakes is expected to move in Wednesday into Thursday, but the start of next weekend could finally see some drier conditions take shape.

Daily highs each day next week are between the 70s and 80s while the lows are anticipated to be in the 50s or 60s, forecasters said.
Last month's passed-out Cranston, Rhode Island city councilman, who was arrested on May 15 after police found two crack pipes in his hand along with "a white, rock-like substance" (crack-cocaine and fentanyl) by his side, was charged again  this time for child molestation.

The now-resigned Republican, Matthew Reilly, was accused of molesting a 12-year-old girl after her legal guardian filed a complaint. And the investigation into this case actually began about a week before his drug bust. According to ABC6, "Reilly was charged and arraigned Thursday with first degree child molestation sexual assault, second degree child molestation sexual assault, and enticement of a person under 16."

The 41-year-old gentleman is being held without bail while he waits for a competency hearing.

From the Providence Journal:
Bone Tumor Ablation Devices Market Analysis

Bone Tumor Ablation Devices Market, by Indication (Chondrosarcoma, Metastatic Bone Cancer, Osteosarcoma, Ewings Sarcoma, and Others), by Technology (Microwave Ablation, Cryoablation, Radiofrequency Ablation, and Others), by End User (Ambulatory Surgical Centers, Specialty Clinics, and Hospitals), and by Region (Africa, Latin America, Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, and the Middle East)  Share, Outlook, Size, and Opportunity Analysis, 2020  2027

When cells within a bone divide uncontrollably, a lump or mass of abnormal tissue forms, which is known as a bone tumor. Most of these tumors are benign and not cancerous. They usually do not pose a threat to life, and they dont spread to other parts of the body. The treatment for these tumors varies depending on the type, ranging from clinical observation to surgical removal. As people age, their bone health tends to deteriorate, increasing the likelihood of accidents and fractures. In 2014, the National Osteoporosis Foundation reported that over half of the U.S. adult population in 2013 was affected by bone disorders, with 10.2 mn adults having osteoporosis and another 43.4 mn having low bone mass.

There are various ablation techniques that can be utilized for the treatment of bone tumors. These techniques have numerous benefits, including minimal invasiveness, precise targeting of the tumor, and a low incidence of complications. Radiofrequency Thermal Ablation (RFTA) and Cryosurgery are currently the most commonly used techniques in this regard.

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Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic:

In most cases of bone tumors, either for a cure or to manage painful bone metastases, bone tumor ablation surgery is necessary. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, surgeries, immunotherapy, and chemotherapy for cancer patients are frequently delayed or cancelled. However, during this time, bone tumor ablation surgery is increasingly becoming the preferred treatment option because it is minimally invasive, requires less time, and is cost-efficient. In 2014, NCBI released data indicating that ablation of bone tumors in patients with painful metastatic bone disease is a safe treatment method that can alleviate pain and enhance the quality of life of cancer patients. However, delivering care for patients with bone cancer during the current crisis is a complex task, as there is a risk of death due to cancer as well as from SARS-CoV-2. Immune-compromised individuals are more susceptible to COVID-19, which further increases the challenge of providing adequate care for patients.

According to estimates, the market for devices used for bone tumor ablation was worth US$ 56.2 mn in 2020, and it is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.2% between 2020 and 2027.

The market for bone tumor ablation devices is anticipated to experience growth due to the rising number of product launches in this field.

Major contributors to the industry are engaged in creating innovative devices for ablation of bone tumors and introducing them to the market. The introduction of these sophisticated systems is predicted to greatly boost the growth of the market and foster a favorable atmosphere for the bone tumor ablation devices market during the projected time frame. Medtronic Plc., for example, unveiled the OsteoCool RF Ablation System in January 2016 to manage spinal metastases. This system allows for the treatment of painful bone tumors with the simultaneous use of two probes. Additionally, the OsteoCool RF Ablation System was introduced in Canada in 2017 by Medtronic plc, specifically for treating bone metastases. In 2015, DFINE, Inc. also launched the Long SpineSTAR ablation instrument, which is the sole radiofrequency device that is both steerable and navigational in the market and is intended for the palliative therapy of metastatic spine tumors.

The market for bone tumor ablation devices is poised for growth due to the rising incidence of bone cancer, which presents lucrative opportunities. In the U.S., the American Cancer Society reported approximately 3,300 novel cases of bone cancer and 1,490 related deaths in 2016. Furthermore, chondrosarcomas, a type of primary bone cancer, account for more than 40% of cases in adults, according to the ACS.

Restraints:

The growth of the bone tumor ablation devices market is likely to be impeded by a significant factor: the limited understanding of bone tumor ablation surgerys advanced therapies and new technologies among both patients and healthcare professionals. In developing countries like Africa and the Asia Pacific, rural areas, in particular, have inadequate knowledge of these novel technologies. Consequently, the slow adoption of bone tumor ablation devices in these regions is anticipated to hinder the markets growth. During the projected period, the global bone tumor ablation market is expected to face hindrances due to several factors, such as the scarcity of skilled surgery professionals in certain regions, the limited lifespan of bone tumor ablation devices, and the extended approval time required for product launch.

Regional Analysis:

The global market for bone tumor ablation devices is categorized by geographical region, including Africa, Latin America, Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, and the Middle East.

During the forecast period, the bone tumor ablation devices market is projected to experience the highest profitability in North America, primarily due to the increasing incidence of osteosarcoma. Osteosarcoma, the most prevalent form of bone cancer, frequently affects children and young adults and is categorized as high-, intermediate-, or low-grade based on cells. According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 800 to 900 fresh cases of osteosarcoma are detected annually in the United States, with around half of these affecting youngsters and teenagers. This trend is expected to fuel the expansion of the bone tumor ablation devices market in the North American region.

Technological advancements in minimally invasive treatment therapies are anticipated to drive the growth of bone tumor ablation devices in the Asia-Pacific region. Additionally, ongoing conferences regarding the use of ablation technology in the region are anticipated to raise awareness among healthcare providers. For example, in 2019, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan hosted ACTA 2019, an Asian Conference of Tumor Ablation, which centered on the principles and technical aspects of various ablation techniques such as microwave ablation (MW), radiofrequency ablation (RFA), irreversible electroporation (IRE), cryoablation, and numerous guiding techniques, including imaging fusion.

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Prominent players:

Prominent participants, including RF Medical Co., Ltd., Medtronic Plc., Misomix Inc., Merit Medical Systems Inc., Varian Medical Systems Inc., MedWaves Inc., Olympus Corporation, Mermaid Medical A/S, and AngioDynamics Inc., are operating in the global bone tumor ablation devices market.

Table of Contents with Major Points:

Executive Summary

Introduction

Key Findings

Recommendations

Definitions and Assumptions

Market Overview

Definition of Bone Tumor Ablation Devices Market

Market Dynamics

Drivers

Restraints

Opportunities

Trends and Developments

Key Insights

Key Emerging Trends

Key Developments Mergers and Acquisition

New Product Launches and Collaboration

Partnership and Joint Venture

Latest Technological Advancements

Insights on Regulatory Scenario

Porters Five Forces Analysis

Qualitative Insights Impact of COVID-19 on Global Bone Tumor Ablation Devices Market

Supply Chain Challenges

Steps taken by Government/Companies to overcome this impact

Potential opportunities due to COVID-19 outbreak

Conclusion

Appendix

Data Sources

Abbreviations

Disclaimer

TOC Continued!

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Worldwide revenue from the cell culture media market stands at US$ 3.0 Bn in 2022, with the global market forecasted to surge ahead at a CAGR of 6.8% to reach a valuation of US$ 6.3 Bn by the end of 2033.

The cell culture media market plays a crucial role in the field of biotechnology and pharmaceutical research by providing essential nutrients and growth factors necessary for the growth and proliferation of cells in vitro. Cell culture media are formulated to mimic the natural physiological environment required for the cultivation of various cell types. The global cell culture media market has witnessed significant growth in recent years, driven by advancements in cell-based research, increasing demand for biopharmaceuticals, and the rising prevalence of chronic diseases. This report aims to provide an overview of the cell culture media market, including market trends, key players, growth drivers, challenges, and future prospects.

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Market Overview

The global cell culture media market has experienced steady growth over the past decade and is expected to continue expanding at a healthy rate. The market is primarily driven by the increasing demand for cell-based therapies, regenerative medicine, and biopharmaceutical production. Cell culture media are extensively used in research laboratories, academic institutions, and biopharmaceutical companies for applications such as drug discovery, tissue engineering, toxicity testing, and vaccine production.

Market Dynamics

Growth Drivers:

Increasing investments in biotechnology and pharmaceutical research.

Rising prevalence of chronic diseases, driving the demand for advanced cell-based therapies.

Technological advancements in cell culture techniques and media formulations.

Growing demand for personalized medicine and regenerative therapies.

Expansion of biopharmaceutical production, particularly in emerging economies.

Challenges:

High cost associated with cell culture media and reagents.

Quality control challenges in large-scale production.

Complex regulatory landscape for cell-based therapies.

Limited availability of skilled professionals for cell culture techniques.

Ethical concerns related to the use of animal-derived components in media formulations.

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Key Players:

Becton, Dickinson and Company

Hi-Media Laboratories

Merck, KGaA

STEMCELL Technologies Inc.

Cell Sciences, Inc.

GE Healthcare

PAN Biotech

MP Biomedicals, LLC.

PromCell GmbH

Irvine Scientific

Lonza

Corning Incorporated

Segmentation:

Product: The cell culture media market can be segmented into serum-free media, classical media, stem cell culture media, specialty media, chemically defined media, and others. Serum-free media is the fastest-growing segment, as it is free of animal-derived components and is therefore considered to be more ethical and safer. Classical media is the most commonly used type of cell culture media, and it is made up of a mixture of amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. Stem cell culture media is used to grow and maintain stem cells, and it is typically more expensive than other types of cell culture media. Specialty media is designed for specific applications, such as the growth of cancer cells or the production of biopharmaceuticals.

The cell culture media market can be Serum-free media is the fastest-growing segment, as it is free of animal-derived components and is therefore considered to be more ethical and safer. Classical media is the most commonly used type of cell culture media, and it is made up of a mixture of amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. Stem cell culture media is used to grow and maintain stem cells, and it is typically more expensive than other types of cell culture media. Specialty media is designed for specific applications, such as the growth of cancer cells or the production of biopharmaceuticals. Application: The cell culture media market can be segmented by application into biopharmaceutical production, diagnostics, cancer and stem cell research, and others. Biopharmaceutical production is the largest application for cell culture media, as it is used to grow cells that are used to produce therapeutic proteins, vaccines, and other biopharmaceuticals. Diagnostics is another major application for cell culture media, as it is used to grow cells that are used to diagnose diseases. Cancer and stem cell research are two smaller but growing applications for cell culture media.

The cell culture media market can be segmented by application into biopharmaceutical production, diagnostics, cancer and stem cell research, and others. Biopharmaceutical production is the largest application for cell culture media, as it is used to grow cells that are used to produce therapeutic proteins, vaccines, and other biopharmaceuticals. Diagnostics is another major application for cell culture media, as it is used to grow cells that are used to diagnose diseases. Cancer and stem cell research are two smaller but growing applications for cell culture media. End-user: The cell culture media market can be segmented by end-user into pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, academic and government research organizations, and contract research organizations. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are the largest end-users of cell culture media, as they use it to grow cells for the production of biopharmaceuticals. Academic and government research organizations use cell culture media for research purposes, such as the study of cancer and stem cell development. Contract research organizations (CROs) use cell culture media to provide services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, such as the screening of new drug candidates.

Recent Developments in Cell Culture Media Market

In June 2022, Evonik introduced a novel peptide to increase the output of cell-culture-based biopharmaceuticals. The peptide is the latest addition to the cQrex product line of cell culture components, which boosts productivity and efficiency in bioprocesses for the production of monoclonal antibodies, vaccines, viral vectors, and therapeutic cells.

cells. In May 2022, Lonza announced the launch of its new cell culture media product line, Celligen. The Celligen product line is designed to meet the needs of cell culture applications in a variety of industries, including biopharmaceuticals, vaccines, and cell therapy.

In April 2022, Thermo Fisher Scientific announced the acquisition of Cytiva, a leading provider of cell culture media and reagents. The acquisition will expand Thermo Fisher Scientifics portfolio of cell culture products and services and help the company meet the growing demand for cell-based therapies.

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NOTICE OF EXPRESSION OF INTEREST  AMI 

Who are we ?

We have been established in Canada since 1994 and in the DRC since 2013. We have become a center of excellence with 6 satellite branches in the DRC in Kinshasa Gombe, Kinshasa Bandalungwa, Kinshasa Ngaliema, Kinshasa Limete as well as in Lubumbashi, a center and a specialized center.

Our vision :Become a network of medical centers of excellence in Canada and sub-Saharan Africa.

Our values : Patient: Everything is centered around a patient-sublime experience; Quality: Quality of Medical care above all else; Rapidity: A service that takes the patient's priorities into account.

For more information on our services, candidates can visit www.cmd.cd

Our mission :Become a center of medical excellence in ambulatory care, surgery, maternity, and dentistry/ophthalmology through a state-of-the-art medical team and cadre.

---------------------------------------

Position Title: Project Manager

I. Context and Job Description:

In partnership with the Executive Committee, lead and implement CMD priorities and strategy. Maintain a highly visible leadership profile, proactive in engaging with other departments as required.

He coordinates the operational management, monitoring and reporting of the activity of the medical center. He also coordinates meetings and monitors the completion of tasks.

II. Main responsibility:

1. Coordinate projects

Leads the project team, establishes the project execution approach, and oversees project hand-over, execution planning, and monitoring and control activities for both internal and external resources in order to accomplish all project goals, provides performance feedback regarding allocated resources working on projects

Active involvement in continuous improvement and simplification, supports improving guidelines, tools, and templates, ensures compliance to relevant regulations, standards and contractual requirements, budget, sales and operations planning, supports Incal Sales and Tendering through early involvement in tenders

Ensures that the project follows execution best practices and company poles, effectively monitors and controls project progress and efficient resource, monitors and controls project financials, overseeing project invoicing status, cost, expenses, and cash flow, identifies, qualifies, quantifies, and manages project risks and ensures that all opportunities are idented and pursued

Captures, analytes and shares lessons learned throughout the project, all in accordance with the contract, ensures that the project consistently apples contract and claims management

Coordinates with Supply Chain Management and successfully procures required services, materials, and equipment for the project from external and internal suppliers, supports Procurement and Logistics in supplier negotiations, claims and projects changes Maintains strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders and effectively communicates with all stakeholders, ensures the project follows and complies with company health, safety, and environmental policies.

2. Follow-up of meetings and various requests

Update the Excel table for monitoring maintenance requests daily

Update the Excel task tracking table for service providers on a daily basis

Follow up on tasks assigned to Directors and Chiefs meetings at CMD

Write the minutes of the meeting of Directors and Chiefs

Update documents

Follow up on tasks that are due for the day by sending reminder emails, or follow up by phone, or via Whatsapp, or face to face

3. Carriage tracking

Support the regulator in his team management (planning, replacement, leave, etc.)

Follow-up of transport to be justified: every week for ambulances (invoiced or uninvoiced races), consistency with mileage and fuel consumption.

Optimization of costs (repairs, maintenance, etc.)

Control of mandatory documents and makes the bridge with the legal (Master Sonny)

Checks the regulator's weekly follow-ups (ensures that the latter carries out checks on the logbooks, etc.)

Escalates information (highlight or issues) to management.

4.  Knowledge  : (what main knowledge does the service provider need?)

Have a good written and oral expression, good spelling skills

Computer proficiency (word processing, spreadsheets)

English

Project management techniques

Oral communication

5. The  know-how  : (what should he be able to do?)

Relational know-how

Carry out its mission and set its organization independently

Facilitate cross-functional cooperation

Adopt appropriate relational behavior

Argue his decisions in order to convince and encourage support

Technical know-how

manage your timing

Manage and plan

Design and adapt communication media and/or documentation based on messages and targets

Implement a quality approach

6.  Savoir-etre  : (desirable ways of acting, behaving?)

Team spirit

Have the desire to achieve and exceed the objectives set.

Stress resistance and versatility

Listening skills

Autonomy and multitasking

Sense of organization and responsibility

Superior communication and interpersonal skills

I. Instructions for applying: Do not submit an application if you do not directly meet these requirements:

An up-to-date CV, with at least 3 reference persons/Company (full names, e-mail addresses as well as telephone numbers) highlighting relevant knowledge and experience;

A copy of the diplomas obtained;

With equal qualifications, female candidates are encouraged;

A cover letter, describing how the candidate's professional qualifications and experience meet the selection criteria;

Ensure access to the site https://cmd.cd/careers/kinshasa

The place of work: Kinshasa.

This online submission is free.

We thank all those who apply, but only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

Kinshasa on 30.05.2023

The Human Capital Department

of the Diamant Medical Center

---------------------------------------------------

NOTICE OF EXPRESSION OF INTEREST

Diamond Medical Center

General & specialized medicine. Laboratory. Imaging. Surgeries.

Maternity. Neonatology. Dentistry. Ophthalmology.
by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, June 9, 2023

In Thursday's edition of "Red, White & Blog," I wrote about the rapid acceleration of AI-generated "news" sites detected in NewsGuard's new AI Tracking Center and posed the question about how that compares to the proliferation of human-generated news sites.

During a follow up interview with NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill, we agreed the best source would be Comscore, but that they probably didn't actually know.

As a proxy, I asked Brill how many new news sites has NewsGuard been indexing in its database since it launched.

"Ten to 15 each month," he said.

Taking the high number in that range, I deduced there is a 10x multiple of AI-generated ones since NewsGuard began tracking them a little more than a month ago, and did some simple math to show how that would accelerate over time (see chart below).

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Obviously, we have no idea what the actual rate of new news-site creation might be over time, but assuming there aren't changes in technology, regulations, laws and/or publishing industry protocols, I'm going to guess it will not go down and will only go up.

By the way, if I carry the math out to 2045 -- the year Ray Kurzweil predicts we will reach the Singularity -- the number of AI-generated news sites added will be 39,600, but it won't matter, because once we fuse with AI we'll all instantly know everything about anything as soon as it happens. Even the stuff that never actually happened.

So no need for news publishers anymore, right?

All joking aside, I had a pretty substantive Q&A with Brill as part of my query, so I am publishing it here for anyone who cares.

MediaPost: Its remarkable what youve found -- that in a little over a month, AI-generated, unreliable news sites has tripled from 49 to 150. My follow-up question is, during the same period of time, what would be the normal number of human-generated news sites that have been created?

Steve Brill: Its a Comscore question that Comscore probably wouldnt be able to answer, but we probably add  over the period of a month  10 new news sites, maybe 15. That doesnt mean that some of them dont generate zero traffic that nobody sees. But this is extraordinary.

The most important thing is that its really a harbinger of what is yet to come. I can imagine some political consultant -- or dozens of political consultants -- are going to figure out that you can create whole websites in the run-up to the 2024 election. And if Im in a candidate in a XYZ swing congressional district, I can create a website that is just directed at my opponent in that campaign in which the news is that incumbent congressman so-and-so attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new center supplying food for veterans. And the next news item is that his or her opponent was caught in a cheating scandal when they were in college.

Now it takes no effort to create persuasive news sites that look like real news sites and you can target it to a specific demographic.

Just like you can ask ChatGPT to write me an explanation of what network television used to be like for a 15-year-old high school student, it can create a website for me in Peoria, IL, directed at people there that has news of Peoria and includes a story about a scandal involving so-and-so.

MediaPost: So this is like Russias Internet Research Agency on steroids. That was human-powered, cheaply under Russian labor.

Brill: Thats exactly right. This is really exponentially weaponizing the internet.

MediaPost: Do you have any idea how this scales and when well get to the point where people just dont believe anything, anymore?

Brill: Right, and it could be that people dont even believe the truth anymore. I mean, just imagine if the Access Hollywood tape came out now, instead of in 2016, Trump would just say its fake and a lot of people would believe its fake. Because guess what -- you can fake that tape today.

The issue is that you really need to train these machines to pay more attention to some websites vs. others. Because right now, what the machines do is they just read everything online and they treat The Economist the same way they treat Alex Jones, or Pravda even.

ChatGPT will say whatever they publish, whereas Bing chat -- which is using NewsGuard now -- will say something different.

MediaPost: Youre not talking about willful disinformation, per se, but misinformation from bogus money-making news sites scraping bad information?

Brill: Well, its the same thing. You can train your generative AI machine that even if someone prompts it to do it, that it wont say the Parkland shooting was staged by crisis actors.

MediaPost: Again, any projection for how this might scale over time?

Brill: It will scale over time and it will make the Internet Research Agency look like amateurs.
by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, June 8, 2023

OpenAI's large language model ChatGPT might be able to write essays, diagnose some diseases, and even pass the bar exam, but the technology comes with a pretty significant drawback -- it sometimes spits out incorrect information.

That tendency to hallucinate -- meaning to make up false information out of whole cloth -- has now resulted in what's believed to be the first defamation lawsuit against OpenAI.

In a complaint brought this week in state court in Georgia, radio host Mark Walters alleges that ChatGPT provided false and malicious information about him to journalist Fred Riehl, who founded the publication AmmoLand News, which covers weapons.

According to the complaint, Riehl asked ChatGPT to summarize a complaint brought last month by the Second Amendment Foundation and its founder, Alan Gottlieb, against Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson. Gottlieb claims in that lawsuit that he is being wrongly investigated by state authorities due to his views on gun rights.

Instead of accurately describing Gottlieb's lawsuit, ChatGPT allegedly wrote that Gottlieb's complaint accused Walters of misappropriating funds.

That response is a complete fabrication and bears no resemblance to the actual complaint, including an erroneous case number, Walters' complaint alleges.

He notes that he has never even been in a position to misappropriate funds from the Second Amendment Foundation, given that he has no employment or other official relationship with the organization.

ChatGPTs allegations concerning Walters were false and malicious, expressed in print, writing, pictures, or signs, tending to injure Walters reputation and exposing him to public hatred, contempt, or ridicule, the complaint alleges.

He is seeking monetary damages and attorney's fees.

While Walters' lawsuit appears to be the first of its kind, it almost certainly won't be the last, given the technology's tendency to hallucinate.

There's no doubt that ChatGPT is going to trigger an enormous amount of lawsuits, Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman tells MediaPost. The question is whether any of them are going to stick.

Even before Walters brought suit, others accused ChatGPT of libelous fabrications. In April, for instance, a mayor in Australia reportedly threatened to sue after learning that ChatGPT wrongly accused him of bribery.

ChatGPT's hallucinations also have proven to be problematic even when they are not libelous. In one highly publicized example, a lawyer filed a brief written with ChatGPT that contained citations to fake cases.

Goldman says that as news spreads of the technology's limitations, people who sue for defamation could have a hard time proving that anyone could reasonably believe ChatGPT's responses are accurate.

OpenAI also could attempt to argue it's protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes web companies from liability for material posted by third parties.

Whether that argument will be successful will depend on the specific facts, Goldman says.

For instance, if ChatGPT provides false information, but is quoting a third party word-for-word, Section 230 should apply, Goldman says. But if ChatGPT is simply making up incorrect information, Section 230 wouldn't protect the company.

Regardless of Section 230, Walters might not be entitled to much in the way of damages even if he proves his case, according to Goldman. That's because, according to the complaint, the false information was only conveyed to one person -- Riehl.

OpenAI hasn't yet responded to MediaPost's request for comment.
by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, June 9, 2023

The potential and power of creativity is part of being human, at least for advertising and media executives. The industry takes on this concept, runs with it, and shares it with others to a high degree at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, which kicks off in the South of France in about a week.

While investments this year by many agency and technology companies may seem a bit more subdued, compared with past years, innovations and advancements, as well as shared thoughts bounced from mind to mind are anything but ordinary.

Goodway Group CEO Jay Friedman said the latest shiny object -- the biggest one the industry has seen in years -- will give advertisers human insight into visions not seen before.

Search & Performance Marketing Daily (S&PMD) caught up with Friedman before his trip to Cannes to talk about generative artificial intelligence (GAI), retail media, connected television (CTV) and video, and first-party data and a cookieless future.

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Search & Performance Marketing Daily: Where do you see the industry heading with GAI?

Friedman: Generative AI is probably the shiniest object -- not only in the room, but the shiniest meaningful object we have had for years.

Web3 was shiny, but it lacked substance. Theres a huge gap between pontificating about it and putting it to work.

S&PMD: How are you advising clients?

Friedman: We are advising our clients to have multiple data sources to combine such as inventory, sales forecast, app use, historical data and media data. In the past, it may not have been required to connect all these different data sources to one system, but there is the need now.

With integrated data, we can start to ask questions like the last time we had a more than 10% spike in app use, did we see inventory challenges and, if so, where? Thats a very different world than most marketers live in today.

I think generative AI will provides answers in ways that people can understand better.

S&PMD: What are your thoughts about GAI, content and search?

Friedman: Image-based and video-based generative AI will become important. There are a lot of copyright issues that need to be worked out. GAI will help marketers discover variations of human ideas that help to move the needle better.

For the foreseeable future, GAI will give humans the insight into what will make other humans want to buy a product and support it. But there are so many shades and variation of the message, and AI can help do that.

S&PMD: What are your thoughts on Retail Media?

Friedman: Marketers will need to move to a more holistic type of search. Generative AI is wrapped completely in consumer search. The paid-search industry is completely traditional and pay-per-click centric. Google is 90% of their world, and Bing is an afterthought. Consumer searches on Amazon, Yelp, YouTube and TikTok are all over the place.

The challenge becomes getting marketers supporting shopper media practices, who want to own search on Kroger and Walmart, to collaborate with traditional marketers in the traditional paid-search practice, who want to own search campaigns on Google and Bing.

They will need to learn how to collaborate in a different way. Brands will demand that of their agencies. We are working on it.

S&PMD: Do you expect to hear talk about CTV and search at Cannes?

Friedman: Whats interesting is that whenever we find that media works well across channels, we act surprised. We know search works with CTV. The fact that marketers and agencies have not been coordinating media around the consumer as opposed to the channel -- thats a mistake.

I think Roku is doing some innovated things with shoppable ads that will help with retail media. CTV and search belong together as much as display and search or podcasts and search.

CPGs on the retail media side received a gift of measurement as deterministic measurement is eliminated by the removal of cookies. Thats a gift that the best CPGs and durable manufactures are using to their advantage.

There are CPGs and brands that may sell products across 40 or 50 retailers, and managing all is not possible. Cross-shopping happens. A major beverage manufacturer might buy an ad on Target, but the sale happens on Walmart. A measurement that identifies the total market impact is needed. I just want to know that ads are working something, and whose consumers are providing the greatest return.

The major DSPs such as Google, Meta and Criteo will need to provide some way for CPGs to unify buys.

S&PMD: Cookie deprecation, can you provide an update on what you see?

Friedman: More than 40% of the market is unaddressable due to cookie deprecation. Cookies today are more a signal for directional understanding rather than direct measurement. The best marketers already integrate into media mix modeling, as well as incrementality testing.

The challenge, helping convey the results to the executive team of a brand. The data in the reports is not easy to understand if youre not an expert. The experts will need technical knowledge and storytelling techniques to be able to pick out the important information and share it.
by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, June 9, 2023

Microsoft Store Ads will now appear in Bing search results and will soon become available to all advertisers worldwide. The plan is to expand the service to 150 new regions.

The company announced Microsoft Store Ads, a product designed to help developers grow their business by getting apps or games in front of the right customers, at its conference Build 2022. Then, at this past Build conference, the company shared that in June the store would expand beyond the United States.

Advertisers will also have more options to reach customers with Premium Search Ads in the Microsoft Store and Bing.com search results.

Microsoft also plans to launch additional features to simplify processed for advertisers. Features such as Premium Search Ads created to offer a visual and prominent ad placement to help advertisers reach more customers and increase downloads. Through the Microsoft Advertising Software Development Kit (SDK), Advertisers can retarget audiences on the Microsoft Network.



The simplified user interface and new design aims to allow advertisers to link apps with one click. It should make looking up app information easier because digital marketers can track and analyze app installations, in-app purchases, and monitor customer engagement.

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Miracle Games, an earlier adopter of the features, wanted to reach more users that intended to download a desktop app or game, Miracle Games was able to reach users searching the Microsoft Store for related apps and games, increasing awareness, preference, and downloads.

After three months of testing and optimizing the ads, Miracle Games saw 25% more installs with Microsoft Store Ads, and averaged a conversion rate 6x higher, compared with prior use of Microsoft Advertising, according to the company.

Bing generates 14.5 billion global monthly searches, according to Comscore March 2023 data. This means Microsoft Store Ads will extend beyond the Microsoft Store on Windows. The feature enables Microsoft Store Ads to trigger on Bing search engine results pages, similar to regular product ads.

Enabling these ads requires advertisers to create a Microsoft Store Ad campaign in Microsoft Advertising and set the Ad Distribution Controls to all.
According to Deadline, James Gunn is about to start doing screen tests for his new film, Superman: Legacy.

One of the coolest things about superhero films is how almost every generation has its definitive version of a timeless character. For Millennials, Spider-Man, and Tobey Maguire are one and the same. For Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland are synonymous with the Web Head. It ultimately just depends on which iteration of a character's film franchise you grew up with.

When it comes to Superman, tons of actors have donned the Man of Steel's iconic red cape in live-action. However, even though every generation can lay claim to a Superman actor, fans of the character typically only acknowledge one: Christopher Reeve.

Reeve's portrayal of the Man of Tomorrow still remains the gold standard for Superman's cinematic career. However, with his new film Superman: Legacy, writer, and director James Gunn has a chance to cast an actor that could become as revered as Christopher Reeve.
by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, June 9, 2023

Lawmakers in the Senate reintroduced a bipartisan bill that would force social media platforms to provide researchers with a trove of information about ads as well as content.

The Platform Accountability and Transparency Act -- introduced Thursday by Senators Chris Coons (D-Delaware). Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Dr. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), John Cornyn (R-Texas), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) -- would require social platforms with at least 50 million monthly U.S. users to share data with researchers whose projects have been approved by the National Science Foundation.

The bill specifically would obligate platforms to share ad libraries, statistics about content moderation, descriptions of recommendation algorithms, and information about highly disseminated content -- defined by the bill as content viewed by at least 10,000 users.

The proposed law also would require platforms to disclose some reasonably public information about users, defined as information that users made available in a manner and under such circumstances such that the author does not retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in the information.

The bill wouldn't require platforms to disclose users' private messages, biometric information, or precise location data.

The tech industry group NetChoice criticized the proposed law, arguing that it could threaten data security and privacy.

Any researchers -- even ones with the best intentions -- can be hacked, NetChoice general counsel Carl Szabo stated.

A slightly different version of the proposed law was floated in 2021, soon after Meta Platforms effectively shut down New York University's Ad Observatory project, which studied political ads on the platform. That project relied on a downloadable browser extension to gather data related to political ads, including how they're targeted. Meta said it disabled the accounts, apps, pages and platform access connected with the initiative due to privacy concerns.
by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, June 9, 2023

Contact lens retailer 1-800 Contacts on Friday asked a federal appellate court to revive a lawsuit accusing rival Warby Parker of wrongly using the term 1-800 Contacts to drive search users to Warby Parker's website.

In a 30-minute argument before the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, attorney Stephen Fishbein said Warby Parker was siphoning off consumers who searched for 1-800 Contacts.

He said people who type 1-800 Contacts into a search engine expect to find that company's website, and that WarbyParker hijacked that consumer interest in 1-800 Contacts by using it to trigger a search ad.

1-800 Contacts has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing, promotion and customer service, he told a three-judge appellate panel. That investment, which the trademark law and policy encourages, has resulted in millions of customers using 1-800's trademarks to search the internet for 1-800 Contacts' website.

Warby Parker attorney Roxanne Elings countered that an appreciable number of consumers are not likely to be confused when they conduct online searches and are served with ads that were triggered by trademarks.

Elings also said using a rival's trademark to trigger an ad was legal in this day and age, noting that 1-800 Contacts previously lost a similar complaint it brought against rival Lens.com.

Friday's arguments came in a battle dating to August of 2021, when 1-800 Contacts sued Warby Parker for trademark infringement based on search ads.

U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Castel in New York threw out 1-800 Contacts' case before either side presented evidence, ruling that even if 1-800 Contacts' allegations were true, Warby Parker's search ads would not have been likely to confuse consumers. He wrote that consumers today are sophisticated enough to review search results and websites before making purchases.

1-800 Contacts says questions about consumer confusion are factual, and that it should have been able to prove its contentions at a trial.

Circuit Judge Denny Chin pressed Warby Parker's attorney on that point.

Was the district court making a finding of fact when it concluded that these days, consumers are so sophisticated, and know the internet so well, that they are not likely to be confused?... Is that not a finding of fact? Chin asked Elings.

She responded that other judges have ruled it wasn't necessary to hold a trial in similar cases -- particularly when, as was the situation with Warby Parker, the ad and landing page contained no reference to 1-800 Contacts.

The judges also questioned Fishbein about whether 1-800 Contacts could proceed if consumers who made a purchase from Warby Parker's site understood that they weren't buying lenses from 1-800 Contracts.

Fishbein said the answer was yes, based on the concept of initial interest confusion -- a controversial doctrine dating to the 1970s that allows companies to sue if consumers are temporarily confused by a rival's use of a trademark, even if they are no longer confused by the time they make a purchase.

The appellate panel questioned whether that decades-old concept was a good fit for disputes over search ads, given that consumers today are familiar with search engines and online shopping.

1-800 Contacts has a long history of suing competitors over their search ads.

Between 2004 and 2013, the company sued or threatened to sue at least 14 other eyewear and contact lens companies for trademark infringement. Thirteen of those companies settled with 1-800 Contacts by agreeing to restrict the use of its trademark in search advertising.

Those prior settlements were at the center of an antitrust action by the Federal Trade Commission, which ruled several years ago that 1-800 Contacts acted anticompetitively by forging deals with rivals that limited their ability to advertise.

The 2nd Circuit later reversed the FTC's ruling, writing that courts should defer to settlement agreements in trademark cases, even if the deals limited competition.
An Indian plastics manufacturer that makes pipes and food packaging wants to set up its first U.S. production facility in the Town of Lockport, in the same business park where an affiliated wind-turbine also wants to start production.

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SRI CV Plastics wants to construct a 13,870-square-foot plastic product manufacturing facility at 1000 IDA Park Drive, using a 2-acre parcel of vacant industrial land that it would purchase from the Lockport Industrial Development Agency. The plant would produce all sizes of PVC plastic pipes and disposable food containers used for food packaging.

The $2.34 million project would represent the companys initial foray into the U.S. manufacturing market, but it expects to ramp up to a full line of disposable food containers within two years.

The company is asking the Lockport IDA for more than $300,000 in tax breaks, on top of another $300,000 in state incentives.

Without the subsidies, the company wrote in its application, it would not undertake the project and instead will seek the assistance it needs from a municipality elsewhere in the United States.

Location of the project in the Town of Lockport or the State of New York is not critical to its success, the company wrote. The applicant will begin to actively pursue development incentives in other municipalities and in other states if financial assistance is not provided by the Town of Lockport IDA.

It cited lower costs for labor and workers compensation insurance, easier permitting, fewer regulations and better development financing in other states. However, the company said it has not yet begun to actively investigate alternative jurisdictions.

SRI is owned by VEVA Holdings Private Ltd. of India, which is led by president Varun Kumar Velumani. He and VEVA are also partners in Siva Powers America, an Amherst-based startup company that is building an adjacent 10,000-square-foot manufacturing facility at 1060 Enterprise Drive, where it will start assembling wind turbines from nacelles and blades produced in India before it starts making the blades themselves locally as well.

Both companies are temporarily based in an East Amherst office at 9260 Transit Road.

SRI said the tax breaks will help offset the high cost of establishing the applicants first U.S.-based manufacturing operation, allowing it to build and furnish a production facility designed to ensure fast track growth of the full extent of the applicants intended product lines and enable the applicant to begin to serve its U.S. customers at the earliest possible date.

The plant would include 8,500 square feet for manufacturing, 2,000 square feet each for warehouse and research, and 1,000 square feet for office space. Plans call for starting work this month, with completion by September 2024.

Besides the $60,000 purchase of the property, SRI would spend $1 million each on construction and manufacturing equipment, plus $50,000 for infrastructure, $200,000 for other equipment and furnishings, and $30,000 in professional fees. Funding would include $2 million in bank financing and $340,000 in equity.

About $500,000 in funding would come from public sources, including $311,856 in unspecified incentives. The company, which would hire 20 full-time and five part-time workers within two years, said it is working with Invest Buffalo Niagara and Empire State Development Corp. It wants the Lockport IDA to provide $25,000 in mortgage-recording tax relief, $59,040 in sales tax breaks and a 15-year property tax abatement that would save $227,816.
Two Western New York congressmen like the chances of the area being designated as a national tech hub, which could come with up to $75 million in investment from the federal government.

One of the main reasons  Buffalo is going at the application process as a region, along with the Rochester and Syracuse areas.

Regions like Buffalo Niagara ready to contend for 'tech hub' funding "I firmly believe upstate New York has everything it takes to help make that dream a reality, and help America maintain its competitive edge, all while taking us to the next frontier in technology," Schumer said.

Congressmen Brian Higgins, a Democrat, and Nick Langworthy, a Republican, are working together to call on the U.S. Economic Development Agency to choose Western and Central New York for the Tech Hub designation.

They anticipate being one of the only applicants that brings together not just a city, but a region to be considered as part of the program.

A focus of the application will be to push the region as a potential leader in the expansion of U.S.-manufactured computer chips, following the recent announcement of Microns $100 billion investment in its Syracuse manufacturing site.

The EDA will designate about 20 regional Tech Hubs across the country, awarding them an initial $500,000 each, and then whittle that down to about five to 10 for the phase two grants, worth up to between $50 million and $75 million.

Were very serious about the viability of this application, Higgins said. There are many attributes here that are unique to this region that distinguish us from other applications. We have every reason to expect that we will be successful.

The application has not only brought together Upstate politicians and leaders in manufacturing, but also universities  such as the University at Buffalo, University of Rochester and Cornell University, foundations, various larger entities and supply chain companies from throughout the region. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, has long backed a tech hub for the region.

We bring an awful lot of firepower together, Langworthy said. This is very unique to bring this many stakeholders to the table.

They say the move would be a catalyst for business, job opportunity and training more skilled workers in upstate New York. It is also another effort to help accelerate the incremental growth of advanced manufacturing in Buffalo, helping to put the area on the forefront of emerging technologies. That includes the semiconductor space.

Biden's budget boosts Buffalo, divides Congress With Democrats in charge of the Senate and Republicans leading the House, expect to hear plenty of divergent comments as Congress fights its way toward approving a new spending plan for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

This investment would help build out semiconductor capacity along the Thruway corridor even further, Langworthy said. The designation of our region as a Tech Hub is the investment that can transform our manufacturing economy and  help put Western New York back on the industrial map, where it belongs.

Along with Rep. Joe Morelle from Rochester, the congressmen have hosted several joint discussions with stakeholders to coordinate planning for submitting the application, and met last year with Assistant Secretary of Commerce Alejandro Castillo, who heads the EDA, to better understand program priorities and elevate awareness about what this region offers. The application is due Aug. 15.

The meeting with Castillo also included senior management at the EDA that will review these applications and make a final decision.

Higgins said that with Buffalos history of manufacturing and abundance of surrounding fresh water, it gives them an advantage in infrastructure and positions the area to be a part of this program, established under the CHIPS and Science Act.

What they want in the end is to be successful with this program, so theyre not going to invest in regions that are not ready. Buffalo is ready, Higgins said.

Higgins and Langworthy met Friday at the proposed future site for the Larkin Workforce Training Center, located in the Larkin Center of Commerce. The employer-led center is being proposed as a resource to provide entry-level manufacturing workers with skills and apprenticeships to help advance their careers. The regions designation as a Tech Hub would provide a huge lift for advancing the training center.

Local manufacturer Tapecon and other industry partners are helping plan the training center. Located within the Larkin Center of Commerce, Tapecon manufacturers flexible electronic circuitry, which is one of the key technologies that the Tech Hub program seeks to advance.

Tapecon President Steve Davis said building owner James Cornell has been supportive in earmarking up to 25,000 square feet of first floor space in the Larkin Center of Commerce for supporting various employer sectors at the training center.

The reality is that most employers are always checking the workforce development box as the biggest issue they have in terms of growth, retention or building skillsets within their organization, Davis said. So, incumbent worker training is a big need for employers in the region.

The regions application also will build off Microns recent announcement that the company plans to invest up to $100 billion in a semiconductor factory in Clay, NY.

The U.S. makes just 10% of the worlds semiconductors  it used to make around 40%, Higgins said.

Building a strong U.S. supply chain will make the country less reliant on foreign entities such as China, Langworthy said.

We have to be prepared to meet that moment and capture that spinoff, and we have so many things going for us here to do it, he said.
BIG RAPIDS  The 2023 Camp 911, hosted by the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program, was deemed another success as local seniors participated in learning about ways to stay safe.

Attendees gathered at the Big Rapids Department of Public Safety on May 17 to participate in presentations and demonstrations on the early signs of Alzheimers, emergency preparedness, and fire safety, as well as opportunities to win prizes.
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Together. Forward. Bold. An exceptional place where everyone thrives.

Thats the Midland County vision statement - and it was a main focus of the Community and Connections event that drew about 40 people to Grove Park on Thursday.

The event was made possible through the Midland Rotary Club, with conversations facilitated by the Midland Cultural Awareness Coalition and Youth Inclusivity Committee.

The conversations centered around further building an inclusive community where everyone belongs and thrives.

The session speakers included Erin Patrice, founder of The Breaking Bread Village, and Ken Jolly, history professor and Black Studies degree advisor for Saginaw Valley State University.

Were here to participate in a community conversation, to build and further an inclusive community where everyone belongs and thrives, said Jolly. To live out the Midland County Vision Statement: Together. Forward. Bold.

Marilyn Lumbert attended the event, not knowing about Community and Connections beforehand. She says she often takes her grandson to the park because she lives close by.

So many times we dont get a chance to really talk to your neighbors and the community like this, about things like this, and I think its great, said Lumbert.

It provides an opportunity to bring people in a space where they feel comfortable, and develop skills for dialogue to get along with each other a little bit better, said Gail Hoffman, a Rotary club member and organizer of the event.

Hoffman says the idea for this event goes back to 2020, when Midland Rotarians became involved in a curriculum developed by the University of Pennsylvania for courageous conversations in the community.

Hoffman says she worked with the Midland Area Wellbeing Coalition to develop programming for the Rotary Club, based on the six pillars of wellness: positivity, engagement, relationships, meaningfulness and purpose, accomplishment, and health.

It needs to start with the self so you can help others. You do it on the interpersonal level, and then you take it larger, community level and beyond, said Hoffman.

Hoffman says the Rotary Club has conducted the programming monthly for a year now, and it all led up to the Community and Connections event. While this is the first year of the event, Hoffman says she hopes it will continue.

Our vision is that Midland is an inclusive community, that we welcome all, we wrap our arms around all, and we can listen and learn from all. That's so vitally important, said Sharon Mortensen, president and CEO of the Midland Area Community Foundation. Cultural Awareness Coalition is really about expanding that understanding and awareness of inclusivity.
Gladwin Pride flew its rainbow flags for the first time in 2020.

On Saturday, June 10, the organization is celebrating its third year together, united in support for the LGBTQ+ community.

The event is organized in part by Christ the King Lutheran Church. It will kick off at 11 a.m. with a march and two speakers before going into a picnic with live music, a new addition this year, said Pastor Emily Olsen.

Music will be presented by Taylor Tatum from Flint and her DJ.

"Last year, we kind of just had speakers and a playlist," Olsen said. "This year, having live music and a DJ will add a lot to this year's Pride (celebration)."

The Pride celebration took a hiatus in 2021 and returned in 2022.

Community groups, including Community Mental Health, will have tables set up to offer support and provide resources, Olsen said. The Gladwin Artists' Guild will provide face painting services.

Last year, around 150 people attended the event, many of which were teenagers, Olsen said. This year, she expects similar attendance or greater.

There has been a "very positive" community response to the events, she said.

"Pride is really good for the health and safety of a lot of people," Olsen said.

On Friday, June 9, Christ the King Lutheran will host a Pride-themed sign painting party at 5 p.m., Olsen said. There will be supplies and snacks available.
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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second in a three-part series detailing the scope of the Memorial Bridge rehabilitation project, including detour and marine impacts.

MANISTEE  Downtown Manistee business owners are bracing for changes ahead of the U.S. 31 bridgework and planned detours that start this summer.

A $16 million bridge rehabilitation project is expected to start June 15 and last until April 2024.

On scheduled dates, the bridge will have single-lane closures with traffic shifts. Initial work is expected to be done with minimal lane closures and one lane open in each direction until the detour is first implemented July 10.

There are two detour routes planned for the months of full closures: one for regular traffic and one for trucks.

U.S. 31 traffic will be closed and detoured July 10 to Sept. 15, and again from Jan. 2 to March 25.

The main detour for northbound U.S. 31 passenger vehicles uses First Street, Maple Street and Memorial Drive. Southbound passenger vehicles detour on Monroe Street, Maple Street and First Street.

The detour for large trucks will take drivers from M-55 to Stronach Road through Filer City.

According to a Michigan Department of Transportation news release about the project, it is expected to directly and indirectly support 152 jobs.

Impending impacts

Marc Miller, Manistee Area Chamber of Commerce economic development director, said the biggest challenge for business owners during the bridge work will be decreased traffic at the shops doorsteps.

Its going to be another challenging summer because of potential downturn in traffic, Miller said. Youre going to have to really work to get people in that direction (of River Street).

U.S. 31 Bridge project highlights Here are the highlights from the upcoming $16 million U.S. 31 Bridge rehabilitation project plans in Manistee: Projected timeline: June 15 through April 2024.

On scheduled dates, the bridge will have single-lane closures with traffic shifts.

Full detours are July 10 to Sept. 15, and again from Jan. 2 to March 25.

There are two detour routes.

The passenger vehicle detour follows Maple Street with traffic re-entering or exiting onto U.S. 31 at First Street, Memorial Drive or Monroe Street.

The detour for large trucks takes M-55 and Stronach Road around Manistee Lake. See More Collapse

Miller said the Manistee County Tourism Authority, formerly known as the visitors bureau, is working with the city on billboards and additional signage at detour barricades to direct drivers to the downtown area.

So, were using marketing to try to overcome that challenge, he said. The businesses to the east of Maple Street may see much less traffic.

That means visitors will need to be much more purposeful in going to the downtown area.

Miller said business leaders are aware of the project and they are collaboratively working on adaptations in the form of events and marketing strategies to get people to visit downtown.

He mentioned the monthly downtown business connection meetings facilitated by the Manistee Area Chamber of Commerce and how those have allowed business owners to team up to address issues and that has spawned new ideas.

Miller gave an example of the creation of a fall festival that Port City Brew, Port City Emporium and the Manistee County Library are working toward putting on in October. These types of collaborative events are expected to help draw more intentional visits downtown during the time when owners are expecting to struggle.

This years detour is also reminiscent of last summer, but in a reversed traffic pattern.

The U.S. 31 bridge runs relatively parallel with the Maple Street Bridge which was closed from Jan. 10 through May 19, 2022.

Miller said North Channel Brewing Company on Washington Street had a very difficult time last year when the Maple Street Bridge was undergoing work. This led to decreased sales revenue and customer counts.

I think well have the reverse problem this time. North Channel Brewery might see tons of people, Miller said. Now, its going to be Blue Fish, the new Golden Stag at 318 River St. and other things on (that side of) River Street that are going to suffer.

File photo

Traffic flow

Recently, the topic of possibly altering the direction of traffic flow on River Street has been introduced in conversations around the bridge work.

Drivers through the area could be looking at two-way traffic downtown on the presently one-way River Street after the possibility was discussed at the May 10 Manistee Downtown Development Authority meeting. River Street is a one-way route from Division Street to Maple Street.

At the meeting, Miller talked about the potential impact that two-way traffic could have on businesses, according to previous News Advocate reporting.

Miller had said the intention is to allow motorists impacted by the future detour necessitated by the upcoming rehabilitation of the U.S. 31 bridge to have easy access to downtown businesses.

He had noted that he had been working with a civil engineering firm, Manistee Department of Public Works and has contacted Spicer Group to talk through what might be needed.

He said the alteration would have three basic components: learn where to put signs, then purchase and install the signage and restripe the street.

DDA chair Kyle Mosher pointed out at the meeting that River Street is not part of the planned detour route, according to previous News Advocate reporting.

"There is an existing (Michigan Department of Transportation) detour for the construction," Mosher had said. "This would be 100% separate from that ..."

Miller had mentioned that work was being done to ensure two-way traffic on that stretch of River Street would be feasible.

"It isn't just a 'make it happen' kind of move. There has to be education and notification according to the traffic experts," he had said. "I just want to put out that we're moving toward that as a possibility. We'll have some updates in the future."

News Advocate graphic using Google Maps

According to May 30 weekly history feature in the News Advocates From the Museums Archives section, River Street had not always been a one-way traffic pattern.

Roughly 50 years ago, a similar topic was discussed and acted upon; only back then the issue surrounding traffic on River Street was a changeover from two-way traffic to one-way traffic, the Manistee County Historical Museum piece reads.

The piece quoted a former mayor-council member from the time as saying, It was just a terrible mess.

Traffic on River Street got to be a big nuisance and over the years, whether it was the larger style vehicles of the time or how busy River Street was, people began to get tied up in traffic, the late Howard Fenton had recalled of the previous two-way pattern.

By the early-1960s the city was looking for a better, safer method, the piece notes.

After the Automobile Club of Michigan completed a comprehensive traffic survey report, the city commission decided to make River Street a one-way street westbound from Division Street to the west side of the triangle with Water Street effective in April 1966.

This was done on a trial basis and continued.

The city of Manistee is in the process of designing future improvements to the River Street area in a streetscape plan.

Miller told the News Advocate that the streetscape plan has a parking study and a traffic study embedded inside.

An area for improvements could be more signage to make it easier for visitors to find parking areas, Miller said.

One thing that we have here, we do have plenty of parking. Its not well signed and not everyone can park in the street in front of the stores  but we have a lot of parking, he said.

The Manistee Downtown Development Authority hosted a public open house on the future of the Manistee Downtown Streetscape Plan on May 5.

The traffic order is still in the discussion phase and the streetscape plan has two more public sessions upcoming next month and in early winter, Miller said.

There will be another, a second participation process meeting day in July. That process is ongoing. We want people to participate in that plan, he noted.

The public session dates are not yet scheduled.
MANISTEE  Festival season is starting soon, but craft beer and boating fans will be in for some disappointment.

The Manistee Downtown Development Authority announced that the citys Hops & Props craft beer festival will not be held in 2023 due to a combination of factors.

Typically held in September, Hops & Props is a day to enjoy beer and wine tastings by Michigan vendors, along with live music and classic Century Boat Club boats in the Manistee River Channel.

This year, however, the DDA reports the props half of the event was unavailable.

As a result of the natural rotation of locations, Century Boat Club will be at Grand Island, New York this year, instead of Manistee, reads part of a news release from the DDA.

Century Boat Club was unavailable for a previous Hops & Props event held in 2018. However, the popular boats returned the next year.

"Every few years we get invited to go to another area of the country, and last year we were invited to Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia, so we didnt have the show here," said Tommy Holmes, then president of Century Boat Club, in a 2019 interview with the News Advocate.

In 2012, Hops & Props replaced the former Port City Street Fair. It would have been the 11th year that the festival took place in Manistee.

While the DDA hopes to resume the festival in the future, it will need the right person managing the event.

Carrie Mosher, the event chairperson from 2022, recently stepped down, and with no replacement available, the event committee made the decision to cancel this years celebration.

Anyone interested in applying to be the event chairperson in 2024 is encouraged to contact the Manistee Downtown Development Authority at director@manisteedowntown.com.

Visit manisteehopsandprops.com to find out more.
Ahead of Taylor Swifts Eras tour coming to Detroit Friday and Saturday, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel warns fans of ticket scams.

Nessel explained Friday morning that reports of scammers taking advantage of Swifts fans, called swifties, showed some residents lost as much as $2,500 paying for tickets that didnt exist. Or, that never arrived.

The Better Business Bureau reportedly received almost 200 complaints nationally related to the Eras tour, according to a Friday press release. The complaints range from refund struggles to outright scams.

Buying second-hand tickets online is an inherently risky endeavor, and its easy for a scammer to fake a screenshot of tickets that dont exist or that have already been purchased, perhaps more than once, Nessels office wrote in the Friday release. With the re-emergence of live concerts after the pandemic, its important to take precautions to avoid bad actors who will take advantage of fans desire to see their favorite performer in concert.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer welcomed Swift to Michigan Friday on Twitter.

Michigan residents who are defrauded by online ticket scammers should not just shake it off, Nessel said in the Friday release. We know these scams all too well. If you believe you were taken advantage of, filing a complaint with my office is better than revenge.

Complaints regarding tickets purchased online should be directed to Nessels Consumer Protection Team using its online complaint form.

Nessel suggested the following tips consumers should remember when purchasing tickets online.

Know your vendor  Make sure you are buying from a reputable website, especially before providing any personal financial information. Anyone can set up a fake website with a web address similar to the legitimate ticket sellers address. Aside from potential licensing and trademark violations, fake websites may offer consumers overpriced or counterfeit tickets and expose the consumer to identity theft.

 Make sure you are buying from a reputable website, especially before providing any personal financial information. Anyone can set up a fake website with a web address similar to the legitimate ticket sellers address. Aside from potential licensing and trademark violations, fake websites may offer consumers overpriced or counterfeit tickets and expose the consumer to identity theft. Do your research  If you are unfamiliar with a particular ticket vendor, call Nessels Consumer Protection Team at 877-765-8388 and ask if it has any complaints on file regarding that seller. Remember, however, that the absence of filed complaints does not guarantee a sellers legitimacy; it means that we have not received any complaints concerning the vendor. As an additional resource, try researching the ticket seller on the Better Business Bureaus website.

 If you are unfamiliar with a particular ticket vendor, call Nessels Consumer Protection Team at 877-765-8388 and ask if it has any complaints on file regarding that seller. Remember, however, that the absence of filed complaints does not guarantee a sellers legitimacy; it means that we have not received any complaints concerning the vendor. As an additional resource, try researching the ticket seller on the Better Business Bureaus website. Use credit  If you purchase tickets online, especially via an online auction site, it is recommended that you complete your transaction using a credit card. Purchasing tickets with a credit card often provides protections you would not otherwise have if you purchased the tickets using cash, check or apps like Venmo and Cash App. Added protections with credit include the ability to dispute a charge if an event is canceled. Or if you receive counterfeit tickets that a venue refuses to honor. Try to choose sellers with long histories of satisfied customers, and make sure the online bid amount is listed in American dollars.

 If you purchase tickets online, especially via an online auction site, it is recommended that you complete your transaction using a credit card. Purchasing tickets with a credit card often provides protections you would not otherwise have if you purchased the tickets using cash, check or apps like Venmo and Cash App. Added protections with credit include the ability to dispute a charge if an event is canceled. Or if you receive counterfeit tickets that a venue refuses to honor. Try to choose sellers with long histories of satisfied customers, and make sure the online bid amount is listed in American dollars. Shop securely  If a website begins with https, the s indicates that the website is secure. Typically, the s will not appear in the web address until you access the order page of the site where you are asked to enter your personal information. Another indicator of a secure website is a graphic of a closed lock located at the bottom of your screen. Secure websites take precautions to ensure that others cannot see and copy the personal information you provide.

 If a website begins with https, the s indicates that the website is secure. Typically, the s will not appear in the web address until you access the order page of the site where you are asked to enter your personal information. Another indicator of a secure website is a graphic of a closed lock located at the bottom of your screen. Secure websites take precautions to ensure that others cannot see and copy the personal information you provide. Inspect your tickets  If you plan to purchase tickets from a source other than an established venue or official outlet, you can reduce your risk of arriving at the venue only to be turned away by physically inspecting the tickets. Check the time, date and location to ensure the information matches your expectations. Review the listed seat assignments and call the venue to ensure they represent validly assigned positions within the facility. The venue may also be able to provide you with information about the unique features of authentic tickets.

Remember, if youre getting a deal that seems too good to be true, it probably is, Nessels office wrote in the release.
NASA once described Venus as a hot, hellish and unforgiving place. Now, the agency is preparing to launch a mission to the planet after decades of spacecraft only flying by.

Scheduled to launch in 2029, the DAVINCI mission will use a probe to study the planets atmosphere and surfaces.

The mission includes flybys of the planet to study its clouds, the heat coming from its surface, and a mountainous region known as Alpha Regio, according to NASAs website dedicated to the mission. By 2031, a probe will descend to Venus' surface to capture images of highlands  some of the oldest surface areas on the planet.

The agency said the probe may not survive landing due to Venus' harsh environment, which includes crushing air pressure, clouds made of acid that can dissolve most metals and a surface hot enough to melt lead. If the probe does land safely, it will have 17 minutes to scan its surroundings.

It may not seem like a lot of time by Earth standards, but given how hard it is for instruments to operate in the hazardous environment on Venus, every additional minute of science is invaluable, a section of the website read.

Its this harsh environment that earned Venus the nickname of Earths evil twin.

Although both planets are nearly the same size, made up of almost the same material and formed in the same part of the solar system, Venus' thick carbon dioxide atmosphere uses a greenhouse effect to trap heat. Temperatures on Venus can reach above 900 degrees Fahrenheit, making it the hottest planet in the solar system despite being farther from the sun than Mercury.

Some people like to say 'Venus went bad' or 'something went wrong,' said NASAs Director of Planetary Science Lori Glaze. I like to say that somewhere along the way, something good happened on Earth.

The DAVINCI mission and two others have the potential to help scientists learn more about why Venus turned out so differently than Earth.
The reopening of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, presents an opportunity to see old favorites  many of which are considered masterpieces  and recent acquisitions that, over time, could become just as beloved and as highly regarded.

Think of the art as something old, something new.

The artwork will be on view during Preview Week, which begins June 12 with a ceremonial ribbon-cutting and opening of the museum.

The general public gets its chance June 16-19. The newly chronological-ordered collection begins in the refurbished Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers Building and continues in the new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building. There is also art in the M&T Room in the reimagined Seymour H. Knox Building, whose free admission includes the Creative Commons and Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Town Square.

After that, the Gundlach Building will be closed until around July 19 to finish the building, while the other two buildings remain open.

Here are six masterworks to look for in the museums permanent collection, and four among the 504 pieces of art acquired while the museum was closed.

Sharing their views about them are Buffalo AKG Godin-Spaulding Senior Curator for the Collection Holly Hughes, Chief Curator Cathleen Chaffee, Associate Curator Andrea Alvarez, Curator of Public Art Aaron Ott and Curator Tina Rivers Ryan.

Something Old...

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, Giacomo Balla, 1912

Italian futurist painter Giacomo Balla was influenced for this oil painting by chronophotography, a technique that captured phases or movements of animals or objects. Here he depicts the rapid, blurry movements of a dachshund on a leash and a woman walking the dog.

Giacomo Balla was hopeful about what the rise of industry and technology would bring in the early 20th century, and I love the way he conveys his excitement for the future in this painting, Hughes said. The repetition of the lease, the dachshunds skittering paws, and near vibrating ears and tail capture a feverish movement of eagerness as the dog tries to keep up with its owner.

The Transparent Simulacrum

of the Feigned Image,

Salvador Dali, 1938 Spanish artist Salvador Dali was a key figure in the surrealist movement in the 1930s. In this painting, he brings together incongruous objects and natural surroundings to create an unsettling, hallucinatory effect.

In surrealist paintings such as this one, Salvador Dali tried to undermine our sense that reality itself is stable and knowable, Chaffee said. The composition can either appear to depict a still life with a fruit bowl on a table, or a landscape with a lake in the distance, or both.

Convergence,

Jackson Pollock, 1952 This painting represents Jackson Pollocks drip painting approach, splattering colors on canvas to create shapes, lines and textures.

Before making Convergence, Jackson Pollock had abandoned painting with color for more than a year, and the ground layer here is actually a fully realized black-and-white painting, Chaffee said. But he was not satisfied with it, and the dynamic convergence of this underlayer and the riotous skeins of colored paint on top were his solution.

New York, NY,

Ellsworth Kelly, 1957 Ellsworth Kellys abstract images were typically in large formats with bright colors, but he also worked in black and white, seen here in New York, NY.

Ellsworth Kelly distilled the world he saw around him into bold geometric designs that have a cool, almost classical beauty, Ryan said. In this painting, the letters NY are suggested by dynamic lines shaped by the contrast between light and dark, capturing the essence of the citys skyline.

Sky Cathedral,

Louise Nevelson, 1958 Russian-born American Louise Nevelsons 38 matte black-painted boxes presents objects in an array of unusual shapes and combinations.

Louise Nevelson was an innovator of abstract sculpture, and Sky Cathedral is an excellent example of how, in her hands, what might be considered scrap or trash can be made into something altogether new, Hughes said. Nevelsons work also helped pave the way for the feminist art movement of the 1970s by breaking the taboo that only mens artwork could be monumental in feeling and scale.

Mirrored Room,

Lucas Samaras, 1966 Lucas Samaras created this mirror-cubed room of 24-inch-square mirrors, the only light coming from an open door.

The Mirrored Room is one of the most beloved works of art in the AKGs collection, and it was created as a space in which the images are drawn on the surface by the reflections of visitors, Alvarez said. Before he made this work, Samaras was interested in performative and publicly engaged art as well as much smaller, sculptural boxes; this installation brought those interests together to create an environment where a sense of acrophobia and vanity meets with infinity and wonder.

Something New...

This property will not

be demolished,

Teresa Margolles, 2011 Mexican-born artist Teresa Margolles created a series of 40 images to show the effect of drug cartel violence and corruption in a Mexican border town.

As we open our amazing new museum campus, I am struck by this poignant photographic series of structures in the border town of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, that have been abandoned, often by citizens seeking to escape the effects of the international drug trade, Chaffee said. This property will not be demolished is a reminder that all architecture has a very long life that shapes and is shaped by community.

People Like Us,

Jeffrey Gibson, 2019 Jeffrey Gibson, an artist of Choctaw and Cherokee descent, uses this androgynous work to explore the complexities of identity in present-day Native American culture.

People Like Us exemplifies many of the aspects of Jeffrey Gibsons practice for which he has become well-known: it is a garment that bears bright colors, text, objects that make sounds like bells and dried gourds, and a nylon fringe that suggests bodily movement and dance, Alvarez said. Its potential energy and vibrancy conveys the lively nature of powwows, the longstanding Native American tradition that this garment references, and it demands our attention in the galleries  a strategy he uses to advocate for Indigenous and minority representation.

Deborah Roberts,

That One, 2018 Deborah Roberts uses collages of Black children to present societal observations about race, beauty and the body by combining hand-painted details with photographs, magazines and internet images.

Robertss large-scale work, That One, is a mixed-media painting and collage that portrays Black boys seated together, one with his hands in the air, prompting questions about their depiction and preconceived cultural presumptions about Black youth culture, Ott said. This sensational work is carefully arranged to move viewers eyes even as it challenges our hearts and minds.

Simone Leigh,

Village Series, 2021 One of the museums newest collections is an example of art by Simone Leigh that draws attention to the cultures of Africa and the African diaspora and how they are often left out of history.

This clay sculpture depicts a heroic Black woman who proudly wears an afro but has her eyes and mouth closed, as if to keep her innermost self private, Ryan said. Her bell-shaped raffia skirt, which combines the hoop skirts of the antebellum South with traditional African materials, is almost six feet wide, literalizing the importance of taking up space in places that historically have not been open to Black women  including the canon of Western art, whose armless Greco-Roman goddesses she resembles.
Progress is being made on a construction project at Port Crescent State Park.

As part of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources infrastructure plan, Port Crescent has entered the next phase in the design and bidding part of the project.

Park officials are seeking bids for two jobs in its first cluster of three major construction projects. The first bids sought are for extending the breakwater out at the harbor. This work is already out for bid and expected to come back at the end of this month.

"We're making very good progress," said park supervisor Brian Dunn. "We got a lot of the needed permits we needed."

In addition, the park is also in its final design phase for the replacement of docks along the shoreline. Finally, the beach building is also moving closer to the construction phase.

"We plan to have the upgrades done to the building by this fall," Dunn said.

According to the DNR website, this round includes more than a hundred projects with a proposed investment of $108.8 million. There will be three clusters of projects, which are estimated to be about $4.9 million in improvements.

Other projects include parking lot and road maintenance as well as the replacement of the utility and water systems throughout the park.

To stay up-to-date with the lastest progress, visit the Department of Natural Resources website.
REED CITY  Officers with the Reed City Police Department responded to the following calls May 29 through June 4. This is part of a report submitted by the RCPD and compiled by associate editor Julie Norwood. All calls may not be reported.

An officer assisted with a mental health patient who walked away. The patient returned for treatment.

TUESDAY, MAY 30

An officer responded to a residence for a report of aggravated domestic assault. Upon arrival, the suspect had already left and could not be located. Police has turned the matter over to the prosecutor for charges.

An officer issued an abatement notice for an inoperable vehicle.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 31

Officers responded to a residential burglar alarm. They checked the property and determined the alarm to be unfounded.

An officer contacted a Reed City resident to inform him that his wallet had been found in Lake County.

An officer assisted a truck driver who had experienced brake problems and was blocking the intersection.

While patrolling, an officer noticed someone who appeared to be passed out sitting by the Reed City Depot. After approaching the male, the officer determined he was fine.

An officer responded to a residence for a report of domestic assault. One party had departed the city prior to the other party calling police. Officers turned the matter over to the prosecutor for possible charges.

THURSDAY, JUNE 1

An officer took a report about stolen property. An investigation revealed the individual who had taken the property believed it to be scrap metal. The individual returned the property.

An officer responded to a call regarding a small child found alone outside at an apartment complex. Police located the parent of the child, who was not injured, and address the situation.

An officer responded to a residence for a 911 hang up. Upon arrival, police determined the call was made by accident as the resident was doing lawn work and had the phone in her pocket.

FRIDAY, JUNE 2

Officers responded to an apartment complex for a report of a possible methamphetamine lab. Upon reviewing the matter, they determined the equipment the caller saw had been a small homemade wine distillery for personal consumption.

Officers stood by while the caller picked up property from her exs residence.

An officer responded to reports of a dispute between neighbors regarding their dogs.

SATURDAY, JUNE 3

An officer issued an abatement notice for lawn maintenance not meeting the city ordinance.

An officer assisted the Osceola County Sheriff's Office with a vehicle and grass fire caused by a single vehicle rollover accident.

A traffic stop for an expired plate resulted in the driver being issued a misdemeanor appearance citation for driving on a revoked license. The officer also served a passenger in the vehicle with a personal protection order out of another county that had not yet been served. A licensed driver took over driving duties.

SUNDAY, JUNE 4

While on patrol, an officer spotted three juveniles out after curfew. The officer took the juveniles home where they had to awaken their mother who was unaware they had left premises. Police said she was not pleased.

Officers took a report of a scratch on a vehicle that the owner had not noticed before.

Officers took a report of a possible criminal sexual conduct. Police determined no CSC had taken place but found possible violations of providing marijuana to a minor and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. They turned the matter over to the prosecutor for review.
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WASHINGTON (AP)  Iran is providing Russia with materials to build a drone manufacturing plant east of Moscow as the Kremlin looks to lock in a steady supply of weaponry for its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, according to a U.S. intelligence finding released by the White House on Friday.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said U.S. intelligence officials believe a plant in Russias Alabuga special economic zone could be operational early next year. The White House also released satellite imagery taken in April of the industrial location, several hundred miles east of Moscow, where it believes the plant will probably be built.

President Joe Biden's administration publicly stated in December that it believed Tehran and Moscow were considering standing up a drone assembly line in Russia for the Ukraine war. The new intelligence suggests that the project, in the Yelabuga region of Tatarstan, has moved beyond conception.

Iran has said it provided drones to Russia before the start of the war but not since.

Kirby said that U.S. officials also have determined that Iran continues to supply the Russian military with one-way attack drones made in Iran: The drones are shipped via the Caspian Sea, from Amirabad in Iran to Makhachkala, Russia, and then are used by Russian forces against Ukraine.

As of May, Russia had received hundreds of one-way attack drones, as well as drone production-related equipment, from Iran, according to the White House.

This is a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful to Ukraine, to Irans neighbors, and to the international community, Kirby said. We are continuing to use all the tools at our disposal to expose and disrupt these activities including by sharing this with the public  and we are prepared to do more.

The Biden administration on Friday issued an advisory meant to help businesses and other governments put in place measures to ensure they are not inadvertently contributing to Irans drone program.

The notice from the departments of Commerce, State, Justice and Treasury said it was critical that private industry be aware of its legal obligations to abide by U.S. export controls and sanctions.

The United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom in recent months all have issued rules designed to cut off the flow of drone components to Russia and Iran.

The Biden administration has repeatedly publicized intelligence findings that detail how Iran is assisting the Russian invasion.

The persistent drip of intelligence findings from the administration is intended to detail what U.S. officials say is a deepening defense partnership between Russia and Iran. Its also part of a broader administration effort to spotlight Moscows prosecution of its war in Ukraine in hopes of further promoting global isolation of Russia.

The White House last month said Russia was looking to buy additional advanced attack drones from Iran after using up most of the 400 drones it had previously purchased from Tehran.

The Biden administration last year first publicized satellite imagery and intelligence findings that it said indicated Iran sold hundreds of attack drones to Russia. For months, officials have said the United States believed Iran was considering selling hundreds of ballistic missiles to Russia, but White House officials have said they do not have evidence a deal was consummated.

The White House has noted that Iran also has weapons flowing its way from Russia.

Iran is seeking to purchase additional military equipment from Russia, including attack helicopters, radars and YAK-130 combat trainer aircraft, according to the White House. In April, Iran announced that it had finalized a deal to buy Su-35 fighter jets from Russia.

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Follow the AP's coverage of Russia's war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.
Photo provided/Michigan State Police

A 19-year-old Midland man was sentenced under Michigan's youthful offender law Thursday in Midland County Circuit Court in connection with a 2022 incident that caused severe burns to a then 20-year-old woman.

Midland County Circuit Court Judge Stephen Carras sentenced the teen to the Holmes Youthful Training Act. The man, whose name is withheld by the court, was charged with possession of Molotov cocktail/other explosive.
Photo provided Midland County Jail

A 28-year-old Saginaw man, who pleaded guilty to fleeing and eluding police while possessing cocaine and fentanyl, was sentenced Thursday to the MiHope program.

Midland County Circuit Court Judge Stephen Carras sentenced Jalen Jackson to 365 days in jail and five years probation through the MiHope (Midland County Honest Opportunity with Probation and Enforcement) intensive program on Thursday. Midland County Prosecutor J. Dee Brooks said if Jackson completes the program successfully, the court will suspend the rest of his jail sentence.
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MIAMI (AP)  Follow along for live updates on former President Donald Trump, who has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate. The indictment marks the first time in U.S. history that a former president faces criminal charges by the federal government he once oversaw. Trump faces the possibility of prison if convicted.

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What to know:

 A timeline of events leading to Trumps indictment in the classified documents case

 Indictment accuses Trump of scheming and lying to keep secret papers

 A look at the charges, the special counsels investigation and whats next

 Trump faces a string of inquiries in various states and venues as he campaigns for a return to the White House

 Does the indictment stand to damage Trumps standing with voters?

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STANDING OVATION FOR TRUMP AT NORTH CAROLINA GOP DINNER

An indictment by the Department of Justice is an attempt to thwart the will of the American people, former President Donald Trump said at a state GOP convention dinner in North Carolina.

I promise you this: If you put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and American will be a free nation once again," he said to a standing ovation.

The indictment is an attempt to damage his chances for a second term, he alleged.

Trump is accused of willfully defying Justice Department demands to return classified documents, enlisting aides in his efforts to hide the records and even telling his lawyers that he wanted to defy a subpoena for the materials stored at his residence.

In appearances at Republican state conventions in Georgia and North Carolina on Saturday, Trump sought to frame the 37 criminal charges hes facing as an attack on not just him but also his supporters.

In the end theyre not coming after me, theyre coming after you, and Im just standing in the way, he said in North Carolina.

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TRUMP VOWS TO CONTINUE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN EVEN IF CONVICTED

Former President Donald Trump vowed Saturday to continue his bid for a second term even if he is convicted in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

Ill never leave, he told Politico in an interview aboard his plane after speaking at a Republican state convention in Georgia. He further predicted that he will not be convicted and sidestepped questions about whether he would pardon himself if elected.

I dont think Ill ever have to, Trump said. I didnt do anything wrong.

The indictment unsealed Friday accuses Trump of willfully defying Justice Department demands to return classified documents, enlisting aides in his efforts to hide the records and even telling his lawyers that he wanted to defy a subpoena for the materials stored at his residence.

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MIKE PENCE DECLINES TO SHARE REACTION TO TRUMP INDICTMENT

Former Vice President Mike Pence said Saturday that he has read the indictment outlining federal charges against former President Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

But he declined to share his personal reaction to the content of the indictment, which included photographs of boxes with classified information stacked in a bathroom and on a ballroom stage, or to criticize Trump, whom he is challenging for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024.

Ive read the indictment, Pence said in an interview with The Associated Press in North Carolina, where he addressed state Republicans.

I also know that every Americans entitled to the presumption of innocence. And as I said today, we now know the Department of Justices view of these matters. But the former president is entitled to present his defense. And we dont know what the facts of that are.

That's why I said today Im going to urge patience, encourage people to be prayerful for the former president, but also for all those in authority and for the country going forward, said Pence, who formally launched his 2024 campaign this week.

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TRUMP SIGNS AUTOGRAPHS AND POSES FOR PHOTOS AT LOCAL WAFFLE HOUSE

After speaking at the Georgia Republican Convention, Trump stopped by a local Waffle House, where he signed autographs, posed for photos and chatted with supporters.

We did absolutely nothing wrong, Trump said of federal authorities unsealing a lengthy indictment accusing him of mishandling national security secrets and then covering up his actions.

He is scheduled to speak to another Republican audience in North Carolina later Saturday.

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TRUMP CALLS INDICTMENT AN ATTACK ON HIS CAMPAIGN

Speaking Saturday at the Georgia Republican Convention, Trump cast his federal indictment as an attempt to hurt his chances of returning to the White House as he campaigns for a second term in office.

In his first public appearance since the 37 felony counts against him were unsealed, Trump blasted the indictment as ridiculous and baseless."

Theyve launched one witch hunt after another to try and stop our movement, to thwart the will of the American people, Trump said, later adding, In the end, theyre not coming after me. Theyre coming after you.

The strategy is a well-worn one for Trump, who remains the front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination despite his mounting legal woes. He is scheduled to speak to another Republican audience in North Carolina later Saturday.

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TRUMP ARRIVES IN GEORGIA FOR STATE GOP CONVENTION APPEARANCE

Former President Donald Trump arrived Saturday in Georgia to chants of Four more years! Four more years! from supporters waving signs that read, Witch Hunt.

About 100 eager supporters turned out at Columbus airfield for Trumps first public appearance since federal authorities unsealed a lengthy indictment accusing him of mishandling national security secrets and then covering up his actions.

Hes headed to Georgia Republicans' state convention, where hes expected to blast the prosecution as a political exercise because hes running for president again.

He doesnt have to convince his audiences Saturday.

Michael Sellers, a 67-year-old Trump backer who came to the airfield, said hed read the indictment and was aware of accusations that Trump sought to resist returning classified records, which previous presidents have routinely done when coming across such material in their possession.

Its criminal what theyre doing to him, Sellers said. Asked whether he believes Trump will win another term in 2024, Sellers said, He won the last time. He will win again.

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TRUMP SUPPORTERS CHEER FORMER PRESIDENT IN GEORGIA

Scores of Trump supporters braved the beating sun to cheer the former presidents arrival in Columbus, Georgia, as he prepared to deliver two state GOP convention speeches Saturday in the wake of his federal criminal indictment.

Backers waved Witch Hunt signs, unbowed a day after federal authorities unsealed a lengthy charging document that depicted Trump as willfully mishandling national security secrets after leaving office and then covering up his actions.

Jan Plemmons, a 66-year-old Trump supporter, called the charges absolutely ridiculous and said shes ready to hit the campaign trail with Trump as he runs for another term in 2024.

I was watching Fox News this morning, and its just crazy, Plemmons said, as her oversized foam Make America Great Again hat bobbed with each emphasis. Its just to divert attention.

Plemmons said she does not dislike Trumps primary rivals but sees the former president as the man to put back in the White House and fix this mess that were in now.

 Bill Barrow

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INDICTMENT EXPECTED TO ADD FUEL TO GOP CAMPAIGN AGAINST JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

Congressional Republicans have prepared an aggressive campaign against the Justice Department for months, a key part of former Trumps public defense against this weeks indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents.

The GOP counter-offensive against federal prosecutors and others who have investigated Trump avoids the substance of the charges facing the former president. Instead, they have tried to discredit law enforcement and President Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, for instance, has issued a series of letters to the Justice Department demanding documents related to special counsel Jack Smiths investigation of Trumps handling of classified records. Jordan has also aggressively sought to undercut Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who in April filed charges against Trump in a New York hush money investigation.

Democrats say Republicans are sowing conspiracy theories with potentially dangerous consequences.

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NOT ALL PLAN WARM WELCOME FOR TRUMP IN GEORGIA

Although most of the GOP activists attending the Georgia Republican Party convention Saturday are voicing support for Trump, some are suggesting his indictment and record make him a bad choice for the party's presidential nominee in 2024.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who has called for Trump to drop out of the race, got a polite but reserved reception Saturday morning at a party breakfast where Hutchinson touted his bid for the Republican presidential nomination as a consistent conservative.

Hutchinson didnt mention Trump in his speech but told reporters that the Republican Party should not lose its soul in defending Trump, saying the evidence so far suggests he treated national secrets like entertainment tools.

 Jeff Amy

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TRUMP HEADED TO GEORGIA, NORTH CAROLINA FOR CAMPAIGN APPEARANCES

Trump is set to campaign in Georgia and North Carolina on Saturday, making his first public appearances since his federal indictment on 37 counts of mishandling classified documents.

Friendly audiences are expected to welcome Trump at the two state party conventions.

Trump is a fighter, and the kinds of people that attend these conventions love a fighter, said Jack Kingston, a former Georgia congressman who supported Trump in 2016 and 2020.

A campaign official described Trump's mood as defiant Friday after the indictment was unsealed. Trump has insisted publicly that he committed no wrongdoing and is likely to repeat that theme during Saturday's appearances.

Trump remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. His rivals have handled news of his indictment cautiously, including former Vice President Mike Pence, who is also scheduled to address North Carolina Republicans on Saturday.

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DEMOCRATS CALL FOR PEACEFUL PROCESS; GOP SPEAKER SAYS CASE MAY DISRUPT NATION

The Democratic leaders of both congressional chambers are urging supporters and detractors of Trump alike to let the case against him peacefully run its course in court.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries, also from New York, released a statement saying Trumps indictment must play out through the legal process, without any outside political or ideological interference.

We encourage Mr. Trumps supporters and critics alike to let this case proceed peacefully in court, Schumer and Jeffries said.

That was a departure from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, who suggested that the nations core legal values were being undermined.

This is going to disrupt this nation because it goes to the core of equal justice for all, which is not being seen today, McCarthy said in an interview with Fox News Digital. And were not going to stand for it.

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SECRET SERVICE PREPARES FOR TRUMP COURT APPEARANCE

The U.S. Secret Service is preparing for Trumps appearance at a federal court in Miami on Tuesday after a grand jury indicted him on 37 felony counts related to his handling of classified documents.

Spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the agency will not seek any special accommodations outside of what would be required to ensure the former Presidents continued safety in connection with Trumps appearance.

He added: As with any site visited by a protectee, the Secret Service is in constant coordination with the necessary entities to ensure protective requirements are met. We have the utmost confidence in the professionalism and commitment to security shared by our law enforcement partners in Florida.

Trumps April 4 arraignment in his New York case, where he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, attracted a crush of media and protesters, involved multiple street closures, extra security screenings and shut down non-Trump court business for an afternoon.

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TRUMP KEPT CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS IN BATHROOM, SHOWER OF CLUB, INDICTMENT SAYS

The indictment alleges Trump kept classified documents in the bathroom and shower at his Florida estate, as well as various other locations that included a ballroom, storeroom, office and bedroom.

Prosecutors noted that tens of thousands of members and guests visited the active social club of Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trumps presidency in January 2021 through the August 2022 search. They argued that nonetheless Trump stored documents in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

The indictment claims that, for a two-month period, some of Trumps boxes were stored in one of Mar-a-Lagos gilded ballrooms. A picture included in the indictment shows boxes stacked in rows on the ballrooms stage.

The indictment also shows photographs of boxes that spilled over in the storage room, including a document marked SECRET/REL TO USA, FVEY which means information releasable only to members of the intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. In the photo the classified document is redacted.

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LAWYER SAID TRUMP SUGGESTED HE REMOVE DAMAGING DOCUMENTS

The indictment unsealed Friday also says that, unaware of any records being moved, Trumps attorney on June 2, 2022, identified 38 documents with classified markings and placed them in a folder, which he sealed with clear duct tape handed to him by Trump valet Walt Nauta. The valet then took the attorney to see the former president.

Did you find anything? Is it bad? ... Is it good? the lawyer said Trump asked.

The attorney told federal authorities that he discussed the folder of classified material with Trump and how the material should be handled. The attorney told authorities that as they discussed the attorney taking the materials with him, Trump gestured in a way that suggested he wanted the attorney to identify anything really bad and you know, pluck it out. The lawyer clarified that Trump did not articulate such instructions beyond making that plucking motion.

The attorney told authorities that he did not take anything out of the folder and that he instead immediately contacted the FBI and another Trump attorney. On June 3, according to the indictment, the second Trump attorney acted as the official custodian of records on Trumps behalf and turned the material to the FBI.

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INDICTMENT ALLEGES VALET MOVED BOXES AT TRUMPS DIRECTION

The indictment alleges that Nauta acted at Trumps direction to move move approximately 64 boxes of documents from the Mar-a-Lago storage room to the former presidents residence. Nautas actions occurred between May 23, 2022, and June 2, 2022, according to the indictment.

That total includes approximately 30 boxes Nauta allegedly moved on June 2, the same day Trumps legal team was expected to examine the cache. Nautas actions that day came hours after he talked briefly via phone with Trump, prosecutors allege. Neither Trump nor Nauta, according to the indictment, disclosed to the former presidents attorneys that Nauta had moved any of the storage room contents.

According to prosecutors timeline, Trump met later that day with one of his attorneys and Nauta escorted the attorney to the storage room for his review of the documents
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MIDDLETOWN  A pair of local siblings had a blast spending their recent spring break collecting some $100 for the local animal shelter by setting up a lemonade stand at Wesleyan University, building on previous similar fundraising efforts for other causes.

Beman Middle School student Nivain, 11, and his sister Rushali, 8, who attends Wilbert Snow Elementary School, organized the project, assisted by friends who helped serve customers, according to their mother, Nimesha Weerasekera.

Weerasekera baked lemon cupcakes to complement the freshly squeezed lemons she had added to the lemonade mix to create the drinks. The children charged between $.50 and $1 for each.

The pair set up their table on campus, where their father is a graduate student. A lot of customers stopped by, Weerasekera said.

She and her husband have always encouraged the children to donate the proceeds from their efforts to charities here and abroad. The children have hosted other fundraisers, including last year when they held a bake sale at another lemonade stand. They gave the proceeds to a hospital in Sri Lanka, their parents native country.

The two had raised some $300, Weerasekera said, and the money paid for much-needed medicine during a tough economic time in the South Asian country.

In this latest effort, Senior Animal Control Officer Gail Petras called the gift fantastic and the siblings adorable.

Soon after the $100 donation, Weerasekera called the department to tell them about the children's project. Thats when Petras invited the pair to visit and see what their donation would support.

Nivain and Rushali were all over the place at the shelter, excited at being inside and seeing the kennels, Petras said.

Their mother said the children had a blast, however, they did end up overfeeding the animals in their eagerness, she said with a laugh.

Nivain and Rushali were delighted to give the dogs cookie treats, offer the cats some welcome petting and even saw a rooster that shortly after was adopted, Petras said.

While the police budget pays for required procedures stemming from animal control cases, it can't cover veterinarian bills deemed unnecessary, such as spaying and neutering surgery, one of which the $100 will cover.

The Police Department funds more animal care than most municipalities, Petras said, but it doesnt set aside money for dental work or elective surgeries. Thats where donations come in.

There have been a high number of animal cruelty cases recently, Petras said, resulting in cats and dogs being seized, as well as creatures such as the rooster, a turtle, pregnant cats and birds, which need particular feed, Petras said.

Its been bonkers, she said of the number of seizures.

When people adopt pets through the shelter, they receive a coupon from the state for a free surgery. We have to send that animal out the door, unspayed or unneutered, and trust that the people are going to use their voucher to get it done, Petras said.

Female cats, for instance, are of particular concern, Petras added. Even for people with the best intentions, sometimes mistakes happen.

When the ACO sends animals to rescue centers, having them spayed or neutered helps shelters avoid such an expense. Theyre helping us out by taking animals, so we like to try to send the animal already spayed or neutered, and vetted (being cared for by a veterinarian) if we can, she said.

The Weerasekera family will leave for a visit to Sri Lanka at the end of the month when school is dismissed for summer. If they want to do it over there, their mother said of their charitable efforts, it will make our vacation a little more meaningful.

To donate to the animal shelter, checks may be sent to the Police Department, in care of Animal Control, at 222 Main St., Middletown, CT 06457, or at the station. Electronic payments are unable to be taken at this time.

For information, visit middletownct.gov.
Permanent change of station assignments to Air Force and Navy bases on Guam have been temporarily paused at least through the end of this month as the Pacific island territory recovers from a historic typhoon that hit late last month.

Military families and other island residents were still without power this week after Typhoon Mawar, a massive Category 4 storm, hit the U.S. territory. It caused widespread damage and power outages that sparked clean-up efforts at Andersen Air Force Base, Naval Base Guam and Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz.

A Navy administrative message sent out just after the storm on May 23 said "due to damage as a result of Typhoon Mawar, a stop movement for all permanent change of station (PCS) moves to Guam for Navy uniformed members, civilians, and their dependents is in effect until 30 June 2023."

Read Next: Green Berets Have Struggled for Years with Recruiting, Internal Data Shows

The order does not apply to sailors on temporary additional duty orders, but those scheduled to report there "over the next 30 days are advised to contact their chain of command to determine whether they should execute their TAD orders as scheduled," the administrative message continued.

Maj. Christopher Merian, a spokesperson for Pacific Air Forces, confirmed to Military.com in a phone interview Thursday that PCS moves to Andersen Air Force Base have also been temporarily halted due to the ongoing situation with the typhoon, but those who are already en route to the base should continue their move and keep the chain of command in the loop on their situation.

The stop on inbound PCS moves was put into place May 25, "in order to ensure incoming service members and their families have adequate resources available to them when it comes time for them to PCS," an Air Force official told Military.com.

"The stop movement also gives 36th Wing leadership time to evaluate the damage done to our resources while also making sure we're prepared to take care of the families that are due to PCS to Andersen," the official added.

The tentative stop date is 60 days from May 25, but it could fluctuate, the Air Force official said. Representatives from the Army and the Marine Corps did not immediately respond to Military.com questions asking whether they had stopped PCS moves to Guam as well.

Mawar was the strongest typhoon to engulf the island since Pongsona in 2002. It brought an estimated two feet of rain in certain parts of the island, Al Jazeera reported, though no fatalities were immediately reported following the storm. More than 51,000 households and customers were reportedly left without electricity in the immediate aftermath.

The Guam Power Authority, the electricity provider on the island, said in a June 8 press release that more than 50% of its customers are still waiting for power to be restored.

Guam is home to 21,700 service members and dependents, the Pacific Island Times -- which cited the 2020 census -- reported, accounting for 14% of the island's population.

Military relief societies are also offering financial support to those who may be affected by the typhoon.

The Air Force Aid Society said on Facebook that it has provided $775,000 in grants to "help those impacted by this devastating natural disaster."

The Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society said on social media the group "has assisted over 2,000 sea service members and their families with over $1.1 million due to Typhoon Mawar."

-- Thomas Novelly can be reached at thomas.novelly@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @TomNovelly.

Related: Typhoon Mawar Batters Guam, and 'What Used to Be a Jungle Looks Like Toothpicks'
More than 4,500 sailors and Marines returned to San Diego aboard three warships Thursday, wrapping up a seven-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific, the site of growing tensions with China.

The Makin Island Amphibious Ready Group conducted joint exercises with partners and allies, including large-scale training in Indonesia.

The group was comprised of the amphibious assault ship Makin Island and the amphibious transport docks John P. Murtha and Anchorage. The ships carried troops from Camp Pendleton's 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

"Our goal was to achieve interoperability with our allies and partners and promote a free and open Indo-China," Capt. Andria Slough, commanding officer of the Makin Island, said in a statement.

"We accomplished that mission and brought every single Sailor and Marine home safely."

The political and military climate in the Indo-Pacific has grown more edgy in recent months because China has continued to threaten to invade Taiwan. The Chinese also have been building bases in the South China Sea that could be used to interfere with international trade in that part of the world, according to defenses analysts.

This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune.

2023 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Visit sandiegouniontribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
FRIDAY, June 9, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Dr. Olena Postuypalenko was caring for patients at Kyiv City Clinical Oncology Center on Feb. 24, 2022, when her mother called to ask what seemed like an odd question: Has Russia invaded Ukraine?

My mom called me and said, There are explosions. Has the war begun? And honestly, at that time, I didnt believe it. I didnt understand what had happened, said Postuypalenko, who specializes in onco-gynecology.

Postuypalenkos chief soon verified that the attack was underway. The hospital began sending patients home if they were well enough or leading them into an underground bunker, where they could shelter and keep receiving cancer care.

Postuypalenko wound up spending two weeks in the bunker, providing patients with chemotherapy and tending to them as the opening days of the war raged above them.

The hospital is located near the northwestern border of Kyiv, only about 4 to 6 miles from the fighting, she said.

For those two weeks, every day we had explosions, Postuypalenko said. Sometimes between air raid sirens we could go out from the shelter, and we allowed the patients to go out from the shelter. But when we hear sirens, back in the shelter.

The war is now nearly a year and a half long. Ukraine has put up strong and unexpected resistance, pulling Russia into a grinding conflict.

But cancer is cancer, and Postuypalenko has no shortage of patients for whom to care.

Out of a population of 44 million, there are more than 1.3 million Ukrainians living with cancer and about 160,000 new cases of cancer each year, according to estimates.

Postuypalenko was part of a 10-person Ukrainian delegation that attended the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago last weekend. She and her colleagues came to learn, to share their stories, and to seek help.

One project the doctors promoted is a series of U.S.-Ukraine cancer medicine observerships, with different American cancer centers hosting Ukrainian doctors for a week-long information exchange.

Ukraine needs more experience and expertise to improve health care, to improve cancer care, said Dr. Rostyslav Rosty Semikov, a Ukrainian cancer researcher now living in Houston who is helping organize the observerships. We want to make personal connections. Im focused on having Ukrainians come to the U.S. and make connections with local people, local clinics, local doctors and nurses, which could bring experience and expertise into Ukraine.

The Ukrainian doctors also promoted direct aid to their medical centers, from pharmaceutical companies and from donors in the United States.

All resources of our country are redirected to the Army because we want to survive, said Dr. Arman Kacharian, lead for cancer control at the Ministry of Health of Ukraine. We have to win this war to survive, and thats why it would be great to have some support in drugs and funding.

Kacharian lives in Kyiv, and he remembered being awakened by explosions on the first day of the war.

I woke up and the first feeling, honestly, that was fear, Kacharian said. I was expecting the war, but you cant be prepared, you know?

To keep himself busy, Kacharian went to his office at the Ministry and started fielding incoming calls.

I remember we started to see a lot of calls from different regions of Ukraine  from northern region, eastern, southern region  because we were not expecting that there will be a full-scale invasion from all directions, Kacharian said. So we started to receive different calls, what should we do, where we go, especially from emergency medical services, because they were the first in health care system who started to receive requests, calls after the missile strikes.

Western Ukraine started to receive a flood of refugees fleeing from the Eastern part of the country, where the most territory was lost, Kacharian said.

About 6.5 million people were displaced within Ukraine, and another 4.2 million fled to neighboring countries, the doctors said.

Those refugees included cancer patients, but unfortunately many medical supplies allotted for their care had to be abandoned in the areas lost to the Russians.

We lost a lot of cancer drugs in hospitals that were occupied and are still occupied, Kacharian said. People went to the Western parts of Ukraine and [medical] storages in the Western parts of Ukraine became empty very shortly.

These shortages led to many acts of personal bravery.

One medical director, Dr. Viktor Paramonov, skirted battlefields in a 120-mile drive from his hospital, the Cherkasy Regional Oncology Center, to northern Kyiv storage facilities in search of medical supplies, Kacharian said.

The manager of the storage facility couldnt risk the trip because it was located too close to the battle front, so Paramonov took it upon himself to make the delivery.

He went by himself by car to that storage, Kacharian said. He took all the necessary cancer drugs and brought them back to the regional center, despite the danger.

After two weeks spent living in the Kyiv City Clinical Oncology Centers shelter, Postuypalenko left the bunker and went to Poland to help care for Ukrainian refugees there.

In Poland, Postuypalenko encountered another serious problem facing Ukraines cancer patients  a lack of medical records.

Ukraine had only started shifting to electronic health records when the war commenced, Kacharian said. Most records are still on paper, and they had to be left behind by refugees.

Patients asked often how they can retrieve their medical history, Postuypalenko said. What was their diagnosis, what treatment they received, maybe some CT scans, records of incidents and so on. For cancer patients, its a very important thing, and this was very disruptive to their care.

Other Ukrainian refugees simply didnt bother getting checkups, because they no longer could see the hometown doctor with whom theyd formed a bond, Postuypalenko said.

They dont go to a doctor, and I now see a lot of cases with advanced stages of cancer, she said.

Back home in Kyiv, the shelter at Postuypalenkos hospital remained open for six weeks. During that time, cancer patients could receive chemo but no radiation or surgery.

By mid-March, many types of cancer treatment had been restored, including some surgery, the doctors said. But a lot of patients still did not receive timely care.

Treatment of such patients was almost always delayed, one months, two months, three months, whether they remained in the country or fled abroad, Postuypalenko said. Almost always it was delayed. They had no possibility to get that treatment, not because they didnt want to do it.

Doctors gave patients the best cancer care they could, Postuypalenko said, but only time will tell how badly this delay in care cost people in terms of their long-term health.

Olena Postuypalenko consumer.healthday.com

And Postuypalenko works at one of the top Ukrainian cancer clinics, Semikov said.

Imagine all the other 90% of clinics, and the patients who got disrupted treatment, Semikov said. We just dont have the data at the moment for long-term outcomes, but it certainly is not good.

Things have returned closer to normal regarding cancer care in Ukraine, thanks to support from the international community, Kacharian and Postuypalenko said.

Hospitals have been provided their own generators, which can help them withstand Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, Semikov said.

We have a lot of stories and videos where doctors finish operations in full darkness, Semikov said. During the war, Russians target critical infrastructure and they particularly target a lot of hospitals.

However, in many parts of the country chemo and radiation therapy are still available only on a limited basis, the doctors said.

The world has been pouring money into large international aid groups like the Red Cross, but that money is only dribbling into Ukraine, Semikov said. He urges people to donate directly to the Ministry of Health or humanitarian aid groups that are working on the ground, such as his Peace and Development Foundation.

The doctors are also reaching out to pharmaceutical companies, to see if they can either donate cancer drugs or offer them at a discount.

Were not a rich country. We couldnt provide patients with expensive targeted therapies before the war, and of course we cant do that now, Kacharian said. But donations or discounts could help support our patients.

More information

The Peace and Development Foundation has more on donating to Ukraine aid.

SOURCES: Olena Postuypalenko, MD, Kyiv City Clinical Oncology Center; Arman Kacharian, MD, lead, cancer control, Ministry of Health of Ukraine; Rostyslav Rosty Semikov, MD, CEO, Audubon Bioscience, Houston
"Almost two years since Kabul fell, a frayed refugee system creates obstacles for Afghans in Texas" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans  and engages with them  about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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In the summer of 2021, Azita Jawady and Hamid Sadra were a young, married couple in love, living in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan, and expecting their first child. They felt good about their future and their country. Despite decades of war, Afghanistan seemed to be moving in a positive direction.

At least in urban areas, women could attend school and university, enter the workforce and participate in public life. Jawady believed this was a lasting transformation since the end of the first Taliban regime in 2001.

"For 20 [years] we tried to make a good Afghanistan," Jawady said. "We were an open-minded people. We go to restaurant, we work with men. We never thought that Afghanistan fall downs again."

But on Aug. 15, 2021, their lives changed in an instant. Two weeks before the U.S. military ended its 20-year presence in Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of Kabul and the country. Jawady, Sadra and many others didn't expect it to happen so quickly  if at all.

Tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked for the U.S. government or other Western entities were now at risk. That included Jawady, who was a social worker for the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Sadra, who worked for ArtLords, an Afghan artist-activist group that had done work for the U.S. Embassy and painted murals with themes of peace, health and human rights on the blast walls that protected buildings from bombs across Afghanistan  themes that conflicted with the Taliban's stringent rules against behavior considered un-Islamic.

Even speaking English was dangerous. A Taliban fighter at a security checkpoint once asked Sadra, in English, what his job was, and Sadra pretended not to understand. He felt he was being tested.

"I really was scared, and all of my body was shaking. I didn't say anything," he said.

They feared for their lives, and for the life of their unborn son, and fled the country on Dec. 1, 2021, on a flight arranged by nongovernmental organizations including Sadra's employer. After staying at a military base for a month in Qatar  where Jawady was treated for Bell's palsy, a partial facial paralysis, usually temporary, that she thinks was triggered by stress  they were sent to a U.S. Army base in New Jersey, then to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and finally arrived in Austin in February 2022.

More than 97,000 Afghans have come to the United States since the Afghan government collapsed in 2021, according to a U.S. State Department spokesperson. Federal data indicates at least 3,800 Afghans came to Texas as refugees or with special immigrant visas during that time.

Since fiscal year 2010, at least 17,000 Afghan refugees and those with special immigrant visas have arrived in Texas. Only California surpasses it, with at least 40,000 Afghans arriving during that time.

Texas has long been one of the top states for refugee resettlement in the country. Almost 220,000 refugees arrived in the state between 1980, when the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program began, and 2018, according to research conducted by Germany's Georg-August-Universitat-Gottingen and the University of Western Australia.

Most recent Afghan refugees are here through humanitarian parole, which allows people facing an urgent humanitarian crisis permission to stay in the United States for a short time. They don't receive visas or permanent residency  better known as green cards  but they are eligible for public benefits and can apply for temporary work permits.

Afghan parolees now have up to four years to either figure out a way to stay in the country for good or leave when their parole expires. Their best option for eventually getting a green card is the so-called Afghan Special Immigrant Visa. Afghans who worked for the U.S. government in Afghanistan for at least one year are eligible, as are their spouses and children. Many SIV applicants worked as interpreters for the U.S. military.

In 2021, the Department of Homeland Security estimated that more than 40% of Afghan parolees were eligible for SIVs because of their previous work with the U.S. government. But what should be a minimum nine-month visa process is currently taking at least 10 months to navigate, and has climbed to as much as 33 months in recent years.

The State Department has historically been slow to process SIVs, but it became a crisis when thousands of Afghans eligible for those visas arrived in the United States after the fall of Kabul. The State Department was understaffed and reported receiving "hundreds of thousands of emails" between August 2021 and October 2021. It took at least a year to clear the backlog of inquiries.

At their home in Austin, Azita Jawady, her husband Hamid Sadra and their 1-year-old son Qmars look through wedding photos from Afghanistan. (Texas Tribune photo by Leila Saidane)

For now, Jawady and Sadra are trying to focus on what they can control. That includes adjusting to refugee life in Austin, where they live with 1-year-old Qmars, a gentle boy with fluffy spikes of dark hair, in an apartment they found about 15 miles north of downtown.

After first working at an online retailer's fulfillment center, Sadra, who was an artist in Afghanistan, now works as a technician testing building materials for construction sites. He says he's become a workaholic after starting over in Austin and struggling to keep up with the city's high cost of living. Jawady tutors other Afghan refugees in English; she also teaches refugees how to access health care services in Texas through a nonprofit organization.

Navigating the labyrinth of federal, state and local entities in charge of helping them get health care, food and housing support and even diapers and formula for their son has been a head-spinning experience.

"We thought the American people has a special benefits to the babies  maybe some nurses help? Because it''s my first experience of being a mom, so it's very hard for me," Jawady said. "In America, we have a lot of expectation. But it's different."

And their immigration status is always on their minds. Jawady applied for an SIV and said she hasn't heard anything from immigration officials since four months ago, when they said her case was in "stage one." Sadra's not eligible for an SIV because he didn't officially work for the U.S. government, so he applied for asylum in April.

Receiving asylum gives someone temporary permission to stay in the United States and the ability to apply for a green card after a year. The best-case scenario for the family would be that Jawady receives an SIV, which would cover Sadra and Qmars too.

Felix Villalobos, an attorney for RAICES, which provides free and low-cost legal services to immigrants and refugees, said so many Afghans have arrived in Texas after the fall of Kabul that he formed a rapid response team that has counseled Afghan families mostly about special immigrant visas and asylum. He estimates RAICES has worked with 400 Afghan refugees so far, and that has just been in San Antonio, where RAICES operates.

"It is very time-consuming work," Villalobos said. "It's not their fault, and they're just having to deal with the realization that  they're in a new country, they may lose status here in the next few months and they're trying to find a way to stay because they can't go back."

A system under stress

For refugees, getting help from an immigration attorney can give them the best chance for a favorable decision in their case. But for refugees in Texas with little to no money, free or affordable legal help is hard to come by.

Villalobos is one of those hard-to-come-by attorneys. He's trying to beat the clock and submit around 200 applications for Temporary Protected Status in the next few months as parole begins to expire for his clients. TPS prevents someone from getting deported for a designated period of time if they're from a country the U.S. deems unsafe. Recipients get temporary authorization to work, but unlike parole, they don't get access to public benefits.

And while his clients are also now eligible to extend their parole for two more years, he's not convinced it will be a smooth process or that it ultimately serves his clients' best interests.

Helping Afghan clients over the last year and a half has been unnerving for Villalobos and others. Getting official documents out of Afghanistan can be difficult to impossible since its government fell to Taliban rule and its president fled the country.

Houston-based refugee advocate Khalil Arab, an Afghan refugee who received his special immigrant visa in 2019 after spending five years interpreting for the U.S. military and coalition forces, said Afghan refugees without "concrete documentation" are unlikely to be granted visas.

Villalobos says every one of his clients is eligible for an SIV, including some who risked their lives assisting the military at prison camps, in black ops missions or in confrontations with the Taliban. Not receiving a visa at the end of it all would be a huge broken promise, he said.

"All of them had the expectation that upon arrival to the U.S., they would get their green cards," he said, referring to the fact that under normal circumstances they would have finished the SIV application process prior to leaving Afghanistan and received a green card once they arrived. "It took quite a while for them to understand and figure out that that was no longer the case."

They have also arrived when the U.S. refugee safety net is badly frayed. The Trump administration drastically reduced the number of refugees allowed into the United States for several years  from 110,000 when Donald Trump took office to 18,000 in 2020. The Biden administration has since raised the limit to 125,000 for fiscal year 2023. But the effects of the previous cuts linger because less federal funding had been flowing to agencies and to the system as a whole.

Airmen prepare to load qualified evacuees aboard a C-17 Globemaster III aircraft at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 21, 2021. (Senior Airman Taylor Crul/U.S. Air Force photo)

Ian Kysel, an expert in migration and refugee law and a professor at Cornell Law School, says that created a vicious cycle starting with the federal government ending contracts or cutting off support to some organizations  "starving" the resettlement system, according to a 2020 Migration Policy Institute report  which caused those organizations to lay off workers and limited how many refugees they could work with at a time.

Texas' largest refugee resettlement agency, Refugee Services of Texas, collapsed in the wake of those cuts. In March, the organization announced a budget shortfall, and in early May, it announced it was cutting staff and closing some offices. On May 26, it announced it was closing completely. Over the last seven months, the agency has served almost 1,000 refugees in its seven offices across Texas.

When Kabul fell to the Taliban, the system couldn't accommodate the surge in demand  especially for Afghan refugees who needed specialized help such as Pashto or Dari interpreters.

Khaleemullah Ghazi, a former interpreter for U.S. Special Forces and an Afghan refugee who resettled in Austin after evacuating his country in August 2021, worked at a Texas resettlement agency in 2022 and said caseworker pay is low, especially given the skills needed.

"The person who has a skill of three or four languages, he still is getting paid $16 or $17 an hour," Ghazi said. "Every person has more than 15 or 20 cases. There's a ... heavy load of work on everybody."

The refugees have allies who are trying to help them. One veterans organization, Houston-based Combined Arms, has been lobbying Congress to pass legislation that would streamline the Afghan immigration process.

Khalil Arab, the Houston refugee advocate who also works for Combined Arms, said this is an emotional issue for many veterans who feel a deep "moral injury" about how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan unfolded.

"They left their comrades behind. A lot of them have seen their interpreters or their comrades suffering, go into hiding, some of them even got a family member killed by the Taliban," Arab said. "So the expectation is to provide them a pathway to legal residency and eventually to citizenship."

Still waiting

Jawady and Sadra's humanitarian parole expires in about seven months. In a perfect system, that should be just enough time for Sadra's asylum to be approved and Jawady's SIV application to be finalized.

But neither is certain.

The good news for Jawady is that processing time for the visas dropped significantly at the end of last year. The bad news is that the recent end of Title 42, a public health order that went into effect at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and allowed border officials to swiftly deport people who had crossed the U.S. border illegally, could delay refugee processing. Villalobos of RAICES said he's already seeing the effects.

"USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] has canceled asylum interviews for our clients to move resources to the border. We had several clients set to go to interviews next week and they were all canceled on us yesterday," Villalobos said on May 11, the final day Title 42 was in effect.

Despite all that his family has gone through since fleeing Afghanistan, though, Sadra isn't cynical.

"I trust one thing: America is very, very, very lawful," he said.

But the closing of Refugee Services of Texas seemed to shake Sadra. A lawyer from the organization had been helping them navigate the system, and now they have to start over with another agency, which could further delay things like renewing his work permit.

"Honestly, we don't have a good feeling, but we don't have any other option," Sadra said.

Refugee Services of Texas said in a press release that all of its Austin cases will now be managed by Episcopal Migration Ministries.

One thing keeping Jawady and Sadra grounded is their close ties to family and friends in Afghanistan. But they also feel responsible for them. They were the lucky ones who got out, and they worry about their loved ones' well-being given the damage to Afghanistan's economy since the U.S. withdrawal. Sadra feels obligated to send money back home.

"When  Afghanistan fell down, all of the jobs go down  no education, no work, no money, no income. So we should support them," Sadra said.

They still feel the weight of how their country transformed seemingly overnight. Jawady grieves for the girls who aren't allowed to go to school or work like she did. To an observer, Jawady's new jobs with refugees as a tutor and health care advocate could be interpreted as subtle acts of defiance against the Taliban regime.

"It's really hard for us, all of us just cry," Jawady said, reflecting on what Afghans have gone through during the last couple of years.

A few minutes later, she quoted the Farsi version of the saying, "This too shall pass."

Jawady, Sadra and Qmars outside their Austin home. (Texas Tribune photo by Leila Saidane)

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/06/texas-afghan-refugees-visa-asylum/.

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KYIV, Ukraine  A drone crashed into a high-rise residential building in southwestern Russia near the border with Ukraine, a regional governor said Friday, exposing the latest vulnerabilities in the country's air defense systems as President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine increasingly affects Russian soil.

The latest drone attack to target Russian cities in recent weeks wounded three people and came amid a front-line push by Ukrainian forces in what appears to be the early stages of a long-awaited counteroffensive in pockets of south and east Ukraine that Russia invaded more than 15 months ago.

The Ukrainian presidencys website posted a video statement overnight from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that alluded to the latest efforts of his countrys forces to drive out the Russian invaders, along various parts of the more than 1,000-kilometer (about 620-mile) front line.

Speaking inside what appeared to be a train car after visiting flood-hit southern Ukraine on Thursday, Zelenskyy said it was not time yet to talk about the details of the fighting. but said he was in touch with Ukrainian forces in all the hottest areas of the fight and praised an unspecified result from their efforts.

Ukrainian officials have kept generally quiet about their latest military moves, refusing to join in on rising commentary from Western military experts and others that the counteroffensive  critical for Ukraine's Western-funded military effort  was underway.

Analysts and Russian reports suggest Ukrainian forces have been active around the city of Bakhmut, which was largely devastated in a bloody, monthslong standoff, as well as carrying out probing operations around Russian-occupied areas of the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.

Ukrainian authorities have generally also denied any role in attacks inside Russia.

In a Telegram post Friday, regional governor Alexander Gusev said the three residents were hurt by shards of glass from broken windows in the city of Voronezh and received help on the spot. Russian state media published photos showing a high-rise apartment building with some windows blown out and damage to the facade.

Gusev said the drone was targeting a nearby airbase, but veered off course after its signal was electronically jammed. The city lies some 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Ukraines eastern Luhansk region, most of which is occupied by Russia.

Separately, Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov of the neighboring Belgorod region, which also borders Ukraine, said on Telegram that air defenses had been working overnight and an apartment building and private homes had been damaged. He said two unspecified targets were shot down, but he did not specify the cause of the damage.

Such drone strikes  they have previously hit places like residential areas in southern Krasnodar and there was even one at the Kremlin  along with cross-border raids in southwestern Russia have exposed glaring breaches in Russian air defenses and porous border security, and brought the war home to Russians.

Separately, Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin of Ukraine's southern Kherson region said Friday that water levels had decreased by about 20 centimeters (about 8 inches) overnight on the western bank of the Dnieper River, which was inundated starting Tuesday after a breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam upstream. The lower part of the river runs along the front line between Russian and Ukrainian forces.

Officials on both sides gave figures that indicated about 20 people have died in connection with the flooding, which has added misery to the lives of Ukrainians beleaguered by the war.

Viktor Vitovetskyi, a representative of Ukraines Emergency Service, said 46 municipalities in the region have been flooded  14 of them along the Russian-occupied eastern bank.

Even as efforts to rescue civilians and supply them with fresh water, health care and other services, Russian shelling over the last day killed two civilians and injured 17 in the region, Prokudin said.

Across the country, a total of at least 4 civilians were killed and 41 people were injured over the past day, according to Zelenskyy's office.

___

Kozlowska reported from London. Jon Gambrell in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Hanna Arhirova in Warsaw contributed to this report.
The University of New Mexico stopped accepting provisional Army tuition payments for its students last month after the service fell behind on paying its bills to the university.

Students there who were using Army scholarships were told by the university to pay out of pocket or drop out. The Army had eight outstanding invoices but has since paid all those bills after a Military.com inquiry. A spokesperson with the university did not return a request for comment.

It's the most recent example in nearly three years of issues with Army IgnitED, the service's tuition assistance program. But the Army now says the platform is being improved and the bugs that have put students and schools in a bind are starting to disappear. About 250 of beneficiaries who paid out of pocket since 2021 have yet to be reimbursed by the Army.

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The program has been plagued with technical glitches stretching back to 2021 when the online service launched as a successor to GoArmyEd. Soldiers and other beneficiaries could not use their benefits, schools were not getting paid, and some beneficiaries were either putting their education on hold or paying out of pocket, sparking outrage across the rank and file and raising concerns in Congress.

Education benefits are a critical recruiting and retention tool in the force. Those entitlements are becoming even more relevant as noncommissioned officers are increasingly expected to have an extended civilian education. Roughly 100,000 beneficiaries use Army IgnitED each year, and it provides up to $250 per semester hour, with the benefits maxing out at $4,000 for the fiscal year.

Despite the problems, service officials hope the worst days are behind them -- when it comes to processing tuition payments -- after a system upgrade in August 2022.

The service claims Army IgnitED is now running relatively well, ahead of where it was in 2021, and is expected to be fully operational by the end of the year.

"We understand that over the last few years students across the Army have faced hardship and frustration while trying to get courses paid for," Col. Julia Bell, who oversees the Army's education programs, told Military.com in an interview. "We are committed to ensuring this upgraded Army IgnitED system provides the resources they need to facilitate their education."

The Army has reimbursed 533 of the 784 beneficiaries who were forced to pay out of pocket since the program began, according to service data provided to Military.com.

Officials hope to have all of those cases closed out by the end of the year. In total, there have been some 23,000 outstanding invoices since 2021, many of which were delayed payments to schools due to the glitchy platform.

Of that, the Army still has roughly 6,500 to process.The cause of delay is that those payments all have to be done manually.

In March 2021, the service launched the Army IgnitED platform for soldiers and other beneficiaries to use their education benefits. It was run by professional services company Deloitte.

But the program's launch was a disaster, and it was almost immediately shut down temporarily. The Army ceased most new tuition payments, effectively shutting soldiers out of a key benefit of their service. The problems resulted from the transfer of data from the previous platform, GoArmyEd, and a premature launch of the new platform.

Deloitte's government contract running the platform expired, and the Army opted not to extend it. Deloitte is known to take on other complicated Pentagon projects, including a $106 million contract to build an artificial intelligence hub for the Defense Department. After the bungled launch of Army IgnitED, the service took its business to BAM Technologies.

Improvements have come with the Army IgnitED's update last year and the Army's adoption of some of the internal mechanics behind the Air Force's online tuition platform.

"We did adopt a lot of Air Force [ideas] to enhance Army IgnitED," Keith Baylor, product lead for Army IgnitED, told Military.com. "So, instead of wasting valuable time, we got something that can hit the ground running."

Since the update, 80,000 soldiers have enrolled in more than 220,000 classes, all with relatively few hiccups, according to Bell. One new upgrade, the General Fund Enterprise Business System, has slowly phased in processing payments for 18 schools and was able to process $25 million in payments in less than a month. Army planners expect to have that new internal payment mechanism fully in place by the end of July.

"As someone who graduated college using tuition assistance, I understand the importance of this benefit, and ensuring the program functions as promised is something I will own," Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston, the service's top enlisted leader, said in a statement to Military.com. "We've seen a significant improvement in the functionality of the IgnitED system, with the overwhelming majority of soldiers experiencing no issues at all.

"As we work to clear the backlog of invoices, I'll continue to ask soldiers to not pay out of pocket for covered education expenses," he said. "Keep your chain of command informed of issues and work directly with your local education center to resolve them as quickly as possible."

-- Steve Beynon can be reached at Steve.Beynon@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevenBeynon.

Related: Army Dumping Contractor Behind Troubled Tuition Assistance Platform
Military spouses who work for the government or own their own business could see a series of improvements and opportunities under a new executive order by President Joe Biden.

The order aims to increase the number of federal jobs that provide hiring preference to military spouses; improve telework policies and capabilities to give spouses with government jobs flexibility as they move from installation to installation; and bolster resources for military and veteran spouse entrepreneurs to help them maintain their businesses if they move.

Biden was expected to sign the order Friday in a ceremony at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, with his wife, first lady Jill Biden. The Army base was previously known as Fort Bragg but renamed this month as the military scrubs Confederate namesakes.

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"For the last two years, we've spoken with spouses across the country about what they need to be able to find a job, keep a job and support their families. And we brought their input back to the White House," said Jill Biden, speaking with reporters Thursday about the executive order. "Across the government, agencies are now working on new ways to help military spouses connect with federal and private-sector careers."

Despite ongoing federal efforts to encourage private industry and communities to hire military spouses, unemployment among the population remains stubbornly high -- 21% in 2021, according to a biennial survey conducted by the Department of Defense. Nationally, the unemployment rate for working-age married women is 2.3%; for men, it's 2.0%.

Barriers to military spouse employment, according to the survey, include permanent change of station moves, needing licenses or credentials in a new state, and child care.

The order contains a mix of directives for the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Small Business Administration to implement, as well as encouragement for federal agencies and the private sector to boost opportunities for military spouses.

Roughly 16,000 military spouses are employed by the federal government. White House officials said in the call that the order is designed to ensure that those individuals can keep their jobs if they change location and later expand opportunities for others.

It directs OPM and OMB to develop a government-wide strategic plan within 180 days for hiring and retaining military spouses, as well as veteran spouses, caregivers and survivors. It also directs agencies to develop common standards and communications for spouses to participate in the Domestic Employees Teleworking Overseas program, giving them access to employment while stationed abroad, and orders OPM to issue guidance to agencies outlining telework and remote work flexibility for military spouses.

It encourages -- but does not require -- federal agencies to give military spouses up to five days of administrative leave when transferring to a new duty station, and implores them to support military spouses with finding new federal employment at new duty stations if it is impossible for them to keep their old jobs.

It also creates new annual training for federal human resources personnel and hiring managers on hiring military spouses and survivors.

And it sets a deadline for the DoD to implement a new benefit announced in March  flexible spending accounts for child care expenses that will allow service members to set aside $5,000 in pretax income to cover costs.

According to the order, the DoD is required to establish Dependent Care Flexible Savings Accounts by Jan. 1, and it also must expand opportunities for military spouses to provide home-based child care on military installations.

Officials with Joining Forces, the White House effort founded in 2011 by then-first lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden to support military families and veterans, said the Bidens chose to sign the order at the newly renamed Fort Liberty because it is home to the largest population of military spouses across all the services.

Jill Biden said that, while the executive order contains numerous provisions for the federal government, agencies can't "solve these problems on their own." She implored employees everywhere to recruit military and veteran spouses, caregivers and survivors, because "they're skilled and passionate."

"Offer them flexible and portable opportunities so you can retain their talent," Biden said. "The future of our armed services will be defined by how we support the whole of our military community."

 Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime

Related: Applications Are Now Open for the DoD's Paid Private Fellowship Program for Military Spouses
SEOUL, South Korea  South Koreas Foreign Ministry summoned China's ambassador on Friday to protest comments he made accusing Seoul of tilting toward the United States and away from China, as competition between Washington and Beijing for global influence intensifies.

South Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Chang Ho-jin warned Chinese Ambassador Xing Haiming over his senseless and provocative remarks made during a meeting with a South Korean opposition leader.

The ministry accused Xing of violating diplomatic protocols and interfering with South Korean domestic politics but didnt specify the parts of Xings comments it saw as inappropriate. The ministry also didn't share what Xing said in reply to Chang.

In a meeting Thursday with South Korean Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung, a key rival of conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol, Xing accused Yoons government of leaning excessively toward Seoul's treaty ally, the United States, and damaging its relations with China, its biggest trading partner.

Xing said South Korea was entirely to blame for the many difficulties in bilateral relations, citing its growing trade deficit with China which he attributed to de-Chinaization efforts, apparently referring to actions by South Korean companies to shift their supply chains away from China. He demanded that Seoul respect Beijings core interests including Taiwan and other major regional issues.

With the United States pressuring China with all its might, some are betting that the United States will win and China will lose. But this is clearly the wrong judgment, Xing said, describing a rosy future for his country under authoritarian leader Xi Jingping. What can be said with certainty is that those who bet on Chinas defeat will surely regret it later," Xing said.

South Korea's Foreign Ministry said Xings irresponsible comments countered "the desire of both countries' governments and people to value and further advance South Korea-China relations based on mutual respect.

South Korea, whose economy depends greatly on exports of computer memory chips and other technology products, has struggled to strike a balance between the United States, its decades-long military ally, and China, the biggest buyer of its goods as the rivalry between Washington and Beijing deepens over regional influence and technology.

Faced with a growing nuclear threat from North Korea, Yoon has pushed aggressively to strengthen the alliance with the United States, making it a central goal of his policies.

Seoul has expanded joint military training with the United States and is seeking stronger assurances that it would swiftly and decisively use its nuclear weapons to defend South Korea in the event of a North Korean nuclear attack.

The Biden administration in turn has been seeking stronger three-way cooperation with South Korea and Japan to counter both the North Korean threat and Chinas increasingly assertive foreign policy.
WASHINGTON  The Pentagon announced Friday that it will provide an additional $2.1 billion in long-term weapons aid for Ukraine. The new assistance package will include funding for more Patriot missile battery munitions, Hawk air defense systems and missiles, and small Puma drones that can be launched by hand.

The latest infusion of funding, one of the larger packages the U.S. has provided, comes as there are signs that Ukraine is beginning  or about to begin  the much anticipated counteroffensive to try to take back territory that has been seized by Russia.

Unlike the U.S. equipment, weapons and ammunition that are more frequently sent from Pentagon stocks and delivered quickly to Ukraine, this money would be provided under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and is meant to be spent over the coming months or even years to ensure Ukraines future security needs.

In a statement, the Pentagon said the package shows America's continued commitment to both Ukraines critical near-term capabilities as well as the enduring capacity of Ukraines Armed Forces to defend its territory and deter Russian aggression over the long term.

The aid also will include munitions for laser-guided rockets, an undisclosed amount of artillery rounds, and funding for training and maintenance support.

A number of administration officials have acknowledged that the fighting in Ukraine has intensified in recent days, but much of the focus turned early this week to the collapse of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River. The White House and the Pentagon insisted Thursday they are still working to determine who caused the damage, which set off a scramble to evacuate residents in dozens of flooded areas and get aid to those still there.

Although the U.S. has been willing to provide billions of dollars in military weapons and other aid, the Biden administration has been clear that there will be no U.S. combat forces inside Ukraine. In that vein, Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said Thursday the military had no plans to directly provide transportation or other support to the areas damaged by the dam collapse.

The Biden administration has provided more than $37.6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022.
Dino A. Bruscia searched online for how to use a flare gun, according to prosecutors.

He also looked up the penalties for arson and the victims Amherst address.

'It's over': Buffalo man admits setting fire to Amherst home with flare gun Dino A. Bruscia, who goes by the first name Dean, pleaded guilty Wednesday morning in Erie County Court to third-degree arson, according to the Erie County District Attorney's Office.

Prosecutors obtained video of Bruscia buying a flare gun at Walmart a week before the arson. They found the guns packaging in his home.

Yet the victims of the 2019 arson, as well as Bruscias attorneys, believe that while Bruscia was at the scene, someone else actually started the fire.

On Friday, State Supreme Court Justice M. William Boller sentenced Bruscia to three to six years in prison. Bruscia, 30, of Cheektowaga, will also attempt to enter a shock incarceration program run by the state Department of Corrections and Comm

unity Supervision, which is similar to a military boot camp. That would see him released after six months, to be followed by parole supervision.

Case that began as hate crime probe ends with chaotic sentencing and claims that justice was not served Christian R. McCaffrey, 21, received three years of probation, a sentence promised as part of his plea agreement, but not before a tense State Supreme Court hearing.

Bruscia, who goes by Dean, pleaded guilty April 5 to third-degree arson, just before his trial was set to begin. Prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed to the terms of the sentence at the time the plea was entered.

Penny Myers, whose familys home was damaged in the arson, told the judge she is still dealing with the effects of serious trauma.

We dont know how to make sense of all this senseless pain, Myers said. We dont know what it will take to get rid of the fear.

The blaze was set at the Arcadian Drive home about 5 a.m. Dec. 22, 2019, the first day of Hanukkah. The attack happened following months of harassment of her son by Bruscias former co-defendant, who was never charged with arson.

Christian R. McCaffrey, 21, pleaded guilty in October to misdemeanor harassment and was sentenced to three years of probation. The hate crime charge was dropped at the time as part of the plea.

Hate crime charge dropped as part of guilty plea in Amherst case Prosecutors have dropped a hate crime charge as part of an Amherst man's guilty plea to a misdemeanor in the high-profile case, a move that frustrated the victims family.

The harassment began due to a romantic rivalry involving McCaffrey and Myers son. But the harassment soon turned to religiously motivated, hateful comments, according to the family, who is Jewish.

McCaffrey referred to her son as Jew Boy and Buffalo Jew, Myers said. At the time of the fire, she was the cantor at Temple Beth Zion.

The fire began in the familys dining room, which is where numerous items used in religious rituals, some passed down over generations, were kept.

Brian K. Parker, one of Bruscias defense attorneys, previously said he would have argued at trial that the vast majority of evidence in the case pointed to McCaffery setting the fire. Parker also previously acknowledged jurors still could have found Bruscia guilty in the case, even if his arguments were successful.

The initial harassment charges levied against McCaffrey consisted of one felony hate crime charge and four misdemeanors that were not hate crimes.

It was mainly over a girl, District Attorney John Flynn said Friday. Thats the evidence we had.

Police found McCaffreys cellphone and an identification card with his name on it in the snow outside the home after the fire.

Before Boller issued the sentence, Bruscia apologized to the Myers family for the role that I played that night.

I hope that one day, I hope they can find it in their hearts to forgive me, he said.

Cheryl Demmerley, Bruscias mother, said after her sons sentencing that he has had a lot of issues with substance abuse, starting when he was about 13. He also worked to protect the Myers family from McCaffrey after the fire, she said.

Man accused of inciting riot says social media posts are easy to fake The man accused of created a social media post encouraging people to storm the Walden Galleria has been charged with a misdemeanor.

In her 24-minute statement in court on Friday, Myers described damage to the family that went far beyond our physical home.

Myers said she believed the dining room was targeted because of the objects it held, including her grandmothers silver, which she brought with her when she fled from Russia a century ago and a tablecloth made by her grandmother that was used to celebrate Shabbat.

The family wasnt home at the time the fire began.

In the weeks after the blaze, Myers said she would sit on her front porch alone after everyone else in her house went to bed. There, she cried and she prayed.

It was her way, she said, of trying to reclaim what they had violently taken away from us  our safety and our security.

Parker said Bruscia had no knowledge of the homes layout.

The judge told Bruscia he caused unbelievable grief and described the shock incarceration program as really what you need.

Bruscia spent about a year in jail after being convicted of attempted weapons possession, a felony, in 2018.

Brucias legal troubles arent over, either. In separate cases, Bruscia pleaded guilty April 20 in Cheektowaga Town Court to inciting a riot and criminal impersonation. Those charges stemmed from a May 2020 Facebook post encouraging people to assemble and loot at Walden Galleria, as well as a March 2022 traffic stop.

Sentencing in those cases is scheduled Thursday.
The Mets announced that first baseman Pete Alonso has been diagnosed with a bone bruise and a sprain of his left wrist, with the expected return timeline as three to four weeks. He has been placed on the 10-day injured list as part of a slate of moves that also involves right-hander Stephen Nogosek being designated for assignment. Infielder Luis Guillorme and left-hander Zach Muckenhirn were recalled in corresponding moves.

Additionally, the club announced that catcher Tomas Nido has been outrighted to Triple-A Syracuse and that right-hander Edwin Uceta underwent surgery to address a torn meniscus in his left knee, with an expected return timeline of eight weeks.

Losing Alonso is the biggest development for the Mets, of course. Reports emerged this morning suggesting MLBs home run leader was headed to the IL. Hell be out beyond the minimal stay, though the silver lining is that he didnt suffer a fracture. Alonsos absence likely opens first base for rookie Mark Vientos, whos in the lineup at designated hitter tonight against Pittsburgh starter Rich Hill. Outfielder Mark Canha slides over to first base this evening.

Nogosek has logged action for the Mets in four different seasons. Hes worked 57 1/3 innings across 33 career relief outings, posting a 5.02 ERA. The Oregon product has tallied a career-high 25 2/3 frames this season, pitching to a 5.61 ERA with middling peripherals. Hes striking hitters out at a slightly below-average 21.2% rate while walking nearly 12% of opponents. Hes surrendered six home runs, one of which came off the bat of Marcell Ozuna in last nights disheartening extra-inning loss to the Braves.

The 28-year-old Nogosek has exhausted his minor league option years. The Mets had no choice but to take him off the 40-man roster to remove him from the big league club. Theyll have a week to deal him or look to run him through waivers. If another team rolled the dice on a claim, theyd also have to keep him in the majors or designate him for assignment.

Nido went through the DFA process earlier in the week. The Mets reportedly explored trade scenarios after taking him off the roster but apparently didnt find sufficient interest. They waived him instead. Hes gone unclaimed, in part on account of a $1.6MM salary this season and a guaranteed $2.1MM next year.

The Mets DFA Nido just before he was set to surpass five years of major league service. That meant that while he can technically decline the minor league assignment in favor of free agency, hed have to relinquish that guaranteed money to do so. With other clubs apparently unwilling to match that deal, Nido is accepting the assignment to Syracuse, tweets Mike Puma of the New York Post. Hell stick in the organization as a defensive depth option but no longer occupies a 40-man roster spot.

As for Uceta, he joined New York at the start of April on a waiver claim from the Pirates. He made one three-inning appearance at the big league level and pitched twice more in Triple-A. He initially landed on the injured list with an ankle sprain but apparently suffered a knee injury while rehabbing. The Mets could move him to the 60-day IL if they need a 40-man roster spot at some point, though the recent DFAs of Nido and Nogosek have already dropped that tally to 38.
The Crowded Room premieres today on Apple TV+. Stream the new ten-episode thriller for free with an Apple TV+ trial.

About the show:

New Apple TV+ limited series The Crowded Room follows Danny Sullivan, played by Tom Holland, after hes arrested in relation to a 1979 shooting in New York City. In ten episodes, the show explores Dannys life via interrogation interviews with Rya Goodwin. The investigative conversations between inquisitive interviewer and complicated suspect reveal the moments from Dannys past that led him to this place, ultimately yielding a thrilling epiphany.

Stream The Crowded Room episodes 1-3 today on Apple TV+ (7-day free trial). For $6.99/month, subscribe and stream award-winning shows, movies, Apple TV originals, and more. Click here to get started.
It took three decades, but the heinous, murderous acts of Bryan Patrick Miller  aka the Arizona Zombie Hunter -- have finally caught up with him. And they will cost him his life.

An Arizona superior court judge on Wednesday sentenced Miller, 50, to death for the brutal, bloody first-degree knife murders of Angela Brosso, formerly of Lower Allen Township, Pa., and Melanie Bernas, 17. Both murders took place in the early 1990s along the metro Phoenix canal system as the women were biking there. Miller also raped both women, possibly as they were dying or dead.

The defendant did not just murder them. He brutalized them. And he evaded capture for over 20 years, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Suzanne Cohen was quoted as saying, explaining why she condemned Miller to die, rather than serve life in prison for the Arizona Canal Killings.

There is no question that what the defendant did deserves the death penalty, Cohen said.

Brosso, a 22-year-old from Cumberland County who relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, was stabbed and beheaded in Nov. 1992 while on a pre-birthday celebration ride on her newly tuned-up purple mountain bike. She was a 1989 graduate of Cedar Cliff High School  and Millers first victim.

Millers knife attack was so frenzied, Brosso was nearly cut in half at the waist, according to forensic testimony. The exact number of stab wounds couldnt be calculated; there were just too many.

Her body was discovered along the canal trail the next morning. Brossos head would not be found for 11 more days. It was located in a grate in the canal about a mile and a half away from where her body was found.

Angela Brossos mother, Linda Brosso Strock, still lives on the West Shore. She didnt respond to PennLives repeated attempts to contact her for comment on her daughters case.

Ten months later another brutally stabbed female was found floating in the canal. This time it was a 17-year-old girl who was supposed to be home sick from school. Instead, Melanie Bernas went out for a bike ride along the canal in September 1993, only to encounter Miller.

Bernas suffered a deep stab wound to her back. Just like Brosso, the fatal knife plunge severed Bernas aorta and pierced her lung. Unlike Brosso, a cross was carved into Bernas chest, along with the initials WSC. The meaning of the initials was never determined.

Many more graphic details of both murders were chronicled by police, pathologists and forensic experts who testified at the trial.

The unsolved killings in the fall of 1992 and 1993 had Phoenix on edge as the desert city braced for the bloody reign of a brutal serial killer. Instead, the killings stopped. The sensational case grew cold for 22 years.

Then in January 2015, a DNA breakthrough finally linked the semen found at both murder scenes to Miller.

Miller was known as the Zombie Hunter for the converted police car that was parked in his driveway. Miller would splatter the old black-and-white police cruiser with fake blood, much to the delight of trick-or-treating neighborhood kids.

Photo of Bryan Patrick Miller, convicted in the 1992 murder of Angela Brosso in Phoenix, Az., from his Facebook account "Arizona Zombie Hunter".

The car remained in his driveway right up until the day a breakthrough DNA match led to Millers 2015 arrest, some 22 years after his alleged crimes. Detectives used a fake job interview to lure Miller. They obtained his DNA from the lip of a beverage container he drank from during the ruse interview.

When the tests came back, they had their killer.

Following a months-long bench trial that began in October 2022, Judge Cohen in April found Miller guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of kidnapping and two counts of attempted sexual assault.

She handed down a death sentence to Miller on Wednesday afternoon, completing the sentencing phase of the trial  and closing a bloody chapter in Arizona history.

According to an account of Cohens ruling by AZcentral, the question was whether Millers tortured childhood as chronicled during the trial was enough to warrant the leniency of a life sentence.

The answer is no, she said.
ALPENA, MI  Two men accused of murdering a 17-year-old Alpena girl and 34-year-old Alpena woman are headed to trial.

Following a lengthy preliminary examination in Alpena County District Court this week, Judge Alan Curtis bound over both men to trial, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and Alpena County Prosecutor Cynthia Muszynski announced Friday, June 9.

Brad Srebnik, 36, of Alpena, is accused of murdering Brynn Bills, 17, in August 2021.

Srebnik and Joshua Wirgau, 35, also of Alpena, are accused of then murdering Abby Hill, 34, in September of that same year to prevent Hill from revealing information about the murder of Bills.

Related: 2 Northern Michigan women were murdered by strangulation, gunshot to the head

Facebook Messenger and eyewitness testimony both support that Bills was picked up by Hill in the early morning hours of August 2, 2021, the release states. The prosecution alleges that shortly after she was last seen alive, Bills was killed by Srebnik and with the help of Wirgau and Hill, her body was buried in Wirgaus backyard.

On September 25, 2021, Srebnik, Wirgau, and Hill were dropped off in a remote area of Alpena. The prosecution alleges Hill was executed by gunshot on that property. Her body was discovered there on October 15, 2022.

Im grateful for the collaborative effort of the Michigan State Police, prosecutor Muszynski and the prosecutors in my office for bringing this heinous crime into the courtroom before a jury, Nessel said. Our department will continue our tireless efforts to seek justice for these two young women as we begin to make the states case to the jury.

Related: 2 Northern Michigan men charged in murders of 2 Alpena women

Srebnik is charged with the following:

One count of first-degree premeditated homicide for the murder of Bills, a felony that carries a life sentence without the possibility of parole;

One count of first-degree premeditated homicide for the murder of Hill, a felony that carries a life sentence without the possibility of parole;

One count of disinterment and mutilation of a dead body for the burying of Bills, a felony that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years;

One count of felony firearm  second offense, using a firearm in the commissioning of a felony, five years consecutive to any underlying charges; and

One count of felon in possession of a firearm, a felony with a maximum sentence of five years.

Wirgau is charged with the following:

One count of first-degree premeditated homicide for the murder of Hill, a felony that carries a life sentence without the possibility of parole;

One count of disinterment and mutilation of a dead body for the burying of Bills, a felony that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years;

One count of being an accessary after the fact to a felony for the hiding of Bills body, a felony carrying a maximum sentence of five years; and

One count of felon in possession of a firearm, a felony carrying a maximum sentence of five years.

Both Srebnik and Wirgau are habitual offenders, the prosecutors office states.

We are very pleased to be one large step closer to achieving justice and having closure for the families of Brynn Bills, Abby Hill, and our entire community, said Muszynski. I want to extend my gratitude, not only to law enforcement and AG Nessels office for their dedicated diligent work, but also the patience and fortitude exhibited by the families throughout this process, especially as they heard the details of these heinous crimes.

The two men will next appear before Judge Ed Black in the 26th Circuit Court in Alpena for arraignment.

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Three Grand Rapids men found guilty of killing church choir director at ATM

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Already facing charges after child brought gun to school, man arrested following standoff with police
ANN ARBOR, MI -- After their LGBTQ pride flag was stolen twice in recent weeks, a pair of Ann Arbor churches are responding the only way they know how  giving away more flags.

St Aidans Episcopal Church and Northside Presbyterian Church, which share the building at 1679 Broadway St. in Ann Arbor, are launching a Need A Flag, Take A Flag event on Sunday, June 11. The event will feature 300 LGBTQ pride flags and allow anyone in need of a flag to take home their own handheld versions.

Although the event is in part a Pride Month celebration, the inspiration for it comes from the theft of the churches own flags.

On April 3, church leadership received an email saying someone had removed the flag and thrown it into the bushes. On June 1, the churches reported the replaced flag had been stolen completely.

I still havent found it, said the Rev. Thomas Ferguson, vicar at St. Aidans Episcopal Church.

The Rev. Jenny Saperstein, pastor at Northside Presbyterian Church, told Ferguson, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that whoever took it must have needed a flag.

She said, lets answer this with something positive, Ferguson said.

The churches, which often partner on social justice issues, will have 300 flags available and plan to order more if they run out. Launching the event on a Sunday allows the entire congregation to get involved with the advocacy, Saperstein said.

Its really this church community that stands for that, Saperstein said. Not just the pastors.

Hearing affirming messaging from churches is especially important for marginalized communities, Ferguson said.

We want everyone to know that God loves everybody, even people who would be offended by our flag, Ferguson said. Everybody is part of Gods kingdom.

Flags are available starting at 11:45 a.m. Sunday, at the churches building. The churches plan to keep the lawns stocked at least through June. Flags will be available on both the Plymouth Road and Broadway Street sides of the building.

Well hope to change hearts and minds with love, Ferguson said. Were not going away, and were not changing our stance here with the oppressed.

Anyone with information about the theft is encouraged to reach out to the Ann Arbor Police Department at 734-794-6920.

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Man fatally shot in Ann Arbor remembered as light in this world

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WASHTENAW COUNTY, MI -- Toyota aims to promote STEM education opportunities in Washtenaw County with the creation of a new institute within Eastern Michigan University.

Toyota Motor North America, Inc. announced Thursday, June 8, it will be awarding about $10 million over a five-year span to support technological development in southeast Michigan.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI  A man charged in connection with a child recently bringing a loaded gun to a Grand Rapids elementary school was arrested Friday afternoon after a four-hour standoff.

Grand Rapids police said the man, who they did not identify but said is 26 years old, was arrested around 1:30 p.m. Friday, June 9, after he exited a home in the 1100 block of Marshall Avenue near Eastern Avenue and Hall Street.

Officers had surrounded the home, where the man was barricaded, since around 9:15 a.m. Friday. Along with the police departments Special Response Team and Crisis Negotiation Team, the U.S. Marshal Fugitive Task Force also responded.

I want to commend our negotiators, said Grand Rapids police Capt. Terry Dixon. They were able to establish a rapport and ultimately convince the suspect to come out on his own accord. I want to echo the Chiefs earlier comments on GRPDs commitment to combat gun violence in our community and keep our kids safe. I am very thankful this incident ended peacefully.

The man involved in the standoff and later arrested was recently charged with felony firearm and fourth-degree child abuse after an 8-year-old student brought a loaded gun to Stocking Elementary School on May 10.

Related: Another parent facing charges related to student who brought gun to school

The May 10 incident is the fourth time this school year Grand Rapids Public Schools has had a young student bring a gun in a school building. No one was injured in any of the incidents.

The May 10 incident prompted Grand Rapids Public Schools officials to ban backpacks in an effort to prevent further guns being brought into school buildings.

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GRAND RAPIDS, MI  Grand Rapids wants a judge to bar the states civil rights watchdog from pursuing nearly a dozen discrimination cases being investigated against the citys police department.

In a June 2 filing, Grand Rapids attorneys asked the Michigan Court of Claims for a preliminary injunction against the Michigan Department of Civil Rights (MDCR) that would prevent the state agency from investigating and pursuing discrimination charges against the city in any case older than three years old.
KENT COUNTY, MI  Residents of a 36-unit apartment building in Cutlerville have been displaced after the building caught fire late Thursday evening.

The fire was reported just after 11:40 p.m. Thursday, June 8, at the Byron Lakes Apartments off of 68th Street near Burlingame Avenue.

Cutlerville Fire Chief Ken Van Hall said no residents, firefighters or pets were injured.

Damage from the fire and efforts to put it out impacted all 36 units of the apartment building. Van Hall said residents will be displaced for an indeterminate amount of time. The American Red Cross is helping displaced residents.

When firefighters arrived, multiple residents of the apartment building were entering and exiting the building to retrieve pets and belongings, Cutlerville Fire Department officials said.

Firefighters with the Cutlerville and Wyoming fire departments began attacking the flames but had to exit the building shortly after due to a roof collapse.

Those firefighters were joined by others from Byron Township Fire Department, which helped rescue pets from the building.

The incident lasted about six hours and is currently under investigation by the Wyoming Fire Department. On Friday morning, the Kent County Sheriffs Office had deployed a drone to survey the damage.

Thank you to Wyoming Fire and Byron Fire for your assistance and hard work on the scene, Cutlerville Fire Department officials said. We truly could not have done this without you.

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GRAND RAPIDS, MI  Dutch-American businessman Paulus Heule has received a royal decoration from the Netherlands.

Heule, the CEO of Eenhoorn, a Grand Rapids-based real estate investment firm with offices in the Netherlands, received the recognition for his work as honorary counsel of the Netherlands in West Michigan, a position hes held since 2010.

He was recommended for the award, presented to him in April in Washington D.C., by the former prime minister of the Netherlands Jan Peter Balkenende, the Royal Dutch Orchestra and others. The decoration honored Heules work to strengthen relations between the U.S. and the Netherlands.

I dont really like to be in the public eye, but it meant a lot to me that these people recommended me, he said. It was really a moving experience to be recognized like that. For a Dutch guy, its a big deal.

The official name of the decoration is the Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau, and it was given to Heule by Andre Haspels, the Dutch ambassador to the U.S.

Heule, who lives in Ada and has five daughters, was born in the Netherlands and moved to Caledonia in 1982. He graduated from Caledonia High School and went on to earn a bachelors degree in math from Calvin College. He founded his company, Eenhoorn, in 1988, with the financial assistance of his father, Carl.

Today, the firm owns multi-family and residential properties in Michigan, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, California and Wisconsin, as well as in Europe and the Netherlands. In Grand Rapids, the company owns properties such as Plaza Towers at 201 W. Fulton St. and the 234 Market Ave. SW apartment building.

Over the years, Heules work to build stronger ties with the Netherlands has included trade missions to the Netherlands, and raising money for the Netherlands Carillon, a historic landmark at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia that expresses the gratitude of the Dutch people for American aid received during and after World War II.

He also co-founded the West Michigan Global Initiative, which aims to promote economic and cultural ties between the U.S. and the Netherlands. He sits on the board of the International Friends of the Royal Orchestra of the Netherlands. And in 2015, he helped host a trip to Grand Rapids for the King and Queen of the Netherlands.

It is a tremendous honor to be recognized by The Kingdom of the Netherlands, he said. I see my role as a liaison for both cultures, serving as a bridge to make connections, explore opportunities for collaboration and celebrate the rich heritage of each.

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JACKSON, MI  A volunteer fire department in a small Jackson County township is in turmoil after the firing of two fire fighters and resignation of its fire chief.

Here is that headline and some more you might have missed this week.

Abrupt firings, resignations impact small Jackson County volunteer fire department

A fire department in a small Jackson County township has lost two firefighters and its fire chief in the last two months due to disagreements over the condition of its main fire engine.

Dave and Mindy Thomas -- a husband-and-wife duo who worked as on-call firefighters for the Pulaski Township Fire Department before being abruptly let go in April -- said their firing has been a detriment to the morale of the remaining on-call firefighters.

Petition language for recall of Rives treasurer passes

Recall petition language against Rives Townships treasurer passed an election commissions review while recall petition language against its two trustees failed.

A recall petition against Rives Township Treasurer Janina Teske could be circulating soon after language for the proposed petition was approved Thursday, June 8, during a hearing before the Jackson County Election Commission headed by Circuit Judge Susan Jordan.

Herbs for wellness and gentle care can now be found at this downtown Marshall store

Bulk herbs, tinctures and other wellness products are the focus of a new business in downtown Marshall.

Jenn Ziegler-Sherman, with help from her husband Zach Sherman, celebrated the official grand opening of the herbal apothecary called The Wilderness Maven at 211 E. Michigan Ave. in early June.

Everything you need to know for the 2023 Art, Beer & Wine Festival in Jackson

Its time to sip some drinks and browse art at a popular annual Jackson festival.

The 18th annual Art, Beer & Wine Festival is 2 to 8 p.m. Saturday, June 10, at the Ella Sharp Museums Hillside Farm Lane, 3225 Fourth St.

Man beats woman with pistol after it fails to fire in her face, police say

Police are looking for a man who assaulted and beat a woman with a handgun after it failed to fire in her face, police say.

Police were called at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday, June 7, to a home in the 200 block of W. North Street for a reported assault involving a gun, according to the Jackson Police Department.

Roundabout construction is closing a busy Jackson County intersection

Construction is beginning on a roundabout aimed at making a busy Jackson County intersection safer.

The Jackson County Department of Transportation is creating the single-lane roundabout at the intersection of McCain and Dearing roads in Spring Arbor Township, west of Jackson.

One of two men critically injured in I-94 crash upgraded to stable condition

One of two men critically injured in a multi-vehicle crash on I-94 in Jackson County Saturday has been upgraded to stable condition.

Rescue crews were called at 5:37 p.m. Saturday, June 3, to a multi-vehicle crash on westbound I-94 between Airport Road and M-60, where they found two critically injured men pinned inside a Ford Ranger pickup after crashing into the median wall, according to the Blackman-Leoni Township Department of Public Safety.

Cascades Splash Pad is opening for the summer with free admission, pizza

Celebrate the beginning of summer with the opening of the Splash Pad at Cascade Falls Park.

The Splash Pad, 1401 S. Brown St., is opening for the 2023 season with free admission at 11 a.m. Friday, June 9.

Fishing, rides and a parade: Your guide to the 2023 Carp Carnival in Michigan Center

Its almost time to enjoy rides, a parade and fishing during the 64th annual Carp Carnival in Michigan Center.

The event, hosted by the Michigan Center Lions and Lioness clubs, raises money for the clubs to give back to the community for scholarships, eye exams and community dinners.

Jackson Sheriffs Office Fun Fest brings community together

There was dancing. And games. And lots of food.

It was the first-ever Jackson County Sheriffs Office Fun Fest and Open House in a parking lot near the sheriffs office in downtown Jackson on Sunday, June 4.

Indoor pickleball court being considered in Jackson County

Pickleball enthusiasts in Jackson County might be very happy soon if county commissioners approve a proposal for an indoor pickleball court at the Jackson County Fair Grounds.

A proposal coined the Crossroads Pickleball Project, was submitted to the Jackson County Board of Commissioners, June 1, asking for the board to consider at its next meeting a multi-year lease at the American 1 Credit Union Event Center, located in Keeley Park 128 W. Ganson Street, to create an indoor pickleball court.

In-N-Out Burger lawsuit against Doll n Burgers reaches settlement

A lawsuit claiming a burger restaurant with locations in Jackson and Tecumseh looks too much like In-N-Out Burger has been settled and dismissed.

In-N-Out Burger, a large regional chain headquartered in California, filed the civil suit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in 2020 against locally-based Doll n Burgers, for trade dress infringement, which occurs when a company looks so similar to another company it could cause confusion.

Want more Jackson-area news? Bookmark the local Jackson news page or sign up for the free 3@3 Jackson daily newsletter.
KALAMAZOO, MI  Kalamazoo Public Schools trustees and community members denounced gun violence at its Thursday, June 8 meeting, in light of the recent death of KPS student.

Markii Jerrell Robinson, 17, a junior at Loy Norrix High School, was killed in a drive-by shooting around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, June 7 at the 1100 block of East Stockbridge Avenue.

Robinson was in critical condition but later died at the hospital, the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety said.

Shona Espinoza, a KPS paraprofessional, pleaded for mental health supports during the school board meetings public comment time.

Please take into consideration our babies, that little boy was our student who died in my backyard, Espinoza said.

Board Vice President Jermaine Jackson said the shooting occurred shortly after Robinson got off a KPS school bus.

Its unfortunate that there is no ray of hope (in) sight in this country to get gun control (measures in place), Jackson said. Jackson also said he prayed for all KPS graduations to happen without violence, and there hasnt been so far.

Trustee Patti Sholler-Barber said gun violence has been an issue in Kalamazoo for many years.

A former KPS student was killed in a shooting on I-94 in September 2022. So far, there have been seven homicides in the city of Kalamazoo this year, six of which were shootings.

Want more Kalamazoo news? Our 3@3 newsletter rounds up Kalamazoos top stories every weekday at 3 p.m.



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Trustee Jennie Hill said the community is losing children to gun violence and expressed the need for more safety measures. She pointed to when seatbelts and airbags became required in cars as motivation for passing gun laws now.

Look how hard they pushed and look where theyve come, Hill said. It can be done.

Board President TiAnna Harrison said she was hopeful for the Kalamazoo Blueprint for Peace program to help address gun violence in Kalamazoo.

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Targeting homeless, Kalamazoo bans sleeping bags, bedding in city parks
KALAMAZOO, MI -- New signs posted on the Kalamazoo Mall and in city parks warn that extended use of blankets and bedding will not be tolerated, echoing a controversial proposal of the past that went cold.

While some residents are in favor of rules for health and safety reasons, others are concerned about where the rule came from -- and who it targets.

It includes the same language as a policy that the Kalamazoo City Commission chose not to adopt in 2018, after a community outcry from dozens of people.

Once again, the city administration is acting in direct opposition to the clearly and unambiguously expressed will of Kalamazoo citizens and the City Commission, resident Jeff Messer said.

Homeless people are often seen in spaces along downtown Kalamazoo on any given day. Hangouts include some of the citys prime areas, like Arcadia Festival Place, which has one of the new signs.

"I wish the city would do something. Not push us away," Stuart Hamilton said. From left, Stuart Hamilton and Carl Wiseman take shelter from the rain under the pavilion at Arcadia Creek Festival Place, Friday Aug. 17, 2018. On Monday Aug. 20, 2018, a city meeting will be held for a proposal to change city ordinances limiting access to city parks for people who are homeless. (MLive File Photo)Kalamazoo Gazette archive photo

The posted rule targets homeless people, who are often seen sleeping or sitting with blankets in public spaces, Messer said.

Messer wants the City Commission to step in and remove the rules, and said only rules in the city code should be posted.

At the meeting on Aug. 20, 2018, minutes show 45 people spoke against a proposal that included the following text:

Any activity in City Parks where bedding, sleeping bags, personal belongings or other materials, are established, or maintained for the purpose of maintaining a place to dwell or sleep for a period longer than 2 total hours within a 12 hour period, whether or not such place incorporates the use of any tent, lean-to, shack, or any other structure, or any vehicle or part thereof.

Besides some minor rewording, the rule on the new sign is nearly identical. Messer said he believes the controversy helped kick off ongoing Bronson Park demonstrations that followed, attracting outside news coverage to the city.

Jeff Messer points to a sign posted on the Kalamazoo Mall that outlines how a person can be prosecuted for using a blanket for too long.

Two citizens spoke in support of the proposed changes at the 2018 meeting.

None of the commissioners on the 2018 board made a motion, so the recommended item was not approved.

Back to 2023, the current city code of ordinances does not include any mention of bedding, though it does say camping is prohibited and includes some of the other rules shown on the sign. Those are misdemeanors.

The city managers office said the rules apply to all city parks  including the Arcadia Festival Site and the downtown north mall.

The rules were developed by the City Attorneys Office and have been in place for several years, said city Communications Manager Mike Smith. He did not immediately have an answer about for follow-up questions but said he would look into them for a response.

Violations are a criminal misdemeanor and subject to prosecution, including fines, he said. The city did not provide further clarification on the penalty for using bedding.

Deputy City Manager Jeff Chamberlain said the North Kalamazoo Mall is a public green space, operated and maintained by the city parks department. Thats why it falls under the citys park rules ordinance, he said.

New park rules signs have been installed on the North Mall to clarify to the public that park rules apply to this green space, Chamberlain said, and the signs on the North Mall are consistent with park rules signs in other city of Kalamazoo parks.

Residents weigh in

Some residents say the move unfairly targets homeless people, while others argue the bedding ban is necessary for safety reasons.

Theyre slowly pushing the homeless people out of town, said John L., who said he and others often sleep outside. He declined to give his last name. We dont have a lot of places to go and relax and chill without being bothered.

Ryan Robinson, who is in a wheelchair and has no legs following a 2021 injury, was at Arcadia Tuesday morning.

Im out here every single night, he said.

He did not sleep overnight, Robinson said, and one reason is due to fear of having his things stolen.

Im so tired tired right now, Robinson said.

Judy Lowery, an advocate for houseless individuals in Kalamazoo said the posted rules dont match the ones posted on the city website.

Theyve changed the rules without public input, specifically targeting people who are houseless! she said in a message to MLive/Kalamazoo Gazette. This lack of transparency and closed-door decisions with our city leadership seems to keep growing, just like our lack of affordable housing and homeless numbers keep growing.

It is confounding how our leaders can sleep at night, when they are destroying what little belongings people own and are utilizing our police forces to harass and displace people who are houseless, Lowery said.

College student Jasmine Hollman, 28, said she agrees with the posted rule that limits the use of bedding. She was sitting on a park bench at Arcadia Festival Place Thursday morning, June 8, where three people were sleeping on the ground and stage nearby.

I just dont want them to over-enforce it with high fines and penalties, she said. Certain people cant afford that. But I do want them to enforce that rule.

One resident, who said shes new to the city and lives in a condominium on the Kalamazoo Mall, said there is a potential safety issue because of people spending time on the mall, as well as littering and public urination.

She declined to give her name, but said she has attended meetings with Southwest Michigan First where efforts to revitalize downtown have been discussed. They discussed ideas to increase bathroom access, for example, she said.

Tony Oliver, 43, was walking the North Kalamazoo Mall on Wednesday, June 7. He said he doesnt see a problem with people using a blanket or lying in areas along the mall for hours, as long as they arent doing anything more to bother anyone.

Just laying here, just sleeping, I dont see no problem with it, Oliver said.

The bedding rule surfaced as the city is working to address crime using new techniques, including establishing a substation on the North Kalamazoo Mall. The City Commission is also considering a proposal to create a public-private partnership to expand police surveillance capabilities.

The issue is not unique to Kalamazoo.

Across the country, in Portland, Oregon, the Portland City Council voted 3 to 1 on Wednesday to ban people from camping on public land during daytime hours within the city and to prohibit camping at all times near schools and other specific locations.

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MASON COUNTY, MI  A Ferrysburg man has been charged with drug delivery and weapon charges following a months-long undercover investigation by a West Michigan drug enforcement team.

Trenton Thomas Armstrong, 26, was arraigned Wednesday in Mason County District Court on charges of delivery of cocaine, ketamine and methamphetamine; possession with intent to deliver cocaine; and felony firearm, according to a Friday, June 9 news release from the State, Sheriffs, Chiefs Enforcement Narcotics Team.

The team goes by the acronym SSCENT.

During the investigation that started in April, Armstrong allegedly made several deliveries of various controlled substances to an undercover officer, according to the news release.

Officers executing a search warrant at Armstrongs Ferrysburg home confiscated numerous controlled substances, according to the news release.

SSCENT was assisted by the Mason County Sheriffs Office, the Michigan State Police Hart Post, the West Michigan Enforcement Team South and Michigan State Police Canine Unit.

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BUENA VISTA TOWNSHIP, MI  More than a decade later, the story of expectant mother Jenny Webbs death by strangulation and the criminal conviction of a Buena Vista Township police officer in her murder continues to resonate.

This weekend, their romance-turned-deadly story will reach audiences tuned in to the weekly true crime documentary TV series, Sex and Murder, on the Investigation Discovery channel. The shows 60-minute episode about the Webb case, titled Bite of Evidence, will debut at 10 p.m. Saturday, June 10.
Research facilities in Michigan that would otherwise euthanize dogs or cats once testing was completed would be required to offer the animals up for adoption first, under a bill reintroduced in the state Senate.

This legislation does not prohibit animal testing or place restrictions on the type of testing being done in Michigan, SB 149 sponsor Sen. Kevin Hertel, D-Saint Clair Shores, told the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Agriculture this week. He said it would, however, allow for these animals to be sent to loving homes once testing is complete.

We are unnecessarily euthanizing many dogs, and cats for that matter, simply because folks dont want to know that they exist, that this testing has occurred, Hertel said.

Related: Medical research facility that uses dogs, primates plans Muskegon expansion amid protest

The bill package is named Teddys law after a beagle who was rescued along with dozens of other dogs in 2019 from a lab near Kalamazoo. The lab, Charles River Laboratories, received heavy scrutiny after The Humane Society of the United States found researchers were force feeding the dogs pesticides.

Before the lab reached an agreement with the Humane Society to rehome the animals, all dogs were initially scheduled to be euthanized.

David Rubello, Teddys owner, said despite the trauma Teddy experienced in the lab, hes a loving dog no different than one found at a shelter.

We all know what were getting, and hes a family member, Rubello said. He does everything your dog does, theres no difference.

More than 40 years ago, the state legislature passed the law creating standards for the humane treatment of animals used in medical research. The law required research facilities to comply or lose the ability to operate.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel also felt more can be done. In a formal opinion last year, she said there needed to be more industry oversight.

Related: Further action needed to ensure humane animal testing in Michigan, says AG opinion

An average of 600 dogs and 100 cats used in medical research are euthanized each year in Michigan, according to Sen. Dayna Polehanki, D-Livonia, who sponsors SB 148 in the package.

Polehankis bill would require a research facility that used cats or dogs to submit an annual report to the state including information about the animals and their release.

This bill would correct an oversight which prevents the state from accessing information collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture about research facilities that test on animals.

If an animal no longer needed for research is not offered for release, the facility would be fined. The maximum fine for the first violation would be $1,000, with each subsequent fine increasing until reaching a maximum of $10,000. The funds would be deposited into a Laboratory Animal Fund created under the bill.

The bills await a committee vote. If passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan would join the at least 13 states with laws related to the placement of animals post-research.

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A serial shoplifter was sentenced Thursday to serve two to four years in prison by State Supreme Court Justice Debra Givens, said Erie County District Attorney John J. Flynn.

Maurice J. Land, 35, of Buffalo pleaded guilty to two counts of third-degree burglary and one count of first-degree criminal contempt, both felonies, on May 2.

Land acknowledged having stolen merchandise from inside two different home improvement stores. On Jan. 15, he stole an air compressor and accessories valued at about $778 from a store in the Thruway Plaza in Cheektowaga, which also put him in violation of a three-year no trespass order that was issued following a prior incident.

Then, on April 8, Land entered a home improvement store on Niagara Falls Boulevard in Amherst and stole various light fixtures valued at about $787. He had also entered that store in violation of a three-year no trespass order that was issued after a prior incident.

"Shoplifting is not a victimless crime. I want the retailers in Erie County to know that these thefts will not be tolerated and that my office will continue to hold these offenders accountable for their crimes," said Flynn.

Land, who was wanted on a warrant, was a passenger in a vehicle that was stopped by Amherst police on April 5 because police said the operator was driving without headlights on Niagara Falls Boulevard. Police also discovered that Land was in violation of an existing order of protection that was issued on behalf of the driver of the vehicle.

Flynn commended the Amherst, Buffalo and Cheektowaga police department for their work into the investigations of the burglaries.
Michiganders in the southern lower peninsula have been waking this week to some of the worst air quality in the world, as smoke from wildfires raging in Canada continues to choke the region.

While individual disasters cant be directly linked to climate change, there is a sea of scientific evidence connecting human impacts on the climate to more frequent and severe forest fires. Pair that with, increasingly, the abnormal atmospheric patterns, also influenced by climate change, that have caused smoke to linger over Michigan, and it makes a recipe for hazy days and health warnings.

Democrats, who control state government for the first time in 40 years, have indicated addressing climate change remains a priority. The most notable effort has been a package of legislation from Senate Democrats that would, among other things, require Michigan utilities to source 100% of their electricity from carbon-free sources by 2035.

Read more: Senate Democrats propose moving Michigan to 100% clean energy by 2035

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and legislative leaders told MLive they support the sentiment, but avoided discussing any specifics around the proposed benchmarks.

Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, D-Grand Rapids, said in a statement shes supportive of a 100% benchmark, but didnt reference a date.

We only need to step outside our front doors to feel  and breathe  the effects of climate change, Brinks said. Its no longer a choice; its a mandate that we get on the fast path to a 100% clean energy future.

Whitmer said this week the need to transition to clean energy is an undeniable reality, and seemed to imply she expected the bills to pass the legislature after revision.

The spirit of it I am supportive of, Whitmer said, while conceding, Im not familiar with all of the intricacies of it and it will probably change before it gets to my desk.

It remains unclear whether the proposed standard might be watered down in negotiations.

Whitmers own MI Healthy Climate plan is a bit less ambitious. It calls for the states power sources to be 60% renewable by 2050 and for the state to be carbon-neutral by 2050. Environmental advocacy groups had called for the loftier goal before it was introduced as legislation. Her proposed budget had called for billions in spending on environmental priorities.

Related: Whitmer says shes a climate optimist in conference keynote

Democrats hold particularly narrow majorities in both chambers of the legislature, where one or two defections on a party-line vote in the 110-member House and 38-member Senate can sink legislation.

It means lawmakers have to walk a fine line on contentious issues to keep skeptical members of their caucuses on board.

In an interview last week, House Speaker Joe Tate, D-Detroit, said that while Michigan has to transition toward clean energy, we just have to look at the details. He indicated hed like to see a shift in energy sources paired with policies to minimize the economic impact to avoid energy poverty.

Were gonna have to move in that direction, thats going to be incredibly important, Tate said. I think whats also important, especially for me, is making sure as we do make this transition that no one is left behind.

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For the first time in its more than 40-year history the Human Rights Campaign has declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ people across the United States.

The move comes as the activist organization documented more than 76 anti-LGBTQ+ bills that have been signed into law in 2023, more than double the amount signed last year; 2022 was previously considered the worst year on record for anti-LGBTQ legislation.

The multiplying threats facing millions in our community are not just perceived  they are real, tangible and dangerous, campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a June 6 statement. In many cases they are resulting in violence against LGBTQ+ people, forcing families to uproot their lives and flee their homes in search of safer states, and triggering a tidal wave of increased homophobia and transphobia that puts the safety of each and every one of us at risk.

In all, more than 525 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in 41 states in 2023, with more than 220 specifically targeting transgender children, according to a campaign guidebook accompanying the emergency declaration.

Much of that data is outlined within the 12-page guidebook, along with whether states have enacted a non-discrimination law and bans on conversion therapy and using bathrooms not otherwise in line with a persons assigned gender at birth, among other things.

Michigan is among the handful of states the Human Rights Campaign deems as supportive, legislatively, of LGBTQ rights  the state amended its civil rights law this year to explicitly protect LGBTQ people  only dinging the state for not having passed a ban on conversion therapy.

The Michigan legislature is currently working on that issue, however. Lawmakers had a first hearing on making conversion therapy illegal for minors on Tuesday, June 6.

RELATED: Banning conversion therapy in Michigan would protect LGBTQ children, supporters say

Twenty-one states, plus the District of Columbia, have already enacted such bans. Four others, including Michigan, have banned using state or federal funding to support conversion therapy efforts on minors.

But Michigan has no such state-level ban on the practice of conversion therapy despite efforts on the local level. Eight cities independently enacted their own ban on the practice according to the Movement Advancement Project, a non-profit think tank based in Colorado.

The Human Rights Campaign doesnt see it as a time for the state to be resting on its laurels.

Anti-LGBTQ bills have been considered in Michigan. Just recently a state Republican introduced a bill package that would make it a felony punishable by up to four years in prison to provide puberty blockers or genital gender reassignment surgery to a minor. Because of the states Democratic majorities in both legislative chambers, such bills are unlikely to see any momentum.

Even LGBTQ+ people living in states like Michigan  where were seeing real progress towards equality  are living in fear as these nationwide attacks put all of our safety at risk, Sarah Warbelow, legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. Our priority is ensuring LGBTQ+ people know their rights and have the tools they need to defend and protect themselves against acts of hostility, discrimination and violence  both at home in Michigan and when they travel to hostile states.

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This story is updated with more reaction and information after the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed its indictment of Trump Friday afternoon.

Former president Donald Trump will face a federal judge Tuesday afternoon in Miami after being indicted in his second high-profile case of the year.

Although the reaction in Michigan has been more muted than when Trump was indicted on New York campaign finance crimes in March, some Republicans are still standing by the ex-president and calling politically motivated this new federal indictment on mishandling classified documents.

The Michigan Republican Partys only public reaction has been retweeting House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who called Thursday a dark day for the country and claimed without evidence that President Joe Biden influenced the indictment.

I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice, McCarthy wrote. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.

MIGOP chair Kristina Karamo has not spoken publicly about the federal charges but had called Trumps state indictment the weaponization of our government against citizens.

Former Michigan governor candidate Perry Johnson, currently running a longshot presidential campaign, renewed his call Thursday night for Biden to pardon Trump. Johnson has also said he would pardon Trump of any federal charges if hes elected president.

Go deeper: Here are the other investigations involving Donald Trump

Republican congressmen like Bill Huizenga, Tim Walberg and Jack Bergman, who had publicly reacted to Trumps state indictment, have not said anything of the federal case as of publication Friday afternoon.

Neither has Peter Meijer, the former West Michigan congressman who called the New York case fing weak sauce.

On the Democratic side, Michigan U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow tweeted that Trump storing classified documents in a bathroom (according to the unsealed 38-count indictment) amounts to a sshow.

Trump has maintained his innocence in both his state and federal cases. He claimed without evidence on social media after announcing his indictment Thursday that corruption and election interference from the Biden administration is behind the Justice Department special counsel Jack Smiths charges.

Trumps federal charges include obstruction, false statements, conspiracy willful retention of national defense information  a crime under the Espionage Act.

As with the political implications of Trumps New York state case, a federal conviction will not prevent him from running for president or being elected. The U.S. Constitution only requires someone be a natural born citizen, 35 years old and a U.S. resident for 14 years.

A conviction would, however, despite presumably making campaigning behind bars difficult for Trump, set up a situation where can serve as president but cant vote for himself because hed be a felon.

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Nikki Samonas

08.06.2023 LISTEN

Actress Nikki Samonas has sparked pregnancy speculations with her new looks while her followers praise her.

It all started when the Pretty Queen star shared new images of herself on social media looking all chubby and plumpy.

The actress who is known for her petite looks has suddenly cut a chubby and plumpy figure to the surprise of her followers.

These chubby cheeks are only for a short time, ok? Second, bombastic side eye!!!, she wrote on Instagram on June 7 when she shared the new photos.

Nikki comfortably showcased her new looks with a relaxed demeanor. She sat in a way that made it difficult for anyone to see her belly. However, the change in body size is obvious.

She looked like an expectant mother and some followers are convinced it is a pregnancy. This is because she stated in her caption that the new looks were for a short time.

Nikki is one of Ghana's celebrated actresses and she is known for her roles in a number of movies.

Many years ago, she was rumored to have dated actor Ekow Smith Asante but they both denied it at a point. Since then she hasn't been linked to any man publicly.

Currently, it is still not known which man is in her life. Many considered her still single while others believed she is seeing someone just that she knows how to hide her man from the public.

-DGN online
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Monday signed into law a controversial anti-gay bill, his office and the country's parliament said, introducing draconian measures against homosexuality that have been described as among the world's harshest.

Museveni "has assented to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2023. It now becomes the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023," a statement posted on the presidency's official Twitter account said.

Uganda's parliament on Twitter said Museveni had approved a new draft of the legislation that had been passed overwhelmingly this month by lawmakers, who defended the measures as a protection of national culture and values.

The president had called on MPs to rework the bill, although most of the hardline provisions that caused an outcry in the West and warnings of diplomatic repercussions were retained.

The amended version said that identifying as gay would not be criminalised but "engaging in acts of homosexuality" would be an offence punishable with life imprisonment.

Although Museveni had advised lawmakers to delete a provision making "aggravated homosexuality" a capital offence, lawmakers rejected that move, meaning that repeat offenders could be sentenced to death.

Uganda has not resorted to capital punishment for many years.

The United States, European Union and international human rights groups have all condemned the bill, and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk has described it as "probably among the worst of its kind in the world."

But it enjoys broad public support in Uganda, a devout majority-Christian nation, where homosexuals have faced persistent discrimination in recent years, and same-sex relationships have been attacked as an import from the West.

Discussion of the bill in parliament was laced with homophobic slurs, and Museveni himself referred to gay people as "deviants."

'Defending culture'

"As Parliament of Uganda, we have heeded the concerns our people and legislated to protect the sanctity of family," said one of the bill's strongest proponents and Uganda's speaker of parliament, Anita Among, in a statement.

"We have stood strong to defend the Culture, Values and aspirations of our people."

The revamped bill says that "a person who is believed or alleged or suspected of being a homosexual, who has not committed a sexual act with another person of the same sex, does not commit the offence of homosexuality".

The earlier version also required Ugandans to report suspected homosexual activity to the police or face six months' imprisonment.

Lawmakers agreed to amend that provision after Museveni said it risked creating "conflicts in society."

Instead, the reporting requirement pertained only to suspected sexual offences against children and vulnerable people, with the penalty raised to five years in jail.

According to the new draft, anyone who "knowingly promotes homosexuality" faces up to 20 years in jail -- a provision left unchanged from the original bill.

Organisations found guilty of encouraging same-sex activity could face a 10-year ban.

Reaction from civil society in Uganda has been muted following years of erosion of civic space under Museveni's increasingly authoritarian rule.

But internationally, the law provoked outrage.

The European Parliament voted in April to condemn the bill and asked EU states to pressure Museveni into not implementing it, warning that relations with Kampala were at stake.

The White House has also warned the Ugandan government of possible economic repercussions if the legislation takes effect.

Homosexuality was criminalised in Uganda under colonial laws, but there has never been a conviction for consensual same-sex activity since independence from Britain in 1962.
"Anticipate, inform, protect": the French government has presented a 15-point plan to deal with the risk rising temperatures after the summer of 2022 was marked by several extreme heatwaves.

While presenting the government's heatwave plans this Thursday, France's Minister for Ecological Transition, Christophe Bechu declared: "We need to change gear when it comes to adapting to climate change."

"On the one hand, this plan is based on the standardisation and systemic implementation of existing procedures, and on the other, new practices," he explained.

The minister added that the effects of global warming are already being felt in France and an increase in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves between now and 2050 is inevitable."

Bechu underlined that heatwaves affect "all aspects of our economy and daily life," such as health, work, social life, natural resources, forests, and so on.

Heatwaves by 2050

Since 2000, heatwaves in France have been five times more frequent than they were before 1989, and they will be twice as frequent in 30 years' time.

In this respect, 2022 highlighted this trend with more than 1,500 local heat records broken, 33 days of extreme temperatures between the beginning of June and the end of August, and the earliest heatwave ever recorded between 15 and 19 June.

To tackle the problem, the French government is launching a campaign aimed at the general public, outlining the work that needs to be done and the behaviour that should be adopted in the home, as well as "good housekeeping" practices to prevent drowning and look after pets.

A survey of cool spots and fountains in communes will be carried out and presented to the public, and prevention messages will be sent out on transport and by text message in the event of extreme weather.

Emergency measures, registers and guidelines

The electricity network operators RTE and Enedis will be stepping up their monitoring and response resources from this summer  in particular by deploying emergency teams during heat waves and droughts to avoid power cuts.

Vulnerable people will be encouraged to sign up to community registers  that have been in place since a deadly heatwave in 2003 in which approximately 14,000 people died  so that they can be informed and helped in the event of excessive heat.

Annual checks will also be carried out on school buildings, particularly in exam halls.

As far as businesses are concerned, a guide to measures and work designed to improve the temperature in offices will be introduced, while labour inspections will be stepped up in the sectors most vulnerable to heat-related risks.

Finally, a survey of cultural and sporting events  which are also subject to the vagaries of the weather  will be carried out in each departement to encourage them to adapt their organisation in the event of a heatwave.

If extreme weather presents itself, regional the prefects may have to postpone or cancel some events.

Christophe Bechu concluded, "This year, we are not going to wait for a heatwave to arrive before issuing instructions and good practices."
The eight edition of the Armada, the world's largest gathering of tall ships, kicks off on Thursday in Rouen, in western France, and lasts for ten days.

Six million visitors are expected for the Armada which is France's biggest event in terms of visitor numbers on a single site.

In total, 45 tall ships will be present.

They include the traditional three-mast Belem (France), Cuauhtemoc (Mexico) and Dar Mlodziezy (Poland), the frigate Normandie and the terre-neuvas Marite, which is a hundred years old this year. The Bima Suci, an Indonesian ship, will aso be present for the first time.

Over 30 nationalities are represented with nearly 7,000 sailors from all over the world.

Visitors will be able to access the seven kilometres of docks on the city's right and left banks of the Seine.

All the tall ships and naval vessels can be visited - for free - from 10am to 5pm on each day of the event.

'Voiles de la Liberte'

The festival goes back to the early 1980s, when Jean Lecanuet, the then Mayor of Rouen, was looking for an idea to revive the city's docks.

His deputy suggested a race from Rouen to New York to celebrate the centenary of the Statue of Liberty in 1986.

Eight multihulls took part in the race, known as the 'Course de la Liberte. ( The Freedom race)

The 23-metre catamaran Roger et Gallet, skippered by Eric Loizeau and Patrick Tabarly, won the race after sailing to New York in 14 days.

Lecanuet, who was present at the finish of the race was so impressed by the popular success of the rac as a follow up, he created 'The Sails of Freedom' ('Les Voiles de la Liberte'), to celebrate the bicentenary of the French Revolution.

The first edition took place between 9 and 16 July ,1989.

The Armada was given its current name in 1994 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy.
08.06.2023 LISTEN

Ministry of Communications has announced that almost 280,000 merchant SIMs have not been registered, offering fraudsters an opportunity to use them in perpetuating their activities.

The Minister of Communications and Digitalization, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, provided an update on the SIM re-registration exercise in Parliament, stating that all unregistered merchant SIMs will be blocked permanently at the end of June 2023.

I have also been informed that almost 280,000 merchant SIMs have not been registered. A viral video doing the rounds on social media a few weeks ago indicated that some criminal networks have actually acquired merchant SIMs to facilitate fraudulent activities. Let me reiterate once again, that all unregistered merchant SIMs will be blocked permanently at the end of June 2023, she stated.

Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful urged victims of illegal acts to notify the National Communications Authority (NCA) for action to be taken against the perpetrators.

She further advised subscribers who were unable to complete the second stage of the registration process to contact the NCA to have their SIMs registered.

I will urge victims of illegal acts to notify the National Communications Authority (NCA) and action will be taken to deter this process. I have also heard complaints that though they had registered their SIMs, those SIMs were blocked. My information is that several of these complaints are people who didnt complete the second stage of the process as required. Such people should contact the NCA to have their SIMs registered and owners of the SIMs will get their numbers back after duly registration.

She added, They must act timeously as the NCA will announce when this moratorium will end after which all unregistered SIMs will permanently be blocked from the networks. If your line has been blocked, and you still need it, please go and register. There may be however some whose SIMs are blocked inadvertently in full registration. Kindly notify the NCA and a full investigation will be conducted to be determined if this was really the case and why it happened.

The Minister of Communications and Digitalisation announced that Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are working with the Bank of Ghana to facilitate the retrieval of funds for individuals whose monies are locked up in mobile money accounts.

Numerous subscribers have voiced their concerns regarding the inability to access their funds on mobile money accounts after their SIM cards were deactivated for failing to re-register them.

The Minister assured subscribers that the MNOs and the Bank of Ghana are working together to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
EU nations on Thursday reached agreement on a long-stalled revision of the bloc's rules to share the hosting of asylum seekers and migrants more equitably.

Sweden, which holds the bloc's rotating presidency, announced the breakthrough after a fraught day of negotiations between EU interior ministers in Luxembourg.

The deal -- which needed approval from a majority of countries, representing at least 65 percent of the bloc's population -- comes after years of wrangling over the divisive issues of asylum policy.

"These are not easy decisions for everyone around the table, but they are historic decisions," said German interior minister Nancy Faeser.

The proposal tabled at the meeting called for compulsory help between EU countries, but with an option of doing that in one of two ways.

The priority is for EU countries to share the hosting of asylum-seekers, taking in many that arrive in nations on the bloc's outer rim, mainly Greece and Italy.

An initial text said nations that refuse would instead be required to pay a sum of 20,000 euros ($21,000) per person to the countries hosting them.

A preliminary agreement of the EU's 27 members opens the way for negotiations with the European Parliament on legislation that could be adopted before European elections in June next year.

The difficult reform has jumped up the bloc's agenda as the number of asylum seekers rises, after a pause caused by travel restrictions during the Covid pandemic.

'Good balance'

The European Commission put forward its suggestion for a new migration and asylum pact in 2020 based on a quota system.

But that plan quickly hit the buffers after refusals from Hungary, Poland and other countries that objected to any requirement to take them in.

Sweden, which holds the rotating EU presidency until the end of this month, presented two compromise texts: one that called for the hosting-or-cash approach by all member states, and the other on asylum procedures on the EU's external borders.

That second text obliges member states to put in place fast-track procedures at the borders for arrivals from countries deemed as safe in order to facilitate their return.

"These files constitute the two main pillars of the reform of the EU asylum system and is key to a good balance between responsibility and solidarity," the Swedish presidency tweeted.

But Oxfam, a charity that aids refugees, has criticised the direction of the talks as EU countries take harsher steps to stem asylum seekers.

It argued prior to the final negotiations that the proposals "will not fix the chronic deficiencies in the EU asylum system".

"Instead, they signal the EU's desire to barricade Europe from asylum seekers," Oxfam said.
A 23-year-old labourer, Isyaku Lawal, has been arrested by the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) in Jigawa State for allegedly sodomizing a nine-year-old boy.

The incident, which occurred in Chiromari village, Malam Madori LGA in Nigeria, was reported to the NSCDC by the victim's father after his daughter, an elder sister to the victim, informed him of the abuse.

According to the complaint lodged by the father, the victim was taken to an isolated place by the suspect while playing with his friends in the evening.

The suspect removed the boy's trousers and had canal knowledge of him, after which he warned him not to tell anyone and promised to buy him sweets, a promise which he failed to fulfil.

The victim later disclosed the incident to his sister due to the unfulfilled promise, who also informed their father.

Medical examinations conducted at the Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC) at General Hospital Dutse showed repeated rectal penetrations and bruises in the anal area, confirming the sexual abuse.

The NSCDC commandant in Jigawa State, who confirmed the incident in a statement shared on their Facebook page, said the suspect has confessed to the crime and will be charged to court of competent jurisdiction to expedite justice.

The command also urged parents and guardians to be vigilant and protect their children from sexual predators.

Read a full copy of the security agencys statement as copied to ModernGhana News below;

NIGERIA SECURITY AND CIVIL DEFENCE CORPS (NSCDC).

JIGAWA STATE COMMAND.

7th June, 2023.

PRESS RELEASE

TWENTY THREE YEAR OLD ARRESTED ON A SUSPECTED CASE OF SODOMY

Operatives of Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, Jigawa Command, on Sunday, 4th day of June, 2023, arrested one Isyaku Lawal (Dan Babani), a labourer by occupation, aged Twenty Three (23) of Chiromari village, Malam Madori LGA for allegedly sodomizing a nine (9) year old boy (name withheld) of same address which is contrary to section 284 of the PCL of Jigawa State and punishable under same.

The arrest was prompted upon receipt of a complaint lodged by the father of the victim, who stated that his daughter, an elder Sister to the victim, reported to him that her sibling was sexually abused by the suspect.

Upon questioning, the boy stated that he was taken to an isolated place in the evening while he was playing alongside his friends by the suspect who removed his trousers and had canal knowledge of him, thereafter urged him not to tell anyone and promised to buy him sweets, a promise which he failed to fulfil and which made him to expose the incident to his Sister.

Meanwhile, medical examinations conducted at Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC) at General Hospital Dutse shows repeated rectal penetrations and bruises in the anal area.

Suspect has confessed to the crime and will be charged to court of competent jurisdiction to expedite justice.

Signed:

CSC Adamu Shehu, fcism.

Command Public Relations Officer.

For: State Commandant.


As of late Friday morning, the Air Quality Index was showing marked improvement over the truly unhealthy levels reached Wednesday, which began to fade during Thursday. For those of you with chronic lung disease or high sensitivity, this is a particularly good link to bookmark, from the U.S. EPA and other scientific partners.

Ask Don Paul: Is there a link between smoky skies and climate change? "It is most likely that we are seeing a blend of extreme weather events being multiplied and exacerbated by the human activity-caused warming climate," writes Don Paul.

With so much actual cloud cover now obscuring our region up north into Quebec, what smoke is left is hard to discern on GOES satellite imagery. In Friday upper air analysis, the nearly stationary low pressure system  which is in a blocking pattern that has kept it in place for days  has undergone just enough westward drifting to place the main steering winds for the Quebec smoke to be displaced more to the west and south.

This small shift is reflected in lessened near surface smoke density in Western New York shown in the National Weather Service HRRR model. During late Friday afternoon, modeled concentrations are down significantly.

However, we dont yet have a completely clean bill of health. Smoke levels will rise modestly Friday night, but fortunately decline again during Saturday, as modeled.

Concentrations remain at the low end of the scale into Sunday. It is safe to say for now, the worst of this serious air pollution episode is over.

There has been no measurable rain in Buffalo since May 20. Our abnormally dry status has broadened this week in the U.S. Drought Monitor, with some moderate drought conditions showing up closer to the state line.

Spotty Friday and Friday evening showers will end up being insufficient to make any kind of a dent in the overall moisture shortfall for most of the region.

Any rainfall will at least dampen dry vegetation into Saturday. But caution is advised for campers this weekend. Any outdoor burning could present a brushfire hazard, even though no elevated fire danger status is in effect.

Ask Don Paul: Is El Nino adding fuel to the global warming flame? There is broad scientific consensus that the world has only a few years in which to act to lessen the severity of climate change impacts yet to come, writes Don Paul.

Saturday will be a partly to mostly sunny day with milder temperatures. The afternoon high will range from around 70 at the Lake Erie shoreline, adjacent to 60-degree Lake Erie, to the mid 70s inland. A southwest breeze of 12-18 mph by afternoon will bring wave heights up to 2 feet on Lake Erie. The breeze will be lighter over Lake Ontario, keeping waves at about 1 foot.

On Sunday, clouds will increase, with mild and tranquil conditions.

The afternoon high will reach the mid-to-upper 70s. For outdoor activities, you may want to keep the DEET repellants handy, as a light wind will make humans easier prey for mosquitoes. Wave heights on both lakes should average around 1 foot. By later in the day, it is possible that a few spotty showers will begin to work their way in to our region, ahead of the main surge of some needed rainfall to our southwest.

It is later Sunday evening into early Monday when our best rainfall potential in weeks should be realized, along with some scattered thunderstorms. A center of low pressure will bring more abundant moisture and humidity, and will muggify our region into Monday.

During Monday, with the low nearly overhead, the more widespread showers and thunderstorms will tend to thin out in coverage, giving us some rain-free periods and somewhat humid conditions, with temperatures in the low-to-mid 70s. A blend of all the models puts out fairly impressive rainfall totals into Tuesday afternoon, with the low sticking around nearby to our northwest.

It is important to keep in mind that summertime convective cells producing this rainfall have a tendency to be quite uneven in coverage. The blended model output may end up being overstated in many locations due to its lower resolution. Nonetheless, the pattern flip should afford us some real improvement in our topsoil moisture.

Limited sunshine with a few scattered showers will be the scene for Tuesday and Wednesday, with slightly below average highs closer to 70 (average is now up to 74). Drier high pressure will filter in for Thursday and Friday, returning warmer temperatures and more abundant sunshine.

Ask Don Paul: Does a stronger El Nino change our summer outlook? There are "a lack of strong signals for cooler than average temperatures prevailing in Western New York this summer," Don Paul writes.

In the extended range, model ensembles support an upper air pattern that favors average to slightly above average temperatures by the following weekend and the next week.

We will need more rainfall than were going to receive Sunday night and early next week. Rainfall potential is very uncertain in this more distant timeframe.

El Nino is strengthening

El Nino in the eastern tropical Pacific has shown signs of rapid strengthening, and evidence is growing that it will become a moderate to uncommon strong El Nino, with greater impacts around the globe.

Westerly winds across the Pacific are what push the warmer waters toward South America, to the extent that sea levels are actually rising beyond the mean sea levels (which have already risen due to climate change). In addition, warmer water expands in volume, adding to the sea level rise augmented by the pushing westerlies.

El Ninos tend to increase disruptive wind shear over the Atlantic hurricane basin, which would ordinarily reduce the total number of tropical cyclones during the summer and fall. However, very large warm anomalies in sea surface and near surface temperatures are already in place in the southwest Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf waters. Such a heat and moisture source can energize and intensify tropical cyclones, so we have two opposing variables that will impact the Atlantic hurricane season. That is making most tropical meteorologists split the difference at this point, forecasting an average hurricane season, compared to the recent stretch of above average years.

A strong El Nino will put lots of additional oceanic heat into the atmosphere into next year, and will likely send the rate of global warming spiking toward record levels. The European/ECMWF El Nino forecast projects an exceptional El Nino, though not all models are in agreement.

Even though the impacts from a strong El Nino wont be permanent, its added heat will make the task of mitigating the rate of global warming (by lessening greenhouse gas emissions) all the more difficult to accomplish. Most climate scientists agree that humanity has only a small window of years to steer the warming away from worst case scenarios later this century to more manageable impacts. Nature is not making this huge task any easier.
08.06.2023 LISTEN

The ECOWAS Commission held a virtual meeting on Tuesday, May 30, 2023, with the National Committees of the Community Development Program (NC-CDP).

The main objective of the meeting was to revitalize the activities of the CDP with the NC-CDP. It provided an opportunity to review the implementation of the CDP within the ECOWAS Commission, present the Terms of Reference for the CDP review, and discuss the projects for establishing a database and developing a long-term impact analysis model for development agendas. It also served as a platform to remind the CN-CDP of their role and the modalities for utilizing the financial support from ECOWAS.

Dr. Zonon, the Coordinator of the CDP, delivered the opening remarks on behalf of the Vice President of the Commission, welcoming the representatives of the Member States.

As a reminder, the CDP was adopted in 2014 during the 45th Ordinary Session of the EGA in Accra, Ghana, with 230 projects from all major development areas, totaling a cost of 49 billion US dollars. It was designed as the region's flagship program for achieving the Vision 2020. It serves as a comprehensive and coherent framework for regional development, like the national development programs at the Member State level.

Since 2014, the main activities of the CDP include project preparation in collaboration with the relevant project departments, project promotion, and the organization of an investment forum for project financing. Although resource mobilization for CDP financing has faced challenges, notable progress has been made in the projects.

However, the adoption of the Vision 2050 in 2021 requires the revision of the CDP to align it with the region's new directions. The meeting discussed the CDP revision process and its roadmap. It also made recommendations, including alternative options for resource mobilization, increased involvement of the NC-CDP in the revision process, and coordination of resource mobilization activities with UEMOA to avoid duplication of efforts.

The ECOWAS Commission remains committed to supporting coordination activities with the National Committees of the Community Development Program (NC-CDP) and encourages Member States and all stakeholders to work together to achieve the objectives of the CDP and contribute to the acceleration of regional integration and sustainable development in West Africa.
In keeping with pillar one of the Pro-poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development, the ardent development mantra of the George Weah-led government, which gives power to the people and under which education and training are enshrined, the Youth League of the ruling Coalition for Democratic Change has commenced a two-day training workshop that is focused on political education, leadership, and empowerment.

The CDC Youth League headed by its erudite Chairman, Emmanuel Mulbah Johnson, believes that in order for young people to have the ability and critical awareness skills to influence positive change in a political system, there is a need to have the requisite training and knowledge on youth empowerment and political participation. With this, he is cognizant that these young people will have a sense of identity and collective interest so as to become critical component of political leadership and nation building.

The training workshop which commenced on Thursday, June 8, at the Headquarters of the Coalition for Democratic Change, witnessed the influx of cabinet officials, and heads and members of fourteen different auxiliary groups registered under the Youth League.

Meanwhile, the workshop opened with a welcome address and opening statement from the Youth Chairman Hon. Emmanuel Mulbah Johnson.

Assistant Gender Minister for Administration Hon. Mamensie Kabba, served as the workshops first speaker and made a presentation on the topic Understanding Political Leadership and Growing Your Leadership Influence.

During her presentation, Hon. Kabba talked about the qualities of a good political leader and stressed the need for good leadership among young people in politics.

On the other hand, Hon. Eddie Tarawali, Assistant Justice Minister for Correction and Rehabilitation, who served as the second speaker during the workshop, spoke on the topic Empowering Liberian Youth to take Ownership of their own Destiny. Hon. Tarawali motivated young people to take ownership and encouraged them to utilize new opportunities.

After their presentation, both Hon. Tarawali and Hon. Kabba were quizzed by the workshop attendees during the question and answer session of the training.

The workshop will empower these young people with the tools for their growth and development and provide them with the knowledge, resources, and skills they need to become active citizens and leaders in their communities and make their voices heard in the decision-making process of the country.

In addition, the workshop will help them get more engaged in peace building and strengthening security, as well as building a stronger democracy by increasing voter turnout, promoting civic education, and also encouraging them to take leadership roles locally and nationally.

The second phase of the workshop will be held on Friday, June 9 and will also end the same day. Other officials of government such as Hon. Williametta Piso Saydee-Tarr, Gender Minister and His Lordship Jefferson T. Koijee, Mayor of Monrovia will serve as speakers.
09.06.2023 LISTEN

The chiefs and people of Nogokpo in the Volta Region have hit back at evangelist Patricia Asiedu, popularly known as Nana Agradaa, for threatening them over their feud with Archbishop Charles Agyinasare.

Nana Agradaa had warned Nogokpo to stop threatening Archbishop Agyinasare, who she referred to as her "father for describing the town as a demonic headquarters.

But in a social media post on Thursday, June 8, Nogokpo said Nana Agradaa's threats were empty and unnecessary.

"Who is Agradaa, the one who cant even give credit to the talismans given her against accidents? The funny one who quickly switched from a comic money doubler to an Evangelist? the post read in part.

It accused Nana Agradaa of duping people in the name of money doubling, urging her to direct her threats at the town's deities - Torgbui Zakadza and Torgbui Adzima - " and not a name of our town called Nogokpo.

The post added: "'A church that sales Penis enlargement medicine and you want your words to be taken serious?' For your own good, do not climb on someones mistake."

It noted that all the town's chiefs and elders wanted was for Archbishop Agyinasare to clear their name "for peace to reign. Theres no spiritual battle here."

The post concluded, "ZAKADZA and ADZIMA are all deities with justice and truth...Everyone faces the consequences not even the chief priest and priestesses are spared."
Deep in South Africa's semi-desert Karoo region, a glittery weekly drag show in an old hilltop hotel brings a burst of excitement to a sleepy conservative town.

Every Saturday night, Mark Hinds and Jacques Rabie, the owners of the Karroo Theatrical Hotel, amaze their guests with a night-long cabaret and drag show in the small town of Steytlerville in the Eastern Cape.

The show, called "The Steytlerville Follies", stars the couple in their flamboyant stage alter egos -- the desert diva Dame Leyla Lamborghini and the piano maestro Freddy Ferrari.

"If you tell somebody that there is a drag show happening in the middle of absolutely nowhere... every single Saturday night, that creates curiosity," Hinds told AFP as he added the final touches to the set.

The show, which the organisers described as a rollercoaster of emotions, from outrageously funny to nostalgic, is "packed out every Saturday night". By Michele Spatari (AFP)

A grand piano sat on the stage against the backdrop of bright pink party foil curtains, feathers and disco lights as around 20 guests took their seats in the dimly candle-lit hotel restaurant.

In his dressing room, minutes before the show began, Rabie recalled how "it was difficult" to begin with to put on the show in the region of mountains and wild expanses best known for ostrich farming.

"But after a while more people like us, more gay people... moved in and it became more acceptable in town," he said as he put on his make-up.

Welcomed by his partner on stage, Rabie, wearing a blonde bob wig, high heels and a glittery pink corset dress ripped off his pink feather tutu skirt as he broke into song and dance.

For show-goer Lara Engelbrecht-Wilbraham, the performance was "classy and beautiful". Celebrating her birthday, it was only the second time in her life that she had attended a drag show.

The 44-year-old who sells solar energy products brought her partner and two friends.

"If you tell somebody that there is a drag show happening in the middle of absolutely nowhere... every single Saturday night, that creates curiosity". By Michele Spatari (AFP)

The show, which the organisers described as a rollercoaster of emotions, from outrageously funny to nostalgic, is "packed out every Saturday night", said Hinds.

"One of the biggest things that draws people here is curiosity, having heard about something that they have never heard before, that they would have never thought possible," he added.
The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) has formed a team of 9 senior officers to engage with the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) regarding access to the Integrated Customs Management System (ICUMS).

The OSP had requested access to GRA's operational systems in a May 2 letter, citing Section 73 of the OSP Act, 2017 (Act 959) which directs public institutions to cooperate with investigations.

In a memo dated May 30 and seen by ModernGhana News, the ICUMS Project Manager said "In order to engage with the OSP to understand the aspects of the operational system they require access to; the following officers have been nominated..."

The nominated officers include IT specialists, legal experts and those from the customs divisions at Tema and KIA.

Emmanuel Ohene, the Deputy Commissioner of Suspense at ICUMS will head the delegation.

The memo stated, "The scope of the engagement will centre around: Manifest Arrival and release, Revenue Compliance, ICUMS access.

It added that the meeting with OSP will take place on Thursday, May 25 at the OSP premises in Accra from 0800 hours.

Find full copies of the Memo below;
A 10-year-old girl, name placed on ice, was allegedly defiled by her teacher and two male cousins, aged 11 and 13, who reportedly took turns to abuse her, a Nigeria-based Punch Newspaper reports.

The victims mother and the mothers of the two boys, per the report, were also arraigned for conspiracy.

The incident, which took place in the Ikotun area of Lagos State, Nigeria, in 2021, was hidden by the two mothers, according to the prosecutors account.

The defendants were arraigned before a Magistrate Court on charges of defilement and conspiracy.

The teacher, Taofeek Davies, was said to have raped the victim in his house.

The case was held inside the chamber due to the age of the two boys.

The prosecutor, Thomas Nurudeen, told the court that the two mothers concealed the crime.

The defendants were charged with contravening Sections 137 and 263 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State of Nigeria, 2015.

The magistrate admitted the two women to bail in the sum of N200,000 each with two responsible sureties.

He remanded the teacher for 30 days, while releasing the two boys to their father with a warning that he must make them available in court.

The case was adjourned till July 7, 2023.
The Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) has extended its investigation into the activities and expenditure of the defunct Inter-Ministerial Committee Against Illegal Mining (IMCIM) by interrogating two more persons.

Horace Ekow Ewusi, the immediate past 1st Vice-Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the Central Region, and Seth Mantey, a Journalist with Accra-based Peace FM, were both arrested and questioned as part of the ongoing probe.

The interrogation of Ekow Ewusi and Seth Mantey occurred following the recent questioning of Prof. Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, the former Chairman of the IMCIM, by the Special Prosecutor.

IMCIM was responsible for addressing the issue of illegal mining in the country, and Prof. Frimpong-Boateng compiled a report highlighting various individuals involved in illegal mining activities, including Ekow Ewusi and Mantey.

According to sources, Ekow Ewusi and Mantey were interviewed, cautioned, and subsequently granted bail.

Their involvement in the IMCIMs activities and expenditure is being scrutinized in light of the bombshell report submitted by Prof. Frimpong-Boateng to the Presidency.

Further investigations by the OSP are expected to involve more individuals who were mentioned in the report.

The Special Prosecutor intends to summon them for questioning in the coming weeks to gather more information about the expenditure and operations of the IMCIM.

In a related development, Charles Bissue, the former Secretary to the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM), has taken legal action to prevent the OSP from prosecuting him.

Bissue filed a writ at the High Court in Accra on Thursday, June 8, seeking to halt the ongoing investigation into alleged corruption within the IMCIM, particularly concerning Prof. Kwabena Frimpong Boateng.

The lawsuit filed by Bissue is the latest development in the high-profile investigation, which has garnered significant attention in Ghana. The OSP is determined to thoroughly examine the allegations and ensure that all individuals involved in any wrongdoing are held accountable.

-citinewsroom
French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed his former foreign minister as his personal envoy to Lebanon to try to break the political deadlock in the country, a year after his own efforts to do so failed.

Macron led international efforts to resolve the political and economic crisis in Lebanon that intensified after a massive explosion in Beirut in 2020 that killed more than 200 people.

But after nearly four years, France failed to push politicians to reconcile their differences and carry out economic reforms that would unlock foreign aid.

After 11 parliamentary votes to try to name a successor to President Michel Aoun, whose term ended at the end of October, Lebanon still has no head of state, and living standards for most Lebanese have plummeted over the last year.

On Wednesday, Macron appointed Jean-Yves Le Drian, who served as foreign minister from 2017-2022, to try to find ways out of the political deadlock.

"In the spirit of friendship that binds France to Lebanon, the President of the Republic continues to act in favour of a solution to the institutional crisis and the implementation of the reforms necessary for the recovery of this country," the French presidency said in a statement.

France, Lebanon's former colonial ruler, retains some sway, but other powers have influence, notably Saudi Arabia, with members of Lebanon's Sunni community, and Iran, which backs the Lebanon-based Shiite movement Hezbollah.

Considered a political heavyweight, Le Drian is a former Socialist lawmaker and served as defence minister for five years under President Francois Hollande between 2012-2017.

As foreign minister, Le Drian had been in charge of implementing several of Macron's initiatives for Lebanon.

His appointment is likely to undermine current Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, a former ambassador, but political novice.

(with newswires)
Member of Parliament for Bawku Central, Mahama Ayariga, has disclosed that Parliament will write to the Supreme Court to demand an explanation of its ruling directing the House to expunge ousted Member of Parliament for Assin North, James Gyakye Quayson, from its records.

Speaker of the House, Alban Bagbin, raised concerns about the interpretation of the apex courts May 17 ruling directing Parliament to expunge Quaysons name from its records.

Speaking in an interview on Eyewitness News on Citi FM, Mr. Ayariga stressed the different implications of the ruling, which he said is likely to affect the functions of Parliament.

When you say that something should be expunged, it has a number of implications. So the Speaker is asking what it really means. Does it mean that everything that Gyakye Quayson ever contributed to in the House does not exist? That is why the Speaker wanted to know the meaning of the ruling, he said.

Mr. Ayariga further indicated that a clarification from the Supreme Court will satisfy the curiosity of Ghanaians who are longing to get an understanding of the courts ruling.

If we assume that the directive given by the Speaker is the position of the House, then yes, the Speaker has directed that the Supreme Court be written to explain what they meant by we should expunge Gyakye Quaysons name from the Houses records.

The Supreme Court is clear about the nullification of Quaysons election. It is the consequential order that they have given that is the subject of some misunderstanding by the Speaker. So the issue of the nullification of his election is not what we are discussing here, he added.

-citinewsroom
At the edge of an oasis almost engulfed by the dunes, where the rare caravan still passes, is a desert landscape punctured by holes.

The salt pans of Kalala, near Bilma in northeastern Niger, were once an essential stop for traders with their swaying lines of camels.

Salt digging, carried on from generation to generation, was a thriving business, involving a commodity so precious that it was bought and sold across the Sahara and beyond.

Today, in this isolated desert region plagued by armed gangs and smugglers, the diggers struggle to survive.

Over centuries, hundreds of pits have been dug by hand and then filled with water to leach salt from the local rock.

Caravans still stop at Bilma for trading, but are far rarer these days. By Souleymane Ag Anara (AFP)

Standing in the black- and ochre pits, Ibrahim Tagaji and a colleague were wrestling with a crowbar to harvest the bounty -- a method of extraction that essentially remains unchanged over time.

A blisteringly hot day, when the temperatures reached 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) in the shade, was coming to a close.

Barefoot in brine swimming with crystals, the two men dug out salty chunks and pounded them into grains, which were then scooped out with a gourd.

They then poured the salt into moulds made from date palms, forming slabs that were then ready for sale.

A trader in Bilma arranges salt slabs -- these ones are destined for animal consumption. By Souleymane Ag Anara (AFP)

It is punishingly hard work, rewarded by an income that fluctuates according to whichever buyers happen to pass through town.

"When someone with money comes, you earn a lot," said Tagaji between shovelfuls. "Otherwise, it's a lot of work and the money's poor."

But the local economy offers few alternatives and roughly half of Bilma's population still works in the pits, according to local officials.

"As soon as you drop out of school, you have to work here," said Omar Kosso, a veteran of the industry.

"Every family has its own salt pan. You are with your wife, your children, you come and work."

'The world has changed'

The camel caravans still stop over in Bilma, where the vast majority of residents live in traditional houses with walls of salt and clay drawn from nearby quarries.

Kiari Abari Chegou, descendant of a long line of chieftains who oversee the salt trade, poses with his ceremonial sword at his palace in Bilma. By Souleymane Ag Anara (AFP)

An individual called the "mai" is the traditional authority here, determining who gets which area to dig and setting the sale price.

Kiari Abari Chegou comes from a long line of chiefs, each of whom has handed down to his successor the office and its attributes: a ritual sword and a parchment leather war drum.

There is also the white flag covered with surahs, the same one displayed by his grandfather in an old black-and-white photo from the early 1920s pinned to the wall of the family home.

As mai, Abari Chegou promotes the virtues of the locally produced salt.

"Sea salt has to be iodized to avoid deficiencies," he said. "Our salt is 90 percent iodized, so we can eat it directly without risking getting sick."

Unfortunately for Bilma, however, the world outside has changed.

"In the past, the caravans came -- the Daza, the Hausa, the Tuareg," he said, reeling off some of ethnic groups in the region. "Now it's not like before."

The Tuareg traders, for instance, gradually gave up their nomadic way of life to settle, farming the fertile foothills of the nearby Air mountains in the north.

The official flag of local chieftain Kiari Abari Chegou, who oversees the salt trade in Bilma. The flag has been handed down from generation to generation for two centuries, he says. By Souleymane Ag Anara (AFP)

"You make more money like that than tiring yourself out spending 10 days travelling to get to Bilma, then 10 days back," Abari Chegou acknowledged.

It made more sense to buy a slab of salt for 2,000 CFA francs ($3.25) in Agadez, the regional capital 550 kilometres (350 miles) away, than to travel all the way to Bilma to bargain for it at a third of the price, he said.

Black market

The desert journey is as dangerous as it is tough.

Niger. By (AFP)

The Kawar oasis borders Chad and Libya, a country ravaged by a civil war since 2011, and traffickers and other criminals take advantage of the region's porous borders.

That means that people travel in the region armed and, where possible, in convoys under military escort to guard against attacks.

"The bandits stop our trucks, they take our phones and money and then they let us through," said a driver who gave his name as Ahmed and was about to set off with sacks of salt.

Salt worker Omar Kosso said that customers were hard-bargaining merchants, passing traders or traffickers.

Desert track: A truck bearing food and cattle feed heads towards the Libyan border. By Souleymane Ag Anara (AFP)

"We don't have good customers," he said.

All of that means that offers are difficult to refuse for the people in this poor region.

The European Union did pay for several trucks, in an bid to open up the salt-producing municipalities.

But the fleet of vehicles succumbed to the heat, the rugged roads and squabbles between members of the local cooperative.

Abari Chegou, the chief, said he dreamt of a "well-knit" cooperative that could buy vehicles and have a place to store production to help buttress prices.

In the meantime, he waited for the lonely caravans that passed between the dunes.
Hamburg Central School District leaders planned to file disciplinary charges against the districts assistant superintendent of administrative services and finance before accepting her resignation.

Barbara Sporyz resigned for purposes of retirement April 15, after being placed on paid administrative leave last Nov. 21.

Under her separation agreement, she is receiving more than $200,000 in compensation. She would have received less than $100,000 in compensation had she retired without an agreement.

Superintendent Michael Cornell declined to say why Sporyz was placed on leave, or why the district intended to file disciplinary action against her.

It would not be appropriate for me to share the details of any personnel matter, Cornell told The News last week.

The district informed Sporyz that it intended to prefer disciplinary charges under state Education Law, according to the separation agreement, which The Buffalo News obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request.

Sporyz denied any wrongdoing, and the two parties opted for the separation agreement to resolve any and all disagreements, disputes or claims arising out of Ms. Sporyzs employment with the district, according to the agreement.

Neither the district nor Sporyz admit any liability or unlawful conduct, the agreement states. There also is a nondisparagement clause, with each side agreeing they will not disparage or denigrate each other.

Sporyz also served as district clerk and was in charge of creating the annual budget, as well as other administrative duties.

Under her employment contract, she was paid an annual salary of $165,930 this school year, which includes a 2% longevity bonus. Upon her retirement, she was entitled to $31,200 for accumulated sick days and $34,569 for accumulated vacation days that could be put into a reserve account to pay for health care premiums. She also would have received $5,531 for eight other vacation days, for a total of $71,300 in compensation.

Her contract also called for the district to pay 75% of the health care premium for Sporyz, 58, and her husband, 63, until they become eligible for Medicare at age 65.

Under the separation agreement, Sporyz will be paid $52,544 in severance, the amount she would have earned from her retirement date until June 30. The district will put a total of $119,750 into her 403 (b) retirement account over the next three years. She also will have $34,569 in unused vacation put into a reserve for health care premiums and $5,531 for eight other vacation days, which is what was in her employment contract, bringing the compensation package to $212,000.

The district also will pay 75% of health care premiums until she and her husband become eligible for Medicare.

Sporyz declined to comment on her separation from the district. She was hired as director of administrative services in Hamburg in 2011, and was named assistant superintendent in 2014.

Douglas Whelan, a retired superintendent, was appointed interim assistant superintendent of administrative services and finance Nov. 28. He receives $700 per day, or $98,000 through June 30.

The district hired a new school business administrator, Christine Ljungberg, who will join the Hamburg district in July.

Cornell said the district does not plan to add an assistant superintendent for administrative services and finance.

Filing disciplinary charges against an assistant superintendent with tenure is often a lengthy, expensive process.

In Williamsville, former assistant superintendent for human resources Kim A. Kirsch was placed on leave in mid-2014, and the School Board lodged charges against her four months later. There were 49 days of hearings over the next three years, culminating with a hearing officers decision to remove her in 2017. The superintendent estimated it cost the district $500,000 in legal fees, in addition to the salaries of the assistant on leave and the interim assistant superintendent.
Parliament of Ghana in collaboration with the Forestry Commission would, today, Friday, 9 June 2023 hold a short exercise within the precinct of Parliament to commemorate the 2023 Green Ghana Day.

The Speaker of Parliament, Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin will lead Members of Parliament and the Parliamentary Service Staff to plant about 300 tree seedlings at Parliament House, the official residence of the Speaker, Deputy Speakers, Leaders village, Clerk-to -Parliament among others.

Considering the importance of this national exercise, the Speaker will suspend sitting today to enable Members of Parliament to join their various constituents to plant trees in the towns, communities and villages in their constituencies, a statement signed by David Sebastian Damoah, Director, Media Relation said.

The Speaker, Members of Parliament and entire staff of the Parliamentary Service will participate fully in the national exercise.

This years edition of the Green Ghana Day exercise is being marked on the theme: Our Forests, Our Health with a target to plant at least 10 million tree seedlings across the country.

The nationwide exercise is part of an aggressive afforestation and reforestation agenda to restore degraded forest landscape and to contribute to global efforts to fight climate change.

Parliament says it sees the preservation and protection of the forest as a collective responsibility as a nation.

In view of this, Parliament is calling on state agencies, institutions, faith-based organisations and members of the general public to demonstrate their patriotism by actively participating in the tree planting exercise.

-Classfmonline.com
09.06.2023 LISTEN

Popular broadcast journalist, Johnnie Hughes has voiced his concerns about the failure of government to tackle the challenges in the School Feeding Programme in the country.

He said government should have focused on tackling the issue rather than embarking on tree planting initiatives.

Hughes said, Green Ghana Project: over 1,000 seedlings dumped in garbage bins at Asante Mampongwhat happened in this matter? In Oti Region, a Regional Minister had to let the trees that had been planted by NDC members to celebrate June 4 anniversary be removed.

These were not seedlings sourced with Ghanas money. The Ashanti Mampong seedlings were bought with our taxes and were abandoned there. What was ordered by the Oti Regional Minister to be uprooted after they had been planted is by a political party," he added.

Citing Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the broadcast journalist emphasized that the fundamental necessities of life, which include food, clothing and shelter should be prioritized.

During the Johnnies Bite show on 3FM on Friday, June 9, Mr Hughes said, Maslows Hierarchy of Needs 1943 says basic necessaries of life; food, clothing and shelter. Trees will provide shelter but the children's first priority is food.

Expressing his frustration, Mr Hughes also raised concern that the GHS1.20 increased per child was insufficient to adequately provide nutritious meals to the children.

He asked, How much were we planning to give the school feeding caterers to feed the children? GHC1.20p? From 97 pesewas to GHC1.20p.

Mr Hughes described the authorities as "shameless" for not addressing the pressing needs of Ghanaians.

Were just a shameless lot of people. Were shamelesswere interested in the PR of things, he expressed.
Geneva, 9 June 2023: Press Emblem Campaign (PEC), the global media safety and rights body, expresses concern over the missing of Pakistan journalist and political commentator Imran Riaz Khan for weeks after his arrest at Sialkot international airport and urged the federal government in Islamabad to launch a probe to get his whereabouts at the earliest.

The 47 years old scribes family members informed that he was flying to Oman after their Lahore-based house was raided by the police in the second week of May and subsequently Khan was arrested. Later the police informed the family members that he was released on 11 May itself after some hours of detention. But he has neither returned home till date nor contacted the family members.

A Pak minister publicly stated that Khan was kidnapped by miscreants and the government was looking for the perpetrators. He indirectly questioned the identity of Khan as a journalist terming him a political party spokesperson (inclined to former Pak Prime Minister Imran Khan and his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf).

We condemn the abduction of Khan and demand his urgent release. The Islamabad regime should look into the matter seriously and inform the family members on his whereabouts. The authorities must ensure that no physical harm will be done to the scribe, said Blaise Lempen, president of PEC (https://pressemblem.ch/pec-news.shtml), adding that Khan should be produced in a court if he has committed any crime.

PEC south Asia representative Nava Thakuria informs that Pakistan continues to be a dangerous country for scribes and it lost television scribe Imtiaz Baig in Jhelum locality on 4 May last. During 2022, the country lost seven journalists (Sadaf Naeem, Arshad Sharif, Muhammad Younis, Iftikhar Ahmed, Hasnain Shah, Murtaza Shar and Athar Mateen) in different brutal incidents.
09.06.2023 LISTEN

CAPE TOWN, South Africa, --

The African Energy Chamber this week announced the annual Energy Scholarship Award under efforts to expand the participation of youth in the energy sector.

AEC said,"We are thrilled to announce the launch of the AEC African Energy Education Fund, an annual program aimed at supporting young individuals across Africa who are pursuing undergraduate studies in oil, gas and energy-related fields. The application cycle for the scholarship award runs from June 2023 to 31 August 2023, and the recipients will be announced at African Energy Week 2023, the AECs premier event for Africas energy sector."

According to expert opinion, the funds come at a critical time when Africa is witnessing rapid advancements in gas and renewable energy, presenting immense opportunities for economic growth and environmental sustainability.

"Recognizing the importance of harnessing these opportunities and equipping the next generation with the necessary knowledge and skills, we are committed to providing financial aid and educational resources to talented African students from South Africa to Egypt, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Namibia and across Africa pursuing studies in energy-related fields, added the AEC.

Also revealed is that through strategic partnerships with educational institutions, the Chamber will offer scholarships, grants, and mentorship programs to deserving students on the continent and those studying in the diaspora.

And this holistic approach to support aims to nurture the brightest minds in the energy sector, enabling them to contribute effectively to the continent's energy transition and project development landscape.

By investing in education and professional development, the Fund aims to create a new generation of skilled professionals who will contribute to Africa's energy transformation and project development including gas, nuclear, hydrogen and other renewable energies projects, noted the Chamber.

Moreover, according to reports, as an organization dedicated to improving the African energy sector and fostering a sustainable energy future for the continent, the Chamber recognizes the importance of investing in youth and supporting heightened participation and excellence. The Chamber firmly believes that the younger generation plays a pivotal role in shaping the industry and driving its development. Therefore, it is committed to supporting and empowering young individuals who demonstrate academic excellence and a passion for contributing to the energy sector.

According to the Chamber, the AEC Energy Education Fund 2023 recognizes and rewards 8 exceptional students, with special consideration given to female students. To be eligible for the award, applicants must under 35 years old and enrolled in undergraduate/postgraduate level studies in any oil, gas or energy-related field. The selection process will primarily be based on academic excellence, ensuring that recipients have demonstrated exceptional performance in their studies.

In addition to the recognition and prestige associated with the AEC Energy Scholarship Award, the recipients will receive financial support ranging from $5,000 to $10,000. This funding is intended to ease the financial burden of pursuing higher education and enable the scholars to focus on their studies and professional development in the energy sector.

Furthermore, the awardees will be given a unique opportunity to attend and actively participate in the youth forum at AEW 2023, representing the biggest gathering of energy stakeholders on the continent and taking place in Cape Town from 16-20 October 2023.

This forum serves as a platform for young professionals to engage with industry leaders, share insights, and exchange ideas on the future of the African energy sector. The event itself provides unparalleled networking opportunities for up and coming entrepreneurs, allowing delegates to make key connections that will fast-track careers and contributions. The recipients of the AEC Energy Scholarship Award will gain invaluable engagement opportunities, exposure to industry trends, and the chance to contribute to meaningful discussions that shape the future of energy in Africa, said the Chamber.

Speaking about the Fund, Oneyka Cindy Ojogbo, an advisory board member of the Chamber and Fund manager commented that the Energy Education Fund holds great promise for both students and Africa as a whole. By investing in the education and professional development of African students in the energy sector, we are fostering a new generation of skilled professionals who will play a crucial role in driving Africa's energy transformation. This fund not only empowers students to realize their full potential but also bolsters Africa's capacity to meet the increasing demands of sustainable and new energy infrastructure and project development to improve energy access."

The application process for the AEC Energy Scholarship Award 2023 is officially open and interested candidates are encouraged to visit the AECs official website or contact [email protected] for further details and application guidelines.

When we empower the next generation of energy leaders, we empower Africa. We believe that by empowering young individuals with knowledge and financial support, we are fostering a brighter future for the energy industry in Africa. Through this scholarship, we aim to recognize academic excellence, promote diversity, and provide valuable opportunities for young professionals to engage with industry leaders. Together, we can shape a more inclusive, sustainable, and prosperous energy landscape for Africa, stated, NJ Ayuk, Executive Chairman of the AEC.
09.06.2023 LISTEN

Concerned Youth of Keta are accusing their Municipal Chief Executive, Emmanuel Gemegah, of abusing his powers in the sale of premix fuel.

The youth say that the MCE has shrouded the sale and distribution of the commodity in secrecy.

In a press statement issued on Wednesday, June 7, the youth group said that the MCEs actions are affecting the fisherfolk, their families, and the entire municipality.

They called on President Akufo-Addo and the Minister for Fisheries and Aquaculture to immediately investigate and take the necessary measures to curb the situation.

The Concerned Youth have also threatened to stage a mammoth protest if the appropriate authorities ignore their concerns.

The statement said: It is obvious that in Ghana, fish and fisheries are integral parts of livelihood, culture, and heritage in all coastal-fishing communities, and this makes important contributions to the socio-economic development and well-being of the people, especially the people of Keta Municipal Assembly.

However, the sale of consignments to fisherfolk in the Keta Municipal Assembly (KeMA) of the Volta Region has been bedevilled with improprieties and lack of transparency and accountability, and abuse of power by various MCEs, and it is worst under the leadership of Hon. Emmanuel Gemegah.

MCE rejects allegations

Meanwhile, the MCE, in an interview, denied the allegations.

He said that the youth smuggle the product to neighbouring countries without giving it to the intended fisherfolk.

It is not true, he said. I was not in town and I only returned to town yesterday. But they forwarded their press release to me.

What I can say is that, I have information that some premix fuel will be arriving this morning. I have only worked against them smuggling the premix fuel to neighbouring countries and hoarding same. That is my only crime.

-Citi Newsroom
09.06.2023 LISTEN

As part of its efforts to help increase the resilience and profitability of tomato farmers in the face of climate change, poor pricing and other challenges, Just Sow organized its first Agricultural Seminar: Lets talk Tomato in Akumadan, under the theme Reducing Post Harvest Losses: A Pathway to Sustainable Farming in the Ashanti region aimed at addressing the critical issue of post-harvest losses and officially introducing their innovative agribusiness tool to the farmers in Akumadan and its environs in the Offinso North Municipality.

The seminar brought together key industry experts, tomato farmers, agric extension officers and passionate individuals, all dedicated to transforming the agricultural landscape for the betterment of our country.

Objective

Speaking at the seminar, Sarkodie Ohemeng William, Founder of JUST SOW a non-governmental organization that is specialized in Mechanized Farming Solutions and IT Services for farmers explained that majority of smallholder farmers in Ghana are trapped in a vicious circle.

They remain trapped in low productivity and high-cost farming practices, thus unable to cope with the market demand and price volatility.

To crack this challenge, we at JUST SOW, a digital agriculture startup based in Ghana, want to use Artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to build a sustainable agribusiness model for farmers in Ghana starting from Akumadan.

Farmers in most developing countries use the same manual methods of farming as their ancestors did centuries ago, as a result, farms are small with fragmented operations and low output and that is the problem we want to solve.

These challenges can be overcome by our business model where we help farmers create a mechanized farm by providing farm machinery or equipment and a mobile app after which profits are shared among all stakeholders involved.

The mechanized farm will not only increase yields but also reduce drudgery for farmers and their families, increase incomes and give young people more opportunities to find work in rural areas, he said.

Lecturer and Researcher, Biotechnology Centre, University of Ghana, Dr. John S.Y. Eleblu explained that its time to provide invaluable insights and knowledge to our farmers in Ghana and across West Africa with the tools and techniques needed to minimize post-harvest losses.

Post-harvest losses decrease food quality and leave food less desirable for consumption; this also means that the food available for consumption is decreased hence, an increase in food insecurities, which also lead to an increase in food prices due to food shortages.

This is the time to intensify education and share more knowledge on Post-harvest losses which takes us all the way to an increase in poverty, he said.

The District Agric Director, Edward Boamah, shared valuable perspectives on the local agricultural landscape in his district especially the need for irrigation dams and good seeds for farmers and emphasized the importance of collaboration between government institutions and private sector.

Chief Executive Officer, Motiving the Farmer Africa, Quainoo Reuben encouraged smallholder farmers to embrace new approaches, new seeds and new innovations to make their farming a sustainable business.

Let me point to you my farmers that the post-harvest system comprises a range of interconnected activities, from the time of harvest through processing, marketing, preparation, and finally consumption decisions at the consumer level.

Every year, large quantities of food are wasted or lost at each of these stages during their journey to consumers, he said.

President, Tomatoes Growers Association - Akumadan, Kwadwo Nkansah, said with the right education and equipment for smallholder farmers, the country would produce the quality and quantity to meet the demands of consumers.

If we the producers and buyers agree to what youre teaching us today, market women will stop going to Burkina Faso, market women will stop applying chemicals to their tomato with the intention of making look more reddish.

This meeting should help us strategize and plan well to see the way forward in having to bring back tomato production vigorously in this district and across the country and also help us build more dams in the district, he said.
The President of the Republic, H.E Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on Friday, June 9, led the country to mark the 2023 Green Ghana Day commemoration to plant trees.

The Presidents administration two years ago declared that every year the country will plant trees as part of efforts to protect the environment and save the planet.

Speaking at an event to mark this years Green Ghana Day, President Akufo-Addo emphasised that preserving forests in the country must be done with a sense of urgency for the survival of every Ghanaian.

Today, we have another opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to saving planet Earth and protecting our livelihoods. The theme for this year Our Forest, Our Health is a clarion call for the need to preserve our forests for our own survival. We must do this with a sense of urgency and renewed purposes noting that success depends on our collective action, the President said.

President Akufo-Addo continued, This is a duty we owe not only to the current generation but also to generations yet unborn. We must do it with the spirit of nationalism, solidarity, and most importantly love for ourselves, our country, and our planet.

Meanwhile, President Akufo-Addo has assured that government is committing resources to nurture the over 20 million trees that have survived the past two years since they were planted.

Im proud of the successes we have chalked over the first two years of the implementation of this project. It was important that we review our target downwards this year to devote some time and resources to nurturing the over 23 million trees that have survived over the past two years, the President indicated.

This year, the target of government is to plant 10 million trees as part of the Green Ghana Day commemoration.
Alhaji Khuzaima Mohammed Osman, Executive Secretary of the Tijjaniya Muslims Movement of Ghana (TMMG), has challenged other religious organizations to collaborate on initiatives that will benefit society at large and the Tijjaniya as a Sufi Order in particular, the whole Muslim community, and the nation as a whole.

Alhaji Khuzaima said there are actually five Tijjaniya institutions or organizations with official recognition from the government, diplomatic missions, donors, and development-focused organizations in Ghana and abroad.

Unfortunately, we are fighting for acceptance and popularity because we are on the verge of forgetting the sect's fundamental beliefs, principles, and values, as well as its key goals for founding and managing institutions and organizations, he said.

Alhaji Khuzaima stated during the Tijjaniya Muslims Movement of Ghanas leadership tour of ongoing construction at the Tijjaniya University College in Asokore, Ashanti Region, which was monitored by the Communication for Development and Advocacy Consult (CDA Consult).

Construction work was at a standstill during the COVID-19 pandemic, but now the development is again moving along smoothly and is anticipated to be finished by 2025.

He asked, "To what extent have we helped our target group? We created organizations to serve Allah and His creation, i.e., humanity in general and the people in our community in particular.

He claimed that Tijjaniya, which accounts for around 50 percent of all African Muslims, is both the most widely practiced Sufi Order and the largest Islamic organization in the continent.

The first Muslim to arrive in Ghana was Tijjaniya, and we currently make up the majority of the Muslim population.

However, the other Islamic sects have hospitals, senior high schools, and to a greater extent, tertiary institutions in their names, while we compete for dominance, popularity, and recognition. Things our sect detests and despises," he remarked.

Other than the three outstanding projects that the Tijjaniya Muslims Movement had achieved, he questioned what else we could demonstrate for our size and the significance of our split into five distinct organizations.

In his own words, "I personally have no problems with people within one organization wanting to create another organization to champion certain courses as part of general efforts to serve humanity, but it must always be on purpose and on target," he stated.

The Tijjaniya Senior High School (TIJJASHS) in Asokore, a guest home in Kumasi, both in the Ashanti Region, and the Tijjaniya School Complex in Adgyin Kotoku in Greater Accra are among the other initiatives carried out by the Tijjaniya Muslims Movement of Ghana.

-CDA Consult || Contributor
Trial of convener of #FixTheCountry Movement, Oliver Barker-Vormawor charged with treason felony is set to begin following the empanelling of a seven-member jury to hear the case.

An Accra High Court has successfully empanelled the jury made of five males and two females, although the accused rejected two prospective candidates.

The court, presided over by Justice Mary Yanzuh, therefore, ordered the prosecution to file their disclosures within two weeks and gave them an additional two weeks within which to file witness statements for their witnesses.

The court subsequently adjourned the case to July 18, 2023, for case management and case completion plan.

The Office of the Attorney General last week amended the two charges against Barker-Vormawor to treason felony following the order of the court which had held that the old charges were duplicitous.

He, however, refused to plead to the two new charges yesterday, invoking Section 238 of the Criminal and Other Offences Act, (Act 29) which allows him to do so.

Oliver Barker-Vormawor was initially charged with two counts of high treason and treason felony after he had indicated on his Facebook and Twitter handles that he will undertake a coup, calling Ghana's military useless in the process.

The charges were subsequently amended to two counts of treason felony which were read to him in court on June 1, 2023, as the court decided to retake his plea on the new charges.

The court clerk after reading the first count asked the accused, Oliver Barker-Vormawor are you guilty or not guilty, and he responded by saying, I want to exercise my rights under Section 238 of the Criminal Code not to plead to the charges.

The clerk read the second count and repeated the question and the accused repeated same answer, and the court presided over by Justice Mary Yanzu entered a 'not guilty' plea for him.

Section 238 of Act 29 states that Where an accused who is arraigned on, or charged with an indictment, stands mute of malice, or neither will, nor by reason of infirmity can answer directly to the indictment, the Court may cause a plea of not guilty to be entered on behalf of the accused.

The accused is before the court charged with two counts of treason felony after he threatened to undertake a coup while describing Ghana's military as useless.

His post was in reaction to an E-Levy cake allegedly made to celebrate the birthday of Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu.

Barker-Vormawor made his appearance before the High Court on October 13, 2022, after he was committed by the Ashaiman District Court to stand trial for the post.

-DGN online
Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger claims that the oldest burial site in the world, dating back to some 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, is in South Africa. He believes the primitive Homo naledi species buried their dead and carved symbols on tomb walls. The findings challenge the current understanding of human evolution.

We are going to tell the world that we have discovered a non-human species, that had fire and controlled it, and went into incredibly difficult- to-reach spaces, and buried its dead in a ritual fashion, over and over and over again.

And while they were doing that, they carved symbols on the wall above it", said paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Berger, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, and his team uncovered fossil remains ofHomo naledi adults and children, in a fetal position, in shallow holes, in a burial chamber some 30 metres underground.

The holes, which researchers say were deliberately dug and then filled in to cover the bodies, contain at least five individuals.

"These are the most ancient interments [burials] yet recorded in the hominin record, earlier than evidence of Homo sapiens interments by at least 100,000 years," the scientists wrote in a series of preprint papers  yet to be peer-reviewed  to be published in eLife.

The oldest burial sites previously unearthed, found in the Middle East and Africa, contained the remains of Homo sapiens.

Homo naledi

In 2015, Lee Berger announced a new species of primitive human relative , the Homo naledi, whose bones were found in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind World Heritage site, 50 kilomeres north-west of Johannesburg.

Homo, because it belonged in the genus shared by other humans, and naledi, meaning star in the Sesotho language.

Berger describes Homo naledi as being similar in size and weight to a small modern human. It stood 1.50 metre tall, with human-like hands that could work objects and legs for walking upright.

This is not a human species, they have a brain the third the size of ours, it's about the size of a chimpanzee's, Berger told CNN TV channel.

In 2013, Berger and his team began excavating 1,550 fossil elements of Homo naledi, 30 metres underground in a chamber they called Dinaledi, or chamber of stars, located within the Rising Star cave system.

This particular burial site was discovered in 2018, but Berger could only see it through videos. He said he had to loose 55 pounds to get into a 40 foot long chute that is around seven to nine foot wide. The chute is a vertical corridor that leads into the Dinaledi chamber.

The Homo naledi's small size enabled it to travel through the narrow passageways of the Rising Star cave system.

Brain and carvings

The research team describes a series of marks carved into the cave's walls which they say are symbols on tomb walls.

The carving symbols date back to 150,000 years before humans even thought of doing that. The carving symbols look familiar to us, crosses, boxes, triangles, hashtags, Berger said.

The findings question the current understanding of human evolution implying that the small-brained Homo naledi had cognitive abilities usually associated with modern humans.

Paleoanthropologist John Hawks, a member of Berger's team, said that the size of the brain does not really matter, it's how you use it and what it's structured for.

Controversy

Berger previously faced accusations of lacking scientific rigour and rushing to conclusions.

For Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian's Human Origins Programm, there is still a lot to uncover as scientists have not yet been able to identify how old the engravings are. He added that the current evidence cannot confirm whether Homo naledi was the one to create the symbols or it was done some other species, maybe Homo sapiens, at a later point in time.

Bruno Maureille, paleoanthropologist at the French CNRS research institute, thinks that Berger may be moving too quickly.

We are told that these are intentional burial sites. After reading the online papers, I would say that we need evidence that the living [Homo naledi] actually paid attention to what happened to their dead, he told RFI.

I'm not sure that having a skeleton or several skeletons next to each other is enough to claim that there was indeed a burial ritual at that time.

Response

If you don't want to call it a grave, don't call that a grave. But it's a grave, Berger responded.

We are not exceptional! he added to the media.

Humans have got this narrative that our big brain supercharge us and make us different. A brain doesn't make us whatever we are.

We now see Homo naledi doing, 250,000 years ago, the things we held as the only thing we had left.

All Dinaledi fossil material is available for study by researchers upon application to the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand where the material is curated.
After more than 50 years of working out of a county-owned bomb shelter in Chestnut Ridge Park, the Erie County Sheriffs Special Services Division needs to move someplace new.

But the new office and warehouse space in Orchard Park, 5 miles away, would cost taxpayers about $10 million over the course of a 10-year lease. In addition, the amount budgeted by the Sheriffs Office to cover the lease for the remainder of this first year falls far short of what is required.

No one denies the need for new space.

Many mechanical and structural components in the bunker are failing, Sheriffs Office officials said. There is no way to repair or upgrade the Cold War-era facility, said Special Operations Chief Brian Britzzalaro. Made to withstand a nuclear blast, the bunker is windowless, poorly ventilated and mostly underground. The facility has sewer drains that back up several times a year.

The bunker has basically been condemned by the county because it is such an unhealthy structure, said Sheriffs Administration Chief John Greenan.

After searching for a new facility, the Sheriffs Office decided on 10 Centre Drive, a building that offers both office space to house detectives and members of the Special Operations Unit, as well as warehouse and garage space tall enough to fit the many different types of vehicles and equipment needed by Special Operations personnel, from boats and Bobcats to snowmobiles.

Currently, that equipment is scattered around the county.

But the cost of the lease and the need for the additional revenue raised a red flag with Legislator Jeanne Vinal, D-Amherst. The Legislature had no prior detailed discussion about the terms of the deal before it was sent forth for consideration at Thursdays meeting.

Before that much money is given by the county to a private business, I think we should know that the cost is fair, Vinal said.

Overtime for Erie County political appointees has ended, but not before costing plenty last year Because of the termination of the county's overtime policy, more than 100 high-level, nonunion political appointees received $1.5 million in overtime-related payments, according to a Buffalo News analysis of Comptroller's Office data.

The lease of new space was first brought before the Legislature in July of last year. At that time, the only information included in the Legislature resolution was the need to transfer up to $173,319 to facilitate lease deals for Sheriffs Office space.

The only additional financial information provided was that the leasing of new office and warehouse space would be a lot less than the county building new space and that the lowest bidder was selected for the lease of new space. The Sheriffs Office also stated that multiple property owners responded to the request for proposals and that the Sheriffs Office selected the lowest bidder.

Legislators in July unanimously approved a resolution authorizing the county to lease the property.

Subsequently, however, it became apparent that the Sheriffs Office did not budget enough money to cover the lease costs, which includes a first, full-year payment of $710,239, and grows by 4% a year for each year of the 10-year agreement.

Total payments over the 10 years amount to more than $9 million. But that is not the limit of Erie Countys costs.

The county would also spend an additional $1 million to customize the building to include evidence storage, a reinforced armory for weapons, K-9 Unit space and larger bay doors to accommodate armored vehicles.

In addition, Vinal, the primary critic of the deal, said the lease is structured as a triple net lease, meaning that the county would be responsible for any maintenance, repair and insurance costs. She and Chairwoman April Baskin also said they didnt know who the true owner of the property was.

On Thursday, the Legislature was expected to approve the lease deal, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional spending. But after Vinal raised concerns, the Legislature took no action.

Comptroller Kevin Hardwick said he shared Vinals concerns and was glad that the Legislature would discuss the matter further in committee.

Matt Davison, spokesman for 13 Centre OPNY LLC and 24 Ventures LLC, which owns the property, said representatives look forward to following up with the Legislature to answer any questions. The new space is ideally suited to meet the Sheriffs Office needs, he said.

Mark Cornell, the countys deputy budget director, told The Buffalo News that the Sheriffs Office appeared to have budgeted $206,000 in this years budget to cover the costs of the new lease. But the cost for the first six months  prorated at $355,120, plus another $1 million for needed build-out, falls far short of the amount of money required to sign a contract with the property owner.

Part of the issue is that the building being leased includes both office space and attached warehouse space, but the Sheriffs Office budget did not account for the warehouse portion of the building in its calculations, Cornell said.

Subsequently, the Budget Office worked with the Sheriffs Office to come up with the balance of funding needed to cover lease costs for this year. That included allocating $950,000 in unanticipated revenue related to casino and hospital subsidies and $200,000 in revenue from the Sheriffs Office from its seized assets fund.
Guinea-Bissau's opposition has won an overall majority in legislative elections, ushering in power-sharing with President Umaro Sissoco Embalo, according to official results announced Thursday.

PAI-Terra Ranka, a coalition led by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) won an absolute majority of 54 out of 102 seats, well ahead of Embalo's Madem G15 party, which picked up 29.

The Party for Social Renewal (PRS) won 12 seats, the Workers' Party, founded just six months ago, picked up six and the Assembly of the People United one seat.

"We are opening a new page in the political history of our country," the head of PAIGC Domingo Simoes Pereira told RFI.

Sunday's vote was given a clean bill of health by some 200 international monitors, who said they had not observed any major incident and described the ballot as "free, transparent and calm".

Party has failed

The outcome is a blow for Embalo, who came to power in 2019.

He dissolved the National Assembly in May 2022 after falling out with lawmakers, describing the legislature as a "space for guerrilla politics and plotting".

Embalo acknowledged the setback in an address to the nation following the announcement of the results.

"My party has failed. The people have punished it," he said, congratulating the winning coalition.

The country of nearly 2 million people has seen frequent political instability with four military coups since it gained independence from Portugal in 1974.

There was also an attempt to overthrow Embalo in February 2022.

Analysts said Embalo's electoral setback was caused by rifts within his party and unpopularity with rural voters hit by the falling prices of cashew nuts, a major source of income.

Under the constitution, the party which obtains the majority in parliament automatically gains the post of prime minister.

Embalo is expected to announce Pereire's appointment shortly.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States of America have announced that representatives of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have agreed to a ceasefire. This follows an overnight attack on Saudi Arabia's embassy in Khartoum.

The ceasefire is due to begin on Saturday, 10 June, at 6:00 a.m. local time and is due to last 24 hours.

All parties hope that the 24-hour ceasefire will provide an opportunity to deliver humanitarian to those caught-up in the fighting assistance and to permit resumption of peace talks in Jeddah.

Further attacks

Meanwhile, an attack on Saudi Arabia's embassy took place overnight in Sudan's capital.

The country condemned it via a statement from its foreign ministry.

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs expresses the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's strong condemnation of the storming and vandalism of the building of the Kingdom's embassy in Sudan", the statement reads.

The Saudi foreign ministry also reported that the property and housing of Saudi employees had been vandalised, and blamed armed groups for the violence in Khartoum, without specifying who was involved.

Saudi Arabia has been leading mediation between the warring sides along with the US since the conflict erupted in mid-April.

"Saudi Arabia's involvement in the talks is crucial as part of the Arab League and IGAD," Christopher Tounsel, Associate Professor of History at University of Washington and Interim Director of their African Studies Program, told RF

Tounsel added that the mediation as much as sanctions will affect the two Sudanese sides in the end, especially if the conflict last long.

The UN envoy declared "persona non grata"

Meanwhile, the Sudanese government has designated the United Nations envoy Volker Perthes as a "persona non grata".

"The Government of the Republic of Sudan has notified the Secretary-General of the United Nations that it has declared Mr. Volker Perthes... [a] persona non grata as of today," the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Thursday evening.

Perthes was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Thursday for a series of diplomatic talks, according to the UN.

Burhan blamed the envoy for exacerbating fighting between his army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, and accused Perthes of bias and of not respecting "national sovereignty".

The UN mission he heads in war-torn Sudan (UNITAMS) was created in June 2020 to support Sudan's democratic transition after the fall of Islamist-military ruler Omar al-Bashir in 2019.

Last week, the UN's Security Council voted to extend the UNITAMS mandate for six months.

UN chief Antonio Guterres has repeatedly defended Perthes.

'Worst' humanitarian crisis

Sudan's path to civilian rule was disrupted in 2021 when Burhan and Daglo together seized power in a coup, before falling out.

Since the fighting began between Burhan's army and Daglo's RSF in Khartoum and in the western region of Darfur, more than 1,800 people have been killed. And the UN says 1.2 million have been displaced, with more than 425,000 fleeing abroad.

"Khartoum is the worst metropolitan area on Earth right now," Sudan specialist Christopher Tounsel said, "when it comes to human rights abuses and access to healthcare and clean water."

The UN estimates around 25 million people are now in need of aid and protection, more than half of Sudan's population.
Government has started the construction of a Psychiatric Hospital in the Northern Region funded by the Central Government to improve access to psychiatric health services in the area.

Mr Sule Salifu, Tamale Metropolitan Chief Executive, who announced this, said it was under agenda 111 of the government to roll out a grand national flagship project in health.

He was addressing the ordinary meeting of members of the Tamale Metropolitan Assembly in Tamale.

Mr Salifu said the scope of the project included the construction of Male and Female Wards, Occupational Therapy Facility and Medical Waste Disposal Facility, Security Posts, Family Hostel for the patients relatives, executive apartments, non-medical support services amongst others.

He said this year, the Metropolis recorded positive cases of polio, and in view of that, the Metropolitan Health Directorate had started undertaking a polio-vaccination exercise to address the situation.

He said this year, the government handed over CHPS compounds at Tugu and Dohini communities to the Health Directorate to operate.

He said, The facilities are expected to bring some relief to the citizenry as far as health service delivery in those communities and surrounding areas is concerned.

Mr Salifu appealed for support from Assembly Members to liaise with the chiefs for land to be earmarked as CHPS zones for the construction of more of such facilities to enhance quality health care in the rural areas.

He also announced that the Assembly, in collaboration with some German partners, was in the process to build labour ward for the Tamale West Hospital.

He touched on education and said the Assembly was committed to ensuring that school infrastructure, ancillary facilities and quality education were accessible and affordable to all children in the area.

He indicated that the Assembly had also committed to ensure that the progress of all ongoing educational projects was hastened and duly completed to serve their intended purposes.

GNA
The Speaker of Parliament, Rt. Hon. Alban Bagin has raised concern about governments tree-planting initiative.

President Akufo-Addos administration in the last two years has been planting trees across the country under its Green Ghana agenda.

Speaking in Parliament on Thursday, June 8, Alban Bagbin proposed that instead of planting seedlings, it will be better if government planted trees.

The tree planting youve seen in the Middle East, Dubai, and the rest where they really bring trees and plant for a desert to be turned into forest. That is tree planting. What we do here is planting seedlings and we should talk about growing trees, the Speaker of Parliament said.

In an appeal to Members of Parliament, the Speaker urged the lawmakers not to say because there is illegal mining (galamsey) in the country they wont plant trees.

He pleaded with all MPs to make it a point to join the efforts of government today to plant as many trees as possible.

We plant and go away and the survival rate is what we are talking about which we have to work on. But I believe that its better to do this than to say that because there is galamsey (illegal mining) we will not plant the trees, then we will worsen the situation.

So please I want to encourage members to continue and lets grow the trees together and I will direct that honorable members to as usual proceed to lead their constituents in the exercise. So there will be no sitting on Friday, Alban Bagbin said.

This year, government has set a target to plant 10 million trees across the country.

Already, government is nurturing over 23 million trees planted in the last two years.
A female fire tender driver, Assistant Group Officer (AGO) in the Northern region, Rosemary Azure has been adjudged as the outstanding operational woman of the year.

She is the second female driver in the region from the Tamale Metro Fire Station and had served the service as a driver for five years.

Fire Service Ladies Association (FISLA) is an association of female fire officers in the Ghana National Fire Service, the Association set up the award scheme to appreciate female officers who have distinguished themselves in the service.

Presenting the award to her, the Regional Commander, ACFOI James Nkrah, commends her for the great feat achieved and for making the region proud.

Speaking to the regional command Public Relations team, she expressed her excitement for the recognition and the award given to her.

She said driving is her passion and that she has been doing it for the past five years, even though she was not enlisted in the service as a driver.
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) is a formidable and highly focused party that is ready to break the eight-year political cycle in Ghana. However, before the general elections, the party has to first of all elect a flagbearer who is capable of breaking the eight. Party members, sympathizers and loyalists have over the past two years been campaigning for their preferred candidates in one way or the other.

Among the campaign volunteers, the most effective, orderly, innovative and purposeful volunteers, are the DMB's campaign volunteers. It all started with a hashtag DMB. This acronym DMB confused opponents then. It trended on social media for a long time. The most interesting aspect of it was that, people voluntarily joined the campaign with excitement without any inducement. It was clearly that the DMB has everything to do with Dr. Bawumia but as I said, the opponents were still in wonderland. What could this DMB mean? Some even hurriedly went to the political market and were attributing the 'D' to Dombo and started their usual tribal bigotry, maligning and character assassination. The DMB's brand is a brand that has come to stay. The DMB evolved into DMB2024.

The DMB2024 came up and gave more light and direction to the course of the campaign. It hit the nail right on the head that Dr. Bawumia was going to contest for the primaries of the NPP and further represent the party as its flagbearer in the 2024 general elections. The vibrant DMB's campaign volunteers did not waste time to get the message flooded all over the media. At every stage, an innovative strategy comes up with massive patronage and natural love to propagate it. The strategies are not mere slogans. Each carries very important pieces of information for the consumption of the delegates and the general public.

The DMB's brand crusaders being purposeful and focused, always come up with many innovative strategies that continue to confuse their opponents and keep them wondering. Any strategy that comes up is fully embraced by the campaign volunteers and beautifully circulated like wildfire to the dislike of the opposition. It is obvious that the DMB's brand comes with quality characteristics and digitalization is one. Through this solid brand, Dr. Digital emerged. It also occupied the political space forcing opponents to resort to scoring own goals. There is no doubt that when you mention digitalization in Ghana, the one that comes to mind is Dr. Bawumia. The DMB's brand is wide with countless positive initiatives that are easily coined, effortlessly propagated and beautifully enjoyed by the masses.

The Next to Lead and Best to Lead were another strategies adopted to keep the political space busy and the DMB's brand alive and kicking. It also came with distortions from the other side. They tried copying it but woefully failed. Majority of party faithfuls believe that Dr. Bawumia is the next and best to lead NPP to break the eight in the incoming general elections, hence, the slogan is as alive as the DMB's brand. This is evidenced by the massive support and chanting (The Next to Lead; The Best to Lead) people exhibit upon seeing Dr. Bawumia. The euphoria is just indescribably euphoric. The masses are enjoying it, and it will definitely travel as far as to the general elections with positively unquantifiable impact.

Bawumia must win (BMW) also joined to add more spices to the already very delicious meal the supporters of Dr. Bawumia were enjoying. The campaign volunteers never lost focus abit in the many attempts to preach the gospel of Dr. Bawumia to the respected delegates and Ghanaians in general. This strategy also made the opponents of DMB jittering and bitter than before. They attempted mocking it and as usual they failed miserably. Everyday, new campaign strategies come up to continually sustain the DMB's brand and BMW did not actually disappoint.

Then came, the massive one from the man of the moment himself, H. E. Alhaji Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia. When it was all clear that the NPP have settled on the political calendar for the internal contest, the reliable Vice President and a man with the mindset of possibilities came up with a great piece of information his supporters were all waiting for. He posted on his social media handles 'It is possible' with Ghana and NPP flags respectively attached. Social media experienced a great traffic with the message 'It is possible', In Shaa Allah. It is indeed possible for Dr. Bawumia to lead NPP to break the eight and possible to lead Ghana to the promised land.

Immediately the brand owner, the delegates' choice, Dr. Digital, the humble servant, the ever loyal Veep, the first-class Veep, the reliable Veep, name them, announced his intention to contest for the presidential primaries, the network automatically got activated with a very strong signal. People are connecting to the DMB's signal all over the country. The opponents who are purposelessly purposeless attempted once again to lampoon the signal initiative but as usual failure was their record. The campaign volunteers are more than ready to do more for DMB. This is the DMB's brand for you. Latest trending initiative aimed at mobilizing funds for the DMB's campaign is the short code *202#. Just dial it and contribute to realizing the dream of making Dr. Bawumia the next flagbearer of NPP and president of Ghana.

This write-up cannot be concluded without recognizing the intelligent and dedicated personnel behind the innovative and purposeful DMB's brand initiatives. They must be recommended for the sustainable, orderly and timely manner the initiatives are being introduced to the teeming loyalists especially the media communicators for DMB across the country. The traditional and social media communicators must also be highly praised for their solid, constant and tireless propagation of the DMB's brand on the media landscape. Recommendations must also be given to the many lovers of DMB who are contributing in diverse ways to keeping the brand alive and strong.

DMB2024, It is possible, In Shaa Allah.

Thank you

Alhaji Salifu Hadara

A Patriot

Nalerigu/Gambaga Constituency

North East Region
(Take The Money and Run! Didnt Make Sense!)

Take the Money and Run! Probably Didnt Make Sense

You probably struggled making heads or tails of last three weeks article, Take the Money and Run!. I will tell you why. If you read the print version, you missed an entire opening paragraph. This is how the article was supposed to begin:

PART I

I have been wanting to tell you this for some time now, you know.

I think Americans have a Stockholm Syndrome for the British particularly. Yes, yes, I know This is a nation which has managed to assert its place as the modern age leading empire, its influence spreading far and wide across the globe. A nation which has managed to, very intentionally, very painstakingly, carve out an image for itself as heaven on earth, as the very epitome of the grandness attainable by the human being. In America you can be anything you want to bea nation for the fulfilment of dreams. First on the moon; first on earth... In all things earth, first. First economically, first in science, in technological advancements, in art; a nation leading the course of our time America is great! You see how I put that in quotation marks? That is because these Americans do not even wait for you to say it; they make sure to tell you so. This nation, suffering a Stockholm syndrome for another nation? It sounds absurd, I know.

It was after this introductory paragraph right up here, that this paragraph followedthe paragraph which was mistakenly made last three weeks introduction in print:

I hear them using this word Anglophile in description of what the feeling is between them andone can saytheir past overlords, particularly Britain, a lot. But if you witness this supposed Anglophile-ness, you cant help but smell some Stockholm lurking behind itat least a tiny dose of it. Granted, it is not as dire as ours is to the West... Because for one thing their colonialism, that which planted this seed, this Syndrome in the American, was totally different from ours. It didnt proceed from an immediate past of slavery, of degradation as ours did, but a voluntary exeunt. But thats not the point of this article. We will have to look at this matter in a later article.

Essentially, we began that article with an assertion that the typical Caucasian American wouldnt be particularly happy with. An assertion that said that he/she, the born and bred American, conditioned, and socialised into believing themselves the best there is, and their nation the best there is, was in fact suffering some form of inferiority for another nation, the British. This nation, this global superpower which has throughout its history made conscious efforts at asserting its dominance over countries and peoples worldwide, suffering a Stockholm Syndrome? It sounds absurd, I know. But absurd does not necessarily equate falsehood.

You know what, let me just go ahead and add to the whole mystic surrounding the CIA by saying, I wasnt too shocked to find this introductory paragraph of last three weeks article magically omitted in the print version. [But I will however admit to being completely floored when this follow-up article also magically disappeared from my laptop. After a week-long futile attempt at recovery, it had to take an IT-expert friend of mine all the way in Gambia to recover the .asd file. I will admit that at some point during that whole wahala, I began to think, Maybe God doesnt want me to write this piece? Eh, this piece that paints the American in an almost unflattering light Maybe God wants me to ditch it all together. But what are wewe, these offspring of Kweku Anansiif not stubborn? So here we are this week, in full print, powering on, on this story of The Fool-hunters]

I must say that as a Ghanaian always on a lookout for the display of perfection and world-class standards by fellow Ghanaians, I have always been proud of the standards constantly displayed by the great people at the Business & Financial Times (B&FT). The B&FT has consistently proven itself an epitome of excellence. So, for them to mistakenly publish an article without its intended introductory paragrapha paragraph which was in some way a slight against the American brand of bravado, ah! it must have been the clandestine work of the CIA. Or?

Still a Rundown

The entire article took a nosedive after that. Coming right from depressing the American, last three weeks article went straight into depressing the Ghanaian, the Africanand the writer, for that matter. We faced reality head-on. And the fact is this: the human ecosystem is no different from the animal kingdom. Let your guard down and you are eaten alive. Let your guard down and you are taken advantage of by fellow human beings. Worse, we find this same dynamic at play on the national level. In last three weeks article Take the Money and run! we saw how the White folk, a people so tainted with a tyrannical historya tyranny particularly against our race, the Black people We saw how they, at a point in this same history of theirs, committed a similar tyrannical act against their own peopletowards this same end of increasing their economic gains. Yes indeed, at some point in their modern history, the White folk, towards this same end of making money, committed to enslaving fellow White folks.

And this reality led us to fantasise over an alternate history: what would history have been like if these two races never chanced upon one another? What would history have been like if the White folk never chanced on us? There is only one conclusion that pops up in our headsthe White folk would most definitely have proceeded and continued to enslave their own fellow kinsfolk, their own race, towards this same end of increasing their economic gains.

We are animals.

Us all people, spread world-wide, we are all, quite easily, animals. This world is but a jungle. Live yourself open, and you are eaten.

We are fool-hunters.

Us all people spread worldwide, we are all, always in search of fools. We are constantly in search of fellow human beings to take advantage ofbe they male or female, adult or young, black, white, red, or yellow. We usually do not discriminate in our victims-searchwe do not discriminate when we are out on this hunt for fools. All we care about is gamefinding those persons who are easily susceptible to our hunt. Fools, they come in different shapes and forms; different genders, colours, races, and nationalities. So, we spread our nets wide in our search. But in this search for these fools, one must be careful not to come out the fool themselves. One must conduct the hunt in such a way that chances of reaping success is almost always a guaranteed 100%. And thats where stereotyping becomes keen. This is where experience becomes vital.

A Foolish Analogy

Because not all people are easy targets. It is like a man who has made it his inane life mission of remaining forever on the prowl... A man who decides to, even upon finding the onethe one with whom he is to be paired for all eternity, a woman with whom he is to carry out the tough journey of existence, a person to call his own, and him, hersA man who after attaining this desired state, decides to remain still on the muddy prowl, on the senseless hunt of entanglements Such a man in this senseless huntyou will often findwould still apply some level of brain activity to this endeavour. Wisdom is too beautiful a word to use in these messy circumstances. But yes, I daresay, that such a man would often go about this mess with some level of brain activity in play. He would, on this hunt, never go about chasing those members of the opposite sex with brain activity so optimal that they would look upon him with utmost disgust And in so expressing this disgust, make this perpetrator of a man feel like the perpetrator he ismade to feel like a fool. In this hunt, one selects their game meticulously. One does not go chasing after targets who or which are likely to make one come out looking foolish. In ones hunt for a fool, one must be careful not to come out looking like the fool instead.

And it is the same for the woman. It is same for those females who dedicate their livestheir often-times young bodily formsinto setting traps for their prey men, men to whom they would, upon getting caught, play the victim. Such ladies, they target the well-known, easy targets. You do not go chasing after a mana married manso high-and-mighty that they look upon you with disgust and make you feel like a fool for attempting on them, a prowl. This is way too much English used in description of infidelityI know. But how we go do am? This is, after all, a business and financial newspaper. We have to apply some level of diplomacy to everything over here.

Now back to the matter of the messy prowl. For fear of coming out as fools, one, in this prowl must be extremely careful. And this is where the stereotyping comes in. This is where the categorisation comes in. To hunt for fools, and do so effectively, one must take keen lessons from experiencefool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me indeed. This is the philosophy with which a hunter settles on their fools. The hunter, they look out for those persons who have made themselves susceptible to their first advance(s). A successful first attempt means a likelihood of a successful second attempt. And there comes the third, fourth, fifth attempts and their consequent successes. With these known-fools, ones chances of infinite attempts and infinite successes are high. And with each attempt and consequent success, these targets mature into well-known fools. They become game for all to go out in hunt of. And there you have it, the stereotypingthe stereotype of a known-fool.

We are mathematicians. Us all humans, always doing mathsits incredible. Because maths is exactly how we settle on our foolish targets.

Sorry for the use of the word fool a lot today. But its not particularly our fault, is it? Because isnt the word right up there in the title? I apologise, but its only natural we proceed still with the use of the term.

The Tragedy

Here is the thing though, my brothers and sisters: manage to fool a person, and thats sad. But manage to fool an entire nation of people, and that is just tragic. Just tragic!

How does an entire nation of people allow themselves to be made constant game for the successful prowls of others? How does an entire nation of people, perhaps an entire region or continent, slowly but surely allow themselves to be made gamenot just once or twice, but countless times, with such frequency that it threatens perpetuity? How does an entire nation or group of people allow themselves to be made fools for the fool-hunter with such frequency and consistency that this unfortunate state of affairs becomes slowly but surely morphed into their character trait? And best believe that when this consistency becomes morphed into a character trait, it is God who gets the covert blame. Yes, God Himself gets implicated in it all The narrative begins to get couched to look as though the Creator Herself made these supposed fools that wayas though the Creator made them only to assign them the role as the earths fools... A puppet for the puppeteer, the animal that has to die and degenerate into manure so that the tree might get life. God sitting His somewhere, minding Her business, gets implicated in this whole mess, as though She intentionally created this weakness, this weak bunchyou and Ito serve as game for the fool-hunters. And we catch ourselves saying this of ourselves a lot Some go so far as to claim ourselves the descendants of the infamous Hamcursed by his father Noah, with the curse enforced by God against his (Ham) son.

We, Blacks, descendants of this curse? An utter liea senseless lie. Poor Godimplicated in a lie. There is no truth in this, only meaningless conjecture.

God has no hand in this resignation to inferiority we have done upon ourselves. There are no biological roots to it. This earthly dynamic finding the Black folk at the bottom of the global food chain has all been purely sociological. It is a dynamic, at its very root, driven by the economic law of demand and supply. One person demands a fool, while the other, through some indecisions and lack of a sense of self, sells themselves out for cheap, or for nothing at allaccepting gladly the role of fools.

You are a country, you aspire to build a powerful nation of yourself, you need the wherewithalthe human and natural resource capitalto make this happen, what do you do? You go out on the hunt. Right there, beyond your national borders, lies certain nations, certain people, lacking foresight and a sense of self, lacking an identity and good leadership, gladly awaiting your poking and prodding. These people with little self-esteem, these people crippled by their own greed for their immediate bellies, these people having leaders suffering these ailments, they await youthey willingly await your hunt.

Because a baby intent on playing with a stone, we all know, will not hesitate throwing the first 200 Cedis note they find at you just so they can get that stone youre holding right there in your hand. Find yourself a nation with leaders having such weakness of mind, and they will, without even you descending to committing the overt inhumane act of enslaving or colonising them, hand over to you that which you desirethis time around, on their own accord. Why? Because he/she is a child holding 200 Cedis, but in dire need of your stone to play with.

A country which is willing to resign, in this competitive age, to the production of raw materials even while you take on the wealthier role of refinerladies and gentlemen, youve got your fool A nation whose leaders will gladly connive with you in the loot of their own nationrejoice, thats your fool

While you are bent on building empires, while you are bent on making SOMETHING of yourselves and your generations, these people are out here in the world just looking for something to put into their stomachsjust for the now. They are looking at making abundant wealth in their slums of nations. While you seek a respectable identity, not only for yourself, but your kind, these people are out here, really still looking at those bellies of theirs... Their bellies and their immediate filling, that is all life means to them.

It's tragic.

Schrodingers Cat

We can continue playing the legal politics and say to ourselves that as long as one is not caught red-handed, the accusations must be false. But we are Ghanaians here in this same Ghana with you, our political leaders... We all see as you come into power or come into positions of power through your affiliations with incumbent political governments... We see how quickly your finances make a 180-degree turn as soon as you land into these leadership positions. We see how you, serving the various political and public offices, come by all this money so quicklyso easily. Blessed with an environment of mismanagement and lack of supervision, we see how youour leadersget obesed with money.

Money intended for national growth, so very often and easily, get diverted into your pockets. You had no business getting this rich this quickly within this short space of time in your service as leaders. But here you are, gluttoned with your peoples moneywealthy in a slum of a nation. As your colleague leaders elsewhere are focused on building empires of nationsnations whose citizens are held in high-esteem worldwide, nations whose citizens determine the course of our time, here you are, in this slum of a nation, happy with our lowliness and mediocrity (at best)gluttoned with wealth that is supposed to be for the benefit of the entire nation.

While your colleague leaders are out here in this world bent on building for their nations, wealth in perpetuity, here you are intent on acquiring fleeting wealth for you and your small units of families. Here you are, leaderbut just like the people from whom you loot, inconsequential in this world of much consequence. Here you are, puppet for the puppeteer, a gatekeeper for the neo-colonialist looting of your own nation Here you are, still hiding behind Jesus, yet constantly Judas-ing. Here we are, full in the belly but in the grand scheme of things merely fools for the fool-hunters.

It's 66 years and we are still under-living our potential. Its 66 years and we risk getting numb to the tragedy of it all. All for bad leadership. This is all so tragic.

BY YAO AFRA YAO

THE FOOL-HUNTERS

(Take The Money and Run! Didnt Make Sense!)

Take the Money and Run! Probably Didnt Make Sense

You probably struggled making heads or tails of last three weeks article, Take the Money and Run!. I will tell you why. If you read the print version, you missed an entire opening paragraph. This is how the article was supposed to begin:

PART I

I have been wanting to tell you this for some time now, you know.

I think Americans have a Stockholm Syndrome for the British particularly. Yes, yes, I know This is a nation which has managed to assert its place as the modern age leading empire, its influence spreading far and wide across the globe. A nation which has managed to, very intentionally, very painstakingly, carve out an image for itself as heaven on earth, as the very epitome of the grandness attainable by the human being. In America you can be anything you want to bea nation for the fulfilment of dreams. First on the moon; first on earth... In all things earth, first. First economically, first in science, in technological advancements, in art; a nation leading the course of our time America is great! You see how I put that in quotation marks? That is because these Americans do not even wait for you to say it; they make sure to tell you so. This nation, suffering a Stockholm syndrome for another nation? It sounds absurd, I know.

It was after this introductory paragraph right up here, that this paragraph followedthe paragraph which was mistakenly made last three weeks introduction in print:

I hear them using this word Anglophile in description of what the feeling is between them andone can saytheir past overlords, particularly Britain, a lot. But if you witness this supposed Anglophile-ness, you cant help but smell some Stockholm lurking behind itat least a tiny dose of it. Granted, it is not as dire as ours is to the West... Because for one thing their colonialism, that which planted this seed, this Syndrome in the American, was totally different from ours. It didnt proceed from an immediate past of slavery, of degradation as ours did, but a voluntary exeunt. But thats not the point of this article. We will have to look at this matter in a later article.

Essentially, we began that article with an assertion that the typical Caucasian American wouldnt be particularly happy with. An assertion that said that he/she, the born and bred American, conditioned, and socialised into believing themselves the best there is, and their nation the best there is, was in fact suffering some form of inferiority for another nation, the British. This nation, this global superpower which has throughout its history made conscious efforts at asserting its dominance over countries and peoples worldwide, suffering a Stockholm Syndrome? It sounds absurd, I know. But absurd does not necessarily equate falsehood.

You know what, let me just go ahead and add to the whole mystic surrounding the CIA by saying, I wasnt too shocked to find this introductory paragraph of last three weeks article magically omitted in the print version. [But I will however admit to being completely floored when this follow-up article also magically disappeared from my laptop. After a week-long futile attempt at recovery, it had to take an IT-expert friend of mine all the way in Gambia to recover the .asd file. I will admit that at some point during that whole wahala, I began to think, Maybe God doesnt want me to write this piece? Eh, this piece that paints the American in an almost unflattering light Maybe God wants me to ditch it all together. But what are wewe, these offspring of Kweku Anansiif not stubborn? So here we are this week, in full print, powering on, on this story of The Fool-hunters]

I must say that as a Ghanaian always on a lookout for the display of perfection and world-class standards by fellow Ghanaians, I have always been proud of the standards constantly displayed by the great people at the Business & Financial Times (B&FT). The B&FT has consistently proven itself an epitome of excellence. So, for them to mistakenly publish an article without its intended introductory paragrapha paragraph which was in some way a slight against the American brand of bravado, ah! it must have been the clandestine work of the CIA. Or?

Still a Rundown

The entire article took a nosedive after that. Coming right from depressing the American, last three weeks article went straight into depressing the Ghanaian, the Africanand the writer, for that matter. We faced reality head-on. And the fact is this: the human ecosystem is no different from the animal kingdom. Let your guard down and you are eaten alive. Let your guard down and you are taken advantage of by fellow human beings. Worse, we find this same dynamic at play on the national level. In last three weeks article Take the Money and run! we saw how the White folk, a people so tainted with a tyrannical historya tyranny particularly against our race, the Black people We saw how they, at a point in this same history of theirs, committed a similar tyrannical act against their own peopletowards this same end of increasing their economic gains. Yes indeed, at some point in their modern history, the White folk, towards this same end of making money, committed to enslaving fellow White folks.

And this reality led us to fantasise over an alternate history: what would history have been like if these two races never chanced upon one another? What would history have been like if the White folk never chanced on us? There is only one conclusion that pops up in our headsthe White folk would most definitely have proceeded and continued to enslave their own fellow kinsfolk, their own race, towards this same end of increasing their economic gains.

We are animals.

Us all people, spread world-wide, we are all, quite easily, animals. This world is but a jungle. Live yourself open, and you are eaten.

We are fool-hunters.

Us all people spread worldwide, we are all, always in search of fools. We are constantly in search of fellow human beings to take advantage ofbe they male or female, adult or young, black, white, red, or yellow. We usually do not discriminate in our victims-searchwe do not discriminate when we are out on this hunt for fools. All we care about is gamefinding those persons who are easily susceptible to our hunt. Fools, they come in different shapes and forms; different genders, colours, races, and nationalities. So, we spread our nets wide in our search. But in this search for these fools, one must be careful not to come out the fool themselves. One must conduct the hunt in such a way that chances of reaping success is almost always a guaranteed 100%. And thats where stereotyping becomes keen. This is where experience becomes vital.

A Foolish Analogy

Because not all people are easy targets. It is like a man who has made it his inane life mission of remaining forever on the prowl... A man who decides to, even upon finding the onethe one with whom he is to be paired for all eternity, a woman with whom he is to carry out the tough journey of existence, a person to call his own, and him, hersA man who after attaining this desired state, decides to remain still on the muddy prowl, on the senseless hunt of entanglements Such a man in this senseless huntyou will often findwould still apply some level of brain activity to this endeavour. Wisdom is too beautiful a word to use in these messy circumstances. But yes, I daresay, that such a man would often go about this mess with some level of brain activity in play. He would, on this hunt, never go about chasing those members of the opposite sex with brain activity so optimal that they would look upon him with utmost disgust And in so expressing this disgust, make this perpetrator of a man feel like the perpetrator he ismade to feel like a fool. In this hunt, one selects their game meticulously. One does not go chasing after targets who or which are likely to make one come out looking foolish. In ones hunt for a fool, one must be careful not to come out looking like the fool instead.

And it is the same for the woman. It is same for those females who dedicate their livestheir often-times young bodily formsinto setting traps for their prey men, men to whom they would, upon getting caught, play the victim. Such ladies, they target the well-known, easy targets. You do not go chasing after a mana married manso high-and-mighty that they look upon you with disgust and make you feel like a fool for attempting on them, a prowl. This is way too much English used in description of infidelityI know. But how we go do am? This is, after all, a business and financial newspaper. We have to apply some level of diplomacy to everything over here.

Now back to the matter of the messy prowl. For fear of coming out as fools, one, in this prowl must be extremely careful. And this is where the stereotyping comes in. This is where the categorisation comes in. To hunt for fools, and do so effectively, one must take keen lessons from experiencefool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me indeed. This is the philosophy with which a hunter settles on their fools. The hunter, they look out for those persons who have made themselves susceptible to their first advance(s). A successful first attempt means a likelihood of a successful second attempt. And there comes the third, fourth, fifth attempts and their consequent successes. With these known-fools, ones chances of infinite attempts and infinite successes are high. And with each attempt and consequent success, these targets mature into well-known fools. They become game for all to go out in hunt of. And there you have it, the stereotypingthe stereotype of a known-fool.

We are mathematicians. Us all humans, always doing mathsits incredible. Because maths is exactly how we settle on our foolish targets.

Sorry for the use of the word fool a lot today. But its not particularly our fault, is it? Because isnt the word right up there in the title? I apologise, but its only natural we proceed still with the use of the term.

The Tragedy

Here is the thing though, my brothers and sisters: manage to fool a person, and thats sad. But manage to fool an entire nation of people, and that is just tragic. Just tragic!

How does an entire nation of people allow themselves to be made constant game for the successful prowls of others? How does an entire nation of people, perhaps an entire region or continent, slowly but surely allow themselves to be made gamenot just once or twice, but countless times, with such frequency that it threatens perpetuity? How does an entire nation or group of people allow themselves to be made fools for the fool-hunter with such frequency and consistency that this unfortunate state of affairs becomes slowly but surely morphed into their character trait? And best believe that when this consistency becomes morphed into a character trait, it is God who gets the covert blame. Yes, God Himself gets implicated in it all The narrative begins to get couched to look as though the Creator Herself made these supposed fools that wayas though the Creator made them only to assign them the role as the earths fools... A puppet for the puppeteer, the animal that has to die and degenerate into manure so that the tree might get life. God sitting His somewhere, minding Her business, gets implicated in this whole mess, as though She intentionally created this weakness, this weak bunchyou and Ito serve as game for the fool-hunters. And we catch ourselves saying this of ourselves a lot Some go so far as to claim ourselves the descendants of the infamous Hamcursed by his father Noah, with the curse enforced by God against his (Ham) son.

We, Blacks, descendants of this curse? An utter liea senseless lie. Poor Godimplicated in a lie. There is no truth in this, only meaningless conjecture.

God has no hand in this resignation to inferiority we have done upon ourselves. There are no biological roots to it. This earthly dynamic finding the Black folk at the bottom of the global food chain has all been purely sociological. It is a dynamic, at its very root, driven by the economic law of demand and supply. One person demands a fool, while the other, through some indecisions and lack of a sense of self, sells themselves out for cheap, or for nothing at allaccepting gladly the role of fools.

You are a country, you aspire to build a powerful nation of yourself, you need the wherewithalthe human and natural resource capitalto make this happen, what do you do? You go out on the hunt. Right there, beyond your national borders, lies certain nations, certain people, lacking foresight and a sense of self, lacking an identity and good leadership, gladly awaiting your poking and prodding. These people with little self-esteem, these people crippled by their own greed for their immediate bellies, these people having leaders suffering these ailments, they await youthey willingly await your hunt.

Because a baby intent on playing with a stone, we all know, will not hesitate throwing the first 200 Cedis note they find at you just so they can get that stone youre holding right there in your hand. Find yourself a nation with leaders having such weakness of mind, and they will, without even you descending to committing the overt inhumane act of enslaving or colonising them, hand over to you that which you desirethis time around, on their own accord. Why? Because he/she is a child holding 200 Cedis, but in dire need of your stone to play with.

A country which is willing to resign, in this competitive age, to the production of raw materials even while you take on the wealthier role of refinerladies and gentlemen, youve got your fool A nation whose leaders will gladly connive with you in the loot of their own nationrejoice, thats your fool

While you are bent on building empires, while you are bent on making SOMETHING of yourselves and your generations, these people are out here in the world just looking for something to put into their stomachsjust for the now. They are looking at making abundant wealth in their slums of nations. While you seek a respectable identity, not only for yourself, but your kind, these people are out here, really still looking at those bellies of theirs... Their bellies and their immediate filling, that is all life means to them.

It's tragic.

Schrodingers Cat

We can continue playing the legal politics and say to ourselves that as long as one is not caught red-handed, the accusations must be false. But we are Ghanaians here in this same Ghana with you, our political leaders... We all see as you come into power or come into positions of power through your affiliations with incumbent political governments... We see how quickly your finances make a 180-degree turn as soon as you land into these leadership positions. We see how you, serving the various political and public offices, come by all this money so quicklyso easily. Blessed with an environment of mismanagement and lack of supervision, we see how youour leadersget obesed with money.

Money intended for national growth, so very often and easily, get diverted into your pockets. You had no business getting this rich this quickly within this short space of time in your service as leaders. But here you are, gluttoned with your peoples moneywealthy in a slum of a nation. As your colleague leaders elsewhere are focused on building empires of nationsnations whose citizens are held in high-esteem worldwide, nations whose citizens determine the course of our time, here you are, in this slum of a nation, happy with our lowliness and mediocrity (at best)gluttoned with wealth that is supposed to be for the benefit of the entire nation.

While your colleague leaders are out here in this world bent on building for their nations, wealth in perpetuity, here you are intent on acquiring fleeting wealth for you and your small units of families. Here you are, leaderbut just like the people from whom you loot, inconsequential in this world of much consequence. Here you are, puppet for the puppeteer, a gatekeeper for the neo-colonialist looting of your own nation Here you are, still hiding behind Jesus, yet constantly Judas-ing. Here we are, full in the belly but in the grand scheme of things merely fools for the fool-hunters.

It's 66 years and we are still under-living our potential. Its 66 years and we risk getting numb to the tragedy of it all. All for bad leadership. This is all so tragic.

[Published in the Business & Financial Times (B&FT) - 8th June 2023]
The Association of European Lawyers (AEA) has recently announced the appointment of Kwame Nyampong, a distinguished lawyer from Ghana, as the Vice President on the Board of Directors. The decision to appoint Kwame was based on his exceptional expertise and significant contributions to the legal profession.

In his new role, Kwame will work closely with AEA President Pedro Beltran and other board members to effectively execute the association's mission. He expressed his gratitude for the appointment and pledged to uphold and promote the values of the AEA.

"I am deeply honoured by this appointment. It is truly humbling to know that my work has been recognized by others. I assure the Board and the entire Association that I will diligently work to uphold the values of the AEA," stated Mr Nyampong.

Known for his exceptional leadership qualities and willingness to take on challenging tasks, Kwame brings a wealth of experience to his new position. His expertise in debt recovery is particularly notable, having previously served as the Managing Director of Direct Debt Recovery Consult Limited.

Kwame's educational background includes a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Ghana, an LLB from the Law Faculty of the Ghana Institute of Management and Professional Administration, and a BL from the Ghana School of Law. Currently, he serves as the managing partner of Franklyn and Partners, a prestigious law firm based in the capital city of Ghana.

Established in 1988, the Association of European Lawyers aims to provide accessible and expert legal services across Europe. Originally formed through the collaboration of five leading law firms in the United Kingdom (UK), the AEA has since expanded its network to include correspondent firms throughout Europe. These firms offer a wide range of legal services for businesses, emphasizing excellence and efficiency in their operations.
Tamale North Member of Parliament (MP), Alhassan Sayibu Suhuyini has expressed his concerns regarding the Green Ghana Day initiative.

He said government must shun corruption and ensure transparency in the implementation of the initiative.

Hon. Suhuyini indicated that such initiatives, although well-intentioned, should not become channels for syphoning state funds.

During his address in Parliament on Friday, June 9, he said, Initiatives such as this; good as theyre intended do not fall victim to corruption or do not become victim of corruption. It does not become an establishment that is used to syphon money from the taxpayer.

The Tamale North MP urged the government to establish robust strategies to ensure that funds allocated for climate change are used effectively.

Mr. Speaker, this is important because climate finance has to be optimised for impact and effectiveness and the way to do that is to ensure that strategies are put in place to change finance and to ensure that finance that is meant for climate change and its mitigation and its adaptation are not misapplied and also give us less optimal value, Suhuyini said.

He further raised questions about the number of trees planted indicating that the President and Minister quoted conflicting figures.

He also referred to the President's State of the Nation Address (SONA) in 2022, where it was announced that 7 million trees had been successfully planted as part of the Green Ghana Day initiative, exceeding the initial target by 2 million trees.

He noted that during a session in the house, the sector Minister reported that only around 4.9 million trees had been planted.

The President in 2022 in his SONA address revealed to this house that they had successfully planted 7 million trees, 2 million more than it was initially planned to be planted. However, the Minister, weeks earlier in an answer to a question in this same house, reported that only about 4.9 million trees were planted, he intimated.

Raising a pertinent question, Hon. Suhuyini sought clarification on the actual number of trees that were planted and the exact amount of resources allocated to the tree-planting campaign.

'Mr Speaker, the question therefore is, how many trees indeed were planted and how much did we throw at the plantation of these trees,
The Media Coalition Against Galamsey (MCAG), has expressed worry over the failure of authorities to prosecute the directors of Akonta Mining for allegedly engaging in illegal small-scale mining popularly known as galamsey.

The Coalition indicated that in line with the discharge of their constitutional mandate of holding leadership to account to the people and ensuring that all who have broken the laws of Ghana are prosecuted and appropriately punished, together with other Petitioners, met with senior officials of the Criminal Investigative Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) at the behest of the Director General of the CID.

This was in furtherance to their earlier petitions sent to the Inspector General of Police to prosecute the Director of Akonta Mining Limited.

The Coalition said they were made to know during the meeting that investigations were ongoing into the activities of Akonta Mining Limited.

The delegation from the MCAG was appreciative of the work being carried out by the CID.

We, however, expressed our frustration at the seeming lack of action in the prosecution of the director(s) of Akonta Mining Ltd, in the face of clear evidence (including what we added to our petition and statement to the Police) of they having breached the Minerals & Mining Act, 2006 (Act 703) and prayed that the needed urgency be applied for the speedy prosecution of the director(s) of Akonta Mining Ltd since there was ample evidence available for their prosecution. The delegation also assured the CID of assisting in any way necessary to facilitate the work of the CID since this is a fight for the overall good of our dear nation Ghana.

The MCAG remains resolute in our conviction that there is and can be no conceivable justification for illegal mining to continue in Ghana. The Media Coalition Against Galamsey continues to call on all well-meaning Ghanaians, Civil Society Organizations to join hands with the media to help mount continued pressure on our leaders, Political, Technocrats, Traditional and Business to help save Ghana's water bodies and preserve our environment for current and future generations.

Losing this war is definitely not an option. Irresponsible and unsustainable mining is an existential threat and should not be countenanced, a statement issued by the Coalition on Friday, June 7 said.

6.8 Press Statement  Update on the Petition to the Police on the Prosecution of Directors of Akonta Mining Ltd for Illegal Mining in the Tano Nmira Forest Reserves  Accra, June 2023

It is however unclear whether the directors will be prosecuted after President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo exonerated the company from any wrongdoing.

The President stressed that the Company is not involved in any illegal mining anywhere in Ghana.

Let me respond briefly to the chairperson on the issue of illegal mining, President Akufo-Addo remarked after concerns about the menace came to the fore at the 28th National and 16th Biennial Congress of the National Union of Ghana Catholic Diocesan Priests Association held in Koforidua.

I want to assure him and all of you that Akonta Mining is not engaged in any illegal mining anywhere in Ghana as we speak.

Further, the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources has through the agency of the Forestry Commission with the assistance of the military made the effort to cordon off all 294 sites of forest reserves in the country and rid them of illegal mining as we speak.

President Akufo-Addo was responding to a concern expressed by the chairperson of the occasion, Ing. Ken Ashigbey, regarding Akonta Mining Company Limited's supposed infraction of the laws to mine in the Tano Nimiri Forest Reserve in the Western North Region.

Despite having a mining lease, the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources in October 2022 stopped Akonta Mining Company Limited, owned by New Patriotic Party's Ashanti Region Chairman Bernard Antwi-Boasiako, from mining in the forest reserve.

The issue is under investigation by the Special Prosecutor.

President Akufo-Addo reiterated his government's commitment to win the fight against galamsey no matter the cost in effort.

-3news.com
Candidates for the Masten District seat on the Buffalo Common Council will participate in a Meet the Candidate Forum on Saturday.

Zeneta B. Everhart, India B. Walton and Murray Holman will attend the event, which will be held during Council Member Ulysees O. Wingo Sr.'s monthly stakeholders breakfast.

The breakfast and forum will be held at 9 a.m. Saturday at Delavan Grider Community Center, 877 E. Delavan Ave.

The candidates are vying for the seat currently held by Wingo, who announced earlier this year he would not seek re-election. His term ends in December.
09.06.2023 LISTEN

ASA Savings and Loans Limited on Friday, June 9 commemorated the 2023 Green Ghana Day.

The Savings and Loans company was at Dunkwa Senior High Technical School today and planted over 150 seedlings to complement to help protect the environment and preserve forests.

Seedlings planted during the exercise include Casia, Orange, Rain Tree and Toningii.

The tree planting at Dunkwa Senior High Technical School was spearheaded by Mr. Samuel Odame, Area Manager of ASA Savings and Loans in Bekwai.

He was joined by Dunkwa Branch Manager Graham Kyei Kwakye.

Area Manager Mr. Samuel Odame said the tree planting is part of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities of ASA Savings and Loans to protect the environment in areas where the company operates.

He said the company believes that the gesture will go a long way to vegetate and prolong the existence of mankind and all living organisms on Earth.

Richard Nartey, the CSR/Climate Change Manager stated, Our tree planting aims to combat desertification, check global warming and contribute to environmental sustainability."

The tree planting exercise at Dunkwa Senior High Technical School was supervised by Mr. Christian Duodu from the Forestry Commission.

Acknowledging the importance of trees, the headmistress of Dunkwa Senior High Technical School, Mrs. Patience Larko Lartey, and the head of the agric department of the school, George Anane Coleman led students to participate in the exercise.

Sharing a few words, the headmistress thanked ASA Savings and Loans for contributing to protecting the environment by planting trees.

She emphasised the importance of tree planting to human life while indicating that when the last tree dies the last man dies.

ASA Savings and Loans, the companys goal is set to plant 2,000 trees in various parts of the country before the end of the year.
The Volta Region has recorded a 75 per cent survival rate among trees planted under the Green Ghana initiative.

This suggests that 25 per cent of the trees have died.

Dr. Archibald Yao Letsa, Volta Regional Minister, made the disclosure at a ceremony held at the Volta Barracks to commemorate this year's Green Ghana Day.

The region planted 100,000 trees in 2021, and 500,000 in 2022 during the Green Ghana exercises, and the Regional Minister said the survival rate rewarded the efforts of all stakeholders including the public, the various agencies, departments and organizations, and the traditional leaders towards protecting the environment.

He said the desecration of the nation's vegetative cover was a security threat that compounded the woes of climate change, and also destroyed the rich diversity of nature.

Dr. Letsa said the Volta region's rich tourism acclamation, and the efforts to promote the regional capital as Ghana's prime oxygen city, made it imperative for all people to continue to support the Government's afforestation drive.

The sacrifices would benefit us and our children he stated, noting that more than 200,000 trees would be planted this year across the region.

Mr. Yaw Kwakye, Operations Manager at the Forestry Commission, said an average survival rate of 75 per cent had been recorded across the country from the total of over 30.5 million trees planted since the project begun in 2020.

He said Ghana's efforts should be seen as sustaining the key drivers of biodiversity, and that the Forestry Commission would continue to grow more trees and commit to their maintenance.

The Operations Manager said the nation's fore bearers had a strong regard for the environment, and that it was important to channel their commitment to save the environment.

Lt. Col. Jalali Dean Ibrahim, Rear Commander of the 66 Artillery Regiment, said the Green Ghana initiative was a step in the right direction towards a green and sustainable future, and therefore, commended stakeholders for their support towards the nation's wealth in biodiversity.

He said trees were essential pillars of life providing clean air, shelter, and sustenance for countless wildlife, and that the nationwide exercise should help the populace renew their pledge to embark on a journey of environmental consciousness, and plant trees for a sustainable future.

By planting trees, we are symbolically planting hope and resilience in Ghana, the Rear Commander stated, and urged military personnel to seize the opportunity to actively participate in greening Ghana.

By participating, you are planting your future, he said, calling for unity and collaboration among all stakeholders towards the success of the programme.

Green Ghana Day is a special initiative by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo as a major effort for the reforestation of the country in view of the threats of climate change.

An estimated 10 million trees would be planted this year across the country, and a ceremonial planting was undertaken at the Volta Barracks following the regional launch, and which was

undertaken by heads of various agencies including security, civil service organizations, and traditional leaders.

Some planted sites in the Ho Municipality were also visited by the stakeholders after the launch.

GNA
09.06.2023 LISTEN

First batch of pilgrims for the 2023 hajj is expected to fly from the Tamale Airport to the Holy City of Mecca in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia tonight.

Nearly 430 pilgrims are expected to be on board the first flight.

An agent for the Hajj pilgrims, Ahmadu Inusah in an interview with Citi News expressed satisfaction with the process so far.

Today is the first flight and my people are moving. They are going to have medical checks starting at 12pm and everything is moving on smoothly. Some of the people will join the next flight because their visas are not yet in.

This years Hajj is unique, we have a secretariat here in Tamale where pilgrims passports are printed in Accra and distributed here, and our visas come for pick up.

Mr. Amadu also assured that nobody will pay this year and will not go because we have enough visas, and we have enough time and flights, and I am advising people to be patient because no one will be left out.

-citinewsroom
Over the past few months, there has been a surge of diplomatic endeavours in the Middle East, which includes an effort by certain nations within the region to establish normalized relations with Syria. A number of Arab nations have endeavoured to reintegrate the conflict-ridden nation into their collective with the aim of ameliorating historical grievances and re-establishing stability in the region. The current geopolitical landscape of global politics has led to a noteworthy diplomatic advancement in the Middle East, as evidenced by the decision.

At an emergency meeting held in Cairo, Arab foreign ministers cast their votes in favour of the reinstatement of Syria's membership, thereby indicating a burgeoning momentum in the ongoing efforts towards reconciliation with Damascus. Syria has been reintegrated into the Arab fold by regional powers, with measures such as the restoration of diplomatic relations and high-level visits, spearheaded by Saudi Arabia.

Nonetheless, there are still obstacles to be addressed as the extent of Damascus' willingness to make concessions on crucial matters, including the trade of Captagon, the repatriation of refugees, and the political process, remains ambiguous. Conversely, the act of reinstating Syria's membership in the Arab League was met with resistance from certain Arab nations and was viewed with doubt by the United States and Europe. However, Iran received it with approval as a component of a more extensive regional restructuring.

Why this is a significant diplomatic breakthrough?

The determination pertaining to re-admittance carries significant weight from multiple standpoints and is unquestionably a distinctive diplomatic accomplishment, particularly given the recent geopolitical shifts in worldwide politics. The contemporary geopolitical terrain is distinguished by the participation of substantial international group of actors, including Russia, USA, the West, and China, in a complex and ornate setting that evokes memories of the Cold War. On the contrary, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the current global economic and energy crisis have curtailed the projected global growth. Moreover, the crisis in Sudan has incited a new surge of tension in the Arabian Peninsula.

Therefore, the cumulative effect of these strategic fragmentations and activities has led to a substantial vacuum in the Middle Eastern region. In the contemporary global context, notable entities such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey have assumed a leadership role in the Middle East, thereby establishing a distinctive standing for the region. The reinstatement of Syria into the Arab League is a noteworthy diplomatic accomplishment, as it presents a viable approach for the Arab League to address the ongoing Syrian conflict and serve as the protector of the Arab region.

Moreover, the shift from the Arab nations underscored the need for intra-regional cooperation across the entire region. The significance of inter-state collaboration in countering external influences within a given region cannot be overstated. Moreover, the Arabian region has become a pivotal point of concern for Western nations in recent decades. The Middle East region has witnessed substantial geopolitical intervention from non-Arab countries, particularly following the events of 9/11, Arab spring and the emergence of the ISIS crisis. In recent decades, external powers have undertaken diverse military operations and engagements in the region.

However, the present redirection of Western attention towards the Indo-Pacific region and the persistent strife in Ukraine have created a prospect for Arab nations to rejuvenate their respective states. Hence, the reintegration of Syria is an essential element of this process of rejuvenation.

Thirdly, the decision to refuse readmission to Syria carries multiple implications and facets for various groups. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's recent decision to restore diplomatic relations with Syria offers valuable insight into the modified course of Saudi Arabia's regional foreign policy. The current strategy employed by Riyadh can be concisely encapsulated through the utilization of three key concepts: de-escalation, economic cooperation, and pragmatism.

Moreover, Riyadh has recently taken the lead in promoting the Arab consensus by following in the footsteps of the UAE, Bahrain, and Oman, all of which had already restored diplomatic ties with Damascus. Hence, the process of readmission and the provision of support by KSA are indicative of its support for other Arab nations.

Conversely, Qatar is the sole country that continues to refuse to re-establish diplomatic relations with Syria. The stance of the United States towards the Assad regime has become increasingly critical, a position that is expected to garner support from the US.

Moreover, the trade of Captagon holds considerable weight for Arab nations when deliberating on their acceptance of Syria. The trafficking of Captagon is a pressing issue for the Gulf monarchies, posing a considerable threat to public health. Additionally, it represents a national security concern for neighbouring countries, with Jordan being a particularly noteworthy case.

In the present context, while the rationale behind the Arab nations' choice to establish normalized relations appears evident, there persists a degree of ambiguity concerning the level of commitment Damascus is prepared to demonstrate in combatting the trade of Captagon.

Fourthly, the normalization of relations with the Assad government has been a crucial objective for some, if not all, Arab nations, who have sought to reintegrate Syria into the Arab community while simultaneously detaching it from Iran. During the previous decade, there has been a noteworthy proliferation of Tehran's military, economic, and political affiliations with Damascus. Iran has successfully established a robust presence in strategically significant areas surrounding Syria. Iran's involvement in the Syrian conflict has incurred substantial expenses. Tehran encountered a state of seclusion both on a global and regional scale.

Hence, the reinstatement of Syria into the Arab League ought to be viewed as a constituent of the broader reorganization of the regional security and economic structure, in light of the recent de-escalation of hostilities between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the increased diplomatic engagement of authorities in the Gulf area.

It is noteworthy that the United States and the European Union maintain an unfavourable position regarding the recent reintegration of Syria into the Arab League, as they assert that Syria is not meritorious of such a restoration. The party in question has made it clear that they do not wish to establish normalized relations with the Syrian government given the current circumstances. The lack of progress in initiating a political process based on UN Resolution 2254 can be attributed to the government in Damascus' failure to make concessions or demonstrate engagement in said process. Hence, the act of admission served as a demonstration of the waning hegemony of the United States' power in the international system. Nevertheless, it is crucial to acknowledge that Syria does not occupy a prominent position on the foreign policy agenda of Washington.

Hence, it is crucial to acknowledge that regardless of the result of this reentry, it fails to adequately tackle the profound suffering experienced by the populace of Syria. The affluent Arab nations bear a responsibility to undertake measures aimed at normalizing the situation in Syria, rather than exacerbating the adversities, for the betterment of the destitute Syrian populace and the global community at large. From this perspective, the process of readmission appears to communicate a message of alleviating the challenges encountered by the Syrian populace and advancing towards a feasible resolution to the persistent issue.

Despite the diplomatic significance of Syria's reinstatement to the Arab League, it is crucial to prioritize the pressing requirements of humanitarian assistance, reconstruction endeavours, and sustained stability within the nation. It is imperative for the international community and Arab world to remain cognizant of the predicament faced by the Syrian populace, who have been subjected to significant distress and displacement due to the persistent hostilities.

To summarize, the ultimate outcome of Syria's reinstatement into the Arab League highlights the reluctance of global actors to provide Arab countries with the opportunity to shape their own future. The decision may be interpreted as a signal to the global community regarding the resurgence of a self-governing Arab foreign policy and the demonstration of solidarity, collaboration, and interdependence. Nonetheless, this statement serves as a prompt to emphasize the importance of prioritizing the welfare of the Syrian populace and the pressing necessity for a holistic resolution that mitigates their distress and establishes enduring tranquillity. The affluent Arab nations possess a crucial responsibility in furnishing assistance, aid, and resources to alleviate the adversities encountered by Syrians and facilitate a trajectory towards a more favourable outcome. It is crucial for the global community to maintain its focus on the Syrian populace and strive towards a viable resolution to their ongoing predicament.

S. M. Saifee Islam

Research Associate

The KRF Center for Bangladesh and Global Affairs (CBGA)

Dhaka, Bangladesh
*Boakye Agyarko Best Qualifies To Lead NPP*

He who wants to lead, must first learn to serve; so the sages say, and it's true.

Nomination forms for the NPP leadership, preceding the 2024 presidential elections have taken off in earnest, and so far, all interested leadership potential personalities have picked up their forms, with accompanying due fees paid.

Without wasting any time on what is already known, a due diligence assessment is much required for NPP to get it right for once, by not making a choice of leader that will be woefully wistful, disappointing, and regrettable.

It is no secret that all Party officers, members of parliament, Ministers, and appointees of this Akufo-Addo administration have been enjoined to give their full support to Dr. Bawumia, and this is a command of the powers that be.

This indeed is a crazy tenet that should not be abided by, and be seen as being sheepish to crazy edicts that will surely have dire consequences for the Party.

Dr. Bawumia's campaign message delivered at Walewale is full of lies and concocted fabrications that when analysed with the truth as it stands, makes ridicule of him, and exposes him as a power-hungry liar who has nothing good in store for the NPP and Ghana.

A Bawumia leadership will be a continuation of Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko-controlled Akufo-Addo/Bawumia administration, for the vicious circle to continue turning nonstop.

Delegates from the grassroot must reject him because Ghanaians will never even vote for him to be President. Those who are goading him on in his delusive fantasy are doing so in disingenuity, and are fake NPP patriots. They have no goodwill for the Party and its fortunes, let alone anything good for Ghana. Their interest is centred on corruption, personal fortune seeking, and they care less even if Ghana falls, and all Ghanaians perish.

Hon Alan Kyeremateng has failed woefully in all his ministerial positions held from the Kufuor administration, ranging from his UN posting as ambassador, as Minister of presidential special initiatives, and eventually as Trade and Industries Minister; then in the Akufo-Addo administration as Trade and Industries Minister.

In spite of all these positions held for approximately 14 years, Hon Alan Kyeremateng has not been able to provide any pedigree of quality performance. He's too ordinary, and doesn't excel anywhere.

Ghanaians keep on moaning about overspill of Chinese people who have migrated to colonise Ghana, and having flouted our immigrant and trading laws with impunity. Worst of all, our vegetation and river bodies are at the mercy of Chinese exploiters.

Ex-president Kufuor attempted to foist Hon Alan Kyeremateng on the NPP to be leader and presidential candidate in 2008, but failed, and the choice of Party delegates prevailed. Alan did not hesitate to resign from the NPP for having lost in his leadership contest. As to who counselled him to make a U-turn is not my concern.

Ever since, Alan has contested for NPP leadership in 2012, and in 2016, only to appreciate his real and actual smoothness level. The fact that he has persistently contested doesn't make him any obvious choice on the basis of sympathy, the same channel through which Akufo-Addo emerged for sympathy votes, only to fail woefully in disappointment.

Supporters and followers of both Alan and Bawumia have been engaged in violent clashes. Animosity exists, and will continue to pervade in division of our Party if any of them is elected NPP leader and presidential candidate. None of these is advocating for Party unity, let alone having any proactive programme or agenda for Party unity, an apathy that led to a near electoral loss in 2020.

In the case of Kwabena Agyapong, he has served as presidential spokesman, and as General Secretary of the Party. His own haughtiness image, his pride, and disdain for the then elected leader during the time of need, referring to the leader as "your presidential candidate", makes him a perfect nuisance, and unqualified.

Kwabena Agyapong put up this behaviour simply because his favourite contestant, Mr. Alan Kyeremateng couldn't win the slot to lead NPP, so this made him do and make several pronouncements that were untoward for a Party General Secretary. This is besides his accepting inducement from Ibrahim Mahama.

When questioned at the disciplinary committee hearing, Kwabena came out with lies upon lies, and fake documents in his defence, leading to his indefinite suspension.

Now, "the boiling hot soup" has been made tepid, so Kwabena intends to dip his fingers into it.

Hon Afriyie Akoto has no foresight for governance, apart from his personal ambition to lead the NPP. This is what has been said from his own lips.

Kennedy Agyapong, member of parliament for Assin Central is only a noise maker with uncontrollable slippery lips. Kennedy doesn't hesitate in using indecent language on public platforms.

He is banking on his wealth, amassed from contracts allotted to him by NDC and NPP, and particularly under President Kufuor. Most of our sub-standard transformers from China, that cannot withstand lightning, thunder, and rain were supplied by Kennedy Agyapong.

Kennedy focuses most on his businesses more than caring about Ghana. A true son of Ghana, and a patriot will be mindful of quality goods for Ghana, not the sub-standard to maximise profits.

As a boastful and braggard talkative, he's fond of threats as if he is privy to everything evil and criminal that goes on in Ghana, yet no evidence or exhibit has ever been produced. Kennedy even threatens to collapse the NPP if anybody dares challenge him. Is it not Kennedy Agyapong who publicly announced that he would reveal how the NPP won the 2016 elections?

Can he be a dedicated and loyal Party member?

Kennedy Agyapong has waded into the NPP leadership contest without any aims and governance foresight. He's in the race simply because he claims he has provided the Party with various logistics, as well as cash funding. He appears to have forgotten that the Party intentionally created a millionaire avenue for him through making him resourceful enough, and for him to reciprocate for the Party in times of need.

Kennedy has shirked every national responsibility position offered to him, because his concentration is on his businesses and personal wealth creation. How can such a person, all of a sudden claim to be able to lead the NPP, and be elected President of Ghana? Is it simply because he has amassed wealth from only God knows where and how?

Hon Boakye Agyarko has proved himself worthy of leading the NPP even from the little hallmark that he left in his brief tenure of office as Energy Minister. The "Dumsor" menace was crippled within a short space of time, yet not to the appreciation of his autocratic and family and friends and cronies-minded hirer.

Removed from office under circumstances that still remain unexplained, while the onus on the President, Agyarko was feared, and so, made a sacrificial lamb, in order to make a way for Bawumia.

Hon Boakye Agyarko has a long trail of unflinching membership and services to the UP tradition, through to the Progress Party; the PFP, incident to the formation of the modern day NPP.

He has been groomed by Hon J H Mensah, and Mr Kwame Mpianim, both renown economists with World Bank experience, and thoroughbred loyalists to the Party and Ghana.

Hon. Boakye Agyarko has learned to serve in the parent tradition in several committee capacities even as a young student. In the NPP, his role responsibilities have been indispensable.

He served as a member of the Economic Management Team when he was Energy Minister, and in our present economic downturn crises, Hon. Boakye Agyarko has alternative options for recovery and national development, yet this Akufo-Addo/Bawumia administration has purposefully made a monster of him out of fear of his knowledge, his ability to perform and transform; his can-do innate spirit with determination and perseverance scare them, as they fear their deeds and misdeeds being exposed.

The rest of the contestants don't matter to me much, because the grassroot delegates with their own initiatives and rationality, will carefully pick the grains out of the chaff.

Adreba Abrefa Damoa
09.06.2023 LISTEN

Contrary to claims by the popular broadcaster of Onua FM, Blessed Godsbrain Smart that the Municipal Chief Executive ordered his boys to disrupt his Onua 'Maakye programme' in Obuasi, Hon Elijah Adansi-Bonah has said Captain Smart did not notify the Assembly nor the security details in Obuasi before hosting the programme at the Central Business District.

According to the MCE at a press conference in Obuasi, he got to know Captain Smart was coming to host a programme in Obuasi on the eve of the program on Tuesday through someone.

He refuted the allegation by Captain Smart that he was with him (the MCE) prior to the program. "I only heard Captain Smart was coming to town on Tuesday through somebody and even that, he said the program will rather come off at Tutuka in Obuasi East and not the Obuasi Municipal," he stated.

Hon Adansi-Bonah added that he later on the same day heard that the organisers of the programme had moved it from Tutuka to the Obuasi Municipality.

He intimated that Captain Smart and his crew did not seek the permission of the Assembly to host the program at the CBD.

Contrary to the claim that the team was attacked, he stressed the taskforce of the Assembly led by one 'Afar' charged to maintain law and order at the Obuasi Central Business District only confronted Captain Smart and his crew to stop the programme, go for permit and pay the required amount to the Assembly.

The venue of the program was a designated revenue point

The Obuasi MCE indicated that due to the fact that Captain Smart and his crew failed to seek permit from the Assembly to use the venue as has been the practice, the Assembly lost revenue.

He said "the venue is a designated On-street parking lot which is one of the revenue streams of the Assembly. Since we were not notified by the organizers of the programme, the Assembly lost so much in revenue on the day."

He added that the Assembly decided to allow them to continue the programme on the first day because they had the impression that the programme was only a day's activity but was shocked to know that the programme would travel beyond two days. He said even at that, Captain Smart and his crew did not seek approval from the Assembly to use the venue.

Breach of security and heightening already tensed atmosphere

Hon. Elijah Adansi-Bonah revealed that prior to Captain Smart coming to Obuasi, he had already incited the youth of Obuasi against the management of AngloGold Ashanti and the company in one of his morning shows.

He said his presence in Obuasi and engagement with the same galamseyers he had incited was a security risk yet, Captain Smart failed to notify the Police to even know of the security implications of his program and to seek the right advise.

Captain Smart said he did not know Obuasi was divided into two

According to the MCE, a Police officer who was in the company of Captain Smart phoned and told him the broadcaster had said he brought a letter to the Obuasi East District to host the programme there and not the Obuasi Municipal Assembly.

"That Captain Smart said he did not know Obuasi had been divided into two; the Obuasi Municipal and the Obuasi East District," he emphasised.

The MCE noted that he had to call the Obuasi East DCE to find out if truly Captain Smart brought a letter to her to host his programme at Tutuka.

According to him, the DCE denied knowledge of any letter from Captain Smart.

Hon. Elijah Adansi-Bonah added that the Police officer again phoned him and that Captain Smart said he had sent a letter to the Chief of staff and the Regional Minister about his programme.

In response, the MCE said he asked Captain Smart to produce those letters yet to no avail.

We will not allow AngloGold Ashanti to go down

Whiles disputing claims he has a bodyguard, the Obuasi Municipal Chief Executive further stated that the Assembly will not allow anybody to disrupt the activities of AngloGold Ashanti.

"Though we all concede that AngloGold Ashanti has not been able to employ the chunk of the population, we will not allow anybody to use that as an excuse to cause tension and disrupt their activities," he intimated.

He added that Captain Smart had an agenda to cause disaffection for AngloGold Ashanti which the Assembly and security prevented from happening.

He stressed, "we will not allow what happened in 2016 where AngloGold Ashanti threatened to leave the country to happen again. I call on residents of Obuasi to speak against all those who want AGA to go down. As an Assembly, we will not allow that to happen."

A call on the Security

Hon Elijah Adansi-Bonah called on the Police Service and national security to come together to protect AngloGold Ashanti and 'fight' those who want to disrupt the activities of the mining company.

He further reiterated that the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Abu Jinapor has set up a taskforce led by the Deputy Minister George Mireku Duker to look into the concerns of the illegal miners.

He therefore called on the illegal miners to remain calm as the committee works to bring a lasting solution to the matter.
Molina Healthcare, Inc. (NYSE:MOH  Get Rating) traded down 3% during mid-day trading on Tuesday . The company traded as low as $284.22 and last traded at $284.22. 185,846 shares were traded during mid-day trading, a decline of 63% from the average session volume of 508,776 shares. The stock had previously closed at $293.14.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

A number of brokerages recently commented on MOH. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft lowered their price objective on Molina Healthcare from $365.00 to $335.00 in a research note on Monday, May 8th. Wells Fargo & Company cut their target price on Molina Healthcare from $307.00 to $282.00 and set an underweight rating on the stock in a research note on Tuesday, March 21st. Truist Financial cut their target price on Molina Healthcare from $400.00 to $380.00 and set a buy rating on the stock in a research note on Friday, February 10th. StockNews.com raised shares of Molina Healthcare from a buy rating to a strong-buy rating in a research note on Saturday, June 3rd. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. lowered their target price on shares of Molina Healthcare from $360.00 to $348.00 and set an overweight rating on the stock in a research note on Thursday, February 23rd. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, four have given a hold rating, five have issued a buy rating and one has given a strong buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the company currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $354.75.

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Molina Healthcare Stock Performance

The firm has a fifty day simple moving average of $286.45 and a 200 day simple moving average of $297.46. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.72, a current ratio of 1.47 and a quick ratio of 1.47. The company has a market cap of $16.75 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 19.44, a P/E/G ratio of 1.07 and a beta of 0.68.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Molina Healthcare ( NYSE:MOH Get Rating ) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, April 26th. The company reported $5.81 earnings per share for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $5.13 by $0.68. Molina Healthcare had a net margin of 2.64% and a return on equity of 36.20%. The business had revenue of $8.15 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $8.31 billion. During the same period in the previous year, the company earned $4.90 earnings per share. Molina Healthcares revenue for the quarter was up 4.9% on a year-over-year basis. On average, sell-side analysts expect that Molina Healthcare, Inc. will post 20.25 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the business. Prelude Capital Management LLC acquired a new position in Molina Healthcare during the first quarter worth $259,000. Macquarie Group Ltd. grew its stake in Molina Healthcare by 9.4% during the first quarter. Macquarie Group Ltd. now owns 26,728 shares of the companys stock worth $7,149,000 after buying an additional 2,306 shares during the last quarter. ProShare Advisors LLC boosted its stake in Molina Healthcare by 52.8% in the first quarter. ProShare Advisors LLC now owns 12,910 shares of the companys stock worth $3,453,000 after purchasing an additional 4,462 shares in the last quarter. Brandywine Global Investment Management LLC acquired a new position in Molina Healthcare in the first quarter worth $4,941,000. Finally, Toroso Investments LLC boosted its stake in Molina Healthcare by 233.6% in the first quarter. Toroso Investments LLC now owns 3,993 shares of the companys stock worth $1,068,000 after purchasing an additional 2,796 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors own 94.25% of the companys stock.

Molina Healthcare Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Molina Healthcare, Inc engages in the provision of health care services. It operates through the following segments: Medicaid, Medicare, Marketplace, and Other. The company was founded by C. David Molina in 1980 and is headquartered in Long Beach, CA.

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Paragon Private Wealth Management LLC bought a new position in shares of ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP  Get Rating) during the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the SEC. The fund bought 1,986 shares of the energy producers stock, valued at approximately $234,000.

Several other institutional investors and hedge funds also recently added to or reduced their stakes in COP. Fairfield Bush & CO. acquired a new position in shares of ConocoPhillips during the 1st quarter valued at about $31,000. Cetera Investment Advisers boosted its position in shares of ConocoPhillips by 4.0% during the 1st quarter. Cetera Investment Advisers now owns 25,399 shares of the energy producers stock valued at $2,540,000 after acquiring an additional 968 shares during the last quarter. Baird Financial Group Inc. boosted its position in shares of ConocoPhillips by 1.9% during the 1st quarter. Baird Financial Group Inc. now owns 512,126 shares of the energy producers stock valued at $51,213,000 after acquiring an additional 9,313 shares during the last quarter. Zions Bancorporation N.A. boosted its position in shares of ConocoPhillips by 59.1% during the 1st quarter. Zions Bancorporation N.A. now owns 1,810 shares of the energy producers stock valued at $181,000 after acquiring an additional 672 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. boosted its position in shares of ConocoPhillips by 21.3% during the 1st quarter. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. now owns 14,063 shares of the energy producers stock valued at $1,406,000 after acquiring an additional 2,465 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 81.76% of the companys stock.

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ConocoPhillips Stock Down 0.4 %

ConocoPhillips stock traded down $0.39 during mid-day trading on Friday, hitting $104.15. The company had a trading volume of 1,663,116 shares, compared to its average volume of 6,399,405. The stock has a market cap of $126.03 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 8.36, a PEG ratio of 0.57 and a beta of 1.31. ConocoPhillips has a 1 year low of $78.30 and a 1 year high of $138.49. The company has a quick ratio of 1.29, a current ratio of 1.39 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.32. The business has a fifty day moving average of $102.74 and a 200 day moving average of $109.07.

ConocoPhillips Announces Dividend

ConocoPhillips ( NYSE:COP Get Rating ) last announced its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, May 4th. The energy producer reported $2.38 EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $2.02 by $0.36. The company had revenue of $15.52 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $16.06 billion. ConocoPhillips had a net margin of 20.21% and a return on equity of 32.75%. The firms revenue was down 19.6% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the prior year, the firm posted $3.27 earnings per share. On average, sell-side analysts expect that ConocoPhillips will post 10.05 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 1st. Stockholders of record on Tuesday, May 16th were issued a $0.51 dividend. This represents a $2.04 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 1.96%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Monday, June 26th. ConocoPhillipss payout ratio is currently 16.32%.

Insider Activity

In other news, Director Caroline Maury Devine sold 1,000 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, May 8th. The stock was sold at an average price of $102.08, for a total value of $102,080.00. Following the completion of the sale, the director now directly owns 849 shares of the companys stock, valued at $86,665.92. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through this hyperlink. Corporate insiders own 0.37% of the companys stock.

Analyst Ratings Changes

COP has been the topic of several recent research reports. Piper Sandler boosted their price target on shares of ConocoPhillips from $140.00 to $149.00 in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. UBS Group started coverage on shares of ConocoPhillips in a research note on Wednesday, April 19th. They set a buy rating and a $139.00 price target on the stock. Raymond James boosted their price target on shares of ConocoPhillips from $135.00 to $142.00 and gave the stock a strong-buy rating in a research note on Friday, April 21st. Morgan Stanley boosted their price target on shares of ConocoPhillips from $122.00 to $124.00 in a research note on Monday, May 15th. Finally, StockNews.com started coverage on shares of ConocoPhillips in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock. Six analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, fifteen have issued a buy rating and one has given a strong buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, ConocoPhillips currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $137.58.

ConocoPhillips Company Profile

(Get Rating)

ConocoPhillips engages in the exploration, production, transportation and marketing of crude oil, bitumen, natural gas, natural gas liquids, and liquefied natural gas on a worldwide basis. It operates through the following geographical segments: Alaska, Lower 48, Canada, Europe, Middle East and North Africa, Asia Pacific, and Other International.

Further Reading

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2Xideas AG grew its holdings in Dominos Pizza, Inc. (NYSE:DPZ  Get Rating) by 9.2% during the 4th quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 22,463 shares of the restaurant operators stock after acquiring an additional 1,884 shares during the period. 2Xideas AG owned about 0.06% of Dominos Pizza worth $7,781,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

A number of other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also recently modified their holdings of the stock. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Public School Empls Retrmt SYS raised its holdings in Dominos Pizza by 6.6% during the 1st quarter. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Public School Empls Retrmt SYS now owns 4,869 shares of the restaurant operators stock valued at $1,982,000 after buying an additional 302 shares during the period. Cibc World Market Inc. lifted its stake in shares of Dominos Pizza by 15.3% during the 1st quarter. Cibc World Market Inc. now owns 6,303 shares of the restaurant operators stock worth $2,565,000 after acquiring an additional 838 shares during the last quarter. Sei Investments Co. lifted its stake in Dominos Pizza by 2.3% in the first quarter. Sei Investments Co. now owns 15,131 shares of the restaurant operators stock worth $6,034,000 after acquiring an additional 339 shares during the period. Aviva PLC increased its holdings in shares of Dominos Pizza by 35.3% in the 1st quarter. Aviva PLC now owns 17,279 shares of the restaurant operators stock valued at $7,033,000 after acquiring an additional 4,505 shares during the period. Finally, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board boosted its position in Dominos Pizza by 1,387.6% during the first quarter. Canada Pension Plan Investment Board now owns 1,800 shares of the restaurant operators stock valued at $733,000 after purchasing an additional 1,679 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors own 90.32% of the companys stock.

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Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

A number of research analysts have issued reports on the stock. Morgan Stanley cut their price target on shares of Dominos Pizza from $430.00 to $405.00 and set an overweight rating on the stock in a research note on Friday, February 24th. Robert W. Baird cut Dominos Pizza from an outperform rating to a neutral rating and decreased their price objective for the company from $400.00 to $320.00 in a report on Friday, February 24th. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft lowered their price objective on Dominos Pizza from $351.00 to $334.00 and set a hold rating on the stock in a research report on Monday, February 27th. TD Cowen restated a market perform rating and set a $320.00 price target on shares of Dominos Pizza in a research report on Monday, April 3rd. Finally, Citigroup increased their target price on shares of Dominos Pizza from $343.00 to $349.00 in a research note on Friday, April 28th. Two research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, fifteen have assigned a hold rating and ten have given a buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the stock currently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $356.04.

Dominos Pizza Price Performance

Shares of NYSE:DPZ traded down $1.74 on Friday, reaching $298.16. 238,371 shares of the company traded hands, compared to its average volume of 739,557. The companys 50 day moving average is $314.76 and its 200-day moving average is $334.19. The stock has a market capitalization of $10.54 billion, a PE ratio of 23.12, a P/E/G ratio of 1.89 and a beta of 0.79. Dominos Pizza, Inc. has a fifty-two week low of $285.84 and a fifty-two week high of $426.44.

Dominos Pizza (NYSE:DPZ  Get Rating) last posted its earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The restaurant operator reported $2.93 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $2.66 by $0.27. The firm had revenue of $1.02 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $1.04 billion. Dominos Pizza had a net margin of 10.24% and a negative return on equity of 11.07%. The companys revenue was up 1.3% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the previous year, the company earned $2.50 earnings per share. As a group, analysts expect that Dominos Pizza, Inc. will post 13.32 EPS for the current year.

Dominos Pizza Announces Dividend

The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, June 30th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, June 15th will be issued a $1.21 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Wednesday, June 14th. This represents a $4.84 annualized dividend and a yield of 1.62%. Dominos Pizzas dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 37.32%.

Insider Transactions at Dominos Pizza

In related news, EVP Cynthia A. Headen sold 136 shares of Dominos Pizza stock in a transaction dated Monday, March 13th. The shares were sold at an average price of $300.00, for a total transaction of $40,800.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the executive vice president now directly owns 4,867 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $1,460,100. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at the SEC website. 0.76% of the stock is owned by insiders.

About Dominos Pizza

(Get Rating)

Dominos Pizza, Inc engages in the management of a network of company-owned and franchise-owned pizza stores. It operates through the following segments: U.S. Stores, International Franchise, and Supply Chain. The U.S. Stores segment consists primarily of franchise operations. The International Franchise segment comprises a network of franchised stores.

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a.k.a. Brands Holding Corp. (NYSE:AKA  Get Rating) was up 11.4% during trading on Tuesday . The company traded as high as $0.48 and last traded at $0.45. Approximately 1,573,762 shares were traded during trading, an increase of 536% from the average daily volume of 247,625 shares. The stock had previously closed at $0.40.

Analyst Ratings Changes

A number of equities research analysts have recently commented on AKA shares. Piper Sandler downgraded shares of a.k.a. Brands from an overweight rating to a neutral rating and lowered their price target for the stock from $3.00 to $2.00 in a report on Friday, March 10th. Truist Financial reduced their price target on shares of a.k.a. Brands from $4.00 to $2.60 and set a buy rating on the stock in a research report on Friday, March 10th. TD Securities dropped their price target on shares of a.k.a. Brands from $1.70 to $1.00 and set a market perform rating for the company in a research note on Tuesday, March 21st. Jefferies Financial Group lowered shares of a.k.a. Brands from a buy rating to a hold rating and lowered their target price for the company from $4.00 to $1.70 in a research note on Wednesday, February 15th. Finally, Telsey Advisory Group reissued a market perform rating and set a $2.00 price target on shares of a.k.a. Brands in a report on Wednesday, April 19th. Nine investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and one has assigned a buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $2.19.

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a.k.a. Brands Stock Up 16.8 %

The firm has a market cap of $64.89 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -0.35 and a beta of 1.05. The firms fifty day moving average is $0.40 and its two-hundred day moving average is $1.04. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.54, a current ratio of 2.23 and a quick ratio of 0.74.

Insider Buying and Selling at a.k.a. Brands

a.k.a. Brands ( NYSE:AKA Get Rating ) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, March 9th. The company reported ($0.03) earnings per share for the quarter. a.k.a. Brands had a negative return on equity of 4.98% and a negative net margin of 32.16%. The company had revenue of $149.13 million during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $161.44 million. On average, sell-side analysts expect that a.k.a. Brands Holding Corp. will post -0.04 EPS for the current fiscal year.

In other a.k.a. Brands news, CFO Ciaran Joseph Long purchased 79,979 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Friday, March 17th. The stock was bought at an average cost of $0.63 per share, with a total value of $50,386.77. Following the acquisition, the chief financial officer now owns 383,226 shares of the companys stock, valued at $241,432.38. The acquisition was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this hyperlink. In related news, Director Myles B. Mccormick acquired 56,250 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Thursday, March 16th. The shares were purchased at an average price of $0.65 per share, for a total transaction of $36,562.50. Following the acquisition, the director now owns 122,635 shares in the company, valued at $79,712.75. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which can be accessed through the SEC website. Also, CFO Ciaran Joseph Long acquired 79,979 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Friday, March 17th. The shares were bought at an average price of $0.63 per share, for a total transaction of $50,386.77. Following the acquisition, the chief financial officer now owns 383,226 shares in the company, valued at approximately $241,432.38. The disclosure for this purchase can be found here. 34.90% of the stock is owned by corporate insiders.

Institutional Trading of a.k.a. Brands

Institutional investors and hedge funds have recently bought and sold shares of the stock. Shay Capital LLC acquired a new position in shares of a.k.a. Brands in the 4th quarter valued at about $27,000. Jane Street Group LLC acquired a new position in a.k.a. Brands in the third quarter worth approximately $28,000. Bank of New York Mellon Corp increased its holdings in a.k.a. Brands by 24.2% in the first quarter. Bank of New York Mellon Corp now owns 23,254 shares of the companys stock worth $103,000 after buying an additional 4,538 shares during the last quarter. PDT Partners LLC acquired a new position in a.k.a. Brands in the first quarter worth approximately $119,000. Finally, Renaissance Technologies LLC increased its holdings in a.k.a. Brands by 24.1% in the third quarter. Renaissance Technologies LLC now owns 85,100 shares of the companys stock worth $123,000 after buying an additional 16,500 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 59.89% of the companys stock.

a.k.a. Brands Company Profile

(Get Rating)

a.k.a. Brands Holding Corp. operates a portfolio of online fashion brands in the United States, Australia, and internationally. It offers apparel, footwear, and accessories through its online stores under the Princess Polly, Culture Kings, Petal & Pup, mnml, and Rebdolls brands, as well as operates eight physical stores under the Culture Kings brand name.

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ALBANY  The State Senate is declining to hold a vote on whether to confirm Justin Driscoll, the acting president and CEO of the New York Power Authority, a setback for Gov. Kathy Hochuls administration.

On Tuesday, The Buffalo News had reported on several discrimination complaints lodged at the Niagara Power Project in Lewiston. Between 2014 and 2021, Driscoll was counsel for NYPA and his office was charged with reviewing all such complaints.

Power Authority faced discrimination complaints under Hochul nominee's leadership ALBANY  Shirley Hamilton, the former president of the Niagara Falls NAACP, died in March at

Before her death in March, Shirley Hamilton, the former leader of the Niagara Falls NAACP, had sought to raise awareness about the claimed mishandling of discrimination complaints under Driscolls leadership, a charge that Driscoll denies. Hamilton had worked at NYPA for 44 years, rising to become the first Black female control room operator at the Lewiston plant.

In statement Friday following the news that Driscoll would not be confirmed, the coalition Public Power NY, which opposed Driscolls nomination, said it was deeply grateful to Shirley Hamilton, whose tireless activism for racial justice fueled us, and to all the NYPA employees who were brave enough to share their stories and struggle for justice in their workplace.

Some liberal lawmakers also questioned other aspects of Driscolls records, including his history of making campaign donations to Republicans and his initial opposition to a law expanding NYPAs green energy production.

Probe says Power Project workers' conversation was bugged; no charges filed Sgt. Russell J. DeFranco has filed a $3 million lawsuit against the New York Power Authority, claiming his firing in February 2020 after years of tension between him and a supervisor was unjust and discriminatory.

Hochul recommended Driscoll last year for the top post at NYPA, a public benefit corporation that provides low-cost power to New Yorkers. The news that Driscoll would not receive a confirmation vote was first reported by Politico, and two Senate sources confirmed that development to The Buffalo News.

One Senate source said Driscoll did not have support within the full Senate Democratic conference to be confirmed. That was despite Driscoll having easily passed through two Senate committee votes Tuesday.

Driscoll always faced resistance from liberal members of the Senate due to his one-time opposition to the Build Public Renewables Act, according to another legislative source  and the recent Buffalo News article didnt help.

Hochuls office said Driscoll would remain in his acting role and defended his hiring.

Following a national search last year, Governor Hochul recommended Justin Driscoll for President and CEO of the New York Power Authority because he has the expertise to lead the nations largest state-owned utility, helping New York to achieve its ambitious climate goals using both NYPAs existing authorities and its expanded mandate to build renewable energy secured in the FY24 State Budget, Hochul spokeswoman Katy Zielinski said.

Asked about the discrimination complaints at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Driscoll said that before complaints ever got to his office, they were vetted at several levels within the state government, both within the agency and outside it  by some 10 to 15 people. He noted that of NYPAs nine top executives, three are Black. The last two managers of the Niagara Power Project, where Hamilton worked, have been Black.

Anyone who knows me knows thats not me, thats not how I operate, Driscoll said of the accusations. I would never try to minimize complaints.

Near the end of Hamiltons 44-year career at NYPA, Christopher Carey was the operations superintendent at the Niagara Power Project. Several of the complaints lodged there concerned Carey.

For instance, Nick Gilewski, an outage coordinator there who is white, grew concerned about a series of comments that Carey reportedly made about Hamilton  and in 2019, reported his concerns to a regional Power Authority manager.

Carey, who is white, would berate, belittle and discredit Hamilton in front of other employees; referred to how she made crazy and wild complaints; talked about how Hamilton was prone to make mistakes on the job; and said that no one could have Hamilton fired because she was Black and untouchable, but that he would get her fired and be the first, according to a complaint Gilewski later filed with the state Division of Human Rights.

In the same complaint, Gilewski claimed that he was also denied a raise and disciplined by Carey in retaliation for coming forward to an authority manager about Careys disparaging comments. Carey denied the charges. But the state Division of Human Rights in January 2021 found probable cause to support the allegations.

Five months earlier, in August 2020, Power Authority chief diversity officer Nancy Harvey had written a letter to Gilewski, stating that the authority could not substantiate Gilewskis claim of retaliation. But Harvey did write that administrative action has been recommended to address Mr. Careys unprofessional conduct toward Shirley Hamilton.

Yet following that action, Careys pay jumped from $166,000 in 2020 to nearly $195,000 in 2021, and he gained the new title of superintendent. Last year, he made more than $202,000.
Bank of America began coverage on shares of Aflac (NYSE:AFL  Get Rating) in a research report sent to investors on Monday, The Fly reports. The brokerage issued a buy rating on the financial services providers stock.

Other equities analysts have also recently issued reports about the stock. StockNews.com started coverage on shares of Aflac in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating for the company. Wells Fargo & Company started coverage on shares of Aflac in a research report on Tuesday, April 25th. They set an equal weight rating and a $73.00 price objective for the company. Truist Financial lifted their price objective on shares of Aflac from $65.00 to $70.00 and gave the stock a hold rating in a research report on Monday, February 6th. Morgan Stanley reduced their price objective on shares of Aflac from $77.00 to $72.00 and set an overweight rating for the company in a research report on Wednesday, April 12th. Finally, Citigroup reduced their price objective on shares of Aflac from $73.00 to $69.00 in a research report on Thursday, April 27th. Six investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and four have assigned a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company presently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $71.22.

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Aflac Trading Down 0.3 %

NYSE:AFL opened at $68.21 on Monday. Aflac has a twelve month low of $52.07 and a twelve month high of $74.01. The company has a quick ratio of 0.05, a current ratio of 0.05 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.38. The business has a 50 day moving average price of $66.29 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $68.36. The company has a market cap of $41.21 billion, a P/E ratio of 9.84, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.48 and a beta of 0.94.

Aflac Dividend Announcement

Aflac ( NYSE:AFL Get Rating ) last released its earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The financial services provider reported $1.55 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $1.40 by $0.15. Aflac had a net margin of 22.90% and a return on equity of 15.25%. The business had revenue of $4.80 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $4.61 billion. During the same period last year, the business earned $1.42 earnings per share. The firms revenue was down 7.2% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, analysts expect that Aflac will post 5.81 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 1st. Shareholders of record on Wednesday, May 17th were paid a dividend of $0.42 per share. This represents a $1.68 annualized dividend and a yield of 2.46%. The ex-dividend date was Tuesday, May 16th. Aflacs payout ratio is 24.24%.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In other news, Director Joseph L. Moskowitz sold 500 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Monday, April 3rd. The stock was sold at an average price of $64.45, for a total transaction of $32,225.00. Following the sale, the director now directly owns 19,269 shares in the company, valued at $1,241,887.05. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is accessible through the SEC website. In related news, Director Joseph L. Moskowitz sold 500 shares of the companys stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, April 3rd. The stock was sold at an average price of $64.45, for a total value of $32,225.00. Following the sale, the director now directly owns 19,269 shares in the company, valued at $1,241,887.05. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this hyperlink. Also, CFO Steven Kent Beaver sold 13,118 shares of the companys stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, May 12th. The shares were sold at an average price of $66.33, for a total value of $870,116.94. Following the completion of the sale, the chief financial officer now owns 20,793 shares in the company, valued at $1,379,199.69. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Over the last 90 days, insiders sold 112,582 shares of company stock valued at $7,647,192. 0.90% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the company. Panagora Asset Management Inc. raised its holdings in shares of Aflac by 36.2% during the 1st quarter. Panagora Asset Management Inc. now owns 23,941 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $1,542,000 after buying an additional 6,369 shares in the last quarter. Blair William & Co. IL raised its stake in Aflac by 6.8% during the first quarter. Blair William & Co. IL now owns 17,268 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $1,112,000 after buying an additional 1,102 shares during the last quarter. Aviva PLC raised its stake in shares of Aflac by 0.7% in the first quarter. Aviva PLC now owns 210,634 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $13,563,000 after purchasing an additional 1,503 shares during the last quarter. Dakota Wealth Management purchased a new position in shares of Aflac in the first quarter worth $428,000. Finally, Sequoia Financial Advisors LLC raised its stake in shares of Aflac by 7.3% in the first quarter. Sequoia Financial Advisors LLC now owns 6,142 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $396,000 after purchasing an additional 417 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors own 66.22% of the companys stock.

Aflac Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Aflac, Inc is a holding company, which engages in the provision of financial protection services. It operates through the following segments: Aflac Japan and Aflac U.S. The Aflac Japan segment offers life insurance, death benefits, and cash surrender values. The Aflac U.S. segment sells voluntary supplemental insurance products for people who already have major medical or primary insurance coverage.

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Air Lease Co. (NYSE:AL  Get Rating) EVP Alex A. Khatibi sold 25,000 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, June 6th. The stock was sold at an average price of $40.00, for a total value of $1,000,000.00. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president now owns 89,266 shares of the companys stock, valued at $3,570,640. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through this link.

Air Lease Stock Performance

AL opened at $41.67 on Friday. Air Lease Co. has a 12-month low of $29.75 and a 12-month high of $46.20. The stock has a market cap of $4.63 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 10.11, a PEG ratio of 0.62 and a beta of 1.77. The business has a 50 day moving average of $39.04 and a 200-day moving average of $40.08. The company has a quick ratio of 1.03, a current ratio of 1.03 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 2.88.

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Air Lease Dividend Announcement

The firm also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, July 7th. Stockholders of record on Tuesday, June 6th will be given a $0.20 dividend. The ex-dividend date is Monday, June 5th. This represents a $0.80 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 1.92%. Air Leases payout ratio is 19.42%.

Institutional Trading of Air Lease

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the business. Amalgamated Bank lifted its holdings in Air Lease by 80.0% during the 4th quarter. Amalgamated Bank now owns 35,874 shares of the transportation companys stock worth $1,378,000 after purchasing an additional 15,940 shares during the last quarter. Arizona State Retirement System increased its stake in Air Lease by 3.9% during the 4th quarter. Arizona State Retirement System now owns 29,726 shares of the transportation companys stock worth $1,142,000 after acquiring an additional 1,107 shares during the period. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP increased its stake in Air Lease by 2.7% during the 3rd quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP now owns 6,553,426 shares of the transportation companys stock worth $203,226,000 after acquiring an additional 169,304 shares during the period. Bfsg LLC bought a new position in Air Lease during the 4th quarter worth $758,000. Finally, Copeland Capital Management LLC increased its stake in Air Lease by 14.0% during the 4th quarter. Copeland Capital Management LLC now owns 1,484,478 shares of the transportation companys stock worth $57,034,000 after acquiring an additional 182,354 shares during the period. 88.77% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

Several equities research analysts have issued reports on AL shares. Citigroup started coverage on Air Lease in a report on Monday, May 15th. They issued a neutral rating and a $41.00 price target for the company. The Goldman Sachs Group initiated coverage on Air Lease in a research report on Tuesday, February 28th. They set a buy rating and a $59.00 price target for the company. Credit Suisse Group reissued an outperform rating and set a $55.00 price target on shares of Air Lease in a research report on Friday, February 17th. Finally, StockNews.com initiated coverage on Air Lease in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating for the company. Two equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and three have issued a buy rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat, Air Lease has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $51.75.

Air Lease Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Air Lease Corporation, an aircraft leasing company, engages in the purchase and leasing of commercial jet aircraft to airlines worldwide. It also sells aircraft from its fleet to third parties, including other leasing companies, financial services companies, airlines, and other investors. In addition, the company provides fleet management services to investors and owners of aircraft portfolios.

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Shares of AstraZeneca PLC (OTCMKTS:AZNCF  Get Rating) traded up 0.2% during trading on Tuesday . The stock traded as high as $147.45 and last traded at $145.45. 1,348 shares changed hands during mid-day trading, a decline of 62% from the average session volume of 3,566 shares. The stock had previously closed at $145.19.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Separately, Barclays reiterated a buy rating and issued a $13,500.00 target price on shares of AstraZeneca in a report on Friday, February 10th.

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AstraZeneca Trading Down 1.6 %

The company has a fifty day moving average price of $146.58.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca Company Profile

A hedge fund recently bought a new stake in AstraZeneca stock. Boston Common Asset Management LLC bought a new position in AstraZeneca PLC ( OTCMKTS:AZNCF Get Rating ) during the 1st quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm bought 271,130 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $37,654,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 40.87% of the companys stock.

(Get Rating)

AstraZeneca Plc is a holding company, which engages in the research, development, manufacture, and commercialization of prescription medicines. The company was founded on June 17, 1992 and is headquartered in Cambridge, the United Kingdom.

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Shares of BAE Systems plc (LON:BA  Get Rating) traded down 0.8% during mid-day trading on Tuesday . The company traded as low as GBX 934.80 ($11.62) and last traded at GBX 934.80 ($11.62). 3,906,728 shares traded hands during mid-day trading, The stock had previously closed at GBX 942.40 ($11.72).

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

Several equities research analysts have recently weighed in on BA shares. Shore Capital reissued a not rated rating on shares of BAE Systems in a research report on Thursday, May 4th. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft restated a buy rating and set a GBX 1,050 ($13.05) price target on shares of BAE Systems in a research note on Tuesday, March 14th. Berenberg Bank raised their price target on BAE Systems from GBX 950 ($11.81) to GBX 1,000 ($12.43) and gave the stock a hold rating in a research note on Friday, April 28th. Citigroup restated a buy rating and set a GBX 1,146 ($14.25) price target on shares of BAE Systems in a research note on Wednesday, March 1st. Finally, Barclays restated an overweight rating and set a GBX 1,020 ($12.68) price target on shares of BAE Systems in a research note on Wednesday, March 1st. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating and four have given a buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat, the stock currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of GBX 1,019.33 ($12.67).

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BAE Systems Stock Performance

The company has a market capitalization of 28.38 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 1,861.20, a PEG ratio of 3.50 and a beta of 0.55. The stock has a fifty day moving average price of GBX 989.33 and a two-hundred day moving average price of GBX 908.88. The company has a quick ratio of 0.91, a current ratio of 1.08 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 61.16.

Insider Activity at BAE Systems

About BAE Systems

In other BAE Systems news, insider Tom Arseneault sold 23,627 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Monday, March 20th. The stock was sold at an average price of GBX 920 ($11.44), for a total transaction of 217,368.40 ($270,224.27). Insiders own 0.36% of the companys stock.

(Get Rating)

BAE Systems plc provides defense, aerospace, and security solutions worldwide. The company operates through five segments: Electronic Systems, Cyber & Intelligence, Platforms & Services (US), Air, and Maritime. The Electronic Systems segment offers electronic warfare systems, navigation systems, electro-optical sensors, military and commercial digital engine and flight controls, precision guidance and seeker solutions, military communication systems and data links, persistent surveillance systems, space electronics, and electric drive propulsion systems.

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StockNews.com cut shares of Bank of Nova Scotia (NYSE:BNS  Get Rating) (TSE:BNS) from a hold rating to a sell rating in a report issued on Tuesday morning.

Other research analysts have also issued research reports about the company. Barclays lowered Bank of Nova Scotia from an equal weight rating to an underweight rating in a research report on Tuesday, May 9th. Canaccord Genuity Group downgraded shares of Bank of Nova Scotia from a buy rating to a hold rating in a report on Wednesday, March 1st. Scotiabank downgraded shares of Bank of Nova Scotia from a buy rating to a hold rating in a research report on Tuesday, February 28th. Finally, Royal Bank of Canada decreased their target price on shares of Bank of Nova Scotia from $86.00 to $77.00 and set a sector perform rating for the company in a research report on Wednesday, March 1st. Two equities research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, six have issued a hold rating and one has given a buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, Bank of Nova Scotia has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $86.06.

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Bank of Nova Scotia Stock Performance

Bank of Nova Scotia stock opened at $49.66 on Tuesday. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.51, a current ratio of 1.05 and a quick ratio of 1.05. Bank of Nova Scotia has a 12 month low of $45.26 and a 12 month high of $67.07. The company has a fifty day moving average price of $49.70 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $50.52. The company has a market cap of $59.50 billion, a PE ratio of 9.76, a P/E/G ratio of 2.31 and a beta of 1.02.

Bank of Nova Scotia Increases Dividend

Bank of Nova Scotia ( NYSE:BNS Get Rating ) (TSE:BNS) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, May 24th. The bank reported $1.25 earnings per share for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $1.32 by ($0.07). The business had revenue of $5.85 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $5.91 billion. Bank of Nova Scotia had a net margin of 14.16% and a return on equity of 13.99%. Research analysts expect that Bank of Nova Scotia will post 5.28 earnings per share for the current year.

The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, July 27th. Shareholders of record on Wednesday, July 5th will be given a $0.7851 dividend. This represents a $3.14 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 6.32%. This is an increase from Bank of Nova Scotias previous quarterly dividend of $0.77. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Monday, July 3rd. Bank of Nova Scotias dividend payout ratio is 59.92%.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Bank of Nova Scotia

Several hedge funds have recently modified their holdings of the company. Raymond James Financial Services Advisors Inc. lifted its holdings in shares of Bank of Nova Scotia by 59.1% in the first quarter. Raymond James Financial Services Advisors Inc. now owns 26,438 shares of the banks stock valued at $1,896,000 after buying an additional 9,818 shares during the period. Cambridge Investment Research Advisors Inc. boosted its position in shares of Bank of Nova Scotia by 2.7% during the 1st quarter. Cambridge Investment Research Advisors Inc. now owns 18,359 shares of the banks stock valued at $1,317,000 after purchasing an additional 475 shares in the last quarter. Cetera Advisor Networks LLC bought a new position in shares of Bank of Nova Scotia during the 1st quarter valued at about $366,000. Private Advisor Group LLC grew its stake in shares of Bank of Nova Scotia by 56.3% in the 1st quarter. Private Advisor Group LLC now owns 7,272 shares of the banks stock worth $522,000 after purchasing an additional 2,619 shares during the last quarter. Finally, BlackRock Inc. raised its holdings in shares of Bank of Nova Scotia by 10.3% in the 1st quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 870,918 shares of the banks stock worth $62,462,000 after purchasing an additional 81,002 shares in the last quarter. 45.19% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

Bank of Nova Scotia Company Profile

(Get Rating)

The Bank of Nova Scotia engages in the provision of financial products and services including personal, commercial, corporate, and investment banking. It operates through the following segments: Canadian Banking, International Banking, Global Wealth Management, Global Banking and Markets, and Other. The Other segment includes group treasury and smaller operating segments.

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Charles Schwab (NYSE:SCHW  Get Rating) had its target price increased by Jefferies Financial Group from $61.00 to $64.00 in a research report report published on Monday, The Fly reports.

Other research analysts have also issued reports about the company. StockNews.com lowered Charles Schwab from a hold rating to a sell rating in a research report on Monday, May 29th. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft dropped their target price on Charles Schwab from $75.00 to $72.00 in a report on Tuesday, April 18th. Raymond James upgraded Charles Schwab from a market perform rating to an outperform rating and set a $63.00 price objective on the stock in a research note on Monday, May 15th. Bank of America dropped their price objective on Charles Schwab from $53.00 to $51.00 in a research note on Monday, April 17th. Finally, Credit Suisse Group raised Charles Schwab from a neutral rating to an outperform rating and decreased their target price for the company from $81.50 to $67.50 in a research report on Wednesday, March 15th. Three research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, two have assigned a hold rating and twelve have given a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, the stock presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $67.04.

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Charles Schwab Price Performance

Shares of NYSE:SCHW opened at $55.03 on Monday. The business has a 50 day moving average price of $51.65 and a 200 day moving average price of $67.61. Charles Schwab has a twelve month low of $45.00 and a twelve month high of $86.63. The company has a market cap of $97.36 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 15.04, a PEG ratio of 2.81 and a beta of 0.88. The company has a quick ratio of 0.39, a current ratio of 0.39 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.74.

Charles Schwab Dividend Announcement

Charles Schwab ( NYSE:SCHW Get Rating ) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Monday, April 17th. The financial services provider reported $0.93 EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.90 by $0.03. Charles Schwab had a return on equity of 27.83% and a net margin of 34.82%. The firm had revenue of $5.12 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $5.13 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the firm posted $0.77 EPS. The companys revenue for the quarter was up 9.5% on a year-over-year basis. Research analysts predict that Charles Schwab will post 3.33 earnings per share for the current year.

The firm also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, May 26th. Stockholders of record on Friday, May 12th were given a $0.25 dividend. This represents a $1.00 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 1.82%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Thursday, May 11th. Charles Schwabs dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 27.32%.

Insider Buying and Selling at Charles Schwab

In other Charles Schwab news, CFO Peter B. Crawford purchased 5,000 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Tuesday, March 14th. The shares were purchased at an average cost of $57.96 per share, with a total value of $289,800.00. Following the completion of the purchase, the chief financial officer now owns 44,725 shares in the company, valued at $2,592,261. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available through the SEC website. In other news, CEO Walter W. Bettinger acquired 50,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, March 14th. The stock was purchased at an average price of $59.31 per share, for a total transaction of $2,965,500.00. Following the completion of the acquisition, the chief executive officer now directly owns 656,501 shares in the company, valued at approximately $38,937,074.31. The purchase was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available at the SEC website. Also, CFO Peter B. Crawford acquired 5,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, March 14th. The shares were purchased at an average price of $57.96 per share, with a total value of $289,800.00. Following the acquisition, the chief financial officer now owns 44,725 shares of the companys stock, valued at $2,592,261. The disclosure for this purchase can be found here. Over the last three months, insiders have acquired 81,000 shares of company stock valued at $4,706,960. 6.60% of the stock is currently owned by company insiders.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Charles Schwab

Several hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the company. Circle Wealth Management LLC grew its stake in Charles Schwab by 2.8% in the 4th quarter. Circle Wealth Management LLC now owns 4,811 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $401,000 after purchasing an additional 131 shares during the period. Trustcore Financial Services LLC raised its holdings in shares of Charles Schwab by 3.1% in the 4th quarter. Trustcore Financial Services LLC now owns 4,395 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $366,000 after acquiring an additional 134 shares in the last quarter. CVA Family Office LLC raised its holdings in shares of Charles Schwab by 26.8% in the 4th quarter. CVA Family Office LLC now owns 638 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $53,000 after acquiring an additional 135 shares in the last quarter. Regal Investment Advisors LLC increased its position in shares of Charles Schwab by 3.6% during the 4th quarter. Regal Investment Advisors LLC now owns 3,918 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $326,000 after purchasing an additional 135 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Signet Financial Management LLC increased its position in shares of Charles Schwab by 0.3% during the 4th quarter. Signet Financial Management LLC now owns 49,378 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $4,111,000 after purchasing an additional 139 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors own 73.49% of the companys stock.

About Charles Schwab

(Get Rating)

The Charles Schwab Corp. is a savings and loan holding company, which engages in the provision of wealth management, securities brokerage, banking, asset management, custody, and financial advisory services. It operates through the Investor Services and Advisor Services segments. The Investor Services segment includes retail brokerage and banking services to individual investors, and retirement plan services, as well as other corporate brokerage services, to businesses and their employees.

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The Chiba Bank, Ltd. (OTCMKTS:CHBAY  Get Rating) shares reached a new 52-week high during mid-day trading on Wednesday . The company traded as high as $37.38 and last traded at $37.38, with a volume of 0 shares changing hands. The stock had previously closed at $37.38.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

Separately, Daiwa Capital Markets downgraded shares of Chiba Bank from an outperform rating to a neutral rating in a report on Wednesday, April 5th.

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Chiba Bank Price Performance

The firms 50-day simple moving average is $37.38 and its 200 day simple moving average is $34.44.

About Chiba Bank

The Chiba Bank, Ltd., together with its subsidiaries, provides banking products and services in Japan and internationally. It offers various deposit products; and various loans and bills discounting products, as well as investment management and investment advisory services. The company also engages in securities, leasing, credit card, and credit guarantee business; management and collection of claims; and outsourcing of operational business.

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Clear Street Markets LLC acquired a new position in Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:BR  Get Rating) during the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The firm acquired 2,364 shares of the business services providers stock, valued at approximately $317,000.

Several other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also modified their holdings of BR. American Century Companies Inc. grew its stake in shares of Broadridge Financial Solutions by 10.7% in the first quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 8,155 shares of the business services providers stock worth $1,270,000 after acquiring an additional 788 shares during the last quarter. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Public School Empls Retrmt SYS boosted its stake in Broadridge Financial Solutions by 6.8% during the first quarter. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Public School Empls Retrmt SYS now owns 15,625 shares of the business services providers stock worth $2,433,000 after buying an additional 992 shares in the last quarter. Raymond James Trust N.A. boosted its stake in Broadridge Financial Solutions by 126.2% during the first quarter. Raymond James Trust N.A. now owns 3,384 shares of the business services providers stock worth $527,000 after buying an additional 1,888 shares in the last quarter. Canada Pension Plan Investment Board boosted its stake in Broadridge Financial Solutions by 1,851.9% during the first quarter. Canada Pension Plan Investment Board now owns 527 shares of the business services providers stock worth $82,000 after buying an additional 500 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Allianz Asset Management GmbH lifted its holdings in shares of Broadridge Financial Solutions by 13.2% during the first quarter. Allianz Asset Management GmbH now owns 12,722 shares of the business services providers stock valued at $1,981,000 after acquiring an additional 1,487 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 86.45% of the companys stock.

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Insider Buying and Selling at Broadridge Financial Solutions

In other Broadridge Financial Solutions news, Director Leslie A. Brun sold 6,900 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Thursday, June 1st. The stock was sold at an average price of $148.98, for a total value of $1,027,962.00. Following the transaction, the director now directly owns 59,916 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $8,926,285.68. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this link. In related news, Director Leslie A. Brun sold 6,900 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Thursday, June 1st. The stock was sold at an average price of $148.98, for a total value of $1,027,962.00. Following the sale, the director now directly owns 59,916 shares of the companys stock, valued at $8,926,285.68. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this link. Also, VP Richard John Stingi sold 750 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Thursday, May 4th. The shares were sold at an average price of $155.27, for a total value of $116,452.50. Following the completion of the sale, the vice president now directly owns 4,202 shares in the company, valued at $652,444.54. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders have sold a total of 27,397 shares of company stock valued at $4,162,229 in the last ninety days. 1.60% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders.

Broadridge Financial Solutions Trading Up 0.0 %

NYSE:BR opened at $153.99 on Friday. Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. has a twelve month low of $131.35 and a twelve month high of $183.33. The company has a quick ratio of 1.35, a current ratio of 1.35 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 2.04. The business has a 50 day moving average price of $148.57 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $144.56. The company has a market cap of $18.17 billion, a P/E ratio of 33.05 and a beta of 0.99.

Broadridge Financial Solutions (NYSE:BR  Get Rating) last released its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, May 2nd. The business services provider reported $2.05 earnings per share for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $2.01 by $0.04. Broadridge Financial Solutions had a return on equity of 40.29% and a net margin of 9.33%. The firm had revenue of $1.65 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $1.65 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the firm posted $1.93 EPS. The businesss revenue was up 7.3% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, analysts expect that Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. will post 6.91 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Broadridge Financial Solutions Dividend Announcement

The firm also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, July 6th. Investors of record on Thursday, June 15th will be paid a $0.725 dividend. This represents a $2.90 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 1.88%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Wednesday, June 14th. Broadridge Financial Solutionss dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 62.23%.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

BR has been the subject of a number of analyst reports. Royal Bank of Canada began coverage on Broadridge Financial Solutions in a report on Monday, April 24th. They set an outperform rating and a $169.00 price objective for the company. StockNews.com began coverage on Broadridge Financial Solutions in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating for the company. Two equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and two have issued a buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat.com, the company presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $161.40.

Broadridge Financial Solutions Profile

(Get Rating)

Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc engages in the provision of investor communications and technology solutions to banks, broker-dealers, mutual funds, and corporate issuers. It operates through the following segments: Investor Communication Solutions and Global Technology and Operations. The Investor Communication Solutions segment offers services for broker-dealer investor communication, customer communication, corporate issuer, advisor solutions, and mutual fund and retirement solutions.

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Desarrolladora Homex (DHOXY) (OTCMKTS:DHOXY  Get Rating) passed above its 200-day moving average during trading on Tuesday . The stock has a 200-day moving average of $0.00 and traded as high as $0.42. Desarrolladora Homex (DHOXY) shares last traded at $0.39, with a volume of 51,600 shares.

Desarrolladora Homex (DHOXY) Price Performance

The company has a fifty day simple moving average of $0.39.

About Desarrolladora Homex (DHOXY)

(Get Rating)

Desarrolladora Homex, SAB. de C.V. (Homex) is a vertically integrated home development company. The Company is engaged in the development, construction and sale of entry-level housing in Mexico. The Company is engaged in the development, construction and sale of middle-income housing in Mexico. Homex operates in Mexico.

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Dorsey Wright & Associates bought a new stake in shares of ONEOK, Inc. (NYSE:OKE  Get Rating) during the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent Form 13F filing with the SEC. The firm bought 41,877 shares of the utilities providers stock, valued at approximately $2,751,000.

Several other large investors have also recently bought and sold shares of OKE. First Command Bank grew its stake in shares of ONEOK by 401.0% in the 2nd quarter. First Command Bank now owns 491 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $27,000 after purchasing an additional 393 shares during the last quarter. MinichMacGregor Wealth Management LLC acquired a new position in shares of ONEOK in the 4th quarter worth approximately $29,000. Worth Asset Management LLC acquired a new position in shares of ONEOK in the 1st quarter worth approximately $30,000. CI Investments Inc. grew its stake in shares of ONEOK by 1,003.7% in the 3rd quarter. CI Investments Inc. now owns 596 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $31,000 after purchasing an additional 542 shares during the last quarter. Finally, RFP Financial Group LLC acquired a new position in shares of ONEOK in the 4th quarter worth approximately $39,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 67.16% of the companys stock.

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Analysts Set New Price Targets

OKE has been the topic of several recent research reports. Seaport Res Ptn reaffirmed a neutral rating on shares of ONEOK in a research note on Thursday, February 16th. Citigroup upgraded shares of ONEOK from a neutral rating to a buy rating and raised their target price for the stock from $71.00 to $72.00 in a report on Tuesday, April 4th. Barclays decreased their target price on shares of ONEOK from $71.00 to $70.00 in a report on Tuesday, April 18th. UBS Group decreased their target price on shares of ONEOK from $82.00 to $81.00 in a report on Monday, May 8th. Finally, StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of ONEOK in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a buy rating for the company. Five equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and seven have issued a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat, ONEOK presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $73.45.

ONEOK Stock Performance

OKE stock traded down $0.80 on Friday, reaching $59.91. 1,120,848 shares of the company were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 2,764,172. ONEOK, Inc. has a 12 month low of $50.50 and a 12 month high of $71.57. The stocks fifty day moving average price is $62.47 and its 200 day moving average price is $64.83. The firm has a market capitalization of $26.81 billion, a PE ratio of 11.45, a PEG ratio of 1.76 and a beta of 1.68. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.78, a current ratio of 1.18 and a quick ratio of 0.92.

ONEOK (NYSE:OKE  Get Rating) last announced its earnings results on Tuesday, May 2nd. The utilities provider reported $2.34 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $1.81 by $0.53. The business had revenue of $4.52 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $5.13 billion. ONEOK had a net margin of 11.09% and a return on equity of 36.54%. During the same quarter in the previous year, the firm posted $0.87 earnings per share. On average, research analysts anticipate that ONEOK, Inc. will post 5.47 EPS for the current fiscal year.

ONEOK Dividend Announcement

The firm also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Monday, May 15th. Shareholders of record on Monday, May 1st were issued a $0.955 dividend. This represents a $3.82 annualized dividend and a yield of 6.38%. The ex-dividend date was Friday, April 28th. ONEOKs dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 72.08%.

ONEOK Company Profile

(Get Rating)

ONEOK, Inc engages in gathering, processing, fractionating, transporting, storing and marketing of natural gas. It operates through the following segments: Natural Gas Gathering and Processing, Natural Gas Liquids and Natural Gas Pipelines. The Natural Gas Gathering and Processing segment offers midstream services to producers in North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma.

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Angry veterans in Hamburg say its not which flag was hoisted on the flagpole in front of Town Hall earlier this month, but which flag was taken down to make room for it.

The town Coalition for Equity and Inclusion raised the Pride flag below the American flag June 2 as part of the observance of Pride Month.

A POW/MIA flag was taken down, upsetting some veterans  including a Vietnam War vet charged with harassing the town supervisor  and prompting calls for a demonstration at 10:30 a.m. Saturday at Town Hall to support veterans, prisoners of war and those missing or killed in action, as well as object to the actions of Supervisor Randy Hoak, whom they blame for the incident.

Amy Owczarczak, commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1419, said on Facebook that her VFW post is not organizing the gathering Saturday, but several veterans in the post and outside groups are organizing it.

I do not tolerate hate against race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or disability. Anyone within the post, whether it be a member or a guest will abide by our standards. Otherwise, they will be asked to leave, Owczarczak said in the social media post.

Hoak told The Buffalo News this week the POW/MIA flag was frayed and tattered, and needed to be replaced.

Veterans who are upset said that was not made clear before or on June 2, and if they had known, they would have presented a new one to the town the same day.

A transgender veteran who attended the Pride flag raising said she is the one who discovered the POW/MIA flag was tattered, and feels responsible for the controversy. She said on a Facebook video shot immediately after the flag-raising that the flag was damaged and would go back up.

Im the one who said it needed to be taken down because the flag was tattered, I was helping to take the flag down, said Diana Patton, a former U.S. Navy hull technician.

Patton told The Buffalo News this week she had served in color guards in the Navy and for an American Legion post. She said the POW/MIA flag is very important to her, because her grandfather was a POW three times during World War II. And the Pride flag means just as much to her because she said veterans served and fought for others to have the freedom to express who they are.

The POW/MIA flag should not be used in this manner, same thing with the Pride flag, Patton said. Neither one is supposed to be political.

It isnt just a flag that has been frayed.

Some veterans are angry over what they see as the supervisors cavalier attitude toward them and the flag.

John Grotke, commander of Post 527 American Legion, called Hoak a classless buffoon in a letter he sent to the supervisor.

He can call me a classless buffoon, Hoak said this week, and I still want to talk to his organization about how we can build a better Hamburg, a more patriotic Hamburg, how we can educate this next generation on the importance of our veterans, our veterans organizations and respect for the flag.

He said the town had no intention of removing the POW/MIA flag, even temporarily.

Upset veterans said there were mounts on the pole for only two flags until Monday.

Hoak said the town had the equipment to add a third flag last week, but did not add it before Monday because there were only two flags.

Thats when a new POW/MIA flag was hoisted, in the second position beneath the American flag, with the Pride flag underneath both.

Flying interest climbs

Grotke said he presented the town with the POW/MIA flag last year, and hoped the town would install an additional pole for other flags.

Hoak said the POW/MIA flag was hoisted last July after the Pride flag was taken down at the end of Pride Month. The POW/MIA flag also was taken down last November, when a flag commemorating Native American Month was raised.

Grotke said at the annual Memorial Day ceremony he asked Hoak what his intentions were for the Pride flag, and was told it would be raised under the American flag.

I said, Dont you think there are better options available, Grotke recalled.

It means so much to us veterans, the POW/MIA flag. It means more than anything imaginable, he said.

Congress in 1990 officially recognized the black-and-white silhouette flag and designated it as the symbol of the nations concern and commitment to resolving as fully as possible the fates of Americans still prisoner, missing and unaccounted for in Southeast Asia.

Tensions mount

On June 2, Gerald Welsted, a former commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1417, was driving past Town Hall. He noticed people in front of the flagpole, and that the POW/MIA flag was missing. Hoak said Welsted expressed his concerns with great profanity, and he walked the veteran away from the group, which included high school students.

When I was able to get him to the perimeter of the gathering was when he expressed his frustration with slapping my forearm, Hoak said.

Welsted would not talk with a reporter this week, said his friend and fellow Vietnam veteran Russ Deveso, who told The News it would be difficult for him to imagine a circumstance when Welsted would hit someone.

All veterans take an oath to defend the flag, Deveso said. That POW/MIA flag is just as important as the American flag.

This has kind of been a nightmare, and it shouldnt have been, Deveso added.

Hoak said he called police, and Welsted was charged with harassment.

The town received an application for a permit for the Saturday demonstration from Hamburg Lakeshore Overseas Veterans, and the event has been promoted on the Facebook pages of the Constitutional Coalition of Western New York, which says it is a gathering place for patriots and protectors of the Constitution, and the 1791 Society, a local gun rights group.

The supervisor, a Democrat elected in 2021, said his family has a rich military tradition and respect for service. He said he would continue to march and advocate for veterans at the town and state level.

Hoak said his office is looking into improved local property tax exemptions for seniors and veterans, and the town plans to install a parking spot reserved for Purple Heart recipients later this summer.

The town got a lot of pushback over the missing POW/MIA flag last weekend, he said, but the tone and tenor of phone calls to his office changed starting Monday, when all three flags were hoisted on the pole.

They understand, Hoak said, and theyre glad that the POW/MIA flag is back up.
Barclays reiterated their overweight rating on shares of Dr. Martens (LON:DOCS  Get Rating) in a report released on Monday, Marketbeat reports. The firm currently has a GBX 175 ($2.18) price target on the stock.

A number of other analysts also recently commented on DOCS. Numis Securities reissued an add rating and set a GBX 180 ($2.24) price objective on shares of Dr. Martens in a report on Friday, February 24th. Royal Bank of Canada downgraded shares of Dr. Martens to a sector perform rating and decreased their price objective for the stock from GBX 230 ($2.86) to GBX 180 ($2.24) in a research note on Tuesday, May 30th.

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Dr. Martens Stock Performance

LON:DOCS opened at GBX 127 ($1.58) on Monday. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 125.74, a quick ratio of 1.13 and a current ratio of 2.39. Dr. Martens has a fifty-two week low of GBX 125.50 ($1.56) and a fifty-two week high of GBX 295.21 ($3.67). The stock has a market capitalization of 1.27 billion, a P/E ratio of 976.92, a PEG ratio of 0.04 and a beta of 0.08. The company has a 50 day moving average price of GBX 156.43 and a 200 day moving average price of GBX 167.45.

Dr. Martens Increases Dividend

Insiders Place Their Bets

The firm also recently disclosed a dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, July 18th. Stockholders of record on Thursday, June 8th will be given a dividend of GBX 4.28 ($0.05) per share. This is a positive change from Dr. Martenss previous dividend of $1.56. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, June 8th. This represents a dividend yield of 2.74%. Dr. Martenss dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 4,615.38%.

In related news, insider Robyn Perriss purchased 5,000 shares of Dr. Martens stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, June 7th. The stock was acquired at an average cost of GBX 136 ($1.69) per share, with a total value of 6,800 ($8,453.51). In related news, insider Robyn Perriss acquired 5,000 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, June 7th. The shares were acquired at an average price of GBX 136 ($1.69) per share, for a total transaction of 6,800 ($8,453.51). Also, insider Lynne Weedall purchased 4,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Monday, June 5th. The shares were acquired at an average price of GBX 136 ($1.69) per share, for a total transaction of 5,440 ($6,762.80). Insiders bought a total of 9,100 shares of company stock worth $1,238,000 over the last ninety days. 3.86% of the stock is currently owned by company insiders.

About Dr. Martens

(Get Rating)

Dr. Martens plc designs, develops, procures, markets, sells, and distributes footwear in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific. Its product segments include originals, fusion, kids, and casual, as well as accessories. The company offers its products under the Dr. Martens brand name.

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Fundamental Research set a C$144.25 price objective on Bank of Montreal (TSE:BMO  Get Rating) (NYSE:BMO) in a report issued on Tuesday morning, BayStreet.CA reports. The firm currently has a buy rating on the banks stock.

Several other brokerages have also recently commented on BMO. Cormark decreased their price target on shares of Bank of Montreal from C$140.00 to C$131.00 in a research note on Thursday, May 25th. Royal Bank of Canada decreased their target price on shares of Bank of Montreal from C$151.00 to C$143.00 and set an outperform rating on the stock in a research report on Thursday, May 25th. National Bankshares decreased their target price on shares of Bank of Montreal from C$129.00 to C$122.00 and set a sector perform rating on the stock in a research report on Thursday, May 25th. Barclays decreased their target price on shares of Bank of Montreal from C$127.00 to C$123.00 in a research report on Thursday, May 25th. Finally, Canaccord Genuity Group decreased their target price on shares of Bank of Montreal from C$130.00 to C$121.50 in a research report on Thursday, May 25th. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, two have given a hold rating and four have issued a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, Bank of Montreal presently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus target price of C$135.91.

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Bank of Montreal Stock Down 0.3 %

Shares of BMO stock opened at C$117.19 on Tuesday. The stock has a market cap of C$82.42 billion, a P/E ratio of 5.86, a PEG ratio of 1.49 and a beta of 1.13. Bank of Montreal has a 52 week low of C$111.88 and a 52 week high of C$137.64. The companys fifty day simple moving average is C$118.89 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is C$124.74.

Bank of Montreal Increases Dividend

Bank of Montreal Company Profile

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, August 28th. Shareholders of record on Friday, July 28th will be paid a $1.47 dividend. This is an increase from Bank of Montreals previous quarterly dividend of $1.43. This represents a $5.88 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 5.02%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, July 27th. Bank of Montreals dividend payout ratio is currently 28.61%.

(Get Rating)

Bank of Montreal engages in the provision of diversified financial services primarily in North America. The company's personal banking products and services include checking and savings accounts, credit cards, mortgages, personal loans, small business lending, cash management, and financial and investment advice services; and commercial banking products and services comprise business deposit accounts, commercial credit cards, business loans and commercial mortgages, cash management solutions, foreign exchange, specialized banking programs, treasury and payment solutions, and risk management products for small business and commercial banking customers.

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Greene King plc (LON:GNK  Get Rating) passed above its 200-day moving average during trading on Tuesday . The stock has a 200-day moving average of GBX 849.20 ($10.56) and traded as high as GBX 849.40 ($10.56). Greene King shares last traded at GBX 849.20 ($10.56), with a volume of 6,678,342 shares.

Greene King Price Performance

The firm has a market capitalization of 2.63 billion and a price-to-earnings ratio of 21.94. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 111.89, a current ratio of 0.67 and a quick ratio of 0.51. The business has a fifty day moving average price of GBX 849.20 and a two-hundred day moving average price of GBX 849.20.

Greene King Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Greene King plc operates as a pub retailer and brewer in the United Kingdom. The company operates through three segments: Pub Company, Pub Partners, and Brewing & Brands. Its brands include Greene King Local Pubs, Hungry Horse, Flaming Grill, Farmhouse Inns, and Chef & Brewer. The company is also involved in brewing, marketing, and selling beer under the Greene King IPA, Old Speckled Hen, Abbot Ale, and Belhaven Best brands.

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Touchstone Bankshares (OTCMKTS:TSBA  Get Rating) and United Bancorporation of Alabama (OTCMKTS:UBAB  Get Rating) are both small-cap finance companies, but which is the better investment? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their profitability, valuation, analyst recommendations, dividends, risk, institutional ownership and earnings.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Touchstone Bankshares and United Bancorporation of Alabamas top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

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Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio Touchstone Bankshares N/A N/A $4.05 million $0.83 10.46 United Bancorporation of Alabama $61.78 million 2.01 $18.68 million $6.24 5.50

United Bancorporation of Alabama has higher revenue and earnings than Touchstone Bankshares. United Bancorporation of Alabama is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Touchstone Bankshares, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Volatility & Risk

Profitability

Touchstone Bankshares has a beta of 0.52, meaning that its stock price is 48% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, United Bancorporation of Alabama has a beta of 0.38, meaning that its stock price is 62% less volatile than the S&P 500.

This table compares Touchstone Bankshares and United Bancorporation of Alabamas net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Touchstone Bankshares N/A N/A N/A United Bancorporation of Alabama 33.24% 18.68% 1.69%

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of current recommendations and price targets for Touchstone Bankshares and United Bancorporation of Alabama, as reported by MarketBeat.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Touchstone Bankshares 0 0 0 0 N/A United Bancorporation of Alabama 0 0 0 0 N/A

Insider & Institutional Ownership

5.8% of United Bancorporation of Alabama shares are owned by institutional investors. 10.4% of Touchstone Bankshares shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Dividends

Touchstone Bankshares pays an annual dividend of $0.32 per share and has a dividend yield of 3.7%. United Bancorporation of Alabama pays an annual dividend of $0.44 per share and has a dividend yield of 1.3%. Touchstone Bankshares pays out 38.6% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. United Bancorporation of Alabama pays out 7.1% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. Both companies have healthy payout ratios and should be able to cover their dividend payments with earnings for the next several years.

Summary

United Bancorporation of Alabama beats Touchstone Bankshares on 8 of the 12 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Touchstone Bankshares

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Touchstone Bankshares, Inc. operates as a commercial bank, which provides services to consumers and small businesses through several branches located in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. It provides a variety of loans, checking and savings accounts, and investment services. The company was founded in July 2020 and is headquartered in Prince George, VA.

About United Bancorporation of Alabama

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United Bancorp of Alabama, Inc. is a bank holding company, which engages in the ownership and management of United Bank. It provides commercial banking services in Baldwin, Escambia, Monroe, and Santa Rosa counties through its bank subsidiary. The company was founded on March 8, 1982 and is headquartered in Atmore, AL.

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Portolan Capital Management LLC raised its stake in Hudson Pacific Properties, Inc. (NYSE:HPP  Get Rating) by 39.2% during the 4th quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the SEC. The institutional investor owned 218,364 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock after buying an additional 61,446 shares during the period. Portolan Capital Management LLC owned approximately 0.15% of Hudson Pacific Properties worth $2,125,000 as of its most recent filing with the SEC.

Several other institutional investors and hedge funds have also recently bought and sold shares of the stock. Beverly Hills Private Wealth LLC acquired a new stake in Hudson Pacific Properties during the 4th quarter worth about $146,000. Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc. raised its stake in Hudson Pacific Properties by 9.7% during the 4th quarter. Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc. now owns 2,054,881 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $19,994,000 after purchasing an additional 181,237 shares during the period. Panagora Asset Management Inc. acquired a new stake in Hudson Pacific Properties during the 4th quarter valued at $116,000. Wells Fargo & Company MN raised its stake in Hudson Pacific Properties by 4.3% during the 4th quarter. Wells Fargo & Company MN now owns 510,774 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $4,970,000 after purchasing an additional 21,095 shares during the period. Finally, Credit Suisse AG increased its holdings in shares of Hudson Pacific Properties by 35.9% in the 4th quarter. Credit Suisse AG now owns 344,543 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $3,352,000 after purchasing an additional 91,016 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 95.57% of the companys stock.

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Insider Activity

In related news, EVP Arthur X. Suazo bought 10,000 shares of the companys stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, March 28th. The stock was bought at an average cost of $5.86 per share, for a total transaction of $58,600.00. Following the acquisition, the executive vice president now directly owns 87,102 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $510,417.72. The acquisition was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through this hyperlink. In other news, CIO Drew Gordon acquired 25,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, March 27th. The stock was bought at an average cost of $5.96 per share, for a total transaction of $149,000.00. Following the acquisition, the executive now directly owns 116,958 shares in the company, valued at $697,069.68. The acquisition was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this link. Also, EVP Arthur X. Suazo bought 10,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Tuesday, March 28th. The shares were bought at an average price of $5.86 per share, with a total value of $58,600.00. Following the completion of the purchase, the executive vice president now owns 87,102 shares in the company, valued at approximately $510,417.72. The disclosure for this purchase can be found here. In the last 90 days, insiders acquired 38,975 shares of company stock valued at $232,523. Corporate insiders own 2.95% of the companys stock.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

Hudson Pacific Properties Stock Down 2.1 %

A number of research firms have recently weighed in on HPP. Morgan Stanley dropped their price target on shares of Hudson Pacific Properties from $10.00 to $6.00 and set an equal weight rating on the stock in a research note on Friday, March 31st. Citigroup cut their target price on Hudson Pacific Properties from $10.00 to $6.00 and set a neutral rating for the company in a research report on Wednesday, March 22nd. The Goldman Sachs Group initiated coverage on shares of Hudson Pacific Properties in a research note on Tuesday, March 21st. They issued a sell rating and a $5.50 target price for the company. Wells Fargo & Company dropped their price target on shares of Hudson Pacific Properties from $10.00 to $7.00 and set an equal weight rating for the company in a research note on Thursday, March 16th. Finally, StockNews.com began coverage on Hudson Pacific Properties in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a sell rating for the company. Three equities research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, nine have given a hold rating and one has issued a buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the stock has a consensus rating of Hold and an average target price of $10.46.

Hudson Pacific Properties stock traded down $0.11 during midday trading on Friday, hitting $5.13. 973,103 shares of the companys stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 3,342,595. Hudson Pacific Properties, Inc. has a 52-week low of $4.08 and a 52-week high of $18.18. The stock has a 50-day moving average price of $5.29 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $8.11. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.37, a current ratio of 1.80 and a quick ratio of 1.80.

Hudson Pacific Properties Profile

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Hudson Pacific Properties, Inc is a real estate company, which acquires, repositions, develops, and operates sustainable office and state of-the-art studio properties in high-barrier-to-entry submarkets in California, the Pacific Northwest, Western Canada, and Greater London, United Kingdom. It operates through the Office Properties and Studio Properties segments.

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Dover Co. (NYSE:DOV  Get Rating) CFO Brad M. Cerepak sold 17,769 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, June 6th. The shares were sold at an average price of $139.03, for a total transaction of $2,470,424.07. Following the sale, the chief financial officer now directly owns 54,569 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $7,586,728.07. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through this hyperlink.

Dover Stock Performance

DOV opened at $142.30 on Friday. The business has a 50 day moving average price of $142.56 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $143.48. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.66, a current ratio of 1.32 and a quick ratio of 0.76. The company has a market capitalization of $19.90 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 18.97, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.14 and a beta of 1.35. Dover Co. has a 1-year low of $114.49 and a 1-year high of $160.66.

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Dover (NYSE:DOV  Get Rating) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, April 26th. The industrial products company reported $1.94 earnings per share for the quarter, meeting the consensus estimate of $1.94. The business had revenue of $2.08 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $2.08 billion. Dover had a return on equity of 28.27% and a net margin of 12.51%. The companys revenue was up 1.4% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter in the prior year, the firm posted $1.90 earnings per share. Research analysts predict that Dover Co. will post 9 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Dover Dividend Announcement

Institutional Trading of Dover

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, June 15th. Investors of record on Wednesday, May 31st will be issued a $0.505 dividend. The ex-dividend date is Tuesday, May 30th. This represents a $2.02 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 1.42%. Dovers payout ratio is currently 26.93%.

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in DOV. Vanguard Group Inc. increased its holdings in shares of Dover by 1.3% in the first quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 16,895,470 shares of the industrial products companys stock valued at $2,650,899,000 after buying an additional 224,091 shares in the last quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. lifted its holdings in shares of Dover by 8.8% during the first quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. now owns 13,992,891 shares of the industrial products companys stock valued at $2,126,080,000 after purchasing an additional 1,134,365 shares during the last quarter. State Street Corp boosted its position in shares of Dover by 3.5% in the 3rd quarter. State Street Corp now owns 6,867,691 shares of the industrial products companys stock valued at $800,635,000 after purchasing an additional 231,562 shares during the period. Boston Partners increased its stake in Dover by 3.9% in the 3rd quarter. Boston Partners now owns 4,530,080 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $529,036,000 after purchasing an additional 171,924 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Bank of America Corp DE raised its holdings in Dover by 0.9% during the 4th quarter. Bank of America Corp DE now owns 3,786,001 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $512,662,000 after buying an additional 33,496 shares during the period. 85.52% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Several research firms have recently commented on DOV. Citigroup upped their target price on Dover from $175.00 to $184.00 and gave the company a buy rating in a report on Monday, March 6th. Royal Bank of Canada reaffirmed a sector perform rating and issued a $145.00 target price on shares of Dover in a research report on Thursday, March 9th. StockNews.com started coverage on Dover in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a buy rating on the stock. 92 Resources restated a maintains rating on shares of Dover in a research report on Thursday, April 27th. Finally, Robert W. Baird reduced their target price on shares of Dover from $176.00 to $170.00 in a research note on Wednesday, April 26th. Five research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and nine have given a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, the company has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $162.31.

Dover Company Profile

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Dover Corp. operates as a manufacturer and solutions provider delivering innovative equipment and components, consumable supplies, aftermarket parts, software and digital solutions, and support services. It operates through the following segments: Engineered Products, Clean Energy and Fueling, Imaging and Identification, Pumps and Process Solutions, and Climate and Sustainability Technologies.

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International Personal Finance plc (LON:IPF  Get Rating)s stock price crossed above its two hundred day moving average during trading on Tuesday . The stock has a two hundred day moving average of GBX 92.09 ($1.14) and traded as high as GBX 112.50 ($1.40). International Personal Finance shares last traded at GBX 111.50 ($1.39), with a volume of 143,755 shares trading hands.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Several research analysts have commented on the company. Shore Capital restated a buy rating on shares of International Personal Finance in a research note on Thursday, April 27th. Peel Hunt restated a buy rating and issued a GBX 150 ($1.86) price objective on shares of International Personal Finance in a research report on Wednesday, March 1st.

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International Personal Finance Price Performance

The business has a 50 day simple moving average of GBX 102.57 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of GBX 92.41. The firm has a market capitalization of 261.82 million, a P/E ratio of 487.50, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.32 and a beta of 1.66. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 128.08, a quick ratio of 3.69 and a current ratio of 3.19.

Insider Activity at International Personal Finance

International Personal Finance Company Profile

In related news, insider Katrina Cliffe purchased 40,000 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Monday, March 13th. The stock was acquired at an average price of GBX 110 ($1.37) per share, with a total value of 44,000 ($54,699.15). In other International Personal Finance news, insider Gary Thompson acquired 22,000 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Thursday, May 4th. The stock was purchased at an average cost of GBX 98 ($1.22) per share, for a total transaction of 21,560 ($26,802.59). Also, insider Katrina Cliffe acquired 40,000 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Monday, March 13th. The stock was acquired at an average cost of GBX 110 ($1.37) per share, with a total value of 44,000 ($54,699.15). Insiders have purchased 83,443 shares of company stock valued at $8,721,743 over the last three months. 8.03% of the stock is owned by corporate insiders.

(Get Rating)

International Personal Finance plc, together with its subsidiaries, provides consumer credit in Europe and Mexico. The company offers home credit products, such as money transfer loans direct to bank account, cash and microbusiness loans, home, medical and life insurances, and repayments services. It also offers digital business services comprising of instalment loans and repayment schedules, credit line products, and mobile wallet payments.

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iShares S&P/TSX 60 Index ETF (TSE:XIU  Get Rating)s share price dropped 0.1% during mid-day trading on Thursday . The stock traded as low as C$30.09 and last traded at C$30.25. Approximately 2,123,424 shares were traded during trading, a decline of 18% from the average daily volume of 2,601,101 shares. The stock had previously closed at C$30.27.

iShares S&P/TSX 60 Index ETF Stock Performance

The companys 50-day moving average price is C$30.98 and its 200-day moving average price is C$30.76.

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iShares S&P/TSX 60 Index ETF Cuts Dividend

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Wednesday, May 31st. Investors of record on Thursday, May 25th were given a $0.257 dividend. The ex-dividend date was Wednesday, May 24th. This represents a $1.03 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 3.40%.

About iShares S&P/TSX 60 Index ETF

iShares S&P/TSX 60 Index Fund seeks to provide long-term capital growth by replicating, to the extent possible, the performance of the S&P/TSX 60 Index through investments in the constituent issuers of such index, net of expenses. The Index is comprised of 60 of the largest (by market capitalization) and liquid securities listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), selected by Standard & Poors (S&P) using its industrial classifications and guidelines for evaluating issuer capitalization, liquidity and fundamentals.

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JPMorgan European Discovery Trust plc (LON:JEDT  Get Rating)s share price traded down 0.5% during trading on Tuesday . The company traded as low as GBX 400.50 ($4.98) and last traded at GBX 402 ($5.00). 107,867 shares were traded during trading, a decline of 45% from the average session volume of 195,862 shares. The stock had previously closed at GBX 404 ($5.02).

JPMorgan European Discovery Trust Trading Down 0.5 %

The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 9.12, a current ratio of 1.79 and a quick ratio of 1.00. The business has a 50 day moving average of GBX 414.63 and a 200 day moving average of GBX 415.88. The firm has a market capitalization of 626.77 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -245.68 and a beta of 1.23.

JPMorgan European Discovery Trust Company Profile

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JPMorgan European Smaller Companies Trust plc is a closed ended equity mutual fund launched and managed by JPMorgan Funds Limited. The fund is co-managed by JPMorgan Asset Management (UK) Limited. It invests in the public equity markets of Europe, excluding the United Kingdom. The fund seeks to invest in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors.

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Headinvest LLC lessened its holdings in shares of Lowes Companies, Inc. (NYSE:LOW  Get Rating) by 8.2% during the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The institutional investor owned 1,396 shares of the home improvement retailers stock after selling 124 shares during the quarter. Headinvest LLCs holdings in Lowes Companies were worth $278,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

Several other institutional investors and hedge funds also recently bought and sold shares of the business. Pershing Square Capital Management L.P. grew its stake in Lowes Companies by 1.6% during the 3rd quarter. Pershing Square Capital Management L.P. now owns 10,374,801 shares of the home improvement retailers stock valued at $1,948,491,000 after acquiring an additional 167,495 shares in the last quarter. Franklin Resources Inc. grew its stake in Lowes Companies by 0.3% during the 4th quarter. Franklin Resources Inc. now owns 3,623,125 shares of the home improvement retailers stock valued at $721,871,000 after acquiring an additional 10,340 shares in the last quarter. London Co. of Virginia grew its stake in Lowes Companies by 2.9% during the 3rd quarter. London Co. of Virginia now owns 2,071,408 shares of the home improvement retailers stock valued at $389,031,000 after acquiring an additional 58,983 shares in the last quarter. Renaissance Technologies LLC grew its stake in shares of Lowes Companies by 7,952.8% in the 1st quarter. Renaissance Technologies LLC now owns 1,586,400 shares of the home improvement retailers stock valued at $320,754,000 after buying an additional 1,566,700 shares in the last quarter. Finally, The Manufacturers Life Insurance Company grew its stake in shares of Lowes Companies by 43.2% in the 4th quarter. The Manufacturers Life Insurance Company now owns 1,509,118 shares of the home improvement retailers stock valued at $300,677,000 after buying an additional 455,084 shares in the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 72.62% of the companys stock.

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Insiders Place Their Bets

In other Lowes Companies news, EVP Donald Frieson sold 9,411 shares of the stock in a transaction on Wednesday, March 15th. The shares were sold at an average price of $197.00, for a total value of $1,853,967.00. Following the sale, the executive vice president now directly owns 17,888 shares in the company, valued at $3,523,936. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available at the SEC website. Company insiders own 0.26% of the companys stock.

Lowes Companies Price Performance

Shares of LOW stock traded down $0.93 during trading hours on Friday, hitting $209.53. 608,558 shares of the companys stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 2,953,403. The stocks 50-day moving average is $204.76 and its 200-day moving average is $204.51. The stock has a market cap of $122.78 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 20.49, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.25 and a beta of 1.08. Lowes Companies, Inc. has a 52 week low of $170.12 and a 52 week high of $223.31.

Lowes Companies (NYSE:LOW  Get Rating) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, May 23rd. The home improvement retailer reported $3.67 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $3.48 by $0.19. The business had revenue of $22.35 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $21.68 billion. Lowes Companies had a negative return on equity of 68.42% and a net margin of 6.65%. The firms quarterly revenue was down 5.5% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same quarter last year, the business earned $3.51 earnings per share. Equities research analysts forecast that Lowes Companies, Inc. will post 13.41 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Lowes Companies Increases Dividend

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Wednesday, August 9th. Shareholders of record on Wednesday, July 26th will be paid a $1.10 dividend. This is a positive change from Lowes Companiess previous quarterly dividend of $1.05. The ex-dividend date is Tuesday, July 25th. This represents a $4.40 annualized dividend and a yield of 2.10%. Lowes Companiess dividend payout ratio is presently 40.90%.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Several equities research analysts recently commented on the company. StockNews.com raised Lowes Companies from a hold rating to a buy rating in a research note on Tuesday. TD Cowen lowered their price target on Lowes Companies from $220.00 to $210.00 and set a market perform rating for the company in a research note on Thursday, March 2nd. Roth Capital restated a neutral rating on shares of Lowes Companies in a report on Wednesday, March 1st. Telsey Advisory Group reduced their target price on Lowes Companies from $235.00 to $225.00 and set an outperform rating for the company in a report on Wednesday, May 17th. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. reduced their target price on Lowes Companies from $230.00 to $210.00 and set a neutral rating for the company in a report on Thursday, March 2nd. Two investment analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, twelve have assigned a hold rating and twelve have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, Lowes Companies currently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $222.65.

Lowes Companies Company Profile

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Lowes Cos., Inc engages in the retail sale of home improvement products. The firm offers products for maintenance, repair, remodeling, home decorating and property maintenance. It also provides home improvement products in the following categories: appliances, bathroom, building supply, electrical, flooring, hardware, paint, kitchen, plumbing, lighting & fans, outdoor living, windows and doors.

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Want to see what other hedge funds are holding LOW? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Lowes Companies, Inc. (NYSE:LOW  Get Rating).

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MIAMI (AP)  Donald Trump improperly stored in his Florida estate sensitive documents on nuclear capabilities, repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a Pentagon plan of attack and classified map, according to a sweeping felony indictment that paints a damning portrait of the former president's treatment of national security information.

The conduct alleged in the historic indictment  the first federal case against a former president  cuts to the heart of any president's responsibility to safeguard the government's most valuable secrets. Prosecutors say the documents he stowed, refused to return and in some cases showed to visitors risked jeopardizing not only relations with foreign nations but also the safety of troops and confidential sources.

Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced, Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case, said in his first public statements. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.

Trump, currently the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is due to make his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon in Miami. In a rare bit of welcome news for the former president, the judge initially assigned to the case is someone he appointed and who drew criticism for rulings in his favor during a dispute last year over a special master assigned to review the seized classified documents. Meanwhile, two lawyers who worked the case for months announced Friday that they had resigned from Trump's legal team.

All told, Trump faces 37 felony counts  31 pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information, the balance relating to alleged conspiracy, obstruction and false statements  that could result in a substantial prison sentence in the event of a conviction. A Trump aide who prosecutors said moved dozens of boxes at his Florida estate at his direction, and then lied to investigators about it, was charged in the same indictment with conspiracy and other crimes.

Trump responded to the indictment Friday by falsely conflating his case with a separate classified documents investigation concerning President Joe Biden. Though classified records were found in a Biden home and office, there has been no indication that the president, unlike Trump, sought to conceal them or knew they were there.

Nobody said I wasnt allowed to look at the personal records that I brought with me from the White House. Theres nothing wrong with that, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. But among the various investigations he has faced, legal experts  as well as Trumps own aides  had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution. Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trumps attorneys were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.

The indictment arrives at a time when Trump is continuing to dominate the Republican presidential primary. A Trump campaign official described the former presidents mood as defiant" and he is expected to deliver a full-throated rebuke of the filing during a speech before Republican Party officials in Georgia Saturday afternoon and will also speak in North Carolina in the evening

Aides were notably more reserved after the indictments unsealing as they reckoned with the gravity of the legal charges and the threat they pose to Trump beyond the potential short-term political gain.

The document's startling scope and breadth of allegations, including a reliance on surveillance video and an audio recording, will almost certainly make it harder for Republicans to rail against than an earlier New York criminal case that many legal analysts had derided as weak.

The documents case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years  as president and private citizen  but had never before charged him with a crime. The most notable investigation was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, but prosecutors in that probe cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Once he left office, though, he lost that protection.

The inquiry took a major step forward last November when Attorney General Merrick Garland, a soft-spoken former federal judge who has long stated that no person should be regarded as above the law, appointed Smith, a war crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation, to lead both the documents probe as well as a separate investigation into efforts to subvert the 2020 election. That investigation remains pending.

The 49-page indictment centers on hundreds of classified documents that Trump took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving office in January 2021. Even as tens of thousands of members and guests visited Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trumps presidency and August 2022, when the FBI obtained a search warrant, documents were recklessly stored in spaces including a "ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

The indictment claims that, for a two-month period between January and March 15, 2021, some of Trumps boxes were stored in one of Mar-a-Lagos gilded ballrooms. A picture included in the indictment shows boxes stacked in rows on the ballrooms stage.

Prosecutors allege that Trump, who claimed without evidence that he had declassified all the documents before leaving office, understood his duty to care for classified information but shirked it anyway. It details a July 2021 meeting in Bedminster in which he boasted about having held onto a classified document prepared by the military about a potential attack on another country.

Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, the indictment quotes him as saying, citing an audio recording. He also said he could have declassified the document but Now I cant, you know, but this is still a secret, according to the indictment.

Using Trump's own words and actions, as recounted to prosecutors by lawyers, aides and other witnesses, the indictment alleges both a refusal to return the documents despite more than a year's worth of government demands but also steps that he encouraged others around him to take to conceal the records.

For instance, prosecutors say, after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for the records in May 2022, Trump asked his own lawyers if he could defy the request and said words to the effect of, I don't want anybody looking through my boxes.

Wouldnt it be better if we just told them we dont have anything here? one of his lawyers described him as saying.

But before his own lawyer searched the property for classified records, the indictment says, Trump directed aides to remove from the Mar-a-Lago storage room boxes of documents so that they would not be found during the search and therefore handed over to the government.

Weeks later, when Justice Department officials arrived at Mar-a-Lago to collect the records, they were handed a folder with only 38 documents and an untrue letter attesting that all documents responsive to the subpoena had been turned over. That day, even as Trump assured investigators that he was an open book, aides loaded several of Trumps boxes onto a plane bound for Bedminster, the indictment alleges.

But suspecting that many more remained inside, the FBI obtained a search warrant and returned in August to recover more than 100 additional documents. The Justice Department says Trump held onto more than 300 classified documents, including some at the top secret level.

Walt Nauta, one of the personal aides alleged to have transported the boxes around the complex, lied to the FBI about the movement of the boxes and faces charges that he conspired to hide them, according to the indictment. His lawyer declined to comment.
Lundin Gold Inc. (OTCMKTS:LUGDF  Get Rating)s share price shot up 1% during mid-day trading on Tuesday . The company traded as high as C$12.79 and last traded at C$12.78. 2,714 shares were traded during trading, a decline of 58% from the average session volume of 6,409 shares. The stock had previously closed at C$12.66.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

A number of brokerages recently issued reports on LUGDF. BMO Capital Markets increased their target price on shares of Lundin Gold from C$20.00 to C$21.00 in a research report on Thursday, April 6th. CIBC increased their target price on shares of Lundin Gold from C$20.00 to C$21.00 in a research report on Thursday. Desjardins increased their target price on shares of Lundin Gold from C$20.75 to C$21.00 in a research report on Tuesday, May 16th. Finally, National Bank Financial decreased their price objective on shares of Lundin Gold from C$21.00 to C$20.50 in a report on Monday, May 15th.

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Lundin Gold Trading Down 2.1 %

The business has a fifty day moving average price of C$12.81.

Lundin Gold Cuts Dividend

Lundin Gold Company Profile

The business also recently disclosed a dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, June 27th. Shareholders of record on Tuesday, June 13th will be issued a dividend of $0.0993 per share. This represents a yield of 3.17%. The ex-dividend date is Monday, June 12th.

(Get Rating)

Lundin Gold, Inc is a natural resource mining company, which engages in the acquisition, exploration, and development of gold, base, and precious metal properties. It focuses on the operation of Fruta del Norte project. The company was founded on July 25, 1986 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.

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Luxottica Group SpA (OTCMKTS:LUXTY  Get Rating)s share price was up 0.4% during mid-day trading on Tuesday . The company traded as high as $55.90 and last traded at $55.80. Approximately 2,900 shares changed hands during mid-day trading, a decline of 80% from the average daily volume of 14,259 shares. The stock had previously closed at $55.60.

Luxottica Group Stock Performance

The stock has a market capitalization of $27.07 billion, a PE ratio of 24.37 and a beta of 0.27. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.19, a current ratio of 1.18 and a quick ratio of 0.88. The businesss fifty day moving average price is $55.80 and its 200-day moving average price is $55.80.

About Luxottica Group

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Luxottica Group S.p.A., together with its subsidiaries, provides fashion, luxury, sports, and performance eyewear worldwide. It operates through two segments, Manufacturing and Wholesale Distribution, and Retail Distribution. The Manufacturing and Wholesale Distribution segment engages in the design, manufacture, distribution, and marketing of proprietary and designer lines of prescription frames and sunglasses.

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Mercantile Ports & Logistics Limited (LON:MPL  Get Rating)s share price was up 6.3% during mid-day trading on Tuesday . The company traded as high as GBX 4.50 ($0.06) and last traded at GBX 4.25 ($0.05). Approximately 170,249 shares traded hands during mid-day trading, an increase of 183% from the average daily volume of 60,265 shares. The stock had previously closed at GBX 4 ($0.05).

Mercantile Ports & Logistics Price Performance

The stock has a 50 day moving average of GBX 4.87 and a 200-day moving average of GBX 6.50. The firm has a market capitalization of 1.76 million, a P/E ratio of -9.44 and a beta of 0.54. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 47.34, a quick ratio of 0.38 and a current ratio of 1.51.

Mercantile Ports & Logistics Company Profile

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Mercantile Ports & Logistics Limited, through its subsidiaries, develops, owns, and operates port and logistics facilities in India. The company is developing a port and logistics facility in approximately 200 acres of land with a sea frontage of 1,000 meters at Karanja Creek in the Raigad District of Maharashtra.

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Molson Coors Beverage (NYSE:TAP  Get Rating) shares hit a new 52-week high during mid-day trading on Friday after Evercore ISI raised their price target on the stock from $70.00 to $73.00. The stock traded as high as $66.70 and last traded at $66.70, with a volume of 265 shares changing hands. The stock had previously closed at $66.40.

TAP has been the topic of a number of other reports. StockNews.com raised shares of Molson Coors Beverage from a hold rating to a buy rating in a research note on Friday, May 12th. UBS Group boosted their price objective on shares of Molson Coors Beverage from $54.00 to $67.00 in a research report on Wednesday, May 3rd. TheStreet upgraded shares of Molson Coors Beverage from a c+ rating to a b rating in a research report on Tuesday, May 2nd. Barclays boosted their price objective on shares of Molson Coors Beverage from $62.00 to $69.00 in a research report on Thursday. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. upgraded shares of Molson Coors Beverage from an underweight rating to a neutral rating and boosted their price objective for the stock from $59.00 to $64.00 in a research report on Wednesday, May 3rd. Four investment analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, nine have assigned a hold rating and three have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat.com, Molson Coors Beverage currently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $60.19.

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Insider Activity

In other news, insider Geoffrey E. Molson sold 1,840 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Thursday, May 25th. The shares were sold at an average price of $60.62, for a total transaction of $111,540.80. Following the completion of the transaction, the insider now owns 25,904 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $1,570,300.48. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available at this hyperlink. Corporate insiders own 2.30% of the companys stock.

Institutional Trading of Molson Coors Beverage

Molson Coors Beverage Price Performance

A number of institutional investors and hedge funds have recently bought and sold shares of TAP. Norges Bank acquired a new stake in Molson Coors Beverage during the 4th quarter worth approximately $83,092,000. Vanguard Group Inc. increased its position in Molson Coors Beverage by 6.1% during the 1st quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 21,329,879 shares of the companys stock worth $1,138,589,000 after purchasing an additional 1,235,013 shares in the last quarter. Dodge & Cox grew its position in Molson Coors Beverage by 3.8% in the first quarter. Dodge & Cox now owns 28,120,054 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,453,244,000 after acquiring an additional 1,032,150 shares in the last quarter. Liontrust Investment Partners LLP acquired a new stake in Molson Coors Beverage in the first quarter valued at approximately $32,391,000. Finally, Squarepoint Ops LLC grew its position in Molson Coors Beverage by 471.1% in the first quarter. Squarepoint Ops LLC now owns 593,917 shares of the companys stock valued at $30,694,000 after acquiring an additional 489,926 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 76.24% of the companys stock.

The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.48, a current ratio of 0.77 and a quick ratio of 0.49. The companys 50-day simple moving average is $60.03 and its 200-day simple moving average is $54.91.

Molson Coors Beverage (NYSE:TAP  Get Rating) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday, May 2nd. The company reported $0.54 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.26 by $0.28. Molson Coors Beverage had a negative net margin of 1.97% and a positive return on equity of 7.16%. The company had revenue of $2.35 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $2.23 billion. During the same quarter last year, the company earned $0.29 earnings per share. Molson Coors Beverages revenue for the quarter was up 5.9% on a year-over-year basis. On average, analysts anticipate that Molson Coors Beverage will post 4.41 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Molson Coors Beverage Announces Dividend

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, June 15th. Shareholders of record on Friday, June 2nd will be given a $0.41 dividend. This represents a $1.64 annualized dividend and a yield of 2.46%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, June 1st. Molson Coors Beverages dividend payout ratio (DPR) is -137.81%.

Molson Coors Beverage Company Profile

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Molson Coors Beverage Co is a holding company, which engages in the production and sale of beer. It operates through the following segments: Americas, and EMEA and APAC. The Americas segment operates in the U.S., Canada and various countries in the Caribbean, Latin, and South America. The EMEA and APAC segment operates in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Montenegro, the Republic of Ireland, Romania, Serbia, the UK, various other European countries, and certain countries within the Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific.

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Morgan Stanley downgraded shares of Dollar General (NYSE:DG  Get Rating) from an overweight rating to an equal weight rating in a report issued on Monday morning, The Fly reports. The firm currently has $180.00 target price on the stock, down from their prior target price of $235.00.

DG has been the subject of a number of other reports. VNET Group reiterated a maintains rating on shares of Dollar General in a research report on Friday, June 2nd. Piper Jaffray Companies cut Dollar General from an overweight rating to a neutral rating in a research note on Friday, June 2nd. BMO Capital Markets cut their target price on Dollar General from $230.00 to $175.00 in a research report on Friday, June 2nd. Barclays started coverage on Dollar General in a report on Tuesday, February 7th. They issued an equal weight rating and a $237.00 price target on the stock. Finally, OTR Global raised Dollar General to a positive rating in a research note on Friday, May 26th. Thirteen investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, seven have given a buy rating and two have issued a strong buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $206.14.

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Dollar General Trading Up 0.2 %

Shares of DG opened at $155.87 on Monday. Dollar General has a 12-month low of $153.81 and a 12-month high of $261.59. The stocks fifty day simple moving average is $208.28 and its 200-day simple moving average is $224.13. The company has a quick ratio of 0.12, a current ratio of 1.32 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.18. The firm has a market capitalization of $34.19 billion, a PE ratio of 14.69, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.57 and a beta of 0.34.

Dollar General Dividend Announcement

Dollar General ( NYSE:DG Get Rating ) last announced its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, June 1st. The company reported $2.34 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $2.38 by ($0.04). The business had revenue of $9.34 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $9.47 billion. Dollar General had a return on equity of 40.03% and a net margin of 6.19%. The firms revenue was up 6.8% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same quarter last year, the company earned $2.41 earnings per share. As a group, research analysts predict that Dollar General will post 10.1 earnings per share for the current year.

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, July 25th. Investors of record on Tuesday, July 11th will be given a dividend of $0.59 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Monday, July 10th. This represents a $2.36 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 1.51%. Dollar Generals payout ratio is currently 22.24%.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In related news, CEO Jeffery Owen purchased 1,500 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, June 6th. The shares were purchased at an average cost of $157.86 per share, for a total transaction of $236,790.00. Following the purchase, the chief executive officer now directly owns 55,720 shares of the companys stock, valued at $8,795,959.20. The purchase was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through this link. In other news, Director Todd J. Vasos sold 27,327 shares of Dollar General stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, June 6th. The shares were sold at an average price of $156.65, for a total value of $4,280,774.55. Following the sale, the director now owns 118,635 shares of the companys stock, valued at $18,584,172.75. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through this hyperlink. Also, CEO Jeffery Owen bought 1,500 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, June 6th. The stock was purchased at an average cost of $157.86 per share, for a total transaction of $236,790.00. Following the acquisition, the chief executive officer now owns 55,720 shares of the companys stock, valued at $8,795,959.20. The disclosure for this purchase can be found here. 0.60% of the stock is owned by company insiders.

Institutional Trading of Dollar General

Institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the stock. Kentucky Retirement Systems raised its position in shares of Dollar General by 4.6% in the third quarter. Kentucky Retirement Systems now owns 17,769 shares of the companys stock valued at $4,262,000 after buying an additional 789 shares during the last quarter. Toroso Investments LLC raised its holdings in shares of Dollar General by 0.8% during the third quarter. Toroso Investments LLC now owns 10,874 shares of the companys stock worth $2,607,000 after purchasing an additional 83 shares during the period. Quadrant Capital Group LLC increased its holdings in shares of Dollar General by 3.3% in the 4th quarter. Quadrant Capital Group LLC now owns 2,263 shares of the companys stock worth $557,000 after acquiring an additional 72 shares during the period. Heritage Wealth Management LLC increased its holdings in shares of Dollar General by 100.0% in the 4th quarter. Heritage Wealth Management LLC now owns 1,146 shares of the companys stock worth $282,000 after acquiring an additional 573 shares during the period. Finally, Wesbanco Bank Inc. increased its holdings in shares of Dollar General by 27.5% in the 4th quarter. Wesbanco Bank Inc. now owns 1,568 shares of the companys stock worth $386,000 after acquiring an additional 338 shares during the period. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 90.73% of the companys stock.

About Dollar General

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Dollar General Corp. engages in the operation of merchandise stores. Its offerings include food, snacks, health and beauty aids, cleaning supplies, basic apparel, housewares, and seasonal items. It sells brands including Clorox, Energizer, Procter & Gamble, Hanes, Coca-Cola, Mars, Unilever, Nestle, Kimberly-Clark, Kelloggs, General Mills, and PepsiCo The company was founded by J.

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Shares of Nicolet Bankshares, Inc. (NYSE:NIC  Get Rating) traded down 5.7% during trading on Friday . The stock traded as low as $71.51 and last traded at $71.51. 34,574 shares were traded during trading, a decline of 11% from the average session volume of 38,820 shares. The stock had previously closed at $75.81.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

Several equities analysts recently commented on the stock. Piper Sandler dropped their price target on shares of Nicolet Bankshares from $75.00 to $70.00 in a research report on Wednesday, April 19th. TheStreet lowered shares of Nicolet Bankshares from a b rating to a c+ rating in a research report on Wednesday, April 19th.

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Nicolet Bankshares Stock Performance

The stocks 50 day moving average price is $61.12 and its 200 day moving average price is $70.22. The company has a current ratio of 0.91, a quick ratio of 0.91 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.21. The firm has a market cap of $1.06 billion, a PE ratio of 17.88 and a beta of 0.70.

Nicolet Bankshares Dividend Announcement

Insider Activity

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, June 15th. Stockholders of record on Thursday, June 1st will be paid a $0.25 dividend. This represents a $1.00 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 1.39%. The ex-dividend date is Wednesday, May 31st. Nicolet Banksharess dividend payout ratio is presently 23.58%.

In other news, CFO Hubert Phillip Moore, Jr. purchased 1,500 shares of the companys stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, April 21st. The shares were purchased at an average price of $56.63 per share, with a total value of $84,945.00. Following the purchase, the chief financial officer now directly owns 29,361 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $1,662,713.43. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this link. In the last 90 days, insiders have acquired 1,895 shares of company stock valued at $107,402. Company insiders own 18.10% of the companys stock.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Nicolet Bankshares

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Signaturefd LLC increased its stake in Nicolet Bankshares by 158.3% during the 1st quarter. Signaturefd LLC now owns 390 shares of the companys stock worth $25,000 after buying an additional 239 shares during the period. U.S. Capital Wealth Advisors LLC acquired a new position in Nicolet Bankshares during the 4th quarter worth $31,000. Wells Fargo & Company MN acquired a new position in Nicolet Bankshares during the 4th quarter worth $35,000. Citigroup Inc. acquired a new position in Nicolet Bankshares during the 4th quarter worth $35,000. Finally, Winch Advisory Services LLC acquired a new position in Nicolet Bankshares during the 4th quarter worth $40,000. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 37.40% of the companys stock.

About Nicolet Bankshares

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Nicolet Bankshares, Inc is a holding company, which engages in the provision of commercial and consumer banking services through its subsidiary. It offers lending and deposit gathering, ancillary banking-related, trust, brokerage, and other investment management products and services. The firm also delivers commercial-related and residential real estate loans.

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Prio Wealth Limited Partnership bought a new stake in shares of Dell Technologies Inc. (NYSE:DELL  Get Rating) in the 4th quarter, according to its most recent filing with the SEC. The institutional investor bought 17,100 shares of the technology companys stock, valued at approximately $688,000.

Several other institutional investors and hedge funds also recently made changes to their positions in the business. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. grew its holdings in Dell Technologies by 80.7% in the 1st quarter. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. now owns 4,976,265 shares of the technology companys stock valued at $249,759,000 after buying an additional 2,222,995 shares during the last quarter. Alliancebernstein L.P. grew its holdings in shares of Dell Technologies by 43.9% during the 3rd quarter. Alliancebernstein L.P. now owns 4,567,318 shares of the technology companys stock worth $156,065,000 after purchasing an additional 1,394,376 shares in the last quarter. Pacer Advisors Inc. grew its holdings in shares of Dell Technologies by 40.7% during the 4th quarter. Pacer Advisors Inc. now owns 4,019,506 shares of the technology companys stock worth $161,665,000 after purchasing an additional 1,161,913 shares in the last quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP boosted its stake in Dell Technologies by 78.1% in the 1st quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP now owns 1,424,666 shares of the technology companys stock valued at $71,566,000 after buying an additional 624,628 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Teachers Retirement System of The State of Kentucky acquired a new stake in Dell Technologies in the 3rd quarter valued at $19,938,000. 26.42% of the stock is currently owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Analyst Ratings Changes

DELL has been the topic of several recent analyst reports. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft boosted their price target on Dell Technologies from $45.00 to $48.00 in a research note on Friday, June 2nd. Sanford C. Bernstein cut their price objective on Dell Technologies from $60.00 to $51.00 in a research report on Friday, March 3rd. Citigroup cut their price objective on Dell Technologies from $53.00 to $50.00 in a research report on Friday, March 3rd. JPMorgan Chase & Co. downgraded Dell Technologies from an overweight rating to a neutral rating and set a $47.00 target price for the company. in a research report on Monday, April 17th. Finally, The Goldman Sachs Group began coverage on Dell Technologies in a research report on Monday, March 20th. They set a buy rating and a $43.00 target price for the company. Five research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and eleven have issued a buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the company has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $49.81.

Insider Buying and Selling

Dell Technologies Trading Up 0.9 %

In related news, General Counsel Richard J. Rothberg sold 200,958 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, April 18th. The stock was sold at an average price of $45.36, for a total transaction of $9,115,454.88. Following the sale, the general counsel now owns 149,379 shares in the company, valued at $6,775,831.44. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this hyperlink . In other news, COO Anthony Charles Whitten sold 15,983 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Thursday, March 16th. The stock was sold at an average price of $36.49, for a total transaction of $583,219.67. Following the transaction, the chief operating officer now owns 841,207 shares in the company, valued at $30,695,643.43. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available through the SEC website . Also, General Counsel Richard J. Rothberg sold 200,958 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, April 18th. The stock was sold at an average price of $45.36, for a total value of $9,115,454.88. Following the transaction, the general counsel now owns 149,379 shares in the company, valued at approximately $6,775,831.44. The disclosure for this sale can be found here . Over the last quarter, insiders have sold 522,371 shares of company stock worth $22,038,868. Corporate insiders own 48.60% of the companys stock.

Shares of DELL stock traded up $0.42 on Friday, hitting $48.31. 304,927 shares of the stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 4,190,964. The firm has a market capitalization of $35.32 billion, a P/E ratio of 18.14, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.86 and a beta of 1.02. The business has a 50-day moving average of $44.50 and a 200 day moving average of $42.05. Dell Technologies Inc. has a fifty-two week low of $32.90 and a fifty-two week high of $50.70.

Dell Technologies (NYSE:DELL  Get Rating) last released its earnings results on Thursday, June 1st. The technology company reported $1.31 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $0.86 by $0.45. Dell Technologies had a negative return on equity of 147.96% and a net margin of 2.01%. The business had revenue of $20.92 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $20.27 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the company posted $1.64 earnings per share. Dell Technologiess revenue was down 19.9% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, research analysts forecast that Dell Technologies Inc. will post 4.59 EPS for the current fiscal year.

About Dell Technologies

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Dell Technologies Inc designs, develops, manufactures, markets, sells, and supports various comprehensive and integrated solutions, products, and services in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and internationally. The company operates through two segments, Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) and Client Solutions Group (CSG).

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Qtron Investments LLC grew its stake in The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE:KO  Get Rating) by 13.7% in the 4th quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The institutional investor owned 48,682 shares of the companys stock after acquiring an additional 5,874 shares during the period. Coca-Cola accounts for approximately 0.7% of Qtron Investments LLCs holdings, making the stock its 27th largest position. Qtron Investments LLCs holdings in Coca-Cola were worth $3,097,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

Several other hedge funds also recently modified their holdings of KO. Salem Capital Management Inc. lifted its holdings in shares of Coca-Cola by 3.8% in the 3rd quarter. Salem Capital Management Inc. now owns 4,359 shares of the companys stock worth $244,000 after acquiring an additional 159 shares during the last quarter. Kessler Investment Group LLC lifted its holdings in Coca-Cola by 6.6% during the 4th quarter. Kessler Investment Group LLC now owns 2,679 shares of the companys stock valued at $170,000 after buying an additional 167 shares in the last quarter. Alaska Permanent Fund Corp lifted its holdings in Coca-Cola by 1.0% during the 4th quarter. Alaska Permanent Fund Corp now owns 16,604 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,056,000 after buying an additional 170 shares in the last quarter. Bellwether Advisors LLC lifted its holdings in Coca-Cola by 32.4% during the 3rd quarter. Bellwether Advisors LLC now owns 698 shares of the companys stock valued at $39,000 after buying an additional 171 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Laurel Wealth Advisors Inc. lifted its holdings in Coca-Cola by 0.6% during the 3rd quarter. Laurel Wealth Advisors Inc. now owns 28,494 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,597,000 after buying an additional 171 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors own 68.74% of the companys stock.

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Coca-Cola Stock Up 0.2 %

Shares of Coca-Cola stock traded up $0.14 on Friday, reaching $60.51. The stock had a trading volume of 4,689,656 shares, compared to its average volume of 13,277,506. The company has a 50 day moving average price of $62.57 and a 200 day moving average price of $61.85. The company has a quick ratio of 0.95, a current ratio of 1.15 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.34. The Coca-Cola Company has a 1 year low of $54.01 and a 1 year high of $65.47. The stock has a market capitalization of $261.68 billion, a P/E ratio of 26.47, a P/E/G ratio of 3.41 and a beta of 0.55.

Coca-Cola Announces Dividend

Coca-Cola ( NYSE:KO Get Rating ) last released its earnings results on Monday, April 24th. The company reported $0.68 EPS for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $0.65 by $0.03. The company had revenue of $11 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $10.78 billion. Coca-Cola had a net margin of 22.69% and a return on equity of 42.96%. Coca-Colas revenue for the quarter was up 4.8% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period last year, the business earned $0.64 EPS. As a group, equities research analysts forecast that The Coca-Cola Company will post 2.61 EPS for the current year.

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 3rd. Investors of record on Friday, June 16th will be paid a $0.46 dividend. This represents a $1.84 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 3.04%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, June 15th. Coca-Colas dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 80.70%.

Insider Buying and Selling

In other Coca-Cola news, insider Henrique Braun sold 16,950 shares of Coca-Cola stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, May 12th. The shares were sold at an average price of $64.03, for a total transaction of $1,085,308.50. Following the completion of the sale, the insider now directly owns 26,272 shares in the company, valued at approximately $1,682,196.16. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is accessible through this hyperlink. In other Coca-Cola news, insider Henrique Braun sold 16,950 shares of Coca-Cola stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, May 12th. The shares were sold at an average price of $64.03, for a total transaction of $1,085,308.50. Following the completion of the sale, the insider now directly owns 26,272 shares in the company, valued at approximately $1,682,196.16. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is accessible through this hyperlink. Also, CEO James Quincey sold 150,000 shares of Coca-Cola stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, May 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $64.33, for a total transaction of $9,649,500.00. Following the sale, the chief executive officer now owns 442,546 shares of the companys stock, valued at $28,468,984.18. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders sold 420,052 shares of company stock worth $26,839,689 in the last three months. Corporate insiders own 1.00% of the companys stock.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

A number of brokerages recently weighed in on KO. JPMorgan Chase & Co. set a $67.00 price objective on shares of Coca-Cola in a report on Tuesday, February 14th. Evercore ISI lifted their price objective on shares of Coca-Cola from $68.00 to $70.00 in a report on Tuesday, April 25th. Wells Fargo & Company cut their target price on shares of Coca-Cola from $70.00 to $68.00 and set an overweight rating on the stock in a research report on Wednesday, February 15th. Royal Bank of Canada set a $69.00 target price on shares of Coca-Cola in a research report on Tuesday, February 14th. Finally, The Goldman Sachs Group raised their target price on shares of Coca-Cola from $61.00 to $62.00 and gave the company a neutral rating in a research report on Monday, February 13th. Three investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and ten have given a buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $67.67.

About Coca-Cola

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The Coca-Cola Co engages in the manufacturing and marketing of non-alcoholic beverages. It operates through the following segments: Europe, Middle East and Africa, Latin America, North America, Asia Pacific, Global Ventures, and Bottling Investments. The company was founded by Asa Griggs Candler on May 8, 1886 and is headquartered in Atlanta, GA.

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Secom Co., Ltd. (OTCMKTS:SOMLY  Get Rating) reached a new 52-week high during trading on Friday . The company traded as high as $17.49 and last traded at $17.04, with a volume of 17845 shares. The stock had previously closed at $16.79.

Secom Stock Up 1.5 %

The firm has a fifty day moving average price of $16.19 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $15.24. The stock has a market capitalization of $15.90 billion, a P/E ratio of 19.08 and a beta of 0.39.

Secom Company Profile

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SECOM CO., LTD. provides security services in Japan and internationally. Its Security Services segment offers static guard, armored car, merchandise, and other services, as well as online security systems; sells security and water-treatment equipment; and operates PFI correctional facilities. The company's Fire Protection Services segment provides building management, automatic fire alarm systems, fire extinguishing systems, other fire protection systems, and related maintenance services to office buildings, plants, tunnels, cultural properties, ships, and residences; and environmental monitoring systems.

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Signet Jewelers Limited (NYSE:SIG  Get Rating)s share price traded down 5.2% during trading on Friday after Bank of America lowered their price target on the stock from $88.00 to $71.00. The company traded as low as $58.80 and last traded at $58.86. 1,064,455 shares traded hands during trading, an increase of 36% from the average session volume of 783,597 shares. The stock had previously closed at $62.11.

A number of other research analysts have also recently commented on SIG. Wells Fargo & Company dropped their price target on Signet Jewelers from $100.00 to $95.00 in a research report on Friday. Citigroup dropped their price objective on Signet Jewelers from $82.00 to $68.00 in a report on Friday. Telsey Advisory Group increased their price objective on Signet Jewelers from $75.00 to $85.00 and gave the stock a market perform rating in a report on Wednesday, April 19th. UBS Group increased their price objective on Signet Jewelers from $92.00 to $98.00 in a report on Friday, March 17th. Finally, StockNews.com initiated coverage on Signet Jewelers in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a buy rating on the stock. Three research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and two have issued a buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat.com, the stock has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $83.40.

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Insiders Place Their Bets

In other Signet Jewelers news, CEO Virginia Drosos sold 10,000 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, May 23rd. The stock was sold at an average price of $70.29, for a total value of $702,900.00. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now directly owns 1,037,740 shares in the company, valued at approximately $72,942,744.60. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through this hyperlink. In other news, insider Jamie Singleton sold 17,500 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, April 19th. The stock was sold at an average price of $80.00, for a total transaction of $1,400,000.00. Following the transaction, the insider now directly owns 211,056 shares in the company, valued at approximately $16,884,480. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. Also, CEO Virginia Drosos sold 10,000 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, May 23rd. The shares were sold at an average price of $70.29, for a total value of $702,900.00. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 1,037,740 shares in the company, valued at $72,942,744.60. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders have sold 69,693 shares of company stock worth $5,231,135 in the last ninety days. 4.54% of the stock is currently owned by insiders.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Signet Jewelers

Signet Jewelers Trading Down 4.6 %

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently bought and sold shares of SIG. Raymond James Financial Services Advisors Inc. grew its position in Signet Jewelers by 1.6% during the 1st quarter. Raymond James Financial Services Advisors Inc. now owns 25,524 shares of the companys stock worth $1,856,000 after acquiring an additional 404 shares during the last quarter. Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan Trust Fund bought a new position in Signet Jewelers during the 1st quarter worth approximately $377,000. Rhumbline Advisers lifted its holdings in Signet Jewelers by 7.1% in the 1st quarter. Rhumbline Advisers now owns 136,265 shares of the companys stock worth $9,906,000 after buying an additional 9,028 shares during the period. Great West Life Assurance Co. Can lifted its holdings in Signet Jewelers by 3.7% in the 1st quarter. Great West Life Assurance Co. Can now owns 50,017 shares of the companys stock worth $3,742,000 after buying an additional 1,772 shares during the period. Finally, Sei Investments Co. lifted its holdings in Signet Jewelers by 188.0% in the 1st quarter. Sei Investments Co. now owns 34,675 shares of the companys stock worth $2,521,000 after buying an additional 22,633 shares during the period. 97.88% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

The company has a current ratio of 1.56, a quick ratio of 0.60 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.09. The firm has a fifty day simple moving average of $71.69 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $71.62. The firm has a market cap of $2.68 billion, a PE ratio of 9.33, a PEG ratio of 0.78 and a beta of 2.14.

Signet Jewelers (NYSE:SIG  Get Rating) last released its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, June 8th. The company reported $1.78 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $1.49 by $0.29. The business had revenue of $1.67 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $1.65 billion. Signet Jewelers had a return on equity of 46.64% and a net margin of 4.80%. The businesss revenue was down 9.3% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter last year, the business posted $2.86 EPS. Equities analysts forecast that Signet Jewelers Limited will post 11.18 EPS for the current year.

Signet Jewelers Dividend Announcement

The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, August 25th. Stockholders of record on Friday, July 28th will be paid a $0.23 dividend. This represents a $0.92 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 1.55%. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, July 27th. Signet Jewelerss payout ratio is presently 14.58%.

About Signet Jewelers

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Signet Jewelers Ltd. engages in the retail of diamond jewelry. It operates through the following business segments: North America, International, and Others. The North America segment operates jewelry stores in malls, mall-based kiosks, and off-mall locations throughout the U.S. and Canada. The International sells primarily in the UK and Ireland under the H.

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ALBANY, N.Y. (AP)  New York would create a commission to consider reparations to address the lingering, negative effects of slavery under a bill passed by the state Legislature on Thursday.

We want to make sure we are looking at slavery and its legacies, said state Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages before the floor debate. This is about beginning the process of healing our communities. There still is generational trauma that people are experiencing. This is just one step forward.

The state Assembly passed the bill about three hours after spirited debate on Thursday. The state Senate passed the measure hours later, and the bill will be sent to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for consideration.

New York is following the lead of California, which became the first state to form a reparations task force in 2020. That group recommended a formal apology from the state on its legacy of racism and discriminatory policies and the creation of an agency to provide a wide range of services for Black residents. They did not recommend specific payments amounts for reparations.

The New York legislation would create a commission that would examine the extent to which the federal and state government supported the institution of slavery. It would also address persistent economic, political and educational disparities experienced by Black people in the state today.

According to the New York bill, the first enslaved Africans arrived at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, then a Dutch settlement, around the 1620s and helped build the infrastructure of New York City. While the state Legislature enacted a statute that gave freedom to enslaved Africans in New York in 1817, it wasnt implemented until 10 years later.

Im concerned were opening a door that was closed in New York State almost 200 years ago, said Republican state Assemblymember Andy Gooddell during floor debates on the bill. Gooddell, who voted against the bill, said he supports existing efforts to bring equal opportunity to all and would like to continue on that path rather than focus on reparations.

In California, the reparations task force said in their report that the state is estimated to be responsible for more than $500 billion due to decades of over-policing, mass incarceration and redlining that kept Black families from receiving loans and living in certain neighborhoods. Californias state budget last year was $308 billion. Reparations in New York could also come with a hefty price tag.

The commission would be required to deliver a report one year after their first meeting. Their recommendations, which could potentially include monetary compensation for Black people, would be non-binding. The legislature would not be required to take the recommendations up for a vote.

New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who is the first Black person to hold the position, called the legislation historic.

Heastie along with the governor and legislative leader in the state Senate would each appoint three qualified members to the commission.

Other state legislatures that have considered studying reparations include New Jersey and Vermont, but none have yet passed legislation. A Chicago suburb in Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to make reparations available to Black residents through a $10 million housing project in 2021.

On the federal level, a decades-old proposal to create a commission studying reparations has stalled in Congress.

Some critics of reparations by states say that while the idea is well-intentioned, it can be misguided.

William Darity, a professor of public policy and African and African American Studies at Duke University said even calling them reparations is presumptuous," since it's virtually impossible for states to meet the potentially hefty payouts.

He said the federal government has the financial capacity to pay true reparations and that they should be the ones responsible.

My deeper fear with all of these piecemeal projects is that they actually will become a block against federal action because there will be a number of people who will say there's no need for a federal program, Darity said. If you end up settling for state and local initiatives, you settle for much less than what is owed.

Associated Press Writer Sophie Austin in Sacramento, California contributed to this report.

Maysoon Khan is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Maysoon Khan on Twitter.
The Brinks Company (NYSE:BCO  Get Rating) EVP Dominik Bossart sold 15,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Tuesday, June 6th. The stock was sold at an average price of $70.00, for a total value of $1,050,000.00. Following the sale, the executive vice president now directly owns 35,291 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $2,470,370. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through this hyperlink.

Brinks Trading Up 2.0 %

BCO opened at $72.13 on Friday. The firm has a market cap of $3.35 billion, a P/E ratio of 29.44 and a beta of 1.34. The business has a fifty day simple moving average of $65.76 and a 200-day simple moving average of $62.86. The Brinks Company has a 52 week low of $48.38 and a 52 week high of $72.89. The company has a quick ratio of 1.53, a current ratio of 1.53 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 5.27.

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Brinks Increases Dividend

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 1st. Investors of record on Monday, May 15th were issued a $0.22 dividend. The ex-dividend date was Friday, May 12th. This is a positive change from Brinkss previous quarterly dividend of $0.20. This represents a $0.88 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 1.22%. Brinkss dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 35.92%.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several research analysts have recently commented on the company. TheStreet upgraded Brinks from a c+ rating to a b rating in a research report on Wednesday, February 22nd. Truist Financial raised their price target on Brinks from $78.00 to $90.00 and gave the stock a buy rating in a research report on Friday, March 24th. Finally, StockNews.com lowered Brinks from a strong-buy rating to a buy rating in a research report on Wednesday, May 24th.

A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the stock. Thrivent Financial for Lutherans boosted its holdings in Brinks by 1.4% in the third quarter. Thrivent Financial for Lutherans now owns 12,504 shares of the business services providers stock valued at $606,000 after purchasing an additional 167 shares during the period. Public Employees Retirement System of Ohio boosted its holdings in Brinks by 8.8% in the third quarter. Public Employees Retirement System of Ohio now owns 2,206 shares of the business services providers stock valued at $107,000 after purchasing an additional 179 shares during the period. Cim Investment Management Inc. lifted its holdings in Brinks by 3.6% during the 1st quarter. Cim Investment Management Inc. now owns 5,229 shares of the business services providers stock worth $349,000 after buying an additional 180 shares during the last quarter. SummerHaven Investment Management LLC lifted its holdings in Brinks by 1.4% during the 4th quarter. SummerHaven Investment Management LLC now owns 13,555 shares of the business services providers stock worth $728,000 after buying an additional 187 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Campbell Newman Asset Management Inc. lifted its holdings in Brinks by 1.3% during the 1st quarter. Campbell Newman Asset Management Inc. now owns 17,557 shares of the business services providers stock worth $1,173,000 after buying an additional 227 shares during the last quarter. 97.41% of the stock is currently owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

About Brinks

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The Brinks Co provides secure logistics and cash management services. It operates through the following segments: North America, Latin America, Europe and Rest of World. Its logistics and security solutions include cash-in-transit, ATM replenishment & maintenance, and cash management & payment services, such as vault outsourcing, money processing, intelligent safe services, and international transportation of valuables.

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Third Point Investors Limited (LON:TPOU  Get Rating) was down 0.5% during trading on Thursday . The stock traded as low as GBX 19.25 ($0.24) and last traded at GBX 19.50 ($0.24). Approximately 18,066 shares traded hands during mid-day trading, a decline of 13% from the average daily volume of 20,835 shares. The stock had previously closed at GBX 19.60 ($0.24).

Third Point Investors Trading Down 0.5 %

The company has a 50 day moving average of GBX 19.42 and a 200 day moving average of GBX 19.80. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 22.39, a quick ratio of 20.13 and a current ratio of 17.82. The stock has a market capitalization of 5.19 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -2.38 and a beta of 0.52.

About Third Point Investors

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Third Point Offshore Investors Limited is a close ended feeder fund launched and managed by Third Point LLC. The fund invests its entire corpus in Third Point Offshore Fund Ltd. It seeks to benchmark the performance of its portfolio against the S&P 500 TR USD. The fund was formed on July 20, 2007 and is domiciled in Guernsey, Channel Islands.

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TriNet Group, Inc. (NYSE:TNET  Get Rating) shares saw an uptick in trading volume on Friday . 1,655,004 shares were traded during trading, an increase of 343% from the previous sessions volume of 373,240 shares.The stock last traded at $109.17 and had previously closed at $97.32.

Analyst Ratings Changes

TNET has been the topic of a number of research analyst reports. Needham & Company LLC initiated coverage on TriNet Group in a report on Friday, May 12th. They issued a buy rating and a $115.00 target price on the stock. StockNews.com lowered TriNet Group from a buy rating to a hold rating in a report on Friday. Finally, Cowen raised their price objective on TriNet Group from $67.00 to $74.00 and gave the stock a market perform rating in a research report on Thursday, February 16th. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, four have given a hold rating and one has given a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the company currently has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $88.00.

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TriNet Group Trading Up 9.8 %

The stock has a market capitalization of $6.35 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 19.36 and a beta of 1.16. The business has a 50 day simple moving average of $88.46 and a 200-day simple moving average of $79.68. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.60, a current ratio of 1.18 and a quick ratio of 1.18.

Insider Activity

TriNet Group ( NYSE:TNET Get Rating ) last released its earnings results on Wednesday, April 26th. The business services provider reported $2.35 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $1.77 by $0.58. TriNet Group had a return on equity of 47.82% and a net margin of 6.96%. The business had revenue of $394.00 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $364.55 million. As a group, equities analysts expect that TriNet Group, Inc. will post 4.71 earnings per share for the current year.

In other news, CEO Burton M. Goldfield sold 6,250 shares of the companys stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, May 24th. The stock was sold at an average price of $91.33, for a total value of $570,812.50. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 181,863 shares of the companys stock, valued at $16,609,547.79. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. In other TriNet Group news, SVP Alexander G. Warren sold 2,442 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Thursday, May 18th. The stock was sold at an average price of $90.64, for a total transaction of $221,342.88. Following the completion of the sale, the senior vice president now directly owns 39,058 shares in the company, valued at $3,540,217.12. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through the SEC website. Also, CEO Burton M. Goldfield sold 6,250 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Wednesday, May 24th. The stock was sold at an average price of $91.33, for a total value of $570,812.50. Following the sale, the chief executive officer now owns 181,863 shares of the companys stock, valued at $16,609,547.79. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Over the last quarter, insiders have sold 14,942 shares of company stock valued at $1,265,468. 37.40% of the stock is owned by insiders.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Large investors have recently modified their holdings of the company. Brandywine Global Investment Management LLC bought a new position in TriNet Group during the 1st quarter worth $1,290,000. Toroso Investments LLC bought a new position in TriNet Group during the 1st quarter worth $577,000. Rockefeller Capital Management L.P. raised its position in TriNet Group by 48.2% during the 1st quarter. Rockefeller Capital Management L.P. now owns 22,635 shares of the business services providers stock worth $1,824,000 after purchasing an additional 7,365 shares during the last quarter. Thrivent Financial for Lutherans bought a new position in TriNet Group during the 1st quarter worth $2,545,000. Finally, State Street Corp raised its position in TriNet Group by 2.0% during the 1st quarter. State Street Corp now owns 788,307 shares of the business services providers stock worth $63,545,000 after purchasing an additional 15,678 shares during the last quarter. 91.65% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

TriNet Group Company Profile

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TriNet Group, Inc provides human capital management (HCM) solutions to small and mid-sized businesses. Its services include HR expertise, benefit options, payroll services, risk mitigation, and a technology platform. The company was founded by Martin Babinec in 1988 and is headquartered in Dublin, CA.

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Creegan & Nassoura Financial Group LLC cut its position in shares of UnitedHealth Group Incorporated (NYSE:UNH  Get Rating) by 1.8% during the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent filing with the SEC. The firm owned 4,060 shares of the healthcare conglomerates stock after selling 75 shares during the quarter. UnitedHealth Group accounts for 1.7% of Creegan & Nassoura Financial Group LLCs portfolio, making the stock its 25th largest position. Creegan & Nassoura Financial Group LLCs holdings in UnitedHealth Group were worth $2,153,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

Several other hedge funds also recently modified their holdings of UNH. MFA Wealth Advisors LLC raised its position in UnitedHealth Group by 4.8% during the 3rd quarter. MFA Wealth Advisors LLC now owns 414 shares of the healthcare conglomerates stock worth $209,000 after buying an additional 19 shares during the last quarter. Formidable Asset Management LLC raised its position in UnitedHealth Group by 1.5% during the 3rd quarter. Formidable Asset Management LLC now owns 1,366 shares of the healthcare conglomerates stock worth $741,000 after buying an additional 20 shares during the last quarter. Signet Financial Management LLC raised its position in UnitedHealth Group by 2.2% during the 1st quarter. Signet Financial Management LLC now owns 964 shares of the healthcare conglomerates stock worth $491,000 after buying an additional 21 shares during the last quarter. Nicolet Advisory Services LLC grew its stake in shares of UnitedHealth Group by 3.9% during the 3rd quarter. Nicolet Advisory Services LLC now owns 562 shares of the healthcare conglomerates stock worth $280,000 after purchasing an additional 21 shares during the period. Finally, McElhenny Sheffield Capital Management LLC grew its stake in shares of UnitedHealth Group by 1.6% during the 4th quarter. McElhenny Sheffield Capital Management LLC now owns 1,317 shares of the healthcare conglomerates stock worth $698,000 after purchasing an additional 21 shares during the period. 86.31% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

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Insider Buying and Selling at UnitedHealth Group

In other news, EVP Erin Mcsweeney sold 1,008 shares of UnitedHealth Group stock in a transaction dated Friday, April 21st. The stock was sold at an average price of $484.58, for a total value of $488,456.64. Following the transaction, the executive vice president now directly owns 10,359 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $5,019,764.22. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through the SEC website. In related news, EVP Erin Mcsweeney sold 1,008 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, April 21st. The stock was sold at an average price of $484.58, for a total transaction of $488,456.64. Following the transaction, the executive vice president now directly owns 10,359 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $5,019,764.22. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this hyperlink. Also, CEO Andrew Witty sold 6,160 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Thursday, April 27th. The stock was sold at an average price of $487.49, for a total value of $3,002,938.40. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now directly owns 86,564 shares in the company, valued at $42,199,084.36. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders sold 8,852 shares of company stock worth $4,313,962 in the last 90 days. 0.35% of the stock is owned by company insiders.

UnitedHealth Group Stock Performance

NYSE UNH traded up $4.77 on Friday, reaching $495.00. The stock had a trading volume of 1,864,715 shares, compared to its average volume of 3,324,187. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.71, a quick ratio of 0.81 and a current ratio of 0.81. UnitedHealth Group Incorporated has a 12-month low of $449.70 and a 12-month high of $558.10. The businesss 50-day moving average price is $492.53 and its 200 day moving average price is $497.02. The stock has a market cap of $460.86 billion, a P/E ratio of 22.42, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.40 and a beta of 0.68.

UnitedHealth Group (NYSE:UNH  Get Rating) last released its quarterly earnings results on Friday, April 14th. The healthcare conglomerate reported $6.26 EPS for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $6.24 by $0.02. The business had revenue of $91.93 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $89.77 billion. UnitedHealth Group had a return on equity of 27.05% and a net margin of 6.16%. The companys quarterly revenue was up 14.7% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same quarter in the prior year, the business earned $5.49 earnings per share. As a group, equities analysts expect that UnitedHealth Group Incorporated will post 24.97 earnings per share for the current year.

UnitedHealth Group Increases Dividend

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, June 27th. Investors of record on Monday, June 19th will be given a dividend of $1.88 per share. This represents a $7.52 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 1.52%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, June 15th. This is a boost from UnitedHealth Groups previous quarterly dividend of $1.65. UnitedHealth Groups dividend payout ratio (DPR) is currently 30.18%.

Analyst Ratings Changes

UNH has been the topic of a number of analyst reports. Royal Bank of Canada reaffirmed an outperform rating and set a $592.00 price objective on shares of UnitedHealth Group in a research note on Monday, April 17th. Stephens reissued an overweight rating and issued a $605.00 price target on shares of UnitedHealth Group in a research note on Tuesday, February 28th. Raymond James reissued a strong-buy rating and issued a $630.00 price target on shares of UnitedHealth Group in a research note on Friday, April 14th. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft lifted their price target on shares of UnitedHealth Group from $617.00 to $627.00 in a research note on Monday, April 17th. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. dropped their price target on shares of UnitedHealth Group from $595.00 to $562.00 in a research note on Tuesday, May 30th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating, thirteen have issued a buy rating and two have given a strong buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, UnitedHealth Group presently has a consensus rating of Buy and a consensus target price of $599.06.

UnitedHealth Group Company Profile

(Get Rating)

UnitedHealth Group, Inc engages in the provision of health care coverage, software, and data consultancy services. It operates through the following segments: UnitedHealthcare, OptumHealth, OptumInsight, and OptumRx. The UnitedHealthcare segment utilizes Optums capabilities to help coordinate patient care, improve affordability of medical care, analyze cost trends, manage pharmacy benefits, work with care providers more effectively, and create a simpler consumer experience.

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Want to see what other hedge funds are holding UNH? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for UnitedHealth Group Incorporated (NYSE:UNH  Get Rating).

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Go First Committee Of Creditors (CoC) appointed Shailendra Ajmera as resolution professional (RP) in the airline's insolvency case, CNBC TV-18 reported on June 9. Ajemra is a Partner in Transaction Advisory Services at Ernst & Young and the lenders will seek NCLT's approval to make him the RP for Go First, the report stated. At the time of admission of the insolvency plea, NCLT had named Abhilash Lal of Alvarez & Marsal as IRP of Go First. Also Read | Go First extends suspension of flight operations till June 14 The cash-strapped airline has sought Rs 200 crore interim financing to restart operations, which is still under discussion. On May 2, the Wadia group-owned airline requested voluntary insolvency resolution proceedings as well as an interim moratorium on financial obligations due to liabilities of Rs 11,463 crore. Out of this, bank dues are Rs 6,521 crore. Central Bank of India, Deutsche Bank, Bank on Baroda and IDBI Bank are among the financial creditors to the company, according to the report. Also Read | MC Exclusive: Go First's sole intent is to hijack insolvency process, Delhivery alleges in plea

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Indias largest private, multi-modal asset-light logistics company, Western Carriers (India) Ltd has filed a draft red herring prospectus with the Securities Exchange Board of India to raise funds via initial public offerings (IPO). The IPO consists of a fresh issue of Rs 500 crore and an offer for sale (OFS) of up to 9.33 million shares by its existing promoter Rajendra Sethia. Currently, Rajendra Sethia holds a 99.99 percent stake in the company. The proceeds from the fresh issue worth Rs 200 crore will be used to repay debt. As of March 2023, the firm has outstanding borrowings of Rs 260.81 crore. The firm will also use Rs 186 crore for capital expenditure. The company plans to buy commercial vehicles and 40 feet of specialised containers and 20 feet of normal shipping containers and reach stackers. As of December 31, 2022, the company owned over 400 GPS-enabled heavy commercial vehicles, 13 light commercial vehicles, over 400 shipping containers and 27 reach stackers. JM Financial and Kotak Mahindra Capital are the lead managers of the issue. For the nine months ended December 2022, the company reported a revenue of Rs 1,206.90 crore while the net profit stood at Rs 55.09 crore. For FY22, it reported revenue of Rs 1,470.88 crore versus Rs 1,110.11 crore a year ago. Net profit for the fiscal stood at Rs 61.13 crore against Rs 44.53 crore last year. Western Carriers operate on a scalable and asset-light business model. This allows them to offer distinct 3PL and 4PL solutions. With over five decades of experience, Western Carriers specialize in road, rail, and sea/river multi-modal transportation for both domestic and EXIM cargo to and from India. As of December 31, 2022, Western Carriers boasted a robust customer base of more than 1100 clients spanning various sectors such as metals and mining, FMCG, pharmaceuticals, building materials, chemicals, oil and gas, utilities, and others, including textile, power, electrical equipment, and retail. Notable companies among their key clients include Tata Steel, Hindalco Industries, Vedanta, BALCO, JSW, HUL, Coca-Cola India, Tata Consumer Products, Cipla, Haldia Petrochemicals, MCPI, Gujarat Heavy Chemicals, BCPL, and DHL, among others.

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FastBeetle Logistics Pvt. Ltd, a Jammu and Kashmir-based tech start-up focused on last-mile logistics in the Union Territory, has raised an undisclosed amount at $3 a million valuation in a Pre-Series A round led by Jaipur-based angel investors KM Trans Group. Alsisar Impact acted as the advisor on the transaction. The startup, co-founded in 2019 by childhood friends Sheikh Samiullah and Abid Rashid Lone and incubated by Mumbai-based Alsisar Impact, is aiming to disrupt the conventional delivery sector in J&K and making inroads into e-commerce. Locally referred to as Beetles, FastBeetle Logistics has a strong network of warehouses and delivery centres across major districts of J&K, including recent expansion into the Union Territory of Ladakh. This fund raising is another milestone and our mission is to provide a world-class experience to customers and partners while generating long-term value for stakeholders. Our investments in the Himalayan region have the potential for significant social and economic impact. For example, this fund raising will provide confidence to local entrepreneurs as well as to budding entrepreneurs who have been suffering due to many hurdles. The outside investment for a local startup is also encouraging for the overall Kashmir business setup, Samiullah told Moneycontrol. The fundraising comes at a time when the Indian startup ecosystem has been hit hard by a capital crunch. Tech solutions We will invest in advanced technology solutionsAI (Artificial Intelligence), machine learning, and data analytics to improve operations, hiring, route planning, and tracking, Lone said. This funding will also help in geographical expansion, strengthen supply chain partnerships, and enhance solutions for D2C (Direct To Consumer) brands like offering same-day and next day delivery by integrating better with warehouses, transporters and third-party warehouse management systems, Lone said. KMTs Amit Chandwar, according to the FastBeetle statement, said: We are delighted to announce our partnership with FastBeetle and eagerly anticipate witnessing their journey as they strive to establish a technology-driven logistics network in J&K, an accomplishment that has eluded many major players in the field. The startup's significant contribution to the state's economic growth fills us with immense pride. The company claimed that FastBeetle offered enterprise users a streamlined order management platform, utilising proprietary algorithms like real-time order clubbing and dynamic batching. This optimisation reduces lead times and improves first-time delivery success, minimising the need for multiple attempts and returns. By minimising delivery failures, startups help businesses save costs associated with RTO (Return to Origin). With a robust logistics network, the company offers services across 19,000 PIN Codes in India and internationally, handling over 300,000 shipments monthly. We are partnering with over 1,500 micro-entrepreneurs and SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises), including women-led businesses; it fosters entrepreneurship and drives economic growth in underserved areas, said Samiullah. Sunny Gupta, FastBeetles strategy and partnership head, claimed that the company had demonstrated exceptional financial performance, achieving profitability in a short duration. By prioritising profitability as a core metric, we have established itself as a robust and sustainable venture, attracting the attention of investors seeking long-term value, Gupta said. In January, FastBeetle became the first Kashmiri business to pitch for funding on Shark Tank India, the business reality television series on SonyLIV, and a franchise of the famous American show Shark Tank. Family and friends first investors The four-year-old logistics and courier company from J&K raised Rs 90 lakh in Season 2 of the reality show. Like other startups in India, FastBeetle too started its operations with the help of financing from family and friends. Within a short span of time, it emerged as a fast-growing logistics tech platform in J&K and Ladakh. The company, according to the founders, has already raised a couple of rounds of investments from angel investors and high net-worth individuals. In December 2021, the company became the first startup in the Valley to raise $100,000 in a Seed A funding round from angel investors.
Shares of SpiceJet jumped 5.5 percent in early trade on June 9 after the company announced that it will induct 10 Boeing 737 aircraft from September. The airline has signed a lease agreement for 10 Boeing 737 planes, including five 737 Max. The low-cost airline is actively engaged in the restoration and revival of its grounded aircraft, which are expected to be back in service soon. Ajay Singh, the chairman and managing director of SpiceJet, had mentioned in an interview with CNBC-TV18 in April that the airline has plans to revive the grounded fleet within the next two to three months. Singh had pointed out the increasing demand and shared hopes that it will last till the year-end. To address the growing needs of the Indian aviation market, SpiceJet has been working on capacity expansion. The airline is set to induct ten B737 aircraft between September and October. This timing aligns with the peak travel season in India, allowing SpiceJet to introduce new routes and reinforce its presence on existing ones, as stated by Singh. At 11am, the shares of SpiceJet were trading at Rs 29.09, up 4.12 percent on the National Stock Exchange. Around 27 lakh shares of the company changed hands on the exchanges, as against the one month daily traded average of 25 lakh shares. Follow our live blog for all the market action The announcement came just a day after the low-cost carrier said that it had partnered with FTAI Aviation to effectively manage maintenance expenses and minimize aircraft downtime. Under this collaboration, FTAI Aviation will lease up to 20 engines to SpiceJet, along with providing maintenance services. Also Read: SpiceJet jumps 4% on tie-up with FTAI Aviation By leveraging the expertise of FTAI Aviation in engine services, SpiceJet will gain access to a pool of available engines, eliminating the need for frequent shop visits and ensuring a smoother operational process. This collaboration forms part of SpiceJet's revitalization program, aimed at reducing maintenance costs and enhancing overall performance by minimizing aircraft downtime. The news of a partnership with FTAI Aviation had also set the stock soaring 4.4 percent higher in the previous session. Disclaimer: The views and investment tips expressed by experts on Moneycontrol are their own and not those of the website or its management. Moneycontrol advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.
The term market coupling has been buzzing on the internet since June 8 and even resulted in the stocks of Indian Energy Exchange (IEX), a bourse for electricity trade, crashing by 23 percent in just two days. Moneycontrol gives you a lowdown on this development. What is market coupling? India has three power exchanges  IEX, Power Exchange India Limited (PXIL) and Hindustan Power Exchange Limited (HPX). These are voluntary markets and each of them collect buy bids and sell bids on their own, and thus, come up with their own market clearing prices (MCP). In simple terms, currently, each power exchange has a different cost of electricity, even though it is usually higher or lower to each other only by a few paisa. Market coupling is a model where buy bids and sell bids from all power exchanges in the country will be aggregated and matched to discover a uniform MCP. It means there will be only one price for the electricity that is to be traded at any point of time through these exchanges. If implemented, power exchanges will rendered as a platform where only buy and sell bids will be received and power dispatched to the buyer. ALSO READ: IEX says market coupling will kill innovation, move akin to clubbing Ola, Uber Why is it in news now? It is in news now because the government has given its approval to introduce market coupling in the electricity sector. In fact, Moneycontrol was the first to give out the details of the governments plans (read here), based on a letter dated June 2, which was sent by the ministry of power to the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC). Is market coupling going to be implemented immediately? No. The process of implementing market coupling in Indias electricity sector is going to take at least six months. It could also take a year or more, depending on the feedback received from stakeholders. CERC officials told Moneycontrol, requesting anonymity, that it is now going to begin the process of preparing a proposal on this after which stakeholder consultations will be initiated. Besides, the process will also take a lot of technology upgrades and bringing in new systems, which will take time. Will it impact the end consumer? Market coupling, upon its implementation, is not going to have any immediate impact on the end consumer of electricity (household, industry or commercial). However, in the long-run, power ministry officials and a section of stakeholders say it will lead to an overall reduction in power tariffs. Why does the government want market coupling? Apart from the point of uniform price discovery across exchanges mentioned above, the government wants market coupling also because it wants to significantly increase the share of power exchanges in the trade of electricity. The government wants to reduce the current format of long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs), which run for as long as 25 years. It will also help improve the overall allocation of transmission corridor amongst the power exchanges. At present, transmission corridors are not optimal due to the skewed market share of various power exchanges. Besides, government officials said it is also required for efficient integration of renewable energy which is going to constitute 500 GW in India's installed capacity by 2030. Also, to shift to a market-based electricity trading system, the government needs to implement the Market-Based Economic Dispatch (MBED) mechanism in India, which is not possible without market coupling. MBED envisages a centralised scheduling for dispatching electricity across the country at the inter-state as well as intra-state level. At present, electricity dispatch happens at multiple levels  state as well as Central  for which modes of trade are also multiple (PPAs, exchanges and power banking). Currently, power exchanges account for only seven percent of India's electricity trade and the rest is mostly through long-term PPAs which restrict fluidity and liquidity in the sector. For example, if a generating company (genco) has higher price of power, the distribution company (discom) will have to procure electricity from it due to the PPA signed with it, despite other gencos offering lower power prices. If MBED is implemented, it will give flexibility to both buyers and sellers. This is how through MBED power tariffs also will come down in the long run. Why did IEX shares tumble? Of all the electricity that is traded in the Indian power exchanges, IEX has a share of about 90 percent. Power exchanges offer different products such as Day-Ahead Market (DAM), Real-Time-Market (RTM), Term Ahead Market, Green-Dam and so on. DAM and RTM contribute 75-80 percent of the country's total exchange volumes, of which IEX holds nearly a 100 percent market share. Market coupling, once implemented, is likely to reduce the dominance of IEX in terms of market share, which was the primary reason for its share prices to hit a 52-week low of Rs 116.05 on June 9 morning. Who aggregates and discovers the price in market coupling? There are two ways on how market coupling can operate. One, where an external agency termed as the Market Coupling Operator (MCO) will collect the bids and discover the MCP, while also being the custodians of registrations, deposits, payment securities, settlement of financial dues and so on. In Indias case, it could be Grid-India, if the MCO model is used. Second option is a roster system, where the power exchanges take turns in aggregating the bids and discovering the uniform MCP.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) may increase scrutiny of cooperative banks and introduce additional measures to better regulate them, experts said, after the central bank included them in the framework for resolution of stressed assets and extended some of their priority sector lending deadlines. These measures suggest the RBI is looking at the operations and overall functioning of cooperative banks, which have a strong influence in rural areas, experts said. Going ahead, the RBIs regulatory watch over the cooperative banking space will widen and additional measures can be introduced, they said. At the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting on June 8, the central bank brought in two measures for the cooperative banking sector  extending priority sector lending target deadlines, and including them in the framework for resolution of stressed assets. They have announced these measures for cooperative banks as the banks have been looked at by the apex bank quite closely, said Arijit Basu, chairman of the banking and finance committee at the Indian Merchants Chamber (IMC). Going ahead, we can expect the RBI to work on additional measures for the cooperative banking sector. Mudit Verma, director of the National Federation of Urban Cooperative Banks and Credit Societies, said the central banks regulations and measures will only work in favour of cooperative banks. The way we see the RBIs approach is that it is becoming more alert and the measures will help the cooperative banks work more smoothly, said Verma. Measures by RBI RBI governor Shaktikanta Das, in his statement on keeping the repo rate unchanged at 6.5 percent, announced eight developmental and regulatory policy measures related to the financial markets, regulation, and payment systems, of which two were for cooperative banks also. Firstly, Das said the RBI will propose guidelines on settlements as a resolution mechanism in respect of non-performing assets and technical write-offs for all regulated entities, including cooperative banks. Also Read | Crisis-ridden cooperative banks continue to face RBIs ire, 8 lose license in FY23 Previously, the framework was applicable to scheduled commercial banks and select non-banking financial companies (NBFCs). Secondly, RBI decided to extend the priority sector lending target timelines for urban cooperative banks (UBCs) by two years to March 2026. The extension, Das said, was granted to ease implementation challenges faced by some urban cooperative banks in meeting the targets. The timing Cooperative banks, which play a critical role in extending financial services in villages and semi-rural areas, have been dealing with a range of issues from dual regulation, and weak finances, to interference by local politicians. In FY23, RBI cancelled licences of eight cooperative banks and imposed monetary penalties 114 times on wrongdoers. The watchful eye of the central bank was triggered by the Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative (PMC) Bank crisis in 2019. Nandkishor Desai, a former banker with the State Bank of India (SBI), said cooperative banks have a bigger role to play in boosting financial inclusion in rural and semi-rural areas. These banks have faced several issues. But there are some good examples of cooperative banks which are working fine. India is an underfinanced country and these banks have an important role to play, said Desai. A senior executive of a cooperative bank said on condition of anonymity that cooperative banks are trying to explore avenues for more services and wider area coverage. We have seen that cooperative banks are working smoothly and ensuring innovation in their operations. The concerns raised by the central bank from time to time work as a reminder for some banks to keep a check on their operations, said the executive.
News / Local

by Staff reporter

THE Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC)'s candidates selection process has left its Bulawayo province divided amid reports that there is a plot to rig the exercise.Sources said there was a plot to impose some losing candidates who have appealed amid allegations of vote buying among others during the selection process.In Nketa constituency, insiders said there was an attempt to impose academic Mandla Nyathi after he lost the bid to represent the constituency to party benefactor Obert Manduna.The sitting MP Phelela Masuku was disqualified alongside many others who were believed to have been part of the Dougals Mwonzora camp.In 2013, the then MDC leadership tried to impose Nyathi as Bulawayo mayor, without success after he was rejected by the structures."A number of losers have appealed and are fighting for reruns," an insider told Southern Eye."In Nketa, Nyathi's campaign team has resorted to mudslinging to tarnish the image of others yet he (Nyathi) emerged at the last minute."In Magwegwe, Njube and Bulawayo North, there are also reports of disputes over the whole selection exercise and indications show that officials who were presiding over the process were receiving kickbacks to sway the selection process."As the circus continues in the Nelson Chamisa-led opposition party, Entumbane/Njube sitting MP Gift Banda, who had initially been disqualified by the party, bounced back under unclear circumstances.CCC spokesperson Fadzayi Mahere on Tuesday told Southern Eye that the selection process was not yet complete."No person who is not the Candidate Independent Selection Panel (ICSP) has the prerogative to announce candidates. As soon as the final, official candidate list is complete, it will be made public and communicated officially," Mahere said.However, sources said in Mpopoma constituency, newcomer Desmond Makaza prevailed against sitting MP Charles Moyo, who is also reportedly using dirty tactics to bounce back.In Bulawayo South, businessman Francis Mangwendeza emerged victorious.Party deputy spokesperson Gift Ostalos Siziba emerged the winner for the Tshabalala/Pelandaba constituency.Other newcomers are Surrender Kapolika and Minienhle Gumede for Bulawayo Central and Bulawayo North, respectively.In Pumula, the sitting MP Sichelecile Mahlangu also won with former youth leader Discent Colins Bajila coming out tops for the Luveve/Emakhandeni constituency.
The project to start Indias first pod taxi, or Personalised Rapid Transit (PRT), which will connect the upcoming Noida International Airport with the proposed Film City, has been given the go-ahead by Uttar Pradeshs PPP Bid Evaluation Committee, at a meeting in Lucknow. With the nod from the committee, tenders for the pod taxi project are likely to be invited by next week, officials aware of the development said. Pod taxis are small automated vehicles that are designed to transport a small number of passengers quickly and efficiently between designated stations. The vehicles are often designed to be modular, so that they can be easily coupled together to form longer trains during periods of high demand. According to officials, a detailed project report (DPR) has already been submitted to the Uttar Pradesh government. Last month a presentation of 18 functional and proposed PRT projects in different countries was made before the Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA), which is executing the project. Later, the presentation report was submitted to the state government for its inclusion in the DPR, which was prepared by the Indian Port Rail and Ropeway Corporation Limited. Arun Vir Singh, CEO of YEIDA, said that a meeting of the Public Private Partnership (PPP) bid evaluation committee was held in Lucknow on June 7, where a discussion on the request for proposal (RFP) document was held. The Pod Taxi or PRT project got the nod from the committee and the tenders for the project will be floated next week. The estimated cost of the project is Rs 671 crore, Singh told Moneycontrol. He added that since the project was worth less than Rs 1,000 crore a Cabinet nod would not be required before inviting the bids for the project. Singh said that there will be 12 stations on the 14.6-km route connecting Noida International Airport in Jewar with the proposed Film City in sector 21 along the Yamuna Expressway. It will be an entirely elevated corridor that will start from Jewar airport and pass through Handicraft Park, Apparel Park, MSME Park in sector 29, industrial units in sector 32, and the Toy Park in sector 33, before culminating at Film City in sector 21. According to a YEIDA official, this will be Indias first pod taxi service, and it will be developed on the PPP model. The track of the pod taxi will be 100 metres above the road, passing through different sectors. After the pod taxis become operational, over 35,000 passengers are expected to use the service daily, officials said.
The market regulator has cancelled the Certification of Registration of the commodity broker Emkay Commotrade, for facilitating the illegal paired-contracts transactions in the National Spot Exchange. Operations of the National Spot Exchange (NSEL) were suspended on August 6, 2013, after investigations found that there were physical commodities not available for delivery, that the exchange had permitted short-sale in commodities and the paired contracts were being offered as an alternative to fixed deposits with assured returns, among other things. Also read: Sebi releases framework for stock brokers, clearing members to upstream client funds The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) order stated that the trading activities of the Noticee (Emkay Commotrade) in paired contracts for its clients on NSEL platform have serious ingredients amounting jeopardizing the reputation, belief in competence, fairness, honesty, integrity and character of the Noticee in the Securities Market. It added that the conduct of the Noticee is detrimental to the Securities Market being not in conformity with the applicable code of conduct. According to the order, by virtue of the Noticees participation/ facilitating in the trading in paired contracts on NSEL platform during the relevant period as a Trading Member/Clearing Member, the Noticee has violated the conditions of the 2007 Exemption Notification and also the provisions of the FCRA. In 2007, the Central Government had given an exemption to all forward contracts of one-day duration for the sale and purchase of commodities traded on NSEL from operations of the provisions of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) subject to certain conditions including no short sale by the members of the exchange shall be allowed and all outstanding positions of the trades at the end of the day shall result in delivery. But the Forward Market Commission (FMC) that had looked into NSELs functioning found that the exchange had violated the no-short-sale clause and was allowing contracts that had settlement periods that extended beyond the set limit. The order on Emkay Commotrade added that the act of Noticee in offering access to paired contracts seriously calls into question the integrity, honesty and lack of ethical behaviour on its part. These contracts, as stated earlier, were ex facie offered in violation of the 2007 Exemption Notification issued by MCA and far removed from the spot contracts in commodities. The market regulator said that there were enough red flags that should have alerted the broker. The order has asked Emkay Commotrade to allow existing clients, if any, to withdraw or transfer their securities or funds held in its custody, within 15 days from the date of the order. The order added, In case of failure of any clients to withdraw or transfer their securities or funds within the said 15 days, the Noticee shall transfer the funds and securities of such clients to another broker within a period of next 15 days thereon, under advise to the said clients.
Antler, a Netherlands-based venture capital (VC) firm, has raised $285 million in a new fund for investing in growth-stage companies across the world, adding to the billions of dollars of undeployed VC capital as startups witness a prolonged funding winter. The VC firm, having invested in close to 750 companies globally, said in a statement on June 9 that the new fund, called Antler Elevate, would be managed from its offices in London, Singapore and New York. M&G Catalyst, Schroders, Vaekstfonden, Korea Venture Investment Corp (KVIC), and a US pension fund are some of the investors in Antler's new fund. I am excited to announce the second generation of our Funds to support our founders beyond Series A and drive our mission to make progress inevitable. A better future will not happen automaticallythe world needs talented, driven, and resilient people to build it, said Magnus Grimeland, Antler founder and CEO. Antler Elevate would be providing scale-up capital from Series A onwards for companies that show strong signs of product-market fit, and demonstrate compounding growth, the VC firm said. Through the fund, it will also invest in new as well as its existing portfolio startups, spread across 20 startup ecosystems globally, the VC said. Antler has already invested $70 million through Antler Elevate, the company said. "By creating a lasting life-long partnership that is about more than capital, Antler is able to not only attract top-tier talent but propel the next generation of game-changing founders forward," said Fady Abdel-Nour, partner at Antler. Founded in 2017, Antler has an office in 25 cities across the globe, including Bengaluru in India. Antler plans to back as many as 6,000 companies by end of 2030, the company said. In India, Antler has invested in 28 startups, according to data by Tracxn Technologies, but does not have even one unicorn or startup valued at over $1 billion yet. Antler's new fund adds to an already big pile of VC capital across the globe. Some of the biggest and most-active VC firms like Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners), Accel, Elevation, Matrix Partners among others have raised large, multi-hundred million dollar funds. Most of these funds are for India's startup ecosystem, currently the world's third-largest.
Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFC) and fintech firms are cheering the Reserve Bank of Indias (RBI) move to approve First Loss Default Guarantees (FLDG) between regulated and unregulated entities, while capping the same at 5 percent of the loan portfolio value. As a lending service provider (LSP), I am very happy. The 5 percent cap is more than adequate to cover the risk scenarios which regulated entities (RE) worry about, Nitin Gupta, Founder of pay-later cards startup Uni, told Moneycontrol. In September 2022, the RBI prohibited REs from entering into FLDG arrangements with unregulated entities. It had said that the loan offered to a consumer is strictly between the lender and the consumer, and the fintech partner is just a loan originator, basically like an agent. But now the central bank has permitted REs to enter into FLDG arrangements with unregulated entities, subject to a 5 percent cap. As per the new framework, the default cover could be provided for up to 5% of the loan portfolio and shall be invoked within a maximum overdue period of 120 days. The RE shall ensure that the total DLG cover on any portfolio which is specified upfront shall not exceed 5 percent of that loan portfolio. In case of implicit guarantee arrangements, the DLG provider shall not bear performance risk of more than five percent of the underlying loan portfolio, RBIs circular issued on June 8 said. Who are regulated entities and lending service partners (LSPs)? As per RBI's circular, Regulated entities include all commercial banks (including Small Finance Banks), primary (Urban) cooperative banks, state cooperative banks, central cooperative banks and Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs), including Housing Finance Companies. LSPs are an agent of a Regulated Entity who carries out one or more of lenders functions or part thereof in customer acquisition, underwriting support, pricing support, servicing, monitoring, recovery of specific loan or loan portfolio on behalf of REs in conformity with extant outsourcing guidelines issued by the Reserve Bank. These regulations will expand credit access to the masses, said Rajan Bajaj, Founder-CEO, slice. "Their pro-consumer stance refrained it from an outright ban last year, allowing continued innovation until comprehensive guidelines are formulated, including appropriate safeguards such as accurate NPA recognition," Bajaj said. Why 5 percent? Before the digital lending norms were introduced, fintechs and banks had developed an FLDG model on their own, where the former provided a guarantee to compensate the latter up to a certain percentage of the loan portfolio in case of default. Sources said that earlier the cover was usually around 10-12 percent, with some banks demanding as much as 18-20 percent as DLG from smaller LSPs. This arrangement was beneficial for banks as they were protected from default as the fintech took care of a substantial percentage of the risk. However, RBI was not comfortable with fintechs taking such a high default risk as they were not REs. RBIs 5 percent cap is to control and manage the risk of loans turning into large NPAs (non-performing assets). Now banks and NBFCs will be careful not to lend to people who don't have the capacity to pay, said a fintech expert. If LSPs gave a 20 percent guarantee, then banks really wouldn't mind lending. However, that causes problems in debt collection as high DLG loans can be a debt trap as these are high-interest loans, often as high as 24 percent per annum, the fintech expert said. This circular provides clarity on digital lending. The new guideline will allow REs to work with non-REs to source loans, which will aid financial inclusion. If REs expect more than 5 percent cover then probably they should question their lending strategy itself, said Srinath Sridharan, Member, Governance, Fintech Association for Consumer Empowerment (FACE). Innovative products in the BNPL (buy now, pay later) model, and MSME lending in tier 2-4 towns come with higher risk which REs typically don't entertain. Which is where the FLDG comes in, providing a safety cover for lenders, said Manish Lunia, Co-Founder of the lending platform Flexiloans. However, the move may force some smaller LSPs out of business, said experts. Bigger LSPs like Pine Labs, LendingKart or any LSPs with more than Rs 500 crore of revenue were anyway following the 5 percent cap with their banking partners. But smaller LSPs would initially propose a higher DLG rate, slowly gain trust, and then reduce the rate. Now there is no scope for this, said a digital lending startup founder. More clarity in terms of risk-bearing, founders and investors say "Considering the pros and cons of the challenges that the industry was facing, the regulator has once again put the right format on the table, keeping the default loss guarantee (DLG) cover limited to 5%," said Anand Kumar Bajaj, Founder, MD & CEO of PayNearby, a money transfer and bill payment firm. The 5 percent cap is reasonable, say investors. A 5 percent cap is reasonable. In a country that is credit-starved, and where the economy can be meaningfully impacted by the availability of credit, fintechs and REs have an opportunity to partner for more than just their own economic benefit. A reasonable amount of risk and reward sharing is the only way to go, wrote Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner, Prime Ventures, on Twitter. This ensures that the lender doesnt face loss as long as the NPAs are below 5%. This made it a win-win for the fintech platform and the lender, said Anshul Gupta, cofounder of the WintWealth asset management Platform. "A key risk was if a fintech had equity of 50 crore they were giving cover that was 5X that number. Which means they wouldn't be able to make good should defaults happen," Gupta wrote on Twitter on Thursday. Fintechs are also welcoming RBIs move to accept DLGs only in cash and cash equivalent forms. The LSPs must provide the hard guarantee in the form of cash deposits, fixed deposits maintained with a Scheduled Commercial Bank with a lien marked in favour of the RE or a bank guarantee in favour of the RE. It is a judicious view. The collateral should be safe and liquid, not the other way round, Sridharan.
When Aditya Birla group's Grasim Industries announced its foray into the paints segment in January 2021, all paints stocks, including market leaders Asian Paints and Berger, tanked. The same conglomerate has now announced its entry into the retail jewellery segment with Novel Jewels, but this time the Street is not too worried about market leader Titan losing its sparkle. "It would be too soon to expect an impact on Titan at this stage," said Abneesh Roy, Executive Director, Nuvama Institutional Equities. "After all, jewellery is a business of trust." Back in the early 2000s, when Titan entered the jewellery business with Tanishq, it won peoples trust by introducing the Karatmeter in its stores. The proposition was simple: use the machine to verify if the jewellery sold by your family jeweller is 22-carat gold or not. That strategy was to drive home the point that local jewellers were not trustworthy. "Brand creation in jewellery takes much longer than other discretionary categories," said Roy. Tanishq has managed to maintain its pole position despite competition from several new brands. The company also caters to working women with its Mia and Zoya brands, which gives it access to an additional consumer segment. So, Novel Jewels might find it tough to make a splash in this market. The numbers game Aditya Birla group will be investing about Rs 5,000 crore in the new venture and set up large-format jewellery stores across India. Analysts expect Novel Jewels to open about 150-200 outlets. "However, this is only a rough estimate. It is unclear which model the group plans to adopt, such as having franchisees or setting up its own stores. The number of stores would vary greatly depending on the group's strategy," said Aman Soni, Head of Operations at Prudent Equity. In comparison, Titan has over 540 jewellery stores, including in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and the USA. "With expansion plans outside India, Titan has little to worry about," Soni added. What is Titan up to? According to a report by Kotak Institutional Equities in April, Titan reduced franchisee incentives for Tanishq stores from Q1 FY24, indicating the management's focus on expanding jewellery EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) margins, or defending the same in the event of any rise in competitive intensity. "On a blended basis, this change would aid Titans standalone EBIT margin by about 50 basis points over two years (slightly front-ended)," said Kotak. The consumer discretionary major posted a standalone net profit of Rs 734 crore for the quarter ended March, up 50 percent over Rs 491 crore reported in the same period last year. Revenue from operations surged 33 percent to Rs 9,704 crore for the quarter. The companys jewellery business grew 23 percent on-year, with 31 new stores added during the quarter. The stock remains a 'Buy,' with many brokerages expecting it to breach the Rs 3,000 mark soon. At 10.30 am, Titan was quoting at Rs 2,885 on the National Stock Exchange, about 0.28 percent higher from the previous close. Disclaimer: The views and investment tips expressed by experts on Moneycontrol.com are their own and not those of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions
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About 3.4 crore shares of Kotak Mahindra Bank, amounting to 1.7 percent equity stake, changed hands on June 9. The block was worth Rs 6,336 crore, according to Bloomberg. While the buyers and sellers were not known immediately, it was earlier reported that the Canada's state-run Canada Pension Fund was looking to sell a 1.66 percent stake in the private lender. Canada Pension Fund held 4.3 percent equity in Kotak Mahindra Bank as of March 2023 end. Follow our live blog for all the market action As Canada Pension Fund is an FII (foreign institutional investor), investors are curious whether the stake sale means foreign room opening up and thus leading to higher weightage on MSCI. According to Nuvama Alternative Research's Abhilash Pagaria, this is unlikely. "Post the May MSCI rejig, the FIF or the foreign inclusion factor is now 55 percent and FOL (foreign limit) in the stock is capped at 55 percent. So there is no scope of foreign headroom and hence no weight up," he explained. Foreign investors' holding in Kotak Mahindra Bank already dropped to 41.22 percent in the March 2023 quarter, lower by 1.47 percentage points from December. Following this, MSCI had used an adjustment factor of 1 for calculating Kotak Bank's weightage in its index versus 0.5 adjustment factor earlier. In Q4, Kotak Mahindra Bank reported 26.3 percent year-on-year rise in its standalone net profit at Rs 3,495.6 crore while its net interest income (NII) jumped 35 percent YoY to Rs 6,102.6 crore. The bank's net NPA decreased to Rs 1,193.30 crore in Q4 vs Rs 1,736.71 crore in the year-ago period. In percentage terms, the net NPA improved further to 0.37 percent of net advances as against 0.64 percent in the corresponding quarter of FY22. The stock has 24 Buy call, 15 Hold and 3 Sell calls on it. The consensus target price on the stock is Rs 2141, representing 14 percent upside from current levels. At 9:45am on June 9, the stock was quoting at Rs 1,871.80, 0.7 percent from previous close. Disclaimer: The views and investment tips expressed by experts on Moneycontrol.com are their own and not those of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions
Hindustan Aeronautics share price rose nearly 3 percent in early trade on June 9 as company's board of directors decided to consider, a proposal of sub-division of equity shares of the company in a meeting scheduled to be held on June 27, 2023. The trading window for trading in the securities of the company shall remain closed for all insiders including designated persons, connected persons and their immediate relatives, from tomorrow till 48 hours after declaration of the outcome of the board meeting. Catch all the market action on our live blog The company has posted 8.8 percent fall in its Q4FY23 net profit at Rs 2,831.18 crore versus Rs 3,105.17 crore, YoY. Revenue of the company rose 8 percent at Rs 12,494.67 crore against Rs 11,558.23 crore in March 2022. At 09:24 am Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. was quoting at Rs 3,582.90, up Rs 55.20, or 1.56 percent and touched a 52-week high of Rs 3,630 on the BSE.

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After taking strong support at 16,800 levels in March 2023, the Nifty 50 turned up sharply and sustained near its lifetime highs indicating a strong positive undertone of the Index. On the weekly charts, the index has been forming a Rising Wedge price pattern since March 2023. On the Daily Time frame, the Index can be spotted forming Higher Highs and Higher Lows on a swing basis, confirming the uptrend's presence. The momentum indicator RSI has sustained above 60 on all the time frames like daily, weekly and monthly indicating strong positive momentum of the Index. The Index has strong support at 18200 followed by 18000. While on the higher side, the mark of 18887 (lifetime high) followed by 19055 (key resistance) is a crucial level to watch out for. The overall trend looks positive for the Nifty Index, we expect the prices to move higher till 18887 followed by 19055 levels in the coming weeks. Here are three buy calls for the next 2-3 weeks: Axis Bank | CMP: 962.10 | Target: Rs 1,100 | Stop Loss: Rs 930 | Upside: 13% Based on the analysis, Axis Bank stock has displayed a shift in polarity around the 830 level, indicating a notable increase in bullish sentiment. Additionally, the recent breakout of the Rounding Bottom pattern suggests the initiation of an upward trend. Furthermore, the stock is currently trading above key Moving Averages, specifically the 50, 100, and 200 Days Exponential Moving Averages (EMA), confirming the presence of an uptrend. The momentum indicator RSI has sustained well above the 50 mark on both the Daily and the weekly timeframe which shows the rising Momentum. Looking ahead, we anticipate the prices to continue upward, potentially reaching the 1100 level. It is advisable to set a stop loss at 930, based on the closing prices Grindwell Norton | CMP: Rs 2138.30 | Target: Rs 2385 | Stop Loss: Rs 2010 | Upside: 11% Based on the analysis, Grndwell stock has demonstrated a change in polarity at its bearish trend line, which has been respected by prices since January 2022. This indicates a positive undertone in the prices. Furthermore, the breakout of the double-bottom pattern suggests the initiation of an upward trend. Additionally, the stock experienced a Golden Cross over in mid-May 2023, confirming the beginning of an upward trend. Moreover, the Momentum Indicator RSI is showing a rising trend and has consistently remained above the 50 mark, indicating increasing momentum in the prices. Based on these factors, we anticipate the prices to continue upward, potentially reaching the 2385 level. It is recommended to set a strict stop loss in 2010, based on closing prices. Bharat Forge | CMP: Rs 818 | Target: Rs 910 | Stop Loss: Rs 784 | Upside: 11% The Bharat Forge has sustained above three-month high after taking strong support at 50% Fibonacci retracement of the last advance from 595  919 levels indicating the start of an up move. On the weekly charts, the stock has maintained a bullish structure of higher top higher bottom formation. On the daily timeframe, the stock has given a Double Bottom price pattern breakout with volume confirmation showing the presence of a bullish undertone. The momentum Indicator RSI on the Weekly timeframe is rising and sustaining above 55 levels reflecting the presence of positive momentum. We expect the prices to move higher till the 890 level where the stop loss must be 784 strictly on the closing basis. Disclaimer: The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts on Moneycontrol.com are their own and not those of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.
Shares of Premier Explosives jumped after the company received two orders worth Rs 57 crore on June 9 but traders booked profits at highs to push the stock lower. Premier Explosives said on June 9 it received an order for supplying PI & P2 motors to Bharat Dynamics for a Medium Range Surface to Air Missile (MRSAM), which it has to deliver within 24 months. The order is worth Rs 43.26 crore. MRSAM is a high-response, quick-reaction, vertically launched supersonic missile designed to neutralise enemy aerial threats  missiles, aircraft, guided bombs, helicopters. The army, navy and air force use different variants of the 275-kg missile has a range of 70 kilometres. The defence sector company also said it received an order from Larsen & Toubro (L&T) to supply propellant strap-on motors (PSOM-XL), which is used to achieve higher payload capability for satellite launch vehicles of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The motors need to be supplied within 12 months. The company will receive Rs 13.94 crore, including taxes, for the order. The stock rose 2.49 percent to Rs 447 on the BSE but gave in to selling pressure to trade flat at Rs 436.55 at 1.50 pm. In the current year, the stock has returned about 5 percent. Its one -year return stands at 39 percent. Premier Explosives Ltd is a prominent player in manufacturing solid propellants for India's prestigious missile programmes like Akash, Astra, and Long Range Surface to Air Missile (LRSAM).

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News / Local

by Staff reporter

LEGAL counsels representing about 170 000 Zimbabwean Exemption Permit Holders (ZEP) in South Africa yesterday said Pretoria's aborted plan to send them home was illegal.Simba Chitando, who represents about 170 000 Zep holders whose stay was this week extended to December, said South African laws allowed Zimbabweans to apply for permanent residence after 10 years.The permits were expected to expire at the end of this month, after which those not qualifying stay in South Africa would be deported."Zep holders have been in South Africa for more than 10 years, and, according to the provisions of the Immigration Act and applicable regulations, after five years in the country, they ought to be able to apply to be permanent residents in South Africa," Chitando told the Zimbabwe Independent.He said South Africa's decision to further extend the permits demonstrated that Pretoria's initial decision was "ill conceived, unreasonable, procedurally unfair, unconstitutional and thereby unlawful".It was the second time that the permits were extended since last year.Zimbabwean immigrants were initially set to leave South Africa at the end of last year, before authorities said they would extend it to this June.South African Home Affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi said on Wednesday the extension would allow his department to process increased applications for waivers.He said his department was receiving more than 1 000 visa and waiver applications a day.Motsoaledi said South Africa had already approved thousands of waiver applications of the affected Zimbabweans, and was "considering and approving waiver applications daily"."This has resulted in a significant increase in the number of visa and waiver applications. The Departmental Advisory Committee (DAC) led by Dr Cassius Lubisi is now dealing with the increased number of visa applications," Motsoaledi told the South African media this week.According to this week's ministerial directive, under the extension, no holder of a valid Zep may be arrested, ordered to depart the country or be detained for deportation for any reason related to them not having a valid exemption certificate.The holder of a Zep will be allowed to enter and exit South Africa, provided they comply with all entry or exit requirements.Zep holders would not be required to present an exemption permit or authorisation letter to remain in the country during the extension period."ZEPHA (Zimbabwean Exemption Permit Holders Association) is concerned with the Minister of Home Affairs report that desperate Zep holders are making thousands of waiver applications at great expense. A waiver' only allows ZEP holders to make yet another application for a visa provided for in the Immigration Act," Chitando said."There is no lawful reason why Zep holders should have to apply twice for a one visa or permit. Zep holders ought to be able to make a single application, provided for in the Immigration Act, for a visa or permit appropriate to their personal circumstances," he added.Yesterday, Zimbabwe said it welcomed the directive.Foreign Affairs and International Trade spokesperson Livit Mugejo said: "We are going to keep on preparing to assist those who want to return. We are going to be ready to assist our citizens whenever the time comes".Many Zimbabweans fled the country during the economic and political strife in Zimbabwe in 2008 and 2009 with the South African government creating a blanket exemption so that they could get permits to live and work legally.
Shares of Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Ltd spurted 4.87 percent in the morning trade on June 9, marking its third straight day of gains during which it has soared by 30 percent. TTML shares were trading at Rs 82.24 at 11.27am on Friday. However, shares of the company are still down 10 percent till date this year. The counter had rallied over 14 percent in the previous session on June 8 with unusually high volumes of 42.58 million shares on the NSE, as against the previous months average of less than 5 million. Catch all the market action on our live blog Tata Teleservices had earlier this year incurred a net loss of Rs 277 crore in the three months to March, marginally down from the Rs 280-crore loss clocked in the corresponding quarter of FY23 and Rs 279.7 crore reported in the preceding December quarter. Tata Teleservices provides connectivity and communication solutions to enterprise customers, with services ranging from connectivity, collaboration, cloud, security and IoT. The company had in 2009 signed a 15-year agreement with state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) for sharing infrastructure, including mobile towers, across the nation. Earlier this week, the Union Cabinet approved a Rs 89,047-crore revival package for the loss-making BSNL to help the state-run telecom operator deploy 4G and 5G services in a market dominated by private players. Disclaimer: The views and investment tips expressed by experts on Moneycontrol.com are their own and not those of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.

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Open AI Chief Executive Sam Altman is set to meet South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and about 100 local startups on Friday, as the country seeks to encourage domestic competitiveness in artificial intelligence. South Korea is one of few countries that has developed its own foundation models for artificial intelligence in a field dominated by the United States and China, thanks to local tech firms such as Naver, Kakao, and LG. South Korea has new AI regulation awaiting full parliament approval, which is seen as less restrictive than the EU's version. ByteDance Ltd. is testing an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot among employees, joining rival Chinese internet conglomerates from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to Baidu Inc. in a race to create a local version of ChatGPT. Code-named Grace, athe chatbotwill greet Employees using the service with a pop-up message saying its based on several large language models. Globally, TikTok is also experimenting with a chatbot named Tako. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is on a visit to the US, on Thursday announced plans for a first-ever global summit on artificial intelligence later this year, bringing together key countries. India is likely to be among the countries as Sunak stressed the importance of like-minded allies and companies working together to develop an international framework. The summit, which will be hosted in the UK this autumn, will consider the risks of AI, including frontier systems, and discuss how they can be mitigated through internationally coordinated action.

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A major fire broke out in a seven-storey residential building in Kalbadevi area of south Mumbai in the wee hours of Friday, after which at least 50 people were rescued from there, officials said. The blaze erupted in White House building located on Dhanji Street near the famous Mumbadevi temple around 1.30 am and one man suffered a minor burn injury in the incident, they said. "Fifty to sixty people were trapped inside the complex when the fire broke out, but they were safely rescued by the fire brigade personnel using the staircase of an adjoining building," a civic official said. At least 12 fire engines were engaged in the firefighting operation and the blaze was doused around 8 am after more than six half hours of efforts, he said, adding that the fire engulfed five floors starting from the ground floor. A 40-year-old man sustained a minor burn injury and a medical team of the 108 emergency ambulance service treated him on the spot, he added. As some portions of the first and the second floor ceiling along with a part of the staircase fell off, the firefighting operation was carried out from outside the building as a precautionary measure, the official said. The cause of the fire is being ascertained, he added.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the US this month will set new benchmarks for bilateral ties and some "really big, historic and exciting" announcements are likely to be made on defence cooperation and boosting India's indigenous military industrial base, the Pentagon has said. Prime Minister Modi will embark on his first state visit to the US at the invitation of President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden this month. During his four-day visit starting on June 21, the US president and the First Lady will host PM Modi for a state dinner on June 22. "When Prime Minister Modi comes here to Washington for a State Visit later in the month, I think it will be a historic visit setting new benchmarks for the relationship," Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner said during a panel discussion at the Center for New American Security on Thursday. "I think it (the visit) will be looked back upon similar to how the Japan two plus two earlier this year was a pivotal moment in the relationship. People will be looking back on this visit by Prime Minister Modi as a real springboard for the US-India relationship," he said. Ratner said US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited India recently to advance a number of bilateral issues and prepare the ground for the prime minister's visit to Washington by finalising particular agreements and initiatives that the two countries are working on. "Among the priorities are clear strategic alignment around the question of co-development and co-production between the United States and India on the defence side. This is a priority for Prime Minister Modi to strengthen India's indigenous defence industrial base, as well as advancing the military modernisation," he said. US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and his Indian Indian counterpart Ajit Doval here in January launched the initiative for critical and emerging technology (iCET) to try to bolster technology cooperation between the US and India and there is a very strong defence component of that that the two countries are looking to advance. "I know there have been efforts at this in the past. Sometimes there's skepticism around, is it going to be real this time? And my answer is, I think, all signs are pointing toward yes, it's going to be real and we're going to have some really big, historic, exciting announcements out of the prime minister's visit in terms of particular projects around defence industrial cooperation," Ratner said. "We are also enhancing our operational coordination in a number of different places. A lot of focus on the Indian Ocean, a lot of focus on the undersea domain, as well as new domains, space and cyber and new efforts around information sharing," he said. "If you look at the development of the US-India relationship, it's really unbelievable how far the relationship has moved over the last couple of decades. That's true now more than ever," he said. Ratner said the two countries are seeing increasing strategic alignment. "From our perspective, from India's perspective, we do share a vision again for a free and open Indo-Pacific. A strong US-India partnership is a critical ingredient to realising that vision. That's what both sides have understood that from India's perspective and from the US perspective, that a closer partnership is going to be essential to the manifestation of that vision," he said. The US, India and several other world powers have been talking about the need to ensure a free, open and thriving Indo-Pacific in the backdrop of China's rising military manoeuvring in the region. China claims nearly all of the disputed South China Sea, though Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all claim parts of it. Beijing has built artificial islands and military installations in the South China Sea. "One of the major thrusts of the bilateral defence relationship and one of the things we were talking about, while we were in Delhi, is this ongoing US effort to support India's military modernisation," Ratner said. "The integration of our defence industrial base is more co-production, co-development, and I think that is based upon the belief that a stronger India that can defend its own interest and its sovereignty is good for the United States," he said.
Ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and five assembly polls due before the end of this year, the Election Commission has initiated "first level checks" of EVMs and papertrail machines across the country in a phased manner, sources said. "Mock polls" are part of the first level check (FLC) process, they said. "It is a pan-India exercise. FLC will take place across the country in a phased manner, including all constituencies of Kerala," an Election Commission functionary said. He was responding to a question on a mock poll taking place in Kerala's Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency, which fell vacant following the disqualification of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi after he was convicted in a criminal defamation case in March by a sessions court in Surat. "The EC issues a calendar for such exercises and there are standing instructions that are to be followed by state chief electoral officers," the functionary explained. The functionary pointed out that FLCs will also take place in the five poll-bound states of Rajasthan, Mizoram, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Madhya Pradesh as well as assembly and parliamentary seats where bypolls are due. At present, the Lok Sabha seats of Wayanad, Pune and Chandrapur (Maharashtra), Ghazipur (Uttar Pradesh) and Ambala (Haryana) are vacant. Gandhi's plea seeking a stay on the conviction and sentencing is pending before the Gujarat High Court. During FLCs, electronic voting machines and papertrail machines are checked for mechanical flaws by engineers of BEL and ECIL, the two PSUs who manufacture the two equipment. Faulty machines are returned to the manufacturers for repair or replacement. A mock poll is also held to check the two machines in the presence of representatives of political parties.

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The worst fears of many of us journalists working in the Northeast that the violence could linger have turned into a painful reality. The inhuman murder of a seven-year-old and his mother is just the most recent act of dastardly violence that has engulfed the state and despite several claims to the contrary, the state is far from returning to normalcy. This is why it feels almost wrong to talk about the economic impact of the Manipur violence at a time the state is still counting its dead, and the civilians are hoping, almost against hope, that no more names are added to the list. But let us assume Manipur returns to normalcy. Or even better, let us assume violence had never hit Manipur. Where was the state in terms of development and what was in store for the states over three million people? There were promises, yes, and there was also hope. Joblessness Contributing To Unrest? Manipur is not a rich state by any stretch of the imagination. Let us take a look at some numbers. An Indian Express report published on May 9, 2023, pointed out that a worsening employment crisis linked to a slowdown in its services sectors  a key driver of the hill states economy  seems to be a contributing factor for the unrest in Manipur. The report added that Manipur had one of the highest unemployment rates for the age group of 15 years and above, at 9 per cent, more than double the national unemployment rate of 4.1 per cent in 2021-22, and higher than other states in the Northeast. Every region within Manipur fared badly in joblessness. The unemployment rate in the Kuki and Naga regions was estimated to be 9.5 percent for 2021-22, while the unemployment rate in the urban areas, where much of the Meitei population lives, was only marginally lower at 7.6 percent. Nearly 65 percent of men in the state were reported as self-employed in rural areas, compared to the all-India rate of 59 per cent. In absolute numbers too, the joblessness is scary for a small state like Manipur. One of the figures we have is from a 2020 PTI story, which had quoted the Manipur government claiming that the total number of unemployed youth in the state had reduced by half between 2014 and 2018. The then Labour and Employment Minister Th Radheshyam Singh, replying to a question raised in the Assembly during Question Hour and quoting the Directorate of Labour and Employment, said the number of unemployed youths in Manipur was 721,824 in 2014, which fell to 346,690 in 2018. Now, compare these numbers to the Census 2011 data which recorded Manipurs population at 2.8 million. The unemployed constitute a staggering 12 percent of the total population. Such is the condition that the perennial lack of water in the Imphal Valley has, as I learnt during the election coverage last year, provided the Valleys youth with one of the biggest avenues for employment (manning water tankers). Manipur, meanwhile, also faces the risk of a lot of people sliding below the poverty line. Promise Of Progress Belied It is in this dismal scenario that the violence erupted, laying waste to the state, sowing strong seeds of mistrust among communities that could endure for decades, and undoing years of planning and strategising to bring the state to the modern era. One of the biggest investments in the state has been towards bringing the Railways to the state. Last years horrific tragedy in Noney aside, where over 50 people lost their lives following a landslide, the onset of Railways remains perhaps the most promising hope for the region. But what will assure us now that the railway tracks will not be attacked? Peace is the number one pre-requirement for sustained, long-term investments. For the longest period, the Northeast remained an afterthought in terms of investments of any kind: even educational institutions remained far and few. Think of it: what industries spring to mind when we talk of the Northeast? The Manipur government, at least in theory, was trying to address this malaise. Earlier this year, the media in the Northeast, especially in Manipur, was abuzz with news of investments. In February 2023, CM Biren Singh informed that he had been assured by delegates of the US taking part in the plenary session of the B20 meeting held in Imphal that a US-based company (he did not name) was willing to invest $500 million dollars in Manipur. Delegates of Argentina and Peru had also expressed their desire to employ female nurses from the state in healthcare centres in their respective countries on learning that a good number of female nurses from Manipur were currently working in Japan. One can only wonder what the aforementioned American company is thinking about now. Or should I wonder if they even know what is happening in Manipur? Amit Kumar is executive editor of Eastmojo.com, a Northeast-based news portal. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.
History, it seems, tends to move in full circles. Be Indian, Buy Indian, a popular slogan from the bygone era has changed to Vocal for Local. Deliberate incursions by the government into the market, especially into the digital economy, are reminiscent of old Nehruvian socialist objectives despite all the blame Nehru gets for Indias economic problems. The governments intervention into payment via the Unified Payments Interface (or UPI) was justified on the grounds that it is a public good (it isnt) and that lowering transaction costs can benefit everybody (it can). But the justifications grow thinner when we consider other government run or backed enterprises in the digital economy, such as the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) (facilitate government procurement), mSeva app store (indigenous mobile app store), and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) among others. ONDC is a government-backed, network-centric, technology infrastructure where buyers and sellers can interact with each other irrespective of which platform they are using. Is Government Intervention Justified? Since every government intervention in markets has costs attached to it and can create deep distortions, it requires irrefutable justification. In economics, the only acceptable justification for government intervention is the correction of market failure (public goods, externalities, information asymmetry, and concentration of market power). So, what is the market failure in app stores and e-commerce? These products are generally projected as solutions to the problem of concentration of market power, i.e., the digital economy is dominated by a few big foreign players, and we therefore need an Indian player in the mix. This line of reasoning, while attractive at first glance, is fallacious. True, the digital economy, whether app stores, cab aggregators or e-commerce, tends to have some concentration of market power due to the existence of network effects. In competition law, however, just having a large market share and being dominant doesnt necessarily mean that its harmful. There is scant evidence of harm towards consumers. Further, there was evidence that new players are entering into the e-commerce space (Reliance and Tatas) and competing against the likes of Amazon and Flipkart. The harm that occurs is usually for sellers on the platform. Google Play Store is accused of charging exorbitant commissions to app developers. Amazon has been accused of self-preferencing, copying products from other sellers and selling it through its in-house brand (Basics) and leveraging buyer and seller data to distort competition. While these are valid and legitimate concerns, the government has a range of options before going down the do-it-yourself path. Instead of rushing to develop your own app store or a protocol for facilitating e-commerce, the better option would be to invest and strengthen the Competition Commission of India (CCI), an institution that exists precisely for the purpose of solving for harm caused by concentration of market power. Consequences Aplenty These interventions are/can be ineffective, costly, distortive, and unaccountable. With ONDC, it may be too early to talk about its effectiveness, but mSeva and the GeM have been inefficient, at best. A CAG audit report is particularly scathing towards the GeM calling it uneconomical, opaque, inefficient and slow, unreasonably priced and underutilised. The mSeva app store has a paltry 1,250 apps, most of which are for government (union and state) services and since it has opened up for private players, only two notable apps have been onboarded  Koo and PayTM. Since inception, there have been 88.5 million app downloads, which dwarfs in comparison to about 27 billion app downloads from Google in 2021 alone. Next, these come at a cost to the exchequer. mSeva has promised that they will not charge the app developers a fee for hosting the apps, which seems noble. But someone must pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the app store and build a robust security mechanism. This is subsidised from the government purse directly or indirectly. Delivery of food on ONDC is turning out to be cheaper than Zomato or Swiggy. This was because ONDC was providing discounts to end users, subsidising the entire delivery amount and no charge of convenience fee. The expectation is that these are initial discounts to attract both sellers and consumers and these will eventually go away. Remember, however, that UPI was also meant to be free at first and when NPCI tried to levy a transaction fee, there was an uproar. Now, the union government has to subsidise banks for the upkeep of UPI. In all these cases, if the government intends on keeping the cost low to beat the competition, it has to either fund it through the public purse or compromise on security and upkeep of the infrastructure. Sadly, you cant have all of it, as this article illustrates. No Level Playing Field When a government plays umpire, player and technology infrastructure, it does not always create a level playing field. The company ONDC and the government backing it enjoy enormous gatekeeping powers, which has the potential for misuse. The Union commerce minister had made comments to the effect that they will remove platforms from ONDC that do not contribute to the growth of the network. This is arbitrary and indiscriminate use of the gatekeeping privilege. Given this, can we be absolutely certain that this gatekeeping function will not be politicised  help Indian companies or apps, while keeping anti-national and foreign companies out. Remember that NPCI made an arbitrary decision in placing caps on the market share of PhonePe and Google Pay. Also, the RBI has not allowed for competition in the UPI space, denying a New Umbrella Entity licence to a consortium including Google, Facebook and Amazon. With the government being a big player in the system, it potentially crowds out private investment and business. The space for other domestic innovations in the app store, payments or e-commerce space, which could potentially compete against the likes of Google, Amazon and Flipkart, has been occupied by government backed players. ONDC is also facing a paradox in that it is trying to build an open e-commerce network to help small retailers, whose success depends on onboarding the very giants it is trying to slay. Finally, since ONDC and NPCI are Section 8 companies and not a public authority, they are outside the ambit of the RTI Act. Moreover, as the Internet Freedom Foundation points out, aggrieved citizens or sellers wont be able to file a writ petition under Article 32 and 226 in case of violation of their rights. There are further issues of privacy of user data and liability in case of harm (if an order goes wrong, who will do the grievance redressal  ONDC or the e-commerce platforms or delivery platforms?). Even with UPI, around 18 percent of UPI users had some form of grievance with the system (fraud or mistaken payment), but only 30 percent of these complaints have been resolved. When it comes to public policy problems, Do-it-Yourself should be the last resort of the government, even if it is an open protocol. Instead, it should have considered strengthening institutions such as CCI to ensure fair market conditions. Anupam Manur is a Professor of Economics at the Takshashila Institution, an independent think tank and school of public policy. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.
If you were looking for a silver lining in the cloud of smoke thats descended on New York this week as wildfires raged through Canadas forests, consider the effect a similar natural disaster in 2019 and 2020 had on the politics of climate on the opposite side of the world. Australia has long had a reputation as a climate laggard. A country that vies with Indonesia and Qatar as the biggest exporter of coal and liquefied natural gas, its leaders have spent decades blocking environmental action. Former Prime Minister John Howard refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. His successor Tony Abbott once dismissed the science of climate change as absolute crap. Scott Morrison, the incumbent at the time of the 2019 fires, brandished a lump of coal on the floor of parliament to taunt the Labor opposition. Just a few months before the start of the fire season, the countrys May 2019 general election was seen as having dealt a decisive blow against green policies. A perception that Labor was not supportive of the mining industry, due to its equivocal stance on Indian billionaire Gautam Adanis Carmichael coal project, cost the party votes in regions dependent on digging up solid fuel, according to the partys post-mortem into the election. It was released in November just as the fires were hitting disastrous proportions. Fearful of being seen to highlight climate-adjacent issues, Labor and the broader political-media class initially remained largely silent on the fires, even as red smoke and floating ash cloaked Sydney. The unmistakable devastation of the subsequent fire season, with its infernal images of flame-ringed holiday towns and toxic legacy of health problems, changed all that. Polling done by the Australian National University in early 2020 found that confidence in the federal government fell by 10.9 percentage points over the bushfire period, while the number seeing the environment as a crucial issue rose 8.2 percentage points. Some 77.8 percent of the population had a friend or family who was directly exposed to the catastrophe. Images of Morrison holidaying in Hawaii while the fires raged and being heckled by residents of Cobargo, a burnt-out town in the coastal hinterland southeast of the capital Canberra, became emblematic of his collapsing premiership. The 2022 election delivered the greenest parliament on record, with three new Green and six new climate-focused independent MPs added to the 151-member governing House of Representatives. The new government in March passed a bill mandating emissions reductions of 43 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, the most significant environmental legislation in a decade. That sounds like resounding evidence that the calamity affecting the US right now should stiffen public determination to take action on global warming, even if subsequent elections and court rulings deliver victories for fossil-fuel interests. Dont get too excited. For one thing, natural disasters can have a curiously value-free effect on voter behavior. Such events dont so much cause people to shift toward particular viewpoints, as punish whichever party is in power. (In one famous if contested study, a wave of shark attacks in New Jersey in 1916 damaged US President Woodrow Wilsons re-election campaign, despite the manifest absence of policy implications.) That was bad for the climate-denialist government in Australia in 2019, but might also be bad for the climate-focused government in the US in 2023. An inept response would be likelier to do damage to the Biden administration than to its opponents, as President George W. Bush found after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The effects of disasters can also be limited and perverse. Although support for new coal mines in Australia fell from 45.3 percent to 37 percent after the bushfires, those who had backed the industry beforehand and were subsequently directly affected by smoke and fire were more, rather than less likely, to favor them. Gilmore, the Labor-held electorate where footage of Morrison being heckled went viral, saw a counterintuitive swing toward his party and is now the most competitive seat in the country. Overlay the smoke maps of the northeastern US on electoral outcomes, and its clear that many of the worst-affected bits of the country are in parts of New York and New England where Democratic politicians are already dominant. More purple regions such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan have also been affected, but with nothing like the hellish pollution settling over the Hudson. A 2019 analysis of 73 separate studies on public opinion and climate experiences found that extreme weather only had a weak effect on peoples views, far less than traditional factors such as underlying partisanship. To the limited extent that natural disasters shape the environmental opinions of US voters, it appears to mostly happen to skeptics who are directly affected. Voters in swing states, however, arent the ones breathing in soot right now. David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities, as well as industrial and consumer companies. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication. Credit: Bloomberg
News / National

by Desmond Nleya

Former Vice President Phelekezela Mphoko's son, Siqokoqela has been granted ZWL$200k bail pending appeal by the Bulawayo High Court.Mphoko's son, has been serving a 20-year jail term after being found guilty of three counts of raping his niece, as well as escaping lawful custody.Through his legal representative, Thabekhulu Dube, of Ncube and Partners and the State, led by prosecutor Thobekani Mathanzima Nyathi did not oppose the bail application, citing that Mphoko has prospects of success on appeal against his conviction in respect of the three counts of rape.He was convicted early last month.
BJP leader and Home Minister Amit Shah will be addressing public meetings in four states on June 10 and 11 as part of the party's programmes to mark the Narendra Modi government's nine years. One of the venues for his meetings is Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, where the political atmosphere is abuzz with speculation on whether the BJP will join hands with the N Chandrababu Naidu-led Telugu Desam Party after the two leaders met recently in the national capital. Shah will address the public meeting in Andhra Pradesh on Sunday, and people will keenly look for any message in his address on the BJP's political plans for the state in terms of a new alliance. The state's ruling YSR Congress has been largely supportive to the central government on key issues so far. BJP president J P Nadda is also scheduled to address a public meeting in Tirupati in the state on June 10. He will also offer prayers at the Tirupati Balaji temple. On Saturday, Shah will address meetings at Patan in Gujarat and at Nanded in Maharashtra. Official sources said he will pay obeisance at the Hazur Abchalnagar Sahib Gurudwara in Nanded. He will address a meeting at Vellore in Tamil Nadu on Sunday before travelling to Andhra Pradesh. The BJP is observing a month-long public outreach programme between May 30 and June 30 to mark the government's anniversary.

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Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Friday hit out at the Modi government over reports of fresh Chinese military constructions along the LAC in Uttarakhand, and demanded that China should be confronted strategically and not by "hollow boasts". The nation is paying a heavy price for the prime minister's "clean chit" to China, he charged. "Our Territorial Integrity is being impinged upon by audacious Chinese military construction at the LAC, now in Uttarakhand," Kharge said on Twitter, sharing satellite images showing Chinese constructions at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) bordering Uttarakhand. "The nation is paying a heavy price for Modi ji's CLEAN CHIT to China. China should be confronted strategically together, and not by making hollow boasts!" he also said. The Congress has been attacking the government over its policy with China and has asked why it does not confront Beijing. In clear message to Beijing, India on Thursday said any expectation of normalisation of its ties with China when the border situation in eastern Ladakh is not normal is unfounded. At a special media briefing on the Modi government's foreign policy in the last nine years, Jaishankar had said China is the only leading country with which India's relations have not advanced in the last few years as it violated border agreements in 2020 and deployed large numbers of troops along the frontier.

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Nationalist Congress Party president Sharad Pawar has received a "death threat" on social media, NCP claimed on Friday. Taking cognisance of the matter, Mumbai police are in the process of registering a first information report, a senior police official said. A delegation of NCP workers led by Pawar's daughter and Lok Sabha member Supriya Sule met Mumbai police chief Vivek Phansalkar demanding action. The NCP leaders told the police that 82-year-old Pawar received a message on Facebook that read "he will meet the same fate as (Narendra) Dabholkar soon". Narendra Dabholkar, who fought against superstitious beliefs, was shot dead by two bike-borne assailants during his morning walk in Pune on August 20, 2013. Sule submitted printouts of the screenshots of the death threat to the police. A senior police official told PTI that they have been informed about the threat to the NCP chief on a social media platform. "We are looking into it. We have started a probe," the official said. NCP had sent a representative to lodge a police complaint, the official said. "The police are in the process of registering an FIR in this connection at South Region Cyber police station," he added.

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared a photograph from his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his India visit. Great conversation with @narendramodi discussing India's incredible tech ecosystem and how the country can benefit from AI. Really enjoyed all my meetings with people in the @PMOIndia, he tweeted with the picture. Earlier he had said that the meeting was great and that the PM was enthusiastic about AI. It was great. It was really fun. He was so enthusiastic, really thoughtful about AI, and the benefits of it. We asked why India has embraced ChatGPT so much and so early. Its really been fun for us to watch. He had great answers about that, he revealed at the Digital India Dialogues. great conversation with @narendramodi discussing india's incredible tech ecosystem and how the country can benefit from ai. really enjoyed all my meetings with people in the @PMOIndia. pic.twitter.com/EzxVD0UMDM  Sam Altman (@sama) June 9, 2023 He also added during the session that he spoke about framing global regulations for artificial intelligence and working with stakeholders on using the technology for education with PM Modi. During a session at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, he said that they also talked about what opportunities India presents for AI, and about regulation. We talked about the opportunities in front for the country, what the country should do, also the need to think about global regulation to make sure we prevent some of the downsides from happening  but it was a great hour, the OpenAI CEO said. Altman, whose company has created ChatGPT, said that OpenAI is looking to fund Indian startups and has already held some discussions regarding this. Read: ChatGPT creator Sam Altman meets another CEO in India. This one is his friend from Stanford "We were always amazed by the quality of Indian startups. The energy we are seeing in Indian startups, we are looking to fund them... We had some conversations yesterday on funding startups in India," Altman said. Altman is currently on a world tour and set to visit Israel, Jordan, Qatar, UAE, and South Korea this week.
Actor Kajol has deleted all her Instagram posts and said that she would be taking a break from social media in a surprise announcement. Taking to Twitter and Instagram, she expressed that she is currently facing one of the toughest trials of her life. Her sudden disappearance from Instagram left fans curious and concerned while also sparking speculation whether this is a marketing stunt for an upcoming legal drama she is set to star in. The highly anticipated Indian legal and political drama series called "The Good Wife" with Kajol in the lead role will be streamed on Disney+Hotstar. It is an adaptation of the popular American series created by Robert King and Michelle King of the same name. Directed by Suparn Verma, the Indian version, along with Kajol, also features Jisshu Sengupta, Kubbra Sait and Aamir Ali among others. "The Good Wife" will tell the story of a housewife who, after several years of being a dedicated homemaker, decides to re-enter the workforce to support her family when her husband is imprisoned. The announcement of "The Good Wife" in India was made in July 2022 with principal photography for the series beginning in August the same year. Taking a break from social media. pic.twitter.com/9utipkryy3  Kajol (@itsKajolD) June 9, 2023 After the announcement, worried fans asked the actor if everything was alright and the reason for her decision. Many sceptics dismissed it as a promotional stunt, especially with the use of the word trial in her post  indicating it may be for the show. I think it's a promotional post about her upcoming web series titled "The Good Wife', one user wrote. Shes playing a lawyer in her upcoming series...I guess it's for that only? wrote another. Kajol, 48, has 3.6 million and 14.4 million Twitter and Instagram followers respectively.
The story goes that when Abraham Lincoln was asked how long a persons legs should be, he replied: Long enough to reach the ground. Its the same with novels. They should be long enough to achieve their objectives and no more. This commonsensical view is often ignored. One website that promises to make your writing shine claims that most publishers consider a novels length anywhere between 50,000 and 110,000 words and adds that the average length of an adult novel is about 90,000 words. Surely thats too many. The economics of publishing and printing may have something to do with word count, but that cant be the only reason. Perhaps theres satisfaction and seriousness  however misplaced  to be found in the sheer heft of a doorstopper. Or maybe writers and readers are living up to expectations that arose when Victorian serialized novels started to be published as triple-deckers, and then singly. This is not to say that every novel should get to the point as soon as possible. Clearly, authors should be free to explore and navigate their concerns in a manner that best suits them. Nevertheless, there are many examples that show how this can be done without sacrificing pithiness. Depending on your edition, Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, Albert Camuss The Stranger and Raymond Chandlers The Big Sleep are all under 200 pages. Moreover, as Robert McCrum points out, The novels of that great triumvirate  Waugh, Greene and Orwell  average 60-70,000 words apiece. Many excessively long novels lose momentum in the middle. Thats the fuzzy bit between the innovative opening and the satisfying conclusion. Typically, a sagging middle will over-extend the plot and make characters jump through needless hoops to get from Point A to Point B. The result, in Henry Jamess words, is a large, loose baggy monster. Craft classes are full of ways to fix sagging middles. Establish clear goals, they say. Raise the stakes. Throw some more obstacles in the characters paths. Sadly, few of them tell you to simply ditch the excess baggage and get on with it. Granted, a reason that some prefer long novels is the pleasure of being immersed in a fictional world for an extended period. Thats certainly a delight. Such titles, though, are few and far between -- its not every day that you come across A Suitable Boy or Middlemarch. The Russians excelled at this, but then, their view of the role of literature in crafting a nations consciousness was more elevated than the one that prevails today. SF and speculative novels also tend to be longer than those in other genres, simply because both novelists and readers take pleasure in lingering over the characteristics and characters of a world different from our own. Nevertheless, classics from Mary Shelleys Frankenstein to Stanislaw Lems Solaris are just over 200 pages, and no-one can deny their inventiveness. Sometimes, its an authorial voice that makes reading a long novel worth it, never mind the plot. This unique point of view can be edifying, sardonic, or simply funny. Take Steve Toltzs longer-than-usual A Fraction of the Whole, with its over-the-top stories and non-stop exuberance. Or, at double the length, Lucy Ellmanns Ducks Newburyport, with its stylistic repetitions, social commentary and cutting satire. On the other hand, its not that a short novel means sacrificing experimentation, style, or distinctiveness. Look at Jenny Offills Dept of Speculation, Renata Adlers Speedboat, or even Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse. Again, all of them are under 200 pages. Much fiction translated into English is also in the form of exquisitely crafted short novels that dont seem rushed but dont sprain the wrists either. To take a few recent titles of note, theres French author GauZs Standing Heavy, Catalan author Eva Baltasars Boulder, and Mexican author Fernanda Melchors Paradais. These are short, yes, but theyre as intricate and impactful as works that are twice the size. Randall Jarrell once defined the novel as a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it. All too often, its the elongation thats at fault. Brevity is the soul of wit, as Polonius informed us, and it should be the soul of novels, too.
The U.S Supreme Court on Friday delivered a verdict favouring liquor brand Jack Daniel's in the dog toy row and stated that the the toy was a trademark violation. "This case is about dog toys and whiskey, two items seldom appearing in the same sentence," Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the court's opinion, said. Here is the background regarding the Jack Daniel's-Supreme Court story: In November 2022, a dispute over a poop-themed dog toy that seemed shaped like a a Jack Daniel's whiskey bottle came to the forefront, reaching as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, who decided to referee over the case. The dog toy was named "Bad Spaniels,". The toy mimicked Lynchburg, the liquor brand's famous whiskey bottles with hilarious dog-themed alterations. It replaced "Old No. 7" with "the Old No. 2, on your Tennessee Carpet" and alcohol descriptions with "43% Poo By Vol." and "100% Smelly." In March 2023, the U.S Supreme Court decided a ruling against the case would be handed in June. Jack Daniel's Properties Inc. appealed a decision handed out by a lower court that "Bad Spaniels" chew toy was an "expressive work" protected by the First Amendment. Competitors felt that a ruling against Jack Daniel's would have weakened their control over their brands and reputations. Others, however, felt that ruling favoring Jack Daniel's would impact free-speech rights. In the ruling announced on Friday, The U.S Supreme Court backed Jack Daniel's and gave a 9-0 verdict favouring the liquor brand which threw out the verdict given by lower court against Jack Daniel's earlier. (With inputs from Reuters)

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The Supreme Court on June 9 asked the Union government to file their response to Delhi Government's appeal against the Delhi High Court order staying transport department's order of stopping bike taxis. The court directed Delhi government to serve a copy of the plea to the office of Solicitor General and deferred the hearing of the case to June 12 (Monday). Today, the Delhi government argued that aggregators such as Uber and Rapido are using two wheelers with private licenses as bike taxis. On hearing this, the court also expressed its apprehension about how a passenger in a bike taxi will be covered by insurance in case of an accident. The court further asked the Delhi government if they were planning to introduce a license regime for taxi aggregation. The Delhi government responded stating that the draft rules is up for comments and they intend to introduce the license regime in a month. Appearing for Uber, senior advocate Neeraj Kishan Kaul argued that the aggregators are great facilitators. He further argued that the centre had introduced certain guidelines in 2004, which said that aggregators could use both two wheelers and four wheelers with private licenses. On hearing this, the court expressed its inclination to hear the Union government's opinion on this aspect, thus directing the Delhi government to serve a copy of the plea to the Solicitor General's office. Public notice On May 26, the Delhi High Court stayed the notice issued by the Delhi transport department to stop bike taxi services. The division bench of Justices Suresh Kumar Kait and Neena Bansal Krishna also directed the transport department to not take any coercive steps against Rapido and Uber till such time policy is framed. In February this year, the transport department issued a public notice to aggregators like Uber, Rapido, and Ola to stop plying their bike taxi services effective immediately. It has been brought to the notice that two-wheelers having non-transport (private) registration mark/numbers are being used to carry passengers on hire which is a purely commercial operation and a violation of the Motor Vehicle Act, 1988, the transport department said in the notice.
Pride Month which is celebrated in June is an entire month dedicated to amplifying LGBTQ+ voices as well as celebrating their accomplishments. It commemorates years of struggle for civil rights and the ongoing pursuit of equal justice under the law for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community. Colourful parades, rallies, seminars, music festivals, workshops and concerts are among the principal components of Pride Month. But why is Pride Month celebrated in June? It goes back to the morning of June 28, June 1969 when the police raided Stonewall Inn a popular gathering place for young members of the LGBTQ+ community in New York Citys Greenwich Village. They arrested employees for selling liquor without a license and roughed up many of the patrons. A year later the first Pride marches took place in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, coinciding with the first anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. Pride symbol the rainbow-coloured flag was designed by artist Gilbert Baker and unveiled on June 25, 1978, during the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. The flag's design was particularly picked by Baker as a representation of hope, with each colour on the flag having a distinct significance. Red signifies life in the six-color flag, while orange and yellow stand for healing and brightness, respectively. Green symbolises nature, blue denotes peace, and purple represents soul. On July 2, 1999, India held its first Pride Parade in Kolkata which was also the first-ever Pride march in South Asia. Post this event, Pride marches have been conducted in over 21 cities in India. Heres a list of some of the Pride events this month in India: MUMBAI Tinder and Gaysi Queer Made Weekend Fashion, art, merch, home decor - if you can think it, you can probably find it at Queer Made Weekend. Mingle, peruse and shop from queer entrepreneurs and small business owners at this event. Expect to be entertained by a stellar line up of artists such as Rani Ko-HE-Nur aka Sushant Divgikar, Strum Away Collective, Suggahunny, Smruti Jalpur and others. Get tattooed or your face painted or simply chill with great food and drinks all by queer people. When: June 10-11 Where: Jio World Drive, Bandra Kurla Complex, Bandra East, Mumbai. be-loved  an evening of theatre and music Gaysi Familys newest theatre production, in collaboration with Tamaasha Theatre, is a kaleidoscopic exploration of queer love and companionship. The piece draws from powerful writings from desi queer history and literature and is a rich tapestry of songs, satire, musical storytelling and more. When: June 24 Where: antiSOCIAL, Lower Parel, Mumbai. Show timings: 5.30 pm & 8 pm (2 shows) Free entry, limited seating. Desi Pride Weekender This 3-day event in Bandra will have drag performances, art, makeup, theatre workshop, pole workshops, erotica storytelling, pop-up stalls and some partying. When: June 16-18 Where: 331, Dr. BR Ambedkar Road Pali Hill, Bandra West, Mumbai Ticket price: Rs 499 onwards National Pride of India Parade In addition to celebrating LGBTQ love and joy, Pride Parades serve as a platform to address important issues faced by the community. National Pride of India Parade will be held in Mumbai, first and then move to other cities. The walk in Mumbai will commence from Azad Maidan at 3 pm and end at Oval Maidan by 5:30 pm after which is the Pride Celebration - The Official National Pride Party. Its time to don your hottest look and have a ball. When: June 24 Where: Azad Maidan at 3 pm 14th KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival The ongoing KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival has been screening 127 films from 45 countries at Liberty Cinema and Alliance Francaise de Bombay. This will be followed by an online festival. Among the movies to watch out for include the Canadian feature film When Time Got Louder, directed by Connie Cocchia, who identifies as an LGBTQ+ director, producer, and writer. The festival also has panel discussions, performances by the queer community, workshops, interactive sessions and a film pitching session for LGBTQ+ filmmakers to make their next short film. When: June 7-11 Where: Liberty Cinema and Alliance Francaise de Bombay. The LGBT Pride Summit This summit will see some of the top professionals across industries discussing important issues such as diversity and inclusivity. This event will focus on the key areas like acceptance of diversity, diversity policies for workplace and why education is an important tool for driving change and many more topics revolving around diversity and inclusion. When: June 21, 9am-6pm Where: ITC Maratha, Andheri Registration fee: Rs 15,000 Legends And Divas - Pride Edition This two hour theatrical presentation is Indias only musical in support of the LGBTQAI++ community. Get ready to groove and move as the hosts takes you down memory lane with Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Andrea Bocelli, Adele along with scintillating drag acts and more. The roles of the divas and legends will be played by Sarosh Nanavaty, Vishaal Asrani, Delraaz Bunshah and Sparsh Korde. Expect dazzling performances, fancy lighting and sound effects, LED backdrops and stunning costumes. When: June 11, 6.30 pm Where: Royal Opera House Theatre DELHI Queer Made Weekend Like Mumbai, Delhi too will witness Tinder India and Gaysi Familys Queer Made Weekend. Shop from over 30 LGBTQIA+ owned businesses from diverse categories such as fashion, art, merch, home decor and tune in to artists like Sushant Divgikar, Madboy/Mink, Nidhi Wagle and many more from the community. When: June 17-18, 5 pm onwards. Where: DLF Promenade, Delhi. BENGALURU Satrangi Mela (Pride Edition) This queer festival by hospitality chain Social will have vibrant flea markets set up by fellow LGBTQIA+ folks and some jaw-dropping performances by super talented individuals. Look out for art workshops and a drag show. When: June 18, 12pm onwards Where: Indiranagar SOCIAL, Bengaluru Rainbow Tales Get ready for theatre, poetry reading, stand-up and a drag show at this colourful event by Interweave Consulting. Dancing Queens, India`s first transgender dance troupe will be presenting a mix of folk dance, Bollywood tribute and dance drama, highlighting the life of the transgender community in India. There will be poems curated by Rohini Venkatesh Malur and also a drag act by Alex Mathewn one of Indias most popular drag artists. When: June 14, 5 pm Where: Bangalore International Centre. Ticket price: Rs 499 CHENNAI Chennai Rainbow Pride It was in 2009, that local groups and collectives working in the areas of sexuality, gender identity, human rights and health/HIV came together under the banner of Chennai Rainbow Coalition, and organised a series of events in the city culminating in the first march on the last Sunday of the month. This year's Pride march will be preceded by a number of activities like panel discussions, movie screenings, cultural performances and awareness campaigns. The venue is yet to be decided. When: June 25 GOA D.N.A Definitions Not Applicable  A community affair by W Goa Shop, sip and shake a leg at this ocean front hotel which is celebrating Pride month with a lively and joyous event. There will be a pop up market of clothing and accessories from Blacksheep, handmade decor from Wildthings, art from Aadhi Darshan, wellness & skincare products by Transmutation Soap Studio  all from the queer community. A special drag performance by artist Jiya Labejia will be the highlight of the evening. When: June 10, 4 pm onwards Where: Rockpool, W Goa For Reservation, call: +91 7830777765
Innovation has always been a key part of fast food chain McDonald's attracting customers to visit their outlets around the world. However, sometimes company strategies, particularly in aspects such as advertisements, can lead to criticism among the public. Recently, McDonald's shared an ad on their social media platforms which showed a man buying a meal and a woman staff member handing over the food to him. Both the man and the woman make eye contact and the ad shows how there might be a love story brewing between the two. A few seconds later, after eating his food, he can be seen standing again in the queue to meet the woman and initiate a conversation. "Sometimes, the greatest love stories start with the tiniest things  a glance, a smile, a meal. Watch this unusual date and find out how a meal can give you #MoreForLess at just Rs.179! Visit a McDonalds near you and get McVeggie Meals @ Rs.179," McDonald's wrote in their tweet with the video. Sometimes, the greatest love stories start with the tiniest things  a glance, a smile, a meal. Watch this unusual date and find out how a meal can give you #MoreForLess at just Rs.179! Visit a McDonalds near you and get McVeggie Meals @ Rs.179https://t.co/nXOWHHIgGZ  McDonald's India (@mcdonaldsindia) June 5, 2023 The ad generated a lot of critical responses as many questioned the idea behind making the ad. First Global Chairperson and Managing Director Devina Mehra replied to the ad on Twitter, asking who was behind its approval. This morning saw this awful castiest & dehumanising Kachra campaign from @zomato that I couldn't even bear to watch till the end And now @mcdonaldsindia is encouraging customers to flirt with their female employees Who is approving these campaigns? Don't they have any sense? https://t.co/gRl2Xdm6eM  Devina Mehra (@devinamehra) June 7, 2023 Few others, too, were critical of the idea expressed in the ad. "This is outrageous and disgusting beyond words 1. You are inviting your customers to hit on your employees 2. Creating potentially unsafe workplace for your female employees 3. Objectifying your female staff for profit by suggesting your customers can flirt and find a date here," one user wrote. "McDonald's ad encouraging customers to flirt with the employees," another user wrote. The ad come around the same when Zomato also received criticism for their recent ad that featured a character from Lagaan "Kachra". The ad tried to convey the importance of not wasting food, but instead led to backlash over its depiction. Also read: McDonald's iconic character Grimace is back and tweeting. Why Elon Musk is impressed
News / National

by Staff Reporter

Aspiring Mazowe North ZANU PF Member of Parliament Tsungai Makumbe nearly traded blows with the losing candidate Campion Mugweni whom he defeated in the primary elections.Mugweni has since swallowed his pride and is now vying for a councillor post in Mvurwi ward five.The two are not seeing each other eye to eye since Mvurwi electorate is not attending ZANU PF meetings.Recently Makumbe and Mugweni clashed at a drug abuse meeting and nearly traded blows after a poor gathering.Makumbe accused Mugweni of sabotaging the party and is pushing for Makumbe's lose to opposition.A senior party member told Bulawayo24.com that the two are at logger heads and the beef is emanating from primary elections."There is a serious tension between the two and unfortunately when they held a anti drug abuse meeting which was poorly attended they clashed and nearly traded blows," the source said."The party leadership is trying hard to unite the two and we hope they will reconcile since we are about to face the opposition."Both Mugweni and Makumbe refused to comment on the matter.However, a lot of candidates in ZANU PF are disgruntled and are likely to let their supporters vote for opposition dubbed "bhora musango."
Parakala Vangamayi, daughter of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, married Pratik Doshi on Thursday in a low-key ceremony in Bengaluru. The news of the wedding emerged after a clip from the simple ceremony surfaced on social media. Who is Pratik Doshi? Doshi is an official at the Prime Ministers Office (PMO). Originally from Gujarat, he is reportedly a close aide of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He is an officer on Special Duty (OSD) in the rank of joint secretary, handling research and strategy at the PMO. His job includes providing secretarial assistance to the Prime Minister with regards to matters including, but not restricted to research and strategy. He was appointed to the top role in July 2019. Salary As of September last year, Doshi falls in the Level 14 pay band among officers and staff at the PMO. His monthly basic pay was Rs 1,57, 600, according to the PMO website. Education Doshi is a graduate of Singapore Management University, as per reports. Parakala Vangamayi is a multimedia journalist who is currently a features writer at Mint Lounge. She was formerly with The Hindu. She holds a Masters degree from Delhi Universitys Department of English. After Delhi University, she went to Medill School of Journalism in Northwestern University to pursue a Masters degree in journalism. Her work has been published in several Indian and foreign publications. Vangamayi and Doshis wedding was attended by close family and friends. No political leaders were invited, reports said. Sitharaman could be seen standing behind the bride as Hindu priests officiated the wedding. The rituals were carried out in the Vedic order of Adamaru Mutt by priests from Udupi Adamaru Mutt, The Hindustan Times reported.

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Google Doodle on Friday celebrated iconic American dancer William Roscoe Leake, best known as Willi Ninja. He played a crucial role in Black LGBTQ+ representation and acceptance in the 1980s and 90s. The Google Doodle on Willi in the month of June is especially significant as the month is marked as Pride Month to celebrate and honour the LGBTQ+ community. It was on this day 33 years ago when the documentary "Paris is Burning", which features Willi and the iconic House of Ninja, was released in the US at the NewFest New York LGBT Film Festival. He was famous for his "voguing", a dance style that blends fashion poses with intricate, mime and martial arts-like movements. Willi Ninja, who was born on April 12, 1961, in New Hyde Park, New York, became a skilled dancer through self-teaching and honed his voguing style during his twenties. Willi was a vocal spokesperson for the LGBTQ+ community. He actively promoted HIV/AIDS prevention at drag balls and worked to reduce the stigma associated with the disease. The Google Doodle includes a video featuring performances by the current members of the House of Ninja. The dancers featured are Archie Burnett Ninja, Javier Madrid Ninja, Kiki Ninja and Akiko Tokuoka aka KiT Ninja. They are seen dancing in celebration of Willis legacy. Willi, who was suffering from AIDS, died on September 2, 2006, at the age of 45.

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Bank of America Corp promoted the head of its Latin America business, Alex Bettamio, to co-head of global investment banking alongside Thomas Sheehan, according to a memo seen by Reuters on Thursday. The leadership change was one of several announced by the second largest U.S. bank. It also elevated Faiz Ahmad to jointly lead global capital markets with Sarang Gadkari. Ahmad currently runs the Global Transaction Services (GTS) unit. Elif Bilgi Zapparoli, who currently serves as co-head of global capital markets, will become head of international client strategy, reporting to Bernie Mensah, BofA's top executive in charge of its overseas businesses. Bank of America's investment-banking revenue rose 19% to $6.2 billion in the first quarter, its second-best quarter for revenue, even as investment banking fees sank 20%. The memo also outlined other personnel moves. Mark Monaco will take over GTS in addition to his current role leading the company's payments business. Augusto Urmeneta was named president for Latin America, succeeding Bettamio. Jiro Seguchi, co-president of Asia Pacific, will retire. Jin Su will become the bank's sole president for the Asia Pacific region when Seguchi retires. Peter Guenthardt will lead global corporate investment banking in the region.

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Russia will start deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus after special storage facilities are ready on July 7-8, President Vladimir Putin said on Friday, Moscow's first move of such bombs outside Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. More than 15 months into the biggest land war in Europe since World War Two, Putin says the United States and its Western allies are pumping arms into Ukraine as part of an expanding proxy war aimed at bringing Russia to its knees. Putin in March announced he wanted to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, an apparent warning to the U.S.-led NATO military alliance over it support for Ukraine. Leading NATO countries say they will support Ukraine and help it defend itself for as long as it takes from what Kyiv casts as an imperial-style land grab by Russia which threatens the survival of the Ukrainian state. "Everything is going according to plan," Putin told Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko when discussing the planned nuclear deployment during talks at the Russian leader's Black Sea summer retreat in Sochi. "Preparation of the relevant facilities ends on July 7-8, and we will immediately begin activities related to the deployment of appropriate types of weapons on your territory," Putin said, according to a Kremlin transcript of his remarks. Lukashenko said: "Thank you, Vladimir Vladimirovich." Putin, 70, casts the war as a battle for Russia's own survival in the face of what he says is an ever-expanding NATO. He has warned the West that Moscow will not back down. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says Ukraine will not rest however until every last Russian soldier is ejected from his country, which he wants to join NATO as soon as possible. Putin's nuclear move is being watched closely by both the United States and its NATO allies in Europe and by China, which has repeatedly cautioned against the use of nuclear weapons in the conflict. After the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, the United States and Russia worked hard to return the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal, then also deployed in newly independent republics such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, to Russia. Only the United States had so far used nuclear weapons in anger - in the 1945 attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A press release from the city police said as of now 49 accused individuals have been arrested in connection with the case, while one person, currently residing in New Zealand, is still at large. The total money transacted in the buying and selling of various TSPSC question papers is Rs 1.63 crore, it said. "All the material evidences seized during the arrest of the accused persons were sent to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Ramanthapur, and experts opinion obtained. Legal opinion is obtained and the preliminary charge sheet has been filed today in the Hon'ble jurisdictional Court," the release said.The TSPSC on March 15 cancelled the Assistant Engineers (AE) exam held on March 5, following allegations that the question paper had been leaked.The TSPSC on March 15 cancelled the Assistant Engineers (AE) exam held on March 5, following allegations that the question paper had been leaked. Amid massive protests by the Congress, BJP and other opposition parties and students groups over the leakage of a question paper of a recruitment test, the TSPSC had earlier cancelled the Group-I Preliminary Examination and other recruitment tests.Amid massive protests by the Congress, BJP and other opposition parties and students groups over the leakage of a question paper of a recruitment test, the TSPSC had earlier cancelled the Group-I Preliminary Examination and other recruitment tests. The Enforcement Directorate too had registered an 'Enforcement Case Information Report' (ECIR) in connection with the case. The Enforcement Directorate too had registered an 'Enforcement Case Information Report' (ECIR) in connection with the case.
Tony Shalhoub and Brooke Adams met on Broadway and have been married since 1992

P Yim/Getty

Tony Shalhoub and Brooke Adams know how to light up a stage  and each others lives.

The actors met in 1990 while starring in the play The Heidi Chronicles in New York City. After moving to Los Angeles separately, they began dating and wed in 1992.

The pair share two daughters together, Josie Lynn Shalhoub, whom Adams adopted in 1988, and Sophie Shalhoub, whom the couple adopted in 1994.

My main focus had been on my work, and that took priority over everything. But then, when I met Brooke, I realized, no, it didnt have to be that way. The work could be in its place, and I could also have my life, a relationship, children, Shalhoub told Marthas Vineyard Arts & Ideas during a joint interview with Adams in 2020.

He added: I needed to be more well-rounded ... Once Brooke came into my life, the rest of my life just improved so vastly, and so quickly, it was an immediate turnaround.

Not only did Shalhoub and Adams meet on the job, but theyve also worked together multiple times since. Adams guest starred on Shalhoub's hit show Monk five times, and they got to act alongside each other in 2002s Made-Up, which Shalhoub also directed.

It revives our romance when we work together, Adams told American Theatre in 2014, noting that she doesnt work much anymore but does love to work with Tony.

So, who is Tony Shalhoub's wife? Keep reading to learn more about Brooke Adams.

She is from New York City

Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Adams was born in New York City on Feb. 8, 1949.

The Adamses were a theater family. Her father was a producer and CBS executive, and her mother was an actress. She has one older sister, Lynne Adams, who is also an actress and writer.

In Manhattan we lived in a townhouse and Lynne and I slept in what was the parlor in the house, Adams recalled to the Los Angeles Times in 1994. The piano was in there and wed often wake up in the morning to somebody auditioning in our bedroom and a line of actors out in the hall.

Adams told American Theatre that they had always expected to embark on an acting career.

It wasnt so much that my parents encouraged us; its that they didnt really offer us anything else, she said. This is all my sister Lynne and I knew how to do.

She spent her early 20s in Spain

Robert R McElroy/Getty

Adams attended the High School of the Performing Arts in N.Y.C. but didnt go to college after that because, as she told the blog Better After 50, she loved acting and just assumed I was going to act.

In her early twenties, she took a trip to Europe with her sister, Lynne. She ended up staying in Spain from ages 20 to 24 because she didnt know what to come back to.

I lived with a Spaniard and was kind of a housewife for four years  I went to Spain to escape everything, to broaden my horizons and see what I really wanted to do. When I came back I really wanted to act, she told American Theatre.

She is an actress and a director

Carlo Allegri/Getty

Adams started acting at a young age, working alongside her older sister, Lynne, in their fathers summer theater, the Flint Musical Tent, in Michigan. She made her stage debut at age 6 in Brigadoon.

She moved to L.A. in 1974 with a burning desire to get into the movies, she told the Los Angeles Times. She had small roles in 1976s Car Wash and 1977s Shock Waves before landing her breakout role as the lead in 1978s Days of Heaven, alongside Richard Gere and Sam Shepard. She has also appeared in films like 1978s Revenge of the Body Snatchers, 1983s The Dead Zone, 1992s Gas Food Lodging and 1995s The Baby-Sitters Club.

It was a b---- making my debut in such an extraordinary movie, she said. I knew it was extraordinary when we were making it and that Id never have another experience like it and I was right. I was offered lots of stuff after that--and looking back I have to say I didnt handle things so well.

On television, Adams played a lead character on the 60s series O.K., Crackerby!, appeared in more than a dozen TV movies in the 70s and 80s, and had a number of guest spots in the 90s on shows like Frasier, Thirtysomething, Touched By an Angel and Wings. After moving back to N.Y.C., she concentrated on theatre, appearing in plays like The Cherry Orchard in 2005 and the 2010 revival of Lend Me a Tenor.

The latter was one of many times Adams has worked with her husband, which also included five guest spots on Shalhoubs hit series, Monk. In addition to acting, Adams is also a writer. Shalhoub did a reading of her play, Delusion by Proxy.

She met Shalhoub on Broadway

Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic

In the late 70s, Adams returned to N.Y.C. from L.A. to take care of her sick parents. She appeared in a number of plays, including The Heidi Chronicles in 1990, where she met Shalhoub.

My contract was up in February, but because Brooke was in it, I re-upped for another four months, because I couldnt extricate myself, Shalhoub told Marthas Vineyard Arts & Ideas, adding: I was so completely enamored of her that I just could not leave.

She and Shalhoub got married in 1992

Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

Shalhoub and Adams had a mutual attraction but didnt begin dating until each had separately relocated to L.A. They reconnected after Shalhoubs father died, and they got engaged after a few months of dating.

Shortly after they got engaged, Adams got cast in the national tour of Lost in Yonkers. Shalhoub was starring on the sitcom Wings at the time, so he would visit her and Josie every three weeks when the show had a hiatus.

They got married in April 1992, with Adams getting three months off to go to N.Y.C. for her nuptials.

We were really simpatico. I guess, too, it has a lot to do with where you are in your life, and your sense of readiness, Shalhoub told Marthas Vineyard Arts & Ideas. When we got married, I was 38 and Brooke had just turned 43. We were both single and had both steered clear of marriage and large commitments, and there was this instant feeling, that this was going to be it, there would never be any other person for me.

Two years after they wed, Adams told the Los Angeles Times that she was enjoying taking a break from acting, as it was too brutal a way to make a living.

When I got married in 1992, it was the first time since I was 16 that I didnt have to support myself, so I guess Ive just been enjoying that  This is the most competitive business in the world, and there are so many young, beautiful, talented actresses that its a miracle Ive worked at all, she said.

She is a mom of two

Lisa Rose/Globe Photo/ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

The couple are parents to two daughters. Adams adopted Josie Lynn Shalhoub in 1989. After she and Shalhoub wed, the two adopted another girl, Sophie Shaloub, in 1994.

While promoting her mockumentary Made-Up, Adams admitted to the New York Times in 2004 that it's such a weird thing to be a mother.''

''Being a mother is more like being wallpaper. It's not being the center of attention, she said. And so I think for a woman who's a mother, it is very hard to be an actress, to get all excited about yourself in the center seat.''

Josie followed in her parent's footsteps, earning her BFA in theatre from the California Institute of the Arts, and she now works as a writer. In 2020, Shalhoub and Adams became grandparents when she welcomed her first child that summer.

Ahead of his grandsons arrival, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel actor told PEOPLE he was in awe.

Related: Tony Shalhoub Is Excited to Become a Grandfather in 2020: 'I Am In Awe'

Im going become a grandfather this year for the first time, he said. I play one on the show, but now I actually get to be one. My oldest daughter is having a baby boy in the summer.

She is a painter

Andrew Toth/Getty

Adams began painting watercolors while in Spain. Her hobby took a backseat when she moved back to N.Y.C. and started acting again, but she took art classes after her second daughter was born.

The Unborn stars first group show came in 2006, and she has gone on to showcase her work nearly a half-dozen times, most recently at the Kara Taylor Gallery on Marthas Vineyard in 2021.

When I started, it was the first time I felt like Im not trying to impress anyone, Im not trying to make anyone love me. I like this. I like painting. I loved acting too, the acting part was great, the business was what I hated, she told the Better After 50 blog.

Adams paintings have run the gamut from a series titled Behind The Scenes to portraits of friends  including her husband  to a monochrome collection called Cast of Characters.

She has decided that she is not an actor anymore, telling Marthas Vineyard Arts & Ideas, Im not competing with [Shalhoub and his acting] in that way. Im now a painter. I love to paint, and I sell my paintings, so its all good.

She and Shalhoub live in New York City and summer in Massachusetts

Roger Kisby/Getty

To get away from the hustle of Hollywood, Adams and Shalhoub moved from L.A. to N.Y.C., and the couple spend summers on Marthas Vineyard, where theyve owned a house since 1999.

Their island home is a 90-year-old saltbox, chosen because its vastly different from life in L.A., and Adams spends plenty of time in her art studio there.

"Martha's Vineyard is quiet and green, not a parade of billboards and chain restaurants," Shalhoub told Country Living in 2010. "It's like going back in time 50 years."

Though they are both still tied to L.A. and N.Y.C. for work, they love being on Marthas Vineyard and are well-connected to the arts scene on the island.

One of the things that I find fun about the Vineyard in the summer is that we always get asked to do readings and stuff. Theres just so much going on, at the Yard, the Vineyard Playhouse, the Vineyard Arts Project, Adams told Marthas Vineyard Arts & Ideas. Our MO is to always say yes, and then bitch and moan about it until we actually do it  and then we love it.

She and her sister Lynne are frequent collaborators

Ricardo Dearatanha/Los Angeles Times via Getty

Adams has worked with her sister Lynne a few times, including directing her one-woman play Two Faced in the '90s, which toured the country. The play was turned into a film, 2002s Made-Up, which starred both sisters and marked Shalhoubs directorial debut.

More than a decade later, the two teamed up once again on the web series All Downhill From Here, a semi-autobiographical comedy about aging sisters.

''Brooke and I have this phenomenon. When I write something, it turns out to be true for her," Lynne told the New York Times in 2004.

Her dog is Instagram famous

Rachel Brosnahan/Instagram

Shalhoub and Adams have an adorable dog named Scoop.

A number of paintings that Adams has sold at her home gallery on Marthas Vineyard have been of the pup.

But whats really gotten the worlds attention is whenever Rachel Brosnahan, Shalhoubs The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel costar, posts about Scoop Shalhoub  whom shes deemed the man, the myth, the legend  on social media.

Whenever she puts Scoop on, she gets more responses than anything, Adams told Better After 50.

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June 09, 2023 Kursk 2.0? Lazy and arguably biased as I am, I will just present the analysis (slightly edited) of the former Swedish officer and defense politician Mikael Valtersson: ANALYSIS UKRAINIAN COUNTEROFFENSIVE ZAPORIZHIA AFTERNOON JUNE 9 Hard fighting continues along the Zaporizhia front, but with no Ukrainian breakthrough. Sometimes UkrAF makes small gains and then RuAF retakes the lost territories. But all fighting are still being conducted in the grey area in front of the Russian main defence lines.

bigger I will not go into details about attacks and counterattacks, but the main areas of fighting has been centred around Lobkove to the west, and Robotino to the south, of Orikhiv. Lobkove was captured a short while by Ukrainian forces, but later they retreated due to intense Russian bombardments.

bigger In Robotino Russian forces retreated to the second line of forward positions closer to the settlement, then Russian forces retook the lost positions and presently Ukrainian forces has taken them a second time and now Russian forces try to retake the first line a second time. But still the Ukrainians has not reached the settlement of Robotino and they are fighting an uphill battle in open terrain through Russian minefields and might have to withdraw a second time to their original positions.

bigger The Ukrainian forces don't seem to sweep mines in advance of the attack. They do it with a couple of mine clearing vehicles when they attack and behind them the Ukrainian armour advance in a column that is an easy target for Russian AT assets. In a way it resembles the Russian armour columns in the beginning of the war. Columns that took catastrophic losses to Ukrainian AT weapons, a history now repeated by the Ukrainians. In advance of an offensive, the attacking side must secure air and artillery superiority, so they can shield their mine clearing operations and troop concentrations. And at the same time destroy the defenders command structures and logistical hubs. Finally when they attack their air and artillery superiority can be utilised to severely hurt and slow down enemy reserves to secure breakthroughs. This becomes even more important if the enemy has large reserves and a defence in depth. On the Zaporizhia front the situation is the opposite, so Ukrainian forces hasn't many choices how to act. One method is to achieve strategic surprise as in the Kharkiv offensive last autumn. That option doesn't exist on the Zaporizhia front. In general I would say that an attack towards an enemy who has all the benefits RuAF has on the Zaporizhia front is suicidal. The only way Ukrainian (and western) commanders even could have contemplated that such an offensive could succeed was if western weapons were much superior to Russian weapons, western trained soldiers much superior to Russian soldiers and Russian morale was dismal. If all these factors where true, UkrAF might have had a chance to succeed, but nothing seems to corroborate those assumptions. Many on the Ukrainian and western side had anticipated hard initial resistance from RuAF, but after 2-3 days fighting and advances of around 6-8 km, they expected an increasing collapse of Russian morale and the real breakthroughs would come. Nothing of this seems to be other than wishful thinking, since fighting still are in the grey zone and Russian resistance are unbroken. At the same time Ukrainian forces take heavy casualties both in soldiers and vehicles. The offensive isn't over yet and the main Ukrainian attack fist remains with probably over 600 tanks and as many IFVs around Orikhiv. But the future for the Ukrainian offensive looks bleak if their vanguard is destroyed before they reach the Russian main defence lines. The probability is large that Ukraine has to use up their main force to get through a couple of the Russian defencelines and then they will run out of forces to exploit any successes and be forced to withdraw. To summarise, the most likely outcome of the Ukrainian offensive is minor territorial gains at a horrendous cost. As I've said before it seems to be Kursk 2.0 I largely agree with the above assessment (even though Kursk 1.0 was much larger and way more balanced). The biggest tactical mistake I see on the Ukrainian side is the bunching up of vehicles. The distance between combat vehicle on roads and in open fields should be 100 meter, not 10, 5 or 1 meter like in the picture below. The Ukrainian columns regularly get slaughtered by artillery strikes because they always(!) bunch up. Keeping distances is a basic training lecture for any combined arms warfare unit.

bigger Where are the air defenses? Ukraine has received 37 German Gepard (cheetah) air defense tanks. These are old but can keep the air clean, each within a 10 kilometer wide bubble. The Gepards were specifically designed to cover tank and mech-infantry battalions in battle. But judging from the number of drone videos the Russian can put out, there is not one Gepard in the whole area. Also where are the electromagnetic measures. Why can Russian artillery directing drones fly over the combat zone but not Ukrainians? Why are no fog grenades used by Ukrainian artillery to cover the approaches and breaching attempts by Ukrainian armor? How are piecemeal commitments, wave after wave but hours apart, going to change anything when what is needed are massive consistent pushes to get through? Folks, these are basics, not higher level operational or strategic issues. I have drilled these basics into conscripts. If you can't even get those right, after allegedly intense 'western' training, what hope is there to breach through seriously prepared Russian defense lines? None. Here is some of the damage done to last night's and today's morning attacks by an allegedly prime Ukrainian unit, the 43rd 'western' trained brigade, that uses prime 'western' equipment.

bigger

bigger

bigger

bigger Here is video of more. The first serious probing attacks for the counter offensive started on June 5. I have listed the Ukrainian losses the Russian Ministry of Defense has since reported. Note that these numbers are mostly for the whole front, not just for the Zaporizhia region.

bigger These numbers are, like in most frontline reports, likely too high. But even if one only takes them at half or a third for real they are still frightening high.

bigger A whole brigade, more likely a third each of three brigades, has been wasted for zero gains. Consider that we are five days in and the Ukrainian forces, despite using Leopards and Bradleys, their main forces, have hardly crossed the first contact line. The real Russian first defense lines are still miles away and there are three or more of those. The History Legends Youtube channel calls this a disaster. I agree with that too. Posted by b on June 9, 2023 at 16:33 UTC | Permalink Comments next page  next page 
June 09, 2023 Media: One Side "Says" - The Other "Provides No Evidence" The recent reporting on the conflict in Ukraine in 'western' media has reveled a deceiving scheme in which baseless claims from Kiev are taken for granted while everything Moscow says, even when based on facts, is put into doubt. Here are a few examples: White House dismisses ludicrous Russian claims US planned Kremlin drone strikes - Guardian - May 4, 2023 Asked about an accusation by the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, that Washington had ordered Wednesdays strike, John Kirby, the US National Security Council spokesman, said: One thing I can tell you for certain is that the US did not have any involvement with this incident, contrary to Mr Peskovs lies, and thats just what they are: lies.

...

Earlier on Thursday, Peskov claimed the US had dictated the plan of what Russia said was a drone attack on the Kremlin intended to kill Vladimir Putin. Peskov did not provide any evidence to support the allegations. What evidence did the U.S. provide? Ukrainian forces advance on Russians, deny counteroffensive has begun - Washington Post - June 5, 2023 Ukraines military made gains against Russian forces in multiple locations along the eastern front, the countrys deputy defense minister said Monday, as an increasing cadence in combat operations raised speculation that the much-anticipated counteroffensive was finally imminent. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar wrote on Telegram that troops conducted multiple offensive actions in the eastern Donetsk region despite stiff resistance and the enemys attempts to hold the occupied lines and positions. But Ukrainian officials denied claims by Moscow that they had launched the counteroffensive  and that Russian troops had thwarted it. A spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry said Ukrainian forces had started the counteroffensive by trying to push through five areas of the Russian line in Donetsk but had been repelled. The statement by Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, in a video posted by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti, could not be verified. The piece repeats the claims of "gains" made by the Ukrainian side but puts the Russian claim into doubt. How many of Ukrainian claims of victories "could not be verified" but were senselessly repeated? Ukrainian Armed Forces say they have no information on large scale offensive in Donetsk region - CNN - June 5, 2023 Ukraine does not have information on the large-scale offensive that Russian claims was launched against them in Donetsk region, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian armed forces Bohdan Senyk, told CNN. On Monday, Russia claimed they have repelled, killed and captured multiple Ukrainian units in the region, but did not provide any evidence of the fact. Next case: Key Ukrainian dam blown up, Kyiv blames Russia - Politico - June 6, 2023 Ukraine blamed Russia for explosions at a key dam, which unleashed massive flooding and threatened 80 settlements in what Kyiv says is a last-ditch attempt to derail its counteroffensive. In a statement, Ukraine's Southern Operational Command said "Russian occupation troops blew up the dam" at Nova Kakhovka, in the Kherson region in eastern Ukraine.

...

The Russian-installed mayor of Nova Kakhovka, Vladimir Leontiev, denied allegations the dam had been sabotaged by the Kremlin's forces and claimed Ukraine was responsible for the damage, according to Russian state media. Leontiev did not provide any evidence for his claims. Neither did Ukraine for its claims but there is not even a hint in the piece that Kiev may be lying. And another one: Ukraine Mounts Multiple Attacks on Russian Occupiers - New York Times - June 8, 2023 On one side - just flat out statements taken for granted: Three senior U.S. officials, as well as military analysts, said that a long-awaited major Ukrainian counteroffensive appeared to be underway, after months spent mobilizing and training new units, and arming them with advanced Western weapons.

...

Kyiv said little about the intensified fighting, neither confirming nor denying Russian claims, and Ukrainian officials have said they will not discuss details for reasons of operational secrecy.

...

A Ukrainian deputy defense minister, Hanna Malyar, said a battle was underway in the area of a larger town about 10 miles away in the neighboring Donetsk region, Velyka Novosilka, but it was unclear if she was referring to the same clash. The other side's claims are depicted as dubious: The Russian war bloggers, who have become a major source of information from the front lines, said Ukraines forces had suffered heavy losses, though such claims could not be confirmed and in the past have often been exaggerated.

...

The Russian account, like most claims about what was happening at the front, could not be confirmed independently, but videos verified by The New York Times showed a Ukrainian armored vehicle near Velyka Novosilka hitting a land mine. I could add a dozen more pieces that follow the scheme. Ukrainian or U.S. claims lead the piece without being put into doubt. Russian counterclaims come a few paragraphs down and are immediately said to lack any evidence. By the way: What the New York Times claims to have confirmed via video is just one of many screw ups on the Ukrainian side that can be seen these days. Over the last 48 hours I have watched half a dozen drone videos of Ukrainian vehicles rumbling in tight columns over open fields, without minesweepers, without smokescreen or artillery cover, only to get blown up in minefields and massacred by anti-tank missiles. No seasoned platoon or company leader would plan and execute attacks like that but, watching those videos, I doubt that the Ukraine still has any of those. Then we have this: Ukrainian forces have suffered losses in heavy equipment and soldiers as they met greater than expected resistance from Russian forces in their first attempt to breach Russian lines in the east of the country in recent days, two senior US officials tell CNN. One US official described the losses  which include US supplied MRAP armored personnel vehicles as significant. Did any of the U.S. or NATO leaders really think that the Ukrainian forces would have a f***ing chance by senselessly running into well prepared Russian defenses? Really??? Posted by b on June 9, 2023 at 8:25 UTC | Permalink Comments next page  next page 
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Donald Trump's indictment on 37 counts of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate represents the most serious legal jeopardy so far for Trump, coming less than three months after he was charged in New York with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Here's a look at the charges, the special counsel's investigation and how Trump's case differs from those of other politicians known to be in possession of classified documents:

WHAT ARE THE CHARGES?

Trump faces 37 counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, according to the indictment unsealed Friday. The charges include counts of retaining classified information, obstructing justice and making false statements, among other crimes.

Trump is accused of keeping documents related to nuclear weaponry in the United States and the nuclear capabilities of a foreign country, along with documents from White House intelligence briefings, including some that detail the military capabilities of the U.S. and other countries, according to the indictment. Prosecutors alleged Trump showed off the documents to people who did not have security clearances to review them and later tried to conceal documents from his own lawyers as they sought to comply with federal demands to find and return documents.

The top charges carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.

After leaving office in 2021, the former president showed someone working for his political action committee a map that detailed a military operation in a foreign country, prosecutors allege in the document. On another occasion that year, Trump showed a writer, a publisher and two of his staffers  none of whom had security clearances  a military plan of attack.

HOW IS TRUMP REACTING?

Trump, on his Truth Social app on Thursday, called his indictment a DARK DAY for the United States of America. In a video post, he said, Im innocent and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly. Within 20 minutes of breaking the news, his 2024 presidential campaign sent out a fundraising missive asking for financial support.

On Friday, he continued to post about it on social media, lashing out at the special counsel who investigated the case, seeking to blame President Joe Biden, labeling the investigation a WITCH HUNT and declaring, I had nothing to hide, nor do I now.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The Justice Department unsealed the indictment Friday, the first time the department confirmed Trump was being charged with a crime. Special counsel Jack Smith, who filed the charges, made his first public statement Friday afternoon, saying in brief remarks to reporters in Washington that the country has one set of laws and they apply to everyone." He said prosecutors would seek a speedy trial.

Trump is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday in South Florida. It wasnt immediately clear what the procedure would look like.

When he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney in the New York case, Trump surrendered to authorities, where he was booked behind closed doors and appeared in the courtroom, sitting with his lawyers at the defense table.

The Florida case was initially assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Trump and who previously granted his request for an independent arbiter to review documents obtained during an FBI search of his Florida estate.

HOW DID THIS CASE COME ABOUT?

Officials with the National Archives and Records Administration reached out to representatives for Trump in spring 2021 when they realized that important material from his time in office was missing.

According to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents are considered property of the U.S. government and must be preserved.

A Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago. In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trumps Florida home, later telling Justice Department officials that they contained a lot of classified material.

That May, the FBI and Justice Department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Trumps possession. Investigators who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Trumps lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.

But that assertion turned out to be false. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents.

In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings  including some at the top secret level  have been recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021.

HOW DID A SPECIAL COUNSEL GET INVOLVED?

Last year, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland picked Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor with a background in public corruption probes, to lead investigations into the presence of classified documents at Trumps Florida estate, as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.

Smith's appointment was a recognition by Garland of the politics involved in an investigation into a former president and current White House candidate. Garland himself was selected by Democratic President Joe Biden, whom Trump is seeking to challenge for the White House in 2024.

Special counsels are appointed in cases in which the Justice Department perceives itself as having a conflict or where its deemed to be in the public interest to have someone outside the government come in and take responsibility for a matter.

According to the Code of Federal Regulations, a special counsel must have a reputation for integrity and impartial decision making, as well as an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies.

DIDNT BIDEN AND FORMER VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE HAVE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS, TOO?

Yes, but the circumstances of their cases are vastly different from those involving Trump.

After classified documents were found at Biden's think tank and Pence's Indiana home, their lawyers notified authorities and quickly arranged for them to be handed over. They also authorized other searches by federal authorities to search for additional documents.

There is no indication either was aware of the existence of the records before they were found, and no evidence has so far emerged that Biden or Pence sought to conceal the discoveries. Thats important because the Justice Department historically looks for willfulness in deciding whether to bring criminal charges.

A special counsel was appointed earlier this year to probe how classified materials ended up at Bidens Delaware home and former office. But even if the Justice Department were to find Bidens case prosecutable on the evidence, its Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a president is immune from prosecution during his time in office.

As for Pence, the Justice Department informed his legal team earlier this month that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against him over his handling of the documents.

DOES A FEDERAL INDICTMENT PREVENT TRUMP FROM RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT?

No. Neither the indictment itself nor a conviction would prevent Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

And as the New York case showed, criminal charges have historically been a boon to his fundraising. The campaign announced that it had raised over $4 million in the 24 hours after that indictment became public, far smashing its previous record after the FBI search of Trumps Mar-a-Lago club.

HOW ARE TRUMPS REPUBLICAN RIVALS REACTING TO THE NEWS?

Many of Trump's challengers for the GOP nomination jumped to his defense after news of the indictment broke.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump's top rival for the 2024 nomination, accused the Justice Department of political bias in charging the former president.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, DeSantis tweeted. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation."

He questioned why the Justice Department had been so zealous in bringing charges against Trump and so passive about going after former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton or Biden's son Hunter.

Campaigning in New Hampshire on Friday, former Vice President Pence said he was deeply troubled to see the indictment because he believed it would further divide the nation. He also called on Garland to make the indictment public as soon as possible.

You need to stand up and explain to us why this was necessary before the sun sets today," Pence said.

Trump's United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, also decried the indictment, saying, This is not how justice should be pursued in our country.

The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics," she said Friday. "Its time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions.

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said Thursday that he felt the justice systems scales are weighted based on politics. In America, every single person is presumed innocent, not guilty, Scott said on Fox News, decrying the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president.

Biotech entrepreneur and anti-woke activist Vivek Ramaswamy said the federal case was part of an affront to every citizen. Reiterating his comments that he would pardon Trump, Ramaswamy called it hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden over his own classified documents case.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who called for Trump to drop out of the race after the New York charges were filed, said the federal indictment marked a sad day for our country and reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.

___

Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in Des Moines, Iowa and Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix contributed to this report.
Foreign Medical Graduate Examination 2023 https://career.webindia123.com/career/dates_and_events/entrance/medi/foreign-medical-graduate-examination.htm Details of Foreign Medical Graduate Examination 2023 2023-6-9 2023-6-20 https://career.webindia123.com/career/images/exams.png India India Foreign Medical Graduate Examination 2023 Medical

Foreign Medical Graduate Examination (FMGE)

Category : Medical Admissions 2023 Published : On June 9, 2023 By Webindia123 Editor

Important Dates

Availability of Information Bulletin 31st May 2023 onwards Last Date of Online Registration 20th June 2023 Examination Dates for FMGE 2023 30th July 2023 Issue of Admit Card 25th July 2023 Declaration of result By 30th August 2023

Foreign Medical Graduate Examination is a screening test for medical graduates to be eligible to practice medicine in the country. FMGE exam is conducted biannually in the month of June and December by the National Board of Examinations for Indian and Overseas Citizens of India (OCIs) to obtain the registration certificate from the National Medical Commission (NMC) or State Medical Council (SMC).

National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) has been entrusted with the responsibility to conduct the Screening Test as per Screening Test Regulations 2002. Role of NBEMS is limited to conduct of the test, publishing the result and handing over the result to National Medical Commission & all State Medical Councils.

Application for FMGE June 2022 session can only be submitted online through NBEMS website https://nbe.edu.in There is no other methodology for application submission. Application submitted through any other mode shall be summarily rejected.

Eligibility

The candidate must meet/fulfil the following criteria:

He / She is a citizen of India or Overseas Citizen of India. The candidate should possess a primary medical qualification, which is confirmed by the Indian Embassy concerned, to be a recognized qualification for enrolment as medical practitioner in the country in which the institution awarding the said qualification is situated. Candidates must note that it is mandatory for them to submit proof /documentary evidence that clearly establishes that the result of the final

examination for such a primary medical qualification was declared on or before the cut-off date i.e. 30th April 2022. The document submitted must confirm that the candidate has successfully completed all required courses of the primary medical courses with eligible results as per requirement of the institution concerned. In the event that the proof / documentary evidence submitted by the candidate does not clearly establish that the result of the final examination of his primary medical qualification was not declared on or before 30th April 2022, the candidature shall be cancelled and the candidate shall be declared as ineligible. Candidates who fail to submit the documents as prescribed in the Information Bulletin for FMGE will not be allowed to appear in the examination and would be declared ineligible to appear.

Test Fees

FMGE Exam fee :

Rs. 6000/-

(GST@ 18%)-1080/-

Total Amount-7080/-

Please visit the website www.nbe.edu.in

Application procedure

The online registration website for FMGE 2022 for admission to MDS courses for 2022 session is available at website www.nbe.edu.in Candidates are advised to carefully go through the registration & scheduling guide available on the website before starting their online registration & scheduling.

More details can be available from the official website.

Contact Details Address : Foreign Medical Graduate Examination

Medical Enclave, Ansari Nagar, Mahatma Gandhi Marg (Ring Road), New Delhi-110029 Phone : Helpline Number- 0124-6771700 / 1800 11 1700 (Toll Free) Fax : - Mobile : - E-mail : Contact I Website : www.nbe.edu.in

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This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Midland Reporter-Telegram Show More Show Less 2 of 3 City of Midland Show More Show Less 3 of 3





Betenbough Homes, a leading home builder in West Texas, will host a groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday for its newest Midland community. This event will take place at the future site of the Mockingbird Ridge community, located near the corner of Mockingbird Lane and Fairgrounds Road on at 11:30 a.m., according to a press release. All homeowners, city leaders, media, business partners and non-profit organizations are invited to attend.

The fully themed, new home community will offer affordable floor plans, ranging from 1,000 to 2,660 square feet, with a starting price of $1,700 a month, according to a press release. Community amenities in Mockingbird Ridge will include two themed parks and nearly 2 miles of walking trails. Children living in this community will attend schools in Midland ISD.
CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  The brother of a gay American who was attacked and fell from a Sydney cliff top in 1988 said elements within local police had demonized their family over their pursuit of justice.

An Australian man was sentenced to nine years in prison Thursday for killing Scott Johnson. His older brother Steve Johnson led the familys efforts to overturn a coroners finding in 1989 that the American mathematician had taken his own life.

Steve Johnson told Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Friday that evidence in a New South Wales state government inquiry into hate crimes had confirmed our worst fears that the police were really not only opposed to the investigation but demonizing our family.

Its still a question mark why? Maybe they thought of Scotts case as a tinderbox that would force them to work on the other 100 cases of gay men who died during the same period, Steve Johnson said.

There are still some in the police force that are opposed to trying to solve these other cases of gay deaths and we think that they need to, he added.

Text messages between senior police in 2015 revealed their hostility toward the Johnson family.

Former Deputy Police Commissioner Mick Willing, then commander of the homicide squad, warned then Detective Chief Inspector Pamela Young in a text message against letting them win.

Young replied: Mick  I will not let them win  that is not in my DNA.

Willing added: We will come out on top. Both police officers have since left the force.

The text messages were exchanged the day after Young told a television news program there was evidence and information that Scott Johnson took his own life.

A second coroners inquiry into Johnson's case in 2012 could not explain the death, but overturned the 1989 finding of suicide. The coroner found similarities between Scott Johnson's death and the deaths of three gay men off the coast of the Sydney coastal suburb of Bondi between 1985 and 1989. The coroner found there was a possibility that Scott Johnson was the victim of a gay hate crime similar to those that occurred in Bondi.

A third inquiry ruled in 2017 that Scott Johnson had been attacked by an unknown assailant or assailants because he was perceived to be homosexual.

A breakthrough came in 2020 when police offered a 1 million Australian dollar ($667,000) reward for information. Steve Johnson, a wealthy entrepreneur based in Boston, offered his own money to double the reward.

Scott Phillip White, 52, was charged after his former wife came forward with crucial information. He eventually said he had punched Johnson in an argument and the man had fallen off the cliff to his death.

A government inquiry began hearing evidence last year of unsolved deaths resulting from hate crimes over four decades in New South Wales where police were notoriously indifferent to such violence.

The Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes will report on Aug. 30. The acronym refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer people.

Willing told the inquiry last month that Young regarded the Johnson family as police opponents. Willing said Young held the view that one of the police objectives at a third inquest would be to defeat the Johnson family by convincing the coroner that it was not homicide. Police rated Scott Johnson's death as zero solvability.

Willing described the police relationship with the Johnsons as adversarial, but said he did not see the police objective to be to defeat the family.

But in light of the text message exchange, Peter Gray, a lawyer assisting the inquiry, urged Commissioner John Sackar to find that Willing shared Young's view that police should oppose and prevent a coroner finding of homicide.

Willing also described Steve Johnson as obsessive and erratic.

Young has not given evidence to the inquiry. But she told the ABC on Friday that she had objected in 2015 to the powerful supporters the Johnson family had attracted.

No other homicide next of kin gets the priority and personal attention from government or the police hierarchy, Young said.

Steve Johnson described his relationship with the NSW Police Force as a little mixed. The family was very close friends with Detective Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans amazing team of investigators that arrested White in 2020.

Steve Johnson said the conviction on Wednesday of Stanley Bruce Early, 77, for murdering Raymond Keam in a gay hangout in the Sydney suburb of Randwick in 1987 was proof that old cases could be solved.

Asked about Steve Johnsons criticism that the family had been demonized, the police media office referred to Yeomans comments outside court on Thursday.

The police should be a voice for the victims of crime and thats what we did, Yeomans said. How staunch hes (Steve Johnsons) been and how remarkable the family has been through all these years, has just been incredible. And in the end, all we did was our job."
Meet with Scienscopes Advanced Inspection Experts at the SMTA Queretaro Expo Published: 09 June 2023 by Tyler Hanes by Tyler Hanes

CHINO, CA  Scienscope International is excited to announce plans to exhibit at the SMTA Queretaro Expo & Tech Forum in Mexico on Thursday, July 13, 2023. As a prominent supplier of cabinet-style micro-focus X-ray systems in the United States, Scienscope offers a range of solutions for the production process. The Scienscope team looks forward to showcasing the companys advanced inspection equipment and discussing Component Management, X-ray Inspection and Optical Inspection Solutions.

Scienscopes local sales representative, Mario Montano, will be available during the show to answer any questions regarding the companys solutions, while Cesar Martinez will be available to discuss Optical Inspection Solutions.

Scienscope International understands the demanding requirements of modern electronics manufacturing and the company designs products to provide unparalleled precision, speed, and accuracy in detecting defects and anomalies in critical components. As a one-stop solution provider for warehouse automation, machine vision, and X-ray and optical inspection, Scienscope offers customization based on your facility's needs. Scienscope component counters can save you time and money, reduce labor, and avoid "line down" scenarios due to a lack of components.

Visit Scienscope International at the SMTA Queretaro Expo & Tech Forum to learn more about its state-of-the-art systems and find out how Scienscope International can help improve your production process. For further information, please email Scienscope at info@scienscope.com, call 1-909-590-7273, or visit www.scienscope.com
A lava lake forms at Halemaumau as seen from the west rim of the Kilauea caldera during the volcano's eruption in Hawaii, U.S. June 7, 2023 in a still image from webcam video. USGS/Handout via REUTERS
Trump says he has been indicted for mishandling US documents
Donald Trump said Thursday that he was indicted for mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate, a remarkable development that makes him the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges by the federal government that he once oversaw as he seeks to reclaim the White House.

The indictment carries unmistakably grave legal consequences, including the possibility of prison if he's convicted.

The Justice Department did not immediately publicly confirm the indictment. But two people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to discuss it publicly said Trump's team had been informed that he had been indicted on seven counts and that prosecutors had contacted lawyers to advise them of the indictment shortly before Trump announced it himself on his Truth Social platform.

This is indeed a DARK DAY for the United States of America, Trump posted. We are a Country in serious and rapid Decline, but together we will Make America Great Again!

Within 20 minutes of his announcement, Trump, who said he was due in court Tuesday afternoon in Miami, had begun fundraising off it for his 2024 presidential campaign.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. As the prosecution moves forward, it will pit Trumps claims of sweeping executive power against Attorney General Merrick Garlands oft-stated mantra that no person, including a former commander in chief, should be regarded as above the law.

The indictment arises from a monthslong investigation by special counsel Jack Smith into whether Trump broke the law by holding onto hundreds of documents marked classified at his Palm Beach property, Mar-a-Lago, and whether Trump took steps to obstruct the governments efforts to recover the records.

Prosecutors have said that Trump took roughly 300 classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, including some 100 that were seized by the FBI last August in a search of the home that underscored the gravity of the Justice Departments investigation.

Trump and his team have long seen the special counsel investigation as far more perilous than the New York matter  both politically and legally. Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trumps attorneys were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.

But it remains unclear what the immediate and long-term political consequences will be for Trump. His first indictment spurred millions of dollars in contributions from angry supporters and didnt damage Trump in the polls. No matter what, the indictment  and the legal fight that follows  will throw Trump back into the spotlight, sucking attention away from the other candidates who are trying to build momentum in the 2024 presidential race.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump opponent in the primary, condemned the indictment on Twitter, saying it represented the weaponization of federal law enforcement.

Trump has insisted he was entitled to keep the classified documents when he left the White House, and has also claimed without evidence that he had declassified them.

The former president has long sought to use mounting legal troubles to his political advantage, complaining on social media and at public events that the cases are being driven by Democratic prosecutors out to hurt his 2024 election campaign. He is likely to rely on that playbook again, reviving his longstanding claims that the Justice Department  which, during his presidency, investigated whether his 2016 campaign had colluded with Russia  is somehow weaponized against him.

The case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years  as president and private citizen  but had never before charged him with a crime. Garland was appointed by President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection in 2024.

Among the various state and federal investigations that Trump faces, legal experts  including Trumps own former attorney general  had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as one of the most likely to result in indictment and the one where evidence seemed to favor the government.

Court records unsealed last year showed federal investigators believed they had probable cause that multiple crimes had been committed, including the retention of national defense information, destruction of government records and obstruction of an investigation.

Since then, the Justice Department has amassed additional evidence and secured grand jury testimony from people close to Trump, including his own lawyers. The statutes governing the handling of classified records and obstruction are felonies that could carry years in prison in the event of a conviction.

Signs had mounted for weeks that an indictment was near, including a June 5 meeting between Trumps lawyers and Justice Department officials. After that meeting, Trump said on social media that he anticipated he could be charged, even as he insisted he had done nothing wrong.

Though the bulk of the investigative work had been handled in Washington, with a grand jury meeting there for months, it recently emerged that prosecutors were presenting evidence before a separate panel in Florida, where many of the alleged acts of obstruction scrutinized by prosecutors  including efforts to move the boxes  took place.

Trumps legal troubles extend beyond the New York indictment and classified documents case.

The special counsel has a separate probe underway focused on efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. And the district attorney in Georgias Fulton County is investigating Trump over alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election in that state.

The classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, along with thousands of other unclassified government records, were taken from the White House to the Florida club after Trump left office in January 2021.

The Justice Department has said Trump and his lawyers repeatedly resisted efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration to get the documents back. After months of back-and-forth, Trump representatives returned 15 boxes of records in January 2022, including about 184 documents that officials said had classified markings on them.

FBI and Justice Department investigators issued a subpoena in May 2022 for classified documents that remained in Trumps possession. But after a Trump lawyer provided three dozen records and asserted that a diligent search of the property had been done, officials came to suspect even more documents remained.

They obtained surveillance footage boxes of records being moved from a storage room at Mar-a-Lago.

The investigation had simmered for months before bursting into front-page news in remarkable fashion last August. Thats when FBI agents served a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago and removed 33 boxes containing classified records, including top-secret documents stashed in a storage room and desk drawer and commingled with personal belongings. Some records were so sensitive that investigators needed upgraded security clearances to review them, the Justice Department has said.

The investigation into Trump had appeared complicated  politically, if not legally  by the discovery of documents with classified markings in the Delaware home and former Washington office of President Joe Biden, as well as in the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence. The Justice Department recently informed Pence that he would not face charges, while a second special counsel continues to investigate Bidens handling of classified documents.

But compared with Trump, there are key differences in the facts and legal issues surrounding Bidens and Pences handling of documents, including that representatives for both men say the documents were returned as soon as they were found.

In contrast, investigators quickly zeroed on whether Trump, who for four years as president expressed disdain for the FBI and Justice Department, had sought to obstruct the inquiry by refusing to turn over all the requested documents. The focus on obstruction was reminiscent of the special counsel investigation Trump faced as president, when prosecutors examined whether Trump illegally tried to thwart the Russia probe, including by firing his FBI director.

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Timeline: Key dates in the investigation into Trump's Mar-a-Lago docs Jan. 20, 2021 May 2021 December 2021 NARA "continued to make requests" for records it believed to be missing for several months, according to the affidavit. Around late December 2021, a Trump representative informed the agency that an additional 12 boxes of records that should have been turned over had been found at the former president's Mar-a-Lago club and residence and were ready to be retrieved. Jan. 18, 2022 NARA received 15 boxes of presidential records that had been stored at Mar-a-Lago  14 of which, it would later be revealed, contained classified documents. The documents were found mixed in with an assortment of other material, including newspapers, magazines, photos and personal correspondence. In total, the boxes were found to contain 184 documents with classified markings, including 67 marked confidential, 92 secret and 25 top secret. Agents who inspected the boxes also found special markings suggesting they included information from highly sensitive human sources or the collection of electronic "signals" authorized by a court under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Feb. 9, 2022 Feb. 18, 2022 Feb. 19, 2022 NARA revealed in a letter to a congressional oversight committee that classified information was found in the 15 recovered boxes and confirmed the Justice Department referral. Trump's Save America PAC released another statement insisting, "The National Archives did not 'find' anything," but "were given, upon request, Presidential Records in an ordinary and routine process to ensure the preservation of my legacy and in accordance with the Presidential Records Act." April 12, 2022 NARA informed Trump of its intent to provide the documents to the FBI, at the request of the Justice Department. A Trump representative requested an extension until April 29. April 29, 2022 May 10, 2022 NARA informed Trump's lawyers that it would provide the FBI access to the records as soon as May 12. May 11, 2022 The Justice Department issued a subpoena for additional records. June 3, 2022 June 8, 2022 The Justice Department sent a letter to Trump's lawyer requesting that the storage room be secured, and that "all of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago (along with any other items in that room) be preserved in that room in their current condition until farther notice." Aug. 5, 2022 Aug. 8, 2022 Aug. 12, 2022 Aug. 26, 2022 Aug. 30, 2022
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Three west-central Illinois students are among those named to the spring semester dean's list for academic achievement at Greenville University in Illinois.

To qualify for the dean's list, a student must successfully complete a minimum of 12 hours for the semester. Freshmen (0-29.5 credits) must have a 3.5 or higher semester grade point average. Sophomores, juniors and seniors must have a 3.7 or higher semester grade point average.
Jesper Klausen/Science Photo Library

Illinois is starting a new program to help low- and moderate-income residents afford to buy a home.

Illinois HFA1 will provide a 30-year, fixed-interest mortgage and $10,000 worth of assistance for down payment and closing costs. The down payment assistance comes in the form of an interest-free second mortgage with payments deferred for 30 years; as such, the borrower does not need to pay back the assistance until they refinance, sell the home or pay the first mortgage.
The Journal-Courier won six awards and received second-place general excellence honors in the Illinois Press Association's annual contest.

More than 1,400 entries were submitted in 38 categories from nearly 100 daily and non-daily newspapers. The Journal-Courier competed in Division D, against other daily newspapers up to 10,000 circulation.

Winners were announced Thursday during the press association's yearly convention.

A second-place award was given to Samantha McDaniel-Ogletree for her photo series "Fire & ice" of Jacksonville firefighters training for cold-water rescues.

Angela Bauer took second place in the Business/Economic Reporting category for her story "State tries appetizing rebrand of 'bad boy' carp".

David C.L. Bauer received second place in the Informational Graphic category.

Dave Dawson was awarded third place in Feature Writing for his article, "String along: Beer cans unique to Modesto man's homemade guitars."

Dawson also received a fourth-place award in the Agricultural Story category for his story, "Farmer committed to keeping carbon in ground, out of air."

David Bauer also received fourth place in the Headline Writing category.

Iowa Press Association members judged contest entries.
MOUNT STERLING  More than 30 west-central Illinois nonprofit organizations showcased their organizations' missions at Dot Foods' first-ever Giving Festival earlier this month.

Besides hosting the nonprofits and surprising them with grants totaling $45,000 as a thank you for their ongoing partnership, Dot Foods also recognized its employees for giving back to their communities and announcing the 2022 Volunteer of the Year during the event at its distribution center in Mount Sterling.

Nonprofits that participated in the event included the United Way, the American Red Cross, the Alzheimer's Association, various school districts, and multiple food pantries, including the Central Illinois Food Bank and the Beardstown Food Pantry.

The new event was co-sponsored by Dot's charitable committee and its Teaming with Local Charities volunteer program which is celebrating its 15-year anniversary this year. Dot's charitable group and TLC reach into 11 west-central Illinois counties to volunteer and provide grants and food donations.

"Supporting the community was an integral part of Dot Foods co-founders Robert and Dorothy Tracy's lives, and volunteerism is a part of Dot Foods' culture," said Jessica Mock, director of the TLC program.

"We are always looking for ways to encourage employees to volunteer  and always looking for organizations that could use Dot's support through grants, donations, and volunteerism," Mock said.

Becky Long of Camp Point was named the 2022 Volunteer of the Year. As part of the program, Dot Foods gave her a $1,000 donation to the charity of her choice, which she directed to St. Mary's in Mount Sterling to be used in support of veteran memorials at their cemetery, and a paid vacation to Osage Beach, Missouri.

"Becky has volunteered a total of 484 hours through Dot's TLC Program, and her passion for volunteerism is second to none," Mock said. "Her dedication is visible across each of our programs, from food pantries to schools, and also supporting the local cemeteries in her community."

More than 180 Dot Foods employees at locations in Mount Sterling, Burley, Idaho, and St. Louis, Missouri, volunteered for a combined 2,810 hours in 2022 as part of Dot Foods' TLC program. Employees donated $23,000 to local charity organizations via employee program incentives.

The other 2022 Volunteer of the Year finalists were Tana Parsano, Jennifer Knapp, Brandon Scranton, Amber Elliot, Daniel Koch, Stacey Volk, Patty Barchak, Lora Decker and Celia Eicken.

Dot Charitable made $11.2 million in donations of money and product in the communities the company calls home. The Mount Sterling charitable committee donated $1.4 million to local groups in 2022.
Jacksonville Police

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 A 41-year-old Jacksonville woman was arrested at 8:36 p.m. Wednesday in the 1000 block of West Morton Avenue on a domestic battery charge after is was reported she punched and kicked her boyfriend.

 A 41-year-old Jacksonville woman was arrested at 8:14 p.m. Wednesday in the 800 block of West College Avenue on a Calhoun County warrant accusing her of violating a court order.

 A 43-year-old Jacksonville woman was arrested at 9:49 a.m. Wednesday at North Church Street and West Independence Avenue on a Morgan County warrant accusing her of violating probation on a charge of possession of methamphetamine.

 A 24-year-old Jacksonville man was arrested on a charge of driving under the influence and cited on a charge of reckless driving at 12:41 a.m. Wednesday in the 600 block of East State Street. Police said he was seen speeding when he crossed railroad tracks and his car went airborne.

THEFTS, BURGLARIES

 Police are investigating a man's report that he was pushed to the ground at 3:07 a.m. Thursday in the 800 block of West College Avenue after confronting someone about taking his wallet.

 A bicycle worth more than $500 was stolen from a residence in the 800 block of Hardin Avenue, according to a report filed at 8:07 a.m. Wednesday.

VANDALISM

 Someone broke into a vehicle in the 400 block of South Sandy Street, according to a report filed at 4:10 a.m. Thursday.
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KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Alyona Shkrygalovas family kept a rubber boat for their daily needs along the broad Dnieper River.

The boat was nothing special until Tuesday, when the Kakhovka dam ruptured and sent a flood from Ukraines largest reservoir into cities, towns and countryside downstream in a region that has suffered terribly since Russia invaded the country last year.

Water climbed waist-high on the second floor of Shkrygalovas two-storey house. Her family began using their boat to scavenge for food, and find houses on higher ground with dry places to sleep. That way, they survived in the war zone until Shkrygalova, 60, spotted a group of people in a boat and raised yellow, white and pink fabrics to get their attention.

We were scared, we were trying to understand, Whos approaching us? Are they Russian or not? We raised a flag, Shkrygalova said.

Lucky for her and her family, they were Ukrainian.

According to those stranded and their desperate Ukrainian rescuers, Russian forces are taking rescuers boats. Some say the soldiers will only help people with Russian passports.

Russian soldiers are standing at the checkpoints, preventing (rescuers) from approaching the most-affected areas and taking away the boats, said one volunteer, Yaroslav Vasiliev. They are afraid of saboteurs, they suspect everyone.

Others have been turned away from rescue.

Viktoria Mironova-Baka said she has been in touch from Germany with relatives stuck in the flooded region.

My relatives said that Russian soldiers were coming up to the house today by boat, but they said they would only take those with Russian passports, she told The Associated Press. Her grandmother, aunt and more than a dozen other people are taking shelter in the attic of a two-story house.

Details of life in Russian-occupied Ukraine are often unclear. The AP could not independently verify reports of boat seizures or that only Russians were being evacuated, but the account is in line with reporting by independent Russian media.

Its a sharp contrast to Ukrainian-controlled territory flooded by the dam collapse. Authorities there have aggressively evacuated civilians and brought in emergency supplies. On Thursday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy traveled to the area to assess the damage. Russian President Vladimir Putin has no plans at the current moment to visit affected Moscow-occupied areas, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.

The latest disaster in the region began Tuesday, when the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, roughly 80 kilometers (50 miles) upstream from the town of Oleshky, collapsed, sending torrents of water down the Dnieper and across the wars front lines. The Russian-occupied town across the river from the city of Kherson had a prewar population of 24,000.

Officials say that more than 6,000 people have been evacuated from dozens of inundated cities, towns and villages on both sides of the river. But the true scale of the disaster remains unclear for a region that was once home to tens of thousands of people.

Officials on both sides indicated that about 20 people were known to have died, but the figures could not be independently verified. Oleshkys Ukrainian mayor, Yevhen Ryshchuk, said corpses were floating to the surface.

Many of the survivors are homeless, and tens of thousands are without drinking water.

The floods ruined crops, displaced land mines, caused widespread environmental damage, and set the stage for long-term electricity shortages.

Ukraine says Russia destroyed the dam with explosives. Russia accuses Ukraine of destroying it with a missile strike.

A drone flown Wednesday by an AP team over the dams wreckage revealed none of the scorch marks or shrapnel scars typical of a bombardment. The bulk of the dam itself is now submerged, and The AP images offered a limited snapshot, making it difficult to rule out any scenario. The dam also had been weakened by Russian neglect and water had been washing over it for weeks. It had been under Russian control since the invasion in February 2022.

Compounding the tragedy, Russia has been shelling areas hit by the flooding, including the front-line city of Kherson. On Thursday, Russian shelling echoed not far from a square in Kherson where emergency crews and volunteers were dispensing aid. Some evacuation points in the city were hit, wounding nine people, according to Ukrainian officials.

Russia claims that the Ukrainians also have been shelling flood-hit areas that Moscow controls. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov praised the selfless work of Russian emergency teams helping victims of the flooding, noting that they have been working under constant Ukrainian shelling.

People who suffered from the flooding have been killed by the shelling, including a pregnant woman, Peskov said.

The floodwaters have irrevocably changed the landscape downstream, and shifted the dynamic of the 15-month-old war.

Ryshchuk, the Oleshky mayor, said that by Thursday afternoon water levels were beginning to fall, but roughly 90% of the city remained flooded.

Ryshchuk fled after Russian forces tried to force him to collaborate, but he remains in close contact with people in and around the city.

Russia says it is helping the regions civilians. Moscow-appointed regional Gov. Vladimir Saldo claimed over 4,000 people had been evacuated from the flood zones. He shared a video showing empty beds in shelters prepared for evacuees.

Ryshchuk dismisses such talk.

He said some people trying to leave flooded areas were forced back by Russian soldiers who accused them of being waiters  people waiting for Ukraine to reclaim control of the region.

Others, who called the Russian-controlled emergency services, were told they would have to wait for help, he said.

Thats it, he said. Yesterday, some Russians came in the morning, took a few people off the roofs, filmed a video, and left. Thats everything they have done as of today.

The help that made it through has been scattered.

Ukrainian military footage, for instance, showed their forces dropping a bottle of water from a drone to a boy trapped with his mother and sister in the attic of their home near Oleshky. Ukrainian soldiers later evacuated the family and their pets to the city of Kherson, National Police reported.

Much of the help is being organized by volunteers communicating on the encrypted app Telegram. Messages about stranded people, often trapped on the roofs of their houses, appear in these groups every few minutes. Most are posted by relatives in safer areas.

Just one of these volunteer groups has a map showing over 1,000 requests to locate and rescue people, mostly in Oleshky and the nearby town of Hola Prystan.

A woman helping with one of the groups, who spoke on condition her name not be used for fear of reprisals from the Russian occupiers, shared a message with an AP journalist.

We were looking for a person named Serhii Borzov, the message read. He was found. Unfortunately, dead. Our condolences to the relatives.

___

Karmanau reported from Tallinn, Estonia. Arhirova reported from Warsaw, Poland.

___

Follow APs coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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MILAN (AP)  Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was readmitted to a Milan hospital Friday for planned medical checks related to his chronic leukemia, his doctors said in a statement.

Berlusconi's doctors, Alberto Zangrillo and Fabio Ciceri, said the tests being conducted at San Raffaele Hospital had been moved up as part of normal practice in medicine, and that the timing didn't signal any criticality or alarm.
Several high tech manufacturers are apparently looking at setting up shop on a site near Fremont for a potential semiconducter project.

According to emails obtained by the Fremont Tribune, Fremont Mayor Joey Spellerberg has been communicating with an official associated with a semiconductor and microchip production effort called Project Silicon Heartland in an effort to possibly woo four massive chip manufacturing firms to the city's new inland port.

Fremont approved the inland port earlier this year on 1,500 acres of land south of Fremont near U.S. 275.

The email between Spellerberg and Trent Overhue, chairman of the board of directors of Nantero Inc., details how four microchip production firms could land at the new inland port and explains in detail their extensive utility needs.

Former Gov. Dave Heineman, who is the chairperson of the Fremont Municipal Inland Port Authority Board, said excitement about the potential of tech firms coming to Fremont should be tempered, because the inland port is in its infancy stages. He also said preparing land, utilities and securing projects can take years.

But, Heineman added, if the semiconductor project ends up calling the Fremont Inland Port home, it would transform the community in incredible ways.

It would be a game-changer. We are talking somewhere between 500 to 2,000 jobs, and they are higher-paying jobs. No one should get ahead of themselves. There are still a lot of things that need to be accomplished before this could come into fruition, Heineman said. It is a huge positive. Part of the reason the Fremont Inland Port Authority is being considered is because we have 1,500 acres that will be developed. That is a challenge for a lot of other communities and states. They simply do not have the land to do the development.

Spellerberg also warned about too much premature excitement, agreeing with Heineman that any talks with potential firms are preliminary. However, he, too, felt the tech firms could be a game changer.

These are the kinds of jobs we want to bring to the area with the inland port. These are just fantastic jobs, Spellerberg said. This is an industry that would make an impact on the community. I think it also speaks highly on Fremont and Nebraska and what we have to offer.

Heineman said efforts to bring the high-tech manufacturing firms to the inland port was part of President Joe Biden's CHIPS Act of 2022, signed into law in August 2022. That legislation, being implemented by the U.S. Department of Commerce, aims to bring more semiconductor research and manufacturing to the U.S.

Heineman said that federal effort could work in combination with LB616, a bill proposed by state Sen. Mike McDonnell aimed at helping attract semiconductor firms to the Cornhusker state.

Obviously, there is a tremendous effort at the federal level to bring the semiconductor industry back from Asia. I know (the inland port) is going to put in an application for federal dollars, Heineman added.

Megan Skiles, executive director of the Greater Fremont Development Council, also cautioned against being too overly optimistic about the project, but she agreed with Heinemans sentiments about the transformative nature of such a development at the inland port.

This is exactly the kind of project we would love to see in the port authority, something that is going to create high-quality jobs, that is going to buffer the national supply chain. It is exciting to see these kinds of companies have interest in our project, Skiles said.

Scenarios explained in email

Overhue wrote to Spellerberg on May 15, explaining that the two needed to get caught up on the project from the citys point of view.

This may have been a misunderstanding on my part, as I had thought individual projects would be reviewed by the Inland Port Board and a development agreement with the port  which is why I have been patiently waiting for that to be organized, Overhue wrote. Sounds like we should loop in both (the city and Inland Port) to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Overhue then proposed having four companies possibly come to the Inland Port in the future, describing the big one being Skywater as well as LA Semiconductor, Hyperion and his own company Nantero, Inc.

Project Silicon Heartland is a consortium of some of the biggest semiconductor and chip manufacturers in the United States, including firms such as Skywater, Nantero, LA Semiconductor, SGH, Photonics, Hyperion, Smart Modular Technologies and KPH Technology.

Overhue said that in addition to the Fremont site, Project Silicon Heartland officials are eyeing several sites around Omaha, as well as possibly in the Kansas City metro region.

Right now, we are looking at a lot of side options. I have been helping field a lot of site inquiries. I do like the Omaha metro area as a site for this. Fremont is definitely an attractive option, Overhue said. I am hopeful this project will change the trajectory for the state and attract other industries.

According to the organizations website, officials view Nebraska as a wonderful location for a semiconductor cluster due to its advantageous location, strong economy, supportive business climate, military importance and affordable utility rates.

As a central hub for transportation and commerce, Nebraskas access to major highways, railroads and airports make it easy for businesses to transport goods and reach customers across the country. In addition, the state offers aggressive incentives, low operating costs and an affordable skilled workforce, all of which make it attractive to businesses of all sizes, officials wrote on the website. Nebraska has a reputation for being a welcoming and supportive community, with a strong entrepreneurial spirit and a commitment to innovation. Overall, the combination of a skilled workforce, business-friendly climate, central location and government support make Nebraska an excellent choice for building a semiconductor business.

Skiles said talks with the technology consortium and individual companies is extremely preliminary, and noted that the recruitment of companies to the Inland Port is a long, drawn-out process and can take years of negotiations and planning, much of which is confidential because of competition for firms between communities and states.

I feel like it is a little speculative at this point. We said at our (last meeting) how the economic development happens. We get a number of requests from companies, some pan out, but most dont, Skiles said. We are early on in the stages of this. It usually takes a company a long time to make a decision.

When we work with companies, we try very, very hard to protect their confidentiality until they are ready to make a decision. At the time they are ready to make a decision, theyll usually have a formal announcement, Skiles added. We are a little bit speculative, and we are probably competing with other sites and other states at this point. But, it is an exciting example of what could happen. There is still a lot of investigation to happen.
A wise man once said that an army moves on its stomach. Without food, nobody can fight. The Russians victory over the German military during World War II was based on this principle when they cut off Nazi supply lines and deprived soldiers of not only food but also clothing, weapons, equipment, medical care and ammunition.

The Russians are now on the other side of this lesson against a Ukrainian military that has engaged in the 21st-century version of this strategy. Russia invaded with what it assumed would be an overwhelming force  but its tanks didnt work well enough. It knocked out Ukrainian landlines  but Ukrainian forces pivoted to satellites, keeping their fight and cause alive. And while Russia went to war with the military that it had, Ukraines smart resistance has kept food, arms and equipment coming from Western allies  all while exhausting Russias limited resources.

There are many lessons we should take from Russias WWII success and Ukraines success. Unfortunately, we are not learning a critical, if not headline-grabbing lesson: having enough equipment.

Russia is undoubtedly learning the lesson. The U.K. Ministry of Defense said that in the middle of October, Russian forces were losing more than 40 armored vehicles a day, which is roughly the equivalent of a battalions worth of equipment, Newsweek reported last year. Meanwhile, over recent weeks Russia has been forced to turn to Belarusian stocks to acquire at least 100 additional tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Russian forces are also running short on ammunition.

At least Russia got to use its equipment. The United States has deprived itself of equipment through foolish mistakes, such as the massive number of military vehicles left behind in our disorganized retreat from Afghanistan. And almost two years ago, an explosion at a black powder facility in Louisiana took the factory offline, denying our military a critical supplier for the explosive used in U.S. bombs.

The United States may also deprive itself of a strong national defense by, ironically, oversupplying Ukraine. The U.S. alone has sent more than $24.9 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion, Time magazine reports. The Pentagon marked the first anniversary of the invasion with a $2 billion package of long-term security assistance for Ukraine that includes more rounds of ammunition and a variety of small, high-tech drones.

That is taking a toll on our own military readiness. After months of supplying Ukraine with Stingers, howitzers, anti-armor systems and artillery ammunition, stocks are low in the United States and its NATO allies, especially in 155mm howitzer shells, an ammunition that has been crucial to pushing back Russian forces, The Wall Street Journal reported. We should be proud of how our weapons have allowed Ukrainians to prevail against an invasion, but defeating Russia is just one of the many fronts on which we may have to fight in the next few years.

Finally, in the greatest irony of all, we risk depriving some equipment of the fuel that brings the food, weapons and medical supplies troops need to win. The Air Force is in a political battle about whether to keep flying a fleet of 60 KC-46 tankers, which are cleared to refuel 97% of the Navy and Air Force fleet. Some lawmakers want to launch a competition for a second tanker, one that is larger, less agile and simply cant hold as much fuel for mid-air refills.

These politicians are making the same mistake as Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who didnt prepare for unexpected Ukrainian resistance. They are not relying on the facts on the ground.

A military moves on its stomach, but the food has to be moved to make it to the stomach. The same is true for medical supplies to heal and missiles and bullets to kill the enemy.

The Pentagon should learn from history, not repeat it.
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Amanda Gorman, a young woman who read her highly celebrated poetry at Joe Bidens inaugural two years ago, has proven herself to be quite adept at writing fiction in addition to her laureate skills.

Last month, she tweeted out a photo of two pages of her poem The Hill We Climb, and suggested that these pages were the reason that a Florida school district banned her work.

The truth is that her books were removed from the elementary school curriculum, but were still available to middle and upper school students.

Thats not banning. Thats not even canceling. Thats making decisions on what is, and what is not, age-appropriate.

You can argue whether the book is not appropriate for kindergartners, who wouldnt even understand the points she was trying to make, but you cannot unilaterally jump on the I was Banned-wagon because it weaponizes your victimhood.

I attended a lecture the other evening by a local author named Ernest Owens, whose book The Case For Cancel Culture argues that not everything we call canceling really is censorship.

While Owens and I disagree on a lot of things, we both come down on the same side of censorship: its bad.

And yet, as he points out, we need to be a bit more pragmatic when defining what is, and what is not cancellation.

For example, the bus company in Selma, Alabama, was not canceled during the civil rights boycotts.

Bud Light is not being canceled by conservatives for its spokesperson choice.

In both cases, people used their voices and their choices to make a political point. That is what we do in a free society, and that is what Owens refers to as pragmatism.

The poet laureate of the Biden inauguration deliberately chose to frame the controversy as a banning, when she knew very well that nothing of the kind had happened.

Her poetry is widely available, widely exalted by those in literary circles and beyond, and she herself has become a mini-celebrity. More power to her.

But the idea that young children must be exposed to her writing or their growth will be stunted is ridiculous, and to this writer, immensely annoying. If parents want their little sons and daughters to read The Hill We Climb, they can buy them a copy and read it to them as a bedtime story.

The book is available everywhere, and the suggestion that what is being done in Florida is akin to Ray Bradburys dystopian Fahrenheit 451 is laughable.

This is not to say that I support actual banning of books.

If you make it impossible for children to access great literature that has stood the test of time, like To Kill A Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn, you are engaging in the same sort of conduct that we justifiably condemned when the Soviet Union and the satellite states existed.

It is the same sort of conduct that I see when working with some of my asylum clients who have fled totalitarian regimes.

But that is not what is happening with Gorman. Her poem is still out there, and will be read by generations of children in countless schools around the country.

Her little pique about being canceled from one district is ridiculous when viewed in the larger context of what is going on around the world.

One final thought: when we put brown paper covers on Hustler and Playboy on the newsstands, we didnt do it to ban Larry Flynt and Hugh Hefner. We did it because certain things are inappropriate in certain environments.

Amanda might disagree with the decision of the school administrators in Florida, but she cant argue with the principle that not everything is good for everybody, at every moment.
Most of us have heard people say something along the lines of I get more out of it than they do when talking about the volunteer experience.

Some will even couch that statement with I know it sounds cliche, but ... as if others may not believe the genuine feeling they get from their belief.

However, its a statement that should be celebrated without an ounce of shame, because it highlights the truth about the volunteer experience.

When we volunteer, we can find common ground with others we may have perceived as different from ourselves. We discover new passions and gifts that can be shared with others. We realize that serving someone in need often happens in a positive atmosphere.

Feeling personally fulfilled, refreshed or excited about lending a hand to someone else is more than just gratifying. Those feelings are also catalysts that will bring you back for more.

If volunteering were a drag or unfulfilling, people wouldnt have done it amid a pandemic  more than 23% of the U.S. population did, according to an AmeriCorps report. The impact made by those 60.7 million Americans helped others better handle or face their circumstances during a difficult time.

With Disabled American Veterans, the charity I represent, service to others is why we exist. Were committed to helping make whole those forever changed by their time in the military.

A huge part of how we do that is through selfless volunteers who give their most valuable resource: their time.

Our volunteers come from all walks of life and backgrounds. Some are DAV members; others are friends and supporters of the veteran community. All make a difference in veterans lives.

One thing our volunteers help with is running our nationwide DAV Transportation Network for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Through this program, we provide no-cost rides to veterans who otherwise wouldnt have access to lifesaving and critical VA medical appointments. When COVID-19 hit, we lost many of these drivers as the country effectively shut down. But even as things are largely back to normal, many of our Transportation Network vehicles remain idle, waiting for volunteers to get behind the wheel.

Every vehicle that doesnt move means a veteran isnt getting a needed ride or paying expensive transportation fees for each necessary trip. So if you are willing and able to drive veterans to their appointments, even if you have just a few hours a month, go to driveforveterans.org to sign up or get more information.

But the DAV Transportation Network is just one opportunity we offer volunteers. We have many other ways to be involved, both in VA medical facilities and right in your community. You can learn more about those at volunteerforveterans.org.

Volunteering changes lives  and not just those on the receiving end. If you choose to raise your hand to give your time, I hope youre able to say you got more out of it than the people youve served. Its a wonderful gift you receive in exchange for that most precious resource.
The Friends of the Conodoguinet Greenway released their findings from a study about the feasibility and optimal route of a recreational trail that will connect East Pennsboro Township, Hampden Township and Camp Hill.

After more than a year of public meetings, stakeholder input and engineering reviews, the Conodoguinet Greenway has reached a major milestone toward becoming reality, with the release of a feasibility study that includes concrete recommendations for the multi-use trail in Cumberland County, PA, the group said in a news release.

The study, conducted by Simone Collins Landscape Architecture of Norristown, was funded by a grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and matched by a Cumberland County land partnership grant, according to the group. The three host municipalities and private donors also contributed funds for the study.

The trail is proposed to begin at the western edge of Hampden Township at Lambs Gap Road, and roughly follows the creek to its confluence with the Susquehanna River in East Pennsboro Township.

The proposed trail consists of 10 miles of existing on-road trails with new signage and pavement markings, 3.74 miles of existing off-road trails, 2.12 miles of new sidewalks, and 4.58 miles of new off-road trails, according to the study. Three new pedestrian bridges are also proposed.

The optimal route for the trail was determined in a process that lasted 14 months, according to the study. The project committee consisted of representatives from the three municipalities and the county. A public opinion survey with more than 500 respondents was also used. There were four public meetings, several committee meetings, and two meetings with each of the three host communities, according to the study.

The three bridges are estimated to cost about $18.57 million to construct. An additional estimated $3.77 million will be needed for other parts of the trail, according to the study. The group plans to fund the trail primarily by grants and fundraising, according to the group.

It should also be noted that each of the three communities has generally supported the concept of pedestrian and bicycle trails in their municipality through their individual, past planning efforts, the group said in the study.

The planning process with the three host municipalities will begin next month. There is no timetable for how long the process will take.

Those interested in joining the greenway effort should visit the groups website or contact it directly at conodoguinetgreenway@gmail.com.
Blinken to travel to China next week, carrying out trip postponed after spy balloon incident

Blinken to travel to China next week, carrying out trip postponed after spy balloon incident View Photo

WASHINGTON (AP)  Secretary of State Antony Blinken is planning to travel to China next week as the Biden administration pushes to improve ties that hit a new low in February after a Chinese surveillance balloon was shot down over U.S. airspace.

U.S. officials say Blinken expects to be in Beijing on June 18 for meetings with senior Chinese officials, including with Foreign Minister Qin Gang and possibly President Xi Jinping.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because neither the State Department nor the Chinese foreign ministry has yet confirmed the trip.

The visit, which was agreed between Xi and President Joe Biden last year at a meeting in Bali, had been initially planned for February but was postponed after the spy balloon incident. Beijing insists the craft was a weather balloon that strayed off course.

Since then, there have been contacts between the U.S. and China, but they have been rare as tensions have risen over Chinas conduct in the South China Sea, aggressive actions toward Taiwan and support for Russias war against Ukraine.

Last week, Chinas defense minister rebuffed a request from U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for a meeting on the sidelines of a security symposium in Singapore.

However, shortly after postponing his trip to Beijing, Blinken met briefly with Chinas top diplomat, Wang Yi, at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.

And, CIA chief William Burns traveled to China in May and Chinas commerce minister traveled to the U.S. last month. And Bidens national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with Wang in Vienna in early May.

The White House said at the time that the meeting was part of ongoing efforts to maintain open lines of communication and responsibly manage competition. The two sides agreed to maintain this important strategic channel of communication to advance these objectives.

More recently, the top U.S. diplomat for the Asia-Pacific region, Daniel Kritenbrink, traveled to China earlier this week along with a senior National Security Council official.

By MATTHEW LEE

AP Diplomatic Writer
Dutch Supreme Court orders museum artifacts borrowed from Crimea returned to Ukraine View Photo

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP)  The Supreme Court of the Netherlands on Friday ordered that a Dutch museums trove of historical treasures from Crimea be sent to Ukraine, upholding a lower court ruling that the 300 artifacts are part of Ukraines cultural heritage.

The collection of archaeological objects, some more than 2,000 years old, was on display at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, sparking a dispute over the repatriation of the borrowed pieces.

Both the Ukrainian government in Kyiv and the four Crimean museums that had loaned bronze swords, golden helmets, precious gems and other artifacts to the Allard Pierson demanded the objects back. The Amsterdam museum instead opted to store the items until a court could decide their fate.

The legal tug-of-war has now ended with the Hague-based Supreme Court ordering the collection to be returned to Ukraine. Judges cited the lack of national recognition for the Russia-annexed Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

Although the museum pieces originate from Crimea and can therefore also be regarded as Crimean heritage, they are part of the cultural heritage of Ukraine, the ruling said.

Mediation in 2014 between all the museums involved and Ukrainian authorities failed, and the Allard Pierson Museum took the matter to court.

Highlights from the Crimea  Gold and Secrets of the Black Sea exhibition included a solid gold Scythian helmet from the 4th century B.C. and a golden neck ornament from the second century A.D. that weighs more than a kilogram (two pounds).

In 2016, the District Court of Amsterdam cited the 1970 UNESCO convention, finding that the objects must be returned to the sovereign state that loaned them and the issue of ownership should be decided by a Ukrainian court.

The Crimean museums appealed and Russia threatened to stop lending objects to Dutch museums if the museum didnt return the pieces. In 2021, an appeals court again ordered the objects to be sent to Ukraine.

In a statement, the Allard Pierson Museum says it can now act on the decision and return the objects. Legal fees and storage have already cost the museum more than 500,000 euros ($538,000), according to documents it submitted during the proceedings.

It is unclear when the transfer of the objects will take place.

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Follow APs coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

By MOLLY QUELL

Associated Press
Colombia government, largest remaining rebel group agree to 6-month cease-fire View Photo

HAVANA, Cuba (AP)  Colombias government and its largest remaining guerrilla group agreed Friday to a six-month cease-fire at talks in Cuba, in the latest attempt to resolve a conflict dating back to the 1960s.

The government and the National Liberation Army, or ELN, announced the accord at a ceremony in Havana attended by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, top guerrilla commander Antonio Garcia and Cuban officials. The cease-fire takes effect in phases, goes fully into effect in August and then lasts for six months.

This effort to look for peace is a beacon of hope that conflicts can be resolved politically and diplomatically, top rebel negotiator Pablo Beltran said at the ceremony.

The talks originally were scheduled to conclude with an official ceremony on Thursday, but were postponed as the parties asked for additional time to work on final details. Petro traveled to the island for the ceremony, saying it could herald an era of peace in Colombia.

The accord reached Friday also calls for the formation of a broadly representative national committee by late July to discuss a lasting peace.

You have here proposed a bilateral agreement, and I agree with that, but Colombian society has to be able debate it, and to participate, Petro said during the ceremony.

Garcia, the rebel commander, said his group was very confident in the accord, though he characterized it as procedural and not yet the substantial kind needed for Colombia to change.

Negotiations between the sides had resumed in August, after being terminated in 2019 when the rebels set off a car bomb at a police academy in Bogota killing 21 people.

Following that incident, the government of then-President Ivan Duque (2018-2022) issued arrest warrants for ELN leaders in Cuba for the peace negotiations. But Cuba refused to extradite them, arguing that doing so would compromise its status as a neutral nation in the conflict and break with diplomatic protocols.

Talks relaunched in November shortly after Petro was elected as Colombias first leftist president.

Petro has pushed for what he calls a total peace that would demobilize all of the countrys remaining rebel groups as well as its drug trafficking gangs. He has questioned whether senior ELN leaders have full control of a younger generation of commanders who he has suggested are focused more on the illegal drug trade than on political goals.

The ELN was founded in the 1960s by union leaders, students and priests inspired by the Cuban revolution. It is Colombias largest remaining rebel group and has been notoriously difficult for previous Colombian governments to negotiate with.

In 2016, Colombias government signed a peace dea l with the larger FARC group that ended five decades of conflict in which an estimated 260,000 people were killed.

But violence has continued to affect rural pockets of the country where the ELN has been active, along with FARC holdout groups and drug trafficking gangs. Colombian authorities have accused the ELN of involvement in the drug trafficking, but the groups top leaders have denied that.

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Juan Francisco Valbuena contributed reporting from Bogota.

By ANDREA RODRIGUEZ

Associated Press
Sonora, CA  The CHP has released new details regarding a three-car crash on Highway 108 yesterday in which one person was flown from the scene and traffic was backed up for several hours.

The collision happened around 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, just east of the Lime Kiln Road and South Washington Street intersection, with one person having to be freed after being pinned inside a vehicle, as earlier reported here. The CHP reports that 22-year-old Kylin Vance from Standish, was driving a 2012 GMC pickup westbound on Highway 108, approaching slowing traffic ahead. They added, Vance failed to react to the slowing traffic, and the front of the pickup collided into the back of a 2017 Chevrolet pickup driven by 49-year-old Copperopolis resident, Keith Solinger.

The force of the impact pushed Solingers truck into the back of a 2022 Hyundai Palisade SUV driven by 47-year-old Kristina Lackey of Modesto. Vance lost consciousness and was flown to Memorial Medical Center in Modesto, suffering major injuries. Solinger, Lackey and her passenger all suffered minor injuries and were treated at the scene. The CHP reports, Alcohol and/or drugs appear to be a contributing factor in this crash.
California State Senator Marie Alvarado-Gil (D-Jackson) has made strides in combating organized crime linked to the illegal fentanyl trade.

Alvarado-Gil was Fridays KVML Newsmaker of the Day.

Last week, the Senate passed her bill, SB 226, with a vote of 36 to 0. This bill classifies the possession of fentanyl while carrying a loaded firearm as a felony. Previously, the law specifically listed methamphetamine, crack, cocaine, heroin, and PCP as drugs prohibited from simultaneous possession with a loaded firearm. SB 226 aims to rectify this oversight by acknowledging the inclusion of fentanyl, a substance more than 50 times more potent than heroin, on this list.

I am grateful for the wisdom shown by my senatorial colleagues in supporting this important legislation, expressed Alvarado-Gil. Together, we are sending a message that California will continue to crack down on the fentanyl-dealing criminals who are killing our children, family, and friends.

Senator Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana) agrees, stating SB 226 corrects an inconsistency in the law and protects Californians by ensuring that fentanyl dealers are treated the same as dealers of other illegal substances when armed with a loaded and operable firearm. As a former federal prosecutor, I understand the importance of this measure and am proud to be a coauthor of this bill.

Fentanyl, even in minute doses, poses a lethal threat and has been infiltrating California through organized criminal networks, including drug cartels. These criminals produce pills that resemble pharmaceutical-grade opioids, often lacking proper quality control. Recently, they have introduced a dangerous variant known as rainbow fentanyl into circulation, specifically designed to entice children due to its candy-like appearance.

Initially, SB 226 faced obstacles when it was withdrawn from the Senate Public Safety Committee on March 28th due to insufficient support. However, Senator Alvarado-Gils determination prevailed, leading to the bills successful passage in the committee with a 5-0 vote, paving the way for it to proceed to the Senate Floor. From here, the bill will move to the Assembly Public Safety Committee for approval.

Representing the 4th Senate District, which includes Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, Mono, Nevada, Placer, Stanislaus, and Tuolumne counties, Senator Alvarado-Gils district and neighboring communities have witnessed the devastating consequences of fentanyl, much like numerous states across the country. Therefore, many public safety officials in her district support her efforts in introducing SB 226.

The Newsmaker of the Day is heard every weekday morning at 6:45, 7:45 and 8:45 on AM 1450 and FM 102.7 KVML.
Governor Gavin Newsom View Photo

Sacramento, CA  California Governor Gavin Newsom is calling for a 28th Amendment to the US Constitution that would enshrine gun restrictions like universal background checks, raising the firearm purchase age to 21, and prohibiting the purchase of assault weapons.

It is Governor Newsoms latest step into the national political conversation, after earlier criticizing conservative governors on issues like immigration and abortion. Newsom has argued that Democrats have been too passive in the countrys culture wars.

Newsom claims that the 28th amendment would leave the 2nd Amendment unchanged, and respect Americas gun-owning tradition.

He adds that he will work with grassroots organizations across the country to push for the change.

The Republican leader of the Assembly, James Gallagher, is criticizing the idea, stating, Newsoms proposal is a poorly thought out, attention-seeking stunt from a governor desperate to distract from his ever-growing record of failure. If Newsom is this disinterested in leading California, he should let the Lieutenant Governor take over so hell be free to chase the national spotlight full-time.

Democrats are voicing support for the amendment. California Democratic Senator Aisha Wahob says,  Governor Gavin Newsom has the backbone to actually do something about the gun fetish culture around weapons of war, and tackle the relentless problem of gun violence and mass shootings.

A new amendment has not been added to the Constitution since 1992. A steep task, it would take 33 additional states to call for a Constitutional Convention. It would then take  of the states to vote in favor for it to pass.
Brother of gay American who was fatally attacked in Sydney in 1988 says police demonized family

Brother of gay American who was fatally attacked in Sydney in 1988 says police demonized family View Photo

CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  The brother of a gay American who was attacked and fell from a Sydney cliff top in 1988 said elements within local police had demonized their family over their pursuit of justice.

An Australian man was sentenced to nine years in prison Thursday for killing Scott Johnson. His older brother Steve Johnson led the familys efforts to overturn a coroners finding in 1989 that the American mathematician had taken his own life.

Steve Johnson told Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Friday that evidence in a New South Wales state government inquiry into hate crimes had confirmed our worst fears that the police were really not only opposed to the investigation but demonizing our family.

Its still a question mark why? Maybe they thought of Scotts case as a tinderbox that would force them to work on the other 100 cases of gay men who died during the same period, Steve Johnson said.

There are still some in the police force that are opposed to trying to solve these other cases of gay deaths and we think that they need to, he added.

Text messages between senior police in 2015 revealed their hostility toward the Johnson family.

Former Deputy Police Commissioner Mick Willing, then commander of the homicide squad, warned then Detective Chief Inspector Pamela Young in a text message against letting them win.

Young replied: Mick  I will not let them win  that is not in my DNA.

Willing added: We will come out on top. Both police officers have since left the force.

The text messages were exchanged the day after Young told a television news program there was evidence and information that Scott Johnson took his own life.

A second coroners inquiry into Johnsons case in 2012 could not explain the death, but overturned the 1989 finding of suicide. The coroner found similarities between Scott Johnsons death and the deaths of three gay men off the coast of the Sydney coastal suburb of Bondi between 1985 and 1989. The coroner found there was a possibility that Scott Johnson was the victim of a gay hate crime similar to those that occurred in Bondi.

A third inquiry ruled in 2017 that Scott Johnson had been attacked by an unknown assailant or assailants because he was perceived to be homosexual.

A breakthrough came in 2020 when police offered a 1 million Australian dollar ($667,000) reward for information. Steve Johnson, a wealthy entrepreneur based in Boston, offered his own money to double the reward.

Scott Phillip White, 52, was charged after his former wife came forward with crucial information. He eventually said he had punched Johnson in an argument and the man had fallen off the cliff to his death.

A government inquiry began hearing evidence last year of unsolved deaths resulting from hate crimes over four decades in New South Wales where police were notoriously indifferent to such violence.

The Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes will report on Aug. 30. The acronym refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer people.

Willing told the inquiry last month that Young regarded the Johnson family as police opponents. Willing said Young held the view that one of the police objectives at a third inquest would be to defeat the Johnson family by convincing the coroner that it was not homicide. Police rated Scott Johnsons death as zero solvability.

Willing described the police relationship with the Johnsons as adversarial, but said he did not see the police objective to be to defeat the family.

But in light of the text message exchange, Peter Gray, a lawyer assisting the inquiry, urged Commissioner John Sackar to find that Willing shared Youngs view that police should oppose and prevent a coroner finding of homicide.

Willing also described Steve Johnson as obsessive and erratic.

Young has not given evidence to the inquiry. But she told the ABC on Friday that she had objected in 2015 to the powerful supporters the Johnson family had attracted.

No other homicide next of kin gets the priority and personal attention from government or the police hierarchy, Young said.

Steve Johnson described his relationship with the NSW Police Force as a little mixed. The family was very close friends with Detective Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans amazing team of investigators that arrested White in 2020.

Steve Johnson said the conviction on Wednesday of Stanley Bruce Early, 77, for murdering Raymond Keam in a gay hangout in the Sydney suburb of Randwick in 1987 was proof that old cases could be solved.

Asked about Steve Johnsons criticism that the family had been demonized, the police media office referred to Yeomans comments outside court on Thursday.

The police should be a voice for the victims of crime and thats what we did, Yeomans said. How staunch hes (Steve Johnsons) been and how remarkable the family has been through all these years, has just been incredible. And in the end, all we did was our job.
Natalee Holloway disappearance suspect pleads not guilty to extorting victims mother View Photo

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP)  Joran van der Sloot, the chief suspect in Natalee Holloways 2005 disappearance, pleaded not guilty Friday in Alabama to charges he tried to extort money from the missing teens mother in exchange for revealing where to find her daughters remains.

Although hes not on trial for harming Holloway, the extortion and wire fraud charges are the only alleged crimes that link the Dutch citizen to Holloways unsolved disappearance on the Caribbean island of Aruba. The 18-year-old went missing during a high school graduation trip with classmates and was last seen leaving a bar with van der Sloot, a student at an international school on the island where he grew up.

Van der Sloot, now 35, walked shackled into the Alabama courtroom Friday as Holloways parents looked on. Hed been extradited Thursday from Peru, where hes serving a 28-year sentence after confessing to killing a Peruvian woman in 2010  five years to the day after Holloway went missing.

Natalees mother, father and brother were in the courtroom Friday. Beth Holloway stared occasionally at van der Sloot but otherwise showed no obvious emotion.

The wheels of justice have finally begun to turn for our family, she wrote in a statement. It has been a very long and painful journey.

Van der Sloot, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, declined to use a Dutch interpreter offered to him, saying I dont think its necessary. During the brief court preceding, he entered a not guilty plea through his attorney and answered Yes when asked if he understood his rights.

Afterward, Beth Holloway hugged friends who had come to offer support. She declined to comment outside the courthouse.

Her spokesperson, George Seymore, told reporters that seeing van der Sloot in court was chilling but at the same time gratifying.

The mysterious disappearance sparked years of news coverage and countless true-crime podcasts. Van der Sloot was identified as a main suspect and was detained for questioning along with two Surinamese brothers, weeks after Holloway went missing. No charges were filed in the case.

A judge declared Holloway dead, but her body has never been found.

U.S. prosecutors say that in 2010, van der Sloot sought money from Beth Holloway to lead her to the young womans body. A grand jury indicted him that year.

In 2012, van der Sloot pleaded guilty in Peru to killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores, a business student from a prominent family, in 2010.

Van der Sloot married a Peruvian woman in July 2014 in a ceremony at a maximum-security prison. He was shuffled between prisons in response to reports he enjoyed privileges like television, internet access and a cellphone, and accusations he threatened to kill a warden.

Peru will let van der Sloot remain in U.S. custody until the Alabama case is concluded, including any appeal if hes convicted, according to a resolution published in Perus federal register. U.S. authorities agreed to return him to Peruvian custody after that, the resolution states.

Cindy Rysedorph, a friend of the Holloways, said the family is doing as well as can be expected.

Its progress, she said. Im so grateful that hes here.

By KIM CHANDLER

Associated Press
Trump campaigns after indictment unsealed | Live updates View Photo

MIAMI (AP)  Follow along for live updates on former President Donald Trump, who has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate. The indictment marks the first time in U.S. history that a former president faces criminal charges by the federal government he once oversaw. Trump faces the possibility of prison if convicted.

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What to know:

 A timeline of events leading to Trumps indictment in the classified documents case

 Indictment accuses Trump of scheming and lying to keep secret papers

 A look at the charges, the special counsels investigation and whats next

 Trump faces a string of inquiries in various states and venues as he campaigns for a return to the White House

 Does the indictment stand to damage Trumps standing with voters?

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STANDING OVATION FOR TRUMP AT NORTH CAROLINA GOP DINNER

An indictment by the Department of Justice is an attempt to thwart the will of the American people, former President Donald Trump said at a state GOP convention dinner in North Carolina.

I promise you this: If you put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and American will be a free nation once again, he said to a standing ovation.

The indictment is an attempt to damage his chances for a second term, he alleged.

Trump is accused of willfully defying Justice Department demands to return classified documents, enlisting aides in his efforts to hide the records and even telling his lawyers that he wanted to defy a subpoena for the materials stored at his residence.

In appearances at Republican state conventions in Georgia and North Carolina on Saturday, Trump sought to frame the 37 criminal charges hes facing as an attack on not just him but also his supporters.

In the end theyre not coming after me, theyre coming after you, and Im just standing in the way, he said in North Carolina.

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TRUMP VOWS TO CONTINUE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN EVEN IF CONVICTED

Former President Donald Trump vowed Saturday to continue his bid for a second term even if he is convicted in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

Ill never leave, he told Politico in an interview aboard his plane after speaking at a Republican state convention in Georgia. He further predicted that he will not be convicted and sidestepped questions about whether he would pardon himself if elected.

I dont think Ill ever have to, Trump said. I didnt do anything wrong.

The indictment unsealed Friday accuses Trump of willfully defying Justice Department demands to return classified documents, enlisting aides in his efforts to hide the records and even telling his lawyers that he wanted to defy a subpoena for the materials stored at his residence.

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MIKE PENCE DECLINES TO SHARE REACTION TO TRUMP INDICTMENT

Former Vice President Mike Pence said Saturday that he has read the indictment outlining federal charges against former President Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

But he declined to share his personal reaction to the content of the indictment, which included photographs of boxes with classified information stacked in a bathroom and on a ballroom stage, or to criticize Trump, whom he is challenging for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024.

Ive read the indictment, Pence said in an interview with The Associated Press in North Carolina, where he addressed state Republicans.

I also know that every Americans entitled to the presumption of innocence. And as I said today, we now know the Department of Justices view of these matters. But the former president is entitled to present his defense. And we dont know what the facts of that are.

Thats why I said today Im going to urge patience, encourage people to be prayerful for the former president, but also for all those in authority and for the country going forward, said Pence, who formally launched his 2024 campaign this week.

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TRUMP SIGNS AUTOGRAPHS AND POSES FOR PHOTOS AT LOCAL WAFFLE HOUSE

After speaking at the Georgia Republican Convention, Trump stopped by a local Waffle House, where he signed autographs, posed for photos and chatted with supporters.

We did absolutely nothing wrong, Trump said of federal authorities unsealing a lengthy indictment accusing him of mishandling national security secrets and then covering up his actions.

He is scheduled to speak to another Republican audience in North Carolina later Saturday.

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TRUMP CALLS INDICTMENT AN ATTACK ON HIS CAMPAIGN

Speaking Saturday at the Georgia Republican Convention, Trump cast his federal indictment as an attempt to hurt his chances of returning to the White House as he campaigns for a second term in office.

In his first public appearance since the 37 felony counts against him were unsealed, Trump blasted the indictment as ridiculous and baseless.

Theyve launched one witch hunt after another to try and stop our movement, to thwart the will of the American people, Trump said, later adding, In the end, theyre not coming after me. Theyre coming after you.

The strategy is a well-worn one for Trump, who remains the front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination despite his mounting legal woes. He is scheduled to speak to another Republican audience in North Carolina later Saturday.

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TRUMP ARRIVES IN GEORGIA FOR STATE GOP CONVENTION APPEARANCE

Former President Donald Trump arrived Saturday in Georgia to chants of Four more years! Four more years! from supporters waving signs that read, Witch Hunt.

About 100 eager supporters turned out at Columbus airfield for Trumps first public appearance since federal authorities unsealed a lengthy indictment accusing him of mishandling national security secrets and then covering up his actions.

Hes headed to Georgia Republicans state convention, where hes expected to blast the prosecution as a political exercise because hes running for president again.

He doesnt have to convince his audiences Saturday.

Michael Sellers, a 67-year-old Trump backer who came to the airfield, said hed read the indictment and was aware of accusations that Trump sought to resist returning classified records, which previous presidents have routinely done when coming across such material in their possession.

Its criminal what theyre doing to him, Sellers said. Asked whether he believes Trump will win another term in 2024, Sellers said, He won the last time. He will win again.

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TRUMP SUPPORTERS CHEER FORMER PRESIDENT IN GEORGIA

Scores of Trump supporters braved the beating sun to cheer the former presidents arrival in Columbus, Georgia, as he prepared to deliver two state GOP convention speeches Saturday in the wake of his federal criminal indictment.

Backers waved Witch Hunt signs, unbowed a day after federal authorities unsealed a lengthy charging document that depicted Trump as willfully mishandling national security secrets after leaving office and then covering up his actions.

Jan Plemmons, a 66-year-old Trump supporter, called the charges absolutely ridiculous and said shes ready to hit the campaign trail with Trump as he runs for another term in 2024.

I was watching Fox News this morning, and its just crazy, Plemmons said, as her oversized foam Make America Great Again hat bobbed with each emphasis. Its just to divert attention.

Plemmons said she does not dislike Trumps primary rivals but sees the former president as the man to put back in the White House and fix this mess that were in now.

 Bill Barrow

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INDICTMENT EXPECTED TO ADD FUEL TO GOP CAMPAIGN AGAINST JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

Congressional Republicans have prepared an aggressive campaign against the Justice Department for months, a key part of former Trumps public defense against this weeks indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents.

The GOP counter-offensive against federal prosecutors and others who have investigated Trump avoids the substance of the charges facing the former president. Instead, they have tried to discredit law enforcement and President Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, for instance, has issued a series of letters to the Justice Department demanding documents related to special counsel Jack Smiths investigation of Trumps handling of classified records. Jordan has also aggressively sought to undercut Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who in April filed charges against Trump in a New York hush money investigation.

Democrats say Republicans are sowing conspiracy theories with potentially dangerous consequences.

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NOT ALL PLAN WARM WELCOME FOR TRUMP IN GEORGIA

Although most of the GOP activists attending the Georgia Republican Party convention Saturday are voicing support for Trump, some are suggesting his indictment and record make him a bad choice for the partys presidential nominee in 2024.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who has called for Trump to drop out of the race, got a polite but reserved reception Saturday morning at a party breakfast where Hutchinson touted his bid for the Republican presidential nomination as a consistent conservative.

Hutchinson didnt mention Trump in his speech but told reporters that the Republican Party should not lose its soul in defending Trump, saying the evidence so far suggests he treated national secrets like entertainment tools.

 Jeff Amy

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TRUMP HEADED TO GEORGIA, NORTH CAROLINA FOR CAMPAIGN APPEARANCES

Trump is set to campaign in Georgia and North Carolina on Saturday, making his first public appearances since his federal indictment on 37 counts of mishandling classified documents.

Friendly audiences are expected to welcome Trump at the two state party conventions.

Trump is a fighter, and the kinds of people that attend these conventions love a fighter, said Jack Kingston, a former Georgia congressman who supported Trump in 2016 and 2020.

A campaign official described Trumps mood as defiant Friday after the indictment was unsealed. Trump has insisted publicly that he committed no wrongdoing and is likely to repeat that theme during Saturdays appearances.

Trump remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. His rivals have handled news of his indictment cautiously, including former Vice President Mike Pence, who is also scheduled to address North Carolina Republicans on Saturday.

___

DEMOCRATS CALL FOR PEACEFUL PROCESS; GOP SPEAKER SAYS CASE MAY DISRUPT NATION

The Democratic leaders of both congressional chambers are urging supporters and detractors of Trump alike to let the case against him peacefully run its course in court.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries, also from New York, released a statement saying Trumps indictment must play out through the legal process, without any outside political or ideological interference.

We encourage Mr. Trumps supporters and critics alike to let this case proceed peacefully in court, Schumer and Jeffries said.

That was a departure from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, who suggested that the nations core legal values were being undermined.

This is going to disrupt this nation because it goes to the core of equal justice for all, which is not being seen today, McCarthy said in an interview with Fox News Digital. And were not going to stand for it.

___

SECRET SERVICE PREPARES FOR TRUMP COURT APPEARANCE

The U.S. Secret Service is preparing for Trumps appearance at a federal court in Miami on Tuesday after a grand jury indicted him on 37 felony counts related to his handling of classified documents.

Spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the agency will not seek any special accommodations outside of what would be required to ensure the former Presidents continued safety in connection with Trumps appearance.

He added: As with any site visited by a protectee, the Secret Service is in constant coordination with the necessary entities to ensure protective requirements are met. We have the utmost confidence in the professionalism and commitment to security shared by our law enforcement partners in Florida.

Trumps April 4 arraignment in his New York case, where he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, attracted a crush of media and protesters, involved multiple street closures, extra security screenings and shut down non-Trump court business for an afternoon.

___

TRUMP KEPT CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS IN BATHROOM, SHOWER OF CLUB, INDICTMENT SAYS

The indictment alleges Trump kept classified documents in the bathroom and shower at his Florida estate, as well as various other locations that included a ballroom, storeroom, office and bedroom.

Prosecutors noted that tens of thousands of members and guests visited the active social club of Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trumps presidency in January 2021 through the August 2022 search. They argued that nonetheless Trump stored documents in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

The indictment claims that, for a two-month period, some of Trumps boxes were stored in one of Mar-a-Lagos gilded ballrooms. A picture included in the indictment shows boxes stacked in rows on the ballrooms stage.

The indictment also shows photographs of boxes that spilled over in the storage room, including a document marked SECRET/REL TO USA, FVEY which means information releasable only to members of the intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. In the photo the classified document is redacted.

___

LAWYER SAID TRUMP SUGGESTED HE REMOVE DAMAGING DOCUMENTS

The indictment unsealed Friday also says that, unaware of any records being moved, Trumps attorney on June 2, 2022, identified 38 documents with classified markings and placed them in a folder, which he sealed with clear duct tape handed to him by Trump valet Walt Nauta. The valet then took the attorney to see the former president.

Did you find anything? Is it bad?  Is it good? the lawyer said Trump asked.

The attorney told federal authorities that he discussed the folder of classified material with Trump and how the material should be handled. The attorney told authorities that as they discussed the attorney taking the materials with him, Trump gestured in a way that suggested he wanted the attorney to identify anything really bad and you know, pluck it out. The lawyer clarified that Trump did not articulate such instructions beyond making that plucking motion.

The attorney told authorities that he did not take anything out of the folder and that he instead immediately contacted the FBI and another Trump attorney. On June 3, according to the indictment, the second Trump attorney acted as the official custodian of records on Trumps behalf and turned the material to the FBI.

___

INDICTMENT ALLEGES VALET MOVED BOXES AT TRUMPS DIRECTION

The indictment alleges that Nauta acted at Trumps direction to move move approximately 64 boxes of documents from the Mar-a-Lago storage room to the former presidents residence. Nautas actions occurred between May 23, 2022, and June 2, 2022, according to the indictment.

That total includes approximately 30 boxes Nauta allegedly moved on June 2, the same day Trumps legal team was expected to examine the cache. Nautas actions that day came hours after he talked briefly via phone with Trump, prosecutors allege. Neither Trump nor Nauta, according to the indictment, disclosed to the former presidents attorneys that Nauta had moved any of the storage room contents.

According to prosecutors timeline, Trump met later that day with one of his attorneys and Nauta escorted the attorney to the storage room for his review of the documents
How Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis talks about his own Catholic faith on the presidential campaign trail

How Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis talks about his own Catholic faith on the presidential campaign trail View Photo

GREENVILLE, S.C. (AP)  As Ron DeSantis wrapped up a 12-stop campaign tour that began in an Iowa evangelical church and ended here in a South Carolina convention center, dozens of pastors met backstage to pray for the presidential candidate. Later, to the 1,500 people in the auditorium, DeSantis closed out his speech with a paraphrased Bible verse: I will fight the good fight, I will finish the race, and I will keep the faith.

The governors religious rhetoric and hard-charging policies are at the center of his outreach to white evangelicals  an important voting bloc in the early GOP nominating contests. When it comes to his own Catholicism, DeSantis is more guarded, rarely mentioning his specific faith practices.

I dont think hes a wear-your-religion-on-your-sleeve kind of guy, said Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote, a conservative advocacy organization that hosted a fall rally for DeSantis.

Burch argue DeSantis policies are the true measure of his faith, from Floridas six-week abortion ban to a spate of laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights: Perhaps a good Scripture reference that may describe him is, By their fruits you shall know them.

DeSantis officially entered the race last month and is the leading alternative to former President Donald Trump. If the Florida governor captures the Republican nomination and takes on Joe Biden, two Catholic presidential candidates will face off for the first time in U.S. history.

Both have publicly clashed with Catholic bishops: DeSantis over immigration and the death penalty; Biden over abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. The current president, though, speaks often about being Catholic. He is known to wear a rosary and is regularly photographed attending Mass  in contrast to DeSantis, who is intensely private.

Hes nominally Catholic, according to a New York Times essay from the conservative writer Nate Hochman, who later joined the DeSantis campaign. Last year, Hochman wrote that DeSantis is politically friendly to conservative Christians. But he rarely discusses his religion publicly and almost never in the context of politics.

The campaign did not respond directly to questions about Hochmans essay or where the DeSantises go to church. A spokesperson for Never Back Down, the DeSantis super PAC, did not have information about his current church attendance.

Maria Sullivan, a DeSantis supporter, remembers worshipping regularly with DeSantis and his wife at Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church when they lived in Northeast Florida. Hes a very low-key man, not looking for attention, just there with his family, she said.

Sullivan said she attended the baptism of DeSantis older daughter at the church. The parish also was a polling place in 2018 and where DeSantis cast his own ballot when he was first elected governor.

DeSantis grew up Catholic. He attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School in Dunedin, Florida, and his political memoir says he was expected at church every Sunday. His mother counts a nun and a priest among her siblings.

His uncle figures into one of the few religious anecdotes he shares on the campaign trail. After his first inauguration, his uncle baptized their son at the governors mansion, using water the DeSantises collected from the Sea of Galilee.

Its during the rare instances when DeSantis talks about trials that he gives his most revealing faith responses. He has spoken of the power of prayer in helping his family through his wifes breast cancer diagnosis. In March, he agreed with the journalist Piers Morgan when asked if he leaned on his faith after his sisters death.

You start to question things that are unjust, like Why did this have to happen? DeSantis said. You just have to have faith that theres a plan in place, trust in God, theres no guarantee that youre going to have a life without challenges and without heartbreak.

In his stump speeches, though, DeSantis sticks to general God-and-country fare, occasionally referencing the Bible and often in ways bolstering his fighter persona, such as telling audiences to put on the full armor of God.

He deals in vague platitudes about faith  and he very much downplays his Catholicism, said Cary McMullen, the former religion editor of The Ledger in Lakeland, Florida.

In 1960, when anti-Catholic sentiment was more prevalent, then-candidate John F. Kennedy gave a landmark speech to a group of Protestant ministers, pledging he would not take orders from the Catholic Church if elected. DeSantis has already defied the Catholic hierarchy on policy.

In 2022, DeSantis attended Mass and met with most of Floridas bishops, who urged him to reconsider his objection to unaccompanied minors, which the Catholic Church cares for in one of its Florida shelters.

It was a frank exchange, said Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, the highest-ranking Catholic official in Florida.

DeSantis doubled down in opposition after the meeting, which devolved into competing press conferences by him and Wenski.

The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops has praised the DeSantis administration on its anti-abortion, school choice and anti-LGBTQ+ policies, while criticizing its death penalty support.

No political party is totally consistent with the gamut of our Catholic interests, Wenski said.

Biden makes a bigger deal of his Catholicism than DeSantis does, Wenski added, noting that it gives all us bishops heartburn because of his radical abortion stance.

For now, the DeSantis team appears to be focusing their faith outreach on white evangelicals, who vote overwhelmingly Republican. Catholics are swing voters. Never Back Down, the DeSantis super PAC, has brought on adviser David Polyansky in part to coordinate faith outreach  efforts he also led for Ted Cruz, who won the 2016 Iowa caucus thanks to evangelicals.

Bob Vander Plaats, head of The Family Leader and a coveted evangelical endorsement in Iowa, was impressed when he and his wife had lunch with the DeSantises recently. When asked if the governor talked about his own Catholic faith, Vander Plaats demurred: No, we really didnt get into a lot of that, other than what we believe are our core values.

Presidential candidates have long shared personal faith stories, which used to be integral to courting evangelicals, but Trump helped change that calculus.

DeSantis offers fewer scandals and more religious literacy than Trump, who won over record numbers of evangelical voters. Even if DeSantis doesnt share his personal faith easily, he still can appeal to them.

You dont have to be Pat Robertson in order to win those votes because Trump isnt, said Michael Binder, a political scientist at the University of North Florida.

After the Greenville rally, a group of four friends and former Trump supporters said DeSantis won them over.

Hes more palatable, said Tom OShields from Easley, S.C. Mr. DeSantis seems to have what those Christian voters are going to want without the baggage of Mr. Trump.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the APs collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

By TIFFANY STANLEY

Associated Press
Trump faces unprecedented legal peril, but will it hurt his standing with Republican voters?

Trump faces unprecedented legal peril, but will it hurt his standing with Republican voters? View Photo

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  In March, when Donald Trump became the first former president in U.S. history indicted on criminal charges, his reelection campaign saw a huge surge in donations. Even political rivals rushed to support him. There was no dent in his front-runner status after the state charges in New York.

Thursdays news that Trump has been indicted again, this time on federal charges related to his handling of classified documents, may offer a repeat.

A 37-count felony indictment unsealed Friday accuses Trump of willful retention and improper sharing of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice and corruptly concealing a document or record, among other charges. The top counts carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison upon conviction.

But soon after he was indicted, there were clear signs that Republican voters may be willing to entrust him again with access to the nations biggest secrets and authority over the very laws prosecutors say he defied.

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said the indictment would not fundamentally change Trumps standing in the GOP or his advantage in the crowded 2024 Republican primary.

In any other decade, this would be more than enough to kill a presidential contender in the crib. Thats no longer the case  particularly for Donald Trump, Newhouse said. He argued Trump has been effectively setting expectations for more charges for months.

This comes as a surprise to very few Republicans, Newhouse said. Trumps been saying hed get indicted. He got indicted. The sense from many Republican voters is that this is all about politics.

The prospect that someone under indictment  twice  could somehow still be considered a viable presidential candidate underscores Trumps grip on the Republican Party and the ways that he has fundamentally transformed democratic norms in America.

It also illustrates just how effective he has become at inoculating himself against political fallout by setting expectations and controlling the narrative. And it reflects growing Republican hostility toward the federal government and particularly the Justice Department, which Trump has now spent the better part of a decade maligning.

But even if the indictment doesnt hurt Trumps standing with Republican primary voters, its far from certain that the broader set of general election voters, which includes independents and moderates in both parties, will be as forgiving next fall in a prospective matchup against President Joe Biden.

The Democratic president beat Trump in 2020 with a promise to restore a sense of normalcy to Washington after Trumps drama-filled presidency. With these new charges, Trumps baggage is only growing heavier.

The former president faces the possibility of still more indictments in Georgia and Washington, D.C., a prospect that could see him facing trial in four separate jurisdictions while running to return to the highest office in the land.

For now, the new indictment throws Trump back into the spotlight, dominating every news cycle and denying his rivals space to break through to voters, just as many have formally launched their campaigns.

Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, a fierce Trump critic and founder of the Republican Accountability Project, acknowledged the indictment might ultimately help Trump seize the GOP nomination.

Ive certainly seen a rally around Trump effect every time Trump is impeached or indicted, she said, adding that much depends on the reaction of his Republican 2024 challengers.

Does anyone have the political talent to seize this as an opportunity? Or will they all line up behind Trump? she said. Because if they all defend him, they will relegate themselves to bit players in Trumps drama and never get around to making an affirmative case for themselves.

Still, Doug Heye, another Republican strategist, said Trumps primary opponents do have a major opportunity to argue that the former president cannot win in 2024 because of his baggage.

This should be gold for Republican presidential candidates, should they choose to use it, Heye said.

So far Trumps rivals instead seem to be rallying to his side  an acknowledgement of his enduring popularity with the GOP voters they need to win over in order to snag the nomination.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who received backlash after he briefly knocked Trump over the New York case, lashed out at the Justice Department in a tweet Thursday night. The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, he wrote.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott used similar language in an appearance on Fox News, decrying the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president.

Former Vice President Mike Pence said he was deeply troubled that Trump had been indicted because he believed it would further divide the nation.

Only former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot candidate and frequent Trump critic, offered a rebuke. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign, he said.

Republican leaders in Congress, as they have time after time, sprang to Trumps defense as if in choreographed unison.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said the indictment marked a dark day for the United States of America and a grave injustice.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise accused President Biden of weaponizing his Department of Justice against his own political rival with a sham indictment that was the continuation of the endless political persecution of Donald Trump.

Trump and his allies had been bracing for a federal indictment since the presidents lawyers were informed he was a target of the investigation, believing it was a matter of when  not if  charges would be brought.

Trump received word of the indictment Thursday evening while huddled with advisers at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he is spending the summer. He broke the news to the world himself on his Truth Social platform.

His team  well practiced in crisis response  had already asked allies to have supportive statements at the ready, and quickly reacted with a fundraising solicitation and opposition research targeting special counsel Jack Smith. As political donations poured in, Trump ended the night playing DJ at dinner with a mix that included songs from Elvis Presley, Pavarotti and James Brown.

Trusty said on CNN that Trump would appear in court Tuesday, as requested.

Hes not shrinking from the fight, he said Thursday. Youre not going to see him hide in Scotland. Hes going to be ready to handle this case and help his attorneys fight it.

Trusty and another Trump attorney resigned from the case on Friday.

People close to Trump have long seen the Mar-a-Lago case as far more serious than the charges he faces in New York in connection to hush money payments made to women who accused him of affairs. Conviction of the federal charges would be expected to carry far steeper legal consequences, and Smith is generally viewed as more difficult to malign than Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat.

Trumps first indictment failed to hurt his support, and polls suggest his position among Republicans has, if anything, grown stronger in the months since.

An April poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that nearly half of Americans (47%) said they believe Trump did something illegal in the classified documents case, slightly more than the 41% who said he did something illegal in the New York hush money case.

New York-based Republican donor Eric Levine, who has emerged as a vocal Trump critic in recent months, acknowledged that, regardless of how serious the charges may be, the Trump faithful will rally behind the former president no matter what.

But for people who were on the fence about Trump, this may push them away, he said. Enough of the chaos and craziness.

___ Peoples reported from New York. Associated Press polling director Emily Swanson contributed to this report from Washington.

___

More on Donald Trump-related investigations: https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump

By JILL COLVIN and STEVE PEOPLES

Associated Press
David Becker/Getty Images for Nightclub & Bar

A Texas artist who used his favorite drink as inspiration for shoe designs landed a dream collaboration when the beverage company took notice.

Jose Vela had been customizing white Vans sneakers using Topo Chico imagery and colors, later selling them online. Soon, Coca-Cola, which purchased the Mexican mineral water company in 2017, sent him a message.
Donald Trump's indictment on 37 counts of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate represents the most serious legal jeopardy so far for Trump, coming less than three months after he was charged in New York with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Here's a look at the charges, the special counsel's investigation and how Trump's case differs from those of other politicians known to be in possession of classified documents:

WHAT ARE THE CHARGES?

Trump faces 37 counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, according to the indictment unsealed Friday. The charges include counts of retaining classified information, obstructing justice and making false statements, among other crimes.

Trump is accused of keeping documents related to nuclear weaponry in the United States and the nuclear capabilities of a foreign country, along with documents from White House intelligence briefings, including some that detail the military capabilities of the U.S. and other countries, according to the indictment. Prosecutors alleged Trump showed off the documents to people who did not have security clearances to review them and later tried to conceal documents from his own lawyers as they sought to comply with federal demands to find and return documents.

The top charges carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.

After leaving office in 2021, the former president showed someone working for his political action committee a map that detailed a military operation in a foreign country, prosecutors allege in the document. On another occasion that year, Trump showed a writer, a publisher and two of his staffers  none of whom had security clearances  a military plan of attack.

HOW IS TRUMP REACTING?

Trump, on his Truth Social app on Thursday, called his indictment a DARK DAY for the United States of America. In a video post, he said, Im innocent and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly. Within 20 minutes of breaking the news, his 2024 presidential campaign sent out a fundraising missive asking for financial support.

On Friday, he continued to post about it on social media, lashing out at the special counsel who investigated the case, seeking to blame President Joe Biden, labeling the investigation a WITCH HUNT and declaring, I had nothing to hide, nor do I now.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The Justice Department unsealed the indictment Friday, the first time the department confirmed Trump was being charged with a crime. Special counsel Jack Smith, who filed the charges, made his first public statement Friday afternoon, saying in brief remarks to reporters in Washington that the country has one set of laws and they apply to everyone." He said prosecutors would seek a speedy trial.

Trump is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday in South Florida. It wasnt immediately clear what the procedure would look like.

When he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney in the New York case, Trump surrendered to authorities, where he was booked behind closed doors and appeared in the courtroom, sitting with his lawyers at the defense table.

The Florida case was initially assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Trump and who previously granted his request for an independent arbiter to review documents obtained during an FBI search of his Florida estate.

HOW DID THIS CASE COME ABOUT?

Officials with the National Archives and Records Administration reached out to representatives for Trump in spring 2021 when they realized that important material from his time in office was missing.

According to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents are considered property of the U.S. government and must be preserved.

A Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago. In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trumps Florida home, later telling Justice Department officials that they contained a lot of classified material.

That May, the FBI and Justice Department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Trumps possession. Investigators who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Trumps lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.

But that assertion turned out to be false. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents.

In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings  including some at the top secret level  have been recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021.

HOW DID A SPECIAL COUNSEL GET INVOLVED?

Last year, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland picked Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor with a background in public corruption probes, to lead investigations into the presence of classified documents at Trumps Florida estate, as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.

Smith's appointment was a recognition by Garland of the politics involved in an investigation into a former president and current White House candidate. Garland himself was selected by Democratic President Joe Biden, whom Trump is seeking to challenge for the White House in 2024.

Special counsels are appointed in cases in which the Justice Department perceives itself as having a conflict or where its deemed to be in the public interest to have someone outside the government come in and take responsibility for a matter.

According to the Code of Federal Regulations, a special counsel must have a reputation for integrity and impartial decision making, as well as an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies.

DIDNT BIDEN AND FORMER VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE HAVE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS, TOO?

Yes, but the circumstances of their cases are vastly different from those involving Trump.

After classified documents were found at Biden's think tank and Pence's Indiana home, their lawyers notified authorities and quickly arranged for them to be handed over. They also authorized other searches by federal authorities to search for additional documents.

There is no indication either was aware of the existence of the records before they were found, and no evidence has so far emerged that Biden or Pence sought to conceal the discoveries. Thats important because the Justice Department historically looks for willfulness in deciding whether to bring criminal charges.

A special counsel was appointed earlier this year to probe how classified materials ended up at Bidens Delaware home and former office. But even if the Justice Department were to find Bidens case prosecutable on the evidence, its Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a president is immune from prosecution during his time in office.

As for Pence, the Justice Department informed his legal team earlier this month that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against him over his handling of the documents.

DOES A FEDERAL INDICTMENT PREVENT TRUMP FROM RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT?

No. Neither the indictment itself nor a conviction would prevent Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

And as the New York case showed, criminal charges have historically been a boon to his fundraising. The campaign announced that it had raised over $4 million in the 24 hours after that indictment became public, far smashing its previous record after the FBI search of Trumps Mar-a-Lago club.

HOW ARE TRUMPS REPUBLICAN RIVALS REACTING TO THE NEWS?

Many of Trump's challengers for the GOP nomination jumped to his defense after news of the indictment broke.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump's top rival for the 2024 nomination, accused the Justice Department of political bias in charging the former president.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, DeSantis tweeted. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation."

He questioned why the Justice Department had been so zealous in bringing charges against Trump and so passive about going after former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton or Biden's son Hunter.

Campaigning in New Hampshire on Friday, former Vice President Pence said he was deeply troubled to see the indictment because he believed it would further divide the nation. He also called on Garland to make the indictment public as soon as possible.

You need to stand up and explain to us why this was necessary before the sun sets today," Pence said.

Trump's United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, also decried the indictment, saying, This is not how justice should be pursued in our country.

The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics," she said Friday. "Its time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions.

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said Thursday that he felt the justice systems scales are weighted based on politics. In America, every single person is presumed innocent, not guilty, Scott said on Fox News, decrying the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president.

Biotech entrepreneur and anti-woke activist Vivek Ramaswamy said the federal case was part of an affront to every citizen. Reiterating his comments that he would pardon Trump, Ramaswamy called it hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden over his own classified documents case.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who called for Trump to drop out of the race after the New York charges were filed, said the federal indictment marked a sad day for our country and reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.

___

Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in Des Moines, Iowa and Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix contributed to this report.
June 1

A theft was reported on June 1 at the 2800 block of Houston St.

Theft from a vehicle was reported at the 600 block of E. 9th St. on June 1.

Another theft from a vehicle was reported at the 1000 block of W. 5th St.

Two people were arrested on June 1 at the 600 block of W. 24th St. Police arrested a 41-year-old woman for possession/delivery of drug paraphernalia and for possession of a controlled substance, which is a felony. Another 41-year-old woman was also arrested for active warrants.

Police arrested two people at the 900 block of W. 28th St. on June 1. A 26-year-old man was arrested for an active warrant and a 44-year-old woman was arrested for hindering the apprehension or prosecution of a known felon, which is a felony.

June 2

Police arrested three people during a traffic stop at the 1300 block of Houston St. on June 2. Officers searched the vehicle and found narcotics. A 64-year-old man, a 48-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman were all arrested for one charge each of possession of a controlled weapon, which is a felony.

A 38-year-old man was arrested on June 2 at the 700 block of W. 11th St. during a traffic stop. The man was charged with driving with an invalid license with previous conviction without financial resolution.

Fraud was reported at the 1000 block of Oakland St. on June 2.

A threat was reported at the 900 block of N. Broadway on June 2.

An aggravated assault with a weapon was reported at the 100 block of Pecos Place on June 2.

A 33-year-old man was arrested at the 900 block of N. Columbia on June 2. He was found to have an active warrant.

A 23-year-old man was arrested on June 2 at the 700 block of N. I-27 following a hit-and-run crash with vehicle damage. The individual was charged with accident involving damage to a vehicle.

June 3

A driver pulling out of El Rincon crashed into a police unit on June 3. According to the incident report, the driver failed to yield right-of-way and pulled into traffic at the 1300 block of W. 5th St.

A 37-year-old man was arrested for public intoxication on June 3 at the 1300 block of W. 5th St.

A stolen vehicle was reported at the 1000 block of N. I-27.

Burglary of a habitation was reported at the 800 block of Denver St. on June 3.

A crash was reported at the 1800 block of W. 5th St. on June 3.

Another crash was reported at Denver and W. 8th St. Vehicle damage was reported.

A 31-year-old man was arrested on June 3 at the 3500 block of Olton Road for active warrants for theft and for failure to appear/bail jumping.

An 18-year-old man was arrested at the 1600 block of Independence St. on June 3. He was found to have multiple active warrants including charges for running a stop sign, violating a promise to appear and driving with no license.

June 4

A hit-and-run crash was reported at the 2000 block of W. 11th St. Vehicle damage was reported.

A stolen vehicle was reported at the 1000 block of W. 24th St.

A 32-year-old individual was arrested at the 2000 block of Smythe St. on June 4. The individual was charged with assault causing bodily injury.

Police arrested a 26-year-old individual on June 4 at the 3700 block of Olton Road. The individual was charged with theft and public intoxication.

Theft was reported at the 100 block of E. 7th St. on June 4.

An abandoned vehicle was reported at the 800 block of N. I-27 on June 4.

June 5

A 19-year-old man was arrested at the 1000 block of Milwaukee St. on June 5. He was charged with criminal trespass and with evading arrest or detention.

Criminal mischief was reported at the 500 block of W. 5th St. Damaged property was noted.

Criminal mischief was reported at the 1200 block of Quincy. Damaged property was reported.

Theft of a bicycle was reported at the 1200 block of Amarillo St. on June 5.

Criminal mischief was noted at the 500 block of W. 10th St. on June 5. Damaged property was reported.

Harassment was reported to the Plainview PD on June 5.

A traffic stop was conducted at the 1500 block of Nassau St. on June 5. Police pulled over the car and found marijuana, which was confiscated. The driver was released at the scene.

June 6

A 17-year-old man was arrested at the 1300 block of Galveston St. on June 6. He was charged with public intoxication.

A traffic violation was noted at the 2500 block of W. 16th St. on June 6.

Theft was reported at the 1300 block of W. 24th St. on June 6.

June 7

A burglary was reported at the 100 block of Pecos Place on June 7.

A 26-year-old man was arrested at the 3700 block of Olton Road on June 7. Officers responded to the location in reference to a privacy violation. The individual was charged with criminal trespass.

Criminal mischief was reported at the 200 block of W. 7th St.

Harassment via phone calls was reported at the 300 block of SE 5th St. on June 7.

A crash with an injury was reported at the 3600 block of Olton Road on June 7. An injury was noted.

Pornography was reported to the police on June 7.

A crash with vehicle damage was reported at W. 13th and Canyon on June 7.

A stolen vehicle was reported on June 7 at the 1600 block of S. Cedar St.
Criminal Case Disposition Report

May 2023

242nd District Court

Joetta Beverly Velasquez  possession of a controlled substance with intent to delivery, penalty group 1, at least 4 grams, less than 200 grams  conviction  confinement  5 years, Texas Department of Corrections

Ruben Cardona  manufacture/delivery of a controlled substance, penalty group 1, at least 4 grams, less than 200 grams  convicted  confinement  10 years  Texas Department of Corrections

Jose Iran Cuba  possession of a controlled substance, penalty group 1, less than 1 gram  convicted  confinement  90 days, county jail

Sergio Musquiz, Jr.  assault of a family/household member with previous conviction  convicted  confinement  5 years  Texas Department of Corrections

Ruben Cardona  manufacture/delivery of a controlled substance, penalty group 1, at least 4 grams, less than 200 grams  dismissed
Attorneys told a federal appeals court Friday they are close to an agreement that could temporarily maintain government requirements that health insurance plans include coverage of HIV-preventing drugs, cancer screenings and other preventive care while a court battle over the mandates plays out.

An agreement could be ready to present to the court by Tuesday, attorneys for opponents of the mandates and the Biden administration, which is defending the mandates, said in a brief report filed with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
NORFOLK, Va. (AP)  Pat Robertson united tens of millions of evangelical Christians through the power of television and pushed them in a far more conservative direction with the personal touch of a folksy minister.

His biggest impact may have been wedding evangelical Christianity to the Republican party, to an extent once unimaginable.

The culture wars being waged today by just about all the national Republican candidates  that is partly a product of Robertson, said veteran political analyst Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Robertson died Thursday at the age of 93.

Robertson's reach exploded with the rise of cable in the late 1970s. He galvanized many viewers into a political force when he unsuccessfully ran for president in 1988.

The next year, he created the deeply influential Christian Coalition. He sought to influence and impact the trajectory of the Republican Party and turn it into a pro-life, pro-family party, said Ralph Reed, who ran the coalition in the 1990s and now chairs the Faith & Freedom Coalition.

The Christian Coalition helped fuel the Republican Revolution of 1994, which saw the GOP take control of the U.S. House and Senate following the 1992 election of President Bill Clinton.

The son of a U.S. senator and a Yale Law School graduate, Robertson made political pronouncements that appalled many, particularly in his later years, placing the ultimate blame for the 9/11 attacks on various liberal movements. He claimed to have participated in prayer to keep a hurricane away from his Virginia base.

Even Pentecostals, and Ive known a lot, theyre not usually going to go that far, said Grant Wacker, professor emeritus of Christian history at Duke Divinity School.

When he ran for president, Robertson pioneered the now-common strategy of courting Iowas network of evangelical Christian churches. He finished in second place in the Iowa caucuses, ahead of Vice President George H.W. Bush.

Robertson later endorsed Bush, who won the presidency. Pursuit of Iowas evangelicals is now a ritual for Republican hopefuls, including those seeking the White House in 2024.

Reed pointed to former Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Tim Scott as examples of high-ranking Republicans who are evangelical Christians.

Its easy to forget when youre living it every day, but there wouldnt have been a single, explicit evangelical at any of those levels 40 years ago in the Republican Party, Reed said.

Robertsons Christian Broadcasting Network started airing in 1961 after he bought a bankrupt UHF television station in Portsmouth, Virginia. His long-running show The 700 Club began production in 1966.

Robertson coupled evangelism with popular reruns of family-friendly television, which was effective in drawing in viewers so he could promote The 700 Club, a news and talk show that also featured regular people talking about finding Jesus Christ.

He didn't rely solely on fundraising like other televangelists. Robertson broadcast popular secular shows and ran commercials, said David John Marley, author of the 2007 book Pat Robertson: An American Life.

He was the one who made televangelism a real business, Marley said.

Robertson had a soft-spoken style, talking to the camera as if he was a pastor speaking one-on-one and not a preacher behind a pulpit.

When viewers began watching cable television in the late 1970s, there were only 10 channels and one of them was Pat, Reed said.

His appeal was similar to that of evangelist Billy Graham, who died in 2018 after a career with a towering impact on American religion and politics, said Wacker, of Duke Divinity School.

He really showed a lot of pastors and other Christians across this country how impactful media can be  to reach beyond the four walls of their churches, said Troy A. Miller, president and CEO of the National Religious Broadcasters.

When he ran for president in 1988, Robertson's masterstroke was insisting that 3 million followers sign petitions before he would decide to run, Robertson biographer Jeffrey K. Hadden told The AP. The tactic gave Robertson an army.

He asked people to pledge that theyd work for him, pray for him and give him money, Hadden told the AP in 1988.

When he was working on the book as a graduate student in George Washington University in the late 1990s, Marley got unfettered access to Robertsons presidential campaign archives and saw a campaign plagued by internal strife.

But, he put a lot of effort into his presidential campaign, Marley said, adding that Robertson worked for at least two years to lay the groundwork for his presidential run.

Robertson relished his role as a kingmaker and liaison of sorts between top Republican leaders such as Ronald Reagan and evangelical Christians.

That ended with George W. Bush, who was able to have that conversation on his own, Marley said.

During his 1998 interview with Robertson, Marley said he saw the preacher as someone who was as comfortable with his failings as he was with his accomplishments.

I saw someone who absolutely at peace with himself, Marley said.

___

Smith reported from Pittsburgh and Bharath from Los Angeles. Associated Press reporters Holly Meyer in Nashville and David Bauder in New York contributed.
A fresh wave of nervousness and excitement washes over the Maldonado family as the line for CBP One appointments begins to advance (Corrie Boudreaux for Source NM).

CIUDAD JUAREZ  It was well before dawn Sunday morning, when Olga Maldonado, her nieces Yulisa, Marcela Maldonado and Kevin Hernandez and the children, ages 3 to 10-years old, rose to prepare for their asylum meeting with the U.S. Customs and Border Protections.

Nervous, but excited, was how Olga described her feelings, slipping on plain black sandals, before combing her daughters hair and checking the bags with all of their papers again.

After months of trying, the family of eight Hondurans who fled San Pedro Sula in the past year, received one of the coveted 1,000 daily slots allowing asylum-seekers to get an appointment with immigration officials through the CBP One app.

After a bumpy ride from Anapra into downtown Ciudad Juarez, the family shared a tearful goodbye with Pan de Vida shelter director Pastor Ismael Martinez. They joined the line of over 200 people stretching along the fence before the entrance to the Paseo Del Norte at 6:45 a.m., as the sky began to glow bright yellow.

All CBP One appointments are scheduled for 7 a.m. at the El Paso crossing at the Paseo Del Norte Bridge, said Roger Maier, the CBP spokesman for New Mexico and El Paso. He said CBP can receive people crossing as early as 6:30 a.m. and said most appointments are confirmed, and escorted to the CBP lobby by 7:30 a.m.

There are very few no-shows, Maier wrote in an email.

On Sunday, Mexican officials allowed people to start lining up on the pedestrian bridge just after 7:10 a.m. The Maldonados, in the center of the line, showed documents and entered into the U.S. just after 7:45 a.m. Dozens of people waited behind them.

The sun crested over the edge of the horizon as they waited on the bridge. The children gazed out as the reflection blazed in the shallow pools on the Rio Grande, marveling at a pack of cyclists on the banks below.

Im so happy, Marcela said. Were finally here, arriving in El Paso, realizing our dream, its the most beautiful feeling.

The appointment

In an interview after the appointment, Olga Maldonado said the family received a COVID-19 vaccine, despite all of them having three rounds of the shot. All of the adults also gave a DNA sample from a cheek swab. The children, below the age of 14, were not required to give a sample.

DNA samples have become common at different agencies since 2019 said, attorney Sophia Genovese with the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center.

CBP has been collecting DNA for a few years at the border, and the U.S. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has also been doing it at the local ICE office in Albuquerque, she said.

The family was released on parole Sunday afternoon, with a court date set for 2025.

Privacy and technology concerns

There are two programs to test DNA of people in the U.S. immigration system, and both are relatively new.

One applies to people ages 14-79 and sends samples to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, for input into the federal Combined DNA Index System, called CODIS.

The other is the use of rapid-testing to determine parent-child relationships, which started under the Trump administration and continued into the Biden administration.

Olga Maldonado said she isnt concerned about failing that test.

We were not worried because none of us have a [criminal] record, she said in a WhatsApp message Tuesday.

But privacy and immigration advocates said these kinds of policies raise safety concerns for vulnerable people on the border, while also posing serious privacy questions for both the border and interior.

Saira Hussain is a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization focusing on technology and the law. Hussains expertise is examining immigration, race and surveillance in the U.S.

Privacy concerns are threefold, Hussain said. First, theres the collection of a physical sample  and how thats used and if it can be used again in the future without consent. Second, is how that data is stored, whether it is private and secure. Finally, its how the data is shared. Some databases, like CODIS have extra privacy requirements and training, but other databases that access the same information could be less secure.

Taking DNA samples to use for CODIS adds a risk to people exercising their legal right to seek asylum, she said.

The collection of DNA from people who are already marginalized as it is, is very concerning, Hussain said. Especially when you consider who that information can be shared with, including foreign governments that people may be trying to escape persecution from.

Even though immigration detention is administrative and not criminal in nature, collecting DNA adds a layer of criminality, she said, despite the fact that asylum is legal under international and federal law.

In 2019, the Department of Justice put forward a big rule change. The department removed an exception to a 2005 law to submit samples to the FBI, due to operational constraints. The new rules removed that exception for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP and ICE.

In 2020, DHS said it would collect DNA from anyone ages 14-79 in custody, who is arrested, facing charges, convicted, or detained by CBP or ICE (this can include non-citizens, lawful residents and U.S. citizens).

In a May 23 report from the Government Accountability Office, CBP officials told the agency the DNA sample collection will generally not include the exceptions  like non-citizens entering legally or being processed for lawful admission.

Since the program was launched in 2020, DHS has been rapidly sending DNA samples over to the FBI. In the first year, the agency sent 5,641 samples. In fiscal year 2022, that ballooned to 634,422 samples, or about 37% of the total people they encountered.

CBP officials did not respond by press time to a detailed list of questions about DNA testing people seeking asylum through CBP One appointments, including if the agency has any guidelines since their news release in 2020.

A second program, which first started in 2000, was expanded in 2019.

DHS granted a $5.2 million dollar contract to Bode Cellmark Forensics for a project to rapid DNA test parents and children to determine if they are related within a matter of hours. According to the CBP, the tests are destroyed after testing.

Hussain said there are serious questions about the accuracy of the technology with rapid DNA testing, and whether people could truly consent to getting their DNA taken.

There was an understanding that if you refuse to submit your DNA to this test, then it could factor into whether a parent and child were detained together or separately, she said.

In press releases DHS officials claimed this would prevent child-smuggling.

However, Hussain and others found that most of the people tested were related. A further look at the non-related tests often showed kinship relationships Hussain said. Step-parents or adopted families had little to no recourse to challenge the tests.

Underlying all this is the idea of what is the family and who qualifies as family, she said. And is the way that the government is interpreting who is family, is that sufficient to start taking DNA from people?

The current state of that program is murky.

CBP officials did not respond to questions about the status of the program. Last week, Republican congressional lawmakers wrote letters requesting Sec. of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to continue the program after reports that it ended on May 31, 2023.

Hussain said expanding surveillance on the border has consequences for the rest of the country, pointing to the creep of just collecting DNA from prior arrests or convictions to immigration custody, to lawfully going through asylum proceedings.

Closer attention does need to be paid to the uses of technology to surveil and collect information from communities at the border, she said. Because what happens at the border has repercussions for what happens in the interior.

This story was produced by Source New Mexico, a States Newsroom affiliate. Corrie Boudreaux contributed to the reporting of this article.
Principal Kathleen Snipes briefly fills in for a second grade teacher at Faxon Elementary School on Feb. 1 in Kansas City (Zach Bauman/The Beacon).

The state has collected more than 73,000 survey responses that reflect details such as who is substitute teaching in Missouri public schools, what theyre paid and where they work.

The data, released Wednesday by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, may not offer a clear reason why some school districts struggle to recruit substitute teachers, though more people are applying for certification.

But it could provide some clues.

For example, have state law changes enacted last year affected the applicant pool?

Last year, the Missouri legislature reduced the number of college credit hours required to be a substitute teacher from 60  typical to earn an associate degree  to 36. Substitute teachers can also become certified without college credit hours by taking a 20-hour training course.

The changes raised concerns the state would see a bunch of younger substitutes, said Paul Katnik, assistant commissioner in DESEs office of educator quality. Thats not whats happening.

Instead, the majority of survey entries are from substitutes 50 or older, and 88% are from people in their 30s or older. Less than 1% are from substitutes younger than 20.

And most substitute teachers exceed the education requirements. The survey data indicates many have much more than 36 hours of college credit  equivalent to two or three full-time semesters. More than two-thirds of the surveys were from substitutes with a four-year degree or higher, while 16% of the responses note the respondent had less than a two-year degree.

Missouri, along with other states, has struggled to recruit substitute teachers. Locally, the staffing shortage has been so severe that some schools canceled classes last year.

In January 2022, Keith Elliott, a spokesperson for Kelly Education, said the staffing company could send substitute teachers to fill only about 60% to 70% of vacancies in the nine Kansas City-area districts it serves. By May of this year, that rate had improved to around 90%, even with more teacher absences, but the company would like to fill at least 95%.

Another positive sign: More people are applying for substitute teacher certification. Those applications jumped to 18,000 in 2022 after averaging 12,000 during the three previous years, Katnik said. The pace of applications has kept up this year, but certified substitute teachers dont automatically accept open positions in schools.

Could substitute teachers pay offer more clues about the reasons for the gap between certification applications and accepting open positions?

A typical substitute teacher in the state makes $75 to $125 per day. The lower end of that range would be less than the states $12 minimum wage if teachers work seven-hour days. Much less often, about 9% of the time, they make more than $150 per day. Pay varies by school district, region or whether the assignment is short-term or long-term.

So when youre asking, Why dont people want to sub? maybe that might be it, Katnik said of substitute teacher pay. I dont know if youve ever substitute taught, but its pretty challenging work. I dont know if you would do it for 100 bucks a day.

The substitute teachers who take on that challenging work gave positive responses about the support they received to do it. Of the survey responses submitted, 97% said they received at least adequate support from school staff. Most of them, nearly two-thirds, responded that they receive abundant support.

Officials are still trying to understand why shortages persist and are pondering ways to get certified substitute teachers into classrooms.

Is it just that they dont want to substitute teach? Katnik asked. Or is it that the needs of the school districts are so much higher than weve seen in the past?

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
My position with the Post has evolved since 2000, when I began work with The City Paper. In 2008, SouthComm Inc. bought the Post and The City Paper, after which I worked with both publications. The City Paper ceased operations in 2013, two years after I was named Post managing editor. In 2018, FW Publishing acquired the Post.

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(Natural News) BlackRock CEO Larry Fink defended the environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards in a 2017 video that has resurfaced on social media, In particular, Fink stressed the need to force behaviors.

The aforementioned clip showed Fink boasting how his investment firm forced companies to accept the ESG system alongside the diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) system during a 2017 DealBook conference sponsored by the New York Times.

Behaviors are going to have to change, and this is one thing we are asking companies. You have to force behaviors  and at BlackRock, we are forcing behaviors, the BlackRock CEO said. If you dont force behaviors  whether its gender, race, or just any way you want to  say, the composition of your team, youre [going to] be impacted. Thats not just recruiting; it is development.

The CEO of the worlds biggest asset management firm also touted that his company added four more points in terms of diverse employment for that year. Fink continued: What we were doing internally is if you dont achieve these levels of impact, your compensation could be impacted.

Many users voiced out their thoughts about Finks 2017 revelations on social media. Twitter owner Elon Musk also joined in the fray, writing that the BlackRock CEOs remarks were concerning.

ESG and DEI control mechanisms are not designed to improve social justice or the environment. They are simply meant to consolidate economic power, InfoWars noted. According to the outlet, the globalist Club of Rome outlined the exact plan Fink brags about in its 1991 book The First Global Revolution. The book stated that the elites would use global warming and climate change to assert the New World Order agenda. (Related: The Club of Rome: How climate hysteria is being used to create global governance.)

Fink defends wokeism years after 2017 conference

Five years after the 2017 conference where he defended the need for ESG, DEI and forcing behaviors  Fink doubled down on his defense of the woke agenda. He claimed that investors focusing on the interests of wider society instead of pure profits are not woke.

Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics, the BlackRock CEO wrote in a January 2022 open letter. It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not woke. It is capitalism driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers and communities your company relies on to prosper.

But the letter failed to mollify critics. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Consumers Research argued that BlackRocks woke posturing was a smokescreen for funneling money to Chinese companies via its investment funds. The nonprofit also launched an advertising campaign attacking the asset management firm.

The Department of Labor also proposed permitting fund managers to include ESG as part of their fiduciary duty to investors in 2021. However, Republican lawmakers did not take too kindly to the suggestion.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) cited the proposal as the latest example of how the political left works. He commented: They want to remake the entire country to comply with the latest woke agenda.

His colleague Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) also shared the same sentiment. The lawmaker from the Lone Star State commented that powerful CEOs have made the decision to use their companies to enforce the political agenda of todays Democratic Party, which is controlled by the Radical Left.

Visit Wokies.news for more stories about ESG and DEI in corporate America.

Watch this video explaining why BlackRock is the New World Order.

This video is from the Truthchannel channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

Everything you need to know about BlackRock, the company that owns the world.

Nineteen U.S. states launch investigations into BlackRock and Vanguard for embracing climate tyranny.

Two of the largest asset management companies, BlackRock and Vanguard, own both Big Pharma and the media.

Sources include:

YourNews.com

InfoWars.com

FT.com

Brighteon.com
(Natural News) The Federal Bureau of Investigation has aided a Ukrainian intelligence effort to censor social media users and obtain their personal information, leaked emails reveal.

(Article republished from Mate.Substack.com)

In March 2022, an FBI Special Agent sent Twitter a list of accounts on behalf of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Ukraines main intelligence agency. The accounts, the FBI wrote, are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation. In an attached memo, the SBU asked Twitter to remove the accounts and hand over their user data.

The Ukrainian governments FBI-enabled targets extend to members of the media. The SBU list that the FBI provided to Twitter included my name and Twitter profile. In its response to the FBI, Twitter agreed to review the accounts for inauthenticity but raised concerns about the inclusion of me and other American and Canadian journalists.

The FBIs attempt to ban Twitter accounts at the request of Ukrainian intelligence is among the most overt requests for censorship revealed to date in the Twitter Files, a cache of leaked communications from the social media giant.

The FBIs censorship request was relayed in a March 27th, 2022 email from FBI Special Agent Aleksandr Kobzanets, the Assistant Legal Attache at the US Embassy in Kyiv, to two Twitter executives. Four FBI colleagues were copied on the exchange.

Thank you very much for your time to discuss the assistance to Ukraine, Kobzanets wrote. I am including a list of accounts I received over a couple of weeks from the Security Service of Ukraine. These accounts are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation. For your review and consideration.

FBI Special Agent Aleksandr Kobzanets censorship request to Twitter.

The attached document, drafted by Ukraines SBU, contained 163 accounts, including mine. (The list is numbered to 175, but some accounts have two corresponding numerical lines).

The listed Twitter profiles, the SBU alleged, have been used to disseminate disinformation and fake news to inaccurately reflect events in Ukraine, justify war crimes of the Russian authorities on the territory of the Ukrainian state in violation of international law.

In order to stop Russian aggression on the information front, the SBU continued, we kindly ask you to take urgent measures to block these Twitter accounts and provide us with user data specified during registration.

The SBU expressed its gratitude for the existing level of interaction.

In a memo forwarded by the FBI, Ukraines SBU asks Twitter to block the listed Twitter accounts and provide us with user data specified during registration.

If granted, the users on the list would not only have been banned from Twitter but had their phone number, date of birth, and email address disclosed to both the FBI and SBU.

In response, Yoel Roth, Twitters then-Head of Trust and Safety, informed Special Agent Kobzanets and his FBI colleagues that Twitter would review the reported accounts under our Rules. But he warned that the list included a few accounts of American and Canadian journalists (e.g. Aaron Mate). Therefore, Roth said, Twitters review would focus first and foremost on identifying any potential inauthenticity.

Roth then suggested that he would be open to suspending authentic accounts if it could be proven that they have a hidden tie to a foreign government. Journalists who cover the conflict with a pro-Russian stance are unlikely to be found in violation of our rules absent other context that might establish some kind of covert/deceptive association between them and a government, Roth wrote. Any additional information or context in those areas is of course welcome and appreciated.

Twitter executive Yoel Roths response to the FBIs censorship request flags its inclusion of journalists, e.g. Aaron Mate.

In his reply, Kobzanets did not directly acknowledge Roths concerns about Ukraines FBI-abetted effort to censor journalists. Understood, Kobzanets told Roth. Whatever your review determines and action Twitter deem[s] is appropriate. He also indicated that the FBI would not meet Roths request for any context that might establish ties between journalists and a foreign government: Unlikely there will be any additional information or context.

Inside Twitter, Roth forwarded the FBI request to two colleagues. This is the output of our meeting with the FBI last week, he wrote. The list of accounts is a mixed bag  theres some state media mixed in with a bunch of other stuff  but given the context, I think a deep dive here warranted. (Roth left Twitter in November 2022).

In an email, I asked Special Agent Kobzanets if he had vetted Ukraines censorship request list before sending it to Twitter. I also asked Kobzanets if, after being informed by Twitters Roth that the FBI was trying to censor journalists on the SBUs behalf, whether that had prompted any review or revision of his assistance to Ukrainian intelligence. Kobzanets did not respond.

The FBIs National Press Office also declined to answer questions. Among several queries, I invoked Twitters warning that the FBIs assistance to Ukraine entailed censoring journalists, and asked if that has prompted any changes to the bureaus collaboration with Ukrainian intelligence.

While we appreciate your inquiry, as a matter of practice we do not confirm, deny, or otherwise comment on specific interactions nor confirm the veracity of correspondence, an FBI spokesperson wrote.

The FBI officials copied on the Kobzanets exchange with Twitter include Elvis Chan, an Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) of the FBIs San Francisco field office, where he manages its Cyber Branch. Chan was active in the FBIs contacts with Twitter when the social media giants censorship of reporting on Hunter Bidens laptop shortly before the November 2020 election. (As I recently reported, he was also involved in FBIs decision to forego a direct inspection of the DNC servers and instead rely on the Hillary Clinton-funded cyber firm CrowdStrike in the bureaus probe of alleged Russian hacking in 2016).

Of the 163 accounts named by the SBU, 34 were suspended and 20 no longer exist. The rest remain active.

Those marked for censorship by Ukraine but remain online include Russian politicians Gennady Zyuganov, a longtime member of Russias Communist Party and parliamentarian who lost to Boris Yeltsin in Russias 1996 president election; Dmitry Rogozin, Russias former Deputy Prime Minister; and Sergey Mironov, a Russian politician and parliamentarian. The list also includes Russian journalists Vladimir Solovyov, a television news host; and Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Russian state-controlled network RT. Several Russian government agencies and media outlets were also listed.

The Ukrainian nationals targeted by the SBUs suppression request include Anatoly Shariy, a video blogger and politician who fled Ukraine in 2012 and subsequently received European Union asylum; and Andriy Portnov, a Ukrainian lawyer and politician who served as a senior official under Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych until the latters ouster in the February 2014 Maidan coup. (Both Shariy and Portnovs Twitter accounts remain active).

The disclosure of a collaboration on censorship between the FBI and SBU is the latest documented instance of Ukrainian state-tied attempts to target foreign voices. A Ukrainian website known as Myrotvorets maintains a list of what it calls enemies of Ukraine. I was recently added to that list along with The Grayzones Anya Parampil, as well as the comedian and YouTube host Jimmy Dore. The Myrotvorets database was co-founded by Anton Gerashchenko, former deputy minister at the Ukraines Ministry of Internal Affairs, where he now serves as an advisor.

Last year, the global tech/media conference Web Summit withdrew a speaking invitation to The Grayzones Max Blumenthal and I after Olena Zelenska, the wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, demanded our cancellation. (Another Grayzone colleague, Kit Klarenberg, was recently detained and interrogated about his journalism by British authorities).

News of the FBIs work with Ukrainian intelligence to censor Twitter users also follows reporting from journalist Lee Fang that the FBI has pressured Facebook to remove accounts and posts deemed by the SBU to be Russian disinformation. According to Fang, a senior Ukrainian official in regular contact with the FBI defined disinformation in such broad terms that it could mean viewpoints that simply contradict the Ukrainian governments narrative.

Read more at: Mate.Substack.com
(Natural News) Until yesterday, Id not read any documents in the lawsuit brought by the states of Missouri, Louisiana et al vs. President Biden. Because of this, I didnt fully grasp the stunning claims made by the plaintiffs, nor realize how overwhelming the evidence is that supports this case.

(Article republished from BillRiceJr.Substack.com)

Yesterday, I read the first 54 pages of a 354-page legal document that was filed with a federal district court in Louisiana on March 3, 2023.

I now better understand why some people believe this might be the most important legal case in U.S. history.

In a nutshell, attorneys for the plaintiffs are compiling and presenting a mountain of evidence that shows actors for the U.S. government have conspired to nullify the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

This Amendment was first for an important reason.

It states that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The core issue at stake is should American citizens be allowed to have genuine freedom of speech.

In my view, the evidence already presented in this legal case proves beyond a reasonable doubt that a cadre of officials in government (and organizations working in partnership with government agencies) despise, fear and want to end free speech. In fact, theyve already effectively blocked the free speech of millions of Americans.

In a democracy, free speech is vitally important as it makes dissent from prevailing narratives possible and thus protects the natural rights of citizens who may hold minority views. That is, without free speech, only the views of those who embrace authorized opinions would be allowed to participate in any meaningful way in democratic debates.

One can parse this lengthy document a thousand ways, but the bottom-line conclusion is that the U.S. government believes only its views should be allowed to be widely disseminated.

Even more terrifying, virtually all the important institutions in contemporary society defend and seemingly support the efforts of the federal government to censor any speech labeled mis- or disinformation.

A few of my main take-aways from my (partial) reading of this must-read legal document:

All Hope is Not Lost

The fact that attorneys general from at least two U.S. states have filed such a lawsuit provides hope that the entire country has not yet become disciples and enforcers of Big Brother.

It is also significant that the push-back to mass censorship comes from the state level of our republic and not from the federal government itself. That is, the Attorney General of the United States should have brought this case. Instead, representatives of the U.S. government are vigorously defending mass censorship, and the effort to abridge the freedom of speech.

The Legal System Can Work

This document is 354 pages because its replete with transcripts from legal depositions and exhibits that the public would not have seen absent the commencement of this legal proceeding.

The document also proves the power of legal discovery wherein defendants have to turn over all relevant evidence such as emails, meeting records, etc. (although plaintiffs argue that the defendants have still not turned over every piece of discovery requested).

A healthy democracy hinges on fact-finding and a search for the truth. This lawsuit has made it possible for the people who are following this case (not enough people) to learn more about the activities of the most powerful individuals who work for the most powerful government on the planet.

A quick aside .

In reading this summary of evidence, I was struck by how easy it was for plaintiffs attorneys to build their case.

The attorneys, investigators and staffers bringing this case are clearly intelligent professionals whove been very thorough in developing their evidence and trying to prove their case. That is, if they get a fair hearing (which Im not sure they will), they should win this case with ease.

However, this example made me think of all the lawsuits and fact-finding exercises that have NOT occurred with any of the litany of crimes and scandals of our Covid times (and even before Covid).

One strongly suspects that if other teams of competent litigators and investigators had employed the same tools of discovery and depositions, every scandal of our times would also be just-as-easily exposed.

Just like I think about all of the mainstream news articles that are off limits to alleged watchdog journalists, I also think about all the lawsuits and prosecutions that are apparently off limits to the people and organizations who could bring such cases.

Whats the core issue in this case?

The first paragraph of the motion for the injunction describes what the plaintiffs are trying to prove (and have already proven as far as I am concerned).

Federal officials, including Defendants, have made a long series of public statements since at least 2018 demanding that social-media platforms increase their censorship of speech and speakers disfavored by these officials, and threatening adverse consequences  such as repeal or reform of Section 230 immunity under the Communications Decency Act (CDA), antitrust scrutiny or enforcement, increased regulation, and other measures  if the platforms do not increase censorship .  (emphasis added).

Comments:

Laymen and legal scholars alike agree that the First Amendment does not compel any publisher to print any and all speech. For example, a private company like The New York Times can publish, or not publish, whatever speech it wants for whatever reason it wants.

The issue in this case is whether citizens living in the town square can use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. to share their opinions or facts.

Or, more specifically, can the government use its immense power to compel private companies to censor speech the government doesnt like (speech labeled by the government as dangerous, extremist, false or basically misinformation or disinformation as the government defines these terms).

Plaintiffs argue that the federal government is using its power to abridge free speech. The federal government is doing this by threatening to effectively shut down social media companies who dont comply with the governments wishes.

The federal government could harpoon these companies by reforming or amending Section 230 of the CDA. This section grants legal immunity to such companies, meaning social media companies cant be sued or criminally tried because of the speech of citizens who make posts on their platforms.

Paragraph 3 of the document explains the power of this threat.

3. The threat of antitrust scrutiny or enforcement is also a major motivator to social-media platforms. For example, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that the threat of antitrust enforcement is an existential threat to his platform.

The evidence  presented on scores of pages  clearly reveals this threat was made explicitly, implicitly, publicly and privately over and over and over by myriad employees of the U.S. government, including the President of the United States.

This makes one (almost) feel empathy for these social media companies, which have had a symbolic bazooka pointed at their heads by the U.S. government dating to the day Joe Biden allegedly won the presidential election over Donald Trump.

I write that I almost feel empathy for these companies because if anyone skims this document, he will quickly see that virtually every employee and key executive of these companies was eager and happy to accede to the demands of their pro-censorship rulers.

Those who read this document will see never-ending examples of government officials brow-beating and intimidating social media companies for NOT censoring MORE.

To me, these companies appear almost masochistic  as in they seemingly enjoyed their incessant scoldings. For example, social media employees often thanked their government minders for pointing out their transgressions, which they seem overly-eager to correct. (Here, the Stockholm Syndrome comes to mind).

The stick of repealing Section 230 is not the only motivation social media companies have for complying with Big Brother.

Numerous carrots also exist as almost every one of these companies also profits from big contracts with the federal government and/or receives large sums of money (such as vaccine advertising spends) for supporting the authorized narratives (or, more precisely, silencing the non-authorized narratives).

The Virality Project

The document makes many references to the Virality Project, an influential project commissioned by academics at Stanford University.

As Ive written previously, the most important goal of the worlds real rulers in Covid times was/is the effort to fight vaccine hesitancy.

If people were hesitant about getting their Covid vaccines, the mRNA project would be a bust. Big Pharma and all the many entities that receives massive amounts of money from Big Pharma would not be pleased.

One thing that might make half the world skeptical of the safe and effective non-vaccines would be if the views of vaccine skeptics actually went viral.

This, very possibly, could have happened  absent mass censorship.

In my last article, I discussed several of the key chess moves our rulers have made to make sure they win this game.

Arguably, the most important move was making sure dissenting views did NOT go viral, a result which didnt happen by chance  but by a coordinated effort to censor hundreds of millions of potential skeptics and critics.

Since the government doesnt own Facebook (where two billion people share speech), the government had to persuade Facebook (Meta) to do their censoring for them.

This was a conspiracy, a massive one 

In reading this document, I was also stunned when I thought about all the employees and organizations that were involved in the effort to defeat the threat of vaccine hesitancy (and protect all the other many untrue Covid narratives).

I stopped reading after 54 pages, but this was enough to see that the actors in this conspiracy (a cover-up of the truth) included the President of the United States, all his key White House employees, the CDC, the Census Bureau, The Surgeon General and his staff, officials in the NIH (such as Anthony Fauci), many of the key members of Congress, all the new fact checkers and probably the White House chef.

Time and again, plaintiffs attorneys present examples where government officials cite articles written by journalists at The New York Times or Washington Post that were used as a weapon to demand even more censorship among social media companies.

Surreally, this means our free press has been one of governments key allies in suppressing free speech.

Government contractors, non-profits and think tanks were also brought in to help with the vital censorship chess moves.

Another hallmark of a conspiracy would be any evidence proving a co-ordinated initiative. The plaintiffs attorneys have done an excellent job proving this happened. For example, the authors of the legal brief repeatedly show how the words accountable and transparency, were used ad nauseam by all the censorship conspirators.

When government actors told social media companies they would be held accountable, this was a not-too-subtle threat that they better do as told  Which, sadly and not surprisingly, they did.

The conspirators also incessantly demand transparency from social media companies.

The government didnt just ask social media companies to do a little more censorship for the good of the country, they demanded access to all the algorithms, data bases, search queries, content-moderation policies, etc. that would prove companies were censoring the content the government said must be censored.

Amazingly, companies like Meta complied . so, apparently, officials at the CDC and The Census Bureau (which for some reason took a lead role in enforcing censorship) and key White House staffers were looking at the same tools Meta used to see what Covid topics were trending on their platform.

The government would then tell the companies to ban such speech on their platforms.

Not only did government actors hold a gun to the social media companies heads, they wanted to see (and even use) the very tools that allow these companies to know what their users were posting.

As weve learned from the Twitter files, government officials also repeatedly zeroed in on key disinformation super-spreaders and made sure they were banned and punished.

Victims/targets of these censorship efforts include high-profile Covid skeptic like Alex Berenson, Steve Kirsch and Robert Kennedy, Jr., but they might as well have included Bill Rice, Jr, whose Facebook account has also been suspended (for no known or stated reason) multiple times.

Per the copious evidence in this legal brief, every time Meta banned someone or said some topic was now taboo, government officials were rarely placated, and demanded even more censorship. And, again, government officials kept demanding transparency to see that thys will was being done.

The irony of course is that the U.S. government is the least transparent entity on the face of the earth.

To be clear and to state what should be perfectly obvious by now, the multi-faceted censorship and disinformation programs (which pre-date Covid) were created and enforced to make sure no real government transparency is/was possible.

For our government officials, transparency is like sunlight or a silver crucifix to a vampire.

What will be the result of this lawsuit?

I actually dont know what the plaintiffs are demanding except for the government to cease and desist with its efforts to compel censorship.

Speaking for myself, Ive already seen enough evidence where this U.S. citizen wont be mollified unless we have criminal prosecutions, the impeachment of President Biden and the censure of all the members of Congress who bullied these social media executives.

Also, the companies that went along with this need to be boycotted by every citizen that still cares about the First Amendment.

Id also note that while Twitter has (largely) turned over a new leaf under the ownership of Elon Musk, the rest of the social media companies are censoring left and right just like theyve been doing since Joe Biden was sworn into office. (This tells me these companies are betting on Biden prevailing in this lawsuit).

Its not just Covid issues subject to mass censorship .

For those who think the censorship regime only deals with Covid topics, I say you better think again  as this document also proves.

Plenty of sections of this document provide evidence showing that disinformation about Climate Change, election fraud and woke issues like gender identification will also continue to be subject to the whims of the governments arbiters of truth.

For my part, Im now convinced that what shouldnt happen  will probably happen. This means, Joe Biden will probably win re-election and this case will probably be thrown out or the Supreme Court led by (captured?) John Roberts will ultimately side with the defendants.

If this happens, perhaps more Americans will belatedly understand the new legal precedent that has been set.

In the future, any speech thats deemed misinformation by unelected bureaucrats (at say the CDC or EPA) can indeed be censored and banned.

It will be perfectly fine for presidents, Congressmen and surgeon generals to demand that social media companies censor unauthorized or dangerous speech. Furthermore, the government will be granted that transparency that tells them Meta or Google are following their orders.

Strangely, Substack wasnt mentioned 

In reading this document, I was struck by the fact Substack (as far as we know) has yet to be targeted by the Censorship Czars.

My guess is that if this case is decided in favor of the defendants, this will no longer be the case. The dangerous misinformation Ive been posting (and my readers in the Reader Comments) will suddenly be fair game for censorship as well.

Substack is replete with writers challenging the false Covid narratives, but this speech platform is also full of skeptics of Climate Change, writers who might not support the Ukraine War or central bank digital currencies  authors who think election fraud is real and correspondents who dont like the woke transgender and pronoun malarky.

For the past 240 years, Americans thought the First Amendment gave them the freedom to share their views on controversial topics. If Biden and the U.S. government wins this case, I suspect well soon learn otherwise.

Read more at: BillRiceJr.Substack.com
(Natural News) The only reason the United States intervention in Russias special military operation in Ukraine hasnt turned into World War III is because of the restraint of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This is according to conservative political commentator Glenn Beck, who discussed the ongoing situation in Ukraine during a recent episode of his program on BlazeTV with co-host Steve Burguiere. (Related: Prather Point: Biden is turning Ukraine into an ENDLESS WAR for the benefit of war profiteers  Brighteon.TV)

Beck and Burguiere made their point by suggesting that if the U.S., for some reason, invaded Mexico and the Kremlin was openly arming and providing other kinds of military aid and support to the Mexican government, the White House would be furious and would likely be attacking Russia.

What is stopping this [World War III]? The only thing stopping it right now, solely, is the restraint of Vladimir Putin which, by the way, is not something I can depend on, said Burguiere. Hes shown over and over again that he has almost no restraint. He just went in and invaded a country in a completely ridiculous fashion  I cant say enough how much I hate [this invasion].

That being said, if this scenario had played out the other way, we would 100 percent be outwardly saying we are at war with Russia, and in a way [the Kremlin] is saying that, but they havent acted that way yet, thankfully, concluded Burguiere.

Biden administration is giving away Americas armaments

To make matters worse in Ukraine, President Joe Biden has approved a new package of military aid for Ukraine worth up to $300 million in taxpayer dollars, including additional munitions, especially for drones.

The White House is openly discussing providing Ukraine with more drones and more ammunition for Kyivs already fast-growing drone fleet just as reports are coming in of renewed drone attacks targeting Moscow. The administrations defense for this is that there is supposedly no indication that U.S.-made drones or munitions were used in the recent attacks on Moscow.

Furthermore, the White House claims that Kyiv has agreed not to use any American-provided weapons for attacks on Russian soil, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself has given the U.S. his assurances that his government and his armed forces will respect Americas concerns.

We dont tell them where to strike. We dont tell them where not to strike Ultimately, President Zelensky and his military commanders decide what theyre going to do from a military perspective, said John Kirby, the White House National Security Council spokesperson. But he added that the U.S. has been very clear with the Ukrainians privately, weve certainly been clear publicly, that we do not support attacks inside Russia.

The new aid package provided to Ukraine includes munitions for Patriot missile batteries and additional rockets for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, as well as more ammunition for Avenger and Stinger anti-air defense systems.

The U.S. is also providing a whole host of mine-clearing equipment, anti-armor ammunition, Zuni unguided air-to-surface rockets, night vision goggles, about 30 million rounds of ammunition for small arms and an undisclosed amount of other artillery rounds.

We have no armaments, remarked Beck. Because what have we been doing? Weve been giving them all away.

Follow WWIII.news to know more about the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Watch this clip from Glenn Becks program on BlazeTV explaining the only reason the conflict in Ukraine hasnt turned into World War III yet.

This video is from the channel Galactic Storm on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

Biden is trying to buy more allies for America before initiating World War III against Russia.

Military expert warns: Drone attack against the Kremlin could escalate Ukraine conflict to dangerous new levels.

Biden regime continues shipping weapons to Ukraine, draining American stockpiles that cant be quickly replaced.

Putin warns of lightning fast response if America, West try to intervene in Ukraine war.

NATO, Western governments ponder next move after Putin orders his nuclear forces upgraded to special readiness amid ongoing Ukraine war.

Sources include:

Brighteon.com

APNews.com

Stripes.com
(Natural News) The Nova Kakhovka dam in Russian-occupied Kherson Oblast (province) in southern Ukraine was destroyed on Tuesday, June 6, forcing thousands of people to evacuate and sparking fears of a wider humanitarian disaster.

Concerns over the fate of the Nova Kakhovka dam had been building since the beginning of the conflict and Russias takeover of the Kherson Oblast. The dam itself had already suffered damage in October when sections of it and some of its sluice gates were destroyed during a Ukrainian offensive. The dam was vital both for Ukraine and Russia.

The reservoir created by the dam provided a much-needed stable irrigation source for farmers who depend on the dams water to cultivate some of Ukraines most productive farmland. Crimea, which Ukraine claims but has been administered by Russia since 2014, depends on the Nova Kakhovka dam for drinking water as well.

The collapse of the dam means no more water is flowing along an important canal from the dams reservoir to Crimea, leaving the Russian-administered peninsula to be dependent on water pumped into the region from across the bridge spanning the Kerch Strait connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland.

Furthermore, the dams destruction could also affect the water supply to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which relies on water from the reservoir to keep its reactors from overheating.

Multiple nations note that the destruction of the dam may have led to many deaths, and recently re-elected Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already offered to create an international commission to probe the dams destruction.

Todays news means the plight of the people in Ukraine is set to get even worse, said United Nations Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths during a UN Security Council emergency meeting discussing the dams destruction.

Russia and Ukraine have already been evacuating thousands of people since the dams destruction.

Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Andriy Kostin noted that over 40,000 people are currently in danger of being flooded by the dams destruction, and that over 25,000 people on the Russian-occupied portions of Kherson Oblast need to be evacuated.

Both sides blame the other for the dams destruction

Both sides immediately leaped to blame the other for the destruction of the dam. Kyiv claimed the dams destruction  seized by Russia in the early hours of the war  was an attempt by Moscow to distract from Ukraines long-awaited offensive, which President Volodymyr Zelensky said would not be affected. (Related: ACTS OF TERROR: Ukraines intel chief admits his government has MURDERED quite a few Russian civilians.)

Zelensky further accused Russia of detonating an environmental bomb of mass destruction.

This crime carries enormous threats and will have dire consequences for peoples lives and the environment, he added. [But the explosion] will not affect Ukraines ability to de-occupy its own territories.

Commenting on the risk the dams destruction brings to the Zaporizhzhia plant, Zelenskys aide Mykhaylo Podolyak claimed that Russia has once again put the world on the brink of a nuclear disaster  and this danger is growing rapidly.

Russia, meanwhile, has similarly blamed Kyiv for the dams destruction. Russian state-owned news agency TASS provided evidence showing that Ukrainian forces had planned to blow up the Nova Kakhovka dam as early as 2022.

Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzya pointed out that the head of the Armed Forces of Ukraine openly declared Kyivs plan to destroy the dam in late December 2022.

I underscore that as early as last year, leaders of the Ukrainian military publicly claimed they are ready to blast the dam in order to obtain some military advantage, he said during a UN Security Council meeting.

Nebenzya then presented a quote from a Washington Post article describing how Ukrainian Maj. Gen. Andriy Kovalchuk considered flooding the Dnipro River by destroying the dam, and the Ukrainian Army even conducted a test strike with an American-supplied HIMARS multiple rocket launcher on one of the dams floodgates to see if the rivers water could be raised enough to prevent Russians from crossing the river without flooding nearby villages.

The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step remained a last resort. He held off, said Nebenzya, who added that Moscow had been warning the international community of a possible Ukrainian attack on the dam for some time now.

We warned the global community and UN leadership about this, he said. We regret that our calls to the Secretary-General [of the UN] to do everything possible to prevent this appalling crime remained unheeded.

Learn more about the state of the conflict in Ukraine at UkraineWitness.com.

Watch this video from Tucker on Twitter as Tucker Carlson discusses the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Dam.

This video is from the channel Marine 1063 on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

Ukraine launches biggest attack in months as much-hyped counteroffensive begins.

Russia launches drone attack on Kyiv Day, killing one and injuring another.

Russia claims avian flu pathogens with 40% lethality rate in humans being cooked up at US-run biolab in Ukraine.

CLAIM: Radioactive cloud moving toward Western Europe following destruction of depleted uranium shells in Ukraine.

Russia shuts down Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant amid threat of Ukrainian attack.

Sources include:

SCMP.com

WSJ.com

TASS.com

Brighteon.com
(Natural News) Students at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) were reportedly behind a censorship initiative aimed at conservative news outlets, according to a report.

Margot Cleveland, senior legal correspondent at the Federalist, pointed out in her May 25 article that the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) report was written by students under the direction of academics at UT Austins Global Disinformation Lab (GDIL). She added that the academics at the GDIL held an anti-conservative bias per internal documents reviewed by the outlet.

In early February 2023, Gabe Kaminsky authored an exclusive multi-part report about self-styled disinformation tracking organizations. The first part of this report noted that the GDIs rating of American news outlets was skewed against conservatives. The top 10 supposed riskiest outlets were all conservative:

American Spectator

Newsmax

Federalist

American Conservative

One America News

The Blaze

Daily Wire

RealClearPolitics

Reason

New York Post

In contrast, the top 10 least risky news outlets espoused political leanings almost entirely left of center. Included in this least risky list were the New York Times, notorious for its biased reporting, and CNN, a known purveyor of fake news. (Related: STUDY: NewsGuard ratings system heavily skews in favor of left-wing outlets.)

The GDI report released in December 2022 disclosed the bias against conservative outlets. This also prompted the Federalist to file a public records request with UT-Austin in February 2023. The conservative outlet demanded all communications related to the GDILs work with the GDI on the Mews Media Review.

The university withheld some of the details of its methodology used in the December 2022 GDI report, citing confidentiality of trade secrets and concerns regarding certain commercial or financial information. Nevertheless, the documents obtained by the Federalist revealed concerning details about the endeavor.

According to the files, the GDI paid UT Austin to have student researchers with little training apply the organizations screening methodology for rating various media outlets. Student researchers were recruited by being informed that their work would be immediately valuable. However, it would only be valuable to the group as it planned to release the report early to make waves ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

Moreover, UT Austin retained surplus funds from the GDI after the group sold the university project to the laboratory. This led critics to question how a state-funded university could profit from such a politically biased program.

Federal government bankrolled GDI censorship initiative

Kaminsky also disclosed that the White House is funding the GDI. The government-funded nonprofit National Endowment for Democracy gave the GDI more than $500,000 between 2020 and 2021. Meanwhile, the Global Engagement Center (GEC) under the Department of State awarded a $100,000 grant to the group in 2021.

Internal files obtained by the Federalist also revealed that both the GDI and the GDIL worked with the State Department under the Biden administration, alongside other prominent public and private organizations, to censor conservatives.

An internal email penned by a top lab manager at the UT-Austin project said the GDI worked with governments, policymakers, social media platforms and [advertising technology] companies to defund disinformation.

They added: They are instrumental in providing data to a bunch of people that I am not sure if I am allowed to talk about. According to the manager, the GDI had formal and informal relationships with trust and safety teams at various big [technology] platforms.

The Federalist also shared an email to the GDIL from the GECs academic and think tank liaison. The liaison disclosed in the correspondence that the State Department had developed a close relationship with a growing number of universities and publicly funded think tanks to promote the censorship of anti-progressive views.

Moreover, another set of emails from the GEC invited the GDIL to participate in the Ukraine Content Aggregator pilot project. Based on the exchanges, the project seeks to amplify unique and verified content related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including war crimes being committed.

Visit Censorship.news for more stories about the censorship of conservative media outlets.

Watch Alex Jones and Anthony Cumia discuss why conservative censorship is real and not just a conspiracy theory below.

This video is from the InfoWars channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

Oracle drops UK-based disinfo nannies after conservative blacklisting cited in lawsuit.

Disinformation tracking groups receiving boatloads of cash to blacklist conservative news.

State-funded University of Texas managed censorship project targeting conservative outlets.

More evidence emerges of U.S. government colluding with Big Tech to censor conservatives.

University of Texas students created Global Disinformation Index blacklisting independent media.

Sources include:

ZeroHedge.com

TheFederalist.com

TheEpochTimes.com

Brighteon.com
One of Charlottesvilles most notorious social media stars, Bryan Gratata Silva, faces sentencing on weapon and drug charges next month. But some former office neighbors are expressing worry about something sooner: that Silva could be released from jail.

Were taking it very seriously here, one of the tenants told The Daily Progress. Were back to locking our door and keeping it closed.

The tenant, asking not to be identified over concerns about retribution, alleged that another tenant recently received word from a victims advocate that Silva had applied for home electronic incarceration at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail. Home electronic incarceration frees up jail space by letting certain prisoners get out from behind bars by wearing electronic monitors.

Silva rose to fame in 2014 with a six-second video on the now-defunct Vine app. In the video, Silva points a finger pantomiming a handgun toward a bathroom mirror and says, as if firing a machine gun, Gratata.

In that video, Silva was naked from the waist up. Today, however, Silva appears to spend much of his time naked from the waist down.

The 32-year-old has nearly 26,000 followers on his mostly porn-promoting Twitter account. And he recently filled out a form for the local magistrate asserting that he earns up to $10,000 every month from the pornographic videos he uploads to his OnlyFans account.

Despite his business boom, Silva has had several legal troubles. His most infamous occurred in January 2016, when he barricaded himself in a Jefferson Park Avenue-area apartment after pointing a gun at a 17-year-old girl hed met online. The ensuing police stand-off shut down the street outside for about nine hours  some of which Silva spent live-streaming himself guzzling alcohol and taunting the cops. He later pleaded guilty to two charges, including brandishing a firearm, and served nearly two years behind bars.

Last June, Silva was convicted of stalking a female University of Virginia student at her apartment building on West Main Street. The court file in that case shows that the woman sought a protective order against him.

Silva became the subject of another protective order just three months after that conviction. This time it was the office neighbor who alleges that he was recently warned about Silvas potential release. The man told police that Silva threatened to kill him after Silvas car was towed from the property.

Silva faces two more hearings next month. One hearing could assess damages in his eviction from that office building. Following a writ of eviction granted on April 26, the landlords attorney Randall Purdue said the preliminary amount of back rent, damages and other fees Silva owes totals nearly $24,000.

We have issued and served him with no-trespass papers as well, Purdue told The Daily Progress.

The other July hearing will set Silvas punishment on the weapon and drug charges to which Silva pleaded guilty last month. Both crimes are classified as low-level felonies, so he may not get much, if any, prison beyond the time already served since his arrest on Nov. 14.

That was the day after the murderous shooting at the University of Virginia that claimed three lives. And Silva, hours before the shooting, had made threatening comments targeting the school on social media.

I want u v a to know what pain and suffering is, he wrote on Facebook. I will sell everything I have to make that pain and suffering happen.

Silva was not charged for those words but for something else that he previously posted on Facebook: images of him handling ammunition-filled gun magazines.

Those things are forbidden to a convicted felon.

So the day after the UVa killings, Charlottesville police Cpl. Steven Young and other officers showed up with a battering ram, according to the March 3 testimony of Charlottesville police Detective Christopher Raines.

Raines told the Charlottesville General District Court about the Nov. 14 raid at the downtown office.

Cpl. Young knocked and announced, Charlottesville Police Department, Raines testified.

They did not wait for for the door to be opened, as damage to the door and molding attests.

Raines described finding three gun magazines  one filled with 9mm rounds and two others with 7.62 rounds, the kind that go into an AK-47 rifle. Plus, he said he saw a cardboard box under bubble wrap.

It was just filled up with ammunition, Raines testified.

Raines went on to describe a sealable plastic bag that held a white powder later found to contain cocaine, according to a certificate of analysis on file at the Charlottesville Circuit Court.

Silvas troubles in his rented office at 223 W. Main St. began two months before the raid. On Sept. 7, just six days into his lease, the landlord sent him a letter asserting that he was headed toward default by allegedly failing to obtain insurance, by failing to return borrowed keys and by improper parking. The landlord, the Joe H. Gieck Trust, also mentioned a persistent marijuana odor that wafted into nearby offices. They filed eviction papers five weeks later.

When the eviction came to court in February, an attorney said that Silva, then jailed and not present for the hearing, wanted to hold on to the office.

I never broke my lease, he later wrote to the court. I never received a letter saying the potential defaults under the lease.

On April 14, the landlord won that eviction case. But Silva wanted the office so much that, 11 days later, he filed his own counterclaim against the landlord. However, that effort to retain the office was dismissed.

Clearly, having this office is important to him, said one of Silvas worried former office neighbors.

While Silva might be eligible for home electronic incarceration, that has not happened yet. Silva remains where he has been since Nov. 14, at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, according jail Superintendent Martin Kumer.

He is still physically incarcerated, Kumer told The Daily Progress Thursday afternoon.

Silvas criminal defense attorney, Peter Frazier, said that he would need to confer with his client before making a substantive statement.

We have sentencing set for July, and he looks forward to making statements at that point, Frazier told The Daily Progress.

The prospect of Silvas release is keeping some former office neighbors concerned that he might return despite the no-trespass order and the restraining order.

Bryan is not a good rule follower, said one of them. Hes going to be upset.
(Natural News) Walgreens has unveiled new anti-theft measures at its redesigned store in Chicago as a solution to rising retail crime, but customers are complaining of being unable to shop for themselves.

Company executives made significant changes to their stores to prevent thefts which have been on the rise in retail outlets, with big box stores like Walgreens being the main targets due to how easy it is to steal from them.

At one Walgreens store at 2 East Roosevelt in downtown Chicago, the entire store was completely redesigned in a way where there are just two short aisles where customers are allowed to shop for themselves. These aisles of touchable merchandise consist mostly of food and drinks in a Grab & Go Snacks section as well as other so-called essentials.

The rest of the store has been placed behind staffed counters where customers can shop through a digital kiosk system. Here, customers can select the items they wish to purchase. After making their choices, shoppers proceed to the checkout counter, where an employee retrieves their selected products. This system has also been adopted in the stores pharmacy section.

After placing an order, a plastic-framed sign next to the kiosk instructs customers to relax while we shop for you. Customers will then be called to the counter to claim their goods once store employees have picked it out for them.

A spokesperson from Walgreens also mentioned that the changes are intended to improve the overall customer experience due to the increasing incidents of retail theft across the United States. The redesigned Chicago store is a test run for new concepts, technologies and practices. (Related: Walgreens closing 5 more San Francisco stores due to organized shoplifting.)

It will continue to offer retail products and pharmacy services, just with a new look and feel that focuses on shopping digitally for convenience, said the spokesperson.
(Natural News) With President Donald J. Trump now having been criminally indicted (read the indictment PDF here) with the help of a weaponized, corrupt DOJ, more and more Americans are coming to realize that under the illegitimate Biden regime, the United States of America is now a banana republic.

Via Breitbart.com:

On Thursday evening, the Justice Department notified Trump of the indictment. Trump announced the news on Truth Social. The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, Trump said, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania.

As is becoming the norm, Trump is being indicted for the very same thing that Democrats can carry out without any fear of indictment. Thus, we have a two-tiered justice system rooted in selective prosecution. Only Republicans are indicted  often for made-up crimes  while Democrats are ignored, even when engaging in felonious bribery, corruption and all-out treason (Mayorkas and the border invasion fiasco, for example).

Republicans say it is not a coincidence that the day they gained access to an FBI document alleging President Joe Biden was involved in a bribery scheme was the same day that Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted former President Donald Trump, reports Breitbart.com.

It will all BACKFIRE and make Trump even more popular than before

Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington told me in an interview yesterday (see links below) that this effort to indict Trump will backfire in spectacular fashion. The extreme, lawless and desperate actions of the Democrats will only wake up even more Americans to the fact that unless they take their country back from the lawless Dems, they wont have a country remaining at all.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis even chimed in on the fiasco, writing on Twitter:

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.

This indictment of Trump has even spurred more talk of a revolution to cast off the shackles of a government regime gone rogue.

If the Biden regime imprisons Trump, there is a chance that it could set off a revolt among the American people who may decide theyve seen too much tyranny to stand by and do nothing. Perhaps thats the plan of the regime, of course: To try to provoke a kind of nationwide J6 insurrection and finally paint all Trump supporters as extremists or terrorists. (All the training at DHS and the FBI is already prepping for this designation)

With the DOJ rigged, the courts rigged, the media rigged and the elections rigged (2018, 2020, 2022), its hard to see how the American people vote their way back into a fair, just and law-abiding system, since the very people who now control that system seek absolute power and control at any cost.

Let us pray for a peaceful resolution and the restoration of the rule of law. The 2024 election, if it even takes place, is likely the very last opportunity to reverse the march of left-wing fascist tyranny across America. And we can all be confident that the Dems are already planning to rig the 2024 election in every way possible.

Watch my Brighteon Broadcast News episode for full details, including my interviews with Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington and investigator / analyst John Moore (The Liberty Man):

 Russia claims huge losses of Ukrainian forces, tanks, artillery and more

 Forever chemicals being spread across US farmland via SEWAGE SLUDGE distribution

 NASA pushing 3-month internet BLACKOUT narrative as predictive programming

 Controlled media suddenly dropping stories about 10-foot ALIENS coming out of the sky

 All a setup for a controlled demolition narrative

 Full interview with Liz Harrington, Trumps campaign spokesperson: indictments, vaccines, rigged elections

 Full interview with The Liberty Man John Moore, covering escalation toward World War III

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(Natural News) Prominent British cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra is calling for an end to COVID vaccine mandates in Australia and is embarking on a nationwide tour to shut the destructive program down. The tour, hosted by the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS), is bringing the truth to the people, in an attempt to restore scientific integrity and medical ethics across the medical police state of Australia.

I see this crisis as an opportunity actually to restore trust and rebuild and take medicine back to where it should be, which is to promote practice, very simple. Thats why Im an advocate for ethical, evidence-based medicine, Malhotra recently told the Epoch Times.

Dr. Malhotra once supported covid-19 vaccines but then he lost his father to Pfizers COVID jab

Dr. Malhotra once supported the covid-19 vaccines and all the associated vaccine propaganda, coercion, and abuse of the peoples rights. Today, Malhotra is speaking out against the vaccines, the mandates, and all the associated medical tyranny. Malhotra changed course in 2022 after experiencing grief in his own family. Malhotra says the death of his father, Dr. Kailand Chand, a general practitioner and former deputy chair of the British Medical Association, came suddenly after taking two shots of the Pfizer vaccine.

This is when Malhotra called for the suspension of Britains vaccine mandates in April of 2022. Not long after, the government terminated vaccine mandates for NHS workers. Now he is calling on Australias medical regulator to suspend COVID vaccine mandates across Australia. After coming to terms with the vaccine manufacturers own studies, Malhotra said the COVID jab was always going to do more harm than good. The evidence against the vaccine, in his opinion, is overwhelming. Professor Brendan Murphy, the Secretary of the Australian federal Department of Health, agrees with Malhotra and says the COVID vaccine mandates in Australia are now unjustified.

On June 1, Dr. Malhotra talked about the uptick in myocarditis, pericarditis, cardiac arrhythmia, and sudden cardiac arrest. These issues were not prevalent during the first year of the covid-19 pandemic. These health issues spiked after the COVID vaccine rollout and continue to destroy (mostly) young lives to this day.

For every 100,000 individuals who get the shot, approximately 2 people will suffer from debilitating myocarditis and pericarditis. Malhotra said these heart complications were known by the manufacturers prior to the vaccine rollout, but the program was not shut down; it was forced onto the unsuspecting public.

But nobody knew about it, doctors didnt know about it, and in medicine, unless youre aware of a potential side effect or a diagnosis, youll always miss it or think it doesnt exist. And thats whats been happening. Thats why a lot of vaccine-injured are getting gaslighted, he said. The people who did know about these impending health issues were targeted, censored, and slandered by governments and public health authorities, as deadly products were forced onto the public without any real informed consent.

Australian government and public health agencies are beholden to lies, complicit in mass death

Data released by the UK government shows that the COVID vaccine poisons and injures more people than it helps. For the 70-year-old category, 2,500 people need to be vaccinated to allegedly prevent one person from COVID hospitalization. In the under-30-year-old category, 200,000 people need to be injected to allegedly prevent one COVID hospitalization. In other words, at least four young people will suffer from myocarditis or pericarditis just to prevent one person from going to the hospital with a sickness from which they can recover!

Ive never come across anything in my whole career in medicine, anything Ive heard about any drug, any pharmacological intervention, has efficacy or effectiveness this poor, Malhotra said.

Despite the facts being out, Australias Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) remain prideful and arrogant, beholden to the lie that the protective benefits of vaccination far outweigh the potential risks. Right now, the TGA continues to allow provisional approval for Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Novavax and maintains full approval for the Moderna jab.

Sources include:

TheEpochTimes.com

Pubmed.gov
(Natural News) Just in time for pride month, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is warning the public that attendance and participation at pride events this summer could lead to a resurgence of monkeypox.

It has only been a few weeks, by the way, since the CDC revamped its guidelines to allow homosexual males to donate blood without so much as a screening for AIDS or any other sexually transmitted diseases. Meanwhile, the CDC is warning that an uptick in mpox, as they are now calling it, is expected in conjunction with pride.

According to the CDC, an uptick in mpox cases in Chicago that began in mid-April underscores the risk of renewed mpox outbreaks, which we judge is substantial across the United States.

The reason why the CDC now calls it mpox is because the Biden regime decided that calling it monkeypox is racist, presumably because some people refer to blacks as monkeys (?).

CDC continues to assess that the risk of resurgent mpox outbreaks is substantial in the United States, the agency wrote in its May update.

The risk of outbreaks could further increase as people gather this spring and summer for festivals and other events with high potential for skin-to-skin contact or increased sexual activity.

Check out what happened at the recent Biomedical HIV Prevention Summit in Las Vegas where White House National Monkeypox Coordinator Demetre Daskalakis proudly sashayed down the catwalk with two other LGBTs:

Experts warn possible Monkeypox resurgence due to pride month ?

This is Demetre Daskalakis, White House National Mpox Response Coordinator in Las Vegas in April at 2023 Biomedical HIV Prevention Summit! Pride is beyond sick & twisted, they made HIV medical conferences sex orgies pic.twitter.com/RTUBNm2nlG  NetworkinVegas.com (@Networkinvegas) June 5, 2023

(Related: FACT CHECK: Monkeypox, aka pridepox, is a gay disease.)

CDC suggests latest evolved mutations of monkeypox may have evaded the two-dose Jynneos vaccine series  meaning new pridepox jabs are soon on the way

Since the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has been all but completely milked dry, the CDC has shifted its focus back to pridepox, which it says may have evolved mutations to evade the two-dose Jynneos vaccines that were rolled out last year to protect against it.

Such rhetoric suggests that once again we are going to see new jabs developed at warp speed for these alleged new strains of monkeypox, which means more money for Big Pharma.

These alleged mutations are said to have been detected in a cluster of cases around Los Angeles. In some rare cases, the agency warns, drug-resistant monkeypox can be transmitted person-to-person  but during pride activities, those few rare cases are likely to become many, many new cases.

Cases of mpox in San Francisco remain low. However, we remain watchful as several new cases have recently been reported in other parts of the country, said San Francisco Health official Dr. Susan Philip in a statement that was strategically released in advance of the summer season and Pride Celebrations.

We want to make sure that everyone can enjoy a happy and healthy Pride.

As expected, the Biden regime is already talking about unveiling new monkeypox booster shots to go along with the first two Jynneos jabs that were released last year, just like what happened with covid shots and their boosters.

Pride about what? one commenter asked about why they call these things pride celebrations in the first place.

Sodom and Gomorrah? Perversion? Pedophilia? Grooming? Rabid fits of pique? Lack of self-control? Having pride in their very unhealthy choice of behavior.

The latest news about the disease-spreading cult of LGBT can be found at Gender.news.

Sources for this article include:

ZeroHedge.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) At least nine people, including seven very young children and two adults, were injured in a knife attack on Thursday morning in a park in the alpine town of Annecy in southeastern France.

(Article by Thomas Brooke republished from RMX.news)

French police arrested one individual, identified as Abdalmasih H., in connection with the attack who is believed to be a Syrian asylum seeker and previously unknown to the authorities, according to a police source cited by Agence France-Presse.

French newspaper Le Figaro reported that the children were aged about three years old and at least two were in critical condition.

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

A horrendous video has emerged of the knife attack on small children in #Annecy, France. In the video, a mother can be seen protecting her child who is stabbed multiple times in its baby stroller. pic.twitter.com/wvHikbbDYe  Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) June 8, 2023

A video released of the stabbing shows the man running back and forth on the playground and stabbing a small child inside its stroller while the mother tries to protect it. Another bystander attempts to stop the attack multiple times.

According to a witness, the attack took place near Lake Annecy near a location with paddle boats, recreation activities, and a playground. The witnesses, Ferdinand, told BFMTV that the assailant jumped at the children and he started screaming, he walked towards the strollers and started repeatedly stabbing the little ones.

The witness said he saw children and a mother on the ground.

When he saw that he was surrounded by the police, he went to a couple and he stabbed the elderly person, said Ferdinand.

He went straight for a grandpa who was with his wife and he stabbed him, said another witness, Anthony. I was telling (the police) to shoot him, to shoot him. () They immobilized him.

Little is known about the nature of the attack; however, police have cordoned off the area and are conducting investigations.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin tweeted: Several people including children were injured by an individual armed with a knife in a square in Annecy. The individual was arrested thanks to the very rapid intervention of the police.

The number of victims has since been revised by French news outlets.

National Rally parliamentary leader Marine Le Pen added: It is with fear and horror that we learn of the attack on young children in Annecy by an individual armed with a knife. My thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones.

It is understood Darmanin will travel to Annecy with French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne later on Thursday, and the French National Assembly observed a minutes silence ahead of its morning session.

Conservative commentator Eva Vlaadringerbroek placed the blame for the incident on Europes open borders policy and commitment to mass immigration.

BREAKING: A Syrian asylum seeker just stabbed 7 children on a playground in Annecy, France. Seven more kids sacrificed on the alter of mass migration & diversity. When will Europeans finally say enough is enough? Where is our will to protect our children? When will we rise up?  Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) June 8, 2023

Annecy public prosecutor Line Bonnet is expected to conduct a press briefing at 12:30 p.m. local time.

A source close to the investigation told Le Figaro the suspect is a 32-year-old Syrian national named Abdalmasih. He submitted an asylum application in France on Nov. 28, 2022, and was granted refugee status in Sweden in April this year.

It is not yet known when he initially arrived in France or why he returned to the country following a successful asylum application in the Scandinavian country

The investigation is ongoing.

Read more at: RMX.news
(Natural News) Once again, American taxpayers are being abused by the woke deep state.

According to a report by The Federalist this week, The U.S. Air Force has authorized Air and Space Force commanders to use taxpayer money to cover the travel costs for service members seeking to attend the branchs upcoming pride events.

In a memo issued on June 1, Marianne Malizia, the director of the Air Forces Office of Diversity and Inclusion, informed branch commanders about a series of upcoming LGBT-related events in Washington, D.C., organized by the Department of the Air Force (DAF). The memo stated that Air and Space Force commanders have the authorization to utilize unit funds to cover the travel expenses of service members under their command to travel to, and participate in, this years DAF Pride events if approved by their individual supervisory authority.

Mind you, there shouldnt even be offices of Diversity and Inclusion in the military in the first place since all members of all branches are already equally treated and offered the very same rank and training opportunities  based on the needs of their respective service. So the existence of those offices alone constitution an abuse of taxpayer funds.

Service members or civilian employees may attend conferences at the unit expense to maintain and improve professional competency or to improve management of the Departments functions and activities, the memo says, according to the outlet.

The Department of the Air Force (DAF) justifies the utilization of taxpayer funds for travel expenses related to such events by referring to Section 030201 of the Defense Departments Joint Travel Regulation. This particular section outlines the provision of travel and transportation allowances for military service members.

The report notes further:

A rainbow-colored flyer accompanying the memo lists the three upcoming events the DAF is slated to participate in, including a Pride at the Pentagon celebration scheduled to be held at the Pentagon Air Force Art Gallery on June 8 and an LGBTQ+ Initiatives Team (LIT) Symposium to be held at the Pentagon Library & Conference Center on June 9. The Air Force will also have a recruiting booth at the D.C. Pride Festival on June 11.

The Air Force has additionally issued a pre-constructed memo that service members can fill out and submit to their commanders to request permission to leave their unit and travel to D.C. for the aforementioned events.

BREAKING: Pride at the Pentagon: Troops, dont miss out on your opportunity to use taxpayer dollars to travel to Pride Month at the Pentagon beginning this Thursday, 8 June.??????????? ? Check out the official memos in this thread pic.twitter.com/WhrNLSxslb  Matt Lohmeier (@matthewlohmeier) June 6, 2023

Meanwhile the Air Force is celebrating LGBT pride month with a serviceman saluting the activist homosexual-bisexual-transgender-queer rainbow flag.

The Air Force published a tweet Wednesday reading: June is #PrideMonth! The Department of the Air Force proudly recognizes and celebrates generations of LGBTQI+ service members and their contributions to our #AirForce & #SpaceForce.

June is #PrideMonth! The Department of the Air Force proudly recognizes and celebrates generations of LGBTQI+ service members and their contributions to our #AirForce & #SpaceForce. pic.twitter.com/lQi9lH5sdr  U.S. Air Force (@usairforce) June 7, 2023

Tweeted Mike Garcia: As an AF veteran, this is pathetic & embarrassing. You should focus on winning wars & not social or political issues. Disgusting.

As WND reported Tuesday, the Pentagon has chosen to honor a radical homosexual activist, Harvey Milk, as the symbol of this years pride activities. Milk, who was molested by homosexual predators when he was a young teenage boy, went on to enter into a live-in sexual relationship with a 16- or 17-year-old boy when he was in his thirties.

And the Navy has named a ship after him, the USNS Harvey Milk, part of another politically correct class of ships, the John Lewis class of oilers, which replenish fuel-burning warships at sea.

Lewis, a long-serving Democratic lawmaker from Georgia, was a civil rights icon.

Sources include:

TheFederalist.com

WND.com
(Natural News) According to Ohio-based lawyer Tom Renz, wokeism is a huge threat that America is facing.

He began the June 6 edition of his Brighteon.TV program Lawfare with Tom Renz by citing a June 6 press release from the America First Legal (AFL) website. It stated that AFL served big-box retailer Target a formal demand for it to produce books and records. The demand filed by AFL on behalf of its client National Center for Public Policy Research seeks transparency regarding the radical LGBT political agenda of the retailer, which has cost the company $12 billion.

AFL President Stephen Miller said his group is proud to represent American shareholders financially harmed by Targets descent into gender extremism and child sexual exploitation.

Building a trusted national brand can take decades. And yet, one major American corporation after another has chosen to immolate their brands, reputations, decency and dignity in a bonfire to appease the woke mob  instead of safeguarding their shareholders, customers and communities and honoring their inviolable fiduciary obligations.

According to Renz, Targets pivot toward wokeism was a terrible decision without any legitimate basis. He added that companies, especially publicly traded one, do not exist to promote woke ideals as they are owned by their shareholders.

Taking a shareholders value in a company to run it into the dirt simply because the ones doing so have control is illegal, the lawyer emphasized. Thus, AFLs lawsuit is a shareholder lawsuit because Target has a duty to its shareholders not to destroy the value of the company. (Related: Get woke, go broke: Anheuser-Busch loses $15.7 billion in value after disastrous Bud Light transgender influencer campaign.)

DeSantis: Wokeism an existential threat to society

The Lawfare host mentioned that woke isnt about being kind, open-minded or conscious and becoming enlightened. Aside from creating dissent and problems, wokeism is feeding delusions and bad things.

Wokeism is a nightmare, Renz said. Its about division. They try and pretend that its about bringing us together, but its actually just the opposite.

He ultimately remarked that the people pushing for wokeism are liars for claiming that they want to bring people together. In truth, they are trying to divide Americans and get everybody fighting against each other  so they can come in and take over while everyone is distracted.

Renz also cited a Summit News article on his program about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his thoughts on the word woke. The Republican presidential candidates comments were in reply to former President Donald Trump, who expressed his dislike of the term as nobody knows what it really means.

Woke is an existential threat to our society, said the Florida governor. To say that its not a big deal  just shows you dont understand what a lot of these issues are right now.

DeSantis defined woke as a form of Cultural Marxism and basically a war on the truth. He continued: Its about putting merit and achievement behind identity politics. That has infected institutions, and it has corrupted institutions.

Youve got to be willing to fight the woke. Weve done that in Florida, and we proudly consider ourselves the state where woke goes to die.

Renz then commented that Trumps remarks did not mean that he downplays the threat of wokeism. He said: At the end of the day, wokeism is a huge threat. It is, and Trump recognizes that just like DeSantis. All of our guys do it so these guys squabbling with each other to me is stupid, but the point remains.

Watch the June 6 episode of Lawfare with Tom Renz below. Tune in to Lawfare with Tom Renz every Tuesday at 11:30 a.m.-12 p.m. and every Saturday at 12:30-1 p.m. on Brighteon.TV.

More related stories:

Well hang with Satan instead: Target receives MASSIVE backlash after woke pride month merchandise designer is exposed to be a Satanist.

Colleges, universities have become so woke that students are shifting back to technical education to learn useful skills.

Author Nicky Billou urges Americans to establish parallel anti-woke PATRIOT ECONOMY.

GONE WOKE: Chick-fil-A embraces woke agenda, names VP for diversity, equity and inclusion.

Target launches new Satanist Pride line of LGBTQ+ clothing for CHILDREN, prompting anti-woke boycott.

Sources include:

Brighteon.com

AFLegal.org

Summit.news
(Natural News) In just over two hours following its official launch, Tucker Carlsons new program Tucker on Twitter gained 10 million views, demonstrating that Fox News and other traditional media platforms are no longer necessary to get the word out about important things that are censored elsewhere.

Tuckers mission is simple: to tell the truth about government propaganda and the lying liars that are constantly spewing it through the airwaves and online.

One of Tuckers first orders of business was to address the Kakhovka dam situation in Ukraine, which the Western press is blaming on Vladimir Putin. Tucker shot that idea down quick, explaining how the media paints Putin as he is evil and evil people do evil things  even to themselves.

The reason why the media has to say this is that bombing the Kakhovka dam would certainly not be in the best interests of Putin and his special operation seeing as how the resulting flood submerged the roads that Russian troops were using to get the job done.

It is obvious to those who have been paying close attention that the Kakhovka dam incident was either an inside job by Ukraine itself, or the United States and its global war machine did it. Either way, it is obvious that Putin did not do it to spite himself.

You can watch the first episode of Tucker on Twitter below:

(Related: Prior to getting canned by Fox News, Tucker started to blow the lid on the elite pedophilia problem.)

Tucker Carlson blasts media for ignoring bombshell of the millennium concerning recovery of non-human intelligence craft

The reason why it is absolutely, positively not the case that Putin blew up the Kakhovka dam himself is also because the USSR built the thing back in the 1950s, not to mention the fact that it currently sits on the front lines of the war in Ukraine.

It is nearly 100 feet tall and over 10,000 feet wide, reports explain.

The dam was constructed as a hydroelectric power plant and created the Kakhovka Reservoir, which is over 2,000 sq km. Europes largest nuclear power plant  the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) and the Crimean Peninsula receive water from the reservoir.

The destruction of this strategic dam has created a major setback for Russia, having been a core Russian concern all this time. Through the 250-mile-long Northern Crimean Canal, the reservoir behind the dam feeds water to a peninsula that Moscow itself annexed back in 2014.

Before the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin regularly issued demands to Kiev that irrigation systems supplying water to Crimea remain open, reports further explain.

Tucker is in full agreement with this assessment, having stated on the first episode of his new program that one would have to have been lied to over a period of years to reach the conclusion that Putin, for some unknown and antithetical reason, bombed it.

Tucker also talked about what he called the bombshell of the millennium, referring to the government whistleblower who recently came forward to reveal that craft developed by non-human intelligence has been recovered by governments all around the world as part of an 80-year race to reverse engineer materials for geopolitical advantages.

If you are wondering why our country seems so dysfunctional, Tucker stated, this is a big part of the reason: nobody knows whats happening.

A small group of people control access to all relevant information and the rest of us  dont know. Were allowed to yap all we like about something like racism  but dare to talk about something that really matters and go ahead and see what happens  you keep it up, theyll make you be quiet  trust us  thats how they maintain control.

To keep up with the latest news about Tuckers work, visit Journalism.news.

Sources for this article include:

ZeroHedge.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) The long-awaited and long-expected Ukrainian offensive that seeks to retake land captured by Russian forces over the course of the 16-month-long war there has begun, and early reports claim that Moscows troops are taking a beating.

Ukraines HIMARS are now being used on the front lines to hit Russian positions in the south of the country, according to a prominent Russian war blogger, Newsweek reported on Thursday, a reference to the U.S.-supplied rocket system.

HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) are being deployed without hesitation, to be used on the very front in regions such as the eastern Donetsk and southern Zaporizhzhia regions, Kremlin propagandist Semyon Pegov, who runs the WarGonzo Telegram account, said on Thursday, the report continued.

They hit right on the advanced fortifications, he wrote, adding Kyivs military could try to cut through Russian forces with the HIMARS.

Kicking the HIMARS out of the trenches is much more difficult than tank attacks, Pegov added.

Since the summer of 2022, Ukraine has incorporated HIMARS into its arsenal. The arrival of these wheeled, multiple-rocket launchers in June 2022 was met with praise from Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, who described them as powerful tools. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later remarked in late July 2022 that the addition of HIMARS and other precision weapons was significantly tilting the tides of war in their favor.

As part of its military aid packages, the United States has supplied Ukraine with 38 HIMARS, along with ammunition for the artillery systems. However, some experts claim that it is uncertain whether Ukraine has actually initiated its anticipated counteroffensive against Russian forces. On Monday, the Russian defense ministry reported that Ukraine had commenced a large-scale offensive on Sunday, concentrating on five sectors of the front.

The adversarys objective was to break through our defense on the most vulnerable front sector, according to Russian defense ministry spokesperson, Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov. The defense ministry went on to say that the offensive had already failed.

Earlier this week, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch who heads the Wagner Group of mercenaries fighting in Ukraine, claimed that the Ukrainian forces had already breached the line of defense in multiple regions.

On Thursday, Vladimir Rogov, the leader of the pro-Moscow We Are Together With Russia movement, revealed to state media that Kyiv had been engaging in counteroffensive operations in the southern Zaporizhzhia region for a duration of approximately four days.

While Kyiv has maintained a predominantly secretive stance regarding its operations, the head of Ukraines Defense and Security Council refuted the notion of a counteroffensive commencing on Wednesday.

All of this is not true, Oleksiy Danilov told the Reuters news agency. When all this will begin, it will be decided by our military.

When we start the counteroffensive, everyone will know about it, they will see it, Danilov added.

During an announcement on Wednesday, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar reported that Ukrainian forces had made notable advancements in various regions near the disputed city of Bakhmut, specifically ranging from 200 to 1,100 meters over the previous day.

In a separate Newsweek report, the outlet noted that Russian soldiers fighting against Russian anti-Vladimir Putin militia that crossed into the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine last week have complained that entire regiments are being wiped out.

According to the Pskov Province Telegram channel, a message was received on Tuesday from a Russian unit operating near the border town of Shebekino in Belgorod.

I would like to see the story of our regiment being slaughtered on the Shebekino and Graivoron directions and somehow put the matter to rest, the message said.

The report added:

Two Russian rebel groupsthe Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC)entered Belgorod last week, and intense fighting has been ongoing since. The Legion is made up of defectors from the Russian armed forces and Russian and Belarusian volunteers, and the RVC says its members include Russians fighting on Ukraines side and against the Kremlin regime.

On Sunday, the RVC said it was behind an attack in the Belgorod region that resulted in the capture of several Russian soldiers.

Its hard to know what exactly is going on.

Sources include:

Newsweek.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) A report has revealed that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is also running biological weapons laboratories in both Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, not just in Ukraine.

Russia initially disclosed the existence of the said biolabs in Ukraine. However, recent reports state the disappointment of many nations in the Asia-Pacific region and Africa over these experiments.

Back in December, lawmakers part of the Makabayan (Nationalist) bloc of the Philippine House of Representatives called for an investigation on the U.S. DoDs biological weapons activity. The American agency had been doing experiments at the Regional Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory in the province of Tarlac. In a resolution, the bloc pointed out that the DoDs Defense Threat Reduction Agency is in charge of countering chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high-explosive weapons of mass destruction.

A civilian laboratory was constructed using funds of a foreign military agency, which has the responsibility of managing and integrating the U.S. Defense Departments chemical and biological defense science and technology program, the measure stated.

Allowing the U.S. DoD to influence civilian agricultural initiatives gives rise to reasonable suspicions on the true objectives of these projects in the Philippines, it continued. According to the lawmakers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ought to be in charge of civilian cooperation on bilateral agricultural concerns, not agencies under the DoD  a concern shared by many Filipinos.

Indonesia also voiced out its opposition toward the presence of the Naval Medical Research Unit Two (NAMRU2) in the country. Officials dubbed the unit, which is led by the U.S. Navy, as inexpedient and useless. Thus, Jakarta ordered the immediate cessation of operations at NAMRU2, forcing the transfer of the units unfinished Indonesian operations to Cambodia.

Nations in Africa, former Soviet Union also hosting Pentagon biolabs

The DoD-operated biolabs are also present in Africa, which has prompted the health ministry of an unnamed Central African state to remark that this facility is likely responsible for the outbreak of an Ebola-based virus in September of last year. The pathogen reportedly created in Sudan was fully identical to a virus circulating throughout Africa back in 2012.

Aside from Africa, the Eastern European country of Georgia also hosts one such facility. The so-called Lugar Center in the capital Tbilisi is funded by Washington. Its operations are overseen by the U.S. Army Medical Research Unit in Georgia and some private companies linked to the DoD and DTRA under a state contract.

Only American citizens who have access to classified information and possess diplomatic immunity under the U.S.-Georgia Agreement on Defense Cooperation are allowed to access the Lugar Center, a Level III laboratory. Aside from collecting unspecified biological agents, the facility works works with a number of biological agents  including anthrax, tularemia and a number of highly contagious hemorrhagic fevers.

Lt. Gen Igor Kirillov of the Russian Armed Forces (AFR) disclosed last April that Washington is developing biological weapons in close proximity to Russias borders. He cited more than 2,000 documents of various plans and projects examined by Moscow to back up his claim. (Related: Russia says U.S. government working on universal GMO bioweapon at Ukrainian biolabs that would cause MASS DEATH of humans, animals and crops.)

We have no doubt that the U.S.  under the guise of ensuring global biosafety  conducted dual-use research, including the creation of biological weapons components in the immediate vicinity of the Russian borders, said Kirillov, the head of the AFRs radiation, chemical and biological defense unit.

According to the Russian general, the work on bioweapons was carried out in laboratories in the Donetsk and Luhansk republics and in the Kherson region. Formerly under Ukraine, the three areas are now under Russian control.

Head over to BiologicalWeapons.news for more stories about U.S. bioweapons laboratories around the world.

Watch this video that discusses the presence of U.S.-funded biolabs near countries known to be Americas enemies.

This video is from the Global Agenda channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

Ukraine is basically a biological weapons outsourcing nation for NATO.

Russia exposes Ukrainian biolab operator Metabiota and its connections to the Pentagon, Hunter Biden, EcoHealth Alliance and the WEF.

Communist China building nearly 100 more biolabs similar to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Sources include:

NewsWars.com

PhilStar.com

English.AlMayadeen.net

Brighteon.com
Dave Norris wants you to know that the free concert his campaign is organizing on Saturday is not a political fundraiser.

But the other campaigns in the Democratic primary race for the 54th District seat in the House of Delegates arent so sure.

The Primary Voice Music Festival at the Jefferson Theater in downtown Charlottesville is billed on Norris website as a way to remind everyone to vote in the upcoming Democratic Primary.

Thats the way the concert is billed, Norris opponent Bellamy Brown told The Daily Progress, but its specifically designed to boost his campaign. Its not billed with all three candidates in the primary.

Josh Norris, campaign manager for the races other contender Katrina Callsen, noted that advertisements for the concert explicitly feature Dave Norris campaign logo.

If theres a campaign putting something out on its Facebook page and its a flyer to an event and its got their logo on it, to me thats a campaign event, he told The Daily Progress. Thats just the rule of thumb.

Dave Norris maintains it is not in anyway a campaign fundraiser.

My campaign is organizing and sponsoring the event, and as such will of course be featured prominently, he told The Daily Progress. But the overarching goal is to encourage people to get out and vote in the June 20 primary, regardless of who theyre voting for.

Although Dave Norris insists the event is simply intended to increase participation in democracy, neither of his opponents have been invited.

And neither plan to attend.

It is Daves event, so no, said Callsen.

I wouldnt go even if I was invited, said Brown, adding, If I wasnt in the race, Id go.

Among the musicians slated to perform is Abbey Ellerglick, who has written a campaign song for Dave Norris.

He even has a campaign song that says, Go out and vote for Dave, Brown said.

As a former mayor of Charlottesville with a long history of involvement in local politics, Dave Norris is one of the more recognizable faces, and a top contender, in the primary race. Callsen is the chair of the Albemarle County School Board. Brown is the former chair of Charlottesvilles Police Civilian Oversight Board.

The question of whether the Saturday evening performance will be a campaign event masquerading as a pro-democracy concert is not simply an issue of semantics. Events that are not clearly billed as fundraisers for candidates but raise money for their campaigns could run afoul of campaign finance laws if those funds are not duly reported.

When contacted about this possibility, the Virginia Department of Elections told The Daily Progress it does not comment on hypothetical violations of code.

Candidates have the Code of Virginia and the Candidate Committee Summary of Laws and Policies to guide them on proper campaign conduct regarding campaign finance, Andrea Gaines, external affairs manager for the state agency, told The Daily Progress.

Michael Allenby, who is helping to organize the Saturday concert, told The Daily Progress that while most of the musicians will not be paid for the performance, the Norris campaign is footing the bill for the concerts hard costs.

That is acceptable, according to the Department of Elections.

Dave Norris said the idea for the concert was spurred by his friends in the local music scene who asked if they could play music to support his campaign.

They started putting the word out to other musicians and it really snowballed. Once they saw who else was playing they were like, Yeah, I want to be in a lineup with that person, he said.

He added that he plans to take the stage a number of times during the concert.

Callsen said she wishes Dave Norris and his concert nothing but the best.

I would love to attend if invited, she said. I think its always a good thing to get voters to the polls.

Even though no formal invitation has been extended to Brown or Callsen, Dave Norris said his opponents in the race are still welcome if they change their minds.

Theyre welcome to come and enjoy some music, he told The Daily Progress.

Votes will be cast in the Democratic primary on June 20.
(Natural News) The World Health Organization (WHO) wrapped up its 76th World Health Assembly (WHA) event last week, and one major point of discussion was the next covid, which Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned is soon to come.

The WHO is readying its so-called Pandemic Treaty in preparation for the next global health emergency, which Ghebreyesus told members will probably be another pathogen emerging with even deadlier potential remains.

Once the Pandemic Treaty is in place, all member nations, including the United States, will be legally bound by its stipulations. The WHO will be in charge of the entire prevention, preparedness, and response effort, overriding all national laws and even the Constitution in the process.

Think Global Health says that those arguing in favor of this Pandemic Treaty have variously argued that it should address  among other things  surveillance, outbreak notification, the sharing of pathogen samples and genetic sequence information, zoonoses, pandemic prevention, trade, and travel measures, equitable access to health countermeasures, health capacities in low-income countries, universal health coverage, social determinants of health, intellectual property rights, misinformation and disinformation, financing for pandemic preparedness and response, human rights, and strengthening the WHO.

(Related: Did you know that investment firms BlackRock and Vanguard are quietly taking over the food supply in order to enslave you and your family?)

The next pandemic will be the LAST pandemic to usher in a globalist new world order

Negotiations for the Pandemic Treaty began back in March 2021 at the height of the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19). The WHO and its 194 member nations, including the U.S., are planning to adopt it by Spring of 2024, just in time for whatever the globalists have planned as the next phase of their global depopulation efforts in preparation for their envisioned new world order.

Just like how covid was preceded by Event 201, a simulation that went live just months later, the next global health emergency will likely have a similar predecessor simulation. WHO member nations are already calling for one to occur before next year  watch below to learn more:

WTF

WHO members wants to run a simulation exercise before implementing Pandemic Treaty. #STOPTreatyWHO pic.twitter.com/k9lPtKYVnm  Denis Kristan (@DenisKristan) June 5, 2023

To help iron out and apply the insights and lessons learned from covid, the WHO set up an Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response. The purpose of this panel is to provide an evidence-based path for the future, grounded in lessons of the present and the past to ensure countries and global institutions, including specifically WHO, effectively address health threats.

That panel, which was established in September 2020 at the request of Ghebreyesus, presented its first report, entitled COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic, to the 74th WHO in May 2021. The video below contains more about that:

The world has the opportunity to commit to transformational changes that can make COVID-19 the #LastPandemic. And the UN General Assembly has a key role. @MaEllenSirleaf & @HelenClarkNZ provide a roadmap for a world protected from pandemic threats.https://t.co/pThYUwYSMT pic.twitter.com/FHgt8P7os4  The Independent Panel (@TheIndPanel) May 4, 2023

This last pandemic, as they are calling it, is intended to be the pandemic that ends all pandemics. In other words, this is the endgame the WHO and its partners are aiming to implement by next year, which they intend to be the catalyst into the new totalitarian world order they have planned after the current order is finally demolished.

Will they be successful, is the question. Will the totalitarian world of the globalists succeed, or will something unexpected occur that demolishes the globalists plans and takes the world down a different path? What do you think?

The latest news about the globalist threat to humanity can be found at Globalism.news.

Sources for this article include:

UncoverDC.com

NaturalNews.com
Kilauea volcano in Hawaii has erupted again after a three-month pause, emitting a "glowing lava" from its crater during the morning of Wednesday, June 7, according to reports.

However, the eruption of one of the world's most active volcanoes also sparked fears of renewed threats from flowing lahar and plumes of hazardous volcanic ash in Hawaii's Big Island and its surrounding regions.

Amid the volcanic threat, local authorities have raised the volcano's alert level or into a warning status since the aviation color code changed to red. This comes as scientists, examine the recent eruption and potential hazards, according to Phys.org.

This implies that the increased volcanic activity and recent volcanic explosion could cause destructive, life-threatening risks to nearby communities. Surrounding towns have seen the basaltic shield volcano's eruptions several times in recent years, which also witnessed the eruption of Mauna Loa volcano in November 2022.

Kilauea Volcano Eruption

In a tweet earlier this week, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported that Kilauea volcano has been erupting from the Halema'uma'u summit crater as of Wednesday, occurring just several hours after an 'eruption watch' was issued.

The eruption was first observed just before 4:45 a.m. local time on Wednesday when the U.S. island state's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory detected some "glow" from the volcano's summit captured by webcam images. The pictures show "fissures" on the base of the crater where lava flows were generated on the crater floor's surface, as cited by CBS News.

According to the U.S. seismic agency's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, increased earthquake activity and changes in ground formation patterns were observed at the volcano summit on Tuesday night, June 6. These changes include movement of magma beneath the surface, as cited by Phys.org.

Also Read: Kilauea Resumes Eruption as Lava Flows Again to Summit Crater of Hawaii Volcano

Previous Eruptions

As mentioned earlier, Kilauea volcano has erupted many times in previous years. Yet, the latest eruption started on January 5 this year and continued recurrently until March 7. Before its 2023 eruption, Kilauea underwent intermittent eruptions from September 2021 to March 2022, according to the USGS.

Beyond the 21st century, Kilauea experienced an "extended eruption period" since January 1983 and involved open lava lakes and lava flows from its summit caldera and the East Rift Zone, the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program stated.

Tectonic Plates

In its historic record, Kilauea has been intermittently erupting for at least 2,000 years and its volcanic activity is caused by seismic pressure as Hawaii sits at the center of the Pacific Plate, which is the largest plate in the Pacific Ocean. The plate measures approximately 103 million square kilometers, area where all the plates are constantly moving, according to The University of Melbourne.

In the said region, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are common. Just last year, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano located in the southern Pacific Ocean, particularly in the Tongan archipelago, made a powerful eruption not seen for more than 100 years.

Related Article: Kilauea Volcano Ends 61-Day Eruption, No Active Lava Detected - Hawaii
Bottlenose dolphins have been reported being killed on the Aegean Sea in recent months, according to scientists, who blame some Turkish fishermen to be the cause of the fatalities.

Researchers from a non-profit organization in Greece have linked the bottlenose dolphin deaths to the said anglers after finding the marine animals trapped in fishing gear.

In addition to the alleged killings, Turkish media has also reported deaths of the same dolphin species. However, this time, it involved a rise in beach stranding incidents along the coasts of the Black Sea.

In relation to the reports, scientists blamed the dolphin deaths were caused by the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Bottlenose Dolphin Killings

Researchers from the Archipelagos Marine Protection Institute found two more dead bottlenose dolphins in the open sea located northeast of the Aegean Sea, according to the Greek City Times media company.

The research team linked the deaths to a large group of fishing vessels coming from Turkey but with the aim of tuna fishing as their objective.

Meanwhile on the side of Turkey, dolphin strandings have been reported along some coastal areas of the country, as mentioned earlier.

According to the Turkish-based Hurriyet Daily News, some scientists said the strandings were caused by the Russia Ukraine war since it started in February 2022.

Also Read: Barbaric Killings of Dolphins in Denmark: Coastline Turned Red as More Than 1,500 Dolphins Dead

Dolphin Deaths Worldwide

Outside the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea, the deaths of bottlenose dolphins are common as one might think. The main causes of deaths have been attributed to bycatch, overfishing, or other human activities in the marine environment, this is in addition to the controversial annual dolphin-killing practice in the Faroe Islands.

One such place is Australia where several bottlenose dolphins were caught and killed in the country's western coast. In 2022, a government report estimated that between 11 and 17 dolphins are killed each year. Meanwhile, independent observers placed the figure as high as 50 deaths each year, The Guardian reported.

In France, there have been mass dolphin deaths in the country's waters in recent years.

In March 2023, the country's council of state issued a six-month deadline for French government officials. Within the period, local authorities need to implement the closure of fishing in the Bay of Biscay for "appropriate periods."

This is to limit the deaths of various dolphin species, including bottlenose dolphins and common dolphins, which are victims of bycatch during fishing, The Associated Press reported.

Dolphin Deaths Investigation

While several dolphin-related cases have been reported in different parts of the world, one of the most bizarre cases can be traced back along U.S. coasts in 2011, a year after the largest oil spill in history occurred in the Gulf of Mexico.

The U.S. case involved the deaths of more than 80 bottlenose dolphins, which were found along the U.S. Gulf Coast since January of that year. In such context, marine scientists are debating if the deaths were linked to the oil spill, Reuters reported.

Related Article: 10 Disturbing Facts About Dolphins You'll Wish You Never Knew!
Great white shark encounters are common than previously thought along California beaches, according to a new study led by scientists in the United States.

The researchers involved in the new research asserted that the meeting between the sharks and humans are increasing "nearly every day" in some beaches across the Golden State. However, the encounters do not necessarily equate to attacks, the study implies.

For decades, modern pop culture and mainstream movies have portrayed great whites as the apex predator of the ocean, with a thirst for human flesh.

Yet, marine scientists in previous years have clarified that humans are not on a shark's menu list. Despite our exclusion from their food chain, dangerous, fatal shark attacks have still occurred in the U.S. and other parts of the world.

Experts explain that such attacks on humans are unprovoked and caused by 'mistaken identity' as the ocean predators apparently deem swimming humans on the ocean's surface as their prey, including seals.

While incidents related to shark bites are isolated and placed into the 'rare statistics,' some reports indicate that our fear of great white sharks remain.

Great White Shark Encounters

In the study published on the journal PLOS ONE on June 2, researchers from the California State University Long Beach examined patterns of "overlapping habitat use" between juvenile white sharks and humans, who use the same area for recreational activities, along southern California beaches.

The research team focused on the area since it is being used by great white sharks as a nursing habitat, where young great whites spend their early years of life. The team observed that the local shark population is growing, acknowledging it is a positive news for the local marine ecosystem. This comes under the context that great white sharks are a threatened species globally.

Also Read: Dead Great White Shark Washed Ashore Into California Beach Killed During Fishing Activity

California Beaches Drone Surveillance

The team used commercial drones to conduce surveillance of 26 southern California beaches, ranging from San Diego to Santa Barbara, between January 2019 and March 2021.

Patrick Rex, a graduate student from the university's Department of Biological Sciences, told Newsweek that southern California is one of the most popular sites for ocean recreational activities, but he also said an increase in shark population in the state's coast heightens concern that it may lead to more shark bites.

To confirm the concern, Rex scanned the beaches using the drones to search for hotspots where people and juvenile great white sharks share. He found that both groups use the same beach almost daily and 97% of the time. The figure tells that there is a "high likelihood" that the marine animals are encountering beachgoers in southern California frequently each day.

The U.S. is the leading country with the highest number of shark bite incidents, with California only having four incidents in 2022, according to the Florida Museum's International Shark Attack File.

Related Article: Great White Shark Makes Mexican Diver Its Buffet, Making It The First Fatal Shark Attack of 2023
A giant wolf believed by many once terrorized 18th century France and was blamed for several gruesome deaths in the county of Gevaudan.

The predator went on a killing rampage in the said rural territory.

The threat was too great it even caught the attention of the French monarchy at that time under the rulership of King Louis XV, who sent out hunters to kill the unknown creature in what will be known in history as the Beast of Gevaudan.

For years, scientists have confirmed the existence of giant wolves called "dire wolves," as portrayed in "Game of Thrones" used by the protagonist Stark family as their pets and guardians.

In relation to the Beast of Gevaudan, various inquiries have pointed if it was just a dire wolf.

However, the ancient animals went into extinction approximately between 10,000 to 13,000 years ago, according to various sources.

With fossils dating back as old as 250,000 years ago, dire wolves once reportedly roamed the Americas and feasted on large prey like bison and now-extinct animals like Ice Age horses and ground sloths.

Still, the disappearance of the giant wolves remains a mystery to scientists, who contest if their annihilation is linked to changes in the climate and environment or caused by humans and other animal competitors.

Beast of Gevaudan

It was the early summer of 1764 when the Beast of Gevaudan carried out its "first recorded attack" in France, wherein its first victim was a 14-year-old girl named Jeanne Boulet who was watching her sheep.

Her death was followed by harrowing incidents involving mostly women and children, according to the Smithsonian Magazine.

Although wild animal attacks of today devastating from its own nature, the Gevaudan attacks involved mutilated victims with their throats or heads severed, the magazine reported.

In terms of death toll, multiple sources estimate it to be 100. Yet, some approximate it to be almost 300 fatalities.

Accounts about the Beast of Gevaudan was one of the first international news stories, captured by the Courrier in Avignon and reached the newspapers of Paris.

Since then, it spread abroad, according to the Public Domain Review. In 2001, a movie about the Gevaudan creature entitled "Brotherhood of the Wolf" was made.

Also Read: Red Wolves are Going Extinct and Chances of Recovery are Extremely Low

Extinct Dire Wolves

The extinction of the dire wolves has been a subject of debates even until today.

Still, new research potentially sheds light on the mystery behind their disappearance.

Based on several studies, scientists believe that the megafauna in which the giant wolves rely on started dying due to climate change.

The prehistoric wolves then had trouble completing with the much smaller gray wolf when it comes to catching smaller prey amid co-existing for thousands of years, according to the National Park Service.

It is for this reason why the dire wolves died out at the end of the last Ice Age.

Related Article: 'Game of Thrones' Giant Wolves Were REAL and Even Fiercer than Most People Thought
In nature, albino animals are quite uncommon. Because albinism inhibits melanin synthesis, both people and animals with the condition have lighter skin, and lips; and in animals claws, feathers, and fins.

It causes problems with hearing, astigmatism, sun sensitivity, and vision.

Due to the dangers posed to them by predators and poachers by their rarity, albino animals are protected in zoos and private care.

Here are some of the world's rarest albino animals, according to Rarest.

#9: Axolotl

The IUCN Red List classifies the albino axolotl as being in critically endangered status. They are quite uncommon, with just 1,000 still existing in the wild.

Albino axolotls need special care because of their sensitive eyes and desire for hiding places, in contrast to ordinary axolotls, which come in a variety of hues.

They are well-liked as pets and take pleasure in eating frozen blood worms.

#8: Turtle

One in 100,000 turtle hatchlings is albino, making albino turtles incredibly uncommon.

Due to the problems sea turtles face, including habitat destruction and egg collection, their survival in the wild is extremely difficult.

For albino turtles, additional challenges include vision issues and light sensitivity. Most often found on Australian beaches, although they have also been seen off the coast of Mozambique.

#7: Wallaby

Within the kangaroo family, white wallabies are a rare variation of the wallaby. Their population in Australia is thought to be less than 1,000, and they are mostly found on islands in Papua New Guinea and Australia. Their numbers have topped 200 on Bruny Island. They flourish in groups and encounter fewer predators, assuring their protection.

#6: Hummingbird

Due to the high species variety of birds, albinism is quite uncommon among them.

Less than 100 specimens of the ruby-throated hummingbird, a noteworthy example of an albino hummingbird, have been found throughout North, Central, and South America.

Albino hummingbirds do not have pigmentation and have pink eyes, bills, feet, and skin.

#5: Alligator

With only 200 living, albino alligators are one of the rarest species of animals.

Due to the difficulties presented by their health, these freshwater species are often kept in private care in the Southeastern United States. They are extremely vulnerable to solar damage and are immediately recognized by predators because of their lack of color.

Additionally, their limited vision makes them much more vulnerable.

#4: Moose

The moose, a powerful member of the New World deer family, is distinguished by its dark brown or black coat and its large antlers.

However, although they are uncommon, white or albino moose may be found worldwide, including in Sweden, Europe, North America, and Russia.

They are the subject of debate, with some debating whether they are real albinos or simply carriers of the recessive trait known as piebald.

#3: Humpback Whale

Like Migaloo, albino humpback whales are exceedingly uncommon.

Male performer Migaloo, first observed in 1991, is known for his catchy tunes. The total number of albino whales, including several albino killer whales, is unknown and sightings are unusual.

Also Read: 'Albino' White Bison Calf in Wyoming State Park Revealed to Be Just a Pale Cattle, Says DNA Test

#2: Kiwi

Manukura, the only albino kiwi known to exist in the world, had a distinctive look that resembled a snowball on legs. Tragically, following surgery for an unfertilized egg, she passed away in December 2020, according to The Guardian. Her unusual white feather gene, which was inherited from both parents, gave her snow-white feathers.

#1: Panda and Orangutan

Recently, a rare albino panda was spotted in China, engaging with other pandas. Believed to be 5 or 6 years old, it was first seen and photographed in 2019 at Wolong National Nature Reserve in Sichuan province, People reported.

Similarly, Alba, the only known albino orangutan globally, was rescued by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation in 2017. After a year of monitoring and treatment, Alba returned to the Borneo wilderness.

Given her limited vision and white skin, she receives close care and protection from poachers and other animals, currently residing in a rainforest with other rehabilitated orangutans, Rarest reported.

Related Article: World's Only Albino Panda Seen Interacting with Other Pandas in China Nature Reserve
Wildfire smoke is a serious health hazard for both humans and animals, especially in areas where air quality is poor due to the fires.

Wildfire smoke can irritate the eyes, nose, throat and lungs, and cause coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath and other respiratory problems, and can also worsen existing conditions such as asthma, bronchitis and heart disease.

Dogs are particularly vulnerable to the effects of wildfire smoke, as they have more sensitive respiratory systems and tend to breathe faster and deeper than humans.

Dogs can also suffer from smoke inhalation if they are exposed to large amounts of smoke or are near a fire.

Smoke inhalation can cause severe symptoms such as disorientation, fainting, seizures, difficulty breathing and even death.

To protect their dogs from wildfire smoke, pet owners should keep them indoors as much as possible, with windows and doors closed and air conditioning on if available.

They should also limit their outdoor activities, such as walks and playtime, and provide them with plenty of water to stay hydrated.

Pet owners should also watch for signs of respiratory distress or eye irritation in their dogs, and seek veterinary attention if needed.

However, some pet owners have gone the extra mile to protect their dogs from wildfire smoke by creating homemade masks for them.

One such example is Emily Uhde from Rochester, New York, who made an "incredible" mask for her dog Siggi using a hotel shower cap and an N95 respirator mask.

How She Made the Mask

Uhde told Newsweek that she decided to make the mask for her dog after noticing that the air quality in her area was poor due to wildfire smoke coming from Canada.

She said that she had an N95 mask for herself, but she wanted to protect her dog as well.

The pet owner said that she used a shower cap because it had elastic that could fit over her dog's muzzle. She then cut a hole in the shower cap and inserted the N95 mask through it.

According to her, it only took her about five minutes to make the mask.

She said that she tested the mask on her dog by putting it on him and taking him outside for a few minutes, and that he seemed comfortable with it and did not try to take it off.

Uhde further said that she only used the mask when the air quality was very bad and that she did not leave it on him for too long.

She said that she shared a photo of her dog wearing the mask on Twitter because she thought it was funny and cute, but that she did not expect it to go viral and that she was surprised by the positive reactions from people.

Also Read: Perseid Meteor Shower Returns This 2021: Will Wildfire Smoke Obscure the View?

What Experts Say About Dog Masks

While Uhde's mask may have worked for her dog, experts say that pet owners should be careful when using homemade masks for their dogs.

They say that homemade masks may not fit properly or filter effectively, and that they may cause discomfort or breathing difficulties for dogs.

Dr. Sarah Nelson, a veterinarian at Banfield Pet Hospital, told Newsweek that while she appreciated Uhde's creativity and concern for her dog's health, she did not recommend using homemade masks for dogs.

She said that dogs have different facial structures than humans and that masks designed for humans may not fit them well or cover their noses and mouths adequately.

She said that masks may also interfere with dogs' ability to pant or regulate their body temperature.

The vet also said that instead of using homemade masks, pet owners should follow the general guidelines of keeping their dogs indoors when the air quality is poor, limiting their outdoor activities, providing them with water and monitoring them for signs of respiratory distress.

Dr Nelson advised pet owners to consult with their veterinarians if they have any questions or concerns about their dogs' health or well-being during wildfire season.

They should also be aware of the air quality in their area and avoid exposing their dogs to excessive smoke or other pollutants, and they should always keep an eye on their dogs for any signs of distress or discomfort and seek veterinary attention if needed.

Related article: Wildfire Smoke Particles Can Affect the Climate Longer Than Previously Expected
MIAMI  Donald Trump improperly stored in his Florida estate sensitive documents on nuclear capabilities, repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a Pentagon plan of attack and classified map, according to a sweeping felony indictment that paints a damning portrait of the former presidents treatment of national security information.

The conduct alleged in the historic indictment  the first federal case against a former president  cuts to the heart of any presidents responsibility to safeguard the governments most valuable secrets. Prosecutors say the documents he stowed, refused to return and in some cases showed to visitors risked jeopardizing not only relations with foreign nations but also the safety of troops and confidential sources.

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Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced, Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case, said in his first public statements. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.

Trump, who is currently the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is due to make his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon in Miami. In a rare bit of good news for Trump, the judge initially assigned to the case is someone he appointed and who drew criticism for rulings in his favor during a dispute last year over a special master assigned to review the seized classified documents. Meanwhile, two lawyers who worked the case for months announced Friday that they had resigned from the legal team.

All told, Trump faces 37 felony counts  31 pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information, the balance relating to alleged conspiracy, obstruction and false statements  that could result in a substantial prison sentence in the event of a conviction. A Trump aide who prosecutors said moved dozens of boxes at his Florida estate at his direction, and then lied to investigators about it, was charged in the same indictment with conspiracy and other crimes.

Trump responded to the indictment Friday by falsely conflating his case with a separate classified documents investigation concerning President Joe Biden. Though classified records were found in a Biden home and office, there has been no indication that the president, unlike Trump, sought to conceal them or knew they were there.

Nobody said I wasnt allowed to look at the personal records that I brought with me from the White House. Theres nothing wrong with that, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. But among the various investigations he has faced, legal experts  as well as Trumps own aides  had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution. Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trumps attorneys were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.

The indictment arrives at a time when Trump is continuing to dominate the Republican presidential primary. Hes expected to make his first public appearance since the charges were made public on Saturday when he attends state GOP conventions in Georgia and North Carolina.

But the documents startling scope and breadth of allegations will almost certainly make it harder for Republicans to rail against than an earlier New York criminal case that many legal analysts had derided as weak.

The 49-page indictment centers on hundreds of classified documents that Trump took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving office in January 2021. Even as tens of thousands of members and guests visited Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trumps presidency and August 2022, when the FBI obtained a search warrant, documents were recklessly stored in spaces including a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room. A photograph included in the indictment shows several dozen file boxes stacked in a storage area.

The case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years  as president and private citizen  but had never before charged him with a crime. The most notable investigation was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, but prosecutors in that probe cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Once he left office, though, he lost that protection.

The inquiry took a major step forward last November when Attorney General Merrick Garland, a soft-spoken former federal judge who has long stated that no person should be regarded as above the law, appointed Smith, a war crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation, to lead both the documents probe as well as a separate investigation into efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

The indictment alleges that Trump, who claimed without evidence that he had declassified all the documents before leaving office, understood his duty to care for classified information but shirked it anyway. It details a July 2021 meeting in Bedminster in which he boasted about having held onto a classified document prepared by the military about a potential attack on another country.

Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, the indictment quotes him as saying, citing an audio recording. He also said he could have declassified the document but Now I cant, you know, but this is still a secret, according to the indictment.

Using Trumps own words and actions, as recounted to prosecutors by lawyers, aides and other witnesses, the indictment alleges both a refusal to return the documents despite more than a years worth of government demands but also steps that he encouraged others around him to take to conceal the records.

For instance, prosecutors say, after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for the records in May 2022, Trump asked his own lawyers if he could defy the request and said words to the effect of, I dont want anybody looking through my boxes.

Wouldnt it be better if we just told them we dont have anything here? one of his lawyers described him as saying.

But before his own lawyer searched the property for classified records, the indictment says, Trump directed aides to remove from the Mar-a-Lago storage room boxes of documents so that they would not be found during the search and therefore handed over to the government.

Weeks later, when Justice Department officials arrived at Mar-a-Lago to collect the records, they were handed a folder with only 38 documents and an untrue letter attesting that all documents responsive to the subpoena had been turned over.

But suspecting that many more remained inside, the FBI obtained a search warrant and returned in August to recover more than 100 additional documents. The Justice Department says Trump held onto more than 300 classified documents, including some at the top secret level.

Walt Nauta, one of the aides alleged to have transported the boxes around the boxes, lied to the FBI about the movement of the boxes and faces charges that he conspired to hide them. His lawyer declined to comment.

Photos: Donald Trump through the years Talking politics With Melania 'How to Get Rich' On the course At Doral Sarazen Cup With Serena USS Iowa Debating Jeb Bush In Biloxi Campaign rally Winning South Carolina She's with him Signing autographs Another debate Waving to supporters In Arizona The Trump family At the convention The nominee The ticket Showing her support In Mexico Debating Clinton Casting his vote Election Night In the Oval Office Mitt Romney The inauguration Thumbs up Taking the oath Waving goodbye Armed Forces Ball James Comey Trump to lay out his agenda to Congress Thanking school children Medal of Honor recipients Justice Anthony Kennedy swears in Neil Gorsuch Easter Egg Roll Super Bowl champs Little Sisters of the Poor Russian foreign minister, ambassador At the Western Wall Meeting the pope Wreath-laying ceremony in Arlington National champs Congressional shooting At the White House Congressional Picnic Go, Cubs, go Departing the White House USS Gerald R. Ford joins the Navy The eclipse 9/11 anniversary Trump addresses world leaders at U.N. General Assembly Las Vegas shooting Trump visits Puerto Rico Trump meets Kissinger With Trudeau Medal of Honor Happy Halloween National Christmas Tree Lighting Celebrating GOP tax plan March for Life State of the Union School shootings State dinner With Olympians Greeting a guest Freed Americans Historic summit With Kim Kardashian West In Washington Debating Joe Biden Election Night 2020 Jan. 6 Leaving the White House
An evening with Daniel Munayer at Norwich church An evening with Daniel Munayer at Norwich church

Daniel Munayer, the Executive Director of Musalaha, a faith-based organisation that teaches, trains, and facilitates reconciliation, mainly between Israelis and Palestinians from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, visited Norwich in May.

Daniel is a half British and half Palestinian Israeli and is driven by his Christian faith to develop and deliver conflict resolution programmes. Daniel encapsulates the rich diversity and fascinating complexity that continues to offer hope to resolving the intractable conflict that impacts all who live in the Land that some call holy. He is the only Palestinian ever to be invited to personally address the UN Security Council.



Daniel visited Holy Trinity Church in Norwich. Noah Marsh, a student, commented Daniels words helped me to see how communities can actively seek to grow in understanding and love for one another, to practically put into place the Biblical perspective for reconciliation: Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you (Ephesians 4:32).



Yuyu Ng, a member of Holy Trinitys 20s & 30s group, said, "As an individual coming from a complex cultural background, it struck me when I heard how Daniel applied the teachings of reconciliation from the Bible to such deep and complex affairs. It acted as a metaphorical fire extinguisher, extinguishing the anger that had been deeply buried in my heart regarding the injustice faced in the socio-political context of Hong Kong. It serves as another reminder that God has personally taught us how to approach conflicts through reconciliation which is sustainable and eternal.


By Express News Service

BHOPAL: Facing anti-incumbency and multiple-time MLAs after being in power for over 18 years, the ruling BJP is believed to be toying with the idea of fielding some of its sitting MPs in the Madhya Pradesh polls.

With less than six months separating the assembly elections and the 2024 national elections, the partys poll planners dont seem averse to taking a calculated risk of fielding some of their sitting 28 LS members from Madhya Pradesh in the state polls.

Only six months after having narrowly lost the 2018 assembly polls to the Congress, the BJP bounced back with a stellar performance in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, winning 28 out of the 29 seats in MP. Four years after the LS polls, the party which is faced with a resurgent Congress following the Karnataka assembly triumph, is now eyeing the most winnable candidates in the assembly polls.

Its not that all 28 sitting MPs won in 2019 just riding on the Modi wave, they also have deep influence in multiple assembly segments of their parliamentary constituencies, a senior state BJP functionary told this newspaper.

While there are 28 LS members of BJP from MP, names of 15 of them are doing the rounds as probable candidates in the assembly polls. Those sitting MPs, include Sudhir Gupta (Mandsaur), Guman Singh Damor (Ratlam-Jhabua), Anil Firojiya (Ujjain), DD Uikey (Betul), Dr Dhal Singh Bisen (Balaghat), Gajendra Singh Patel (Khargone), union minister Faggan Singh Kulaste (Mandla), Ganesh Singh (Satna), Riti Pathak (Sidhi), Himadri Singh (Shahdol), Dr KP Singh Yadav (Guna), Rodmal Nagar (Rajgarh), Uday Pratap Singh (Hoshangabad), Vivek Shejwalkar (Gwalior), Mahendra Singh Solanky (Dewas) and Sandhya Rai (Bhind).

Some of these sitting MPs have won or lost the assembly polls in the past. While Balaghat MP Dr Dhal Singh Bisen is a four-time former MLA and ex-MP minister, first-time MP from Bhind seat Sandhya Rai had won from Dimni seat of Morena district in 2003 and Guman Singh Damor had won from Jhabua seat in 2018 polls, before quitting it in 2019 after winning the LS polls.

A senior state BJPs organizational leader said its not just that the party isnt averse to fielding its sitting MPs in the assembly polls, but many MPs too are believed to be keen on contesting the assembly polls.

BHOPAL: Facing anti-incumbency and multiple-time MLAs after being in power for over 18 years, the ruling BJP is believed to be toying with the idea of fielding some of its sitting MPs in the Madhya Pradesh polls. With less than six months separating the assembly elections and the 2024 national elections, the partys poll planners dont seem averse to taking a calculated risk of fielding some of their sitting 28 LS members from Madhya Pradesh in the state polls. Only six months after having narrowly lost the 2018 assembly polls to the Congress, the BJP bounced back with a stellar performance in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, winning 28 out of the 29 seats in MP. Four years after the LS polls, the party which is faced with a resurgent Congress following the Karnataka assembly triumph, is now eyeing the most winnable candidates in the assembly polls.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Its not that all 28 sitting MPs won in 2019 just riding on the Modi wave, they also have deep influence in multiple assembly segments of their parliamentary constituencies, a senior state BJP functionary told this newspaper. While there are 28 LS members of BJP from MP, names of 15 of them are doing the rounds as probable candidates in the assembly polls. Those sitting MPs, include Sudhir Gupta (Mandsaur), Guman Singh Damor (Ratlam-Jhabua), Anil Firojiya (Ujjain), DD Uikey (Betul), Dr Dhal Singh Bisen (Balaghat), Gajendra Singh Patel (Khargone), union minister Faggan Singh Kulaste (Mandla), Ganesh Singh (Satna), Riti Pathak (Sidhi), Himadri Singh (Shahdol), Dr KP Singh Yadav (Guna), Rodmal Nagar (Rajgarh), Uday Pratap Singh (Hoshangabad), Vivek Shejwalkar (Gwalior), Mahendra Singh Solanky (Dewas) and Sandhya Rai (Bhind). Some of these sitting MPs have won or lost the assembly polls in the past. While Balaghat MP Dr Dhal Singh Bisen is a four-time former MLA and ex-MP minister, first-time MP from Bhind seat Sandhya Rai had won from Dimni seat of Morena district in 2003 and Guman Singh Damor had won from Jhabua seat in 2018 polls, before quitting it in 2019 after winning the LS polls. A senior state BJPs organizational leader said its not just that the party isnt averse to fielding its sitting MPs in the assembly polls, but many MPs too are believed to be keen on contesting the assembly polls.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The CBI has formed a 10-member special investigation team (SIT) under a DIG-rank officer to probe six cases related to the Manipur violence referred to it by the state government, officials said on Friday.

During his visit to the northeastern state, Home Minister Amit Shah announced a CBI probe into six FIRs -- five on alleged criminal conspiracy and one on general conspiracy behind the violence in Manipur.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had dispatched Joint Director Ghanshyam Upadhyay to coordinate with the state officials, and upon his return, the SIT was constituted, they said.

The agency re-registered the six cases referred to it by the state government.

The Special Crime Branch, Kolkata will probe the cases, they said.

Violence broke out in the northeastern state after a 'Tribal Solidarity March' was organised in the hill districts on May 3 to protest against the Meitei community's demand for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status.

ALSO READ | Naga MLAs ask Centre to exclude their regions in event of any separate administration

WATCH |

So far, nearly 100 people have lost their lives, and over 300 have been injured ever since the ethnic violence broke out over a month ago.

The clashes were preceded by tension over the eviction of Kuki villagers from reserve forest land, which had led to a series of smaller agitations.

Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley.

Tribals -- Nagas and Kukis -- constitute another 40 per cent of the population and reside in the hill districts.

Around 10,000 Army and Assam Rifles personnel have been deployed in the state to maintain peace.

NEW DELHI: The CBI has formed a 10-member special investigation team (SIT) under a DIG-rank officer to probe six cases related to the Manipur violence referred to it by the state government, officials said on Friday. During his visit to the northeastern state, Home Minister Amit Shah announced a CBI probe into six FIRs -- five on alleged criminal conspiracy and one on general conspiracy behind the violence in Manipur. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had dispatched Joint Director Ghanshyam Upadhyay to coordinate with the state officials, and upon his return, the SIT was constituted, they said.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); The agency re-registered the six cases referred to it by the state government. The Special Crime Branch, Kolkata will probe the cases, they said. Violence broke out in the northeastern state after a 'Tribal Solidarity March' was organised in the hill districts on May 3 to protest against the Meitei community's demand for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status. ALSO READ | Naga MLAs ask Centre to exclude their regions in event of any separate administration WATCH | So far, nearly 100 people have lost their lives, and over 300 have been injured ever since the ethnic violence broke out over a month ago. The clashes were preceded by tension over the eviction of Kuki villagers from reserve forest land, which had led to a series of smaller agitations. Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley. Tribals -- Nagas and Kukis -- constitute another 40 per cent of the population and reside in the hill districts. Around 10,000 Army and Assam Rifles personnel have been deployed in the state to maintain peace.
By PTI

NOIDA: A 22-year-old law student in Uttar Pradesh has alleged that he was assaulted by police in Greater Noida and falsely implicated in an extortion case in which he was jailed last year.

The second-year BA LLB student, who belongs to the Dalit community, also alleged he was forced to drink urine by policemen and that they thrashed him inside Greater Noida's Beta 2 police station.

The claims are being investigated, police said.

When approached for a response, Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (Greater Noida) Ashok Kumar, who is probing the matter, told PTI that it is "sub-judice and I cannot comment on it".

The student claimed that he had tipped off the Gautam Buddh Nagar Police about a sex racket being run from a spa and massage centre. Its owner, a woman, was arrested and sent to jail from the Sector 49 police station in Noida in June 2021, he said.

"The woman and her husband, who was my friend, implicated me in a false case of extortion. I was picked up by police on November 18 last year from outside the SNG Plaza in Greater Noida and brutally assaulted by them at the Beta 2 police station," the student, who hails from the state's Aligarh district, alleged.

ALSO READ | Temple in TN's Villupuram sealed following opposition to entry of Dalits

"I was held in a room on the upper deck of the building where I was thrashed to the extent that I started bleeding. I urged them that I had undergone a fistula operation... Later, when I pleaded for water to drink, I was given urine in a pot from the bathroom and forced to drink it. I resisted and pushed the pot away, with some of the urine spilling on me," he told PTI requesting anonymity.

He alleged that he was picked up by police around 1.30 pm but officially showed up in custody after 5 pm.

The student said he got bail after spending less than a fortnight in jail, but has since then been trying to get the "false FIR" against him quashed.

He claimed that he has met several officers with his request but his case is being delayed.

"I want the matter to be probed impartially. If I have done anything wrong, then charge me. I have proof and evidence to prove my case. I will seek justice," the law student said, alleging police inaction.

A couple of short video clips of the student purportedly being assaulted surfaced on social media this week.

Responding to them on Twitter, the Gautam Buddh Nagar Police Commissionerate tweeted: "The incident is one year old. The authenticity of the videos is being ascertained and other angles related to the incident are being probed by the additional deputy commissioner of police (Greater Noida)."

NOIDA: A 22-year-old law student in Uttar Pradesh has alleged that he was assaulted by police in Greater Noida and falsely implicated in an extortion case in which he was jailed last year. The second-year BA LLB student, who belongs to the Dalit community, also alleged he was forced to drink urine by policemen and that they thrashed him inside Greater Noida's Beta 2 police station. The claims are being investigated, police said.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); When approached for a response, Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (Greater Noida) Ashok Kumar, who is probing the matter, told PTI that it is "sub-judice and I cannot comment on it". The student claimed that he had tipped off the Gautam Buddh Nagar Police about a sex racket being run from a spa and massage centre. Its owner, a woman, was arrested and sent to jail from the Sector 49 police station in Noida in June 2021, he said. "The woman and her husband, who was my friend, implicated me in a false case of extortion. I was picked up by police on November 18 last year from outside the SNG Plaza in Greater Noida and brutally assaulted by them at the Beta 2 police station," the student, who hails from the state's Aligarh district, alleged. ALSO READ | Temple in TN's Villupuram sealed following opposition to entry of Dalits "I was held in a room on the upper deck of the building where I was thrashed to the extent that I started bleeding. I urged them that I had undergone a fistula operation... Later, when I pleaded for water to drink, I was given urine in a pot from the bathroom and forced to drink it. I resisted and pushed the pot away, with some of the urine spilling on me," he told PTI requesting anonymity. He alleged that he was picked up by police around 1.30 pm but officially showed up in custody after 5 pm. The student said he got bail after spending less than a fortnight in jail, but has since then been trying to get the "false FIR" against him quashed. He claimed that he has met several officers with his request but his case is being delayed. "I want the matter to be probed impartially. If I have done anything wrong, then charge me. I have proof and evidence to prove my case. I will seek justice," the law student said, alleging police inaction. A couple of short video clips of the student purportedly being assaulted surfaced on social media this week. Responding to them on Twitter, the Gautam Buddh Nagar Police Commissionerate tweeted: "The incident is one year old. The authenticity of the videos is being ascertained and other angles related to the incident are being probed by the additional deputy commissioner of police (Greater Noida)."
Dilip Singh Kshatriya By

Express News Service

AHMEDABAD: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has petitioned the Gujarat High Court to review its March decision, which allowed a Gujarat University appeal and nullified and overturned a Central Information Commission (CIC) directive ordering the university to "search for information" regarding Prime Minister Narendra Modi's degrees.

On Friday, the complaint was admitted by the court of Justice Biren Vaishnav and issued a rule to the respondents, Gujarat University, the Union of India, the Chief Information Commissioner, and Professor M Sridhar Acharyulu, who was the CIC commissioner at the time the order was made.

While the court had noted that PM Modi's degree is available on the university's website in response to arguments made to that effect by Solicitor General of India Tushar Mehta, attorney for the university, "upon a scan of the said website.. is found that the said 'degree' is not available, but a document referred to as OR (Office Register) is displayed," according to the review petition filed by Kejriwal.

ALSO READ |AAP, BJP spar after Kejriwal gets emotional over Sisodia

The petition notes that even the aforementioned OR "appears to be cryptic and without any seal or signatures of the authority," making it "impossible" to verify it. In his appeal, Kejriwal contends that the display of "degree" on the university's official website is one of the key and preliminary grounds for demanding a review of the court's earlier decision. Because the degree is not available on the website, the judgment "suffers from the error apparent on the face of the record and permitting them would lead to failure of justice," it has been stated.

Arvind Kejriwals Attorney Aum Kotwal told TNIE, "The University Lawyer had only orally submitted on the day of the hearing, that too for the first time, that the degree is available on the website." We argued that there was no way for us to verify the oral submission and therefore OR cannot be deemed a degree as the University stated.

A review petition was submitted in the High Court today, and the court admitted our petition and set a hearing date for June 30, Kotwal said

In his review plea, Kejriwal also contested the Rs 25,000 fine imposed by the court for continuing to pursue the issue of PM Modi's degree, claiming that the proceedings were begun suomoto by the then CIC and professor M Sridhar, implying that he did not pursue the subject.

AHMEDABAD: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has petitioned the Gujarat High Court to review its March decision, which allowed a Gujarat University appeal and nullified and overturned a Central Information Commission (CIC) directive ordering the university to "search for information" regarding Prime Minister Narendra Modi's degrees. On Friday, the complaint was admitted by the court of Justice Biren Vaishnav and issued a rule to the respondents, Gujarat University, the Union of India, the Chief Information Commissioner, and Professor M Sridhar Acharyulu, who was the CIC commissioner at the time the order was made. While the court had noted that PM Modi's degree is available on the university's website in response to arguments made to that effect by Solicitor General of India Tushar Mehta, attorney for the university, "upon a scan of the said website.. is found that the said 'degree' is not available, but a document referred to as OR (Office Register) is displayed," according to the review petition filed by Kejriwal.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); ALSO READ |AAP, BJP spar after Kejriwal gets emotional over Sisodia The petition notes that even the aforementioned OR "appears to be cryptic and without any seal or signatures of the authority," making it "impossible" to verify it. In his appeal, Kejriwal contends that the display of "degree" on the university's official website is one of the key and preliminary grounds for demanding a review of the court's earlier decision. Because the degree is not available on the website, the judgment "suffers from the error apparent on the face of the record and permitting them would lead to failure of justice," it has been stated. Arvind Kejriwals Attorney Aum Kotwal told TNIE, "The University Lawyer had only orally submitted on the day of the hearing, that too for the first time, that the degree is available on the website." We argued that there was no way for us to verify the oral submission and therefore OR cannot be deemed a degree as the University stated. A review petition was submitted in the High Court today, and the court admitted our petition and set a hearing date for June 30, Kotwal said In his review plea, Kejriwal also contested the Rs 25,000 fine imposed by the court for continuing to pursue the issue of PM Modi's degree, claiming that the proceedings were begun suomoto by the then CIC and professor M Sridhar, implying that he did not pursue the subject.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Scores of students, civil rights activists and media personalities gathered here on Friday to express solidarity with former JNU student leader Umar Khalid after he completed 1,000 days of incarceration in the 2020 northeast Delhi riots case.

The activists gathered at the Press Club to talk about 'Democracy, Dissent and Censorship', saying Khalid's 1,000 days of imprisonment equals "1,000 days of resistance."

The event was earlier scheduled to be held at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, but the activists claimed police forced the venue managers to cancel their booking.

Khalid was arrested by Delhi Police in 2020 and charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and provisions of the Indian Penal Code. Police claimed he was the mastermind of the northeast Delhi riots which had left 53 people dead and over 700 injured.

Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader and Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Jha said, "This is 1,000 days of imprisonment as well as 1,000 days of resistance. Umar Khalid will be very happy to know that in this scorching heat, hundreds of people gathered to defend democracy."

"This solidarity is not just for Umar, but for every political prisoner. This is a fight of memory. A dominant memory is mainstream today, while the memories of marginalised communities are ignored," he said.

Senior journalist Ravish Kumar said the road to the door of justice has been stretched too far for those like Khalid. "Remember 1,000 days that have passed. Remember that these are not just 1,000 days since Khalid's incarceration, but also 1,000 days of shame for the Indian judicial system," he said.

Present at the event was also Khalid's father SQR Ilyas who said the confines of the prison walls has not dampened the spirit of his son. "Has 1,000 days of jail dented Umar's confidence, has it dampened the spirits of his friends? Absolutely not. When I see all those who have been jailed during their court hearings, I see confidence in their faces, they know that they are in jail for a cause," he said.

He said his son is fighting for the country and democracy.

Ilyas demanded the release of all 'political prisoners', including his son, Sharjeel Imam, Khalid Saifi, Shifa Ur Rehman and others.

On the row over the event's venue, Supreme Court advocate Shahrukh Alam said the venue was cancelled following an intervention by the Delhi Police.

"We were told Delhi Police gave a notice to the management of the earlier venue that the booking should be cancelled. They did not quote any sections under which the order was made," she claimed.

Khalid, who completed his PhD on tribals in Jharkhand from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), was arrested on September 14, 2020.

Ilyas said Khalid was not in Delhi when the riots took place, but the police refused to accept it as "evidence of his innocence."

Meanwhile, RJD MP Manoj Jha also slammed the BJP-led Centre over the sedition law.

"Now the Law Commission is recommending that more stringent punishment should be given under the sedition law... That would mean those who cannot be targeted by agencies like the CBI and ED will be booked under the UAPA to crush dissent," he said.

Opposition parties, including the RJD, have been alleging that the Union government is misusing probe agencies like the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against their leaders.

Prabhat Patnaik, Professor Emeritus, JNU said the continued detention of Khalid is not just a personal tragedy, but a "social waste" of a talent.

"Even in the colonial days, Gandhi was never in jail for more than two years. Nehru was longest in jail at one go for 1,041 days... Umar has now been in jail for 1,000 days," he said.

"This is against democracy, anyone can be put in jail on the flimsiest of pretexts," he added.

Journalist Ravish Kumar, author Arundhati Roy, activist Shabnam Hashmi, former Planning Commission member Sayeda Hamid were among those present at the solidarity event.

Khalid had recently got eight days bail to attend his sister's wedding.

NEW DELHI: Scores of students, civil rights activists and media personalities gathered here on Friday to express solidarity with former JNU student leader Umar Khalid after he completed 1,000 days of incarceration in the 2020 northeast Delhi riots case. The activists gathered at the Press Club to talk about 'Democracy, Dissent and Censorship', saying Khalid's 1,000 days of imprisonment equals "1,000 days of resistance." The event was earlier scheduled to be held at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, but the activists claimed police forced the venue managers to cancel their booking.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Khalid was arrested by Delhi Police in 2020 and charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and provisions of the Indian Penal Code. Police claimed he was the mastermind of the northeast Delhi riots which had left 53 people dead and over 700 injured. Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader and Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Jha said, "This is 1,000 days of imprisonment as well as 1,000 days of resistance. Umar Khalid will be very happy to know that in this scorching heat, hundreds of people gathered to defend democracy." "This solidarity is not just for Umar, but for every political prisoner. This is a fight of memory. A dominant memory is mainstream today, while the memories of marginalised communities are ignored," he said. Senior journalist Ravish Kumar said the road to the door of justice has been stretched too far for those like Khalid. "Remember 1,000 days that have passed. Remember that these are not just 1,000 days since Khalid's incarceration, but also 1,000 days of shame for the Indian judicial system," he said. Present at the event was also Khalid's father SQR Ilyas who said the confines of the prison walls has not dampened the spirit of his son. "Has 1,000 days of jail dented Umar's confidence, has it dampened the spirits of his friends? Absolutely not. When I see all those who have been jailed during their court hearings, I see confidence in their faces, they know that they are in jail for a cause," he said. He said his son is fighting for the country and democracy. Ilyas demanded the release of all 'political prisoners', including his son, Sharjeel Imam, Khalid Saifi, Shifa Ur Rehman and others. On the row over the event's venue, Supreme Court advocate Shahrukh Alam said the venue was cancelled following an intervention by the Delhi Police. "We were told Delhi Police gave a notice to the management of the earlier venue that the booking should be cancelled. They did not quote any sections under which the order was made," she claimed. Khalid, who completed his PhD on tribals in Jharkhand from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), was arrested on September 14, 2020. Ilyas said Khalid was not in Delhi when the riots took place, but the police refused to accept it as "evidence of his innocence." Meanwhile, RJD MP Manoj Jha also slammed the BJP-led Centre over the sedition law. "Now the Law Commission is recommending that more stringent punishment should be given under the sedition law... That would mean those who cannot be targeted by agencies like the CBI and ED will be booked under the UAPA to crush dissent," he said. Opposition parties, including the RJD, have been alleging that the Union government is misusing probe agencies like the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against their leaders. Prabhat Patnaik, Professor Emeritus, JNU said the continued detention of Khalid is not just a personal tragedy, but a "social waste" of a talent. "Even in the colonial days, Gandhi was never in jail for more than two years. Nehru was longest in jail at one go for 1,041 days... Umar has now been in jail for 1,000 days," he said. "This is against democracy, anyone can be put in jail on the flimsiest of pretexts," he added. Journalist Ravish Kumar, author Arundhati Roy, activist Shabnam Hashmi, former Planning Commission member Sayeda Hamid were among those present at the solidarity event. Khalid had recently got eight days bail to attend his sister's wedding.
By PTI

AHMEDABAD: It was once normal for girls to marry at a young age and deliver a child before they turned 17, a judge of the Gujarat High Court has remarked while hearing a minor rape survivor's plea for permission to terminate her pregnancy.

While indicating that he might not allow the petition if both the girl and foetus were healthy, Justice Samir Dave of the high court also referred to the Manusmriti during the hearing on Wednesday.

The rape survivor is 16 years and 11 months old and carrying a seven-month-old foetus.

Her father moved the HC seeking permission for abortion as the pregnancy had crossed the 24-week threshold up to which abortion can be performed without a court's leave.

On Wednesday, his lawyer sought an early hearing, saying the family was concerned because of the girl's age.

Justice Dave said there was anxiety because "we are living in the 21st century".

"Ask your mother or great-grandmother. Fourteen-fifteen was the maximum age (for marriage), and girls used to give birth to their first child before turning 17. And girls mature before boys... Though you may not read, but you should read Manusmriti once," he added.

As the expected date of delivery is August 16, he consulted expert doctors in his chamber, the judge informed the lawyer.

"The court can consider (allowing abortion) if any serious ailments are found in the foetus or the girl. But if both are normal, it will be very difficult for the court to pass such an order," the judge said.

In the end, the court directed the Medical Superintendent of Rajkot Civil Hospital to get the girl examined by a panel of doctors to find out if the medical termination of pregnancy was advisable.

The doctors should also carry out an ossification test on the girl and a psychiatrist should ascertain her mental condition, Justice Dave said, asking the hospital to submit reports by June 15, the next date of hearing.

During the hearing, the judge also advised the girl's lawyer to start looking for options in case the medical opinion went against the termination of the pregnancy.

"I will not give permission if both are found healthy. The weight of the foetus is also good... What will you do if the girl gives birth and the child lives? Who will take care of that child? I will also inquire if there are government schemes for such children.

You should also check if someone can adopt that child," said the judge.

AHMEDABAD: It was once normal for girls to marry at a young age and deliver a child before they turned 17, a judge of the Gujarat High Court has remarked while hearing a minor rape survivor's plea for permission to terminate her pregnancy. While indicating that he might not allow the petition if both the girl and foetus were healthy, Justice Samir Dave of the high court also referred to the Manusmriti during the hearing on Wednesday. The rape survivor is 16 years and 11 months old and carrying a seven-month-old foetus.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Her father moved the HC seeking permission for abortion as the pregnancy had crossed the 24-week threshold up to which abortion can be performed without a court's leave. On Wednesday, his lawyer sought an early hearing, saying the family was concerned because of the girl's age. Justice Dave said there was anxiety because "we are living in the 21st century". "Ask your mother or great-grandmother. Fourteen-fifteen was the maximum age (for marriage), and girls used to give birth to their first child before turning 17. And girls mature before boys... Though you may not read, but you should read Manusmriti once," he added. As the expected date of delivery is August 16, he consulted expert doctors in his chamber, the judge informed the lawyer. "The court can consider (allowing abortion) if any serious ailments are found in the foetus or the girl. But if both are normal, it will be very difficult for the court to pass such an order," the judge said. In the end, the court directed the Medical Superintendent of Rajkot Civil Hospital to get the girl examined by a panel of doctors to find out if the medical termination of pregnancy was advisable. The doctors should also carry out an ossification test on the girl and a psychiatrist should ascertain her mental condition, Justice Dave said, asking the hospital to submit reports by June 15, the next date of hearing. During the hearing, the judge also advised the girl's lawyer to start looking for options in case the medical opinion went against the termination of the pregnancy. "I will not give permission if both are found healthy. The weight of the foetus is also good... What will you do if the girl gives birth and the child lives? Who will take care of that child? I will also inquire if there are government schemes for such children. You should also check if someone can adopt that child," said the judge.
Yeshi Seli By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: India on Thursday sharply rebuked Canada for letting Khalistani separatists use its space, saying it is not good for them or for bilateral relations.

Responding to questions on a tableau Khalistani activists took out on Wednesday in Brampton glorifying the assassination of the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said, It is not just one incident as the larger underlying issue is that they give space to those who advocate violence. Besides vote bank politics why would anybody do this? Its is neither good for Canada nor its relationship with India, Jaishankar said.

He also was appalled at Canadas National Security Advisor complaining that India interferes in Canadas domestic affairs. This comment reminds me of the phrase in Hindi, Ulta Chor Kotwal ko Dantey (accused reprimanding the victim), he quipped.

Regarding the fate of about 700 Indian students who face possible deportation for allegedly having fake documents, the minister said the students should not be sent back if they arent at fault. For some time now there is this case of Indian students who the Canadian authorities have alleged did not study in the colleges that they had claimed to have graduated from."

"Our foreign ministry and High Commission and Consulates in Canada have taken up their case. The people who mislead them are culpable and should be acted against. The students studied in good faith and its unfair to punish them, Jaishankar told this paper.

For his part, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau assured the Indian students that his government will evaluate each case of the protesting students. We are deeply aware of the cases of international students facing removal orders over fraudulent college acceptance letters. To be clear, our focus is on identifying the culprits, not penalising the victims, said Trudeau.

NEW DELHI: India on Thursday sharply rebuked Canada for letting Khalistani separatists use its space, saying it is not good for them or for bilateral relations. Responding to questions on a tableau Khalistani activists took out on Wednesday in Brampton glorifying the assassination of the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said, It is not just one incident as the larger underlying issue is that they give space to those who advocate violence. Besides vote bank politics why would anybody do this? Its is neither good for Canada nor its relationship with India, Jaishankar said. He also was appalled at Canadas National Security Advisor complaining that India interferes in Canadas domestic affairs. This comment reminds me of the phrase in Hindi, Ulta Chor Kotwal ko Dantey (accused reprimanding the victim), he quipped.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Regarding the fate of about 700 Indian students who face possible deportation for allegedly having fake documents, the minister said the students should not be sent back if they arent at fault. For some time now there is this case of Indian students who the Canadian authorities have alleged did not study in the colleges that they had claimed to have graduated from." "Our foreign ministry and High Commission and Consulates in Canada have taken up their case. The people who mislead them are culpable and should be acted against. The students studied in good faith and its unfair to punish them, Jaishankar told this paper. For his part, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau assured the Indian students that his government will evaluate each case of the protesting students. We are deeply aware of the cases of international students facing removal orders over fraudulent college acceptance letters. To be clear, our focus is on identifying the culprits, not penalising the victims, said Trudeau.
Ericsson and Thailands Digital Economy Promotion Agency (DEPA) announced ambitious plans to develop Thailands own version of Silicon Valley.

In a statement, Ericsson detailed the project is called Thailand Digital Valley and will be located 50 miles east of Bangkok, with ambitions to become Southeast Asias new digital hub and digital transformation in the region.

Around 20,000 new jobs are expected to be created from the project and generate THB5 billion (US$144 million) worth of foreign investment annually.

Ericsson and Depa recently signed a memorandum of understanding to partner up for projects to drive 5G-based digital transformation in Thailand. The two will work to establish an innovation lab in Thailand Digital Valley that will serve as a 5G testbed and service centre for trials of new wireless technologies, spectrum sharing and applications.

As a 5G leader, who has been in Thailand for 117 years, we are committed to leveraging our leading, trusted solutions and global ecosystem of partners to drive the digital transformation of the country. We look forward to further working with depa, Thai operators, enterprises and start-ups to unlock the potential of 5G, through the co-creation of 5G use cases, said Dr Jesada Sivaraks, Head of Government and Industry Relations, Ericsson Thailand.

Thailand Digital Valley will play a significant role in uplifting the digital ecosystem of Thailand and prompt the country to become Southeast Asias digital hub. It will be the key driving force for the digital industry, investment atmosphere and global trade and collaboration, said Dr Nuttapon Nimmanphatcharin, DEPA President & CEO.
Shahid Faridi By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: India and Russia are locked in a tussle for the control of a joint venture company that has won an approximately Rs 30,000-crore contract to build 120 new Vande Bharat trains and maintain them for the next 35 years.

Metrowagonmash, which is part of Transmashholding, Russias largest transport engineering company specialising in developing, designing and manufacturing of rolling stock for railways, had in partnership with Indian public sector undertaking Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd (RVNL) successfully bid for manufacturing 120 Vande Bharat trains and their maintenance for the next 35 years.

Metrowagonmash owns 80% and RVNL 20% of the company that won the contract. The RVNL now wants a larger share of 69%, leaving 26% for Metrowagonmash and 5% for a third partner, Locomotive Electronic Systems (LES). In a letter dated April 25, 2023 to Metrowagonmash, the RVNL said it has incorporated a fully owned private company by the name of Kinet Railway Solutions Ltd (KRSL).

This company will act as the SPV (special purpose vehicle) that will sign the Manufacturing-cum-Maintenance Agreement (MCMA) with the Ministry of Railways and subsequently implement the project. The RVNL said in the letter that being a government company it is better placed to handle issues like getting clearances and engaging local manpower.

It further said that given the present geo-political situation and the fact that the RVNL is a trustworthy public sector unit having robust standing with public financial institutions, it will be easier for the SPV to mobilise funding from the domestic market at the most competitive rates.

The PSU said it will be a win-win situation for all partners if RVNL plays the primary role in this initiative RVNL asked Metrowagonmash to provide its consent for its proposed shareholding of 69% for RVNL, 26% for Metrowagonmash and 5% for LES. But Metrowagonmash protested and took up the matter with the Russian government.

The trade representative of the Russian Federation then sent a Note Verbale to the government of India on May 8 asking it to direct RVNL to stick to the original contract. The tussle between the two companies is continuing and the matter is now likely to be settled at the top level of the two governments.

Vande Bharat deal

At present, RVNL has 20% stake in the JV. It wants it hiked to 69% citing the present geo-political situation. The JV bagged a Rs 30,000-crore contract to manufacture and maintain Vande Bharat trains

NEW DELHI: India and Russia are locked in a tussle for the control of a joint venture company that has won an approximately Rs 30,000-crore contract to build 120 new Vande Bharat trains and maintain them for the next 35 years. Metrowagonmash, which is part of Transmashholding, Russias largest transport engineering company specialising in developing, designing and manufacturing of rolling stock for railways, had in partnership with Indian public sector undertaking Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd (RVNL) successfully bid for manufacturing 120 Vande Bharat trains and their maintenance for the next 35 years. Metrowagonmash owns 80% and RVNL 20% of the company that won the contract. The RVNL now wants a larger share of 69%, leaving 26% for Metrowagonmash and 5% for a third partner, Locomotive Electronic Systems (LES). In a letter dated April 25, 2023 to Metrowagonmash, the RVNL said it has incorporated a fully owned private company by the name of Kinet Railway Solutions Ltd (KRSL).googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); This company will act as the SPV (special purpose vehicle) that will sign the Manufacturing-cum-Maintenance Agreement (MCMA) with the Ministry of Railways and subsequently implement the project. The RVNL said in the letter that being a government company it is better placed to handle issues like getting clearances and engaging local manpower. It further said that given the present geo-political situation and the fact that the RVNL is a trustworthy public sector unit having robust standing with public financial institutions, it will be easier for the SPV to mobilise funding from the domestic market at the most competitive rates. The PSU said it will be a win-win situation for all partners if RVNL plays the primary role in this initiative RVNL asked Metrowagonmash to provide its consent for its proposed shareholding of 69% for RVNL, 26% for Metrowagonmash and 5% for LES. But Metrowagonmash protested and took up the matter with the Russian government. The trade representative of the Russian Federation then sent a Note Verbale to the government of India on May 8 asking it to direct RVNL to stick to the original contract. The tussle between the two companies is continuing and the matter is now likely to be settled at the top level of the two governments. Vande Bharat deal At present, RVNL has 20% stake in the JV. It wants it hiked to 69% citing the present geo-political situation. The JV bagged a Rs 30,000-crore contract to manufacture and maintain Vande Bharat trains
By PTI

AURANGABAD: A teenage boy's alleged act of putting social media status message glorifying Mughal emperor Aurangzeb has triggered tension in Ashti town of Maharashtra's Beed district, with some Hindutva organisations giving a "bandh" call, police said on Friday.

Commercial establishments in the market area of Ashti, located around 80 km from Beed district headquarters, are shut in response to the 'bandh' call, they said.

This comes against the backdrop of some youths displaying photos of 17th century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in a procession in Ahmednagar and tension in Kolhapur city on Wednesday over the alleged use of 18th century Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan's image along with an objectionable audio message as social media "status" by some locals.

Talking to PTI, Beed Superintendent of Police (SP) Nandkumar Thakur said, "A 14-year-old boy kept a status message in praise of Aurangzeb on a social media platform on Thursday. A complaint was received in this connection, based on which an offence was registered at Ashti police station."

After that, some local pro-Hindutva organisations gave a 'bandh' call, he said.

"The boy is not in Ashti at present. He is in Mumbai on a vacation. He will be asked to return and once he comes back, he will be presented in a juvenile court after investigation," Thakur said.

No untoward incident has been reported so far during the 'bandh', he said.

Tension gripped Kolhapur city in western Maharashtra on Tuesday after two men allegedly put Tipu Sultan's image along with an offensive audio message as their social media status.

The next day, police had to disperse hundreds of protesters after they hurled stones during a demonstration against the alleged use of Tipu Sultan's image. Police said they have arrested at least 36 people and registered cases in connection with the Kolhapur violence.

AURANGABAD: A teenage boy's alleged act of putting social media status message glorifying Mughal emperor Aurangzeb has triggered tension in Ashti town of Maharashtra's Beed district, with some Hindutva organisations giving a "bandh" call, police said on Friday. Commercial establishments in the market area of Ashti, located around 80 km from Beed district headquarters, are shut in response to the 'bandh' call, they said. This comes against the backdrop of some youths displaying photos of 17th century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in a procession in Ahmednagar and tension in Kolhapur city on Wednesday over the alleged use of 18th century Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan's image along with an objectionable audio message as social media "status" by some locals.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Talking to PTI, Beed Superintendent of Police (SP) Nandkumar Thakur said, "A 14-year-old boy kept a status message in praise of Aurangzeb on a social media platform on Thursday. A complaint was received in this connection, based on which an offence was registered at Ashti police station." After that, some local pro-Hindutva organisations gave a 'bandh' call, he said. "The boy is not in Ashti at present. He is in Mumbai on a vacation. He will be asked to return and once he comes back, he will be presented in a juvenile court after investigation," Thakur said. No untoward incident has been reported so far during the 'bandh', he said. Tension gripped Kolhapur city in western Maharashtra on Tuesday after two men allegedly put Tipu Sultan's image along with an offensive audio message as their social media status. The next day, police had to disperse hundreds of protesters after they hurled stones during a demonstration against the alleged use of Tipu Sultan's image. Police said they have arrested at least 36 people and registered cases in connection with the Kolhapur violence.
Jitendra Choubey and Bosky Khanna By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI/BENGALURU: The southwest monsoon hit the Kerala coast on Thursday, a week after the usual onset date of June 1. It is likely to enter south interior Karnataka by June 10 or 11. A slight delay was expected as India Meteorological Department (IMD) had forecast that the monsoon will hit Kerala on June 4. However, the formation of a very severe cyclonic storm, Biparjoy, in the Arabian Sea delayed the onset of monsoon.

The southwest monsoon has advanced into remaining parts of south Arabian Sea and some parts of central Arabian Sea, entire Lakshadweep area, most parts of Kerala, most parts of south Tamil Nadu, remaining parts of Comorin area, Gulf of Mannar and some more parts of southwest, central and northeast Bay of Bengal on Thursday, according to a statement from India Meteorological Department.

While the IMD forecast a normal monsoon, it cautioned above normal showers for June in south interior Karnataka, including Bengaluru, Chikkaballapura, Tumakuru, Chamarajanagar, Kolar and its surrounding areas.

Rainfall forecast for Karnataka from June to September is 83 cm. Bengaluru is likely to receive 11 cm of rainfall in June. For the entire season, Bengaluru is likely to receive 60 cm of rainfall. There will be normal rainfall over most parts of Karnataka during this monsoon season, according to officials.

The southwest monsoon is critical for agriculture, as over 52% of the country is rain-dependent. In view of the very severe cyclonic storm, fishermen have been warned not to venture into the sea till June 14.

The weather agency also warned of heat wave conditions over Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in the next 2-4 days.

NEW DELHI/BENGALURU: The southwest monsoon hit the Kerala coast on Thursday, a week after the usual onset date of June 1. It is likely to enter south interior Karnataka by June 10 or 11. A slight delay was expected as India Meteorological Department (IMD) had forecast that the monsoon will hit Kerala on June 4. However, the formation of a very severe cyclonic storm, Biparjoy, in the Arabian Sea delayed the onset of monsoon. The southwest monsoon has advanced into remaining parts of south Arabian Sea and some parts of central Arabian Sea, entire Lakshadweep area, most parts of Kerala, most parts of south Tamil Nadu, remaining parts of Comorin area, Gulf of Mannar and some more parts of southwest, central and northeast Bay of Bengal on Thursday, according to a statement from India Meteorological Department. While the IMD forecast a normal monsoon, it cautioned above normal showers for June in south interior Karnataka, including Bengaluru, Chikkaballapura, Tumakuru, Chamarajanagar, Kolar and its surrounding areas. googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Rainfall forecast for Karnataka from June to September is 83 cm. Bengaluru is likely to receive 11 cm of rainfall in June. For the entire season, Bengaluru is likely to receive 60 cm of rainfall. There will be normal rainfall over most parts of Karnataka during this monsoon season, according to officials. The southwest monsoon is critical for agriculture, as over 52% of the country is rain-dependent. In view of the very severe cyclonic storm, fishermen have been warned not to venture into the sea till June 14. The weather agency also warned of heat wave conditions over Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in the next 2-4 days.
Dilip Singh Kshatriya By

Express News Service

AHMEDABAD: Two booking clerks, Adevabhai Solanki, and Mansukhbhai Topiya, were granted regular bail by the Gujarat high court in relation to the October 30, 2022, Morbi suspension bridge collapse disaster, which resulted in the deaths of 135 people.

Justice Samir Dave ordered the bail. Three security guards who were posted at the bridge on the disaster day had previously been granted bail by the HC. The Ticket Booking clerk defended their innocence in the matter.

The court questioned the attorneys during the hearing, "Shall I observe that section 304A of the IPC is applicable in this case?" The judge declared after some deliberation that "in this court's opinion, section 304 of the IPC is not applicable." In response, the public Prosecutor Mitesh Amin claimed that the trial court should have the final say over the accusations in the case rather than the high court making such an observation.

Earlier, on June 7, the family of the victims had already protested the bail requests. Advocate Rahul Sharma, who is representing the victims of the bridge collapse told Justice Samir Dave that the clerks "were black marketing these tickets, which resulted in the bridge being overloaded."

However, they acknowledged that there was no reference to black-marketing in the chargesheet during the hearing on Friday. It was argued that the accused's involvement went well beyond merely issuing an excessive number of tickets which led to congestion on the bridge.

According to the charge sheet, around 3,165 tickets were sold on the day of the incident. The two ticket clerks Madevbhai Solanki and Mansukhbhai Topiya failed to stop issuing tickets despite being aware that there was an increase in traffic on the bridge, displaying egregious negligence on their part.

Alpesh Gohil, Dilip Gohil, and Mukesh Chauhan, security guards for Oreva Group's Ajanta Manufacturing Pvt Ltd, which managed the bridge, were granted bail by the HC last month.

The case's ten accused, including Oreva Group MD Jaysukh Patel, are charged under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

AHMEDABAD: Two booking clerks, Adevabhai Solanki, and Mansukhbhai Topiya, were granted regular bail by the Gujarat high court in relation to the October 30, 2022, Morbi suspension bridge collapse disaster, which resulted in the deaths of 135 people. Justice Samir Dave ordered the bail. Three security guards who were posted at the bridge on the disaster day had previously been granted bail by the HC. The Ticket Booking clerk defended their innocence in the matter. The court questioned the attorneys during the hearing, "Shall I observe that section 304A of the IPC is applicable in this case?" The judge declared after some deliberation that "in this court's opinion, section 304 of the IPC is not applicable." In response, the public Prosecutor Mitesh Amin claimed that the trial court should have the final say over the accusations in the case rather than the high court making such an observation.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Earlier, on June 7, the family of the victims had already protested the bail requests. Advocate Rahul Sharma, who is representing the victims of the bridge collapse told Justice Samir Dave that the clerks "were black marketing these tickets, which resulted in the bridge being overloaded." However, they acknowledged that there was no reference to black-marketing in the chargesheet during the hearing on Friday. It was argued that the accused's involvement went well beyond merely issuing an excessive number of tickets which led to congestion on the bridge. According to the charge sheet, around 3,165 tickets were sold on the day of the incident. The two ticket clerks Madevbhai Solanki and Mansukhbhai Topiya failed to stop issuing tickets despite being aware that there was an increase in traffic on the bridge, displaying egregious negligence on their part. Alpesh Gohil, Dilip Gohil, and Mukesh Chauhan, security guards for Oreva Group's Ajanta Manufacturing Pvt Ltd, which managed the bridge, were granted bail by the HC last month. The case's ten accused, including Oreva Group MD Jaysukh Patel, are charged under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
By PTI

MUMBAI: In a recent development in the alleged murder of a woman in Thane district, the police on Friday said the man charged with her killing had in fact married the victim, and they were not live-in partners as believed earlier, and he has claimed she committed suicide.

Manoj Sane (56), arrested for allegedly murdering his `live-in partner' Saraswati Vaidya, was in fact married to her but the couple had concealed this fact, the police said, two days after the 36-year-old woman's body parts were found inside the flat where they resided in the Mira Road area of Mumbai.

Sane, who worked at a ration shop, has now claimed Vaidya committed suicide by drinking poison and he only tried to dispose of her body by chopping it up, officials said.

The accused, arrested on Thursday, also allegedly told the interrogators he was HIV-positive and never had any physical relationship with Vaidya.

"The couple did not register their marriage, but they had married by performing rituals in a temple," said Deputy Commissioner of Police Jayant Bajbale of Mira-Bhayandar, Vasai Virar commissionerate, citing the statements given by three sisters of the deceased.

Vaidya had informed her sisters about the marriage, but since there was a considerable age gap between them, the couple did not make their wedding public, he said.

The remains of the woman will be handed over to her sisters for last rites as per their wish once DNA testing and other formalities are over, the official added.

The motive behind the crime was still not clear.

ALSO READ | Mumbai man chops live-in partners body in repeat of Shraddha case

An FIR has been registered against Sane under Indian Penal Code sections 302 (murder) and 201 (destruction of evidence) at the Naya Nagar police station.

Vaidya's mother had died when the sisters were very young while their father had abandoned them, DCP Bajbale said.

"The victim studied up to Class 10 at an `ashram' school (school for orphans) in Ahmednagar district of western Maharashtra and came to Mumbai to reside with her relatives after turning 18," he said.

"After the couple met, Sane had arranged a job as a salesperson for her," he added.

Sane, who is in police custody till June 16, told interrogators Vaidya died on the morning of June 3 after consuming poison with foam coming out of her mouth, and fearing he would be held responsible for her death, he decided to dispose of the body.

He also claimed after disposing of the body pieces he had planned to commit suicide, police officials said.

Police were yet to verify these claims, they said, adding it was possible that the accused was trying to mislead the investigators.

On Wednesday (June 7), the police found Vaidya's body parts, some cooked in a pressure cooker and even roasted, inside the rented flat of the couple who were staying there for the last three years.

Sane kept the woman's chopped body parts in three buckets in their flat and tried to suppress the stench by spraying room freshener, his neighbours said on Thursday.

The crime came to light after neighbours alerted the police about a foul smell coming out of the flat.

It is suspected Vaidya died on June 4, but the case came to light on June 7.

Neighbours also told the police Sane had been feeding stray dogs for the past few days, something he had never done before.

Amid Sane's interrogation, the police traced Vaidya's family members and her three sisters recorded their statements with the police on Friday.

The shocking details that emerged in the crime evoked the memories of the last year's Shraddha Walkar case. Walkar, a call centre employee, was strangled to death allegedly by her live-in partner Aaftab Poonawala on May 18 last year.

The accused sawed her body into several pieces, which he kept in a refrigerator for almost three weeks at his residence in south Delhi's Mehrauli.

MUMBAI: In a recent development in the alleged murder of a woman in Thane district, the police on Friday said the man charged with her killing had in fact married the victim, and they were not live-in partners as believed earlier, and he has claimed she committed suicide. Manoj Sane (56), arrested for allegedly murdering his `live-in partner' Saraswati Vaidya, was in fact married to her but the couple had concealed this fact, the police said, two days after the 36-year-old woman's body parts were found inside the flat where they resided in the Mira Road area of Mumbai. Sane, who worked at a ration shop, has now claimed Vaidya committed suicide by drinking poison and he only tried to dispose of her body by chopping it up, officials said.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); The accused, arrested on Thursday, also allegedly told the interrogators he was HIV-positive and never had any physical relationship with Vaidya. "The couple did not register their marriage, but they had married by performing rituals in a temple," said Deputy Commissioner of Police Jayant Bajbale of Mira-Bhayandar, Vasai Virar commissionerate, citing the statements given by three sisters of the deceased. Vaidya had informed her sisters about the marriage, but since there was a considerable age gap between them, the couple did not make their wedding public, he said. The remains of the woman will be handed over to her sisters for last rites as per their wish once DNA testing and other formalities are over, the official added. The motive behind the crime was still not clear. ALSO READ | Mumbai man chops live-in partners body in repeat of Shraddha case An FIR has been registered against Sane under Indian Penal Code sections 302 (murder) and 201 (destruction of evidence) at the Naya Nagar police station. Vaidya's mother had died when the sisters were very young while their father had abandoned them, DCP Bajbale said. "The victim studied up to Class 10 at an `ashram' school (school for orphans) in Ahmednagar district of western Maharashtra and came to Mumbai to reside with her relatives after turning 18," he said. "After the couple met, Sane had arranged a job as a salesperson for her," he added. Sane, who is in police custody till June 16, told interrogators Vaidya died on the morning of June 3 after consuming poison with foam coming out of her mouth, and fearing he would be held responsible for her death, he decided to dispose of the body. He also claimed after disposing of the body pieces he had planned to commit suicide, police officials said. Police were yet to verify these claims, they said, adding it was possible that the accused was trying to mislead the investigators. On Wednesday (June 7), the police found Vaidya's body parts, some cooked in a pressure cooker and even roasted, inside the rented flat of the couple who were staying there for the last three years. Sane kept the woman's chopped body parts in three buckets in their flat and tried to suppress the stench by spraying room freshener, his neighbours said on Thursday. The crime came to light after neighbours alerted the police about a foul smell coming out of the flat. It is suspected Vaidya died on June 4, but the case came to light on June 7. Neighbours also told the police Sane had been feeding stray dogs for the past few days, something he had never done before. Amid Sane's interrogation, the police traced Vaidya's family members and her three sisters recorded their statements with the police on Friday. The shocking details that emerged in the crime evoked the memories of the last year's Shraddha Walkar case. Walkar, a call centre employee, was strangled to death allegedly by her live-in partner Aaftab Poonawala on May 18 last year. The accused sawed her body into several pieces, which he kept in a refrigerator for almost three weeks at his residence in south Delhi's Mehrauli.
By Express News Service

GUWAHATI: The Naga MLAs of strife-torn Manipur told the Centre that the Naga areas should not be touched if any arrangement is made for any community to settle the ongoing unrest.

They met Union home minister Amit Shah in New Delhi two days ago. Outer Manipur MP Dr Lorho Pfoze, who is also a Naga, was with them.

Minister Awangbou Newmai told journalists at a press conference in Nagalands Dimapur town on Friday that all 10 Naga MLAs went to Delhi at Shahs invitation. He said they had a meaningful discussion with him on the present Manipur situation.

We conveyed to him very clearly that in the event of any arrangement for separate administration (as demanded by the Kuki MLAs), our Naga areas should not be touched, Newmai said.

He said they had made it clear to Shah that the Nagas should be consulted properly in the event of any such arrangement to avoid further escalation of the situation.

ALSO READ | Manipur violence: 35 weapons, warlike stores recovered during joint combing operations

We said the Naga areas should not be touched as that will escalate the situation. We also said in case any arrangement is made for the Nagas, it should be based on the peace process between the Nagas (read Naga rebels) and the Government of India, Newmai said.

He said they conveyed to Shah that they were trying their best to bring the two warring communities  Meiteis and Kukis  to an understanding.

The home minister conveyed to us very clearly that in the event of any plan for separate administration or whatsoever, the three major communities  Meiteis, Nagas and Kukis  will be properly consulted, Newmai said.

To a query, he said the Nagas were not silent on the Manipur unrest nor were they siding with any community but they formed a peace committee to try and reach out to everyone for restoring normalcy.

Nagas are peace-loving people. We never start any war. We dont want any war with anybody and we dont want our friends and neighbours to engage in a war. So, we are trying to reach out to them to tell them they should come together and negotiate if there is any issue. That is the role we are playing, the minister added.

GUWAHATI: The Naga MLAs of strife-torn Manipur told the Centre that the Naga areas should not be touched if any arrangement is made for any community to settle the ongoing unrest. They met Union home minister Amit Shah in New Delhi two days ago. Outer Manipur MP Dr Lorho Pfoze, who is also a Naga, was with them. Minister Awangbou Newmai told journalists at a press conference in Nagalands Dimapur town on Friday that all 10 Naga MLAs went to Delhi at Shahs invitation. He said they had a meaningful discussion with him on the present Manipur situation. googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); We conveyed to him very clearly that in the event of any arrangement for separate administration (as demanded by the Kuki MLAs), our Naga areas should not be touched, Newmai said. He said they had made it clear to Shah that the Nagas should be consulted properly in the event of any such arrangement to avoid further escalation of the situation. ALSO READ | Manipur violence: 35 weapons, warlike stores recovered during joint combing operations We said the Naga areas should not be touched as that will escalate the situation. We also said in case any arrangement is made for the Nagas, it should be based on the peace process between the Nagas (read Naga rebels) and the Government of India, Newmai said. He said they conveyed to Shah that they were trying their best to bring the two warring communities  Meiteis and Kukis  to an understanding. The home minister conveyed to us very clearly that in the event of any plan for separate administration or whatsoever, the three major communities  Meiteis, Nagas and Kukis  will be properly consulted, Newmai said. To a query, he said the Nagas were not silent on the Manipur unrest nor were they siding with any community but they formed a peace committee to try and reach out to everyone for restoring normalcy. Nagas are peace-loving people. We never start any war. We dont want any war with anybody and we dont want our friends and neighbours to engage in a war. So, we are trying to reach out to them to tell them they should come together and negotiate if there is any issue. That is the role we are playing, the minister added.
Mayank Singh By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: India conducted a successful flight test of its new generation ballistic missile, Agni Prime, on Wednesday. The test was carried out by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) from Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Island off the coast of Odisha. All objectives of the test were described as successful.

The Ministry of Defence issued a statement mentioning the deployment of range instrumentation, including radar, telemetry, and electro-optical tracking systems, at various locations, including two ships. These instruments capture flight data throughout the missiles trajectory.

This launch marked the first pre-induction night launch by the users, following three successful developmental trials of the missile. The Ministry emphasized that this test validated the accuracy and reliability of the system. The flight tests signify significant progress towards the operationalization of the new weapons system.

Agni Prime is a two-stage canisterized solid propellant nuclear-capable ballistic missile equipped with a dual redundant navigation and guidance system. The canister mode assembly of the missiles facilitates rapid deployment, storage and mobility. The missile has a range capability of 1,000-2,000 km and represents an advanced variant of the Agni class of missiles.

The Agni series of missiles are part of the Integrated Guided Missile Development Project (IGMDP) initiated by MoD in 1982. Over time, the Agni series has undergone further development to achieve extended ranges and improved mobility. The series includes Agni-1 (with a range of 700 km), Agni-2 (with a range of 2,000 km), Agni-3 (with a range of 2,500 km), Agni-4 (with a range of 3,500 km), and Agni-5, which can strike targets up to 5,000 km away.

NEW DELHI: India conducted a successful flight test of its new generation ballistic missile, Agni Prime, on Wednesday. The test was carried out by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) from Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Island off the coast of Odisha. All objectives of the test were described as successful. The Ministry of Defence issued a statement mentioning the deployment of range instrumentation, including radar, telemetry, and electro-optical tracking systems, at various locations, including two ships. These instruments capture flight data throughout the missiles trajectory. This launch marked the first pre-induction night launch by the users, following three successful developmental trials of the missile. The Ministry emphasized that this test validated the accuracy and reliability of the system. The flight tests signify significant progress towards the operationalization of the new weapons system.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Agni Prime is a two-stage canisterized solid propellant nuclear-capable ballistic missile equipped with a dual redundant navigation and guidance system. The canister mode assembly of the missiles facilitates rapid deployment, storage and mobility. The missile has a range capability of 1,000-2,000 km and represents an advanced variant of the Agni class of missiles. The Agni series of missiles are part of the Integrated Guided Missile Development Project (IGMDP) initiated by MoD in 1982. Over time, the Agni series has undergone further development to achieve extended ranges and improved mobility. The series includes Agni-1 (with a range of 700 km), Agni-2 (with a range of 2,000 km), Agni-3 (with a range of 2,500 km), Agni-4 (with a range of 3,500 km), and Agni-5, which can strike targets up to 5,000 km away.
Rajesh Kumar Thakur By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: As part of its Mission 2024, the BJP is learnt to have called a meeting of its chief ministers and their juniors on June 11-12 in Delhi to discuss the partys electoral agenda for the Assembly as well as parliamentary elections.

The meeting will have wider deliberations on the partys agenda for both elections as the two are due in a gap of a few months. As we know, the BJP takes every election very seriously and systematically follows well-crafted electoral strategies, said a senior party functionary.

For us, the nation comes first and development politics happens to be our USP in all elections. This will preface our discussions, said the senior leader. Senior leaders such as BJP chief JP Nadda, the partys principal strategist Amit Shah, national general secretary (organization) BL Santhosh and other party general secretaries are supposed to attend the meeting. Elections are due in MP, Rajasthan and Telangana in a few months.

PM Modi may also attend the meeting. CMs and deputy CMs of BJP-ruled states will present their performance reports on central governments people-centric welfare schemes, said a source.

It is believed that if the PM attends the meeting, he would like to be briefed on the performances of the party governments in states.

BJP aims to retain power in MP and wrest Rajasthan from the Congress and Chhattisgarh. It is supposed to discuss its strategy to counter the Opposition meeting which is due on June 23 in Patna. The opposition unity efforts seem to have accelerated after Congress victory in Karnataka. Bihar CM Nitish Kumar has emerged as the architect of unity efforts, but it is yet to be seen how he takes the Congress along.

NEW DELHI: As part of its Mission 2024, the BJP is learnt to have called a meeting of its chief ministers and their juniors on June 11-12 in Delhi to discuss the partys electoral agenda for the Assembly as well as parliamentary elections. The meeting will have wider deliberations on the partys agenda for both elections as the two are due in a gap of a few months. As we know, the BJP takes every election very seriously and systematically follows well-crafted electoral strategies, said a senior party functionary. For us, the nation comes first and development politics happens to be our USP in all elections. This will preface our discussions, said the senior leader. Senior leaders such as BJP chief JP Nadda, the partys principal strategist Amit Shah, national general secretary (organization) BL Santhosh and other party general secretaries are supposed to attend the meeting. Elections are due in MP, Rajasthan and Telangana in a few months.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); PM Modi may also attend the meeting. CMs and deputy CMs of BJP-ruled states will present their performance reports on central governments people-centric welfare schemes, said a source. It is believed that if the PM attends the meeting, he would like to be briefed on the performances of the party governments in states. BJP aims to retain power in MP and wrest Rajasthan from the Congress and Chhattisgarh. It is supposed to discuss its strategy to counter the Opposition meeting which is due on June 23 in Patna. The opposition unity efforts seem to have accelerated after Congress victory in Karnataka. Bihar CM Nitish Kumar has emerged as the architect of unity efforts, but it is yet to be seen how he takes the Congress along.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The BJP's claim that the 'Sengol' was a symbol of transfer of power from the British to former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru has been exposed, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said on Friday citing an interview quoting a Tamil Nadu-based religious body's chief.

Citing the interview in a daily that quoted the head Swamigal of the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam, he said neither Lord Mountbatten nor C Rajagopalachari were present at the handing over of the 'Sengol' to Nehru. The ceremonial sceptre was presented to Nehru at 10 pm on August 14, 1947, at his residence.

Ahead of the inauguration of the new Parliament building and the installation of the 'Sengol' in Lok Sabha on May 28, the BJP had alleged that the Congress displayed disregard for Hindu traditions by calling the sacred 'Sengol' a "golden stick gifted" to India's first prime minister Nehru and tucking it away in a museum.

The vesting of the "sacred 'Sengol" with Nehru, on the eve of India's Independence, was the exact moment of transfer of power from the British to India, BJP leader Amit Malviya had said on May 26. Even then, Ramesh had said there is no documented evidence of Mountbatten, Rajagopalachari, and Nehru describing the 'Sengol' as a symbol of transfer of power by the British to India.

Rajagopalachari was the first Indian-born Governor-General who succeeded Mountbatten.

In a tweet on Friday, the Congress leader said, "So the BJP's 'FakeFactory' stands exposed today by none other than the revered head Swamigal of the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam himself in The Hindu. No Mountbatten, no Rajaji, no part in the official transfer of power on August 14, 1947. But yes, the majestic 'Sengol' was indeed presented to Nehru as I have been saying all along."

"Here are some more facts to nail the lies of today's Raja and his drumbeaters," he said citing an advertisement dated August 29, 1947, on the presentation of the ceremonial sceptre to Nehru at 10 pm on August 14, 1947, at his residence.

"It was clearly an initiative of the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam itself," he said.

In the photo, he said, the famed Nagaswaram virtuoso TN Rajaratnam Pillai is marked.

"Here is what is said about him in an article on a website of the Union Ministry of Culture: When India attained independence, Rajaratnam was sent to Delhi by the Pandarasannadhi of the Tiruvaduturai Matam to present on his behalf a mace of solid gold senkol (symbol of righteous administration). Rajaratnam was thrilled by this proud privilege.

It was Dr P Subbaroyan who introduced him to prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to whom Rajaratnam played the Nagaswaram before handing over the mace," Ramesh tweeted.

"There is no mention of Mountbatten or even Rajaji.

Rajaratnam Pillai is himself the subject of a fascinating new biography by an eminent Japanese ethnomusicologist in which the August 14, 1947, episode is mentioned," the Congress leader said on Twitter.

The Congress general secretary has been claiming that the Sengol was never presented before Mountbatten or Rajagopalachari.

NEW DELHI: The BJP's claim that the 'Sengol' was a symbol of transfer of power from the British to former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru has been exposed, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said on Friday citing an interview quoting a Tamil Nadu-based religious body's chief. Citing the interview in a daily that quoted the head Swamigal of the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam, he said neither Lord Mountbatten nor C Rajagopalachari were present at the handing over of the 'Sengol' to Nehru. The ceremonial sceptre was presented to Nehru at 10 pm on August 14, 1947, at his residence. Ahead of the inauguration of the new Parliament building and the installation of the 'Sengol' in Lok Sabha on May 28, the BJP had alleged that the Congress displayed disregard for Hindu traditions by calling the sacred 'Sengol' a "golden stick gifted" to India's first prime minister Nehru and tucking it away in a museum.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); The vesting of the "sacred 'Sengol" with Nehru, on the eve of India's Independence, was the exact moment of transfer of power from the British to India, BJP leader Amit Malviya had said on May 26. Even then, Ramesh had said there is no documented evidence of Mountbatten, Rajagopalachari, and Nehru describing the 'Sengol' as a symbol of transfer of power by the British to India. Rajagopalachari was the first Indian-born Governor-General who succeeded Mountbatten. In a tweet on Friday, the Congress leader said, "So the BJP's 'FakeFactory' stands exposed today by none other than the revered head Swamigal of the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam himself in The Hindu. No Mountbatten, no Rajaji, no part in the official transfer of power on August 14, 1947. But yes, the majestic 'Sengol' was indeed presented to Nehru as I have been saying all along." "Here are some more facts to nail the lies of today's Raja and his drumbeaters," he said citing an advertisement dated August 29, 1947, on the presentation of the ceremonial sceptre to Nehru at 10 pm on August 14, 1947, at his residence. "It was clearly an initiative of the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam itself," he said. In the photo, he said, the famed Nagaswaram virtuoso TN Rajaratnam Pillai is marked. "Here is what is said about him in an article on a website of the Union Ministry of Culture: When India attained independence, Rajaratnam was sent to Delhi by the Pandarasannadhi of the Tiruvaduturai Matam to present on his behalf a mace of solid gold senkol (symbol of righteous administration). Rajaratnam was thrilled by this proud privilege. It was Dr P Subbaroyan who introduced him to prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to whom Rajaratnam played the Nagaswaram before handing over the mace," Ramesh tweeted. "There is no mention of Mountbatten or even Rajaji. Rajaratnam Pillai is himself the subject of a fascinating new biography by an eminent Japanese ethnomusicologist in which the August 14, 1947, episode is mentioned," the Congress leader said on Twitter. The Congress general secretary has been claiming that the Sengol was never presented before Mountbatten or Rajagopalachari.
Mukesh Ranjan By

Express News Service

RANCHI: At least three persons were killed and more than a dozen feared trapped after a mine caved in during illegal mining of coal under the Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL) mine, under the Bhawra Police station area in Dhanbad.

According to locals, the roof of the mine caved in at around 10:30 am on Friday when hundreds of locals were engaged in the illegal mining of coal.

Local sources claimed that the BCCL has outsourced the mine to Devprabha outsourcing company where illegal mining was being done with the help of local police and the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF).

Since illegal mining is done by the locals without any technical know-how, the roof of the mine collapsed trapping more than a dozen people inside it, they said.

With the help local residents, three persons were dragged out from the debris and taken to a private hospital where doctors declared two of them brought dead. The deceased have been identified as Jitendra (12), Madan (25) and Sikandar (22).

Family members of the deceased gheraoed the office of Bhowra BCCL General Manager demanding proper compensation and FIR in the case.

According to police, the actual number of casualties could be ascertained only after the rescue operation is completed.

"The incident took place at around 10:30 am on Friday and the rescue operation still continues. The actual number of casualties could be known only after the rescue operation gets completed and debris is removed from the spot," said Sindri DSP Abhishek Banerjee.

Nothing could be said that how many people are trapped inside the debris, he added.

Notably, illegal mining is very common in Dhanbad as thousands of people here are earning their livelihood through it.

WATCH |

RANCHI: At least three persons were killed and more than a dozen feared trapped after a mine caved in during illegal mining of coal under the Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL) mine, under the Bhawra Police station area in Dhanbad. According to locals, the roof of the mine caved in at around 10:30 am on Friday when hundreds of locals were engaged in the illegal mining of coal. Local sources claimed that the BCCL has outsourced the mine to Devprabha outsourcing company where illegal mining was being done with the help of local police and the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF).googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Since illegal mining is done by the locals without any technical know-how, the roof of the mine collapsed trapping more than a dozen people inside it, they said. With the help local residents, three persons were dragged out from the debris and taken to a private hospital where doctors declared two of them brought dead. The deceased have been identified as Jitendra (12), Madan (25) and Sikandar (22). Family members of the deceased gheraoed the office of Bhowra BCCL General Manager demanding proper compensation and FIR in the case. According to police, the actual number of casualties could be ascertained only after the rescue operation is completed. "The incident took place at around 10:30 am on Friday and the rescue operation still continues. The actual number of casualties could be known only after the rescue operation gets completed and debris is removed from the spot," said Sindri DSP Abhishek Banerjee. Nothing could be said that how many people are trapped inside the debris, he added. Notably, illegal mining is very common in Dhanbad as thousands of people here are earning their livelihood through it. WATCH |
Yeshi Seli By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Indias relationship with China is complicated though there is engagement in terms of both sides meeting and talking at multilateral events. The situation, however, is not normal. China 2020 consciously chose to break an agreement and moved forces in border areas and coerced India, said external affairs minister S Jaishankar on Thursday.

China had consciously chosen to violate the peace agreements to move forces in border areas in Galwan in 2020. It has been made clear that until there is peace and tranquillity in border areas our relations cannot progress, said Jaishankar while speaking about the challenges in Indias relationship with China.

India and China are talking to each other. There is no breakdown of communications. With China, before the Galwan incident, India was cautioning them about seeing movement in the border areas. Yet they came to blows.

When foreign minister Qin Gang came for the SCO foreign ministers meeting in Goa, we had a discussion. Even during the BRICS meeting, I met his deputy. But both of us have to disengage as the relationship will get impacted.

However, at multilateral events where the Chinese are there, we have a conversation. Bilaterally only one visit happened when former Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi came to India. We have the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination (WMCC) and the senior high-level commander meets which will continue, the foreign minister added.

The minister without confirming whether China had made encroachments on Indian soil said that in the past (around 1959) China had made some encroachments as borders were neglected then.

Congress condemns glorification of Indiras assassins in Canada

New Delhi: The Congress strongly condemned the glorification of former PM Indira Gandhis assassins during a parade in the Brampton City of Canada. The party questioned the silence of PM Modi on the issue, saying it was not a partisan matter but an issue concerning the national interest. Addressing a press conference, party general secretary RS Surjewala such incidents have a ramification on peace in Punjab and the rest of India. He sought to know why the external affairs ministry had not so far summoned the Canadian High Commissioner in India to lodge a protest.

NEW DELHI: Indias relationship with China is complicated though there is engagement in terms of both sides meeting and talking at multilateral events. The situation, however, is not normal. China 2020 consciously chose to break an agreement and moved forces in border areas and coerced India, said external affairs minister S Jaishankar on Thursday. China had consciously chosen to violate the peace agreements to move forces in border areas in Galwan in 2020. It has been made clear that until there is peace and tranquillity in border areas our relations cannot progress, said Jaishankar while speaking about the challenges in Indias relationship with China. India and China are talking to each other. There is no breakdown of communications. With China, before the Galwan incident, India was cautioning them about seeing movement in the border areas. Yet they came to blows.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); When foreign minister Qin Gang came for the SCO foreign ministers meeting in Goa, we had a discussion. Even during the BRICS meeting, I met his deputy. But both of us have to disengage as the relationship will get impacted. However, at multilateral events where the Chinese are there, we have a conversation. Bilaterally only one visit happened when former Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi came to India. We have the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination (WMCC) and the senior high-level commander meets which will continue, the foreign minister added. The minister without confirming whether China had made encroachments on Indian soil said that in the past (around 1959) China had made some encroachments as borders were neglected then. Congress condemns glorification of Indiras assassins in Canada New Delhi: The Congress strongly condemned the glorification of former PM Indira Gandhis assassins during a parade in the Brampton City of Canada. The party questioned the silence of PM Modi on the issue, saying it was not a partisan matter but an issue concerning the national interest. Addressing a press conference, party general secretary RS Surjewala such incidents have a ramification on peace in Punjab and the rest of India. He sought to know why the external affairs ministry had not so far summoned the Canadian High Commissioner in India to lodge a protest.
Preetha Nair By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The first joint meeting of Opposition parties in Patna on June 23 will deliberate various options for firming up coalitions, maximising anti-BJP votes at state levels and fielding common candidates against the saffron party in 2024 Lok Sabha polls, among others.

The tried-and-tested coalition models such as the 2004 UPA-1 and tactical state-level alliances will also be discussed, according to leaders familiar with the developments. The meeting will be attended by Rahul Gandhi, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, her Tamil Nadu counterpart M K Stalin and AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal, Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren, Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray and NCP president Sharad Pawar, CPI leader D Raja, CPMs Sitaram Yechuri and Dipankar Bhattacharya of CPI(M-L).

A leader, engaged in backchannel talks with other parties, told this newspaper, The idea is to augment anti-BJP votes at the state level and reach a consensus to jointly fight the BJP in 2024. The proposal of fielding a common candidate in as many as 450 seats against the BJP nominee may also be discussed in the meeting, said another leader.

Some leaders, including P Chidambaram, Nitish Kumar and Sanjay Raut, have backed the idea of a common candidate to avoid an Opposition vote split. Of the 543 Lok Sabha seats, Opposition parties are in a direct fight with each other in states like Kerala, Punjab, Delhi, West Bengal and Telangana, which account for 98 seats in total.

"In states like Kerala, Punjab, Delhi, Bengal and Telangana, Congress will be in a direct fight with CPM, AAP, TMC and BRS. However, there can be post-poll alliances, said the leader. The formula is that other regional parties will support Congress in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh where the party is in direct fight with BJP. In Uttar Pradesh, the Congress may support SP.

NEW DELHI: The first joint meeting of Opposition parties in Patna on June 23 will deliberate various options for firming up coalitions, maximising anti-BJP votes at state levels and fielding common candidates against the saffron party in 2024 Lok Sabha polls, among others. The tried-and-tested coalition models such as the 2004 UPA-1 and tactical state-level alliances will also be discussed, according to leaders familiar with the developments. The meeting will be attended by Rahul Gandhi, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, her Tamil Nadu counterpart M K Stalin and AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal, Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren, Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray and NCP president Sharad Pawar, CPI leader D Raja, CPMs Sitaram Yechuri and Dipankar Bhattacharya of CPI(M-L). A leader, engaged in backchannel talks with other parties, told this newspaper, The idea is to augment anti-BJP votes at the state level and reach a consensus to jointly fight the BJP in 2024. The proposal of fielding a common candidate in as many as 450 seats against the BJP nominee may also be discussed in the meeting, said another leader. googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Some leaders, including P Chidambaram, Nitish Kumar and Sanjay Raut, have backed the idea of a common candidate to avoid an Opposition vote split. Of the 543 Lok Sabha seats, Opposition parties are in a direct fight with each other in states like Kerala, Punjab, Delhi, West Bengal and Telangana, which account for 98 seats in total. "In states like Kerala, Punjab, Delhi, Bengal and Telangana, Congress will be in a direct fight with CPM, AAP, TMC and BRS. However, there can be post-poll alliances, said the leader. The formula is that other regional parties will support Congress in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh where the party is in direct fight with BJP. In Uttar Pradesh, the Congress may support SP.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Friday asked the Kerala government the "reason or pressure" for using the Chinese-origin optical fibre in its Kerala Fibre Optic Network (KFON) project.

The minister, while addressing a press briefing after a presentation on how far India has travelled in terms of digitisation in the last nine years, said India has many optical fibre plants but wondered why Kerala needed to import from China.

"They didn't require importing from China, and this (optical fibre) is a domestically available product. There are many plants in India that manufacture optical fibre. Why did they need to import from China. What was the pressure? What was the reason?" the minister said.

The Kerala Fibre Optic Network (KFON) is a Rs 1611-crore project, and is a joint venture of Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) and Kerala State IIT Infrastructure Limited. The purpose of the project is to provide internet connectivity to the state and also free internet to BPL families.

ALSO READ | KFON heralds public internet in Kerala

However, as per reports, it is believed that the cable or optical fibre used in this project are of Chinese origin. Therefore, it is violating Central government regulations, which mandate importing telecom or communication devices designated as "trusted products" from "trusted sources".

"We are not against any country nor are we particularly against a source of the product. But there is one framework in the country - trusted source. It means, an equipment and its source should be trusted wherever it is from. There is nothing like against one particular country," said the minister.

After confrontations between Indian and Chinese troops in Ladakh in 2020, the government came up with a national security directive on the telecom sector. It means telecom service providers will have to use devices, which are designated as "trusted products" from "trusted sources". The government has deployed the National Cyber Security Coordinator as the designated authority for determining about a vendor or product.

NEW DELHI: Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Friday asked the Kerala government the "reason or pressure" for using the Chinese-origin optical fibre in its Kerala Fibre Optic Network (KFON) project. The minister, while addressing a press briefing after a presentation on how far India has travelled in terms of digitisation in the last nine years, said India has many optical fibre plants but wondered why Kerala needed to import from China. "They didn't require importing from China, and this (optical fibre) is a domestically available product. There are many plants in India that manufacture optical fibre. Why did they need to import from China. What was the pressure? What was the reason?" the minister said.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); The Kerala Fibre Optic Network (KFON) is a Rs 1611-crore project, and is a joint venture of Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) and Kerala State IIT Infrastructure Limited. The purpose of the project is to provide internet connectivity to the state and also free internet to BPL families. ALSO READ | KFON heralds public internet in Kerala However, as per reports, it is believed that the cable or optical fibre used in this project are of Chinese origin. Therefore, it is violating Central government regulations, which mandate importing telecom or communication devices designated as "trusted products" from "trusted sources". "We are not against any country nor are we particularly against a source of the product. But there is one framework in the country - trusted source. It means, an equipment and its source should be trusted wherever it is from. There is nothing like against one particular country," said the minister. After confrontations between Indian and Chinese troops in Ladakh in 2020, the government came up with a national security directive on the telecom sector. It means telecom service providers will have to use devices, which are designated as "trusted products" from "trusted sources". The government has deployed the National Cyber Security Coordinator as the designated authority for determining about a vendor or product.
By Agencies

KOHIMA: Around 1,500 people from the ethnic violence-affected Manipur have taken refuge in different parts of neighbouring Nagaland, an official said on Friday.

While many of these people are staying with their relatives, others are in houses provided by villagers.

"The Nagaland government is yet to collect the accurate data. However, as per available reports, around 1,500 people from Manipur have taken shelter in various parts of the state," Home Commissioner Abhijit Sinha told PTI here.

The clashes between Meitei and Kuki tribes, which started early last month, have so far claimed over 100 lives and some 10,000 army and para-military personnel had to be deployed to bring back normalcy in the northeastern state.

ALSO READ | CBI forms SIT to probe Manipur violence, takes over probe

Meanwhile, the Chakhroma Public Organisation (CPO), a tribal body, on Friday visited six villages in the Chumoukedima district, where the displaced people have taken refuge. The organisation distributed relief materials to them.

In a statement, the CPO said a total of 704 Kuki people have come to these villages from Manipur.

Clashes broke out in Manipur after a 'Tribal Solidarity March' was organised in the hill districts on May 3 to protest against the Meitei community's demand for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status.

The violence was preceded by tension over the eviction of Kuki villagers from reserve forest land, which had led to a series of smaller agitations.

Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley. Tribals -- Nagas and Kukis -- constitute another 40 per cent of the population and reside in the hill districts.

10 parties seek PM Modi's intervention

Meanwhile, ten political parties in Manipur, led by Congress, on Friday sought the intervention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to restore peace and normalcy in the state at the earliest.

Criticising the Prime Minister's silence over the Manipur situation, three-time Chief Minister and veteran Congress leader O Ibobi Singh said that Modi's silence over the devastating violence in Manipur proves that the Centre is neglecting the state.

He also emphasised that while the visit of Union Home Minister Amit Shah was appreciated, Manipur continued to suffer from unabated unrest and persistent reports of violence.

The Congress leader further expressed the view that if the Central government had intervened on time, the crisis could have been resolved much earlier.

The ten political parties in its meeting on Friday at Congress Bhawan in Imphal also resolved to urge the state government to convene a special session of the Manipur Assembly for a detailed discussion on the ongoing unrest.

The meeting was chaired by the Manipur State Congress President K Meghachandra Singh.

The 10 political parties include the CPI, CPI-M, JD-U, Forward Bloc, RSP, SS-UBT, Trinamool Congress, NCP, and a local party, besides the Congress.

Last month, a Congress delegation led by party President Mallikarjun Kharge met President Droupadi Murmu in Delhi and sought her intervention in the Manipur crisis.

(With inputs from PTI and IANS)

KOHIMA: Around 1,500 people from the ethnic violence-affected Manipur have taken refuge in different parts of neighbouring Nagaland, an official said on Friday. While many of these people are staying with their relatives, others are in houses provided by villagers. "The Nagaland government is yet to collect the accurate data. However, as per available reports, around 1,500 people from Manipur have taken shelter in various parts of the state," Home Commissioner Abhijit Sinha told PTI here.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); The clashes between Meitei and Kuki tribes, which started early last month, have so far claimed over 100 lives and some 10,000 army and para-military personnel had to be deployed to bring back normalcy in the northeastern state. ALSO READ | CBI forms SIT to probe Manipur violence, takes over probe Meanwhile, the Chakhroma Public Organisation (CPO), a tribal body, on Friday visited six villages in the Chumoukedima district, where the displaced people have taken refuge. The organisation distributed relief materials to them. In a statement, the CPO said a total of 704 Kuki people have come to these villages from Manipur. Clashes broke out in Manipur after a 'Tribal Solidarity March' was organised in the hill districts on May 3 to protest against the Meitei community's demand for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status. The violence was preceded by tension over the eviction of Kuki villagers from reserve forest land, which had led to a series of smaller agitations. Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley. Tribals -- Nagas and Kukis -- constitute another 40 per cent of the population and reside in the hill districts. 10 parties seek PM Modi's intervention Meanwhile, ten political parties in Manipur, led by Congress, on Friday sought the intervention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to restore peace and normalcy in the state at the earliest. Criticising the Prime Minister's silence over the Manipur situation, three-time Chief Minister and veteran Congress leader O Ibobi Singh said that Modi's silence over the devastating violence in Manipur proves that the Centre is neglecting the state. He also emphasised that while the visit of Union Home Minister Amit Shah was appreciated, Manipur continued to suffer from unabated unrest and persistent reports of violence. The Congress leader further expressed the view that if the Central government had intervened on time, the crisis could have been resolved much earlier. The ten political parties in its meeting on Friday at Congress Bhawan in Imphal also resolved to urge the state government to convene a special session of the Manipur Assembly for a detailed discussion on the ongoing unrest. The meeting was chaired by the Manipur State Congress President K Meghachandra Singh. The 10 political parties include the CPI, CPI-M, JD-U, Forward Bloc, RSP, SS-UBT, Trinamool Congress, NCP, and a local party, besides the Congress. Last month, a Congress delegation led by party President Mallikarjun Kharge met President Droupadi Murmu in Delhi and sought her intervention in the Manipur crisis. (With inputs from PTI and IANS)
By ANI

NEW DELHI: India's External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Friday took a swipe at Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's recent criticism of the government during his US visit and said arguments in a democracy are not the problem but that when leaders go outside India and invite people from outside to come and interfere, it becomes the problem.

"In any democracy, there will be arguments. There will be differences, there will be diversity and opinions. And it should be there, there is nothing wrong with it. It is concerning, when they take India's problem out in the world and then invite people from outside to come and interfere," Jaishankar said at Aryabhatta College without taking Rahul Gandhi's name.

"If you say that India has problems and great concerns then the world must do something about it, this has big implications and that is not good for the country," he added.

During a six-day, three-city tour of the United States, Rahul Gandhi criticised the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Three days ago, Gandhi said at an event in New York that the BJP and RSS are "incapable" of looking at the future and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is trying to drive the Indian car by only looking in the rear-view mirror which will lead to "one accident after another."

"Back home we have a problem, and I will tell you the problem. The BJP and the RSS are incapable of looking at the future. They're incapable. Unse aap kuch bhi poocho, woh peeche ki aur dekhte hain (You ask anything they look into the past)," he said.

His remark assumes significance as the BJP, which holds the reins of administration at the Centre, has often accused him of sullying India's image on foreign soil.

The saffron party has also alleged a larger global narrative to defame India.

Continuing with his offensive against the saffron party, the Congress leader said the country faces a battle between two ideologies -- one espoused by the Congress and the other by the BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

"There is a fight between two ideologies in India -- one that we (Congress) represent and another that is espoused by the BJP and the RSS," the Congress leader claimed.

Further, he added that the principles and ideology that Congress holds dear are the same as that of the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi. He claimed that the ideas espoused and propagated by the BJP and RSS were that of Nathuram Godse, a rightwing leader who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi.

NEW DELHI: India's External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Friday took a swipe at Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's recent criticism of the government during his US visit and said arguments in a democracy are not the problem but that when leaders go outside India and invite people from outside to come and interfere, it becomes the problem. "In any democracy, there will be arguments. There will be differences, there will be diversity and opinions. And it should be there, there is nothing wrong with it. It is concerning, when they take India's problem out in the world and then invite people from outside to come and interfere," Jaishankar said at Aryabhatta College without taking Rahul Gandhi's name. "If you say that India has problems and great concerns then the world must do something about it, this has big implications and that is not good for the country," he added.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); During a six-day, three-city tour of the United States, Rahul Gandhi criticised the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Three days ago, Gandhi said at an event in New York that the BJP and RSS are "incapable" of looking at the future and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is trying to drive the Indian car by only looking in the rear-view mirror which will lead to "one accident after another." "Back home we have a problem, and I will tell you the problem. The BJP and the RSS are incapable of looking at the future. They're incapable. Unse aap kuch bhi poocho, woh peeche ki aur dekhte hain (You ask anything they look into the past)," he said. His remark assumes significance as the BJP, which holds the reins of administration at the Centre, has often accused him of sullying India's image on foreign soil. The saffron party has also alleged a larger global narrative to defame India. Continuing with his offensive against the saffron party, the Congress leader said the country faces a battle between two ideologies -- one espoused by the Congress and the other by the BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). "There is a fight between two ideologies in India -- one that we (Congress) represent and another that is espoused by the BJP and the RSS," the Congress leader claimed. Further, he added that the principles and ideology that Congress holds dear are the same as that of the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi. He claimed that the ideas espoused and propagated by the BJP and RSS were that of Nathuram Godse, a rightwing leader who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi.
Couldnt find a single toilet, Ktaka woman writes to Prez Murmu on her ordeal

Chikkamagaluru, June 8: A Karnataka woman's letter on how she was forced to attend nature's call in public in the absence of public toilets at a pilgrimage centre in Chikkamagalur district has gone viral on social media.

'Couldn't find a single toilet', K'taka woman writes to Prez Murmu on her ordeal

Jademma, the devotee, who wrote the letter in Kannada, has described her ordeal in detail.She has urged President Droupadi Murmu to ensure the construction of public toilets at the pilgrimage centres, which are visited by lakhs of people. She also stated that the President is an inspiration and symbol of confidence for a woman like her.The letter reads, "the main objective of the letter is to bring forth the pain of common women like me."Few days ago, I visited Bababudangiri Datta Peeta, Mullaiyyanagiri and Seethalaiahyyanagiri, all Hindu pilgrimage centers. At Bababudangiri, I started to get a sensation for nature's call. I could not find a public toilet. Suppressing the urge, I climbed Mullaiyyanagiri hill. I searched for toilets but to no avail."Later, I climbed Seethalaiahyyanagiri and looked for the public toilet. Every moment the sensation was growing stronger. I could not tolerate it and swallowing humiliation, I peed in the public place swallowing the humiliation and insult."Every day, people fight for their religions and gods. But, their negligence towards building toilets is unfortunate. When we get the urge for nature's call, we forget which religion we belong to and attend it. If there is any place in the world which is used by people of all religions at all places, it is the toilet."You are also a woman like me. But, you don't face my problems as you are in power and you have people to serve you. But, non availability of toilets has brought down the dignity of women like me. You can understand the pressure of a normal woman regarding attending nature's call."Women know the difficulties faced by women. The absence of a public toilet at a Pilgrimage centre visited by lakhs of people is a violation of Articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution. We have reached Mars but could not build a toilet at these pilgrimage centers."India is the capital of diabetes in the world. They are highly dependent on public toilets. The people of Karnataka won't forget if you build a toilet facility here."IANS08 June 2023

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UN investigator calls for domestic legal framework in Iraq to try IS crimes

United Nations, June 8: Christian Ritscher, the head of a UN investigative team on crimes committed by the Islamic State (IS) terror group in Iraq, has called for the adoption of an appropriate domestic legal framework in the country that allows for trials to happen.

UN investigator calls for domestic legal framework in Iraq to try IS crimes

Ritscher said such a domestic legal framework can be considered the main challenge that needs to be addressed to yield the desired results in Iraq, reports Xinhua news agency.His team remains committed to supporting the Iraq-led process for the implementation of a legal framework that enables the prosecution of IS criminal acts as international crimes -- war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide -- before national courts, Ritscher told the UN Security Council in a briefing.The establishment of a joint working group in March 2023 with the Office of the Prime Minister, the National Permanent Committee for International Humanitarian Law, the Iraqi State Council and senior members of the judiciary, as well as key parliamentarians, is an important step forward in this regard, he noted.The UN Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da'esh/Islamic State (UNITAD) remains at the disposal of the Iraqi authorities to provide technical support, leverage international expertise and share best practices, said Ritscher.The other two elements for the success of UNITAD's work are competent courts and admissible and reliable evidence, he said.The issue of competent courts is the easiest of the three. UNITAD already works closely with competent investigative judges in Iraq, and is enhancing their capacities and ensuring that Iraqi courts are ready to hold IS perpetrators accountable for their international crimes, he said.On admissible and reliable evidence, Ritscher said there is no shortage of evidence on IS crimes in Iraq, and the main challenge is what should be done with this evidence; how can the significant volumes of documents and the sheer amount of information be dealt with; and most importantly, how should the integral chain of custody for such evidence be maintained."What we aim to do is to ensure that this evidence is admissible before any competent court, whether in Iraq or in other states where prosecutions of IS members for international crimes are taking place," he said.UNITAD is assisting the Iraqi judiciary to organise and access considerable volumes of IS records and battlefield evidence notably via a mega digitization project. Led by UNITAD, digitization operations have been launched at five courts in Iraq and two further courts will follow in the coming months. Some 8 million pages of IS documents from the holdings of the Iraqi authorities, including Kurdish authorities, have been digitised so far, he said.As a next step, UNITAD is establishing a central archive that will be the unified repository of all digitized evidence against the IS, he said.As a perspective for the future, this central repository will play a key role in supporting prosecutions of IS perpetrators for their international crimes in Iraq, and it could be a milestone in founding a comprehensive e-justice system in Iraq, according to Ritscher."IS's criminality constitutes some of the most gruesome acts we have seen in recent history. Individuals responsible for such acts must be identified, tried and convicted for their crimes," he said, using another acronym for the IS terrorist group.IANS08 June 2023

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Ballantines Glassware True Music kicks-off series of live gigs and workshops in India; Hosts an evening of Urban Punjabi music in Gurugram

BusinessWire India, New Delhi, June 8 Kick-starting a series of live gigs and workshops in India, Ballantine's Glassware True Music hosted an exciting evening of Urban Punjabi music at Studio XO Bar in Gurugram recently.

Ballantine's Glassware True Music kicks-off series of live gigs and workshops in India; Hosts an evening of Urban Punjabi music in Gurugram

The event was buzzing with a line-up of activities that celebrates the power of self-expression and music.Popular Punjabi rapper Prabh Deep graced the event as the headliner and charmed the audience with his live performance. To add to the magic, emerging artists Kunwarr and Raashi Sood performed their new songs 'Freestyle' and 'Let's Talk', respectively, released by Ballantine's Glassware True Music. Also present at the event, mentor Manj Musik hosted an exclusive masterclass on 'Crafting Timeless Punjabi Sounds' with surprise guest Bobin James, Music Editor, Apple Music India. Manj Musik also performed his hit songs 'Aloo Chaat' and 'Swag Mera Desi', much to the delight of the attendees. To further engage music enthusiasts in attendance, studio partner Big Bang Music hosted an enlightening panel with Apple Music around 'The Hit Factor Mastering Music Marketing and Monetisation for Artists'. The workshop came to a close with an interactive round of Q and A with the audience.Ballantine's Glassware True Music is a global platform that goes beyond genre or fame, representing music communities and the people that make them thrive. In India, the platform is recognizing young artists across trending music genres, empowering them to find their voice in the music industry through mentorship and workshops, and giving them a platform to unleash their true potential. It has collaborated with Big Bang Music, a new age music label dedicated to finding superstars in the non-film music space, bridging the gap between pop culture and independent music.Kartik Mohindra, CMO, Pernod Ricard India, said, "Ballantine's Glassware strongly believes in the power of being true to yourself and following your dreams. Bringing this philosophy alive, we are very excited to present our global music platform, Ballantine's Glassware True Music, to India. With this property, we give emerging artists a stage and the opportunity to champion their self-expression through mentorships, workshops and multi-city live gigs. Our vision is to make the platform a cultural symbol that inspires people to pursue their passion and stay true to themselves."Gaurav Wadhwa, Co-Founder and CEO, Big Bang Music added, "Big Bang Music is here to enable independent artists to deliver their creative vision, with an aim to make subcultures in music, the future soundscape of India. As part of this collaboration with Ballantine's Glassware True Music, we are reimagining how artists and brands in India can collaborate. The multi-genre, multi-format, collaborative nature of the platform opens endless opportunities for aspiring young talent, allowing them to find their feet in the music industry and build superfans. We look forward to seeing how Ballantine's Glassware True Music makes waves along the way."Mentor Manj Musik shared, "I love the concept of Ballantine's Glassware True Music. I've always encouraged new artists to create new content, and it's wonderful that I now get to do it as part of a coveted global platform. I've worked with young artists Raashi and Kunwarr, and both of them are very talented. I think the audience will love their music."Artist Raashi Sood said, "It's been an incredible experience to be a part of Ballantine's Glassware True Music and especially to be mentored by Manj Musik. He is a force to reckon with in the Urban Punjabi music scene and he's helped me express my musicality like never before."Artist Kunwarr said, "Through Ballantine's Glassware True Music, young artists like I find a platform to hone our skills and put forth our music in its truest form. I can't wait to see where this journey takes us!"In its first leg in the country, Ballantine's Glassware True Music has collaborated with musicians Tesher, Manj Musik and Ankur Tewari to mentor six emerging artists. Together, they've curated 12 sensational tracks and are hosting live gigs and workshops across 9 cities, including Mumbai, Hyderabad and Gurugram. The first track '' by Akshath Acharya is out on all music streaming platforms.Ballantine's Glassware is set to travel to Hyderabad, Mumbai and Chandigarh next. For more information, visit .(Disclaimer The above press release has been provided by BusinessWire India. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)ANI08 June 2023

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Scorching heatwave grips parts of India as monsoon arrives late

New Delhi, June 8: As the southwest monsoon finally made its entrance in Kerala on Thursday, its most-delayed arrival in seven years, certain parts of India are now grappling with scorching heatwave conditions.

Scorching heatwave grips parts of India as monsoon arrives late

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) issued warnings that several regions would be affected in the coming days with the heat wave.It forecasts that Bihar will experience heatwave to severe heatwave conditions from June 8 to 12, while Gangetic West Bengal and Jharkhand are expected to endure similar conditions from June 8 to 11.A"Additionally, Odisha and the sub-Himalayan West Bengal region will likely face heatwave conditions during June 8-10. Telangana will experience high temperatures on June 8 and 9, while parts of Uttar Pradesh will persist with heatwave conditions until June 11," the IMD said.Amidst this heatwave, southwest monsoon has advanced into remaining parts of south Arabian Sea and some parts of central Arabian Sea, entire Lakshadweep area, Kerala, parts of Tamil Nadu, remaining parts of Gulf of Comorin area, Gulf of Mannar and Bay of Bengal on Thursday."Southwest Monsoon has set in over Kerala today," said the IMD."Conditions are favourable for further advance of Southwest monsoon into some more parts of central Arabian Sea, remaining parts of Kerala, some more parts of Tamil Nadu, some parts of Karnataka and some more parts of southwest, Central and northeast Bay of Bengal and some parts of northeastern states during next 48 hours," it said.Meanwhile, a senior official of IMD said that temperatures in northwest India are likely to rise, reaching as high as 40-42 degree Celsius."However, no heatwave conditions are anticipated in the region for the next four to five days. In contrast, east India and adjoining areas of northwest India, such as east Uttar Pradesh, are currently experiencing heatwave conditions.While eastern India grapples with extreme heat, other parts of the country have encountered unexpected hailstorms and excessive rainfall.The IMD also issued a warning on Thursday, cautioning about isolated hailstorms in Uttarakhand on June 11 and 12.Meteorologists attribute the unusual surplus of rainfall and below-normal temperatures during the pre-monsoon season (March to May) to an increased frequency of western disturbances.These weather systems originate in the Mediterranean region and bring untimely rain to northwest India.Meanwhile, the western coast of India is bracing itself for heavy rainfall over the upcoming weekend as Cyclone Biparjoy intensifies. Previously, meteorologists had mentioned that the cyclone was influencing the intensity of the monsoon, leading to a "mild" onset over Kerala.IANS08 June 2023

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Vast majority of worlds biggest companies made almost no progress on limiting global warming since 2018

London, June 8: The vast majority of the worlds biggest companies have done almost nothing in the past five years to cut their planet-heating pollution enough to avoid catastrophic climate change, according to a media report.

Vast majority of world's biggest companies made almost no progress on limiting global warming since 2018

Large companies are either more likely to contribute to extreme levels of warming or are not disclosing their greenhouse gas emissions at all, according to a new report from ESG Book, CNN reported.The leading sustainability data provider found that the efforts of just 22 per cent of the world's 500 biggest public companies by market value are aligned with the Paris Agreement, aimed at limiting global warming to 1.5-degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That's a measly gain from 18 per cent of firms in 2018, CNN reported.Climate scientists consider a 1.5-degree rise in the average global temperature a key tipping point, beyond which the chances of extreme flooding, drought, wildfires and food shortage could increase dramatically.Almost half, or 45 per cent, of companies are aligned with warming of at least 2.7-degree Celsius - a disastrous level of warming that could expose billions of people to dangerously hot conditions. That's down from 61 per cent in 2018."Our data presents a clear message We need to do more, and we need to do it quickly," ESG Book CEO Daniel Klier said, CNN reported."Without a fundamental change in the way the global economy operates, it's not obvious how we see a significant shift."The report is the latest in a string of evidence that the world is way off track to meet its climate goals, CNN reported.IANS08 June 2023

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Serbia: President Murmu, counterpart Vucic agree to strengthen cooperation in UN, hold delegation-level talks

Belgrade [Serbia], June 8: Apart from underlining the large potential for trade and investment, India and Serbia agreed to strengthen coordination and cooperation in the United Nations and other multilateral forums.

Serbia: President Murmu, counterpart Vucic agree to strengthen cooperation in UN, hold delegation-level talks

Addressing a press briefing in Serbia, President Droupadi Murmu said that she and her Serbian counterpart Aleksandar Vucic discussed important aspects of bilateral relationships and global and regional issues of common interest."We agreed to strengthen our coordination and cooperation in the United Nations and other multilateral fora," read the Press Statement of President Droupadi Murmu.Recently, the UN General Assembly president has said the UN Security Council (UNSC) has become "paralysed" and "dysfunctional" in its "present form."The UNSC was last reformed in 1965 when it increased its nonpermanent members from 11 to 15 and increased the necessary votes for the adoption of resolutions from 7 to 9.At the 2005 World Summit, all Heads of States and Governments unanimously pledged themselves to an agenda for early and meaningful reform of the United Nations.India is of the view that the international community needs to make more determined efforts to revitalize the General Assembly to enable it to fulfill its rightful role as the principal deliberative organ of the United Nations.It is India's belief that no reform of the United Nations is complete without the composition of the Security Council changing to reflect the contemporary realities of the twenty-first century. This requires expansion in the membership of the Security Council in both the permanent and non-permanent categories.India is a member of the G4 [India, Brazil, Japan and Germany] and the L - 69, the grouping of developing countries from Asia, Africa and Latin America that have been at the forefront of inter-governmental negotiations on the reform of the Security Council since 2009, India has relentlessly pursued this cause.The Indian delegation has affirmed that the process of bringing about UNSC reforms should not be seen as an exercise ad-infinitum and called for concrete outcomes on this subject at the earliest through the initiation of text-based negotiations.Meanwhile, President Droupadi Murmu held delegation-level talks with President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia and both Presidents discussed important aspects of the India-Serbia bilateral relationship."President Droupadi Murmu held delegation-level talks with President @avucicof Serbia. Both the Presidents discussed important aspects of India-Serbia bilateral relationship and global and regional issues of common interest," the official handle of Rashtrapati Bhavan tweeted.Calling the relations between India and Serbia during the presser, "unique" since the days of the Non-Alignment Movement, the President said that the relationship between both countries is based on mutual trust, mutual understanding and support for each other on issues of core interest.We remain committed to injecting more ambition into this vital relationship, the President added.During the meeting, President Murmu and Serbian counterpart Vucic agreed to strengthen long-standing bilateral connections, particularly in trade and investment, research and technology (including information and digital technologies), and people-to-people interactions.Furthermore, President Murmu also thanked President Aleksandar Vucic and the people of Serbia for the warm welcome and hospitality."I am delighted to visit Serbia, my first State Visit to any European country. I thank President Aleksandar Vucic and the people of Serbia for the warm welcome and hospitality extended to me and my delegation," she said.On this occasion, I recall the visit of President Vucic to India in 2017, as the then Prime Minister of Serbia. His visit set the tone for further expansion of our bilateral partnership, President Murmu added, according to the official press statement.President Droupadi Murmu reached Belgrade, Serbia, earlier on Wednesday, in the final leg of her two-nation visit to Suriname and Serbia.The ongoing visit by President Murmu marks the first such visit by an Indian head of state to Serbia. In a special gesture, she was received by the Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, and accorded a guard of honour at the Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade.From the airport, the President travelled to Gandijeva Street where he paid his respects at the bust of Mahatma Gandhi.She also interacted with the diaspora and friends of India at a Community Reception hosted by the Ambassador of India to Serbia, Sanjiv Kohli, in Belgrade on Wednesday.ANI08 June 2023

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Dubai International Chamber launches International Partners Network

Dubai, June 8: Dubai International Chamber (DIC), one of the three chambers operating under Dubai Chambers, has launched the International Partners Network, a new platform to enhance cross-border dialogue and cooperation between DIC and trade promotion agencies, commercial attaches, and business councils.

Dubai International Chamber launches International Partners Network

The launch of the network was attended by more than 100 representatives from these organisations. During the event, Mohammad Ali Rashid Lootah, President and CEO of DIC, delivered a keynote address on the importance of cross-border cooperation for businesses. He also highlighted the chamber's efforts to support businesses in expanding into new markets.Hassan Al Hashemi, Vice President- International Relations, Dubai Chambers, commented, "We are in the process of reshaping and enhancing the role of country-specific business councils operating under the umbrella of Dubai Chambers. We are engaging with embassies and consulates in the UAE, as well as foreign trade and commercial offices that work with them, to establish several new business councils that will cover countries that are currently not represented by existing business councils.""Our goal is to empower these councils and commercial offices to expand their efforts to promote cross-border business opportunities and boost trade and investment flows between Dubai and other markets," he added."The international partners network is an ideal and exceptional platform for exchanging visions, ideas and proposals, introducing cooperation opportunities, encouraging dialogue, engaging target groups in efforts to stimulate a business environment, launching strategic initiatives for the chambers, and opening new channels of interaction, communication and partnership to serve the private sector and business communities in Dubai and these countries," Al Hashemi explained.The International Partners Network will be focused on updating stakeholders on the chamber's attraction and expansion plans, growth plans for its international offices, as well as to capture intelligence from their international counterparts on areas of collaboration and synergy. It supports Dubai International Chamber's strategic objectives of attracting 100 SMEs, 30 MNCs and expand100 Dubai-based companies by the end of 2024.Dubai International Chamber is focused on strengthening partnerships with global corporations, investors and entrepreneurs - working to boost Dubai's status as a major global trading hub. The chamber supports Dubai's vision to expand to new global markets, forge new economic partnerships and support local companies in achieving global success, while also attracting promising talent and investors from across the world. (ANI/WAM)ANI09 June 2023

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Hope all our athletes will make India proud: Union Minister Smriti Irani on Indian Special Olympics contingent

New Delhi, June 9: Union Minister Smriti Irani on Thursday delivered an inspirational message to the Special Olympics Bharat contingent at the National Send-Off ceremony and expressed hope that all the athletes will make India proud.

Hope all our athletes will make India proud: Union Minister Smriti Irani on Indian Special Olympics contingent

Special Olympics Bharat on Thursday organised a torch run and a national send-off ceremony at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, New Delhi, for the Indian contingent that will be travelling for the Special Olympics World Summer Games 2023 in Berlin, Germany which will take place between June 17 to 25.India will be sending a contingent comprising 198 athletes and Unified partners and 57 Coaches to participate across 16 sports at the prestigious event, as per a press release from Special Olympics Bharat.The ceremony was graced by Union Minister Anurag Thakur, Department of Youth Affairs and Sports and Department of Information and Broadcasting as the chief guest for the torch run, Union Minister Smriti Irani, Department of Women and Child Development and Department of Minority Affairs as the chief guest for the send-off ceremony, among other distinguished guests."Our contingent will represent our country in the Special Olympics going to be held in Berlin, where about 190 countries will participate. It is a matter of pride for us that the 102 athletes from India are women. I hope all our athletes will make our country proud," Union Minister Smriti Irani told ANI.The event was divided into two parts -- 'The Flame of Hope' and 'The Send-Off Ceremony'. The Flame of Hope left New Delhi on May 26 and travelled across multiple cities. The torch returned to Haryana from where it was brought to the nation's capital, New Delhi, along with the Haryana athletes who will be travelling to Berlin along with Special Olympics Bharat. The Torch was received by the Guest of Honour, President, Indian Olympic Association, PT Usha and officials of Special Olympics Bharat. The Flame of Torch came to an end with a rousing speech from Hon'ble Union Minister Shri Anurag Thakur.ANI09 June 2023

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They were always in touch with Embassy... Jaishankar after meeting a student back from Ukraine

New Delhi, June 8: After meeting a student, who returned from strife-torn Ukraine, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Thursday said it will be beneficial for the students if the exams are conducted in India.

They were always in touch with Embassy... Jaishankar after meeting a student back from Ukraine

Responding to media queries on the Centre's assistance to Indian students, who returned from Kyiv after the war broke out, the EAM said that they were always in touch with the Embassy."I also met one of the students who returned from Ukraine, and he gave me feedback about how our Embassy supported them during tough times in Ukraine," Jaishankar told ANI.Apart from giving feedback, the student urged to go back and complete his studies, Jaishankar said."I met a student who returned from Ukraine. He wanted to go back and complete his studies there but the situation in Ukraine is not under control yet. It will be beneficial for the students if the exams are conducted in India. They were always in touch with the Embassy....supported them a lot during difficult times," Jaishankar told reporters on Thursday.He later met the victims of the 1984 riots as well. Speaking to ANI, the EAM said, "We heard the problems of the victims of 1984 riots. Some of them were saying that their electricity bills are very high .... which of course are their day to day problems. So, we assured them that all their problems will be addressed."Earlier, in April this year, Ukraine's First Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova conveyed to India during her visit that Indian medical students, who had returned to New Delhi following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, will be allowed to take a key examination from India.According to the official release of the Ministry of External Affairs, Emine Dzhaparova held talks with the Indian side on several issues. Regarding the Indian medical students, the Deputy FM mentioned that Ukraine will allow foreign medical students to take the Unified State Qualification Exam in their country of domicile.Thousands of Indian medical students were left stranded, with their future hanging in the balance, after Russia attacked Ukraine at the end of February 2022.Several of them were evacuated from Ukraine to India.ANI09 June 2023

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Birmingham spinout to develop 20-minute test following surge in sexually transmitted infections

BIRMINGHAM, England: University of Birmingham spinout Linear Diagnostics, which specialises in near-patient diagnostics for sexually transmitted diseases, has received funding to finesse a point-of-care test for rapid diagnosis of gonorrhoea and Chlamydia in men who have sex with men (MSM), and women who have sex with women (WSW).

Birmingham spinout to develop 20-minute test following surge in sexually transmitted infections

The funding from the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) will cover essential work to optimise and validate Linear's platform technology so it can diagnose infection from rectal and pharyngeal (throat) swabs.Gonorrhoea and Chlamydia are both major public health concerns. While Chlamydia remains the most commonly detected sexually transmitted infection in the UK, the UK Health Security Agency recently warned of a surge in gonorrhoea cases, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has noted the rapid increase in multi-drug resistant gonorrhoea, with all confirmed treatment failures except one being pharyngeal infections affecting the throat.The most commonly used tests identify DNA from swabs or urine samples, and require laboratory processing, meaning it can be days or even weeks between testing and result.Brendan Farrell, Chairman of Linear Diagnostics, said For STIs, the rapidity of the testing procedure is key, as patients prefer to get test results quickly and start treatment immediately. We are aiming to produce a testing platform that will meet the WHO stipulations of being easy to use with minimal training, so people can present for testing and collect their treatment in a single visit.Linear Diagnostics' platform technology uses linear dichroism, where a beam of polarised light detects multiple targets in a sample, to provide fast, accurate diagnosis by detecting pathogen DNA in samples. The company's proprietary technologies include a new DNA amplification technique.Linear Diagnostics is now seeking commercial partners to develop a portable, low-cost, point-of-care diagnostic that will identify Chlamydia trachomatis and Neisseria gonorrhoea from a single sample within a 20-minute timescale, making it faster than any current alternative.The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the world's top 100 institutions. Its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers, teachers and more than 8,000 international students from over 150 countries.PRN09 June 2023

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PM Modi, Saudi Crown Prince speak over phone; discuss bilateral, multilateral issues

New Delhi, June 8: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday had a telephone conversation with Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, with both leaders reviewing a number of bilateral, multilateral and global issues, according to a release by the Prime Minister's Office.

PM Modi, Saudi Crown Prince speak over phone; discuss bilateral, multilateral issues

PM Modi also thanked the Saudi Crown Prince for his support during the evacuation of Indian nationals from Sudan via Jeddah.India had launched 'Operation Kaveri' to evacuate its nationals caught up in the Sudan crisis amid intense fighting between the army and a rival paramilitary force. Around 3,000 Indians were stuck in various parts of Sudan, including the capital Khartoum and in distant provinces like Darfur.The operation involved the deployment of the Indian Navy's INS Sumedha, a stealth offshore patrol vessel, and two Indian Air Force C-130J special operations aircraft in Jeddah.PM Modi also conveyed his best wishes for the upcoming Haj pilgrimage, read the PMO release.Meanwhile, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman fully supported India's ongoing G20 Presidency.India holds the Presidency of the G20 from December 1, 2022, to November 30, 2023. The 43 Heads of Delegations, the largest ever in G20, will be participating in the final New Delhi Summit in September next year.The G20 is an informal grouping of 19 countries and the European Union, with representatives of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.The G20 Presidency rotates annually according to a system that ensures a regional balance over time."The two leaders agreed to remain in touch," added the release.ANI09 June 2023

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China forcibly seizes Tibetan farmers land to build hydropower dam: Report

Lhasa [Tibet], June 9: The situation in Tibet continues to raise concerns, with ongoing uncertainty about China's intentions as authorities are forcibly seizing property from Tibetan farmers in Rebgong County, Qinghai Province, with an excuse to construct a hydropower dam, according to Tibet Press.

China forcibly seizes Tibetan farmers' land to build hydropower dam: Report

According to Tibet Press, Locals have been warned to cooperate and abandon their land, with the threat that their compensation will be withheld for those who refuse to give their land. The order was issued on May 23, 2023, by Langya village authorities, which are roughly an hour's drive from Rebgong. It required seven villages in the area to relocate so that the Chinese government could start the first phase of construction ten days after the notice was issued.This dam is one of the major initiatives of China's 13th Five-Year Plan and has a total area of 4.58 million square metres and will cost Yuan 245 million to build.Rebgong, also called Tongren in Chinese, is a Tibetan-populated area of the Qinghai province of China. It is situated in Malho, sometimes called Huangnan. The reservoir region of the project is home to the Tibetan settlements Shu-Ong-Kye, Shu-Ong-Nyi-tha, Langya, Malpa-Jam, Malpa-Kharnang-Kharshi, and Malpa-Chauwo. It is predicted that the development of the reservoir would start soon. According to Tibet Press, peasants would be compelled to move to towns and cities in search of temporary employment if local officials seized their property.The policy of rural urbanisation, the forcible relocating of Tibetan nomads and farmers to urban areas, and the ongoing settling of considerable numbers of Han Chinese in Tibet are all examples of China's efforts to compel the incorporation of Tibetan minorities into the Han-Chinese-dominated majority.Chinese infrastructure and development projects in Tibet have led to frequent clashes with Tibetans, who accuse Chinese firms and local officials of improperly confiscating land and disrupting the lives of local people, Tibet Press reported.This issue is not new and traces back to China's invasion of Tibet in 1951, resulting in a continuous deterioration of Tibetan lives. Ever since the protests in 2008, more than 150 Tibetan monks have self-immolated. The torture, mistreatment and deaths of thousands from Chinese state repression have resulted in repercussions that are felt even today. Note that 87,000 people died when China invaded Tibet in 1951. Countless more have died in the subsequent years and the toll is telling.The cultural and ethnic identity of Tibet is being erased systematically by China.Today, relatives of Tibetan protestors are routinely harassed, thrown into prison for "re-education" denied political and medical rights, and even killed if deemed to be a threat. The treatment of nomadic herders who lived in Tibet has been even worse. More than a million nomads have been forced to leave the grasslands with a ridiculous plea that this move is meant to protect the ecology of the grasslands, Tibet Press reported.After two years of living in urban environments, most were forced to abandon their new homes to use them as tourist centres and for government housing. The year 2017 witnessed a state-sponsored forced resettlement wherein Tibetan nomads returned to the grasslands without the animals that were their main means of livelihood. By 2018, Chinese security forces in the region were forcibly promoting "bilingual education" by arresting anyone promoting the Tibetan mother tongue and related issues as an 'underworld gang crime'.Following Xi Jimping's directive to improve security in the region, various organs of the Chinese state including, the Public Security Bureau, the State Security Bureau, the United Front Work Department, the Religious Affairs Bureau, the TAR Internet Affairs Office, and the Internet Management Department jumped to establish political achievements. There is no authentic information about the extent of secret trials being conducted in the region, Tibet Press reported.With the introduction of cash rewards for spilling the beans on 'dissidents, cadres at every level of government are making the lives of remaining Tibetans in the region even more difficult. A recent Freedom House report lists Tibet as the worst country to live in the world. Another feature of Chinese rule in Tibet is the political re-education camps.China has criminalized any form of social activism in the region and is hard at work to try and destroy the influence of any form of traditional leaders at the grassroot levels under the excuse of eradicating 'mafia-like gangs. There is a massive database of Tibetans in the region wherein anyone affiliated with dissidents is deprived of political rights and access to jobs and healthcare.Tibet is one of the issues that China remains sensitive about globally. This translates in practice to the United Front Works Department (UFWD) which operates to subvert opposition to the CCP, both within China and overseas. Apart from confusing ethnic minorities on their rights of self-determinism and setting up a false narrative, the UFWD is also active internationally with the objective of co-opting ethnic Chinese individuals and communities abroad, Tibet Press reported.The spy case against the Overseas China Affairs Office was a prime example of the UFWD in action. The launch of the 'China Association for Preservation and Development for Tibet Culture' is an "NGO" that has been set up by the UFWD for the sole purpose of defrauding the world on China's human rights track record in Tibet. Another institution that is being led by former top CCP officials is the 'China Society for Human Rights Studies' which deeply studies foreign human rights in the US as a propaganda tool.The presence of government-sponsored non-governmental organizations is an obstructionist tact that China is utilizing to establish itself as a paragon of human rights in front of the United Nations.According to UN sources, more than 23 Chinese NGOs have falsified data in the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UNCESCR) to defend China's track record of breaking international treaties and covenants it is party to. The 'rule of law' is noticeably absent in China, where there was the infamous 709 crackdown against more than 300 lawyers, paralegals and assistants, Tibet Press reported.Three years after the whistle-blower Li Wenliang died of Covid, China is still standing firm in maintaining its stance on the pandemic in the international arena. China's game plan in Tibet become clear from three UN reports released in February 2023. These reports state that nearly one million Tibetan children have been separated from their families and sent to residential schools run by the CCP.Tibet Press claims that in these schools, Tibetan children are forced to learn Mandarin with a curriculum that teaches them about Chinese culture and are indoctrinated with CCP ideology. In Marc 2023, the UNCESCR expressed concern at China's "coercive boarding school system and expressed concern over the CCPs attempt to undertake large-scale erasure of Tibetan identity and culture.There is a clear and present danger to the Tibetan people from the CCP. One way or another, the Communist Party aims to Sinicize all of Tibet and its people. This being the objective, it is not surprising that the record of their actions makes their intentions crystal clear. The lesson learnt is that Tibetans the world over must unite and rally behind their brethren in Tibet. Unless this happens, China will soon subsume the Tibetan identity within Han China and then it will be too late.ANI09 June 2023

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Las Vegas police probe multiple UFO sightings in a night

Las Vegas, June 9: Police in Las Vegas have investigated multiple reports of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) sightings that occurred on the night of April 30, a media report said.

Las Vegas police probe multiple UFO sightings in a night

According to body camera footage obtained by USA Today, an officer drove to a family's residence on that night after they called 911 to report the sighting.One of the family members told the officer they saw "a big creature" that was "long, 10 feet tall".The officer told the family that he was looking into the claims because another cop saw something in the sky that matched the family's description eight minutes earlier."I'm not going to BS, you guys. One of my partners said they saw something fall out of the sky, too, so that's why I'm kind of curious," USA Today on Thursday quoted the officer as saying in the body camera footage."It's weird just the fact that our partner saw something at the exact time," he added.Meanwhile, another nearby resident also called 911 on the same night to report about something "100 per cent not human" on their property, Las Vegas-based local TV station 8 News Now reported.A separate body camera footage showed a glowing object flying in the sky.About 40 minutes later, another man called 911 to report two unknown entities in his backyard after he and his family saw a similar object fall from of the sky, according to 8 News Now."There's like an 8-foot person beside it and another one is inside us and it has big eyes and it's looking at us and it's still there," the man said, according to the police dispatch audio posted by the TV channel."In my backyard. I swear to God this is not a joke, this is actually -- we're terrified."The man described the creatures as large and somewhere between 8 to 10 feet tall and appearing like aliens with big mouths, big shiny eyes.The developments come as the powerful House Oversight Committee of the US House of Representatives is planning to hold a hearing on UFOs after a former intelligence official claimed that the Washington government has allegedly found crashed alien spacecraft.On Monday, the former intelligence official, David Grusch, had said that the government has a covert program focused on recovering debris from crashed, non-human origin spacecraft and is attempting to reverse-engineer the technology, ABC News reported.During a hearing in April, Director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Sean Kirkpatrick told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his agency was reviewing 650 incidents dating back decades but "found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics".But last week, Kirkpatrick said that the total number of incidents had grown to "well over 800 cases".Between 2004 to 2022, the US government has received more than 510 reports of UFOs, according to a declassified version of an annual report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published in January this year.IANS09 June 2023

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Kauvery Hospital, Radial Road, Kovilambakkam, Chennai Commemorated World Brain Tumour Day with Inspiring Connect Support Group Event

NewsVoir, Chennai, June 9 Kauvery Hospital, Radial Road, in observance of World Brain Tumour Day on June 8th, organized a special event for the Brain Tumour Support Group - Connect.

Kauvery Hospital, Radial Road, Kovilambakkam, Chennai Commemorated World Brain Tumour Day with Inspiring Connect Support Group Event

The event brought together patients and their families to share their experiences and organised events where they engaged in various performances and interactive sessions, fostering a sense of community and support.World Brain Tumour Day is an annual global initiative to raise awareness about brain tumours and their management. Recognizing the significance of providing a support network for individuals facing brain tumours, Kauvery Hospital, Radial Road has actively organized this event for the Connect Support Group. This year's event at Kauvery Hospital, Radial Road saw an inspiring gathering of patients and their families.Dr K Sridhar, Director of the Kauvery Institute of Brain and Spine @ Kauvery Hospital, Radial Road emphasized the invaluable role of support groups for brain tumour patients. He stated that, "The importance of a support group for brain tumour patients cannot be overstated. It provides a platform for patients and their families to connect, interact, and support each other during difficult times while instilling hope and optimism for the future."The event witnessed patients and families sharing their personal stories, experiences, and triumphs, creating a solid bond among participants. The power of listening to others' narratives helped patients realize that they are not alone in their journey, fostering a positive outlook and renewed determination.The Connect Support Group was established by Dr K Sridhar approximately six years ago with the vision of creating a supportive community for brain tumour patients and their loved ones. The group has played a pivotal role in providing emotional support, guidance, and a sense of belonging to countless individuals.Kauvery Hospital, Radial Road remains committed to enhancing the quality of life for patients by organizing events like the Connect Support Group. The hospital strives to create an environment of compassion, understanding, and encouragement, enabling patients to navigate their journey with strength and resilience.Kauvery Hospital, Radial Road is a renowned healthcare institution that provides comprehensive and compassionate medical care. With a focus on patient-centric services, the hospital offers a wide range of specialities, including Neuro Sciences, Cardiac Sciences, Women and Child Care, Gastro Sciences, Renal Sciences, 24/7 Emergency Care. Kauvery Hospital, Radial Road is committed to promoting overall wellness and improving the lives of individuals in its community.(Disclaimer The above press release has been provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)ANI09 June 2023

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Kajol deletes all her Instagram posts, says facing one of the toughest trials

Mumbai, June 9: Actor Kajol on Friday informed her fans that she is facing one of the toughest trials of her life and has decided to take a break from social media.

Kajol deletes all her Instagram posts, says facing one of the toughest trials

Taking to Instagram, Kajol shared a picture stating "Facing one of the toughest trials of my life."Along with the post, she wrote, "Taking a break from social media."Not only that, she has deleted all the pictures and videos from her handle.Kajol did not mention the reason behind this action.As soon as fans noticed this, they flooded the comment section.One of the users wrote, "I hope that the break does you great good and I wish you the very best as you navigate the tough parts of life. Prayers and love."Another commented, "You are strong enough to face any problem.soon you will overcome."Meanwhile, on the work front, Kajol will be seen in an upcoming web series 'The Good Wife'.The series is an Indian adaptation of the American courtroom drama of the same name starring Julianna Margulies in the lead role The show has seven seasons and concluded in 2016. Kajol will be seen as a housewife who goes back to working as a lawyer after her husband's scandal lands him in jail. Directed by Suparn Verma it will stream on Disney+ Hotstar.She will also be seen in 'Lust Stories 2' along with Neena Gupta, Tamannaah Bhatia, Vijay Varma, Mrunal Thakur, Angad Bedi, Amruta Shubhash, Tillotama Shome and Kumud Mishra.ANI09 June 2023

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Study reveals how immune system trip wire that detects COVID-19

California, June 9: Inflammasomes are part of a complex network of molecular sensors that our bodies utilise to detect infection. However, immunologists have been intrigued by the processes behind these sensors, which activate responses to dangers such as invading infections.

Study reveals how immune system trip wire that detects COVID-19

University of California San Diego researchers disclose a previously undiscovered manner that the immune system recognises some viruses in a new study. CARD8, an inflammasome immune protein, they discovered, may act as a trip wire to identify a variety of viruses, including SARS-Cov-2, which causes COVID-19.Researchers lead by Matt Daugherty of the School of Biological Sciences and colleagues from the University of Washington and UC Berkeley discovered that CARD8 acts differently between animals and even amongst people in the human population. The findings, which came from a series of tests involving human cell lines and an examination of CARD8 genetic diversity in mammalian species, were published in the journal PLOS Biology."In a version of CARD8, we found that some humans have lost the ability to sense coronavirus infections based on a single genetic difference but have gained the ability to sense viruses in a different family, the enteroviruses--which includes rhinovirus (common cold) and poliovirus," said Daugherty, an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biology. "So that means it's an evolutionary tradeoff and CARD8 diversity in humans impacts which viruses can be sensed and which ones cannot."The research team found that the bat version of CARD8 is not able to sense coronaviruses. This could explain how coronaviruses are able to infect bats so easily and become a virus "reservoir."The findings provide evidence that CARD8 has evolved substantially across different species of mammals and individual humans. According to the authors, "Our findings establish CARD8 as a rapidly evolving, polymorphic, innate immune sensor of positive-sense RNA viruses."Daugherty said researchers have only found the tip of the iceberg in terms of the way immune sensors sound the alarm about pathogens and infection."It's amazing to see this evolutionary balance of one virus to another going from sensing to not sensing--it's mind-blowing," said Daugherty.More studies are needed to thoroughly determine CARD8's role in the severity of COVID-19 infections and long COVID symptoms."It is tempting to speculate that diminished CARD8 inflammasome activation may be a contributing factor to variation in COVID-19 disease outcomes, and more generally for other human pathogenic coronavirus and picornavirus infections," the authors note.ANI09 June 2023

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Millersville University & Academic Partnerships to Launch Online Graduate Degree Programs

MILLERSVILLE, Pa: Millersville University today announced the expansion of its online portfolio of graduate degree programs, proudly supported by Academic Partnerships. Launching in the Fall of 2023, the online graduate programs will appeal to students seeking an alternative option to on-campus education.

Millersville University & Academic Partnerships to Launch Online Graduate Degree Programs

Through this partnership, Millersville will offer its highly sought-after Nursing programs, Integrated Scientific Applications and Emergency Management degrees online.The online programs includeNursingMSN in Nursing Education OnlineMSN in Nursing Leadership OnlineMSN in School Nursing OnlineIntegrated Scientific ApplicationsMS in Integrated Scientific Applications - Weather Intelligence and Risk Management OnlineMS in Integrated Scientific Applications - Geoinformatics OnlineEmergency ManagementMS in Emergency ManagementWith a student-centered approach, Millersville is recognized as one of the top public universities for academics and community engagement in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. Partnering with AP to make critical programs like nursing more accessible to students is aligned with MU's mission of being a community dedicated to high-quality education at an exceptional value.Academic Partnerships is honored to partner with Millersville University as they increase access to their high-quality graduate degree programs, said Fernando Bleichmar, CEO of Academic Partnerships. Millersville has a rich history of serving its students in the PASSHE system and throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. We are excited to work side-by-side with Millersville as they expand their footprint and impact.Founded over 160 years ago in historic Lancaster County, Millersville University has become one of the most highly regarded universities in the Northeast. With a supportive and enriching environment, MU is an integral part of the community.Millersville University is a powerful economic multiplier. It is connected to the local community, school systems, businesses and the local labor market. This partnership with AP only strengthens our standing in the local and regional community by extending our program offerings further, says Dr. Gail Gasparich, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost.AP, a leading online facilitator focused primarily on adult learners, is a partner to approximately fifty-five universities, primarily regional universities, across North America. AP's mission of expanding access to top-quality, affordable and workforce relevant education makes it an excellent fit with the University to grow its portfolio of programs.For more information or to apply for these programs, please visit https//online.millersville.edu/PRN09 June 2023

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PWSC Appoints Paul Weckerly as President and CEO

CHANTILLY, Va: Professional Warranty Service Corporation (PWSC) today announced the promotion of Paul Weckerly to President and CEO. He succeeds Tyler Gordy, who led the company from 2017 to 2023.

PWSC Appoints Paul Weckerly as President and CEO

Weckerly joined PWSC as Vice President and General Counsel in 2018 and has played a critical role in its growth over the past five years, making him the clear choice to lead the company going forward.PWSC has been a trusted name in homebuilder warranties since the mid-1990s, and I'm proud of the work we've done in the past few years to continue that tradition, said Gordy. We've maintained the values and expertise that have always made PWSC a world-class partner while making great strides to modernize our approach and mitigate even more risk for our customers. Paul has been instrumental in everything we've done, so I leave knowing the company could not be in better hands.Gordy and Weckerly have guided PWSC through phenomenal growth together. In the past two years, they've re-branded the company, introduced new technologies and launched a suite of successful products, including a builder's risk insurance program and a warranty program for property managers. Their crowning achievement occurred last year when PWSC was acquired by PCF Insurance Services, a top 20 U.S. insurance brokerage firm.Paul's proven ability to navigate complex risk management challenges in the homebuilding industry, as well as his strategic mindset, will help PWSC continue its growth trajectory, said Jenni Lee Crocker, President of PCF Insurance Services. He will strike the perfect balance of consistency and innovation for the PWSC leadership team.Weckerly possesses 20 years of homebuilding and construction defect litigation experience. As the company's new leader, he's driven to continue PWSC's growth through a continued focus on quality, thought leadership and the industry expertise for which PWSC is known.We really have something special at PWSC, and I'm both thrilled and humbled to have the opportunity to lead PWSC through its next phase, said Weckerly. Our team has hands-on homebuilding experience that enables us to bring a unique perspective when serving our clients. When you pair that with our strong carrier relationships and a supportive parent company like PCF, it's a true differentiator.About PWSCPWSC is a nationally recognized warranty and insurance provider, protecting more than 1.9 million homes, homeowners, and America's top builders and property managers. As the housing market continues to evolve, so does PWSC. With over a century of combined in-house builder experience with multiple top 10 builders, the PWSC team leads the charge in offering groundbreaking, comprehensive risk management solutions to the residential construction and real estate industries. For more information, visit pwsc.com.About PCF Insurance ServicesA top 20 U.S. broker headquartered in Lehi, Utah, PCF Insurance Services is a leading full-service consultant and insurance brokerage firm offering a broad array of commercial, life and health, employee benefits, and workers' compensation solutions. Propelled by its people, PCF Insurance's agency-centric operating model and entrepreneurial environment support its tremendous growth profile, offering partner agencies alignment through equity ownership, significant leadership incentives, and resources. Ranked #20 on Business Insurance's 2022 Top 100 Brokers and #13 on Insurance Journal's 2022 Top Property/Casualty Agencies, PCF Insurance is a notable leader in the insurance space, with 3,100 employees across the U.S. Visit pcfins.com for more information.PRN09 June 2023

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UK: Manchester University flags cyber security breach, detects unauthorised activity

Manchester, June 9: An incident of a cyber security breach was reported by Manchester University on Friday, with officials confirming that some of their systems have been accessed by unauthorised parties.

UK: Manchester University flags cyber security breach, detects 'unauthorised activity'

"Regrettably, I have to share with you the news that the University is the victim of a cyber incident. It has been confirmed that an unauthorised party has accessed some of our systems and data have likely been copied," the University of Manchester informed through a release today.The university said internal specialists were working around the clock with established professional external support. "We are investigating what information has been accessed, and we'll keep you informed as new details emerge," the university said in the release.The investigation into the cyber security breach was underway, with relevant authorities, including the Information Commissioner's Office, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the National Crime Agency and other regulatory bodies looking into the matter."We know this will cause concern to members of our community and we are very sorry for this. Our priority is to resolve this issue and provide information to those affected as soon as we are able to. We are focusing all available resources," Patrick Hackett, registrar, secretary and chief operating officer was quoted as saying in the release.The varsity advised enhanced vigilance in light of the incident and the need to pay heed to suspicious emails."You should be vigilant to any suspicious phishing emails. The NCSC has guidance for individuals advising on how to protect against the impacts of data breaches Data breaches guidance for individuals and families - NCSC.GOV.UK. There is also guidance on phishing. University IT Services have also published advice," the release said.The university added that it will keep providing updates as soon as it has new information to offer.ANI09 June 2023

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The Truth about Kajols facing toughest trial of my life cryptic post is out

Mumbai, June 9: Actor Kajol on Friday left her fans worried by sharing a cryptic post about her life on Instagram.

The Truth about Kajol's facing toughest trial of my life cryptic post is out

In the post, she mentioned that she is "facing one of the toughest trials" of her life.To deal with her struggles, the 48-year-old said she had decided to take a break from social media.She even deleted and archived all her other Instagram posts.The post left her fans confused and concerned.However, after leaving her fans guessing on what she was hinting at and if all was well with her, the actor later clarified that the cryptic postwas part of a promotional strategy for her upcoming OTT series 'The Trial Pyaar, Kaanoon, Dhoka'.The web series was earlier titled 'The Good Wife'. Kajol put out an update on her earlier post by sharing a post from Disney+Hotstar, on her Instagram handle.'The Trial' is an Indian adaptation of hit American courtroom drama 'The Good Wife' starring Julianna Margulies in the lead role. It began airing in 2009.The show ran for seven seasons and wound up in 2016.Kajol will essay the role of a housewife, who goes back to working as a lawyer after her husband's scandal lands him in jail. Directed by Supan Verma, it will stream on Disney+Hotstar.Kajol also has 'Lust Stories 2' in her kitty.ANI09 June 2023

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Why Gujarati director Nidhi Purohit took 9 years to make debut film I Wish

Ahmedabad, June 9: When we met Nidhi Purohit for the first time she was a novice filmmaker trying to navigate her way in the Gujarati film industry. The year was 2014 and she was working on her first film 'I Wish' as a writer and director. The energy in the young team in their makeshift office was palpable.

Why Gujarati director Nidhi Purohit took 9 years to make debut film 'I Wish'

Cut to June 2023, when she finally released the film after nine years of waiting. We sat with Nidhi, 33, to know what made her release the film this month when it was shot in 2016."When I started I was young and disoriented as an artiste. Also, I was newly married. I was still finding my way," Nidhi said candidly. "Eventually, there were creative differences between the team and therefore it got delayed. I guess, the film industry was also not ready to have a female writer-director making a film with a female protagonist."Her film 'I Wish' is the story of Isha and Vismay, who are in love, and their struggle after moving in together. They embark on separate paths of self-discovery to save their love. A musical journey unfolds, filled with hope and uncertainty. Will they find a way back to each other? That's the crux of the 'I Wish' story.Nidhi came from a small coastal town in Saurashtra called Veraval with no background in films. "My past experience was traumatic and therefore I chose to be an independent filmmaker," she said. "I will only get a producer on board when I'm sure I can make the film a box-office success."Continuing with her story, Nidhi said "To make films you need money and therefore, I took up a corporate job in an MNC in Mumbai. I was the vice- president of their multi-media department. I did it purely for money to fund my films. Whatever I saved -- Rs 15-20 lakh -- I put into producing films."Nidhi has also worked with a Gujarati entertainment magazine as an editor. And she was associated with a celebrity chat show on a news channels as creative director and writer.She added "I worked for two years and half to fund my passion. I always knew I wanted to do something around stories and I'm happy that I'm finally doing it. You can't even imagine the joy of a person whose film is released after nine years of being in the process. The movie is equally relevant now, it doesn't look dated, and that's a win for us."Nidhi is now in the Gir doing a recce for an upcoming film project. Also, she has two independent web series in English all set to release. "I trust the process and the Almighty. I finally left my corporate job to be a full-time independent filmmaker. The universe always says 'Your wish, my command'. Isn't that so?"IANS09 June 2023

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Entrepreneurs at CODE 2023 Founders Conference Organized by Expand of Business

NewsVoir, New Delhi, June 9 Expand My Business, a B2B marketplace for digital services, is excited to organise CODE - India's Largest Digital Convention, a prestigious gathering that acknowledges the indispensable role that events play in providing entrepreneurs with access to the right community and resources.

Entrepreneurs at CODE 2023 Founders' Conference Organized by Expand of Business

With a mission to facilitate meaningful connections between startups and their ideal network, CODE is all set to unite a community of entrepreneurs, investors, CXOs, and industry leaders from across India.The Convention is going to be a great platform for startups to showcase their ideas and services to a large audience. Attendees should seize the opportunity to attract potential partners and investors. Pradeep Kumar, the esteemed CEO of Neil Patel Digital India, will be one of the speakers at CODE. His address on "Power of Personalisation in Digital Marketing" is eagerly awaited, and will take place during CODE's Founders' Conference, scheduled to be held on June 11, 2023, at Hall No. 5, Pragati Maidan, New Delhi.Adding to the excitement, leading industry giants such as Google Cloud, MongoDB, Shopify, HSBC, Yellow.AI, Neil Patel Digital India, Prooh.ai and Internshala Jobs have joined hands with CODE as their sponsors. Their involvement highlights the event's potential to drive innovation and growth in the startup ecosystem.Moreover, featuring a captivating lineup of industry leaders like Mr Shireesh Joshi, CBO of ONDC, Aastha Grover, Head of Startup India, Ankit Agarwal, Founder of InsuranceDekho, and Raja Agrawal, Head of Microsoft Azure - Middle East and Africa, among others, CODE will offer a unique opportunity for attendees to gain deep industry knowledge from 50+ seasoned professionals.Nishant Behl, the Founder and CEO of Expand My Business, emphasises the significance of events like CODE. He shares, "We have personally witnessed the transformative power of events, as they have helped us connect with our first clients, suppliers, and partners. Our aim is to provide similar opportunities to India's startup community through CODE. With over 200+ exhibitors, 50 keynote speakers, and more than 10,000 attendees, CODE will be the biggest startup event of the year."For more information about CODE 2023 and to secure your place, please visit the official event website at .Expand My Business is Asia's largest digital solutions platform dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship and innovation. EMB strives to empower entrepreneurs and help them succeed in the global marketplace through its services and initiatives. Through CODE, the goal is to foster a culture of innovation and creativity, and to support the growth and development of businesses of all sizes and sectors.(Disclaimer The above press release has been provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)ANI09 June 2023

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Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

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FBI agents have arrested a Texas businessman at the center of the scandal that led to the historic impeachment of state Attorney General Ken Paxton
Unfortunately, everyone sees the guns and drugs. They dont see the person. Hes 18. Their brain hasnt developed. Everybody is carrying guns. You can get weed on the corner of Cunningham and University"
Inflammasomes make up an intricate system of molecular sensors that our bodies use to sound an alarm when an infection occurs. However, the mechanisms behind these sensors, which initiate responses to threats such as invading pathogens, and how they operate has been an area of intrigue for immunologists.

In a new study, University of California San Diego biologists describe a previously unknown way that the immune system detects certain viruses. The inflammasome immune protein known as CARD8, they found, can serve as a trip wire to detect a range of viruses, including SARS-Cov-2, which causes COVID-19.

Adding a twist to their discovery, researchers led by the School of Biological Sciences' Matt Daugherty and colleagues at the University of Washington and UC Berkeley, found that CARD8 functions differently among various species and even varies between individuals in the human population. The findings, which resulted from a series of experiments across human cell lines and an analysis of CARD8 genetic variation in mammalian species, are described in the journal PLOS Biology.

In a version of CARD8, we found that some humans have lost the ability to sense coronavirus infections based on a single genetic difference but have gained the ability to sense viruses in a different family, the enteroviruses-;which includes rhinovirus (common cold) and poliovirus. So that means it's an evolutionary tradeoff and CARD8 diversity in humans impacts which viruses can be sensed and which ones cannot." Matt Daugherty, associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biology

The research team found that the bat version of CARD8 is not able to sense coronaviruses. This could explain how coronaviruses are able to infect bats so easily and become a virus "reservoir."

The findings provide evidence that CARD8 has evolved substantially across different species of mammals and individual humans. According to the authors, "Our findings establish CARD8 as a rapidly evolving, polymorphic, innate immune sensor of positive-sense RNA viruses."

Daugherty said researchers have only found the tip of the iceberg in terms of the way immune sensors sound the alarm about pathogens and infection.

"It's amazing to see this evolutionary balance of one virus to another going from sensing to not sensing-;it's mind-blowing," said Daugherty.

More studies are needed to thoroughly determine CARD8's role in the severity of COVID-19 infections and long COVID symptoms.

"It is tempting to speculate that diminished CARD8 inflammasome activation may be a contributing factor to variation in COVID-19 disease outcomes, and more generally for other human pathogenic coronavirus and picornavirus infections," the authors note.

The research study's authors include: Brian Tsu, Rimjhim Agarwal, Nandan Gokhale, Jessie Kulsuptrakul, Andrew Ryan, Elizabeth Fay, Lennice Castro, Christopher Beierschmitt, Christina Yap, Elizabeth Turcotte, Sofia Delgado-Rodriguez, Russell Vance, Jennifer Hyde, Ram Savan, Patrick Mitchell and Matthew Daugherty.
A final deal cut between President Joe Biden and House Republicans extends the U.S. debt ceiling deadline to 2025 and reins in some spending. The bill signed into law by the president will preserve many programs at their current funding levels, and Democrats were able to prevent any changes to the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Still, millions of Americans are likely to lose their Medicaid coverage this year as states are once again allowed to redetermine who is eligible and who is not; Medicaid rolls were frozen for three years due to the pandemic. Data from states that have begun to disenroll people suggests that the vast majority of those losing insurance are not those who are no longer eligible, but instead people who failed to complete required paperwork  if they received it in the first place.

This week's panelists are Julie Rovner of KFF Health News, Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico, Lauren Weber of The Washington Post, and Jessie Hellmann of CQ Roll Call.

The host

Julie Rovner KFF Health News @jrovner

Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News' weekly health policy news podcast, "What the Health?" A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book "Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z," now in its third edition.

Panelists

Jessie Hellmann CQ Roll Call @jessiehellmann

Joanne Kenen Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico @JoanneKenen

Lauren Weber The Washington Post @LaurenWeberHP

Among the takeaways from this week's episode:

Lawmakers and White House officials spared health programs from substantial spending cuts in a last-minute agreement to raise the nation's debt ceiling. And Biden named Mandy Cohen, a former North Carolina health director who worked in the Obama administration, to be the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though she lacks academic credentials in infectious diseases, Cohen enters the job with a reputation as someone who can listen and be listened to by both Democrats and Republicans.

The removal of many Americans from the Medicaid program, post-public health emergency, is going as expected: With hundreds of thousands already stripped from the rolls, most have been deemed ineligible not because they don't meet the criteria, but because they failed to file the proper paperwork in time. Nearly 95 million people were on Medicaid before the unwinding began.

Eastern and now southern parts of the United States are experiencing hazardous air quality conditions as wildfire smoke drifts from Canada, raising the urgency surrounding conversations about the health effects of climate change.

The drugmaker Merck & Co. sued the federal government this week, challenging its ability to press drugmakers into negotiations over what Medicare will pay for some of the most expensive drugs. Experts predict Merck's coercion argument could fall flat because drugmakers voluntarily choose to participate in Medicare, though it is unlikely this will be the last lawsuit over the issue.

In abortion news, some doctors are pushing back against the Indiana medical board's decision to reprimand and fine an OB-GYN who spoke out about providing an abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio. The doctors argue the decision could set a bad precedent and suppress doctors' efforts to communicate with the public about health issues.

Also this week, Rovner interviews KFF Health News senior correspondent Sarah Jane Tribble, who reported the latest KFF Health News-NPR "Bill of the Month" feature, about a patient with Swiss health insurance who experienced the sticker shock of the U.S. health care system after an emergency appendectomy. If you have an outrageous or exorbitant medical bill you want to share with us, you can do that here.

Plus, for "extra credit," the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: The New York Times' "This Nonprofit Health System Cuts Off Patients With Medical Debt," by Sarah Kliff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg.

Jessie Hellmann: MLive's "During the Darkest Days of COVID, Some Michigan Hospitals Made 100s of Millions," by Matthew Miller and Danielle Salisbury.

Joanne Kenen: Politico Magazine's "Can Hospitals Turn Into Climate Change Fighting Machines?" by Joanne Kenen.

Lauren Weber: The Washington Post's "Smoke Brings a Warning: There's No Escaping Climate's Threat to Health," by Dan Diamond, Joshua Partlow, Brady Dennis, and Emmanuel Felton.

Also mentioned in this week's episode:

KFF Health News' "As Medicaid Purge Begins, 'Staggering Numbers' of Americans Lose Coverage," by Hannah Recht.

Credits

Francis Ying Audio producer Emmarie Huetteman Editor
Autistic individuals often rely on Medicaid for insurance, but the transition to adulthood can, and often does, impact their enrollment status. In continuing to examine how autistic individuals use Medicaid, recent research from Drexel University's A.J. Drexel Autism Institute has identified a trend in intellectual disability diagnoses among autistic young people that is likely indicative of a system-wide problem that makes it difficult for them to maintain coverage into adulthood.

It's estimated that one in three autistic people use Medicaid, with nearly 70% of the enrollees being children. During the transition to adulthood, autistic young adults' coverage can be disrupted for many reasons. At age 19, autistic young adults are reassessed for Medicaid eligibility as an individual -; rather than being allowed to continue coverage as part of their family. At age 21 most states terminate autism support resources provided by the education system, which can also disrupt Medicaid access. And most states don't have autism-specific eligibility criteria included in their Medicaid waivers, and most states that do have autism-specific eligibility criteria only cover children. This means people whose only medical diagnosis is autism may not be eligible to continue Medicaid coverage as an adult.

Medicaid's waiver system is currently set up to allow tailored health care services for individuals diagnosed with an intellectual disability through their transition to adulthood. Intellectual and developmental disabilities are a larger class of conditions, including autism, which is characterized by its social-behavioral differences and repetitive or restricted behaviors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) uses the term intellectual disability when there are limits to a person's ability to learn and function in daily life. For the vast majority of individuals diagnosed with autism or intellectual disability, those diagnoses are made in childhood  typically by age 8.

Previous research has found that during the transition to adulthood, autistic individuals are more likely than their non-autistic peers with intellectual disability to lose their Medicaid benefits and not re-enroll. To examine this more closely, the Drexel team decided to look at whether autistic young people who experienced disenrollment from Medicaid were actually more likely than autistic young people who had not experienced disenrollment to be diagnosed with intellectual disability in adulthood.

Led by Meghan Carey, a doctoral student in the Epidemiology and Biostatistics department in the Dornsife School of Public Health, the research team examined national Medicaid claims data from the 20082016 to study the probability of autistic young people, who did not have an intellectual disability diagnosis in their first year of Medicaid enrollment, receiving an intellectual disability diagnosis later.

We found that one in five autistic individuals, ages 8-25, received an intellectual disability diagnosis during follow-up." Meghan Carey, doctoral student, Epidemiology and Biostatistics department, Dornsife School of Public Health

She also noted that while the co-occurrence of intellectual disability among the autistic population enrolled in Medicaid is common  about 25%  intellectual disability is most often diagnosable in early childhood, especially as children enter school when cognitive testing is delivered more frequently.

"We would expect the number of accrued intellectual disability diagnoses after age 8 to be substantially lower than the observed 19%," said Carey. "Further, the American Psychological Association suggests any newly acquired intellectual disability after age 18 should be diagnosed as a neurocognitive disorder or another diagnosis, unless there was a traumatic brain injury, which is inconsistent with the peaks of intellectual disability accrual at ages 19 and 21 observed in this study."

Because most states don't have autism-specific criteria for Medicaid eligibility, Carey noted the research team hypothesized, and found, that autistic individuals who experience disruptions in Medicaid coverage  or periods of disenrollment  would be more likely accrue an intellectual disability diagnosis later, because in their home state, their autism diagnosis alone was potentially insufficient for retaining Medicaid coverage.

"New intellectual disability diagnoses may help autistic youth with coverage disruptions regain  or when receiving a diagnosis proactively, retain  Medicaid coverage and allow for continued health care service access," said Carey. "However, it may also mean that autistic young people are no longer receiving services related to their autism diagnosis, which could have negative effects on their health."

Carey and her coauthors hope that this research strengthens the call to ensure lifelong Medicaid coverage for autistic people.

One solution to this problem, the team suggests, would be to adjust Medicaid waivers. A change to states' waivers that ensures adequate coverage for autistic people without a co-occurring intellectual disability diagnosis, and ensures continuity in coverage through adulthood, could be an effective approach to mitigate these disruptions to Medicaid coverage -; and the need for people to be reexamined for intellectual disability diagnoses in young adulthood, according to the research team.

"Their service needs don't just end when they become adults," said Carey. "Given Medicaid is a critical safety net insurer and the lifelong needs of autistic individuals, policies aimed at ensuring Medicaid coverage continues from childhood throughout adulthood are essential to meet the health care-related needs for autistic people."
Researchers in the Hermelin Brain Tumor Center at Henry Ford Health are leading a Phase I clinical trial studying the maximum tolerated dose of an oncolytic adenovirus, a mutated virus engineered to selectively replicate in and destroy cancer tissue, in combination with fractionated stereotactic radiosurgery among patients who are undergoing resection of a recurrent high-grade astrocytoma brain tumor.

The participants in this study have progressive high-grade astrocytoma as well as glioblastoma, and are scheduled to undergo repeat surgery. After the removal of as much tumor tissue as possible, a modified oncolytic adenovirus is injected into the wall of the resection cavity and any residual tumor tissue. The goal of this study is to determine the maximum tolerated dose of the injected adenovirus, which is engineered to selectively replicate in and destroy cancer tissue." Tobias Walbert, M.D., Ph.D., principal investigator of the study and co-director of the Hermelin Brain Tumor Center at Henry Ford Health

This treatment is combined with a combination of oral 5-fluorocytosine and valganciclovir prodrug therapy, which are designed to only become toxic once they are inside tumor cells. This is known as "suicide-gene therapy," as these prodrugs cause the tumor cells to self-destruct. Following the surgery to remove as much tumor tissue as possible, patients will be treated with fractionated radiosurgery, which is a process in which the total dose of stereotactic radiation is divided into several doses administered to the patient's remaining brain tumor tissue on separate days of treatment.

"This study will help advance medical research data on oncolytic adenovirus mediated double suicide-gene therapy in patients with high-grade astrocytoma," said Farzan Siddiqui, M.D., Ph.D., co-investigator of the study and radiation oncologist at Henry Ford Health. "Gathering data on the maximum tolerated dose in combination with fractioned stereotactic radiosurgery will be essential to understanding the full potential therapeutic benefit to patients."

When a cancer cell self-destructs, the activated prodrug inside it may be passed on to neighboring tumor cells. This is known as a "bystander effect," and it may allow a single infected cancer cell to not only destroy itself, but also several other cancer cells around it. Additionally, when cancer cells self-destruct in this manner, they may attract immune cells that work to clear the body of dead and dying cells. If many cancer cells self-destruct at once, it may potentially provoke an immune system response against any remaining tumor cells.

Since 1993, Henry Ford's Hermelin Brain Tumor Center has been recognized by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) as a national leader for delivering leading brain tumor therapies. Henry Ford was among a select group of the nation's centers, and the only one in Michigan, chosen to participate in the NCI-funded Adult Brain Tumor Consortium and Brain Tumor Trials Collaborative. As a major contributor to The Cancer Genome Atlas, a landmark cancer genomics program that molecularly characterized over 20,000 primary cancers, the Hermelin Brain Tumor Center at Henry Ford has the third largest tumor bank in the world with more than 3,000 brain tumor tissue samples and corresponding data for treatments and outcomes.
A UCF research team has engineered tissue with human cells that mosquitoes love to bite and feed upon -; with the goal of helping fight deadly diseases transmitted by the biting insects.

A multidisciplinary team led by College of Medicine biomedical researcher Bradley Jay Willenberg with Mollie Jewett (UCF Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences) and Andrew Dickerson (University of Tennessee) lined 3D capillary gel biomaterials with human cells to create engineered tissue and then infused it with blood.

Testing showed mosquitoes readily bite and blood feed on the constructs. Scientists hope to use this new platform to study how pathogens that mosquitoes carry impact and infect human cells and tissues. Presently, researchers rely largely upon animal models and cells cultured on flat dishes for such investigations.

Further, the new system holds great promise for blood feeding mosquito species that have proven difficult to rear and maintain as colonies in the laboratory, an important practical application. The Willenberg team's work was published Friday in the journal Insects.

Mosquitos have often been called the world's deadliest animal, as vector-borne illnesses, including those from mosquitos cause more than 700,000 deaths worldwide each year. Malaria, dengue, Zika virus and West Nile virus are all transmitted by mosquitos. Even for those who survive these illnesses, many are left suffering from organ failure, seizures and serious neurological impacts.

Many people get sick with mosquito-borne illnesses every year, including in the United States. The toll of such diseases can be especially devastating for many countries around the world." Bradley Jay Willenberg, Biomedical Researcher, College of Medicine, University of Central Florida

This worldwide impact of mosquito-borne disease is what drives Willenberg, whose lab employs a unique blend of biomedical engineering, biomaterials, tissue engineering, nanotechnology and vector biology to develop innovative mosquito surveillance, control and research tools. He said he hopes to adapt his new platform for application to other vectors such as ticks, which spread Lyme disease.

"We have demonstrated the initial proof-of-concept with this prototype" he says. "I think there are many potential ways to use this technology."

Captured on video, Willenberg observed mosquitoes enthusiastically blood feeding from the engineered tissue, much as they would from a human host. This demonstration represents the achievement of a critical milestone for the technology: ensuring the tissue constructs were appetizing to the mosquitoes.

"As one of my mentors shared with me long ago, the goal of physicians and biomedical researchers is to help reduce human suffering," he says. "So, if we can provide something that helps us learn about mosquitoes, intervene with diseases and, in some way, keep mosquitoes away from people, I think that is a positive."

Willenberg came up with the engineered tissue idea when he learned the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was looking for new in vitro 3D models that could help study pathogens that mosquitoes and other biting arthropods carry.

"When I read about the NIH seeking these models, it got me thinking that maybe there is a way to get the mosquitoes to bite and blood feed [on the 3D models] directly," he says. "Then I can bring in the mosquito to do the natural delivery and create a complete vector-host-pathogen interface model to study it all together."

As this platform is still in its early stages, Willenberg wants to incorporate addition types of cells to move the system closer to human skin. He is also developing collaborations with experts that study pathogens and work with infected vectors, and is working with mosquito control organizations to see how they can use the technology.

"I have a particular vision for this platform, and am going after it. My experience too is that other good ideas and research directions will flourish when it gets into the hands of others," he says. "At the end of the day, the collective ideas and efforts of the various research communities propel a system like ours to its full potential. So, if we can provide them tools to enable their work, while also moving ours forward at the same time, that is really exciting."

Willenberg received his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Florida and continued there for his postdoctoral training and then in scientist, adjunct scientist and lecturer positions. He joined the UCF College of Medicine in 2014, where he is currently an assistant professor of medicine.
Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development Algernon Yau highlighted Hong Kong's unique advantages and vast potential for Hungarian companies and entrepreneurs during his two-day visit to Budapest, Hungary, that began on June 8.



After attending the Ministerial Council Meeting of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development in Paris, France, Mr Yau proceeded to Budapest to meet Hungarian government officials and the business community to update them on Hong Kong's latest trade and economic developments, and exchange views on further collaboration in various areas.



The commerce chief pointed out that Hong Kong has all along maintained close bilateral trade relations with Hungary.



In 2022, bilateral merchandise trade between Hong Kong and Hungary amounted to HK$17.8 billion. Hungary was Hong Kong's seventh largest trading partner among the European Union member states. Around 11.4% of the total merchandise trade between Hungary and Mainland China is routed through Hong Kong.



Mr Yau stressed that with Hong Kong's unique advantages under one country, two systems, the city is an ideal gateway for Hungarian companies to tap into the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area markets and participate in the Belt & Road Initiative.



He also briefed officials and business leaders there about Hong Kong's new initiatives on attracting enterprises and investments to create a strong impetus for growth.



Mr Yau today met Hungarian National Bank Deputy Governor Csaba Kandracs, Hungarian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs & Trade Levente Magyar and Hungarian State Secretary for Economic Development & National Financial Services Mate Loga to learn more about the country's economic development and monetary and fiscal policy.



He also took the opportunity to visit Q Contemporary, which is an art museum founded by a Hong Kong-born businesswoman.



On June 8, apart from attending a roundtable luncheon with members of the Hungary-Hong Kong Business Association, Mr Yau had meetings with Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary Istvan Jakab and President of Hungarian Chamber of Commerce & Industry Laszlo Parragh to exchange views on fostering closer economic and trade co-operation between the two places.



Later in the day, he seized the occasion to meet Acting Chinese Ambassador to Hungary Yang Chao during a dinner engagement to keep him abreast of the latest developments in Hong Kong.
Japanese carmaker Toyota will invest $328 million more in a plant in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, it said on Thursday, as it looks to adapt its production processes for a new hybrid model of its Tacoma pickup truck.

The new version of the Mexican pickup will be hybrid electric, which means Guanajuato will now form part of the companys electrification production strategy," Toyota said in a statement.

The funds will help adapt manufacturing for the new Tacoma model for a North American market, it added.

Also Read: 2024 Lexus GX SUV Globally Unveiled, To Go On Sale by Early Next Year

Toyota has invested close to $1.2 billion in Guanajuato since it announced the plant, it added, saying the factory provides more than 2,500 jobs.

The announcement followed a visit from Guanajuato governor Diego Sinhue to Japan.

Carmakers worldwide are shifting production away from internal-combustion engines to more electric-powered vehicles as they seek to comply with the advent of more stringent emissions rules intended to curb the worsening impacts of climate change.

Although Mexico, a key car manufacturing hub, produces large numbers of electric vehicles, many are exported to countries such as the United States because they remain too costly and impractical for drivers in much of Mexico, which lacks a thorough network of charging stations.

Mexico has about 1,100 charging stations, mostly clustered in large cities, restricting long-distance EV drives. Hybrid vehicles, however, could be a step forward until there is more investment in EVs, according to industry analysts.

In March, Tesla said it would open a gigafactory" in the northern state of Nuevo Leon, as the electric vehicle behemoth looks to expand its global output.

At last years COP27 climate summit, Mexico, the Americas third-biggest greenhouse gas emitter, pledged 50% of its auto sales would be zero-emissions vehicles by 2030 and said it would ramp up its clean energy capacity.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, revealed that he had a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently in the capital city of India. During their discussion, Altman expressed admiration for Indias remarkable tech ecosystem and explored ways for the country to leverage artificial intelligence. Altman shared his enthusiasm for the conversations he had with various individuals in the Prime Ministers Office.

During a conference, Altman stated that the organization responsible for ChatGPT is not currently engaged in training GPT5, the successor to GPT4. Altman emphasized that there is a significant amount of work to be done before reaching the development stage of GPT5 and that it is still distant on the horizon.

Altman expressed that his team is currently focusing on generating new concepts required for GPT5, but emphasised that they are far from commencing its development. He highlighted the importance of conducting additional safety audits and mentioned that he is unable to provide a specific timeline for the release of the next GPT.

These remarks from Altman reflect the growing apprehension among AI researchers and leaders in the tech industry regarding the rapid advancement of AI technology. In March, prominent figures such as Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and Twitter, and Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple, penned an open letter urging AI labs to temporarily halt training AI systems more advanced than GPT-4 for a minimum of six months.

Following the open letter signed by more than 1,100 global AI researchers and executives, calling for a pause in all giant AI experiments," Altman acknowledged that although the letter lacked technical nuance, OpenAI had not initiated training for GPT-5 and had no immediate plans to do so.

Altman further admitted in May, during his testimony at a US Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., that if generative AI technology malfunctions, the consequences can be significant.

This statement came as US Senators expressed their concerns about AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Altman emphasized the need for government regulation in the AI industry due to its increasing power.
Indias Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran on Friday said maintaining economic growth while ensuring sustainability is important, and the government has increased investments on the ground, rather than revenue expenditure. He said this is the best way to develop the economy.

Speaking at an event on Building a Resilient Economy with various industry leaders in Lucknow, the CEA said India Inc has improved its balance sheet, reduced debt and increased profitability.

He also said because of Indias sound economic policy, infrastructure built in the past eight years and digital transformation, it is possible for India to grow for a longer period rather than 3-4 years without running into overheating problems.

He also said India has the potential to growth 10-11 per cent in nominal terms.
Stocks to watch June 9: The Nifty futures contract traded on the Singapore Exchange indicates a positive start to domestic equities. The contract was trading at 18,756.50, up 36 points or 0.19% from the previous close.

Aether Industries: Aether Industries Limited has inked a license agreement with Saudi Aramco Technologies Company for the commercialisation of the sustainable Converge polyols technology.

L&T Finance Holdings: The Board of Directors of the Company has recommended a final dividend of Rs 2 per equity share for the financial year 2022-23.

Arihant Capital Markets: A meeting of Board of Directors of the Company will be held on June 15, 2023, to consider and approve issuance of secured unlisted redeemable non-convertible debentures (NCD) on a private placement basis.

Urja Global: Urja Global Limited entered into Agreement on June 7, 2023, with Tesla Power India Private Limited for the purpose of manufacturing and supply of batteries under the TESLA POWER USA brand.

Ex-dividend shares: Asian Paints, Bhansali Engineering Polymers, Caplin Point Laboratories, Cigniti Technologies, Dynamatic Technologies, Elecon Engineering Co, HDFC Asset Management Company, Himadri Speciality Chemical, Indian Hotel Co, National Fertilizers, NRB Bearings, Solar Industries India, and Voltas.

Blue Dart: Logistics firm Blue Dart Express, on Thursday, has appointed Sudha Pai as the chief financial officer (CFO) of the company with effect from September 1, 2023.

Tata Power, Tata Steel: Tata Power Renewable Energy through its subsidiary TP Vardhaman Surya Ltd received a contract to set up a 966 MW round-the-clock hybrid renewable power projects for Tata Steel. The project has the hybrid renewable capacity of 379 MW solar and 587 MW wind power, a company statement said.

Hindustan Aeronautics: A meeting of the Board of Directors of the Company is scheduled on June 27, 2023, to consider and approve a proposal of sub-division of equity shares of the Company.

Biocon: The companys Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) manufacturing facility located in Bangalore has received a certificate of GMP compliance from the Competent Authority of Germany, following an EU GMP inspection that was conducted in February 2023.

IRB Infrastructure Developers: The toll collection for IRB Infrastructure Trust grew 24 per cent on-year to Rs 201.18 crore, up from Rs 162.64 crore in the previous year.

Abans Holding: The companys subsidiary Abans Agri Warehousing & Logistics is executing a contract to sell its entire 100 per cent stake in Shanghai Yilan Trading Co. to Forever Trading F.Z.C. for a composite consideration of Rs 41 lakh.
The UPSC Civil Services results have been announced, and candidates from Rajasthan have emerged as winners. Among them is Abhijeet, a resident of Arjun Nagar, Jaipur, who secured AIR 440.

This achievement has brought immense joy to his family. Abhijeet acknowledges his parents and teachers for their contribution to his success during an interview. After dedicating himself and putting in consistent effort, he achieved this milestone in his second attempt. Abhijeet prepared for the exam while staying at his home in Jaipur.

A noteworthy aspect of Abhijeets journey is that he had previously secured a job in a reputable company after graduating from IIT. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he found inspiration in Prime Minister Narendra Modis speech urging people to transform adversity into opportunity.

Motivated by this, Abhijeet decided to take a different path and once again set his sights on the UPSC exam, ultimately achieving success.

Abhijeets father, Anoop Singh, serves in the police department. Before his UPSC preparations, Abhijeet received a job offer with a salary of INR 35 lakh. However, his primary motivation was not driven by monetary considerations.

Abhijeet understood that true happiness would come from pursuing a career in civil services. Guided by this mindset, he persevered and put in considerable effort, ultimately achieving success in the UPSC examination of 2022.

Upon their sons accomplishment, Sarita (Abhijeets mother) and Savitri (his grandmother) expressed immense pride and happiness. They acknowledged Abhijeets tremendous dedication and hard work. Although Abhijeet faced initial failure in his first attempt, his family supported and motivated him, encouraging him not to give up.

Abhijeet is making another attempt at the UPSC exam 2023 to improve his rank. If he achieves a higher rank this time, it would be satisfactory. However, if his rank remains the same as before, he will begin training for the service he qualified for based on his previous rank. Abhijeet emphasizes the importance of intrinsic motivation, believing that it should always be the driving force behind ones actions.
The National Testing Agency (NTA) has issued the examination schedule for the final phase of the Common University Entrance Tests for Undergraduate (CUET UG) 2023. According to the official calendar, the Common University Entrance Tests are scheduled to be conducted from June 12 to 17. Candidates who registered for the CUET UG final phase can check the exam timetable on the official website of NTA at nta.ac.in.

The advance city intimation slips and admit card for the final phase of the CUET UG 2023 are not scheduled yet, they will be released on later dates. All those candidates who have not been issued Admit Card / City Intimation Slip yet or any of the Test paper(s) opted by them in the Application have not been scheduled yet, will be scheduled in Phase 6 i.e., 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 June 2023, reads the official notice. While, June 21, 22, and 23 will serve as the buffer dates. This will be the final phase for the CUET UG 2023.

Also read| From DU Admissions to NEET UG Result, Major Academic Events Lined Up in June

The exam conducting body successfully administered the CUET UG 2023 in four phases. Phase 1 was held from May 21 to 24, phase 2 took place from May 25 to 28, phase 3 spanned from May 29 to June 2, and Phase 4 was conducted from June 5 to 8. Currently, Phase 5 is underway and will end on June 11.

NTA is conducting the CUET UG 2023 in computer-based test (CBT) mode for around 14.99 lakh registered candidates at several exam centres placed in different cities across India and abroad.

The Common University Entrance Test is being held in 13 languages  English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. The test is conducted for candidates seeking admission to undergraduate courses in central universities and other participating universities, autonomous colleges, institutions, organisations.
The Delhi Police is looking for three associates of a 22-year-old man who was arrested in connection with the alleged molestation and attempted kidnap of two female students inside the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus, an officer said Thursday.

The JNU Students Union (JNUSU) had on Wednesday alleged that some inebriated men in a car had come to the campus Tuesday night and attempted to kidnap two students. They also got into a fight on campus, it said.

Two cases were registered in the matter after students approached the police, one for physical assault and another for molestation-kidnapping bid, the student group said.

The arrested youth has been identified as Abhishek, a resident of Gurgaon, police had earlier said.

Abhishek used to live in Munirka village and had shifted to Gurgaon around four to five months ago. He has completed his graduation and is currently preparing for the MBA, sources said.

According to sources, Abhishek was driving the car when the alleged incidents took place.

Initial investigation revealed that four people had come to the campus to meet a person and also to eat. It has also been revealed that they were not known to the victims.

The three other persons who were with Abhishek at the time of the incident, all residents of Munirka village, have been identified and raids are being conducted to nab them, sources said.

According to police, Abhishek has said he had come to the campus twice on Tuesday to meet a student, however, his versions are being verified.

Two complaints  one regarding physical assault and another on molestation, attempt to kidnap  have been received from JNU students. Cases have been registered.

In both cases, the accused and the vehicle are the same and have been identified, Deputy Commissioner of Police (southwest) Manoj C had said Wednesday. Hours after the incident, the security department of JNU announced that the entry of outside vehicles into the campus will be restricted from 10 pm to 6 am.
Bigg Boss 16 alum Sumbul Touqeer Khan has revealed that her father, Touqeer Khan, is getting married again. The actress, who was brought up by her single father, revealed that her father will be remarrying in a wedding ceremony next week. It is reported that Sumbul and her sister Saniya convinced Touqeer to give marriage another chance and with the help of their uncle, the wedding is taking place.

Speaking with Bombay Times, Sumbul said, We are very happy and looking forward to welcoming them into our family. We are very excited about it. Our father has been our greatest source of inspiration and support for the past many years. Our bade papa Iqbal Hussain Khan (he was seen on Bigg Boss 16 during the family week) played an important role in this alliance. I am grateful to him."

Who is Sumbul Touqeer Khans stepmother?

The publication reported that Sumbuls father is getting married to Nilofer. It is said that Nilofer was previously married and separated from her husband. She has a daughter from the first marriage named Izra.

What has Sumbul been upto?

Sumbul has been busy with work and personal life. She recently revealed she lost her cat. The actress, who was away from social media after she lost her cat named Clouds, returned to the social media platform last Saturday and shared a video to thank fans for their support in the past few weeks.

In the video shared on her Instagram Stories, Sumbul looked visibly affected with recent turn of events. She said,, Everyone knows the last two weeks of my life were not very smooth, it was actually very difficult, but all I wanna say is thank you to each and everyone of you for cheering me up. I have seen a few tweets and messages, thank you so much." She also has been in the news after her friend, actor Fahmaan Khan made shocking allegations about her and her father.
Donald Trump said Thursday he has been indicted over his handling of classified documents after leaving office, the US ex-presidents most serious legal threat yet as a firestorm of criminal investigations imperil his bid for a second White House term.

What does this mean? News18 simplifies it for you:

What Has Happened?

Donald Trump, the former US President, is facing serious legal trouble. Hes been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his fancy Florida estate. This case has caught everyones attention because its one of the most significant in the history of the Justice Department.

These federal charges are a big deal for Trump. Just a few months ago, he was already charged in New York with 34 felony counts for falsifying business records. So, hes facing multiple legal battles at once, Associated Press reports.

Now, lets talk about what makes Trumps situation different from other politicians who have dealt with similar issues.

What are the Charges?

The charges against Trump involve seven counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, as reported by sources familiar with the indictment, Associated Press explained in its report.

These charges include accusations of willfully retaining national defense information, obstruction of justice, making false statements, and conspiracy. Its important to note that these details are provided by individuals who are knowledgeable about the indictment but are not authorized to discuss it publicly.

In response to the charges, Trumps lawyer, James Trusty, appeared on CNN and confirmed the nature of the indictment.

Meanwhile, Trump himself took to his Truth Social app to address the situation. In a video post, he proclaimed it as a DARK DAY for the United States of America." He firmly asserted his innocence and expressed his determination to prove it unequivocally and swiftly. Interestingly, within a remarkably short span of 20 minutes after the news broke, his 2024 presidential campaign sent out a fundraising appeal to his supporters, informing them of the indictment and requesting financial support.

The situation continues to unfold, and it remains to be seen how Trumps legal team will proceed.

How is It Different from Other Similar Cases?

Both current US President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence were found to have classified documents, but the circumstances surrounding their cases differ significantly from Trumps situation.

Heres how:

In the cases of Biden and Pence, classified documents were discovered at Bidens think tank and Pences Indiana home, respectively. However, their lawyers promptly notified authorities and facilitated the handover of the documents. They also authorized federal authorities to conduct further searches for any additional relevant materials.

Crucially, there is no indication that either Biden or Pence had prior knowledge of the existence of these records before they were found. Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that either of them attempted to conceal the discoveries. This is a significant factor because the Justice Department typically considers willfulness when deciding whether to pursue criminal charges.

Regarding President Biden, a special counsel was appointed earlier this year to investigate how classified materials ended up at his Delaware home and former office. However, even if the Justice Department were to find the evidence sufficient for prosecution, the Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a sitting president is immune from criminal charges during their time in office.

In the case of Vice President Pence, the Justice Department recently informed his legal team that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against him regarding his handling of the documents.

These contrasting developments highlight the distinctions in how the cases of Trump, Biden, and Pence have unfolded, both in terms of the handling of classified documents and the legal implications involved.

When then-FBI Director James Comey explained the decision not to charge Hillary Clinton in 2016 regarding her handling of classified information, he emphasized that charges typically arise in cases involving clear instances of intentional and willful mishandling of classified information, according to a report by MSNBC.

These charges may also be brought forth when significant volumes of materials are exposed in a manner that suggests intentional misconduct, or when there are indications of disloyalty to the United States or efforts to obstruct justice.

So, What Will Happen to Trump Now?

The Justice Department has yet to publicly confirm the indictment, and no charges have been officially filed in a public manner.

According to Trump himself, he claimed to have received a summons to appear in a Miami court on Tuesday afternoon. However, it remains uncertain whether Trump intends to attend the scheduled appearance or what the procedural details will entail.

In a prior case in New York, when Trump faced charges from the Manhattan district attorney, he voluntarily surrendered to authorities. During that occurrence, he underwent the booking process behind closed doors and subsequently appeared in the courtroom, where he sat alongside his legal team at the defense table.

AFP, Associated Press contributed to this report
Plans to topple the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government and method to trap Eknath Shinde and Anil Parab" are among the top points mentioned in the chat transcripts attached by the police to the chargesheet filed in Amruta Fadnavis bribery-extortion case.

A day before the Malabar Hill police station in south Mumbai (on February 20) registered an FIR against Anil Jaisinghani, the bookie reportedly messaged Amruta: Last shivratri (March 1, 2022) you said to make MVA government fall and how to trap Eknath Shinde and Anil Parab, that also I have all recordings and proof dont worry"

A report in Times of India stated that the chargesheet, with attached chat transcripts, mentioned that in the conversation with a handle purportedly of Maharashtra deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis wife, Jaisinghani sent a series of videos.

Whatever I have sent is absolutely true and factual, you tell me if it is lie. I hope you must have heard that *camera never tells lie* and Im even ready for narco are you?" he added.

Amruta reportedly responded: What is this cash issue? Why r u doing this thing to a straight person?" The document is also accompanied by videos prepared by Aniksha Jaisinghani purportedly to frame the deputy CMs wife.

The Uddhav Thackeray-led MVA government, comprising Shiv Sena (UBT), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), and Congress, fell in June 2022 following the rebellion by Eknath Shinde and 39 MLAs of Sena against the leadership of Thackeray. Subsequently, Shinde took oath as the CM with the support of the BJP and Devendra Fadnavis became deputy CM.

The report stated that the transcripts show Amruta was in regular touch with the Jaisinghanis even after filing the FIR. The police was quoted as saying that it was according to their advice in a bid to trace the location of Jaisinghani, absconding for seven-eight years.

The chargesheet, filed recently before a special court in Mumbai, has listed several purported telephonic chats between Amruta Fadnavis and the Jaisinghanis.

READ | If You Are Wrongly Framed, I Can Talk to Devenji, But: What Amruta Fadnavis told Anil Jaisinghani

According to one of the conversations, suspected bookie Anil Jaisinghanis daughter, Aniksha, had once told Amruta that they can earn huge sum of money" by giving information about bookies to cops and getting them arrested.

The 793-page document has named Anil Jaisinghani, his daughter Aniksha and his cousin Nirmal as accused in the case related to demanding bribes and trying to extort money from Amruta Fadnavis. It has included screenshots of purported WhatsApp chats and messages exchanged between Amruta Fadnavis and the father-daughter-duo.

The police had booked Jaisinghanis for allegedly threatening to make public certain audio and video clips that purportedly show Amruta Fadnavis accepting favours from Aniksha.

In one of the purported chats, Amruta Fadnavis expressed apprehension that Devendra Fadnavis may divorce her as their relationship was not going well since 2019", according to the chargesheet.

Threatening to leak certain videos and audios, Ankisha Jaisinghani, in one of her messages to Amruta Fadnavis, said, Didiji, my father knows that you and honble Devendra sir will use police against him and police will say that video is fake, but it will not help as my father is in regular contact with Sharad Pawarji and Uddhav Thackerayjis and he will give all video and audio recording to them and to Modiji, according to the chargesheet.

According to an official, Aniksha Jaisinghani had shot a video of a bag being filled with currency notes worth Rs 1 crore and sent the clip to Amruta Fadnavis from another mobile number after the complainant blocked her number.

They are very serious and will be a big political issue, all TV and newspapers in the country will use this against Devendra Fadnavis and he will have to resign from deputy chief ministers post and your career will also finish, her message read.

All the three accused were arrested after the FIR was filed in February. Aniksha Jaisinghni and Nirmal are currently out on bail, while Anil Jaisinghni is in jail under judicial custody.

(With inputs from PTI)
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who is also the convenor of the North-East Democratic Alliance (NEDA), is set to visit the violence-hit state of Manipur on Saturday. Sarma is set to meet his Manipur counterpart N Biren Singh and discuss issues leading to large-scale violence in the state last month.

Ever since Manipur was first rocked by violence, the protestors have made their discontent and distrust of the chief minister and his cabinet very apparent. Political leaders of both BJP and Congress have been attacked as well. However, Union Home Minister Amit Shahs recent visit to the state brought hope. Peace was restored to a certain extent and curfew was also relaxed in some places.

On the other hand, Naga MLAs in Manipur on Friday addressed the media in Dimapur and said, We met the Union Home Minister Amit Shah on June 7 in Delhi. We have made it clear that if any arrangement is made for separate administration as being demanded by Kukis in Manipur, they should not include the places inhabited by Nagas. If any such decision is made, Centre should have a proper discussion with the Nagas in Manipur.

Home Minister Amit Shah has stated that the matter will be discussed but first restoring peace to Manipur is of utmost importance. We, as NAGAs have extended full support to restore peace in Manipur. Regardless of any political party, Nagas in Manipur have come together for the common cause, they added.
The Town of Cottonwood Fire Department has added a new truck to its fleet.

Engine One, manufactured by Deep South Fire Trucks of Seminary, Mississippi, is a 2,000 gallon-per-minute pumper with a 1,700 gallon on-board water supply that will assist in reducing the ISO fire rating of the Cottonwood Fire Departments 45 square-mile service area. Engine One is equipped with ISO and NFPA compliant equipment.

Around 17 volunteers make up the Cottonwood Fire Department. Those individuals operate Engine One, Engine Three, a 1,500 gallon per minute pumper, a 3,500-gallon tanker, an off-road brush firefighting truck, and Engine Two, a 1000 gallon-per-minute pumper with 500 gallons on board.

The Cottonwood Fire Department responds to about 100 calls annually and due to continued growth in the area, the department needed another pumper.

The town paid $306,000 for the new equipment. The Houston County Commission also gave Cottonwood $68,000 toward the purchase.
In another gruesome killing reported from Indias Tech Capital Bengaluru, a womans head and one hand was found nearby Suvarnamukhi hill. The police also nabbed three accused.

According to TOI, the woman was a home-alone widow near Bannerghatta and was reportedly killed by her tenants due to some property dispute. Earlier, the police found the dead woman in a nearby drain.

The womans torso was the only body part found by police in the murder case, however, there was an interesting twist when the Bengaluru Rural District police arrested three accused from the site where the body parts of the woman were found.

According to police, the arrested accused are three of the womans former tenants. Preliminary investigation revealed that they allegedly murdered her after she refused to transfer a portion of her property to them, TOI reported.

The police combed the nearby Suvarnamukhi hill and recovered her head and arm based on the information given by the accused.

On June 2, cops spotted the decomposed torso from a drain in Janata Bande Colony, Bannerghatta and confirmed it was of R Geeta, the woman who was allegedly murdered by the tenants.

Cops suspected her tenants from Bihar to be the assailants as seven of them suddenly vanished, TOI reported.

Police are now searching for the other hand and two legs killers. The probe is underway.
In a big relief to vehicle owners, the Uttar Pradesh government has cancelled all traffic challans for private as well as commercial vehicle owners in the state pending from 2017 to 2021.

According to the official order, all traffic challans issued between January 1, 2017, and December 31, 2021, regardless of the vehicle type will be cancelled, Livemint reported.

The move was in accordance with UP Ordinance Number 2 of June 2023.

UP Transport Commissioner Chandra Bhushan Singh has given directions to all Regional Transport Officers (RTOs) in the state to remove these traffic challans from the e-challan portal after getting the list of the court regarding abated cases.

An official, cited by Hindustan Times, also highlighted that farmers in Noida were protesting for the cancellation of such challans.
Mumbai girls hostel guard, accused of raping and killing and 18-year-old student, reportedly climbed up a drainage pipe in a duct at the back of the building to the first floor. Investigators said that accused Om Prakash Kanojia then went in through a gap and took the stairs to the fourth floor where the victim was alone.

Kanojia, who also worked as a laundry man in the same hostel near Charni Road in south Mumbai, raped and strangled the girl inside her room on the fourth floor early Tuesday morning. The victim was a resident of Akola in Maharashtras Vidarbha region and had come to the city to pursue computer engineering in a Bandra college.

A report in Times of India quoted investigators probing the case as saying that they believe Kanojia may have forced the latch of the girls room through an opening above the door as the police have found fingerprints.

The security guard had killed himself on nearby railway tracks minutes after leaving the hostel at 4.44am on Tuesday. Investigators are now trying to establish if the fingerprints belong to Kanojia.

The report stated that police have been trying to work out how the 35-year-old accused reached the fourth floor since the internal gate of the hostel is locked at night and the working CCTV camera in the front porch did not record him trying to get it.

Prima facie, it seems the accused had climbed the drainage pipe till the first floor and walked up the stairs. His chappals were found lying near the pipe. The drainage pipeline area is near the place where Kanojia used to work as a laundryman. There was no CCTV camera," a senior police officer was quoted.

How Many Pipes Did Kanojia Climb?

Interestingly, the report stated, Kanojia was captured by one camera trying to climb a pipe in another part of the building. However, he did not succeed and left the hostel.

It is still not clear when did Kanojia go to the fourth floor and how many hours he spent there as only six cameras were working. The TOI report stated that other cameras, including the ones on the fourth floor, were defunct.

On this portion, all the windows have grilles installed. So its not clear why he was trying to climb from there," the officer was quoted by TOI.

It is believed that before leaving the hostel, Kanojia is likely to have gone to the place where he worked and put on another pair of slippers as his body was found with footwear.

The report stated that the forensic experts have collected fingerprints from the victims room, her clothes, the accuseds hair, nail and his clothes for examination. The final autopsy is still awaited. While initial information stated that she was strangled using a dupatta, the interim report said she was strangulated with her own leggings.

ALSO READ | Mumbai Hostel Murder: Teen Raped, Strangulated with Dupatta; Suspect Guard Found Dead on Tracks

Compensation & Reaction

According to the TOI report, the police are compiling a proposal for compensation to the victims family under the Manodhairya scheme, for children and women who have been victims of sexual crimes and acid attacks.

The victims father and one of her friends had told the police that the accused security guard, who hailed from Uttar Pradesh, used to harass her, NCP spokesperson Mahesh Tapase said.

Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi leader Prakash Ambedkar, meanwhile, visited the Marine Drive police station on Thursday and met the victims family. He said there should be a thorough inquiry into how Kanojia reached the fourth floor.

Later in a tweet, he said that the social justice department of the Maharashtra government which runs the hostel had been very lax and action should be taken against the concerned officials.

The father of an 18-year-old student has sought a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The girls family members visited the Marine Drive police station and demanded action against those responsible for the incident, including a warden of the hostel.

The womans family members, who had initially refused to accept her body, collected it on Thursday for last rites. Police say the accused died, but his face can not be seen (identified). Police are saying they identified the accused from a kada (iron bangle) in his hand. Something is fishy," he said, asking why would the accused commit suicide.
Was more than one shooter present in the Lucknow courtroom, where gangster Sanjeev Maheshwari, alias Jeeva, 48, was killed during a hearing on Wednesday? How many firearms were used by the assailant?

Crucial unanswered questions like these and many more are under investigation as the Uttar Pradesh (UP) Police tries to find out the exact sequence of the incident and the motive behind the murder of Maheshwari, the close aide of gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari. He had 26 criminal cases against him, dating back to 1995.

ALSO READ | Who Was Sanjeev Jeeva? Before Taking to Crime, Gangster Was Family Man with Compounders Job

The questions popped up soon after the First Information Report (FIR) and postmortem report of Maheshwari came to the fore.

WHAT DOES THE POSTMORTEM REPORT SAY?

According to the postmortem report, there were 16 bullet wounds on Maheshwaris body. They include eight entry and eight exit wounds, ranging from 11 cm to 2x2cm. Of the total bullet wounds, 12 were on his torso and four on his limbs. It also implies that eight or more than eight bullets were fired.

#BreakingNews: Three-member SIT to probe #Lucknow Civil Court firing in connection with Gangster Sanjeev Jeeva murder case CNN-News18's Amit Singh shares more details #UttarPradesh | @anjalipandey06 pic.twitter.com/XAuFcCiwQD  News18 (@CNNnews18) June 8, 2023

WHAT DOES THE FIR SAY?

According to the FIR filed by sub-inspector Udai Pratap Singh, Maheshwari was brought to the courtroom around 11:30 am for a court hearing.

Around 3:15 pm, Maheshwari sought permission to go to the toilet. While he was returning amid tight police security from the toilet to the courtroom, a man dressed as a lawyer opened fire at Maheshwari after which he fell to the ground.

In the incident, policemen, including Lal Mohammed, Kamlesh Chaudhary and a two-year-old girl, too, suffered bullet injuries.

Police arrested the shooter, identified as Vijay alias Anand Yadav who hails from Jaunpur district and recovered a revolver and six cartridge shells from the crime scene. The FIR was lodged under multiple sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), including section 302 for murder, section 307 for attempt to murder, section 332 for causing hurt to public servant in the discharge of his duty, section 353 for assault or use of criminal force against public servant as well as Section 7 of Criminal Law Amendment (CLA) Act.

WHAT DO FIREARMS EXPERT SAY?

According to a firearm expert, who is part of the investigation, Maheshwari was shot dead using a Czech-made .357 bore Magnum Alfa series revolver, with six rounds of fire capacity.

ALSO READ | Who is Eliminating UPs Gangsters? Jeevas Murder After Atiq & Ashrafs Raises Targeted Killing Suspicion

Rahul Raj, deputy commissioner of police (DCP), West Lucknow, said the matter is still under investigation and it will be too early to comment. He said that further investigation would reveal the actual sequence of events and the motive behind the killing.

Meanwhile, the state government has announced a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the murder.
Regular activities resumed in Kolhapur city of Maharashtra after the recent violence during a demonstration against the alleged use of Tipu Sultans image and an objectionable audio message as social media status by a few locals, but police personnel continue to be deployed in large numbers across the city, especially at sensitive places, an official said on Friday.

Internet services, which were snapped following the violence, are being resumed gradually, some local residents said.

Tension gripped the city on Tuesday after two men allegedly put 18th-century Mysore ruler Tipu Sultans image along with an offensive audio message as their social media status. The next day, the police had to disperse hundreds of protesters after they hurled stones during a demonstration at Shivaji Chowk against the alleged use of Tipu Sultans image. At least 36 people have been arrested and cases registered in connection with the violence, police said.

Kolhapur Superintendent of Police Mahendra Pandit said the situation is getting back to regular activities are taking place in the city.

The order on keeping the internet services shut was applicable till 10 am on Friday. The nodal officers of the internet service providers have already been communicated through the order, but it takes some time to fully activate all the service towers," he said.

Talking about the probe in connection with the violence, Pandit said, Some more people have been identified, but they are still absconding. We are examining the footage from the CCTV cameras installed at the shops around the place where the violence broke out. The process of identifying the suspects is on." He added that police personnel continue to be deployed at key places across the city as a precautionary measure.

The police deployment at sensitive places is continuing to be there in Kolhapur city and the district. A total of 60 police officers and 300 other personnel are guarding the city and more than 1,000 home guards are on their toes in the district. Besides, four companies of the State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) are also deployed," the SP said.
Railway Board apprehended a 42-year-old man, who claimed that his mother had died in last weeks three-way train crash in Odishas Balasore in an attempt to land a government job, officials said on Thursday.

According to a Hindustan Times report, the accused was identified as Sanjay Kumar, a resident of Patna. Kumars mother actually died in 2018, officials said, adding that post the Balasore train accident, he travelled to New Delhi to meet railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and seek a job for himself.

When Kumar reached Vaishnaws residence, he was directed to Rail Bhawan in order to meet the minister. It was then that he approached the ministers office and was apprehended after he kept changing his statements, a railways official was quoted by Hindustan Times as saying.

A Railway Board official stated that Kumar approached officials claiming that his mother was travelling in the Coromandel Express that crashed into a goods train and died in the accident.

However, we got suspicious when we found that he did not have any proof of his mothers travel, the official said.

A second Railway Board official said when Kumar was asked to show information about his mothers travel, he could not provide them.

He claimed that he booked the ticket via a travel agent but did not remember his name. He could also not prove that his mother was on the waiting list," the official added.

Kumar, however, did provide the officials with his mothers photograph. We started searching for his mother at all the stations at which the train had halted before the accident. Our aim was to locate her with facial recognition technology. However, when we could not locate her at any of the stations, we grew more suspicious," the official was quoted by Hindustan Times as saying.

It was then that Kumar admitted to lying about his mothers death. The official, on the condition of anonymity, said that Kumars mother had died in 2018 but when the ministry announced ex-gratia payment to the family of deceased passengers, Kumar saw an opportunity and decided to approach the minister and ask him to give him a job instead of the compensation amount.

The official added that Kumar had been unemployed for a long time and was depressed about it.
In a fresh twist to the brutal murder of Saraswati Vaidya, allegedly by her live-in partner Manoj Sane in Mumbais Mira Road, the couple had exchanged garlands in a temple, but there was no legal confirmation of their wedding, police sources citing the victims sisters told CNN-News18.

Saraswati Vaidya had been in contact with her three sisters and had informed them about the temple marriage with her live-in partner Manoj Sane, according to police officers familiar with the case

The development comes after Sane told police that he was HIV-positive and never had any physical relationship with the 36-year-old Vaidya.

According to latest updates regarding the case, Saraswati has four other sisters. At a very young age, Saraswatis parents separated. Following the separation, she lived with her mother, but her mother passed away within a few years, officials said.

After her mothers demise, the victim and her sisters resided in an orphanage in Ahmednagar. She attended Jankibai Aapte Balika Ashram in Ahmednagar, where she studied from 1st to 10th standard and stayed for over ten years," they said.

Upon turning 18, she left the orphanage and stayed with her sister in Aurangabad for four years. She later relocated to Mumbai, where she came into contact with Manoj Sane, they said.

Sane assisted Saraswati in finding employment and accommodation as she was facing challenges in securing a job in Mumbai. Manoj also offered his house in Borivali for her to stay," according to officials

During their time together, they fell in love and decided to marry. Although they desired an official marriage, they ultimately got married in a temple," an official added.

Saraswati Vaidya Introduced Manoj Sane as Uncle

After their stay in Borivali for the past seven years, the couple moved to Mira Road on the outskirts of Mumbai. Saraswati had some of her educational documents stored in the Ashram, which required her regular visits to the Ahmednagar Ashram accompanied by Manoj Sane. During these visits, she would introduce Manoj as her uncle.

Currently, statements from three sisters are being recorded and DNA tests will be conducted, the police said. These statements hold significant importance as the sisters were in constant communication with Saraswati," officials said, adding following forensic examination, the body parts will be handed over to her sisters for the final rites.

Police Dismiss Accuseds HIV+ Theory as Misleading

The recent revelation contradicts Sanes previous statement to the police, in which he asserted that Saraswati died on the morning of June 3 after consuming poison. Sane said he decided to dispose Vaidyas body after observing foam coming out of her mouth, fearing that he would be held accountable for her death. He further stated that he had planned to commit suicide after disposing of the body parts, according to a police official.

Following the statement, the police had announced that the claims would be verified and acknowledged the possibility that the accused might be attempting to mislead the investigators.

After recording statements from Saraswatis sisters, the police have also refuted Sanes claims of being HIV-positive" due to the use of infected blood during a past accident-related treatment."

Regarding the claim related to HIV, the police stated that there is no merit to the information. The accused is attempting to mislead the investigation by introducing such theories," officials said.

Even if the claim were true, it would not have any impact on the ongoing investigation," they added.

Accused From a Wealthy Family

Manoj Sane, the accused in the Mira Road murder case, resided in Borivali before relocating to Mira Road. Coming from a wealthy family, the Sane family has a building named after them.

Manoj is the owner of flat number 702 in Sane Residency. Currently, the flat is being rented out, with tenants occupying it for the past three years. Prior to that, Manoj had two other tenants who paid a monthly rent of Rs 30,000.

Similar to Saraswati, Manoj also experienced the loss of his parents at a young age, leaving him orphaned. However, Manojs uncle and cousin reside in the same building. It is worth mentioning that Manoj had severed ties with them nine years ago.

Following the murder, the accused distant family members have expressed shock upon learning about this case.

Mira Road Murder Case

On Wednesday, the police discovered the dismembered body parts of Saraswati Vaidya inside a flat located in the Naya Nagar area of Mira Road in Thane district. Some of the body parts were found cooked in a pressure cooker and others were roasted. The rented flat had been occupied by Vaidya and Sane, as confirmed by the police.

Sane has been remanded in police custody until June 16.
Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to the US this month will set new benchmarks for bilateral ties and big announcements are likely to be made on defence-industrial cooperation and boosting Indias indigenous military base, the Pentagon has said.

Prime Minister Modi will embark on his first state visit to the US at the invitation of President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden this month. During his four-day visit starting on June 21, the US president and the First Lady will host Modi for a state dinner on June 22.

When Prime Minister Modi comes here to Washington for a State Visit later in the month, I think it will be a historic visit setting new benchmarks for the relationship, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner said during a panel discussion at the Center for New American Security on Thursday.

I think it (the visit) will be looked back upon similar to how the Japan Two plus Two earlier this year was a pivotal moment in the relationship. People will be looking back on this visit by Prime Minister Modi as a real springboard for the US-India relationship, he said.

Ratner said US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited India recently to advance a number of bilateral issues and prepare the ground for the prime ministers visit to Washington by finalising particular agreements and initiatives that the two countries are working on.

Among the priorities are clear strategic alignment around the question of co-development and co-production between the United States and India on the defence side. This is a priority for Prime Minister Modi to strengthen Indias indigenous defence industrial base, as well as advancing the military modernisation, he said.

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and his Indian Indian counterpart Ajit Doval here in January launched the initiative for critical and emerging technology (iCET) to try to bolster technology cooperation between the US and India and there is a very strong defence component of that that the two countries are looking to advance.

I know there have been efforts at this in the past. Sometimes theres scepticism around, is it going to be real this time? And my answer is, I think, all signs are pointing toward yes, its going to be real and were going to have some really big, historic, exciting announcements out of the prime ministers visit in terms of particular projects around defence industrial cooperation, Ratner said.

We are also enhancing our operational coordination in a number of different places. A lot of focus on the Indian Ocean, a lot of focus on the undersea domain, as well as new domains, space and cyber and new efforts around information sharing, he said.

If you look at the development of the US-India relationship, its really unbelievable how far the relationship has moved over the last couple of decades. Thats true now more than ever, he said.

Ratner said the two countries are seeing increasing strategic alignment. From our perspective, from Indias perspective, we do share a vision again for a free and open Indo-Pacific. A strong US-India partnership is a critical ingredient to realising that vision.

Thats what both sides have understood that from Indias perspective and from the US perspective, a closer partnership is going to be essential to the manifestation of that vision, he said.

The US, India and several other world powers have been talking about the need to ensure a free, open and thriving Indo-Pacific in the backdrop of Chinas rising military manoeuvring in the region.

China claims nearly all of the disputed South China Sea, though Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all claim parts of it. Beijing has built artificial islands and military installations in the South China Sea.

One of the major thrusts of the bilateral defence relationship and one of the things we were talking about, while we were in Delhi, is this ongoing US effort to support Indias military modernisation," Ratner said.

The integration of our defence industrial base is more co-production, co-development, and I think that is based upon the belief that a stronger India that can defend its own interest and its sovereignty is good for the United States, he said.
Unless youve been living under a rock, youre sure to know Aishwarya Mohanraj, a renowned stand-up comedian, writer, YouTuber, and storyteller. Along with her husband, Aakash Shah, the founder of the marketing agency One Hand Clap, whove recently moved into their stunning home in Mumbai. Lets take a tour of their happy abode designed by Livspace and experience their cozy, welcoming, and aesthetically pleasing space.

Maximizing Space with Minimalism

In a city like Mumbai, where space is at a premium, Aishwarya and Aakash made the most of their 950 sq. ft. 3BHK. By opting for bare walls and minimal furniture in neutral colors, they achieved a spacious appearance. Additionally, they chose sleek furniture pieces, such as a sofa and chaise lounge, to optimize the available space.

Lighting for a Bright and Warm Ambience

Addressing the lack of natural lighting in their 3BHK, they choose 3-in-1 lights that can change colors and tones in each room. This clever lighting solution by Livspace designers created a bright and warm ambience throughout the home, enhancing the overall spacious feel.

Transforming Home with Aesthetic Choices

Aishwarya and Aakash along with the designers focused on choosing the right color theme, lighting, aesthetic furniture pieces, and adding plants to breathe life into the space. These simple modifications transformed their old flat into a stunning new home.

The Artful Use of Green

Aishwaryas favorite color, green, was intelligently incorporated throughout the home. Rather than overwhelming the space, they strategically used tinges of green, which beautifully complemented the overall design like the lower cabinets in the kitchen were green, balanced by muted beige upper cabinets. Similarly, only the headboard in the bedroom showcased the vibrant green color. Plants were placed generously, providing a fresh and natural touch.

Adding Personalized Artwork

To infuse the dining area with a tropical vibe, Aishwarya and Aakash chose a gorgeous tropical-themed artwork. The Livspace team created wall trims to highlight the artwork, seamlessly integrating it with the rest of the homes design.

Striking TV Unit Design

The laminate TV unit in their living room stands out due to its grooved finish. This unit not only offers additional storage space but also meets Aishwaryas requirement for a visually captivating design element.

Aishwarya Mohanraj and Aakash Shahs stunning Mumbai home is a testament to their impeccable taste and creative vision. Despite the challenges of time constraints and rental limitations, they managed to create a warm and aesthetically pleasing heaven that reflects their personalities. From utilizing minimalism to incorporating strategic pops of green, their home is an inspiration for those seeking both comfort and style in a limited space.
Gabriella Demetriades has always been good with her fashion choices and now she is acing maternity style. The South African model is expecting her second child with actor Arjun Rampal. Gabriella makes the most of her summer style through carefree looks and muted colour schemes, but this time she stunned in a unique black cut-out dress that left all expectant mothers with major pregnancy fashion goals.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Gabriella Demetriades (@gabriellademetriades)

Gabriellas attire was from the collection of the fashion brand LPA and had a halter neckline. Her midriffs cutaway details made her growing baby bump stand out. It was emphasised even more with string floss accents. Gabriella accessorised her ensemble with black sliders that also had a cutaway design on their straps, staying true to her comfortable-first aesthetic.

Her outfit was finished off by a middle-parted, tied-up hairdo, a no-makeup look, a small hand-held clutch and a pair of oversized black tinted glasses.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Gabriella Demetriades (@gabriellademetriades)

Gabriella Demetriades proved that maternity clothing is much more than loose-fitting gowns and shapeless dresses. The model looked chic in a printed dress set. Her outfit included a front-open, half-sleeved ochre yellow shirt with black leafy motifs. She wore it over a plunging neckline bralette, which showed off her baby bump. The trouser had the same print and a straight, flared fit. As for her accessories, she went for casual open-toe flats. Lastly, she tied her hair up in a long ponytail and wore large, dark sunglasses.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Gabriella Demetriades (@gabriellademetriades)

Earlier, Gabriella Demetriades shared this gorgeous photo from her maternity shoot to announce her pregnancy. She was dressed in a stunning orange gown by the designer Deme. She wore a sleeveless satin dress with thin strings supporting her plunging neckline. Gabriella opted for subtle, dusky-toned makeup instead of accessories to keep the appearance on the simpler side. Her light brown contours and bronzed cheekbones complemented her cherry-coloured lip tint. She let her long tresses open, which freely flowed over her shoulders.

Arjun Rampal and Gabriella are already parents to Arik, a four-year-old son. Gabriella has also acted in the film Sonali Cable.
ENTERPRISE-A former Enterprise police officer pleaded guilty Thursday to 14 child sex abuse and pornography in Coffee County Circuit days before his jury trial was set to begin.

Tomas Arias, 38, who had been free on $600,000 bond, was immediately taken into custody after pleading guilty to begin his 35 year sentence imposed by Twelfth Judicial Circuit Judge Sonny Reagan.

According to Twelfth Judicial Circuit District Attorney James Tarbox, after the jury had been selected for Arias June 13 trial, Arias entered into a plea agreement with the state wherein he would plead guilty to all charges against him and receive a 35-year sentence to be executed in the Alabama Department of Corrections. Under Alabama law, due to the nature of the crimes for which he has pleaded guilty, Arias will serve his 35-year sentence day-for-day. He will not be eligible for parole or early release.

Arias was arrested by Alabama State Bureau of Investigation agents on Oct. 16, 2019, and charged with 14 felony child sexual abuse and child pornography charges, including five counts of producing pornography with minors, six counts of sexual abuse of a child less than 12 years old, two counts of parent permitting production of pornography with minors, and one count of first degree sodomy.

At an Oct. 16, 2019, press conference, then interim Enterprise Police Chief Michael Moore announced that Arias, a field training officer who has served with the EPD since 2007, had been placed on administrative leave since Oct. 5 when the initial allegations arose. He was terminated on Oct. 8 at the completion of the police internal investigation. Because of its relationship with the suspect, EPD requested that ABI conduct the investigation.

We as police officers have sworn to protect those who cannot protect themselves, and children are the most vulnerable of these, Moore said at the 2019 press conference. The anger and disappointment towards the unbecoming actions of one officer are echoed throughout the Enterprise.

There are no winners today, said Tarbox. This is a sad case but we are grateful that it has finally concluded. This matter was only worsened by the fact that Mr. Arias was a police officer and violated the public trust.

He knew how cases like these are investigated and he knew exactly what process these victims were going to have to go through for an investigation and trial, Tarbox said. I am very thankful for the work of Assistant District Attorney Jeremy Mitchell and our entire office on this case. Jeremy let the way in preparing for trial and our team made sure that these victims were property represented and cared for during this entire process.
GOOGLE DOODLE TODAY 9 JUNE, 2023: Todays video Doodle celebrates Willi Ninja, an iconic dancer and choreographer known as the Godfather of Voguing. An acclaimed performer, Willi paved a path for Black LGBTQ+ representation and acceptance in the 1980s and 90s. The community he created, The Iconic House of Ninja, lives on to this day.

On this day in 1990, the documentary Paris is Burning  which features Willi and the Iconic House of Ninja  was released in the US at the NewFest New York LGBT Film Festival.

The Doodle video was illustrated by Rob Gilliam, and edited by Xander Opiyo,with original music by Vivacious. The performers featured are current members of the House of Ninja (Archie Burnett Ninja, Javier Madrid Ninja, Kiki Ninja, and Akiko Tokuoka aka KiT Ninja) dancing in celebration of Willis legacy.

Watch the Google Doodle Video Here

LESSER-KNOWN FACTS ABOUT WILLI NINJA
Precisely, 1996. Miss World was slated to take off in India, and Bengaluru was chosen as the host city. The production company of Amitabh Bachchan (ABCL) was in charge. However, the tournament sparked an uproar and protests were held throughout Karnataka.

Miss World 2023 is all set to take place in India yet. However, this is not the first for the country. It was in 1996 when Amitabh Bachchans production house ABCL was given the charge of hosting the pageant. However, the contest was met with furore all over the state with road blockings and violent attacks.

Even though the country is receiving enormous publicity at this time, lets have a quick look to when Amitabh Bachchans production house, ABCL hosted the event and when Big B himself gave his opinion on the protests that were taking place back in the days.

Irene Skliva, an 18-year-old model from Greece, won the title of Miss World in 1996 at the event hosted in Bengaluru, which was marred by violent demonstrations and threats by militant women to burn themselves to death. Protesters who said the contest is insulting to women and threatens Indias 5,000-year-old cultural heritage had been disturbing it for more than two months back then.

In response to the protests, Amitabh Bachchan had spoken to Sunday editor Vir Sanghvi in 1987. He said, Obviously, I dont agree with the protestors. But this is a democratic country, they have freedom of speech. At the same time, we have the right to host the contest. Were not doing anything illegal or unconstitutional. All permissions have been sought and granted. Ideally, both sides should respect the others point of view. Thats not happening. Violence is being threatened.

He continued by saying that the violence was terrifying. There is no possible method to defend with force. And it wont result in any sort of resolution. At the same time, the state should look into it if these people are threatening violence. He acknowledged being a citizen of this nation. He would also seek security if necessary.

India will be the host country for the 71st Miss World competition in 2023. Karolina Bielawska, the current Miss World, and Julia Morley, the chairperson and CEO of the Miss World Organisation, had a news conference on June 8 in New Delhi to officially make the announcement. Sini Shetty, the 2022 Femina Miss India World, attended the occasion as well.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Miss World (@missworld)

The highly anticipated pageants date and location are still in flux, although the finale is likely to be provisionally slated for November or December 2023. Participants in a series of demanding competitions, including talent shows, sporting challenges, and philanthropic endeavours, will congregate in India from over 130 different countries. A month before the event, there will be multiple rounds to shortlist participants.
We all know the creamy and chocolatey taste of Nutella. And guess what the brand has launched an exciting campaign, Nutella Back to School," just in time for the upcoming academic year. The campaign is dedicated to bringing joy and delectable moments to childrens school days.

The centerpiece of the campaign is the introduction of an irresistible recipe by the esteemed chef, Vikas Khanna - Nutella Rice Pancakes and Nutella French toast. These delightful recipes combine the irresistible taste of sweetened hazelnut cocoa spread with the scrumptiousness of rice pancakes and French toast, creating an unforgettable treat for kids.

Below are the recipes for your quick breakfast hack.

Nutella Rice Pancakes:

Serving  3 (1 per person)

Ingredients

2 cups dosa batter

2 firm peaches (you can use other options like apple)

2 tablespoons brown sugar (for 3 servings)

1  Tbsp Butter for cooking peach + 1 tbsp for cooking pancakes

60 grams Nutella (15 g per portion)

Method:

Cut the peaches in half and core them. Evenly toss them in sugar and grill until soft and cooked through. Thinly slice them.

On a hot gridle preferably cast iron, add 1 tablespoons batter. Wait for 30 seconds and place the sliced peaches on top. Cooked until the batter is cooked through.

Add the Nutella and enjoy. Serve along with watermelon juice.

Nutella French toast:

Serving: - 8 (1 per person)

Ingredients:

1 cup skimmed milk

1/4 cup cornstarch

1 teaspoon ground flaxseeds

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon vanilla

8 slices thick sliced bread

3 tablespoons coconut oil for cooking (for 8 slices)

Method:

120gm Nutella (15g per slice)

 cup fresh fruit (Strawberries or blueberries or raspberry or red current etc.)

In a shallow wide bowl, whisk together the milk, cornstarch, ground flaxseeds, baking powder, and vanilla.

Add butter to a pan over medium-high heat and melt. Whisk the batter again right before dipping bread, as the cornstarch will settle to the bottom of the bowl.

Dip each side of the bread in the batter and let soak for about 10 seconds, then add the bread to the pan and cook for 2-3 minutes on each side, until golden brown. Add more butter to the pan as needed in between pieces of bread.

Serve with Nutella and fresh fruit. (Can serve berry smoothie)

Link to the video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQUvsMgTaa8
Celebrated couturier Sabyasachi Mukherjee once said: The saree belongs just as much in board rooms as tailored suits, and as much on red carpets as evening gowns. For Sabyasachi its always a moment of pride and joy to see women drape the six-yards of sheer elegance on a global stage. From Cannes, MET Gala to Bollywood Brides, the saree is a story Sabysachi will never stop telling.

Having designed for celebrities brides including Alia Bhatt, Anushka Sharma, Katrina Kaif and Patraklekha, Sabyasachis saree journey has also seen international celebrities such as Kim Kardashian, Naomi Campbell being enamoured by his craftsmanship. Recently, on Season 2 of Never Have I Ever, the Netflix TV series, in one of the episodes actor Poorna Jagannathan was seen draped in one of Sabyasachis classic sarees.

Rooted in tradition with a global connect, every Sabyasachi saree moment narrates a story of its own. Here are five Sabyasachi saree styles that will go down in history:

Deepika Padukone at Cannes 2022

Saree: Bengal Tiger Couture

Deepika Padukone is one of the many stars who loves adorning ensembles designed by Sabyasachi. In one of her interviews, Deepika had mentioned how during her modelling days she saved up to buy herself a Sabysachi saree. From limited edition hand painted sarees to the iconic red sarees, Deepika has draped them all.

In 2022, when Deepika Padukone was announced as one of the jury members for Cannes Film Festival, the global star graced the red stairs in a custom Bengal Tiger couture saree. The black and gold stripes were block printed and hand embroidered by some of Indias finest craftspeople at the Sabyasachi atelier. A part of the Aakash Tara collection, the couture saree celebrated heritage Indian crafts and techniques through a modern lens. The saree became one of the most talked about silhouettes at Cannes in 2022.

Natasha Poonawalla at MET Gala 2022

Saree: Gold Handcrafted Printed Tulle

When philanthropist Natasha Poonwalla had to grace the iconic MET Gala red carpet in 2022, she chose Sabyasachi to give life to her vision, which was to interpret the dress code gilded glamour with an Indian gaze. Celebrating Indian craftsmanship, Sabyasachi created a gold handcrafted printed tulle sari and a trail embroidered with silk floss thread and embellished with bevel beads, semi-precious stones, crystals, sequins and appliqued printed velvet. The opulent saree was paired with a Schiaparelli hand-forged metal bustier.

The saree was not only a hit on the global platform in 2022, but this year, it found a special place at the Offbeat Sari exhibition hosted at The Design Museum in London. The exhibition which celebrates the contemporary saree in its numerous forms, is curated by Priya Khanchandani and features an array of saree designed by celebrated Indian designers, and will be open to the public till September 2023.

Kangana Ranaut at Padma Awards 2020

Saree: Beige saree with golden motifs and border

Kangana Ranaut who was announced as one of the Padma Shri awardees in 2020, attended the award ceremony hosted in 2021 at the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi. Receiving the prestigious award at the hands of former President of India, Ram Nath Kovind, Kangana celebrated the precious moment draped in a Sabyasachi beige saree featuring gold motifs and an intricately embroidered border. Paired with a dark brown blouse, the saree was a perfect blend of power and elegance. The golden motifs and border on the saree added a hint of sparkle to her overall traditional look.

Laxmi Agarwal at Chhapaak screening in 2020

Saree: Banarasi Silk

Laxmi Agarwal, a motivational speaker and acid attack survivor attended the screening of Chhapaak in a Sabyasachi saree. Looking radiant in red and gold, the saree has been one of Sabyasachis iconic pieces. Called the Sabyasachi Red, the colour holds a special place in the designers collections. You will see the colours used as a perfect canvas to highlight the impeccable craftsmanship in varied colours.

Kim Kardashian in Vogue 2018 photoshoot

Saree: Red Sequins

Be it weddings to red carpet events, the Indian film and fashion industry wont deny a Sabyasachi saree. But did you know that back in 2018, reality TV star and entrepreneur, Kim Kardashian was draped in one of Sabysachis sarees? The Keeping Up with the Kardashians star was seen in the Vogue 2018 edition looking ravishing in a hot red sequin sari, styled by celebrity stylist Anaita Shroff Adajania. Sabyasachi has now and again proved that the six-yards of fabric is not only a versatile garment but can also be an extension of your personality.
Sunny Leone took some time off from updating her Instagram followers on her daily adventures in the Maldives to give them a surprise. She pleased her followers by sharing gorgeous old photos from the Cannes Film Festival, where she stole the show in a magnificent white gown. Sunny continues to captivate her audience as she lounges effortlessly along the streets of the gorgeous French Riviera town. Sunny has immaculate taste and a commanding presence.

Check out her post below:

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sunny Leone (@sunnyleone)

On Friday, the actress took to Instagram and shared a series of mesmerising pictures of herself with the caption, Got a chance to visit one of Gods homes before the big #kennedy premier! Felt amazing to offer one last prayer of thanks!"

The actress chose an exquisite dress from the Zeena Zaki collection for her look, and Hitendra Kapopara expertly styled her. Her clothing is a sophisticated white colour with an off-the-shoulder neckline, a knot at the waist, and a wrap design on the bottom. A front slit adds a bit of intrigue to the look.

She accessorised simply, adding a simple set of diamond drop earrings to complete her appearance. She chose a pair of golden tie-on heels to finish off her look, adding a touch of glitz and refinement. With neutral eyeshadow, winged eyeliner, mascara-coated lashes, contoured cheeks, and burgundy lipstick, she chose a natural makeup look. She neatly adorned her hair in a vintage bun in a classic pulled-back hairstyle, which gave her whole appearance a hint of retro charm.
As women age, saggy breasts can become a big concern. Like all body parts, breasts also show signs of ageing. But the issue is no longer limited to older women. A sedentary lifestyle, lack of physical activity and poor posture are triggering the issue even in younger women. Fret not, as certain yoga postures can help combat this problem. Renowned celebrity yoga expert Anshuka, who has trained well-known actresses like Ananya Pandey, and Kareena Kapoor Khan, has shared some yoga asanas to improve saggy breasts and strengthen the back muscles.

A hunched or bent back can cause the breasts to hang by their own weight, aggravating the sagging process. But, when your posture is good, you are indirectly putting less strain on your back and breasts, reads her caption.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by ANSHUKA YOGA (@anshukayoga)

Here are some yoga asanas to get rid of saggy breasts and stiff back muscles:
Zendaya will always deliver a standout red carpet look  even under pressure and today is the testimony to that. On Thursday, the Euphoria actress, 26, made an appearance at a Bulgari Hotel Roma opening in Rome, where she lit up the carpet in a relaxed-fitted black Valentino suit covered in iridescent glitter. She, alongside image architect Law Roach, completed the sparkling set with a fishnet top accented with reflective rhinestones and pointed-toe stilettos.

The Emmy-winning actress looked so put together on the carpet that itd be easy to assume that her glam was smooth-sailing  but that wasnt the case. It was Italian House Valentino that pulled her out in a time of need. She arrived at the party in attire that made her appear carefree, easygoing, and incredibly stunning. Her typical cool attitude on the red carpet was evident. A sparkly black fishnet blouse was tucked into her black Valentino suit, which she accessorised with pointed stilettos.

Check out her look right here:

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dayacrew  (@z.x.daya)

There was no sign of the last-minute terror that had to have grabbed her and her stylist earlier, and she appeared poised. The caption she posted on her Instagram stories said, Fun factmy dress for tonights @bulgarihotels event got lost in transit, so we got this suit an hour before the event. When in doubt.a @maisonvalentino suit. @luxurylaw For the record, Zendaya was the face of Valentino in 2020 and has since been a part of a variety of high-profile fashion collaborations, including one with the Bulgari jewellery company.

Not just any Valentino suit either. In a video that was posted to Zendayas Instagram Stories, she was wearing a matching two-piece outfit with a sleeveless shirt that was covered in sparkling sequins that shone from all over. Zendaya chose to wear her hair in loose waves and accessorised the look with dangling silver earrings and rings.

Following the news of his retirement from celebrity style in March, there was some fan speculation that he and Zendaya may have had a falling out in April. He quickly spoke up for Zendaya though, dispelling rumours about their tight relationship. He launched a string of sharp tweets with, So yall really think Im breaking up with Z.. we are forever!" Its real love, not the fake industry love," I said, referring to my little sister.
Mark Ballas journey to becoming a Toilet Warrior began with a visit to a school in Dharavi, where he discovered that girls were dropping out due to the lack of toilets. This inspired him to found the NGO We Cant Wait, focusing on improving sanitation in schools, particularly for girls. His work has highlighted the impact of sanitation on girls education and safety, and he has authored the book Toilet Warrior to share his experiences and inspire others to join the cause.

Recently, Mark had the opportunity to meet Indias PM Narendra Modi in Australia as a part of the three-nation tour. Heres what Mark had to say about the meeting, and the biggest sanitation drive in the world - the Swachh Bharat Mission.

We spoke about something that he and I both have a great passion for, which is sanitation. Mr Modi is the Number 1 changemaker in the sanitation space globally. Absolutely Number 1, there is no who comes close, said Mark. He lauded the Swachh Bharat Mission as the biggest sanitation infrastructure program in human history. Nothing comes close. Mr Modis impact socially, to create a social will, political will for this issue in India has been enormous and I think this social impact, it is unquestionable. This is one of the most important things that I have seen happen in India in the 15-20 years that I have been visiting your country.

Marks book, Toilet Warrior, also features change makers in Indias sanitation sector and recognises the contribution of a key partner: Ravi Bhatnagar, Director External Affairs and Partnerships SOA, Reckitt Benckiser. Reckitt has, of course, built strong communication strategies around the need for good toilet hygiene habits in particular, and sanitation overall.

Harpic has emerged as a trailblazer in the sanitation and hygiene movement, spearheading innovative campaigns and impactful outreach programs. Joining forces with News18 for the Mission Swachhta aur Paani initiative, Harpic champions the cause of inclusive sanitation, ensuring access to clean toilets for all while advocating for equality among genders, abilities, castes, and classes. Emphasising that clean toilets are a shared responsibility, Harpics visionary approach has ignited a paradigm shift and empowered communities to actively participate in creating a cleaner and healthier world.

While the Swachh Bharat Mission has been a resounding success in creating access to toilets, the gap remains in the mindsets that keep people from using them. This is where awareness and communication plays a monumental role. According to a NITI Aayog report, behavioural change is the core of the Swachh Bharat Mission since access alone does not translate into usage. The core issue is this: most people do not see how deep the connection between good toilet sanitation and good health goes.

This is the issue that Mission Swachhta aur Paani aims to address. Visit https://www.news18.com/missionswachhtapaani/ to join the conversation and to learn more about how you can help move the needle on a Swachh and Swasth Bharat.
Hyderabad: Prabhas starrer Adipurush, which is going to hit the silver screen all over the world on June 16, has created a fresh controversy after the movie director Om Raut hugged and kissed the films leading lady, Kriti Sanon, in front of The Sri Venkateswara Swami Temple in Tirumala, wearing sacred robes.

Before reaching the hill shrine, the team of Adipurush, also starring Saif Ali Khan, launched the final trailer of the film at a pre-release event which took place at Sri Venkateswara University Stadium in Tirupati. The event was attended by Prabhas and Kriti. Spiritual guru Chinna Jeeyar Swami graced the occasion as chief guest and blessed the movie team amidst crowds in huge number.

But the hug and kiss controversy involving Om Raut and Kirti Sanon has received a major backlash from some of the religious organizations, public associations, leaders of the BJP and the RSS apart from the devotees of Lord Balaji.

Actress Kriti Sanon who is playing the role of #Sita in the movie #Aadipurush and director Om Raut offered prayers at the hill abode of #LordVenkateswara atop Tirumala hills this morning. #AndhraPradesh pic.twitter.com/uYqPkyWCc9 Ashish (@KP_Aashish) June 7, 2023

BJP leader Ramesh Naidu Nagothu, in a now-deleted tweet, condemned the act of kiss and hug in the premises of Tirumala main temple. In a tweet, he also demanded authorities of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) to take stringent action against the persons involved in order to prevent such incidents on the hill shrine.

Echoing the same, Rangarajan, main priest, Chilkur Balaji Temple, has objected the act of the Adipurush movie director and heroine at the sacred hill shrine. He said that it pained him a lot after seeing both the person involved in the ugly act" after wearing the sacred silk robes given by the Vedic scholars at Tirumala main temple. Everyone has to follow the rules and regulations fixed at the hill shrine, Chilkur Balaji Temple main priest said. Representatives of some of the Hindu religious organisations also objected to Om Rauts gesture and lamented that the incident was nothing but an insult" to Goddess Sita.
Amid shooting for Gadar 2, Ameesha Patel is making sure to take some time off for her birthday. The actress rang in her 47th birthday in style and in the most filmy way possible. A video of the actress dancing to one of her hit songs, Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai inside a club has gone viral. Ameesha Patels Gadar 2 is all set to hit the theatres next month.

In the video, Ameesha sizzled in a black top which she paired with shorts of the same shade. Wavy locks and pair of black heels tied her whole look together. She donned one of her brightest smiles while she danced away the night. The club also featured posters of Ameesha which sent out birthday wishes.

Have a look at the video :

Prior the release of Gadar 2, the makers have re-released the first part of the film, Gadar 1 in theatres. The makers of the period romantic actioner have re-released it in 4K Resolution and Dolby Atmos audio format in theatres across Mumbai, Delhi and Jaipur. In an exclusive conversation with News18, Ameesha revealed that the producers decided to re-release it today as a gift to her. 22 years ago, the film had released on 15th June. They were planning to re-release it on 15th again but they matched the date with my birthday. It was a lovely surprise by Zee, the producers, she shared.

Sharing her excitement about Gadar being screened on the big screen, she says, I cant believe this is happening. What is the chance of one of Indias biggest blockbusters to be remastered and released on my birthday again? Its a beautiful feeling. The fact that its a prequel to the sequel coming out in just two months post that is amazing.

And how has her fans been reacting considering they showered immense love on her for her portrayal of Sakeena, a Pakistani girl, after Gadar had released? The reactions from my fans and the people Ive met wherever Ive been stepping out has been tremendous. Theyre very excited to see this remastered and revamped version. I dont know anybody whos not a Gadar fan, Ameesha remarks.

Speaking of Gadar 2, the film, helmed by Anil Sharma is all set to release on August 11, 2023.
All 12 Alabama metro areas ranked among the lowest (metropolitan unemployment rates) in the country for in April, Gov. Kay Ivey told the Huntsville-Madison County Chamber of Commerce today.

Huntsville and Decatur metro unemployment is down to 1.4 percent tying fourth place nationally, Ivey said speaking to a chamber lunch by video recording after problems with her state airplane grounded the governor in Montgomery.

Yall, these are historic lows, Ivey said, and were not slowing down.

Speaking for Ivey in person to the luncheon, State Finance Director Bill Poole said the Birmingham-Hoover metro unemployment rate fell in April from 1.8 to 1.6 percent, the lowest ranking for a metro with a population of 1 million or more. Statewide, Alabamas current 2.2 percent unemployment puts it in the top five states with the lowest jobless rates, Poole said.

It wasnt that long ago that our unemployment numbers were north of 10 (percent), he said. Its creating new challenges in the workforce; we all know that, but it is great to have low unemployment.

Poole said Huntsville and the Tennessee Valley recorded $10 billion in commercial investment and 30,000 new jobs in the last dozen years calling the area a pacesetter.

Poole also spoke about the continuing battle over where to locate Space Command. He said Ivey believes Huntsville is the only choice for U.S. Space Command Headquarters and she is committed to that just as this community and all of you are committed to that.

Ivey is proud to add her voice to the strong force of bipartisan support for a thorough investigation of the Biden administrations delay announcing a permanent home for Space Command Headquarters, Poole said. She commends, and I do as well, the entire Alabama federal delegation that has worked so hard.

Ivey is closely monitoring the base process daily, Poole said, and she is exploring further options to make sure the command comes to Redstone Arsenal. Anything the governor and the governors office can do to support you, please let us know, Poole said.

The two-year delay between the announcement of Redstone Arsenal as the best headquarters candidate and the official notification cannot be seen as anything but political, Poole said. The facts clearly show that the delay is not in the best interest of Americas national defense.

Poole said he stuck closely to Iveys prepared remarks for the speech because there were things in it Ivey wanted the area to hear.
When Bloody Daddy begins, one may wonder if Shahid Kapoors Sumair is an extension of Kabir Singh. You may even feel relieved about finally putting all your imaginations about Kabirs life after his wedding with Preeti to rest. The reason? Sumair dresses up just like Kabir and seems like a slightly mellowed extension of the exasperated Kabir (probably because marriage calmed him down a little bit). But no, Shahid Kapoors Sumair isnt Kabir and though it might be unfair to draw comparisons, one cant help but miss ignore the fact that there are streaks of him in Sumair that surface at irregular intervals. In contrast to Kabir, Sumair respects women. In a scene in Bloody Daddy, he is seen beating up a man who doesnt understand it when a woman says no means no. So, we can put that analogy to rest here.

But on a serious note, Bloody Daddy is as cool as a cucumber. Before you get confused and question its angry-meets-cool quotient, let us tell you that were strictly speaking about the execution and the treatment. It will remind you of those slick, stylish and good-looking John Wick films. It looks and sounds international but maybe thats also because its the official adaptation of the 2011 French film, Nuit Blanche. You cant get over cinematographer Marcin Laskawiecs lenses romantically waltzing with psychedelic neon lights at a high-profile party at a seven-star hotel in Gurugram, where the main action unfolds. Accompanying this and the stylised fight sequences, paradoxically, is hard-core Punjabi music and a cameo by rapper, Badshah.

Unlike most slick, globe-trotting actioners made in Bollywood, Bloody Daddy is very much set in the desi milieu of north India. And at the centre of it is a hero with a complicated personal life that almost tugs at your heartstrings. Almost. The film opens with the information that the story is set at a time when the country was slowly getting back to its feet following the second Covid-19 lockdown where the crime rate was quite high. In the first scene, we see Sumair and his colleague in a car racing down the roads of Connaught Place chasing another car, fighting two men and getting their hands on cocaine worth Rs 50 crore. And this sets the tone of the film. This is the just beginning and were told that the rest of the story has some hard-core action written all over it.

When Sikander, a drug lord and hotelier, comes to know that Sumair has beaten up his men and is now in possession of the cocaine, he abducts Sumairs son, Atharv, who is obsessed with lactose free milk. Thus begins Sumairs fight to bring his son back from Sikander. Thrown into this mix are Hamid, another drug dealer, and anti-corruption officials, Aditi and Sameer, who are trying to bust a drug nexus in a game of hide and seek. Soon, a cat-and-mouse chase starts but theres more than what meets the eye. In a parallel track, we are given a glimpse of the messy relationship Sumair shares with his ex-wife, Riya, and son.

The plot might not be the meatiest or the most novel but it is the writing that deserves brownie points. Writers Ali Abbas Zafar and Aditya Basu weave together a juicy screenplay that is effortlessly peppered with intelligent humour, which will burst you into peals of laughter every now and then. The film rides high on its quirky one-liners and oddball situations. Unlike the action hero avatars were familiar with it, Sumair is way closer to reality. Hes not larger-than-life, hes not perfect and may even come as a selfish and irresponsible father. His character is fleshed out in the smartest fashion and his oscillating moral compass will keep you guessing whether he is the good guy or the anti-hero till the very end. Hes not seen engaging in death-defying and anti-gravity based stunt sequences either. His fight sequences are bloody and believable and still keep you engrossed.

The first half of the film is almost perfect. Its crisp, engaging and before you know, its time for the interval. But much like most films, Bloody Daddy also suffers from the curse of the second half. Suddenly, the compelling, captivating and charismatic screenplay dips. The cat-and-mouse chase becomes a bit too long-drawn and starts testing your patience. But thankfully, the makers have stuck to the core plot that happens over a span of a single night without digressing and incorporating peripheral tropes like romance and song-and-dance.

This might be a genre where director Ali Abbas Zafars forte lies but unlike his previous films, Bloody Daddy is modern and uber-chic. Underneath the high-octane action and gory combat sequences, lies a story of a father and a son and a fathers attempt to make his son realise that he isnt an irresponsible, careless and indifferent dad. Knowing Alis strength at helming emotional subplots (Sultan, for instance), we wish he would emphasise a little more on the father-son dynamic to create a more profound impression.

Bloody Daddy belongs to its protagonist, Shahid. Hes seen exuding power in an elegant tux, revelling in his comfort zone and cracking you up with straight-faced humour. Despite it being a full-blown mainstream Ali Abbas Zafar film, Shahid keeps theatrics at bay, sticks to what he does best, underplays in most of the scenes and wins you over. In a scene, he stands atop a table and kicks around glassware as the family seated at it is reduced to tears and those involved in the drug nexus blankly stare at Sumair. In another, his conversations with a Nepali kitchen staff will make you laugh out loud. Shahids intense and nervous portrayal of an uninhibited and strong Sumair punctuated with these quirky comic situations are as remarkable as his scenes, though far and few, with his onscreen son, which add a whole new layer to his character.

Hes ably supported by Ronit Roy, who plays Sikander. He once again takes on the role of a baddie, this time with a subtle comic timing, and delivers an impressive act. His scenes with Sanjay Kapoors Hamid are pure gold. Their camaraderie is cracking and banter, exhilarating. Sanjay, Zeishan Quadri and Rajeev Khandelwal are equally impressive. Vivan Bhatena and Ankur Bhatia, though good, dont have much to do. Bloody Daddy projects Diana Penty in a brand-new avatar but we wish she had more meat to chew.

If you want to unwind after a tiringly long week and blow off steam, Bloody Daddy is the option. It is light, breezy, fun, fizzy and pleasing to the eyes. Our biggest complaint remains, a spectacle film of this scale and elaborate canvas deserved a theatrical release. Who wouldnt want to watch the enigmatic and good looking duo of Shahid Kapoor and Rajeev Khandelwal locking horns with one another on a 70mm screen?

Bloody Daddy is currently streaming on JioCinema.
Chris Hemsworth has managed to captivate his audience globally not just with his acting skills, but also with his undeniable charm. The Australian actor became a household name after playing Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Hes also proved to be one of the most promising actors when it comes to action or even heartfelt dramas.

Piggybacking on the success of Thor: Love and Thunder, Hemsworth will now be seen in the sequel of 2020 Netflix action-blockbuster Extraction. Directed by Sam Hargrave, Extraction 2 will see Tyler Rake, played by Hemsworth, on yet another mission with his team starring Golshifteh Farahani and Adam Bessa.

In an exclusive conversation with News18, Hemsworth got candid about what went behind the making of this action-packed sequel. Speaking of how he physically and mentally prepared for the role of Tyler Rake this time, he exclusively tells News18 Showsha, I was coming on the back of Thor, so, I was in a bigger shape than I would have been in the first film. So, aesthetically, there was a lot more muscle I was carrying. But I had to very quickly adapt to what was required for [Extraction 2]. It was all about functionality, flexibility and a lot of movement. I worked with Sam [Hargrave] and the stunt team, and the rehearsals kind of became my training.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Chris Hemsworth (@chrishemsworth)

Sam Hargrave, in Extraction 1, had a single-shot action sequence that ran over 12 minutes, and Hemsworth admits that this is the nature of how Sam shoots. We do long days [of shoot]. We have thrown in heart and soul and blood, sweat and tears into it. It is a huge collaboration and a wonderful one, Hemsworth shares. On the emotional side, Hemsworth states that this time, the story dives deep into his characters past. We had a great story here to tell, we hadnt talked about in the first film. So, we had a great opportunity to dive right into the character, and what is Tyler Rakes backstory in real depth and a greater insight to who he is.

We have seen Hemsworth packing powerful jabs and swinging the famous Mjolnir and Stormbreaker in all of the Marvel movies. But action sequences in Extraction series are obviously not similar to the ones he is used to in Thor series. So, which character was more demanding? Every character demands you to show up and put your soul into it. It is all about the preparation and updating and exploration throughout the whole process. [Tyler Rake] is probably the most physically demanding role I have done. In Marvel movies, there are a lot of green screens and a lot of different camera angles and so on, whereas, the way Sam shoots is its all in-camera. Itt not like if we make a mistake we can fix it part, we got to get back and do it again. Physically demanding, but the reward is so much greater, says Hemsworth.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Chris Hemsworth (@chrishemsworth)

The original Extraction marked Hemsworths first collaboration with Bollywood actor Randeep Hooda. In fact, the film was largely shot in India, which is also one of Hemsworths favourite places. The actor is aware of his fandom in India, and has even named his daughter, India. Extraction 3 is something we are already hoping for, and Hemsworth expresses his desire to work with Indian actors, again. I just watched RRR recently, and I thought the film was incredible. Ram Charan and NTR Jr are amazing, so, if was lucky to work with them, that would be fantastic, Hemsworth concludes.
Priyanka Chopra was seen in Rome, attending the opening of BVLGARIs hotel with Zendaya and boy, she looked like a vision in white! The actress was seen joining Zendaya and other members of the brand on the red carpet wearing a rather bold outfit. Priyanka opted for a white gown which featured a plunging neckline and a risque thigh-high slit.

The Jee Le Zara star was seen styling the outfit with a statement necklace. She tied her hair up into two ponytails, bringing back memories of Ariana Grande from 2020. She completed her look with a pair of white heels. Fan pages have shared several videos and photos of her look.

While Priyanka opted for white, Zendaya wore a black ensemble. The Spider-Man: No Way Home actress chose to keep things rather formal but chic as she stepped out wearing a dazzling sheer top with a jacket and a pair of formal pants, all in black.

Priyanka was seen joining Zendaya earlier this summer for yet another event with the brand. At the time, Priyanka and Zendaya were seen with Anne Hathaway and BLACKPINK member Lisa. Photos of their event went viral and set social media on fire.

On the work front, Priyanka was last seen in Citadel with Richard Madden. She now has Head of States and her Bollywood comeback film Jee Le Zara in the pipeline. The film also stars Alia Bhatt and Katrina Kaif.
Rekha has sent netizens into a frenzy as an old video of actress commenting on a question about a woman falling hard for a married man," has surfaced on the internet. The video is from the sets of Indian Idol 12, where Rekha had appeared as a special guest.

In the video, which is now going viral on social media, host Jay Bhanushali asks the judges, Rekhaji, Nehu (Neha Kakkar), kabhi aapne dekha hai ki koi aurat itna pagal horahi hai kisi aadmi k liye, woh bhi shaadi shuda aadmi k liye? (Rekhaji, Nehu, have you ever noticed a woman falling hard for a man, that too for a married man?)."

Responding to him, Rekha says, Muhse puchiye na (Ask me)." Jay goes huh?" To this, Rekha quips, Maine kuch nahi kaha (I didnt say anything)," leaving the audience in splits. Judges Neha Kakkar and Vishal Dadlani couldnt control themselves either. Kya baat hai. Yeh laga sixer (Wow. That was a sixer)," says Jay.

The post has been flooded with fans applauding Rekha for her witty humour. One fan wrote, Rekhaji is really very brave and courageous. Nobody could actually notice the pain and sorrow behind her cheerful." Another one said, She speaks her heart out, always." I love her," a third user said.

Rekha is considered one of the most beautiful and versatile actresses in the Hindi film industry. She has been famous for her evergreen charm and ageless beauty in Bollywood. However, the actress would often grab headlines for various controversies. Rekha has reportedly had disputes with several actresses that later escalated to the point where they even stopped talking to each other.

When Rekha was at the peak of her career, she was infamously linked with megastar Amitabh Bachchan. Meanwhile, despite all the rumours and gossip about the two A-listers, Rekha seemed to be unfazed. While she chooses to remain single, Amitabh Bachchan celebrated his 50th marriage anniversary with wife-actress Jaya Bachchan on June 3.
Sidharth Malhotra has been grabbing all the headlines ever since he tied the knots with her Shershah co-actor Kiara Advani. From mushy PDAs to setting new couple goals everyday, Sidharth Malhotra has truly been at the top of his game. As the actor gears up for his next big release Yodha, the actor was seen relaxing a bit with a refreshing drink of lemonade.

On Friday, Sidharth Malhotra took to his Instagram handle to drop a breezy picture of himself from inside a cafe. The actor wore a light green sweatshirt and was seen taking a sip from a lemonade with an animated expression plastered across his face. Also, what captured the netizens attention was the wedding band around his wrist.He complimented the picture with

a quirky caption that read, When life gives you lemons, step into the limelight ."

Needless to say but fans were swooning all over the Shershah actor in the comment section. One of the fans wrote, I can understand now why girls simp for him " Another one commented, I dont mind lemon or limelight if thats coming from Sid " Someone else said, When life gave u Kiara , you take 7 rounds". A fan also stated, Awwwwu blown me out baby".

Apart from being a stellar actor, Bollywood actor Sidharth Malhotra has also been a huge advocate of sustainable living and environmental conservation. On World Environment Day, he joined forces to invoke community participation with fans for planting trees. This initiative follows Sidharth Malhotras previous successful venture with Sadhguru on World Environment Day, where they joined hands for the Save Soil. This initiative sought to enhance the nations green cover, showcasing Sidharths dedication to environmental sustainability.

On the professional front, Sidharth Malhotra was last seen in Mission Majnu alongside Rashmika Mandanna. He will next be seen in Dharma Productions Yodha, in which he co-stars with Disha Patani and Raashii Khanna. He also has Rohit Shettys online series Indian Police Force with Shilpa Shetty and Vivek Oberoi, in addition to other projects.
Your father probably had a government job or worked in a public sector undertaking. During his time, say in the 1980s, Indias population was around 69 crore, the use of information technology was minimal and there was a job for almost every educated person who did not want to join the family business.

Cut to 2023. India is now the worlds most populous country with 142 crore people out of which around two-thirds are in the working age group of 15 to 64 years. Technology has rendered most manual jobs redundant and with ever-decreasing requirements of the workforce in government and public sector institutions, its time for young India to look at entrepreneurship.

Over the last nine years, the Narendra Modi government has taken multiple steps to promote entrepreneurship, making it easier for youngsters to set up new enterprises. The journey began with the Startup India initiative announced by the prime minister on August 15, 2015. Through funding support, simplification of permissions and processes, reduction in various compliance fees, and other initiatives, the scheme gave an instant leg-up to Indias then-fledgling startup ecosystem.

Entrepreneurship received another boost with the Stand-Up India scheme rolled out by the government on April 5, 2016. It provides financial support to foster entrepreneurship among the Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST) and women entrepreneurs in the country. The scheme provides loans between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 1 crore for setting up greenfield enterprises in the manufacturing, trading or services sector.

The results of these and other government initiatives are clearly visible now. India is today the global hub of the startup ecosystem, ranking third after the US and China. We now have over 90,000 startups and 107 unicorn companies worth 30 billion dollars, which has been the result of the governments efforts and the contribution of Indias youth.

This, then, is the way to go forward instead of banking on the government or the corporate sector for jobs and employment where the number of applicants is most often more than the number of jobs on offer. Why? Simply because it is much easier to sell your products and services in the global market, thanks to the internet and globalisation. Funding is pouring into the country and India has a thriving ecosystem of venture capitalists and private equity investors.

Technology and e-commerce have made it easier for budding entrepreneurs and artisans from small towns and villages to take their niche products and ideas to customers all over the country and even globally. This was unthinkable in the era of brick-and-mortar retail when the entire trade and retail ecosystem was controlled by a handful of large corporations and their distributors and wholesalers. The execution of the idea is also easy and very cost-effective, thanks to Indias global leadership in information technology and services.

For customers, it has never been easier and cheaper to buy products and services on the internet due to one of the worlds lowest data rates and a smartphone in almost every household now.

So, if you can become the owner, promoter and CEO of your enterprise and sell globally from the comfort of your home, why would you want to sweat for others and live in fear of salary cuts and even losing your job?

Not surprisingly, there has been an explosion in the creation of new startups and fundraising in recent years. According to Fintrackr, 1,327 startups raised $25.2 billion, spread over 1,556 deals in 2022. This includes $21 billion from 330 growth-stage startups and $4.2 billion from 1012 early-stage startups.

Another big factor in favour of entrepreneurship right now is Startup20. Indias theme for G20 Presidency is One Earth, One Family, One Future, signalling the need for unity of purpose as well as action. PM Modi has announced the setting up of Startup20, an engagement and dialogue forum with stakeholders of the global startup ecosystem, extending the broader G20 theme to startups as well. This grouping will create a global narrative for supporting startups by bringing together investors, innovators, and ecosystem enablers, with startups on a common platform.

To drive innovation by supporting young entrepreneurs, the University of Delhi has also set up Udhmodya Foundation, a Section-8 Company. It helps entrepreneurs to collaborate for growing their startups and provides seed money, co-working spaces, and networking besides expert mentorship.

With the emphasis and incentives for Make in India, now is the right time to make locally and sell globally. In fact, this also aligns well with Mahatma Gandhis concept of Gram Swaraj  the idea of a self-reliant village. He regarded villages as the basic unit of the nation and if our villages can become home to startups, it would be the realisation of Mahatmas vision.

At a time when migration from villages and small towns is creating immense pressure on urban infrastructure, especially in cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru, it is time for youth to set up their own enterprises in their hometowns or villages. Already, 49 percent of the recognised startups in India are based out of Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities including Indore, Jaipur, Surat and Ahmedabad.

Indias smaller cities and towns are also home to traditional crafts and culinary heritage that is the rage among consumers globally due to a shift towards a sustainable lifestyle. Its the perfect time for Indias youth to grab the opportunities all around.

The author is Joint CEO of Udhmodya Foundation, Startup Ecosystem of University of Delhi. Views expressed are personal.
A month ago, those who screamed the loudest about the rise of fascism in India and democracy being under threat oddly fell silent. It was not out of any sudden realisation or grave defeat. Rather, their silence came riding on the white horse of victory.

After Congress swept the Karnataka state elections defeating the ruling BJP, the noise around elections and institutions being rigged fell into a temporary lull. It had beaten the BJP even in the Himachal Pradesh assembly elections just five months ago.

The democracy of one-and-a-half billion keeps jumping out of the ballot boxes to declare it is alive. In the face of violent, foreign-funded street protests and insurgencies, the Indian state quietly says that democracy is not just alive, it has the will to be extraordinarily restrained. Many of these protests  whether it was the countrywide stone-pelting and arson during the anti-CAA violence or the rampage in the capital in the name of farmers agitation or making Manipur burn  have been engineered precisely to provoke the Indian government into using brute force. It has not, so far, except for firing on armed militants in Manipur.

But it would be naive to say that Indian democracy is not under attack. It is under attack from wolves who cry wolf.

Take for instance dynastic political parties. The Congresss ruling Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is particularly bitter and restless. It has never sat out of power for so long, electorally kicked out by the people not once but twice for wanton corruption, neglect of national security, and naked minoritism by disadvantaging Indias Hindu majority.

More importantly, the dynasty has never faced such low odds of returning to power at the Centre. In a Parliament of 543, the Congresss tally has been 44 and 52 respectively in the 2014 and 2019 elections. In spite of some gains in the state polls, it is unlikely to cross the 100 mark in 2024 as well.

And while its scion Rahul Gandhi comes up with syrupy and misleading Bharat Jodo Yatra (Join India Tour) and the recent Mohabbat ki Dukaan (Shop of Love) tour of the US, in the then Congress-ruled Maharashtra, sadhus were lynched in Palghar, editors were thrown in jail and physically tortured. In Congress-ruled Rajasthan, Hindus supporting BJPs Nupur Sharmas right to quote and criticise the Hadiths on air were beheaded on live cam.

In other dynasty-ruled states like Bengal, Mamata Banerjees TMC cadre murdered, raped and burnt the homes of rival supporters after winning the 2021 state elections. The violence against the states Opposition continues.

Rahul Gandhi has consistently spoken Chinas language against his own nation, made unverified claims of the Chinese occupying new tracts of Indian soil, and appealed for foreign intervention to overthrow the Narendra Modi government during his overseas tours.

Indias ruling dynasties are among the biggest threats to democracy because they find it difficult to accept the peoples mandate and sit out of power. They are willing to ally with even anti-India forces to deny their opponents the right to govern. And sure enough, they find allies.

Today, Western deep states, Left-liberal media, and elite globalist networks like George Soross Open Society Foundation have launched a concerted campaign to malign India and stem its rise. Deep states in the Western world find Indias surge towards being a responsible, new superpower alarming. Indian agencies and politicians  including Congressman and then PM Manmohan Singh  had repeatedly warned about foreign powers using NGOs to scuttle development projects in India.

In this comes the role of the Church, especially the evangelists. The Congress-led UPA government in 2012 revoked the licences of three Church-based groups involved in stoking and funding the Kudankulam nuclear plant protests. The Narendra Modi government has cracked down on hundreds of such NGOs which are fronts of foreign powers and the Church.

One of Indias topmost enemies remains global jihad and Islamic fundamentalism. Besides working through now-banned outfits like the Popular Front of India (PFI) to ensnare, convert, radicalise, terrorise and oversee a demographic takeover, Islamists have adopted a strategy of working through influencers, using politically correct terms like concern for humanity and secularism and infiltrating movements like anti-CAA and anti-farm laws. They have adopted the wolf-in-sheep-skin approach after a strong backlash from rising Hindutva. The effort is to convert to their side unsuspecting, secular and liberal Indians without revealing the underlying jihadi agenda.

While the pragmatic Arab world has become much friendlier towards India, attacks are now launched from Pakistan, Turkey, Qatar and certain Western nations like Germany, the UK and the US. Islamic terror groups and agencies like Pakistans ISI have also been funding the Khalistani movement with mobs of radicalised Sikhs from places like Canada.

And then there is China. It has long-standing border conflicts with India. But now it resents Indias sharp economic and military rise and the unexpected pushback it has got in Doklam and along the Arunachal and Ladakh border.

Chinese discuss Indias new nationalism with anger and despondency on social platforms. It tries to sabotage Indias growing relations with the rest of the world.

During a number of recent disruptive campaigns, all these forces have come together to attack India in the guise of attacking the Narendra Modi government.

And Indias Opposition leaders like Rahul Gandhi walk right into that trap in their greed for power. The Congress has still not divulged the contents of the memorandum of understanding that it had signed with the Chinese Communist Party in 2008.

All this puts Indian democracy in danger. Not from the so-called fascist Modi government or the BJP and RSS, but from those who most vociferously say that Indias democracy is in danger.

Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed are personal.
What exactly was Raja Rammohun Roys role vis-a-vis the British administrations introduction of an English education system in early 19th century colonial India, replacing the older system that consisted of a traditional Sanskrit pedagogy? Was he an apologist for Christianity under the guise of a progressive Hindu, or, perhaps even a convert  who had secretly relinquished his forebears religion in order to embrace Christianity, the religion of the rulers of his era? Did he present a distorted interpretation of Hindu thought and scriptures before the world? Was it part of the Rajas ulterior motives to Christianise the entire Indian subcontinent and annihilate Hinduism from the land of its birth?

The clamour of such questions and many more, asked in a similar vein, has risen to an almost deafening level, even as we celebrated the 250th (or, perhaps 252nd) year of the Rajas birth just a fortnight ago. British stooge or not, the Raja has been consistent in attracting controversies and condemnations from a section of his own countrymen, throughout these two-and-a-half centuries that encompass his life as well as his afterlife as a monumental Indian renaissance figure. In stark contrast to these negative reactions and outright denunciations, the Raja has equally been at the receiving end of great adulation and reverence extended to him by some of the best minds that India has ever produced, including Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sri Aurobindo.

Such extreme and contradictory attitudes towards the Raja may naturally baffle the 21st-century Indian reader. Partly to alleviate such bafflement, partly to respond to the many cynical questions surrounding the Raja, and thus (hopefully) lay to rest some of the controversies surrounding him, let us not be outright dismissive of the aforementioned questions. Instead, let us consider these questions, cynical and provocative as they may be, at face value  if only to explore them at a deeper level  and find out whether they have any truth to them. And to do that, let us go over the available evidence from the Rajas life, his times, his written works, as well as some writings about him  including by those who saw him; and then compare all of that with several of the commonly held notions about the Raja and his legacy in todays time.

Based on these principles and methods of historical enquiry, the present series of articles propose to deal with a number of questions and allegations that surround the Rajas life and his role in modern Indias history  with the hope that such an exercise might help us better understand our countrys past, as well as its present and future.

What Was Rammohun Roys Role vis-a-vis English Education in Colonial India?

A common charge against the Raja is that he was majorly  if not solely  responsible for bringing about a decisive change in the British colonial administrations policy on education for Indians, whereby the older system of Sanskrit-based traditional education was replaced with the English-based European liberal education, causing Indians to become progressively anglicised and indifferent to their own religion and tradition. This particular allegation against the Raja is hinged on broadly three assumptions, which are as follows:

The Raja was the only  or at least the most influential  lobbyist for English education. It was his intervention, in the form of a letter to Lord Amherst, the then Governor-General, in December 1823, that played a key role in changing the British colonial administrations attitude towards education policy in India. The Raja was prejudiced against the older Sanskrit-based traditional education owing to his poor knowledge of Sanskrit and the shastras.

Therefore, to verify the above allegation against the Raja with regard to his role in affecting a crucial change in the education policy of the British colonial administration, let us interrogate the three aforementioned assumptions. Based on the verbal admissions made by well-known products of the liberal system of English education and the historiographical analysis of early 19th-century Indian society by reputed historians, we shall examine whether Raja Rammohun Roy was either the very first proponent, among Indians, of English education, or even the only Indian who advocated for the adoption of the English education (which included using English as a medium of instruction across different levels of education) in colonial India; whether his letter to Lord Amherst was effectual in bringing policy changes; and, last but not the least, whether the Raja was familiar with the Sanskrit language and the shastras written in it, and to what extent.

First things first. Here is a timeline of the British interventions with regard to bringing a change in educational practices in colonial India. At this point, it is important to note, as the renowned Indian historiographer R.C. Majumdar observes, that the policy of the East India Company was not to interfere in the religious beliefs of its subjects. In keeping with this policy, the early colonial administration simply encouraged oriental learning. Thus, Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal, founded the Calcutta Madrasa (or Muhammadan College) in 1781. The objective of this college was to promote studies in Arabic and Persian, as well as Muslim legal studies. A decade later, the Sanskrit College at Benares was established in 1791 by a government official by the name of Jonathan Duncan, who was appointed Superintendent and Resident at Benares by the second Governor-General of Bengal Lord Cornwallis. The stated objectives of this college were the preservation and cultivation of the laws, literature and religion of the Hindus.

The first-ever British intervention in encouraging and/or actively promoting English education in colonial India, through a change in administrative policy, took place much later  in March 1835  when the first Governor-General of India, Lord William Bentincks Resolution on education was issued. This change in policy came about in the aftermath of a series of heated debates in the British parliament, held between 1833 and 1835, on the question of allocating funds to either oriental education (i.e., Sanskrit-based traditional education) or the English liberal education. Here, we should note that Raja Rammohun Roy had already passed away in 1833 while visiting England, which made it impossible for him to take part in these crucial debates during the years 18331835 that ultimately led to the change in British administrative policy in favour of the English education.

Now, a question arises as to why the debates on education policy picked up momentum in the year 1833. The answer lies in the Charter Act of 1793, which mandated that the Royal Charter given to the British East India Company, for the latter to manage the British territories in India, would be renewed every 20 years  and so it was until the year 1853. At the time of the passing of the Charter Act of 1793, the Christian evangelists Charles Grant and William Wilberforce, both members of the British Parliament, tried their best to persuade the British government to send missionaries and school masters throughout British India, so that Christianity as well as European learning could be spread in that country. In this, they failed utterly.

Thereafter, these Christian evangelists recommenced their efforts at the time of the next renewal of the Charter Act in 1813. This time, thanks to Charles Grants Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, a treatise advocating with evangelical zeal the preaching of Christianity among the Hindus, as well as William Wilberforces conviction, idealism, and eloquence in the Parliament, the evangelists succeeded in setting up an episcopal establishment in India, and, in addition, the first grant of one lakh rupees a year [was] set apart, out of the Indian revenue, for the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction of a knowledge of European sciences among the people. (Majumdar 2018 [1965])

However, the money thus sanctioned by the renewed Charter Act of 1813 remained unspent for a long time  a decade, to be precise  until July 1823, when the General Committee of Public Instruction at Calcutta was formed. This Committee was put in charge of the existing government institutions as well as the one lakh grant. The Governor-General of Bengal at the time was Lord Amherst, and within months of the formation of the Committee, an institution of higher learning in Sanskrit and the shastras came up in Calcutta in the form of the Sanskrit College, which was founded in February 1824.

It is at this juncture, that Raja Rammohun Roy comes into the picture. As mentioned earlier, the Raja had written a letter dated December 1823 to Lord Amherst, passionately opposing the proposal to establish yet another Sanskrit institution (prior to this, the government official Jonathan Duncan, Superintendent and Resident at Benares, had founded the Sanskrit College at Benares) and requesting that the funds be utilised for the promotion of useful Sciences instead. It is now clear that the Rajas epistolary protests against setting up yet another institution of oriental learning, out of the Indian revenue extracted by the Colonial government, had fallen on deaf ears  as the Sanskrit College at Calcutta came up anyway, within only three months of his letter being directed to the Governor-General. So much for the role of the Rajas letter to Lord Amherst opposing Sanskrit education and advocating for English education.

But a more important question to ask would be: was the Raja being exceptional among his contemporary fellow Indians, or, was he the earliest pioneer in desiring and advocating for English education for his countrymen? Far from it  so far as historical facts are borne out by the evidence available in this regard.

By means of a meticulous survey of the various newspapers and journals of the period (i.e., the early decades of the 19th century), R.C. Majumdar has captured, in vivid detail, the genuine and intense public enthusiasm for acquiring English education during the Rajas lifetime. Majumdar presented his findings in this regard in the tenth volume of his magnum opus The History and Culture of the Indian People, titled British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance (Part II).

In this fine historiographic account of the socio-cultural conditions of the Indian people during the 18th and 19th centuries, Majumdar traces the public enthusiasm for English education right back to the final years of the 18th century; observing that exigencies of administration and commercial intercourse between the native Indians and Europeans, especially the British, were responsible for kindling an initial interest in English education among Indian traders, entrepreneurs and various other professionals. However, what is more interesting as well as significant is that this interest in English education for mere material reasons like administration and commerce, soon turned into widespread enthusiasm for European learning, as educated Indians  especially Hindus  came to realise the value of the English language as the high road to acquainting oneself with European culture.

In the words of R.C. Majumdar: The more they [i.e., the educated Hindus] came into contact with the educated English people the more they understood the nature and importance of their distinctive culture and realized the necessity of imbibing its spirit through the knowledge of English. Schools for teaching English were accordingly founded in Calcutta and its neighbourhood. (Majumdar 2018 [1965])

In this connection, Majumdar notes that this growing public enthusiasm for English education was mainly concentrated in the three Presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras since the 18th century or even earlier. He locates the period of the intensification of this phenomenon around the turn of the 18th century  i.e., the years leading to the close of the 18th century and the initial decades of the 19th century. Around this time, many Indian inhabitants of the three presidency towns, especially Calcutta (it being the principal centre of commercial activities and the location of key administrative institutions), came in close contact with educated Englishmen, and thus began to appreciate European culture and learning.

The inevitable consequence of such intermingling and close acquaintance between the Indians and the English was the mushrooming of schools for teaching English. Majumdar informs us that efforts in this direction began with establishing such a school at Bhowanipore in Calcutta in the final year of the 18th century, i.e., in the year 1800. Another school for the same purpose came up at Chinsurah (or, Chuchura, a Calcutta suburb) in 1814.

Within a span of only a few years, a concerted initiative towards the spread of English education was palpable in Bengal, especially in its urban and semi-urban areas. In most cases, such initiatives were jointly led by Europeans and Indians, and these were entirely private in nature, up to 1835  the year when the government finally took a step towards making and rolling out policies on education with a definite aim to spread English education in India.

As the eminent Indian philosopher K.C. Bhattacharya (18751949) puts it, I do not mean that it [i.e., the entire Western system of education, ideas, and sentiments] has been imposed on unwilling minds: we ourselves asked for this education, and we feel, and perhaps rightly, that it has been a blessing in certain ways. (Bhattacharya 2011 [1929], Swaraj in Ideas) Such statements are a testament to the popularity of English education among 19th-century Indians and their willingness to adopt it. Bhattacharyas statement, in particular, assumes a special significance  for it comes from someone as learned and reputed as him, one who was not only educated in the English liberal education system during the 19th century and turned out to be a master of both Western and Indian systems of philosophy, reinterpreting and assimilating the former in light of the latter, but someone who also happens to be the author of a celebrated manifesto for decolonising the Indian mind. Bhattacharya, it would be pertinent to mention here, studied at the Presidency College (previously known as the Hindu College).

Coming back to Raja Rammohun Roy, we get to know that he permanently settled down in the city of Calcutta in the year 1814. However, before he set up his permanent residence in the city, several schools had come up there and were offering courses on the English language and grammar, among other subjects. It is extremely important for us to remember this fact, as it helps us properly contextualise and better appreciate the Rajas exact role in promoting English education in India.

Having settled in Calcutta, the Raja founded a school near Hedua in North Calcutta (1816). There were 200-odd students studying at this school. In the year 1817, two notable institutions for the proliferation of English education came into being. These are the Calcutta School Book Society and the Hindu College.

The objective of the Calcutta School Book Society was to make available good textbooks, both in English and in Indian languages, suitable for schools. The society undertook to prepare such textbooks and to print and publish them. [the printing press technology had already arrived in Calcutta a few years prior to this] They were sold at a cheap price and sometimes distributed free. (Majumdar 2018 [1965])

The committee members of the society soon felt the need for good schools for teaching English. As a result of their initiative, the Calcutta School Society came into being in the year 1818. Its objectives were to help and improve the schools already existing in Calcutta and to establish new schools according to need. (Majumdar 2018 [1965])

It was jointly headed by two prominent individuals: one of them was Raja Radhakanta Dev, who was foremost among the orthodox Hindus of Bengal at that time as well as a leading opponent of Raja Rammohun Roy, and the other individual was the Scottish philanthropist and celebrated clockmaker David Hare, a friend and well-wisher of Rammohun Roy. The composition of the Calcutta School Societys leadership itself tells us that the Raja was not alone in desiring and promoting English education for his countrymen; he shared this objective with his friends and foes alike.

What was the nature of the Rajas association with these notable institutions that we just mentioned? In 1817, the year of its founding, the Calcutta School Book Society requested the Rajas assistance in preparing textbooks. Upon their request, he wrote a Bengali textbook on geography and translated it into English as well. He also translated a pre-existing textbook on astronomy into Bangla and titled it Khagola Vijnana. We should also keep in mind that among the eminent Indian members of the Calcutta School Book Society was Pandit Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, who would later emerge as a chief theological opponent of Raja Rammohun Roy. Apart from him, Raja Radhakanta Dev was also a notable member of the same society. Despite their presence, the society had sought and incorporated the Rajas services to achieve its objectives. This close cooperation between the Raja and some of his principal opponents clearly demonstrates that the orthodox as well as reformist sections of Hindus of the time had joined forces in adopting and proliferating English education.

However, as R.C. Majumdar notes, By far, the most important institution that helped the spread of English education in Bengal was Hindu College [later Presidency College and presently University], established in Calcutta on January 20, 1817. Let us enquire: what exactly has been the Rajas role, if any, in establishing this institution of higher learning, which single-handedly produced most of the greatest scientists, historians, archaeologists, philosophers, poets, religious teachers and politicians of 19th and early 20th-century India? We should keep in mind that among its notable pupils were Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, K.C. Bhattacharya, Acharya P.C. Roy, Rakhal Das Banerji, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Syama Prasad Mukherjee, S.N. Bose, Meghnad Saha, and former President Dr Rajendra Prasad, among others.

Majumdar discusses the origin of this institution at some length, because, as he notes, there is a great deal of misconception regarding the foundation of this college. The misconception that Majumdar refers to is chiefly concerning the Rajas role in setting up this college. Incidentally, Majumdar was himself among the luminaries who graduated from the Hindu (or, Presidency) College.

By perusing documents that are contemporary to the era of the institutions genesis, Majumdar presents a brief but interesting history of the circumstances that led to its founding. In the process, he concludes that Raja Rammohun Roy can certainly not be counted among those who had taken the initiative to set up this institution. However, the circumstances of the founding of the Hindu College tell us a great deal about the general enthusiasm for adopting English education in place of the traditional Sanskrit or Perso-Arabic education prevalent in that era.

Majumdar writes: It appears that about the beginning of May, 1816, a Brahmin of Calcutta saw Sir [Edward] Hyde East, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Calcutta, and informed him that many of the leading Hindus were desirous of forming an establishment for the education of their children in a liberal manner as practised by Europeans, and desired him to hold a meeting for this purpose. (Majumdar 2018 [1965])

Sir Edward assented to the request and with the permission of the Governor-General and the Supreme Council, called a meeting at his house on May 14, 1816, at which fifty and upwards of the most respectable Hindu inhabitants of rank or wealth attended, including also the principal Pandits, when a sum of nearly half-a-lakh of Rupees was subscribed and many more subscriptions were promised. (Majumdar 2018 [1965])

This account, taken almost verbatim by Majumdar from a letter that Sir Edward wrote to a friend of his, is remarkable  for it reveals that the Hindu inhabitants of Calcutta (and surrounding areas), irrespective of their caste and class, were highly eager to educate their children in the European system of liberal education in English, as early as in the year 1816  almost two decades prior to Macaulays and Lord Bentincks interventions in this direction! Majumdar informs us that the Brahmin who first suggested to Sir Edward about the institution was not named in the letter, although Sir Edward mentioned that he knew him.

Many had assumed that this Brahmin was no other than Raja Rammohun Roy, and this gave rise to the myth that the Raja was the founder or promoter of the Hindu College. Majumdar rejects this view, adding that it is certainly wrong, for later in the same letter, Sir [Edward] Hyde East categorically says that he did not know Raja Rammohun Roy. The Brahmin who saw Sir [Edward] Hyde East seems to be no other than Baidyanath Mukherjee, a well-known citizen of Calcutta at that time. (Majumdar 2018 [1965])

Mukherjee went on to become the first secretary of the Hindu College and came to be regarded as one of its founders, as noted by Nagendranath Chattopadhyay, the most well-known Bengali biographer of Raja Rammohun Roy.

What comes out as evidently conspicuous from the above account is that under British colonial rule, the early 19th-century Hindu society  orthodox as well as reformist sections of it  was keen on adopting and promoting English education for their children. And this eagerness was expressed in the form of a private initiative, undertaken by a representative gathering of the Hindu society, irrespective of caste and class, and without any active involvement of Raja Rammohun Roy  whose role in this matter has been confidently ruled out by R.C. Majumdar.

Describing the intensity of Hindu enthusiasm and eagerness for English education, Majumdar further quotes Sir Edward in this regard, who observed: One of the singularities of the meeting was that it was composed of persons of various castes, all combining for such a purpose, whom nothing else could have brought together; and whose children are to be taught, though not fed, togetherAnother singularity was that the most distinguished Pandits who attended declared their warm approbation of all the objects proposed; and when they were about to depart, the head Pandit [in all likelihood, Pandit Mrityunjay Vidyalankar], in the name of himself and the others, said that they rejoiced in having lived to see the day when literature (many parts of which had formerly been cultivated in their country with considerable success, but which were now nearly extinct) was about to be revived with greater lustre and prospect of success than ever. (Majumdar 2018 [1965])

The above account demonstrates the great desire for English education, even among the orthodox Hindus of the early 19th century. We, therefore, have little reason to put the entire (or even the greater part of the) blame or credit of ushering in English education in colonial India, squarely on Raja Rammohun Roy, for he was merely symptomatic of his times  a typical representative of the common will for change  at least in this regard. At best, the Raja can be described as one of the most articulate voices advocating for the adoption of English education in place of the traditional Sanskrit pedagogy  a change that was anxiously desired by an overwhelming majority of the Hindu intelligentsia as well as common Hindu parents from various castes, classes, and religious persuasions (orthodox and reformist) of his era. The Raja merely gave voice to this collective early 19th-century Hindu enthusiasm for English education.

Expanding further on his survey of early 19th-century Indias enthusiasm for English education, Majumdar remarks: Anyone who goes through the newspapers of the period cannot fail to be struck with the genuine enthusiasm which the foundation of these schools evoked in the mind of the public, and a sincere desire to multiply their number in order to meet a keenly felt need for liberal education. There were no less than 25 such schools in Calcutta alone before 1835, when the government ultimately decided to extend its patronage to English education. Large numbers of such institutions were also founded outside Calcutta. (Majumdar 2018 [1965])

It must be mentioned that the Raja, like several other private individuals and organisations of his time, founded a school where English, along with other subjects, was taught. Some other notable individuals and organisations, who had set up schools and colleges about the same time, were David Hare, Gaurmohan Auddy, G.A. Turnbull, the Baptish Mission, and the Lord Bishop of Calcutta. The Oriental Seminary, Gaurmohan Auddys renowned institution, was set up in 1828. The Lord Bishops College came up in 1820. The Christian missionaries of the Baptist Mission established the Baptist Mission College in 1818. They had also set up a school named after Reverend Alexander Duff, who once described the enthusiasm for English education in Bengal in the following words: The excitement for Western education continued unabated. They pursued us along the streets; they threw open the doors of our palankeens; they poured in their supplications with a pitiful earnestness of countenance which might have softened a heart of stone. (Majumdar 2018 [1965])

Last but not least, the students who graduated from the famous Hindu College showed great initiative in starting new schools. Majumdar reports that by 1831, as many as six morning schools were being run by the students of Hindu College. All of these schools were founded by them and were being managed by them alone.

One should note that all these institutions mentioned above had come up before 1835, the year when the British colonial administration finally began promoting English education, and the founders, as well as management of these institutions, was fully private in nature. Based on the occasional references found in contemporary sources to the various subjects taught in these schools, Majumdar informs us that they offered courses on mathematics, astronomy, geography, chemistry (both theoretical and practical), philosophy (both Indian and European), history (ancient and modern), painting, handwriting, and various arts and crafts, apart from English literature and grammar.

Founded and run by so many Indians and Europeans, who often collaborated with each other in the early decades of the 19th century to spread English education throughout the country, these institutions played the most important role in bringing about a great transformation in India, and especially in the Hindu society, by fast-forwarding its march out of a medieval era and into modernity. If anything, this transformation gave the early 19th-century Hindu society an edge over other communities in contemporary India  in the spheres of socio-cultural progress, political consciousness, and organisational activities, ultimately giving birth to a renascent nationalism. Whether or not we, applying our present-day perspective which itself is coloured by our own contemporary politics, retrospectively read this radical transformation in the early 19th-century Hindu society as a blessing or a curse, it should be clear in our mind while dealing with 19th-century India and its historical figures, that the historical evidence from that period speaks of a collective social zeal to adopt the European liberal system of education in English, in place of the traditional Sanskrit-based pedagogy.

It would therefore be a grave injustice to historical accuracy to either blame or praise Raja Rammohun Roy for being single-handedly  or even majorly  accountable for ushering in this new education in 19th-century India. Such blame/praise can be equally claimed by other significant historical personalities as well as collective entities, such as Raja Radhakanta Dev, Baidyanath Mukherjee, Pandit Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, Prince Dwarkanath Tagore, Gaurmohan Auddy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, David Hare, Rev. Alexander Duff, Sir Edward Hyde East, the Lord Bishop of Calcutta, Lord William Bentinck, Lord T.B. Macaulay, the Baptist Mission, The Calcutta School Book Society, the Calcutta School Society, the first few generations of the Hindu College graduates, and so on and so forth, for each played their historically significant part in fulfilling the great public desire for English education in 19th-century colonial India.

It is worth reasserting that such personalities and groups represented a variety of social/political/religious interests, they often collaborated with each other on the particular agenda of spreading English education in India; and among such personalities and groups, those of native Indian origin came from both sides of the partisan religious divide, namely, the Hindu orthodoxy and the reformist Hindus.

Thus, we can see why no single individual or entity  be it Raja Rammohun Roy or Lord T.B. Macaulay  can be credited with (or blamed for) replacing the older education system based on a traditional Sanskrit pedagogy with a new liberal education system based on the English language and imported from the European soil. Any credit or blame in this regard goes to the enlightened and rejuvenated sections of the early 19th-century Hindu society, comprising people from various castes, classes, and religious views, who themselves asked for this revolutionary change in the ideals and method of their education.

(To be continued)

Part II will deal with questions concerning the Rajas relationship with the Hindu religion, its scriptures and knowledge systems, its sacred language of Sanskrit, as well as those concerning his views on the Abrahamic religions.

Sreejit Datta is an educator, researcher and social commentator, writing/speaking on subjects critical to rediscovering and rekindling the Indic consciousness in a postmodern, neoliberal world. Views expressed are personal.
The main Opposition party of the Tripura state assembly, the Tipra Motha of the royal scion Pradyot Bikram Manikya Debbarma, after a stunning debut in this years state assembly elections, is now struggling to retain the momentum. Aware of the ground reality, the party has now decided to hold the first two-day plenary session this month, most likely on June 23 and 24.

Delay of the visit of the interlocutor

The problems for Tipra Motha started on the day the results of the state assembly elections were declared early this year. Despite claims that it would emerge as the kingmaker, it failed to do so as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) along with its ally, Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT) formed the government for the second time.

Since then, the politics of Tipra Motha has been based on the issue of an interlocutor  to be appointed by the Centre  to look into the partys demand for a constitutional solution for the tribals. Pradyot had announced several times the visit of an interlocutor to the state but that didnt materialise. He even had meetings with Assam Chief Minister and North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA) convenor Himanta Biswa Sarma and Union Home Minister Amit Shah on this issue.

A significant thing is that both the Centre and the state government have been avoiding the word interlocutor. There were reports of interlocutor AK Mishra visiting the state but he was introduced by the state government as the advisor to the government of India on Northeast affairs and the word interlocutor wasnt mentioned. Although later, he didnt visit the state and if reports are to be believed, he was preoccupied with the developments of Manipur.

Importantly, an interlocutor is generally appointed by the Centre to initiate a dialogue with a banned organisation. This is not the case with Tipra Motha, which is a political party. So how can there be an interlocutor is also the question asked by many, including the Left leaders. Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPI(M) state secretary Jitendra Choudhury has even termed the interlocutor issue as a bogus one.

Soft-approach towards the BJP

Although the partys Animesh Debbarma became the leader of the Opposition, Tipra Motha has faced allegations of taking a soft approach towards the ruling BJP. These allegations strengthened when Motha, despite initially showing its intentions to support, didnt back the Opposition Left-Congress candidate for the Speaker elections. During the time of the elections, the party walked out of the state assembly on the pretext of a minor issue of assembly seat arrangement.

Pradyot had even called for a fast-unto-death agitation in the last week of March on the issue of the delay of the interlocutor but that didnt happen after he had a fruitful meeting with Himanta.

Meanwhile the tribal people, according to the state media, living under the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council  currently ruled by Motha  are facing problems like scarcity of work, food, water etc. Not only this, the ADC administration has been unable to pay the salaries of the employees on time. However, for this situation, Motha has been blaming the BJP for not providing the required funds to the ADC. It is true that the state BJP government has reduced the funding of the Motha-ruled ADC budget. But the question arises why the party has been unable to launch protest movements in the hills, where it is the dominant force. In the name of protest, recently, there was a one-day demonstration led by Pradyot outside the governors house on this issue.

The truth is that the partys activities have reduced after the elections  and this is evident from party chairman Pradyots statement where he asked his party leaders, including MLAs and Members of the District Council, to be active on the ground.

Dissatisfaction rising within the party

Recently, the South Zonal chairman of the ADC, Debojit Tripura, resigned from his post. Although he resigned citing health reasons, the actual reason seems to be his unhappiness with the party, which inducted three executive members into the ADC. Debojit, the partys councillor from the South Tripura district, hoped that he would be inducted as the executive member of the ADC, which had no EMs from this district. But the party didnt do that.

Delayed by the visit of the interlocutor and the partys soft stand towards the BJP, there has been visible discontent among a section of the party workers. Also, they arent happy with the functioning style of the party, which is a one-man-run party where all decisions are taken by Pradyot himself. A section wants to ally with the BJP and this may be the reason that this section hasnt been much active on the ground. These are not mere speculations. Pradyot himself had said that some leaders of the party want to go with the BJP and had even accused the saffron party of trying to break his party. Not everyone, particularly at the grassroots level, is happy with the partys soft approach towards the BJP. A section of the grassroots workers of the party are anti-BJP. This has led to confusion at the lower level.

Party relies on Greater Tipraland demand again

Less than a year is left for the Lok Sabha elections. Before this, there would be a by-election in the Dhanpur seat, which was vacated by Union Minister Pratima Bhowmik. But the partys grassroots organisation isnt that active on the ground. To re-energise the party, Pradyot has called to re-ignite the movement for Greater Tipraland, a demand which isnt properly defined by the party.

It seems that the party is banking again on the Greater Tipraland demand, which has produced fruitful results for them. It is also pressing the demand for the introduction of Roman script for the Kokborok language. These emotional issues are likely to dominate in the upcoming plenary session, which is going to set the partys agenda for the near future.

Emotional issues dont fetch desired votes every time. Exploiting the issue of Greater Tipraland to win elections repeatedly is unlikely to yield the desired results, particularly at a time when the common people living under Motha-ruled ADC are facing a severe crisis.

Sagarneel Sinha is a political commentator and tweets @SagarneelSinha. Views expressed are personal.
The opposition meeting in Patna saw a date change from June 12 to 23  the postponement clearly made to accommodate and ensure Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharges presence.

In fact, Congress confirmed its presence just a few days prior to the 12th. Till then, the Grand Old Party wanted to make it a low-profile appearance, given the fact that both Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Trinamool Congress (TMC) would be attendees too.

AAPs presence amidst the Congress reticence on the ordinance issue had put the party in a quandary. But then, Rahul Gandhi conveyed to the Congress president that the party must take the lead in unity talks and sending a low-profile delegation would send the message that the party was disinterested.

There are a couple of reasons why both Rahul Gandhi and Kharge will be present for the meet. First, post the Karnataka win, which was clearly a straight BJP versus Congress fight, the Grand Old Party feels it has made the point that it remains a force to reckon with and its the only pan-India alternative to the BJP and therefore cannot be wished away.

Till now, most opposition parties like the TMC and AAP have not warmed up to the idea of Congress as the fulcrum of opposition unity as it was under Sonia Gandhi in 2004. But Jairam Ramesh made it clear when he told News18.com: No attempt at building a front against the BJP can be successful if Congress doesnt play the lead role.

Since the Karnataka win, an aggressive Congress will reiterate this point in Patna.

Second, the Congress  with Rahul Gandhis presence  wants to make the point that no talks for 2024 can be possible in his absence. He is the Sonia Gandhi of 2004, for 2024. Congress will project him as the only unwavering critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the government and that it was his relentless questioning of the PM and corruption allegations which clicked in Karnataka.

But there is a hitch. The Opposition feels will work is no division of anti-BJP votes in 2024 and hence, the proposal that on at least 450 seats, there should be one joint candidate.

In New York, Rahul Gandhi had admitted: While we are making good progress with unity talks, we also have to factor in the fight for individual space.

This is the reason why despite opposition pressure, so far, Congress has not supported AAP over the ordinance issue as the Punjab and Delhi units of the party have objected to it. Similarly, in Bengal, Congress state president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury is against ceding any space to the TMC.

This could be a challenge for Rahul Gandhi and Kharge despite the points their presence wants to prove.


Treasurer Jim Chalmers has introduced significant reforms to modernise the regulation of payment systems in Australia.

These reforms, which are the most substantial in over twenty-five years, recognise that payments providers extend beyond traditional banks. Regions require a more comprehensive arsenal of tools to protect users in this massive system.

The payments landscape in Australia is rapidly evolving. Technology companies, rather than traditional lenders, are increasingly facilitating these transactions. Notable players in this space include global giants like Apple, Google and Australias own buy now, pay later providers such as Afterpay and Zip.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has announced three major payment initiatives to address these changes as part of the Federal Governments agenda.

The first initiative is the Strategic Plan for the Payments System. This plan entails phasing out the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS) and fully transitioning to the New Payment Platform (NPP), which is a safer and more productive system. By embracing the NPP, the government aims to build a digital economy and reduce reliance on traditional payment methods like cheques.

The second initiative involves reforming the payments regulatory architecture. This reform includes expanding the mandate of the RBA, which will play a crucial role in overseeing and ensuring the payment systems integrity, stability, and competitiveness. The regulatory framework will be updated to adapt to the changing landscape and address the unique challenges technology-driven payment providers pose.

The third initiative under consideration is the introduction of a new Payments Licensing regime. This regime would require payment providers to obtain licenses and adhere to certain standards and consumer protection measures. The government aims to create a more transparent and accountable ecosystem, where payment functions subject to regulation are clearly defined and monitored.

The Australian government aims to create a more resilient and efficient payment system through these reforms. The reforms seek to enhance consumer protection, foster innovation, and promote a digital economy that benefits all Australians. By embracing technological advancements and accommodating non-traditional payment providers, Australia is positioning itself for the future of payments.

Airwallex Director of Strategy Amelia Hamer said: Businesses have been passing on the higher operating costs from Australias outdated payments system, which has been helping fuel the hip pocket pain Australians are feeling.

While this is a welcome step from the Treasurer in what has already been a two-year process, we urge the Government to act swiftly.



Many of the regulations under which we operate were written in 1998 at a time when the internet barely existed, let alone the concept of a fintech. Australia is already as much as ten years behind the United Kingdom and Singapore in delivering a fit-for-purpose regulation system for payments businesses.



Australia needs a regulatory regime for the payments sector that works for small and medium businesses and consumers, not just the big banks.



The current system is anti-competitive and outdated and has entrenched the power of the banks to continue excessive charging and under-servicing Australian businesses and consumers.



Thats meant capital and skills shifting to other markets, higher costs for Australian businesses, and ultimately less money in their coffers to train Australian staff and keep prices down for Australian consumers.

Australian Banking Associations (ABA) CEO Anna Bligh expressed support for the Strategic Plan for the Payments System, stating that it will provide guidance for banks and the payments industry in their investments in future technology. Bligh emphasized the need for modernisation, noting that Australia is currently relying on a 60-year-old system for many consumer and business payments.

With cheques now in steady decline and accounting for only 0.2 per cent of all payments, its time to have a smooth and well-planned process to phase out this form of payment. Australian banks will work with the Government to ensure that customers and businesses are ready for a gradual and orderly phase out.

Australia is currently operating under payments legislation that was created in 1988. The proposed changes announced today will help ensure clear consumer protections apply no matter who is processing your payment and that the security of customers personal and financial information is maintained.

By giving the RBA greater oversight and standard-making powers over digital wallets and other forms of payments infrastructure, these regulatory changes can also help to maintain the security and efficiency of our payments system.

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Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Chief Sharad Pawar on Friday received death threats over phone calls from unknown persons.

In an audio recording that has surfaced, a man can be heard issuing a death warning to Sanjay Rauts brother Sunil Raut where he claims that he will shoot the Shiv Sena (UBT) leader.

The unidentified caller said that Sanjay Raut must attend to his calls or he will shoot him. The caller also served an ultimatum to Raut to stop his morning loudspeakers within a month failing which he would be sprayed with bullets".

While Raut received a call threatening to shoot him, Pawar was warned via a Twitter message threatening that he will meet the same fate as Dr Narendra Dabholkar (the rationalist who was shot dead in Pune in August 2013).

Meanwhile, NCP MP Supriya Sule, who is Sharad Pawars daughter, also told ANI that she had received a threat for her father on WhatsApp and also sought Union Home Minister Amit Shahs intervention citing it to be a serious matter.

#WATCH | Mumbai | "I received a message on WhatsApp for Pawar Sahab. He has been threatened through a website. So, I have come to the Police demanding justice. I urge Maharashtra Home Minister and Union Home Minister. Such actions are low-level politics and this should stop..," pic.twitter.com/C7zwuJlzQq ANI (@ANI) June 9, 2023

I received a message on WhatsApp for Pawar Sahab. He has been threatened through a website. So, I have come to the Police demanding justice. I urge Maharashtra Home Minister and Union Home Minister. Such actions are low-level politics and this should stop..," Supriya Sule told ANI.
Trinamool Congress MP Shatrughan Sinha on Friday said that a united opposition could work a miracle" in next years Lok Sabha polls.

Sinha, who is on a trip to his home town Patna, told journalists that he was sanguine about the opposition parties meet scheduled here on June 23.

Lauding Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar for the initiative", he also expressed delight that his party chief Mamata Banerjee has agreed to attend the meeting.

I have always held that Mamata Banerjee is a game changer. It is great that she will be there with people like national icon Rahul Gandhi, who has acquired heroic stature after Bharat Jodo Yatra," said Sinha, who was briefly with Congress before joining TMC.

The Asansol MP hoped that the meeting will help build a common minimum programme for the new government which replaces the current regime".

Sinha, who had represented Patna Sahib twice as a BJP MP before losing the seat to Ravi Shankar Prasad in 2019 while contesting on a Congress ticket, was asked that given his optimism, how many seats he expected the united opposition to win in 2024.

He replied, I am not an astrologer but it can be safely said that there would be a miracle. We have seen glimpses of what can be achieved in the assembly polls of Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka where the BJP got defeated by the Congress." In Karnataka, no stone was left unturned by the BJP which ran a campaign equating Bajrang Dal with Bajrang Bali. But the party opposed to it got the blessings of the deity," added Sinha.

When asked whether he saw Nitish Kumar as PM material", the yesteryears Bollywood star, who has earned nicknames like Bihari babu" and shotgun", quipped why not?" I have always said whosoever enjoys public support is a PM material. You and I could be in the reckoning as well, if we had such a mass following," Sinha hastened to add.

But let us respect the fact that Nitish Kumar has repeatedly made it clear that he is not a claimant for the prime ministers post. His initiative though is being appreciated by all," he said.
With massive digitisation, online fraud cases are on the rise in India. Not only through calls but also using new strategies, scammers are now expanding their reach to messaging services like WhatsApp in an effort to con victims to fulfil their criminal agenda.

Officials in the department of telecommunications said that the country has been seeing a surge in telephonic and online scams since the peak days of the Covid-19 pandemic. But scammers also keep adopting innovative ways to steal money from victims. For instance, AI voice cloning scams have created a buzz in recent days.

Since a significant number of Indians fall into the trap of these criminals, it is becoming more essential to make them aware of the pitfalls, say observers. So, here are some of the most common online and telephonic scams prevalent in India:

Fake job scams

Scammers typically generate bogus job advertisements on employment sites or social media. The job postings are frequently for highly lucrative positions with less experience. The fraudsters will get in touch with people after they apply for the jobs and demand money for further progress.

In some cases, posing as representatives of employment agencies, scammers contact people and promise to assist them in finding permanent, part-time, or work-from-home jobs. They frequently demand payment for their services and disappear once they receive the money.

A Delhi woman lost about Rs 9 lakh to a fake job offer scam after the fraudster asked her to pay the so-called processing fee to secure a content writer position.

Fake government grants or schemes

Scammers pose as government officials and offer people grants or new schemes. The fraudsters often use social media, emails, calls, or text messages to target their victims. Once they successfully gain a victims trust, they ask for personal information or money to process" the grant.

Recently, the Press Information Bureau issued a fact-check warning against a fake government scheme that is circulating online. The bogus post claims that the government is offering free laptops to students and unemployed youth. PIB has advised people to beware of such fake schemes and not share their personal information with anyone who claims to be from the government.

Fake parcel agency scams

Cheats will send text messages or emails that appear to be from a courier service such as DHL or FedEx. The messages or emails will say that the recipients have packages waiting for them, but that they need to pay a fee to have them delivered. They may also create fake tracking websites that look like real ones or call while pretending to be customer service representatives.

One such case involved a Mumbai resident who received a scam call from a fake FedEx customer care operator and Mumbai police officials.

In another case, the family of a retired Indian Army brigadier was cheated out of Rs 4.47 crore by fraudsters who posed as FedEx officials.

Fake law enforcement scams

Scammers pretend to be government or police officers and ask for victims Aadhaar, ATM, and PAN card details. The fraudsters may say that the victim owes money, or they are investigating a case and the victims details are required, or ask to pay a fine.

Recently, people reported receiving calls from so-called Delhi police officers who were asking for such information.

Fake romance scams

Con artists will create fake profiles on dating websites or apps, using stolen photos, made-up names and information to pose as someone theyre not and contact people to build a relationship.

After building trust, the scammers frequently employ a method known as love bombing". This entails giving victims undivided attention, gifts, and praise to make them feel special so that money can be coaxed out of them easily.

According to a report by Norton, Indian consumers lost an average of Rs 7,966 due to online dating scams in 2022. The report also found that nearly three out of four victims suffered financial losses.

Apart from these five scams, there are a few more concerning issues noticed across the country including phishing scams, tech support scams, and WhatsApp scam calls. Additionally, some have said that tricksters have called them up, claiming to be a friend, neighbour, or someone their parents know, seeking immediate online transactions.

As per the reports, UPI payment request is also a new addition to this scamming saga in which fraudsters send money to a victim and then call them to say it was a mistake. When victims repay the money, malware infects their devices and gives scammers access to their bank and KYC details.

However, there are a few ways to stay safe from any of these scams:
Sam Altman, the CEO and co-founder of ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, during his visit to India, met Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss the countrys tech ecosystem and its workings.

Great conversation with PM Narendra Modi discussing Indias incredible tech ecosystem and how the country can benefit from AI, Altman tweeted.

He added, really enjoyed all my meetings with people in the @PMOIndia.

As reported by CNBCTV18, Altman, addressing the audience at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, revealed the topics he discussed with PM Modi. We talked about the opportunities in front of the country, what the country should do, and also the need to think about global regulation to prevent some of the downsides from happening. It was a great hour, Alman said.

Altman, who is on a tour to visit other countries as well, including Israel, Jordan, Qatar, UAE, and South Korea, recently also claimed that the Microsoft-backed company is not training GPT-5 at the moment.

At an event hosted by The Economic Times, Altman said, We have a lot of work to do before GPT5. It takes a lot of time. We are nowhere close to it.

Were working on the new ideas that we think we need for it, but we are nowhere close to the start. There need to be more safety audits: I wish I could tell you about the timeline of the next GPT, he added.

Altman, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, also finally broke his silence on the dangers of generative AI for humankind earlier this year. He believes that if generative AI (which powered by LLMs) goes wrong (gains sentience), things can go quite wrong.
The obsession with mobile phones and love for TV among the youth is dangerous. Mohite Vadgaon, a village in Maharashtras Sangli, has recognised this and is determined not to let this frenzy negatively impact the intellectual abilities of its students and youth. As part of this distinctive initiative, the villagers have decided that every evening, the TV sets and mobile phones will remain switched off for one and a half hours. This initiative was initiated last year.

Campaign

To safeguard students and young people in the village from excessive exposure to mobile devices and televisions, the village authorities have initiated this project. This campaign serves as a way for students to concentrate on their studies and indulge in reading books, which is crucial considering the detrimental impact of childrens attachment to mobile devices and television on their health and learning abilities. The beneficial impact of this initiative is apparent, as women and students can be seen engrossed in reading after completing their daily tasks.

Also Read: This Moms No Phones At Dinner Table Policy Is Superhit

Here is the video:

Cause

Mohite Vadagaon is a village in Kadegaon taluka of Sangli district, with a population of 3105. The COVID-19 pandemic has already had a substantial adverse effect on childrens education, leading to the majority of students being unable to continue their studies. In light of these circumstances, on August 14 of the previous year, the local Sarpanch, Vijay Mohite, organised a meeting of the village women, during which they shared their opinions on the matter. Recognising the gravity of the situation, it was decided that children would be allocated one and a half hours each day in the evening for studying.

Also Read: Watch: Mans Phone Obsession Results In Hilarious Noodle Mishap

Action and After-effects

A siren has been installed on the temple to notify the students in the village that it is time to study. Every evening at seven oclock, a siren summons the children back home to study, regardless of their location. Mothers also manage to engage with their children while working in the kitchen. Additionally, it is common to see parents reading alongside their children. From 7 to 8:30 in the evening, all mobile phones and televisions are switched off.

Meanwhile

The village is renowned for producing 15 revolutionaries who contributed to the state and the nation. The community actively participated in the fight for independence. Now, during the Amrit Mahotsav celebrations, Mohite Vadgaon also took some innovative measures. The villages primary and middle schools cater to 130 and 450 students, respectively. In order to create a focused environment for studying, the village has made the decision to designate the evenings as TV and mobile-free time for the students.
A dog is truly a mans best friend, and this human-pet duo is here to prove just that. Simon OBrien, and his beloved pet Labrador, Bella, were diagnosed with kidney cancer just months apart. While Simons cancer went into remission, Bella, his loyal best friend, faces a limited time left to live. Their parallel journeys of courage, love, and unwavering support have been shared by The Independent. The distressing saga began when Simon, a project manager from UKs Merseyside, received the devastating news that Bella had only a few months to live. The furry companion was diagnosed with kidney cancer. Overwhelmed by this heartbreaking revelation, Simons world turned upside down when he, too, was diagnosed with the same condition last year.

Both Simon and Bella started experiencing similar symptoms, such as constant fatigue and excessive thirst, prompting medical investigations. This helped unveil potentially lethal kidney tumors. Convinced of his impending fate, Simon even visited the Marie Curie website to plan his own funeral and make arrangements for his familys future. This included heartfelt letters for his three children, Ivy, Callum, and Niamh, to open on significant occasions.

I wrote letters for my children and even planned my funeral songs. It gave me peace of mind whereas my health was out of my control, he said, quoted Independent.

However, a glimmer of hope emerged when Simons cancer unexpectedly went into remission earlier this year. He underwent a seven-hour emergency surgery. This involved the removal of his kidney. The news of his remission brought immeasurable relief to his family and friends, evoking an overwhelming sense of joy and gratitude.

Sadly, Bellas prognosis was not as favourable. She is left with limited time. Despite the devastating news, Simon cherishes every precious moment he has left with his beloved companion. Bella. The pet companion is now on expensive medication and has defied expectations, living longer than initially anticipated. Simon ensured that they spend quality time together, often taking her to the beach where she can revel in the joy of playing in the waves.

Simon said, The one thing we have kept going is taking her to the beach because she loves the waves, and for five or ten minutes shell forget everything and be a puppy again.

Simon, who temporarily stopped working following his diagnosis, has been supported by his employer. They continued paying his salary throughout his ordeal.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the ecological disaster triggered by the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam has become a global problem as highly contaminated water is flowing into the Black Sea.

Zelensky said the flood waters raging through the lower Dnipro River valley brought with them sewage, oil, chemicals and possibly anthrax from animal burial sites.

At least two anthrax burial places are in the temporarily occupied territories. What is happening to those sites we do not know yet, Zelenskiy said in an online discussion with environmental activists.

The destruction of a major Russian-held dam on the river on Tuesday left 600 square kilometres of the region under water.

Both Ukraine and Russian have accused each other of blowing up the dam on Tuesday morning, however, it is not proved yet on what led to the destruction of the crucial dam.

Zelensky said that apart from the 100,000 people affected downstream, 50,000 hectares of forests have been flooded while 20,000 animals and 10,000 birds were under threat of imminent death.

He further said that altogether 2 million living beings are in danger as the contaminated water spreads.

The poisoning and contamination coming from the flooding area goes to the groundwater almost immediately, poisoning rivers and then the water basin of the Black Sea. So its not happening somewhere else. It is all interrelated in the world, he said.

The Ukrainian President visited the area on Thursday after floods inundated dozens of villages and parts of the regional capital, Kherson.

The death toll from the flooding reached six as the Moscow-backed administration of Nova Kakhovka said five people had died and 41 admitted in hospital.

Much Bigger Problem for Ukraine Farming

The Ukrainian agriculture ministry said earlier this week that the dams destruction would not only flood tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land in southern part of the country but also turn at least 500,000 hectares of land left without irrigation into deserts".

It said the disaster would cut off water supply to 31 irrigation systems in the Ukrainian regions of Dnipro, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and these systems provided irrigation on 584,000 hectares.

There were up to 1 million hectares of non-irrigated land per 500,000 hectares irrigated. If the income from irrigated land stops, it is obvious and predictable that farmers will not be able to produce and the consequences will be not for 0.5 million hectares but for 1 or 1.5 million," Solsky said.

He called the problem with irrigation a major issue for agriculture in the region in the long term". Without a source of water supply, it is impossible to grow vegetables. Grain and oilseeds will be grown using an extensive model with low yields," the ministry said in a statement.

Ukraine is a global major grain and oilseeds grower and exporter.

(With inputs from agencies)
A little white pill has given Syrian President Bashar Assad powerful leverage with his Arab neighbors, who have been willing to bring him out of pariah status in hopes he will stop the flow of highly addictive Captagon amphetamines out of Syria.

Western governments have been frustrated by the red-carpet treatment Arab countries have given Assad, fearing that their reconciliation will undermine the push for an end to Syrias long-running civil war.

But for Arab states, halting the Captagon trade is a high priority. Hundreds of millions of pills have been smuggled over the years into Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries, where the drug is used recreationally and by people with physically demanding jobs to keep them alert.

Saudi Arabia has intercepted large shipments of pills hidden in crates of fake plastic oranges and in hollowed out pomegranates  even pills crushed and molded to look like traditional clay bowls.

Analysts say Assad likely hopes that by making even limited gestures against the drug he can gain reconstruction money, further integration in the region and even pressure for an end to Western sanctions.

The vast majority of the worlds Captagon is produced in Syria, with smaller production in neighboring Lebanon. Western governments estimate the illegal trade in the pills generates billions of dollars.

The United States, Britain and European Union accuse Assad, his family and allies, including Lebanons militant Hezbollah group, of facilitating and profiting from the trade. That has given Assads rule a massive financial lifeline at a time when the Syrian economy is crumbling, they say. The Syrian government and Hezbollah deny the accusations.

Syrias neighbors have been the biggest and most lucrative market for the drug. As the industry flourished, experts say Damascus in recent years saw Captagon as more than just a cash cow.

The Assad regime realized that this is something they can weaponize for political gain  and thats when production started being on a large scale, said Karam Shaar, a senior fellow at Washington-based New Lines Institute.

Stopping the trade has been a top demand of Arab countries in their talks with Syria on ending its political isolation. Syria was readmitted last month from the Arab League, from which it was suspended in 2011 because of Assads brutal crackdown on protesters. On May 20, Assad received a warm welcome at the Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

A possible sign of the behind-the-scenes trade-offs came on May 8, when airstrikes in southern Syria reduced the home of a well-known drug kingpin to rubble. Merhi al-Ramthan, his wife and six children were killed. Another strike destroyed a suspected Captagon factory outside the city of Daraa, near the Jordanian border.

Jordan was likely behind the strike, with Assads consent, say activists and experts. The strike came one day after the Arab League formally re-admitted Syria, a step Jordan helped broker.

Assad gave assurances that he would stop the regime from supporting and protecting smuggling networks, a former brigadier general of Jordans intelligence service, Saud Al-Sharafat, told The Associated Press. For example, he facilitated the disposal of al-Ramthan.

Jordan, he said, sees the Captagon trade as a threat to both security and communal peace.

In public comments, Jordans foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, refused to confirm or deny whether his country was behind the airstrikes but said it was willing to take military action to curb drug smuggling.

Arab states, many of which had backed the rebels trying to oust Assad, say they share the goal of pushing him to make peace. Ahead of the Jeddah summit, Jordan hosted a meeting of top diplomats from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt, and the long agenda included setting a roadmap for peace talks and the return of millions of Syrian refugees.

But it was on Captagon where the gathering made the most progress. Syria pledged to clamp down on smuggling, and a regional security coordination committee was agreed on. Days later, Syrian state media reported that police quashed a Captagon smuggling operation in the city of Aleppo, discovering 1 million pills hiding in a pickup truck.

Jordan has intensified surveillance along the Syrian border in recent years and has raided drug dealers. Jordanian troops killed 27 suspected smugglers in a fierce gun battle in January.

Smuggling routes have made untangling drug networks more difficult. A member of an Iraqi militia told the AP that militias in Iraqs desert Anbar province, which borders Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, have been crucial for Captagon smuggling. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Syrian lawmaker Abboud al-Shawakh denied the government profits from the drug trade and insisted authorities are trying vigorously to crack down on smuggling.

Our country is used as a regional transit route as there are border crossings out of the states control, al-Shawakh told the AP. He alleged that only armed opposition groups are involved in Captagon dealing.

Syrian opposition groups are believed by many observers to have some involvement in drug smuggling. Western governments, however, accuse Assads relatives and allies of a direct role in Captagon production and trade and have imposed sanctions on a string of individuals close to Assad.

While Assad may be willing to move against some parts of the drug trade, he has little incentive to crush it completely without winning something in return from Arab states, al-Sharafat said.

A Saudi official denied reports that Riyadh had offered billions of dollars to Damascus in exchange for a crackdown. But he added that whatever the kingdom might offer Syria would be less costly than the damage that Captagon has caused among Saudi youth. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

The U.S. and other Western governments fear that the Arab states normalization with Syria undermines attempts to push Assad to make concessions to end Syrias conflict. They want Assad to follow a peace roadmap outlined in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254, passed unanimously in 2015, which calls for talks with the opposition, rewriting the constitution and U.N.-monitored elections.

So far, the resolution has gone nowhere. Since it passed, Assad regained control over previously lost territory, confining the opposition to a small corner of the northwest. His grip on power now seems solid, though much of the north and east remains out of his hands, held by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters.

Shaar said Assad might use the Captagon card to try to get the U.N. resolution shelved.

Other concessions, like the lifting of Western-led sanctions, would be harder for him to win. While Gulf Arab states wont be able to directly inject cash into Assads government with the sanctions in place, Shaar said they could funnel money through U.N.-led projects in government-held Syria to get action from Assad against Captagon.

He will be politicking with Gulf states, Shaar said.
Southeast Asian nations have agreed to hold their first-ever joint military drills in the South China Sea, Indonesian officials said Thursday, as tensions grow over Chinas increasing assertiveness in the region.

We will hold joint military drills in the North Natuna Sea," Indonesian military chief Yudo Margono said after a meeting of Southeast Asian defence chiefs in Bali, state news agency Antara reported.

They will take place in September involving all 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc and observer member Timor-Leste, he said.

That would include junta-ruled Myanmar, where the military has overthrown a civilian leader and overseen a bloody crackdown on dissent that has resulted in wide-ranging US and EU sanctions.

Margono said the exercises will focus on maritime security and rescue, and will not involve combat operations.

It is about ASEAN centrality," he said.

The blocs members have held naval drills with the United States before but never military exercises as a bloc on its own.

The announcement comes after Washington called on Beijing to stop provocative" behaviour in the disputed waterway after a near-collision with a Philippine vessel and a Chinese fighter pilots dangerous manoeuvre near an American surveillance aircraft.

Chinese vessels have also occasionally intruded into the Indonesian-claimed waters of North Natuna where the drills will take place, prompting protests in Jakarta.

China says most of the South China Sea is its own despite competing claims from other Southeast Asian nations including Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia.

Beijings ships have patrolled the area and when confronted have invoked Chinas so-called nine-dash line  an area it claims but is contested by its neighbours  to justify its alleged historic rights to the waters.

At a summit last month, ASEAN leaders discussed serious incidents" in the South China Sea and ongoing negotiations for a code of conduct aimed at reducing the risk of conflict there.

ASEAN has long been decried by critics as a toothless talking shop, and its charter principles of consensus and non-interference have hamstrung its ability to take action.

The bloc will hold its next leaders summit in Indonesian capital Jakarta in September.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China for diplomatic talks next week and is expected to be there on June 18, a U.S. official said on Friday.

Reuters reported on Wednesday that Blinken would travel to China in the coming weeks, citing an official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Associated Press reported the timing of the trip earlier on Friday.

The U.S. official did not elaborate on the trip.

Washingtons top diplomat scrapped a planned trip earlier this year over a suspected Chinese spy balloon that flew over the United States.
The United States has called for the release of unjustly detained Iranian prisoner Vahid Afkari.

Vahid is the brother of champion Iranian wrestler Navid Afkari, who was executed in secret by Iranian authorities in 2020, in what the United States called an unconscionable act.

Navid and Vahid, as well as a third brother, Habib, were arrested in 2018 after peacefully joining protests in their hometown of Shiraz. The demonstrations at the time erupted over economic issues and expanded to protest the regimes repressive rule.

Navid Afkari was tortured to confess to crimes he did not commit and was subjected to a grossly unfair trial. Vahid and Habib Afkari were sentenced to decades in prison. Habib was released in March 2022 after spending 550 days in solitary confinement.

U.S. State Department Principal Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel noted, Vahid Afkari has now spent 1,000 days in solitary confinement:

Like his brother [Navid], Vahid was unjustly detained and tortured into giving false confessions and handed a 33-year and nine-month prison sentence and 74 lashes after an unfair trial.

Vahids treatment is typical of that of the Islamic Republics judicial authorities, who are not interested in justice but who endeavor to strike fear in the hearts of ordinary civilians and protesters.

The demonstrations that took place in Iran in 2017 and 2018 were, up until that time, the largest protests since the Green Revolution of 2009. Both have been surpassed by the nationwide anti-regime protests that followed the September 2022 death in police custody of twenty-two year-old Kurdish Iranian Mahsa Amini. Tens of thousands of people were arrested in those protests.

The U.S. Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control has imposed 11 rounds of sanctions actions targeting the Iranian regime and its security elements and officials involved in the crackdown on peaceful demonstrations since September 2022.

Spokesperson Patel said, Well continue to take steps to hold the Iranian regime accountable for its egregious human rights abuses.

Meanwhile, he said, the United States wants to draw attention to the case of Vahid Afkari.

We once again call on Iranian authorities to free Vahid and all those Iranians, including many young people, who remain imprisoned for exercising their human rights, including the right to freedom of expression.
Britains former prime minister Boris Johnson on Friday announced his resignation as an MP, accusing a parliamentary probe into the Partygate" scandal of driving him out.

Johnson, 58, said he was stepping down with immediate effect triggering an immediate by-election" in his marginal seat, which heaps political pressure on his successor Rishi Sunak.

The ex-leader is currently being investigated by a parliamentary committee over whether he lied to MPs about lockdown-breaching parties at Downing Street.

In the statement, Johnson said he had received a letter from the committee making it clear - much to my amazement - that they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of parliament.

They have still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons," he said.

Speaking to the committee in March, Johnson denied intentionally misleading parliament.

I did not lie, and I believe that in their hearts the Committee know it," Johnson said in the statement on Friday.

They know perfectly well that when I spoke in the Commons I was saying what I believed sincerely to be true and what I had been briefed to say, like any other minister," he added.

Johnson said he corrected the record as soon as possible".

He accused the committee of being a kangaroo court" and said that its purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts".
The US is experiencing its worst toxic air pollution in its recent recorded history after the wildfire smoke entered the country from Canada, researchers have said. New York, which is among the worst affected cities, has been exposed to levels of pollution more than five times above the national air quality standard.

The smoke emanating from the unprecedented forest fires caused Americans to suffer the worst day of average exposure to such pollution since 2006, The Guardian reported.

The plume of smoke darkened the skies over New York City and around the Northeast since Wednesday, making the air dangerous to breathe and disrupting life across the region.

Here are the latest updates in the Canada wildfires:

- The air quality index of New York improved significantly for the first time in three days as the city remained shrouded in orange haze.

- The current status of New York Cty has been downgraded from hazardous to Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups as the smoke spreads further down south and west, The Independent reported.

- More than 111 million people in the United States were living under air quality alerts due to the fires, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday.

- The Air Quality Index in New York was more than 400 in some parts on Thursday, which is roughly 58 times the World Health Organizations guidelines. The particulate matter in New York air hit around 195 micrograms, more than five times above the national air quality standard.

- There are currently over 400 wildfires burning throughout the provinces of Canada.

- Though the conditions are improving, but it isnt expected to return to normal until the weekend.

- New York has set up around 300 emergency room visits for complaints about wheezing, asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder on Wednesday.

- The White House postponed an outdoor Pride event, although a parade and festival this weekend remain on course for now.

- The National Zoo meanwhile announced it would close for the safety of our animals, our staff and our guests."

- The fires sent plumes of fine particulate matter as far away as North Carolina and northern Europe and parked clumps of air rated unhealthy or worse over the heavily populated Eastern Seaboard.

- US President Joe Biden said hundreds of American firefighters and support personnel have been in Canada since May, and that hed offered Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau any additional help Canada needs to rapidly accelerate the effort to put out these fires.
Former US president Donald Trump said Thursday he has been indicted in the federal probe over his handling of classified documents after leaving office.

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax," Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social as he broke what would be bombshell news that he has been charged criminally for the second time.

There was no immediate confirmation from the Justice Department.

In his post, Trump, who is running for president again, said he has been summoned to a federal courthouse Tuesday in Miami.

I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States," he wrote.

Trumps announcement came a day after US media said federal prosecutors have informed the former presidents lawyers that he is the target of the probe into his handling of classified documents.

He was already the first former or sitting president to be charged with a crime  in his case over election-eve hush money payments to a porn star who said she had an affair with him. That indictment came down in March.

Special counsel Jack Smith, named by Attorney General Merrick Garland, has been looking into a cache of classified documents that Trump had stored at his Mar-a-Lago residence after leaving the White House.

The FBI carted away some 11,000 papers after serving a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago in August, and Trump could face obstruction-of-justice charges after spending months resisting efforts to recover the trove.

Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

He could conceivably be indicted in yet two other cases  over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and his role in inciting the Capitol mob attack in 2021.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday said the health of the preschool children badly wounded in a mass knife attack by a Syrian refugee was heading in the right direction", as the attacker refused to cooperate with police.

Four children  aged between 22 months and three years old  were stabbed Thursday in a playground in the Alpine town of Annecy, a normally idyllic lakeside spot popular with tourists.

As social media flooded with praise for rescue workers and a man hailed as a hero for chasing the attacker out of the area, sources close to the investigation said the attacker was remaining totally silent" and obstructing justice."

Prosecutors insisted they did not see a terror motive in the attack, but the rampage intensified tensions in France over immigration, with right-wing politicians seizing on the suspects origins.

Macron and his wife Brigitte arrived in the southeastern city of Grenoble, where three of the children are being treated.

Everything that I was told is heading in the right direction," he said in Annecy after visiting the wounded toddlers in hospital, adding that news on their condition was positive".

Attacking children is the most barbaric act there is," he said, highlighting his pride" over the work of rescuers.

The fourth child, a Dutch citizen, is in a Swiss hospital over the border in Geneva. She is out of danger", the Netherlands Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said.

One of the victims is British and the others French.

- Pray for the children -

Macron also met the civilians being hailed as heroes for chasing the attacker from the playground.

Pray for the children, I am doing fine," wrote Henri, one of those who intervened, on Instagram as the hashtag #MerciHenri trended on social media.

Henri joined hundreds of faithful at a mass held Friday for the victims.

An impromptu shrine emerged overnight at the park, where people placed candles, flowers and messages.

We are not prepared for these kinds of events," said local Leo Ganassali, 21, as he laid flowers.

I came as a child to play in this park and to see it in mourning is very, very tough."

The attacker, dressed in black and carrying a blade around 10 centimetres (four inches) long, could be heard shouting in the name of Jesus Christ", according to a video taken by a bystander and seen by AFP.

Regional prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said the detention of the suspect, named as Abdalmasih H., who is under investigation for attempted murder, had been extended after a psychiatric examination.

Recently divorced from a Swedish national and in his early 30s, the suspect had previously lived for 10 years in Sweden where he was granted refugee status in April, security sources and his ex-wife told AFP.

He called me around four months ago. He was living in a church," his ex-wife said, adding that he left the country because he had been unable to get Swedish nationality.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told broadcaster TF1 that for reasons not well explained he had also sought asylum in Switzerland, Italy and France".

It emerged that his application in France was rejected last Sunday as he already enjoyed refugee status in Sweden, which Darmanin described as a troubling coincidence".

Witnesses described the assailant running around the park on the banks of Lake Annecy wearing a bandana and sunglasses, apparently attacking people at random. Armed police arrested him at the scene.

Several observers have expressed concern that the video of the attack circulated on Twitter for several hours.

- Time of emotion -

France has suffered a series of attacks in the last decade or so, most of them by Islamic extremists.

Most recently, the beheading of a teacher in broad daylight in 2020 near his school in a Paris suburb by a radicalised Chechen refugee led to a wave of shock and a national debate about the influence of radical Islam in deprived areas.

Thursdays attack spurred fresh debate about Frances immigration and asylum policy.

It seems like the culprit has the same profile that you see often in these attacks," the head of the right-wing Republicans party, Eric Ciotti, told reporters at parliament.

Far-right National Rally (RN) figurehead Marine Le Pen told French radio that France should regain sovereignty" on immigration.

But government spokesman Olivier Veran said such debates were premature when we are in the time of emotion, when the kids are on the operating table."

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne invited everyone to show dignity in these circumstances".
The United States is experiencing its worst air pollution in its recent recorded history, after the wildfire smoke entered the country from Canada. The worst affected state, New York has been exposed to levels of pollution more than five times above the national air quality standard.

The air around New York City reached unprecedented levels of pollutant concentration on Wednesday afternoon with the air quality soaring to 413.

As an orange haze engulfs the city, New York can take some lessons from Indias national capital, which is no stranger to unhealthy and hazardous air quality at some time periods of the year.

From forming a Green War Room to wearing a good quality mask, lets take a look at how has Delhi tried to tackle its stubborn air pollution problem.

Wearing a good quality mask

Experts unanimously agree that the best way to keep one safe from the impact of air pollution is to invest in a high-quality mask that one must continue to wear when stepping out.

In fact, A study by the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organization, Germany, found that FFP2 masks provide 75 times better protection compared to surgical masks. A BIS approved FFP2 S mask like Savlon provides protection from virus, bacteria, dust, pollution, allergens and pollen ( > = 0.3 micron). These masks provide 95% protection from particle aerosols > = 0.3 micron.

These masks have electrostatically charged meltblown filters which provide advanced filtration compared to ordinary masks. These masks are also tested for comfort and skin compatibility. Savlon FFP2 S Masks are BIS Certified. Each batch undergoes rigorous testing on quality performance and efficacy as prescribed by BIS. By wearing a good quality, well fitted mask the effects of viruses, bacteria, dust, pollution, pollen and allergens can be greatly reduced and can contribute to overall better health.

No to outdoor activities

Not staying for long hours outside, when the air is polluted, especially for children, the elderly, pregnant women among others is also a must. In times of really severe Air Quality Index, Delhi has closed its schools.

Focus on vulnerable population

While air pollution is bad for everyone, it is worse for people with lung disorders and other health issues along with children, the elderly and pregnant women.

Dr Bhagwan Mantri, a Pulmonologist at Moolchand Hospital, New Delhi, says, Polluted matter enters the lungs through breathing. In such circumstances, wearing a mask is important to restrict the passage of particulate matter. Patients suffering from asthma and other respiratory issues may find it difficult to breathe. They might experience allergic reactions and acute bronchitis and asthma attacks due to pollution. Irritation in the eyes is one of the common signs of air pollution. Hence, splashing water is necessary.

Campaigns for people to follow

The city also followed certain campaigns especially during festivals that see more pollution. One such campaign was Red light on, gaadi off campaign which essentially asks people to switch off their their ignition at traffic intersections while waiting for the signal to turn green.

Air purifiers at home

Several Delhiites invested in an air purifier to keep the air of their house relatively cleaner than what was outside. According to survey conducted by LocalCircles, 1 in 3 households had an air purifier in their houses.

Increasing indoor plants

To avoid indoor pollution, planting Aloe Vera, Ivy, and Spider plants can be beneficial. You can plant it at home or the office as well. These plants tend to minimize indoor pollution.

Creating a Green War Room

A Green war room launched by Delhi environment minister Gopal Rai monitored he air quality levels of the city 24X7 and stubble burning, and implement strategies based on the data to overcome smog.

This was managed by y 12 personnel, including scientists, green fellows and trainee engineers.

Anti-dust campaign

During the heavy polluted months of winter, the Delhi government launched a month-long anti-dust campaign to check compliance of pollution norms at construction sites.

Some of these norms are deploying anti-smog guns, covering construction sites with tin walls and tarpaulin sheets and not leaving construction material uncovered. Rai said the norms state that stone cutting during construction cannot be done in the open and a wet jetting machine should be used for it.
Donald Trumps main rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination condemned the Justice Department for its move to charge him over his handling of classified documents, underscoring their fear of upsetting his core supporters.

The indictment of a former president on federal charges is unprecedented in U.S. history, a case made more extraordinary by Trumps status as the clear front-runner in the Republican race to challenge Democratic President Joe Biden next year.

Instead of using the indictment to undermine Trumps bid for the White House, however, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, U.S. Senator Tim Scott and Nikki Haley were among the candidates accusing the Justice Department of political bias, highlighting a stance that has become central to many of their own campaigns.

All sounded in before the indictment was unsealed on Friday afternoon, revealing detailed allegations that Trump had mishandled documents containing some of the countrys most sensitive security secrets and obstructed the probe.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society," DeSantis, who is running a distant second behind Trump in the polls, wrote on Twitter. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.

Republicans have alleged, without evidence, that the Trump indictment is a politically motivated move by Biden. The Justice Department says all investigative decisions are made without regard to partisan politics, and has handed the investigation to a special counsel who was appointed in an effort to add a degree of independence to such a politically sensitive probe.

The 37-count indictment against Trump accused him of mishandling classified documents that included information about the secretive U.S. nuclear program and potential domestic vulnerabilities in the event of an attack. It also alleged that Trump discussed with his lawyers the possibility of lying to government officials seeking to recover the materials.

President Joe Biden, who is facing his own review over his handling of classified documents, reflecting the tightrope he must walk in dealing with a prosecution into his main political rival, said on Friday he had not spoken to Attorney General Merrick Garland about the case.

I have not spoken to him at all and Im not going to speak with him," Biden said, distancing himself from the investigation into his political rival.

Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot Republican candidate, was the sole rival so far to outright criticize Trump. Hutchinson called on him to end his campaign, arguing that Trump had flouted the Constitution and shown a disrespect for the rule of law."

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who this week blasted Trump as he announced his own 2024 bid, said he wanted to see the details of the indictment before weighing in.

By and large, however, the challengers came to Trumps defense, perhaps mindful of how Trumps March indictment in New York over an alleged hush money payment to a porn star was seen by many Republicans as politically charged and only served to rally support to his side.

Trumps support has held steady through many other lawsuits and scandals but the serious charges laid out against him on Friday could give his Republican rivals ammunition to attack his record, especially on national security.

Chuck Coughlin, a longtime consultant for Republicans in Arizona, said the cumulative effect of criminal charges will begin to take its toll on Trumps base, which is thought to make up 30% of the Republican electorate.

Trump is also under investigation in Georgia for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election in the state, and faces a separate federal probe into his alleged role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.

If the indictments pile up, Coughlin predicts the other Republican candidates will start to argue that Trump cannot win the general election.

Theres got to be a fatigue factor there," Coughlin said.

RIVALS ECHO TRUMPS RHETORIC

In the meantime, Trumps rivals are adopting his rhetoric against the Justice Department, accusing federal prosecutors of singling out Republicans, even as they cheer on a federal investigation into Bidens son, Hunter, over tax-related issues since 2018. The presidents son has denied wrong-doing.

Scott, who is polling in the single digits, criticized what he also called the weaponization" of federal prosecutors.

Today what we see is a justice system where the scales are weighted," he said in an interview on Fox News late on Thursday.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a venture capitalist also considered a long shot for the Republican nomination, accused the Justice Department of unfairly targeting Trump and vowed to pardon him if elected.

Haley, U.N. ambassador under Trump, said Americans were exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach," but also hinted at the chaos surrounding Trump.

Its time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions," Haley wrote on Twitter on Friday.

In New Hampshire on Friday Pence said he was deeply troubled" by the indictment, believing it would further divide the country.

He added, however, that the American public should review the facts of the case and make their own judgment.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lost his latest attempt to fight extradition from Britain to the United States where he is wanted on criminal charges, though he will renew his appeal next week.

Assange, 51, is wanted by U.S. authorities on 18 charges relating to WikiLeaks release of vast troves of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables.

Britain has given the go-ahead for his extradition and a judge at Londons High Court ruled this week that Assange had no legal grounds to challenge the decision, according to a court order published on Friday.

However, his wife Stella Assange said there will be a hearing next week at which Assange will again appeal against the decision to extradite him.

We remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the U.S. government," she said on Twitter.

In January 2021, a British judge ruled Australian-born Assange should not be extradited, saying his mental health meant he would be at risk of suicide if convicted and held in a maximum security prison.

But that decision was overturned after an appeal by U.S. authorities who gave a package of assurances, including a pledge he could be transferred to Australia to serve any sentence.

The extradition was signed off by the then-British interior minister last June.

WikiLeaks first came to prominence in 2010 when it released hundreds of thousands of secret classified files and diplomatic cables in what was the largest security breach of its kind in U.S. military history.
French nuclear power is an absolute red line" and non-negotiable, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said Thursday, following Franco-German disagreements over the role of nuclear energy in Europe.

Nuclear-reliant Paris has already irked Berlin by insisting on giving nuclear energy a starring role in European plans to produce more green technology in Europe.

Nuclear power is an absolute red line for France, and France will not relinquish any of the competitive advantages linked to nuclear energy", Le Maire insisted as he closed the annual conference of the French Electricity Union.

Frances 56 ageing reactors normally provide some 70 percent of Frances electricity needs.

French nuclear power is non-negotiable and will never be negotiable. We will have to live with it, and we are convinced that it is not only in Frances interest, but also in the interest of the European continent", he added.

Earlier, at the same meeting, German state secretary for economic affairs and climate action Stefan Wenzel acknowledged that France and Germany often have different approaches in energy policy, especially concerning nuclear energy"

Germany respects diverging choices for other fossil fuel energy sources by other member states as France that may similarly contribute to achieve climate neutrality," he added.

However what we cannot accept is when nuclear energy is defined as renewable, or low carbon hydrogen is equated with green hydrogen".

In April, Germany switched off its last three nuclear reactors, exiting atomic power even as it seeks to wean itself off fossil fuels and manage an energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine.

While many Western countries are upping their investments in atomic energy to reduce their emissions, Germany brought an early end to its nuclear age.

Germany has indicated that it will respect French energy choices, which is good news", commented Le Maire.

We have always respected German choices, and it would never occur to me, as Minister of the Economy and Finance, to go and criticise the energy choices of this or that nation", he added.
The Russian army on Friday said it had repelled several attacks on the southern Ukrainian front, where fighting sharply intensified this week amid expectations of a major Kyiv offensive.

The statement came after Russian war correspondents had reported active combat" in the southern Zaporizhzhia region.

Over the past day, the armed forces of Ukraine continued attempts to conduct offensive operations in the South-Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia directions," the Russian army said.

It said they were decisively" pushed back by Russian troops and planes.

The Russian army it had repelled four attacks carried out by forces of up to two battalion tactical groups, reinforced with tanks" near the village of Levadnoye in the Zaporizhzhia region and in Novosleka village in the Donetsk region.

The other two attacks were near the Novodanilovka and Malaya Tokmachka in Zaporizhzhia.

There are expectations of a major Ukrainian offensive, with some analysts saying it has already begun.

At the moment, active combat is ongoing in the region between Orekhovo and Tokmak," Vladimir Rogov, an official with Russian occupation authorities, wrote on the Telegram messaging service, referring to a locality known in Ukrainian as Orikhiv.

Alexander Sladkov, a Russian war correspondent, wrote on Telegram of intense fighting" in the area.

The enemy is undertaking incredible efforts, attacks. In vain. Our forces are holding on. The front line is stable," he wrote.

This could not be independently verified.

The Ukrainian army meanwhile said only the adversary remains on the defensive" in Zaporizhzhia.

It said it destroyed four missiles and 10 drones, out of some 20 that Russia had fired at military installations and critical infrastructure".
The UNs top court gave the green light Friday to Ukraines western allies to support it in its legal fight against Russia.

Ukraine dragged Moscow to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague shortly after the February 2022 invasion.

Judges last year issued a preliminary order telling Moscow to suspend its military operations in Ukraine.

Many of Ukraines allies then asked to be allowed to intervene" in the case, in which Kyiv accuses Moscow of falsely using allegations of genocide in eastern Ukraine to justify its invasion, and of planning genocide itself.

Judges issued an order Friday clearing 32 countries including France, Britain and Germany to support Ukraine.

The court concludes that the declarations of intervention filed in this case are admissible," the court said.

However, the ICJ dismissed a bid by the United States to join the case.

The allies interventions mainly concern whether the ICJ has jurisdiction in the case, a process that could take months or even years.

Ukraine has alleged that Russia broached the UN genocide convention by its stated justification early in the war that it invaded to halt what it called genocide in pro-Russian areas of eastern Ukraine.

The ICJs order in March last year that Russia must stop its invasion was just a preliminary ruling, pending a decision on whether it is competent to deal with it or not.

The ICJ was created after World War II to deal with disputes between UN member states. Its decisions are binding although it has no means to enforce them.

The ruling comes as the court is dealing with a separate case filed by Ukraine alleging that Russia backed separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine for years before the invasion.
SolRiver Capital , a leading renewable energy investment firm, is excited to unveil plans for the Canyonville Solar Project , which will combine sustainable energy generation with agricultural practices. Canyonville will be the first Oregon Community Solar Program available in Douglas County, helping residents there and throughout Oregon save money every month.

With respect for the land, neighbor's views and area wildlife, and screened from public view behind trees on all sides, the agrisolar project in Myrtle Creek will combine solar power generation with agricultural land use.

The Canyonville Solar Project will create a pathway to energy independence for the community. And now, not only those who own their own homes and have ample roof space for solar panels, but any community member - including renters, businesses and commercial sites - can subscribe to the program and participate in solar. What all participants have in common is simple: they'll save money on their energy bills while building a sense of community.

Canyonville will integrate several agrisolar features, seamlessly blending solar energy and sustainable farming practices, to unlock a future where energy self-sufficiency and environmental stewardship go hand in hand.

Dual Use - Solar & Ag. The solar panels will be positioned to enable certain crops to thrive, optimizing land utilization and promoting food production alongside renewable energy generation. By utilizing the same land for both purposes, Canyonville exemplifies our commitment to self-reliance and sustainability. Goats for Mowing. Local goats, and other grazing animals, will be allowed to eat overgrown grass. This helps reduces the need for mechanical mowers, while giving a good meal to the animals. Bee Hives. With bees on the decline, we know bees (and beekeepers) need our help. Beekeepers will maintain bee hive boxes on the property, providing benefits to farmers throughout the county. Critter-Friendly Fences. Special fences are used to allow small animals such as turtles, squirrels and bunnies to run freely through the site, while larger animals such as cattle are kept from wandering in. Biodiversity Enhancement. By cultivating diverse ecosystems, native plants and pollinator-friendly vegetation will be thoughtfully integrated, fostering ecological balance and supporting the flourishing of local wildlife. Community Solar Empowerment. The Canyonville Solar Project is also an exceptional community-centric endeavor that empowers individuals to reduce their reliance on traditional power sources and forge a path to a more self-reliant future.

SolRiver Capital warmly invites all Oregon residents to participate in the community solar revolution by subscribing to the Canyonville Solar Project, and following our progress by following us on Facebook. By choosing to purchase energy from this pioneering initiative, individuals will become active participants in the clean energy transition, supporting local agriculture, driving sustainable development and taking a significant step towards energy independence for our community.

About SolRiver Capital

SolRiver Capital is a clean energy investment fund dedicated to financing the acquisition, development, and construction of distributed generation and utility-scale projects. Focusing on solar and storage, SolRiver owns and operates over 200 MW of projects across the U.S. from Oregon to New York. Founded in 2016, SolRiver's team combines top-tier developers, financial professionals, and operational experts with over 15 years' experience each. SolRiver utilizes a streamlined approach to underwriting and transactions, allowing it to close and fund projects quickly. For more information on SolRiver Capital, visit www.solrivercapital.com.

Contact:

Judy Campbell

360399@email4pr.com

SolRiver Capital

360399@email4pr.com

(720) 307-2672
A nurse on trial for allegedly killing seven babies at a UK hospital where she worked was a very calculating woman" who murdered many children", a court heard on Friday.

Lucy Letby, 33, who is also accused of attempting to kill another 10 babies in the neo-natal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital in northwest England, denied harming children.

You are a murderer You have murdered many children," prosecutor Nick Johnson said in an exchange with Letby on the final day of her cross-examination at the Manchester Crown Court.

I have never murdered a child or harmed any of them," she replied.

Letby is accused of targeting newborns by various means between June 2015 and June 2016, including giving them injections of insulin, air or milk.

She was removed from the neo-natal unit in July 2016 but continued working at the hospital on clerical duties before her arrest two years later.

Letby previously told the court she felt isolated" after her removal the unit and said she was only allowed to speak to a select few colleagues.

Prosecutor Johnson said Friday that Letbys social diary at the time was peppered with you out socialising with lots of different people on that unit".

Letby agreed with his assertion that she had a very active social life".

You are a calculating woman arent you Miss Letby? You tell lies deliberately, dont you?" Johnson continued.

He said Letby lied to get sympathy from people" and to get attention from people".

Letby replied to his questions with a simple no".

When she entered the witness box last month, Letby told the court she always wanted to work with children" and said it was devastating" to find out she was blamed for the deaths of the babies.

Letby is facing 22 charges  seven of murder and 15 of attempted murder, as she allegedly tried to kill some children more than once.

The trial, ongoing since October, will resume next week.
Ukraine was evacuating more people on Friday from southern areas where officials said at least five people had been killed in flooding caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.

Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on the Telegram messaging app that four people had died and 13 people were missing in the Kherson region, and that one person had died in the Mykolayiv region.

A Russian-appointed official said eight people had died in Russian-held territory and more than 5,800 had been evacuated from their homes.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the authorities were working round the clock to save people.

The evacuation continues. Wherever we can get people out of the flood zone, we are doing it," Zelenskiy said.

He also posted photographs online showing flooded areas where emergency services workers were using boats to rescue people and animals.

We are finding out more details about the damage Russia caused by this disaster," he said.

Klymenko said 48 settlements in the Kherson region had been flooded, including 14 on territory occupied by Russia. In the Mykolayiv region, 23 villages and towns were flooded.

Ukraine has accused Russian forces of blowing up the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station and dam from inside the plant, which had been under Russian occupation since the early weeks of Russias invasion in February last year.

Moscow has blamed the destruction of the dam on Ukraine. Each side has accused the other of shelling civilians as rescue are carried out.

Natalia Humeniuk, spokesperson for Ukraines southern military command, said Russian forces were continuing to shell the Kherson region but that the frequency of shelling had dropped as the flooding had forced them to change position.

Previously there were 70 to 80 incidents of shelling every day and (now) there are about 30 to 50," she told a briefing.

Ukrainian forces took back kherson last November after more than eight months of Russian occupation.
A ruby sold at Sothebys in New York on Thursday for $34.8 million, setting a new record price at auction for the precious stone.

The 55.22-carat gemstone named Estrela de Fura was already the largest ruby ever to go under the hammer.

It was cut from a 101-carat rough stone discovered in July last year at the Montepeuz ruby mine in Mozambique operated by the Fura Gems company.

The stone was the star attraction of a sale offering 100 different pieces of jewelry.

#AuctionUpdate The Eternal Pink diamond sells for $34.8 million at #SothebysNewYork today during the Magnificent Jewels Auction, presented in partnership with @Silversea, setting a new world auction record for a Fancy Purplish-Pink diamond. pic.twitter.com/5aJuLdnCAT Sothebys (@Sothebys) June 8, 2023

Offered at a starting price of $21 million, it sold for $30 million plus fees and commissions to an anonymous telephone buyer.

The previous record belonged to a 25.59-carat Burmese ruby, which sold for a total price of $30.33 million by Sothebys in Geneva in 2015.

This is really a true wonder of nature," Quig Bruning, head of jewelry for Sothebys in the Americas, told AFP.

Any ruby that comes out of the ground that ends up over five carats as a polished ruby is something thats rare. Ten carats is really rare. Twenty carats is almost unheard of.

Any ruby really over 50 carats is a once in a lifetime opportunity," he added.

Sothebys also sold The Eternal Pink," a rare 10.57-carat diamond from a mine in Botswana, for the same price of $34.8 million.

That set a record per carat of $3.29 million for a stone of its color.

The most expensive pink diamond sold to date was the $71.2 million paid for the 59.60-carat Pink Star" in Hong Kong in 2017.
The Railroad Mining District southwest of Elko, Nevada in Elko County has been active recently, with Gold Standard Ventures and now Orla Mining exploring the area with the goal of developing open pit gold mines.

The district has a long history of exploration and mining. Here is a look back at the early days of the district in the late 1800s.

The Railroad Mining District in the Pinion Mountains was established in the summer of 1869 with these borders: From the mouth of the south fork of the Humboldt River to Palisades Station the district went up Pine Valley to Emigrant Road, along Emigrant Road and Railroad Canyon to the toll road in Huntington Valley, to the south fork of the Humboldt River, and then down and along the south fork of the Humboldtan area of approximately 755 square miles.

However, nearly all the historic mining was from an area approximately three miles long by one mile wide along the flanks of Bunker Hill. The area was originally organized to mine coal and iron, but silver, lead and copper quickly became the main commodities.

The district is generally broken into two sections on the east and west sides of Bunker Hill. The largest and most profitable mines would be developed on the east side of the mountain. These were primarily lead-silver or copper-silver mines. The west side mines were predominantly copper.

Early development focused on the galena veins, an ore of lead, containing high-grade silver.

Frank and Armstrong made an early discovery on their claim from which three tons of almost pure metal were taken out by two men in three hours, containing about $200 the ton in silver. Copper was important as well, but only where it contained significant silver. Wm. Broadhead & Cos ore was the richest of copper and silver combo ever found in the State. Several ledges reported gold, but it was not the focus due to low grades and sporadic nature. The Rainbow Ledge ore was astonishingly rich in bromide of silver that when burned in a forge became perfectly coated with silver.

Such were the claims of the early mines.

Early ore was first moved to the railroad by pack train, then shipped to English Mill at Reno, the Selby mill in San Francisco, and as far away as England. With the number of producing mines increasing and the high cost of shipping, it was clear that the district needed its own smelter to reduce the ore to saleable bullion.

In 1870 and 1871 individuals and companies built four smelters in the district, all of which proved failures. On the west side of Bunker Hill, D.W. Keyes began work on the first smelter in March of 1870. However, there is conflicting information on when or even if this smelter was ever completed.

G.W. Rogers and Nathaniel Haskell built a water lined Haskell furnace in Bullion in June 1870. The furnace started with great acclaim but struggled to keep the ore hot enough to stay liquid. The Palisade Smelting and Mining Company, of which Rogers was the local agent, then built a stone furnace. They extracted about forty tons of bullion which they shipped to San Francisco, and, without paying any debts, shut down the works.

Adam Haag, who owned the Tuolumne Saloon in Elko and a mine with the same name in the district, began building a smelter mid-1871. The Pluto Mining and Metallurgical Company incorporated in August 1871 with Haag as a trustee. After several tries, the company built a functioning furnace and made a short run with favorable results, but internal problems with company management forced it to shut down.

During 1870 three towns including Highland, Railroad City and Bullion were platted and lots sold.

Highland was centrally located to many of the biggest mines, and by the end of 1870 it contained several saloons, including one in the blacksmith and a boarding house and several private homes.

The first hotel in the district was established by S. M. Campbell in what would become Railroad City. Campbell and his partner E. C. Hardesty sold several lots, but the town never developed. Hardesty and Campbell constructed the first road within the district, starting near the Brown Ranch in Dixie Valley and proceeding through Bullion up Right Fork Canyon to Highland.

Bullion would quickly become the largest town and the center of business in the district. The town boasted two hotelsthe Bullion Hotel owned by Joseph and Catherine Phillips, and the Hoffman House operated by William and Eliza Hoffman. Both families would live in the Bullion area until the early 20th century.

By October 1872 Bullion had three stores, four saloons, one blacksmith and wagon-makers shop, a post office, express office, district recorder and justices office, two smelting furnaces and a large number of pleasant residences. With the smelters being built in Bullion, this spelled the end of Railroad City, as the sites were only located three quarters of a mile apart.

On the west side of Bunker Hill is a small collection of houses that supported the mines in that area. D.W. Keyes and his wife Catharine were the first residents. There is no other information on this area, and whether it was ever called a town is unknown.

When the 1870 census was taken in June the district contained 110 people, including a number of families with children. Hellen Miller and husband J.W. welcomed a daughter on May 3 of 1870, marking the first recorded birth in the district. By 1880 the districts population rose to 150, which was likely near the peak for the district.

The Bullion Post Office was established on Aug. 8, 1871 in the Bullion Hotel, with Joseph Phillips as the postmaster. The post office closed on Jan. 20, 1934. The post office was generally housed in one of the hotels or stores, depending on who was the postmaster or postmistress at the time.

A one room schoolhouse was completed on the south side of Bullion in June 1874. Miss L. Conner was the first teacher. There are only a few references to the number of students at the school, but depending on the health of the district it likely ranged from just a few to as many as 15 or 20.

Access to the district was enhanced with the construction of toll roads, first from Carlin, with the Carlin and Dixie Valley Toll Road built by George Barry, and then from Elko. The road from Elko was built by George Shepard, who owned the Elko  White Pine Road, or as it is commonly referred to today, the Hamilton Stage Road. A third road from Pine Valley gave access to the Central Pacific Railroad through Elko, Carlin, and Palisade.

With the completion of the various roads, the stage lines from Carlin and Elko began competing for business. Stages from Elko seem to have been the most consistent, or at least the best reported. For much of the 19th century the stages generally ran from one to three times per week, depending on the need at the time.

Despite the setbacks caused by the failed smelters, by late 1870 the district had been opened sufficiently and enough ore shipped to attract the attention of outside capitalists.

Andrew J. Roulstone arrived from California in late 1870 representing San Francisco interests and controlled the Ella mine, the best early copper mine. In April 1872 the Webfoot Mining Company incorporated and focused their efforts on the Tripoli and the Webfoot mines. Roulstone shipped ore primarily to smelters in San Francisco until the Webfoot company built its own smelter in 1874.

A compound fracture of his thigh bone forced Roulstone to resign his position in May 1875. P.S. Buckminster took over as superintendent and reportedly ran the company $10,000 in debt, causing the company to be sold at a sheriffs sale.

E. Lucian Richie, a Philadelphia lawyer representing a group of eastern investors, purchased all or partial interests in at least 25 claims and a quarter interest in the Highland townsite starting in April 1871. The Highland Silver Mining Company, which was established in March 1871, owned many of the same claims, although the connection between the company and Richie could not be confirmed. Highland Silver focused their efforts on the Humboldt and the Nevada claims, with William Broadhead as superintendent.

J.W. Hussey and the Empire City Mining Company began mining in the spring of 1871. The company owned several claims, but much of the work was centered on the Last Chance claim, which included the Last Chance, Elko and Hussey tunnels.

Hussey would also play a large role in development at Cornucopia and other northeast Nevada districts. Hussey built the first successful smelter in the district in October 1872. Hussey made several significant changes to the smelting process in the district, including importing coke as a fuel from Pennsylvania and pyrite in order to improve the recovery in the smelter. Erection of the smelter reportedly cost $30,000.

The financial panic of 1873 and the inability to raise capital likely caused the end of this early stage of mining and pushed the district into becoming an area of unprofitable borrasca mines. The Empire City Company shut its mines and smelter in 1873, followed by the Webfoot company in late 1874.

A potential resurgence occurred when the Mindeleff Company entered the district in November of 1876, promising that ore with as little as 10% copper could be smelted at a profit. The company leased both the Empire City and Webfoot furnaces and contracted for 100,000 bushels of charcoal. The company employed 30 laborers to open the mines and bilked many out of half their mines before abruptly exiting the district, leaving the coal burners and laborers to whistle for their pay.

The district began to rebound in late 1877, with the focus shifting from lead and silver to copper. Edward Reilly of Lancaster, Pennsylvania purchased an interest in both the Blue Bell and Emma mines on Bob Hunter Hill and immediately began putting up a new water jacket furnace that produced both copper matte and black copper. The furnace began operation in April 1878 with Bullion resident F.J. Franks as the superintendent.

Reilly and partners formed the Blue Bell Copper Mining Company in October 1878 to work the mines. Reilly lost much of the mine to Alfred Wild through a suit brought by his brother Charles. A new company, the Blue Bell Consolidated Mining Company, was formed to run the mines. In 1883 Benedict Reinhart and Co. of Elko bought the property for $30,000.

Ben Reinhart was one of Elkos leading merchants, money lenders and traders in gold dust. Reinhart and company would run the mine until 1887.

Andrew J. Roulstone reentered the district in December 1879 as the superintendent of the Enterprise Mining Company. Local banker M. P. Freeman, with backing from San Francisco capital, took control of the Tripoli and Webfoot mines where Roulstone previously had success. The company ordered new hoisting works to set over the Tripoli Shaft, which had a depth of over 200 feet. Jefferson Henderson, who began the Henderson Bank in 1880, purchased the property in 1885.

The Elko Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company was formed in January 1880 to work the former Empire City Mines. Dr. George H. Everett of New York had charge of the mines. Everett refurbished the mines and in 1880 installed a new forty ton per day water jacket furnace to replace the brick furnace built by Hussey. The former Last Chance Mine was restaked as the Standing Elk Mine by Everett.

After losing the Blue Bell and Emma Mines, Edward Reilly bought Elko Consolidated Mines, focused on the Standing Elk, in January 1883. He later sold his interest to Jefferson Henderson.

The Standing Elk was one of the largest producers until the smelter shut down in November 1887.

Charles Brossemer and John Norton, who had been partners since at least the early 1870s, began opening the Sweepstakes Mine and worked it intermittently throughout the 1880s, either shipping the ore or smelting it locally in one of the districts smelters.

Production in the 19th Century ended in 1889. Total production is difficult to determine, but was likely around $3,000,000.

After shutdown of the smelters the district began a significant decline, and by 1900 only 34 people were living in the district, and most stated their occupation as farmer or rancher. The district had later revivals, but never to the extent of the 1880sbut that is a story for another time. 
UPDATE

Jun 9, 2023 8:00 AM CDT

In September, US District Judge Ronnie Abrams dismissed a suit from Amy Coopera white woman fired from her job after calling 911 on a Black bird-watcher in NYC's Central Parkagainst her former employer. On Thursday, an appeals court upheld that decision, ruling that Cooper's complaint, in which she demanded her job as an insurance portfolio manager back, isn't to be reinstated, reports the Independent. In its 3-0 decision, Manhattan's 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals said Cooper, who went viral online as "Central Park Karen," didn't offer proof that ex-employer Franklin Templeton had fired her illegally using race as a basis, or defamed her by labeling her a racist. "We continue to believe the company responded appropriately," Franklin Templeton says, per Reuters. Meanwhile, only good news for Christian Cooper, the man in the May 2020 encounter with Amy Cooper (no relation).

Sep 22, 2022 7:44 AM CDT

A woman who was fired from her job after a video of her calling the cops on a Black bird-watcher in New York City's Central Park went viral has lost her lawsuit against her former employer. Bloomberg reports that on Wednesday, US District Judge Ronnie Abrams dismissed the complaint by Amy Cooper (aka "Central Park Karen"), which claimed defamation, as well as racial and sexual discrimination, regarding the May 2020 incident. The New York Post notes that Cooperwho yelled at birder Christian Cooper (no relation) while walking her dog, then phoned police, claiming he was "threatening" her by asking her to leash her dogwas axed from her job as an insurance portfolio manager at Franklin Templeton the day after the altercation.

Cooper claimed in her suit that the company and its CEO, Jenny Johnson, fired her based on her race and gender, and that it publicized the incident on social media without even investigating what had happened. In terms of the racial discrimination claim, Abrams wrote in his ruling that Cooper's argument "merits little attention," as "none of Franklin Templeton's public statements made any mention of Plaintiff's race." Abrams similarly dismissed Cooper's sexual discrimination and defamation claims. As for the viral video of the Cooper-Cooper confrontation, and the conversation that emerged around it, Abrams didn't hold Franklin Templeton responsible for perpetuating that, noting those things "were already matters of public knowledge" by the time the company put up its own tweet. (Read more Central Park stories.)
Chris Christie criticized Donald Trump on a couple of fronts after the former president posted an altered video on his social media site mocking his rival's weight. The video was doctored to make it appear Christie was standing at an all-you-can-buffet, holding a plate of food, when he kicked off his presidential campaign Tuesday in New Hampshire, USA Today reports. The clip surfaced on Twitter before Trump posted it on Truth Social. Christie's response: "It's so childish. It's so juvenile. He is such a spoiled baby."

Christie addressed the post Wednesday in an appearance on CNN, saying that, "like tens of millions of Americans," he's struggled with his weight for about 20 years. Trump also posted a critique of Christie's speech, per the Hill. "If we had a child who conducted themselves like that," Christie told host Jake Tapper, "we'd send them to their room, not to the White House." The Republican candidate kept the issue alive later on Twitter, adding a potential Trump vulnerability. "At his advanced age, it is time to give up hope that Trump will ever grow up," Christie tweeted. "We need a leader, not a child." (Read more Chris Christie stories.)
The meeting between Vietnamese Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son and Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira in Paris on June 8 (Photo: VNA)

Meeting with his Brazilian counterpart Mauro Vieira, he affirmed that Vietnam treasures and wishes to enhance the comprehensive partnership with Brazil, one of its most important partners in Latin America.

Son suggested the two sides maintain high-level delegation exchanges as well as coordination and mutual support at international organisations and multilateral forums, especially the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and others of which both are members.

He asked Brazil to support and push the launch of negotiations on a free trade agreement between Vietnam and the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), adding Vietnam is ready to serve as a bridge helping strengthen sectoral partnerships between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Brazil, along with the ties between ASEAN and MERCOSUR.

Minister Vieira congratulated Vietnam on its achievements in socio-economic development and agreed with his counterparts suggestions, especially those about boosting effective and substantive cooperation in different spheres.

Both officials underscored the importance of ensuring security, safety, and freedom of navigation and overflight in the East Sea to peace and prosperous development in the regions and the world. They shared the view that all disputes must be resolved peacefully via dialogue and on the basis of international law, especially the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son meets with Diplomatic Advisor to the French President Emmanuel Bonne on June 8. (Photo: VNA)

Talking to Minister Son, Diplomatic Advisor to the French President Emmanuel Bonne expressed the determination to strongly promote the Vietnam - France strategic partnership.

He noted there remains much room for bilateral trade and investment links to grow further, the two sides should fully and effectively carry out the EU - Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), and that France will soon consider the ratification of the EU - Vietnam Investment Protection Agreement (EVIPA).

The two officials also agreed to support the expansion of cooperation in potential fields like climate change response and renewable energy production, and in responding to regional and global issues.

At the meeting with Executive Vice President of the EC Valdis Dombrovskis, Son called on the EC to promote the EVIPA ratification by the parliaments of member countries to create breakthrough in bilateral investment, and soon remove the yellow card warning against illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing for Vietnams fishery exports.

He also asked both sides to work closely to implement the commitments under the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) to help with energy transition in Vietnam.

Dombrovskis said Vietnam is an important partner of the European Union (EU) in Asia-Pacific and recommended the two sides step up connections in trade, investment, and climate change response. He also took note of Vietnams proposal for accelerating the EVIPA ratification.

The Vietnamese and EC officials expressed their delight at the progress in the Vietnam - EU comprehensive partnership and cooperation, particularly in economic affairs, and agreed to further increase high-level mutual visits. They also discussed the possibility of expanding ties in other aspects such as labour, health care, and pharmaceuticals.

Regarding the East Sea issue, they affirmed support for the peaceful settlement of disputes on the basis of international law.

The meeting between Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son and Canadian Minister of International Trade, Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development Mary Ng in Paris on June 8 (Photo: VNA)

Meeting with Canadian Minister of International Trade, Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development Mary Ng, Minister Son called on the North American country to continue opening its market to key exports of Vietnam such as agricultural and fishery products, apparel, footwear, and steel.

The officials agreed on the need to keep fostering the Vietnam - Canada comprehensive partnership, especially in high-level delegation exchanges, trade and investment, green transition, OECD programmes, and education - training, as the countries are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their diplomatic relations.

The two countries will also capitalise on the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and bolster coordination at regional cooperation mechanisms such as ASEAN - Canada and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), they said.

Later on June 8, Minister Son left for the Czech Republic, wrapping up the working visit to France and OECD./.
Donald Trump has been indicted over his handling of classified documents. The former president posted on Truth Social Thursday evening that his lawyers informed him of the development, reports the Hill. The New York Times confirmed the news, reporting that the Justice Department filed the indictment in federal court in Miami, where Trump has been ordered to appear on Tuesday afternoon. He is expected to surrender to authorities rather than be taken into custody. Trump thus becomes the first former president in US history to face federal charges, per the Times. As the Washington Post notes, the investigation involves not just hundreds of classified documents found at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate but whether the former president obstructed efforts to recover the material.

The specific charges Trump faces have not yet been publicly detailed. Trump has insisted that he did nothing wrong and that he had full authority as the outgoing president to retain such documents. He has further accused the FBI and the Justice Department of a politically motivated investigation intended to torpedo his 2024 run for reelection. The Justice Department investigation has been run by special counsel Jack Smith, who has, as expected, remained mum about developments.

Investigators also found documents at the residence of Mike Pence but have cleared him of criminal charges. An investigation is still underway over classified papers found at the residence of President Biden, stemming back to his days as vice president. On Thursday, Biden said Americans should trust the process. "Because youll notice, I have never oncenot one single timesuggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do on whether to bring any charges or not bring any charges," the president told reporters, per CNN. "Im honest. (Read more Donald Trump stories.)
Kevin Pezanowski probably didn't envision spending his 60th birthday fighting wildfires in Nova Scotia. But that's where the New Hampshire man found himself as part of a team of about 17 firefighters who traveled from the US northeast to help battle the largest forest fire in the Canadian province's history. His assistance did not go unnoticed. On Monday, he was repaid in love and lobster. For the last 10 days, the Salvation Army has been providing about 250 meals per day to firefighters who've been battling Shelburne County's Barrington Lake wildfire, per CTV News. On Monday, a volunteer serving breakfast to the firefighters at a local arena heard from another firefighter that it was Pezanowski's birthday.

The woman "asked if there was anything we could do that evening for his birthday," Nick Brand tells the CBC. Brand says he told the woman, "Leave it to me." He then contacted a friend, who donated some 25 lobsters for the birthday feast, along with cooking equipment. More locals donated biscuits, salads, an ice cream cake, and serving dishes, while others volunteered to cook. The owners of an old restaurant even offered up their space, feeling a proper lobster dinner shouldn't be eaten in an arena.

With the community coming together to help those affected by the fires, "it's pretty easy here in town right now to find people to help out," Brand notes. "There's so many of us that were just wanting to do something to help, to pay back the firefighters that are here helping to save our community." Brand, who shared a photo of the special birthday dinner, said it came as a surprise to Pezanowski and his fellow firefighters, who were "pretty happy to see some lobster waiting for them" after a long day of battling flames on Monday. The Barrington Lake fire remains out of control, though it is no longer moving, per the CBC. It covered 90 square miles as of Thursday, when displaced residents were expected to learn whether their homes had been damaged. (Read more uplifting news stories.)
Former President Trump was indicted on seven counts related to the probe into his handling of classified documents, his attorney confirmed. Trump is facing one charge under the Espionage Act, plus charges including obstruction of justice, destruction or falsification of records, conspiracy, and false statements, CNN reports. Trump himself weighed in on the Espionage Act charge, which he called "ludicrous." Federal agents from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security are en route to Miami ahead of Trump's court appearance, which the former POTUS said would happen Tuesday, the AP reports.

Meanwhile, Trump's fellow Republicans are speaking out against the indictment. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy blamed President Biden for the charges, saying it is "unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him." House Majority Leader Steve Scalise agreed, saying Biden is "weaponizing his Department of Justice against his own political rival." Even Trump's 2024 rivals are backing him up on this: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wondered, "Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?" while Sen. Tim Scott said the justice system's "scales are weighted" based on politics. Fellow GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said the indictment was "an affront to every citizen." (Read more Donald Trump stories.)
A lawyer who used ChatGPT to create a legal brief is likely to face sanctionsthough some might feel the embarrassment he suffered during a hearing Thursday is punishment enough. The New York Times reports that Steven Schwartz was grilled for almost two hours by US District Judge Kevin Castel, who "gesticulated often in exasperation, his voice rising as he asked pointed questions." In a personal injury case involving Colombian airline Avianca, Schwartz submitted a brief citing several court decisions like "Varghese v. China Southern Airlines," all of which had been invented by ChatGPT.

Schwartz, who has been practicing law since 1991, told the judge that he had heard about ChatGPT from his college-age children and "falsely assumed" the artificial intelligence tool was like "a super search engine." "I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases," said Schwarz, who told the judge he felt "embarrassed, humiliated, and extremely remorseful." "There were many things I should have done to assure the veracity of these cases," Schwartz said, per Bloomberg. "I failed miserably at that. He said he was "duped" by ChatGPT, which had assured him that the cases were real.

The judge said he would rule at a later date on sanctions against Schwartz and colleague Peter LoDuca. Ronald Minkoff, an attorney for their law firm, argued that the filing "resulted from carelessness, not bad faith," the AP reports. He said Schwartz "thought he was dealing with a standard search engine" when he used the new technology, but "what he was doing was playing with live ammo." The Times reports that the Manhattan federal courtroom was packed with lawyers, law students, and professors. "This case has reverberated throughout the entire legal profession, says legal commentator David Lat. It is a little bit like looking at a car wreck." (Read more ChatGPT stories.)
It's a genuinely unprecedented situation in American politicsa former president has been indicted on federal charges while running for president. So far, Donald Trump's rivals have mostly been rallying around him and at least one has publicly promised to pardon him, Politico reports. "We cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents," Vivek Ramaswamy tweeted late Thursday, pledging to "pardon Trump promptly on January 20, 2025 and to restore the rule of law in our country." Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stopped short of promising to pardon Trump, reports the New York Times, but he tweeted that he would "restore accountability" to the Department of Justice and condemned the "weaponization of federal law enforcement."

Sen. Tim Scott also slammed what he called the "weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president," but long-shot candidate and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson called for Trump to drop out, the Washington Post reports. "Donald Trumps actionsfrom his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of lawshould not define our nation or the Republican Party," he said in a statement. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tweeted that people should wait to get facts from somewhere other than Trump's Truth Social postsbut "no one is above the law, no matter how much they wish they were."

Trump, who reportedly faces seven counts connected to his handling of classified documents, also faces state charges in New York and could face more federal and state indictments. But none of his legal troubles would disqualify him from running for president or serving another term even if found guilty, New York Law School professor Anna G. Cominsky tells the Washington Post. "There are actually not that many constitutional requirements to run for president, Cominsky says. "There is not an explicit prohibition in the Constitution in respects to having a pending indictment or even being convicted." In some states, a felony conviction could bar Trump from voting, but the voting ban in Florida, where Trump resides, was overturned in 2018. (Read more Donald Trump stories.)
Elliot Page found his breakout role in 2007's Juno and nearly quit show business as a result. Under the media's gaze, the Canadian actor was "made to feel that I was inadequate, erroneous, the little queer who needed to be tucked away," the 36-year-old writes in Pageboy, a new memoir from perhaps the most famous transgender man in the world, arriving at a time when anti-trans sentiment is surging. More:



'Brutally honest': Page "brings to life the visceral sense of gender dysphoria, or at least one type of dysphoria: the sense that your body is betraying you," in what turns out to be a "brutally honest memoir," writes Gina Chua at the New York Times.

Page "brings to life the visceral sense of gender dysphoria, or at least one type of dysphoria: the sense that your body is betraying you," in what turns out to be a "brutally honest memoir," writes Gina Chua at the New York Times. Societal pressures: The memoir "slips back and forth among different decades," conveying "honest disorientation" as Page "charts the tremendous emotional and psychological effort it took for him to confront suffocating social messaging about gender and sexuality," writes Brandon Tensley at the Washington Post.

The memoir "slips back and forth among different decades," conveying "honest disorientation" as Page "charts the tremendous emotional and psychological effort it took for him to confront suffocating social messaging about gender and sexuality," writes Brandon Tensley at the Washington Post. On experiencing sexual predation: "From a certain age onward, it just became so consistent," Page tells NPR in an interview. "It's baffling to me why anyone would want to treat anyone that way, particularly someone who is so young and in a vulnerable position." He describes several rapes in the book, per Vox.

Sex with Olivia Thirlby: Page's Juno costar was the "first woman I had a suitably consensual sexual relationship with," he writes, per People. They had sex "all the time" during filming, which "helped my shame dissipate," Page writes. "I didn't see a glint of it in her eyes and I wanted thatdone feeling wretched about who I am."

Page's Juno costar was the "first woman I had a suitably consensual sexual relationship with," he writes, per People. They had sex "all the time" during filming, which "helped my shame dissipate," Page writes. "I didn't see a glint of it in her eyes and I wanted thatdone feeling wretched about who I am." On coming out: It would be years before Page came out as gay in 2014. "I felt like a huge weight lifted, immediately, like overnight, because that really was just so challenging and insufferable, being as closeted as I was, and for as long as I was," Page tells NPR.

It would be years before Page came out as gay in 2014. "I felt like a huge weight lifted, immediately, like overnight, because that really was just so challenging and insufferable, being as closeted as I was, and for as long as I was," Page tells NPR. Falling for Kate Mara: Page writes of having a relationship with actor Kate Mara soon after coming out as gay. Though Mara was dating Max Minghella at the time, she reportedly fell for Page, too. "It was a time of exploration and also heartbreak," Page tells People.

A-lister's rape threat: Page "recounts horrifying incidents, including being gay-bashed repeatedly," writes Vox's Aja Romano. Romano notes Page recalls the time one of the most famous men in Hollywood "threatened to rape him to prove that being gay wasn't real."

Page "recounts horrifying incidents, including being gay-bashed repeatedly," writes Vox's Aja Romano. Romano notes Page recalls the time one of the most famous men in Hollywood "threatened to rape him to prove that being gay wasn't real." On transitioning: "I still knew something about me was different," Page tells NPR. In contemplating transitioning, "I'd figure out ways around it because it did just feel like that's too much, that's too big." During the pandemic in 2020, however, Page found the space "to sit with myself and reflect," which led him "to acknowledge and express my truth."

"I still knew something about me was different," Page tells NPR. In contemplating transitioning, "I'd figure out ways around it because it did just feel like that's too much, that's too big." During the pandemic in 2020, however, Page found the space "to sit with myself and reflect," which led him "to acknowledge and express my truth." Estrangement from his father: They haven't spoken in more than five years, per USA Today. Page writes that his father and stepmother "support those with massive platforms who have attacked and ridiculed me on a global scale," per Vox. That's a nod to Jordan Peterson, the psychologist who was banned from Twitter for attacking Page.

They haven't spoken in more than five years, per USA Today. Page writes that his father and stepmother "support those with massive platforms who have attacked and ridiculed me on a global scale," per Vox. That's a nod to Jordan Peterson, the psychologist who was banned from Twitter for attacking Page. A mother's love: "Some of the book's most moving parts paint vivid pictures of Page's touching relationship with his mother," per the Post's Tensley. "Amid all of the untangling that's led me to me, no matter the difficulties or moments of distance, I've never doubted my mother's love for me," Page writes.

(Read more Elliot Page stories.)
In 2019, retired British surgeon Derek Fawcett was having a workshop built, planning to indulge in his new retirement hobby of wood-turning. As the Guardian reports, an unexpected discovery catapulted him into the world of archaeology. Workers found a blackened chunk of wood that, upon closer inspection, was revealed to be the oldest carved piece of wood ever discovered in Britain, dating back over 6,000 years to the late Mesolithic erapredating both Roman occupation and the building of Stonehenge. The artifactwhich was just over three feet in lengthhad been preserved in peat almost five feet below ground. As Metro UK notes, peat can help preserve everything from human remains to wood because the lack of oxygen slows decay.

Fawcett's discovery was labeled "amazing" by the UK's Historic England agency, and radiocarbon dating proved it was at least 500 years older than a similar find made in Wales about a decade ago, per the BBC. The wood has markings that appear to be man-made, though their purpose isn't clear. Fawcett's piece underwent testing at the Nottingham Tree-ring Dating Laboratory and the Center for Isotope Research at the University of Groningen, which confirmed its age. Fawcett, who has donated it to the West Berkshire Museum in Newbury, tells the Guardian he wasn't initially impressed when workers first showed it to him. "It looked like a big stump of wood," he recalls. "I wondered if I could turn it into some nice bowls. (Read more archaeology stories.)
Ukraine's counteroffensive against Russian invaders looks to be underway. As Politico reports, it's a long-anticipated moment that is being closely watched around the world, including at the White House, as some senior US officials see President Biden's global reputation as hinging on its success. Here's what to know:



Unofficial launch: Ukrainian forces have launched attacks in the eastern Donetsk region in recent days. These are thought to be the start of a long talked-about counteroffensive, though they may be "a prelude to an even larger push," per the New York Times. Ukrainian officials are offering few, if any, details.

Ukrainian forces have launched attacks in the eastern Donetsk region in recent days. These are thought to be the start of a long talked-about counteroffensive, though they may be "a prelude to an even larger push," per the New York Times. Ukrainian officials are offering few, if any, details. A 'most dangerous' phase: The Institute for the Study of War believes the counteroffensive is underway, citing "a general uptick in military activity across the entire front line," per Al Jazeera. It adds the counteroffensivewhich is "most dangerous and costly" in this "penetration phase"will likely consist of "many undertakings at numerous locations of varying size and intensity over many weeks."

The plan: Twelve newly-formed brigades, nine of which were trained by the US and other allies, are expected to take part in the counteroffensive to reclaim occupied territory, with a focus on parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions, per the Times. They appear to be probing the Russians' combat ability in the early stage, per Al Jazeera.

Twelve newly-formed brigades, nine of which were trained by the US and other allies, are expected to take part in the counteroffensive to reclaim occupied territory, with a focus on parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions, per the Times. They appear to be probing the Russians' combat ability in the early stage, per Al Jazeera. What the Ukrainians face: Russian forces have spent months building a network of defenses. Ukrainians will also encounter "table-flat terrain, with little cover along much of the southern front," which "leaves any advancing force of troops or armored vehicles vulnerable to enemy artillery," per the Times.

Russian forces have spent months building a network of defenses. Ukrainians will also encounter "table-flat terrain, with little cover along much of the southern front," which "leaves any advancing force of troops or armored vehicles vulnerable to enemy artillery," per the Times. Rough start: Two senior US officials describe casualties for the Ukrainians in early fighting, per the Times. Russian war bloggers claimed heavy losses for the Ukrainian side, though this has not been verified and such claims "have often been exaggerated" in the past, per the Times.

Some 'results': Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address Thursday that his forces had achieved "results" in fighting "very tough battles" in the Donetsk region, specifically Bakhmut, per Al Jazeera. A Ukrainian deputy defense minister said forces managed to "destroy a lot of enemy manpower" in Bakhmut, per the Times.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address Thursday that his forces had achieved "results" in fighting "very tough battles" in the Donetsk region, specifically Bakhmut, per Al Jazeera. A Ukrainian deputy defense minister said forces managed to "destroy a lot of enemy manpower" in Bakhmut, per the Times. A make-or-break moment: If Ukraine fails to make a breakthrough with billions of dollars in weapons supplied by its allies, Western support could falter, "putting pressure on Kyiv to enter into negotiations with Moscow or freeze the conflict, cementing in place some of Russia's territorial gains," the Times reports.

If Ukraine fails to make a breakthrough with billions of dollars in weapons supplied by its allies, Western support could falter, "putting pressure on Kyiv to enter into negotiations with Moscow or freeze the conflict, cementing in place some of Russia's territorial gains," the Times reports. Biden isn't concerned: Some Biden administration officials fear "any initial missteps ... could empower House Republicans to scuttle efforts by their Senate counterparts to boost defense spending," per Politico. But Biden appeared unconcerned Thursday. "I believe well have the funding we need for Ukraine for as long as it takes," he said.

(Read more Russia-Ukraine war stories.)
There's apparently been speculation among fans that Tyler James Williams, who plays Gregory Eddie on the ABC comedy Abbott Elementary, might be gay, and on Sunday he took to Instagram to address the rumors. But LZ Granderson doesn't care so much about Williams' sexual preferences as he does how the 30-year-old actor handled the situationand he calls it a win for Williams, and for a society that often pigeonholes men into certain behaviors, traits, and appearances. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Granderson notes that Williams made clear in his social media post that he isn't gay, but that "the culture of trying to 'find' some kind of hidden trait or behavior that a closed person 'let slip' is very dangerous." Williams added: "Being straight doesn't look one way. Being gay doesn't look one way."

It's a refreshing take, writes Granderson, himself a gay man who was uncomfortable being around "flamboyant" gay men when he was younger. "The truth is I wanted to be viewed as a 'regular dude' who just happened to be gay," he writes. "I was almost 30 before I understood how unhealthy my thinking had been." Williams, on the other hand, successfully tackled the "archetypes" of being masculineones that Granderson notes can ultimately be harmful to all men, gay or straight. He compares Williams' perspective to that of GOP Sen. Josh Hawley, who promotes an alpha male lifestyle that Granderson says can lead to misguided fears of appearing "gay." "Homophobia, disguised as masculinity, slowly drains the joy and connection out of life," Granderson writes. His full column here, as well as a Today.com piece on how Williams' two brothers say he supported them when they came out. (Read more LGBTQ stories.)
A man on a year-long walking tour of France's cathedrals says he was meant to be in an Annecy park on Thursday as an assailant began stabbing children. Henri d'Anselme, 24, of Paris has been dubbed "the backpack hero" after he intervened in Thursday's attack that left two adults and four toddlers injured. Video footage shows him using backpacks in an attempt to block the attacker, whom he then pursues, per Reuters. At one point, he throws a bag at the assailant. "I didn't even think about it," the devout Catholic said of pursuing the "furious madman," per the Guardian. "I let myself be guided by providence and the Virgin Mary," he added, per Reuters. "I said my adieu. They would decide what would happen."

He was nine months and 800 miles into his tour, documented on Instagram, when he stopped in Annecy, about 25 miles south of Geneva, Switzerland. He shared a photo of the city's namesake lake early Thursday before "atrocious scenes" unfolded at a park on the lakeshore, where families were enjoying the sunshine. When d'Anselme heard screams and saw a man with a knife, he ran toward the chaos and ended up "chasing the attacker out of the children's area," per the Guardian. His bravery was all the more surprising as a friend describes d'Anselme as "a beanpole who is afraid of heights," per the outlet. "But you do what you can," said d'Anselme, who met French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday. "Anyone would have done what I did."

Two adults and four children between the ages of 22 and 36 months, including a British national and a Dutch national, were injured in the morning attack, Reuters reports. Two of the toddlers who were critically injured were listed in stable conditon on Friday. Police arrested a 31-year old Syrian national who was granted asylum in Sweden 10 years ago and entered France legally, per Reuters. The man, believed to be homeless, had been questioned by police on Sunday while washing himself in Annecy lake, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said late Thusday, according to the outlet. He added the man's request for asylum in France was rejected around the same time. (Read more France stories.)
Szabolcs Szolnoki, deputy state secretary for technology of the Ministry of Economic Development of Hungary, speaks during the opening ceremony of the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) in Budapest, Hungary, on June 8, 2023. After a three-year hiatus, the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) has once more opened in Budapest, showcasing the expanding economic and trade ties between China and Hungary. (Photo by Attila Volgyi/Xinhua)

BUDAPEST, June 8 (Xinhua) -- After a three-year hiatus, the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) has once more opened in Budapest, showcasing the expanding economic and trade ties between China and Hungary.

The recurring three-day event, the sixth edition of this fair, has evolved into a significant platform for fostering business relations and facilitating commercial and economic cooperation thanks to the presence of over 230 Chinese exhibitors.

Wu Zhengping, director general of the Trade Development Bureau of the Ministry of Commerce of China, acknowledged the steady growth in bilateral economic and trade relations.

"The fair sends a signal throughout Europe, providing a comprehensive platform for exhibitions, trade negotiations, investment cooperation and cultural exchange," he said.

He highlighted Hungary's strategic geographical position among the countries participating in China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and urged enterprises to make use of the available international supply routes and logistics services, such as the China-Europe freight trains.

Wu also encouraged Hungarian companies to explore investment opportunities in China, fostering two-way investment and a balanced trade relationship. He expressed his hope that entrepreneurs and friends could "foster friendship, engage in cooperative discussions, and jointly plan for the future" via this platform.

Liu Bo, minister-counsellor of the Chinese embassy in Hungary, said that "Hungary has become China's largest investment destination in Central and Eastern Europe."

He emphasized the significance of the BRI in fostering developments, noting that the current fair, the first after the COVID-19 pandemic, will further enhance bilateral economic and trade cooperation.

Szabolcs Szolnoki, deputy state secretary for technology of the Ministry of Economic Development of Hungary, expressed his gratitude for the event, noting that China is Hungary's top trading partner outside the European Union.

He assured attendees that Chinese goods not only offer an excellent price-per-performance ratio but also boast the highest quality.

Erno Peto, president of the Chinese Hungarian Chamber of Economy, praised the event, highlighting its purpose of connecting companies and helping them to establish mutually beneficial collaborations. "The China Brand Fair has become the biggest and most important exhibition of Chinese brands in Central and Eastern Europe."

Local entrepreneurs also view the fair as a useful platform for harmonious exchange and mutually beneficial trade between China and the Central and Eastern European countries.

"We are looking for new opportunities, we want to find new markets, and that's why we have come to this exhibition," Kristof Horvath, a 26-year-old entrepreneur in energy sector told Xinhua, following the opening ceremony.

"I am impressed by the variety of products on show, and on such a big area," he said.

"It is really worth coming here because we can touch and try the products with our hands, it is much better than just scrolling pics on the web," Mate Kovacs, his 27-year-old friend, interested in the catering business, said.

A lion dance is performed during the opening ceremony of the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) in Budapest, Hungary, on June 8, 2023. After a three-year hiatus, the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) has once more opened in Budapest, showcasing the expanding economic and trade ties between China and Hungary. (Photo by Attila Volgyi/Xinhua)

Visitors talk with an exhibitor at the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) in Budapest, Hungary, on June 8, 2023. After a three-year hiatus, the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) has once more opened in Budapest, showcasing the expanding economic and trade ties between China and Hungary. (Photo by Attila Volgyi/Xinhua)

People attend the opening ceremony of the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) in Budapest, Hungary, on June 8, 2023. After a three-year hiatus, the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) has once more opened in Budapest, showcasing the expanding economic and trade ties between China and Hungary. (Photo by Attila Volgyi/Xinhua)

A visitor talks with an exhibitor at the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) in Budapest, Hungary, on June 8, 2023. After a three-year hiatus, the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) has once more opened in Budapest, showcasing the expanding economic and trade ties between China and Hungary. (Photo by Attila Volgyi/Xinhua)

People attend the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) in Budapest, Hungary, on June 8, 2023. After a three-year hiatus, the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) has once more opened in Budapest, showcasing the expanding economic and trade ties between China and Hungary. (Photo by Attila Volgyi/Xinhua)

People attend the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) in Budapest, Hungary, on June 8, 2023. After a three-year hiatus, the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) has once more opened in Budapest, showcasing the expanding economic and trade ties between China and Hungary. (Xinhua/Chen Hao)

Visitors talk with an exhibitor at the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) in Budapest, Hungary, on June 8, 2023. After a three-year hiatus, the 2023 China Brand Fair (Central and Eastern Europe) has once more opened in Budapest, showcasing the expanding economic and trade ties between China and Hungary. (Xinhua/Chen Hao)

Editor: ZAD
Thanks to a traffic stop made by an observant officer, police say a South Carolina woman is safe and her passenger, a suspect in an attempted murder, is under arrest. Citing a Facebook post from the Myrtle Beach Police Department, USA Today reports that officer Kayla Wallace pulled over a white Jeep that ran a red light. Wallace observed that the driver appeared to be "distressed" and mouthed the words "help me" when her male passenger wasn't looking. CBS News reports that Wallace put the male, identified as 29-year-old Collins Bates, in the back of her cruiser and returned to the driver, who said Bates had forced her to drive him at gunpoint after he allegedly shot someone.

Shortly afterward, a Be On the Lookout advisory, or BOLO, came over the police radio describing a man fitting Bates' description who was involved in a shooting. He was placed under arrest, reports WBTW, and charged with kidnapping, possessing a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, and attempted murder. No details were provided about the person who had been shot. The arresting officer was commended in the department's Facebook post, which said in part, "our community is lucky to have Officer Wallace." (Read more crime stories.)
A second person has been indicted alongside former President Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, with Trump himself announcing it. That individual is Walt Nauta, described by Axios as being "Trump's personal aide and a military valet in the White House." Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Friday that the DOJ would be indicting "a wonderful man, Walt Nauta, a member of the U.S. Navy, who served proudly with me in the White House, retired as Senior Chief, and then transitioned into private life as a personal aide. He has done a fantastic job!"

Trump added of Nauta: "They are trying to destroy his life, like the lives of so many others, hoping that he will say bad things about 'Trump.' He is strong, brave, and a Great Patriot." A "person familiar with the matter" confirms Nauta's indictment to the Wall Street Journal, which notes that Nauta has been a target of the probe for some time "after he was seen on surveillance footage moving boxes from a storage room before and after investigators issued a May subpoena seeking the return of all government documents in Trump's possession." Nauta has reportedly told investigators that Trump had instructed him to do so.

The case against the two men has been assigned to Trump-appointed US District Judge Aileen Cannon. Cannon was the judge who OK'd the Trump team request in 2022 to appoint an outside "special master" to review the classified documents seized from the Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida. Meanwhile, Friday also saw Trump's legal team get a bit of a shake-up. Per Politico, two of the former president's top attorneys, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, have resigned from his defense team. The lawyers noted they would no longer be representing Trump in either the Mar-a-Lago case or the pending January 6 probe, per a statement cited by CNN's Kaitlan Collins.

"Now that the [Mar-a-Lago] case has been filed to Miami, this is a logical moment for us to step aside and let others carry the cases through to their completion," they wrote. In another Truth Social post, Trump thanked Trusty and Rowley and noted that going forward, "I will be represented by Todd Blanche, Esq., and a firm to be named later." The Journal notes that Trump is now "facing the biggest legal threat in his life"one that "[points] to the possibility of prison time" if he's convicted of the charges against him. (Read more Donald Trump stories.)
The special counsel handling the Donald Trump classified documents case addressed the nation Friday afternoon, asking Americans to read the indictment of the former president "in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged." (You can do so here.) In a two-minute televised statement delivered at the Justice Department in Washington, accompanied by a security guard, Jack Smith pointed out that those working in the military and intelligence community "dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people," NBC News reports. "Our laws that protect national defense information are critical for the safety and security of the United States. And they must be enforced." The counts filed against Trump include violating the Espionage Act.

Smith promised a speedy trial, per the Washington Post. He did not say in his remarks, delivered solemnly, why the case was brought in Florida. The address constituted the special counsel's first public comments about the case. Just before Smith stepped to the microphone, Trump attacked him in a social media post. Republican allies of Trump have argued the case isn't worth prosecuting, per the New York Times; Smith emphasized its seriousness. They've also said the Justice Department is being weaponized against Trump; Smith thanked "the dedicated public servants" working on the investigation, saying they "work tirelessly every day upholding the rule of law in our country." (Watch video of his statement.)
Boris Johnson, who was forced from office as British prime minister last year, resigned his seat in Parliament on Friday. He did not go quietly. An investigation had recommended Johnson's suspension from the House of Commons after finding he'd misled Parliament about parties he'd hosted during the pandemic lockdown, the Guardian reports. He issued a 1,000-word statement on his way out, attacking Prime Minister Rishi Sunak over taxes, his handling of Brexit, and for being insufficiently Conservativethe party Johnson also belongs to. And he hinted that he might be back.

Johnson's resignation letter argued that the members of the investigating committee were biased against him, per the Washington Post. "Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts," he said. The panel's report has not been made public. Johnson said the committee has "not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled" Parliament. A byelection will be held to fill his seat. Johnson's parting shot hinted that he might not be finished with political life, saying he was "very sad to be leaving parliamentat least for now." (Read more Boris Johnson stories.)
TRADOC and the Development of a New Generation of Weapons
An examinee talks with his mother at an exam site in Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Hu Xingyu)

An examinee hugs her mother at an exam site in Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Hu Xingyu)

Relatives of examinees wait outside an exam site in Suiyang County, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Yang Ying)

Examinees pose for photos outside an exam site in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

Examinees run out of an exam site in Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Hu Xingyu)

Examinees pose for photos outside an exam site in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

An examinee poses for a photo with her relatives at an exam site in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)

Examinees and their relatives pose for photos at an exam site in Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Hu Xingyu)

An examinee is presented with flowers by his mother at an exam site in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)

Relatives of examinees wait outside an exam site in Yinchuan, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Li Xulun)

Examinees celebrate outside an exam site in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

Examinees walk out of an exam site in Changchun, northeast China's Jilin Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Zhang Nan)

A teacher greets his students outside an exam site in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

Examinees walk out of an exam site in Changchun, northeast China's Jilin Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Zhang Nan)

A teacher takes selfies with her students at an exam site in Changchun, northeast China's Jilin Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Zhang Nan)

In this aerial photo, examinees walk out of an exam site in Suiyang County, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Yang Ying)

An examinee claps hands with her father at an exam site in Xi'an, northwest China's Shaanxi Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Li Yibo)

Examinees celebrate outside an exam site in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

An examinee runs out of an exam site in Hefei, east China's Anhui Province, June 8, 2023.

China's annual college entrance exam concluded on Thursday in some parts of the country. The exam, also known as the "gaokao," saw a record 12.91 million candidates sign up this year. (Xinhua/Huang Bohan)

Editor: ZAD
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister, yesterday hailed the significant contributions made by the members of the Indian community to Bahrains comprehensive development.

Expressing delight in the continuous growth of Bahrain-India ties across various sectors, HRH stressed the need to further strengthen the ties to fulfil the aspirations of both nations and their people.

The remarks came as HRH Prince Salman spoke with the Indian Ambassador, H.E. Piyush Srivastava, marking the end of his tenure in Bahrain. Prince Salman expressed appreciation for the commendable role played by Srivastava in bolstering Bahrain-India ties.

HRH also specifically acknowledges the pivotal role played by the members of the Indian community in propelling Bahrains comprehensive development forward.

Furthermore, wishing the Ambassador continued success in his future responsibilities, HRH underscored his keenness to nurture partnerships with India across multiple sectors. His Royal Highness also conveyed to Srivastava the importance of building upon the accomplishments achieved by both friendly nations for the betterment and progress of all.

"This is crucial to meeting mutually beneficial goals," HRH said at the Gudaibiya Palace.

Expressing his gratitude, Ambassador Piyush Srivastava conveyed his appreciation to His Royal Highness for the opportunity to meet, commending the Crown Princes unwavering support in enhancing Bahrain-India relations for the welfare of citizens in both countries. Vinod K. Jacob, a native of Kerala and a 2000-batch Indian Foreign Service Officer, will replace Srivastava as the next ambassador to Bahrain. He is presently Deputy High Commissioner at the Indian High Commission in Sri Lanka.
AFP | Washington

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to undermine prospects for a Palestinian state, after talks in Saudi Arabia which linked normalization to peace efforts.

Blinken, after wrapping up a visit to the Gulf Arab monarchy criticized by rights groups, spoke by telephone with Netanyahu to discuss "deepening Israel's integration into the Middle East through normalization with countries in the region," State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.

Blinken "discussed the need to uphold the commitments made at regional meetings in Aqaba and Sharm el-Sheikh to avoid measures that undermine the prospects for a two-state solution," Miller said, referring to talks earlier this year in Jordan and Egypt that brought Israeli, Palestinian and US officials together.

Blinken in a speech this week before the leading US pro-Israel group said that he would work to win recognition of the Jewish state by Saudi Arabia -- a major goal for Israel due to the kingdom's size and role as guardian of Islam's two holiest sites.

Speaking alongside Blinken on Thursday, Prince Faisal bin Farhan said that normalization with Israel "is in the interest of the region" and would "bring significant benefits to all."

"But without finding a pathway to peace for the Palestinian people, without addressing that challenge, any normalization will have limited benefits," he said.

"Therefore, I think we should continue to focus on finding a pathway towards a two-state solution, on finding a pathway towards giving the Palestinians dignity and justice."

Netanyahu during his last stint in power won normalization from the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Bahrain in what both he and the then US administration of Donald Trump saw as crowning achievements.

The longest-serving Israeli premier has returned to power leading the country's most right-wing government ever with supporters adamantly opposed to a Palestinian state.
, Jun 09 ( NHK ) - An Upper House committee has approved a controversial bill to revise Japan's immigration law. The legislation is designed to make it easier to deport foreign nationals who are illegally staying in Japan, and to end long detentions in immigration facilities.

The chamber's Judicial Affairs Committee endorsed the bill by a majority vote on Thursday. The Upper House is expected to pass it into a law on Friday. The lower chamber approved it in May.

Under the current system, asylum seekers are shielded from deportation, while their applications for refugee status are being processed. The government says some people are applying repeatedly in order to stay in Japan indefinitely.

The bill would end the deportation exemption if they apply more than two times unless adequate reasons are given.

It would also allow those facing deportation to stay out of detention facilities. They would be able to live elsewhere under the supervision of authorized supporters. ...continue reading
General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee Xi Jinping, also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, hears a work report from the Party committee and government of Inner Mongolia and delivers an important speech in Hohhot, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, June 8, 2023. (Xinhua/Ju Peng)

HOHHOT, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, has called on north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to adhere to its strategic position, pursue green development, and strive to write a new chapter of Chinese modernization.

Xi, also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks during an inspection tour in Hohhot, the capital of the autonomous region, on Wednesday and Thursday.

During his visit to the Zhonghuan industrial park on Wednesday afternoon, Xi said green development is the path that must be taken. The top priority of Inner Mongolia's development lies in transforming and upgrading the traditional energy industry, vigorously developing green energy, and strengthening the country's major energy base.

Xi also stressed the need to carry out high-level opening up and engage in win-win cooperation with the rest of the world.

On Thursday morning, Xi heard a work report from the Party committee and government of Inner Mongolia and spoke approvingly of their achievements.

Inner Mongolia is the country's important base of energy and strategic resources, its important production base of agricultural and livestock products, and a vital gateway for opening up to countries and regions north of China, Xi said.

Inner Mongolia should improve its industrial structure based on these characteristics and strategic positioning, strengthen its distinctive industries, explore new paths of transformation and development suitable for resource-rich regions, and speed up the construction of a modern industrial system that displays its unique features and advantages, Xi said.

The autonomous region should take an active part in the joint development of the Belt and Road Initiative as well as the China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor, and elevate the level of opening up, Xi said.

He also urged Inner Mongolia to boost its connectivity with the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and China's northeastern provinces.

General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee Xi Jinping, also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, visits the Zhonghuan industrial park in Hohhot, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, June 7, 2023. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi)

On the ecology front, Inner Mongolia must consolidate its role as a vital ecological barrier in northern China, with efforts to facilitate major ecological projects, including the Beijing-Tianjin sandstorm source control project and the Three-North Shelterbelt Forest Program, and ensure tougher management of ecological red lines, according to Xi.

More efforts should go into the conservation of natural forests as well as soil and water, the fight against desertification, and the conservation of wetlands, Xi said, also calling on the autonomous region to sustain the positive trend of expanding afforestation and curbing desertification.

Xi stressed that the most arduous task in bringing prosperity to all the people nationwide remains in some border areas with mainly ethnic minority populations. These areas must not be left behind on the way to common prosperity, he said.

He emphasized the significance of a people-centered approach, urging efforts to ensure and improve the people's well-being in the course of pursuing development.

Xi stressed the full implementation of the employment-first policy, urging targeted and effective implementation of measures and policies to ease corporate burdens and stabilize and expand employment. He also called for efforts to expand employment channels and provide more assistance for those experiencing difficulties.

It is important to improve the multi-tiered social security system, ramp up social and medical assistance, increase support for households receiving subsistence allowances or in difficulties, and develop elderly care programs and services, said Xi.

General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee Xi Jinping, also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, hears a work report from the Party committee and government of Inner Mongolia and delivers an important speech in Hohhot, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, June 8, 2023. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi)

Xi urged efforts to consolidate and expand the achievements in poverty alleviation and forestall any large-scale relapse into poverty.

He also stressed the importance of workplace safety, saying the utmost efforts should be made to prevent various types of major accidents.

Xi said the Party's work on ethnic affairs in the new era should focus on forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation.

The introduction of laws, regulations, policies and measures should be conducive to strengthening the commonalities of the Chinese nation and enhancing the sense of community for the Chinese nation, he added.

Concerning the ongoing Party education campaign, Xi called for solid efforts to improve Party conduct through the campaign, stay focused on solving problems and achieving goals, and see that follow-up rectifications are made effectively.

Cai Qi, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee, accompanied Xi on the visits.

Editor: ZAD
Chinese Vice President Han Zheng meets with Nicholas Lyons, Lord Mayor of the City of London, in Beijing, capital of China, June 8, 2023. (Xinhua/Zhang Ling)

BEIJING, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice President Han Zheng met with Nicholas Lyons, Lord Mayor of the City of London, in Beijing on Thursday.

Noting that the economic and trade ties between China and Britain enjoy sound momentum and huge potential, Han said financial cooperation has increasingly become a new driving force for bilateral practical cooperation.

London is one of the most internationalized financial hubs in the world, and the City of London is not only the "heart" of London's economic development but also a world-renowned financial center, Han said.

At present, China is unswervingly expanding its high-level opening-up in various fields, including the financial industry, Han said, adding that China is willing to deepen mutually beneficial cooperation with the British financial community and promote the sustained and healthy development of bilateral economic and trade relations.

China has made massive achievements in economic and social development, and its future development goals will be achieved, Lyons said, adding that Britain and China share broad common interests and enjoy promising prospects for financial cooperation.

The City of London is willing to deepen cooperation with the Chinese government, enterprises, and financial institutions to achieve win-win development, Lyons said.

Editor: ZAD
Here are 6 recommendations from a much longer list of well known attractions and of the beaten path uniquely Israel experiences for this Summer and many others throughout the year:

1. Tel Aviv Pride Parade!

The Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality Tel Aviv Travel Guide - Tel Aviv's Official Tourism Website (tel-aviv.gov.il) is delighted to announce the return of its iconic Pride Parade on June 8th! The famous parade marks the climax of the annual Pride Month events in Tel Aviv. Each year the parade attracts thousands of visitors and in 2022 over 200,000 people attended! It is also recognized as one of the leading events on the global LGBTQ calendar and the largest event of its kind in the Middle East.

The parade will take place on the beautiful iconic Tel Aviv Promenade that runs along Tel Aviv's fabulous Mediterranean coastline and translates into one of the world's biggest beach parties! The following day, on June 9th, celebrations will continue. Tel Aviv Pride vibes that reach around the globe!

2. Jerusalem  the ultimate combination of a holy city with modern touch.

Take the high-speed train for a 25-minute door-to-door ride or experience a Sherut (shared taxi shuttle) straight to Jerusalem. Drop off your bags and head straight to Jaffa Gate of "The Old City" and take a walking tour of Jerusalem's distinct 4 quarters  experience the Arab market that winds its way through the ancient walled city. It is recognized as a key UNESCO World Heritage site, where thousands of years of glorious history seamlessly intertwine with modern day life. At the same time, the city's strikingly modern attractions promise around the clock excitement and pleasure for all lovers of culture, arts, music, and culinary delights. Whether simply for the cultural experience, history & archaeology, street food bites exploration, or to experience true religious pilgrimage, Jerusalem offers something for everyone.

iTravelJerusalem: Jerusalem's Official Travel, Tour and Attractions Website

3. For Adventure seekers  Israel National Parks Authority  uncovering the past.

Whether fans of history and archaeology, or simply to connect with the diverse geography and topography presented throughout Israel. Hikers, mountain bikers, bird watchers, rock climbers, jeep safari or camel riders, and those choosing to simply connect with nature and camp under the stars. One of the major projects is The Ancient Sussita (Hyppos) archeological site, recently reopened to the public. Watch the video: In the city "set above a mountain" - YouTube

  - Israel Nature and Parks Authority

4. Culinary - The "foodie" that reaches from Tel Aviv, Israel to Toronto, Canada ?

From the vast array of street food inspired by ethnic flavors, or international fast-food chains, to larger culinary hot spots where innovative Israeli chefs are making their mark. Where to eat is part of the buzz factor generated by the local population and for visiting tourists.

Most consider Tel Aviv as the food capital of Israel with its over 4,000 eating establishments just in greater Tel Aviv to choose from. As for line-ups around the block, in 2011, Israeli Chef Eyal Shani added another to that growing number. Miznon was opened in Tel Aviv, and in 2023, Miznon expanded into Canada's upscale Yorkville, Toronto neighborhood location. Miznon is known to be a strong supporter of fresh local farm-to-table ingredients to create a new kind of Mediterranean street food experience, even in Toronto. Grabbing a connection to Israel via a unique Israeli inspired experience does work to inspire culinary foodie travel to the places where it originated.

Asif Culinary Institute of Israel - Recipes, Cookbooks and Cafe

5. The best single malt in the world - and it's not from Scotland .

In an off-the-beaten-path commercial building on the edge of Tel Aviv sits M+H (Milk & Honey) Distillery https://mh-distillery.com/ . One of their popular spirits, M&H Elements Sherry, was recently voted the world's best single malt whisky at by the 2023 World Whiskies Awards. The win perfectly exemplifies the distillery's commitment to excellence. It is made using the finest sherry and ex-bourbon casks and is crafted with great care and attention to detail. The M&H Elements Sherry is the first and only single malt whisky in the world, aged in kosher Sherry casks. This single malt reveals robust flavors of red fruit, dark chocolate, and oaky notes. M+H products are available at fine liquor merchants across Canada and around the globe.

https://whiskymag.com/magazine/190

6. Mediterranean Cruising  Creating unforgettable passenger experiences in Israel .

For centuries the Mediterranean coastline of Israel has been the landing spot for travellers and even conquerors. From biblical times to the Knights of the Crusades and centuries onward including Emperor Napoleon, Israel has been a hugely desired destination for all sorts of cruises. There is a growing popularity to explore the new nautical and land frontier for enriched travel.

Major international cruise companies landing or sailing from Israel's two cruise ship ports at Haifa or Ashdod, offer pre-cruise and post-cruise options for multi-day or shorter tours. Such opportunities draw on carefully designed itineraries specially crafted to highlight the natural beauty and spectacular culture and uniqueness of Israel. Visiting cruise passengers gain the capacity to dive deep and embrace unique cultural immersion and discovery in the cradle of civilization on journeys encompassing Israel, among other Mediterranean ports of call, with the goal to further inspire and become global citizens through travel.

https://www.jpost.com/tags/cruise

SOURCE Consulate General of Israel

For further information: Jerry Adler, Deputy Director for Canada, Director, PR + Communications, Israel Ministry of Tourism, Office Tel. 416.964.3784 ext. 24, E-mail: [email protected]
PEI National Park officially opened for the visitor season on June 6; campgrounds and most beach accesses will be ready to welcome visitors

CHARLOTTETOWN, PE, June 9, 2023 /CNW/ - In September 2022, Hurricane Fiona's ferocious forces left an unprecedented wake of destruction across the province. In Prince Edward Island (PEI) National Park, storm impacts included the falling of thousands of trees, road and beach access washouts, and the significant erosion of the park's shoreline, including sand dunes. Since the first days of disaster response, the Government of Canada has been helping keep people safe, and communities recover and rebuild.

Photo: Covehead Beach, PEI National Park Credit: Parks Canada (CNW Group/Parks Canada)

Today, Heath MacDonald, Member of Parliament for Malpeque, on behalf the Honourable Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Environment and Climate Change and Minister responsible for Parks Canada, announced a federal investment of $11.6 million for Parks Canada administered sites on Prince Edward Island. This funding will support ongoing rehabilitation efforts throughout PEI National Park following the impact of Hurricane Fiona, including: the buried revetment in Dalvay; Stanhope beach access infrastructure; visitor experience infrastructure at Oceanview; the rehabilitation of Robinsons Island; and repairs to the Gulf Shore Parkway.

Today's announcement is an important step in the Government of Canada's assistance to communities and businesses affected by Hurricane Fiona as part of the $300 million Hurricane Fiona Recovery Fund. Parks Canada is looking at ways to make PEI National Park more resilient to climate change. This includes adapting and rebuilding damaged infrastructure that is better able to withstand the effects of adverse weather events.

National parks are gateways to discovering, learning about, and connecting with nature. There are countless opportunities to enjoy the mental and physical benefits of being outdoors in these treasured places. PEI National Park, including Stanhope and Cavendish Campgrounds, will all be open for business in 2023. Many of these places will look very different to visitors as Hurricane Fiona left a profound mark on coastal and forested areas of PEI National Park.

Beginning June 6, entrance gates, most beaches, day use areas, trails, and all washroom facilities are open. The Greenwich Interpretation Centre is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Beginning June 13, the camping season gets underway in PEI National Park. This year, visitors will be able to enjoy:

all day use areas (public washrooms and shower facilities will be open)

accessible trail riders reservable by calling 902-566-5070; three are available: one at Cavendish Campground, one at Stanhope Campground, and one in Greenwich

surfguard services which resume June 28 and 29 at supervised beaches in PEI National Park

and 29 at supervised beaches in PEI National Park free entry to the park on Canada Day

opportunities to learn more about Indigenous history and cultures, including through Park Promise , A'Tuken, Mi'kmaw interpretive programming and Ninna L'nu exhibit on offer in Greenwich , and Mi'kmaw wigwam at SkmaqnPort-la-JoyeFort Amherst National Historic Site

Visitors to PEI National Park can stay informed about parking availability, surf conditions, and more by subscribing to our Info-Line. Sign-up is easy: Text OPT IN to 902-200-4499. To stop receiving alerts, text "STOP" to the same number.

For details and updates on PEI National Park, please visit: https://parks.canada.ca/pn-np/pe/pei-ipe.

Green Gables Heritage Place  including grounds, trails, Green Gables House and the Visitor Centre  is currently open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. In addition to guided tours and interpretation on site, special after-hours programming will again be available this year:

"Ropes Down" tour on Sundays and Tuesdays (English) and Mondays (French), 5:30-6:30 p.m. , July 2 to September 5, 2023

, "A Cordial Visit" on Thursdays (English) and Fridays (French), 5:30-6:30 p.m. from July 2 to August 1, 2023 , and on Thursdays and Saturdays (English) and Fridays (French), 5:30-6:30 p.m. from August 3 to September 2, 2023

For details and updates visit parks.canada.gc.ca/greengables.

Grounds and trails are open at SkmaqnPort-la-JoyeFort Amherst National Historic Site, and washrooms reopen June 12. The Visitor Centre reopens July 1. For details and updates visit parks.canada.gc.ca/skmaqn.

Parks Canada staff at PEI National Park are excited to welcome new and returning guests back to experience everything that the park has to offer.

Quotes

"Canadians are increasingly feeling the impacts of climate change, and our Government is committed to supporting Canadians be better prepared and to build a stronger economy. We are taking ambitious climate action to cut our pollution and create an all-hands-on-deck approach to climate adaptation. The Government invests in Parks Canada's administered places to help combat the effects of climate change, while supporting the health of our natural environment and ensuring public safety and enjoyment of these national treasures."

The Honourable Steven Guilbeault

Minister of Environment and Climate Change and Minister responsible for Parks Canada

"Prince Edward Island National Park plays a vital role in the local economy and tourism industry, attracting thousands of visitors year-round. When Hurricane Fiona devastated our region, our government created the Hurricane Fiona Recovery Fund, administered by ACOA, to help repair and rebuild critical infrastructure that communities depend on for economic activity. Today's investment will help Parks Canada ensure that roads, trails, beaches and campgrounds are ready for this year's tourism season and more resilient to climate-induced weather events in the future."

The Honourable Ginette Petitpas Taylor

Minister of Official Languages and Minister responsible for Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA)

"PEI National Park is an iconic destination in our community. Visitors from near and far are welcome to experience the many facets of PEI National Park including the beaches, trails, campgrounds, interpretive programs and renowned destinations like Green Gables Heritage Place. The funding announced today is contributing to the repair and rehabilitation of coastal infrastructure throughout the park, ensuring that visitors have safe access to their favourite treasured places. Make the most of the warmer weather and enjoy all that Parks Canada administered sites on PEI have to offer."

Heath MacDonald

Member of Parliament for Malpeque

Quick Facts

PEI National Park is within the traditional and un-ceded Mi'kmaq territory of Epekwitk.

is within the traditional and un-ceded Mi'kmaq territory of Epekwitk. Hurricane Fiona made landfall on PEI on September 24, 2022 . While it is not uncommon for hurricanes to reach Atlantic Canada , as the climate changes , the frequency and severity of extreme storms is intensifying. One of the known impacts of climate change on coastal locations such as PEI is a potential increase in the rate of coastal erosion.

. While it is not uncommon for hurricanes to reach , as the climate changes the frequency and severity of extreme storms is intensifying. One of the known impacts of climate change on coastal locations such as PEI is a potential increase in the rate of coastal erosion. Through the Hurricane Fiona Recovery Fund (HFRF), the federal government is providing up to $300 million over two years, starting in 2022, to support local communities, businesses and organizations affected by the storm and to help long-term recovery efforts.

over two years, starting in 2022, to support local communities, businesses and organizations affected by the storm and to help long-term recovery efforts. The Fund is coordinated by the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA), which is working with other federal departments and agencies to address and determine local recovery needs, develop targeted initiatives to assist in recovery and rebuilding, and allocate funds accordingly to the departments and agencies that will deliver their portion of the HFRF.

Parks Canada takes wildfire preparedness very seriously. The safety of the public, our crews, and neighbouring lands is always Parks Canada's top priority. Throughout PEI National Park, wildfire fire risk is actively managed by implementing guidelines developed by FireSmart Canada, the preparation of fire suppression systems throughout the park and the maintenance of municipal, provincial, and national partnerships all directed at wildfire response. The FireSmart program helps reduce wildfire risks to homes, neighbourhoods, critical infrastructure, and vital natural resources.

takes wildfire preparedness very seriously. The safety of the public, our crews, and neighbouring lands is always Parks Canada's top priority. Throughout PEI National Park, wildfire fire risk is actively managed by implementing guidelines developed by FireSmart Canada, the preparation of fire suppression systems throughout the park and the maintenance of municipal, provincial, and national partnerships all directed at wildfire response. The FireSmart program helps reduce wildfire risks to homes, neighbourhoods, critical infrastructure, and vital natural resources. Parks Canada administered places are a source of shared pride for all Canadians. That is why the Government of Canada is pleased to continue to offer free admission to all Parks Canada's administered places for youth aged 17 and under. By encouraging young people to discover and connect with these incredible natural and cultural places, we can inspire the next generation of stewards for these protected places.

administered places are a source of shared pride for all Canadians. That is why the Government of is pleased to continue to offer free admission to all Parks Canada's administered places for youth aged 17 and under. By encouraging young people to discover and connect with these incredible natural and cultural places, we can inspire the next generation of stewards for these protected places. A full dune closure remains in effect for PEI National Park. Visitors must not walk over dunes for any reason. Anyone found in violation of this prohibition may be prosecuted under Section 7(4)(c) of the National Parks General Regulations. The minimum fine for a violation of this prohibition is $150.

Related Documents

Backgrounder: Prince Edward Island National Park Post-Fiona Operational Updates

Associated Links

SOURCE Parks Canada

For further information: Stacey Evans, Partnering, Engagement and Communications Officer, Parks Canada, 782-377-2340, [email protected]; Kaitlin Power, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, 819-230-1557, [email protected]; Marianne Blondin, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Official Languages and of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, [email protected]; Media Relations, Parks Canada, 1-855-862-1812, [email protected]
The Government of Canada invested over $14 million to restore and enhance this site and renew the visitor experience.

SAINT-PAUL-DE-L'ILE-AUX-NOIX, QC, June 8, 2023 /CNW/ - The network of historic sites and protected areas administered by Parks Canada is a gateway to nature, history, and 450 000 km of stories from coast to coast to coast.

From left to right Hugues Michaud, Executive Director, Quebec and Nunavut Genevieve Caron, Superintendent, Mauricie and Western Quebec Field Unit Isabelle Charlebois, Executive Director, Tourisme Haut-Richelieu Denis Thomas, Mayor, Municipality of Saint-Paul-de-l'Ile-aux-Noix Christine Normandin, Member of Parliament for Saint-Jean, Bloc Quebecois Deputy House Leader Daniel Beaudin, Manager, Mauricie and Western Quebec National Historic Sites Credit: Parks Canada (CNW Group/Parks Canada)

Today, Parks Canada celebrated the reopening of Fort Lennox National Historic Site. Over the past five years, Parks Canada has worked to restore and enhance the site, especially the soldiers' barracks, which is the iconic building at the heart of the fortification, and to renew the visitor experience. Starting this summer, the public will be able to discover the new exhibition Passages, experiences of this island.

This restoration project was made possible thanks to over $14 million in funding from the Federal Infrastructure Investment Program. Parks Canada would like to acknowledge the collaboration of the community, especially the regional tourism stakeholders, including Tourisme Haut-Richelieu, throughout the work.

Through this investment, Parks Canada is helping to conserve the heritage value of these important cultural resources, ensuring high quality, meaningful visitor experiences and contributing to Canada's world-class tourism offering.

Investments at Fort Lennox National Historic Site is reflected in a number of initiatives aimed at ensuring the condition of the facilities and enriching the experience offered to visitors today and for generations to come. The most important work was carried out on the soldiers' barracks, the emblematic building of Fort Lennox. Major masonry work on its foundations and exterior walls has been carried out in recent years. Deployed in a completely renewed space on the first floor, the magnificent new thematic exhibition Passages, experiences of this island tells the great story of the little Ile aux Noix.

Other essential maintenance and restoration work on some of the adjoining infrastructures has been done on the site to ensure public safety.

Such investments help sustain the health of natural and built heritage, and create jobs in local communities, while offering visitors high-quality, safe and meaningful experiences across the country. Parks Canada is working with its tourism partners to ensure the return of this heritage treasure to the heart of the regional cultural and museological landscape.

Quotes

"With this project, we not only succeeded in restoring Fort Lennox, but we have also improved the experience offered to visitors. By working with the community and tourism partners, we are also showcasing the historical value of the Monteregie, which will promote the region and bring economic opportunities for local businesses."

The Honourable Pablo Rodriguez

Minister of Canadian Heritage

"It is with great pride that we celebrate the reopening of this tourist treasure, Fort Lennox. Heritage presentation is a priority for Tourisme Haut-Richelieu, and we are delighted to invite visitors to come and rediscover this enchanting site, with its renewed experience, a real asset for the municipality of Saint-Paul-de-l'Ile-aux-Noix and the entire region. Thousands of visitors are expected this summer, who will be able to take advantage of their visit to Fort Lennox to enjoy a microadventure on the banks of the Richelieu River, and thus contribute to the economic development of our region."

Isabelle Charlebois

Executive Director, Tourisme Haut-Richelieu

Quick Facts

Parks Canada's role is to protect representative examples of Canada's natural and cultural heritage, and to share its history, including the cultures, stories and contributions of Indigenous peoples.

role is to protect representative examples of natural and cultural heritage, and to share its history, including the cultures, stories and contributions of Indigenous peoples. Parks Canada's wide-ranging infrastructure portfolio includes more than 18,500 built assets. Since 2015, the Federal Infrastructure Investment Program has enabled Parks Canada to improve the condition of approximately 5,000 assets across the country.

wide-ranging infrastructure portfolio includes more than 18,500 built assets. Since 2015, the Federal Infrastructure Investment Program has enabled Parks Canada to improve the condition of approximately 5,000 assets across the country. Fort Lennox is a British fortification whose historic buildings were built between 1819 and 1829. There are no bridges or roads leading to it. It can only be reached by boat.

The new exhibition Passages, experiences of this island will present the human history of this unique place and unlock the secrets of the imposing building that is Fort Lennox Barracks. Visitors will also be introduced to the daily life of the service families and the life of the women in the garrison, and many of the artifacts recovered will tell the story of the soldiers who lived on the island.

will present the human history of this unique place and unlock the secrets of the imposing building that is Fort Lennox Barracks. Visitors will also be introduced to the daily life of the service families and the life of the women in the garrison, and many of the artifacts recovered will tell the story of the soldiers who lived on the island. This must-see family getaway provides a half-day (or more!) of discoveries on an island where nature and culture meet in an exceptional setting. Fort Lennox's 2023 operating season is as follows:

June 17 and 18 | Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

and 18 | Saturday and Sunday,

June 23 to September 4 | Daily, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

| Daily,

September 8 to October 9 | Friday, Saturday, Sunday and public holidays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Related Document

Backgrounder: Federal Infrastructure Investment Projects  Fort Lennox National Historic Site Reopening

Related Links

SOURCE Parks Canada

For further information: Kaitlin Power, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, 819-230-1557, [email protected]; Media Relations, Parks Canada, 1-855-862-1812, [email protected]
TORONTO, June 8, 2023 /CNW/ - Every day, LGBTQI+ people around the world face discrimination, persecution, and violence, just because of who they are or who they love. In 2023, we continue to see LGBTQI+ rights under attack  forcing people out of their homes and their communities. Everyone should have the right to be safe, no matter their gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation. With the number of LGBTQI+ refugees on the rise, the Government of Canada is helping them find a safe home right here in Canada.

The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today announced that the Government of Canada is partnering with non-profit organization Rainbow Railroad to protect LGBTQI+ refugees and welcome them to Canada. Through this partnership, Rainbow Railroad will work to identify LGBTQI+ people and their families who are fleeing violence and persecution, and refer them to the Government of Canada for resettlement under the Government-Assisted Refugees (GAR) Program.

In their new role as a LGBTQI+ referral partner under the GAR Program, Rainbow Railroad will build on the trust and expertise they have already established with LGBTQI+ communities around the world to help more LGBTQI+ people and their families find safety in Canada. The partnership will also provide an example for other resettlement countries who are seeking to provide additional protection for members of LGBTQI+ communities.

Canada has a proud history of helping those most in need of resettlement, including members of LGBTQI+ communities. Today's announcement reaffirms the Government of Canada's commitment to protecting the human rights of LGBTQI+ people, at home and abroad, and building a better, more inclusive future for everyone.

Quotes

"Everyone deserves a safe place to call home, and Canada continues to be a destination of choice for people looking to start a new life with new opportunities for them and their families. Together with Rainbow Railroad, we will help LGBTQI+ people start a new, safe chapter here in Canada."

 The Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada

"In many parts of the world, LGBTQI+ people face severe discrimination and are criminalized just for being who they are. This is why Canada continues to step up and do more to protect the rights and freedoms of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people. This new partnership with Rainbow Railroad  making us one of the first countries to have such an arrangement with an LGBTQI+ organization  helps Canada continue to be a safe haven for LGBTQI+ people at risk around the world. It will also better equip us to respond to emerging situations anywhere in the world."

 The Hon. Sean Fraser, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship

"This partnership represents a landmark milestone in Rainbow Railroad's history. For several years, we have worked tirelessly to advocate for direct referral partnerships with governments around the world. We are delighted that Canada has stepped up as the first country to partner with us in this capacity and hope other countries will follow suit. In a time when there are more displaced people than ever, LGBTQI+ people are uniquely vulnerable due to systemic, state-enabled homophobia and transphobia. We are proud to work with the Government of Canada to bring even more at-risk LGBTQI+ individuals to safety in Canada."

 Kimahli Powell, CEO, Rainbow Railroad

Quick Facts

Rainbow Railroad is a global not-for-profit organization that helps LGBTQI+ people facing persecution based on their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or sex characteristics. It has helped thousands of LGBTQI+ refugees from around the world escape violence and persecution to find a path to safety, including right here in Canada .

. In addition to this new partnership with Rainbow Railroad, the federal government already supports at-risk LGBTQI+ people from around the world who are referred to Canada by the United Nations Refugee Agency and other referral organizations, as well as those arriving to Canada through the Rainbow Refugee Assistance Partnership.

by the United Nations Refugee Agency and other referral organizations, as well as those arriving to through the Rainbow Refugee Assistance Partnership. Under the Rainbow Refugee Assistance Partnership, the Government of Canada works with the Rainbow Refugee Society to encourage Canadians to sponsor LGBTQI+ refugees by providing start-up costs and three months of income support, while private sponsors provide nine months of income support to LGBTQI+ refugee newcomers and their families. This initiative is strengthening collaboration between LGBTQI+ organizations and the refugee sponsorship community in Canada .

works with the Rainbow Refugee Society to encourage Canadians to sponsor LGBTQI+ refugees by providing start-up costs and three months of income support, while private sponsors provide nine months of income support to LGBTQI+ refugee newcomers and their families. This initiative is strengthening collaboration between LGBTQI+ organizations and the refugee sponsorship community in .

In 2022, the partnership was expanded in response to the Afghanistan crisis to provide an additional 150 spaces for Afghan refugees between 2022 and 2024. As of May 2023 , more than 235 LGBTQI+ refugees arrived through this partnership.

crisis to provide an additional 150 spaces for Afghan refugees between 2022 and 2024. As of , more than 235 LGBTQI+ refugees arrived through this partnership. To make sure LGBTQI+ refugee newcomers and their families, like any other refugees, thrive after they arrive in Canada , the Government of Canada provides funding to settlement service provider organizations that offer programming available to diverse newcomers.

, the Government of provides funding to settlement service provider organizations that offer programming available to diverse newcomers. From 2021 to 2023, Canada also supported the National Network for Enhancing LGBTQI+ Refugee Sponsorship project. The project brought together five organizations who are leaders in LGBTQI+ refugee sponsorship to improve the settlement experiences of LGBTQI+ refugee newcomers in Canada .

also supported the National Network for Enhancing LGBTQI+ Refugee Sponsorship project. The project brought together five organizations who are leaders in LGBTQI+ refugee sponsorship to improve the settlement experiences of LGBTQI+ refugee newcomers in . To help support refugees fleeing persecution because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, Canada was among the first countries to launch a special humanitarian resettlement initiative for vulnerable Afghans, including LGBTQI+ individuals. Over 16,700 Afghans have already arrived in Canada under this program since August 2021 .

was among the first countries to launch a special humanitarian resettlement initiative for vulnerable Afghans, including LGBTQI+ individuals. Over 16,700 Afghans have already arrived in under this program since . In August 2022 , the Government of Canada launched Canada's first Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan Building our future, with pride, a whole-of-government approach to address persisting disparities faced by 2SLGBTQI+ communities and to build a safer, more inclusive country.

Associated Links

This document is also available at https://pm.gc.ca

SOURCE Prime Minister's Office

For further information: PMO Media Relations: [email protected]
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BILLINGS, Mont. (AP)  NorthWestern Energy will resume construction of a natural gas power plant along Montana's Yellowstone River following a two-month delay, a company spokesperson said Friday, after a state judge revived a pollution permit for the project despite lingering concerns over its planet-warming emissions.

Work on the $250 million plant near the town of Laurel was largely halted in April when Judge Michael Moses cancelled its permit and said officials had failed to adequately consider the 23 million tons of greenhouse gases it would emit over several decades.

But Moses reversed his earlier order late Thursday while an appeal from NorthWestern is pending before the Montana Supreme Court. The judge cited a changing legal landscape that includes a new state law that eliminated a requirement for state officials to look at climate impacts from emissions.

Anne Hedges with the Montana Environmental Information Center said the group was considering its next steps.

Many utilities across the U.S. have replaced coal power with less-polluting natural gas plants in recent years. But the industry remains under pressure to abandon fossil fuels altogether as climate change worsens.

The Montana plant would produce up to 175 megawatts of electricity. Its air permit was challenged in a 2021 lawsuit from the Montana Environmental Information Center and the Sierra Club.

Moses said restoring the permit could also help avoid future cost increases to customers of Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based NorthWestern, which had warned that the construction delay would drive up the projects price.

A spokesperson for the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, Rebecca Harbage, said the agency was pleased the judge recognized his earlier ruling's potential negative impacts on customers.

Steve Krum, a Laurel resident whos opposed to the plant, said he wasnt surprised by the judges ruling after Montana legislators excluded climate change from permitting decisions.

Lawmakers are looking out for NorthWestern Energy, Krum said. They are giving them what they want.

A legal challenge by plant opponents is still pending, he said, regarding the decision to build the plant close to town.

Why would they put a major source of hazardous air pollution right in a populated area? Krum asked.

The plant is expected to begin serving customers sometime next year, said Jo Dee Black, a spokesperson for NorthWestern.

We need that additional capacity in Montana, dedicated to serving our Montana customers, for both reliability and affordability, said Black, adding that the plant would ensure enough electricity is available at times of high demand, such as on hot days or cold nights.

To prevent the worst of climate changes future harms, including even more extreme weather, the head of the United Nations recently called for rich countries to quit coal, oil and gas by 2040.
Gather 55, a Hartford restaurant with a philanthropic mission, recently received $40,000 through the Backing Historic Small Restaurants grant program, funded by American Express and administered by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The 25 grantees were selected by the National Trust for Historic Preservation from "a group of historic and culturally significant restaurants that operate in historic buildings or neighborhoods, who contribute to their neighborhoods past and identity," according to a news release. Gather 55 was the only Connecticut restaurant to be chosen for the honor.

Molly Reynolds, Gather 55's manager, said Friday the grant would likely be used to update the restaurant's exterior, with potential improvements for lighting and signage. As the Bartholomew Avenue restaurant is in a historic building, she said it's been a challenge to navigate the rules and regulations of what is permitted.

Gather55 takes the place of a traditional soup kitchen, promising food from a rotating host of professional chefs with a space designed to bring together Hartford residents of varying socioeconomic backgrounds. The restaurant, an initiative by the Hands on Hartford charitable organization, opened in July and introduced dinner in October, with three-course, fixed-price menus. Twenty percent of reservations are set aside each evening for patrons who are unable to pay.

Lisa Nichols/ Special to Hearst CT Media

Guest chefs have included Tyler Anderson of Millwright's in Simsbury, a "Top Chef" contestant and multiple-time James Beard award nominee; Billy Grant, of Restaurant Bricco in West Hartford and Bricco Trattoria in Glastonbury; Emily Mingrone, chef-owner of Tavern on State, Provisions on State and Fair Haven Oyster Co. in New Haven and Xavier Santiago, culinary director of The Place 2 Be restaurants. In April and May, chef Prasad Chirnomula of Chef Prasad in New Canaan and Scott Miller and Lou Fiore of Zohara in West Hartford added Indian and Mediterranean-influenced dishes to the menu.

During breakfast and lunch hours Monday through Thursday, diners may participate by paying the full posted price of each item (or more) or a minimum price. They can also choose to volunteer time with Hands On Hartford, depending on their ability to pay that day, according to the organization's website. Service staff at Hands On Hartford and partnering agencies will have "on the house" meal vouchers to help support those who are not able to pay or volunteer.

Hands on Hartfords Bartholomew Avenue building had a lovely kitchen and restaurant space, Reynolds told Connecticut Magazine in December. Before the pandemic, it existed as Cafe Fifty-Five, a restaurant open to the public that helped support the organizations basic-needs human services.

But the pandemics upheaval forced the move of Hands on Hartfords soup kitchen, which existed in a downtown church. The organization decided to reopen that operation in the Parkville building, and closed Cafe Fifty-Five as 2020 progressed, Reynolds said.

Lisa Nichols/ Special to Hearst CT Media

Hands on Hartford debuted Gather55 last summer, a retooled model taking the place of a traditional soup kitchen, offering free breakfast and lunch options. It opened with great interest and success, Reynolds said  so successful that the restaurant served 7,200 meals in August.

But the team decided that initial setup was unsustainable, Reynolds said, as word had gotten out that Hands on Hartford had the best free food. Instead, they transitioned to what she calls a participation model, with the paid minimum or volunteer work.

Nobodys going to walk away hungry, Reynolds said. We will always feed you if you come. But we really need to break free from that soup kitchen model.

Guests looking to book a dinner reservation must contact Hands on Hartford by email or phone and indicate theyre in need, but Reynolds said the reservation process is handled discreetly and those diners are treated just like paying customers. She said Gather55 is positioning the restaurant as a special-occasion experience, for birthdays or anniversaries or just an evening out for anyone who hasnt been able to dine at an upscale eatery.

Eight months into the dinner service, Reynolds said Gather 55 is "plugging along," and that each chef who has volunteered time and recipes has been "amazing." "Really, every single one of them has embraced the mission and what they're doing, and I think they've had fun," she said.

"Would I love more customers? Yes," she said. "But I think some of it is a matter of time, and I think just having better lighting and signage is going to help us. We're a little off the beaten path. It's not like being in West Hartford Center, where you're just walking around and saying, 'Oh, that looks nice. Let's go there.' You have to be very intentional about coming here."

Gather55, within Hands on Hartford's Center for Community at 55 Bartholomew Avenue, serves breakfast and lunch Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Dinner is available Wednesday through Saturday from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m.
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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP)  Joran van der Sloot, the chief suspect in Natalee Holloways 2005 disappearance, pleaded not guilty Friday in Alabama to charges he tried to extort money from the missing teens mother in exchange for revealing where to find her daughters remains.

Although he's not on trial for harming Holloway, the extortion and wire fraud charges are the only alleged crimes that link the Dutch citizen to Holloway's unsolved disappearance on the Caribbean island of Aruba. The 18-year-old went missing during a high school graduation trip with classmates and was last seen leaving a bar with van der Sloot, a student at an international school on the island where he grew up.

Van der Sloot, now 35, walked shackled into the Alabama courtroom Friday as Holloways parents looked on. He'd been extradited Thursday from Peru, where hes serving a 28-year sentence after confessing to killing a Peruvian woman in 2010  five years to the day after Holloway went missing.

Natalees mother, father and brother were in the courtroom Friday. Beth Holloway stared occasionally at van der Sloot but otherwise showed no obvious emotion.

The wheels of justice have finally begun to turn for our family, she wrote in a statement. It has been a very long and painful journey.

Van der Sloot, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, declined to use a Dutch interpreter offered to him, saying I dont think its necessary. During the brief court preceding, he entered a not guilty plea through his attorney and answered Yes when asked if he understood his rights.

Afterward, Beth Holloway hugged friends who had come to offer support. She declined to comment outside the courthouse.

Her spokesperson, George Seymore, told reporters that seeing van der Sloot in court was chilling but at the same time gratifying.

The mysterious disappearance sparked years of news coverage and countless true-crime podcasts. Van der Sloot was identified as a main suspect and was detained for questioning along with two Surinamese brothers, weeks after Holloway went missing. No charges were filed in the case.

A judge declared Holloway dead, but her body has never been found.

U.S. prosecutors say that in 2010, van der Sloot sought money from Beth Holloway to lead her to the young woman's body. A grand jury indicted him that year.

In 2012, van der Sloot pleaded guilty in Peru to killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores, a business student from a prominent family, in 2010.

Van der Sloot married a Peruvian woman in July 2014 in a ceremony at a maximum-security prison. He was shuffled between prisons in response to reports he enjoyed privileges like television, internet access and a cellphone, and accusations he threatened to kill a warden.

Peru will let van der Sloot remain in U.S. custody until the Alabama case is concluded, including any appeal if he's convicted, according to a resolution published in Perus federal register. U.S. authorities agreed to return him to Peruvian custody after that, the resolution states.

Cindy Rysedorph, a friend of the Holloways, said the family is doing as well as can be expected.

Its progress, she said. Im so grateful that hes here.
WEST HAVEN  For centuries, the tale of William Campbell has been kept alive in West Haven through oral tradition as well as a main road in the city named in his honor.

In the Glaswegian suburb of Pollokshields, where Campbell's descendants reside, however, at some point, that oral tradition ceased.

George Campbell, the 70-year-old, fifth-generation grandson of William Campbell, said his grandfather put an end to any discussion of the family's generations of service in the British military after several members of the Campbell clan were killed in action during World War I.

"I think he didn't want any more family deaths," he said. However, a book provided by an uncle informed him of the existence of two ancestors who served in the British army and died in the United States  Archibald Campbell and Archibald's brother, whose name he could not find.

For that reason, George Campbell had been unaware of the existence of his ancestor Adjutant William Campbell, a career military man in the British army. In 1779 during a British invasion here, the Rev. Noah Williston, a local minister, broke his leg during an attempt to flee and was captured. William Campbell made the decision to spare the minister's life, an act of mercy that was uncharacteristic to the British army, according to Peter Malia, a West Haven native who published a book on the city's Colonial-era history. Campbell was fatally shot just hours later.

In a move Malia chalks up to pure serendipity, he and George Campbell both posted on the same Internet forum: Malia in search of more information on the British adjutant hailed as a hero in West Haven and Campbell in search of more information on his ancestors. That chance interaction happened about a decade ago, Malia said.

On Thursday, George Campbell made his first trip to West Haven from Scotland with his teenage daughter Miriam, whom he had wanted to accompany him after she finished school but before she had other commitments. The pair visited Williston's grave on the downtown Green before visiting William Campbell's burial site on Prudden Street, where a monument is maintained in honor of his sacrifice.

"It's an honor to be here. I'm really, seriously glad I came," said Campbell. "This is really quite moving."

Campbell said that if a street is named after a historical figure in Glasgow, it's likely to be arterial; he said he was taken aback by how Campbell Avenue, the road named for his ancestor, is a major road in the city and that the Prudden Street monument dedicated at William Campbell's burial site is so large.

Mayor Nancy Rossi read a proclamation declaring June 8, 2023, to be Adjutant William Campbell Day in West Haven.

The site of the Campbell monument is the adjutant's approximate burial site; Malia said that shortly after he spared Williston's life that Campbell was ordered to investigate why the army's formation had been disrupted around the current area of Notre Dame High School; what was waiting for him around the current site of the University of New Haven were American military forces. Campbell was taken by surprise and shot and is believed to have bled out within 20 minutes.

Malia said his research on the Campbells leads him to believe William Campbell's mercy for the minister was not an aberration, but something deeply ingrained in him by his family following the Battle of Culloden in which thousands of Jacobites were killed by British forces. It was during that conflict that the importance of mercy was instilled in the Campbells, he said.

"It's what this guy gave his life for," Malia said.

Pete Bonewicz, who has lived in his home abutting the monument for three generations, said he was glad to see the Campbells visit because of what it represented. He said his brother and he would make their way around the then-wooded area, covered in branches and bramble, to find the monument.

"We didn't have playgrounds. This was our park," he said.
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MILFORD  When the purple martins at Milford Point look for food, its often difficult to spot them because they fly at too high of an altitude, according to Ken Elkins.

But as smoke from the Canadian wildfires blanketed the state this week, that changed: the martins and other birds flew closer to the water to search for insects, said Elkins, director of the Connecticut Audubon Societys Coastal Center at Milford Point, which is home to a purple martin colony.

He was unsure why the bird behaved differently. Did the smoke make the visibility too poor for them to see their prey from up high? Or were they simply trying to stay below the bothersome smoke?

Right now, experts say there is too little data to know exactly how local wildlife populations will be affected by the poor air quality that kept many state residents indoors for several days. But that doesnt mean they arent concerned  smoke could harm animals in much the same way it can humans, they said.

If theyre breathing in the smoke, theres the same risk of irritation in the respiratory tract, said Kristina Wagstrom, an air pollution expert and associate professor of environmental engineering education at the University of Connecticut. Theres the same risk of some of those neurological and cardiovascular impacts as humans.

Because of those risks, Wagstrom has shortened the walks she takes with her dog, she said.

The primary pollutant causing health concerns in recent days is particulate matter 2.5, fine particles that measure 2.5 microns or fewer in width.

Those particles consist of a variety of organic, or carbon-based, compounds emitted when forests burn, Wagstrom said, and researchers still are trying to understand how each individual substance might affect health.

A lot of the information we have thats definitive of some of those health impacts  just has to do with particles as a whole, she said. Youre breathing in these small particles, you know, theres lots of different things in them and  just the particles themselves being in your lungs can cause a lot of issues.

They can aggravate the lining of people's lungs and airways, cross into the bloodstream and then get carried to other parts of the body, including the brain, Wagstrom said.

The same would hold true for animals, she said, although there is less conclusive information about possible impacts on animal health.

Still, the concern has preoccupied Tom Andersen, communications director for the Connecticut Audubon Society.

Birds have the most sensitive respiratory system among vertebrates, according to Andersen. He was especially concerned because it is nesting season, and baby birds could be more susceptible to health issues than adults, he said.

He also worried whether adult birds would struggle to gather food in the smoky conditions, and whether that in turn would reduce the supply available for hatchlings.

The Connecticut Audubon Society has a network of volunteers and staff who collect data that will help determine whether the nesting success rate for certain bird species, such as ospreys, purple martins and piping plovers, is worse this year than last year.

What we always try to have the volunteers observe is the number of nestlings in each nest and what percent of nestlings successfully fledge young, Andersen said, referencing Connecticuts osprey nests. If the numbers are a lot lower this year, we might be able to tentatively conclude if the birds had trouble finding enough fish to feed their babies.

Sarah Lawson, an assistant professor of biology at Quinnipiac University, noted that because smoke muffles sound, it could make obtaining food difficult for species that use sound to hunt.

Still, she would be more concerned if the smoky conditions were to recur over the long term, she said.

In Milford Point, at least, the situation looked promising, as the behavior of the ospreys nesting there did not seem to have changed, according to Elkins.

There were no major observations of them being disturbed by it," he said. "The adults have been prolific at catching food for their young and bringing it back."

Meanwhile, while the purple martins have not yet hatched, Audubon staff are keeping an eye on young beach-nesting birds.

We have staff every day monitoring our piping plovers and other beach-nesting birds, and they had a great early hatching rate, so we have a lot of young birds walking around on the beach at the moment, he said. Well be able to see whether that holds true.
UNITED NATIONS, June 8 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Thursday called for more action to protect oceans.

"The ocean is the foundation of life. It supplies the air we breathe and food we eat. It regulates our climate and weather. The ocean is our planet's greatest reservoir of biodiversity," the UN chief said in his video message for World Oceans Day, which is observed annually on June 8.

Guterres said that over a third of global fish stocks are being harvested at unsustainable levels -- just one example of how "human activity is harming oceans," which cover more than 70 percent of the Earth's surface.

The ocean also produces resources that sustain communities, prosperity and health. Worldwide, more than a billion people alone rely on fish as their main source of protein, he said.

"We should be the ocean's best friend. But right now, humanity is its worst enemy," he said.

The top UN official said human-induced climate change is heating the planet, disrupting weather patterns and ocean currents, and altering marine ecosystems and the species living there.

Guterres said that marine biodiversity is also under attack from overfishing, over-exploitation and ocean acidification, fish stocks are being depleted, and coastal waters have been polluted with chemicals, plastics and human wastes.

"But this year's World Oceans Day reminds us that the tides are changing," he said.

Guterres recalled that last December, countries adopted an ambitious global target to conserve and manage 30 percent of land, and marine and coastal areas, by the end of the decade.

The past year also saw a landmark agreement on fisheries subsidies, and the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, where the world agreed to push for more positive action.

Negotiations for a global, legally binding treaty to end plastic pollutions are currently underway, and in March, countries agreed the historic High Seas Treaty on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

"Realizing the great promise of these initiatives requires collective commitment," he said.

"This World Oceans Day let's keep pushing for action. Today and every day, let's put the ocean first," he said.

Editor: WXL
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HAVANA, Cuba (AP)  Colombias government and its largest remaining guerrilla group agreed Friday to a six-month cease-fire at talks in Cuba, in the latest attempt to resolve a conflict dating back to the 1960s.

The government and the National Liberation Army, or ELN, announced the accord at a ceremony in Havana attended by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, top guerrilla commander Antonio Garcia and Cuban officials. The cease-fire takes effect in phases, goes fully into effect in August and then lasts for six months.

This effort to look for peace is a beacon of hope that conflicts can be resolved politically and diplomatically," top rebel negotiator Pablo Beltran said at the ceremony.

The talks originally were scheduled to conclude with an official ceremony on Thursday, but were postponed as the parties asked for additional time to work on final details. Petro traveled to the island for the ceremony, saying it could herald an era of peace in Colombia.

The accord reached Friday also calls for the formation of a broadly representative national committee by late July to discuss a lasting peace.

You have here proposed a bilateral agreement, and I agree with that, but Colombian society has to be able debate it, and to participate, Petro said during the ceremony.

Garcia, the rebel commander, said his group was very confident in the accord, though he characterized it as procedural and not yet the substantial kind needed for Colombia to change.

Negotiations between the sides had resumed in August, after being terminated in 2019 when the rebels set off a car bomb at a police academy in Bogota killing 21 people.

Following that incident, the government of then-President Ivan Duque (2018-2022) issued arrest warrants for ELN leaders in Cuba for the peace negotiations. But Cuba refused to extradite them, arguing that doing so would compromise its status as a neutral nation in the conflict and break with diplomatic protocols.

Talks relaunched in November shortly after Petro was elected as Colombias first leftist president.

Petro has pushed for what he calls a total peace that would demobilize all of the countrys remaining rebel groups as well as its drug trafficking gangs. He has questioned whether senior ELN leaders have full control of a younger generation of commanders who he has suggested are focused more on the illegal drug trade than on political goals.

The ELN was founded in the 1960s by union leaders, students and priests inspired by the Cuban revolution. It is Colombias largest remaining rebel group and has been notoriously difficult for previous Colombian governments to negotiate with.

In 2016, Colombias government signed a peace dea l with the larger FARC group that ended five decades of conflict in which an estimated 260,000 people were killed.

But violence has continued to affect rural pockets of the country where the ELN has been active, along with FARC holdout groups and drug trafficking gangs. Colombian authorities have accused the ELN of involvement in the drug trafficking, but the groups top leaders have denied that.

______

Juan Francisco Valbuena contributed reporting from Bogota.




In preparation for the inauguration of the 10th National Assembly next week, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Thursday met with Senators and Reps members-elect and asked them to choose good leaders among themselves.

The lawmakers-elect who spoke with journalists after the meeting disclosed they were invited by President Tinubu to primarily work for the unity of the country.

They said Tinubu did not lend his support for a particular candidate or asked any lawmaker to step down for the other as portrayed in some quarters.

Tinubu, they maintained, held a meeting with a joint session of the National Assembly elected members across all political parties at the State House Conference Centre, Abuja.

This, they said, was against some misleading report in some of the media that Mr President on Wednesday night, made a strong appeal to the All Progressives Congress (APC) Senators-elect and Members-elect to abide by the zoning arrangement as announced by the National Working Committee (NWC) of the party in electing presiding officers of the Senate and House of Representatives.

The member representing Ningi/Warji Federal Constituency in Bauchi State, Adamu Ranga, said the President did not voice support for any of the candidates vying for the Senate or House leadership, adding that he called for a united front.

According to him, The lawmakers were told to work together to choose good leaders in the 10th National Assembly.

Mr President spoke to the general assembly, both the Senate and the House of Representatives in order to ensure that we have a solid government. Second, he emphasized that he will perform an open-door policy for everybody.

Whoever wants to see him can see him without any hindrance. And whatever you want to discuss with him, he will give you that privilege to discuss.

Thirdly, he said we should put our constituency first since we are here to represent them. He mentioned that he wants the Senate and the House to cooperate to elect good leaders.

On his part, the member-elect for Enugu East/Isi-Uzo Federal Constituency, Prof Paul Nnamchi told reporters that Tinubu appealed to lawmakers to uphold national interest.

He appealed that we should forget about party politics and face national interest. That was the major part of his speech.

He didnt mention anybodys name to be voted for. Maybe he is appealing, but I didnt hear anybodys name, Nnamchi said.
Shehu Sani, a former senator, says the All Progressives Congress (APC) must put its house together to avoid a repeat of 2015.

He spoke ahead of the inauguration of the 10th national assembly on June 13.

During an interview with Channels Television, Sani said the party must engage in serious consultations to deliver its anointed candidates for the national assembly positions.

The APC had nominated Godswill Akpabio and Jibrin Barau as senate president and deputy senate president respectively.

For the house of representatives, the ruling party nominated Tajudeen Abbas and Benjamin Kalu as the preferred choice for speaker and deputy, respectively.

However, some lawmakers-elect, including Orji Kalu, Abdulaziz Yari, and Idris Wase, have opposed the zoning arrangement of the party, while insisting on contesting the positions.

In 2015, Ahmed Lawan, the nominated candidate of the APC, lost the senate president position to another member of the party, Bukola Saraki.

Reacting to the development, Sani said President Bola Tinubu must engage with Yari and Kalu in order to deliver his anointed candidates.

Tinubu being a former senator and he was also part of the circle in 2015 during the Saraki and Lawan issue, he said.

I thought that by now the first thing he (Tinubu) needs to do, knowing that his party has the majority, is to first of all go into a room with members of his party.

Talk to Orji Kalu and Yari. Tell them that this is the person I want to support. They will agree with him. But that was not done.

What is happening in the national assembly is that there are basically two candidates  Akpabio and Yari.

Akpabio is the anointed candidate of the president while Yari is the rebel leader. I have no doubt that from now to Monday, if there is no serious consultation, appeasement and horse-trading, it may go the wrong way for the president.

One thing I know very well is that if the APC goes to the floor without putting its house in order, the 2015 scenario will re-enact itself, especially if there is secret voting.
Edwin Clark, the convener of the Pan-Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF), says a Christian senator from the southern region of the country should be elected as the senate president of the 10th national assembly.

The All Progressives Congress (APC) has chosen Godswill Akpabio, a former minister of Niger Delta affairs, to be senate president, but there has been opposition from lawmakers who are interested in the position.

Abdulaziz Yari, a former governor of Zamfara, and Orji Uzor Kalu, chief whip of the senate, have insisted on contesting the position.

Babajide Sanwo-Olu, governor of Lagos, Nyesom Wike, former governor of Rivers and Ali Ndume, senator representing Borno south district, have all openly endorsed Akpabio for the position.

Reacting to this development, Clark said the national assembly should work to unite the country and ensure that citizens trust one another.

It is your duty as the legislative arm of government to produce during your term, a united country where the citizens genuinely trust one another, and regard themselves as equal citizens and as brothers and sisters, he said.

It is time to heal our land, and in so doing, what I expect of the 10th senate is to give the position of the senate president to a Christian senator from the southern part of the country.

Clark also castigated Nasir el-Rufai, former governor of Kaduna, for allegedly saying that the APC used religion to win the presidential election.

The insensitive, irresponsible, uncouth and arrogant statement credited to Nasir El-Rufai, on his plan to impose the Islamic religion on the country, lasting for the next 20 years, is still causing bad blood, he added.

It is unthinkable how someone who describes himself as a leader, could utter such a statement, except to cause confusion, which is very obvious that he benefits from such confusion. Because there is no other way of explaining such crass behaviour and statement.

Recall that el-Rufai came under fire on social media for boasting about Muslims leading the affairs of the country.

Religion was used, God made Asiwaju victorious. What we did in Kaduna has now been done in the country. No liar who is going to contest using the politics of Christianity will ever win any election again. Peter Obi tried and see how he ended. Weve tackled it, the former governor had said.

Since Asiwaju won the election CAN has been quiet. That is how there will be peace in the country. If this is done again and again and again everything will.. wallahi (swearing) that was what we did. And myself and others, we think we have done our part, Asiwaju has won the election, so our job is done. Our appeal to you is to pray for him to find good people to work with him.




The Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi-Ojaja II, has said traditional rulers are well grounded on challenges of insecurity, hence President Bola Ahmed Tinubu should employ their services to tackle it.





He gave the charge during a courtesy visit by the National Council of Traditional Rulers of Nigeria (NCTRN) to the President at the State House Conference Centre, Abuja.





Ooni, who is also the co-chair of traditional rulers of Nigeria, said, There are areas we would like to work with you, one of which is security. It is time to use us more, we are not saying we are idlebut to make your work easier, use us.





The foundation of this country today are the traditional rulers. We are here to pledge our loyalty and support. We want to work with you to ensure you leave a legacy.





Dont underestimate what traditional rulers can do, he said.





Earlier, Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Saad Abubakar III, said the visit is a normal tradition by the monarchs whenever theres a change in leadership of the country.





He said the monarchs are people of different professions, from the military to judiciary and businessmen, who have what it takes to contribute to the betterment of the society, saying, whenever you reach out to us, we will be here.





The Sultan, who said the monarchs do not envy President Tinubu at this time with the numerous challenges facing the country, however, expressed confidence that with the combination of himself and Vice President Kashim Shettima, they will deliver.





He said: We thank God for the smooth way the elections took place. Many negative people thought this country would collapse, but we are still here.





We are here for you, for our people and our country. If you dont reach out to us, we will reach out to you.





We wish you the most successful tenure in good health.





Also in attendance is Secretary to the Government of the Federation, George Akume.





Traditional rulers drawn from the countrys six geo-political zones attended the event.




The Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria, MACBAN, has urged President Bola Tinubu-led Federal Government to deploy security agencies to Zamfara State to prevent the heartbreaking killings in some parts of the state.





No fewer than seven people were reportedly killed on Tuesday after unknown gunmen went from house to house killing people in the Chafe Local Government Area of the state.





However, Bello Gotomo, the National Secretary of MACBAN, alleged that the attacks were carried out by an outlawed group tagged Yan Sa Kai Group.





In a statement on Friday, Gotomo called on the states government to ban the groups activities and ensure that the perpetrators of the dastardly killings were brought to book.





So much innocent blood had been shed in the state that a firm and convincing solution must be found to this unwholesome bloodletting.





The causes of the crisis are well known and the solutions to it are also very clear, it is, therefore, up to the state government to take the bull by the horn and restore lasting peace for all communities in the state.





The association also called on the federal government to intervene by deploying more security to arrest not only the perpetrators but also their financiers.





The new administration is being tested in the resurgence of this sectarian violence and it is up to it to be firm from day one in dealing with this unwanted calamity, he said.








The Concerned Northern Forum has called for the immediate arrest and thorough investigation of former Aviation Minister, Hadi Sirika over the Nigerian Air scandal.





The forum noted that the EFCC must not waste any time in arresting Hadi Sirika alongside all his alleged co-perpetrators that took part in deceiving Nigeria, shaming it before the international community.





A statement signed by the Chairman of the forum, Ali Muhammad, said, the call for arrest of Hadi Sirika followed the recent revelation by the interim MD of the so called Nigerian Airline, Captain Dapo Olumide, when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Aviation, where he stated that the Nigeria Air aircraft used for unveiling of the Nigeria Air was rented from Ethiopian Airline. No wonder the unveiling was quick, no details were made available, no one has the eyes to say he saw any features of the plane or anything.





According to the statement, Captain Dapo also made known that the airline was yet to secure an operating licence for full flight operations, disagreeing with earlier declarations of the former Minister, Hadi Sirika.





The forum lamented that the Minister was so adamant and insisted on going ahead with the unveiling of the Nigerian Air even when there was a court order acting against the same matter, describing it as a half baked project, driven by lies, deception, corruption and personal money benefits to the Minister amounting to billions of Naira.





The statement said that the alleged deception and breach of trust should not go unpunished, stressing that Hadi Sirika must be brought to face the law as it is also a disregard for the rule of law and entire justice system to proceed on matters against the order of a competent court of law.





The statement alleged that the Minister had acted with so much impunity on several occasions, adding that he continuously operated as a tyrant Minister, refusing to listen to no one, the aviation experts, Airline Operators of Nigeria, AON, who advised against this project.





According to the statement, the national embarrassment and waste of resources incurred on the country would have been averted if he had listened to advice.





It called on President Tinubu not to consider Sirika for Minister or any appointment in his administration.




Former President Olusegun Obasanjo on Thursday in Abeokuta joined the call for a female President in Nigeria.





Obasanjo spoke at the Egba Dialect Debate and Choral Competition for Secondary Schools in Ogun Central District.





He said it was unfair that women were being relegated for the nations topmost job despite their contributions to society.





The former Head of State noted that power and key positions must be shared among both genders for fairness and equity.





Obasanjo told the audience that a hand cant carry a load to the head alone, hence the need to give the womenfolk a chance to lead.





A female can get pregnant for nine months, and a male cant. That is the only difference between us.





There is nothing preventing the female gender to be the president of our country, the retired General added.





Ogun Deputy Governor, Naimot Salako-Oyedele charged more women to join politics to assert dominance since they have the numbers.





We cant give someone power, it has to be fought for. We have to start bringing females into politics, she urged.
The decrease in hydropower capacity due to the need to reduce the volume of water discharged into the Kakhovka Reservoir, the lowest in the Dnipro cascade, will be compensated by an increase in thermal generation capacity, Dmytro Sakharuk, Executive Director of DTEK, has said.

"The whole system will now adapt in order, on the one hand, to reduce the volume of water discharged into the Kakhovka reservoir, and on the other hand, to ensure the sufficiency of balancing capacities at the expense of thermal power plants. Due to the fact that HPPs are producing somewhat less now, our plants, on the contrary, provide additional generation to the system so that consumers do not have blackouts," he said on the air of the Pryamiy TV channel on Thursday evening.

At the same time, Sakharuk noted that now the operation of thermal power plants, which, along with hydroelectric power plants, perform the function of balancing in the energy system, will be very important, especially during peak loads. He drew attention to the request of Ukrenergo to reduce consumption during peaks in order to facilitate the balancing of the energy system.

In general, according to him, the system is balanced, there are no balance restrictions, and imports come in small volumes.

"Most blackouts are in the frontline and border areas. The most difficult situation is in Donetsk region, where 10,000-20,000 consumers are cut off daily due to shelling," DTEK's top manager explained.

But, as Sakharuk emphasized, these are spot shutdowns not related to power shortages.




The media aide to former Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State, Terver Akase, has reacted to the allegation by Governor Hyacinth Alia that there was massive looting of the government house in Makurdi under the previous administration.





Akase said Ortom is no longer the Governor, and so should not be speaking about issues of governance in the State.





Recall that Alia had on Thursday alleged that he met no official car or truck in the government house as they were all carted away.





The statement is coming on the heels of calls by the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in the state that Alia should reverse his decision, which led to the nullification of all last-minute appointments made by Ortom.





However, Akase has clarified that the defunct State Executive Council resolved that government officials of Ortoms administration should go with their vehicles, insisting it was legal.





Akase spoke with newsmen on Thursday. He said the executive council made the resolution before Governor Ortom left office.





Well, I dont work in a government house. I dont know about that. What I do know is that the Benue State Government executive council, before Governor Ortom left office, made a resolution that government officials of the Ortom administration should leave with their vehicles. So, if the Governor had a car, that is, the former Governor and Exco made a resolution that he should go with his vehicle, thats a different thing; that is Excos decision. I dont know about all the other things because I havent been to the government house since we left. I dont know the veracity of those things you are saying. All I know is that Exco made a resolution that government officials who worked under the Ortom administration should go with their vehicles. Yes, so if the Governor was using a vehicle at that time and Exco said he should go with it, there is nothing wrong with that; its not criminal. It is legal because this is the decision of the Benue State Government.





I am not the spokesperson for PDP. I only speak for the former Governor. And the former Governors reaction is that he is no longer the Governor. Our people say that when you dont have clues on the close line, you no longer put your hands there. He is no longer the Governor, so he cant be speaking about issues of governance in Benue State. Governor Ortom prays for the current Governor and wishes him well, he said.
A witness for the Labour Party on Thursday accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of an attempt to sabotage the 2023 presidential election.





At the resumed hearing , the presidential election tribunal, saw the LP bring forward its witness, Anthony Chinwo, who is a software engineer.





Under cross examination by legal counsels to the INEC, President Bola Tinubu and the All Progressives Congress (APC), Mr Chinwo said that he conducted investigations around the uploading of results to the Irev portal by electoral umpire and discovered that there was a deliberate plot to undermine the electoral process.





This claim infuriated A.B Mahmood the INEC counsel who objected and insisted that from the documents presented before the court, INEC used the highest level of software security.





After listening the witness statement and the counter-claims by the defense counsel, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, was allowed to submit to the court, the official national results of the February 25 presidential election.





Counsel to the LP, Professor Paul Ananaba (SAN) tendered the form EC8DA, which is the official national results of the election.





Ananaba also tendered the remaining exhibits in forms EC8As, EC8Bs and EC8Cs, which are polling units, wards and local governments collation respectively for about 18 states where they are challenging the election results.





Some of the states tendered and admitted are Bayelsa, Benue, Cross River, Ebonyi, Edo, Lagos, Niger, Ondo, Oyo, Rivers, Sokoto, Ekiti and Delta.





INEC objects to states result presented by Obi

In a slight twist of events, INEC did not object to the Labour Party (LP) and Peter Obis submission of result sheets of the national collation for the February 25 presidential election.





There was no reason given for the non-objection position taken by INECs counsel.





In a similar vein, the lawyers for President Bola Tinubu and the All Progressives Congress (APC) , Akin Olujinmi (SAN) and Lateef Fagbemi (SAN), did not oppose the submission made by the LP and its candidate, however, they objected to results the opposition party said it obtained from polling units, wards, local governments and states.





LPs counsel, Ananaba informed the court that they are ready to tender forms EC40G series, which are forms for materials distribution across states, at the next hearing.





He said they will be responding to the reasons made for objecting and not objecting to the documents tendered before the court.





PDP Calls witnesses

Earlier, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) called its subpoenaed witnesses to address the tribunal.





When the first witness Egwumah Friday came forward, there was no objection from the lawyers of the All progressives Congress (APC) and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).





The witnessed prayed that the court adopts his submission, following this prayer, the lead counsel for President Bola Tinubu, Mr Wole Olanipekun (SAN) objected to the motion for adoption of the PDPs witness submission on the grounds that the party didnt list him as part of their witnesses before the tribunal began.





Mr Olanipekun urged the tribunal to reject the application of Chris Uche (SAN) Counsel to the PDP, to admit the submission of the witness.





The counsel to INEC, A.B Mahmood (SAN) and that of the APC, Lateef Fagbemi also agreed with Wole Olanipekun counsel to the president.





However, the five man panel of judges led by Justice Haruna stood down briefly for ruling on the matter.





Upon their return, the panel of judges allowed the subpoenaed witness to proceed with submissions.





Under cross examination by INECs Counsel, Friday Egwumah said as an adhoc staff he was able to successfully transmit the results for the Senatorial and House of Representatives elections, but he could not transmit that of the presidential elections even after repeated attempts.





The PDP called its second subpoenaed witness for the day, Grace Timothy, but counsels to Bola Tinubu, APC and INEC, all objected to her submission.





However, Justice Haruna allowed her to give her submission before the court.





Again under cross examination, Grace Timothy who was a presiding officer in Plateau State said she also faced the same challenge of uploading the results for the presidential elections to the Irev portal.




President Bola Tinubu says his administration took the right decision by removing the subsidy on premium motor spirit (PMS), popularly known as petrol.

Tinubu spoke at a meeting with the National Council of Traditional Rulers of Nigeria (NCTRN) at Aso Rock on Friday.

The president described the subsidy as an elephant that could have brought the country to its knees because it is struggling to pay salaries.

He said Nigeria should not be Father Christmas to neighbouring countries by providing them subsidised petrol.

I am grateful that you are paying attention to what I have been doing, Abiodun Oladunjoye, the villas director of information, quoted the president as saying.

You have paid attention to the subsidy removal. Why should we in good heart and sense, feed smugglers and be Father Christmas to neighbouring countries, even though they say not everyday is Christmas?

The elephant that was going to bring Nigeria to its knees is the subsidy. A country that cannot pay salaries and we say we have potential to encourage ourselves.

I think we did the right thing.

The president said his administration would listen to counsel.

We are all ears. We are ready to listen at any given time. I promise you an open-door policy and that is the way I will go. That open door policy is for you to call me and send to me at any given time any concern that you might have, he said.

We may not have it right 100 percent of the time but we must get it right 90 percent of the time for this country.

On his part, Muhammad Saad Abubakar, Sultan of Sokoto, said the monarchs are in full support of Tinubus administration.

We are 100 percent in support of your government and we believe in the will of the Almighty Allah you will move this country forward, he said.

Petrol from Nigeria is regularly smuggled into nearby countries including Cameroon, Ghana, Benin Republic, and as far as Sudan.

Following the announcement of petrol subsidy removal in Nigeria, the product was sold for 700 CFA or 800 CFA in Benin Republic  up from a previous price of 450 CFA.

Motorcyclists in Cameroon recently protested Nigerias subsidy removal, saying the development has adversely affected their business.
Umo Eno, governor of Akwa-Ibom, says he has sought President Bola Tinubus intervention on two federal governments uncompleted projects in the state.

Eno spoke on Thursday after a meeting with Tinubu at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

The governor said he requested the presidents assistance for the completion of the Ibom deep seaport and an export license for the free zone at the Ibom airport.

After listening to his requests, Eno said Tinubu has promised to review the proposal.

The Akwa Ibom governor said the state is keen on forging a strategic partnership with the federal government.

We talked about the road you have just mentioned, the Calabar-Itu road. We will need the president to help us intervene and lets get that road finished, Eno said.

We talked about our Ibom deep seaport; we will need the president to also intervene and lets get the seaport. I also mentioned to him the export license, the free zone for our airport, so that for the maintenance, repairs, and overhauling facility there, we will be able to bring in spare parts to service the aeroplanes.

These are the strategic partnership that we want with the federal government. So, I talked about it and he promised to look into it, and I believe him.

Politics is over and governance has started. So Akwa Ibom is an integral part of Nigeria and we have to work with the federal government to ensure that Akwa Ibomites will see the benefits of democracy and we cannot do that if we work standing apart.

And so I came to visit with the president like I said, to congratulate him and pledge our support to work with him and our commitment as a state so that Akwa Ibomite will derive the full benefit of democracy.

There are lots of things we expect from the federal government and its only with that cooperation that we can work together and achieve the common good, whatever I know I can do, to bring the dividends of democracy to my people, I will do it.
A staff of the Independent National Electoral Commission, (INEC), Abedemi Joseph on Friday told the Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC, that they were instructed by their employer not to give copies of election results to political party agents who declined to sign the results.

The witness made the revelation while testifying in a petition filed by a former Vice President and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party PDP, Atiku Abubakar against the election of President Bola Tinubu.

Led in evidence-in-chief by the petitioners lead counsel, Chris Uche, SAN, Joseph prayed the court to adopt her witness statement on oath as her evidence in the petition against the victory of Tinubu.

Joseph, who was a presiding officer in Niger State during the February 25 presidential elections, told the court that she was satisfied with the process as instructed.

She, however, said they were instructions not to give out the results of the election to party agents who did not sign the result sheet.

Also testifying, a presiding agent in Edo state during the election told the court that she tried in vain to upload the presidential election results to the INEC server.

While another subpoena witness from Kogi State, Grace Ajagbonna also affirmed the peaceful conduct of the election she said was not happy that she could not upload the presidential election as instructed.

Ajagbonna, responding to INEC counsel as to whether she was happy with the conduct of the election and her work as presiding officer, said,  I was not happy that I was unable to transmit the result to the server.

However, INEC, represented by Abubakar Mahmoud, SAN; APC, represented by Lateef Fagbemi, SAN and other respondents objected to the use of statements made on oath by the subpoenaed witnesses to be tendered at PEPC in aid of Atikus petition.

Atikus lawyer, Chris Uche urged the court to discountance their objections and grant his request.

The five-man panel headed by Justice, Haruna Tsammani reserved ruling on the applications for later.

Meanwhile, the Court has adjourned further hearing to June 10.
Daniel Bwala, an aide to the 2023 Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, has warned President Bola Tinubu over the frequent visits of a former PDP governor to the presidential Villa.

Bwala warned that the former PDP governor would soon inflict Tinubus administration with toxic equity, fairness, and justice.

Tweeting, Bwala wrote: There is a former governor of the PDP that frequents Presidential villa daily like a bus conductor. He will soon inflict the administration with his toxic equity, fairness and justice poison.

Following Tinubus inauguration, former governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State visited the Presidential Villa three times in one week, with the latest being yesterday.

Wike had visited Tinubu in the company of the PDP G-5 governors yesterday.

During the last presidential election, the group ignored Atiku and worked for Tinubus emergence as president.




A chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Femi Fani-Kayode, has raised an alarm over the invasion of the home of the immediate past governor of Zamfara State, Bello Matawalle by police officers.

Fani-Kayode alleged that policemen invaded Matawalles residence in search of cars without an arrest warrant.

Condemning such an action, the former Aviation Minister said it was vindictive for Matawalles successor to allegedly send the officers on such an assignment.

He spoke while sharing photographs of the invasion via his Twitter handle.

According to Fani-Kayode, This morning a detachment of policemen raided the home of my brother, the former Gov. of Zamfara state, Bello Matawalle in Maradun. They claimed to be looking for cars.

They did not have a search or arrest warrant and they claimed to be acting on the orders of the new Governor. This is unacceptable. It is not only vindictive but also lawless and it stands condemned.
The New Jersey Forest Fire Service is battling a wildfire Friday afternoon in Burlington County.

There was no initial estimate on the size of the blaze near City Line Road in the Browns Mills section of Pemberton Township, but helicopter video by 6abc.com showed multiple locations burning and firefighters setting backfires.

Please avoid the area at this time, the Forest Fire Service said in a tweet shortly after noon. Forest Fire Service crews are on scene assessing the situation.

Exceptionally dry conditions have led to multiple forest fires in recent weeks. The most recent was an 82-acre fire in Jackson in Ocean County earlier this week.

Another wildfire in Ocean County burned more than 1,600 acres in April.

The latest wildfire comes as air quality conditions continue to improve in New Jersey after days of thick, hazy smoke that drifted south from Canada. New Jersey had the worst air quality in 43 years on Wednesday and Thursday.

All 21 counties in New Jersey remain under a code orange air quality alert through midnight Friday,

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A woman admitted Thursday that she bribed an Essex County mail carrier to steal keys that open mail boxes and receptacles and used the stolen items to fraudulently obtain bank funds, federal prosecutors said.

Halimatou Ndiaye, 27, of the Bronx, New York, offered the unidentified postal employees in East Orange and Newark cash, typically $5,000, in exchange for the them giving her and another person, who also not identified, a postal arrow key, according to a statement from the US Attorneys Office. From June to July 2021, Ndiaye and the other person drove to various locations in the Essex County cities, where they stopped the carriers and handed them a note indicating they would pay them in exchange for the keys.

She admitted that she used stolen checks and bank cards to draw funds from bank accounts linked to the stolen items and using the identification of others to illegally obtain funds, the office said.

She pleaded guilty in Newark federal court to one count of bribery of U.S. Postal Service mail carriers and one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, authorities said. She now faces a maximum of 30 years in prison and a potential $1 million fine when she is sentenced later this year.

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Chris Sheldon may be reached at csheldon@njadvancemedia.com.
Smoke inhalation can cause many health problems, especially in those with weakened immune systems or those with chronic conditions.

Here is what you need to know about the short-term and long-term symptoms you can get from smoke inhalation from wildfires, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and various medical journals.

How can smoke from wildfires cause health problems?

Air pollution from wildfire smoke can cause respiratory issues in anyone. However, it is especially an issue for young children, the elderly, pregnant women, people with compromised immune systems and people with chronic respiratory conditions, such as asthma.

Its an almost immediate effect, Dr. Aida Capo, a pulmonologist from Hackensack Meridian Health in New Jersey, told NBC News. If youre outside for any length of time, your symptoms can start and can worsen quickly.

What are some of the short-term symptoms that can occur from wildfire smoke inhalation?

The following short-term symptoms can occur from inhaling wildfire smoke, according to the EPA:

Irritation of the eyes and respiratory tract

Coughing

Phlegm

Wheezing

Difficulty breathing

What are some of the long-term effects of wildfire smoke inhalation?

Some studies have shown that there are long-term effects of continued exposure to wildfire smoke.

This increased exposure can lead to chronic conditions, such as the following:

Heart disease/failure

Heart attack

Stroke

Severe asthma

Preterm birth

Lung cancer

Gestational diabetes

Dementia

How can you prevent exposure to wildfire smoke?

Dr. Shilpa Patel, medical director of Childrens National IMPACT DC Asthma Clinic in Washington, told CNN that people should minimize outdoor activities that require deep breathing.

Dr. Capo says that in cases of severe air pollution, the recommendation is not to be outside, but if you want to wear a mask to help, absolutely wear one and then make sure it is an N95, not a surgical mask.

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Katherine Rodriguez can be reached at krodriguez@njadvancemedia.com. Have a tip? Tell us at nj.com/tips.
USA to provide financial, humanitarian aid to Ukrainians affected by disaster at Kakhovka HPP

Within the USAID Program, the United States will provide financial assistance in the amount of $608,000 to more than 1,000 households, as well as a number of humanitarian aid to victims of the disaster at Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant (HPP), the USAID press service said.

"Cash assistance: UAH 22.5 million (approximately $608,000) cash assistance will be provided to more than 1,000 flood-affected households. Each household will receive UAH 2,200 ($60) per person for three months, for a total of up to five people per household in the affected areas," UDAID said on Thursday.

In addition, through a $22.9 direct government budget support from the Government of Ukraine, USAID facilitates the timely payment of salaries to more than 57,000 employees of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, including rescuers working in Kherson region.

It is also reported that USAID is supporting the State Emergency Service and other emergency response entities in acquiring and delivering water treatment equipment, water pumps, water rescue equipment, and boats and outboard motors.

In addition, the program provides assistance in the provision of drinking water, hot meals and fuel.

"Water: We have provided over 14,000 people with drinking water and will continue to provide clean water. We also supply water filtration systems to communities in Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk regions to provide them with clean water.

Meals: We distributed hot meals to 7,000 people in Kherson and Mykolaiv, we plan to distribute additional rations in the coming days.

Fuel: Provided over 10,000 liters of fuel to support water rescue operations and emergency distribution," according to the statement.

The press service says USAID has provided evacuation buses and is also providing boats to support rescue efforts. Due to the support of partner organizations, financial assistance is provided, hygiene kits are purchased for the evacuees, and mobile groups have been created to support evacuated children at railway stations, during transportation and at reception stations.

Regarding the restoration, USAID said "the U.S. government is working on a plan to deliver pumps for Kherson's critical infrastructure."

"The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), as part of the large-scale measures of the U.S. government to support Ukraine, will continue to promptly provide assistance to people affected by the destruction of Kakhovka hydroelectric dam and other humanitarian crises caused by Russia's war against Ukraine," the press service said.

It is noted that USAID joined the liquidation of the consequences of the destruction of Kakhovka dam on June 6, and is currently working in coordination with Kherson regional and city administrations, the State Emergency Service, the Ministry of Reconstruction of Ukraine and other government agencies to provide critical assistance through partners in the UN, international non-governmental organizations and Ukrainian civil society.
An 11-year-old boy has pleaded guilty to stabbing another child while the two were walking home from school in February in Perth Amboy, authorities announced Friday.

The juvenile, a sixth grader, will serve three years on probation and complete a residential treatment program as part of a sentence imposed on May 24 by a family court judge, the Middlesex County Prosecutors Office said.

The stabbing took place at approximately 2:37 p.m. on Feb. 22 while the two boys were walking home from school, the prosecutors office said. The fifth grade victim, also 11, sustained serious injuries in the attack, authorities said.

A city spokeswoman said previously that the stabbing followed a fight outside the Samuel E. Shull Middle School on Hall Avenue at dismissal and occurred near one of the boys homes a few blocks from the school.

The 11-year-old perpetrator of the crime was charged with juvenile delinquency for offenses that, if committed by an adult, would be attempted murder, aggravated assault, and weapons charges, officials said.

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Jackie Roman may be reached at jroman@njadvancemedia.com.
A New Jersey man was drunk when he caused a crash in Wall earlier this year that injured the driver of another vehicle and her 9-year-old son, authorities said

Kevin Christian, 41, of Seaside Heights, is charged with two counts of aggravated assault, the Monmouth County Prosecutors Office said Thursday.

Christian lost control of his van on the exit ramp from Route 18 south to Route 138 east and struck an SUV after sliding across the grass median, officials said.

The 44-year-old Toms River woman driving the SUV and her son were hospitalized. The boy suffered a serious head injury in the crash, which took place at about 8 p.m. on March 17, prosecutors said.

Christians blood alcohol level was more than three times the legal limit of .08, officials said. He was also issued summonses for driving with a suspended license, DWI, reckless driving, delaying traffic and failure to maintain a lane.

He was arrested Wednesday and brought to the Monmouth County jail ahead of a first appearance in court. Attorney information wasnt immediately available.

Anyone with information about the crash is asked to call prosecutors office Det. Brian Boryszewski at 800-671-4400 or Wall police at 732-449-4500.

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Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com.
A former pharmaceutical sales representative who helped his brother with a multi-million dollar prescription drug scheme has been sentenced to 18 months in prison, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Vikas Khanna said.

Nicholas Tedesco, 49, of Linwood, previously admitted in a guilty plea that he submitted fraudulent claims for medically unnecessary prescriptions, defrauding state health benefits programs out of more than $2 million, officials said.

Tedesco pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud, court records said.
An Ocean County man is facing 36 charges in an antisemitic crime spree that included burning down a home and scrawling antisemitic graffiti on multiple other houses in what authorities called a targeted attack against Jewish residents.

Ron Carr, 33, of Manchester, was arrested Wednesday shortly after investigators say he set fire to a home in the Pine Lake Park section of Manchester at about 3:10 a.m., the state Office of the Attorney General said Friday.

The fire, which was ignited with an accelerant, destroyed one home and caused heat damage to three others before being extinguished by firefighters. No one was injured.

Several hours earlier, police say Carr was captured on surveillance video spray-painting swastikas on 14 homes as well as on fences and other property.

Carr was brought to a medical facility after being taken into custody near the corner of Commonwealth Boulevard and Larchmont Street. He is being held at the Ocean County jail after being charged with 36 counts of bias intimidation, aggravated arson, arson and criminal mischief. Attorney information wasnt immediately available.

This crime spree and the antisemitism that it expressed caused pain, destruction, shock and fear among the residents of Manchester Township, Attorney General Matthew Platkin said in a statement. No community in the state of New Jersey should feel vulnerable or anxious in the face of acts of intolerance. No resident should feel their personal safety or their home is threatened by bigotry, persecution and violence.

Carr has been arrested multiple times previously. He was arrested for being under the influence of methamphetamine before crashing in Toms River and for resisting arrest after being caught peering into backyards in Manchester, according to police.

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Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com.
A roundup of conversations we're having daily on the site. Subscribe to the Reckon Daily for stories centering marginalized communities and speaking to the under-covered issues of the moment.

Three lawsuits filed this week in response to the Davenport, Iowa condo collapse allege that the city, landlord, numerous contractors and engineers knew of the imminent danger facing tenants and chose not to act.

The building, which was constructed in 1906 and had over 50 apartment units, was plagued with numerous problems for years, especially pertaining to its west exterior wall, according to the complaints.

The former tenants are suing Andrew Wold, the buildings owner; his contracting company, Alliance Contracting, LLC; his investment company, Andrew Wold Investments; Select Structural Engineering; Bi-State Masonry, INC., a contractor; the City of Davenport; and the buildings former owner, Waukee Investments I, LLC, among others.

The defendants including Andrew Wold and his companies, as well as The City of Davenport were repeatedly warned of the severe and deteriorating condition of the west exterior wall that ultimately failed, a suit filed by former tenant Danya Feuerbach states.

In a statement given to CNN this week, Wolds spokesperson, Harlan Loeb, said, We are devastated by the buildings collapse and our hearts go out to everyone involved, people displaced, people injured and of course the people that lost their lives.

A complaint filed by tenants Quanishia Peach White-Cotton Berry and Lexus Berry details what happened to the couple on May 28.

Just before 5:00 p.m., the pair began hearing cracking noises and saw a new opening in their window which hadnt been there previously. They hurried to grab their cats and flee their unit.

In seconds, their apartment collapsed, with White-Cotton Berry inside. Berry fell to the ground as the structure crumbled.

She felt a bright light and quickly realized that the apartment she stood in a moment before was suddenly missing.

She found herself on a small piece of the remaining structure. Berry emerged from her lost apartment with her life, while sustaining minor bruises and cuts. Her wife, however, was stuck under debris, bricks and water that rained down on top of her, the complaint states.

At around 12:45 a.m., emergency responders amputated her left leg and freed her from the rubble. Berry has just awoken from a coma, the suit notes, but remains in the hospital. She will likely have to undergo multiple surgeries for her right leg, though it might need to be amputated as well.

This tragedy was altogether avoidable, the complaint states. For years, the building collapse was waiting to happen.

Approximately nine residents were rescued in the hours following the collapse. Dozens were immediately evacuated by first responders once the structure failed. Some of the buildings occupants are now homeless.

Two other complaints filed by former tenants Feuerbach as well as Mildred Harrington allege the same.

Had even a marginally competent inspection or due diligence been performed by the Wold defendants at the time of purchase, the dangerous condition of the west exterior wall would have been noticed and the need for immediate action realized.

Despite knowing of the structures hazardous condition, the suit alleges that owners simply chose to paint over the wall instead of investing the funds to permanently fix it, photos from 2022 show.

Feuerbachs attorneys claim that this action only made matters worse. Painting over the bricks acted only to trap moisture and condensation within the bricks and the wall, further damaging the wall and accelerating its deterioration, the suit states.

Once the building caved in, city officials told reports that the building had prior water damage.

In the days and hours before the collapse, large two by four pieces of wood were leaned against the west side of the building, giving the illusion that work was being done on the property, the suit alleges.

Former tenants are also suing contractors and engineers that worked on the building, claiming that they violated their responsibility as experts to warn tenants if their lives were in danger. All were identified in the hundreds of documents released by the city days following the incident.

Neither the Berrys suit nor Feuerbachs lists a dollar amount sought for damages sustained during and following the collapse, leaving it up to the courts discretion.

Plaintiff prays the court enter a judgment on her behalf and against the defendants, in an amount that will fairly and adequately compensate her for the damages described herein, as well as punitive damages, together and with interest and costs all as provided by law, Feuerbachs suit states.
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Russian occupation forces deliberately continue to shell Kherson and the communities in the region that are already flooded as a result of the terrorist attack at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP), President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said in a video address on Thursday night.

"They are even shelling the evacuation centers, which is already such a rush of evil, which, perhaps, no terrorists in the world, except for Russian ones, have demonstrated," he said.

According to the head of state, the occupiers completely abandoned the people on the left-bank part of Kherson region.

"The catastrophe has only been expanding there for the second day already. And this is also an absolutely conscious choice of the Russian leadership. There is no one in the world now who would not see that Russia is led by nonhumans. Nonhumans, who personally are the greatest catastrophe on the planet today," he said.
In its first iteration, the Lakeview restaurant the Backyard was known as a neighborhood spot with comfort food and good drinks, and, significantly, a play set outside for kids to romp.

Today, the Backyard is a family-friendly neighborhood spot with much the same comfort food and good drinks, though now is also a playground for bourbon lovers. The play set is gone, while a newly built bar is now the centerpiece of the operation, pouring a bourbon you cant get anywhere else.

The restaurant is now licensed as a micro distillery, which is feeding much of its new identity as Lakeviews whiskey hub.

It bottles its own Backyard bourbon brand, which lines the bar where people sample tasting drams, order glasses on the rocks, have them mixed into cocktails or buy bottles for home.
Zelenskyy doesn't speak about results of fighting in south, east - 'not to be voiced today'

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not voice any results of the fighting in the south and east of the country.

"Avdiyivka, Maryinka, the whole east, the situation in the south, the situation after Russian blew up the dam in our native Kakhovka We can see every detail, but it's not to be voiced today," he said in a video address on Thursday night.

"Donetsk region... Very fierce battles, but there is a result. I am grateful to everyone who ensures this result. Bakhmut, well done. Step by step. We thank each of our soldiers," the head of state said.
Trader Joe's could be coming to New Orleans, a source close to the development disclosed last week. And that news had many fans of the California-based grocery store chain celebrating.

+7 Trader Joe's could be coming to New Orleans. Find out where. Trader Joe's, the California-based grocery chain with a cult-like following, is planning to open a store on Tulane Avenue late next year, acco

It would be the store's first location in the New Orleans city limits, but not the first in the metro area; the Metairie location has been open since 2016.

Trader Joe's is known for its smaller stores with a curated selection of unique products -- from snacks to frozen foods -- that are not available anywhere else. And those unique products are a big part of what the chain's fans love about it.

The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com asked readers on social media to share what they like the most about Trader Joe's.

Best Trader Joe's snacks, according to readers
In this photo provided by climate scientist Rob Jackson, researcher Eric Lebel samples natural gas from a stove in Stanford, Calif., in 2021. According to a study published Thursday, Jan. 27, 2022, in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, gas stoves are worse for the climate than previously thought because of constant tiny methane leaks even while theyre off. (Rob Jackson via AP)
Drag Queen ladies parade on Burgundy Street in the Bywater at the start of Krewe of Saint Anne parade also know as the Society of Saint Anne on Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, in New Orleans, La. Tuesday, Feb., 2017. The group was founded in 1969 and starts in the Bywater before finishing in the French Quarter to watch Rex on Canal St.
On the night of Thursday to Friday, during the air attack of Russia on the territory of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Air Force eliminated ten attack drones out of 16 launched, and four missiles out of six launched.

"On the night of June 9, 2023, in the period from 22:00 to 04:00, Russian invaders attacked Ukraine with Iranian Shahed-136/131 attack drones and Kh-101/X-55 air-launched cruise missiles at military facilities and critical infrastructure facilities. Shahed drone attacks were carried out from the south, cruise missiles, from the area of the Caspian Sea, from four Tu-95ms strategic bombers," the AFU said on Friday morning.

"During the attack, up to 16 strike UAVs and six air-launched cruise missiles were launched," the AFU said.

It is reported that the air defense forces of the Air Force in the areas of responsibility of the air commands Skhid (East), Zakhid (West) and Pivden (South), in cooperation with the air defense of other components of the Ukrainian Defense Forces, destroyed four X-101/X-55 cruise missiles, ten Shahed strike drones and four UAVs of the operational-tactical level Orlan-10, Supercam.

In addition, at about 20:00 on June 8, the enemy launched strikes from the Black Sea with two Kalibr missiles at one of the civilian facilities in Cherkasy region.

"Aviation of the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine over the past and current day inflicted up to 20 fire air strikes on air defense systems, logistics, military equipment and positions of the occupying forces," the AFU said.
Russia has prepared another special information operation to discredit Ukraine and its military-political leadership in order to shift responsibility for blowing up the dam of Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant (HPP) to Ukraine, the Main Intelligence Agency of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said.

"With the joint efforts of the intelligence community of Ukraine, information has been received that the Russian agency for social design has launched a new stage of the campaign to discredit the Ukrainian military command and government officials. Within its framework, a series of provocative materials have been prepared, which, according to the authors, should shift responsibility for undermining Ukraine to dam of Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant and create the preconditions for a political crisis," according to the statement.

The intelligence said the prepared headlines of publications are of the so-called "clickbait" nature. They contain direct accusations against the military-political leadership, in particular the President of Ukraine.

"Under each article, comments from fake accounts will be placed, allegedly on behalf of Ukrainian and foreign readers. They should create the impression of a lively discussion and attract real network users to the discussion. The project's available budget is about $6 million with the possibility of further increase," the Ukrainian intelligence agency said.
Japan plans to provide emergency humanitarian aid worth $5 million through international organizations as soon as possible to people affected by the explosion of Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant (HPP), the Japanese Foreign Ministry said.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a 30-minute call, the ministry said.

Kishida once again expressed condolences and solidarity with the people of Ukraine over the consequences of the destruction of Kakhovka dam. He said Russian aggression has led to the death of many civilians in various parts of Ukraine, as well as damage to civilian facilities, including power plants, which is absolutely unjustified.

"He said that Japan plans to promptly provide emergency humanitarian assistance in the amount of $5 million to residents affected by the flood through international organizations," the Foreign Ministry said.
Entertainment Editor/Features Reporter

Eloise is A&E Editor and a food, entertainment and features writer for The Times, subjects she has covered for over two decades in and around the Region. She was the youngest of eight in a Chicago household filled with fantastic cooks and artists.
Kelly Vates and Tom Tremblay Kelly Vates and Tom Tremblay speak to about 80 attendees of a Trauma-Informed Sexual Assault Investigations training hosted Tuesday and Wednes

HAMMOND  Entitlement. Power. Control. Manipulation.

Domestic violence offenders operate off this "course of conduct," says Tom Tremblay, former chief for the Burlington Police Department in Vermont. In the wake of their violent behavior, they leave physical and emotional scars on bewildered investigators, frustrated prosecutors and wounded victims.

Tremblay, a former state public safety commissioner and director of a sexual assault investigation unit, presented a Trauma-Informed Sexual Assault Investigations training Tuesday and Wednesday to a group of social workers, police officers and first responders at Purdue University Northwest.

The course was facilitated by Lake County's Sexual Assault Response Team (SART), a community-based group of advocates from the Fairhaven Rape Crisis Center, Haven House NWI, Franciscan Health and more who provide resources and advocacy to ensure that all victims of sexual violence are never silenced.

Trauma-informed approaches, Tremblay said, ensure that victims of sexual assault are approached with compassion and care throughout the process of reporting an assault. The training explored myths surrounding rape culture, the effects of trauma on the brain, effective interview techniques for investigators and how trauma can affect investigations.

Attendees were asked to confront their own biases surrounding domestic violence or sexual assault cases and re-examine how the cases have historically been handled by the law.

Tremblay said this is his second time conducting the training in Northwest Indiana. After he retired from being a law enforcement leader and investigator, he felt compelled to educate others on the nuances of trauma in sexual assault investigations. He has brought his knowledge to departments throughout the country. In his 25 years on the police force, he understood the complexities behind these cases and felt convicted about respecting due process of the law.

"We have to start by believing victims, that something has happened," he said. "Not that someone is guilty. And we have to start measuring justice not just by arrest and conviction, but how we help victims heal."

Kelly Vates, executive director of Fairhaven Rape Crisis Center, is one of the leaders of SART. While she is a fierce advocate for victims of assault and abuse, she is also a victim. She said she experienced sexual violence from a young age, and when she finally escaped and began to heal, she realized she could use her experiences to heal others and change her life.

"What I want survivors to hear is, there is life without pain," she said.

Vates volunteered at a domestic violence shelter before establishing Fairhaven in 2005. At the time, she had "$500, one program and a whole lot of faith."

One in 4 women and 1 in 10 men experience sexual violence, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Griffith police Detective Robert Carney said he attended the two-day training to understand more about how trauma affects victims. Sexual assault investigations have been flawed, he said, but knows there are ways to ensure that victims are treated with compassion and due process is respected.

"These crimes should be believed like any other," Carney said. "There are ways we can better understand victims and trauma."

Ultimately, preventing sexual assault and domestic violence is a community effort, Vates and Tremblay said. The training concluded with a discussion on ways to enhance safety, accountability and education surrounding these topics, and breaking the stigma of reporting a sexual assault.
Following a few simple safety tips can make long summer strolls just as fun for your dog as they are for you. Heres what you need to know as the temperatures rise.

1. Timing is everything.

When the sun is at its peak, pavement can become scorching hot. Its best to save walks for early mornings or late evenings when the temperature is cooler. Skip mid-day walks when the sun is blazing unless you can stroll in a wooded area where the ground gets plenty of shade.

2. Stay hydrated.

Just as its important for people to get plenty of water on hot days, its also important for dogs. When walking in the summer, grab a cold water bottle and a collapsible dog bowl. If you notice excessive panting or salivation, take a break and give your dog time to hydrate. Freezing low-sodium broth in an ice cube tray is also a great way to get your dog more fluids in the summer.

3. Stay in the shade.

Staying in shady wooded areas is ideal, but for city-dwellers, its best to cross to the shady side of the street. Plan your dog's walking routes in areas with more tree or building coverage to keep your dogs paws cooler. As a bonus, it might help you avoid your next sunburn.

4. Protect their paws.

As mentioned before, if the sidewalk is too hot for the back of your hand, its also too hot for your dogs paws. Stick to grassy areas, or get some breathable dog booties to protect their paws from hot pavement.

5. Watch for signs of overheating.

Dogs produce far less sweat than people, so theyll need your help to stay cool in the summer.

Watch for common signs of your dog overheating which include:

Excessive panting

Difficulty breathing

Drooling

Weakness

Fatigue

Collapsing

If you notice any of these symptoms, get to a shady spot and offer your dog plenty of water. Wetting your dogs paws, belly, and ears with cool water can also help bring down their body temperature. You can even store some dog ice cream in the freezer for a special treat when you get home.
CROWN POINT  A Merrillville man faces two arson charges in connection with a fire this week at the Lake County Jail.

Ryan Andrews, 26, was charged Thursday with two counts of arson, a Level 4 felony that is punishable by up to 12 years in prison.

Charging documents said that Andrews doused the lobby floor of the Lake County Jail in gasoline around noon Monday, lit a stack of papers on fire and then threw them on the floor, which caused more areas of the lobby to go up in flames.

A consultant for the jail put the total cost of damages at $6,500 to $8,500, according to the probable-cause affidavit.

A witness told police that before setting the fire, Andrews came up to the desk in the front lobby and acted erratically. She said he was carrying a gallon jug filled with yellow liquid and appeared to be angry at the state of Indiana, making statements about the current president, current governor of Indiana, the previous governor of Indiana, and he also yelled out black [expletive] during his rant, according to the affidavit.

The witness later identified Andrews in a photo lineup, charging documents said.

Court records indicated that Andrews has a history of disturbing the peace. Before Mondays fire, he had been charged nearly a dozen times with intimidation and disorderly conduct.

The probable-cause affidavit noted that Andrews has two pending felony cases from 2022.

In October, Andrews was charged with intimidation, strangulation, criminal trespass, battery and disorderly conduct. On Oct. 5, Andrews reportedly berated customers and strangled the manager of the Merrillville McAlisters, 8217 Broadway, according to charging documents.

When officers detained Andrews there, he said to one officer Once I get out, I will beat your ass. Andrews later clarified to the officer that it was not a threat, but a promise.

Andrews was also charged with two counts of intimidation and disorderly conduct in November. Charging documents say Andrews berated customers and officers Aug. 18 at the Merrillville Dollar Tree, 295 W. Lincoln Highway.

One officer wrote in charging documents that once they arrived at the store, Andrews yelled at him in vulgar language and said the he had his check, according to charging documents.

A spokesperson from the prosecutors office declined to comment on Andrewss new charges or his criminal history.

Records indicate that Andrews is at large and a warrant is out for his arrest.

This suspect should be considered dangerous, Lake County Sheriff Oscar Martinez Jr. said in a statement. We encourage the public to avoid approaching him and to call 911 immediately if they see him.

Gallery: Recent arrests booked into Lake County Jail April Wright Fallon Stone Kecelyn Sydner Hilario Torres Jr. Shawn Washington Steven Petrisko Roosevelt Pickett Jr. Andre Patterson Kenneth Mack Jr. Rachel McKinney Patrick Noonan Bradley Kelly Jason Howard Tena Johnson Leslie Hawkins Chanel Copeland Tameera Dillon Elvee Evans III Totianna Gaston Olivia Blakeley Steven Bogner Kristina Bohn Tammy Berry Christopher Arroyo Melvin Pumphrey III Dakota Robinson Michael Sullivan Shauntwain Johnson Karley Jensen Cali Huerta Cindy Irons Jack Hampton John Huber Chauncey Hackett Jr. Antwon Butler Aundra Butler
VALPARAISO  A 42-year-old Portage man, arrested and charged Thursday in the wake of a Nov. 8 crash on Willowcreek Road that left one dead, others injured and several vehicles mangled, was accelerating at 113 mph in a 40-mph zone just 5 seconds before the collision, according to a newly filed charging document.

The speed dropped to 107 mph at less than a second before impact, and the driver, Arthur Schmidt, was braking, according to information pulled from the event data recorder from Schmidt's gray 2016 Cadillac SRX SUV.

"The speedometer showed the needle was stuck in place at the 122-mph mark," police said.

Schmidt was arrested around 4 p.m. Thursday at his Portage home exactly seven months after the fatal crash, police Lt. Rob Maynard said.

Schmidt was taken to the Porter County Jail and faces felony counts of reckless homicide and criminal recklessness when defendant commits aggressive driving resulting in death.

Police say Lauren Thompson, an eighth-grade English teacher at Chesterton Middle School, was in her GMC SUV stopped behind two cars at a red light around 5:45 p.m. Nov. 8 near the intersection of Willowcreek and Lute roads in Portage when a Cadillac smashed into her vehicle from behind.

The speed of the Cadillac caused Thompson's vehicle and two cars in front of her to slide through the intersection and onto the south side of Lute Road, police said. Six vehicles were involved in the crash.

In the aftermath of this initial collision, three other vehicles that were traveling on Lute Road or northbound Willowcreek were struck in secondary collisions with the first three vehicles, Maynard said. One of these involved vehicles flipped onto its roof, and another vehicle came to rest on top of the Cadillac.

Thompson was reportedly dead when police arrived.

Among the new details in the charging document is a witness seeing Schmidt holding his cellphone in the moments leading up to the fatal crash.

The witness "stated the Cadillac passed him on the right side of him at 'like 70 mph and he was on his cellphone, and it was in his hand'," a court document reads.

A witness reportedly told police the crash occurred as east-west traffic began flowing across Willowcreek from Lute. The witness said he saw the Cadillac driven by Schmidt "traveling aggressively" south on Willowcreek before the crash.

Northwest Indiana man charged with stalking, threatening Taylor Swift: 'We will destroy you,' accusations say "(Mitchell) Taebel still maintains a delusion that he and the ARTIST will be married and, if elected President, that the ARTIST will be his First Lady," charges say.

The witness told police he was with his wife and daughter, all of whom suffered pain as a result of the crash.

Police described arriving to a chaotic crash scene with six vehicles strewn about, including an SUV on top of Schmidt's Cadillac that was leaning partially on another vehicle.

Schmidt was found trapped in his vehicle, Thompson was dead, another driver was standing near a curb "visibly disoriented," and another involved was "shaken up," police said.

"We want to thank the officers and detectives of the Portage Police Department who investigated this case as well as the members of the Porter County Prosecutor's Office who dedicated many hours to meticulously prepare this case for prosecution in order to reach the point of an arrest being made," Portage police said in a prepared statement.

"We of course continue to express our sympathies and extend our condolences to the Thompson family and all of those whose lives have been tragically affected by this crash."

The Times identified Schmidt in April when a civil lawsuit was filed against him in the wake of the crash.

One of those injured, Andrew Larr, filed suit against Schmidt and Larr's auto insurance company, seeking to invoke his uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage, according to the litigation filed on his behalf by Porter County-based attorney Jesse Harper.

Portage Police Chief Mike Candiano previously said that his department received numerous questions regarding the identity of the drivers in the crash and has been accused on social media of withholding the information for various reasons.

"As with any crime or potential crime, we do not release names of suspects/participants until the investigation is complete and charges are filed or in the event there is an immediate threat to the community," he said.

Porter County Prosecutor Gary Germann had said the investigation into the crash was "fairly complex."

After the crash, Schmidt was taken to a Chicago hospital for treatment of severe injuries. Maynard said police were initially unable to speak to him because of his medical condition, and he reportedly later refused to talk to police without an attorney present.

In addition, the prosecutor's office said it had not received much cooperation from the hospital.

The case has been assigned to Porter Superior Court Judge Mike Fish, court records show.

Gallery: Recent arrests booked into the Porter County Jail Brandon York Rebecca Edwards Gracey Lovitt Christopher Harbison Mathew Koch Ronald Deluna Marlene Fair Wendell Webb Barry Smith James Wayte Dwayne McMullen Curtis Sconyers Jerry McGee Kelvin Breland Jr. Daniel Calvillo Cortez Jones Luis Sanchez-Espinoza Brisedia Montenegro-Barrera Christopher Loar Jeremy Lewis Tataneisha Jones Marktwain Green William Munchenburg Robert Rohweder Michael Vasquez Tylor Ahrens Kevin Byrnes Jennifer Steinke Alyssa Ramirez Nicholas Rangel Eric Henderson Justan Ostertage Catherine Gallas Amarion Bradford Amy Aliaga John Garner III Jalen Ray Danny Contreras Tianna Campbell
Hungarian Vice Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen confirmed the information that Russia handed over 11 Ukrainian prisoners of war, ethnic Hungarians, to Hungary, ATV said.

The publication said earlier the Russian Orthodox Church issued a statement that on June 8, "as part of inter-church cooperation, at the request of the Hungarian side, a group of Ukrainian prisoners of war of Zakarpattia origin who participated in hostilities was transferred to Hungary."

The media said, citing insider sources, that the transfer of prisoners of war was not coordinated with the Ukrainian side.

Semjen, however, refused to disclose details, citing "the interests of the cause and the people."

However, later Semjen told ATV that "all this is a gesture of the Russian Orthodox Church towards Hungary, these people owe their freedom to it."

"This is my human and patriotic duty," he said.
MERRILLVILLE  A woman is dead and an a man is in critical condition after shootings late Thursday in the area of the Menards at 6300 Mississippi St., said Merrillville Police Cmdr. Matthew Vasel.

Officers were called to the scene around 11:15 p.m. and found a man shot near the entrance of the store, Vasel said.

Medics arrived a short time later and began treating the shooting victim, who was transported by helicopter to a Chicago hospital, where he was listed Friday morning in critical condition, according to police.

"Officers continued to search the area and located a female, who was deceased on scene as a result (of a) gunshot wound," police said.

The shootings are under investigation, and police did not release the identities of those shot.

Anyone with information is encouraged to contact Detective Alexander Van Rite at 219-769-3531, ext. 349, or avanrite@merrillville.in.gov.

Anonymous tips can be sent to investigations@merrillville.in.gov.

Gallery: Recent arrests booked into the Porter County Jail Brandon York Rebecca Edwards Gracey Lovitt Christopher Harbison Mathew Koch Ronald Deluna Marlene Fair Wendell Webb Barry Smith James Wayte Dwayne McMullen Curtis Sconyers Jerry McGee Kelvin Breland Jr. Daniel Calvillo Cortez Jones Luis Sanchez-Espinoza Brisedia Montenegro-Barrera Christopher Loar Jeremy Lewis Tataneisha Jones Marktwain Green William Munchenburg Robert Rohweder Michael Vasquez Tylor Ahrens Kevin Byrnes Jennifer Steinke Alyssa Ramirez Nicholas Rangel Eric Henderson Justan Ostertage Catherine Gallas Amarion Bradford Amy Aliaga John Garner III Jalen Ray Danny Contreras Tianna Campbell
EAST CHICAGO  A major investment in life-saving cardiac care at St. Catherine Hospital is being hailed as a victory for East Chicago.

The long-standing hospital in the Indiana Harbor neighborhood landed a $1.5 million federal grant from the Health Resources & Services Administration to improve health care access for people who are medically vulnerable or underinsured.

U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan helped line up the money and helped announce the investment.

"Today is a victory for the residents of East Chicago because it's access to health care," he said. "I was born at St. Catherine Hospital. My grandparents were taken here. My mom and dad were cared for here. My sister was a candy striper here and went on to become a nurse practitioner for Northwestern. This was and still is an anchor for the community."

East Chicago leaders were concerned about the hospital's future after Franciscan Health decided to close the similarly aged former St. Margaret Hospital in neighboring Hammond, Northwest Indiana's most populous city.

"They wanted to make sure the safety-net hospital continued," he said. "What today is about is assuring the city of East Chicago and every resident that St. Catherine is thriving and investing in new technology that gives them access to care equal to anywhere around the world. This is an investment in East Chicago itself, and it allows the residents to understand they have access to quality care here in the city."

When Mrvan was North Township trustee, he often heard complaints from residents that they didn't have access to care.

"This is a safety-net hospital. That means it takes care of the most vulnerable populations," he said. "This technology is the gold standard for Northwest Indiana. It's the same technology you would have in the city of Chicago, but it's right here in East Chicago. The hospital is working to provide world-class health care. As a congressman, I will listen to your concerns and try to provide access to health care, the best technology and the best for East Chicago."

St. Catherine CEO Leo Correa said the hospital continues to provide advanced technology to East Chicago and surrounding communities.

"St. Catherine Hospital is committed to ensuring that our community has state-of-the-art cardiac care close to home," Correa said. "It's a well-known fact that in the 1960s, St. Catherine Hospital became the choice facility in the Chicagoland area for the treatment of heart disease, performing the first open-heart surgery in Northwest Indiana. And today, we continue to invest in cardiac care and treating heart disease."

The hospital will install an Azurion 7 C20 Catalyst table, an image-guided therapy system that provides high-quality images with low doses of X-rays. Philips Healthcare is installing the new technology in its cath lab, which is undergoing a multiphase modernization project.

It will allow for precision diagnosis and treatment for patients. The new technology can capture uncommon angiography views, provide real-time 3-D impressions for complex vascular interventions and better visualize stent and balloon placement in coronary arteries.

"Our patients and clinicians benefit from the fast procedure times, reduced radiation exposure and superior image quality of this new technology," said Mary Miller, director of Cardiovascular Services.

St. Catherine Hospital has long placed an emphasis on cardiac care while serving the community for nearly a century, Correa said.

"During that time, we built a reputation for providing unparalleled cardiac care," he said. "That did not happen by chance. That's the result of an intentional investment in top health care providers and resources.

"We have fortified a culture of excellence in cardiac care by continuing to invest in skilled specialists and technologies to diagnose and treat heart disease. St. Catherine, along with our fellow hospitals in Community Healthcare System, Community Hospital in Munster and St. Mary Medical Center in Hobart, operates one of the largest and most advanced cardiovascular programs in Northwest Indiana. Our hospitals are certified chest-pain centers that are fully accredited by the Joint Commission or the American College of Cardiology.

"Every day, highly skilled cardiologists, cardiovascular surgeons, electrophysiologic and cardiac support staff walk through our doors and use their expertise to treat patients who put their trust in us."
HAMMOND  A first responder and two industry leaders are members of the second annual Purdue University Northwest Alumni Hall of Fame class.

PNWs 2023 honorees are Robert Johnson III, Stewart Stu McMillan and Alfredo Al Sori.

Each of our 2023 honorees have been innovators and leaders in their industries. They have also remained loyally connected to their alma mater by mentoring and supporting our students, said PNW Chancellor Thomas Keon.

PNWs Alumni Hall of Fame honors graduates who are high-achieving leaders in their fields, involved members of their communities and who have engaged with PNW well beyond their time as students.

Johnson is president and CEO of Cimcor, Inc. in Merrillville. Cimcor develops information technology security software to help companies meet compliance and regulatory requirements as well as protect valuable information and ensure system uptime.

A Dyer resident, Johnson recalled his professors took time to help me, see me, believe in me and challenge me.

Johnson earned his associates, bachelors and masters degrees from PNW and serves as a member of the Board of Advisors for PNWs department of Computer Information Technology and Graphics in the College of Technology.

Its been a long journey, Johnson said, but his work has afforded him the opportunity to follow my passion and make Northwest Indiana a better place to live, be healthy, work and play.

Saying he has received plenty of support along the way, Johnson noted, To stand here tonight, I have an overwhelming sense of humility.

While building a company and being an inventor, Johnson has learned the real key is building great families, building up others.

McMillan is the founder of the Multi Agency Academic Cooperative Foundation in Valparaiso. The MAAC Foundation, named to honor McMillans father, Clyde Mack McMillan, is a multi-purpose campus that provides training opportunities to first responders in Northwest Indiana.

Noting that Purdue has enabled him to live the American dream, McMillan credited the unnamed people who saw the value of regional campuses, such as Hammond and Westville.

They put this campus here, McMillan, a Valparaiso resident, said, so I can be successful.

He earned his bachelors degree in interdisciplinary engineering in 1977 from PNW. McMillans support has helped PNW upgrade facilities and student workspace, including the PNW Design Studio on the Hammond campus.

Sori retired after a distinguished career from Kiewit Corp., one of North Americas largest construction and engineering organizations. He most recently served as division manager of Kiewit subsidiary Mass Electric Transportation, where he oversaw transit electrical, communication, traction power, security, ITS, roadway lighting projects and high-speed rail pursuits across North America.

Sori earned both an associates degree in civil engineering technology and a bachelors degree in construction management in 1989 from PNW.

Sori thanked several people, including his parents, who fled Cuba for a better life for themselves and their five children.

Ive had a blessed career, said Sori, a Dallas resident, who made 22 career moves and took every opportunity to grow.

I am truly honored to be inducted, said Sori, who hopes to become more involved with PNW.

The PNW Alumni Hall of Fame is located on the first floor of the Student Union & Library building. Keon called the hall one of his priorities, to identify and recognize graduates who have done something spectacular; to inspire current students; and to share alumni accomplishments with the community.

Katie Holderby, director of Alumni Engagement at PNW, reported on other school successes, including the annual PNW Day of Giving April 26. The 24-hour effort provided $2.8 million from 1,895 gifts.

As to the induction ceremony, Holderby said, The honorees exemplify leadership, innovation and giving back to their respective communities and institutions. The students, faculty and staff of PNW appreciate our alumni and their support as they continue to excel in their fields and support our students and institution to succeed as well.
ST. JOHN  When Martin Kisel was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia, he didnt even know what cancer was.

He just knew that it hurt, his mom, Colleen, said.

After a few weeks of painful treatments, the 7-year-old refused to leave the house.

He was so scared, Colleen, who lives in Oak Forest, Illinois, recalled.

So she began to bribe him with small toys, anything to make the treatments easier. Three decades later, Colleen and the Pediatric Oncology Treasure Chest Foundation are making treatments easier for thousands of children across the country.

When Martin started treatment, Colleen wasnt sure whether he was going to be one of the winners, a child who doesnt experience a relapse.

I can remember feeling like, Im going to make his life the best I can. Thats what I was thinking because I was watching kids die with the same cancer that Martin had, Colleen said, her eyes filling with tears. Its really hard on these kids, the treatment is years-long, and its very, very painful.

Martin underwent about four years of treatment, first at Advocate Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, then at Advocates Hope Childrens Hospital. After it became clear his treatment had been successful, Colleen began to think about all the other children undergoing painful spinal taps, bone marrow aspirations and rounds of chemotherapy. She filled an itty-bitty wooden box with used library books, CDs and VHS tapes, and brought it to the clinic.

Colleen launched the Pediatric Oncology Treasure Chest Foundation in 1996. The Orland Park, Illinois-based nonprofit places treasure chests filled with toys in pediatric oncology facilities across the country. The foundation has boxes in 21 states and 66 locations. With help from a few local woodworkers, the foundation will soon add a 67th location.

The community really got behind the idea, Colleen said. Now we have a warehouse full of toys. We supply thousands of kids with toys every month.

Over the years, Colleens brother, Tom Nagle, has built several treasure chests for the foundation. This winter, Nagle, who lives in St. John, asked if any of his co-workers at Robinson Engineering would be interested in doing some volunteer woodworking. Adam Glens, Randell Gann and Bob Birlson said yes right away.

Birlson called the project a no-brainer. He and Glens have experienced the stress of having an ill child; each has a son who battled an illness when they were born.

According to the American Cancer Society, cancer is the second-leading cause of death in children ages 1 to 14; accidents is the first. About 1,040 children younger than 15 are expected to die from cancer in 2023, although major advances in treatment have improved the overall survival rate. In the mid-1970s, the five-year survival rate for children with cancer was 58%; today, it is 85%.

The team crafted three chests, one of which will go to a naval base in Virginia. The boxes feature soft-close hinges and rounded lids. Each has a shiny golden dollar pressed into it, a practice Nagle learned from his grandmother.

She told me it would bring wealth to whoever has it, he explained.

The chests will be white-washed, then painted.

Volunteering has always been an important part of Robinson Engineerings mission. When the South Holland company celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2012, it organized 75 volunteer events. This year, Robinson instituted a practice called Volunteer Time Off, or VTO. For every hour employees spend volunteering for a pre-approved cause, they can get an hour of time off. Employees can get up to 16 hours of VTO in a calendar year.

Nagle said Robinson wants employees to be engaged in the communities where they work.

Im blessed to have the support of my brother, Robinson Engineering and the community, Colleen said.

These days, Martin is a healthy 37-year-old who lives in Denver and continues to support his mothers work.

This summer, he and some friends will complete the fifth Climb for the Kids, which raises money for the foundation. They are going to climb La Plata Peak, the fifth-highest summit in the Rocky Mountains. Previous climbs have raised more than $14,000; the Climb for the Kids GoFundMe page is at gofundme.com/f/climbforthekids-2023.

The foundation encourages local communities to host toy drives. The organization also accepts monetary donations and gift cards, which are given to teens undergoing treatment. More information is available at treasurechest.org.

PHOTOS: St. John photographer documents the town
What is the most memorable concert you attended of your favorite music performer?

The Rolling Stones? U2? Prince? Coldplay? Aretha Franklin? Metallica? Beyonce? Led Zeppelin? Lady Gaga? Queen? Dolly Parton? NWA?

Whoever it is and whenever it happened, Ill bet you remember it vividly. The songs. The crowd. The venue. The encore. Your friends. Your feelings. Your excitement. Your memories.

Whether it took place in the 1960s or 1980s or 2000s, that live performance likely is imprinted in your head like lyrics on a sheet of music. And its possibly emblazoned in your soul.

In some way, it profoundly affected your life. Especially if you attended it in your impressionable youth, when musical heroes play such a meaningful role in our lives. They voice our feelings. They embody our passion. They amplify our angst.

All of these reactions were on display last weekend when Taylor Swift performed three sold-out shows at Soldier Field in Chicago. About 200,000 ticket-holders sang in unison. Beat for beat. Word for word.

This includes thousands of other Swifties who enjoyed acoustic ripples of the three shows from the grass areas outside Soldier Field. Despite being nowhere close to Swift or a stage, they enjoyed every song on the set list from afar. The vibe from inside the stadium wafted all around it, like the warm glow from a raging campfire.

Many of the fans outside Soldier Field described it as feeling like Ravinia, the music venue in Highland Park, Illinois, one of my favorite places for a live show. Last summer, I attended a Stevie Nicks concert there with my wife, whos a die-hard fan. We didnt get one glimpse of the enchantress. We didnt care. My wife simply wanted to share the same air space with her musical heroine.

We will have some moments tonight, Nicks told the mesmerized audience.

And we did.

Swifts fans experienced similar moments of spellbound ecstasy in Chicago. Countless videos posted on social media show Swifties going absolutely nuts during the shows. Teenage girls and young women, mostly, screamed in delight at the mere sight of Swift, similar to the generations of pop-music fans at Beatles concerts when they first hit the American music scene in the 1960s.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the difference between The Beatles and Taylor Swift. But its their fans Im comparing, not their music. The similarities of sheer joyfulness displayed at those live performances  more than 50 years apart  should connect generations of fans.

This wasnt the case with some people of older generations who wrongly mocked the Swifties this past week in Chicago and Northwest Indiana.

Get a grip! Taylor Swift is just a pop tart princess with too little talent and too many fans, a middle-aged friend of mine posted on Twitter.

Me-ow, I thought.

Other critics of a certain age shared similar scorn or a belittling of Swifts fans. I felt that the harsh criticism was unfair, short-sighted and generationally cyclical. Many of those critics attended live shows in their younger years of their own pop music heroes, insisting that it was a life-changing experience. Many of them also were mocked by their parents or grandparents for feeling that way.

I remember attending a Janes Addiction concert in Chicago (one of my top 10 live shows) but first picking up my friend, Mark Manos, at his home. As we left, his big brother mocked us for our choice of musical performance.

Have fun, dudes! he said sarcastically.

Music shouldnt divide us. It should unite us.

Music is life, said Chris Bro, a fellow music explorer.

The Palatine, Illinois, native is a former radio DJ who lives in New York. He has a pulse on pop cultures hottest trends, deepest cuts and musical soundscapes. (Find him on Twitter @ChrisBroNext.)

As Swifts fans reminded us last weekend, a poets words dancing in unison with a musicians sounds can move us to tears, smiles and nostalgic recollections. It can also enrage us, mesmerize us and enthrall us. The good songs anyway.

Live concerts of our favorite performer should epitomize all of these feelings into a singular celebration that transcends musical genres, music venues and music itself. The experience can catapult us to the stars, far beyond the star thats performing on stage.

Those Swifties who were mocked or teased just had the time of their life. I mean this literally. It may be the best experience of their life. They didnt want it to end.

Looking back, it wont matter to them what they paid for tickets. Or the pilgrimage to get there. Or the hours of waiting to see their heroine. All that will matter is that they were there. Period.

They will relive those memories like many of us relive unforgettable memories of concerts from decades ago. This kind of generational joy should be celebrated, not judged.

As Swift sings in one of her songs, I could build a castle out of all the bricks they threw at me.

Its a castle now filled with a lifetime of memories for her Swifties.
The Juilliard School has fired a professor who had been accused of sexually harassing students after an independent investigation found credible evidence that he had engaged in conduct which interfered with individuals academic work, the school said in a letter to students, staff, faculty and alumni on Thursday.

Juilliard said the professor, Robert Beaser, 69, who served as chair of the composition department from 1994 to 2018, had behaved in a manner that was inconsistent with Juilliards commitment to provide a safe and supportive learning environment for its students. The school did not elaborate, saying only that the investigation had found evidence of a past unreported relationship and that Beaser had repeatedly misrepresented facts about his actions.

Richard C. Schoenstein, a lawyer for Beaser, denied that his client had misled his employer. He said the relationship in question took place three decades ago, had been known to Juilliard since then and had been the subject of previous inquiries. He called the schools findings unspecific and unattributed and said that Beaser would pursue his legal rights in full.

Dr. Beaser is shocked and dismayed by Juilliards conclusions and actions, Schoenstein said.

The inquiry was ordered after an investigation in December 2022 by VAN, a classical music magazine, that detailed accusations against Beaser and other Juilliard composition teachers. VAN, citing interviews with unnamed former students, said that Beaser had made unwanted advances toward students and engaged in sexual relationships with them.
Democratic lawmakers in New York had scrambled this week to assemble a plan to tackle the states housing crisis: They said it included measures to protect tenants from eviction and cap rent increases, incentives to remodel empty offices into apartments and an extension of a tax break for developers to build affordable housing.

But it all unraveled on Thursday, when Democrats who control the State Legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul failed to reach a deal, leading to a new round of finger pointing among Democrats in Albany.

Lawmakers blamed Ms. Hochul for opposing their housing measures, particularly those to protect tenants, while the governor said lawmakers never presented her with any housing bills to approve.

The one unarguable point was that Democrats were bound to finish the 2023 legislative session this week without addressing the states housing crisis for the second time this year, despite proclaiming the issue a top priority.
James G. Watt, who as President Ronald Reagans first Interior secretary tilted environmental policies sharply toward commercial exploitation, touching off a national debate over the development or preservation of Americas public lands and resources, died on May 27 in Arizona. He was 85.

His son, Eric Watt, confirmed his death in a text message on Thursday but declined to cite a cause.

After taking office in 1981, Mr. Watt was asked at a hearing of the House Interior Committee if he favored preserving wilderness areas for future generations. He had been picked by Reagan from a Denver legal foundation that had often challenged the rules and policies of the department he now headed. Critics called him a fox in the hen house.

He replied, I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.

Mr. Watts response startled some committee members, but seemed to explain his intention to ease restrictions on the use of millions of acres of public lands.

The remark was revealing. Mr. Watt, a born-again Christian and a lifelong Republican, saw himself as a servant of God and prayed with colleagues at work. But it raised questions over whether he would be motivated by conservative political judgments or religious convictions, or both.
This may well be true, but not necessarily. Anyone who becomes one of two major party nominees has a shot at winning the White House. Thats especially true in our era of stark partisan polarization and intense negative partisanship. That Mr. Trump would be running against an opponent with persistently low approval ratings who will be 81 years old on Election Day 2024 only makes a Biden-Trump matchup more uncertain.

The other response dismisses such concerns entirely. Let justice be done, we are told, though the heavens fall. To weigh political considerations in determining whether someone, even a former and possibly future president, should be prosecuted is to supposedly commit a grievous offense against the rule of law, because no one is above the law and the consequences of holding him or her to account shouldnt matter.

This is a powerful argument and one seemingly vindicated in the case of Mr. Trump, who has now managed to get himself ensnared in legal trouble in multiple jurisdictions dealing with a wide range of possible crimes. At a certain point, the logic of the law applying to everyone equally demands that the process be seen through.

But that doesnt mean we should deny the gravity of the potential consequences. Mr. Trump is not a standard-issue politician who happened to run afoul of corruption statutes. Hes a man who rose once to the presidency and seeks to return to it by mobilizing and enhancing mass suspicion of public institutions and officials. Thats why one of the first things he said after announcing the indictment on Thursday night was to proclaim it was a DARK DAY for the United States of America. Its why die-hard supporters like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio tweeted: Sad day for America. God Bless President Trump. Its likely that tens of millions of our fellow citizens agree with the sentiment.

To most Americans, such a reaction to news of Mr. Trumps indictment seems unimaginable. But its clearly something sincerely felt by many. Our country has a history of lionizing outlaws  folk heroes who defy authority, especially when they claim to speak for, channel and champion the grievances and resentments of ordinary people against those in positions of power and influence. From the beginning of his 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump has portrayed himself as just such a man of defiance, eager to serve as a tribune for those who feel left behind, denigrated and humiliated by members of the establishment.
On Friday, June 9, Russian occupiers shelled a hospital in the town of Huliaipole (Zaporizhia region), Head of the President's Office of Ukraine Andriy Yermak said.

"It is known about two dead hospital employees  a junior nurse and a plumber. Two more people were wounded," Yermak said on the Telegram channel.
An Alabama inmate who escaped from jail and avoided capture for nearly two weeks last spring was sentenced on Thursday to spend the rest of his life in prison, the maximum sentence for first-degree escape.

The inmate, Casey White, escaped from Lauderdale County Jail in Florence, Ala., in May 2022. He was aided by a corrections officer, Vicky White, who was of no relation to him. After leaving the jail for a courthouse appointment that was later revealed to be a ruse, the pair were on the run for 11 days, setting off a nationwide manhunt that ended with his arrest and her death after a police chase in Indiana.

At a courthouse in Lauderdale County on Thursday, the local CBS affiliate station reported, Mr. White, 39, said he felt like the most hated man in the world and that he had loved Ms. White, whose family members attended the sentencing hearing and to whom he apologized.

Vicky took me out because she said, Right was right. Wrong is wrong. First person to show me affection. First person to give me a hug in six years, he said. Ms. White, 56, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after the police pursuit ended in a car crash. Mr. White surrendered.
The parents of the assailant who killed six people at a Nashville Christian school in March will transfer legal ownership of the writings their child left behind to the families of roughly 100 students, providing unexpected support to those families efforts to prevent the release of the documents.

The surprise decision, outlined in a Tennessee courtroom on Thursday, could prove crucial in an increasingly fierce legal battle over whether the writings should be made public to shed light on the shooters motivations or kept private to shield the victims from further pain.

The lawyer for the shooters parents, David Raybin, did not say in court how or why they had come to the decision. But speaking to reporters, he acknowledged that it strengthened the argument that the families should be allowed to participate in a lawsuit aimed at forcing the release of the writings as a matter of public record.

The parents of students at the Covenant School, along with the school itself and the adjoining church, have said the writings should never be released, citing fears of inspiring another mass shooting and further traumatizing their children. An opposing coalition that includes news outlets and a gun rights group has argued that the writings, which are now in the polices possession, are part of the public record and crucial to understanding why the violence occurred.
The details of Chinas and Cubas negotiations  which U.S. officials described on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence  come as the Biden administration has attempted to stabilize relations with Beijing, its main strategic rival, after a period of rising tensions. The Wall Street Journal first reported on plans to build a facility in Cuba.

President Bidens National Security Council pushed back against reports of the planned facility. This report is not accurate, John Kirby, the council spokesman, said in a statement, declining to go into further detail. We have had real concerns about Chinas relationship with Cuba, and we have been concerned since Day 1 of the administration about Chinas activities in our hemisphere and around the world.

Mr. Kirby said that the administration was closely monitoring those activities and taking steps to counter them. He added that we remain confident that we are able to meet all our security commitments at home and in the region.

Several diplomatic, military and climate engagements between the two countries were frozen last year after former Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to Taiwan. Bilateral relations had a further setback earlier this year when a Chinese spy balloon was caught traversing the United States, hovering near sensitive military sites.

The incident inspired a backlash from Congress and prompted Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, to cancel a scheduled trip to Beijing in February. Mr. Blinken plans to make the trip soon, according to U.S. officials, after weeks of intense diplomacy that included a meeting between Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and a senior Chinese official, Wang Yi. It is unclear if the latest revelations about the planned facility in Cuba could affect the visit once again.
Former President Donald J. Trump faces a host of investigations around the country, at both the state and federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers.

Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts filed by prosecutors in Manhattan related to his role in what they described as a hush-money scheme to cover up a potential sex scandal in order to clear his path to the presidency in 2016. A Georgia prosecutor is in the final stages of an investigation into Mr. Trumps attempts to reverse the election results in that state.

And Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the documents case, is also examining Mr. Trumps efforts to reverse his defeat at the polls in 2020 and his role in the events that led to the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Here is where notable inquiries involving the former president stand.

Manhattan Criminal Case

The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, brought the case over Mr. Trumps role in a hush-money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who was poised during the campaign to go public with her story of a sexual encounter with him.
Jack Smith, appointed in November to investigate former President Donald J. Trump, is a hard-driving, flinty veteran Justice Department prosecutor chosen for his experience in bringing high-stakes cases against politicians in the United States and abroad.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland tasked him with overseeing two investigations into Mr. Trump: one into his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, including the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and the other into Mr. Trumps retention of classified materials at his residence in Florida.

He was the right choice to complete these matters in an evenhanded and urgent manner, Mr. Garland said in announcing the appointment of Mr. Smith, who had been serving as the top prosecutor investigating war crimes in Kosovo in The Hague.

Mr. Smith, 54, has cut an elusive figure since his appointment last November to investigate former President Donald J. Trump. He has granted no interviews, and kept a profile so low that a recent sighting of him emerging from a Subway with lunch was news in the Justice Department headquarters across town.
So far, his core supporters have stuck with him and even some of those running against him for the Republican nomination next year have criticized the investigations against him. But he recently was found liable for sexual abuse in a civil trial, his company has been found guilty of 17 counts of tax fraud and other crimes and he still faces two other possible indictments stemming from his effort to overturn his 2020 election defeat, leading to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The question, politically at least, is whether the accumulation of all those allegations will someday weigh him down among Republican voters who otherwise like him, especially if there is a third and maybe a fourth indictment. At least some of his rivals for the party nomination are counting on the fatigue factor eventually draining his support.

As for Mrs. Clinton, whether she was feeling a little schadenfreude on Thursday night, the defeated candidate herself was not saying. But she and her allies have long believed that the reopening of the email investigation by James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, just days before the 2016 election cost her the victory that so many polls had forecast.

Mr. Trump will try to turn this around on his pursuers, arguing that the fact that he has been indicted where Mrs. Clinton was not is proof that he is being unfairly persecuted.

Never mind that the facts of the cases are different, that he seemed to go out of his way to intentionally thwart authorities trying to recover the secret documents for months while investigators concluded that Mrs. Clinton was not willfully trying to violate the law. But it will be a useful political argument for Mr. Trump to insist that he is a victim of double standards.

Why, given the 2016 campaign, he did not recognize the potential danger of mishandling classified information and take more care about it is another matter. But he spent much of his presidency disregarding concerns about the security of information and the rules about preserving government documents.

He disclosed highly classified information to Russian officials visiting him in the Oval Office. He posted sensitive satellite imagery of Iran online. He kept using an unsecured mobile phone even after being told it was monitored by Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies. He tore up official documents and threw them to the floor once he was done with them despite laws requiring that they be saved and cataloged, leaving aides to collect the ripped-up pieces and tape them back together.
Each such charged document would be a separate offense, so it is possible that prosecutors have brought as many as five counts of this offense by citing five different records. A conviction would be theoretically subject to 10 years in prison for each count, although defendants in other Espionage Act cases have received significantly less than the maximum.

To obtain a conviction, prosecutors would also have to prove to the jury that the documents related to the national defense, that they were closely held and that their disclosure could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary.

Although Mr. Trump has claimed  without evidence  that he declassified all the files he took to Mar-a-Lago, prosecutors would not technically need to prove that they were still classified because the Espionage Act predates the classification system and does not refer to it as an element.

Conspiracy Charges

It is a crime to agree with another person to break a law. Prosecutors would need to show that Mr. Trump and some other person had a meeting of the minds about committing a specific crime and that one of them took some step toward that goal. The penalty can be up to five years.

Obstruction

It is a crime to conceal records to obstruct an official effort. Prosecutors would need to show several things, including that Mr. Trump knew he still had files that were subject to the efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration to take custody of presidential records. They would also need to be able to demonstrate that he willfully defied the Justice Departments subpoena for files marked as classified, and that he intentionally caused his subordinates to fail to turn them all over while leading officials to believe they had complied. The penalty is up to 20 years per offense.
The Supreme Courts surprising decision on Thursday to effectively reaffirm the remaining powers of the 1965 Voting Rights Act has halted, at least for the foreseeable future, the slide toward irrelevance of a landmark civil rights law that reshaped American politics.

In 2013, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote an opinion that effectively gutted the heart of the act, a provision that gave the Justice Department a veto over changes in election procedures in states with histories of racial bias in elections. Two years ago, an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito greatly weakened the laws authority over polling rules that reduced the clout of minority voters.

Supporters of the act expected the court to take an ax to the laws chief remaining authority, over political maps, in the latest case, Allen v. Milligan  a suit charging that Alabama had drawn its seven congressional districts to illegally limit Black voters influence to a single House seat.

Instead, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 ruling, reaffirmed the laws authority over racially biased maps and the arcane structure of legal precedents and court tests that underpin it.
The worst of the wildfire smoke is likely over for millions of people across the Northeast, after two days of orange-tinted skies and the smell of burning forests filling the air. But smoke could remain dense in other parts of the region through at least Friday, according to a New York Times analysis of atmospheric computer models.

Poor air quality peaked in some of the Northeasts most populous cities late Wednesday or early Thursday, and conditions have been steadily improving in places including New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Instead of a concentrated mass of thick smoke streaming into some of the nations densest urban regions, the plume from Canadian wildfires became more widespread Thursday, spreading haze into the Deep South.

A swath of more concentrated smoke still hung over portions of the Mid-Atlantic, from Virginia into New Jersey, on Thursday afternoon, with forecast models showing it lasting through the evening. And New York could see some smoke return, blown back in from the Atlantic Ocean by sea breezes. But conditions in the city were likely to improve and stay that way on Friday, forecasters with the National Weather Service said.

By the time the sun rises on Friday morning, forecasters expect it to lose much of its reddish hue  caused by light scattering from wildfire smoke  across much of the Northeast, though a swath from the Washington region through Western Pennsylvania could still experience some gloom throughout the day.
The refreshing part of being one on one, Brooks said, is that it takes the preciousness away from performance. At the same time, I feel like theres so much fear in public, they said. Theres this kind of fear on the subway. These kinds of art projects could be interventions, happenings that open up ways to just be a little bit more courageous in public  and caring. And just change the chemistry of the public space a little bit.

Bakst, speaking in a video interview with Brooks and Julia Gladstone  who is training to become a psychotherapist, making her life all about, she said, getting into the nuances of the one on one  is thinking about public space, too. Its become more privatized, Bakst said. And I think theres a need to work our collective muscles of being able to bear the presence of others, she said, citing Lauren Berlants book, On the Inconvenience of Other People. Gleefully, Gladstone held up her own copy.

We actually have to work our capacity to be with the needs of others, Bakst said. New York really asks us to do that  especially in terms of forms of life that are repressed and that are oppressed in the city. And its more like an everyday practice than a protest or something. I feel like this frame can be an invitation to work that muscle.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley will travel to Brussels to participate in the 13th meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on June 15, the U.S. Department of Defense has said.

"Secretary Austin will travel again next week to Brussels, where he and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley will host an in-person meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on June 15th, followed by the NATO Defense Ministers Meeting on June 16th. We'll provide additional details regarding the trip in the near future," Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told a press briefing on Thursday.
The Gadsby show was developed in response to an invitation extended to several institutions by the Musee Picasso to mark the 50th anniversary of Picassos death in part by considering what the artist and his work mean today. It seemed necessary to think about that question in terms of the culture shift brought about by feminism over the 50 years since his death, Small said.

We wanted to foster dialogues about the myths and tropes of the male-dominated Modernist canon that Picasso exemplifies, the curator added. It was also an opportunity to present and interpret our own collection of feminist artworks.

Among the other artists included are Mickalene Thomas, Judy Chicago and Marilyn Minter, all of whom were informed that their pieces would be in the show. Thomas and Minter declined to be interviewed.

Chicago said she saw in the derisive reviews confirmation of the misogyny that Gadsby confronted in the museum show and in Nanette.

There is a level of hysteria  and hostility  in some of the writing that reminds me of the hysteria that surrounded The Dinner Party, Chicago said, referring to her famous feminist installation from the 1970s, which resides at the Brooklyn Museum.

There is very little space to critique the great heroes of art history, as if theyre above analysis  this very odd idea that patriarchal attitudes and misogyny do not affect either the worldview or creative production of male artists, and of course they do, Chicago said. I celebrate and congratulate the Brooklyn Museum for trying to begin that conversation.
They helped me develop a sense of kinship, Oluwamuyiwa said by phone, and I became confident that photographing was a valid way to understand a city. His interpretations of Lagos are gritty and fast paced, matching the environment in which he works, yet he manages to elucidate things that can only be apparent to someone looking closely. In such moments, as in Boss and Assistant where two men in a Danfo (the rundown yellow minibuses used for public transport) seem to be whispering to each other, or in Hazy II, where light pours from under the Third Mainland Bridge onto two figures standing in a canoe, the images transcend their sharp surfaces and acquire a misty luster; grittiness gives way to haziness, and the private anxieties of Lagos life become heightened.

A quick history of Lagos: Indigenously peopled by the Awori, it was once a military outpost for the ancient Benin Kingdom, a slave trading port for the Portuguese, who named it after their own city, and eventually an entry point for British colonialism into Nigeria.
Before he returned it to the video store  F.B.I. agents, look away!  my dad gamely taped the closing credits for me on a blank VHS. Its still an inside joke in my family, the story of a 3-year-old future music critic constantly asking her parents to put on the Lethal Weapon tape, just so she could listen to this Harrison song over and over.

You can learn a lot about a person from asking about their first favorite songs  its the sonic equivalent of looking at someones baby pictures. And since Ive been dropping into your inbox twice a week with this newsletter, I figured it was only fair that you heard a few of mine.

Listen along on Spotify as you read.

1. Cat Stevens: Moonshadow

I am pretty sure someone sang this as a lullaby to me when I was a baby, and to this day the-artist-formerly-known-as-Cat-Stevenss voice can still make me feel an almost preternatural comfort  a feeling of being swaddled beyond what even the heaviest weighted blanket can offer. My parents got a CD player (state-of-the-art technology) when I was young, and I can still remember being taught how to place Cat Stevens: Greatest Hits into the tray very, very carefully and cue up track 8, which was of course my song, Moonshadow. (Listen on YouTube)

2. Tom Petty: Free Fallin

I grew up in New Jersey and did not visit the West Coast until my mid-20s, so throughout my youth the proper nouns in this song sounded exquisitely exotic to me: Mulholland, Ventura Boulevard, this surely indescribably glamorous oasis called Reseda. Free Fallin would now probably land on the shortlist of the most overplayed American rock songs of the 20th century, and yet  perhaps the reason I cannot imagine ever getting sick of it  I can still travel back to a time when its lyrics sounded alluringly strange to me, and when I believed there might be actual vampires haunting Ventura Boulevard. (Petty also co-wrote Cheer Down, and Jeff Lynne helped produce both of those songs  so clearly the Traveling Wilburys had a hold on my musical taste from an early age.) (Listen on YouTube)

3. U2: Zoo Station

After it came out in late 1991, U2s angsty, glammy Achtung Baby was an absolute staple in my parents steel-blue Ford Taurus. Taking it in over and over again from the back seat, this album seemed to contain all of the mysteries of the adult world, set somewhere just beyond my realm of understanding. All I knew was that it sounded cool. And a little scary! On Achtung Baby, relatively straightforward rock songs are haunted by weird, ghostly sounds, like the mournful, malfunctioning tape loop at the beginning of Whos Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses, the eerie distortion of Until the End of the World or any number of ghost noises that lurk throughout the tone-setting opener Zoo Station. I later realized that a lot of this strangeness was the result of the Edges adventurousness with effects pedals and, even more ineffably, Brian Enos arty production. (I also realized much later  for shame  that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle was an iconic second-wave feminist slogan, not a funny lyric that Bono made up.) No matter what U2 does or how many albums it forcefully installs on my iPhone, Achtung Baby will always have a special place in my heart for being one of the first records to freak me out  in a good way. (Listen on YouTube)
Right now, Im playing private concerts in Moscow because big halls are closed for me. I truly hope that I wont be put in jail for my views and opinions. Every time I talk openly about my feelings, Im being watched. All I need now is to be able to work, to feed my children, and not to be afraid that I might be a political prisoner.

In March, the authorities in Moscow interrupted a concert in which you and several other artists were playing works by Shostakovich and Mieczysaw Weinberg.

The police ran into the concert hall in the middle of the performance, and they said they got a call that there was a bomb inside. And they asked everyone to to leave. And everybody stepped out onto the rainy street, and the police went inside with the bomb-sniffing dogs. And the audience stayed with me  there under the rain  and nobody left. And when finally the police hadnt found any bombs, obviously, we got back to the hall and we continued the concert.

How did that experience make you feel?

At that moment, I was completely broken because I had the feeling that I had been struggling for months for the possibility to play, and it was interrupted. But I remembered the people who have been thanking me for not leaving Russia. People write me letters telling me that they dont feel abandoned because Im here. Many of the artists have left.

Did you have any hesitations about speaking out when the war first started?

On the first day of the war, I woke up at 7 a.m. because I was making my children breakfast and taking them to school. And I opened my eyes and I saw a post on Facebook by my friend that said, Oh God, No! No! I immediately understood what was going on. I just couldnt believe it was happening. I never had the idea that I could keep silent. I had to scream.
Sun House, by David James Duncan

This novel of ideas, which took Duncan 16 years to complete, follows all manner of people who are staring down crises of faith. These lost souls  from cowboys to urban refugees  make their way to Montana and build new communities for themselves. Im really trying to portray something that might give something hope, Duncan said of the book in an interview with The Idaho Mountain Express. When I shatter a heart, I try as best as I can to at least partially mend it as well.

Little, Brown, Aug. 8
Donald Trump has been indicted again. He is now the first president, former or current, to be charged with a federal crime.

The charges stem from an investigation into Trumps handling of classified documents that he kept after he left the White House. Federal officials tried to get those documents back, and Trump is accused of resisting their efforts and trying to keep the files for himself.

Trump faces at least seven criminal counts, my Times colleagues reported. They include willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice. The Justice Department has not confirmed or announced the charges.

It is not unusual for federal officials to misplace or accidentally hold on to classified documents. Such files were found in the homes of President Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. What is unusual in Trumps case are his apparent efforts to keep the documents as federal officials asked him to return them.
The American branch of Binance, the giant cryptocurrency exchange, said late on Thursday that it would no longer allow customers to trade on its platform using U.S. dollars, after its banking partners cut the firm off in response to a crackdown by federal regulators.

The move is a major blow to Binance.US, the American arm of the worlds largest crypto exchange. One of the main functions of an exchange is allowing users to convert their traditional money into digital currencies like Bitcoin or Ether. Binance will no longer be able to offer that service in the United States.

In a message to customers, Binance.US said it was taking necessary actions as we transition to a crypto-only exchange. In recent days, the company said, its banking partners had signaled that they would no longer facilitate the movement of dollars on and off Binance.USs platform.

The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Binance on Monday, accusing the firm and its chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, of mishandling customer funds and lying to regulators. In a separate filing, the S.E.C. asked a federal judge in Washington to freeze assets related to U.S.-based customers of Binance, citing the defendants years of violative conduct.
Just days after the Securities and Exchange Commission sued it, the American arm of Binance, the giant cryptocurrency exchange, announced some painful news: It will no longer allow customers to trade on its platform using U.S. dollars.

Banking partners of the exchanges U.S. unit, Binance.US, had been spooked by the S.E.C.s action, the company said, and were shutting down crucial payment rails that allowed dollars to move on and off the platform.

This week, the S.E.C. filed back-to-back lawsuits against Binance and the U.S. exchange Coinbase, two of the largest crypto companies in the world. The S.E.C. said Binance had lied to regulators and improperly handled customer funds; Coinbase was accused of operating as an unlicensed securities exchange.

The impact of the suits was immediate. Starting on June 27, the trading app Robinhood said, it will no longer support transactions in three popular cryptocurrencies  Solana, Cardano and Polygon  that the S.E.C. categorized as unregistered securities in its court filings.
New York Citys smoke-clogged air reached 407 on the Environmental Protection Agencys 500-point Air Quality Index at one point this week, signifying that pollution levels were hazardous and at historically dangerous levels.

But its not the worst air quality that the United States has seen. There have been about 40 times over the past decade when the index has risen above 500, into what the E.P.A. calls Beyond the A.Q.I. Most of those instances have occurred in Western states, including California, Oregon and Washington, the E.P.A. said in an email, as wildfires spread a blanket of smoke over parts of the region.

The E.P.A. in 1999 released the current version of the six-tier index as a way to communicate to the public the density of five pollutants. A rating anywhere between 301 and 500 is considered hazardous, and air quality at that level will trigger health warnings. At that level and beyond, everyone should stay indoors and reduce activity levels. Use the same information that is for the hazardous category, the E.P.A. advises.

While the A.Q.I. measurement used in the United States does not support values above 500, such values occur so infrequently that the issue rarely comes up, said Robert Rohde, the lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, an organization focused on environmental data science.
With so much toxic wildfire smoke moving across the Canadian border and upending life across the Eastern United States, it raises a troubling question: Will there be more of this in the years ahead, and if so, what can be done about it?

First, lets take a step back. Global average temperatures have increased because of the unchecked burning of coal, oil and gas for 150 years. That has created the conditions for more frequent and intense heat waves.

That extra heat in the atmosphere has created a greater likelihood of extreme, sometimes catastrophic, weather all over the world. While that doesnt mean the same extremes in the same places all the time, certain places are more susceptible to certain disasters, by virtue of geography. Australia could see more intense drought. Low-lying islands are projected to experience higher storm surges as sea levels rise.

In places that become hot and dry, wildfires can become more prevalent or intense.

The unifying fact is that more heat is the new normal.
The European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission) has recommended Ukraine to postpone the implementation of the law on oligarchs due to the war, Justice Minister of Ukraine Denys Maliuska announced after a meeting of the commission in Venice.

"Because the war dramatically changes the balance of power in Ukraine: it significantly reduces the influence of oligarchs. It is about destruction of their enterprises as well as operation of public authorities during the war," he said in a video address on Facebook.

"Thus, it is extremely difficult to assess properly the impact of the law on oligarchs on the political system and the legal system," the minister said.

He stressed that the pause in the implementation of the law would not be long and that Ukraine and the Venice Commission would return to this issue after the victory in the war, if by that time the oligarchs had not become "ordinary decent businessmen."

"War does wonders for politicians and let's hope it does wonders for oligarchs," the minister said.

Maliuska recalled that the implementation of the law on oligarchs is one of the seven recommendations of the European Commission, which is necessary to start negotiations on Ukraine's accession to the European Union.

The minister also said that the Venice Commission at the meeting will consider two more Ukrainian bills, one of which is on the Constitutional Court.
Allina Health, a large nonprofit health system based in Minnesota, announced on Friday that it would stop withholding care from patients with outstanding medical debt as it re-examines its policy of cutting off services for those who have accrued at least $4,500 in outstanding bills.

The health system will now temporarily halt this practice but will not restore care for indebted patients who have already lost access.

Although Allinas hospitals treated anyone in emergency rooms, other services were cut off for indebted patients, including children and those with chronic illnesses like diabetes and depression, The New York Times reported last week. Patients werent allowed back until they had paid off their debt entirely.

Allinas chief executive, Lisa Shannon, called the move a thoughtful pause while the company re-examined the policy.
Dr. Harald zur Hausen, a German virologist who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 for his discovery that the seemingly benign human papillomavirus, known for causing warts, also caused cervical cancer, died on May 29 at his home in Heidelberg, Germany. He was 87.

His death was announced by the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, which Dr. zur Hausen led for two decades. Josef Puchta, the centers former administrative director and a longtime colleague and friend, said Dr. zur Hausen had a stroke in May.

Dr. zur Hausens discovery paved the way for vaccines against human papillomavirus, or HPV, a sexually transmitted disease that can also cause other cancers, including of the vagina, vulva, penis, anus and back of the throat.

More than 600,000 people develop an HPV-related cancer every year, according to the National Cancer Institute. Vaccination can prevent as many as 90 percent of those cancers.
After conducting evidence reviews, Finland has begun limiting who can access gender-related treatments and Sweden has restricted the use of puberty blockers and hormones to clinical trials. A Norwegian health body and the French National Academy of Medicine have also urged caution.

In the United States, more than 20 Republican-led states have passed laws banning the use of puberty-blocking drugs and hormones, with some making it a felony for doctors to prescribe them. Hundreds of clinicians across the country  including some who have raised concerns about which adolescents should receive gender-related treatments  have denounced the bans, saying such decisions should be made by patients, their families and their doctors.

Background: Data on the effect of blockers is sparse

Last year, the N.H.S. announced that it would be shutting down the countrys only youth gender clinic after an external review showed that the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service had been unable to provide appropriate care for the rapidly increasing number of adolescents seeking gender treatments. The clinic had seen a sharp rise in referrals, from 250 young people in 2011 to 5,000 in 2021.

Puberty blockers, which work by suppressing estrogen and testosterone, were first tested on children with gender dysphoria in the Netherlands in the 1990s. The Dutch researchers published their first study on 70 children in 2011, finding that the adolescents reported a decrease in depression and anxiety after taking the drugs.
It is almost certainly a fact that Richard Montanez did not invent Flamin Hot Cheetos.

That revelation, which came to light as part of a 2021 Los Angeles Times investigation, arrived at a rather inconvenient time, considering a biopic based on Montanezs inspirational 2013 memoir, A Boy, a Burrito, and a Cookie: From Janitor to Executive, in which he claims to have invented the spicy snack, was already in development.

But the Times article wasnt a death knell for the film  in fact, far from it.

We never set out to tell the history of the Cheeto, Eva Longoria, who is making her feature directorial debut with Flamin Hot, told The Los Angeles Times in March, shortly before the films premiere at South by Southwest. We are telling Richard Montanezs story and were telling his truth.

So, the filmmakers forged ahead, and Flamin Hot, which bills itself as a true story, will begin streaming on Disney+ and Hulu on Friday. The film follows Montanez (Jesse Garcia) through his early days as a janitor at a Frito-Lay plant in California, where he eventually makes a pivotal phone call to Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub), the chief executive of the Frito-Lay parent company PepsiCo, to pitch an idea for a tasty corn puff. That sets him on a path to becoming a multicultural marketing executive at PepsiCo.

Heres a guide to how the spicy Cheeto tale unraveled, what parts of it are actually true (there are some!) and what the real Montanez has said about the controversy.
Thats something that we are now developing, he told reporters.

Dr. Jay Varma, director of the Cornell Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response and a health adviser under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, said that the health crisis showed the need for the state and city to create early warning systems to alert residents about the risks of wildfire smoke in advance, like they do with coastal storms, and to consider solutions to improve air quality when it is poor, such as limiting car traffic as other cities do, including Beijing and Mexico City.

The states Department of Environmental Conservation first posted an advisory warning about elevated levels of fine particulate matter in certain parts of the state on June 1.

On Tuesday afternoon, the governors office issued a news release announcing that the wildfires were creating hazy conditions in New York City and elsewhere, urging residents to limit exposure and saying state experts were monitoring the situation.

On Wednesday morning, as many New Yorkers woke up to a thick blanket of haze, the governor spoke to reporters in Albany about the situation, saying it was an emergency crisis and warning it could last several days.

Asked about the wisdom of declaring a state of emergency, Ms. Hochul said that it was unnecessary.

A state of emergency is a mechanism you use when theres something you can do about it, she said. We dont have a lot we can do about the circumstances for contaminated toxic air coming into our airspace, so theres not a need for deploying resources or bringing money to the table.
Out of these and other revelations came the notion for New York Focus, a nonprofit news site. It would enter a space that had been enlivened by the arrival of The City in 2019 and Hell Gate three years later, digital publications devoted to covering New York City. But it would distinguish itself by concentrating on the way that power is exercised in Albany and how it filters down and affects almost everything. Against trend, there would be very little in the way of takes or opinion.

Since it came into being in the fall of 2020 with two of Mr. Mehtas classmates from Chicago, Sam Mellins and Lee Harris (who was the editor of the university newspaper, The Maroon), the platform has had an impressive influence, particularly around its coverage of prisons.

On Tuesday, New York Focus reported on a directive, rendered to almost no attention last month by the states Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, that sought to severely limit the ways in which incarcerated people could distribute their creative work. In recent years, as magazines and literary journals have sought a more diverse range of voices, prison writing has reached a new visibility, with the work of essayists like John J. Lennon, currently serving time at Sullivan Correctional Facility, appearing in The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Magazine.

The order would have also prevented Mr. Lennon and writers like him from getting paid. A day after the New York Focus piece appeared, the corrections department rescinded the directive. By Wednesday evening, PEN America had issued a statement celebrating the reversal of a decision that would have undermined the free expression of incarcerated writers.

This was not all. In November New York Focus, with the Intercept as a partner, published the results of a yearlong investigation into allegations of physical and sexual abuse at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County. The prompt had come from an inmate who had accused two guards of beating and sodomizing him only to find that he was disbelieved, that his medical care in the aftermath of the incident was inadequate and that witnesses to the assault were subject to retaliation for speaking out.
And while a broad overhaul of the states Prohibition Era alcohol laws did not materialize, lawmakers found consensus on a bill to allow liquor stores to open before noon on Sundays.

Heres what else got done, and what fell by the wayside.

A commission to study reparations

Following Californias lead, lawmakers passed a bill this week to create a commission that would study the effect that slavery had on racial disparities in New York and to recommend remedies.

The commissions scope would be broad: It is expected to study not only the history of slavery, which was outlawed in 1827 in New York, but also its subsequent effects on housing discrimination, biased policing, income inequality and mass incarceration of African Americans.

The consequences of slavery in New York State is not an echo of the past, but can still be observed in daily life, reads a bill memo. A sufficient inquiry has not been made into the effects of the institution of slavery on present-day society in New York.

It remains unclear if Ms. Hochul will sign the bill. The commissions recommendations would not be binding and would require approval by lawmakers.
It remains to be seen how his appeal before Judge Joanna Seybert will be received.

Mr. Santos, a Republican representing parts of Long Island and Queens, is facing 13 felony counts including money laundering and wire fraud. He has pleaded not guilty.

A group of media organizations, including The New York Times, requested last month that the identities of the people who guaranteed Mr. Santoss bail bond be unsealed. The coalition contended that the names of those individuals were a matter of public interest, particularly given Mr. Santoss position in Congress and the possibility that the bail arrangement could constitute an improper political gift.

In a motion filed on Monday, Mr. Murray shared a response he wrote to the Ethics Committees questions about bail, in which he pointed to House ethics rules that permit gifts from family members. At the time, it was not clear whether he was referring to some or all of the sureties. In Fridays motion, he was more explicit.

Mr. Murray said that he would not oppose a targeted unsealing that would confirm to the public and to House investigators that Mr. Santoss guarantors were family members, without fully revealing their names or exact relationships to Mr. Santos.

Though the suretors did not hand over actual money, they will be on the hook for the $500,000 if Mr. Santos flees prosecution. And while the Ethics Committee has not issued specific guidance on bail bonds, experts suggested the arrangement could run afoul of House gift rules if the sureties were not immediate relatives, spouses, extended family or in-laws.
Having grown up during the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, he understood the value of political activism early on, and participated in civil rights and antiwar protests as a teenager. In 1973 he joined Milwaukees Gay Peoples Union, a rights organization, serving as secretary. He also published his first article, A Transvestite Answers a Feminist, in the groups newsletter  a kind of coming out.

Sullivan moved to San Francisco in 1975 with his longtime partner, a cisgender man who encouraged Sullivans gay identity but did not see himself as gay. Sullivans first few years in San Francisco were difficult: He found the L.G.B.T.Q. community much larger and more diffuse than Milwaukees, and his relationship was collapsing amid tensions around his desire to medically transition.

In 1979, Sullivan ended his 11-year relationship and sought medical support for transition  pursuits stymied by therapists and doctors who determined that his sexual orientation toward men made him an atypical candidate. In a powerfully worded response to a denial letter he received from Stanford Universitys Gender Dysphoria Clinic, Sullivan wrote, The general human populace is made up of many sexual persuasions  it is incredible that your program requires all transsexuals to be of one fabric.

With help from the transgender activist and mentor Steve Dain, Sullivan finally got the medical care he needed at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, where he also became a regular speaker on F.T.M. concerns.

Sullivan later volunteered at the Janus Information Facility, a counseling and education resource for transgender people, where he established a friendship with the psychotherapist Paul Walker, who had helped draft the first international care standards for treating transgender patients. Walker came to rely on Sullivans knowledge and often sent clients to him for peer counseling.
This philosophy was naturally amplified by a recent (bad) economic idea that the singular objective of corporations should be to maximize short-term shareholder wealth. Combined together, these ideas are cementing the notion that the most productive applications of A.I. replace humankind. Doing away with grocery store clerks in favor of self-checkout kiosks does very little for the productivity of those who remain employed, for example, while also annoying many customers. But it makes it possible to fire workers and tilt the balance of power further in favor of management.

We believe the A.I. revolution could even usher in the dark prophecies envisioned by Karl Marx over a century ago. The German philosopher was convinced that capitalism naturally led to monopoly ownership over the means of production and that oligarchs would use their economic clout to run the political system and keep workers poor.

Fortunately, Marx was wrong about the 19th-century industrial age that he inhabited. Industries emerged much faster than he expected, and new firms disrupted the economic power structure. Countervailing social powers developed in the form of trade unions and genuine political representation for a broad swath of society. And governments developed the ability to regulate industrial excesses. The result was greater competition, higher wages and more robust democracies.

Today, those countervailing forces either dont exist or are greatly weakened. Generative A.I. requires even deeper pockets than textile factories and steel mills. As a result, most of its obvious opportunities have already fallen into the hands of Microsoft, with its market capitalization of $2.4 trillion, and Alphabet, worth $1.6 trillion.

At the same time, powers like trade unions have been weakened by 40 years of deregulation ideology (Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, two Bushes and even Bill Clinton). For the same reason, the U.S. governments ability to regulate anything larger than a kitten has withered. Extreme polarization and fear of killing the golden (donor) goose or undermining national security mean that most members of Congress would still rather look away.

To prevent data monopolies from ruining our lives, we need to mobilize effective countervailing power  and fast.

Congress needs to assert individual ownership rights over underlying data that is relied on to build A.I. systems. If Big A.I. wants to use our data, we want something in return to address problems that communities define and to raise the true productivity of workers. Rather than machine intelligence, what we need is machine usefulness, which emphasizes the ability of computers to augment human capabilities. This would be a much more fruitful direction for increasing productivity. By empowering workers and reinforcing human decision making in the production process, it also would strengthen social forces that can stand up to big tech companies. It would also require a greater diversity of approaches to new technology, thus making another dent in the monopoly of Big A.I.
Ukraine will hold talks with the Allard Pearson Museum (Netherlands, Amsterdam) on the mechanisms for the return of Scythian gold to the country, First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Emine Dzhaparova said.

"We will hold talks with the Allard Pearson Museum about the mechanisms for returning the exhibits to Ukraine, which are now stored in the museum's basements," Dzhaparova wrote on Facebook.

She stressed that the decision of the Supreme Court of the Netherlands is final and not subject to appeal.

"I hope that soon the unique Scythian gold will be where it should be - in the free Ukrainian Crimea," the official summed up.

As reported, the exhibition "Crimea. The Golden Island in the Black Sea", representing a collection of Scythian gold jewelry, was formed at the Allard Pearson Museum from the collections of five museums, one of which is located in Kyiv, four in Crimea. After the occupation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, which occurred after the opening of the exhibition, the question arose about who to return the collection  565 museum items with a total insurance value of EUR 10 million.

The part of the collection belonging to the Crimean museums was claimed by the Russian Federation after the occupation. Ukraine, in turn, stated that the exhibits cannot be returned to the occupied territory, which is temporarily not under Ukrainian control, and must be transferred directly to the State of Ukraine.

In December 2016, the Amsterdam District Administrative Court recognized Ukraine's rights to the collection and decided to transfer it to Kyiv. In October 2021, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal confirmed the decision of the Court of first instance. After that, in January 2022, the Crimean Museums filed a cassation against the decision of the Court of Appeal.

On June 9, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands upheld the decision of the previous instance in the case of the fate of the Scythian gold and decided to transfer it to Ukraine.
To the Editor:

Re Trump Is Indicted Over Classified Files (front page, June 9):

The indictment of Donald Trump heralds a new chapter in American history. His trial could come sometime next year during the Republican primary season. He will continue to tell his followers that he has done nothing wrong and that this is all part of a vendetta by the Washington elite.

His followers will continue to support him. If he is found guilty in any of his trials, he will appeal. If he is nominated, the appeals process will play out during the election campaign. He could be elected and then have a guilty verdict upheld as he is about to be sworn into office.

Mr. Trump and the special counsel Jack Smith serve as the protagonists in the first act of a Shakespearean tragedy. The full effects on America of Mr. Smiths essential action will not be known until the final act.

Sidney Weissman

Highland Park, Ill.

To the Editor:

Is no one above the law? We are about to find out. The stakes couldnt be higher if the country hopes to remain a legitimate democracy.
Californias government has run some remarkable budget surpluses over the last few years, but this year its projecting a jarring deficit: The state is about $32 billion in the red. Because California must pass a balanced budget every year, the governor and Legislature must cut spending, raise revenues or in some other way make the numbers work. Their deadline is next week. As a Californian, I understand that some difficult choices will have to be made.

But Im baffled by Gov. Gavin Newsoms budget proposal  that puts $2 billion in previously planned spending for public transit infrastructure on the chopping block  and more than a little bit concerned that the Legislature will go along with it at a moment when local transit systems need more money, not less.

Newsoms proposal could lead to service cuts that will be punishing for millions of commuters who depend on transit. Theyll also be terrible for the millions who dont ride the bus or take the train  if transit riders feel like their only realistic alternative is to drive, the freeways are going to be very unpleasant. The cuts would also make it far more difficult for California to meet its ambitious goals to address climate change and the states housing woes  issues on which Newsom has tried to project national leadership.
Working on this show night after night, Im forced to confront another truth: Antisemites have never cared what kind of Jew you are, whether you attend synagogue or throw around Yiddish words. Parade speaks to historical antisemitism and mob violence, and it forces us to see how antisemitism and racism are inextricably linked, underscoring how the pursuit of justice fails in a broken judicial system. There is fear in acknowledging ourselves  Jewish people  as marginalized. But as Lucille learns through the course of the play, assimilating into the mainstream and hoping that will protect you isnt the answer. If we refuse to embrace our inherent otherness  the parts that make us definitively Jewish Americans  we forget our common struggle with other marginalized people.

The evidence presented against Leo in court revolves mostly around Jewish stereotypes. We hear about Leos fancy talk and his sweating from every pore, and we hear testimonies that he had a pattern of inviting underage girls up to his office. Many of these stereotypes felt outlandish to me, but such conspiracies are at the very core of colloquial antisemitism. The idea of fancy talk is a dog whistle referring to the perception that Jews run the world. The pedophile accusations are rooted in what is known as blood libel, a rumor dating back to the Middle Ages that Jews murder Christian children, then use their blood for ritual purposes like baking matzo.

But in the play, it is not only Jews who are maligned and abused. The only other person the police considered making a suspect in the murder was a Black man, the night watchman of the pencil factory. In the show, the prosecutor on the case has been instructed to deliver a quick conviction, and he casually states that hanging a Black man aint enough this time. We gotta do better. He knows that pinning the crime on a Jewish man will cast the outcome in a different light than pinning it on a Black man: He can knock the Jewish man down a peg, whereas the Black mans social status has no farther to fall. In the layered storytelling of Parade, we can see how antisemitism and racism are integrally connected and how white people in power are incentivized to pit minorities against one another, using racism to provide convenient scapegoats and the illusion of law and order.

Minnie  Minola McKnight, played by the incomparable Danielle Lee Greaves  is the Franks Black housekeeper. Shes built a relationship with Lucille over years, becoming her confidante. But Minnie testifies against Leo, offering evidence we later learn was fabricated by the prosecution. It is a damning moment, both because it leads to Leos indictment and because it forces the audience to reckon with how the criminal justice system fails to protect all of those without power.

Parade was first produced on Broadway in 1998 and Michael Arden, who directed the 2023 production, understands that successfully reviving a musical requires purposeful reinvention. Throughout the process, he has led with beautiful intention around making those who were underrepresented in 1913 (or 2023) a stronger and more active presence. Among my favorite moments in the show is one of the last: Minnie and Lucille, reconciled, center stage, singing softly under a parasol together. A Black woman and a Jewish woman, undone by the same system, having a picnic.
It is hard to overstate the gravity of the criminal indictment issued against Donald Trump late Thursday by a federal grand jury. For the first time, a former president has been charged with violating federal laws, laws that he swore to uphold just over six years ago. It is the first time a former leader of the executive branch has been charged with obstructing the very agencies he led, and the first time a former commander in chief has been charged with endangering national security by violating the Espionage Act.

The indictment, unsealed on Friday, accuses Mr. Trump of 37 crimes. The majority of them  31 of the counts  are for willful retention of national defense information, each a violation of the Espionage Act. There is one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, in which Mr. Trump is accused of conspiring with his personal aide, Walt Nauta, to hide classified documents from the F.B.I. and the grand jury investigating the case. The other charges involve withholding documents, corruptly concealing documents and making false statements to law enforcement authorities.

The potential prison sentences for Mr. Trump add up to as much as 420 years, even though conviction almost never results in the maximum sentence. But this indictment confronts the country with the harrowing prospect of a former president facing years behind bars, even as he runs to regain the White House.

Mr. Trump and his Republican allies are already trying to politicize the indictment, insisting that the charges issued by 23 randomly chosen residents of South Florida were an attempt by President Biden to demolish his rival. But the evidence compiled by the government is so substantial that it is clear the Justice Department had no choice but to indict.
By charging the case in the Southern District of Florida, the special counsel has wisely pre-empted one other potential defense: improper venue. The rule is that a case must be brought where the essential conduct took place, and here there was an argument for Washington, D.C., as an alternative, one with possibly friendlier juries for Mr. Smith. But there is potentially much at stake on the proper selection of venue: This term, the Supreme Court is deciding a case that looks at whether the price of selecting the wrong venue could be dismissal of the charges and preventing the offense from being prosecuted again.

The clock is ticking

Mr. Smiths third hurdle is time. He will have to battle the clock. On the one hand, he has to ensure that Mr. Trump, like any defendant, has sufficient time to file motions challenging the charges and evidence and time to prepare for trial. The robust materials the government is required to provide to a defendant in discovery must be turned over promptly so the government does not extend the clock.

Special attention is required by Mr. Smith here because the case involves classified evidence. That means the court will probably have to deal with motions under the Classified Information Procedures Act. These rules create avenues for the government to prosecute the case and protect classified information without having a defendant graymail the government with the risk of public disclosure.

But because this case is in Florida, where the act is rarely used, rather than in the District of Columbia, where it is invoked more commonly, prosecutors will have to contend with a judge who may not have experience with these intricate issues. There is also the strong likelihood that the government will be forced to seek other protective orders as well, such as we saw New York Supreme Court Justice Juan M. Merchan impose in the Manhattan case, to prevent Mr. Trump from using material obtained in discovery to intimidate or retaliate against witnesses or otherwise misuse discovery materials.

American voters are entitled to a determination of Mr. Trumps guilt at a trial. Ideally, that will happen before the presidential nominating process, but at a minimum, it must take place before the general election. That can be done while ensuring that the defendant has his day in court, with full due process rights to seek to be cleared of charges against him  or not, given the strength of the evidence against him.
The mayor cant solve the climate crisis. But he could have mustered city government agencies more effectively to help get New Yorkers through a tough, hazardous week in the city he was elected to serve.

Residents, for example, need better advance notice of any public health emergency, and not simply on social media, which is how the Adams administration primarily interacted with the public for the first 24 hours of the crisis.

The mayor could have also issued a Code Red, usually used for heat emergencies, to deploy outreach workers to help coax homeless New Yorkers off the street and into shelters. He could have coordinated with the governor to use the subway system announcements to communicate about the smoke with residents. He could have even directed city vehicles like police cars to issue warnings from their loudspeakers.

The mayor could have worked quickly to distribute high-quality N95 masks  and critically, information  to New Yorkers, especially in the citys most vulnerable communities. Gov. Kathy Hochul, by contrast, directed that masks be distributed in transit hubs and other state-owned facilities, which is a good start. The citys Fire Department, which reports to the mayor, finally said on Twitter Thursday it would have masks available at certain locations. Good. The Department of Education said all students would shift to remote learning on Friday, rather than just the younger grades, which were already scheduled to have the day off for a clerical day.

The citys enormous municipal government has the capacity to do more to help residents weather this ordeal. During summer heat waves, the city often opens cooling centers. The city could have opened designated clean air centers, deploying air purifiers to school gyms or libraries, offering vulnerable New Yorkers a similar refuge during the smoke crisis. Mr. Adams could have coordinated with the citys library systems, helping them stay open longer to provide a safe haven for the millions of New Yorkers who live in apartments with poor ventilation.
Dan Cogdell, one of the lawyers who will be representing Mr. Paxton when he is tried in the State Senate, said on Friday that the federal case against Mr. Paul had no connection to Mr. Paxton.

This just shows that there is no there there, in terms of an illegal relationship between the two men, Mr. Cogdell said in an email. The reality is, at least for Ken Paxton, today is a good day, not a bad one.

Mr. Paul has had legal troubles at least since 2019, when F.B.I. agents raided his 9,175-square-foot home and his downtown offices in connection with an inquiry whose specifics they declined to disclose at the time. Investigators for a Texas House committee revealed last month that Mr. Paul had asked his friend Mr. Paxton to help him learn more about that federal investigation, a request that may have violated the states public records laws. And since the F.B.I. raid, Mr. Paul has been embroiled in a number of lawsuits and bankruptcy proceedings.

Mr. Pauls appeal for help from Mr. Paxton is the aspect of the case that has attracted the most scrutiny. Investigators and whistle-blowers who spoke up about what they perceived to be abuse of power in the attorney generals office said that Mr. Paxton arranged a meeting between Mr. Paul and the local district attorneys office, and later appointed a special prosecutor to look into Mr. Pauls allegations about law enforcement abuses, even though members of Mr. Paxtons staff raised concerns that those actions might violate the rules of the office.

It also emerged that Mr. Paxton had recommended to Mr. Paul that he hire a woman with whom Mr. Paxton was having an extramarital affair, and that Mr. Pauls company had later hired the woman as a project manager.
President Biden and his top aides in the West Wing, along with members of his administration and re-election campaign at all levels, are executing a carefully crafted strategy in response to the federal indictment of former President Donald J. Trump: Say nothing.

Mr. Biden has always insisted that he would never interfere with the independence of the Justice Department. But he and his aides also believe that commenting on the case will only feed into the accusations, from Mr. Trump and members of the Republican Party, of a politically motivated prosecution.

It is a stance that will test a voluble president with a penchant for saying what is on his mind, even when it is not politically advantageous. With his predecessor and 2024 rival charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice and mishandling classified documents, Mr. Biden and his aides are eager to keep themselves far away from the Trump political and legal spectacle as it migrates south to Miami.

For Mr. Biden, keeping his distance also keeps the focus squarely on Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden ran for office in 2020 with a pledge of restoring a sense of pre-Trump normalcy to the White House; the White House is betting that avoiding substantive public comments on the investigations into Mr. Trump will remind voters of that contrast.
Prosecutors also sought communications, documents or financial records tied to Erik Prince, the international security consultant, as well as former operatives who worked for the conservative group Project Veritas and its founder. Mr. Prince and Mr. Seddon are longtime associates.

The operatives working for Mr. Seddon made several large political donations  including $20,000 to the Democratic National Committee, which gained them entree to a Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas in 2020. They also made donations to the election campaigns of Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona; Colorados secretary of state, Jena Griswold; as well as to the Wyoming Democratic Party.

Drew Godinich, a spokesman for Ms. Griswold, said she returned that donation.

Mr. Seddon used money from Ms. Gore to fund the operation. Ms. Gore has said publicly that she was not aware her money was being used for sabotage operations. Robert Driscoll, a lawyer for Mr. Seddon, declined to comment. Nicholas Gravante, a Manhattan lawyer for Ms. Gore who represents many high-profile clients, also declined to comment.

It is not clear if the operatives who made the donations  Beau Maier and Sofia LaRocca  did it at someones behest and were reimbursed. Both were named in the subpoena reviewed by The Times. It is also unclear whether the couple had been subpoenaed or were cooperating with federal authorities.

The F.B.I. declined to comment.

Mr. Seddon closely managed the two operatives, who filed weekly intelligence reports to him about their activities and targets, according to a person with direct knowledge of the operation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the secret details.
In it, he said that during his closed-door interview, Mr. DAntuono had testified that he believed a search conducted with the consent of the former president  rather than a surprise search  would have been the best thing for all parties involved, including for the F.B.I., for former President Trump and for the country.

Mr. DAntuono declined to comment about his interview.

Among the other concerns Mr. Jordan said Mr. DAntuono had listed were that Washington officials, not the Miami field office, had conducted the search and that the F.B.I. did not wait until one of Mr. Trumps lawyers was present to begin it.

But Mr. Jordan omitted several facts from his letter in an apparent effort to place Mr. DAntuonos account in the worst possible light. According to associates of Mr. DAntuono and Democrats who reviewed the interview transcript, the former F.B.I. official said that while he believed the Miami office should have been more involved in the investigation because of its proximity to Mar-a-Lago, he also understood that his counterintelligence agents should play a part because of their expertise on the matter.

His concerns about the search had to do with the optics of F.B.I. agents entering the club in raid jackets, given Mr. Trumps vilification of the agency, and with his desire to give the former presidents lawyers one final chance to produce the documents voluntarily before going in. But prosecutors believed that they had already given ample opportunity to Mr. Trump and his lawyers, who had misled them.

House Republican leaders have closely aligned themselves with Mr. Trump for years, and are under more intense pressure than ever from their right flank to defend him as they struggle to hold together a governing majority.
The U.S. Department of Defense on Friday announced a new security assistance package, underscoring the unwavering U.S. support for Ukraine.

This package, which totals up to $2.1 billion and includes critical air defense and ammunition capabilities, is being provided under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), according to the Department of Defense's website.

The capabilities in this announcement include: additional munitions for Patriot air defense systems; HAWK air defense systems and missiles; 105mm and 203mm artillery rounds; Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems; laser-guided rocket system munitions; and support for training, maintenance, and sustainment activities.

"The United States will continue to work with its Allies and partners to provide Ukraine with capabilities to meet its immediate battlefield needs and longer-term security assistance requirements," the U.S. Department of Defense said.
Former President Donald J. Trump declared at a meeting in July 2021, six months after leaving the White House, that a document in front of him was classified and highly confidential, according to a person briefed on the matter.

That meeting, with people helping his former chief of staff with a book, has been previously reported but new details of Mr. Trumps specific comments appear to demonstrate explicitly that he was aware that materials he had taken with him from the White House included classified information. The recording is expected to be a key piece of evidence in the case against him that the special counsel Jack Smith brought this week, with seven counts related to his possession of reams of classified material.

Mr. Trump also indicated he couldnt show the document to the people in front of him  many if not all of whom didnt have security clearances that would allow them to see sensitive government material  and added, As president, I could have declassified them, now I cant, according to the person briefed on the matter, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Mr. Trump then said the document was classified, and a woman in the room replied, Now we have a problem, according to the person familiar with the recording.
In federal law, venue refers to the proper place to hold a trial: Prosecutors cannot choose any federal courthouse in the country, but rather must charge a defendant in a district that has a sufficient connection with the events that gave rise to the matter.

There was some connection to Washington. The National Archives and Records Administration, the legal custodian of White House records after a president leaves office, is based there, as is the grand jury the Justice Department used to obtain a subpoena in 2022 requiring Mr. Trump to return all documents marked as classified in his possession.

And there would have been some advantages to prosecutors to bringing a case in Washington. For one thing, that is where the team working on the investigation lives and works. For another, it would have ensured that the case stayed away from Judge Cannon.

But bringing the case in Washington would have given Mr. Trumps defense team an argument for having the charges thrown out for being in the improper venue. Dennis M. Fitzpatrick, a former prosecutor who handled national security cases in Virginia, noted that Mr. Trumps own actions under investigation appear to have happened in Florida rather than Washington.

Not only were the documents improperly stored at Mar-a-Lago, but investigators have also tried to determine whether Mr. Trump had sought to have the files at his estate moved or concealed after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for their return.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said in a speech on Friday night that if he had taken classified documents while in military service, I would have been court-martialed in a New York minute.

Visitors from a foreign planet might think Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida had been delivered a tremendous gift this week when his main presidential rival was charged with mishandling the countrys national security secrets.

But as Mr. DeSantiss latest speech showed, this is a turn of events he will need to beware.

In an address to Republicans in North Carolina on Friday night, his first public remarks since the unsealing of federal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. DeSantis trod carefully and danced quickly past the subject.

Previewing how he might criticize the Justice Departments case without letting Mr. Trump entirely off the hook, he offered a somewhat backhanded defense of the now twice-indicted former president  whose loyal followers Mr. DeSantis is seeking to avoid angering  by drawing on his own experiences as a Navy lawyer.

Seeming to muse aloud, Mr. DeSantis asked what the Navy would have done to him had he taken classified documents while in military service. I would have been court-martialed in a New York minute, he said, in a riff on Mr. Trumps hometown.

While Mr. DeSantis made his remark in reference to the fact that Hillary Clinton did not face charges over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, his comments could just as easily have applied to Mr. Trump. And they suggested that he believed both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton should have faced charges  or neither.

Is there a different standard for a Democrat secretary of state versus a former Republican president? he asked. I think there needs to be one standard of justice in this country. Lets enforce it on everybody and make sure we all know the rules.

(A yearslong inquiry by the State Department found that Mrs. Clinton had not deliberately or systemically mishandled classified information.)

The nature of Mr. Trumps federal indictment, which emerged in full view on Friday, left Mr. DeSantis and several other Republican presidential contenders ever more wobbly on the tightrope they are walking, trying to defend a rival accused of cavalierly and illegally keeping sensitive documents about U.S. nuclear programs and the countrys vulnerabilities to military attack.

Many of these candidates now find themselves in the difficult position of rallying around Mr. Trump even as they seek to differentiate themselves from his legacy while he continues to dominate them in the polls.

This is not how justice should be pursued in our country, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and Mr. Trumps United Nations ambassador, said on Twitter. The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics.

Such caution struck a sharp contrast with the two Republican candidates most willing to criticize Mr. Trump.

Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey called the indictment devastating, telling CNN that the facts that are laid out here are damning. And in an interview with The New York Times, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas pushed back against claims that Mr. Trump was being treated unfairly and reiterated his belief that he should drop out of the race.

To pejoratively say this is the result of a political prosecution is not in service to our justice system, Mr. Hutchinson said, adding, It would be doing a disservice to the country if we did not treat this case seriously.

Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the investigation, urged the public on Friday to understand the scope and gravity of the charges.

Mr. Trump is expected to appear in Federal District Court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon to face charges including willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice. On his Truth Social website, the former president called Mr. Smith deranged.

Some voters who attended Mr. DeSantiss speech in Greensboro, N.C., suggested they were growing weary of the controversy surrounding Mr. Trump, even as they expressed a belief that the charges were politically motivated. (Mr. Trump also faces charges in state court in New York for his alleged role in paying hush money to a porn star.)

Even if he gets elected again, theyre never going to leave him alone. So whats the point? said Mary Noble, 70, who voted twice for Mr. Trump but has not made up her mind in the 2024 primary. Hell never be effective. Thats my fear.

Tom Wassel, who sells air pollution control equipment and also supported Mr. Trump in both previous elections, did not mind that Mr. DeSantis had touched on the indictment only briefly, and not very forcefully.

I want him to talk about what hes going to run on, Mr. Wassel, 70, said.

Beyond Mr. Christie and Mr. Hutchinson, Republicans running for president were largely supportive of Mr. Trump, with some arguing that the prosecution amounted to an extraordinary and unfair political vendetta and one going so far as to bluntly promise to pardon him.

Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who has positioned himself to secure the backing of Mr. Trumps supporters if the former presidents legal problems derail his political comeback, said, I commit to pardon Trump promptly on Jan. 20, 2025.

In a radio interview on Friday before the indictment was unsealed, former Vice President Mike Pence seemed to contrast Mr. Trumps conduct with his own diligent return of classified documents to the National Archives. But he added that he was deeply troubled to see this indictment move forward and took a swipe at what he called years of politicization of the Justice Department.

Meanwhile, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the Republican nominee for president in 2012 and a leading critic of Mr. Trump, was one of the few G.O.P. officeholders to condemn him, saying the former president had brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities to do so.

Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting from Chicago, and Luke Broadwater from Washington.
In the topsy-turvy world of 2024 Republican politics, rivals of Donald J. Trump had been bracing for weeks for his second indictment with more dread than any sense of opportunity.

After years of successive scandals, the immediate instincts of so many Republican voters are thoroughly ingrained. They snap to Mr. Trumps defense, no matter how outrageous the charges are or who is making them  Democrats, the news media, local prosecutors or, now, federal ones. Donations surged after Mr. Trumps first indictment in Manhattan. And he consolidated support in the polls.

Even prominent Republicans eager for the party to cast aside Mr. Trump in 2024 were concerned ahead of the indictment. They have long been exasperated by the immunity of Mr. Trumps base to almost any attack or argument, swarming to neutralize any perceived political threat almost by habit.

Theres a lot of folks who just dont buy any of it, Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire who announced this week that he would not run for president in 2024, said in a recent interview. Democrats are like the boy who cried wolf. Oh, no, no. But this is real.
He was one of the very few members of Mr. Trumps post-presidential office when Mr. Trump first returned to private life at his club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla. There, Mr. Nauta resumed the kind of personal chores that he had helped Mr. Trump with while he was president.

Mr. Nauta has been seen as deeply loyal to Mr. Trump by other aides.

But he attracted the attention of the government for his appearance on security camera footage from the club, which was subpoenaed by prosecutors, moving boxes in and out of a basement storage room after a grand jury subpoena.

In interviews with government officials, according to the indictment, he gave false testimony about whether he had moved boxes to Mr. Trumps residence earlier in the year. In reality, according to the indictment, Mr. Nauta brought several boxes to Mr. Trumps residence from the storage room at a time when National Archives officials were seeking the return of presidential material, but he told investigators he didnt.

In another memorable moment noted in the indictment, on Dec. 7, 2021, Mr. Nauta discovered that some of the boxes in the storage room had fallen and their contents were all over the floor, including a document marked SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY, which denoted that the information in the document was releasable only to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance consisting of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the United States.

Mr. Nauta texted a colleague and wrote, I opened the door and found this

Prosecutors have been weighing charging Mr. Nauta since the fall, but had been pressuring him to cooperate with their investigation. He declined.
People burned out of their homes by the hundreds. Villages, even refugee camps, raked with gunfire. Men, women and children beaten and set ablaze by angry mobs.

India, the worlds most populous country and home to the fastest-growing major economy, is now also the site of a war zone, as weeks of ethnic violence in the remote northeastern state of Manipur has claimed about 100 lives.

Militarized buffer zones now crisscross the state, patrolled by local women  who are seen as less hotheaded than men  and the thousands of troops who have been sent to quell the fighting, drawing down forces in other parts of India, including the border with China.

More than 35,000 people have become refugees, with many living in makeshift camps. Internet service has been cut  an increasingly common tactic by the Indian government  and travel restrictions have made it difficult for the outside world to see in.
Gelje Sherpa was attempting to reach the summit of Mount Everest for the sixth time last month when he spotted a descending climber lying in the snow, not talking and in shock.

Mr. Sherpa, 30, had performed dozens of rescues in the Himalayas as a guide, but this one was the most difficult, he said. The ill climber was at an elevation of more than 27,200 feet, in an area that is known as the death zone because of the severe cold and oxygen scarcity.

For roughly the next hour, the two remained in that zone, he said. The guide acted as the stricken climbers eyes, ears and strength as he carried him more than 1,000 feet down the mountain.

He didnt have nothing, Mr. Sherpa said in a phone interview this week. No energy, no oxygen, nothing.
The Thai activist, Sutharee Wannasiri, knew the poultry company had violated labor laws. She went on Twitter in 2017 to share a video containing an interview with an employee who said he had to work day and night with no day off.

The poultry company hit back, suing Ms. Sutharee for defamation and libel. Though a court found her not guilty in 2020, the company wasnt done.

While the case was still pending, her colleague at their human rights organization spoke up for Ms. Sutharee on Twitter and Facebook. She, too, ended up being sued for defamation and libel. Now the colleague, Puttanee Kangkun, is facing a maximum of 42 years in prison as she awaits a verdict.

The cases exemplify what often happens in Thailand when companies and government officials are unhappy with public criticism. A criminal defamation charge follows in which critics are accused of spreading falsehoods, and defendants find themselves mired in lengthy legal battles and facing the threat of a prison sentence.
Britains former prime minister, Boris Johnson, abruptly resigned his parliamentary seat on Friday, another dramatic twist in the career of one of the countrys most flamboyant and divisive politicians.

Mr. Johnson has been under investigation from a committee of the House of Commons that was looking into whether he had lied to Parliament over lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street during the Covid-19 pandemic.

On Friday, having received a confidential copy of their findings, he accused the committee of attempting to drive him out, adding: They have still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons.

The committee had the power to recommend a sanction that could have led to Mr. Johnson being forced into an election to hold onto his constituency just outside London  a contest he might well have lost.
It was love at first sight.

More than 10 years ago, Andre Demesmaeker, an architect for the Belgian government, was asked to investigate a ceiling collapse at the Palace of Justice, a 19th-century behemoth in the heart of Brussels that houses the countrys sprawling judiciary system and has been falling apart for decades.

I opened a door not seen in ages, Mr. Demesmaeker recalled recently. I entered this attic and had to start climbing to explore.

On that  and later visits to the immense building  Mr. Demesmaeker discovered a warren of rooms and anterooms, some occupied by lawyers or judges, others abandoned and moldering. The floors, roof and walls were falling apart. Water had seeped inside, so fungus grew abundantly. Homeless people sometimes broke in to sleep and booze it up alongside piles of archived legal files. Many corridors reeked of alcohol and urine.

Some rooms looked frozen in time: old magazines, a coat, a coffee pot. As if the people working there had simply vanished one morning.
In the temporarily occupied Crimea, in particular, in Simferopol, local media keep silence about the undermining of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam by the Russians, due to the fear of the occupation authorities of panic among the population.

"In the temporarily occupied Crimea, in particular, in Simferopol, there is a tendency for local media to conceal the fact of the destruction of the Kakhovka HPP by Russian occupiers and the consequences of this disaster. It is known that the local occupation authorities are concerned about a possible panic among the population," the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in its morning report on Friday.
President Emmanuel Macron met on Friday with victims of a stabbing attack that injured six people, including four children, in southeastern France a day before. He also praised those who helped stop the attack, including a bystander known to the French public only as Henri  hailed as the backpack hero for swinging and hurling his bag at the assailant.

Attacking children is the most barbaric act possible, and I think thats what devastated all of us, Mr. Macron said in Annecy, the Alpine city where a man lunged at bystanders and families on Thursday with a switchblade knife before police officers arrested him. The children are 3 years old or younger.

Mr. Macron, who earlier in the day had met with victims hospitalized in Grenoble, about 60 miles south of Annecy, alongside his wife, said that their conditions were continuing to improve.

Addressing a gathering of local officials, emergency workers, police officers, and others  including Henri  Mr. Macron said the swift response to stop the attacker showed Frances strength and resiliency.
BRUSSELS  As optimism that Sweden will soon be able to join NATO rises, the Swedish government says it will allow the alliance to base troops on its territory even before formally joining the group.

The government has decided that the Swedish Armed Forces may undertake preparations with NATO and NATO countries to enable future joint operations, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Defense Minister Pal Jonson said in an article for the Dagens Nyheter newspaper this week.

Those preparations could include the temporary basing of foreign equipment and personnel on Swedish territory, they wrote. The decision sends a clear signal to Russia and strengthens Swedens defense.

Sweden applied last year to join NATO as a result of Russias invasion of Ukraine. Objections from Turkey and Hungary have delayed the bid, and Sweden now hopes to join before a NATO summit in Lithuania next month.
Two of Italys most powerful octogenarians, Pope Francis and Silvio Berlusconi, whose health conditions have in recent years kept the country in suspense, were both in the hospital on Friday.

The pope was unexpectedly admitted to a hospital in Rome this week and underwent surgery for a hernia that had caused painful intestinal blockages. Mr. Berlusconi, a former prime minister and media mogul, was hospitalized on Friday in Milan for checkups related to his blood disease, his personal physician, Alberto Zangrillo, said in a text message.

In both cases, the news followed several recent medical scares, and prompted fresh concerns about the health of the men, both 86.

The pope was hospitalized in March to receive treatment for bronchitis, and in 2021 he had part of his colon removed. He also has knee problems and sciatica, and now often uses a cane or a wheelchair.
He is courted by American and European diplomats, applauded by a media machine dedicated to vilifying his critics and still has four years left in a presidential term secured last year with a landslide re-election victory.

But President Aleksandar Vucic, Serbias strongman leader for more than a decade, never looked so lost as when he appeared this week in an official video on the vast rooftop terrace of his presidential offices to share a bowl of cherries with two lieutenants  and gripe about street protesters calling them rude names, including abnormal lunatics, murderers and criminals.

Over-the-top insults, a regular feature of Rottweiler tabloids loyal to Mr. Vucic and pro-government television stations, used to be directed mostly at the presidents enemies, at least in public. But, after weeks of street protests set off last month by two mass shootings, Mr. Vucic is now on the receiving end  and on the defensive like never before since establishing himself in 2012 as the pivot around which Serbian politics turns.

The protests, with calls for the dismissal of senior law enforcement officials and the withdrawal of broadcasting licenses from two pro-government television stations, have grown into a wider revolt against a climate of violence blamed on Mr. Vucic and his media attack dogs.
WASHINGTON  A senior Biden administration official says that U.S. spy satellites detected an explosion at the Kakhovka dam just before it collapsed, but American analysts still do not know who caused the dams destruction or how exactly it happened.

The official said that satellites equipped with infrared sensors detected a heat signature consistent with a major explosion just before the dam collapsed, unleashing huge floodwaters downstream.

American intelligence analysts suspect that Russia was behind the dams destruction, the senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details. But he added that U.S. spy agencies still do not have any solid evidence about who was responsible.

Seismic data picked up by the NORSAR observatory in Norway also supported the theory there had been large explosion near Kakhovka dam on Tuesday at 2:54 a.m. local time, when the structure collapsed. NORSAR said in a statement that signals captured from a station 385 miles away from the dam show clear indications of an explosion.
The Ukrainian soldiers sped along a dirt road, their pickup truck bouncing over ruts, lest they become an easy target for Russian tanks across the Dnipro River.

Nearby, Russian howitzers fired with deafening booms, sending shells streaking over the ruins of the Kakhovka dam, the destruction of which this week unleashed a flood with far-reaching humanitarian and economic consequences. As Kyiv reckons with the devastation, the military must also fight in the flood zone, adjusting and adapting to the changing contours of the land to meet its broader strategic goals.

Fighting continued apace on Thursday in the area of the destroyed dam, across the expanse of floodwaters downriver and over the vanishing reservoir upstream.

Soldiers will go back to fighting, said a commander fighting near the dam, who asked to be identified by his nickname, Barakuda, for security reasons and in keeping with Ukrainian military rules. They are already doing that.
Intense fighting raged across a wide swath of southeastern Ukraine for a second day on Friday, as Ukrainian forces attacked occupying Russian troops in multiple locations, while military analysts and U.S. officials cautioned that it was far too early to gauge the success of Kyivs offensive.

Both sides were grappling with severe flooding caused by the destruction of a major dam on the Dnipro River, but east of there, the fierce combat indicated that Ukraines long-awaited counteroffensive against the Russian invasion was underway, according to analysts and Western and Russian officials.

Two senior U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations, confirmed that Ukrainian troops had, as expected, suffered casualties and equipment losses in the early fighting, but said that classified assessments quantifying the losses were still being developed.

There was no information available on Russian losses, but attackers typically suffer heavier initial casualties than dug-in defenders, and analysts warned that breaking through the Russian lines would be difficult and come at a high price.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court surprised many observers by issuing an opinion that effectively reaffirmed the remaining powers of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The decision was a reprieve for a law that many believed was in danger of being fatally weakened, or overruled entirely, by the conservatives on the court.

The consequences of that decision will be profound. The Voting Rights Act, along with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, were crucial steps in American democratization, and the laws remain an important institutional means of preserving it.

To understand the significance of this weeks ruling, you need to turn to history. Paths Out of Dixie by Robert Mickey, which tracks the Deep Souths transition, between 1944 and 1972, from what he called authoritarian enclaves  pockets of single-party rule within a federal democracy  to nascent democracies that incorporated African American voters. And Racial Realignment, by Eric Schickler, shows how a bottom-up alliance of powerful trade unions and groups like the N.A.A.C.P. forced the Democratic Party to embrace civil rights, even though that meant losing its longtime power base in the segregated solid South.

Round out those academic works with two beautifully written books for more general audiences. South to America, by Imani Perry, which won the 2022 National Book Award for nonfiction, explores how the history and politics of the South shaped American identity and culture.
Millions of Americans use mobile payment apps to pay friends, family and retailers, but they may not know that money held in the apps often lacks federal insurance protection.

Unlike deposits in savings and checking accounts at federally insured banks, funds stored in many peer to peer apps arent automatically protected, potentially putting cash at risk if the apps parent company stumbles financially, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned in a consumer advisory this month.

As more people go cashless, apps like Venmo, Cash App and Apple Cash have gained popularity as an easy way to split a dinner tab, buy stuff at yard sales or pay bills. Use of the apps increased during the pandemic, experts say, as people shifted to online shopping and contactless payment methods.

Transaction volume on such apps was an estimated $893 billion last year, the bureau said, and is projected to reach $1.6 trillion by 2027. More than three-quarters of the nations adults say they have used one of four popular payment apps, according to the Pew Research Center.
Mobile network operator Vodafone Ukraine has announced its withdrawal from the UN Global Compact network in protest against inaction towards Ukraine and Ukrainians and the double standards effective in the organization, the company said on Friday.

"Vodafone Ukraine has always been and is a socially responsible business, it is recognized as the most transparent Ukrainian company. We share the principles of the Global Compact and live by them every day as we work desperately to provide a vital connection. However, we clearly understand that the development of the Global Compact platform does not look possible until the basic principles of security are restored in Ukraine. And we do not consider it possible to remain among the initiatives of an organization that itself does not demonstrate due responsibility and avoids using its levers of influence for the sake of sustainable development," the operator said on Facebook.

At the same time, the UN calls for development in line with the Sustainable Development Goals provide, first of all, basic security issues: for life, health, environmental and energy security.

"These basic principles are completely destroyed in Ukraine today, and millions of people suffer because of this. And the organization declaring these lofty principles turned out to be unable to implement them in the situation with Ukraine. Unfortunately, during the war we saw many examples of the UN's shortsightedness towards to the problems of Ukrainians. We are outraged by the inaction and unwillingness to call a spade a spade at a time when Ukrainians have been opposing Russian aggression for 15 months, which is committing military, economic, environmental crimes and terrorizing the civilian population," the company said in the press release.

The company said they are ready to reconsider the decision to withdraw if the situation changes.

"We hope that the structures that should perform important global functions for the sake of sustainable development will soon become as effective as possible. In the meantime, we call on other Ukrainian companies that are members of the UN Global Compact to temporarily leave the platform in protest against inaction on the situation in our country," the press service of the operator said.
A scandal known as Rat Head Gate has been getting a lot of attention on Chinese social media after a student found what looks like a rat head in their cafeteria meal. The school claims its actually a duck head.

The incident reportedly occurred last week at the cafeteria of the Jiangxi Vocational Technical College of Industry Trade in Nanchang, China. While eating their lunch, a student found what looked like a rats head in their bowl of rice and pulled out their phone to record the discovery. They then confronted the cafeteria staff about it but were told that it wasnt a rats head, but a ducks head. The latter, along with duck necks are an important part of Chinese cuisine, but it wasnt what the student had ordered, and it certainly didnt look like a duck

This is a rat! It clearly has rat teeth, cant you see? the student can be heard telling the cafeteria staff.

The video quickly spread on Chinese social media, but the school doubled down on the version that the head found by the student actually belonged to a duck. On June 3rd, the Jiangxi Vocational Technical College put out an official statement debunking the rat head rumors that had begun going around the school insisting that it had been a weird-looking duck head. The very next day, the local food supervision bureau also commented on the case, alleging that it had indeed been a duck head.

This trending topic received over 310 million views on Weibo today and its quite Kafkaesque. June 1st, a student at a Jiangxi college finds a rat head in his cafeteria rice meal. When he makes a complaint, hes told that its actually duck. He says, but you can see its teeth! pic.twitter.com/MCnW7V2JSG  Manya Koetse (@manyapan) June 7, 2023

As the rumors kept spreading, school officials warned students not to discuss the incident online anymore, and the official catering company contracted by the school issued its own statement, claiming that the head had not been discovered in food it had delivered, but had in fact come from a separate cafeteria stall. The company also warned anyone spreading rumors about it of serious consequences.

But despite all efforts to cover up the incident, Rat Head Gate has been getting more and more traction online, with people from all walks of life declaring their disappointment with both the school and the local authorities supporting its lies. Its one thing to find a rats head in the food, but it was the way they insisted that it wasnt what it seemed that truly shocked people.

Discovering a rat head while eating is not [even] the scariest part, one Chinese blogger wrote. What is truly frightening is that the public clearly sees a rat head, yet they insist on claiming it to be a duck neck. If its really a rat head, it would be better to calmly admit it. At most, this would be a food safety incident and one or two temporary workers might get sacked and a fine could be imposed, and that would be it.

The way that the school and the food supervision bureau have handled this matter is in complete opposition to the public and it is a provocation of social morality, completely inverting right and wrong and disregarding public trust in order to protect the innocence of one or two individuals. I wonder if these leaders are actually so stupid or if netizens are too naive, the blogger added.

Meanwhile, microblogging platforms like Weibo have been inundated with photos of rat and duck skulls to show that they look nothing alike, from the shape to the teeth, as well as digitally-altered photos of ducks with rat heads.
Todays business leaders recognize the value of social media marketing as well as the impact social media data and insights have on informing key business decisions, according to new research from social media management and analytics software Sprout Social.

As a result, business leaders are increasing investment in social media and broadening the role it plays in their companies overall marketing strategies.

The report, which surveyed marketing, customer service and communications professionals on the role that social media plays in their business strategies, found that executives almost universally agree that social media is vital for their companies communications efforts.

Nearly all (97 percent) of business leaders surveyed agree that social media data and insights are essential for effective public relations, and 91 percent believe that social media has a positive impact on a businesss public relations efforts. Nearly nine in 10 (88 percent) of business leaders think that social media should be a business primary communication tool.

Sprouts report found that an overwhelming majority (96 percent) of executives polled think companies should continue to invest in social media marketing. And according to the report, thats exactly what most companies intend to do. 80 percent of the business leaders surveyed said they plan to invest more in social media over the next three years. In fact, nearly half (44 percent) said theyre planning to increase their companys social media budgets by more than 50 percent over the next three years.

Business leaders also appear to recognize that the data and insights capabilities provided by social media are essential in informing their overall business strategies. A whopping 97 percent believe the practice of using social data to understand market trends will increase over the next three years, and 90 percent said they think their companys success will depend on how effectively it can use those data and insights. As a result, 93 percent of business leaders said that moving forward, they expect social media data and insights to be a primary source of their future business intelligence.

Business leaders also seem particularly interested in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning and what potential impact these advances can have on improving their decision-making processes and data analysis toolkits. Almost all (98 percent) said they think companies should work to better understand the potential of AI and ML technology, and almost the same number (97 percent) believe AI and ML will enable companies to more efficiently analyze social media data.

Nearly 9 in 10 (86 percent) business leaders think the implementation of AI and ML is critical for their companys long-term success, and perhaps thats why 87 percent said they expect to increase their companys investments in AI and ML technology in the next three years.

Finally, two-thirds of executives (66 percent) said that strengthening brand reputation and loyalty is their top business priority in the current economic environment, higher than any other priority listed in the survey.

Sprouts The 2023 State of Social Media: AI & Data Take Center Stage report surveyed nearly 800 U.S. and U.K.-based executives specializing in social media marketing, customer service and communications fields. The survey was conducted by The Harris Poll. Data was collected in March.


San Jacinto River Authority (TX) Needs PR Support Wed., Jun. 7, 2023 The San Jacinto River Authority is looking for a PR partner to support its Woodlands division that serves as a wholesaler to 11 municipal utility districts in Texas and is in need of an infrastructure overhaul.
Poet Cormac Lally was one of the performers at Tuesday's June 6, official opening by President Michael D Higgins of Esker Arts Centre.

Cormac is originally from Tullamore and is one of Ireland's top spoken word artists.

His work has been featured on national radio and television and he is a familiar face at the country's top festivals. He has performed with numerous other well established artists.

His presence was extremely well received by the packed auditorium last Tuesday. Having made the audience laugh with his remarks about the appropriateness of the name ''Esker'' for the centre and referring to the time frame between the concept and last Tuesday's official opening, Cormac commented.''this project started quite a while ago and it was a very slow moving beast. So I think it's a beautiful artistic irony that it's named after a glacier.''

Cormac's work has been described as a''mix of utter lies, hard truths, politics and family life, dropped on the listener with a cutting humour with deep emotional levels, delivered in a flowing rhythm.''

At the opening ceremony he spoke about Tullamore and how when he was young he thought he would never get away from the town as he felt there was nothing in it. Yet when he had travelled extensively, reminders of home were everywhere in the people he met.

In the end he found what he had been looking for all along in his home town.

He wrote and spoke the following poem about his travels and the connections to home.

Tullamore

I walk out of my front door, and the footpaths my environ

Hard concrete, conceals cobbled streets, that sang in horseshoe iron

Where barefoot youths, learned barefaced truths, of famine and plantation

From sixteen Church Street, I stroll old beats, to find my inspiration

My earthly host, now trods on ghosts, of memories surprising

The phoenix ashes, violent clashes, the first shots of the rising

Colonial masters, aviation disasters, the empires fall and flight

Where Papal church, pitched souls that searched, for spiritual being, to fight

But Tullamore, she was a bore, to teenage I with school achieved

I knew it all, theres no enthrall, in these town walls I believed

I journeyed East, to slay the beasts of wanderlust and cloister

I strode in haste anticipating tastes, of worldly flavoured oysters

Old Tullamore, she lay behind new shores, but escaping her proved hard

In rural France, I met a man by chance, that lived once in Ballard

In Rotterdam, well Ill be damned, where industries regaled

My professional peers, those engineers, knew men from Arden Vale

In Dubrovnik's old town, it was there I found, Croatian fighting legends

In their archives, they owed their lives, to a warrior born in Screggan

I waded through marsh, through jungles harsh, in deepest darkest thailand

In tribal elder homes, I was regaled in tomes, of a Jesuit from Walsh Island

In New South Wales, my escape it paled, and withered, without cure

In the dry outback, on a miners track, theres a road sign for Tullamore

So in the furthest place, bar outer space, I could travel on this earth

Could not conceal, nor suppress my feels, for the Big Hill of my birth

And when the ground, gave way I found, when brainstorm clouds had gathered

When I was lost, connections crossed, and oceans left me battered

The arms of family, meant more to me, than outlandish sought adventure

My community, and yes Joe Lees, in Irelands boggy centre

My uncles, aunts, my Mam and Dad, my brothers and my sister

Made my heart full, and the hometown pull, I could truly not resist her

So thank you D.E. Williams, for the industry that prospered

The Moores, the Hutton Burys, and the ethic that they fostered

Each master masons stone they placed, they built these walls that hold us

This is my hood, and its mainly good, and it will always, shape and mould us

Its deep inside, the old Uibh Fhaile pride, and no vaccine has the cure

For once the phoenix lives, its fire forgives, and bests the worst cute hoor

This town gave me, a red haired cailin, my children and Im grateful

An Tulach Mhor, mo chroi, mo stor, in the heartland of the Faithful.
UP to 15 pedal-powered rail cars will be available for Lough Boora Discovery Park visitors under a new project planned by Bord na Mona.

The 'velo rail' will run on a 5km loop along the existing Bord na Mona narrow gauge railway with a star point close to the existing visitor centre.

Velo rail networks are a common feature in France and Ireland's first was opened in Kiltimagh, Co Mayo this year.

Bord na Mona says that up to 12 part-time seasonal jobs could be created by the Lough Boora velo rail project.

The project has been developed under the Midlands Just Transition Fund programme and the company hopes it will further enhance the overall offering for visitors at Lough Boora Discovery Park, one of Offaly's most popular tourist attractions.

Each cart will seat up to four people with the front pair providing the pedal power which will operate the chain to turn the wheels.

The carts will be specially designed to fit the 91.4cm existing railway which was previously used for the transport of peat.

There will be viewing bays, passing bays, picnic areas and a rail terminus and nearly all of the 5km route will be on parts of the park formerly inaccessible to the public.

In a presentation about the project recorded for the Midlands Ireland YouTube channel, Bord na Mona estate manager, Joe Ryan, said that in the longer term the velo rail could be extended to a proposed industrial heritage museum at Boora workshop or out to one of the company's wind farms.

But for now, I'm all for getting this [velo rail] delivered in Lough Boora and I'm sure it'll be a resounding success, said Mr Ryan.

The idea for the velo rail was originally proposed by David McNulty, Tourism Development International, when he carried out a tourism study for Bord na Mona and Offaly County Council.

Mr McNulty recognised the potential of a velo rail service at Lough Boora.

Bord na Mona hope the velo rail will extend visitor stays at the park (pictured below) by introducing a new activity which will offer new views of the wetlands, the sculpture park, wildlife and biodiversity.

It will also result in the preservation of a portion of Bord na Mona's vast narrow gauge rail network.

According to a planning notice in last week's Tribune, Bord na Mona will apply to Offaly County Council for the recreational development where the rail line will be used for between 10 and 15 velo cars.

Bord na Mona previously ran a tourist attraction at Blackwater bog, the Clonmacnoise and West Offaly railway, where visitors took a 9km ride on a bog train and had the opportunity to see modern and traditional methods of turf cutting.
Donald Trump has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate, less than three months after he was charged in New York with 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Here is a look at the new charges, the special counsels investigation and how the ex-presidents case differs from those of other politicians known to be in possession of classified documents:

 What are the charges and how is Mr Trump reacting?

Mr Trump has been charged with seven counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, sources have said.

Mr Trumps lawyer James Trusty said on Thursday on CNN that the indictment includes charges of wilful retention of national defence information, obstruction of justice, false statements and conspiracy.

Mr Trump, on his Truth Social app, called it a DARK DAY for the United States of America.

In a video post, he said, Im innocent and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly.

Within 20 minutes of breaking the news, his 2024 presidential campaign sent out a fundraising missive telling his followers he had been indicted and asking for financial support.

 What happens next?

The Justice Department has not confirmed the indictment, and any charges have not been publicly filed.

Mr Trump said he had been summoned to appear in court on Tuesday afternoon in Miami.

When he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney in the New York case, Mr Trump surrendered to authorities, where he was booked behind closed doors and appeared in the courtroom, sitting with his lawyers at the defence table.

 How did this case come about?

Officials with the National Archives and Records Administration reached out to representatives for Mr Trump in spring 2021 when they realised that important material from his time in office was missing from their collection.

According to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents are considered property of the US government and must be preserved.

A Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago.

In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Mr Trumps Florida home, later telling Justice Department officials that they contained a lot of classified material.

That May, the FBI and Justice Department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Mr Trumps possession. Investigators who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Mr Trumps lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.

But that assertion turned out to be false. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents.

In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings  including some at the top-secret level  have been recovered from Mr Trump since he left office in January 2021.

 How did a special counsel get involved?

Last year, US attorney general Merrick Garland picked Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor with a background in public corruption probes, to lead investigations into the presence of classified documents at Mr Trumps Florida estate, as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Janurary 6 2021 insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.

Mr Smiths appointment was a recognition by Mr Garland of the politics involved in an investigation into a former president and current White House candidate. Mr Garland himself was selected by President Joe Biden, whom Mr Trump is seeking to challenge for the White House in 2024.

Special counsels are appointed in cases in which the Justice Department perceives itself as having a conflict or where it is deemed to be in the public interest to have someone outside the government come in and take responsibility for a matter.

According to the Code of Federal Regulations, a special counsel must have a reputation for integrity and impartial decision-making, as well as an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies.

 Did not Joe Biden and former vice president Mike Pence have classified documents too?

Yes, but the circumstances of their cases are vastly different from the situation involving Mr Trump.

After classified documents were found at Mr Bidens think tank and Mr Pences Indiana home, their lawyers notified authorities and quickly arranged for them to be handed over. They also authorised other searches by federal authorities to search for additional documents.

There is no indication either was aware of the existence of the records before they were found, and no evidence has so far emerged that Mr Biden or Mr Pence sought to conceal the discoveries. That is important because the Justice Department historically looks for wilfulness in deciding whether to bring criminal charges.

A special counsel was appointed earlier this year to probe how classified materials ended up at Mr Bidens Delaware home and former office.

But even if the Justice Department were to find Mr Bidens case prosecutable on the evidence, its Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a president is immune from prosecution during his time in office.

As for Mr Pence, the Justice Department informed his legal team earlier this month that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against him over his handling of the documents.

 Does a federal indictment prevent Mr Trump from running for office?

No, neither the indictment nor a conviction would prevent Mr Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

And as the New York case showed, criminal charges have historically been a boost to his fundraising.

The campaign announced that it had raised more than 4 million dollars in the 24 hours after that indictment became public, beating its previous record after the FBI search of Mr Trumps Mar-a-Lago club.

 How are Mr Trumps Republican rivals reacting to the news?

Many of M Trumps challengers for the Republican nomination jumped to his defence on Thursday night after news of the indictment broke.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis accused the Justice Department of political bias in charging the former president.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? The DeSantis  Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) June 9, 2023

The weaponisation of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, Mr DeSantis tweeted. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.

He questioned why the Justice Department had been so zealous in bringing charges against Mr Trump and so passive about going after former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton or Mr Bidens son Hunter.

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said he felt the justice systems scales are weighted based on politics.

In America, every single person is presumed innocent, not guilty, Mr Scott said on Fox News, decrying the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president.

However, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who called for Mr Trump to drop out of the race after the New York charges were filed, said the federal indictment marked a sad day for our country and reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has held a meeting of the Supreme Commander's Headquarters, special attention of the participants was paid to the situation on the front line.

I just held a meeting of the Staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. The situation on the front line is the main focus. Reports from commanders of task forces, the Commander-in-Chief, Defense Intelligence, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Strategic Industries, Ministry of Internal Affairs, the president said in his evening video address.

Also, according to him, they focused their attention on all directions where actions of the defense forces are needed and where the enemy may suffer certain defeats. Our defensive actions, active actions, our gains on the front lines.

In addition, the participants of the Staff meeting discussed defense, achievements on the front line, as well as the supply and distribution of ammunition, strengthening artillery and air defense.

The Head of State expressed gratitude to the Ukrainian soldiers who are currently in conditions of heavy fighting.

We see your heroism, and we are grateful to you for every minute of your life  a life that is truly the life of Ukraine. Because Ukraine is as free as you, our soldiers, are strong. Ukraine is defended as much as you, our soldiers, are effective, Zelenskyy said.
The analytical center "Club of Experts" in Kiev within the framework of the initiative on training of journalists in basic skills of rendering the first pre-medical care has held the first seminar-workshop. The event was organized by the Club of Experts, the Adonis network of medical centers, and "Help For Ukraine" Charitable Foundation, "Hromada Priirpenia Foundation" Charity Foundation; the information partner - "Interfax-Ukraine" and Open4Business portal.

The seminar was attended by the representatives of mass media from different regions of Ukraine, whose work is connected with risk and possibility of facing emergency situations. According to the participants, mastering basic first aid skills can be of vital importance at critical times, related to their professional activities in wartime conditions.

The seminar's keynote speaker, Adonis Medical Group anesthesiologist Mariana Bolyuk, is the co-author of 12 scientific publications and has a wealth of experience in the medical field. In her presentation, she covered important aspects of pre-medical care, including algorithms for basic life support, types of bleeding and how to stop it. Practical techniques, such as determining the pulse on main arteries and applying a turnstile, were also practiced at the seminar.

According to Maxim Urakin, organizer of the seminar and founder of the "Expert Club," in the current situation it is important to develop first aid skills among journalists because the role of their profession and the risk they face daily has increased significantly in war conditions.

"According to information published in the media, since last February, 61 media workers have already been killed and about 500 more journalists have been wounded. Therefore, we are deeply aware of the importance of training journalists in basic first aid skills. Our colleagues constantly face risks and have the responsibility of informing the public under difficult conditions. Therefore, we should strive to provide journalists not only with information, but also with the means to preserve and protect their lives and health," Urakin emphasized.

In the future, the organizers of the seminar plan to develop this training project, covering more media representatives and expanding their knowledge and skills in first aid. Journalists with a basic knowledge of premedical care will be able to act more effectively in difficult situations, contributing to quick and effective aid to victims. First-aid training for journalists in the future must become an integral part of their professional training and responsibility to society. According to the organizers, it is important to support and develop such initiatives in the future so that journalists are prepared for emergencies and contribute to general safety and well-being.
Gruha Lakshmi Scheme: Are Women From Income Tax Paying Families Eligible To Get Rs 2000?

Bengaluru

oi-Prakash KL

The Congress government's key poll promise the 'Gruha Lakshmi' scheme will be launched in August.

Under the scheme, the women identified as heads of families will get Rs 2,000 assistance per month. It is likely to be launched in August.

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has instructed the officials to simplify the application process for the scheme and avoid asking unnecessary information and documents. If the applications are rejected, proper reasons have to be cited to the individuals, he has told the authorities.

With Congress rolling out five schemes, the CM directed the officials of the e-governance department to increase the capacity of the Seva Sindhu portal in accordance with the huge amount of data submitted.

Will Review Law Banning Cow Slaughter, APMC Act: Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah

However, the question that largely looms in the minds of the people is: are taxpayers eligible for the scheme?

The women from Blow Poverty Line (BPL) and Above Poverty Line (APL) families can apply, but taxpayers and GST-registered families have been kept out of the scheme. It means if the women's husband is a taxpayer, then they are not eligible to get Rs 2000 from the state government.

However, the good news is the government might include the I-T payers in the scheme.

Women and Child Welfare Minister Laxmi Hebbalkar has said that the state government is likely to include even women from tax-paying families under the scheme and the proposal has been sent to the CM.

"We intend to add 10-11 lakh women with APL cards who are I-T payees or have their children or spouses as I-T payees, under the scheme. While the CM has not rejected the proposal, the government has decided to wait until a future date to include them," The Times Of India quoted the minister as saying.

Application Process

The application process will start from June 15. One can apply for this scheme online through the Seva Sindhu portal (sevasindhu.karnataka.gov.in). Similarly, applications can also be submitted in person at 'Nadakacheris', where separate counters will be set up for this purpose.

Documents For Getting Rs 2000

Applicants should provide Ration Card Number, Aadhaar Card Number of wife and husband, bank account details with Aadhaar combination. Copies of these documents can also be submitted with offline applications.

Once approved, the amount will be directly deposited into the bank account of the eligible beneficiaries through DBT.

The scheme amount will be deposited directly into the bank account of the eligible beneficiaries through DBT. It is estimated that this scheme will reach around 85 per cent of families in the State.

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Story first published: Friday, June 9, 2023, 16:11 [IST]
OPINION: Will Minorities Be Better Off In Nepal Now?

On Way Back From US, PM Modi Likely To Visit Egypt

PM Speaks With Saudi Crown Prince, Thanks Him For Support During Evacuation Of Indians From Sudan

AI's Potential In Enhancing India's Tech Ecosystem Vast: PM Modi

India

oi-Deepika S

The potential of artificial intelligence in enhancing India's tech ecosystem is vast, among the youth in particular, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday.

"Thank you for the insightful conversation Sam Altman. The potential of AI in enhancing India's tech ecosystem is indeed vast and that too among the youth in particular. We welcome all collaborations that can accelerate our digital transformation for empowering our citizens," tweeted PM Modi.

Altman, whose company deals with artificial intelligence technologies and has created ChatGPT is on a six-nation tour this week. Besides India, he was set to be in Israel, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE, and South Korea.

Thank you for the insightful conversation @sama. The potential of AI in enhancing Indias tech ecosystem is indeed vast and that too among the youth in particular. We welcome all collaborations that can accelerate our digital transformation for empowering our citizens. https://t.co/OGXNEJcA0i  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 9, 2023

Speaking at a session af IIIT Delhi, Altman said that in a meeting with PM Modi on Thursday, he discussed about the opportunities in front of the country and what the country should do in AI.

"We also felt the need to think about global regulation, which prevents some of the downsides from happening," Altman said.

"We spent almost 8 months on GPT for making sure that it was safe enough to release. We build the technology, and we have worked with organisations to figure out what the limits should be and tested them all. We do think that coordination is important. So self-regulation is important. It is something that we want to offer. The world should not be left entirely in the hands of the companies," Altman was quoted saying by ANI.

Talking about his plan for India, Altman said that the first thing he will do in India is to fund startups.

"We were always amazed and quite grateful for the quality of Indian startups," he said, adding that he had met some startups in India.

Given India's strong IT industry, artificial intelligence based utilities can leverage huge potential in the country. However, it is still in its early stages.
Congress Alleges Misuse of Railway Safety Funds for Crockery, Cites CAG Report

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

The Congress party, referring to a 2021 report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), has accused the central government of misusing funds intended for railway safety.

This comes in the aftermath of a tragic train accident in Odisha that claimed the lives of 288 individuals.

Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh took to Twitter to share the CAG's findings, highlighting the alleged misuse of funds on crockery, car rentals, furniture, laptops, and foot massagers.

Jairam Ramesh, in his tweet, stated, "This is how funds specifically meant for railway safety were used. This is the CAG's finding." He further pointed to the March 2021 CAG report, claiming that the Narendra Modi-led government had misused the funds from the Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh (RRSK) on various items.

This is how funds specifically meant for railway safety were used. This is the CAG's finding. pic.twitter.com/7zuEhfEvb3  Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) June 9, 2023

According to an official document, the Indian Railways had spent over Rs 1 lakh crore on safety measures between 2017-2018 and 2021-22, with a significant focus on track renewal.

1,129 Derailments In Last 4 Years: 2022 CAG Report's Major Red Flags On Train Safety

Government sources have stated that the railways will provide a response to the CAG report mentioned by Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge, who used it to criticize the government following the recent Balasore train crash.

Kharge, in a letter to the Prime Minister, accused Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw of making empty safety claims that have now been exposed. He highlighted the CAG report titled 'Derailment in Indian Railways,' which revealed a 79% reduction in funding for the RRSK. Kharge questioned why the required funds were not allocated for track renewal work despite the budget presentation stating an annual availability of about Rs 20,000 crore.

Contrary to Kharge's claims, the document shows that the Indian Railways had spent over Rs 1 lakh crore on RRSK work from 2017-18 to 2021-22. In February 2022, the government extended the validity of the RRSK for another five years, starting from 2022-23.

It is important to note that the mentioned CAG report was presented in Parliament on December 21 last year.

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Story first published: Friday, June 9, 2023, 20:58 [IST]
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. The Italian Trade Agency (ITA) in Baku is planning to arrange a business delegation from Italy to Azerbaijan, Andrea Maccanico, Director of the ITA said in an exclusive interview with Trend.

According to him, the agency strives to bring representatives of some Italian regions to present themselves here. This mission is going to include representatives of the Italian tourism and agricultural sectors. As Maccanico noted, ITA often arranges missions from Italy to Azerbaijan and vice-versa.

"Two months ago we arranged a visit of an Azerbaijani delegation to Italy's Piedmont region. There were journalists, importers, bloggers, and so on. The idea was to make Italian regions more well-known to Azerbaijani businessmen. So, residents of the region were glad to have the opportunity to interact with the Azerbaijani delegation and now are willing to come to Azerbaijan," he said.

Maccanico added that the planned timing for the mission is in September or October 2023.

"The main purpose of it is to build connections and communication. Thus, our main goal for this year is to go on like this and arrange more missions both to Italy and from Italy to Azerbaijan," he added.

Overall, according to Maccanico, there are three main events that are held in Azerbaijan constantly: Italian Design Day, Italian Cuisine Week and Republic Day.

"Also, I constantly keep in touch with local restaurants, bars, and hotels. If they are going to host some events dedicated to Italy, we are here to support them in several ways," he added.

"New ideas for events are generally proposed by us [Andrea Maccanico and Italian Ambassador to Azerbaijan Claudio Taffuri] to the headquarters in Italy. There, they decide which program or event should be financed. Just for you to understand the scale of the projects we implement here, this year only for the promotional events we are going to spend around 500,000 euro," he said.

Speaking further about the agency's ongoing projects, the director noted that the ITA conducts plenty of projects to support Italian businesses wishing to operate in Azerbaijan.

According to Maccanico, the agency is particularly interested in providing more real made-in-Italy products, and in order to do so has plenty of projects. Thus, one of the agency's key initiatives is its incoming project which is designed to support Italian enterprises interested in doing business in Azerbaijan and which involves inviting buyers, business representatives, bloggers, and importers to various events held in Italy.

"Throughout the year, we invite 30 to 50 people to exhibitions dedicated to different sectors, ranging from cosmetics and beauty to agriculture, food, and wines. This is one part of the job and this is very important for us since it helps us have good relations with importers, while we help them understand how the trade goes. Those are the exclusive fairs for professionals only, where you can see the state of the industry," he said.

As Maccanico noted, this is the first step in order to build bridges between Azerbaijan and Italy in terms of business - to find importers. Once importers have been identified, the Italian Trade Agency takes the next crucial step.

"The second step is to organize further business meetings and promotions to connect Azerbaijani importers with Italian producers," he said.

In addition to the agency's efforts in Italy, it also focuses on bringing Italian producers directly to Azerbaijan. As the director noted, one such upcoming event is a fair scheduled to take place in Baku on June 22.

"For instance, on June 22 we will be holding a fair with the participation of numerous Italian producers here in Baku. These producers are going to meet with importers. This event is not going to be open to the public; it is designed only for professionals. We expect attendance of 100-150 people," he said.

Andrea Maccanico clarified that because of the relatively limited number of Azerbaijani importers of food and beverage from Italy, particularly among smaller enterprises, the agency aims to connect with major players, and therefore will invite them to this event. This approach ensures wider distribution and a greater reach for Italian products in the country, as huge players are also connected with smaller businesses.

"During the event, there will be business-to-business (B2B) meetings. Hopefully, in the next 6 months, Italian producers will receive orders from Azerbaijan and here we will have new products. The idea is to increase the variety of products and lower the prices since imported food and beverages are always more expensive than the local ones," Maccanico added.

Speaking further about the areas of particular interest to Italian businesses in Azerbaijan, Andrea Maccanico noted that there are plenty of activities going on.

"There is really strong political friendship between the two countries. We are the main client of Azerbaijan in terms of energy trade. But in the same way, we also have many other businesses. For instance, we have Ansaldo Energia working in Azerbaijan - they signed a contract to modernize the power station. There is also an Italian company producing machinery for Azerbaijan's agriculture industry in a joint venture with an Azerbaijani manufacturer of tractors," he said.

Furthermore, according to the ITA director, there is also a large presence of Italian fashion brands in Azerbaijan. This industry is also of interest to the Italian SMEs and the Italian Trade Agency is always here to help them enter the market.

"Moreover, we are going to take part in the International Aerospace Conference that will take place in Baku in October. There we will bring companies from Italy engaged in the space sector. Also, we are going to launch the next edition of the conference which will take place in Milan in 2024 and which signifies very good relations between Azerbaijani Azercosmos and the Italian Space Agency," Maccanico added.

When it comes to helping Azerbaijani companies interested in doing business in Italy, the director noted that although this matter is not precisely included in the mandate of the agency, ITA also tries to help Azerbaijani companies as well.

"We signed a Memorandum of Understanding with AZPROMO, but the problem was that we signed this memorandum just before the COVID-19 pandemic, so everything was suspended. But apart from that I constantly keep in touch with ministries, agencies, and the Small and Medium Business Development Agency of Azerbaijan as the dialogue with counterparts is very important because we need to understand where Azerbaijan wants to go and how Italy can help," he said.

It is well-known that Italy remains Azerbaijan's top partner in terms of exports. In this regard, Maccanico highlighted that although the trade relations between the countries are based on Azerbaijan's exports of oil, Italy also exports goods to Azerbaijan.

"Azerbaijan's biggest import from Italy is composed of machinery. Machinery is quite a large sector and this is something that Italy is strongest at. For instance, in the agriculture sector, there are plenty of Italian companies that supply Azerbaijan with advanced machinery to help the country in plant cultivation and achieve a final product with more value-added," he said.

The Italian Trade Agency is a government agency. It operates through a worldwide network of 79 offices in 65 countries. One of these countries is Azerbaijan. ITA offices serve as the perfect entry point for companies looking to establish business relationships with Italian partners, encompassing activities such as sourcing Italian products and exploring investment opportunities within Italy.
I will not compromise on the issue of corruption: Sachin Pilot

Rajasthan: Amid Rift With CM Gehlot, Sachin Pilot To Float New Party? Here's What Congress Says

Speculation On Pilot's Next Move, Sources Say He Awaits High Command's Response

Congress Dismisses Talks Of Pilot Floating New Party As Mere Rumors

India

oi-Deepika S

Congress leader KC Venugopal on Friday ruled out the possibility of dissident leader Sachin Pilot floating a new party.

Several media reports have speculated that Sachin Pilot would announce his own regional party on June 11, which is his father Rajesh's death anniversary.

"I don't think so. These are all rumours...To my knowledge, there is no such movement in Rajasthan. I had a word with Sachin Pilot 2-3 times. Don't worry, we will fight unitedly. Rajasthan Congress will be together. Don't believe these rumours," he told reporters.

Venugopal reiterated that Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi had recently talked to Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot in Delhi in which both the Rajasthan leaders agreed to work unitedly.

Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot have been at loggerheads for the chief minister's chair and often indulged in open spats, throwing barbs and leveling insinuations at each other since the Congress formed government in Rajasthan in 2018.

Rajasthan: Amid Rift With CM Gehlot, Sachin Pilot To Float New Party? Here's What Congress Says

The grand old party is seeking to broker peace between the two ahead of the assembly elections in the state, slated for later this year.

There is intense speculation that Pilot may give a clear indication of his way forward on June 11 when he marks his father's death anniversary in Dausa.

Pilot, a vocal critic of the Gehlot government, has been raising concerns over the administration's alleged failure to address corruption cases that occurred during the previous BJP government led by Vasundhara Raje.

Meanwhile, Pilot is scheduled to meet with top party officials, including former Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Friday.

The meeting holds immense significance as the party aims to resolve the internal turmoil in Rajasthan and strengthen unity ahead of the crucial elections. The outcomes of these discussions is expected to shape the future course of politics in the state and could have far-reaching implications for the Congress party as a whole.
Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal Moves Gujarat HC for Review of PM Modi's Degree Case

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has filed a petition in the Gujarat High Court seeking a review of the judgment that set aside the Chief Information Commission's (CIC) directive to provide Prime Minister Narendra Modi's degree.

The judgment also imposed a fine of Rs 25,000 on Kejriwal for allegedly persistently seeking the degree.

Justice Biren Vaishnav, a single bench, has admitted the petition and issued notices returnable on June 30. Kejriwal has requested a stay on the execution of the judgment passed on March 31, citing "errors apparent on the face of the record."

In the review petition, Kejriwal raised two main issues. First, he claimed that he never persisted in seeking the Prime Minister's degree as he did not file any application for information on the degree. The petition argues that the CIC took up the matter suo motu, and Kejriwal should not be considered an applicant. Therefore, the cost imposed on him is an error on the record.

Second, Kejriwal questioned the claim made by Gujarat University that PM Modi's graduation degree is displayed on its website. In the previous judgment, Justice Vaishnav referred to the university's claim to support the argument that Kejriwal should not have persisted in seeking the degree because it was already available on the website.

Oppn Meet In Patna On June 23; Rahul, Mamata & Kejriwal Among Leaders To Attend

Kejriwal contended that despite searching for the degree on the website, it was not found. However, a document referred to as OR (Office Register) was found, which has a different format from a degree. The petition argues that the statement by the university claiming the degree was on the website, which influenced the court's observation, is incorrect and constitutes an error on the face of the record. Permitting such errors would lead to a failure of justice, according to the petition.

On March 31, Justice Vaishnav had quashed the CIC's direction and ruled that PM Modi's educational degrees were exempted from disclosure under the RTI Act due to the absence of any larger public interest. The court also imposed a fine of Rs 25,000 on Kejriwal for persistently seeking such information through RTI. The court noted that Gujarat University had orally submitted that the degree was publicly accessible on its website.

In 2016, Gujarat University had approached the high court against the CIC's direction to provide information on PM Modi's post-graduation degree to Arvind Kejriwal. The CIC commissioner at the time, M Sridhar Acharyulu, had also directed the Prime Minister's Office to provide information on Modi's degrees to both Gujarat University and Delhi University. Kejriwal had not filed a formal RTI application, but the CIC treated his response as an application and issued notices to the PMO, Gujarat University, and Delhi University. Kejriwal is also facing a criminal defamation case for alleged derogatory remarks on Gujarat University regarding the PM's degree. He, along with Sanjay Singh from his party, is expected to appear before a court in Ahmedabad on July 13.

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Story first published: Friday, June 9, 2023, 18:02 [IST]
For A Railways Job, Patna Man Falsely Claims His Mother Died In Odisha Train Tragedy

India

oi-Prakash KL

In an attempt to bag a government job, a man from Bihar went to Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw's residence and claimed that his mother died in the Odisha train tragedy, Hindustan Times reported.

However, his lies got exposed as the railways official started hearing his case. The 42-year-old man is identified as Sanjay Kumar. Following the tragedy in Balasore, he went to Delhi from Patna.

"When Kumar reached Vaishnaw's residence, he was directed to Rail Bhawan in order to meet the minister. It was then that he approached the minister's office and was apprehended after he kept changing his statements," the daily quoted a railways official as saying.

A Railway Board official said that he approached the authorities saying that his mother was a passenger in the ill-fated Coromandel Express and she died in the accident. However, they got suspicious after he failed to provide any proof to his claims.

In fact, when asked to produce details about his mother's travel, Sanjay Kumar did not respond. Another official said, " "He claimed that he booked the ticket via a travel agent but did not remember his name. He could also not prove that his mother was on the waiting list."

He also did not show his mother's photo. The official said, "We started searching for his mother at all the stations at which the train had halted before the accident. Our aim was to locate her with facial recognition technology. However, when we could not locate her at any of the stations, we grew more suspicious."

Chilling Video Clip Shows Moments Before Odisha Train Tragedy

However, soon Sanjay Kumar confessed that he was lying and his mother had died in 2018. After the government and railways announced the compensation to the kin of the victims, he decided to approach authorities for a job instead of exgratia. "His mother had died in 2018, but after the Balasore accident when the railway ministry announced ex-gratia payment to the family of passengers who had lost their lives, Kumar decided to approach the minister and ask him to give a job rather than the compensation amount," the official added.

Going by his confession, Kumar is unemployed and depressed about not having a job. The authorities are further investigating whether unemployment is the only reason for his visit to Vaishnaw's residence.

Similarly, a woman had approached the authorities in Odisha fraudulently claiming a dead body as her husband. The 40-year-old named Gitanjali Dutta from the Baramba area in Cuttack appeared at the temporary morgue in North Orissa Chamber of Commerce and Industry Business Park in Balasore where the bodies have been kept for verification by the family members.

"I suspected her intention as she looked unusually calm unlike the bereaved kin of the other deceased passengers. She saw some of the photographs of the unidentified bodies that we had displayed outside the temporary morgue. She picked up one photo and claimed him to be her husband," The Times Of India quoted Bikas Kumar Palei, an SI, as saying.

The crash involving Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express and Shalimar-Chennai Central Coromandel Express and a goods train occurred near the Bahanaga Bazar station in Balasore on June 2. At least 288 people have died in the tragedy while over 1,000 have been injured.

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Story first published: Friday, June 9, 2023, 10:53 [IST]
Scindia gives details of steps taken to ease congestion at Delhi airport

Hoax Bomb Threat Delays Delhi-Mumbai Vistara Flight By Two Hours

India

oi-Deepika S

A man from Uttar Pradesh's Pilbhit was arrested at Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport after he was overheard referring to a 'bomb' in his bag onboard a Dubai-bound Vistara flight.

The man was taken into custody by the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) after a female co-passenger said she overheard him saying 'bomb' during a telephone conversation.

The incident happened at 4.55 pm and the flight was delayed by two hours.

"A male passenger, identified as Azeem Khan of Pilibhit in Uttar Pradesh who was onboard a Vistara flight to Dubai, was arrested at Delhi airport on a complaint by a woman co-passenger. The woman had complained to a flight crew member that she heard the man speak of a bomb over the phone. The man was handed over to CISF and then arrested by Delhi Police. The incident happened on 7th June but nothing was found after the investigation, said Delhi Police.

Kolkata: Passengers Offloaded After Man Shouts Bomb In Aircraft

"The male passenger, Azeem Khan has been given a notice and allowed to go as nothing suspicious was found on him. If needed, he will have to join the investigation in the future," it added.

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Story first published: Friday, June 9, 2023, 13:11 [IST]
Indian-Origin Minister Set To Be Singapore's Next President

India

oi-Sanjeev Nayak

Tharman Shanmugaratnam, an Indian-origin senior minister of Singapore, has announced his intention to run in the city-state's presidential election later this year, and going by his massive popularity, it is almost certain that he will get elected.

Political pundits opine that Tharman's popularity may deter other hopefuls, even the Chinese-origin candidates from throwing their hat into the ring, possibly resulting in a walkover. They say that he is rather the People's Action Party (PAP) government's "trump card" for the presidential election, the Strait Times said in a report.

Former nominated MP Zulkifli Baharudin described Tharman as "a PAP nuclear option, meaning you can't think of a better winning formula for the PAP." He added that Tharman appeals to a wide spectrum of Singaporeans regardless of race, socio-economic class, and even political party.

Stepping aside from active politics after 22 years, 66-year-old Tharman became the first person to openly declare his intention to contest the polls, which has to be completed before incumbent President Halimah Yacob's term expires on September 13.

Tharman is said to have informed Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of his decision to resign from the ruling PAP, which has been running the prosperous city-state since 1960s, as well as from all his positions in the government and retire from politics to run for presidency.

Tharman was first elected Member of Parliament in 2001, in Jurong Group Representation Constituencies (Jurong GRC) which allows candidates from the minorities to join a group led by members from the city state's predominantly Chinese origin population.

Singapore hangs Indian-Origin man for trafficking 1 Kg cannabis

"I plan to do so a month from now, on July 7, so that I can first fulfil my immediate official commitments in Singapore and internationally, and ensure that arrangements are fully in place for constituents of Jurong GRC to be well-served for the rest of the electoral term," Channel News Asia quoted Tharman from a letter he wrote to the Prime Minister.

He will also step down as chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), deputy chairman of GIC, chairman of the Economic Development Board's International Advisory Council and other responsibilities he has been undertaking in his ministerial capacity.

After the election in 2017 that was reserved for Malay candidates, the sense was voters were expecting leading candidates this time to be Chinese, male, and have as little association with the establishment as possible. This is especially more so if Chinese Singaporeans see the process of electing a President as "turn-taking".

Such a move would capture the support of those who might still feel discomfort with the hiatus-triggered ethnic reservation to ensure fair representation of the constituent communities of Singapore that was introduced then, the channel said.

While Tharman is ethnically an Indian, his family is multiracial and arguably, quintessentially Singaporean -- a unique asset to our sense of national identity. The presidential poll will be an opportunity to see if qualifications and political standing can transcend race when it comes to electing the Head of the State.
North Bengal Likely To Get Heavy Rains Till June 13, 2 Killed In Lightning Strike In Kolkata

India

pti-PTI

The sub-Himalayan districts of West Bengal are set to get a respite from the heatwave conditions with the likely advancement of the southwest monsoon, officials said on Friday.

The southern districts of the state will not be as lucky, and are very likely to continue suffering due to the sweltering heat till June 13, they said.

Thundershowers, however, brought some relief to Kolkata and its neighbouring districts on Friday afternoon.

In the lightning that accompanied the showers, two persons were killed and one other was injured in eastern Kolkata's Dhapa area. The deceased were identified as Kajola Naskar (45), a resident of Sonarpur, and Palani Mondal (35) of Tardaha in South 24 Parganas, officials said. The injured was identified as Sannyasi Mondal, a resident of Bantala, they said.

The weather office forecast pre-monsoon showers in the sub-Himalayan districts of the state as the southwest monsoon is likely to advance into all northeastern states and this part of West Bengal and Sikkim within two days.

Extreme Weather Events Claimed 233 Lives In India Between January-April: Report

The onset of the monsoon in the northeastern states is likely to bring heavy to very heavy rain in Manipur, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram during the next three days and in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh over the next five days, it said. Heavy rains are likely in the sub-Himalayan districts of West Bengal -- Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Jalpaiguri, Cooch Behar and Alipurduar, and in Sikkim till June 10 and very heavy rainfall thereafter till June 13.

Intermittent showers, coupled with heavy rain at isolated places, occurred in these districts on Friday. Heatwave conditions will continue in isolated pockets of Gangetic West Bengal till June 13, the weather office said.
Locals Complain Of Foul Smell From Mangled Coach; Railways Says It's From Rotten Eggs, Not Human Bodies

Odisha Train Tragedy: Bahanaga High School That turned Into Makeshift Morgue Demolished

India

oi-Prakash KL

The Bahanaga High School, which was turned into a temporary morgue after the triple train crash which killed 288 passengers, is reportedly being demolished by the local administration after the students were scared to return to their classes in the building.

The visuals doing rounds on social media sites showed the demolition works in progress. Following the Balasore tragedy, the dead bodies were kept in this 65-year-old school building.

"The children are affected and are reluctant to come to school after it reopens on June 16," a member of the school management told the district collector.

However, the students refused to attend the classes in the building associated with the tragic mass death. As a result, the school management committee (SMC) had pleaded with the state government to demolish the building, according to a report in PTI.

Chilling Video Clip Shows Moments Before Odisha Train Tragedy

"Younger students are scared," PTI quoted Bahanaga High School Headmistress Pramila Swain as saying. She added that the school planned to "conduct spiritual programmes and follow some rituals to help them overcome their fears."

She said some senior students and NCC cadets from the school had even joined the rescue work.

VIDEO | Bahanaga High School, which was turned into a makeshift morgue following the train crash incident in Odisha's Balasore on June 2, is now being demolished. pic.twitter.com/ragmcklBNE  Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) June 9, 2023

"Our children are refusing to go to school and their mothers are not keen to send them to the educational institute now," Sujit Sahoo, a guardian had earlier said.

Also, there are a few parents who are now thinking of changing school instead of sending their children to Bahanaga High School.

Even though the bodies have been shifted to Bhubaneswar and the school campus has been sanitised and cleaned, people are still scared and in a state of panic.

Odisha Train Accident: 19 Bihar Passengers Missing, 50 dead

"It is difficult to forget that so many bodies were kept in our school building," said a student.

Balasore district collector Dattatraya Bhausaheb Shinde, who visited the school on Thursday, said, "I have met members of the school management committee, headmistress, other staff and local people. They want to demolish the old building and renovate it so that children do have any fear or apprehension to attend classes."

It is an old building which sheltered people during floods as Bahanaga is a flood-prone area.

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Story first published: Friday, June 9, 2023, 13:45 [IST]
Relations With China Cannot Progress Without Peace And Tranquillity At Border: S Jaishankar

India

oi-PTI

In clear message to Beijing, India on Thursday said any expectation of normalisation of its ties with China when the border situation in eastern Ladakh is not normal is unfounded with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar describing the "forward deployment" of troops as the main problem.

At a special media briefing on the Modi government's foreign policy in the last nine years, Jaishankar said India also wants to improve the relations with China, but it can only be possible when there is peace and tranquillity in the border areas. He said China is the only leading country with which India's relations have not advanced in the last few years as it violated border agreements in 2020 and deployed large numbers of troops along the frontier.

Jaishankar said that India has made it very clear to China that until there is peace and tranquillity in border areas, the relationship between the two countries cannot progress. India does not get swayed by coercion, inducements and false narratives, he said while citing examples of New Delhi's approach towards the situation along the Northern border and its opposition to China's Belt and Road Initiative.

The Indian and Chinese troops are locked in an over three-year confrontation in certain friction points in eastern Ladakh even as the two sides completed disengagement from several areas following extensive diplomatic and military talks. Jaishankar said the two sides will have to find ways for disengagement of the troops and that the current impasse is not to China's interests either. "The fact is the relationship is impacted. And the relationship will continue to be impacted. If there is any expectation that somehow we will normalise (ties) while the border situation is not normal, that's not a well-founded expectation," he said replying to a volley of questions. Asked to clarify whether China has occupied Indian territory following the border row that erupted in May 2020, Jaishankar said the problem is of "forward deployment of troops".

OPINION: Worries Increasing In China

The ties between the two countries nosedived significantly following the fierce clash in the Galwan Valley in June 2020 that marked the most serious military conflict between the two sides in decades. "We want to improve relations with China. But it will be possible only when there is peace and tranquillity in border areas and if there is an agreement, it should be adhered to," he said.

Jaishankar said both sides are engaged in talks to resolve the row. "It is not that communications have broken down. The point is that with China, even before Galwan happened, we were talking to the Chinese saying that look we are seeing movement of your forces which in our view is violative of our understanding. The morning after Galwan happened, I actually spoke to my (Chinese) counterpart," he said. Since then, he said both sides have been engaged in talks at diplomatic and military levels. "At the end of the day disengagement is a very detailed process," he said adding the details of it have to be worked out by people on the ground.

The external affairs minister said India's ties with all the leading countries and key groupings are on an upswing, except with China. Asked why, he said: "That answer can only be given by China. Because China consciously for some reason chose in 2020 to break agreements to move forces to the border areas and seek to coerce us. "It has been made very clear to them that until there is peace and tranquillity in border areas, our relationship cannot progress. So that is the obstacle that is holding that back," he said.

On Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's charge that China has captured Indian territory in eastern Ladakh, Jaishankar said the issue is of forward deployment and the forces from both sides are deployed very close to each other. Responding to allegations by Gandhi about China building a bridge at Pangong Lake, Jaishankar said the area was occupied by the Chinese side in 1962. On Congress' allegations of China developing a village in disputed areas in Arunachal Pradesh, he said the area has been under Chinese occupation since 1959. China has occupied territory since the 1950s and the neglect of border infrastructure by past governments had also put Indian troops at a disadvantage, he said.

"I do not want to go into those famous statements that our best defence is neglect of the border so that other people cannot come forward. But the result was that our own troops were severely disadvantaged when they had to respond," he said. The eastern Ladakh border standoff erupted on May 5, 2020, following a violent clash in the Pangong lake area. As a result of a series of military and diplomatic talks, the two sides completed the disengagement process in 2021 on the north and south banks of the Pangong lake and in the Gogra area. On China's growing friendship with Russia, he did not comment, but asserted that New Delhi's relations with Moscow have been very steady.

"There are reasons as leadership in both countries understand the importance of the ties. We did not do anything that would raise a question mark over our relationship," he said.

Jaishankar said India's ties with all leading countries except China is on a significant upswing. "In each of the relations, the Modi government has put in place policies and the prime minister himself has sort of led the diplomatic efforts from the front," he said.

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Story first published: Friday, June 9, 2023, 8:37 [IST]
Not In PM Race, Working To Get Oppn Parties Together, Says Sharad Pawar

States Need To Have Formal Policies For Promotion Of Film Tourism, says Kishan Reddy

Must Bring Non-BJP Parties Together: Pawar Extends Support To Kejriwal Against Centres Ordinance

Sharad Pawar Slams Rituals Followed At Inauguration Of New Parliament Building

1st Photo Of New Parliament Building That Came Out Was...: Sharad Pawar

Sharad Pawar A Reincarnation Of Aurangzeb: BJP's Nilesh Rane Kicks Up Row

India

oi-Deepika S

BJP leader Nilesh Rane described Nationalist Congress Party Chief Sharad Pawar as a reincarnation of Mughal ruler Aurangzeb, evoking a sharp reaction from the Opposition parties, which asked him to take back his words and apologise.

Rane's statement was in response to a media report about Pawar expressing concern for the minority communities such as Muslims and Christians in Maharashtra.

"Pawar Saheb gets worried for the Muslim community as the election approaches. Sometimes it seems that Sharad Pawar is the reincarnation of Aurangzeb," Nilesh Rane tweeted in Hindi.

Following the tweet, NCP leader Clyde Crasto sought action from Twitter over the malicious post defaming Pawar.

"FYI @TwitterIndia, You are aware there is prevailing tension in Kolhapur city, Maharashtra due to the name 'Aurangzeb'. The handle @meNeeleshNRane is using the same name against Padma Vibhushan Sharad Pawar, MP -Rajya Sabha. This tweet has malicious intent, please take action," Crasto tweeted.

NCP's Sharad Pawar Meets Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde

NCP spokesperson Mahesh Tapase said Rane must delete the tweet in 24 hours, while BJP national president JP Nadda and state unit chief Chandrashekhar Bawankule should clarify if they agree with Rane.

Meanwhile, tension gripped Maharashtra's Kolhapur on Tuesday after two men allegedly put 18th-century Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan's image along with an offensive audio message as their social media "status".

At least 36 people have so far been arrested and cases registered in connection with the violence.

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Story first published: Friday, June 9, 2023, 12:46 [IST]
Sixth Tirupati Balaji Temple Opens In Jammu For Devotees

India

oi-Sanjeev Nayak

The grand newly constructed Sri Venkateswara Swamy Temple in Jammu, which is seen as another Tirupati Balaji temple, has been thrown open for devotees. The temple is now one of the largest temples in the region and is expected to boost religious and pilgrimage tourism in the Union territory.

Located amidst the scenic lower Shivalik forests in Majeen area on the outskirts the city, the temple has been built by Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) at a cost of Rs 30 crore on 62 acre of land donated by the government there. This is the sixth Balaji Temple to be constructed outside Andhra Pradesh, with the TTD having previously built temples in Hyderabad, Chennai, Kanyakumari, Delhi and Bhubaneswar.

Jammu & Kashmir Lt. Governor Manoj Sinha, Union Ministers Jitendra Singh and G. Kishan Reddy and TTD chairman Y.V. Subba Reddy were present at the temple while Union Home Minister Amit Shah inaugurated it through video conferencing with high priests conducting the 'Maha Samprokshanam' rituals amid chanting of mantras.

TTD chief Reddy informed that the temple has been completed in a period of two years. "Whatever system and practice being followed in Tirumala, will be followed here as well," he said and added that the temple's construction is part of a broader initiative by the TTD to establish multiple Balaji temples across the country.

After paying their obeisance at the sanctum sanctorium, the dignitaries attended the ceremony to dedicate the temple to the devotees. "It is a historic moment in the 'Sanatan journey' of J&K and the country. The temple has finally been opened for the devotees," Sinha said while addressing the inauguration function.

"The dedication of Lord Venkateswara Temple will strengthen the religious tourism circuit in J&K and give a boost to spiritual tourism as well as a major fillip to the economic development and employment opportunities in the Union territory," the LG said.

He said Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board, Shri Kailash Jyotish, Vedic Sansthan and many other organisations are making immense contributions to promote Vedic culture and traditions. "I am confident Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams will develop a Ved Pathshala and health Centre on priority," he said.

In his speech, Kishan Reddy said the temple will carry the message that Kashmir to Kanyakumari, India is one, to the world. "This will be a centre of spirituality and Sanatan traditions. Jammu & Kashmir is looking ahead to a bright future. It is our collective responsibility to contribute to the task of socio-economic growth and to ensure participation and empowerment of the common man," he added.

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Story first published: Friday, June 9, 2023, 15:45 [IST]
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. The Public-Private Partnerships Office of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) will prepare a road map for public-private partnerships under the Partnership Strategy for 2024-2028, Trend reports via the State Service for Antimonopoly Control and Supervision of the Consumer Market under the Ministry of Economy of Azerbaijan.

According to the service, this issue was discussed at a meeting with an ADB delegation.

Moreover, issues of effective planning and implementation of public procurement, plans for public procurement through a single internet portal, and the possibility of participating in a tender were discussed. Issues of cooperation with ADB in the areas of increasing human resources and institutional capacity in the field of quality infrastructure were also touched upon.

As of early May 2023, ADB has committed 67 public sector loans, grants, and technical assistance totaling $3.7 billion to Azerbaijan. Cumulative loan disbursements to Azerbaijan amount to $3.96 billion. These were financed by regular and concessional ordinary capital resources. ADBs ongoing sovereign portfolio in Azerbaijan includes one loan and one sovereign guarantee worth $565.2 million.

Besides, recently, the ADB Presidium has approved a loan of up to 34 million manat ($19.9 million) for the Azerbaijani Bank Respublika OJSC in order to increase access to loans for women and borrowers working in the field of production, processing and trade in agriculture of Azerbaijan.
Why Prabhas And Kriti Sanon's 'Adipurush' Has Run Into Trouble?

India

oi-Prakash KL

With only a week left for its release, the multilingual movie 'Adipurush' has run into a controversy with netizens coming down heavily on the Prabhas and Kriti Sanon-starrer.

The movie has hit the headlines for the wrong reasons in the last one year. First Saif Ali Khan's comment that 'Adipurush' showcases the human side of Raavan. However, he withdrew the comment, later.

Then after the release of a teaser, netizens criticised the makers over the poor VFX quality which forced the makers to delay the films' release. Many were not happy to see Kriti Sanon, who plays goddess Sita, in ultra glamorous avatar.

There were also plagiarism allegations against the makers.

#Adipurush: Controversies continue to haunt the Team! While such a send-off gesture is quite common amongst the celebrities, it was inappropriate at the Tirumala. #KrithiSanon #OmRaut pic.twitter.com/hkUd2ButLG  AndhraBoxOffice.Com (@AndhraBoxOffice) June 7, 2023

What Is The Controversy All About?

However, the fresh controversy erupted after director Om Raut was caught giving a kiss to Kriti Sanon at Lord Venkateswara temple's premises in Tirumala, Tirupati on June 7. This is a sacred place for the Hindus and this gesture did not go well with the netizens.

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Adipurush director Om Raut kisses Kriti Sanon inside Tirupati temple, People react | Oneindia News

Many took to Twitter to condemn their behaviour.

Andhra BJP State Secretary Ramesh Naidu Nagothu slammed Kriti Sanon and Om Raut and tweeted, "Is it really necessary to bring your antics to a sacred place? @kritisanon @omraut. Engaging in public display of affection, like kissing and hugging, in front of the Lord Venkateswara Swamy Temple in #Tirumala is deemed disrespectful and unacceptable." However, he deleted the post, later.

The head priest at Telangana's Chilkur Balaji Temple criticised the incident and said, "Even a husband and wife do not go there (temple) together. You can go to a hotel room and do it. Your behaviour is like insulting Ramayan and Goddess Sita."

Also, veteran actress Dipika Chikhlia, who immortalised the role of Sita in Ramanand Sagar's popular television series 'Ramayan', has expressed her displeasure against Sanon.

"I believe this is a big problem with actors of this generation, as they neither get into the character nor understand its emotions. For them, Ramayana must have been just a film. Perhaps they haven't connected with it spiritually. Kriti is an actress of today's generation. In today's era, kissing or hugging someone is considered a sweet gesture. She must have never thought of herself as Sita Ji. It becomes a matter of emotions. I have lived the character of Sita, while today's actresses just consider it a role. After the film or project is over, they don't care anymore," she told in an interview.

'Adipurush' is a mythological film based on the Hindu epic Ramayana. Prabhas plays the role of Lord Rama, Kriti Sanon as Sita and Saif Ali Khan will be doing the role of Ravan. The film is scheduled to be released on June 16.

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Story first published: Friday, June 9, 2023, 12:03 [IST]
New IT rules will make sure no unlawful content is posted online: Minister

Ransomware attacks on AIIMS a deliberate act: How prepared is India for this battle

No issue with crypto currency, if all laws of the land are followed: MoS Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Will Regulate AI To Ensure It Doesn't Harm Digital Citizens: Union Minister

India

oi-Deepika S

Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Friday said that the government will regulate Artificial Intelligence to ensure that it doesn't harm digital citizens.

The union minister's comments assume significance as ChatGPT creator OpenAI, led by CEO Sam Altman, has acknowledged the need to regulate AI technology, and proposed a new international authority for regulating artificial intelligence (AI).

The first draft of the much-awaited digital India bill, that will replace the existing information technology act is set to be released for public consultation by the end of June.

Reportedly, the new bill proposes ways to deal with things that could harm users such as revenge porn, cyber flashing, defamation, cyberbullying and doxxing. It also suggests age-gating addictive technologies and protect data of minors on social media and gaming applications.

Addressing a press conference, Rajeev Chandrashekhar said "India has taken a major stride in the digital and technology sector in the last 9 years. The country has become the world's largest country in digital transactions."

"Under PM Modi's leadership, India is becoming a global trusted partner for manufacturing. In the manufacturing sector, we are seeing the emergence of world-class factories, huge investments, and the creation of a big number of jobs," he said.

BJP believes in public service and performance: Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Stepping up his attack on Congress, the union minister said, "Chidambaram, former Finance Minister had mocked DBT in the Rajya Sabha. But today, the people of India know the change PM Modi has brought to their lives with the use of technology."

"In 2014, PM Modi's first objective was to stop corruption leakage in public spending using technology and DBT (direct bank transfer). Rs 29 lakh crore has been transferred through DBT under different government schemes, he said.

"We are among the biggest consumers of mobile internet and data and have the lowest prices compared to anywhere in the world. This has happened in the last nine years," he added.
Trump Indicted: What To Know About The Classified Documents Case and What's Next

Donald Trump Indicted In Classified Documents Case

International

dwnews-DW News

Former US President Donald Trump wrote on social media that his lawyers were informed he has been indicted in connection with the mishandling of classified documents.

"The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

The Justice Department had no immediate comment or confirmation.

Trump wrote that he had been summoned to appear at the federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday. He profused his innocence in a video posted on social media.

The former president has been indicted on seven counts, media outlets reported. They relate to his handling of classified documents and obstruction of justice.

The case is one of several investigations into the former US president.

Florida Grand Jury Involved In Donald Trump Documents Probe By Justice Dept

He was indicted in March in New York over an investigation into hush money paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels, and still faces investigations in Washington and Atlanta that could also result in criminal charges.

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What do we know about the case?

The US Justice Department has been investigating whether the former president mishandled documents he held onto after leaving the White House in 2021.

Some 13,000 documents were seized from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, last year. Of those, some 100 were marked classified.

Trump's lawyers had earlier said that all classified records had been restored to the government.

Trump had defended retaining the documents, suggesting he had them declassified back when he was in office. He never provided evidence to support this claim.

Source: DW
New study debunks theory that climate change is biggest reason for Pak floods

Sonam Wangchuk, man who inspired '3 Idiots', tells PM Modi that 'all is not well' in Ladakh

Global warming surged in past decade, research says

International

dwnews-DW News

Global warming has increased in the past decade by 1.14 degrees Celsius, according to new research presented on Thursday in the German city of Bonn during the interim negotiations for the annual UN Climate Conference (COP28).

The research warned that human-induced warming has been rising at an "unprecedented rate" of 0.2 degrees per decade. The study, which looked at the decade between 2013 and 2022, was published in the Earth System Science Data journal.

The global community convenes annually at COP summits to review climate efforts and measure them against targets set during the 2015 Paris Climate Conference.

A peer-reviewed assessment presented on Thursday revealed that the net-zero plans of most countries contributing to global greenhouse gas emissions lacked credibility.

The United States and China, which together contribute to about a third of the global greenhouse gas emissions, were among the countries whose plans were regarded as lacking.

Who scored low on the 'net zero' plans review?

Nearly all of the 35 countries that contribute to over four-fifth of the global greenhouse gas emissions scored low.

Only one of the world's top carbon polluters had a credible plan: the European Union. Other top scorers included Britain and New Zealand.

Most countries are targeting carbon neutrality by 2050, with China and India committing to the years 2060 and 2070, respectively.

Thursday's assessment noted that many net-zero goals lacked important details, including whether the targets only cover CO2 or include other important planet-warming gasses such as methane and nitrous oxide.

How did emerging economies fare?

The majority of emerging economies were at the bottom of the list, scoring the lowest ratings. They included Brazil, India, South Africa and Indonesia.

Arab states such as Egypt, which hosted last year's COP, and the UAE, which is hosting this year's COP, also scored low.

COP28 call to scale down fossil fuel emissions

In Bonn, the UAE's incoming COP28 president tried to strike a stricter tone on the phasedown of fossil fuels. Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber had previously called in controversial comments for scaling down fossil fuel emissions rather than the use of the fuels themselves.

"The phasedown of fossil fuels is inevitable. The speed at which this happens depends on how quickly we can phase up zero-carbon alternatives, while ensuring energy security, accessibility and affordability," he said.

Al-Jaber also runs the UAE's state oil giant.

Last month, over 100 US congressmen and the EU parliament urged US President Joe Biden and European Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen to pressure the UAE to oust him.

The Bonn interim negotiations are meant to lay the groundwork for the decisions reached during the COP summit.

Source: DW
Trump Indicted: What To Know About The Classified Documents Case and What's Next

What Is Donald Trump's Classified Documents Case About?

International

oi-Deepika S

Former US President Donald Trump's indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate has renewed attention to one of the most notable cases in Justice Department history.

The federal charges pose the biggest legal jeopardy so far for Trump, just three months after he was charged in New York with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

It is also the first time a sitting or former commander-in-chief has ever faced federal charges.

Trump, who is running for president again has been summoned to a federal courthouse in Miami next Tuesday, the day before his 77th birthday. Now, special counsel Jack Smith's prosecutors must prove their case in court against Trump's legal team as they challenge the charges and evidence against the former president.

The legal process could stretch out for months or years before a Florida jury may get to render a verdict or a plea deal is reached.

What are the charges against Donald Trump?

On Thursday, Donald Trump said Truth Social that Justice Department lawyers had informed his legal team that he had been indicted. Though the indictment remains sealed, media reports suggest the former president has been indicted on seven counts.

According to DW news, the first law cited prevents unauthorized possession of national defense information and is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

The other two laws, which prohibit concealing or destroying official US documents, are punishable by up to three and 20 years in prison, respectively.

According to Trump's lawyer Jim Trusty, the former president faces serious charges that includes conspiracy, false statements, obstruction of justice, and illegally retaining classified documents under the Espionage Act.

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Donald Trump indicted on 7 charges: What is classified documents case about?

Donald Trump Indicted In Classified Documents Case

How did Trump react?

"I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!", said Trump.

"They come after me, because now we are leading in the polls by a lot...leading against Biden by a lot. We can't let this happen, we can't let this happen. The whole thing is a hoax," Trump added.

How did the classified documents case begin?

The classified documents case came to light shortly after Trump lost the 2020 election race and had to move out of the White House. In the spring of 2021, National Archives and Records Administration officials realised important documents from Trump's tenure were missing from their collection.

The Presidential Records Act deems all White House documents the property of the US government, meaning they must be preserved.

Archives officials reached out to Trump representatives, one of whom told them in December of the same year that presidential records had been found at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

Why did the FBI raid Mar-o-Lago?

In August 2022, federal officials aided a storage room and an office in Mar-o-Lago, seizing over 33 boxes that contained thousands of documents. The boxes included 100 classified documents.

Since he left office in January 2021, some 300 classified documents have been recovered from Trump, including some at the top secret level.

However, Donald Trump defended his actions, saying he had them declassified back when he was in office, yet without providing evidence to support this claim.

According to US law, incumbent presidents can declassify information, but that authority lapses once they leave office.

What is an indictment?

An indictment is a written statement of criminal charges against a person approved by a grand jury, which is made up of members of the community - votes and enough members agree there's sufficient evidence to charge someone with a crime. The indictment against Trump remains sealed. But once the document is made public, it will lay out the crime or crimes that Trump is accused of committing.

Sometimes indictments include a lengthy narrative with lots of details about the allegations, while others are more basic and just outline the charges a defendant is facing.

Can Donald Trump run for Presidential polls?

Yes, neither the indictment itself nor a conviction would prevent Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024. And as the New York case showed, criminal charges have historically been a boon to his fundraising.

However, experts also believe Trump's indictment may add to his legal woes and complicate his 2024 presidential bid.
The makers of Main ATAL Hoon meet UP Chief Minister Shri Yogi Adityanath as they shoot in Lucknow

The Importance Of Liquidity In Crypto: DogeMiyagi, Cardano, And Polkadot

Partner Content

oi-Oneindia English Desk

In the ever-evolving world of cryptocurrencies, liquidity plays a pivotal role in the stability and growth of digital assets. In this comparative analysis, we will examine and explore the liquidity of three prominent players in the industry: DogeMiyagi (MIYAGI), Cardano (ADA), and Polkadot (DOT).

By understanding the significance of liquidity and how it impacts these cryptocurrencies, investors can ensure that they are making investments that best fit what they desire from their investment portfolio.

DogeMiyagi: The Rising Star Of Liquidity

DogeMiyagi (MIYAGI), inspired by the ever-popular Dogecoin (DOGE) and the legendary Mr. Miyagi from "The Karate Kid," has gained considerable attention in the crypto community. With a primary focus on liquidity, DogeMiyagi has emerged as a meme coin with unique potential.

DogeMiyagi's liquidity stems from its active community engagement and frequent trading volumes. The project utilises advanced algorithms and liquidity protocols to ensure seamless transactions and market depth. By incorporating liquidity mining and staking mechanisms, MIYAGI incentivizes users to contribute to the liquidity pool, enhancing overall market stability.

The liquidity of DogeMiyagi is further reinforced by its presale strategy. By conducting presales before listing on major exchanges, the project establishes a solid foundation of liquidity, enabling investors to engage in early-stage opportunities. This approach creates a sense of exclusivity and fosters a vibrant trading ecosystem for the coin.

Cardano: The Stalwart Of Liquidity

As one of the leading blockchain platforms, Cardano (ADA) has garnered a reputation for its robust technological framework and commitment to scalability. In terms of liquidity, ADA offers a different approach compared to DogeMiyagi (MIYAGI).

Cardano's liquidity is primarily driven by its growing user base and strategic partnerships. By collaborating with prominent exchanges and fostering a diverse ecosystem, ADA ensures ample liquidity for its tokens. This allows investors to enter and exit positions with ease, contributing to overall market stability.

The implementation of liquidity pools, such as decentralised exchanges (DEXs) built on the Cardano network, further bolsters liquidity. These DEXs provide a decentralised and secure environment for users to trade ADA and other compatible tokens, enhancing market depth and liquidity.

Polkadot: The Interoperable Liquidity Solution

Polkadot (DOT), renowned for its interoperability and cross-chain functionality, introduces a unique approach to liquidity within the cryptocurrency industry. By enabling seamless communication between different blockchains, Polkadot enhances liquidity across multiple networks.

The liquidity of DOT is fueled by its ability to facilitate the transfer of assets between parachains. This interoperability allows for the efficient movement of digital assets, resulting in increased liquidity and accessibility. By bridging different blockchain ecosystems, DOT provides users with diverse liquidity pools, expanding investment opportunities.

Moreover, Polkadot is a key utility token that plays a crucial role in ensuring liquidity, acting as a bridge currency, enabling value transfer across parachains and facilitating liquidity between different assets.

Liquidity serves as a vital component in the stability and growth of cryptocurrencies. In this comparative analysis, we explored the liquidity of DogeMiyagi (MIYAGI), Cardano (ADA), and Polkadot (DOT), shedding light on their unique approaches to fostering liquidity within the crypto industry.

DogeMiyagi leverages its active community, presales, and liquidity protocols to establish a vibrant trading ecosystem. Cardano focuses on strategic partnerships, decentralised exchanges, and a growing user base to ensure ample liquidity for ADA. Polkadot, on the other hand, utilises its interoperability features and native token, DOT, to enhance liquidity across multiple blockchains.

By understanding the nuances of liquidity within these cryptocurrencies, investors and enthusiasts can make informed decisions. As the crypto market continues to evolve, liquidity remains a critical factor in the success of digital assets.

DogeMiyagi:

Website: https://dogemiyagi.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/_Dogemiyagi_

Telegram: https://t.me/dogemiyagi
A 17 yr old Afghan refugee went on a bloody rampage after boarding a train in Germany. He attacked people with the axe and knife that left four people badly injured. The incident happened on Monday night in a commuter train near the southern German city of Wurzburg. He was later shot dead by the Germany police.
The Public Investment Fund is the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. It is among the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world with total estimated assets of US$620 billion (514 billion). It was created in 1971 for the purpose of investing funds on behalf of the Government of Saudi Arabia. The wealth fund is controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler since 2015.
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the California State Normal School. It was absorbed with the official founding of UCLA as the Southern Branch of the University of California in 1919, making it the second-oldest of the ten-campus University of California system.
Ahead of an inquest into a police shooting at a Queensland party precinct, the family made social media posts lashing police over the death of their son.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. Dorris Hsu, the Chairperson and CEO of GlobalWafers, has been announced the winner of this years EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year award. GlobalWafers is an independent semiconductor wafer company from Taiwan. It is the worlds third-largest wafer manufacturer, specializing in silicon wafer production at 17 sites across nine nations on three continents. She was unveiled as this years winner at a special ceremony held in Monaco.

Entrepreneurs who have won their respective national EY Entrepreneur Of The Year competitions come together in Monaco to see who will be named the world winner. To select a winner, a diverse panel of independent judges  entrepreneurs themselves  have assessed the achievements of each competitor in the Class of 2023 against four criteria: entrepreneurial spirit, purpose, growth and impact.

Azerbaijan was represented by the winner of EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2023 award Seymur Mammadov, the CEO of Azerbaijani high-tech company Simbrella. The company has gained recognition in the developing world thanks to its mission to improve the quality of life for unbanked populations in Asia, Latin America and Africa through access to financial instruments and microloans.

Speaking at the ceremony in Monaco Seymur Mammadov said: Given todays economic challenges and major societal shifts, programs like EY Entrepreneur Of The Year are needed more than ever to support innovators who think differently and risk boldly to create new solutions and drive growth. These brave and inspirational individuals - entrepreneurs - are answering the call to address global sustainability, diversity and inclusion and overcome economic disparities.

EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year event brings together visionary founders, CEOs and business leaders from around the world in the ultimate global competition for entrepreneurs. This annual event held in Monaco is dedicated to celebrating the accomplishments of intrepid leaders whose vision and innovation are transforming the world for the better.
Donald Trump wrote that he'd been 'summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday,' via Truth Social.
President Zelenskyy said the breached Kakhovka dam had restricted access to clean drinking water for "hundreds of thousands" and placed blame firmly at Moscow's feet. DW has the latest.
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A Syrian refugee who stabbed six people, including four young children in Annecy, southeast France, was denied asylum in the country last month.
The Wall Street Journal said Beijing and Havana secretly agreed on the facility, some 100 miles off Florida. The Cuban government denied the "unfounded" reports, while the White House said it wasn't "accurate."
Eurasia Review 09 Jun 2023

By Imtiaz Gul*



Pakistans is witnessing yet another stand-off between former prime minister Imran Khan and sections of..
The US former president has been indicted for the second time in what is deemed to be a more serious case. What do we know about the classified documents case over which Donald Trump has been indicted?
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ASTANA, Kazakhstan, June 9. Azerbaijan will put 1.8 GW of solar and wind power capacities into operation by 2026, Parviz Shahbazov, Minister of Energy of Azerbaijan, said during the panel discussion themed Regional development in renewable energy: alternative ways to ensure energy security within the Astana International Forum (AIF 2023), Trend reports from the scene.

According to the minister, this will help save about 1 bcm of natural gas annually.

Noting that a renewed partnership between Azerbaijan and the EU implies the increase of gas supplies by 2027, the minister noted these additional volumes will be directed to the European market.

Azerbaijan is developing renewable energy sourced not only to diversify its own electricity generation, but also to ensure energy security of its partners. By 2025, we are to become a green growth country with clean economy, he said.

Minister Shahbazov invited Kazakhstani companies to participate in renewable energy projects implemented in Azerbaijan.
In the past, Germany's biennial Protestant Church Assembly has been dominated by debates about disarmament. But this year, the discussions are revolving around weapons for Ukraine.
Watch as Great Britain's Keely Hodgkinson wins the 800m with a new national record of one minute 55.77 seconds at the Diamond League meeting in Paris.
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson accused opponents of driving him out of Parliament following an inquiry over whether he misled Parliament over social gatherings at 10 Downing Street during the pandemic.
Prime Minister Modi will embark on his first state visit to the US at the invitation of President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden this month. During his four-day visit starting on June 21, the US president and the First Lady will host Modi for a state dinner on June 22.
Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke highlighted the need for more forest management in America, as Canadian wildfire smoke causes alarm across the east coast.
EXCLUSIVE: President Joe Biden was allegedly paid $5 million by an executive of the Ukrainian natural gas firmBurisma Holdingswhere his son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board, the confidential human source told the FBI during a June 2020 interview, sources familiar told Fox News Digital.
President Biden railed against lawmakers pushing state-level bills that ban gender surgery from being performed on children, calling them "hysterical" and "prejudiced."
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CatholicVote will run a TV ahead of the Dodgers game Saturday night that slams the Los Angeles team for inviting an anti-Catholic drag troupe to the team's annual Pride Night.
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Newsy 07 Jun 2023
ASTANA, Kazakhstan, June 9. The study conducted by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) confirmed the feasibility of green hydrogen production in Azerbaijan, Parviz Shahbazov, Minister of Energy of Azerbaijan, said during the panel discussion themed Regional development in renewable energy: alternative ways to ensure energy security within the Astana International Forum (AIF 2023), Trend reports.

According to the minister, currently, with the Banks support, Azerbaijan is working out the plan for an actual production and further export of green hydrogen.

Diversifying energy resources is a priority for Azerbaijan. In this regard, we are looking into production of green hydrogen and green ammonia, he said.

At the same time, as the minister mentioned, the project for the transportation of green electricity with initial capacity of 4 GW via the Black Sea submarine cable has already been launched, and that additional 1 GW of green energy will be supplied to Turkiye.

Currently, we are applying our successful experience in oil and gas industry into the implementation of green energy projects. We invite Kazakhstani companies, as well as other international partners, to participate in our initiatives, Shahbazov added.
Tel Aviv (AFP) June 5, 2023



OpenAI chief Sam Altman spoke out Monday against immediate "heavy regulation" that could hamper the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, but stressed the need for long-term institutional oversight. Altman, whose company created the ChatGPT bot, last month told US lawmakers that governmental regulatory intervention was needed to face the risks of AI. In remarks at Isra
Versailles, France (AFP) June 8, 2023



Ukraine called Thursday on Europe to double electricity supplies after Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure and the destruction of the Kahkovka dam which supplies water needed to cool a nuclear power plant. "We asked Europe to increase" the supply from the current import ceiling of one gigawatt currently to the two gigawatts that the electricity grid handle" Ukraine's Energy Minister
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#generalmotors #arlingtonassembly #marybarra #arlington #chevrolettahoe #suburban #gmcyukon #yukonxl #escaladevgm #cadillac
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. SOCAR Energy has opened the first hydrogen filling station on Swiss motorways, Trend reports via the tweet of Azerbaijani Ambassador to Switzerland Fuad Iskandarov.

"I was glad to take part in the opening of the first hydrogen supply terminal at the SOCAR gas station in Switzerland. I am proud that the first energy innovation - hydrogen on the autobahns of the most innovative country in the world, was provided by the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan. The joint work of Azerbaijan and Switzerland in the name of a clean future begins now" the ambassador said.

This item was launched at a SOCAR gas station near the city of Bern, on the highway connecting the main major cities of Switzerland.

The ceremony was attended by SOCAR Energy CEO Edgar Bachmann, officials of the Swiss Federal Government and the Canton of Bern, representatives of the Swiss business community and media representatives.

One of the main guests, Fuad Iskandarov, welcomed the guests in the official part of the ceremony. In his speech, he informed about the initiatives implemented by Azerbaijan in the field of green transition, including Azerbaijan's contribution to the energy security of Europe, and the supply of green energy to Europe.

The ambassador also spoke about the successful development of Azerbaijan over the past 30 years as a result of the visionary activities of national leader Heydar Aliyev and President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev in all areas and shared his opinion on the positive impact of Azerbaijan's achievements in other countries.

The ribbon was cut and familiarization with the territory took place in the presence of the Azerbaijani ambassador, SOCAR Energy CEO and members of the federal and cantonal governments.
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By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War; Kathy Kelly, President of World BEYOND War; John Reuwer, Board Member of World BEYOND War; Brad Wolf, Director of Peace Action, Lancaster, PA

Forty-eight hours before a global peace conference in Vienna, Austria, was to begin, the venue host abruptly cancelled. Peace, it seems, cannot be discussed, especially peace in Ukraine.

This news is a disturbing step in a growing trend.

Owners of the venue which was to host the Summit for Peace in Ukraine, announced on Wednesday, 7 June, 2023, their decision to cancel the agreement holding the summit on their premises. Fortunately, a new location was secured in Vienna (and anyone on Earth can sign up to take part online), but not before a smear campaign against the summit had been launched.

The venue owners reportedly explained: "We have decided to comply with the wishes of Ukraine and its embassy operating in Austria and have cancelled the rental of all rooms in the GB catamaran for the event 'International Summit for Peace in Ukraine' next weekend."

This was not just one venue taking this position. "On Wednesday, the Press Club Concordia also refused to make its premises in a central location in downtown Vienna available for a press conference of the 'summit'."

Supporters of the summit note the chilling innuendo caused by the abrupt cancellation of the summit. Speakers widely regarded for their moral and intellectual guidance have been undermined in statements intended to justify objections to the summit.

This is not an isolated incident. Western liberal ideals have long asserted that the best answer to mistaken speech was wiser speech and more of it. We now have a rapidly growing liberal consensus in favor, instead, of censoring media outlets, canceling speaking events, and forbidding people with unwanted points of view from even gathering together. Powers are being granted to governments, social media platforms, and other tech corporations that believers in democratic self-governance spent centuries claiming nobody should have.

Those who turn against free speech are often groups afraid they cannot win an honest debate. And so, they take up censorship. The movement for peace in Ukraine can take this as a compliment. Governments fear such a discussion of peace and instead smear this peace summit and the speakers.

An Austrian press report announced on Thursday that the venue (GB Catamaran) had been withdrawn because the event was "under suspicion of propaganda." What sort of propaganda? Well: "According to its own statements, the 'International Summit for Peace in Ukraine' wanted to show ways out of the war." Under international law, propaganda for war is illegal and must be banned. Not a single nation on Earth complies with that requirement, raising up the value of free speech as trumping the rule of law. But speaking in favor of bringing a war to an end has now acquired the status of forbidden propaganda.

Moreover, the report explains, "some announced participants have no current fear of contact with the media of the aggressor." In other words, if talk of negotiating peace is shut out of the media controlled by only one side of a war, speaking to media controlled by the other side "" even to say exactly what one would have said to any other media outlet "" is grounds for not only censorship but a ban on meeting and strategizing.

The report gives some specifics: "The internationally prominent U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs, for example, as well as Anuradha Chenoy, ex-dean of India's Jawarharlal Nehru University and an important representative of global civil society networking, have given interviews to the TV station Russia Today (RT). The channel has been blocked across the Union for Russian war propaganda in the wake of EU sanctions. Sachs also answered questions from Russian TV host and war advocate Vladimir Solovyov in December 2022. Solovyov has often called for attacking Germany and Great Britain as well."

The "Press Club Concordia" also explained that the problem was that Jeffrey Sachs might do an interview on Russian media.

Not only is diplomacy shunned, but speaking to members of the media with whom one disagrees is equated with advocating whatever those journalists have advocated. This can only contribute to distrust, enmity, and war without end.

Not only did the venue say it was doing the wishes of the Ukrainian embassy, but the Ukrainian ambassador to Austria tweeted that peace activists were the fifth column and henchmen of the Russian government.

And who created the idea that the whole world must obey the wishes of the government of Ukraine? The government of the United States "" a country where little time passes these days without news of some event cancelled to fulfill the wishes of the government of Israel.

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This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

24 hours ago, former United States President Donald "Agent Orange" Trump, and current candidate for the U.S. presidency, has given me another reason to despise him, and those like him. 24 hours ago, Donald Trump was indicted for multiple federal crimes. He has also, previously, been charged with state crimes along with being civilly liable for untoward behavior with a woman. Donald Trump, the preeminent orange sus domesticus, will face more indictments and more charges as time marches on; both criminal and civil.

Donald Trump feels as though he is being subjected to a "witch hunt" and I am not so certain that I disagree with him in that U.S. presidents have been criminals since Thomas Jefferson (slaver, rapist and pedophile). Jefferson was never prosecuted. Ah but, alas, let us stick with the contemporary, shall we?

George "Dumbya" Bush violated both international and U.S. law including the Geneva Convention, The Hague Convention, The War Crimes Act and Federal Assault Laws. Let alone the moral crimes, and murder, he committed subsequent to Hurricane Katrina. Dumbya was never prosecuted. It is simply a matter of fact.

Ronaldo "Maximus" RayGun committed numerous criminal acts including the 1986 bombing of Libya. The illegal invasion of Grenada. The CIA smuggling cocaine into the United States to support rebel groups in Latin America (which, literally, destroyed millions of Black People in the United States). Vehemently supporting apartheid in so-called South Africa and selling chemical/biological weapons to Saddam Hussein used in the Iran-Iraq War. RayGun was never prosecuted. It is simply a matter of fact.

Bill "Slick Willie" Clinton, and his broad, committed any number of crimes pertinent to the Whitewater scandal; and motherfathers ended up mysteriously dead in that one. Slick Willie also lied to congress and was guilty of perjury; doesn't matter that he was lying about a blow job from a child he victimized, he was under oath. Slick Willie was guilty of obstruction of justice and witness tampering. Slick Willie was never prosecuted. It is simply a matter of fact.

Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Baines Johnson and, yes, John F. Kennedy all committed crimes; none prosecuted. None were prosecuted because the United States is a criminal enterprise and has been from its inception. It is simply a matter of fact.

24 hours ago, a so-called "conservative" pundit, with righteous indignation, stated Donald Trump was being "lynched." Trump also stated he was being "lynched" four years ago during his first impeachment. I remember decades ago the fascination of the business world with facsimile machines; the ability to send a document to anyone, anywhere, instantaneously electronically. I wish there was a machine that would allow one to pimp-slap the living daylight out of someone else, electronically. The slap machine.

24 hours ago, former United States President Donald Trump made history by being the only orange European-American to ever be lynched (and live). Most people that have been subjected to lynching lack the opportunity, let alone privilege, of telling others about it. Virtually all have been Black People in the United States. I use the term "virtually" sardonically.

Not a day goes by that I do not marvel at the literal ignorance of people in the United States; especially in terms of verbiage. Black People in the United States, for reasons both systemic and institutional, are the greatest casualties of linguistic ignorance; but, at least, they have a somewhat valid excuse. All other "Americans" have no such excuse, and I will leave it at that.

Most have no clue of the origins of the words they speak, let alone their meanings and their history. I have harangued my youngest child, her entire life, about understanding the words she utters and those of others. She both loathes, and loves, me for it. The only thing worse than willful ignorance is when it marries, and fornicates with, willful apathy. For their offspring is a child named stupidity.

Stupid people are dangerous; in fact, they are the most dangerous of all animals.

Lynching

About seven years ago, when my child was attending high school, I wrote about the origins of the word "lynch". I was aghast at how many people did not, and do not, know its origins; especially those that were, and are, subjected to lynching. The following is an excerpt from that writing:

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BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. Issues of reintegration of Armenian residents of Karabakh into Azerbaijani society were discussed in the release of the analytical "Dialogue with Tofik Abbasov" video project on the Baku Network expert platform, Trend reports.

The guest of the program was famous Azerbaijani scientist, teacher, educator and public figure, President of the "Simurgh" Association, founder of culturology in Azerbaijan Fuad Mammadov.

Speaking about the reintegration of the Armenians of Karabakh, Mammadov noted that it's necessary to consider the ways leading to peace, cooperation and mutual understanding.

"We must build our better future on the basis of a cultural vision. We need communication and contacts. Everything should happen on the basis of goodwill," he said. "It would be advisable to launch these processes on the territory of Azerbaijan so that the Armenians see these processes really meet the interests of the Armenian people."

"Armenians who live on the territory of Azerbaijan are actually citizens of Azerbaijan. The reintegration of the Armenians of Karabakh into Azerbaijani society is the only way. They are part of the population of Azerbaijan," he added.

VIDEO:
Nuclear Experimentation: Year 78

Russian Nuclear Terror



Russian SMO Z, for Zaporizhzhia

(Image by Open) Details DMCA



July 16, 1945: Year Zero

The first atomic detonation experiment occurred in The New Mexico Desert 78 years ago this July, 2023. It has been 78 years since the first detonations in New Mexico and soon after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We are 78 years from year 0 of what is a many millions of years long experiment by way of the radioactivity of some of the elements involved. And now we have a whole array of nuclear experimentation processes mainly in the form of weaponry, energy generation, and medicine. And certainly this is a strange direction for medicine, that instead of herbs, vitamins or minerals or anything else for that matter radiation exposure is explored as a possible treatment to various ills"

All that aside, 2023, Year 78 of the nuclear experiment has been all about the Russian Invasion of its progenitor, Ukraine. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in my summation was engaged at least in part to take resources and after its overt failures is now waged at least in part to destroy the successes of Slavic people there so that Russian Slavic people would not question their own monolithic system compared to people with more liberty, and toilets and washing machines apparently. If a westernized Slavic group were to do better than Russian Slavic group it would - it does prove the monolith needs improvement.

The Ukrainians themselves have been subjugated to theft of life and liberty in a dark but familiar manner. War is war. War is hell. And war is the politics of terrorism. All aggressors and invaders are terrorists, throughout recorded time. Putin is now wanted under international law for kidnapping Ukrainian children, one of the many extreme horrors perpetuated unto Ukraine as is the destruction of over 1,000 Ukrainian hospitals and clinics, energy infrastructure, apartments, and dams. Despite the extraordinary level of evil, such evil is not new. What is vividly new in this war is the implementation of nuclear terrorism by Russia perpetuated unto Ukrainians and onto the entire world.

At the onset of the invasion Russia sent troops through the Chernobyl Zone on their way to violently steal Kiev and to the Chernobyl nuclear site to seize it. They stayed there and they dug trenches in the radioactive forest! The ferocious ignorance in ordering soldiers to do so cannot be understated. That's how they treat their own soldiers.

During the takeover of the former Soviet power generation experiment gone bad power outages were an issue which is required for the spent fuel pools still active at the former power generation experiment. Most all nuclear power plants, producing power or defunct, are in this position, around the world, dependent on external power for cooling. Ukrainian nuclear power plant workers suffered the jeopardy and stress of militarization of the site for 35 days. Russia occupied and attempted to steal the nuclear experiment site until repelled by Ukraine.

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Defying Western expectations, President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an won in last month's runoff election. Turkey's longest-serving leader, Erdogan won 52.2% support in the runoff, defying polls that predicted economic strains would lead to his defeat.

In his victory speech on May 28, Erdo?an denounced his NATO allies who didn't hide their preference for his opponent Kemal K?l?cdaro?lu in the election. "Didn't German, French and British magazines publish covers to beat Erdo?an? They also lost. You have seen the alliances that have been formed against us for months. You have seen who is with whom. They failed and they will not succeed from now on," he said.



His new mandate is expected to allow Erdogan to pursue increasingly independent policies that have strengthened Turkey's position as a regional military power.



According to TRT, Erdogan's independent foreign policy, decades of political experience and domestic programs gave him the edge over his challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who led a fragile opposition alliance.

Erdogan's long tenure has increased Turkiye's political bid to become a global power as the US has continued to lose its international influence and soft power across many areas from the Middle East to Central Asia, TRT said adding:

Erdogan has skillfully pursued a middle ground in many conflicts from Libya to Ukraine, protecting Turkish interests across the chaotic Middle East and increasing Ankara's political stakes in Turkic-dominated Central Asia.

In the Ukraine conflict, Turkiye has also acted as a mediator, brokering a landmark grain deal between Kiev and Moscow mainly thanks to Erdogan's good friendship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

West Frustrated

Turkey is in NATO, sits close to the wars in Ukraine and Syria and often frustrates western powers in how it negotiates those conflicts.

Erdogan has maintained close ties with Russia and refused to participate in Western sanctions, while also supplying weapons to Ukraine.

The next five years will likely see a continuation of Erdogan walking a fine line and his transactional approach to foreign policy.

"There's absolutely no reason to think that [Erdogan] would reverse course or soften his approach," said political analyst Selim Koru.

"There is sort of a Western bloc that is broadly geopolitically aligned, and the Bloc wanted Turkey to be in its camp. Turkey essentially has said no, it wants its own camp and isn't interested in participating in any kind of geopolitical alignment where it isn't the boss," said Koru.

The Strategic Depth Doctrine

Tellingly, Turkish foreign policy under Erdogan has been associated with the name of Ahmet Davuto?lu, once his chief foreign policy advisor. It is virtually impossible to discuss Turkish foreign policy since 2002 without a reference to Ahmet Davuto?lu, one of the few academics who joined the ranks of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi-AKP).

In his book "Strategic Depth," published in 2001, Davuto?lu elaborates on his strategic vision about Turkey. He argues that Turkey possesses "strategic depth" due to its history and geographic position and lists Turkey among a small group of countries which he calls "central powers". Turkey should not be content with a regional role in the Balkans or the Middle East, because it is not a regional but a central power. Hence, it should aspire to play a leading role in several regions, which could award it global strategic significance.

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Barring a last-minute breakthrough, the 1,800 nurses and other caregivers at Providence Portland Medical Center, Providence Seaside Hospital and the Providence systems home health and hospice operations will go on strike on June 19.

It will be a limited duration strike, lasting five days, the Oregon Nurses Association said Friday.

Oregon Nurses Association officials warned Providence of the impending strike Thursday afternoon, a formal 10-day notice required under state law. Richard Botterill, a nurse in the Providence Portland emergency department and chair of the nurses bargaining unit, said about 95% of the Providence nurses approved the strike in a vote that concluded on Sunday.

Providence officials said they were disappointed that ONA would ask union caregivers to choose between continuing to care for our community and a strike that distracts from the important dialogue at the bargaining table, which is where contracts get settled.

Providence will likely have little choice but to limit certain services and shut down others, though it offered no specific plans.

Our ministries have been preparing for this unfortunate possibility and are confident they will continue to provide critical services during the strike, the giant hospital chain said. Our highest priority is continued access to care for those who need it.

The nurses union said Providence has failed to pay enough to hire and retain staff, causing poor conditions both for nurses and patients. They are seeking a compensation package similar to the 16% wage hike granted by management last summer to nurses at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center.

Its not just about the money, Botterill said. If it was just about money, wed all go become traveling nurses, where we can make double what were making now. We want decent staffing, decent working conditions, decent sick and vacation time.

Hospitals, meanwhile, are struggling financially, with labor shortages throughout the health care industry playing a major role. Nursing homes and recovery centers are understaffed and not taking new patients, so those patients take up hospital beds instead. That crowds out the patients who have traditionally made up much of the hospitals revenues, including those seeking elective or ambulatory procedures.

And the hospitals have had to hire scores of traveling nurses to fill their staffing gaps, paying the temporary contractors much higher rates than their own employees.

Staffing has been a difficult issue for many Oregon hospitals. The dangers of COVID-19 and the demands that they work longer hours drove many nurses out of hospitals and patient-facing jobs.

The union has scheduled negotiating sessions next Tuesday and Wednesday, and another on June 20. Providence officials told union representatives they wont be there, according to Botterill, who said the hospital system wont negotiate while a 10-day strike notice has been issued.

-- Jeff Manning; jmanning@oregonian.com
The Clackamas County Board of Commissioners this week decided to ask voters next spring whether Oregons drug decriminalization law should be repealed, a mostly symbolic gesture intended to signal county leaders disapproval of the policys implementation.

The board also said it would encourage other Oregon counties to put similar questions on local ballots in the May 2024 election in an effort to push state leaders to rescind the law.
Washington County Circuit Judge Eric Butterfield sentenced 35-year-old Tyler William Fetterhoff to more than seven years in prison on Wednesday in the July 2022 hit-and-run crash that severely injured a 72-year-old pedestrian near Providence St. Vincent Medical Center.

Fetterhoff pleaded guilty to felony charges of second-degree assault and failure to perform the duties of a driver this week after running a red light, striking pedestrian Diana Petty of Vancouver in a crosswalk and then fleeing, police said. Petty had been visiting her husband in the hospital when Fetterhoff hit her, and the force of the crash caused extensive injuries, requiring doctors to amputate Pettys lower right leg.

Prosecutors said Fetterhoff tried to conceal his involvement in the crash by ditching his Subaru at the home of an acquaintance and paying for a ride to his home at the time in Northwest Portland.

A witness captured the crash in a dash cam recording, and Fetterhoffs acquaintance called police after seeing news stories about the collision. A Providence nurse who had just ended her shift at the hospital treated Petty at the scene, Petty said.

Fetterhoff had been convicted in 2011 of aggravated assault and driving under the influence after causing another serious crash in Arizona, records show. Under Measure 11, Fetterhoff faced 70 months in prison but Butterfield added 20 months, bringing his sentence to seven and a half years.

Petty said Thursday she was grateful to have a resolution and to have avoided an arduous trial, scheduled for next week.

Its good to know that person is not going to be driving on our roads, Petty said. This was a win, catching him and sentencing him.

 Beth Slovic; bslovic@oregonian.com; 503-221-8551

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Jenna Longenecker described Thursday losing both her parents within four years of one another -- her mother fatally shot at Clackamas Town Center and her father who died by suicide with a gun.

This is not something that goes away, she said. This is not something that gets easier.

Longenecker, 34, was the last witness called to testify in a federal trial on the constitutionality of Oregons voter-approved gun control Measure 114.

The measure bans the sale, transfer and manufacture of magazines holding more than 10 rounds, requires a permit to buy a gun and requires a completed criminal background check before any sale or transfer of a gun. Several gun rights groups, rural sheriffs and gun owners have challenged the measure in federal court.

Their lawyers didnt cross-examine Longenecker but restated their move to strike her victim impact statement. They have argued that the relationship between Measure 114 and general public safety isnt permissible under last summers U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a New York gun case.

U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut denied their motion, finding the impact of gun violence relevant for evaluating the justification for the measure.

Longenecker, who is eight months pregnant with her second child, flew back to Portland from New Hampshire where she now lives to testify in support of Measure 114.

I hope that by sharing my personal story today, I can help remind the court and help the court understand a little bit better about why this law was enacted in the first place, she said.

Longenecker was 23 and in her first marketing job after graduating months earlier from University of Oregon when she spotted reports on her Twitter feed of a shooting unfolding at Clackamas Town Center on Dec. 11, 2012.

She called her mom, Cindy Yuille, just to make sure everything was OK but didnt get an answer after four or five tries. When she reached her mothers husband, Robert Yuille, at their Portland home, he told her: Your mom went shopping.

Hours later, when her 54-year-old mother didnt return home, Longenecker learned she was one of two people fatally shot at the mall that afternoon.

She was killed while Christmas shopping when a masked gunman armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and multiple 30-round magazines began shooting. He fired as he meandered through the mall before sheriffs deputies closed in on him 22 minutes later in a stairwell and he turned the rifle on himself. Eyewitnesses saw him move to reload the rifle at least once, but it apparently jammed.

Four years later, Longeneckers father, Michael Passalacqua, 58, died by suicide in a spiral of depression suffered after his ex-wifes killing.

The sudden loss of each parent affected her differently.

I felt my moms life was taken from her and there was this great injustice that had been committed, Longenecker said.

Three days later, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred. Within weeks, Longenecker started to get involved with gun control groups and eventually testified before the Oregon Legislature in support of legislation to give judges discretion to remove guns from people who show signs they might shoot themselves or others. In 2016, she went to work in Washington, D.C. for Giffords, the nonprofit thats led by former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and dedicated to trying to curb gun violence. Thursday marked Longeneckers first time testifying in a courtroom.

Longenecker said she had been aware that her father was diagnosed with depression but his illness worsened leading up to his death. He had quit work and, unknown to her, had bought a gun in July 2016. He shot himself that September.

His death keeps her up at night, she said, wondering, What could I have done differently?

Back then, she said she had no avenue to alert someone that her father could potentially harm himself, she said.

After court, she said, if Measure 114s gun permit requirement had been in place in 2016, it might have dissuaded her father from trying to buy a gun. She said she also would have reported her dad as a danger to himself to local police, which also may have barred him from getting a gun permit.

I think its really important to remind people that this issue of gun violence is not just about numbers and statistics, Longenecker said. This is a very real issue thats happening in our communities and is having really lasting effects.

She is now married with a young daughter. She struggles to avoid being overprotective in the wake of her mothers death and said she may be reluctant to send her daughter to school when the time comes. She struggles with the void of her mothers loss and the knowledge her children will never get to meet their maternal grandparents. She described her mother as fun, compassionate and friends with everyone.

She testified, she said, because she believes Measure 114s regulations represent a common-sense way to reduce shootings.

Its easy to think of gun violence, she said, as this horrible thing that happens to other people. Thats how she used to view it.

One of the things thats most frustrating to me is when people just say, Oh, well you know, theres nothing we can do. There are things we can do, Longenecker said. Things like Measure 114 are very reasonable steps that we can take that will help make a difference.

The trial is to conclude Friday with closing arguments. Its unknown when Immergut will release her written decision. The measure remains on hold from taking effect in a separate state case.

-----

Previous stories from trial:

-- From bowie knives to muskets and machine guns, historians testify in Measure 114 trial about Americas gun history, regulations

--Oregons gun control Measure 114 gets federal court test

--City of Portland supports gun control Measure 114 as federal judge prepares to hold trial next week

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email mbernstein@oregonian.com; 503-221-8212

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian

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The Lower Columbia Major Crimes Team has completed its interviews and released the names of officers in the fatal shooting of an armed robbery suspect last month in a Vancouver shopping center.

The man killed was identified as Joshua James Wilson, 43, of Vancouver, who was captured on video pointing a gun at police just before he was killed. The Vancouver Police Department said one of its detectives spotted a car about 5:30 p.m. that day and recognized the driver as a suspect who was wanted in multiple, recent armed robberies. Detectives trailed the man to the shopping center, and Wilson went inside a Safeway. Police said they tried to arrest him as he exited the store.

He dropped a bag of items, displayed a firearm and ran westbound through the parking lot, police said in a statement. During the attempt to apprehend him, the suspect fired at officers, and they returned fire.

The Lower Columbia Major Crimes Team took over the investigation. The names of the officers involved in the shooting were released by the Cowlitz County Sheriffs Office on Thursday.

They are:

Detective Colton Price of the Vancouver Police Department. With the department since 2012, he serves on the Safe Streets Task Force and is assigned as a detective on the Neighborhood Response Team.

Officer Brandon Riedel of the Vancouver Police Department since 2018, he is assigned to the East Precinct Patrol.

Detective Aaron Yoder of the Vancouver Police Department. With the department since 2015, he is assigned to the Neighborhood Response Team and is also a SWAT team member.

Detective Zach Nielsen of the Clark County Sheriffs Office. With the office since 2016, is assigned to the Sheriffs Office Tactical Detectives Unit.

 Tom Hallman Jr

503-221-8224; thallman@oregonian.com; @thallmanjr

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Lawyers for right-wing protest leader Joey Gibson and one his followers have made good on their plans to sue Portland and Multnomah County, claiming malicious prosecution.

Gibson, who led the Vancouver-based Patriot Prayer, and associate Russell Schultz beat felony riot charges during a trial last July after they were involved in a face-off with left-wing protesters outside a bar in 2019.
The Portland Police Bureau is attempting to seize more than $30,000 from the owner of Shroom House, the store that was raided and shuttered late last year for illegally selling psilocybin.

The brightly colored storefront at West Burnside Avenue and Northwest 16th Avenue openly sold psychedelic mushrooms and products containing psilocybin for weeks last winter, even though recreational sales are prohibited by Oregon law.
The Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission on Thursday approved a change to community college funding which will reward colleges that enroll students from backgrounds often underrepresented in higher education and that help students progress toward certificates and degrees.

Previously, the states 17 community colleges were funded almost entirely based on enrollment. The new model adds financial incentives for colleges to support student achievement and equity.

Terry Cross, chair of the commission, said in a news release that the new funding formula strikes a balance between incentivizing equity and maintaining stable funding for colleges. A maximum of 10% of funding will be based on a colleges enrollment of groups like adult learners, low-income students and students of color, as well as how colleges help those and other students meet milestones toward their degrees. Commission projections estimate that colleges will see their budgets change by less than 2%.

This change is good news for students, for colleges, for Oregons diverse regions and communities and for all of our partners who are working together to better support thriving futures for Oregonians from underserved populations across the state, commission director Ben Cannon said in the release.

Unlike community colleges, Oregons public universities have been funded partially based on student outcomes since 2015. About half of university funding is tied to student degree completion, with bonus funding for the success of historically underrepresented student populations.

The commission has been working with community colleges to move in that direction for more than a year. The new model goes into effect in the summer of 2024, a delay colleges asked for in order to better plan for how the change will impact their schools.

Community colleges exist to provide equitable access to higher education in our communities, Mt. Hood Community College President Lisa Skari said in a news release from the Oregon Community College Association. The new model provides clarity and transparency as to how we align with state goals and focus on the success of our students, while also acknowledging these desired results require financial investments.

This story was brought to you through a partnership between The Oregonian/OregonLive and Report for America. Learn how to support this crucial work.

Sami Edge covers higher education for The Oregonian. You can reach her at sedge@oregonian.com or (503) 260-3430.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. Azerbaijan is purchasing C-27J Spartan tactical transport aircraft from Italy, Trend reports.

According to Italian Leonardo S.p.A. company, which is producer of the aircraft, Azerbaijani and Italian Defense Ministries have already signed a contract for the aircraft supply.

Deployed in the challenging geographic and operating conditions, C-27J Spartan is an aircraft capable of executing defense and civil protection missions.

The cost of one C-27J Spartan aircraft is $65-70 million.

Initially linked to the energy sectors, the collaboration between Italy and Azerbaijan is now also extended to defense industry products thanks to the valuable contribution provided by the Italian Ministry of Defense working group.

The program for the purchase of the C-27J from Leonardo, a tactical transport aircraft with many years of proven experience in the most challenging operational scenarios, was finalized through a technical round table between the two countries' defense ministries.

The agreement is part of the extensive modernization program of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces, which are increasingly looking to the products of Italian industry.
Gov. Tina Kotek has dropped her request for the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission to add another 50-cent surcharge to bottles of alcohol to fund mental health and addiction services.

She asked for the surcharge in her February budget. But on Wednesday, she sent a letter to the commissions board, saying the tax was no longer needed.

Since my recommended budget was originally released, there have been two revenue forecasts indicating there will be sufficient resources to fund essential services in the next biennium without the surcharge, she wrote. Additionally, I have been clear that I only support a new surcharge if the funds are directly allocated to behavioral health services. Without further specific action by the Legislature this session, any surcharge approved by the commission would go into the general fund with no designatedpurpose, undermining the purpose of the recommendation.

The Legislature has yet to pass a budget due to the continuing Republican-led walkout in the state Senate, which has brought floor votes to a halt. They object to a bill to expand access to gender-affirming care and guarantee abortion rights for minors. The session has to end by June 25, and a continuing stalemate will leave hundreds of bills on the table.

The surcharge would have doubled the tax on bottles of hard alcohol, raising $90 million over the next two years for behavioral health care and addiction services. The proposal was supported by advocates, primarily Oregon Recovers, a Portland-based group that supports people in recovery. They did not respond to a request for comment by mid-afternoon Thursday.

The tax was opposed by many in the liquor industry, who said it would have a major impact on their revenue.

The commission had been gathering public comments on the tax and was due to vote on it on Thursday, June 15. A spokesman also did not respond to a request for comment by mid-afternoon Thursday.

The pullback drew praise from the industry. Tom Burkleaux, president of the Oregon Distillers Guild, released a statement thanking Kotek for her decision.

We appreciate the governors office has listened to Oregons craft distillers about how this proposed increase would disproportionately hurt our local producers that make higher-cost, premium products, the statement said. This surcharge increase would have had a detrimental effect on our smaller Oregon businesses, which cannot absorb a price increase compared to larger out of state brands.

Burkleaux said industry executives were willing to work on alcohol and drug addiction.

This is a multifaceted challenge that requires the commitment of many stakeholders, including those in Oregons craft alcohol industries, the statement said.

A December 2021 nationwide survey showed that Oregon has the fifth-highest rate of alcohol addiction in the country, the second-highest rate for drug addiction and the second-highest rate of mental illness.

Kotek said in her letter that improving mental health services remains a priority for her administration, and she called on continuing discussions with the commission on how it can better support behavioral health services.

-- Lynne Terry, Oregon Capital Chronicle

Oregon Capital Chronicle is an affiliate of States Newsroom, a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit supported by grants and a coalition of donors and readers.
Negotiations to end the longest walkout in Oregons political history have intensified in the last few days, with talks centering around whether Democrats would scrap the controversial reproductive health care bill that has been central to the Republicans boycott, multiple sources told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Thursday.

We are definitely trying to find agreement, Sen. Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles, said Thursday.

The outlines of any deal are not yet clear. But several legislative staffers said that Republicans have offered a deal thats under active consideration by Democrats.

Democratic and Republican senators have been meeting independently over the last few days, while Gov. Tina Kotek met Thursday with Senate President Rob Wagner, a Democrat from Lake Oswego. Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp, R-Bend, was spotted in conversation with House Speaker Dan Rayfield, D-Corvallis, on Thursday.

The Legislature has been at a stalemate for six weeks now, the longest walkout in the states history, after GOP senators launched a quorum-denying boycott over the reproductive and gender-affirming care legislation. Previous negotiations have been fitful and borne little fruit, at least publicly.

But the prolonged deadlock has left both Democrats and Republicans increasingly aware of the policy, financial and reputational detritus if they cant come to terms by June 25, when the session must end. Bills that are at risk of dying include those to reform and shore up the states crumbling public defender system, protect against the looming wildfire season and address the longstanding drought in eastern Oregon.

In the past week, conversations to reach a deal to end the impasse have centered on House Bill 2002, which would codify into law the right of minors younger than 15 to receive an abortion without parental consent or notification. Democrats say that would protect pregnant children with abusive parents and remove the threat of litigation from medical providers; Republicans have said that it infringes on parental rights.

Lobbyists from both businesses and human rights groups said Thursday that the bill might be shelved, but that doesnt mean the issue would dissipate.

This session, Democrats are also pursuing Senate Joint Resolution 33, a proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee the right to same-sex marriage, abortion and gender-affirming care. Supporters say its goal is to protect against any future anti-reproductive rights and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Democrats hope to bring the constitutional amendment before voters in November 2024.

-- Julia Silverman, @jrlsilverman, jsilverman@oregonian.com

-- Grant Stringer, gstringer@oregonian.com
Donny Brown loves playing music.

This is evident in the 22 years he spent with The Verve Pipe. In addition to being a founding member and a core songwriter, he was also the drummer from 1992 until 2014.

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This is also evident in the way he jams with his friends in various bands. For instance, in October last year he was invited to play with Bobby Randall and others at the Orange Blossom Opry in Florida.

He also plays regularly with a local classic country band, The ClaimJumpers. And he plays with other bands, within the area and beyond, who call him up because they need a drummer for a gig or two.

In December last year he joined Andy Reed and other volunteer musicians to play for the Torrant Center, the Midland County Educational Service Agency and the Saginaw Intermediate School District. The musicians gathered through the All Music is Power non-profit he founded with Reed and Mark Lyons.

And his love for music is evident in the band - as well as the AM radio concert show - he has put together over the past few years.

The musicians for both Stone Street Revival and Pure AM Gold are almost one and the same, except Pure AM Gold has one additional member, a live DJ.

I started SSR by grabbing some of the best musicians I had played with previously  put them all together  and then we began to choose songs that we loved but had not heard other bands do. After only one gig we decided to add horn players so SSR could become an even more expansive song juggernaut, Brown said.

The Pure AM Gold music selection focuses a little more on radio songs and one hit wonders  and the SSR song list tries to keep people dancing a bit more!

Niky House

Stone Street Revival played in Downtown Midland last year as part of Midlands River Days Festival. The band also plays at other gigs or private events throughout the Great Lakes Bay Region and beyond.

Pure AM Gold came together in 2022.

Pure AM Gold started with a show that we began to write which was modeled after Casey Kasem, who talked a little more in-depth about each artist and song. It was inspired by listening to those kinds of things and we thought, somebody should be doing that live, Brown said.

Casey Kasems American Top 40 started in 1970. Kasem hosted the show for more than 24 years all together. Each week he would count down the top 40 hits according to Billboard Magazine charts early on and other charts in later years.

Pure AM Gold follows a similar format, imitating a live broadcast while adding some radio drama elements. During the performance, call letters for the radio station are WPAM for Pure AM Gold. The band also created jingles for the station.

Throughout the show, Pure AM Gold plays songs from 60s and 70s AM radio and might include music from Burt Bacharach, Neil Diamond, The Mamas and the Papas and Tony Orlando and Dawn.

We thought, why not have a disc jockey.  So a live disc jockey comes out; hes the MC for the show.  We also have commercials and various things like that which are part of the program, Brown said.

Niky House

Stone Street Revival and Pure AM Gold band members include John Anderson on saxophones; George Bork on trombone; Donny Brown on drums and vocals; Ricky Nalett on keyboards; John Rickert on trumpet; Kay Rinker-ONeil on flute, guitar and vocals; Scotty VanDell on guitars and Jeffrey Walikangas on bass and vocals.

Chuck Colby, of Three Men and a Tenor, joins Pure AM Gold as the shows live DJ.

On June 3, Pure AM Gold played a benefit show for Brians House at the State Theater in Bay City. Brians House, according to brians-house.org, was established in 1996 to accommodate terminal patients who were in need of end-of-life care.

On June 9, Stone Street Revival will play from 7 to 9 p.m. in downtown Midland as part of The Common Live Music Series.

On Friday, June 16, Stone Street Revival will play as part of Saginaw YMCAs 2023 Concert for a Cause. The concert, which will be held at 1915 Fordney St. in Saginaw, starts at 5:30 p.m., but its a good idea to arrive earlier.

On Friday, Aug. 4, Stone Street Revival will play from 9 - 11 p.m. as part of the Commons Live Music Series in downtown Midland.

And on Saturday, Sept. 9, Stone Street Revival will play a benefit concert for Brians House starting at 7 p.m. at the Wenonah Park bandshell in Bay City.

For more on the All Music is Power non-profit, allmusicispower.com. For more about Stone Street Revival, visit stonestreetrevival.com. For more about Pure AM Gold visit facebook.com/PureAmGold.
Photo provided Midland Fire Department

The Midland Fire Department has issued an educational statement in response to recent inquiries about recreational fires and burning in the Midland city limits.

Recreational fires are still permitted in the Midland city limits at this time; however, the MFD recommends that residents refrain from having these fires until conditions improve. Conditions are extremely dry and residents should exercise extreme caution if choosing to have a recreational fire on their property.
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FORT LIBERTY, N.C. (AP)  President Joe Biden traveled to the recently renamed Fort Liberty in North Carolina on Friday to sign an executive order that aims to bolster job opportunities for military and veteran spouses whose careers are often disrupted by their loved ones' deployments.

Less than 100 miles away at the states Republican Party convention, GOP presidential contender, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, vowed to restore the former name of the base that until last week was called Fort Bragg in honor of a Confederate general, if voters elect him president.

Its an iconic name and iconic base, and were not gonna let political correctness run amok in North Carolina, DeSantis said at the convention in Greensboro hours after Biden's speech and signing ceremony at Fort Liberty.

The installations former name honors Gen. Braxton Bragg, a North Carolinian, who was known for owning slaves and losing key Civil War battles that contributed to the Confederacys downfall. Biden made no mention in his remarks before hundreds of soldiers and their spouses about the renaming of the base which was formally done by military officials last week.

The renaming of the base was part of a broader effort by the U.S. military to confront racial injustice in the aftermath of the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. An independent commission last year recommended new names for Bragg and eight other Army posts that commemorate Confederate officers.

The installation is the largest U.S. Army base by population, with roughly 47,000 active-duty soldiers. The recent renaming didnt play a role in selecting the base to serve as a backdrop for Biden to announce his executive order, according to an administration official who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In addition to DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and former President Donald Trump, the current GOP front-runner, are scheduled to address delegates on Saturday at the state convention in Greensboro. Trump, who has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate, is also slated to speak on Saturday to the Georgia Republican Partys convention.

The order Biden signed on Friday directs agencies to develop a federal government-wide strategic plan on hiring and job retention for military spouses; bolster child care options; improve the collection of data on military and veteran spouses, caregivers and survivors in the federal workforce; and more than a dozen additional actions.

In remarks shortly before signing the order, Biden noted that the U.S. next month will mark 50 years of the all-volunteer force, which the president proclaimed the greatest fighting force in the history of the world, bar none.

The reason weve been able to sustain that force year after year, decade after decade, is because military spouses, caregivers and survivors have answered the call as well, Biden said. You have your loved ones backs, just like they have the countrys back.

Biden was accompanied by first lady Jill Biden, whose Joining Forces initiatives focuses on aiding military families. She said that while the new executive order is a step forward, employers must also do their part by hiring military spouses and offering their families support.

Spouses bring experience and adaptability that really can't be taught, Jill Biden said. And when they get the opportunities that they deserve, our service members can do their duty knowing that those they love most are able to thrive"

The order was largely framed by conversations through the first lady's initiative, which looks to support families, caregivers and survivors of members of the U.S. military, Jill Biden said on a call with reporters previewing the order.

With nearly one in five military families citing challenges with spousal employment as a reason for considering leaving active-duty service, the issue is no small matter for the military's recruitment and training efforts, according to the White House. More than 16,000 military spouses work within the federal government.

Were asking agencies to make it easier for spouses employed by the federal government to take administrative leave, telework and move offices, the first lady said. Were creating resources to support entrepreneurs. And the executive order helps agencies and companies retain military spouses through telework or when they move abroad.

Before their visit to Fort Liberty, the Bidens took a tour and met with students at Nash Community College in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The school is part of a coalition that received $23.7 million to train students for clean energy jobs from Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.

Biden said the job training effort is part of a strategy to "make us once again the most competitive nation in the world.

___

Associated Press writer Meg Kinnard in Greensboro, N.C.., and Seung Min Kim in Washington contributed to this report.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. The agreement between Azerbaijan and Bosnia and Herzegovina has been approved, Trend reports.

A draft law on approval of the "Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina on cooperation in the field of protection against natural disasters" was discussed at today's meeting of the Milli Majlis (Parliament) of Azerbaijan.

The document was put to the vote and adopted after discussions.
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AUSTIN, Texas (AP)  A Texas businessman at the center of the scandal that led to the historic impeachment of state Attorney General Ken Paxton was charged Friday with making false statements to mortgage lenders to obtain $172 million in loans.

The federal indictment of real estate developer Nate Paul is the result of a yearslong FBI investigation  a probe Paxton involved his office in, setting off a chain of events that led to a separate federal probe of the attorney general and his impeachment and suspension from office last month.

Paul was charged with eight counts of making false statements while seeking loans from mortgage lenders in the U.S. and Ireland. There was no mention of Paxton or the attorney generals office during the hearing.

Paul, 36, who entered the federal courtroom shackled and wearing jeans, a blue shirt and Nikes, did not enter a plea during his initial appearance in an Austin court nor visibly react as the charges were read. He was released ahead of trial but ordered to surrender his passport and inform the court of any travel outside Texas.

Following the hearing, Paul left through a back door and climbed into a car in a gated area outside the courthouse.

Paul is adamant that he is not guilty," defense attorney Gerry Morris said after hearing, adding that he did not know when his client last spoke with Paxton. An attorney for Paxton, Dan Cogdell, speculated Thursday evening that prosecutors might use the charges against Paul to try to get him to flip and cooperate in the investigation of the attorney general.

Paul is accused of overstating his assets and understating his liabilities while seeking loans in 2017 and 2018, including by giving financial institution false and counterfeit records. In one case, prosecutors said, Paul told banks he had $18 million in an account when he had less than $13,000. In another case laid out in the 23-page indictment, Paul is accused of telling a credit union he had around $3 million in liabilities when he actually owed more than $28 million at the time.

A grand jury handed up the indictment Tuesday but a judge sealed the document until after the court hearing, which took place just a few blocks from Paul's downtown Austin offices.

Prosecutors said each count of making false statements carries a penalty of up to 30 years in prison and a fine up to $1 million.

FBI agents examining Pauls troubled real estate empire searched his Austin offices and palatial home in 2019. The next year, eight of Paxton s top deputies reported the attorney general to the FBI on allegations of bribery and abuse of office, including for hiring an outside lawyer to examine the developers claims of wrongdoing by federal agents.

The allegations by Paxtons staff prompted an FBI investigation that in February was taken over by the Justice Departments Washington-based Public Integrity Section. They are also central to 20 articles of impeachment overwhelmingly approved by the GOP-led state House of Representatives. They include abuse of public trust, unfitness for office and bribery.

The impeachment accuses Paxton of using his office to help Paul over his unproven claims of an elaborate conspiracy to steal $200 million of the developers properties. The bribery counts say that in return the developer employed a woman with whom Paxton had an extramarital affair and paid for expensive renovations to the attorney generals million-dollar Austin home.

Paxton's lawyers sought to rebut the latter claim this week by releasing a bank statement that included a 2020 wire transfer purportedly showing Paxton, and not a donor, paying more than $120,000 for a home renovation. But the document raised new questions about the mens dealings.

The wire transfer was dated Oct. 1, 2020  the same day Paxtons deputies signed a letter informing the head of human resources at the Texas attorney generals office that they had reported their boss to the FBI. The $121,000 payment was to Cupertino Builders, whose manager had done work for Paul and had an email address with his company, state corporation and court records show.

Paul has faced numerous lawsuits from creditors and business partners over the years, with several of his companies filing for bankruptcy or being placed under the supervision of court-appointed overseers. Last year, one of those receivers wrote in a report that Cupertino Builders was used for fraudulent transfers from Paul's business.

Paul has denied bribing Paxton. The attorney general has also broadly denied wrongdoing and said he expects to be acquitted during an impeachment trial in the state Senate, where his wife is a member.

The Senate will set its own rules for a trial that has little precedent, given that Paxton is just the third sitting official in Texas history to be impeached. The proceeding is set begin no later than Aug. 28.

Paxton was separately indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, though he has yet to stand trial.

___

Bleiberg reported from Dallas.
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - It seems that the curse of oil and gas could strike at the political stability and peaceful alternation of power that Senegal has experienced since its independence in 1960
Ouagadougou, Burzkina Faso (PANA) - A peacekeeper from the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) was killed and 8 others wounded on Friday in an attack on one of its security patrols in the town of Ber, in the Timbuktu region of northern Mali, the UN mission announced in a statement
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. In order to hold regular political consultations between the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan and Germany, a delegation headed by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan Khalaf Khalafov was on a working visit to Germany on June 7-8, 2023, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan told Trend.

The German delegation at the political consultations was headed by the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Germany for the countries of Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia Matthias Luttenberg.

Meetings were also held with Adviser to the Federal President of Germany on Foreign Policy Wolfgang Silbermann, Head of the Department for Foreign Policy and Security Policy of the Federal Chancellor's Administration Christian Aulbach and State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Susanne Baumann.

The current state of Azerbaijani-German relations was analyzed, and views were exchanged on the possibilities of expanding cooperation during the consultations and meetings. Broad opportunities for trade and economic ties were highlighted, and issues of organizing high-level mutual visits, and developing cooperation in the field of energy, including green energy, transport, communications, industry, and investment were discussed.

Relations in the humanitarian, cultural, and educational areas were also touched upon, as well as opportunities for expanding cooperation within the framework of international organizations. Regional security issues and international issues of mutual interest were also discussed.

The sides exchanged views on the efforts and initiatives of Azerbaijan to establish lasting peace in the region, strengthen stability and security, and the effectiveness of international efforts related to the process of normalization of relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

During the discussions, the German side was informed about Armenia's contradictory position in the approach to the peace process, including its steps that violate the peace process in some cases, as well as Armenia's failure to fulfill its obligations under the trilateral declaration.

The reconstruction and construction works carried out by Azerbaijan in the liberated territories from Armenian occupation [after Second Karabakh War], the projects being implemented to return the population to their lands, the steps taken in connection with the reintegration of the Armenian residents of Karabakh into the legal, economic and social space of Azerbaijan were brought to attention.
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (PANA) - Almost two months into the armed clashes between the paramilitaries of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo and the regular army of General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhane, the UN Human Rights Office expressed concern on Friday about the devastating impact that the fighting in Sudan continues to have on civilians, an official source said
Rome, Italy (PANA) - The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said on Friday that it is temporarily halting food aid assistance in Ethiopia
Photo: (Photo : EVA MARIE UZCATEGUI /Getty Images)

In a shocking turn of events, a Florida woman, Susan Louise Lorincz, 58, has been arrested and charged with manslaughter in connection with the fatal shooting of her Black neighbor, Ajike "AJ" Owens, 35.

As the investigation unfolds, disturbing details have emerged regarding Lorincz's troubled history of harassing children in the neighborhood, including allegations of racial slurs.

The case has sparked outrage within the community, leading to calls for a swift and thorough investigation.

Troubling Patterns of Harassment and Racial Slurs

The arrest of Susan Louise Lorincz has exposed a deeply troubling pattern of behavior. According to interviews with neighbors, Lorincz has a history of harassing area children, often resorting to racial slurs and intimidation tactics.

Phyllis Wills, a resident who has lived in the neighborhood for 15 years, revealed that Lorincz would frequently confront children who were merely engaged in innocent play. Wills recounted incidents where Lorincz hurled derogatory slurs at the children and even brandished firearms, creating an atmosphere of fear and hostility.

The tragic incident unfolded when Ajike Owens approached Lorincz's residence in Ocala, seeking resolution to an ongoing dispute.

The sheriff's office reports that Owens knocked on Lorincz's door multiple times before a single fatal shot was fired through the door, striking Owens in the upper chest. Shockingly, Owens' own children were present during the altercation, witnessing the horrifying scene. In the immediate aftermath, Owens was rushed to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Read Also: New York City Tops List of Worst Air Quality Due To Canadian Wildfire Smoke

Outcry, Demands for Justice, and Questions Regarding Self-Defense

According to the BBC, the recent incident marked the most recent escalation in a series of disputes between the two women, prompting law enforcement to be contacted on multiple occasions, with at least six reported incidents since January 2021.

Furthermore, on Tuesday, a significant number of demonstrators congregated outside a nearby prosecutor's office, urging authorities to take swift action and make an arrest in connection with the case.

During a press conference held at New St. John Missionary Baptist Church on Wednesday, as reported by the Tampa Bay Times, community leaders, friends, and family members of the victim gathered to express their gratitude to the sheriff for the arrest and to demand justice for Owens.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who spoke during the conference, emphasized the straightforward nature of the case and urged the state attorney's office to prosecute the shooter with the utmost dedication.

Crump, accompanied by Owens's mother and concerned neighbors, highlighted that the so-called "feud" mentioned by the sheriff was primarily between Lorincz and the neighborhood children who frequently played near her residence and were often subjected to derogatory language and provocation from Lorincz. The incident has raised significant questions about the claim of self-defense made by Lorincz.

Crump argues that the response of firing a weapon through a metal door was disproportionate and unnecessary, urging Lorincz to have sought assistance from the police instead.

As the investigation progresses, the community remains steadfast in its demand for justice. Protests have been organized, with residents calling for a thorough examination of Lorincz's troubled history and a fair legal process.

The focus is not only on holding Lorincz accountable for her actions but also on addressing the broader issues of racial prejudice, harassment, and the appropriate use of force within society.

In the wake of this tragic event, the community hopes that the loss of Ajike Owens serves as a catalyst for change, fostering a safer environment for all residents, particularly the children, who deserve to grow up without fear or discrimination.

Related Article: Child Labor Violations: Meatpacking, Produce Companies in 11 States Under Scrutiny in Federal Investigation
Photo: (Photo : ROBYN BECK / Getty Images)

The FDA is another step closer to protecting infants from RSV through AstraZeneca-Sanofi's Nirsevimab vaccine.

In a significant development in the battle against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a panel of independent advisors to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has unanimously recommended the approval of the antibody nirsevimab.

This recommendation marks a crucial step toward safeguarding infants from RSV, the leading cause of hospitalization among newborns.

If the FDA grants approval, nirsevimab will become the first medical intervention available in the United States capable of protecting all infants from RSV.

AstraZeneca developed this monoclonal antibody, which would be marketed by Sanofi.

The Unanimous Recommendation for Nirsevimab

Nirsevimab offers a promising solution to combat RSV effectively.

While another monoclonal antibody called palivizumab exists for preterm infants and those with specific risk factors, nirsevimab's approval would provide protection to a broader population, including healthy infants, who constitute the majority of RSV-related hospitalizations.

Unlike palivizumab, which requires monthly administration, nirsevimab offers the convenience of a single-dose regimen.

The FDA's review of nirsevimab's effectiveness revealed encouraging results.

According to CNBC, the FDA's analysis of the antibody demonstrated up to 75% efficacy in preventing lower respiratory tract infections requiring medical attention and approximately 78% efficacy in preventing hospitalizations due to RSV.

Even the more conservative estimate, accounting for missing health outcome data, still placed nirsevimab's effectiveness at around 48% against lower respiratory tract infections.

Importantly, the FDA did not identify any safety concerns during its review of nirsevimab.

While other monoclonal antibodies have been associated with serious allergic reactions and hypersensitivity, the trials involving nirsevimab showed minimal cases of these side effects in infants who received the antibody.

It is essential to note that the FDA anticipates rare cases of allergic reactions and hypersensitivity to occur if nirsevimab receives approval.

Recognizing the paramount importance of safety, AstraZeneca has committed to closely monitoring the safety profile of nirsevimab through a robust global monitoring system.

This measure ensures that any potential adverse effects can be promptly identified and addressed.

Read Also: Child Labor Violations: Meatpacking, Produce Companies in 11 States Under Scrutiny in Federal Investigation

Nirsevimab: A Potential Game-Changer

According to NPR, Dr. Mary Anne Jackson, a voting member and pediatrician at Children's Mercy in Kansas City, Missouri, highlights the significance of this infectious disease within the pediatric population, emphasizing its substantial impact on the lives of young children and the limitations it imposes on accessing medical care for those with other illnesses.

Dr. Steven Krug, a pediatric emergency physician and professor at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, concurs, noting the significant morbidity and mortality caused by RSV.

The viral infection annually leads to the hospitalization of approximately 58,000 to 80,000 young children in the United States, making it the primary reason for infant hospitalizations.

AstraZeneca's analysis suggests that the use of this drug could prevent the majority of RSV-related hospitalizations.

Looking ahead, unanswered questions remain regarding the interaction between nirsevimab and vaccines under development that confer protective antibodies to fetuses when administered to pregnant mothers.

While the FDA is not obligated to follow the recommendations of its advisory panel, the unanimous vote in favor of nirsevimab underscores its potential significance in the fight against RSV.

According to NBC News, it is worth noting that nirsevimab has already received approval in Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdom, further highlighting its global impact in preventing RSV-related hospitalizations.

Furthermore, in the event of drug approval, infants born between April and October could receive immunizations at their pediatrician's office ahead of the approaching RSV season.

Similarly, infants born from November to March could be immunized before their discharge from the hospital.

The company projected that the administration of their injection could potentially prevent around 500,000 medical visits annually, which includes up to 60,000 hospital admissions.

Related Article: FDA Approves GSK's Arexvy: First Vaccine to Protect Against Life-Threatening RSV in Elderly
Photo: (Photo : Buda Mendes / Getty Images)

Louisiana has taken a significant step toward safeguarding children's online experiences with the potential implementation of a new bill, HB61.

If signed into law by Governor John Bel Edwards, the legislation will mandate that kids and teens under the age of 18 obtain parental permission before signing up for online accounts, including those for social media, gaming, and various other online activities.

The move reflects a growing trend in several states to protect young individuals from the potential risks and harms of unrestricted internet access.

Concerns over Children's Online Safety

According to CNBC, as digital platforms become increasingly integrated into the lives of young people, concerns about their safety and well-being have emerged.

Louisiana's HB61 seeks to address these concerns by placing a requirement on minors to seek parental consent when creating online accounts. The bill covers a wide range of services, including video games, social networks, and other platforms that facilitate the exchange of text, photos, or videos online.

By involving parents in the decision-making process, proponents of the legislation believe it will provide an additional layer of protection for children navigating the online landscape.

HB61 encompasses a comprehensive approach to regulating children's online activities. In addition to requiring parental permission for new accounts, the bill would nullify any agreements previously made by miners during the sign-up process.

Existing state law already empowers parents or legal guardians to rescind contracts their children enter into. Moreover, the bill allows online platforms to employ third-party services to obtain consent from parents, facilitating a streamlined process for account creation while ensuring compliance with the legislation.

Louisiana's proposed legislation reflects a larger national conversation about the balance between protecting children online and respecting their digital autonomy.

According to CNN, conservative states like Utah and Arkansas have already enacted similar laws, underscoring the widespread popularity of measures aimed at safeguarding kids from online harm.

However, it is worth noting that even liberal states like California, as well as certain Democratic lawmakers in Congress, have been actively exploring new regulations to mitigate the adverse effects of social media on young individuals.

Read Also: Child Labor Violations: Meatpacking, Produce Companies in 11 States Under Scrutiny in Federal Investigation

Tech Industry and Civil Society Responses

The introduction of HB61 has sparked debate and garnered mixed reactions from various stakeholders. Tech companies, including internet giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, and TikTok, represented by the group NetChoice, have expressed their opposition to the bill.

They argue that while protecting children online is essential, such legislation fails to consider the positive aspects of social media, particularly for marginalized youth.

Critics also contend that stricter regulations may inadvertently limit the resources available to children in negative home environments and necessitate the collection of more user information, raising concerns about privacy.

Before the bill can become law, Governor John Bel Edwards must sign it. If approved, HB61 is set to take effect in August 2024, giving online platforms and families ample time to adapt to the new requirements.

Aside from Arkansas and Utah, The Verge also reported that the legislation's potential consequences extend beyond other states like Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, and Texas, which have also contemplated similar measures.

Some lawmakers at the federal level have introduced bills, such as the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, which proposes a nationwide age verification pilot program and stricter age restrictions for social media access.

In a digital age where children are increasingly connected, Louisiana's HB61 signals a commitment to protecting their online well-being.

By requiring parental permission for kids' online activities, the bill aims to strike a balance between the benefits and potential risks of the digital realm.

As the legislative landscape evolves, policymakers, industry stakeholders, and advocates will continue to grapple with finding effective solutions that ensure children can safely navigate the vast online world while preserving their rights and freedoms.

Related Article: LGBTQ Pride Events in Conservative States Altered Due To Anti-Drag Legislation
Photo: (Photo : engin akyurt/Unsplash)

In an era where the pressures of parenting often lead to burnout, one mom's viral TikTok cleaning strike has ignited a conversation about the importance of self-care and setting boundaries. Sarah Thompson, a mother of two from Chicago, posted a video on the popular social media platform showcasing her decision to take a break from her household chores in order to prioritize her mental and physical well-being.

According to Today, Thompson's TikTok video captured the attention of millions as she shared her journey of exhaustion and the realization that she needed to make a change. With mounting responsibilities and the constant demand for a spotless home, she found herself neglecting her own needs. In the video, Thompson announced that she would be taking a week-long cleaning strike, encouraging other parents to join her in reclaiming their personal time.

Overwhelmed Parents Applaud Cleaning Strike as a Call to Prioritize Mental and Physical Well-Being

The response was overwhelming. Parents from around the globe applauded Thompson's bold move, empathizing with the constant pressure to maintain a pristine household while also managing the everyday challenges of parenting. Many shared their own experiences of feeling overwhelmed and the difficulty of finding time for self-care amidst the chaos, per Home-Start West Somerset.

As Thompson's video gained traction, experts in the fields of mental health and parenting weighed in on the significance of her message. Dr. Emily Collins, a renowned psychologist specializing in parental stress, highlighted the importance of setting boundaries and prioritizing self-care. She emphasized that parents who neglect their own well-being are more likely to experience burnout, which can have detrimental effects on their overall mental health and parenting abilities.

Thompson's cleaning strike also sparked conversations about shared responsibilities within households. Many viewers pointed out that household chores should be a collective effort involving all family members rather than solely burdening one person. This raised important questions about gender roles, parenting expectations, and the need for open communication between partners.

Read Also: Mom Uses Only Paper Plates For Every Meal At Home, And Her Reason Is Touching

Parenting Community Rallies Behind Viral Movement, Shares Stories of Self-Care and Balance

In the days that followed Thompson's viral TikTok video, numerous parents across social media platforms began sharing their own stories of self-care and finding ways to balance their responsibilities. From implementing chore charts for children to enlisting the help of spouses and extended family members, parents demonstrated a newfound commitment to prioritizing their mental and physical well-being.

The impact of Thompson's cleaning strike extended beyond social media. Local parenting groups organized workshops and support sessions to discuss the challenges faced by parents and explore strategies for self-care. Mental health organizations partnered with parenting bloggers to promote resources and tools for managing parental stress and finding balance.

Thompson herself has been amazed by the response her TikTok video has received and is grateful to have sparked a movement focused on self-care. In a recent interview, she stated, "I never expected my video to resonate with so many people. It just goes to show that we're all in this together, and by prioritizing ourselves, we can become better parents."

As the conversations around parental burnout, self-care, and shared responsibilities continue, Thompson's cleaning strike serves as a powerful reminder that parents need to take care of themselves in order to be fully present and effective in their roles. By challenging societal expectations and redefining the concept of a "perfect" home, Thompson has inspired a generation of parents to prioritize their well-being, fostering healthier families and happier households in the process.

Related Article: Wife Continues Husband's Legacy of Kindness
Photo: (Photo : ERIN EDGERTON/AFP via Getty Images)

Rescuers in Washington state are hailing the incredible resilience and resourcefulness of a 10-year-old girl who managed to survive over 24 hours alone in the rugged terrain of the Cascade Mountains after getting separated from her family during an outing.

According to CNN, Shunghla Mashwani was enjoying a gathering with her extended family in the picturesque Cle Elum River Valley on Sunday when she unintentionally became separated from the group. They were crossing a pedestrian bridge over the river to have lunch near the Cathedral Pass Trailhead, according to the Kittitas County Sheriff's Office. Kittitas County is situated approximately 85 miles east of Seattle.

How a 10-Year-Old Girl Survived Alone in Harsh Terrain for Over 24 Hours

Originally from Afghanistan, Shunghla and her family moved to the United States two years ago. According to the sheriff's office, they frequently seek solace in the high backcountry because it reminds them of their home.

According to The Guardian, Shunghla recounted her ordeal, explaining that she couldn't locate the nearby bridge her family had crossed, leading to her being separated and left alone. The sheriff's office reported, "Shunghla told her family and rescuers she found herself suddenly separated and alone when the family was traveling back toward the footbridge and she couldn't find the bridge on her own."

After noticing Shunghla's absence, approximately 20 adults from the family group retraced their steps and initiated a search. However, due to the lack of cell service in the area, a passerby offered to call the police using a satellite phone from a nearby cabin around 2 p.m.

In response, deputies, volunteer ground search teams, and law enforcement personnel from neighboring agencies swiftly joined the search efforts. Drones, helicopters, and K9 units were also deployed to aid in the search for Shunghla.

Read Also: Florida Mom Reunites With Abducted Daughter After a 14-Year Search

Young Girl's Survival Story Highlights Strength in the Face of Adversity

Realizing the language barrier, the sheriff's office requested the girl's father record a reassuring message in their native language, which was broadcast throughout the search area. The message conveyed that people were actively searching for Shunghla and doing their utmost to help her, according to a spokesperson for the sheriff's office. "The search area was steep, rugged, and remote, with dense trees and undergrowth cut through by the fast-running Cle Elum River," stated the sheriff's office, highlighting the challenging conditions faced by the search teams.

According to CTV News, after spending more than 24 hours alone in the wilderness, Shunghla was finally located by two ground search volunteers around 3 p.m. on Monday, approximately 1.5 miles south of where she was last seen. Remarkably, she had only sustained minor scrapes. Recalling her experience, Shunghla told CNN affiliate KING that she tried to sleep during the night and planned to wake up early in the morning to find her parents in the forest.

"She hiked downstream through the dense forest and spent the cold night between some trees. She said she knew it was the right thing to follow the river. She proved an extraordinarily resourceful and resilient 10-year-old," praised the sheriff's office. Shunghla's courageous survival story serves as a testament to her remarkable determination and the unwavering dedication of the search and rescue teams who tirelessly worked to bring her back safely.

Related Article: New York Girl, Missing Since 2019, Found Alive in Secret Staircase; Who is Paislee Shultis?
In February, Patently Apple reported that Qualcomm, Samsung and Google knew that Apple was likely to introduce their first-gen XR Headset at WWDC23. At Samsung's Unpacked 2023 event, Dr. TM Roh, Samsung's President and Head of MX Business, brought Qualcomm's CEO and Google's SVP of Platforms and Ecosystems on stage to announce their collaboration for building the next XR experiences. Roh added: "For the chipset, it is going to be a strategic collaboration with Qualcomm. The hardware will be provided by us. And the software, he added, will be provided by Google."

Apple did in fact introduce Apple Vision Pro, their first spatial computer, at their WWDC23 event this week. Apple presented a new operating system for the headset branded VisionOS. The revolutionary spatial computer seamlessly blends digital content with the physical world, while allowing users to stay present and connected to others. Vision Pro creates an infinite canvas for apps that scales beyond the boundaries of a traditional display and introduces a fully three-dimensional user interface controlled by the most natural and intuitive inputs possible  a users eyes, hands, and voice. Featuring visionOS, the worlds first spatial operating system, Vision Pro lets users interact with digital content in a way that feels like it is physically present in their space.

With Apple revealing their vision for spatial computers, the Samsung, Qualcomm and Google alliance have their work cut out for them if they want to match Apple's offering. The alliance has hinted that they'll have their first device out within the next year.

Last month, Sameer Samat, a vice president of product management at Google stated that Google is "excited about our new Android collaboration with Samsung Electronics in the domain of immersive XR. We will share more news later this year."

Business Korea reported yesterday that "Samsung also filed a trademark application for Galaxy Glasses with the Korean Intellectual Property Office in February. Industry insiders are speculating that Samsungs XR product will be shaped like glasses, rather than ski goggles like Apples Vision Pro."

While Samsung has filed numerous patent for an XR-style headset in the past, they've been escalating their patent filings aimed a AR Glasses for most of 2023. Here are just a few example patent filings: 01, 02, 03, 04 and 05. The patent figures below relate to their May 19, 2023 filing that appears to be a hybrid AR device with much thicker lenses than the other glasses oriented patents.

We may know later this year what the alliance's headset will look like or they may want to wait and reveal it a CES2023 in a splashier presentation. Will the alliance attempt to match the Apple Vision Pro's capabilities or aim much lower to compete with Meta's Quest 3. Their third option is to leap to a simplier glasses form factor like the patent figures present above, though technnically, glasses may have to wait for 2nm or even 1nm processors are available in order to be of value in providing longer battery life, faster computation and thinner lenses.

According to Business Korea, "This is the first time the Android group has united for the MR-XR market. In the past, each Android group member company had launched some projects and then abandoned them. Google launched the Daydream Project in 2016 to develop a VR platform for smartphones, but gave it up in 2019. Samsung Electronics, along with Meta subsidiary Oculus, launched the Gear VR Headset in 2014, but has not released a related product since then.

With the Android group following Apples lead in developing MR devices, industry insiders are paying much attention to the growth potential of this market. Market research firm Counterpoint Research expects global MR-XR headset shipments to grow from 18 million units in 2022 to 110 million in 2025 and 1 billion in 2030."

With the Apple Pro Vision setting the bar very high for competitors to compete with it in the 'Spatial Computing' space, will the Android alliance aim to compete with the Apple Vision Pro, aim lower at a mere gaming device or something in between?

Have an opinion on this? Send your comments in below or on our Twitter feed.
Phillips Consulting Limited (pcl.) and LRMG Africa hosted a successful Ghana Business Conference on Reimagining Talent Experience and Retention. The conference featured discussions led by prominent executives who presented innovative ideas for improving the utilisation of corporate talent in Ghana.



During his keynote speech, Rob Taiwo, the Managing Director of pcl. emphasised that "talent goes where talent wants, and employees have the freedom to choose where they work. He also emphasised that leadership is crucial in creating inclusive work environments that prioritise psychological safety and support employee retention and those companies that do not prioritise employee well-being and job satisfaction may risk losing their top talent to organisations that do.



Paul Ayim, Partner, Digital Learning, pcl. stated that when you provide your employees with an environment that fosters learning, understanding of the company's purpose, collaboration, and empowerment, it leads to a positive experience and high engagement. Thanks to digital learning, employees no longer need to wait for a classroom to learn. This democratises the learning experience, improves performance, and establishes a consistent culture. Organisations that re-imagine and refocus their talent experience will always outcompete peers in their industry.



Speakers, including Jonathan Thompson, Head of LRMG Africa, Oredolapo Adedayo, Head of HR, pcl., Esi Mmirba Wilson, Director, People and Transformation, Consolidated Bank Ghana, Francis Buamah, Chief Execution Champion, bASE_JUMP, and Kojo Amissah, Lead Executive/Principal Consultant, CITAM shared valuable insights on how companies can improve their talent experience, increase employee retention rates, address underemployment issues, and promote a culture of inclusivity and skills development. They also discussed the future of work and the effects of digital technology and Artificial Intelligence.



The Ghana Business Conference was a successful event that offered valuable insights into addressing talent management in the Industry 4.0 era.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









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BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has approved the law on amendments to the decree "On Public Participation", Trend reports.

According to the amendments:

1. In Article 1.0.4, the words "on relevant issues" are replaced by "as well as on issues of public and local importance discussed by central, local executive authorities and local self-government bodies"; in the same article, after the word "preparation", an addition follows - "(study)".

2. In Article 1.0.8, after the word "projects", an addition follows - "or issues of public and local importance discussed by central, local executive authorities and local self-government bodies", and the words "central and local executive authorities and local self-government bodies" are replaced by "these bodies".

3. In Article 7.1.5, the word "public" is followed by an addition - "and local".

4. In Articles 16.1 and 17.1, the word "projects" is followed by an addition - "or issues of public and local importance under discussion".
The US is suspending food aid to Ethiopia because it says donations are being diverted from those in need.



The US Agency for International Development (USAID) says an investigation has uncovered a widespread and co-ordinated scheme to divert assistance.



"We made the difficult but necessary decision that we cannot move forward with distribution of food assistance until reforms are in place," USAid said.



It does not say who is behind the campaign, but an internal briefing document quoted by the Reuters news agency alleges that some officials are doing it using military units across the country.



The US is by far the largest humanitarian donor to Ethiopia, where more than 20 million people need food aid because of drought and the recent war in the northern region of Tigray.



This suspension comes weeks after USAid and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) halted aid to Tigray over similar claims.

Source: BBC









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State Housing Company (SHC) Chief, Kwabena Ampofo Appiah, was in London recently to speak at the Ghana Investment Opportunities summit, presenting to potential investors opportunities for investment in the burgeoning housing sector.



Ghana currently has a severe housing deficit of about 2 million homes, with the acuteness of this situation being felt particularly by lower and middle income families. To bridge the gap it is estimated 400000 homes need to be built annually for the next five years.



This is a target that the government through its developing agencies cant meet on their own hence the governments invitation to the private sector to join in the effort. Access to housing is difficult, particularly in urban areas where 58% of the population now live.



Housing is far from affordable, with landlords normally demanding two years rent up front. With urbanisation running at an annual rate of 3.3% the current situation is unsustainable. According to statistics, only 5% of the urban population are able to provide for their housing need without any support.



With some form of government subsidy, it is estimated that at least 60% would be able to provide for their housing need. The remaining 35% would not be able to afford homes even with government subsidies. For ownership to be a realistic ambition.



State Housing Company, a government organ, has an ambitious plan to close the housing deficit, providing affordable homes for lower and middle income families via government subsidy. With an emphasis on quality as well as affordability, SHC is targeting, in the short and medium term at least, the 60% of those who could afford a home with the government providing some form of limited subsidy.



In the longer term, SHC aims to look at providing housing for the 35% requiring a much heavier subsidy or rental options to meet their housing need.



Much of Ghanas current housing stock is of poor quality consisting of shacks, shipping containers, kiosks and assortment of other ragtag structures constructed and located in a slapdash manner without recourse to infrastructure.



The result is often shantytowns that are a blight on the landscape and not fit for human habitation. SHC homes are built to high specifications and minimum space standards, ensuring that quality of life for occupants is not compromised.



Despite the government implementing an Affordable Housing Programme in 2006, the project initially failed to take off, with many promising projects stymied by a lack of coordination between institutions and stake holders, lack of access to finance and a reliance on imported building materials as well as an associated escalation in their cost.



These cost increases were underpinned by an overall lack of policies and strategies targeted at the critical components that impact on the cost of housing units in the short and the long term.



Learning from the mishaps of earlier projects, The government have gone into partnership with the private sector to help achieve its aims, as well as utilising technology that allows processes and procurement to be as cost-effective as possible.



From securing land banks, to providing infrastructure services, mortgages and rent-to-own schemes, SHC serves as a one-stop-shop in the construction and purchasing of homes fit-for-purpose. When it comes to land, traditionally a bone of contention in Ghana, SHC carries out open liaison with all stakeholders  Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, Lands Commission and traditional rulers.



For the secured land, infrastructure is planned and provided in conjunction, together with engagement with the Ministry of Finance through the Joint Technical Committee that considers how the government can absorb the infrastructure component for commissioned projects. A thread of joined-up-thinking is par for the course.



SHC has developed a model that makes owning a decent home a realistic ambition for the majority of Ghanaians. Generous government subsidies, as well as tax-breaks for developers, is a fillip for the construction industry serving as a wider vehicle for investment and job creation.



It is an industry that is only set to grow, satisfying both the demand and supply sides of the industry in a mutually beneficial partnership.



Authur

Kwame Gyamfi

Freelance Journalist

London, United Kingdom









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Angolan President Joao Lourenco has sacked the minister responsible for economic and social development following protests triggered by the governments decision to end fuel subsidies



He replaced Manuel Nunes Junior, a seasoned minister and economics professor, with the central bank governor, Jose de Lima Massano, a statement said.



The withdrawal of the subsidies - which Mr Nunes Junior said was aimed at cutting government spending - came into effect on 1 June, leading into a steep rise in fuel prices.



The oil-rich nation has since experienced a wave of protests, with more expected over the weekend.



On Monday, five people died and eight were injured after police opened fire on a group of protesters the city of Huambo.



Angola is one of the largest oil exporters in sub-Saharan Africa.

Source: BBC









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The Executive Secretary of the Ghana Hajj Board Secretariat, Alhaji Farouk Hamza, has landed in Tamale to oversee the formalities preceding the commencement of flights to Saudi Arabia from the Northern end.



Accompanying him are some members of the Secretariat who have already set to work to ensure a smooth operation.



Speaking to the DAILY GUIDE upon touching down at the Tamale International Airport, he said all is set for the airlift. The relevant agencies have readied themselves for the task which God willing will be smooth. We have taken all the necessary measures to achieve success.



Meanwhile, the Hajj Village in Accra is now a beehive of activities as agents and prospective pilgrims alike can be seen going in and departing the venue as they ensure that their documentations are in order.



The frontage of the Hajj Village has been given a facelift with fresh chippings and a barricade to ensure security during the operations which commence as soon as the Northern end is completed.



Information reaching DAILY GUIDE from Saudi Arabia is that visa abusers are weighing their options as the Ghana Hajj Board and Saudi authorities have fresh strategies to ensure that they do not infiltrate the camp of the Ghanaian contingent.



As for the Saudi authorities, they are ready to apply sanctions on those who are unqualified to perform the Hajj because of their visa status.



Over two thousand such illegal Ghanaians are in Saudi Arabia ready to abuse their visas, but as the Executive Secretary said, we call on genuine pilgrims to support us in stopping these persons from entering our camp. Our efforts at ensuring the comfort of our pilgrims will be threatened by the illegal persons.

Source: dailyguidenetwork.com









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The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) Taskforce has arrested three shop managers of some stores in Accra for breaching Section 41 of the VAT Act.



Section 41 of the VAT Act 2013, (Act 820) states that every registered VAT taxpayer is required to issue an electronic VAT invoice with details prescribed by the Commissioner General when they provide services and supply goods.



According to the Head of Accra Central Enforcement Unit, GRA, Joseph Annan, Buildmart Ghana limited at Adabraka, Bedarts Cold Supplies at Lashibi, Yat ventures at Mamobi, and Excellence Boutique at Spintex were identified for not issuing VAT invoices to customers upon investigation, thus, prompting the agency to arrest the managers.



In all these cases they have been arrested, the CID will take them to the Charge Office for their statements to be taken, when they are done they will come to my office where the punitive assessment will be established and they have to pay immediately. After that, we will recommend them for full audit while the CID also continues with their investigations, he stated.



He added that the exercise has been on-going for nine months and so far, 48 shops have been flagged for not complying with section 41 of the VAT Act.



Mr. Annan further explained that the arrests are not done abruptly and that investigations take place before any arrests are made.



We started with test purchase where we come in unnoticed and buy from you to test whether you are voluntarily complying. Once you fail that test, the next process is to arrest you for non-compliance, he shared.



The exercise is expected to continue throughout the city.

Source: dailyguidenetwork.com









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The police have arrested four suspected kidnappers at their rented residence at Ntranoa, near Ankaful, in Cape Coast.



One suspect, who allegedly disguised himself and entered a mosque, has reportedly been killed, while two others, including their supposed leader, believed to be in his 60s, are, however, on the run.



The police are said to have rescued some victims, all in their 20s, and taken them to the hospital following the Wednesday evening operation.



Information gathered by the Ghana News Agency (GNA) from residents of Ntranoa suggested that the suspected kidnappers lured their victims from Accra and other parts of the country with the promise of job opportunities and camped them at their fenced apartments for unlawful purposes.



Some residents told the GNA that they noticed the presence of the suspects, believed to be francophone nationals, in the community about two months ago.



However, their decent disposition did not give them away as being involved in any illegal activities, such as trafficking or ritual activities.



Some residents said that on Wednesday afternoon, at about 1 p.m., one of the victims managed to escape and called for help from others.



The matter was reported to personnel of the Regional Police Headquarters, whose timely intervention saved two of the suspects from being lynched by members of the community.



One of them, who also attempted to escape, was reportedly caught and beaten at Atrokwa before he was handed over to the police.



Later in the evening, a female suspect, who identified herself as the cook for the suspects, was also arrested.



The police reportedly retrieved talismans, knives, and other implements from the apartment.



The victims were put on a bus with their luggage and mattresses.







Source: GNA









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The 2020 running mate to John Dramani Mahama, Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, has joined executives from the national, regional, constituency, and branch levels of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to campaign on behalf of James Gyakye Quayson.



This is towards the re-election bid being sought by the NDC member, whose election as Member of Parliament for the constituency was recently declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.



Campaigning for him, Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang met with some traders at the markets, beauticians, hairdressers, seamstresses, and the elderly on her first day in the town.



She told the people that she believes that James Quayson is best placed to continue the great work he started after his victory in 2020.



A vote for him in this bye-election solidifies this position, she stressed.



The NDC hopes to reclaim the constituency seat on June 27, 2023.



The party is retaining its candidate, James Gyakye Quayson, for the crucial election to be conducted by the Electoral Commission of Ghana.















Source: GNA









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Disqualified Member of Parliament for Assin North constituency, James Gyakye Quayson, who has still been filed by the National Democratic Congress, to contest the Assin North by-election says he will fight with his last breath to win back the parliamentary seat.



I will fight for Assin North with my last breath. In every family, there is a Judas, as you are trying to pack things up others will be ready to destroy. But I know whoever is fighting something not for selfish gain but for the gains of the public, God crowns his efforts. The vision here is not a selfish vision. It is a vision for the whole Assin North community and its people. So, I know definitely we will achieve it, he said in an interview posted by TV3.



But some concerned persons advise that the deposed MP should abstain from this by-election and wait till 2024 to re-contest the seat.



However, Dr. Benjamin Otchere-Ankrah strongly believes Mr. James Gyakye Quayson is the NDC's best shot for the Assin North seat.



"He is their best foot forward," he told host Nana Yaw Kesseh on Peace FM's "kokrokoo" show.



He noted that for the governing New Patriotic Party to exert their energies in opposing Mr. Quayson's candidature is an indication of him possessing a unique quality.



"There must be something that is in Gyakye Quayson which is why the NPP doesn't want him to re-contest," he emphasized.





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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Dr. Benjamin Otchere-Ankrah, a Governance Lecturer at the Central University, has released his list of candidates who will make the "five" for the New Patriotic Party upcoming presidential primaries.



Ten candidates including Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia and former Trade Minister, Alan Kyerematen have picked their nomination forms to contest the race.



The party is therefore to hold a Super Delegates Congress to elect five out of the 10 Presidential aspirants who will then go into the main congress for a candidate to be elected to lead the party.



To Dr. Benjamin Otchere-Ankrah, his top five candidates to progress to the main primaries are Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, Alan Kwadwo Kyerematen, the Assin Central MP; Kennedy Agyapong, former Railways and Development Minister; Joe Ghartey and former Member of Parliament for Asante Mampong, Francis Addai-Nimoh.



Those who will not make it, according to him, include former Agriculture Minister, Dr. Afriyie Akoto, former NPP General Secretary; Kwabena Agyepong, former Energy Minister; Boakye Agyarko and the rest.



"I can't see what is motivating some people to contest this election," he exclamed during Peace FM's "Kokrokoo" morning show.



Watch video below





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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A former Presidential staffer, Charles Bissue, has gone to the High Court to stop the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) from investigating him over suspected corruption and corruption-related offences involving a public officer.



According to Mr. Bissue, an investigation cannot be launched when a copy of the petition forming the basis of the investigation has not been given to him.



In a writ, Mr. Bissue argued that, the OSP in it half-year report dated December 31, 2022 had stated that the Office has concluded investigation into the allegation of the use of public office for profit against Charles Bissue during his tenure as secretary to the erstwhile Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM) arising from an investigative documentary titled Galamsey Fraud Part 1 published by Tiger Eye P.I and the journalist, Anas Aremeyaw Anas.



But in view of this and notwithstanding a suit against the OSP, the Office in a new letter dated May 3, 2023 has informed him of ongoing investigations into the activities of the IMCIM.



According to the letter, he is still considered a person of interest, hence the need for him to avail himself for an interview.



This is the second time Mr. Bissue is suing the Special Prosecutor since the release of the documentary by Anas Aremeyaw Anas.



Earlier, he had argued that the police have already investigated and exonerated him of any wrongdoing.



He is therefore seeking a declaration from the court that upon a true interpretation of the OSP Act, 2017 (Act 959), the OSP does not have the power to review an investigation done by the police.



Again, he is seeking a declaration that the powers granted the OSP under Act 959 does not allow the anti-graft body to investigate and prosecute him when the subject matter had already been investigated by the police.



Mr Bissue also wants the court to declare that the OSP cannot investigate him without investigating Anas and Tiger Eye P.I.



Finally, he is seeking an order perpetually restraining the OSP from investigating him over the same issue investigated by the police, unless the police refers the matter to the OSP.



Background



The OSP, in December last year, announced that it was investigating indigenous mining firm, Akonta Mining Limited, Mr Bissue, some officials of the Lands Commission, Forestry Commission, the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, some mining entities, individuals and political party officials over suspected corruption relating to illegal mining.



A statement signed by the Special Prosecutor, Kissi Agyebeng, and issued in Accra on December 10 last year, said Mr Bissue was already being investigated on allegations that he used his office for private gain.



The investigation includes the active and ongoing enquiry into allegations of use of public office for profit against Charles Bissue during his tenure as Secretary to the IMCIM, arising from an investigative documentary titled Galamsey Fraud Part I published by Tiger Eye P.I., the statement said.



But Mr. Bissue has refuted all allegations made in the documentary against him. As I have said countless times that money was not a bribe and I did not make any demands whatsoever from any operative or beneficiary of illegal mining while I served on the IMCIM, he said in a recent statement.



Subsequently, in July 2019, the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service exonerated Mr Bissue from any wrongdoing or allegation of corruption.



The CID concluded that the documentary which was aired was not a true reflection of what transpired between Mr. Bissue and one Yaw Ben of ORR Resource Enterprise.



The CID investigations primarily relied on the documentary and other sources, as already indicated, but the lead investigator of the Tiger Eye documentary, Mr Anas Aremeyaw Anas, failed to avail himself to assist in investigations and also failed to provide a copy of the unedited version of the documentary, the CID report said.

Source: myjoyonline.com









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BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has signed a decree on amendments to the "Action Plan for the implementation of the Strategy for Children for 2020-2025", Trend reports.

According to the decree, the Cabinet of Ministers, the State Committee on Family, Women and Children, the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of the Population should ensure the preparation of a new law "On the rights of the child".

The project preparation period will cover 2023-2024.
The Speaker of the Parliament of Ghana, Rt. Hon. Alban Sumana Bagbin has commended the Vanuatu Trade Commissioner to Ghana, Amb. Prof Hugh Aryee, for linking up the Republic of Vanuatu to Ghana and Africa, and ensuring the country opens business interests in the Vanuatu economy towards African trade facilitation.



The Rt. Honourable Speaker emphasized on how the world has become a global village and for that matter, the distance between countries no longer matter, hence, the extreme need to get some of the smaller nations at the outermost parts of the world to be linked to the advanced and other nations for bilateral trade engagements.



The Rt. Hon. Speaker said this when he received the Vanuatu Trade Commissioner to Ghana, Amb. Prof Hugh Aryee and his team to the Parliament House in Accra.



The visit was to officially inform the Speaker about the impending visit of the Speaker of the Vanuatu Parliament and his 5-member delegation on an official state visit to Ghana in July 2023.



The Trade Commissioner also briefed the Speaker and his staff about the extent of plans and the itinerary for the august visit as regards the important places and personalities the august visitors might want to visit when in Ghana.



He informed the Rt Hon Speaker and his team of the reciprocal return business trip to Vanuatu which has been slated from 20th August to 4th September. The business trade mission will include a cross section of the Ghanaian public, businesses and trade agencies interested in doing business in the Republic of Vanuatu as well as leisure and holidays.



Rt Hon Alban Sumana Bagbin told the gathering that he was very happy about the visit and reiterated the desire of entire House would be looking forward to the trade and business mission.



The Rt. Hon speaker also mentioned he was excited about this news because he had always wanted to visit Vanuatu in the past, hence, a pleasant news and therefore encouraged Ghanaians to take advantage of this opportunity.



He said the Parliament of Ghana is ready to receive his counterparts and the delegation from the Republic of Vanuatu, accord them all the necessary courtesies and protocols they deserve. He said he will confer with the leadership of the House to afford the visiting Speaker the opportunity to address the House.



He called for the constitution of a joint Committee of his Parliamentary staff and the Trade Commission to come out with a befitting plan of action for the historic visit being the first official visit of government delegation from the Republic of Vanuatu to Ghana.



The delegation would be accompanied by Hon Seremaiah Matai Nawalu Member of parliament and Minister of Trade, Industry, Tourism and Ni-Vanuatu Businesses, Hon Anatole Hymak Member of Parliament, Chairman of Economics and Foreign Policies Standing Committees of Vanuatu Parliament, Mr. Noel Kalo, Director of Department of Trade and Mr. Gaetan Ruru who oversees Interparliamentary Relations of the office of the parliament of Vanuatu and Ms. Vanessa MOLISA - Advisor to the Office of Speaker.



The Trade Commissioner presented a picturesque brochure which details the blueprint of activities of the Vanuatu Trade Commissions (short, medium to long term) goals and objectives for Ghana and the rest West African regional bloc under which the mandates of the commission operate, as well as Vanuatu vehicle Stickers, presented to the Rt Hon Speaker.

Source: Emmanuel Akorli/ Peace FM's Parliamentary Correspondent









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Seasoned Journalist, Kwesi Pratt Jnr. says the deposed Member of Parliament for Assin North, James Gyakye Quayson, is absolutely qualified to contest the seat again.



He said this on Peace FM's "Kokrokoo" show Friday morning in contrast with arguments that Mr. Gyakye Quayson should abstain from the by-election, particularly due to reason that he has been cited for criminal offence in a law suit by the Attorney General.



The Attorney General, Godfred Dame, is said to have filed criminal charges including perjury against the former MP, accusing him of deceiving the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by making a false statement that he did not have dual citizenship to acquire a Ghanaian passport among other things.



In Ghana, second-degree felonies are punishable by ten years imprisonment which means Mr. Gyakye Quayson could be slapped with a ten-year jail sentence if found guilty.



In view of this, there are claims that the embattled MP may still be disqualified to re-contest the Assin North parliamentary seat until his case is completely dealt with.



Mr. Pratt explains that the Supreme Court ruling nullified Mr. Gyakye Quayson's election as Assin North MP but there is nowhere in the law that prevents him from standing for re-election.



"There was no time that the court said Gyakye Quayson is not qualified to contest. So, as we currently sit here, he is qualified to contest. No law in Ghana prevents him from contesting; he is qualified to contest," he argued.



To him, whether or not Mr. Gyakye Quayson will face a sentence in the criminal case against him is a secondary matter, thus having no correlation with him contesting the Assin North by-election.



"Some people say that he may be sent back to court and when he is arraigned before court, he may be jailed or fined but that is future matters," he told host Nana Yaw Kesseh.





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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By DAVID SHARP, The Associated Press

PORTLAND, Maine (AP)  Ann Allen loved going to church and the after-school social group led by a dynamic priest back in the 1960s.

The giggling fun with friends always ended with a game of hide and seek. Each week, the Rev. Lawrence Sabatino chose one girl to hide with him. Allen said when it was her turn, she was sexually assaulted, at age 7, in the recesses of St. Peters Catholic Church.

I dont remember how I got out of that cellar and I dont think I ever will. But I remember it like its yesterday. I remember the smells. The sounds. I remember what he said, and what he did, she said.

Allen, 64, is one of more than two dozen people who have sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, Maine, over the past year, seeking delayed justice since lawmakers allowed lawsuits for abuse that happened long ago and cant be pursued in criminal courts either because of time limits or evidence diminishing over time.

More survivors are pursuing cases as states increasingly consider repealing time limits for child sex crime lawsuits. Vermont was the first state to remove the limits in 2019, followed by Maine in 2021 and Maryland this year.

Michigan, Rhode Island and Massachusetts are poised to take action before their legislative sessions end this summer.

The momentum is irreversible, said Marci Hamilton, CEO of CHILD USA, a think tank aiming to prevent child abuse and neglect.

In Pennsylvania, a battle continues over legislation that would open a two-year window of justice for child sex abuse survivors to bring civil lawsuits against their abusers, regardless of whether the statute of limitations expired.

In April, Maryland lifted time limits on child sexual abuse lawsuits against institutions less than a week after the attorney general detailed decades of abuse of more than 600 children by more than 150 priests associated with the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

Other states, meanwhile, have briefly removed the statute of limitations on lawsuits for childhood abuse. More than 9,000 lawsuits were filed when New York set aside time limits for two years.

Across the country, those lawsuits have targeted churches, summer camps, scout groups and other institutions accused of enabling pedophiles or turning a blind eye to wrongdoing.

More states eliminating the limits would help achieve justice and prevention, according to advocates who say survivors tend to keep the trauma to themselves, backed by new research suggesting survivors typically come forward in their 50s.

More and more people come forward as they realize that theyre not alone, said Michael Bigos, one of Allens attorneys, whose law firm has brought 25 lawsuits since last June and is evaluating more than 100 additional potential cases, including about 65 targeting the Portland diocese.

Most of Maines newly filed civil lawsuits target the Diocese of Portland, accusing leaders of ignoring accusations against priests, or simply moving them to new parishes, allowing the abuse to continue.

Maine removed its time limits in 2000 to sue over childhood sexual abuse, but not retroactively, leaving survivors without recourse for older cases. Changes in 2021 allowed previously expired civil claims. The Legislature also is considering easing the statute of limitations on criminal charges for sexual assaults of children.

The Portland diocese contends survivors had ample time to sue and its unconstitutional to open the door to new litigation, which could lead to requests for damages of tens of millions of dollars.

A judge rejected the arguments. The diocese has appealed to the state supreme court. An attorney and a spokesperson for the diocese both declined comment.
A Maryland man died in an overnight Friday motorcycle crash in Adams County, Pennsylvania State Police said.

The 41-year-old Taneytown man, whose name has not been released, was speeding when he crashed around 12:39 a.m. on the 900 block of the Frederick Pike in Germany Township, according to state police.

State police said the motorcycle failed to negotiate a curve and veered off the road, into a mailbox and telephone pole.

Littlestown police were following the motorcycle and saw the crash, according to state police. The motorcycles exact speed was not provided in a Friday news release.

READ MORE: Dauphin County Prisons internal affairs investigator was fired

Coroner IDs man found dead after central Pa. fire
A northwestern Pennsylvania motorcyclist who had stopped after hitting a deer was then struck and killed by a van, according to news reports in Erie.

The incident occurred on Ridge Road in Springfield Township, roughly 20 miles west of Erie, around 12:40 a.m. on Thursday.

The 41-year-old victim was waiting for a ride by the side of the road after hitting a deer with his motorcycle, the Erie Times News reported, citing Pennsylvania State Police and Erie County Coroner Lyell Cook.

A van that had swerved to avoid the disabled motorcycle then struck the victim, who was dragged for some distance, Cook told the Times-News; the victim was pronounced dead at the scene.

The driver of the van - identified as a 25-year-old man - left the scene but was later located at a nearby residence, police said.
Want a say in the news? Email Claudia at todayinpa@pennlive.com to have your thoughts on the stories covered here or on PennLive heard during Listening to Listeners, an original Today in Pa. segment that occurs every other Friday.

You can listen to the latest episode of Today in Pa at this link, or on any of your favorite apps including Alexa, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher. Episodes are available every weekday on PennLive. Feel free to subscribe, follow or rate Today in Pa. as you see fit!

Today in Pa. Daily Podcast | June 9, 2023

A man with a jihad journal who drove a stolen school bus from Jersey toward Pennsylvania has been deemed not competent to stand trial. Porch pirates may get tougher penalties in the future. In an effort to become the countrys first sustainable superhighway, the Pennsylvania Turnpike is slowly but surely removing paper towel dispensers from its service stations. Also, these local farmers markets have been nominated as some of the top in the U.S.

Those are the stories we cover in the latest episode of Today in Pa., a daily weekday podcast from PennLive.com and hosted by Claudia Dimuro. Today in Pa. is dedicated to sharing the most important and interesting stories pertaining to Pennsylvania that lets you know, indeed, whats happening today in Pa.

Todays episode refers to the following articles:

If you enjoy Today in Pa., consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or on Amazon. Reviews help others find the show and, besides, wed like to know what you think about the program, too.

As sponsored by Renewal by Anderson of Central PA.
Delaware County disenfranchised a handful of eligible voters in the May primary by rejecting their provisional ballots, based on an allegedly incorrect interpretation of state law, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania argued in a new lawsuit.

Following the May 16 primary, Delaware Countys Board of Elections decided not to accept provisional ballots cast in person by voters who had already been told their mail ballots were rejected due to technical defects. That means that these voters were twice rejected, after trying to remedy their mail ballot mistake by voting provisionally at their nearby polling places, and ultimately were unable to have their ballot counted.

While the legal dispute only involves roughly a half-dozen voters, it could have implications statewide for whether voters whose mail ballots get rejected have the chance to vote by other means.

The dispute hinges on a contradiction between Pennsylvanias vote-by-mail law and the states statute governing provisional voting, which, if not resolved, has advocates concerned that it could be used as a way to disenfranchise voters in future elections.

We need clarity in the law on this, said Marian Schneider, senior voting rights policy counsel at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. I think that the intent was to prevent double voting, but theres an inconsistency with the earlier version of the statute, and as we said in our petition the courts should reconcile that statute.

At a Delaware County election board meeting last month, the board members said that while they felt these ballots should be counted on principle, they were not accepting six provisional votes because the states mail voting statute, and established case law, prevented the county from doing so. The county pointed to a 2020 case from the states Commonwealth Court, though there was disagreement about whether that case set a binding legal standard.

If we received a mail-in ballot that has a fatal flaw, it only makes sense that they should be able to cast a provisional ballot, elections director James Allen said at a May 23 meeting of the board. However, we have this Commonwealth Court ruling that says you shall not do that. We dont have any liberty to just make our own rules.

Provisional ballots are given to people whose eligibility to vote is in question when they check in at a polling place. Election officials withhold those ballots from being counted until eligibility can be confirmed.

The provisional ballots came from voters who had requested and returned a mail ballot, but had that mail ballot canceled by the county due to defects before the vote was tallied. By law, counties cannot count mail ballots which lack a signature, proper date, or are returned without being placed in a secrecy envelope, though a case making its way through the federal courts may change that.

The total number of twice-rejected voters in the May primary is small, largely because Delaware Countys municipal primary was a low-turnout, off-year election. In a presidential or midterm election year, the number of twice-rejected voters under this policy could be much higher.

In last years midterm elections, more than 16,000 Pennsylvania voters had their mail ballots rejected for such reasons, including more than 900 in Delaware County.

The county notified voters whose mail ballots were rejected ahead of primary day and gave them the opportunity to come to the election office, in Media, to fix their errors. But in two examples, the ACLU said its clients age made traveling to the election office difficult compared with going to their local polling place on election day.

Those voters and at least four others cast provisional ballots at their voting precincts after being notified of their mail ballots defect, according to the ACLU. The ACLU also claims a county employee advised two of the plaintiffs to use the provisional ballots. A provision in Act 77, the 2019 law that established no-excuse mail voting in Pennsylvania, says a provisional ballot shall not be counted if  the electors absentee ballot or mail-in ballot is timely received by a county board of elections.

But in the ACLUs petition to the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas  which asks the courts to compel the board to count the ballots  the organization argues that another portion of the statute takes precedence. That section says that as long as a voter is eligible to vote, their signature on the provisional ballot envelope matches their registration, and they have not cast another ballot, their provisional ballot shall be counted. Cast is the key word, the ACLU argues.

Were not encouraging double voting, but if the timeliness of the receipt of the mail ballot is not the end of the story, it has to be counted, Schneider said.

To cast a ballot means for it to be counted, the ACLU argues, and voters who have their mail ballots canceled by definition did not have it counted.

Other counties, and the Department of State, appear to interpret the conflict between the statutes the same way the ACLU does. Schneider, as well as election administrators contacted by Votebeat and Spotlight PA, were unaware of any other counties taking Delaware Countys approach.

Nick Custodio, deputy city commissioner in neighboring Philadelphia, said the city counts provisionals cast under the same circumstances.

The Pennsylvania Department of States official website advises voters to vote provisionally if they returned a completed absentee or mailin ballot that was rejected by the county board of elections, although members of the Delaware County Board of Elections said they felt this advice was misleading because of case law on the matter.

The Department of State declined to comment specifically on the ACLUs case, but said it was monitoring the litigation and would update its guidance if there is any authoritative court ruling. The guidance on the departments website remained the same as of the time of publishing.

The clause in Act 77 regarding provisional ballots for mail voters with ballot defects was the basis of a 2020 Commonwealth Court decision involving voters from Allegheny County. In that ruling, the court found that provisional ballots cast by voters with defective mail ballots should not be counted.

Much of the dispute between the ACLU and Delaware County comes down to whether the 2020 ruling set a binding legal standard, known as a precedent.

Schneider and the boards attorney went back and forth at the boards May 23 meeting on whether the decision in the 2020 case from Allegheny County carries the weight of legal precedent.

A spokesperson for Pennsylvanias court system said the decision was an unreported memorandum opinion (i.e., unpublished), meaning it does not have the same precedential value as a reported or published opinion.

A spokesperson for the county said that even though the board felt the ruling in question is incorrect, the board members voted to follow the law as they understood it.

It is not for the Board to ignore court rulings it does not like, said spokesperson Adrienne Marofsky in a statement to Votebeat and Spotlight PA. Rather, the Board will litigate this matter with the goal of seeking clarity from the courts of Pennsylvania on this important issue.

Lawyers with ties to former President Donald Trump have signaled the provision could be the basis for litigation in future elections for federal races.

A law firm composed of two attorneys who helped handle 2020 election cases for Trump and the Pennsylvania GOP  Pittsburgh-based Gallagher Giancola  sent a letter to counties last fall on behalf of the Republican National Committee stating that they intended to challenge such ballots, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA.

The RNC intends to challenge the provisional ballots cast by voters who also cast an absentee or mail-in ballot, even if such absentee or mail-in ballot has been deemed unable to be counted under applicable law, the letter read. It appears such challenges never materialized.

State regulators are also interested in resolving the discrepancy. At a recent meeting of the Joint State Government Commissions Election Law Advisory Board, member Christina Iacono brought up the Delaware County situation and said it was something the board should consider addressing and issuing a legislative recommendation.

Schneider, the ACLUs attorney, said it would be best to have ambiguities like this resolved before the next presidential election, which is why the ACLU is pursuing the case.

I do think Delaware County is incorrect in their analysis, but we do need the courts to weigh in, she said. This is an important issue to get clarity on.

The case will first need to be decided on by a Delaware County judge before it could potentially be appealed up to a high court and set precedent. The county has yet to file a reply brief to the ACLUs petition.
The TV pundits got it right. Whether you love former President Donald Trump or not, his indictment will mark one of the saddest days in American history.

Thats because all Americans want to admire the President of the United States. They want to look at the man, or perhaps someday a woman, and see a person of integrity, ethics, responsibility and selfless patriotism.

They want the person in the White House to be someone their children can emulate. Above all, they want there to be no question about a president obstructing justice, undermining the rule of law or worse yet, being connected in any way with the word espionage.

This image contained in a court filing by the Department of Justice on Aug. 30, 2022, and redacted by in part by the FBI, shows a photo of documents seized during the Aug. 8 search by the FBI of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. The Justice Department says it has uncovered efforts to obstruct its investigation into the discovery of classified records at former President Donald Trump's Florida estate.Department of Justice via AP

Thats exactly what a grand jury in Florida has called into question with its indictment of former President Donald Trump. The grand jury has indicted him on charges of obstruction of justice, destruction or falsification of records, conspiracy and false statements. Its all connected to the Espionage Act that forbids unauthorized retention or disclosure of information related to national defense that could hurt the United States or help our enemies.

Former President Trumps federal criminal indictments are a first in U.S. history. Its a tragic first no matter how you look at it.

Its important to note a grand jury is not a group of politicians or government officials. A grand jury is a group of ordinary people. They are called together like any jury to review evidence and figure out if theres enough of it to charge someone with a crime.

Protesters stand outside as Donald Trump's lawyers enter Brooklyn Federal Court on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022, in New York. Lawyers for Trump and for the Justice Department appeared in federal court in Brooklyn before a judge named a special master to review the roughly 11,000 documents  including about 100 marked as classified. The documents were taken during the FBI's Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago. (AP Photo/Brittainy Newman)AP

In the case of former President Donald Trump, they found enough evidence to charge him with seven crimes.

Its also important to note a grand jury doesnt decide guilt or innocence. Thats coming next with a full trial against the former president. A grand jury simply looks at the evidence a prosecutor presents and decides if it makes sense to take the case to the next level  a full blown trial.

That is disturbing enough when it comes to a former president. Somewhere between 16 and 23 people came together in Florida where the former president lives at Mar-A-Lago, considered the evidence, and found it compelling enough to make him stand trial. These ordinary Americans had to think long and hard about whether to put the nation through the trial of a former president. But they also had to think long and hard about the security of our nation and holding elected officials accountable for their behavior in office, no matter how high the office.

In this image taken from video released by Kaplan Hecker & Fink, former President Donald pauses during his Oct. 19, 2022, deposition for his trial against writer E. Jean Carroll. The video recording of Trump being questioned about the rape allegations against him was made public for the first time Friday, May 5, 2023, providing a glimpse of the Republican's emphatic, often colorful denials. (Kaplan Hecker & Fink via AP)

The grand jury indictment could bring another solemn day in American history. A former president could go to jail. And he should, if a jury finds him guilty of crimes as serious as obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and jeopardizing national security.

All of this is playing out at the worst possible time, as the next presidential campaign gets underway. Before his indictment, former President Trump was the leading candidate for the Republican party. He still may be. But heres the scary part. Even if he were convicted of all seven counts, some experts say he could still hold office.

Last month, the House removed the shiny gold plaques that hung below the stately portraits of former Speakers John Perzel, left, Bill DeWeese, center, and Herbert Fineman, not in photo, and explained the corruption-related convictions that sent them to prison. Replacing them were the plaques that hung under the portraits until 2014, and that are similar to those under the portraits of other former House speakers hanging in the Capitol hallway. They list only the years they served in the House and the years they served as speaker. At far right is former House Speaker Robert O'Donnell. July 28, 2020. Dan Gleiter | dgleiter@pennlive.com

Pennsylvania law forbids people convicted of serious crimes from holding elective office anywhere in the commonwealth, but theres no such prohibition in the U.S. Constitution for holding the highest office in the land. A man convicted of seven criminal counts could occupy the Oval Office, again. Some pundits even quip, he could pardon himself.

That would not be one of the saddest days in American history. It would be the saddest day -- whether you love Donald Trump, or not.

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By Col. Christopher L. Paris

The Pennsylvania State Police is committed to providing professional police services to the residents of the Commonwealth. As commissioner, one of my top priorities is to ensure police respect your Constitutional rights during every interaction. Thats why weve invested in collecting data with the goal of reducing racial and ethnic bias in traffic stops. At a time when law enforcement agencies face more public scrutiny than ever, we recognize that we must not only be the proponents for effective law enforcement, but we also must hold ourselves accountable and research ways in which we can improve on the services we deliver.

In 2002, the Pennsylvania State Police was one of the first state police agencies to initiate traffic stop data collection voluntarily. As part of our ongoing commitment to transparency and accountability, in 2021, we voluntarily reinitiated contact data reporting from all traffic stops by troopers and sought the expertise of Dr. Robin Engel, a leading academic in the criminal justice and criminology fields at the National Policing Institute, whom we have worked with in the past dating back to 1999. We knew that working with an outside research team would provide us with a holistic and accurate assessment of our services  and Dr. Engels more than two decades of experience and knowledge of the Pennsylvania State Police will help us improve our work to better serve Pennsylvanians every day.

Dr. Engel and her teams analysis of our 2022 traffic stop data, which we announced last month, concluded that the Pennsylvania State Police has made excellent progress on our data collection practices and that our team remain[s] committed to the data collection effort and the larger goals on reducing racial/ethnic disparities in traffic stops and post-stop outcomes.

The study shows that our data collection effort has had significant and continued improvement  and the Pennsylvania State Police has one of the most comprehensive and high-quality data collection efforts in the United States. That is in large part thanks to our troopers, who played a big role in the improvements made on data collection and continue to strive to represent PSP with the utmost professionalism every day.

Among the key findings from the 2022 data analysis is that variables such as the reason for the stop and evidence discovered are the strongest predictors of post-stop outcomes, such as warnings, citations, arrests, and searches.

The study also found that compared to previous data collection efforts, there has been an increase in the number of searches and a significant increase in seizure rates. Dr. Engel also called PSPs rate of contraband seizures during searches among the highest in the nation.

The report showed no detectable, substantive racial or ethnic disparities in warnings, citations, or arrests during traffic stops. It also showed that disparities in search and seizures have decreased over time, while contraband seizure as part of those searches has doubled and, in some cases, tripled. I believe that which gets measured, gets improved, and our agencys goal is to improve where needed.

The Pennsylvania State Police work every day to keep Pennsylvania communities safe, and our use of independent analysis helps us build trust with the public and show up every day trying to do better. Our efforts to provide professional and unbiased service to the Commonwealth are well-known, and our efforts include:

Having mobile video recording cameras in patrol cars for over a decade.

Moving toward a body camera pilot program which will begin this summer.

Having a 24-hour hotline and an online database to lodge complaints, as well as 88 installations where people can file a complaint if they believe theyve been treated unfairly, and a robust Internal Affairs division to investigate allegations of wrongdoing by troopers.

The Pennsylvania State Police are a vital part of creating safer and healthier communities across the Commonwealth  and Governor Shapiros proposed budget calls for an increase in our complement, demonstrating that public safety is a top priority of this Administration.

Public safety is our top priority at the Pennsylvania State Police, and we will continue to work with Dr. Engel and her team to collect this data to help us to identify opportunities for improvement in policy, supervision, and training.

We remain committed to delivering the police services Pennsylvanians expect and deserve.

Colonel Christopher Paris is Commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov met with EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia Toivo Klaar on June 9, 2023, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan told Trend.

During the meeting, the parties exchanged views on the process of normalizing relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia and the current state of negotiations mediated by international partners, including the EU, on regional security issues.

Bayramov once again delivered Azerbaijan's position on the current situation in connection with the peace agreement [with Armenia], and the issues of opening communications and delimitation.

Klaar expressed EU support for the normalization process between Azerbaijan and Armenia and expressed hope for continued contact between the leaders of both countries in this direction.

The parties also exchanged views on the prospects for cooperation between Azerbaijan and the EU.

The special representative has been on a visit to Azerbaijan since June 8.

Previously, Klaar visited the country on March 6 this year.
Supreme Court Justice Louis LeBel laughs during his swearing-in ceremony in Ottawa Monday Feb 14, 2000. Former Supreme Court of Canada judge Louis LeBel has passed away after a 60 year career of overseeing hundreds of legal cases. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Tom Hanson
A new condo construction site is reflected in the window on an ongoing condo construction site in downtown Toronto on Thursday, May 25, 2023. Toronto's ombudsman is calling on the city's social housing provider to respect and protect tenants' human rights after a number of tenants complained about human rights violations. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. A telephone conversation was held between Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov and Acting Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Dereck Hogan, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan told Trend.

The sides exchanged views on the bilateral agenda of cooperation between Azerbaijan and the US during the telephone conversation, as well as on issues related to the process of normalization of relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

The position of Azerbaijan on the negotiations with Armenia held over the past month and the prospects for resolving open issues on the agenda was brought to attention.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. The information disseminated by the Ministry of Defense of Armenia about the alleged shelling of a car with servicemen of the Armenian Armed Forces by units of the Azerbaijani army on June 9 at 18:30 (GMT+4) in the direction of the Garaiman settlement of the Basarkechar district is completely false and does not correspond to reality, Trend reports citing the Azerbaijani MoD.

"We categorically deny this information, the statement said.
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Brazil Out in Force for Reis' First Bracelet in $1,500 6-Handed No-Limit Hold'em

June 09, 2023 Matt Hansen Live Reporting Executive

The Brazilian rail was out in force on Thursday night to witness Rafael Reis win his first gold bracelet in Event #15: $1,500 6-Handed No-Limit Holdem at the 2023 World Series of Poker.

Reis defeated Daniel Barriocanal in heads-up play to win $465,501. The tournament drew 2,454 players for a prize pool of $3,276,090.

Day 2 chip leader Sarah Herzali finished in third while Nikolaos Angelou and four-time bracelet winner John Monnette rounded out the top five.

Event #15: $1,500 6-Handed No-Limit Holdem Final Table Results

Rank Player Country Prize 1 Rafael Reis Brazil $465,501 2 Daniel Barriocanal Spain $287,679 3 Sarah Herzali France $207,720 4 Nikolaos Angelou Greece $151,559 5 John Monnette United States $111,755 6 Grant Wang United States $83,289

Winners Reaction

This is the second deep run at the WSOP for Reis, but his first big chance came to an end in third place at the 2021 Monster Stack event.

I am feeling like I had a mission, and I accomplished my mission, Reis said in his post-win interview with PokerNews. Last time that I was here, I was [at the final table], and I got third. This time I felt super comfortable.

Reis leveraged his experience from his first trip to the main stage at the WSOPa disappointing end that turned into a valuable learning experience.

Ive made mistakes in the past, but I have more experience now. I was feeling really confident. I texted my friends that today is a bracelet today. Come and rail me, follow me on social media. Today was a bracelet day and I was very confident. It wasnt easy.

The celebration was the second of the evening after Reis and the entire Brazilian rail misread a board and thought Reis had claimed victory early in heads-up play.

I was not looking at the table. I was looking at the monitor. When the last card hit the felt, I saw a straight and everybody was cheering, so I was cheering.

Reis needed a moment to regain his focus.

When I came back, it was hard. I had to come back again. I was in Narnia. When I was celebrating, I went from Narnia to the WSOP, and I had to go back to Narnia again. We grinded it up and I am super happy. Thank god.

The champ received his bracelet in an impromptu ceremony with Yuri Dzivielevski. He plans on sticking around for the remainder of the WSOP.

I will play everything. I had this plan before this tournament, and it changes nothing. I will keep playing the whole thing, and I hope I can get more bracelets. It feels really nice on me.

Rafael Reis and the Brazilian Rail

Day 3 Action

Day 3 kicked off with 15 players and David Wells fell first in the opening level of the day. Following Wells to the payout window before the final table were Upeshka De Silva, Alexander Maas, Curt Kohlberg, Gabriel Schroeder, Yue Liu, Ian Matakis, and Kevin Choi.

The tournament reached its unofficial final table after about three hours of play and Ryan Hohner bowed out in seventh when he got it in with pocket queens and ran into the Big Slick of Barriocanal.

Barriocanal continued his run with the elimination of Grant Wang in sixth place. Wang got it in with ace-seven, but Barriocanal was waiting with ace-queen to send him to the rail.

John Monnette

Monnette was unable to add a fifth bracelet after a deep run in the no-limit holdem event for the four-time champ. He got it in with king-nine, but Herzali put him at risk with ace-nine and picked up top pair on the flop.

Barriocanal picked up another knockout when Angelou fell in fourth place. Angelou picked his spot with ace-seven, but it was ace-queen doing the work once again to send him to the rail.

Sarah Herzali

Herzali went on a magical run and a large contingent of French supporters turned out, but a Day 3 that included a straight flush came to an end in third place when she jammed her short stack with king-nine and ran into the pocket jacks of Reis. A jack on the flop sealed the deal and sent the tournament to heads-up play.

Heads-up play lasted nearly two levels while Barriocanal battled it out, but he was unable to move the chip count in his favor. After one false start when Reis and his rail misread the board and claimed victory, the champ regained his focus. The big moment came after a small double from Barriocanal with a suited nine-eight. Barriocanal got it in again with the same hand, but Reis was there with the suited ace-queen to claim victory with two pair.

Be sure to keep it with the PokerNews team throughout the 2023 WSOP for live updates from the floor at Horseshoe and Paris Las Vegas.

Check out our guide to the Best Online Casinos around the world. For US players, online real money casino is available in Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey and West Virginia. If you're looking to start playing Online Casino right now, then we recommend FanDuel Casino. If youre in a State where real money online casino isnt an option, then you still have the chance to play via Social Casino sites such as Chumba Casino and LuckyLand Slots.

Sharelines Vamos! Rafael Reis forever gets to call himself a WSOP champion.
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Heres a weird nugget in this unprecedented world of a former president being criminally indicted for the second time in a few months: Former president Donald Trump could end up with his criminal case assigned to a judge he nominated to the bench.

Scott MacFarlane of CBS pointed out, All of this unprecedented news also raises the prospect a former Presidents criminal case is randomly assigned to .. a judge Trump nominated to the bench

There are Trump-nominated judges in Southern District of Florida, including Miami. This was posted over a link to this announcement after the Senate confirmed Roy Kalman Altman to serve as a federal district court judge for the Southern District of Florida.

Florida is not a bastion of law and order these days, so anything is possible but its also not a given that even if this were to happen, it would mean the judge would let this fact interfere in her or his judgment.

Not every judge is as crooked as some of our Supreme Court justices appear to be. Imagine a judge that might actually recuse given the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest.

No matter how this shakes out, it is now a fact that the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is now a two times indicted, two times impeached criminal defendant, who was also found liable in yet another case for sexual assault.

Trump is apparently confused himself over his many potential criminal charges, as he isnt sure which alleged crime he has been indicted for this time. Is it his violent, deadly attempted coup? Is it the Espionage Act? Is it falsifying business records? Is it interfering in an election in Georgia? Its easy to get confused.

Donald Trump is innocent until proven guilty. He denies any wrong doing and has proclaimed himself an innocent man. The former president immediately sent out a fundraising plea noting the criminal charges.

Even if he isnt found guilty, its impossible to avoid the elephant in the room: Couldnt Republicans find anyone better than this man? Apparently not. This is who their base wants, and this is who the modern day Republican Party is: a repeat criminal defendant screaming about witch hunts.

If this scenario happens, it would be best for the country for the judge to recuse. Donald Trump has already divided this country enough; we dont need the appearance of more special favors being done for him. The law must be applied without fear or favor.

No one is above the law.
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Espionage Act, Ryan Goodman, former Special Counsel at the Department of Defense wrote above a detailed description of the charges in the indictment against former president Donald Trump, which include willful retention of national defense information.

* Espionage Act * ABC News: The charges include willful retention of national defense information. (As I have long predicted.) That offense fits the alleged conduct, a perfect match, Goodman wrote.

Katherine Faulders of ABC News reported, Were learning from our sources that there appear to be at least seven counts here. This ranges from everything from the willful retention of national defense information to conspiracy to a scheme to conceal, to false statements and representations.

The New York Times reported, Mr. Trump was charged with a total of seven counts, including willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and an obstruction of justice conspiracy, according to people familiar with the matter.

Goodman linked to a model prosecution memo written by top legal names Andrew Weissmann, Ryan Goodman, Joyce Vance, Norman L. Eisen, Fred Wertheimer, Siven Watt, E. Danya Perry, Joshua Stanton and Joshua Kolb at Just Security. The legal scholars pointed out in this June 2nd piece, Those past cases show that to decline to bring charges against Trump would be treating him far more favorably than other defendants, including those who were charged for less egregious conduct than his.

It is absolutely terrifying and sobering to consider the idea that a former U.S. President and current front runner for the Republican Party presidential nomination is charged with violating the Espionage Act. No matter which side of the aisle from which you come, this is a grave and deeply troubling juncture in U.S. political history.

The willful retention of defense information is chilling given the people adjacent to world leaders whove traipsed through Mar-A-Lago and the current state of world affairs as fascism encroaches globally.

Donald Trump maintains that he is innocent and has done nothing wrong. He is fundraising off of this indictment.

Trumps campaign slogan of Make America Great Again is taking on an eerie tone given the accusations he faces, especially of violating the Espionage Act. That is the opposite of making America great, again; it is endangering America.
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A 37-count criminal indictment against former president Donald Trump was unsealed Friday afternoon, revealing that Trump intentionally took away classified documents and showed them to people who did not have a security clearance.

This indictment says Trump intentionally took away classified documents and then showed them to people without a security clearance. If he did that, thats a guaranteed trip to the slammer, Richard Painter wrote.

The indictment was made public one day after Trump was charged federally with seven counts in southern Florida.

It lays out that Trump took documents that could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the U.S. military and human sources. Of the 37 counts, there are 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information.

The documents Trump took are related to defense and weapons capabilities of the U.S and other countries, vulnerabilities of the United States to military attack, U.S. nuclear programs, and plans for possible retaliation in response to an attack by a foreign country.

The classified documents Trump stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.

It charges that Trump showed classified documents on two occasions to other people after he left office.

One of these documents was a document Trump told the others in the room with him in July of 2021 was prepared for him by the Pentagon and was called a plan of attack.

Then in August or September of 2021, Trump showed an operative from his PAC a classified map related to a military operation.

The document lays out how Trump took steps to obstruct the investigation into his handling of classified documents, including instructing his attorney to tell the DOJ that he didnt have the documents listed in the subpoena.

It lists his valet Walt Nauta as his co-conspirator and alleges that Trump instructed Nauta to move documents for the purpose of hiding them not only from the FBI but from his own attorneys. Furthermore, it alleges that Trump suggested his lawyer to hide or destroy the evidence sought by FBI agents.

Nauta had at one point texted two photos to another Mar-a-Lago employee showing spilled classified documents on the floor that included intelligence releasable only to Five Eyes countries (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).

Trump stored these documents all over Mar-A-Lago, including a ballroom and a bathroom and shower.

The document makes it clear that after his presidency, Trump was not authorized to posses or retain these documents. While it is possible to obtain a waiver Trump did not obtain one.

In closing, 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information represents a staggering threat to the security of our country, our military, intelligence collectors, alliances and more. Its clear from the indictment that when he wasnt sharing it deliberately with others, Trump was also reckless and careless with the top secret, sensitive and critical information.

Donald Trump is innocent until proven guilty and he has denied all accusations and charges against him.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 10. Armenian "court" has extended the detention of Azerbaijani serviceman, Trend reports.

Thus, the detention of the Azerbaijani soldier Huseyn Akhundov has been prolonged for three months.

This action once again demonstrates Armenia's destructive stance towards the peace process, its disregard for its responsibilities under international law, its indifference to the calls of the international community for the release of hostages, and its disregard for the principles of humanism.

The Azerbaijani military servicemen Agshin Babirov (born in 2004) and Huseyn Akhundov (born in 2003) went missing due to limited visibility under adverse weather conditions in the border area of the Shahbuz district of Azerbaijans Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic with Armenia on April 10.

Later, it was revealed that both of the servicemen were captured by Armenian Armed Forces.

Meanwhile, on May 8, a court in Armenia passed "a verdict" against Babirov, sentencing him to over 11 years of imprisonment.
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Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) made Donald Trumps federal criminal indictment a problem for Republicans in the House and Senate.

In a statement provided to PoliticusUSA, Raskin said:

Todays federal grand jury indictment tells us that former President Donald Trump put our national security in grave danger as he pursued yet another lawless personal agenda by pilfering and hoarding government documents. After reviewing a trove of factual evidence, the federal grand jury found probable cause to believe that former President Trump knowingly retained hundreds of presidential and classified records, deliberately defied subpoenas, obstructed law enforcement, and lied about his continuing retention of records.

Instead of trying to divide the country and undercut our legal system, Congressional Republicans should respect the outcome of the Special Counsels comprehensive investigation and the decisions of the citizens serving on the grand jury. Dangerous rhetoric about a two-tiered system of justicediscriminating against the rich no lessin order to prop up the twice-impeached former President not only undermines the Department of Justice but betrays the essential principle of justice that no one is above the commands of law, not even a former President or a self-proclaimed billionaire.

As Committee Democrats, we are determined to understand the full sweep of Trumps unlawful possession of hundreds of government documents and his offenses against our government and people. We must ensure that federal officials preserve our countrys records in a way that is consistent with law and that safeguards our national interests.

Rep. Raskin brought up a great point. Initially, most Republicans are rallying around Trump, but there needs to be a price paid for a political party sticking with a leader who jeopardized national security.

Trump is toxic, and if Republicans are going to glue themselves to him, and betray the nation, then voters need to understand that the GOP is a party that will never put them first. Republicans would rather divide the country than stand up for American values.

Raskin was right. America needs to know that Republicans are putting the country last, and they should not be rewarded for protecting a potential felon.
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Fox News is not taking Trumps indictment well, as Mark Levin nearly had a stroke while discussing Trump potentially spending the rest of his life in prison.

Video:

Fox's Mark Levin: "President Trump is 76 years old. If the Department of Justice gets its way, he will die in federal prison." pic.twitter.com/wH2gUJtWiM  Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 9, 2023

Levin said on Hannity, President Trump is 76 years old. If the Department of Justice gets its way, he will die in federal prison. Just by one of these counts conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice which has a 20-year sentenceMerrick Garland is a mob lawyer..Jack Reed (Smith) is a rogue Soviet style prosecutor. The Presidential Records Act is not a criminal statute. It was never meant to be. The Espionage Act of 1917 was passed under Woodrow Wilson, another corrupt president.

Mark Levin closed by arguing that this is a document case and there is no crime here.

Fox News is trying to scare its viewers into getting off the couch and taking it to the streets by telling them that Donald Trump could go to prison for the rest of his life.

Things have gotten real when Woodrow Wilson is catching strays on Fox News because they are upset that Donald Trump might get locked up.

Fox News is hysterical over Trump getting indicted to the point where Mark Levin might need to seek medical attention because he is so upset over Trump potentially getting locked up for the rest of his life.
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While the majority of Republicans are lying to the American public by claiming that former president Donald Trump is being unfairly targeted by the DOJ, Republican Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) said Trump brought these charges upon himself and was given opportunities to avoid the charges that isnt given to others.

By all appearances, the Justice Department and special counsel have exercised due care, affording Mr. Trump the time and opportunity to avoid charges that would not generally have been afforded to others, Romney wrote in a statement.

Mr. Trump brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities to do so.

A pause while Reality Winner enters the chat. As a reminder, Reality Winner was sentenced on August 23, 2018 to five years and three months in prison for violating the Espionage Act, the longest ever imposed in federal court for unauthorized leaking of a government document to the press.

A major difference in motives between Reality Winner and Donald Trump is that Ms. Winner leaked a document about the Russians hacking 2016 voter data in an effort to stop the gaslighting about Russian interference. By all appearances, her leak was meant as an act of whistleblowing, although technically that isnt allowed as a defense for leaking documents to the press.

She was the first person prosecuted by the Trump administration for leaking to the press, with a sentence that surely served as a chilling effect on anyone else considering warning the public about the Russians trying to help their now president get elected.

Romney wasnt done yet. Romney, like many of us, sees the common thread in Trumps actions in that his actions are offensive to our national interest.

These allegations are serious and if proven, would be consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest, such as withholding defensive weapons from Ukraine for political reasons and failing to defend the Capitol from violent attack and insurrection.

Last night, I shared my thoughts on video for our newsletter subscribers, saying that the seven charges against Trump, including one for violating the Espionage Act, continue the narrative that started on this very day in 2016, when his team met with the Russians at Trump Tower to get dirt on Hillary Clinton: Trump as a political candidate and president has always been a threat to our national security and national interests. He simply has never indicated that he places his loyalty to this country ahead of his loyalty to his own self-enrichment or ego.

Mitt Romney as a presidential candidate became known for flip flopping and a general lack of spine, but through the Trump years he has shown up for his country often when it was necessary. Romney has shown integrity and patriotism at a time when both are missing in action from his party.

The Republican Senator is correct: Trump was shown special treatment, Trump refused to cooperate, Trump lied and hid and obfuscated and then bragged about his misdeeds claiming a right to do as he pleased. He brought these charges upon himself. He practically had to publicly taunt the DOJ into finally doing something.

Trump is innocent until proven guilty and he has repeatedly claimed that he is innocent of all charges.
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Federal prosecutors have a tape of Trump admitting he didnt declassify documents and showing military documents to other people.

CNN reported:

Former President Donald Trump acknowledged on tape in a 2021 meeting that he had retained secret military information that he had not declassified, according to a transcript of the audio recording obtained by CNN.

As president, I could have declassified, but now I cant, Trump says, according to the transcript.

.

The transcript of the audio recording suggests that Trump is showing the document hes discussing to those in the room. Several sources have told CNN the recording captures the sound of paper rustling, as if Trump was waving the document around, though is not clear if it was the actual Iran document.

Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, Trump says at one point, according to the transcript. This was done by the military and given to me.

The Tape Destroys Trumps Defense

Whether or not Trump actually had the classified document about a plan to attack Iran is uncertain from the audio transcript, but it is a safe assumption that prosecutors tracked down the other person involved in the conversation to explain what Trump showed them.

The tape proves that Trump knew the process for declassification while also knowing that he did not declassify the documents. The tape is a confession and one of the most substantial pieces of evidence that prosecutors could hope for,

Donald Trump has not offered anything resembling a defense because he is on tape admitting to the crime.

Why he did it remains unknown, but Trumps motives could have been the same as they have always been ego and vanity.

Trump could end up in federal prison because he wanted to impress people by waving classified information in their faces, which might be one of the dumbest reasons in history why a person ended up with a felony conviction.
Midland Valleys graduation ceremony on Thursday night was brimming with groundbreaking accomplishments, beginning with the introduction of Daisy Gonzales as the first Mexican American valedictorian in Midland Valley history.

Gonzales noted her parents  both Mexican immigrants  as the driving force behind her ambition. Her father, who became an orphan at the age of 12, and her mother, who was unable to pursue education, have given Gonzales the inspiration she needed to succeed. My greatest source of motivation has been with me since before I was even born, she said. And now it happens to be the ones I share a home with.

In her speech, Gonzales made sure to emphasize the importance of her identity and the struggles faced by many first-generation students.

A long time ago, I made myself a promise that others in this audience may relate to. It wasn't that I would leave where I came from, but that I would take who I am wherever I go. My parents have instilled in me the value and the importance of being a proud Mexican American student, she said. Being a first-generation student is not easy. Entering an unfamiliar school system with an unfamiliar language as a test drive for future generations is not easy. We have the power to break barriers, overcome obstacles and create a new path for future generations.

She also spoke a portion of her speech in Spanish for other bilingual listeners in the audience. Like many others here tonight, I pride myself in loving in two languages and working in two languages and speaking in two languages.

Gonzales has been accepted to over 23 schools, including Notre Dame and Ivy League schools such as Brown and Yale. This fall, she will be attending Harvard.

Gonzales wasnt the only highlight of the night  the graduating class of 2023 set a record by earning $18,073,241 in scholarship money.

The class of 2023 has been offered, in total, the most scholarship dollars in Midland Valley High School history, said Principal Sheldon Higgenbottom. Class of 2023, you are accomplished, compassionate and courageous. Remember, you are always a mustang in everything you do.
The Aiken City Council will once again consider a plan to construct a Parker's Kitchen at the corner of Whiskey Road and Stratford Drive Monday evening.

On the agenda for the council's 7 p.m. meeting is the first reading of an ordinance approving a plan for building a gas station and convenience store between Stratford Drive and a Lulu's Car Wash being built.

Parker's Kitchen is a Savannah-based gas station chain with over 70 stores mainly located in the Savannah/Hilton Head and Charleston areas. The Southside store would be the company's third in Aiken. The first location is planned for the former Dick Smith dealership near the intersection of Jefferson Davis Highway (U.S. 1/78) and the bypass. The second is planned for the intersection of East Pine Log Road and Levels Church Road.

The applicant asking for approval is Drayton-Parker Companies.

Drayton-Parker Companies is a Georgia registered corporation also registered to do business in South Carolina. Multiple entries online describe the company's registered agent as the general counsel for Parker's Kitchen.

The 2.63 acre property upon which the gas station and convenience store would be built was annexed into the city in 2003 and zoned planned commercial, meaning the city council needs to approve a concept plan before anything can be built on it.

Lulus Holdings of South Carolina LLC owns the property but, Daniel Ben-Yisrael, a real estate development manager for Parker's Kitchen, implied at a previous city council meeting that the property would be sold to Parker's Kitchen.

The concept plan calls for building a 5,175 square feet gas station and convenience store with eight pump islands  there would be one pump on each side so there would be a total of 16 pumps  facing Whiskey Road. Forty-three parking spaces will be provided on each side of the building.

Access would be provided via Stratford Drive and a right in and right out only turn located between Parker's Kitchen and the car wash. There are also plans to connect the car wash to Sizemore Circle so it's conceivable someone could turn into Sizemore Circle, go around the car wash, cross the road to be built and enter Parker's that way.

The Planning Commission recommended approving the concept plan Jan. 10.

At the meeting, several residents of the neighborhoods further west along Stratford Drive expressed concerns about the increase in traffic, the potential exposure to chemicals and neighborhood access during an emergency.

The city council considered and continued consideration of the ordinance Feb. 13 to allow for a traffic study.

Again, several residents of the neighborhoods further west along Stratford Drive expressed concerns about the increase in traffic, the potential exposure to chemicals and neighborhood access during an emergency.

The traffic study was completed and presented to the city council April 24  several residents spoke at that meeting, too  but the city council again voted to continue the ordinance to allow City Attorney Gary Smith to prepare information on the history of the property and its zoning.

The council will also consider:

 the second and final readings of ordinances setting the city's millage rate, establishing the city's budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year and annexing and zoning a property on Derby Lane and zoning it RS-15;

 the first reading of an ordinance conveying the city's real property interest in Deodar Plantation to Crowell and Company;

 resolutions accepting easements for section two of Danbrook Village and from G. Rebecca Winans, approving a rural infrastructure grant for the city's new water treatment plant and approving a memorandum of understanding with the Center for African American History Art and Culture Board of Directors.

The city council will also meet for a work session at 5 p.m. to discuss but not approve:

 submitting an application to the South Carolina Conservation Bank for property adjacent to the city's Mason Branch property;

 an update to the city's comprehensive plan; and

 changing the order of business of the city council agenda.

Between the work session and the regular meeting the council will hold an executive session to discuss revising City Manager Stuart Bedenbaugh's contract, the Parker's Kitchen application and the sale of Newberry Hall's building to the business's owners.

The meetings will be held in Room 309 of the Municipal Building located at 111 Chesterfield St. S.W.
A member of the South Carolina House of Representatives Aiken County delegation has endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

S.C. Rep. Bill Hixon, R-North Augusta, introduced and endorsed DeSantis at a Lexington County campaign stop Friday.

"We need somebody that can beat the current president," Hixon said. "When I look at how DeSantis has run the state of Florida and the things he stands for, those are my beliefs."

Hixon mentioned DeSantis's ongoing legal battle with Disney and his efforts to change the curriculum of Florida's schools. He also mentioned DeSantis's military background.

Hixon added DeSantis would be the first president with military service since George H.W. Bush and asked who would be better qualified to be a commander in chief than a former member of the military.

DeSantis served in the Navy. He was an advisor to Seal Team One and served at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq.

Hixon said he felt DeSantis would spend more time in South Carolina because of his wife's connection to the state.

Casey DeSantis graduated from the College of Charleston. Her parents reside in Aiken County.

Hixon said he did not make his endorsement lightly. He said he started looking at candidates a couple of weeks ago prior to the entry of former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Hixon said he supported former President Donald Trump in his 2020 reelection bid but added that a lot has changed since then.

"He needs to listen more and don't talk as much," Hixon said. "Everybody that I deal with in North Augusta said if he would keep his mouth shut they would like him more."

Hixon said he hesitated to endorse DeSantis because of the candidacy of U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., but said Scott's campaign never called and asked for his help.

"I didn't want to hurt Tim Scott's feelings, I like him," Hixon said. "I don't have anything personally against Tim Scott. I've told many people and I've told the DeSantis people this: if something happens and Sen. Scott doesn't make the nominee, if Gov. DeSantis is the nominee, I'd love for him to choose Tim Scott as his vice presidential candidate."
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson has joined a challenge to the federal approval of a California rule that would force automakers to increase their sales of zero-emissions tractor-trailers beginning next year.

Wilson announced Thursday he had joined a 19-state petition led by Iowa Solicitor General Eric Wessan that asks the District Court of the District of Columbia to review and reject the Environmental Protection Agency's approval of a California Air Resources Board regulation requiring vehicle manufacturers to increase their sales of zero-emission and near-zero-emission heavy duty vehicles to 40% to 75% of sales depending on the type of vehicle by 2035.

News stories on the approval add that California sets the standard for environmental regulation because of an exemption in the Clean Air Act and the federal government and other states  eight have already adopted similar rules  follow suit.

Wilson said if court doesn't reject the EPA's approval of the regulation and a similar adoption process plays out the increase in prices would be "crippling."

"There were more than 13 million trucks on U.S. roads in 2020, carrying the goods we all buy," Wilson said. "Either we wont be able to get the things we need, or the cost of those goods will be astronomical. This ban is another example of prioritizing the climate change agenda above everyday people."

Other states are involved in the lawsuit are Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Shock and horror are how Kari Johnson described a shooting Wednesday night at the Walmart on Whiskey Road.

Scrambling for safety, she couldn't believe what happened.

It was chaos, and you can see terror on peoples faces," she said.

Johnson is still trying to wrap her head around the Wednesday night shooting that left a 13-year-old injured and led to the arrest of an Aiken man.

Stephen Christopher Foreman, 32, was arrested and charged Thursday with attempted murder and possession of a weapon during a violent crime.

In 2019, Foreman was arrested for kidnapping after he held members of his family captive. He pleaded guilty to two counts of pointing and presenting a firearm in 2021 and was sentenced to mental health court.

Its beyond traumatic, and I still cant wrap my head around it still, Johnson said. I definitely didnt think it would happen at an Aiken Walmart.

The shooting in Aiken was not the first shooting to take place at a Walmart. In 2019, a man killed 20 people and wounded 26 in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, the Associated Press reported.

In November 2022, another shooting took place at a Chesapeake, Virginia Walmart by a manager who killed six people, the Associated Press reported.

The shooting

Dispatch received a call around 7:34 p.m. in reference to a juvenile who had been shot in the arm and abdomen at the Walmart on Whiskey Road.

While en route to the shooting, dispatch advised police that Foreman called and said he was at KFC.

Foreman was taken into custody at the KFC and transported to the Aiken County detention center, where he is currently being held and has no bond.

Officers on the scene rendered aid to the victim and gave the victim oxygen before she was taken to a hospital.

Foreman admitted that he discarded the gun on a shelf at Walmart, police reported, and officers found the gun on a bottom shelf in the cards section at the store.

'I was so scared'

It is something I will never forget, Johnson said.

She said she will never forget the chaos, the looks on peoples faces when the shooting unfolded and that the store did not have security.

Johnson said she was in the grocery aisle with her husband getting bacon when they heard a pop near the watch area. She said her husband escorted her to a safe space.

He took off running for help because he was in the Army as a medic, she said.

She said customers in the store didnt know what was going on and thought it was a balloon popping until she saw people run toward the grocery exit.

That is when I knew something was wrong, but my husband asked me to stay put, she said.

A short time later a store employee said it was an active shooter and told people to leave the store.

I just grabbed my purse, started towards the door and I was so scared, Johnson said.  I remember I was looking around because I didnt know where the active shooter was.

Johnson said a lot of people were standing outside and didnt know what to do. She said she called 911 after hearing there was an active shooter and people were coming inside the store to shop. She said a short time later police arrived and roped the store off with caution tape.

A few people and myself were yelling 'active shooter, go away,' and one guy still went in and self-checked out during this, she said.

Johnson was worried about her husband, who stayed inside the store to help the victim. She said before EMS arrived, her husband helped resuscitate the victim five times by using CPR.

Johnson said the victim was in the apparel aisle with her mother looking for a pair of shorts when the suspect decided to shoot her.

A 13-year-old was shopping with her mother, was shot and is fighting for her life, she said.

She said she thinks about her own children, who are 10 and 16, and could have been victims.

When I got home I just hugged my children so, so hard, she said. I am still in a state of shock."

Johnson said she wants Walmart to have more safety protocols such as active shooting drills.

According to a Walmart website, the company offers virtual reality active shooter training for employees. During the training, employees learn and practice the avoid, deny, defend method.

Johnson said after the shooting at Walmart she wants people to be nice to each other because shootings can happen in places even as small as Aiken.

I want this to be a wake-up call for people that it can happen at any time and anywhere and that there is a 13-year-old girl fighting for life, and that is the most important thing right now, Johnson said.

Anyone with any information on the shooting should call Detective Celina Dobbs at 803-643-2121.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 10. The information released by the Ministry of Defense of Armenia regarding the alleged shelling of Armenian armed units by the Azerbaijani side near the Garaiman settlement in the Basarkechar district on June 9 at 22:50 (GMT+4) is entirely false and does not reflect the truth, Trend reports citing the Azerbaijani MoD.

We categorically deny this information, the statement said.
To make sure a piece of Aikens Black history doesnt become forgotten, the Schofield Community Association is on a mission to preserve it.

It seems like the only preservation they are concerned about is on the Southside and the horse district, President Bill McGhee said. It seems to contradict how great Aiken is.

The Schofield Community Association was relaunched in early 2023 as a way for residents in the Schofield neighborhood to meet to discuss ways to preserve the neighborhood and designate it as a historical area.

The mission is to recognize the impact the neighborhood has on the African American community and to revitalize the neighborhood.

The historical neighborhood is part of Aiken's Parkway District including York Street to the west, Beaufort Street to the east, Park Avenue to the south and Hampton Avenue.

The neighborhood also includes Schofield Middle School, Smith-Hazel Recreation Center, the Aiken County Sheriffs Office historical churches  such as Friendship Baptist Church  and C.C. Johnson Drugstore.

McGhee, who serves as president of the Schofield Community Association, said it was started in 1999 and was one of the first neighborhood associations to be recognized in the city of Aiken. The group has meetings every third Thursday of the month.

The community association also has neighborhood clean-ups.

McGhee said the neighborhood is different from what it used to be. He moved back to Aiken from Philadelphia in the 1980s.

I came back to the same community and saw how it deteriorated through the years, like a lot of Black communities across the county, he said.

He said he hoped the community association could get help from the city of Aiken, but he feels like not enough has been done for the neighborhood. One area of concern, he said, was the demolition of some of the homes as part of the city's Demo 200 program.

BB McGhee said her husband has roots in the community, which includes building the old Aiken Elementary School and the C.C. Johnson Drug store.

We hate to see it diminished by thoughtless policy, she said.

Mandy Drumming became involved with the group because of the historical significance of the neighborhood with the craftsman style of the homes and a lot of things in the neighborhood played a part in Aiken's history.

I am really interested in the Schofield School and it kind of shaped the area," she said. It was an integral part of Aiken.

She said she doesnt want things to get replaced or torn down in the community.

They are tearing down our artifacts and objects, she said.

Bill McGhee said he doesnt want to see what happened to other communities.

"Its not just a local issue, but the same things that are taking place in other parts of the county, he said.

Bill McGhee said he is concerned about people in the neighborhood who are not investing in the properties and the lack of the enforcement of city codes on property.

They have not been active in code enforcement, he said.

The group has the long-term goal for the area to have grocery stores, other businesses and making it walkable a walk community and saving a lot of the historical homes in the area.

LJ McGhee said the neighborhood has a lot of history and it would be a shame for Aiken to lose it.

We are looking to uplift this neighborhood where it was comparable to other areas of the city like the Southside, LJ McGhee said.

The organization is always looking for volunteers. Those who are interested can reach out to Bill McGhee at AikenBill@bellsouth.net or 803-507-1839.

Membership for the group is $20.
Aiken, SC (29801)

Today

Partly to mostly cloudy with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms late at night. Low 68F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

Partly to mostly cloudy with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms late at night. Low 68F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
COLUMBIA  South Carolina House members and senators reached an agreement on the state's $13 billion budget Thursday, barely 24 hours after a tense meeting where both sides appeared to be out of patience.

Thursday's meeting was all smiles and jokes. The key sticking point  how much money to give Clemson University to make significant progress on the state's first veterinary school  went to the Senate, which set aside $102 million. The House spending plan had about $8 million.

Republican Senate Finance Committee Chairman Harvey Peeler announced the deal, ticking off joint accomplishments like around $100 million toward a continuing effort to lower state income tax rates, this time from 6.5 percent to 6.4 percent as well as salary increases for almost all state employees and most state law enforcement officers and teachers.

"And something that is near and dear to my heart, we funded a new school of veterinary medicine at Clemson University," a smiling Peeler said.

It was a very different mood from Wednesday, when Peeler scowled as Democratic House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford said the Senate was "putting pets over people" and "the House being concerned with higher ed and the Senate being concerned with Mister Ed."

It was the House members who were deferential during Thursday's meeting,

"We're not supposed to agree on everything. But when we disagree, we come together and we talk about it and we do what 's best for the people of South Carolina," Rutherford said.

Republican House Ways and Means Chairman Bruce Banister said he didn't know whether Rutherford deserved credit or blame for creating a crisis after the Wednesday meeting. But it seemed to spur the deal.

"Having a budget is the most important thing we could do and I appreciate you reminding me and the House conferees and the Senate conferees at the end of the day brinksmanship is bad for everybody," said Bannister, who was overseeing his first budget as committee leader.

It seemed like everybody got something as tax revenues continue to roll into the state at record levels. Budget writers had well over $1 billion more to spend for the 2023-24 fiscal year.

The governor's office asked and received $200 million for the Office of Resilience for a fund to help with the aftermath of natural disasters.

Lawmakers in both the House and the Senate got hundreds of millions of dollars for downtown revitalizations, festivals, park improvements and other local projects.

Along with a pay raise of at least 5 percent for every state employee, the spending plan also covers any increase in health insurance premiums.

Some law enforcement positions, like state troopers, state agents, and officers and nurses in prisons, could see 10 percent or more in raises.

The budget includes more than $1 billion to help Volkswagen-backed Scout Motors build a plant for electric SUVs near Columbia and about $120 million in a fund to help rural districts build schools.

"It takes care of out kids, our teachers, our law enforcement," Bannister said.

Both the full House and Senate have to approve the compromise, then it is sent to the governor, who can veto individual items. The General Assembly can put those items back into the spending plan with a two-thirds vote.

The new budget starts on July 1.
Pop-Up Picks is a recurring series in The Post and Couriers Food Section that previews an upcoming pop-up breakfast, lunch or dinner and the chefs behind it.

Those who make a habit of dining at Charleston restaurants have surely sampled what many believe to be the Souths most celebrated condiment: Dukes Mayonnaise.

Its an ingredient so beloved by chefs that restaurants often flaunt it on their menus  Berkeleys pairs Dukes with house-made cheese whiz on its cheesesteak sandwich, and the condiment serves as the base for the Buffalo krab rangoon dip at Jackrabbit Filly. The list of local spots highlighting the mayonnaise that was created in South Carolina goes on and on.

From July 24-30, Dukes will find its way onto even more menus at Charleston restaurants participating in Dukes Hot Tomato Summer. The week-long initiative invites local spots in Richmond, Va., Charlotte, Greenville and Charleston to serve dynamic dishes that pair tomatoes with Dukes Mayonnaise.

"It started in Richmond in 2021 as a way to partner with our customers and drive consumers in a fun and engaging way back into restaurants," said Rebecca Lupesco, Brand Marketing Manager at Dukes. "We just decided to keep it going."

The history of the popular Southern mayonnaise brand began right here in the Palmetto State more than a century ago. An enterprising woman named Eugenia Duke started selling sandwiches coated with her homemade mayonnaise to soldiers stationed near Greenville.

By 1919, she was vending more than 10,000 sandwiches a day. But that legacy pales in comparison to the one jarred with a yellow lid and produced nationwide. She sold her sugar-free mayonnaise recipes to C.F. Sauer in 1929, who opened the first Dukes factory on the banks of the Reedy River in downtown Greenville. And well, the rest is history.

Dukes uses abound in the kitchen  there is even an entire cookbook dedicated to Duke's recipes. The United States most popular condiment (yes, it beats out ketchup) can be used to concoct everything youd find at a Lowcountry picnic, from coleslaw to pimento cheese to chicken salad.

Fresh, local tomatoes are another natural pairing.

Restaurants, pop-ups and bakeries across the Charleston area are participating in Duke's week-long initiative. Lewis Barbecue, Frigid Bits, Weltons Tiny Bakeshop, Indaco, Legend Deli, Bert and T's Desserts and Herd Provisions are among the many local participants.

For more information, visit dukesmayo.com.
GREENVILLE  After a decade of false starts, a prime but long-disused property on the edge of downtown Greenville is poised to transform into a mixed-use development that would include 300 apartments, green space and retail.

The 3-acre site is most identified as the home to a small grocery store known colloquially as the "Baby Bi-Lo," which closed in 2013 at the intersection of North Main and Academy streets across from historic McPherson Park. Its closing sparked community speculation about its future.

In the years that followed, most of the other tenants at the two-story complex left, and the storefronts have remained largely empty since.

The property, which includes 40,000 square feet of retail and office space, sits at the bottom of a small valley between the North Main neighborhood and downtown. A creek runs under it, and an easement running over the waterway bisects the site, prohibiting major construction on a large portion of the property. The geography of the land has thwarted multiple attempts to develop it in the past.

But now, the private equity firm ACRE has created a plan it believes could be workable.

Bret Hewett, ACRE's vice president over acquisitions and asset management, shared the concept with residents who live near the property at a June 6 community meeting.

The development would include two buildings  one five stories and the other four.

The buildings would stand on opposite sides of the easement, which would become a pocket park and plaza. The ground floor would be reserved for retail space with apartments above.

Hewett told the group of two dozen people gathered that roughly 60 percent of the new units would be one-bedroom or studio apartments.

The project would be among the first major developments that would take advantage of an affordable-housing height bonus included in Greenville's upcoming new development code.

The provision would allow the developer to add two stories to each building in exchange for making 15 percent of the units in the project affordable for people making 80 percent of the area median income.

City Council is set for a final vote June 12 on the massive overhaul of the land-management ordinance.

The project wouldn't be viable without the height bonus, which under the new code is allowed by right.

ACRE's proposal received a mixed reaction.

When Hewett asked the room who was concerned about how the project would impact traffic in the area, virtually every hand went up. Hewett said a traffic study his firm conducted through a third-party engineering firm found the impact of the development would be minimal.

Some in the room said they worried how the scale and mass of the proposed buildings would fit in with the surrounding area.

Others appeared eager to see progress on the site, voicing concern that the boarded-up grocery store and empty storefronts were becoming a magnet for blight and crime.

ACRE is still working out the details for the project and has not submitted any formal proposal to the city.

If the development moves forward, it would need approval from the city's Design Review Board, which reviews projects in the city's downtown district.

Hewett said he left the community meeting feeling optimistic.

"Those neighbors care about what goes into this site because it's something that could impact their lifestyle, their traffic situation," he said. "But I think, by and large, what we heard last night is that a lot of people want to see that site redeveloped."

With planning still in the early stages, the project faces several obstacles moving forward. For one, an early version of the draft zoning map for the city showed that up to six stories would be allowed on the site, and ACRE developed plans in line with those requirements.

However, the latest map going before the council in the coming week limits the max height to five floors for the taller building, and Hewett said the firm is still working through how to make the project feasible within those parameters.

Constructing a parking garage partially situated beneath one of the buildings could be a part of the solution, he said, but ACRE is still exploring possibilities.

And the earth used to fill the site when it was originally developed in the mid-1980s came from a nearby construction site and the low-quality soil can't support any redevelopment, he said.

"It's junk, and it has to go out for anything to be built here," he said. "We're talking 40,000 to 60,000 cubic yards of fill that has to be removed from the site because it's not supportable soil."

While the excavation will cost the firm millions of dollars, Hewett said it could make burying some of the development's parking easier, given that they will be digging regardless.
Bennett Gulyas, Jackson Bell and Marcelino Leon III all lived on the same floor of MUSC's Shawn Jenkins Children's Hospital up until a few weeks ago.

Walking into their living room, which is actually a hospital breakroom turned into videogame and lounge area, it'd be easy to mistake the three as siblings who grew up together.

But their budding friendship is only a few months old.

All three boys have been sequestered on the pediatric cardiology floor for the past few months. Each is waiting for a new heart.

The boys were all born with a rare heart defect known as hypoplastic left heart syndrome. It means the left side of the heart is extremely underdeveloped and unable to pump an adequate amount of blood.

On a normal day, Jackson and Bennett, both 6 years old, could be caught arguing over who really won the latest round of video games. The eldest of the group, 9-year-old Marcelino who enjoys building playdough Titanic models, politely intervened: "Guys, it's not about who wins or loses, it's about having fun."

It's not uncommon to be monitored while waiting for a transplant. But what's special is that the boys were placed in rooms next to each other and the three of them and their parents have formed a special bond while living there, said Carter Coyle, a spokesperson for MUSC.

Congenital heart defects are the most common type of birth defect in the U.S. Cases vary from mild (small holes in the heart) to severe (such as missing or poorly formed parts of the heart).

According to data from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control, about one in four babies born with a heart defect are critical, meaning they will require surgery or other procedures within the first year of their life.

In South Carolina, over 5,000 children were born with congenital heart defects from 2008-2017. Many of the defects were small and didn't need surgery.

Bennett, Jackson and Marcelino are rare cases. All three have experienced numerous open heart surgeries since being born. But the surgeries weren't enough. They need new hearts to continue living.

Open heart surgery

The normal course of treatment for hypoplastic left heart syndrome is a series of open heart surgeries over the span of several years. Doctors break it down in three stages.

Stage one is the Norwood procedure. This operation occurs within the first week of being born. Its purpose it to ensure that blood flow is controlled enough to prevent damage to the heart and lungs.

According to an article from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the goal of this operation is to ensure enough blood is reaching the lungs to keep the child alive until the second operation.

Stage two is called the Glenn operation and usually occurs within the first six months of life. This procedure disconnects a large vein that carries deoxygenated blood from the upper body from the heart and attaches it to the pulmonary artery.

According to the article, after the operation blood from the upper body will go to the lungs without passing through the heart.

Stage three is called the Fontan procedure. It occurs when a child is over a year to 3 years old. This procedure disconnects a large vein carrying blood from the lower body into the heart and attaches it to the pulmonary artery.

Dr. Andrew Savage, pediatric cardiovascular surgeon for MUSC, said the success of these surgeries varies. And while the majority of the children who undergo each surgery may not have any more complications until later in life, some like Bennett, Jackson and Marcelino will need heart transplants.

"Hypoplastic left heart syndrome is one of the more severe defects that we take care of," Savage told The Post and Courier. "A certain percentage of those patients will develop heart failure during childhood or some of them as they age out of childhood."

"Their hearts are never...normal," he added.

The start of it all

Bennett arrived at the hospital in March 2023. Jackson was admitted four days later.

Marcelino, the most critical of the three, had been in the hospital since mid February 2023, after suffering two strokes within the same week. After the strokes he developed a blood clot that traveled to his brain.

"And after he recovered from all of that, we learned that he needed a new heart and it was going to have to happen sooner rather than later," said Shondrell Leon, Marcelino's mother.

The boys are able to visit each other a few times a day. Jackson and Bennett have about one hour a day when they are not connected to an IV pole and other machines. The first 30 minutes is dedicated to a bath. The rest is play time.

"It's the highlight of his day," Bennett's mom, Lindsey Gulyas said.

Marcelino's condition only allows him 10 minutes of untethered time once a week.

Waiting for transplant

According to officials from We Are Sharing Hope, the state's only organ procurement organization, 13 of the 14 kids on the organ transplant waiting list in South Carolina are waiting for a heart.

"There is such a need for more registered donors," Krystal Cau, director of communications for the organization said. "We encourage our community to make that selfless decision and help save someone's life."

Doctors at MUSC told the parents the typical waiting period for a heart is six to 12 months.

"They say it happens in spurts," said Jackson's mother, Kristin Bell. "Often they have a few patients waiting on hearts at the same time and within a few weeks," multiple hearts could become available.

Savage said he's seen it happen at least once in his over 10 year career.

He recalled getting a heart transplant offer on a Friday night a few years ago. He did the transplant surgery the day after on Saturday and in the middle of the surgery, another heart became available. He did the second transplant on a Sunday.

"That was one of the craziest weekends of my life," he said. "It was almost like 36 hours straight of heart transplants."

Dreams

Lindsay, Kristin and Shondrell, nicknamed The Heart Moms by staff at MUSC, said this process hasn't been easy. But all said it would have been much worse without being able to lean on each other during hard times.

When the boys have all gone down for bed, the common room that was used for video games during the day turns into their little sanctuary. They get a moment to de-stress and talk to people who know what they're going through.

Many of the conversations include stories of what insightful word Marcelino had for the day. Others are roundtables about the newest place each of their boys has added to their list of places to go after they've gotten their heart transplant.

For Bennett, the first stop is Legoland. Jackson wants to go to Disney World, Chucky Cheese, the zoo and the children's museum.

"He said he wants to do them all in the same day. I said are you trying to kill me," Bell laughed.

Marcelino has his eyes set on the Statue of Liberty. "Mama, you know it wasn't always green," Leon recalled him saying.

To learn more about treatment options for congenital heart defects, visit www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/heartdefects/facts.html
Kingstree, SC (29556)

Today

A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible early. Cloudy early with some clearing expected late. Low near 65F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible early. Cloudy early with some clearing expected late. Low near 65F. Winds light and variable.
A St. Stephens man who participated in the nighttime mayhem in Charleston that followed peaceful protest of the death of George Floyd in 2020 was sentenced to five years in prison for arson.

Shabazz A. Watson, 27, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in March to one count of arson. More arson courts were dismissed by federal prosecutors in exchange for Watson's guilty plea, with the sentencing handed down June 7.

Watson was accused of setting several businesses on fire the night of May 30-31, 2020 after protests turned destructive in Charleston. He was accused of setting fires inside a wine bar and clothing store on King Street, and setting fires inside a paint store and a Family Dollar on Meeting Street.

The destruction caused just by arson totaled $2.28 million. There were 20 fires intentionally set that night, according to a Charleston Police Department incident report.

There were 35 people arrested on various charges in all, but only five people faced federal charges. Watson is the last riot-related federally charged person to be sentenced.

Floyd died on May 25, 2020 when Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin pinned him to the ground with a knee on his neck. A bystander recorded for more than 9 minutes as Floyd pleaded for his life and died. The horrifying video sparked protests throughout the United States and abroad.
DARLINGTON  The city of Darlington's water and sewer rates need to rise 75 percent to resolve the city's water and sewer infrastructure issues and balance the budget.

The water rate would increase from $32.47 a month to $56.82, while the sewer rate goes from $39.78 to $69.61 a month if the rate hike is approved.

The hotly contested water and sewer rate increases from 2020 that residents have lamented ever since wont go up this coming year. The future of those rates will need to be significantly higher however, according to David White and Willie Morgan of Southeast Rural Community Assistance Project Inc.

During its June 6 meeting, Darlington City Council received a water-and-sewer rate study report on what it will take to continue to maintain its 100-year-old system. The report was produced by the Southeast Rural Community Assistance Project Inc., a nonprofit organization focused on improving the quality of life for low-to-moderate income individuals living in the Southeast.

Youve been operating at a net loss year after year: 2020, 2021, and 2022, White said. The reserves you have are not adequate to sustain the water-sewer system.

He described the system as having clay sewer pipes that were disintegrating and metal water pipes rotting from the inside out.

The city system loses money every year to the tune of $749,594 this calendar year alone. The deficit in 2022 was 29 percent. Major investments need to happen, including grants, loans, and substantial rate increases.

White even referenced the specter of the Town of Timmonsville, which had its system taken over by the EPA. Its a sad story, but it happens in communities across the country, he said.

Darlington Mayor Curtis Boyd pointed out the numerous grants and projects that are ongoing across the town. A lot is getting fixed.

Morgan agreed, saying, The current staff is doing an excellent job seeking funding opportunities that are available.

Nonetheless, White said rates would have to increase by 75 percent to break even but agreed that the city is on the right path in trying to be proactive.

This gloomy outlook for the city water-sewer system did not deter City Manager John Payne from requesting a raise for himself.

After a brief executive session and less than three minutes of discussion in open session, council approved a $6,000 raise (a 5.7 percent increase) for the city manager, making him the highest-paid manager in the citys history. Previous managers made approximately $20,000 less.

According to the Municipal Association of South Carolina's municipal compensation survey, Payne's annual salary was $104,000 for the 2022-23 fiscal year.

There is no justification for that amount, said council member Elaine Reed who voted against the measure.

When asked, Boyd did not justify the increase but said he was still working on first responder pay.

Uneven salary increases have been a hot topic as Payne gave the public works director a $30,000 bump last year without notifying all members of council and gave the streets and sanitation director a $10,000 raise, also without notifying all members of council and outside the standard budget cycle. A similar $40,000 salary increase for the planning director this coming year did not get a mention.

Other employee salaries are addressed in the proposed budget.

Earlier this year, the city procured a salary and compensation survey from The Archer Co. at a cost of $16,500. The report indicated a minimum, mid-range, and maximum for each job description. Payne said the overall budget brings many of the woefully underpaid employees up to the minimum.

Payne noted police officers received a $3-per-hour raise midyear in the current fiscal year and firefighters received a $1-per-hour raise as well. The increases for the fiscal year 2023-24 budget would be smaller as a result, 1 to 3 percent).
Boxes of diapers fill the room to the brim. It feels like if you open the door they might all come tumbling out. Down the hallway, stacks of shirts line the walls, divided by gender, then by season, then again by size. Some piles reach the ceiling; others have only a couple of boys size 7-8 T-shirts.

A team of volunteers packs colorful pillowcase-sized bags, stuffing them with two weeks worth of clothes, shoes, essential toiletries, school supplies and books. The smile of a stuffed animal pokes out of the opening, the cherry on top of the sundae of goodies inside.

These emergency care kits include any materials a child might need after being taken out of an unsafe household and placed into foster care. Social Services, as well as over 200 other agencies geared toward helping children in dire situations, turn to these kits  brainstormed by one notable person  to help thousands of at-risk kids in South Carolina each year.

That person is Lynn Young, and her organization is Lowcountry Orphan Relief.

After being removed from an abusive or unsafe household, kids are not allowed to return to their homes for their belongings or clothes. They enter foster care usually with only the clothes on their backs. Lowcountry Orphan Relief provides a care kit within 48 hours of a child being removed from their home to comfort and support the child early in their transition into a new environment.

After 20 years of delivering around 42,000 care kits to these children, Young has been presented with the Order of the Palmetto, considered the highest civilian honor in the state. It recognizes "individuals who have selflessly given of their time, resources and goodwill through a variety of different causes and pursuits to the benefit of their neighbors, fellow citizens and the fabric and prosperity of South Carolina."

Young was one of 25 people to be recognized this year. She joins her husband, Jerry Young, as a recipient. The Youngs are one of the few couples to be bestowed the Order of the Palmetto for starting separate nonprofits in South Carolina; he started the Charleston Leadership Foundation.

A South Carolina native, Lynn Young raised five children before becoming a schoolteacher in Philadelphia. After moving to Charleston, she became a guardian ad litem, a person appointed by a court to represent a minor or an incompetent adult in a lawsuit.

In 2003, Young began to collect clothes and construct care kits in her living room. When agencies like Social Services started asking for orders of these kits, she decided to expand.

Now located on 1850 Truxtun Ave. in North Charleston, Lowcountry Orphan Relief distributes thousands of emergency care kits each year, all of which are packed by volunteers. Though proud of her organization's work, Young at the same time laments the number of kits needed each year.

Its a sad number," she said. "We shouldnt have that (child neglect) in our beautiful state of South Carolina or in beautiful Charleston.

In 2022, Young opened a branch of the organization in her hometown of Columbia called Midlands Orphan Relief. Volunteers have begun packaging care kits for children further inland, too, now servicing 13 counties across the state.

Young says that volunteers "are our bloodline."

In addition to making the care kits, Young and volunteers work with Title 1 schools in the area to provide "Just In Case Closets." The closets house clothes and supplies so that, in the event of an accident that might rip or stain their clothes, the child's day is not entirely disrupted.

The organization also hosts annual carnivals, beach days and other events for foster children.

When you can see the faces of those children you think, 'Oh my gosh, this is why we do what were doing', said Christina Lope, Lowcountry Orphan Relief program director.

The outings can be eye-opening, she said.

A lot of the kids who come to these events, let's use Beach Day as an example, have never seen the ocean, never put their toes in the sand, Lope said.

"The work is hard, and it's emotional," said Young. "But you think, if you could just take care of one child and change that one childs life, you know youve done a great thing.

For more information on Lowcountry or Midlands Orphan Relief and to learn how to help, visit lowcountryorphanrelief.org.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. Thanks to the attention and care of President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Ilham Aliyev, measures are being taken to improve the service and social-living conditions of the military personnel, and newly built military facilities that meet modern standards are being commissioned, the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan told Trend.

Minister of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov and other leadership of the Ministry have got acquainted with the conditions created in several newly commissioned accommodation points in the liberated territories today.

It was reported to the Minister of Defense that modern conditions have been created for military personnel serving in areas with difficult terrain. The accommodation points are equipped with modern equipment, furniture, and inventory to meet all the necessary needs of military personnel. There is a weapon room, dormitory, dining room, kitchen, food and storage facilities, bathroom and sanitary facility and generators that provide uninterrupted electricity to the area.

Colonel General Hasanov highly appreciated the conditions created for personnel at the accommodation points and expressed his satisfaction.

Then the minister met with the military personnel and inquired about their concerns. He drew the attention of the servicemen to the tasks set to the Azerbaijan Army by President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Ilham Aliyev. Colonel General Hasanov spoke about the work done to improve the social and living conditions of military personnel thanks to the attention and care of the president, and emphasized that these work will continue.

In the end, Colonel General Hasanov gave specific instructions regarding the organization of combat duty and increasing the combat capability of the troops, further improving the social and living conditions of military personnel.
The Post and Courier provides a forum for our readers to share their opinions, and to hold up a mirror to our community. Publication does not imply endorsement by the newspaper; the editorial staff attempts to select a representative sample of letters because we believe its important to let our readers see the range of opinions their neighbors submit for publication.
GAFFNEY  A company that manufactures frozen bakery products will begin operations in mid-2024 at an existing bakery facility in Cherokee County.

Gaffney Bakery LLC announced June 7 plans to renovate a facility at 131 Corporate Drive near Hyatt Street formerly used by Ace Bakery. The company has pledged $96 million in investments and plans to create more than 260 new jobs in the operation.

The Coordinating Council for Economic Development approved job development credits for the project and Cherokee County was awarded a $2.5 million Rural Infrastructure Fund grant to assist with the costs of building improvements.

"We are delighted to welcome Gaffney Bakery, LLC to Cherokee County and congratulate them on their significant investment of $96 million," Cherokee County Council Chairman Tim Spencer said in a news release. "This is a testament to the strength of our workforce, our business-friendly environment and our strategic location. We look forward to supporting their growth and success in our community."
SPARTANBURG  A new assisted stretching business has opened inside an Eastside Spartanburg retail plaza.

StretchLab had a three-day grand opening from June 2-4 and is located inside Converse Plaza on 1200 E. Main Street. The business has been seeing customers since late March.

We stretch everybody that way everyone can have freedom of motion, energy and quality of life, said Courtney Gray, general manager of the Spartanburg location.

StretchLab offers customized assisted stretching sessions with a focus on mobility, flexibility and posture. Members work with a trained Flexologist and participate in a 25 or 50-minute stretch session.

The California-based franchise was started in 2015 and has more than 300 studios across the U.S. Theres another Upstate StretchLab location on Augusta Street in Greenville.

Members do a mixture of stretches that restore functional range of motion and increase strength and muscle length. The sessions can help with blood circulation, posture, muscle recovery, muscle activation, stress relief, tension and improve tech neck for those with work at computers for long periods of time.

Our Flexologists are able to really get in there and open up those muscles, work on posture and release tension that's building up in there, Gray said.

Members work on breathing techniques, and percussion therapy is used to break up knots, fascia or scar tissue that could be restricting stretches.

Sessions are open to all ages. Gray said she has members ranging from ages 7 to 80. The business also works with those in wheelchairs and people with various disabilities.

There are plans for the business to offer group stretch sessions later this summer.

StretchLab is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

To learn more about StretchLabs Spartanburg location, visit stretchlab.com/location/spartanburg.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. The Accounts Chamber of Azerbaijan may be able to conduct an audit in the Central Bank in only one direction, Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Economic Policy, Industry, and Entrepreneurship Tahir Mirkishili said at todays meeting of the Milli Majlis (Parliament) of Azerbaijan, Trend reports.

He made the remark during the discussion of amendments to the law "On the Central Bank of the Republic of Azerbaijan" and other laws related to this area.

He noted that among the expected innovations in banks is the abolition of the certification requirement for chief accountants, branch managers, heads of internal audit services, etc.

According to Mirkishili, the requirement for banks to obtain permission from the Central Bank to open branches is canceled.
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SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / Hagens Berman urges Advance Auto Parts, Inc. (NYSE:AAP) investors who suffered substantial losses to submit your losses now.Visit: www.hbsslaw.com/investor-fraud/AAP Contact An Attorney Now: AAP@ hbsslaw.com 844-916-0895Advance Auto Parts, Inc. (NYSE: AAP) Investigation:The investigation focuses on the accuracy of Advance Auto Parts' statements concerning the demand for its products and the potential adverse impact of undisclosed sales practices.On May 31, 2023, Advance Auto Parts announced disappointing Q1 2023 financial results. While management had guided for operating margin improvements in 2023, management revealed that in Q1 the company's operating margin shrank to 2.6%, whereas it had an operating margin of 6% in the prior-year period. Management blamed the poor profitability on the company's attempts to "narrow competitive price gaps" (i.e., lowering of pricing to divert sales away from competitors).In addition, Advance Auto Parts provided a dim outlook, particularly with respect to the Company's anticipated earnings per share ("EPS"). Previously, management expected full-year EPS of $10.20 to $11.20. But with diminished sales and a strained operating margin, management revealed it now anticipates EPS of only $6.00 to $6.50.Moreover, with profits falling, the company cut its quarterly dividend by 83% from $1.50 quarterly to $0.25.On this news, Advance Auto Parts' stock dropped $39.31 per share, or 35% in a single trading day."We're focused on investors' losses and whether Advance Auto Parts misled investors about its sales strategy," said Reed Kathrein, the Hagens Berman partner leading the investigation.If you invested in Advance Auto Parts and have significant losses, or have knowledge that may assist the firm's investigation, click here to discuss your legal rights with Hagens Berman.Whistleblowers: Persons with non-public information regarding Advance Auto Parts should consider their options to help in the investigation or take advantage of the SEC Whistleblower program. Under the new program, whistleblowers who provide original information may receive rewards totaling up to 30 percent of any successful recovery made by the SEC. For more information, call Reed Kathrein at 844-916-0895 or email AAP@ hbsslaw.com # # #About Hagens BermanHagens Berman is a global plaintiffs' rights complex litigation law firm focusing on corporate accountability through class-action law. The firm is home to a robust securities litigation practice and represents investors as well as whistleblowers, workers, consumers and others in cases achieving real results for those harmed by corporate negligence and fraud. More about the firm and its successes can be found at hbsslaw.com . Follow the firm for updates and news at @ClassActionLaw.Contact:Reed Kathrein, 844-916-0895SOURCE: Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP
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GRAND CAYMAN, CAYMAN ISLANDS / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / Effective estate planning requires thoughtful conversation to determine how assets, including property, money, and possessions, are distributed as part of a family legacy. When determining the best strategy to protect and support family and friends in the planning process, one valuable tool to consider is the Single Premium Deferred Variable Annuity (SPDVA). BP Dan Martiuk, a trusted financial specialist, and Board Member for Star Insurance Company (Cayman), Limited (STAR), points to the SPDVA offered by STAR as an example, and outlines how this annuity can help protect assets and ensure a secure family future."When beginning the estate planning process, it's important to invest in tools such as a SPDVA," states BP Dan Martiuk. "The STAR-SPDVA is designed to provide exceptional estate planning benefits with enhanced preservation and flexibility." The four main features include deferral, (taking advantage of long-term compound growth of the investment portfolio), protection, (preserving accumulated wealth for the future), compliance (remaining compliant with international regulations and reporting requirements), and planning (additional estate planning benefits).DeferralThe STAR-SPDVA enables tax-free growth of investment, where earnings accumulate on a tax-deferred basis until withdrawn. This deferral allows investments to compound over time, maximizing potential returns and providing a more substantial legacy for beneficiaries.ProtectionOne key benefit of the STAR-SPDVA is the robust protection it provides. Based in the stable and secure jurisdiction of the Cayman Islands, the annuity product preserves policy assets for high-net-worth individuals. Placing assets into this annuity helps keep hard-earned wealth protected for future generations.ComplianceCompliance with international fiscal regulations is paramount, and thoughtful planners know to take advantage of fiscally efficient strategies. The STAR-SPDVA adheres to all applicable laws and reporting requirements to ensure peace of mind, knowing that the investment is fully compliant with global standards.PlanningSTAR-SPDVAs allow for better legacy planning as beneficiaries can be named to receive funds upon a passing. This helps ensure that assets are distributed according to clear wishes and can also help avoid the time and expense of probate.BP Dan Martiuk summarizes, "Annuity products such as the STAR-SPDVA may be structured to provide lifetime income through regular payments for a reliable source of income during retirement, while also offering a range of investment options to diversify investment portfolios and manage risk." Securing a legacy is an important step for every family - finding personalized service and customized solutions to meet unique estate planning needs can make a significant difference in preserving wealth for future generations.This article provides guidance and information for consideration and is not intended to provide specific tax and/or legal advice.Contact Information:Andrew MitchellEmail: media@ cambridgeglobalmedia.com Phone: 404-955-7133SOURCE: Cambridge Global
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NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / CNH Industrial has awarded innovation grants to start-ups Blixify Meraque and Sofien for their outstanding zero waste solutions as part of Enterprise Singapore's Sustainability Open Innovation Challenge 2022.The Sustainability Open Innovation Challenge brought together industry partners and creative innovators to co-develop sustainable solutions in areas such as zero waste, sustainable food sourcing, materials, and packaging.CNH Industrial's zero waste challenge statement focused on the mechanization of palm oil harvesting using robotics and new technologies. By improving harvesting efficiency, farmers can maximize yields from current growing areas, ultimately resulting in less waste and reduced environmental impact.Matthieu Sejourne, Vice President of Brand and Commercial Services CNH Industrial APAC region, said, "Large-scale palm oil farming can present social and environmental challenges, but it's a crop that is very important globally. We have to find a solution that will make production efficient, sustainable and safe." The palm oil industry, with an annual harvest of 71 million tonnes, predominantly relies on manual harvesting methods. This labour-intensive process involves workers cutting fruit bunches from the trees using knives on long poles, resulting in significant fruit loss and safety issues.After a comprehensive evaluation based on technical criteria, Blixify Meraque and Sofien emerged as the first and second placed projects, respectively. In addition to receiving cash and in-kind prizes, CNH Industrial has committed to being the initial launch customer for both start-ups, and to support their IP development and go-to-market strategies."Safety is paramount, as is affordability, for an innovation to benefit smallholder farmers. The two winning prototypes were very interesting and met the key criteria. We look forward to co-developing these projects," Matthieu added.Malaysian consortium Blixify Meraque designed a pruning and harvesting machine using computer vision and AI technology. The machine incorporates sensors and cameras to analyze the color and texture of palm oil fruit, accurately detecting its ripeness before harvest.Sofien, a startup based in Brazil, meanwhile created a cutting device attachment equipped with two mounted cameras and sensors to detect and monitor the ripeness of palm oil fruit, ensuring efficient harvesting.The Sustainability Open Innovation Challenge is part of CNH Industrial's on-going engagement with the Singapore Agri-Food Innovation Lab (SAIL) at Nanyang Technological University. In 2021, CNH Industrial partnered with SAIL to foster innovation and explore opportunities for co-developing sustainable agriculture solutions with the start-up ecosystem, academic and research institutions in Singapore and Southeast Asia.View additional multimedia and more ESG storytelling from CNH Industrial on 3 blmedia.com Contact Info:Spokesperson: CNH IndustrialWebsite: https://www.3blmedia.com/profiles/cnh-industrial Email: info@3 blmedia.com SOURCE: CNH Industrial
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TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / June 8, 2023 / A group of concerned shareholders (the "Concerned Shareholders") of Tenet Fintech Group Inc. ("Tenet" or the "Company"), who are leading the initiative to replace certain members of Tenet's Board (the "Incumbent Directors") at the Company's upcoming annual general meeting to be held June 27, 2023 (the "Meeting"), are issuing this statement in response to the Company's press release dated June 7, 2023 (the "Company's Release").The Incumbent Directors' statements regarding the AMF investigation have already been addressed on several occasions. The Concerned Shareholders do not intend to respond to those statements nor repeat their previous statements on this issue. Restating this matter is just another attempt by the Company to obfuscate the fundamental issues of the Incumbent Directors' poor performance and misconduct, which have caused significant damage to the Company.The Incumbent Directors are mistaken about the independence requirements applicable to Tenet - Tenet is a "venture issuer" under applicable securities laws and not a senior issuer. As such, it is exempt from many of the independence requirements otherwise applicable to senior issuers. Moreover, the Canadian Securities Exchange does not consider it is appropriate to prescribe a higher threshold for its listed issuers than that prescribed by applicable corporate law or securities laws. Consequently, the Concerned Shareholders' nominees for election to the Board meet the independence requirements for a board of directors of a venture issuer. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding of the regulations is yet another example of the Incumbent Directors' incompetence and their attempts to obfuscate the real issues facing the Company, and the importance of replacing them on Tenet's Board.In addition, the Incumbent Directors' statement in the Company's Release that Mr. Joseph has failed to repay an outstanding promissory note to the Company is misleading. This amount related to the reimbursement of withholding taxes associated with Mr. Joseph's exercise of stock options to acquire common shares in the Company. Due to the unexpected nature of the transaction, those amounts were recorded as loans and the repayment terms were still being negotiated as of Q1 2023. This has been publicly disclosed in the Company's MD&A for Q1 2023.The Concerned Shareholders continue to fully support Mr. Joseph and disagree with the misleading statements made against him by the Incumbent Directors to date. The Company's Release demonstrates the continued incompetence and misconduct of the Incumbent Directors and the need to vote against them and for the Concerned Shareholders' nominees at the upcoming Meeting on June 27, 2023.For more information on this news release, please contact:The Concerned Shareholders of Tenet Fintech Group Inc.info@ tenetagm2023.com (705) 887-6331SOURCE: Cavalcanti Hume Inc
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The agency was recognized as a Platinum Super Bell Award finalist for the fourth year in a row.PROVIDENCE, RI / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / Duffy & Shanley, a full-service communications agency based in Providence, earned 14 awards at the 55th Bell Ringer Awards Ceremony on Thursday, June 8. The annual event celebrates the work of public relations and communications professionals from across New England and was hosted by the PR Club, the region's leading communications trade organization.Honored alongside hundreds of New England-based industry professionals, the Duffy & Shanley team received awards in multiple categories across a diverse range of business sectors. Duffy & Shanley's 2023 Bell Ringer awards include:Gold Bell Award - Digital/Printed Collateral, for How Hanes Nabbed Major Press Interest With the Health of a Custom Media GiftGold Bell Award - Paid Media, for "Reasons to Believe" - BJ's Membership CampaignGold Bell Award - National Media Placement, for Showcasing Rhode Island's Offshore Wind Leadership in The New York TimesGold Bell Award - Vertical/Trade Media Placement, for E&E News: "Inside America's Offshore Wind Hub"Gold Bell Award - Integrated Marketing Communications, for Talking Student Loans - Four Different WaysGold Bell Award - Micro/Nano Influencer Campaign, for RI Seafood Find Your FreshSilver Bell Award - Social Media Platform Excellence, for @BjsWholesale: Utilizing Instagram as a Vehicle for Brand Growth Through Audience ConnectionSilver Bell Award - Content Marketing, for Ready, Set, Click: Starting the Customer Journey with ContentBronze Bell Award - Paid Media, for Decoding the Crystal Ball: The Future of Student Loan RefinancingBronze Bell Award - Single Video, for Paying for College? Watch This Video for 5 Expert TipsBronze Bell Award - National Media Placement, for Fast Company: "Hanes undies gets a colorful redesign to win over Gen Z"Bronze Bell Award - Regional Media Placement, for Boston Globe: "BJ's Wholesale Club to open new concept BJ's market' in Warwick, R.I."Bronze Bell Award - High Tech, for "Hi, Jill!": Ships Ahoy for New York's First Offshore Wind FarmMerit Bell Award - One-Time Special Event, for A Holiday for a CauseDuffy's Integrated Marketing Communication Campaign entry for College Ave Student Loans, "Talking Student Loans - Four Different Ways", was recognized during the ceremony as a finalist for the prestigious Platinum Super Bell Award which honors the overall top PR campaign of the evening."We are proud of the work we do on behalf of our clients, and honored to have that work recognized in the form of more than a dozen Bell Ringer awards," said Jon Duffy, president, Duffy & Shanley. "This year marks the 50th anniversary of Duffy & Shanley and these awards are another example of our growth and evolution over the course of a half century in business. Our work extends far beyond the walls of our Providence office, and we strive every day to create impactful campaigns that our clients are proud to call their own." A full list of all winners is available here, and a full winner's gallery is located here.About Duffy & Shanley, Inc.Based in Providence, R.I., Duffy & Shanley is one of New England's largest independently-owned communication firms. A uniquely integrated, full-service agency, Duffy & Shanley develops breakthrough campaigns for Fortune 500 companies and leading brands, including AT&T, BJ's Wholesale Club, College Ave, Dunkin', Foster Grant, rsted and Hanesbrands. Visit duffyshanley.com , or Duffy & Shanley's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn for more information.About PR ClubFounded in 1948, PR Club (formerly the Publicity Club of New England) strives to promote and encourage involvement in the communications industry and specifically the professions of public relations, promotions, and marketing. Get additional information about monthly PR Club programs, social and networking events, the "Bell Ringer" blog, and the Bell Ringer Awards Ceremony at www.PRClub.org . Follow them on Twitter @PRClubofNE.About the Bell Ringer AwardsThe Bell Ringer Awards recognize public relations and communications work that demonstrates excellence in creative planning and superior execution to achieve a high degree of success in reaching predetermined objectives. Open to all New England practitioners, the program, now in its 54th year, celebrates the extraordinary work of the region's communications professionals.Media Contact: Annette Maggiacomo; Amaggiacomo@ duffyshanley.com SOURCE: Duffy & Shanley, Inc.
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PORT HUENEME, CA / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / In celebration of World Oceans Day, the Port of Hueneme held a "Sustaining the Seas Summit" on Thursday, June 8 at the Channel Islands Maritime Museum in Oxnard. The event was an opportunity for the Port of Hueneme, maritime industry companies, environmentalists, and community organizations to gather to discuss partnerships focused on the sustainability of the world's oceans.Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, a local Chumash Elder, provided a Land Acknowledgement blessing during the opening of the World Oceans Day: Sustaining the Seas Summit."We are the only planet that has an ocean, and we must sustain it for generations to come," said Jess Herrera, President of the Oxnard Harbor Commission. "The Port of Hueneme is committed to a clean and sustainable environment and ocean. That is why we are here today to learn more from leaders on efforts concerning ocean-based technology, advocacy, and management. Understanding the status and the change in our oceans is a complex issue." According to the United Nations, the purpose of World Oceans Day is to inform the public of the impact of human actions on the ocean, to develop a worldwide movement of citizens for the ocean and mobilize and unite the world's population on a project for the sustainable management of the world's oceans."This event is something very important to me. I have a very long history with the ocean," said Oxnard Harbor Commissioner, Jason Hodge. "Everything is interconnected. I am personally invested in this. We all are. Anyone that lives near a coast, or not near a coast, has to be concerned about our oceans." "The oceans cover 70 percent of our planet, and it needs our help," said California State Treasurer, Fiona Ma, who was the event's keynote speaker. "It's great that there are so many communities and people around the world that are seeking to bring that balance back into our seas," Treasurer Ma said. "We need to work creatively to make sure we are bringing back the oceans to abundance that it gives us." Fiona Ma, California State Treasurer, was the Keynote Speaker for the "Sustaining the Seas" Summit held on World Oceans Day, June 8, 2023.During the summit, the Port of Hueneme and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gave their "Blue Whales Blue Skies" award to Wallenius Wilhelmsen, Hyundai Glovis, Maersk, K Line and NYK for participating in NOAA's Vessel Speed Reduction program that provides incentives to companies for incorporating sustainable shipping practices across their global supply chains.Commissioners Jess Herrera, Celina Zacarias and Jason Hodge presenting the "Blue Whales Blue Skies" award recognitions on behalf of the Port of Hueneme/Oxnard Harbor District to Hyundai Glovis, Maersk, K Line, Wallenius Wilhelmsen, and NYK for participating in the Vessel Speed Reduction program."Every breath we take and every drop we drink are small but mighty reminders of our connections to the ocean," said Adam Vega, Community Outreach Specialist at the Port of Hueneme. "The Port of Hueneme convened decision makers, scientists, business executives, indigenous communities, and ocean activists making cutting edge innovations for the Blue Economy' right here in our own backyard." Giles Pettifor, Environmental Manager at the Port of Hueneme, stated: "This event was a great opportunity to acknowledge the history, learn about the present and get empowered to advocate for a more sustainable future." The summit also included panel discussions on the topics of "Technology for the Sea," "Local Ocean and Whales," and "Attracting Attention & Education." About the Port of HuenemeThe Port of Hueneme is one of the most productive and efficient commercial trade gateways for niche cargo on the West Coast. Five locally elected Port Commissioners govern the Port. The Port consistently ranks among the top ten U.S. ports for automobiles and fresh produce. Port operations support the community by bringing $2.2 billion in economic activity and creating 20,032 trade-related jobs. Trade through the Port of Hueneme generates more than $173.2 million in direct and related state and local taxes, which fund vital community services. In 2017, the Port of Hueneme became the first port in California to become Green Marine certified and was voted the Greenest Port in the U.S. at the Green Shipping Summit. www.portofh.org PRESS CONTACT:Letitia AustinPublic & Government Relations Managerlaustin@ portofh.org (805) 271-2205SOURCE: The Port of Hueneme
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NEW ORLEANS, LA / ACCESSWIRE / June 8, 2023 / Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC ("KSF") and KSF partner, former Attorney General of Louisiana, Charles C. Foti, Jr., remind investors that they have until August 7, 2023 to file lead plaintiff applications in a securities class action lawsuit against SentinelOne, Inc. (NYSE:S), if they purchased the Company's securities between June 1, 2022 and June 1, 2023, inclusive (the "Class Period"). This action is pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.What You May DoIf you purchased securities of SentinelOne and would like to discuss your legal rights and how this case might affect you and your right to recover for your economic loss, you may, without obligation or cost to you, contact KSF Managing Partner Lewis Kahn toll-free at 1-877-515-1850 or via email ( lewis.kahn@ksfcounsel.com) , or visit https://www.ksfcounsel.com/cases/nyse-s/ to learn more. If you wish to serve as a lead plaintiff in this class action, you must petition the Court by August 7, 2023.About the LawsuitSentinelOne and certain of its executives are charged with failing to disclose material information during the Class Period, violating federal securities laws.On June 1, 2023, the Company disclosed that "[a]s a result of a change in methodology and correction of historical inaccuracieswe made a one-time adjustment to ARR of $27.0 million or approximately 5% of total ARR" and that the Company had slashed its fiscal year 2024 revenue guidance from a range of $631 million to $640 million to a range of $590 million to $600 million, due to the discovery of "historical upsell and renewal recording inaccuracies relating to ARR on certain subscription and consumption contracts, which are now corrected." On this news, shares of SentinelOne fell $7.28 per share, or more than 35%, to close at $13.44 per share on June 2, 2023.The case is Johansson v. SentinelOne, Inc., et al., No. 23-cv-02786.About Kahn Swick & Foti, LLCKSF, whose partners include former Louisiana Attorney General Charles C. Foti, Jr., is one of the nation's premier boutique securities litigation law firms. KSF serves a variety of clients - including public institutional investors, hedge funds, money managers and retail investors - in seeking recoveries for investment losses emanating from corporate fraud or malfeasance by publicly traded companies. KSF has offices in New York, California, Louisiana and New Jersey.To learn more about KSF, you may visit http://ksfcounsel.com/ Contact:Kahn Swick & Foti, LLCLewis Kahn, Managing Partner1-877-515-18501100 Poydras St., Suite 960New Orleans, LA 70163SOURCE: Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC
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TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / Tsodilo Resources Limited ("Tsodilo" or the "Company") (TSXV:TSD)(OTCQB:TSDRF)(FSE:TZO) is pleased to announce that at its Annual Meeting of shareholders held on June 9, 2023, the following directors were elected: James M. Bruchs, Thomas S. Bruington, Jonathan R. Kelafant, Blackie Marole and Mark Scowcroft.Appointment of AuditorsThe shareholders also approved the appointment of Crowe MacKay LLP, Vancouver, Canada, as auditors of the Company.Grant of Stock OptionsUnder the terms of its Stock Option Plan, Tsodilo granted incentive stock options to five directors, two employees and an advisor to purchase an aggregate of 950,000 common shares of Tsodilo exercisable at CDN$ 0.21. These options vest as to 25% effective June 12, 2023, and 25% on each of the sixth, twelfth and eighteenth-month anniversaries of the date of the grant. The options are valid for five years.About Tsodilo Resources LimitedTsodilo Resources Limited is an international resource exploration company engaged in the search for economic metal and diamond deposits at its Gcwihaba Resources (Pty) Limited ("Gcwihaba") and Bosoto (Pty) Ltd. ("Bosoto) projects in Botswana. The Company has a 100% stake in its Gcwihaba project area consisting of five metal (base, precious, platinum group, and rare earth) prospecting licenses all located in the North-West district of Botswana. The Company has a 100% stake in Bosoto (Pty) Ltd. which holds the BK16 kimberlite project in the Orapa Kimberlite Field (OKF) in Botswana. Tsodilo manages the exploration of the Gcwihaba and Bosoto projects.This press release may contain forward-looking statements. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, that address activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future (including, without limitation, statements pertaining to the use of proceeds, the impact of strategic partnerships and statements that describe the Company's future plans, objectives or goals) are forward- looking statements. These forward-looking statements reflect the current expectations or beliefs of the Company based on information currently available to the Company. Forward- looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results of the Company to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements, and even if such actual results are realized or substantially realized, there can be no assurance that they will have the expected consequences to, or effects on the Company. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, changes in equity markets, changes in general economic conditions, market volatility, political developments in Botswana and surrounding countries, changes to regulations affecting the Company's activities, uncertainties relating to the availability and costs of financing needed in the future, exploration and development risks, the uncertainties involved in interpreting exploration results and the other risks involved in the mineral exploration business. 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. Although the Company believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, 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 therein.Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results of the Company to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements and, even if such actual results are realized or substantially realized, there can be no assurance that they will have the expected consequences to, or effects on, the Company. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, uncertainties relating to availability and cost of funds, timing and content of work programs, results of exploration activities, interpretation of drilling results and other geological data, risks relating to variations in the diamond grade and kimberlite lithologies; variations in rates of recovery and breakage; estimates of grade and quality of diamonds, variations in diamond valuations and future diamond prices; the state of world diamond markets, reliability of mineral property titles, changes to regulations affecting the Company's activities, delays in obtaining or failure to obtain required project approvals, operational and infrastructure risk and other risks involved in the diamond exploration and development business. 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. Although the Company believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward- looking statements are reasonable, forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to their inherent uncertainty.Neither the TSX Venture Exchange ("TSXV") nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release. This news release may contain assumptions, estimates, and other forward-looking statements regarding future events. Such forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties and are subject to factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control, which may cause actual results or performance to differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements.FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:James M. BruchsChairman and Chief Executive OfficerJBruchs@ TsodiloResources.comHead OfficeTelephone +1 416 572 2033Facsimile + 1 416 987 4369Website http://www.TsodiloResources.com SOURCE: Tsodilo Resources Limited
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JACKSONVILLE, FL / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / VyStar Foundation announced today that $197,092 will be distributed among 10 recipients in its first grant cycle focused on nonprofit organizations that support active military, veterans, and their families. Specific funding priority was given to programs that address food and housing insecurity, employment and small business counseling, and mental health services."Each of the 10 nonprofit organizations selected as part of this grant cycle are truly making a difference in the lives of our military, veterans and their families," said Patricia McElroy, President VyStar Foundation. "It is our privilege to be able to provide them with much needed support to enhance their efforts. VyStar's spirit of philanthropy is deeply embedded in who we are along with our commitment to our brave service members." The list of grantees and causes: Alachua County Coalition for the Homeless and Hungry (Alachua, FL) - Basic Needs for Homeless Veterans' Program in Alachua County that ensures veterans have ongoing access to nutritious meals. America's Second Harvest of Coastal Georgia Network (Chatham, GA) - Mobile Food Pantry that provides food for active military and veterans at Hunter Army Airfield in Chatham County. Beaches Habitat for Humanity (Duval, FL) - Critical home repairs for its Hometown Heroes program to improve the quality of life and living conditions of veterans in the community by focusing on exterior and interior home repairs. Five STAR Veterans Center (Duval, FL) - The Weaver Wellness Mental Health Program provides case management, supportive on-site housing, and 24 hour a day mental health services. Northeast Florida Women Veterans, Inc. (Duval, FL) - HerSPACE provides a safe space for women to access intense case management and stable housing. Operation New Uniform, Inc. (Duval, FL) - Provides employment and small business counseling to help veterans transition from military to civilian careers. SD Gunner Fund, Inc. (Chatham, GA) - Its Service Dogs' Program provides a service dog and training to veterans to improve their mental health. Task Force Hydro 1 (Duval, FL) - Provides service members, veterans, their families, and friends with therapeutic mental health support through the healing powers of the ocean and outdoor recreational activities. United Way of Northeast Florida (Duval, FL) - Mission United Veteran Emergency Needs Program provides access to a basic needs fund for military/veterans and their families who need emergency financial assistance to help overcome immediate crises. Veterans Entrepreneurship Initiative (Orange, FL) - Provides comprehensive support, resources, and education to help veterans successfully transition into entrepreneurship and contribute to the economic growth of their communities."It is a tremendous honor to recognize the outstanding organizations that are addressing critical needs in the communities we serve," said VyStar Credit Union President/CEO and Foundation Chairman Brian Wolfburg. "The military grant cycle honors VyStar's roots at Naval Air Station Jacksonville. I am grateful to the organizations that are supporting active duty armed forces, veterans, and their families." VyStar Foundation is dedicated to doing good and leading by example through collaborative partnerships that support military members and veterans, youth, and overall community vitality in the areas served by VyStar.Grants through VyStar Foundation are available to 501(c)(3) organizations whose purpose and mission align with the Foundation's strategic giving pillars: Military: Ensuring military members, veterans and their families receive the social services they need and the recognition they deserve Youth: Empowering youth by providing equitable access to creative learning environments Community Building: Cultivating financially strong, culturally vibrant, and interconnected communitiesVyStar Foundation will launch its next grant cycle this August giving funding priority to nonprofit organizations that support underserved youth. The youth program application opens on Aug. 21, 2023, and closes on Sept. 30, 2023. To learn more about VyStar Foundation and upcoming information sessions, visit vystarfoundation.org About VyStar FoundationAs VyStar Credit Union's philanthropic arm, VyStar Foundation was established in 2021 to strengthen the credit union's ability to do good. Operating as a 501(c)(3) charity, the Foundation is dedicated to doing good and leading by example through collaborative partnerships that support youth, military members and veterans and overall community vitality in the areas served by VyStar Credit Union. For more information, visit vystarfoundation.org CONTACT:Charlene Shirk, Assistant Vice President, Public Relationsshirkc@ vystarcu.org 904-594-5450SOURCE: Vystar Credit Union
Nigerian crude grades are failing to attract buyers from Europe, China and India as traders, to cut cost, shift to a blend of WTI (the main oil benchmark for North America) and Brazilian grades as a substitute for the countrys highly sought-after sweet crude.

Top crude grades of Africas biggest oil producer, Bonny Light, Forcados and Brass, have a reputation for being light in sulphur, a quality that has made them the darling of refineries in Europe and Asia.

But traders are flocking to the Urals crude blend because they see the Nigerian grades as relatively pricey, with traders reluctant to offload the countrys cargoes, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights.

That had driven Nigerias premium grade Bonny Light to 50 cents per barrel discount to Dated Brent on 6 June.

WAF (West Africa) is losing out to alternatives in Europe  WTI, Midland and Brazilian grades have been consistently undercutting differentials, and sellers of Nigerian barrels just cannot find demand in Europe, the research house said, quoting a source.

The development adds more pain to the woes of Nigeria, where output hit a multi-decade low of below 1 million barrels a day last year. Already, the nation has struggled to contain incidents of oil theft on a grand scale in the far south which sapped as much as $1 billion from the governments revenue in the first quarter of the year.

That production level is less than half of the countrys current daily capacity of 2.2 million barrels.

On account of a price ceiling placed on the crude oil from Russia following its war with Ukraine, which has made the grade cheaper, African crude graders are struggling to find patronage from refiners in Asia, outsold by the Urals crude.

READ ALSO:

I dont think Nigeria can sustain competition with WTI Midland mixed with Brazil, its been a long time now since we have seen Europe able to absorb Nigerian exports, a source told S&P Global Commodity Insights.

It comes as an early blow to plans by newly-inaugurated President Bola Tinubu to bolster production and buck up oil earnings, at a time the government is spending nearly everything it earns to service debt.

President Tinubu had promised in his manifesto ahead of the February presidential election to scale up Nigerias daily output to 2.6 million barrels by 2027 and 4 million come 2030.

That compares to Aprils production (condensate inclusive), which fell 17.8 per cent to 1.25 million bpd.

Nigerian producers have to lower prices to compete, said Uwadiae Osadiaye, a chartered financial analyst with Lagos-based FBNQuest.

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The Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) says its focus is to exceed the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)s oil production quota of 1.74 million barrels per day (bpd).

Its Chief Executive, Gbenga Komolafe, made the assertions shortly after he received an Award of Excellence from the Federal University of Petroleum Resources (FUPRE), Effurun in Delta State on Thursday evening.

Mr Komolafe, addressing journalists, said that the countrys current crude oil production capacity was within the neighbourhood of 2.2 million bpd, which had already exceeded OPECS quota.

He said that with the current 2.2 million bpd, the country has the capacity to surpass the OPEC quota.

Mr Komolafe ascribed the capacity to the improvement in general security services in the country as well as the collaborative efforts of stakeholders in the oil and gas industry.

He said the collaboration would be sustained in a manner that would ensure that crude oil theft was brought down.

In recent times, there has been increase in the volume of crude oil production and decrease in oil theft.

This could largely be ascribed to the general security services in the country, as well as the collaborative efforts of the stakeholders in the oil and gas industry.

The effort of the general security services, collaborations between the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, the regulators and the private security services have helped to curtail oil theft and upscaled our production, he said.

Mr Komolafe said that the commission has the statutory mandate to increase the quantum of crude oil production in the country.

He noted that within the short time of its existence, the commission had received favourable feedback from the industry in terms of attracting investors confidence in the industry.

We have been able to provide clarity in the activities of the industry.

No investor will invest in a situation where there is acrimony.

READ ALSO:

So, the commission is keen and doing everything possible to attract investors into the upstream, Komolafe said.

The NUPRC chief executive said that human capital development was key to the development and optimisation of the nations hydrocarbon resources.

He commended FUPRE for supporting the federal government in developing the needed human capital to help develop the hydrocarbon resources.

We will support and collaborate with FUPRE to ensure that the university continues to turn out the best in terms of human capital that will help in the development of our upstream resources.

In terms of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), we will continue to collaborate with the university in providing infrastructure so that the standard for which the institution is known will continue to be sustained, he said.

Mr Komolafe, while dedicating the award to the Board of the NUPRC and the commissions management, said it would spur him to do more.

Earlier, the Vice-Chancellor of FUPRE, Akpofure Rim-Rukeh, said that the university was established in 2007 and began academic activities in 2008.

Mr Rim-Rukeh said that the institution had made a lot of in-roads into achieving its objectives over the years.

According to him, diversification is a good initiative by the federal government, but the oil industry is very relevant.

The products that are coming out from the petrochemical industry today are awesome.

We are prepared to reposition the oil industry; we are ready to face the challenges in terms of research and development, Mr Rim-Rukeh said.

On the NUPRC delegation were NUPRC Board Chairman, Isa Modibbo; Sabo Lamido, executive commissioner, Finance and Account; Ben Ogunnubi, coordinator, NUPRC, Warri office and Rose Ndung, executive commissioner, Exploration and Acreages and among others.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the award ceremony, which also had Seinye Briggs, Greg Ugbeifun and Kestin Pondi, among others as recipients, was powered by the African Child Foundation.

(NAN)

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The House of Yul Edochie is in disarray, or so we are meant to believe. In the past couple of days, actor Edochie and his second wife, Judy Austin, have been on the internet with their issues.

They say new couples tend to hit some rough spots. Perhaps this is the case with the Edochies.

Although things are unclear about the situation with Yuls first wife, May Edochie, the new entrant, Judy, has successfully settled into the role May left behind.

However, cracks began to appear recently when Yul posted clips of Judy engrossed on her phone while he was attempting to discuss something serious with her.

On Monday, Yul hinted to the public about the issues he has been having with his new wife when he posted a clip on his Facebook page.

He said: I dont understand why I cannot talk to Judy and shell listen. Im getting tired of this whole thing. I found this video she made, and I had to post it.

The video showed Judy busy with her phone as he tried to converse seriously.

That was the beginning of what has now come to be perceived as a rancorous union.

Cracks in the wall

While the Edochies are not necessarily bringing the roof down, their tension is palpable.

From Yuls initial post accusing Judy of not listening to him, it has been one issue to another.

Judy, who has a son for the actor, retaliated by posting another video on his page.

In the clip, the couple was shouting over who had the right to post what video.

She captioned, Since Yul Edochie decided to embarrass me by posting a video I made on my phone without my consent, I will shock him. It is now game on.

The actor then responded by making a video of himself airing his thoughts over her actions and threatening to take drastic measures.

Ill do something drastic. Im trying so hard to control myself. Ill do something drastic if I take the action that is getting into my head. Youre getting me upset, believe me, he said in the 12-minute video.

Another clip shows the actor preventing his second wife from driving out with his car, to the point of wresting the keys from her hand.

Deflections

But it wasnt always like this. While some believe that the couple is bound to have issues, given that Judy is perceived as a third wheel in what was once regarded as a happy home, others believe they are putting on an act.

Before now, Yul and Judy gave the impression that they lived together in peace, harmony and love.

Other videos on his page, which has 2.7 million followers, show the couple being loved up.

Before the shouting match, they referred to each other with their pet names. While Judy calls her husband Isi Mmili, meaning Deep Water, he calls her Ijele Odogwu, loosely translating to Big Masquerade.

A video of the couple, posted on the 1st of June, shows them together in a car, having small talks, sing-alongs and laughing heartily at each others jokes.

The clip was captioned, Goofing around with Ijele Odogwu. Judy Austin. Yul Edochie.

Another video posted on the 26th of May shows the couple having a praise and worship session.

Conflict money

Despite all their shenanigans, many believe that the couple is putting up an act.

Critics say they are fashioning their Facebook page after popular MC and comedian, Yanbaba.

Yanbaba and his wife also go by the personae Aisha and Odogwu.

From being a couple in love, Aisha and Odogwu once switched ring partners.

During their period of conflict, they made their page trend for days.

Similarly, Yuls page has been trending all week. Notably, the videos on the page are monetised, meaning Facebook places advert on them, and which income for the page administrator pays between $8.75 and $10 for every 1000 views

As of Friday afternoon, the four videos of Yul and Judy arguing page have garnered approximately 144,000 views cumulatively.

Background

In the past year, Yul has been in the news for one reason or another.

What started as a rumoured affair suddenly gained a life of its own when it was revealed that Judy bore a son to the actor.

Consequently, Yuls wife of 19 years moved out of his home. She then stated that she would not be manipulated into forgiveness.

In March, his first son with his first wife passed on. The tragic event occurred weeks after he celebrated his 16th birthday.

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Some lawmakers-elect, who attended the closed-door meeting with President Bola Tinubu on Thursday at the Presidential Villa Abuja, have said the president did not tell them who to vote for during the election of the leadership of the National Assembly on Tuesday.

Adamu Ranga and Paul Nnamchi told journalists after the meeting that the president merely advised them to work for the countrys unity and choose good leaders among themselves.

Mr Tinubu met with the senators-elect and members-elect of the House of Representatives ahead of the inauguration of the 10th National Assembly on Tuesday.

The president and his party, APC, are backing a former governor of Akwa Ibom State, Godswill Akpabio, and a senator representing Kano North, Barau Jibrin, for the senate president and deputy senate president.

Tajudeen Abbas from Kaduna State and Benjamin Kalu from Abia State are the preferred choices of the president and the ruling party for speaker and deputy speaker of the House.

But some aspirants have kicked against the choices and vowed to remain in the race.

Among them are a former Zamfara governor, Abdulaziz Yari, a former Abia State governor, Orji Kalu, Osita Izunaso and Sani Musa, all members of the APC.

They have refused to withdraw from the race because they allege the president and the party are unfair to them. They also threaten to form alliances against the presidents choices of the president and the party.

In the lower chamber, outgoing Deputy Speaker Idris Wase, Yusuf Gagdi, Muktar Betara, Sada Soli and Miriam Onuoha have also refused to withdraw from the race. Some have formed a group known as G-7 to forge ahead with their ambitions.

What Tinubu told us

Mr Ranga, elected to represent Ningi/Warji Federal Constituency of Bauchi State, said the president did not mention the names of his preferred choices for the National Assembly leadership positions at the meeting but merely asked to work together to choose good leaders.

The lawmakers were told to work together to choose good leaders in the 10th National Assembly, Mr Ranga said.

Mr President spoke to the general assembly of both the Senate and the House of Representatives in order to ensure that we have a solid government. Second, he emphasised that he will perform an open-door policy for everybody.

Whoever wants to see him can see him without any hindrance. And whatever you want to discuss with him, he will give you that privilege to discuss, he noted.

Thirdly, he said we should put our constituency first since we are here to represent them. He mentioned that he wants the Senate and the House to cooperate in electing good leaders.

On his part, Mr Nnamchi said the president appealed to all the lawmakers-elect to ignore their political differences and work for national unity.

READ ALSO: Reps hold valedictory session ahead of final adjournment of 9th National Assembly

He appealed that we should forget about party politics and face national interest. That was the major part of his speech.

He didnt mention anybodys name to be voted for. Maybe he is appealing, but I didnt hear anybodys name, Mr Nnamchi, the lawmaker-elect for Enugu East/Isiuzo Federal Constituency of Enugu State in the House of Representatives, said.

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President Bola Tinubu Friday suggested that even though he has his preference among the candidates seeking to be leaders of the National Assembly, he is ready to work with whoever the new lawmakers choose to elect as their leaders.

Mr Tinubu spoke during a meeting with traditional rulers at the State House, Abuja, his office said in a statement.

He, however, appealed to the traditional rulers to speak to elected lawmakers about managing their ambitions

On the leadership of the National Assembly, the President urged the Royal Fathers to counsel their subjects interested in elective positions on the need to manage their ambitions and create harmony within the legislative house, Abiodun Oladunjoye, the director of information at the State House, wrote about the meeting in a statement sent to PREMIUM TIMES

President Tinubu declared that he is ready to work with any elected representative from the National Assembly, stressing that the Nigeria project is of paramount importance to him.

Mr Oladunjoye then quoted President Tinubu as saying: Nigeria must survive. Nigeria must develop. Nigeria must make progress.

Mr Tinubu and his party, APC, have endorsed candidates for the four leadership positions in the National Assembly. However, some other aspirants, who are also members of the APC, have rejected the endorsements.

The president also explained his decision to cancel petrol subsidy.

Details later

Read the full statement by Mr Oladunjoye below.



President Bola Tinubu on Friday in Abuja assured traditional rulers in the country that his administration will run an open-door policy that is ready to listen to the yearnings of Nigerians toward transforming the countrys rich potentials to reality.

Speaking at an interactive session with the Royal Fathers under the aegis of National Council of Traditional Rulers of Nigeria (NCTRN), the President apprised them on the decision of his government to remove fuel subsidy, improve security, create jobs and sustain the environment as well as the forthcoming election of principal officers of the 10th National Assembly.

We are all ears. We are ready to listen at any given time. I promise you an open-door policy and that is the way I will go.

That open-door policy is for you to call me and send to me at any given time any concern that you might have.

We may not have it right 100 per cent of the time but we must get it right 90 per cent of the time for this country, he said.

Responding to issues raised by the traditional rulers on challenges facing the country, he assured them, saying worry not because the country is in good hands. He added that his administration is very conscious of the expectations of Nigerians.

On the decision to remove fuel subsidy, for which various speakers at the meeting expressed support, the President appealed to the traditional leaders to persuade Nigerians to have faith and that the pump prices of fuel will eventually come down.

I am grateful that you are paying attention to what I have been doing. You have paid attention to the subsidy removal. Why should we in good heart and sense, feed smugglers and be Father Christmas to neighbouring countries, even though they say not everyday is Christmas?

The elephant that was going to bring Nigeria to its knees is the subsidy. A country that cannot pay salaries and we say we have potentials to encourage ourselves. I think we did the right thing, he said.

While acknowledging concerns on the need for critical infrastructure in different parts of the country, President Tinubu pledged that any road block on the way of the progress of the Nigeria people would be removed by his government.

The lamentations about the capital projects, where is the money going to come from if we dont protect our resources and our boundaries?

You cannot have development without capital projects, he added.

On the leadership of the National Assembly, the President urged the Royal Fathers to counsel their subjects interested in elective positions on the need to manage their ambitions, and create harmony within the legislative house.

President Tinubu declared that he is ready to work with any elected representative from the National Assembly, stressing that the Nigeria project is of paramount importance to him.

Nigeria must survive. Nigeria must develop. Nigeria must make progress, he said.

On security, the President reiterated his pledge to Nigerians to prioritise the sector until every Nigerian goes to sleep with their two eyes closed.

He emphasized that the unity and togetherness of the country cannot be compromised, saying that every region of the country would get what it is due.

We are going to tackle youth unemployment. It is only when we have the prosperity for the country that we can create jobs that will employ our youths.

Condemning crude oil theft in the Niger Delta region by a tiny percentage of the population, President Tinubu said it was counterproductive to the growth of the economy.

We need to tame those involved in this sabotage and we will work as hard as possible to ensure that the diversity of this country is used for its prosperity, growth and stability.

President Tinubu told the traditional rulers that, with the campaigns and elections over, he is primed for governance, and his government has already signed a law that extends the retirement age of judicial officers from 65 to 70 years, while also addressing pension reforms.

Equally on electricity, the President said a constitutional amendment signed into law now allows Nigerias 36 States to generate electricity.

Thats devolution of power and that should be our contribution to the developmental projects you are looking for and we will continue in ways that will help our people, he said.

President Tinubu thanked members of NCTRN for their early visit and prayers for the success of his administration.

Without your prayers and support, I cannot stand before you as President and I thank you for your support during the campaigns, he said.

In separate remarks, the Chairman and Co-Chairman of NCTRN, the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Saad Abubakar, and Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Ogunwusi, pledged the support and loyalty of traditional rulers from the six geo-political zones to President Tinubu.

They assured the President of their continued prayers in his resolve to move the country forward under his Renewed Hope agenda.

We are 100 per cent in support of your government and we believe in the will of the Almighty Allah you will move this country forward, the Sultan said, while congratulating him and Vice President Kashim Shettima on their election victory, peaceful transition and assumption of office.

We will contribute our quota to the development of the country once you reach out to us, the Sultan added.

The Ooni of Ife expressed delight that the country has remained united and focused despite the challenges.

Recounting that the President had said he deserves no pity from anyone because he asked for the job, the Imperial Majesty appealed to President Tinubu not to underestimate the power and reach of traditional rulers in complementing the programmes and visions of the new government.

The President and his deputy listened to presentations from representatives from the six geo-political zones, including Shehu of Borno, Alhaji Ibn Umar Al Amin El-kanemi; Obi of Onitsha, Igwe Alfred Achebe; Emir of Kano, Alhaji Aminu Ado Bayero; Amanayabo of Nembe, Edmund Daukoru; Tor Tiv, Prof. James Ayatse; and Deji of Akure, Oba Aladetoyinbo Aladelusi.

Abiodun Oladunjoye

Director of Information

State House

June 9, 2023

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Forum of Commissioners for Finance of Nigeria has called on the federal government to ensure that all accruals from the removal of fuel subsidy go to the federation account.

Outgoing Chairperson of the Forum, David Olofu, made the call at a valedictory session for outgoing state commissioners for finance held in Abuja on Friday.

Mr Olofu, the immediate past Commissioner for Finance and Economic Planning in Benue State, commended President Bola Tinubu on the removal of subsidy.

We will like to sincerely commend the President for having that political will to do that, first day in office, he said.

That is what we had been yearning for. He came, his first day in office, he was able to achieve that which we have always asked for.

On how the president should manage the funds from subsidy removal, Mr Olofu said the constitution provided for all federation revenues to go into the federation account.

Nobody has any authority whatsoever to deduct any amount from federation revenue.

So, I will align myself with the position of the Constitution and recommend that all the accruals go into the federation account and let it be disbursed from the federation account, he noted.

He explained, however, that the Federal Government should come up with policies and programmes that could address the challenges Nigerians are currently facing as a result of an increase in the pump price of fuel due to the removal of subsidy.

He said: I believe that the President has the capacity and knowledge to do that decisively.

He has already started it by proposing a wage increase for workers, but that has to be done alongside sub-nationals because the sub-nationals have the bulk of civil servants in this country.

I believe he is on track, but apart from the wage increase, we also have to look at issues of infrastructure because we believe strongly that if we can wrap up infrastructure in this country, it will also help to improve the living standard and bring down the cost of living.

Mr Olofu also appealed to Nigerians to be patient, adding that the long-term benefit of what has been done by the president far outweighs the short-term pains people were going through.

Meanwhile, the incoming Chair of the Forum, Wale Akinterinwa, commended his predecessor, saying that Mr Olofu did a very good work while leading the forum.

He has actually elevated the forum to a much higher level than he met it. Be that as it may, I will try to ensure that I continue from where he stopped.

I will continue to sustain the good relationship he has created with all the revenue generating agencies, such as the Ministry of Finance and the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation, he said.

Mr Akinterinwa, commissioner for finance in Ondo State, reiterated that the removal of fuel subsidy was an overdue issue.

I commend the President for having the courage to immediately remove the fuel subsidy as he was sworn.

Well, we are going to feel the pain we are feeling in the short run, but in the long run, it is in the best interest of everybody.

Mohammed Shehu, Chairperson Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), on his part, commended the forum on taking the issue of the federation account very seriously.

We hope that as the years go by, the agitation on federal might or federal imposition on a lot of things would become a thing of the past.

This is an opportunity for states revenue mobilisation and all other agencies to collaborate in the area of increasing internally generated revenue of states and diversification of the economy, he said.

He also said the removal of fuel subsidy was good for the economy.

Mr Shehu urged states to ensure that the monies that were eventually going to the states should be used properly so that we can run a very good federation and create opportunities for jobs for Nigerians.

Special Guest of honour at the event, the Governor of Jigawa, Umar Namadi, tasked the forum to build on the legacy of the outgoing chairman, saying that he brought a lot of innovation and professionalism to the organisation.

Mr Sheu, who served as both Commissioner for Finance and Deputy Governor of Jigawa state, said that the removal of fuel subsidy was a bold step taken by the president.

The News Agency of Nigeria NAN reports that the event was attended by the Accountant General of the Federation, Oluwatoyin Madein, and representatives of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS).

NAN

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Zamfara State Government has said it recovered 40 vehicles from the residences of the immediate former governor of the state, Bello Matawalle.

PREMIUM TIMES gathered that the police operatives surrounded the two residences in Gusau, the state capital and Mr Matawalles hometown, Maradun, early Friday morning.

The Zamfara governors spokesperson, Sulaiman Bala  Idris, in a statement Friday evening, said the state government notified Mr Matawalle to return all state government vehicles in his possession within five days, but he refused.

He said police authorities in the state acted on a court order and a search warrant obtained for the operation.

Recall that the Zamfara State Government communicated officially to former Governor Bello Matawalle and his Deputy to return all the missing vehicles within five working days. We also lodged an official complaint with the Police on overriding public interest in wasteful looting of valuables, including official vehicles.

Consequently, the Police sought a search warrant which was duly given by the court and hence raided Matawalles residences in Gusau and Maradun areas and another unidentified hideout. Over 40 vehicles were recovered, including three bulletproof vehicles and eight SUVs, he said.

APC kicks

In an earlier statement, however, the All Progressives Congress (APC), through its spokesperson, Yusuf Idris  Gusau, faulted the invasion of Mr Matawalles residences.

It said the invasion was unlawful and a barbaric and brutal trespass by the Zamfara State governor, Dauda Lawal.

The unlawful invasion is a gross violation of the sacred provisions of sections 34, 35, 37, 41, 42 and 43 of the 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

What exactly might have warranted the invasion still remains a mystery to the good people of Zamfara state. If the government thinks it has any case against the former Governor, why not charge him to court instead of resorting to such barbaric and uncivilised means?

To say the least, the action, which is said to have been directed by Governor of Zamfara, Dauda Lawal, is archaic, barbaric, brutal, unacceptable and an illegal trespass on the former governors property in Gusau and his home town Maradun, Mr Idris  Gusau said.

The statement added that the governor or security agency has no right to invade any persons residence without notice or warrant.

The police spokesperson in the state, Yazid Abubakar, did not respond to SMS and calls sent to him on the issue for several hours.

Messrs Lawal and Matawalle are sworn political rivals, but their rivalry aggravated when Mr Lawal defeated Mr Matawalle, who was seeking a second term.

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A federal lawmaker, Chris Azubogu has described the sustenance of petroleum subsidy as the bane of Nigerias economy, saying it was unfortunate that the country did not pull out of it since 2011.

Mr Azubogu, a House of Representative member from Anambra State stated this Thursday on Focus Nigeria, a programme aired by the Africa Independent Television.

Nigerias President, Bola Tinubu had during his swearing into office on 29 May declared that petroleum subsidy was over, a development that has seen the price of petrol and transport fare triple within a week.

The price of a litre of petrol has gone up from N189 to N540, the largest margin in decades leaving Nigerians struggling to meet their needs with some unable to pay their way to work.

But Mr Azubogu, a three time member of the House of Representatives said what Nigerians are going through now as a result of subsidy removal would have been history if it was done since 2011, a statement that suggests he was blaming past leaders of the country for not removing subsidy before now.

According to him, the country had more economic capacity to have sustained the impact of subsidy removal in 2011 than now.

READ ALSO:

It would have been much cheaper to co-locate new refineries with the old ones and we would have been producing enough (petrol). We would have doubled our refining capacity and would have been exporting and capturing the sub-Saharan markets.

These are the things we needed to have looked at. We have gas wasted. We can do gas to energy and sell power and once we do that our financial sector would start funding real sectors from agriculture to manufacturing to value addition and once we do that our population becomes our strength.

Our population is youthful and energetic, thats why you can see the rise in crimes because the youthful population are not being soaked into where they need to be because if you soak them into the productive sector there would be less crime, he said.

He said it was embarrassing and shameful that after 60 years of oil exploration the country cannot refine petrol and added that having resources without processing or adding value to it makes no meaning to him.

In the last 12 to 14 years weve been depending on the importation of fuel and paying subsidies. These are wastages. These are avenues of inefficiency and loss of revenue so you cant plug it. Its shameful that after over 60 years of exploration we cant refine fuel. It is not rocket science. he said.

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Members of the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP) have embarked on a strike at the Ondo State-owned Rufus Giwa Polytechnic, Owo, over owed salaries.

The lecturers said they would not participate in the first semester examinations scheduled to begin at the institution on Tuesday, June 13.

They highlighted that they are being owed 13 months salaries.

This was contained in a communique they issued at the end of a congress held on Thursday and signed by the unions chairperson, Arikawe Ade, and secretary, Fapetu Damilola.

After much emphasis and extensive deliberation, the Congress unanimously agreed to withdraw the services of members from participating in the scheduled First Semester Examination Exercise, which is proposed to commence on 13th June 2023, until the condition below is met, the communique partly read.

The union had observed that the hardship and other challenges arising from the current fuel price on their members and attendance to their official duties is making it extremely difficult.

We want the payment in full of all outstanding (13 Months) salary arrears owned the staff of the institution, the statement further said.

The Congress wish to strongly emphasise that the decision above is binding on all the financial members of the union (ASUP).

However, the institutions spokesperson, Samuel Ojo, said its management would resolve the dispute with the teachers.

READ ALSO: Nigerian health workers suspend strike after meeting Tinubu

If there is now a problem or an issue to the extent that the lecturers are going on strike, then we will return to the discussion table and resolve them, Mr Ojo said.

I can assure you, the matter will be resolved amicably between the school and the lecturers.

The lecturers, in January last year, staged a protest over the same unpaid salary arrears but returned to work after promises were made that the salaries would be paid.

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Ukpong Akpabio, a nephew to the senator-elect for Akwa Ibom North-West District, Godswill Akpabio, has lost his bid to become the speaker of the 8th Akwa Ibom State House of Assembly.

In a keenly contested election held on Friday at the plenary, Udeme Otong of the Abak State Constituency polled 20 votes to defeat Mr Akpabio (Junior) from Essien Udim State Constituency, who scored six.

Mr Akpabio (junior) is a first-term member, while Mr Otong is a second-term member. Both are members of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

Messrs Akpabio and Otong are from Akwa Ibom North-West District, known as Ikot Ekpene Senatorial District, where the speakers position was zoned.

The member representing Itu State Constituency, Kufreabasi Edidem, was elected deputy speaker.

Mr Edidem is a second-term member of the House of Assembly.

PDP, the ruling party in the state, won 24 seats, while the Young Progressives Party won two seats in the 26-member assembly in the 18 March election.

Four females, the largest number since the return of democracy in 1999, were among the 26 lawmakers elected during the election.

The four female lawmakers are all members of the PDP.

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The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) in Abia State has suspended their strike after six months.

The doctors, on 8 December 2022, embarked on an indefinite strike to protest the non-payment of their salary arrears by the immediate past administration of Okezie Ikpeazu.

The Chairperson of the NMA in the state, Isaiah Abali, announced the suspension of the strike on Friday in a communique he jointly signed with the Secretary of the association, Daniel Ekeleme.

The doctors said the suspension followed assurances by Governor Alex Ottis administration to offset their salary arrears in the state.

The present state government led by Dr Alex Otti, at different fora, promised to offset all salaries owed doctors in Abia State by 31st December 2023, the communique reads in part.

The NMA said doctors in Abia State University Teaching Hospital, Hospitals Management Board and the Ministry of Health are owed 23, 16 and two months salary arrears, respectively.

The promise to pay off these salaries was also emphasised by his (Ottis) special adviser on health in a meeting with NMA Abia State Executive on Friday, 2nd June 2023.

With this olive branch extended to the Abia State Government irrespective of the hardship being experienced by doctors under Abia State employ, it is our expectation that the government would expedite action on the payment of the salaries as promised to avert the ugly trend of the recent past, it added.

The doctors accused the states immediate past governor, Mr Ikpeazu, of not making a reasonable and acceptable commitment to pay the salary arrears.

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The police in Kano State on Friday said they have arrested additional 57 suspected thieves looting shop owners properties at several demolition sites in the state.

The police spokesperson in the state, Abdullahi Kiyawa, said the suspects would be charged with criminal trespass, mischief, shop breaking, and theft.

Mr Kiyawa said the arrests aligned with the commands resolve to protect the lives and properties of people in the state.

He said the Commissioner of Police, Kano State Command, Mohammed Gumel, directed round-the-clock visibility patrols, following reports that some hoodlums are taking advantage of the demolition of buildings/structures by the Kano State Government to loot peoples properties.

In addition to the forty-nine (49) suspects arrested and charged to Magistrate Court 35 Normans Land Kano, for offences of Criminal Trespass, Mischief, Shop Breaking and Theft, another fifty-seven (57) suspects have been arrested with exhibits and charged to the same court with the same offences, bringing the total to one hundred and six (106).

Victims are advised to come to State Criminal Investigation Department (SCID) Bompai, Kano State Police Command to provide testimony for the various crimes committed by the suspects, or through this phone number; 0803 824 9455

The Commissioner of Police appreciates those that assisted with information that led to the arrest made and the looted properties recovered.

He reiterates that policing is a collective responsibility and therefore calls on parents and community leaders to admonish their wards and youths to desist from looting peoples properties, as anyone arrested will face the full wrath of the law.

In case of emergencies, Kano State Police Command can be contacted through these phone numbers; 08032419754, 08123821575, 09029292929, the police statement said.

Demolition exercise

The state government has been demolishing structures built on government properties it claimed were illegally sold by the immediate past administration of Abdullahi Ganduje.

The demolition exercise has resulted in the massing looting of properties by a mob who invaded and looted a Bureau De Change mall in Kano on Sunday in anticipation of an alleged plan by the state government to demolish the building.

PREMIUM TIMES witnessed how the mob vandalised buildings and carted away valuables before the demolition exercise.

Following the looting, shop owners in properties sold by the Ganduje administration were evacuating their belongings for fear that the government might demolish the structures overnight without prior notification or their properties might get looted.

The government had demolished a three-storey building with 90 shops on a race course at the Nasarawa GRA.

READ ALSO: Mob loots Kano Mall ahead of alleged planned demolition

The government also demolished Daula Hotel, a three-star hotel reconstructed by the Ganduje administration under a Private Public Partnership arrangement.

Also, the government demolished another structure, at Hajj Camp, sold to private individuals by the immediate past administration of the state.

The owners of the demolished properties have vowed to sue the Kano government over the alleged unlawful demolition of their properties.

More Pictures:

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Two ad hoc officers of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Friday told the Presidential Election Petition Court in Abuja that they were instructed not to give election results sheets to political party agents who refused to sign the documents.

The subpoenaed witnesses  Abedemi Joseph and Grace Ajagbonna  appeared before the five-member panel of the court chaired by Haruna Tsammani to testify in the petition filed by Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) challenging President Bola Tinubus victory.

Mr Tinubu won the 25 February presidential election on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC) after defeating Atiku and Peter Obi of the Labour Party in the contest.

But Atiku and Mr Obi are urging the court to overturn Mr Tinubus victory. They are alleging electoral malpractices against INEC and the president.

At the resumed hearing of Atikus suit Friday, the two subpoenaed witnesses informed the court that they were directed by INEC management not to hand copies of the election results sheets to any party agent who declined to append their signature on the documents.

Ms Abidemi and Ms Ajagbonna were members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) and served as presiding officers for the February presidential and National Assembly elections.

They recalled that during their training as ad hoc staff for the polls, top officials of the electoral umpire gave instructions regarding the signing of results sheets.

Earlier on Thursday, two ad hoc officers of INEC testified that they could not upload the presidential election results on the electoral commissions IReV portal.

At Fridays proceedings, Ms Ajagbonna, who was led in her evidence by Chris Uche, Atikus lawyer, told the court that she served as a presiding officer in Kogi State during the polls.

She was Atikus 14th witness to testify at the court.

Mounting the witness box, Ms Ajogbenna expressed her disappointment in not being able to use the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) device to transmit the results sheet to INECs portal.

On her part, Ms Joseph, Atikus 15th witness who presented her appointment letter from INEC in evidence, said she served as a presiding officer in Niger state.

She informed the court that the election was hitch-free at her polling unit.

She recalled that all the party agents appended their signatures on the election results sheet.

I was trained by INEC. It was part of our training that unless party agents signed, we should not give them duplicate copies of the result, Ms Joseph said, affirming what PDP agents at the polls earlier told the court.

But while being cross-examined by Mr Tinubus counsel, Yusuf Alli, a Senior Advocate of (SAN), Ms Joseph said she did not compel any party agent to sign the results sheet.

While being cross-examined by APCs lawyer, Lateef Fagbemi, a SAN, the witness said INEC appointed her as a presiding officer two days before the 25 February election.

Another witness, Obosa Edosa, from Ovia South-West of Edo State, recounted her experience as a presiding officer at the polls.

I tried to upload the result using the BVAS machine, but it failed. At the end, I took the result to the collation centre.

Everything went well, apart from the transmission of the results with the BVAS.

As a Presiding Officer during the election, I performed my duties very well, Ms Edosa, the 16th witness, narrated.

The witness said she received a phone call to appear as a witness before the court.

In her evidence, Ms Edosa said, I did the accreditation of voters using the BVAS and the voters register. The process went well, and actual voting started afterwards.

Afterwards, we sorted and counted the votes and recorded the results in Form EC8A. We entered the figures manually, and after that, I signed, and the party agents signed.

Objections

Lawyers to the respondents  Mr Tinubu, INEC and APC  objected to the admissibility of the witnesses statements on oath.

They promised to articulate their opposition to the admissibility of the statements at the close of arguments in the case.

But Atikus lawyer, Mr Uche, a SAN, prayed the court to dismiss the objections.

Subsequently, the court said it would rule on the objections at the end of the case. It adjourned further hearing in the petition until Saturday.

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A police orderly to a former Speaker of the Imo State House of Assembly, Chiji Collins, has been found dead.

The victim, identified as Charles, an inspector, was abducted by unidentified gunmen last month alongside a driver in Ohaji/Egbema Local Government Area of the state.

He and the yet-to-be-identified driver were reportedly driving in a Hilux Utility Vehicle when they were blocked by the attackers, who abducted them into a nearby bush.

But Mr Charles was found dead inside a bush in Oguta, a neighbouring local government area in the state, on Thursday, PREMIUM TIMES learnt.

The driver was earlier found dead in the same area while the search for Mr Charles continued.

Sources from the police in the state said the body of the deceased officer had already decomposed upon discovery in the bush

We are saddened by his death, a police officer, who asked not to be named, said.

When contacted on Friday, the police spokesperson in Imo State, Henry Okoye, confirmed the incident to PREMIUM TIMES.

Mr Okoye, an assistant superintendent of police, said the Commissioner of Police in the state, Ahmed Barde, had commissioned a team of police investigators to track down the killers.

The police spokesperson assured that the police in the state would ensure that the officers killers were prosecuted in line with the law.

Worsening Insecurity

Like other states in Nigerias south-east, security has deteriorated in Imo State with frequent attacks by armed persons.

The attacks often target security agencies, government officials and facilities.

Hundreds of people have been killed or injured in such attacks.

The latest attack comes less than one month after gunmen killed Victor Ijioma, the traditional ruler of Orsu Obodo, a community in the Oguta Local Government Area of the state. The attackers also killed the traditional prime minister of Mgbele, the Isama of Mgbele, another community in the same council area.

Gunmen, in April, killed five police officers and a couple in Ngor Okpala Local Government Area of the state.

Three weeks ago, gunmen killed two police officers at Okpala Junction in the same community and council area.

The Nigerian government has accused the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) of being responsible for the deadly attacks in the region. But the group has repeatedly denied any involvement in the attacks.

IPOB is leading the agitation for an independent state of Biafra which it wants to be carved out from the south-east and some parts of south-south Nigeria.

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For too long in Nigeria, weve practised government essentially without the people I firmly believe that a visionary and capable government can be a force for good We need to rethink the notion of government, with a prepositional insistence that places the peoples present and future needs at the centre of public policy We need a government that is for the people.

Long ago, in the 1980s, I lived with my mom in Aggrey Waterside  one of the most enigmatic informal settlements in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

In those days, the first thing that came to your mind when you woke up in the morning was how to join the long queue leading to the communal toilet on the banks of the Aggrey River.

I was a teenager, but I learnt my first lessons in human resilience by simply looking at the quiet desperation of the people on those long harrowing queues.

There were no water closet systems in the area, no health care services, and we heard of the word government only as a cruel and distant rumour.

For many people, government was a mythical entity whose agents occasionally came to raid small shop owners in our area, demanding for tax.

Fast forward to 2015, when I was invited to serve as a Commissioner for Information in the Rivers State Government.

As I stood before the governor to take the oath of office, it struck me that the majestic opulence of the Government House where I was being sworn into office was only 900 metres away from the prosaic squalor of Aggrey Waterside, where I lived decades before.

So why was the Government House so near, and yet the government itself seemed so distant from the people?

As I found during my time in government, the distance between the people and those who lead is not necessarily a physical distance. It is a policy distance, a performance distance, and an empathy distance.

Policy distance happens when what the government thinks and wants to do is in complete misalignment with what the people actually need.

For instance, if you build an ultramodern post office in a community where the people are concerned about the high infant death rate, then there is a serious policy distance. A well-staffed primary health care delivery system may help the people more.

So, as governor, you may invite the Sultan of Brunei to join the King of Monaco to commission the completed ultramodern post office to much media fanfare, but children continue to die from all kinds of preventable diseases, and your post office is unable to help them.

In government, performance distance happens when there is insufficient or lack of imaginative and practical capacity to deliver services that actually improve the peoples lives.

For example, a local government chairman may be quick to organise thugs to disrupt an opposition political rally in his area.

But if he lacks the imaginative capacity to mobilise the people on a campaign to, say, increase school enrolment in his domain, then the council area may not see positive development in the long term.

This is performance distance because the council chairmans mobilisational ability is misdirected, destructive, and does not bring any benefit to the people.

Similarly, a governor may position his henchmen in every political unit in his state, and he may master how to manipulate the judicial system for his political gain.

But if the governor lacks the imaginative abilities to understand and implement sustainable development goals for the benefit of the people as a whole, then his negative hold on the political system will ultimately lead to a failure of development.

Finally, one of the biggest lessons I learnt during my time in government and in my studies at Harvard is that empathy does matter in leadership.

Empathy does not require us to act as emotional holograms on behalf of other people.

Rather, empathy challenges us to reaffirm our own humanity by showing compassion and understanding in our relationships with others.

In leadership, empathy distance occurs when leaders feel no connection with the plight and struggles of the people they are meant to serve.

Empathy is what moves us to stand hip to hip with the people when our communities are flooded, and the people need to be evacuated to a higher ground, with warm blankets on their backs.

On the other hand, empathy distance is what happens when were so obsessed with the tantalising hedonism of high office, that were unable to hear or respond to the piercing cry of a woman in labour only 900 metres away, who has no access to prenatal care.

Empathy distance is the icy indifference we show when 20 million children are out of school in Nigeria  the highest number in the world.

For too long in Nigeria, weve practised government essentially without the people. Although I eventually resigned from my post in government, I firmly believe that a visionary and capable government can be a force for good.

We need to rethink the notion of government, with a prepositional insistence that places the peoples present and future needs at the centre of public policy.

We need a government that is for the people.

Austin Tam-George, an alumnus of Harvard Kennedy School, Boston, is a former Commissioner for Information, Rivers State.

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The real issue about Sirika was that he was close to the President and therefore could act with impunity, fail in his assignment and remain in power, while running the ministry as a personal fiefdom. How could the President even consider a major structural re-organisation of the ministry in his last week in office, knowing fully well that the Tinubu administration was coming in? The bigger picture, of course, is that the lack of scrutiny extended basically to all the other ministries

One of the clearest symbols of the failure of the Buhari administration was former Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirikas attempt at pulling the wool over the eyes of Nigerians by presenting a hastily repainted Ethiopian Airline plane, chartered for the trick at a high cost, to claim that he had delivered on his mandate of delivering Nigeria Air before the end of his mandate. The tragicomedy was not funny because Nigerians knew about the billions spent on the project with nothing to show for it. Maybe the big question was: Why was Sirika re-appointed to deliver on this mandate, when he had been given the opportunity in the first term of the administration but had failed miserably? For his failure, he was promoted from junior to senior minister in 2019 and his empire carved out of the Ministry of Transport, so that he would have sole authority on the matter. The signal was clear: the reward for failure under Buhari was promotion.

It would be recalled that in September 2018, Hadi Sirikas Nigeria Air project was suspended by the Federal Executive Council (FEC), dashing the hopes of many Nigerians who would have loved to see a national air carrier that we could proudly call our own ferry us around the world, while we make a lot of money in the process, as British Airways, Emirates, Air France etc. are making out of our resources. We know the difficulties of government ownership of airlines and what led to the liquidation of Nigeria Airways in 2004, as such when Minister Hadi Sirika announced in December 2015 that his strategic objective as Aviation minister was the establishment of a successful private sector national airline for Nigeria, I put him on my I like list. With the suspension of the project and the knowledge that it was all Hadi Sirikas fault, I feel bitter because he could have succeeded if he had consulted widely and planned well. Instead, he conducted one of the most opaque attempts at establishing a project in Nigeria, with no information given about this, almost no consultation with the necessary stakeholders and absolutely no transparency in the process. His second failure is more painful, even if it was expected.

I have followed the airline issue closely and noticed that on numerous occasions, between December 2015 and July 2018, Minister Hadi Sirika assured Nigerian that the project was on course but he never gave any details on what was being planned. I noticed that a lot of aviation stakeholders were asking question on what the plans of the minister were but there was no response. It became clear that for him, the airline was his personal project and he did not see the need to discuss it with stakeholders and create a consensus on the best strategy to adopt. Given the total information blackout from the Minister, a lot of speculations arose that he was planning to use the assets of Arik and Aero Airlines taken over by AMCON to start the new line. Others speculated that he was begging Qatar Air and/or Ethiopian Airways to come and set up an airline for us. Speculation became the sole mode of engagement because the minister refused to engage with anybody.

Part of the problem was that the same Minister Hadi Sirika had refused to inaugurate all the governing boards of the parastatals in the aviation sector, despite repeated admonishment from the President, the APC party chairman and the Central Working Committee of the ruling party. He, therefore, single-handedly ran the entire aviation sector. This meant that he was all powerful and it pleased him that he was the master.

It was only in July 2018 at the Farnborough International Air Show in the United Kingdom that Hadi Sirika announced that the name of the proposed new national carrier is Nigeria Air and that the proposed national airline would be unveiled before the end of 2018. Then came the bombshell  government would invest $300 million in the new venture and own only 5% of it. With great fanfare, he then launched the logo of the airline for which he had paid some foreign company $600,000 and multiple criticisms arose. The most effective, I recall, was the tweet by Mustafa Chike Obi, former managing director of AMCON, on 21st July 2018 asking why Nigeria was paying $300 million for only 5% of the new carrier, while Air France/KLM had paid $286 million for a 31% share of Virgin Atlantic. The tweet went viral and there was massive reportage in the media that the minister was planning a scam. It was in this context that the next day, the Minister announced that the entire bill for the start-up would be borne by government, which would have 100% and not 5% ownership, but would subsequently sell 95% to the private sector. It was incredible that even at that stage, Hadi Sirika was not willing to share basic information on the strategy for the establishment of the airline. After assuring Nigerians for three years that the project would be 100% private, he turned it to a 100% government project and did not even want to tell Nigerians about it.

Part of the problem was that the same Minister Hadi Sirika had refused to inaugurate all the governing boards of the parastatals in the aviation sector, despite repeated admonishment from the President, the APC party chairman and the Central Working Committee of the ruling party. He, therefore, single-handedly ran the entire aviation sector. This meant that he was all powerful and it pleased him that he was the master. For his second term from 2019, boards were not even appointed for the parastatals in the aviation sector to please him. President Buhari made it a one-man show. In his last two weeks in office, Sirika reorganised the entire ministry, added aerospace to it, appointed new managing directors and directors and even boards for the parastatals. Clearly, having served and failed for the eight years he was there, he decided to stamp his mark of failure on the future of the aviation industry.

Currently, Nigerians are correctly calling for a probe of Sirikas second failure. President Buhari may be the only human being who could believe that giving him four extra years would produce a different outcome. Today, we are still in stage one of the five-stage process of establishing an airline after eight years work by Hadi Sirika.

In 2018, it was the Economic Management Team (EMT) led by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo that examined the Nigeria Air project and discovered with consternation that the Minister had committed the government to a major and immediate investment to set up the carrier, despite knowing fully well that the project had not been budgeted for. Meanwhile, somehow, an $8.8 million preliminary cost had apparently been provided by government. What the money was spent on has not been explained up till now. It was symptomatic of the Buhari regime that for all these failures, he was promoted and asked to deliver the same mandate he had failed to perform earlier. Currently, Nigerians are correctly calling for a probe of Sirikas second failure. President Buhari may be the only human being who could believe that giving him four extra years would produce a different outcome. Today, we are still in stage one of the five-stage process of establishing an airline after eight years work by Hadi Sirika.

The real issue about Sirika was that he was close to the President and therefore could act with impunity, fail in his assignment and remain in power, while running the ministry as a personal fiefdom. How could the President even consider a major structural re-organisation of the ministry in his last week in office, knowing fully well that the Tinubu administration was coming in? The bigger picture, of course, is that the lack of scrutiny extended basically to all the other ministries and in the coming weeks and months, we will start learning details of how other ministers ruled and ruined the country. May accountability return to governance.

A professor of Political Science and development consultant/expert, Jibrin Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Democracy and Development, and Chair of the Editorial Board of PREMIUM TIMES.

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President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (GCFR) has so far demonstrated unwavering determination to drive tangible progress and establish fruitful alliances across party lines in just nine days since assuming office. A self-proclaimed talent hunter who is generally regarded as a results-oriented action man, a master negotiator, and a strategist, he already displays an uncanny ability to pursue results in the general interest of all Nigerians, regardless of party affiliations. From his deft handling of the fallout of the fuel subsidy removal to dousing the labour union situation and, more recently, his impassioned charge to state governors across party lines, could these early days signpost the direction of the Tinubu Administration  one that will be marked by pragmatic, hands-on leadership, as well as direct consultations with varied interest and political groups? More importantly, do the quality of his first set of state house appointments point toward the future of his government? Some believe this is the kind of leadership Nigeria has needed all along.

With these first state house appointments of Prince Adedamilotun Aderemi as his personal assistant, Rt. Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila as his chief of staff, and Victor Adeleke as his state chief of protocol, the Tinubu administration seems to have set the stage for a transformative era through the appointment of exceptional individuals who embody brilliance, experience, and a deep sense of patriotism into his statehouse team with his first appointees displaying a blend of youth, political dexterity, and diplomatic experience respectively.

Here are the profiles of President Tinubus first political State House appointees:

Personal Assistant: Prince Adedamilotun Aderemi, a young commercial lawyer, and crown prince of Ile-Ife

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (GCFR) recently appointed 37-year old Prince Adedamilotun Aderemi as the Personal Assistant to the President. Prior to his appointment Damilotun was Personal Assistant to Asiwaju Bola Tinubu for five years.

Prince Aderemi is a lawyer par excellence, an active distinction student who achieved first class academic results in the Sciences and the Arts. He has a Bsc in Chemistry from Imperial College, London and LL.B (Hons) Second Class Upper from the University of Buckingham. He earned an LLM in International and Commercial Law, specialising in International Law with distinction, from University of Buckingham and was called to the Nigerian Bar in August 2014.

In practice, Prince Aderemi has co-authored a number of practice guides, including A Practical Guide on the Impact of New Anti-Money Laundering Regulations. He advised on a number of unprecedented matters including; a Federal Government $300 million diaspora bond, the first US SEC registered bond issued by Nigeria and the most subscribed $500million Eurobond Issuance in sub-Saharan Africa.

A crown prince of Ife, Damilotun is the grandson of Ooni Adesoji Aderemi, King of the ancient city of Ile-Ife Kingdom from 1930- 1980. He is also the great-grandson of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the great sage.

He is described by many as a level-headed strategist, with a passionate and patriotic heart for all things Nigerian, for which he constantly seeks new ways to make Nigeria better.

Chief of Staff: Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, a distinguished lawyer, and former Speaker of the House of Representatives

Femi Gbajabiamilas appointment as Chief of Staff further reiterates Presidents Tinubus seriousness about selecting accomplished, long serving technocrats with track records to key positions.

Elected Speaker of the House of Representatives in June 2019, Gbajabiamila is recognised as one of Nigerias most accomplished law makers. A distinguished lawyer, he graduated at the top of his class at the University of Lagos and was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1984. He proceeded to the USA, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude from John Marshall and earned for himself a Juris Doctor degree. He then went on to write and pass the Georgia Bar exams, after which he set up another thriving law office where he practised until his return to Nigeria.

With encouragement and support from President Tinubu, then governor of Lagos, Gbajabiamila delved into partisan politics in 2003 on the platform of the then Alliance for Democracy and thereafter was elected for six consecutive terms to represent the people of Surulere I Federal Constituency of Lagos in the National Assembly. He served as the Minority Whip of the house, and by the end of his second term in office, Gbajabiamila had sponsored the highest number of Bills in the National Assembly.

State Chief of Protocol: Victor Adeleke, a career diplomat and former Permanent Representative to the African Union and UNECA

President Bola Tinubus State Chief of Protocol (SCOP) appointee, Victor Adeleke is a long serving (with 30 years in service) diplomat par excellence. Prior to his appointment, Adeleke was Ambassador Extraordinary, Plenipotentiary of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to Ethiopia, with concurrent accreditation to Djibouti and Nigerias Permanent Representative to the African Union and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in Ethiopia.

Legally trained, Adeleke who graduated from the Obafemi Awolowo University, lle-Ife was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1991, before he proceeded to join the Foreign Service in 1993 where he trained in International Law and Diplomacy at the Foreign Service Academy. He was later deployed as Personal Assistant to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1997 before being posted to the Embassy of Nigeria in Beijing, China (1998-2000), where he acted as key representative of NIgeria on political and economic matters. He moved on to the Head Chancery administration in Brasilia, Brazil in 2001 acting as a key political liaison between both countries. Adelekes talent was noted in service, Notably, in 2010 President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (2010) requested that he be deployed as Assistant Director of Protocol at State house, Aso Rock Presidential Villa, Abuja.

Adeleke served exceptionally well, and is noted for his cool-headedness, excellent management style and well roundedness. He was deployed to Warsaw, Poland in 2010 to assist with developing Nigerias relationship with the country. Thereafter in 2017, he proceeded to head the Economic, Trade and Industry section of the Nigeria High Commision in London, whilst concurrently Deputising the Head of Mission at the Nigerian embassy in Ireland.

Toby Jacob wrote from Lagos.

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The telecommunications and information services sector in Nigeria has, in the first quarter 2023, delivered a handsome N2.508 trillion in terms of financial value contribution to the nations gross domestic product (GDP), representing 14.13 per cent.

Figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed that the sector recorded a 4.3 per cent increase from its performance in the last quarter of 2022 when it recorded 13.55 per cent.

When compared on a year-on-year basis, the growth showed a positive progression from 12.94 per cent in the first quarter of 2022 , to the 2023 figure of 14.13, which is an approximate growth of 9.19 per cent.

The percentage of telecom contribution to GDP was calculated from 46 distinct sectors of the economy, which constitute telecom and information services baskets.

The Nigerian telecom industry has continued its show of positive outlook, which is credited to the innovative and predictable telecom regulatory environment promoted, and implemented by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).

One of the key highlights of the telecom industry performance within the period was the generation of $820.8 million for the federal government from 5G spectrum licences fees paid by three eventual winning operators, MTN, MAFAB and Airtel.

Following the issuance of the licences in December 2021 to MTN and MAFAB, both companies have launched 5G services. Airtel, which received its licence in December 2022, is set to launch services this month, June 2023.

Another major development in the sector was the launch of Starlinks broadband services, a satellite-based wireless broadband services with potential nationwide coverage. This followed the issuance of licence to Elon Musk-owned SpaceX by the Commission. The services are now available in different parts of the country.

Meanwhile, the growth statistics of the telecom industry are showing an impressive record of contributions to the economy. The number of phone subscribers as at April 2023, stood at 223.6 million subscribers, scoring a teledensity of 117 per cent. Internet subscribers for the same period were 157 million while Broadband subscriptions stood at 92 Million, translating to 48 per cent broadband penetration in the country.

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Zamfara State Governor Dauda Lawal has expressed concerns over the increasing spate of terrorists attacks in the state.

This is even as the governor vowed to find lasting solutions to banditry in parts of the state.

A statement by the governors spokesperson, Sulaiman Bala  Idris, noted that the governor gave the assurance on Thursday when he visited Tsfae Local Government to commiserate with the people over recent attacks in the area.

Mr Lawal was at the palace of the Emir of Tsafe, Muhammadu Bawa, where he told the monarch that he has been in close contact with heads of security agencies in the state to end insecurity.

He also said he met with President Bola Tinubu alongside other governors from the North West, where they discussed insecurity-related issues.

I want to assure His Highness and our people that security is the top priority of my government, and that is why we are working closely with the relevant security agencies to ensure peace prevails in our state. Other Governors and I had the honour of meeting with the President, and I brought to his attention the issue of insecurity in Zamfara.

President Tinubu has assured me of his total support and commitment towards ending the state of insecurity in Zamfara. I also requested another meeting with the President in my quest to tackle the security issues bedevilling our state.

The instant I was informed of the bandits aggression in Tsafe, I reached out to our security forces for immediate action and a quick response was deployed. While the government is working round the clock to address the problem, I urge the people of Zamfara to be steadfast in prayers, Mr Lawal said.

The Emir said Mr Lawal has shown high commitment to solving the problem through his prompt response to distress calls by troubled communities.

READ ALSO: )

I want to express gratitude and applaud the Governor for this unscheduled visit to empathise with us.

I cant hide my happiness and that of the people of Tsafe because this is the first time that a governor is visiting to commiserate with us over the attacks by bandits. I must also commend the swift response we got from the security and the support from the governor, the Emir said.

Tsafe Local Government shares boundaries with Faskari and Kankara Local Governments in Katsina State. The area has an expense forest that links up with Kuyanbana and some areas of Kaduna and Niger states.

The area has been among the worse hits in terms of terrorist attacks since the banditry began.

The said area came under heavy gunfire recently when terrorists, suspected to be loyal to Ado Alero, a notorious banditry kingpin, stormed the town to avenge the killing of some people believed to be terrorists.

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Governor Peter Mbah of Enugu State has again asked President Bola Tinubu to release Nnamdi Kanu, the detained leader of the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).

Mr Mbah made the appeal on Thursday when he visited Mr Tinubu at the Presidential Villa in Abuja.

He told reporters after meeting with Mr Tinubu that he had initiated talks with the president on the release of the IPOB leader, who has been in detention since he was re-arrested in Kenya and brought back to Nigeria in June 2021 after initially fleeing the country in September 2017.

We also talked about the release of Nnamdi Kanu. You know that the South-east has made a collective demand to have Nnamdi Kanu released, Mr Mbah told reporters.

My visit to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu at the Presidential Villa, Abuja pic.twitter.com/KTrkT5eKFO  Peter Ndubuisi Mbah (@PNMbah) June 9, 2023

And we basically identified with that and requested (Kanus release by) Mr President, who in his inaugural address promised the people that hes going to engender national healing and hes going to serve with compassion.

So, weve basically informed him that this (Kanus release) would serve as a pointer to his administrations extension of his hands of fellowship to Ndigbo, the governor added.

Sit-at-home

Mr Mbah also said he discussed his recent ban of Monday sit-at-home in Enugu with Mr Tinubu.

The governor said the ban on the IPOB directive was intended to encourage private investments and stimulate ease of doing business in the state, stressing that security and infrastructures were key indicators of ease of doing business.

READ ALSO:

He said private sector investments, which he hopes to rely on in driving economic growth, would not be possible if the sit-at-home should be allowed to continue in the state.

And obviously, what that means is that we will, of course, need to heighten our security, tackle the challenges that would flow from that, and, essentially thats what I have come to do, he said.

Partnership with federal government

Mr Mbah said he was also at the presidential villa to partner with Mr Tinubu-led federal government to be able to achieve his humongous vision for Enugu, noting that his administration had considered the federal government as a core partner for the development of the state.

The governor said the partnership would also help the state to transform dominant assets in Enugu into productive assets and also achieve his administrations target of growing the states economy from its current level of $4.4 billion to $30 billion.

A lot of people do not know, but we have huge mineral resources in Enugu. And these resources are sitting under our ground not being productive.

So, we believe with the partnership were trying to basically build with the federal government, were able to transform these assets into productive assets, he stated.

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MUNICH, June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- IFCO, the world's leading provider of Reusable Packaging Containers (RPCs) is expanding its support for FareShare and The Felix Project, two of the leading food redistribution charities in the UK. The overriding goal of the three-way partnership is to make it easier, faster and cost neutral for producers, suppliers and retailers to donate their surplus food to the charitable organizations, while at the same time ensuring that FareShare and The Felix Project can deliver healthy fresh food to people in need more safely and efficiently. Both organizations work closely with the food industry to source good surplus food that would otherwise go to waste, landfill or anaerobic digestion.

Using IFCO reusable packaging containers, volunteers unload Felix van. Volunteers sort and prepare surplus food that has been donated by retailers in IFCO reusable packaging containers.

This collaboration agreement reinforces IFCOs commitment to help reduce food waste in the fresh produce supply chain. In October 2022, the European Food Banks Federation (FEBA) selected IFCO as their official partner for Reusable Packaging Containers. Since then, food banks across Europe (including FareShare and the Felix Project) have already received donated sustainable RPCs to support their food distribution to charities.

While food donations are not a long-term solution to food poverty, IFCO recognizes that the professional redistribution of quality surplus food has an important role to play. For this reason, IFCO has now made it even easier for suppliers and retailers to donate fresh produce in IFCO RPCs into the FareShare and The Felix Project networks. Although producers and retailers have always been able to transport food donations in IFCO RPCs, this partnership ensures the faster flow of fresh produce from even more suppliers through to food banks, as well as the simplified return of RPCs into the IFCO pooling system. One aspect of the partnership taps into IFCO digital solutions, as both FareShare and The Felix Project now use the MyIFCO app to declare and schedule the pick-up of IFCO RPCs, ensuring a much smoother return process.

FareShare is the UK's largest charity fighting hunger and food waste. They work with the food industry to source and distribute over 50,000 tonnes of good surplus food to 8,500 organizations across the UK each year, the equivalent of around 128 million meals for vulnerable people. By being directly involved in the UK operation, IFCO is providing essential support to the charity.

Kris Gibbon-Walsh, Director of Network, Community & Operations at FareShare said: "IFCO has contributed to our mission in a strategic, pragmatic and impactful way. With IFCO on board, we have reduced the typical barriers that often prevent suppliers and retailers from donating surplus food, namely time, effort and costs. This partnership automatically expands our network of potential suppliers across the UK and internationally. Currently FareShare is experiencing skyrocketing demand due to the cost-of-living crisis, and so this support from IFCO is needed more than ever so that we can deliver more nutritious food to the people in our local communities who need it most."

The Felix Project is London's largest food redistribution charity. In 2022 they redistributed the equivalent of over 29 million meals and supplied food to every London Borough. It is part of the FareShare network, but also works independently to source over half of its own high quality surplus food, which is then delivered to around 1,000 charitable organizations and schools in the capital.

Richard Smith, Deputy Head of Food Supply at The Felix Project said: "The IFCO partnership has helped us to attract new suppliers, including manufacturers. In the past, some were keen to donate surplus food but were hesitant because of the potential extra cost or workload involved. Now, thanks to the support of IFCO, they are able and eager to become part of our network."

IFCO is determined to reduce food waste to make the global fresh grocery supply chain more sustainable. That's why IFCO RPCs are designed to protect fresh products along the entire value chain, so that the food arrives in better condition for a longer shelf life and is therefore less likely to end up in landfill. Independent scientific studies have proven RPCs help reduce food waste across the supply chain, by providing superior product protection and ventilation. Since 2016, IFCO has partnered with FareShare to support their important mission to fight hunger and food waste and has been working with The Felix Project since 2020.

Neil Stewart, Asset Control Manager at IFCO who leads UK food bank collaboration, said: "We are proud and excited to be supporting FareShare and The Felix Project, two organizations that are so incredibly passionate about getting good surplus food to vulnerable people. We hope that our contribution means that more suppliers will join the network and more communities can be reached, particularly at a time when such services are so desperately needed. On a more personal level, many of our UK IFCO employees have been so impressed by the impact of FareShare and The Felix Project that they will be using some of their annual paid volunteering leave to help at the food banks and distribution centers run by the charities. It's a sign that the UK IFCO team is fully committed to making this partnership work."

Additional information

IFCO is the leading global provider of reusable packaging solutions for fresh foods, serving customers in 50+ countries. IFCO operates a pool of over 370 million Reusable Packaging Containers (RPCs) globally, which are used for 2 billion shipments of fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, bread, and other items from suppliers to grocery retailers every year. IFCO RPCs ensure a better fresh food supply chain by protecting freshness and quality and lowering costs, food waste and environmental impact compared to single-use packaging. More: www.ifco.com | Follow us on LinkedIn @IFCO SYSTEMS

About FareShare

FareShare is the UK's biggest charity fighting hunger and food waste. We take good-to-eat surplus food from across the food industry, sort it in our regional warehouses across the UK, and pass it onto a network of nearly 8,500 charities and community groups. These include food banks and pantries, hostels, refuges, community centers, older people's lunch clubs, school clubs, and hospices. Three-quarters of the organizations we provide food to, support children and families. During the last financial year, 2022-23, FareShare redistributed the equivalent of nearly 128 million meals - that's 4 meals every second.

About The Felix Project

The Felix Project is London's largest food redistribution charity. Founded in 2016, it rescues good food that cannot be sold and delivers it directly to around 1,000 organizations and schools that support those in need. Our vision is a London where no one goes hungry and good food is never wasted. In 2022, we delivered enough food to make more than 29 million meals. For more information, visit: www.thefelixproject.org

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2096899/IFCO_UK_felix.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2096900/IFCO_UK_felix_2.jpg

SOURCE IFCO
Spacious third-row legroom and generous cargo space of 20.1 cubic-feet behind the third row

Two electrified powertrain options: a Plug-in Hybrid combined with a powerful V6 engine, and a high-performance 2.4L turbocharged hybrid available exclusively as F SPORT Performance

Enhanced Lexus Driving Signature fundamentals provide a smooth and exhilarating drive

First Lexus vehicle to be assembled at Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Indiana

Lexus Safety System+ 3.0 and Lexus Interface Multimedia System with standard 14-inch touchscreen

New Lexus Unified Spindle design prioritizes aerodynamic handling and vehicle stability

AUSTIN, Texas, June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Passengers have grown accustomed to battling for the best seats. Lexus ends that now with a new three-row vehicle, making every seat the best seat. Today, Lexus has ushered in a new era of luxury with the global reveal of the first-ever TX, a vehicle made specifically for the North American market.

With increasing demand for a three-row SUV that offers substantial space and seating, Lexus rose to the challenge to round out its vehicle offerings and create a sense of luxury that will satisfy and delight the diversifying needs of its guests.

A NEW ERA OF THREE-ROW LUXURY: THE FIRST-EVER LEXUS TX

"It's only human to want the best seat in the house. And it's only Lexus to make every seat the best seat," said Dejuan Ross, group vice president and general manager, Lexus Division. "This is a pivotal moment for our brand, creating an elegant and indulgent vehicle experience for every single passenger. TX prioritizes comfort in every row and embodies our steadfast commitment to electrification, technology, performance and design."

The 2024 Lexus TX provides a serene interior space with a comfortable, quiet in-cabin atmosphere, confident driving, and a spacious luggage compartment - even at full occupancy. Through safety and technology features and powerful performance from a diverse mix of powertrains, TX provides excitement for the driver and an enjoyable ride for up to seven people.

Following the release of the NX, LX and RX, TX continues the next chapter of Lexus SUVs with evolved Lexus Driving Signature fundamentals. TX has been specifically tuned to provide a smooth, yet exhilarating drive, in every row, without compromising the luxury features Lexus guests enjoy.

TX will be exclusively assembled by Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Indiana (TMMI), and is the first Lexus vehicle to be assembled there.

Practical Elegance and Design

While pursuing a unique three-row SUV silhouette, TX adopts Lexus' current design language and adds eye-catching and unique design elements.

For the TX, Lexus Design set out to prioritize aerodynamic performance. The result not only enhanced efficiency and handling stability, but also led to the creation of the new Lexus "Unified Spindle," which incorporates Lexus early design language. The headlights are linked by a narrow aperture that runs beneath the leading edge of the hood, under which a low-set grille forms a seamless spindle shape. This sleek front-end was designed to enhance aerodynamic handling and provides both a sense of mass and cooling performance.

The 2024 TX will be offered in four grades: Standard, Premium, Luxury and F SPORT Performance.

The vehicle's driving performance is realized through a wide, grounded stance accented by 20-inch wheels for standard, Premium and Luxury grades. For those who want a more powerful look, 22-inch wheels are available for the TX 350 Luxury grade and come standard on the 550h+. The 500h F SPORT Performance also rides on standard 22-inch wheels that sport an exclusive design.

From the back, the TX includes a slim signature L-shaped light bar lamp that mirrors the modern and resolute impression in the front to create a powerful silhouette. The cabin silhouette with its blacked out rear pillar and arrow-shaped ornamentation provides a sleek and refined design.

The 2024 TX will be offered in seven exterior color options depending on grade: Cloudburst Gray, Wind Chill Pearl, Caviar, Matador Red Mica, Nightfall Mica, Incognito and Celestial Silver Metallic.

Inside, the TX's driver-focused cockpit design and available 12.3 multi-information display enable a deeper connection to instill confidence and control in the driver. Opening the door with just a touch of the Digital Latch, TX welcomes passengers with available multi-colored illumination accents and door trim options. Driver controls like the available head-up display (HUD) enables smooth line of sight to minimize driver distraction. Lexus Interface comes standard on the TX with a 14-inch Multimedia Touchscreen Display, which provides easy-to-use controls and clear information to the driver and front-seat passengers. The 2024 TX also comes standard with wireless Apple CarPlay Integration and Android Auto compatibility. Available with all powertrains, the 21-speaker Mark Levinson Premium Surround Sound System is tuned for the TX cabin to deliver high-quality sound.

Comprehensive utility and usability are provided in every row to ensure all guests travel with comfort and convenience. All rows have accessible storage. Throughout the vehicle, seven charging/communication ports and three power outlets enable passengers to use their smartphone or tablet at any point during their journey. The cupholders, which can hold various sizes of cups and bottles, are removable to accommodate diverse usage styles.

In the front seats, a dual-opening console lid provides the driver and front-seat passenger with the ability to open the left and right sides independently. The second row, depending on grade, is available in two configurations: captain's chairs or a 60:40 split-folding bench. Access to the third row is made easier with a slide assist walk-in mechanism. With a press of the switch on the seat shoulder, the seat tilts forward and the slide assist spring slides and folds the second-row seats.

In addition, TX offers storage areas throughout the cabin, including an available center console for the second row when equipped with captain chairs. This removable semi-console box can be used to store small items or a digital device such as a tablet. It can also accommodate cups or bottles by installing the removable cupholders. For passengers with an active, on-the-go lifestyle, TX has ample cargo capacity with room for seven carryon suitcases in the rear of the vehicle. When the third-row seats are folded down, cargo capacity increases to 57.4 cubic feet. When both the second and third row are folded down, cargo capacity increases to 97 cubic feet.

The TX does more than provide a way of traveling to a destination. It ensures the journey itself is enjoyable through serene cabin quietness. TX employs high-damping door and roof mastic seals and an increased silencer material under the rear cargo and floor area to help soften rear seat noise vibration.

The 2024 TX will be offered in three interior color options depending on grade: Peppercorn, Birch and Black.

The GA-K Platform

The TX is the latest Lexus SUV to adopt the GA-K platform, which offers a low center of gravity and optimal weight distribution. To improve performance and comfort for a three-row SUV, enhancements were made to strengthen the TX's body rigidity and minimize noise, vibration, and harshness. TX also inherits the Lexus Driving Signature fundamentals and elevates them to the next level.

For TX, welds and adhesives are included to increase the vehicle's joint strength and rigidity through the main framework components of the chassis. In addition, the steering system and rear section were also strengthened. Along with the introduction of the rear multi-link suspension design and widened front and rear tracks, these enhancements enable the vehicle to provide the driver with an engaging experience through a direct connection to the road through the tires, precise steering and a confident brake feel.

A Powertrain for Everyone

The all-new vehicle will be offered in three powertrain options to help meet the diverse needs and lifestyles of guests. These include two electrified units, a Lexus-first 3.5L V6 plug-in hybrid and a high-performance 2.4L turbocharged hybrid powertrain that reduce carbon emissions and help the brand's progress toward its vision of a carbon-neutral society.

The TX 350 (FWD/AWD) offers a responsive 2.4L turbocharged inline-4 engine for an elegant and refined driving performance, as seen on the RX and NX.

The TX 500h (DIRECT4 AWD only) offers a 2.4L turbocharged Parallel Hybrid system and is available exclusively as F SPORT Performance. This system, first introduced on the 2023 RX, is combined with DIRECT4 and Dynamic Rear Steering (DRS), which offers responsive maneuverability and enhanced vehicle stability. Previously seen on the 2023 RX and 2023 RZ, DIRECT4 is Lexus' exclusive all-wheel drive technology that provides instant electric control to all four wheels to transform dynamic performance, working instantaneously according to driving conditions and driver intentions. During higher speed maneuvers, DRS enables the rear wheels to turn in the same direction as the front wheels to give clear, stable turning response. At slower speed, the rear wheels can seamlessly turn in the opposite direction as the front wheels for low-speed maneuverability.

The TX 550h+ (DIRECT4 AWD only) plug-in hybrid vehicle offers a Lexus-first, combining a powerful 3.5L V6 engine with DIRECT4. Guests will experience a distinctive driving experience with serene quietness, smooth acceleration, and a manufacturer projected estimated EV range rating of 33 miles. This is the first Lexus PHEV assembled in North America and this powertrain will be available at a later date.

Technology and Convenience Features with All Passengers in Mind

With Lexus Safety System+ 3.0 standard on 2024 TX models, drivers and passengers will enjoy added peace of mind.

The comprehensive suite of active safety equipment provides the brand's highest level of driver support with features such as Pre-Collision System (PCS) with Pedestrian Detection, All-speed Dynamic Radar Cruise Control (DRCC), Lane Tracing Assist (LTA), Lane Departure Alert with Steering Assist (LDA w/SA), Road Sign Assist (RSA) and Proactive Driving Assist (PDA). These technologies are designed to help, for example, alert the driver of a pedestrian or vehicle in front of the vehicle or maintain a preset speed or following distance from a vehicle ahead.

Available Advanced Park aids in supporting safe and secure perpendicular parking/exiting and parallel parking/exiting. In addition, with an active Drive Connect trial or subscription, available Traffic Jam Assist is designed to monitor surrounding traffic in condensed, low-speed driving situations on limited access roadways and automatically move forward and brake as needed to keep a set following distance behind the preceding vehicle.

The 2024 TX 350 and 500h are expected to go on sale this fall. The 2024 TX 550h+ is expected to go on sale at a later date.

2024 TX Preliminary Specifications

Powertrain TX 350 TX 500h TX 550h+ Platform

GA-K

Engine 2.4LT Gas 2.4LT Hybrid Electric

Vehicle 3.5L V6 Plug-in Hybrid

Electric Vehicle Transmission 8AT 6AT CVT Drivetrain FWD/AWD DIRECT4 AWD DIRECT4 AWD Horsepower 275 hp 366 hp 406 hp Torque 317 lb.-ft 409 lb.-ft - Manuf. EST. MPG

(combined) 21 mpg 24 mpg 30 mpg 33 mi. EV range Cargo space behind

third row

20.1 cubic feet

Cargo space with third

row folded flat

57.4 cubic feet

Cargo space with

second row folded flat

97 cubic feet

Overall length 203.1 in. 203.5 in. 203.1 in. Overall width

78.3 in.

Overall height

70.1 in.

Wheelbase

116.1 in.

Tread (Fr/Rr) 67.0 in./67.4 in. 67.4 in./67.8 in. available 67.4 in./67.8 in. 67.4 in./67.8 in. Wheels 20-inch 22-inch available 22-inch 22-inch Tires 20" - 255/55 22" - 255/45 22" - 255/45 22" - 255/45

About Lexus

Lexus' passion for brave design, imaginative technology, and exhilarating performance enables the luxury lifestyle brand to create amazing experiences for its customers. Lexus began its journey in 1989 with two luxury sedans and a commitment to pursue perfection. Since then, Lexus has developed its lineup to meet the needs of global luxury customers in more than 90 countries. In the United States, Lexus vehicles are sold through 244 dealers offering a full lineup of luxury vehicles. With seven models incorporating Lexus Hybrid Drive, Lexus is the luxury hybrid leader. Lexus also offers eight F SPORT models, one F performance model and one F model. Lexus is committed to being a visionary brand that anticipates the future for luxury customers.

Media Contacts

Brooke Sinek

469-980-1017

[email protected]

Note to Editors: Photos and b-roll can be found on https://pressroom.lexus.com/

SOURCE Lexus
Access Bank Mozambique has won the "Best Banking Brand Mozambique" and "Best New Micro Loans Product Mozambique" in Mozambique for the year 2022. The felicitation ceremony was held at the Palm Jumeirah  Waldorf Astoria in Dubai on the 10th of December 2022.

LONDON, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Global Brand Awards is an annual event held by Global Brands Magazine (GBM), an international publication headquartered in the UK. The award aims to recognise global brands achieving excellence in performance across a broad range of sectors while keeping its readers updated on key trends surrounding the branding world. Access Bank Mozambique was evaluated based on customer service, satisfaction, digital innovation, strategic relationships and new business development.

Commenting on Access Bank Mozambique winning the awards, Jay Reddy, Director of Global Brands Magazine said, "Congratulations to Access Bank Mozambique on their exceptional performance and achievements in the financial sector. Access Bank Mozambique's remarkable success, is a testament to their dedication to providing innovative banking solutions and unparalleled customer service. Their position as a leading financial institution in Mozambique is well-deserved and a result of their unwavering commitment to excellence. Best of luck for the future."

Commenting on winning the awards, Mr. Marco Abalroado, Chief Executive Officer of Access Bank Mozambique, said, "Our success is a result of our relentless focus on customer satisfaction, innovation, and sustainability. Access Bank remains committed to enhancing its products and services to better serve the needs of its customers."

About Access Bank Mozambique

Access Bank is today the largest bank in Nigeria and leads the ranking of African banks in terms of customer base. It is a universal commercial bank, operating in a network of more than 600 branches and agents, in 3 continents, 15 countries and 49 million customers. It employs more than 28,000 employees in its operations in Nigeria, Sub-Saharan Africa and United Kingdom, with representative offices in China, Lebanon, India and the United Arab Emirates. The Group keeps looking for opportunities to grow its network in international trade and payment centers, helping Africa to increasingly show its potential for the rest of the world. In Mozambique, Access Bank intends to operate in all customer segments of the Market, with the main focus on Retail and Business banking in the various sectors of relevance to the Mozambican economy. Aware of the challenges associated with the level of financial inclusion in the country, Access Bank intends to bet on a set of solutions and services, which will allow greater access to services benefiting mass market at remote areas as well as the agents of the informal market.

About Global Brands Magazine (England)

Global Brands Magazine (GBM) has been at the forefront, bringing news, views, and opinions on brands shaping the future of their industry. The Magazine focuses on the world's top brands, showcasing their strategies and success stories. The magazine covers a wide range of industries, including fashion, beauty, technology, and more. It is targeted towards business executives and marketing professionals, offering insights and analysis on brand building and management. Each year, GBM develops a series of awards for companies that stand out, and have a unique vision, exceptional service, innovative solutions, and consumer-centric products among their industry leaders. The Magazine has over 9.5 million visitors and 14 million page views per month, making it one of the best online magazines in the world. The Magazine also has a strong presence on social media with over 20k+ Facebook likes, 10k+ Instagram followers, 25k+ Twitter followers, and 3k+ LinkedIn followers.

About the Global Brand Awards

The Global Brands Awards is an annual event that recognizes and celebrates the achievements of the world's leading brands. The awards recognize brands in various categories, including innovation, sustainability, customer experience, and more. The awards are designed to highlight the best practices in branding, marketing, and customer engagement and to provide recognition and exposure for the winning brands. The awards ceremony typically involves a gala event attended by business leaders, marketing executives, and media representatives.

Over 20k companies were evaluated last year, and winners were honoured at an awards ceremony. The 10th Global Brand Awards Night was held at the Waldorf Astoria, Palm Jumeirah, Dubai. This event marked the presence of nearly 100 companies with around 150 delegates from across the globe. The event marked the presence of several dignitaries from across industries like Banking, Insurance, Financial Services, Education, Healthcare, Hospitality, Logistics, and many more. To learn more about our awards, visit the awards section on our website.

To nominate your company or your business leader for the Global Brand Awards 2023, please click on the link below:

https://www.globalbrandsmagazine.com/nomination-form/

Check out our social media shout outs from the links:

Facebook: https://bit.ly/3qrJZsu

Linkedin: https://bit.ly/3WWfaZk

Twitter: https://bit.ly/3WVaVx3

Instagram: https://bit.ly/45RIBjh

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1764747/3812924/GBM_2022_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Global Brands Publications Limited
To understand the causes of the crisis and ultimately to find solutions, we address three critical post-pandemic trends.

ESSEX, N.Y., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- COVID-19 wreaked havoc on K-12 and postsecondary education across the U.S. Test scores in foundational subject areas such as reading and math fell to their lowest levels in decades, absenteeism worsened, and students were more likely to drop out of high school and less likely to pursue post-secondary education.

For educators, this pandemic trauma transcends statistics. "It's been like waking up from a bad dream and having the dream be real," said Chris Bishop, assistant head of Jeremiah Burke Academy in Boston. "Our kids were in shambles academically. The aspirations of our children, especially our young men, dropped like a rock."

Bishop's nightmare is repeating itself nationwide, with many schools, especially those serving low-income and minority students, showing learning losses of more than a year in reading and math. Today's students are projected to earn $70,000 less, on average, over their lifetimes, and the impact on the U.S. economy will total as much as $188 billion annually when this cohort enters the workforce.

To understand the causes of the crisis and ultimately to find solutions, we have identified--through surveys, focus groups, observations, and research studies--three critical post-pandemic trends:

Males are falling behind. We are seeing widening gender gaps in high school graduation, college attendance, and completion of postsecondary studies. These gaps are especially concerning for low-income youth and Black and Latino males, who are three times less likely to earn a college degree than their white, upper-middle-class peers. In the last two years, college enrollment for Black and Latino males dropped 15% and 10%, respectively. Students are increasingly telling us they want jobs and careers where they can work for themselves. A recent study by Junior Achievement showed that 60% of America's teens want to own their own businesses. Males are twice as likely as females to prefer entrepreneurial opportunities--they want hands-on learning experiences. Most disturbing of all, students and their families are rejecting higher education. Three decades ago, there was near-universal agreement that higher education was a ticket to opportunity. However, this is no longer the case. The number of students enrolled in postsecondary education has decreased every semester over the last three years, resulting in an enrollment drop of four million students. During this time, the percentage of high school students who believe college is worthwhile has slipped from 71% to 40%.

Understanding and addressing these and other trends is key to solving the K-12 crisis in schools across America. Take the male achievement gap. In his book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling and What to Do About It, Richard Reevesdelivers the message that too many males feel the educational system doesn't fit their interests or needs--and this disconnect starts at an early age.

Schools need to ensure that all students feel they belong. Mentoring programs that utilize both peer and community mentors can go a long way toward making students feel understood. Increasing the number of male teachers at the K-12 level can also help boys feel more connected to the classroom. In addition, males are increasingly looking for a connection between what they learn and what they earn. This means we need to expose our young men (and women!) to careers in healthcare, teaching, and other sectors that are desperate for workers and pay a livable wage. CFES Brilliant Pathways is proactively implementing these recommendations through its academic and pre-professional mentorship programs, in which volunteer mentors from our corporate partners Bain, TransPerfect, and Colgate Palmolive regularly share their pathways to education and the workplace with students.

As a growing number of young people express a desire to become entrepreneurs, colleges including Seton Hall, the University of Delaware and the University of Vermont are offering competitions for high school students to pitch innovative plans to start businesses, make money, and improve their communities. Contestants not only learn the basics of entrepreneurship and idea generation, but have the opportunity to win cash prizes and scholarships. They also come to understand how higher education can boost their chances of entrepreneurial success.

In addition, students who see successful entrepreneurs who look like them are more inspired to pursue their own startups. This year, CFES launched a six-part webinar series targeting students called "Entrepreneurial Insights" that featured diverse entrepreneurs in aerospace, music, tech, and energy.

The diminishing public perception of the value of college is a serious problem that compels educators to shine a brighter spotlight on the real-world benefits of higher education. When postsecondary education is framed as a bridge to economic development, students, their families, and community members are far more likely to understand its economic value and support and encourage postsecondary education. Educators should also emphasize that the strong correlation between education and income also translates into economic development for our communities. Future-proof jobs--positions with growing employment prospects, strong compensation, and upward career mobility--almost always require some form of postsecondary education, as do fully two-thirds of all of America's jobs.

Dramatically expanding economic development partnerships between schools and industry is another impactful way to help students and parents see the benefits of a college education. For example, Eximius Preparatory Academy, a public high school located in the South Bronx, one of America's most impoverished neighborhoods, is leveraging a comprehensive peer-mentoring program and partnerships with TransPerfect and the University of Vermont to meet post-pandemic challenges head on. In its predominantly Black and Latino 2023 graduating class, 80% of whom live below the poverty line, 85 of 87 students will attend college in the fall. These students have collectively earned $3.5 million in scholarship funding for their first year of college. "We've created a college and career readiness culture and a sense of belonging that provides individual pathways to opportunity for all students," said Eximius principal Jon Daly.

As we look for solutions to new challenges in the college and career readiness space, we can't return to pre-Covid expectations and norms. We need strategies at both the K-12 and postsecondary levels that fit the needs of today's students and educators. In the words of Chris Bishop, "I believe we can find a way to get back what we lost during the pandemic and take our kids, families, and teachers to heights they've never dreamed possible."

To do so, stronger, more strategic partnerships are needed between colleges, businesses and K-12 students and educators. Covid didn't create these new trendlines, but it did accelerate them. The pandemic was a wake-up call that can ultimately spark dramatic and positive change for those most in need.

Provided by Newswise, online resource for knowledge-based news at www.newswise.com

Media Contacts: Jon Reidel

Sr. Communications Professional

jon.reidel

Phone: 802-578-0447

SOURCE CFES Brilliant Pathways
FORNEBU, Norway, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Aker BP (OSE: AKRBP) (OTCQX: AKRBF) has successfully completed the drilling of the st Frigg Beta/Epsilon exploration well in the Yggdrasil area. This marks the longest exploration well ever drilled on the Norwegian Continental Shelf and has resulted in a significant oil discovery.

The updated estimate of the discovery size is 53-90 million barrels of oil equivalent (mmboe), which is twice as large as the original pre-drill estimate and slightly larger than the preliminary estimates announced on 25 May.

The discovery, located in the Yggdrasil area, contributes to increasing the resource base for the ongoing Yggdrasil development by approximately 10 percent. The Yggdrasil development was recently approved by Stortinget (the Norwegian parliament) and is planned to commence production in 2027.

More information about this record-breaking well can be found at Aker BP's web site: LINK

The discovery is located within production licences 873 and 442. In licence 873, the partnership consists of Aker BP (operator, 47.7 percent interest), Equinor (40 percent interest) and PGNiG Upstream Norway (12.3 percent interest). In licence 442, the partnership comprises Aker BP (operator, 87.7 percent interest) and PGNiG Upstream Norway (12.3 percent interest).

The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate has issued a separate press release about the discovery which can be found at NPD's website: LINK

Contacts:

Kjetil Bakken, Head of IR, tel.: +47 918 89 889

Ole-Johan Faret, Press Spokesman, tel.: +47 402 24 217

The following files are available for download:

SOURCE Aker BP ASA
National Law Firm Supports Alabama Law Students through Financial Support

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys, a nationally recognized personal injury law firm headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, announces their second annual "Call Me Alabama Scholarship." The scholarship returns for a second year after receiving hundreds of applicants during last year's launch, continuing the firm's commitment to investing in Alabama's future attorneys. Three "Call Me Alabama Scholarship" winners will receive up to $5,000 applied to their law school tuition.

Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys Second Annual 'Call Me Alabama Scholarship.'

"Alabama is home to me, and I care deeply about the future of the state and its future judicial leaders," states Alexander Shunnarah, founder and president of Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys. "I am invested in the state of Alabama and it is my honor to support Alabama's next generation of attorneys."

Last year's first-place winner, Demarcus Joiner, received a $5,000 scholarship to put toward his tuition at the University of Alabama's School of Law. "Having a zeal to further advance the state of Alabama, I believe my desire to reside in Alabama post law school will afford me this opportunity while giving me the chance to reinvest in my community," states Joiner.

Entries for the "Call Me Alabama Scholarship" open on June 1, 2023 and close on July 31, 2023. Applicants must be currently accepted or enrolled at an Alabama law school. Winners will be announced by September 14, 2023. Detailed application information and eligibility requirements can be found here .

For more information regarding the Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys "Call Me Alabama Scholarship," please visit https://shunnarah.com/call-me-alabama-scholarship/ or contact Krista Conlin at [email protected]

About Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys, P.C.

Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys is committed to protecting the legal right to be compensated for individuals who have suffered loss, accidents, or injuries the chance to rebuild their lives after misfortune. The practice was founded on the belief that the civil jury system is the best means to provide compensation and deter wrongdoers from injuring others in the future.

With over 500 attorneys and staff, the firm has a vast knowledge and experience in handling all types of claims for clients who have been injured. The firm consistently recovers substantial settlements in lawsuits involving personal injury, auto accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle accidents, wrongful death, social security disability, pharmaceutical litigation, drug recalls, medical devices, and mass torts throughout the United States.

The premier, award-winning, and nationally recognized firm has represented over 50,000 clients and recovered in excess of $1 billion in settlements and judgments to date. The firm prides itself on providing outstanding legal advice and excellent representation for their clients.

For more information, contact:

Krista Conlin, [email protected]

SOURCE Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys, P.C.
ISTANBUL, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Arcelik, one of Europe's leading home appliances companies, has today announced the launch of the 'Arcelik Developers' AI Platform', a new web application designed to enhance the efficiency and capabilities of its developers in coding by utilizing multiple features through artificial intelligence, such as code generation, error detection, code optimization, and automated testing. Available to developers across the organisation, the platform has been built to integrate seamlessly with OpenAI GPT model, strengthening the security and confidentiality of intellectual property across the global organization through the incredible power of AI.

Utku Bars Pazar, Arcelik Chief Strategy and Digital Officer

Arcelik Developers' AI Platform marks a promising roadmap for the company which boasts a global workforce of 40,000 employees across 12 brands and over 100 countries. In opening up the Platform, Arcelik hopes to revolutionize the way developers work with AI, and how data, security, and operations is handled across the business as the company seeks more efficient, more intelligent and more technologically advanced ways.

Hosted in Arcelik's dedicated cloud environment, the platform is built to strengthen the security of intellectual property across the organisation. Key features include multi-factor authentication adding an extra layer of protection, GPT 3.5/GPT 4.0 integration to enhance development processes, and analytics usage reports which help developers analyse insights and make data-driven decisions. The program is expected to have positive impacts in productivity, speeding up coding capabilities by 40% as well as the time-to-market for applications by 20%. Additionally, the program is set to see a 30% reduction in support tickets for developers trained or upskilled.

Commenting on the launch, Utku Bars Pazar, Chief Strategy and Digital Officer at Arcelik said: "The launch of the Arcelik Developer Platform is a significant milestone, helping us enhance operations as we advance Arcelik's digital transformation journey. The platform has rich potential, with many use cases in departments across the business and we're excited for the innovations and creativity this will help us unlock."

While the first iteration of the platform is aimed at Arcelik's developer community, the organisation is also investing in upskilling its global workforce through its AI champions, comprised of its dealers and employees in other departments such as HR, marketing and product design, and providing targeted training content.

Creating value by employing cutting-edge AI solutions is an essential aspect of Arcelik's overarching AI strategy. The new platform will be the first of many other AI platforms across Arcelik in various domains such as supply chain, manufacturing, and product portfolio, from product testing to intelligent consumer solutions. Impactful artificial intelligence integration is part of Arcelik's wider AI vision.

About Arcelik:

With 40,000 employees throughout the world, Arcelik's global operations include subsidiaries in 52 countries, and 30 production facilities in 9 countries and 12 brands (Arcelik, Beko, Grundig, Blomberg, ElektraBregenz, Arctic, Leisure, Flavel, Defy, Altus, Dawlance, Voltas Beko). Arcelik, Europe's second largest white goods company with its market share (based on volumes), reached a consolidated turnover of 7.7 billion Euros in 2022. Arcelik's 30 R&D and Design Centers & Offices across the globe are home to over 2,300 researchers and hold up to 3,000 international registered patent applications to date. In 2022, Arcelik achieved the highest score in the DHP Household Durables category for the 6th year in a row (based on the results dated December 2022) in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index of the S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment. Through its leadership position in sustainability and credible decarbonization roadmap for achieving net zero, Arcelik became the first and only company from its industry to receive the Terra Carta Seal by His Majesty King Charles III. Arcelik's vision is 'Respecting the World, Respected Worldwide.'

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2097643/Chief_Strategy_and_Digital_Officer.jpg

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1653921/4067101/Arcelik_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Arcelik Global
TOKYO, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The 7th "JAPAN'S FOOD" EXPORT FAIR, a specialized show in the direct procurement of a wide variety of Japanese food, is set to take place on June 21-23 at Tokyo Big Sight, Japan.

Supported by the Japanese government's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, the first "JAPAN'S FOOD" EXPORT FAIR was organized in 2017 in collaboration with RX Japan Ltd., Japan's largest trade show organizer, and Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), Japan's leading trade promotion agency with a global network of 74 offices, aiming to boost Japanese food exports.

The annual show attracts food buyers from over 70 countries, who are eager to explore and source the finest Japanese food products. This year's version is expected to draw an even larger number of international visitors, including major importers, supermarkets, restaurants, and department stores, creating an ideal platform for establishing new partnerships and engaging in impactful trade discussions.

The fair showcases not only renowned traditional Japanese food such as confectionery, sake, and tea but also a wide range of regional specialties, including agricultural products, meat, seafood, processed foods, and more. With 800 exhibitors, visitors will have the opportunity to sample their products, enabling them to experience their quality and flavor firsthand, and facilitating well-informed procurement decisions.

The show is also tailored to meet the needs of industry professionals, providing English-speaking staff, comprehensive English brochures, and product information to ensure effective communication and engagement.

As global demand for Japanese food continues to rise, the 7th "JAPAN'S FOOD" EXPORT FAIR plays a crucial role in facilitating mutually beneficial business outcomes for exhibitors and visitors alike. Interested participants are encouraged to pre-register via the official website.

For more information, please visit:

https://www.jpfood.jp/en-gb.html (English)

https://www.jpfood.jp/zh-hk.html (Traditional Chinese)

About RX Japan Ltd.

RX Japan Ltd. is Japan's largest trade show organizer, hosting a diverse portfolio of 96 trade shows across 38 fields, including jewelry, fashion, gift items, electronics, energy, IT, cosmetics, and medical.

Outline of the 7th "JAPAN'S FOOD" EXPORT FAIR

- Dates: June 21-23, 2023

- Venue: Tokyo Big Sight, Japan

- Organizer: RX Japan Ltd.

- Co-organizer: Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO)

- Supporter: Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries

Images: https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/release/202306076197?p=images

SOURCE RX Japan Ltd.
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare to evaluate zolbetuximab as treatment option for patients with advanced gastric and gastroesophageal cancers

TOKYO, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Astellas Pharma Inc. (TSE: 4503, President and CEO: Naoki Okamura, "Astellas") today announced the submission of a New Drug Application (NDA) on June 9, 2023 to Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) for zolbetuximab, a first-in-class investigational Claudin 18.2 (CLDN18.2)-targeted monoclonal antibody, for first-line treatment of patients with locally advanced unresectable or metastatic HER2-negative gastric or gastroesophageal junction (GEJ) adenocarcinoma whose tumors are CLDN18.2-positive. If approved, zolbetuximab would be the first CLDN18.2-targeted therapy available in Japan for these patients.

"Gastric cancer remains the third deadliest cancer in Japan, leading to approximately 50,000 deaths per year despite significant strides to reduce the impact of this cancer," said Pranob Bhattacharya, DrPH, MS, MBA, Executive Director and Interim Head of Immuno-Oncology Development, Astellas. "Astellas' submission of a New Drug Application to Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare for zolbetuximab demonstrates critical momentum in addressing the unmet needs of patients with gastric cancer in Japan."

The NDA is based on results from the Phase 3 SPOTLIGHT and GLOW clinical trials. The SPOTLIGHT study evaluated zolbetuximab plus mFOLFOX6 (a combination regimen that includes oxaliplatin, leucovorin and fluorouracil) compared to placebo plus mFOLFOX6. The GLOW study evaluated zolbetuximab plus CAPOX (a combination chemotherapy regimen that includes capecitabine and oxaliplatin) compared to placebo plus CAPOX.

In both SPOTLIGHT and GLOW, approximately 38% of patients screened for the trials had tumors that were CLDN18.2-positive (75% of tumor cells with moderate-to-strong membranous CLDN18 staining intensity), as determined by a validated immunohistochemistry assay.1,2

About Locally Advanced Unresectable Metastatic Gastric and Gastroesophageal Junction Cancer

Gastric cancer, also commonly known as stomach cancer, is the fifth most commonly diagnosed cancer worldwide.3 Gastric cancer kills 50,000 people per year in Japan, making it the third deadliest cancer by number of deaths in the country.4 Signs and symptoms can include indigestion or heartburn, pain or discomfort in the abdomen, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea or constipation, bloating of the stomach after meals and loss of appetite and sensation of food getting stuck in the throat while eating.5 Signs of more advanced gastric cancer can include unexplained weight loss, weakness and fatigue and vomiting blood or having blood in the stool.6 Risk factors associated with gastric cancer can include older age, male gender, family history, H. pylori infection, smoking and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD).5,7 Because early-stage gastric cancer symptoms frequently overlap with more common stomach-related conditions, gastric cancer is often diagnosed in the advanced or metastatic stage, or once it has spread from the tumor's origin to other body tissues or organs.5 The five-year relative survival rate for patients at the metastatic stage is 6.6%.8 Gastroesophageal junction (GEJ) adenocarcinoma is a cancer that starts at the area where the esophagus joins the stomach.9

About Zolbetuximab

Zolbetuximab is an investigational, first-in-class chimeric IgG1 monoclonal antibody (mAb) that targets and binds to CLDN18.2, a transmembrane protein. Zolbetuximab acts by binding to CLDN18.2 on the cancer cell surface of gastric epithelial cells. In pre-clinical studies, this binding interaction then induces cancer cell death by activating two distinct immune system pathways  antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC) and complement-dependent cytotoxicity (CDC).10 Zolbetuximab has not been approved by any regulatory bodies for the treatment of patients with gastric, GEJ and pancreatic cancers and there is no guarantee the agent will receive regulatory approval or become commercially available for the uses being investigated.

INVESTIGATIONAL STUDIES

About SPOTLIGHT Phase 3 Clinical Trial

SPOTLIGHT is a Phase 3, global, multi-center, double-blind, randomized study, assessing the efficacy and safety of zolbetuximab (IMAB362) plus mFOLFOX6 (a combination regimen that includes oxaliplatin, leucovorin and fluorouracil) compared to placebo plus mFOLFOX6 as a first-line treatment in patients with CLDN18.2-positive, HER2-negative, locally advanced unresectable or metastatic gastric or GEJ adenocarcinoma. The study enrolled 565 patients at 215 study locations in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Europe, South America and Asia, including Japan. The primary endpoint is progression-free survival (PFS) of participants treated with the combination of zolbetuximab plus mFOLFOX6 compared to those treated with placebo plus mFOLFOX6. Secondary endpoints include overall survival (OS), objective response rate (ORR), duration of response (DOR), safety and tolerability and quality-of-life parameters.

Data from the SPOTLIGHT clinical trial were presented during the 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Gastrointestinal (GI) Cancers Symposium in an oral presentation on January 19 and were subsequently published in The Lancet on April 14.1

For more information, please visit clinicaltrials.gov under Identifier NCT03504397.

About GLOW Phase 3 Clinical Trial

GLOW is a Phase 3, global, multi-center, double-blind, randomized study, assessing the efficacy and safety of zolbetuximab (IMAB362) plus CAPOX (a combination chemotherapy regimen which includes capecitabine and oxaliplatin) compared to placebo plus CAPOX as a first-line treatment in patients with CLDN18.2-positive, HER2-negative, locally advanced unresectable or metastatic gastric or GEJ adenocarcinoma. The study enrolled 507 patients at 166 study locations in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, South America and Asia, including Japan. The primary endpoint is PFS in participants treated with the combination of zolbetuximab plus CAPOX compared to those treated with placebo plus CAPOX. Secondary endpoints include OS, ORR, DOR, safety and tolerability and quality-of-life parameters.

Data from the GLOW study were initially presented at the March 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Plenary Series with an encore presentation during an oral presentation at the 2023 ASCO Annual Meeting on June 3.2

For more information, please visit clinicaltrials.gov under Identifier NCT03653507.

Investigational Pipeline in Claudin 18.2

An expanded Phase 2 trial in metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma is in progress. The trial is a randomized, multi-center, open-label study, evaluating the safety and efficacy of investigational zolbetuximab in combination with gemcitabine plus nab-paclitaxel as a first-line treatment in patients with metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma with CLDN18.2-positive tumors (defined as 75% of tumor cells demonstrating moderate-to-strong membranous CLDN18 staining based on a validated immunohistochemistry assay). For more information, please visit clinicaltrials.gov under Identifier NCT03816163.

In addition to zolbetuximab, ASP2138 is under development in our Primary Focus Immuno-Oncology. ASP2138 is a bispecific monoclonal antibody that binds to CD3 and Claudin 18.2, and it is currently in a Phase 1 trial for people with gastric, gastroesophageal junction or pancreatic cancer. The safety and efficacy of the agents under investigation have not been established for the uses being considered. For more information, please visit clinicaltrials.gov under Identifier NCT05365581.

There is no guarantee that the agent will receive regulatory approval and become commercially available for the uses being investigated.

About Astellas

Astellas Pharma Inc. is a pharmaceutical company conducting business in more than 70 countries around the world. We are promoting the Focus Area Approach that is designed to identify opportunities for the continuous creation of new drugs to address diseases with high unmet medical needs by focusing on Biology and Modality. Furthermore, we are also looking beyond our foundational Rx focus to create Rx+ healthcare solutions that combine our expertise and knowledge with cutting-edge technology in different fields of external partners. Through these efforts, Astellas stands on the forefront of healthcare change to turn innovative science into VALUE for patients. For more information, please visit our website at https://www.astellas.com/en.

Cautionary Notes

In this press release, statements made with respect to current plans, estimates, strategies and beliefs and other statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements about the future performance of Astellas. These statements are based on management's current assumptions and beliefs in light of the information currently available to it and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: (i) changes in general economic conditions and in laws and regulations, relating to pharmaceutical markets, (ii) currency exchange rate fluctuations, (iii) delays in new product launches, (iv) the inability of Astellas to market existing and new products effectively, (v) the inability of Astellas to continue to effectively research and develop products accepted by customers in highly competitive markets, and (vi) infringements of Astellas' intellectual property rights by third parties.

Information about pharmaceutical products (including products currently in development) which is included in this press release is not intended to constitute an advertisement or medical advice.

References

1 Shitara K, et al. Zolbetuximab plus mFOLFOX6 in patients with CLDN18.2-positive, HER2-negative, untreated, locally advanced unresectable or metastatic gastric or gastro-oesophageal junction adenocarcinoma (SPOTLIGHT): a multicentre, randomised, double-blind, phase 3 trial. The Lancet. Published online April 14, 2023; S0140-6736(23)00620-7.

2 Xu RH, Shitara K, Ajani JA, et al. Updates on Abstract 405736: Zolbetuximab + CAPOX in 1L claudin-18.2+ (CLDN18.2+)/HER2 locally advanced (LA) or metastatic gastric or gastroesophageal junction (mG/GEJ) adenocarcinoma: Primary phase 3 results from GLOW. Presented at: 2023 ASCO Annual Meeting. Abstract 405736.

3 Sung H, et al. Global cancer statistics 2020: GLOBOCAN estimates of incidence and mortality worldwide for 36 cancers in 185 countries. CA Cancer J Clin. 2021;71(3):209-49.

4 Asaka M, Kobayashi M, Kudo T, Akino K, Asaka Y, Fujimori K, Kikuchi S, Kawai S, Kato M. Gastric cancer deaths by age group in Japan: Outlook on preventive measures for elderly adults. Cancer Sci. 2020 Oct;111(10):3845-3853. doi: 10.1111/cas.14586. Epub 2020 Aug 18. PMID: 32713120; PMCID: PMC7540974.

5 American Cancer Society. Signs and symptoms of stomach cancer (01-22-2021). Available at https://www.cancer.org/cancer/stomach-cancer/detection-diagnosis-staging/signs-symptoms.html. Last accessed May 25, 2023.

6 National Cancer Institute. Gastric cancer treatment (PDQ): patient version (08-24-2021). Available at https://www.cancer.gov/types/stomach/patient/stomach-treatment-pdq. Last accessed May 25, 2023.

7 American Cancer Society. Esophageal cancer risk factors (06-09-2020). Available at https://www.cancer.org/cancer/esophagus-cancer/causes-risks-prevention/risk-factors.html. Last accessed May 25, 2023.

8 National Cancer Institute. Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program. Cancer stat facts: stomach cancer. Available at https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/stomach.html. Last accessed May 25, 2023.

9 American Cancer Society. About esophagus cancer (03-20-2020). Available at https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/CRC/PDF/Public/8614.00.pdf. Last accessed May 25, 2023.

10 Sahin U, et al. FAST: a randomised phase II study of zolbetuximab (IMAB362) plus EOX versus EOX alone for first-line treatment of advanced CLDN18.2-positive gastric and gastro-oesophageal adenocarcinoma. Ann Oncol. 2021;32(5):609-19.

SOURCE Astellas Pharma Inc.
Inspiring Story of Overcoming Adversity and Finding Self-Love

SAN ANTONIO, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Christina Maria Martinez (nee Diecedue), the author of the inspiring bestselling book Shattered Pieces Everywhere: How I Found True Joy In My Most Broken Moments is on a mission to find the Good Samaritan who saved her life 25 years ago. Raised in a family struggling to stay afloat despite domestic violence, substance abuse and time spent in a children's home, young Christina overcame immense challenges, including a traumatic accident which left her with disfiguring facial scars. Through self-love and an unwavering spirit, she found the strength to embrace her journey and live each day with renewed vigor.

Mystery Good Samaritan Christina Hospitalized Post Accident

On June 9th, 25 years ago, 19-year-old Christina was involved in a near-fatal car accident. She was severely injured, unable to move and bleeding when an unknown hero emerged. This compassionate stranger, without a second thought, selflessly took off his shirt to stop the bleeding and provide comfort until emergency services arrived. This act of kindness instilled within her a renewed faith in humanity and set her on a path of resilience and self-discovery.

Following the accident, Christina was airlifted to the University Hospital's, Trauma I Center in San Antonio, Texas. She underwent extensive medical treatment including surgeries and rehabilitation after relying on a wheelchair to move around. The physical and emotional scars she endured became symbols of her triumph over adversity. Through therapy, support from loved ones, and her own determination, she overcame depression and rebuilt her life.

In her book, Shattered Pieces Everywhere, Christina shares her extraordinary journey of resilience, self-acceptance, and finding love within herself. The book has inspired readers worldwide, offering hope and encouragement to those facing their own struggles.

In the midst of her journey to self-acceptance, Christina also experienced the transformative power of love. She found a partner who saw beyond her scars and physical limitations, and together they embarked on a journey of healing and growth. The profound love and support she received ignited a newfound sense of worthiness and inner strength.

On the 25th anniversary of the accident, Christina is searching for the Good Samaritan who was by her side. She wishes to express her heartfelt gratitude and share her inspiring story of overcoming challenges. If you have any information about the heroic individual who came to her aid on June 9, 1998, please contact [email protected].

Christina Maria Martinez invites everyone to celebrate the power of the human spirit and the importance of self-love. Through her remarkable journey, she encourages others to embrace their own stories, find strength in their scars, and live each day with renewed purpose.

Note: For any further information or interview requests, please contact Krystal Navarro at Elan Publishing USA, via email at [email protected] or by phone at 707.337.6282

Media Contact: Krystal Navarro

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 707.337.6282

SOURCE Christina Martinez
BEIJING, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Chinese President Xi Jinping has called on north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to adhere to its strategic position, pursue green development, and strive to write a new chapter of Chinese modernization.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks during an inspection tour in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, on Wednesday and Thursday.

During his visit to the Zhonghuan industrial park on Wednesday afternoon, Xi said green development is the path that must be taken, and the top priority of Inner Mongolia's development lies in transforming and upgrading the traditional energy industry, vigorously developing green energy, and strengthening the country's major energy base.

In the exhibition hall of the park, Xi learned about the region's efforts in developing new energy and new materials industry, promoting the optimization and adjustment of industrial structure, and promoting green and low-carbon development.

Xi visited the factories in the park to see the production process and learn more about the research and development and production of semiconductor and photovoltaic materials among other products.

Upon leaving the park, Xi stressed the need to carry out high-level opening up and engage in win-win cooperation with the rest of the world.

Xi hopes that the enterprises and employees will continue to work hard and strive to gain greater achievements.

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvDSIphdlnw

SOURCE CCTV+
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. The mining industry is rapidly developing in Azerbaijan, including the liberated territories, as well as throughout the world, Chairman of the Board of the Small and Medium Business Development Agency (SMBDA) Orkhan Mammadov said, Trend reports.

Mammadov made the remark during a business forum themed "Opportunities and Prospects in the Mining Industry".

According to him, the mining industry is currently the driver of economic development.

"The country is aimed at using green technologies and introducing innovations in this sector," Mammadov said.

He stressed that the SMBDA is carrying out activities aimed at identifying and solving the problems of entrepreneurs in this sector.

"In the course of meetings with entrepreneurs in the mining industry, we discuss the possibility of reducing taxes, fees and other state duties, as well as state support tools," Mammadov said.
CHENGDU, China, June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- On June 8th, 2023, Coviccine Trivalent XBB.1.5-Recombinant COVID-19 Trivalent (XBB.1.5+BA.5+Delta) Protein Vaccine (Sf9 cell) developed by WestVac Biopharma/ West China Medical Center, Sichuan University was approved for EUA by relevant authorities in China. This is the first COVID-19 vaccine in the world approved for EUA against XBB descendent lineages of SARS-CoV-2. It demonstrates that China is leading the world in the development of COVID-19 vaccines.

WestVac Biopharma and its subsidiary company WestVac Biopharma (Guangzhou) leveraged the rapid response of the insect cell expression platform on constructing the vector for Coviccine Trivalent XBB.1.5-Recombinant COVID-19 Trivalent (XBB.1.5+BA.5+Delta) Protein Vaccine (Sf9 Cell), which is of high purity and high quality for human use. The subunit vaccine antigen is precisely designed based on the structure of the targeting S-RBD and HR proteins of the COVID-19 subvariants XBB.1.5 and BA.5 and self-assembled into stable trimeric protein particles with squalene-based oil-in-water emulsion adjuvant added after purification and mixing. This novel adjuvant significantly raises the titer of neutralizing antibodies, which enables the trimeric protein vaccine to induce a higher level T-cell immune response. Studies have shown that Coviccine Trivalent XBB.1.5 induced a high titer of neutralizing antibodies against multiple subvariants, including Omicron subvariants XBB.1.5, XBB1.16, XBB1.9.1, XBB.2.3, BA.5, BF.7, BQ.1, BA.2.75. 14 days after injection of this product, the protective efficacy against XBB.1, XBB.1.5, XBB1.9 is 93.28% with an excellent safety profile, demonstrating that it is a broad-spectrum COVID-19 vaccine against multiple prevalent subvariants locally and internationally.

The XBB.1.5 variant had gradually become the major circulating variant in various parts of the world by the beginning of 2023. With the professional guidance and support from the State Council's Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism's vaccine R&D team, the scientific team of WestVac Biopharma/West China Medical Center, Sichuan University overcame all hurdles and successfully developed a vaccine covering XBB family of variants.

Early May, China CDC expert noticed that the transmission and immune escape capability of XBB variants is much stronger than that of the early circulating Omicron variants. The XBB.1 descendent lineages currently predominate SARS-CoV-2 circulation globally. As of the end of May, XBB family of variants accounted for 98.1% of all variants in the United States. In China, newly detected XBB variants have increased gradually and now exceed 90%.

The WHO Technical Advisory Group on COVID-19 Vaccine Composition (TAG-CO-VAC) advised on May 18 that new formulations of COVID-19 vaccines should aim to induce antibody responses that neutralize XBB descendent lineages. The rate of "second infection" is rising. Experts urge prompt prevention, immunization against COVID-19, particularly for people with high-risk infection, the elderly, people with underlying diseases and those who are immunocompromised to get a vaccine covering SARS-CoV-2 variants.

WestVac Biopharma uses the international advanced insect cell recombinant protein vaccine platform to develop Coviccine Trivalent XBB.1.5 which has been approved for EUA in China. WestVac's COVID-19 vaccine offers a unique option for COVID-19 prevention, is crucial for the prevention of the current XBB descendent lineages and contributes significantly to the ongoing management of the COVID-19 epidemic.

About WestVac Biopharma

WestVac Biopharma Co., Ltd. is an innovative biopharmaceutical company, capable of doing the full spectrum of research, manufacturing, and commercialization of products. WestVac Biopharma has been selected successfully on the list of unicorn companies from 2021 to 2023. WestVac Biopharma Co., Ltd. is located in Chengdu of West China while WestVac Biopharma (Guangzhou), a wholly-owned subsidiary company of WestVac Biopharma., is located in Guangzhou Economic Development Zone.

WestVac Biopharma Co., Ltd. has completed construction of 5,000-litre and 3,000-litre insect cell recombinant protein vaccine production lines with an annual production capacity of 100 million doses. The GMP production lines were well established with the "Drug Production License" in place. WestVac Biopharma (Guangzhou) has completed scale-up construction of insect cell recombinant protein vaccine production lines with an annual production capacity of 100 million doses.

In December 2022, Coviccine-Recombinant COVID-19 Vaccine (Sf9 cell) developed by WestVac Biopharma was approved by relevant authorities for EUA in China.

SOURCE WestVac BioPharma Co., Ltd.
Leading Florida furniture retailer provides complimentary design services with

one-on one personalization.

TAMARAC, Fla., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- CITY Furniture ("CITY" or "the Company"), a family-owned American furniture and mattress retailer, fine upholstery manufacturer, and one of America's Top 20 furniture retailers, is looking to wow their customers with one-on-one complimentary designer services, CITY Interiors. CITY Interiors provides customers with the opportunity to work one-on-one with its professional design experts to design their dream homes and living spaces.

CITY Furniture Logo (PRNewsfoto/CITY Furniture)

"CITY Furniture is already a popular destination for those seeking design inspiration and looking to change the way they live with beautiful home furnishings at incredible value," stated Andrew Koenig, CITY's CEO. "We have expert designers who know how to create spaces that fit all lifestyles and budgets, taking the guesswork out of how to best furnish their living spaces."

CITY Interiors helps customers bring their dream homes to life by providing free expert design services. These services are tailored to their customers' unique styles, spaces, and budgets, and take the guesswork out of interior design. From small updates to complete makeovers, CITY can help with any project. The design process, which is very quick and easy, begins with a consultation with one of CITY's design experts to review inspiration and goals. Once the customer has chosen a direction, the designer can help customers select the perfect furnishings from CITY's thousands of items that are available online and in-store, to create the perfect home or living space. From there, the designer will customize a plan and create a personal mood board, floorplans, color palettes, and furnishing selections to turn a vision into a reality. Customers can book a free appointment to meet one-on-one in-store or online and discover the difference a designer can make.

The CITY Interiors expert designers create hundreds of individualized designs each year and invite customers to shop from the company's robust e-commerce platform featuring the most popular styles in home retail.

In addition to offering free one-on-one design help and tailored product recommendations, CITY customers have access to a team of experts who are committed to making the design process as seamless as possible, ensuring that every detail is taken care of. After the initial design consultation, the team will manage the entire order, delivery, and installation to ensure that the customer's vision is brought to life.

With a commitment to personalized service and comprehensive support, CITY is the perfect partner for anyone looking to transform their home into a space that is both functional and beautiful. To discover the difference a designer can make, please visit: https://www.cityfurniture.com/services/city-interiors.

ABOUT CITY FURNITURE: CITY Furniture, a South-Florida-based, family-owned American furniture and mattress retailer and fine upholstery manufacturer and one of America's Top 20 furniture retailers, operates over thirty showrooms from Miami through Vero Beach, and in Southwest and Central Florida, as well as fourteen Ashley Home Store showrooms as the brand's Southeast and Southwest Florida licensee. For more information, please visit: http://www.cityfurniture.com.

SOURCE CITY Furniture
MARLBOROUGH, Mass. , June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Concentric Energy Advisors, Inc. ("Concentric") experts in guiding clients through the complex and continuously evolving issues, opportunities, and challenges confronting the energy and water industries, today announced the appointment of Jeff McDonald, Ph.D. as a Vice President.

Dr. McDonald has over 20 years of experience in the economics of wholesale electricity markets and is an expert in market design, performance, and monitoring. Dr. McDonald is also a testifying expert on wholesale electric market design, just compensation for generator assets, market competitiveness, and cost allocation.

"We are excited to welcome Jeff to Concentric and share his expertise with our clients," said Danielle Powers, Executive Vice President at Concentric. "The wholesale electric markets are experiencing significant issues from reliability challenges caused by extreme weather conditions to a changing resource mix to resource adequacy concerns. Jeff's experience will be critical to our clients as they navigate these dynamic factors and articulate their decisions to stakeholders."

Before joining Concentric, Dr. McDonald was a Principal at Libertas Market Analytics, where he provided a wide range of analytical services to clients in the wholesale electricity industry. Prior to that position, he held various roles in Market Monitoring with the California Independent System Operator and headed the Market Monitoring department at ISO New England. In these roles, he provided extensive expert witness support in regulatory proceedings, stakeholder engagement, and technical consultations on Independent System Operator market rules, performance, and practices.

About Concentric Energy Advisors:

Concentric Energy Advisors specializes in management consulting and financial advisory services focusing on the North American energy and water industries. Through its subsidiaries, CE Capital Advisors and Concentric Advisors ULC, Concentric provides capital market advisory support and consulting services in Canada.

Media Contact:

Wendy Preston

[email protected]

SOURCE Concentric Energy Advisors
NEW YORK, June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ --

WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, reminds purchasers of the securities of Charles River Laboratories International, Inc. (NYSE: CRL) between May 5, 2020 and February 21, 2023, both dates inclusive (the "Class Period"), of the important July 18, 2023 lead plaintiff deadline.

SO WHAT: If you purchased Charles River securities during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement.

WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the Charles River class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=12403 or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] or [email protected] for information on the class action. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than July 18, 2023. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation.

WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources or any meaningful peer recognition. Many of these firms do not actually handle securities class actions, but are merely middlemen that refer clients or partner with law firms that actually litigate the cases. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm has achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs' Bar. Many of the firm's attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers.

DETAILS OF THE CASE: According to the lawsuit, defendants throughout the Class Period made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Charles River had engaged in illegal activity with respect to its importation of non-human primates for research; (2) as a result, Charles River was at a heightened risk of criminal and regulatory investigation by, inter alia, the U.S. Department of Justice ("DOJ"); (3) as a result, Charles River would be forced to suspend shipments of primates from Cambodia; and (4) as a result of the foregoing, defendants' positive statements about Charles River's business, operations, and prospects were materially misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages.

To join the Charles River class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=12403 or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] or [email protected] for information on the class action.

No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investor's ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff.

Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/.

Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Contact Information:

Laurence Rosen, Esq.

Phillip Kim, Esq.

The Rosen Law Firm, P.A.

275 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor

New York, NY 10016

Tel: (212) 686-1060

Toll Free: (866) 767-3653

Fax: (212) 202-3827

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

www.rosenlegal.com

SOURCE Rosen Law Firm, P.A.
First location-based UpLink Challenge will encourage collective action within the community to develop sustainable solutions for the city

SAN FRANCISCO, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Deloitte, Salesforce and World Economic Forum today announced the launch of the Yes San Francisco (Yes SF), Urban Sustainability Challenge, the first location-based UpLink Challenge created in direct response to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 11 of making cities more inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. The Challenge is a unique call to action for entrepreneurs to submit sustainable solutions that contribute to the city's needs and to have the opportunity to receive funding and support.

The Yes SF, Urban Sustainability Challenge engages local organizations, including those with significant presence in the city and those who are interested in establishing some part of their operations in the city in the future, to bring specialized expertise to help create equal access to opportunity and a more sustainable future. Collaborators in this effort include Citi and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Foundation. Citi will leverage the Citi Impact Fund to help UpLink engage a network of investors who can provide strategic guidance and the potential for funding to support the growth and scale of these ventures. The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Foundation will bring an ecosystem of local stakeholders to advocate and support the progress of the Challenge. The mission of the Challenge is aligned with Deloitte's social impact strategy, and Deloitte's ongoing efforts to help drive equity in places with the greatest need.

"The Challenge provides an opportunity to help support the San Francisco community in addressing some of its biggest challenges," said Kwasi Mitchell, chief purpose and DEI officer at Deloitte. "This type of effort is foundational to our organization's purpose and commitment to social impact in the communities where we live and work. We hope it will help catalyze systemic change by creating a more sustainable and equitable future for this city."

Submissions to support sustainable urban transformation in downtown San Francisco will be accepted through the UpLink platform via https://bit.ly/45wDULo from June 9 to July 14, 2023. Proposals must demonstrate an ability to have a positive impact on the community through sustainable solutions that revitalize spaces across the city. Challenge innovations may include solutions such as:

Redesigned indoor and outdoor spaces that bring residents, visitors and new businesses to the area while utilizing sustainable materials that minimize the city's carbon footprint.

Reimagined ideas for urban food production to provide healthy, reliable nutrition to the community.

Innovative approaches to water conservation and reuse that stimulate equitable job creation.

"At Salesforce, we believe that collective action is essential to address the complex challenges facing our communities. We're proud to support the Yes SF, Urban Sustainability Challenge, which will harness new innovations from ecopreneurs. By working together, we can bring the power of technology to create a more equitable, sustainable, and vibrant San Francisco for all," said Suzanne DiBianca, EVP and chief impact officer at Salesforce.

San Francisco is known globally as a birthplace of innovation. Like many cities, it was hit hard by the pandemic and is still recovering economically. The Yes SF, Urban Sustainability Challenge will bring together entrepreneurs, nonprofits and public sector stakeholders, communities and for-profit companies to spark change and help create a revitalized and more sustainable San Francisco. The focus on urban transformation aims to further position San Francisco as a leading city where people can sustainably live and work, becoming a model for resilient and inclusive cities of the future.

"UpLink helps scale world-class innovations that are crucial to achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals," said Olivier Schwab, managing director, World Economic Forum. "The Yes SF, Urban Sustainability Challenge offers a unique opportunity to connect local solutions to the resources, expertise and funding they need to scale and to create transformational change for the city and its inhabitants."

UpLink is the open innovation platform on which the Challenge will be hosted. World Economic Forum launched UpLink at Davos in 2020, with the assistance of Salesforce and Deloitte, to bring together entrepreneurs and experts to source ideas and innovations in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The platform facilitates connections for entrepreneurs to grow and scale their businesses with the aim of creating a world where anyone with impactful ideas is empowered to address the world's most pressing challenges. UpLink has now run more than 43 challenges and identified over 350 entrepreneurs with innovative solutions across critical SDG areas including health, food, freshwater, ocean, plastics, education, climate and more. Entrepreneurs selected for the Yes SF, Urban Sustainability Challenge will be announced in September.

The launch of the Yes SF, Urban Sustainability Challenge aligns with Deloitte's annual Impact Day  a single day that engages Deloitte US professionals to actively participate in the organization's purpose through hands-on social impact efforts in the communities where we live and work. As part of the Challenge announcement, key leaders from Deloitte including US CEO Jason Girzadas, Chief Purpose & DEI Officer Kwasi Mitchell, San Francisco Managing Principal Kirsten Rhodes, among others will join Challenge sponsors and collaborators to participate in a skills-based volunteer event at Deloitte's San Francisco office to offer guidance to local entrepreneurs who are focused on driving social impact within the community.

For more details on Deloitte's ongoing purpose initiatives, please visit www.deloitte.com/us/purpose.

About Deloitte

Deloitte provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax and advisory services to many of the world's most admired brands, including nearly 90% of the Fortune 500 and more than 7,000 private companies. Our people come together for the greater good and work across the industry sectors that drive and shape today's marketplace  delivering measurable and lasting results that help reinforce public trust in our capital markets, inspire clients to see challenges as opportunities to transform and thrive, and help lead the way toward a stronger economy and a healthier society. Deloitte is proud to be part of the largest global professional services network serving our clients in the markets that are most important to them. Building on more than 175 years of service, our network of member firms spans more than 150 countries and territories. Learn how Deloitte's approximately 415,000 people worldwide connect for impact at http://www.deloitte.com.

Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee ("DTTL"), its network of member firms, and their related entities. DTTL and each of its member firms are legally separate and independent entities. DTTL (also referred to as "Deloitte Global") does not provide services to clients. In the United States, Deloitte refers to one or more of the US member firms of DTTL, their related entities that operate using the "Deloitte" name in the United States and their respective affiliates. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting. Please see www.deloitte.com/about to learn more about our global network of member firms.

SOURCE Deloitte
The Zebulon, North Carolina Event Reignited Storied Tradition and Continued Commitment to Wounded Warrior Project Partnership

NEW YORK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- DEVIL-DOG Dungarees, the vintage-inspired men's lifestyle brand, proudly commemorated its 75th anniversary with a grand celebration on Thursday, June 8. The event, held in Zebulon, North Carolina, included a reception at Olde Raleigh Distillery, followed by a ceremony at the DEVIL-DOG distribution center. The highlight of the evening was the relighting of the fully restored iconic 1950s neon sign that has graced the building for decades along with a check presentation to the Wounded Warrior Project.

"We are thrilled to mark this incredible milestone for the brand," said Jeff Rosenstock, President of General Sportwear and DEVIL-DOG Dungarees. "For 75 years, our brand has been synonymous with durability, quality, and a commitment to our North Carolina heritage. It's an honor to celebrate this anniversary surrounded by our valued customers, partners and the Zebulon community."

"For 75 years, our brand has been synonymous with durability, quality, and a commitment to our North Carolina heritage." Tweet this

In 1927, an army veteran named Louis Rosenstock founded General Sportwear, a small apparel manufacturer that would go on to launch the iconic DEVIL-DOG Dungarees brand in 1948. Inspired by the strength and durability of the U.S. Marines who earned the nickname "Devil Dogs" in World War I, the brand quickly gained a reputation for quality and toughness. Seventy-five years later, the third generation of Rosenstocks, Louis' grandchildren Jeff and David, carry on the legacy - relaunching the brand in 2019 as a men's denim and lifestyle label that's all about casual, comfortable clothing that fits great.

The factory turned distribution center has been a staple of the Zebulon community since 1952. Atop the building, sits an iconic neon sign that, like DEVIL-DOG, has stood the test of time. While it has remained in place all these years, the neon burnt out some 50 years ago. But, thanks to a restoration by Durham-based Hex Neon, the sign once again illuminates the Zebulon night sky. It's a small but significant reminder of the brand's enduring legacy and the importance of preserving cultural history. DEVIL-DOG continues to honor its N.C. roots in various ways. Each line of jeans is named for an N.C. location, from Durham to Boone and more, and each pair includes a leatherette patch that proudly says Zebulon, North Carolina. The company also partnered with local artists George Hage and Brock Forrer to create amazing North Carolina-inspired designs for its 75th-anniversary T-shirt and bandana.

Glenn York, the mayor of Zebulon, expressed his appreciation during the event for DEVIL-DOG Dungarees' contributions to the local community. "DEVIL-DOG has been an integral part of Zebulon for over seven decades," said Mayor York. "Their commitment to quality craftsmanship and their dedication to North Carolina is truly commendable. We congratulate them on their 75th anniversary and look forward to many more years of shared success."

In addition to celebrating their remarkable history, DEVIL-DOG Dungarees took the opportunity to honor their longstanding partnership making a difference in the lives of veterans. As a supporter of the Wounded Warrior Project (WWP), every pair of DEVIL-DOG pants comes with a special WWP dog tag to help raise awareness for their veteran support programs. During the sign relighting ceremony, DEVIL-DOG presented WWP a check to represent its $125,000 in contributions since 2019 and reflect a continued commitment to honoring and supporting those who have served their country.

For more information about DEVIL-DOG Dungarees, please visit devil-dog.com and follow @DEVILDOGJeans on Instagram and Facebook.

About DEVIL-DOG Dungarees

DEVIL-DOG Dungarees was first established in 1948, relaunching to the market in 2019 as a men's lifestyle brand, creating vintage-inspired and high-quality menswear at a great value. Originally known for their great fitting and durable denim jeans, DEVIL-DOG has expanded into a full lifestyle collection including new categories such as: Casual Bottoms & Shorts, Knit Tops, Sweatshirts & Tees, Denim Shirts & Jackets, Caps and Leather Accessories.

SOURCE DEVIL-DOG Dungarees
ABU DHABI, UAE , June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Department of Health  Abu Dhabi (DoH), the regulator of the healthcare sector in the Emirate, signed a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with leading global biopharmaceutical company MSD GCC, to advance research into breast and lung cancer.

DoH MoU with MSD GCC DoH MoU with MSD GCC

In the presence of H.E. Mansoor Al Mansoori, Chairman of the Department of Health  Abu Dhabi and Jenelle Krishnamoorthy, VP Global Public Policy and Government Relations at MSD, the MoU was signed by Dr. Asma Ibrahim Al Mannaei, Executive Director of the Research and Innovation Center at the DoH and Ashraf Mallak, Managing Director of MSD GCC, on the sidelines of the BIO International Convention 2023, which is being held from June 5-8 in Boston, United States. The agreement marks the continuation of a long-term collaboration between the two entities to advance observational research in Abu Dhabi.

Within the framework of their renewed partnership, the two parties will work together to initiate two observational research studies in the field of oncology, explicitly targeting non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). The studies aim to advance the ability to address the healthcare challenges associated with these diseases and improve patient outcomes.

Dr. Asma Ibrahim Al Mannaei, Executive Director of the Research and Innovation Center at the Department of Health  Abu Dhabi (DoH) said: "As we navigate the complexities of healthcare challenges, we remain focused on expanding collaboration with global partners who share our vision of advancing healthcare for all. Under the directives of our wise leadership, we are proud to renew our cooperation with MSD GCC, a long-standing partner that has been part of the Emirate's healthcare journey. Through this agreement, we will leverage collective expertise, resources and knowledge to address pressing healthcare challenges."

Dr. Al Mannaei added: "Abu Dhabi is leading the transformation of the regional healthcare ecosystem by leveraging sciences and technology, positioning itself as a life science hub and an incubator for innovation on the global stage. Our research will pave the way for innovative treatments and interventions while fostering breakthrough diagnosis and solutions for patients around the world."

Commenting on the agreement, Ashraf Mallak, Managing Director of MSD in the GCC, said: "The Department of Health Abu Dhabi has had exceptional efforts in establishing a healthcare system that stands as a global model of innovation and sustainability. Their forward-thinking approach, embracing advanced technology and fostering research and development, has led to the advancement of public health in the Emirate."

He continued: "It is with great pride that MSD joins hands with the DoH at the BIO Convention. With this renewed collaboration, we are embarking on two important observational research studies in two prevalent cancers in the UAE: lung and breast cancer. Through these studies, we aim to make a meaningful impact on patient outcomes and contribute to the UAE's vision for healthcare. This agreement reaffirms our commitment to driving medical progress to benefit patients in UAE."

During the signing, DoH and MSD reiterated the importance of public-private partnerships to have a meaningful impact on the enhancement of healthcare services, with such collaborations bringing together the entities' collective expertise and resources in medical research and patient care. The studies conducted by DoH and MSD will commence following a feasibility stage that ensures the necessary preparations are in place.

Led by the Department of Health  Abu Dhabi (DoH), a high-profile Abu Dhabi delegation is visiting the United States of America (USA) between June 1st, 2023 and June 8th, 2023 to showcase the Emirate's partnership opportunities and explore collaboration with leading organisations in Research and Development (R&D), manufacturing and innovation. Kicking-off in Washington DC, delegates have met with existing partners and foster fresh collaboration with governmental bodies and health-tech giants. The transnational mission has culminated in Boston, coinciding with Abu Dhabi's participation at BIO International Convention 2023 to exhibit the Emirate's growth and development of its biotechnology industry. The participation has witnessed in-depth discussions, shared insights and expertise as well as explored collaborations in health-tech, life science and innovation.

To know more about the mission, visit: https://www.doh.gov.ae/en/Abu-Dhabi-a-regional-life-science-hub

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2097384/DoH_MoU_with_MSD_GCC.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2097385/DoH_MoU_with_MSD_GCC_Signing.jpg

SOURCE The Department of Health - Abu Dhabi
MONACO, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Doris Hsu, Chairperson and CEO of GlobalWafers Co., Ltd., was named the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year 2023 at an award ceremony held in Monaco's Salle des Etoiles. Doris was selected from among nearly 5,000 program participants that included the 49 winners across 45 countries and jurisdictions competing for the global title. She is the third woman to hold the title and the first winner from Taiwan in the award's 23-year history.

Doris Hsu from Taiwan named EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year 2023

Doris is a visionary business leader with an unwavering passion for innovation and commitment to sustainability. For more than a decade, she has been the driving force behind GlobalWafers' meteoric rise, overseeing a series of successful M&As that transformed the company's product portfolio and expanded operations into Europe. In 2015, Doris took GlobalWafers public with a highly successful IPO, and today it is the world's third-largest wafer manufacturer. She has continuously created value and sustainable growth for shareholders while always staying true to her core values of putting people first while leading with honesty, integrity, enthusiasm and hard work.

Carmine Di Sibio, EY Global Chairman and CEO, says:

"We are in a moment where purpose-driven entrepreneurs are leading the charge in taking on global challenges and this year's World Entrepreneur Of The Year winner, Doris Hsu, is the complete embodiment of that. Doris' vision and drive not only built an industry-leading company that has created thousands of jobs and helped generate significant local and global economic impact, but her passion for building a better working world is really what this event is all about. Congratulations to Doris on being named this year's world winner."

Doris Hsu, Chairperson and CEO of GlobalWafers, says:

"I am honored to receive this prestigious distinction as EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year. We as entrepreneurs often find ourselves on the front lines of addressing so many of today's most pressing issues, from building towards a more sustainable future to ensuring social wellbeing in the areas of greatest need. I hope that I can continue the legacy of this great award by driving conversations about these challenges, helping to come up with big new ideas and bringing in new voices along the way. There is an underrepresentation of female leaders, especially in the high-tech [semiconductor] industry, and this shows that regardless of gender, anyone can succeed. I'm so proud of my amazing team at GlobalWafers and grateful to all those who have helped and inspired me throughout this journey."

The EY organization hosts the annual World Entrepreneur of the Year event to celebrate the accomplishments of visionary leaders who are transforming industries, growing the economy and answering the call to address global challenges. The annual gathering brings together founders, CEOs and business leaders for a series of networking opportunities and workshops, culminating with the winning announcement.

The EY World Entrepreneur of the Year 2023 was chosen by an independent panel of judges against four criteria: entrepreneurial spirit, purpose, growth and impact. This year's panel included a diverse and esteemed group of entrepreneurs from all over the world, chaired by Hernan Kazah, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Kaszek Ventures.

B-roll footage, sound bites from the winners, judges and EY executives and high-resolution photography is available here to download for broadcast and online use.

About EY

EY exists to build a better working world, helping to create long-term value for clients, people and society and build trust in the capital markets.

Enabled by data and technology, diverse EY teams in over 150 countries provide trust through assurance and help clients grow, transform and operate.

Working across assurance, consulting, law, strategy, tax and transactions, EY teams ask better questions to find new answers for the complex issues facing our world today.

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. Information about how EY collects and uses personal data and a description of the rights individuals have under data protection legislation are available via ey.com/privacy. EY member firms do not practice law where prohibited by local laws. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com.

This news release has been issued by EYGM Limited, a member of the global EY organization that also does not provide any services to clients.

Lauren Mosery Eric Minuskin EY Global Media Relations EY Global Media Relations +1 732 977 2063 +1 908 770 9758 [email protected] [email protected]

SOURCE EY
LONDON, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Comac Medical (Comac or the Company) announced today that funds advised by EdgeCap Partners (EdgeCap) acquired a majority equity interest in the Company. Comac's founder and CEO, Dr. Milen Vrabevski, as well as other shareholders, retain a significant minority stake and will continue in their current roles as executive managers, thereby providing continuity to all its clients and partners.

Headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria, and established in 1997, Comac Medical is the leading full-service clinical research organisation (CRO) in Southern Eastern Europe, present in more than 30 countries and providing a comprehensive range of early to late-phase drug development services to the global pharmaceutical and biotech industries across a variety of therapeutic areas.

Chris Backes, EdgeCap's co-founder, said: "We are excited to invest in Comac Medical, which over the past 25 years has grown under Milen's leadership into an outstanding business that customers overwhelmingly praise for its quality of service, deep medical expertise in early phase clinical development as well as its speed and agility, specifically with regards to patient recruitment across therapeutic areas and rare indications. We think Comac is uniquely positioned to capitalise on the CRO market's favourable growth prospects and untapped potential."

Kristjan Piilmann, EdgeCap's co-founder, said: "Our investment in Comac reflects EdgeCap's thematic focus on the healthcare & life sciences industry, as well as our commitment to partner with exceptional founders and management teams. We look forward to working alongside Milen and his team to accelerate the Company's growth organically and to drive consolidation in the CRO space via a targeted buy-and-build strategy."

Dr. Milen Vrabevski, Comac Medical's founder, said: "This transaction is a significant milestone for Comac Medical and its over 350 employees who contribute to our success daily. To continue our strong growth trajectory in the years to come and to meet our customers' needs, we are looking to significantly expand operations while preserving our unique culture that has served as the foundation of our success. EdgeCap supports this vision and is committed to investing significant resources to capitalise on an exciting opportunity ahead. I am thrilled to start this next chapter in our journey and partner with Kristjan and Chris as we work towards the growth and success of Comac Medical."

The transaction has been completed in June 2023. Kristjan Piilmann, Chris Backes, and Dr. Gunter Schmid, Senior Operating Partner for EdgeCap, will join Comac's Board of Directors.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

WOLF THEISS provided legal counsel to EdgeCap, and Kingsley Napley LLP provided legal counsel to the shareholders of Comac Medical in connection with the transaction. Deloitte LLP conducted financial and tax due diligence, and Health Advances LLC conducted commercial due diligence for EdgeCap.

About Comac Medical

Comac Medical, established in 1997 in Sofia, Bulgaria, is one of the largest full-service clinical research organisations (CRO) in South-Eastern Europe, present in more than 30 countries, providing a comprehensive range of early to late-phase drug development services to the global pharmaceutical and biotech industries across a variety of therapeutic areas with a differentiated expertise and track record for indications within oncology, dermatology, gastroenterology, and respiratory diseases.

The Company has a global customer base consisting of emerging biotech and established pharmaceutical companies, offering full outsourced clinical trial support across the entire clinical development timeline. Comac Medical's FDA and EMA-inspected Clinical Research Unit (CRU) for Phase I, Bioavailability and Bioequivalence studies has 18 years of experience in early phase clinical research and counting over 260 completed clinical trials to date. The facility is the largest in the region and comprises 42 beds, an on-site pharmacy as well as a clinical and bioanalytical laboratory.

Visit our company website.

About EdgeCap Partners

EdgeCap is a London- and Tallinn-based private equity and growth capital firm focused on investing in high-quality European mid-market companies. Founded by Kristjan Piilmann and Chris Backes, EdgeCap is backed by family capital and seeks to deploy between EUR 10-100 million per investment.

Follow us on LinkedIn.

SOURCE EdgeCap
PUNTA DEL ESTE, Uruguay, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Faroy S.A. (the " Company ") announced today the results of its offer to exchange (the " Exchange Offer ") any and all of its outstanding US$11,628,766 step-up senior secured note due 2033 (the " Existing Note ") for a new note (the " New Note " or the " Short-Term Discount Note ") which was made pursuant to the Company's private invitation memorandum dated April 14, 2023 (the " Private Invitation Memorandum "), in compliance with and pursuant to Section 4.17 of the indenture dated December 28, 2020 (the " Indenture "), by and among the Company, The Bank of New York Mellon, as trustee, registrar, paying agent and transfer agent, and TMF Trust Company (Uruguay) S.A., as collateral agent, under which the Existing Note was issued and pursuant to which the New Note will be issued.

This announcement is addressed only to holders of the Existing Note who are not "U.S. persons" (as defined in Rule 902 under the Securities Act, " U.S. Persons "), who are not acting for the account or benefit of a U.S. Person, and whose receipt and review of the terms of the Private Invitation Memorandum and participation in the Exchange Offer was otherwise permitted under the laws and regulations of any jurisdiction applicable to them (the " Eligible Holders ").

The aggregate principal amount of the Existing Note tendered, not validly withdrawn, and accepted by the Company in the Exchange Offer as of 5:00 p.m. (New York time) on June 9, 2023, was US$3,525,356 representing 30.32% aggregate principal amount of the Existing Note (the " Exchanged Note ").

The Settlement Date, as defined in the Private Invitation Memorandum, is expected to occur on June 16, 2023, when the Company expects to issue the New Note in exchange for the Existing Note accepted in the Exchange Offer, and cancel the Exchanged Note in the manner provided in the Indenture. Following the cancellation of the Exchanged Note, the principal amount of the outstanding Existing Note shall be US$8,103,410.

D.F. King acted as information and exchange agent. Any questions regarding the Exchange Offer may be directed to D.F. King at +1 (212) 269-5550 (Banks and Brokers call) - +1 (800) 249-7148 (Toll-free) - +1 (212) 709-3328 (facsimile), or at [email protected].

Important Notice

This announcement does not contain or constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to exchange, buy or subscribe for securities to or from any person in any jurisdiction to whom or in which such offer or solicitation is unlawful. This announcement is, and the Exchange Offer referred to herein was, directed to Eligible Holders, and the Existing Note may be exchanged for the New Note as described in the Private Invitation Memorandum only by Eligible Holders. Persons into whose possession this announcement or the Private Invitation Memorandum comes are required by the Company to inform themselves about, and to observe, any restrictions on the distribution of materials relating to the Exchange Offer, or on the issue and resale of securities.

The recipient of this announcement may not forward or distribute the announcement or the related Private Invitation Memorandum in whole or in part to any other person or reproduce the announcement or the Private Invitation Memorandum in any manner whatsoever and any forwarding, distribution or reproduction of the announcement or the Private Invitation Memorandum in whole or in part is unauthorized. The failure to comply with this instruction may result in a violation of the Securities Act or the applicable laws of other jurisdictions.

You are also reminded that this announcement and the Private Invitation Memorandum have been provided to you on the basis that you are a person into whose possession this announcement and the Private Invitation Memorandum may be lawfully delivered in accordance with (i) the laws of the jurisdiction in which you are located or resident and (ii) any jurisdictional restriction pursuant to applicable securities laws, and you may not, nor are you authorized to, deliver this announcement and the Private Invitation Memorandum to any other person. Any materials relating to the Exchange Offer do not constitute, and may not be used in connection with, any form of offer or solicitation in any place where such offers or solicitations are not permitted by law.

Forward-Looking Statements

All statements in this press release, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements. These statements are based on expectations and assumptions on the date of this press release and are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, market conditions, and factors over which the Company has no control. The Company assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, and does not intend to do so, unless otherwise required by law.

SOURCE Faroy S.A.
AUBURN HILLS, Mich., June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - FLO Chief Product Officer Nathan Yang issued the following statement in response to the announcement that multiple automakers will adopt the North America Charging Standard (NACS):

FLO NYC Curbside Charger. Photo Credit: Ignacio Ciocchini, Industrial Designer (CNW Group/FLO)

"FLO welcomes initiatives to standardize charging hardware in North America because we believe it will help eliminate confusion for EV drivers. Ultimately, the increased adoption of the NACS standard relates both to its widespread use by EV drivers and the reliability of stations that currently offer NACS. FLO is an industry leader in reliability, offering a 98%+ uptime. With our objective of delivering the best EV charging experience for users, we are committed to supporting the technologies and standards our drivers want to use.

FLO is vertically integrated, which means we have great flexibility to adopt the standards that customers prefer. This, coupled with our flexible platform approach to hardware, software and network design and engineering allows us to rapidly adopt new technology and standards.

Our new stations, including the NEVI-compliant FLO Ultra fast charger are already designed to support NACS cables if requested by customers or site hosts.

We are committed to providing the best charging experience for all drivers and plan to announce an option for customers with existing stations to be able to add NACS on compatible stations."

To learn more about how FLO calculates uptime, visit: 98% Uptime.

About FLO

FLO is a leading North American electric vehicle (EV) charging network operator and a smart charging solutions provider. We help to overcome climate change and accelerate EV adoption through a vertically integrated business model and by delivering EV drivers the best charging experience from curbside to countryside. Every month, we enable more than 1 million charging events thanks to over 90,000 fast and level 2 EV charging stations deployed at public, private and residential locations. FLO operates its network across North America and our high-quality charging stations are assembled with care in Michigan and Quebec. To learn more about what "EV charging done right" means to us, visit flo.com.

FLO and FLO Ultra are registered trademarks of Services FLO Inc.

SOURCE FLO
LOS ANGELES, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Frandzel Robins Bloom & Csato, L.C. congratulates Attorney Michael Gomez on his appointment by the United States District Court for Eastern District of California to be a lawyer representative to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference.

In each judicial district, the judges and the bar organizations select a group of lawyers to serve as lawyer representatives to the annual Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference. During their three-year terms, these lawyers, who represent the federal bar, meet throughout the year with the judges from their districts to discuss matters of mutual concern. The lawyer representatives also meet separately to work on projects -- such as rule changes, alternative dispute resolution, or education programs -- designed to aid the courts to improve the administration of justice in their districts. Gomez's term runs from January 2023 until December 2025.

Michael Gomez is a Martindale-Hubbell AV Rated lawyer who focuses his practice in the areas of bankruptcy, debtor and creditor rights, commercial litigation, and business litigation; debt workout negotiations, restructuring, and documentation of commercial lending transactions, and personal property and real estate-secured credits. He has represented various entities, including debtors, creditors' committees, hedge funds, indenture trustees, equipment lessors, receivers, landlords, bankruptcy trustees, judgment creditors, private lenders, and institutional lenders in out of court workouts, federal and state court litigation, and chapters 7, 11, 12, and 13 bankruptcy cases.

Frandzel is a recognized leader offering legal counsel and litigation services to financial institutions and businesses. For over three decades we've been providing clients with time-tested results and business insights to help them succeed. We are known for our highly responsive service, lasting client relationships and solutions that work.

SOURCE Frandzel Robins Bloom & Csato, L.C.
DUBLIN, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Gene Amplification Technologies Market Report 2023-2033" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The Gene Amplification Technologies Market Report 2023-2033: 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 expand their existing operations in a new region.

A Rise in Demand for Genetic Data Collecting to Identify and Map Every Gene in the Human Genome Is Causing the Global Market to Expand

Gene amplification is the differential expansion of a certain region of the genome relative to the rest. Most species appear to engage in this process, which has been demonstrated to take place in both somatic and germline cells. Gene Amplification can have positive such as growth or survival benefit or negative effects on the organism. It can be linked to normal developmental processes or occur as spontaneous genetic events. Somatic cell gene amplification in human malignancies has lately received substantial research. Proto-oncogene amplification may cause or contribute to the development of tumours. The amplified gene may occasionally serve as a viable target for cancer treatment. It mentions the growth of a certain DNA from a very little volume.

A rise in demand for genetic data collecting to identify and map every gene in the human genome is causing the global market to expand. The global market for gene amplification technology is being driven by the widespread acceptance of specific cancer therapies. Human Genome Projects continue to be the primary factor driving the market for gene amplification technology (HGP).

The Growing Adoption of Customised Medicine, and Expanding Research in Molecular Diagnostics and Genomics Are the Key Market Drivers

The arrival of fresh and cutting-edge products, the growing adoption of customised medicine, and expanding research in molecular diagnostics and genomics are the key market drivers. In the near future, it is projected that rising genomics investments by pharmaceutical and biotechnology businesses would significantly fuel the industry. The biotechnology industry has recently seen a considerable shift toward novel pharmaceuticals and therapies, medicines based on genome sequencing, and technological developments, which has fuelled market expansion. The commercial adoption of gene multiplication techniques has been affected by improvements in molecular diagnostic tools such as NGS, droplet digital PCR, and genome-wide sequencing with respect to reproducibility, accuracy, and timeframe. The industry for gene multiplication technology has also been boosted by international projects like the Africa Pathogen Genomics Initiative (Africa PGI).

What Questions Should You Ask before Buying a Market Research Report?

How is the gene amplification technologies market evolving?

What is driving and restraining the gene amplification technologies market?

How will each gene amplification technologies submarket segment grow over the forecast period and how much revenue will these submarkets account for in 2033?

How will the market shares for each gene amplification technologies submarket develop from 2023 to 2033?

What will be the main driver for the overall market from 2023 to 2033?

Will leading gene amplification technologies markets broadly follow the macroeconomic dynamics, or will individual national markets outperform others?

How will the market shares of the national markets change by 2033 and which geographical region will lead the market in 2033?

Who are the leading players and what are their prospects over the forecast period?

What are the gene amplification technologies projects for these leading companies?

How will the industry evolve during the period between 2023 and 2033? What are the implications of gene amplification technologies projects taking place now and over the next 10 years?

Is there a greater need for product commercialisation to further scale the gene amplification technologies market?

Where is the gene amplification technologies market heading and how can you ensure you are at the forefront of the market?

What are the best investment options for new product and service lines?

What are the key prospects for moving companies into a new growth path and C-suite?

You need to discover how this will impact the gene amplification technologies market today, and over the next 10 years:

The 425-page report provides 176 tables and 190 charts/graphs exclusively to you.

The report highlights key lucrative areas in the industry so you can target them - NOW.

It contains in-depth analysis of global, regional and national sales and growth.

It highlights for you the key successful trends, changes and revenue projections made by your competitors.

This report tells you TODAY how the gene amplification technologies market will develop in the next 10 years, and in line with the variations in COVID-19 economic recession and bounce back. This market is more critical now than at any point over the last 10 years.

Forecasts to 2033 and other analyses reveal commercial prospects

In addition to revenue forecasting for 2033, the new study provides you with recent results, growth rates, and market shares.

You will find original analyses, with business outlooks and developments.

Discover qualitative analyses (including market dynamics, drivers, opportunities, restraints and challenges), cost structure, impact of rising gene amplification technologies 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.

Segments Covered in the Report

Market Segment by Sample Type

Single Cell

Formalin-Fixed & Paraffin-Embedded (FFPE)

Market Segment by End-User

Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology Companies

Academic & Research Institutes

Other End-Users

Market Segment by Business Type

Gene Amplification Kits & Reagents

Gene Amplification Instruments

Gene Amplification Services

Gene Amplification Ancillaries

Market Segment by Application

Hybridization Application

Whole Genome Amplification

Exome Sequencing Amplification

SNP Genotyping Arrays

Array CGH

Market Segment by Technology

PCR-based Amplification

Loop-mediated Isothermal Amplification

Nucleic Acid Sequence Based Amplification

Strand Displacement Amplification

Multiple Displacement Amplification

Other Technology

In addition to the revenue predictions for the overall world market and segments, you will also find revenue forecasts for four regional and 20 leading national markets:

North America

U.S.

Canada

Europe

Germany

Spain

United Kingdom

France

Italy

Rest of Europe

Asia Pacific

China

Japan

India

Australia

South Korea

Rest of Asia Pacific

Latin America

Brazil

Mexico

Rest of Latin America

Middle East & Africa

Turkey

Saudi Arabia

South Africa

Rest of Middle East & Africa

The report also includes profiles and for some of the leading companies in the Gene Amplification Technologies Market, 2023 to 2033, with a focus on this segment of these companies' operations.

Overall world revenue for Gene Amplification Technologies Market, 2023 to 2033 in terms of value the market will surpass US$4,853 million in 2023, this work calculates. We predict strong revenue growth through to 2033. this work identifies which organizations hold the greatest potential. Discover their capabilities, progress, and commercial prospects, helping you stay ahead.

How will the Gene Amplification Technologies Market, 2023 to 2033 report help you?

In summary, this 420+ page report provides you with the following knowledge:

Revenue forecasts to 2033 for Gene Amplification Technologies Market, 2023 to 2033 Market, with forecasts for application, technology, sample type, business type, end-user and company size, each forecast at a global and regional level - discover the industry's prospects, finding the most lucrative places for investments and revenues.

Revenue forecasts to 2033 for four regional and 20 key national markets - See forecasts for the Gene Amplification Technologies Market, 2023 to 2033 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.

, , and LAMEA. Also forecasted is the market in the US, , , , , , UK, , , , , and 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 Gene Amplification Technologies Market, 2023 to 2033.

Find quantitative and qualitative analyses with independent predictions. Receive information that only this report contains, staying informed with invaluable business intelligence.

Companies Mentioned:

4BASEBIO AG

Abbott Laboratories

Agilent Technologies, Inc.

Ambion Inc.

Bayer Pharmaceutics AG

Becton Dickinson and Co.

and Co. Bio-Rad Laboratories

Danaher Corporation

Illumina Inc.

LGC Group

Merck KGaA

MyBioSource

Nanjing Vazyme Biotech Co.

New England Biolabs

PerkinElmer Inc.

Promega Corporation

Qiagen N.V.

Silicon Biosystems

Takara Bio Inc.

Yikang Inc.

4D Molecular Therapeutics

Abeona Therapeutics

Actus Therapeutics

Adrenas

Adverum Biotechnologies

Akouos

Amicus Therapeutics

Apollo Therapeutics

Aruvant Sciences

Aspa Therapeutics

Audentes

AVROBIO

Axovant Sciences Ltd

BioVec Pharma

Brainvectis SAS

Catalyst Biosciences

CavoGene Lifesciences

Copernicus Therapeutics

CRISPR Therapeutics AG

Editas Medicine

Enzo Biochem

Errant Gene Therapeutics

Esteve Pharmaceuticals SA

Excision BioTherapeutics

Exonics Therapeutics

Expression Therapeutics

Fibrocell Science

Freeline Therapeutics

Gemini Therapeutics

Generation Bio Corp.

Genethon SA

GenSight Biologics SA

Gyroscope Therapeutics

Hemera Biosciences

Holostem Terapie Avanzate Srl

Homology Medicines

Horama SA

Immusoft Corp.

iTherapeutics Corp.

IVERIC bio

Krystal Biotech

Lamellar Biomedical

Logicbio Therapeutics

Lysogene

Lysogene SAS/ Sarepta Therapeutics

MeiraGTx

Milo Biotechnology

Mustang Bio

NanoScope Technologies

NeuExcell Therapeutics

Nightstar Therapeutics/

Passage Bio

Therapeutics

PTC Therapeutics

Renova Therapeutics

Rocket Pharmaceuticals

Rubius Therapeutics

SanBio Co

Tamid Bio

Telocyte

Temprian Therapeutics

Tocagen

Tolerion

Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical

ViroMed Co Ltd

Vivet Therapeutics SAS

Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI)

Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO)

Department of Health and Family Welfare

Development and Reform Commission (NDRC)

Food and Drug Administration (US FDA)

Gene Therapy Net

Indian Drug Manufacturer's Association (IDMA)

Informa UK Limited

IntechOpen

International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineering (IPSE)

JOURNAL OF GENERAL VIROLOGY

Korea Food and Drug Administration (KFDA)

Korea Pharmaceutical Manufacturer's Association (KPMA)

Massachusetts Medical Society

Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)

Medicines Manufacturing Industry Partnership (MMIP)

Ministry of Health (MOH)

Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW)

Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT)

National Center for Biotechnology Information

Pan European Networks Ltd

Pharma Manufacturing

Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA)

Pharmaceutical-Networking.com

South Americaan Commission

South Americaan Medicines Agency (EMA)

The Alliance for Regenerative Medicine

The Royal Society

World Health Organization (WHO)

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Utilizing the new service, businesses can outsource their entire feedback operations and receive expert advice based on real-time analytics

TAMPERE, Finland and ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- HappyOrNot ( www.happy-or-not.com ), the leading provider of customer feedback solutions announces the launch of its 'Managed Service' package. Taking responsibility for overseeing digital feedback strategy and deploying its premier expertise, HappyOrNot's new offering fulfills businesses' need for reliable and refined customer experience insights.

In today's competitive business environment, using real-time feedback data to keep customers happy is critical to running any organization. HappyOrNot's expansion into managed services will enable businesses to receive actionable insights faster, while reducing IT costs and maximizing their return on investment.

With the introduction of a 'Managed Service' option, HappyOrNot takes feedback management to the next level. By removing the administrative commitment on businesses, the package allows organizations to incorporate detailed customer analytics into their processes to drive sales and improve their operations.

Positioned as an optional add-on for businesses looking to leverage HappyOrNot's software and range of smiley-faced feedback devices, the package promises to address three key feedback areas: to measure, to analyze and to educate. These components will support companies in gathering and breaking down higher volumes of feedback, while access to a team of on-hand experts will provide strategic customer experience advice.

Measure: To get the most out of HappyOrNot, every feature must be correctly configured. From installation, to setting up reports and continuous service monitoring, HappyOrNot's 'Managed Service' package handles the feedback collection process on behalf of the businesses. This includes setting up real-time alerts, specifically designed to notify and point staff in the right direction when issues arise. Similarly, ensuring that monthly health checks and reports reach the right people helps maintain organizational structure.

To get the most out of HappyOrNot, every feature must be correctly configured. From installation, to setting up reports and continuous service monitoring, HappyOrNot's 'Managed Service' package handles the feedback collection process on behalf of the businesses. This includes setting up real-time alerts, specifically designed to notify and point staff in the right direction when issues arise. Similarly, ensuring that monthly health checks and reports reach the right people helps maintain organizational structure. Analyze: In order to maximize large amounts of feedback data, HappyOrNot presents insights in a range of digestible formats. From powerful Business Intelligence reports, to data integrations via APIs, HappyOrNot's 'Managed Service' combines easy to visualize data with access to support from trained experts. Guiding businesses through reports and reviews, the service helps businesses track progress, uncover pain points, and activate short and long-term changes.

In order to maximize large amounts of feedback data, HappyOrNot presents insights in a range of digestible formats. From powerful Business Intelligence reports, to data integrations via APIs, HappyOrNot's 'Managed Service' combines easy to visualize data with access to support from trained experts. Guiding businesses through reports and reviews, the service helps businesses track progress, uncover pain points, and activate short and long-term changes. Educate: In the interests of skill sharing, HappyOrNot's 'Managed Service' empowers businesses by offering personalized training sessions tailored to their specific feedback data. Adding further value, businesses will receive unlimited access to the HappyOrNot Academy, a new self-learning platform dedicated to training. Tutorials and on-boarding sessions are also available, ensuring staff and operational teams have full knowledge of the software.

"Our 'Managed Service' package is the perfect complement to our already industry-leading customer feedback solutions," said Miika Makitalo, the Chief Executive Officer of HappyOrNot. "We believe that all businesses deserve access to the best feedback technology and insights. The new offering will provide our customers with the best practices on turning data to insights and actions that are creating improved customer satisfaction and bigger profits, especially those with limited resources or time to maximize their investment."

Alongside the launch, HappyOrNot also releases its self-learning platform, which will host free courses, live monthly webinars, and skill certifications. Hosted by professional trainers, the HappyOrNot Academy is designed to present leaders and staff with the necessary skills to implement strong customer experience strategies and processes. Available for all HappyOrNot users and administrators, the classes and short video clips cover everything from how to optimize the placement of feedback terminals to maximize responses, to uncovering trends in the feedback data.

Head of Customer Training and Enablement at HappyOrNot, Nilufer Piirainen, explains: "We take pride in our Academy and the way it can support all types of learners with different formats of learning. Customers will gain more value from their investment as they can consistently use the HappyOrNot service to improve their operations based on data insights. The insights help them engage staff, optimize operations, and improve the overall customer experience so they can transform their business for the better."

For more information about HappyOrNot's managed services solution, please visit https://www.happy-or-not.com/en/solution/managed-service/

About HappyOrNot

Creator of the globally recognized four Smileys, HappyOrNot enables companies to identify and optimize experiences across all touchpoints through relevant, in-moment feedback data. With the ability to track, validate, and compare ongoing performance, companies are empowered to continuously improve experiences and drive operational success.

Founded in 2009, today HappyOrNot serves 4,000 brands across 135 countries, like Amazon, Google, Aramark, and Miami Airport, and has collected and reported on over 1.5 billion feedback responses. Headquartered in Finland, HappyOrNot also has offices in the U.S. and around the globe and a reseller network of over 100 companies. Visit www.happy-or-not.com.

Media Contact:

Kimberley Brown

[email protected]

678 829 9075

SOURCE HappyOrNot
Nominating Window Now Open to Spotlight Young People Making a Positive Impact

AUSTIN, Minn., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Hormel Foods Corporation (NYSE: HRL), a Fortune 500 global branded food company, announced today the nominating window is open for the next cohort of 10 Under 20 Food Heroes. The special program celebrates the efforts of remarkable young philanthropists and entrepreneurs working to create a better world by designing innovative ways to bring about a more transparent, secure and sustainable food system.

10 Under 20 Food Heroes logo

"Now more than ever, we need new generations to chart the path forward and develop the skills needed to foster an equitable and sustainable food future," said Wendy Watkins, senior vice president and chief communications officer at Hormel Foods. "The 10 Under 20 Food Heroes Award allows Hormel Foods to honor these young leaders and the amazing work they do all year."

Each 10 Under 20 Food Hero will gain access to resources and support from Hormel Foods and its partners, including a trip to the company's global headquarters in Austin, Minn. In addition to hands-on experience and mentorship, each winner will also be presented with a financial donation meant to aid each of their charitable endeavors.

Nominees must reside in the United States and be under 20 years old. Submissions are due by June 22, 2023, and can be made here: https://10under20foodheroes.com/nominate.

The first 2023 recipient of this prestigious award has already been named: 9-year-old Cavanaugh Bell, who has been featured in national media and is best known for creating a nonprofit organization to end bullying, spread positivity and do good.

"Young people from all over are taking action in their communities to inspire meaningful change," said Theresa Myers, manager of Global Impact and Corporate Responsibility Communications, Hormel Foods. "Some are even scaling their work to create impact across state lines, and in other countries. We want to honor all of them and continue supporting their good work that is inspiring positive change everywhere."

The first class of 10 under 20 Food Heroes continue to make a difference in their communities. Honorees from that class include: Grace Callwood (We Cancerve), Adam Fellows (Food Pantry Sherrill), Liam Hannon (Lunches of Love), Kiki Hardee (Kiki's Kindness Project), Lucas Hobbs (Chef Lucas Food), Jahkil Jackson (Project I am), Elise Simokat (Box to Belly Challenge) and Bradley Ferguson (Post Crashers). Ferguson, who attended Harvard University, completed an internship at Hormel Foods.

Learn more about the inaugural class of Food Heroes here: https://10under20foodheroes.com/2020-food-heroes/.

ABOUT HORMEL FOODS  INSPIRED PEOPLE. INSPIRED FOOD.

Hormel Foods Corporation, based in Austin, Minn., is a global branded food company with over $12 billion in annual revenue across more than 80 countries worldwide. Its brands include Planters, SKIPPY, SPAM, Hormel Natural Choice, Applegate, Justin's, WHOLLY, Hormel Black Label, Columbus, Jennie-O and more than 30 other beloved brands. The company is a member of the S&P 500 Index and the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats, was named on the "Global 2000 World's Best Employers" list by Forbes magazine for three years, is one of Fortune magazine's most admired companies, has appeared on the "100 Best Corporate Citizens" list by 3BL Media 13 times, and has received numerous other awards and accolades for its corporate responsibility and community service efforts. The company lives by its purpose statement  Inspired People. Inspired Food.  to bring some of the world's most trusted and iconic brands to tables across the globe. For more information, visit www.hormelfoods.com and http://csr.hormelfoods.com/.

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SHENZHEN, China, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- With a 100% user recommendation rate and a full score of 5.0 based on 214 reviews, Huawei was recognized a 2023 Customers' Choice in the Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for Primary Storage for its OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage.

As part of the evaluation process, Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage was reviewed by hundreds of customers worldwide in various regions covering industries from a wide range of economic sectors, including telecommunications, manufacturing, services, and so on.

Huawei was recognized as a 2023 Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for primary storage for its OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage

A customer in the manufacturing industry commented: "At the beginning of 2022, we purchased Huawei OceanStor Dorado 8000 as our file system storage... This reduces our average time per operation to 5 minutes, compared with 20 minutes before. At the same time, it can tolerate the failure of a maximum of four controllers, which greatly reduces the risk of simulation operation failure and interruption, and ensures that products can be launched on time and efficiently." [1]

A customer from the banking industry also spoke highly of Huawei's primary storage: "The product is excellent. Many features are innovative in the storage field. And its management console is intelligent and easy to use. Improved our efficiency a lot." [2]

Another customer, an IT technical director in the healthcare industry, had this to say:"The response speed of the HIS system is greatly improved. Especially during the peak period of diagnosis and treatment, all departments such as diagnosis and treatment, settlement, and medicine collection reported that our business had improved significantly, and there was no jamming, significantly improving our medical experience." [3]

Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage is now utilized in over 150 countries and regions including Latin America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, where it provides reliable services to industries such as finance, telecommunications, government, and public utilities.

"We are grateful for the global community's continued support and recognition, as Huawei's primary storage is once again regarded as a 'Customers' Choice'. We believe this recognition is the highest form of affirmation from our valued clients, and it serves as a driving force fueling our persistent efforts towards further improvements," remarked Huang Tao, President of Huawei All-Flash Storage Domain. "In our commitment to innovation, we will focus on crucial aspects such as reliability, ease of use, and security, while continuously investing in technologies to offer our clients more efficient, stable, and intelligent storage solutions that accelerate their digital transformation," Huang added.

To learn more about Huawei Storage products and solutions, please visit the Huawei Storage official website: https://e.huawei.com/cn/products/storage

[1]Comments by a customer from manufacturing industry, from Gartner Peer Insights

[2]Comments by a customer from banking industry, from Gartner Peer Insights

[3]Comments by an IT technical director from healthcare industry, from Gartner Peer Insights

CONTACT: [email protected]

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SOURCE Huawei
NEW YORK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- As per Facts and Factors study, the global HVAC systems market size was nearly $137 billion in 2022 and is anticipated to surge to approximately $235 billion by 2030 along with recording the highest growth rate of nearly 6.4% from 2023 to 2030.

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HVAC Systems Market: Overview

HVAC systems are referred to as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning tools that make use of a slew of technologies for regulating humidity, temperature, and purity of air in a closed space. These systems are the pivotal components of residential structures including hotels, single family households, apartments, and senior living units. Furthermore, the design of the HVAC system is based on thermodynamics principles, heat transfer principles, and principles of fluid mechanics.

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Key Insights:

As per the analysis shared by our research analyst, the global HVAC systems market is projected to expand annually at the annual growth rate of around 6.4% over the forecast timespan (2023-2030)

In terms of revenue, the global HVAC systems market was evaluated at nearly $137 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $235 billion by 2030.

in 2022 and is expected to reach by 2030. The global HVAC systems market is anticipated to record massive growth over the forecast period owing to changing climatic conditions and the necessity of maintaining ambient environments in various buildings.

Based on the product, the cooling segment is predicted to contribute majorly towards the global market share over the forecast timeline.

In terms of end-use, the residential segment is projected to account for a major share of the global market in 2023-2030.

Region-wise, the North American HVAC Systems market is projected to register the highest CAGR during the assessment period.

Facts and Factors published the latest report titled "HVAC Systems Market Size, Share, Growth Analysis Report By Product (Heating, Ventilation, and Cooling), By End-Use (Residential, Industrial, and Commercial), and By Region - Global and Regional Industry Insights, Overview, Comprehensive Analysis, Trends, Statistical Research, Market Intelligence, Historical Data and Forecast 2023  2030" into their research database.

Industry Dynamics:

Global HVAC Systems Market: Growth Drivers

Massive demand for energy conservation to boost the global market trends.

Changing climatic conditions and the necessity of maintaining ambient environments in various buildings will steer the global HVAC systems market demand. Furthermore, the growing demand for power conservation will boost global market trends. In addition to this, escalating demand for sustainable constructions will impel the expansion of the market across the globe. Large-scale preference for smart households and the popularity of eco-friendly HVAC systems for reducing GHG emissions will proliferate the growth of the global market. Furthermore, the massive penetration of smart HVAC systems in building automation will embellish the scope of growth for the global market.

In addition to this, a surge in the construction activities in the industrial as well as residential sectors will protrude the growth of the global HVAC systems market in the upcoming years. Swift urbanization and industrialization will contribute majorly towards the market proceeds in the years ahead. Surge in demand for ventilation, hybrid heating, and cooling systems will spur the growth of the market across the globe.

Global HVAC Systems Market: Restraints

Huge maintenance charges can decimate the global industry trends over 2023-2030.

Huge maintenance and deployment costs as well as a rise in the repairing charges can put brakes on the expansion of the global HVAC systems industry. Less availability of skilled personnel can further impede global industry growth.

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HVAC Systems Market: Opportunities

Surging inclination towards use of software-based HVAC systems to generate new horizons of growth for the global market.

Growing preference for software-driven HVAC systems will open new opportunities for growth for the global HVAC systems market. Massive demand for commercial HVAC will generate new facades of growth for the global market.

HVAC Systems Market: Challenges

Less know-how about advantages derived through use of HVAC systems can be a challenge to the industry growth globally.

Low awareness about benefits accrued due to HVAC system installation in emerging economies can be a big challenge for the global HVAC systems industry expansion. Less allocation of funds to HVAC infrastructure & training programs can be a challenging task for the global industry.

Global HVAC Systems Market: Segmentation

The global HVAC systems market is sectored into product, end-use, and region.

In terms of product, the global HVAC systems market is sectored into heating, ventilation, and cooling segments. Furthermore, the cooling segment, which accounted for more than 55% of the global market share in 2022, is set to retain its segmental domination in the anticipated timeline. The segmental surge in the coming eight years can be a result of a rise in population & disposable income leading to the purchase of air-conditioners. As per IEA, cooling contributes to nearly 11% of the global power consumption leading to huge demand for HVAC systems in the cooling segment.

Based on the end-use, the HVAC systems industry across the globe is divided into residential, industrial, and commercial segments. Moreover, the residential segment, which accumulated nearly 40% of the global industry share in 2022, is slated to dominate the global industry surge even in the forecasting years. The growth of the segment in the coming years can be due to the humungous demand for HVAC systems in the residential segment. Surging population in developing countries will further accentuate the demand for HVAC systems in the residential segment.

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List of Key Players in HVAC Systems Market:

Hitachi Ltd.

Carrier Corporation

Lennox International Inc.

Emerson Electric Co.

Daikin Industries Ltd.

Johnson Controls International plc

Trane Technologies

Others

Key questions answered in this report:

What are the growth rate forecast and market size for HVAC Systems Market?

What are the key driving factors propelling the HVAC Systems Market forward?

What are the most important companies in the HVAC Systems Market Industry?

What segments does the HVAC Systems Market cover?

How can I receive a free copy of the HVAC Systems Market sample report and company profiles?

Report Scope:

Report Attribute Details Market size value in 2022 USD 137 Billion Revenue forecast in 2030 USD 235 Billion Growth Rate CAGR of almost 6.4% 2023-2030 Base Year 2022 Historic Years 2016  2021 Forecast Years 2023-2030 Segments Covered By Product, End-User, and Region Forecast Units Value (USD Billion), and Volume (Units) Quantitative Units Revenue in USD million/billion and CAGR from 2023 to 2030 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 Hitachi Ltd., Carrier Corporation, Lennox International Inc., Emerson Electric Co., Daikin Industries Ltd., Johnson Controls International plc, Trane Technologies, and others. 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 of customized purchase options to meet your exact research needs. https://www.fnfresearch.com/customization/hvac-systems-market

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Regional Dominance:

Asia-Pacific to contribute majorly towards the global HVAC systems market share over the forecast timeline.

Asia-Pacific, which accounted for more than 42% of the global HVAC systems market revenue in 2022, is anticipated to dominate the global market proceeds even during the assessment timeline. The regional market expansion over 2023-2030 can be due to surging population, rise in per capita spending capacity of consumers, and urbanization. Apart from this, the rise in the use of HVAC systems in the commercial sector of the region will steer the regional market trends.

Furthermore, the North American HVAC systems industry is set to record the fastest CAGR in the forecasting timeframe. The factors that are likely to determine the growth of the regional market include new revenue streams created by OEMs in the region and the presence of giant players in the countries such as the U.S. Apart from this, renovation of old infrastructure in countries such as Canada and the U.S. will contribute notably towards the regional industry revenue share in the coming years.

Global HVAC Systems Market is segmented as follows:

HVAC Systems Market: By Product Outlook (2023-2030)

Heating

Ventilation

Cooling

HVAC Systems Market: By End-User Outlook (2023-2030)

Residential

Industrial

Commercial

HVAC Systems Market: By Region Outlook (2023-2030)

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

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According to the report published by Facts and Factors, The global testing, inspection, and certification (TIC) market size was worth around in 2022 and is predicted to grow to around by 2030 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 5.51% between 2023 and 2030. Air Starter Market : According to the report published by Facts and Factors, the global air starter market size was worth around USD 421.6 million in 2022 and is predicted to grow to around USD 581.4 million by 2030 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 4.1% between 2023 and 2030.

According to the report published by Facts and Factors, the global air starter market size was worth around in 2022 and is predicted to grow to around by 2030 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 4.1% between 2023 and 2030. Air Compressor Market : According to the report published by Facts and Factors, the global air compressor market size was worth around USD 20.9 billion in 2022 and is predicted to grow to around USD 27.5 billion by 2030 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 3.5% between 2023 and 2030.

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According to the report published by Facts and Factors, the global ISO tank container market size was worth around in 2021 and is predicted to grow to around by 2030 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 5.1% between 2022 and 2030. C-Clamp Market: According to the report published by Facts Factors, the global C-clamp market size was worth USD 814.2 million in 2021 and is estimated to grow to USD 989.3 million by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 3.3% over the forecast period.

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CHICAGO, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Insect Repellent Active Ingredients Market is estimated at USD 1.0 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 1.5 billion by 2028, at a CAGR of 7.6% from 2023 to 2028 according to a report published by MarketsandMarkets. The rise in insect-borne diseases, such as malaria, dengue fever, Zika virus, and Lyme disease, has heightened the need for effective insect repellents. According to WHO 2020, More than 17% of all infectious diseases are vector-borne diseases, which result in more than 700 000 deaths per year. They may be caused by bacteria, viruses, or parasites. As people become more aware of the health risks associated with insect bites, the demand for insect repellent products, and consequently, their active ingredients, has increased.

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Browse in-depth TOC on "Insect Repellent Active Ingredients Market"

70  Tables

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290  Pages

DEET segment, by type is expected to account for the largest share in 2023.

DEET has been proven to be highly effective in repelling a wide range of biting insects, including mosquitoes, ticks, flies, and fleas. It is known to provide long-lasting protection, making it a preferred choice for individuals seeking reliable insect repellent solutions. DEET can be used in various formulations, such as sprays, lotions, creams, and wipes, making it suitable for different user preferences and needs. It can be applied directly to the skin or on clothing, making it versatile for both personal and outdoor use.

The Mosquito segment, by insect type is expected to dominate the market with the largest share in 2023.

Mosquitoes are found in various regions worldwide, including tropical, subtropical, and even temperate climates. They are a common nuisance and a persistent problem, particularly in areas with high mosquito populations. This widespread presence of mosquitoes contributes to the sustained demand for mosquito repellents and active ingredients to protect individuals from their bites. Mosquitoes are not only disease vectors but also cause significant annoyance and discomfort with their biting behavior. The itchy welts left behind by mosquito bites can disrupt daily activities and negatively impact quality of life. People seek effective mosquito repellents to prevent these bites and minimize the discomfort associated with mosquito infestations.

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Asia Pacific is expected to account for the largest market share in 2023.

The insect repellent active ingredients market industry has been studied in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, South America and Rest of the World. The Asia Pacific region is known for having a high prevalence of insect-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya, Japanese encephalitis, and Zika virus. According to an article by National Library of Medicine 2022, India reported a ZIKV outbreak in Kerala in July 2021, the first activity in the region of South-East Asia since the outbreak in Rajasthan, India, in 2018. At least 70 ZIKV disease cases were found after extensive testing and confirmed by PCR by August 2021. These diseases pose significant health risks to the population, leading to a greater demand for insect repellent products and active ingredients to protect against insect bites.

Major players operating in the insect repellent active ingredients market includes Spectrum Brands Inc. (US), Reckitt Beneckiser Group Plc (UK), Henkel AG & Co KGaA (Germany), MERCK KGaA (Germany), S.C. Johnson & Son Inc. (US), Dabur (India), Godrej (India), Sawyer (US), BUGG Products, LLC (US), Coghlan's (Canada), Vertellus (US), Sumitomo Chemical Co., Ltd (Japan), Clariant (Switzerland), Citrefine (UK), NK Chemiosys Pvt. Ltd. (India), and Shorgun Organics (India).

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SOURCE MarketsandMarkets
FREMONT, Calif., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Jackery, a global leader of innovative portable power and green outdoor energy solutions, has recently released its Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Report, making it the first company in the portable energy storage industry to launch such a report. The report highlights Jackery's commitment to pursuing appropriate corporate governance, green operations, and social responsibility.

The ESG report, verified by independent third-party TUV SUD verification and testing, reveals that Jackery demonstrated remarkable achievements in environmental protection, promoting green energy and innovative storage technology, advocating for a diverse and inclusive culture, and fostering sustainable social value innovation.

Furthermore, Jackery has fulfilled its social responsibility on a global scale. It has maintained long-term cooperation with global public welfare organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the National Forest Foundation (NFF), and the International Rescue Committee (IRC), contributing its strength and value to boost global sustainable development and other public welfare.

It is worth noting that the report highlights Jackery's contributions to disaster relief efforts in affected areas. In December 2021, Jackery donated solar generators to Kentucky, which had been severely damaged by a tornado. In October 2022, Jackery donated portable power stations and photovoltaic panels to Lee County and other areas in southwest Florida devastated by Hurricane Ian. These efforts are in addition to Jackery's prior contributions towards disaster relief, including multiple donations of portable power stations to emergency shelters in both the United States and Japan.

In terms of corporate governance, the report shows that Jackery upholds integrity and has implemented standardized operations to safeguard shareholders' rights. The company has established an appropriate governance structure and has also set corresponding rules to ensure clear responsibilities and balanced supervision among these governing bodies.

On product stewardship, the report found that Jackery strictly complies with international, national, and industrial standards, and implements the quality policy of "valuing technological innovation, quality, efficiency, customers and integrity."

"Driven by innovative technology, advanced manufacturing, global brands, and omnichannel distribution, we will fulfill the corporate mission of making green energy accessible anytime and anywhere, working together to protect our planet and build a better future," said Jack Sun, CEO of Jackery.

To get the latest news about Jackery , please visit www.jackery.com and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok

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SOURCE Jackery Inc.
Ms. Banks brings over two decades of corporate financial leadership and public accounting experience

CHESTERBROOK, Pa., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Industry leading consumer financial services company JG Wentworth announces it has appointed Kim Banks as Chief Accounting Officer effective March 2023. Banks will report directly to Chief Financial Officer Dwight Perry. In her new role, Banks will manage the company's accounting and finance functions.

Kim Banks - Chief Accounting Officer at JG Wentworth

Banks will serve as a leader across the entire company's accounting practices. A seasoned finance executive, she will ensure accounting practices are streamlined across all JG Wentworth lines of business  including Peachtree Financial Solutions, Stone Street Capital, the recently launched debt resolution service, and the upcoming launch into personal lending later this year.

Banks joins JG Wentworth with over two decades of experience having previously worked for global publicly traded, and privately owned companies in the financial services industry, and as a public accountant. Prior to joining JG Wentworth, she was Head of Finance Systems and Process Transformation at AssuredPartners, an insurance brokerage company. She also spent over four years at Money Mart, a consumer lending company, rising through the ranks from Senior Manager to Director, and was at Deloitte for the early part of her career. She holds a bachelor's degree in accounting and finance from Temple University in Philadelphia and is a Certified Public Accountant.

When asked why she decided to join the Company, Banks said, "The ability to access cash especially in tough times is one of the fundamental necessities of every household. JG Wentworth has been serving this basic consumer need for decades and continues to enhance the consumer experience by broadening its product line-up with debt resolution and personal loan services. I am delighted to join a trustworthy company and its excellent leadership team."

"We are excited to have Kim join the team. With the increasing complexity of our business model, her leadership and direction will prove invaluable as we continue to evolve how we serve our customers and manage our business," said Dwight Perry, Chief Financial Officer at JG Wentworth.

About JG Wentworth

JG Wentworth is a consumer financial services company that focuses on helping Americans achieve their financial goals. Its services include Structured Settlement Payment Purchasing, Debt Resolution Services and Personal Lending (launching 2023). JG Wentworth was founded in 1991 and is headquartered in Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania. In 2023, JG Wentworth was the recipient of the Philadelphia Top Workplaces Award.

Follow JG Wentworth on social media to stay updated on the latest news from the company: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

SOURCE The JG Wentworth Company
TSX/NYSE/PSE: MFC SEHK: 945

Seventeen John Hancock Wholesalers Named to Top 100 Advisor Allies; Most of Any Firm

TORONTO, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - John Hancock Retirement and John Hancock Investment Management, companies of Manulife Investment Management, today announced 17 defined contribution (DC) wholesalers, from the retirement and defined contribution investment only (DCIO) businesses, were named National Association of Plan Advisors (NAPA) Advisor Allies this year. After five consecutive years of recognition, more John Hancock Retirement and John Hancock Investment Management DC wholesalers were named to the Top 100 list in 2023 than from any other firm by retirement plan advisors.

Finalists for this year's list of Top 100 DC Wholesalers were selected based on the votes cast by thousands of advisors from a list of almost 500 wholesalers nominated by NAPA Firm Partner recordkeepers and DCIOs.

"At John Hancock Retirement, we believe in the power of partnership," said Gary Tankersley, head of sales and distribution, John Hancock Retirement. "One of the biggest compliments an advisor can give a wholesaler is that they provide insight and are seen as a valuable partner and I am proud that so many of our wholesalers have earned spots on this respected list."

"Congratulations to Ryan, Aylmer and Lindsay who have been named NAPA Allies in the Investment Only category this year," said Gene Huxhold, senior managing director, John Hancock Investment Management. We're pleased our wholesalers have been helpful to advisors and consultants in growing their businesses with a wide range of investment strategies to address the challenges faced by today's retirement savers."

The John Hancock DC wholesalers named to NAPA's 2023 Advisor Allies list are:

Dennis Beaudet, John Hancock Retirement

Jarrett Berry, John Hancock Retirement

Blake Burkett, John Hancock Retirement

Daniel Fratalia, John Hancock Retirement

Jerry Giovinazzo, John Hancock Retirement

Adam Johnson, John Hancock Retirement

Jerry Lopez, John Hancock Retirement

Hayden Main, John Hancock Retirement

Mark Needham, John Hancock Retirement

Jonah Smith, John Hancock Retirement

Edward Thurmond, John Hancock Retirement

Scott Ward*, John Hancock Retirement

Jason Yepko*, John Hancock Retirement

Dan Zibaitis*, John Hancock Retirement

And DCIO wholesalers recognized include:

Ryan Fay*, John Hancock Investment Management

Aylmer Magill, John Hancock Investment Management

Lindsay Warrington, John Hancock Investment Management

*Denotes wholesalers ranked in the top 10 in their respective categories



About John Hancock Retirement

John Hancock Retirement is the U.S. retirement business of Manulife Investment Management. For more than 50 years, we've helped people plan and invest for retirement; today, we're one of the largest full-service providers in the United States.* We take a hands-on consultative approach based on the idea that no two plansand no two plan participantsare exactly alike. We partner with plan sponsors, advisors, and third-party administrators to ensure that every plan is personal to the participant and delivers proven results.

As of March 31, 2023, John Hancock serviced over 56,000 retirement plans with over 3.1 million participants and over $195 billion in AUMA.**

* "PLANSPONSOR 2022 Defined Contribution Recordkeeping Survey 2022 Asset International, Inc.," PLANSPONSOR, 2022. ** As of Mar 31, 2023, John Hancock Life Insurance Company (USA) supported 51,722 plans, 1,613,752 participants, and $ 93,969,824,636.02 in AUMA. John Hancock Life Insurance Company of New York supported 2,704 plans, 77,262 participants, and $ 5,333,451,390.46 in AUMA. John Hancock Retirement Plan Services LLC supported 1,919 plans, 1,494,059 participants, and $96,266,799,366.59 in AUMA. Participant Counts reflect all active participants with a balance. Approximate unaudited figures for John Hancock, provided on a U.S. statutory basis.



About John Hancock Investment Management

A company of Manulife Investment Management, we serve investors through a unique multimanager approach, complementing our extensive in-house capabilities with an unrivaled network of specialized asset managers, backed by some of the most rigorous investment oversight in the industry. The result is a diverse lineup of time-tested investments from a premier asset manager with a heritage of financial stewardship.

About Manulife Investment Management

Manulife Investment Management is the global brand for the global wealth and asset management segment of Manulife Financial Corporation. We draw on more than a century of financial stewardship and the full resources of our parent company to serve individuals, institutions, and retirement plan members worldwide. Headquartered in Toronto, our leading capabilities in public and private markets are strengthened by an investment footprint that spans 19 geographies. We complement these capabilities by providing access to a network of unaffiliated asset managers from around the world. We're committed to investing responsibly across our businesses. We develop innovative global frameworks for sustainable investing, collaboratively engage with companies in our securities portfolios, and maintain a high standard of stewardship where we own and operate assets, and we believe in supporting financial well-being through our workplace retirement plans. Today, plan sponsors around the world rely on our retirement plan administration and investment expertise to help their employees plan for, save for, and live a better retirement. Not all offerings are available in all jurisdictions. For additional information, please visit manulifeim.com.

John Hancock Retirement Plan Services LLC offers administrative and/or recordkeeping services to sponsors and administrators of retirement plans. John Hancock Trust Company LLC provides trust and custodial services to such plans. Group annuity contracts and recordkeeping agreements are issued by John Hancock Life Insurance Company (U.S.A.), Boston, MA (not licensed in NY), and John Hancock Life Insurance Company of New York, Valhalla, NY. Product features and availability may differ by state. Securities are offered through John Hancock Distributors LLC, member FINRA, SIPC.

John Hancock Investment Management Distributors LLC is the principal underwriter and wholesale distribution broker-dealer for the John Hancock mutual funds, member FINRA, SIPC.

NOT FDIC INSURED. MAY LOSE VALUE. NOT BANK GUARANTEED.

 2023 John Hancock. All rights reserved.

SOURCE John Hancock Retirement
NAIROBI, Kenya, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) is proud to announce that Joseph Ng'ang'a, Vice President of Africa at GEAPP, has been appointed as Chief Executive Officer of the inaugural Africa Climate Summit, which will take place in Nairobi from 4- 6 September 2023.

The African Union Assembly in February 2023, adopted the African Union's Committee of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change (CAHOSCC) - Chaired by President William Ruto - resolution and nominated Kenya to host the Africa Climate Summit. The summit marks a critical staging post for African countries and the world to achieve its climate goals. The 3-day event will bring together world leaders, experts, policymakers and the private sector to unite in action ahead of COP28 in November.

Joseph will head the ACS Secretariat and oversee the planning and coordination of all activities related to the Summit, working closely with Environment Cabinet Secretary, Hon. Soipan Tuya and other stakeholders. Joseph will return to his role at GEAPP once the Summit is complete.

Simon Harford, CEO of GEAPP said: "GEAPP is delighted to support the vision of President Ruto and the African Union Commission. President Ruto has shown immense personal leadership and vision, putting collaboration at the heart of Africa's response to the climate crisis. This summit is indicative of that and provides an opportunity for Africa to come together with the world, convening leaders across sectors, countries and continents."

He continued: "Joseph's appointment signals the trust and respect he commands as he works to reshape and accelerate the climate agenda within Africa, and beyond. By unlocking this urgent movement for change, we can accelerate the green energy transition and create the sustainable economic growth and jobs that Africa and the world needs to thrive."

Joseph Ng'ang'a said of his appointment: "I am honoured with this Presidential appointment to lead and deliver the Africa Climate Summit, which could not come at a more important time for the world. Climate change poses existential challenges to people and our shared planet but our response to it offers tremendous opportunities for growth and innovation if we all work together. This summit will generate transformative change by accelerating collaboration and climate action, mobilising climate finance and renewable energy adoption, and implementing nature-based solutions. Together, we can build a prosperous and resilient future for Africa and the world."

Joseph is also the Chair of the Funders Council for Sustainable Energy for All and a co-Founder of the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI).

The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) is an alliance of philanthropy, governments, and technology, policy, and financing partners, founded by IKEA Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bezos Earth Fund. GEAPP was created to help accelerate clean energy for everyone, everywhere, for people and the planet.

Mr Ng'ang'a was joined at State House in Nairobi, by Simon Harford, CEO GEAPP, and William Asiko, Vice-President, The Rockefeller Foundation Africa.

About the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet



The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) is an alliance of philanthropy, governments in emerging and developed economies, and technology, policy, and financing partners. Our common mission is to enable emerging economies to shift to a clean energy, pro-growth model that accelerates universal energy access and inclusive economic growth, while supporting the global community to meet critical climate goals during the next decade. As an alliance we aim to reduce 4 gigatons of future carbon emissions, expand clean energy access to one billion people, and enable 150 million new jobs. With philanthropic partners, IKEA Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and Bezos Earth Fund, GEAPP works to build the enabling environment, capacity, and market conditions for private sector solutions, catalyse new business models through innovation and entrepreneurship, and deploy high-risk capital to encourage private sector solutions, and assist just transition solutions. For more information, please visit www.energyalliance.org and follow us on Twitter at @EnergyAlliance.

SOURCE Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP)
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers proclaims June 9 as "Kikkoman Day" in recognition of the company's continued contributions to the state and country.

WALWORTH, Wis., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Fifty years ago, with the opening of Kikkoman Foods, Inc., a farm field in southern Wisconsin was transformed into what has now become the highest-producing soy sauce facility in the world. Today, the state of Wisconsin recognizes "Kikkoman Day," marking the golden anniversary of the plant opening in Walworth, Wis. The proclamation also celebrates the company's positive impact on the partnership between Wisconsin and Japan, and its contributions of more than $17 million to charitable causes in the local community and beyond.

Chancellor Mnookin of UW-Madison and Chancellor Mone of UW-Milwaukee accept a gift from Yuzaburo Mogi, honorary CEO and chairman of Kikkoman Corporation.

At its anniversary events today, the Kikkoman Foods, Inc. Foundation presented $5 million in support of sustainable agriculture and freshwater studies. The foundation's donation includes $3 million for the University of Wisconsin-Madison's College of Agricultural & Life Sciences and $2 million for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Freshwater Science, with both donations supporting research that will contribute to protecting the very resources that initially drew the world's leading soy sauce producer to Wisconsin.

"Kikkoman is pleased to invest in a state that has become a second home to our company," said Mr. Yuzaburo Mogi, honorary chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Kikkoman Corp. "We believe that for a company to thrive over the long run, coexistence and co-prosperity with society, and especially the local community, are essential. The time-honored traditional brewing process for soy sauce uses just four simple ingredients: water, soybeans, wheat, and salt. Through the donations to these two leading research programs, we're providing meaningful benefit to the region, and world, by helping to ensure the sustainability of agricultural systems and natural resources that contribute to producing soy sauce into the future."

The Walworth plant, which began producing soy sauce in 1973, made history by being one of the first production facilities built in the United States by a Japanese company. Since arriving in Wisconsin, Kikkoman forged partnerships and friendships within the local community, finding and celebrating shared cultural values like hard work, respect, cooperation, and a commitment to excellence. With these values as its foundation, Kikkoman Foods, Inc. grew to become the cornerstone of Kikkoman's international business, now producing 30 times more product annually than in its first year.

"The state of Wisconsin is proud to join Kikkoman Corporation in celebrating a half-century of business in the state with the proclamation of June 9 as Kikkoman Day," announced Governor Tony Evers. "From a deep commitment to promoting collaboration and understanding between our state and Japan to its countless contributions in support of charitable causes over the years, we thank Kikkoman Corporation for its impact on the state and wish them many more years of success in Wisconsin."

These announcements were shared at a press conference preceding the Wisconsin-U.S.-Japan Economic Development Conference held in conjunction with the company's anniversary celebration at the Grand Geneva Resort & Spa in Lake Geneva, Wis. UW-Milwaukee and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation are co-sponsors of the conference, which is focused on fostering sustained global economic growth in an Era of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. Conference discussions are being led by preeminent business and political leaders from Japan and the United States, including Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers.

"As we celebrate the anniversary of Kikkoman Foods Inc. and 50 years of brewing soy sauce in the United States, I want to profess my profound gratitude for the people of Wisconsin whose partnership and support have made every accomplishment over the years possible," Mr. Mogi said. "We're looking forward to the next 50 years of friendship and continued growth in our pursuit to make Kikkoman Soy Sauce a truly global seasoning."

SOURCE Kikkoman Foods, Inc.
SEOUL, South Korea, June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- KT SAT, South Korea's the sole satellite service company with its self-owned satellites, participated in SatelliteAsia 2023, a biggest satellite technology trade show throughout Asia Pacific region held in Singapore Expo from 7th to 9th, June.

KT SAT, a leading satellite service provider in South Korea, participated in SatelliteAsia 2023 held in Singapore Expo from 7th to 9th of June.

KT SAT has set up the exhibition booth to showcase its competitive services and solutions along with this year's business strategy, laying the foundation to become a Multi-Orbit satellite operator. This year, the MEO (Medium Earth Orbit) satellite service of Mangata Networks took up a big portion of the booth. MEO capacity, which is secured by partnership with Mangata Networks, is one of the important resources for KT SAT to proceed a Multi-Orbit business.

As a part of its Multi-Orbit business strategy, KT SAT invested in Mangata Networks which provides end-to-end cloud-based solutions, powered by a global satellite and terrestrial network. Following the investment, KT SAT also signed a MEO capacity purchase contract with Mangata in order to meet diverse customer needs with Multi-Orbit networks including its self-owned GEO capacity. The contract includes the target service date of 2026 and service region of Southern East and East Asia such as Indonesia, Malaysia and India etc.

Brian Holz, CEO of Mangata Networks said "We are building a multi-orbit constellation of HEO (highly elliptical orbit) and MEO (medium Earth orbit) satellites and a terrestrial grid of edge data centers to provide seamless connectivity with cloud and IoT services. We are delighted to be partnering with KT SAT to provide MEO capacity to Southern East and East Asia which are significant regions in the industry expecting it to play a key part in our growth strategy. "

KT SAT also showcased its next generation satellite solutions  Edge Computing over Satellite and Multi-beam Terminal- aligned with its business strategy. Edge Computing over satellite is about processing data closer to where it's being generated enabling processing at great speed and volume, leading to reduce satellite backhaul bandwidth and minimize latency. No matter what kinds of satellite network is used, it can apply to any networks including GEO, MEO and LEO.

Multi-beam terminal, an integrated satellite terminal that includes antenna and modem, enables simultaneous Tx/Rx operation on GEO and other NGSO satellites through multi-beam radiation. KT SAT is applying its own-developed Hybrid solution to the terminal so that it will be able to provide a merged speed of multiple networks and seamless hand over between networks.

Along with Multi-orbit service, KT SAT will further expand its GEO business domain. Tata group company Nelco, a leading satellite communication service provider in India, also expressed an interest in KT SAT's GEO service expansion. Recently, KT SAT and Nelco entered into a partnership to bring KT SAT's GEO service in India with KORASAT-7. At the Satellite Asia 2023 event, both companies discussed various ways to bring value of connectivity in India and to strengthen the partnership.

Kyungmin Daivd Song, CEO of KT SAT said "We are endeavoring to raise service competitiveness and customer satisfaction by establishing fundamentals to be a Multi-Orbit service provider with Multi-orbit satellite portfolio and high quality solutions"

SOURCE KT SAT
LONG BEACH, Calif., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- L.A. Care Health Plan and Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan today announce the official grand opening celebration for their Community Resource Center in Long Beach. The Center, located at 5599 Atlantic Avenue, is one of 12 out of 14 planned centers jointly operated by the health plans throughout Los Angeles County.

The Center offers a wide range of free fitness and wellness classes, programs, and services that are open to the general public to enhance the community's overall well-being.

Bringing families together to learn and have fun with a healthy Family Cooking Class.

"At a time when life stress seems to be through the roof, we are pleased to offer free resources that positively contribute to physical, mental, and social health," said John Baackes, L.A. Care CEO. "There is something for everyone under one roof, so we welcome residents of Long Beach to take advantage of these offerings and jumpstart a healthier lifestyle."

Visitors to the center will have access to various offerings, including:

Fitness activities such as Zumba, yoga, cardio dance, and resistance training

Nutrition classes and hands-on cooking demonstrations

Homework help for students in grades K-12

Stress reduction and management classes

Educational resources about healthcare coverage options including Medi-Cal renewals

"Today marks an important milestone for Blue Shield Promise's partnership with L.A. Care and joint commitment of $146 million to open 14 community resource centers across Los Angeles County," said Kristen Cerf, president and CEO of Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan. "So much of our work to improve the health of Medi-Cal populations is about meeting people where they are in the community and empowering them with access to resources they need to lead healthier lives. The establishment of this Center, gives Long Beach residents a one-stop destination to enhance their lives and personal wellbeing."

L.A. Care and Blue Shield Promise recognize that building healthier communities requires addressing multiple social factors that impact health. Therefore, the Community Resource Centers and programming have been designed with a holistic approach.

The ribbon-cutting ceremony will include the presence of several local elected officials, and features a Acjachemen tribal blessing, Cambodian blessing dance by Modern Apsara Company, and orchestral music performed by students from the neighboring Lindbergh STEM Academy. The Center is open Monday to Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. To learn more about the Community Resource Centers, visit www.CommunityResourceCenterLA.org.

About L.A. Care Health Plan

L.A. Care Health Plan serves more than 2.8 million members in Los Angeles County, making it the largest publicly operated health plan in the country. L.A. Care offers four health coverage plans including Medi-Cal, L.A. Care Covered, L.A. Care Medicare Plus and the PASC-SEIU Homecare Workers Health Care Plan, all dedicated to being accountable and responsive to members. As a public entity, L.A. Care's mission is to provide access to quality health care for L.A. County's low-income communities, and to support the safety net required to achieve that purpose. L.A. Care prioritizes quality, access and inclusion, elevating health care for all of L.A. County. For more information, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

About Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan

Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan is a managed care organization, wholly owned by Blue Shield of California, offering Medi-Cal. It is led by healthcare professionals with a "members-first" philosophy and committed to building a quality network of providers and partnering with community organizations for more than 537,618 members across Los Angeles and San Diego counties. For more information about Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan, please visit www.blueshieldca.com/promise. For more news about Blue Shield of California, please visit news.blueshieldca.com. Or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

Media Contacts:

Blue Shield Promise

Mashi Nyssen

626-436-4345

[email protected]

L.A. Care

Penny Griego

310-613-8309

[email protected]

SOURCE Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan
MANCHESTER, England, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Hot on the heels of Manchester City's triumphant securing of their third English Premier League title in a row, and just freshly backed FA Cup Champions, Midea - the official home appliances partner of the club - announced the launch of this season's #WorldClassAwards.

Also, for the third year in a row, global Cityzens are again invited to cast their votes for their favorite Man City player this season across nine different categories. Based on the extensive product portfolio, Midea selected 9 main categories which respectively sponsor one award:

"Coolest Distributor"  sponsored by Midea Air-Conditioner

"Cleanest Tackler"  sponsored by Midea Washing Machine

"Freshest Opener"  sponsored by Midea Refrigerator

"Air-Dominator"  sponsored by Midea Air-Fryer

"Corner Master"  sponsored by Midea Vacuum Cleaner

"Hottest Recipe"  sponsored by Midea Microwave Oven

"Brilliant Finisher"  sponsored by Midea Dishwasher

"High Pressure Performer"  sponsored by Midea Pressure Cooker

"Smart Team Management"  sponsored by Midea Smart Home App

Besides having a chance to win one of over 111 amazing prizes, like an awe-inspiring VIP trip to a home game next season, 10 player-signed 2022/2023 jerseys or one of 100 jerseys of the upcoming season 2023/2024, Manchester City legends Paul Dickov and Shaun Wright-Phillips invite the fans to their home in "Legends Lane" right behind the stadium in Manchester.

Similar to the years before, Shaun is teased to find out who the nominees in each category are, before fans can recap the most beautiful moments of Manchester City's successful season and vote to win.

Nine different categories, nine different awards, nine votes have nine-times higher chances the win. Voting closes on 29th June 2023 at 23:59 CT.

The "Corner Master"

Among the #WorldClassAwards categories, this year, the Midea M9 Robotic Vacuum Cleaner shines as the "Corner Master". The dual-purpose cleaner, with both vacuuming and mopping functions represents a breakthrough within "set-it-and-forget-it" household chores territories. Featuring modern robotic cleaner functions, the M9 enables efficient cleaning regardless of household layout or surface changes.

Midea M9 is now available in France and Spain, offering an exceptional value proposition with an astounding 53% discount, priced at 344.45. What's more, from June 12th to June 18th, the Midea M9 can be purchased exclusively on Aliexpress for a significantly lower price of only 289.99.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2095399/image_5016365_36402759.jpg

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SOURCE Midea Group
NEW YORK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The maritime surveillance market is estimated to grow by USD 1,476.9 million from 2022 to 2027. The market is estimated to be growing at a CAGR of 3.65% during the forecast period. North America is estimated to account for 33% of the global market growth during the forecast period. The US is a major market for marine surveillance in the region. This growth can be attributed to the growth of the marine surveillance market is the large number of Americans participating in water-related recreational activities. Additionally, the growth of the marine surveillance market is the large number of Americans participating in water-related recreational activities. Hence, the growing demands for maritime security in the United States are expected to boost the demand for marine surveillance during the forecast period. For Comprehensive details on the market size of the historic period(2017 to 2021) and forecast period (2023-2027) - View Sample report

Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Global Maritime Surveillance Market 2023-2027

Maritime Surveillance Market - Vendor Landscape

The maritime surveillance market is fragmented; the vendors are competing with competitors and are trying to get a greater market share. The market is growing, and the chances of new entrants cannot be overlooked. The major vendors have well-established economies of scale and market presence and generally rely on positioning technological advances, and the price of the products -The report provides a full list of key vendors, their strategies, and the latest developments. Buy Now

Maritime Surveillance Market - Market Dynamics

Major Drivers & Challenges-

Key Drivers boosting the market growth

The growing marine threats are the major factor that drives the global maritime surveillance market growth.

In national security, territorial integrity, global trade, immigration, and migration, maritime borders play an important role. Patrolling territorial water areas with state-of-the-art flying platforms is of increasing importance, for many countries with long coastlines.

For example, the oil rigs in the Gulf of Guinea in western Africa are highly vulnerable to the threat of piracy.

in western are highly vulnerable to the threat of piracy. Hence, such factors drive the market growth during the forecast period.

Major Challenges hindering the market growth

The issues related to privacy can challenge the growth of the maritime surveillance market growth.

In order to prevent and detect crime, but its use can lead to privacy concerns, ocean surveillance is used. Public surveillance systems may cover private areas such as homes and offices without the owner's consent, which leads to an invasion of privacy.

People's privacy is a fundamental right and the use of surveillance systems can violate it, which results in the line between legitimate surveillance and intrusion blurs.

Hence, such challenges impede market growth during the forecast period.

Key Trends-

The expansion of the Chinese naval fleet in critical regions is an emerging trend fueling the global maritime surveillance market growth.

As the Chinese president announced in 2012 that China would become a maritime power, China has focused on expanding its naval fleet.

would become a maritime power, has focused on expanding its naval fleet. Furthermore, the expansion of China's naval fleet has emboldened the country to assert dominance in key regions such as the disputed South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.

naval fleet has emboldened the country to assert dominance in key regions such as the disputed South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Hence, such trends influence the growth of the market in focus during the forecast period.

Technavio has identified key trends, drivers, and challenges in the market, which will help clients improve their strategies to stay ahead of their competitors. - View Sample Report

Company Profiles

The maritime surveillance market report includes information on the product launches, sustainability, and prospects of leading vendors including Airbus SE, BAE Systems Plc, Elbit Systems Ltd., Furuno Electric Co. Ltd., HENSOLDT AG, Honeywell International Inc., Kongsberg Gruppen ASA, L3Harris Technologies Inc., Lockheed Martin Corp., MIND TECHNOLOGY INC., Northrop Grumman Systems Corp., Raytheon Technologies Corp., Saab AB, Safran SA, Sonardyne International Ltd., SRT Marine Systems Plc, Teledyne Technologies Inc., Terma AS, Thales Group, and The Boeing Co.

Competitive Analysis

The report includes competitive analysis, a proprietary tool to analyze and evaluate the position of companies based on their industry position score and market performance score. The competitive scenario categorizes companies based on various performance indicators. Some of the factors considered include the financial performance of companies over the past few years, growth strategies, product innovations, new product launches, investments, and growth in market share, among others.

Maritime Surveillance Market - Market Segmentation

This maritime surveillance market report extensively covers market segmentation by component (sensors, radar, AIS receiver, and software and others), end-user (defense, customs, fisheries, intelligence, and others), and geography (North America, Europe, APAC, Middle East and Africa, and South America).

The market share growth by the sensors segment is significant during the forecast period. Sensors are used in a wide range of maritime applications including hydraulic cylinder position measurement, marine machinery condition monitoring, crane and deck hoist load measurement, and tank pressure measurement. Some major benefits of sensors include near-lossless transmission, increased sensitivity during data collection, and continuous real-time analysis. Hence, such factors are expected to have a positive impact on the sensors segment of the maritime surveillance market during the forecast period.

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Maritime Surveillance Market Scope Report Coverage Details Base year 2022 Historic period 2017-2021 Forecast period 2023-2027 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 3.65% Market growth 2023-2027 USD 1,476.9 million Market structure Fragmented YoY growth 2022-2023 (%) 2.94 Regional analysis North America, Europe, APAC, Middle East and Africa, and South America Performing market contribution North America at 33% Key countries US, China, Japan, Germany, and UK Competitive landscape Leading Vendors, Market Positioning of Vendors, Competitive Strategies, and Industry Risks Key companies profiled Airbus SE, BAE Systems Plc, Elbit Systems Ltd., Furuno Electric Co. Ltd., HENSOLDT AG, Honeywell International Inc., Kongsberg Gruppen ASA, L3Harris Technologies Inc., Lockheed Martin Corp., MIND TECHNOLOGY INC., Northrop Grumman Systems Corp., Raytheon Technologies Corp., Saab AB, Safran SA, Sonardyne International Ltd., SRT Marine Systems Plc, Teledyne Technologies Inc., Terma AS, Thales Group, and The Boeing Co. Market dynamics Parent market analysis, Market growth inducers and obstacles, Fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID-19 impact and recovery analysis and future consumer dynamics, Market condition analysis for forecast period. Customization purview If our report has not included the data that you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get segments customized.

Table of Contents

1 Executive Summary

1.1 Market overview

Exhibit 01: Executive Summary  Chart on Market Overview



Exhibit 02: Executive Summary  Data Table on Market Overview



Exhibit 03: Executive Summary  Chart on Global Market Characteristics



Exhibit 04: Executive Summary  Chart on Market by Geography



Exhibit 05: Executive Summary  Chart on Market Segmentation by Component



Exhibit 06: Executive Summary  Chart on Market Segmentation by End-user



Exhibit 07: Executive Summary  Chart on Incremental Growth



Exhibit 08: Executive Summary  Data Table on Incremental Growth



Exhibit 09: Executive Summary  Chart on Vendor Market Positioning

2 Market Landscape

2.1 Market ecosystem

Exhibit 10: Parent market



Exhibit 11: Market Characteristics

3 Market Sizing

3.1 Market definition

Exhibit 12: Offerings of vendors included in the market definition

3.2 Market segment analysis

Exhibit 13: Market segments

3.3 Market size 2022

3.4 Market outlook: Forecast for 2022-2027

Exhibit 14: Chart on Global - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 15: Data Table on Global - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 16: Chart on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 17: Data Table on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

4 Historic Market Size

4.1 Global maritime surveillance market 2017 - 2021

Exhibit 18: Historic Market Size  Data Table on Global maritime surveillance market 2017 - 2021 ($ million)

4.2 Component Segment Analysis 2017 - 2021

Exhibit 19: Historic Market Size  Component Segment 2017 - 2021 ($ million)

4.3 End-user Segment Analysis 2017 - 2021

Exhibit 20: Historic Market Size  End-user Segment 2017 - 2021 ($ million)

4.4 Geography Segment Analysis 2017 - 2021

Exhibit 21: Historic Market Size  Geography Segment 2017 - 2021 ($ million)

4.5 Country Segment Analysis 2017 - 2021

Exhibit 22: Historic Market Size  Country Segment 2017 - 2021 ($ million)

5 Historic Market Size

5.1 Global maritime surveillance market 2022 - 2027

Exhibit 23: Historic Market Size (value)  Data Table on Global maritime surveillance market 2022 - 2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 24: Historic Market Size (volume)  Data Table on Global maritime surveillance market 2022 - 2027 ($ million)

5.2 Global maritime surveillance market by Segment  Historic Analysis 2022 - 2027

Exhibit 25: Historic Market Size (value) - Data Table on Global maritime surveillance market Segment 2022 - 2027 ($ million)

6 Five Forces Analysis

6.1 Five forces summary

Exhibit 26: Five forces analysis - Comparison between 2022 and 2027

6.2 Bargaining power of buyers

Exhibit 27: Chart on Bargaining power of buyers  Impact of key factors 2022 and 2027

6.3 Bargaining power of suppliers

Exhibit 28: Bargaining power of suppliers  Impact of key factors in 2022 and 2027

6.4 Threat of new entrants

Exhibit 29: Threat of new entrants  Impact of key factors in 2022 and 2027

6.5 Threat of substitutes

Exhibit 30: Threat of substitutes  Impact of key factors in 2022 and 2027

6.6 Threat of rivalry

Exhibit 31: Threat of rivalry  Impact of key factors in 2022 and 2027

6.7 Market condition

Exhibit 32: Chart on Market condition - Five forces 2022 and 2027

7 Market Segmentation by Component

7.1 Market segments

Exhibit 33: Chart on Component - Market share 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 34: Data Table on Component - Market share 2022-2027 (%)

7.2 Comparison by Component

Exhibit 35: Chart on Comparison by Component



Exhibit 36: Data Table on Comparison by Component

7.3 Sensors - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 37: Chart on Sensors - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 38: Data Table on Sensors - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 39: Chart on Sensors - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 40: Data Table on Sensors - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

7.4 Radar - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 41: Chart on Radar - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 42: Data Table on Radar - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 43: Chart on Radar - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 44: Data Table on Radar - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

7.5 AIS receiver - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 45: Chart on AIS receiver - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 46: Data Table on AIS receiver - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 47: Chart on AIS receiver - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 48: Data Table on AIS receiver - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

7.6 Software and others - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 49: Chart on Software and others - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 50: Data Table on Software and others - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 51: Chart on Software and others - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 52: Data Table on Software and others - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

7.7 Market opportunity by Component

Exhibit 53: Market opportunity by Component ($ million)



Exhibit 54: Data Table on Market opportunity by Component ($ million)

8 Market Segmentation by End-user

8.1 Market segments

Exhibit 55: Chart on End-user - Market share 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 56: Data Table on End-user - Market share 2022-2027 (%)

8.2 Comparison by End-user

Exhibit 57: Chart on Comparison by End-user



Exhibit 58: Data Table on Comparison by End-user

8.3 Defense - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 59: Chart on Defense - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 60: Data Table on Defense - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 61: Chart on Defense - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 62: Data Table on Defense - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

8.4 Customs - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 63: Chart on Customs - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 64: Data Table on Customs - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 65: Chart on Customs - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 66: Data Table on Customs - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

8.5 Fisheries - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 67: Chart on Fisheries - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 68: Data Table on Fisheries - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 69: Chart on Fisheries - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 70: Data Table on Fisheries - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

8.6 Intelligence - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 71: Chart on Intelligence - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 72: Data Table on Intelligence - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 73: Chart on Intelligence - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 74: Data Table on Intelligence - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

8.7 Others - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 75: Chart on Others - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 76: Data Table on Others - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 77: Chart on Others - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 78: Data Table on Others - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

8.8 Market opportunity by End-user

Exhibit 79: Market opportunity by End-user ($ million)



Exhibit 80: Data Table on Market opportunity by End-user ($ million)

9 Customer Landscape

9.1 Customer landscape overview

Exhibit 81: Analysis of price sensitivity, lifecycle, customer purchase basket, adoption rates, and purchase criteria

10 Geographic Landscape

10.1 Geographic segmentation

Exhibit 82: Chart on Market share by geography 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 83: Data Table on Market share by geography 2022-2027 (%)

10.2 Geographic comparison

Exhibit 84: Chart on Geographic comparison



Exhibit 85: Data Table on Geographic comparison

10.3 North America - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 86: Chart on North America - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 87: Data Table on North America - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 88: Chart on North America - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 89: Data Table on North America - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

10.4 Europe - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 90: Chart on Europe - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 91: Data Table on Europe - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 92: Chart on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 93: Data Table on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

10.5 APAC - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 94: Chart on APAC - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 95: Data Table on APAC - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 96: Chart on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 97: Data Table on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

10.6 Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

and - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 98: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

and - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 99: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

and - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 100: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

and - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 101: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

10.7 South America - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 102: Chart on South America - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 103: Data Table on South America - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 104: Chart on South America - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 105: Data Table on South America - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

10.8 US - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 106: Chart on US - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 107: Data Table on US - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 108: Chart on US - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 109: Data Table on US - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

10.9 China - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 110: Chart on China - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 111: Data Table on China - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 112: Chart on China - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 113: Data Table on China - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

10.10 Germany - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 114: Chart on Germany - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 115: Data Table on Germany - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 116: Chart on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 117: Data Table on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

10.11 UK - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 118: Chart on UK - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 119: Data Table on UK - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)



Exhibit 120: Chart on UK - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 121: Data Table on UK - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

10.12 Japan - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 122: Chart on Japan - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 123: Data Table on Japan - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 ($ million)

Exhibit 124: Chart on Japan - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 125: Data Table on Japan - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

10.13 Market opportunity by geography

Exhibit 126: Market opportunity by geography ($ million)



Exhibit 127: Data Tables on Market opportunity by geography ($ million)

11 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends

11.1 Market drivers

11.2 Market challenges

11.3 Impact of drivers and challenges

Exhibit 128: Impact of drivers and challenges in 2022 and 2027

11.4 Market trends

12 Vendor Landscape

12.1 Overview

12.2 Vendor landscape

Exhibit 129: Overview on Criticality of inputs and Factors of differentiation

12.3 Landscape disruption

Exhibit 130: Overview on factors of disruption

12.4 Industry risks

Exhibit 131: Impact of key risks on business

13 Vendor Analysis

13.1 Vendors covered

Exhibit 132: Vendors covered

13.2 Market positioning of vendors

Exhibit 133: Matrix on vendor position and classification

13.3 Airbus SE

Exhibit 134: Airbus SE - Overview



Exhibit 135: Airbus SE - Business segments



Exhibit 136: Airbus SE - Key news



Exhibit 137: Airbus SE - Key offerings



Exhibit 138: Airbus SE - Segment focus

13.4 BAE Systems Plc

Exhibit 139: BAE Systems Plc - Overview



Exhibit 140: BAE Systems Plc - Business segments



Exhibit 141: BAE Systems Plc - Key offerings



Exhibit 142: BAE Systems Plc - Segment focus

13.5 Elbit Systems Ltd.

Exhibit 143: Elbit Systems Ltd. - Overview



Exhibit 144: Elbit Systems Ltd. - Product / Service



Exhibit 145: Elbit Systems Ltd. - Key offerings

13.6 HENSOLDT AG

Exhibit 146: HENSOLDT AG - Overview



Exhibit 147: HENSOLDT AG - Business segments



Exhibit 148: HENSOLDT AG - Key offerings



Exhibit 149: HENSOLDT AG - Segment focus

13.7 Honeywell International Inc.

Exhibit 150: Honeywell International Inc. - Overview



Exhibit 151: Honeywell International Inc. - Business segments



Exhibit 152: Honeywell International Inc. - Key news



Exhibit 153: Honeywell International Inc. - Key offerings



Exhibit 154: Honeywell International Inc. - Segment focus

13.8 Kongsberg Gruppen ASA

Exhibit 155: Kongsberg Gruppen ASA - Overview



Exhibit 156: Kongsberg Gruppen ASA - Business segments



Exhibit 157: Kongsberg Gruppen ASA - Key news



Exhibit 158: Kongsberg Gruppen ASA - Key offerings



Exhibit 159: Kongsberg Gruppen ASA - Segment focus

13.9 L3Harris Technologies Inc.

Exhibit 160: L3Harris Technologies Inc. - Overview



Exhibit 161: L3Harris Technologies Inc. - Business segments



Exhibit 162: L3Harris Technologies Inc. - Key news



Exhibit 163: L3Harris Technologies Inc. - Key offerings



Exhibit 164: L3Harris Technologies Inc. - Segment focus

13.10 Lockheed Martin Corp.

Exhibit 165: Lockheed Martin Corp. - Overview



Exhibit 166: Lockheed Martin Corp. - Business segments



Exhibit 167: Lockheed Martin Corp. - Key news



Exhibit 168: Lockheed Martin Corp. - Key offerings



Exhibit 169: Lockheed Martin Corp. - Segment focus

13.11 MIND TECHNOLOGY INC.

Exhibit 170: MIND TECHNOLOGY INC. - Overview



Exhibit 171: MIND TECHNOLOGY INC. - Product / Service



Exhibit 172: MIND TECHNOLOGY INC. - Key offerings

13.12 Northrop Grumman Systems Corp.

Exhibit 173: Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. - Overview



Exhibit 174: Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. - Business segments



Exhibit 175: Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. - Key news



Exhibit 176: Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. - Key offerings



Exhibit 177: Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. - Segment focus

13.13 Raytheon Technologies Corp.

Exhibit 178: Raytheon Technologies Corp. - Overview



Exhibit 179: Raytheon Technologies Corp. - Business segments



Exhibit 180: Raytheon Technologies Corp. - Key news



Exhibit 181: Raytheon Technologies Corp. - Key offerings



Exhibit 182: Raytheon Technologies Corp. - Segment focus

13.14 Saab AB

Exhibit 183: Saab AB - Overview



Exhibit 184: Saab AB - Business segments



Exhibit 185: Saab AB - Key news



Exhibit 186: Saab AB - Key offerings



Exhibit 187: Saab AB - Segment focus

13.15 Safran SA

Exhibit 188: Safran SA - Overview



Exhibit 189: Safran SA - Business segments



Exhibit 190: Safran SA - Key news



Exhibit 191: Safran SA - Key offerings



Exhibit 192: Safran SA - Segment focus

13.16 Terma AS

Exhibit 193: Terma AS - Overview



Exhibit 194: Terma AS - Business segments



Exhibit 195: Terma AS - Key offerings



Exhibit 196: Terma AS - Segment focus

13.17 Thales Group

Exhibit 197: Thales Group - Overview



Exhibit 198: Thales Group - Business segments



Exhibit 199: Thales Group - Key news



Exhibit 200: Thales Group - Key offerings



Exhibit 201: Thales Group - Segment focus

14 Appendix

14.1 Scope of the report

14.2 Inclusions and exclusions checklist

Exhibit 202: Inclusions checklist



Exhibit 203: Exclusions checklist

14.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

Exhibit 204: Currency conversion rates for US$

14.4 Research methodology

Exhibit 205: Research methodology



Exhibit 206: Validation techniques employed for market sizing



Exhibit 207: Information sources

14.5 List of abbreviations

Exhibit 208: 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 provide actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

Contact

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media & Marketing Executive

US: +1 844 364 1100

UK: +44 203 893 3200

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.technavio.com

SOURCE Technavio
CHICAGO, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - Today, the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative announced a renewed commitment to advancing climate action following its 20th anniversary Annual General Meeting in Chicago on June 7 and 8. The two-day gathering of local elected leaders from across the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River Basin included hands-on training in developing and implementing climate action plans, policy insights from world-renowned climate experts and practical strategies for enhanced collaboration on climate action across the basin.

Mayor Justin M. Bibb of Cleveland, OH  a member of the Cities Initiative's Board of Directors and the Vice-Chair of Climate Mayors  secured the approval of a member resolution committing the Cities Initiative to continue to support its members to advance their local climate action plans. These plans generate broadly shared benefits for residents across the basin by identifying key steps to prepare communities for climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Several members of the Cities Initiative's Board of Directors also signed a pledge endorsing Mayor Bibb's resolution.

"I am pleased to have received such robust support for my resolution on climate action plans," said Mayor Bibb. "I look forward to continuing to work with the Cities Initiative to implement measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and bolster resilience in order to ensure Cleveland and other basin cities remain vibrant places to live, work and play for current and future generations."

"It is a great honour to step into a leadership role with the Cities Initiative at a critical time for communities in the basin to help advance climate initiatives that will make us all stronger," said Mayor Gino Moretti of Saint-Anicet, Quebec, and the incoming Chair of the Cities Initiative. "Natural disasters, such as the ice storm that hit my community and surrounding areas this spring, will only become more frequent and severe. We have no choice but to prepare ourselves and make sure that funding is going where it is needed to keep our residents safe and protect our local and regional economies."

"I was proud to attend the Cities Initiative's Annual General Meeting in Chicago to discuss the Milwaukee Climate and Equity Plan and learn about other basin cities' efforts to galvanize climate action," said Mayor Cavalier Johnson of Milwaukee. "In Milwaukee, we will work to effectively implement the Milwaukee Climate and Equity Plan, which will ensure we achieve net zero emissions by 2050 while creating green jobs that pay at least $40,000 and are focused on recruiting local people of color."

Prior to its 20th anniversary Annual General Meeting, the Cities Initiative released a survey of more than 130 U.S. and Canadian local jurisdictions in the basin that revealed communities are struggling to develop climate action plans even as risks increase. More than a quarter of local governments surveyed had not yet started developing action plans and only 17 percent were currently implementing a plan.

About the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative

The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative is a binational, mayor-led coalition of U.S. and Canadian cities dedicated to the environmental and socioeconomic health of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River Basin. With more than 230 member cities, the Cities Initiative is the largest municipally driven organization in the basin focused on these issues.

SOURCE The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative
BOCA RATON, Fla., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Ernst & Young LLP (EY US) has announced MDVIP Chairman & CEO Bret Jorgensen as an Entrepreneur Of The Year 2023 Florida Award winner. Entrepreneur Of The Year is one of the preeminent competitive business awards for entrepreneurs and leaders of high-growth companies. Jorgensen was selected by an independent panel of judges based on his entrepreneurial spirit, company purpose, growth and impact, among other core contributions and attributes.

Under Jorgensen's leadership, MDVIP has delivered significant growth to over 1,175 physicians and 385,000 patients Tweet this MDVIP Chairman & CEO Bret Jorgensen Wins EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2023 Florida Award

"Every year, we are completely blown away by the accomplishments of our Entrepreneur Of The Year Regional Award winners, and 2023 is no different," said AJ Jordan, EY Americas Entrepreneur Of The Year Program Director. "They are change-makers and champions of business and community, and we are so proud to be honoring them. We can't wait to see how these leaders will continue to improve lives and disrupt industries."

"I am honored to be named a winner of this esteemed award and want to thank EY for continuing to celebrate innovation and entrepreneurship," said Jorgensen, who previously received the Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in Healthcare in 1995 as co-founder and president of TheraTx. "This recognition further validates the collective dedication of the entire MDVIP team and our affiliated doctors across the country who work every day to help people lead healthier and more vibrant lives."

MDVIP is the largest membership-based healthcare network in the U.S. Under Jorgensen's leadership, the company has delivered significant and consistent growth, which is represented today by more than 1,175 affiliated primary care physicians and over 385,000 patients.

Published research shows that MDVIP drives better health outcomes, cost savings to the healthcare system and higher satisfaction among physicians and patients. Medicare patients who joined MDVIP were hospitalized 79% less than those in traditional primary care practices, and commercially-insured patients were hospitalized 72% less. This equates to an estimated savings of $600 million for Medicare per year.

Demonstrating how patients highly value the model and relationship with their doctor, MDVIP has a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 88 and consistently achieves a 90+% member annual renewal rate. For physicians, MDVIP provides the tools and resources to transition to a membership-based model and the autonomy to practice medicine how they envisioned.

As a Florida award winner, Jorgensen is now eligible for consideration for the Entrepreneur Of The Year 2023 National Awards. The National Award winners, including the Entrepreneur Of The Year National Overall Award winner, will be announced in November at the Strategic Growth Forum, one of the nation's most prestigious gatherings of high-growth, market-leading companies.

Sponsors

Founded and produced by Ernst & Young LLP, the Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards include presenting sponsors PNC Bank, N.A.; SAP America; and the Kauffman Foundation. In Florida, sponsors also include platinum sponsors: Cresa & DLA Piper.

About Entrepreneur Of The Year

Entrepreneur Of The Year is the world's most prestigious business awards program for unstoppable entrepreneurs. These visionary leaders deliver innovation, growth and prosperity that transform our world. The program engages entrepreneurs with insights and experiences that foster growth. It connects them with their peers to strengthen entrepreneurship around the world. Entrepreneur Of The Year is the first and only truly global awards program of its kind. It celebrates entrepreneurs through regional and national awards programs in more than 145 cities in over 60 countries. National Overall Award winners go on to compete for the World Entrepreneur Of The Year title. Visit ey.com/us/eoy.

About MDVIP

Founded in 2000, MDVIP leads the market in membership-based healthcare that goes far beyond concierge medicine services. The company has been certified by Great Place to Work since 2018 and is recognized by Fortune as one of the 2022 Best Workplaces in Healthcare. For more information, visit www.mdvip.com. Follow MDVIP on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

About EY Private

As Advisors to the ambitious, EY Private professionals possess the experience and passion to support private businesses and their owners in unlocking the full potential of their ambitions. EY Private teams offer distinct insights born from the long EY history of working with business owners and entrepreneurs. These teams support the full spectrum of private enterprises including private capital managers and investors and the portfolio businesses they fund, business owners, family businesses, family offices and entrepreneurs. Visit ey.com/us/private.

About EY

EY exists to build a better working world, helping create long-term value for clients, people and society and build trust in the capital markets. Enabled by data and technology, diverse EY teams in over 150 countries provide trust through assurance and help clients grow, transform and operate. Working across assurance, consulting, law, strategy, tax and transactions, EY teams ask better questions to find new answers for the complex issues facing our world today.

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. Information about how EY collects and uses personal data and a description of the rights individuals have under data protection legislation are available via ey.com/privacy. EY member firms do not practice law where prohibited by local laws. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com.

Media Contact:

Nancy Udell

561-310-5455

[email protected]

SOURCE MDVIP
SAO PAULO, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Traive, a Brazilian fintech specializing in agri-business, together with embassies and other companies that support the sector in the country, is participating in meetings in London (06/07), Berlin (06/09) and The Hague (06/12) with attendees from investment funds, venture capitals and banks.

One of the most biodiverse nations on the planet, Brazil is a benchmark in sustainable agriculture, with regulations for the protection of the environment throughout the entire production chain. However, the business potential of this segment is not always widely disseminated to potential investors, while it simultaneously supports guidelines for global preservation of natural resources. "The European market tends to have a lot of interest in knowing how the Brazilian agro market operates, its capacity and how it is incorporated into the ESG agenda. With excellent statistics in sustainable management that involve the preservation, conservation and development of the use of bio-inputs, Brazilian agri-business is also showing solid results, having started 2023 with a surplus of US$ 8.69 billion *, which is appealing to investors who are looking to invest capital in the Green Bond segment with social-environmental assurance and a financial return," says Fabricio Pezente, CEO of Traive.

In 2022, the Responsible Commodities Facility (RCF) initiative run by Traive, in partnership with SIM and OPEA, raised US$ 11M in investments from British chains Tesco, Sainsbury's and Waitrose to support deforestation and DCF-free soy farming in the Brazilian Cerrado. Traive's technology was responsible for leading investors to carry out a transparent analysis of the risk of credit and operation monitoring. Through the stimulus driven by social-environmental criteria, the initiative has a 0% non-compliance rate on the part of the 32 financed farms, who produced 42,400 tons of soy, 27,000 tons of maize and 3,200 tons of cotton, all deforestation-free, preserving 8,541 hectares of forest. This pioneering financing in the country also led to talks with the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, and was named the "2022 Initiative of the Year - Green Bonds" by Environmental Finance.

About Traive

With its head office in the USA and operating in Brazil, Traive is a technology platform that uses Artificial Intelligence and data to develop risk-analysis solutions that cover the entire agricultural credit journey. Connecting retailers, cooperatives and industries to the capital market, allowing access to financial resources, data, scalability and sustainability in their businesses.

SOURCE Traive
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. The economic independence of the Central Bank of Azerbaijan is increasing, Trend reports.

This is reflected in the proposed amendments to the law "On the Central Bank of the Republic of Azerbaijan".

According to the amendments, no state and local self-government bodies, individuals and legal entities have the authority to monitor the activities of the Central Bank, except in cases provided for by law.

According to the proposed Article 6.2, the CBA has economic independence, and the funds received from the sale of its assets or other disposal of them relate to its income.

The CBA is not liable for the obligations of the state, and the state is not liable for the obligations of the CBA, except for the cases provided for in Article 14 of this law (The Central Bank cannot be declared bankrupt, and the capital shortage resulting from its activities is compensated by securities issued by the state, with a delay of one financial year).

The amendments were put to the vote and adopted in the second reading after discussion.
 Former white supremacists, a deradicalization specialist, and a psychiatry professor discuss how to help get people out of violent hate groups

 Thursday June 15 | 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET

 Register below

OAKLAND, Calif., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Reporter Laurie Udesky was in her early 20s when a neo-Nazi organization decided it wanted to march through her hometown, Skokie, a suburb of Chicago in Illinois where some 7,000 Holocaust survivors resided. She remembers a fiery meeting at her synagogue where an elderly Holocaust survivor jumped up out of his seat, shaking his fist as he shouted, "This time I will kill them!"

Breaking Away from Hate event panelists and moderators

She wondered then what compelled people to join a hate group like the Nazis. Decades later, she found herself reporting on a critical question: What leads people to get involved in violent hate groups, and  perhaps more importantly  how can they be helped to get out?

Udesky explored this in her story, Breaking Away from Hate , recently published by MindSite News and republished by USA Today and Wisconsin Watch. Udesky's report profiled former white supremacists who have renounced hate and formed a movement that helps people extricate themselves from hate groups.

MindSite News, a nonprofit news organization devoted to mental health, invites you to participate in a panel discussion with anti-hate specialists on the psychology of hate and recovery on June 15, 2023, at 10 am PST /1 pm EST. The panel will explore what attracts people to hate groups and strategies for extricating them.

Hate crimes in the U.S. have been rising for years and white supremacist organizations represent the biggest domestic terror threat, according to the FBI. Experts say the risk factors include mental health.

Register for this live conversation

The panelists will include:

- Arno Michaelis, former leader of the neo-Nazi Northern Hammerskins, who co-founded Life After Hate and works with Parents4Peace.

- Pardeep Kaleka, a deradicalization specialist at Parents4Peace and co-director of Not In Our Town whose father died in a Sikh temple massacre by a member of the Northern Hammerskins.

- Chris Buckley, an Army veteran and former leader in the Klan, now a peer mental health specialist for an anti-hate group.

- Stevan Weine, MD, a psychiatry professor and director of the Center for Global Health at the University of Illinois, who researches violent extremism.

SOURCE MindSite News
NEAR Foundation signed a strategic business partnership with leading financial company Mirae Asset.

NEAR Foundation supports the development of the NEAR protocol which focuses on providing optimal solutions for the innovation of the Web3 financial paradigm.

SEOUL, South Korea, June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- NEAR Foundation announced a strategic partnership with Mirae Asset, a subsidiary of Asia's largest financial group Mirae Asset Global and a leading company in the financial services industry, for further development of Web3 technology.

NEAR Foundation - Mirae Asset: Paving the Way for the Future of Web3 Finance

Through this strategic collaboration, NEAR Foundation and Mirae Asset aim to expand the Web3 business domain and lead the global financial paradigm by conducting joint research and collaboration. This will be achieved by organizing global joint events to enhance brand awareness, and establishing a mutual support system to strengthen the Web2/Web3 business network.

Mirae Asset is an investment specialist aiming to leap as a global top-tier investment bank (IB). It provides competitive services in major businesses such as corporate finance, trading, wealth management (WM), and private equity investments (PI). Moreover, it is leading innovation in the finance industry by forming the "Next Finance Initiative" (NFI), along with prominent companies in Korea, such as SK Telecom and Hana Financial Group.

NEAR is a global Layer 1 protocol with a strong emphasis on usability (NEAR Protocol). Its FastAuth feature provides a user experience similar to login via email. It also offers Web2 companies and developers solutions through its blockchain operating system, BOS. This lowers the entry barriers for the initial adoption of Web3, allowing existing companies and users familiar with traditional financial services to easily adopt the new financial ecosystem and contribute to the development of innovative financial services.

Ahn In-sung, Head of the Digital Division at Mirae Asset, stated, "We will continue to innovate and develop the foundational blockchain technology that underpins the industry. We will actively collaborate with exceptional blockchain communities like NEAR Foundation to incorporate Web3 technology into our global business."

Marieke Flament, CEO of the NEAR Foundation, commented: "Our agreement with Mirae Asset will provide a platform for us to showcase the capabilities of NEAR Protocol and its powerful BOS system to help transform the finance industry. We look forward to supporting this important partnership and helping to play a key role in transforming the future of Web3 finance."

Scott Lee, General Manager, NEAR Korea Hub, commented: "NEAR Foundation is expanding the horizons of Web3 industry by onboarding leaders in the gaming industry (Kakao Games Bora, WeMade, and Netmarble) and Mirae Asset, a pioneer in the financial industry." He further emphasized "NEAR Foundation will continue to expand its reach through collaborations with industry leaders to actively drive the transformation of the existing financial paradigm."

More information can be found on the NEAR Protocol's official Website , Blog and Twitter .

Press Contacts

NEAR Foundation

Georgia Hanias

[email protected]

+44 7812 211403

About the NEAR Foundation

The NEAR Foundation is a Swiss non-profit that supports the growth and development of the NEAR Protocol and its associate ecosystem, a high-performance carbon-neutral blockchain that is designed to be super-fast, incredibly secure, and infinitely scalable. NEAR Protocol is built by an award-winning team of engineers and entrepreneurs to be simple to use, inclusive and good for the environment.

About the NEAR Korea Hub

NEAR Korea Hub is a multi-function regional hub that manages the overall business in Korea and East Asia. Specifically, NEAR Korea Hub supports project onboarding, fostering developer community, marketing, and more.

About the Mirae Asset

Mirae Asset is an investment specialist aiming to leap as a global top-tier investment bank (IB). It provides competitive services in major businesses such as corporate finance, trading, wealth management (WM), and private equity investments (PI). It is much anticipated that NEAR Protocol will engage in joint research efforts with Mirae Asset to both apply and drive Web 3 adoption in the financial industry.

SOURCE NEAR Foundation
-Litigation Update, OTCQB Notice

VANCOUVER, BC, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - Chemistree Technology Inc. (CSE: CHM) and US (OTCQB: CHMJF) (the "Company" or "Chemistree"), is providing Notice of the semi-annual payment of interest on its convertible debentures maturing March 29, 2024. Pursuant to the Supplemental Indenture entered into with the Debenture Trustee, Odyssey Trust Company, effective January 17, 2022, the Company will pay the interest due on June 30, 2023 - via the issuance of common shares in lieu of payment in cash.

According to data provided by the Debenture Trustee, $7,491,000 in convertible debentures remain outstanding. The debentures bear interest at 10% per annum, paid semi-annually at the end of June and December. Common shares to be issued in satisfaction of the interest payment are calculated according to a market price formula set out in the Supplemental Indenture and are subject to a minimum issue price of $0.05 per share.

The convertible debentures accrue interest daily, with such accrued interest paid immediately upon conversion of the debentures. The principal amount of the debentures is convertible into common shares of the Company at a price of $0.50 per share.

Litigation Update

On March 9, 2023, the Company's subsidiary American CHM Investments Inc. filed an Answer, Counterclaim and Cross Claim in Case No. 23-2-01552-31 in the Superior Court of the State of Washington for Snohomish County related to the overdue Promissory Note (in default) due to American CHM from the former operator of the Washington Assets. Effective May 13, 2023, the Company entered into a Settlement Agreement and Mutual Release, for a recovery to the Company of $270,000 (US$200,000). Once payment is received, the recovery will be booked against an impairment recorded in a prior period.

OTCQB Notice

The Company has received Notice from OTC Markets Group that the Company's bid price has closed below $0.01 for more than 30 consecutive calendar days and no longer meets the Standards for Continued Eligibility for OTCQB as per the OTCQB Standards, Section 2.3(2), which states that the Company must "maintain proprietary priced quotations published by a Market Maker in OTC Link with a minimum closing bid price of $.01 per share on at least one of the prior thirty consecutive calendar days."

As per Section 4.1 of the OTCQB Standards, the Company will be granted a cure period of 90 calendar days during which the closing bid price for the Company's common stock must be $.01 or greater for ten consecutive trading days in order to continue trading on the OTCQB marketplace. If this requirement is not met by July 9, 2023, the Company will be removed from the OTCQB marketplace.

About Chemistree Technology Inc.

Chemistree Technology Inc. is a Canadian investment company whose strategy is to focus on opportunistic investments across a broad range of industries, and is seeking to invest in early stage, promising companies where it may be the lead investor and can additionally provide investees with advisory services, mentoring and access to the Company's management expertise. Existing holdings are in a consumer-targeted biotechnology venture, a renewable energy developer in the wind and solar sector ("REVV"), a plant-based wellness company ("FUEL") and an Ontario limited partnership ("ONLP") to take advantage of opportunistic long/short equity opportunities in both potential upside and downside expected price moves.

"Karl Kottmeier"

President

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

Information set forth in this news release includes forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements are statements that relate to future, not past, events. In this context, forward-looking statements often address expected future business and financial performance, and often contain words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", "budget", "scheduled" and "intend", statements that an action or event "may", "might", "could", "should", or "will" be taken or occur, or other similar expressions. In particular, but without limiting the foregoing, this news release contains forward-looking statements pertaining to: the ability for the Company to pay future interest payments on the Debentures as such payments become due and the anticipated results of the Debenture Amendments on the debt burden and future operations of the Company.

By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, the risks identified in the Company's reports and filings with the applicable Canadian securities regulators. Forward-looking statements are made based on management's beliefs, estimates and opinions on the date that statements are made, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if these beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change, except as required by applicable securities laws. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. The Company assumes no responsibility to update or revise forward-looking information to reflect new events or circumstances unless required by applicable law.

SOURCE Chemistree Technology Inc.
CINCINNATI and DALLAS, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Two local entrepreneurs, Chad Brizendine of McKinney TX and Jake Warm of Cincinnati OH, acquired the beloved bourbon brand O.K.I. from New Riff Distilling in 2020. Since its re-launch in 2020, O.K.I. has sold over 10,000 cases of bourbon and rye whiskey. In 2023 alone, the brand is on pace to exceed 12,000 cases before the Fall.

"We're thrilled with how whiskey lovers have responded to the brand's reintroduction" Brizendine shared. "Our waitlist for single barrels has been filled with retailers and groups from Texas, Florida, and Illinois since 2020. It was a no brainer to expand beyond Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana."

O.K.I. Bourbon Continues Rapid Expansion into Texas, Florida, & Illinois Tweet this

Signing a multi-state agreement with Green Light Distribution in Texas and Florida, O.K.I. plans to dramatically increase its presence in the southern United States. Dusty Odell, co-founder and CEO of Green Light Distribution added "O.K.I. is a cult whiskey brand known for its single barrels and couldn't be a more perfect fit for Texas and Florida whiskey connoisseurs."

O.K.I. too plans to launch its first "true O.K.I. blend" in Fall 2023 under its Reserve sub-brand featuring dark rye whiskey from Middle West Spirits in Ohio, bourbon from Bardstown Bourbon Company in Kentucky, and rye whiskey from MGPI in Indiana. Warm shared "Reserve Batch 02 has been in the works since last year and pays homage to our company name and the tri-state where O.K.I. was founded. It's a truly one-of-a-kind blend!"

Stay up to date on all things O.K.I. Bourbon at www.okibourbon.com

About OKI Spirits LLC

Local whiskey entrepreneurs Chad Brizendine and Jake Warm are co-owners of OKI Spirits. Brizendine was co-founder and Warm an early investor in George Remus Bourbon, acquired in 2016 by MGPI. OKI Spirits now operates in 6 states including OH, KY, IN, TX, FL, IL.

CONTACT:

Chad Brizendine,

[email protected]

SOURCE O.K.I. Spirits
NEW YORK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ --

Market Share Along with Major Challenges and Upcoming Trends

Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Global Olive Market 2023-2027

A key driver for the olive market is the growing demand from the food industry. When olives are harvested, they are at various stages of ripeness, and this results in the variety of olives that are sold on the market. Different types of olive oil are available based on the extraction method, variety, quality, degree of acidity, and sensory characteristics. Virgin olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, pure olive oil, and lampante olive oil are the most popular varieties of olive oil used in commerce. During the forecast period, these factors are anticipated to fuel the growth of the global olive market. However, the olive market is set to decelerate at a CAGR of 3.7% during 2022 and 2027. The market size is expected to decline by 911.64 thousand tons.

During the forecast period, Europe is anticipated to contribute 44% to the growth of the global market. The regional trends and drivers that will shape the market over the course of the forecast have been thoroughly explained by Technavio's analysts.

Learn more about the truffle market. Stay informed and seize opportunities  Get our Industry report at your fingertips.

Here are some of the challenges faced in the olive market:

Lack of awareness among farmers: The main internal challenges are the fragmentation of the olive production base, inadequate farmer knowledge of market trends and demand characteristics, improper packaging, an unknown geographic indication of Irbid olives, poor marketing performance, a lack of effective branding, as well as a lack of coordination between farmers and mills that frequently results in quality degradation. The competition in export markets, lack of confidence in the quality of domestic consumer goods, and climate change, which has been causing unpredictable rainfall in recent years, are the main external challenges. The expansion of the global olive market during the forecast period may be hampered by these factors.

The main internal challenges are the fragmentation of the olive production base, inadequate farmer knowledge of market trends and demand characteristics, improper packaging, an unknown geographic indication of Irbid olives, poor marketing performance, a lack of effective branding, as well as a lack of coordination between farmers and mills that frequently results in quality degradation. The competition in export markets, lack of confidence in the quality of domestic consumer goods, and climate change, which has been causing unpredictable rainfall in recent years, are the main external challenges. The expansion of the global olive market during the forecast period may be hampered by these factors. Vulnerabilities and challenges in value chains of olive market:

Italian olive crisis hindering Europe's vulnerable supply

Here are the highlights on the Trends to overcome challenges.

Expansion of olive production out of Mediterranean nations: In the past, Mediterranean countries dominated and concentrated the production of olives. The production base has grown over the past 20 years to include countries like the USA , Australia , Chile , and most recently China and India which were previously net importers. Even though less than 2% of the world's olive oil is produced in these countries, their presence has a positive effect on the market on a global level because the new entrants aim to replace imports with domestically produced goods and expand their export market share. During the anticipated period, this trend is anticipated to fuel market expansion.

In the past, Mediterranean countries dominated and concentrated the production of olives. The production base has grown over the past 20 years to include countries like the , , , and most recently and which were previously net importers. Even though less than 2% of the world's olive oil is produced in these countries, their presence has a positive effect on the market on a global level because the new entrants aim to replace imports with domestically produced goods and expand their export market share. During the anticipated period, this trend is anticipated to fuel market expansion. Mechanization and dense groves

Higher percentage of extra virgin production

The report also provides major insights into the consumer base under the premium product category and new product launches that help vendors establish long-term relationships with end-users and consumers.

Unveil the untapped potential of such emerging challenges and trends Click & get Latest Sample Report!

Every Information on Vendor Analysis of Olive Market 2023-2027:

The full report consists a detailed analysis of Top 15 vendors operating in the Olive Market, including :

2Brothers Company

ACEITUNA GREEN SL

Adamakis Olives

Apollo Pharmacies Ltd.

B.R. Cohn

Cargill Inc.

Dcoop S. Coop.

Deoleo SA

Eugene Brunel

Filippo Berio USA Ltd.

Ltd. FRUYPER SA

GAIA olives

Gallo

Grup Pons

MINERVA S.A

OLIVA OLIVA INTERNET SL

Olive line international SL

SCAMILLA OLIVES

The report is backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking and is designed to provide entry support, customer profile, and M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support.

Vendor Offerings of Truffle Market-

Special Food Industry International - The company is a leading Egyptian manufacturer exporting olives, olive oil, and pickled vegetables in bulk.

- The company is a leading Egyptian manufacturer exporting olives, olive oil, and pickled vegetables in bulk. Texas Hill Country Olive Co.- The company offers award-winning extra virgin Texas olive oils which are made with varieties of olives that are grown on site at olive orchard in Dripping Springs, Texas .

To know about all major vendor offerings and insights  Download a FREE sample Now!

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Related Report:

Organic Edible Oil Market : The organic edible oil market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 10.33% between 2022 and 2027. The size of the market is forecast to increase by USD 3,126.37 million.

Cottonseed Oil Market : The Cottonseed Oil Market is projected to increase by 965.24 thousand tons from 2022 to 2027. The market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 3.6% between 2022 and 2027. In 2017 the market size was valued at 4,779.13 thousand tons.

Olive Market Scope Report Coverage Details Page number 143 Base year 2022 Historic period 2017-2021 Forecast period 2023-2027 Growth momentum & CAGR Decelerate at a CAGR of 3.7% Market growth 2023-2027 911.64 thousand tons Market structure Fragmented YoY growth 2022-2023 (%) 3.9 Regional analysis Europe, Middle East and Africa, North America, South America, and APAC Performing market contribution Europe at 44% Key countries US, Turkey, Spain, Italy, and Greece Competitive landscape Leading Vendors, Market Positioning of Vendors, Competitive Strategies, and Industry Risks Key companies profiled 2Brothers Company, ACEITUNA GREEN SL, Adamakis Olives, Apollo Pharmacies Ltd., B.R. Cohn, Cargill Inc., Dcoop S. Coop., Deoleo SA, Eugene Brunel, Filippo Berio USA Ltd., FRUYPER SA, GAIA olives, Gallo, Grup Pons, MINERVA S.A, OLIVA OLIVA INTERNET SL, Olive line international SL, SCAMILLA OLIVES, Special Food Industry International, and Texas Hill Country Olive Co. Market dynamics Parent market analysis, market growth inducers and obstacles, fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID-19 impact and recovery analysis and future consumer dynamics, and market condition analysis for the forecast period. Customization purview If our report has not included the data that you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get segments customized.

Don't waste any more time on searching for answers, buy our report now

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 Market Segmentation by Distribution Channel



Exhibit 07: Executive Summary  Chart on Incremental Growth



Exhibit 08: Executive Summary  Data Table on Incremental Growth



Exhibit 09: Executive Summary  Chart on Vendor Market Positioning

2 Market Landscape

2.1 Market ecosystem

Exhibit 10: Parent market



Exhibit 11: Market Characteristics

3 Market Sizing

3.1 Market definition

Exhibit 12: Offerings of vendors included in the market definition

3.2 Market segment analysis

Exhibit 13: Market segments

3.3 Market size 2022

3.4 Market outlook: Forecast for 2022-2027

Exhibit 14: Chart on Global - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 15: Data Table on Global - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 16: Chart on Global Market- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 17: Data Table on Global Market- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

4 Historic Market Size

4.1 Global olive market 2017 - 2021

Exhibit 18: Historic Market Size  Data Table on Global olive market 2017 - 2021 (thousand t)

4.2 Application Segment Analysis 2017 - 2021

Exhibit 19: Historic Market Size  Application Segment 2017 - 2021 (thousand t)

4.3 Distribution channel Segment Analysis 2017 - 2021

Exhibit 20: Historic Market Size  Distribution channel Segment 2017 - 2021 (thousand t)

4.4 Geography Segment Analysis 2017 - 2021

Exhibit 21: Historic Market Size  Geography Segment 2017 - 2021 (thousand t)

4.5 Country Segment Analysis 2017 - 2021

Exhibit 22: Historic Market Size  Country Segment 2017 - 2021 (thousand t)

5 Five Forces Analysis

5.1 Five forces summary

Exhibit 23: Five forces analysis - Comparison between 2022 and 2027

5.2 Bargaining power of buyers

Exhibit 24: Chart on Bargaining power of buyers  Impact of key factors 2022 and 2027

5.3 Bargaining power of suppliers

Exhibit 25: Bargaining power of suppliers  Impact of key factors in 2022 and 2027

5.4 Threat of new entrants

Exhibit 26: Threat of new entrants  Impact of key factors in 2022 and 2027

5.5 Threat of substitutes

Exhibit 27: Threat of substitutes  Impact of key factors in 2022 and 2027

5.6 Threat of rivalry

Exhibit 28: Threat of rivalry  Impact of key factors in 2022 and 2027

5.7 Market condition

Exhibit 29: Chart on Market condition - Five forces 2022 and 2027

6 Market Segmentation by Application

6.1 Market segments

Exhibit 30: Chart on Application - Market share 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 31: Data Table on Application - Market share 2022-2027 (%)

6.2 Comparison by Application

Exhibit 32: Chart on Comparison by Application



Exhibit 33: Data Table on Comparison by Application

6.3 Food and beverage - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 34: Chart on Food and beverage - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 35: Data Table on Food and beverage - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 36: Chart on Food and beverage - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 37: Data Table on Food and beverage - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

6.4 Others - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 38: Chart on Others - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 39: Data Table on Others - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 40: Chart on Others - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 41: Data Table on Others - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

6.5 Market opportunity by Application

Exhibit 42: Market opportunity by Application (thousand t)

7 Market Segmentation by Distribution Channel

7.1 Market segments

Exhibit 43: Chart on Distribution Channel - Market share 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 44: Data Table on Distribution Channel - Market share 2022-2027 (%)

7.2 Comparison by Distribution Channel

Exhibit 45: Chart on Comparison by Distribution Channel



Exhibit 46: Data Table on Comparison by Distribution Channel

7.3 Offline - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 47: Chart on Offline - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 48: Data Table on Offline - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 49: Chart on Offline - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 50: Data Table on Offline - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

7.4 Online - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 51: Chart on Online - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 52: Data Table on Online - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 53: Chart on Online - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 54: Data Table on Online - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

7.5 Market opportunity by Distribution Channel

Exhibit 55: Market opportunity by Distribution Channel (thousand t)

8 Customer Landscape

8.1 Customer landscape overview

Exhibit 56: Analysis of price sensitivity, lifecycle, customer purchase basket, adoption rates, and purchase criteria

9 Geographic Landscape

9.1 Geographic segmentation

Exhibit 57: Chart on Market share by geography 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 58: Data Table on Market share by geography 2022-2027 (%)

9.2 Geographic comparison

Exhibit 59: Chart on Geographic comparison



Exhibit 60: Data Table on Geographic comparison

9.3 Europe - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 61: Chart on Europe - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 62: Data Table on Europe - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 63: Chart on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 64: Data Table on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

9.4 Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

and - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 65: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

and - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 66: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

and - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 67: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

and - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 68: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

9.5 North America - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 69: Chart on North America - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 70: Data Table on North America - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 71: Chart on North America - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 72: Data Table on North America - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

9.6 South America - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 73: Chart on South America - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 74: Data Table on South America - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 75: Chart on South America - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 76: Data Table on South America - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

9.7 APAC - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 77: Chart on APAC - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 78: Data Table on APAC - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 79: Chart on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 80: Data Table on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

9.8 Spain - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 81: Chart on Spain - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 82: Data Table on Spain - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 83: Chart on Spain - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 84: Data Table on Spain - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

9.9 Italy - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 85: Chart on Italy - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 86: Data Table on Italy - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 87: Chart on Italy - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 88: Data Table on Italy - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

9.10 US - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

Exhibit 89: Chart on US - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 90: Data Table on US - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)



Exhibit 91: Chart on US - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)



Exhibit 92: Data Table on US - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

9.11 Turkey - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 93: Chart on Turkey - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 94: Data Table on Turkey - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 95: Chart on Turkey - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 96: Data Table on Turkey - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

9.12 Greece - Market size and forecast 2022-2027

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 Exhibit 97: Chart on Greece - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 98: Data Table on Greece - Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

- Market size and forecast 2022-2027 (thousand t)

Exhibit 99: Chart on Greece - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

Exhibit 100: Data Table on Greece - Year-over-year growth 2022-2027 (%)

9.13 Market opportunity by geography

Exhibit 101: Market opportunity by geography (thousand t)

10 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends

10.1 Market drivers

10.2 Market challenges

10.3 Impact of drivers and challenges

Exhibit 102: Impact of drivers and challenges in 2022 and 2027

10.4 Market trends

11 Vendor Landscape

11.1 Overview

11.2 Vendor landscape

Exhibit 103: Overview on Criticality of inputs and Factors of differentiation

11.3 Landscape disruption

Exhibit 104: Overview on factors of disruption

11.4 Industry risks

Exhibit 105: Impact of key risks on business

12 Vendor Analysis

12.1 Vendors covered

Exhibit 106: Vendors covered

12.2 Market positioning of vendors

Exhibit 107: Matrix on vendor position and classification

12.3 2Brothers Company

Exhibit 108: 2Brothers Company - Overview



Exhibit 109: 2Brothers Company - Product / Service



Exhibit 110: 2Brothers Company - Key offerings

12.4 ACEITUNA GREEN SL

Exhibit 111: ACEITUNA GREEN SL - Overview



Exhibit 112: ACEITUNA GREEN SL - Product / Service



Exhibit 113: ACEITUNA GREEN SL - Key offerings

12.5 Adamakis Olives

Exhibit 114: Adamakis Olives - Overview



Exhibit 115: Adamakis Olives - Product / Service



Exhibit 116: Adamakis Olives - Key offerings

12.6 Apollo Pharmacies Ltd.

Exhibit 117: Apollo Pharmacies Ltd. - Overview



Exhibit 118: Apollo Pharmacies Ltd. - Product / Service



Exhibit 119: Apollo Pharmacies Ltd. - Key offerings

12.7 Cargill Inc.

Exhibit 120: Cargill Inc. - Overview



Exhibit 121: Cargill Inc. - Product / Service



Exhibit 122: Cargill Inc. - Key news



Exhibit 123: Cargill Inc. - Key offerings

12.8 Deoleo SA

Exhibit 124: Deoleo SA - Overview



Exhibit 125: Deoleo SA - Business segments



Exhibit 126: Deoleo SA - Key offerings



Exhibit 127: Deoleo SA - Segment focus

12.9 Eugene Brunel

Exhibit 128: Eugene Brunel - Overview

- Overview

Exhibit 129: Eugene Brunel - Product / Service

- Product / Service

Exhibit 130: Eugene Brunel - Key offerings

12.10 FRUYPER SA

Exhibit 131: FRUYPER SA - Overview



Exhibit 132: FRUYPER SA - Product / Service



Exhibit 133: FRUYPER SA - Key offerings

12.11 GAIA olives

Exhibit 134: GAIA olives - Overview



Exhibit 135: GAIA olives - Product / Service



Exhibit 136: GAIA olives - Key offerings

12.12 Grup Pons

Exhibit 137: Grup Pons - Overview



Exhibit 138: Grup Pons - Product / Service



Exhibit 139: Grup Pons - Key offerings

12.13 OLIVA OLIVA INTERNET SL

Exhibit 140: OLIVA OLIVA INTERNET SL - Overview



Exhibit 141: OLIVA OLIVA INTERNET SL - Product / Service



Exhibit 142: OLIVA OLIVA INTERNET SL - Key offerings

12.14 Olive line international SL

Exhibit 143: Olive line international SL - Overview



Exhibit 144: Olive line international SL - Product / Service



Exhibit 145: Olive line international SL - Key offerings

12.15 SCAMILLA OLIVES

Exhibit 146: SCAMILLA OLIVES - Overview



Exhibit 147: SCAMILLA OLIVES - Product / Service



Exhibit 148: SCAMILLA OLIVES - Key offerings

12.16 Special Food Industry International

Exhibit 149: Special Food Industry International - Overview



Exhibit 150: Special Food Industry International - Product / Service



Exhibit 151: Special Food Industry International - Key offerings

12.17 Texas Hill Country Olive Co.

Exhibit 152: Texas Hill Country Olive Co. - Overview



Exhibit 153: Texas Hill Country Olive Co. - Product / Service



Exhibit 154: Texas Hill Country Olive Co. - Key offerings

13 Appendix

13.1 Scope of the report

13.2 Inclusions and exclusions checklist

Exhibit 155: Inclusions checklist



Exhibit 156: Exclusions checklist

13.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

Exhibit 157: Currency conversion rates for US$

13.4 Research methodology

Exhibit 158: Research methodology



Exhibit 159: Validation techniques employed for market sizing



Exhibit 160: Information sources

13.5 List of abbreviations

Exhibit 161: List of abbreviations

About Us

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provide actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

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SOURCE Technavio
OPPO's Find N2 Flip phone features 44W SUPERVOOC Flash Charging technology, allowing it to reach 50 percent in 23 minutes

OPPO has addressed the challenge of fast charging in flip phones by implementing a "Dual-Battery Charging System", ensuring long-term battery health

The Find N2 Flip delivers long-lasting battery and best-in-class fast charging, taking the entire flip phone category to the next level

DUBAI, UAE, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Flip phones don't typically charge as quickly as traditional phones, because fast charging systems require a very large battery. Once again, OPPO has risen to the challenge for the Find N2 Flip, featuring its best-in-class 44W SUPERVOOC Flash Charging technology, allowing the phone to reach 34 percent battery capacity in just 15 minute and 50 percent in 23 minutes.

Find N2 Flip

OPPO prioritizes safety and durability in their charging philosophy, understanding that speed should be built upon a strong foundation. As flip phones are so unique by design, creating a fast-charging system with excellent longevity, even after an extended number of charge cycles, is incredibly challenging.

As a pioneer in fast-changing technology, OPPO addressed this challenge by reimagining its tried and tested fast-charging dual-cell design by incorporating a larger 3110mAh cell and a smaller 1190mAh cell, totaling 4300mAh. To ensure long-term battery health, OPPO created a "Dual-Battery Charging System" that requires both cells to charge and discharge simultaneously. This system incorporates a control switch in the parallel circuit, disconnecting the smaller battery once it reaches a certain charge level and shifting the charging process to the larger battery, allowing the battery as a whole to achieve the same charge and discharge times as traditional smartphones.

This "Dual-Battery Charging System" makes 44W SUPERVOOC charging safe, stable, efficient, and possible in a compact space. OPPO also prioritizes the Find N2 Flip's heat management, incorporating a partitioned heat dissipation design and separating the charging chip and other heat-producing components. Additionally, a four-sheet graphite layer dissipate heat uniformly across the phone, ensuring the maximum temperature is no higher than 41.5 C.

Peaking at similar temperatures to many traditional phones, even when performing demanding tasks like charging while on a video call, Find N2 creates a compromise-free battery experience, despite being a compact flip phone.

While flip phones may have been novel, stylish gadgets in the past, OPPO has changed the narrative. Find N2 Flip proves a flip phone can also be a durable partner ready for real life, and able to deliver all-day, long-lasting battery and best-in-class fast charging. With Find N2 Flip, OPPO takes the flip phone category as a whole to the next level.

About OPPO

OPPO is a leading global technology brand since 2004, dedicated to providing products that seamlessly combines art and innovative technology.

OPPO is on a mission to building a multiple-access smart device ecosystem for the era of intelligent connectivity. The smartphone devices have simply been a gateway for OPPO to deliver a diverse portfolio of smart and frontier technologies in hardware, software and system. In 2019, OPPO launched a $7 Billion US Dollar three-year investment plan in R&D to develop core technologies furthering design through technology.

OPPO is firmly pursuing the creation of the best technology products and technological artistry for global users. Based on the brand elements of leading, young and beautiful, OPPO dedicates to the mission of letting the extraordinary users enjoy the beauty of technology.

For the last 10 years, OPPO has focused on manufacturing smartphones with camera capabilities that are second to none. OPPO launched the first mobile phone, the Smile Phone, in 2008, which marked the launch of the brand's epic journey in exploring and pioneering extraordinary technology. Over the years, OPPO has built a tradition of being number one, which became a reality through inventing the world's first rotating camera smartphone way back in 2013, launching the world's then thinnest smartphone in 2014, being the first to introduce 5X Zoom 'Periscope' camera technology and developing the first 5G commercial smartphone in Europe.

Today, OPPO was ranked as the number four smartphone brand globally. OPPO brings the aesthetics of technology of global consumers through the ColorOS system Experience, and Internet service like OPPO Cloud and OPPO+.

OPPO's business covers 60 countries operated by more than 40,000 dedicated employees, with over six research institutes and five R&D centers across the world, from San Francisco to Shenzhen. OPPO also opened an International Design Centre headquartered in London, driving cutting edge technology that will shape the future not only for smartphones but for intelligent connectivity.

About OPPO MEA

OPPO started its journey in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region in 2015 after setting up its regional office in Egypt. Following the immense success of the brand's sales centre in Cairo in the first year, OPPO accelerated its expansion plan across the MEA region and inaugurated its country operations in the UAE in 2019. Now OPPO is physically present in more than 14 markets across the region, including Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and the Levant.

To empower its presence in the region in line with its product localisation strategy, OPPO further invested in MENA and set up its very own factory in Algeria in 2017, thus, becoming the first Chinese brand to build a manufacturing premises in North Africa. Based on insights of local consumers in each country, OPPO has evolved the progress of product localisation, taking into consideration several perspectives towards each market, including product localisation, to further meet the core needs of users; marketing localisation, to better communicate with local young customers; and talent localisation, to understand local consumers further and provide an optimum customer service.

Within the last year, OPPO has started to adjust its product line in the Middle East region specifically. This has included the launch of its flagship OPPO Find X Series and the introduction of the OPPO Reno Series. OPPO will continue to evolve its local product line to offer more premium series to consumers in the region.

A forward-thinking international technology company, OPPO strives to be a sustainable company that contributes to a better world and have enacted positive change in every way possible through activating local community initiatives and humanitarian, charity campaigns.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2097719/Find_N2_Flip.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1451542/4031756/OPPO_Logo.jpg

SOURCE OPPO
Part of the company's ongoing commitment to fighting hunger, the volunteer day included more than 50 local Brand Ambassadors and a $5,000 donation to Utah Food Bank

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Plexus Worldwide (Plexus), one of the largest global direct selling health and wellness companies, hosted a volunteer event at Utah Food Bank in Salt Lake City supporting the nonprofit's mission of fighting hunger statewide. More than 50 volunteers from Plexus' local independent salesforce ("Brand Ambassadors") spent several hours volunteering after Plexus executives presented a $5,000 donation to Utah Food Bank. Combined, the efforts donated the equivalent of 22,500 meals and helped to sort 12,500 meals worth of food for Salt Lake City children and families in need.

"As a Mission Partner of Feeding America, Plexus is honored to partner with Utah Food Bank to further our ongoing commitment to helping children and families facing hunger," said Alec Clark, President and Founder of Plexus Worldwide. "Salt Lake City is home to many of our Brand Ambassadors who volunteered today, and it is a privilege to witness their compassion for this community and eagerness to give back. We hope that our contribution will make a meaningful difference in the lives of those who need it most."

Salt Lake City is the second community to benefit from the new Plexus series of hands-on volunteer events that bring the company's local ambassadors together in support of hunger relief. The events are an extension of the company's Nourish One Initiative, through which Plexus Worldwide donates the equivalent of 10 meals for every purchase of a meal replacement product to Feeding America. As a Mission Partner of Feeding America, Plexus has donated more than $3.5 millionthe equivalent of more than 35.5 million mealsto support children and families facing hunger.

"Generous contributions from companies like Plexus make a profound difference in our ability to provide food and resources to those who are struggling," said Ginette Bott, President and CEO of Utah Food Bank. "We deeply appreciate the time and treasure that Plexus' Brand Ambassadors and executives committed today. Their support enables us to strengthen our efforts to fight hunger statewide."

To learn more about the company's Nourish One initiative, visit www.plexusworldwide.com .

About Plexus Worldwide:

Plexus Worldwide, LLC, is a leading health and wellness company featuring products that enable people to improve their lives and well-being. With hundreds of thousands of independent business owners ("Brand Ambassadors") worldwide, Plexus is among the top30 largest direct sales companies globally, according to Direct Selling News. Plexus products and opportunities help individuals meet their health and financial goals. For more information about the company, visit www.plexusworldwide.com .

About Utah Food Bank:

Founded in 1904, Utah Food Bank has operated under various names but remains true to its mission of Fighting Hunger Statewide by providing food to a statewide network of 230 emergency food pantries and agencies. Last fiscal year, Utah Food Bank distributed 67.3 million pounds of food and goods, the equivalent of approximately 56.1 million meals, to families and individuals in need across the state. For more information about Utah Food Bank, visit www.utahfoodbank.org. Find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/UtahFoodBank and Twitter at www.twitter.com/UtahFoodBank.

SOURCE Plexus Worldwide
The global polyethylene terephthalate market is driven by factors such as the increasing demand for packaged food and beverages and the growing demand for sustainable packaging.

PORTLAND, Ore., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Allied Market Research published a report, titled, "Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Market By Type (Virgin, Recycled), By Application (Packaging, Automotive, Construction, Medical, Others): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2023-2032 ". According to the report, the global polyethylene terephthalate (PET) industry generated $30.3 billion in 2022, and is anticipated to generate $54.4 billion by 2032, witnessing a CAGR of 6.1% from 2023 to 2032.



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Prime determinants of growth

The global polyethylene terephthalate market is driven by factors such as the surge in demand for packaged food and beverages along with the rising demand for sustainable packaging. However, the increase in crude oil prices used to produce virgin plastics coupled with the fluctuation in raw material prices, are expected to hamper the global PET market's growth. Nevertheless, technological advancements in polyethylene terephthalate production coupled with increasing demand for polyethylene terephthalate in the automotive and electrical & electronics industry are expected to offer lucrative opportunities for market growth in the coming years.

Report Coverage & Details:

Report Coverage Details Forecast Period 20232032 Base Year 2022 Market Size in 2022 $30.3 billion Market Size in 2032 $54.4 billion CAGR 6.1 % No. of Pages in Report 250 Segments covered Type, Application, Region. Drivers Changing preferences of consumers. Surge in demand for eco-friendly packaging. Opportunities Rise in demand for polyethylene terephthalate in automotive industry. Restraints Hazardous effects of plastic packaging. Volatile raw material prices.

Covid-19 Scenario

The COVID-19 pandemic has had mixed impact on the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) market. The global lockdowns and restrictions implemented to control the spread of the virus disrupted supply chains across industries, including the PET market. Restrictions on transportation and logistics led to delays in the delivery of raw materials, intermediate products, and finished goods. These disruptions affected PET manufacturers, causing production slowdowns and temporary closures of facilities.

Several sectors that are major consumers of PET products, such as automotive, construction, and non-essential consumer goods, experienced a significant decline in demand during the pandemic. With lockdown measures in place and consumer spending reduced, the demand for PET-based products in these sectors declined. This had a negative impact on the PET market.

The pandemic led to a shift in consumer behavior, with increased emphasis on hygiene, safety, and health. This resulted in a surge in demand for essential goods like packaged food, beverages, and personal care products. PET is widely used for packaging these products, and the increased demand for such items positively impacted the PET market.

The pandemic led to a surge in the use of single-use plastics, including PET bottles, due to concerns about contamination and the need for hygienic packaging. The demand for bottled water, sanitizers, disinfectants, and other essential items packaged in PET containers increased during the pandemic.

While there was a temporary surge in demand for single-use plastics, the pandemic also heightened awareness about the environmental impact of plastic waste. Governments, organizations, and consumers became more conscious of sustainable practices and the need to reduce plastic pollution. This increased focus on sustainability may drive the development of alternative packaging materials in the long run, which could have an impact on the PET market.

The virgin segment to maintain its lead position during the forecast period

Based on type, the virgin segment accounted for the largest share in 2022, contributing to around three-fourths of the global polyethylene terephthalate market revenue, and is projected to maintain its lead position during the forecast period. Virgin polyethylene terephthalate is made from a petrochemical feedstock, including crude oil or natural gas, which has never been used or processed before. It offers exceptional properties, such as it is non-reactive to food and water and is shatterproof, due to which it is extensively used in flexible packaging applications. The rising technological innovations in packaging applications are anticipated to drive the demand for virgin polyethylene terephthalate during the forecast period. Moreover, the recycled segment would cite the fastest CAGR of 6.3% from 2023 to 2032.

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The packaging segment to maintain its lead position during the forecast period

Based on application, the packaging segment accounted for the largest share in 2022, contributing to nearly three-fourths of the global polyethylene terephthalate market revenue, and is projected to maintain its lead position during the forecast period. Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) is widely used for producing sheets & films owing to its physical, optical, thermal, mechanical, and chemical properties. Non-oriented PET sheets can be thermoformed to produce packaging blisters and trays. Other packaging applications include bottles, microwavable containers, rigid cosmetic jars, and transparent films. The construction segment on the other hand, is projected to display the highest CAGR of 6.6% during the forecast period.

Asia-Pacific to maintain its dominance by 2032

Based on region, Asia-Pacific held the highest market share in terms of revenue in 2022, accounting for around one-third of the global polyethylene terephthalate market revenue and is likely to dominate the market during the forecast period. The same region is projected to grow at a CAGR of 6.5% from 2023 to 2032. The polyethylene terephthalate market in Asia-Pacific is witnessing growth due to a rise in the food & beverage industry. Besides, there is an increasing demand for ready-to-cook, packaged, ready-to-eat food, and a range of beverages. Polyethylene terephthalate is an essential material utilized for packaging these food & beverages.

Leading Market Players: -

RTP COMPANY

BASF SE

DUPONT

DSM

LOTTE CHEMICAL CORPORATION

INDORAMA VENTURES PUBLIC COMPANY LIMITED

SABIC

LANXESS

NAN YA PLASTICS CORPORATION

LYONDELLBASELL INDUSTRIES HOLDINGS B.V.

The report provides a detailed analysis of these key players in the global polyethylene terephthalate market. These players have adopted different strategies such as new product launches, collaborations, expansion, joint ventures, agreements, and others to increase their market share and maintain dominant shares in different regions. The report is valuable in highlighting business performance, operating segments, product portfolio, and strategic moves of market players to showcase the competitive scenario.

Want to Access the Statistical Data and Graphs, Key Players' Strategies:

https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/polyethylene-terephthalate-market/purchase-options

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Polyethylene Insulation Materials Market: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2020-2030

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Pawan Kumar, the CEO of Allied Market Research, is leading the organization toward providing high-quality data and insights. We are in professional corporate relations with various companies and this helps us in digging out market data that helps us generate accurate research data tables and confirms utmost accuracy in our market forecasting. Each and every data presented in the reports published by us is extracted through primary interviews with top officials from leading companies of domain concerned. Our secondary data procurement methodology includes deep online and offline research and discussion with knowledgeable professionals and analysts in the industry.

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DUBLIN, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Power & Distribution Transformer Market - Global Industry Size, Share, Trends, Opportunity, and Forecast, 2018-2028 By Type (Power Transformer & Distribution Transformer), By Rating, By End User, By Phase, By Insulation, By Region, Competition" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Global Power & Distribution Transformer Market was valued at USD 50,923.69 million in 2022 and is expected to register a CAGR of 7.98% during the forecast period.



Transformers and distribution of power to step-up and step-down voltage levels for a number of applications, including transmission and distribution, transformers are frequently employed in power systems.

A static electrical machine called a transformer alters the amounts of voltage and current in a circuit without altering the frequency of the power source. The principle of electromagnetic induction underlies how transformers work. While the electromagnetic induction-based operating principle of all transformers is typically the same, their design, purpose, and winding configurations make them suitable for various purposes.



Technological Advancement of Smart Grid



The key market trend for the global power & distribution transformer business is the rising need for consistent and dependable electrical energy worldwide. Several industrialized nations are currently concentrating their efforts on modernizing their aging energy infrastructure. The need for I.O.T. compatible distribution transformers will rise as smart grid technology develops. For instance, AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) devices are predicted to see a significant growth rate as a result of the grid modernization activities done by the state and federal governments throughout the area.

By 2027, it is predicted that countries such as Mexico will invest USD 6.3 billion in the infrastructure of smart grids and another USD 2.1 billion in LED and smart street lighting, which might open up a wide range of opportunities for the concerned industry players. A smart grid is thought of as a highly effective and affordable technology that can reduce carbon emissions into the environment. Future prospects for the North American transformer business might result from such improvements to the region's present networks.



Government Initiatives Power Transformers



As part of its infrastructure plan, which was presented in 2016, the Canadian government anticipates investing over USD 180 billion over the following 12 years in projects related to transportation, green infrastructure, social infrastructure, commerce, and tourism. Similarly, as part of its Smart Renewables and Electrification Pathways Initiative, the Canadian government announced in 2021 that it would contribute up to USD 964 million over four years for projects related to smart renewable energy and grid modernization (SREPs). Thanks to the proper application of governmental laws and support of grid growth, 98 million smart meters have been placed in the US by the end of 2020.

The market may see growth during the projected period as a result of governments in many North American nations investing in advanced metering infrastructure to update the energy grid and minimize transmission and distribution losses. Moreover, it is anticipated that increased investment in the modernization of Europe's transmission and distribution networks will result from the rising energy demand from the expanding commercial and residential sectors, supporting the European market for distribution transformers in the years to come.



Latest Investments



North America is predicted to have a high CAGR over the forecast period. In 2019, the California Public Utilities Commission granted a permit for the construction of the Artesian 230-kV Substation Expansion Project in San Diego County, California. The commission additionally observed that SDG&E's (San Diego Gas & Electric) stated goal for the proposed project is to build a new substation in order to meet the stringent dependability criteria of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). The West Ashville substation project in New York was initiated by the national grid in 2019.

It is predicted that the majority of the project is expected to be in the county's western section, with minor components in San Diego City, and the decision was taken in response to low voltage problems that would develop on the existing electric transmission system if the local load rose fast. National Grid decided to construct a new substation in the Town of Harmony to alleviate pressure on the existing system and to supply the region with constant and steady electricity. The Power & Distribution Transformer market is anticipated to expand throughout the projected period as a result of these most recent advances.



Report Scope:



In this report, the Global Power & Distribution Transformer market has been segmented into the following categories, in addition to the industry trends, which have also been detailed below:



Power & Distribution Transformer Market, By Type:

Power Transformer

Distribution Transformer

Power & Distribution Transformer Market, By Rating:

1-500 MVA

Upto 1000 KVA

Above 500 MVA

Power & Distribution Transformer Market, By End User:

Industrial

Commercial

Residential

Utility

Power & Distribution Transformer Market, By Product:

Multi-turn Valve

Quarter-turn Valve

Others

Power & Distribution Transformer Market, By Phase:

Three Phase

Single Phase

Power & Distribution Transformer Market, By Insulation:

Oil Immersed

Dry

Power & Distribution Transformer Market, By Region:

North America

Europe

Rest of the World

Key Topics Covered:



1. Product Overview

2. Research Methodology



3. Executive Summary



4. Impact of COVID-19 on Global Power & Distribution Transformer Market



5. Voice of Customers



6. Global Power & Distribution Transformer Market Outlook



7. North America Power & Distribution Transformer Market Outlook



8. Europe Power & Distribution Transformer Market Outlook



9. Market Dynamics



10. Market Trends & Developments



11. Policy & Regulatory Landscape



12. Company Profiles



13. Competitive Landscape



14. Strategic Recommendations



15. About the Publisher & Disclaimer



A selection of companies mentioned in this report includes

Siemens Energy Global GmbH & Co. KG

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation

Hitachi Ltd

CG Power & Industrial Solutions Ltd.

Hyundai Electric & Energy System Co., Ltd.

GE Grid Solutions

Schneider Electric SE

Eaton Corporation plc

Hammond Power Solutions Inc

Olsun Electrics Corporation's

TBEA Co., Ltd.

JiangSu HuaPeng Transformer Co. Ltd

Toshiba Corporation

Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/va2vsz

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Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/539438/Research_and_Markets_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Research and Markets
STOCKHOLM, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- RaySearch Laboratories AB (publ) will exhibit at PTCOG 61, to be held in Madrid, Spain, June 10-16. The latest news in treatment planning system RayStation*, oncology information system RayCare* and oncology analytics system RayIntelligence will be on show. Book a demo at raysearchlabs.com.

RaySearch software on show

RayStation is the next generation of treatment planning systems. Recent advancements in RayStation technology include LET optimization*, discrete proton arcs* and dose computation on converted CBCTs for protons and light ions.

RayCare is an innovative oncology information system designed to support comprehensive cancer care. RayCare connects all oncology disciplines, enabling fluid coordination of tasks to ensure optimal use of resources. Patient chart improvements, extension of summary workspace, and increased support for radiotherapy processes are all included in the latest version.

RayIntelligence is a cloud-based oncology analytics system that simplifies data integrations and turns data into insights. It can be used in all areas of cancer care including radiation therapy, medical oncology, and surgical oncology.

RaySearch is recognized as the market leader in ion therapy planning software and remains at the forefront with releases of new cutting-edge functionality, such as robust optimization and a superfast Monte Carlo dose engine which can perform the final dose computation in less than 5 seconds. RayStation treatment planning system has been selected by over 100 particle centers worldwide.

RaySearch's scientific contributions at PTCOG

RaySearch organizes a symposium on conformal FLASH and a review of ongoing research at RaySearch, as well as gives several oral and poster presentations. Click here to learn more about RaySearch at PTCOG 61.

For more information, please contact:

Johan Lof, founder and CEO, RaySearch Laboratories AB (publ)

Telephone: +46 (0) 8 510 530 00

[email protected]

Henrik Bergentoft, CFO, RaySearch Laboratories AB (publ)

Telephone: +46 (0) 8 510 530 00

[email protected]

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/1102/3782443/2118994.pdf RaySearch Press Release June 9, 2023 https://news.cision.com/raysearch-laboratories/i/pr-ptcog-2023,c3187395 PR-PTCOG-2023

SOURCE RaySearch Laboratories
ASTANA, Kazakhstan, June 9. Both Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan pay great attention to the development of renewable energy projects, Almassadam Satkaliyev, Minister of Energy of Kazakhstan, said at the panel discussion within the Astana International Forum (AIF 2023), Trend reports from the scene.

At the same time, we both strive to launch exports of renewable energy to the European market. In this regard, with our Azerbaijani colleagues, we have already launched the implementation of a high voltage cable project through the bottom of the Caspian Sea. This line will connect Kazakhstan with Turkiye, and then further with Europe, he said.

The minister noted that the same project is also underway in the Black Sea, where Azerbaijan also participates.

Kazakhstan continues to work with Azerbaijan on traditional energy resources projects, Satkaliyev said, noting that the country already uses Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Baku-Supsa pipelines for its oil exports.
Danger of product rupture poses laceration and ingestion hazards.

MIAMI, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Empower Brands has issued a safety recall for their Power XL Self-Cleaning Juicers, following reports of product rupture during use. This can cause potential harm to users through laceration or ingestion hazards. The Law Offices of Jason Turchin, a national law firm in product liability, can help consumers who may have been injured by these defective products.

Victims of these faulty appliances could be eligible for compensation. "In numerous states, product-related injury can lead to legitimate claims or lawsuits against the manufacturer," notes Jason Turchin, a national Product Liability Attorney.

Which Juicer Models are Under Recall?

The recall notice extends to PowerXL Models SHL96 and SHL90-SC Self-Cleaning Juicers. These are countertop, brushed stainless steel appliances with a built-in automatic shut-off system. The PowerXL logo can be found on the front of the product.

Has Anyone Been Injured?

To date, Empower Brands has received 261 incident reports including 47 injuries according to the CPSC. These injuries range from severe cuts requiring emergency treatment and stitches to bruises and ingestion of small particles requiring medical attention.

What Kind of Compensation Can Be Expected?

Individuals injured by these defective juicers might be eligible for various forms of compensation. This can cover past and future medical expenses, lost wages, the cost of the faulty juicer, as well as past and future pain and suffering, among other possible damages.

The Law Offices of Jason Turchin is a nationally recognized product liability law firm that advocates for victims of harmful and defective products across the United States. This covers a broad range of products from electronics and household goods to child products, medical devices, and automotive products.

Do You Need a Product Liability Attorney?

Manufacturers often have legal teams battling these claims. To protect your rights, learn more about our dedicated product defect lawyers at the Law Offices of Jason Turchin. To arrange a free consultation, visit our website at https://www.victimaid.com or call us at (954) 515-5000.

Related Links

https://www.jasonturchin.com/product-liability-attorneys.html

Contact:

Jason Turchin

(800) 337-7755

[email protected]

SOURCE Law Offices of Jason Turchin
NEW YORK, June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ --

WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, reminds purchasers of securities of NextEra Energy, Inc. (NYSE: NEE, NEE-PR, NEE-PQ) between December 2, 2021 and February 1, 2023, both dates inclusive (the "Class Period") of the important July 25, 2023 lead plaintiff deadline.

SO WHAT: If you purchased NextEra securities during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement.

WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the NextEra class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=16680 or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] or [email protected] for information on the class action. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than July 25, 2023. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation.

WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources or any meaningful peer recognition. Many of these firms do not actually litigate securities class actions, but are merely middlemen that refer clients or partner with law firms that actually litigate the cases. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm has achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs' Bar. Many of the firm's attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers.

DETAILS OF THE CASE: According to the lawsuit, defendants throughout the Class Period made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) NextEra's primary subsidiary, Florida Power and Light Co. ("FPL"), surreptitious orchestration of political misconduct exposed NextEra to substantial legal and reputational risk; and (2) in light of the above, defendant's positive statements about the Company's business, operations, and prospects were materially misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages.

To join the NextEra class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=16680 mailto:or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] or [email protected] for information on the class action.

No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investor's ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff.

Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/.

Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Contact Information:

Laurence Rosen, Esq.

Phillip Kim, Esq.

The Rosen Law Firm, P.A.

275 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor

New York, NY 10016

Tel: (212) 686-1060

Toll Free: (866) 767-3653

Fax: (212) 202-3827

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

www.rosenlegal.com

SOURCE Rosen Law Firm, P.A.
WOBURN, Mass., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Sanctuary Medicinals, a leading provider of medical cannabis, is pleased to announce the expansion of its services to include recreational adult-use consumers at its Woburn location. This strategic move allows Sanctuary Medicinals to cater to a broader clientele while maintaining its commitment to exceptional customer care and product quality.

Situated at 130 Commerce Way, Woburn, MA 01801, Sanctuary Medicinals Woburn has been renowned for its dedication to medical marijuana patients. With this expansion, the company is excited to welcome recreational adult-use consumers seeking a trusted and professional cannabis shopping experience.

Sanctuary Medicinals Woburn offers an extensive range of premium cannabis products, including cannabis flowers, pre-rolls, tinctures, edibles, topicals, and concentrates. All products provided by Sanctuary Medicinals are organically produced and undergo rigorous laboratory testing to ensure safety, potency, and consistency.

"We firmly believe that Sanctuary Medicinals' expansion at our Woburn flagship dispensary will have a transformative impact on our patients, consumers and the broader community," emphasized Jason Sidman, CEO of Sanctuary Medicinals. "Our goal extends beyond mere retail transactions. Instead, we are committed to understanding the unique needs of each individual, providing personalized consultations, and offering comprehensive education on our products and the industry. This expansion allows us to touch more lives and contribute to the well-being and happiness of an even wider audience."

The dispensary in Woburn boasts a spacious layout, encompassing 4,000 square feet, double the size of the previous medical-only operation. Each location includes a secure reception area where patients and consumers check in, accompanied by point-of-sale systems and well-curated product displays. Security is of paramount importance to Sanctuary Medicinals, with constant camera monitoring and restricted access to certain sections through security card scanners. The dispensary plans to implement express lane pick-ups that allows consumers to pay for orders online in the near future.

Sanctuary Medicinals Woburn is proud to expand alongside the company's existing dispensaries in Gardner and Brookline, extending its dedication to serving the community and fostering positive experiences for all consumers. Moreover, the company operates an indoor cultivation and product manufacturing facility in Littleton, Massachusetts, encompassing a sprawling 36,000 square feet with eight grow rooms and facilities for producing cannabis, edibles, oils, and more.

For further information about Sanctuary Medicinals Woburn and its wide range of products, please visit https://sanctuarymed.com/

About Sanctuary Medicinals Sanctuary Medicinals is a vertically integrated, multi-state cannabis company with operations in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Florida. The company was also recently awarded a provisional retail license in New Jersey. Sanctuary is rapidly expanding into new markets, bringing its high-quality, award-winning products, including flower, vapes, concentrates and edibles, to patients and consumers across multiple states, with a steadfast commitment to creating positive impact in the communities in which it operates. Visit www.sanctuarymed.com for more information.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sanctuarymedicinals

Instagram: @SanctuaryMedicinals

SOURCE Sanctuary Medicinals
Alumni Achievement Award Recipients Joyce Carol Oates and Tracy Reese, and More Than 2,000 National Medalists from Across the Country were Honored during the 2023 National Ceremony at Carnegie Hall on June 8

New York Life Recognized with Alliance for Young Artists & Writers' Leadership Award

NEW YORK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the nation's longest-running and most prestigious scholarship and recognition program for young artists and writers in grades 7-12, celebrated their 100th anniversary during the 2023 National Ceremony at Carnegie Hall. The event honored acclaimed program alumni and more than two thousand national student medalists from across the United States, U.S. territories and military bases, and Canada.

On June 8, 2023, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the nations longest-running and most prestigious scholarship and recognition program for young artists and writers in grades 7-12, celebrated their 100th anniversary during the 2023 National Ceremony at Carnegie Hall. From left, Chair of the Board, Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer and President, Scholastic Entertainment, Iole Lucchese, interdisciplinary artist Derek Fordjour, fashion designer and Alumni Achievement Award recipient Tracy Reese, actor Derek Luke, President and CEO of Scholastic Peter Warwick and poet Kinsale Drake pose backstage at the 2023 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Ceremony held at Carnegie Hall, Thursday, June 8, 2023 in New York. (Jason DeCrow/AP Images for Alliance for Young Artists & Writers) Interdisciplinary artist Derek Fordjour poses with fashion designer and Alumni Achievement Award recipient Tracy Reese and her award backstage at the 2023 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Ceremony held at Carnegie Hall, New York, N.Y., Thursday, June 8, 2023. (Photo by Jason DeCrow /AP Images for Alliance for Young Artists & Writers) Gold Medal Portfolio recipients are recognized on stage at the 2023 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Ceremony held at Carnegie Hall, New York, N.Y., Thursday, June 8, 2023. (Photo by Jason DeCrow /AP Images for Alliance for Young Artists & Writers) Actor Derek Luke delivers remarks at the 2023 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Ceremony held at Carnegie Hall, New York, N.Y., Thursday, June 8, 2023. (Photo by Jason DeCrow /AP Images for Alliance for Young Artists & Writers) Fashion designer and Alumni Achievement Award recipient Tracy Reese delivers remarks at the 2023 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Ceremony held at Carnegie Hall, New York, N.Y., Thursday, June 8, 2023. (Photo by Jason DeCrow /AP Images for Alliance for Young Artists & Writers) Poet Kinsale Drake, back row far left, fashion designer and Alumni Achievement Award recipient Tracy Reese, back row second left, Executive Director of the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers Christopher Wisniewski, back row third left, Chair of the Board, Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer and President, Scholastic Entertainment, Iole Lucchese, back row center left, President and CEO of Scholastic Peter Warwick, back row center right, Chairman of the Board of the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers Hugh Roome, back row third right, interdisciplinary artist Derek Fordjour, back row second right, and actor Derek Luke, back row far right, pose with the Gold Medal Portfolio recipients and National Student Poets backstage at the 2023 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Ceremony held at Carnegie Hall, Thursday, June 8, 2023 in New York. (Photo by Jason DeCrow /AP Images for Alliance for Young Artists & Writers)

The June 8 Ceremony featured a poetry reading by Scholastic Awards alumna and Class of 2017 National Student Poet Kinsale Drake, a centennial video featuring Drake and two other alumni, filmmaker Ken Burns and illustrator Gordon C. James, and a special address by actor Derek Luke. Alumnus and artist Derek Fordjour presented author Joyce Carol Oates and fashion designer Tracy Reese with the 2023 Alumni Achievement Award, each having received a Scholastic Award as high school students in 1956 and 1981, respectively. Reese and Oates gave remarks focused on the validation the Scholastic Awards gave them and how the honor was a fortifying experience for their careers in fashion and writing, respectively.

Christopher Wisniewski, Executive Director of the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, the nonprofit presenter of the Awards, shared, "It is an honor to celebrate the longstanding legacy and impact of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, including Alumni Award recipients Joyce Carol Oates and Tracy Reese, as well as the 'next generation' of talent. From the first students who authored pieces of writing published in a Scholastic magazine one hundred years ago, to each teen we celebrate today, the teens recognized in this program have unique visions that are inspiring and bold. In validating their efforts, our program points toward the future."

In the centennial program year, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards received more than 300,000 works of art and writing submissions from more than 100,000 students in every state in the nation, U.S. territories, and Canada. The accomplished students honored throughout the event join a famed group of Scholastic Awards recipients which, in addition to the above-mentioned alumni, includes Truman Capote, Amanda Gorman, John Lithgow, Sylvia Plath, Zac Posen, Robert Redford, Tschabalala Self, Kay WalkingStick, Andy Warhol, Charles White, and more.

The evening also included the presentation of the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers' Leadership Award to long-term partner and Centennial Sponsor New York Life. In conjunction with the Awards' 100th anniversary, the New York Life Foundation has committed a $1.2 million grant over the next four years as a continuation of its more than a decade-long partnership with the Alliance. The grant supports teens who have had the opportunity to express themselves and reflect on their grief, personal losses, and healing, through the presentation of the New York Life Awarda scholarship initiative within the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Nearly 100 students have been awarded New York Life Award scholarships, with their works published in 22 anthologies and featured in 22 exhibitions. Further, nearly 1,000 students and educators have participated in workshops across the country and online to further creative practices, investigate their feelings, and build supportive environments.

"Together with the Alliance, we are proud to offer the New York Life Award to feature the art and writing works by young people who are courageous enough to explore personal grief, death, and bereavement. Providing a creative outlet for students to express their feelings about loss is more important than ever, as we continue to grapple the tremendous human toll and mental health issues caused by the pandemic," said President of New York Life Foundation and SVP, Corporate Responsibility, New York Life Heather Nesle.

Following the Ceremony, the Awards' Centennial Gala took place at the legendary Ziegfeld Ballroom. The evening, benefitting the Alliance, was the largest and highest-grossing fundraising event for the organization, bringing in over $750,000 for scholarships, educators' awards, and general operating funds. Approximately 300 guests from the art, philanthropy, and publishing worlds attended the Gala.

The Alliance announced a number of significant gifts from generous individuals and institutions in conjunction with the Awards' Centennial year. The organization is a beneficiary of gifts in memory of Maurice R. Robinson, Florence L. Robinson, and Richard Robinson, whose visions for the Awards have endured and brought the Awards to their milestone moment. Additional gifts include a $250,000 pledge over five years from Blick Art Materials, to underwrite fee waivers and help enable teens with financial challenges to participate in the Awards; a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies through its Digital Accelerator program, to rebuild the Awards' portal; and a generous contribution of $100,000 each from The Jay Pritzker Foundation and from an anonymous donor, among other gifts.

Video and photos from the 2023 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Ceremony at Carnegie Hall can be found here: http://mediaroom.scholastic.com/artandwriting

About the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards

Founded in 1923, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards are presented by the 501(c)3 nonprofit organization the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, and are made possible through the generosity of Scholastic Inc., the New York Life Foundation, The Maurice R. Robinson Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Command Companies, The Herb Block Foundation, The Jay Pritzker Foundation, Quad, Blick Art Materials, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Times, DHIFI, Inc., RBC Foundation USA, Morgan Stanley, Change CX, Lindenmeyr Book Publishing Papers, Garcia Family Foundation, and numerous other individual, foundation, and corporate funders; and, for the National Student Poets Program, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Hearthland Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, and Academy of American Poets.

For more information about the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, visit artandwriting.org . Additional details about the Awards can be found in the Scholastic media room: http://mediaroom.scholastic.com/artandwriting .

SOURCE Alliance for Young Artists & Writers
Treatment with TIBSOVO resulted in durable remissions, including complete response in nearly 40% of patients, and an acceptable safety profile

Servier plans to submit a supplemental New Drug Application (sNDA) with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

BOSTON, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Servier, a leader in oncology committed to bringing the promise of tomorrow to the patients we serve, today announced updated data from the Phase 1 trial of TIBSOVO (ivosidenib tablets) as monotherapy for patients with isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 (IDH1)-mutated relapsed or refractory (R/R) myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). The results presented today at the European Hematology Association (EHA) 2023 Annual Congress in Frankfurt, Germany demonstrate that the efficacy and safety profile of TIBSOVO may provide an important new treatment option for MDS patients within this molecularly defined subset.

The Phase 1, open-label study included an evaluation of the safety, tolerability, and clinical activity of TIBSOVO in patients with IDH1-mutated R/R MDS. The primary endpoint was complete remission (CR) plus partial remission (PR) rate and key secondary endpoints included duration of CR plus PR, duration of transfusion independence, and time to transfusion independence.

In the efficacy analysis set (n=18), a complete remission (CR) rate of 38.9% and overall response rate (ORR) of 83.3% were documented in patients treated with TIBSOVO. In addition, the median time to CR was 1.87 months (range: 1.0, 5.6). At the time of data cutoff, the median duration of CR had not been reached (range: 1.9, 80.8*) and the median overall survival was 35.7 months (range: 3.7*, 88.7*).

"We are pleased to share these updated efficacy results that demonstrate durable remissions and an acceptable safety profile in patients with IDH1-mutated relapsed or refractory MDS at this year's EHA Congress," said Susan Pandya, M.D., Vice President Clinical Development and Head of Cancer Metabolism Global Development Oncology & Immuno-Oncology, Servier. "These data add to the growing body of evidence behind targeted IDH inhibition, and we look forward to taking the next steps with regulatory authorities to potentially expand the use of TIBSOVO in the United States to include the treatment of IDH1-mutated relapsed or refractory MDS."

Additionally, of the nine patients who were transfusion dependent with red blood cells or platelets at baseline, 66.7% (n=6) became independent of transfusions during any 56-day post-baseline period. Further, of the nine patients who were transfusion independent with red blood cells or platelets at baseline, 77.8% (n=7) maintained transfusion independence during any 56-day post-baseline period.

"Patients with IDH1-mutated relapsed or refractory MDS currently have no targeted therapy options, and outcomes are generally poor for those who experience disease progression after treatment with standard care," said Courtney D. DiNardo, M.D., MSCE, Associate Professor, Department of Leukemia, Division of Cancer Medicine, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and investigator on the study. "This updated analysis demonstrates that TIBSOVO has the potential to improve outcomes in the treatment of IDH1-mutated relapsed or refractory MDS and reinforces the importance of molecular analysis to ensure we're harnessing the potential benefit of targeted therapies."

Overall, treatment-related adverse events (TRAEs) were consistent with the known safety profile of TIBSOVO. Among 19 patients included in the safety analysis set, TRAEs occurred in eight (42.1%) patients, including a grade 1 QTc interval increase in one (5.3%) patient, grade 3 fatigue in one patient, and grade 3 hyponatremia in one patient, none of which led to discontinuation with treatment.

In 2019, the U.S. FDA granted Breakthrough Therapy designation for TIBSOVO (ivosidenib) for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory myelodysplastic syndromes with a susceptible isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 (IDH1) mutation as detected by an FDA-approved test. Servier plans to submit a supplemental New Drug Application (sNDA) based on these results to the U.S. FDA for TIBSOVO in adult patients with R/R IDH1-mutated myelodysplastic syndromes.

TIBSOVO is currently approved in the U.S. as monotherapy for the treatment of adults with IDH1-mutant relapsed or refractory AML and in monotherapy or in combination with azacitidine for adults with newly diagnosed IDH1-mutant AML who are 75 years old or who have comorbidities that preclude the use of intensive induction chemotherapy. TIBSOVO was recently approved by the European Commission as a targeted therapy in two indications: in combination with azacitidine for the treatment of adult patients with newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with an isocitrate dehydrogenase-1 (IDH1) R132 mutation who are not eligible to receive standard induction chemotherapy; as well as in monotherapy for the treatment of adult patients with locally advanced or metastatic cholangiocarcinoma with an IDH1 R132 mutation who were previously treated by at least one prior line of systemic therapy. TIBSOVO has also been approved in the U.S. and Australia for patients with previously treated IDH1-mutated cholangiocarcinoma. TIBSOVO is also approved in China[i] for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory AML who have a susceptible IDH1 mutation. Servier has granted CStone a co-exclusive license for the development and an exclusive license agreement for the commercialization of TIBSOVO in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and Singapore.

* Denotes a censored observation.

About the Study

In the Phase 1 dose-escalation and expansion study evaluating TIBSOVO in adults with advanced hematologic malignancies with IDH1 mutations, the clinical activity, safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of TIBSOVO in adult patients with relapsed or refractory MDS with a susceptible IDH1 mutation is being assessed. (NCT03503409)

About Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS)

MDS comprises a diverse group of bone marrow disorders in which immature blood cells in the bone marrow do not mature or become healthy blood cells. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society estimates that more than 20,000 people are diagnosed with MDS in the U.S. each year. Failure of the bone marrow to produce mature healthy cells is a gradual process, and reduced blood cell and/or reduced platelet counts may be accompanied by the loss of the body's ability to fight infections and control bleeding. For roughly 30 percent of the patients diagnosed with MDS, this bone marrow failure will progress to AML1. Chemotherapy, supportive therapy, stem cell transplant, growth factors, and similar approaches are used to treat MDS.

About Servier in Oncology

Servier is a global leader in oncology focused on delivering meaningful therapeutic progress for the patients it serves. Governed by a non-profit foundation, Servier approaches innovation with a long-term vision, free of influence from investors and outside pressure to chase short-term monetary targets.

As a leader in oncology, Servier has significantly accelerated its investment in difficult and hard-to-tread cancers, with more than 50% of its research and development dedicated to delivering significant advances in areas of high unmet need throughout oncology with the potential to change the lives of the patients it serves. Within these areas, Servier is the leader in mutant IDH inhibition, with the first ever mutant IDH inhibitor approved in the U.S. and the European Union, and the company continues to drive the science behind targeted mutant IDH inhibition throughout its pipeline.

Servier's commitment to therapeutic progress guides its collaboration strategy. While many companies across the industry are scaling back investments, Servier is actively building alliances, completing acquisitions, conducting licensing deals and entering new partnerships that can help to accelerate access to therapies for patients in need. With the company's commercial expertise, global reach, scientific expertise and commitment to clinical excellence, Servier is dedicated to bringing the promise of tomorrow to the patients it serves.

Press contact

Servier Pharmaceuticals (U.S.)

Julia Ferreira

[email protected]

Servier Group (France and worldwide)

[email protected]

+33 (0)1 55 72 40 21 / + 33 (0)7 84 28 76 13

Disclosures

This release contains general information about the Servier Group and its entities (hereinafter "Servier and its Affiliates") and is intended for informational purposes only. The information is thought to be reliable; however, Servier and its Affiliates make no representation as to the accuracy or completeness of the information contained herein or otherwise provided and accept no responsibility or liability, in contract, in tort, in negligence, or otherwise, should the information be found to be inaccurate or incomplete in any respect.

Servier and its Affiliates are not acting as an advisor to the recipient of this information, and the ultimate decision to proceed with any transaction rests solely with the recipient of this information. Therefore, prior to entering into any proposed transaction, the recipient of this information should determine, without reliance upon Servier or its Affiliates, the economic risks and merits, as well as the legal, tax, and accounting characterizations and consequences, of the transaction and that it is able to assume these risks.

This statement also contains forward-looking statements that are subject to varying levels of uncertainty and risk. Investigational new drugs and indications are subject to further scientific and medical review and regulatory approval. They are not approved for use by the FDA.

Any reliance placed on this document is done entirely at the risk of the person placing such reliance. The information contained in this document is neither an offer to sell nor the solicitation of an offer to enter into a transaction.

The content of this document is a summary only, is not complete, and does not include all material information about Servier and its Affiliates, including potential conflicts of interest.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable laws and regulations, Servier and its Affiliates disclaim all representations, warranties, conditions and guarantees, whether express, implied, statutory or of other kind, nor does it accept any duty to any person, in connection with this document. Without prejudice to the generality of the foregoing, Servier and its Affiliates do not warrant or represent that the information or opinions contained in this document is accurate or complete.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable laws and regulations, Servier and its Affiliates shall not be liable for any loss, damage or expense whatsoever, whether direct or indirect, howsoever arising, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), strict liability or otherwise, for direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, punitive or special damages arising out of or in connection with this document, including (without limitation) any course of action taken on the basis of the same. The estimates, strategies, and views expressed in this document are based upon past or current data and information and are subject to change without notice.

TIBSOVO IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION AND INDICATION FOR U.S. PATIENTS

INDICATIONS

TIBSOVO is an isocitrate dehydrogenase-1 (IDH1) inhibitor indicated for patients with a susceptible IDH1 mutation as detected by an FDA-approved test with:

Newly Diagnosed Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML)

In combination with azacitidine or as monotherapy for the treatment of newly diagnosed AML in adults 75 years or older, or who have comorbidities that preclude the use of intensive induction chemotherapy

Relapsed or Refractory AML

For the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory AML

Locally Advanced or Metastatic Cholangiocarcinoma

For the treatment of adult patients with locally advanced or metastatic cholangiocarcinoma who have been previously treated

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION

WARNING: DIFFERENTIATION SYNDROME IN AML

Patients treated with TIBSOVO have experienced symptoms of differentiation syndrome, which can be fatal. Symptoms may include fever, dyspnea, hypoxia, pulmonary infiltrates, pleural or pericardial effusions, rapid weight gain or peripheral edema, hypotension, and hepatic, renal, or multiorgan dysfunction. If differentiation syndrome is suspected, initiate corticosteroid therapy and hemodynamic monitoring until symptom resolution.

WARNINGS AND PRECAUTIONS

Differentiation Syndrome in AML: In the combination study AG120-C-009, 15% (11/71) of patients with newly diagnosed AML treated with TIBSOVO plus azacitidine experienced differentiation syndrome. Differentiation syndrome is associated with rapid proliferation and differentiation of myeloid cells and may be life-threatening or fatal. Symptoms of differentiation syndrome in patients treated with TIBSOVO included noninfectious leukocytosis, peripheral edema, pyrexia, dyspnea, pleural effusion, hypotension, hypoxia, pulmonary edema, pneumonitis, pericardial effusion, rash, fluid overload, tumor lysis syndrome, and creatinine increased. Of the 11 patients with newly diagnosed AML who experienced differentiation syndrome with TIBSOVO plus azacitidine, 8 (73%) recovered. Differentiation syndrome occurred as early as 3 days after start of therapy and during the first month on treatment.

In the monotherapy clinical trial AG120-C-001, 25% (7/28) of patients with newly diagnosed AML and 19% (34/179) of patients with relapsed or refractory AML treated with TIBSOVO experienced differentiation syndrome. Of the 7 patients with newly diagnosed AML who experienced differentiation syndrome, 6 (86%) patients recovered. Of the 34 patients with relapsed or refractory AML who experienced differentiation syndrome, 27 (79%) patients recovered after treatment or after dose interruption of TIBSOVO. Differentiation syndrome occurred as early as 1 day and up to 3 months after TIBSOVO initiation and has been observed with or without concomitant leukocytosis.

If differentiation syndrome is suspected, initiate dexamethasone 10 mg IV every 12 hours (or an equivalent dose of an alternative oral or IV corticosteroid) and hemodynamic monitoring until improvement. If concomitant noninfectious leukocytosis is observed, initiate treatment with hydroxyurea or leukapheresis, as clinically indicated. Taper corticosteroids and hydroxyurea after resolution of symptoms and administer corticosteroids for a minimum of 3 days. Symptoms of differentiation syndrome may recur with premature discontinuation of corticosteroid and/or hydroxyurea treatment. If severe signs and/or symptoms persist for more than 48 hours after initiation of corticosteroids, interrupt TIBSOVO until signs and symptoms are no longer severe.

QTc Interval Prolongation: Patients treated with TIBSOVO can develop QT (QTc) prolongation and ventricular arrhythmias. Concomitant use of TIBSOVO with drugs known to prolong the QTc interval (e.g., anti-arrhythmic medicines, fluoroquinolones, triazole antifungals, 5HT3 receptor antagonists) and CYP3A4 inhibitors may increase the risk of QTc interval prolongation. Conduct monitoring of electrocardiograms (ECGs) and electrolytes. In patients with congenital long QTc syndrome, congestive heart failure, or electrolyte abnormalities, or in those who are taking medications known to prolong the QTc interval, more frequent monitoring may be necessary.

Interrupt TIBSOVO if QTc increases to greater than 480 msec and less than 500 msec. Interrupt and reduce TIBSOVO if QTc increases to greater than 500 msec. Permanently discontinue TIBSOVO in patients who develop QTc interval prolongation with signs or symptoms of life-threatening arrhythmia.

Guillain-Barre Syndrome: Guillain-Barre syndrome can develop in patients treated with TIBSOVO. Monitor patients taking TIBSOVO for onset of new signs or symptoms of motor and/or sensory neuropathy such as unilateral or bilateral weakness, sensory alterations, paresthesias, or difficulty breathing. Permanently discontinue TIBSOVO in patients who are diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome.

ADVERSE REACTIONS

In patients with AML, the most common adverse reactions including laboratory abnormalities (25%) are leukocytes decreased, diarrhea, hemoglobin decreased, platelets decreased, glucose increased, fatigue, alkaline phosphatase increased, edema, potassium decreased, nausea, vomiting, phosphate decreased, decreased appetite, sodium decreased, leukocytosis, magnesium decreased, aspartate aminotransferase increased, arthralgia, dyspnea, uric acid increased, abdominal pain, creatinine increased, mucositis, rash, electrocardiogram QT prolonged, differentiation syndrome, calcium decreased, neutrophils decreased, and myalgia

the most common adverse reactions including laboratory abnormalities (25%) are leukocytes decreased, diarrhea, hemoglobin decreased, platelets decreased, glucose increased, fatigue, alkaline phosphatase increased, edema, potassium decreased, nausea, vomiting, phosphate decreased, decreased appetite, sodium decreased, leukocytosis, magnesium decreased, aspartate aminotransferase increased, arthralgia, dyspnea, uric acid increased, abdominal pain, creatinine increased, mucositis, rash, electrocardiogram QT prolonged, differentiation syndrome, calcium decreased, neutrophils decreased, and myalgia In patients with cholangiocarcinoma, the most common adverse reactions (15%) are fatigue, nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhea, cough, decreased appetite, ascites, vomiting, anemia, and rash. The most common laboratory abnormalities (10%) in patients with cholangiocarcinoma are hemoglobin decreased, aspartate aminotransferase increased, and bilirubin increased

DRUG INTERACTIONS

Strong or Moderate CYP3A4 Inhibitors: Reduce TIBSOVO dose with strong CYP3A4 inhibitors. Monitor patients for increased risk of QTc interval prolongation.

Strong CYP3A4 Inducers: Avoid concomitant use with TIBSOVO.

Sensitive CYP3A4 Substrates: Avoid concomitant use with TIBSOVO.

QTc Prolonging Drugs: Avoid concomitant use with TIBSOVO. If co-administration is unavoidable, monitor patients for increased risk of QTc interval prolongation.

LACTATION

Because many drugs are excreted in human milk and because of the potential for adverse reactions in breastfed children, advise women not to breastfeed during treatment with TIBSOVO and for 1 month after the last dose.

Please see Full Prescribing Information, including BOXED WARNING for AML patients

1 Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) Research Funded by LLS. Available at: https://www.lls.org/research/myelodysplastic-syndrome-mds-research-funded-lls

SOURCE Servier Pharmaceuticals
GOTHENBURG, Sweden, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- SKF has decided to allocate SEK 3 billion to meet its energy and decarbonization goal by 2030, which is a key element of the Group's strategy. The Group has also decided to ban any fossil fuel investments in its own operations, as well as to replace direct fossil gas use with renewable energy or approved non-fossil fuel alternatives by 2029.

The SEK 3 billion investment frame is to be exclusively used to fund decarbonization activities, mainly energy efficiency and removal of fossil gas use for process and building heat, within the Group's operations around the world. The frame will be utilized at around SEK 500 million per year up to the end of 2028.

Rickard Gustafson, President and CEO, says: "I am very pleased to announce this next step in our Decarbonization and Net Zero approach. This is just another example of our commitment towards the achievement of the goals set out in the Paris Climate agreement. We act on this commitment both with actions like this and through all our various engagement and advocacy activities."

"The scale and urgency of the climate crisis demands an even greater focus and speed of action. These investments, coming with a clear frame, will help us reach our goal to decarbonize our own operations by 2030. To achieve this is an absolute key element of our strategy."

SKF has reduced its Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 46% since 2015. This has been achieved by focusing on energy efficiency as well as efficient production and use of materials, while continually increasing the share of renewable energy used in the Group's operations around the world. More than half of the electricity used in SKF's operations comes from renewable energy sources.

Aktiebolaget SKF

(publ)

For further information, please contact:

PRESS: Carl Bjernstam, Acting SKF Media & Press Director

tel: 46 31-337 2517; mobile: 46 722-201 893; e-mail: [email protected]

INVESTOR RELATIONS: Patrik Stenberg, Head of Investor Relations

tel: 46 31-337 2104; mobile: 46 705-472 104; [email protected]

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/637/3783655/2116569.pdf 20230609 SKF to phase out its own fossil gas use with a SEK 3 billion decarbonization investment frame https://news.cision.com/skf/i/solar-panels-on-skf-building,c3188254 Solar panels on SKF building https://news.cision.com/skf/i/rickard-dsc9658,c3188255 Rickard DSC9658

SOURCE SKF
First-ever Overtrail grade with standard 33-inch All-Terrain tires and 18-inch wheels

3.4L twin-turbo V6 produces 349 horsepower; 479 lb.-ft. of torque

Hybrid powertrain to come later

Standard Lexus Safety System+ 3.0 and Lexus Interface with 14-inch multimedia touchscreen

Up to 8,000 lbs. towing capacity

AUSTIN, Texas, June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Elevating the adventure-ready SUV segment is not a task taken lightly, but the all-new 2024 Lexus GX is up to the challenge with an unparalleled combination of elegant features, offroad capability, and the luxurious quality for which Lexus is known. Redesigned from the ground up, the GX builds on its 20 years in the Sport Utility Segment making the case for the GX to be defined as a "Sophisticated Utility Vehicle."

SOPHISTICATED UTILITY VEHICLE: ALL-NEW 2024 LEXUS GX REDEFINES SUV

Today, a new legend is born as Lexus unveils the all-new, completely redesigned 2024 GX. The first-generation GX entered the North American market in 2002 as a force to be reckoned with in the mid-luxury SUV market. Lexus enthusiasts have praised its legendary off-road capability and its ability to tackle rough terrains, taking customers comfortably from errands to remote spaces.

"For more than two decades, the GX has bridged the gap between legendary off-road capability and luxurious everyday driving," said Dejuan Ross, group vice president and general manager, Lexus division. "The GX is a critical piece in the evolution of the Next Chapter for Lexus, and with new powertrains, an impressive host of premium features, and the all-new Overtrail grade, the 2024 GX has something for everyone."

The age-old saying is true: it's about the journey; not the destination. The all-new GX was designed to inspire customers to pursue their urge to travel, take an unpaved path, immerse themselves in nature and revel in the joy of driving. As part of that journey, GX blazes the trail as the first vehicle to bring the global Lexus "Overtrail Project" to life. The 2024 GX builds upon the strong foundation created by the outgoing generation, and brings the intuitive technology, thoughtful interior touches, and continued off-road prowess that Lexus guests have come to expect.

Next Chapter Design

Rugged Yet Refined Exterior:

The all-new GX presents an unmistakably aggressive exterior design that exudes the tough, rugged persona that it has earned time and time again. Lexus designers were intent on expressing the off-road functionality of a true body-on-frame SUV. Their guiding light was envisioning GX customers enjoying refined outdoor experiences, and, as such, they were determined to design a GX that exemplifies the juxtaposition of a tough exterior with a calming, lux, and modern interior space.

The 2024 GX will be offered in six grades: Premium, Premium+, Luxury, Luxury+, and all-new for Lexus, Overtrail and Overtrail+.

The 2024 GX introduces a noticeable change from the previous generation with a square-body profile with a horizontal design motif. From the front, the all-new GX continues the Lexus spindle body concept with an all-new bold, resolute design that also aids in off-roading functionality. To achieve the grounded, stable stance, designers created a taut body with a wide track and fender flares, pulling the front pillar base to the rear. The overall width increases by 3.74 inches (Overtrail by 4.52 inches) compared to the previous-generation GX. The Premium Triple Beam LED headlamps and grille opening have been raised to help avoid potential road impact. LED fog and cornering lamps are available for increased visibility. The front overhang has been decreased by 0.78 inches for improved clearance. The powerful front presence is led by the seamless grille and headlamp integration.

From the side, the 2024 GX presents a solid, powerful presence featuring a horizontally flowing body with an increased wheelbase of 2.36 inches. The A-pillar has been pulled back for increased visibility in addition to the lower belt line and improved ground clearance. The overall length of the 2024 GX is increased by 2.75 inches. Contributing to the strong presence are the hard-to-miss 33-inch tires with 18-inch wheels on the Overtrail grades for optimal off-road performance. Rear tread is increased by 3.26 inches for Premium and Luxury grades and 4.06 inches for the Overtrail grades.

At the back, the square, aggressive stance is continued with the signature unified L-shaped light bar. The updated LEXUS logo is a continuation of the Next Chapter design originally introduced on the 2022 NX. And, based on customer feedback, the all-new GX will feature a standard power rear lift door (GX first) with a pop-out window and an available kick sensor for hands-free convenience.

The 2024 GX will be offered in 11 exterior color options depending on grade: Eminent White Pearl, Nebula Gray Pearl, Atomic Silver, GX-first Incognito, Caviar, Nori Green Pearl, Nightfall Mica. The Overtrail and Overtrail+ grades will offer exclusive bi-tone exterior color combinations including Atomic Silver/Black Roof, Incognito/Black Roof, Nori Green Pearl/Black Roof, and Lexus-first Earth/Black Roof.

Lush Interior:

The all-new GX presents customers with the duality required of a luxury SUV  a rugged, capable exterior with the luxurious interior elements that help to create a road-trip oasis. No matter the length of the journey, drivers and passengers will reap the benefits of the modern and sophisticated interior. Featuring the driver-focused cockpit design also seen in the all-new RX, the all-new GX exhibits thoughtful elements that allow the driver the confidence to focus on the journey ahead.

A substantial improvement on the last generation model is the all-new lower, horizontal instrument panel design that carries into the dash for a simplified front and passenger seat experience, providing excellent front and side visibility. It provides a clean, open space that seamlessly connects the available Head-Up Display (HUD) to the center where the standard 14-inch Multimedia Touchscreen Display with Lexus Interface technology can be found. Physical dials for frequently used controls such as air conditioning and audio volume remain, and all available off-road controls are concentrated near the gear shifter to help minimize potential driver distraction. The 2024 GX comes standard with a wireless Apple CarPlay Integration and Android Auto compatibility, as well as a digital 12.3 Multi-Information Display (MID).

With seating for up to 7, the all-new GX incorporates thoughtful touches at every turn. Ergonomic measures have been implemented to help decrease load and work to aid driving posture through seat cushion, seatback bolster, and headrest improvements. The front seat hip point to heel height has been extended 1.18 inches.

The second row is available in two configurations: captain's chairs or a 60:40 split-folding bench. A one-motion tumble system has been added for convenient access to the third row/luggage space. Heated and ventilated seats are standard in the driver and front passenger seats, with available heated second-row seats. The third row is available in both power and manual seat configurations. A rear seat reminder has been implemented for increased safety and convenience.

The earth-tone focused interior color design is intended to complement the nature just outside the vehicle's doors. The 2024 GX is available in both a semi-aniline leather and NuLuxe trimmed interior in Black, Dapple Gray, or Saddle Tan with black or dark brown grained trim. Overtrail grades are available in a GX-first color combination of Black NuLuxe trimmed interior with Olive Ultrasuede accents or Chateau NuLuxe trimmed interior with Olive Ultrasuede accents and black ornamentation.

Six illuminated charging ports (four in Overtrail) are available throughout and a wireless charger is available in the front console tray to complete the tech-focused interior. And of course, interior storage space has been increased in the center console, door pockets and up to 12 cupholders. Luggage space for both the second and third row configurations has improved compared to the previous generation, holding up to 5 suitcases with the 3rd row folded. Two additional storage spaces have been added under the cargo area to accommodate smaller items, and a 120V AC inverter has been added for additional power needs.

The 2024 GX comes standard with a 10-speaker premium surround sound system, with available 21- Speaker Mark Levinson Surround Sound. Additional options (depending on grade) include: Digital Key*, Cool Box, Head-Up Display, Traffic Jam Assist**, Cold Area Package and Tonneau Cover.

GA-F Platform and Suspension

The 2024 GX shares the GA-F platform introduced on the current-generation LX 600. This strong and lightweight ladder frame increases body rigidity and improved on-road handling, key elements of Lexus Driving Signature. A newly developed double-wishbone front suspension is paired with a multi-link rear suspension to achieve both a high level of off-road driving performance and on-road prowess. An available Adaptive Variable Suspension (AVS) constantly adjusts damping forces based on changing road conditions. GX adopts Electronic Power Steering (EPS) enabling increased steering feel on and off-road.

Legendary Offroad Performance

The GX has been known for its offroad prowess since the beginning, and the 2024 GX is no different. Standard Full-Time 4WD is adopted for consistent responsiveness in varied terrain with a Torsen limited-slip center differential with locking feature. Overtrail grades add an electronic locking rear differential. When accelerating during a turn, the Torsen differential optimally distributes the driving force according to the load on the rear left and right wheels to achieve a high level of controlled performance. In straight-line driving, it responds well to changes in road conditions, contributing to overall vehicle stability. Switching between 4hi and 4lo is now faster versus the previous generation due to enhancements on the electronic transfer case.

Evolved Engine: 3.4-L Twin Turbo V6 and Direct Shift-10AT

The all-new GX will be offered in two powertrain options to meet the needs of customers. At launch in the U.S., GX will come standard with a highly capable and efficient twin-turbocharged 3.4L V6 engine paired with a 10-speed Direct Shift Automatic Transmission. The twin-turbo V6 produces an improved 349 horsepower, outperforming the previous generation V8's 301 horsepower, and torque output also improves to a massive 479 lb.-ft. The twin turbochargers deliver steady and consistent acceleration to easily control power delivery in both on and off-road scenarios. Towing capacity has increased to 8,000 lbs. for Premium, Premium+ and Overtrail grades with the standard tow hitch.

A hybrid powertrain will be available in the U.S. at a later date.

First-Ever Lexus OVERTRAIL Grade

As expressed at the Tokyo Outdoor Show earlier this year, Lexus has introduced the first-ever "Overtrail Project," an initiative that intends to inspire customers around the world to explore nature through refined adventures. The goal is to include more opportunities for Lexus customers in the future, including potential products, accessories, gear and experiences. The all-new Overtrail grade falls under the umbrella of this initiative.

Adding to an already tough and rugged exterior, the Overtrail and Overtrail+ models add a host of features and specialized styling. An eye-catching bi-tone exterior paint combination is available in Atomic Silver/Black Roof, Incognito/Black Roof, Nori Green Pearl/Black Roof, and Lexus-first Earth/Black Roof. The intention behind the color design was to create a cohesive relationship with the outdoors via calming earth tones that blend in with nature. Overtrail grades also feature standard 33-inch All-Terrain tires wrapped around 18-inch wheels, black accented overfenders and a standard aluminum skid plate.

On the inside, the natural earth tones continue with Lexus-first Chateau with Olive Ultrasuede accents and a classic Black with Olive Ultrasuede accents for a luxurious touch. Overtrail+ grade will come standard with an exclusive seat design for optimal off-road comfort with available driver and front passenger massage seats and driver power cushion extender.

Multi-Terrain Select (MTS), Crawl Control, Downhill Assist Control (DAC), and 3D Multi-Terrain Monitor systems are standard on GX Overtrail grades for optimal traction on the trails, along with an Electronic-Kinetic Dynamic Suspension System (E-KDSS) for improved wheel articulation. An electronic locking rear differential is exclusive on OVERTRAIL for maximum traction.

Lexus Safety System+ 3.0

For 2024, the all-new Lexus GX includes standard Lexus Safety System+ 3.0.

The comprehensive suite of active safety equipment provides our highest level of driver support with features such as Pre-Collision System (PCS) with Pedestrian Detection, All-speed Dynamic Radar Cruise Control (DRCC), Lane Tracing Assist (LTA), Lane Departure Alert with Steering Assist (LDA w/SA), Road Sign Assist (RSA) and Proactive Driving Assist (PDA). These technologies are designed to help, for example, alert you of a pedestrian or vehicle in the path of your Lexus or maintain a preset speed or following distance from a vehicle ahead.

The 2024 GX will be assembled at the Tahara plant in Japan and is expected to go on sale in early 2024.

*Active Remote Connect trial or subscription required **active Drive Connect trial or subscription required

2024 GX Preliminary Specifications

Powertrain GX 550 Premium,

Premium+ GX 550

OVERTRAIL,

OVERTRAIL+ GX 550 Luxury GX 550 Luxury+ Platform GA-F Transmission 10-speed Direct Shift Automatic Transmission Engine 3.4L V6 Twin Turbo Drivetrain Full-Time 4WD Horsepower 349 hp Torque 479 lb.-ft. Towing 8,000 lbs. 8,000 lbs. 6,990 lbs. 6,780 lbs. Manuf. EST. MPG (combined) 17 MPG Overall length 197.04 in. Overall width (+ mirrors) 83.22 in. Overall height 75.59 in. 76.18 in. 75.39 in. 75.39 in. Approach/Breakover/Departure

Angles 26/23/23 26/24/22 26/23/21 26/23/21 Wheelbase 112.2 in. Tread (Fr/Rr) 65.62 in./65.66 in. 66.41 in./66.45 in. 65.62 in./65.66 in 65.62 in./65.66 in Wheels 20-in. alloy 18-in. alloy 22-in. alloy 22-in. alloy Tires 265/55R20

265/70R18 265/50R22 265/50R22

About Lexus

Lexus' passion for brave design, imaginative technology, and exhilarating performance enables the luxury lifestyle brand to create amazing experiences for its customers. Lexus began its journey in 1989 with two luxury sedans and a commitment to pursue perfection. Since then, Lexus has developed its lineup to meet the needs of global luxury customers in more than 90 countries. In the United States, Lexus vehicles are sold through 244 dealers offering a full lineup of luxury vehicles. With six models incorporating Lexus Hybrid Drive, Lexus is the luxury hybrid leader. Lexus also offers nine F SPORT models, two F performance model and one F model. Lexus is committed to being a visionary brand that anticipates the future for luxury customers.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Kelsey Soule

469-292-2890

[email protected]

Note to Editors: Photos and b-roll can be found on https://pressroom.lexus.com/

SOURCE Lexus
Alcorn Brings Decades of Experience Building Purpose-Driven Brands in the Natural Products Industry

BURLINGTON, Vt., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Sunsoil, a certified organic hemp farm and fourth largest-selling CBD brand based in Vermont is proud to announce the appointment of Lucinda Alcorn as Vice President of Sales.

With an extensive background in the natural products industry, Lucinda brings a depth of knowledge and proven success to the company. She comes to Sunsoil with a decade of experience working with Tom's of Maine, leading them through their acquisition by Colgate-Palmolive in 2006. Since then, Lucinda has led sales for Madhippie and Humble Brands  helping purpose-driven brands increase their footprint and mission in the marketplace. Earlier in her career, Lucinda worked at UNFI in their purchasing and distribution departments allowing her an in-depth understanding of all aspects of sales strategy.

"I am thrilled to join Sunsoil, a company I have long admired for its commitment to organic farming, superior processing techniques, and accessible pricing. I share in Sunsoil's mission to provide high-quality, affordable access to the highest-quality CBD products to the masses."

"Lucinda brings extensive experience that will undoubtedly be a tremendous asset to our business," said Bharat Ayyar, CEO of Sunsoil. "I believe she can help lead us into our next phase of growth as a pioneer in the sustainable and ethical household name brand space."

ABOUT SUNSOIL

Sunsoil is a vertically integrated, organic CBD brand based in Vermont. Sunsoil is on a mission to create affordable access to the highest-quality CBD products through its innovative farming and manufacturing practices. The fourth-largest CBD brand in the country, Sunsoil offers CBD tinctures, capsules, and gummies. Sunsoil pioneered a better way to make CBD oil called "whole-plant infusion"departing from the standard practice of CO2 or alcohol extractionbecause it involves minimal processing of the plant and is naturally cost-effective. For more information, visit, http://sunsoil.com and follow along on http://instagram.com/sunsoil

Wink PR

Elaine LaPersonerie

212  614  2191 | [email protected]

SOURCE Sunsoil
Employer Unlawfully Imposes Non-Compete Clauses, Fines on Pilots

INDIANAPOLIS, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Teamsters have filed a lawsuit against Republic Airways and Cape Air for unlawfully requiring pilots to sign employment contracts with non-compete clauses that impose penalties ranging from $100,000 to $250,000.

The lawsuit asserts the employment contracts are an attempt by the airlines to change pilots' working conditions unilaterally, in violation of federal labor law under the Railway Labor Act. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.

"The contracts that pilots at these two companies are forced to sign as a condition of employment are unlawful and we fully expect to win in court," said Josh LeBlanc, President of Teamsters Local 357 and a Republic Airways pilot. "These punishing non-compete agreements are not a solution for the labor supply problem that these employers created of their own accord."

The non-compete clauses that the companies are forcing on pilots require them to work at Republic Airways for a minimum of two years. In addition to the financial penalties, the pilots are barred from flying professionally for up to a year.

"If these companies are having a hard time recruiting pilots, then they should do what nearly every other airline has done in a competitive job market  increase wages and benefits," said Joe Muckle, President of Teamsters Local 1224. "Trying to retain professional pilots by handcuffing them with bogus contracts is illegal and bad business, which is why no other airline is doing this. The Teamsters will fight this with the full force of our union."

Founded in 1903, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters represents 1.2 million hardworking people in the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico. Visit Teamster.org for more information. Follow us on Twitter @Teamsters and "like" us on Facebook at Facebook.com/teamsters.

Contact:

Matt McQuaid, (202) 624-6877

[email protected]

SOURCE International Brotherhood of Teamsters
Ribbon Cutting Ceremony on Wednesday, June 14

ANDERSON, S.C., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Blood Connection is celebrating World Blood Donor Day with the grand opening of its newest donation center in Anderson, SC. The center is now open at 101 Hanna Crossing in Anderson, SC  across from T.L. Hanna High School. A ribbon cutting ceremony will be held at 10:30 am on Wednesday, June 14th in partnership with the Anderson Chamber of Commerce. The ceremony will consist of local leaders, AnMed representatives, TBC blood donors, board members, and other special guests  including Anderson Mayor Terence Roberts, State Representative Thomas Beach, Danielle Gibbs from Senator Tim Scott's Office, and City Councilman Glenn Davis.

"AnMed depends on a continuous reliable blood supply to provide care for many types of patients including those fighting cancer, heart disease and serious injury," says AnMed CEO William Kenley. "We could not do what we do without the Blood Connection and are very grateful for their partnership and for their commitment to the Anderson community. We encourage everyone who can to donate blood at the new Anderson donation center and help us ensure those life-saving blood products remain continuously available for those who need them."

This long-awaited fixed donation site represents a major milestone for TBC in the Upstate. TBC first began supplying blood products to AnMed in 2018, after the hospital system invited TBC to be its blood provider. TBC is now the exclusive blood provider for the Anderson community and will be for the foreseeable future, as AnMed and TBC just recently signed a 3-year exclusive agreement to continue their partnership.

"This has been a long time coming for TBC and we are so thrilled to finally opening a donation center in Anderson. This community has proven again and again that it is dedicated to a stable community blood supply. We are grateful to our donors here and to the many more that will now join our family with the opening of this new center," says President and CEO, Delisa English. "When an AnMed patient receives a blood transfusion, that blood is available only through The Blood Connection. Local blood donations truly make a difference for our friends and neighbors."

TBC is thankful to the many partners who have hosted blood drives over the years. Smaller organizations and businesses can now bring a group to the Anderson Donation Center to donate together. The center is open Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m and on Saturday and Sunday 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Appointments are encouraged but not required. For more information, visit the TBC Anderson Center website.

About The Blood Connection

Founded in Greenville, SC, The Blood Connection has been committed to saving lives since 1962. TBC is an independently managed, not-for-profit, community blood center that provides blood products to more than 120 hospitals and emergency partners within South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. Recognized by the U.S. Congress for its dedication to disaster preparedness and the community, TBC works diligently to collect blood from volunteer donors to meet the ever-increasing demand. By keeping collections local, TBC serves hundreds of thousands of patients a year in its communities. TBC is licensed and regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. For more information, visit thebloodconnection.org.

Media contact:

Allie Van Dyke

[email protected]

SOURCE The Blood Connection, Inc.
ASTANA, Kazakhstan, June 9. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have signed 8 contracts worth $55 million, Serik Zhumangarin, Minister of Trade and Integration of Kazakhstan, said at a meeting with Parviz Shahbazov, Minister of Energy of Azerbaijan, on the sidelines of the Astana International Forum (AIF 2023), Trend reports from the scene.

Zhumangarin noted that these contracts have been signed during a business mission of Kazakhstani entrepreneurs to Azerbaijan. He proposed continuing this practice and proposed to host a business delegation from Azerbaijan as well.

The minister also mentioned that Kazakhstan can offer Azerbaijan around 110 new types of goods worth approximately $300 million to further enhance trade and economic relations.

He emphasized Kazakhstan's interest in establishing fruit and vegetable supplies from Azerbaijan, particularly to the western region of the country.

Zhumangarin further highlighted that the trade turnover between the two countries has increased by $50 million, reaching $183 million in the first four months of the current year.
A roundup of the week's most newsworthy energy industry press releases from PR Newswire, including LG's commitment to renewable energy and Royal Caribbean's biofuel testing.

NEW YORK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- With thousands of press releases published each week, it can be difficult to keep up with everything on PR Newswire. To help journalists covering the energy and natural resources industry stay on top of the week's most newsworthy and popular releases, here's a roundup of stories from the week that shouldn't be missed.

The list below includes the headline (with a link to the full text) and an excerpt from each story. Click on the press release headlines to access accompanying multimedia assets that are available for download.

PR Newswire Weekly Energy Press Release Roundup, June 5-9, 2023. Photo provided by Autel Energy. https://prn.to/3MOWupu

Read more of the latest energy-related releases from PR Newswire and stay caught up on the top press releases by following @PRNenergy on Twitter.

Can't-Miss Earnings

In addition to these popular releases, several must-read earnings reports crossed the wire this week, including the quarterly results for Hyzon Motors.

Catch up on all the latest earnings reports here.

Helping Journalists Stay Up to Date on Industry News

These are just a few of the recent press releases that consumers and the media should know about. To be notified of releases relevant to their coverage area, journalists can set up a custom newsfeed with PR Newswire for Journalists.

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Access ProfNet, a database of industry experts to connect with as sources or for quotes in your articles. Related Resources: Read and subscribe to our journalist- and blogger-focused blog, Beyond Bylines, for media news roundups, writing tips, upcoming events, and more.

About PR Newswire and PR Newswire for Journalists

For more than 65 years, PR Newswire has been the industry leader with the largest, most comprehensive distribution network of print, radio, magazine, television stations, financial portals and trade publications. PR Newswire has an unparalleled global reach of more than 200,000 publications and 10,000 websites and is available in more than 170 countries and 40 languages.

PR Newswire for Journalists (PRNJ) is an exclusive community that includes over 20,000 journalists, bloggers and influencers who are logging into their PRNJ accounts specifically looking for story ideas. PR Newswire thoroughly researches and vets this community to verify their identity as a member of the press, blogger or influencer. PRNJ users cover more than 200 beats and verticals.

For questions, contact the team at [email protected].

SOURCE PR Newswire
A roundup of the week's most newsworthy environment industry press releases from PR Newswire, including conservation efforts in recognition of World Oceans Day.

NEW YORK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- With thousands of press releases published each week, it can be difficult to keep up with everything on PR Newswire. To help journalists covering the environment industry stay on top of the week's most newsworthy and popular releases, here's a roundup of stories from the week that shouldn't be missed.

The list below includes the headline (with a link to the full text) and an excerpt from each story. Click on the press release headlines to access accompanying multimedia assets that are available for download.

PR Newswire Weekly Environment Press Release Roundup, June 5-9, 2023. Photo provided by Sandals Resorts International. https://prn.to/3IVi7Dp

Read more of the latest environment-related releases from PR Newswire and stay caught up on the top press releases by following @PRNenv on Twitter.

Helping Journalists Stay Up to Date on Industry News

These are just a few of the recent press releases that consumers and the media should know about. To be notified of releases relevant to their coverage area, journalists can set up a custom newsfeed with PR Newswire for Journalists.

Once they're signed up, reporters, bloggers and freelancers have access to the following free features:

Customization: Create a customized newsfeed that will deliver relevant news right to your inbox. Customize the newsfeed by keywords, industry, subject, geography, and more.

Create a customized newsfeed that will deliver relevant news right to your inbox. Customize the newsfeed by keywords, industry, subject, geography, and more. Photos and Videos: Thousands of multimedia assets are available to download and include with your next story.

Thousands of multimedia assets are available to download and include with your next story. Subject Matter Experts: Access ProfNet, a database of industry experts to connect with as sources or for quotes in your articles.

Access ProfNet, a database of industry experts to connect with as sources or for quotes in your articles. Related Resources: Read and subscribe to our journalist- and blogger-focused blog, Beyond Bylines, for media news roundups, writing tips, upcoming events, and more.

About PR Newswire and PR Newswire for Journalists

For more than 65 years, PR Newswire has been the industry leader with the largest, most comprehensive distribution network of print, radio, magazine, television stations, financial portals and trade publications. PR Newswire has an unparalleled global reach of more than 200,000 publications and 10,000 websites and is available in more than 170 countries and 40 languages.

PR Newswire for Journalists (PRNJ) is an exclusive community that includes over 20,000 journalists, bloggers and influencers who are logging into their PRNJ accounts specifically looking for story ideas. PR Newswire thoroughly researches and vets this community to verify their identity as a member of the press, blogger or influencer. PRNJ users cover more than 200 beats and verticals.

For questions, contact the team at [email protected].

SOURCE PR Newswire
A roundup of the week's most newsworthy health industry press releases from PR Newswire, including a new fund for AIDS prevention and treatment.

NEW YORK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- With thousands of press releases published each week, it can be difficult to keep up with everything on PR Newswire. To help journalists covering the healthcare industry stay on top of the week's most newsworthy and popular releases, here's a roundup of stories from the week that shouldn't be missed.

The list below includes the headline (with a link to the full text) and an excerpt from each story. Click on the press release headlines to access accompanying multimedia assets that are available for download.

PR Newswire Weekly Health Press Release Roundup, June 5-9, 2023. Photo provided by Elton John AIDS Foundation. https://prn.to/45NyN9X

Read more of the latest health-related releases from PR Newswire and stay caught up on the top press releases by following @PRNhealth on Twitter.

Helping Journalists Stay Up to Date on Industry News

These are just a few of the recent press releases that consumers and the media should know about. To be notified of releases relevant to their coverage area, journalists can set up a custom newsfeed with PR Newswire for Journalists.

Once they're signed up, reporters, bloggers and freelancers have access to the following free features:

Customization: Create a customized newsfeed that will deliver relevant news right to your inbox. Customize the newsfeed by keywords, industry, subject, geography, and more.

Create a customized newsfeed that will deliver relevant news right to your inbox. Customize the newsfeed by keywords, industry, subject, geography, and more. Photos and Videos: Thousands of multimedia assets are available to download and include with your next story.

Thousands of multimedia assets are available to download and include with your next story. Subject Matter Experts: Access ProfNet, a database of industry experts to connect with as sources or for quotes in your articles.

Access ProfNet, a database of industry experts to connect with as sources or for quotes in your articles. Related Resources: Read and subscribe to our journalist- and blogger-focused blog, Beyond Bylines, for media news roundups, writing tips, upcoming events, and more.

About PR Newswire and PR Newswire for Journalists

For more than 65 years, PR Newswire has been the industry leader with the largest, most comprehensive distribution network of print, radio, magazine, television stations, financial portals and trade publications. PR Newswire has an unparalleled global reach of more than 200,000 publications and 10,000 websites and is available in more than 170 countries and 40 languages.

PR Newswire for Journalists (PRNJ) is an exclusive community that includes over 20,000 journalists, bloggers and influencers who are logging into their PRNJ accounts specifically looking for story ideas. PR Newswire thoroughly researches and vets this community to verify their identity as a member of the press, blogger or influencer. PRNJ users cover more than 200 beats and verticals.

For questions, contact the team at [email protected].

SOURCE PR Newswire
A roundup of the week's most newsworthy technology industry press releases from PR Newswire, including Priceline's AI travel agent and new products from Otterbox.

NEW YORK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- With thousands of press releases published each week, it can be difficult to keep up with everything on PR Newswire. To help journalists covering the business technology industry stay on top of the week's most newsworthy and popular releases, here's a roundup of stories from the week that shouldn't be missed.

The list below includes the headline (with a link to the full text) and an excerpt from each story. Click on the press release headlines to access accompanying multimedia assets that are available for download.

PR Newswire Weekly Technology Press Release Roundup, June 5-9, 2023. Photo provided by OtterBox Business Solutions. https://prn.to/3oW37yz

Gray Introduces Insight Advisor: Conversational AI Comes to Higher-Education Data Analysis

Insight Advisor enables casual users to gather and analyze complex information more quickly and efficiently than ever before. More advanced users can create, revise, save, and reuse visualizations, data, and reports in a few minutes.

Read more of the latest business technology releases from PR Newswire and stay caught up on the top press releases by following @PRNtech on Twitter.

Can't-Miss Earnings

In addition to these popular releases, several must-read earnings reports crossed the wire this week, including the quarterly results for Cengage Group and Secureworks.

Catch up on all the latest earnings reports here.

Helping Journalists Stay Up to Date on Industry News

These are just a few of the recent press releases that consumers and the media should know about. To be notified of releases relevant to their coverage area, journalists can set up a custom newsfeed with PR Newswire for Journalists.

Once they're signed up, reporters, bloggers and freelancers have access to the following free features:

Customization: Create a customized newsfeed that will deliver relevant news right to your inbox. Customize the newsfeed by keywords, industry, subject, geography, and more.

Create a customized newsfeed that will deliver relevant news right to your inbox. Customize the newsfeed by keywords, industry, subject, geography, and more. Photos and Videos: Thousands of multimedia assets are available to download and include with your next story.

Thousands of multimedia assets are available to download and include with your next story. Subject Matter Experts: Access ProfNet, a database of industry experts to connect with as sources or for quotes in your articles.

Access ProfNet, a database of industry experts to connect with as sources or for quotes in your articles. Related Resources: Read and subscribe to our journalist- and blogger-focused blog, Beyond Bylines, for media news roundups, writing tips, upcoming events, and more.

About PR Newswire and PR Newswire for Journalists

For more than 65 years, PR Newswire has been the industry leader with the largest, most comprehensive distribution network of print, radio, magazine, television stations, financial portals and trade publications. PR Newswire has an unparalleled global reach of more than 200,000 publications and 10,000 websites and is available in more than 170 countries and 40 languages.

PR Newswire for Journalists (PRNJ) is an exclusive community that includes over 20,000 journalists, bloggers and influencers who are logging into their PRNJ accounts specifically looking for story ideas. PR Newswire thoroughly researches and vets this community to verify their identity as a member of the press, blogger or influencer. PRNJ users cover more than 200 beats and verticals.

For questions, contact the team at [email protected].

SOURCE PR Newswire
A roundup of the week's most newsworthy travel industry press releases from PR Newswire, including unusual room service requests and new National Geographic Expedition itineraries.

NEW YORK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- With thousands of press releases published each week, it can be difficult to keep up with everything on PR Newswire. To help journalists covering the travel industry stay on top of the week's most newsworthy and popular releases, here's a roundup of stories from the week that shouldn't be missed.

The list below includes the headline (with a link to the full text) and an excerpt from each story. Click on the press release headlines to access accompanying multimedia assets that are available for download.

PR Newswire Weekly Travel Press Release Roundup, June 5-9, 2023. Photo provided by Disneyland Resort. https://prn.to/3Nll8Qn

Read more of the latest travel-related releases from PR Newswire and stay caught up on the top press releases by following @PRNtravel on Twitter.

Helping Journalists Stay Up to Date on Industry News

These are just a few of the recent press releases that consumers and the media should know about. To be notified of releases relevant to their coverage area, journalists can set up a custom newsfeed with PR Newswire for Journalists.

Once they're signed up, reporters, bloggers and freelancers have access to the following free features:

Customization: Create a customized newsfeed that will deliver relevant news right to your inbox. Customize the newsfeed by keywords, industry, subject, geography, and more.

Create a customized newsfeed that will deliver relevant news right to your inbox. Customize the newsfeed by keywords, industry, subject, geography, and more. Photos and Videos: Thousands of multimedia assets are available to download and include with your next story.

Thousands of multimedia assets are available to download and include with your next story. Subject Matter Experts: Access ProfNet, a database of industry experts to connect with as sources or for quotes in your articles.

Access ProfNet, a database of industry experts to connect with as sources or for quotes in your articles. Related Resources: Read and subscribe to our journalist- and blogger-focused blog, Beyond Bylines, for media news roundups, writing tips, upcoming events, and more.

About PR Newswire and PR Newswire for Journalists

For more than 65 years, PR Newswire has been the industry leader with the largest, most comprehensive distribution network of print, radio, magazine, television stations, financial portals and trade publications. PR Newswire has an unparalleled global reach of more than 200,000 publications and 10,000 websites and is available in more than 170 countries and 40 languages.

PR Newswire for Journalists (PRNJ) is an exclusive community that includes over 20,000 journalists, bloggers and influencers who are logging into their PRNJ accounts specifically looking for story ideas. PR Newswire thoroughly researches and vets this community to verify their identity as a member of the press, blogger or influencer. PRNJ users cover more than 200 beats and verticals.

For questions, contact the team at [email protected].

SOURCE PR Newswire
Follows Last Year's Win of Best Sell-Side EMS Award

CHICAGO and NEW YORK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Trading Technologies International, Inc. (TT), a global capital markets technology platform provider, announced that its TT platform was named Best Solution for Futures Trading at the TradingTech Insight USA Awards 2023 last evening in New York. Last year, the platform won for Best Sell-Side Execution Management System (EMS).

Trading Technologies won Best Solution for Futures Trading at the TradingTech Insight Awards USA 2023.

TradingTech Insight is a publication of A-Team Group. A-Team editors worked closely with an Advisory Board to select the shortlist in each award category, and members of the capital markets community voted to determine the winners.

Angela Wilbraham, CEO at A-Team Group and host of the TradingTech Insight Awards USA 2023, said: "Our awards recognize leading providers of trading technology solutions, services and consultancy to capital markets in North America, and Trading Technologies has proven themselves to be worthy winners of this prestigious title. We congratulate them on winning Best Solution for Futures Trading in recognition of their contribution to the financial trading technology industry."

TT CEO Keith Todd said: "It's truly an honor for TT to be singled out as the leading platform for futures trading. This is an exciting time for us as we are building on our decades-long leadership in listed derivatives to expand our footprint into new asset classes and service offerings. Thank you to TradingTech Insight and the professional trading community for this recognition."

The TT platform is a global financial ecosystem for institutions and professional traders that offers end-to-end, cross-asset solutions in a growing number of asset classes. The ultra-low-latency platform  accessible from anywhere  streamlines trade order, execution and workflow, enabling users to execute high-volume, real-time trades. Handling two billion transactions in 2022, the broker-neutral Software-as-as-Service (SaaS) solution provides connectivity to approximately 60 global derivatives exchanges. The breadth of the platform allows institutions to meet a full range of needs, from order and execution management and algorithmic trading through to surveillance and risk management, analytics and data, infrastructure and hosting, and post-trade allocation and clearing.

Now in its fifth year, the annual TradingTech Insight USA Awards recognize excellence in trading solutions and services for capital markets, and focus on vendors providing exceptional and innovative trading infrastructure, technology and data solutions dedicated to the challenges faced by firms operating in the U.S. trading environment.

About Trading Technologies

Trading Technologies ( www.tradingtechnologies.com ) is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology platform provider to the global capital markets industry. The company's award-winning TT platform connects to the world's major international exchanges and liquidity venues in listed derivatives alongside a growing number of asset classes, including fixed income and cryptocurrencies. The TT platform delivers advanced tools for trade execution and order management, market data solutions, analytics, trade surveillance, risk management and infrastructure services to the world's leading sell-side institutions, buy-side firms and exchanges. The company's blue-chip client base includes the Tier 1 banks as well as brokers, money managers, hedge funds, proprietary traders, Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs), commercial hedgers and risk managers. These firms rely on the TT ecosystem to manage their end-to-end trading operations. In addition, exchanges utilize TT's technology to deliver innovative solutions to their market participants. TT also strategically partners with technology companies to make their complementary offerings available to Trading Technologies' global client base through the TT ecosystem.

SOURCE Trading Technologies
CHICAGO, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Transformer Oil Market is projected to reach USD 3.0 billion in 2030 from USD 2.0 billion in 2023 at a CAGR of 5.9% according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets. Transformer oil is a special kind of oil that is primarily used in transformers to facilitate insulation and cooling. Transformer oil caters to the T&D, railways and metros, power generation, industrial, and commercial end users. The most commonly used transformer oil is mineral oil-based, which includes naphthenic and paraffinic types. The other variants of transformer oil include bio-based and silicone-based transformer oils. The increasing energy demand has pushed developing and developed economies to expand their electric grids and modernize their grid network, respectively. These developments are expected to drive the transformer oil demand. On the contrary, environmental concerns associated with mineral-based transformer oil and competition from the unorganized sector can negatively impact the growth of the Transformer Oil Market.

Browse in-depth TOC on "Transformer Oil Market"

220 - Tables

51 - Figures

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Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=967

Transformer Oil Market Scope:

Report Coverage Details Market Size USD 3.0 billion in 2030 Growth Rate 5.9% of CAGR Largest Market Asia Pacific Market Dynamics Drivers, Restraints, Opportunities & Challenges Forecast Period 2023-2030 Forecast Units Value (USD Million/Billion), Volume (Units) Report Coverage Revenue Forecast, Competitive Landscape, Growth Factors, and Trends Segments Covered Transformer Oil Market by oil type, application, end-user, and region Geographies Covered Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, and the Rest of the World Report Highlights Updated financial information / product portfolio of players Key Market Opportunities Increased investment in HVDC transmission systems Key Market Drivers Modernization of electric grids and adoption of smart grids in developed economies

The Mineral Oil segment, by oil type, is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

Based on oil type, the Transformer Oil Market has been segmented into mineral oil, silicone, and bio-based. Mineral Oil further categorized into inhibited napthanic & parrafinic oil and uninhibited napthanic & parrafinic oil. The mineral oil segment is expected to have the largest market share followed by bio-based oil. It is projected to grow at the highest rate during the forecast period. Mineral oil provides reliable insulation and cooling properties which contributes to the longevity of the transformers. The growth of the mineral oil segment is attributed to its proven performance, cost-effectiveness, and widespread adoption in the industry.

The transmission & distribution segment, by end-user, is expected to be the largest segment during the forecast period

This report segments the Transformer Oil Market based on end-user into four segments: transmission and distribution, power generation, railways and metros, and others. The transmission and distribution segment is expected to be the largest segment during the forecast period. Aging transmission and distribution infrastructure demands repair and improvement in various regions. Increasing investments in smart grids coupled with the upgradation and modernization of the new and existing infrastructure will propel the growth of the transmission and distribution segment in the Transformer Oil Market. Railways and metros is expected to be second largest segment during the forecast period. Growing focus on the enhancement of transportation sector along with investment in railways and metros is expected to drive the Transformer Oil Market.

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Asia Pacific is expected to be the largest region in the Transformer Oil Industry

Asia Pacific is expected to be the largest Transformer Oil Market during the forecast period. The Asia Pacific region, comprising major economies such as China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, are witnessing significant investments for expanding the number of substations owing to increased demand for electricity driven by the robust growth in industrial and commercial sectors. Electricity shortage is expected to support market grow in Asia Pacific as it can attribute to the increasing demand for power leading to installations of transmission & distribution infrastructure, which in turn increases the demand for the transformer oil.

Key Market Players:

Some of the major players in the Transformer Oil Companies are Nynas AB (Sweden), Ergon, Inc. (US), PetroChina Company Limited (China), Shell (UK), APAR Industries Limited (India), and Calumet Specialty Products Partners, L.P. (US). The major strategies these players adopt include new product launches, contracts, agreements, partnerships, acquisitions, and investments & expansions.

Get 10% Free Customization on this Report: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestCustomizationNew.asp?id=967

Recent Developments

In October 2022 , Nynas AB launched the new transformer fluid named NYTRO RR 900X. It is a circular transformer fluid based on refining technology. NYTRO RR 900X is high-grade oil used in various electrical applications, including high voltage and high-power transformers.

, Nynas AB launched the new transformer fluid named NYTRO RR 900X. It is a circular transformer fluid based on refining technology. NYTRO RR 900X is high-grade oil used in various electrical applications, including high voltage and high-power transformers. In December 2021 , MIDEL, a transformer oil manufacturing brand of M&I Materials Limited, was awarded a three-year contract by First Philec Inc, to supply MIDEL transformer oil for their transformers to minimize the risk of fire and damage

, MIDEL, a transformer oil manufacturing brand of M&I Materials Limited, was awarded a three-year contract by First Philec Inc, to supply MIDEL transformer oil for their transformers to minimize the risk of fire and damage In May 2021 , Calumet Specialty Products Partners, L.P. partnered with Aevitas, Inc. to improve access to exclusive transformer oil products in the Canadian market. The company's new arctic-grade transformer oil will be distributed exclusively by Aevitas, Inc. across Canada , as a result of this partnership.

, Calumet Specialty Products Partners, L.P. partnered with Aevitas, Inc. to improve access to exclusive transformer oil products in the Canadian market. The company's new arctic-grade transformer oil will be distributed exclusively by Aevitas, Inc. across , as a result of this partnership. In May 2021 , Cargill, Incorporated. partnered up with Delta Star , Inc. to provide retro-filling services for its Envirotemp range of dielectric fluids to its consumers in the Western United States . The agreement designates Delta Star , Inc. as a Cargill, Incorporated service center in the Western United States market.

Browse Adjacent Markets: Energy and Power Market Research Reports & Consulting

Related Reports:

Switchgear Market - Global Forecast to 2027

Instrument Transformers Market

About MarketsandMarkets:

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The B2B economy is witnessing the emergence of $25 trillion of new revenue streams that are substituting existing revenue streams in this decade alone. We work with clients on growth programs, helping them monetize this $25 trillion opportunity through our service lines - TAM Expansion, Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy to Execution, Market Share Gain, Account Enablement, and Thought Leadership Marketing.

Built on the 'GIVE Growth' principle, we work with several Forbes Global 2000 B2B companies - helping them stay relevant in a disruptive ecosystem. Our insights and strategies are molded by our industry experts, cutting-edge AI-powered Market Intelligence Cloud, and years of research. The KnowledgeStore (our Market Intelligence Cloud) integrates our research, facilitates an analysis of interconnections through a set of applications, helping clients look at the entire ecosystem and understand the revenue shifts happening in their industry.

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BEIJING, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- In the face of conflict, China prefers to achieve peace via dialogue and mediation, rather than the unilateral use of force or through regime change. Ken Hammond, a professor of Global History and East Asian History at New Mexico State University, the U.S., shared his opinions on this topic from a historical perspective with Beijing Review reporter Li Nan.

Excerpts from their conversation follow:

In the face of conflict, China prefers to achieve peace via dialogue and mediation, rather than the unilateral use of force or through regime change. Ken Hammond, a professor of Global History and East Asian History at New Mexico State University, the U.S., shared his opinions on this topic from a historical perspective with Beijing Review reporter Li Nan.

Ken Hammond: China takes the interests of all parties seriously and tries to find a path forward that minimizes conflict. Maybe we're not going to resolve everything. Maybe it's not going to be necessarily one big group hug. But it respects the interests of the various parties involved.

We can see it in China's brokerage of an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March, and we can also see it in the China-proposed Global Security Initiative. And we can see it in China's 12-point proposal to end the conflict in Ukraine [issued in late February].

And I think that has deep roots in Chinese historical tradition. In China, there has always been the idea of unity. When we talk about tianxia, literally "under Heaven," that's all of us, that's everybody. It's people, animals, plants, the soil, the water, the air... We are all connected.

We see the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence that go back to Premier Zhou Enlai in the 1950se.g., the nonaligned movement of respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, seeking mutual benefit, the idea of mutuality, of shared interestemphasizing more what can bring us together rather than what is going to split us apart.

We need to be able to learn from that and apply the same ideas, the same principles to solving our problems in a way that then becomes mutually beneficial, becomes a future of shared prosperity.

We must find a way to advance what will raise the livelihoods of people all around the planet. China has made incredible gains in eliminating absolute poverty, raising hundreds of millions of people to a better life. This is a historic accomplishment that no other country on Earth can claim as much of.

We can read in Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, in the different volumes, this vision of a world that isn't just about one group, one country, one society, but is about solving the problems that we all face in a way that will enhance all of our circumstances. But there is still so much to be done.

Initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative are therefore important. This vision of a future of shared prosperity for humanity, a future of mutual benefit [is important]. That's the only path forward.

Comment to [email protected]

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BeijingReview/status/1651386256855826433

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SOURCE Beijing Review
The everyday mask is not enough to protect you from smoke. Proper protection like an N95 respirator is your best choice. Tweet this

"Even if you live hundreds of miles from wildfires, the smoke can travel and have a big impact on your air quality," said Dr. Nikki McCullough, a respiratory health scientist at 3M. "It's important for people to pay attention to the Air Quality Index for their area and plan accordingly."

Dr. McCullough has spent the past 30 years as a respiratory scientist at 3M, testing and developing products to protect respiratory systems for all types of people and environments.

"The everyday mask is not enough to protect you from wildfire smoke. Proper protection like an N95 respirator is your best choice because it is designed to form a seal to your face and filter very fine particles. If it's safe to do so, the best place to be when air quality is poor is indoors and to continue filtering your air."

In locations where wildfire smoke events are more common, such as in states like California, regulations have been put in place to guide employers on how to protect outdoor workers. As these events occur throughout the country, it is important to think through proper protection for workers whose jobs require them to be outdoors during these events.

3M is the largest manufacturer of N95 respirators in the US and has plants in South Dakota and Nebraska.

About 3M

3M (NYSE: MMM) believes science helps create a brighter world for everyone. By unlocking the power of people, ideas and science to reimagine what's possible, our global team uniquely addresses the opportunities and challenges of our customers, communities, and planet. Learn how we're working to improve lives and make what's next at 3M.com/news or on Twitter at @3M or @3MNews.

SOURCE 3M
ASTANA, Kazakhstan, June 9. By the end of the year, 1.125 million tons of oil from Kazakhstan will be transported via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, Minister of Energy of Azerbaijan, Parviz Shahbazov, said during a meeting with Serik Zhuminagarin, Minister of Trade and Integration of Kazakhstan, on the sidelines of the Astana International Forum (AIF 2023), Trend reports from the scene.

"Every month, Azerbaijan receives 12 to 14 tankers carrying Kazakhstani oil. This is a satisfying development. The initial agreement between the parties involved the transportation of 1.5 million tons of oil this year. However, considering that deliveries began in April this year, we will be able to transport 1.125 million tons of oil by the end of 2023," he said.

Shahbazov emphasized that this is just the beginning of productive cooperation and added that, in this regard, the Baku-Supsa pipeline can be an excellent alternative for the delivery of Kazakhstani oil.
ASTANA, Kazakhstan, June 9. Currently, we are in the process of working out an agreement for the supply of locomotives to Azerbaijan, Serik Zhumangarin, Minister of Trade and Integration of Kazakhstan, said during a meeting with Parviz Shahbazov, Minister of Energy of Azerbaijan, on the sidelines of the Astana International Forum (AIF 2023), Trend reports from the scene.

"Azerbaijan has expressed interest in purchasing seven locomotives. We have initiated a new program that will allow Azerbaijani buyers to be accredited in Kazakhstan, and we will cover the transportation expenses for them. In this regard, we will create mutually beneficial conditions for both parties," he said.

Zhumangarin also proposed signing a cooperation agreement between the relevant ministries to strengthen trade and economic relations in various sectors.
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BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. The EAEU [Eurasian Economic Union] countries need to jointly unlock the potential of the North-South and East-West transport corridors, Prime Minister of Kazakhstan Alikhan Smailov said at the plenary session of Eurasian Congress, held in Russia's Sochi, Trend reports.

According to Smailov, one of the crucial areas of cooperation is development of transportation infrastructure. In this regard, Kazakhstan's PM emphasized the importance of collaborative efforts in unleashing the potential of the North-South and East-West transport corridors.

In this context, the significant potential lies in the integration of the North-South corridor with the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), where freight volumes grew by over 2 times last year.

"Equally important is our work towards simultaneously eliminating bottlenecks and further developing transportation routes," noted Alikhan Smailov.

According to him, another example of cooperation is the construction of the Bakhty-Ayagoz railway from the Russian border through Kazakhstan to China.

This project is being implemented with the financial support of the Eurasian Development Bank. It is expected that the new road will significantly reduce the distance and delivery time of goods.
Patna, June 8 : Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav on Thursday said that BJP, which was allegedly, one time, seek to strip minorities of the right to vote, would not succeed as long as Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav are there in the state.

"People of every religion have contributed to the freedom struggle of the country. This country belongs to Hindu, Muslims, Sikhs, Christian and others... 'Ye desh kisi ke baap ka nahi hai' (it doesn't belong to someone's father). There was a buzz earlier to take the voting rights of Muslim community. How it is possible until we are here? "We have different states, different religions, different people, different cultures, different foods, different styles of clothing but we are living together. It is our diversity of the country that people of different communities are living together," Yadav said while addressing a gathering of Bunkar community in Gyan Bhawan here.

"Hence, if anyone would think of throwing someone out of the country or taking back their voting rights, it would not be possible until Nitish ji and Lalu ji are here," he added.

"We are watching how they (the BJP) are conspiring in the country to communalise the society. Lalu ji had stopped the Rath of (veteran BJP leader L.K.) Advani ji and our Mahagathbandhan government under the leadership of Nitish Kumar will stop the rath of (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi ji in Bihar. Hence, every opposition party including Congress, regional parties are assembling here in Patna for the meeting," he said, adding that if the BJP comes into power again, "the country and its Constitution would not survive".
Jaipur, June 8 : After submitting a complaint to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against the Department of Information Technology and Communication (DoITC) over an alleged scam worth Rs 5,000 crore, Rajasthan BJP MP Kirodi Lal Meena will now submit a separate complaint against Vaibhav Gehlot, the son of Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, to the agency on Friday.

Meena will reach the ED office on Friday and hand over 'evidence' against Vaibhav Gehlot and Fairmont Hotel owner Ratankant Sharma, his team told IANS.

The BJP MP alleged that about Rs 100 crore has been invested in Hotel Fairmont by a shell company based out of Mauritius. This money belongs to Gehlot and his family members which was first sent to Mauritius via hawala channel, Meena alleged.

Meena, while addressing a press conference at the BJP headquarters on Thursday, accused Gehlot, his son Vaibhav Gehlot, and daughter-in-law Himanshi Gehlot of making illegal investments worth crores of rupees in five-star heritage hotel business by creating fake and dummy companies.

Alleging illegal land conversion, illegal construction, encroachment of pasture land and irrigation department's land, Meena demanded an investigation by the ED.

Meena mainly pointed out alleged irregularities at Raffles Hotel in Udaipur, Taj Aravali Hotel, Nimdi Palace in Mount Abu and Fairmont Hotel in Jaipur.

He alleged that Vaibhav Gehlot and Himanshi Gehlot are involved in benami business at Fairmont Hotel with funds invested from Mauritius, and part of the profit made from the said business is being further transferred to one dummy company of Vaibhav Gehlot named Sunlight Car Rental Services Pvt Ltd.

Also, Ashok Gehlot and Vaibhav Gehlot indulged in money laundering and made benami investments in Fairmont Hotel under the ownership of Triton Hotel and Resort Pvt Ltd, Meena alleged in a press note, adding, "Ashok Gehlot had given permission to construct the Fairmont Hotel and under his government on 21/08/2009, the Jaipur Development Authority (JDA) had approved the site plan of Triton Hotel and Resort, i.e., Fairmont Hotel, which was all done with the malafide intent of Gehlot for bringing in his share of 50 per cent partnership in the hotel." The MP said, "Vaibhav Gehlot had invested his crores of rupees from Mauritius and he is continuing his business in the benami name of 'SivNar'. If the same is not true, Ashok Gehlot being the head of the state and being under the oath of holding a constitutional post is being asked questions like 'why Congress government had approved the construction of a hotel (Fairmont) by JDA and RIICO in the Kukas area, which is half owned by JTC/Minerva, which was part of the Panama paper leak scam'? "Why Ashok Gehlot's son Vaibhav Gehlot was the legal advisor in Triton Hotels (Fairmont Hotel) which has over Rs 95 crore of unaccounted money-launderer's money?

"Why Vaibhav Gehlot is receiving lakhs of rupees monthly under the name of 'Sunlight Car Rental' from Fairmont, which is under the ownership of money-laundering company JTC Fiduciary and has invested unaccounted Mauritius money to the tune of Rs 95 crore in it?

"Why Vaibhav Gehot was the business partner with 50 per cent share with Ratankant Sharma in 'Sunlight Car Rental' when Ratankant is already clearly involved in money laundering regarding the Mauritius investments received in Fairmont Hotel?

"Why Ratankant Sharma was removed from the list of directors and shareholders from 'Sunlight Car Rental' only before money was being channelised to Sunlight from Triton Hotel and Resort Pvt Ltd? If Vaibhav Gehlot has nothing to do with the black money invested in Fairmont, why didn't Ashok Gehlot demolish the illegal construction done in violation of the approved construction plan for Fairmont Hotel?"

Meena also said that he would hand over the evidence related to the entire matter to the ED on Friday.
New Delhi, June 8 : The results of the MCD's standing committee poll conducted on February 24 were announced on Thursday.

An equal number of three members each from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will serve on the committee.

Earlier, the Delhi High Court had set aside the decision of Mayor Shelly Oberoi to call for a re-poll. The High Court had then directed her to declare the results of the poll.

Despite the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) holding the majority in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), the outcome of the standing committee election could have a significant impact on the functioning of the civic body.

This is because the standing committee, responsible for making executive decisions, now comprises an equal number of members from both the AAP and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

BJP councillors Kamaljeet Sehrawat and Sikha Roy had approached the Delhi High Court challenging the decision of mayor Shelly Oberoi to go for a re-poll to elect the member of the panel.

The petitioners put forth claims asserting that the mayor, affiliated with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and serving as the returning officer, improperly invalidated a vote and disrupted the election proceedings upon realising that the resulting outcome would be politically unfavourable.

On February 24, members from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) engaged in physical altercations, exchanging kicks, punches, and shoving, while shouting ensued.

The dispute arose when Mayor Oberoi invalidated a vote. Additionally, the high court, in its ruling, instructed that the "disputed vote" be considered in favour of BJP councillor Pankaj Luthra.
Bengaluru, June 8 : Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Thursday said that a "fearful atmosphere" was created for Dalits, the poor, backwards, and minorities in the state, but his government will create a sense of security among these people and this work has already begun.

"As soon as our government came to power, I have given strict instructions to the police officers to take decisive action against those who create an atmosphere of fear in the society and disrupt harmony through social media. Moral policing will not be allowed in the state anymore," he said while interacting with representatives of the Eddelu Karnataka organisation.

"Our government will work as per the expectations of the people. We will require Rs 59,000 crore annually to implement the five guarantees promised during the election. The financial requirement is Rs 41,000 crore for the remaining months of the current year," he said.

Siddaramaiah said that the government will review the National Education Policy and repeal many anti-people laws along with implementing the new policy.

More than 30 representatives of various organisations including K.M.Ramachandrappa, Noor Sridhar, Vijayamma, Mallige, J.S.Patil, Yusuf Khanni, and Tara Rao of Karnataka Exploited Communities Maha Union were in the delegation.

The Chief Minister that Griha Jyoti scheme - for free electricity upto 200 units - will be launched on August 1 and the Griha Lakshmi scheme - for Rs 2,000 monthly to women head of families - on August 17-18, and had held a high-level meeting with senior officials on both schemes.

He instructed the officers that the application process for all guarantee schemes should be made very simple, and unnecessary information and documents should not be demanded. Also if applications are rejected, appropriate reasons should be cited. He warned the officials not to reject them for silly reasons.

Since a large number of applications are expected to be submitted in all the guarantee schemes, the Chief Minister directed the officials of the e-governance department to increase the capacity of the Seva Sindhu portal in accordance with the huge amount of data submitted.

Discussions were held to launch the Griha Lakshmi scheme on August 17 or 18 in Belagavi. The application process will start from June 15. One can apply for this scheme online through Seva Sindhu portal. Similarly, applications can also be submitted offline in person at Nadakacheri where separate counters will be set up for this purpose.

Applicants should provide ration card number, aadhaar card Number of wife and husband, and bank account details with Aadhaar combination. Copies of these documents can also be submitted with offline applications.

The scheme amount will be deposited directly into the bank account of the eligible beneficiaries through DBT. It is estimated that this scheme will reach around 85 per cent of families in the state. APL card holders, who are not tax payers or have no GST registration, will also get this facility.
Patna, June 9 : Angry over the railway crossing barrier being down, a biker stabbed a gate man several times in Bihar's Darbhanga district on Thursday morning.

The incident occurred at gate number 19A near Laheriasarai railway station around 8.15 a.m. The victim, identified as Akhilesh Kumar, is admitted in Darbhanga Medical College and Hospital and his condition is out of danger. He sustained stab wounds on head and neck.

"On Thursday morning around 8.15 a.m., a train crossed from the place and another train was about to arrive there. The control room instructed me to keep the barrier down until the train crosses. At the same time, a biker arrived there and waited for sometime at the railway crossing. When he inquired with me, I told him the reason for the barriers being down. The biker went angry and attacked with a knife," Kumar said.

"I sustained stab wounds on my head and neck. Still, I chased him for a few meters but he escaped. I clicked the picture of the attacker's bike's number plate and shared it with the personnel of Laheriasarai RPF police station," he said.

Deep Kumar, a constable of RPF said: "We have rescued the injured gate man and admitted him in a hospital. He is out of danger. We have received a complaint and forwarded it to senior officials for further action."
Tehran, June 9 : The Iranian Foreign Ministry has said that Iran's missile activities are "conventional and defensive", refuting some Western remarks on the matter as "groundless and meddlesome".

In response to criticism voiced by the US, France and the UK about Tehran unveiling a hypersonic missile, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Nasser Kanaani noted on Thursday that the activities are "completely legitimate based on international law", Xinhua news agency reported.

Kanaani said that such Western states "with track records of violating international obligations in non-proliferation have no right to comment on Iran's legitimate capabilities".

He noted that the AUKUS trilateral security agreement, under which the United States and Britain will assist Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, was a blatant example of violating the aims and objectives of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Iran on Tuesday unveiled the domestically-developed hypersonic missile Fattah in the capital Tehran, news agency IRNA reported.

The missile boasts high tactical capabilities and is equipped with a solid-fuel propulsion system and a second-stage mobile nozzle, which allow it to reach a velocity of up to 15 Mach (5104.35 meters per second) and a range of 1,400 km, according to IRNA.

The precision-guided missile is also equipped with stealth technology, enabling it to evade detection by radar systems, it said.

Later, US State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel told a press conference that his country is "committed to using a range of available nonproliferation tools to address Iran's missile development", while a spokesman of the British Foreign Office accused Iran of "continued disregard of international restrictions".

The French Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that it "notes with concern Iran's announcements, claiming these activities come amid the continued escalation of Iranian's nuclear and ballistic programmes".
Lucknow, June 9 : Authorities have beefed up security at the district court in Lucknow where gangster Sanjeev Maheshwari Jeeva was killed during a shootout in the premises earlier this week.

District judge of Lucknow Sanjay Shanker Pandey has issued directives for random frisking of people on the premises, separate entry gates for advocates and litigants in future and upgraded security at all entry gates of the court.

Earlier, the district judge, presided over meeting with joint commissioner of police (crime) Nilabja Chaudhary and district magistrate Surya Pal Gangwar to seek details about the incident.

He directed them to carry out random frisking of people on the court campus to deter unwarranted elements from entering the district court.

He also directed them to strengthen security at all entry points of the court.

"In the meeting of the monitoring committee, it was suggested that there should be separate entry gates for lawyers and litigants so that proper screening of those entering the district court could be carried out," said Manoj Tripathi, DGC (criminal).

Identity cards will also be issued to all lawyers within a week, Tripathi said.

Meanwhile, the Lucknow Bar Association of the district court has decided to not boycott court as the district judge accepted all their suggestions.

Kuldeep Narain Mishra, general secretary, Lucknow Bar Association, said the lawyers had decided to not boycott court proceedings as all their demands had been accepted.
Lucknow, June 9 : A minor girl from Uttar Pradesh's Jalaun district set herself on fire after facing constant harassment from a youth.

The girl was rushed to the hospital in Jalaun and then referred to a facility in Jhansi on Thursday night.

Her condition is said to be critical.

Sameer Kumar Singh, inspector-in-charge of the case, said: "On the complaint of the minor girl's father, the police have registered a case against the unidentified accused and have intensified the process to nab the youth." In a statement, the victim's father said: "Since earlier this week, a young man, named Nikki, started harassing my daughter on the phone. He used to harass my daughter everyday. Troubled by this repeated harassment, she locked herself in a room and set herself on fire." The accused would also send obscene clips to the girl, he added.
Lucknow, June 9 : In a major step, the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) has restored the pension of retired honorary naib subedar, Krishana Pal Singh following his release after serving his jail sentence.

Singh had joined the Army in January 1981 and served for more than 24 years.

He was booked for murder in his home district of Aligarh nearly one and a-half-years after his retirement from the Corps of Signals.

After court proceedings, he was sentenced to life imprisonment and was released more than 15 years later, on April 30, 2022.

While serving jail term, his pension was stopped from December 2009 under provisions that he would be entitled for it after his "acquittal" only.

After release from jail, Singh approached the AFT's Lucknow regional bench, where the judge citing the AFT Chandigarh order, stated, that the Pension Regulations for the Army, 1961(Part II), makes it clear that pension could be suspended during the period of imprisonment, but after 'release', the pension has to restored.

The order was issued by Justice Ravindra Nath Kakkar and Major General Sanjay Singh.

In the order, the bench citing the AFT Chandigarh order in Chandra Singh vs Union of India, decided in September 2013 said, "The word used in the Regulation is 'Release' and not 'Acquittal'.

"These are two entirely different words having different meanings. One cannot be equated with another. If the word 'Release' is equated with the word 'Acquittal' then it would mean that if the hearing in the appeal does not take place for 20 years, the petitioner will not get the pension for 20 years till his acquittal. That cannot be the intention of the framers of the Regulations." "The interpretation given by the AFT Chandigarh does not seem to have been modified or annulled by any higher forum and therefore, it has the binding effect. The action of the ministry of defence to stop pension without serving show cause notice or without providing opportunity of hearing to the applicant is against the principle of natural justice too. Therefore, the pension must be restored with immediate effect," read the order.
Srinagar, June 9 : The principal of the Vishwa Bharati Higher Secondary school in Srinagar has apologised after some students protested against the school management for directing them against wearing 'Abaya' (Long Robe).

"Today's conversation with the students and the parents has been misrepresented and in any case if it has hurt the sentiments of the students or the parents, I unconditionally apologise for the same," the principal said in a statement on Thursday.

The statement added that it is clarified that no ban has been imposed by the school Principal or the Management on wearing Abaya.

"It is for the information of all students that they can wear the Abaya and no such restrictions have been imposed in the classrooms." Earlier, several students had held a protest against the school management on Thursday for allegedly not allowing them to enter the premises wearing Abaya.
Shimla, June 9 : Country's longest and highest altitude bus service that connects Delhi with Leh via Himachal Pradesh's tourist resort Manali has restarted after remaining closed for nine months due to closure of the route with snowfall, official said on Friday.

One-way fare for the 1,026-km long route is Rs 1,736, which includes a night's halt at Keylong, the headquarters of Lahaul-Spiti district. Three drivers will ply the bus with two conductors onboard at different timings of a 30-hour long journey.

The state-run Himachal Road Transport Corp (HRTC) bus leaves Delhi at 3.45 p.m. After stopping at Keylong the next day, it will leave for Leh.

The HRTC is running this special bus to promote tourism.

"The response of tourists, especially the foreigners, is quite good on the Delhi-Leh route. A passenger can even get online booking between Keylong and Delhi routes. However, Keylong to Leh tickets are sold on the counter in Keylong," an HRTC official told IANS.

The bus crosses four high mountain passes in the cold deserts of Himachal and Ladakh -- Rohtang Pass (13,050 feet), Baralacha Pass (16,020 feet), Lachungla Pass (16,620 feet) and Tanglangla Pass (17,480 feet).
San Francisco, June 9 : In a meeting with employees, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed Apple's Vision Pro headset launch and said it "could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it's not the one that I want".

During the companywide meeting, Zuckerberg said that Apple's device didn't introduce any major advancements in technology that Meta hadn't "already explored", reported The Verge on Friday.

He also stated how Meta will be able to reach a larger user base due to the Quest 3 headset's lower pricing of $499 as compared to the Vision Pro's $3,499 selling price.

"I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important," Meta CEO mentioned.

According to Zuckerberg, the Quest headset is about "people interacting in new ways and feeling closer" in addition to "about being active and doing things".

"By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself," he said about Apple's 'Worldwide Developers Conference' keynote event which was held earlier this week.

"I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it's not the one that I want," he added.

The iPhone maker had unveiled the 'Vision Pro' headset earlier this week, which seamlessly blends the digital world with the real one around us.
Kiev, June 9 : Ukrainian attacks have continued in the key southern region of Zaporizhzhia, most of which has already been seized by Russia, a media report said.

Shortly after Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it seized most of the region, home to Europe's largest nuclear power plant. Ukraine however, continues to control the regional capital city also known as Zaporizhzhia.

Several Russian pro-Kremlin military bloggers reported late on Thursday that Ukraine had resumed its attacks overnight, the BBC said.

The bloggers said that armoured personnel carriers and drones directing artillery fire were also deployed.

Vladimir Rogov, a Moscow-installed official in the region, said there had been "active fighting" in the area between Orikhovo and Tokmak, with Russian troops holding their positions.

The town of Tokmak is seen by many military experts as a key target for Ukraine as it seeks to advance to the Sea of Azov.

In a statement earlier on Thursday, Ukraine's Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said that Russian forces were currently "in active defence" on the Zaporizhzhia direction, reports the BBC.

On Thursday evening, Ukraine's military stated only that the "enemy continues to be on the defensive" towards Zaporizhzhia as well as in neighbouring Kherson, a region hit by a massive flooding after a major dam collapsed earlier this week.

It added that Russian troops had carried out air strikes there and used artillery during the day.

Although Ukraine has continued to remain silent about the launch of its much-awaited counter-offensive against Russia, US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said on Thursday that Kiev has started it.

The UK Defence Ministry also acknowledged that "amidst a highly complex operational picture, heavy fighting continues along multiple sectors of the front".

It added that "in most areas Ukraine holds the initiative".

Ukraine has been planning the counter-offensive for months, but it wants to first train troops and receive advanced military equipment from Western allies.

Last month, Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, told the BBC that Kiev was ready to launch the attack, but did not specify a date.
Paris, June 9 : The preparations for next year's Olympics and the participation of contingents from Russia and Belarus in Paris 2024 were the main topics of discussion when International Olympic Committee (IOC) Thomas Bach met French President Emmanuel Macron here.

While both leaders expressed their full support to the Organising Committee for Paris 2024 Olympic Games, they also reaffirmed that the decision regarding the participation of Russian and Belarus athletes will be left to the IOC, to be taken at a later date.

The IOC President Thomas Bach was welcomed by French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday at the AlysAe Palace in Paris.

The two leaders discussed the preparations for the Olympic Games Paris 2024, which are going extremely well. President Bach and President Macron expressed their full support for the Organising Committee and its President, Olympic champion Tony Estanguet, who also attended the meeting, the IOC informed in a release late on Thursday.

The Olympic Games Paris 2024 will be Games of a new era, taking the reforms of the Olympic Agenda 2020 and Olympic Agenda 2020+5 fully into account." "The "Games"wide open" slogan will fully come to life at these Games. Paris 2024 will be the most inclusive Olympic Games, the most urban Olympic Games, the youngest Olympic Games, the most sustainable Olympic Games and the most gender-balanced Olympic Games in history, with full parity of female and male athletes," the IOC said.

President Bach thanked President Macron for the recent declaration at the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, concerning the autonomy of sport and the conditions for the participation of athletes with a Russian or Belarussian passport, in alignment with the respective recommendations of the IOC.

"In addition, they reaffirmed that the decision on the participation of these athletes at the Olympic Games Paris 2024 will be taken by the IOC at the appropriate time and that they will continue to cooperate in this respect, too," the IOC informed.

The IOC has currently suspended Russian and Belarus from the Olympic movement over the war in Ukraine. Russian and Belarus sportspersons participated in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 under the IOC flag. As of now, the IOC has not lifted the suspension of the two National Olympic Committees but will allow participants from the two countries as neutrals.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Las Vegas, June 9 : Police in Las Vegas have investigated multiple reports of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) sightings that occurred on the night of April 30, a media report said.

According to body camera footage obtained by USA Today, an officer drove to a family's residence on that night after they called 911 to report the sighting.

One of the family members told the officer they saw "a big creature" that was "long, 10 feet tall".

The officer told the family that he was looking into the claims because another cop saw something in the sky that matched the family's description eight minutes earlier.

"I'm not going to BS, you guys. One of my partners said they saw something fall out of the sky, too, so that's why I'm kind of curious," USA Today on Thursday quoted the officer as saying in the body camera footage.

"It's weird just the fact that our partner saw something at the exact time," he added.

Meanwhile, another nearby resident also called 911 on the same night to report about something "100 per cent not human" on their property, Las Vegas-based local TV station 8 News Now reported.

A separate body camera footage showed a glowing object flying in the sky.

About 40 minutes later, another man called 911 to report two unknown entities in his backyard after he and his family saw a similar object fall from of the sky, according to 8 News Now.

"There's like an 8-foot person beside it and another one is inside us and it has big eyes and it's looking at us and it's still there," the man said, according to the police dispatch audio posted by the TV channel.

"In my backyard. I swear to God this is not a joke, this is actually -- we're terrified." The man described the creatures as large and somewhere between 8 to 10 feet tall and appearing like aliens with big mouths, big shiny eyes.

The developments come as the powerful House Oversight Committee of the US House of Representatives is planning to hold a hearing on UFOs after a former intelligence official claimed that the Washington government has allegedly found crashed alien spacecraft.

On Monday, the former intelligence official, David Grusch, had said that the government has a covert program focused on recovering debris from crashed, non-human origin spacecraft and is attempting to reverse-engineer the technology, ABC News reported.

During a hearing in April, Director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Sean Kirkpatrick told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his agency was reviewing 650 incidents dating back decades but "found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics".

But last week, Kirkpatrick said that the total number of incidents had grown to "well over 800 cases".

Between 2004 to 2022, the US government has received more than 510 reports of UFOs, according to a declassified version of an annual report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published in January this year.
New Delhi, June 9 : Bidders have the rare opportunity to acquire exquisite masterpieces and rare compositions spanning different periods of Modern Indian Art at AstaGuru's upcoming 'Collector's Choice' Modern Indian Art auction.

Commenting on the auction, Sunny Chandiramani, Senior Vice President- Client Relations, AstaGuru, said, "The overwhelming response to 'Collectors Choice' affirms its success in creating a platform that appeals to a broad range of collectors, fostering a vibrant and dynamic art community. The ability to acquire artworks at different price points presents a chance for both seasoned and new art connoisseurs to expand their collections with diverse pieces. It encourages exploration and discovery, enabling them to uncover hidden gems and lesser-known artists that might otherwise go unnoticed." Leading the auction lineup is lot no. 15, which features on the catalogue cover. The work appearing in an auction for the first time belongs to the oeuvre of revered Bengal School artist Nandalal Bose. Executed in 1941 with tempera on paper, it depicts the immortal imagery of Radha and Krishna churning butter. Through vibrant colours and intricate details, as well as the serene expressions and graceful postures of the figures, the work evokes a sense of harmony and embodies the spirit of divine love. This lot is estimated to be acquired at Rs 15,00,000 - 20,00,000.

Lot no. 47, an untitled work by artist K. Laxma Goud is estimated to be sold at Rs 20,00,000 - 25,00,000. Appearing in an auction for the first, the work executed with acrylic on canvas in 2022 is a brilliant example of the artist's vibrant and captivating colour and his mastery over figurative subjects.

The auction will also present several renditions by Krishen Khanna depicting his famous Bandwallah figure. Lot no. 72 is a large-scale monochrome work executed with acrylic and charcoal. This work is estimated to be acquired at Rs 25,00,000 - 30,00,000. Lot no. 179 showcases a group of Bandwallahs through the medium of a bronze sculpture. Executed in 2016, this work is appearing in an auction for the first time and is estimated to be sold at Rs 10,00,000 - 15,00,000.

Lot no. 95 is a work from F. N. Souza's iconic head imagery. The mixed media on paper creation was executed in 1956 when the artist was staying in London. It was during this period that Souza first achieved critical and commercial success. The work originally belonged to the collection of Ragnar Zedell, who met the artist in Stockholm in the early 1960s and became one of his earliest patrons in the city. This work is estimated to be acquired at Rs 40,00,000 - 60,00,000.

Titled 'Prakriti', lot no. 113 is an illustrious example of S.H. Raza's exploration of the 'Bindu', which became an iconic element and a unifying motif of his oeuvre. Executed in 1994 with acrylic on canvas, this work also embodies the artist's renowned and groundbreaking approach to geometric abstraction. This work is appearing in an auction for the first time and is estimated to be sold at Rs 80,00,000 - 1,00,00,000.

Lot no. 133 is a monochrome abstract landscape work by Ram Kumar titled 'Autumn Landscape'. Executed Circa 1950, this work was created after the artist moved to Paris to study under famed artist and writer Andre Lhote. The oil on canvas work is estimated to be acquired at Rs 60,00,000 - 80,00,000.

An important bronze sculpture by artist Himmat Shah, lot no. 145, is also offered in the auction. The work 'Untitled - Goddess Durga (Ed. 5/5)', was also exhibited at the artist's retrospective at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, in 2016. It was also published in the book 'Himmat in London: 36 Bronze Sculptures' by Aleph Book Company in 2021. It is estimated to be sold at Rs 25,00,000 - 30,00,000.

Lot no. 155 is a large-scale figurative work, executed in signature style by artist Jogen Chowdhury. Executed with pastel and acrylic on canvas in 2019, it is estimated to be sold at Rs 30,00,000 - 40,00,000.

Lot no. 200 is an untitled work by artist Anjolie Ela Menon, executed in her signature medium of oil on masonite board. Executed in 2022, it was showcased in the exhibition titled 'Anjolie Ela Menon: Nostalgia 2022' at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi. It was also published in the book 'Anjolie - Inner Vision: A Selection of Works from 1956 - 2022' by The Arts Trust, Mumbai, in 2023. This work is estimated to be acquired at Rs 30,00,000 - 40,00,000.

The auction will also present works by several more eminent artists of India, including M.V. Dhurandhar, Jamini Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, M. F. Husain, Akbar Padamsee, K. H. Ara, Sakti Burman, K. K. Hebbar, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Ganesh Pyne, Satish Gujaral, K.G. Subramanyan, Manu Parekh, Biren De, Thota Vaikuntam, Bhupen Khakhar, V.S. Gaitonde, and ManitBawa among others.

(IANSlife can be contacted at ianslife@ians.in)
New Delhi, June 9 : Through "Soft Invasions, stitch-punk visions" exhibition, celebrate Pride with exhibits crocheted sculptures and embroidery. It fearlessly reclaims the art of crochet, envisioning utopia within a dystopian world. The exhibition unveils a vibrant narrative where colourful organisms break free from a smog-filled, colour-drained world impacted by rising temperatures and habitat loss. These regenerative life forms disrupt borders and leave an indelible impression. How will we respond to this queer invasion? Queer visual artist liactuallee proudly presents an extraordinary exhibition hosted by Method Bandra in honour of Pride Month. Experience a collection of captivating crocheted sculptures and embroidery that offers a fresh and different perspective.

liactuallee explores alternate worlds, leveraging crochet as a medium. Drawing inspiration from traditional, punk, and feminist textile art encountered during their Polish childhood, the artist reintroduces crochet, needle-point, and embroidery techniques. These mediums serve as a conduit for liactuallee's tender profanities, manifesting into three-dimensional reality from the two-dimensional realm. Through repetitive stitches, the artist evokes a sense of calm, breath control, and comfort within the body. The fluidity of the stitch mirrors that of the human body, fearlessly transcending boundaries and occupying space. Rather than portraying dystopian or apocalyptic visions, li redefines stitching as a potent and expressive tool, advocating for hopeful futures.

With a diverse cultural background, liactuallee, a queer transient being, explores the fluidity of the world through mixed media drawings and fibre art. Influenced by their practice as a yoga instructor, li merges aesthetics and spiritual transformation, emphasising the significance of repetitive patterns of movement and line.

(IANSlife can be contacted at ianslife@ians.in)
Moscow, June 9 : Siberia, known for its harsh cold climate, has reported record breaking temperatures as the Russian region is currently amidst the "worst heat wave in history".

On June 3, temperatures reached 37.9 degrees Celsius in Jalturovosk, its hottest day in Siberia's history, climatologist Maximiliano Herrera told CNN on Thursday.

Several all-time heat records were also broken on Wednesday, including in Baevo, which reached 39.6 degrees and Barnaul, which hit 38.5 degrees.

Some of these stations have between five and seven decades of temperature recordings, Herrera told CNN.

"So we can say it's really exceptional. It's the region's 'worst heat wave in history'," he added.

"Records keep falling today (Thursday) with again temperatures around 40 degrees Celsius," Herrera told CNN.

An intense and prolonged heat wave in 2020, which saw the Arctic Siberian town of Verkhoyansk hit 38 Celsius, would have been "almost impossible" without human-caused climate change, according to an analysis by a team of international scientists.

"Siberia is one of the fastest warming regions on the planet with hot extremes increasing in intensity," Omar Baddour, chief of climate monitoring and policy services at the World Meteorological Organization, told CNN.

The region "has seen some very intense heat waves", said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

"These heat waves have major implications for people and nature and will continue to happen more frequently unless we rapidly cut emissions of greenhouse gases," she told CNN.

It is not just Siberia that has seen record heat this week.

On Wednesday, temperatures of more than 45 degrees were recorded in China, 43 degrees in Uzbekistan and 41 degrees in Kazakhstan.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. Switzerland stood as the primary export partner of Kyrgyzstan among non-CIS countries from January through March 2023, representing 9.3 percent of the Kyrgyz overall export volume, Trend reports.

The exports from Kyrgyzstan to Switzerland amounted to $40.6 million in 1Q2023 skyrocketing by 149 times, compared to $271,100 in the same period of 2022.

Imports to Kyrgyzstan from Switzerland totaled $2 million in 1Q2023, which is a 2.2-fold increase compared to the $895,100 recorded in the same period of 2022.

Overall, trade turnover between Kyrgyzstan and Switzerland exceeded $42.6 million in 1Q2023, which is 36.5 times higher than $1.166 million in the same period of 2022. Trade with Switzerland accounted for 1.6 percent of the Kyrgyz total trade turnover.

Meanwhile, trade turnover between Kyrgyzstan with European countries amounted to $270.2 million in the first quarter of 2023, increasing by 2.7 times over $99 million in the same time span of 2022.
San Francisco, June 9 : Aerospace giant Boeing has been sued by Colorado-based Wilson Aerospace over alleged theft of intellectual property (IP) related to NASA's Artemis rocket mission.

In the lawsuit, the small family-run tools company claimed that Boeing has stolen its IP related to multiple devices over the last two decades.

The company alleged that Boeing built "counterfeit" variations of Wilson's tools for NASA projects including the International Space Station (ISS) and its NASA's Space Launch Systems rocket.

It stated that the tools that Boeing passed on as its own to NASA were behind the leaks on ISS and hydrogen leaks during repeated attempts to fuel and launch SLS rocket for its Artemis 1 mission. These endangered lives of astronauts.

"Boeing has not only stolen our intellectual property and damaged our company's reputation but has used the technology incorrectly and at the expense of astronauts' safety, which is beyond despicable," said David Wilson, Jr., Wilson Aerospace president and founder, in a press statement.

Wilson's "lawsuit is rife with inaccuracies and omissions", a Boeing spokesperson was quoted as saying in a statement to CNBC.

According to Wilson's lawyer Pete Flowers, the theft of tools helped Boeing's win billions in contract awards and fees from the government, while the company faced a loss of "hundreds of millions of dollars".

The company brought 10 claims against Boeing, including claims of copyright infringement, misappropriation and theft of trade secrets, and fraud, the report said.

Wilson said it believes the theft is "a broader pattern of criminal behaviour by Boeing". The company pointed to prior litigation such as theft of Lockheed Martin trade secrets in 2006.

"We fully believe that there are other companies, probably small American-owned companies, that have been affected by this same activity inside Boeing," Wilson lawyer Flowers told CNBC.

"We will vigorously defend against this in court," Boeing said.
New Delhi, June 9 : Two people died and two others injured after a car collided with a motorcycle in Delhi's Dwarka area, a police official said on Friday.

The four were riding on the same bike. While the victims were identified as Foola (30) and Lakhan (37), the two injured were Foola's husband Maate (32) and their 10-year-old daughter Diksha.

According to the official, the incident was reported to the police in Dwarka North at around 11.30 p.m. on Thursday night.

"The injured victims were transferred to the Indira Gandhi Hospital for medical treatment. Maate and Diksha were referred to Safdarjung Hospital for further care. Unfortunately, Foola and Lakhan succumbed to their injuries during treatment," said M. Harsha Vardhan, the Deputy Commissioner of Police (Dwarka).

"It was revealed that Lakhan was Maate's brother-in-law. All four individuals hailed from the Tikamgarh district of Madhya Pradesh and were engaged in labour work in Delhi," said the DCP.

During investigation, the police recorded a statement from Maate.

"He recounted that he, along with his family, were traveling on the motorcycle from Bharat Vihar towards Sector 17 in Dwarka when the Creta, coming from Sector 13, collided, resulting in the accident," said the DCP.

A case under sections 279 (Rash driving or riding on a public way), 337 (Causing hurt by act endangering life or personal safety of others), 304A (Causing death by negligence), and 427 (Mischief causing damage to the amount of fifty rupees) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) has been registered at Dwarka North police station.

"We have successfully apprehended the accused, identified as Abrar, (24), a resident of Gopal Nagar, Najafgarh," the official added.
Paris, June 9 : Defending champion Iga Swiatek booked her place in the Roland-Garros final for the third time in four years after she ended the dream run of 14th seed Beatriz Haddad Maia, beating the Brazilian 6-2, 7-6(7).

Just as she did in 2020, when she won her first Grand Slam title as the unseeded World No.54, Swiatek hasn't dropped a set en route to the final, where she will face the unseeded Czech player Karolina Muchova, who edged out No.2 seed Aryna Sabalenka in a three-set thriller earlier on Thursday.

The win also ensured Swiatek will retain the No.1 ranking after Roland Garros concludes, whatever the result against Muchova.

"I'm just pretty happy to be in the final again. It was a tough match, and especially the second set, every point counted. It was stressful in some moments, so I'm happy that I was really solid and I was able to close it in the tiebreaker," Swiatek said after the win as quoted by WTA.

The Pole had to come from a break down in each set and saved a set point in the second-set tiebreak and eight games marked the most she lost in her six matches so far this fortnight.

After turning around an 0-1 head-to-head against Haddad Maia, Swiatek will seek to do it against Muchova in Saturday's final. The Czech won their only prior meeting four years ago in Prague, when Swiatek was a 17-year-old ranked No.95 in the world.

Speaking on her how she will prepare for the final, the 22-year-old Pole said: "There is no sense to change anything. If you're in a final it means your routine is working. Our goal is to play this match as any other one. I always tried to do that and it usually works."
Hyderabad, June 9 : Taking strong exception to 'Aurangzeb ki aulad' remark of Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi asked him "who are the offspring of Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte, the killers of Mahatma Gandhi".

The Hyderabad MP slammed Fadnavis for making the remark while referring to riots in Kolhapur. "Tell us who are the offspring of Godse and Apte," asked Owaisi.

He alleged that 30,000 RSS men came out on streets after the alleged display of an image of Tipu Sultan in Kolhapur. "It was not an image of Tipu Sultan but was of some Allah Waley (saint) and the local people explained this to police," Owaisi said while addressing a public meeting in Hyderabad on Thursday night.

"Maharashtra minister Deepak Kesarkar said that 21 people were arrested for displaying the image of Tipu Sultan. Tell me which section of IPS says you can't keep a photo of Tipu Sultan," he asked The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) president lashed out at the BJP and Sangh Parivar for spreading hatred and maligning Islam and Muslims.

He also alleged that there is a conspiracy to create riots in Maharashtra before the Lok Sabha elections. He was all praise for AIMIM MP from Aurangabad Imtiaz Jaleel for standing in front of the temple for three hours to foil the designs to create communal trouble.

Referring to the list of 44 banned organisations in the first schedule of UAPA, he dares the BJP and RSS to also make a list of prohibited names like Tipu Sultan, Aurangzeb, Babar, Khilji, Jahangir, Bahadur Shah Zafar and Quli Qutb Shah.

"You also say that we will not include in this list names of Godse, Apte and Madanlal Pahwa because they are dear to us," he said, referring to the killers of Mahatma Gandhi.

Owaisi said 50 public meetings were held in Maharashtra in the name of Love Jihad to spread hatred. "Do you know where the Love Jihad started...," he asked.

"We know your history... I can cite many such examples," taunted Owaisi.

He also referred to the recent incident in which a girl eloped with her lover the day after BJP MP Pragya Singh showed her the movie 'Kerala Story'. The AIMIM chief advised BJP and Sangh Parivar not to interfere in love affairs.

Owaisi condemned the action of Madhya Pradesh's BJP government against Ganga Jamuna school for publishing an advertisement in which a Hindu girl is seen with 'dupatta' on her head.

The MP said the Collector and SP of Damoh also found during the investigation that the school was not forcing anyone to wear 'hijab'. "But such is their hatred towards Muslims and hijab that the district BJP president threw ink on the district education officer because he stated the truth in his report," he said.

He also referred to the suspension of UP bus driver Krishnapal Singh and contract employee Mohit Yadav for stopping the bus for three minutes to enable two Muslims to offer namaz.

"If offering namaz is a crime then remove all religious symbols from government offices," he said.
New Delhi, June 9 : The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday said that it recently carried out search operations at 27 locations linked to Broadson Commodities Pvt Ltd and Aditya Multicom Private limited directors, Chartered Accountants and other associates in Patna (Bihar), Jharkhand's Dhanbad and Hazaribagh, and Kolkata (West Bengal) in illegal mining case.

The ED initiated the PMLA investigation based on various FIRs registered by the Bihar Police against the companies and their directors.

FIRs were registered based on complaints from the Mining Department of Bihar against Broadson Commodities Pvt Ltd and Aditya Multicom Private limited and their directors for illegal sand mining and its sale without using the departmental pre-paid transportation E-Challan, issued by the Mining Authority, Bihar thus causing huge revenue loss of Rs. 250 crore to the government exchequer.

The search operation resulted in the discovery of cash, incriminating documents, sale deeds of properties purchased, FDRs in the name of companies and their directors.

The cash of Rs 1.5 crore and property documents worth Rs 11 crore have been seized, FDRs worth Rs 6 crore and 60 bank accounts have been freezed. Other incriminating physical and digital material found during the search have also been seized for further examination.

Further investigation into the matter is ongoing.
New Delhi, June 9 : Madhav Sheth, currently VP for Business and Corporate Strategy (Global) at leading technology brand realme, is likely to soon join Honor India to revive the rival brand in the country, top sources told IANS on Friday.

According to the sources, senior India leadership at realme is also rumoured to join Sheth in a key exodus, who is likely toAspearhead Honor India's operations as CEO in the country.

The director-level executives from realme's online and mainline (offline) verticals have also put in theirApapers, who will join Sheth at his new stint at Honor India, according to sources.

When contacted, the company did not immediately comment on the development.

Importantly, Sheth was absent from the company's flagship launch event on Thursday, where it introduced Realme 11 Pro 5G series featuring two models -- the 11 Pro 5G and the 11 Pro+ 5G.A The realme 11 series was endorsed by Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan as the company's new brand ambassador.

In March, the company said that Sheth, who was elevated to the new role of VP for Business and Corporate Strategy (Global), would look after the India market which is strategically important for the global technology brand.

The company had told IANS that Sheth's international background and global vision will provide forward-looking strategic guidance for realme's development in the global market.

It also firmed up its Indian management team. Nisar Naikoo and Dipesh Punamiya were assigned the responsibility of independently managing the India business.

Sheth, earlier the CEO of realme India, VP, realme and President, realme International Business Group, has been at the forefront of creating consumer products with trendsetting technologies, features and designs in the country.

The development at realme is significant at a time when the Indian smartphone market is going through a churn, as Apple and Samsung solidify their presence amid doubling down on local manufacturing of their products, leaving once formidable Chinese players behind in the race.

In 2020, Chinese conglomerate Huawei sold off its Honor smartphone business assets to China-based Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology Co Ltd.

Last year, Honor said it was not planning to exit the Indian market, where it expanded beyond smartphones to enter the laptop segment and also launched a wearables portfolio.

"Honor is maintaining business operations in India and will continue its development," a company spokesperson had said.

The company still has a sizable presence in the country, along with its service centres.

Launched at Rs 42,990, the company's introductory laptop, Honor MagicBook 15, came with 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, a hidden pop-up webcam, 2-in-1 fingerprint power button and a compact 65W fast charger.

Since its creation in 2013, the Honor brand has focused on the youth market by offering phones in the low- to mid-end price range.

In 2020, the company made the Honor Watch GS 3 available in India for Rs 12,990.
New Delhi, June 9 : The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to examine a plea on June 13 against the Telangana High Court order allowing anticipatory bail to YSRCP MP from Kadapa Y.S. Avinash Reddy in the 2019 murder case of former Andhra Pradesh Minister Y.S. Vivekananda Reddy.

The plea has been filed by Suneetha Narreddy, daughter of Y.S. Vivekananda Reddy.

Senior advocate Sidharth Luthra, representing Narreddy, mentioned the matter before a vacation bench comprising Justices Aniruddha Bose and Rajesh Bindal.

Seeking urgent hearing on the petition, Luthra said, "He is the principal conspirator in the death of my father. He is a local MP. He is getting political support from the administration, who ensured that the CBI could not arrest him... The high court has gone on certain media reports..." The apex court scheduled the matter for hearing on June 13.

Narreddy contended that the high court virtually accepted the entire case put forth by the accused and disregarded the evidence collected by the CBI. Narreddy, in the special leave petition, pointed out that Kadapa MP from the ruling party had not cooperated with the CBI by evading notices for appearance.

The plea submitted that the high court allowed the anticipatory bail to the accused contrary to the law laid down by this court. The plea argued that the high court held a mini trial, gave findings and made comments on the merits of the prosecution case.

On May 31, the Telangana High Court granted anticipatory bail to Kadapa MP Y.S. Avinash Reddy with certain conditions in the murder case. Justice M. Laxman, who had completed the hearing last week, pronounced the order on Wednesday.

The court granted anticipatory bail subject to certain conditions. It directed that the MP should not leave the country without prior permission from the CBI. "The petitioner shall not tamper with the prosecution witnesses or alter any evidence," read the order.

The MP had not appeared before the CBI on May 16 and May 19 in Hyderabad. On May 16, he cited prior-fixed official engagements in Pulivendula as the reason and sought four days' time. On May 19, he conveyed to the CBI that he would not be able to appear before it as his mother took ill. She was admitted to a hospital in Kurnool and the MP was also staying there.

The central agency had issued a fresh notice on May 19, directing him to appear before it at its Hyderabad office on May 22.

Amid reports of the CBI officials reaching Kurnool for possible arrest, he wrote to the CBI seeking exemption from appearance till May 27 in view of his mother's condition.

Vivekananda Reddy, brother of former Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, uncle of Jagan Mohan Reddy, was murdered at his residence in Pulivendula on March 15, 2019, weeks before the elections.

Last month, the CBI arrested Avinash Reddy's father Y.S. Bhaskar Reddy, a cousin of Rajasekhara Reddy.
Lucknow, June 9 : Soaring air fares to various prime tourist destinations are now making people cancel holiday plans this summer.

Air fares to Srinagar, Goa, Mumbai, Coimbatore, Kolkata, Dehradun and Kathmandu have soared beyond the reach of middle-class families and record cancellations have taken place in the past one week.

"We had planned to visit Srinagar in mid-June but the air fares are now beyond our reach. The one-way air fares are between Rs 11,000 and Rs 18,000 and I cannot afford it for my family of five. I am told that taxis in Srinagar have also increased their rates," said Rajeshwar Singh, an executive in a telecom company.

With one-way Lucknow-Dehradun fares ranging between Rs 8,000 to 11,000, several people have opted for road travel to Uttarakhand.

"We went to Mukteshwar in Uttarakhand but could not get any hotel. For the first time, people are seeing traffic jams in this small town. We could stay for just two days in a homestay and then came back," said Sumit Agarwal, a software techie.

"The rising air fares have been a major spoiler this season. A one-way ticket to Kathmandu costs between Rs 15,000 to Rs 18,000. How can any middle-class family be expected to bear the cost of this holiday? We searched for other options, including Goa but could not afford a family trip," said Prem Swarup, a retired government employee.

Travel and tour operators also admit that there have been a record number of cancellations due to soaring prices in the industry.

Even hotel tariffs have soared beyond the reach of the common man.

Vivek Kumar, who works in a travel agency, said, "The air tariffs are coming down in July but by then schools will reopen and family holidays cannot be planned."
Lucknow, June 9 : The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has decided to project its party chief Mayawati as the Prime Ministerial candidate for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

BSP sources said that the party would not join any opposition alliance but would go it alone in the Lok Sabha elections.

Senior BSP leader Bhimrao Ambedkar said, "The leaders of the opposition are holding meetings in various states to prepare the groundwork for the opposition parties to fight against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Even after several rounds of meetings, it is not clear as to who would be the Prime Ministerial candidate from the opposition." The BSP, however, has decided to project party chief Mayawati as the PM candidate," he said.

Ambedkar said that BSP is not a follower of other political parties but it is a party based on ideology and cadre.

BSP functionaries said that Mayawati continued to enjoy the confidence of Dalits across the country and had the image of being a tough and able administrator.

Party leaders claim that once Mayawati positions herself as the prime ministerial candidate, Dalits who had moved over to the BJP, will return to the BSP fold.
New Delhi, June 9 : While attacking the Centre over a media report claiming Chinese infrastructure construction near the Line of Actual Control (LAC) on the Uttarakhand border, Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge on Friday said that Beijing "should be confronted strategically together and not by making hollow boasts".

Taking to Twitter, Kharge said: "Our territorial integrity is being impinged upon by audacious Chinese military construction at the LAC, now in Uttrakhand! The nation is paying a heavy price for Modi ji's CLEAN CHIT to China.

"China should be confronted strategically together, and not by making hollow boasts!" He also attached the media report which cited satellite images showing the construction of the new infrastructures allegedly of the Chinese army.

The report also claimed that the structures coming up just 40 km away from the Pulam Sumda in Uttarkashi district.

The Congress has been criticial of the Central government for giving a clean chit to China in June 2020 over the Galwan border standoff.

The party has also criticised the Centre over the issue of Indian land occupied by China in Ladakh region.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. The Uzbek-Kyrgyz Development Fund signed a credit agreement with Kyrgyz Kogart HPP Company, where the fund undertakes to finance the construction of a small hydropower plant (HPP) in Kyrgyzstan, Trend reports.

According to the fund, it prioritizes projects that enhance electricity generation from renewable sources. The approval of financing for the small HPP construction demonstrates the fund's commitment to promoting sustainable energy solutions.

The project envisions the construction of a small hydropower plant with an installed capacity of 6.7 MW. Once operational, it is estimated to generate an average annual electricity output of 20.1 million kWh.

The advantages of this project include boosting of the economic development of the region, and creating 11 new job opportunities.

Moreover, the project's electricity output will play an important role in meeting the growing energy demands of Kyrgyzstan. With an existing deficit, the supply of electricity from the small hydropower plant will help stabilize the energy market.

The successful realization of this project is expected no only to contribute to the country's energy security, but also advance its sustainable development goals.
Addis Ababa, June 9 : The number of people arriving in Ethiopia to escape the violence in Sudan has surpassed 41,200, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) said.

"More than 41,200 people are estimated to have crossed from Sudan into Ethiopia, majority are Ethiopian returnees, as of June 6," the UNOCHA said in its latest situation update.

The UNOCHA said the uninterrupted daily large number of arrivals, estimated between 700 and 1,000 per day, is a challenge to response capacities at the Metema point of entry in Ethiopia's Amhara region, reports Xinhua news agency.

It warned that more than 4,000 refugees, asylum seekers and about 80 returnees remain at the Metema point of entry resulting in congestion that could expose arrivals to health and protection risks.

It said more than 19,500 Ethiopian returnees were provided with transportation services from Metema to their respective destinations.

Noting that hot meals, drinking water and health services are being provided at the Metema point of entry and Mandefro Terara transit site, the UNOCHA said the services are far from meeting the scale of needs.

Amidst efforts being made by partners to assess the situation at other border entry points of the country, the UNOCHA said refugees and asylum seekers in Gambella Region reportedly must travel from crossing points to existing refugee camps or often stay with host communities as there is no known support in between the areas.

Sudan has witnessed deadly armed clashes between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in the capital city of Khartoum and other areas since April 15, with the two sides accusing each other of initiating the conflict.

The conflict has so far killed more than 800 people, injured thousands others and displaced at least 1.6 million.
Kiev, June 9 : The breaching of a major dam in southern Ukraine and the susequent collapse of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant earlier this week, will lead to devastating economic and ecological consequences, an expert has said.

"Up to 1 million people may face drinking water problems," Oleksii Kushch, an economist at "United Ukraine" think-tank, told Xinhua in an interview.

The breaching of the dam and the subsequent destruction of a hydro-electric power plant in the Russian-controlled Nova Kakhovka region in the early hours of Tuesday, have led to mass evacuations as water levels downstream rapidly increased.

Officials have said that 30 towns and villages along the river have been flooded and nearly 2,000 homes have been submerged in the city of Kherson -- the region's capital controlled by Ukraine.

Of the 30 flooded towns and villages, 20 are controlled by Ukraine and 10 are occupied by Russia.

Kiev and Moscow have traded accusations over the dam's destruction, without providing concrete proof that the other is culpable.

It is not yet clear whether the dam was deliberately attacked or whether the breach was the result of structural failure.

Apart from the humanitarian consequences, the catastrophe will take a heavy toll on the economic development of Ukraine's central Dnipropetrovsk and southern Mykolayiv, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions, Kushch said.

"The water use intensity in the regional gross domestic product will change significantly -- industrial enterprises will lack water. These are mainly enterprises in the processing industry and metallurgy," he said, citing the industrial cities of Kryvyi Rih and Nikopol among those to be severely hit by the water crisis.

In addition, the disaster will stop the water supplies to about 30 irrigation systems, which irrigated about 1 million hectares of agricultural fields, the expert said, adding as a result, Ukraine may lose 10-15 per cent of its agricultural potential due to indirect or direct influence of the breaching incident.

Consequently, Ukraine's southern regions, where vegetable growing and horticulture were concentrated, may soon turn into semi-deserted areas.

"The land use in this region will be changed. Instead of vegetables and moisture-loving plants, mostly unpretentious plants, primarily sunflowers, will be grown in the region," Kushch said.

As the Kakhovka plant destruction would cause the loss of approximately 60 percent of water resources in the regional water balance of Mykolayiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, soil salinazation may become another environmental disaster, posing risks to people's health, he warned.

"In the absence of water and irrigation, groundwaters, which consist primarily of salt marshes in this region, will rise... Some salt marshes in the region contain heavy metals and harmful substances that could be spread by the wind. They enter the human body through the respiratory system. This can lead to an increase in serious diseases and abnormalities in the development of children," Kushch said.

The expert estimated that the restoration of the Kakhovka plant and its structures would take about five years and require about $2 billion.

The attack on the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant is possibly the most significant damage to civilian infrastructure since the Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths.

"The sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realized in the coming days. But it is already clear that it will have grave and far-reaching consequences for thousands of people in southern Ukraine," he told an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.
Sanaa, June 9 : A UN mission has conducted a successful test landing of a helicopter at the Hodeidah International Airport in Yemen after an eight-year suspension.

In a statement, the UN Mission to Support the Hodeidah Agreement (UNMHA), responsible for monitoring the ceasefire agreement in the Red Sea port city, said the test landing was conducted as part of its ongoing efforts to improve its operations, reports Xinhua news agency.

It called the success a positive step toward enhancing the mission's access and ensuring the effective implementation of its mandate.

The Hodeidah International Airport, under the control of the Houthi militia since 2014, has remained non-operational since the start of military operations by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in support of the internationally recognised Yemeni government in March 2015.

The restoration of the Hodeidah airport holds the potential to facilitate the flow of humanitarian aid, bringing relief to the suffering population in Yemen.

The UNMHA was established following an agreement between the Yemeni government and the Houthi group under the auspices of the UN in Stockholm, Sweden, in December 2018 to oversee the cessation of military activities in the Hodeidah region.
Kolkata, June 9 : The CBI is questioning the superintendent of Presidency Central Correctional Home in Kolkata Debasish Chakraborty over "prisoner's petition" filed by expelled youth Congress leader Kuntal Ghosh's allegations that the central agencies were pressuring him to name Trinamool Congress national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee in the school recruitment case in West Bengal.

Ghosh, an accused in the case, has written letters to a local police station and a judge of a special court for the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) accusing the central agencies on this count.

Sources said that Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officials are questioning Chkaraborty on whether proper procedures were followed and his approval was sought by Ghosh before making this "prisoner's petition".

The sleuths are seeking information about the jail employee who performed the task of delivering the letters from Ghosh to the local police station and the office of the judge of the special court of PMLA.

Both CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED) counsels have questioned the justification of making this "prisoner's petition" separately when Ghosh's counsel had never raised the same allegation within the court.

The central agency counsels have also informed the court that Ghosh started making these accusations just a day after Abhishek Banerjee made a similar allegation against the central agencies of pressuring senior Trinamool Congress leaders in the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam.

Recently, CBI sleuths also questioned Ghosh in connection with the Presidency Central Correctional Home premises. The main question was whether Ghosh had made these "prisoner's petitions" under any kind of pressure.

However, sources said, Ghosh informed that he was under no such pressure to write those letters.
Colombo, June 9 : At least 20 passengers were injured when a passenger bus collided with a lorry in Colombo on Friday, the police said.

The police said the bus heading from the Sri Lankan capital to the eastern town of Akkaraipattu, reports Xinhua news agency.

The police said the injured were rushed to the local hospitals.

Some 19,740 road accidents were reported in Sri Lanka in 2022, killing 2,485 people, according to the police.
Mumbai, June 9 : A political storm was kicked up in Maharashtra again as two top Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) leaders -- Nationalist Congress Party President Sharad Pawar and Shiv Sena (UBT) Chief Spokesperson Sanjay Raut -- received fresh death threats from unknown persons, here on Friday.

Sharad Pawar has been warned via a Twitter message threatening he will meet the same fate as Dr. Narendra Dabholkar (the rationalist who was shot dead in Pune in August 2013), sending shockwaves in political circles.

Moving swiftly, the state police's Cyber Cell has tracked down the purported suspect, Saurabh Pimpalkar to Amravati, a local history-sheeter, who made the Twitter threat, and now he is being probed.

In a telephonic threat issued through Sunil Raut, MLA, his brother, Sanjay Raut, MP has been served an ultimatum to stop his 'morning loudspeakers' within a month failing which he would be "sprayed with bullets".

Sanjay Raut pointed an accusing finger at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and alleged that the threats to him and Pawar are 'stage-sponsored', and said the state government took no action in the previous threats he had received.

The unknown caller, speaking in a menacing tone, even warned a similar fate to Sunil Raut if his elder sibling (Sanjay Raut) failed to stop his 'morning loudspeakers' (daily morning media interactions), and "we shall send you both to the crematorium".

Taking strong umbrage, NCP MP Supriya Sule called on Mumbai Police Commissioner Vivek Phansalkar and lodged a complaint seeking a probe and strict action in the matter, while Raut has shot off a letter to the police on the threats he received.

An agitated Sule warned that if anything happens to her father, "then the state home department (headed by Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis) shall be held responsible for it".

She also drew the attention of Union Home Minister Amit Shah to the development even as many NCP leaders slammed the government and demanded immediate action.

State BJP President Chandrashekhar Bawankule said the threat to Pawar is a matter of concern and urged the police to take urgent action in the matter.

A grim Fadnavis said that such threats will not be tolerated in a progressive Maharashtra and later called the CoP (Commissioner of Police) for a meeting on the issue.

Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) President Prakash Ambedkar said the state government must take these threats seriously and act on them.

"Power comes and goes... Whichever government may be ruling, the people and the leaders cannot be put at risk in this manner," cautioned Ambedkar.

Other NCP seniors, including Leader of Opposition Ajit Pawar, state President Jayant Patil, Chhagan Bhujbal, Dr. Jitendra Awhad, Anil Deshmukh, and other leaders slammed the government for their failure to prevent the regular threats faced by the Opposition parties and their top functionaries.

Both Pawar and Raut are considered the chief architects of the Congress-NCP-Shiv Sena (UBT) MVA alliance which ruled for over 30 months till the former Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray was toppled in June 2022.
Bengaluru, June 9 : The ruling Congress in Karnataka on Friday stated that it would take a re-look at handing over government properties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and organisations linked to Sangh Parivar.

The issue is likely to stir a huge controversy in the state.

Minister for Health and Family Welfare K. Dinesh Gundu Rao told media that a lot of government properties have been given to the institutions linked to RSS and Sangh Parivar during the rule of previous BJP government.

"We have to re-look at all those things, verify whether they were done lawfully and due procedure is followed and take a decision on what can be done now," he said.

Minister Dinesh Gundu Rao stated that a large number of government properties have been given to institutions and organisations which are closely linked to the RSS and Sangh Parivar.

Minister Rao also announced that the contract given to GVK company for providing services of 108 ambulances have been terminated. The system for dialysis in the state is not proper and a contract in this regard has also been canceled. "Immediate works have been taken up now, the pattern of work in the health department is being changed. The work pattern of officers, doctors will have to be changed. Some of the policy matters will also need to be changed," he said.

The Congress government had declared that it would get the alleged illegalities investigated committed during the previous BJP government. Dr K. Sudhakar was holding the health portfolio then.

The Congress government has stated that it has begun the textbook revision exercise to remove the texts written on RSS founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, BJP's iconic figure Veer Savarkar and texts by right wing authors to the much chagrin of the BJP party. It has been alleged that the BJP government has generously granted land and properties to Hindutva organisations during its tenure in Karnataka.

It is to be seen the Congress government which took U-turn over the statement on imposing ban on RSS and Bajrang Dal and stated no proposal as such is before it, how the matters will be pursued regarding allotment of government properties to the organisations linked with the RSS and sangh parivar.
Tokyo, June 9 : Japan's upper house of parliament on Friday passed a contentious bill to amend an immigration and refugee law allowing for authorities to deport foreign nationals who apply for refugee status multiple times.

Despite some opposition parties rejecting the move, the law was enacted with the support of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its junior Komeito coalition ally, along with other smaller parties, reports Xinhua news agency.

The controversial revision of the immigration and refugee law has been heavily criticized by organisations here established to support asylum seekers.

Such entities believe that now the revised law has been enacted it could lead to individuals being repatriated to their home countries where they face persecution.

The main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, which has called for the system to be overseen by a third-party and not just immigration officials to ensure fairness, attempted to block passage of the bill in the eleventh hour by submitting a censure motion against Justice Minister Ken Saito, who is in charge of the legislation.

The motion was voted down in the upper chamber of Japan's bicameral parliament on Wednesday, however.

Refugee status was given to a record 202 people in Japan in 2022.

But this was out of 3,772 applicants, with Japan falling far behind some European countries and the US, which take in tens of thousands of refugees annually.

In 2021, refugee permits were granted to only 74 out of 2,413 asylum-seekers.

This is because Tokyo only grants refugee permits to those who meet each criteria of the Refugee Convention, which describes refugees as people who are unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion; outside the country of their nationality; and unable or, owing to such fear, unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of their country.
New Delhi, June 9 : The Supreme Court on Friday modified the Delhi High Court order, which granted 15-day interim bail to Raghav Magunta, son of YSR Congress Party MP Magunta Srinivasulu Reddy.

A vacation bench comprising Justices Aniruddha Bose and Justice Rajesh Bindal did not cancel the bail granted to Raghav, however it asked him to surrender on June 12, instead of June 22.

At the outset, additional solicitor general (ASG) S.V. Raju, appearing for the Enforcement Directorate (ED), argued that the interim bail was a ploy on the part of Raghav to stay out of jail. Raju said his regular bail was rejected by a special court and then he attempted at interim bail, where he cited his wife's sickness, which also failed because as soon as the high court ordered evaluation in the matter, he withdrew his application. Raju argued that now he has filed for interim bail for maternal grandmother and stressed that she just had a fall and it is not serious, there are people to look after her.

Senior advocate Amit Desai, representing Raghav, contended that her sickness had been verified by the ED itself. Raju emphasized that in the high court it was made to appear that his paternal grandmother was in the hospital, however, as per records, his paternal grandmother had already passed away. Desai said grandmother includes paternal and maternal and his client never claimed anyone else, and she is very old and there is no one to look after her.

During the hearing, Raju said falling in the bathroom has become a trend and also referred to the fall of Satyendar Jain in the bathroom, while insisting that these are tricks to get interim bail because Raghav could not get regular bail.

After hearing submissions, the top court said the purpose for Raghav's release could be served by June 12. "We accordingly modify the order to direct that interim bail be till 12 June 2023 as he has already been enlarged on bail on 7 June 2023," said the bench.

The top court was hearing a plea by the ED against the high court order. The ED had arrested him in February 2023 in connection with the Delhi liquor policy scam case.

On Wednesday, the high court granted interim bail to Magunta after noting that his mother-in-law has been hospitalised. Magunta is an accused in the Delhi excise policy money laundering case.

The trial court had earlier declined to grant interim bail saying that it cannot be ignored that the accused was being prosecuted for money laundering which is a serious economic offence.

The CBI and ED are investigating the case against senior AAP leader and former Delhi deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, Magunta and others, claiming that there are irregularities, which were committed while modifying the excise policy and undue favours were extended to licence holders. Sisodia, who is an accused in the case, is currently in jail.

In November 2021, the Delhi government implemented the excise policy, but scrapped it at the end of September 2022 amid allegations of corruption.
Canberra, June 9 : Australian flag carrier Qantas announced on Friday that it has relaxed its gender-based uniform rules, allowing male employees to put make-up while female staffers will no longer require to wear heels while on duty.

In a statement, the airline said: "Fashions change, and so have our style guidelines over the years. We're proud of our diversity as well as bringing our guidelines up to date," the BBC reported.

Under the relaxed rules, which will also apply to employees of Qantas' budget airline Jetstar, both women and men will also be allowed to wear the same sort of jewellery, including large watches.

All employees, including pilots and flight attendants, will be allowed to have long hair, if it is worn in a ponytail or bun.

But Qantas worker will still have to keep their tattoos covered up and the rules also specify which items of uniform can be worn together, including requiring tights or stockings to be worn with skirts.

Meanwhile, Imogen Sturni from the Australian Services Union (ASU), which had campaigned for Qantas to change its uniform policy, said the move was a "big win for workers".

"Some of the dress code requirements were bordering on ridiculous, such as makeup style guides and a requirement for women to wear smaller watches than men," Sturni told the BBC.

The flag carrier's move comes after some other airlines also relaxed their uniform policies.

In September 2022, UK-based carrier Virgin Atlantic said it would take a "fluid approach" to uniforms, which allowed staff to choose what they wore to work "no matter their gender".

In 2019, Air New Zealand ended a ban on staff having visible tattoos, to allow "employees to express their individuality and cultural heritage".
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. Two Chinese companies (China Machinery Engineering Corporation (CMEC) and Global Advanced Manufacturing Institute (GAMI)) will take part in the reconstruction and renovation of Talco Tajik Aluminium Company, which runs the largest Tajik aluminum plant, Trend reports.

This announcement was made during Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon's visit to Tursunzoda city, where the company is located.

The Chinese companies plan to take part in utilizing automated process control system technologies.

The modernization of Talco is expected to reduce electricity usage and increase the production of alumina, aluminum fluoride, cryolite, and anode.

The reconstruction and modernization are being carried out in three stages. The first stage of the project is expected to be completed within 14 months, with a production capacity of 80,000 tons of products per year during this phase. The second stage of the project will cover the years from 2025 through 2026. During this period, the remaining part of the sixth line will be updated, and the annual metal production will supposedly reach 70,000 tons.

In the third stage of the project implementation, which will last 14 months, the sixth line of electrolysis production will be completely renovated, and new aluminum production technologies will be installed. According to the forecasts, the production capacity during this stage will be 150,000 tons of products per year.

The outcome of the upgrade and the introduction of the cutting-of-edge technologies is expected to boost production capacity of the company up to 300,000 tons per year.
Shillong, June 9 : The Meghalaya government has banned the sale, distribution and storage of imported fish for a period of 15 days after a sample test of river water fish showed the presence of formalin, officials said Friday.

If anyone violates the government order, the person would be punished with seven years in jail and a fine of Rs 10 lakhs.

In notification, the state's Commissioner for Food Safety M. Kurbah said that out of the 40 samples of fish tested, 30 were positive for formalin.

The analysis reports of Tuesday from the Assistant Food Analyst of Meghalaya government, said that the samples were highly toxic and injurious to health.

The Food Safety and Standards (Food Products Standards and Food Additives) Regulations, 2011, indicates the preservatives permitted to be used in select articles of food and formalin is not included in the said list of permitted preservatives.

The notification said that the distribution, storage and sale of fresh fish treated with formalin or other unpermitted preservatives render the articles 'unsafe" under the Food Safety and Standard Act, 2006.

"The storage, distribution or sale of imported fresh fish or crustaceans brought from outside the state is hereby prohibited under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 for a period of 15 days in the interest of public health or till corrective measures are taken," the notification said.

Meghalaya imports various types of fish mostly from Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam and Bangladesh.
Mumbai, June 9 : Actor Sohum Shah, who has been receiving a lot of positive response for his recently released streaming show 'Dahaad', has explained the reason behind the audio-visual content's wide reach and why it appeals to a lot of people compared to other art forms like painting, music or photography.

Talking to IANS, the actor said: "Kahaniyaan toh har kisiko sunane ka shauk hi hota hai na (Everyone loves good stories). The kids are also told bed time stories. Stories engage the minds of the audience and keep them on the edge, not like other artforms don't do but stories connect with the mass audience on a very basic level." In the series, Sohum essays the role of a cop from a small town who has earlier faced charges of corruption.

He further mentioned: "Modern art for instance often requires you to be equipped with a certain kind of understanding and perception about that artform, the colours and themes, but a good story can be easily grasped by the audience of all kinds, that's the reason I feel films have a very big audience base." 'Dahaad' is streaming on Prime Video.
Betul : , June 9 (IANS/ 101 Reporters) Nisha Bele (37), a Korku tribal from Ratamati village in Betul district, distinctly remembers waking up at the crack of dawn and engaging in work till the sun was over her head in the sweltering summer to gather about 25 to 30 kg of mahua flowers every day.

The fear of wild animals also preyed upon her as she toiled on the forest floor, a part of Bhainsdehi forest range.

"The flowers had to be picked up one by one from the ground. The earlier we reached, the better chance we had of finding a tree that had not been marked by someone else for picking," she told 101Reporters.

Now, she can gather the same quantity in about 15 to 20 minutes, thanks to the Madhya Pradesh forest department's initiative to encourage net-quality mahua, wherein nets are spread around the trees to catch the flowers as they fall naturally from the tree.

The small, yellowish-white flowers of mahua (Madhuca longifolia) trees are known for their sweet fragrance. The flowers usually fall between 4 a.m. and 12 noon from mid-April to May. The tribals not only collect the flowers but also protect the trees as they are venerated in the community and hold a special place in their culture and customs. They do not cut or harm these trees.

The Korku tribals have received community forest rights under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006. They also have protection under the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996.

Net-quality flowers are considered to be of a higher grade as they do not fall on the forest floor, thus significantly reducing the risk of contamination. The purity of flowers is also assured. They are used to produce oil, food products and beverages such as mahua tea. "They fetch us a higher price, too," added Bele.

In fact, impressed by the quality of mahua flowers collected by the tribal communities in Madhya Pradesh, OForest, a UK-based company, had reached an agreement by which the forest department will procure 200 tonnes of the minor produce to fulfil the commitment by year-end.

The company will process the flowers to make mahua tea, which is said to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties and can relieve stress. The flowers will be dried and roasted to brew tea that has a slightly sweet and nutty flavour.

Like in Betul, nets are used in Hoshangabad and Sehore districts as well. "Our district bagged half of the 200-tonne order as the mahua flowers found in the forest ranges here are of excellent quality," Vijay Nantam TR, District Forest Officer (DFO), South Forest Division of Betul, tells 101Reporters. However, this time, the tribals were not very successful in delivering the committed volume due to less flower production triggered by climate change.

The collectors' collective This is the first time that the villagers of Betul district are dealing with such a large order for mahua flowers. Together, Rateda Kala Samiti of Amla range and Chandu Van Samiti of Bhainsdehi range collect flowers from 1,250 trees by involving as many as 500 people. Four and eight villages coming under these respective ranges are part of the project.

The collectors sun-dry the flowers, allowing them to wither naturally. This step is crucial to preserve the flower's aroma and flavour. Once done, they are carefully packed and sent to the head office of the forest department in Bhopal, from where MP State Minor Forest Produce Federation takes charge of shipping the items internationally.

Explaining how the high-quality mahua order came about, Nantam says Narmadapuram DFO DK Vasnik had sent a sample of 24 quintals to OForest Limited last year. "They tested the sample in their lab and made the purchase at a rate of Rs 110 per kg." Subsequently, during the van mela held in Bhopal last December, the company entered into an agreement with the forest department for the supply of 200 tonnes high-grade mahua flowers. "We are pushing for Rs 120 per kg this year, though last time we got Rs 110," he added.

Nantam claims the forests of Madhya Pradesh are fully organic by default and no chemicals are used during any stage of flower processing. "The flowers are sourced through designated committees. The department helps them collect it by providing nets." Besides gainful employment, the initiative ensures competitive prices for the flower pickers. Earlier, they used to sell it for Rs 25 to 30 per kg to local buyers or community members, who would consume it directly or use it for brewing liquor.

As providing mahua flowers to the designated committees is more lucrative now, the villagers are no longer inclined to brew and sell illegal mahua liquor in rural areas. This could have unforeseen positive effects in the form of reduction in crime rates and migration in search of employment.

To prepare for the rainy season, some members of the households would usually migrate to neighbouring Maharashtra and Rajasthan in summer to work as farm labourers or at construction sites. The new initiative provides them with employment back home. Though tendupatta is also collected during summers, more tribals are involved in mahua flower picking due to its lucrativeness and the scale of the order received.

"The forest department has assigned 200 mahua trees to 68 people who are part of Chandu Van Samiti in our village. The nets were also provided on behalf of the committee. We have been told that the flowers will be initially bought for Rs 35 per kg. Later, we will get a bonus," said Ratamati resident and flower picker Hansraj Dahikar.

(Nandkishor Pawar is a Betul-based freelance journalist and a member of 101Reporters, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters)
Hyderabad, June 9 : Police have arrested a priest of a temple in Hyderabad for the murder of a woman with whom he was having an extramarital relationship.

The shocking incident came to light on Friday, nearly a week after the priest killed the woman in cold blood and dumped her body in a manhole.

The accused, who was already married and father of two children, was having extramarital relations with Apsara, a resident of Saroornagar. As she was exerting pressure on the priest for the marriage, he hatched a plot to eliminate her.

Venkata Sai Krishna, priest of a temple in Saroornagar, killed the woman in Sultanpalli and dumped the body in a manhole in Saroornagar area.

According to police, he took Apsara to Sultanpalli Shamshabad mandal on the city outskirts in a car.

They had a heated argument over her proposal for marriage. The priest killed her by smashing her head with a boulder.

He bundled the body in a bag, kept it in the car and brought it back to Saroornagar, where he dumped it in a manhole.

The accused then lodged a complaint with Shamshabad police that his relative Apsara had been missing since June 3.

Police registered a case and took up an investigation. When the police checked the CCTV footage and mobile signals of Sai Krishna, they were shocked to find that the complainant himself was the killer.

Police have arrested Sai Krishna, who confessed to the crime. The body was retrieved from the manhole and sent for autopsy.
New Delhi, June 9 : Three people, including a woman and her 10-year-old daughter, died and one was injured after a car collided with a motorcycle in Delhi's Dwarka area, a police official said on Friday.

The four victims were riding on the same bike. While Foola, 30, her daughter Diksha and Lakhan, 37, died, Foola's husband Maate, 32, was injured.

According to the official, the incident was reported to the police in Dwarka North at around 11.30 p.m. on Thursday night.

"The injured victims were transferred to the Indira Gandhi Hospital for medical treatment. Maate and Diksha were referred to Safdarjung Hospital for further care. Unfortunately, Foola and Lakhan were declared brought dead," Deputy Commissioner of Police, Dwarka, M. Harsha Vardhan said.

"Diksha also succumbed to her injuries during the treatment at the hospital on Friday," said the DCP.

"On initial probe, it was revealed that Lakhan was Maate's brother-in-law. All four individuals hailed from the Tikamgarh district of Madhya Pradesh and were engaged in labour work in Delhi," said the DCP.

During the investigation, the police recorded a statement from Maate.

"He recounted that he, along with his family, were traveling on the motorcycle from Bharat Vihar towards Sector 17 in Dwarka when the Creta, coming from Sector 13, collided with it, resulting in the accident," said the DCP.

A case under sections 279 (Rash driving or riding on a public way), 337 (Causing hurt by act endangering life or personal safety of others), 304A (Causing death by negligence), and 427 (Mischief causing damage to the amount of fifty rupees) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) has been registered at Dwarka North police station.

"We have successfully apprehended the accused, identified as Abrar, 24, a resident of Gopal Nagar, Najafgarh," the official added.
New Delhi, June 9 : US-based language learning app Duolingo announced on Friday that it won a Design Award during the 2023 edition of the Apple Design Awards, which honour excellence in innovation, inventiveness, and technical achievement in app and game design.

The learning app incorporated a series of major redesign improvements during this past year.

"I want to thank our VP of Design, Ryan Sims, for his work in leading this effort and for his continued creative vision," Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-Founder at Duolingo, said in a statement.

"The secret to Duolingo is that we're not an education company. We're a fun and motivation company. Fun is the most important part of the work we do," he added.

Moreover, the company said that the app has figured out how to make a daily language lesson a fun moment, instead of classwork, as a result, Apple awarded Duolingo among the Delight and Fun Winners, a category that recognises platforms that provide memorable, engaging, and satisfying experiences that are enhanced by Apple technologies.

This past year, Duolingo launched a major learning path redesign.

In previous versions, it focused on a main screen -- known as "the tree" -- that let people explore numerous routes.

The path redesign coincided with another important update -- animations for Duolingo's wonderful cast of characters.

There's Lily, a perpetually unimpressed teen with a dismissive slow-clap; Oscar, a dramatic teacher who takes his job very seriously; and Eddy, a fitness buff with an enthusiasm for just about everything, according to the company.
Islamabad, June 9 : Pakistan has said it will examine the proposal floated by Iran with regard to forming an Indian Ocean naval alliance aimed at ensuring collective maritime security, media reports said.

Iran's Naval chief Rear Admiral Shahram Irani had proposed the alliance comprising Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, India and Pakistan, The Express Tribune reported.

"We have seen that statement and we will examine any proposal when it comes to Pakistan. At this stage, we are not in a position to comment on a statement which has been made," Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said.

The proposal, if executed, will be one of the most important regional security initiatives after the China-mediated rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March this year. According to reports, China may have an important role to play in the proposed maritime alliance, The Express Tribune reported.

China has emerged a key player in Middle East politics after brokering a landmark deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Meanwhile, the spokesperson said Pakistan will follow its laws and international obligations while taking up the cases of individuals responsible for the May 9 violence.

Responding to a question about the US State Department's request about the provision of consular access to a suspect of May 9 vandalism, Khadija Shah, and requests considering other dual nationals who have been detained, the spokesperson said that the requests have been received and forwarded to the Ministry of Interior.
Bengaluru: Members of Aam Aadmi Party stage a protest with Kivi Mele Hoova (flower on the ear) against Karnataka government five guarantee scheme, in Bengaluru on Friday June 09, 2023. (Photo:IANS) Image Source: IANS News

Bengaluru: Members of Aam Aadmi Party stage a protest with Kivi Mele Hoova (flower on the ear) against Karnataka government five guarantee scheme, in Bengaluru on Friday June 09, 2023. (Photo:IANS) Image Source: IANS News

Bengaluru: Members of Aam Aadmi Party stage a protest with Kivi Mele Hoova (flower on the ear) against Karnataka government five guarantee scheme, in Bengaluru on Friday June 09, 2023. (Photo:IANS) Image Source: IANS News

Bengaluru, June 9 : The Karnataka unit of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Friday organised a protest against the Siddaramaiah-led government in the state for imposing conditions on the guarantee schemes promised ahead of the May 10 Assembly polls.

Karnataka unit AAP president Prithvi Reddy, who participated in the protest organised by the party at Freedom Park against the conditions put forth for the five guarantees, said: "Due to the Congress' five guarantee conditional schemes, their true colours stand exposed." He said that Congress has copied the AAP's model of Delhi and Punjab, gave false assurances to the people and has come to power in an "incorrect way".

"The Congress is deceiving the people of the state by lying and imposing various conditions and not fulfilling the promises," Reddy said.

He said that Gruha Jyothi, Gruhakshmi and other guarantees of the government are nothing but programmes to make the lower strata of society suffer.

"We are fulfilling all these guarantees in a scientific manner in Delhi and Punjab. Our education and health revolution is a model comparable at the international level. The Congress government here does not talk about government education and healthcare systems," he said.

He said that the ministers cannot provide any guarantee about the guarantees given by the government.

"It's a shame that everyone is making statements on a daily basis which creates confusion," Prithvi Reddy said.

AAP Working President Mohan Dasari, who took part in the protest, said: "Today, we have protested only symbolically. If the government continues to show similar indolence, there will be severe protests across the state."
Imphal, June 9 : In a fresh incident of violence in restive Manipur, at least three people, including a woman, were killed and two other injured by the suspected militants in Manipur's Khoken village on Friday, police said.

Khoken village lies on the boundary between Kangpokpi and Imphal West district and the suspected militants and the victims belong to different communities.

According to the police, the extremists, who were reportedly dressed in khaki and driving military vehicles, came to the Khoken village early on Friday morning and fired upon villagers with automatic rifles.

Accusing the Meitei community for the killing, Indigenous Tribal Leaders' Forum (ITLF) said that this attack is yet another example of the utter disregard shown by the militants and demanded swift action should be taken against the perpetrators.

"The incident also violated the peace process called by the Union Home Minister Amit Shah. We urge upon the authorities to take decisive actions against the militants," the ITLF said in a statement.

It said that one of the victims, Domkhohoi, was shot dead inside a church when she was in early morning prayer.

Additional columns of the Army and paramilitary forces have been deployed to control the situation in the Khoken village.

Meanwhile, reports of incidents of violence including burning of houses were received from two other districts. But official confirmation has not yet been received.
San Francisco, June 9 : Music streaming platform Spotify is officially testing a new feature called -- 'Your Offline Mix', a playlist designed for users when they might not be online and still wants to listen to their favourite playlist.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek stated in a tweet that the company has been testing 'Your Offline Mix'. But he didn't go into any further detail.

It's unclear when the company intends to release the feature, in particular.

"We've been testing out a new feature called "Your Offline Mix" - a playlist designed for those times when you might not be online. What do you think?" Ek tweeted on Thursday.

According to the screenshot posted by Ek indicates, these playlists can store music with multiple hours of listening time. This could be useful in situations when users are about to board a flight but have forgotten to download music.

Several users expressed their thoughts on this development.

"This is going to be extremely useful when we are on a road trip in the middle of nowhere and we forgot to download our playlists," a user commented.

"Finally!! please allow us to filter whether its offline music or offline podcasts too please!!," another user said.

Meanwhile, Spotify has started rolling out its AI feature called "DJ" for premium customers in the UK and Ireland.

This feature was first made available to premium subscribers in the US and Canada in February.

The feature is still in beta and is powered by OpenAI's technology.
Munich : , June 9 (IANS) German champions Bayern Munich on Friday announced that they have signed midfielder Konrad Laimer on a free transfer from fellow Bundesliga club RB Leipzig.

The 26-year-old Laimer, who is joining Bayern on a four-year deal, made 190 appearances for Leipzig since moving from Red Bull Salzburg in 2017.

"Konrad Laimer has joined FC Bayern on a contract until 30 June 2027. The 26-year-old central midfielder moves to Munich on a free transfer from DFB Cup winners RB Leipzig," the club said in a statement.

"It's a dream come true for me. FC Bayern is one of the biggest clubs in the world. I will give everything for the club and the fans. FC Bayern always has the highest goals - just like me. I'm in the right place here. I'm only capable of giving 100 percent, and that's what I'll put into every training session from day one. I can hardly wait," said Laimer.

Laimer learned his trade at the Red Bull Salzburg youth academy and made his professional debut in September 2014. At Salzburg, the midfielder won the Austrian league and cup three times each before moving to Leipzig in the summer of 2017. He made 190 competitive appearances (15 goals) for Leipzig and won the DFB Cup there twice (2022 and 2023).

Laimer made his full international debut for Austria in September 2019 and has so far been capped 26 times for his home country (two goals).

"We are delighted to have signed Konrad Laimer. He comes to us as a two-time DFB Cup winner - and together we will now hopefully celebrate many more great victories and titles here at FC Bayern," said FC Bayern CEO Jan-Christian Dreesen.
Islamabad, June 9 : Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan and party's Vice Chairman Shah Mehmood Qureshi do not really like each other, but, as luck would have it, the latter is the most likely option, acceptable to those who matter, to lead the PTI in the absence of the former, media reports said.

There are no confirmed reports about Qureshi's interactions with the powerful quarters during his post-May 9 stay in the Adiala jail under the MPO (Maintenance of Public Order), but there are talks within important government circles about Qureshi leading the PTI, The News reported.

"Shah Mehmood Qureshi will lead the PTI minus Imran Khan," an official source said, the report said.

When asked about the reported bitter meeting between the two on Wednesday at the Zaman Park residence of Khan, he said, "It does not matter." According to another official source, "Our information is that both Khan and Qureshi do not like each other, but they are together for their respective political interests." "Interestingly, Qureshi is also suspected within the PTI of having contacts with the relevant quarters yet Imran Khan recently announced that in case of his arrest, Qureshi would lead the party. Imran Khan fears that he can be arrested anytime. With his arrest, it is said, the minus-Imran Khan process will technically start, paving the way for the emergence of Qureshi as PTI's head, The News reported.

According to a PTI leader, Imran Khan will not recuse himself at this stage and before his arrest, to save the party from further desertions of its second and third-tier leaders.

Qureshi, the PTI leader said on condition of anonymity, can have the lead role only after Khan's arrest or conviction in any case.

Qureshi, it is said, may not be a popular leader for the PTI followers and ranks but his acceptability to the powers that be, makes him most suitable to save the party from further damage, The News reported.
New Delhi, June 9 : After a brief shootout, two more sharpshooters, including a minor, of the infamous Kapil Sangwan-Lawrence Bishnoi gang involved in the killing of Delhi BJP leader Surender Matiala were apprehended, a Delhi Police's Crime Branch official said on Friday.

Two automatic pistols, Tarus (made in Brazil) and Zigana (made in Turkey) were recovered from the possession of the accused identified as Pankaj alias Baba, a resident of Jhunjhunu district, Rajasthan, and the minor.

Earlier in May, the Special Cell of Delhi Police had arrested two wanted criminals and members of the gang identified as Rajat Yadav alias Poppal (23), a resident of Chanchal Park, and Habib Ali alias Rahul (23), a resident of Najafgarh, in connection with the murder.

On April 14, two unidentified men had entered the office of Surender, district president Najafgarh Kishan Morcha of BJP Unit, and fired upon him leading to his death.

Police have apprehended a total of eight members of the Kapil Sangwan gang, including three juveniles, in connection with the murder.

The Special Commissioner of Police (Crime) Ravinder Singh Yadav said that recently, information was received regarding two wanted and active criminals of Lawrence Bishnoi-Sampat Nehra-Kapil Nandu-Rohit Godara gang, would come to meet their associate in South Delhi's Safdarjung Enclave area for planning of murder of the rivalry gang.

"Acting on the inputs, a team was formed and a trap was laid down near district park gate. At around 2.00 a.m. in early hours of Friday, two persons came on a motorcycle in front of district park, they parked the motorcycle and stood near the motorcycle," said the Special Commissioner of Police (CP).

Later, the police team showed their ID cards and asked them to surrender, however, the duo opened fire upon the police team in which Inspector Rampal and ASI Narender were hit on their bullet-proof jackets.

"In retaliation and self-defence, police also opened fire and after a brief scuffle, both the accused were overpowered," said the Special CP.

Upon questioning, it was revealed that the duo was hired by the gangsters Kapil alias Nandu and Rohit Godara of the Lawrence Bishnoi-Sampat Nehra gang.

"Nandu and Godara had earlier tasked them to commit the murder of Surender Matiala only to spread terror in the locality and to weaken the rival Manjit Mahal gang. Sampat Nehra arranged the shooters for the task with the help of his recruiting agents in Rajasthan. Now they were tasked to commit murder of a top gangster belonging to a rival Neeraj Bawana gang member," said the Special Commissioner of Police (Crime).

The official added that the accused Pankaj was introduced to Rohit Godara by one Rakesh alias Chinnu of Jhunjhunu (Rajasthan) (who is in Bhondsi Jail).

"On the directions of Rohit Godara and Kapil Nandu, he came to Delhi to commit the murder of a rival gang member in Tilak Nagar," the official said.
Kolkata, June 9 : The joint forum of state government employees in West Bengal, which is leading the movement against non-payment of enhanced dearness allowance and the arrears accrued on it, said on Friday that its members will not join poll-related duties for the forthcoming panchayat elections in the absence of security cover by central armed forces.

A delegation of the joint forum led by its convener Bhaskar Ghosh went to the State Election Commission (SEC) office on Friday and submitted a memorandum in this regard.

"We have clearly informed the SEC that without the deployment of central forces, we will not join poll-related duties for the panchayat elections. We are also speaking on behalf of the state police personnel, who like us have been denied their legitimate right for enhanced dearness allowance and the arrears accrued on it," Ghosh said.

Supporting the joint forum, BJP's national Vice President Dilip Ghosh said that the demand is justified because everyone barring the state government is asking for the deployment of central forces for the panchayat polls.

"As it is, the state government employees have been denied their legitimate right for enhanced dearness allowance. In such a situation, they cannot risk their lives by performing poll duties without central forces security cover considering the past history of violence and bloodbath in the state during elections," he said.

Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha member Santanu Sen, however, described the demand of the state government employees as highly unjustified.

"When the state government and the SEC are assuring to hold free, fair and violence-free panchayat polls, the state government employees should have faith on us. They are unnecessarily trying to create an issue in this matter," Sen said.
Kolkata, June 9 : The Calcutta High Court on Friday expressed ire over the "slow" pace of investigation by central agencies in the multi-crore municipalities' recruitment case in West Bengal.

As counsel for Enforcement Directorate (ED) presented a progress report on the investigation, Justice Amrita Sinha expressed dissatisfaction over the contents of the report. "The report is not satisfactory. It is not clear what is new in the report. Why is the progress of investigation so slow?" she asked.

In reply, counsel submitted that since Central Bureau of Investigation is the prime investigation agency in the manner, the progress of the ED's investigation is, to a great extent, dependent on the CBI's progress. However he assured that the ED officials are keeping a close watch on the progress in the case.

The CBI counsel, on his part, informed the court that the agency needs some more time for filing its progress report on this count.

Finally, Justice Sinha directed both the agencies to submit their respective progress reports to the court on the next date of hearing which is scheduled on June 14.

On Friday, the state government also faced the ire of Justice Sinha for first keeping multiple court options open in the matter and then withdrawing the special leave petition (SLP) filed at the Supreme Court.

The state government, while approaching a division bench of the Calcutta High Court to seek a stay on central agency probe in municipalities recruitment case, also moved the apex court on this count. However, on Friday, the state government has informed the division bench that it is withdrawing the SLP at the apex court.

"First you filed the SLP at the Supreme Court against the order of the single-judge bench of the Calcutta High Court. Then you withdrew the SLP. What kind of a move is this? Are you not bearing the cost behind such litigations? Whose money is being spent behind such litigation?" Justice Sinha questioned.
Srinagar, June 9 : The army on Friday said three main conduits or operatives of the cross-border narco-terror module have been apprehended.

In a statement, Defence Ministry spokesman, Lt. Col. Devender Anand said: "The apprehended individuals have been identified as Shakar Din, Rashid and Shafir.

"In the search operations, war-like stores to include two grenades have also been recovered from the possession of these individuals. Extensive joint search operations are currently in progress. The apprehension of these three individuals, is a major blow to the complex cross-border narco-terror nexus being operated from Pakistan occupied part of Jammu and Kashmir."
Chandigarh, June 9 : Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Friday took another step towards ensuring access to clean and safe water with the launching of biennial Integrated Water Resources Action Plan (2023-25).

"The plan aims to meet the twin challenges of water depletion and water logging. I am confident that the action plan will serve as a roadmap to achieve the targets of water saving and water management in the state," Khattar said at the launch ceremony.

He said the state's water availability is 20,93,598 crore litres, against the demand of 34,96,276 crore litres, making a shortfall of 14 lakh crore litres.

"All water-related departments have come forward and taken the ownership to conserve water through various demand and supply side interventions, which would save around 6.97 lakh crore litres (49.7 per cent) of water in the next two years," he said.

The Chief Minister said the maximum amount of water is used in agriculture and horticulture sector, which are 86 per cent and 5 per cent, respectively.

Continuous efforts are needed to reduce water consumption by adopting water conservation methods.

The Chief Minister said the Agriculture Department has included various measures in the action plan.

According to the plan, 3.14 lakh acres of area will be covered under crop diversification, which will save 1.05 lakh crore litres (7.6 per cent) water.

The direct seeding of paddy will be done in 4.75 lakh acres and will save 1.18 lakh crore liters (8.4 per cent) and 27.53 lakh acresA will be brought under conservation tillage to save 0.51 lakh crore liters (3.7 per cent).

Further 0.47 lakh crore liters (3.4 per cent) water will be saved by using high varieties in 3.49 lakh acres, 0.35 lakh crore liters (2.5 per cent) will be saved by using green manure in 9.73 lakh acres and 0.27 lakh crore litres will be saved by covering 0.43 lakh acres under natural farming.

While highlighting the importance of the substantial use of natural resources, the Chief Minister became emotional with saying: "We launched Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign to save our daughters. Now mother nature is calling us to save her. Therefore I urge everyone to use natural resources substantially and not exploit them." The Chief Minister said "three Rs" -- reduce, recycle and reuse -- should be the focus as "we move towards water management and conservation".

"We are taking new innovative like 'Mera Pani Meri Virasat' for crop diversification. I thank the farmers of my state who have adopted this scheme on 1.5 lakh acres of land. The farmers are also moving towards the direct seeded rice method," he said.

He said at present 250 cusec water is being given to Delhi as per the Supreme Court orders.

"In the coming times, the water need is certainly going to increase, hence dedicated efforts are being made to ensure that proper management of water with optimum use, recycle and reuse is done." The Chief Minister described the Satluj Yamuna Link (SYL) canal a pivotal issue for Haryana and Punjab.

"We are hopeful that this issue will soon be resolved. The construction of SYL is not in our hands," he added.

The Chief Minister said three dams -- Renuka, Lakwar and Kishau -- are being built so as to ensure regulation of water. "With the construction of these dams, the water needs of the state would certainly be addressed." He said plans are also being made to explore the utilisation of small sources of water.

"Dams will be constructed and plans will be formulated to ensure how this water can be utilised for local use. Work is being done on nine dams and the work on the Adi badri dam is completed," Khattar added.
Hyderabad, June 9 : A special CBI court has rejected the bail petition of Kadapa MP Y.S. Avinash Reddys father Y.S. Bhaskar Reddy in former Andhra Pradesh minister Y.S. Vivekananda Reddys murder case.

The court, which had reserved its order on Thursday, pronounced the same on Friday, refusing to release Bhaskar Reddy on bail.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had arrested Bhaskar Reddy from Pulivendula town in Kadapa district on April 16 and brought him to Hyderabad the same day. Since then, he is lodged at the Chanchalguda Central Jail here.

Two days before Bhaskar Reddy's arrest, the CBI had arrested his close aide G. Uday Kumar Reddy. The investigating agency found during the probe that Uday Kumar Reddy was at the residence of Bhaskar Reddy a day before Vivekananda Reddy's murder.

Opposing the bail petition of Bhaskar Reddy, the CBI argued that he can influence the witnesses in the case. The agency told the court that he is an influential person in Kadapa and Pulivendula, and the protests after his arrest are proof of the same.

Vivekananda Reddy's daughter Suneetha Reddy also opposed Bhaskar Reddy's bail petition. Her counsel submitted to the court that if released on bail, the accused could influence the investigation and the witnesses.

Vivekananda Reddy, the uncle of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, was murdered at his residence in Pulivendula on March 15, 2019, weeks before the elections.

The CBI stated in its counter affidavit that the MP along with his father conspired to tamper with evidence, leading to obstruction of the inquiry.

During the hearing of bail petition of Bhaskar Reddy, the CBI had informed the court on Thursday that it has listed Avinash Reddy as accused No. 8 (A8) in the murder case.

This was the first time that Avinash Reddy was categorised as an accused, as he was previously treated as a witness and questioned by the CBI on multiple occasions.

According to the counter affidavit, N. Sivashankar Reddy and Avinash Reddy had spoken to the prime accused, Erra Gangireddy, before 5.20 a.m. on the day of the murder. The counter-petition stated that Avinash Reddy arrived at the crime scene within a minute of Sivashankar Reddy's call.

Avinash Reddy, Bhaskar Reddy and Sivashankar Reddy allegedly attempted to persuade Vivekananda Reddy's former driver, Sheik Dastagiri, to withhold information from the CBI and the court.

It also came to light on Thursday that the CBI had arrested Avinash Reddy on June 3, but released him on bail the same day after he completed formalities as per the high court's order.

While granting anticipatory bail on May 31, the Telangana High Court had ruled that in the event of the petitioner's arrest by the CBI, he shall be released on bail on executing a personal bond of Rs 5 lakh with two sureties for a like sum each.
New Delhi, June 9 : Delhi Police on Friday took one of the six complainants, who have filed charges of sexual harassment against Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) chief and BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, to WFI's office in Delhi as a part of their ongoing probe into the matter.

The WFI office, located on at 21 Ashoka Road, is adjacent to Brij Bhushan's official residence in the national capital.

According to sources, the complainant willingly accompanied the police as part of the investigation process, and took part in scene re-creation.

However, confusion arose when reports began circulating that the female wrestler had been taken to "Brij Bhushan's home".

Refuting the reports, the Deputy Commissioner of Police, New Delhi, took to Twitter to clarify that "there are false rumors circulating about the matter of the female wrestler going to Brij Bhushan Singh's house. Please do not pay attention to the rumors. The Delhi Police had taken the female wrestler to the office of the WFI for investigation".

It is worth noting that the entry points to the WFI office and Brij Bhushan's residence, although situated on the same road, are separate. The only division between the two is a small room where Brij Bhushan interacts with the media.

In April, Delhi Police had registered two separate FIRs against the WFI chief accusing him of sexual harassment. The first FIR pertains to the accusations made by a minor which has been filed under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, along with relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code concerning the act of outraging modesty.

The second FIR focuses on the complaints made by adult grapplers and involves relevant sections of the IPC related to outraging modesty.

Meanwhile, sources said the police are on track to conclude the investigation in this matter within a period of seven days. Over 150 individuals have been questioned thus far in connection with the case.

In a recent development, the father of the minor wrestler involved in the case stepped forward and claimed that he filed a "false" complaint of sexual harassment against the WFI chief.

The father alleged that his actions were driven by anger and frustration over the WFI chief's perceived biased treatment towards his daughter.
Guwahati, June 9 : Two members of the banned outfit Popular Front of India (PFI) have been arrested in Assam's Baksa district, an official said on Friday.

A police officer said Ruhul Amin (31) and Tota Miya (40) were arrested on June 6.

"We had specific inputs about the movement of two PFI members in the Gobardhana area of the district. Based on this, an operation was launched to nab them," the police officer said.

Police said that the arrested individuals were presented in court on Wednesday, and they have been sent to police custody.

Police have been questioning the two arrested PFI members to unearth further details.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. One of the priority areas of partnership between Uzbekistan and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is the development of a new comprehensive cooperation program until 2023, Trend reports.

This was stated during the meeting between Uzbekistan's President Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Director General of the FAO Qu Dongyu, which was held as part of the president's official visit to Italy.

Among the priority areas, the development of a comprehensive cooperation program until 2030 was highlighted. This program aims to implement specific projects and initiatives related to food security, fundamental scientific research, digitalization of agriculture, and addressing environmental issues in the Aral Sea region, among others.

Furthermore, the practical aspects of expanding cooperation between Uzbekistan and this international specialized institution were discussed, particularly focusing on important areas such as agricultural modernization and food security.

The president of Uzbekistan expressed special satisfaction with the fruitful collaboration achieved in recent years. Both parties expressed interest in further expanding their partnership, considering the increasing global risks to food security.

Additionally, preparations for the upcoming high-level International Conference under the auspices of the FAO in Uzbekistan's Samarkand were discussed.
New Delhi, June 9 : The Congress on Friday demanded expulsion of former Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat from the Bharatiya Janata Party for praising Mahatma Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse as a 'patriot', saying it is an insult to 'Bapu' and demanded his sacking from the saffron party.

Addressing a press conference at the party headquarters in New Delhi, Congress leader Vaibhav Walia, who is also the party's Secretary Communications, referred to the recent remarks by Rawat where he had repeatedly said that Godse was a patriot.

Walia said it was not only an insult to Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, but the entire nation itself.

He added that while Prime Minister Narendra Modi continues praising Mahatma Gandhi, his party leaders like Rawat and another MP Pragya Thakur were glorifying his killer.

The Congress leader said that if the BJP did not take any action against the former Uttarakhand Chief Minister, it would be obvious that he had spoken for the BJP.

"If you (Modi) don't remove him from the party then it means what he has said has tacit support from you," Walia added.

The Congress leader said, highlighting the remarks of former party chief Rahul Gandhi during his recent visit to the US, said, "It was in the same context that Rahul Gandhi was repeatedly saying that there was a continuous fight between two ideologies in the country." "One ideology of hatred preached by the BJP and another of love preached by the Congress," he said, referring to the remarks of the former Wayanad MP.

Walia also said that the remarks of leaders like Rawat, Thakur, Anant Hegde proved Rahul Gandhi's point, adding that while one ideology talked about and preached hatred and violence, the other one taught about love and harmony.

His remarks came after Rawat on Wednesday while speaking to media in Uttar Pradesh's Ballia said, "Gandhiji was killed. That is a different issue. But as far as I have understood and read Godse, he too was a patriot. We do not agree with the killing of Gandhiji." Rawat also termed Godse a 'patriot' while mocking Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for sharing his surname with the father of the nation.
Mumbai: Maharashtra Education Minister Varsha Gaikwad comes out after attending the Cabinet meeting at Mantralaya in Mumbai on Wednesday June 22, 2022. (Photo: Megha Jadhav/IANS) Image Source: IANS News

Mumbai, June 9 : Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge on Friday appointed veteran leader Prof. Varsha Gaikwad as the first-ever woman President of the powerful Mumbai Regional Congress Committee (MRCC), as per an official announcement.

A former three-time state minister, she will replace the incumbent Ashok alias Bhai Jagtap who served in the position since December 2020.

Incidentally, Prof Gaikwad's father, the late Eknath Gaikwad had also served as the MRCC President from 2017-2020, and she becomes the first woman ever to head the city party unit, according to her senior colleagues.

Hailing from an Ambedkarite-Buddhist family, Prof Gaikwad - an MSc in Mathematics - taught at the Siddharth College, Mumbai, and has also served as a four-time MLA from 2004 onwards, from Dharavi constituency in the south-central part of the city.

She was appointed a Minister of State in 2009, later elevated to Cabinet rank till 2014, and also re-appointed with Cabinet status when the Maha Vikas Aghadi government ruled from November 2019-June 2022.
New Delhi, June 9 : The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has filed six FIRs and formed a special team to probe an alleged conspiracy in connection with the violence in Manipur.

"CBI has today registered six cases transferred by Manipur pertaining to incidents of large scale violence leading to destruction and looting of properties, arson, looting/snatching of arms/ammunition, loss of human lives etc. in various districts of Manipur," the central probe agency said confirming mediapersons.

According to official information, a Special Investigation Team (SIT) under supervision of a DIG has been constituted for a thorough probe in all the six cases and to unearth the criminal conspiracy behind the unfortunate incidents.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah during his visit to Manipur had ordered a CBI probe into the matter.

"As part of the CBI investigation, six cases have been identified for further examination. One of these cases focuses on a possible common conspiracy, aiming to determine whether the ethnic violence was pre-planned. The investigation will delve into the details to uncover any evidence suggesting a coordinated effort behind the unrest," said an official.

Last Thursday, the Central government had announced several measures to bring peace and rebuild trust in Manipur, which has been facing unrest since May 3. These measures included the investigation of the incidents by a special team from the CBI and the formation of a Judicial Inquiry Commission. The aim is to address the ongoing turmoil and maintain harmony in the region.

The Union Home Minister, who had been staying in Manipur since Monday evening, informed the media in Imphal that a special team from the CBI would take charge of the six cases connected to the riots.

Additionally, a Judicial Inquiry Commission led by a retired High Court judge will investigate the origins of the violence and identify any potential conspiracy that led to the state's unrest.

Shah had said that the government was taking these steps to understand the reasons behind the turmoil and hold those responsible accountable.

As of June 3, a total of 3,734 FIRs have been filed in Manipur. The clashes between the Kuki and Meitei communities have resulted in more than 100 deaths since May 3.

The district with the highest number of cases is Imphal West, with 1,257 FIRs registered. Kangpokpi district follows with 932 cases, and Bishnupur district with 844 cases, according to the information shared by the Manipur Chief Minister's office.
Hyderabad, June 9 : The Congress in Telangana is planning five guarantees in the Assembly elections scheduled later this year on the lines of similar promises made in Karnataka, where the party stormed to power last month.

Waiver of farm loans up to Rs 2 lakh, LPG cylinder for Rs 500, monthly allowance of Rs 4,000 for every unemployed graduate, filling two lakh vacancies within a year of forming government, bonus along with Minimum Support Price (MSP) for agriculture produce, increased financial assistance to farmers under Rythu Bandhu, annual job calendar and electric bikes to girl students are the promises likely to be included in party's manifesto.

The party leaders are working to finalise five major guarantees from these promises to woo the voters.

The party has already announced some of these promises as part of declarations for farmers, youth and unemployed.

Like in Karnataka, the Congress party is keen to release its election manifesto much before the polls, which are due in November-December.

Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) chief A. Revanth Reddy told mediapersons on Friday that the Congress party will announce its manifesto on September 17. He said the manifesto will be drafted in tune with the aspirations of Telangana people.

Revanth Reddy said the party's central leadership already held talks with some state leaders in this regard. He exuded confidence that the Karnataka result will be repeated in Telangana.

The party had released its declaration for farmers in May last year while last month it released a declaration for youth and unemployed. The party is likely to release declarations for some other sections in the coming days and take them to people.

Meanwhile, addressing the national executive of Youth Congress, Revanth Reddy urged the Youth Congress to gear up to defeat the KCR government in Telangana. He said the youth leaders who fight for the party's victory will have a bright future.

He recalled that Telangana state was created with the sacrifice of 1,200 students and youth.

He reiterated that if the Congress comes to power, it will scrap the Dharani portal. He alleged that the portal was being used to grab the lands of farmers. He stated that those involved in land grabbing would be sent to jail.

Revanth Reddy also accepted the challenge of BRS leader K.T. Rama Rao for a debate on the development of Telangana during Congress rule between 2004 and 2014 and after BRS came to power in 2014.
New Delhi, June 9 : The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday confirmed that it has arrested Roop Kumar Bansal, promoter-director of real estate firm M3M Group, for alleged diversion of Rs 400 crore from the investors.

After the arrest, Bansal was produced before a special PMLA court in Panckula, Haryana, which remanded him to seven-day ED custody.

The ED recently conducted raids at the premises of IREO Group and M3M Group over allegations of diverting and siphoning off Rs 400 crores from the investors.

During the search operations, luxury vehicles, including Ferrari, Lamborghini, Land Rover, Rolls Royce, Bentley and Mercedes Maybach, with an acquisition value of Rs 60 crore, jewellery, bullion worth Rs 5.75 crore, cash amounting to Rs 15 lakh, and various incriminating documents, digital evidence, and books of accounts were seized.

Bansal's arrest was made in connection with the investigations against IREO Group and M3M Group on charges of diverting funds, misappropriating funds of investors, customers etc.

According to the ED, the owners, controllers, and promoters of M3M Group, namely Basant Bansal, Roop Kumar Bansal, Pankaj Bansal and other key individuals, deliberately avoided the investigation.

The ED has been investigating IREO Group based on multiple FIRs filed against it for diverting and misappropriating the funds of investors and customers.

"The ED's investigation revealed that a significant amount of money, running into hundreds of crores of rupees, was siphoned off through M3M Group as well. In one transaction, M3M Group received approximately Rs 400 crore from IREO Group through several shell companies in multiple layers. These transactions were shown in IREO's books as payments towards development rights," the ED said.

The ED also said that a land was owned by M3M Group, with a market value of around Rs 4 crore. Initially, M3M Group sold the development rights of the land to five shell companies against a payment of Rs 10 crore.

"It was claimed that these five companies were unrelated entities. However, investigation revealed that the five shell companies were operated by M3M Group. Subsequently, these companies sold the development rights of the same land to IREO Group for approximately Rs 400 crore. Once the amount of Rs 400 crore was received from IREO Group, the five shell companies transferred the funds to M3M Group through multiple shell companies and layers," the ED said.

The ED also stated that all the shell companies were owned and operated by M3M Group under the directions of its promoters, Basant Bansal, Roop Kumar Bansal and their family members.

"In this manner, IREO and M3M siphoned off approximately Rs 400 crore, which belonged to the investors and customers. The proceeds of crime remained with the M3M Group, which was used for other investments and to pay off liabilities. On the other hand, IREO Group made no efforts to develop the land and started to write off the investments every year," the ED said.

"Bansal played a key role in the completion of the said transactions. His custody had become necessary for the investigation. He had been avoiding the probe and was not responding to the summons issued by the ED on multiple occasions," it added.
Chandigarh, June 9 : Punjab NRI Affairs Minister Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal on Friday wrote a missive to Sanjay Kumar Verma, High Commissioner, High Commission of India, Ottawa, and Cameron Mackay, High Commission of Canada, to solve the issues of 700 students, mostly Punjabi, facing deportation from Canada.

In his letter, Dhaliwal said: "Your kind attention is invited towards the impending deportation of more than 700 students from Canada due to fake acceptance letters from Canadian colleges.

"These students are innocent and have been cheated by the clique of fraudsters that includes this travel agent, officials in the Canadian Embassy in India and other agencies in Canada.

"I shall be highly grateful if the matter is looked into personally. The future of these students and of their families is at stake. You are requested to take up the same with the concerned agencies of the MEA and the government of Canada so that these students can be saved from being deported."
Patna, June 9 : Six persons, including four women, died while four sustained injuries after a mini truck laden with scrap overturned on two e-rickshaws at Bakhtiyarpur on the outskirts of Patna on Friday.

The road accident occurred on State Highway 106 when an e-rickshaw was trying to overtake a mini truck. The police said that the driver of the mini truck applied brakes following which his vehicle overturned on two e-rickshaws, including the one which tried to go past it.

Three persons died on the spot while three others succumbed at the hospital during the treatment.

The deceased have been identified as Ranjit Mishra (55), Lalpari Devi (55), Kiran Kumari (24), Manoj Kumar (35), Inder Devi (65) and Ranju Devi (30).

The injured have been identified as Nitish Kumar (25), Lakhita Kumar (15), Mani Kumar (18) and one more person.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has extended his condolences to the family members of the deceased. He also directed the medical officers to provide best available treatment to the injured so that they can recover from their injuries soon.
Bhopal, June 9 : A 44-year-old farmer allegedly committed suicide by consuming a poisonous substance in Madhya Pradesh's Harda district, the police said on Friday.

However, the police not found any suicide note yet.

The deceased has been identified as Rajesh Karode, a resident of Dagashankar village in the district. He was reportedly struggling to repay some loans he took from local moneylenders for farming purposes.

Karode had consumed sulfas on Thursday and was rushed to the nearby hospital for treatment. He was later shifted to a private facility from where he was referred to the district hospital. He died there during treatment at around 12 noon on Friday, the police said.

Meanwhile, the deceased's son Virendra Karode claimed that his father had a debt burden of Rs 40 lakh and moneylenders were troubling him every day because of which he took the extreme step.

He also alleged that the moneylenders had imposed 10 per cent interest on the amounts his father had borrowed, because of which the outstanding amount had increased to Rs 40 lakh, adding that they even had to sell 10 acres of land to repay the loans.

Meanwhile, Madhya Pradesh Congress chief Kamal Nath, who was on a visit to Harda to address an election rally on Friday, has appealed to the farmers not to end their lives due to debt.

"I appeal to the farmers of Madhya Pradesh not to lose heart due to the burden of debt. Wait for five months somehow. As soon as the Congress government is formed in the state, loan waiver will be done and no farmer brother will be have to suffer," Kamal Nath said.

Incidentally, Madhya Pradesh Agriculture Minister Kamal Patel hails from Harda and has won as many as five Assembly elections from this constituency since 1993.
New Delhi, June 9 : The Supreme Court on Friday set aside an Orissa High Court judgment, which directed enrolment of a candidate as an advocate even though he secured a law degree from a college not recognised by the Bar Council of India (BCI).

A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sanjay Kumar said: "The rule framed by BCI requiring a candidate for enrolment as an advocate to have completed his law course from a college recognised/approved by BCI cannot be said to be invalid, as was held in the impugned order." "We, therefore, have no hesitation in holding that the Division Bench was not justified in directing the enrolment of respondent No. 1 as an advocate, despite the fact that he secured his law degree from a college which was not recognised or approved by Bthe CI." The top court allowed an appeal by the BCI against the Orissa High Court's judgment. "The appeal is accordingly allowed, setting aside the order dated 21.09.2012 passed by the Orissa High Court," said the bench.

The top court relied upon the constitution bench's judgment of February 10, 2023 which held that the Advocate Act of 1961 vested the BCI with the power to prescribe the norms for entitlement to be enrolled as an advocate.

The bench said: "The earlier decision of this court in V. Sudeer (1999) fell for consideration recently before a constitution bench in Bar Council of India vs. Bonnie Foi Law College & Ors. Perusal of the constitution bench judgment reflects that the decision in V. Sudeer (supra) was held to be not good law. The constitution bench held that the BCI's role prior to enrolment cannot be ousted and the ratio decidendi in V.Sudeer (supra), that it was not one of the statutory functions of BCI to frame rules imposing pre-enrolment conditions, was erroneous." It noted that the candidate had secured his law degree from Vivekananda Law College, Angul, in the year 2009, which was not recognised or approved by BCI. "In fact, by letter dated 05.01.2002, BCI had directed Vivekananda Law College, Angul, not to admit students in law course stating that students so admitted would not be eligible for enrolment as advocates. BCI stated to this effect again in its letter dated 28.02.2011 addressed to the Orissa State Bar Council. As a corollary, the Orissa State Bar Council rejected the application of respondent No. 1 for enrolment as an Advocate, vide letter dated 04.05.2011," noted the bench.
Ahmedabad, June 9 : An Ahmedabad-based businessman was arrested on Friday on charges of bogus billing which led to fraudulent tax credit of Rs 15.62 crore.

The arrested businessman has been identified as Pareshbhai Dayaljibhai Patel. The arrest came in wake of an intensified campaign launched by the department of Goods and Services Tax (GST) in Gujarat to crack down on tax evasion cases.

Patel, who is associated with Ahmedabad-based firms Shayona Colors Private Limited and Shamrock Chemical, was arrested following a raid conducted by the state GST department. The department's search operation unearthed incriminating documents from Hari Om Metal and Shayona Industries at Kalol, which are linked to Patel.

An in-depth examination of these documents is currently underway.

Preliminary investigations have revealed that Patel managed to secure bogus tax credits through fabricated bills amounting to Rs 12.37 crore from Gujarat-based firms and Rs 3.25 crore from Maharashtra-based firms.

These transactions were recorded without any physical movement of goods between the concerned firms.

Patel was placed under arrest on June 3, and subsequently an Ahmedabad court approved his remand until June 13.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili has discussed the situation in the South Caucasus with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during a meeting in Berlin, Trend reports citing Georgian government administration.

The meeting focused on issues related to the processes taking place in the world, new challenges, as well as events in the South Caucasus, peace negotiations, global energy and transport projects.

Irakli Garibashvili informed Olaf Scholz in detail about the steps taken by Georgia towards European integration, the reforms carried out and the important progress made in the implementation of the 12 recommendations of the European Commission.
New Delhi, June 9 : The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday said that they recently carried out search operations at residential premises of different people at 27 locations of Rajasthan in Senior Teacher Grade II Paper Leak Case and REET Paper Leak Case.

The locations included Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Ajmer, Dungarpur, Barmer, Sikar and Jalore.

The ED initiated a PMLA investigation based on an FIR registered by Rajasthan Police in Senior Teacher Grade II examination conducted by RPSC and REET examination under various sections of IPC.

"During the investigation it was revealed that suspected persons were leaking the questions papers of Senior Teacher Grade II examination conducted by RPSC and REET Examination and they were also involved in paper leak racket, setting up of dummy candidates etc.

"During the search operation documents related to immovable properties, fake documents, digital devices, bank account details of the said persons and other incrementing documents were found and seized," an ED official said.
Moscow, June 9 : Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday said that the much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive has started, as evinced by their deployment of strategic reserves, but Russian troops are holding on to their positions.

"We can state with absolute certainty that this Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun, and the use of strategic reserves points to it," he said at a press conference here, RT reported.

President Putin said that particularly heavy fighting has been ongoing for five days, with Russian troops managing to hold their positions, while the Ukrainian military has suffered far heavier casualties than the "classic" three-to-one ratio often expected during an offensive.

However, Kiev has still retained its offensive capabilities, Putin said. He added that he expected Russian commanders to "assess the situation realistically" and act accordingly.

The Russian leader also acknowledged that Russian troops are facing shortages of modern weapons, and expressed hope that the country's military industry will soon be able to satisfy growing demand.

He attributed the purported failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive to the effectiveness of the armaments already at the disposal of Russian forces.

On Thursday, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu revealed that the Ukrainian military had tried to break through Russian defences in Zaporozhye Region. However, this attempt was thwarted by pre-emptive artillery and aerial strikes, the official claimed.

According to the minister, Kiev's forces suffered losses running into the thousands as a result.

On Friday, Moscow stated that Ukraine had lost up to 1,240 troops and 39 tanks in just 24 hours. Dozens of armored vehicles and artillery units, including ones provided by Western countries, were also destroyed, Russian military officials claimed.

Citing anonymous senior US officials, CNN also reported that the Ukrainian military had sustained "significant" casualties this week.
New Delhi, June 9 : A Delhi court on Friday rejected the bail pleas of businessman Amandeep Singh Dhal in cases related to the Delhi excise policy.

Special Judge M. K. Nagpal of Rouse Avenue Courts stated that there is prima facie evidence indicating serious allegations against Dhal, an executive director of Brindco Sales Private Ltd, and therefore, he is not entitled to bail, even in this scheduled offences case of the CBI.

The ED arrested Dhal under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in the excise case and said that he, along with others, allegedly conspired and played an active role in formulating policy and facilitating kickbacks to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and its recovery by the South Group through various means.

"It is observed that the role played by this applicant in commission of the alleged offence of money laundering is even (more) grave or serious than the role played by some other co-accused.

"... and further, some allegations of tampering of evidence, influencing of the witnesses and falsification of accounts and records have also been made against him, which are also required to be taken into consideration, along with the other material, for considering the question of grant of bail to him," the judge added.

Dhal was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on March 1 and later by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in April.

In the corruption case being probed by the CBI, the allegations against the accused were serious, according to the court.

"While considering the evidence on the face of it and without minutely testing its credibility or trustworthiness, it, prima facie, leads this court to form an opinion that the allegations made by prosecution against the applicant are serious in nature and he is not entitled to be released on bail even in this scheduled offences case of CBI," the judge said.

The court rejected Dhal's argument that he should be granted bail based on the principle of parity with other accused individuals, including Sameer Mahendru, who was not even arrested by the CBI in the case.

It stated that while Mahendru's role may be serious and as grave as that of Dhal, the mere fact that the investigating agency did not arrest Mahandru cannot be the basis for granting bail to Dhal.

The evidence on record indicates a significant role played by Dhal in the commission of the alleged offences, leading to the dismissal of his bail application in the corruption case, it added.

The judge also highlighted that even Manish Sisodia, the former Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi and a co-accused in the case, has been arrested.

Sisodia's bail applications were previously dismissed by both the court and the Delhi High Court.

Both the ED and the CBI have alleged irregularities in the modification of the excise policy, including favoritism towards license holders, waiving or reducing license fees, and extending the L-1 license without proper approval.

The beneficiaries of these actions allegedly diverted illegal gains to the accused officials and falsified their accounting records to avoid detection.
Jaipur, June 9 : Rajasthan BJP MP Kirodi Lal Meena on Friday submitted a complaint to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) accusing Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot of converting black money into white money with the help of his friends sitting abroad.

In the complaint, Meena named Narendra Singh Dhindsa, who's based out of London, Hitesh Bayani, a resident of the UK, and Yuk Latincic, a Russian national, as those helping Gehlot convert black money into white money.

Many others, including Ashok Gehlot's son Vaibhav Gehlot and his daughter-in-law Himanshi Gehlot, were also named in the complaint, in which the Rajya Sabha MP alleged that a Mauritius-based shell company is involved in money laundering.

Meena reached the ED office on Friday afternoon along with his supporters and submitted the 10-page complaint to a joint director ranked officer.

He alleged in the complaint that Vaibhav Gehlot has connections with a businessman who runs ventures across the country using "illegal money channelised from Ashok Gehlot".

The BJP leader said the "facts" presented in the complaint call for a detailed investigation by the ED.

Meena also alleged that tax evasion and 'benami' transactions were carried out by Vaibhav Gehlot and others.

The complaint against Vaibhav Gehlot, along with a person who is reportedly in business with him, seeks legal action under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

Earlier at a press conference on Thursday, Meena had claimed that investigations will reveal Ashok Gehlot to be the richest politician in the country.

He also claimed that the son of the Chief Minister had used a Mauritius-based illegal firm to invest Rs 96.75 crore in a hospitality entity operating a hotel in Jaipur. He alleged that the Gehlot family is using a shell company to convert their illegally acquired funds into legal ones through money laundering.

According to Meena's statement, both the Mauritius-based company and the hospitality firm were established in 2007.

During his previous tenure as the Chief Minister, Ashok Gehlot had allegedly obtained authorisation for constructing hotels from the Jaipur Development Authority in 2009, Meena said.

He claimed there were inconsistencies in the authorisation given for hotel construction in Udaipur and Mount Abu, adding that these establishments were owned by individuals who had close ties to Ashok Gehlot.

Meena claimed that a shell company received an investment of Rs 100 crore from a doctor who is based out of London and is an NRI known to have a close ties with Ashok Gehlot.

Meanwhile, Ashok Gehlot said at an event on Friday, "Whenever elections near in states where opposition parties are in power, ED gets into action. The probe agency is working under pressure, which is not right. We do not have an issue with the ED or the CBI, but they should not work under any pressure."
Kolkata, June 9 : The West Bengal government has cancelled all leaves for police personnel till the end of counting for the forthcoming panchayat polls.

The order comes into effect from June 10 and will continue till July 11, the date of counting. The polls will be conducted in a single phase on July 8.

Though it is not yet clear if the State Election Commission (SEC) will agree on the deployment of central armed forces for the panchayat elections, State Election Commissioner Rajiva Sinha has said that people should have faith in the state administration's capability of holding free and fair elections.

Earlier on Friday, a division bench of the Calcutta High Court observed that five days are not enough for filing nominations for 75,000 seats for the panchayat polls and there is a need for a review of the situation by the SEC. The bench also directed the state government to submit its observations on the deployment of central armed forces before the court on Monday.

Immediately after the court observation, Sinha held a meeting with the top bureaucrats and police officers of the state to review the situation.

After the meeting, Sinha said he had a discussion on the possibilities of deploying enough state police personnel in each and every booth for the rural civic body polls.

However, he did not make it clear if the deadline for filing nominations will be extended.

"No decision has been taken so far in this matter. The nomination process just started today. We will take a decision according to the evolving situation," Sinha said.
New Delhi, June 9 : Days after Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge targeted the Railways over the Odisha train tragedy in which at least 288 people died, four Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) parliamentarians on Friday termed the criticism "high on rhetoric and low on facts", saying "it does not suit a leader of your (addressing Kharge) stature to be writing letters to the Prime Minister based on 'WhatsApp University' assertions.

In the four-page letter to Kharge, BJP MP Tejashwi Surya and others said: "In response to your recent letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi Ji, we must say, we found it high on rhetoric and low on facts." The BJP MPs said that Kharge, as a former Minister of Railways, "one would anticipate your discernment of the situation to be infused with depth and understanding".

"Yet, your recent communication to us suggests otherwise. We must, therefore, break down the reality for you, with factual replies to your conjectures," the BJP MPs said.

Taking on Kharge's charge over employment, they said that in the past nine years, Railways appointed 4.58 lakh new appointees and currently the recruitment process to appoint about 1.52 lakh candidates is ongoing.

"Thus, in our 10 years, we would appoint more than 6.1 lakh youngsters, which is almost 50 per cent more than of 4.11 lakh candidates appointed during the 10 years of UPA," the MPs said.

The letter also said that 5,518 freshly appointed Assistant Loco Pilots "quash your allegations about neglecting this sector".

"The incident of February 2023 that you have mentioned was thoroughly investigated by Railways. All the Railways personnel were counselled on the strict implementation of maintenance practices," they said on South Western Railway report.

Hitting back at the Congress Rajya Sabha MP, they said that it may also be noted that "there was no collision in Mysore as stated in your letter".

"It doesn't suit a leader of your stature to be writing letters to the PM based on what has been received from 'WhatsApp University'. But perhaps as the Vice-Chancellor of WhatsApp University, you are forced to regurgitate fake news as facts," they alleged.

"You have held the responsibility of the Ministry of Railways and you must be aware that the Commissioner of Railway Safety is an independent and statutory authority," the BJP MPs submitted.

Attacking the Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha, the BJP MPs said that recently in 2022, the Commission was strengthened by upgrading the post of CRS to Apex level.

"The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture in its 323rd report dated 22nd December 2022, that you have mentioned, has also appreciated in Para 28 that almost 90 per cent of the recommendations of CRS have been accepted by the Ministry of Railways during the last five years," they said.

"You raise concerns about safety investments, yet under our (BJP) tenure, the Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh (RRSK) was established for critical safety-related works. Railways spent over Rs 1 lakh crore on RRSK works between 2017-18 and 2021-22.

"Our total safety expenditure in the last 9 years of Rs 1,78,012 crore is 2.5 times the expenditure during your era. It is amusing how you have the confidence to lecture us on rail safety after performing so miserably during the 10 years of UPA," they alleged.

The BJP leaders also said that the fact remains that "we developed and adopted the Anti-Collision device National Automatic Train Protection (ATP) in July 2020. After successful testing of ATP, it was installed as KAVACH on 1,465 RKM (route km) on South Central Railway".

"The Anti-Collision Device developed by Konkan Railway during your government did not pass the necessary technical and operational feasibility requirements. A new system was developed and successfully adopted as In the next phase, KAVACH will be installed on 34,000 RKM at the cost of Rs 13,000 crore. The first 3,000 RKM on Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah will be operational next year," it said.

The remarks of BJP leaders came days after Kharge wrote to Modi over the tragic train accident in Odisha, which led to the death of 288 passengers and over 800 injured.
New Delhi, June 9 : A Delhi court on Friday set aside an order of a judicial magistrate and directed him to pass a 'reasoned' order, emphasing that every court's primary objective is to establish the truth and that every investigating agency is also obligated to work towards ascertaining the truth.

Additional Sessions Judge Rakesh Kumar Singh was reviewing a revision petition filed by an advocate challenging the decision of a metropolitan magistrate.

The magisterial court had refused to direct the police to file an FIR based on the advocate's complaint against his former client.

The advocate had a dispute with his client regarding professional fees, and subsequently, an FIR was lodged against him, accusing him of rape.

The court said that the police have the responsibility of uncovering the truth regarding the entire sequence of events.

After obtaining anticipatory bail, the advocate had approached the police with a counter complaint.

He had sought the registration of an FIR against his former female client, alleging that she had fabricated the story in an attempt to extort money from him.

The advocate claimed that the police took action based on the woman's FIR and filed a charge sheet against him, which compelled him to approach the magisterial court to file a criminal case against the woman.

The magisterial court had then declined to grant relief to the advocate who had then filed a revision petition in the sessions court, which stated that the complainant's claim was a cross-case involving the same parties and a series of related transactions.

ASJ Singh said that it is well known that every court should work solely to establish the truth and for this to happen, the basis itself must be truthful, and therefore, every investigating agency is also obligated to work towards ascertaining the truth.

"The order is set aside. The magistrate shall hear the complainant and pass a reasoned order," ASJ said.
Imphal, June 9 : Ten political parties in Manipur, led by Congress, on Friday sought the intervention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to restore peace and normalcy in the state at the earliest.

Criticising the Prime Minister's silence over the Manipur situation, three-time Chief Minister and veteran Congress leader O. Ibobi Singh said that Modi's silence over the devastating violence in Manipur proves that the Centre is neglecting the state.

He also emphasised that while the visit of Union Home Minister Amit Shah was appreciated, Manipur continued to suffer from unabated unrest and persistent reports of violence.

The Congress leader further expressed the view that if the Central government had intervened on time, the crisis could have been resolved much earlier.

The ten political parties in its meeting on Friday at Congress Bhawan in Imphal also resolved to urge the state government to convene a special session of the Manipur Assembly for a detailed discussion on the ongoing unrest. The meeting was chaired by the Manipur state Congress President K. Meghachandra Singh.

The 10 political parties include the CPI, CPI-M, JD-U, Forward Bloc, RSP, SS-UBT, Trinamool Congress, NCP, and a local party, besides the Congress.

Last month, a Congress delegation led by party President Mallikarjun Kharge met President Droupadi Murmu in Delhi and sought her intervention into the Manipur crisis.
Bengaluru, June 9 : The textbook revision row in Karnataka escalated after the Congress called RSS founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar a coward who submitted six mercy petitions to the British.

The BJP has retaliated by saying "if Karl Marx could be taught to the children, why lessons of RSS leaders cannot be taught".

BJP national General Secretary C.T. Ravi on Friday, reacting to the development of textbook revision, said: "If lessons on Karl Marx could be read, why can't students read the lessons of RSS leaders. The ideology will spread through the branches of RSS. They can only remove them from the syllabus, but not from the hearts of people. Former PMs Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi have failed in their similar attempts earlier." Criticising the grand old party, the senior BJP leader further said: "Lies and Congress are two sides of the same coin. Congress leaders have begged for the seat of power. Why were Congress leaders not sent to Andaman prison by the British? Why was only Veer Savarkar sent there? Why was Jawaharlal Nehru not sent to Andaman prison?" Former Revenue Minister R. Ashoka has warned that the BJP would not sit quiet if changes in the syllabus are made according to the whims and fancies of Congress leaders.

Senior Congress leader B.K. Hariprasad claimed that Hedgewar admitted to writing 6 mercy petitions to the British. "We don't want to teach our children chapters on cowards. The Congress government will not approve the ideology of Sangh Parivar, the family of Hindu nationalist organisations such as RSS, will not be allowed to influence the functioning of any government department.

"No evidence is there to prove that Hedgewar was a freedom fighter. I refuse to respect individuals pretending to be freedom fighters... and who sought mercy from the British. Someone even referred to Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, as a freedom fighter," he said.

The previous BJP government had introduced a chapter on Hedgewar last year, after setting up a committee headed by right-wing writer Rohit Chakrathirta.

Former Karnataka Education Minister B.C. Nagesh said: "We made changes (in the textbooks) by taking these people into confidence. But they were hurt by these changes. We removed the lessons on Nehru and reduced the lessons on the glorification of Tipu Sultan. We brought such lessons that developed a feeling of nationalism among students.

"Though Congress ruled the country and the state for many years, they are not bothered about the education system. We were practising the same system framed by Macaulay," he stated.

Amid the warning of the BJP that it won't sit quiet over revision of syllabus, the Congress government has made it clear that it has already taken up the process of revision of textbooks.

Minister for Education Madhu Bangarappa stated on Thursday in Vidhana Soudha that during the ongoing academic year, the "unscientific and un-Constitutional content would be revised".

"The previous BJP government had added objectionable content to the syllabus. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah himself is concerned about revision of those aspects," he said.

Many rounds of talks have taken place with academic experts.

"Authors and litterateurs have also given their opinions. The experts who are giving advice that the syllabus taught to children should be scientific and have social orientation are not connected to any political parties," minister Madhu Bangarappa stated.
New Delhi, June 10 : A Delhi court has sent a man arrested in connection with a money laundering investigation involving the banned Popular Front of India (PFI) to custody of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) till June 18.

Sahul Hameed, who was apprehended on June 7 in Madurai and subsequently brought to Delhi, was deemed uncooperative during the probe.

The court granted the ED's request for custodial interrogation, but reduced the initial request of 14 days to 10 days.

The judge's decision was based on Hameed's lack of cooperation thus far and the need for the ED to gather relevant evidence.

The ED, represented by Special Public Prosecutor N.K. Matta, told the court that Hameed was involved in collecting illegal funds for the PFI through various channels, both legitimate and illegitimate, from Singapore and other locations.

The agency stated that Hameed was deported to India and, upon interception, was unable to account for certain activities related to fund collection.

The ED also mentioned that Hameed was evasive in answering questions about crucial aspects discovered during the investigation, which led to his arrest.

The ED's case is based on an FIR filed by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for alleged terrorism-related activities.
Press Release

June 9, 2023 Villar encourages women to embrace digital transformation Noting that nearly 90% of jobs will require digital skills by 2025, Sen. Cynthia Villar yesterday exhorted women to embark on digital technology. "As women, let us support and uplift one another, ensuring that no woman is left behind in this journey of digital transformation" said Villar during the 18th Annual General Assembly of thePhilippine Federation of Local councils of Women (PFLCW) held at The Heritage Hotel in Pasay City on June 8. Villar noted that globally, only about 24% of women enroll in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) courses, resulting in a shortage of skilled workers. "In the Philippines, it is slightly higher at 30-40%, but still insufficient. This means we are missing out on the potential contributions of more than half of our population in the development of a strong digital economy," she said. During the event with the theme "Women in Digital Transformation," Villar acknowledged that PFLCW plays a vital role in advocating for women empowerment across our nation. Representing 300,000 women in 500 Local Councils, the senator lauded their organization for driving positive change and championing inclusivity and women's participation in various sectors. "It's about making sure that women have the same chances as men in tech jobs and encouraging them to take full advantage of the internet and other digital tools," she said. "By doing so, we strive to prevent women from being left behind and provide them with opportunities to lead and innovate," she added. However, she noted the 'gender digital divide' poses a pressing issue that hinders women's digital empowerment. To help bridge this divide, she said the Senate enacted last year the Philippine Digital Workforce Competitiveness Act. "Now, more than ever, we must be committed to break down all the barriers and challenges in the digital platforms to develop the country's economy." The senator further stated that as Chairperson of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and a strong advocate for the empowerment of our farmers and others in the agricultural sector, she hopes for the efficient and effective integration of technological advancements into agriculture. "I firmly believe that by using technology in agriculture, we can improve the yield of our farmers, ensure food security, and uplift the lives of those involved in this important sector." She envisions a future where we embrace the power of digital tools and innovations to transform agriculture, leading to a sustainable and prosperous future for our farmers and our nation. Villar, hinikayat ang kababaihan na mag- digital transformation Dahil kailangan ang digital skills sa halos 90% ng trabaho sa 2025, nanawagan si Sen. Cynthia Villar sa mga kababaihan na mag-digital technology. "As women, let us support and uplift one another, ensuring that no woman is left behind in this journey of digital transformation," ani Villar sa 18th Annual General Assembly of thePhilippine Federation of Local councils of Women (PFLCW) na idinaos sa Heritage Hotel sa Pasay City nitong June 8. Ipinunto ni Villar na sa buong mundo, 24% lamang ng kababaihan ang naka-enroll sa Information and Communication Technology (ICT) courses na nagreresulta sa kakulangan ng skilled workers. "In the Philippines, it is slightly higher at 30-40%, but still insufficient. This means we are missing out on the potential contributions of more than half of our population in the development of a strong digital economy," ayon pa kay Villar. Sa naturang okasyon na may temang "Women in Digital Transformation," kinilala ni Villar ang pagsusulong ng PFLCW sa women empowerment sa buong kapuluan. Pinuri niya ang may 300,000 kababaihan sa 500 Local Councils dahil sa kanilang pag tutulak sa positibong pagbabago at paglalahok ng kababaihan sa maraming sektor. "It's about making sure that women have the same chances as men in tech jobs and encouraging them to take full advantage of the internet and other digital tools," ayon sa senador. "By doing so, we strive to prevent women from being left behind and provide them with opportunities to lead and innovate," dagdag pa niya. Subplot, kanyang sinabi na ang 'gender digital divided' ang hadlang sa women's digital empowerment. Upang matugunan ito, ipinasa ng Senado noong nakaraang taon ang Philippine Digital Workforce Competitiveness Act. "Now, more than ever, we must be committed to break down all the barriers and challenges in the digital platforms to develop the country's economy." Binanggit din ng senador na bilang Chairperson ng Senate Committee on Agriculture at strong advocate sa empowerment ng magsasaka at ng mga nasa agricultural sector, umaasa siya sa epektibong integration ng technological advancements sa agriculture. "I firmly believe that by using technology in agriculture, we can improve the yield of our farmers, ensure food security, and uplift the lives of those involved in this important sector." Nakikita niya sa hinaharap ang kapangyarihan ng digital tools at innovations sa pagbabago ng agriculture, para sa sustainable at masaganang kinabukasan.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 9. The navies of India, France and the UAE have carried out a two-day mega wargame in the Gulf of Oman reflecting their growing cooperation to deal with challenges in the maritime sphere, Trend reports.

It was the first edition of the wargame involving navies of the three countries, officials said on Thursday,

Indian Naval ship INS Tarkash, French ship Surcouf, French Rafale aircraft and the UAE Navy's maritime patrol aircraft participated in the exercise that began on Wednesday.

"The exercise featured a wide spectrum of naval operations such as surface warfare, involving tactical firing and drills for missile engagements on surface targets, helicopter cross deck landing operations, advanced air defence exercise and boarding operations," said an Indian Navy official.

The official said the exercise aimed to enhance trilateral cooperation between the three navies and pave the way for adopting measures towards addressing traditional and non-traditional threats in the maritime environment.
Gaborone, June 10 : Health authorities in Botswana are on high alert following the outbreak of cholera in some countries in the Southern African Development Community -- South Africa, Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi.

"The ministry is on high alert and continues to monitor developments in the region and globally," said Christopher Nyanga, spokesperson of the Ministry of Health, on Thursday issuing a statement on precautionary measures against cholera.

Nyanga highlighted that some deaths have also been recorded in the neighboring countries due to the cholera outbreak. "However, Botswana has so far not recorded any cholera case," he was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency.

Nyanga further advised citizens and residents who travel to infected countries to take necessary hygiene precautions and present to their health facilities if experiencing any symptoms.
Patna, June 10 : BJP senior leader and Rajya Sabha MP Sushil Kumar Modi slammed Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar for "failing" to help the victims of Balasore train tragedy.

Sushil Modi said that neither Nitish Kumar himself nor any of his senior ministers visited Odisha to help the rail tragedy victims of Bihar origin. Even his government has not initiated any help desk to provide assistance to the family members of the victims.

"Unlike Mamata Banerjee, who went to Odisha and personally monitored the proceedings of relief and rescue operations. She went beyond party politics and provided 40 buses for injured persons, and family members of the victims. Why did Nitish Kumar not go to Balasore or send a senior minister of the government to provide assistance to the victims of the railway tragedy," the BJP leader asked.

"At present, 21 passengers belonging to Bihar are still missing and their family members are struggling to find them. The state government is not providing help to any of the victim's families. They are going there at their own expense and returning home empty hands after their money ends. Why has the Bihar government not made arrangements for the accommodation and food for the family members who went there in search of their loved ones?" he said.

"Even, the state government has not made any arrangements of DNA and blood tests at ground zero," Sushil Modi added.

Meanwhile, officials of Bihar's Disaster Management Department claimed that the department has issued toll-free numbers 0612-2294204/205 and 7070290170. They also said that a control command centre was also established on June 2 in Patna. The train tragedy in Balasore happened on June 1.

Officials further said that in the tragedy, 48 persons belonging to Bihar have lost their lives so far, while 43 were injured. As many as 89 passengers have returned home.
Washington, June 10 : The US Justice Department has charged former President Donald Trump on 37 counts in connection with his handling of classified documents from his presidency that he carried with him while leaving the White House at the end of his term in January 2021, according to an indictment unsealed on Friday.

The department plans to seek a "speedy trial" of the case.

Trump is the first former American President to face federal charges. He has been indicted by New York state in a case of paying hush money to an adult film star.

The charges include willful retention of national defence information that ranges from the country's nuclear weapons to attack plans for foreign countries, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or a record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and making false statements and representations.

Walter Nauta, Trump's valet, is co-accused in some of these charges and the sole accused in the 38th, making false statements and representations.

The 49-page indictment details the former President's reckless treatment of classified documents - he showed them to people without the necessary security clearance - on two occasions, and his attempts to withhold them from FBI investigators despite grand jury subpoenas.

"The men and women of the United States intelligence community in our Armed Forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people. Our laws that protect National Defense Information are critical to the safety and security of the United States. And they must be enforced," said Jack Smith, the Justice Department's Special Counsel for this case.

The indictment shows - with photographs - these boxes were stored in publicly accessible places in Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, which has been his home - in the ballroom, bathrooms, and the business centre. The document also contains transcriptions of audio recordings of the former President's remarks in which he acknowledges that the documents he is showing to people are classified and that he cannot and should not be doing that.

He further said: "Violations of those laws put our country at risk adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle in the Department of Justice. And our nation's commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone." "It's very important for me to note that the defendants, in this case, must be presumed innocent until proven guilty. beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law," Smith said in conclusion, adding, "To that end, my office will seek a speedy trial on this matter consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused." Trump is expected to appear in a Miami court in connection with this case on Tuesday. "I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax," Trump wrote on Truth Social, referring to the boxes of documents that he had carried with him from the White House at the end of this presidency to his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, which contained many that were described as classified.

"I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!" he wrote in a subsequent post and said in a video, using capital letters that he is known to use for rhetorical flourish.

Trump is running for a second term and is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in a field that has grown every day, and now includes his former Vice-President Mike Pence and former Ambassador to UN Nikki Haley and the current Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis, who is second in the polls.
Bengaluru, June 10 : BJP MLA from Belthangady constituency of Dakshina Kannada, Harish Poonja, who had stirred a controversy by claiming that Chief Minister Siddaramaiah got 24 Hindu activists killed, got relief from the Karnataka High Court on Friday.

The High Court bench headed by Justice M. Nagaprasanna stayed the police investigation into the case. Three complaints were registered against the BJP MLA in Puttur, Belthangady and Bantwal police stations.

Appearing for Poonja, senior counsel Prabhuling Navadagi submitted in the court that the case is not fit to be lodged against the BJP MLA under IPC Section 153A. "That is why there was a delay in filing FIR against BJP MLA Harish Poonja... no incidents of violence were reported following the statement...," he argued.

Considering the argument, the bench issued a stay on the investigation.

Poonja had made the controversial remarks while venting out ire on Hindu activists who campaigned for Congress recently. The audio and video of his outbursts went viral on social media. Satyajith Surathkal, a Hindu activist, had carried out campaigning for the Congress party.

"You sought votes for Siddaramaiah who got 24 Hindu activists killed... You have sought votes for the Congress which is proposing a ban on Bajrang Dal," Poonja had stated.

BJP has been claiming that during the tenure of Siddaramaiah between 2013 and 2018, the coastal Karnataka region - especially Dakshina Kannada district - witnessed a series of murders of Hindu activists. The saffron party further accused the Congress government headed by Siddaramaiah of protecting the accused persons by withdrawing cases against the workers of PFI and SDPI.

The BJP had made it a poll issue in 2018 and swept elections in the coastal region. However, Siddaramaiah denied these allegations, saying that the murders had happened due to rivalry and personal enmity. CBI investigation revealed that Paresh Mesta, a Hindu youth who was allegedly killed in the backdrop of communal violence, died accidentally. The investigation report proved to be a major setback for the BJP during the elections.
Owendo Airport, Owendo, Gabon [ OWE / ]

If you are planning to travel to Owendo or any other city in Gabon, this airport locator will be a very useful tool. This page gives complete information about the Owendo Airport along with the airport location map, Time Zone, lattitude and longitude, Current time and date, hotels near the airport etc... Owendo Airport Map showing the location of this airport in Gabon. Owendo Airport IATA Code, ICAO Code, exchange rate etc... is also provided.

Owendo Airport Info:

Owendo Airport IATA Code: OWE Owendo Airport ICAO Code: Latitude : 0.290217 Longitude : 9.50636 City : Owendo Country : Gabon World Area Code : 526 Airport Type : Small Owendo Airport Address / Contact Details :

Owendo (OWE), Libreville, Gabon Timezone : Africa/Libreville Owendo Airport Timezone : GMT +01:00 hours Current time and date at Owendo Airport is 03:43:30 AM (WAT) on Monday, Jun 12, 2023

Looking for information on Owendo Airport, Owendo, Gabon? Know about Owendo Airport in detail. Find out the location of Owendo Airport on Gabon map and also find out airports near to Owendo. This airport locator is a very useful tool for travelers to know where is Owendo Airport located and also provide information like hotels near Owendo Airport, airlines operating to Owendo Airport etc... IATA Code and ICAO Code of all airports in Gabon. Scroll down to know more about Owendo Airport or Owendo Airport, Gabon.

Owendo Airport Map - Location of Owendo Airport Load Map Gabon - General Information Country Formal Name Gabonese Republic Country Code GA Capital Libreville Currency Franc (XAF)

 1 XAF = 0.002 USD

 1 USD = 610.457 XAF

 1 XAF = 0.002 EUR

 1 EUR = 655.957 XAF

 More XAF convertion rates Tel Code +241 Top Level Domain .ga

This page provides all the information you need to know about Owendo Airport, Gabon. This page is created with the aim of helping travelers and tourists visiting Gabon or traveling to Owendo Airport. Details about Owendo Airport given here include Owendo Airport Code - IATA Code (3 letter airport codes) and ICAO Code (4 letter airport codes)

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OWE - Owendo Airport IATA Code
National Forklift Safety Day "CertifyMe is dedicated to empowering employers with OSHA-compliant safety training, reducing accidents, and protecting lives in the industry." - Mr. Tom Wilkerson, Founder at CertifyMe

CertifyMe, the leader in online forklift certification, is proud to join the nationwide effort in promoting forklift safety on National Forklift Safety Day, taking place on June 12 and June 13, 2023. The Industrial Truck Association proudly commemorates the 10th year of National Forklift Safety Day, marking a decade of dedicated efforts to promote forklift safety awareness and best practices in the industry. This annual event serves as a reminder of the importance of creating a culture of safety within the industry.

National Forklift Safety Day is an opportunity to raise awareness about the critical need for proper forklift training and safety practices. According to the National Safety Council, a staggering 70% of all industrial accidents are caused by operator error. However, effective training has been shown to reduce accident rates by 25-30% (OSHA). Following forklift operator training, OSHA found a remarkable 61% improvement in operator performance scores.

CertifyMe has been at the forefront of online forklift training since 1999, providing comprehensive and convenient certification solutions to employers across the nation. With their website, CertifyMe.net, they have empowered over 101,872 companies to take control of their safety training for employees. Read their blog on National Forklift Safety Day to learn more about the importance of the event and CertifyMe's commitment to being the industry leader in forklift safety training and certification.

Celebrate National Forklift Safety Day 2023 with Certify Me's exciting social media giveaway contest on Facebook! From June 10th to June 16th, share your best forklift safety tip or story in the comments for a chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card. Increase your odds of winning by submitting a short video showcasing safe forklift practices. Join CertifyMe in fostering a community dedicated to forklift safety awareness and the chance to win this valuable prize!

As part of their commitment to forklift safety, CertifyMe offers two dedicated websites for forklift certification: ForkliftCertification.com and CertifyMe.net. ForkliftCertification.com provides a comprehensive Forklift Certification Kit and USB drive, enabling employers to certify an unlimited number of operators in as little as 1 hour. CertifyMe.net offers fully online forklift training and certification that can also be completed in under an hour.

"Industry compliant safety training is of utmost importance for anyone working with or who is an operator." stated Mr. Tom Wilkerson, Founder at CertifyMe. "National Forklift Safety Day serves as a vital reminder to prioritize safety and ensure that operators receive the necessary training to prevent accidents and protect lives."

CertifyMe's dedication to forklift safety and their reliable online certification programs have established them as a trusted partner for companies nationwide. Their mission is to provide employers and forklift operators with the tools and knowledge they need to prioritize safety, reduce accidents, and maintain industry compliance.

For more information about CertifyMe and their certification programs and offers, please visit their websites: CertifyMe.net and ForkliftCertification.com.

About CertifyMe:

CertifyMe is a leading provider of forklift certification, committed to promoting safety and OSHA compliance in the industry. Since 1999, they have empowered employers to take control of their safety training, offering convenient and comprehensive certification solutions. Other CertifyMe certification solutions include CertifyMeOnline.net, ForkliftCertification.com, and AerialLiftCertification.com.
Current & Upcoming Licensing Opportunities Across the United States

As cannabis legalization continues to sweep through the nation, several states have recently released various licensing opportunities:

Kentucky: On March 31st, Governor Beshear signed Senate Bill 47 to legalize medical marijuanamaking The Bluegrass State the 38th state in the country to approve the medical use of marijuana for its qualifying patients. Under the new law, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services will have until July 1st, 2024, to finalize all regulationswhich sets Kentuckys medical marijuana programs launch expectancy to be in January 2025.

Kentuckians and non-residents will have the opportunity to apply for five (5) different licenses: (i) Cultivator [4 tiers]; (ii) Processor; (iii) Producer [holds both cultivator and processor licenses); (iv) Dispensary; and (v) Safety Compliance Facility.

Missouri: Currently, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services is accepting applications for Transportation and Seed-to-Sale licenses. In addition, the Department announced they will open applications for Microbusiness licenses on June 6th, 2023, for the initial 48 Microbusiness licenses to be awarded. There are two types of Microbusiness licenses an applicant can apply for: Wholesale (Cultivation & Manufacturing) or Dispensary. The 48 initial licenses to be awarded will be limited to 6 in each of the 8 congressional districts  4 wholesale facilities and 2 dispensaries.

To apply for a Microbusiness license, applicants will be required to pay a $1,500 application fee, as well as a $1,500 annual fee. After issuing the initial 48 Microbusiness licenses in October 2023, the Department will open future application rounds to issue additional 48 licenses (in each round) in July 2024 and May 2025.

Maryland: Medical marijuana business licensees will have until July 1st, 2023, to convert their licenses to adult-use before the Maryland Cannabis Administration opens its first round of applications for adult-use marijuana business licenses in September 2023. There are several license types interested individuals or entities can apply for: (i) Standard licenses: Grower; Processor; Dispensary; Incubator Space; and On-Site Consumption; and (ii) Microbusiness. The first round of licenses is set to be issued on/before January 1st, 2024; however, applicants must qualify as social equity applicants to be awarded a license in this round.

To qualify as a social equity applicant, the applicant must be 65% owned and controlled by individual(s) who meet one of the following requirements: (i) Lived in a disproportionately impacted area for at least 5 of the 10 years preceding the application; (ii) Attended a public school in a disproportionately impacted area for at least 5 years; OR (iii) At least 2 years, attended a 4-year institution of higher education in Maryland where at least 40% of individuals who attended the institution are eligible for a pell grant. For those interested who may not meet the Administrations eligibility requirements, the law sets forth the states intention to issue a second round of licenses on/before May 1st, 2024.

Minnesota: On May 30th, 2023, Governor Walz signed HF 100A into law making Minnesota the 23rd state to legalize marijuana within its borders. The new law permits adults to legally possess marijuana on August 1st, 2023, as well as initiates state officials process of reviewing and expunging tens of thousands of marijuana convictions. Although the decriminalization and expungement efforts will begin quickly, adults in Minnesota will likely not see retail sales of cannabis products until sometime in 2024.

The 300-page bill carves out the new recreational marijuana program with the Minnesota Office of Cannabis Management as the overseeing agency to the adult-use licensing program. Interested individuals and entities will be able to apply for the following license types: (i) Microbusiness; (ii) Mezzobusiness; (iii) Cultivator; (iv) Manufacturer; (v) Retailer; (vi) Wholesaler; (vii) Transporter; (viii) Delivery Service; (ix) Testing Facility; and (x) Event Organizer. Pursuant to HF 100A, vertical integration is strictly prohibited, with the exception to microbusinesses or mezzobusinesses, or the issuance of both lower- potency hemp edible manufacturer and lower-potency hemp edible retailer licenses to the same person or entity. Further, social equity applicants will be given priority points in the states competitive scoring process.

New York: With the slow roll out of adult-use licenses since The Big Apple legalized marijuana in 2021, many interested groups are prepared and ready to apply for the various licenses permitted under New York law. New Yorks Office of Cannabis Management has until the end of August 2023 to finalize any and all regulations, so they can begin opening application periods after Labor Day. Those interested in entering New Yorks billion-dollar market will be able to apply for the following license types: (i) Nursery; (ii) Cultivator [4 types & 5 canopy tiers]; (iii) Processor [3 types]; (iv) Retail Dispensary; (v) Distributor; (vi) Microbusiness; (vii) Cooperative; (viii) Delivery; (ix) On-site Consumption; and (x) Laboratory.

Although the OCM has been vague as to the exact date general applications will open for the above license types, it is essential to begin working with an expert consulting team as New Yorks law implements strict ownership requirements and locality restrictions. Further, under the current proposed regulations, the OCM will not permit applicants to apply on a rolling basis rather set deadlines to apply.

US Virgin Islands: In January 2023, Governor Albert Bryan Jr. signed the Virgin Islands Cannabis Use Act streamlining a regulatory scheme for both medicinal and adult-use of cannabis. Many anticipate this new market will begin application licensing late 2023 or early 2024. Those interested in joining this flourishing market will have the chance to apply for the following licenses: (i) Cultivation (3 levels); (ii) Cannabis Product Manufacturer; (iii) Dispensary; (iv) Research and Development; and (v) Approved Vendor Certificate. Application fees will range from $500 - $5,000 dollars with reduced fees for existing farmers that apply for cultivation licenses. Not only will this be a competitive scoring application process, but also sets forth restrictions to ensure the US Virgin Islands residency requirements are met to apply for a cannabis business license.

Who is Cannacore Group?

Cannacore Group is a team of experts with a passion for building successful businesses specializing in controlled substances from its initial start-up phase to a fully thriving operational business. From assisting clients in identifying new markets to target to bringing in additional resources such as funding and an operational team from our expansive network, our Team works with our clients side-by-side to ensure we can achieve their goals. Through extensive collaboration with clients across the United States, we have successfully supported marijuana businesses in 10+ states and have achieved an overall success rate of ~85%. Due to our Teams combined 19+ years working in the cannabis industry, we have a deep understanding of the array of complex regulations that are key to obtaining a prosperous business license. As such, Cannacore Group are bringing our unique experiences and expert skillset to cannabis markets in Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, and the US Virgin Islands to further assist innovative enterprises.

Founder/CEO, Paula Savchenko, Esq., has spent her career tailoring her services to each clients individual needs. With over 6 years specializing in cannabis business licensing, she has led our Team in developing proven Standard Operating Procedures to ensure continuous success pre- and post-licensure. With our Teams combined 19+ years of knowledge and experience in the cannabis industry, we bring a unique and innovative perspective to each application as we have worked in various states from vertically integrated systems to individual licensing. Our goal is to set our clients apart from the rest through strategic partnerships, foundational relationships with local partners and entities, and trailblazing community outreach and development.

How Can We Help You Achieve Your Goals in the Cannabis Market?

To enter the legal cannabis market, there are various regulatory requirements that are demanded by the state. Due our Teams experience in working with in multi-state expansion, we have an in-depth understanding of how to successfully meet all such requirements to ensure your team creates a strong, trusting relationship with the states regulatory body. Depending on your teams needs, we offer an array of services to best meet your current and future goals. From building a team, including local partners and organizations, to introducing you to our network of lobbyists and expert industry professionals, we will make sure you have a strong group to enter such competitive markets. Further, we will provide proven Standard Operating Procedures and personalized narratives to ensure we represent your team as an efficient, turnkey group who is eager and ready to enter the industry. Our Team will collaboratively develop innovative strategies to help differentiate your team from the rest through tactical funding, community outreach initiatives, and identifying ideal facilities. From residency ownership requirements to mandating locality approval, we will help your team overcome any and all regulatory requirements regardless of how each state adapts the process to their specific needs.

Contact Us Today!

Due to the complex obstacles many face when entering or operating in the cannabis space, we understand that having an expert Team behind you to overcome the complex regulatory hurdles is essential to ensuring your success. If you are interested in discussing your options, contact our Team today at info@cannacorgrp.com or via our website: https://www.cannacoregrp.com/contact/

We look forward to working with you!
Mr. Ahmad underscored the need for training the youth on advanced IT skills that can contribute to world peace by helping address some of the global challenges that threaten human security and well-being, such as poverty, inequality, climate change, health, and education.

Global EdTech company CodersTrust and the University for Peace, a university and treaty organization mandated by UN General Assembly, have forged a partnership on Saturday June 3rd, at a signing ceremony held at UPEACE campus in San Jose, Costa Rica, to offer Next Generation Skills training for the Digital Era through academic collaboration and student exchanges.

Dr. Dipu Moni, Hon'ble Minister of Education of Bangladesh graced the event as the Chief Guest. Aziz Ahmad, Chairman of CodersTrust and Professor Fransisco Rojas Aravena, Rector of University for Peace signed the agreement. Dr. Juan Carlos Sainz Borgo, Vice Rector of University for Peace and Md. Shamsul Haque, CEO of CodersTrust were present among others.

Congratulating both UPEACE and CodersTrust, Dr. Dipu Moni said, this partnership will accelerate the mission of both the organizations. She lauded CodersTrust for its continued role in transforming unemployed and under-employed youth into skilled workforce in both Bangladesh and worldwide, especially the youths and women. She mentioned the International Agreement for the establishment of University for Peace, in which the Permanent Mission of Bangladesh to the United Nations was a signatory four decades back.

UPEACE Rector Professor Fransisco Rojas Aravena praised CodersTrust for its focus on youths and women from underprivileged, underserved and underemployed backgrounds. Emphasizing innovation for peace, Professor Aravena said next-generation skills and technologies like Artificial Intelligence should be leveraged for the peace and prosperity of humanity, addressing any concerns. He recalled his visit to Bangladesh and termed its relationship with Bangladesh as permanent.

CodersTrust Chairman Aziz Ahmad said, this affiliation holds great significance in relation to world peace, education, job opportunities, and women empowerment. He said, in today's world where technology is rapidly advancing, digital skills have become essential for socio-economic progress. He pointed out, $17 trillion will be lost due to setbacks of educational attainment during the pandemic, 1 billion youth are entering the labor market this decade with risk of un/under-employment and 45% of the workforce will need to be reskilling every 3-4 years.

Mr. Ahmad underscored the need for training the youth on advanced IT skills that can contribute to world peace by helping address some of the global challenges that threaten human security and well-being, such as poverty, inequality, climate change, health, and education.

The signing ceremony was followed by a roundtable discussion on Human Rights and Peacebuilding in the Digital Age, where Aziz Ahmad spoke as a panelist. Other panelists included Juan Carlos Sainz-Borgo, Vice Rector, UPEACE, Melissa Mannis, Special Advisor, UPEACE, Dr. Mariateresa Garrido, Doctoral Coordinator, UPEACE, Giannina Segnini, Director, Master of Data Journalism, Columbia University, Branka Panic, Founding Director, AI for Peace, Fabin Solis of Abogado Aguilar Castillo Love, Marina Meira, Head of Projects, Data Privacy Brazil Research Association, Marcela Chacon, VP and Global Director for United Nations Relations, Dan O'Bryan, CEO of Roco Plants and Natalia Porras, Director of Foreign Trade of Ministry of Foreign Trade, Costa Rica Government.

About CodersTrust

CodersTrust is a global digital workforce development company. With the power of EdTech, CodersTrust mission is to transform underprivileged, disadvantaged, and marginalized communities - especially youth and women - with skills for the Digital Era and connect them with work opportunities to enable financial independence and economic growth at a global scale. CodersTrust has developed a sustainable and scalable market-based model for providing skill-focused training to millions of youths worldwide, resulting in employment, upward social mobility and durable social impact. https://coderstrustbd.com

About University for Peace

The University for Peace (UPEACE) is an international graduate-only university and intergovernmental organization, established as a treaty organization by the United Nations General Assembly in 1980. Its chartered mission is to provide humanity with an international institution of higher education for peace with the aim of promoting among all human beings the spirit of understanding, tolerance and peaceful coexistence, to stimulate cooperation among peoples and to help lessen obstacles and threats to world peace and progress, in keeping with the noble aspirations proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations. https://www.upeace.org
The team pledged a donation of 25 packages to be sent to U.S. military personnel at 800 bases in 70 countries, including those serving in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and other posts in the Middle East. Operation Shoebox NJ was founded in 2005 and is an all-volunteer grassroots organization dedicated to collecting donated supplies and shipping curated care packages to deployed U.S. troops. The firm is honored to be a part of the mission.

Lyons & Associates, P.C. is a full-service law firm with an impeccable reputation. For more information, call 908-575-9777 or visit http://www.lyonspc.com to schedule a free consultation. The firms offices are located in Somerville, Morristown, and Freehold, New Jersey, and they serve clients throughout the state.
Sarah has long been a fierce proponent of justice for those impacted by negligence and will bring tremendous insight to effecting the Sections goals and to the betterment of litigation within the states trial and appellate courts.

Christensen Law today announced the appointments of Sarah Stempky-Kime, managing partner, to the Michigan State Bar Negligence Section Council, and of Nora Hanna, trial attorney, to the Executive Board of the Michigan Association of Justice.

Kime brings extensive experience in plaintiff personal injury and law firm management to her role with the organization. Overseeing the firms day-to-day business operations, she focuses on developing a collaborative, client-centric practice, and the delivery of excellence in strategic legal services.

After earning her Juris Doctor from Michigan State University College of Law, Sarah joined firm founder David Christensen as his trial partner. Career highlights include several multiple million-dollar verdicts and settlements, including a record-setting $17.8 million award for a traumatic brain injury case, and a recent $9.5 million verdict in a wrongful death suit. An accomplished litigator, she is one of few young female partners in personal injury in the state of Michigan and is lauded for her legal prowess, as evidenced by her recent recognition as an Influential Woman of the Law by MILW.

An advocate for disabled equity and social inclusion, Kime is involved with organizations supporting epilepsy and brain injury and sits on the Board of the Epilepsy Foundation of Michigan.

Sarah has long been a fierce proponent of justice for those impacted by negligence and will bring tremendous insight to effecting the Sections goals and to the betterment of litigation within the states trial and appellate courts; says partner David Christensen, we are extremely proud of her achievements.

Nora Hanna began her tenure with Christensen Law in 2022, where she quickly proved her skill as a trial attorney in medical malpractice, personal injury, and civil rights cases. A trailblazer for expanding access to justice and educating the public about the rights she vehemently protects, recent wins include verdicts for the wrongful death of a 2-year-old child and plaintiffs in a complex fatal aviation case, as well as her efforts in preventing the unlawful deportation of hundreds of Michigan Iraqi nationals.

Hanna graduated from Wayne State with a Bachelor of Arts degree in speech communication and rhetoric and earned her JD from Wayne State University Law School in 2015. Her success in the courtroom has earned her numerous accolades including Super Lawyers Rising Stars, MILW Up & Coming Lawyers, and the Michigan State Bars Regeana Myrick Outstanding Young Lawyer Award.

Committed to her Chaldean roots and community, Nora serves as a board member of the Chaldean Community Foundation and Cultural Center Museum, and as a member of the West Bloomfield Chamber of Commerce.

A tenacious defender of victims and civil rights, Noras commitment will undoubtedly make a significant contribution to the work of the MAJ, says Christensen. She is a powerhouse both in the courtroom and in the community and her confident voice will positively impact peoples lives through her efforts with the organization.

ABOUT CHRISTENSEN LAW

Christensen Law is a preeminent Michigan law firm specializing in personal injury, traumatic brain injury (TBI), wrongful death, and truck, car, and motorcycle accidents. With offices in Detroit, Southfield, Ann Arbor, and Grand Rapids, the firms experienced trial attorneys have secured record-setting settlements and verdicts for accident victims throughout the state. The firms ethos is rooted in empathy, as demonstrated by its commitment to compassionate client care and the support of local communities and charities. Led by MILW Hall of Fame founder Dave Christensen, the firm has received a First-Tier ranking in Detroit in Personal Injury Litigation  Plaintiffs by U.S. News  Best Lawyers for the 2023 Edition of Best Law Firms. The firm is also recognized as a Martindale Hubbell AV Preeminent Law Firm.

Christensen Law Offices

25925 Telegraph Road, Suite 200, Southfield MI 48033 | Tel 248.900.9000

615 Griswold StreetSuite 515, Detroit MI 48226

3049 Miller Road, Ann Arbor MI 48103

3205 Eaglecrest Drive, Suite 100, Grand Rapids MI 49525
The concept document, issued by Moscow last March, attracted some attention in the Arab world, which I deemed not enough. However, some sober writings cannot be ignored, the most important of which is the study of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
SpiTrex Orthopedics, industry leader in medical device contract manufacturing, announced that Brett Gopal has joined the team as Senior Vice President of Operations. Brett brings to SpiTrex improvements in lean manufacturing, automation, and continuous improvement to services.

A native of Chennai, India, Brett came to the United States to study at Western Michigan University and then earned an Executive MBA from the University of Maryland. He began his career at Orchid as a Quality Leader and later a Plant Manager, and he also spent 6 years at Smith & Nephew as Senior Director of Global Operations. He has 16 years of expertise in operations, lean manufacturing, and sterile packaging from his work in the medical device industry. Brett has also consulted for various industry bodies and is in demand as a speaker on all manner of medical device subjects.

Brett is well known throughout the industry as a global expert in lean manufacturing, automation, and continuous improvement. His industry knowledge and leadership will be a welcome addition to our senior leadership team. Brett is responsible for working with our sites to improve efficiencies, drive down costs and improve our lead times, which are already industry-leading. He is also a tenacious go-getter and I know from our previous working relationship that his dogged persistence to get the job done is infectious, said Matt Burba, SpiTrex Orthopedics CEO. With an enviable CapEx budget and exciting development plans, Brett is tasked with future proofing our sites and continuing to drive customer satisfaction through our continuous improvement activities. I am excited to see how he steps up to this challenge.

SpiTrex is confident Brett's broad experience and expertise will play a vital role as the company continues to innovate and grow. For more information visit SpiTrexOrthopedics.com.

About SpiTrex Orthopedics

SpiTrex Orthopedics is an international contract manufacturer with a specific focus on complex orthopedic implants for the Spine, Trauma, and Extremity markets (Spi.Tr.Ex.). Our multi-site footprint consists of 3 manufacturing locations: CTE Solutions (Plymouth, IN), MDI (Lancaster, PA), and SpiTrex Switzerland (Le Locle, CH). They believe that together they can positively impact lives, that success comes from integrity, serving others, and a relentless quest for perfection, and that all problems can be solved with dedication, creative thinking, and personal care.
This recognition is a testament to the passion of our Atlanta-area team, and their ability to work together to continuously deliver exceptional service," said Ben Nichols, Amerisures regional vice president of Field Marketing and Underwriting for the Central region.

Amerisure Insurance has once again been recognized among Atlantas Best and Brightest Companies to Work For. This year marks the eighth time Amerisures Atlanta service center has been named to the prestigious list for the Atlanta area. The program identifies and honors organizations that display a commitment to excellence in human resource practices and employee enrichment.

The 2023 award recipients were evaluated based on key workplace categories, including communication; work-life balance; employee education; diversity, equity and inclusion; achievement and recognition; and retention. Only companies that distinguish themselves as having the most innovative business acumen and human resource practices can be bestowed this honor, according to the program requirements.

Were excited to once again be recognized for the outstanding work culture fostered by our employees and we congratulate our Atlanta team for their proven dedication, said Ben Nichols, Amerisures regional vice president of Field Marketing and Underwriting for the Central region. This recognition is a testament to the passion of our Atlanta-area team, and their ability to work together to continuously deliver exceptional service.

The annual Best and Brightest competitions are sponsored by The National Association for Business Resources (NABR). All of the 2023 winning organizations will be invited to attend an exclusive national conference for winners across the country. This years conference will be held on September 27-28 in Detroit, Michigan.

Amerisures Metro Detroit headquarters has also been awarded the Best and Brightest recognition for 2023. To see the full list of recipients or learn more about the award, click here.

About Amerisure Insurance

Amerisure is a leading provider of commercial property and casualty insurance solutions for U.S.-based construction, manufacturing and healthcare businesses. Licensed in all fifty states and available through an exclusive network of elite independent agents, the company upholds an A (Excellent) financial strength rating, industry-leading service scores, and multiple awards for innovation. Amerisure has been in business for more than 100 years and is consistently named among the best places to work in the industry and throughout the nation. To learn more, visit amerisure.com.
Out of all events, be it elating or traumatic, come lessons from lifes journey. Monica M. Taddeo, in her new book titled 11 Big Lessons I've Learned as a Little Person (published by Balboa Press), walks readers through her inspiring story of overcoming challenges and finding greatness from within.

Born with achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism, this New York author chronicles her life from her youngest years to the present with the life-changing lessons she has learned along the way. As young as 3, Taddeo underwent her first major surgery followed up by in her tween years undergoing extended limb-lengthening surgeries as well as other corrective surgeries into her later life. Over 20 surgeries and many lessons later, she continues the journey to find her true self through her determination, strength and courage.

I think there is a vulnerability in this book that will allow people to relate to and connect with, Taddeo states. This book encompasses many themes from empathy to setting boundaries, as well as the courage to have self-love and survive.

An excerpt from the book reads:

Truly, your journey will never end. You arent looking for an endyou are looking for those moments that make you feel alive and that give you that tingly feeling inside and that let you know you are making a difference. You will have mountains to climb and overcome as well, but keep your eyes on your goals. Your mountains will begin to look like molehills, and you will conquer them.

Visit https://www.balboapress.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/840534-11-big-lessons-ive-learned-as-a-little-person to get a copy.

11 Big Lessons I've Learned as a Little Person

By Monica M. Taddeo

Hardcover | 6 x 9in | 108 pages | ISBN 9798765236154

Softcover | 6 x 9in | 108 pages | ISBN 9798765236147

E-Book | 108 pages | ISBN 9798765236291

Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

About the Author

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Mount Sinai Health System celebrates new Mount Sinai-Behavioral Health Center, Thursday, June 8, 2023 in New York. We believe everyone should have access to the care they need in a setting that is convenient, supportive, and purpose-built and that's exactly what the Mount Sinai-Behavioral Health Center provides for New Yorkers," said Kenneth L. Davis, MD, CEO of the Mount Sinai Health System.

Mount Sinai Creates Transformational New Model of Behavioral Health Care With New State-of-the-Art $140 Million Center

Largest private investment in mental health in state history to create one-stop shop for mental health care, substance use treatment, and primary care

Mount Sinai Health System today hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the newly constructed Mount Sinai-Behavioral Health Center, located at 45 Rivington Street in Lower Manhattan. Click here to watch a video and learn more about the new Center.

The $140 million facilitybelieved to be the largest private investment in mental health care in New York State historywill transform behavioral health care in New York City by serving as a comprehensive one-stop shop for mental health care, substance use treatment, and primary care.

Mount Sinai leaders were joined at the event by Ann Marie T. Sullivan, MD, Commissioner of the New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH); Zoraida Diaz, Downstate District Director, Office of Addiction Services and Supports (OASAS); Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine; and New York City Council Members Carlina Rivera and Christopher Marte, among others.

We believe everyone should have access to the care they need in a setting that is convenient, supportive, and purpose-builtand that is exactly what the Mount Sinai-Behavioral Health Center provides for New Yorkers," said Kenneth L. Davis, MD, Chief Executive Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System. This Center brings our existing behavioral health offerings downtown together and expands our services, ensuring our patients have the high-quality care they deserve, directly in the communities where they live and work.

We are immensely proud to open the Mount Sinai-Behavioral Health Center, which represents a monumental step forward for both behavioral health care and health innovation in New York City, said Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and President for Academic Affairs of the Mount Sinai Health System. This new facility will help change the lives of thousands of patients and introduce a new model of comprehensive care that will improve the entire field of behavioral health for decades to come.

The new center features a robust, integrated continuum of behavioral health services all under one roof. In addition to inpatient care, it will provide critically needed intensive outpatient and crisis services, including a Partial Hospitalization Program, an Intensive Outpatient Program, and one of New York States first Intensive Crisis Residences. The Intensive Crisis Residence is a short-term therapeutic residence in a home-like setting for people experiencing acute mental health crises that are not severe enough to require hospitalization. It can also serve as a step-down from an acute hospital stay to help patients transition more safely back into the community. At the new center, general outpatient mental health and substance use disorder treatment services are integrated with primary care services, providing seamless access and comprehensive care for our communities overall health needs.

In addition, the Mount Sinai-Behavioral Health Center will serve as a hub for innovation, continually expanding and improving behavioral health services available in New York City. By bringing these services under one roof and adding critical new programs, this center will offer a full continuum of care, an integrated process to coordinate care, and a seamless system to access other specialized behavioral health services across the Mount Sinai Health System.

This new facility will address some of the critical gaps in behavioral health services that New Yorkers downtown currently face, giving them access to the care they need when and where they need it, said Grant Mitchell, MD, Chair of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Beth Israel. By expanding the services offered at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, this new behavioral health center will ensure we continue to provide the excellent care our patients deserve.

Mount Sinai-Behavioral Health Centers transformation of the current system for behavioral health treatment goes hand in hand with basic and clinical research. The new center is part of Mount Sinais Department of Psychiatry, a national leader in basic and clinical research with $59 million in grant funding in 2022, more than 40 labs, 130 research faculty members, and 15 major research centers.

All patients of the Center will have the opportunity to participate in research and clinical trials that contribute to the advancement of psychiatric knowledge and care. These trials provide early and exclusive access to innovative therapeutic approaches that could have beneficial, life-changing outcomes.

The facility means dedicated space and resources for the Department of Psychiatry and behavioral health across the Health System, says Rene S. Kahn, MD, PhD, Esther and Joseph Klingenstein Professor of Psychiatry at Icahn Mount Sinai and Chair of Psychiatry for the Mount Sinai Health System. That means we can focus our extensive academic, clinical, and training expertise on developing a research program, delivering quality care to our patients, and launching new programs and approaches for treatment.

A key tenet of the Mount Sinai-Behavioral Health Center is a commitment to treat all patients and families with dignity, compassion, and respect. This commitment to providing an outstanding patient experience extends to the warm, healing environment created inside the building. The tall ceilings, abundant natural light, artwork, and outdoor courtyard are designed to create a sense of peace and calm. Welcome rooms, recovery areas, and therapy spaces facilitate dignity and wellness for patients.

The new Mount Sinai-Behavioral Health Center is a welcome addition to New Yorks behavioral healthcare system. In addition to New York Citys first Intensive Crisis Residence, the Center will also improve access to a wide range of inpatient and outpatient services and integrate primary care into mental health and substance use treatments, all in one location. Congratulations to Mount Sinai for this important addition to their health care system, said Dr. Sullivan, the OMH Commissioner.

This new facility removes barriers to critical services and ensures that individuals seeking treatment have one-stop access to person-centered comprehensive services in a comfortable, supportive environment, said Chinazo Cunningham, MD, Commissioner of OASAS. We are committed to developing and strengthening integrated models of care to help improve outcomes across the populations we serve."

The Mount Sinai-Behavioral Health Center is part of Mount Sinais innovative effort to transform care downtown. To date, Mount Sinai has invested more than $1 billion in its downtown network that includes building a network of 20 outpatient and ambulatory care facilities below 34th Street to provide comprehensive care throughout downtown Manhattan.

Lendlease provided construction management services for the renovation of the late-1800s building into the new Mount Sinai-Behavioral Health Center.

About the Mount Sinai Health System

Mount Sinai Health System is one of the largest academic medical systems in the New York metro area, with more than 43,000 employees working across eight hospitals, over 400 outpatient practices, nearly 300 labs, a school of nursing, and a leading school of medicine and graduate education. Mount Sinai advanced health for all people, everywhere, by taking on the most complex health care challenges of our time  discovering and applying new scientific learning and knowledge; developing safer, more effective treatments; educating the next generation of medical leaders and innovators; and supporting local communities by delivering high-quality care to all who need it.

Through the integration of its hospitals, labs, and schools, Mount Sinai offers comprehensive health care solutions from birth through geriatrics, leveraging innovative approaches such as artificial intelligence and informatics while keeping patients medical and emotional needs at the center of all treatment. The Health System includes approximately 7,300 primary and specialty care physicians; 13 joint-venture outpatient surgery centers throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida; and more than 30 affiliated community health centers. We are consistently ranked by U.S. News & World Report's Best Hospitals, receiving high "Honor Roll" status, and are highly ranked: No. 1 in Geriatrics and top 20 in Cardiology/Heart Surgery, Diabetes/Endocrinology, Gastroenterology/GI Surgery, Neurology/Neurosurgery, Orthopedics, Pulmonology/Lung Surgery, Rehabilitation, and Urology. New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai is ranked No. 12 in Ophthalmology. U.S. News & World Reports Best Childrens Hospitals ranks Mount Sinai Kravis Children's Hospital among the countrys best in several pediatric specialties.

For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

###

Media Contact: Elizabeth Dowling

Mount Sinai Press Office

212-241-9200

NewsMedia@mssm.edu
"Secrets of the Shore," the new album by The Sofia Goodman Group. My first album was such a learning experience. This time I was much more prepared in terms of what I should do and how my music should be. As I worked on 'Secrets of the Shore,' I cared about how I felt as it was happening.

Drummer-composer Sofia Goodman pursues an increasingly sophisticated and multidimensional vision with the July 14 release of "Secrets of the Shore" on Joyous Records. The Nashville-based Goodmans sophomore album with her eponymous Group (trumpeter Matt White, trombonist Roy Agee, saxophonists Joel Frahm and Dan Hitchcock, clarinetist Max Dvorin, keyboardist Alex Murphy, guitarist Rheal Janelle, bassist Leland Nelson, and percussionist Carlos Duran) finds her changing direction from the jazz-funk fusion of her debut albumthough still retaining aspects of that styleand exploring thoughtful and often tender post-bop.

That exploration encompasses a diversity of styles, grooves, emotions, and compositional and improvisational shapes across the albums ten original tunes. But it also includes a remarkable, expansive new approach to colors and textural possibilities, not least on Goodmans drum kit. Its a tremendous leap forward from her 2018 debut, "Myriad of Flowers."

My first album was such a learning experience, Goodman says. This time I was much more prepared in terms of what I should do and how my music should be. As I worked on Secrets of the Shore, I cared about how I felt as it was happening.

A concept album about water and its many guises, "Secrets of the Shore" suitably washes over the listener in waves that are alternately placid (Siren Song), enigmatic (Albertos Dreamland), foreboding (Buried Treasures), and tempestuous (In Barbaras Mist)sometimes in sudden and violent shifts (the complex closing track Angel). It also boasts watery sonic details, such the gentle ripples of piano and cymbal on Shadows on the Sand and the crystalline droplets of saxophone and Fender Rhodes on Skipping Stones.

Importantly, these offerings of detail and mood depend on heavy lifting from the entire Sofia Goodman Group. Each element, from Nelsons slippery electric bass, to White and Agees declaratory brasses, to Frahm and Hitchcocks sinewy (and sinuous) sax lines, has a vital contribution to realizing Goodmans music. Still, its never hard to detect the leaders hand, be it her smart writing or her versatile drumming, ultimately guiding "Secrets of the Shore."

Sofia Goodman was born in 1987 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she was adopted as an infant. She began taking piano lessons in elementary school, but an encounter with a young friends drum kit reoriented her musical interests. Initially that meant blues, rock, and punk, reflecting a teenage defiance that she took with her to Berklee College of Music in Boston. While still in high school, Sofia attended a summer workshop at Berklee taught by Esperanza Spalding, then one of the youngest teachers ever to work at the school. Spaldings encouragement inspired Sofia to take private lessons with Berklee faculty member Jackie Santos, and to return to Berklee for further studies.

After a somewhat turbulent period of relocation and readjustment, however, she found solace in exploring singing and composing at the piano. Time spent outside of the practice rooms at Berklee was typically spent at Wallys Cafe, the beloved South Boston jazz club that is a proving ground for the citys music students.

Not long after graduating from Berklee with a degree in Drum Set Performance, Goodmans Boston apartment was decimated by fire. Fate, and some friends, drew her to Nashville, Tennessee, the country music mecca that also nourishes a rich jazz scene. What Goodman thought was a short-term summer residence developed into more than a decade of enthusiastic embrace of, and by, the community of artists that make up the aptly styled Music City.

Goodman plied her skills with musicians of all stripes, at the same time studying composition for a masters degree from Belmont University. It was only a short time before she was ready to form her own band. Those early efforts would evolve into what is now The Sofia Goodman Group, building a following throughout the South and into the Midwest. Her first album, 2018s "Myriad of Flowers," received a nomination for Best Jazz Album from the Nashville Industry Music Awards. "Secrets of the Shore" is the Goodman Groups follow-up to that acclaimed debut.

Goodmans work strives for lofty goals, takes big musical risks and aspires for the freedom to manifest itself fully, wrote Sean L. Maloney last year in the Nashville Scene. It is truly progressive and fundamentally jazzand a reason to be excited about the continuing evolution of jazz in Music City.

Upcoming shows by The Sofia Goodman Group include: Fri 6/23 Taggart Amphitheater, Indianapolis (7:30-9pm); Sat 6/24 Elkhart (IN) Jazz Festival (3-4:15pm); Fri 7/14 Nashville Jazz Workshop (7:30-9pm); Thurs 7/20 Dogwood Amphitheater, Cookeville, TN (7:30-9pm); Wed 7/26 Rudys Jazz Room, Nashville (6-8:15pm); and Mon 8/7 Analog, Nashville.
Mixteco-speaking families will now have the opportunity to read and listen to stories in their own language, allowing us to celebrate and preserve their rich culture, said Dr. Karling Aguilera-Fort, Oxnard School Districts superintendent.

Oxnard School District, which serves more than 15,000 students in TKgrade 8, and Renaissance, a leading provider of education technology, are pleased to announce the release of six new books in the Mixteco language. The new books, which include natural-voice audio narration by native Mixteco speakers to model fluent reading, are available to Oxnard students through myON, a popular digital reading and literacy platform from Renaissance.

Mixteco is an indigenous language predominantly from Oaxaca, Mexico, with a strong presence in Californiaparticularly in Ventura County. With 65 variants of the Mixteco language, the variant heard in these books originates in the southern region of Oaxaca, specifically the San Martin Peras community. Long recognized for its commitment to dual-language education and biliteracy, Oxnard School District sees the addition of books in Mixteco as key to its mission of serving all students and families in the communityand to honoring all the language assets that students bring to the classroom.

The idea for the project dates to a Family Reading Night event hosted by the districts education services team, led by Dr. Anabolena DeGenna. During the event, Mixteco-speaking district staff were brought in for the first time to provide oral translations of myON books into Mixteco. This soon flourished into a formal initiative to translate 25 myON titles into Mixteco by next fall, and to make them accessible to all students in the district. The first six titles chosen are directed toward early readers to involve families in the experience of reading with their children and supporting their learning to read in a native language.

Oxnard has the second-largest population of Mixteco-speaking families in the world, and we take great pride in valuing and honoring these families unique heritage, said Dr. Karling Aguilera-Fort, Oxnard School Districts superintendent. We are thrilled to announce the launch of these digital books. Mixteco-speaking families will now have the opportunity to read and listen to stories in their own language, allowing us to celebrate and preserve their rich culture.

We would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to Renaissance for partnering with us and making these valuable resources available, he added. Together, we are fostering inclusivity, diversity, and a deep appreciation for the languages and cultures that make our community thrive. It is through initiatives like this that we can truly make a difference.

In addition to serving as the districts superintendent, Dr. Aguilera-Fort is also an officer of the California Association for Bilingual Education, or CABE. The CABE leadership has been highly supportive of this initiative, which aligns with the organizations mission of supporting biliteracy, multicultural competency, and educational equity for all California students.

As part of the districts partnership with Renaissance, district staff and Oxnard community members selected the 25 myON titles to be translated into Mixteco. The districts own translators then undertook the translations and recorded the audio narration in order to ensure that the books reflect the nuances of the Mixteco language as its spoken in Ventura County. In addition to listening to the audio narration, students can also use myON to record themselves reading the Mixteco books aloud, to support the development of reading fluency in a native language.

Renaissance understands that schools can be the hub of their community culture, said Todd Brekhus, Chief Product Officer at Renaissance and Nearpod General Manager. We are delighted to support Oxnard with this joint project that provides myON titles in Mixteco to support students and the community. Language preservation and promoting bilingualism are core to our values of accelerating learning for all.

After months of hard work, we are excited to see this project blossom within the Oxnard community, said Amy Callahan, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Renaissance. Renaissance is proud to be a part of creating a space for belonging and inclusion within the district, helping educators see every student.

About Oxnard School District

In Oxnard School District, we nurture self-confident and empowered multilingual global citizens, strong in their multiple identities and potential, who achieve inspired levels of individual, community, and social accomplishment in school and beyond in their endeavors. For more information, visit https://www.oxnardsd.org/Page/9.

About Renaissance

As a leader in education technology, Renaissance is committed to providing educators with insights and resources to accelerate growth and help all students build a strong foundation for success. For more information, visit https://www.renaissance.com.
"Our mission at SightMD is to provide the very best in eye care, both medically and surgically. Said Jeffrey Martin, MD Hearing that we have achieved an excellent report from our patients is the ultimate in satisfaction as a provider. We will continue to strive to be even better."

SightMD, a leading multi-specialty ophthalmology platform is proud to announce that it has received a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 84, based on a survey of over 5,750 patients since the survey launched in Q4 of 2022. Net Promoter Score is a customer experience metric that measures loyalty and is predictive of business growth. NPS is calculated by asking an initial survey question on a 010 rating scale. Then, the accumulated ratings are graded as one number between -100 and 100. This number expresses how customers perceive a company. A score of 84 is considered to be among the absolute best in their industry and is a testament to the high level of satisfaction that SightMD's patients have with the practice.

"Our mission at SightMD is to provide the very best in eye care, both medically and surgically. Said Jeffrey Martin, MD Co-Founder and President of SightMD Hearing that we have achieved an excellent report from our patients is the ultimate in satisfaction as a provider. We will continue to strive to be even better."

Through the survey patients reported high levels of satisfaction with SightMDs team of doctors as well as its clinical staff. "SightMD is the best!! The team of highly skilled doctors are intelligent, highly knowledgeable, who are also very patient. They listen to you and answer all the questions you may have. Their team is confident in what they are doing and gives you confidence as well." said one patient from Long Island. Survey responses also praised the company's support teams, noting that they were "informative and quick to respond."

"Our role as administrative provider is to support our eye doctors so they can provide the greatest patient care experience. said Jonathan Lujan CEO of Sight Growth Partners NPS scores above 80 are considered world-class. I am proud that we can help provide world-class experiences for the physicians we support and their patients."

About SightMD

SightMD is a rapidly-growing integrated ophthalmic provider group, offering patients access to over 80 eye care providers through the convenience of 40 locations across New York. SightMD's track record of providing clinically-excellent care spans over 50 years, and its services include general eye exams, laser cataract surgery and lens implantation, glaucoma management, retinal disorder treatment, corneal services, neuro-ophthalmology, LASIK laser vision correction, oculoplastic surgery, pediatric ophthalmology, and audiology. Sight Growth Partners is the administrative services provider for SightMD as well as SightMD Connecticut, SightMD New Jersey, and SightMD Pennsylvania. For more information about SightMD, please visit https://www.sightmd.com/sightmd-ny/

About Sight Growth Partners

Sight Growth Partners is the leading administrative services provider for the ophthalmology sector including SightMD in New York, SightMD Connecticut, SightMD New Jersey, and SightMD Pennsylvania. It has over 140 employees who provide administrative solutions to physicians, ophthalmology clinics and ambulatory surgery centers. Sight Growth Partners provides its clients with world-class administrative services, including a 24/7 call center, billing, credentialing, marketing, human resources, and other services, enabling them to continue delivering best-in-class care to patients in their communities. Sight Growth Partners is backed by Chicago Pacific Founders, a leading middle market private equity firm which focuses exclusively on partnerships with growing companies in the healthcare services sector. For more information about Sight Growth Partners, please visit http://www.sightgrowthpartners.com.


Taber Extrusions, alongside Senator Cotton and the AEC urges the DOC to revoke the GAE related to aluminum extrusions and revise the criteria upon which objections can be filed. The aluminum extrusion industry is a crucial player in a myriad of areas of our countrys economy. Our military and defense sectors depend upon us to deliver resources in a consistent manner, and this tariff puts this in jeopardy. says Jason Weber, V.P. of Marketing & Sales at Taber Extrusions.

U.S. aluminum extrusion leader Taber Extrusions voices their support of Senator Tom Cotton for initiating the effort to ask the Department of Commerce (DOC) for immediate attention in protecting the American aluminum industry against foreseeable pitfall. Other supporters of Cotton include The Aluminum Extruders Council (AEC), Senators Mitt Romney, Sherrod Brown, Debbie Stabenow, Rafael Warnock, Bob Casey, and Marco Rubio  who also signed the letter.

The aluminum extrusion industry is a crucial player in a myriad of areas of our countrys economy. Our military and defense sectors depend upon us to deliver resources in a consistent manner, and this tariff puts this in jeopardy. says Jason Weber, V.P. of Marketing & Sales at Taber Extrusions.

A recent DOC report stated that rising aluminum imports "are weakening our internal economy' and threaten to impair the national security as defined in Section 232" and imposed a 10% tariff in response. As a result, aluminum imports fell by 31% and domestic production rose by nearly a billion dollars between 2018-2021. As such, the DOC noted in public remarks that "the data shows that those tariffs have been effective." Because of these overly-broad tariff exclusion rules, these tariffs may have helped limit unfair foreign competition for principal aluminum producers - but dont protect domestic aluminum extruders. The DOC also adopted a General Approved Exclusion or GAE process whereby importers of foreign-made aluminum extrusions are granted automatic exclusion to the Aluminum 232 tariffs.

According to the AEC, The General Approved Exclusions rules are unfair to American aluminum extruders and as a result foreign imports have risen 82 percent and market penetration now exceeds 25 percent, the highest level in more than a decade (US) extruders have been forced to cut shifts, capital investment, and production, putting this robust industry at risk and costing our nation nearly 9,000 jobs. Extrusion plants could be shuttered if these trends continue, which will hurt American workers and undermine America's defense industrial base.

Taber Extrusions, alongside Senator Cotton and the AEC urges the DOC to revoke the GAE related to aluminum extrusions and revise the criteria upon which objections can be filed.

The full Senate letter can be accessed HERE.

Taber Extrusions a minority business enterprise, fully integrated with In-house casting, extrusion, and fabrication, IS0 9001, AS9100, and NADCAP certified, and offers alloys in 2xxx, 5xxx, 6xxx, and 7xxx series with extrusion sizes ranging from less than 1 lb./ft. up to 140 lbs./ft. Taber is a leading supplier of aluminum extrusions purposed for Military and Department of Defense, and offers a diverse range of products and services while simultaneously maintaining a high level of customer care and support.

Connect at http://www.taberextrusions.com or call directly 888.985.5332.


Egypt welcomed on Friday the approval by the Libyan House of Representatives of the 13th constitutional amendment, describing it as an important step to hold parliamentary and presidential elections in Libya.

According to a statement released by the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the amendment, which was approved yesterday, marks an important step in fulfilling the necessary frameworks to hold the Libyan presidential and parliamentary elections simultaneously and as soon as possible under the supervision of a neutral executive authority that upholds the supreme interests of the Libyan state.

The statement added that Egypt is looking forward to seeing the Libyan House of Representatives and Council of State completing their efforts in preparing electoral laws.

The foreign ministry reiterated Egypt's full support for the Libyan-Libyan process, praising the efforts of the House of Representatives, the only elected legislative body in Libya, and the High Council of State.

The statement also asserted Egypts rejection of any external dictates on the Libyans or circumventing the role of Libyan institutions, in accordance with the Skhirat Agreement.

Egypt also called on all involved parties to adhere to these irreplaceable foundations and determinants.

The foreign ministry also stressed the need to stop external interference in Libya and the exit of all foreign forces.

It reiterated Egypts support for the relevant mission of the 5+5 Joint Military Committee in order to ensure and emphasise the sovereignty and stability of Libya.

On Thursday, the Libyan House of Representatives in Benghazi approved the 13th amendment of the Libyan Constitutional declaration that was published in the Libyan states official gazette on the same day.

The newly amended constitutional declaration includes 34 articles defining the new system of government and the tasks of the elected president and prime minister.

It also defines the powers and tasks of the legislative authority, which the amendment divides into two chambers: a House of Representatives and a National Assembly.

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Battles raged in Sudan's war-torn capital of Khartoum on Tuesday, witnesses said, and the residents of an island in the Nile reported being "under siege" amid desperate shortages.

Eight weeks of fighting have pitted army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

A number of broken ceasefires have offered brief lulls but no respite for residents of the city, where witnesses again reported "the sound of heavy artillery fire" in northern Khartoum.

Witnesses also said there were "clashes with various types of weapons" in south Khartoum, where "the sound of explosions shook our walls".

In the city centre, at the confluence of the White Nile and Blue Nile rivers, the island of Tuti is "under total seige" by RSF forces, resident Mohammed Youssef told AFP.

Paramilitaries have blocked the only bridge to the island and prevented residents from going by boat to other parts of the capital.

"We can't move anyone who's sick to hospitals off the island," Youssef said.

"If this continues for days, stores will run out of food."

Since the fighting began on April 15, more than 1,800 people have been killed, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

The United Nations says that more than a million and a half people have been displaced, both within the country and across its borders.

For those still in Khartoum and the western region of Darfur -- which together have seen the worst of the fighting -- the situation is growing increasingly dire.

"We face a massive humanitarian crisis that is only going to get worse with the collapse of the economy, collapse of the health care system," the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) warned on Tuesday.

The danger will increase with "the flood season fast approaching and the looming hunger crisis and disease outbreaks that now are becoming more inevitable".

Sudan's annual rainy season begins in June, and medics have repeatedly warned that it threatens to make parts of country inaccessible, raising the risks of malaria, cholera and water-borne diseases.

Some 25 million people -- more than half the population -- are now in need of aid and protection, according to the UN.

More than 425,000 people have fled to other countries -- more than 100,000 west to Chad and 170,000 north to Egypt.

"There's an urgent need for a massive injection of funds" to support those fleeing the violence, according to the IFRC.

The UN has also appealed for financing, as the fighting shows no signs of abating.

Washington slapped sanctions on the two warring generals last week, blaming both sides for the "appalling bloodshed" after a US- and Saudi-brokered truce collapsed and the army pulled out of ceasefire talks altogether.

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Two major lawsuits filed by freedom to read advocates in Florida and in Arkansas are welcome developments in fighting a nationwide surge in book bans and censorship. But a June 7 hearing before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals serves as a reminder that the legal road can be long, winding, and uncertain. Take the closely watched case in Texas, Little v. Llano County, filed in April 2022, as an example.

On March 30, Judge Robert Pitman issued a widely hailed preliminary injunction in the case, ordering the return of 17 library books Pitman determined were illegally "targeted and removed" and barring the library from removing other books while the litigation proceeds. The Fifth Circuit is now considering an appeal filed by Llano County officials challenging that order. On Thursday, the Texas Tribune reported some notable details from Wednesday's nearly hour long oral argument before a skeptical three-judge panel of appeals court judges.

At one point, the Tribune reports, Duncan asked: "Why is removing pornography from a library an impermissible motive under the First Amendment?" It isn't, replied lawyer Katherine Chiarello, representing the library patrons, but a legal analysis know as the Miller test is typically used to determine whether materials are obscene, which was not done in Llano. Duncan responded by applying his own on-the-spot test to two books that feature prominently on the ALA Top 10 most challenged books list: Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison. "Lawn Boy and Gender Queer, if they don't meet the definition of pornography, I don't know what does," Duncan says. At which point Chiarello corrects Duncan that the standard is not pornography, but obscenity. "Seems obscene, Duncan concludes.

Duncan's line of questioning is notable because the question before the appeals court really does not involve any legal determination of obscenity for the books in question, as Chiarello explains. Rather, Llano County's rather tortured main argument is that the 17 books Pitman ordered returned to the library's shelves were removed as part of a "weeding" exercise, not based on contentin fact lawyers for Llano County argue that the librarian who removed the books in question didn't even read themwhile at the same time arguing that the supposedly weeded books are still available for checkout. Which, of course, is not how weeding works at all.

You can listen to the Fifth Circuit arguments here.

As we reported in Publishers Weekly, two amicus briefs filed in support of Pitman's injunction late last Fridayone by librarians, and one by publishersdo a good job of explaining the question before the Fifth Circuit. "The purpose of 'weeding' is to maintain a library collection that is 'vital, relevant, and useful.' But 'weeding' must never be usedas it was hereas a cynical dodge for purging library collections of controversial or disfavored books," the librarians' amicus brief explains. "Professional librarian training, standards of conduct, and ethical canons, consistent with the First Amendment, demand far more."

The Washington Post has more on the lawsuit filed in Arkansas over Act 372, including comments from plaintiff and organizer Nate Coulter, director of the Central Arkansas Library System. The laws vagueness will have a chilling effect, Coulter said, which, he added, is the law's objective. "The purpose is to scare people, discourage people, intimidate people from collecting these things that are deemed objectionable by certain parts of the community," Coulter told the Post.

 The purpose is to scare people, discourage people, intimidate people from collecting these things that are deemed objectionable by certain parts of the community. 

From the Louisiana Illuminator, news that Louisiana has passed its bill to limit access to so-called sexually explicit books in libraries. It's unclear whether Governor John Bel Edwards will veto the bill. "Senate Bill 7, by Sen. Heather Cloud, R-Turkey Creek, would require libraries to create a card system so parents could prevent their children from checking out books deemed inappropriate. Libraries would also have to adopt policy language to limit minors access to material that describes 'sexual conduct,' which the bill defines in five paragraphs," the article explains. "The bill sets out financial penalties for libraries that do not comply."

In Arizona, Tucson.com reports that Governor Katie Hobbs has vetoed a bill that would have banned allegedly "sexually explicit" school library books from minors, which sponsors tried to slide through by including it in a bill to outlaw porn from being filmed in schools, after two Arizona teachers were fired last year for making an only-fans video on school property grounds. "The sponsor has stated that this bill was aimed at preventing a specific action from reoccurring, while in reality it is written in such a vague manner that it serves as little more than a thinly veiled effort to ban books, Hobbs wrote in her veto statement.

From KCUR, a local NPR affiliate, news that a large Kansas Cityarea library system has banned LGBTQ Pride displays in its childrens and teens sections. "The Mid-Continent Public Library said the decision was made to comply with Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcrofts new rules, which forbid libraries from having displays of 'age-inappropriate' materials in areas designated for teens and children. If libraries dont comply, they could lose state funding," the article notes. An MCPL spokesperson told reporters that the controversial new rule has been a source of confusion. "Were trying to balance complying with the rule and being able to keep that state funding thats important to us, with making sure we have great access."

From the local Royal Examiner, some extensive, colorful coverage of an effort to defund the Samuels Public Library in Front Royal, Va. "At issue...was whether continued county funding of the Samuels Public Library should occur while a total of 134 books requested for removal by the 'CleanUpSamuels' website advocacy group remain on library shelves," writes Roger Bianchini. "Our count was 34 to defund pending removal of cited books, 26 to fully fund the library and let its own review process control content, with a few who seemed on the fence favoring removal of certain books but not really favoring defunding of the library."

From Patch.com, news of a bid by local Republicans in Massachusetts to defund the Sturbridge Public Library over its hosting of a drag event via Zoom. "The defund effort failed in a vote of 320 to 23," Patch reports.

Some good news on the library funding front in Montana: The Great Falls Tribune reports that Great Falls voters approved the library mill levy: "The 'yes' vote clears the way for the Great Falls Public Library to clear its fiscal shortfall and expand its level of services with the addition of 12 full-time employees, increased funding for building repair and maintenance, and more money for computers, books, and research materials."

From Boston.com, reports on a proposed school library policy in Ludlow, Mass., that would label "sexually explicit" materials and empower elected "school committee members" to override librarians decisions to collect materials. "At this point, the American Civil Liberties Union is involved," the article notes, adding that an attorney at the ACLU wrote a letter to the district criticizing the proposed policy.

Over at Book Riot, Kelly Jensen starts her weekly censorship column with a discussion of an Amazon Prime docuseries about the Duggar family, which details the work of the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBPL) and its affiliated home schools. "The homeschool curriculum developed through the IBPLcalled the Advanced Training Institute (ATI)showcases the talking points being spewed by right-wing bigots bent on banning books," she writes. Jensen also has a piece for Book Riot this week on Kirk Cameron and his publisher, Brave Books, and their plan for a nationwide day of public library events for August 5.

From Wisconsin Public Radio, residents of Menomonee Falls, Wisc., appear to have reason to be concerned about the future of their public library. "Trustees denied the Menomonee Falls Public Library is in danger. But a recent $250,000 funding cut to the librarys budget, the ousting of three library board members, and a comment that Menomonee Falls residents are 'affluent and can buy their own books,' paint a different picture," the report states. The article goes on to call out one village board rep who reportedly told the president of the Menomonee Falls Library Board of Trustees that he would be "requesting a book audit, and he planned to submit a request for reconsideration 'concerning teen LGBTQ+ titles on behalf of residents who may be hesitant to share their names and addresses that the form requests." The board member also indicated "that at least three village board trustees are already planning on not funding Menomonee Falls Public Library in the future."

From the New York Times, a piece on the legal battle over a recently opened Queens library. "A few years back, architects designed a public library in Queens that has been lauded as one of the most stunning public buildings produced in New York in a century. But it is also rife with obstacles for people with disabilities, according to city officials who are now suing the designers for the $10 million they say it will cost to fix," the Times writes. In their defense, the architects say the city "signed off" repeatedly on the design. Advocate Sharon McLennon-Wier, executive director of the Center for Independence of the Disabled, nails it, though. "Its really a shame, McLennon-Wier told the Times. This library was built in 2019. You would not thinkADA was passed in 1990 that we would have such a new structure that has so many problems.

An interesting read from Government Technology on the "steady decline for the last decade" in public computer use in libraries. "While libraries struggled to meet the demand for public computers nearly 20 years ago, theyre now facing a new battle: keeping up with the popularity of digital resources like e-books, audio, and video downloads," the article observes. "While this digital transformation makes the library resources more convenient for many, some of these changes come with a hefty price tag. The societal shifts in how people use the Internet and consume media are leading some librarians to question what the future of library collections looks like and how added digital costs will fit into their local governments budget."

And finally this week, California governor Gavin Newsom announced a statewide expansion of Dolly Partons Imagination Library, which will provide more free books to young children across the state. With the expansion, all California children under five will be eligible to receive a free book in the mail every month as the program scales over the next several years. In addition, California is now the first state to offer a fully bilingual book option for Dolly Partons Imagination Library.

Dolly Partons Imagination Library is currently active in all 50 states, and has gifted over 200 million books since it launched in 1995. In recognition of this remarkable work, the American Library Association is set to confer an honorary lifetime membership to Dolly Partonthe organization's highest honor. The award will be made at the upcoming ALA Annual Conference, set for June 22-27 in Chicago.

This is the kind of challenge we like at the State Libraryworking with local partners to put as many books as we can into the hands of as many kids as we can, said California state librarian Greg Lucas, in a statement. Early readers grow into strong readers. Strong readers are more likely to succeed in school and to succeed in life. The Imagination Library makes that happen for every kid under five.
In celebration of Pride Month, the White House has announced a set of actions designed to protect LGBTQIA+ communities, including the appointment of a new coordinator within the Department of Education to spearhead a response to the rising number of book bans at the state level.

While details are still to come, White House officials say the new coordinator position will be situated within the Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights, and will work to provide new trainings for schools nationwide on how book bans that target specific communities and create a hostile school environment may violate federal civil rights laws.

The announcement comes just two weeks after the DOE announced a landmark resolution agreement with the Forsyth County (Georgia) School district over its removal of library books largely featuring Black and LGBTQ characters.

Across the country, our nation faces a spike in book bansefforts that disproportionately strip books about LGBTQIA+ communities, communities of color, and other communities off of library and classroom shelves, a White House statement reads. Book banning erodes our democracy, removes vital resources for student learning, and can contribute to the stigma and isolation that LGBTQIA+ people and other communities face.

In a statement, the American Library Association applauded the move.

We are heartened by the Biden-Harris Administrations leadership to address the alarming rise in book bans and other attacks on LGBTQIA+ Americans that aim to stigmatize and erase the voices of the LGBTQIA+ community," ALA President Lessa Kanani'opua Pelayo-Lozada said. "Everyone deserves the opportunity to see themselves and their family reflected in the books in their librarys collection. Those books are a safe place, with stories that validate their experience and where they find acceptance, hope and can see a future."

The move comes in response to an ongoing, politically motivated wave of book bans and attacks on the freedom to read nationwide.

In March, ALA reported a stunning 1,269 "demands to censor library books and resources" in 2022, the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago, and nearly double the record-shattering 729 challenges recorded in 2021. The vast majority of works challenged, ALA officials note, were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people of color.
Elizabeth Winklers debut, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, expands on her 2019 Atlantic essay exploring the messy, ugly dispute over the authorship of works attributed to Shakespeare. Questioning how a relatively uneducated man from Stratford-upon-Avon could write such learned and feminist plays, Winkler suggests that perhaps the author was not an uneducated man but an educated woman. She discusses the numerous candidates scholars have forwarded and uses the debate to serve up thoughtful meditations on the role of the author, the objectivity of biography, and the limits of scholarly study.

The works in Shake-speares Sonnets, first published in 1609, are among the most obscure, enigmatic poems in the English language. They open with a bizarre plea for a handsome man, the fair youth, to produce an heir. They lavish praise on the mans beauty. Others involve a woman, the so-called dark lady. The poet refers repeatedly to his shame, a brand upon his name, and a vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow. At some point, the youth and the mistress seem to have an affair. A fourth figure hovers over this thorny threesomea rival poet. What on earth is it all about? And why does the poet repeatedly insist that his identity be buried and forgotten? Skeptics over the years have pointed to the sonnets as evidence that the author wrote under a nom de plume. If his name has received a brand, might that compel him to write under another name?

The sonnets are so problematic for the traditional theory of authorship that some scholars have tried to dismiss them, arguing that they are merely poetic fictionsliterary exercises through which Shakespeare could display his technical virtuosityand not about him at all. It is better to read the sonnets for universal values than to lose their poetry by turning them into riddles about Shakespeares biography, warned the scholar C. L. Barber. But sonnetswhether John Donnes Holy Sonnets struggling with his faith or John Miltons meditation on his blindnesstend to be highly personal. Reading Shakespeares sonnets, William Wordsworth was compelled by their aura of personal confession: With this key, Shakespeare unlocked his heart, he wrote. C. S. Lewis agreed that the sonnets tell so odd a story that we find a difficulty in regarding it as fiction. Even the most traditional scholars have conceded that it is not unreasonable to look in them for reflections of his personal experience.

Who, for instance, are the other figures in the sonnets? Scholars have tried desperately to unravel the sonnets and identify the figures, publishing studies with titles like Shakespeares Sonnets Solved and The Secret Drama of Shakespeares Sonnets Unfolded, with the characters identified. No capable poet, much less a Shakespeare, intending to produce a merely dramatic series of poems, would dream of inventing a story like that of these sonnets or, even if he did, of treating it as they treat it, wrote the scholar A. C. Bradley. The very weirdness of the sonnets, their obscurity and unintelligibility, suggests they tell a real story, written for people who knew the details and incidents of which we are ignorant. But the sonnets remain opaque. Nothing in them fits the life of Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeares sonnets are an island of poetry surrounded by a barrier of icebergs and dense fog, wrote Harvard scholar Douglas Bush.

Other mysteries abound. When the sonnets were published in 1609, the publisher Thomas Thorpe added a dedication praising the poet as ever-living, a word used to refer to the divine or the dead, who have passed into eternal life. In Shakespeares Henry VI Part 1, it is used to describe the deceased king: That ever-living man of memory, Henry V. When the playwright John Fletcher died, he was referred to as the deceased, but ever-living Author . . . Fletcher. The dedication has been telling us, for three hundred years in the plainest of terms, that the poet was already dead, a skeptic named J. T. Looney wrote in 1920. But in 1609, Shakespeare of Stratford was very much alive. When he died in 1616, he left detailed instructions for the distribution of his assets but mentioned no plays, poems, or manuscripts of any kind. At his death, only half of his plays had been published. Did he have no concern for their preservation? Why didnt he say anything about his 154 sonnets?

The sonnets suggest a poet who clearly thought about his legacy: Not marble nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme, he writes in Sonnet 55. Your monument shall be my gentle verse, / Which eyes not yet created shall oer-read, he boasts in Sonnet 81. The scholar Samuel Schoenbaum couldnt help noting the discrepancy between Shakespeares meticulous parceling of his assets and his apparent disregard for his literary legacy: If Shakespeare was indifferent to the ultimate fate of the plays that immortalized him, he showed no similar nonchalance about assembling and passing down his estate.

Here are 10 of the most enigmatic sonnets:

1. Sonnet 10

Sonnet 10 is one of the procreation sonnets, in which the poet begs the handsome young man to produce an heir. Initially, this request appears as a general praise of beauty: From fairest creatures we desire increase / That thereby beautys rose might never die, the poet begins in Sonnet 1. By Sonnet 10, however, the request has become deeply personal. The poet admonishes the youth for his refusal to fall in love and produce heirs. Make thee another self for love of me, he urges, a bizarre request. What man cares if another man has a child? If the request is directed at a nobleman, as scholars have suspected, it also unthinkably inappropriate. What was the nature of the poets relationship to the beautiful youth?

2. Sonnet 20

For a long time, Sonnet 20 was considered one of the most shocking sonnets because of its sexuality. The poet praises the beloved as the master-mistress of my passion, fantasizing that Nature initially created the beloved as a woman: A womans face with natures own hand painted, / Hast though A womans gentle heart. But as Nature fell in love with her creation, she turned the woman into a man, prick[ing] thee out for womens pleasure. Critics were horrified by the sonnets homoeroticism. One could not read of Shakespeares passion for a man, lamented the 18th-century critic George Steevens, without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation. The editor of a 1793 edition of Shakespeares works simply omitted the sonnets because the strongest act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service. Scholars continued wringing their hands well into the 20th century. The story Shakespeare recounts of his moralor rather his immoralpredicament . . . must certainly, in the interests of the British Empire, be smothered up, the critic L. P. Smith concluded in 1933.

3. Sonnet 29

Sonnet 29 addresses the poets sense of shame. He describes himself as an outcast, bemoaning his fate: When in disgrace with fortune and mens eyes / I all alone beweep my outcast state, / And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, / And look upon myself, and curse my fate he writes. How to reconcile this with Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, who, far from being outcast, enjoyed rising wealth and status: a coat of arms, a large house. The poet despises himself, he continues. It is only when he thinks of his beloved that he feels uplifted, sing[ing] hymns at heavens gate.

4. Sonnet 71

In Sonnet 71, the poet anticipates his own death and urges the beloved to forget him when he is gone. No longer mourn for me when I am dead, he writes. Do not so much as my poor name rehearse/ But let your love even with my life decay. Why should the beloved refrain from repeating the poets poor name? The final couplet hints at the reason: Lest the wise world should look into your moan, / And mock you with me after I am gone. Shame of some sort is associated with the poet. If the beloved mourns him publicly, he will be associated with the poets shame and suffer the mockery of the world.

5. Sonnet 72

Sonnet 72 continues the poets plea to be forgotten. The beloved can only defend his love for the poet by lying, and the world will only mock him for it, the poet writes. It is better, then, that the poets name simply be buried. My name be buried where my body is, / And live no more to shame nor me nor you. In this way, the beloved will escape the shame of association with someone so worthless. But what is this mysterious shame?

6. Sonnet 73

The poet of the sonnets appears to be writing in old age. In Sonnet 73, he describes himself as approaching death: That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang, he writes. In me thou seest the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west; / Which by and by black night doth take away, / Deaths second self, that seals up all the rest. But in 1600, Shakespeare of Stratford was only 36, hardly approaching death. In Sonnet 62, too, he writes of looking in the glass and seeing himself beated and choppd with tanned antiquity. For some readers, this discrepancy has further suggested the hand of a hidden, much older author.

7. Sonnet 76

In Sonnet 76, the poet wonders why his verse is so lacking in variation, why he doesnt adopt new poetic styles or fashions, instead always writing in the same vein and on the same themehis love. His style is so unchanging that he suspects his writing reveals him: Why write I all one, ever the same / And keep invention in a noted weed, / The every word doth almost tell my name, / Showing their birth, and where they did proceed? Might his suspicion that his words almost tell my name suggest that his identity is otherwise concealed?

8. Sonnet 81

In Sonnet 81, the poet addresses his beloved, imagining a future in which they are both dead. While the beloved will be immortalized forever in verse, the poet seems to believe that his own identity will vanish. From hence your memory death cannot take, / Although in me each part will be forgotten, the poet writes. Your name from hence immortal life shall have, / Though I, once gone, too all the world must die. How could the author be forgotten? How could he die to all the world? When the sonnets were published in 1609, the works of Shakespeare were already widely admired and praisedand the author knew they would last. You shall livesuch virtue hath my pen / Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.

9. Sonnet 112

Sonnet 112 picks up the theme of the poets shame again, referring to a vulgar scandal that has branded him. Your love and pity doth the impression fill, / Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow, he writes, suggesting that his friends love heals the hideous brand. But what is this vulgar scandal? What happened? (In Sonnet 111 he also writes that my name receives a brand.) Ignoring the malicious gossip of the world, the poet insists that only the opinion of his friend matters. For what care I who calls me well or ill, he writes. You are my all-the-world, and I must strive / To know my shames and praises from your tongue.

10. Sonnet 136

If the poets name has received a brand, might that compel him to write under another name? After all, the poets identity could be buried if William Shakespeare was not his name but a nom de plume. My name is Will, the poet writes in Sonnet 136, punning repeatedly on different meanings of will: Will, will fulfill the treasure of thy love, / Ay, fill if full with wills, and my will one. Among a number one is reckoned none: / Then in the number let me pass untold. Asked about this sonnet, the Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells replied, I would have thought hes simply saying, Let me remain anonymous.
About 300 infants, toddlers and older children have been rescued from an orphanage in Sudans capital after being trapped there while fighting raged outside, aid officials said Thursday.

The evacuation came after 71 children died from hunger and illness in the facility since mid-April.

The tragedy at the Al-Mayqoma orphanage made headlines late last month as fighting raged outside between Sudans military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

The deaths have highlighted the heavy toll inflicted on civilians since mid-April when the clashes erupted between forces loyal to Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan and RSF forces led by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo.

About 300 children at the Al-Mayqoma orphanage in Khartoum were transferred to a safer location elsewhere in the northeastern African nation, said Ricardo Pires, a spokesman for the U.N. childrens agency, UNICEF.

Sudans ministries of social development and health have taken charge of the children, while UNICEF has provided humanitarian support including medical care, food, educational activities and play, Pires said in an email to The Associated Press.

He said the children had received medical checks following their long journey to their new location, adding that any child requiring hospitalization will have access to healthcare.

The International Committee of The Red Cross, which helped with the evacuation, said the children, aged between 1 month to 15 years, were relocated after securing a safe corridor to Madani, the capital of Jazira province, about 135 kilometers (85 miles) southeast of Khartoum. Seventy caretakers have been transferred with the children, the ICRC said.

They (the children) spent incredibly difficult moments in an area where the conflict has been raging for the past 6 weeks without access to proper healthcare, an especially hard situation for children with special needs, said Jean-Christophe Sandoz, the head of the ICRC delegation in Sudan.

Nazim Sirag, an activist who heads the local charity Hadhreen, said in a phone interview that the children were ferried late Tuesday to a newly established facility in Madani.

Sirag, whose charity led humanitarian efforts to help the orphanage and other nursing homes in Khartoum, said at least 71 children died at the Al-Mayqoma since the war in Sudan began on April 15.

Among the dead were babies as young as three months, according to death certificates obtained by the AP. The certificates listed circulatory collapse as a cause of death, but also mentioned other contributing factors such as fever, dehydration, malnutrition, and failure to thrive.

Their relocation followed an online campaign led by local activists and international charities, which intensified after the death of 26 children in two days at the orphanage in late May. The children had been trapped in the fighting for over seven weeks as food and other supplies dwindled. The facility was inaccessible because of the war had turned the capital and other urban areas into battlefields.

The safe movement of these incredibly vulnerable children to a place of safety offers a ray of light in the midst of the ongoing conflict in Sudan, Mandeep OBrien, UNICEF Representative in Sudan, said in a statement. Many millions of children remain at risk across Sudan."

Local volunteers, meanwhile, evacuated 77 other children earlier this week from separate foster homes in the coastal, Sirag of Hadhreen said. The children have temporarily sheltered along with 11 adults in a school in the town of Hasahisa, also in Jazira province, he said.

The fighting has inflicted a heavy toll on civilians, particularly children. More than 860 civilians, including at least 190 children, were killed and thousands of others were wounded since April 15, according to Sudans Doctors Syndicate which tracks civilian casualties. The tally is likely to be much higher.

The conflict has forced more than 1.9 million people to flee their homes, including around 477,000 who crossed into neighboring countries, according to the U.N.'s migration agency. Others remain trapped inside their homes, unable to escape as food and water supplies dwindle. The clashes have also disrupted the work of humanitarian groups.

There have been reports of widespread looting and sexual violence, including the rape of women and girls in Khartoum and the western Darfur region, which have seen some of the worst fighting in the conflict. Almost all reported cases of sexual attacks were blamed on the RSF, which didnt respond to repeated requests for comment.

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China's defense industry has exported malfunctioning and defective military equipment in recent yearsleaving countries short of what's needed for their security while also draining military budgets.

Nigeria's military reported several technical problems with the Chinese-made F-7 aircraft delivered starting in 2009. A handful were lost in crashes or accidents. By 2020, of the nine remaining, seven had to be sent back to China for deep maintenance and repair.

The military junta ruling Myanmar found that the Chinese-made radar on its JF-17 aircraft has poor accuracy, and the aircraft itself lacks beyond-visual-range missile and airborne interception radar. Bangladesh reported problems with firing the ammunition loaded into its Chinese-built K-8W aircraft just shortly after their delivery.

Pakistan, the largest importer of Chinese military equipment, expressed dissatisfaction with Chinese-produced F-22P frigates, including technical issues, engine degradation, and poor overall performance. Pakistan also found that the onboard imaging device of the FM90 (N) missile system had a defective infrared sensor (IR17) system and SR-60 radars. As a result, the missile system was unable to lock onto targets. The IR17 sensors had to be discarded completely.

China attracts customers for its military equipment with cut-rate pricing and financing, but there are hidden costsespecially when gear malfunctions. Share on Twitter

China attracts customers for its military equipment with cut-rate pricing and financing, but there are hidden costsespecially when gear malfunctions. A lack of technological compatibility with the Chinese military equipment can prove particularly expensive. Countries often do not have the personnel with the expertise and training to resolve issues. They also can have difficulty acquiring replacement parts.

Chinese suppliers have demonstrated little accountability for maintenance or repair. That has pushed some countries to recruit help from third countries. For instance, the Myanmar military forged partnerships with Pakistani technicians to solve its technical problems with the JF-17. Delays in getting equipment working can significantly slow down recipient countries' military modernization timeline.

So why do countries continue to order military equipment from China?

A RAND report tracking China's military exports shows that its customers are primarily developing countries. Its largest customers are in South Asia and Africa, though it has also made a push into South America. China has also benefited as countries in the Middle East and North Africa have sought to reduce their dependency on Western military suppliers. Soft power and image-building are China's major motivators in these regions, setting the foundation for ties in the same way that its Belt and Road infrastructure projects do.

China also isn't particularly discerning in who it will or won't sell to.

Its arms deals have few political contingencies involved. In Africa, sales appear driven by profit and trying to grab market share from Russia. If a country worries its human rights records, financial credibility, or regime stability might harm its eligibility to purchase military equipment from Western suppliers, China is always an option.

If a country worries its human rights records, financial credibility, or regime stability might harm its eligibility to purchase military equipment from Western suppliers, China is always an option. Share on Twitter

In addition, China is a major player in the value arms market such as light training and fighter aircraft, armored personnel carriers, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Such equipment meets the affordability and the minimum functionality criteria that developing countries look for to use in counterterrorism operations and fighting rebel groups.

The question now is whether a subpar reputation for quality will harm Beijing's position in the global arms market. Data that the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute released in March showed a 23 percent decrease in China's arms exports between the four-year periods of 201317 and 201822.

Affordability will remain an issue for developing countries looking to bolster their hardware and supplies. They also may have few alternatives. But if recipient countries continue to view Chinese military equipment as unreliable long term, or find training and maintenance contracts lacking, they may not want to become completely dependent on Chinese suppliers.

Cindy Zheng is a research assistant at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. She specializes in research on Chinese foreign policy and U.S.-China relations.

This commentary originally appeared on RealClearDefense on June 8, 2023. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis.
Both terrorism and coups are on the rise in the Sahel. This is a troubling trend that the United States should be working to reverse. To do this, Washington needs to ramp up support aimed at improving security governance, professionalizing militaries, and strongly sanctioning all forms of military takeovers in the region. This will require a real shift from the current U.S. security approach in the region.

Worrying Rise in Extremism and Coups

The Sahel is now the epicenter of terrorism globally. The region accounted for 43 percent of global terrorism deaths in 2022, according ( PDF ) to the latest data from the Global Terrorism Index. Burkina Faso and Mali alone accounted for a huge chunk of the 2022 violence, making up ( PDF ) 73 percent of terrorism deaths in the Sahel in 2022 and 52 percent of all deaths from terrorism in sub-Saharan Africa. This recent spike of extremist violence in the region is in line with longer-term trends, as terrorism rates increased more than 2,000 percent in the Sahel over the past 15 years.

In addition to this worrying spike in extremist violence, coup plotters have also launched a wave of successful military interventions in the region over the past three years, including two coups each in Mali and Burkina Faso alone. This resurgence of such violent overthrows spurred United Nations chief Antonio Guterres to decry an epidemic of coups, a departure from a previous lull in the region.

The U.S. Response

The United States has responded to these dual developments in a number of ways. To counter the terrorist threat, in addition to supporting regional and international military operations, the United States has deployed a wide range of security assistance tools. The United States has spent over $3.3 billion dollars in security assistance over two decades in the Sahel, according to the Security Assistance Monitor. This assistance has often led with tactical training and equipping partner militaries and elite special counterterrorism units in the region, as well as large-scale military-to-military exercises and smaller-scale advise-and-assist missions.

The Sahel is now the epicenter of terrorism globally. Share on Twitter

On the coup front, the U.S. response has been decidedly mixed. The United States condemned armed takeovers and suspended ( PDF ) some security assistance in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Guinea since 2021. But in Chad, a long-time U.S. security partner, the United States danced around the coup label and did not apply sanctions or suspend assistance.

Because the United States has engaged so widely in the region, a few recent coup plotters received U.S. training, including in Guinea, where Green Berets were actively training soldiers when they left to launch a coup in 2021. The available evidence suggests that U.S. assistance is highly unlikely ( PDF ) to have directly contributed to any coup activity. But the worrying actions of U.S.-trained partner forces do call into question the overall efficacy of U.S. assistance, specifically the amount of emphasis the United States places on imparting democratic civil-military relations and rule of law.

Further complicating matters is an increased amount of engagement from outside powers vying for access and influence in the region, namely China and Russia. Research from the RAND Corporation has documented that while U.S. and Russian influence in sub-Saharan Africa has remained largely the same over the past two decades, Chinese influence has grown significantly. As the French have recently begun to pull back their military presence in the Sahel, the Russiansoften through the shadowy Wagner Groupare actively trying to step into the void and increase their influence with coup governments and other undemocratic leaders in the region.

Rethinking the U.S. Approach

So what is to be done? To help turn the tide of these increasingly precarious trends in the regionwhile also countering Chinese and Russian activityU.S. security policy must present a much starker alternative to the aims of Beijing's and Moscow's authoritarian expansion in the region.

To do so, the United States must first shift its security policy away from the delivery of tactical weapons and towards a governance-first policy that leads with support for institution building aimed at fostering civilian control and responsible use of force within Sahelian militaries. Despite some recent first steps in the right direction, the U.S. model of military assistance in the Sahel often continues to default to tactical-level training and equipping of unprofessional and often predatory security forces, which frequently makes things worse.

To help turn the tide of these increasingly precarious trends in the region U.S. security policy must present a much starker alternative to the aims of Beijing's and Moscow's authoritarian expansion in the region. Share on Twitter

The overwhelming evidence shows that an overly militaristic and repressive terrorism response is counterproductive and only adds fuel to grievances against governments and security forces, which are the leading cause of extremism in many African countries. Moreover, past research shows that a more-holistic and smartly sequenced security assistance approach can deliver real soft and hard power results in both Africa and beyond.

Indeed, a U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization focus on institution building and defense management reform prior to the full Russian invasion has proven to be remarkably successful in Ukraine. This emphasis on good defense governance, doctrine, and logistics helped to build more-professional and surprisingly effective military forces in Ukraine, with clear outsized strategic payoffs for the United States and its allies.

Second, the U.S. response to all types of military takeovers must be much stronger and consistent. An uneven coup response is counterproductive in the short term, giving fresh coup governments initial room to breathe and consolidate power. It is also unhelpful in the long term, creating an incentive for future overthrows by the military. Prospective coup plotters see that they too can avoid the coup labeland corollary sanctionsas long as their country has firm security ties with the United States and other Western powers. In addition to unequivocally condemning coups, the United States should also suspend assistance and apply visa restrictions on coup leaders, regardless of how soft (see Chad, Zimbabwe, Egypt) or hard the military action.

Moving in this direction will require strong coordination across the U.S. government, particularly between the Defense and State Departments. The launch of the 21st Century Partnership for African Security in December 2022 is a start, but the devil will be in the details and implementation. A fundamental shift towards a governance-first security policy in the Sahelleading with support for security governance and institution buildingis far more likely to lead to more-professional, democratic, and stable partners, as well as pay strategic dividends for the United States.

Alexander Noyes is a political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and former senior advisor for security cooperation assessment, monitoring, and evaluation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy.

This commentary originally appeared on Hoover Institution on June 6, 2023. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis.
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Entourage actor Adrian Grenier is a new dad.

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Grenier, 46, recently welcomed his first child, son Seiko Aurelius, with his wife, Jordan Grenier.

The couple shared the news in a joint post Thursday on Instagram alongside maternity photos of Jordan.

"We are happy to announce the arrival of our son who was born a few weeks ago," the pair captioned the post. "In an instant... Our hearts have expanded beyond infinite space. We are cultivating our world now to preserve his innocence, his magic, and to leave enough quiet space to hear and encourage his roar."

"We couldn't be more blissed out, spending the next weeks in divine solitude, mother, father and child. We want to make sure to give our baby an easeful transition from the spirit world to this one," they added. "All rejoice this gift to the world, Seiko Aurelius Grenier, our exquisite golden one, welcome earth side!"

Television personality Ricki Lake and actresses Kimberly Van Der Beek and Debi Mazar were among those to congratulate the couple in the comments.

"Yayayayaayay! Over the moon for you all!" Lake wrote.

"welcome little Seiko to your beautiful life earth side in the elven kingdom," Van Der Beek added.

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"Congratulations to you 3!!!! Hi Seiko!" Mazar said.

Grenier and Jordan Grenier married in June 2022 at a spontaneous ceremony in Morocco.

"It wasn't planned," Grenier told People at the time. "We eloped in the Atlas Mountains while on vacation with friends in Morocco."

"We embraced the serendipity of the moment and made the decision to tie the knot -- literally, we didn't have rings so used string for rings," he added.

Grenier is known for playing Vincent Chase on the HBO series Entourage and Nate in the film The Devil Wears Prada. He most recently starred in the Netflix series Clickbait.
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By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 06/09/2023



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Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade.

couple Matt James and Rachael Kirkconnell have shot down breakup rumors with a fun date night video on social media.Matt and Rachael have apparently been going strong ever since falling in love on 's 25th season in 2021, but fans began speculating last week they had split since neither person was posting pictures or videos of the other on Instagram.Matt's last post with Rachael -- who recently traveled to Saint John and Greece without Matt -- was on May 17, and Rachael's last post with Matt on her account was on April 24.But Matt took to Instagram on Tuesday and posted a video of himself and Rachael eating pasta together at Fiaschetteria "Pistoia" restaurant in New York City.Rachael was chowing down on bolognese pasta, and Matt munched on duck pasta with a secret sauce.Alongside the video, the former star wrote, "On today's episode of New York City pasta recommendations..." before sharing a long list of everything he and his girlfriend had ordered."'Pappardelle al ragu' $24 (slow cooked beef ragu bolognese style). 'Pappardelle al duck' $24 (slow cooked duck)," he wrote."Pici freschi cacio e pepe $26 (hand-roll spaghetti, pecorino, black pepper). Tagliatella al tartufo $34 (homemade egg pasta with truffle). Iinsalata 'rafanelli' $16 (baby spinach, balsamic, walnut, gorgonzola). Burrata e pomodorini $18 (buppalo burrata with grape tomato)."Rachael commented on Matt's post, writing, "Pawsta pawty!"Many fans were happy to see that Matt and Rachael are still enjoying date nights and foodie outings together."I'm so happy to see you guys eating together again for a minute I got a bit worried. Enjoy," wrote a fan."So happy to see you 2 together eating again!!!" commented another person.Matt selected Rachael, a model from Cumming, GA, as his winner on 's 25th season in early 2021.Matt and Rachael briefly split in February 2021 during Rachael's memorable racism controversy -- which resulted in former host Chris Harrison and ABC agreeing to part ways -- but Rachael was extremely apologetic and so she and Matt reconciled in April 2021 and have been inseparable ever since.Matt and Rachael began traveling the world together and trying new restaurants to promote, but they have yet to get engaged.Rachael told Us Weekly in June 2022, "The only timeline I give him is I was like, 'I gotta have kids before, you know, I can't have kids.' So keep that in mind."Rachael said she and Matt weren't concerned with others' expectations for their relationship and future together."I feel like it's pretty crucial to just have fun with one another no matter where we're at or what we're doing," Rachael shared. "We got to make the most of everything."And Matt told the Los Angeles Times that same month, "We're one of the only couples from that franchise still going strong. The reason is we're going at things at our own pace. We're not playing games that a lot of people play just to stay in that circle."Matt said on a May 2022 episode of Watch What Happens Live that he had a feeling Rachael was The One for him when they met on the very first night of filming in late 2020."When I met everybody that first night, [our] interaction was the most genuine," Matt said, according to People. "I was looking for that genuine connection and just realness and she exuded it. And there it is."Matt also reportedly wrote in his book, First Impressions: Off Screen Conversations with a Bachelor on Race, Family, and Forgiveness, that he wanted to spend all of his time with Rachael while taping the show."In the beginning, she cut through the polished front I'd honed and into my nerdy side," Matt wrote of Rachael."We debated who was the bigger fan of How to Train Your Dragon and Marvel movies. I observed her empathy from afar, noticed how her kindness extended beyond our time alone and to everyone else she encountered."Due to Rachael and Matt's tight bond, Rachael and Matt's best friend, ette 15 alum Tyler Cameron , have confessed to having a love-hate relationship Tyler and Rachael explained the cause of their feud on Tyler's "Everybody But Me" radio show back in January.Interested in more news? Join our The Bachelor Facebook Group
Sudanese army soldiers and paramilitaries fought for control of a military facility Thursday in Khartoum where a fire raged at an oil and gas facility, witnesses said.

The battles came a day after the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) announced in a statement they had wrestled "full control" of the Yarmouk weapons manufacturing and arms depot complex.

Witnesses speaking to AFP from southern Khartoum said they heard the "sound of gunfire and clashes" around the complex, the most important military industrial facility in the country.

The RSF claimed that soldiers had fled the site, leaving behind large quantities of military equipment and vehicles.

The paramilitaries also posted videos online purportedly showing their fighters inside the facility, celebrating. Weapons, including machine guns, and large quantities of ammunition could be seen in the background.

Sudan has been embroiled in a deadly conflict since mid-April, when fighting erupted between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo -- commonly known as Hemeti -- who commands the RSF.

Violence has spread across the country, most notably in the western region of Darfur, which is home to around a quarter of Sudan's population and has never recovered from a devastating two-decade war that left hundreds of thousands dead and more than two million displaced.

The fire at the Al-Shajara oil and gas facility near Yarmouk broke out overnight Wednesday to Thursday, witnesses said.

It was not immediately clear what started the fire but residents said they heard a loud explosion at the facility, around which fierce fighting has been underway for the past couple of days.

Plumes of smoke still rose from the site on Thursday morning and could be seen from as far as 10 kilometres (six miles) away.

Since fighting broke out in Sudan on April 15, more than 1,800 people have been killed, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

Nearly two million people have been displaced by the conflict, according to the latest UN figures, including 476,000 who have sought refuge in neighbouring countries.

Talks mediated by Saudi Arabia and the United States broke down, and multiple ceasefires have failed to take hold.

Last week, Washington slapped sanctions on the warring generals accusing both sides of the "appalling bloodshed" after the latest truce collapsed and the army pulled out of ceasefire talks altogether.

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Athens Pride and Queer Collective held their second annual Pride Parade on Saturday. The parade route flowed through downtown and ended at The Foundry Pavilion, which held a celebratory resource festival with food trucks, non-profit vendors and performances from musician Sarah Mootz and The League of Step, an Athens-based step dance team.
With debt woes and a legal case in the US courts, educational technology (edtech) giant Byjus is expected to be laying off more employees, according to media reports.

Byju Raveendran, Founder and CEO, Byju'. Photographs: Kind courtesy, Byju's

According to The Morning Context report, Byjus intends to lay off 1,000 employees.

This number, however, could not be confirmed by Business Standard independently.

A spokesperson for the company declined to comment on the reports.

Media reports suggest these employees are contractual and part of the sales team.

Earlier this year, the company had laid off 900-1,000 employees.

The job cuts have taken place across several verticals, such as product, content, media, and technology teams.

The Bengaluru-headquartered firm has also reportedly sacked many top executives, including senior vice-presidents who were taking salaries of Rs 1 crore and above, per annum.

The pink slips come at a time when the company has defaulted on payment of $40 million to lenders in the US and also filed a case in the New York Supreme Court as lenders accelerated demand for a $1.2-billion Term Loan B.

The case also petitions to disqualify investment management firm Redwood who, contrary to the terms of TLB, purchased a significant portion of the loan while primarily trading in distressed debt.

Byjus has raised $6 billion in total from investors like Qatar Investment Authority, BlackRock, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Sequoia, Silver Lake, Bond Capital, Tencent, General Atlantic, and Tiger Global.

US-based asset manager BlackRock has again reduced the valuation of the edtech giant, this time to about $8.4 billion.

BlackRock cut the value of Byjus share by 62 per cent in the quarter ended March this year, from a year ago, the investor disclosed in a filing.

This is a sharp decrease from the peak valuation of $22 billion at which the edtech decacorn was last valued in 2022.
'I was a young pilot in the IAF and Tom Cruise (with his genuine Ray-Bans) was now an icon with his sensational performance in Top Gun.'

'The IAF, maybe influenced by the movie, decided to 'issue' pilots Ray-Bans as part of their flying kit,' remembers IAF Veteran Air Commodore Nitin Sathe.

IMAGE: Flight Lieutenant Tejaswi Ranga Rao, the Indian Air Force's first woman SU-30 weapon system operator, wearing Ray-Bans (but, of course) speaks to the media at the IAF's Tezpur airbase. Photograph: ANI Photo

A few days ago, I came across a video forward which brought out a historical perspective about the Ray-Ban sunglasses that pilots just can't do without, whether on ground or in the air. And obviously, this took me back four decades, pondering over my experiences with the Ray-Ban as an Indian Air Force pilot.

"Don't take such a dim view of the world! Remove those sunglasses and see how bright and colourful things are around you!" my flight commander once remarked when he saw us IAF rookies wearing our newly issued sunglasses even inside the crew room and office premises.

We were also advised to remove them while interacting with seniors and ladies, something we weren't ready to accept.

IMAGE: Air Marshal Sreekumar Prabhakaran addresses the media in October 2022, wearing his Ray-Ban aviators, of course. Photograph: ANI Photo

My first encounter with Ray-Ban aviators was when I was just about to join the armed forces.

Roaming around a Madras market that boasted of 'genuine' 'foreign' goods at cheap rates, I was looking around for something that suited my pocket which carried a 100 rupee note.

A man selling sunglasses, hooked all over his shirt, suddenly stood in front of me.

I picked on a tear-drop shaped one with green tinted shades hanging from his left breast pocket.

'How much?' I asked.

'This?' he asked, and before I knew it, in a blink, I saw a green shaded world around me, as the glasses found their way from the hook on his shirt over my eyes.

A small pocket mirror appeared out of nowhere and a transformed 'smarter' me stared at myself.

'How much?' I asked again. 'Only 100!' he said, a bright smile appearing on his sun-tanned face revealing his tobacco stained teeth.

My heart sank. I had planned to buy little-little things for everyone who mattered back home and this Ray-Ban was going to ruin it all.

'Na na, no way!' I exclaimed, and walked away with the salesman in tow. He went on haggling: '80? 70? 60? 50?...'

By then, I had lost interest in the eyewear and wanted him to leave me alone.

'How much you pay?' he asked in an exasperated tone.

'10', I mumbled, walking away quickly, feeling sheepish and foolish.

He kept up with me and wiping the pair I had liked with a soft yellow cloth that hung around his neck, handed me the shiny sunglasses.

'Pay 10! I am hungry and therefore I am selling at loss!' He sure sounded irritated.

I had to honour the deal and that made me a proud owner of my first Ray-Ban!

Sometime later, when I looked at my green lenses closely, I discovered, much to my dismay, that I was the proud owner of a ROY-BON! In any case, it could pass off as the expensive brother from afar and I let this miniscule fact not be known to anyone.

IMAGE: Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh with senior IAF officers, all sporting Ray-Bans. Photograph: ANI Photo

A few years later, I was a young pilot in the IAF and Tom Cruise (with his genuine Ray-Bans, but of course!) was now an icon with his sensational performance in Top Gun.

The IAF, maybe influenced by the movie, decided to 'issue' pilots Ray-Bans as part of their flying kit.

We needled our logistician friends to get them to us ASAP and waited earnestly for the centrally procured consignment to arrive at our base, situated in the far east.

Looks aside, we were quite confident that, with the green glasses draped around our eyes, our green overalls with the many zips and our ankle length flying boots, the girls were sure to fall for our charms.

When the Ray-Bans finally arrived, there was a problem.

The supply was well below the demand, and, naturally and logically so, (most unnatural and illogical, we helicopter pilots thought!) the fighter pilots were to be issued with this 'flying clothing' item first.

We were told that as and when more stock was received, we, at the lower end of the flying chain, would be issued ours.

The cost of the glasses was quite prohibitive, and therefore, many of us who did not want to be outdone by our fighter friends, went and bought ourselves cheaper Roy-Bons in the interim!

We were secretly overjoyed to learn from our fighter pilot friends that they weren't too happy with their free 'issue'.

The sunglasses were either too large or too small; hardly anyone got one that suited their faces.

It seemed that all unsold sizes had been palmed off to the IAF and we hoped that once our turn came, sunglasses of correct sizes would be available.

Photograph: Nitin Sathe

Style aside, it was due to aeromedical reasons that pilots were expected to wear these glasses while flying.

In the good old days, aircraft were unpressurised and not air-conditioned as they are today and those who flew them had to endure extremes of temperature.

Just imagine, taking off from a blistering desert in 45 degree heat and climbing to altitudes where the mercury dipped to as low as 35 below zero.

Aviators, in those times, used leather clothing to keep themselves warm in the sub-zero temperatures encountered while flying at high altitudes.

Leather prevented cold air from getting in from head to toe.

The head was covered with a fur-lined leather helmet which housed the ear pieces, the face was covered by the mask connected to the breathing apparatus and the eyes protected by fur-lined plain goggles.

The plain glasses, however, did not protect the pilots from the sharp glare of the sun as well as exposed them to a high dosage of ultra-violet and infra-red radiation.

Very often, during sorties, these plain glasses would fog up, forcing the pilots to remove them and exposing the eyes to the extreme cold.

The American military turned to Bausch and Lomb, the leading eyewear manufacturers of those times to design special goggles for their pilots.

Thus was born the concept of 'anti-glare' glasses, and the research and development of the same continued through the second world war.

They were later patented as Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses which used Kalichrome lenses designed to filter the blue light and sharpen details, thus making them ideal for misty conditions.

I still have my Ray-Bans stored away somewhere with my not-in-use flying clothing. Maybe, it is gathering dust along with my worn out maps in my navigation bag, the leather case which accompanied me on the many missions I flew.

Sadly, I can't wear them anymore as poor vision compels me to use plain glasses to look far and near. But my love for the Ray-Ban endures.

IAF Veteran Air Commodore Nitin Sathe is a rediffGuru and you can ask him your questions about the defence services here.

A helicopter pilot who served the IAF for 35 years, he is also a frequent contributor to Rediff.com and you can read his earlier articles here.

Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com
A lesson we have not learnt from China is the urgent need to knit the vast country together to keep it from falling apart at the seams.

While there is considerable dent in poverty, sadly, the North East remains as distant today as it always was, points out Shreekant Sambrani.

IMAGE: A house that caught fire in violence-hit Manipur. Photograph: ANI Photo

As the plane comes in to land at Imphal, the capital of Manipur, the visitor is treated to a breath-taking sight.

A saucer-shaped valley lies nestled between gently rising hills lush green with paddy, looking like an emerald encased in platinum.

The crescent-shaped terraces of paddy lands on lower hill slopes elsewhere are evidence of both the fertility of the area and enterprise of its farmers, producing bountiful harvests.

It feels like Shangri-la, except that unlike James Hilton's fictional Himalayan utopia, Manipur is very real and far from bathed in tranquility.

Those were my initial thoughts when I first went to Manipur 45 years ago in 1978.

On my several subsequent visits, I was invariably struck by the eerie coexistence of natural calm and man-made calamities in the North Eastern state.

And now that coexistence has reached explosive levels, or so it would seem.

My substantial exposure to the entire North East, especially Manipur, was due largely to my involvement in the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad faculty consulting team for the North Eastern Council.

As the youngest member of the team then, I was unanimously nominated for extensive field touring, which was a Godsend for me.

It gave me the rare privilege to visit even the remote corners of the region.

This was followed subsequently by professional work for some private/co-operative clients.

Ever since the present trouble started brewing, I have had a sense of deja vu, that these events have been foretold and we have done nothing worth the mention to avert them.

Two aspects mark the situation in Manipur (and with some variations, the rest of the North East as well). The first is economic and the second is human.

I would like to share my understanding of the economic realities first.

It is best told through the experience of Subrata Bhowmik. He went to Manipur as its director of agriculture in 1972.

A middle-level officer in the vast West Bengal bureaucracy, Bhowmik thought he was selected for the deputation because others did not want to go to a remote state with a population barely exceeding that of an average district. He grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

Manipur then faced an acute shortage of its staple crop, rice. Bhowmik discovered that Manipuri farmers rejected the recommended high-yielding varieties because the rice cooked from them was not sticky enough for their liking.

His search for more glutinous varieties in India yielded no results. Next stop, the International Rice Research Institute, Manila, a premier organisation.

He found the wonder variety he was looking for and filled his suitcases with its seeds.

After smuggling this precious cargo into Manipur, Bhowmik grew its crop on a state farm.

He then went from village to village cooking the new rice and giving mouthfuls of it to leading farmers.

The left-over crop was sold as seed in no time flat. By 1976, Manipur grew a surplus of rice and Subratada enjoyed a well-earned reputation as its saviour.

He told me of the of the enormous potential of the region and its daunting problems. Forty-five years on, both these remain almost where they were, including shifting cultivation.

In most areas with partial or non-existent permanent rural settlements, farmers clear hill-slopes of the natural growth by burning it.

They broadcast the crop seed, mostly rice or maize, and let it grow under nature's mercy.

Harvesting involves slashing through the crop with a scythe (hence the other name of this practice, slash-and-burn cultivation).

They move on, leaving the land fallow to regain its productive vigour, returning when they have finished using other such lands available to them.

Rising population has reduced the 'jhoom' (the local name for this practice) cycle considerably, from seven or eight years down to as little as two years.

In some areas, even permanent jhoom is practiced. The resulting soil degradation and falling productivity puts greater pressure on an already depleting resource.

A classic vicious cycle of deprivation is set in motion.

Most of the North East is poverty-stricken due to this situation. But it does not have to be so at all.

Most states have fertile plains to grow enough food to feed their relatively small populations and did not need to farm the vast hill-slopes.

Yet the population still resorts to jhoom because it has no means, nor opportunities, for other gainful occupations, as is the case of surplus rural population almost everywhere else in the country.

The North East has a veritable feast of local fruit. Pineapple and pear are available in plenty and practically grew wild everywhere.

The local variety of pears are as delicious as any found in the cooler regions of the world.

Ripe fruit fall off the trees to rot, because there are no takers for them even at Re 1 a kilo!

Pineapples are sent to the Siliguri market, but the local price is seldom enough to meet the cost of harvesting.

IMAGE: Security personnel stand guard in Manipur. Photograph: Shrikant Singh/ANI Photo

A viable alternative to jhoom required considering the totality of activities possible on land.

Organised orchards practically suggested themselves. We proposed a strategic plan envisaging the North East becoming the fruit basket of the country with jhoomiyas earning attractive incomes from horticulture.

What could not be sold as fresh fruit could be processed.

New plants would become showpieces for the region. They would also provide additional employment.

Trees instead of shifting crops would help undo a part of the ecological damage. With Bhowmik's firm backing, the North Eastern Council accepted the plan.

But like the best laid schemes of mice and men, that did not happen.

Even now, as imported stone-fruit grace supermarket shelves at sky-high prices, pears are probably still rotting in Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram.

The pineapple barely manages to reach Kolkata. The North Eastern Council's once-gleaming processing plant at Siliguri never really functioned and now rusts away.

A private plant, too, is shut down as it turned out to be a ruse to bilk the state government.

Another activity that begs attention is the great variety of handicrafts that exists in the region.

Manipuri and Naga shawls and saris with their striking designs and colour schemes enjoyed the pride of place in my wife's extensive wardrobe.

I could afford them even on my teacher's salary and bought them, not at the state emporia, which wore desultory looks, but at the local traders, mostly Marwaris.

For them it was a straight-forward commercial deal, albeit conducted behind fenced walls, of course.

But the state departments charged with the responsibility of developing and promoting handicrafts and artisans' welfare are usually marked by apathy.

Given the surge of interest of consumers in ethnic art there is no telling how it can transform rural lives.

This has already happened in other parts of the country, including Kutch in Gujarat, Sanganer in Rajasthan, Sambalpur in Odisha and Gadwal in Telangana, which have now become reputed suppliers of ethnic wear and crafts the world over.

Although this was not part of our brief, we suggested setting up special programmes for skill development and marketing of these artefacts.

The reason for these grand plans not materialising, and for most of the myriad problems of the North East in one word is remoteness. And that is no oversimplification.

Surface transport in the North East, despite the grand uni-gauge and National Highway projects, lags far behind the rest of the country both in reach and quality.

We showcase the Konkan Railway and the new Kargil highway, but roads, or what passes for them east of Kolkata, languish in a limbo.

Meanwhile, China builds rail and road links to Tibet and Xinjiang under far more trying conditions.

Yet another lesson we have not learnt from China is the urgent need to knit the vast country together to keep it from falling apart at the seams.

Creating infrastructure, especially in remote areas such as the North East, became a mantra of Plan after Five-year Plan, much like removal of poverty.

While there is considerable dent in poverty, sadly, the North-east remains as distant today as it always was.

Trains now connect Guwahati to most cities, but the North East stretches a further 600 km as the crow flies to the north-east and the south-east.

Horticulture becoming the growth-engine of the North East required easy, rapid and economic access to markets.

The nearest large urban market, Kolkata, was at best a half day's journey -- more like three days in case of Arunachal Pradesh -- over tortuous roads and the Chicken's Neck in North Bengal.

These poor excuses of roads are often blocked by landslides or insurgencies.

IMAGE: Kukis protest against the killing of tribals in Manipur at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. Photograph: Shrikant Singh/ANI Photo

We knew of these constraints while proposing the plan, but believed the grand assurances of state and central governments and the North Eastern Council according infrastructure the top priority and the North-east soon having seamless connectivity with the rest of the country.

That has still not happened despite the far greater attention the present regime pays to infrastructure development.

The North East remains a distant outpost full of promise and poverty.

And when the pressure becomes unbearable, the lid blows off, which brings to the fore an even more pressing human dimension of the problem. That was the subject of my earlier column.

Author's note: Some readers may have found a few references, such as those to the Manipur saviour, Subrata Bhowmik, and the overall economy of the region, a bit confusing. This backstory fills those gaps.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
'To avoid accountability and cover the mismanagement of the head of the department, they create this kind of sabotage theory.'

'If it's a sabotage theory, then the higher-level officials can go scot-free.'

IMAGE: Rescue operations in Odisha'S Balasore district on Saturday, June 03, 2023, after a major collision On June 2 between three trains claimed 288 lives. Photograph: ANI Photo

The three train collision that resulted in the deaths of 288 people is the worst train accident in India this century.

A week later, various theories are floating around about the cause of the accident.

Was it a technical error? Or a human error? Or sabotage?

The initial investigation claimed a technical error resulted in the accident. Then the CBI entered the scene. Now, they are talking about sabotage.

How unsafe does a loco pilot feel in situations like these? In what kind of conditions do they work?

K Parthasarathi, a loco pilot and the south zone joint general secretary of the All India Loco Running Staff Association, reveals the problems loco pilots face.

"When you increase the speed from 100 kmph to 130 kmph, you should understand that my reaction time as a loco pilot becomes very limited. At 130 kmph, I pass 1 km in 28 seconds! Imagine how much time I get for any reaction," Parthasarathi tells Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier.

"We are not against running Vande Bharat or Bullet trains. Along with this, you should reduce human dependence on the controls," says Parthasarathi in the first of a two-part interview.

IMAGE: Bandel Junction station in West Bengal has the world's largest electronic interlocking system. Photograph: Kind courtesy Ministry of Railways/Twitter.com

Various theories are going around about the train accident. Will we ever know the truth?

It is very difficult to answer. Yes, technical errors can happen.

This is not the first time that the electronic interlocking system has failed. It has failed many times earlier also. It is not an unusual happening.

The difference this time is that it has caused such a big accident where hundreds of people died and more than a thousand injured.

The interlocking system is there to ensure safety. For example, if a line is occupied, the signal will be red. But the electronic interlocking system failing is very much possible.

In the old days, the interlocking arrangement was done by people who operated a lever point, and the signal was cleared by the station master. Yes, too many people were involved in the system in those days.

After the introduction of the electronic interlocking system, all those people became redundant. Now, only the station master is there. There is a relay room at the station near the station master's room and that's where all the operations happen.

IMAGE: A view of the train traffic management system inside the Bahanaga Bazar railway station control room near the accident site in Balasore. Photograph: Krishn Kaushik/Reuters

Can anyone enter the room and sabotage the system?

In this particular case, we have no idea what happened. But the chances of sabotage are very remote.

Sometime back, a retired general manager said that if anyone wanted to sabotage, he would not try to enter the room located at a station where there are many people. They would prefer a faraway place where they are not seen.

When someone who wants to sabotage a train can tamper with the track in some remote area, will he take the risk of going to the station?

Also, it is not easy to understand the complicated electronic system.

But there may be some intention behind this sabotage theory.

IMAGE: CBI officers at the accident site in Balasore. Photograph: ANI Photo

To make someone a scapegoat?

Exactly. Accountability in the Indian Railways ends with lower-level employees. It never goes beyond the Supervisor level; mostly Group D staff or, it goes up to the Supervisor level. Not beyond that.

To avoid accountability and cover the mismanagement of the head of the department, they create this kind of a sabotage theory.

If it's a sabotage theory, it is concerned with security, law and order of the state, etc. Then, the higher-level officials can go scot-free.

I am talking about the sabotage theory based on media reports.

IMAGE: A Damaged Vande Bharat Express train. Photograph: PTI Photo

Do you feel those at the very top like the railway minister, the chairman of the Railway Board, GM, etc should resign taking moral responsibility?

Asking for resignations is always political.

For quite some time, in the Railways, they have been talking about 'graded responsibility', which is, the responsibility goes up with higher grades. But in practical terms, the graded responsibility is not applied at all.

For example, in Indian law, there is something called vicarious liability. In simple terms, it is like a master-servant relationship. It means, if the servant does something wrong, even if he is negligent, the master also is accountable.

Even though the vicarious liability law is available in the Indian Penal Code, it is not applicable in the Indian Railways.

It is absolutely essential to have graded responsibility. It is not because I have any issues with the higher officials. I am not disputing the fact that there are many officials who work day and night without any rest for the Railways.

Because there is no accountability, they are not taking sincere steps to ensure safety.

I will give you an example. After starting the Vande Bharat trains, the train speed was increased to 120-130 kmph. But what safety improvements have they made for running trains at a higher speed? Nothing.

After putting heavier gauge rails in some places and cattle fences in some other places, they are declaring the rails are suitable for 130 kmph.

When you increase the speed from 100 kmph to 130 kmph, you should understand that my reaction time as a loco pilot becomes very limited. At 130 kmph, I pass 1 km in 28 seconds! Imagine how much time I get for any reaction.

We are not against increasing the speed, we are not against running Vande Bharat or Bullet trains. Along with this, you should reduce human dependence on the controls.

You should have more of electronic surveillance and electronic monitoring. You also need sophisticated anti-collision devices.

The problem here is, they are just increasing the speed of the train without introducing modern devices.

IMAGE: A view of the tragic triple railway accident in Balasore. Photograph: PTI Photo

And the end result is, the life of the loco pilot and the travelling public is in danger....

Exactly. In this accident, the driver of the Coromandel Express survived. But in many accidents, the driver does not survive. If he had died, the number of dead would have changed from 288 to 289.

In most cases, the blame falls on the driver...

Yes. To stop making the driver alone responsible for an accident, we had fought for several years to have a recorder in the engine compartment.

Like the Black Box on planes?

Yes. Like the data logger, there should be a recording of the signalling in the engine room because in most cases, we were not in a position to prove our innocence. We had to fight for so many years for this.

We work in such conditions.

Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com
Two police teams have been constituted to investigate the murder of gangster-politician Mukhtar Ansari's aide Sanjeev Maheshwari Jeeva in Lucknow, while steps have been taken to tighten security at court premises in the wake of the incident, a senior police officer said on Friday.

IMAGE: Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath meets an injured cop iat the King George's Medical University, in Lucknow, June 8, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo

Jeeva (48) was shot dead on the premises of a Lucknow court on Wednesday, police said. A policeman and a two-year-old girl were injured in the incident.

"Two teams with four policemen each have been formed for prompt and successful disposal of the investigation of the case registered at the Wazirganj police station in Lucknow," joint commissioner of police (law and order) Upendra Aggarwal told reporters.

Wazirganj police station in-charge Manoj Kumar Mishra will head the investigation, he said.

"The second team constituted for technical assistance includes Rajdev Prajapati, in-charge of the surveillance cell, western zone with three others," Aggarwal said.

Apart from this, Inspector Ramphal Prajapati has been assigned the task of making adequate security arrangements at the old premises of district court and high court Lucknow Bench, the officer said.

He said an application will be moved in court on Saturday over the police custody of the accused.

The senior police officer said a meeting was also held with lawyer organisations on Friday and a consensus was reached on several points regarding security on court premises. There will be separate entry gates for officers and advocates besides other elaborate security arrangements, he said.

"Steps are being taken to ensure security in court. We also held a meeting with the Central Bar Association and the members have assured their cooperation in this process," he said.

Meanwhile, the police have increased the number of police personnel deployed in the district and sessions courts, and installed metal detectors at every gate.

Lawyers coming to court now have to show their identity cards and are frisked by police officers.

The alleged assailant, identified as Vijay Yadav (24), a resident of Jaunpur district, was caught on the spot after the shooting took place right outside a courtroom, the police said.

Eyewitnesses said the assailant was dressed as a lawyer and fired around six shots.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has directed the formation of a three-member Special Investigation Team to probe the incident.

The assailant opened fire when Jeeva, who was serving a life term in a Lucknow jail, was brought to the court for hearing in a case, police officials said.

A resident of Muzaffarnagar district in Uttar Pradesh, Jeeva is an accused in the murder cases of Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Krishnanand Rai and former state minister Brahm Dutta Dwivedi as well as in 22 other cases, including those of fraud and criminal conspiracy.

Meanwhile, chief medical superintendent of King George's Medical University Trauma Centre said the girl, who was shot in the incident, has been successfully operated and the bullet has been removed.
Mozambique is keen to increase the presence of Egyptian companies in the country by removing all obstacles facing their work, President Filipe Nyusi said on Friday.

In a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi in Mozambiques capital, Maputo, President Nyusi hailed El-Sisis African tour, saying it reflects Egypts deep keenness to support its African brothers. Nyusi also praised El-Sisis historic visit to Mozambique, the first such visit by an Egyptian president, Egyptian Presidential Spokesman Ahmed Fahmy said in a statement.

President Nyusi also expressed his aspiration to strengthen economic cooperation with Egypt and encourage Egyptian investment in his country.

For his part, El-Sisi highlighted the broad horizon for economic cooperation with Mozambique and stressed the need to boost trade exchange between the two countries.

El-Sisi also underlined the mutual keenness to increase the presence of Egyptian companies in Mozambique and encourage new investments in the fields of infrastructure development, agriculture, fish farming and health.

The Egyptian president also stressed that they would continue providing support to Mozambique to build civilian and military capacity.

Regional issues

The discussion between El-Sisi and Nyusi touched on a number of regional issues, especially the Sudanese crisis.

In this regard, the two leaders agreed to intensify political consultation and coordination on urgent African issues, including developments in conflict hotspots across the continent.

They also agreed to coordinate their response to the repercussions of various global crises on African development, especially in light of Mozambiques election to as a member of the UN Security Council 2023-2024.

The presidents also discussed deepening security cooperation, including the exchange of information to counter terrorism and extremist thought in Africa.

This aims to help achieve security and stability required for development in the continent, especially in the eastern and southern African regions, the presidents agreed.

In this regard, Nyusi hailed Egypts religious institutions role in countering the extremist thought and spreading the moderate Islam worldwide, including in Mozambique.

In a press conference following their meeting, El-Sisi invited Nyusi to visit Egypt.

Africa tour

Egypt's president arrived on Friday in Mozambique on the last leg of his African tour that included Angola and Zambia, to push economic ties and continental integration.

During the tour, El-Sisi attended the 22nd Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Heads of State and Governments Summit in Zambias Lusaka on Thursday, where he handed over the rotating presidency of COMESA to Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema.

In a speech at the summit, El-Sisi urged member states of COMESA to exert more efforts to achieve regional integration in order to address the current challenges.

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Tension prevailed in Ghoti town of Maharashtra's Nashik district after some local residents gathered outside a police station and sought action against a man over his Facebook post, which they alleged hurt their religious sentiments, police said on Friday.

IMAGE: Members of the Hindu outfits stage a protest demanding strict action against two people for posting objectionable status on social media, at Chhatrapati Shivaji Chowk, in Kolhapur. Photograph: ANI Photo

The incident took place on Thursday evening, after which the police took the 23-year-old accused into custody, they said.

"A Facebook post by a man created a tense situation in Ghoti. The man had posted some edited photographs on the social media platform, which went viral and triggered tension," a police official said.

"Local residents gathered outside the Ghoti police station in the evening seeking action against the man. The police, however, managed to defuse the situation," he said.

Following the incident, the police took out a route march in the town.

A case was registered under Indian Penal Code (IPC) section 295-A (deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs) against the accused and he was taken into custody, the police said.

"The situation is under control now and no untoward incident occurred," the official said.

The incident took place close on the heels of tension in Kolhapur and Ahmednagar cities of the state recently over social media status messages put by some individuals.

Tension gripped Kolhapur city in western Maharashtra on Tuesday after two men allegedly put 18th century Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan's image along with an offensive audio message as their social media status.

The next day, police had to disperse hundreds of protesters after they hurled stones during a demonstration against the alleged use of Tipu Sultan's image.

In Ahmednagar, some youths displayed photos of 17th century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in a procession, which sparked tension earlier this week.

In Ashti town of Beed district, a teenage boy's alleged act of putting a social media status message glorifying Aurangzeb triggered tension, with some Hindutva organisations giving a "bandh" call on Friday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the United States this month will set new benchmarks for bilateral ties and some 'really big, historic and exciting' announcements are likely to be made on defence cooperation and boosting India's indigenous military industrial base, the Pentagon has said.

IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi with United States President Joe Biden at the 17th G20 Summit, in Bali on November 15, 2022. Photograph: ANI Photo

Prime Minister Modi will embark on his first state visit to the US at the invitation of President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden this month.

During his four-day visit starting on June 21, the US president and the First Lady will host Modi for a state dinner on June 22.

When Prime Minister Modi comes here to Washington for a State Visit later in the month, I think it will be a historic visit setting new benchmarks for the relationship, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner said during a panel discussion at the Center for New American Security on Thursday.

"I think it (the visit) will be looked back upon similar to how the Japan two plus two earlier this year was a pivotal moment in the relationship. People will be looking back on this visit by Prime Minister Modi as a real springboard for the US-India relationship," he said.

Ratner said US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin visited India recently to advance a number of bilateral issues and prepare the ground for the prime minister's visit to Washington, DC by finalising particular agreements and initiatives that the two countries are working on.

Among the priorities are clear strategic alignment around the question of co-development and co-production between the United States and India on the defence side. This is a priority for Prime Minister Modi to strengthen India's indigenous defence industrial base, as well as advancing the military modernisation, he said.

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and his Indian Indian counterpart Ajit Doval in January launched the initiative for critical and emerging technology (iCET) to try to bolster technology cooperation between the US and India and there is a very strong defence component of that that the two countries are looking to advance.

"I know there have been efforts at this in the past. Sometimes there's skepticism around, is it going to be real this time? And my answer is, I think, all signs are pointing toward yes, it's going to be real and we're going to have some really big, historic, exciting announcements out of the prime minister's visit in terms of particular projects around defence industrial cooperation," Ratner said.

"We are also enhancing our operational coordination in a number of different places. A lot of focus on the Indian Ocean, a lot of focus on the undersea domain, as well as new domains, space and cyber and new efforts around information sharing," he said.

"If you look at the development of the US-India relationship, it's really unbelievable how far the relationship has moved over the last couple of decades. That's true now more than ever," he said.

Ratner said the two countries are seeing increasing strategic alignment.

"From our perspective, from India's perspective, we do share a vision again for a free and open Indo-Pacific. A strong US-India partnership is a critical ingredient to realising that vision. That's what both sides have understood that from India's perspective and from the US perspective, that a closer partnership is going to be essential to the manifestation of that vision," he said.

The US, India and several other world powers have been talking about the need to ensure a free, open and thriving Indo-Pacific in the backdrop of China's rising military manoeuvring in the region.

China claims nearly all of the disputed South China Sea, though Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all claim parts of it. Beijing has built artificial islands and military installations in the South China Sea.

"One of the major thrusts of the bilateral defence relationship and one of the things we were talking about, while we were in Delhi, is this ongoing US effort to support India's military modernisation," Ratner said.

"The integration of our defence industrial base is more co-production, co-development, and I think that is based upon the belief that a stronger India that can defend its own interest and its sovereignty is good for the United States," he said.
The Gujarat police have apprised Canadian authorities about investigations into a case where four members of a family from a village in the state froze to death while trying to illegally enter the United States from the North American country with help of agents last year, said an official on Friday.

IMAGE: The Patels were found dead near Emerson, Manitoba, approximately 12 metres from the Canada-US border on January 19, 2022. Photograph: Courtesy courtesy Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Manitoba/Facebook

The victims, Jagdish Patel, his wife and their two children -- residents of Dingucha village under Kalol taluka of Gandhinagar district --, died due to exposure to extreme cold conditions on the border of the two countries in January 2022 when they were walking towards the US from Canada amid a blizzard.

Three Gujarat-based illegal immigration agents, who facilitated the family's ill-fated journey, were later arrested.

According to a senior official of the Ahmedabad crime branch, which has been investigating the involvement of local agents in what appeared to be part of a widespread immigration racket, a 'security liaison officer' of Canada visited their office a few days ago as part of a routine procedure.

"Security liaison officer of Canada visits our office at regular intervals during the year. It is their routine procedure. During one such visit a few days back, we discussed the Dingucha case and related investigation. We have already filed a chargesheet in the case," said deputy commissioner of police, crime branch, Chaitanya Mandlik.

In January 2022, the Crime Branch had arrested three agents - Yogesh Patel, Bhavesh Patel and Dashrath Chaudhary - in connection with the Dingucha case.

It was revealed during investigation that apart from the Dingucha family, these agents had sent seven others from Gujarat to Canada as part of their plan to get them illegally cross the border and enter the US.

At the time of their arrest, the crime branch had said these agents and their accomplices, or "crossing agents" in those countries, had forced these 11 people to walk in the snow in a bid to get them illegally cross the US-Canada border, leading to the death of the couple and their two children.

Of these 11 persons from Gujarat, seven were nabbed by US authorities after they landed on the other side of the border.

Investigations had revealed the victims were taken to Toronto in Canada and later to Vancouver.

The agents then dumped them at Winnipeg in the Manitoba province, leaving them to cross over to the US on their own.
The Central Bureau of Investigation has formed a 10-member special investigation team (SIT) under a DIG-rank officer to probe six cases related to the Manipur violence referred to it by the state government, officials said on Friday.

IMAGE: Security personnel conduct joint combing operations in sensitive areas of Manipur. Photograph: ANI Photo

During his visit to the northeastern state, Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced a CBI probe into six FIRs -- five on alleged criminal conspiracy and one on general conspiracy behind the violence in Manipur.

The CBI had dispatched Joint Director Ghanshyam Upadhyay to coordinate with the state officials and upon his return, the SIT was constituted. The Special Crime Branch, Kolkata, will probe the cases, the officials said.

"The CBI has today registered six cases transferred by the state of Manipur pertaining to large-scale violence leading to destruction and looting of the properties arson, looting/snatching of arms/ammunition and loss of human lives, etc. in various districts of the state," an agency spokesperson said.

He said the SIT has been constituted for a "thorough probe" in the cases and to unearth the criminal conspiracy behind the unfortunate incidents.

Meanwhile, security forces recovered 57 arms, 1,588 ammunition and 23 bombs from Imphal East, Kakching, Tengnoupal and Bishnupur districts of Manipur during the last 24 hours, sources said.

A total of 953 arms, 13,351 ammunition and 223 bombs of different kinds have been recovered till date, they said.

Violence broke out in Manipur after a 'tribal solidarity march' was organised in the hill districts on May 3 to protest against the Meitei community's demand for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status. So far, nearly 100 people have lost their lives and over 300 have been injured.

The clashes were preceded by tension over the eviction of Kuki villagers from reserve forest land, which had led to a series of smaller agitations.

Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley. Tribals -- Nagas and Kukis -- constitute another 40 per cent of the population and reside in the hill districts.

Around 10,000 Army and Assam Rifles personnel have been deployed in the state to maintain peace.
The Congress on Friday hit out at the Bharatiya Janata Party over former Uttarakhand chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat terming Mahatma Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse a "patriot" and demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi must remove him from the party for such a statement.

IMAGE: Uttarakhand CM Pushkar Singh Dhami meets former state Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat (right), at his residence in Dehradun, February 20, 2022. Photograph: ANI Photo

Congress leader Vaibhav Walia said Rawat's remarks were not just an insult to the father of the nation but also an insult to the country.

Rawat on Wednesday termed Godse a patriot while mocking Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for merely sharing the surname with the father of the nation.

"Gandhi ji was killed, that is a different issue. But as far as I have understood and read Godse, he too was a patriot. We do not agree with the killing of Gandhi ji," the BJP leader told reporters in Uttar Pradesh's Ballia.

Hitting out at the prime minister, Walia, at a press conference in New Delhi, said Modi hails Mahatma Gandhi when he goes abroad but an ex-chief minister of his own party calls the father of the nation's assassin a patriot.

"The eulogising of Godse must stop and to give a message for this Rawat must be shown the door by the BJP," said Walia, secretary in All India Congress Committee's communications department.

"If you (Modi) don't remove him from the party then it means what he has said has tacit consent from you," the Congress leader from Uttarakhand said.

Walia said the Congress was walking on the path shown by Rahul Gandhi to open 'mohabbat Ki dukan (shop of love)' in 'nafrat ka bazaar (market of hate)'.

"I would like to elaborate that what one gets in this nafrat ka bazaar, one gets hate, violence, rising prices, injustice to women. While we want to open 'mohabbat ki dukanein' which talks about love, compassion, brotherhood, and harmony, you get a cylinder for Rs. 500," he said.

"Modi ji remove this person (Rawat) from your party and send a message that eulogising the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi will not be tolerated," Walia said.
West Bengal Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury on Friday announced that his party will fight the upcoming panchayat elections in the state in an alliance with the Communist Party of India-Marxist.

IMAGE: West Bengal Congress chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury addresses a press conference, in Kolkata, June 9, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo

Addressing a press conference, Chowdhury said he has directed Congress workers to extend all cooperation to the CPI-M in fighting the July 8 polls.

"The Congress and the CPI-M will fight the panchayat elections together. We have already directed our party workers to extend all forms of support to the CPI-M in this regard," he said.

Chowdhury's comments came as the submission of nominations for the elections to around 75,000 seats in the three-tier Panchayati Raj system began. It will continue till June 15.

The CPI-M-led Left Front and the Congress fought the 2016 and 2021 assembly elections in West Bengal together, besides the Tripura polls earlier this year.

Since then the two parties have also collaborated in moves to foster opposition unity.

Earlier in the day, Chowdhury moved the Calcutta high court, demanding that nominations for panchayat polls be allowed to be filed online, besides urging for the deployment of central forces.

The court observed that the time given for filing nominations was prima facie inadequate and sought the State Election Commission's response on June 12.

"The people of West Bengal can cast their votes only if central forces are deployed. And because of their presence, polling was possible in the Sagardighi by-elections. That is why the TMC lost there and the Congress won," Chowdhury said.

Targetting Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, he said, "If you are not scared and if you are keen on organising the panchayat election, then why are you reluctant on giving permission for the deployment of central forces?"

He also said that more time should be given for the filing of nominations.

"Didi (Mamata Banerjee) must file an affidavit in the Calcutta high court declaring that she will ensure free and fair polls. We are not trying to escape the elections but want it to take place peacefully," he said.

"We remember the 2018 panchayat polls when around 34 per cent of the population could not cast their votes because of terror. The TMC won in at least 20,000 seats without any contest as people could not file nominations. Around 60-70 people were murdered," he alleged.
President Xi Jinping has called on China's border troops to forge a "great wall of steel" along the country's frontiers by enhancing their capabilities in border defence and control, the state media reported Friday.

IMAGE: China's President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan attend a welcoming ceremony for Democratic Republic of Congo's President Felix Tshisekedi in Beijing, China May 26, 2023. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Pool/Reuters

Xi, 69, who heads the ruling Communist Party of China and the country's Central Military Commission, the high command of the People's Liberation Army, made a fact-finding trip on Wednesday to survey the work of border management and control and the development of frontier troops in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

The Chinese president asked troops to break new ground in border defence, state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.

Xi has called on Chinese border troops to enhance their capabilities in border defence and control to forge a "great wall of steel" along the country's borders, it said.

Unlike his predecessors, Xi, who came into power in 2012, has regularly visited troops in various border regions, including Tibet.

In 2021, he made a rare visit to Nyingchi, a strategically located border town close to Arunachal Pradesh, during his first visit to Tibet.

While visiting the Inner Mongolia military command of the PLA, Xi emphasised the importance of ensuring integrity and a high degree of unity among the border troops.

Highlighting cooperation among the ruling Communist Party of China and government departments, the military, law enforcement agencies, as well as the ordinary people in border defence as China's unique strength, Xi called for joint efforts from all parties to break new ground in defending the country's borders.

He called for additional efforts to intensify troop training and enhance combat preparedness, and speed up capacity building concerning information technology-enabled border defence and control.

He also called for efforts to transform how border defence duties are performed, tighten military discipline, maintain good troop order, and foster more border defence professionals.

Xi commended the role of the region's border troops in ensuring security and stability on the country's northern border.

Praising China's progress in border defence work since he came to power in 2012, Xi said the country's border troops have boosted military training and combat preparedness and resolutely safeguarded border security and the stability in regions along the frontiers.

He added that the troops have effectively safeguarded China's sovereignty, security, and development interest.

Stressing the importance of border defence in ensuring national stability and governance, Xi called on the border troops to have a stronger sense of mission and responsibility and guard the borders diligently for the ruling Communist Party and the people.

Xi underscored the need for continuous efforts to enhance cohesion and forge the soul of the border troops with the CPC's new theories, as well as to improve their education on political discipline, discipline regarding the public and affairs related to foreigners, and policies on ethnic and religious affairs.

Xi has been placing more emphasis on ramping up security and increasing the combat levels of the troops ever since he was re-elected as head of the CPC for an unprecedented third time last year.

He is the only leader after the party founder Mao Zedong to continue in power for more than two five-year terms.
Three people were killed in a village in Manipur's Imphal West district on Friday when a group of insurgents dressed as security personnel called them out of their homes on the pretext of a combing operation and fired at them, officials said.

The incident took place in a village on the border of Kangpoki and Imphal West districts.

The insurgents are believed to be from the Meitei community, the officials said.

Security forces on a routine patrol of the village stepped in when they heard the sound of gunfire. Insurgents fled the area but not before shooting down three villagers, the officials said.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde on Friday said his government has taken serious note of the death threat to Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar and he has given instructions for a probe. His deputy Devendra Fadnavis said such threats will not be tolerated.

IMAGE: Nationalist Congress Party supremo Sharad Pawar. Photograph: ANI Photo

While the Mumbai police registered a first information report (FIR) over the threat, Pune cops reviewed security at Pawar's residence in Shivajinagar area of the city.

Calling Pawar a senior respected leader, Shinde said in a statement that all necessary precautions will be taken for his security. Police authorities have been asked to beef up Pawar's security if needed, the CM said.

For the past few days, the chief minister said, deliberate attempts are being made to create tension in the state.

Ever since the Supreme Court verdict (in Shiv Sena-related issues), some people are upset due to which attempts are being made to spoil the atmosphere by glorifying Aurangazeb and Tipu Sultan, said the statement.

It added, These attempts will be thwarted. We will foil the conspiracy to create disturbances for selfish political interests.

NCP leaders said their 82-year-old party president received a message on social media that read he will meet the same fate as (Narendra) Dabholkar soon. Narendra Dabholkar, who fought against superstitious beliefs, was shot dead in Pune in August 2013.

Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who also holds the home portfolio, said he had asked police to take action, asserting that the government will not tolerate such threats.

The Mumbai police have registered an FIR under Indian Penal Code sections 153 (wantonly causing or provoking any riot through illegal means) and 506 (II) (issuing threat to cause death or grievous hurt), said a senior official.

In Pune, senior cops visited Pawar's residence in Shivajinagar to review security there.

Eight police personnel and one police officer are deployed there in the daytime and a similar strength is maintained at night. Besides, personnel from police headquarters are also stationed at the residence (of Pawar), said inspector Arvind Mane at Shivajinagar police station.
Nationalist Congress Party workers on Friday held a protest in Mumbai and courted arrest over Bharatiya Janata Party leader Nilesh Rane's tweet, in which he termed Sharad Pawar as a 'reincarnation' of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.

IMAGE: NCP chief Sharad Pawar. Photograph: ANI Photo

NCP spokesperson Mahesh Tapase said hundreds of party workers courted arrest against Rane's 'defamatory' tweet against the party chief.

In a tweet posted on Wednesday, Nilesh Rane, former MP and elder son of Union minister Narayan Rane, said, 'Pawar saheb gets worried for the Muslim community when elections are near. Sometimes it seems that Sharad Pawar is the reincarnation of Aurangzeb.'

The NCP workers gathered at Azad Maidan to condemn Rane's tweet.

However, the police took them to the Yellow Gate police station from the protest site, Tapase said in a statement.

"Our workers are emotional about (Pawar) saheb and we will come out on the streets to protect his dignity," he said.

"We knew that the state government will not take any action against Nilesh Rane as they have no morality left. Therefore, we courted arrest by protesting against him," the NCP functionary said.

The 'Mumbai Jail Bharo Andolan' was organised by the NCP's Mumbai unit working president Narendra Rane.

Party spokesperson Clyde Crasto and others were arrested by the police, the statement added.
Egypt has welcomed efforts made by Libyas 6+6 Joint Committee, formed of the House of Representatives (HoR) and the High Council of State (HCS), to prepare Libyan election laws.

In a statement posted by the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Friday, Egypt encouraged the HoR and the HCS to continue their efforts to hold the Libyan presidential and parliamentary elections in parallel as soon as possible.

The ministry called for the HoR and the HCS to continue their role assigned to them under the Skhirat Agreement in this regard in order to meet the aspirations of the brotherly Libyan people.

Earlier this week, the envoys of the rival Libyan factions in the committee announced that they had reached agreements on electoral laws governing the long-delayed presidential and parliamentary elections after around two weeks of talks in Moroccos Bouznika city.

The agreements will be signed "in the coming days" by HoR Speaker Aguila Saleh and Chair of the High Council of State (HCS) Khaled Al-Mishri, said Morocco's Minister of Foreign Affairs Nasser Bourita.

In its Friday statement, the Egyptian foreign ministry called for all Libyan parties to back the efforts of the 6+6 Joint Committee to restore Libyas stability and achieve its peoples aspirations.

This comes in line with the principle of the Libyan ownership of the solution [of the crisis] and given that [those parties] mandate derives from legitimate Libyan institutions, the ministry said.

Egypt also praised Morocco for hosting the last round of the committee.

The UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) also hailed the committees efforts in a Wednesday statement, calling on all Libyan actors to engage to create a safer and more conductive environment for holding elections in 2023.

The UNSMIL also urged all players to refrain from delay tactics aimed at prolonging the stalemate, which has caused so much suffering for the people of Libya.

The 6+6 Committee was formed in March, with the task of formulating legislation to regulate elections in the country.

Egypt has been highlighting the necessity of holding elections in Libya as soon as possible in order to restore stability in its western neighbor, ever since the elections scheduled to be held late in 2021 under a UN-led agreement failed to materialise.

Libyan elections have been delayed since then over persistent disputes between parties, including on the framework for holding elections.

In a meeting in Cairo in January, Saleh of the HoS and the HCSs Al-Mishri agreed on drawing a roadmap for holding the long-awaited elections.

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Both the BJP and Congress understand that coalitions and alliances are not just about numbers, but have symbolic value.

IMAGE: Bharatiya Janata Party President J P Nadda and party leaders garland BJP supremo and India's prime minister Narendra D Modi on his government completing four years in its second term, May 24, 2023. Photograph: Ayush Sharma/ANI Photo

Opposition parties that boycotted the May 28, 2023 inauguration of the new Parliament building will meet in Patna on June 23 to discuss unity for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

It is a challenging task, as evident from the Trinamool Congress poaching the Congress's lone Bengal legislator Bayron Biswas on May 29, bringing back the latter to zero seats in the 294 member Bengal assembly.

If 21 Opposition parties boycotted the May 28 ceremony, the support the Bharatiya Janata Party received from 13 affiliates of the much diminished National Democratic Alliance, along with from half a dozen not aligned to either camp, who attended the function, reawakened it to the importance of allies.

Addressing a meeting of BJP chief ministers and deputy CMs on May 28 evening, Narendra D Modi asked them to assuage allies and respect regional aspirations.

Modi asked the party to celebrate 25 years of the NDA's inception, stressing its spectacular success as no alliance has endured for a quarter of a century.

The BJP would need to nurse its alliances in Maharashtra, Haryana, Bihar, the north eastern states and the south and also keep channels open with parties equidistant from both camps, such as the Biju Janata Dal.

However, the development in Bengal and the Congress meeting in Delhi to decide its response to the Aam Aadmi Party's appeal to oppose the Delhi services ordinance issue laid bare the contradictions in the Opposition camp.

Congress leaders from Punjab and Delhi asked the party leadership not to support the AAP, describing it as the BJP's 'B team' that has hurt the Congress in Delhi, Punjab and other states.

In Bengal, Sagardighi MLA Bayron Biswas, elected in a by-poll three months AGO, joined the TMC in the presence of party national General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee.

Biswas was the joint Congress-Left Front candidate and defeated the Trinamool candidate by almost 23,000 votes, a seat that the Trinamool had held since 2011, leading their leaders to talk about the 'Sagardighi model', hoping minorities would turn away from the TMC.

'We don't mind supporting the Congress, but that doesn't mean that in places where the TMC is strong, the Congress fights us to strengthen the BJP,' Abhishek Banerjee said after Biswas joined his party, slamming Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury.

Abhishek echoed not just her aunt, Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's view on the issue, but also the Samajwadi Party's Akhilesh Yadav.

Both skipped attending the oath-taking ceremony of the Congress ministry in Bengaluru on May 20.

Yadav argued that Congress should let his party fight the BJP in Uttar Pradesh.

However, the Rashtriya Lok Dal's Jayant Chowdhury -- an SP ally in UP -- attended the swearing-in.

According to sources, the RLD is keen to ally with the Congress in western UP as it believes the Congress would help it get minority votes.

Meanwhile, some former friends-turned-rivals, including the Telugu Desam Party and Shiromani Akali Dal, are keen to return to the NDA fold.

In his Mann ki Baat address last month, Modi paid homage to TDP founder N T Rama Rao on his 100th birth anniversary.

But the BJP has kept its equation with YSR Congress Party at an even keel.

Last month, the Union government released Rs 10,461 crore (Rs 104.61 billion) of pending bifurcation dues from 2014, which a YSRCP spokesperson attributed to his party's 'friendly attitude with Delhi'.

The Andhra CM attended Parliament's inauguration.

The K Chandrasekhar Rao-led Bharat Rashtra Samithi, which boycotted the event, said it cannot go with the Congress-led Opposition.

According to a senior BJP leader, the Telangana assembly election in December would be "difficult" for his party, indicating the fight was between the BRS and the Congress.

As a CSDS-Lokniti survey published on May 29 nrevealed, Opposition parties, such as the SP and TMC, may be justified in worrying about the Congress.

According to the survey, the Congress and Rahul Gandhi's acceptance has increased after the Bharat Jodo Yatra.

The survey found that compared to 2014 and 2019, there is a decent increase in the proportion of respondents willing to vote for the Congress.

But this spike is primarily at the cost of regional parties, rather than the BJP.

The BJP and the Congress understand that coalitions and alliances are not just about numbers but have symbolic value.

It would be interesting to watch how they accommodate the electoral interests of their smaller allies.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
It was once normal for girls to marry at a young age and deliver a child before they turned 17, a judge of the Gujarat high court has remarked while hearing a minor rape survivor's plea for permission to terminate her pregnancy.

Image used only for representation. Photograph: ANI Photo

While indicating that he might not allow the petition if both the girl and foetus were healthy, Justice Samir Dave of the high court also referred to the Manusmriti during the hearing on Wednesday.

The rape survivor is 16 years and 11 months old and carrying a seven-month-old foetus.

Her father moved the HC seeking permission for abortion as the pregnancy had crossed the 24-week threshold up to which abortion can be performed without a court's leave.

On Wednesday, his lawyer sought an early hearing, saying the family was concerned because of the girl's age.

Justice Dave said there was anxiety because 'we are living in the 21st century'.

"Ask your mother or great-grandmother. Fourteen-fifteen was the maximum age (for marriage), and girls used to give birth to their first child before turning 17. And girls get mature before boys...Though you may not read, but you should read Manusmriti once," he added.

As the expected date of delivery is August 16, he consulted expert doctors in his chamber, the judge informed the lawyer.

"The court can consider (allowing abortion) if any serious ailments are found in the foetus or the girl. But if both are normal, it will be very difficult for the court to pass such an order," the judge said.

In the end, the court directed the Medical Superintendent of Rajkot Civil Hospital to get the girl examined by a panel of doctors to find out if the medical termination of pregnancy was advisable.

The doctors should also carry out ossification test on the girl and a psychiatrist should ascertain her mental condition, Justice Dave said, asking the hospital to submit reports by June 15, the next date of hearing.

During the hearing, the judge also advised the girl's lawyer to start looking for options in case the medical opinion went against the termination of pregnancy.

"I will not give permission if both are found healthy. The weight of the foetus is also good...What will you do if the girl gives birth and the child lives? Who will take care of that child? I will also inquire if there are government schemes for such children. You should also check if someone can adopt that child," said the judge.
At least 35 weapons and warlike stores were recovered during joint combing operations by security forces in ethnic violence-affected Manipur, an official said.

IMAGE: Security personnel display recovered snatched weapons during a Joint Combing Operations in sensitive areas both the Hills and Valley sectors of Manipur on Thursday. Photograph: ANI Photo

Domination of the arterial national highway 37, connecting capital Imphal with Assam and other parts of the country, was carried out to ensure free movement of essential goods to and from Manipur as part of the operations, he said.

Stating that 35 weapons of different types, ammunition and warlike stores were recovered on the second day of joint combing operations on Thursday in the hills and valley sector, the official said that the security forces are adopting confidence building measure and a people centric approach to alleviate the hardships of the people, affected by the month-long ethnic strife in the northeastern state.

On the first day of the joint combing operations on Wednesday, the security forces recovered 29 weapons, mostly automatic, mortar, hand grenades, small arms, ammunition and warlike stores.

He said that magistrates were present during combing operations in non-AFSPA areas.

Adequate measures were being taken during the combing operations, aimed at de-escalation of tensions amongst communities through physical domination besides recovery of weapons and ammunition, to ensure that the local population are not inconvenienced, the official added.

At least 100 people lost their lives and 310 others were injured in the ethnic violence in Manipur that broke out a month ago.

A total of 37,450 people are currently sheltered in 272 relief camps.

Clashes first broke out on May 3 after a 'Tribal Solidarity March' was organised in the hill districts to protest against the Meitei community's demand for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status.

Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley.

Tribals Nagas and Kukis constitute another 40 per cent of the population and reside in the hill districts.

Around 10,000 Army and Assam Rifles personnel have been deployed in the state to bring back peace.
A Ganesh Nadar/Rediff.com reports on a wedding in Tamil Nadu at which guests were asked to gift only school books -- and got 1,500 of them!

IMAGE: The couple is happy to receive books as their wedding present. Photographs: Jawahar Subramaniam

On May 31, Swarna Prabha and Thiruvikram wed at the Ayyappa Seva Sangam marriage hall in Ramnagar, Coimbatore.

As with most marriages, presents there were in plenty.

But unlike most marriages, the presents here were not gift cheques or cash or household appliances.

This marriage was unique as in the guests were requested to gift only textbooks for school students.

The father of the bride, Jawahar Subramaniam, a businessman dealing in masalas, is also a social worker and is involved in planting trees, cleaning lakes and the like.

It was his idea to collect books at his daughter's marriage.

To make sure that everyone remembered the request, he even put the message in the invitation cards he gave out.

To make it easier for donors, he also listed the books that were needed.

10th and 12th standard guides

Notebooks

Geometry boxes

History books

Wikipedia in Tamil

Self-help books

Poetry and literature

Books on the Constitution

IMAGE: Guests at the wedding check out the books received as gifts.

"We were already working in schools. In government schools students are provided with textbooks and notebooks, but no reference books for competitions or entrance exams like UPSC, JEE, NEET," says Subramaniam.

"I expected some 50 books, but 1,500 books were collected that day. It was not only my guests, people who did not even attend the marriage sent books because they liked the idea," Subramaniam adds.

Apart from being involved in cleaning water bodies, Subramaniam has been working with an NGO called Siruthuli, which is based in Coimbatore, for 15 years now. Its latest venture is Sewage to Usage, in which they plan to put up water purification plants.

They have also planted 250,000 trees with 90 per cent success -- meaning 90% of the trees they planted have survived.

"Jawahar is my friend, we planned this together. I spoke to a couple of publishers and they had put up stalls at the wedding hall," says Kishore Chandran, managing trustee of the Kalam Foundation in Coimbatore. "Some guests had brought books from home and others bought it at the venue itself and presented it."

The books are now with the Kalam Foundation and will be distributed among six libraries it runs in Coimbatore.

All the libraries are located in government schools and students have free access to them.

"He recently bought a guidebook for a 12th standard student and realised that it would be very helpful to all students. He is always interested in sending a message to society, so he wanted to use my marriage to collect books," says Swarna Prabha, the bride.

"Everyone gets gifts for marriage, but people will remember my marriage as it was for a good purpose. I am very happy with what my father did," she adds.

"I didn't know about this school books gift idea till I saw the bride's wedding invite," says Thiruvikram, the groom, adding, "It was a good initiative. A couple of our guests who had heard about this also presented books."

"I appreciate what my daughter-in-law's father did," says Krishna Kumar, Thiruvikram's father.

The initiative was confined to the bride's side. "We are from Dharmapuri and most of our guests attended the reception in Dharmapuri, only a few close relatives came to Coimbatore," says Krishna Kumar. "We did not print any message on our invitation cards, and our guests gave normal, regular, gifts."

Jawahar Subramaniam hopes families will use marriages and other family events to do something to help others.

Like T Kirtikumar, who recently celebrated his son's first birthday at a marriage hall in Chennai.

Guests were given a sapling on the way out which they could plant in their homes.

Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com
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The state affirms confidence in incumbent head of the Egyptian Engineers Syndicate Tarek El-Nabarawy, Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources and engineer Hani Sewilam said Thursday, after a no-confidence motion to remove the syndicate head from office late in May ended in violence.

Prime Minister Mosatafa Madbouly, Sewilam and Minister of Transport Kamel El-Wazir intervened to resolve the crisis amid an ongoing legal dispute between the syndicate head and some board members over the recent violence.

Videos circulating online showed counters at the no-confidence vote being assaulted and ballot boxes and papers being destroyed by a cohort of what many called thugs at the syndicates General Assembly meeting on 30 May in Cairo International Convention Centre in Cairos Nasr City.

A press conference on Thursday organised by the syndicate and attended by El-Nabarawy as well as El-Wazir and Sewilam, who are also engineers and members of the syndicate, saw the announcement of resignation of six board members.

The resigned members include Secretary-General Yousry El-Deeb, Assistant Secretary-General Ahmed Sabry, Treasurer Mohamed Nasser, Assistant Treasurer Moataz Barakat, First Undersecretary Hossam Rezk and Undersecretary Ehab Khedr, according to reports.

El-Nabarawy had earlier accused the secretary-general, his assistant, the assistant treasurer and others of working in flagrant and deep collusion to stage the attacks.

The syndicate head accused armed thugs belonging to the pro-government and parliamentary majority party Mostaqbal Watan of storming the no-confidence vote in a bid to stop the process after preliminary voting appeared in favor of keeping the head in his post.

The Public Prosecution has been investigating the incident after it received complaints from the competing parties over the incident that sparked outrage among engineers and citizens alike.

State confirms confidence

The masses of engineers and the Egyptian state confirm their confidence in Engineer Tarek El-Nabarawy, the head of the Engineers Syndicate, the irrigation minister said during the press conference.

The engineers and the state also denounce what was carried out by a few that do not appreciate the role and weight of the Engineers Syndicate and the role of the engineers in building modern Egypt, Sewilam added.

He also stressed the unity of the General Assembly and its solidarity with the syndicate head in upholding the engineering profession and caring for the engineers interests.

The transport minister, for his part, extended appreciation for both El-Nabarawy and the board members for their efforts to serve the engineers during their tenure.

El-Wazir also expressed their appreciation for the resignations, saying this affirms that they are not power-hungry and are keen on [maintaining] the syndicates coherence, a statement by the Ministry of Transport read.

Withdrawing complaints

The [transport] minister called for all those who filed complaints against their colleagues [in the syndicate] to withdraw them and resolve the disputes inside their syndicate.

However, El-Nabarawy wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday that he would not withdraw any of the complaints that he filed on Wednesday, 31 May, and have been investigated by the prosecution on 1 and 5 June.

In TV remarks, El-Nabarawy thanked the transport and irrigation ministers for attending the press conference and extending support to the syndicate.

He stressed that he would continue to defend the engineers rights that were violated on the day of the incident.

El-Nabarawy also reiterated his call for the announcement of the result of the no-confidence vote on that day in respect for the right of 25,000 engineers who attended the vote.

No-confidence motion

The no-confidence motion was called after El-Nabarawy proposed a number of bylaws that provoked the ire of some members of the syndicate board, said MP Maha Abdel-Nasser, the vice president of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, who witnessed the attack.

The bylaws included one to prevent members of the syndicate board from becoming board members of companies owned by the syndicate, and to prevent the sale of the shares of any of these companies, said Abdel-Nasser.

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Sweden, whose NATO membership bid is currently blocked, is ready to welcome temporary NATO bases on its soil even before it is a full member, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said Friday.

"The government has decided that the military can undertake preparations with NATO and NATO member states to enable future joint operations," Sweden's conservative Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson wrote in an article co-signed by Defence Minister Pal Jonson in daily Dagens Nyheter.

"These preparations could include temporary stationing of foreign materiel and personnel on Swedish soil," they wrote.

"The decision sends a clear signal to Russia and strengthens Sweden's defence."

The presence of NATO troops would serve as a deterrent against any possible Russian actions from across the Baltic Sea.

Sweden has been a NATO "invitee" since June 2022, but its bid, which must be ratified by all 31 member states, has been blocked by Turkey and Hungary.

Only full members are covered by NATO's Article 5 collective defence clause under which an attack on one member is considered an attack on all.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has not provided any indication, since his re-election in late May, about whether he plans to approve Sweden's NATO bid.

Western nations, and the United States in particular, have been pushing Ankara to give its green light, insisting that Sweden has met the terms of a deal agreed with Ankara last year.

That accord includes a committment to crack down on opposition Kurdish movements, such as the Kurdistan Workers' Party PKK, blacklisted by Ankara which considers them "terrorist" groups.

But Turkey has also demanded that Stockholm extradite dozens of activists living in Sweden that it also labels as "terrorists".

The Swedish government has insisted that it cannot make such decisions since its judiciary is independent.

In addition to bidding to join NATO, Sweden has also hiked its military spending following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

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ALBANY, N.Y. (AP)  New Yorkers who commit crimes could have their records automatically sealed if they stay out of trouble for a certain number of years after they have finished serving their sentences under a bill passed by state lawmakers Friday.

The clean slate legislation would automatically seal most recent convictions  three years after serving time or parole for a misdemeanor and eight years for felony convictions. Sex crimes and most Class A felonies, such as murder, will not be eligible for sealing.

The state Assembly debated the bill for almost five hours before passing it on a party-line vote, garnering applause and cheers. The state Senate followed with its own approval late Friday.

Some liberal lawmakers and unions who support the bill say it would give New Yorkers a path forward that is not encumbered by past mistakes. They say a criminal record often means difficulty obtaining secure work and housing.

That's the case for Ismael Diaz Jr., of Long Island, who was released from prison seven years ago and is still struggling to find secure employment.

Diaz, who served almost 10 years in prison for manslaughter, said he went through three rounds of interviews for a janitorial position at a supermarket before being told he was unemployable because of his criminal record.

I was stressed out because I was trying to get a job and you can't because of having a record," said Diaz, 52. I want to earn a salary and take care of my family and start building up my life where it is supposed to be.

Other states including Utah and Michigan have passed similar measures. California passed legislation last year that would automatically seal conviction and arrest records for most ex-offenders who are not convicted of another felony for four years.

Business groups including big companies like JPMorgan Chase and Verizon have also endorsed the New York legislation. They say increasing the labor pool would boost the states economy and make the state more competitive.

Under New York state law, employers can ask about conviction records at any point in the hiring process, but they must consider factors such as whether the conviction has any bearing on the person's ability to do the job. But advocates for the legislation say that despite that, those with criminal records face huge barriers to stable employment.

Nearly 2.2 million people in New York have criminal convictions, according to a study by the Data Collaborative for Justice, a research center at John Jay College. The study is based on New Yorkers who had convictions from 1980 to 2021.

But Republican lawmakers and victim advocacy groups have criticized the legislation, warning it will take away accountability for those who have committed crimes.

Im sorry, you committed it, youre convicted of it, and unfortunately you have a debt to pay to society, and some aspects of those will be with you forever, just like you did to your victim, said Republican state Assemblymember Anthony Palumbo, also a former prosecutor, before floor deliberations. I think this is completely disregarding the victims of those crimes and disregarding society as a whole.

Palumbo said he favors an existing sealing statute in New York through which people can apply to seal their records depending on the type of conviction and whether theyre a repeat offender. But advocates for the states clean slate bill said the application process is cumbersome and expensive.

Less than 1% of New Yorkers eligible for sealing criminal records through that statute have successfully done so, according to a study conducted by Santa Clara University.

The automatic sealing would not apply to a person who has a pending felony charge in another state.

The state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, in coordination with the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, will be tasked to provide data to state administrative agencies so that they can seal eligible convictions.

Those sealed convictions could be later accessed by any court, prosecutors and defense attorneys under certain conditions, as well as by federal and state law enforcement agencies. Gun licensing agencies, law enforcement employers, and employers for work with vulnerable populations such as children and older adults will still be allowed to access the criminal records.

The original version of the bill excluded only sex crimes from automatic sealing and required seven years to pass until a felony conviction could be sealed.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she wants to make sure the bill would not have any negative, unintended consequences while also giving those with criminal records a second chance.

It's not a simple answer. These are complicated issues, far more than people may realize at first glance, Hochul told reporters at an unrelated event earlier in the week. My goal as governor is to make sure we have forward thinking, progressive policies that actually work."

The bill would go into effect one year after it is signed into law.

___

Maysoon Khan is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Maysoon Khan on Twitter.
AUSTIN, Texas (AP)  A Texas businessman at the center of the scandal that led to the historic impeachment of state Attorney General Ken Paxton was charged Friday with making false statements to mortgage lenders to obtain $172 million in loans.

The federal indictment of real estate developer Nate Paul is the result of a yearslong FBI investigation  a probe Paxton involved his office in, setting off a chain of events that led to a separate federal probe of the attorney general and his impeachment and suspension from office last month.

Paul was charged with eight counts of making false statements while seeking loans from mortgage lenders in the U.S. and Ireland. There was no mention of Paxton or the attorney generals office during the hearing.

Paul, 36, who entered the federal courtroom shackled and wearing jeans, a blue shirt and Nikes, did not enter a plea during his initial appearance in an Austin court nor visibly react as the charges were read. He was released ahead of trial but ordered to surrender his passport and inform the court of any travel outside Texas.

Following the hearing, Paul left through a back door and climbed into a car in a gated area outside the courthouse.

Paul is adamant that he is not guilty," defense attorney Gerry Morris said after hearing, adding that he did not know when his client last spoke with Paxton. An attorney for Paxton, Dan Cogdell, speculated Thursday evening that prosecutors might use the charges against Paul to try to get him to flip and cooperate in the investigation of the attorney general.

Paul is accused of overstating his assets and understating his liabilities while seeking loans in 2017 and 2018, including by giving financial institution false and counterfeit records. In one case, prosecutors said, Paul told banks he had $18 million in an account when he had less than $13,000. In another case laid out in the 23-page indictment, Paul is accused of telling a credit union he had around $3 million in liabilities when he actually owed more than $28 million at the time.

A grand jury handed up the indictment Tuesday but a judge sealed the document until after the court hearing, which took place just a few blocks from Paul's downtown Austin offices.

Prosecutors said each count of making false statements carries a penalty of up to 30 years in prison and a fine up to $1 million.

FBI agents examining Pauls troubled real estate empire searched his Austin offices and palatial home in 2019. The next year, eight of Paxton s top deputies reported the attorney general to the FBI on allegations of bribery and abuse of office, including for hiring an outside lawyer to examine the developers claims of wrongdoing by federal agents.

The allegations by Paxtons staff prompted an FBI investigation that in February was taken over by the Justice Departments Washington-based Public Integrity Section. They are also central to 20 articles of impeachment overwhelmingly approved by the GOP-led state House of Representatives. They include abuse of public trust, unfitness for office and bribery.

The impeachment accuses Paxton of using his office to help Paul over his unproven claims of an elaborate conspiracy to steal $200 million of the developers properties. The bribery counts say that in return the developer employed a woman with whom Paxton had an extramarital affair and paid for expensive renovations to the attorney generals million-dollar Austin home.

Paxton's lawyers sought to rebut the latter claim this week by releasing a bank statement that included a 2020 wire transfer purportedly showing Paxton, and not a donor, paying more than $120,000 for a home renovation. But the document raised new questions about the mens dealings.

The wire transfer was dated Oct. 1, 2020  the same day Paxtons deputies signed a letter informing the head of human resources at the Texas attorney generals office that they had reported their boss to the FBI. The $121,000 payment was to Cupertino Builders, whose manager had done work for Paul and had an email address with his company, state corporation and court records show.

Paul has faced numerous lawsuits from creditors and business partners over the years, with several of his companies filing for bankruptcy or being placed under the supervision of court-appointed overseers. Last year, one of those receivers wrote in a report that Cupertino Builders was used for fraudulent transfers from Paul's business.

Paul has denied bribing Paxton. The attorney general has also broadly denied wrongdoing and said he expects to be acquitted during an impeachment trial in the state Senate, where his wife is a member.

The Senate will set its own rules for a trial that has little precedent, given that Paxton is just the third sitting official in Texas history to be impeached. The proceeding is set begin no later than Aug. 28.

Paxton was separately indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, though he has yet to stand trial.

___

Bleiberg reported from Dallas.
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LONDON (AP)  He was the mayor who reveled in the glory of hosting the 2012 London Olympics, and the man who led the Conservatives to a whopping election victory on the back of his mission to get Brexit done.

But Boris Johnsons time as prime minister was marred by his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and a steady stream of ethics allegations, from alcohol-fueled government parties that broke lockdown rules.

Here is a timeline of events relating to Johnsons political career:

2001-2008: Serves as a member of Parliament in the House of Commons representing the constituency of Henley.

2008-2016: Serves as London mayor, overseeing 2012 London Olympics.

2016: Co-leader of the campaign to take Britain out of the European Union, in opposition to then-Prime Minister David Cameron, a fellow Conservative. Cameron resigns after voters approve Brexit in a national referendum on June 23, 2016.

2016-2018: Serves as Foreign Secretary under Camerons successor, Prime Minister Theresa May. Johnson resigns in July 2018 in opposition to Mays strategy for a soft Brexit that would maintain close ties with the EU.

June 7, 2019: Theresa May resigns as Conservative Party leader over her failure to persuade Parliament to back the Brexit agreement she negotiated with the EU. The party is split between those who back May and hard-liners, led by Johnson, who are willing to risk a no-deal Brexit in order to wring concessions from the EU.

July 23, 2019: Johnson is elected Conservative Party leader in a vote by party members. He takes office as prime minister the next day, inheriting a minority government that relies on votes from Northern Irelands Democratic Unionist Party to pass legislation. Johnson insists Britain will leave the EU on Oct. 31, with or without a deal.

Aug. 28, 2019: Johnson announces he will shut down Parliament until mid-October, giving opponents less time to thwart a no-deal Brexit.

Sept. 3, 2019: Twenty-one rebel Conservative Party lawmakers support legislation requiring the government to seek an extension of Brexit negotiations if it cant negotiate an agreement with the EU. The measure passes and the rebels are expelled from the party.

Sept. 5, 2019: Johnson asserts he would rather be dead in a ditch than ask the EU for another extension.

Sept. 24, 2019: U.K. Supreme Court rules governments suspension of Parliament was unlawful.

Oct. 19, 2019: Johnson asks the EU to delay Brexit again. New deadline set for Jan. 31.

Nov. 6, 2019: Parliament is dissolved and early elections are set for mid-December as Johnson seeks a mandate for his Brexit strategy.

Dec. 12, 2019: Johnson wins an 80-seat majority in the general election, giving him the backing to push through Brexit legislation. The victory makes Johnson the most electorally successful Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher.

Jan. 23, 2020: The Brexit deal becomes law after approval by U.K. Parliament. European Parliament approves the deal six days later.

March 23, 2020: Johnson places U.K. in first lockdown due to COVID-19.

April 5, 2020: Johnson hospitalized and later moved to intensive care with COVID-19. He is released from the hospital on April 12, thanking the nurses who sat with him through the night to make sure he kept breathing.

Nov. 3-4, 2021: Johnsons government orders Conservative lawmakers to support a change in ethics rules to delay the suspension of Owen Paterson, a Johnson supporter who had been censured for breaching lobbying rules. The measure passes. A day later, facing an angry backlash from lawmakers of all parties, Johnson reverses course and allows lawmakers to vote on Patersons suspension. Paterson resigns.

Nov. 30, 2021: Allegations surface that government officials attended parties in government offices during November and December 2020 in violation of COVID-19 lockdown rules. The scandal grows to reports of more than a dozen parties. Johnson denies the allegations, but opposition leaders criticize the government for breaking the law as people across the country made sacrifices to combat the pandemic.

Dec. 8, 2021: Johnson authorizes investigation into the scandal, dubbed Partygate. Pressure builds for a leadership challenge, but fizzles.

Feb. 3, 2022: Johnsons longtime aide, Munira Mirza, quits Downing Street, followed by three other top aides.

March 23: The government announces a mid-year spending plan thats criticized for doing too little to help people struggling with the soaring cost of living. Then-Treasury chief Rishi Sunak refuses to delay a planned income tax increase or impose a windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies benefiting from rising energy prices.

April 9: Johnson meets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, pledging a new package of military and economic support. The move helps bolster Johnson and his supporters, who argue the government should not focus on domestic political squabbles.

April 12: Johnson is fined 50 pounds ($63) for attending one of the lockdown parties. Opposition parties characterize him as the first U.K. prime minister in history shown to have broken the law while in office. Johnson apologizes but insists he didnt know he was breaking the rules.

May 22,: Findings of the Partygate investigation are published, detailing 16 gatherings at Johnsons home and office and other government offices between May 2020 and April 2021. The report details excessive drinking among some of Johnsons staff, at a time when millions of people were unable to see friends and family.

May 26: The government reverses course on its tax decision on oil and gas companies and announces plans for a 25% windfall profits levy.

June 6: Johnson narrowly wins a vote of no confidence, with Conservative lawmakers voting 211148 to back him. But the scale of the revolt  some 41% voted against him  shakes his grip on power.

June 15: Christopher Geidt quits as ethics adviser to Johnson, accusing the Conservative government of planning to flout conduct rules.

June 24: Johnsons Conservatives lose two former strongholds to opposition parties in special elections.

June 29: Parliaments cross-party Privileges Committee issues a call for evidence for a probe into whether Johnson misled Parliament over lockdown parties.

June 30: Chris Pincher resigns as Conservative deputy chief whip amid allegations he assaulted two guests at a private members club in London. Previous sexual misconduct allegations emerge about Pincher. Questions swirl about whether Johnson knew about the claims when Pincher was given the job.

July 5: Johnson apologizes for his handling of the Pincher scandal and says he had forgotten about being told of the allegations. Two of Johnsons most senior Cabinet ministers, Sunak and Health Secretary Sajid Javid, quit the government.

July 6: Some three dozen junior ministers resign from the government, attacking Johnsons leadership.

July 7: Johnson resigns as Conservative Party leader, but plans to remain as prime minister while the leadership contest is held.

November 2022: Johnson begins stepping up speaking engagements that take him around the world from India to Nigeria to Singapore to the United States. During the current parliamentary term, he reports 2.7 million pounds ($3.4 million) for speaking engagements.

March 3, 2023: A U.K. parliamentary committee says evidence suggests Johnson repeatedly misled Parliament about his knowledge of lockdown-breaking parties at his Downing Street office.

March 22: Johnson insists hand on heart that he never lied to lawmakers about rule-breaking government parties, mounting a robust defense at a hearing that could damage or even end his tumultuous political career.

June 9, 2023: Johnson resigns his parliamentary seat after receiving report on lockdown plans.
Deccan Herald - June 07 2023

Hiding the poor is not a desired development model

Cities across India are getting dressed-up to host G20 events, for which the poor have been removed from sight, their dwellings demolished, and their livelihoods hit

by Tikender Singh Panwar

Green curtains put up outside Jogeshwari slums along the Western Express [Bombay]

Highway as the city is hosting several G20 meetings, in Mumbai. Credit: PTI Photo https://www.deccanherald.com/opinio...Green curtains put up outside Jogeshwari slums along the Western Express Highway as the city is hosting several G20 meetings, in Mumbai. Credit: PTI Photo

The G20 meetings are being held across various cities in India, and if there is one pattern common, it is that in all these cities the poor here have been targeted. To dress up the city, the poor have been removed from sight, their dwellings have been demolished, and their livelihoods hit. What has been presented are the achievements of the Government of India.

Be it Srinagar or Indore, Delhi or Ahmedabad, Nagpur or Mumbai, the idea has been to hide the poor from the sight of the visiting G20 delegates. If in most cities preparation for the summits meant evicting people from the land they have been living for years together, in Mumbai the slums were hidden behind walls meant to keep them out of sight. The evictions in Delhi could have a communal and a social angle to it as well, because of more than 5,000 households evicted in Mehrauli, 3,000 of them belong to Muslims and Dalits.

What is perplexing is the silence from the elected representatives of both the city government and the legislature. Adding to the intrigue is that most of these evicted are registered voters who are represented by these elected leaders who are now maintaining a silence.

Various reports have pointed out that Indias urban population is nearly 35-40 per cent, and about 500 million people live in urban centres. This figure does not include the near 23,000 villages which are for all reasons urban but still have not been considered in the urban nomenclature. Also, about 40 per cent of the urban population in some of the major urban agglomerates is living in slums, or slum-like conditions. Slums are not a slur but a reality we cannot wish away. They are part of the ecosystem and demand the attention of the government and planning authorities.

In fact, slums reflect the failure of the governments and civic bodies to provide its people decent living conditions. The trajectory of planning since the 1990s and particularly after 2014 has further accentuated the problem. Post-2014 the government relied heavily on capital-intensive technologies in the urban sector. The flagship programmes of the Union government: smart city mission, AMRUT or even SBM were in tune to this principle. The programmes laid out roadmaps for levying more burden on the people in the form of user charges and even the grant from the Centre was only for 50 per cent of the scheme, unlike the JNNURM where it was 90 per cent.

Read | Authorities demolish shanties near Delhis Pragati Maidan

What is required is a strong consensus and acceptance of the reality that evictions are no answer  rather housing and land rights is the way forward. Even the United Nations has laid a broad policy framework for shaping the principles for slum rehabilitation: like, including slums in a citys masterplan, provide security of tenure for slum dwellers, plan with (not for) slum communities, and accept their importance in economic development.

In this regard, three state governments look favourably on the right to life for the urban poor.

Punjab and Odisha have large slums in their cities and towns. Here, the land tenure rights have been ordained in the policy framework, and the PMAY has been customised to meet ground realities.

Both states have shown exemplary political leadership in designing their slum policies. In both states a multi-pronged strategy for each city has been designed, rather than a state-level policy framework. Inter-departmental partnerships were built, which are driven at the state level and is crucial for unlocking land for slum/informal settlement, and for its improvement. Community partnership is ensured at every stage of planning and its implementation.

In Karnataka, it is slightly different, where more than 100,000 people have been given rights of registration in 2022. This scheme was started by the previous Sidaramaiah government. This means that it is not just a land patta that has been given to the slum dwellers, but the sale deed in the name of slum dwellers were issued for a nominal sum of less than Rs 5,000.

The Karnataka story of reclaiming rights by the slum dwellers is a story of two decades of struggle that started in 2003. Another important feature is the subjective role of the officers. The slum board comprised officers who were not just proactive but also assimilated the argument of housing for all.

Unfortunately, as far as Indias urban poor are concerned, evictions are a continuous process, especially when the ruling political party envisages a world class city where the poor are invisible. Alongside this is the ongoing struggle of people reclaiming their spaces in cities and towns. Acquiring land tenures, apart from housing, top these struggles.

Some mobilisations have shown promise and resulted in policy-level interventions. These struggles are the starting point in a long journey for a decent and dignified living.

(Tikender Singh Panwar is the former deputy mayor of Shimla)
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan confirmed Thursday that normalization with Israel is in the interest of the region, but the Palestinian issue must be addressed first.

Bin Farhan made his comments during a press conference with his American counterpart, Anthony Blinken, at the conclusion of the meeting of the international coalition against the Islamic State terrorist group, according to statements published by Al Arabiya Net.

For his part, Blinken stated that "the United States will play a major role in expanding normalization processes with Israel."

"We are working on Israel's integration in the Middle East, and we have worked to deepen existing agreements," he added.

Bin Farhans remarks came as Blinken wrapped up a three-day trip to Saudi Arabia that included efforts to push normalization between the Gulf Arab country and Israel.

Earlier in his trip, Blinken had also criticized Israeli unilateral actions in the West Bank, including the expansion of settlements and demolition of Palestinian homes.

He described such actions as obstacles to peace, saying Israel-Saudi normalization is not a substitute for progress between Israelis and Palestinians, and they should not come at its expense.

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The Aurangzeb row that triggered clashes in Kolhapur does not seem to be dying down. Following the clashes, Maharashtra deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had asked what had led to the mushrooming of Aurangzeb's children, AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi hit back with his Godse's children comment. Now, in a stern reaction, the BJP has called Owaisi 'Pakistan Ki Aulaad' (son of Pakistan). "Before using derogatory language against Maharashtra Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis, he (Owaisi) should be concerned about his image. He should not talk like a son of Pakistan," said BJP leader Ram Kadam.

India would never support a person (Aurangzeb), who jailed his father and murdered his brother. Who is whos son, we will definitely have a discussion on that, but right now he should not talk like the son of Pakistan, he added.

The BJP leaders comments came following Owaisis attack on BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis, who termed the miscreants of the Kolhapur violence  Aurangzeb ki Aulaadein (Children of Aurangzeb).

Owaisi lashes out at Fadnavis

Assaduddin Owaisi, while addressing a rally, took a swipe at Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis over his sons of Aurangzeb remark and said he didn't know the BJP leader was an expert in figuring out such relationships. He further asked him to call out the offsprings of Nathuram Godse, the man who murdered Mahatma Gandhi.

Owaisis comments came after Fadnavis slammed the supporters of Aurangzeb for glorifying the Mughal ruler following the violence in Kolhapur city. We will not tolerate the glorification of Aurangzeb. This is Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharajs Maharashtra.

"Suddenly, in some districts of Maharashtra, sons of Aurangzeb have taken birth. Because of this, there are tensions, Fadnavis added.

Fadnavis statement came in light of violent clashes that errupted in Maharashtra's Kolhapur on Wednesday morning as people belonging to Hindu organisations gathered to protest against social media posts showing an image of 18th-century Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan and Mughal ruler Aurangazeb.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah will chair a high level meeting on Friday to take stock of the preparations and security for the upcoming Amarnath pilgrimage in Jammu and Kashmir, sources said. The 62-day-long annual pilgrimage to the holy cave shrine of Amarnath, located at a height of 3,880 metres in the south Kashmir Himalayas, will begin on July 1 and continue till August 31.

The home minister will review the preparations for the Amarnath pilgrimage with top officials of the central government and Jammu and Kashmir administration, the sources said. Shah will also take stock of the plans being formulated to ensure foolproof secretary for the pilgrimage, they said.

According to the Sources, there have been intelligence inputs and the Pakistan-based terror outfits may try to disrupt the pilgrimage for which adequate security forces will be deployed. All stakeholders of the pilgrimage are expected to take part in the meeting and all issues relating to arrangements being made for it would be discussed.

A lot of snow have been found along the both the tracks  Baltal and Pahalgam leading to the holy cave and therefore the Border Roads Organisation has been given the task to clear the snow by June 15, the sources said. Last year, 3.45 lakh people visited the holy cave and this year, the figure could go up to 5 lakh.

The sources said to avoid any incident like last year's when 16 people were killed after flash floods triggered by heavy rain near the shrine, the National Disaster Response Force has started identifying ideal locations for setting up pilgrim camps keeping in mind any possible unforeseen natural disaster.

The Indian Air Force helicopters are expected to be deployed to carry out aerial sorties in the upper reaches of the holy cave to check for glacial events and the formation of lakes that may trigger flash floods downhill. Last year, such sorties were conducted only after the flash floods occurred in June, but this year, the exercise will be undertaken before the start of the yatra and at continuous intervals during the two-month pilgrimage, the sources said.

The aerial surveys may be conducted by a team with expertise in remote sensing and satellite, hydrology and disaster response. Once a dangerous water build-up is spotted, contingency measures will be taken all along the pilgrimage route, especially the area near the cave shrine, they added.
On May 24, 2023, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an announcement through a press release regarding a new visa policy that has sparked controversy and raised concerns among politicians and citizens in Bangladesh. The policy, implemented under Section 212(a)(3)(C) ("3C") of the Immigration and Nationality Act, specifically targets politicians, judges, civil-military officials, and members of law enforcement agencies in Bangladesh.

In the press release, Secretary Blinken stated that the new visa policy is aimed at supporting Bangladesh's goal of holding free, fair, and peaceful national elections. Under this policy, the United States will have the ability to restrict the issuance of visas to any Bangladeshi individual believed to be responsible for or complicit in undermining the democratic election process in Bangladesh. This includes current and former officials, members of political parties (both pro-government and opposition), as well as law enforcement, judiciary, and security service personnel.

The announcement of this new visa policy has generated confusion and uncertainty among the people of Bangladesh. Some experts and citizens have referred to it as a "blanket restriction" imposed on Bangladeshi citizens, raising questions about its fairness and potential consequences for bilateral relations between the United States and Bangladesh.

Shahidur Rahman Tapa, a prominent opposition politician and Presidium Member of the Jatiya Party, expressed his disappointment with the sudden implementation of the new visa policy. In a statement, he remarked, "Given the cordial and warm relationship between Washington and Dhaka, it is unfortunate that the Biden administration abruptly announced a new visa policy for Bangladeshi citizens. This has created doubts in people's minds about the true intentions of the Biden administration. If this policy is aimed at pressuring Bangladesh to align exclusively with the United States while distancing itself from India and China, it will ultimately jeopardize the existing friendly relations between Dhaka and Washington."

Tapa emphasized that Bangladesh is a sovereign nation and should not allow any foreign country to assume a superior position or dictate its policies. He argued that while maintaining friendly relations with the United States is important, it should not come at the cost of sacrificing relations with other nations, particularly neighboring countries like India and China. Tapa further questioned the rationale behind targeting a specific group of individuals, including politicians and law enforcement officials, and raised concerns about potential biases and unintended consequences of the visa policy.

The implementation of the new visa policy has prompted discussions among politicians and experts in Bangladesh. Some argue that it infringes upon the sovereignty of the nation and interferes with its internal affairs. Others believe that the policy reflects the United States' genuine concerns about democratic processes and human rights in Bangladesh, as well as its desire to support fair and transparent elections.

Critics of the policy highlight that Bangladesh has made significant progress in recent years in terms of democratic reforms and improving its electoral system. They argue that singling out Bangladeshi politicians and officials could undermine the progress made and create tensions between the two countries. Additionally, concerns have been raised about the potential negative impact on the relationship between the people of Bangladesh and the United States, including restrictions on academic exchanges, cultural events, and people-to-people interactions.

Proponents of the policy argue that it is a necessary step to ensure the integrity of the democratic process in Bangladesh. They contend that there have been instances of election-related violence, corruption, and human rights abuses in the country, and that the United States has a legitimate interest in preventing individuals involved in such activities from entering the country.

The controversy surrounding the new visa policy underscores the complexities of balancing national interests, sovereignty, and the promotion of democratic values in international relations. It highlights the challenges faced by both the United States and Bangladesh in navigating their respective priorities and maintaining strong bilateral ties.

Moving forward, it is crucial for both countries to engage in open and constructive dialogue to address concerns and find common ground. This includes clarifying the objectives and scope of the visa policy, as well as exploring avenues for cooperation in strengthening democratic institutions, promoting human rights, and ensuring fair and transparent elections.

Ultimately, the relationship between the United States and Bangladesh should be built on mutual respect, shared interests, and a commitment to democratic values. It is essential to strike a balance between supporting democratic processes and preserving the sovereignty and dignity of nations. Only through such an approach can both countries work together to address challenges and advance their bilateral relations in a manner that benefits the people of Bangladesh and upholds the principles of democracy and human rights.

Ref link: https://www.easternherald.com/2023/05/30/after-the-us-eu-joins-ranks-in-mounting-pressure-on-bangladesh-ahead-of-elections/
Swedish prosecutors charged a Turkish man Friday with attempted aggravated extortion, an aggravated weapons offense and attempted terrorist financing, saying he was acting on behalf of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party. Swedish media noted it was the first time that someone in Sweden was prosecuted for alleged terrorist financing of the party. Also known as PKK, it has waged an insurgency in southeast Turkey since 1984 and is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

Turkey has refused to approve Sweden's request to join NATO, accusing the Swedish government of not doing enough to crack down on PKK members and others whom Ankara considers extremists. The military alliance wants to admit Sweden before a NATO summit next month in Vilnius, Lithuania . All existing members must ratify a candidate country's accession protocol before it can join the trans-Atlantic alliance. Turkey and Hungary are the only two members that have not yet ratified Sweden's bid.

The man charged Friday is in his 40s. Prosecutors did not identify him. He is accused of attempting to extort money on Jan. 11 in Stockholm by pointing a loaded revolver at a person, firing in the air and threatening to damage the premises unless he received demanded funds the following day, according to the charge sheet obtained by The Associated Press. The man denies any wrongdoing, Swedish news agency TT said.

The charge sheet alleged the money he attempted to raise was to finance terror activities and part of activity on a larger scale. The suspect had been alluding to his belonging to the organization PKK, the document states. The prosecution suspects he had contact with another Turkish citizen who was sentenced to prison in Germany in 2016 for membership in the PKK and for being directly involved in the organizations fundraising.

Sweden tightened its anti-terrorism laws last month, a move expected to help persuade Turkey to approve the Nordic nations request to join NATO . Swedish lawmakers included a prison term of up to four years for individuals convicted of participating in an extremist organization in a way that is intended to promote, strengthen or support the group.

However, the penalty can be increased to eight years when a crime is deemed serious. The revisions took effect June 1. Turkey has long pressed for concrete measures against the PKK, so I think this can have a certain effect on the NATO process, Paul Levin, director of the Institute for Turkish Studies at Stockholm University, told Swedish broadcaster TV4.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will make a state visit to China next week, Beijing said Friday, after China said it was ready to help facilitate Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

"At the invitation of President Xi Jinping, President of the state of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas will pay a state visit to China from June 13 to 16," foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said.

China's Foreign Minister Qin Gang in April told his Israeli and Palestinian counterparts that his country was willing to aid peace negotiations.

The separate phone calls between Qin and the Israeli and Palestinian top diplomats came as Beijing positions itself as a regional mediator.

Qin encouraged "steps to resume peace talks" and said that "China is ready to provide convenience for this", in a phone call with Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, Xinhua reported.

And Qin told Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki that Beijing supports the resumption of talks as soon as possible, according to the state news agency.

In both calls Qin emphasised China's push for peace talks on the basis of implementing a "two-state solution".

"President Abbas is an old and good friend of the Chinese people," foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a regular briefing later on Friday.

"He is the first Arab head of state received by China this year, fully embodying the high level of China-Palestine good relations, which have traditionally been friendly," he added.

"The Palestinian issue is the core of the Middle East issue. It bears on peace and stability in the Middle East and on international fairness and justice."

China has been on a recent diplomatic offensive, brokering the restoration of ties in March between Iran and Saudi Arabia -- rivals in a region where the United States for decades has been the main powerbroker.

Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have been stalled since 2014.

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Malaysia and Indonesia signed agreements Thursday that ended longstanding maritime border disputes and vowed to bolster cooperation to fight highly detrimental discriminatory measures against palm oil.

Visiting Indonesian President Joko Widodo and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim witnessed the signing of two landmark treaties on the delimitation of the nations' territorial seas in parts of the Straits of Malacca and the Sulawesi Sea. Other signed pacts included plans to improve border crossings, strengthen border trade and promote investment.

After 18 years of negotiations ... praise be to God, it has finally been resolved, Widodo told a joint news conference, in reference to the sea treaties.

Widodo arrived in Malaysia on Wednesday accompanied by his wife and Cabinet ministers after a short visit to Singapore. His two-day visit reciprocates Anwar's trip to Indonesia in January, shortly after Anwar took office.

In a joint statement after their meeting, the leaders said the signing of the treaties will provide a strong foundation for future maritime boundary negotiations. They pledged to resolve other land boundary issues by June 2024.

The two leaders also reiterated their stand to cooperate closely to battle the European Union's highly detrimental discriminatory measures against palm oil. They urged the EU to work toward a fair and equitable resolution.

We will speak in one voice to defend the palm oil industry, Anwar told the news conference.

The EU introduced a new law this year banning the import of commodities linked to deforestation, a move that is expected to hit Malaysia and Indonesia. The two countries, which jointly account for 85% of global palm oil output, reportedly sent a joint mission to Brussels last week to try and resolve the matter with the EU.

Jokowi said the two countries also agreed to set up a mechanism to better protect Indonesian migrant workers in Malaysia, without giving details. Indonesians make up the bulk of over two million foreign workers in Malaysia, mostly in plantations, industries and as maids.
Malaysian officials on Thursday condemned a Singapore-born stand-up comedian who mocked Malaysia and made fun of the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 during a skit in the United States.

Jocelyn Chia posted her act on social media, sparking outrage in Malaysia and prompting Singapore officials to quickly apologize. Chia made crude remarks about Malaysia, which she said lagged far behind Singapore after the two separated in 1965.

She joked about Malaysian airplanes not being able to fly, drawing gasps from the audience. Chia continued: Why? Malaysian Airlines going missing not funny, huh? Some jokes dont land."

Flight MH370 was carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it vanished on March 8, 2014, and is presumed to have crashed in the far southern Indian Ocean.

Malaysian Foreign Minister Zambry Abdul Kadir said Chia's act showed a total lack of sensitivity and empathy toward Malaysians and the victims families.

This video also clearly depicts behavior that is contrary to the values of Asian countries that are known for their manners and morals," he said in a statement.

Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan took to Twitter on Thursday to apologize. He said he was appalled by Chia's horrendous statements and that Chia doesn't speak for Singaporeans.

We treasure our ties with family and friends in Malaysia, and are sorry for the offense and hurt caused to all Malaysians," he said.

Singapore officials said Chia was no longer a citizen. The Singapore Straits Times reported she is now a U.S. citizen. Following the backlash, the video appeared to have been removed from some of Chias social media but could still found on some sites.

A Malaysian social news portal, the World of Buzz, reported that Chia was defiant. She had posted earlier on social media in response to criticism that people take jokes way too seriously, it said. Chia added that tragedy + time = comedy and said that the joke was acceptable as it has been long enough since the incident, the site reported. Her comments were later inaccessible.

Scattered pieces of debris that washed ashore on African beaches and Indian Ocean islands indicated that MH370 likely crashed in a distant remote stretch of the ocean. But a government search by Australia, Malaysia and China failed to pinpoint a location. And a second, private search by U.S. company Ocean Infinity found no sign of a possible crash site.
Cambodias prime minister also offered pardons to any Sam Rainsy supporters who repudiate him.

Prime Minister Hun Sen speaks during a groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of a 135 km (84 mile) expressway from the capital Phnom Penh to Bavet city in Svay Rieng province on the Cambodia-Vietnam border, in Phnom Penh on June 7, 2023.

Prime Minister Hun Sen on Friday warned supporters of opposition leader Sam Rainsy that they will be prosecuted if they continue their association with him.

The longtime leader also said that supporters living in exile were welcome to return to Cambodia as long as they renounce Sam Rainsy, one of Hun Sens most prominent critics and rivals.

The movement of the opposition party members who left the party is like a broken dam, the prime minister said at a meeting with factory workers in Kampong Chhnang province.

We are welcoming all parties inclinations to live with the CPP, Hun Sen said on Friday, referring to the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party. But I wont accept just one person: the traitor, referring to Sam Rainsy.

Anyone who disassociates with him, I will pardon them but those who are associated with him will be prosecuted, he said.

Hun Sen and the CPP have neutralized the political opposition ahead of the July 23 parliamentary election by threatening or co-opting activists.

Additionally, members of the main opposition Candlelight Party have been arrested in several provinces in recent months, including two senior party officials in Tboung Khmum province who were charged this week with incitement.

Some detained activists have received pardons, were released from prison and given government positions after they publicly switched their allegiance to the CPP. Some have made claims that they were cheated by Sam Rainsy.

Cambodias exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy talks to the media outside Parliament House in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Nov. 12, 2019. Credit: Associated Press





Thailand and Vietnam

Once the head of the now-disbanded opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, Sam Rainsy fled to France in 2015 to avoid a series of charges that his supporters say were politically motivated.

His recent visit to Kuala Lumpur  where he spent time with Cambodian political activists living in Malaysia  angered Hun Sen, who threatened to attack him with a rocket launcher if he led workers from Thailand into Cambodia.

In May, Sam Rainsy told Radio Free Asia that if a new pro-democracy Thai government is formed, he would look into traveling to Cambodia through Thailand.

Hun Sen has asked Thailand to arrest Sam Rainsy if he travels there. This week, he said he has received information that Sam Rainsy has also considered traveling on a French passport to Vietnam, where he could walk across the border to Cambodia.

Last week, the prime minister threatened to arrest anyone who took part in a planned demonstration in Phnom Penh to protest against the National Election Committees decision  citing inadequate paperwork  to keep the Candlelight Party off the ballot for next months elections

Please try me if you dare, you can come out now, Hun Sen said. I will handcuff you immediately and I wont keep you in Phnom Penh.

It is hard to accept

Candlelight Party spokesman Kim Sour Phirith said party officials are working to collect information on this weeks arrests in Tboung Khmum and will provide defense lawyers.

It is hard to accept [the arrests], he told RFA. The Candlelight Party cant participate in the election and now many important activists have been arrested without proper reasons.

Hun Sen is obviously worried that Sam Rainsy will return to Cambodia, where he continues to have support, said Duong Chantrea, an opposition party activist who fled Cambodia and is living in Bangkok.

He said he wont accept Hun Sens offer and will continue to associate with Sam Rainsy.

People are struggling for freedom and a better economy like other countries, he told RFA. They wont follow Hun Sen. They are waiting to get a good chance to change the dictatorial regime.

Translated by Samean Yun. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken waits behind closed doors during G7 Foreign Ministers' Meeting at The Prince Karuizawa hotel in Japan, April 17, 2023.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Beijing next week, Reuters and the Associated Press reported Friday, as the United States seeks to shore up strained ties with China.

Both Reuters and AP said Blinken would be in Beijing on June 18, next Sunday, citing anonymous American officials. AP said he would meet with Foreign Minister Qin Gang and possibly President Xi Jinping.

State Department officials would not confirm the reported plans.

In February, Blinken abruptly canceled a trip to Beijing just hours before he was set to depart Washington after officials said a Chinese spy balloon was found floating over the United States. China insisted it was a weather balloon that strayed off course.

Since then, an unofficial trip by Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen to New York and Los Angeles in March has further inflamed ties.

Relations between the worlds two major powers have been tense since August, when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan to the protests of Beijing, which regards the democratic island as a renegade province and has vowed to reunite it with the mainland.

There has also been an uptick in near-miss accidents between the two countries militaries in the past two weeks in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, with the Pentagon accusing Chinas navy and air force of dangerous maneuvering in front of American vessels.
Experts say the country may face higher temperatures than last years records.

Women use an umbrella to shelter from the sun amid soaring temperatures in Shanghai on May 29, 2023.

An early heatwave in southern and southwestern China, which saw electricity demand hitting peak levels in May, suggests that China may face another scorcher of a summer  even fiercer than last years record-breaking season, according to meteorological reports.

So far, the heat has reportedly been particularly punishing on animals, with hundreds of pigs perishing in Jiangsu, central China, fish dying in southwestern Chinas Guangxi province and Chengdu suffering shortages of rabbit heads  a much-loved Sichuanese street snack.

Peak electricity demand was recorded in late May, a month earlier than last year, while in Beijing the temperature is expected to nudge at 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) next week and Shanghai recorded a 150-year-record-high temperature for the month on May 29 at 36.7 C (98 F), eclipsing the previous high of 35.7 C (96.3 F) recorded in May 1876.

Was last year a warm-up?

Last summer, RFA reported that industry in the Yangtze Region, including semiconductor manufacturer Foxconn, was forced to scale back on production amid a heatwave and drought, in which the authorities prioritized residential electricity supply so that people could run air-conditioning.

The Yangtze River delta has never experienced such high temperatures since historical records began, and high temperatures like this are accompanied by drought, Jiangsu-based current affairs commentator Zhang Jianping told Radio Free Asia at the time.

The unseasonably hot weather in China comes on the heels of record-breaking temperatures in Southeast Asia during April and May, as RFA reported.

In Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos, the heat led to deaths and hospitalizations, closed schools and caused losses to farmers and business-owners.

The region saw the mercury reach record highs everywhere, with Thailands capital, Bangkok, experiencing its hottest day on record on April 6, 2023, when the city recorded a temperature of 40.2 C (104.4 F).

The heat index, which measures how hot it feels when humidity is factored in, reached a staggering 50.2 C (122 F) in some areas of Bangkok, according to local news reports.

The worst heatwave in history

Some experts are already calling it the worst heatwave in history and it is not just affecting Southeast Asia and China; records are even being broken in high-latitude Siberia, CNN reported.

Jalturovosk in Siberia had its hottest day in history on June 3 at 37.9 C (100.2 F), according to Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures across the globe.

Experts blame it on global warming, El Nino, atmospheric blocking patterns and urban heat island effects.

But a likely return of El Nino, a weather pattern caused by warming of sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, is of particular concern this year, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Residents cool off along a canal during a heat wave in Beijing, Sunday, May 21, 2023. ( AP Photo/Andy Wong)





In an update on May 3, the WMO warned that there is a 60% chance for a transition to El Nino during May-July 2023, increasing to about 70% in June-August and 80% between July and September.

The organization added that the development of an El Nino will most likely lead to a new spike in global heating and increase the chance of breaking temperature records. It advised the world to prepare for the impacts, such as increased rainfall, droughts, heat waves and storms.

China and beyond

Back in China, local reports are already warning of possible hardships to come, chiefly focusing on the possibility of a food security crisis involving essential crops such as wheat, which has already been affected by heavy May rain and high temperatures, and rice, which Chinese agricultural experts are warning will likely be affected by high temperatures and drought conditions.

On June 2, Chinas Meteorological Agency held a press conference, in which experts urged local governments to prepare for the coming heat, warning that densely urban areas are likely to be vulnerable to the so-called urban heat island effect and rural areas suffering from heatwaves will also likely experience droughts, the combination of which can devastating to crops.

Bloomberg reports that China has so far avoided any large-scale power cuts, but shoppers are spurning daytime shopping for night markets and beer and ice cream sales have risen.

Air conditioner sales are up 95% from last year, according to local Chinese-language news reports.

A UN report in March warned that every increment of global warming will escalate multiple and concurrent hazards.

According to scientists, the past eight years have been the eight warmest on record globally, with 2016 being the hottest on record.

The World Meteorological Organization says that is primarily due to the double whammy of a powerful El Nino event and human-induced warming from greenhouse gasses.

Edited by Mike Firn and Malcolm Foster.
Channel C struggles to cover costs after trying to fill a void left by strict government censorship

The staff of "Channel C" explain the company's current financial status during a live broadcast. Facing bankruptcy.

A social media news channel set up by former journalists from shuttered pro-democracy media outlets in Hong Kong has put out an emergency call for new subscribers, citing the imminent threat of bankruptcy.

Channel C, which was founded by former journalists from the Apple Daily and other pro-democracy news outlets forced to close amid aggressive "national security" investigations, used its Thursday night broadcast to announce a financial emergency, citing monthly running costs of around HK$600,000 (US$76,500).

If supporters are unable to raise enough money in the next month, the channel -- which currently boasts an audience of some two million people across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube -- expects to shut down on July 12, two years after it was founded, it told viewers in an announcement.

At least eight pro-democracy news organizations have folded since Beijing imposed a draconian national security law on Hong Kong in 2020, banning public criticism of the authorities as "subversive." Police and prosecutors have also used colonial-era sedition laws to target some journalists and publications.

While Channel C commands the biggest audience among the handful of Cantonese pro-democracy news outlets still operating outside Hong Kong, its viewing figures have struggled to take off since its launch to a degree that would keep it solvent, multimedia production director Ronson Chan told Radio Free Asia.

Copies of Apple Daily on July 1, 2020, edition with its front page title "Draconian law is effective, one country two system is dead" at the newspaper's printing house in Hong Kong. Credit: Vincent Yu/AP





Chan, who also heads the Hong Kong Journalists' Association, said the channel only had around 600 subscribers when it made the announcement, but had received offers of assistance from around 80 more sources in the wake of the announcement.

"We will definitely be able to keep going for this month and next, but it's hard to say how things will be in 18 months from now," Chan said. "It's too far ahead to say."

"If people aren't able to keep us afloat, then we'll have no choice [but to shut down]," he said. "There's a limit to the number of times you can cry 'emergency,' after all."

Will they get support?

Current affairs commentator To Yiu-ming said the fact that many pro-democracy Hong Kongers are scattered around the world could make it hard for Channel C to hold all of their attention.

"Will they still care about current affairs in Hong Kong as much as they did back then [during the 2019 protest movement]?" To said. "Enough to support media like this?"

"There are a lot of independent outlets [for Hong Kongers] but they are all in different places, and they are trying to make themselves unique," he said. "But they are all competing for the attention and support of the same group of Hong Kongers ... overseas."

"So it's inevitable that they will run into difficulties."

Since jailed media mogul Jimmy Lai's Apple Daily newspaper was forced to close in 2021, when its assets were frozen by national security police, similarly independent and hard-hitting outfits like Stand News, FactWire and Citizen News have also been forced to close by the ongoing crackdown on dissent.

Former members of Hong Kong's once-freewheeling press corps responded by launching their own media outlets aimed at covering the city from overseas, including The Chaser, Commons, Photon and Channel C.

They have warned that Hong Kong journalists still working in the city are being reduced to the status of government stenographers, as a climate of fear leads to widespread self-censorship.

Mike Hui, right, takes a selfie of his family and friends before his departure to England, in Hong Kong airport on May 21, 2021. Hui, a former photojournalist for the Apple Daily, a pro-democracy newspaper that was shut down following the arrest of five top editors and executives and the freezing of its assets under a national security law. Credit: Kin Cheung/AP

To believes some independent outlets will survive, due to sheer dedication, however.

"These independent online media organizations really care about this, so I believe they'll find a way to adapt ... to meet the needs of their audiences," he said. "The worst-case scenario will be that we see some mergers and reorganization."

International press freedom groups say the ruling Chinese Communist Party under supreme leader Xi Jinping has "gutted" press freedom in the formerly freewheeling city amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent in the wake of the 2019 protest movement.

Meanwhile, journalists who fled the city continue to campaign for press freedom for the city from overseas.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
The League of Social Democrats say the move has hampered their ability to raise funds from supporters.

Chan Po-ying, chairwoman of the pro-democracy group League of Social Democrats, speaks during a protest outside the headquarters of The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC) in Hong Kong on Tuesday, June 6, 2023, after the bank canceled the groups accounts.

Opposition party activists staged a protest outside the iconic headquarters of HSBC in Hong Kong this week after the bank shut down their party's accounts.

Five League of Social Democrats members gathered by the lion statues outside the bank's headquarters in Hong Kong's Central business district on Tuesday, holding up a banner that read: "Dollar signs in their eyes  aiding and abetting tyranny."

"Cancellation of bank accounts is soft political persecution!" the protesters, who included party chairwoman Chan Po-ying, chanted. "Everyone is at risk in this international financial center!"

"Don't trample on our rights of association!" they shouted, watched closely by around a dozen police officers.

The protest comes amid a citywide crackdown on public dissent and political opposition under the 2020 national security law, which has included the freezing of politicians assets by Hong Kong banks.

Party leader Chan Po-ying, who was arrested at the weekend on a downtown shopping street carrying an electric candle and a yellow paper mourning flower on the 34th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, said the move had stopped the party's operations in their tracks.

"The closure of the League of Social Democrats' bank accounts for no reason affects our day-to-day operations, but also our survival as a political organization," Chan told journalists at the scene. "We were dependent on digital transfers from people's bank accounts, because we're not allowed to raise money on the street."

"We may live in an international financial hub, but we lack access to even the most basic banking services," she said.

Vice chairman Dickson Chau said he had received an initial notification from HSBC in February that the bank would be closing down the party's three bank accounts, which were held at different branches of the bank, but without explaining why.

At least four other members of the party have had their personal accounts shut down, too.

"Based on our political stance, but without explaining the reason, HSBC unilaterally and recklessly canceled our accounts, affecting the day-to-day running of our organization," Chau told journalists at the protest.

"We believe that this is part of the systematic suppression of Hong Kong people's freedom of association and freedom of speech," he said.

He said the bank's actions had affected the party's ability to raise funds of its jailed former chairman Leung Kwok-hung, who is one of 47 political activists and former lawmakers currently standing trial for "subversion" after they organized a democratic primary in the summer of 2020.

Veteran activist Tsang Kin-Shing [left], a member of the League of Social Democrats, speaks during a protest outside the headquarters of The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC) in Hong Kong on Tuesday, June 6, 2023. Credit: AFP

Chau said the League had been forced to return "thousands of Hong Kong dollars" in donations due to the move by HSBC, adding that he wasn't optimistic that the party would be able to open new accounts anywhere in Hong Kong.

A security officer from HSBC received a letter from the protesters at the scene.

But requests for comment from the bank had met with no response by the time of writing.

The protest came after the London-based rights group Hong Kong Watch accused banks including HSBC of perpetrating a brazen asset grab by withholding up to U.S.$2.4 billion in the pension pots of Hong Kongers who have emigrated to the United Kingdom under its British National Overseas visa scheme.

The group called it a form of "punishment" for leaving amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent, and singled out HSBC for criticism, saying the bank had been supportive of a draconian national security law imposed on Hong Kong by the Communist Party from July 1, 2020.

In January 2021, HSBC came under fire for freezing the accounts of self-exiled former opposition lawmaker Ted Hui and his family after he said he was resettling in the U.K., as well as that of a Hong Kong church that had helped protesters during the 2019 pro-democracy movement.

Police watch as the League of Social Democrats protests outside the headquarters of The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC) in Hong Kong on Tuesday, June 6, 2023. Credit: AFP Former finance channel chief at i-CABLE News Joseph Ngan said such actions damage Hong Kong's image as an international financial center.

"Before, [this would only happen in the case of] illegal activities like money-laundering, which would have been explained and understood," Ngan said.

"But this is purely a case of targeting a political party, an organization that is legally registered in Hong Kong, yet it is still being restricted."

Ngan said it was unclear whether the political pressure on the bank was coming from the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, or the Hong Kong government.

He said HSBC had a responsibility to explain "in a clear and reasonable manner," why it was restricting customers' access to banking services.



Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Paul Eckert.
Observers question whether the NUGs absence points to a schism within the opposition.

Salingyi PDF members patrol with anti-junta protesters in Salingyi township, Sagaing region, during the first anniversary of the military coup on Feb. 1, 2022.

More than 170 anti-junta paramilitary groups from Myanmars northern, embattled Sagaing region have held talks to deepen cooperation in their fight against the military and share strategies for administering areas under their control.

The Sagaing Forum, hosted online on May 30-31, provides a rare glimpse into the myriad of so-called Peoples Defense Force, or PDF, groups that are fighting the junta but have not pledged allegiance to the shadow National Unity Government seeking to reestablish a civilian administration in the aftermath of the militarys Feb. 1, 2021, coup detat.

Speaking to RFA Burmese on Friday, Sagaing Forum spokesperson Chaw Su San called the gathering part of efforts to strengthen the revolutionary forces of the region, despite the absence of NUG-aligned PDFs.

More than two years into the resistance against the military junta, we held the forum as we saw the need to unite all revolutionary groups, in order to keep up the momentum of the revolution, he said.

The purpose of the forum is to make the anti-junta revolutionary groups in Sagaing more connected so that they will be able to continue fighting against the junta as part of a wider network, he said.

Chaw Su San said that topics at the forum focused on regional issues related to politics, the military and regional administration. A statement issued by forum organizers on June 1 said other themes included ending military rule, self-governance, self-administration and the organization of regional anti-junta forces.

While NUG-aligned PDF groups were absent from the forum, the shadow government sent a message to the forum at its conclusion, expressing hope that the talks could foster progress on issues related to local needs, without unwanted external pressures.

The National Unity Consultative Council  an advisory body to the NUG made up of various ethnic armed organizations and majority Bamar groups  was present and delivered a speech to attendees.

Captain Htut Khaung, the leader of the Yinmarbin township 28th Battalion of the Dar Ma Saing Army under the NUG, told RFA that he did not receive an invitation to the forum, but was briefed on the topics covered.

The forum attendees pledged to continue the revolution as a united front and they discussed their goals, including what they want and how they will carry it out, he said.

A person who attended the forum as an observer confirmed to RFA on condition of anonymity that he did not see PDF groups under the NUGs Ministry of Defense in attendance.

NUG rival?

Critics of the forum have suggested that the groups that attended intend to present an alternative to the NUG and gain political advantage.

However, forum spokespersons dismissed the allegations, calling it a platform for all revolutionary groups to meet and confer.

Thein Tun Oo, the executive director of the Thayninga Institute for Strategic Studies, which is made up of former military officers, said he viewed the gathering as a sign of disunity among anti-junta actors.

It is natural that, after a time, groups with different directions and preferences part ways, leading to fragmentation, he said. We will have to wait and see if that is whats happening, but its a possibility.

Thein Tun Oo said it is highly probable that there will be further splits between the groups going forward, although he did not elaborate.

Salingyi PDF members, some with flags of National League for Democracy party gather in Salingyi during the first anniversary of the military coup on Feb. 1, 2022. Credit: MPA

Kyaw Zaw, spokesman for the office of NUG President Duwa Lashi La, denied speculation that the shadow governments absence was proof of a split within anti-junta forces and said the NUG supported the gathering.

The people of Sagaing region and their revolutionary and political groups need to come together and discuss how to jointly implement a new federal democratic state in the Sagaing Forum, he said, elaborating on the NUG statement sent last week.

Kyaw Zaw said that discussions at the forum pertaining to the right to self-determination and self-governance were in line with the Federal Democratic Charter, adding that the NUG was satisfied with the results of the meeting.

Local support

RFA spoke with residents of Sagaing who also welcomed the gathering, including a person from Pale township who said he hopes for additional meetings that promote unity between the regions anti-junta groups.

I welcome these forums as a citizen, said the Pale resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing security concerns. My only hope is that they collaborate with scholars and other experts to ensure that they dont go astray.

Sagaing Forum organizers told RFA that the next gathering will allow participants to drill down on topics raised in May and said they plan to invite additional groups to increase participation.

A date has yet to be decided for the second forum.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
'The United States cannot turn our back to those fleeing this persecution,'one sponsor says.

A Uyghur demonstrator rallys in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., in support of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, on Oct. 1, 2020.

U.S. lawmakers have introduced a bipartisan bill in Congress that would grant priority refugee status to Uyghurs fleeing persecution in China.

It designates Uyghurs and other ethnic groups persecuted by the Chinese government as priority 2, or P-2, and expedites their ability to apply for asylum in the United States.

The horrific atrocities that Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities are facing at the hands of the Chinese government are a global human rights emergency, and the United States cannot turn our back to those fleeing this persecution, said Rep. Jennifer Wexton, a Democrat from Virginia, one of the sponsors of the Uyghur Human Rights Protection Act.

In addition to Wexton, representatives Maria Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, Gregory Meeks, a Democrat from New York, Don Beyer and Gerry Connolly, both Virginia Democrats, introduced the bill on Wednesday.

The P-2 designation is for Uyghurs oppressed by China for expressing political views and religious beliefs or attending political, religious and cultural activities. Those given the designation will receive special humanitarian help and will receive assistance with resettlement and the U.S. asylum process.

The bill also seeks to protect Uyghur refugees who have fled to countries outside China besides the United States, by prioritizing U.S. diplomatic efforts in those nations which usually face great pressure from the Chinese government to extradite Uyghurs back to China.

The move comes at a time when Uyghur rights groups have called on the international community to take concrete action against China for committing severe rights abuses against the mostly Muslim group in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Chinas repression of the Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang has been well documented, with first-hand reports of detention in re-education camps and prisons, torture, sexual assaults, forced labor and the separation of Uyghur children from their parents.

Allegations of genocide

The American government and the parliaments of several Western countries have said the abuses amount to genocide or crimes against humanity.

The United States cannot simply condemn Beijing for its genocide and pat itself on the back, Meeks said in the statement. We have a moral and international responsibility to offer aid and assistance to those that are trying to escape the PRCs [Peoples Republic of China] atrocities in Xinjiang.

Providing expanded refugee protections to Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities is the right thing to do and a clear way to demonstrate that America walks the talk when it comes to human rights.

Rushan Abbas, executive director of the human rights group Campaign for Uyghurs, said the introduction of the bill is a crucial, though overdue, step forward in addressing the plight of the Uyghurs.

It should have already happened back in 2020 when [former U.S. Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo acknowledged that China was carrying out the Uyghur genocide and committing crimes against humanity, she said.

At the very least, it is of utmost importance to have a bill that will help expedite asylum cases for Uyghurs who have been residing in the U.S. for years, enduring a prolonged wait for their cases to be resolved, she said.

Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, said the bills passage would be a significant milestone following the Canadian governments acceptance of 10,000 Uyghur refugees and serve as encouragement for Uyghurs who have fled China for other countries.

Canadian move

In February, the Canadian parliament unanimously passed a motion to resettle the Uyghur refugees in Canada in response to the Chinese governments efforts to forcibly return members of the mostly Muslim group back to China, where they are at risk of persecution.

With a focus on Uyghurs from other countries rather than directly from China, the resettlements are expected to begin in 2024.

Moreover, for future generations, this event would be etched in history as a testament to the United States unwavering commitment to defending the rights of the Uyghurs, potentially inspiring other nations to take similar action, Isa said.

From a moral and international law standpoint, it will exert pressure on countries that are attempting to repatriate Uyghurs to China, serving as a deterrent against further crimes.

Tursunay Ziyawudun, who was previously detained in a re-education camp but now lives in the United States, said the bill is significant for Uyghurs whose asylum applications remain unresolved in the U.S.

There are numerous Uyghurs who have been in the process for over a decade, and their cases still linger in uncertainty, she said, adding that when she stayed temporarily in Kazakhstan and Turkey before reaching the U.S., she lived in constant fear of being forcibly sent back to China.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
Armed with Western tanks and trained by NATO troops, Ukrainian forces have kicked their offensive operations into high gear, attacking Russian units on at least three fronts as part of a multipronged assault that Kyiv hopes will turn the tide of the war more than 15 months after Russia's full-scale invasion.

Intense fighting was reported over the past two days in the southern Zaporizhzhiya region, around the towns of Orikhiv and Tokmak, which sits astride two major highways leading south and southwest. Capturing Tokmak would open the door for Ukrainian troops to push into Melitopol, bringing them close to the occupied Crimean Peninsula, and Berdyansk, a major port on the Sea of Azov.

Fighting was reported further east, around the village of Velyka Novosilka, close to the administrative border between the Zaporizhzhya and Donetsk regions, and near Vuhledar, which was the site of a catastrophic defeat for Russian forces in February. Major clashes were also reported around Bakhmut, a Donetsk region city that Russia captured last month after nearly 10 months of scorched-earth, urban combat that all but obliterated the city.

Ukrainian officials have said little publicly about the beginnings of the push, though President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Ukraine's commander-in-chief, General Valeriy Zaluzhniy, have signaled the offensive was imminent.

"Regarding Ukraine's defensive and offensive actions, of course they're under way," Mykhaylo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskiy's presidential office, told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service on June 9.

"It's fair to say the offensive has begun," Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general who has written extensively about the war, told RFE/RL.

Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said fierce fighting was occurring at various locations in the Donetsk region, and that Ukrainian troops were on the offensive.

In his nightly video address on June 8, Zelenskiy said there were "very difficult battles" going on in the Donetsk region.

The increased tempo in combat in recent days has been closely documented by Russian military bloggers, some of whom have close ties to military units or security agencies, including claims that Ukrainian troops were suffering major losses of troops and equipment. Some of the claims included videos purporting to show at least two German-supplied Leopard tanks damaged or destroyed in a localized push by Ukrainian forces in southeast Zaporizhzhya.

"We're seeing new NATO equipment like Leopard 2 tanks and AMX-10," a French armored vehicle, said Rob Lee, a former U.S. Marine who is now a military expert at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. That "indicates that at least some of Ukraine's new brigades have been committed and that the counteroffensive is under way."

Russia's Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said as early as June 5 that new Ukrainian operations were under way, reporting a "large-scale offensive on five sectors of the front in the southern Donetsk area." Unnamed U.S. administration officials told The Washington Post that the Ukrainian effort got under way on June 5.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on June 8 that Russian forces had beaten back a Ukrainian attack near Novodaryivka, in the Zaporizhzhya region just west of the Donetsk region line and Velyka Novosilka, that involved one of several newly constituted, Western-trained units, the 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade. Shoigu claimed up to 1,500 troops and 150 tanks and armored vehicles were involved in the fight, a claim that could not be corroborated.

WATCH: Ukrainian troops attacked enemy positions with a captured Russian tank and retook land north of Bakhmut.

The ministry's claims of Ukrainian failure were echoed by other, widely read Telegram channels of pro-Russian military bloggers.

"Despite the failure of the Ukrainian offensive, it is too early to relax: the enemy is just beginning to seriously attack in the Zaporizhzhya direction," Rybar, a channel reportedly affiliated with former Defense Ministry officials, said late on June 8. "In addition, a blow should be expected in other sectors of the front."

Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-installed official in the part of Zaporzhzhya occupied by Russian forces, said Ukrainian troops went on the offensive near Malaya Tokmachka and Novodanilovka, reports that were partly corroborated by other sources.

"There is a high-intensity battle going on right now. The enemy is firing continuously from artillery and tanks at our positions, trying to raze them to the ground," he said on Telegram on June 8.

"I assume that the enemy will not stop the attacks that have been launched, will not change plans on the go, and we will have a long bloody battle," said Igor Girkin, a former Russian intelligence officer convicted for his role in the deadly downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014 over eastern Ukraine.

"Depending on the success of the enemy, it can last from several days (4-5) to 2-3 weeks," he said on Telegram. "If the enemy manages to achieve at least minimally encouraging successes, he will beat and beat forward, in hopes of a breakthrough."

A Shift In Tempo

There had been a lull in fighting across much of the 1,000-kilometer front line after Ukraine's stunning counteroffensives last fall, in which its forces swept east to push Russian troops out of the Kharkiv region and parts of the Luhansk region. Kyiv also scored a notable success in pushing Russian troops from the western bank of the Dnieper River in the Kherson region, including the city of Kherson.

Over the winter, Russia, bolstered by some of the nearly 300,000 troops ordered mobilized by Russian President Vladimir Putin, made smaller-scale pushes in Vuhledar. And Russian commanders ground down Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut, relying heavily on soldiers from the private mercenary company Wagner.

For its part, Ukraine tried to absorb the blows, particularly in Bakhmut, while it also bolstered its arsenals with new Western-provided tanks, artillery, armored vehicles, and other equipment. Ukrainian commanders also turned to NATO members to train and reconstitute as many as 12 new brigades. That includes the 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade, which has been equipped with U.S.-supplied Bradley fighting vehicles.

"Not all of Ukraine's new brigades have been committed," Lee told RFE/RL. "So, Ukraine may attempt to advance in other directions. I also think much of this depends on how much success Ukraine has in the current directions, which may lead Ukraine to commit reserves there or elsewhere."

Outside observers, not to mention Russian intelligence, have been watching closely for signs where Ukraine might start its new push. Southern regions like Zaporizhzhya were considered likeliest, since the terrain is largely flat and open, and pushing south to the Sea of Azov would potentially allow Ukraine to cut the "land bridge" that allows Russia to supply occupied Crimea.

However, Russia has spent months fortifying the terrain, digging trenches, laying minefields, installing anti-tank barriers, erecting other obstacles.

"Really what we're seeing is the initial attacks, that the Ukrainians will be using to prod Russian reaction," Ryan said. "It's not just about finding weakness in the Russian lines. It's about prompting Russian reactions. When do they move their reserves? When they can be targeted? Where are their headquarters?"

"Attacks are not just designed to attack Russian units, but to prod a reaction from high-level decision makers," he said.

"The Ukrainians seem to be trying to fight their way through the Russian defenses. That's going to be hard and there will be many losses. The fact that there are losses does not mean that the Ukrainians are losing," Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps officer and senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told RFE/RL.

Western officials have said nothing publicly. Asked on June 8 about the reports of the new offensive, a U.S. Defense Department spokesman said that "we're monitoring reports of increased fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces [along the front line].... But when it comes to characterizing the fighting, that's best left to the Ukrainians."

But U.S. officials speaking anonymously have told Western media that the counteroffensive was fully under way.

The launch of the counteroffensive has coincided with the catastrophic failure of the Dnieper River dam at Nova Kakhovka earlier this week. The Russian-controlled dam burst on June 6 -- Ukraine claims it was destroyed in an explosion caused by Russian forces -- flooding hundreds of square kilometers in the Kherson region.

Some experts have speculated that the dam's destruction was intentional, to thwart a potential river crossing by Ukrainian troops. However, the floodwaters have also swamped many of the Russian trenches and other fortifications in the region, raising the question of why Russia would cause the breach intentionally. Moreover, once the floodwaters recede, it could be even easier for Ukrainian troops to stage crossings to the opposite riverbank.

The new push is likely to be one of the most, if not the most, consequential actions of the invasion, demonstrating whether Ukraine can again surprise allies and outside observers, like it did with earlier successes such as in the early days after the invasion, when Ukraine thwarted the Russian effort to seize the capital, Kyiv.

"The Ukrainians fought the Russians off of Kyiv, that's where the West saw the Ukrainians could fight," Ryan said. "No doubt that this (new effort) is also very important moment in the war."

If Ukraine pulls off a major success, that will reassure Western allies, some of whom have grown impatient with the scope of equipment supplies and the continuing international instability stemming from the fight. If they don't, however, pressure on Kyiv to agree to negotiations with Moscow will grow.

"As long as you're making less mistakes than your enemy, that's what matters," Ryan said. "The Ukrainians don't claim to be a perfect military, but they've made a lot less mistakes than their enemy has."
Israeli forces on Friday killed a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry and the army said, with the latter adding that a soldier was lightly wounded.

Mehdi Bayadsa, 29, was killed by "bullets from the occupation (Israel) near the Rantis military checkpoint, west of Ramallah", the ministry said in a statement.

The Israeli occupation army in a statement said it had "neutralised" a Palestinian who had arrived near the crossing point between the occupied West Bank and Israel in a stolen vehicle.

"While IDF (Israeli army) soldiers inspected his vehicle, the suspect attacked an IDF soldier and attempted to steal his weapon," the occupation army said, adding a "lightly injured" soldier was taken to hospital.

"Following the confrontation, another soldier in the area shot live fire toward the suspect and neutralised him," the occupation army said, adding that it was "investigating the incident".

Nearly three million Palestinians live in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since the Six-Day War of 1967.

About 490,000 Israelis live in the occupied territory in settlements deemed illegal under international law.

Since the start of the year, at least 157 Palestinians have been killed in violence linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to an AFP tally compiled from official sources.

The figures include combatants as well as civilians.

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Welcome to The Azadi Briefing, an RFE/RL newsletter that unpacks the key issues in Afghanistan. To subscribe, click here .

I'm Abubakar Siddique, a senior correspondent at RFE/RL's Radio Azadi. Here's what I've been tracking and what I'm keeping an eye on in the days ahead.

The Key Issue

The Taliban appears to have sharply reduced opium cultivation in Afghanistan, the world's largest producer of the illicit drug.

In April 2022, the militant group banned the cultivation, production, and trafficking of all illicit narcotics.

Annual opium cultivation has dropped by as much as 80 percent compared to last year, according to new research by David Mansfield , a leading expert on Afghanistan's drugs trade who worked with Alcis, a British firm specializing in satellite analysis.

Mansfield said the Taliban had "exceeded expectations and reduced poppy cultivation to levels not seen since 2001," when the militant group was ousted from power by the U.S.-led invasion.

Around 80 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan comes from the southern province of Helmand. Mansfield said satellite imagery appeared to show that in Helmand "poppy cultivation has fallen from more than 120,000 hectares in 2022 to less than 1,000 hectares in 2023."

Why It's Important: Ending Afghanistan's status as one of the world's biggest producers of narcotics has been a priority for neighboring countries and the international community for years.

After 2001, the United States spent some $8 billion in a bid to eradicate the opium trade in Afghanistan. Washington destroyed poppy fields, offered alternative crops to farmers, conducted air strikes, and raided suspected labs. But the strategy largely failed.

For years, the Taliban earned hundreds of millions of dollars from taxing poppy farmers and trafficking narcotics to neighboring countries, from where they ended up in Europe and North America, experts have said.

Since regaining power, the Taliban appears to be succeeding where foreign powers have failed. In 2000, during its first stint in power, the Taliban implemented a similar ban.

Tom West, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, tweeted that reports documenting a significant decrease in poppy cultivation "are credible and important."

Michael McCaul , the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a tweet criticized West for praising a group he said, "actively oppress Afghan women and girls, execute them in public, take Americans hostage, provide terrorist safe havens to Al-Qaeda, and are not recognized as a legitimate government by the United States." It appears that he later deleted the tweet.

What's Next: The complete eradication of the drug industry in Afghanistan still appears to be far off.

Even as opium production appears to have decreased, Afghanistan has become a major supplier of crystal meth in recent years.

The militant group is likely to face intense pushback from poppy farmers in southern Afghanistan if it fails to provide them with alternative livelihoods and crops. The Taliban's cash-strapped and isolated government could lose popularity in a region of Afghanistan that has historically provided most of its leaders and fighters.

The Week's Best Stories

International donors and aid agencies have suspended their operations in three provinces in Afghanistan after accusing the Taliban of attempting to divert or manipulate aid distribution . The move has deprived hundreds of thousands of people of crucial assistance as the country grapples with the world's largest humanitarian crisis.

China and Afghanistan's Taliban rulers appear keen on deepening their relationship, with the sides expanding trade links and pushing for deeper cooperation on security. But experts say the relationship is limited and largely transactional .

What To Keep An Eye On

In a new report, global rights watchdog Amnesty International accused the Taliban of committing the war crime of collective punishment against civilians in Afghanistan's northern province of Panjshir.

Since the Taliban seized power in August 2021, Panjshir has been the scene of low-level resistance to the militant group.

Amnesty's June 8 report said that the Taliban had targeted civilians with torture and unlawful killings, while it subjected detained members of the National Resistance Front to extrajudicial executions.

Agnes Callamard, Amnesty's secretary-general, said the Taliban engaged in extrajudicial killings, torture, hostage-taking, unlawful detention, and torching of civilian homes. "This conduct in sum amounts to collective punishment -- in itself, a war crime," she said.

Why It's Important: Amnesty's report, which is based on interviews with victims and witnesses in Panjshir and an analysis of open-source material, is yet another example of the grave human rights abuses allegedly committed by the Taliban.

The Taliban is unlikely to act on the recommendations of the report, which called on the hard-line group to investigate the alleged abuses and prosecute and punish the perpetrators.

The Taliban is likely to continue using brute force to silence its opponents and critics, including members of the former government and security forces, activists, journalists, and those from religious minorities.

Until next time,

Abubakar Siddique
For the second time in just months, Baku has warned its citizens against traveling to Iran in the wake of a deadly attack on the Azerbaijani Embassy in Tehran in January that it blamed on the "unstable situation in the Islamic republic."

In what has become a habit in recent weeks, Iranian officials have been angered over the perceived obstinacy of its northwestern neighbor and the encroachment of regional adversaries on what Tehran believes to be its backyard.

Azerbaijan's increasingly cozy relations with Iran's archfoe, Israel -- highlighted by defense deals, the opening of an embassy in Tel Aviv in March, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog's first visit to Azerbaijan last month -- has become a reliable trigger for Tehran as its own ties with Baku hit new lows.

Tehran does not officially recognize Israel, which it refers to disparagingly as a Palestinian-killing "Zionist regime" and accuses of having designs on sabotage and unrest within Iran's borders.

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan has warned against the travel of its citizens to Iran! This is the same policy that the president of the fake, child-killing, and occupying Zionist regime took during his recent trip to Baku," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani tweeted on June 5. "What should scare the people of Azerbaijan is the Zionist regime, not civilized and Islamic Iran."

Complicated Relationship

Herzog's visit, during which he said he and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev discussed in depth "the regional security structure that is threatened by Iran," appeared to have struck a nerve in Tehran.

"From the standpoint of the Islamic republic, the close relations of Azerbaijan with Israel is a major problem, [as is] the active presence of Israel in the military sphere [of Azerbaijan] and providing it with weaponry and the tight economic and security ties between the two countries," Iran analyst Touraj Atabaki, professor emeritus and chairman of the social history of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University, told RFE/RL's Radio Farda.

But Baku's budding ties with Israel are just one among many factors straining Iran's relationship with Azerbaijan, a fellow Shi'a-majority country.

Observers say the relationship has been complicated ever since Azerbaijan became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991. But things became even more problematic when Baku retook territory along Iran's border during its 2020 war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.

While Tehran supported Azerbaijan's claim to territory occupied by Iranian ally Armenia, it has strongly opposed Baku's intention to use the retaken lands to build the east-west Zangezur Corridor, which would connect mainland Azerbaijan to its Naxcivan exclave and open a long-sought trade route to Tehran's rival, Turkey, and beyond.

The plan was boosted by the Russian-brokered cease-fire that ended the war over Nagorno-Karabakh and called for "all economic and transport connections in the region to be unblocked."

While Iran launched large-scale military exercises dubbed "Mighty Iran" along its border with Naxcivan in October 2022 -- a show of force to underscore that it would not "permit the blockage" of its trade and transport links to Armenia -- the initiative has moved forward.

As talk of a possible peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan pick up steam, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksei Overchuk announced on May 31 that the two sides were close to an agreement that would pave the way for the route through Armenia and Azerbaijani territory previously occupied by Yerevan, and "open the road to Russia, the countries of the European Union, and Iran."

As Iran seeks to boost its sanctions-circumventing trade with Russia, including with the completion of a second north-south route that would also pass through Azerbaijan, the prospect of seeing a trade route crossing its passage to Armenia remains a serious bone of contention.

"Iran doesn't like this corridor because in the larger competition and struggle between Tehran and Baku it weakens Iran if this corridor is created, because right now Azerbaijan has to use Iranian airspace or territory to resupply Naxcivan," said Luke Coffey, a foreign policy expert at the Washington-based Hudson Institute think tank.

The Zangezur Corridor, if completed, would mean that "Iran will become less important in the eyes of policymakers in Baku, and perhaps Azerbaijan would feel emboldened to take a more hard line against Iran," Coffey told RFE/RL.

'Mighty Iran' And Shi'ite Brotherhood

Such a scenario does not sit well with Iran, which has worked to exert its influence in Azerbaijan.

"A significant segment of the Azerbaijani population is Shi'a and since the creation of the independent Republic of Azerbaijan, the Islamic republic has considered Azerbaijan as the backyard for the [expansion] of the influence of its brand of Shi'ism," Atabaki said.

Tehran is also wary of the effects the loss of influence on Baku will have on Iran's large ethnic Azeri population, separated from Azerbaijan by the Aras River and located primarily in Iran's East and West Azerbaijan provinces.

During the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh, Coffey said, images emerged on social media of ethnic Azeris in Iran "waving Azerbaijani flags on the other side of the river, literally cheering on, like a spectator event, the advancements of the Azerbaijani armed forces."

In November 2022, Baku stoked tensions with Iran by staging its own military exercises along the Iranian border, with Aliyev saying they were necessary to show Tehran that "we are not afraid of them."

"We will do our best to protect the secular lifestyle of Azerbaijan and Azeris around the world, including in Iran," Aliyev added. "They are part of our people."

A Turning Point

Amid the continuing back and forth, the January attack on the Azerbaijani Embassy in Tehran was seen by some observers as a turning point in bilateral relations.

Azerbaijan evacuated its embassy staff following the January 27 attack, in which a security guard was killed and two others injured when a gunman stormed the complex and opened fire. Baku blamed the attack on the Iranian secret service and called it an "act of terrorism."

In February, the Azerbaijani authorities said that they had detained nearly 40 people on suspicion of spying for Iran.

The fray worsened in March with the alleged assassination attempt on Fazil Mustafa, an Azerbaijani lawmaker who had been critical of Iran. Following the arrest in April of four people in connection with the incident, Baku accused Tehran of orchestrating the plot.

Two weeks later, Azerbaijani media reported the arrest of 20 people allegedly affiliated with Iran's Intelligence Ministry who were accused of promoting "the Islamic republic's propaganda, spreading religious superstitions, [and] attempting to overthrow the secular government of Baku."

In a tit-for-tat move, Tehran and Baku expelled four of each other's diplomats in April. And while diplomatic relations continued, the strains were evident as the two countries' foreign ministers held a series of phone calls that month in which Iran made clear that Tehran did not approve of Baku's relations with Israel.

"Only enemies benefit from the existence of differences" between the two countries, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian was quoted as saying by Iran's Shargh daily.

Iran's vice president in charge of economic affairs, Mohsen Rezaei, went a step further while addressing members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in the western Lorestan Province.

"The incitement of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the signing of arms contracts between Israel and the Republic of Azerbaijan was aimed at creating riots in the north of Iran, and to shift the thinking and focus of the army, the IRGC and the government of Iran to the north so that Israel can bomb Iran's nuclear sites," Shargh quoted Rezaei as saying.

On May 16, the Azerbaijani authorities announced another haul of individuals it said were recruited by Iran to disrupt Azerbaijan's constitutional order and establish Islamic law. This time, Baku claimed, the seven men detained had allegedly planned to assassinate Azerbaijani public figures.

The Feud Continues

That set the scene for the visit to Baku by Herzog in late May, held under strict security out of fear of Iranian retaliation.

After meeting Herzog, Aliyev lauded the boost that Israeli weaponry had given his country "to modernize our defense capability and allow us to defend our statehood, our national interests, and our territorial integrity."

Nearly 70 percent of Azerbaijan's arms imports between 2016 and 2020 were from Israel, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Herzog, in his comments after meeting Aliyev, said that "we expect to develop cooperation between us in many fields."

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Kanaani again took to Twitter to air Tehran's views on the development, writing on March 31 that "none of the regional moves of the Zionist regime remain hidden from the penetrating eyes of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

The next day, an Iranian opposition hacking group released alleged classified Iranian government documents that appeared to shed light on the January embassy attack and indicated the need to reevaluate Tehran's diplomatic ties with Azerbaijan.

The documents, purportedly distributed among top Iranian officials, included advice on how to distance Azerbaijani society from its government and attributed Baku's policies to "Zionist" influence.

That potential bombshell was followed by Azerbaijan's announcement on June 2 that it had closed Iran's cultural attache office in Baku, citing "recent disagreements" between the two countries.

And on June 3 came the spark for Kanaani's latest Twitter outburst: Azerbaijan's renewed travel warning advising its citizens not to travel to Iran and for those who are already there to be vigilant.

Within seconds of blasting Azerbaijan and its ties with Israel in his first tweet on June 5, Kanaani took a softer line, writing that Iran would still "open our arms to our Azerbaijani brothers and sisters," with the goal of continued "mutual respect and respect for neighborhood customs."

But in his comments to Radio Farda on June 7, Iran expert Atabaki expressed skepticism, saying that "the Islamic republic is not planning to see its ties with Azerbaijan as an equal relationship."

And that mindset, Atabaki said, had allowed relations to reach their current low.
Ukrainian forces claim to have retaken two villages in the Donetsk region as a days-old counteroffensive to push Russian forces out of the country gathers steam.

Ukrainian troops said they captured Neskuchne and Blagodatne on June 10 and 11 respectively, posting photos on social media from the center of the villages, a claim RFE/RL could not confirm.

Military bloggers said Ukrainian forces are now attacking the next two villages to the south, Makarivka and Urozhayne, along a road that eventually leads to the outskirts of Mariupol located 130 kilometers away.

However, Ukrainian forces moving in that direction have yet to reach the heavily fortified Russian lines, which are located about 10 kilometers south of the current fighting, experts noted.

Russia, for its part, has claimed that it has repelled Ukrainian attacks, recently posting photos of destroyed armored vehicles NATO had given to Ukraine.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensives, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

On June 10, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy acknowledged that the long-expected counteroffensive had begun.

"Counteroffensive and defensive actions are taking place in Ukraine, but I will not say in detail what stage they are at," Zelenskiy said.

Military experts have said Ukraines current counteroffensive will be much tougher than the one undertaken last year as Russia has had months to build extensive defensive fortifications.

There have been reports of heavy casualties on both sides since the counteroffensive began.

Many analysts have speculated that Ukraine will seek to move southeast toward Mariupol, an industrial city on the the Sea of Azov, in order to cutoff and encircle Russian forces to the west.

Ukraines counteroffensive is taking place in several directions along the 1,000 kilometer front.

The Ukrainian military reported heavy fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk regions in their June 11 update. Zelenskiy said there was also heavy fighting on the southern fronts.

Dam Burst

The counteroffensive has been complicated by the bursting on June 6 of the Russian-controlled Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River.

Kyiv has accused Moscow of mining the dam and deliberately causing its destruction to flood Kherson region in the south and slow down its counteroffensive.

"The explosion of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station was apparently carried out with the intention of preventing the Ukrainian Defense Forces from launching an offensive in the Kherson sector," Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said in a Telegram post on June 11.

Russia, which gained control of the dam shortly after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, has steadfastly rejected the accusations.

Ukraine retook the city of Kherson on the west bank of the Dnieper River last year and had recently been conducting reconnaissance missions on the east bank controlled by Russia.

Malyar added that the destruction of the dam was also intended to allow Russian reserves in the region to be deployed to reinforce the areas of Zaporizhzhya and Bakhmut, the Donetsk city that had been the epicenter of the war for most of 2023.

A Ukrainian military spokesman said on June 10 that Ukrainian forces had advanced more than a kilometer at a number of points along the front line near Bakhmut.

Although Russia's private Wagner mercenary group gained control of most of Bakhmut last month, Kyiv denies that the city is completely held by Russian forces and said fighting is ongoing.

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War has said that the Ukrainian armed forces appear to have also made some gains in their offensive in the Zaporizhzhya region in the south.

The Russian military has said it successfully repelled attacks in both areas. The Russian Defense Ministry has released video footage in recent days showing what it said were numerous strikes on Ukrainian armored vehicles and tanks, including German Leopard 2 tanks and U.S. Bradley fighting vehicles.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu awarded medals on June 11 to soldiers it said had destroyed the foreign weaponry donated to Kyiv.

A UN official warned on June 10 of the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the dam breach and resulting flooding.

UN Undersecretary-General Martin Griffiths told AP that an extraordinary 700,000 people are in need of drinking water and said that the crisis will likely lead to lower grain exports, higher food prices around the world, and less to eat for millions in need. "The truth is this is only the beginning of seeing the consequences of this act," Griffiths said.

On June 11, the British Defense Ministry said in an intelligence assessment that the destruction of the dam "has almost certainly severely disrupted" the primary source of fresh water to Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014.

Water at the dam's reservoir had likely dropped below the inlet that feeds water to the canal delivering water to the peninsula, according to the assessment. Water is expected to stop flowing in the canal as a result, reducing the availability of fresh water in the south of the Kherson region and in northern Crimea..

The British Defense Ministry said that it expected the Russian authorities to meet civilians' water needs by using reservoirs, water rationing, drilling new wells, and bottled water.

It said that communities on both sides of the Dnieper face a sanitation crisis, limited access to safe water, and an increased risk of water-borne diseases.

Rescue efforts continued on June 11, with the Ukrainian Interior Ministry saying that 35 people, including seven children, remain unaccounted for in the Kherson region. Five people in Kherson and one person in the region of Mykolayiv have died as a result of the floods.

The Ukrainian authorities said that 32 towns and villages on the west bank of the Dnieper controlled by Ukrainian forces are still under water.

Evacuation efforts were also reported on the eastern bank of the river, which is more vulnerable to flooding.

Each side has accused the other of shelling civilians during the rescue efforts.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Russian Service, Current Time, Reuters, AP, and dpa.
Sudan's warring generals have agreed to a 24-hour ceasefire from Saturday, US and Saudi mediators said, acknowledging that previous attempts to pause a conflict now nearing its third month had proved abortive.

Multiple truces have been agreed and broken since fighting erupted on April 15, and Washington had slapped sanctions on both rival generals after the last attempt collapsed at the end of May, blaming them for the "appalling" bloodshed.

"Representatives of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) agreed to a 24-hour countrywide ceasefire beginning on June 10 at 6:00 am (0400 GMT)," said a joint statement from the mediators released by the Saudi foreign ministry on Friday.

"Should the parties fail to observe the 24-hour ceasefire, facilitators will be compelled to consider adjourning" talks in the Saudi city of Jeddah which have been suspended since late last month, the mediators said.

The fighting has gripped the capital Khartoum and the western region of Darfur, killing upwards of 1,800 people, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

Nearly two million people have been displaced, including 476,000 who have sought refuge in neighbouring countries, the United Nations says.

The Saudi and US mediators said they "share the frustration of the Sudanese people about the uneven implementation of previous ceasefires".

The army, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said it has "agreed to the proposal", adding in a statement it "declares its commitment to the ceasefire".

The paramilitary RSF, commanded by Burhan's former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, has yet to make an official statement on the latest truce.

"If observed, the 24-hour ceasefire will provide an important opportunity... for the parties to undertake confidence-building measures which could permit resumption of the Jeddah talks," the US-Saudi statement said.

'Immense needs'

Friday's announcement came a day after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrapped up a three-day visit to Saudi Arabia, where he held discussions on Sudan with top Saudi officials.

On Thursday, Sudanese authorities loyal to Burhan declared UN envoy Volker Perthes "persona non grata", accusing him of taking sides.

The fighting has sidelined the envoy's efforts to revive Sudan's transition to civilian rule, which was derailed by a 2021 coup by the two generals before they fell out.

It has also complicated the coordination of international efforts to deliver emergency relief to the 25 million civilians that the United Nations estimates are in need.

Alfonso Verdu Perez, outgoing head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Sudan, warned on Friday that "health care may collapse at any moment".

"The needs are immense and much more remains to be done" in both Khartoum and Darfur, he told reporters in Geneva, describing the many challenges to delivering aid as fighting continues.

About one fifth of medical facilities in the capital are still functioning but face "severe shortages" of water, food and electricity, and "are running low on essential medical supplies", he added.

Witnesses reported hearing clashes on Friday near the Yarmouk weapons manufacturing and arms depot complex in Khartoum, from where plumes of smoke were seen rising for a second successive day.

Air strikes were also carried out in eastern parts of the capital and the sound of anti-aircraft guns was heard.

Those unable to leave have been forced to camp out for weeks as supplies of food and other vital goods run low.

'Distraction'

Sudan specialist Aly Verjee said that in expelling Perthes, Burhan was following in the footsteps of his ousted predecessor Omar al-Bashir who expelled then-envoy Jan Pronk in 2006.

"Like then, the focus on Perthes is ultimately a distraction," said Verjee, a researcher at Sweden's University of Gothenburg.

"Trying to save Perthes's job won't help resolve the much bigger issues that Sudan now faces, not least to dampen the ongoing hostilities."

Perthes and the UN mission he heads have been targeted since late last year by military and Islamist-backed protests denouncing perceived foreign interference.

A Sudanese government official who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity said the decision was taken "because he sided with certain political parties" and sought to "exclude others" from the transition process.

The United Nations has yet to comment on the announcement but UN chief Antonio Guterres has repeatedly defended Perthes, who is currently in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa for a series of talks.

A former academic who has headed the Sudan mission since 2021, Perthes has staunchly defended the UN against accusations of inflaming the conflict, saying those responsible are "the two generals at war".

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Ukrainian officials estimate about 28,000 fish have died due to the draining of the Kakhovka reservoir following the breach of the hydroelectric dam in Russian-occupied territory. Ukraine's prosecutor's office has launched an investigation into what it's calling "ecocide" by Russia, which it accuses of destroying the dam.
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been struggling to get drinking water after major flooding in southern Ukraine following the destruction earlier this week of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, as rescuers continued efforts to bring as many people as possible to safety.

"The evacuation is ongoing," Zelenskiy said on his Telegram channel on June 9. "Wherever we can get people out of the flood zone, we do so."

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensives, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

"In more than 40 settlements, life is broken. For hundreds of thousands of people in many towns and villages, access to drinking water has been greatly hampered," Zelenskiy said, reiterating that Ukraine holds Russia responsible for the destruction of the dam.

"We are establishing more details about the damage Russia has caused by this disaster. Russia must be held accountable for this deliberate crime against people, nature, and life itself," Zelenskiy said.

Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on June 9 that at least five people died and 13 are missing in the flooding that has extended to an area of some 600 square kilometers.

Klymenko said that 34 settlements were flooded on the right bank of the Dnieper that is under Ukrainian control and 14 more were inundated on the left bank, which is under Russian occupation. As of June 9, 2,400 people had been rescued in Kherson, Klymenko said.

In the neighboring Mykolayiv region, 23 settlements were flooded and over 800 people were evacuated, he said.

Vladimir Saldo, the Moscow-installed head of Kherson region, said eight people died and 5,800 were rescued on the Russian-occupied part of the region.

"A total of 22,273 houses in 17 settlements were flooded in the region, Saldo wrote on Telegram, adding that the water may not subside for about 10 days.

IN PHOTOS: Rescuers are struggling to reach Kherson's most vulnerable people who are trapped by flooding following the breach of a dam in Russian-occupied territory.

Earlier the Ukrainian governor of Kherson, Oleksandr Prokudin, said in a video message on June 9 that water levels are beginning to drop in the areas of the region that saw major flooding following the destruction of the dam.

"We can already see that the water has receded by 20 centimeters overnight," Prokudin said.

"In the morning, the water level in the region is 5.38 meters; in Kherson city, 5.35 meters," Prokudin said, adding that on the morning of June 9, a total of 3,624 houses in 32 settlements across the Kherson region were flooded.

Prokudin added that 2,352 people had already been evacuated from the flooded areas, although the rescue teams' efforts to bring people to safety were hampered by constant Russian shelling from across the Dnieper.

On June 8, Russian forces shelled the Kherson area shortly after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited the southern region.

An RFE/RL correspondent on the ground reported explosions Khersons Korabel district as rescuers in rubber dinghies continued to evacuate people who had yet to leave the disaster area.

Prokudin said Russians shelled Kherson's coastal areas and the center of the city of Kherson.

The Red Cross warned that the flooding would have disastrous effect on efforts to locate land mines that had been planted in the region.

Dislodged mines transported by the water could pose serious dangers both to the local people and the rescuers, the Red Cross warned.

WATCH: RFE/RL visited a village in the Kherson region of Ukraine, which was flooded after a large dam broke on the Dnieper River.

On the battlefield, Ukrainian defenders repelled more Russian assaults around the Bakhmut area in the eastern region of Donetsk over the past 24 hours, the General Staff of the Ukrainian military said in its morning report on June 9.

Bakhmut, Avdiyivka, and Maryinka saw 43 combat clashes, the military said, adding that Russian artillery indiscriminately pounded Maryinka.

Zelenskiy said in his nightly address on June 8 that he was grateful to the Ukrainian fighters who achieved "results" on the battlefield after the military said the previous day that Ukrainian forces advanced more than one kilometer in Bakhmut after months of putting up a stark defensive.

"Well done in Bakhmut. Step by step," he said. Zelenskiy referred to other areas where fighting is going on but provided no details.

His statement came amid expectations of the start of a long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive to retake regions occupied by Russia since the invasion that started in February last year.

Early on June 9, the military said that in the Zaporizhzhya and Kherson areas Russian troops were on the defensive, amid reports on social media of a limited Ukrainian counterattack in the Orikhiv area of Zaporizhzhya.

The Ukrainian military has not commented on the reports.

With reporting by Aleksander Palikot in Kherson, AP, AFP, and Reuters
Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) says it intercepted telephone communications between Russian military personnel that "confirm" Russia's involvement in the destruction of the Kakhovka dam as Norway's seismological institute said it had detected a possible "explosion" around the time of the dam's breaching.

The SBU released an audio recording on June 9 on its Telegram channel that it claims occurred between Russian military personnel acknowledging that the breach of the dam was the result of the actions of a "saboteur group" aiming to disrupt the Ukrainian military.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensives, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

The recording has yet to be independently verified.

"It was not them [Ukrainians] who struck it. It was our saboteur group there. They wanted to scare [Ukrainians] with the dam. It didn't go as they planned; it turned out to be larger than they planned," a Russian military officer allegedly says on the call.

Another person on the call seems surprised at the claim about Russian forces, who have occupied the dam since the early days of Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The SBU did not give details on those who were on the call, nor did it give any more information on what was said or when. It has, however, opened a criminal investigation into war crimes and "ecocide" over the dam.

"By blowing up the [Kakhovska] dam, the Russian Federation definitively proved that it is a threat to the entire civilized world," SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk was quoted as saying in the social media post.

Russia has steadfastly rejected accusations it was behind the incident, and has repeatedly claimed Ukraine was at fault for destroying the dam and unleashing mass floods on the area that have forced thousands of people from their homes while creating a major environmental catastrophe.

Moscow has yet to comment on the Ukrainian claim over the audio interception.

Norway's seismological institute, however, said it had analyzed seismic signals from regional stations in connection with the collapse of the dam and found that "clear signals" of seismic activity that coincide with media reports of the dam's destruction.

"The signals indicate that there was an explosion. The magnitude estimate is between 1 and 2," it said.

WATCH: The video has been seen all around the world: a Ukrainian military drone drops bottled water to a family stranded by floodwaters after the breach of a dam in Russian-occupied territory. Now, the mom and her son have spoken to Current Time about how they were rescued -- and how Russian forces left them to their fate.

The news surrounding the dam's breach comes amid reports of heavy fighting in eastern and southern Ukraine as analysts watch to see if Kyiv finally announces it has begun its long-awaited counteroffensive.

Russian officials reported pitched battles in the Zaporizhzhya region, while Ukraine says it is making minor gains around the city of Bakhmut, which Russia claimed last month to have captured after a protracted battle that reportedly killed thousands.

In the Bakhmut region, Colonel Serhiy Cherevatiy, spokesman for the Ukraine's eastern forces, said troops were moving forward, though he did not comment on whether the counteroffensive was officially under way.

"We are taking advantage of the fact that the enemy is conducting rotational operations, and those new units that are entering, they do not fully know the area... Over the previous day, our units advanced up to 1,200 meters in some areas," Cherevatiy said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hailed the heroism of his armed forces.

"For our soldiers, for all those who are in particularly tough battles these days. We see your heroism, and we are grateful to you for every minute of your life," Zelenskiy said in his evening address.

Ukrainian officials have said their forces are ready for a counteroffensive to reclaim territory in the east and south, but that there would be no formal announcement when it begins.

Zelenskiy made no direct reference to the counteroffensive, saying, "We focus our attention on all directions where our actions are needed and where the enemy may suffer certain defeats."

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the counteroffensive had started but that the Ukrainian troops "did not achieve their goal in any area," adding that the still retain "offensive potential."

Ukraine's General Staff said Russian troops were concentrating their main efforts on attempts to fully occupy the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. In its evening briefing on June 9, it said 27 combat clashes took place in the regions during the day.

Overnight, at least one person was killed and three were wounded as Russia unleashed a fresh wave of drone and cruise missile strikes on military and civilian infrastructure targets across Ukraine.

The Ukrainian Air Force said on June 9 that Russia launched 16 Iranian-made attack drones and six cruise missiles.

The drones were launched from southern Russia while the missiles were fired from Tu-95 strategic bombers from the Caspian Sea region, the air force said, adding that Ukrainian air defenses shot down 10 drones and four cruise missiles, the air force said.

The Zhytomyr region, west of the capital, Kyiv, was the most affected, emergency services and regional officials reported.

One person was killed and three were wounded by falling debris in the city of Zviagel, Zhytomyr Governor Vitaliy Bunechko said.



Across the region, four houses were destroyed by falling rocket fragments, and another 30 were damaged, the State Emergency Service said on Telegram.

WATCH: Ukrainian troops attacked enemy positions with a captured Russian tank and retook land north of Bakhmut. Current Time correspondent Andriy Kuzakov spoke with the Ukrainian soldiers about the assault and what the recaptured land means for future maneuvers.

Meanwhile, the governor of Russia's Voronezh region, Aleksandr Gusev, said three people suffered shrapnel wounds when a drone crashed into a residential building in the city of Voronezh.

He added that an emergency regime has been introduced in the city, while the Investigative Committee said it had opened a criminal case against "persons acting in the interests of the military-political leadership of Ukraine."

Amid an increase in air attacks on Ukraine, the U.S. Department of Defense announced a new $2.1 billion security-assistance package for Ukraine on June 9 that includes "critical air defense and ammunition capabilities."

The Defense Department said capabilities in the announcement include additional munitions for Patriot air-defense systems, HAWK air-defense systems and missiles, 105mm and 203mm artillery rounds, Puma unmanned aerial systems, laser-guided rocket-system munitions, and support for training and maintenanceactivities.

"The United States will continue to work with its Allies and partners to provide Ukraine with capabilities to meet its immediate battlefield needs and longer-term security assistance requirements," it said.

Hungary said on June 9 it had received 11 Ukrainian prisoners of war from Russia, an announcement that appeared to catch Ukrainian officials off-guard.

The POWs were from the western part of Ukraine near the border with Hungary, Hungarian Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen said in a post on his website.

Ukraine's Foreign Ministry said it welcomed the news but was not aware the release was happening and has asked Budapest to grant it immediate access to the group while stressing "the need to coordinate cooperation on such sensitive issues."
I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect the key developments in Russian politics and society over the previous week and look at what's ahead. To receive The Week In Russia newsletter in your inbox, click here.

The destruction of a massive Dnieper River dam in occupied territory added another line to the list of calamities unleashed by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Moscow's propaganda machine let a trial balloon fly amid signs that Kyiv's counteroffensive has begun, while the clampdown continued at home.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

Atrocious'

Russian President Vladimir Putin called the breach of the Kakhovka dam a "barbaric act" and suggested it was terrorism.

But unless the Kremlin can come up with hard evidence that Ukraine destroyed the dam, chances are good that Russia is responsible: The huge hydroelectric power plant spanning the Dnieper River upstream from Kherson has been controlled by Russian occupation forces for about 15 months. And while Putin pointed the finger at Kyiv and what he called its "Western handlers," Russian officials have not said how Ukraine could have caused the breach.

On June 9, Ukraine's security service said it had intercepted a telephone call in which a Russian soldier said a Russian "sabotage group" had caused the breach. The authenticity of the recording could not be independently verified.

Arguably, any talk about who or what exactly caused the damage is beside the point. It wouldn't have happened had Russia not launched a full-scale, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Regardless of the details, that seems to hand the bulk of the blame on Russia for what Putin called the "large-scale ecological and humanitarian catastrophe" that ensured when water from Ukraine's main river came pouring over the busted dam, flooding fields, forests, towns, and the city of Kherson while fish flopped and died as the water levels in the wide river upstream from the dam fell fast.

The breach added a catastrophic new twist to the diverse variety of destruction, suffering, and death unleashed by Putin when he ordered the invasion -- a list that, among other things, includes the abuse, torture, rape, and murder of civilians and the dispatch of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia and the territory it occupies, which has made Putin the subject of a war-crimes arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.

European Council President Charles Michel called the destruction of the dam a war crime, while French President Emmanuel Macron called it an "atrocious act." British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that "if it does prove to be intentional, it will represent a new low. It's an appalling act of barbarism on Russia's part."

On The Move

In the days after the dam breach, Russia continued to target Ukrainians in affected areas, shelling Kherson as residents struggled to survive on flooded streets or to leave the city for safer, dryer areas farther from the front.

The collapse of the dam came amid increasing signs that a long-expected and potentially crucial Ukrainian counteroffensive may be under way, with heavy fighting reported on at least two sections of the 1,000-kilometer front line stretching from the area near Kherson in the south to the Donbas and the Kharkiv region in the east.

A major military push would be a chance for Ukrainian forces to regain more of the territory Russia has occupied not just since the February 2022 invasion but since 2014, when it seized control of Crimea and backed anti-Kyiv forces who took parts of the Donbas, including the eponymous capitals of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

It also coincided with intriguing indications that Putin and the Kremlin may be considering cutting Russia's losses and seeking to freeze the conflict in place  or, alternatively, trying to make Kyiv and Western governments think they're considering it.

The main point of such a feint, presumably, would be to increase calls in the West for Ukraine to negotiate with Russia -- though Russia has given no convincing sign that it's interested in good-faith talks -- and step back from its stated goal of driving Russian forces out of all of Ukraine, including Crimea.

After retreating from northern Ukraine in the spring of 2022 following a failed attempt to take Kyiv, and then losing swaths of land it had occupied in Ukrainian counteroffensives in the east and south later in the year, Russia has continued to struggle on the battlefield, making few gains other than a partial victory in the extremely costly battle for the Donbas city of Bakhmut. The Kremlin has also been rattled by attacks and apparent drone strikes inside Russia.

'Deepening Gloom'

Against that backdrop, direct or veiled calls for Russia to scale down its objectives -- essentially abandoning the goal of seizing or subjugating Ukraine, and instead seeking to hold the territory it has occupied and turn the war into a "frozen conflict" -- have been made by prominent and consistently bellicose figures including Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner mercenary group, and Margarita Simonyan, a state media executive and propagandist.

"A mood of deepening gloom is gripping Russia's elite about prospects for President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, with even the most optimistic seeing a 'frozen' conflict as the best available outcome now for the Kremlin," Bloomberg News wrote in an article published on June 8, citing multiple "people familiar with the situation" without naming them.

"Many within the political and business elite are tired of the war and want it to stop, though they doubt Putin will halt the fighting," it said.

"The most favorable prospect would be negotiations later in the year that would turn it into a 'frozen' conflict and allow Putin to proclaim a Pyrrhic victory to Russians by holding on to some seized Ukrainian territory," Bloomberg cited two of its sources as saying.

Do these statements and signals mean that Putin -- who prefaced the invasion with repeated assertions that Ukraine has no right to exist as a sovereign state -- is ready to halt efforts to seize more of its neighbor's territory and bring Kyiv to heel?

No.

For one thing, Bloomberg wrote that according to five of the people it spoke to, "Putin shows no indication of wanting to end the war."

Make No Mistake

Author and analyst Sam Greene, in a Twitter thread about comments from Simonyan that caused a stir, wrote that "it's worth taking a moment to reflect on how Russian propaganda works."

Simonyan's logic "reflects the views of some in the Russian establishment. Maybe even many or most," Greene wrote. "It would be a mistake, however, to assume that it reflects the Kremlin's position in any meaningful way."

Instead, he suggested it had three objectives: to "disrupt Western strategic narratives," to "maintain domestic constructive ambiguity," and to "conduct reflexive public opinion research" -- in other words, in the last case, to send up a trial balloon in an effort to find out what the Russian populace thinks of the idea.

The particular Western strategic narrative that the Kremlin may want to disrupt is "the current Western consensus is that Russia will keep fighting until it either wins or loses outright."

"As a result, when arguments are made that the West should push Ukraine towards a negotiated settlement, they fail to resonate: most analysts and policymakers do not see a negotiating partner in Moscow," Greene wrote. "Simonyan's statement is meant to complicate that assumption."

As the calamity unfolded on the Dnieper in Ukraine, the Russian state's sweeping clampdown on dissent, civil society, and independent media at home continued. On June 8, a Moscow court began the trial of Oleg Orlov, 70, a senior leader of Memorial, a prominent and highly respected human rights organization that was outlawed in December 2021.

The charge against Orlov, who is accused of repeatedly discrediting the armed forces, stems from his condemnation of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The Council of Europe's human rights commissioner, Dunja Mijatovic, called his trial a "travesty of justice."

That's it from me this week.

If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

Yours,

Steve Gutterman
Plato compared the human soul to a chariot that is being pulled by two opposing horses, one is majestic, the other is evil.

Let us admit it at the outset: we are a selfish lot.

Honesty and truthfulness are barely acknowledged, especially at times of crisis. It becomes a matter of survival and we tend to look out for number one.

Looking out for number one has been important for as long as there have been human beings.

Those who are self-oriented, in a biological sense, would survive in a society which values power over kindness.

It may not be entirely our fault. Selfish behaviour has been debated and analysed by philosophers and scientists for millennia, and for the longest time the pervasive view has been one of pessimism for our species  our first instincts are inherently selfish.

Such philosophic beliefs about our selfish human nature inspired many of the teachings we encounter in our everyday life.

Fortunately we also have a cooperative instinct. We were quick to realise that selfishness will result in aloneness, while cooperation overcomes our greed in favour of a more homogeneous existence. That is how we were able to form families, friendships, groups, societies and civilisations.

Number one could never have done it alone.

However, in times of anger and aggression, we find ourselves reverting to our baser instincts. People are at each others throats rather than at each others side. Self-interest becomes the most fundamental of human emotions.

Plato compared the human soul to a chariot that is being pulled by two opposing horses, one is majestic, the other is evil.

The Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago, conducted a study of the brains of both children and adults and there it was again  evidence that people care more about themselves. The self takes precedence.

The good news is that kids are not born selfish. Kids have spontaneous biologically based tendencies to care about others. They do that without being asked, offered a reward or observed by parent. Psychologist Felix Wanaken spent 17 years studying toddlers. They display altruistic behaviour from a very young age.

Therefore, it is human to be kind and compassionate, but we seem to lose it along the years. Let us not.

Hang on to religious teachings, as in the Ten Commandments, to suppress our innermost selfish desires, and let love and compassion for our fellowman rule the day.

We can do that in a variety of ways that would cost us little or no effort at all.

Praising a team worker, giving someone your shoulder to cry on, saying the magic words, please and thank you, especially to subordinates, giving a complement, a helping hand are all morale boosters for both parties. Little things mean a lot.

Best of all is giving a gift. Gift-giving activates reward pathways in our brain provided we dont let stress take away the joy of the occasion. This intrinsic delight of doing something for someone else is oftentimes referred to as a warm glow, said Emiliana Simon-Thomas, PhD, University of California at Berkeley. She has devoted her career to studying the roots of compassion, happiness, and altruism.

Several studies over the last decade have demonstrated that spending money over someone other than yourself provided happiness. That is because when we behave generously, like donating to charity, or giving a loved one something they wanted, creates more interaction between the parts of the brain associated with processing information and feeling pleasure.

At the University of Switzerland in Zurich, researchers gave 50 people $100 and instructed half of them to spend on themselves and the other half to spend it on someone else. They performed functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure activity in the brain associated with generosity and pleasure during a social sharing task. Yes indeed, those who spent money on others reported higher levels of happiness.

The uniqueness of the reward activation around gift-giving activates pathways in the brain that release oxytocin which is a neuro-peptide that signals trust, safety, and connection.

It is often referred to as the cuddle hormone.

When oxytocin is part of the equation, the reward can be sustained longer, unlike the brief lifespan of dopamine. The effects on the brain are even preset during various steps leading up to the actual opening of the gift, such as in shopping for the gift, wrapping it, etc.

Everybody loves receiving gifts. The richest people who have everything, can buy anything, love to receive something.

Giving gifts is an ancient ritual that dates back as far as human memory. It is how we express our love, our appreciation for a job well done, or to share our own fortune.

It is in our DNA as social creatures.

The value is insignificant. It is the thought that counts.

There is something about giving that brings the giver even greater joy.

Truly it is better to give than to receive. The giver has the greater advantage in the transaction, with added psychological and emotional benefits.

Gifts should evoke memories not money. The recipient will not only remember the gift, but also the giver.

We all want to matter. A gift is a token of how much we matter. It is never about money. No money in the world can bring happiness.

An ice-cream cone on a warm summer day to a young boy is worth a gold mine. Your reaction to his reaction is worth two gold mines.

The most precious gift of all is the gift of time.

Today, someone is happy because of you.

We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.

Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

* A version of this article appears in print in the 1 June, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.

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On the occasion of celebrating the National Day of Sweden, its ambassador Hakan Emsgard praised the deep historical ties with Egypt and the importance of Swedish-Egyptian business relations.

Sweden's National Day, celebrated annually on 6 June, marks a significant milestone in the history of the country. This year's celebrations have taken on a special significance as Sweden commemorates its 500th anniversary as an independent kingdom. As part of these festivities, the embassy of Sweden in Cairo hosted a grand event at the ambassadors residence in Zamalek, to celebrate the deepening ties between Sweden and Egypt and highlight the contributions of Swedish businesses to Egypt's economy.

The Swedish Ambassador to Egypt, Hakan Emsgard, said that Sewdens National Day celebration in Egypt drew attention to many Swedish companies operating in Egypt, and the contribution they make to the Egyptian society. The event brought together government officials, dignitaries, business leaders and representatives from all walks of life to strengthen economic partnerships and explore new investment opportunities, with the Egyptian Minister of International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat, present as a guest of honor.

He also pointed out that Swedish companies have made a substantial investments across a wide range of sectors, including renewable energy manufacturing telecommunications retail and infrastructure.

These investments have created new jobs and increased Egyptian experts to world markets," he said

Ambassador Emsgard added, these investments have not only contributed to the creation of new jobs but also to the transfer of technology and knowledge as well as increased Egyptian exports to the world markets.

The celebration featured an exhibition by 20 of the Swedish companies operating in Egypt where they showcased their innovative products and services. Guests had the opportunity to engage with industry leaders, learn about Sweden's expertise in various sectors, and explore potential collaborations. This exhibition highlighted the significant contributions made by Swedish businesses to Egypt's economic progress, fostering a stronger partnership between the two nations.

On 6 June 1523, Gustav Vasa was elected King of Sweden. With this, Sweden left the so-called Kalmar Union with Denmark and Norway, and became fully independent. This laid the foundation of Sweden as the modern European nation state it is today.

Sweden Day celebration was organized in collaboration with the following Swedish companies ABB, Absolut, AstraZeneca, Ericsson, IKEA, Oriflame, Tetra Pak and many more.

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THE Great War effort meant masses of workers were needed in the nations munitions factories.

This meant people pouring into industrial areas  like Rotherham  and living in lodgings away from parental or marital supervision.

Many were prompted by patriotism, others were tempted by the greater level of freedom which came with being far from home  often for the first time.

For some, it led to romantic relationships  whether they were married or single.

William Ward (27) was a munitions worker at Messrs Thomas Firth and Sons at Tinsley, a factory which had been converted at the beginning of the war. In spring 1917 he was staying on Attercliffe Road, Sheffield.

Meanwhile Mary Ives (36) was employed at the Cammell Laird munitions building in Sheffield and was lodging in the city, at Jansen Street.

William and Mary knew each other. Before the hostilities, he had lived on Mitchells Terrace in Wombwell and she was the wife of the villages postmaster, John Henry Ives.

In fact, it seems that William had chosen where he would work in the war based on where he would be close to Mary, and they began a relationship.

The pair were found dead in a field at Yew Tree Farm in Brinsworth on the afternoon of May 17, 1917.

Blacksmith Harold Bennett Wright, of Greasbrough Road in Tinsley, spotted the bodies beside a hedge  initially thinking they had been asleep.

When he got closer, he saw that both their throats were slit.

Harold shouted for a nearby farm labourer to watch the bodies while he rushed over to Tinsley to inform the police.

There was a short delay as officers worked out which force would respond and investigate, before the Rotherham authority was notified and Det Sgt William Shaw and PC Beasby arrived at the scene at 5.15pm.

They immediately noted it appeared there had been no sign of a struggle between William and Mary. William was face-down, nearest the hedge, with his left arm resting on Marys waist. In his hand was a bloodstained pocketknife.

An open razor lay between the two bodies. Its case was in Williams pocket.

Det Sgt Shaw ordered that the bodies be moved to Canklow ready for the inquest. It appeared to be a clear case of murder and suicide, he reported to the Rotherham Coroner, Mr J Kenyon Parker.

The officer visited Williams Attercliffe Road lodgings, where he found several letters written by Mary in a tin box.

The landlady, Ann Sands, told the detective that William had left her house just after 1pm that day and told her he intended to catch the 1.43pm train back to Wombwell. There was nothing unusual about his demeanour, Ann said.

In the past, he had spoken with her about his relationship with Mary  even showing her a photograph.

At the inquest, held at the Atlas Hotel two days later, Det Sgt Shaw told the coroner and jury his opinion that William had cut Marys throat with the razor and then killed himself with the knife.

The coroner asked him: Have you any doubts about it?

The detective answered: Not the slightest.

A man called Steerman gave evidence, saying he had witnessed the couple walking, arm in arm, along a footpath near where the bodies were found.

Mr Steerman said they appeared friendly with each other  but it appeared they might have recently argued. He watched them turn into Shepcote Lane and then lost sight of them.

Marys husband John told the jury that he last saw his wife the previous weekend, when she had returned to the family home at Wombwell.

She would usually travel home on a Saturday and then leave for her lodgings the following morning.

It was the Wombwell police who had contacted him to say a body had been found which was believed to be Mary. John initially identified her by the description of a ring she was wearing and a lock of her hair.

He asked at Rotherham police station how Mary had died, and was told it appeared to have been at the hands of a man called William Ward.

John had known of his wifes infatuation with William.

The coroner asked him: I am not getting into matters any more than I can help, but has there been trouble between you and your wife about this man?

John burst into tears and replied: Yes.

Marys husband also told the inquest that he was aware of William having to serve 12 months in prison for attempting to murder a barmaid a few years earlier.

Williams brother-in-law Walter Bird told the hearing that he had been aware of William and Marys romance, with the couple even living together in Doncaster for a short while.

When this arrangement had ended, Mary had gone home to her husband.

Walter also knew of the attempted murder charge, which had been heard at Leeds Assizes, and said it was his razor which had been found between William and Mary.

In summing up, the coroner assured the jury that there was no doubt that the couple had lived as man and wife at Doncaster and had been seeing each other since.

He added: The opinion of the two witnesses was that the man murdered the woman and afterwards killed himself.

The most significant part of the evidence was the nature of the wounds and the identity of the razor, which the brother-in-law did not even know was missing.

Then there was the letters. Another fact was that Ward was convicted at Leeds Assizes to 12 months imprisonment on a charge of attempting to murder a barmaid at Wombwell.

The jury did not take long to decide a verdict in agreement with the two witnesses.

Det Sgt Shaw was praised by the coroner for his careful and considerate inquiries, and diligent investigation.

But the finer details of Williams previous crime were not heard in court.

In October 1914, he appeared at Barnsleys courthouse charged with the attempted murder of pianist Nellie Ballard (21), at the Junction Inn, Wombwell on September 7.

At the time he was a greengrocer and fish dealer at Wombwell, where he was reported to be a young man of respectable appearance.

Nellies employer told the court how she had taken his children out for a walk on that day, and returned home bleeding from her chest.

When William was brought into the court, he was also bleeding from the chest, having stabbed himself.

Nellie spoke of William acting strangely around that time  to the point where her landlords children referred to him being a bit soft in the head.

Her and Williams romantic relationship had ended the previous week and she had told him they could remain friends.

The pair had been walking along quite happily on the day of the attack, when he asked her if there was any chance of them getting back together.

When she said no, he suddenly shouted: Then die!  and stabbed her with a large fish knife.

Nellie managed to run away... after a short distance she turned, and saw William attempting to kill himself.

On November 31, 1914, William was given 12 months for GBH.

Three years later, there were very similar circumstances  only this time the affair ended tragically.

It was presumed that William and Mary were lovers, choosing to die together. But did the earlier case with Nellie change how clear cut this might have been?

- Adapted from a chapter in Rotherhams Dark Streets by Margaret Drinkall, available from Amazon (Kindle edition 3.99, paperback 6.99).
A SHAKESPEAREAN tale with a twist  from the quill of master satirist Ian Hislop  is bringing a splash of comedy to the Civic this week.

Hislop worked with fellow humourist Nick Newman on A Bunch of Amateurs, which runs until Friday in the capable hands of Rotherham Rep.

The show started life as a screenplay for a 2008 film starring Burt Reynolds and Imelda Staunton and was even put on for the Queen at the Royal Film Performance, prompting the late monarch to request a second screening of it at Christmas.

Several Rep regulars are taking to the stage for the four-night run.

Directed by The Reps dramatic director Richard Wilshaw, A Bunch of Amateurs tells the story of fading Hollywood action hero Jefferson Steel who, keen to boost his waning career, arrives in England to play King Lear at Stratford.

However, this Stratford is not on the River Avon and neither is it Shakespeares birthplace it is a quiet village in Suffolk.

Instead of professional famous names, the cast are literally a bunch of amateurs who are trying to save their theatre from being lost to developers.

These enthusiastic am-dram thespians test Jefferson's monstrous ego, vanity and insecurity to the limit as the actors rehearse for what could potentially be their final performance at the theatre.

Tickets are priced at 9 (7 for concessions) and available on 01709 823621 or from rotherhamtheatres.ticketsolve.com.

Submitted: A sword fight rehearsal between Hollywood star Jefferson Steel (Danny Stewart) and a Stratford dramatic player Nigel Dewbury (Mark Hone).
A Japanese court on Thursday said a ban on same-sex marriage was constitutional but it raised concerns about the dignity and human rights of same-sex couples, a ruling short of activists' expectations but still seen as a step forward.

The judgement by the Fukuoka district court came a week after another district court said it was unconstitutional to ban same-sex marriage, bolstering hopes for change among the LGBTQ community in Japan, the only Group of Seven nation without legal protection for same-sex unions.

Five rulings on same-sex marriage have been handed down in Japan over the past two years -- two concluding the ban was unconstitutional, one saying it was not, and two, including Thursday's, upholding the ban but raising other rights concerns.

A Tokyo court last year upheld the ban but said a lack of legal protection for same-sex families violated their rights.

The Fukuoka court echoed that Tokyo judgement, saying that while not allowing same-sex marriage was within the constitution, it went against a clause saying marriage and family matters were based on individual dignity, terming it a "state of unconstitutionality."

Masahiro, a plaintiff who gave only his first name, said he was encouraged by the overall trend in the court cases. "Four of the five rulings so far have either found not allowing same-sex marriage is unconstitutional or is at odds with part of the constitution," he told a press conference. "It does feel as if we took a step forward, so I'm relieved."
Italian natural gas distributor Italgas S.p.A. announced Friday a sale and purchase agreement with French resource management firm Veolia Environnement (VE). The deal is regarding stakes held by Veolia in three companies active in the water sector in the regions of Lazio, Campania and Sicily.

For the acquisition, Italgas will recognize Veolia a total of around 115 million euros, partially depending upon certain targets of the operational companies.

The agreement includes Veolia's 100 percent stake in Acqua S.r.l., which in turn directly holds 98.7 percent of Idrosicilia S.p.A. and, indirectly, 75 percent of the equity of Siciliacque S.p.A; 100 percent of Idrolatina S.r.l., which in turn holds about 49 percent of Acqualatina S.p.A; and 9 percent of Acqua Campania S.p.A.

The holding companies Acqua, Idrosicilia and Idrolatina hold the stakes in the operational companies Siciliacque and Acqualatina.

The closing of the deal is subject to the fulfillment of certain conditions precedent, including the involvement or approval by the Public Bodies which awarded the water service concession.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

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Visiting Professor at Rhodes University, Professor Sunitha Srinivas

Guests to the Internationalisation Awards event held in early May were welcomed by the uplifting sounds of a Rhodes University ensemble from the International Library of African Music (ILAM), led by Mr Elijah Madiba.

Well-known journalist Ms Thandeka Gqubule-Mbeki, currently lecturing in the School of Journalism and Media Studies (JMS), MC for the evening, immediately called on Professor Jo Dames, interim DVC of Research and Innovation to welcome the attendees, on behalf of the Office of the Vice Chancellor. Prof Sizwe Mabizela, the Vice-Chancellor of Rhodes University, joined the evenings celebration, following another pressing commitment in time to hear the keynote speaker, Professor Sunitha Srinivas.

Currently based in India, Professor Sunitha Srinivas is now a Visiting Professor at Rhodes University, having previously served for 14 years as a Professor in the Faculty of Pharmacy. An Adjunct Professor at the University of Health Sciences & Pharmacy in St. Louis, USA. Professor Srinivas is also currently the Vice-President- Public Health at 3 Analytics, an Integrated, State-of-the-art AI-based Safety Analytics & Compliance Automation Platform.

Professor Srinivas shared that for her, Rhodes University and Makhanda were her Sthana Bala, which is a Sanskrit word to describe a place that gives you strength and purpose.

It is very special to have the opportunity to return and engage with students, colleagues and friends, with whom I stayed in touch since moving back to India, Professor Srinivas said before sharing her moving and personal journey titled: Internationalisation: my serendipitous journey. While her international awareness began with her health-focused work in India, prior to joining Rhodes University, she spoke about how the process leading up to the Award helped to crystallize and then expand her thinking:

I Africanised my curriculum by firstly identifying all the countries that students in my class came from. Secondly, I took the time to learn about those health systems across Africa. Thirdly, I included teaching about those systems, as well as the South African Health system, ensuring that everyone in the class learned comparative perspectives, Prof Srinivas shared.

While still a Professor at Rhodes University, Prof Srinivas was awarded the Talloires Network University Education for Transformative Leadership in Africa grant for community-engaged teaching, research and scholarship. Her community-engaged research was featured as a case study in UNESCO's e-book on community-university research partnership. As well as earning the Rhodes Universitys inaugural 2014 Internationalization Award, she also received the 2014 National Excellence in Teaching and Learning Awards, presented by the Council on Higher Education and the Higher Education Learning & Teaching Association of Southern Africa.

The Director of Internationalisation at Rhodes University, Ms Orla Quinlan, who initiated the Internationalisation Awards in 2014, with the approval of the Internationalisation Committee, spoke about the strategic intention of the Awards. Referring to the work of Broadwell and Birch, in relation to knowledge and skills acquisition, the four stages being conscious competence; unconscious competence; conscious incompetence and unconscious incompetence, Ms Quinlan shared that Several of our most excellent academics shared that the criteria for the Awards have assisted with articulating thinking and practices already unconsciously well-incorporated into their approach. Others shared that reading the criteria alone had already expanded their thinking on internationalisation and had prompted fresh ideas about how they approach their teaching. The Awards event provided a platform to increase awareness of the extensive internationalisation work with other colleagues.

To be eligible for the award, you may include aspects of Internationalisation at Home, as well as abroad. By being creative in your teaching and learning and inviting people online into your classroom or involving yourself in Collaborative Ongoing International Learning (COIL) programmes, you can infuse many aspects of Internationalisation into all your endeavours without ever leaving the campus. We want to shape graduates, who are ready to be conscientious local and global citizens, Quinlan elaborated.

Not only did the Awards event celebrate and share the citation of the most recent recipient of the 2022 Individual Internationalisation Award, Professor Sioux McKenna, but this special occasion also included four individual and four group Internationalisation Awardees from previous years who missed out on face-to-face celebrations, due to a variety of mitigating circumstances, including the pandemic and its aftermath.

The citations illustrated that internationalisation at Rhodes University is appropriate, locally and globally relevant, accessible, and rooted in the context of Rhodes University, Makhanda, Eastern Cape, perhaps most aptly represented by the extensive international relationships of RUCE, the Rhodes University Community Engagement, who were the 2020 collective winners, reflected Quinlan.

Having appreciated all that transpired in the course of the evening, Prof Sandile Khamanga, the Dean of Pharmacy, commented that This event will inspire innovation.

Peers offered a hearty congratulation to the 2022 winner Prof Sioux McKenna, Centre for Postgraduate Studies (CPGS), who shared a message that We are truly a global village, and each one of us now needs to think about how we engage with that reality.

Prof McKenna joins active alumni who, since receiving their awards, have continued to expand the horizons of their academic work. The Individual Internationalisation Award winners to date are as follows:

2021 Prof M Hill, Centre for Biological Control

2020 Prof C Jones, Ichthyology and Fisheries Science

2019 Prof L Louw, Management Department

2018 Prof O Tastan Bishop, Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology

2017 Prof W Sauer, Department of Ichthyology and Fisheries Science (DIFS)

2016 Prof L Dalvit, Faculty of Education

2015 Prof H Tsikos, Geology Department

2014 Prof S Srinivas, Faculty of Pharmacy

2014 Prof Roddy Fox, Geography Department

The Collective Internationalisation Award winners to date are as follows:

2021 Institute for Water Research (IWR)

2020 Rhodes University Community Engagement (RUCE)

2019 Rhodes Business School

2018 Environmental Learning Research Centre (ELRC)

Source: International Office
Dr Nhamo Mutingwende, a post-doctoral researcher at RUBIC, collects water samples for testing

Following a Makana Municipality statement regarding the detection of E. coli in Makanas water supply last month, Rhodes Universitys Biotechnology Innovation Centre (RUBIC) availed its water-testing capabilities to the community to provide consistent and transparent monitoring of the effectiveness of the municipalitys disinfection measures.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and South African National Standards (SANS) 241 standard requirement when testing 100 ml of water for E. coli in drinking water is that it must not be detectable. The presence of E. coli in drinking water indicates the presence of faecal contamination and requires prompt disinfection and follow-up testing to ensure that disinfection is effective.

Since the E. coli detection notice was issued, Dr Nhamo Mutingwende, a post-doctoral researcher at RUBIC, supported by a PhD student, Siphumze Bani, and two MSc students, Shannon Rutherford and Tasmita Singh, worked late nights and weekends to sample water across Makhanda. A city-wide water collection can easily take up to six hours to complete. After each collection, the sample must be kept cool and rushed back to the Water Testing Laboratory, as analysis needs to be performed within a few hours after collection.

The testing involves preparing sample bottles by first autoclaving them in a sterilisation process. These sterilised bottles are then used for the sampling process and returned to the Laboratory to be processed for testing. This process can take a few hours, depending on the number of samples.

RUBIC Administrator, Lwazikazi Madikiza, has managed the sample collection and testing logistics, which has included vehicle hire and ordering additional laboratory supplies and reagents.

The RUBIC Water Testing Laboratorys testing is dependent on water-on days, so samples have been collected over three-day intervals, which includes testing conducted at different water reservoirs.

The staff of RUBICs Water Testing Laboratory, headed by Professor Janice Limson and Dr Ronen Fogel, have primarily conducted microbiological testing, measuring total coliforms and the bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli).

The most recent microbiological testing conducted by the RUBIC Water Testing Laboratory shows that out of eleven sites sampled, four sites showed the presence of E. coli, said Professor Janice Limson, Director of RUBIC and DSI/NRF Chair in Biotechnology Innovation and Engagement.

The Laboratory was launched this year to support community water testing for bacterial contamination, amongst other water quality indicators. RUBICs water testing will not replace the SANAS-accredited testing done by the Makana Municipality but aims to supplement their efforts, Professor Limson explained.

More information about the RUBIC Water Testing Laboratory initiative can be obtained from L Madikiza at 046 603 7673, Email: rubicwater@ru.ac.za

Source: Communications
Maruti Suzuki Tour H1 is basically an Alto K10 hatchback for commercial applications and features the same 1.0L K10C engine as well

Just after launching its 5-door lifestyle off-roader Jimny, Maruti Suzuki has introduced its Tour H1 hatchback for CV space. Maruti Suzukis Tour portfolio for commercial applications is now complete with a hatchback, a sedan and an MPV. The company based Tour H1 on Alto K10, with both petrol only and petrol+CNG bi-fuel options.

Prices for the range starts from Rs. 4,80,500 for Tour H1, 1L 5MT variant and Rs. 5,70,500 for Tour H1 CNG 1L 5MT (both prices ex-sh). Maruti Suzuki is offering Tour H1 in three colour choices named Metallic Silky Silky Silver, Metallic Granite Grey and Arctic White.

Maruti Suzuki Tour H1 Launched

For starters, Tour H1 is a rebranded Alto K10 for commercial applications. When compared to Alto K10, Tour H1 costs Rs. 80,500 more than base Std trim which costs Rs. 3.99 lakh (both prices ex-sh). Maruti Suzuki is charging Rs. 91,000 for CNG variant of Tour H1, which is in line with what the company charges with Alto K10 CNG variants as well.

The company claims Tour H1 to be Indias most fuel-efficient entry-level commercial hatchback. Just like with base Std variant of Alto K10, Maruti Suzuki is not offering painted front and rear bumpers with Tour H1. The 1.0L K10C petrol engine in Tour H1 promises 24.60 km/l fuel efficiency and its CNG derivative promises 34.46 km/kg fuel efficiency.

Speaking of the engine, Tour H1 gets the same 1.0L 3-cylinder Dual Jet, Dual VVT unit as Alto K10. This powertrain is capable of generating around 65 bhp of power and 89 Nm of torque with petrol only and around 55 bhp of power and 82.1 Nm of torque when run on CNG.

Introducing the All-New Tour H1, Mr. Shashank Srivastava, Senior Executive Officer, Marketing and Sales, Maruti Suzuki India Limited, said, The all-new Tour H1 carries on the legacy and trust built by the Alto K10 for the commercial segment. It comes equipped with the trusted Next-Gen K 10C engine, impressive interiors and exteriors along with a host of comfort, convenience, and safety features. Offering excellent fuel-efficiency, the Tour H1 is set to deliver immense joy in the lives of our commercial channel customers.

Safety features with the new commercial version of Alto K10

Maruti Suzuki mentions that there are a bunch of safety equipment as standard on Tour H1. These safety features include dual airbags, front seat belts with load limiters and pre-tensioner functionality, seat belt warning and reminders for both front and rear occupants, ABS, EBD, engine immobiliser, reverse parking sensors, and a speed governor limiting top-speed to 80 km/h.
Hollywood star Tom Cruise will visit Korea later this month to promote his latest film, "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One."

Other cast members will accompany him.

In 2022, when he was visiting the country to promote "Top Gun: Maverick," he made a promise he would come back again.

It will mark his 11th visit to Korea. His first trip here was in 1994 to promote "Interview with the Vampire."

The seventh installment in the famous action series is scheduled for release here on July 12.
The cap on dollar remittances overseas that can be made without official approval will be raised from US$50,000 to $100,000 next month, the Ministry of Economy and Finance said Thursday.

Currently, people have to submit documents to banks specifying the use of the money if their remittance exceeds that amount.
Saudi Arabia has introduced a new business visa for investors as part of its effort to draw foreign funding into its economy.

Read More: Different Kinds of Visas for Saudi Arabia

The new visa service, which was introduced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in collaboration with the Ministry of Investment, intends to facilitate the process of the foreign investor to Saudi Arabia to personally explore the investment potential in the Kingdom.

The unified national platform for visas, which has simpler and easier computerized procedures, is the way to apply for a business visit visa, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The investor's visa will be immediately issued when the application has been processed, according to the ministry.

Investors who are citizens of various nations will benefit from the service in the first phase, according to the ministry. In the following phase, citizens of other nations will be permitted to use the visa service.

The ministry emphasized that the new visa service aids in meeting the goals of the Saudi Vision 2030, which calls for the Kingdom to be a dominant investor and to be economically attractive.


Korea aims to reduce the use of plastic as part of efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030, the Environment Ministry said Thursday.

Plastic will now be listed in a separate category from other waste to draw attention to the vast amounts that are incinerated or put into landfill here.

Countries around the world agreed at a recent meeting in Paris to "develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution," according to the UN Environment Programme, but they have not gotten much further.

Korea is already committed to reducing plastic use by 20 percent over the five years from 2021 or from 4.88 million tons to 3.93 million tons.

Now Environment Minister Han Wha-jin has proposed an even more ambitious reduction target of 30 percent by 2027 or by 3.42 million tons a year.

Reduction efforts typically focus on single-use plastic such as packaging, takeaway food containers, shopping bags, cups and drinking straws, replacing them with fabric "bags for life" and biodegradable or reusable materials.

This could entail huge costs for struggling small businesses like restaurants and coffee shops. But proponents say there is already a dire shortage of landfill sites and incinerators in the capital, and burying plastic waste without incineration will be banned in 2026, making drastic cutbacks inevitable.
Without more legally binding and well-planned net-zero policies, the world is highly likely to miss key climate targets.

In the new study, led by Imperial College London and published today in Science, researchers ranked 90% of global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions pledges as providing low confidence in their full implementation.

The researchers recommend nations make their targets legally binding and back them up with long-term plans and short-term implementation policies to increase the likelihood of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

Lead researcher Professor Joeri Rogelj, director of research for the Grantham Institute at Imperial, said: "Climate policy is moving from setting ambitious targets to implementing them. However, our analysis shows most countries do not provide high confidence that they will deliver on their commitments. The world is still on a high-risk climate track, and we are far from delivering a safe climate future."

Assigning confidence

Climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement include keeping temperature rises well below 2C above the average temperature before the industrial revolution and ideally below 1.5C. The main way to achieve this is the reach 'net-zero' greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, where any remaining emissions are effectively offset.

Most countries have set net-zero goals and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) -- non-binding national plans proposing climate actions. Taking these plans at face value, and assuming they will all be fully implemented, gives the world a chance of keeping warming to 1.5-2 degrees C. But taking current policies only, with no implementation of net-zero pledges, means models predict temperature rises could be as much as 2.5-3 degrees C by 2100, with warming still increasing.

To reduce the uncertainty in which of these scenarios is likely to happen, the team, including researchers from the UK, Austria, USA, Netherlands, Germany, and Brazil, assigned a 'confidence' to each net-zero policy. They assessed 35 net zero targets, covering every country with more than 0.1% of current global greenhouse gas emissions.

The confidence assessment was based on three policy characteristics: whether the policy was legally binding, whether there was a credible policy plan guiding implementation, and whether short-term plans would already put emissions on a downward path over the next decade.

Based on this, policies were given 'higher', 'lower' or 'much lower' confidence of being fully implemented. Some regions scored highly, including the European Union, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, but around 90% scored 'lower' or 'much lower' confidence, including China and the US, which together account for more than 35% of current emissions.

Modelling emissions

From this assessment, the team modelled five scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions and resulting temperatures. These were: considering only current policies (the most conservative scenario); only adding in policies that have a high confidence of being implemented; adding policies with high and low confidence; adding all policies regardless of confidence as if they are implemented; and a scenario where all policies are fully implemented and all NDCs are met (the most forgiving scenario).

The most conservative scenario had the largest uncertainty, with a range of 1.7-3C and a median estimate of 2.6C. The most optimistic scenario has a range of 1.6-2.1, with a median estimate of 1.7C. This might suggest that, if all net-zero policies are fully implemented, the Paris Agreement goals are withing reach. However, with so many policies ranked in the low-confidence end of the scale, this would be wishful thinking in absence of further efforts.

Co-author Taryn Fransen, from the World Resources Institute in Washington DC, and the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California-Berkeley, said: "Climate change targets are by their nature ambitious -- there's no point in setting a target for a foregone conclusion. But implementation must follow."

Catalysing action

Only twelve out of 35 net zero policies are currently legally binding, and the researchers say increasing this number would help ensure the policies survive long-term and catalyse action. Countries also need clear implementation pathways for different sectors, outlining exactly what changes are needed and where the responsibility lies.

Co-author Dr Robin Lamboll, from the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial, said: "Making targets legally binding is crucial to ensure long-term plans are adopted. We need to see concrete legislation in order to trust that action will follow from promises."

The team included researchers from Imperial College London (UK) the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria), the World Resources Institute (US), the University of California-Berkeley (US), the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the Institute for Environmental Studies (Netherlands), the NewClimate Institute (Germany), the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development (Netherlands), and the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).
Recent scientific discoveries have shown that Neanderthal genes comprise some 1 to 4% of the genome of present-day humans whose ancestors migrated out of Africa, but the question remained open on how much those genes are still actively influencing human traits -- until now.

A multi-institution research team including Cornell University has developed a new suite of computational genetic tools to address the genetic effects of interbreeding between humans of non-African ancestry and Neanderthals that took place some 50,000 years ago. (The study applies only to descendants of those who migrated from Africa before Neanderthals died out, and in particular, those of European ancestry.)

In a study published in eLife, the researchers reported that some Neanderthal genes are responsible for certain traits in modern humans, including several with a significant influence on the immune system. Overall, however, the study shows that modern human genes are winning out over successive generations.

"Interestingly, we found that several of the identified genes involved in modern human immune, metabolic and developmental systems might have influenced human evolution after the ancestors' migration out of Africa," said study co-lead author April (Xinzhu) Wei, an assistant professor of computational biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. "We have made our custom software available for free download and use by anyone interested in further research."

Using a vast dataset from the UK Biobank consisting of genetic and trait information of nearly 300,000 Brits of non-African ancestry, the researchers analyzed more than 235,000 genetic variants likely to have originated from Neanderthals. They found that 4,303 of those differences in DNA are playing a substantial role in modern humans and influencing 47 distinct genetic traits, such as how fast someone can burn calories or a person's natural immune resistance to certain diseases.

Unlike previous studies that could not fully exclude genes from modern human variants, the new study leveraged more precise statistical methods to focus on the variants attributable to Neanderthal genes.

While the study used a dataset of almost exclusively white individuals living in the United Kingdom, the new computational methods developed by the team could offer a path forward in gleaning evolutionary insights from other large databases to delve deeper into archaic humans' genetic influences on modern humans.

"For scientists studying human evolution interested in understanding how interbreeding with archaic humans tens of thousands of years ago still shapes the biology of many present-day humans, this study can fill in some of those blanks," said senior investigator Sriram Sankararaman, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. "More broadly, our findings can also provide new insights for evolutionary biologists looking at how the echoes of these types of events may have both beneficial and detrimental consequences."

The other co-lead author on the study is Christopher Robles, postdoctoral researcher at UCLA. Additional authors are UCLA doctoral student Ali Pazokitoroudi; Andrea Ganna of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Alexander Gusev and Arun Durvasula of Harvard Medical School; Steven Gazal of USC; Po-Ru Loh of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; and David Reich of Harvard University.

The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, with additional funding from an Alfred P Sloan Research Fellowship and a gift from the Okawa Foundation. Other authors received funding support from the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, the John Templeton Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Next Generation Fund at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
As warming waters threaten fish populations and disrupt fisheries around the world, it is critical to find ways to sustain fisheries while at the same time allowing those fisheries to remain economically viable to those who depend on them for their livelihoods. In the United States, commercial fishing employs 1.2 million Americans and generates more than $165 billion annually.

The primary way that the United States has protected its fisheries is through the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which was modernized in 1996 to foster the long-term biological and economic sustainability of marine fisheries. However, the reauthorization of this act has been stalled in Congress for a decade, as some politicians blame the law for being too stringent, leading to what they call "underfishing."

The University of Delaware's Kimberly Oremus recently served as a lead author on a paper published in Science that examined U.S. fishing policy. The paper found that the Magnuson-Stevens Act is not constraining most fisheries, and that there are various other reasons that lead to certain fish species being less fished.

Oremus, assistant professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy, and Eyal Frank, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, served as the lead authors on the paper.

The researchers examined two decades of data on 170 U.S. fish stocks. These 170 managed fish stocks represent 85% of the U.S. marine commercial fish landings.

In the study, Oremus, Frank, and their other co-authors examined the assertion of critics of U.S. fishing law that it is too stringent and unnecessarily leaves too many fish in the water.

They found that the main reason about half of the fish stocks in the U.S. are considered "underfished" is due to pure economics -- fishers are not harvesting the fish because there is not enough demand for them.

Just four fish species -- the Eastern Bering Sea walleye pollock, Atlantic sea scallop, Gulf of Mexico brown shrimp and Gulf of Mexico white shrimp -- make up the majority of the revenue of those stocks that the researchers characterized as potentially less utilized and fished. Of those, the majority of the revenue came from just one species: the walleye pollock, the catch of which is not constrained by the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

Other, healthy fish stocks are being left in the water because they could not be profitably caught without also catching other fish species that are depleted.

"Some healthy stocks are constrained by the Magnuson-Stevens Act because they are often caught with other stocks that are depleted," Oremus said. "Some stocks are constrained by other laws such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act or the Pacific Halibut Treaty with Canada. Some stocks are constrained by both market forces and policies, such as our Gulf of Mexico shrimp stocks that are struggling to compete with the price of imported shrimp coming from less regulated countries."

While political rhetoric has focused on laws that protect fisheries -- such as the Magnuson-Stevens Act -- as the main culprit in underfishing, the researchers said it is important to take a nuanced view of the picture and view fisheries on a case-by-case basis.

"Targeting the Magnuson-Stevens Act will not change some of these outcomes," Frank said. "It is important to understand the multitude of factors involved. Simply relaxing fishery management targets under the law will most likely fail to increase utilization in many of the marine fisheries that appear to be underutilized at face value."

With changes to the environment and overfishing still a big concern in other parts of the world, it is critical to have science-based fisheries laws in place in order to sustain fish stocks moving forward, Oremus said.

"On average, we find that less fished stocks were less fished six years before the law was passed in 1996, and their share of revenue has remained steady from 1990-2015," Oremus said. "Though no law is perfect, the law appears to be attempting to balance the needs of fishers, other stakeholders, and the long-term conservation of the resource."




AFP: Reports by US media outlets say that China and Cuba have agreed to set up a Chinese spy facility capable of monitoring communications across the southeastern part of the US. Officials in Washington and Havana have said these reports are not accurate. Does the Chinese foreign ministry have a comment?

Wang Wenbin: I am not aware of what you mentioned. It is well known that the US is an expert on chasing shadows and meddling in other countries internal affairs. The US is the global champion of hacking and superpower of surveillance. The US has long illegally occupied Cubas Guantanamo Bay for secretive activities and imposed a blockade on Cuba for over 60 years. The US needs to take a hard look at itself, stop interfering in Cubas internal affairs under the pretext of freedom, democracy and human rights, immediately lift its economic, commercial and financial blockade on Cuba, and act in ways conducive to improving relations with Cuba and regional peace and stability, not otherwise.

China News Service: On June 8, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a joint press availability with Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud of Saudi Arabia that were not asking anyone to choose between the US and China. Whats your comment?

Wang Wenbin: We take note of the words of the US top diplomat. We hope that US diplomatic missions across the globe will act on this commitment he made regarding not asking anyone to choose between the US and China, and be truly open-minded about other countries growing ties with China, stop bludgeoning Huawei and other Chinese firms, stop coercing allies into restricting chip exports to China, stop baiting and forcing other countries into turning away from cooperation with China and stop spreading disinformation about China such as the debt trap narrative.

George Washington once wrote, actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends. We will listen to what the US says, but more importantly, we will be watching what it does.

NHK: The Philippines launched tourism routes to islands in the South China Sea this month. People of the Philippines and other countries including journalists can visit three islands under actual control by the Philippines. How does China respond to this? Will there be any specific countermeasures?

Wang Wenbin: China has indisputable sovereignty over Nansha Islands and the adjacent waters including Zhongye Island. We call on relevant parties to respect Chinas sovereignty and refrain from actions that might complicate the situation in the South China Sea.

China Daily: China announced today that Palestinian President Abbas will pay a state visit to China. Can you share more about this visit and how China views the current China-Palestine relations and the Palestinian question? What does China expect to achieve through this visit?

Wang Wenbin: President Abbas is an old and good friend of the Chinese people and the first Arab head of state to be hosted by China this year. This speaks volumes about the high-level friendly relations between China and Palestine.

China and Palestine enjoy a traditional friendship. China is one of the first countries to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the State of Palestine. In recent years, thanks to the personal guidance of President Xi Jinping and President Abbas, the China-Palestine relations have maintained a good momentum of growth with stronger political mutual trust and deeper friendship between the two peoples. China stands ready to work with Palestine to follow through on the common understandings of leaders of the two countries and take the China-Palestine traditional friendship to new heights.

The Palestinian question is at the heart of the Middle East issue and matters to the regions peace and stability and global equity and justice. China has all along firmly supported the Palestinian peoples just cause of restoring their legitimate national rights. For ten consecutive years, President Xi Jinping has sent congratulatory messages to the special commemorative meeting in observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. More than once he put forward Chinas proposals for resolving the Palestinian question, stressing the need to resolutely advance a political settlement based on the two-state solution and intensify international efforts for peace. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China will continue to work with the international community for a comprehensive, just and enduring solution to the Palestinian question at an early date.

Reuters: Reports are saying that the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting China as soon as next week. Could the ministry provide any information about this?

Wang Wenbin: You may refer to my response to relevant questions earlier.

AFP: While on a visit to the US, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and President Biden announced what they call the Atlantic declaration: a new framework for US-UK economic cooperation. The document that they agreed upon states that the two countries face new challenges to international stability from authoritarian states, including China. How does the foreign ministry view this declaration?

Wang Wenbin: Exchange and cooperation between countries should be conducive to global and regional peace and stability and not target any third party or harm their interests. Those who seek to incite bloc confrontation based on the Cold War mentality are the real threat to international stability.

CCTV: It has been a decade since former US defense contractor Edward Snowden leaked secret documents to multiple media outlets, which revealed the shocking evidence that the US government has long been conducting massive surveillance and spying on other countries in the name of counterterrorism. This has been strongly condemned by the international community. On the tenth anniversary of the disclosure of the PRISM program, is there any comment you wish to make?

Wang Wenbin: The revelation of the PRISM program certainly brought down the facade of the US as a hacking empire. Tens years on, this champion of hacking, instead of showing any restraint, has doubled down on its hacking behavior and sought to expand its cyber theft targets. Various US eavesdropping and spying programs have surfaced  Irritant Horn, Stellar Wind, Project CAMBERDADA and Telescreen  to name just a few. The US has not only spied on the UN Secretary-General and leaders of its allies such as Germany, France, the ROK and Israel, but also legalized such practice through legislation. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows the US intelligence agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance of foreign targets. That section is set to expire by the end of this year, but the White House has declared that reauthorization of Section 702 is a top priority for the administration.

Over the past decade, it has become clearer to the international community that the US, a self-claimed champion of democracy and freedom, is in fact a violator of the rights and freedom of people across the world by abusing its high-tech prowess for theft of information. The US says it wants to keep the cyberspace safe, yet everything it does is about perpetuating its cyber predominance and expanding its cyber military alliance, which makes the US the biggest threat to cyber peace and stability. The US Clean Network is just another PRISM carefully disguised to create an unrivaled, unsupervised US-led global surveillance network. Since last year, Chinese cyber security institutions and firms have exposed US cyber attacks on China and some other countries in their reports. The US still hasnt provided an explanation to these attacks and has instead tried to use disinformation as a distraction tactic.

Darkness prevails only in the absence of light. As more and more countries become aware of the US hypocrisy, there will be less and less room for the hacking empire to continue its malignancy. The light of truth and justice will eventually prevail.

Kyodo News: On US Secretary of State Blinkens visit to China, whats Chinas attitude toward dialogue and cooperation with the US?

Wang Wenbin: Weve stated more than once that Chinas position on this issue has not changed. We are open to dialogue and communication. The important thing is that communication should not be carried out for the sake of communication, still less saying one thing but doing the opposite. The US needs to stop interfering in Chinas internal affairs and stop harming Chinas interests. It needs to stop eroding the political foundation of bilateral ties while claiming that it wants to put guardrails on the relationship. It needs to work together with China to bring bilateral relations back to the right track of sound and steady development.

CCTV: It was reported that on June 8, the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations approved the Ending Chinas Developing Nation Status Act, asking to end the treatment of China as a developing nation. What is your comment?

Wang Wenbin: The US is not labeling China a developed country out of appreciation or recognition for Chinas development success. The real motive behind ending Chinas developing country status is to hold back Chinas development.

Chinas status as the worlds largest developing country is rooted in facts and international law. Its not something that can easily be wiped away by a US Congressional bill. The rights that China is lawfully entitled to as a developing country will not be deprived just because a few politicians on the Hill say so.

According to some US lawmakers, there is concern that China would use its developing country status to evade international responsibilities. That is completely unnecessary. Chinas contribution to global economic growth and UN regular budget and peacekeeping assessments far outweighs that of most developed countries.

Its not up to the US to decide whether China is a developing country. The US can neither deny the fact that China is still a developing country, nor stop China from moving towards national rejuvenation. Rather than try to figure out how to pin the label of developed country on China, the US might want to think about how to remove its own label of a bully and hegemon.

Yomiuri Shimbun: According to a Peoples Daily report on June 4, the Chinese leader said while visiting the China National Archives of Publications and Culture that he knew of the long tradition of exchanges between Fuzhou and Liuqiu back when he was working in Fuzhou. What is the meaning of the remark?

Wang Wenbin: The Chinese side released a readout on the activity you mentioned. You may refer to that.

Beijing Youth Daily: The IAEA Board of Governors reviewed the AUKUS nuclear submarine cooperation recently. China made a statement at the meeting to point out relevant issues involved in the trilateral cooperation and called for joint efforts to advance the IAEAs inter-governmental discussion process. Representatives of more than 20 countries including Russia, Pakistan, Egypt, South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil and Argentina echoed Chinas position and proposition. Whats your comment?

Wang Wenbin: The IAEA has reviewed the AUKUS nuclear submarine cooperation for the eighth consecutive time. The review shows that the cooperation involves complex political, security, legal and technical issues and has led to serious concerns and controversy in the international community. The US, the UK and Australia claim to abide by the rules-based international order, but when it comes to their own fulfillment of non-proliferation obligations, they blatantly apply double standards and place selfish geopolitical interests above nuclear nonproliferation.

Looking back on past discussions at the IAEA, whenever the US, the UK and Australia sought to set the rules for other countries, they would always stress the importance of the intergovernmental process led by member states. However, when it comes to AUKUS nuclear submarine cooperation, all they do is thwart the intergovernmental process involving all parties, attempt to coerce the IAEA Secretariat into accepting their proposal and impose the so-called rules on other member states. What kind of rules-based behavior is that?

On the Iranian nuclear issue, the US, the UK and some other countries wouldnt budge an inch and strictly prohibits Iran from obtaining highly-enriched uranium. However, the two countries plan to transfer to Australia tonnes of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium of over 90% purity through their nuclear submarine cooperation. The contrast once again laid bare their hypocrisy on the issue of nuclear non-proliferation.

We urge the US, the UK and Australia to earnestly fulfill their international obligations on nuclear non-proliferation and stop double standard and political manipulation. We call for joint efforts by all IAEA member states to advance an open, inclusive, transparent and sustainable inter-governmental discussion process to firmly defend the international nuclear non-proliferation system, uphold the international order underpinned by international law, and advance peace and security in the world. At the same time, we hope the IAEA Secretariat will follow through the IAEA Statute and its mandate from member states, fulfill its non-proliferation duty and help advance the inter-governmental discussion process.

Bloomberg: Will Beijing host the BRICS summit in place of South Africa? When will President Xi Jinping next speak to Cyril Ramaphosa? And will the BRICS summit be on the agenda for that conversation?

Wang Wenbin: I have no information to offer on these specific questions. As to the BRICS summit, I already stated Chinas position. You may refer to it.

Reuters: The Taiwan foreign minister will reportedly make a visit to Europe next week. The minister is expected to visit Brussels and also to appear with the Czech president at one event. What is the ministrys comment on this trip?

Wang Wenbin: Let me first point out that Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinas territory. There is no so-called Taiwan foreign minister but the head of local foreign affairs department.

The one-China principle is a universally recognized norm in international relations, a prevailing consensus among the international community and the prerequisite and political foundation for China to develop friendly ties with all countries around the world. We urge the EU to understand the real nature of the Taiwan question and follow through on the commitment it has made to China on the one-China principle. Do not support the Taiwan independence forces or have any official exchanges in any name with the Taiwan region. China never wavers in its resolve of safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity. We also have a clear message for the Taiwan DPP authorities that any separatist moves and attempts to solicit foreign support are bound to fail.

The following questions were raised after the press conference:

Q: On June 8, Chinese Ambassador to the ROK Xing Haiming had a meeting with Lee Jae-myung, leader of the ROK main opposition Democratic Party. During the meeting, Ambassador Xing commented on the China-ROK relations and stressed that the current bilateral relations face considerable difficulties and the responsibility does not lie with China. The remarks made by Ambassador Xing Haiming attracted public attention in the ROK. The ROK foreign ministry expressed concerns to China over this. Whats Chinas comment?

Wang Wenbin: The current difficulties and challenges in the China-ROK relations are not caused by China. It is part of Ambassador Xings job to have extensive engagement with the ROK government, political parties and people from all walks of life, exchange views on bilateral relations and issues of mutual interest and share Chinas position and concerns. We hope that relevant parties in the ROK can put this into perspective and focus on how to face up to problems and realize the stability and growth of China-ROK relations.

Q: According to reports, an official with the ROKs Office of the President said on June 7 that recent reports about a Chinese foreign ministry official conveying the four noes position during a visit to the ROK are not true. The official also clarified that the reported dialogue between the two sides never happened. The ROK government can continue consultations with the Chinese side on issues concerning the DPRK. China has never premised dialogue with the ROK on the THAAD issue or national security issues. Whats your comment?

Wang Wenbin: The current difficulties and challenges in the China-ROK relations are not caused by China. In the recent China-ROK diplomatic consultations at the director-general level, China has clearly and explicitly stated its position and concern. The ROK side is fully aware of this. It should have an in-depth understanding of the crux of the problem, take it seriously and work with China for the sound and steady growth of China-ROK relations.

Q: It was reported that Chinese officials warned ROK officials that if Seoul crosses Beijings red line on the Taiwan question and engages in military coordination with Tokyo and Washington, China will suspend high-level diplomatic engagements and cancel cooperation on policies related to the DPRK. What is your comment?

Wang Wenbin: The Taiwan question is purely Chinas internal affair. It is at the core of Chinas core interests. Resolving the Taiwan question is a matter for the Chinese, a matter that must be resolved by the Chinese. The 1992 joint communique on the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the ROK explicitly states that the Republic of Korea recognizes the government of the Peoples Republic of China as the sole legal government of China, and respects Chinas position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China. The ROK needs to act on the spirit of the joint communique, adhere to the one-China principle and handle Taiwan-related issues in a prudent way.
The ministry plans to incorporate AI first into math, English and IT lessons and come up with electronic texts starting in 2025. Three years later it hopes to expand AI-assisted teaching to Korean, social studies and science.

That will in theory free teachers up to look after the mental welfare of students and invite them to debate and discuss issues rather than drilling hard facts into them from the blackboard.

AI programs will also be used to analyze students' strengths and weaknesses and come up with tailored teaching strategies.

The plans include using AI to answer students' questions and electronic textbook apps, according to the Education Ministry on Thursday.

Korea is pushing to use artificial intelligence in teaching students amid a growing failure of the public education system to meet the needs of its charges.

Korea will be the first country in the world to incorporate AI into public school education amid a growing awareness that schools can no longer cope with their tasks and are powering a spiral of ever more expensive after-school tutoring.

According to the ministry, the crux of the AI teaching plan is that lessons can be tailored to students' individual needs. AI textbooks will gauge a student's progress, level of understanding, time it takes him or her to solve problems, and other factors to help them study more effectively.

Teachers can then use the data to offer students feedback on how to improve their grades, while parents will be able to access information on their child's educational achievements.

Education Minister Lee Ju-ho said, "At present, teachers are able to assess the academic levels of students only after mid-term exams, but in the age of AI textbooks that will only take a few days."

The programs will feature chatbots that can answer questions from students, but only if they are pertinent to each subject to prevent frivolous use. They will also be blocked from producing the kind of Google essay that devices like ChatGTP produce.

Asked about alarming meltdowns in current AI systems, Lee Ji-won at the ministry promised that the apps will be closely screened to ensure that they only pass on "proper" information.

They will be designed not to let students who excel in a subject get ahead of the rest of the class by "peeking" at upcoming lessons. This has sparked accusations that the uniform system will slow gifted students down, but the ministry insists the aim is to ensure that 80 percent of students in a class do not lag behind.

AI will be used from third grade, while first and second graders will continue to be taught by humans.
Research led by an Indiana University astronomer challenges longstanding beliefs about the isolation of "hot Jupiters" and proposes a new mechanism for understanding the exoplanets' evolution.

While our Jupiter is far away from the sun, hot Jupiters are gas giant planets that closely orbit stars outside our solar system for an orbital period of less than 10 days. Previous studies suggested they rarely have any nearby companion planets, leading scientists to believe that hot Jupiters formed and evolved through a violent process that expelled other planets from the area as they moved closer to their host stars. The research team's findings reveal that hot Jupiters do not always orbit alone.

"Our research shows that at least a fraction of hot Jupiters cannot form through a violent process," said Songhu Wang, assistant professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences. "This is a significant contribution to advance our understanding of hot Jupiter formation, which can help us learn more about our own solar system."

Wang presented the results of the research at the June 2023 meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Researchers analyzed the full, four-year data set for hot and warm Jupiters from NASA's Kepler Mission. Warm Jupiters have a longer orbital period that ranges from 10 to 300 days. Researchers used transit timing variations to determine that at least 12% of hot Jupiters and 70% of warm Jupiters have a nearby planetary companion orbiting their host stars.

Wang and his collaborators combined their results with existing observational constraints to propose a new framework for explaining the evolution of hot and warm Jupiters and why some have companion planets. They determined that the makeup of hot and warm Jupiter systems depends on the occurrence of gas giants in the system, which impacts how much the planets interact and migrate.

The findings provide a launching point into future research about exoplanets and our solar system's planets.

"The ultimate goal for astronomers is to set our solar system into the bigger picture -- 'Are we unique?'" Wang said. "This helps us to understand why we don't have a hot Jupiter in our solar system."

Additional collaborators are Dong-Hong Wu, lecturer in the Department of Physics at Anhui Normal University, and Malena Rice, 51 Pegasi b Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and incoming professor at Yale University.

Wang has long been interested in the configurations and demographics of exoplanets. He uses observational research to try to understand their dynamics and origins, helping astronomers better understand how our solar system fits into a larger cosmic context.
Everyday materials such as paper and plastic could be transformed into electronic "smart devices" by using a simple new method to apply liquid metal to surfaces, according to scientists in Beijing, China. The study, published June 9 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, demonstrates a technique for applying a liquid metal coating to surfaces that do not easily bond with liquid metal. The approach is designed to work at a large scale and may have applications in wearable testing platforms, flexible devices, and soft robotics.

"Before, we thought that it was impossible for liquid metal to adhere to non-wetting surfaces so easily, but here it can adhere to various surfaces only by adjusting the pressure, which is very interesting," said Bo Yuan, a scientist at Tsinghua University and the first author of the study.

Scientists seeking to combine liquid metal with traditional materials have been impeded by liquid metal's extremely high surface tension, which prevents it from binding with most materials, including paper. To overcome this issue, previous research has mainly focused on a technique called "transfer printing," which involves using a third material to bind the liquid metal to the surface. But this strategy comes with drawbacks -- adding more materials can complicate the process and may weaken the end product's electrical, thermal, or mechanical performance.

To explore an alternative approach that would allow them to directly print liquid metal on substrates without sacrificing the metal's properties, Yuan and colleagues applied two different liquid metals (eGaln and BilnSn) to various silicone and silicone polymer stamps, then applied different forces as they rubbed the stamps onto paper surfaces.

"At first, it was hard to realize stable adhesion of the liquid metal coating on the substrate," said Yuan. "However, after a lot of trial and error, we finally had the right parameters to achieve stable, repeatable adhesion."

The researchers found that rubbing the liquid metal-covered stamp against the paper with a small amount of force enabled the metal droplets to bind effectively to the surface, while applying larger amounts of force prevented the droplets from staying in place.

Next, the team folded the metal-coated paper into a paper crane, demonstrating that the surface can still be folded as usual after the process is completed. And after doing so, the modified paper still maintains its usual properties.

While the technique appears promising, Yuan noted that the researchers are still figuring out how to guarantee that the liquid metal coating stays in place after it has been applied. For now, a packaging material can be added to the paper's surface, but the team hopes to figure out a solution that won't require it.

"Just like wet ink on paper can be wiped off by hand, the liquid metal coating without packaging here also can be wiped off by the object it touches as it is applied," said Yuan. "The properties of the coating itself will not be greatly affected, but objects in contact may be soiled."

In the future, the team also plans to build on the method so that it can be used to apply liquid metal to a greater variety of surfaces, including metal and ceramic.

"We also plan to construct smart devices using materials treated by this method," said Yuan.

This work was supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, the National Nature Science Foundation of China, and the cooperation funding between Nanshan and Tsinghua SIGS in science and technology.
Over the past two decades, Afghanistan has been one of the regions of the world that the media has documented the most. Even so, when it comes to getting a general idea of the situation in this war-ravaged country, we face many myths that underlie and complicate our interpretation. Interest in the country has been tailed off after the withdrawal of international troops from Afghan territory in 2021. That led Cristina de Middel and Lorenzo Meloni to revisit the narratives surrounding one of the countries that has been a main player on the world stage since the turn of the 21st century.

Image from 'The Kabuler'. Cristina de Middel & Lorenzo Meloni / Magnum Photos, 2023. Cristina de Middel & Lorenzo Meloni (Magum Photos 2023)

In January last year, the two photographers traveled the length and breadth of Afghanistan to document a new period in its history marked by the Talibans return to power after 20 years of war with the United States. Their intention was to gather enough information, in thirty days, to shape The Kabuler. Its authors conceived the publication as a nod towards Western weeklies and the special issues that magazines often devote to places or topics that are not under constant scrutiny. The magazine-format publication is made up of interviews, reports, opinion articles, lighthearted sections that also include humor, and texts by several contributors. In it, the duo aims to offer a more unusual look at Afghan society and to provide a space for the different voices that make it up.

One of those voices is Mullah Abdullah Sarhadis, the one-eyed governor of Bamiyan. He was one of the men responsible for the destruction of the giant Buddhas in his province. He is also implicated in the massacre of the Hazaras, and is an Guantanamo ex-convict. More recently he has been accused of overseeing the looting of Buddhist antiquities in the area. In an interview, he introduces us to this melting pot of experiences that will also lead us on to discover one of the discreet beauty parlors where women paint their nails (for which they can have their fingers cut off), have their hair curled, or put in hair extensions that will be hidden under the burqa. In one of her features, journalist and writer Jean Marie Ward compares George Lucas Star Wars to the war in Afghanistan, based on what an Al Qaeda fighter told CIA officer Amaryllis Fox: What you dont realize is that, in the rest of the world, you are the Empire. We are Luke and Han. Similarly, the past glories of the mujahideen and Taliban are on display in the Jihad museum, a symbol of a divided present rather than a shared past, as Johan Faes points out; while colorful rickshaws and their drivers, who work up to 15 hours a day to earn about four dollars (wages have been halved since the return of the Taliban), make up the chapter dedicated to the engine. Cooking, fashion, a word puzzle and, of course, a classifieds section, in which a stocky member of the Taliban with a gun invites us to celebrate whatever we like at the Stars Palace, complete the other themes. The relaxed publication is dotted with powerful portraits and unusual images of everyday life in the Middle Eastern country.

Image from The Kabuler. Cristina de Middel & Lorenzo Meloni / Magnum Photos, 2023. Cristina de Middel & Lorenzo Meloni (Magum Photos 2023)

Both photographers are part of the Magnum agency (of which De Middel has been president since last year). The Spanish photographers career has been defined by a conceptual photography through which she plays with reality. Her photographs question the excess of truth that is granted to the photographic medium as an authenticating document. In contrast, Melonis work is framed in the depiction of different armed conflicts and the toll they take on people and the landscape. Their different approaches to photography would serve to reflect the coexistence of the two complementary tendencies (documentary and artistic) that are the backbone of their cooperative work. It was precisely as a result of a conversation the authors had about whether art and photojournalism, fiction and truth, can coexist or not, that the idea of joining the two visual languages came about, and that gave shape to the project about a country unknown to both photographers. We decided to give it a try, De Middel explains. This was experimental work in which we would not give any of the approaches special treatment. Meloni is a war photographer. His photography is the result of a more exhaustive approach. His photos need to be explained, while I work in a more conceptual field where I dont need so many checks, just visual anchor points that allow me to speak with images. However, this project has taught me to be more thorough and more demanding.

Since its foundation, Magnum has fought to defend the independence of its members (whether or not the medium in which the photographers publish is independent is beyond its control). More than for truth or objectivity, the fight is for the photographers personal voice, De Middel says. When many subjectivities are added together one gets as close as one can to the truth. A single explanation of things in a world as complex as the one we live in is nonsense. The moment we understand that to get closer to objectivity, or to the truth, we have to bring together the maximum number of opinions and subjectivities, maybe we will make some progress, she adds.

Image from The Kabuler. Cristina de Middel & Lorenzo Meloni / Magnum Photos, 2023. Cristina de Middel & Lorenzo Meloni (Magum Photos 2023)

Similarly, behind The Kabuler is the need to remind the public of the importance of seeking new narrative formulas in a world continually transformed by technology. If a few years ago the media had exhausted its ways to explain things, we are now experiencing a reinvention, says the photographer. Newspapers are more visual than ever. There are interactive and multimedia pages in the digital versions of newspapers. But even so, the perspective given to the issues, not only through photography but also in the text, is almost always the same. For example, with the war in Ukraine we are seeing that only one point of view is being offered. Im not saying one is true and the other is a lie, but other versions of the war are published in Russia and Putin-friendly countries. The Kabuler tries to emphasize the need to incorporate all that we have missed in order to decipher the complexities of a conflict.

The publication also alludes to the difficulty readers have in navigating between a constant flow of information and the tendency to succumb to platitudes, which would appear to simplify our understanding of the world. Hence, one of the articles offers a list of the 12 most cliched representations of Afghanistan, put together with the help of ChatGPT: Regarding the use of artificial intelligence, I think we are at a very tricky point in time because we dont know how far this can go, or the consequences, says De Middel. Im afraid that controlling it is going to be difficult. Its as if we had given a Formula 1 car to a child to drive around central Madrid. I believe that in the field of photography the consequences are going to be terrible in terms of fake images, but this is precisely what will cause the authorities to take corrective measures. Manipulating the audience is a very serious matter.

This project was born with the hope that it will continue. We will continue to expand the publication, says De Middel. We want it to be a kind of structure for the Magnum family. Or maybe it will be just the two of us, if no one else is up for it, so that we can continue to increase peoples understanding and demystify places that are very stigmatized.
First comes the admiration, then the conquest, then contempt, followed by imitation and plagiarism. There, it becomes clear that no one ever fully conquers, and no one is ever fully defeated. After proclaiming himself to have won the Battle of Platea against the Persians in 479 A.C., the Spartan general Pausanias entered the camp of the emperor Xerxes, where he found tents full of gold and silver furniture bowls, goblets, and cups, all made of gold, writes the historian Herodotus. Surrounded by embroidered tapestries he could barely believe what his eyes saw.

The father of history contributed to the Persian stereotype that justified the Greek victory. The keywords are contained in that last phrase, he could barely believe what his eyes saw. That was a world based on perception, and Herotodus steers us toward a story that explains how the small network of city-states that were the Greeks achieved such spectacular victories in their fight against the biggest empire known until then, which lay in wait from its eastern border, explains James Fraser, curator for Ancient Levant and Anatolia at the British Museum and one of those behind the exhibition Luxury and power: Persia to Greece. When they found this world of refinement, the conclusion of the text was clear: no one was surprised that the Persians had lost. They had become corrupt, weak and effeminate because of a life of luxury. They had become a decadent people, Fraser says.

Through decorative objects and luxury utensils, collected from the different corners of that empire  from present-day Greece to Asia Minor, on the Turkish coast, passing through Italy, Afghanistan or Bulgaria , the museum recounts how the Achaemenid dynasty founded by Cyrus II the Great used, for more than 500 years, the brilliance and seduction of jewels, tableware and clothing to establish and mark its political authority. The satraps who ruled the Persian domains imitated this luxury, albeit with more modest budgets. Tyrian purple, or royal purple, which Phoenician artisans in Lebanon and North Africa extracted from the murex sea snail, was a color associated with power at the Achaemenid court. A cuneiform tablet from Iraq contains instructions for achieving a similar color through plant extracts  the imitation of luxury as an aspiration for power.

The history of luxury encompasses much more than the binary tale of Persia and Greece. Whats more, that Greco-Persian world was actually a network of hundreds of groups with different cultures. And this exhibition helps to understand how the different styles of luxury connected those cultures, despite the political borders that divided them, explains the director of the British Museum, Hartwig Fischer.

The golden funerary crown from Turkey, originally from the Macedonian court, one of the stars of the exhibition. BRITISH MUSEUM

The only drawback in the exhibition is the decoration of silk gauze and false Greek columns, which give the appearance of a theme park against the material displayed. The displays show off rings, bracelets, necklaces and plates, alongside the stars of the show: the elaborate rhytons, or pouring glasses, of gold and silver, that the Persian aristocracy used in their libation ceremonies, to drink an exquisite wine  without watering it down, unlike the Greeks. In one hand, diners held the rhyton, and in the other the deep plate into which the broth was poured little by little. Balance was a symbol of elegance and measure. I always think of Coco Chanels phrase, the French designer: Luxury begins where necessity ends. If you are using these delicate vessels to pour the wine, clearly the rite goes beyond necessity. It is a way of celebrating the authority of the Persian monarch, who collects the most delicate resources and uses the best craftsmen that exist throughout his empire, explains Fraser.

From Greek modesty to Alexandrian luxury

The exhibition contains several pieces of the Thracian treasure from Panagyurishte, the Bulgarian city where the Deikov brothers, who were digging to extract clay in 1949, found more than six kilos of gold in the form of rhytons, amphoras and oenochoes (wine jugs), all decorated with scenes from Greek mythology and Homers Iliad.

The Thracian treasure from Panagyurishte, six kilos of gold found in 1949 in Bulgaria. BRITISH MUSEUM

Greek contempt for the Persians did not encompass their luxury and refinement. The wealthy classes imitated  with moderation  a style and elegance they admired. Nothing in excess, said the inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Athens, for example, rose in power and wealth after the Greco-Persian wars, and lavish items from the East arrived in abundance. Personal ostentation was considered a threat to stability and social order, however, so the Athenians sought ways to imitate, in clay and less noble metals, the sophistication of their political enemies.

Alexander the Great brought a sort of synthesis. His sculptures imitate the splendor of the Persian emperors or the Egyptian pharaohs. He defeated an empire, forged one of his own, raised a new Hellenic era in which he retained some of the Persian governors or satraps, established his court in the tent of Darius III, and embraced the luxury and symbols of power that the ancient Greeks had so hated. The Panagyurishte treasure, from the Thracian court, is a reflection of this synthesis, as is the pure gold funerary crown from Turkey, the central object of the exhibition, which demonstrates the acceptance of luxury in the confines of the Alexandrian empire after his death in 323 B.C.

At the entrance to the exhibition, like a challenging hieroglyph, two glass showcases face the busts, in stone and bronze, one of a Persian with ringlets and a snailed beard  presumably smeared with perfumed oil  and one of the Greek god Apollo, with a simple and youthful face. Simple and pure Greece against decadent Persia? It is not so clear: both sculptures were discovered in Cyprus. They come from the 5th century B.C. and it is very possible that they shared a temple, because Apollo and the plague god Resef were worshiped in the same place.

Now we suffer the calamities of a long peace. Luxury has settled among us, crueler than combat, thus avenging the world we once conquered. Dirty money imported foreign modes and mannered wealth that corrupted our era with sickening decadence, wrote the Roman poet Juvenal. His words close an exhibition with a moral: luxury is irresistible, but it needs a culprit to justify its excesses.

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Mali: un Casque bleu tue, 4 gravement blesses dans une attaque dans le nord

Un Casque bleu a ete tue et quatre autres grievement blesses vendredi au cours d'une attaque pres de Tombouctou dans le nord du Mali, pays en proie a la propagation jihadiste et aux violences de toutes sortes, a indique la mission de l'ONU Minusma.





Une patrouille "a ete la cible d'une attaque complexe" pres de Ber ou elle a d'abord heurte une mine avant d'essuyer des tirs, a rapporte la Minusma sur Twitter, des informations confirmees a l'AFP par une porte-parole.








A Ukrainian tank on Wednesday near Chasiv Yar (Donetsk region). Iryna Rybakova (AP)

In an operation that could run for weeks or even months, Ukraine is trying to make a dent in the territory gained by the Russian army following the major invasion launched in February of last year. Clashes between local troops and Russian invaders in the southeast of the country have intensified in recent hours, particularly in the region of Zaporizhzhia, according to anonymous Ukrainian and Western testimonies, in a sign that the expected Ukrainian counteroffensive is consolidating. The first signs of the long-awaited military operation were recorded on Monday.

The setting for this new battle is Zaporizhzhia, the strategic region where Ukraine is trying to break the corridor that allows Russia to connect the Crimean peninsula, illegally annexed in 2014, with the Donbas (the territory which includes the occupied regions of Donetsk and Lugansk). Zaporizhzhia is also home to Europes largest nuclear power plant, occupied by Russian forces since March 2022. There are indications that German-made Leopard tanks which Kyiv has received from different European countries are already fighting there, according to some images circulating on social media and according to Russian military sources. Meanwhile, Ukraine claims that it continues to advance on enemy positions in Bakhmut (Donetsk region), a town that Russia almost completely controls since May, after long months of fierce fighting.

Some of the confirmations of the large military operation have even come from President Volodymyr Zelenskiys entourage, according to the U.S. network ABC, although the president himself has kept silent in public in order to not hinder the campaign. One of the latest developments has taken place around the city of Orijiv, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said on Telegram. Zelenskiy had already acknowledged at the end of May in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that they had everything ready for the counteroffensive. The government and the army insisted that the operation would not be officially and publicly launched, but, at the same time, they have not failed to offer hints about its imminence over the last few weeks.

The Russian command itself has also acknowledged that Ukraine has launched a serious attack in the last hours in Zaporizhzhia, a region 80% controlled by Moscow, but, according to the Russian Minister of Defense, Serguei Shoigu, they have managed to repel it, causing serious casualties among the 1,500 Ukrainian troops. Three of the Leopard tanks were destroyed, according to Russian military sources quoted by Reuters. In another sign that this new phase in the war has already begun, the British Ministry of Defense noted in its daily report that the local army has taken the initiative on the battlefield. Two U.S. media outlets, ABC and The Washington Post, reported that the counteroffensive had begun on Thursday, although local authorities continue to refuse to offer any confirmation. A senior U.S. official told The New York Times that fighting has intensified in the southeast. In the face of this official silence, even local Ukrainian media are quoting foreign media.

Members of the Ukrainian emergency services carrying out a drill on Wednesday in Zaporizhia, in the area under Kyiv's control. Andriy Andriyenko (AP)

Top military officers have also spoken out. The time has come to take back what is ours, a video published by the head of the Armed Forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, said on May 27, giving his blessing to the great operation to retake lost ground. Our heroic soldiers are going on the offensive to liberate Ukraine from Russian occupiers and raise the banner of victory, added the announcement, laced with military epic and inspired by the century-old work of local author Osip Mashchak.

These developments suggest that this weeks bursting of the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro river and the flooding of dozens of villages in the Kherson region were not enough to significantly alter the plans that Kyiv had been cooking up for months. Some analysts, without concluding precisely that it was the Russians who blew up the dam, nevertheless consider that it could have been a strategy to try to prevent the Ukrainian advance, as the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has shown.

On the ground, the water has forced a Russian withdrawal to positions from where it is difficult to continue attacking Ukrainian positions on the western side of the river with its artillery, which it had been shelling almost daily. This has forced them to move five to 15 kilometers beyond the flooded areas, according to the spokeswoman for the Armed Forces Southern Command, Natalia Humeniuk. Two-thirds of the flooded area is under Russian control, according to local authorities in Kherson.

Zelenskiys visit

Without referring to aspects directly related to the counteroffensive, President Zelenskiy went to the area on Thursday to closely follow the rescue work and keep up-to-date with the consequences. The Kremlin announced that President Vladimir Putin has no plans to travel to the flooded localities under the control of his military. Attacks are continuing from the Russian side on the western bank of the Dnipro while Ukrainian emergency teams are carrying out rescue work.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Thursday in Kherson. MYKOLA TYMCHENKO (EFE)

In total, nine people have been injured, including two members of the rescue services, according to sources from that body and the governor of Kherson. The pro-Russian authorities in power on the eastern side of the river accused Ukraine of also launching attacks that killed two people. Five others were reportedly killed by the floods.

Having overcome the major obstacle in the first weeks of the invasion, which was to stop the Kremlin troops in their attempt to seize Kyiv, the local army has since carried out two successful counter-offensives. One, last September, enabled it to recapture almost the entire Kharkov region in the northeast. Another, in November, made it possible to expel the Russians from the western bank of the Dnipro river and to liberate the city of Kherson, the only provincial capital which had been seized in the full-scale invasion launched on February 24 last year.

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During the worst parts of the pandemic, when humans hid in our houses to escape from the virus, many animals began wandering through our cities. Although many of the videos of panthers, deer or badgers treading on asphalt turned out to be faked or recorded before the coronavirus, the exceptional situation has permitted scientists to analyze the flexibility of animal behavior. A work by 175 scientists, following 3,000 mammals during the strictest lockdown periods of the pandemic, has confirmed that they moved and approached highways more than usual. But the increase in mobility only occurred over long stretches and in zones where confinement was strictest. The authors of the study, published in Science, believe that not only human infrastructure harms wildlife: the mere presence of humans does, too.

The environmental impact of human constructions has been widely studied. On the borders of Asia and Europe, there are more than 30,000 kilometers of fences. On the European continent alone, one million artificial barriers interfere with the natural course of rivers. And half of Spain is less than a kilometer from a highway. Artificial interventions in the landscape, like roads and railways, have a triple negative effect: they put up barriers, insert humans and invasive species into the depths of wildlife, and, as has been seen with lynxes, they multiply traffic accidents. But what really affects wildlife: infrastructure or humans use of it? It isnt easy to separate them. Only on exceptional occasions, like the creation of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, has it been possible to study the changes in animal behavior in the absence of humans. One such exception was the coronavirus lockdown, and scientists have used it to study humans true impact.

The study published in Science shows that animals approached highways up to 36% more during the relevant period. To measure it, scientists traced the journeys of 2,300 animals of 43 species in dozens of countries, thanks to the GPS collars they wore. But this increased closeness to roads only occurred in areas with a high human footprint, with a significant presence of infrastructure, agriculture and urbanized environments, and in regions with strict confinement measures.

The researchers used two metrics: the total distance traveled in 10 days and the distance traveled in an hour, representing the two extremes in travel patterns. The studys principal author, Radboud University researcher Marlee Tucker, says that during the lockdown animals traveled distances up to 73% longer than in the same period of 10 days of the previous year, when there was no lockdown. The comparison with 2019 is one of the studys strengths. The researchers have spent years following the same animals, and they compared the data with pre-pandemic times.

Animals traveled distances up to 73% longer than in the same 10-day period the previous year. Marlee Tucker, researcher at the Radboud University Nijmegen and lead author of the study

When it comes to animals that travel smaller distances, the opposite happened: the animals shortened their movements. The response varied between individuals and species. Some traveled longer distances and others shorter, but on average there was a 12% decrease, Tucker says in an email. We dont have the necessary data to measure the impact of the change on the animals, however, for some, it could be a pretty significant decrease, she adds. These changes in pattern could be due to the fact that, in humans absence, the movements to avoid and escape from them decreased between February and May 2020, coinciding with the most severe months of lockdown, according to the studys authors.

During the lockdown, large mammals easily crossed highways. MARK GOCKE

The Spaniard Nuria Selva, researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences, spent all of the lockdown in the Biaowieza National Park, one of the last virgin forests in Europe. As co-author of the study, she emphasizes that the changes in animal movement patterns depend on the degree of the lockdown: The reduction was less in semi-urbanized and semi-natural zones. In those areas there were still people, as in parks, where human presence increased by more than 200%, she says.

Beyond mobility, human presence can also affect animals physiology. In an unpublished study, Selva has demonstrated that cortisol levels  an indicator of stress  decreased in bears and chamois in Polands Montes Tatras National Park during the months of the lockdown.

A road where no one passes is not a barrier, the barrier is the traffic, it is us. Nuria Selva, researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Huelva

Selva points out another important aspect of the study: It has allowed us to separate the impact of human infrastructure and humans. A highway where no one travels isnt a barrier. The barrier is the traffic; the barrier is us. Between 2013 and 2015, the Boise State University biologist Jesse Barber carried out a series of experiments with traffic. He recorded highway sounds and played them in natural environments where there was no asphalt. His results showed that on the so-called ghost highways, a significant percentage of birds disappeared. During the pandemic, the opposite phenomenon was observed: birds sang at lower frequencies and communicated better.

University of A Coruna biologist Alejandro Martinez Abrain notes the studys statistical power, but he points out that the change in movement patterns has only been observed in areas with a greater human footprint, in severe lockdown conditions and on the extremes of animal movement. He also points out that the presence of wild animals in cities has not been studied.

A raccoon walks through a near-deserted Central Park in Manhattan, April 16, 2020. JOHANNES EISELE (AFP)

Not all animals prefer for people to move around less, Martinez Abrain says. For example, when it comes to highways, many prey species prefer for there to be a lot of movement, because that causes what in ecology is called a scarecrow effect, scaring away predators. Starlings gather at crossroads, where they cant be hunted. Red kite birds fly over railways looking for food. Rabbits nest alongside roads.

For the university professor, the changes in animal mobility patterns do not have to do with confinement. We have to go back to the abandonment of the countryside. Animals have spent six or seven decades losing their fear of humans, urbanites who wont do anything to them. Covid didnt change that, the abandonment of the countryside did. What happened during the pandemia is that they took a step closer, and we realized something that was already happening.

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Dutch citizen Joran van der Sloot is driven in a police vehicle from a maximum-security prison to an airport to be extradited to the U.S., on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, Thursday, June 8, 2023.

Joran van der Sloot, the chief suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway, arrived in the United States from Peru on Thursday to face charges that he attempted to extort money from the missing teens mother.

An FBI-operated plane carrying van der Sloot landed at Birminghams Shuttlesworth Airport about 2:30 p.m.  just hours after Peruvian authorities handed him over temporarily to U.S. custody  and the suspect was escorted down the steps into a black SUV, which brought him to a local jail.

Van der Sloot is scheduled to be arraigned in federal court in Birmingham at 11 a.m. Friday, according to court records. Kevin Butler, an attorney listed as van der Sloots public defender, did not return an email seeking comment on the case.

The suspect has been serving a 28-year sentence in Peru after confessing to killing a Peruvian woman. He is wanted in the U.S. on one count each of extortion and wire fraud  the only charges to have ever linked the Dutch citizen to Holloways disappearance on the Caribbean island of Aruba. He was handed over to the U.S. roughly a month after both countries agreed on his extradition.

Holloways mother, Beth Holloway, said she was overcome with mixed emotions.

As a mother who has tirelessly pursued justice for the abduction and murder of my precious daughter, I stand before you today with a heart both heavy with sorrow and yet lifted by a glimmer of hope, she said in a written statement. For 18 years, I have lived with the unbearable pain of Natalees loss. Each day has been filled with unanswered questions and a longing for justice that has eluded us at every turn. But today ... I am hopeful that some small semblance of justice may finally be realized.

Natalee Holloway, 18, was on a high school graduation trip with classmates in Aruba when she vanished. She was last seen leaving a bar with van der Sloot in 2005. Van der Sloot was questioned in Holloways disappearance, but never charged. U.S. prosecutors said that in 2010, van der Sloot reached out to Beth Holloway, seeking $250,000 to disclose the location of the young womans body. A grand jury indicted him that year on one count each of wire fraud and extortion.

A judge declared Holloway dead, but her body has never been found.

Video and photos released by Peruvian authorities Thursday showed van der Sloot wearing jeans and a black puffer jacket, shaking his shoulders and grimacing as officers adjusted his handcuffs and removed an Interpol-marked vest. Footage and images also showed van der Sloot in a conference room with law enforcement officers from Peru, the FBI and Interpol, and a health care professional.

Holloways mysterious disappearance sparked years of news coverage and countless true-crime podcasts.

In 2012, van der Sloot pleaded guilty in Peru to killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores, a business student from a prominent Peruvian family. She was killed in 2010 five years to the day after Holloways disappearance.

Van der Sloot married a Peruvian woman in July 2014 in a ceremony at a maximum-security prison. He was transferred among Peruvian prisons in response to reports that he enjoyed privileges such as television, internet access and a cellphone, and accusations that he had threatened to kill a warden.

A 2001 treaty between Peru and the U.S. allows a suspect to be temporarily extradited to face trial in the other country. Van der Sloots attorney, Maximo Altez, initially indicated his client would not challenge his extradition but that changed Monday when he filed a writ of habeas corpus. A judge ruled against van der Sloot the following day.

The time that van der Sloot ends up spending in the U.S. will be extended until the conclusion of the criminal proceedings, including the appeal process, should there be one, according to a resolution published in Perus federal register. The resolution also states that U.S. authorities agree to return van der Sloot to the custody of Peru afterward.

Joyce Vance, a federal prosecutor in Alabama when van der Sloot was charged, said his arrival in the Southern U.S. state is a long-awaited opportunity for justice.

We always say that justice delayed is justice denied, and theres a certain simple truth to that, said Vance, the former U.S. attorney for the northern district of Alabama, which includes Birmingham. But this case makes me think sometimes justice delayed is actually worth it. Its not optimal. Its not what anybody would have wanted at the outset, but justice delayed is better than justice never delivered.

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Donald Trump was indicted on Thursday over his handling of classified documents. The Republican, who is seeking a return to the White House in 2024, has become the first former president to face criminal charges for federal crimes in the United States. This judicial procedure adds to a long list that the controversial politician has been dragging through the courts. His latest run for the presidency has now been put to the test by a grand jury. This is a variation on the traditional court system we are used to seeing in movies and TV series. In 95% of cases, this procedure results in indictments.

The indictment against Trump, the second so far in 2023, has sent seismic ripples through U.S. politics. Especially among the Republican Party. Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, has criticized the move, unveiled by the former president on his social network, Truth Social. It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him, the congressman wrote on Twitter.

In reality, Trumps new judicial troubles have been the outcome of a grand jury convened in Miami. Unlike ordinary trials, composed of a judge, 12 jurors, and attorneys for the prosecution and the defense, this indictment has been decided by a panel composed of 23 people. At least 12 had to vote to indict the former president on what appears so far to be seven counts, including: willful retention of national security documents in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Trump could be sentenced to several years in prison if found guilty. For the time being, the politician is due to be arraigned Tuesday at 3.00 pm in a district court in the city.

Grand jury indictments are often controversial, especially because the accusation is decided in complete secrecy, something that contrasts with the absolute transparency that is the aspiration of regular court trials. Grand jury sessions are conducted over a longer period of time, which can range from 18 to 36 months. During this time, a special counsel is appointed, in this case Jack Smith, who presents the evidence they have been able to obtain to support the prosecution. This time it was witness testimonies, security camera footage from Trumps Florida mansion, Mar-a-Lago, and other documentary evidence. Jury members meet at least once a week or a couple of times a month to evaluate these elements.

All of this takes place behind closed doors. Neither a judge nor a defense attorney is present at the trial. Unlike ordinary trials, where the prosecution must prove the case beyond reasonable doubt, the goal of prosecutors is to convince a majority of the grand jury that they have a strong enough case to secure a conviction in court and before a judge; a process that can take months and even years. According to the Department of Justices Bureau of Justice Statistics, 95-99% of cases presented to a grand jury result in an indictment.

This high percentage has provoked criticism of the procedure. In March, when news broke that Trump had been indicted for paying hush money to the porn actress known as Stormy Daniels, former Vice President Mike Pence (who is trying to secure the 2024 Republican nomination) recalled an old saying popular in law schools: You can indict a ham sandwich, he said on CNN. The former Indiana governors words to journalist Wolf Blitzer underscore how easy it is to secure an indictment via grand jury.

Now begins the most arduous task for the Office of the Special Counsel, which must prepare for the case to move through a court of law. For the time being, Trump must appear before a judge next week. The magistrate will then determine the ex-presidents bail conditions. After that, the prosecution led by Smith must share the evidence against Trump with the White House hopefuls lawyers. A trial date should be set in the next 70 days, although this is not derailing Trumps ambitions to regain power,

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Donald Trumps new indictment, this time for violation of laws protecting classified documents, may not be his last. The former U.S. president and current Republican White House hopeful faces numerous pending legal cases for matters including the alleged illegal use of campaign funds, his role in a mob assault on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, and attempts to alter the outcome of the November 2020 election.

The real estate tycoon is due to appear next Tuesday in a federal court in Miami, as he himself has posted on his social networks. This is not the first occasion the former TV celebrity has been summoned to court in recent times.

Trump became the first former U.S. president to be formally indicted last March when Manhattan prosecutors charged him with 34 counts of falsifying accounting records. The charges pertained to hush money paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels on his behalf by his former confidant, Michael Cohen, in 2016. Any news about their alleged sexual relationship could have harmed his election campaign at the time. Trump pleaded not guilty at an arraignment hearing, after which the trial date was set for March 25, 2024, when the Republican primary season will be in full swing.

The former presidents lawyers are trying to get the case moved from the Manhattan courts to a federal court.

The White House hopeful returned to the New York courts in April, this time for a civil case. Writer E Jean Carroll accused him of a rape that occurred in the 1990s and of defaming her after she broke the story in 2019. A jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and ordered him to pay the plaintiff $5 million in compensation. The former presidents lawyers are seeking a reduction of the fine or a new trial.

But the most significant cases, both in terms of the criminal consequences they may entail and the political repercussions they may unleash, are yet to come.

The assault on the Capitol

Special counsel Jack Smith has led the probe into classified documents found in Trumps possession at his Mar-a-Largo residence, in Florida. On behalf of the Justice Department, he also investigated the former presidents role in the events following his defeat in the November 2020 election that culminated in the storming of the Capitol.

The former vice president and Trumps current rival in the Republican race for the White House, Mike Pence, testified before a grand jury in Washington in April after Trump lost an appeal seeking to block his former running mate from appearing.

That investigation also examines a plot that would have presented false lists of electors  the representatives of the states that on January 6, 2021 were to present the votes of their constituencies in Congress and confirm Joe Bidens triumph in the elections  and thus prevent legislators from certifying the Democrat as the new president of the United States.

A special House of Representatives committee set up to investigate the assault recommended that the Justice Department bring charges against Trump for conspiracy to make a false official statement and incitement to insurrection, among other grounds for prosecution.

Election interference in Georgia

In Georgia, the Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (a Democrat) is investigating whether Trump and others associated with him attempted to alter the outcome of the 2020 election in that state.

The investigation stems from a call by the then-president to the local secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, instructing him to find enough votes to overturn Bidens lead in those elections. But it has since expanded to include, among other things, other calls made by Trump and his associates to Georgia officials after the election, and baseless allegations of voter fraud made to state lawmakers.

Willis has hinted that possible indictments will come before September 1. In a letter to County Superior Court Chief Judge Ural Glanville, she noted that much of her staff will be working remotely for the first three weeks of August and has asked judges not to schedule in-person trials and hearings during that time for security reasons.

Experts believe Trump may have violated at least three election laws in that state and may be charged with conspiracy to commit voter fraud, criminal solicitation to perpetrate voter fraud, and intentional interference in the conduct of election duties.

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HSBC has temporarily withdrawn mortgage deals for new borrowers due to a surge in demand ahead of expected rate rises. The bank said on Thursday it would remove all its new business residential and buy-to-let products, with deals becoming available again on Monday.  Guardian

The consumer group Which? has reported Tesco to the UKs competition watchdog over the supermarkets failure to provide detailed pricing information on its loyalty card offers. The group said the UKs largest retailer had not clearly explained the unit price of deals for its Clubcard holders  such as the price per 100g or 100ml  so that shoppers could easily compare value for money between different sized packages, bottles, brands and retailers.  Guardian

Jeremy Hunt is preparing to soften the Governments windfall tax on oil and gas companies after warnings of a jobs bloodbath in the North Sea. The Chancellor could announce changes to the so-called energy profits levy as soon as Friday, The Telegraph understands, following intense lobbying by the industry.  Telegraph

Three of Americas biggest investment banks could cut their ties with Crispin Odeys investment firm over allegations that the fund manager is facing more than a dozen accusations of sexual assault and harassment. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase are reviewing their relationships with Odey Asset Management after allegations that Odey harassed or assaulted 13 women, according to an investigation by the Financial Times, which also said that the City regulator had opened an inquiry two years ago which is believed to be continuing.  The Times

France is claiming victory over Germany in the battle to lure bankers from London, attracting thousands of finance jobs with a little help from Emily in Paris. The TV series appears to have helped convince bankers that the Parisian lifestyle offers perks that Frankfurt cannot match.  The Times
KYODO NEWS - Jun 9, 2023 - 12:10 | All, Japan

Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako will visit Indonesia for seven days from June 17, the Japanese government said Friday, marking their first official goodwill visit abroad since the emperor ascended the throne in 2019.

The couple will attend events including a luncheon with Indonesian President Joko Widodo where the emperor will deliver a speech.

The planned visit, approved by the Cabinet, comes as Japan and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations mark this year the 50th anniversary of friendly ties. Indonesia is the 2023 ASEAN chair.

The couple received an invitation from Widodo in August 2019, according to the Imperial Household Agency.

Empress Masako, who has long battled a stress-induced illness, will determine whether to attend individual events depending on her condition, the agency said.

The couple is scheduled to meet with the president and his wife and have luncheon at the palace in Bogor, near Jakarta, on June 19. They will offer flowers the following day at the Kalibata Heroes' Cemetery, which honors those who fought for Indonesia's independence.

From June 21, the emperor will travel alone to Yogyakarta, an ancient city in central Java, to attend a dinner hosted by the governor of the special province in which it is located.

The plan also includes visits to a high-speed railway constructed with Japan's economic assistance and a university engaging in Japanese-language education, as well as a meeting with Japanese residents in Indonesia.

Related coverage:

Japan emperor, empress celebrate 30th wedding anniversary
Commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal addressed the progress on the India-EU free trade agreement with his French counterpart Oliver Becht on the sidelines of the G20 ministerial meeting in Indonesia. Both sides discussed progress on India-EU FTA negotiations and also identified how a broad-based and balanced trade deal can help to diversify & secure supply chains benefiting both countries, Goyal tweeted.

India and the EU restarted talks for a comprehensive free trade agreement earlier this year after a gap of nine years. The two sides concluded the first round of negotiations for Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreements (BTIA), including the Geographical Indicators (GI) on 1 July. Indias FTA negotiations are being led by chief negotiator Nidhi Mani Tripathi, joint secretary, the Department of Commerce and EU is being represented by its chief negotiator, Christophe Kiener. The second round of negotiations is scheduled to take place in October 2022 in Brussels. Currently, the EU is Indias second-largest trading partner after the US, and the second largest destination for Indian exports.

Goyal also met the South African Minister of Trade and Industry, Ebrahim Patel on the sidelines and discussed ways to expand trade and investment between India and South Africa to further deepen ties between the two countries." The three-day trade, investment, and industry ministerial meeting of the Group of G20 nations kicked off on Wednesday in Bali, Indonesia. The Member Nations discussed critical trade concerns like access to markets, creating sustainable supply chains, and World Trade Organization (WTO) reform, among others.

The earlier talks for the India-EU free-trade agreement were suspended in 2013 after 16 rounds of negotiations since 2007, in view of sharp differences on crucial issues. The EU insisted that India scrap or cut high import duties on sensitive products such as automobiles, alcoholic beverages and dairy products, and open up legal services.

Similarly, Indias demand included higher access to the EU market for its skilled professionals, among others. The earlier talks for the India-EU free-trade agreement were suspended in 2013 after 16 rounds of agreements since 2007, in view of sharp differences on crucial issues. The EU insisted that India scrap or cut high import duties on sensitive products such as automobiles, alcoholic beverages and dairy products, and open up legal services.
IT major HCL Tech has introduced advanced 5G technology test labs at Ambattur and Sholinganallur in Chennai to help telecom infrastructure original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to test and validate 5G solutions. IT major HCL Tech has launched advanced 5G technology test labs at Ambattur and Sholinganallur in Chennai to help telecom infrastructure original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to test and validate 5G solutions.

The facilities can accommodate over 100 people, and the group is set to be a mix of existing HCLTech staff and new hires, a company spokesperson said. The investment in these centres remains undisclosed.

It is equipped with high-end scanners that enable OEMs to test large cellular base stations as well as small form factor antennas used in mobile phones, smart gadgets, health monitoring systems and remote surveillance systems.

The team in the labs will also be leveraged to develop tools and frameworks that are necessary in the field for 5G and also to develop PoCs for enterprise 5G use cases of global enterprises. It will also provide hands-on training for HCLTech employees. RF/antenna design, development, testing and validation, network slicing etc. will be some of the key skill sets of people working in the lab.

Were committed to advancing next-gen mobile telephony with the highest levels of quality, performance and technology. We have a team of highly experienced and skilled engineers to test and verify cellular and non-cellular products with great precision, Vijay Guntur, President, Engineering and R&D Services, HCLTech, said.
Monitoring for employee monitoring has become a hot trending topic as more and more people refuse to go back to the office in favor of working remotely but it has left a sour taste with employees being monitored because they dont feel like they are being trusted.

An anonymous source reported that, At first I thought that it would be like signing in to work but I realized that it was sending snapshots of what I was doing to my employer and it felt like such a gross invasion of privacy.

The employee first noticed an employee monitoring software installed on his company laptop when he joined the company and he quickly noticed that it was taking screenshots of his work and uploading it, which was when he started to grow suspicious and uncomfortable.

While Im not doing anything more than working when I should be working, you dont get this kind of scrutiny even back in the day when we were working in offices. We had the freedom to take a quick break from work, maybe watch a cat video or two, before focusing on our task at hand so as not to burn ourselves out.

But right now, I feel like I have a pair of eyes staring right back at me in the face and it has caused an unnecessary amount of pressure to perform well for the entire duration of work which isnt sustainable - were not robots.

However, employers that do use employee tracking systems beg to differ, stating that employees are free to take breaks, but they can now do that in their own time instead of spending previous minutes of company time.

They have the liberty to stop the clock to run to the bathroom or fix up a lunch, hell, they could even watch a movie for all I care, as long as they clock the necessary amount of time as stipulated in their contract.

Depending on how you look at it, it does seem that employee monitoring is here to stay. But thats not to say that there arent shortcomings to using a time-tracking system. For instance, when an employee has finished their task for the day, should they have to stay on the clock doing nothing?

It leads to the powerful question of whether companies reward competency or dole out punishment in the form of expecting them to do more when they have already delivered what they were expected to do?

Look, if I can do something in one hour that may take a newbie four hours to do, should I be punished by being given even more work to do? If thats the case, whats to stop me from finishing my work four days later, as long as Im still working on it, Im not technically doing anything wrong. But I dont believe that I need to waste my time on something that I can finish quickly and employers should appreciate the fact that I was able to complete the task in a shorter time-frame and give me my well deserved time off. a disgruntled employee said when asked what she felt about her companys policy on employee monitoring.

Right now, every time I complete a task, Im given more to do, sometimes, its things that arent even part of my job scope. I believe that employers need to recognize that employees are people too and when they do a good job, they shouldnt run the risk of having to do someone elses job for them because they arent as competent.

The truth of it is that employers and employees need to have a clear understanding of what they expect from one another during remote work Having open communication can help with these problems that are currently plaguing the workforce.

For employers, the ideal employee is essentially a robot that is constantly productive, moving on to the next task and the next, in order to keep the company going. But for employees, the ideal employer is someone who can recognize professionalism and competency and understand that employees that perform should be rewarded with personal time off, cutting short their work day in favor of the results that they deliver.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the national capital and discussed India's incredible tech ecosystem with him. Altman, who also addressed students and others at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT-Delhi) earlier this week, said that he had a great conversation with odi.

"Great conversation with @narendramodi discussing India's incredible tech ecosystem and how the country can benefit from AI,a he Altman tweeted. "Really enjoyed all my meetings with people in the @PMOIndia," he added. Earlier, Altman said that the company behind ChatGPT is not presently training GPT5 the successor to GPT4.

"We have a lot of work to do before GPT5. It takes a lot of time. "We're working on the new ideas that we think we need for it, but we are nowhere close to the start. There need to be more safety audits: I wish I could tell you about the timeline of the next GPT," he added.

Altman's comments come amid growing concern among AI researchers and Big Tech executives about the alarming pace at which the technology is developing. In March, several top entrepreneurs and AI researchers, including Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple, wrote an open letter, asking all AI labs to immediately pause training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months.

Over 1,100 global AI researchers and executives signed the open letter to pause "all giant AI experiments". After a few weeks, Altman acknowledged that the letter lacked the most technical nuance, but asserted that OpenAI hadn't started training GPT-5 and wouldn't do so for "some time".

In May, Altman admitted that if generative AI technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, as US Senators expressed their fears about AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Altman, who testified at a hearing in the US Senate in Washington, D.C., said that the AI industry needs to be regulated by the government as AI becomes "increasingly powerful".
Here are the top 10 stocks that could be in focus in today's trade:

Kotak Bank: Canada's CPP Investments will sell a 1.66% stake in Kotak Mahindra Bank on the stock exchanges for Rs 5,914-6,225 crore, a person aware of the development said. The Canadian pension fund will sell 33 million shares at the stocks closing price of 1,886.5, or a discount of as much as 5%, the person cited above said on condition of anonymity, adding Kotak Securities will be the book-builder for the transaction. After the deal, CPP Investments stake in the bank will fall to 2.68% from 4.34% at the end of March.

HDFC Bank: HDFC Bank Ltd. has shortlisted veteran Arvind Kapil, its current retail assets head, to spearhead the home loans business post its mega-merger with Indias biggest mortgage financier Housing Development Finance Corp. Kapil, who has worked at Indias most valuable bank for almost a quarter of a century, recently met executives at the mortgage lender to discuss plans for the loan book post-merger, according to people familiar with the matter. At HDFC Bank, Kapil has overseen the rollout of initiatives like getting a personal loan in 10 seconds and offering car loans in 30 minutes.

Tata Power: Tata Power Renewable Energy Limited through its subsidiary TP Vardhaman Surya Limited, has been granted the Letter of Award (LOA) to develop a 966MW Round-the-clock (RTC) hybrid renewable power project for Tata Steel, the company said in a statement. This project, combining solar and wind power, stands as one of the largest industrial RTC power purchase agreements (PPAs) under the Group Captive segment in India. The project will comprise a solar capacity of 379MW and a wind capacity of 587MW.

Delhivery: Delhivery has made accusations that Go Air intentionally accepted payments from them while being aware of its impending voluntary insolvency, as per reports. Delhivery submitted an application to the NCLT stating that they had paid over Rs 1.58 crore to the airline for domestic cargo consignment services, but Go First failed to fulfil its obligations. The payment was made in accordance with the terms of an agreement between the two companies, initially established in 2020 and last renewed in August 2022.

IIFL Finance: IIFL Finance is raising up to Rs 1,500 crore through a public issue of secured redeemable non-convertible debentures (NCDs) to fuel credit growth and debt management, a senior company official said. The public issue of the IIFL NCDs will open on Friday and has a base offer of Rs 300 crore with a green shoe option to retain an over-subscription of up to Rs 1,200 crore. With the Reserve Bank of India pausing its rate hike cycle, IIFL remains optimistic about raising the entire Rs 1,500 crore in this tranche of issues.

Punjab National Bank: Punjab National Bank (PNB) said it has proposed to raise funds from the sale of up to 15 crore shares under its Employee Stock Purchase Scheme (ESPS). The public sector bank in a regulatory filing, regarding the annual general meeting, said it proposes to issue and allot up to 15 crore new equity shares of the face value of Rs 2 each, ranking pari passu with the existing equity shares for all purposes and in all respects, including payment of dividend, under an ESPS in one or more tranches.

Torrent Power: Torrent Power has raised Rs 600 crore through the issuance of non-convertible debentures on a private placement basis. "The company has issued and allotted Series 11  60000 Secured, Rated, Listed, Taxable, Non-Cumulative, Redeemable and Non-Convertible Debentures (NCDs) of Rs 600 crore at a coupon rate of 8.50 per cent per annum...on private placement basis," a BSE filing said. The company issued 60,000 NCDs of Rs 1 lakh per debenture aggregating to Rs 600 crore.

L&T Finance Holdings: L&T Finance Holdings board has declared a final dividend for the financial year 2022-23. The company's board of directors have recommended a final dividend of Rs 2 per share of face value of Rs 10. For the March quarter, L&T Finance Holdings reported a 47 per cent rise in net profit at Rs 501 crore. This is against a net profit of Rs 342 crore in the year-ago period. The growth trajectory was led by the highest annual retail disbursements of Rs 42,065 crore across segments.

CCL Products (India): India's largest instant coffee manufacturer CCL Products (India) Ltd said it has acquired six coffee brands, including Percol, from Sweden-based coffee roasters Lofbergs Group. In a deal estimated to be around 550,000 British Pound ( Rs 5.68 crore), CCL has acquired six brands -- Percol, Rocket Fuel, Plantation Wharf, The London Blend, Perk Up and Percol Fusion -- from Food Brands Group, a subsidiary of Lofbergs Group. Lofbergs Group was founded in 1906 and is now one of the biggest coffee roasters in the Nordic region.

Zydus Lifesciences: Zydus Lifesciences said it has received approval from the US health regulator to market a generic drug used to treat certain stomach and oesophagus problems. The company has received approval from US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) to market Esomeprazole Magnesium for delayed-release oral suspension in 20 mg and 40 mg strengths in the American market, the drug maker said in a statement. Esomeprazole is used to treat certain stomach and oesophagus problems such as acid reflux and ulcer.
Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modis upcoming State visit to the United States, the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum organized a workshop in New Delhi, under the ICT, Emerging Technologies & Digital Infrastructure Working Group of the India-U.S. CEO Forum. The Working Group, anchored by Sunil Bharti Mittal, Founder & Chairman Bharti Enterprises and Pamela Reeve, Chair of the Board, American Tower Corporation, includes Indian companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Larsen & Toubro, Mahindra and Mahindra, Infosys and Reliance Industries, and U.S. companies such as Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Deloitte, Fedex Corporation, Deere & Company and Mastercard, amongst others.

The workshop brought together a diverse range of stakeholders, including government leaders and industry experts, to explore opportunities in critical and emerging technology. India and the U.S. are working towards enhancing collaboration and promoting economic growth through digital trade and trusted partnerships. The insights and recommendations from the workshop hold immense potential to shape the future of technology and foster greater cooperation between the two countries.

Prominent participants included senior representatives from the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Department of Telecommunications (DoT), National Council for Vocational Education and Training (NCVET), Government of India.

The inaugural session featured the launch of a Report on The Future of the India-US Strategic ICT Relationship. The report highlighted the need to recognize digital trade as a central pillar of partnership; the need to leverage initiatives such as iCET for strengthening the supply chain for critical industries, and development of digital infrastructure for inclusive growth and universal connectivity. With regards to accelerating digital connectivity for the last mile, Himani Pande, Joint Secretary DPIIT, said One of the key pillars of the government has been Har Ghar Jal, we are now moving in the right direction of Har Ghar Internet

The workshop also featured three panel discussions on key priority areas. The first panel focused on the evolution of 5G and Open Radio Access Network (ORAN), emphasizing the role of openness, standards, and interoperability in shaping next-generation networks. The second panel delved into the future of artificial intelligence (AI), exploring its rapid evolution, emerging use cases, and responsible innovation. The third discussion centered around creating a future-ready digitally skilled workforce, highlighting the importance of reskilling, upskilling, and public-private partnerships to bridge the skilling gap. Each session highlighted the significance of bilateral and multilateral collaboration in fostering the growth of the digital economy and shaping the future of technology.

Strengthening the strategic technology partnership has emerged as a key priority for India and the United States, particularly through the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET). In January, the Indian and American National Security Advisors held the first high-level iCET dialogue, identifying key areas of cooperation, such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, defense, innovation, space, advanced telecom, and semiconductors. Speaking on India-U.S. collaboration under iCET, Satyajit Mohanty, Joint Secretary, National Security Council Secretariat, Government of India highlighted iCET is a recognition of the Indo-US potential to drive mutually complementary partnerships and aspire through it, for global good. iCET aims at forging technology value chain partnerships and shall focus on outcome oriented cooperation, involving the industry and academia of both countries. The key to the success of iCET lies in mitigating the regulatory issues which companies face in forging deep-tech cooperation.

Speaking about India US collaboration in critical and emerging technologies, Drew Schufletowski, Minister-Counselor, Economic Affairs, Environment, Science & Technology, U.S. Embassy said We will continue working with India to expand our robust partnership in critical emerging technologies, a partnership that holds boundless economic potential. By cultivating an environment that nurtures entrepreneurial spirit, innovation and exceptional expertise, we can fuel economic expansion, create employment opportunities and drive our industries to unparalleled heights.

On technology partnerships and cooperation under iCET, Rudra Chaudhuri, Director, Carnegie India stated that more discussion and dialogue with respect to adoption of ORAN. Cost factors need to be considered and the stack architecture should be understood. This should be a crucial part of iCET negotiations on both sides. If India and the US joined build ORAN, it will be a solution, not just for India but the rest of the world as well.
By Azernews

Rena Murshud

An Azerbaijani delegation was in Italy for the contract signing in the presence of representatives of the Defense Ministers of the two countries, Azernews reports.

The Italian concern Leonardo announced the conclusion of a contract for the supply of C-27J transport aircraft for the Azerbaijani Air Force.

Originally linked to the energy sector, the cooperation between Italy and Azerbaijan is now extended to defense industry products thanks to the valuable input of the working group of the Italian Ministry of Defense. The agreement is part of a large-scale modernization program for the Azerbaijani Armed Forces, which are increasingly paying attention to the products of Italian industry, the head of the company representative stressed.

It is noted that the C-27J Spartan aircraft is capable of performing a wide range of tasks for the defense and protection of civilians, "considered the ideal aircraft" for various tasks, paratroop and cargo landing, special forces operations, humanitarian aid, and disaster relief.

Also, recall that Italy's Leonardo has been closely cooperating with Azerbaijan's AZAL since 2006. During the entire period of cooperation, many projects were implemented, including the supply of aircraft, helicopters and more. Among the projects of recent years are the supply of a navigation system and an aircraft landing system at international airports built in the liberated territories of Azerbaijan.

Besides, initially linked to the energy sectors, the collaboration between Italy and Azerbaijan is now also extended to defense industry products thanks to mutual relations between the two countries, and the valuable contribution provided by the Italian Ministry of Defense working group.




KYODO NEWS - Jun 9, 2023 - 23:03 | All, World, Japan

Japan has been gearing up to attract more foreign workers to address its severe labor shortage, with its Cabinet approving a plan to expand the number of industries covered by the blue-collar skilled worker visa that effectively grants permanent residency.

But the country faces headwinds as an attractive workplace amid a weakening yen and competition from other Asian locations such as Taiwan and South Korea with fewer visa requirements.

Weng Fei, an employee of the construction company in Gifu Prefecture in central Japan, obtained the Specified Skilled Worker No. 2 visa in April last year as the first person in Japan to do so.

As the visa allows holders to bring in family members and has no limit on the number of times they can renew their visa, the 36-year-old has been reunited with his wife from China and now seeks to work longer in his company, where he leads a group of employees made up of Japanese and foreign workers.

"I trust him enough to make him responsible as a foreman," said Taketo Kano, the 51-year-old president of the construction company.

But Kano acknowledged that welcoming foreign workers requires great efforts, saying he helped Weng acquire qualifications in addition to picking up and dropping off Weng's family members to Japanese classes.

"It requires time and patience," he added.

Currently, only proficient laborers in the construction and shipbuilding sectors can upgrade their status to the Specified Skilled Worker No. 2 visa.

But the revision approved by the Cabinet includes nine more industries -- among them the fishery, agriculture and hotel sectors -- with foreign workers under the Specified Skilled Worker No. 1 visas able to apply for No. 2, provided they pass Japanese language and technical skills exams.

As of the end of last year, the number of foreigners who had obtained the No. 1 status stood at around 130,000. Vietnamese people made up the majority at 77,000, but the winds are starting to shift.

"The time when Japan dominated has ended," said one Japanese employee who works for an organization that assists Vietnamese people in working abroad. "At this rate, we will be left behind."

One 34-year-old worker decided to go to South Korea instead of Japan, remaining there for about five years before returning home last year. She noted the abundance of support networks and free Korean language classes.

Taiwan is also becoming a popular destination for work. Between January and March, the number of Vietnamese who went to the island exceeded 18,000, surpassing those who came to Japan in the same period.

"It costs about $8,000 to fly over," but it takes less time to begin working, said an official from another organization who assists in sending workers abroad.

While those who want to work in Japan under the No.1 status require some Japanese language proficiency, there is no such prerequisite, nor any need to sit an exam to work in Taiwan. Foreign workers may also be attracted to the possibility of being employed on the island for up to 12 years.

Taiwan has accepted migrant workers from Southeast Asia since 1992, hosting about 730,000 in comparison with its population of around 23.3 million people.

Related coverage:

Japan to expand skilled worker visa system to address labor shortage

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Clirnet, a Mumbai-based startup, has announced the launch of DocTube, a revolutionary video first, free to public health content platform aimed at providing trustworthy medical information to the citizens of India and improving patient health outcomes.

It is Indias own largest repository of multi-lingual healthcare information made By Doctors, For People that is deeply relevant to the demographics and the huge diversity of the people of India.

DocTube is a game-changer in the healthcare industry, hosting over 10,000 medical videos created by more than 3,000 verified doctors. The platform already covers over 1,000 therapeutic medical conditions, with over 80% of the videos in Indian vernacular languages, catering to the diverse linguistic needs of the Indian population. The intent is to take this to 50,000 plus videos by next year covering all major regions and languages of India.

Padma Bhushan recipient, world renowned cardiologist, and Chairman of Narayana Health, Dr Devi Shetty launched Doctube as the Guest of Honour. Dr Shetty shared his views on "Dissociating Healthcare from Affluence," highlighting the importance of accessible and affordable healthcare for all.

Through DocTube, verified doctors can create and share a wide range of content, including videos, presentations, and demonstrations. The platform covers various health-related topics, such as treatment options, medical procedures, lifestyle changes, and advancements in technology.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, who is on a visit to India, said that the company is committed to backing startups in the country, with conversations are already underway to facilitate this initiative. He also said that education is one of the areas that he is most excited about. The OpenAI CEO said that backing startups in India takes higher priority than opening an office in India at the moment. The energy we have seen from startups here, we are very excited to figure out how we can support them," he said, adding We had some conversations with Indian startups and we would love to invest in Indian startups."

Altman met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and discussed opportunities for artificial intelligence in India, he said while speaking at an event in the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi. We talked about the opportunities for AI in India and also the need to think about global regulation," Altman said, during the fireside chat hours after the meeting with the PM. He said that he is most excited about education. We had a chat with the PM on it (education) and we would love to work with India on this," he said.

Altman also reiterated the importance of regulation in AI and the need to transition to clean energy for training these models. We want to be net zero immediately. We are looking at a lot of cooling ideas that do not evaporate fresh water."

The ChatGPT maker raised $175 million to launch a startup fund to back startups that are working on pushing the boundaries of AI last month. The firm has been backing AI startups for a while. In November 2022, it said that it will provide $1 million each to 10 AI startups and also give them early access to its systems. However, Indian startups have so far not received backing from OpenAI, even though many have adopted ChatGPT and GPT-4 (the underlying platform of ChatGPT) quickly.

According to Stanford Universitys annual AI Index report, published in April, India received the fifth highest investment in AI startups in the world in 2022 after the US, China, UK and Israel. Indian AI startups raised $3.24 billion last year.

The Chennai-based conversational AI startup Uniphore raised $400 million in February, the largest by an Indian AI startup, taking its valuation to $2.5 billion. We are designing systems now that have significant energy usage," Altman said, adding that the industry should push hardware as much as it can, while simultaneously pushing for optimization of models.

OpenAI is a San Francisco-based AI startup, which created powerful large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5 and GPT4. The Microsoft-backed startup raised $300 million at a valuation of $29 billion in April. Its biggest investor Microsoft has reportedly invested close to $10 billion in it and has used its technology to offer new services and products such as Azure OpenAI, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Bing Chat.

Last Month, Sam Altman said in his testimony before a US Senate committee that governments should create an oversight agency to regulate and licence AI companies. He also said that AI companies like his own should be independently audited. Altman also signed an open letter, published by Center for AI Safety, which warned that AI poses a risk of extinction to humans. The letter was also signed by several other industry executives and scientists including Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, AI scientist Geoffrey Hinton, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, and Stability AI CEO Emad Mustaque.

Altmans testimony comes at a time when there is a growing concern about the potential risks of AI, especially generative AI, which can use data to generate human-like content, such as images, text, and music in seconds. Its downside is that it is prone to hallucination and can generate misleading and harmful content. In March, several executives led by Elon Musk have also called for a six-month moratorium on the development of more advanced AI models.

Early this week, Indias IT industry body Nasscom released guidelines to establish common standards for the responsible research, development, and use of generative AI in India. The guidelines aim to help the industry use generative AI for societal good and build trust in the technology.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  The New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) has released its June application schedule for civil service exams.

Open, competitive, computer-based tests are administered throughout each month for various positions. If you meet the basic requirements of the job, you can apply for your exam online at Online Application System (OASys) or at one of the Computer-Based Testing and Application Centers (CTAC).

This months application period opened Wednesday for the following positions: assistant electrical engineer; city assessor; city tax auditor; environmental engineer; environmental police officers; estimator (general construction); gasoline roller engineer; housing exterminator; police officer; probation officer; school safety agent; resident buildings superintendent; traffic enforcement agent; watershed maintainer, and several jobs under the New York City Bridge Exam.

Positions open in the New York City Bridge Exam include: bookkeeper; clerical associate; clerical associate (NYC H+H); computer service technician; maintenance worker; maintenance worker (CUNY); maintenance worker (NYC H+H); secretary; staff analyst trainee.

The deadline to apply for most of these exams is June 27. The police officer application remains open through June 21 and the application for school safety agent is open through June 28.

New York City employs hundreds of thousands of people in its 80 agencies. Taking a test is the way to get started in the hiring process for most of these positions. Application fees range from $40 to $101.

For more information about registering for these and other tests, log onto the DCAS website. To apply for a civil service exam open during this application period, go online via the OASys at www.nyc.gov/examsforjobs. To receive monthly exam updates, sign up for the DCAS newsletter at nyc.gov/examsforjobs and click the Exams tab.

As of March 1, 2021, all examination and eligible list-related notifications will be sent by email only; you will no longer receive notifications via U.S. mail.

On Staten Island, the testing center is located at 135 Canal St., Stapleton. Additional testing centers are located at: 2 Lafayette St., Manhattan; 210 Joralemon St., Brooklyn; 118-35 Queens Blvd., Queens; 1932 Arthur Ave., the Bronx.

After an exam is administered, it generally takes nine to 12 months for an eligible list of passers to be established from which agencies can hire, according to DCAS.

Inquiries regarding the status of an eligible list can be e-mailed to the New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services at: LMAcustomerserviceunit@dcas.nyc.gov.

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  A popular pizzeria was badly damaged in a two-alarm fire at a strip mall in New Springville early on Friday morning.

A firefighter who suffered a minor injury was transported to Staten Island University Hospital in Princes Bay, according to a spokesman for the FDNY/EMS.

The fire was reported at 12:27 a.m. at Barios pizzeria at 446 Nome Ave., according to the FDNY spokesman.

The fire and emergency response caused extensive damage to the strip mall where the restaurant is located.

A fire damaged Bario's pizzeria at 446 Nome Ave. and also other businesses in the strip mall near Richmond Avenue in New Springville on the morning of Friday, June 9, 2023. (Photo courtesy of Salvatore Maurano)

The fire spread from the one-story, 30-by-60-foot pizzeria to an adjoining store, according to the FDNY spokesman.

The blaze was brought under control at 1:52 a.m., the spokesman said, adding that the cause and origin of the fire are under investigation.

A fire truck for Engine 164 was stationed outside the strip mall and firefighters were seen extending hoses and spraying water at Barios around 9 a.m.

Late on Friday morning, the incident remained under control. Units have been on scene monitoring conditions and have been utilized, but the incident has not been reopened, according to the FDNY spokesman.

Part of the strip mall remained cordoned off with caution tape.

The most extensive damage appears to be at Barios, where a light dangled from the ceiling above stacks of burnt cans and singed restaurant equipment.

The restaurant is under a full vacate order and the FDNY has requested a structural stability inspection due to the fire, according to the city Buildings Department website.

A comment related to the vacate order claims there is extensive fire, smoke and water damage throughout with open and deflecting roof.

Debris was scattered on the sidewalk outside adjoining businesses including Laundry Express Launderette, Honey Beauty & Wellness and Princess Nails.

A COMMUNITY STAPLE

Beginning as Brick Oven Pizza in 1989, Barios relocated about nine years later from a space in the Nome Shopping Plaza to larger quarters in the same strip mall. Coinciding with the move, the operations moniker was changed to an acronym of the partners first names, creating Barios.

A community staple, the restaurant is known for its charitable endeavors, in particular, its support for the NYPD. It also operates a vast number of private school lunch contracts on the borough.

Their pie is known as one of the more affordable ones on the Island.

A GoFundMe has been organized for the restaurant by Brendon Valentin who maintained that the owners, Mario Rapaglia and Alfred Pucciarelli, have participated in numerous charitable events and also donated to many people in need on Staten Island and in other boroughs.

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Noah Rozin, a freshman at Staten Island Technical High School, wowed a Shark Tank-style panel of judges with his business plan earlier this month, introducing a group of local investors to his historical and educational board game. The ninth-grader, who earned a $2,200 seed money prize for his efforts, will now take his invention to compete on a national stage.

The students worked painstakingly on every detail of their business plan  from their initial conceptual models to finalizing their actual product prototypes, noted Dr. Janet Leslie, who served as instructor of the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce Foundations Young Entrepreneurs Academy (YEA!), in which Rozin participated. It gave me great joy to watch their final pitches in front of the Investor Panel. Congratulations to Noah Rozin, this years Staten Island Chamber of Commerces YEA awardee, and kudos to each and every student who competed.

Noah Rozin, pictured here with Linda Baran, president and CEO of the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce, and Ed Burke, senior advisor to Borough President Vito Fossella, will now take his invention to compete on a national stage. (Photos courtesy of the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce)

The event served as the culmination of the 2023 YEA! Cohort, a program that guides high school students through the process of starting a real business, including business plan development, pitching to an investor panel, obtaining funding, launching the venture and managing media campaigns.

By the conclusion of the YEA! Program, students are expected to have developed fully formed and functioning businesses, which are often carried on by students after graduation. This years YEA! class was comprised of 18 students, representing nearly every high school on the borough.

Of all of the Chambers initiatives, YEA! is among the closest to my heart, said Linda Baran, president and CEO of the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce. It is a thrill to see a budding entrepreneur enter the cohort with a seed of an idea and emerge with a fully formed business. These students set the stage for the next generation of businesses and demonstrate a tremendous amount of creativity. I cant wait to see what they do next.

The panel of judges consisted of a variety of borough business leaders. (Photos courtesy of the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce)

Rozins business, Ace of Ages, an historical and educational board game that aims to integrate fun into modern-day learning, will now be entered into the YEA! National Saunders Competition.

Elle Barrera and Sophia Borthwick, who produced a business called Hair for Won, and Ben Wiseman, inventor of Entropy Knives, were named runners-up in the competition and received $1,175 and $825, respectively.

The 2023 YEA! cohort was made possible by presenting sponsor Con Edison, who championed this years YEA! program. The 2023 Investor Panel was sponsored by Amazon, Broadway Stages, Empire State Bank, Lions Pride Leadership Company, Mid Island Rotary, National Grid, Northfield Bank, Rotary Club of Staten Island and Staten Islands Small Business Development Center.

YEA! also received support from Scholarship Partner Sponsors AVID Architecture, The Rab Wilkinson Foundation and CI RegentAtlantic. YEA!s 2023 Media Sponsor was Staten Island Community Media, which documented the class, accompanied the cohort on site visits and developed video recaps.

Edward Burke, senior advisor to Borough President Vito J. Fossella, served as the events emcee.

The Staten Island Chamber of Commerce is helping to inspire our next generation of dynamic business leaders through the Young Entrepreneurs Academy, said Burke. I regard this event as one of Staten Islands best showcases for career building among young people. The atmosphere was like a sporting event -- nail-biting and exciting. The students involved this year displayed remarkable creativity and savviness. I wouldnt be surprised to see several of them launching their business enterprises professionally and stepping up as community leaders.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  The Person Centered Care Services (PCCS) hosted the inaugural Tap Into Empowerment Conference, the first Disability Empowerment Conference on Staten Island that demonstrated the value behind the lives of individuals living with intellectual disabilities.

The event also provided direct support from professionals on hand to assist those facing challenges.

The conference was held at the Jewish Community Center and featured three panel discussions and networking opportunities.

Available were community partners, support and services and businesses who are spearheading the effort to include individuals with disabilities in the local workforce, as well as information from government agencies such as The New York State Office for People With Developmental Disabilities (OPWDD).

From the left, Jaclyn Tacoronte, Dr. Ginny Mantello, Cris Marchionne and Vanessa Limani. (Courtesy/Jaclyn Tacoronte)Staten Island Advance

All told, there were more than 130 people in attendance from, State Sen. Jessica Scarcella-Spantons Office to small businesses, where the focus was on equality, the future of workforce development and government advocacy issues, with a welcoming message by SIEDC CEO Mike Cusick.

The conference was dedicated to the memory of Nicholas The Changer DAmora, a self-advocate and the co-founder of Crimson Rise, who died several weeks ago.

Orit Lender, CEO of the JCC of Staten Island, commented: The Joan & Alan Bernikow JCC of Staten Island is proud to partner with Person Centered Care Services to host Staten Islands first Disability Empowerment Conference. We deeply value these partnerships that help create a caring community where people of all abilities can feel safe and included.

From the left, Vanessa Limani and Cris Marchionne. (Courtesy/Jaclyn Tacoronte)Staten Island Advance

Chris Marchionne, the executive director of PCCS, noted: The 2023 Tap Into emPowerment Conference was a collaborative project between disabled justice activists and their non-disabled allies. It was a day of coming together to reimagine community, accessibility, and equity. Through story-telling, people shared experiences of obtaining employment, the challenges and the successes.

Marchionne explained the way they brainstormed about redesigning the service system, validating the role of Direct Support Professionals with a valuable wage and life-long benefits, and the importance of including people with an intellectual disability in community, business, and government decision-making settings.

These stories and life-experiences are valuable and this conference demonstrated how communities came together to recognize challenges, reimagine new ways to improve these relationships, and to value the lives of people with an intellectual disability.

ABOUT THE PERSON CENTERED CARE SERVICES NY

Founded in 2006, the Person Centered Care Services (PCCS) provides person-centered support and services to people with disabilities and their families in the New York City area.

From support in education, employment, and housing to training, counseling, and advocacy initiatives, they have been at the forefront of continuing to expand opportunities for people with disabilities. Throughout the years, its vision has remained the same: equitable opportunities for people with developmental disabilities, and a network of disability allies spread across communities near and far.

For people with disabilities, progress in civil rights over the past few decades has been a result of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Many people with disabilities, as well as their families, continue to face a variety of barriers and uncertainty when it comes to the supportive services that are most essential to their everyday lives, advocates say.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  The consul general of Pakistan hosted a farewell luncheon at the consul generals office in Manhattan attended by dignitaries and members of the Pakistani community.

Her Excellency Ayesha Ali, consul general of Pakistan for more than three years, is saying goodbye, after completing her tenure in New York, notes Dr. Mohammad Khalid, president of the Pakistani Civic Association of Staten Island.

Dr. Khalid explained she has been appointed as Pakistan ambassador to the Czech Republic and will be leaving her New York post in July.

At the luncheon members of the board of the Pakistani Civic Association presented Ali with a portrait of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to thank her for her service to the Pakistani American community of Staten Island.

We as a community were very lucky to have her here in New York, added Dr. Khalid, who also is president of the Iron Hills Civic Association and an Eltingville dentist. She was always there to help the community. Under her leadership people had the access to get emergency documents after hours as well, he added.

He noted that as president of the Pakistani Civic Association of Staten Island, he is saddened  along with the community  to see her leave.

But we are happy that she is achieving a higher goal and has become an ambassador, he said. We will certainly miss her but we all are happy and congratulate her and wish her our best and hope someday she will be back as an ambassador to USA in Washington.
Australias Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus announced the government plans to ban swastikas and other Nazi symbols nationwide due to an increase in far-right activity, according to the Associated Press.

In Australia, many states already ban Nazi symbols, but the federal law would also ban the trade of such material as well, Dreyfus said.

Theres been a rise in this kind of violent far right activity. We think its time for there to be a federal law which Ill be bringing to the Parliament next week, Dreyfus said, according to the AP. Weve got responsibility for import and export. We want to see an end to trading in this kind of memorabilia or any items which bear those Nazi symbols.

The AP reports the law would include a penalty for people displaying Nazi symbols of up to a year in prison.



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A Washington, D.C., mother was trying to bury her 10-year-old daughter who was shot to death on Mothers Day  but another deadly shooting carried out by the funeral home owner marred the burial service, according to a press release from Prince Georges County Police Department.

Wilson Chavis, 48, of Hughesville, Md., shot up Arianna Davis burial, killed Ronald Steven Banks, 30, a family friend, and injured another family member, police allege.

As the burial ceremony was happening, Chavis, the owner of the Maryland funeral home providing burial services, got into an altercation with two people affiliated with another funeral home with whom he had a long-standing business feud, police said.

The Homicide Unit charged the man who shot two people at a Suitland cemetery, killing one of the victims. The suspect is 48-year-old Wilson Chavis of Hughesville, MD. https://t.co/i2DcBNtHfI pic.twitter.com/TQagyOCRRs  PGPDNEWS (@PGPDNews) June 7, 2023

The childs mother, Antionette Belk, detailed to NBC 4 Washington, Chavis yelled I own this body, then spit on the preacher.

Police said he then pulled out a gun and opened fire.



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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  Anthony Aquaro, the oldest living member of the FDNY and a World War II Navy veteran, was overwhelmed with gratitude as he was named Honorary Borough President for the day along with his wife, Gloria, earlier this week inside Borough Hall. But his deep gratitude couldnt match that of a French tourist who happened by the event and tearfully thanked the veteran for her very own freedom.

Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella made the presentation to 102-year-old Aquaro and his wife during an intimate ceremony that took place inside Borough Hall on the 79th anniversary of D-Day, the day Allied soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy in Nazi-occupied France.

Outside, on the St. George Plaza, the Tottenville High School Symphonic Band performed as part of a new Lunch at the St. George Plaza concert series, and the female tourist sat down to enjoy the music, unaware that shed soon have an encounter with a WW II hero.

Inside, surrounded by family and members of the FDNY, the Rossville couple graciously accepted the Honorary Borough President title.

Its just coincidental that this happened to be today, as D-Day is one of the most significant days in world history, Fossella said. We all know that Normandy led the way to liberate Europe to free the world from Fascism. And those individuals, who are often referred to as the greatest generation, bring us two of the greatest, Anthony and Gloria.

Anthony Aquaro not only served the country during the war, but also served as a firefighter in Brooklyns Engine 69 for 26 years.

So, he wears two hats of service, Fossella said.

Members of Engine 153 and Ladder 77 were on hand to help commemorate the special occasion.

Aquaro, who became a firefighter in 1953, said he deeply appreciated the honor.

Members of Engine 153 and Ladder 77 were on hand to help commemorate the special occasion as Anthony Aquaro is named Honorary Borough President for the day. (Courtesy of the Staten Island Borough President's Office)

In my wildest dreams I never, never thought this could happen to me, he said in his remarks. I cant tell you how I feel so deep in this heart of mine for all the people who got involved with this.

Anthony Aquaro served in the U.S. Navy during World War II from 1942 to 1945. He and Gloria were married in 1944 while Anthony was on leave. Theyve been married for 79 years and have lived on Staten Island since 1965.

Outside, Band Director Laurie DAmico was informed of the ceremony taking place inside, so she directed the band to play the United States Armed Forces Medley. The tune prompted staffers to escort the veteran to the plaza. Fossella introduced him to the crowd, prompting the emotional response from the tourist, who didnt share her name.

Im not from Staten Island, I am from France, and I want to thank you for my freedom,' she told him, welling up with tears as she took his hand, according to a witness who was present for the emotional scene.

Those present were left in awe by her words,' the witness said.

The couple represents family, faith, country and service, Fossella said while addressing the honorees earlier inside. Anthony and Gloria, you guys really are role models for us,' he said. We love you. In a way, this is what makes Staten Island special  we come together to honor you and what you mean to us.

Gloria Aquaro ended the ceremonial event by referencing a famous quote. We want to say, like his favorite, Lou Gehrig: Today is the luckiest day of my life!
KYODO NEWS - Jun 9, 2023 - 18:54 | All, Japan, World

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday that Japan will provide $5 million in support after the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam caused severe damage in the nation, the top government spokesman said.

Kishida and Zelenskyy held a telephone conversation days after tens of thousands of residents were forced to evacuate following flooding triggered by the destruction of the dam, for which Ukraine has blamed Moscow with the war with Russia showing no sign of ending soon.

During their first talks since the two leaders met in Hiroshima on May 21, the closing day of the three-day Group of Seven summit, Kishida also expressed sympathy to victims of the dam disaster, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said.

The dam is crucial for Ukraine as it supplies cooling water to the country's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant -- the largest in Europe. Failure to cool the nuclear fuel could lead to a serious accident such as a core meltdown. Both facilities are under Russian control.

Kishida, who visited Kyiv on March 21, told Zelenskyy that any attempt to change the status quo by force must not be accepted, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said, adding the two leaders confirmed the importance of the global order based on the rule of law.

Zelenskyy made a surprise appearance at the G-7 summit in Hiroshima, where he called on the international community to keep supporting Ukraine, which has been at war with Russia since February 2022.

At a regular press conference in Tokyo, Matsuno said Zelenskyy, who has been seeking military assistance from Western democracies, voiced his gratitude to Kishida for his efforts to realize his in-person participation in the summit as a guest.

Tokyo has continued to offer financial and humanitarian aid to Kyiv, and the government recently arranged for two Ukrainian soldiers who were wounded in the war to receive medical care at the Self-Defense Forces Central Hospital in Japan.

Japan has only given nonmilitary assistance to Ukraine against a backdrop of restrictions on the provision of weapons under the war-renouncing Constitution.

With Ukraine apparently stepping up preparations for a massive counteroffensive against Russia, Zelenskyy also held phone talks with French President Emmanuel Macron earlier this week.

At the G-7 summit, the leaders from the industrialized economies agreed to work toward a world without nuclear weapons and stand by Kyiv, with concern lingering that Russia might use such a weapon against Ukraine, in the worst case scenario.

The G-7 leaders urged Russia to "immediately" and "unconditionally" withdraw its troops from Ukraine, pledging to bolster sanctions on Moscow to further undermine the nation's "capacity to wage its illegal aggression" against its neighbor.

Related coverage:

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  Smoke from the Canadian wildfires will linger in the New York City area into Friday  though there is hope that it will subside sometime this weekend, according to forecasters.

Frank Pereira, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said a low front has been stagnant and is most likely why the smoke will stay in the area for the next couple of days.

Thats not to say there wont be points of improvements, but the smoke will continue to be pulled down, he said.

32 1 / 32 Canadian wildfires result in dangerous air quality across NYC | PHOTOS

Pereira added winds will shift and move to the west and south, which will help push smoke further out of the NYC area.

The shift in wind direction will also make it more likely rain will be in the cards early next week, according to Pereira. Which in turn, will help to filter out the remaining smoke in the area.

During the day Friday, skies will be mostly cloudy with a possible thundershower in the afternoon. A high temperature of 69 degrees will be reached.

Weather forecasters say it will still be a few more days before a major change in the weather pattern helps clear up the heavy smoke and polluted air particles that have been blowing across the Northeast from huge wildfires in eastern Canada.AccuWeather

For Saturday and Sunday, temperatures will reach a high of 76 and 78 degrees, respectively.

Skies will be partly sunny on both days.

The Air-Quality Index on Staten Island dropped from over 400 on Wednesday to 162 at 5 p.m. on Thursday. The index measures pollution on a scale between zero and 500, with anything above 150 considered to be unhealthy.

Tom Kines, senior meteorologist for AccuWeather, said earlier on Thursday there was hope that Friday may see better conditions.

Smoke could possibly push further south of the region during the day Friday and lift some of the veil of haze from New York City, but Kines cautioned it was still too early to tell if the gradual shift away from the area will undoubtedly occur.

The push southward has been very, very, very slow, said Kines.

An air quality alert is in effect in the NYC area until midnight Friday night.

Major events this weekend are going forward like the Governors Ball, a three-day music festival.

Were closely monitoring the air quality with weather experts and are in close contact with city officials, festival organizers said Wednesday afternoon in a statement. At this time, the festival is continuing as planned.

Pereira said those individuals who decide to be outdoors this weekend should proceed with caution.

Those people with respiratory conditions might want to stay indoors  but it is an individual decision. You may want to monitor the Air Quality Index [in your area].



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San Mateo, CA (94402)

Today

Cloudy skies early will become partly cloudy later in the day. Slight chance of a rain shower. High 63F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy. Slight chance of a rain shower. Low around 55F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph.
Nick Fordham has been on Team Folbigg for 18 months. Credit: Steven Siewert Fordham declined to comment to PS, however it is understood he started working with Team Folbigg at the start of 2022. He also met with her while she was serving her sentence at the Clarence Correctional Centre in Grafton several months ago. On Tuesday, the Seven Networks Spotlight program and its executive producer Mark Llewellyn emerged the victors against rival 60 Minutes on the Nine Network, the owner of this masthead, in what insiders have described as a bruising bidding war. Theres no rush to get it to air. Its an extraordinary story, and what I am seeing from what weve been shooting is beyond my expectations, Llewellyn told PS. The Spotlight deal was struck by Fordham nearly a month ago, and while it has been reported the fee paid by Seven was $400,000 for the first exclusive interview PS has heard from sources close to the negotiations the final amount was at least double that, and possibly as high as $1 million. The interview is not likely to air for several weeks.

Nor does it appear likely that Folbiggs payment would fall under the Proceeds of Crime legislation, despite her convictions yet to be formally quashed through court. A spokesperson from the NSW Attorney General Michael Daleys office said that in such matters, the particular circumstances of the case would come into consideration. The Seven deal was particularly disappointing for 60 Minutes reporter Tara Brown, who has done several stories on the Folbigg case over many years, including an investigation on the breakthrough science in 2021 which ultimately set her free. International media players have also entered the fray, with names like Winfrey and Morgan in the mix of potential interviewers. Fordham is the brother of 2GB breakfast host Ben Fordham. His late father, John Fordham, founded the media management firm he now runs. He also represents Lisa Wilkinson, who featured prominently in last Sundays polarising Spotlight interview with former political staffer Bruce Lehrmann. The irony that Fordham was cutting a deal on behalf of his new client with the same show that was carving up one of his oldest, has not been lost on his rivals.

The media potential of the Folbigg story in the streaming age is vast. Recently, Fordham has been negotiating content deals with streaming giants including Netflix and Paramount+, which bought the multi-million-dollar John Ibrahim series Last King Of The Cross. Fordham is listed as a co-executive producer on the series, which was created with media executive Mark Fennessys Helium outfit. Fordham also has producing credits on the globally syndicated Netflix TV series Outback Wrangler and Wild Territory featuring Matt Wright, another client who has generated headlines off-camera following the helicopter crash that killed his friend and co-star Chris Willow Wilson in February 2022. Society wedding in the City of Love Chicken or boeuf? All roads lead to Paris for next weeks society wedding of Sydney-based celebrity chef Guillaume Brahimi and chicken heiress Tamie Ingham in what sounds like an affair fit for a poultry princess.

Oui do! Guillaume Brahimi. Credit: Nic Walker Sydney socialite Tamie is a grandchild of the late thoroughbred horse racing figure Jack Ingham, who is the brother of billionaire chook baron Bob. PS can reveal the wedding is taking place in the sumptuous Musee Rodin in Paris. In 1916, a year before his death, Auguste Rodin bequeathed all his works and possessions to the French state which, in exchange, purchased the elegant Hotel Biron and committed to turning it into a museum dedicated to the artist. With iconic and priceless pieces, such as The Kiss and The Thinker, housed in the museum, the couples guests, including Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch, James Packer, Karl (who will MC) and Jasmine Stefanovic, Seek founder Paul Bassat, outgoing AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan, designer Tamsin and her tailor husband Patrick Johnson and Michael and Lisa Wipfli, along with various members of the extended Ingham clan, are clearly in for a cultural treat. In 2013 the Inghams sold their business for $850 million.

It will be the first of three upcoming destination weddings planned for the European summer for the Inghams, with Tamies brother Johnny and sister Katie Ingham all set to tie the knot with their respective partners over the coming weeks. Jasmine Stefanovic and Tamie Ingham. Johnny will marry social media influencer Rey Vakili, who once worked as an assistant to Vogues editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Taormina, Italy, also the location for the second season of The White Lotus. Then its off to Tuscany where Katie Ingham will marry Ali Rosenberg. Dinnigan shuts up shop

The Southern Highlands tweed and twin-set brigade have been clutching their pearls following the closure of Collette Dinnigans homewares boutique in the old Mittagong Post Office, barely a year after it launched amid much fanfare. Dinnigan, understood to be in Europe, had told friends the shop, which sold her bespoke range including fragrances, candles and homewares, was an experiment, and one which apparently caused the former fashion designer considerable headaches when it came to finding staff, with Dinnigan herself often manning the counter. Collette Dinnigan has shut shop in Mittagong. Credit: Bec Parsons However, the year-long lease has ended and now Dinnigan, who owns an expansive estate in nearby Bowral, is selling online her hand-printed Belgian linen curtains, scented candles, ceramics, cushions made from her exclusive archival fabrics and antiques. Showbiz legends art auction

Australian showbiz blueblood Jim Sharman is auctioning 47 works from his personal art collection with all proceeds going to seed the creation of the NIDA Future Centre. Sharman, the son of the iconic travelling showman who bore the same name, has directed on stage and screen, classics including the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. Stage and screen director Jim Sharman is selling his art collection to fund a new generation of creatives at NIDA. Credit: Louie Douvis His art collection includes a masterwork by Tom Polo, major works from Bill Hensons career, Archibald-Prize winner Nigel Milsom, Michael Ramsden, Geoffrey Proud, Andrew Purvis and selected stage and film posters, which will go under the hammer at Shapiro Auctioneers Annex Gallery in Chippendale on June 20. I enjoy art and artists across a wide spectrum and over the years have gifted works to public galleries, said Sharman, who graduated from NIDA in 1966.

Im not a collector in the commercial sense, these works were acquired because I knew the artist, or I loved the work, but mostly because I was inspired by it. Ive enjoyed them, and now its time to share them with others  past and present artists helping to fund artists of the future. Throughout his trailblazing career Sharman directed more than 80 productions, including Hair in Sydney, Tokyo and Boston, Jesus Christ Superstar in Australia and nine years in Londons West End and The Rocky Horror Show in the UK, USA and Australia, along with its film adaptations. Michael Ryan and Zoe Bingley-Pullin in 2019. Credit: Marco Del Grande Dog house for dog food business Hes the man who got his best mate Hugh Jackman into shape for his Wolverine films, but Sydney celebrity fitness guru Michael Ryans foray into the pet food business, in which he also enlisted his television nutritionist wife Zoe Bingley-Pullin and controversial chef Pete Evans, has ended up in the dog house.
James Ivory laughs at the thought that he is still making films at the age of 94.

Im only 94 for two more days, the director of such celebrated Merchant Ivory films as Heat And Dust, A Room With A View, Maurice, Howards End and The Remains Of The Day says from New York earlier this week.

The now 95-year-old, who became the oldest winner in Oscars history with his script for the gay romance Call Me By Your Name five years ago, is still surprisingly busy.

James Ivory in his youth in A Cooler Climate. Credit: The Bureau

He has a new documentary about a trip he made to Afghanistan in 1960, A Cooler Climate, screening at the Sydney Film Festival this long weekend. Its a beautifully shot social history of a time before the country was torn apart by war that is also a memoir of the American film-makers youth.
When the story of four single women and their sex lives hit TV screens 25 years ago this week, it was considered landmark television.

Since Sex and the City aired, the shows premise has become increasingly unremarkable: independent women think about, write about and have sex, so what? Ironically, even in the shows heyday, the sex being had - at least by Carrie  was far from remarkable. Putting womens pleasure centre stage was the really ground-breaking element of the series. Only a few decades ago, that concept would have been deemed unthinkable.

Sex and the City stars in the shows heyday. Credit: Reuters

The History of the Sitcom, screening on SBS, traces many social developments via television shows, including womens rights, gender issues, and, of course, sex. It argues that Americas changing attitudes toward social issues have been mapped out on the screen.

Sex and the Citys creator Darren Star says in the documentary he wanted make the show because he thought it was time to finally lighten up about sex. I wanted to explore this world of female sexual relationships and do something really, really, frank.
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Eating outRestaurant news This is going to be a problem: How changes to student visa rules will hit hospitality Industry leaders say July 1 is too soon to reintroduce student visa work restrictions. Bianca Hrovat June 10, 2023 Save Log in , register or subscribe to save recipes for later. You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more. Save this article for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime. Got it Share

Staff shortages and service standards across the hospitality industry are predicted to worsen from July 1, when the Australian government reintroduces working restrictions on international students. Student visa work restrictions were temporarily removed in January 2022 in an effort to alleviate widespread labour shortages caused by COVID border closures and lockdowns. The scheme proved beneficial to hard-hit industries such as hospitality. In Melbourne, restaurateur Manpreet Sekhon relied on international students to keep her businesses, Masti and Elchi, operational. Students became the backbone of the hospitality industry, Sekhon says, who estimates they make up almost 99 per cent of her workforce. Restaurateur Manpreet Sekhon says students have been the industry backbone. Carlie Jane

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At Ho Jiak restaurants in Sydney, founder and executive chef Junda Khoo has spent the past three years training students to become chefs, filling roles that would have been taken by skilled migrant workers had borders not closed. They really helped us return to normal, Khoo says. During COVID, they didnt receive any income support, but they hung around and stayed back to fight and survive. Now, well have to cut their hours back. Junda Khoo and student Ivy Angelina at Sydney restaurant Ho Jiak Town Hall. Brook Mitchell Come July, restaurants, bars and cafes must limit the working hours of student visa holders to 48 hours a fortnight (about three shifts a week). Often, this will leave business owners scrambling to fill roster gaps.

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A recipe for disaster: The rules putting Sydneys international students at risk Februarys announcement sparked concern across the board  from small, family-run restaurants such as Sekhons to hospitality giants like Merivale. International students  play a significant role in contributing to the growth of our hospitality industry and the economy, says Merivale chief executive officer Justin Hemmes. The increase implemented by the previous government  was a big relief for us, so any winding back of that is, of course, detrimental to our industry and to the individuals. Stefano Catino, co-founder of Sydney cocktail bar Maybe Sammy, argues its too soon to reintroduce the working cap.

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While [the labour shortage] isnt as bad as it was, the problem hasnt been solved. We still need skilled workers, he says. Once the restrictions come in, Ill have to hire two people to do the job of one  or go back to opening just four days a week. Everyone is going to suffer from this. I want to make it very clear: this is going to be a problem. Cutting students hours will definitely have an impact on service at restaurants such as 400 Gradi in Melbourne, says owner Johnny Di Francesco. Anyone who thinks its easy to find good staff right now has got it wrong, he says.

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We have been getting plenty of people inquiring about work but around 70 to 80 per cent of them dont turn up for interviews. And when we do manage to get more people  well have to train them. That can take anywhere from four to 12 weeks and that will always have an impact [on customers]. The team from Al Dente Enoteca in Carlton (from left) co-owner Andrea Vignali, manager Michelle Badek, co-owner Davide Bonadiman and worker Gautam Timalsina. Simon Schluter For hospitality students such as 23-year-old Gautam Timalsina, the changes mean he will barely earn enough to scrape by. The chef de partie-in-training has been studying commercial cookery while working full-time at Al Dente Enoteca in Melbournes Carlton. Almost half of my pay will be gone, just like that, Timalsina says.

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Timalsina says the restaurants managers work around his classes and coursework, allowing him ample time to study. Al Dente Enoteca co-owner Michelle Badek says, as a former student herself, she knows how to support international student employees to balance their commitments. I hope [the student working cap] doesnt deter young people from coming to Australia, Badek says. But as the number of international students swells beyond 585,000 (numbers have jumped 85 per cent between December 2021 to February this year), Home Affairs Minister Clare ONeil seeks to ensure the appropriate use of a student visa. I do not think too many Australians are going to love the idea of people coming here as international students and effectively using that as a pathway to becoming a full-time worker in our country, ONeil says.

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They are either here as students or they are here as workers. A pre-existing condition of the visa mandates that students maintain course enrolment, satisfactory course attendance and good grades while in Australia. ONeil says students are unable to get a good-quality education in Australia if theyre working full-time. Thats why the rule has existed before, she says. Many of the international students working in hospitality are studying at culinary schools such as the Kingsford International Institute in Sydney. KII marketing manager Sandra Arias employs student visa holders at her newly opened Elizabeth Bay business, Greenknowe Cafe. For our staff, this job is not just a means of making money but also a means of gaining their qualification, Arias says.

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Theyve been worried about these restrictions. Imagine having your wages halved during a cost of living crisis, when rent prices are so ridiculous. For bars such as Old Mates Place in Sydney, the new restrictions will mean allowing fewer customers inside on busy nights. It means well suffer financial losses, but thats all you can do, says owner Dre Walters. [Otherwise], people end up waiting too long, and then you get bad reviews. I think youll see a lot more operators bringing in QR codes. Service will have to become simpler, with less attention to detail.

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KYODO NEWS - Jun 9, 2023 - 13:05 | All, World

Former U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday evening he has been indicted on federal charges in connection with his handling of classified documents, becoming the first former U.S. president to face federal criminal charges.

Trump, who is seeking to return to the White House in 2024, disclosed on his Truth Social platform that he has been summoned to appear in a court in Miami, Florida, on Tuesday afternoon.

Shortly after the announcement, CNN, The New York Times and other major U.S. media outlets reported that Trump has seven counts leveled against him, citing unnamed individuals familiar with the situation.

The newspaper said they included willfully retaining national defense secrets, making false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

It is the first time that a former U.S. president has faced federal criminal charges, the reports said. Trump reiterated via his platform that he considers himself innocent and that the investigation is a politically motivated "witch hunt."

Trump's indictment comes as he remains the clear front-runner in a crowded field of Republican candidates vying for the party's presidential nomination.

He was indicted in the special counsel's probe into his handling of more than 100 classified documents discovered last year at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

The Justice Department has been investigating whether Trump illegally mishandled sensitive documents he kept after leaving office in 2021.

The department has not commented on the indictment, which marks the second time Trump has been charged.

In April, he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records associated with the payment of hush money to individuals, including a porn star, in a bid to insulate his 2016 presidential election campaign from scandals.

Related coverage:

Ex-U.S. Vice President Mike Pence launches 2024 campaign for White House

Biden announces re-election bid, vows to defend democracy
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Review Eating outClaremont Nolita: An authentic Italian with atmosphere Rob Broadfield June 9, 2023 Save Log in , register or subscribe to save recipes for later. You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more. Save this article for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime. Got it Share

1 / 5 Squid cooked properly. Rob Broadfield 2 / 5 Nolita chefs at work. Rob Broadfield 3 / 5 The vegetables. Rob Broadfield 4 / 5 The steak. Rob Broadfield 5 / 5 Pasta. Rob Broadfield Previous Slide Next Slide Italian$$$ A few hundred metres north of Bolognas main square and its marble clad San Petronio Basilica is a neighbourhood not frequented by tourists, where locals eat and drink and carouse among the ancient, cobbled streets. There are a few terrific restaurants where the food is first rate and the experience is about as Italian as it comes. We were reminded of this at Nolita in Claremont where the service, the decor and the simple dishes are a nostalgic reminder of small bar restaurants in Italy. Authentic is a much traduced word in Australian hospitality, but Nolita could claim  but doesnt  to be an entirely authentic experience. Close your eyes and you could be in a back street in Milan or Bologna. It has atmosphere too, that rarest of assets for a successful restaurant. Nolita was recently taken over by Il Lido and Canteen Pizza owner Lyndon Waples and the changes he and his team have brought to the Bay View Terrace shop front have been gradual and low key but nonetheless game changing.

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The pasta is now house made, the produce is fresh and superb, frozen food has gone from the kitchen, the cookery is restrained, modest and back to Italian basics. The menu has been deftly redesigned. Theres new stemware in the dining room. In short the experience is better and more authentic than its ever been. Want to find out just how good a kitchen is? Order calamari. There are a thousand ways to ruin this simple fry-up of squid rings. The experience  and its always about the experience  is driven by restaurant manager Giacomo (Jack) Moriero, an Italian hospo professional who thinks first and last about his customers. Would you like a break before the next course? Yes. Give me a number  10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes? 15 minutes thanks. The question rarely gets asked. Even more rare is to be asked when the main course should be called away. This is not only first-rate customer service, it is a pleasurable antidote to the typically off-hand, service-by-numbers delivered in many Perth restaurants. Moriero is also a trained wine expert (dont call me a sommelier) with a degree in oenology. His wine recommendations are delivered with savant level knowledge.

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Moriero is one of the finest front-of-house operators in the city. Want to find out just how good a kitchen is? Order calamari. There are a thousand ways to ruin this simple fry-up of squid rings. Nolitas kitchen knows its stuff. The small squid pieces were dusted in a well seasoned flour and cornmeal. They arrived hot and crunchy like popcorn. A cheek of lemon and an indifferent mayonnaise was on the side. The squids were superb and as simply cooked as good produce should be. The primi course was a pasta dish sauced with a light white wine sugo of pork, sage and cherry tomatoes. The flavours were swashbuckling but not flashy. Seasoning was heavy but well nuanced. And it was served hot. The pork mince was also salted well and crusty in parts from a good sear. It was a difficult dish to put down. For mains, sirloin steak was ordered rare and delivered rare and properly charred. It was delivered with a simple reduction sauce as black as anthracite and deeply flavoured and garnished with snake beans which had been artistically bundled and tied in a knot, no really, and cooked on the grill. Some of the beans were charred by the fire. Those at the centre of the knot were just cooked, green and tender. Its an interesting technique, more Margaret Fulton than haute cuisine, but it was sensational. It takes a confident chef to cook vegetables just this side of burnt and for the outcome to be so right. On the side, a plate of caulini, a portmanteau vegetable: half cauliflower, half broccoli, with florets at the end and a delicate flavour. It was served with romesco sauce which was way out of whack. Too much onion, not enough roasted capsicum and roasted tomato and too little of the acerbic back beat of red wine vinegar that this Spanish sauce requires. It was beige. Literally and figuratively.

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The romesco was the only slip up in an otherwise delightful meal. The kitchen is a well-oiled machine. It doesnt show off. Theres no weird look-at-me cookery going on. Experience, polished technique and chefs who know what theyre doing are the hallmarks of Nolitas simply cooked, cleanly flavoured Italian dishes. Just like youd find in the back blocks of Bologna.



The low-down 16/20 Prices: antipasti $10-$29; pasta $32-$36; mains $30-$48; dessert/cheese $15-$18.

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Truth is an essential force for reconciliation and, on the 185th anniversary of the Myall Creek massacre, we offer an apology for our historical coverage.

I led the research team that has spent the past decade mapping the massacres that scar the Australian landscape. When we published the first stage of our digital map in 2017, it amounted to 172 colonial frontier massacre sites in eastern Australia. We were inundated with online comments. Many expressed relief that the evidence of our violent past  of the mass killing of Indigenous Australians  was now widely accessible. Others were surprised by the extent of the massacres. They had thought of them as rare or occasional events.

Lyndall Ryan illustration by Aresna Villanueva. Credit:

That notion, already dispelled in 2017, is demolished with the publication of the final stage of our online map this year. It covers the whole of Australia, from the first recorded frontier massacre in NSW in 1794 to the last recorded in the Northern Territory in 1928. It includes 429 frontier massacre sites where 10,918 Indigenous people died.

It is important to note that these figures do not include the untold number of frontier murders in which fewer than six Indigenous people died. Our map was the first to deploy a coherent methodology to define a frontier massacre as the indiscriminate killing of six or more undefended people in one operation.

The subject of frontier massacre has been part of the NSW school curriculum since the 1980s, following the publication of Henry Reynolds The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) and Bruce Elders Blood on the Wattle (1988). More sustained studies of specific massacres such as Roger Milliss Waterloo Creek (1992) and the role of massacres in military campaigns, such as John Connors The Australian Frontier Wars (2002), added breadth and depth to the subject.
Nunn and his men  a couple of dozen troopers, joined by as many local stockmen, making for a formidable force of horsemen  are closing in on their quarry: a large group of the Kamilaroi people who have been actively resisting white settlement in the area. There they are, down by the creek, and with no place to run. Nunn barks orders and in the bright sunshine of mid-afternoon, the group are surrounded by the men on horseback and slaughtered with shot and sword. Not a single prisoner is taken, and most reliable estimates of how many are killed vary from 40 to 70, though others claim as many as 300 are slaughtered, their bodies left to rot by the creek, which has briefly run red. The pastoralists can be well pleased that there will be little more problem from the blacks in this immediate area, and the frontier has been satisfactorily expanded.

Ten days ride to the north on this same day, the frontier of white settlement being established on Aboriginal lands for cattle and sheep runs is being pushed ever further out in what has become the traditional manner. At Waterloo Creek , in the upper reaches of the Gwydir River in north-eastern NSW, a detachment of mounted police led by the merciless Major James Nunn, are in train to fulfil the mission set for them by acting governor Sir Kenneth Snodgrass to suppress outrages in the Namoi Gwydir region.

In Sydney Town on January 26, 1838, the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the colony at Sydney Cove are joyous. The bands play endless renditions of God Save the Queen, the flags flutter furiously, and the toasts to the young Queen Victoria are as reverential as they are enthusiastic. The crowds are enormous for this auspicious occasion also marks the first time that Founders Day is a public holiday. The highlights for the young colony are  a regatta for the masses and a dinner for the classes .

Ever and always, it is like this. Behind the breast-beating of empire lies the tragic reality of the violent dispossession that empires are built on.

Roger Milliss Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre, Mark Tedeschis Murder at Myall Creek, and Peter Stewarts Demons At Dusk were a great resource, and Stewart accompanied me and the Indigenous activist Thomas Mayo to the massacre site in mid-May  where we were honoured to be guided by local Indigenous expert Uncle Kelvin Brown, who added fresh detail. - Peter FitzSimons

Over the years Ive written many books and told stories of triumph and tragedy but never have I told a story as haunting as this one. I have recounted this terrible tale based primarily on court transcripts of the time and other newspaper accounts.

Truth is an essential force for reconciliation and, on the 185th anniversary of the Myall Creek massacre, we offer an apology for our historical coverage.

On the morning of Sunday, June 10, 1838, nearly all of the Wirrayaraay men are sent away for three days to cut bark on a nearby station being run by free man overseer Thomas Foster, leaving the women and children on their own. As sundown approaches that day, those women and children are settling for the evening by Myall Creek, the women preparing a meal while the children gambol about. The smoke from the Wirrayaraay fires hangs low in the chilly dusk. But now from the west, a heavy flock of yellow crested white cockatoos suddenly take flight, their cries making the women turn.

Like salt to deep wounds, the white squatters not only steal the Wirrayaraays tribal lands, take their weaponry and disrupt their hunting grounds, but they force the Wirrayaraay men into labour  in return for food  effectively hastening the demise of their ancestral home by having them help the new stations in the area take root.

Myall Creek lies to the direct east of Waterloo Creek, in the same region, and by early June, its Aboriginal people are reeling from the white push from the south. As the systematic killings of natives by Nunn and his men come ever closer to the Wirrayaraay people, a clan of the Kamilaroi, a group of them seek refuge on a pastoral lease at Myall Creek, which had been established just the year before as part of squatter Henry Dangars ever-expanding cattle interests. They have been told by one of the convict stockmen on station, Charles Kilmeister  who is serving a life sentence for house breaking  that they will be safe there, and so it has proved for a fortnight.

Some six weeks later, on March 5, 1838, a report of what has happened at Waterloo Creek lands on the desk of the new governor George Gipps and  despite the lack of documentation and likely severe underestimation of how many blacks have been killed  he is appalled, as is his attorney-general, John Plunkett. Both men are conscious of the need for British law to extend to all, to protect the natives from such slaughter. It is decided that henceforth coronial inquiries will be held for the death of any blacks at the hands of colonists. Before that can be announced, however, the most infamous atrocity of the frontier wars takes place  in part because Major Nunn has encouraged the squatters to take matters into their own hands.

Kilmeister, however, who to this point has been on friendly terms with the whole Wirrayaraay group   dancing and singing with them  every evening after work  buckles in the face of the massed menace of the mounted men. He will later claim that he was told he had to make a choice between being with the whites or the blacks and if he chose the latter, he would share their fate. In a snap decision, he joins their band and takes up a proffered sword.

Anderson fears much worse, but knows his own life might be in the balance. He recognises most of these men and knows both their purpose and their mercilessness. He does not protest beyond trying, and failing, to save Ipeta. The marauders will not listen to his desperate if muted pleas, and he must stop and beat a shattered retreat  even obeying an order from John Fleming to get him some milk from Hobbs nearby hut.

Anderson, highly agitated  beyond his general affection for the blacks, he has recently taken up with one of the young Wirrayaraay women, Ipeta  nervously asks the now dismounted horsemen what is their intention. Take them to the back of the range, one of them replies , to frighten them.

Shouting at Anderson and Kilmeister to come out, the armed men barge in as soon as they do. While Fleming barks orders and his convict servant holds a pistol on them all, his henchmen quickly bind the Wirrayaraay women to a long tether,  their hands all tied, with the palms to each other . Two old Wirrayaraay men, Old Daddy and Joey, are too infirm to worry about tying up  while two lads who had been playing by the creek have been able to jump in to the water and hide behind the reeds on the horsemens approach. They watch fearfully before slipping away.

The women grab their crying children and flee into the hut of Charles Kilmeister and George Anderson, the convicts looking after this part of the station, begging for protection. In the absence of the station overseer, William Hobbs, Kilmeister is in charge, while Anderson  who has been transported to the colony for life for robbing his master and been here five years  is his offsider. The two had been sitting, chatting and smoking with two young Aboriginal stockmen, Black Davy and his brother Billy, when cries and shouts of alarm engulfed the quiet of the twilight.

Seconds later come the thundering of hooves and the snort of horses as 11 stockmen come over the scrubby ridge. Led by a local third-generation squatter originally from the Hawkesbury, John Fleming, they are hard men of grim countenance  convicts and former convicts  and are armed with sawn-off muskets, pistols and swords. With easy expertise, the riders diverge on approach to come at the camp from different directions, and it is quickly surrounded  the horsemen shouting and pointing their weaponry at the Wirrayaraay.

As the women and children try to flee, screaming, the rope restrains them and they are cut down with swords, and most are beheaded by the stockmen, including Kilmeister. Watching closely, albeit from a distance and from behind a tree, is Black Davy, who has followed them and now bears witness to the savagery. Babies are torn from their mothers breasts to be swung around and have their heads smashed against the trunks of gumtrees. Screams fill the night, until at last, all falls silent once more.

The rest of the Wirrayaraay must shuffle along the muddy track into the setting sun, still weeping and moaning. They continue for half a mile over a rise before on the flat they come to a gully. Here, another  good-looking gin  has her hands untied and is spared. But now, after a savage nod from Fleming, two shots are fired into the mass of the rest of them.

The 10 Wirrayaraay men working on Thomas Fosters station look up. It is one of the station workers. Come quickly! White men on horses have come and rounded up your women and children. In an instant the Wirrayaraay men are running back to Myall Creek station, desperate to get there in time to do something.

Weeping, the other women and the children clinging to them are led away, joined by the rope with the horsemen on either side. One of the horsemen ties one end of the rope to his saddle, and leads. Behind them come the two old Wirrayaraay men, Old Daddy and Joey, both weeping. From the whole of them comes a keening . There are several babies, Anderson will recall,  the women carried them on their backs in opossum skins .

The other Wirrayaraay girl is spared at the request of Black Davy, the young black stockman. Another child who tries to follow her mother is swept up by Anderson and carried back to the hut.

Initially, just two young teenage girls are set aside, one, as Anderson will say , because she was good-looking, they said so.

The good-looking gin who had initially been spared the slaughter in the gully continues to be raped. She is spotted several days later in a totally emaciated state at another station, tied behind the horse of one of the marauders but now disappears, never to be seen again.

The next morning, the white marauders head off to look for more Wirrayaraay to kill before returning to Andersons hut for the night, all of them talking about the killing and the raping the night before. The next morning, they return to the Myall Creek massacre site and throw the bodies and severed heads onto a roaring fire. On the orders of the squatter John Fleming, Kilmeister is left to stoke the fires throughout the day, burning the bodies down. The stockmen now go after the Wirrayaraay men who had got away. Most of them are found and killed .

Anderson, Black Davy and Billy lock themselves in their hut, only to soon hear frantic coo-ees and pounding on the door. It is the Wirrayaraay men, frightened, out of breath with running who are now faced with the horror of what has happened, the realisation that they are too late. And there is no time to find their fallen. Anderson convinces them that their only hope is to flee for their lives. Go, now! They go, a mix of fearful phantoms and wraiths of rage in the night.

The murderers make camp nearby and pass the night raping the good-looking gin. The two teenage girls left at the hut, it will be later alleged by Sydneys Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld, were initially spared, only to later be raped by Flemings gang, after first being cut for lascivious purposes.

When the men return to the hut, Kilmeister  produced a bloody sword which he had in his hand when he left before the shots were heard, but which was not then bloody.

The Myall Creek station overseer, William Hobbs, a decent free man who had consented for the Wirrayaraay to stay there before heading off on a cattle droving trip, returns to the station five days after the massacre, shocked to have heard many garbled stories on the way from neighbouring stations of a ... massacre? Told that Kilmeister knows the truth of what had happened, he sends for him.

What has become of the blacks?

I do not know.

I heard they were murdered, and you know all about it.

I know nothing about it and had no hand in it.

Hobbs dismisses him, but is uneasy. He so trusts Kilmeister he has allowed him to carry a brace of pistols, despite being a convict. For Myall Creek, as he will explain, is beyond the boundary of the colony. It can be dangerous for a white man in these parts, and Kilmeister is one who he had known he could count on to be in the frontline. I question, Hobbs will later say, if there is a better servant in NSW than Kilmeister and a more quiet, peaceable disposition. From his general quiet peaceful disposition I would not think he was a man likely to be concerned with the murder.

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So yes, of course, Hobbs believes his denials, but it is certain that something terrible has happened, and he must get to the bottom of it. Anderson is little help, afraid to say anything knowing that so many men on the different stations were leagued together for the destruction of the natives.

But Hobbs must try. With Black Davy by his side, Hobbs now follows the trail: Foot-tracks with horse-tracks on each side.

As they approach, it is the time of day when the massacre happened. The darkness of eventide envelops, the chill goes right to their very hearts.

Even in the twilight, he can see blood stains around and about. And there are no bare foot-tracks leaving here, only the imprint in the mud of horse-shoes departing. With so many beheadings, and such mutilated remains in the ashes, it is hard to be certain as to how many murdered mortal souls lie before him. And, as he will recount, the stench was so great that I was not able to be accurate in counting them. I endeavoured to count them and made more of them sometimes than others, the most I made was 28. Among them, I saw the childrens heads quite distinctly. There were 10 or 12 small heads, also some childrens bodies. The superintendent returns to his homestead in stunned, sickened silence, sure of one thing. I considered it my duty to report it.

First, however, he must write a letter to the station owner, Henry Dangar, telling him of what he has seen and what he suspects has happened. The letter completed, the next day Hobbs reads it to the assembled hands on the station. Kilmeister  who has already told Anderson for Gods sake, mind what you say, do not say I went with them, it was not true  suddenly rises in agitation. I hope, Sir, he says to Hobbs, you wont report. For Jesus Christs sake, dont report it.

The letter from William Hobbs to the authorities reporting the massacre. Credit: State Archive NSW

Kilmeister even goes on his knees to beg his master to say nothing, but the overseer insists. He now consults his fellow free man overseer of the nearby station, Thomas Foster  who comes to inspect the massacre site with Hobbs, which now has hawks and eagles circling overhead. Arriving, Foster has to leave after just 90 seconds because he cannot bear the horror, and is equally appalled. For his part, Hobbs in the better light can now see that some of the body parts appear to have been dragged away by native dogs, but he is fairly sure that he can recognise the torso of the old man they called Old Daddy in the ashes. I saw the large body. There was no head, but the body was pretty whole; the legs and arms were gone.

Unable to leave their own stations for fear the killers will return, Hobbs and Foster approach local landholder Frederick Foote, who shares their shock and outrage and undertakes to call on Police Magistrate Edward Denny Day at his Invermein base near Muswellbrook and officially report to the colonial administration what has happened.

For his part, the owner of Myall Creek Station, Henry Dangar is also outraged when he hears the whole story  but for a different reason. His own man, Hobbs, is making trouble simply because some whites have killed some blacks? Why, it is traitorous behaviour! But it is too late.

The investigation

Governor Gipps, apprised of the atrocity, commands Police Magistrate Day  who views the events of Waterloo Creek and Myall Creek as part of a war of extermination  to investigate. Day rides north in the company of his cohort of constables, and in the company of Hobbs, goes to the site. I pointed out the place where the fire had been, Hobbs will recount, of the burnt spot two-thirds of a cricket pitch in circumference. The bodies had disappeared. There were some remains  ribs and childrens jaw bones. I helped to pick them up. The heads had all been removed. I do not know by whom. Of particular interest to Denny Day is the intact rib bone of a child, which he carefully preserves as evidence. It will later prove crucial.

A sketch of Police Magistrate Captain Edward Denny Day. Credit: Australian Town and Country Journal

Over the next five weeks, Magistrate Day takes depositions from 19 witnesses, and on the strength of it, all of the marauders bar the squatter who had led the attack  John Fleming, who has fled  are arrested. One of the first placed in handcuffs is Kilmeister, and he is soon chained to the other accused men. Summoned from his bed at one point, George Anderson is asked if he recognises the men that Denny Day has in custody. Are they the men who came to Myall Creek that fateful sundown?

I was frightened and confused, Anderson would later recount. I knew them all by sight immediately when they were in custody, and I said [so] at once. The accused stare back in shock. They have been betrayed by a fellow white man, something previously unthinkable. It is for good reason that as Magistrate Day will later testify, I took Anderson under my protection, in consequence of the important information he had given me, and his being in an unprotected state.

Tied together and shuffling along with mounted horsemen either side, the accused men walk all the way to Muswellbrook before they are taken to Sydney Gaol.

The temper of the times

The grisly affair is the talk of NSW. Despite the horrifying details that emerge, the accused men enjoy widespread public support, with the owner of the Myall Creek station, Dangar, one of many local landowners who form a Black Association to raise the money to represent the accused and secure the three best barristers in Sydney to free them. Dangar has already made moves to dismiss Hobbs for making the report and is refusing to settle up for past wages, probably to make him too poor to travel to Sydney to give testimony. For Dangar and his fellow landholders of the Black Association are insistent  the right of whites to kill blacks must be kept sacrosanct.

The Sydney Herald  soon to become The Sydney Morning Herald  agrees. It runs editorials imploring the courts to let the men go and in favour of vigilante justice. It rails against Aborigines and moves to protect them: The whole gang of black animals are not worth the money the colonists will have to pay for printing the silly documents on which we have already wasted too much time.

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For, after all, the Herald says, it is important to protect the white settler, his wife, and children, in remote places, from the filthy, brutal cannibals of New Holland. We say to the colonists, since the government makes no adequate exertion to protect you, protect yourselves; and if the ferocious savages endeavour to plunder or destroy your property, or to murder yourselves, your families, or your servants, do to them as you would do to any white robbers or murderers  SHOOT THEM DEAD, if you can.

Such editorials are not the universal temper of the times in these parts. For other journals do not so debase their pages. Edward Smith Hall, the editor of The Sydney Monitor, writes of the Myall Creek massacre that it was a deed for which we cannot find a parallel for cold-blooded ferocity, even in the history of Cortez and the Mexicans or of Pizzaro and the Peruvians.

Courtroom rollercoaster

The first trial begins on November 15, 1838, in the NSW Supreme Court with chief justice Sir James Dowling presiding in the packed courtroom over a jury of 12 white men. The charge is that the 11 accused had murdered a particularly old and infirm Wirrayaraay man, known as Old Daddy and if that could not be proven, two other natives of unknown names.

None of the accused testify during the trial, relying on their counsels advice to stay united and silent. As Black Davy, an eyewitness, is a heathen who cannot swear on the Bible, it will be a very difficult case for the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt.

George Anderson at least will bear witness to what he saw in the lead-up to the massacre, and most importantly identifies the stockmen. Alas, the case for the prosecution is not helped when Henry Dangar gives his own testimony, much of which is aimed at discrediting his lowly convict employee, Anderson.

I would not believe him on his oath, Dangar says, himself under oath. He has been very troublesome, and on the most trifling occasion he is addicted to lying.

As to William Hobbs, his testimony is strong but slightly ambivalent on the key issue. I could not swear that Daddy is dead, he tells the court, [but] I have not seen him since. I never saw a female so large as that frame. I never saw any of those persons who were on the station since.

As the trial continues, the case of the defence proves to be thin. They maintain that as the victims cannot be positively identified, the case is void. The defence counsel William a Beckett, puts it concisely: No proof has [even] been adduced that Daddy was not alive, or that a dead male black has been found.

His Honour agrees that whether or not the jury is satisfied that Daddy was definitely among the dead is crucial to them finding a guilty verdict, but reminds them: In order to fulfil my duty, I must tell you that the fate of a black is as precious and valuable in the eye of the law, as that of the highest noble in the land.

Attorney-General John Plunkett was determined to pursue justice. Credit: State Library

The jury has to retire for only 20 minutes before coming back with the verdict: Not guilty.

Cheers ring out around the courtroom. It had been unbelievable to see the government of the day supporting blacks at the expense of white people but now, the feeling runs, justice has been done.

But Plunket  knowing the desire of Governor Gipps  is not done. To the astonishment of the gallery, he immediately charges the men with new murders: a six-year-old Wirrayaraay child called Charley, and if that could not be proven, another child of name unknown.

(Plunkett also turns the group of defendants against each other by this time only prosecuting the seven murderers for which there is most proof, that number including Charles Kilmeister. He plans to deal with the other four at a later trial, and they are kept in custody.)

The second trial starts on November 29, 1838  presided over by Justice Sir William Westbrooke Burton  and George Anderson gives particularly compelling testimony, detailing again the gruesome and barbaric acts that have been committed. So, too, does William Hobbs once more tell all that he knows, despite the pressure he has been under to not even turn up. (The jury came under the same pressure. No fewer than 48 are called  at one point the court is reduced to grabbing men off the street  before 12 good men and true had been found willing to serve on it.)

Magistrate Edward Denny Day is called to give an account of his investigations and among the evidence he presents is the rib bone of the deceased child. There is silence in the court, and not one imposed by the judge. The charred rib of a murdered child imposes a solemnity all its own.

For the defence, the barrister a Beckett does his best. Yes, circumstantially, it might appear that these men had done the murders. But can the jury be sure it was the accused who did it?

This tribe might have gone, as was stated, in company with the whites; had been met and attacked by another body of blacks, and left in the way described ... And were these men, merely because they happened to be in their company some time before, to be put on their trial for murder?

The trial proceeds through the day into the evening and finally into the early morning before it is done. All rise.

At two in the morning of November 30, 1838  after a gruelling day and night of testimony  Justice Burton comes back to the courtroom after a brief adjournment, having been advised that the jury has returned.

Mr Foreman have you reached a verdict? We have, Your Honour. The gallery, which includes some of the leading landowners of the day, and the press lean in close to hear his words.

Not guilty.

Uproar. Confusion. Cheers and outrage. It goes on for some time before one of the other jury members speaks up and corrects him. The jury foreman has mis-spoken.

In fact, the verdict is that the seven stockmen have been found guilty of the murder of an Aboriginal child whose name was unknown.

Governor George Gipps ordered an investigation into the massacre. Credit: Fairfax Media

At 9am on December 18, 1838, those seven men are hanged at the Sydney Gaol. It is the first time that white men have been executed for murdering Indigenous people. There have, tragically, been many Indigenous massacres before this, and there will be many to come. But this is the first to go to trial at a time when there was political will to bring the murderers to justice.

The next day, governor Gipps writes a full report to Lord Glenelg, secretary of state for war and the colonies in London, so that the home authorities can understand his actions, and insistence on justice: A determination seems to have been formed by the white men to put the whole of the blacks to death.

The British home authorities endorse Gipps actions. Plunkett now goes after the remaining four stockmen, convinced he can get a conviction with them, too, and moves are made for Black Davy to undertake a course of bible study so that he will be able to take an oath and get in the witness box to testify against them. Alas, though there will be claims that Black Davy is put out of the way by Dangar to prevent this very testimony, the more prosaic reason that the pursuit of the final four is abandoned, is that attorney-general Plunkett is dissatisfied with the progress made with the Bible by Black Davy, and so calls it off. And so only seven stockmen in all are brought to justice.

That breakthrough notwithstanding, as late as 1861 a speech would be made to wide acclaim in the Queensland Legislative Assembly by government spokesman Robert Mackenzie to the effect that the Myall Creek trial of 1838 had represented nothing less than the judicial murder of white men in Sydney. It would be a widely held view for decades to come.

John Fleming, organiser of the massacre, lived for another 56 years, earning a warm obituary in the Windsor and Richmond Gazette in 1894, for his service as farmer in the Hawkesbury, church warden and ... Justice of the Peace.

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Henry Dangar died in 1861 as one of the richest men in the colony. Major Nunn was never held to account for his role in the frontier wars, including the massacre at Waterloo Creek.

Indigenous massacres continued for most of the next century, the last being recorded in the Northern Territory in 1928, some 90 years after the horror at Myall Creek.

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Series

Myall Creek apology

The Herald apologises for its coverage of the infamous 1838 Indigenous massacre after it advocated for the exoneration of nearly a dozen white murderers early in the mastheads history.
Parents at a major regional Anglican school are fighting back against a controversial requirement that their new principal and board members sign a document stating they believe marriage is just between a man and a woman.

Frustrated parents at The Illawarra Grammar School have formed a group to oppose the rule which will force incoming heads of Sydney Anglican diocese-run schools to sign a statement of faith opposing gay marriage.

Some parents are opposing The Illawarra Grammar Schools recruitment process. Credit: Facebook

Last year more than 100 parents at Australias oldest private girls school, St Catherines, established a similar coalition to lobby its council to scrap the rule after it was revealed its next principal could only accept the job if they agreed to the clause.

The chair of The Illawarra Grammar Schools council, Anthony Okely, wrote to parents this week saying he recognised parents concerns about the clause. The schools next principal will be made to sign the document when the current head Judi Nealy steps down at the end of the year.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Its 1.30am in the outdoor trash alley of gay nightclub ARQ, and Jack Schmidt has just arrived on the last train into town. Most of his friends arent out because its Saturday, and on Saturday night you have to pay cover. Thats a dealbreaker. Its just too expensive, says Schmidt, 26. The cost of living has gone up. Going out is a luxury. A lot of gays are really f---ing poor. A few years ago, before COVID and certainly before the lockout laws, this club would have been packed. But on a clear Saturday night in early June, its nearly empty. Zali OSullivan and Jack Schmidt at the ARQ nightclub in Darlinghurst. Credit: Flavio Brancaleone Thats not the case everywhere  a few blocks away on Oxford Street, the club Universal still has a queue outside, and other venues are busy, too. Still, as 20-year-old James Campton says, the strip has died down since summer. Sydneys successful WorldPride festival was supposed to give the citys LGBTQ epicentre a new lease on life after a torrid decade. Instead, Oxford Street is suffering from an identity crisis caused by an influx of heterosexual clubbers creating tension with the queer community, as well as changing nightlife trends and behaviours  especially among Generation Z. The death of Oxford Street has been prematurely announced many times before. The question for business owners, partygoers, policymakers and the queer community is not so much whether this iconic piece of Sydney will survive  it always does  but how it can thrive in a time of tighter wallets and different tastes.

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Safety is another, more immediate problem. In April, former reality TV contestant David Subritzky was called a faggot and left with a bloody lip after an altercation in a kebab shop. Police were called. There have been numerous instances of homophobic abuse, especially towards drag queens. On Tuesday night, the issue was raised at a meeting of business owners, politicians, police and community members at the historic Stonewall Hotel. Local MP Alex Greenwich, who is gay, said he was deeply concerned about the number of homophobic, transphobic and dragphobic incidents reported to him each week. In 2023 we shouldnt be having to deal with this happening on Oxford Street, he said. Its important we take efforts to stamp it out. Drag queen Mu Lan: This is our home. If we dont feel safe here, where shall we go? Credit: Flavio Brancaleone At the meeting, operators were urged to sign up to a pride business charter drafted by the City of Sydney council which asks Oxford Street business owners to honour and share LGBTQ history and culture, create welcoming and inclusive spaces, and ensure LGBTQ people are kept safe. Many blame the opening of a new straight-oriented nightclub, Noir, nearly a year ago, and the crowd it attracts. There is an online petition detailing a string of alleged incidents and calling for the clubs licence to be removed.

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In one recent incident, drag queen Mu Lan said she was grabbed on the crotch by a female patron of Noir while meeting friends there after finishing work at another club. This is the problem: we should feel safe at any single venue on the street because were not safe anywhere else in the city apart from this street, Lan said. This is our home. If we dont feel safe here, where shall we go? Noir owner Ronny Dube attended Tuesdays meeting and said he would sign the charter. He acknowledged the clubs arrival had caused some friction in the Oxford Street ecosystem, but said he and his staff had a zero-tolerance approach to discrimination. Were doing everything that we can to try to mitigate these issues that inherently happen when a venue attracts a heterosexual crowd into an LGBTQ dominated precinct, he said. He has hired extra security, who are on the lookout for anti-social behaviour, and the club is also working with police. Whenever theres an opportunity for us to be better, were gonna be better. With the closure of venues in Kings Cross and The Stars nightclub Marquee, LGBTQ venues on Oxford Street are also dealing with an influx of guests from outside the community. Universal, probably the strips most popular club, recently banned hens and bucks nights from the venue.

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But safety is only a part of the puzzle; the cost of living (and partying) is keeping people at home. Good luck getting any drink under $10, and cocktail prices now start with a 2. Few young people can afford to live in the inner city any more, and poor late-night public transport means they face long and expensive Uber rides home. One nightclub on the strip, Nevermind, opened just before WorldPride but lasted just 62 days before temporarily closing, blaming the quiet atmosphere of the street in the lead-up to winter; ARQ also recently put Thursday nights into hibernation for the same reasons. Charlotte Hogan, 23, works behind the bar at Bitter Phew on Oxford Street. She identifies as LGBTQ but generally doesnt go out in this area with her friends, preferring private events, warehouse parties and underground raves. That way they dont have to deal with overzealous security, venues that empty out by 3am, or crazy drink prices. I dont really think anyone whos my age can afford to go out in Sydney, Hogan says. My rent got put up over 20 per cent ... I think thats why a lot of us choose to go to more underground parties where you can BYO. People on the dancefloor at ARQ nightclub. Credit: Flavio Brancaleone Venues are starting to respond. Poof Doof, a weekly party on Saturdays at Kinselas, has cut drink prices, while Universal this week said it was slashing 40 per cent off all drinks between 8pm and 9.30pm on Mondays to Thursdays.

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Rate rises and the cost of living [have] bitten us all, and we know that nights out are becoming fewer and further between, the club said. We wanted to make a great night out a little more accessible. Loading Then there is a more existential question: are nightclubs just out of vogue? Gen Zs are certainly drinking less, research shows. Many people the Herald spoke to were bored with the traditional formula of Oxford Street venues, which have done little to shake up their approach post-COVID. Gary Nunn, a journalist and occasional party promoter, recently tried to do something different by organising a Broadway musical-themed club night at the Oxford Hotel. The Sydney debut was a success and this weekend he is taking it to Melbourne. We saw people that wed never normally see [out], Nunn says. Providing something new and different can really work ... people just have to stop moaning about it and go out and do it. Jack Ward, 22, says Sydney nightlife can be a chore and going out clubbing isnt everything. I think we realised over the pandemic that there are more ways to enjoy ourselves, he says. Maybe there are things to do at pubs, there are always things to do virtually, or even just staying home. Jack Ward says going out can sometimes feel like a chore. Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

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Truth is an essential force for reconciliation and, on the 185th anniversary of the Myall Creek massacre, we offer an apology for our historical coverage.

As late afternoon light settled across Myall Creek Station in northern NSW on June 10, 1838, a cloud of dust appeared on the horizon as 11 stockmen rode over a hill and headed towards a group of women, children and elderly men known as the Wirrayaraay, a tribal clan of the Kamilaroi nation.

The clan sought protection in a hut occupied by two station employees, George Anderson and Charles Kilmeister, whom they had come to know and get along with. But the gang burst into the hut and used a rope to tie the Wirrayaraay together by their hands and lead them away. Under the threat of violence, Kilmeister betrayed the Wirrayaraay and assisted the stockmen. Anderson refused and would later give evidence in court about what was about to unfold.

The Wirrayaraay were marched away to a gully, where the stockmen slaughtered them in cold blood. Some were slashed or decapitated by swords and others trampled to death by horses. The 28 mangled bodies were thrown in a pile and burnt in an attempt to destroy any evidence of one of Australias worst massacres. In a final act of depravity, the men kept one Indigenous woman to rape over the coming days.

This was not the first massacre in the so-called Frontier Wars and it would not be the last; the indiscriminate killing of First Nations people would continue for nearly a century after Myall Creek. But the events of 1838 can only be retold in detail today because the massacre was the first  and only  time in Australia when colonists were arrested, charged and prosecuted for the mass killing of Aboriginal people. So many other atrocities faded into nothingness, casualties of a culture of silence that has left us with an incomplete picture of our national story.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Truth is an essential force for reconciliation and, on the 185th anniversary of the Myall Creek massacre, we offer an apology for our historical coverage. See all 7 stories . When they first came together to mourn the dead of Myall Creek, it rained. My husband said, its tears of joy because theyre free, says Kamilaroi elder Sue Blacklock, a descendant of one of the two boys who escaped the 1838 massacre of 28 women, children and elderly men. Their souls were free. They knew we were there, and they were not forgotten. Beulah Adams  whose distant uncle Edward Foley was hanged for his role in the killings  and her husband Ian shared that sense of unburdening when they stood with Blacklock in the rain, even as they grappled with Adams link to the murderous Foley. New England is a very conservative place, says Ian, who is in his 80s. Theres still a denial about [what happened in the past], and there is still prejudice. The coming together of black and white to acknowledge the massacre at Myall Creek has been hailed as a triumph of reconciliation. Since Blacklock drove the establishment of a memorial at the site more than 20 years ago, their united voices have healed historical divisions. Now, people from all over Australia visit the memorial, where a gravel path winds through the sparse, beautiful landscape like a rainbow serpent to a massive rock overlooking the massacre site. The driving force is truth-telling, says Ivan Roberts, a member of the half-Indigenous, and half-non-Indigenous memorial committee. The road to the future travels through the past. However, the past can be a tricky place. Knowing what happened is one thing; accepting it is another. That tension plays out in the decades-long, bitter history wars over how to tell Australias story in school curricula, in the debate over the extent of the brutality on the countrys early frontier, and even among those living near Myall Creek. Recently, the memorial was vandalised. [The vandals] didnt like the word massacre, they dont like the word murderers, says Waabii Adele Chapman-Burgess, a Ngarrabul woman and member of the memorial committee. A lot of those were scratched out.

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Australia is not the only country struggling with the darkness of its past. Japan, for example, is debating how to tell the story of World War II in its history books, worried that children will feel ashamed of their country. These are terrible and painful truths, says historian Anna Clark. Coming to terms with them affects our sense of ourselves in the present. Its not about what happened; its about who we are. Every generation has to work out what about its history needs to be passed on. Ngarrabul/Gomeroi//Kooma woman Waabii Adele Chapman-Burgess. Credit: Rhett Wyman Myall Creek is the most infamous Australian massacre of Indigenous Australians, partly because the rare trial and hanging of its perpetrators left comprehensive records. But its far from the only one. Over the past 10 years, as generational shame slowly fades and descendants come forward with details of crimes committed on their land, historians have confirmed almost 100 mass killings in NSW alone. At least 1500 people died, but it was probably closer to double that, says Professor Lyndall Ryan, whose painstaking verification and mapping of atrocities has transformed Australias knowledge of the frontier wars and cemented their place in the states history curriculum. Ryan says the first massacre was in the 1790s and the latest in 1906, when at least six people  the threshold for a massacre  were given alcohol laced with poison.The more you look, says Ryan, the more gruesome it gets. The study of massacres is a relatively new historical discipline. It grew after the 1995 mass executions in Srebrenica during the Balkan War when more than 8000 Bosnian men and boys were killed but no one knew for weeks. There was a code of silence; the perpetrators shut down the whole village, says Ryan. The Europeans thought, we cant have a massacre after WWII, theyre only for uncivilised people. Scholars began to think about [massacres] in a new way, that theyre carried out in secret. That code of silence also applied to Australias frontier wars, when premeditated, secretive killings became common as expanding stations encroached on traditional hunting grounds. Breaking the code has been part of my job, says Ryan. Breaking the code is difficult. She uses press clippings, journals from the European adventurers attracted to the exotic Australian bush, and, increasingly, long-hidden letters from conscience-stricken landowners, which are now being handed over by a generation that no longer fears exposure or shame.

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Loading Most massacres involved planned attacks on Aboriginal camps at dusk or dawn, and the burning of bodies to hide the evidence. As the years passed, and as weapons and tactics became more sophisticated, the number of victims swelled. Conflict over food and land were not the only triggers. [They were] taking Aboriginal women for sex, says Ryan. That never changes over the whole period of the massacres. Some of the women get killed, of course, and others produce children, and many of those ended up in the stolen generation. While the atrocities at Myall Creek were well-documented as perpetrators were tried and hung, it was still forgotten for more than a century by everyone but the local Indigenous people themselves. Blacklock was raised with the story, although she remembers children being told never to speak of it to outsiders. I remember a really old man, I think it was my great-great-grandfather, sitting around talking [about it], she says. It had cut a deep wound; the grief, the shame over accusations of stealing, the refusal of many in the wider community to believe it. Even now, Blacklock abides by her elders rule that she stay away from the massacre site from late afternoon because of the spirits. A lot of sadness, she says, a lot of fear. Is it safe for us to be out in the bush? Or will policemen on horses come and shoot us? The fear of the white man coming. Beulah Adams  whose distant uncle Edward Foley was hanged for his role in the killings  and her husband Ian. Credit: Rhett Wyman It wasnt until the 1960s that the records about Myall Creek were discovered by historians. The story took a further 20 years to seep into the wider consciousness. Even then, there was resistance.

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Loading I think that people of my generation were in a bit of a state of shock, says Ryan, who is in her 80s. I could not believe something like this could happen in Australia. These days, students learn about conflict during settlement in year 8 history. Myall Creek is a fixture in textbooks. A new curriculum being developed by the NSW Education Standards Authority will intensify a focus on Aboriginal perspectives. The frontier wars are expected to be given greater emphasis. Draft syllabuses for history, due to be released in term 3, have been developed with Aboriginal teachers, a NESA spokeswoman said. Inverell High School Indigenous studies students (left to right) Braydon Bateman, Dequin Morgan, Gab Westgreen and Mathilda. Credit: Rhett Wyman At Inverell High, all that is happening already. Aboriginal studies is a popular subject thanks to the enthusiasm of its teachers, Wiradjuri woman Cath Jeffery and her son, Jack. They take students to the massacre site, hear directly from descendants, and encourage students to share their own stories. There are as many non-Indigenous students as Indigenous ones in the class. [We have] nieces and nephews and grandchildren talking about their personal experience, says Jack. It makes it easier to understand and grasp. Education is a very powerful tool. Inverell High School Indigenous studies teacher Jack Jeffery with his mother Cath Jeffery who is the former Indigenous studies teacher. Credit: Rhett Wyman The non-Indigenous students bring those perspectives home and challenge the entrenched beliefs of their grandparents. With the non-Aboriginal kids going into Aboriginal studies, its changed our town, says Cath. Its brought our town closer together.

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Truth is an essential force for reconciliation and, on the 185th anniversary of the Myall Creek massacre, we offer an apology for our historical coverage.

Dhiirranhi ngiyani ganunga  We remember them. Just before sunset on June 10, 1838, a gang of armed stockmen rode onto the Myall Creek station in central NSW and slaughtered a group of Aboriginal women, children and elders. At least 28 Wirrayaraay people of the Gamilaraay nation were killed in that heinous and brutal act of frontier violence.

The Myall Creek massacre was just one of many, many massacres that occurred across the country from the earliest days of British colonisation in 1788 through to the late 1920s. But it was the first time white men were charged over the murders and brought to justice. Seven men were convicted at trial and hanged.

Linda Burney illustration by Aresna Villanueva. Credit:

It has been 185 years to the day since that horrific day at Myall Creek, but the trauma and pain transcends generations  and the grief is still felt today.

Each year, on the June long weekend, hundreds of people, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, gather at Myall Creek to remember what happened there and reflect on the shared history.
Truth is an essential force for reconciliation and, on the 185th anniversary of the Myall Creek massacre, we offer an apology for our historical coverage.

The trials of 11 men in 1838 for the murder of about 28 Aboriginal men, women and children at Myall Creek Station was the only time during the history of colonial NSW that justice was done for the mass murder and dispossession of Indigenous people. This was only achieved because a number of people did the right thing.

Mark Tedeschi illustration by Aresna Villanueva. Credit:

It began with George Anderson, a convict hut keeper living on the remote station, looking after the cattle and sheep of wealthy landowner Henry Dangar. When 11 armed and mounted stockmen, led by free settler John Henry Fleming, suddenly descended on the cleared area around the huts of Myall Creek Station, Anderson knew the fate that was intended for the Wirrayaraay people who were camped there.

Anderson tried his best to convince Fleming and the others not to harm the Aboriginal people, and he desperately sought to protect one of them, Heppita, a woman with whom he had formed a relationship. To no avail.

The second person who did the right thing was Davy (Yintayintin), an 18-year-old Indigenous man from the Peel River district, who was employed to help the convict workmen at the station. Being employed by Dangar ensured Davys safety. When the stockmen tied up the Wirrayaraay to a long length of rope and led them away from the huts into the bush, Anderson asked Davy to follow at a distance and report back to him what happened. Some time later, Anderson heard two shots ring out, and when Davy returned he told him that the whole group had been massacred, except for Heppita (who was also as known as Ipeta). Her life was spared for a few days to satisfy the sexual depredations of the stockmen.
KYODO NEWS - Jun 9, 2023 - 07:35 | All, Japan

The operator of a major conveyer belt sushi chain that became the center of national attention over a viral video of a boy licking a soy sauce bottle filed a 67 million yen ($480,000) damages suit against the boy, court documents showed Thursday.

Akindo Sushiro Co., which runs the Sushiro restaurant chain, filed the suit at the Osaka District Court on March 22.

According to the complaint, the boy went to a Sushiro outlet in Gifu Prefecture with a friend on Jan. 3 and was filmed licking an open soy sauce bottle and an unused teacup, and then touching a passing plate of sushi with a finger covered in his saliva.

The video was uploaded on social media by Jan. 29, and Sushiro restaurants saw a sharp fall in customers after it was shared widely.

The suit also claims the footage caused its parent company's market capitalization to fall by more than 16 billion yen from Jan. 30 to 31.

Akindo Sushiro is installing plastic barriers at over 600 outlets nationwide among other measures, resulting in a loss of 90 million yen. The sushi chain operator could seek higher damages reflecting these measures.

The 45-second viral video caused a stir in Japan and helped give rise to the term "sushi terrorism" to describe unhygienic behavior in the restaurants.

Food is typically served there on plates that pass numerous diners and utensils are set at the tables ready for a succession of customers to use throughout the day.

The boy has admitted to licking communal items and expressed remorse. But his defense team argues that the footage was for sharing only among his friends, and that he had no intention of creating a video to be spread online.

They claim there is no clear causal relationship between his actions and the fall in customers due to stiff competition among rival sushi chains, according to the documents.

Akindo Sushiro declined to comment on the matter.

Sushiro's competitors, including Kura Sushi Inc., were affected by similar scandals earlier in the year, with a man in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, indicted for obstruction of business for licking a soy sauce bottle top at one of its restaurants.

Outside the sushi business, a man in his 30s has also been indicted on the same charge after he was filmed eating red pickled ginger straight from a communal bowl at a branch of a Yoshinoya Co. beef bowl chain restaurant in Osaka.

Related coverage:

Sushi chain installs AI camera system after licking scandal

Sushi chain limits conveyor belt use to orders after licking scandal

Japan sushi chain reports diner who licked utensils in viral clip to police
We move to Mahas brightest room and start with the snacks supplement course, devouring chicken and harissa buns, almond tarts with charred corn and pepper and spanner crab, which Chaney highly recommends. Two savoury courses follow, which feature melt-in-your-mouth Victorian tuna, fried zucchini flowers and roast chicken breast with maple and harissa roasted pumpkin. We have endive and witlof salad and sparkling water for virtue. Chaney has just flown in from his home of Perth, where he is part of a large, prominent tribe that includes his four children, 13 grandchildren and his Norwegian wife, Margrete. You might have heard of his politician father, the late Fred Chaney, or his daughter, Kate Chaney, the new teal member for Curtin. Loading Chaney chose business rather than politics but still has a bit to do with our nations politicians. As chairman of the National School Resourcing Board, which provides independent oversight of Commonwealth school funding, hes dealt with five federal education ministers in six years. Labors Jason Clare is the latest, pouring record funding into state, Catholic and independent schools.

From the boards perspective, nothing much changes when governments change. The ministers have all taken the boards recommendations in full, which is gratifying for Chaney. I ask whether his familys political experience helps him deal with Canberra. Maybe it helps you understand how the sausage is made, I say. Unless youre in there, you dont really understand, he responds. While Chaney started his career as a petroleum geologist and made his name in business, education has always been important. He enjoyed boarding at a Christian Brothers school in Perth, chaired his childrens Catholic school and was chancellor of the University of Western Australia. There are grandchildren in the public system. Chaney admits he didnt understand how school funding worked when the Liberals Simon Birmingham appointed him in 2017. What has struck me on my time on the board is the complexity of the system, he says. His experience running conglomerate Wesfarmers  which owns everything from Bunnings to gas  has helped him take a big-picture view.

Under the Gonski school funding system, the federal education department calculates an estimate of how much public funding each school needs to meet its students educational needs, known as the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS). The SRS is made up of a base amount and loadings for small or remote schools, students who are Indigenous, disadvantaged, have a disability or low English proficiency. For non-government schools, the Commonwealth provides 80 per cent of each schools SRS and the states the remaining 20 per cent. Aged basmati rice, carrots, carroway and pumpkin seeds; roast chicken breast with maple and harissa roasted pumpkin in a ras el hanout jus; and curly endive and witlof salad, smoked egg, cumin and onion dressing. Credit: Jason South For state schools the formula is reversed: states and territories provide 80 per cent of each government schools SRS, and the Commonwealth 20 per cent. One change is government funding to private schools is now based on parents capacity to pay school fees, measured by income tax rather than outdated census data. If the parents are well off, theyll get a lot less money in the school than if theyre not well off, Chaney explains.

In Victoria, 19 per cent of the states private schools received more funding this year, 36 per cent got less and close to 45 per cent received the same amount. State school advocates say the system is needs-based in name only, as states, including Victoria, baulk at fully funding state schools while extending full funding to Catholic and independent schools. The Albanese government has promised to work with states and territories to get every school to 100 per cent of its fair funding level. I put it to Chaney that you would never design this system from scratch. He doesnt agree. Every government believes they should fund non-government schools  and now they have a formula to do so. Once youve got anything in place, its likely to remain, he says. I think any Australian government would be very disinclined to say well, everyone can just do their own thing and work out their own funding formula. Because theres an interest in having commonality across Australia, so the student from a certain socio-economic group gets the same funding. Federal government funding is given to dozens of state, Catholic and independent education authorities in lump sums, which then distribute the money according to their own arrangements.

Chaney has called for more transparency on how state and territory education departments fund individual schools, and how all schools spend their funding. The boards analysis has found seemingly identical government schools received vastly different amounts because the states used their own formula to distribute it. Change is coming. In a win for transparency, the government has accepted the boards recommendation that all education authorities should be required to publish their funding model. In 2018, The Age reported that several needy Victorian Catholic schools had up to 37 per cent of their allocated government funding diverted, while Catholic schools in wealthier areas received hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the federal government had allocated. Shared four-course lunch plus sparkling water at Maha in Melbournes CBD. Credit: Madeleine Heffernan Chaney says the suggestion the Catholic system takes money directed at poor schools and gives them to rich schools is not nearly as material an issue as some people suggest.

And people have used that as an argument for reducing funding to non-government schools. Well, those arguments are based on a philosophy thats not shared by the government, by any government, that you shouldnt be funding non-government schools. Chaney says the key issue for Australian schools is declining student outcomes, demonstrated in both national and international studies. We need to know why, he says. What all the research shows is that money is important for outcomes up to a certain level. We need a basic amount of funding for a school, but above that level, what really affects outcomes is how the money is spent. And in the absence of detailed data at a school level on how the money is being spent, a researcher has no hope really of trying to figure out what works. The role has also given him an insight into the difficulty of improving academic results among students in remote areas. Its given me an opportunity to appreciate some of the challenges in outcomes particularly in remote and very remote Australia, where the outcomes are truly awful, he says. And theyre not a matter of funding  funding obviously plays a part  but its a matter of social setting, family setting, absenteeism, the difficulty of attracting teachers. Its probably the biggest education challenge weve got in Australia.
In 1971, I hitchhiked the length of the east coast of Australia alone. The appearance of a phone box - and there almost always was one not too far away - meant I could drag my contact book out of my backpack and a coin from a pocket and call ahead to some friend of a friend and beg a spot on their couch for the night. It also meant I could dial 013 and ask the operator to place a call to my family, reversing the charges (naturally). Sometimes I did. They were comforting little worlds, those old booths, complete with a door for privacy, even if they often stank of urine. You needed coins to dial. You could amuse yourself perusing messages scrawled into the paintwork, suggesting you call Mandy or Rex if you were in search of an interesting time. There, anyway, is the answer to that regular question: What did we do before mobile phones?

My solo trip was a very long time before Ivan Milat consigned hitchhiking in Australia to a hideously dangerous period of history, of course. Still, an uncle in Rockhampton tried unsuccessfully to persuade me to carry his old service revolver on my travels north. I didnt know then that a 130-kilometre stretch of the Bruce Highway between the North Queensland towns of Marlborough and Sarina was known as death alley, owing to frequent shootings and murders. In the 60s and 70s, one stretch of road in northern Queensland became notorious. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer In 1967, a Queensland Labor MP, Rex Patterson - later a minister in the Whitlam government - told Parliament he carried a loaded rifle in his car when travelling that spooky road. Just in case. In the previous 18 months, two men had been shot and their bodies thrown into a creek on the Marlborough-Sarina stretch, another man was shot dead while camped in a car, and four other people, including a woman, had been ambushed and wounded.

Four years after I hitched through, two more travellers, Sophia and Noel Weckert, were killed on that same road. Two drifters were later found guilty of murder and a woman was convicted of manslaughter. On my way back, after Id finally got as north as I could go, I got stuck in Sarina. By then I knew a bit about the reputation of the area, and wasnt entirely happy about being dropped off in the little sugar-milling town. Sugar cane country in northern Queensland. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer No one would pick me up. For two days. The annual show and rodeo was on. The local cowboys thought it was fine sport to give me a hard time as I tried to sleep on the towns creek bank. I woke to discover someone had shoved a cane toad in my sleeping bag. Beery voices cackled across the creek.

There was a phone booth down the street. In the absence of that pistol Id refused to carry, I needed to hear a friendly voice. The phone was busted. No voice, friendly or otherwise, would come down the line. And I lost a precious 20 cents in the slot. These days phone boxes are free for the public. Credit: Glenn Campbell When a fellow in a Morris Minor finally pulled up well into the second day, I leapt in and refused to leave the tiny vehicle until we reached Rockhampton, 300 kilometres down the track. All the way back to Victoria, I obsessively checked booths to see if their phones were in working order.
After a bus carrying 27 students and several teachers collided with a truck and rolled several times down an embankment, Loreto College Ballarat principal Michelle Brodrick rushed to the hospital.

Deputy principal Christine Shaw stepped up to run things back at the school. One of our challenges was, where was everybody? We werent at the scene, she said of the crash last September near Bacchus Marsh.

Loreto College Ballarat principal Michelle Brodrick (left) and deputy principal Christine Shaw. Credit: Liz Crothers

We knew people were going to hospital, but we didnt know where all our children were and all our families were, so we were just trying to get together and work out, where is everybody, whats actually happened, and what do we do from there?

Shaw said the 147-year-old school had never experienced trauma like it. Obviously lots of schools have trauma through the years  it could be the loss of a staff member or the loss of a student for various reasons  but something on this scale, we had 31 people impacted in such a critical moment where its very life-changing.
A doctor who sliced open his wifes throat with a kitchen knife, claiming she was choking, has been referred to prosecutors for suspected negligent manslaughter after she died.

Paramedics found Mayumi Spencer, 29, dead in the Docklands apartment she shared with husband Peter Spencer in January 2015 with high levels of cocaine in her system.

Mayumi Spencer, 29, died in her Docklands apartment.

Spencer, a registered sleep physician, had waited more than three hours to call an ambulance, telling authorities he sliced his wifes throat open with a kitchen knife and pen, believing she was choking.

State Coroner John Cain on Friday found he could not rule out the possibility Mayumi had died from homicide and noted there was a background of family violence in the relationship.
Preston market traders are urging the government and site owners to come to a resolution over the markets future, fearing thousands of jobs will be lost if a compromise is not met by January.

About 50 traders rallied at the market on Friday and presented an open letter to the state government and landlords to remove the politics and ensure traders would not face closure as a result of the ongoing fight over the markets redevelopment.

Preston Market traders have written an open letter calling for a resolution to market redevelopment. Credit: Paul Jeffers

Kristian Gandolfo, who runs his family business Mariluci deli, presented the letter on behalf of traders, saying they had the most to lose in the dispute but were being largely ignored.

For the past 20 years the traders have been overlooked, Gandolfo said. We want to the government and landlord to work on a compromise to put the traders as a top priority.
As revealed in The Age, the state government is looking at taking statutory planning powers away from local government as part of a planning push to boost urban density and ultimately squeeze an extra million homes in Melbourne suburbs by 2050, among other reforms. Premier Daniel Andrews has promised the reforms, being worked on by Deputy Premier Jacinta Allan and Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny, will place downward pressure on prices by boosting the supply of houses. Thats about getting more housing stock into the market because more housing stock will mean theres downward pressure on prices, Andrews said. People will have the options in housing that they simply dont have now and if they are there, theyre often priced out of them. As part of a push being led by the philanthropic organisation Housing All Australians, the government has agreed that empty buildings will get fast-tracked planning approvals through the Department of Plannings development facilitation unit, avoiding potentially lengthy delays associated with the local government planning process.

The Age can reveal the government has also agreed to conduct a trial under which land tax would be lowered for buildings that are allowed to be used for public purposes such as pop-up shelters. However, it remains unclear whether the change would become a permanent feature of the states planning regime. Loading It follows a range of changes announced in last months state budget, including higher land tax rates, particularly for landlords with more than one property, and a doubling of the absentee owner land tax surcharge. Housing All Australians director and founder Robert Pradolin said the acute shortage of housing in Victoria was only going to get worse with a return to strong overseas migration. If you think its bad now, you wait for three to four years time, Pradolin said. In my view, homeless and housing stress will go through the roof. We just cant turn the tap on to build new homes, it takes time. 

Several projects have already been fast-tracked as part of the push to provide emergency accommodation. In Sandringham, an old convent, previously owned by the Sisters of Mercy and then purchased by the Mercy Hospital for future expansion, was lying empty. It has now been repurposed by Housing All Australians, who negotiated a peppercorn lease between Mercy and the charity Bridge IT to accommodate youth at risk of homelessness. Among several other projects is a former aged care facility on Albert Road, South Melbourne, which is being used for community care accommodation, providing 56 rooms. If you think its bad now, you wait for three to four years time. Housing All Australians director Robert Pradolin Bridge IT chief executive and founder Carla Raynes said that in more than 20 years of working in the homelessness field, she had never seen the situation as bad as it was now. The cost-of-living crisis, rising rents, long wait times for community housing and population growth are forcing more people out onto the street, Raynes said. Homelessness is solvable, but we need charities, government and corporates to come together.

Under the current state planning rules, land can be exempt from land tax if it is used and occupied by a charitable institution exclusively for charitable purposes. But the rules are seen as complex and onerous. Under changes now being considered, a specific land tax and council rates exemption for owners of vacant properties would be introduced as a way of encouraging unused or underutilised buildings to be used for emergency or low-cost accommodation. The plan is that an owner of premises that is vacant would be invited to hand it over for the provision of social and emergency housing for a short or medium fixed period  for example, three years  on the basis that the landowner will ultimately develop the property. It is understood the government has agreed to consider the proposal on a trial basis, although it declined to say whether the changes would become a permanent feature of Victorias planning laws when reforms are announced later this year.
Doctors and families are calling for the meningococcal B vaccine to be made free in Victoria after an infant and an elderly person died from the disease and another five fell ill.

Outgoing chief health officer Brett Sutton issued an alert on Friday urging doctors to be on the lookout for the disease after seven cases were detected in the community this year.

Meningococcal disease is an uncommon but serious bacterial infection that requires urgent medical care to prevent death or disability. Credit: Getty

People with meningococcal disease can become very unwell within a few hours and it can lead to death or disability, Sutton said. Early diagnosis and treatment are critical.

Most of the people struck down by the disease were aged between the ages of 15 and 20 and infected with strain B. The cohort included a Ballarat Grammar staff member, who was hospitalised last month. He was discharged on Friday and no other staff members or students have been diagnosed with the disease.
As an old-age psychiatrist and as a geriatrician, we have spent our working lives caring for people with dementia. We know the toll that this progressive, neurodegenerative disorder takes on those affected. We are dismayed at the push for voluntary assisted dying to be enshrined in an advance care directive, or living will, as a solution to the problems created by this illness.

Dementia is already associated with significant stigma and fear. These will only be compounded if those with dementia have access to assisted dying.

Dementia is already associated with significant stigma and fear. Credit: Danielle Smith

We all know of overstretched caregivers and have seen the cases of neglect and inadequate care as highlighted by the aged care royal commission. These are caused by systemic failures to provide enough trained staff and resources for people with dementia. The recently announced 15 per cent increase in aged care staff salaries, mandatory minimum staffing requirements and 9500 extra home-care packages should help with this, but more can be done.

Dementia has early, middle and late stages, which last an average of one to two years each. More than one-third of patients will die of other causes before their dementia becomes advanced. At diagnosis, those affected have already lost some degree of function, which can impair decision-making. In late-stage dementia, many need care in a nursing home, where 80 per cent of residents have dementia. Those severely affected, who may be bed-bound, incontinent or mute (or all three) often succumb naturally before long with supportive care alone. There is no need to treat complications like pneumonia in every case and no benefit to feeding tubes to prolong life. Adequate palliative care can enable death with dignity.
A Perth miner charged with sexually assaulting multiple women, filming them and distributing photos of them walked out of court on Friday after a magistrate granted him bail with strict conditions not to visit dating sites.

Michael McConnaughty, 27, from Morley is alleged to have sexually assaulted three women he met through various sites including Bumble, Tinder and Hinge between 2019 and 2023.

Michael John McConnaughty has been charged with offences relating to four women, some of which he met through dating sites.

One of the women was an ex-girlfriend, while two others he met online and had brief relationships with them.

A fourth woman was also allegedly recorded by McConnaughty but was unaware it had happened until police found the recording on his phone.
Australian beef producers arent responsible for deforestation, according to advice from the federal Agriculture Department to minister Murray Watt that contradicts Queensland government data, further complicating trade negotiations with the European Union.

The departments claim, released under freedom of information laws, surfaced as Watt and Trade Minister Don Farrells push to seal a trade deal with the EU stalled this week over access for farm exports.

Murray Watt says its impossible to compare what is happening overseas with Australias very specific conditions for producing food and fibre. Credit: Rhett Wyman

Watt had sought the information from the Agriculture Department before travelling to Europe in January to promote the sector as part of the governments pursuit of the trade deal.

The departments official briefing note told Watt there is no risk Australian beef and leather products are connected to deforestation.
KYODO NEWS - Jun 9, 2023 - 19:22 | All, World

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is planning to travel to Beijing as early as next week to hold talks with senior Chinese officials, U.S. political news website Politico reported Thursday.

If the trip goes ahead, it would be the first visit to China by a ministerial-level official from Washington since the start of President Joe Biden's administration in 2021.

Despite months of heightened tensions between the United States and China, the report comes amid the Biden administration stepping up efforts to restore lines of communication between the two countries' high-ranking officials.

Earlier this week, Daniel Kritenbrink, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, met with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu in Beijing, with both Washington and Beijing characterizing their discussions as constructive.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Friday, "Our door to dialogue and communication is always open," but added that the two countries should not communicate for the sake of communication.

"We need to work toward the same goal and bring the bilateral ties back to the right track of sound and stable development," Wang said at a press conference in Beijing.

Blinken had initially planned to visit Beijing in early February in a bid to improve bilateral ties following an in-person meeting between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in November in Indonesia.

But the trip was abruptly postponed after Washington detected what it described as a Chinese spy balloon traveling over sensitive areas of the continental United States, fueling further tensions between the two countries.

Although the bilateral relationship remains fraught over a range of thorny issues, such as Taiwan and territorial disputes in the East and South China seas, as well as human rights, there have been recent signs that the Biden administration is trying harder to re-engage with Beijing.

U.S. officials admitted last week that William Burns, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and one of Biden's closest confidants, visited China in May.

At the Group of Seven summit in the Japanese city of Hiroshima last month, Biden hinted the situation may improve, saying in reference to U.S.-China relations, "I think you're going to see that begin to thaw very shortly."
Households in outer city suburbs will be disproportionately affected by rapid interest rate rises and the cost-of-living crisis, and experts warn the shift towards working from home has exacerbated the divide between the haves and have-nots.

Growth areas on the fringe of Sydney and Melbourne are more vulnerable to spikes in the cost of living, due to greater exposure to mortgage stress, car dependency and other inflationary pressure, the Australian Urban Observatorys VAMPIRE index, released on Thursday, shows.

RMIT Centre for Urban Research director Professor Jago Dodson, who helped create the index, said it assessed the vulnerability of households using a range of indicators  including income, the amount of mortgaged homes and car dependency  based on 2021 census data.

We use the term vulnerability, but that could easily be substituted for stress, Dodson said.
Kherson, Ukraine: Before-and-after images of the area downstream from a dam that collapsed on Tuesday vividly show the extent of the devastation of a large, flooded swath of southern Ukraine.

Before the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River broke, farm fields appear green and crossed by peaceful streets and farm roads and dotted with trees.

Afterward, only metal roofs and treetops poke above the murky water. Greenhouses and homes are almost entirely submerged.

The pre-collapse satellite photos were taken in May and early June.
Harry, 38, alleges that 147 articles published between 1996 and 2010 at the Mirror Groups titles, including the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, were linked to methods including phone hacking, so-called blagging or gaining information by deception, and use of private investigators for unlawful activities. Just 33 of those stories are being examined in the trial. The stories cover his relationship with his family and ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy, visits to strip clubs, a few injuries and illnesses, his military service and allegations of drug use. A court artist sketch of Prince Harry being cross-examined by Andrew Green, KC. Credit: AP Harry said he found certain headlines mean and said he would feel some injustice if the judge finds his phone was not hacked. All this intrusion meant it was very hard to trust anyone, which led to bouts of depression and paranoia, he said. Mirror Group denies that 28 of the 33 articles involved unlawful information gathering, and it is not admitted for the remaining five articles. In 2015, the paper admitted to and apologised for hacking on its front page and has paid 100 million ($186.7 million) in settlements and legal fees to others.

Setting the tone for an explosive two days in court, the prince broke with royal protocol to criticise the current British government, saying in his witness statement that at the moment our country is judged globally by the state of our press and our government  both of which I believe are at rock bottom. He added: Democracy fails when your press fails to scrutinise and hold the government accountable, and instead choose to get into bed with them. He also criticised the lack of oversight of incredibly powerful media companies who masquerade as journalists. Andrew Green, the lead lawyer for Mirror Group Newspapers, passes by media at the High Court in London. Credit: AP But over the course of several hours, Harrys 49-page witness statement was picked apart by Mirror Group barrister Andrew Green, KC, who put it to him that many of the articles in question were actually based on reports already published by other newspapers or official sources. At times, Prince Harry seemed shockingly uninformed about the evidence he himself had submitted to the court. And when challenged about the more difficult matter of the truth by a leading barrister, his recollections fell apart.

Take for instance an article in the Sunday Mirror which reported that the now-Duke of Sussex had separated from Davy in November 2007. Loading Harry told the court: I dont know how anybody would know that we had broken up; we didnt tell anybody. However, under cross-examination he later agreed it was very similar to a story that had appeared in an earlier edition of the News of the World. He was later questioned about a Daily Mirror article from September 1996 reporting a visit by his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, while he was at Ludgrove prep school on his 12th birthday, and how she discussed her divorce.

The duke admitted he was unaware that two days earlier the Press Association news agency had reported the planned visit, while his mother had told the BBCs current affairs program Panorama that she discussed the divorce with her sons. The duke suggested the information came from the hacking of his voicemails, but later acknowledged in court he did not have a mobile phone until he went to Eton. When asked why hed taken exception to an exclusive article about him breaking his thumb in November 2000, he was shocked to find out it had been widely reported the previous day and included a Palace statement. When many of these stories were published, the Daily Mirror was selling 2 million copies a day. Recent circulation figures show sales of about 280,000. But the desire for greater control of the press continues.

The pressure group Hacked Off hopes the case will be the springboard for the establishment of a state regulator with the power to impose sanctions on newspapers. Even The Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch, conceded that in some cases Harrys bitterness was understandable. But, the paper wrote in its editorial, while he may feel the need to dredge up the hurt of the past, he is in reality fighting yesteryears war. Loading If he insists on making these allegations he must prove them. Vague generalities will not do, it added. After finishing his testimony, the prince was asked by his barrister David Sherborne how he felt after being cross-examined while watched by the worlds media. The prince replied in a slightly cracked voice: Its been a lot.
Washington: Donald Trump has become the first former US president to face federal charges and will appear in court next week over the alleged mishandling of classified documents.

The Republican posted on Truth Social on Thursday night that he had been summonsed to appear in court on Tuesday afternoon, capping off an explosive investigation that began last August when the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago property searching for sensitive material that he had taken from the White House.

Donald Trump is the first former US president to be indicted. Credit: afr

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, he wrote.

I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States who ... is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!
PHILIPSBURG (DCOMM):--- The Office of Disaster Management which falls under the Fire Department (Ministry of General Affairs) headed by Fire Chief/Disaster Coordinator Clive Richardson, said on Thursday that a week ago the first named storm of the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season developed.



Tropical Storm Arlene developed in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida last week on June 1  the opening of the hurricane season - but has since dissipated. Richardson said that this is a stark reminder that we have entered the hurricane season and must be prepared.



Richardson is once again calling on the nation, the community, and the business community, to take the necessary steps now to prepare themselves in the event of a storm/hurricane threat; to remain vigilant and ready to take action when called upon to do so to protect life and property.



Sint Maarten has experienced two once in a lifetime storms, namely the most recent, Irma six years ago and Luis 28-years ago, but according to weather forecasters, these types of major hurricanes are becoming more frequent due to climate change and become commonplace in the Caribbean Region.



The Colorado State University (CSU) Department of Atmospheric Science has updated its preliminary forecast for April with a new forecast for early June, that calls for a near-average hurricane season.



The number of named storms forecasted by the CSU is 15 of which seven (7) become hurricanes; and of those three (3) could become major hurricanes of Category 3+.



The community is urged to learn more about hurricane hazards and resources you need on how to prepare your family, home, or business for a storm/hurricane strike by visiting the Government of Sint Maarten website: www.sintmaartengov.org/hurricane where you will be able to download your Hurricane Season Readiness Guide and Hurricane Tracking Chart. The information here is also valuable for new residents.



The storm names for the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season are:

Bret, Cindy, Don, Emily, Franklin, Gert, Harold, Idalia, Jose, Katia, Lee, Margot, Nigel, Ophelia, Philippe, Rina, Sean, Tammy, Vince, and Whitney.



Listen to the Government Radio station SXMGOV  107.9FM - for official information and news before, during and after a hurricane. You can also follow weather related news and information as well as national addresses by the Prime Minister, chairlady of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) by going to @SXMGOV Facebook Page.



For official weather-related information, check out the website of the Meteorological Department of St. Maarten (MDS): www.meteosxm.com



While preparing for a tropical storm/hurricane strike, misinformation can spread during times of uncertainty, and therefore it is vital to monitor official sources of information and always verify before you share.



Remember, it only takes one hurricane to make it a bad season. Be prepared this hurricane season!
PHILIPSBURG:--- The second interception for HNLMS Groningen Last Monday the Dutch Naval ship HNLMS Groningen, functioning as a Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard patrol, disrupted a drug transportthis time near the Windward Islands.

HNLMS Groningen detected a suspicious vessel and started a pursuit. The so-called, FRISCs intercept boats of Groningen were launched after the detection to pursue the suspected vessel. After a long chase at a very high speed, the suspicious vessel managed to escape. During the pursuit, the smugglers threw packages overboard, which the FRISC boats took out of the water. The four packages weighed more than 200 kilos, of which a small amount was marijuana and a larger amount was cocaine.

The intercepted contraband was handed over by Groningen to the Sint Maarten Police.

The KPSM acted hereafter on instructions from the Public Prosecutor's office and destroyed the seized drugs hours later. The investigation of this case is ongoing.

HNLMS Groningen is active in the region as a Caribbean station ship since May 2023 and will combine counter-drug operations with supporting the Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard and humanitarian aid.




Investments in fertilizers and green energies

Russia\-s invasion of Ukraine and recent developments there raise fears of an energy and fertilizer crisis.

Global food security and food prices have become a present topic. Not only the EU, but worldwide, including in developing countries, there are challenges that industry and farmers must overcome. Potash fertilizers, which traditionally come from Canada, Russia, and the Middle East, are essential. Without potash fertilizers, it can\-t work. It also requires a significant amount of transportation. One major country that needs a lot of potash fertilizer is Brazil. Around twelve million tons of MOP (potassium chloride) are imported there every year. The two most sought-after types of potash fertilizer are MOP and SOP. MOP ensures improved soil health and supports the disease resistance of plants.

One company, Millennial Potash  https://www.commodity-tv.com/ondemand/companies/profil/millennial-potash-corp/ -, scores with a significant cost advantage. This is because, compared with other competitors, Millennial Potash is closer to important potash markets and is developing the project rapidly. The delivery time to Brazil and the Asian markets, and thus the costs, are significantly shorter than those of other suppliers. In Africa, in Gabon, the Banio potash project is located in a proven potash basin. Gabon is mining and development friendly.

The sustainable path to the future not only concerns the food supply, but of course also the energy transition. The linchpin here is the sufficient supply of the white gold, lithium. This is because the lithium in lithium-ion batteries cannot be replaced by other substances in the foreseeable future. Most lithium is consumed by the electric vehicle industry. The second important area is the energy storage sector.

Promising lithium projects are held by Targa Exploration  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OiWtGti9Oo  in Quebec, for example. Recently, lithium projects in Ontario and Saskatchewan were added through the acquisition of Pan Canadian Lithium, which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Targa Exploration.

Current corporate information and press releases from Millennial Potash (- https://www.resource-capital.ch/en/companies/millennial-potash-corp/ -)

In accordance with A34 of the German Securities Trading Act (WpHG), I would like to point out that partners, authors and employees may hold shares in the respective companies addressed and that there is therefore a possible conflict of interest. No guarantee for the translation into German. Only the English version of this news is valid. A

Disclaimer: The information provided does not constitute any form of recommendation or advice. Express reference is made to the risks involved in securities trading. No liability can be accepted for any damages arising from the use of this blog. I would like to point out that shares and especially warrant investments are fundamentally associated with risk. The total loss of the invested capital cannot be excluded. All information and sources are carefully researched. However, no guarantee is given for the correctness of all contents. Despite the greatest care, I expressly reserve the right to make a mistake, especially with regard to figures and prices. The information contained is taken from sources that are considered reliable, but in no way claim to be correct or complete. Due to judicial decisions the contents of linked external pages are to be answered for (so among other things regional court Hamburg, in the judgement of 12.05.1998  312 O 85/98), as long as no explicit dissociation from these takes place. Despite careful control of the contents, I do not assume any liability for the contents of linked external pages. The respective operators are exclusively responsible for their content. The disclaimer of Swiss Resource Capital AG applies additionally: https://www.resource-capital.ch/de/disclaimer-agb/
Alpha Lithium Advises Shareholders to TAKE NO ACTION on Tecpetrola?s Significantly Undervalued Takeover Bid

Alpha Lithium Corporation (NEO: ALLI) (OTC: APHLF) (German WKN: A3CUW1) (aAlpha Lithiuma or the aCompanya  https://www.commodity-tv.com/ondemand/companies/profil/alpha-lithium-corp/ ) announces that it has received an unsolicited takeover bid from TechEnergy Lithium Canada Inc., a subsidiary formed five days ago by the Spanish firm Tecpetrol Investments S.L. (aTecpetrola) (the aTecpetrol Offera).

The board of directors of Alpha Lithium (the aBoarda) and its special committee of independent directors (the aSpecial Committeea) will review the Tecpetrol Offer and related takeover bid circular with their financial and legal advisors; after which, the Board will respond in detail and make a recommendation to the Companya?s shareholders through a news release and a directorsa? circular, in accordance with applicable securities laws, within the next 15 calendar days.

As noted in the Companya?s June 5, 2023 press release, Alpha Lithium has been involved in an ongoing and comprehensive process to explore the potential sale of the Tolillar asset, with a focus on maximizing value for shareholders.

The Tecpetrol Offer appears to be a transparent attempt to frustrate an ongoing and robust competitive process, at a price significantly below precedent transactions.

Accordingly, Alpha Lithium urges shareholders to take no action and not to deposit any Alpha Lithium shares in relation to the Tecpetrol Offer. Additionally, Alpha Lithium shareholders should not take any action on the Tecpetrol Offer until Alpha Lithiuma?s Special Committee and Board have had the opportunity to fully review the Tecpetrol Offer (including other possible alternatives) in detail and make a formal recommendation to shareholders.

The Tecpetrol Offer will remain open until 5:00 pm on September 22, 2023, which will provide ample time for shareholders to reach a decision.

Tecpetrol first made an unsolicited non-binding offer on May 15, 2023, which was rejected by the Board after determining the bid to be opportunistic with a low and declining premium to the trading price of the Companya?s common shares and not in the best interests of Alpha Lithium shareholders.

Subsequently on June 2, 2023, Tecpetrol announced its intention of taking the same undervalued bid directly to shareholders via a formal takeover bid to be made by a Canadian subsidiary that did not then exist.

Advisors

Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC is serving as the Companya?s financial advisor, Cozen Oa?Connor LLP is serving as the Companya?s legal advisor and McMillan LLP is serving as the Special Committeea?s legal advisor. Longview Communications & Public Affairs is serving as government and public relations advisor and Kingsdale Advisors is serving as strategic shareholder and communications advisor.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF ALPHA LITHIUM CORPORATION

aBrad Nichola

Brad Nichol

President, CEO and Director

For more information:

Alpha Lithium Investor Relations

Tel: +1 844 592 6337

relations@alphalithium.com

www.alphalithium.com

About Alpha Lithium (NEO: ALLI) (OTC: APHLF) (German WKN: A3CUW1)

Alpha Lithium is a team of industry professionals and experienced stakeholders focused on the development of the Tolillar and Hombre Muerto Salars. In Tolillar, we have assembled 100% ownership of what may be one of Argentinaa?s last undeveloped lithium salars, encompassing 27,500 hectares (67,954 acres), neighboring multi-billion-dollar lithium players in the heart of the renowned aLithium Trianglea. In Hombre Muerto, we continue to expand our 5,000+ hectare (12,570 acres) foothold in one of the worlda?s highest quality, longest producing, lithium salars. Other companies in the area exploring for lithium brines or currently in production include Orocobre Limited, Galaxy Lithium, Allkem Ltd., Livent Corporation, and POSCO in Salar del Hombre Muerto; Orocobre in Salar Olaroz; Eramine SudAmerica S.A. in Salar de Centenario; and Gangfeng and Lithium Americas in Salar de Cauchari.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements and other statements that are not historical facts, including statements concerning the Tecpetrol Offer and maximizing shareholder value. Forward-looking statements are often identified by terms such as awilla, amaya, ashoulda, aanticipatea, aexpectsa and similar expressions. All statements other than statements of historical fact, included in this news release are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company\-s expectations include the results of further discussions, if any, between the Company, Tecpetrol and other third parties, the ability of the Company to successfully complete the process to explore the potential sale of the Tolillar asset or to do so on a timely basis, global economic conditions and other risks detailed from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulators. The reader is cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of any forward-looking information may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, include numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking information. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release and the Company will update or revise publicly any of the included forward-looking statements as expressly required by applicable law.

No securities regulatory authority has reviewed nor accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release.
KYODO NEWS - Jun 9, 2023 - 07:02 | All, World

U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Thursday singled out China and Russia for criticism and agreed to deepen cooperation on new economic challenges such as the risks of artificial intelligence.

Following a meeting in Washington, Biden and Sunak issued an "Atlantic Declaration" document outlining plans to strengthen national and economic security for the two allies in the years to come, including efforts to build stronger supply chains for semiconductors and other key industrial products.

"We face new challenges to international stability -- from authoritarian states such as Russia and the People's Republic of China; disruptive technologies; non-state actors; and transnational challenges like climate change," the declaration said.

As Western officials try to get to the bottom of the recent destruction of a huge dam in the Russian-controlled part of southern Ukraine, Biden told a joint press conference with Sunak that the two also discussed their "unwavering support" for the people of the war-torn country.

Visiting the White House for the first time since becoming Britain's leader in October last year, Sunak described China and Russia as threats that the two countries, both members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, need to address.

"Countries like China and Russia are willing to manipulate and exploit our openness, steal our intellectual property, use technology for authoritarian ends, or withdraw crucial resources like energy," Sunak told the press. "They will not succeed."

Biden and Sunak, who last met in mid-May in the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where the Group of Seven summit took place, both praised their closer and more frequent coordination on major issues, as the latest meeting marked the fourth between them this year.

The declaration, akin to an action plan, identified five pillars that will be particularly important for a new economic partnership between the United States and Britain.

The five are ensuring their leadership in critical and emerging technologies, improving economic security and supply chains, working toward digital transformation, building a clean energy economy for the future and reinforcing their alliance across defense, health security and space.

"I don't think ever in the history of human endeavor has there been as fundamental a potential technological change as is presented by artificial intelligence," Biden said. "It is staggering."

Sunak said Britain looks forward to hosting the first global summit on AI safety later this year.

The United States and Britain said their senior officials will meet biannually to advance a set of proposals outlined in the declaration.
KYODO NEWS - Jun 9, 2023 - 11:57 | All, Japan

Japan pledged Friday to provide foreign aid in an "offer-based" manner without waiting for recipient nations to make requests, as Tokyo looks to counter China's attempts to increase its economic clout in the developing world through economic investment.

Combining the more proactive approach with its traditional "request-based" concept, Japan will use official development assistance as one of its "most important diplomatic tools," according to a revised policy outline approved by the Cabinet.

The first update of the ODA policy blueprint since February 2015 comes amid mounting concern over China's development aid policies, which have been criticized for using loans as leverage to extract concessions from borrowing countries, known as "debt trap diplomacy."

Japan promised in the modified policy proposal to support developing nations based on "inclusiveness, transparency and equity" without resorting to "debt trap or economic coercion," aiming to secure their independence and sustainability.

Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi said at a press conference later in the day that development cooperation is "significant" as building a prosperous international community, underpinned by a free and open global order, is tied to Japan's national interests.

The outline, meanwhile, set a goal of increasing Japan's ODA budget to 0.7 percent of gross national income, although a target year for achieving the objective was not specified.

The figure in 2022 was around 0.4 percent, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The blueprint also said Japan will assist recipient governments to develop their legal systems to establish the rule of law while paying "full attention" to how such nations map out policies to fight climate change.

A Foreign Ministry official told reporters that Japan received more than 140 public comments in a one-month period through May 4 on the draft of the revised proposal, which opened for consultation in April.
A few years ago, I was at a fashion retailers collection launch in London. The crowd was packed, full of media types. In the corner, a DJ pumped out the music. The canapes were going round.

Suddenly, the throng had to part. This short figure, with what appeared to be minders either side of him, had come into the room. He was wearing a chalk pinstripe suit with slicked hair. He looked important  or rather he wanted us to think he was important. It was Howard Barclay, joint owner of the Telegraph newspaper group.

What was striking was just how much like his father and uncle he was. Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, on their rare appearances in public, would make similar entrances. Always dressed in pinstripes, their hair neatly parted, shoes highly polished, ties knotted just so, they were identical twins. They conveyed superiority, detachment and yes, a certain disdain.

David and Frederick were born in 1934 and grew up in Hammersmith and Kensington. The Barclays parents were Beatrice and Frederick, a travelling salesman. David and young Frederick had six other siblings. Frederick snr died when the brothers were 12. They left school as soon as they could and plied a variety of trades.

They clearly had some sort of aura back then. They liked ballroom dancing and in 1955 David, then only 21, married Zoe Newton, who went on to become the highest-paid model of the day. Whats extraordinary about their origins is not only did it give them their style but that they should go on to own the Ritz and Telegraph, two icons of the establishment, as well as both receiving knighthoods.

Sir David Barclay (left) and his twin brother Sir Frederick after receiving their knighthoods from the Queen at Buckingham Palace / PA

That sense of being different was always with them. It was something they cultivated, not just in their choice of dapper clothes and manner, but in the way they led their lives. They eschewed publicity. They lived in Monaco in a shared residence and they had another built in another tax haven, in the Channel Islands. This was a 60-room, gothic fortress on the island of Brecqhou. There they repelled nosy visitors.

Their businesses were shrouded in secrecy. For people who owned a hotel and newspaper beloved of the ruling class, and were knighted in 2000, they went to extraordinary lengths to avoid paying tax, creating a complex structure of offshore trusts. It made them seem, well, odd and mysterious. Together with a predilection for using lawyers and litigating, it gave them a threatening, to-be-feared air.

As well as the Ritz and Telegraph, they owned much more, including an online retailer, delivery service, casinos, shipping lines and properties, tons of properties. Because of their unwillingness to divulge virtually anything about themselves and because of their convoluted ownership arrangements, no one was ever sure what, exactly.

The Barclays approach to life was to invite questions but provide no answers. It was never really known, for instance, how they got started. Frederick was declared bankrupt in 1960 after a sweet and tobacconist shop he ran with his brother Douglas, called Candy Corner in Kensington, fell behind with its rental payments. For a period, Frederick was prevented from taking official positions as an undischarged bankrupt. As well as Candy Corner, he was involved in painting and decorating, doing up boarding houses for flats to rent or for hotels. David became a director of estate agents and property firms. He paid off his brothers creditors and they were in partnership.

Even early on, they made their affairs secret. Their main estate agency, Hillgate, was registered as an unlimited company which meant they didnt have to file publicly available accounts.

It was a mystery as to how they fell in with the Crown Agents. A government agency set up to help the colonies and developing countries do business in Britain, strangely it lent money to the Barclays. This enabled them in 1970 to buy Londonderry Hotel in Park Lane. They continued to borrow and by 1974, David and Frederick owed the Crown Agents 9.5 million  a substantial amount back then. The Crown Agents had been exceeding its brief, extending loans to property developers, not just the Barclays.

The property crash caught up with the agency and it collapsed with debts of 212 million or well over 1 billion today. They were on their way, and acquisitions followed. Always, though, there were distance and privacy. David and Frederick did not sit on the boards of British businesses they owned, their addresses were not disclosed.

Aidan, Davids oldest son, acted as a representative of his father and uncle. With Howard, he ran the Telegraph group. It was never clear how good they were at running businesses. The Telegraph changed course repeatedly and appeared to be in a state of constant flux.

Behind the scenes there were suggestions that all was not well. A court case in the US contained a reference to David suffering from an unspecified neurological complaint (their knighthoods were for services to medical research). The gravestone of Frederick snr was replaced with a new one that made no reference to Frederick jnr. David died in 2021. By then, the family had fractured to the extent that Sir Frederick and his daughter, Amanda, pursued a legal action against Aidan, Howard and Aidans son, Alistair, for bugging their conversations in the conservatory of the Ritz. The case was subsequently settled.

When he got divorced from his wife, Hiroko, Sir Frederick refused to pay her the 100 million he owed as part of the settlement. He claimed not to have the cash. Hiroko took him to court. In her evidence in 2022, Hiroko said how the twins fell out in 2014 and she once witnessed David and Frederick brawling with each other on board their yacht the Beatrice, named after their mother. Frederick was barred from going to Brecqhou because he would not contribute to the islands maintenance.

At the heart of the dispute was the decision, which he said he regretted, by Sir Frederick to divide the familys holdings four ways, between his daughter and Sir Davids three sons, Aidan, Howard and Duncan. Amanda held sway over only 25 per cent of the business. That, plus the fact the group was run entirely by Aidan and Howard, meant that Sir Frederick was cut off and seemingly cut out.

A loan from Lloyds Bank, made during the time of the financial crisis in 2008, was not repaid. Its not clear why  whether it was simply forgotten or ignored, or if the beneficiary was Sir Frederick and the others decided not to settle it and he chose not to or couldnt. In any event, its that loan which has led to Lloyds foreclosing and putting the Telegraphs owner into administration.

As ever, where the Barclays are concerned there are more questions than answers.
T he Government has been accused of bowing to pressure from oil and gas giants by announcing that it will remove the windfall tax should the price of the commodities continue to fall.

Ministers said they would slash the current 75% tax on North Sea oil and gas profits back to its regular 40% if prices reach certain levels.

They said they would take the move if the average price of oil fell to or below 71.40 dollars per barrel for two consecutive quarters, and the average price of gas fell to under 54p.

The Governments windfall tax on oil and gas companies already contains more loopholes than a block of Swiss cheese

Gareth Davies, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, met with leaders in the oil and gas industry during a visit to Aberdeen on Friday.

He told the PA news agency there is a dual lock which requires the prices of both oil and gas to fall for two consecutive quarters before the windfall tax can end.

He said: If the price floor is triggered, what weve announced today is that the EPL (the windfall tax) will be permanently removed.

And I think thats a fairly reasonable thing to say, that when prices return to normal levels, the taxation regime should return to normal levels.

He also said there would be a longer-term fiscal review for the oil and gas sector.

The announcement drew criticism from opposition parties, unions and poverty campaigners, with the change branded premature and one of Rishi Sunaks biggest personal failures as chancellor and Prime Minister.

The windfall tax was first announced a year ago to ensure that oil and gas companies were not benefiting unduly from Vladimir Putins war in Ukraine.

Oil and gas prices soared after the Russian president launched a full-scale invasion, bent on taking Kyiv in just three days.

But well over a year later Ukraine is now pushing to take back the territory it lost in the early days of the war, which started in 2014.

The Government said the windfall tax will remain in place until 2028 as previously planned unless oil and gas prices fall to the levels needed for it to be revoked.

It said the tax had so far raised 2.8 billion since being implemented.

Downing Street said the change was being made to protect domestic energy supply and safeguard thousands of jobs reliant on that sector.

Industry has warned that companies are cutting back on investment, the Government said.

This puts the long-term future of the UKs domestic supply at risk, meaning we would be forced to import more from abroad at a time when reliable and affordable energy is a focus for families and businesses.

But a union chief said ministers should not bow to pressure from oil and gas giants.

This would be a gift to energy giants who have enjoyed a record-breaking cash bonanza, while families across Britain have struggled to heat their homes, TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said.

Oil and gas companies have been allowed to get away with treating the British public like cash machines.

He criticised the Government for considering scaling back this already-moderate windfall tax after already leaving billions on the table by refusing to impose a proper windfall tax.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said: This out-of-touch Government has shown yet again that it doesnt care about people struggling just to get by, or the small businesses clinging on.

This energy tax failure ranks as one of Rishi Sunaks biggest personal failures as chancellor and Prime Minister.

The Green Party said it is beyond comprehension that the Government seems happy to allow these huge corporations to not only wreck the climate but to profit off the back of the cost-of-living crisis which they themselves have contributed to.

Simon Francis, the co-ordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, said the idea was premature.

Energy bills are predicted to remain high and levels of household energy debt are still surging, he said.

Greenpeace UKs climate campaigner, Georgia Whitaker, said: The Governments windfall tax on oil and gas companies already contains more loopholes than a block of Swiss cheese. And now they want to scrap it altogether.

But Offshore Energies UK, which represents the industry, said that it was not enough to restore confidence.

Weve always been clear that when the windfall conditions go, the windfall tax should go, its chief executive David Whitehouse said.

This is a step in the right direction, but many more will need to be taken to restore confidence to our sector.

Conservative MP Simon Clarke, a former cabinet minister and ally of Liz Truss, said the former prime ministers administration was quite clear last year that you cannot tax your way to growth.

He said: Ever higher taxes will only dissuade business from investing in Britain and creating the jobs and growth that we desperately need.

It seems that the Treasury is finally playing catch-up as far as the windfall tax is concerned; how long before it clicks that their corporation tax hike is doing similar damage?
KYODO NEWS - Jun 9, 2023 - 13:34 | All, Japan

Japan's Cabinet on Friday approved a plan to expand the scope of industries covered by the blue-collar skilled worker visa that creates a path to permanent residency for foreigners, in a major shift in the country's restrictive immigration policy.

Raising the number of industries to 11 from the current two, the government seeks to start holding language and skill examinations targeting applicants in the newly added sectors from around this fall after soliciting public opinion.

"It is important to promote smooth acceptance of human resources. To address the severe labor shortage, Japan will expand the (visa's) scope," Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told a meeting of relevant ministers.

Currently, only proficient laborers in the construction and shipbuilding sectors can upgrade their status to the Specified Skilled Worker No. 2 visa, which has no limit on how many times it can be renewed and allows holders to bring children and spouses into the country.

Under the revision, foreign workers in another nine industries, including the fishery, agriculture and hotel sectors, who hold the Specified Skilled Worker No. 1 visas, can apply for No. 2 visas, provided they pass Japanese language and technical skills exams.

The No. 1 visa allows a worker to stay in Japan for up to five years and cannot be renewed.

As of the end of March, the number of foreigners in Japan on the No. 1 visa totaled around 150,000 and No. 2 only 11, according to the Immigration Services Agency of Japan.

The current specified skilled workers system was introduced in 2019 to attract foreign workers in response to the country's severe labor shortage caused in part by a declining birthrate.

After the inception of the system, the government was cautious about expanding the scope of the visa that establishes a pathway to permanent residency as it allows the holder to spend the requisite amount of time in Japan.

But it has received calls to expand the scope of the No. 2 residency status from companies in various industries that wish to retain their foreign workers.

People working as carers, meanwhile, will not be included in the planned change as a visa for foreigners who are certified in Japan exists already. The carer-specific visa can be renewed indefinitely and allows the worker to bring children and spouses into the country.

Related coverage:

Japan parliament passes controversial bill to revise immigration law

Japan's fertility rate drops for 7th straight year in 2022

Foreigner hotel stays in Japan top 10 mil. for 1st time in 3 years
I t is encouraging to see demand for office space in London starting to edge up last month, as consultants JLL report today.

I am not surprised, the cranes hanging over the capital appear to have been as numerous as ever. Today we reveal Landsec giving a vote of confidence in the future of offices by putting in plans for a 500 million development near Liverpool Street station.

Predictions that the traditional office would be in terminal decline in the post-pandemic era appear to be wide of the mark, even in the City. But it is certainly true that what employers and staff want is set at a far higher bar than before.

Outdoor terraces, gyms and yoga studios are de rigueur. The days of grim grey corridors, low suspended ceilings and undrinkable coffee in plastic cups have gone.

The employers charm offensive seems to be working and occupancy rates are slowly returning to levels not seen since before Covid.

Figures from property company Regional REIT today suggest workers now spend an average of 4.2 days a week in the office. That feels a bit on the high side for central London but the direction of travel is unmistakable.

That is good news for the central London economy, particularly the City where the streets only now seem to be returning fully to life. But it is not all unalloyed joy.

It is now up to the train companies to raise their game.

They need to make sure the passengers who want to return to four or five days a week in the office are able to do so without suffering the misery that made commuting such hell for so many before the world was turned upside down by Covid.
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An art charity backed by Banksy, Tracey Emin and Gilbert & George is helping divert hundreds of young Londoners away from knife crime and serious violence every year - with creative disciplines from nail painting to podcasting.

Now, Art Against Knives has produced a report with civil rights group Liberty hoping of finding what it describes as a non-policing solution to Londons tragic battle against rising knife crime, amid youth services ravaged by years of austerity and council cuts.

The project was founded by Oliver Hemsley, who as a 20-year-old Central St Martins student in 2008 was left paralysed and in a wheelchair after being stabbed in a random, unprovoked attack.

Hemsley suffered up to eight stab wounds, mostly to his lungs and heart, in the attack by a gang of youths in Shoreditch - and spent 134 days in intensive care.

As part of his recovery, the promising fashion designers friends helped raise cash and secure donated artworks for auction from some of Britains biggest creative names - and Art Against Knives was born, co-founded with his business partner Katy Dawe. This episode was recorded in Barnet, a borough where Met data shows knife crimes up over 20 per cent since last year.

We met the charitys chief executive Dr Sally Zlotowitz to discuss their work, their report with Liberty, young peoples perceptions of the police, plus the social impact of lockdowns and the cost of living crisis on young Londoners.

Listen above, and find us on your Spotify Daily Drive or wherever you stream your podcasts.
I f you dont vote Tory, it is unlikely you will care about the somewhat anxious mood within the SW1 offices of the famous Spectator magazine, once edited by Boris Johnson. Or understand the sense of hopeful uncertainty buzzing around the offices of the Torygraph newspaper in Victoria. But to many in the Conservative heartlands, Wednesdays announcement that both publications were up for sale meant WhatsApps began buzzing with gossip and intrigue.

The Telegraph Media Group and The Spectator have been forced into receivership after the holding company of both, owned by the billionaire Barclay family, failed to successfully renegotiate their loan of millions of pounds dating back to the financial crash. Despite the rude financial health and growing subscription base of both the legacy news brands, their immediate future hangs in the balance, as much as the political party they support. Rumours of financial concern at their parent company had been rife for weeks.

In May, the chairman of the Daily Telegraph and Telegraph Media Group, the amiable Aidan Barclay, told the High Court that a bitter 100 million divorce fight between his uncle and aunt was not good for the family. Barclay went on to deny that he and his brother Howard, who now control the Barclay empire, had cut off finances to his uncle since 2019. But tellingly, he also admitted: Things have been difficult since then.

On Wednesday, those difficulties Barclay was alluding to became strikingly clear. Who will bid the 600 million required to win ownership is being hotly debated in Fleet Street and Westminster. Will the new proprietor share the same Right-wing Tory values  pro-Brexit, firmly anti-woke  that both institutions have until now supported? Right-wingers are concerned, though the Barclays have not yet given up the fight. One Telegraph employee noted the consensus within the staff was that the sale could be good news depends of course, on who buys it. Someone far sighted and in love with the media would be nice. There wont be a problem among the executive staff if the pro-Brexit, Right-wing tone softens  you would be pushed to find a hardened Tory in the building outside of its columnists. Its loyal readers, however, might feel a bit miffed.

The Spectator is unlikely to change political direction  its success has long been down to its naughty, insider societal spin on the Tory community and Westminster. It is the armchair bible of the red-trouser brigade and the go-to read for political intellectuals. Highly influential, its summer party is normally attended by half the Cabinet.

Many politicians, including Johnson, graduated to Westminster and high office after editing its pages (during Johnsns tenure it began jokingly to be referred to as the Sextator, owing to the number of sex scandals connected with the magazine under his editorship). No new proprietor would be foolish enough to dabble with its DNA.

One name is immediately doing the rounds, that of hedge fund manager Sir Paul Marshall, a long-time Tory supporter who donated 100,000 to the Leave campaign. He part-funds the media upstart UnHerd, currently run by Freddie Sayers, as well as GB News. Paul Marshall is the logical choice, one colleague messages. Hes rich, clever, and Right-wing. If so, Oxford-educated Sayers, who has been the driving force behind UnHerds recent success, could soon become a very big media player indeed if Sir Paul turns Fleet Street kingmaker.

There is always the chance The Spectator, founded in 1828 (and known affectionately as The Speccie) is sold separately to TMG. Any number of private family wealth funds, Saudis or Qataris could take a punt, leaving a far bigger media business to snap up TMG.

One such company could be Axel Springer, Europes largest media and tech publisher  and owner of Politico, whose Playbook Westminster email is must-read for anyone within SW1. The Telegraph hardly sits on the fence on many issues, especially Brexit. The irony if a European company takes over.

The Telegraph is used to powerful, charismatic proprietors. The Barclay brothers  the late Sir David and Sir Fredrick  first acquired the newspapers in 2004 in a 665 million deal from Conrad Black, who was sentenced to 42 months in jail in 2010 for fraud in the US. But given the current upward trajectories of both publications, their long-term future looks bright. Their readers, however, will be wishing the same could be said of the Conservative Party.

Wheres that US deal then, Brexiteers?

It is good to see the tech-bro element of Rishi Sunak come to the fore, especially in Washington  even if he was over-eager to burnish his credentials, insisting the UK was going to lead the world in tech regulation. This has been reduced to London hosting an AI Summit in the autumn, with Joe Biden promising the Americans will attend. Meanwhile the EU and US continue their separate regulation. The other reason many of his team have been noisily pushing messaging on AI and technology around the Washington visit is because despite all the bullish celebration of a new partnership, closer co-operation on green energy and the Atlantic Declaration  and these are fine achievements  there is still no sign of the new free trade agreement Brexiteers brazenly swore would be signed. If anything, we are further behind in the queue. Still, if there is one thing us Brits truly excel in, its waiting in a queue.

Ed Norton is the sexy, green star we need

Lets face it, it is challenging to make the future of ride-sharing and corporate sustainability goals even vaguely glamorous or alluring. But Uber somehow managed it yesterday morning at Bafta in Piccadilly without even trying. First up was chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi, who growled gently to the crowd: The world is absolutely not going green fast enough We have got to make it easy to go green; make it effortless. I was sold.

Next up was biodiversity expert Edward Norton. Yes, the actor. Who also happens to be highly informed and earnestly hopeful we can save our planet. Move over DiCaprio, sustainability has new sex symbols. And not a moment too soon.
T housands of fans sang to Johnny Depp in Romania as the Hollywood star celebrates his 60th birthday.

The Pirates Of The Caribbean star thanked fans for the beautiful gesture, adding that it was the largest happy birthday song Ive ever heard.

It comes as Depps band The Hollywood Vampires kicked off their European tour in Bucharest, Romania, on Thursday.

A video posted to the bands Instagram page showed the actor with a hand over his heart, thanking fans and blowing them kisses.

Depps 60th birthday comes just over a year following his victory in his high-profile defamation case with his former wife Amber Heard.

He had sued the Aquaman star for 50 million dollars, claiming her 2018 article in the Washington Post was defamatory.

Over the past 12 months the actor has made a slow but steady return to the spotlight, touring with musician Jeff Beck and making a surprise appearance at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards.

More recently he appeared at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of new film Jeanne Du Barry, in which he stars as King Louis XV.

Speaking at a press conference at the festival he said he had no further need for Hollywood, and described the fallout from the trial as a weird joke.

The Hollywood Vampires  a supergroup consisting of Alice Cooper, Aerosmiths Joe Perry and Depp  are touring Europe this summer including several dates in the UK in July.

The band was recently forced to cancel a string of dates in the US after Depp suffered an ankle fracture.
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Sublimely witty and surprisingly profound, its a pleasure to experience this new, improved musical version of Groundhog Day again. Based by Danny Rubin on his script for the 1993 Bill Murray film about an arrogant American weatherman endlessly reliving the same day, it has music and lyrics from Tim Minchin and direction by Matthew Warchus, two-thirds of the dream team that made Matilda a smash.

If this show doesnt quite escape the shadow of its source material, it adds dimension and depth to it. Groundhog Day makes perfect sense as a stage musical, a form where actions are repeated with variation in the hope of perfection. And of course, its fitting that Broadway actor Andy Karl is back in the role of Phil Connors at the Old Vic, where he and the show won rave reviews in 2016, only for the subsequent New York run to be cut short, and for the anticipated West End transfer to evaporate. Better luck this time, eh?

Karl is well cast as Connors: smooth, cynical, with a hint of Patrick Bateman psychosis under the surface. Dispatched with novice producer Rita (Tanisha Spring) to smalltown Punxsutawny, Pennsylvania, where a groundhog predicts the weather every February 2nd, Phil puts the moves on anyone female and sneers at everything else.

Tanisha Spring and Andy Karl / Manuel Harlan

Subsequently condemned to repeat the same 24-hour cycle again and again, he moves through states of confusion, exultation, despair and finally acceptance. In the film Phil learns to stop wooing Rita and love his fellow man. Here, he makes a sort of cosmic peace with the fact that life is everything and nothing.

Ignorance of the movie might actually be bliss. Those like me who have watched it (naturally) multiple times will have a mental checklist of scenarios and jokes. The creative team here tick off almost all of them and add more. Theres a deliriously inventive car chase, an exuberant tapdance routine and a song where we watch Phil repeatedly end his own life only to pop up each time on another part of the stage.

Minchin and Rubin fill in the backstories of Rita, Phils old schoolmate Ned Ryerson, and also the local girl he sets out to seduce when he realises he has endless chances. Her number, Being Nancy, is dazzlingly meta, also exploring the feelings of the actress playing the role. Minchin riffles expertly through musical genres  the hillbilly-style Nobody Cares goes straight into the pantheon of drunk songs  and his lyrics are just ravishing. I cant think of another composer whod work an enema into a moment of existential crisis, as it were.

Rob Howells set  snow flurries, skylines, a weather map and Phils recurring bedroom  have been simplified. Warchus handles the scripts subtly layered repetitions with aplomb. Karl doesnt have one of those huge Broadway voices but he is nicely, sardonically terse early on, and sweetly melodious when Phil mellows. Spring has a lovely, bell-like voice and her charming Rita has a bit of grit. I rarely want to see a production more than once. Id happily watch this one a third time. Maybe a fourth, a fifth

The Old Vic, to August 19; buy tickets here. Listen to Tim Minchin and Danny Rubin talk about the show on the Evening Standard Theatre Podcast
I was in Milan in April and popped into Piero Portaluppis Villa Necchi, which has one of the all-time great bathrooms. Its so thoughtfully designed  why do we still treat this as the most utilitarian room in the house?

A marble sanctum in a grand Milanese residence might not be realistic for most of us, but surely we can do better than an in-between space for furious tooth-brushing and a five-minute shower? Its a space you use multiple times a day.

Here are 10 tips for creating a bathroom youll be sad to leave every morning.

1. DO work with what youve got. I promise that Balearic plaster grotto you saw on Pinterest wont look the same in your two-up, two-down in London. Think about whats appropriate for the architecture of your house  stripped floorboards and a freestanding tub are a winner in a Victorian or Georgian bathroom.

2. DONT cheap out on sanitaryware. I know, its tempting, but if you go for the 100 option youre sure to run into issues within a year or two. Vola is a Danish brand that does sleek, minimalist taps, its a great option. The Water Monopoly would be my pick for a classic-meets-contemporary look, and Barber Wilsons is the name to know for the true traditionalists.

The sleek HV1 mixer tap from Vola / Handout

3. DO get samples of finishes before ordering. If you mix and match (Im all for it) consider that there is often little consistency in naming conventions. All bets are off for anything antique or reclaimed.

4. DONT use tadelakt, its a pain to maintain.

Its fine if youre in sunny Morrocco but so many people I know have had issues with water damage from not looking after it perfectly. If the plaster gets damaged youre facing a major re-do.

5. DO use Forcrete. It has the same lime-plaster effect everyones after, but its a micro-cement so much more hardwearing. Neat, seamless, easy.

6. DONT skimp on storage. A recessed mirror cabinet is a trusty space saver, while an antique washstand or glass-fronted vitrine with shelving adds character to a bathroom in a period home. Do a double vanity with two separate sinks.

Up your towel game at Autumn Sonata / Handout

7. DO have fun in a second bathroom. If youre sorted on the practical front with a big family space, you can justify a jewel box approach for the WC under the stairs. Why not do something radical, like wall-to-wall mosaic or mirrors? I wouldnt rule out a big gold swan if youre keen on kitsch.

8. DONT treat your bathroom as a single zone. Top hotels are brilliant at creating a sense of division in their en suites, whether its a reeded glass partition to obscure the toilet or a step up to a freestanding bath.

9. DO go to Balineum. Its a one-stop bathroom heaven for fixtures and finishes, including a wide range of decorative hand-painted tiles. Founder Sarah Watson will help you pick out some fabulous stuff. Visits to the north London studio are by appointment only.

10. DONT underestimate the power of a lick of paint. I went for a mustard yellow in the bathroom of my old rental, and my current downstairs one is lime green. Swap old towels for new ones from Autumn Sonata, sustainably woven in Portugal.
Its been a while since one specific pose dominated the internet. Unlike fashion trends, which currently have a life cycle shorter than a mayfly, facial poses actually tend to stick around for a while.

If passing through a moratorium of selfie poses circa 2000 onwards, you would see Here lies Duckface, 2007 to 2013, followed by RIP Peace Fingers, 2013 to 2020 and that would be about it. There are obviously fleeting phases which dont quite permeate the trend cycle  boys posing with their thumb and forefinger in a V shape around the chin area really posed a threat in 2009  but they need some proper staying power to last multiple years. And since peace fingers moved from sincere to ironic around 2019, weve all been at a bit of a loss when it comes to selfie poses.

Enya Umanzor / Enya Umanzor via Instagram

But then, in 2022, i-D sounded the alarm: something was coming. Writer Rayne Fisher-Quann had noticed a new pose emerging amongst the chicest and coolest of Gen Z, which they dubbed the Dissociative Pout. Its hallmarks are as follows: dead eyes, expressionless lips and the overall aura of a particularly photogenic corpse.

It was embodied in people from the TikTok generation; the likes Addison Rae, Enya Umanzor, Chloe Cherry et al. If duckface was a girlboss who got down on the weekends, the dissociative pout is a detached feminist with an ironic meme page, Fisher-Quann observed.

Rachel Sennott / Rachel Sennott via Instagram

While the duckface and peace sign poses signalled happiness or at least some degree of enjoyment, this new model-esque pose was the first It-Pose in ages to feature its wearer looking actively disengaged and uninterested.

Now, in 2023, we have reached its full form: less dissociative and more actively moody, to the point of cosplaying a teenager who just had their phone confiscated. Its personified perfectly by Rachel Sennott, whos tipped to become the actress of the summer thanks to her role in HBOs buzzy, controversial new series The Idol, as well as lesbian fight club comedy flick Bottoms.

Jennie Ruby Jane, Lily Rose Depp, Troye Sivan and Rachel Sennott in The Idol / Sky/HBO

Sennott is rarely pictured without her signature pout, bottom lip protruding over-dramatically, doe-eyes looking up at the camera like it just told her off, regardless of whatever lavish situation she might be in. All dolled up for the red carpet of Cannes festival? Moody pout. Being photographed for Calvin Klein? Moody pout. Posing poolside on holiday with friends? Moody pout. At a wedding? Moody pout. Sat on the bed at a chic looking hotel? A Rachel Sennott classic: moody pout.

Its not dissimilar from the look of dissociative pout founde Euphoria actress Chloe Cherry, who herself has moved from dissociation to full on tantrum in recent months (shes even crying in one of her latest Instagram posts). So why do we all want to look like were in a full-blown sulk all of a sudden?

Chloe Cherry / Chloe Cherry via Instagram

Some blame the vibe shift, a term popularised by New York magazine writer Allison P. Davis 2022 article where she predicted a drastic incoming change of aesthetic and taste. But the first person to really coin vibe shift was Sean Monahan (the same guy that coined normcore), who wrote about it in his Substack, 8ball, way back in 2021. Monahan, who also spoke to New York Magazine about his theory, predicted the return of early-aughts indie sleaze. American Apparel, flash photography at parties, and messy hair and messy makeup. The perfect setting for a puffed-out bottom lip and pleading pair of doe eyes, then, right?

In another interview with fashion writer Amy Odell, Monahan compares the vibe shift to a moment from The Andy Warhol Diaries: In one of the episodes  and Im paraphrasing here  Andy Warhol talks about how a couple years into a new decade, things start to look and feel different. The quote is something like, Therell be new people and new faces and it takes a couple years into a decade for things to really get going. And thats when you decide whos going to make it into the future and whos going to be relegated to the past. And I feel like thats a bit what 2022 was for a lot of people, this realisation that the last decade is over.

So if 2022 was the realisation year (not to be confused with 2016, the year of realising things, as per the omniscient Kylie Jenner) and the advent of the dissociative pout, 2023 is the year of the moody pout. It needed a while to evolve, but now its time: get ready for everyone on your Instagram feed to start looking thoroughly unhappy all the time. But dont worry guys, its chic!
J ulian Assange has lost the latest stage of his bid to appeal against a judges ruling over whether he should be extradited to the US.

The WikiLeaks founder is wanted in the United States over an alleged conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information following the publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

In a January 2021 ruling, then-district judge Vanessa Baraitser said that Assange should not be sent to the US, citing a real and oppressive risk of suicide, while ruling against the 51-year-old on all other issues.

US authorities subsequently brought a successful High Court challenge against this decision, paving the way for Assanges extradition.

The proposed appeal comes to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made to and rejected by the district judge

Assange, who remains in Belmarsh prison in south-east London, previously indicated that he wants to challenge the original judges dismissal of the other parts of his case.

However, in a decision this week, a High Court judge said all eight parts of Assanges potential appeal were not arguable and should not be heard.

In a three-page ruling obtained by the PA news agency on Friday, Mr Justice Swift said: The proposed appeal comes to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made to and rejected by the district judge.

In a separate decision, Mr Justice Swift also refused Assange permission to challenge then-home secretary Priti Patels decision to approve his extradition in June 2022.

On Thursday, Stella Assange said that her husband would have a High Court hearing on June 13 to renew his appeal bid.

Mrs Assange tweeted: We remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the US government.

During their earlier successful challenge, lawyers for the US authorities said Judge Baraitsers decision risked becoming a trump card for anyone who wanted to oppose their extradition.

They also said that four binding diplomatic assurances had been made, including that the US would consent to Assange being transferred to Australia, where he was born, to serve any prison sentence he may be given.

The Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett, sitting with Lord Justice Holroyde, ruled in favour of the US in December 2021.

The senior judges found that Judge Baraitser had based her decision on the risk of Assange being held in highly restrictive prison conditions if extradited.

Lord Burnett previously said that if the original judge had been given the assurances from the US at the time of her ruling, she would have answered the relevant question differently.

The WikiLeaks founders lawyers had sought to appeal against this decision at the Supreme Court but were denied the opportunity in March 2022 as the bid did not raise an arguable point of law.

His extradition order was formally sent to Ms Patel the following month.
O scar-winning actor Kevin Spaceys trial for alleged sex offences is on track to see a jury sworn in on June 28, a court has heard.

Mr Justice Wall told a hearing at Coventry Crown Court that a second overflow courtroom would be set up at Londons Southwark Crown Court for Spaceys trial, to accommodate members of the press and other interested parties.

Spacey was not required to attend Fridays pre-trial hearing, which saw prosecutor Christine Agnew KC and defence counsel Patrick Gibbs KC both appear via videolink.

The court was told Mr Spacey had been given leave not to attend by the judge prior to the hearing.

During discussions about arrangements for the trial, Mr Justice Wall said: A number of spaces are to be reserved for the press in the court itself and (in) the overspill court.

Spacey, known for starring in American Beauty, The Usual Suspects and House Of Cards, denies a total of 12 charges relating to four men.

The offences are alleged to have taken place between 2001 and 2013.

The actor, 63, pleaded not guilty in January to three counts of indecent assault, three counts of sexual assault and one count of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent.

He had previously denied four charges of sexual assault and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.
A ctress Nikki Sanderson lost some of her sparkle because of the Mirrors publisher, her mother has told the High Court as part of the actresss phone hacking claim.

Hollyoaks star Ms Sanderson is suing Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) for damages, claiming journalists at its titles  which also include the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People  were linked to methods including phone hacking, so-called blagging or gaining information by deception, and use of private investigators for unlawful activities.

Ms Sanderson, who played Candice Stowe in Coronation Street between 1999 and 2005, entered the witness box in the High Court in London on Friday to give evidence in her representative claim, part of a trial that has also featured the Duke of Sussex.

In the end, Nikki was very depressed. She lost confidence and became very unsure of herself

As well as the actress, several other people have given written evidence in support of her case  including her mother Judith Sanderson, ex-boyfriend Danny Young and former co-star Tina OBrien  who have each previously settled their own claims with MGN.

In written evidence before the court, her mother said that when her daughter began working on the soap as a 15-year-old, she was one of the nicest children you could wish for.

Judith Sanderson said in her witness statement: We were expecting some changes, but we werent expecting for Nikki to have to deal with grown-up issues.

She said her daughter very quickly turned from being a carefree, happy girl with her friends who she loved dearly into somebody who was very suspicious.

Judith Sanderson said that her daughter was worried about going out because members of the public would attack her.

The drama school receptionist continued: MGN wrote such horrible things about Nikki and she was not able to defend herself.

In the end, Nikki was very depressed. She lost confidence and became very unsure of herself.

She was paranoid as she felt like she had to watch out all the time, and she dreaded going out because of the reaction she got from the public.

She lost some of her sparkle which, as her mum, was very painful to see.

Judith Sanderson also said in her written evidence, which has not been challenged by MGNs lawyers, that she did not know about phone hacking at the time because I thought that things like that only happened to royalty and American movie stars.

I never saw Nikki as being mega; shes not Hollywood, so I didnt think they would have been interested in her as a normal person, she added. I still find it very strange.

Fellow actress Ms OBrien, who started playing Sarah Platt in Coronation Street in 1999, described Ms Sanderson as very private in her written evidence.

However, she said the press made up their little show about Ms Sanderson falsely being a party girl.

Ms OBrien said in her witness statement: It made her feel very uncomfortable to see these articles and not to know where the information was coming from or how to stop them.

The result of all these doubts and suspicions was that Nikki was sometimes very lonely and she always had this low-level anxiety as she didnt know what was coming next.

It kind of feels like a toxic relationship; that we deserved that treatment from the media as we had gone into this job, she added.

Ms OBrien later said that while her own claim against MGN was settled in December 2016, she had not told anyone about it because of how traumatic it was.

I felt like someone had taken my private diary and opened it up for the world to see, Ms OBrien added.

We stopped going to certain places because we were paranoid about things ending up in the papers

Ms Sandersons former partner Danny Young has also provided written evidence in support of the 39-year-olds claim.

In his witness statement, Mr Young said that Ms Sanderson was essentially used as tabloid fodder during her time on Coronation Street and that the pair changed their behaviour because of press intrusion.

I can recall going for dinner at random locations and the press would be there  We stopped going to certain places because we were paranoid about things ending up in the papers, he said.

He also said that he could remember hearing clicking noises on his phone line and that he would miss voicemail messages he was left.

MGN says Ms Sandersons claim has been brought too late and denies unlawful activity save for four occasions in 2004 and 2005 when its journalists instructed private investigators to obtain information about her.
By George Galer, KYODO NEWS - Jun 9, 2023 - 14:38 | All, World

As cleanup efforts continue in Washington state at a decommissioned U.S. nuclear facility that played a crucial role in the country's acquisition of the atom bomb in World War II, questions linger over whether the site has caused serious health issues for workers and local residents.

Construction began on the facility, known as the Hanford site, 80 years ago in 1943 and involved the building of the world's first large-scale nuclear reactor.

Through the Manhattan Project, a U.S. government research and development program for building nuclear weapons, the site's B reactor, erected on a 580-square-mile stretch of land next to the Columbia River in south-central Washington, produced the nuclear material for one of the only two atomic bombs ever used in an armed conflict.

Codenamed "Fat Man," the device was detonated over the city of Nagasaki in southwestern Japan on Aug. 9, 1945, effectively ending Japan's involvement in the conflict.

The 6.2 kilograms of plutonium contained in the nuclear device released energy equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT, taking the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people while subjecting the surrounding area to deadly radiation, killing countless more.

But citizens of Nagasaki may not be the only victims of Hanford's plutonium production. During its decades of operation, U.S. residents living near and mainly downwind of the complex experienced severe health effects that they believe stem from the site's activities.

One such resident is Tom Bailie, 76, who grew up and still resides just miles downwind from Hanford in a farming community.

Reflecting on his upbringing, Bailie recalled during an interview in April that no one ever thought the site at Hanford would cause harm to "patriotic American citizens."

But, after he and a local journalist conducted a survey on surrounding farms in 1985, Bailie began to have doubts. Nearly all the families living nearby suffered from cancer, birth defects, or thyroid disease, he says -- health issues that could be attributed to radiation exposure. This led to the area being coined "the death mile" by some journalists at the time.

Bailie said that his wife, father, and three uncles all had cancer before passing away, while his two sisters also have cancer and take thyroid medicine. The year before Bailie was born, his mother had a stillbirth. Bailie himself was born with birth defects and was on an iron lung when he was 4 years old. He now requires medication for a thyroid problem.

Bailie vividly remembers encounters with "men in space suits," equipped with dosimeters to measure radiation levels, walking on his farm. The men would collect soil samples and even ask the farmers to send the heads and feet of ducks and rabbits they would kill while hunting to Hanford for analysis.

When he began speaking out about the hardships and health problems that he attributed to the Hanford site, many people from the community dismissed him as "nuts" or "crazy." Some even mockingly referred to him as the "glow-in-the-dark farmer."

But documents that were declassified in the late 1980s showed that Hanford had contaminated the surrounding farmland, air, farm animals, and crops with unsafe levels of radiation for years.

One such document shows that in December 1949, in an experiment called "Green Run," Hanford scientists knowingly released thousands of curies of dangerous radioactive Iodine-131 from the site to track its course and better understand how it dispersed.

Even with the documents, some living downwind who joined the class action suit against the site were unable to explicitly prove their medical problems were caused by the contamination from the Hanford site. But Bailie still firmly believes the facility is the reason for many people's health problems in the downwind areas.

Bailie said "the government should be ashamed of itself" for what it did to its citizens and that he thinks, at the very least, the government should cover the medical expenses of those who lived downwind.

Before being decommissioned in 1989, Hanford produced around 74 tons of plutonium, nearly two-thirds of all the plutonium produced for government purposes in the United States. One of the consequences of the site's work was massive amounts of contamination and dangerous leftover byproducts, most of which remain on the site today.

Currently, 177 underground tanks containing 56 million gallons of highly radioactive waste, contaminated buildings, and cocooned reactors still exist there, alongside multiple other buried waste sites.

The same year Hanford was decommissioned, cleanup efforts began for dealing with the dangerous byproducts left over from the production of plutonium. Efforts to clean the area of waste are anticipated to be astronomically costly and time-consuming.

According to Hanford's latest estimate, released in 2022, the total cost of the cleanup is projected to range from $319.6 billion to $660 billion, with a completion date not expected until at least fiscal 2078.

But Tom Carpenter, 66, former head of Hanford Challenge, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring the responsible and safe clearing of the Hanford site, argues that using the word "cleanup" is misleading.

Carpenter says complete eradication of contamination from thousands of acres is impossible, and not the goal of the cleanup process. He asserts that the best that can be achieved at Hanford is "the mitigation of some risks."

Hanford Challenge's primary goal, he says, is to ensure authorities prioritize a swift cleanup and make sure that no corners are cut, nor workers put in unnecessary danger. This includes fighting for those who are currently working on the site.

Many workers involved in the cleanup of the Hanford site continue to be exposed to toxic chemicals, vapors, and radioactive materials, resulting in debilitating health conditions.

A recent survey of the workers by Washington state revealed more than 50 percent of them had been exposed to radioactive or toxic chemicals. Workers exposed to these dangerous materials and vapors have developed beryllium disease, cancers, organ damage, and occupational dementia.

Until recently, these workers had to prove that their health issues were directly caused by their work at the Hanford site to receive assistance with their medical expenses.

According to former worker and Hanford Challenge director Jim Millbauer, 65, proving this was extremely difficult, costly, time-consuming, and often fruitless, as most occupational illness claims were rejected.

But a recent law has changed this, presuming that any health effects suffered by workers who spend just eight hours working at Hanford are caused by working at the facility, making it easier for sick workers to get their treatment paid for.
A serving Metropolitan Police officer has been jailed for sexually assaulting a female officer while they were both on duty at a north London police station.

PC Archit Sharma, 26, appeared at the Wood Green Crown Court on Friday and was sentenced to 16-month imprisonment for the sex attack at Southgate Police Station. in December 2020.

Sharma, of the Met unit covering Haringey and Enfield, was suspended from duty after the attack was reported by the victim.

Usha Shergill, Crown Advocate for CPS Londons Complex Casework Unit said: As a police officer Sharma was expected to adhere to the strictest standards of behaviour and professional conduct in both the workplace and public.

The incident has made the victim feel very anxious and scared. I would like to thank the victim for bravely reporting the matter and helping us to bring Sharma to justice.

The Crown Prosecution Service will not hesitate to prosecute serious sexual offences where there is the evidence to do so and bring offenders to justice.

Met Detective Chief Superintendent Caroline Haines said: I am furious that an officer has behaved in such a grossly unacceptable way. In doing what he did, PC Sharma totally betrayed all the values of policing.
A s climate change increases the risk of wildfires in the UK this summer, firefighters are turning to new techniques to manage the situation.

Last years sweltering hot summer weather saw thousands of fires start, and this year there have already been hundreds of grass fires.

Increasingly fire crews are training in skills from southern Europe and the US.

This week has seen wildfires in Canada shroud areas of North America in smoke, creating air pollution problems for millions.

Take a look at our guide to how wildfires start and what is being done to respond to them.

How do wildfires start?

A fire needs fuel, oxygen and heat to get going.

When the weather is hot and with drought conditions, often something as tiny as a spark from a train wheel can ignite a huge wildfire.

In other instances, fires occur naturally, lit by heat from the sun or a lightning strike.

A lot of wildfires are caused by human negligence. For example, campfires, discarded lit cigarettes, arson, failing to burn debris properly, and playing with matches or fireworks can all be to blame.

Once started, a wildfire can spread thanks to wind, because of fuel - which could be dry foliage, grass, or trees - or being on a slope.

In dry weather, fires are much more difficult to control and ultimately put out.

Firefighters often refer to the fire triangle when trying to extinguish a blaze.

If you take away oxygen, heat or fuel, then the fire will not be able to sustain itself.

How will the specialist units work?

Fire chiefs are keen to build upon the number of specialist teams who can use burn suppression techniques - which is the deliberate burning of land to keep a fire contained.

Currently, only five UK units across more than 50 fire and rescue services specialise in the fighting fire with fire technique, and this is mostly in moorland regions.

More units could now be trained and deployed nationally.

Speaking to the BBC, Chief Fire Officer Paul Hedley, wildfire lead for the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC), said the threat of such major wildfires was clearly growing in the UK.

He said: All of this learning from international partners, who are probably still some years ahead of us, is a very sensible way of trying to get us ahead of the curve.

There is hopes for a UK-wide training programme to be established as part of a national action plan to build upon the lessons learnt from dealing with last years increase in wildfires.

Surrey Fire and Rescue is at the forefront of the change, and has been called to more than 80 wildfires already this year.

Matt Oakley, a fire investigations officer for Surrey Fire and Rescue, is one of the UKs national wildfire tactical advisors.

This is a group of specialist officers who already have the skills learnt abroad and who will be training units, with techniques borrowed from France and South Africa.

He explained: Our climate is changing - its changing beyond recognition. What used to be a nine to 12-year cycle, this is every year now.

We are heading towards a northern Mediterranean climate in the southeast of England within the next decade and this will be business as usual day in, day out.

Some of the tactics being used include creating natural firebreaks and reducing the fuel-load of vegetation, to setting controlled burns on purpose around wildfires to halt their spread.

When combined, they would stop the need for massive amounts of water in a drought.

But the Fire Brigades Union insists more is needed besides new training and techniques to tackle the growing challenges associated with climate change.

Cuts since 2010 have meant the number of firefighters has been dwindling, and more crews are now needed.

Matt Wrack, the Fire Brigades Unions general secretary, called for more funding from the government, told the BBC: Rising temperatures and the systematic underfunding of the fire and rescue service are a recipe for destruction.

The government said it was giving fire and rescue authorities around 2.6billion this year, and each authority was able to decide what it was spent on.

A spokesperson said: The Home Office works closely with the National Fire Chiefs Council and England and Wales Wildfire Forum to continue to improve our response to wildfires and mitigate them.
S cotlands natural heritage agency has reported a decrease in the number of beavers being destroyed as efforts to expand their population while controlling negative impacts gain momentum.

NatureScot published figures this week suggesting fewer beavers were removed under licence last year from conflict areas in Tayside to prevent serious damage to agriculture  down to 108 compared to 120 in 2021.

The Scottish Government body also reported 45 animals were trapped and translocated to licensed projects last year  12 more than in 2021  out of which a third were released into the wild in Scotland.

A total of 63 beavers were killed under licence, a decrease from 87 in 2021. In addition, 108 dams were cleared under licence.

The reduction reflects the Scottish Governments recently adopted policy to support expansion of the population, alongside efforts to promote trapping as an alternative to lethal control.

An expanded NatureScot beaver team has stepped up work with land managers to mitigate beaver impacts where they are believed to be causing problems, helping more people live alongside the protected species.

The report published this week states the beaver population in Scotland is expanding rapidly, with around 1,500 believed to be living within 424 territories.

If this trajectory continues there could be as many as 10,000 beavers in Scotland by 2030, helping to improve biodiversity in more areas.

Scottish Green MSP and biodiversity minister Lorna Slater said: It is welcome news to see the increase in the proportion of beavers being translocated and that numbers in Scotland are increasing, but more work is required. It is vital that we continue to protect and value these iconic animals.

The report indicates that not only are beaver population numbers increasing at a healthy rate, but that alternative forms of management are being actively used by land managers to reduce their impact. This is a direct result of our commitment to promote the expansion of beavers to all parts of Scotland.

Beavers help re-engineer and restore rivers and can create wetlands. Their introduction is a vital part of our wider commitment to protect and restore Scotlands natural environment.

Donald Fraser, NatureScots head of wildlife management, said: Were pleased to report a significant increase in trapping last year, with NatureScot staff working hard with land managers, the Beaver Trust and the Five Sisters Zoo to enable this wherever possible. As this work continues, we expect to see a further shift away from lethal control.

Alongside this, a huge amount of effort has also been going on behind the scenes to put in place the support and resources to enable others to take forward well-considered translocations in Scotland.

The release of beavers at a new site at Loch Lomond earlier this year marked a significant milestone in the restoration of the species, with two other proposals for the River Spey and Glen Affric/Beauly areas currently being explored.

NatureScot has carried out environmental assessments of these catchments, and we are now inviting views on these. This will ensure we fully understand the likely effect of beaver translocations.
T he victim of a vicious dog attack has spoken of her horrific ordeal as three large dogs clamped on to her arms, face and legs with the owner failing to rip them off.

The woman, in her 20s, left in a hospital bed with a bandaged arm and a cut to her lip, described walking through Abbots Park, Lambeth alone to get to a driving lesson when the owner let two of his dogs off their lead.

The victim, giving her name as Arcadia, said: This man was in there with his dogs but they were on a leash at first. If they were running around I wouldnt have gone in there.

By the time I was almost halfway he let two of them go. They run past me and I ignored them because I know how dogs are if you run.

I asked him Excuse me can you take your dogs please? I dont like them can you take them please?

In horrifying video, the woman can be heard screaming in agony as the three animals jump and bite her while the apparent owner struggles to bring them under control.

She added: They started to jump at me. Im literally trying to push them down and fight them to get off me.

They started to get aggressive and one jumped and bit me on my face.

The man kept telling me to stop. I tried to tell them they were biting me... then I started screaming. They were biting my legs, my face... my arms and jumping on me.

He was trying to stop them but one of them came onto my right arm. He was literally biting into my arm. [The owner] couldnt get them off, he was trying to pull them.

I fell on the floor and he told me to get up off the floor and he was like dont run but it was too late.

He started calling for help. People started coming out of their houses.

She described finally breaking away from the attack by taking off her jumper and wrestling the final dog off before falling to the floor.

She managed to stagger to the safety of her driving instructors car with the help of a friend where she lay on the backseat.

She added: The ambulance said it would take 20 minutes but I couldnt wait that long.

The clip initially reported the attack happened in East Londons Stepney Green, but the Metropolitan Police has since confirmed it happened in Lambeth.

The Met later confirmed that the victim had sustained a significant injury to her right arm. Her injuries are not life threatening.

Officers were called at 12.15pm on Tuesday, June 6 to Abbots Park, Lambeth, SW2. A woman in her mid-20s had reported being attacked by three dogs, a Met Police spokesperson said.

Officers and the London Ambulance Service attended the scene. The woman was taken to hospital where she is being treated for a significant injury to her right arm, the injuries are not life threatening.

The man in charge of the dogs had left with the animals prior to police arrival. Enquires are in hand to trace the dogs and owner.
A fire involving gas cylinders has destroyed two buildings and damaged a van on an industrial site in east London.

Large plumes of black smoke were captured on video by shocked residents near Willoughby Drive in Rainham on Friday morning.

Around 25 firefighters have been tackling the mixed waste blaze after it broke out just before 11am.

Two outhouses were destroyed, a van has been damaged and mixed waste and gas cylinders were involved, the London Fire Brigade told the Standard.

The fire was brought under control just before 1pm and there have been no reports of injuries.

It is not understood to be connected to the on-and-off landfill fires at nearby Launders Lane that have been raging for decades.

Fire trucks remain on site and an investigation into how the fire started is underway.

The thick black smoke alarmed at least one resident, who said it reminded him of the Wennington fire last summer which destroyed several homes.

The village, on the edge of Havering borough in east London, was the scene of a devastating wildfire during the peak of the summer heatwave, on July 19.

James Young wrote on Twitter: A year on from last years horrific wildfires in East London which burned down part of Wennington Village, we have another...fire in Rainham Essex, only a five-minute drive from Wennington.

Londoners are being urged to avoid using disposable barbeques this weekend as temperatures are set to climb to 30C in the capital.

The first heat alert of the year has been issued for London between 9am on Friday and 9am on Monday as millions are expected to flock to parks with dry grass.

The London Fire Bridage warned in a tweet: If youre heading to the park this weekend to enjoy the weather, please do not take a disposable BBQ with you. They can easily cause grass fires, especially in hot weather when the ground is dry. 

The Met Office has also issued a yellow alert for thunderstorms in London on Saturday from 2pm to 9pm.
A beloved late-night underground speakeasy described as a bastion of the old-school Soho faces closure after millionaire neighbours complained of patrons turning it into a haven for drug users.

The New Evaristo Club, known as Trishas after its longtime Italian matriarch, has welcomed generations of musicians from Led Zeppelin to Amy Winehouse through its secret doorway in Greek Street for more than 80 years.

It was once described by Anthony Bourdain as the Dean Martin of drinking establishments but that Rock nRoll approach appears to have riled neighbours with one informing the council of loud music, overcrowding and smoking in the premises despite living three streets away.

The unnamed complainant also hit out at a lack of a fire exit at the basement bar that is open until the early hours and had become a haven for drug users.

Westminister Council has launched a licence review which could force the venue to close its door at 57 Greek Street for good.

Staff posted to the bars Instagram page: To our enormous upset, Westminster Council have told us they want to review our licence. They are asking to close us down and we need your support.

If youd be kind enough to email them Trisha and us would appreciate that with all of our heart.

One supporter wrote: This is the last unique, special place standing in Soho. We need you open because you are the link between the past and the present and you stood throughout all of the changes.

In his hit TV series The Layover, Bourdain famously took celebrity chef Marco Pierre White to Trishas, telling the cook: There is no finer establishment.

When White complained about not having his picture on the wall, Bourdain snapped: They dont give a f***. If you want your picture on the wall, youd have to hang it yourself.

Bourdains portrait now hangs in pride of place on the wall after impressing landlady Patricia Trisha Bergonzi, who has been in charge of the bar for four decades.

Bergonzi entered Soho folklore after telling Led Zeppelins Jimmy Page to f*** off after he asked her to make him a cheese toastie on a heaving Friday night.

Fans and patrons of the speakeasy raised a whopping 20,000 to save the bar during the pandemic.

The council claim the licence review was brought on the grounds of prevention of crime and disorder and public safety

Councillor Aicha Less, Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Communities and Public Protection, said: Westminster City Council values the vibrant nightlife and unique heritage of Soho, but we also have a responsibility to protect the public and ensure all licensed venues operate legally, safely, and within the conditions of their licence.

We work closely with owners and managers of licensed premises and provide support to ensure that they are complying with their licence agreements. However, following a council investigation and a series of complaints from residents and patrons, we have applied a review of this premises licence.

A licensing sub-committee will consider the evidence and decide what action, if any, will be taken, and it would not be appropriate to comment further while the review is ongoing.

One inspector reported: I asked to see the Premises Members Guest Book which was lying on the counter, the book had random names in the pages with no dates. The book was not a suitable recording of members and did not record any guests of members. Some of the guest entries had no addresses. I told them this was not a members guest book to the standard required.

To leave a comment on the licence review click here.
H undreds of security guards at a London university will have to reapply for their roles in a major shakeup that could see them lose 13,500 per year, a union says.

Up to 40 security officers who are contracted by Bidvest Noonan to work at UCL could lose their jobs or be offered work elsewhere in the company under new proposals.

Many of those who stay on face a new shift pattern that reduces hours and salary, the IWGB union told the Standard.

A meeting about the proposals was held on Tuesday night with security officers, the union said.

There are 260 security guards across London that will be affected, IWGB general secretary Henry Chango-Lopez said.

Its just disgraceful that the university is taking this decision at a time where we are in the middle of a cost of living crisis and when the workers need more support for the university in order to support their families, he told the Standard.

Many work five days a week, but a new shift pattern of four days on, four days off, has been tabled, meaning officers will go from working 60 hours a week to 40, amounting to a loss of around 13,500 per year, he explained.

Sean Pasquale, who has been a security guard at UCLs main library for four years, fears his job is on the line because he recently suffered a stroke and subsequent leg ulcer.

It was said in the meeting [that] those who are on long term sick [leave] are in category one to go first, he told the Standard.

He said the possibility of losing his job makes him feel sick to the bone.

Because Ive tried to get back into work. Ive nearly indebted myself to the tune of it. Maybe 100,000 to get back.

The only way to have the best healthcare is to pay because I wanted to get back into work because I love working at the main library.

As part of the proposals, enhanced voluntary redundancy will be offered. The proposals will undergo a consultation period.

But strike action is expected in response to the meeting, Mr Chango-Lopez warned.

They are more united than ever and they are going to take any action that is needed in order to fight back and to highlight the hypocrisy of the university saying that they are essential workers during the pandemic, clapping them during the pandemic or keeping the university safe, and now basically getting rid of them, he said.

Ian Dancy, Executive Director of Operations at UCL, said: Our security colleagues are highly valued and respected members of the UCL community, and we are committed to working closely with them and with Bidvest Noonan throughout this period of change.

Bidvest Noonan will be doing everything they can to support colleagues through the consultation process and to mitigate any compulsory redundancies. This includes making existing and newly created redeployment opportunities available to ensure security staff can be retained within Bidvest Noonan, and the option of an enhanced voluntary resignation scheme.

Bidvest Noonan has been approached for comment.

UCL security guard workers have been campaigning to be inhoused since 2019 and took strike action in November in demand for better pay.
F amed financier and Conservative party donor Crispin Odey is defending his reputation after the Financial Times reported accusations of sexual misconduct against him by 13 women yesterday (all of which he strenuously denies). JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley are considering cutting ties with Odey, according to Reuters. So who can he turn to in these trying times? The elite club run by his friend Robin Birley, 5 Hertford Street, might be one option. But there is some mystery regarding his status at the club. The Londoner hears that Odey, right, was asked to stay away from the club long before yesterdays story broke.

When The Londoner phoned him yesterday asking if he is still a club member, Odey said: Of course I am! Robin [Birley] is a close friend. When we put it to him that he hasnt been seen there in yonks, Odey said: Well, Im a member of lots of clubs, one gets around. But has he been asked to stay away? No, not at all! Didnt he get the memo? The Hertford Street club didnt seem sure of their own position. When we put the story to them, the club gave some confused responses before telling us that they do not comment on the identity of members. Birley has previously described Odey as a personal friend and a valued member of 5 Hertford Street.

Dame Judis new mission as M

Dame Judi Dench / Dave Benett

It seems the Department of Trade is splashing the cash in its mission to build up brand Britain. Civil servants at the department tell us that Lord Johnson, a junior trade minister, has commissioned a James Bond-themed short film to promote the UKs cultural offering. We hear Dame Judi Dench, pictured, is lined up to appear. She played the steely spy boss M in the official Bond films. But sadly this one wont be playing at a cinema near you. The film will only be shown to visiting emissaries in the trade departments Whitehall building. Apparently Rishi Sunak, more of a Star Wars fan, likes the idea. We hope he is shaken and stirred by the flick.

Sir Derek Jacobi values the arts outside London

Sir Derek Jacobi / Alan Chapman/Dave Benett/Getty Images

Sir Derek Jacobi has called a truce in the quarrel between the Standard and Arts Council England over its decision to move some big cultural institutions, such as the English National Opera, out of London. I spent many years of my early career out of London, Sir Derek, right, told us with a smile. London, I suppose, becomes the Mecca, but there is a vibrant theatre in the provinces. Thats where I learned my craft!

Natural History Museum horrified by nationalist event

Natural History Museum, Museum of the Year finalist (Janie Airey/ Art Fund/PA) / PA

The Natural History Museum has quietly apologised for hosting the National Conservatism conference dinner last month. Keynote speaker Douglas Murray caused outrage when he said nationalism shouldnt be written off just because the Germans mucked up twice in a century. The museum says it was horrified and saddened by the event and will donate the proceeds to a good cause.

Dame Joan is royally bored

Londoners Diary 9th June 2023 1 / 5 Londoners Diary 9th June 2023 "Divining The Human: The Art Of Alexander Newley" - Book Launch Alan Chapman/Dave Benett/Getty Images Gaucho Celebrates New Opening In Covent Garden Dave Benett Gaucho Celebrates New Opening In Covent Garden Dave Benett Furla Celebrates Women in Music with the FURLA HER SOUND Series Launch in London Dave Benett

Dame Joan Collins dazzled at the launch of her son Alexander Newleys portrait collection last night in Kensington. Dame Joan, who really has seen it all before, tells us she finds the hoo-ha around Prince Harry mind-numbing. I havent been reading about it, she blithely told us, I find it boring. Boring, darling! Dancer Katya Jones and former This Morning doctor Ranj Singh, below left, were at a Gaucho launch. Elon Musks mum was at a party for FURLA, a brand.
B oris Johnsons decision to resign as an MP marks the end of the parliamentary career of a man whose success at the ballot box was undermined by his handling of the biggest peacetime crisis in modern memory.

Two terms as mayor in previously Labour-run London propelled the former journalist to national prominence and his was perhaps the most public face of the Leave campaign during the Brexit referendum he and his allies won against the odds.

After the resignation of David Cameron and the failure of Theresa May to win over the country with her Brexit deal, Mr Johnson became prime minister and went on to deliver the biggest Conservative win since the Thatcher years in the 2019 Christmas election.

Reports were beginning to emerge of a virus in China which would nearly cost Mr Johnson his life  and in a roundabout way has ended his political career, for now at least.

Brexit was the issue that won Mr Johnson popularity in parts of the UK normally loath to embrace Conservatives.

Mr Johnson, who had been mayor of London during the 2012 Olympics, surprised many with his decision to back Brexit and became a familiar figure around the country, descending from a bespoke red bus to rally voters to end the union with the continent that started in 1973.

He was perhaps the most high-profile figure on the campaign and the take-back-control message prevailed, to the surprise of many pundits at home and abroad.

Many saw him as the man to lead the UK out of the union, but as he prepared to contest the leadership after Mr Camerons resignation, the shock decision of ally Michael Gove to stand scuppered his campaign before it had started.

In the end, Mrs May, a Remainer, won the contest and put Mr Johnson in charge of the Foreign Office as the UK began what would be a fraught process of exiting the then 28-member body.

Mr Johnson eventually quit as foreign secretary amid discord over Mrs Mays perceived soft Brexit.

After she was eventually toppled, Mr Johnson never looked like being beaten in the resulting contest, securing a clear win.

He arrived in 10 Downing Street after being offered the post by the then Queen but it did not take him long to seek a fresh mandate for the oven-ready deal he had struck with the EU.

Voters gave him a ringing endorsement, with the Tories claiming spectacular wins in red wall seats which had previously been seen as safe for Labour.

Little did Mr Johnson know that the imminent leaving of the EU would soon be superseded by a crisis like no other.

The coronavirus outbreak saw him taking unprecedented decisions, governing every aspect of citizens lives with his March 23 2020 address telling people to stay at home at the beginning of a long struggle, politically and personally.

After being treated in intensive care, Mr Johnson resumed full duties but although his physical health recovered, events during the lockdown would in the end help trigger his downfall.

Mr Johnson was credited by some for a fast vaccine rollout, but an inquiry will determine his handling of the pandemic.

It was the so-called partygate scandal of socialising at the heart of Westminster while the four nations were locked down that saw his popularity tumble.

After a series of bad election results, the Chris Pincher scandal proved the final straw for a party that had narrowly voted to keep the leader in post just weeks earlier.

With mass resignations ensuing, Mr Johnson finally agreed to stand down before eventually being replaced by Liz Truss, whose own tenure was historically brief.

Mr Johnsons erstwhile ally Rishi Sunak took over at Number 10 but parliamentary scrutiny of his Covid conduct did not abate.

Fridays decision to quit as an MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip marks the latest downward trajectory of a politician who was a winner with the voters but who made many political enemies.
P roposed changes to a controversial Government Bill on the legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles are not about covering up state wrongdoing, a minister has insisted.

Lord Caine, the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) minister who tabled the amendments, acknowledged the draft legislation was very challenging for victims of the conflict but he urged them to give the proposals fair wind.

The Bill has proved highly contentious, with victims groups, all of the main Stormont parties and the Irish government all opposed to it.

Lord Caine came to the defence of the Bill as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar reiterated his criticism as he said the amendments dont go far enough.

The draft legislation would establish a new commission aimed at uncovering facts around unsolved Troubles deaths.

One of the most controversial aspects of the new legal framework is the offer of immunity from prosecution for perpetrators who co-operate with the commission.

The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill would also halt future civil cases and inquests linked to killings during the conflict.

An earlier draft of the legislation would have allowed any inquest that had commenced with a substantive hearing prior to May this year to proceed to conclusion.

One of the amendments brought forward by Lord Caine changes this provision, with all ongoing inquests, other than those at the point of verdict, to cease on May 1 2024.

The NIO minister said the uncompleted inquests would be transferred to the new Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR), which will be led by former Northern Ireland Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan.

Families ought to have every confidence that therell be a seamless transition from the current inquest process to these cases being dealt with by the new body, the peer told the PA news agency.

And I think its important to know that the purpose of the body is essentially to do the same, produce the same results, in a slightly different way, not in an identical way, but to produce the same result as an inquest would, which is to establish the facts of what happened in a particular case.

We are in the business of trying to get more answers, more information to those families that want them

He added: One thing that is not intended here, and Im very, very clear about this  this is not intended to be some great cover-up.

We are in the business of trying to get more answers, more information to those families that want them.

And Im perfectly sure that in the course of doing this therell be things that come out from the commissions investigations which will be embarrassing to the British state, just as there will be things that come out that will be embarrassing to others. So, Im totally prepared for that.

The Bill is currently at its report stage in the House of Lords before its return to the House of Commons. The Government is hoping the final legislation will be passed by the end of the summer.

Other amendments tabled by Lord Caine include clarification that the commission will have the powers to carry out full criminal investigations, in instances where perpetrators do not gain immunity for co-operation.

Anyone who is convicted in such circumstances would also not benefit from the early release provisions included in the Good Friday Agreement.

A fine for non-compliance with the commission has been increased from 1,000 to 5,000 and anyone found guilty of misleading the truth recovery body can been prosecuted and face a potential two-year jail sentence.

Another amendment places the commission under a new duty to rigorously test the veracity of the accounts of anyone applying for immunity. Immunity would also be revoked if the recipient is subsequently convicted of a terrorism offence.

Further amendments would place the ICRIR under a duty to offer victims and their families the opportunity to submit personal impact statements and put an obligation upon the ICRIR to ensure its examinations of historical cases are compliant with human rights laws.

Lord Caine defended the Bills contentious immunity provision, insisting it was only offered in limited and specific circumstances.

I completely understand the difficulties around this concept, he said.

It really comes back to what can we realistically deliver, which is greater information about what happened in Troubles-related cases to families, victims and survivors. How do you encourage people to co-operate  it is by offering some kind of an incentive and therefore conditional immunity.

Speaking to reporters in Co Tipperary on Friday, Mr Varadkar restated the Irish governments opposition to the Bill.

It is one of the few things that all five major parties in Northern Ireland are united on, that they dont think this is the right approach to have a de facto amnesty, not just for former Army personnel but also for former terrorists, he said.

I dont agree with that approach and while there have been some amendments put forward, they dont go far enough, they dont fundamentally change the fact that any response to legacy has to be victim centred and victim orientated.

To take away the possibility of justice from those families, even if it is remote, is wrong in my view.

Grainne Teggart, Amnesty International UKs Northern Ireland deputy director, said the Bill could not be fixed.

The UK Government needs to drop the pretence that these amendments are about addressing victims concerns, she said.

In fact, amendments such as those on inquests significantly worsen the situation for victims.

To end inquests already under way that have not reached their stage of verdict by the beginning of May 2024 is another devastating blow for victims.

Lets be clear, this remains a Bill that will deny truth and justice.
KYODO NEWS - Jun 9, 2023 - 14:17 | All, Japan

The former operations manager of a bus firm has appealed a court ruling that sentenced him to four years in prison for a crash in 2016 that killed 15 people in a mountain resort town in central Japan, court documents showed Friday.

Tsuyoshi Arai, 54, the operations manager of Tokyo-based bus firm ESP at the time of the crash, filed an appeal after the Nagano District Court on Thursday found him guilty of professional negligence resulting in deaths and injuries over the accident in Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture.

The defendant had pleaded not guilty, saying he could not have foreseen the accident.

The court ruled that Arai had failed to provide necessary training or skills testing for the driver at the time of the accident, Hiroshi Tsuchiya.

In the early hours of Jan. 15, 2016, an ESP ski trip charter bus careened off a road in Karuizawa after hitting a guardrail. Tsuchiya and a second driver along with 13 university students aboard were killed while 26 others were injured.

The 65-year-old Tsuchiya had little experience piloting large buses and was unable to properly operate the gears or brakes as the bus went down a hill, according to the ruling.

In the trial, the district court also sentenced Misaku Takahashi, the 61-year-old president of ESP, to three years in prison.

Related coverage:

Japan bus operator president convicted for fatal 2016 crash
N adine Dorries has announced she is quitting as a Tory MP, triggering a by-election.

In a tweet on Friday afternoon, the former Cabinet minister and MP for Mid Bedfordshire announced she was standing down with immediate effect.

It has been an honour to serve as the MP for such a wonderful constituency but it is now time for another to take the reins, she said.

It came just hours before she was dropped from former Prime Minister Boris Johnsons resignation honours list, which included other friends and loyalists such as Priti Patel, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Andrea Jenkyns.

Explaining her decision on TalkTV, Ms Dorries insisted that she had not wanted to cause a by-election but that something significant had happened to change her mind.

She cited her workload as a reason for stepping down, saying that she was struggling to manage her duties as an MP alongside writing her weekly column in the Daily Mail and presenting a show on TalkTV.

Ms Dorries has been a key ally of Mr Johnson since serving in his Government as culture minister and consistently argued his dismissal was unfair.

The former prime ministers long-awaited list consists of around 50 names and includes several former Cabinet ministers in his Government as well as parliamentary hairdresser Kelly Jo Dodge and Mayor of London candidate Shaun Bailey.

Ms Dorries insisted that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak did not have the power to block Mr Johnsons appointments.

Can you imagine if Rishi suddenly decided I am going to remove somebody from Boris list?

He would be setting a precedent that has never been set before.

A prime minister doesnt do that. Theyd be a very foolish prime minister who tampered with the list of a former prime minister because hed end up not getting his own nominations through.

In other developments, health minister Will Quince announced he would step down at the next General Election.

He said the demands of his role as a minister and MP meant he had neglected the most important job I have, being a good dad to two young girls.

Ms Dorries left frontline politics after Liz Truss became Prime Minister in October last year.

The decision means there will be a by-election in Ms Dorries Mid Bedfordshire constituency, where she has a majority of 24,664.

She won 60 per cent of the vote in the constituency at the 2019 general election, well ahead of Labour in second place on 22 per cent.

Labour would need a swing of at least 19.1 per cent to take the seat from the Conservatives  the sort of swing the party has not achieved in a by-election since 1996.

Ms Dorries, who has been an MP since 2005, has been a vocal critic of Mr Sunaks Government since he entered No 10 and is set to release a book on the downfall of former prime minister Mr Johnson.

Her promotion to culture secretary under Mr Johnsons leadership saw her lead the now-ditched plan to privatise Channel 4.

She was no stranger to controversy during her time in Parliament, losing the Conservative whip in 2013 as a result of her appearance on ITVs Im A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!

Other key allies of Mr Johnson including Sir Alok Sharma, president of the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, were dropped from the list.

Both he and Ms Dorries were expected to stand down to take peerages, which leaves Mr Sunak facing two early electoral battles in their seats.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak refused to comment on Friday when asked about his predecessors submission.

Ms Truss, despite being the shortest serving prime minister in modern British political history, has also reportedly submitted a short resignation honours list.
R hun ap Iorwerth, the Senedd member for Ynys Mon (Anglesey), is set to become the new leader of Plaid Cymru.

Following an announcement by Senedd members Sian Gwenllian and Sioned Williams on Friday, no other Plaid Cymru members intend to stand for election.

As a result, Mr ap Iorwerth is set to run uncontested, with nominations due to close on June 16.

Former leader Adam Price stepped down in May after a report found a culture of harassment , bullying and misogyny in the party.

The report found that the party had failed to implement a zero-tolerance approach to sexual harassment and that women had been especially let down.

Who is Rhun ap Iorwerth?

Rhun ap Iorwerth, 50, worked as a journalist and broadcaster before becoming a politician.

He was born in the Valleys and grew up in Anglesey, where he now lives with his wife and three children, and studied politics and Welsh at Cardiff University.

He joined BBC Wales in 1994 and worked in Westminster before returning to Wales in 1997.

Mr ap Iorwerth has worked as Chief Political Correspondent and a news correspondent, and has presented TV and radio programmes in both English and Welsh.

He was elected as the Member for Ynys Mon in August 2013, during a by-election. His current roles within Plaid Cymru are Health and Social Care Spokesperson, Senedd Commissioner, and Deputy Leader.

Since entering politics, ap Iorwerth has served as Shadow Minister for the Economy and Transport, Health and Care, and Finance, and as a member of the corresponding Assembly and Senedd committees.

He has also, at various times, been a member of the Public Accounts Committee, the Petitions Committee and the Standards Committee, and has also served as a Senedd Commissioner, and as Deputy Leader of the Plaid Cymru Group during the Fifth Senedd.

He is also a member of the Welsh Parliaments Health Committee and of the Welsh Parliaments Commission.

In a video announcing his intention to run for the leadership position, Mr ap Iorwerth said: I have no doubt that Wales needs a Plaid Cymru that is fit and ready to offer a vision of what Wales could be.

Confident, fair, green, prosperous, and with the tools at our disposal right now, on the journey to independence.

He added: My country means so much to me, as does my community, and I remain as committed as ever to Ynys Mon.

But from here to the south Wales valleys where I was born, now is the time to unite Plaid Cymru so we can lead the work of building a new future for Wales, and I look forward to playing my part in that.
R ishi Sunak flew back to Britain from the US on Friday to a simmering row over Boris Johnsons resignation honours.

The Prime Minister was due to head to a meeting in Doncaster of ToryMPs, with many under threat of losing their Northern seats in the former Red Wall.

Other Cabinet ministers were also due to address the gathering of the Northern Research Group amid restlessness in the party as polls show it lagging by a double-digit gap behind Labour.

Mr Sunak, after what is being seen as a largely successful two-day visit to Washington, partly to boost trans-Atlantic economic ties, also faced more controversy over Mr Johnson.

Labour were seeking to portray the PM as weak for not taking the shredder to Mr Johnsons resignation honours list which reportedly could be published as soon as Friday.

Mr Sunak remained tight-lipped about whether he had accepted the nominations list  which is said to contain about 50 names  when quizzed in Washington.

Mr Sunak said: I can completely understand the interest in this topic. All I can say is there is a process that is currently under way. It has not concluded yet and until it does, it would not be right for me to comment any further.

But Sir Keir Starmer suggested the Conservative Party leader was having to appease different bits of the governing party with his handling of the honours roll.

The Times reported that the list had been trimmed, with ex-culture secretary Nadine Dorries and Sir Alok Sharma, president of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, taken off.

If they are not given peerages, it would avoid two by-elections. Sir Alok holds a 4,000-vote majority over Labour in his Reading West constituency and Labour could win there. Ms Dorries, who has already announced her plan to quit as the MP for Mid Bedfordshire at the next election, has a majority of 24,600 but the Liberal Democrats are gearing up to target any by-election there.

Mr Johnsons father, Stanley Johnson, has also reportedly been taken off the list. Former prime minister Liz Truss, despite being the shortest serving prime minister in modern British political history, has also reportedly submitted a short resignation honours list.

Meanwhile, Mr Johnson has been given the findings of an investigation by the Privileges Committee into whether he misled Parliament over the partygate scandal, it was reported. Mr Johnson was said to have been given two weeks to respond before the committee publishes its final verdict. He denies intentionally or recklessly misleading Parliament.
P rince Harry has arrived home in California after spending three nights in Frogmore Cottage in Windsor during his high-profile phone hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), according to reports.

The 38-year-old was in the UK to give evidence at the High Court after suing the publisher of the Daily Mirror for damages over alleged unlawful information gathering.

The prince became the first royal in 132 years to testify in court on Tuesday as he presented his case at a packed courtroom 15 in the Rolls Building, London.

The Telegraph reports that the Duke did not see his father King Charles or Prince William during his brief visit.

Instead, he stayed in Windsor after arriving in the UK on Sunday night before dashing back to the United States on Wednesday evening.

It could be Harrys final stay in the property following reports that the King wants Prince Andrew to leave the Royal Lodge on the Windsor estate and downsize to Frogmore Cottage.

Frogmore cottage has royal links going back to the 17th century / PA Archive

The King evicted Harry and Meghan from the property at the beginning of the year, just days after the publication of Harrys controversial memoir, Spare.

The couple were reportedly given until early summer to vacate the cottage.

However, the Duke of York is allegedly dragging his heels and refusing to vacate his 30-room mansion.

It is widely understood that Royal Lodge, once occupied by the Queen Mother, has been earmarked for Prince William and his family.

Prince Harry is suing MGN after claiming that journalists at their titles, including the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, were linked to methods including phone hacking, so-called blagging or gaining information by deception, and use of private investigators for unlawful activities.

He and his legal team have highlighted 140 articles published between 1996 and 2010 by MGN titles, with 33 being considered at the trial.

MGN denies the articles in question involved phone hacking or unlawful activity.

The Duke of Sussex: Prince Harry at High Court hearing for phone hacking claims 1 / 8 The Duke of Sussex: Prince Harry at High Court hearing for phone hacking claims REUTERS PA PA Wire PA Wire PA REUTERS

Much of his second day of evidence revolved around articles related to his split from Harrys former girlfriend, Chelsy Davy.

But it was Harrys current relationship with Meghan Markle which encouraged him to take action against MGN, he told the court.

The Duke said he wanted to stop the abuse, intrusion and hate that was coming towards me and my wife. He told the court that he was never shown any articles about himself by the Palace and added that even if he had been shown some, he would not have been allowed to make a complaint.
H eathrow Airport security staff have announced that they will take strike action across 31 days from June 24 to August 27, due to continuing disputes over pay.

The strikes will impact holidaymakers flying from the UKs busiest airport on almost every weekend this summer.

With many holidaygoers already enduring huge delays at the airport, or even flight cancellations, its been already turbulent year for the travel industry.

Airlines have only started to recover from last year, which saw huge queues due to staff shortages at some major UK airports, while landing at Heathrow Airport saw huge piles of luggage stacking up after the airport struggled with passenger capacity.

While many hope their travel insurance will cover them for these delays and cancellations, it seems travellers across the UK could be in danger of having to foot the costs for new flights themselves.

Heres everything you need to know, including how to protect yourself and what to look out for.

How to find out if your travel insurance policy covers airport strike action

While many check that their insurance policies cover them for delays and cancellations for various reasons, including strikes, many fail to check exactly what cancellation causes are covered.

It is generally accepted that your travel insurance will cover flight cancellations if this is the airlines fault, however it is always best to read through your policy.

Speaking in 2022, Which? Money Editor, Jenny Ross said: Travellers should ensure theyve taken out adequate insurance to cover any losses or unexpected costs they might face.

Which? analysis of 199 policies shows that levels of cover can vary wildly in important areas like disruption caused by strike action.

We advise travellers to always check policies carefully to ensure they offer the cover that will be most appropriate to their trip, and to ensure they have cover in place from the time of booking.

Make sure youre covered for travel delays and cancellations this summer (Steve Parsons/PA) / PA Wire

For example, less than one in 10 of the 199 policies Which? analysed in a 2022 study offered Complete protection in the event of Covid disrupting a holiday, major problem that holidaymakers face up until last year.

Which? recommends travellers booking holidays on a credit card, where possible, as your bank is legally required to reimburse you for purchases over 100 if the services provided were not as advertised  and if the company, itself, wont refund you.

You should also try to book package holidays from ATOL-protected firms.

What does a good travel insurance policy look like?

While reading insurance documents can be time-consuming, you should always read the fine print to discover exactly what you are and arent covered for.

Travel insurance policies are built from three core elements, comprising how many trips youre making in the next 12 months, where youre travelling to and who youre travelling with.

From there, Which? recommends that you look into whether the policies offer emergency medical cover, and suggests ensuring youre covered for up to 5 million.

Following baggage chaos at Heathrow Airport, travellers should ensure theyve got personal belongings covered in insurance policies (Twitter/PA) / PA Media

Additionally, explore what sort of cancellation cover the policy offers. The consumer choices website suggests that you look for a policy that offers cancellation and curtailment cover of at least 2,000  or the total value of your holiday.

It advises including you select a value that covers the cost of getting you home, too. And, if you are flying from Heathrow this summer, the regular strikes mean that it may be worth speaking to the insurance provider to clarify whether this is covered and what the stipulations are.

Following baggage delays at Heathrow Airport last year, many passengers were concerned about what cover they had for luggage that was lost or missing.

To prevent losing the value of your items, should anything happen to your case, Which? suggests cover of 1,500 or the cost of replacing those belongings.

If a single item in your luggage exceeds 200, you may want to increase your home contents insurance for possessions away from home as the item will be covered by that instead.

Which? states: Often the maximum is between 200 and 500, so check the terms and conditions of your policy and don't carry too much currency around with you.
A ctress Nikki Sanderson is set to testify in the Mirror Group Newspapers trial, in which Prince Harry has been testifying this week.

The Duke of Sussex appeared at the High Court earlier in the week as part of the case against the media group which is accused of unlawfully gathering information.

The trial involves 207 articles published between 1991 and 2011, 33 of which feature Prince Harry, and allegedly contain information obtained through illicit means such as voicemail interception.

Coronation Street star Sanderson, 39, is set to make an appearance as part of the case on Friday.

Mirror Group Newspapers has admitted a private investigator was sent to a nightclub in 2004 to track the prince and find out gossip. Otherwise, the specified allegations are denied, or in a few cases not admitted, a legal representative from the media group has said.

Actress Nikki Sanderson filed her claim in December 2020, her barrister said / PA Wire

Who is Nikki Sanderson?

Nikki Sanderson is Blackpool born actress who joined the cast of Coronation Street in 1999.

She left the beloved soap opera in 2005, and has gone on to star in other TV dramas such as Heartbeat, and Hollyoaks, which she has appeared in since 2012.

Additionally, Sanderson has worked as a model.

Who is Nikki Sandersons partner?

Since last year, Sanderson has reportedly been in a relationship since 2022 with Anthony Quinlan - the pair having both starred in Hollyoaks.

She previously dated her former Coronation Street co-star Danny Young from 2005 to 2009.

Who did Nikki Sanderson play in Corrie?

Sanderson played Candice Stowe in the soap from 1999 to 2005

The Duke of Sussex arrives at the Rolls Buildings in central London for the phone hacking trial against Mirror Group Newspapers / PA

Why is Nikki Sanderson testifying?

Sanderson is reportedly claiming her voicemail was accessed. In May, she said she was physically assaulted in the street following false insinuations published - although the details are yet to come out.

Voicemail interception has been denied by the Mirror group in four cases including Sandersons. She is testifying alongside Prince Harry, Coronation Street star Michael Turner, and the ex-wife of comedian Paul Whitehouse, Fiona Wightman.

Sandersons legal representative told the court: The impact of the stories on Nikki Sanderson was aggravated by their false insinuations that she was promiscuous, causing her great upset and giving rise to her being subjected to mental and physical abuse, having people shout at her in the street calling her a whore, slag or slut and even being physically assaulted on numerous occasions.

A lawyer for Mirror group said: There is some evidence of the instruction of third parties to engage in other types of unlawful information-gathering in respect of each of the claimants, save for Mr Turner whose claim is entirely denied, and MGN has made pleaded admissions in respect thereof.

MGN unreservedly apologises for all such instances of unlawful information gathering and assures the claimants that such conduct will never be repeated.
According to US media, Mr Trump faces seven charges, including conspiracy, false statements, obstruction of justice, and illegally retaining classified documents under the Espionage Act.

It is the second indictment of the former president - who has already been charged in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records connected to hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

He also faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that could lead to criminal charges.

Here are the key details and what could happen next.

Why has Trump been indicted?

He has been indicted for his handling of classified files after he left the White House.

Last year, thousands of documents were seized in an FBI search at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago last year, including approximately 100 which were marked as classified.

When Mr Trump left office in January 2021, he was meant to hand over all presidential records. This is routine for outgoing presidents, as the records are federal property.

Its illegal for officials, including former presidents, to remove or keep classified documents at an unauthorised, insecure location.

However, months after Mr Trump left the White House, prosecutors have said the former president took roughly 300 classified documents to Mar-a-Lago.

The files included a letter that former president Barack Obama left for Mr Trump when he left office, as well as correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

What could happen next?

Mr Trump has been asked to appear at a federal courthouse next week in Miami, on Tuesday 13 June.

He is the first former US president to face federal criminal charges.

Once Mr Trumps arrest paperwork is completed, he will be considered under arrest and in custody.

After the paperwork is processed, he will be arraigned.

This means he will hear the charges and enter a plea in court.

Could Trump go to jail?

Legal experts have said that Mr Trump might face prison if he is convicted of mishandling the documents, or of obstructing the investigation into whether he did.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, told BBC News that what happens next will likely mirror the fallout of Mr Trumps arrest in April, for falsifying business records in relation to the hush money payments made to Ms Daniels.

He is running for president again next year, and has insisted he has done nothing wrong.

He said he never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former president of the United States.

In a video he described the allegations as a hoax that amount to election interference.

Im an innocent man. I did nothing wrong. I will fight this, just like weve been fighting for seven years, he said.
A US federal court has unsealed an indictment against Donald Trump detailing 37 charges against the former President for retaining classified documents after leaving office.

The 49-page indictment alleged that Mr Trump shared a classified map related to a military operation and described a Pentagon plan of attack.

It is the Justice Department's first official confirmation of a criminal case against Mr Trump relating to the retention of hundreds of documents at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.

The indictment alleges Trump kept classified documents in the bathroom and shower at his Florida estate, as well as various other locations that included a ballroom, storeroom, office and bedroom.

Prosecutors noted that tens of thousands of members and guests visited the active social club of Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trumps presidency in January 2021 through the August 2022 search.

Stacks of boxes can be observed in the White and Gold Ballroom of former U.S. President Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach / Getty Images

They argued that nonetheless Trump stored documents in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

One document allegedly retained by Mr Trump concerned a foreign country's support of terrorism against US interests.

Materials came from the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies, the indictment said.

The indictment outlined two circumstances in which Mr Trump allegedly showed the documents to others.

One occurred in a meeting with a writer at his Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he is said to have described federal officials' plan of attack against him. It is claimed that Mr Trump acknowledged that he knew the information was still a secret.

In a later meeting with a representative from his political action committee, Mr Trump is said to have displayed a classified map related to a military operation.

Prosecutors said Mr Trump acknowledged he should not be showing it to the representative and that the representative should not get too close.

Charged alongside Mr Trump was Walt Nauta, an aide who was seen on surveillance camera removing boxes at Mar-a-Lago.

Prosecutors noted that Mr Trump had access to the most sensitive classified documents and national security information, including information from the intelligence community.

Mr Trump has vehemently denied wrongdoing and claimed the prosecution is politically motivated. In a video posted online on Thursday, he repeated his claim that the investigation was a witch hunt.

He is due to appear in court on Tuesday afternoon in Miami, where a federal grand jury had been hearing testimony as recently as this week.

If found guilty, Mr Trump could face a prison sentence.

The Justice Department special counsel who filed charges against Trump says in his first public statement that the country has one set of laws and they apply to everyone while he outlined the charges against the former president.

Jack Smith spoke to reporters briefly in Washington on Friday but did not take questions.

Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice and our nations commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world, Smith said.

Smith said prosecutors would seek a speedy trial and very much look forward to presenting their case.

His wife is a Trump Hater, just as he is a Trump Hater, Trump wrote in response on post on Truth Social, accompanied by a picture of Mr Smith.

Trump is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday in South Florida.

It comes amid mounting legal issues for the former President, who has insisted it will not derail his campaign for reelection in 2024.

Mr Trump is due to go on trial in New York next March in a state case stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star.

Investigators are also continuing to probe efforts by Mr Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

A district attorney in Georgia is also investigating Trump over alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election in that state.

The White House has kept its distance from Mr Trumps legal battles, and President Joe Biden declined to comment when asked by reporters in North Carolina about the indictment.
E mmanuel Macron has travelled to Annecy in the French Alps to visit the families and victims who were stabbed.

A 31-year-old Syrian man was arrested after four children, one of whom is a British national, aged between 22 months and three, and two adults - aged 70 and 78 - were attacked in the Alpine town on Thursday.

Alongside his wife, Brigitte, the French President went to a hospital in Grenoble where three of the four children are being treated.

The fourth child is being treated in Geneva, Switzerland.

French prime minister Elisabeth Borne confirmed all four children underwent surgery and are under constant medical surveillance.

France: Annecy playground knife attack tributes 1 / 13 France: Annecy playground knife attack tributes REUTERS AFP via Getty Images PA PA AFP via Getty Images PA AFP via Getty Images PA PA AP

Ms Borne added that the children were in a stable condition.

Mr Macron then visited emergency workers and one of the adults stabbed on Thursday at a local hospital in Annecy.

Local media reported that the man was hit by a police bullet as well as being stabbed by the attacker.

Mr Macron described the assault as an attack of absolute cowardice adding that the nation is in shock.

Video of the attack showed a man in dark glasses with a blue scarf covering his head brandishing a knife, as people screamed for help.

He then slashed at a man carrying rucksacks who tried to approach him, seemingly trying to stop the attack.

The suspect remains in custody and was granted residency in Sweden in 2013 although interior minister Gerald Darmanin said the attacker had tried to claim asylum in France and Italy.
F our children including a British girl remained in intensive care on Friday following a series of savage knife attacks by a Syrian refugee in eastern France.

Abdelmasih Hanoun, 31, faces attempted murder charges following the assaults by Lake Annecy, in the Alps, on Thursday morning.

He first targeted two French cousins named as Ennio and Alba, both two, and then attacked Ettie, a three-year-old English girl on holiday with her parents, and Peter, a 22-month-old Dutch boy.

On Friday, Ennio and Alba remained in hospital in the nearby city of Grenoble, where their condition was described as critical.

Ettie was in the same hospital and her condition was stable while Peter was also stable having been transferred to a specialist medical unit in Geneva.

Line Bonnet-Mathis, the Annecy Prosecutor who is leading the investigation into the crimes, said: We are dealing with very young victims whose state of health is still extremely fragile. All are in intensive care.

Two adults were also slashed with a knife by Hanoun  Manuel, 70, and Yusuf, 78, who was also hit by police bullet in error.

Hanoun himself was also treated after being shot by police before his arrest, but was still well enough to talk to officers.

He described himself as a Syrian-Christian, who was filmed saying In the name of Jesus Christ throughout the attack, said an investigating source.

A youth lights candles at a playground in the "Jardins de l'Europe" in Annecy, in the French Alps, on June 8, 2023, following a mass stabbing / AFP via Getty Images

The divorced father of a three-year-old girl was refused asylum in France six days ago and faced being deported.

Despite this, he had been sleeping rough in Annecy, with no attempt by the authorities to monitor his movements.

Gerald Darmanin, Frances interior minister, said this was a troubling coincidence, adding: For reasons not well explained he had sought asylum in Switzerland, Italy and France.

Hanoun arrived in Sweden 10 years ago, having served in the Syrian Army during the countrys ongoing civil war.

He married a Swedish woman he had met in Turkey, and they went on to have a daughter, now aged three, before the couple separated around eight months ago.

Hanoun was twice refused Swedish citizenship, and this is thought to have motivated him to move to France alone.

The multiple stabbings follow a series of similar crimes in France dating back to 2015, most of them linked to Islamist terrorism.

There were no early indications as to the motive of the latest attack, said Ms Bonet-Mathis.
By Azernews

Laman Ismayilova

Azerbaijan has been represented at the Revelations International Biennial of Crafts and Creation, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary at Grand Palais Ephemere.

The Azerbaijan stand was set up at the biennale with the support of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and the organization of the Azerbaijani Embassy in France, Azernews reports.

A modern installation "Under one sun" created by Elvin Nabizade for the Venice Biennale in 2017 was exhibited at the biennale.

The Azerbaijani Ambassador to France Leyla Abdullayeva, Assistant to the President of Azerbaijan Anar Alakbarov, Executive Director of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Anar Alakbarov, Deputy Culture Minister Saadat Yusifova, head of the Azerbaijan-France Inter-Parliamentary Connections Working Group Soltan Mammadov, President and CEO of the Grand Palais in Paris Jean-Paul Cluzel, Azerbaijani and French deputies attended the opening ceremony of the Azerbaijani stand.

In her speech, the Azerbaijani Ambassador to France Leyla Abdullayeva highlighted the projects implemented by the Heydar Aliyev Foundation for the promotion of Azerbaijani culture and art.

Noting that the works of talented national artists have been exhibited in Paris many times with the support of the foundation, the ambassador stressed that the installation at the Azerbaijan stand reflects the rainbow and that it embodies peace and a clear future in Azerbaijan.

Assistant to the President of Azerbaijan Anar Alakbarov, Executive Director of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Anar Alakbarov said that the author of the installation Elvin Nabizade, is one of the talented sculptors of the Azerbaijani contemporary art.

Pointing out that E. Nabizade's works are exhibited in many well-known galleries worldwide, Anar Alakbarov emphasized that this art work had a special place in the Venice Biennale. Among the numerous works exhibited at the biennale, this installation attracts attention with its uniqueness.

President and CEO of the Grand Palais in Paris Jean-Paul Cluzel expressed his gladness with Azerbaijan's participation in the Revelations Biennale. He underlined that the main goal of the biennale is to identify and promote talents in the field of artistic creativity. Revelations is a cultural message of peace and solidarity. The Azerbaijan stand reflects the message of the biennale.

Sculptor Elvin Nabizade, the author of the "Under one sun" installation, thanked the Heydar Aliyev Foundation for the chance it created for him.

He spoke about the creation of the work. After ending the Karabakh conflict, which was going through a 44-day war in Azerbaijan, the sculptor decided to give music a new - second life, and thus the installation "Under one sun" was created.

The installation consists of 44 pieces of music in the shape of a rainbow, which is a symbol of luck, is a symbol of Azerbaijan's multiculturalism, the unity of different nationalities and peoples living in our country.

The Azerbaijan stand, prepared with the support of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, which contributes to the protection of the national and moral values and promotes the recognition of the Azerbaijani culture throughout the world, attracted the attention of not only visitors, but also international artists, who participated in the biennale.

Around 400 artists from 30 countries participated in the biennale.

The Revelations International Biennial of Crafts and Creation will run until June 11.
D onald Trumps bid for a White House comeback was rocked today by an indictment bombshell on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate.

The legal move would make him the first former president in US history to face criminal charges by the federal government that he once oversaw. But rather than pull out of the race to become the Republican candidate, Mr Trump went on the offensive with an angry swagger, announcing the indictment on his Truth Social platform, and protesting: I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!.

The justice department was expected to make public a seven-count indictment ahead of an historic court appearance next week amid the 2024 presidential campaign.

Donald Trump on Truth Social /

The indictment carries the possibility of prison if Mr Trump is convicted. It also unleashed a fresh political storm as Mr Trump has been way ahead of other contenders to become the Republican candidate to take on Joe Biden in the presidential election.

It also set the stage for a sensational trial centred on claims that the then president, once entrusted to safeguard the nations most closely guarded secrets, wilfully, and illegally, hoarded sensitive national security information at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office.

Mr Trump has already been charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an historic case over allegations he orchestrated hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal before the 2016 election. He denies any wrongdoing.

Mr Trump and his allies are also being investigated over alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and the district attorney in Georgias Fulton County is investigating him over alleged efforts to subvert the poll in that state.

Stormy Daniels is mobbed by the media outside a New York federal court in 2018 / AP

But among the various investigations he faces, legal experts, as well as Mr Trumps own aides, had long seen the Mar-a-Lago inquiry as the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution.

The indictment arises from a months-long investigation into whether Mr Trump broke the law by holding onto hundreds of documents marked classified at his Palm Beach property and whether he took steps to obstruct the governments efforts to recover the records.

Prosecutors claim that Mr Trump took around 300 classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, including some 100 that were seized by the FBI last August in a search of the home that underscored the gravity of the justice departments investigation. Mr Trump has repeatedly insisted that he was entitled to keep the classified documents when he left the White House, and has also claimed without evidence that he had declassified them.

Court records unsealed last year showed federal investigators believed they had probable grounds that multiple crimes had been committed, including the retention of national defence information, destruction of government records and obstruction.

Since then, the justice department has amassed additional evidence and secured grand jury testimony from people close to Mr Trump, including his own lawyers. The statutes governing the handling of classified records and obstruction are felonies that could carry years in prison if convicted.

The department did not immediately confirm the indictment publicly but it was said to include seven criminal counts. Within minutes of his announcement Mr Trump, who said he was due in court on Tuesday afternoon in Miami, began fundraising off it for his presidential campaign.

Donald Trump Presidency - In pictures 1 / 62 Donald Trump Presidency - In pictures President Donald Trump takes the oath of office as his wife Melania Trump holds the bible and his son Barron Trump looks on, on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC Getty Images Republican president-elect Donald Trump gives a thumbs up to the crowd during his acceptance speech at his election night event at the New York Hilton Midtown in the early morning hours of 9 November 2016 in New York Getty Images U.S. Republican presidential candidate, real estate mogul and TV personality Donald Trump poses with his family after formally announcing his campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination during an event at Trump Tower in New York on 16 June 2015 Reuters Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump holds babies at a campaign rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado on 29 July 2016 Reuters Donald Trump eating KFC on his private jet in August 2016 Donald Trump Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump kisses a "Women for Trump" placard during a rally at the Lakeland Linder Regional Airport in Lakeland, Florida on 12 October 2016 AFP/Getty Images Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speak during the second presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis, America on 09 October 2016 AP U.S. President-elect Donald Trump speaks at his election night rally in Manhattan, New York, U.S. on 09 November 2016 Reuters The future is orange: Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump hugs a U.S. flag Reuters Donald Trump and wife Melania being interviewed on 13 November 2016 by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes 60 Minutes/CBS US President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump meet in the Oval Office of the White House on 10 November 2016 EPA Republican president-elect Donald Trump embraces his wife Melania Trump during his election night event at the New York Hilton Midtown in the early morning hours of 09 November 2016 in New York Getty Images Donald Trump poses on the cover of Time Magazine after being named its person of the year, in a picture provided by the publication in New York on 7 December 2016 Time Magazine Donald Trump and musician Kanye West pose for media at Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York on 13 December 2016 Reuters President-elect Donald Trump and his wife Melania arrive for a VIP reception and dinner with donors in Washington on 19 January 2017 AP Theresa May and U.S. President Donald Trump walk along The Colonnade of the West Wing at The White House on January 27, 2017 in Washington, DC Getty Images Pope Francis walks along with US President Donald Trump and US First Lady Melania Trump during a private audience at the Vatican in May 2017 AFP/Getty Images President Donald Trump examines a fire truck from Wisconsin-based manufacturer Pierce on the South Lawn during a "Made in America" product showcase event at the White House in Washington, DC, on July 17, 2017 AFP/Getty Images U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes 11-year-old Frank Giaccio as he cuts the Rose Garden grass at the White House in Washington, U.S., September 15, 2017 Reuters US President Donald Trump inspects border wall prototypes in March 2018 AFP/Getty Images Activists inflate a giant balloon depicting US President Donald Trump as an orange baby during a demonstration against Trump's visit to the UK in Parliament Square, London July 2018 AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump with The Queen in July 2018 AP German Chancellor Angela Merkel deliberates with US president Donald Trump on the sidelines of the official agenda on the second day of the G7 summit on June 9, 2018 in Charlevoix, Canada Getty Images President Donald Trump meets North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Sentosa Island in Singapore on 12 June 2018 AP U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland in July 2018 Reuters Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian posed for a photograph together at the White House meeting Donald Trump U.S. first lady Melania Trump climbs into her motorcade vehicle wearing a Zara design jacket with the phrase "I Really Don't Care. Do U?" on the back as she returns to Washington from a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border area in Texas, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., June 21, 2018 Reuters A White House staff member reaches for the microphone held by CNN's Jim Acosta as he questions U.S. President Donald Trump during a news conference in November 2018 Reuters President Donald Trump looks over tables of fast food for the the college football playoff champion Clemson Tigers in the State Dining Room of the White House in January 2019 Reuters Donald Trump with Nigel Farage when they met met face-to-face on 2nd March 2019 The White House/PA US President Donald Trump with First Lady Melania Trump and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe' Akie Abe (R) watch a sumo battle during the Summer Grand Sumo Tournament in Tokyo on May 26, 2019 AFP/Getty Images Swedish environmental activist GrSwedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg watches as Donald Trump enters the United Nations to speak with reporters on September 23, 2019eta Thunberg watches as Donald Trump enters the United Nations to speak with reporters Reuters The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall meets US President Donald Trump and wife Melania at Clarence House, central London, as Nato leaders gather to mark 70 years of the alliance on 3 December 2019 PA Prime Minister Boris Johnson shakes hands with U.S. President Donald Trump during a welcoming ceremony at the NATO leaders summit in Watford on December 4, 2019 Reuters Donald Trump in an online address on 13 January 2020 The White House Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rips up the speech of U.S. President Donald Trump after his State of the Union address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on 4 February Reuters US President Donald Trump holds up a newspaper that displays a headline "Acquitted" as he arrives to speak at the 68th annual National Prayer Breakfast on February 6, 2020 in Washington,DC AFP via Getty Images picturesoftheyeargeorgefloydv1.jpg A protester carries the carries a U.S. flag upside, a sign of distress, next to a burning building on 28 May in Minneapolis during the George Floyd protests AP President Donald Trump holds a Bible as he visits outside St. John's Church across Lafayette Park from the White House on 1 June in Washington AP US President Donald Trump arrives for the Independence Day events at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, South Dakota, July 3, 2020 AFP via Getty Images U.S. President Donald Trump holds a baseball bat while looking at exhibits during a Spirit of America Showcase in the Entrance Hall of the White House July 02, 2020 in Washington, DC Getty Images Ivanka Trump, daughter and Advisor to the US President, introduces US President Donald Trump and US First Lady Melania Trump ahead of his acceptance speech for the Republican Party nomination for reelection during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC on August 27, 2020. AFP via Getty Images A car with US President Trump drives past supporters in a motorcade outside of Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland AFP via Getty Images U.S. President Donald Trump works in the Presidential Suite while receiving treatment after testing positive for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland via Reuters U.S. President Donald Trump removes his mask upon return to the White House from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on October 05, 2020 in Washington Getty Images An explosion caused by a police munition is seen while supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington Reuters Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) displays a signed an article of impeachment against President Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol on January 13, 2021 in Washington, DC Getty Images

Appearing last night on CNN, Trump attorney Jim Trusty said the indictment included charges of wilful retention of national defence information  a crime under the espionage act, which polices the handling of government secrets  obstruction, false statements and conspiracy.

The inquiry took a major step forward last November when attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation to lead both the documents inquiry as well as a separate investigation into alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

The case is a milestone for a justice department that had investigated Mr Trump for years, as president and private citizen, but had never before charged him with a crime.

The most notable investigation was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, but prosecutors in that inquiry cited justice department policy against indicting a sitting president.

Once he left office, though, he lost that protection. It still remains unclear how much it will damage Mr Trumps standing given that his first indictment generated millions of dollars in contributions from angry supporters and didnt weaken him in the polls.

Many of his challengers for the Republican nomination jumped to his defence. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Mr Trumps top rival for the 2024 nomination, accused the justice department of political bias in charging the former president.

The weaponisation of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, Mr DeSantis tweeted. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.

He questioned why the department had been so zealous in bringing charges against Mr Trump and so passive about going after former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Amid the turmoil Democrats are also increasingly concerned about Joe Bidens age, especially after the 80-year-old fell at an awards event.
A Russian man was killed in a shark attack near one of Egypts Red Sea resorts, authorities have said.

The 23-year-old died after being mauled by a tiger shark in the waters near the city of Hurghada.

Authorities closed off a 46-mile stretch of the coastline, saying that it will remain off-limits until Sunday.

Egypts environment ministry said it had caught the shark and was examining it in a laboratory to try and determine the reasons for the rare attack.

The Russian embassy in Hurghada identified the man as a Russian citizen, but did not give his name.

Shocking footage online appears to show the man being dragged down into the sea, only for him to resurface and desperately fight off the shark when suddenly the water around him turns red.

Horrified bystanders can be heard yelling Oh my God as the shark repeatedly circles and comes back in to attack.

The mans father said he believes his son was the victim of some kind of evil fate after the horror incident.

He told the media outlet 112: We went to the beach to relax. My son was attacked by a shark, it all happened in seconds.

What kind of help can you give? This meat grinder happened in 20 seconds, he was just dragged under the water.

He added: This is an absolutely ridiculous coincidence, because it is a safe beach. There are ships and yachts around. Its never happened there. They usually attack on wild beaches. Its just some kind of evil fate.

Shark attacks are rare in the Red Sea coastal regions. However, in 2022 an Austrian and a Romanian tourist were killed by sharks in Hurghada.
J apans biggest conveyor belt sushi chain is looking to sue for damages after a video of a teenage boy licking a soy sauce bottle and wiping saliva on food went viral.

Sushiro has filed a suit worth 383,280 with a court in Osaka arguing the so-called sushi terrorism trend had led to it losing business.

Police in Japan arrested three people on suspicion of forcible obstruction of business back in March. Their reported films on TikTok and Instagram led to customers raising concerns over food hygiene.

Kura Sushi, another chain, has also experienced bad behaviour in its outlets - and was the location where a teenager was filmed licking a soy sauce bottle and then wiping saliva on food that was doing the rounds on a conveyor belt.

But it is Sushiro that is looking to sue, according to the Kyodo news agency, and could claim an additional 500,000 after splashing out on extra hygiene measures.

This is the story so far of a trend that is worrying one of Japans culinary touchstones.

How did the sushi prank originate?

At the beginning of 2023, three arrests were made in Japan after pranksters released videos of themselves on social media that showed them tampering with food at sushi restaurants.

This included them licking items, drinking directly from communal soy sauce bottles, and chewing sushi items before putting them back on a conveyor belt for public consumption.

The novelty of the conveyor belt system is part of the attraction but the mechanism does leave the sushi to be unguarded against potential crimes against hygiene.

Businesses have toyed with the prospect of introducing table service - however, restaurants would then have nothing to offer beyond standard sushi eateries.

What has been said?

Hiroyuki Okamoto, of the Kura Sushi chain, said earlier this year: Our company has been hearing from a large number of customers who tell us they no longer trust or want to go to conveyor belt sushi restaurants.

This is a crisis not only for our stores but for the entire conveyor belt sushi industry.

It has been reported that the teenager has admitted to licking items but has expressed remorse and his lawyers have argued he is not solely to blame for Sushiros loss of business. The lawyer added that the boy did not expect the video to go viral.
U krainian forces seized nearly a mile of land in 24 hours near the eastern town of Bakhmut by exploiting blunders by new Russian troops, military sources said on Friday.

Fierce fighting is taking place around the town in the Donetsk province of the eastern Donbas region.

Serhiy Cherevaty, spokesperson for Ukraines East military command said Ukrainian forces had advanced 1.2 km (0.75 mile) near Bakhmut over the past 24 hours.

We took advantage of the enemys rotation measures and the fact that units which entered do not know the area fully, and failed to conduct appropriate reconnaissance and coordination. We struck, he told Ukrainian television.

We have been carrying out assaults for several days.

Over the past several days, Ukrainian forces have made their most rapid gains around the edges of Bakhmut, aiming to encircle the ruined town which Russian forces seized control of last month.

The situation is tense on all areas of the front, Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said on the Telegram messaging app.

Naming eastern areas where fighting has been fierce for months, she said: The enemy continues to focus its main efforts on the Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivsky and Mariinka directions, heavy fighting continues.

She said Ukrainian troops were repelling the Russian attacks, though this could not be independently confirmed.

Meanwhile, Russias Defence Ministry said it was continuing to repel Ukrainian attacks in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia, Russian news agencies reported, though these claims could also not be firmed up independently.

Ukrainian officials made little mention of the situation in Zaporizhzhia but the head of the presidents office said a junior nurse and a plumber had been killed by Russian shelling of a hospital in Huliai Pole in the province.

Earlier, US military experts said Ukraine had launched its long-awaited counter-offensive against Putins army with differential outcomes amid heavy fighting in a series of early battles.

The Institute for the Study of War stressed that Kyiv troops had made advances around the eastern town of Bakhmut.

But it also emphasised that Russian forces had apparently defended against an attack in the western Zaporizhzhia province in a doctrinally sound manner.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday hailed what he described as results in Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.

There is very heavy fighting in Donetsk region, Mr Zelensky said in his daily video message.

But there are results and I am grateful to those who achieved these results. Well done in Bakhmut. Step by step, he said.

In further detail from the Washington-based think tank it said:

Ukrainian officials had signalled that Ukrainian forces have transitioned from defensive to offensive operations in the Bakhmut sector and are making gains of between 200 metres and nearly two kilometre (1.2 miles) on the flanks of the eastern town.

Ukrainian forces made tactical gains during limited localised counter-attacks in western Donetsk province, near the border with the Zaporizhzhia province.

Ukrainian forces also conducted an attack in western Zaporizhzhia province on the night of June 7 to 8 but do not appear to have made gains as part of this attack, or at least not early on, with Moscow claiming Russian troops had regained lost positions.

The ISW has warned that Ukrainian forces may face their hardest challenges as they seek to initially breach Russian defensive lines and so could suffer heavy losses in the early part of the counter-offensive.

Russia's army on Friday reported heavy fighting in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine, saying over 21 Ukrainian tanks had been destroyed in battles across key sections of the front line.

However, claims from Moscow need to be treated with caution given the often inaccurate propaganda issued by the Kremlin and Russian defence minsistry.

A spokesman for Russia's Vostok group of forces said 13 Ukrainian tanks were destroyed in battles in the Zaporizhzhia region and eight in the Donetsk region. It reported artillery, drone and infantry battles.

These claims could not be independently verified.

Russian military bloggers said there were intense battles on the Zaporizhzhia front near the city of Orikhiv as Ukraine sought to pierce Russian defences and drive a wedge through Russian forces.

Russia said Ukraine began a major offensive on Sunday morning, first in southern Donetsk, but Moscow said its forces repelled the attacks. Ukraine accuses Russia of spreading misinformation.

Meanwhile, Ukraines air force said on Friday that it shot down four cruise missiles and 10 attack drones during a Russian air strike overnight.

It said Russian forces had launched 16 drones and six cruise missiles during the attack, and that two other cruise missiles had struck a civilian object in central Ukraine during an earlier attack on Thursday evening.
T his month marks 75 years since hundreds of Caribbeans disembarked the Empire Windrush ship in Tilbury Docks in Essex.

HMT Empire Windrush docked in Britain on June 22, 1948, and marked the beginning of a wave of immigration that helped repair post-war Britain.

But in 2018, it emerged that hundreds of Caribbean immigrants in the UK were being wrongly targeted by immigration enforcement, with many being detained or deported.

Due to the government's "hostile environment" policies, the Windrush Generation of Commonwealth citizens were denied healthcare and threatened with deportation.

This became known as the Windrush scandal, which led to the resignation of then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd after she admitted to "inadvertently" misleading MPs over the targets set for the voluntary removal of migrants.

Theresa May, UK Prime Minister at the time, apologised to the heads of 12 Caribbean countries after an outcry that saw 140 MPs sign a letter to demand a resolution to the crisis.

Windrush generation immigrant:Government 'apology just not good enough'

What was the Windrush Scandal?

The Windrush generation was the generation of immigrants who arrived in Britain between 1948 and 1973.

They were named after the ship HMT Empire Windrush, which came from African and Caribbean countries under a rule allowing freedom of movement within the Commonwealth.

Minors travelled on their parents' documents and some never registered for a passport as they did not intend to travel abroad.

But because they never asked for documents proving their status and the Home Office did not automatically issue any, many were then asked to leave the UK after then-Home Secretary Theresa May brought in the "hostile environment" immigration policies in 2013.

The 1971 Immigration Act gave indefinite leave to remain to Commonwealth citizens already living in the UK, because freedom of movement within the Commonwealth was ending.

However, the Home Office did not record the details of each individual - so it became hard for those who didn't get documents at the time to prove that they were in the UK legally.

Many cases emerged in 2018 of Windrush children - now adults who have lived in the UK for several decades - facing the threat of deportation.

What compensation did those affected receive?

More than 160 people were detained or deported in the Windrush scandal.

However, as yet only 60 people have received financial compensation, despite 1,275 people applying for payouts from the government as of March this year. Officials have only paid out 360,000 to five percent of claimants - despite setting aside an estimated 200million for compensation.

The Migration Observatory at Oxford University estimates there are 500,000 people resident in the UK who arrived before 1971 from a Commonwealth country.

Ms May's official spokesman said the then-Prime Minister was clear that "no-one with the right to be here will be made to leave".

In her resignation letter, Ms Rudd took "full responsibility" for her lack of knowledge regarding targets for migrant removal.

She had previously apologised in the House of Commons for the "appalling" treatment of the Windrush veterans, announcing a taskforce to resolve their immigration status as quickly as possible.

How will the 75th anniversary be celebrated?

A group known as the Windrush 75 network has committed to making it an entire year of marking the anniversary.

They say: The 75th anniversary of the Windrush arriving in the UK is a Diamond Jubilee for modern, diverse Britain  when we mark an important moment in British history and come together to celebrate four generations of contribution, legacy, struggle, and positive change.

A host of events are being planned, including question and answer sessions with people and their families who came over, art installations, and dance events. The full list of events can be found here.
I f theres one thing you can rely on a British festival for, its rain.

A great pair of wellies that are equal parts stylish and functional is essential for navigating the muddy paths of any field.

Whilst the practicalities are clear, it seems that wellies are a fashion trend thats here to stay this season. They were shown on the runway at Chanel and Celine, cementing the Noughties indie sleaze trend, and Balenciaga and Bottega Veneta have both recently released their chunky interpretation of the classic boot. So, this summer is the perfect time to invest in a pair that you can wear both on and off the festival field.

Kanye West wearing Balenciaga X Croc wellies / Getty Images

Not only will they help you forget the poor weather and start enjoying it, but they will elevate your look. Whether you prefer to stand out in a bright neon green, are looking for a pair with classic Western appeal, or would rather tone it down with a minimal Chelsea boot style, weve pulled together a selection to suit every taste.

Mens wellies are often unlined, so make sure you also stock up on welly or boot socks, or else risk the burning sensation of rubbing the hair off your calves for good (speaking from experience). A chunky marl style, like these from Hunter, will be a versatile addition for any look.

To keep those festival feet dancing, shop our edit below
S unglasses season is upon us once more, so now its time to invest in a new pair of shades that work for your face shape and with your personal style.

Whether youre a sunglasses addict (looking at you Anna Wintour, Elton John, and, of course, yours truly), or you just need a new pair for your summer travels, weve curated a selection of the best on the market right now.

As well as the classic aviator, clubmaster and wayfarer designs (all of which can be bought at Ray Ban), in recent years a new wave of sunglasses for men has been growing. You can choose from almost any shape and size, from oval, to rectangular, to square, to cat-eye, to micro-mini, to futuristic, to oversized, in a myriad of colours and design.

With this ever-growing selection, it becomes more and more difficult choosing whats right for you if youre looking to branch away from the classics.

As a rule of thumb, its important to consider your face shape. Those with angular faces would benefit from the softer curves of a pair of cat eye or oval frames, whilst rounder faces might consider square or rectangular designs to add structure to their features.

If youre looking for a versatile style that you can wear on the regs, wed suggest going for a black, a tortoiseshell, or a cream, in a classic shape. If making a statement is more your thing, then try a cat-eye or an oversized design in a bold colour for maximum impact.

For inspiration, look to the shady characters past and present. Whether youre looking to channel a classic James Dean, a fashion forward A$AP Rocky, to an avant-garde Elton John, weve rounded up the best sunglasses to give you a helping hand through the maze of competing eyewear brands.
L indsay Lohan has said she cant wait to be a mother as she revealed the parenting advice that her former co-star Jamie Lee Curtis gave her.

The Mean Girls actress, 36, announced she was expecting her first child in March by posting a photo on her Instagram of a baby grow with coming soon written across the item.

In an interview with US magazine Allure, Lohan shared her excitement and the unexciting way she told her husband Bader Shammas the happy news.

I cant wait to see what the feeling is and what its like to just be a mom, she said.

She also admitted she has been finding pending motherhood overwhelming but in a good way, adding that she has been tearful lately.

Happy tears. Thats just who I am. Though now, its probably baby emotion.

She married her financier husband in April 2022 and later that year she fell pregnant.

Ben Hassett

The actress recalled that she took a pregnancy test and after it confirmed her suspicions, she walked into the next room and announced the news to her husband.

It was so unexciting. I walked into the room, I threw the test down. I was like, Guess what? He goes, We are?, she said.

Lohans breakout role came in the 1998 film The Parent Trap in which she played estranged twin sisters Hallie Parker and Annie James.

It was a critical success and helped launch Lohans acting career.

She went on to star in multiple popular noughties films including Mean Girls, Freaky Friday, Herbie Fully Loaded and Confessions Of A Teenage Drama Queen.

Lohan revealed that her Freaky Friday on-screen mother, Jamie Lee Curtis, was among those who have given her advice.

I spoke to Jamie Lee Curtis recently and she was like, You just bring the baby with you and everything will be fine', she said.

Lohan took a partial step back from the Hollywood limelight after years of tabloid attention alongside pop star Britney Spears and US socialite Paris Hilton.

Ben Hassett

She has returned to screens of recent following a rom-com deal with Netflix which included last years Falling for Christmas and this years Irish Wish.

The actress is now considering her next career move, saying that living in Dubai gives me that space to have my own vision of what I need to do next.

Do I want to build my own brand? Do I want to relaunch a new production company? All of these kinds of things I can take time to think about, she added.
C hina could restrict the use of file-sharing tools like AirDrop and Bluetooth, to prevent the spread of undesirable information.

The proposal comes following file-sharing by protesters, who have used the tools to share political messages and mobilise.

Both AirDrop and Bluetooth allow smartphone users to share images and messages with other phones nearby without revealing their identity, bypassing Chinas strict censorship rules.

In November 2022, Apple implemented an AirDrop restriction that capped the time users could receive files from people outside their contacts list.

Following a 10-minute window, iPhones would revert to a mode that only allows them to receive files from contacts.

At the time, Apple said the change was aimed at curbing the spread of unwanted messages sent with AirDrop, and that it would be rolling out the changes globally.

Now, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the countrys internet regulator, has launched a month-long public consultation on the proposal to further restrict file-sharing tools, in order to prevent and resist the production, copying and distribution of undesirable information.

The authorities are desperate to plug loopholes on the Internet to silence opposing voices, human rights activist Lin Shengliang told the BBC, This is China moving towards 1984.

The proposed rules would require service providers to prevent the spread of illegal or harmful information and share data with regulators and the police.

Users of the tools would also have to register with their real names and would be able to block certain contacts from sending files.

The proposed rules would also require similar tools to face security assessments before being introduced to the public.
A series of leaks have laid bare Instagrams new app  a text-based service that looks a lot like Twitter, ahead of its rumoured launch this month.

Having already glimpsed its design, features, and logo, we now know its alleged title. The new platform, referred to as Project 92, could be called Threads, according to The Verge.

What does the name tell us about the new service? Well, a thread is essentially a collection of posts or emails on a single topic. If you frequent Twitter, youre bound to have come across a thread at some point as they get thrown around a lot by tech founders, journalists and AI enthusiasts.

Instagram owner Meta reportedly revealed the name at an internal meeting where it also took potshots at Elon Musks handling of Twitter.

Weve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox reportedly told staff.

News of the new apps name follows a recent leak that revealed its logo. The icon, which was unearthed from the apps code by developer Alessandro Paluzzi, basically looks like a white @ symbol on a pastel-coloured background.

Its also likely a big hint at the type of service Instagram has in store; a platform that will be more about sparking conversations than gawking at images.

After all, you have to type in that same symbol before a persons username when addressing them on Twitter and a range of other social networks.

What will Instagrams new Twitter rival look like?

In a direct challenge to Twitter, the new service will allow you to share text-based posts using your existing Instagram credentials.

Last month, one of the people secretly testing it out leaked the best look yet at the upcoming platform. University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) professor Lia Haberman tweeted a promotional image of the app, featuring screenshots of its Twitter-like design and information about its functionality. The new platform could be available as soon as the end of June, Haberman said on her blog.

Based on the images, the new service will let you share text, pics, videos, and links that other users can interact with through replies, likes, and shares. It will also carry over many of the privacy controls offered on Instagram proper, including accounts youve blocked and settings that dictate who can engage with your posts.

An internal image shared by The Verge, meanwhile, showed its Instagram-style buttons and menu icons, including a magnifying glass that we assume will let you view trending posts like the Instagram Explore page.

Instagrams Twitter rival is codenamed Project 92 and could officially be called Threads / The Verge

How is Instagrams new app different from Twitter?

So far, it all seems uncannily similar to Twitter. However, the app will reportedly set itself apart from its main rival by offering a decentralised social network. In the leak, Instagram owner Meta says the new service will be compatible with other social platforms, including Twitter competitor Mastodon. For general users, this could result in more followers, an aspect that should be welcomed by influencers and celebrities.

As previous reports have stated, the app will also allow users to create individual, independent servers (or rooms) organised around specific themes, topics or interests, with the ability to message others across this sprawling network of forums.

These groups could set their own community standards, theoretically giving users more say and autonomy over their servers, instead of them being monitored by Meta. However, as the latest leak reveals, users will have to adhere to Instagrams community guidelines.

Meta confirmed the existence of the app in March. Were exploring a standalone decentralised social network for sharing text updates, the company said. We believe theres an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests.

The new app will be able to do all this by using the same decentralised social network protocol as Mastodon, the briefly hot platform that some Twitter users jumped ship to after Elon Musks takeover.

Instagram is already using text-based posts across its app, including in Broadcast Channels / Instagram

However, it remains to be seen if Meta can make decentralised social networking work. The buzz around Mastodon has notably died down in recent months, with some users initially complaining that the service was difficult to navigate. The biggest sticking point for newcomers is that it can be hard to find other people to follow across its vast network of servers.

But, similar community-oriented services already exist, though the biggest of them all is not decentralised: namely, Reddit. On this, users join and interact with communities around a range of topics, which span everything from mainstream subjects such as politics to niche interests such as backyard chickens. Most of these are overseen by volunteer moderators.

You can share Instagram Notes with your friends that disappear after 24 hours / Instagram

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is also prepping a decentralised social network called Bluesky that looks like a Twitter clone.

Why is Meta launching a new Instagram app?

So why is Meta bothering? After all, it already owns multiple apps that have billions of users, including Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

Simply put, it probably sees an opportunity to grab some of the users alienated by the changes being implemented by Musk at Twitter. The entrepreneur is locking previously free features behind a subscription; threatening to take away blue checkmarks from existing verified users including journalists who are among the most prolific tweeters on the app; and probably turning off others with his divisive politics.

Instagram already lets creators share text posts with subscribers / Instagram

A decentralised social network would also allow Meta to skirt some of the regulatory issues that have plagued it over the past decade, including questions about its monopoly over social media and digital advertising.

Whats more, Meta already has plenty of high-profile Instagram users that may relish the chance to create their own servers. Its easy to see how celebrities, brands, and influencers could use the text-based service to share updates with their fans and foster stronger communities.

In some ways, Instagram is already heading down this path. This year, the app introduced its disappearing notes feature, which lets you share text-based messages with your friends. It also recently launched Broadcast Channels, which let creators message their fans with news updates and behind-the-scenes moments using text, photo, video, voice notes, and polls.

Instagram made subscriber chats widely available in 2022, allowing creators to share messages with people who pay for subscriptions to exclusive content.
Bernadeta Killian, the deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Dar es Salaam, speaks at a seminar themed "Nyerere, China and South-South Cooperation: Friendship, Solidarity, and Common Development" in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, June 7, 2023. Scholars and officials from China and Tanzania attended a seminar Wednesday with both sides pledging to promote South-South cooperation.(Photo by Herman Emmanuel/Xinhua)

DAR ES SALAAM, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Scholars and officials from China and Tanzania attended a seminar Wednesday with both sides pledging to promote South-South cooperation.

The one-day seminar, themed "Nyerere, China and South-South Cooperation: Friendship, Solidarity, and Common Development," was held in Tanzania's port city of Dar es Salaam on the occasion of the inauguration of the Center for Julius Nyerere and African Liberation Movement Studies. It was organized by the Institute of African Studies of Zhejiang Normal University, the Research and Education for Democracy in Tanzania and the Confucius Institute at the University of Dar es Salaam.

"China and Africa have maintained their solidarity and cooperation, and they will definitely explore a new path for their development to achieve modernization and common prosperity," said Omar Mjenga, president and chief executive officer of the Center for International Policy-Africa (CIP-Africa) at the seminar.

No country can handle the enormous challenges facing humankind on its own, he said, adding that the partnership between China and Africa is important.

Chen Mingjian, the Chinese ambassador to Tanzania, said China will deepen cooperation with Tanzania and other African countries in such sectors as politics, economy, culture, education, and science and technology.

"Those landmark projects supported by China, including the library of the University of Dar es Salaam, the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School and Kagera Technical and Vocational College have been completed and put into operation, marking new achievements of China-Tanzania cooperation," she said. "China is willing to cooperate with Tanzania in more and more areas to achieve mutually beneficial and win-win development goals."

She also said China and Tanzania will work together through South-South cooperation to deepen the friendship and realize mutual development.

Rwekaza Mukandala, chairman of Research and Education for Democracy in Tanzania and former vice-chancellor of the University of Dar es Salaam, said China has been one of Tanzania's sources of development assistance since the early 1960s.

Bernadeta Killian, the deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Dar es Salaam, said her university has maintained cooperation with Zhejiang Normal University for 10 years after they signed a memorandum of understanding for the establishment of the Confucius Institute in the country in 2013.

"I must say that the Confucius Institute has grown from strength to strength from the time it was established to now. It has recorded numerous impressive achievements and milestones," she said.

"The academia from both China and Africa are jointly working together to strengthen relations of the two countries, so as to achieve the goals of common development in the new era for building a stronger China-Africa community with a shared future," said Liu Hongwu, director of the Institute of African Studies of Zhejiang Normal University. 

Chen Mingjian, the Chinese ambassador to Tanzania, speaks at a seminar themed "Nyerere, China and South-South Cooperation: Friendship, Solidarity, and Common Development" in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, June 7, 2023. Scholars and officials from China and Tanzania attended a seminar Wednesday with both sides pledging to promote South-South cooperation. (Photo by Herman Emmanuel/Xinhua)
This photo taken on June 7, 2023 shows smoke from wildfires in Canada shrouding New York, the United States. Smoke from raging wildfires in Canada has triggered air quality alerts in a number of U.S. states, with the sky over New York City rapidly darkening Wednesday afternoon and New York State Governor Kathy Hochul calling the worsening air quality "an emergency crisis." (Xinhua)

NEW YORK, June 8 (Xinhua) -- The number of people across the United States exposed to extreme smoke days has grown 27 times in the past decade, as exposure to even-more-extreme smoke events has risen 11,000 fold, said an opinion piece published by The New York Times on Wednesday.

Smoke from raging wildfires in Canada has triggered air quality alerts in a number of U.S. states, with the sky over New York City rapidly darkening Wednesday afternoon and New York State Governor Kathy Hochul calling the worsening air quality "an emergency crisis."

Central and eastern areas of New York state will come under an air quality health advisory on Wednesday as air quality worsens amid wildfires in Canada, according to the New York state government.

"Even before this Tuesday's surge of smoke, Jeva Lange at Heatmap had calculated that East Coasters had inhaled more wildfire pollution so far this year than most of their counterparts on the West Coast," the report said. 
VIENNA, June 9 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy lambasted the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal at the board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) held here Thursday.

Li Song, China's permanent representative to the IAEA, stressed that the essence of the deal would transfer tons of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium from the United States and Britain, both nuclear-weapon states, to their military ally Australia, a non-nuclear-weapon state.

Under the trilateral AUKUS alliance, announced in September 2021, Australia can build nuclear-powered submarines with technology provided by the United States and Britain.

The AUKUS countries have carried out the strategic military cooperation for "widely known geopolitical purposes," which has unprecedentedly violated the principles and practices of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and severely undermined the international non-proliferation regime and the IAEA's safeguards system, Li said.

Thursday's meeting marked the eighth consecutive time the IAEA reviewed the AUKUS issue through intergovernmental discussions at China's proposal.

The Chinese envoy noted at the meeting that the AUKUS submarine collaboration and the three countries' efforts to politicize the issue at the IAEA and polarize the agency's member states reflect their Cold War mentality and confrontational blocs.

The AUKUS countries have attempted to depict their nuclear submarine deal as a routine safeguards issue between a non-nuclear-weapon state and the IAEA Secretariat. They have requested the IAEA invoke Article 14 of the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement to make safeguards exemption arrangements, said the envoy, stressing that "this is a clandestine move to coerce the IAEA Secretariat into endorsing their cooperation."

Noting that the AUKUS countries claimed they would work out suitable arrangements with the IAEA Secretariat to set a precedent for other countries' pursuit of naval nuclear propulsion programs, Li questioned such legitimacy.

"Who has granted this right to the three countries? Will other countries have a say on this issue?" Li said, adding that in the past, the three countries always emphasized "the intergovernmental process led by member states" when they set the rules for others.

"But this time, when they want to set the rules for themselves and impose the rules on other member states, they have been very reluctant to initiate an intergovernmental process involving all parties and have constantly tried to obstruct it," he said.

The Chinse envoy also pointed out that the AUKUS deal involves complicated political, security, legal and technical issues, which have caused huge disputes among the IAEA member states.

Representatives from more than 20 countries, including Russia, Pakistan, Egypt, South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil and Argentina, echoed the position of the Chinese side in their speeches at Thursday's IAEA board meeting.

"During the meeting, more member states have put forward important views from different perspectives," Li said, adding that all countries must join hands to steadily advance an open, inclusive, transparent and sustainable intergovernmental discussion process.

Li urged the AUKUS countries to address the international community's concerns with concrete actions, fulfill their non-proliferation obligations, and maintain candid and transparent communication with other parties on the basis of equality and mutual respect.

Li expressed the hope that IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi will fully respect and objectively present the different views and concerns of all parties. He also called on the IAEA Secretariat to comply with the IAEA Statute and the mandates of member states.

After the meeting, the Chinese envoy told reporters that China's diplomatic efforts have helped advance the IAEA member states' understanding of the AUKUS issue and promote an intergovernmental discussion.

China will continue to actively advocate and practice genuine multilateralism, firmly uphold the authority of international non-proliferation, safeguard international law and the global system with the United Nations at its core, and oppose a Cold War mentality, bloc confrontation and double standards, he added. 
Biggest security risk in the Balkans is supremacy of personal agenda of some politicians (senior official Fota).

The greatest risk for security in the Balkans is the supremacy of some interests of personal agenda of some politicians, to the detriment of the public, national interest, the secretary of state for Strategic Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Iulian Fota, said on Friday in western Timisoara, during the Security Challenges in the Balkans 7th international conference, told Agerpres.

"There is a palpable danger, that personal agendas become more important than the public or national interest. We must be very careful here. Joining NATO and the EU are national, public interests, the countries and peoples as a whole will have to gain. Otherwise, if you follow personal agendas and act only on the basis of a small, narrow, sometimes political interest, there is no way it will turn out well in the medium and long term. Unfortunately, in the Western Balkans we have enough examples from the beginning of the '90s, when certain politicians went only on personal agendas and later we even had tragedies that happened as a result of this persistence only on personal agendas (...) Everyone must think about what is good for the people," said the secretary of state Iulian Fota.

The Romanian MAE official pointed out that we are in a very important context, in which the Russians attacked and invaded Ukraine, this act having multiple consequences including for the Western Balkans.

To maintain a climate of stability in the area, according to Fota, Romania contributes, first of all, through diplomatic effort.

The secretary of state added that the battle for joining NATO or the European Union, as each country wants, is won within the respective country.

The Timisoara conference is organized within the framework of the existing partnership between the Western University of Timisoara and the New Strategy Center, under the aegys of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has become an annual reference event that brings to the fore the old and new security challenges in the Balkans.

The event brings together Romanian and foreign officials, representatives from the academic and non-governmental sectors in Romania and abroad. The topics range from conventional and hybrid threats to resilience, regional economic perspectives, the role of foreign actors in the region, as well as the impact of the war in Ukraine and the post-pandemic context.
Chief of Defense Staff: Black Sea is a region of strategic interest for NATO.

The Black Sea is a region of strategic interest for NATO, and the consistent presence of some allied structures, especially American ones, in states like Romania, "contributes to the success that deterrence has in any situation and in a security equation", the head of the Defense General Staff (SMAp), general Daniel Petrescu, stated on Friday, told Agerpres.

He held a joint press statement with the commander of the United States Army Command in Europe, General Christopher G. Cavoli, in the context of the Central European Defense Chiefs' Conference in Bucharest.

According to Petrescu, this meeting establishes, in this region, "a unified, harmonized approach of the states that outline the Allied Eastern Flank".

"In order for deterrence to work, for our nations to be protected, we have the solution of further strengthening our defensive capacity and allied unity," the head of the SMAp pointed out.

The Romanian-American collaboration in the field of Defense, he said, leads to "the development of own capabilities and conveys the strategic message that the United States is interested in the security of Romania and the stability of the Black Sea region".

"The whole world learned its lesson after February 24, 2022. We all want the restoration of peace and the international legal order," Petrescu pointed out.

Christopher Cavoli spoke about the contribution of the Romanian troops to the allied defense.

You host NATO and US troops and contribute a lot to the extensive effort to deter Russian aggression, and I thank you and your army for this. Our Romanian allies are at the forefront of the exercise included in the Defender Europe program, he said.

Over 10,000 soldiers with over 1,700 technical means from 14 allied countries participated in the Saber Guardian 23 exercise, which ends on Friday.

Along with our country, 12 allied countries participated with troops and combat equipment for training in the multinational exercise - Albania, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Italy, North Macedonia, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, the Republic of Moldova and the United States of America.

The main sequences of the exercise took place in the Getica National Combat Training Center in Cincu, Brasov county, the Secondary Combat Training Center in Smardan, Galati county, the Secondary Combat Training Center in Babadag, Tulcea county, the ground-to-air firing range of the Air Defense Training School General Ion Bungescu in Capu Midia and the 57th Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Constanta county.

Saber Guardian is integrated into the Defender Europe exercise complex, planned by US Army Europe Command (USEUCOM) and led by US Army Europe and Africa Command (USAREUR-AF).
Court orders opening of Euroins Romania bankruptcy proceedings.

The Bucharest Tribunal has affirmed the merits of a request made by the Financial Oversight Authority (ASF) ordering the opening of the bankruptcy procedure of Euroins Romania Asigurare Reasigurare, ASF announced on Friday, told Agerpres.

According to ASF, the policies issued by the company, with the exception of the guarantees, are still valid until September 8, 2023.

"The Bucharest Court today affirmed the state of insolvency found by the Financial Oversight Authority under Decision 262 of March 17, 2023. After the Bucharest Court of Appeal on two occasions denied the request of Euroins Romania Asigurare Reasigurare SA to suspend the application of the ASF decision , the Bucharest Tribunal decided to open the bankruptcy procedure of the insurance company. Consequently, under the legislation in force, ASF announces that the insurance policies issued by Euroins Romania are still valid for 90 days from today, throughout August 9, 2023 (except for the guarantee policies, for which the validity is 150 days and expires on November 7,2023)."

ASF also says that after the expiration of the deadlines, the policies issued by Euroins Romania cease by law and, therefore new policies have to be taken out.

ASF reminds that the persons covered by insurance policies issued by Euroins Romania - both RCA third party liability and other types of insurance - as well as the company's clients who request the partial return of the insurance premium will have to report to the Insurance Guarantee Fund (FGA).

Under Decision 262 of March 17, 2023, published in the Official Journal of Romania, Part I, the ASF Council decided to withdraw the business licence of Euroins Romania and declare the state of insolvency of the company, given the existence of a solvency capital deficit of RON 2.2 billion and a minimum capital deficit of RON 1.75 billion.
Gov't Deputy Secretary General Tutuianu: Romania could meet OECD accession requirements in 5-7 years.

Romania could meet, in 5 to 7 years, all the conditions for the accession to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and have adopted all the regulations corresponding to the OECD acquis, Deputy Secretary General of the Government Adrian Tutuianu said on Friday, at the ARIR 2023 Forum, told Agerpres.

He was asked if there was a deadline for Romania's accession to the OECD and when this could be done.

"Next year surely not. We will not be able to go through all the stages and we will not be able to implement the recommendations we will have. But, I hope that in the medium term, 5 - 7 years, Romania will be able to meet all these conditions - and to have adopted all the regulations corresponding to the OECD acquis," Adrian Tutuianu mentioned at the event, now at its 5th edition.

On the other hand, the Government representative underscored that joining the OECD "depends on our diligence."

"We have completed stage I, the self-assessment, stage II is underway, the external assessment. Stage III will come after the external assessment of the recommendations," he said.

Tutuianu voiced his hope that Romania's accession to this organisation "will happen as soon as possible."

"It also depends on the capacity of the state, but there are other actors. We are talking here about ASF [Financial Oversight Authority], we are talking about the Stock Exchange, we are talking about other actors that are important and have a well-defined role in this accession process," he said.

Two days ago, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bogdan Aurescu had a meeting with Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Mathias Cormann, context in which the head of Romanian diplomacy reiterated the strategic nature of Romania's objective of joining the OECD.

According to a Foreign Affairs Ministry (MAE) press release, the meeting took place on the occasion of the participation of the head of Romanian diplomacy in the OECD Ministerial Council Meeting (OECD MCM), held at the OECD headquarters in Paris, between 7 and 8 June 2023. This was the second OECD Council meeting at ministerial level in which Romania participates as a candidate state, after the decision to grant this status, taken by this forum on 25 January 2022.

"Within the meeting, the head of the Romanian diplomacy reiterated the strategic nature of Romania's objective of joining the OECD, benefiting from the broad support of Romanian political forces and society, as well as the solid profile of Romania's candidacy and the involvement of our country, as a like-minded partner, in activities and projects of common interest with the OECD. He showed that Romania is ready to implement the OECD recommendations and to use the accession process as an incentive for further reform and modernization," the press release showed.

In his turn, OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann reiterated the OECD Secretariat's support for Romania's accession to the Organisation, highlighting and expressing appreciation for the progress achieved by our country so far, as well as the positive prospects of future cooperation.

"The two high officials discussed the current state of the accession process, highlighting the fact that Romania has already received questionnaires from 23 of the 26 sectoral committees of the Organisation, already having sent responses to 12 of them, as well as the fact that the assessment missions are already underway, being appreciated the level of interaction with the Organisation. Furthermore, the importance of rapid accession to the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention was underscored, as the draft accession law, already passed by the Government, undergoes the parliamentary procedure for adoption," the press release also said.
IGPF: Over 114,000 people enter Romania on Thursday, of whom approximately 12,000 Ukrainians.

The General Inspectorate of the Border Police (IGPF) informs that, on Thursday, a number of 114,167 people entered Romania through border points, of whom 12,074 were Ukrainian citizens, told Agerpres.

According to a release sent to AGERPRES on Friday, approximately 217,700 people, Romanian and foreign citizens, with over 56,700 means of transport, completed the control formalities at the border crossing points nationwide, both on the way in and on the way out.

As of 10 February 2022 (the pre-conflict period), a number of 4,470,053 Ukrainian citizens have entered Romania.

In the relevant areas - the border crossing points and the "green border," the border policemen discovered 48 illegalities (30 offences and 18 misdemeanors) committed by both Romanian and foreign citizens, with the amount of fines enforced stands at almost 7,100 RON.

Assets of an estimated value of approximately 489,600 RON were impounded.

On Thursday, a number of 17 foreign citizens were not allowed to enter the country because they didn't meet the requirements stipulated by the law, while a number of 17 Romanian citizens were not allowed to leave the country for various legal reasons.
International astronauts come to Romania between 11 and 14 June.

International astronauts will be present in Bucharest from 11 to 14 June to take part in the AIM Higher Romania event organized by Space for a Better World and OP Global Events, under the patronage of the Research, Innovation and Digitization Ministry, told Agerpres.

According to a press release, the event will be attended by astronauts Nicole Stott, NASA Astronaut, Aquanaut & Artist, Dumitru Prunariu - Romanian cosmonaut, Sara Sabry - the first and only astronaut from Africa, Michael Lopez-Allegria, NASA and Axiom astronaut (online) and Dr. Soyeon Yi, the first and only astronaut from South Korea, specialized in biotechnology (online).

The astronauts will participate on 11 and 12 June, in the Poli SpaceFest organised by the University Politehnica of Bucharest, the biggest event in Romania dedicated to the exploration of outer space and the opportunities it offers.

The event will include from meetings organized for the public present at the Poli SpaceFEST with the three astronauts present, question and answer sessions, practical activities and the construction of a huge space artwork on the grounds of the University Politehnica of Bucharest, to trajectories for a career in space, competitions for pupils and students or activities for the entire family, innovative technologies, space experiences using VR and AR, robotics demonstrations, rockets.

On 13 June, the the B2B Space & Tech Innovation Summit takes place at the Palace of Parliament, featuring group discussions highlighting topics such as space business, entrepreneurship, agriculture, energy, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, business development and investment opportunities, workforce development, as well as discussions on space inclusion and technology needs.

On 14 June, the AIM Higher Gala will take place, with the theme "Cosmic Chic", an awards ceremony for each astronaut attending the event.
The Transylvania International Film Festival (TIFF), now at its 22nd edition, begins on Friday, in Cluj-Napoca, with a gala where over 3,000 spectators are expected.

"200 films from 45 countries, 380 screenings, over 1,000 guests - these are just some of the figures of the edition of the Transylvania International Film Festival, which starts on Friday, June 9, with a Gala where over 3,000 spectators are expected. Actors Timothy Spall, Geoffrey Rush, Darko Peric and directors Oliver Stone and Michel Franco are the special guests of the event, which will take place for 10 days in 18 locations in Cluj-Napoca, Floresti and Bontida," according to the press release sent by the organizers.

The first weekend offers the public a meeting with the actor Timothy Spall, known for his roles in the most important British films of the last 30 years, as well as in the Harry Potter series. He will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the TIFF Opening Gala in Unirii Square.

The moment will be followed by the screening of the comedy Northern Comfort (directed by Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigursson).

On Saturday, June 10, cinema professionals, as well as the public, are waited for a meeting with Spall, which will take place at the Radisson Blu Hotel from 10:30. He will have a conversation about his career with Mihai Chirilov, TIFF Artistic Director. Entry is free, subject to spots availability.

"Saturday evening, the Swedish artist Jay-Jay Johanson will perform at Bontida. The show will be followed by the screening of the documentary Ce masinarie fantastica (And the King Said What a Fantastic Machine, dir. Axel Danielson & Maximilien Van Aertryck). Sunday, also at Bontida , the film Infinity Pool (dir. Brandon Cronenberg), not recommended for minors, will be screened", the press release also states.

The program of the first days of the festival also includes the screening of a documentary about the band Omul cu Sobolani, followed by an unplugged concert by the band. Dozens of films are scheduled in theaters, including two Oscar-winning films, Tar (directed by Todd Field, USA) with Cate Blanchett, and Balena (The Whale, directed by Darren Aronofsky, USA) with Brendan Fraser.

Moviegoers are also expected at the Jean-Luc Godard Retrospective, at the first films from the official competitions or at a special screening of the film Padurea Spanzuratilor. Also during the weekend, the activities and films for children and teenagers start in Cluj-Napoca and Floresti.

"Next week, the Australian actor Geoffrey Rush, the American director Oliver Stone, the Mexican director Michel Franco and the Serbian actor Darko Peric are coming to Cluj-Napoca. They will meet the public at special screenings, but also in a series of masterclasses. The director Cristi Puiu and the actress Ana Maria Marinca are also returning to TIFF. They are joined by hundreds of other Romanian professionals - actors, directors or producers," the organizers also announced.

For 10 days, more than 100,000 participants are expected at the TIFF events. The entire program of the festival can be found on tiff.ro or in the official application.AGERPRES
PM Ciuca holds new round of negotiations with education trade unions.

Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca will have a new round of negotiations with the representatives of the education unions, on strike since May 22, on Friday afternoon, at the Victoria Palace, told Agerpres.

On Friday, the education unions are organizing a new protest rally in Bucharest.

The Executive adopted, on Thursday, a Declaration, with a memorandum as an annex, as an "additional guarantee" regarding the sectorial salary policy of the staff in the national education system, in accordance with the request of the teaching staff in this regard.

The Minister of Education specified, on Thursday, that the Government included two main measures in the respective memorandum.

"Once, the guarantee of the principle on which the new grid for education from the Salary Law will be based, namely the fact that the basic salary of the beginner teachers or university assistant will be established at the level of the average gross salary for the economy used to base the state social insurance budget and which represents 23% of the maximum salary scale in the public system. Also, the memorandum assumes that, during the vacation period, as well as during the days of paid leave, the staff in education will be entitled to a leave allowance calculated in relation to the number of vacation days multiplied by the daily average of the basic salary and the increments, allowances that they benefit from, according to the law. Both requests were part of the complaints that we received, documented, from the trade union federations. We responded today, once again, to these claims," said Ligia Deca.

On the other hand, the president of the Federation of Education Unions "Spiru Haret", Marius Nistor, stated that the memorandum by which the Government undertakes to provide additional guarantees regarding the salary of beginner teachers does not present many guarantees from a legal point of view.
Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng delivers a keynote speech at an event hosted by the U.S.-China Business Council in Washington, D.C., the United States, on June 7, 2023. (Photo credit: Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the United States of America)

Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng stressed that dialogue should be based on mutual respect and aim at real results. It surely is not the right way to seek dialogue and cooperation while putting the other on the sanction list. Dialogue conducted only for its own sake will not work either, he added.



WASHINGTON, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng said here Wednesday that China is a source of rare stability and much-needed certainty in this chaotic world, and Beijing is always open to dialogue with Washington.

Xie made the remarks while delivering a keynote speech at an event hosted by the U.S.-China Business Council to welcome him as China's new ambassador to the United States.

He said that China's policy is open and transparent, and its pathway clear. "It is not in our DNA to invade others or seek hegemony. Nor do we have the intention to dominate the world, or challenge anyone else," he added.

Xie also said that China's economic recovery is robust, with bright prospects. China's huge market, well-functioning industrial system, high-quality workforce, and predictable business environment make it irreplaceable, he noted, adding that Airbus recently announced its plan to build a second production line in Tianjin; Tesla is to build a Megafactory in Shanghai.

China's commitment to opening-up is firm, which will bring unprecedented opportunities, Xie stressed, adding China is at the same time the world's largest trader of goods, the top destination for foreign direct investment, and a global manufacturing center.

As the primary export market of over 50 countries and regions and a major trading partner of over 140, China is deeply integrated into the international industrial and supply chains, he said, highlighting that China simply has no reason whatsoever to close its doors.

Noting that China keeps to a path of peaceful development, and has played a key role in the world, Xie said China continues to pursue an independent foreign policy for peace, adding that China is dedicated to building a community with a shared future for mankind.

He also mentioned that President Xi visited Russia and spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the phone, and Special Representative of the Chinese Government on Eurasian Affairs Li Hui visited Ukraine and four other countries.

China is glad to have played a part in the restoration of the Saudi-Iran relationship. The first China-Central Asia Summit was a success, he said, adding the Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative, and Global Civilization Initiative are well received.

When it comes to China-U.S. bilateral relations, the Chinese ambassador said that Beijing has always been open to dialogue with Washington, adding what is essential is a whole-process management of the bilateral relationship.

Xie noted that China and the United States once had 100-plus dialogue mechanisms, but they have been shelved for reasons known to all. The United States has recently expressed its intention to increase high-level contact and return to the Bali agenda. It has also expressed the hope to find a way to lower risk and stabilize and improve the relationship, he added.

Noting that the Chinese side takes these statements seriously and has made a positive response, Xie said that Director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China Central Committee Wang Yi, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Qin Gang and Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao met with U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo respectively, adding that each of these meetings was candid, in-depth, substantive, and constructive.

Xie stressed that dialogue should be based on mutual respect and aim at real results. It surely is not the right way to seek dialogue and cooperation while putting the other on the sanction list. Dialogue conducted only for its own sake will not work either, he added. 
PM Ciuca: Units 3 and 4 of Cernavoda n-power plant is a necessary investment for the future of Romania.

Developing units 3 and 4 of Cernavoda nuclear power plant is a necessary investment for the future of Romania and will meet over a third of the estimated energy demand for the years 2030-2031, Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca said on Friday, told Agerpres.

Ciuca on Friday attended the signing ceremony of a support agreement for the development of units 3 and 4 of the Cernavoda nuclear power plant national strategic project.

"This is a crucial moment for the development of the energy sector in Romania and, of course, for the production of energy from clean and non-polluting sources. Signing the support agreement for the development of the national strategic project Units 3 and 4 of Cernavoda is not only a joint institutional effort, but also a firm commitment of the Romanian government to the successful completion of this project. I am convinced that the involvement and support of the Romanian officials at the highest level are essential for the continuation of the Cernavoda project and for the completion of the activities in the second stage of development in the estimated schedule," said Ciuca.

He added that Europe and the whole world are concerned with providing the necessary energy for citizens and economies in accessible and environmentally friendly conditions, and Romania is no exception.

"In recent years, we have managed to take important steps in everything that means protecting Romanian consumers, developing the energy system and achieving our goal of energy independence. The long-term plans and established investments will secure our continuously growing consumption needs for an economy and a society on a path to sustainable development. Giving the context, the development of units 3 and 4 at Cernavoda is a necessary investment for Romania's future and will meet over a third of the estimated energy demand for the years 2030-2031," said Ciuca.

He mentioned among the expected social benefits the expansion of the production capacity at Cernavoda, and preserving over 20,000 jobs in a top field where Romania has experience at the highest standards.

He added that, along with the project of units 3 and 4, the development of technology based on small modular reactors will turn Romania into a leader in clean and safe energy.

At the same time, Ciuca said that Romania continues to rely on the support of the United States of America for the development of the civil nuclear programme, one of the pillars on which the energy profile of the country will be strengthened in accordance with the European vision of environmental protection and the goals of decarbonisation.

Ciuca went on to say that that European support is equally valuable for achieving the said objectives.

"I am welcoming the decision of the European Union Modernisation Fund to invest EUR 2.4 billion in boosting the green transition. With additional investment of EUR 1.1 billion, Romania is the main beneficiary of the decision. Ladies and gentlemen, we all want unlimited energy, accessible to citizens and investors, produced under safety circumstances and caring for the environment," said Ciuca.

Signing the agreement along with Ciuca were Minister of Finance Adrian Caciu, Minister of Energy Virgil Popescu, Nuclearelectrica CEO Cosmin Ghita and Secretary General of the Government Marian Neacsu.
Romania becomes member of Inter-governmental Committee of UNESCO Convention on Protection and Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expressions.

Romania was elected a member of the Inter-governmental Committee of the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, during the ninth session of the Conference of States Parties, told Agerpres.

"This historic moment represents Romania's first participation as a member of the Committee from the ratification of the Convention and marks the beginning of a four-year mandate (2023-2027) to represent the Eastern European electoral group," the Ministry of Culture said.

At the meeting, held between June 6-8, in Paris, our country was represented by Simona-Mirela Miculescu, permanent delegate of Romania to UNESCO, Gabriel Sarafian, deputy permanent delegate (Permanent Delegation of Romania to UNESCO), Razvan Junescu, counselor (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and senator Vasile Dincu, member of the Joint Committee of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies of the Romanian Parliament for the relationship with UNESCO, with the support of the national focal point within the Ministry of Culture, Cristina Cotenescu.

"As a member of the Inter-governmental Committee, our country will focus on a number of priority areas, such as expanding access to culture, including in the digital environment, enriching education through art and culture, supporting the creative economy and protecting and promoting national heritage culture. Romania permanently starts from the premise that the role of culture is essential in promoting social cohesion, stimulating inter-cultural dialogue and consolidating the national identity and the sense of pride of the Romanian people," the Ministry of Culture states.
Romanian gov't, Nuclearelectrica sign support agreement on units 3, 4 of Cernavoda plant project.

A support agreement regarding units 3 and 4 of the Cernavoda nuclear power plant (NPP) between the government of Romania and Nuclearelectrica was signed on Friday, with the document providing for effective ways of co-operation, commitments and obligations on the part of the government to secure the necessary funding measures for the project, the implementation and adoption of support measures, including legislative measures, according to Energy Minister Virgil Popescu, told Agerpres.

"The Prime Minister of Romania Nicolae Ionel Ciuca signed today a 'support agreement' regarding the Cernavoda CNE units 3 and 4 project between the Government of Romania and Societatea Nationala Nuclearelectrica SA. The document was also signed by me, as the energy minister, Minister of Finance Adrian Caciu, Minister of Transport and Infrastructure Sorin Grindeanu, Secretary General of the Government Marian Neacsu and by the Cernavoda CNE CEO Cosmin Ghita. The agreement provides for effective ways of co-operation, commitments and obligations on the part of the government to secure the necessary funding measures for the project, the implementation and adoption of support measures, including legislative measures," Popescu wrote in a social media post.

According to him, the Romanian government through the Ministry of Finance will take the necessary steps to fund the project including but not limited to providing state guarantees to the project's financiers.

The Romanian government through the Ministry of Energy is responsible for implementing the "Contract for Difference" (CfD) support mechanism by creating the appropriate institutional architecture.

"The Ministry of Energy, responsible for the Modernisation Fund, supports the inclusion of nuclear energy in the key investment programmes and secures the necessary support for the use of the MF for the development, construction and commissioning of the units 3 and 4 of the Cernavoda NPP."

The Romanian government through the Ministry of European Investment and Projects, together with the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Finance, will constantly analyse non-reimbursable European funds for funding opportunities and take the necessary steps to facilitate their use, with priority, to finance the project at any stage of implementation.
Romanian microelectronics industry to receive 420 ml euros in EU funding under IPCEI initiative.

Under a successful call for Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEI) launched in early 2022, Romania's microelectronics industry will receive 420 million euros worth of EU funding that will go into three large-scale projects selected by the European Commission, the Ministry of Economy announced, told Agerpres.

Eight direct participants and 34 potential associated beneficiaries made it through the preselection stage and were notified as such to the European Commission.

"After a year of wait, Romania receives the big news: 3 out of 8 companies and 24 entities from the academic environment and SMEs (associated participants) will receive financing worth 420 million euros. As I said before, the Ministry of Economy supports the financing of research projects and prototype production through the IPCEI program for microelectronics. New opportunities for the Romanian technology sector open following the Commission's approval of projects that propose intelligent actuation solutions for electric vehicles, the development of automotive innovative technologies, combined processor and software solutions," Minister Florin Spataru said.

In accordance with EU state aid rules, the Commission approved an important project of common European interest for microelectronics and communication technologies to support research, innovation and the first industrial deployment of microelectronics and communication technologies across the entire value chain.

The Member States will provide up to 8.1 billion euros in public funding, which is expected to unlock additional 13.7 billion euros in private investments. As part of the IPCEI/ME/CT project, 56 companies, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups, will undertake 68 projects.

The IPCEI ME/CT project was jointly prepared and notified by fourteen Member States, one of which is Romania, which included this financing in its National Recovery and Resilience Plan.

The IPCEI ME/CT concerns research and development projects covering microelectronics and communication technologies across the whole value chain from materials and tools to the chip designs and manufacturing processes.

The first novel products may be introduced to the market as early as 2025 and the completion of the overall project is planned for 2032, with timelines varying in function of the project and the companies involved. Around 8.700 direct jobs are expected to be created, and many more indirect ones.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE) condemns the decision of the Russian Federation to withdraw from the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (TCFE), calling it "the latest action to undermine the rules-based international order and Euro-Atlantic security".

MAE recalls, in a statement sent to AGERPRES, that the procedure initiated by the Russian Federation on May 10 was concluded on Friday, by the notification of the depositary of the CFE Treaty, the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

"The actions of the Russian Federation have negatively affected the TCFE ever since its announcement of "self-suspension" from the Treaty in 2007, without a legal basis. At that time, the Russian Federation was no longer fully fulfilling its obligations under the Treaty," the quoted source says .

The representatives of the Romanian Ministry assure that "Romania will continue, together with the allied states, to actively contribute to the security of Europe by supporting a consolidated position of deterrence and defense of NATO, as well as through appropriate arms control measures, taking into account the security environment and the security of all allies, in accordance with the New Strategic Concept".
Joe Holleman Joe Holleman is a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Follow Joe Holleman 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

Major political endorsements given to U.S. Senate candidate Lucas Kunce had seemed somewhat pro forma  until just a few hours ago.

Virtually no one was surprised that major labor unions, and even a pair of celebrities, had thrown their support to Democrat candidate Kunce in his bid to unseat GOP U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley.

But Wednesdays announcement that St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell would join the 2024 Democratic primary race gives far more luster to previous endorsements, including one released just in time to compete with Bells hat-in-ring pronouncement.

The Missouri AFL-CIO announced Wednesday it is backing Kunce in the upcoming U.S. Senate battle  an endorsement that the Kunce camp is calling an important moment in the campaign.

Lucas Kunce is the ally that working people need in the U.S. Senate, and so Missouris labor movement is mobilizing now to help him win this seat, said Jacob Hummel, president of the Missouri AFL-CIO.

From day one, this campaign has been a fight to take this U.S. Senate seat back for working people. When the working people of Missouri unite, they win, Kunce said in a statement.

Previous to the AFL-CIO announcement, Kunce already had secured backing from a number of labor unions, including:

The construction trade councils from St. Louis and Kansas City, which represents numerous of building-trade unions; the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 655, the largest private-sector union in the state; and the Missouri State Council of Fire Fighters, which has in the past endorsed Republicans Roy Blunt and Eric Schmitt.

Kunce also has gotten the nod from workers guilds representing electricians, iron workers, bricklayers, roofers, tilers and insulators.

Add to that the endorsement Kunce has received from two of St. Louis major celebrities, actor Jon Hamm and show host/producer Andy Cohen

The endorsements will take on added importance as the campaigns of Bell and Kunce gear up for an August 2024 primary, with the winner likely facing Hawley.

Also filed for the Democrats is December Harmon, an activist from Columbia and self-described extreme leftist.

This is Kunces second run at the U.S. Senate. In 2022, he lost to Trudy Busch Valentine in the Democratic primary.
Joe Holleman Joe Holleman is a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Follow Joe Holleman 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

U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski gets most attention around these parts for representing urban areas in Madison and St. Clair counties.

But the Springfield Democrats district covers a lot of ground, of the unpaved kind, in south-central Illinois. That fact has prompted her to push a bill aimed at keeping family farms in the family.

Budzinski is co-sponsoring the Increasing Land Access, Security and Opportunities Act, which would provide financial assistance to young and new farmers. Two other congressmen are with her: Republican Zack Nunn of Iowa and Democrat Joe Courtney of Connecticut.

The act would boost funding for a federal agriculture program by $500 million over five years. The money would be paid directly to farmers and ranchers to help acquire land, make site improvements and get training and technical help.

With the average age of American family farmers approaching 60 years old, its critical that we provide support to help bring the next generation into agriculture, Budzinski said.
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

Theres a section in a recently settled racial discrimination lawsuit against St. Louis County that tells an important story. The lawsuit was filed by Millicent Williams, a 64-year-old Black woman who, driving home after visiting her son in the hospital, was pulled over near Westport Plaza in 2019 for Driving While Black. Without cause, a police officer treated her harshly, searched her vehicle and purse while she was terrified and handcuffed on the side of the road. Williams, the wife of a retired police officer, was eventually let go with no charges.

Represented by attorneys Mark Pedroli and Dan Kolde, Williams recently settled her federal civil rights lawsuit against the county for $305,000. Heres what she mentioned in her petition that should still send shivers down the backs of Missourians:

In 2017, the Missouri NAACP issued a travel advisory warning African-American motorists to be careful while in Missouri because of the danger that their civil rights would not be respected during traffic stops.

I called Rod Chapel, the president of the Missouri NAACP, this week to ask him if that travel advisory is still in effect. It is. Chapel first announced the advisory during an Urban League gathering in St. Louis; and while it didnt get quite the national attention the recent NAACP travel advisory for Florida received, its based on much of the same background, from the consistent racial profiling in traffic stops, to disparate searches like the one that happened to Williams, to legislation that makes it easier to discriminate, and high-profile deaths of Black men in some suspicious rural incidents.

Just last week, the annual traffic stops report produced by the Missouri Attorney General hit with the same thud it normally does, like an old phone book landing on the doorstep and the resident of the house looking outside confused, and wondering: Whats that?

For 23 years now, the report has shown the same thing, the thing Williams experienced in St. Louis, the thing every Black adult I know has experienced at one point in their lives: Black people are significantly more likely to be pulled over by police in Missouri than white people. Worse, they are more likely to be searched even though the statistics say white drivers, as a percentage, are more likely to be carrying illegal contraband.

There was a time when police departments would respond to the report with suggestions that more study was needed. Some of them even promised to look more closely at the numbers. So it was in St. Louis County, where former police Chief Jon Belmar promised the formation of a Bias and Policing Committee to break down the racial profiling numbers and study whether any individual officers had an issue pulling over too many Black drivers.

There were at least two problems, Pedroli found in the process of obtaining evidence in Williams lawsuit: For years, the committee never met. And to the extent that the department reviewed the underlying racial profiling numbers, they ignored the vast majority of officers with disparities, Pedroli said. The system, he said, was rigged so that an officer who was pulling over a disparate number of Black drivers would not likely be flagged. In fact, the only two officers ever counseled under the policy were singled out for pulling over too many white drivers.

Ms. Williams and so many others have a constitutional right to be left alone and certainly not to be humiliated by those in a position of power and authority, Pedroli says. With power comes great responsibility. In this case, the St. Louis County Police Department was ignoring its own responsibility to the U.S. Constitution, and to abide by state law. Ms. Williams always respected and supported the police department. Now, shes helping to make it better.

Chapel reads the statewide racial profiling report every year, and while hes never shocked by its findings, the fact that some things never change reinforces the idea that the travel advisory needs to stay in effect. Black people need to know that they drive in some jurisdictions in Missouri  maybe most of them  at their own risk.

These latest attorney general statistics show that Blacks endure more traffic stops, with awful results, Chapel says.

Among the most recent numbers:

 Black drivers are stopped at a rate 60% higher than they should be based on their percentage of population.

 Black drivers receive citations in about 58% of their stops; compared to 40% for white drivers.

 With the Missouri State Highway Patrol, the numbers are even worse, with 89% of Black drivers receiving a citation after a stop; compared to 60% for white drivers. Twice as many Black drivers as white drivers are arrested after such traffic stops.

Stopping Black drivers is a practice anticipated by law enforcement in a way reminiscent of when Blacks were forced to carry papers to travel  before cars were even invented, Chapel says. A white person can expect to walk away from a traffic stop with little more than a slight delay in their day. Black people know they have to follow the letter of every traffic law and then some or risk death for resisting.

The annual vehicle stops report is a sign that Missouri is still broken, Chapel says. Its why the NAACP travel advisory is still in effect, and will be, until lawmakers and police departments do more than pretend to care about the fact that for 23 years Driving While Black has been documented in black and white, and nobody, other than Millicent Williams, perhaps, has done a damn thing about it.
CHESTERFIELD  The Archdiocese of St. Louis has agreed to pay roughly $1 million to a man who alleged he was sexually abused as a boy by a priest at Ascension Catholic Church in Chesterfield in the 1990s, an attorney for the plaintiff said.

The settlement appears to be the second largest amount the archdiocese is known to have paid one single victim in a sexual abuse claim. Both settlements resulted from lawsuits alleging abuse by the same former priest, Gary P. Wolken, one of the first St. Louis-area clergy to plead guilty to sexual abuse since the crisis shook the Roman Catholic Church two decades ago.

Wolken, now 57 and a registered sex offender, served 12 years in prison from 2003 to 2015 for sexually abusing a Ballwin boy from 1997 to 2000 while babysitting the boy. The archdiocese removed Wolken from ministry in 2002 and in 2004 paid nearly $1.7 million to settle a civil suit alleging church officials could have known about Wolken but failed to intervene.

The settlement reached Wednesday resulted from a 2018 lawsuit that made similar allegations, this time about abuse Wolken allegedly committed years prior to the case that landed him behind bars.

The plaintiff, a John Doe, accused Wolken of sexually abusing him at least four times when he was an altar boy at Ascension, where Wolken was assigned from 1993 to 1997. The abuse began in 1993, when the boy was in fourth grade, and continued through 1995, according to the suit. The plaintiff later recovered repressed memories of the abuse as an adult, starting in 2013, and filed suit in 2018 alleging church officials failed to intervene to protect him.

Rebecca Randles, attorney for the plaintiff, said they stand by the allegations but agreed to settle the case for $1 million this week.

This is validation, and it appears to us that the archdiocese knows and acknowledged that there was wrongdoing here, Randles said on Thursday.

The abuse was horrific and the damages this caused 20 years down the line, while you can heal from it, you cant reclaim the innocence that was stolen from him from the time he was 10 years old.

The archdiocese confirmed it settled the lawsuit but declined to provide details of the terms.

In the Archdiocese of St. Louis, the protection of children and vulnerable adults is our highest priority, it said in a statement. We are hopeful that this settlement provides some measure of comfort for the victim and for his family. We continue to pray for all victims of sexual abuse, that they may find comfort and healing. Please keep all those who are exploited in your prayers, especially children and vulnerable adults.

David Clohessy, with the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said the settlements size signals that the plaintiff had a strong case. A trial was scheduled for September.

Church officials are terrified of that surfacing, Clohessy said.

Wolken was ordained in 1993 and assigned to Ascension until 1997. He was then assigned to Our Lady of Lourdes in University City until 1999 and Our Lady of Sorrows in south St. Louis until 2002.

Then the archdiocese suspended Wolken, after learning of the Ballwin boys allegations.

Wolken was later convicted of two counts of statutory sodomy and six counts of child molestation, sentenced to 15 years in prison, and defrocked. The boys family also filed a civil suit against the archdiocese that resulted in the 2004 payout. Wolken was released on parole in 2015.

In 2019, Wolken was among 64 clergy named by the archdiocese facing substantiated allegations of committing sexual abuse or possessing child pornography.

Wolken, according to a Missouri Highway Patrol sex offender registry, resides in St. Louis and works as a grant writer for Criminal Justice Ministry, a nonprofit that provides rehabilitation services for people newly released from incarceration. The ministry has received partial funding from the Annual Catholic Appeal, a fundraiser by the archdiocese that also supports parishes and independent but affiliated nonprofits and ministries.

The ministry did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

An attorney for Wolken did not return phone calls or an email requesting comment.

Clohessy said the archdiocese should have done more to prevent possible abuse by Wolken after he was released from prison, besides removing him from ministry.

Men like Wolken win parents trust and are able to access and abuse kids because of the clout and prestige they were given by church officials, he said. They cant recruit, teach, house and transfer these guys from parish to parish and then say they kicked him out and hes now societys problem.

The archdiocese, in its statement, emphasized it suspended Wolken in 2002 after learning of the Ballwin boys allegations and triggered a law enforcement investigation. Cardinal Raymond Burke, then Archbishop-emeritus of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, had permanently removed Wolken from the clergy by 2007.

Anyone who wishes to make a report of the sexual abuse of a minor by any priest, deacon or employee of the Archdiocese of St. Louis is encouraged to contact the archdiocesan Office of Child and Youth Protection, the archdiocese said in the statement Thursday. Reports should also be made to the Missouri Division of Social Services Child Abuse Hotline at 800-392-3738.
OTTAWA/NEW YORK, June 9 (Xinhua) -- The ravaging infernos have been continuing to wreak havoc across Canada over the past weeks, and the billowing plumes of smoke generated by the fires are blanketing a large portion of the United States in the last days.

Despite Canada's annual preparations for its wildfire season, which usually runs from May through October, this year's fires have far surpassed expectations, resulting in severe damage in such an early stage. While the country finds itself confronting a formidable situation, its neighbor, the United States, is also in urgent need of solutions to the wildfires and secondary problems.

What is the situation in Canada and the United States in the face of wildfires? What are the underlying causes contributing to the wildfire crisis? And most importantly, what actions should be taken to address this pressing issue?

AN EMERGENCY CRISIS

With more than nine million acres of land burnt, over 20,000 residents evacuated and at least 400 fires still active, half of which are believed out of control, a staggering series of figures revealed on Wednesday by Canadian Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair showed that the country is facing an unprecedented battle against the raging wildfires.

"This (the wildfire) could be something we deal with off and on throughout the remainder of the summer," said Jennifer Gray, a CNN meteorologist, warning that "Canada is still early in their fire season and it has just exploded."

Echoing Gray, U.S. National Weather Service meteorologist Bryan Ramsey said, "Conditions are likely to remain unhealthy...They're probably going to continue for weeks."

The smoke from the wildfires persists, shrouding regions from British Columbia to Quebec, and even impacting the east coast of the United States. The sky takes on an eerie orange hue and visibility dramatically diminishes across northeastern North America.

The ensuing air quality problems pose a serious threat to public health, endangering the well-being of individuals across the affected areas.

"The biggest health threat from wildfire smoke is from these very small, microscopic particles that you breathe in," said Jill Baumgartner, an associate professor in the School of Population and Global Health at McGill University in Montreal, explaining that they can lead to a variety of problems from burning eyes and runny noses to chronic heart and lung diseases.

However, of particular concern is that the western coast of North America is often the hardest-hit region when it comes to wildfires. As the CBS Boston Chief Meteorologist Eric Fisher noted, "We aren't just dealing with Canada smoke, we get it in the western United States, too." The wildfires that ravaged California last year, for example, were a nightmare that no one hopes to revisit.

According to a report released by the United Nations Environment Programme last year, the number of extreme wildfire events will increase by up to 14 percent by 2030 and 30 percent by 2050. People have no alternative but to accept the new normalcy to "learn to live with fire."

In response to the prevailing circumstances, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul called the worsening air quality "an emergency crisis." However, it is more precise to view the recurring wildfires in North America as the true crisis that demands prompt action from the public.

UNDERLYING CAUSE BEHIND THE WILDFIRES

Despite the collective efforts of domestic and international firefighters, the wildfires continued to spread unabated and surged towards an increasingly uncontrollable state.

Firefighters from across Canada were mobilized to combat the fires, while international firefighters, from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and France, rushed to Canada to rescue. According to CTV News, as of Thursday, there are nearly 1,000 international firefighters actively involved in rescue operations.

While natural factors like lightning and thunder caused a large majority of wildfires, human factors, including unattended campfires, discarded cigarette butts and arson, contribute to the others.

However, it should be emphasized that the factors mentioned above are only the direct triggers of wildfires. The underlying cause behind the ravaging infernos is, in fact, climate change.

Mohammadreza Alizadeh, a researcher at McGill University in Montreal, said the fires are a "really clear sign of climate change." In recent years, Canada has experienced prolonged periods of drought and high temperatures.

According to the Canada Drought Monitor, all 10 provinces are now under abnormal dryness, moderate or severe drought. The dry and highly flammable conditions in the forests made it easier for the fires to ignite and spread rapidly, making it more challenging for containment efforts. And the shifts in wind directions and precipitation patterns also increased the difficulty.

Describing the current situation as "a wake-up call," Salome Sane, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace Canada stressed that the Canadian government has to take climate change seriously.

In addition, climate change and the increasing frequency of wildfires seem to form a vicious cycle. Wildfires make ecosystems more fragile, creating conditions that are prone to further wildfires. At the same time, the massive smoke and greenhouse gas emissions from wildfires exacerbate climate change.

Breaking this cycle requires addressing both the causes and consequences of climate change, implementing effective wildfire management strategies, and promoting sustainable practices to mitigate and adapt to a changing climate.

As highlighted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "multiple studies have found that climate change has already led to an increase in wildfire season length, wildfire frequency, and burned area." Therefore, proactive measures should be taken immediately to address the issue.

CONCRETE ACTIONS MUCH NEEDED

To effectively combat wildfires, it is often emphasized that individuals and communities should prioritize fire prevention and adopt responsible fire practices, including but not limited to, increasing awareness of fire prevention measures, educating the public on the proper use of fire outdoors, and implementing regular wild patrols to detect and control fires at the earliest possible stage.

While Canada and the United States indeed have strengthened regulatory measures for wildfires and imposed stricter penalties for human-caused wildfires, it is more important to pay more attention to climate change.

As June 7 marked Canada's Clean Air Day, Steven Guilbeault, the country's minister of Environment and Climate Change tweeted "The ongoing wildfires remind us that carbon pollution carries a cost on our society, as it accelerates climate change."

By the end of the century, climate change could double the acreage burned by wildfires each year, which could take a heavy toll on human safety, ecosystems and air quality, according to Canada's natural resources agency.

The current emergency situation has sounded the alarm for the residents of the east coast of the United States, making them acutely aware of the fear that residents of the western region previously experienced in the face of rampant wildfires and the sense of urgency to deal with climate change.

"If U.S. President (Joe) Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the UN Climate Conference leaders need a reminder to take bold action on climate, the out-of-control Canadian wildfires and consequent smoke pollution should be all they need," said Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. Program co-manager at the advocacy group Oil Change International.

But mere calls for attention are far from sufficient. Addressing the wildfire crisis requires concrete actions rather than hollow slogans. Furthermore, it should not be seen as the sole responsibility and obligation of a few countries; it requires global solidarity.

"This is no time for finger-pointing. The blame game is a recipe for mutually assured destruction," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stressed at the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Otherwise, we will inevitably face the bitter consequences of climate change, for example, devastating wildfires and suffocating smog. 
JEFFERSON CITY  The Missouri Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a St. Louis area man failed to prove that his claims of constitutional violations related to his sanity should stop his execution.

Johnny A. Johnson, 45, convicted in St. Louis County, is set to be put to death by lethal injection on Aug. 1. He was convicted in 2002 of kidnapping and beating a 6-year-old girl to death in Valley Park.

In a 6-1 decision written by Judge Mary R. Russell, the Supreme Court of Missouri denied Johnsons habeas corpus writ, in which he argued that he should not be executed because of his mental state.

Previously, Johnson submitted a medical report from a psychiatrist who stated after an evaluation that Johnson did not have a rational understanding of the link between his crime and punishment.

However, the justices wrote in the opinion that recent medical records and the affidavit from the prisons chief of mental health refuted the psychiatrists report.

Johnson confessed to police that he killed Casey Williamson with bricks and a heavy rock after she started screaming, kicking and crawling away from Johnson when he tried to sexually assault her. Police say he washed himself off in the Meramec River, and returned to the house where he was staying with the girls father.

Testimony in his original trial showed Johnsons defense presented claims about his records of mental illness, which included schizoaffective disorder, a disease similar to schizophrenia.

Missouri has executed three other inmates this year: Michael Tisius was executed on Tuesday; Leonard Taylor on Feb. 7; and Amber McLaughlin on Jan. 3.
ST. LOUIS  The citys new circuit attorney has withdrawn a motion seeking to free a man serving a life sentence for murder, despite growing support nationally for proving his innocence.

With the motion, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore is undoing one of the last official acts former Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner made before she resigned May 16. Gore was sworn in days later.

Christopher Dunns innocence claims rely on the lack of physical evidence linking him to the killing of a 15-year-old in 1990.

We will conduct a full review of Mr. Dunns case and proceed as the law and facts dictate. As Circuit Attorney that is my responsibility, said Gore.

The day before she resigned, Gardner filed a motion to vacate Dunns murder conviction, using a law influenced by the case of a man whose innocence she had also sought to prove, Lamar Johnson.

A judge overturned Johnsons murder conviction on Valentines Day, agreeing that he was innocent after a five-day hearing in December. Johnson walked out of prison after nearly 30 years.

A teen himself in 1990, Dunn, now 51, maintains that at the time of the murder, he was at home with his mother and sister. The main two witnesses have since recanted their testimony, saying they were pressured by police and prosecutors at the time to make an identification, similar to in Johnsons case.

A judge in 2020 noted clear evidence of his innocence and said no court today would convict him, but cited legal hurdles in his bid for freedom.
CLAYTON  Two men were found guilty of murder Friday in a 2019 Jennings drive-by shooting that left two men dead.

A St. Louis County jury found Edward Nixon, 27, of Jennings, and Cortez Caves, 26, of Black Jack, guilty of two counts of first-degree murder along with several weapons offenses Friday after 12 hours of jury deliberations spanning two days.

Nixon and Caves face mandatory sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Prosecutors during the trial argued they both took part in a December 2019 shooting aimed at two vehicles on Jennings Station Road and McLaran Avenue near the New York Market liquor store. Trevion Berry, 24, and Byron Staples, 28, were both killed in the shooting.

Evidence during the trial included footage from multiple surveillance cameras of the gunfire, 911 calls and testimony connecting both Nixon and Caves to the shooters car shortly before the killings.

Testimony included Jaunice Berry, the mother of victim Trevion Berry, who described Caves and Granberry dancing with guns in their hands while playing loud music just before the shooting.

St. Louis County police Officer Stefan Nieman said not long after, he was called to New York Market liquor store to find Berry bleeding in the passenger seat of a Kia.

I need help. I need help, Nieman recalled Berry saying. Ive been shot.

A third man originally charged in the double homicide, Matthew A. Granberry, 28, of Jennings, reached a plea deal with prosecutors and was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in August 2022. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison in the case.

I commend these 12 jurors for staying through deliberations on this tough case for 12 hard hours, with what must have been a sleepless night in the middle, to bring justice, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley said in a statement on Friday.

Victor Stefanescu of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
St. Louis-area librarians are confident their childrens sections dont include  and never have  obscene materials, but they are spending hours examining policies to make sure they are in compliance with a new state rule.

We have never made child pornography available to anyone at any time, said Waller McGuire, director of the St. Louis Public Library. In fact, there is no obscene material in any library location, he says.

And the library has had collection policies, which explain how a library chooses books and other materials, in place since the 1800s, he said.

The state rule introduced by Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft would block state funding for libraries if they allow minors to access books that are pornographic or labeled as obscene under state statutes. It requires written collection policies and a way for a parent or guardian to challenge the age appropriateness of materials or a program.

The rule, which went into effect May 30, is a solution in search of a problem, McGuire said. Kids are lucky to be in libraries rather than in danger from them.

McGuires viewpoint was echoed by several local library directors, who also expressed confusion over the need to assure Ashcrofts office by July 31 that they are doing what their jobs typically entail: offering childrens materials, sorted by ages, and allowing parents control over what their offspring check out.

But because most libraries already do what Ashcroft demands, directors dont discount a connection to recent censorship efforts centered on LGBTQ materials, worrying that culture warriors now have a new weapon.

The State Library administers Missouri funds to public libraries. That money typically is a small percentage of large libraries budgets but can be essential for rural libraries. Now Ashcrofts rule says the states 160 library systems have to submit forms showing they keep materials in age-appropriate areas and label events by age level.

For the St. Louis County Library system, whose budget of $60 million is the biggest in the area, state funds contribute less than 1%. Most of the librarys revenue comes from county residents property taxes.

Last year, Ashcroft, who is running for governor in 2024, sought public feedback on his proposal to refuse state money to libraries that dont have policies protecting children from so-called obscene material. Any libraries that dont already have written policies are likely to be rural locations with small staffs.

About 20,000 residents provided feedback to the proposal, with the majority criticizing it. But Ashcroft enacted a softened version of the first proposal and on June 2 posted on Twitter: Parents should know their children are in a safe environment in our public libraries. These new rules will make sure kids arent exposed to obscene materials.

The St. Louis County system, like others, is still working on tweaking some policies and getting approval from its board of trustees. But director Kristen Sorth said, I think that libraries have policies in place that give parents the ability to make decisions about their childrens reading habits.

When asked whether the county system, made up of 21 locations, contains any obscene material, she said, Oh my gosh no. She said the library has no books that fall under the official legal definition of obscenity. The library also has no plans to move any childrens books from their current locations.

But like other libraries, she doesnt want to give up any state aid. We are working toward compliance, Sorth said.

There are several sources for state aid and grants, including general revenue; a good amount is also generated in St. Louis through an athletes and entertainers tax. McGuire said that because St. Louisans pass that money on to the state, I think some should come back here.

Card crunch

The big challenge to libraries regards library cards and how libraries will ensure that every person younger than 18 has permission from parents or guardians to check out materials.

The new rule, ironically, may mean fewer juveniles have library cards  a result that is the opposite of what libraries want.

The county library currently requires parental signatures when children younger than 13 apply for a library card. The city system seeks parents signatures for those younger than 18.

At the time of sign-up, city parents could check boxes saying their children do not have permission to check out adult materials or to use computers. McGuire estimates that less than 5% of children have cards limiting their access to computers or adult materials. The county and city libraries now share a catalog, so they are collaborating on any new policies.

But other systems have no way to monitor or limit access for cardholders younger than 18. Its all or nothing access, says Tony Benningfield, director of the Jefferson County Library.

Our integrated library system cant handle what Ashcroft is asking for regarding limiting checkouts by age or title. The Jefferson County system has four libraries, with administrative offices in High Ridge. Its budget of about $5.5 million includes about $250,000 from the state.

When questioned, most library directors werent ready to say how they will handle the library card authorizations. Benningfield expects that Jefferson County will have to expire all of the childrens cards and have parents and guardians give new permission for every user younger than 18.

The hassles with puzzling out the secretary of states requirements and tweaking policies has already cost the Jefferson County Library more than the $500 Ashcrofts office estimated for the new rule, Benningfield said. This despite the fact that the library already has 18 pages of collection development policies on its website among more than three dozen other explanations of procedures and guidelines.

The policies, like many other libraries, already make it clear libraries dont want to overrule parents: Many libraries note they cannot act in loco parentis, or stand in for a parent. Rather than urging children to browse unattended, libraries are more likely to have policies requiring supervision for children. All library directors queried also already have a process for patrons to challenge books.

The Ashcroft rule is confusing and is causing headaches, Benningfield admits: There are so many more productive things I could be doing.

Another new requirement for libraries is to attach age levels even to meeting room bookings made by private patrons. Libraries already label their own programs by age.

Benningfield does want to make sure the library remains in compliance and that we dont get dinged for one little misstep.

Facing challenges

Scott Bonner, director of the Ferguson Municipal Public Library, is afraid that even if books dont meet the Supreme Court definition of obscene that the library will see more challenges because of the Ashcroft rule.

In recent years, book challenges have targeted mostly childrens books containing information about LGBTQ life or characters. Still, libraries traditionally face only a few official challenges a year to collections, and an oversight committee typically decides the book is appropriate for where it is shelved. The St. Louis County system had only four challenges last year.

Yet Bonner now sees more risks. A parent of a juvenile may not agree with professional librarians regarding what is appropriate.

Bonner said that even if librarians and a library board confirm a book is appropriate, the Ashcroft rule might give them a path to appeal to the Secretary of States office or use the language of the SoS rule to sue in court.

He said: The rule is not about making libraries shelve materials in appropriate areas. Libraries already do that. Theyve been exceedingly conscientious about this issue since before I was born. No library Ive ever worked at or used has what a reasonable person would call pornography in any kids area, or what the Supreme Court has determined would be obscene. This rule corrects a problem that only exists in propaganda.

The rule is about forcing librarians to conform to the views of a subset of the community instead of trying to serve the whole community, by increasing the leverage of that subset and by making librarians fearful of angering that subset.

He also has told his board that there is no way to be safe from challenge and still be a library, referring to library goals to offer books with various viewpoints and to serve diverse patrons.

He said libraries have gotten challenges claiming obscenity in books that dont even mention sex, but because a character happens to have two dads. Removing such a book means libraries would fail to serve all patrons, he said.

I think there is no way to have a juvenile card without risk of complaints or lawsuits, Bonner said. As a result, its likely that fewer children in some libraries will have their own library cards, he predicts.

Across the river, Illinois is the first state to pass legislation protecting libraries against such censorship efforts. The law, House Bill 2789, is designed to prevent book banning; it awaits the governors signature.

Ashcrofts action surprised some Missouri librarians. Steve Campbell, director of the Scenic Regional Library with headquarters in Union, said he had considered Ashcroft usually generous toward libraries regarding funding. We know hes a social conservative, but he was always a great advocate for funding.

But he doesnt like the secretary of state telling local libraries what to do. We believe in intellectual freedom. He cites that about 95% of book challenges involve LGBTQ themes.

Some people think such books are inappropriate for any minor, no matter their age. Libraries cant help that, Campbell said.

Campbell suspects Ashcroft would argue hes not trying to limit their freedom: But its quite clear to me that is what he is doing. The Scenic Regional Library already has policies regarding book challenges and doesnt expect those to change.

With Ashcroft claiming that libraries offer obscene books, Campbell says, hes created a false battle and made himself the hero of the battle.
CLAYTON  School district and local government groups are moving to kill a plan that would freeze property taxes for seniors.

The Missouri School Boards Association and Missouri Association of Counties both said this week that they were drafting letters to Gov. Mike Parson urging him not to sign the bill passed by the Legislature last month.

It would rob school districts of much-needed revenue to give teachers raises, the school board association said. And it would create a logistical nightmare for counties trying to put the plan in place, the association of counties said.

Most of the counties are going, Look, we cant even implement this, so why would we even try? said Steve Hobbs, executive director of the counties association.

Hobbs said his association planned to send a list of problems in the legislation to the governor early next week, and the Missouri School Boards Association planned to send a letter Friday, according to Linda Quinley, senior director of school finance.

The only new revenue school districts expect anytime soon comes from increased property taxes as home values rise, Quinley said. School districts rely on them for teacher pay increases  an essential part of filling gaps in a nationwide teacher shortage, she said. The Missouri Constitution prevents taxing districts from collecting a tax windfall, but schools could get enough for raises, Quinley said.

Were really concerned about how our schools across Missouri will be able to afford paying teachers under any property tax cap bills, Quinley said.

The governor is reviewing the legislation, said spokeswoman Kelli Jones.

St. Louis County was the only county that had acted on the bill, Senate Bill 190. Republican County Councilman Mark Harder introduced a measure that would put it in place as soon as the governor signed it. It could pass this month. Harder sees it as a common-sense plan to keep seniors from being priced out of their homes.

It had very strong bipartisan support representing all areas of the state, Harder said. There must be something there that attracted all these people from various backgrounds.

The bill passed 154-2 in the state House, and 33-1 in the Senate. Harder pointed out that no one testified in opposition to the bill as it made its way through the legislature.

But Hobbs, of the county association, said a substitute bill introduced in mid-April added the language about tax breaks for seniors. The original bill provided a different kind of tax relief, allowing county assessors to use the previous years lower assessment if values increased more than 10%  a measure the advocacy groups supported, Hobbs said.

Under the version the Legislature passed, a senior could get the tax credit if they are eligible for Social Security retirement benefits, own a home and are required to make tax payments on that home.

It caught everybody flat-footed, Hobbs said. None of the taxing entities that would have commented on this bill were aware.

The Missouri Municipal League also opposes the bill because it creates a potential revenue problem for municipalities, executive Director Richard Sheets said Thursday. That group plans to support the county association as it urges Parson to veto the bill.

St. Louis County estimates if the bill had been in place for the last four years, the county would have missed out on nearly $34 million, according to a memo prepared by county officials. Those numbers would grow as St. Louis Countys population ages.

But in addition to missing out on millions of dollars in tax revenue, county assessors and collectors would face practical problems calculating the bills. Those departments dont have access to residents Social Security information, for one, and have no way of knowing whos eligible, Hobbs said.

The county collectors workload would increase dramatically, and entirely new software would have to be programmed to calculate the credits, said Quinley, of the school board association. Counties could implement the measure differently or inconsistently. And the legislation isnt clear if the bill would apply to all taxing districts in a county  such as rural fire districts or levee districts  or just some, Hobbs said.

The state senator who introduced the bill, Republican Tony Luetkemeyer of Parkville near Kansas City, intended the legislation to apply countywide, said his chief of staff, Brad Green.

St. Louis County Council members could decide to refuse the legislation. Some members, such as Democrats Lisa Clancy of Maplewood and Kelli Dunaway of Chesterfield, have already voiced their reservations. County Executive Sam Page could also veto the bill, though Page said hes deeply concerned about seniors being able to stay in their homes.

I look forward to seeing what form the legislation will ultimately take, Page said.

If the council doesnt approve the bill, voters could put the measure into place through a ballot initiative.

The grassroots group Missouri Tax Relief Now wants the governor to sign the bill, and asked the St. Louis County Council to approve it too. The group has gathered more than 1,600 signatures on its petition supporting the legislation, said spokeswoman Sarah Haenni at this weeks County Council meeting.

Every one of our signers is a voter, and they are paying attention, Haenni said. Well help them remember which council members were for and against senior tax relief when it comes to the next election.
FLORISSANT  Concerned north St. Louis County residents gathered Thursday night at the Florissant Municipal Courts to ask questions at a public hearing about local radioactive contamination issues and related public health risks  at Florissants Jana Elementary School and beyond.

But, armed with a recent report about the site of the school shuttered thanks to radiation concerns fueled by an independent study last year, officials from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers emphasized to a crowd of a few dozen people that the site is safe for use, with the propertys levels of radiation matching those that naturally occur.

Theres no other work needing to be done because there is no contamination on the site, said Phil Moser, a program manager from the Corps St. Louis District. If you dont find it, then its not there.

Moreover, the Corps said its results determined that there were there were no radiological risks to the students or staff at the school.

Radioactivity issues surrounding the creek and other nearby places, like West Lake Landfill, trace back to the 1940s and 50s, when Mallinckrodt Chemical processed uranium in St. Louis for use in the Manhattan Project and the nations earliest nuclear weapons. Resulting radioactive waste was eventually stored at an airport site next to Coldwater Creek, and then later moved to another site along the creek, on Latty Avenue.

Rain washed soil from the sites into and along the creek, where it was deposited downstream, over time.

The Corps, however, says that such contamination near Jana has remained confined to the creek bank on the schools property, and does not extend elsewhere on the grounds, after sampling throughout and around the school building.

The agency said there are three specific places along the creek bank where that material is buried in the soil  with one spot as small as four cubic yards, and the biggest covering more than 6,000 cubic yards. The Corps is working to remove contaminants in those places.

But elsewhere on the property, the Corps says that there were no traces of radioactivity linked to those Manhattan Project activities, or that exceeded naturally occurring background levels. Its analysis therefore concluded that the facility is safe for any use, based on examining hundreds of survey results and swipe measurements.

The Corps latest report compared risk levels at the school to a variety of ordinary and everyday threats  like car crashes, choking on food, or even living in Colorado  to illustrate its relative level of safety. For example, it said that risks from radioactivity are eight times greater in Colorado than they are at Jana  thanks partly to the greater exposure to cosmic radiation that occurs at higher elevations, where the shield from the atmosphere is thinner.

Moser emphasized that the Corps analysis took a reproducible and verifiable approach, and that the findings were reviewed for accuracy by experts at state and federal agencies, as well as different universities.

Right now that school building could be used for anything, he said.

But members of the public remain concerned and skeptical of the Corps declaration that the school is safe.

Ashley Bernaugh, the president of Jana's PTA organization, takes issue with some of the assumptions that have guided the Corps assessment of health risks. For instance, she said the latest study based its determination of risk on exposure to the sites levels of radioactivity for eight hours per day. But students can spend longer intervals at the site, thanks to after-school activities, and then also live in the immediate surroundings.

We dont ever leave, said Bernaugh, adding that she has other long-term exposure concerns for teachers and staff members who have worked at the school for decades. These models are very flawed.

Despite the Corps findings, the Hazelwood School Districts stance remains unchanged, regarding Janas future.

Nothing is changing at this point, said Jordyn Elston, the districts director of communications. There is no expectation that Jana will reopen.

Editor's note: This story was updated on June 9, at 9:50 a.m.
An amusement park in the Ozark Mountains near Branson, Missouri, is investigating a report that a guest was told he couldnt enter the park with an LGBTQ+ Pride bag.

A mother said on Facebook that her son was told Wednesday he couldnt bring the rainbow-hued bag into Silver Dollar City, an 1880s theme park featuring rides and other attractions.

The woman wrote in a now-deleted Facebook post Wednesday that her son wasnt allowed to bring the tote bag, which said BE POWERFUL, HUMAN, LOVING, UNIQUE, INSPIRING & DESERVING in various colors, into the amusement park.

She said someone at the gate told her son that people dont agree with that here, and that he needed to turn the tote inside out or put it in his vehicle if he wanted to enter the park, she said. If he unfolded it later to display the message, the person at the gate allegedly said other staff would be alerted to kick him out.

In a statement, Silver Dollar City said it was aware of the post and investigated the incident by identifying and contacting the guest, reviewing entry security footage and interviewing team members who were working that day.

Its important to us that every team member and guest is treated with love and respect, regardless of their beliefs, values, sexual orientation, age, or background, the park wrote.

The park said the actions described in the post do not align with the companys values, policies or team member training.

Park officials later said they found security footage of the individuals holding the bag right-side-out as they walked through the park. Security officials told investigators that the individuals were, in fact, asked to cover T-shirts that violated the parks dress code. However, the park did not provide specific details about those alleged violations.

The group complied with the request to cover their T-shirts and continued into the park, officials said. Following their investigation, park officials maintained no guest was asked to leave the premises or turn a bag inside out.

According to its dress code, the park does not allow clothing that may be offensive or inappropriate, including anything with profanity or suggestive material.

The park does not make specific references to LGBTQ+-related apparel in its policy.

Updated at 4:14 p.m.
While Congress has grandstanded and battled over the debt ceiling and the budget as if they were sacred documents, it is helpful to remember that compromise is also sacred. Compromise has become a dirty word in national politics in the United States, especially among true believers who consider it immoral.

The most ardent ideologues often come from the right wing  pro-life and gun-rights advocates, for example. But there are some liberal politicians (Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Reps. Cori Bush of St. Louis and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan come to mind) who consider politics a zero-sum game in which every concession to the other side is a defeat.

Tlaib and Bush could not bring themselves to honor fallen policemen in a recent House resolution, which they described in a statement as a document intended to advance Republicans false narrative around supporting law enforcement and gaslight the public about where they stand. The unmistakable language of ideology and division shows their disdain for compromise, even in a good cause.

Although he is portrayed by some Christians as a spirited antagonist of the Pharisees and Sadducees, Jesus was very much a compromiser. Asked about paying taxes to Caesar, the hot political issue of his day, he threaded the needle by saying Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars and unto to God the things that are Gods. He took a deliberately apolitical stand to answer a political question.

Jesus also spoke of compromise with opponents in a lawsuit when he said, Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court (Matthew 5:25). He revealed a negotiators pragmatism when he added, Do it while you are still together on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. He was not giving attorneys advice, he was illustrating the vanity of fighting to get your own way.

Compromise is the ultimate premise of democracy and morality. It is an American and a Christian value. It goes right back to the Golden Rule to Do unto others ... It does not diminish ideals or convictions. It shows the humility of pragmatism, the willingness to reconcile rather than dominate.

In 1790, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, bitter political enemies, compromised to legislate Hamiltons financial plan. Hamilton got the national government to take over state debts, while Jefferson got the national capital moved to the South.

But compromise has often had a bad name in the U.S. because of the fiery rhetoric of campaigning, where the words fighting and defending take priority. Campaign is a word common to war and politics. No one wins an election using words like understanding and reconciling  yet these are words that are key to governing, where majorities are formed by listening and conceding.

One American politician to acknowledge this conflict was Henry Clay. Known as The Great Compromiser, he never gained the fame of his contemporary, President Andrew Jackson, who was known as a warrior and Indian-slayer who opposed the national bank, which proved Clays undoing as a presidential candidate in 1832.

Clay, as a representative and senator and a perennial failure as candidate for president, struggled to keep the Union together from 1820 to 1850 and designed compromise bills in Congress that held off the forces of secession for a decade. As Clay said once said: If any man wants the key to my heart, let him take the key of the Union and that is the key to my heart.

Clay was best known for his compromise legislation to admit Missouri and Kansas (1820) and later California, New Mexico, and Utah (1850) as either free (Kansas and California) slave (Missouri) or optionally free or slave (Utah and New Mexico). These bills kept the Union together in the decades preceding the Civil War, but they never promoted Clay beyond the title speaker of the House.

Clay was a slave owner, but campaigned against slavery and freed his remaining slaves in his will. In his Compromise of 1850, you see the trade-offs that could be criticized by both pro- and anti-slavery advocates. Clays bottom line was to keep the Union together. He died before he could see the Civil War threaten to shatter that dream.

The legacy of Henry Clay, and the important subtext of the Gospels, is lost to many today in Congress, despite its recent success raising the debt ceiling. A vocal minority wanted a larger piece of the pie. For them, compromise was a dirty word.

That does not bode well for the remaining time before the election of 2024. Will compromise ever return to good standing in the U.S.? Will the next president be a fighter or a compromiser?

William D. Tucker lives in Chesterfield.
Regular readers of the Post-Dispatch opinion pages will have noticed some changes here lately. In the coming weeks, youll notice a few more. Nothing drastic, just some tweaking to our formats to provide a little more flexibility in presenting this platform for public debate. Which, after all, is what its all about.

The most significant change is the retirement of the short takes feature  those four or five generally light, brief opinion pieces that replaced the regular editorials on the left side of the page each Saturday, next to images of either a thumbs up or a thumbs down, depending. They were fun to read (and write), but it locked the editorial page into a format that didnt allow for extended commentary about any important news that might break late in the week. Like, say, the federal indictment of a former president.

Readers may also notice that on some (not all) Saturdays and Mondays, the space where multiple short letters to the editor are usually displayed will instead be filled by one longer essay from a local writer. It just provides one more option for more expansive commentary on the two days when there is no op-ed page for that purpose.

There will also be a shakeup in our local columnist lineup. New editorial page editor Kevin McDermott will still weigh in from time to time, but he will no longer write a regular Sunday column, in deference to his other duties. Editorial board members and regular columnists Lynn Schmidt and Janet Jackson both will step in on alternating Sundays, starting next week. Editorial board member Antonio French will contribute as events merit.

Again, the goal here is to loosen the opinion sections structure a bit to allow more flexibility for covering and commenting upon issues. Change is always a little scary, but were hoping these modest ones get a thumbs-up from readers.
Trained attorneys Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt either need some law school refresher courses, or they are deliberately misrepresenting the federal indictment of former President Donald Trump in ways so irresponsible they might qualify as incitement should violence follow. Missouris two sitting senators  who both know better  are telling their constituents the indictment is the personal doing of President Biden, instead of the result of a legitimate legal process that is by definition separate from the White House.

No, Biden hasnt indicted his top political opponent, as Schmitt tweeted. A federal grand jury did that, at the behest of a special counsel who operates independently from the Justice Department, which operates independently from Biden. Ditto regarding Hawleys claim that Biden believes he can just jail his political opponents.

Hawley and Schmitt arent alone. Prominent Republicans around the country are spinning misleading accounts of whats going on. With the echoes of Jan. 6, 2021, not that far in the past, its plain reckless.

It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy wrote in an especially unconscionable tweet. Again, a president cant indict anyone. And is the suggestion here that, by virtue of his candidacy, Trump cant be criminally charged for alleged violation of federal law, as would any other American? It sure sounds like it.

To be clear: These allegations arent just a matter of mistakenly bringing some sensitive documents home from the office and forgetting about them, as Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence both were found to have done. Thats not the best look for national leaders, but in both cases, they immediately cooperated with federal efforts to recoup the documents.

Contrast that with what Trump is accused of doing. The indictment alleges he didnt merely abscond with the hundreds of documents in question, but that he went to extraordinary lengths to prevent the government from getting them back, including activities that sound like textbook definitions of criminal conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

The indictment alleges Trump took classified documents related to U.S. defense strategies and nuclear programs  including documents that could have put U.S. intelligence agents at personal risk  and stored them in unsecured locations like bathrooms and ballrooms at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Hes also accused of improperly sharing sensitive information with people with no security clearance, including visitors to his resort properties.

It might be tempting to dismiss even all of that as the blustery self-indulgence of a clinical narcissist trying to impress people. America has long known who Trump is.

Where it veers into areas that might reasonably be expected to land someone in a federal prison cell were his alleged efforts to resist returning the documents, even after they were subpoenaed, and his alleged obstruction of justice as the investigation unfolded. Among other actions, he allegedly pressed his lawyers and others to hide or destroy documents and to lie to investigators about it. If true, thats not just Trumpian braggadocio, its felonious.

Federally indicting a former president for the first time in history isnt something to be done lightly. If special counsel Jack Smith ultimately presents a case that looks like legalistic nitpicking instead of substantive criminality, the Hawleys and Schmitts of the world may be politically rewarded for their knee-jerk sycophancy to Trump.

But theyre making a dangerous bet. As Smith said Friday: We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone. Most Americans understand that, even if Missouris two sitting senators dont.
The Chengdu 2021 FISU World University Games have released a Flame Relay themed animation named Chasing the Light.

The Flame Relay for the Chengdu 2021 FISU Games will kick off on 10 June.

Presented by Chengdu 2021 FISU Games Official Website
OPENING BELL: The Democratic primary race for the U.S. Senate in August 2024 has gotten far more interesting from a political pundit point of view.

On Wednesday, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell announced he was running against Lucas Kunce.

Kunce was an unknown political entity until he picked up statewide recognition and a healthy chunk of campaign money when he ran and lost to Trudy Busch Valentine in the 2022 Democratic U.S. Senate primary. Never at a loss for opinions or observations, several longtime political game-players weighed in on the pending Kunce-Bell race.

"What does the (St. Louis) region have to do to get a full-time prosecutor?" asked Jane Dueker, an outspoken critic of Bell. "We're in the middle of a crime crisis and Wesley wants to take some time off to run for the Senate."

Dueker then pointed to Bell's failed attempt last month to take over the operations of former St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner.

"Apparently, the only job (Bell) doesn't want is the one he already has," Dueker said. Richard Callow, who has worked with and for numerous St. Louis Democrats in past elections, saw Bell's candidacy in a far more positive light  even mentioning the fact that the Missouri AFLCIO endorsed Kunce on Wednesday.

"Announcing a major labor endorsement is usually a good reason for cupcakes in the office," Callow said. "Instead, Lucas Kunce will be answering questions about the Democratic primary all day."

Callow also opined that while Bell is relatively unknown outside the St. Louis area, there are some factors that could tilt to Bell's favor.

"Lucas has never won an election; Wesley has never lost one," Callow said. "Lucas has a strong message; Wesley has a strong record." Michael Butler, former chair of the Missouri Democratic Party, held a similarly positive view of Bell's candidacy.

"Wesley is a proven leader who was won tough races and delivered for his constituents in Missouri," said Butler, who serves as St. Louis Recorder of Deeds. "Josh Hawley has been an embarrassment to our state and Wesley can beat him next November."

Jamilah Nasheed, a former Democratic state legislator and now a member of the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole, had no problems with Bell entering the race. "It's a person's right to run for office and you can't tell them they shouldn't."

But Nasheed said she was concerned that the Democratic primary, with two major candidates, would eat up money and energy that could be focused more effectively on defeating Hawley.

"Honestly, I think Democrats need to be a little more strategic if we want to win" statewide races, she said.

Ed Rhode, former top aide to Mayor Francis G. Slay and political operative for numerous past candidates and causes, sees Bell's race as being somewhat uphill.

"Mr. Bell has a long road ahead of him. Lucas Kunce ran statewide two years ago, has high name I.D. among Democrats and essentially has organized labor locked down on this race," Rhode said.

Rhode also said out loud what other politicos had been hinting at for months  especially after Bell's bungled bid to take over Gardner's office: Bell wants to expand his recognition outside of the St. Louis area.

Said Rhode, "My bet is that Mr. Bell is looking to raise his profile for a run against Congresswoman Cori Bush next year."

LABOR LOVE: The major political endorsements given to Kunce had seemed somewhat pro forma  until Wednesday, when Bell entered the Democratic primary.

Virtually no one has been surprised that major labor unions have thrown their support to Kunce in his bid to unseat a Republican incumbent.

But Wednesday's announcement that Bell would join the 2024 Democratic primary gives far more weight to endorsements, including one released in time to compete with Bell's hat-in-ring pronouncement.

The Missouri AFL-CIO announced Wednesday it is backing Kunce in the upcoming U.S. Senate battle  an endorsement that the Kunce camp is calling "an important moment in the campaign."

"Lucas Kunce is the ally that working people need in the U.S. Senate, and so Missouri's labor movement is mobilizing now to help him win this seat," said Jacob Hummel, president of the Missouri AFL-CIO.

Previous to the AFL-CIO announcement, Kunce already had secured backing from numerous labor unions, including the construction trade councils from St. Louis and Kansas City; the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 655, the state's largest privatesector union; and the Missouri State Council of Fire Fighters, which in the past has endorsed Republicans Roy Blunt and Eric Schmitt.

Also fi led for the Democrats is December Harmon, a Columbia activist.

JOSH AROUND: From the incumbent camp, Hawley issued a statement after Bell entered the Democratic race. It read, in part:

"We expect whoever emerges from the messy primary to be the darling of the woke left and raise tens of millions of dollars to try and buy this seat from Missourians." Joe Holleman  314-340-8254 @stlsherpa on Twitter jholleman@post-dispatch.com
PHILADELPHIA, PA / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / The following abrdn U.S. Closed-End Funds announced today that the closed end funds in the chart directly below will pay the distributions indicated on a per share basis on June 30, 2023 to all shareholders of record as of June 23, 2023 (ex-dividend date June 22, 2023).

Ticker Exchange Fund Amount ACP NYSE abrdn Income Credit Strategies Fund $ 0.1000 AGD NYSE abrdn Global Dynamic Dividend Fund $ 0.0650 AOD NYSE abrdn Total Dynamic Dividend Fund $ 0.0575 ASGI NYSE abrdn Global Infrastructure Income Fund $ 0.1200 AWP NYSE abrdn Global Premier Properties Fund $ 0.0400 FAX NYSE American abrdn Asia-Pacific Income Fund, Inc. $ 0.0275 FCO NYSE American abrdn Global Income Fund, Inc. $ 0.0700 AEF NYSE American abrdn Emerging Markets Equity Income Fund, Inc. $ 0.1000

At the end of each calendar year, a Form 1099-DIV will be sent to shareholders, which will state the amount and composition of each fund's distributions and provide information with respect to their appropriate tax treatment for the prior calendar year. You should not draw any conclusions about any of these Funds' investment performance from the amount of the distributions.

MANAGED DISTRIBUTION POLICY FUNDS ANNOUNCE DISTRIBUTION PAYMENT DETAILS

abrdn Global Infrastructure Income Fund ("ASGI")

abrdn Asia-Pacific Income Fund, Inc. ("FAX")

The above-noted abrdn U.S. Closed-End Funds (the "Funds" or individually the "Fund"), today announced that the Funds will pay the distributions noted in the chart above on June 30, 2023, on a per share basis to all shareholders of record as of June 23, 2023 (ex-dividend date June 22, 2023).

Each Fund has adopted a distribution policy to provide investors with a stable distribution out of current income, supplemented by realized capital gains and, to the extent necessary, paid-in capital in reliance on an exemptive order granted by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Under applicable U.S. tax rules, the amount and character of distributable income for each Fund's fiscal year can be finally determined only as of the end of the Fund's fiscal year. However, under Section 19 of the Investment Company Act of 1940, as amended (the "1940 Act") and related rules, the Funds may be required to indicate to shareholders the estimated source of certain distributions to shareholders.

The following tables set forth the estimated amounts of the sources of the distributions for purposes of Section 19 of the 1940 Act and the rules adopted thereunder. The tables have been computed based on generally accepted accounting principles. The tables include estimated amounts and percentages for the current distributions to be paid as well as for the cumulative distributions paid relating to fiscal year to date, from the following sources: net investment income; net realized short-term capital gains; net realized long-term capital gains; and return of capital. The estimated compositions of the distributions may vary because the estimated composition may be impacted by future income, expenses and realized gains and losses on securities and currencies.

Each Fund's estimated sources of the current distributions to be paid and for its current fiscal year to date are as follows:

Estimated Amounts of Current Distribution per Share Fund Distribution Amount Net Investment Income Net Realized Short-Term Gains* Net Realized Long-Term Gains Return of Capital ASGI $0.1200 $0.0372 31% $0.0132 11% $0.0696 58% - - FAX $0.0275 $0.0151 55% - - - - $0.0124 45%

Estimated Amounts of Fiscal Year to Date Cumulative Distributions per Share Fund Fiscal Year** to Date Distribution Amount Net Investment Income Net Realized Short-Term Gains* Net Realized Long-Term Gains Return of Capital ASGI $1.0800 $0.3348 31% $0.1188 11% $0.6264 58% - - FAX $0.2200 $0.1210 55% - - - - $0.0990 45%

* includes currency gains

** ASGI has a 9/30 fiscal year end; FAX has a 10/31 fiscal year end.

Where the estimated amounts above show a portion of the distribution to be a "Return of Capital," it means that Fund estimates that it has distributed more than its income and capital gains; therefore, a portion of your distribution may be a return of capital. A return of capital may occur for example, when some or all of the money that you invested in a Fund is paid back to you. A return of capital distribution does not necessarily reflect the Fund's investment performance and should not be confused with "yield" or "income."

The amounts and sources of distributions reported in this notice are only estimates and are not being provided for tax reporting purposes. The final determination of the source of all distributions for the current year will only be made after year-end. The actual amounts and sources of the amounts for tax reporting purposes will depend upon the Fund's investment experience during the remainder of the fiscal year and may be subject to change based on tax regulations. After the end of each calendar year, a Form 1099-DIV will be sent to shareholders for the prior calendar year that will tell you how to report these distributions for federal income tax purposes.

The following table provides the Funds' total return performance based on net asset value (NAV) over various time periods compared to the Funds' annualized and cumulative distribution rates.

Fund Performance and Distribution Rate Information Fund Average Annual Total Return on NAV for the 5 Year Period Ending 04/30/2023 Current Fiscal Period's Annualized Distribution Rate on NAV Cumulative Total Return on NAV Cumulative Distribution Rate on NAV ASGI 3 7.42% 7.11% 13.85% 4.74% FAX -0.73% 10.68% 16.24% 6.23%

1 Return data is net of all fund expenses and fees and assumes the reinvestment of all distributions reinvested at prices obtained under the Fund's dividend reinvestment plan, with the exception of the most recent distribution.

2 Based on the Fund's NAV as of May 31, 2023.

3 The Fund launched within the past 5 years; the performance and distribution rate information presented reflects data from inception (July 29, 2020) through May 31, 2023.

Shareholders should not draw any conclusions about a Fund's investment performance from the amount of the Fund's current distributions or from the terms of the distribution policy (the "Distribution Policy").

While NAV performance may be indicative of the Fund's investment performance, it does not measure the value of a shareholder's investment in the Fund. The value of a shareholder's investment in the Fund is determined by the Fund's market price, which is based on the supply and demand for the Fund's shares in the open market.

Pursuant to an exemptive order granted by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Funds may distribute any long-term capital gains more frequently than the limits provided in Section 19(b) under the 1940 Act and Rule 19b-1 thereunder. Therefore, distributions paid by the Funds during the year may include net income, short-term capital gains, long-term capital gains and/or a return of capital. Net income dividends and short-term capital gain dividends, while generally taxable at ordinary income rates, may be eligible, to the extent of qualified dividend income earned by the Funds, to be taxed at a lower rate not to exceed the maximum rate applicable to your long-term capital gains. Distributions made in any calendar year in excess of investment company taxable income and net capital gain are treated as taxable ordinary dividends to the extent of undistributed earnings and profits, and then as a return of capital that reduces the adjusted basis in the shares held. To the extent return of capital distributions exceed the adjusted basis in the shares held, capital gain is recognized with a holding period based on the period the shares have been held at the date such amount is received.

The payment of distributions in accordance with the Distribution Policy may result in a decrease in the Fund's net assets. A decrease in the Fund's net assets may cause an increase in the Fund's annual operating expense ratio and a decrease in the Fund's market price per share to the extent the market price correlates closely to the Fund's net asset value per share. The Distribution Policy may also negatively affect the Fund's investment activities to the extent that the Fund is required to hold larger cash positions than it typically would hold or to the extent that the Fund must liquidate securities that it would not have sold, for the purpose of paying the distribution. Each Fund's Board has the right to amend, suspend or terminate the Distribution Policy at any time. The amendment, suspension or termination of the Distribution Policy may affect the Fund's market price per share. Investors should consult their tax advisor regarding federal, state and local tax considerations that may be applicable in their particular circumstances.

Circular 230 disclosure : To ensure compliance with requirements imposed by the U.S. Treasury, we inform you that any U.S. tax advice contained in this communication (including any attachments) is not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used, for the purpose of (i) avoiding penalties under the Internal Revenue Code or (ii) promoting, marketing or recommending to another party any transaction or matter addressed herein.

In the United States, abrdn is the marketing name for the following affiliated, registered investment advisers: abrdn Inc., abrdn Investments Limited, abrdn Australia Limited, abrdn Asia Limited, Aberdeen Capital Management, LLC, abrdn ETFs Advisors LLC and abrdn Alternative Funds Limited.

Closed-end funds are traded on the secondary market through one of the stock exchanges. A Fund's investment return and principal value will fluctuate so that an investor's shares may be worth more or less than the original cost. Shares of closed-end funds may trade above (a premium) or below (a discount) the net asset value (NAV) of the fund's portfolio. There is no assurance that a Fund will achieve its investment objective. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

https://www.abrdn.com/en-us/cefinvestorcenter

For More Information Contact:

abrdn U.S. Closed-End Funds

Investor Relations

1-800-522-5465

[email protected]

SOURCE: abrdn U.S. Closed-End Funds

View source version on accesswire.com:
NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / June 9, 2023 / Aflac Incorporated

Since the start of 2023, Aflac has given over $3.3 million to help support the needs of children with cancer and blood disorders and to improve communities and the lives of others through nonprofit funding. Approximately 83% of those funds donated to causes benefiting minority and low-income individuals.

The Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center

Aflac provides funding for the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center in Atlanta every year. The most recent $1.5 million donation brings the company's support of the pediatric cancer and blood disorders cause to over $168 million since 1995. In keeping with the growing need to ensure mental and emotional health, this year, Aflac's donation directly supports the Center's 35-person Family Support Team, which includes social workers, child life specialists, non-denominational chaplains and music therapists who work in tandem with medical staff to provide therapeutic activities, positive distractions and social support for both patients and families. Family support services are often neglected, leaving hospitals dependent on donations to continue these valuable programs. Aflac is proud and pleased to fill this gap.

The Piedmont Columbus Mobile Unit

Aflac, based in Columbus, Georgia, is also having an impact in communities throughout the nation. One example is a recent donation to Piedmont Columbus Foundation to fund their Mobile Unit, which provides high quality health care to underserved and indigent populations throughout Columbus, a midsized city in western Georgia. This is Aflac's third year as principal sponsor of the program.

The Piedmont Columbus Mobile Unit clinical team, consisting of a family practice resident, Pharmacy resident, registered nurse, social worker and medical student, conducts weekly clinics and provide medical care, immunizations and health education in 13 locations throughout the city, such as Safe House, Valley Rescue Mission, Open Door, House of Mercy and more. In 2022, they saw 371 clinic patients, administered 191 COVID-19 and influenza vaccinations, prescribed 277 medications and provided blood pressure screenings to 1,763 individuals.

The Mobile Unit also partnered with The Food Mill mobile farmer's market, which Aflac also supports, in providing fresh fruits and vegetables to 306 individuals from August through December. The partnership, which encourages patients to use food as medicine, included free screenings for body weight, BMI and waist circumference, and health education.

Chattahoochee Riverkeeper

Aflac's commitment to our environment led to continued funding of Chattahoochee Riverkeeper (CRK) in 2023, an organization that works to engage and educate the community in stewardship and protection of waterways. The organization's Neighborhood Water Watch and Sweep the Hooch initiatives give Chattahoochee Valley residents the opportunity, tools and resources to help monitor the health of local waterways and fight litter pollution. Last year, 820 pounds of trash were collected by 50 volunteers at one cleanup site at Lakebottom Park. Overall, in 2022, CRK led cleanups that removed 107,532 pounds of trash from the Chattahoochee watershed.

And 167 students from local Hollis Hand Elementary, Flat Rock Middle and Eastside Elementary, all Title 1 schools, experienced hands-on learning about the environment through the West Point Lake Floating Classroom, thanks to scholarships provided through Aflac's support of CRK.

Employees giving back

In 2022 alone, Aflac employees logged more than 12,000 volunteer hours with organizations and initiatives that are near and dear to them. Whether through fundraising, like the recent fire truck pull in Columbia, South Carolina, to raise funding for childhood cancer, Habitat for Humanity home builds, serving as an ambassador for children's health, or teaming up to support the needs in our communities and beyond - employees across Aflac express care for those in need.

Take Ruthie Brown (pictured above, left), Aflac Financial Systems Accountant, and Executive Assistant Lisa Dente (pictured above, right), for example. They recently volunteered for a bed build with the Columbus chapter of Sleep in Heavenly Peace. The organization, which Aflac has supported through donations, provides beds built by volunteers, mattresses and bedding to children who do not have a bed.

These are but three of the 78-plus donations made by Aflac in the first quarter of 2023. Learn more about how Aflac gives back at investors.aflac.com/Sustainability.

# # #

Confidential and Proprietary. For Internal Use Only. Do Not Distribute. This content contains proprietary information and material that is owned by Aflac and/or its licensors, and is protected by applicable intellectual property and other laws, including but not limited to copyright. This content is provided to you for informational purposes. You further agree not to modify, loan, sell, distribute, or create derivative works based on this content. Any use not specifically permitted herein is strictly prohibited.

Z2300597 EXP 6/24

Aflac employees Ruthie Brown and Lisa Dente volunteer with Sleep in Heavenly Peace in Columbus to build beds for kids in need.

View additional multimedia and more ESG storytelling from Aflac Incorporated on 3blmedia.com.

Contact Info:

Spokesperson: Aflac Incorporated

Website: https://www.3blmedia.com/profiles/aflac-incorporated

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE: Aflac Incorporated

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PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Regulatory News:

ACTICOR BIOTECH (ISIN: FR0014005OJ5  ALACT), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the development of innovative treatments for cardiovascular emergencies, including ischemic stroke, today discloses the total number of voting rights and shares as of May 31, 2023 (pursuant to Article L. 233-8 II of the French Commercial Code and Article 223-16 of the General Regulation of the French Financial Markets Authority).

Listing Place: Euronext Growth Paris

ISIN Code : FR0014005OJ5

Web site: acticor-biotech.com

Date Number of shares making

up the share capital Theoretical number

of voting rights (1) Number of voting rights

excluding shares stripped

of voting rights (2) May 31, 2023 12.338.781 12.338.781 12.299.502

In accordance with Article 223-111 of the AMFs General Regulation, this number of shares is calculated based on all shares carrying the right to vote, including those stripped of voting rights. The actual voting rights correspond to the total number of voting rights that can be exercised in a general meeting. They are calculated on the basis of the total number of voting rights attached to the total number of shares minus the shares without voting rights.

About ACTICOR BIOTECH

Acticor Biotech is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company, a spin-off from INSERM (the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research), which is aiming to develop an innovative treatment for cardiovascular emergencies, including ischemic stroke.

In May 2022, Acticor Biotech presented positive results from its Phase 1b/2a study, ACTIMIS, at the ESOC, confirming the safety profile and showing a reduction in mortality and intracerebral hemorrhage in the glenzocimab-treated group in patients with stroke. The efficacy of glenzocimab is now being evaluated in an international Phase 2/3 study, ACTISAVE, which will include 1,000 patients. In July 2022, Acticor Biotech was granted "PRIME" status by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for glenzocimab in the treatment of stroke. This designation will allow the company to strengthen its interactions and obtain early dialogues with regulatory authorities.

Acticor Biotech is supported by a panel of European and international investors (Mediolanum farmaceutici, Karista, Go Capital, Newton Biocapital, CMS Medical Venture Investment (HK) Limited, A&B (HK) Limited, Mirae Asset Capital, Anaxago and the Armesa foundation). Acticor Biotech is listed on Euronext Growth Paris since November 2021 (ISIN: FR0014005OJ5  ALACT).

For more information, visit: www.acticor-biotech.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005153/en/

ACTICOR BIOTECH

Gilles AVENARD, MD

CEO and Founder

[email protected]

T. : +33 (0)6 76 23 38 13

Sophie BINAY, PhD

General Manager and CSO

[email protected]

T. : +33 (0)6 76 23 38 13

NewCap

Mathilde BOHIN / Quentin MASSE

Investor Relations

[email protected]

T. : +33 (0)1 44 71 94 95

NewCap

Arthur ROUILLE

Media Relations

[email protected]

T. : +33 (0)1 44 71 00 15

Source: ACTICOR BIOTECH
DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Reissuing release dated June 8, 2023, to correct Alex Gellman's title to Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Vertical Bridge (instead of President and CEO of Vertical Bridge).

The updated release reads:

WIRELESS HISTORY FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES 2023 INDUCTEES FOR WIRELESS HALL OF FAME

The Wireless History Foundation (WHF) will induct four honorees into the prestigious Wireless Hall of Fame during the Foundations awards dinner in Washington, D.C. on October 10th. This years inductees are:

Meredith Attwell Baker: President and CEO of CTIA, former FCC Commissioner and former Acting Assistant Secretary for NTIA. As an industry advocate and a policymaker, Ms. Baker has played a role in nearly every major spectrum and wireless infrastructure decision of the past 25 years that have yielded nationwide 3G, 4G and 5G networks, carrying trillions of mega-bytes of broadband data each year for hundreds of millions of consumers, and supporting millions of jobs.

Alex Gellman: Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Vertical Bridge, the largest private owner and operator of wireless communications infrastructure in the US, was one of the first in our industry to recognize the value of cooperative infrastructure resources. Formerly with Horizon Cellular, SpectraSite, Block B Cellular Corp., and Global Towers Partners.

Rob Mechaley: Formerly with McCaw Cellular Communications, co-Founder of Clearwire, and Chief Scientist with AT&T Wireless, Founder of RadioFrame Networks, and holder of over 60 patents in the communications, technology and healthcare sectors, Mr. Mechaley led the team that designed and implemented the North American Cellular Network (NACN) which enabled intercarrier operability throughout the US and Canada. He was also responsible for proving and implementing CDPD as the first data capability on the analog networks.

Ed Whitacre: Former CEO of Southwestern Bell Corp. and the former Chairman of General Motors. Credited with driving the US cellular industry to become a truly national network and also for serving as one of the longest running wireless carrier CEOs, Mr. Whitacre led Southwestern Bell to join BellSouth to create Cingular Wireless in 2000, and then in 2004, led Cingular to acquire AT&T Wireless, creating the largest national wireless carrier at the time.

Wireless technology continues to change the world and our everyday lives. These individuals have made significant contributions to the technology, infrastructure, legislation, or commercial activities that built the industrys foundation, said WHF Executive Director Jenifer Snyder. We are thrilled to welcome The Class of 2023 into the Wireless Hall of Fame.

The WHF is pleased to host this years Wireless Hall of Fame awards dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Washington D.C. Tuesday, October 10th 2023. Additional information on the Wireless Hall of Fame is available on the WHF web site at www.wirelesshistoryfoundation.org. For information about the dinner, including sponsorships and invitations please contact Jenifer Snyder at [email protected]

The Wireless History Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization formed to preserve and promote the history of the wireless industry. www.wirelesshistoryfoundation.org

Facebook: @wirelesshistory

Twitter: @wirelesshistory

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Jenifer Snyder

+1 (303) 875-5326

[email protected]

Source: Wireless History Foundation
TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Toronto Education Workers/CUPE Local 4400 and the Toronto District School Board have reached a tentative agreement in collective bargaining for local terms and conditions. Ratification votes will be scheduled before the end of June for members to vote on new collective agreements covering employees in three bargaining units. When ratified, members will be entitled to retroactive payments for a term beginning on September 1, 2022.

:kw/cope491

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John Weatherup

President, Toronto Education Workers/CUPE Local 4400

416-902-9266 (cell)

Source: CUPE
SIMI VALLEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The students at iQ Academy of California  Los Angeles (iQLA), an online public school serving K-12 students throughout the state, will celebrate its graduates with an in-person commencement ceremony this Monday. The graduation will take place at El Camino College. Details for the graduation can be found below or on iQLAs Facebook page.

iQLA is proud to graduate approximately 105 students this year. Students at iQLA have reported they will attend Universities, Colleges, community colleges in their area, vocational education programs, as well as joining branches of the military. Some of the schools our graduates have been accepted to are UCLA, UC Riverside, CSU Long Beach, CSU Channel Islands, Cal Poly Pomona, Cypress, Saddleback, and the U.S. Marines.

Today is the day the students have earned their shining moment, the recognition of all their hard work, and a celebration of their future, said Nick Stecken, Executive Director of iQLA. Were so happy to watch them head on into their future, and we look forward to seeing what they do next.

Details of the graduation ceremony are as follows:

WHAT: iQLA 2023 Graduation Ceremonies

WHERE: June 12: El Camino College, Marsee Auditorium

Keynote speaker will be former U.S. Representative Jack OConnell.

CONTACT: For any questions about the celebrations, please contact head of school Nicholas Stecken at [email protected]. For media inquiries, please contact Ken Schwartz at [email protected].

About iQ Academy of California  Los Angeles

iQ Academy of California  Los Angeles (IQLA) is a full-time online public charter school authorized by the Rowland Unified School District. IQLA is available to students in kindergarten through 12th grade who reside in Kern, Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Ventura counties. California-credentialed teachers deliver lessons in an online classroom platform that provides families the choice to access the curriculum and tools provided by K12, a Stride Company (NYSE: LRN). Stride offers learners of all ages a more effective way to learn and build skills for their future. For more information about IQLA, visit losangeles.iqacademy.com.

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Ken Schwartz

Senior Manager, Corporate Communications

[email protected]

Source: Stride, Inc.
PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Regulatory News:

TotalEnergies (Paris: TTE) (LSE: TTE) (NYSE: TTE) confirms its commitment to the energy transition in Kazakhstan with the signature of a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for the Mirny project. This will be the first PPA signed in the country for a wind project of such scale. Located in the Zhambyl region, the project aims to build a 1 GW onshore wind farm combined with a 600 MWh battery energy storage system for a reliable power supply. It represents an investment of about $1.4 billion. After Irak, it is another prime example of TotalEnergies ability to leverage its position as a major partner in the upstream sector to speed up the development of renewable energy in oil and gas countries.

The electricity to be produced by the Mirny project will be sold in its entirety to the Financial Settlement Center of Renewable Energy, a public entity owned by the Government of Kazakhstan, for the supply of the national grid. The project will provide electricity to 1 million people.

This agreement has been signed in Astana between Total Eren, an affiliate of TotalEnergies, and the FSC, in the presence of Patrick Pouyanne, Chairman and CEO of TotalEnergies and the Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Almasadam Satkaliyev. TotalEnergies will develop the Mirny project in partnership with the National Wealth Fund Samruk-Kazyna and the National Company KazMunayGas, which will each own a 20% stake in the project.

This project will contribute to the transition of Kazakhstan to the green energy and will be a breakthrough in strengthening French-Kazakh investment cooperation, said Almassadam Satkaliyev, Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

"As a global energy leader, TotalEnergies is proud to drive the energy transition in Kazakhstan through such an innovative project as Mirny. This wind and battery project will contribute to the supply and security of the Kazakh power grid. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Kazakh authorities for their support and collaboration throughout this process. This represents a significant milestone in TotalEnergies' multi-energy strategy. TotalEnergies will bring its expertise in managing large-scale projects to make it a success, " said Patrick Pouyanne, Chairman and CEO of TotalEnergies.

A wind project contributing to Kazakhstans renewable push

The Mirny project, which will consist of around 200 turbines, is the largest wind energy initiative ever undertaken in Kazakhstan. Supported, by both the Kazakh and French authorities, the project will be a strong contributor to the Kazakh Government's target of achieving 15% of electricity from renewable sources by 2030. It will avoid the emission of approximately 3.5 million tons of CO2 annually over the duration of the PPA signed today.

A successful renewable track-record for Total Eren in Kazakhstan

Total Eren has a proven track record of renewable energy developments in Kazakhstan. In particular, Total Eren successfully developed, financed, built, and commissioned in 2019 two solar photovoltaic farms, M-KAT and Nomad, with a combined capacity of 128 MWp. These solar farms, located in the Zhambyl and Kyzylorda regions respectively, have been instrumental in diversifying Kazakhstan's energy mix and reducing carbon emissions.

***

TotalEnergies and renewables electricity

As part of its ambition to get to net zero by 2050, TotalEnergies is building a portfolio of activities in electricity and renewables. At the end of 2022, TotalEnergies' gross renewable electricity generation installed capacity was 17 GW. TotalEnergies will continue to expand this business to reach 35 GW of gross production capacity from renewable sources and storage by 2025, and then 100 GW by 2030 with the objective of being among the world's top 5 producers of electricity from wind and solar energy.

About TotalEnergies

TotalEnergies is a global multi-energy company that produces and markets energies: oil and biofuels, natural gas and green gases, renewables and electricity. Our more than 100,000 employees are committed to energy that is ever more affordable, cleaner, more reliable and accessible to as many people as possible. Active in nearly 130 countries, TotalEnergies puts sustainable development in all its dimensions at the heart of its projects and operations to contribute to the well-being of people.

@TotalEnergies TotalEnergies TotalEnergies TotalEnergies

Cautionary Note

The terms TotalEnergies, TotalEnergies company or Company in this document are used to designate TotalEnergies SE and the consolidated entities that are directly or indirectly controlled by TotalEnergies SE. Likewise, the words we, us and our may also be used to refer to these entities or to their employees. The entities in which TotalEnergies SE directly or indirectly owns a shareholding are separate legal entities. This document may contain forward-looking information and statements that are based on a number of economic data and assumptions made in a given economic, competitive and regulatory environment. They may prove to be inaccurate in the future and are subject to a number of risk factors. Neither TotalEnergies SE nor any of its subsidiaries assumes any obligation to update publicly any forward-looking information or statement, objectives or trends contained in this document whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Information concerning risk factors, that may affect TotalEnergies financial results or activities is provided in the most recent Universal Registration Document, the French-language version of which is filed by TotalEnergies SE with the French securities regulator Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF), and in the Form 20-F filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

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TotalEnergies Contacts

Media Relations: +33 (0)1 47 44 46 99 l [email protected] l @TotalEnergiesPR

Investor Relations: +33 (0)1 47 44 46 46 l [email protected]

Source: TOTALENERGIES SE
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- KBRA affirms the senior unsecured debt rating of BBB, the subordinated debt rating of BBB-, and the short-term debt rating of K3 for Mount Olive, NC-based Southern BancShares ( N.C.), Inc. (OTC: SBNC) (the company). In addition, KBRA affirms the deposit and senior unsecured debt ratings of BBB+, the subordinated debt rating of BBB, and the short-term deposit and debt ratings of K2 for Southern Bank and Trust Company, the main subsidiary. The Outlook for all long-term ratings is Stable.

Key Credit Considerations

SBNCs ratings are supported by a conservative credit and growth culture, which is a function, in our view, of the companys ownership profile (one family and related members have owned half or more of SBNC since the late 1960s). As such, we consider SBNC less inclined than public peers to chase outsized growth, and management is generally reluctant to concede on underwriting standards or credit quality for the sake of growth or margin. Correspondingly, the banks asset quality performance during and since the global financial crisis (GFC) has been excellent, and NCOs have averaged 0.02% over the past five years. Furthermore, SBNC remained profitable throughout the GFC and never recorded an annual loss. A strong funding profile also supports SBNCs ratings, with the company 89% core deposit funded. The companys attractive funding mix, combined with solid market share in its core operating geographies, contributes to a low-cost deposit base (71 bps at 1Q23 compared to 127 bps for the KBRArated universe of publicly traded banks) that has displayed durability through multiple rate cycles and compares favorably to the rating group. SBNC holds an on-balance sheet investment in equity securities of ~$220 million that is marked-to-market each quarter under ASU 2016-01 accounting standards which creates GAAP earnings exposed to volatile market valuations. As a result, the companys earnings metrics display a greater degree of variability than rated peers. Still, accounting nuances aside, KBRA views SBNCs earnings profile as adequate for the rating category, and we estimate the companys average core ROA was 1.09% over the previous nine quarters.

Rating Sensitivities

Increased revenue diversification in the form of stable and recurring fee income sources and further geographic diversification, when combined with the maintenance of strong capital, credit and liquidity profiles, could lead to positive rating momentum over time. A material shift in the companys conservative credit and growth culture, a more aggressive capital management policy, or a dramatic shift in the companys underlying risk profile could pressure ratings.

To access rating and relevant documents, click here.

Methodologies

Financial Institutions: Bank & Bank Holding Company Global Rating Methodology

ESG Global Rating Methodology

A description of all substantially material sources that were used to prepare the credit rating and information on the methodology(ies) (inclusive of any material models and sensitivity analyses of the relevant key rating assumptions, as applicable) used in determining the credit rating is available in the Information Disclosure Form(s) located here.

Information on the meaning of each rating category can be located here.

Further disclosures relating to this rating action are available in the Information Disclosure Form(s) referenced above. Additional information regarding KBRA policies, methodologies, rating scales and disclosures are available at www.kbra.com.

About KBRA

Kroll Bond Rating Agency, LLC (KBRA) is a full-service credit rating agency registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an NRSRO. Kroll Bond Rating Agency Europe Limited is registered as a CRA with the European Securities and Markets Authority. Kroll Bond Rating Agency UK Limited is registered as a CRA with the UK Financial Conduct Authority. In addition, KBRA is designated as a designated rating organization by the Ontario Securities Commission for issuers of asset-backed securities to file a short form prospectus or shelf prospectus. KBRA is also recognized by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners as a Credit Rating Provider.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005263/en/

Analytical Contacts

Kevin Kent, Director (Lead Analyst) +1 301-960-7045 [email protected]

Joe Scott, Senior Managing Director (Rating Committee Chair) +1 646-731-2438 [email protected]

Business Development Contact

Justin Fuller, Senior Director +1 646-731-1250 [email protected]

Disclosures

Brian Ropp, Managing Director +1 301-969-3244 [email protected]

Source: Kroll Bond Rating Agency, LLC
BEIJING, June 9 (Xinhua) -- China will hold an international expo focused on industrial and supply chains later this year, aiming to forge a new platform for exchanges and cooperation in this sector, according to the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT).

The expo will be held in Beijing from Nov. 28 to Dec. 2, Ren Hongbin, president of the CCPIT, told a press conference on Friday.

The exhibition area is expected to exceed 100,000 square meters, providing display spaces for domestic and international enterprises from five major chains including the smart car, green agriculture, clean energy, digital technology, as well as health and lifestyle.

Enterprise application software provider SAP, one of the biggest technology companies in Europe, will take part in the expo, where it will showcase its cutting-edge solutions and innovative products, Elizabeth Pei, vice president of SAP Greater China, told Xinhua.

"Coming out of the pandemic and a period where many of us face adversity and challenges, just being able to gather together to set up a conference is an achievement within itself," said Manuel Sanchez, chief representative of the U.S. Grains Council Beijing office. 
LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Adel Hagekhalil, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, issues the following statement on Gov. Gavin Newsoms announcement to provide $38 million for Southern California water efficiency projects:

The state funding awarded today is a testament to Californias commitment to ensuring a resilient water future for all. I am thankful for the states support and proactive approach toward addressing the ongoing challenges facing our water supplies as the climate changes. This critical investment will provide Southern California communities with opportunities to build on their progress in conservation.

Specifically, these funds will help further Metropolitans commitment to changing the regions landscape by increasing the amount of our turf replacement rebate for public agencies and the commercial, industrial, and institutional sectors  converting up to 30 million square-feet of non-functional turf into water-efficient landscaping. The grant also will allow us to help expand conservation in traditionally underserved communities by funding direct-install programs for high-efficiency fixtures in income-eligible households and purchasing water-recirculating units that conserve water while enabling local fire departments to train for the increasing threat of wildfires.

With the states assistance, we can continue to make major gains in our conservation efforts that are becoming increasingly important as we face a drier, hotter future that may reduce the availability of water from our Northern California and Colorado River sources. As we work to reduce our water use, we must continue to invest in new, local water supplies, storage and the flexibility of our water system for the benefit of the 19 million people in our Southern California communities. Together, we can navigate the challenges of extreme weather and climate whiplash, securing a sustainable water supply for generations to come, with no one left behind.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230608005828/en/

Rebecca Kimitch, (213) 217-6450; (202) 821-5253, mobile; [email protected]

Maritza Fairfield, (213) 217-6853; (909) 816-7722, mobile; [email protected]

Source: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California
FOLSOM, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- PowerSchool Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: PWSC) (PowerSchool or the Company), the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America, today announced it is rescheduling its Investor Day due to scheduling conflicts. Originally planned for July 11, 2023, PowerSchools 2023 Investor Day will now be held on Thursday, September 14th, 2023, in New York City.

About PowerSchool

PowerSchool (NYSE: PWSC) is the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America. Its mission is to power the education ecosystem with unified technology that helps educators and students realize their full potential, in their way. PowerSchool connects students, teachers, administrators, and parents, with the shared goal of improving student outcomes. From the office to the classroom to the home, it helps schools and districts efficiently manage state reporting and related compliance, special education, finance, human resources, talent, registration, attendance, funding, learning, instruction, grading, assessments, and analytics in one unified platform. PowerSchool supports over 50 million students globally and more than 15,000 customers, including over 90 of the top 100 districts by student enrollment in the United States, and sells solutions in over 90 countries. Visit www.powerschool.com to learn more.

 PowerSchool. PowerSchool and other PowerSchool marks are trademarks of PowerSchool Holdings, Inc. or its subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005386/en/

Investor Contact:

Shane Harrison

[email protected]

855-707-5100

Media Contact:

Beth Keebler

[email protected]

503-702-4230

Source: PowerSchool Holdings, Inc.
BAAR, Switzerland--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Stallergenes Greer, a leading global healthcare company specialising in allergen immunotherapy (AIT), will be hosting a company-sponsored symposium entitled Patients perspective: A must have for the future of Allergen Immunotherapy at the 2023 European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) Congress taking place June 9-11 in Hamburg (Germany). During the symposium, four of the worlds leading experts in respiratory allergy will showcase advancements regarding the clinical relevance of its AIT treatments, which contribute to furthering precision medicine and enhance patient benefits.

Stallergenes Greer is committed to therapeutic progress to meet the needs of patients and the medical community. Our personalised allergen immunotherapy solutions are supported by a wealth of data documenting their effectiveness, and by integrating the patients voice into each stage of the lifecycle of our treatments, we further ensure that our treatments meet their expectations. From the first months of treatment, and with an effect that consolidates over time, allergen immunotherapy may provide concrete, substantial and persisting patient benefits, stated Amer Jaber, Executive VP Operations Europe and International and President of Stallergenes SAS.

During the congress, Stallergenes Greer will also present 13 abstracts on precision medicine in AIT and patient benefits and announce new data from clinical trials (EfficAPSI, Practis, and long-term data generated in Japan).

AGENDA

SYMPOSIUM (June 9: 12:00  13:00)

Patients perspective: A must have for the future of allergen immunotherapy.

Chair: Prof. Giorgio Walter Canonica, Italy.

- What can a patient expect from AIT in the short term? Lessons learned from Randomized Controlled Clinical trials (RCT), speaker Prof. Randolf Brehler, Germany.

- Which persisting benefits may patients anticipate with AIT over time? Lessons learned from Real World Evidence, speaker Prof. Pascal Demoly, France.

- What do patients have to say about their experience with AIT? Lessons learned from Patient Reported Outcomes, speaker Prof. Carmen Vidal, Spain.

ABOUT STALLERGENES GREER STUDIES EfficAPSI AND PRACTIS

EfficAPSI is the largest retrospective real-world, longitudinal cohort study regarding sublingual liquid allergen immunotherapy treatment. Its objective is to evaluate the real-life impact of sublingual liquid allergen immunotherapy on the onset and worsening of asthma in patients with allergic rhinitis. This study included more than 100,000 patients in France with allergic rhinitis with or without asthma treated with sublingual liquid AIT and symptomatic drugs and more than 330,000 patients with allergic rhinitis with or without asthma treated with symptomatic drugs only.

PRACTIS is a French multicentre real-world observational prospective one-year study. It evaluates over 1,000 allergic children, adolescents and adults treated in current practice with sublingual immunotherapy (tablets and sublingual solutions) to analyse how SLIT treatment meets patient expectations through the patient benefit index.

ABOUT THE EAACI CONGRESS

The European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) is an association of clinicians, researchers and allied health professionals founded in 1956. EAACI is dedicated to improving the health of people affected by allergic diseases. With more than 13,000 members from 125 countries and over 75 National Allergy Societies, EAACI is the primary source of expertise in Europe and worldwide for all aspects of allergy.

ABOUT STALLERGENES GREER

Headquartered in Baar (Switzerland), Stallergenes Greer International AG is a global healthcare company specialising in the diagnosis and treatment of allergies through the research, development and commercialisation of allergen immunotherapy products and services. Stallergenes Greer International AG is the parent company of Greer Laboratories, Inc. (whose registered office is in the United States) and Stallergenes SAS (whose registered office is in France). For more information: www.stallergenesgreer.com

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Stallergenes Greer

Communications



Catherine Kress

Tel: +33 (0)1 55 50 26 05

Email: [email protected]

Source: Stallergenes Greer
RESTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Stride, Inc.s Promising Practices was named the winner of the Peoples Choice Stevie Award for the Professional Learning Solution for Education category in the 21st Annual American Business Awards. This prestigious award recognizes the best educational applications or services designed to support PK-12 or postsecondary education institutions in the development of faculty and administrative staffincluding professional development programs, learning management systems, and content development with video-based delivery and packaging tools.

Promising Practices, initially launched in 2011, is an annual conference organized by Stride, Inc. where Stride educators, administrators, and industry leaders showcase best practices, share ideas, and address the challenges and opportunities unique to online learning. Conference popularity and attendance have risen dramatically year-over-year for each of the past three years, with an overall satisfaction rate of about 90%.

Conference attendeeshailing from all over the United Statespersonalize their conference schedules by selecting from curated sessions across 10 genres including effective design, engagement practices, evidence of mastery, gamification, meaningful empowerment, and supporting diverse learners. Top conference sessions include "Bitmoji Classrooms for K12 Teaching, Bienvenidos A Stride, Phonics: Whats the Big Dill?," and Game-Based Learning. This infographic shares key highlights from 2023s Promising Practices conference.

Niyoka McCoy, Stride's Chief Learning Officer, expressed her immense pride in Promising Practices being honored with a Stevie Award, stating, After attending the 12th Annual Promising Practices Conference, I am thrilled to witness firsthand the transformative power of this exceptional event. The conference not only celebrates innovative approaches and inspiring initiatives but also serves to ignite creativity in all who attend. This award is a testament to Stride's unwavering commitment to advancing education and fostering collaboration, leaving an indelible mark on the future of learning.

Testimonials from attendees further emphasize the positive and far-reaching impact of Promising Practices:

"This is why I LOVE Promising Practices! Its like Christmas. Thank you for all of the resources as well as the opportunity to reflect and challenge myself to improve." -Stride Special Programs Manager

"I enjoyed all of the events I chose to attend today, but the one that stood out was "Having a Full Cup: Self-Care and Teaching" because I do not do enough for myself. And as I recently heard, you cannot pour from an empty cup." -Stride Teacher

"Mind Blown! Thank you Stride for constantly pushing us to be innovative and connect with students where they are!" -Non-Stride (External) Attendee

"Thank you! As always, Promising Practices was amazing and full of applicable take-aways I can immediately implement in my classroom." -Teacher & Presenter

The American Business Awards are the nations premier business awards program. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations  public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small.

Winners of the crystal Peoples Choice Stevie Awards, as well as all other winners in the 21st ABAs, will be celebrated during a gala awards banquet on Tuesday, June 13 in New York City.

The Peoples Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite New Products are a feature of The American Business Awards in which the general public can vote for their favorite new products and services of the year. More than 41,000 votes were cast in peoples choice categories this year. All new products and services nominated in the ABAs new product categories were included in peoples choice voting.

Promising Practices will continue next year for its 13th conference on March 1, 2024, and all educators are invited to mark their calendars and save the date for this highly anticipated event. Further details and registration will be hosted on the Stride Professional Development Centers website (https://stridepdcenter.com/) later this summer.

For more information about The American Business Awards, the list of Peoples Choice Stevie Award winners, and the complete list of Stevie winners in this years ABAs, please visit www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.

About Stride Professional Development Center

Strides Professional Development Center (SPDC) is an on-demand and ever-growing content library of professional development courses for educators. Teachers professional development is important! Start today: https://stridepdcenter.com/.

About Stride, Inc.

At Stride, Inc. (NYSE: LRN), we are reimagining learningwhere learning is lifelong, deeply personal, and prepares learners for tomorrow. The company has transformed millions of peoples teaching and learning experiences by providing innovative, high-quality, tech-enabled education solutions, curriculums, and programs directly to students, schools, the military, and enterprises in primary, secondary, and postsecondary settings. Stride is a premier provider of K12 education for students, schools, and districts, including career learning services through middle and high school curriculums. For adult learners, Stride delivers professional skills training in healthcare and technology, as well as staffing and talent development for Fortune 500 companies. Stride has delivered millions of courses over the past decade and serves learners in all 50 states and more than 100 countries. More information can be found at stridelearning.com, K12.com, galvanize.com, techelevator.com, and medcerts.com.

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 Sales & Customer Service, and the Stevie Awards for Great Employers. 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.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005036/en/

Ken Schwartz

Corporate Communications

Stride, Inc.

[email protected]

Source: Stride, Inc.
First online gallery reflects Tezos global and diverse community

ZUG, Switzerland--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Today, the Tezos Foundation, which promotes development on the Tezos blockchain, and Misan Harriman, the world-renowned photographer and activist, announced the first presentation of the Tezos Foundation Permanent Art Collection to celebrate artists and creators in the Tezos ecosystem. These works will be on display in a Digital Art Gallery, to be revealed on June 16 on the Collections website for public viewing.

The initial presentation is just a fraction of the overall collection of over 2,000 works acquired between May 2022-2023 with a $1.2M USD endowment from the Tezos Foundation to Misan Harriman. Spearheaded by the Tezos Foundation and driven by Harriman, the initiative reflects the diversity of the digital art community in the Tezos ecosystem and showcases works by artists who span five continents and more than two dozen nationalities.

The first online gallery is separated into three rooms - Who We Are, What We Become, and Tracks of Existence - which highlight important themes around digital identity which emerged from research of the overall collection earlier this year. The works showcase themes of solitude and transcendence, with each piece reflecting the artists culture, environment, and individual experiences, exploring three intertwined levels of creative digital identity.

It has been such a great honor curating the Permanent Art Collection for the Tezos Foundation, said Harriman. For me, Ive wanted to see how inclusive the talent pool could be in a collection like this, and Ive been endlessly amazed by the broad range of storytelling that Ive seen across all mediums in the Contemporary Art Space. What makes this Permanent Art Collection so unique is that we have artists from Iran, from Argentina, from India, whom I believe would never have been seen, and they now know that their story, their point of view as creators, matters. To plant those seeds at the scale we have done is an extraordinary achievement and, for me, shows the world what blockchain technology, when married with intentionality and purpose, can do in actually changing peoples lives in a borderless world.

The completion of this first chapter of the Tezos Foundation Permanent Art Collection allows for new perspectives to take hold on the expansive combination of digital artworks. From poetry and photography to generative art and digital sculpture, the collection allows viewers to interpret new themes on a more global, inclusive scale than most other traditional collections across the globe.

The Tezos Foundation has always had a deep commitment to its community and to elevating the artists who want to share their work with the world, said Arthur Breitman, co-founder of Tezos. Misan Harrimans expertise and creativity allowed us to honor their art in a first-of-its-kind format, and were excited to share these pieces with the public.

Creators in the First Display of the Tezos Foundation Permanent Art Collection

About The Tezos Foundation

The Tezos Foundation is a Swiss non-profit foundation that supports the development of the Tezos blockchain, an energy-efficient network leveraged by art institutions and artists worldwide for digital art and NFTs. The Foundation is committed to expanding opportunities for digital artists, providing affordable, sustainable, and accessible NFT infrastructure. Artists using Tezos encompass a global community  one that elevates digital artists in all geographies to share their art with the world. For more information, please visit www.tezos.foundation.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005280/en/

Randall Woods

Senior Vice President, SBS Comms

[email protected]

Source: Tezos Foundation
Recipients from across the country will receive full-tuition scholarships

PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The University of Phoenix and The Enlisted Association of the National Guard of the United States (EANGUS) are proud to announce the 2023 winners of full-tuition scholarships for a bachelors degree or masters degree program for current enlisted National Guard servicemembers and their immediate family members. This years scholarship winners are Derrick Dimitris, MSgt in the New York Air National Guard; Andrew Hunsicker, SMSgt in the South Carolina Air National Guard; and Jennifer West, RN, whose husband serves in the New Mexico National Guard.

It is an honor and privilege to work with our veteran students and their families. The men and women who serve our country are incredibly brave and we welcome the chance to help support them as they embark on this new chapter of their lives, states Eric Ryan, senior director of Military Operations at University of Phoenix and Marine Corps veteran. These scholarships are a natural extension of our commitment to our military community, and we look forward to helping support these students as they work toward their education and career goals.

Hunsicker is pursuing his Master of Business Administration at the University of Phoenix and expressed his gratitude for the award. I am humbled and honored to accept the scholarship, he shares. I plan on using this blessing, and paying it forward after graduation, by operating a farm that also serves as a ministry and counseling center for those that need restoration, rescue, or rehabilitation.

Dimitris expressed his gratitude for the award, sharing, This scholarship will allow me to fulfill one of my major educational goals and I will forever be grateful to EANGUS and the University of Phoenix for choosing me for this unbelievable opportunity. I look forward to putting my new skills and understanding into practice.

EANGUS is the largest enlisted reserve component association with a mission to give a voice to the enlisted National Guard men and women, their families and retirees on Capitol Hill. University of Phoenix and EANGUS have teamed up since 2011, awarding dozens of scholarships to date, including full and partial tuition, to either current members or immediate family members of EANGUS.

EANGUS is extremely pleased and continually appreciates the generosity of this university in offering a beacon of hope to the National Guard, military and veteran communities as well as their families through our partnership and scholarship program, shared MSgt Daniel B. Reilly (Ret), EANGUS president. With the support of the University of Phoenix, EANGUS will continue developing and enhancing professionals so that our leadership factory always remains open and never closes. I look forward to watching the careers of our recipients and future leaders flourish. May this display of kindness shown by the University of Phoenix inspire others to follow in your footsteps and support those who have selflessly served and sacrificed for our country.

West, who currently works as a registered nurse, is pursuing her Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree at the University of Phoenix. I am very excited to be able to pursue a leadership role in my nursing profession, which is something I have felt ready to do for a long time, she shares. Nursing for the past 17 years has solidified my commitment to the profession, and I am looking forward to learning from and collaborating with my peers in the program. I am fairly certain I would not have been able to further my education without this scholarship. I am grateful for the opportunity.

University of Phoenix is a certified Arizona Veteran Supportive Campus and remains connected to the military community, maintaining relationships with Military Professional Associations to help support those association members and University of Phoenix students.

Click here to learn more about resources for student veterans and military service members at the University of Phoenix.

About University of Phoenix

University of Phoenix is continually innovating to help working adults enhance their careers in a rapidly changing world. Flexible schedules, relevant courses, interactive learning, and Career Services for Life help students more effectively pursue career and personal aspirations while balancing their busy lives. For more information, visit phoenix.edu.

About EANGUS

The Enlisted Association of the National Guard of the United States (EANGUS) is the largest enlisted reserve component association with over 48,000 members. Founded in 1970, EANGUS mission is to give a voice to enlisted National Guard men and women, their families, and retirees on Capitol Hill. EANGUS is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with state associations or chapters in every state and territory. EANGUS WCFA is a 501(c)(3) organization and the charitable arm of EANGUS. Its emergency relief fund has approved more than 3,000 grants to enlisted personnel or families since 2005. For more information, visit www.eangus.org.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005415/en/

Sharla Hooper

University of Phoenix

[email protected]

Michele Mitchum

University of Phoenix

[email protected]

Source: University of Phoenix
Blue Apron (NYSE: APRN) closed its previously announced transaction with FreshRealm. Under the definitive agreements entered into today, Blue Apron transferred its operational infrastructure to FreshRealm, including fulfillment centers, equipment, know-how and related personnel. Blue Apron received approximately $25 million of upfront cash, subject to certain adjustments, and is eligible to receive up to $25 million of value upon the achievement of certain milestones.

Blue Apron is now an asset-light company, focused on the growth of its direct-to-consumer business. The Company plans to continue to build its strong brand and deliver the high-quality products its customers have come to love. In addition, Blue Apron expects to accelerate the expansion of its product offerings, including the addition of new convenient options.

With a portion of the proceeds of the transaction, Blue Apron also completed the repayment of all its outstanding senior secured notes. With this payment, Blue Apron eliminated its debt.

In moving to an asset-light model, Blue Apron plans to execute further streamlining of its business, which includes reduced headcount and administrative costs, and drive additional cost savings and continued year-over-year cash burn reduction beyond the initiatives disclosed in December 2022.

With the ability to focus on the brand, marketing, product and consumer experience, Blue Apron expects to be more agile, which will facilitate faster decision making, enhance its balance sheet and reduce PTG&A costs. The Company believes this will allow it to get to profitability quicker.

Blue Apron plans to provide an update on its profitability goals and future plans on its second quarter 2023 earnings call.

Transaction Details

Under the definitive agreements for the transactions, Blue Apron sold to FreshRealm the assets and business related to its operational infrastructure, in exchange for (i) approximately $25 million of cash upfront, subject to adjustment for certain liabilities, (ii) a $3.5 million note payable by FreshRealm to Blue Apron, which is subject to offset for certain indemnification obligations, (iii) a $4 million contingent cash payment, conditioned on achievement of certain operational and financial milestones by Blue Apron, and (iv) up to an additional $17.5 million in rebates against payments under the production and fulfillment agreement that can be earned by Blue Apron for volume based on meal kits ordered by customers and new product initiatives.

Blue Apron and FreshRealm also entered into a production and fulfillment agreement with an initial term of 10 years, under which FreshRealm will be the exclusive supplier of Blue Aprons meal kits.

In addition, Blue Apron and FreshRealm entered into license agreements, under which Blue Apron licensed to FreshRealm certain rights regarding the ability to use the Blue Apron brand in certain retail channels and the right to use certain Blue Apron software.

In connection with the closing of the transactions, Blue Apron entered into subleases with FreshRealm for its Richmond, California and Linden, New Jersey facilities.

Blue Apron issued to FreshRealm a warrant to purchase shares of Blue Apron common stock representing 19.9% of the Companys outstanding common stock, with an exercise price of $0.01 per share. Blue Apron agreed to grant to FreshRealm certain registration rights with respect to the warrant shares, and FreshRealm agreed to an 18-month lockup, subject to certain exceptions.

The transactions were approved by the Board of Directors of both companies.
Fidelis Insurance Holdings (NYSE: FIHL) has filed for a proposed IPO.

The company describes itself as: "Fidelis is a global (re)insurance company, with operations in Bermuda, Ireland and the United Kingdom. FIHL was formed in Bermuda in 2014 by Richard Brindle, under the principles of focused, process-driven and disciplined underwriting and risk selection, strong client and broker relationships and nimble capital deployment. Fidelis completed its initial funding and began underwriting business in June 2015 under the direction of an experienced management team led by Richard Brindle. Since then, Fidelis has assembled a diversified global book of (re)insurance business and achieved scale as a specialty (re)insurer with GPW of $3.0 billion, total revenues of $1.5 billion and net income of $62.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2022. Our growth has continued in 2023, with our GPW increasing to $1.2 billion in the three months ended March 31, 2023 compared to $1.0 billion for the three months ended March 31, 2022. "

J.P. Morgan, Barclays and Jefferies will serve as lead underwriters.
FILE PHOTO: Binance logo is seen in this illustration taken March 31, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/

By Elizabeth Howcroft, Hannah Lang and Rae Wee

(Reuters) -The U.S. affiliate of Binance said it was halting dollar deposits, while trading platform Robinhood Markets said it was delisting some crypto tokens, after the U.S. securities regulator stepped up its crackdown on the crypto sector.

Binance.US, the purportedly independent partner of Binance, said in a tweet on Thursday that its banking partners were preparing to stop dollar withdrawal channels as early as June 13, after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission asked a court to freeze its assets. Customers have until Tuesday to withdraw their funds.

The development is the latest blow for the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange and raises questions about whether its U.S. operation can survive the SEC lawsuit, which alleges Binance manipulated its trading volumes and comingled customer assets, among other civil charges that it denies.

"This is very serious for Binance.US," said Clara Medalie, director of research at Kaiko, a digital asset data provider.

"The inability for Binance.US to offer USD trading services in a region the exchange was specifically built to operate in is an existential threat."

On Friday, Robinhood said it was removing three cryptocurrency tokens from its platform that the SEC identified as securities in its lawsuit against Binance and a separate action it filed against Coinbase the following day, in a sign the SEC litigation is already rippling through the crypto market.

The SEC sued Binance, its CEO and founder Changpeng Zhao, and Binance.US's operation on Monday, alleging in 13 charges that Binance had engaged in a "web of deception," artificially inflated trading volumes and diverted customer funds, and that Binance and Zhao were secretly controlling the U.S. entity while publicly claiming that it was independent.

Binance did not immediately reply to a request for comment. It has said it would defend its platform "vigorously," claiming the SEC was limited in reach as Binance was not a U.S. exchange.

In a subsequent filing on Tuesday, the SEC asked a federal court to freeze Binance's U.S. assets, including customer assets that total more than $2.2 billion held in crypto and some $377 million in U.S. dollar bank accounts, according to the agency. The SEC expressed concern that the company could move those funds offshore. Binance.US called the motion "unwarranted."

On Thursday, Binance.US said the SEC action had created "challenges" for its financial services providers and that the exchange would no longer accept dollar deposits as part of plans to change to a "crypto-only exchange."

As of 12 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT) on Friday, investors had pulled more than $31 million from Binance.US in the prior 24 hours, according to data firm Nansen.

BAM Trading, Binance.US's operator, holds customers' funds with California-based Axos Bank, according to a letter from lawyers for BAM Trading to the SEC dated May 26, which was made public by the SEC on Tuesday.

Axos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Binance.US had struggled to find banking partners after the failure of Signature Bank, the Wall Street Journal reported in April.

Binance.US said crypto-denominated trading, deposits, withdrawals and "staking" - where users deposit cryptocurrencies for use in blockchain transactions - would remain fully operational.

'REGULATORY GRAY AREA'

Crypto companies started out in a regulatory gray area, but the SEC under Chair Gary Gensler has steadily asserted its jurisdiction over the industry, arguing most tokens are securities and should be subject to the same disclosure rules.

Other U.S. crypto exchanges are likely to be in the firing line as a result of this week's lawsuits, which expand the number of cryptocurrencies that the SEC has identified as securities to include some commonly traded tokens, such as Solana, Cardano and Polygon. Robinhood said it would be removing those three coins effective June 27.

The Binance and Coinbase SEC lawsuits "introduced a cloud of uncertainty around these assets and, as a result, our team has decided to end support for them," the company tweeted.

On Thursday, ratings agency Moody's changed its outlook of Coinbase to "negative" from "stable," citing the potential impact of the SEC's lawsuit. Shares of Coinbase were last down 1.9% to $53.85.

Coinbase did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Hannah Lang in Washington, Elizabeth Howcroft in London and Rae Wee in Singapore; additional reporting by Tom Wilson in London and Rahat Sandhu in Bengaluru; Editing by Michelle Price and Matthew Lewis)
The logo of Robinhood Markets, Inc. is seen at a pop-up event on Wall Street after the company's IPO in New York City, U.S., July 29, 2021. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

(Reuters) - Robinhood Markets said on Friday it is removing three cryptocurrency tokens from its platform, days after the U.S. securities regulator's crackdown against the industry's biggest exchanges.

Customers will not be able to trade Solana, Cardano or Polygon using Robinhood effective June 27, the online brokerage said.

(Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)
This photo taken on June 7, 2023 shows smoke from Canadian wildfires shrouding New York, the United States. (Photo by Michael Nagle/Xinhua)

Climate change and the increasing frequency of wildfires seem to form a vicious cycle. Wildfires make ecosystems more fragile, creating conditions that are prone to further wildfires. At the same time, the massive smoke and greenhouse gas emissions from wildfires exacerbate climate change.

Breaking this cycle requires addressing both the causes and consequences of climate change, implementing effective wildfire management strategies, and promoting sustainable practices to mitigate and adapt to a changing climate.

OTTAWA/NEW YORK, June 9 (Xinhua) -- The ravaging infernos have been continuing to wreak havoc across Canada over the past weeks, and the billowing plumes of smoke generated by the fires are blanketing a large portion of the United States in the last days.

Despite Canada's annual preparations for its wildfire season, which usually runs from May through October, this year's fires have far surpassed expectations, resulting in severe damage in such an early stage. While the country finds itself confronting a formidable situation, its neighbor, the United States, is also in urgent need of solutions to the wildfires and secondary problems.

What is the situation in Canada and the United States in the face of wildfires? What are the underlying causes contributing to the wildfire crisis? And most importantly, what actions should be taken to address this pressing issue?





AN EMERGENCY CRISIS

With more than nine million acres of land burnt, over 20,000 residents evacuated and at least 400 fires still active, half of which are believed out of control, a staggering series of figures revealed on Wednesday by Canadian Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair showed that the country is facing an unprecedented battle against the raging wildfires.

"This (the wildfire) could be something we deal with off and on throughout the remainder of the summer," said Jennifer Gray, a CNN meteorologist, warning that "Canada is still early in their fire season and it has just exploded."

Echoing Gray, U.S. National Weather Service meteorologist Bryan Ramsey said, "Conditions are likely to remain unhealthy...They're probably going to continue for weeks."

The smoke from the wildfires persists, shrouding regions from British Columbia to Quebec, and even impacting the east coast of the United States. The sky takes on an eerie orange hue and visibility dramatically diminishes across northeastern North America.

The ensuing air quality problems pose a serious threat to public health, endangering the well-being of individuals across the affected areas.

"The biggest health threat from wildfire smoke is from these very small, microscopic particles that you breathe in," said Jill Baumgartner, an associate professor in the School of Population and Global Health at McGill University in Montreal, explaining that they can lead to a variety of problems from burning eyes and runny noses to chronic heart and lung diseases.

However, of particular concern is that the western coast of North America is often the hardest-hit region when it comes to wildfires. As the CBS Boston Chief Meteorologist Eric Fisher noted, "We aren't just dealing with Canada smoke, we get it in the western United States, too." The wildfires that ravaged California last year, for example, were a nightmare that no one hopes to revisit.

Photo taken on Sept. 6, 2022 shows a burning building in Hemet, Riverside County, California, the United States. (Xinhua)

According to a report released by the United Nations Environment Programme last year, the number of extreme wildfire events will increase by up to 14 percent by 2030 and 30 percent by 2050. People have no alternative but to accept the new normalcy to "learn to live with fire."

In response to the prevailing circumstances, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul called the worsening air quality "an emergency crisis." However, it is more precise to view the recurring wildfires in North America as the true crisis that demands prompt action from the public.

UNDERLYING CAUSE BEHIND THE WILDFIRES

Despite the collective efforts of domestic and international firefighters, the wildfires continued to spread unabated and surged towards an increasingly uncontrollable state.

Firefighters from across Canada were mobilized to combat the fires, while international firefighters, from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and France, rushed to Canada to rescue. According to CTV News, as of Thursday, there are nearly 1,000 international firefighters actively involved in rescue operations.

While natural factors like lightning and thunder caused a large majority of wildfires, human factors, including unattended campfires, discarded cigarette butts and arson, contribute to the others.

However, it should be emphasized that the factors mentioned above are only the direct triggers of wildfires. The underlying cause behind the ravaging infernos is, in fact, climate change.

Mohammadreza Alizadeh, a researcher at McGill University in Montreal, said the fires are a "really clear sign of climate change." In recent years, Canada has experienced prolonged periods of drought and high temperatures.

According to the Canada Drought Monitor, all 10 provinces are now under abnormal dryness, moderate or severe drought. The dry and highly flammable conditions in the forests made it easier for the fires to ignite and spread rapidly, making it more challenging for containment efforts. And the shifts in wind directions and precipitation patterns also increased the difficulty.

Describing the current situation as "a wake-up call," Salome Sane, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace Canada stressed that the Canadian government has to take climate change seriously.

Aerial photo taken on May 31, 2023 shows wildfires in Shelburne County, Nova Scotia, Canada. (Nova Scotia Government/Handout via Xinhua)

In addition, climate change and the increasing frequency of wildfires seem to form a vicious cycle. Wildfires make ecosystems more fragile, creating conditions that are prone to further wildfires. At the same time, the massive smoke and greenhouse gas emissions from wildfires exacerbate climate change.

Breaking this cycle requires addressing both the causes and consequences of climate change, implementing effective wildfire management strategies, and promoting sustainable practices to mitigate and adapt to a changing climate.

As highlighted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "multiple studies have found that climate change has already led to an increase in wildfire season length, wildfire frequency, and burned area." Therefore, proactive measures should be taken immediately to address the issue.





CONCRETE ACTIONS MUCH NEEDED

To effectively combat wildfires, it is often emphasized that individuals and communities should prioritize fire prevention and adopt responsible fire practices, including but not limited to, increasing awareness of fire prevention measures, educating the public on the proper use of fire outdoors, and implementing regular wild patrols to detect and control fires at the earliest possible stage.

While Canada and the United States indeed have strengthened regulatory measures for wildfires and imposed stricter penalties for human-caused wildfires, it is more important to pay more attention to climate change.

As June 7 marked Canada's Clean Air Day, Steven Guilbeault, the country's minister of Environment and Climate Change tweeted "The ongoing wildfires remind us that carbon pollution carries a cost on our society, as it accelerates climate change."

By the end of the century, climate change could double the acreage burned by wildfires each year, which could take a heavy toll on human safety, ecosystems and air quality, according to Canada's natural resources agency.

A firefighting plane flies above wildfires in Shellburne County, Nova Scotia, Canada, on May 31, 2023. (Nova Scotia Government/Handout via Xinhua)

The current emergency situation has sounded the alarm for the residents of the east coast of the United States, making them acutely aware of the fear that residents of the western region previously experienced in the face of rampant wildfires and the sense of urgency to deal with climate change.

"If U.S. President (Joe) Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the UN Climate Conference leaders need a reminder to take bold action on climate, the out-of-control Canadian wildfires and consequent smoke pollution should be all they need," said Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. Program co-manager at the advocacy group Oil Change International.

But mere calls for attention are far from sufficient. Addressing the wildfire crisis requires concrete actions rather than hollow slogans. Furthermore, it should not be seen as the sole responsibility and obligation of a few countries; it requires global solidarity.

"This is no time for finger-pointing. The blame game is a recipe for mutually assured destruction," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stressed at the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Otherwise, we will inevitably face the bitter consequences of climate change, for example, devastating wildfires and suffocating smog.
Data being presented at the EHA 2023 Hybrid Congress will also be highlighted in an encore oral presentation at 17-ICML

LAUSANNE, Switzerland, June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ADC Therapeutics SA (NYSE: ADCT) today announced updated results from LOTIS-2, the pivotal Phase 2 clinical trial of ZYNLONTA (loncastuximab tesirine-lpyl) in patients with relapsed/refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). The data are being presented in a poster today at the European Hematology Association 2023 Hybrid Congress (EHA2023) and will also be featured in an oral presentation at the 17th International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma (17-ICML) being held in Lugano, Switzerland from June 13-17, 2023.



Were pleased to be sharing updated LOTIS-2 results demonstrating the longterm efficacy and safety of ZYNLONTA with the lymphoma community at EHA2023 and 17-ICML, said Mohamed Zaki, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer of ADC Therapeutics. Importantly, 31% of patients who achieved a complete response remained event-free for two or more years and did not need new anticancer therapy, which we believe validates the durability of ZYNLONTA in heavily pretreated patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.

The multicenter, openlabel, singlearm Phase 2 LOTIS-2 study that evaluated ZYNLONTA in patients with relapsed or refractory DLBCL after 2 prior systemic therapies resulted in an overall response rate (ORR) of 48.3% (70/145), with a complete response (CR) rate of 24.8% (36/145). The median (range) time to response was 41.0 (35 to 247) days for all responders and 42.0 (36 to 247) days for patients with a CR. All-grade treatmentemergent adverse events occurring in 30% of all patients were increased gamma-glutamyltransferase (42%), neutropenia (40%), and thrombocytopenia (33%).

Key data from 145 evaluable patients as of the data cutoff of September 15, 2022 include the following:

The median duration of response (mDOR) was not reached for patients with a CR and was 13.37 months among all responding patients

Of the 36 patients with a CR, 11 (31%) were event-free for 2 years with no evidence of disease and no new anticancer therapy

In the subsets of patients who were event-free for 1 year and 2 years, the median (range) duration of time patients remained treatment-free post-ZYNLONTA was 24.8 (3.4 to 37.5) months and 27.7 (20.7 to 37.5) months, respectively

No new safety signals were identified

The updated results of the LOTIS-2 study demonstrate significant clinical benefit for patients with recurrent diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, an aggressive subtype of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, said Mehdi Hamadani, MD, Professor, Medical College of Wisconsin. I am excited by the potential of ZYNLONTA to treat underserved patients. ZYNLONTA continues to be a welcome option for patients with difficult-to-treat lymphoma and gives hope to them and their families.



Presentations at 17-ICML

Details of ADC Therapeutics oral presentation at 17-ICML are as follows:

Long-Term Responses with Loncastuximab Tesirine: Updated Results From LOTIS-2, the Pivotal Phase 2 Study In Patients with Relapsed/Refractory Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma [Encore of EHA 2023]

Session: Focus On... Session - Large B-Cell And Double Hit Lymphomas

Session Date and Time: Thursday, June 15, 2023, 17:00  18:00 CEST // 11:00 am  12:00 pm EDT

Presentation Time: 17:30 CEST // 11:30 am EDT

Location: Cinema Corso

Presenting Author: Paolo F. Caimi, MD, Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Center, Cleveland, OH, USA

Details of a poster presentation independently driven by IGM Biosciences at 17-ICML are as follows:

Combination of Imvotamab and Loncastuximab Tesirine Shows Enhanced Anti-Tumor Activity in a Preclinical Model of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma

Session: Lugano Poster session

Location: Marquee Parco Ciani

Presenting Author: Kathryn A. Logronio, IGM Biosciences, Inc.

Posters will be available on: Wednesday, June 14, 2023, 12:00  18:00 CEST; Thursday, June 15, 2023, 10:00  18:00 CEST; and Friday, June 16, 2023, 10:00  18:00 CEST. Presenters will be with posters on Thursday, June 15, 2023, from 12:30  13:00 CEST. ePosters will be accessible virtually in Gallery from June 14-December 15, 2023.

Titles of ADC Therapeutics abstracts accepted for publication only are as follows:

LOTIS-5, an Ongoing Phase 3 Randomized Study of Loncastuximab Tesirine with Rituximab (Lonca-R) Versus Immunochemotherapy in Patients with R/R DLBCL

Phase 1b Open-Label Study of Loncastuximab Tesirine in Combination with Other Anticancer Agents in Patients with Relapsed/Refractory B-cell Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (LOTIS-7) [Encore of ASCO 2023]

All accepted abstracts will be included in the Abstract Book, supplement to Hematological Oncology (John Wiley and Sons, Inc.), published online on Wiley Online Library on June 9 (23:59 CEST).

About ZYNLONTA (loncastuximab tesirine-lpyl)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency have 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 and in the European Union under conditional 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. Please see full prescribing information including important safety information about ZYNLONTA at www.ZYNLONTA.com.

About ADC Therapeutics

ADC Therapeutics (NYSE: ADCT) is a commercial-stage global leader and pioneer in the field of antibody drug conjugates (ADCs). The Company is advancing its proprietary ADC technology to transform the treatment paradigm for patients with hematologic malignancies and solid tumors.

ADC Therapeutics CD19-directed ADC ZYNLONTA (loncastuximab tesirine-lpyl) received accelerated approval by the FDA and conditional approval from the European Commission 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 and in earlier lines of therapy. In addition to ZYNLONTA, 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.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially from those described. Factors that may cause such differences include, but are not limited to: the benefits, if any, of the updated clinical data from the LOTIS-2 study of ZYNLONTA to be presented at EHA2023 and 17-ICML; the success of the Companys updated corporate strategy including operating efficiencies, capital deployment and portfolio prioritization; the Companys ability to achieve the 2023 net product sales guidance for ZYNLONTA and the decrease in total operating expenses for 2023 and 2024, the expected cash runway into the middle of 2025, the effectiveness of the new commercial go-to-market strategy and the Companys ability to continue to commercialize ZYNLONTA in the United States and future revenue from the same; Swedish Orphan Biovitrum AB (Sobi) ability to successfully commercialize ZYNLONTA in the European Economic Area and market acceptance, adequate reimbursement coverage, and future revenue from the same; our strategic partners, including Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corporation and Overland Pharmaceuticals, ability to obtain regulatory approval for ZYNLONTA in foreign jurisdictions, and the timing and amount of future revenue and payments to us from such partnerships; the Companys ability to market its products in compliance with applicable laws and regulations; the Companys expectations regarding the impact of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; the timing and results of the Companys or its partners research projects or clinical trials including LOTIS 5, 7 and 9, ADCT 901, 601 and 602, the timing and outcome of regulatory submissions and actions by the FDA or other regulatory agencies with respect to the Companys products or product candidates; projected revenue and expenses; the Companys indebtedness, including Healthcare Royalty Management and Blue Owl and Oaktree facilities, and the restrictions imposed on the Companys activities by such indebtedness, the ability to repay such indebtedness and the significant cash required to service such indebtedness; the Companys ability to obtain financial and other resources for its research, development, clinical, and commercial activities and other statements regarding matters that are not historical facts, and involve predictions. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance, achievements or prospects to be materially different from any future results, performance, achievements or prospects expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. In some cases you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as may, will, should, would, expect, intend, plan, anticipate, believe, estimate, predict, potential, seem, seek, future, continue, or appear or the negative of these terms or similar expressions, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Additional information concerning these and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements is contained in the Risk Factors section of the Company's Annual Report on Form 20-F and in the Company's other periodic reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company cautions investors not to place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements contained in this document. The Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this press release, except as required by law.

Investors

Eugenia Litz

ADC Therapeutics

[email protected]

+44 7879 627205

Media

Mary Ann Ondish

ADC Therapeutics

[email protected]

+1 914-552-4625
Free and open-to-the-public event welcomes all for a summertime experience featuring giveaways, music, and more

Tampa, Fla, June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ashley, the #1 furniture and mattress retailer in North America, announced today the Brand will host Ashleys Beach Retreat on the Santa Monica Pier on Saturday, June 17, and Sunday, June 18 from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. PST. The free and open-to-the-public event will host an accessible vacation oasis for guests to come and experience the Ashley brand in a whole new way.

Locals and visitors of the Pier are invited to bask in the sun on the latest Ashley outdoor furniture featuring pieces including the Danson Swivel Lounge chair, Sandy Bloom Outdoor Sofa, and Byron Bay Chaise Lounge, among others. Guests will also be able to take home one-of-a-kind Ashley gifts, enjoy music from DJ Bella Fox, and indulge in the ultimate beach experience. The event will offer unique experiences including branded Coconuts by Coco Lily, a DIY sunglass station to create sunglass chains with beads and pearls, games, and more. Following the event, as a priority of environmental stewardship, Ashley will be donating all furniture from the event back to the Santa Monica Pier for use in future activations - offering a sustainable solution and ensuring less waste.

"Were excited to bring Ashleys new outdoor pieces to the Pier! We cant wait for guests to experience the same quality, style and durability that Ashley is known for at one of the countrys most celebrated beaches, said Kelly Davis, VP of Marketing Strategy at Ashley.

Ashleys outdoor furniture collection has everything you need to entertain for every occasion. Whether you choose a sectional or a dining table, your modern outdoor furniture is sure to turn heads every time. From vibrant colors to durable frames against most weather conditions, our wide selection of outdoor furniture will always have your best style interests at heart. Shop our assortment of outdoor pieces for that extra wow factor for parties and small get-togethers.

Guests can create their own beach oasis at home by shopping Ashleys outdoor collection at https://www.ashleyfurniture.com/c/furniture/collections/outdoor/. For more information on Ashleys Beach Retreat, follow along on Instagram with @ashleyofficial.

About Ashley

Ashley (formerly Ashley HomeStore) is committed to being your trusted partner and style leader for the home. This commitment has made Ashley the #1 furniture and mattress store in North America and one of the worlds best-selling home furnishing brands with more than 1,125 locations in 67 countries. Start designing your dream home today. Visit Ashley online at www.ashley.com and connect on social media through Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, or see our design-focused boards on Pinterest.

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Attachment
Appointment of Caroline Chanavas to the EDF Groups Executive Committee

As of July 1st, 2023, Caroline Chanavas will be appointed as Executive Vice-President, Human Resources. She is tacking over Christophe Carval upon his retirement. She is currently Executive Vice-President, Human Resources jointly with Christophe Carval since April 17th 2023.

Caroline Chanavas, 57, holds Masters level degrees in multilingual engineering from the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) and from the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (EHESS), and a Masters degree in Chinese. She has also been a senior fellow of the Institut des hautes etudes de defense nationale (IHEDN).

She began her career in China, in 1990, as Sales Manager at Imaje-Jingling. In 1995, she joined Sema Group (now SchlumbergerSema) and created the Chinese subsidiary of which she subsequently became General Manager.

On her return to France, she became Alliances and Partnerships Director for SchlumbergerSema.

In 2003, Caroline Chanavas was appointed Vice-President for Asia-Pacific Strategy at Bull, before joining the Air Operations Division of Thales in 2006, where she held in turn the positions of Vice-President for Sales, then for Commercial Operations, and then for Strategy and Marketing.

In 2013, Caroline Chanavas joined Naval Group as Director of Procurement in the Services Division, responsible for the maintenance and modernization of warships and combat systems.

She has been Naval Group Executive Vice-President, Human Resources, since 2017.

Group Senior Executive Vice-President, Human Resources Division, since July 2017, Christophe Carval holds a degree in electrical engineering from HEI Lille. In 1982, he joined the EDF Group and Gaz de France, where he held numerous management positions, as unit director and then as regional director, in business activities from network operations to management of concessions and customers. In 2007, he was in charge of creating the project of EDF Groups new Shared Services Division, which he subsequently headed until 2011. He was appointed as Transformation Director in 2011 and then in 2014 Human Resources Health and Safety and Transformation Director at Enedis.

Luc Remont commented: I would like to thank Christophe Carval for his exemplary commitment to the EDF Group and, beyond that, to our public service values. The richness of his career is a source of inspiration for all our colleagues. He has given direction and structure to strategic projects for the Group, making employee involvement a key success factor in EDF's drive to become a leading figure in the energy transition. I am delighted to welcome Caroline Chanavas, whom is taking over. I know I can count on her commitment to drive the transformations ahead.

This press release is certified. Check its authenticity on medias.edf.com

About EDF

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 40.3 million customers (1), of whom 30.3 million in France (2). It generated consolidated sales of 143.5 billion in 2022.

(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.

Attachment
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gold Bull Resources Corp. (TSX-V: GBRC) (Gold Bull or the Company) is pleased to announce, in connection with its news release dated April 25, 2023, it has filed a Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA or Scoping Study) for the Sandman Project (Sandman or the Project) located in Humboldt County, Nevada, USA.

The PEA dated June 9, 2023 was prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects and is available on www.sedar.com and on the Companys website, www.goldbull.ca. The previous Mineral Resource Estimate (MRE) was not modified as part of this Scoping Study. The focus of the study was to conduct a preliminary economic assessment of the known gold resources located above the water table.

The news release dated April 25, 2023 summarizes results from the Scoping Study and the Company is pleased to report that there were no material differences between the news release and the PEA.

ABOUT SANDMAN

In December 2020, Gold Bull purchased the Sandman Project from Newmont. Gold mineralization was first discovered at Sandman in 1987 by Kennecott and the project has been intermittently explored since then. There are four known pit constrained gold resources located within the Sandman Project, consisting of 21.8Mt at 0.7g/t gold for 494,000 ounces of gold; comprising of an Indicated Resource of 18,550kt at 0.73g/t gold for 433kozs of gold plus an Inferred Resource of 3,246kt at 0.58g/t gold for 61kozs of gold. Several of the resources remain open in multiple directions and the bulk of the historical drilling has been conducted to a depth of less than 100m. Sandman is conveniently located circa 25-30 km northwest of the mining town of Winnemucca, Nevada.

QUALIFIED PERSON

The technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Mr. Jerod Eastman, a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Eastman is a Registered Member (#00885850) of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration, Inc. and is completely independent of Gold Bull Resources Corp. The information in this news release that relates to mining and cost estimation is based on, and fairly reflects, information compiled by Mr. Eastman.

ABOUT GOLD BULL RESOURCES CORP.

Gold Bulls mission is to grow into a US focused mid-tier gold development Company via rapidly discovering and acquiring additional ounces. The Companys exploration hub is based in Nevada, USA, a top-tier mineral district that contains significant historical production, existing mining infrastructure and an established mining culture. Gold Bull is led by a Board and Management team with a track record of exploration and acquisition success.

Gold Bull is driven by its core values and purpose which includes a commitment to safety, communication & transparency, environmental responsibility, community, and integrity.

Cherie LeedenPresident and CEO, Gold Bull Resources Corp.

For further information regarding Gold Bull Resources Corp., please visit our website at www.goldbull.ca or email [email protected] or phone 778.401.8545

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking StatementsNeither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release contains certain statements that may be deemed forward-looking statements with respect to the Company within the meaning of applicable securities laws. 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, indicates, opportunity, possible and similar expressions, or that events or conditions will, would, may, could or should occur. Although Gold Bull believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance, are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results or realities may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Such material risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the Companys ability to raise sufficient capital to fund its planned activities at the Sandman Project; the timing and costs of future activities on the Companys properties; maintaining its mineral tenures and concessions in good standing, to explore and develop its projects, to repay its debt and for general working capital purposes; changes in economic conditions or financial markets; the inherent hazards associates with mineral exploration and mining operations, future prices of copper and other metals, changes in general economic conditions, accuracy of mineral resource and reserve estimates, the potential for new discoveries, the ability of the Company to obtain the necessary permits and consents required to explore, drill and develop the projects and if obtained, to obtain such permits and consents in a timely fashion relative to the Companys plans and business objectives for the projects; the general ability of the Company to monetize its mineral resources; and changes in environmental and other laws or regulations that could have an impact on the Companys operations, compliance with environmental laws and regulations, dependence on key management personnel and general competition in the mining industry. Forward-looking statements are based on the reasonable beliefs, estimates and opinions of the Companys management on the date the statements are made. Except as required by law, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in the event that managements beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change.

Source: Gold Bull Resources Corp.
SAN JOSE, Calif., June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- New Skin Tattoo Removal is proud to announce the addition of two new Duality laser machines to their tattoo removal services.

New Skin Tattoo Removal has been operating at one location in San Jose, California, and is excited to announce their expansion to a secondary location. New Skin is a non-profit organization that provides low-cost laser tattoo removal services for individuals seeking a lifestyle change, job promotion, military enrollment, and overall peace of mind lifestyle. They also offer complimentary services to remove any gang or cancer-related tattoos. The team at New Skin Tattoo Removal understands that tattoo removal can be a sensitive and personal experience, and they strive to provide a supportive and caring environment for all clients. With the addition of the Astanza Duality laser machines, New Skin will be able to provide laser tattoo removal to even more people at an affordable price.

New Skin Tattoo Removal will be operating one of their new Duality lasers out of MARS Ink Tattoo Studio, a premier tattoo shop in San Jose, California. The new location offers a wide range of services, including complete laser tattoo removal, tattoo fading, and cover-up preparation. The staff at New Skin are certified to operate Q-switched Nd:YAG laser technology, designed to remove tattoos quickly and with minimal discomfort.

We are thrilled to expand our services at MARS Ink Tattoo Studio, said Adam King, owner of New Skin Tattoo Removal. Everyone deserves a second chance, and we are confident that this expansion will help us reach the milestone of 10,000 clients served.

About New Skin Tattoo RemovalNew Skin Tattoo Removal is a trusted and reliable source for tattoo removal services in San Jose, California, and surrounding areas. With a focus on safety, effectiveness, and client satisfaction, they are dedicated to providing the best laser tattoo removal treatments for their clients. Whether youre looking to remove a tattoo or lighten it for a cover-up, New Skin has the expertise and technology to help you achieve your goals.

If you are interested in the transformational work happening at New Skin Tattoo Removal, call them at (408) 899-9695 or visit their website at https://www.newskintr.org/. To reach their new pop-up location, call them at (408) 508-9130 or visit MARS Inks website at https://www.marsinktattoo.com/. Follow New Skin on Instagram or Facebook to stay up to date on the latest news and promotions.

About Astanza Laser

Astanza is the leader in lasers for tattoo removal, hair removal, and additional aesthetic procedures. In addition to delivering cutting-edge medical laser devices such as the Duality, Trinity, MeDioStar, PicoStar, and DermaBlate systems, Astanza offers an unbeatable partnership through The Astanza Experience, which is made of the Business Builder System, 3-Business Day Service Guarantee, and Lifetime Training and Support. Together, these components give Astanza clients a complete range of training, marketing, and business consulting services to achieve success in this growing field. Astanza is an award-winning company that has received several accolades from leading industry organizations, including MyFaceMyBody and Aesthetic Everything. They are also certified as a Great Place to Work and ranked #47 on Fortunes 2022 Best Places to Work in Texas and #49 on Fortunes Best Workplaces in Health Care.

Astanza Laser is headquartered in Dallas, TX, with customers throughout North America and Europe. For product, investor, or press information, call (800) 364-9010, or visit https://astanzalaser.com/. Connect with Astanza on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Source: Astanza Laser
TORONTO, June 08, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wallbridge Mining Company Limited (TSX:WM, OTCQX: WLBMF) (Wallbridge or the Company) held its Annual Meeting of Shareholders (the Meeting) today, June 8, 2023.

A total of 505,795,637 shares or 54.13% of the outstanding shares of the Company were represented at the Meeting. All of the matters submitted to the shareholders for approval as set out in the Company's notice of meeting and management information circular dated April 28, 2023 (MIC) were approved by the requisite majority of votes cast at the Meeting.

Voting on the following matters, as described in the MIC, were conducted by ballot:

To Set the Number of Directors at Nine (9)

Votes For Votes Against Number Percent Number Percent 432,199,325 89.31% 51,742,497 10.69%

Election of Directors for the Ensuing Year

The following directors were elected until the next annual meeting of shareholders or until their successors are otherwise duly elected or appointed: Alar Soever, Faramarz (Marz) Kord, Janet Wilkinson, Parviz Farsangi, Michael Pesner, Anthony Makuch, Jeffery Snow, Danielle Giovenazzo and Brian Christie.

Votes For Votes Withheld Number Percent Number Percent Alar Soever 447,027,908 92.37% 36,913,914 7.63% Faramarz (Marz) Kord 466,152,456 96.32% 17,789,366 3.68% Janet Wilkinson 470,323,251 97.19% 13,618,571 2.81% Parviz Farsangi 433,046,528 89.48% 50,895,294 10.52% Michael Pesner 437,856,828 90.48% 46,084,994 9.52% Anthony Makuch 474,098,432 97.97% 9,843,391 2.03% Jeffery Snow 470,655,348 97.25% 13,286,474 2.75% Danielle Giovenazzo 471,250,789 97.38% 12,691,333 2.62% Brian Christie 466,997,634 96.50% 16,944,188 3.50%

Appointment of KPMG LLP as Auditor of the Corporation for the ensuing year and authorizing the Directors to fix their remuneration

Votes For Votes Withheld Number Percent Number Percent 500,375,204 98.93% 5,420,433 1.07%

About Wallbridge Mining

Wallbridge is focused on creating value through the exploration and sustainable development of gold projects along the Detour-Fenelon Gold Trend while respecting the environment and communities where it operates.

Wallbridges flagship project, Fenelon Gold (Fenelon), is located on the highly prospective Detour-Fenelon Gold Trend Property in Quebecs Northern Abitibi region. An updated mineral resource estimate completed in January 2023 yielded significantly improved grades and additional ounces at the 100%-owned Fenelon and Martiniere projects, incorporating a combined 3.05 million ounces of indicated gold resources and 2.35 million ounces of inferred gold resources.

Fenelon and Martiniere are located within an 830 km2 exploration land package controlled by Wallbridge. The Company believes that these two deposits have good potential for economic development, especially given their proximity to existing hydro-electric power and transportation infrastructure. In addition, Wallbridge believes that the extensive land package is extremely prospective for the discovery of additional gold deposits.

Wallbridge also holds a 19.9% interest in the common shares of Archer Exploration Corp. (Archer) as a result of the sale of the Companys portfolio of nickel assets in Ontario and Quebec in November of 2022.

Wallbridge will continue to focus on its core Detour-Fenelon Gold Trend Property while enabling shareholders to participate in the potential economic upside in Archer.

For further information please visit the Companys website at www.wallbridgemining.com or contact:

Wallbridge Mining Company Limited

Marz Kord, P. Eng., M. Sc., MBAPresident & CEOTel: (705) 6829297 ext. 251 Email: [email protected]

Victoria Vargas, B.Sc. (Hon.) Economics, MBAInvestor Relations AdvisorEmail: [email protected]

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking InformationThis press release may contain forward-looking statements or information (collectively, FLI) within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. FLI is based on expectations, estimates, projections, and interpretations as at the date of this press release.

All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein are FLI that involve various risks, assumptions, estimates and uncertainties. Generally, FLI can be identified by the use of statements that include words such as seeks, believes, anticipates, plans, continues, budget, scheduled, estimates, expects, forecasts, intends, projects, predicts, proposes, "potential", targets and variations of such words and phrases, or by statements that certain actions, events or results may, will, could, would, should or might, be taken, occur or be achieved.

FLI herein includes but is not limited to: statements regarding the potential future performance of Archer common shares; future drill results; the Companys ability to convert inferred resources into measured and indicated resources; environmental matters; stakeholder engagement and relationships; parameters and methods used to estimate the MREs at the Fenelon Gold (defined below) and Martiniere (defined below) properties (collectively the Deposits); the prospects, if any, of the Deposits; future drilling at the Deposits; and the significance of historic exploration activities and results.

FLI is designed to help you understand managements 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. 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 results of exploration activities, the Companys financial position and general economic conditions, 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 estimate the MREs; 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 non-governmental actions; and any impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Deposits, the Companys financial position, the Companys ability to secure required funding, or operations. In addition to the MD&A, risks and uncertainties about Wallbridge's business are discussed in the disclosure materials filed with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada, which are available at www.sedar.com.

Information Concerning Estimates of Mineral Resources

The disclosure relating to the Deposits and MREs in this press release and referred to herein was prepared in accordance with NI 43-101 which differs from the requirements of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"). The terms "measured mineral resource", "indicated mineral resource" and "inferred mineral resource" used in this press release are in reference to the mining terms defined in the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum Standards (the "CIM Definition Standards"), which definitions have been adopted by NI 43-101. Accordingly, information contained in this press release providing descriptions of our mineral deposits in accordance with NI 43-101 may not be comparable to similar information made public by other U.S. companies subject to the United States federal securities laws and the rules and regulations thereunder.

Investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all mineral resources will ever be converted into reserves. Pursuant to CIM Definition Standards, "inferred mineral resources" are that part of a mineral resource for which quantity and grade or quality are estimated on the basis of limited geological evidence and sampling. Such geological evidence is sufficient to imply but not verify geological and grade or quality continuity. An inferred mineral resource has a lower level of confidence than that applying to an indicated mineral resource and must not be converted to a mineral reserve. However, it is reasonably expected that the majority of inferred mineral resources could be upgraded to indicated mineral resources with continued exploration. Under Canadian rules, estimates of inferred mineral resources may not form the basis of feasibility or pre-feasibility studies, except in rare cases. Investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of an inferred mineral resource is economically or legally mineable. Disclosure of "contained ounces" in a resource is permitted disclosure under Canadian regulations; however, the SEC normally only permits issuers to report mineralization that does not constitute "reserves" by SEC standards as in place tonnage and grade without reference to unit measures.

Investors are cautioned that while terms, are substantially similar to CIM Definition Standards, there are differences in the definitions and standards under subpart 1300 of Regulation S-K of the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "SEC Modernization Rules"), with compliance required for the first fiscal year beginning on or after January 1, 2021. The SEC Modernization Rules replace the historical property disclosure requirements included in SEC Industry Guide 7. As a result of the adoption of the SEC Modernization Rules, the SEC now recognizes estimates of "measured mineral resources," "indicated mineral resources" and "inferred mineral resources". Information regarding mineral resources contained or referenced in this press release may not be comparable to similar information made public by companies that report according to U.S. standards. While the SEC Modernization Rules are purported to be "substantially similar" to the CIM Definition Standards, readers are cautioned that there are differences between the SEC Modernization Rules and the CIM Definitions Standards. Accordingly, there is no assurance any mineral resources that the Company may report as "measured mineral resources", "indicated mineral resources" and "inferred mineral resources" under NI 43-101 would be the same had the Company prepared the resource estimates under the standards adopted under the SEC Modernization Rules.

Source: Wallbridge Mining Company Limited
The federal regulatory agency overseeing the firearms industry, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), has issued a cautionary notice emphasizing that residents of Minnesota who partake in marijuana consumption cannot legally possess firearms, despite the states recent legalization of recreational use.

While marijuana has been legalized for adults in 23 states and many others have implemented medical cannabis programs, the

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NOTE TO INVESTORS: The latest news and updates relating to IGC Pharma Inc. (NYSE American: IGC) are available in the companys newsroom at https://cnw.fm/IGC

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Saskatoon, Saskatchewan--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - 1844 RESOURCES Inc. (TSXV: EFF) (the "Company" or "1844") due to market conditions, 1844 announces amended pricing to its previously announced non-brokered private placement (the "Offering"). Pursuant to the amended pricing, the Company is increasing the number of units (the "Units") to be issued from up to 40,000,000 Units to up to 57,142,858 Units and has amended the Unit pricing from $0.05 per Unit to $0.035 per Unit. The gross proceeds for the Offering will continue to be for gross proceeds of up to $2,000,000.

The Units will consist of one common share of the Company and one common share purchase warrant (a "Warrant"). The Warrants are exercisable for a period of 36 months from closing and the exercise price of the Warrants was reduced from $0.075 per warrant to $0.055 per Warrant.

In connection with the Offering, the Company will pay 8% cash finders fee and 8% non-transferable share purchase warrants, each warrant entitling the holder thereof to purchase one common share of the Company at a price of $0.05 per share for a period of 12 months from closing.

Insiders of the Company are expected to participate in the Offering to the extent of up to 2,500,000 Units. This participation by insiders in the Offering constitutes a related party transaction as defined under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"). However, the Company considers such participation would be exempt from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101, as the fair market value of the Units subscribed for by the insiders and the consideration for the Units paid by such insiders, would not exceed 25 per cent of the Company's market capitalization.

1844 will use the net proceeds from the Offering in connection with its option to acquire the Hawk Ridge Project, for exploration on the Hawk Ridge Project and for general corporate purposes. Mr. Sylvain Laberge, President and CEO of the Company commented: "The option to acquire a 100% interest in the Hawk Ridge Project is transformational for 1844. Hawk Ridge is expected to become one of the flagship properties of the Company and is expected to add to our existing portfolio of copper and other critical mineral projects in coastal Quebec."

The Offering will be conducted under available exemptions from the prospectus requirements of applicable securities legislation and participation in the Offering will be available to existing shareholders in qualifying jurisdictions in Canada in accordance with BC Instrument 45-534 - Prospectus Exemption for Distributions to Existing Security Holders and the corresponding blanket orders and rules implementing CSA Notice 45-313 - Prospectus Exemption for Distributions to Existing Security Holders in the participating jurisdictions in respect thereof (collectively, the "Existing Security Holder Exemption").

The Company has set June 1st, 2023 as the record date for the purpose of determining shareholders entitled to participate in the Offering in reliance on the Existing Security Holder Exemption. Qualifying shareholders who wish to participate in the Offering should contact the Company at the contact information set forth below no later than June 20, 2023. If the Offering is over-subscribed for, Units will be allocated pro-rata amongst all subscribers. All subscription materials must be provided to the Company no later than June 23, 2023. The Company may close the Offering in several tranches during the Offering, the first of which the Company intends to close no later than June 30, 2023. In addition to conducting the Offering pursuant to the Existing Shareholder Exemption, the Offering will also be conducted pursuant to other available prospectus exemptions. Insiders may participate in the Offering.

The aggregate acquisition cost to a subscriber under the Existing Security Holder Exemption cannot exceed $15,000, unless that subscriber has obtained advice regarding the suitability of the investment and, if the subscriber is resident in a jurisdiction of Canada, such advice is obtained from a person that is registered as an investment dealer in the subscriber's jurisdiction.

In addition to the Existing Security Holder Exemption and other available prospectus exemptions, a portion or all of the Offering may be completed pursuant to Multilateral CSA Notice 45-318 - Prospectus Exemption for Certain Distributions through an Investment Dealer ("CSA 45-318") and the corresponding blanket orders and rules implementing CSA 45-318 in the participating jurisdictions in respect thereof in the participating jurisdictions (collectively with CSA 45-318, the "Investment Dealer Exemption"). Pursuant to CSA 45-318, each subscriber relying on the Investment Dealer Exemption must obtain advice regarding the suitability of the investment from a registered investment dealer. There is no material fact or material change of the Company that has not been generally disclosed.

All securities issued pursuant to the Offering will be subject to a statutory hold period expiring four months and one day after closing of the Offering. Completion of the Offering is subject to a number of conditions, including, without limitation, receipt of all regulatory approvals, including approval of the TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange").

None of the securities issued in the Offering will be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "1933 Act"), and none of them may be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements of the 1933 Act. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of the securities in any state where such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful.

For more details on the Company's option to acquire the Hawk Ridge Project see the Company's news releases dated March 6 and 7, 2023. The Company originally announced the Offering on April 12, 2023. Copies of the Company's news releases are available under the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. The Company's option to acquire the Hawk Ridge Project remains subject to Exchange approval.

About 1844 Resources Inc.: 1844 is an exploration company with a focus in strategic and energetic metals and underexplored regions "Gasp, Nunavik Quebec". With a dedicated management team, the Company's goal is to create shareholder value through the discovery of new deposits.

1844 RESOURCES INC.

(signed) "Sylvain Laberge"

Sylvain Laberge

President and CEO

514.702.9841

[email protected] resources.com

FORWARD LOOKING INFORMATION

This news release includes "forward-looking statements" and "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. All statements included in this news release, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements including, without limitation, statements with respect to the Company's option on the Hawk Ridge Project and the Offering. Forward-looking statements include predictions, projections and forecasts and are often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", "potential", "target", "budget" and "intend" and statements that an event or result "may", "will", "should", "could" or "might" occur or be achieved and other similar expressions and includes the negatives thereof.

Forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by management based on the business and markets in which the Company operates, are inherently subject to significant operational, economic, and competitive uncertainties, risks and contingencies. These include assumptions regarding, among other things: general business and economic conditions; the availability of additional exploration and mineral project financing; and Exchange approval.

There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate and actual results, and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations include exploration or other risks detailed from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulators, including those described under the heading "Risks and Uncertainties" in the Company's most recently filed MD&A. The Company does not undertake to update or revise any forward-looking statements, except in accordance with applicable law.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169491
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - AXMIN Inc. (TSXV: AXM) ("AXMIN" or the "Company") is providing the following corporate update.

Private Placement

In connection with the non-brokered private placement of up to 10,000,000 common shares at C$0.05 per share (the "Offering") previously disclosed in the Company's new releases dated March 28, 2023 and May 11, 2023, the Company has applied to the TSX Venture Exchange for a further 30-day extension of price protection in order to complete the Offering.

Closing of the Offering is subject to receipt of all necessary corporate and regulatory approvals, including the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. All securities issued in connection with the Offering will be subject to a hold period of four months plus a day from the date of issuance and to the resale rules of applicable securities legislation.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of any of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), or the securities laws of any state of the United States (as defined in Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act) and may not be offered or sold within the United States unless such securities have been registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or pursuant to exemptions from such registration requirements.

Binding International Arbitration Process

Further to the Company's news release dated February 10, 2023 and as disclosed in the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis for the three months ended March 31, 2023 and 2022 filed on SEDAR, during March 2023, the Company engaged White & Case LLP, a leading international law firm with extensive experience in both commercial and investor state international arbitration, to take appropriate steps vis--vis the Government of the Central African Republic ("CAR") in relation to the cancellation of the Company's mining license and two exploration permits for the Passendro Gold Project.

Under the CAR's Mining Convention of 2006 and the addendum thereto concluded in August 2010, the Company can bring their claim against the CAR in international arbitration in Paris before the Chambre Arbitrale Internationale de Paris. The Company intends in due course to initiate the binding international arbitration process against the government of CAR.

The Company has determined that the sunk costs incurred in connection with the Passendro Gold Project to be in the region of US$148.6 million. In 2011, the Company conducted a National Instrument 43-101-compliant Bankable Feasibility Study, which assessed the net present value at over US$340 million, assuming a gold price of US$1,100.

Board of Directors Change

Effective June 9, 2023, Terry Wong resigned as a director of the Company. The board of directors of the Company would like to thank Terry for her years of service to the Company and wish her well in her future endeavours. The Company is in the process of selecting a replacement director.

About AXMIN

AXMIN is a Canadian exploration and development company with a strong focus on central and West Africa. For more information regarding AXMIN, visit our website at www.axmininc.com.

Please follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/axmininc.

This press release includes certain "Forward-Looking Statements." All statements, other than statements of historical fact included herein, including without limitation, statements regarding future plans and objectives of AXMIN and statements regarding the ability to develop and achieve production at the Passendro Gold Project, are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties.

There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from AXMIN's expectations have been disclosed under the heading "Risk Factors" and elsewhere in AXMIN's documents filed from time-to-time with the TSX Venture Exchange and other regulatory authorities. AXMIN disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether resulting from new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Lucy Yan

CEO and Chairman 604 488-8878

[email protected]

General Enquiries

Investor Relations

[email protected]

www.axmininc.com

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169482
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - Baselode Energy Corp. (TSXV: FIND) (OTCQB: BSENF) ("Baselode" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the closing of a final tranche of its previously announced non-brokered private placement (the "Offering"). Under the final tranche, the Company sold 870,000 flow-through units of the Company (the "FT Units") at a price of C$0.48 per FT Unit for gross proceeds to the Company of C$417,600.00 (the "Offering").

Each FT Unit consists of one common share of the Company issued as a "flow-through share" within the meaning of the Income Tax Act (Canada) (each, a "FT Share") and one half of one common share purchase warrant (each whole warrant, a "Warrant"). Each Warrant will entitle the holder thereof to purchase one common share (each, a "Warrant Share") at a price of C$0.70 at any time on or before June 8th, 2025. The FT Shares and Warrant Shares will be subject to a hold period of four months expiring on October 10th, 2023 in accordance with applicable securities laws.

The Company intends to use the proceeds raised from the Offering for exploration of the Company's projects in the Athabasca Basin. Proceeds from the sale of FT Shares will be used to incur "Canadian exploration expenses" as defined in subsection 66.1(6) of the Income Tax Act and "flow through mining expenditures" as defined in subsection 127(9) of the Income Tax Act. Such proceeds will be renounced to the subscribers with an effective date not later than December 31, 2023, in the aggregate amount of not less than the total amount of gross proceeds raised from the issue of FT Shares.

In connection with the final tranche of the Offering, the Company paid total cash commissions of C$25,056.00 and issued 52,200 compensation warrants (each, a "Compensation Warrant"). Each Compensation Warrant entitles the holder thereof to purchase one common share of the Company at a price of C$0.48 at any time on or before June 9th, 2025.

The securities described herein have not been, and will not be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any U.S. state securities laws, and may not be offered or sold in the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of, United States persons absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable U.S. state securities laws. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities in the United States, nor in any other jurisdiction.

About Baselode Energy Corp.

Baselode controls 100% of approximately 264,172 hectares for exploration in the Athabasca Basin area, northern Saskatchewan, Canada. The land package is free of any option agreements or underlying royalties.

The Company discovered the ACKIO near-surface, high-grade uranium deposit in September 2021. ACKIO measures greater than 375 m along strike, greater than 150 m wide, comprised of at least 5 separate zones, with mineralization starting as shallow as 28 m beneath the surface and down to approximately 300 m depth beneath the surface with the bulk of mineralization occurring in the upper 200 m. ACKIO remains open to the west, south, and along the Athabasca sandstone unconformity to the east and south.

Baselode's Athabasca 2.0 exploration thesis focuses on discovering near-surface, basement-hosted, high-grade uranium orebodies outside the Athabasca Basin. The exploration thesis is further complemented by the Company's preferred use of innovative and well-understood geophysical methods to map deep structural controls to identify shallow targets for diamond drilling.

For further information, please contact:

Baselode Energy Corp.

FIND on the TSXV

[email protected]

www.baselode.com

James Sykes, CEO, President and Director

[email protected]

306-221-8717

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the TSX Venture Exchange policies) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Certain information in this press release may contain forward-looking statements. This information is based on current expectations that are subject to significant risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Actual results might differ materially from results suggested in any forward-looking statements. Baselode Energy Corp. assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those reflected in the forward looking-statements unless and until required by securities laws applicable to Baselode Energy Corp. Additional information identifying risks and uncertainties is contained in the Company's filings with Canadian securities regulators, which filings are available under Baselode Energy Corp. profile at www.sedar.com.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169476
UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers separate the Lebanese and Israeli armies in the village of Kfarchouba, Lebanon, June 9, 2023. The spokesperson for the UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Andrea Tenenti on Friday urged Lebanon and Israel to exercise restraint amid the border tensions. (Photo by Ali Hashisho/Xinhua)

BEIRUT, June 9 (Xinhua) -- The spokesperson for the UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Andrea Tenenti on Friday urged Lebanon and Israel to exercise restraint amid the border tensions.

"We urge the parties to use our coordination mechanisms effectively to prevent misunderstandings and violations and contribute to maintaining stability in the region," Tenenti was quoted as saying by the National News Agency.

"UNIFIL peacekeepers are on the ground to ensure the continuation of the cessation of hostilities, establish calm, and help mitigate tensions," he added.

Earlier in the day, the Israeli army attacked with tear gas Lebanese citizens in the border villages of Kfarchouba and al-Arqoub, who were demonstrating against Israel's bulldozing work on their lands, Elnashra news website reported.

The Lebanese army deployed its forces to support the protests while UNIFIL sent reinforcements. 

UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers patrol near the village of Kfarchouba, Lebanon, June 9, 2023. The spokesperson for the UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Andrea Tenenti on Friday urged Lebanon and Israel to exercise restraint amid the border tensions. (Photo by Ali Hashisho/Xinhua)

UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers separate the Lebanese and Israeli armies in the village of Kfarchouba, Lebanon, June 9, 2023. The spokesperson for the UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Andrea Tenenti on Friday urged Lebanon and Israel to exercise restraint amid the border tensions. (Photo by Ali Hashisho/Xinhua)
All Home Care Matters is teaming up with Caregiving.com on a joint venture to support family caregivers and provide them with a sense of community. This partnership aims to redefine what's considered normal for caregivers by bringing together elements of a support group and a talk show.

Livonia, Michigan--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - Caregiving.com and the producers of the popular and critically-acclaimed All Home Care Matters YouTube show and podcast, have joined forces to introduce a brand-new podcast called "Real Talk With Real Caregivers." The upcoming series will shine a spotlight on Caregiving.com's Caregiver Champions, and promises to be an insightful and invaluable resource for all caregivers. The premiere episode is titled "Not Losing Yourself and Still Living Your Life as a Caregiver."

Caregiving.com

The Champions, who are both current and former caregivers, have offered support and a voice to family caregivers across various topics and issues. The show will be produced once a month and will cover a wide range of topics. "Real Talk With Real Caregivers" will debut on June 27 and can be viewed on Caregiving.com, AllHomeCareMatters.com, and most streaming platforms. The premiere episode, which is titled "Not Losing Yourself and Still Living Your Life as a Caregiver," will be featured and available to viewers.

Real Talk with Real Caregivers

Mike Eidsaune, CEO of Caregiving.com, described the upcoming podcast as a unique blend of a support group and a talk show. "It's like a support group met a talk show and had a baby. I'm absolutely thrilled about the podcast because it provides a much-needed platform for family caregivers to recognize their own experiences, and to have their fears, struggles, and emotions affirmed by other caregivers from around the country who understand them." Christina Keys, Director of Community Growth for Caregiving.com, shares that the show will offer educational and healing support for caregivers nationwide.

"Family caregivers have often faced challenges in finding local resources and support, leading to feelings of isolation. As caregivers, our circle of people who truly understand what we are going through becomes very small. Our whole life is impacted - physically, financially, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Real Talk with Real Caregivers is an initiative that aims to help family caregivers feel less alone and redefine what is considered normal. How can we navigate this journey together?"

Christina Keys

Lance A. Slatton, of Livonia, MI, and the award-winning host of All Home Care Matters YouTube show and podcast, expressed excitement about partnering with Caregiving.com to "shed a light on the issues that so many family caregivers face on a daily basis."

"Through this partnership, we look forward to bringing them resources, support, and discussions to help them on their caregiving journey with Real Talk from Real Caregivers," says Slatton, whose show has more than 125,000 YouTube subscribers. "Caregiving.com has a long and established reputation as a leader in resources and support for caregivers. We here at All Home Care Matters are looking forward to contributing to this already prestigious reputation and helping to add voices and faces to the oftentimes silent majority that is family caregivers."

All Home Care Matters recently announced another new show, "Conscious Caregiving with L & L," produced and presented by All Home Care Matters and Alzheimer's Speaks. "Conscious Caregiving with L & L" will take place once a month and feature leading experts and influencers from across the senior care spectrum, focusing on senior care topics and issues.

To catch up on the latest episodes, visit caregiving.com/media/podcasts

About Caregiving.com

Caregiving.com is committed to engaging and empowering family caregivers worldwide via a multi-faceted support model delivered through our leading-edge platform. We strive to inspire a sense of community that engages and supports caregivers in building resilience and sustainability as they navigate their caregiving journey. Likewise, we aim to be a safe, accessible space for all family caregivers to find comfort, support, and advice.

With a combination of community-led support, re-imagined content, innovative incentive structures, thoughtful alignment with health systems, and the utilization of our best-in-class consumer design, we create a one-of-a-kind experience that will be life-changing for hundreds of millions of family caregivers around the world while also dramatically enhance the healthcare landscape as a whole. We believe that by engaging caregivers today, we can empower them for tomorrow's journey.



About All Home Care Matters & Enriched Life Home Care Services

Enriched Life Home Care Services (ELHCS) in Livonia has been named the No. 1 home care company in Michigan the last two years by Top Rated Local. ELHCS provides care for people throughout southeastern Michigan. In May 2020, ELHCS launched All Home Care Matters, a YouTube program focused on long-term care issues. The show, hosted by Lance A. Slatton CSCM, has more than 125,000 YouTube subscribers and 65,000 daily podcast downloads. The show also was a 2023 29th annual AIVA Communicator Award Recipient (Academy of Interactive Visual Arts). Visit the official YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/AllHomeCareMatters or listen to the show on Apple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all-home-care-matters/id1513502341 and visit the official website for All Home Care Matters at https://www.allhomecarematters.com

Contact Person Name: Lance A. Slatton

Email: [email protected]

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169348
Find Addiction Rehabs releases comprehensive resources to prevent drug abuse, help regain custody after substance use, and support parents of addicts. Their commitment to education, guidance, and empowerment aims to break the cycle of addiction and promote healthy communities and families.

Boca Raton, Florida--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - Find Addiction Rehabs, a leading platform dedicated to assisting individuals battling drug addiction, has announced the launch of an extensive range of resources designed to offer effective means of preventing drug abuse, aid in regaining custody after overcoming addiction as a parent, and a complementing guide for parents dealing with addiction-related challenges from their children.

With a firm commitment to supporting individuals, families, and whole communities throughout the journey to recovery, Find Addiction Rehabs aims to equip everyone with the necessary knowledge and tools to overcome the devastating effects of alcohol and substance use disorders.

Find Addiction Rehabs recognizes the vital role education and awareness of addictive disorders play in curbing the escalating issue of drug abuse across the country. As part of its commitment to fostering healthier communities, the platform has developed comprehensive offerings that empower individuals and families with the knowledge and skills needed to prevent drug abuse.

ind Addiction Rehabs Launches Comprehensive Resources on Methods of Drug Abuse Prevention and Recovery

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/8814/169224_5ce0a9e3549e2a4e_001full.jpg

The newly launched resources provide practical advice on promoting a drug-free environment, educating individuals about the risks associated with drug use, and fostering open conversations about substance abuse within families, schools, and communities. Find Addiction Rehabs believes that by raising awareness and offering proactive preventive measures, the devastating cycle of drug abuse can be effectively broken.

Recovery from substance abuse is a complex journey, and one of the most significant challenges individuals face is regaining custody of children after addiction struggles. Find Addiction Rehabs is dedicated to supporting individuals in overcoming these obstacles and rebuilding their lives.

The impact of addiction on families is profound, and parents often find themselves grappling with many emotions, uncertainties, and a lot of questions. Understanding the importance of a strong support system, Find Addiction Rehabs has curated a collection of books specifically tailored to help parents of addicts.

These thoughtfully selected books provide valuable insights, guidance, and solace to parents navigating the challenges of addiction within their families. From personal stories of resilience to expert advice on communication and intervention strategies, these books offer a lifeline of support, equipping parents with the knowledge and strength necessary to support their loved ones and foster their own well-being.

Find Addiction Rehabs' extensive collection of books for parents of addicts aims to foster a sense of community and connection, letting parents know they are not alone in their journey. The platform believes that by arming parents with the right resources, they can play a crucial role in their child's recovery.

With a firm commitment to empowering communities and fostering resilience, Find Addiction Rehabs offers a trusted resource for those seeking support and guidance for recovery. The platform's dedication to providing quality, accessible information serves as a beacon of hope for individuals battling addiction and their loved ones.

About Us: Alcohol Rehab and Drug Rehab Resources Across America

Contact Info:

Name: Eric Reinach

Email: [email protected]

Organization: Find Addiction Rehabs

Phone: 888-292-3113

Website: https://findaddictionrehabs.com/

Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO1Us3y77oU

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169224
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - LevelJump Healthcare Corp. (TSXV: JUMP) (OTCQB: JMPHF) (FSE: 75J) ("LevelJump" or the "Company"), a Canadian leader in B2B telehealth solutions, is pleased to announce that it is undertaking a new preferred offering to investors.

The Company plans to sell a total of 5,000,000 of units at $1 per unit which consist of (i) one (1) common share of LevelJump ("Common Share"), at an issue price of $0.10 per Common Share; and (ii) one (1) 8% cumulative redeemable convertible Class A Series 1 preferred share ("Preferred Share"), at an issue price of $0.90 per Preferred Share.

Each Preferred Share is non-voting, carries a cumulative annual dividend of 8% payable quarterly, along with a top up dividend of 25% of the portion of LevelJump's EBITDA that is above $2,000,000 per year, divided by the then outstanding Preferred Shares. The Preferred Shares are redeemable on the fifth anniversary (the "Redemption Date") after issuance at a price of $1.00 per Preferred Share (or at a price of $1.10 per Preferred Share if redeemed any time prior to the Redemption Date) together with all accrued and unpaid dividends. The Preferred Shares are also convertible, prior to being redeemed or called, into common shares of the Company at a price of $0.40 per Common Share. Subject to applicable law and to certain exceptions, LevelJump may, at any time prior to the Redemption Date, purchase for cancellation all or any number of the Preferred Shares outstanding from time to time at any price in the open market if they are listed or posted for trading on a stock exchange or by tender available to all of holders of Preferred Shares or by private agreement or otherwise.

Preferred Share Unit Sale Update

On May 30, 2023, the Company closed a non-brokered private placement of 50,000 units at a price of $1 per unit, each unit being comprised of one (1) Class A-1 Preferred Share and one common share for gross proceeds of $50,000. The Company paid a finder's fee of $3,500 in relation to the sale.

To date, the Company has sold 164,000 units in a prior offering and has commitments for a further 1,130,000 units. The Company will be offering the remaining 3,706,000 units at this time on approval from the TSXV exchange.

About LevelJump Healthcare

LevelJump Healthcare Corp., (TSXV: JUMP) provides telehealth solutions to client hospitals and imaging centers through its Teleradiology division, as well as in person radiology services through its IHF's (Independent Healthcare Facilities). JUMP focuses primarily on critical care for urgent and emergency patients, establishing integral relationships in the communities we serve.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF

LEVELJUMP HEALTHCARE CORP.

Mitchell Geisler

Chief Executive Officer

Caitlin-Robyn Densmore

Investor Relations Manager

[email protected]

(437) 214-1568

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws relating to the Company's business plans and the outlook of the Company's industry. Although the Company believes, in light of the experience of its officers and directors, current conditions and expected future developments and other factors that have been considered appropriate, that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Actual results and developments may differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this release and the Company assumes no responsibility to update them or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances other than as required by applicable securities laws. The Company undertakes no obligation to comment on analyses, expectations or statements made by third-parties in respect of the Company, Canadian Teleradiology Services, Inc., their securities, or their respective financial or operating results (as applicable).

Neither the Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

The securities being offered have not been, and will not be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any U.S. state securities laws, and may not be offered or sold in the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of, United States persons absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable U.S. state securities laws. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities in the United States, nor in any other jurisdiction.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169438
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - PesoRama Inc.(TSXV: PESO) (OTCQB: PSSOF)("PesoRama" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that, today, it has entered into a binding senior secured revolving credit facility (the "Loan Agreement") for up to $20M (the "Loan") with Third Eye Capital Corporation (the "Agent") on behalf of certain lenders (the "Lenders"). The Loan will support the Company's continued expansion through the construction of new JOi Dollar Plus Stores in Mexico and the expansion of the Company's inventory and product offerings.

The Loan matures in three years and will be made available subject to a borrowing base up to a maximum of $20M. The Loan will bear interest equal to the greater of: (i) 13.5%; and (ii) 7.55% above the Prime Rate posted by the Royal Bank of Canada ("Interest"). The Interest is compounded and payable monthly in arrears and subject to interest reserve requirements.

"Today is a day of celebration as we reach this milestone and closing of this new credit facility," said Rahim Bhaloo, Founder and Executive Chairman. "The successful establishment of this facility demonstrates the effectiveness of our business model, strong market demand and the overall opportunity that the Mexican market presents. I am incredibly proud of everything our team has been able to achieve and will build on this growing momentum as we strategically expand throughout Mexico. Congratulations and thank you to the whole PesoRama and Third Eye teams, our loyal customers and our shareholders who got us here."

"After several months of due diligence with both Canadian and Mexican management and shareholders, which included physical visits to multiple stores and inventory locations, we are pleased to structure a financing specifically tailored to meet PesoRama's growth plans," commented Omar Murad, Director of Special Situations at Third Eye Capital. "We look forward to helping spread 'JOi' across Mexico."

The Loan is subject to a closing fee of $800,000 to be paid in two installments to the Agent, for the rateable benefit of the Lenders. A standby fee equal to 1% will be paid annually by the Company to the Agent, for the account of the Lenders, calculated and payable quarterly in arrears, of the difference between the daily revolver advances outstanding and the revolver limit during such quarter. An annual monitoring fee of $50,000 will be paid by the Company to the Agent, which fee will be paid in quarterly instalments beginning today and each three-month anniversary thereafter.

As partial consideration for entering into the Loan Agreement, the Company issued 15,060,838 non-transferable warrants to the Lenders (the "Warrants") to purchase up to an aggregate of 15,060,838 common shares of the Company. Each Warrant has an exercise price equal to $0.14 and is exercisable for five years.

The Lenders are not Non-Arm's Length Parties of the Company as defined pursuant to the policies of the TSXV. The Lenders do not own nor have any beneficial ownership of any securities of the Company other than the Warrants granted pursuant to the Loan Agreement.

The Loan was approved by the TSXV.

About PesoRama Inc.

PesoRama, operating under the JOi Dollar Plus brand, is a Mexican value dollar store retailer. PesoRama launched operations in 2019 in Mexico City and the surrounding areas targeting high-density, high-traffic locations. PesoRama's 21 stores offer consistent merchandise offerings which include items in the following categories: household goods, pet supplies, seasonal products, party supplies, health and beauty, snack food items, confectionery and more. For more information visit: http://pesorama.ca/.

For further information please contact:

Rahim Bhaloo

Founder & Executive Chairman

[email protected]

416-816-3291



Erica Fattore

President & Chief Executive Officer

[email protected]

In this press release, all references to "$" are to Canadian dollars.

* * *

Notice regarding forward-looking statements:

This press release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including, among other things, statements regarding the Company's proposed construction of new stores, the Company's proposed purchase of inventory, the amount that will be made available per advance pursuant to the Loan Agreement, the calculation of Interest, the payment of a standby fee, and the payment of an annual monitoring fee. While the Company believes that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. 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, including due to changes in consumer behaviour, general economic factors, changes in the Interest, the ability of the Company to execute its strategies, the availability of capital and the risk factors which are discussed in greater detail in the "Risk Factors" section of the Company's prospectus dated January 31, 2022 and filed under the Company's profile on www.sedar.com. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this release. PesoRama undertakes no obligation to comment on analyses, expectations or statements made by third-parties in respect of PesoRama, its securities, or its financial or operating results (as applicable).

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.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169478
Calgary, Alberta and Houston, Texas--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - -PetroTal Corp. (TSX: TAL) (AIM: PTAL) (OTCQX: PTALF) ("PetroTal" or the "Company")announces the following updates related to the illegal river blockade.

Illegal River Blockade Update

As of June 8, 2023, The Indigenous Association for Development and Conservation of Bajo Puinahua ("AIDECOBAP") seized and are holding two oil transport convoys. The first is an empty Brazilian convoy, with a crew of six and a total capacity of 70,000 barrels of oil that was traveling to the Bretana field. The second was a Peruvian convoy which contained approximately 40,000 barrels of oil and was destined for the Iquitos refinery. It has a crew of eight Peruvian nationals, none of whom are PetroTal employees. The Company does not own or operate either convoy, both of which are being held near the town of 7 de Junio. During the hostile takeover of the convoys, a Navy sailor was injured in the head with a spear requiring minor medical attention. The Peruvian navy has been activated and will remain nearby to monitor the integrity of the vessels and health of the crew.

AIDECOBAP continues to prevent the transit of ships in the Puinahua channel with a group of approximately sixty people and ten boats. The residents of Bretana have expressed their strong opposition to the blockade of the river system which has halted PetroTal's operations. On June 8, 2023, The Presidency of the Council of Ministers ("PCM") and the Ministry of Energy and Mines held a meeting with AIDECOBAP to better understand their claims and reasons for engagement. PetroTal was also invited to this meeting and a de-escalation plan has been actioned which is a positive step towards reaching resolution.

The Company has, and always will, strive for full alignment between all working table and social fund members to achieve the social fund's objectives. PetroTal is working with all parties to help the Government of Peru generate a rapid, peaceful, and safe resolution to the blockade. The Company's 2023 oil production forecast included planned downtime and a 5% social downtime contingency in its 2023 guidance to allow for social disruption.

ABOUT PETROTAL

PetroTal is a publicly traded, triquoted (TSX: TAL, AIM: PTAL and OTCQX: PTALF) oil and gas development and production Company domiciled in Calgary, Alberta, focused on the development of oil assets in Peru. PetroTal's flagship asset is its 100% working interest in Bretana oil field in Peru's Block 95 where oil production was initiated in June 2018. In early 2022, PetroTal became the largest crude oil producer in Peru. The Company's management team has significant experience in developing and exploring for oil in Peru and is led by a Board of Directors that is focused on safely and cost effectively developing the Bretana oil field. It is actively building new initiatives to champion community sensitive energy production, benefiting all stakeholders.

For further information, please see the Company's website at www.petrotal-corp.com, the Company's filed documents at www.sedar.com, or below:

Douglas Urch

Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

[email protected]

T: (713) 609-9101

Manolo Zuniga

President and Chief Executive Officer

[email protected]

T: (713) 609-9101

PetroTal Investor Relations

[email protected]

Celicourt Communications

Mark Antelme / Jimmy Lea

[email protected]

T : 44 (0) 208 434 2643

Strand Hanson Limited (Nominated & Financial Adviser)

Ritchie Balmer / James Spinney / Robert Collins

T: 44 (0) 207 409 3494

Stifel Nicolaus Europe Limited (Joint Broker)

Callum Stewart / Simon Mensley / Ashton Clanfield

T: +44 (0) 20 7710 7600

Auctus Advisors LLP (Joint Broker)

Jonathan Wright

T: +44 (0) 7711 627449

READER ADVISORIES

Neither the TSX Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169413
Vancouver, British Columbia and Johannesburg, South Africa--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - Platinum Group Metals Ltd. (TSX: PTM) (NYSE American: PLG) ("Platinum Group", "PTM" or the "Company") reports that the Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security ("JOGMEC") and Hanwa Co. Ltd. ("Hanwa") have established a special purpose company, HJ Platinum Metals Ltd. ("HJM"), to hold and fund their future equity interests in the Waterberg platinum group metals project ("Waterberg PGM Project"). The combined interests of JOGMEC (12.195%) and Hanwa (9.755%) have been consolidated into a 21.95% interest for HJM going forward, with JOGMEC to fund 75% of future equity investments into HJM and Hanwa the remaining 25%.

Platinum Group President and CEO Frank R. Hallam said, "A Memorandum of Understanding regarding cooperation on the Waterberg PGM Project was signed in Cape Town during May 2022. Since then, JOGMEC and Hanwa have undertaken a project-scheme reorganization amongst themselves. With this reorganization now complete, our Japanese partners are in position to continue their support towards a development plan for the Waterberg PGM Project. Platinum, palladium, rhodium, and gold ("PGMs"), as well as copper and nickel, are widely used in Japanese industry, including use in fuel cells, automotive catalysis, and hydrolyzers, and are expected to play a critical role in decarbonization. The Waterberg PGM Project holds1large-scale, shallow PGM reserves and is expected to be a cost-competitive mine based on bulk, mechanized mining methods. The Waterberg PGM Project is also expected to be a new stable PGM supply source for Japanese industry upon the commencement of production."

About the Waterberg PGM Project

The Waterberg PGM Project, discovered in 2011, is a bulk underground PGM deposit located on the northern limb of the Bushveld Complex in South Africa, and is owned by Platinum Group (37.05%), Mnombo Wethu Consultants (Pty) Ltd. ("Mnombo") (26.0%), Impala Platinum Holdings Ltd. (15%) ("Implats"), and HJM (21.95%) through Waterberg JV Resources (Pty) Ltd. ("Waterberg JV Co.). As a result of its equity interest in Mnombo, the Company has an aggregate 50.02% direct and indirect interest in the Waterberg PGM Project.

Qualified Person

Rob van Egmond, P.Geo., a consultant geologist to the Company and a former employee, is an independent qualified person as defined in National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"). Mr. van Egmond has reviewed, validated, and approved the scientific and technical information contained in this news release and has previously visited the Waterberg Project site.

About Platinum Group Metals Ltd.

Platinum Group Metals Ltd. is the operator of the Waterberg PGM Project, a bulk underground palladium and platinum deposit located in South Africa. The Waterberg PGM Project was discovered by Platinum Group and is being jointly developed with Implats, Mnombo, JOGMEC and Hanwa. Total expenditures on the property since inception from all investor sources to February 28, 2023, are approximately US $82.9 million.

On behalf of the Board of

Platinum Group Metals Ltd.

Frank R. Hallam

President, CEO and Director

For further information contact:

Kris Begic, VP, Corporate Development

Platinum Group Metals Ltd., Vancouver

Tel: (604) 899-5450 / Toll Free: (866) 899-5450

www.platinumgroupmetals.net

Disclosure

The Toronto Stock Exchange ("TSX") and the NYSE American have not reviewed and do not accept responsibility for the accuracy or adequacy of this news release, which has been prepared by management.

This news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities laws and forward-looking statements within the meaning of U.S. securities laws (collectively "forward-looking statements"). Forward-looking statements are typically identified by words such as: "believe", "expect", "anticipate", "intend", "estimate", "may", "plans", "postulate" and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. All statements that are not statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the use of metals in Japanese industry, JOGMEC, Hanwa or HJM being in position to continue their support, future development and cost-competitiveness of the Waterberg PGM Project, JOGMEC or Hanwa funding future equity investments into HJM and the Company's other future plans and expectations. Although the Company believes any forward-looking statements in this news release are reasonable, it can give no assurance that the expectations and assumptions in such statements will prove to be correct.

The Company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements by the Company are not guarantees of future results or performance and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including possible adverse impacts due the global outbreak of COVID-19, the Company's inability to generate sufficient cash flow or raise additional capital, and to comply with the terms of any new indebtedness; additional financing requirements; and any new indebtedness may be secured, which potentially could result in the loss of any assets pledged by the Company; the Company's history of losses and negative cash flow; the Company's properties may not be brought into a state of commercial production; uncertainty of estimated production, development plans and cost estimates for the Waterberg PGM Project; discrepancies between actual and estimated mineral reserves and mineral resources, between actual and estimated development and operating costs, between actual and estimated metallurgical recoveries and between estimated and actual production; fluctuations in the relative values of the U.S. Dollar, the Rand and the Canadian Dollar; volatility in metals prices; the uncertainty of alternative funding sources for Waterberg JV Co.; the Company may become subject to the U.S. Investment Company Act; the failure of the Company or the other shareholders to fund their pro rata share of funding obligations for the Waterberg PGM Project; any disputes or disagreements with the other shareholders of Waterberg JV Co. or Mnombo; the ability of the Company to retain its key management employees and skilled and experienced personnel; conflicts of interest; litigation or other administrative proceedings brought against the Company; actual or alleged breaches of governance processes or instances of fraud, bribery or corruption; exploration, development and mining risks and the inherently dangerous nature of the mining industry, and the risk of inadequate insurance or inability to obtain insurance to cover these risks and other risks and uncertainties; property and mineral title risks including defective title to mineral claims or property; changes in national and local government legislation, taxation, controls, regulations and political or economic developments in Canada and South Africa; equipment shortages and the ability of the Company to acquire necessary access rights and infrastructure for its mineral properties; environmental regulations and the ability to obtain and maintain necessary permits, including environmental authorizations and water use licences; extreme competition in the mineral exploration industry; delays in obtaining, or a failure to obtain, permits necessary for current or future operations or failures to comply with the terms of such permits; risks of doing business in South Africa, including but not limited to, labour, economic and political instability and potential changes to and failures to comply with legislation; the Company's common shares may be delisted from the NYSE American or the TSX if it cannot maintain compliance with the applicable listing requirements; and other risk factors described in the Company's most recent Form 40-F annual report, Annual Information Form and other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") and the Canadian securities regulators, which may be viewed at www.sec.gov and www.sedar.com, respectively. Proposed changes in the mineral law in South Africa if implemented as proposed would have a material adverse effect on the Company's business and potential interest in projects. 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 because of new information, future events or results or otherwise.

The technical and scientific information contained herein has been prepared in accordance with NI 43-101, which differs from the standards adopted by the SEC. Accordingly, the technical and scientific information contained herein, including any estimates of mineral reserves and mineral resources, may not be comparable to similar information disclosed by U.S. companies subject to the disclosure requirements of the SEC.

1Technical report entitled "Independent Technical Report, Waterberg Project Definitive Feasibility Study and Mineral Resource Update, Bushveld Complex, South Africa" filed on SEDAR October 7, 2019, at www.sedar.com

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169148
Process Street today announced the release of Process AI, a next-gen business process management platform powered by AI and ChatGPT. AI will allow customers to perform advanced automations, math equations, text formatting, location routing, translation, summarization, sentiment analysis and a myriad of other business tasks.

San Francisco, California--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - Process Street today announced the release of Process AI, a next-gen process management platform powered by AI and ChatGPT.

Process Street's AI-powered process platform serves as a single source for teams to manage all recurring work, including workflows, knowledge, data, forms, and surveys. With AI, customers can generate these often complex resources instantly, solving the blank start problem and saving endless hours of mundane work.

Process Street releases Process AI, a ChatGPT powered Next-gen process platform

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"We saw teams worldwide throwing away their work, wasting precious time and resources running project after project, making the same mistakes over and over. Our plan was to transform the way they work, empowering them to turn their most important processes into transparent, actionable, and accountable workflows." Vinay Patankar, CEO, Process Street.

Founded in 2014, Process Street has helped thousands of companies, including Salesforce, MIT and Colliers. Along the way the startup has secured funding from renowned investors such as Accel, Salesforce Ventures, and Atlassian Ventures, and has grown to become a critical tool for compliance and process-driven teams across HR, Finance, and Real Estate sectors.

"We built the world's easiest-to-use business process management platform, accessible without engineering support. Then we made it available on Slack, Teams, iOS, and Android, empowering teams to work from anywhere with one-click approvals, quick-fill forms, and powerful automations." Cameron McKay CTO, Process Street.

Process Street is now excited to announce the next evolution of its product from a workflow management tool to an AI-powered process platform.

AI will allow customers to perform advanced automations, math equations, text formatting, location routing, translation, summarization, sentiment analysis and a myriad of other business tasks.

"ChatGPT has been an incredible blessing for our customers, enhancing almost every corner of our application and enabling an exciting roadmap for future functionality. It has allowed us to move from a point and click workflow builder to an intelligent UX, making the world's easiest to use business process management platform even easier." Vinay Patankar, CEO, Process Street.

Process AI takes no-code to a whole new level, enabling users to design sophisticated workflows and create advanced automations that would've previously required an engineering team and can compress hundreds of "if this then that" rules into a single prompt.

Based on strong positive reviews from beta users, Process Street is confident their new platform will revolutionize how teams manage recurring work, and has stated they have many future ChatGPT enabled features on their roadmap.

Process Street is offering a free trial of Process AI which Process Street is offering a free trial of Process AI which is available as of today.

- Process AI demo - https://process.st/platform/ai

- Process Street - https://process.st

- Process Street Press Kit - https://process.st/presskit

About Process Street

Process Street is an AI-Powered Platform that revolutionizes workflow management for companies by integrating Artificial Intelligence into every aspect of their operations, enhancing efficiency, collaboration, and consistency across teams. It provides a platform for businesses to document and streamline their processes, making it easier for teams to collaborate, execute tasks, and ensure consistency and efficiency in their operations.

Collaboration software created a promise of increased efficiency, but in reality, this created increased confusion, with free-form project management systems creating complex, unstructured workflows that need to be redesigned for each new project. Process Street takes these unorganized projects and turns them into streamlined repeatable processes, allowing for transparency, consistency and continuous improvement.

Contact Info:

Name: Vinay Patankar

Email: [email protected]

Organization: Process Street

Address: 201 Spear St, San Francisco, California 94105, United States

Website: http://process.st

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169418
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - Tincorp Metals Inc. (TSXV: TIN) (OTCQX: TINFF) ("Tincorp" or the "Company") is pleased to report that all resolutions were approved at the Company's Annual General Meeting of shareholders held on June 9, 2023. The voting results are as follows:

Total issued and outstanding Common Shares as at Record Date: 66,557,423

Total percentage of Common Shares voted: 52.90%

Matter Voted Upon Voting Result Fixing the number of directors of the Company at six (6)





The number of directors of the Company for the ensuing year was fixed at six (6), by a majority of shareholders : Votes For

Votes against

33,539,795 (99.89%) 36,075 (0.11%) Election of Directors





















The following nominees were elected as directors of the Company until the next annual meeting of shareholders of the Company, by a majority of shareholders:

Votes For Votes Withheld Non Vote Gordon Neal 32,736,428 (97.50%) 839,442 (2.5%) 1,633,290 Lorne Waldman 33,542,676 (99.90%) 33,194 (0.1%) 1,633,290 Dr. Rui Feng 33,221,064 (98.94%) 354,806 (1.06%) 1,633,290 Bhakti Pavani 33,222,785 (98.95%) 353,085 (1.05%) 1,633,290 Alex Zhang

Hernan Uribe-Zeballos 33,222,151

33,223,012 (98.95%)

(98.95%) 353,719

352,858 (1.05%)

(1.05%) 1,633,290

1,633,290 Appointment of Deloitte LLP, as auditors of the Company







Deloitte LLP, Chartered Professional Accountants, was reappointed as the Company's auditors for the ensuing year, and the directors were authorized to fix their remuneration, by a majority of shareholders: Votes For Votes Withheld 35,183,495 (99.93%) 25,665 (0.07%) Approval of Amended and Restated 10% Rolling Stock Option Plan (the "Plan")



The Plan was approved by a majority of shareholders:

Votes For Votes Against Non Vote 33,055,857 (98.45%) 520,013 (1.55%) 1,633,290

Appointment of CFO

Ms. Jean Zhang resigned from her position as Chief Financial Officer of the Company effectively immediately to pursue other career opportunities. The Company would like to thank Ms. Zhang for her efforts and wishes her success in her future endeavours.

The Company has appointed Mr. Derek Liu, CPA, CGA as its new Chief Financial Officer effective immediately. Mr. Liu has extensive experience in finance and accounting. He has held senior accounting positions, such as corporate controller and chief financial officer in several public Canadian mining companies, and currently is also the Chief Financial Officer of Silvercorp Metals Inc.

About Tincorp

Tincorp Metals Inc. is a mineral exploration company focusing on tin projects in Bolivia and a gold project near Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. The Company has signed agreements to acquire up to a 100% interest in the Porvenir Project and SF Tin Project, which are 70 km southeast of Oruro, Bolivia. The Company's 100% owned Skukum Gold Project is approximately 84 km south of Whitehorse by road. An independent mineral resource estimate update in respect of the Skukum Gold Project was completed in October 2022.

On Behalf of Tincorp Metals Inc.

signed "Gordon Neal"

Gordon Neal, CEO & Director

For further information, please contact:

Investor Relations, Tincorp Metals Inc.

Phone: +1 (604)-336-5919

Email: [email protected]

www.tincorp.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169479
New York, New York--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - VIP Motors luxury car dealership salon in Dubai is finally expanding. The Founder and CEO of VIP Motors, Ahmad Nabil has been pushing for expansion since the start of 2023.

VIP Motors is extending its showroom space and adding additional 60 vehicles on display. After the completion of this expansion, the salon will host over 250 luxury cars.

(VIP Motors)

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VIP Motors aims to welcome more local and international audiences to their new showroom after the expansion. It will be a surprise to find what new models VIP Motors have arranged to fill up the newly expanded showroom spaces. The expansion is set to be finalized by the end of June.

(Ahmad Nabil, CEO and Founder of VIP Motors)

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About VIP Motors

VIP Motors was founded in 2016 in Dubai. VIP Motors is a company with values; valuing and respecting high-quality extraordinary customer service during all the phases of business including prior sale and after sale.

VIP Motors also participates in the annual Dubai International Boat show event. In 2022 and 2023 the company participated in the Dubai international Boat show event, and in 2019 and 2021 the company participated in the Dubai International Motor Show event. In each event, VIP Motors brought between 15 to 25 luxury and hypercars for display.

(Dubai International Boat Show 2023)

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VIP Motors is a unique car showroom focusing on market differentiation and quick adaptability to new developments. The company specializes in hosting ultra rare, expensive, and limited-edition cars.

VIP Motors

www.vipmotors.ae

Sales Executive: Amr Amer

Contact: +971 4 323 2999

Email: [email protected]

PR Agent:

[email protected]

+971585598974

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169084
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2023) - Westmount Minerals Corp.(CSE: WMC)("Westmount" or the "Company")is pleased to announce a fully subscribed, non-brokered, private placement financing of $250,000 priced at $0.05 per Unit. Each Unit will consist of one common share and one share purchase warrant, with each warrant exercisable into a common share for a period of 24 months at an exercise price of $0.075 for the first year and $0.10 for the second year following the Closing Date.

Proceeds from the financing shall be used for exploration activities on Westmount's Ontario lithium projects as well as working capital and general corporate activities. Initial exploration focus will be on Westmount's recently acquired, Kaba Lithium Project, located in the Georgia Lake area of Northwestern Ontario. Closing will be subject to the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) approval, and any shares issued will be subject to a four-month hold period.

About Westmount Minerals Corp.

Westmount is focused on mineral exploration in the Americas and is well positioned in the emerging world-class critical minerals district of NW Ontario. Its 3,486 hectares, Kaba lithium property is located in the Georgia Lake, lithium-pegmatite region in close proximity to Rock Tech Lithium Inc. Multiple pegmatite showings have been documented and mapped on the Property by the Ontario Geological survey. Additionally, Westmount can earn a 100% interest in the 5,002 hectare lithium-pegmatite bearing, Otatakan and Pilot East Lithium properties located near Ear Falls, Ontario. The properties are just south of Green Technologies' expanding Root deposit.

The Company has advanced the Douay East gold property located within the greater Abitibi Greenstone Belt region in Quebec to the drill-ready stage.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

David Tafel

Chief Executive Officer and Director

For further information, please contact:

David Tafel

Chief Executive Officer and Director

(604) 683-1991

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements:

This news release includes certain forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, statements regarding future capital expenditures, anticipated content, commencement, and cost of exploration programs in respect of the Company's projects and mineral properties, anticipated exploration program results from exploration activities, resources and/or reserves on the Company's projects and mineral properties, and the anticipated business plans and timing of future activities of the Company, are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Often, but not always, forward looking information can be identified by words such as "pro forma", "plans", "expects", "will", "may", "should", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", "believes", "potential" or variations of such words including negative variations thereof, and phrases that refer to certain actions, events or results that may, could, would, might or will occur or be taken or achieved. In making the forward-looking statements in this news release, the Company has applied several material assumptions, including without limitation, that market fundamentals will result in sustained precious and base metals demand and prices, the receipt of any necessary permits, licenses and regulatory approvals in connection with the future exploration of the Company's properties, that the COVID-19 global pandemic will not affect the ability of the Company to conduct future exploration of the Company's properties, the availability of financing on suitable terms, and the Company's ability to comply with environmental, health and safety laws.

Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such risks and other factors include, among others, statements as to the anticipated business plans and timing of future activities of the Company, including the Company's option to acquire the Douay East Project, the proposed expenditures for exploration work thereon, the ability of the Company to obtain sufficient financing to fund its business activities and plans, delays in obtaining governmental and regulatory approvals (including of the Canadian Securities Exchange), permits or financing, changes in laws, regulations and policies affecting mining operations, risks relating to epidemics or pandemics such as COVID-19, including the impact of COVID-19 on the Company's business, financial condition and results of operations, the Company's limited operating history, currency fluctuations, title disputes or claims, environmental issues and liabilities, as well as those factors discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's prospectus dated February 14, 2022, and other filings of the Company with the Canadian Securities Authorities, copies of which can be found under the Company's profile on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com.

Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements in this news release except as otherwise required by law.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169425
By Azernews

Laman Ismayilova

All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature has hosted a creative evening of the People's Artist of Azerbaijan, Honored Art Worker of Russia, film director, screenwriter and photo artist Tofig Shahverdiyev.

The evening was organized by the Russian office of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, the Azerbaijan Cultural Center and the All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature, Azernews reports.

Tofig Shahverdiyev is a member of the Russian Union of Artists, the Guild of Russian Film Directors, the International Guild of Professional Photographers. He is a laureate of many international prizes, including the Golden Eye Award.

The participants of the creative evening viewed a photo exhibition themed "Thousand-Faced Second", which will last until June 30.

A short films "Lagich", "Baku" and "Peaceful military music" were screened as part of the event.

Opening the evening, Director General of the Foreign Literature Library Pavel Kuzmin expressed gratitude for the cooperation of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and the Azerbaijan Cultural Center.

"When look through photos taken by Tofig Shahverdiyev, the words from a well-known song come to mind: Don't think about the seconds down, the time will come, you will understand, probably. They whistle like bullets at the temple: moments, moments, moments. Great happiness when a person can catch this moment. The ability to recognize your inner world in photographs is art. You understand that every person has a soul, feelings, emotions. This unites us. Thank you for your look, for your soul, which you revealed to us," said Pavel Kuzmin.

Head of Humanitarian Programs at the Russian representative office of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Tamilla Ahmadova thanked the Foreign Literature Library for its cooperation, noting that this joint work is a modest contribution to the great friendship between Russia and Azerbaijan.

"Photography was supposed to be the tenth muse on the Olympus of the Arts. It's not just an image on paper. This is our history. It was not for nothing that Einstein said: What a blessing that there is a photograph, because the moment that was yesterday is our door to the future. Tofig Rzakulievich masters this skill perfectly. He has a unique style and manner. You will have the opportunity to peer into his work and see what dynamics, what play of light. He has some extraordinary flair to catch the moment that we could pass by and not even notice. A talented person is talented in everything. In addition to photography, he brilliantly shoots films. I am pleased that today you will see three wonderful films - "Lagich", "Baku" and "Peaceful Military Music". The last film is especially relevant today. It tells that people in military uniform can speak not the language of weapons, but the language of notes," she said.

Director of the Azerbaijan Cultural Center Nisa Mustafayeva thanked the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and personally Vice-President Leyla Aliyeva for the full support of the projects of the cultural center.

"Tofig Shahverdiyev was brought to the cultural center by Tamilla Ahmadova, and she was the instigator of all the beauty that we see today. Today we have an acquaintance with a master, an artist. It seems to me that the words of William Thackeray about photography are ideally suited to creativity, to everything that Tofik Shahverdiev does: The art of photography is to make the familiar new, and the new familiar," said Nisa Mustafayeva.

"I have both Azerbaijani and Russian in me. Therefore, I shot the first two films in Azerbaijan, and the next ones in Russia," said Tofig Shahverdiyev.

He also thanked the organizers and guests of the evening for their interest in his work.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), delivers an important speech during a fact-finding trip to survey the work of border management and control and the development of border troops in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, June 7, 2023. Xi extended greetings to border troops stationed in the region on behalf of the CPC Central Committee and the CMC. (Xinhua/Li Gang)

HOHHOT, June 9 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping has called on Chinese border troops to enhance their capabilities in border defense and control to forge a "great wall of steel" along the country's borders.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks on Wednesday during a fact-finding trip to survey the work of border management and control and the development of border troops in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

While visiting the Inner Mongolia military command of the People's Liberation Army, Xi commended the role of the region's border troops in ensuring security and stability on the northern border of the country.

Praising China's progress in border defense work since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, Xi said the country's border troops have boosted military training and combat preparedness, and resolutely safeguarded border security and the stability in regions along the borders.

They have effectively safeguarded China's sovereignty, security, and development interests, he added.

Stressing the importance of border defense in ensuring national stability and governance, Xi called on border troops to have a stronger sense of mission and responsibility, and guard the borders diligently for the Party and the people.

Xi underscored the need for continuous efforts to enhance cohesion and forge the soul of the border troops with the Party's new theories, as well as to improve their education on the political discipline, discipline regarding the public and affairs related to foreigners, and policies on ethnic and religious affairs. He emphasized the importance of ensuring the integrity and a high degree of unity among the border troops.

He called for more efforts to intensify troop training and enhance combat preparedness, speed up capacity building concerning information technology-enabled border defense and control, transform the way border defense duties are performed, tighten military discipline, maintain good troop order, and foster more border defense professionals.

Highlighting cooperation among Party and government departments, the military, law enforcement agencies and ordinary people in border defense as China's unique strength, Xi called for joint efforts from all parties to break a new ground in defending the country's borders. 
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DOCUMENTARY SHOWCASE airs Fridays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Scientology Network

LOS ANGELES, Calif., June 9, 2023 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) Scientology Networks DOCUMENTARY SHOWCASE  the weekly series providing a platform for independent filmmakers to air films on important social, cultural and environmental issues  presents the award-winning documentary Forgive Dont Forget premiering on June 9, 2023.

Forgive Dont Forget chronicles the journey by an American to return a Japanese samurai sword surrendered at the end of World War II to the family of its original owner in an attempt to better understand the past and build a bridge between cultures.

Codirected by Brad Bennett, Forgive Dont Forget is, at its core, about the connection between two very different cultures and the importance of remembrance. The Japanese sword is a symbol deeply embedded in Japans history and spiritual heritage. When an American who inherited a surrendered sword from World War II decides to try and track down the family of the original owner in hopes of returning it, he encounters many seemingly insurmountable barriers. His quest ultimately leads to a better understanding of both American and Japanese cultures and helps bridge the gap between the two.

ABOUT BRAD BENNETT

Brad is a Japanese American filmmaker and Emmy-nominated producer based in Virginia. His first feature documentary, Forgive Dont Forget, won the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2017 Guam International Film Festival. Bennett has been featured in The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and by the International Documentary Association. His work has been supported by PBS, Southern Documentary Fund, Virginia Film Office and the UCLA Documentary Film Legal Clinic.

In an interview with Scientology Media Productions for Documentary Showcase, Brad reflected on his work:

Stories of positivity are very important nowadays & through our film I just want to be able to share hope and the message of forgiveness and how powerful that is for all of us.

ABOUT PAUL D. UFEMA

During Pauls senior year in college, he was activated into the U.S. Army and sent to Cuba. It was there he was introduced to video journalism. After returning to the U.S., he worked in television production. He founded All New Bricks, a successful YouTube channel that specializes in Lego builds, which aides St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital.

Paul shared insight on the underlying cultural significance of the film:

I was returning a sword to a family and thats all it was. But it was so much bigger than that & we would be bridging the gap between two cultures and I think thats why people are drawn to it.

ABOUT DOCUMENTARY SHOWCASE

Fundamental to Scientology is a humanitarian mission that extends to some 200 nations with programs for human rights, human decency, literacy, morality, drug prevention and disaster relief. For this reason, the Scientology Network provides a platform for independent filmmakers who embrace a vision of building a better world.

DOCUMENTARY SHOWCASE debuts films weekly from award-winning independent filmmakers whose goal is to improve society by raising awareness of social, cultural and environmental issues.

For more information, visit Scientology.tv/docs.

The Scientology Network debuted on March 12, 2018. Since launching, the Scientology Network has been viewed in 240 countries and territories in 17 languages. Satisfying the curiosity of people about Scientology and Founder L. Ron Hubbard, the network takes viewers across six continents, spotlighting the everyday lives of Scientologists, showing the Church as a global organization, and presenting its social betterment programs that have touched the lives of millions worldwide.

Broadcast from Scientology Media Productions, the Churchs global media center in Los Angeles, the Scientology Network is available on DIRECTV Channel 320, DIRECTV STREAM, AT&T U-verse and can be streamed at Scientology.tv, on mobile apps and via the Roku, Amazon Fire and Apple TV platforms.

CONTACT:

Media Relations [email protected]

LEARN MORE:

https://www.scientology.tv/series/documentary-showcase/forgive-dont-forget/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df-97lhZBi0

MULTIMEDIA:

VIDEOS:

https://www.scientology.tv/series/documentary-showcase/forgive-dont-forget/videos/trailer.html

https://www.scientology.tv/series/documentary-showcase/forgive-dont-forget/videos/an-inside-look.html

https://www.scientology.tv/series/documentary-showcase/forgive-dont-forget/videos/inside-look-teaser-with-brad.html

https://www.scientology.tv/series/documentary-showcase/forgive-dont-forget/videos/inside-look-teaser-with-paul.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x983bqHKcrw

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CAPTION: DOCUMENTARY SHOWCASE presents the award-winning documentary Forgive Dont Forget premiering on June 9, 2023.

TAGS: #ScientologyNetwork #Scientology #DocumentaryShowcase #ForgiveDontForget #BradBennet #PaulDUfema #IndependentFilmmaker

NEWS SOURCE: Church of Scientology International



This press release was issued on behalf of the news source (Church of Scientology International), who is solely responsible for its accuracy, by Send2Press Newswire.

To view the original story, visit: https://www.send2press.com/wire/forgive-dont-forget-a-journey-to-return-a-samurai-sword-airs-on-documentary-showcase/

Copr.  2023 Send2Press Newswire, a service of NEOTROPE, Calif., USA. -- REF: S2P STORY ID: 91261SI.04
A young boy showing creativity, heart and, most importantly, the entrepreneurial spirit in his journey to becoming a kid entrepreneur

AJAX, ONTARIO, Canada, June 9, 2023 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) In Sean Lewis current picture book, Finna Lit: Creativity. Entrepreneurship. Lifestyle. Money (ISBN: 978-0228883821; April, 2023), the main character, Dell, uses his wits and experiences to create his own path to financial independence. His connection with his family and his passion for being financially literate lead him to learn from others, but most importantly educate his friend. Despite some initial challenges, Dell learns that being FINNA LIT is more than just words. Its a process. Its a LIFESTYLE.

Finna Lit features a young boy, Dell, who is learning about how finances matter and their impact on decision-making. He wants to develop a video game business but needs the resources and skills to get to his ultimate goal. He uses his creativity and growing financial skills to start a small business of raking leaves so that he can acquire the resources needed to make his video game business viable. He shares his ideas with his friend Link who has a minimal understanding of financial matters. He realizes starting a business has its challenges and setbacks, but he learns that perseverance is his best ally.

Author Sean Lewis is an educator and curriculum writer. Sean values using the world as seen through the lens of students to guide instruction and inquiry. He enjoys conversing with his students and constructing lessons about financial matters, and entrepreneurship. FINNA LIT was created so that families, educators and students can participate in an ongoing learning process that is dynamic and which is unique to each lived experience that honours many ways of knowing. Sean is grateful for the financial hardships he faced growing up and the lessons he learned. Lessons he continues to learn to this day.

Finna Lit: Creativity. Entrepreneurship. Lifestyle. Money is Seans first picture book and was released in 2023.

If you would like to find out more about Finna Lit visit Sean Lewis website: https://seanlewisauthor.com/

Finna Lit is now out through Tellwell Publishing (RRP $15.99) and available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indigo and more.

BOOK SUMMARY:

Author: Sean Lewis

Email: seanlewisauthor[@]gmail.com

Genre: JUVENILE FICTION

Released: APRIL, 2023

PAPERBACK: ISBN-13: 9780228883821

HARDCOVER: ISBN-13: 9780228883838

Publisher: Tellwell Publishing ( https://tellwell.ca/ ).

NEWS SOURCE: Author Sean Lewis



This press release was issued on behalf of the news source (Author Sean Lewis), who is solely responsible for its accuracy, by Send2Press Newswire.

To view the original story, visit: https://www.send2press.com/wire/finna-lit-creativity-entrepreneurship-lifestyle-money/

Copr.  2023 Send2Press Newswire, a service of NEOTROPE, Calif., USA. -- REF: S2P STORY ID: 91255SI.04
WASHINGTON (PRWEB) June 08, 2023

The National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved (NHIT), the first and oldest national non-profit focused on equitable access to health technology for underserved communities and communities of color, celebrated its 15th anniversary today with an in-person Health Equity Roundtable with key White House and administration officials. The discussion revolved around "The Promise of Health IT Innovation and Broadband for All" and took place at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C.

Today's event continues NHIT's long track record of bringing together public, private, and academic leaders to accelerate progress towards the elimination of health disparities for underserved communities. Since its inception in 2008, NHIT has been instrumental in convening key stakeholders from the White House to Wall Street to engage in collaboration, innovation, and advocacy to improve healthcare access, quality, and outcomes for those who have historically been marginalized. Under the auspices of NHIT, executives from federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, have come together with leaders from community-based organizations (CBOs) and the private sector to strategize on how to best address critical goals like improving health IT infrastructure, expanding broadband access, promoting telehealth, advancing interoperability, addressing social determinants of health (SDoH), and enhancing data analytics for targeted interventions.

While marking its 15 years of community impact, NHIT is also focused on the future with the recent expansion of the NHIT Data Fusion Center in collaboration with Amazon Web Services and Tyler Technologies. The Center is a geography-based research platform that pulls together de-identified, aggregated, and publicly available data and tools that facilitate a granular understanding of SDoH the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age that affect a wide range of health risks and outcomes. The Center aggregates SDoH datasets from across federal, state, and local government agencies to enable data mapping and publish research insights on the platform.

"NHIT appreciates the way in which President Biden has made health equity a priority and how his public policy efforts reflect that from the way the budget is drafted to the hiring process at the agency level." said Luis Belen, Chief Executive Officer of NHIT. He added, "If we are going to address the health equity gap, strategic investments are of great importance, but they cannot be at the expense of underserved communities. This Administration is breaking old molds and leading the way by ensuring that diverse communities are represented at the decision-making table, that investments in infrastructure are accompanied by both multicultural community outreach and engagement in both urban and rural areas and include investment in the community-based organizations that are on the frontlines of outreach efforts, and by addressing equity in areas of data collection, competitive grants, diversity among researchers, and procurement. NHIT has advocated for this approach for 15 years, and we are immensely proud to work side by side with the Biden Administration to go from conception to execution."

About NHIT:

NHIT is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization on a mission to provide equitable access to health technologies and to make sure that these technologies address the needs of underserved communities and communities of color. Since its founding in 2008, NHIT has worked to advance health equity and economic viability on issues such as broadband access, electronic health records, precision medicine, consumer health applications and disaster resiliency. NHIT has collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Tyler Technologies to launch the NHIT Data Fusion Center, to tackle and translate social determinants of health (SDoH) data into actionable insights. For more information, visit https://www.nhit.org.

Read the full story at https://www.prweb.com/releases/2023/6/prweb19384074.htm
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Arkansas, USA-based florist, Rose of Sharon Floral Design, now accepts weekly flower subscription service clients for consistent flower deliveries to restaurants, hotels, corporate offices, spas and more.



Rose of Sharon Floral Design Studio is now offering flower subscription services specifically designed for corporate clients such as restaurants, hotels, corporate offices, spas and more to northwest Arkansas businesses. Flower subscriptions are a great way to ensure that the establishment always has fresh, beautiful flowers to create a welcoming and inviting atmosphere for guests. With a flower subscription, clients can choose the frequency of deliveries, the types of flowers used, style and size that suits the needs of the business. Custom arrangements can be made that are specifically tailored to the establishment's style and design.



Flower subscriptions can also be a cost-effective way to keep a floral budget in check since businesses will know exactly how much they are spending each month. Since the flowers are being delivered straight to the establishment, businesses save time and hassle by not having to go to a florist to pick them up.



The weekly corporate subscription service provides customized flowers that match the size, vibe and aesthetics of each space. Every arrangement is refreshed and swapped out weekly by Rose of Sharon Floral Design Studio staff members, and all flowers can be custom designed with a specific color palette or particular variety to keep customers happy, says Althea Wiles, owner at Rose of Sharon Floral Design Studios.



There's something very calming about entering a space filled with fragrant, ravishing flowers that compliment the environment. In addition to their aesthetic appeal, fresh flowers have been shown to have numerous psychological benefits in business environments. They can boost productivity, improve mood, reduce stress levels, and create a sense of well-being among employees and guests. Flowers have been shown to chase away anxieties, making people feel less depressed and agitated. They can help induce a more positive outlook on life, boosting energy and happiness. Moreover, flowers are known to enhance customer satisfaction by leaving a memorable impression on guests, making them more likely to return.



Interested parties in the northwest Arkansas area can use the contact form on Rose of Sharon Floral Design Studios website to get a customized quote:



https://shop.roseofsharon-eventflorist.com/contact/



About Althea Wiles: Althea Wiles is the owner and creative director of Rose of Sharon Floral Design Studio in the Ozark Mountains region of the United States. She is also the founder and education director of J Althea Creative, a florist education consulting program. Wiles earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Hendrix College and then completed her Arkansas Master Florist Certification. After 25 years in business, her design studio takes part in 75-100 weddings and events annually. Recognized by local and national publications, she has been featured on The Knot, The List, among others, and in a wide range of magazines. Wiles continues gaining recognition by participating as a regularly featured artist for the Art in Bloom gallery exhibits chosen and hosted by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Wiles is also a recurring instructor in the horticulture department at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

About Us: Rose of Sharon Floral Design Studio is a florist and floral design service owned by Althea Wiles in northwest Arkansas.

Contact Info:

Name: Althea Wiles

Email: Send Email

Organization: Rose of Sharon Floral Design Studio

Website: https://shop.roseofsharon-eventflorist.com/



Video URL: https://youtube.com/shorts/unA0ceGbu0A

Release ID: 89099590

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VTech Solutions is a technology equipment distributor in Vietnam and is an official distributor of many well-known technology equipment brands, such as AEX, Cyber Power, Zyxel, CP Plus, and Norden.



VTech Solutions is a technology equipment distributor in Vietnam. Established in 2017, up to this day, VTech Solutions has become the official distributor of many well-known brands in the technology equipment field.

VTech Solutions provides the following technology equipment:

UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) - Cyber Power: online UPS, entry line UPS, value Line UPS, battery extension, UPS accessories.

Network system - Zyxel: Ethernet switches, security equipment, Router, Access Point

Camera system - CP Plus: analog cameras, IP cameras, digital video recorders, network video recorders.

Audio system - AEX: IP audio systems, central sound management units, expansion devices, microphones, amplifiers, fire alarms, music players, speakers, accessories.

Camera system - Norden: analog cameras, IP cameras, network video recorder, analog video recorder

VTech Solutions' development journey is as follows:

In March 2013, becoming the Master Dealer for Cyber Power UPS products, exclusively distributing the EC series online UPS.

In November 2018, becoming the official distributor of CP Plus cameras in Vietnam, exclusively distributing the Indigo series.

In June 2021, becoming the authorized distributor for Zyxel networking solutions.

In March 2022, becoming the distributor for AEX audio solutions.

Since 2022, VTech Solutions has become a major player in the information technology field in Vietnam.

In January 2023, becoming the authorized distributor for Norden camera solutions.

VTech Solutions operates based on four important principles: "collaboration - integrity - respect - responsibility." The products at VTech Solutions come with a certification of origin and quality.

VTech Solutions offers nationwide delivery across Vietnam. All products provided by VTech Solutions are eligible for a 7-day replacement period (from the purchasing date) in case of any manufacturer defects. Products with issues arising after 7 days will be subject to the manufacturer's warranty policy. Customers can directly exchange/return products at VTech Solutions' office or send them via delivery service. However, customers should note that the exchange process depends on the items' availability in the warehouse. If a customer requests an exchange with a different product that has lower or higher features than the purchased product and also requests a return, such requests will not be accepted.

Starting from small projects with a dedicated customer service mindset, VTech Solutions has earned the trust of customers and business partners. VTech Solutions has contributed to creating modern and luxurious aesthetics in numerous large-scale projects, including residential areas, resorts, industrial zones, hospitals, universities, and many others.

VTech Solutions is actively investing in technology and business collaboration, strengthening its workforce, and expanding its market to strive towards becoming one of the leading distributors in the information technology field in Vietnam. For more information about VTech Solutions, please visit: https://vtechsolutions.vn

About the company: VTech Solutions is a technology equipment distributor in Vietnam and is an official distributor of many well-known technology equipment brands, such as AEX, Cyber Power, Zyxel, CP Plus, and Norden.

Contact Detail:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vtechjsc

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/vtech_solutions/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/vtech_solution1

About Us: /VTech Solutions/

Contact Info:

Name: VTech Solutions

Email: Send Email

Organization: VTech Solution Joint Stock Company

Address: 04 Huyen Quang Street, Tan Dinh Ward, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City

Phone: (+94) 909 532 676

Website: https://vtechsolutions.vn/



Video URL: https://youtu.be/mZqrOA3jEM4

Release ID: 89099586

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NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. , June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Hear Ye, Hear Ye, our Boxabl Casita is available for weekend tours on the National Mall in Washington, DC , in front of the Air and Space Museum.

Boxabl is showcasing its Casita at the Innovative Housing Showcase on the National Mall in Washington , D.C.

Boxabl is showcasing its Casita at the Innovative Housing Showcase on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

"We are excited to showcase our Casita this weekend at our Nation's Capital," says co-founder Galiano Tiramani . We have worked hard to live up to our Welcome Home motto, and there is no better place to display our home than our Nation's residence.

The Innovative Housing Showcase is a three-day event featuring new building technologies and solutions that make housing more innovative, resilient, and affordable for American families. More than 20,000 people, including policymakers, housing industry representatives, media, and the public, are expected to attend.

Stop by, sit, chat, and stay awhile. Boxabl will have Boxabl representatives on-site to share the Boxabl story and show how we can work together to make affordable housing available to all. "We are proud to be a US-based company," says co-founder Galiano Tiramani . "I can think of no better place I'd rather be than right here in the USA ." The Boxabl Casita can be found by the Air and Space Museum and will be open for tours and meet and greets from June 9 th to 11th from 9:00 AM- 6:00 PM .

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/boxabl-casita-available-for-tours-in-washington-dc-on-the-national-mall-june-9th-11th-2023-301847473.html

SOURCE Boxabl
CHENGDU, China , June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- On June 8 th, 2023, Coviccine Trivalent XBB.1.5-Recombinant COVID-19 Trivalent (XBB.1.5+BA.5+Delta) Protein Vaccine (Sf9 cell) developed by WestVac Biopharma/ West China Medical Center, Sichuan University was approved for EUA by relevant authorities in China . This is the first COVID-19 vaccine in the world approved for EUA against XBB descendent lineages of SARS-CoV-2. It demonstrates that China is leading the world in the development of COVID-19 vaccines.

WestVac Biopharma and its subsidiary company WestVac Biopharma ( Guangzhou ) leveraged the rapid response of the insect cell expression platform on constructing the vector for Coviccine Trivalent XBB.1.5-Recombinant COVID-19 Trivalent (XBB.1.5+BA.5+Delta) Protein Vaccine (Sf9 Cell), which is of high purity and high quality for human use. The subunit vaccine antigen is precisely designed based on the structure of the targeting S-RBD and HR proteins of the COVID-19 subvariants XBB.1.5 and BA.5 and self-assembled into stable trimeric protein particles with squalene-based oil-in-water emulsion adjuvant added after purification and mixing. This novel adjuvant significantly raises the titer of neutralizing antibodies, which enables the trimeric protein vaccine to induce a higher level T-cell immune response. Studies have shown that Coviccine Trivalent XBB.1.5 induced a high titer of neutralizing antibodies against multiple subvariants, including Omicron subvariants XBB.1.5, XBB1.16, XBB1.9.1, XBB.2.3, BA.5, BF.7, BQ.1, BA.2.75. 14 days after injection of this product, the protective efficacy against XBB.1, XBB.1.5, XBB1.9 is 93.28% with an excellent safety profile, demonstrating that it is a broad-spectrum COVID-19 vaccine against multiple prevalent subvariants locally and internationally.

The XBB.1.5 variant had gradually become the major circulating variant in various parts of the world by the beginning of 2023. With the professional guidance and support from the State Council's Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism's vaccine R&D team, the scientific team of WestVac Biopharma/West China Medical Center, Sichuan University overcame all hurdles and successfully developed a vaccine covering XBB family of variants.

Early May, China CDC expert noticed that the transmission and immune escape capability of XBB variants is much stronger than that of the early circulating Omicron variants. The XBB.1 descendent lineages currently predominate SARS-CoV-2 circulation globally. As of the end of May, XBB family of variants accounted for 98.1% of all variants in the United States . In China , newly detected XBB variants have increased gradually and now exceed 90%.

The WHO Technical Advisory Group on COVID-19 Vaccine Composition (TAG-CO-VAC) advised on May 18 that new formulations of COVID-19 vaccines should aim to induce antibody responses that neutralize XBB descendent lineages. The rate of "second infection" is rising. Experts urge prompt prevention, immunization against COVID-19, particularly for people with high-risk infection, the elderly, people with underlying diseases and those who are immunocompromised to get a vaccine covering SARS-CoV-2 variants.

WestVac Biopharma uses the international advanced insect cell recombinant protein vaccine platform to develop Coviccine Trivalent XBB.1.5 which has been approved for EUA in China . WestVac's COVID-19 vaccine offers a unique option for COVID-19 prevention, is crucial for the prevention of the current XBB descendent lineages and contributes significantly to the ongoing management of the COVID-19 epidemic.

About WestVac Biopharma

WestVac Biopharma Co., Ltd. is an innovative biopharmaceutical company, capable of doing the full spectrum of research, manufacturing, and commercialization of products. WestVac Biopharma has been selected successfully on the list of unicorn companies from 2021 to 2023. WestVac Biopharma Co., Ltd. is located in Chengdu of West China while WestVac Biopharma ( Guangzhou ), a wholly-owned subsidiary company of WestVac Biopharma., is located in Guangzhou Economic Development Zone .

WestVac Biopharma Co., Ltd. has completed construction of 5,000-litre and 3,000-litre insect cell recombinant protein vaccine production lines with an annual production capacity of 100 million doses. The GMP production lines were well established with the "Drug Production License" in place. WestVac Biopharma ( Guangzhou ) has completed scale-up construction of insect cell recombinant protein vaccine production lines with an annual production capacity of 100 million doses.

In December 2022 , Coviccine-Recombinant COVID-19 Vaccine (Sf9 cell) developed by WestVac Biopharma was approved by relevant authorities for EUA in China .

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/china-approves-the-worlds-first-vaccine-against-xbb-descendent-lineages-of-sars-cov-2-for-emergency-use-301846845.html

SOURCE WestVac BioPharma Co., Ltd.
Legislation will remove outdated regulations and lead to billions of dollars of cost savings for geothermal heat pump installations for New York residents.

MOUNT KISCO, N.Y. , June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Dandelion Energy , the nation's leading home geothermal company, celebrated the New York Senate passage of S6604 yesterday; this follows the passage of companion legislation A6949 by the New York Assembly on May 17, 2023 , by a vote of 143 to 3.

New York State Senator Peter Harckham (D-40) and Assemblymember Deborah Glick (D-66), chairs of the Environmental Conservation committees in each house, championed this legislation to remove outdated regulatory requirements and unlock New York's ability to meet its climate goals.

" Senator Harckham and Assemblymember Glick have been tireless champions for helping consumers fight climate change, and we are so grateful for their leadership in pushing this legislation forward," said Michael Sachse , CEO of Dandelion Energy. "We look forward to Governor Hochul signing this bill into law and working with her administration on common-sense regulations that will make geothermal more affordable and available to all New Yorkers."

Current regulations treat geothermal systems at depths greater than 500 feet like oil and gas drilling. This disadvantages urban dwellers and those on smaller lots, preventing them from reaping the energy bill savings of geothermal heat pumps . With this change, geothermal systems will be more affordable to install and accessible to more New Yorkers, saving billions in installation and energy costs.

The legislation will also improve the consistency of geothermal installations by consolidating all geothermal regulations under the Department of Environmental Conservation Division of Water, which currently regulates geothermal boreholes less than 500 feet deep.

This regulatory change aligns with the key recommendations of the Climate Action Council in its Scoping Plan . It's a crucial step toward the state's goal of two million electrified and electric-ready homes by 2030. The geothermal heat pump industry is already installing hundreds of systems for New York homeowners and commercial buildings every year  with the enactment of S6604/A6939, that number will significantly increase in the months and years ahead.

About Dandelion Energy

As the nation's leading home geothermal company, Dandelion Energy helps homeowners free their homes from fossil fuels. By making geothermal heating and cooling systems accessible and affordable for homeowners, Dandelion is mitigating climate change with renewable technologies that decarbonize homes. Today, Dandelion's heating and cooling solutions allow homeowners to save up to 50 percent on their heating and cooling bills and help the environment by reducing homes' carbon dioxide emissions by up to 80 percent.

With millions of New York residents reliant on increasingly expensive and dirty heating oils, propane, or natural gas, Dandelion continues to look for opportunities to offer geothermal heating and cooling to additional customers, and has improved its operational efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and service boundaries to help more people go green at home. Dandelion's impact on the environment to date has been significant:

As of June 2023 , Dandelion systems have reduced carbon emissions by 38,700 tons  the equivalent of 1,200 cars being taken off the road.

, Dandelion systems have reduced carbon emissions by 38,700 tons  the equivalent of 1,200 cars being taken off the road. By 2050, these installed Dandelion systems will reduce carbon emissions by 687,000 tons, which is like removing 21,700 cars from the road.

The state-of-the-art geothermal heat pump system offers wifi-enabled monitoring, creating a smarter, more responsive, and more innovative approach than any other HVAC system on the market. To learn more, visit www.dandelionenergy.com .

Press Inquiries:

Kathy Berardi

JMG Public Relations

[email protected]

678-644-4122

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SOURCE Dandelion Energy
PUNTA DEL ESTE, Uruguay , June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Faroy S.A. (the " Company ") announced today the results of its offer to exchange (the " Exchange Offer ") any and all of its outstanding US$11,628,766 step-up senior secured note due 2033 (the " Existing Note ") for a new note (the " New Note " or the " Short-Term Discount Note ") which was made pursuant to the Company's private invitation memorandum dated April 14, 2023 (the " Private Invitation Memorandum "), in compliance with and pursuant to Section 4.17 of the indenture dated December 28, 2020 (the " Indenture "), by and among the Company, The Bank of New York Mellon, as trustee, registrar, paying agent and transfer agent, and TMF Trust Company (Uruguay) S.A., as collateral agent, under which the Existing Note was issued and pursuant to which the New Note will be issued.

This announcement is addressed only to holders of the Existing Note who are not " U.S. persons" (as defined in Rule 902 under the Securities Act, " U.S. Persons "), who are not acting for the account or benefit of a U.S. Person, and whose receipt and review of the terms of the Private Invitation Memorandum and participation in the Exchange Offer was otherwise permitted under the laws and regulations of any jurisdiction applicable to them (the " Eligible Holders ").

The aggregate principal amount of the Existing Note tendered, not validly withdrawn, and accepted by the Company in the Exchange Offer as of 5:00 p.m. ( New York time) on June 9, 2023 , was US$3,525,356 representing 30.32% aggregate principal amount of the Existing Note (the " Exchanged Note ").

The Settlement Date, as defined in the Private Invitation Memorandum, is expected to occur on June 16, 2023 , when the Company expects to issue the New Note in exchange for the Existing Note accepted in the Exchange Offer, and cancel the Exchanged Note in the manner provided in the Indenture. Following the cancellation of the Exchanged Note, the principal amount of the outstanding Existing Note shall be US$8,103,410 .

D.F. King acted as information and exchange agent. Any questions regarding the Exchange Offer may be directed to D.F. King at +1 (212) 269-5550 (Banks and Brokers call) - +1 (800) 249-7148 (Toll-free) - +1 (212) 709-3328 (facsimile), or at [email protected].

Important Notice

This announcement does not contain or constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to exchange, buy or subscribe for securities to or from any person in any jurisdiction to whom or in which such offer or solicitation is unlawful. This announcement is, and the Exchange Offer referred to herein was, directed to Eligible Holders, and the Existing Note may be exchanged for the New Note as described in the Private Invitation Memorandum only by Eligible Holders. Persons into whose possession this announcement or the Private Invitation Memorandum comes are required by the Company to inform themselves about, and to observe, any restrictions on the distribution of materials relating to the Exchange Offer, or on the issue and resale of securities.

The recipient of this announcement may not forward or distribute the announcement or the related Private Invitation Memorandum in whole or in part to any other person or reproduce the announcement or the Private Invitation Memorandum in any manner whatsoever and any forwarding, distribution or reproduction of the announcement or the Private Invitation Memorandum in whole or in part is unauthorized. The failure to comply with this instruction may result in a violation of the Securities Act or the applicable laws of other jurisdictions.

You are also reminded that this announcement and the Private Invitation Memorandum have been provided to you on the basis that you are a person into whose possession this announcement and the Private Invitation Memorandum may be lawfully delivered in accordance with (i) the laws of the jurisdiction in which you are located or resident and (ii) any jurisdictional restriction pursuant to applicable securities laws, and you may not, nor are you authorized to, deliver this announcement and the Private Invitation Memorandum to any other person. Any materials relating to the Exchange Offer do not constitute, and may not be used in connection with, any form of offer or solicitation in any place where such offers or solicitations are not permitted by law.

Forward-Looking Statements

All statements in this press release, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements. These statements are based on expectations and assumptions on the date of this press release and are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, market conditions, and factors over which the Company has no control. The Company assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, and does not intend to do so, unless otherwise required by law.

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SOURCE Faroy S.A.
BEIJING , June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- A news report from China.org.cn on China's Global Civilization Initiative:

A few days ago, I had a conversation with an international student, and I asked him what intrigued him most about China . He responded, "Obviously, Chinese Kung Fu !" After a short pause, he added, "And palace drama."

The appeal of China extends beyond martial arts. Many people from other countries also like other aspects of Chinese culture, including the art of tea-making, Hanfu - traditional Chinese clothing, and Peking Opera. These aspects collectively form a key part of both our Chinese and global intangible cultural heritage. And now, China is gearing up to celebrate these cultural treasures.

China will celebrate this year's Cultural and Natural Heritage Day on June 10 , under the theme "Preserving and Utilizing Cultural Relics, Cultivating Cultural Confidence and Self-improvement." The occasion is also set to mark the 20th anniversary of the "Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage." As part of the celebration, there will be a series of vibrant activities, such as the Intangible Cultural Heritage Folk Art Performance Week and the Intangible Cultural Heritage Shopping Festival. These events emphasize the importance of preserving and reimagining our cultural traditions while reminding us of the historical and cultural values that still hold relevance in today's modern world. It also represents a concrete step towards actualizing the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI) proposed by President Xi Jinping earlier this year.

The key objective of the GCI, as demonstrated by this event, is to encourage developing countries, including China , to cultivate their own unique cultural industries and to respect cultural diversity. At the same time, it also seeks to foster exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations worldwide.

In pursuit of this first objective, China has been working hard for years to revive its traditional culture. Many ancient and unique cultural practices, such as ink-making, single bamboo drifting, and traditional vinegar-making techniques, have been given new life. I grew up listening to Pingshu, a traditional storytelling style in northern China , and I was amazed by many performances at this year's Intangible Cultural Heritage Folk Art Performance Week in Wuhan . In addition, China has also ramped up efforts to support the development of other countries' indigenous cultures. Chinese cultural heritage preservation workers have participated in the restoration of endangered cultural legacies in many countries, including Mongolia , Cambodia , Nepal , and Myanmar . Chinese museums have also protected historical relics from Afghanistan and Syria in times of conflict.

China has a rich history of engaging with other civilizations. Notable examples include the journey of imperial envoy Zhang Qian to the Western Regions during the Han Dynasty ( 202 B.C.-220 A.D.). During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Chinese navigator Zheng He embarked on voyages to the western Pacific and Indian oceans. There's also the journey of Monk Xuanzang to India for Buddhist scriptures in the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Today, China continues its tradition of cultural exchanges with Belt and Road partner countries. It's in the DNA of the Chinese nation to march toward a common future through communication and mutual learning. In the context of Chinese society, such exchanges are emblematic of openness and inclusiveness, which is reflected in the ancient Chinese saying, "The ocean is vast because it admits all rivers." The courage and willingness to learn from other countries' excellent cultural achievements demonstrate China's profound cultural heritage and strong cultural confidence.

Compared with the Global Development Initiative and Global Security Initiative proposed by China , the Global Civilization Initiative is about the shared values of humanity. It's about cooperation and integration at the cultural-ethical level, providing a deeper foundation for ideas and perspectives.

The three initiatives, which complement and interconnect with each other, represent China's wisdom and solutions for the world.

China Mosaic

http://www.china.org.cn/video/node_7230027.htm

Global Civilization Initiative: Celebrating the vibrancy of world cultures

http://www.china.org.cn/video/2023-06/09/content_86803782.htm

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SOURCE China.org.cn
Glowing lava flows from the crater of Mayon volcano as it erupts in Albay Province, the Philippines, June 11, 2023. The Philippine authorities on Friday evacuated people from the 6 km radius danger zone around the erupting Mayon Volcano in Albay province, approximately 500 km southeast of the capital Manila.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said the volcano began erupting on Thursday, warning of a "potential explosive activity within weeks or even days."

Mayon is the Philippines' most active volcano. It last erupted in January 2018, resulting in evacuation of more than 23,000 people from nine cities and municipalities. (Str/Xinhua)

MANILA, June 9 (Xinhua) -- The Philippine authorities on Friday evacuated people from the 6 km radius danger zone around the erupting Mayon Volcano in Albay province, approximately 500 km southeast of the capital Manila.

The Albay Provincial Information Office said more than 18,000 people from 14 villages within the danger zone must be evacuated to safety.

The local government has evacuated at least 10,000 people, and it will take a couple of days to evacuate all the affected villagers within the danger zone.

Albay province, on the southernmost tip of Luzon island, is now under a state of calamity. The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council is still determining the exact number of evacuated people.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said the volcano began erupting on Thursday, warning of a "potential explosive activity within weeks or even days."

In a five-level warning system, the institute raised the alarm at the 2,460-meter cone-shaped Mayon volcano to the third level.

The overall monitoring parameters indicate that very slow extrusion of shallow degassed magma is ongoing, the institute said.

Mayon is the Philippines' most active volcano. It last erupted in January 2018, resulting in evacuation of more than 23,000 people from nine cities and municipalities. 
NAIROBI, Kenya , June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) is proud to announce that Joseph Ng 'ang'a, Vice President of Africa at GEAPP, has been appointed as Chief Executive Officer of the inaugural Africa Climate Summit, which will take place in Nairobi from 4- 6 September 2023 .

The African Union Assembly in February 2023 , adopted the African Union's Committee of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change (CAHOSCC) - Chaired by President William Ruto - resolution and nominated Kenya to host the Africa Climate Summit. The summit marks a critical staging post for African countries and the world to achieve its climate goals. The 3-day event will bring together world leaders, experts, policymakers and the private sector to unite in action ahead of COP28 in November.

Joseph will head the ACS Secretariat and oversee the planning and coordination of all activities related to the Summit, working closely with Environment Cabinet Secretary, Hon. Soipan Tuya and other stakeholders. Joseph will return to his role at GEAPP once the Summit is complete.

Simon Harford , CEO of GEAPP said: "GEAPP is delighted to support the vision of President Ruto and the African Union Commission. President Ruto has shown immense personal leadership and vision, putting collaboration at the heart of Africa's response to the climate crisis. This summit is indicative of that and provides an opportunity for Africa to come together with the world, convening leaders across sectors, countries and continents."

He continued: "Joseph's appointment signals the trust and respect he commands as he works to reshape and accelerate the climate agenda within Africa , and beyond. By unlocking this urgent movement for change, we can accelerate the green energy transition and create the sustainable economic growth and jobs that Africa and the world needs to thrive."

Joseph Ng 'ang'a said of his appointment: "I am honoured with this Presidential appointment to lead and deliver the Africa Climate Summit, which could not come at a more important time for the world. Climate change poses existential challenges to people and our shared planet but our response to it offers tremendous opportunities for growth and innovation if we all work together. This summit will generate transformative change by accelerating collaboration and climate action, mobilising climate finance and renewable energy adoption, and implementing nature-based solutions. Together, we can build a prosperous and resilient future for Africa and the world."

Joseph is also the Chair of the Funders Council for Sustainable Energy for All and a co-Founder of the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI).

The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) is an alliance of philanthropy, governments, and technology, policy, and financing partners, founded by IKEA Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bezos Earth Fund. GEAPP was created to help accelerate clean energy for everyone, everywhere, for people and the planet.

Mr Ng 'ang'a was joined at State House in Nairobi , by Simon Harford , CEO GEAPP, and William Asiko, Vice-President, The Rockefeller Foundation Africa.

About the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet



The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) is an alliance of philanthropy, governments in emerging and developed economies, and technology, policy, and financing partners. Our common mission is to enable emerging economies to shift to a clean energy, pro-growth model that accelerates universal energy access and inclusive economic growth, while supporting the global community to meet critical climate goals during the next decade. As an alliance we aim to reduce 4 gigatons of future carbon emissions, expand clean energy access to one billion people, and enable 150 million new jobs. With philanthropic partners, IKEA Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and Bezos Earth Fund, GEAPP works to build the enabling environment, capacity, and market conditions for private sector solutions, catalyse new business models through innovation and entrepreneurship, and deploy high-risk capital to encourage private sector solutions, and assist just transition solutions. For more information, please visit www.energyalliance.org and follow us on Twitter at @EnergyAlliance.

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SOURCE Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP)
Designed by award-winning British design entrepreneur, Benjamin Hubert of LAYER, KFI Studios launches a family of chairs designed for the modern office

LOUISVILLE, Ky. , June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- KFI Studios , a recognized leader in commercial furniture and pushing sustainable modern design forward, today, introduced the Vale chair collection, the first line of PET Felt seating created by an American manufacturer. Designed by award-winning British designer Benjamin Hubert of LAYER , the Vale seating collection features an armchair, side chair, lounge chair with ottoman, counter stool and barstools. The collection is designed for the modern office and demand by commercial clients for furniture that supports employees' desire for hospitality-style spaces.

With sustainability at the forefront of the design process, the chair shells are created with PET felt made from recycled plastic bottles. The pressed felt shell, with its elegantly contoured form, is used throughout the collection to achieve a harmonious vision. The fluidity of the curved silhouette evokes a softness which is enhanced by the soft texture of the PET felt.

"The name 'Vale' stems from the unique design feature of the rolled edge that gives it a friendly feel and is both very warm and inviting," explains Chris Smith , CEO of KFI Studios. "Vale is the Middle English word for 'valley,' which is what the rolled edge creates on the chair shell. The rolled edge provides a source of strength and shows visual comfort while the thin tube frame maintains the refined and minimal feel with an extra level of tailored comfort."

Vale is available in six PET felt colors including Charcoal, Grey, Stone, Midnight, Sage and Garnet; and seven unique frame finishes so you can customize your Vale set. Customers may also add an upholstered seat for additional customization and comfort.

Vale is available for contract customers via authorized KFI Studios' reps and dealers with a list price starting at $750 .

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SOURCE KFI Studios
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers proclaims June 9 as "Kikkoman Day" in recognition of the company's continued contributions to the state and country.

WALWORTH, Wis. , June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Fifty years ago, with the opening of Kikkoman Foods, Inc., a farm field in southern Wisconsin was transformed into what has now become the highest-producing soy sauce facility in the world. Today, the state of Wisconsin recognizes "Kikkoman Day," marking the golden anniversary of the plant opening in Walworth , Wis. The proclamation also celebrates the company's positive impact on the partnership between Wisconsin and Japan , and its contributions of more than $17 million to charitable causes in the local community and beyond.

At its anniversary events today, the Kikkoman Foods, Inc. Foundation presented $5 million in support of sustainable agriculture and freshwater studies. The foundation's donation includes $3 million for the University of Wisconsin-Madison's College of Agricultural & Life Sciences and $2 million for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Freshwater Science, with both donations supporting research that will contribute to protecting the very resources that initially drew the world's leading soy sauce producer to Wisconsin .

"Kikkoman is pleased to invest in a state that has become a second home to our company," said Mr. Yuzaburo Mogi , honorary chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Kikkoman Corp. "We believe that for a company to thrive over the long run, coexistence and co-prosperity with society, and especially the local community, are essential. The time-honored traditional brewing process for soy sauce uses just four simple ingredients: water, soybeans, wheat, and salt. Through the donations to these two leading research programs, we're providing meaningful benefit to the region, and world, by helping to ensure the sustainability of agricultural systems and natural resources that contribute to producing soy sauce into the future."

The Walworth plant, which began producing soy sauce in 1973, made history by being one of the first production facilities built in the United States by a Japanese company. Since arriving in Wisconsin , Kikkoman forged partnerships and friendships within the local community, finding and celebrating shared cultural values like hard work, respect, cooperation, and a commitment to excellence. With these values as its foundation, Kikkoman Foods, Inc. grew to become the cornerstone of Kikkoman's international business, now producing 30 times more product annually than in its first year.

"The state of Wisconsin is proud to join Kikkoman Corporation in celebrating a half-century of business in the state with the proclamation of June 9 as Kikkoman Day," announced Governor Tony Evers . "From a deep commitment to promoting collaboration and understanding between our state and Japan to its countless contributions in support of charitable causes over the years, we thank Kikkoman Corporation for its impact on the state and wish them many more years of success in Wisconsin ."

These announcements were shared at a press conference preceding the Wisconsin-U.S.-Japan Economic Development Conference held in conjunction with the company's anniversary celebration at the Grand Geneva Resort & Spa in Lake Geneva, Wis. UW-Milwaukee and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation are co-sponsors of the conference, which is focused on fostering sustained global economic growth in an Era of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. Conference discussions are being led by preeminent business and political leaders from Japan and the United States , including Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers .

"As we celebrate the anniversary of Kikkoman Foods Inc. and 50 years of brewing soy sauce in the United States , I want to profess my profound gratitude for the people of Wisconsin whose partnership and support have made every accomplishment over the years possible," Mr. Mogi said. "We're looking forward to the next 50 years of friendship and continued growth in our pursuit to make Kikkoman Soy Sauce a truly global seasoning."

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SOURCE Kikkoman Foods, Inc.
SEOUL, South Korea , June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- KT SAT, South Korea's the sole satellite service company with its self-owned satellites, participated in SatelliteAsia 2023, a biggest satellite technology trade show throughout Asia Pacific region held in Singapore Expo from 7th to 9th, June.

KT SAT has set up the exhibition booth to showcase its competitive services and solutions along with this year's business strategy, laying the foundation to become a Multi-Orbit satellite operator. This year, the MEO (Medium Earth Orbit) satellite service of Mangata Networks took up a big portion of the booth. MEO capacity, which is secured by partnership with Mangata Networks, is one of the important resources for KT SAT to proceed a Multi-Orbit business.

As a part of its Multi-Orbit business strategy, KT SAT invested in Mangata Networks which provides end-to-end cloud-based solutions, powered by a global satellite and terrestrial network. Following the investment, KT SAT also signed a MEO capacity purchase contract with Mangata in order to meet diverse customer needs with Multi-Orbit networks including its self-owned GEO capacity. The contract includes the target service date of 2026 and service region of Southern East and East Asia such as Indonesia , Malaysia and India etc.

Brian Holz , CEO of Mangata Networks said "We are building a multi-orbit constellation of HEO (highly elliptical orbit) and MEO (medium Earth orbit) satellites and a terrestrial grid of edge data centers to provide seamless connectivity with cloud and IoT services. We are delighted to be partnering with KT SAT to provide MEO capacity to Southern East and East Asia which are significant regions in the industry expecting it to play a key part in our growth strategy. "

KT SAT also showcased its next generation satellite solutions  Edge Computing over Satellite and Multi-beam Terminal - aligned with its business strategy. Edge Computing over satellite is about processing data closer to where it's being generated enabling processing at great speed and volume, leading to reduce satellite backhaul bandwidth and minimize latency. No matter what kinds of satellite network is used, it can apply to any networks including GEO, MEO and LEO.

Multi-beam terminal, an integrated satellite terminal that includes antenna and modem, enables simultaneous Tx/Rx operation on GEO and other NGSO satellites through multi-beam radiation. KT SAT is applying its own-developed Hybrid solution to the terminal so that it will be able to provide a merged speed of multiple networks and seamless hand over between networks.

Along with Multi-orbit service, KT SAT will further expand its GEO business domain. Tata group company Nelco, a leading satellite communication service provider in India , also expressed an interest in KT SAT's GEO service expansion. Recently, KT SAT and Nelco entered into a partnership to bring KT SAT's GEO service in India with KORASAT-7. At the Satellite Asia 2023 event, both companies discussed various ways to bring value of connectivity in India and to strengthen the partnership.

Kyungmin Daivd Song , CEO of KT SAT said "We are endeavoring to raise service competitiveness and customer satisfaction by establishing fundamentals to be a Multi-Orbit service provider with Multi-orbit satellite portfolio and high quality solutions"

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SOURCE KT SAT
YOSEMITE VALLEY, Calif., June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- In surprising and welcome news for thousands of Yosemite fans, Yosemite's Big Oak Flat entrance on Highway 120 West , the most direct route to Yosemite from the San Francisco Bay Area , is reopening this Saturday, June 10th .

With Yosemite Valley access reopening after a long-awaited period, local insiders at Visit Tuolumne County , Rush Creek and Evergreen Lodges, are eagerly welcoming visitors to embark on unparalleled adventures filled with breathtaking scenery and epic waterfalls and wildflowers that just won't quit.

Located at the gateway to Yosemite National Park , Rush Creek Lodge & Spa and Evergreen Lodge stand as exceptional basecamps for Yosemite adventures. From guided tours, to local hikes, hanging out at the pool, or spending a relaxing day at the Yosemite -inspired spa, guests worldwide are having the time of their lives. Rush Creek Lodge's "15 Local Attractions and Activities at Rush Creek Lodge & Spa at Yosemite " is filled with tips from locals and recent guests sharing their ultimate Yosemite adventure.

"We're thrilled to extend a warm welcome to visitors as Yosemite Valley opens back up to an extraordinary summer season with unprecedented waterfalls throughout the region. Our Lodges offer a perfect starting point, whether joining one of our friendly guides for a tour, or simply visiting our Recreation Desk for free planning advice on where to go for the best experience," says Josh Bailey , Recreation Manager at the lodges.

With its rich history entwined in the Gold Rush era, Tuolumne County offers a treasure trove of remarkable outdoor experiences and fascinating cultural heritage. Whether visitors are seeking thrilling adventures or serene moments amidst nature's splendor, Tuolumne County has it all. The County's "21 Things to Do in Tuolumne " is the perfect guide to uncovering the hidden gems that the area has to offer.

Lisa Mayo , Visit Tuolumne County's CEO and President comments, "While we understand that many people want to visit the iconic Yosemite Valley Floor, we encourage visitors to explore the lesser-known areas of Yosemite . Our charming Gold Rush and High Sierra towns are experiencing a resurgence of new generations of artists, retailers, craft beverage pioneers and restaurateurs that surprise and delight visitors every day."

Yosemite National Park , Tuolumne County , Rush Creek Lodge & Spa , and Evergreen Lodge continue to welcome visitors who will undoubtedly be enchanted by the pristine beauty and rich heritage of Tuolumne County . Whether hiking the iconic trails of Yosemite National Park , gazing at the majestic waterfalls, or immersing in the captivating Gold Rush history, Tuolumne County and the Lodges serve as a destination within a destination to enrich the wonders of nature and the soul.

ABOUT VISIT TUOLUMNE COUNTY

Visit Tuolumne ("to-all-o-me") County (VTC) is the official destination marketing organization for Tuolumne County in Northern California . Tuolumne County is just a 2 1/2-hour drive east of the San Francisco Bay Area . The main highways leading to the picturesque drive from the Bay Area are Highways 108 and 120 from the west and Highway 49 from the north. The State Highway 120 entrance to Yosemite National Park is considered the "front door" of the park for the Bay Area . For more information, go to VistTCToday.com.

ABOUT RUSH CREEK LODGE & SPA

A fresh take on the Yosemite experience, Rush Creek opened at the doorstep of Yosemite in summer 2016. The contemporary mountain lodge offers 143 guest rooms, and extensive amenities including Restaurant/Tavern, guided recreation program and Yosemite-inspired Spa . Rush Creek is a Certified B Corporation, meeting social sustainability and environmental performance standards, including a fully self-funded on-site youth employment program and a host of environmental initiatives.

ABOUT EVERGREEN LODGE

Evergreen Lodge sits one mile from Yosemite's western border and the entrance to Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy. The lodge blends modern comforts with the relaxed approach and activities of a mountain ranch, and the timeless warmth of a historic 1920s lodge. Evergreen features cozy cabins, custom campsites and two exclusive vacation rentals. Since 2007, Evergreen has been a certified B Corporation, using profits to self-fund and operate an innovative on-site Youth Employment Program teaching job and life skills to Bay Area youth, while also maintaining high standards for environmental stewardship.

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OPPO's Find N2 Flip phone features 44W SUPERVOOC Flash Charging technology, allowing it to reach 50 percent in 23 minutes

OPPO has addressed the challenge of fast charging in flip phones by implementing a "Dual-Battery Charging System", ensuring long-term battery health

The Find N2 Flip delivers long-lasting battery and best-in-class fast charging, taking the entire flip phone category to the next level

DUBAI, UAE , June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Flip phones don't typically charge as quickly as traditional phones, because fast charging systems require a very large battery. Once again, OPPO has risen to the challenge for the Find N2 Flip, featuring its best-in-class 44W SUPERVOOC Flash Charging technology, allowing the phone to reach 34 percent battery capacity in just 15 minute and 50 percent in 23 minutes.

OPPO prioritizes safety and durability in their charging philosophy, understanding that speed should be built upon a strong foundation. As flip phones are so unique by design, creating a fast-charging system with excellent longevity, even after an extended number of charge cycles, is incredibly challenging.

As a pioneer in fast-changing technology, OPPO addressed this challenge by reimagining its tried and tested fast-charging dual-cell design by incorporating a larger 3110mAh cell and a smaller 1190mAh cell, totaling 4300mAh. To ensure long-term battery health, OPPO created a "Dual-Battery Charging System" that requires both cells to charge and discharge simultaneously. This system incorporates a control switch in the parallel circuit, disconnecting the smaller battery once it reaches a certain charge level and shifting the charging process to the larger battery, allowing the battery as a whole to achieve the same charge and discharge times as traditional smartphones.

This "Dual-Battery Charging System" makes 44W SUPERVOOC charging safe, stable, efficient, and possible in a compact space. OPPO also prioritizes the Find N2 Flip's heat management, incorporating a partitioned heat dissipation design and separating the charging chip and other heat-producing components. Additionally, a four-sheet graphite layer dissipate heat uniformly across the phone, ensuring the maximum temperature is no higher than 41.5 C.

Peaking at similar temperatures to many traditional phones, even when performing demanding tasks like charging while on a video call, Find N2 creates a compromise-free battery experience, despite being a compact flip phone.

While flip phones may have been novel, stylish gadgets in the past, OPPO has changed the narrative. Find N2 Flip proves a flip phone can also be a durable partner ready for real life, and able to deliver all-day, long-lasting battery and best-in-class fast charging. With Find N2 Flip, OPPO takes the flip phone category as a whole to the next level.

About OPPO

OPPO is a leading global technology brand since 2004, dedicated to providing products that seamlessly combines art and innovative technology.

OPPO is on a mission to building a multiple-access smart device ecosystem for the era of intelligent connectivity. The smartphone devices have simply been a gateway for OPPO to deliver a diverse portfolio of smart and frontier technologies in hardware, software and system. In 2019, OPPO launched a $7 Billion US Dollar three -year investment plan in R&D to develop core technologies furthering design through technology.

OPPO is firmly pursuing the creation of the best technology products and technological artistry for global users. Based on the brand elements of leading, young and beautiful, OPPO dedicates to the mission of letting the extraordinary users enjoy the beauty of technology.

For the last 10 years, OPPO has focused on manufacturing smartphones with camera capabilities that are second to none. OPPO launched the first mobile phone, the Smile Phone, in 2008, which marked the launch of the brand's epic journey in exploring and pioneering extraordinary technology. Over the years, OPPO has built a tradition of being number one, which became a reality through inventing the world's first rotating camera smartphone way back in 2013, launching the world's then thinnest smartphone in 2014, being the first to introduce 5X Zoom 'Periscope' camera technology and developing the first 5G commercial smartphone in Europe .

Today, OPPO was ranked as the number four smartphone brand globally. OPPO brings the aesthetics of technology of global consumers through the ColorOS system Experience, and Internet service like OPPO Cloud and OPPO+.

OPPO's business covers 60 countries operated by more than 40,000 dedicated employees, with over six research institutes and five R&D centers across the world, from San Francisco to Shenzhen . OPPO also opened an International Design Centre headquartered in London , driving cutting edge technology that will shape the future not only for smartphones but for intelligent connectivity.

About OPPO MEA

OPPO started its journey in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region in 2015 after setting up its regional office in Egypt . Following the immense success of the brand's sales centre in Cairo in the first year, OPPO accelerated its expansion plan across the MEA region and inaugurated its country operations in the UAE in 2019. Now OPPO is physically present in more than 14 markets across the region, including Egypt , Algeria , Tunisia , Morocco , Bahrain , Saudi Arabia , UAE , Oman , Kuwait , Qatar , Kenya , Nigeria , South Africa and the Levant.

To empower its presence in the region in line with its product localisation strategy, OPPO further invested in MENA and set up its very own factory in Algeria in 2017, thus, becoming the first Chinese brand to build a manufacturing premises in North Africa . Based on insights of local consumers in each country, OPPO has evolved the progress of product localisation, taking into consideration several perspectives towards each market, including product localisation, to further meet the core needs of users; marketing localisation, to better communicate with local young customers; and talent localisation, to understand local consumers further and provide an optimum customer service.

Within the last year, OPPO has started to adjust its product line in the Middle East region specifically. This has included the launch of its flagship OPPO Find X Series and the introduction of the OPPO Reno Series. OPPO will continue to evolve its local product line to offer more premium series to consumers in the region.

A forward-thinking international technology company, OPPO strives to be a sustainable company that contributes to a better world and have enacted positive change in every way possible through activating local community initiatives and humanitarian, charity campaigns.

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SOURCE OPPO
Session will cover how to address labor market challenges while balancing internal equity

WALTHAM, Mass. , June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Compensation practitioners Shaun Drawdy of Saia LTL Freight and Neil Sandefur of Salary.com will deliver a session "Striking a Balance with Salary Structures: Internal Equity vs. External Competition" at WorldatWork's Total Rewards '23 conference in San Diego on Wednesday, June 14 at 10am . The theme of Total Rewards '23, taking place from June 12-June 14 is Advancing the Art and Science of Total Rewards.

Visit Salary.com at Booth #313 to price jobs on the spot and learn how to address pay equity.

In the presentation Shaun Drawdy , Senior Manager of Compensation at Saia, and Neil Sandefur , Director, Compensation Professional Services at Salary.com, will walk the audience through Drawdy's salary structure journeys as he has worked throughout his career to address labor market challenges while balancing internal equity. The presentation will cover:

Building salary structures that support organizational goals.

Designing a structure in a challenging labor market.

Maintaining structures to reflect current market data.

Communication of salary ranges for recruiting or ongoing pay decisions.

Using salary structures for pay transparency initiatives.

A sponsor of Total Rewards '23, Salary.com is also welcoming Expo attendees to Booth #313 to price jobs on the spot and learn how Salary.com solutions are helping organizations achieve pay equity. All booth visitors who demo a Salary.com product will receive a $15 Starbucks gift card and a chance to win items from Apple, Bose, Delta and more.

Salary.com's Vice President of Consulting David Turetsky is also on the Total Rewards speaking agenda. He and Steve Brink , President of uFlexReward, will speak on Monday, June 12 at 10:30am in a session titled "True Confessions of Compensation Consultants: Myths, Mistakes and Misconceptions."

WorldatWork is committed to those responsible for cultivating inspired, engaged, productive and committed employees in effective and rewarding workplaces. The organization serves rewards and HR professionals working throughout the world, in organizations of all sizes and in every industry.

About Salary.com

Salary.com has been solving the complex human capital needs of global organizations for more than 20 years. Today, Salary.com's 30,000 organizations in 22 countries use our solutions to confidently hire and retain talent so they can better compete in a constantly changing landscape. Offering the most precise data set on the market, Salary.com provides more than 10 billion data points across more than 225 industries using a powerful, proprietary AI framework. The company's flagship product CompAnalyst is the cornerstone of the compensation management software platform. It empowers organizations with a suite of tools that simplifies hiring, eliminates compensation guesswork, and increases retention. Employee trust depends on fair pay and Salary.com's solutions get pay right. For more information, please visit www.salary.com/business.

Media Contact:

Julie Murphy

Director of MarCom

Salary.com

[email protected]

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SOURCE Salary.com, Inc.
Ribbon Cutting Ceremony on Wednesday, June 14

ANDERSON, S.C. , June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Blood Connection is celebrating World Blood Donor Day with the grand opening of its newest donation center in Anderson, SC . The center is now open at 101 Hanna Crossing in Anderson, SC  across from T.L. Hanna High School. A ribbon cutting ceremony will be held at 10:30 am on Wednesday, June 14 th in partnership with the Anderson Chamber of Commerce. The ceremony will consist of local leaders, AnMed representatives, TBC blood donors, board members, and other special guests  including Anderson Mayor Terence Roberts , State Representative Thomas Beach , Danielle Gibbs from Senator Tim Scott's Office, and City Councilman Glenn Davis .

"AnMed depends on a continuous reliable blood supply to provide care for many types of patients including those fighting cancer, heart disease and serious injury," says AnMed CEO William Kenley . "We could not do what we do without the Blood Connection and are very grateful for their partnership and for their commitment to the Anderson community. We encourage everyone who can to donate blood at the new Anderson donation center and help us ensure those life-saving blood products remain continuously available for those who need them."

This long-awaited fixed donation site represents a major milestone for TBC in the Upstate. TBC first began supplying blood products to AnMed in 2018, after the hospital system invited TBC to be its blood provider. TBC is now the exclusive blood provider for the Anderson community and will be for the foreseeable future, as AnMed and TBC just recently signed a 3-year exclusive agreement to continue their partnership.

"This has been a long time coming for TBC and we are so thrilled to finally opening a donation center in Anderson . This community has proven again and again that it is dedicated to a stable community blood supply. We are grateful to our donors here and to the many more that will now join our family with the opening of this new center," says President and CEO, Delisa English . "When an AnMed patient receives a blood transfusion, that blood is available only through The Blood Connection. Local blood donations truly make a difference for our friends and neighbors."

TBC is thankful to the many partners who have hosted blood drives over the years. Smaller organizations and businesses can now bring a group to the Anderson Donation Center to donate together. The center is open Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m and on Saturday and Sunday 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Appointments are encouraged but not required. For more information, visit the TBC Anderson Center website.

About The Blood Connection

Founded in Greenville, SC , The Blood Connection has been committed to saving lives since 1962. TBC is an independently managed, not-for-profit, community blood center that provides blood products to more than 120 hospitals and emergency partners within South Carolina , North Carolina , Georgia , and Virginia . Recognized by the U.S. Congress for its dedication to disaster preparedness and the community, TBC works diligently to collect blood from volunteer donors to meet the ever-increasing demand. By keeping collections local, TBC serves hundreds of thousands of patients a year in its communities. TBC is licensed and regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. For more information, visit thebloodconnection.org.

Media contact:

Allie Van Dyke

[email protected]

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SOURCE The Blood Connection, Inc.
A roundup of the week's most newsworthy consumer and retail industry press releases from PR Newswire, including a Cheez-It fill station and YSL's makeup collab with Lil Nas X .

NEW YORK , June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- With thousands of press releases published each week, it can be difficult to keep up with everything on PR Newswire. To help journalists covering the consumer and retail industries stay on top of the week's most newsworthy and popular releases, here's a roundup of stories from the week that shouldn't be missed.

The list below includes the headline (with a link to the full text) and an excerpt from each story. Click on the press release headlines to access accompanying multimedia assets that are available for download.

Read more of the latest consumer-related releases from PR Newswire and stay caught up on the top press releases by following @PRNcnsmr, @prnfood, @prnbeauty, and @prnfashion on Twitter.

Can't-Miss Earnings

In addition to these popular releases, quarterly results for Kirkland's Home, Cracker Barrel, and Designer Brands crossed the wire this week.

Catch up on all the latest earnings reports here.

Helping Journalists Stay Up to Date on Industry News

These are just a few of the recent press releases that consumers and the media should know about. To be notified of releases relevant to their coverage area, journalists can set up a custom newsfeed with PR Newswire for Journalists.

Once they're signed up, reporters, bloggers and freelancers have access to the following free features:

Customization: Create a customized newsfeed that will deliver relevant news right to your inbox. Customize the newsfeed by keywords, industry, subject, geography, and more.

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Access ProfNet, a database of industry experts to connect with as sources or for quotes in your articles. Related Resources: Read and subscribe to our journalist- and blogger-focused blog, Beyond Bylines, for media news roundups, writing tips, upcoming events, and more

About PR Newswire and PR Newswire for Journalists

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PR Newswire for Journalists (PRNJ) is an exclusive community that includes over 20,000 journalists, bloggers and influencers who are logging into their PRNJ accounts specifically looking for story ideas. PR Newswire thoroughly researches and vets this community to verify their identity as a member of the press, blogger or influencer. PRNJ users cover more than 200 beats and verticals.

For questions, contact the team at [email protected].

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SOURCE PR Newswire
FILE PHOTO: A 3D printed oil pump jack is seen in front of displayed Opec logo in this illustration picture, April 14, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

By Dmitry Zhdannikov, Ahmad Ghaddar and Alex Lawler

LONDON (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia kept under wraps its plan to make a deep cut to its own oil output during a weekend of OPEC+ talks in Vienna, several OPEC+ sources told Reuters, with some member states only learning about the reduction from the final news conference.

Saudi Arabia is the top OPEC producer and the member with the most flexibility to raise or cut output, giving the kingdom unrivalled influence over the oil market - although the impact on oil prices since announcing its plans has been modest so far.

The Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman has previously used the power of surprise in managing oil markets, where prices have come under pressure due to concerns about the weakness of the global economy and its impact on demand.

Days before the OPEC+ meeting, Prince Abdulaziz said he would inflict more pain on short sellers - those who bet that oil prices will fall - and told them to watch out. He announced the output cut after the meeting, calling it a "Saudi lollipop".

Four OPEC+ sources, who were among their countries' delegations involved in policy talks, said they only heard details of the Saudi cut at the Sunday evening news conference  and that the idea of a cut didn't come up during a weekend of discussions on a broader deal to limit supply into 2024.

"No information on the additional cut was shared prior to the press conference," one of the four sources said. "It was a surprise one, once again."

Saudi Arabia said it would cut output in July by 10% or 1 million barrels per day (bpd) to 9 million bpd and may extend cuts further if needed. Meanwhile, OPEC+ agreed to extend cuts into 2024 but didn't commit to any fresh cuts in 2023.

OPEC+, which groups the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies led by Russia, pumps around 40% of the world's crude.

As well as the Saudi cut, OPEC+ lowered its collective production target for 2024 and the nine participating countries extended the April voluntary cuts to the end of 2024.

The United Arab Emirates secured a higher output quota that it had long been seeking - an issue that has caused tension between the group and Abu Dhabi, which has been increasing its output capacity.

The Saudi Energy Ministry and OPEC's Vienna headquarters did not respond to requests for comment.

'CAN'T PUSH THE OTHERS'

In the days leading up to the June 4 meeting, two other OPEC+ sources said there was an idea for more cuts by OPEC+ states, although this did not proceed to advanced discussions in Vienna.

Saudi Arabia, other OPEC+ sources said, recognised it would be difficult to secure cuts from others such as the UAE and Russia, which according to sources in the days before the meeting was reluctant to cut output further.

"The Saudis were cognizant this time they could not push the others," an OPEC+ source said. "The UAE are happy with the new quota and it is a big relief for the Saudis."

Still, Saudi Arabia did manage to persuade other members of OPEC+ that have been unable to produce at required levels due to lack of investment in capacity - notably Nigeria and Angola - to accept lower production targets for 2024 after long meetings.

Prince Abdulaziz told Al Arabiya after the meeting the group was tired of giving quotas to countries that were unable to produce them and that Russia needed to be transparent about its output and exports levels.

OPEC+ sources said the new targets for Angola and Nigeria were still higher than the countries can realistically pump, which means they do not have to perform real cuts.

Russia, whose exports have stayed strong despite Western sanctions, also avoided having to make a further reduction.

It is unclear if Saudi Arabia hinted about its possible voluntary cut to some officials in Russia or the African producers to help persuade them to agree a broader deal.

Nonetheless, all those producers stand to benefit if they can keep output the same or pump a bit more, especially if the Saudi cut boosts prices.

The Saudi cut could also give the kingdom more leverage in coming months to pressure countries that are not cutting output and yet benefit from others' cuts, one OPEC+ source said.

"To avoid free rider behaviour, Saudi Arabia could threaten to put 1 million bpd back on the market within 30 days, which would lead to a drop in prices," another OPEC+ source said. He did not name which countries this might be directed at.

So far, oil prices have risen slightly following the Saudi plan. Brent crude is trading higher than $77 on Thursday, up from Friday's close just above $76.

"Saudi cuts are playing second fiddle to worries about the state of the global economy," said Stephen Brennock of oil broker PVM, although he added the Saudi cut could widen a supply deficit in July.

"Accordingly, it will take a brave man to bet against an eventual uptick in prices."

(Additional reporting by Rowena Edwards, Maha El Dahan and Olesya Astakhova; Editing by Simon Webb and David Evans)
BEIJING, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Friday that China's position on the Ukraine crisis has been consistent, which is to promote peace talks.

While speaking over phone with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Xi said that he hopes all parties will build up favorable conditions for solving the crisis through dialogue, and that peace-loving countries worldwide that uphold justice can make a rational voice to promote peace talks. 
A view of the new iPhone 14 at an Apple event at their headquarters in Cupertino, California, U.S. September 7, 2022. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

By Mike Scarcella

(Reuters) - Apple and Amazon.com must face a consumer antitrust lawsuit in U.S. court accusing them of conspiring to artificially inflate the price of iPhones and iPads sold on Amazon's platform, a federal judge in Seattle ruled on Thursday.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour rejected bids from Apple and Amazon to dismiss the prospective class action on various legal grounds.

Coughenour said the "validity" of the relevant market, a central issue in antitrust litigation, was a question for a jury.

The lawsuit, filed in November, is among several private and government actions challenging Amazon's online price practices. Coughenour's ruling means the case will move forward to evidence-gathering and other pretrial proceedings.

Lawyers for Apple and Amazon and representatives for the companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.

Steve Berman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, called the court's ruling "a major win for consumers of Apple phones and iPads."

The plaintiffs are U.S. residents who bought new iPhones and iPads on Amazon beginning in January 2019. They contend an agreement between Apple and Amazon that went into effect that year restricted the number of competitive resellers in violation of antitrust provisions.

In 2018, according to the lawsuit, there were some 600 third-party Apple resellers on Amazon. Apple agreed to give Amazon a discount on its products if Amazon reduced the number of Apple resellers from its marketplace, the lawsuit alleged.

Apple has argued that its agreement with Amazon limited the number of authorized resellers to help minimize counterfeit Apple goods being sold on the e-commerce platform.

In a court filing, Apple's attorneys called the agreement "commonplace" and said the "Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit have routinely recognized that such agreements are procompetitive and lawful."

The judge in Seattle said "countervailing" motivations for the agreement between Apple and Amazon would be addressed later in the litigation.

Apple recorded $94.8 billion in sales in the second quarter, and Amazon reported $127.4 billion in its most recent quarterly earnings report.

The complaint seeks unspecified triple damages and other relief.

The case is Steven Floyd v Amazon.com Inc and Apple Inc, U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington, No. 2:22-cv-01599-JCC.

Read more:

Apple, Epic ask US appeals court to reconsider its antitrust ruling

Amazon loses bid to toss consumer antitrust lawsuit

Lawsuit claims Apple, Amazon colluded to raise iPhone, iPad prices

(Reporting by Mike Scarcella; editing by Leigh Jones)
FILE PHOTO: David Johnston, special rapporteur on foreign interference, holds a press conference about his findings and recommendations, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada May 23, 2023. REUTERS/Blair Gable

By David Ljunggren

OTTAWA (Reuters) -A special investigator named by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to probe alleged election interference by China on Friday said he would quit, citing widespread opposition to his appointment and work.

David Johnston, 81, said he would leave his post by the end of June, or as soon as he has delivered a brief final report. Last month he said Trudeau's government had not ignored evidence of Chinese meddling and recommended against an official public inquest.

Johnston was appointed in March after media reports based on leaked intelligence said that Beijing had sought to influence elections and policy. China has denied any interference.

Last month the House of Commons, the lower chamber of parliament, approved a non-binding motion to demand Johnston's resignation. Some critics said he had ignored a real issue while others, noting his long friendship with Trudeau, said the appointment had been a mistake.

"My objective was to help build trust in our democratic institutions. I have concluded that, given the highly partisan atmosphere around my appointment and work, my leadership has had the opposite effect," Johnston said in a letter to Trudeau.

In response, government minister Dominic LeBlanc thanked Johnston and said the attacks on his position and work had been unwarranted and unacceptable.

In a statement, LeBlanc said he would consult experts as to how to continue probing foreign election interference and who would be best placed to lead that work.

Following Johnston's appointment, three opposition legislators said Canada's spy agency told them they had been the target of Chinese interference. Last month Trudeau's government expelled a Chinese official after it emerged that he had sought information about the family of one of the legislators.

China-Canada relations turned icy in late 2018 when Canadian police detained a Chinese telecommunications executive. Shortly afterwards, Beijing arrested two Canadians on spying charges.

All three were freed in 2021.

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Leslie Adler)
FILE PHOTO: An investor sits in front of a board showing stock information at a brokerage office in Beijing, China, December 7, 2018. REUTERS/Thomas Peter

By Summer Zhen and Samuel Shen

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Money managers in China are struggling to lure retail investors, with fundraising by mutual funds in the first five months of the year hitting the lowest in four years and few betting on a near-term rebound, amid diminishing returns and economic challenges.

More than 200 million Chinese retail investors, sitting on billions of yuan in savings, have turned bearish on equities and are instead doubling down on safer assets such as deposits and treasury savings bonds, amid a sputtering economic recovery and rising unemployment.

Newly launched funds raised a total of 432.1 billion yuan ($61 billion) in the first five months, the smallest amount since the same period in 2019, according to data complied by Z-Ben Advisors, a fund industry consulting firm.

The number is even lower than that of 2022 when many Chinese cities were under strict COVID-19 lockdowns, and is only one-third of the same period in 2021.

The trend underscores the challenges Beijing faces in restoring confidence in local markets as the country's post-pandemic recovery loses steam, which has also prompted foreign investors to sell Chinese shares.

China's benchmark CSI 300, which has posted two straight years of losses, has given up all of its early 2023 gains after a recent slew of disappointing consumption, factory and trade data. As of Thursday's close, the index was down 1.3% year-to-date.

"The wealth effect is missing," said Jiao Jinyuan, director of online distribution at China Asset Management. "Client sentiment is unlikely to turnaround until they see an improvement in the wealth effect."

Moreover, many retail investors are also sitting on losses after having chased funds at their peak levels in the past few years, which has made them pessimistic about fresh investments, fund managers said.

Star fund manager Zhang Kun, who manages nearly 90 billion yuan for Guangzhou-based E Fund Management, has seen his flagship 56 billion yuan Blue Chip Selected Mixed Fund lose 8% so far this year.

The fund soared 95% in 2020 which attracted significant subscriptions and helped Zhang become China's first so-called "100 billion fund manager". It dropped 10% in 2021 and 16% in 2022.

Another high profile fund manager, Ge Lan at Lombarda China Fund Management, saw her flagship 28 billion yuan healthcare fund retreat 7% in 2021 and 23% in 2022, after a nearly 100% gain in 2020. The fund has lost 12% so far this year.

On average, equity funds posted a 20%-30% accumulated loss in the past two years, industry participants estimate.

"The demand for active equity products is in particular weak," said Emily Gao, an analyst at Shanghai-based Z-Ben Advisors.

The downward trend in fundraising is happening amid the backdrop of youth unemployment rate hitting record highs, and people are increasingly worrying about their income prospects and preferring to park money in safe havens.

"Not just mutual funds, the overall fund issuance is difficult, as this is closely connected with the economic situation," Steve Chen, partner of Shanghai-based hedge fund manager MX Capital.

Debbie Dai, who works at an advertising agency in Shanghai, said she doesn't have much confidence in markets at the moment.

"Many of my friends bought funds when the market was really hot and lost money all the time," said Dai, who is in her 30s, adding her corporate clients have been cutting budgets or delaying payments this year.

"We feel the future might be difficult."

To boost market sentiment, some mutual funds announced fee cuts or started to purchase their own fund shares recently.

China Assets Jiao said they are putting efforts on investor education while launched campaigns to increase interactions between fund managers and investors to strengthen investor confidence.

(Reporting by Summer Zhen; Editing by Sumeet Chatterjee and Kim Coghill)
Colombia's President Gustavo Petro speaks as people attend a march in support of his government's proposed health, retirement, employment and prison reforms in Bogota, Colombia, June 7, 2023. REUTERS/Luisa Gonzalez

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia's attorney general's office has launched an investigation into reports of the illegal financing of President Gustavo Petro's election campaign last year, it said in a statement on Friday.

The investigation is the latest twist in a political scandal that has destabilized Petro's government at a time when Colombia's first leftist president has tried to push a trio of bills for work, pension and health reforms through the country's Congress.

"(The investigation) will establish the possible authors of crimes relating to the financing of electoral campaigns from prohibited sources, violation of electoral finance limits and others that can be typified," the attorney general's office said in a statement.

Petro has denied any financing irregularities via Twitter. A spokesperson for the president was not immediately available to comment.

Petro accepted the resignations of both his former chief of staff Laura Sarabia and the former ambassador to Venezuela Armando Benedetti last week, after the attorney general's office said two former employees of Sarabia were victims of illegal phone taps after she reported the theft of $4,000 from her home.

Benedetti was accused of leaking information from one of the ex-employees to the press, which he has denied. Sarabia has also denied any wrongdoing.

A local magazine subsequently published audio messages that Benedetti allegedly sent to Sarabia, who worked for him when he was a congressman.

In one recording Benedetti uses phrasing that media outlets and politicians have interpreted as being related to campaign finance irregularities, though Benedetti said on Twitter the audio was "manipulated."

The National Electoral Council said in a statement it has called Benedetti and Sarabia to give evidence on the allegations on June 13.

(Reporting by Oliver Griffin; Editing by Alistair Bell)
A view shows a flooded residential area following the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict, in the town of Hola Prystan in the Kherson region, Russian-controlled Ukraine, June 8, 2023. REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko

(Reuters) - Eight people are dead in Russian-held territory and more than 5,800 have been evacuated from their homes as a result of Tuesday's collapse of the huge Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine, a senior Russian-appointed official said on Friday.

Vladimir Saldo, Russian-appointed head of Ukraine's Kherson province, which Russia claims to have unilaterally annexed, accused Ukraine of continuing to shell rescuers on the Russian-controlled left bank of the Dnipro river.

In a post on Telegram, Saldo said the water level in the urban district of Nova Kakhovka, the town adjacent to the dam on the downstream side, had dropped by 2.5 metres (8.2 feet) from Tuesday's peak.

However, in Oleshky and Hola Prystan, opposite the Ukrainian-held city of Kherson at the mouth of the Dnipro river, the water level remained "at the maximum".

Saldo said the flooding might not abate for another 10 days, and that a total of 22,273 houses had been flooded in 17 towns and villages of the Russian-held part of Kherson.

The Kremlin earlier on Friday accused Ukrainian forces of killing civilian victims of the flooding with repeated shelling, including one pregnant woman.

Reuters could not independently verify the assertions of shelling and there was no immediate comment from Kyiv, which has accused Moscow's forces of shelling civilians located on flooded territory that it controls.

Russia and Ukraine accuse each other of blowing up the dam.

(Writing by Kevin Liffey; Editing by Nick Macfie)
FILE PHOTO: Batteries for electric vehicles are manufactured at a factory in Dongguan, China September 20, 2017. Picture taken September 20, 2017. REUTERS/Bobby Yip TO MATCH INSIGHT CHINA-BATTERIES/RECYCLING

BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China should standardise requirements for electric vehicle (EV) batteries in order to keep its edge over other markets such as the U.S. and Europe in the rapidly growing industry, the country's former industry minister said on Friday.

"Europe and the United States are ramping up efforts to develop local battery makers, while protectionism has resurfaced," Miao Wei told the World Power Battery Conference in China's southwestern city of Yibin where he had an audience of policymakers and industry executives.

He said it was therefore urgent and important to standardise battery specifications and sizes for electric vehicles to secure China's leadership in the industry, adding there were currently 145 types of battery requirements in the country.

Miao is now deputy director of an economic affairs committee within the top political advisory body, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

China dominates EV battery supply, with 63% of the batteries installed in EVs in 2022 coming from Chinese companies, Miao said, adding the country also supplied 70% of lithium, 70% of cathode materials and 90% of anode materials used in batteries worldwide last year.

Finance leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) advanced economies discussed the need to make global supply chains more resilient by reducing over-reliance on China at a meeting in May.

The Biden administration has rolled out incentives for automakers to produce both batteries and EVs in the United States or in key trading partners like South Korea.

Miao said in light of the global consensus on the need to cut carbon emissions, it would help Chinese battery makers in world markets if they build a carbon footprint management system in line with global standards for the battery making industry.

Chinese battery giant CATL announced in April its targets to achieve carbon neutrality with all its battery making plants by 2025, and across its battery value chain by 2035.

(Reporting by Zhang Yan, Qiaoyi Li and Brenda Goh; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Sonali Paul)
The logo of VTB bank is seen at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in Saint Petersburg, Russia June 15, 2022. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

MOSCOW (Reuters) - VTB, Russia's second largest bank, will sell its stake in one of Russia's biggest grain traders, Demetra-Holding, and is in negotiations with both Russian and foreign buyers, CEO Andrei Kostin told Reuters in an interview.

Demetra has a network of grain elevators, major deep sea grain terminals and its own logistics. It owns a non controlling stake in major grain trader United Grain Company (OZK).

VTB has a 45% stake in the holding.

"We're coming out of there. It's decided," Kostin told Reuters. "We have been out of control for a long time, and we will leave completely."

He said the asset would be sold this year.

When asked if buyers had been found, he said: "Yes, and even, maybe, there will be not only Russian ones, we'll see."

He declined to say who the buyers were but clarified that they would be from "friendly" countries - a word Russia uses to describe countries which have not imposed sanctions on Russia.

When asked if billionaire Vadim Moshkovich was a bidder, Kostin said: "No."

Asked if it could be the Chinese, Kostin said: "Why China? We have lots of friends, more than 100 countries did not support the anti-Russian sanctions, so we will choose one of them."

Kostin said VTB saw few prospects for itself in the grain business, adding that a sanctioned bank in the shareholding hindered the holding.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and Elena Fabrichnaya)
FILE PHOTO: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton pauses while speaking during a news conference after the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in President Joe Biden's bid to rescind a Trump-era immigration policy that forced migrants to stay in Mexico to

By Brad Brooks

(Reuters) - FBI agents on Thursday arrested a real estate developer at the center of allegations that have led to the impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, according to jail records.

Nate Paul was booked into the Travis County jail in Austin after his arrest, according to the jail's online inmate records, which indicated he was there on undisclosed federal charges.

The FBI declined to comment. The Department of Justice did not immediately reply to a request for comment. It was not immediately known if Paul had legal representation. Calls and an email to Paul's business - World Class Holdings - were not returned.

Paxton, an ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump whose lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results was tossed out by the Supreme Court, was impeached on May 27 and temporarily suspended from office pending his trial in the Senate.

The articles of impeachment against him accuse Paxton of having employees of the attorney general's office intervene in a lawsuit against Paul, 36, of giving the developer documents related to an FBI investigation against him, and of providing numerous legal favors to Paul in exchange for his renovating Paxton's home.

Paxton, 60, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Aside from his impeachment, he is under a separate corruption investigation by the Justice Department, according to the special prosecutors in Texas leading his state case.

The Texas Senate will try Paxton on the 20 articles of impeachment lodged against him on or before Aug. 28. I

If two-thirds of the 31 senators find him guilty, he will be removed from office. If not, he will be reinstated. Paxton's wife, Angela, is a senator and chair of the Republican caucus in the chamber. She has yet to say whether she will recuse herself from his trial.

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Editing by Sonali Paul)
FILE PHOTO: An absorbent boom is placed after an oil spill along the Yellowstone River in Laurel, Montana, July 5, 2011. REUTERS/John Warner/File Photo

By Clark Mindock

(Reuters) - One of the first climate change trials in U.S. history is set to kick off on Monday in Helena, Montana, where 16 young people are seeking to hold the state accountable for fossil fuel-friendly policies that they say have exacerbated global warming and dimmed their futures.

Lawyers for the young plaintiffs will argue that the states ongoing support for polluting fuels like coal and natural gas violates a state constitutional provision that guarantees them a right to a clean and healthful environment." They will ask Judge Kathy Seeley, who is presiding over the two-week trial, to issue a declaratory judgment to that effect.

The plaintiffs, who were between 2 and 18 when they filed the lawsuit in 2020, hope such an order will set an important precedent and encourage lawmakers in the state capital to take greater action, according to Nate Bellinger, an attorney representing the plaintiffs with non-profit law firm Our Childrens Trust.

What itll make clear, hopefully, is that governments have a constitutional obligation to protect their citizens  especially the youth, the most vulnerable citizens  from the dangers of climate change, Bellinger said.

The plaintiffs originally had sought an injunction ordering the state to develop a remedial plan or policies to reduce emissions. But Seeley rejected that bid in 2021, since she said it would require the court to make policy decisions better left to other branches of government.

The state, which has repeatedly sought to delay or dismiss the case, has called it a "meritless" publicity stunt aimed at "shutting down responsible energy development in our state."

Attorneys for the state have argued that climate change is a global problem best addressed through the political process -- not the courts. They have also said the Montana court can't grant the youth the relief they're seeking since global warming can't be traced directly to the state's fossil fuel policies.

The lawsuit claims the governments systemic authorization, permitting, encouragement and facilitation of fossil fuel use is exacerbating the climate crisis, despite what they say is an affirmative duty under a 1972 amendment to the Montana Constitution to protect and improve the environment for past and future generations.

All but the four youngest plaintiffs are expected to testify during the trial.

The plaintiffs have also claimed that the fossil fuel-dependent energy system degrades and depletes constitutionally protected public trust resources like rivers, lakes, fish and wildlife that they rely on for fishing, cultural traditions and recreation.

Last month, Seeley trimmed portions of the case that relate to the state's energy policy, after the state legislature repealed provisions explicitly promoting fossil fuels.

She declined to call off the trial, as the state requested, finding other changes to challenged state policy hadn't substantively altered the case. The Montana Supreme Court turned away a bid to delay it earlier this week, making it the first youth climate case to go to trial.

Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said the trial, which is only the second on climate change in the U.S., is a significant step forward for climate litigation.

A favorable decision could have a ripple effect around the world, inspiring new cases under multiple theories," he said

The lawsuit is one of several constitutional climate cases filed by Our Childrens Trust on behalf of youth plaintiffs. A federal case that was dismissed in 2020 by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was revived earlier this month. A similar case in Hawaii was set to head to trial in September, but has been delayed.

(Reporting by Clark Mindock, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Chizu Nomiyama)
A general view of flowers, candles and toys left at the Le Paquier park after several children and adults were injured in a knife attack, near the lake in Annecy, in the French Alps, France, June 9, 2023. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

By Geert De Clercq

PARIS (Reuters) -A modern-day pilgrim on a walking tour of France's cathedrals told journalists on Friday his Catholic faith gave him the strength to fight a man who stabbed four children in a park in Annecy.

Dubbed "the backpack hero" - "le heros au sac a dos" - by media, the 24-year-old who only gave his name as Henri said he was near a playground when he saw the man attacking children in a stroller as their mother tried to shield them on Thursday.

It was God's will that he was there and able to intervene, he suggested.

"All I know is that I was not there by chance. On my journey to the cathedrals I crossed paths with this man and I have acted instinctively. It was unthinkable to do nothing," the philosophy and management student told CNEWS.

Video footage shows him trying to block the assailant with one of his two backpacks, pursuing the man into the playground and throwing one of his bags at the attacker.

The devout Catholic said he had felt a strong force inside him pushing him to act.

"I let myself be guided by providence and the Virgin Mary. I said my adieu. They would decide what would happen," he said.

Henri said other young people had also pursued the attacker. "We tried to scare him and make clear he could not do what he wanted," he said.

Police said they arrested a Syrian refugee over the attack and told journalists the suspect had been carrying Christian insignia.

Asked about the suggestion that attacker may have been Christian, Henri said it made no sense.

"It is profoundly unchristian to attack the vulnerable. The entire Christian civilisation on which our country is built is a knightly message to defend widows and orphans. I think that, on the contrary, something very bad inhabited him."

Henri - who is set to meet President Emmanuel Macron later on Friday - said he had to revisit the gruesome details of the attack during a three-hour statement to police on Thursday.

"I now have all these horrible images in my head. I need to try and turn that into something positive," he said.

He would continue his months-long walking tour and hoped to show social media followers "how the beauty of the cathedrals can nourish us and help us do the right thing".

"Because of these events, I will be able to reach more people. I thank heaven," he told BFM television.

(Reporting by Geert De Clercq; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
ZHENGZHOU, June 9 (Xinhua) -- These days are the busiest time of the year for Liu Fukang, a 27-year-old farmer in Minquan County, central China's Henan Province.

Within just three days, he harvested more than 1,400 mu (about 93.3 hectares) of wheat with the use of six combine harvesters. After he completes this task, Liu drives a tractor equipped with assisted driving capabilities to sow corn and soybeans.

"During the summer harvest, the processes of both harvesting and sowing becomes a race against time," Liu said, adding that as the workload intensifies, he finds himself working until midnight every day.

Henan Province, often referred to as the "granary in China's central plains," holds significant agricultural importance in China, accounting for around a quarter of the country's total annual wheat output.

After graduating from Zhengzhou University of Industrial Technology in 2015, Liu spent five years working in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan. However, in 2020, at the strong request of his father, he returned to his hometown of Minquan. The two then embarked on a new venture, running an agricultural planting cooperative with more than 93.3 hectares of land.

"Originally, I had reservations about returning home instead of staying in the big city. However, my perspective gradually changed upon witnessing the introduction of advanced and intelligent agricultural equipment," Liu said.

Liu soon took a huge step in upgrading his sowing tractors by installing the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System's intelligent terminal. Since the system has been put in place, Liu has become adept at utilizing its features.

When operating the tractor, Liu only needs to engage the steering wheel during turns and can operate hands-free the rest of the time. This allows him the freedom to turn around and monitor the sowing process behind him. Also, with the tractor maintaining a consistent speed, Liu can simultaneously bury seeds, fertilizer, and drip irrigation belts into the soil.

"By confirming the plot data in the intelligent terminal, the planter is capable of sowing in a straight line with exceptional accuracy. The system ensures that the margin of error per kilometer is reduced to the centimeter level, thus greatly improving the precision and consistency of the sowing process," Liu said.

The application of Beidou intelligent terminals in harvesting and sowing machinery has reached an advanced stage and is undergoing widespread adaptation in various regions in China.

Liu Fukang's 78-year-old grandfather, Liu Yunjiang, could not help but feel a sense of pride as he observed his grandson's modern farming techniques. Reflecting on his own experience, Liu Yunjiang recalled the laborious task of cutting wheat with a sickle when he was the same age as Liu Fukang.

"At that time, despite my best efforts, I could only harvest a small portion of land each day, and the work left me physically exhausted," Liu Yunjiang said.

Now, Liu Fukang's commitment to embracing agricultural science and technology is evident from his collection of over 30 agricultural machineries, ranging from small to large equipment. His utilization of drones for fertilization and pesticide application has increased his efficiency. He can now cover 600 to 1,000 mu of land per day.

"One can remotely control drones in their car, avoiding direct sun exposure. Also, after turning on the switch, the drip irrigation system would irrigate automatically without the need for manual control," Liu Fukang said.

After three years of hands-on experience, Liu Fukang's interest in agricultural science and technology has grown, motivating him to set new goals.

"We have to learn and introduce new technologies, and strive to achieve fully unmanned harvesting and sowing operations one day," Liu Fukang said. 
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Representative George Santos (R-NY) is escorted by police as he leaves Central Islip Federal Courthouse in Central Islip, New York, U.S., May 10, 2023. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz/File Photo

By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Indicted U.S. Representative George Santos on Friday appealed a ruling requiring that the identities of two people who guaranteed his $500,000 bail be disclosed, saying that releasing their names could threaten their safety.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Joanna Seybert, Santos' lawyer Joseph Murray said the New York congressman and his staff have been subjected to a "media frenzy and hateful attacks" since news of the indictment became public on May 9.

"It is reasonable to conclude that if defendant's suretors are identified, that the attacks and harassment will commence against them too," Murray wrote.

The letter suggested that the guarantors are family members, not lobbyists or political donors, and that their privacy interests justified anonymity given "the political temperature in this country and acts of political violence that occur."

Santos, 34, is appealing a June 6 ruling by a federal magistrate judge to identify his bail guarantors.

Their identities had been sought by at least 11 media organizations, which cited the public interest in their release.

Jeremy Chase, a lawyer for most of those media organizations, declined to comment.

Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the New York Times, which also sought the names, said: "The public has a right to know what is happening in this important case involving an elected official."

A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Breon Peace, whose office is prosecuting Santos and had not objected to identifying his guarantors, declined to comment.

Santos has expressed a willingness to go to jail rather than release the names.

The congressman has pleaded not guilty to a 13-count indictment accusing him of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.

He has also drawn criticism, including many calls that he resign, after reports following his November election showed he had lied about much of his personal and professional background.

Santos has since admitted to fabricating large parts of his resume.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Alistair Bell)
FILE PHOTO: Jamie Dimon, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., pauses as he speaks during an interview with Reuters in Miami, Florida, U.S., February 8, 2023. REUTERS/Marco Bello/File Photo/File Photo/File Photo

By Tatiana Bautzer and Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein victims who are suing JPMorgan Chase over its ties to the disgraced financier on Friday asked a judge to require Chief Executive Jamie Dimon and two other bank officials to sit for new depositions.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan, the lawyers said recalling the executives was necessary because JPMorgan has been slow to produce relevant documents, including more than 1,500 produced after Dimon's May 26 deposition.

The lawyers said these documents included discussion of an internal review conducted after Epstein's August 2019 death, and a 22-page timeline of emails including messages between Epstein and Jes Staley, who once oversaw asset management at JPMorgan.

Epstein was a JPMorgan client from 1998 to 2013. He died of an apparent suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Other executives the lawyers want to recall are Mary Erdoes, who runs JPMorgan's wealth and asset management business, and Mary Casey, a former private banker for Epstein.

JPMorgan spokesman Darin Oduyoye said there was no basis for new depositions.

"Plaintiffs like the headlines, but no amount of time on the record will change the fact that Jamie Dimon never met the man, never worked with the man, and wishes in hindsight the man had never been a client," Oduyoye said.

In his deposition, Dimon said he had barely heard of Epstein before the financier's arrest.

JPMorgan is also being sued over Epstein by the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the financier allegedly also abused victims on a private island he owned.

The bank is suing Staley to cover losses it may face in both lawsuits.

Staley, who was Barclays' CEO from 2015 to 2021, is expected to sit for a deposition on Saturday.

The case is Jane Doe 1 v JPMorgan Chase & Co, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 22-10019.

(Reporting by Tatiana Bautzer and Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Richard Chang)
VILNIUS (Reuters) -Lithuania's government will stay in office despite a scandal over expenses that caused the resignation of a minister, the leadership of the centre-right Homeland Union party decided on Friday, according to a party statement.

Parliament this week rejected a proposal by the Homeland Union to "reset" the political system by dissolving, following reports that many politicians, including three ministers, had misfiled expenses while working as municipal councillors.

Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte, who has led the centre-right coalition government since 2020, initially pledged to present her resignation unless parliament called a snap election but in the end deferred the decision to the party leadership.

The party leadership "is against the prime minister and the government resigning and thus taking personal and institutional responsibility for the formerly predominant way municipalities distributed expenses to councillors", Homeland Union wrote.

Lithuania's next general election is scheduled for October 2024.

(Reporting by Andrius Sytas, editing by Terje Solsvik)
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump yells as he visits the U.S.-Mexico border wall, in Alamo, Texas, U.S., January 12, 2021. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

(Reuters) - Here is a timeline of events that led to charges against former U.S. President Donald Trump and others over government records, some marked as highly sensitive, stored at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after he left the White House in January 2021:

Feb. 9, 2022: The National Archives and Records Administration asks the U.S. Justice Department to investigate Trump's handling of government records, after Trump returned boxes of government documents stored at Mar-a-Lago that included classified materials.

Aug. 8, 2022: Trump discloses that FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago and broke into a safe in what one of Trump's sons said was part of a federal investigation into retention of records.

Aug. 12, 2022: The court-approved warrant behind the Aug. 8 search is released. It shows that 11 sets of classified documents were taken from Trump's property. The warrant states the Justice Department has probable cause to believe there were possible violations of the Espionage Act which makes it a crime to release information that could harm national security.

Aug. 22, 2022: Trump sues to block the Justice Department from reviewing materials seized from his home until a third-party arbiter, known as a special master, is assigned to make sure privileged documents are not improperly accessed.

Aug. 26, 2022: DOJ releases the heavily redacted affidavit behind the warrant for the search of Trump's property, disclosing that it believed the former president illegally possessed documents including some involving intelligence-gathering and clandestine human sources. The affidavit also says that there were "a significant number of civilian witnesses" assisting in the probe and that the department believed there also was evidence of obstruction.

Sept. 6, 2022: U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon grants Trump's request for a special master over DOJ objections, an action that delays the investigation. Senior U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie of Brooklyn is later named to run that third-party review.

Sept. 15, 2022: The Justice Department seeks to access the classified materials taken in the search. Cannon rejects the bid, but the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later allows DOJ to review the documents.

Nov. 16, 2022: Trump announces he will run for the Republican nomination in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Nov. 20, 2022: U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appoints U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith to preside over criminal matters relating to Trump, including the classified documents investigation.

Dec. 1, 2022: A federal appeals court reverses Cannon's appointment of a special master in the case, finding she lacked the authority to appoint one. The ruling gives the Justice Department access to all materials seized in the search of Trump's property.

Dec. 7, 2022: At least two classified records are found during a further search of Trump's properties, a source says.

December 2022: Trump lawyer Tim Parlatore appears before a federal grand jury in Washington to describe efforts to search Trump properties for any remaining government documents.

March 24, 2023: Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran appears before a federal grand jury in Washington after a federal judge finds Smith's team made a sufficient showing that Trump may have deceived his attorneys in furtherance of a crime.

May 17, 2023: Parlatore confirms he has left Trump's legal team. He later says on CNN that he exited over disagreements with others over handling of the probe, claiming Trump aide Boris Epshteyn prevented attorneys from properly defending the former president. A Trump spokesperson denies the claims.

June 8, 2023: Trump writes on social media that the Biden administration has informed his attorneys that he has been indicted, and that he has been summoned to appear at the federal courthouse in Miami on June 13.

June 9, 2023: U.S. prosecutors unseal an indictment against Trump that accuses him of risking some of the country's most sensitive security secrets with his handling of unclassified documents. It charges Trump with 37 counts. A former aide, Walt Nauta, faces charges in the case as well.

(Reporting by Jacqueline Thomsen; Editing by David Bario and Howard Goller)
Firefighters work at a site of residential houses destroyed during a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in the town of Zviahel, Zhytomyr region, Ukraine, in this handout picture released June 9, 2023. Press service of the State Emerg

KYIV (Reuters) - Russia unleashed a new air strike on Ukraine overnight, killing at least one person in a combined assault of cruise missiles and attack drones, Ukrainian authorities said.

The Ukrainian military reported shooting down four out of six missiles launched during the attack, which the air force said lasted around six hours, and 10 out of 16 drones.

The interior ministry said one person had been killed, three were wounded, and four buildings were destroyed from falling debris.

It posted images on the Telegram messaging app of firefighters attending to the smouldering wreckage of what appeared to be residential homes.

The air force also said two cruise missiles had struck a civilian object in the central Ukrainian region of Cherkasy during an earlier attack on Thursday evening.

Regional governor Ihor Taburets said at least eight people had been wounded in that strike, which he said hit a carwash and an industrial object.

Moscow in recent weeks has stepped up regular air strikes against Ukraine as Kyiv prepared for a counteroffensive to try to take back Russian-occupied territory.

(Reporting by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Timothy Heritage)
DAKAR (Reuters) - At least one United Nations peacekeeper was killed and four others seriously injured when their patrol was attacked in northern Mali on Friday, the peacekeeping mission MINUSMA said.

The incident took place near the town of Ber, in the region of Tombouctou - an area that has become a hotbed of jihadist activity over the past decade.

MINUSMA said on Twitter the patrol first encountered an improvised explosive device and was then hit with a direct fire attack.

It did not name perpetrators but said it was a "complex attack" and that updates on casualties would follow.

Islamist militants, some with links to al Qaeda and Islamic State, have been waging an insurgency in northern Mali since they hijacked a Tuareg rebellion in 2012.

The violence has spread across the Sahel region under the Sahara and beyond despite international military interventions to help local troops fight back.

Thousands have been killed and over six million displaced by the fighting, according to the U.N.

MINUSMA - the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali - currently has about 12,000 military personnel deployed in the country.

At least 303 MINUSMA personnel have been killed in hostile acts in Mali since the start of the mission in 2013, making it the deadliest U.N. peacekeeping mission in the world.

(Reporting by Sofia Christensen; Editing by Toby Chopra and Sriraj Kalluvila)
FILE PHOTO: Dutch citizen Joran van der Sloot, who was serving a 28-year sentence in Peru after confessing to killing a 21-year-old Peruvian woman, is escorted to the airport to be extradited to the U.S., to face charges of extortion and wire fraud agains

(Reuters) - A convicted killer suspected in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba pleaded not guilty on Friday in a U.S. courtroom to charges of extortion and wire fraud related to her death, according to media reports.

Joran van der Sloot, 35, was extradited to Birmingham, Alabama, from a prison in Peru on Thursday for arraignment in federal court in northern Alabama. The Dutch national is serving a 28-year prison sentence in the South American country for another woman's killing.

Holloway, an 18-year-old from a Birmingham suburb, mysteriously vanished in 2005 during a high school graduation trip to Aruba. While her remains have not been discovered, an Alabama judge declared her legally dead in 2012.

The teenager was last seen in Aruba with van der Sloot and another man. Her disappearance and an exhaustive investigation drew heavy media attention.

Van der Sloot, who was once arrested in the U.S. in the case but not charged, is accused of extorting the girl's mother, Beth Holloway, for money and offering false information about the teen's whereabouts in 2010, according to prosecutors.

Beth Holloway watched as van der Sloot was arraigned in the courtroom, according to local media.

During the brief court appearance, van der Sloot wore a T-shirt. He had an earpiece for translation of the hearing into Dutch but chose not to use it, CBS News affiliate WIAT-TV reported.

Van der Sloot will be returned to Peru upon the trial's conclusion in Alabama.

He was convicted in 2012 to 28 years in prison in Peru after he confessed to beating, strangling and suffocating a 21-year-old Peruvian business student in 2010.

(Reporting by Tyler Clifford in New York City; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -Swedish prosecutors charged a Turkish citizen on Friday for gun crimes and raising money for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984.

The case comes at a sensitive time in Sweden's relations with Turkey, which is holding up its application for NATO membership, in part because it says Sweden harbours supporters of militant groups it considers to be terrorists.

Sweden's prosecution authority said it was the first time anyone had been charged in the country with attempting to provide financing to the PKK, designated a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.

It said the man was suspected of aggravated extortion, serious gun crime and with attempting to fund terrorism.

"The investigation has given support for suspicions that the man was acting on behalf of the Kurdistan Workers Party," the prosecution authority said in a statement.

According to the indictment, the man was part of an extensive organisation collecting money for the PKK and had contact with another Turkish citizen who was jailed in Germany for being a member of the militant group.

The man's lawyer, Ilhan Aydin, said his client rejected the accusations of aggravated extortion and of attempting to fund terrorism but would accept a weapons charge of a lower grade.

Aydin also said he did not want the geopolitical situation to overshadow his client's case.

"I hope my client does not become a piece in the game or the negotiations on NATO," he said.

Sweden, which applied to join NATO last year following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, wants its membership ratified before the alliance's summit in mid-July in Vilnius.

Only Turkey and Hungary have yet to approve the bid. Finland, which applied alongside Sweden and was initially blocked by Ankara, joined NATO in April.

Sweden says it has fulfilled all the conditions of a three-way pact with Turkey and Finland struck in Madrid in June last year to smooth its path to NATO membership.

But Turkey has said Sweden has not gone far enough to assuage its security concerns.

Talks between the two countries over NATO accession are due to restart next week.

(Reporting by Simon Johnson; Editing by Niklas Pollard, Clarence Fernandez and Hugh Lawson)
FILE PHOTO: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton leaves a news conference after the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in President Joe Biden's bid to rescind a Trump-era immigration policy in Washington, U.S., April 26, 2022. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

By Brad Brooks

(Reuters) - Federal prosecutors on Friday leveled charges of making false statements to financial institutions against a real estate developer who is at the center of allegations that led to the impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

A grand jury indicted Nate Paul, 36, on eight counts of making false statements to lenders based in Texas, New York, Connecticut and Ireland to obtain $172 million in real estate loans in 2017 and 2018.

Paul, who was arrested by the FBI on Thursday and jailed overnight, briefly appeared before a federal judge in Austin on Friday. He did not enter a plea and was allowed to go free on bond. He is scheduled for a June 15 arraignment. His attorney, Gerry Morris, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Paxton was not mentioned in Paul's indictment and Morris told reporters after the hearing that the case against his client did not involve Paxton.

Paxton, a supporter of former President Donald Trump whose lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results was tossed out by the Supreme Court, was impeached by state legislators on May 27 and temporarily suspended from office pending his trial in the Senate.

The articles of impeachment against him accuse Paxton of having employees of the attorney general's office intervene in a lawsuit against Paul, of helping the developer obtain information about the FBI investigation against him, and of providing legal favors to Paul in exchange for his renovating Paxton's home.

Paxton, 60, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Aside from his impeachment, he is under a separate corruption investigation by the Justice Department, according to the special prosecutors in Texas leading his state case.

The Texas Senate will try Paxton on the 20 articles of impeachment lodged against him on or before Aug. 28.

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
VORONEZH/BELGOROD, Russia (Reuters) -A drone struck an apartment building in the southern Russian city of Voronezh on Friday in what investigators called a "terrorist act" on behalf of Ukraine, prompting the regional governor to order a state of emergency.

Drones also fell on an office building in Belgorod and near an oil depot in Kursk, officials in those cities said. Though they caused no serious damage, they underlined the increasing frequency of such attacks in areas of Russia close to the border with Ukraine.

Russia's state Investigative Committee said it had opened a criminal case in connection with the incident in Voronezh, 180 km (110 miles) from the border, against "persons acting in the interests of the military-political leadership of Ukraine".

There was no official reaction from Ukraine, which does not comment on alleged military operations inside Russian territory.

"There was a violent explosion. I screamed. And (the plumber) who was fixing my drain, he saw it; he shouted that it was a drone," a woman who witnessed the Voronezh incident said.

Investigators said there was structural damage to the apartment block, whose facade was partly smashed in and scorched.

Three people were slightly hurt by broken glass but did not need hospital treatment, regional governor Alexander Gusev said. The Kremlin said Russian intelligence services were investigating.

In Belgorod, some 35 km (22 miles) from the Ukraine border, the boom of anti-air defences shooting down incoming targets has become a daily occurrence and people interviewed on the street by Reuters said they were used to it.

"Our guys are stars, the air defence is working well. It's very unpleasant," said Alexei Fedyunin, a 43-year-old driver.

Olga Maskayeva, 71, who lives with her 99-year-old father, said: "Where are we supposed to go? If it happens, it happens."

Drone attacks - including, since last month, in Moscow - have added to a sense among ordinary Russians that what President Vladimir Putin calls his "special military operation" in Ukraine is coming close to home.

Russia accused Ukraine on May 3 of launching two drones at the Kremlin in what it said was an attempt to kill Putin. Kyiv denied involvement in that incident.

On May 30, Russia said it had shot down or diverted eight Ukrainian drones in an attack on several districts of Moscow. A Ukrainian presidential aide denied Kyiv was directly involved but said it was "pleased to watch events" and forecast more such strikes.

(Reporting by Mark Trevelyan, Tatiana Gomozova and Felix Light; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
KIEV, June 9 (Xinhua) -- The dam breach, coupled with the collapse of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant, will lead to devastating economic and ecological consequences, a Ukrainian expert has said.

"Up to 1 million people may face drinking water problems," Oleksii Kushch, an economist at "United Ukraine" think-tank, told Xinhua in an interview Wednesday.

The Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant in southern Ukraine was destroyed on Tuesday, causing a decrease in the dam water level and massive flooding in the nearby areas.

Local authorities said at least 30 settlements have already been affected by the flooding, displacing thousands of people.

Apart from the humanitarian consequences, the catastrophe will take a heavy toll on the economic development of Ukraine's central Dnipropetrovsk and southern Mykolayiv, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions, Kushch said.

"The water use intensity in the regional gross domestic product will change significantly -- industrial enterprises will lack water. These are mainly enterprises in the processing industry and metallurgy," Kushch said, citing the industrial cities of Kryvyi Rih and Nikopol among those to be severely hit by the water crisis.

In addition, the Kakhovka disaster will stop the water supplies to about 30 irrigation systems, which irrigated about 1 million hectares of agricultural fields, the expert said, adding as a result, Ukraine may lose 10-15 percent of its agricultural potential due to indirect or direct influence (of the Kakhovka incident).

Consequently, Ukraine's southern regions, where vegetable growing and horticulture were concentrated, may soon turn into semi-deserted areas. "The land use in this region will be changed. Instead of vegetables and moisture-loving plants, mostly unpretentious plants, primarily sunflowers, will be grown in the region," Kushch said.

As the Kakhovka plant destruction would cause the loss of approximately 60 percent of water resources in the regional water balance of Mykolayiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, soil salinazation may become another environmental disaster, posing risks to people's health, he warned.

"In the absence of water and irrigation, groundwaters, which consist primarily of salt marshes in this region, will rise ... Some salt marshes in the region contain heavy metals and harmful substances that could be spread by the wind. They enter the human body through the respiratory system. This can lead to an increase in serious diseases and abnormalities in the development of children," Kushch said.

The expert estimated that the restoration of the Kakhovka plant and its structures would take about five years and require about 2 billion U.S. dollars in investment.

The attack on the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant is possibly the most significant damage to civilian infrastructure since the start of the Ukraine crisis in February 2022, according to UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths.

"The sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realized in the coming days. But it is already clear that it will have grave and far-reaching consequences for thousands of people in southern Ukraine," he told an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.

The United Nations, Russia and Ukraine have all condemned the incident, while Russia and Ukraine have traded accusations over the responsibility for the attack.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry strongly condemned the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant "by the armed forces of Ukraine," calling on the international community "to condemn the criminal acts of the Ukrainian authorities." Earlier in the day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russian forces had destroyed the Kakhovka dam. 
By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Walt Nauta, a personal aide to Donald Trump, was indicted alongside the former Republican president on Thursday, Trump said on his social media network on Friday.

Nauta, a former military valet, worked for Trump at the White House before accompanying the former president to work for him at his Florida resort.

The charges were brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed to oversee both the investigation into Trump's retention of classified records and a separate probe into efforts to overturn Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

A spokesperson for Smith's office could not be immediately reached for comment. The Wall Street Journal and CNN first reported the indictment citing unnamed sources.

Nauta's lawyer Stanley Woodward declined to comment.

The charges come after Trump's legal team was notified in recent days that he could face potential criminal charges in the classified documents case.

Nauta reportedly helped to move cardboard boxes at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate which contained documents and other mementos from Trump's time as president.

Nauta initially told investigators he did not know whether Trump had retained classified records, according to media reports, but later said he had moved some of the boxes.

The Justice Department later subpoenaed surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago which corroborated that boxes had been moved, raising suspicions about possible obstruction of justice.

Nauta has long been seen as a possible defendant in the criminal case, according to sources familiar with the matter.

It is common for prosecutors in a criminal case to file charges first against lower-level individuals to pressure them to cooperate to secure charges against bigger targets.

Investigators seized roughly 13,000 documents from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, nearly a year ago. One hundred were marked as classified, even though one of Trump's lawyers had previously said that all records with classified markings had been returned to the government.

Trump has previously defended his retention of documents, suggesting that he declassified them while president.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Additional reporting by Rami Ayyub and Susan Heavey; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump listens to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speak about the coronavirus response during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 28, 2020. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

By Nathan Layne

(Reuters) -Donald Trump's main rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination condemned the Justice Department for its move to charge him over his handling of classified documents, underscoring their fear of upsetting his core supporters.

The indictment of a former president on federal charges is unprecedented in U.S. history, a case made more extraordinary by Trump's status as the clear front-runner in the Republican race to challenge Democratic President Joe Biden next year.

Instead of using the indictment to undermine Trump's bid for the White House, however, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, U.S. Senator Tim Scott and Nikki Haley were among the candidates accusing the Justice Department of political bias, highlighting a stance that has become central to many of their own campaigns.

All sounded in before the indictment was unsealed on Friday afternoon, revealing detailed allegations that Trump had mishandled documents containing some of the country's most sensitive security secrets and obstructed the probe.

"The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society," DeSantis, who is running a distant second behind Trump in the polls, wrote on Twitter. "We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.

Republicans have alleged, without evidence, that the Trump indictment is a politically motivated move by Biden. The Justice Department says all investigative decisions are made without regard to partisan politics, and has handed the investigation to a special counsel who was appointed in an effort to add a degree of independence to such a politically sensitive probe.

The 37-count indictment against Trump accused him of mishandling classified documents that included information about the secretive U.S. nuclear program and potential domestic vulnerabilities in the event of an attack. It also alleged that Trump discussed with his lawyers the possibility of lying to government officials seeking to recover the materials.

President Joe Biden, who is facing his own review over his handling of classified documents, reflecting the tightrope he must walk in dealing with a prosecution into his main political rival, said on Friday he had not spoken to Attorney General Merrick Garland about the case.

"I have not spoken to him at all and Im not going to speak with him," Biden said, distancing himself from the investigation into his political rival.

Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot Republican candidate, was the sole rival so far to outright criticize Trump. Hutchinson called on him to end his campaign, arguing that Trump had flouted the Constitution and shown a "disrespect for the rule of law."

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who this week blasted Trump as he announced his own 2024 bid, said he wanted to see the details of the indictment before weighing in.

By and large, however, the challengers came to Trump's defense, perhaps mindful of how Trump's March indictment in New York over an alleged hush money payment to a porn star was seen by many Republicans as politically charged and only served to rally support to his side.

Trump's support has held steady through many other lawsuits and scandals but the serious charges laid out against him on Friday could give his Republican rivals ammunition to attack his record, especially on national security.

Chuck Coughlin, a longtime consultant for Republicans in Arizona, said the cumulative effect of criminal charges will begin to take its toll on Trump's base, which is thought to make up 30% of the Republican electorate.

Trump is also under investigation in Georgia for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election in the state, and faces a separate federal probe into his alleged role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.

If the indictments pile up, Coughlin predicts the other Republican candidates will start to argue that Trump cannot win the general election.

"There's got to be a fatigue factor there," Coughlin said.

RIVALS ECHO TRUMP'S RHETORIC

In the meantime, Trump's rivals are adopting his rhetoric against the Justice Department, accusing federal prosecutors of singling out Republicans, even as they cheer on a federal investigation into Biden's son, Hunter, over tax-related issues since 2018. The president's son has denied wrong-doing.

Scott, who is polling in the single digits, criticized what he also called the "weaponization" of federal prosecutors.

"Today what we see is a justice system where the scales are weighted," he said in an interview on Fox News late on Thursday.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a venture capitalist also considered a long shot for the Republican nomination, accused the Justice Department of unfairly targeting Trump and vowed to pardon him if elected.

Haley, U.N. ambassador under Trump, said Americans were "exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach," but also hinted at the chaos surrounding Trump.

"It's time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions," Haley wrote on Twitter on Friday.

In New Hampshire on Friday Pence said he was "deeply troubled" by the indictment, believing it would further divide the country. He added, however, that the American public should review the facts of the case and make their own judgment.

(Reporting by Nathan Layne, Dan Whitcomb, Nandita Bose, Susan Heavey and Tim Reid; Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Kieran Murray, Ross Colvin, Daniel Wallis and Alistair Bell)
FILE PHOTO: Downtown Washington, D.C. is seen shrouded in haze and smoke caused by wildfires in Canada, in Washington, U.S., June 8, 2023. REUTERS/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades

By Tyler Clifford

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The mass of smoky air that choked New York, Washington and other U.S. cities earlier this week moderated on Friday as it drifted as far south as the Florida Panhandle, and conditions improved to "moderate" along most of the Eastern Seabord.

The U.S. National Weather Service said air quality had improved in areas along the East Coast, but hazy skies and degraded air quality persisted in pockets of the mid-Atlantic, the Ohio Valley and Eastern Great Lakes region.

The haze, emanating from some 400 wildfires burning in Canada - many of them in Quebec province north of New England - was still severe enough on Friday for the weather service to issue air quality alerts for pockets of the Carolinas and elsewhere in the Southeast, as well as in some parts of Texas and Oklahoma.

"That's due to a combination of both the particle pollution that's related to the smoke, but also increased ozone levels for those more urban areas," weather service meteorologist Zack Taylor said.

Further north, air quality alerts remained in effect, including some "Code Orange" designations in Baltimore and Washington, where a day earlier the smoke was thick enough to obscure the top of the 555-foot tall (169-meter tall) Washington Monument.

The weather service issues "Code Orange" alerts when air quality has degraded to a point where it could affect the health of vulnerable people, such as children and the elderly.

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said the quality of the air in the nation's capital should show further improvement by Saturday.

"We urge residents and visitors to follow precautions related to the 'Code Orange' air quality alert," she wrote in a tweet.

The weather service said there was a chance of showers and thunderstorms in parts of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

"That'll help bring more clouds, and more precipitation will help clean the air a little bit," Taylor said.

REMOTE LEARNING RETURNS FOR A DAY

Even as conditions cleared in New York and Philadelphia, school districts there reverted to remote learning for all students on Friday. Air quality in Philadelphia was "unhealthy" for sensitive groups in the morning, according to IQAir, a Swiss technology company that measures levels of ozone and fire-generated particulate matter in the air.

Health officials continue to advise millions of Americans to stay indoors if possible to avoid respiratory issues and other health problems that high levels of fine particulates could trigger.

After registering the worst Air Quality Index reading for major global cities for much of the week, New York's AQI on Friday morning was "moderate" at 74, according to IQAir, pushing it out of the top 25.

Cities and towns in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Virginia experienced the worst air quality in the U.S., with their AQI readings exceeding 150, considered "unhealthy."

Canada is experiencing the worst start to the wildfire season on record. More than 2,300 fires this year have charred some 4.3 million hectares (10.6 million acres), according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. Thousands of Canadians have been forced from their homes.

Hundreds of wildfires were still burning in Quebec, while fires spread in British Columbia in the west. Wildfires are common in Canada, but it is unusual for simultaneous outbreaks in the east and west.

Nearly a third of the fires burning across Canada are in Quebec, more than any other province, but provincial Premier Francois Legault said on Thursday the situation there was stabilizing.

The U.S. has dispatched more than 600 firefighters to Canada to help its northern neighbor battle the blazes. President Joe Biden, who has called the wildfires another reminder of the dangers of climate change, said U.S. officials were monitoring air quality and aviation delays.

(Reporting by Tyler Clifford in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
FILE PHOTO: General view of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Netherlands December 11, 2019. REUTERS/Yves Herman//File Photo

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will allow 32 states to submit written opinions in a case in which Ukraine accused Russia of falsely applying genocide law to justify its invasion of its neighbour.

The U.N.'s top court in a statement released on Friday said countries had until July 5 to give their opinions on the case.

The ICJ in a preliminary decision in the case in March last year ordered Russia to cease military actions in Ukraine immediately.

The court's rulings are binding but it has no direct means of enforcing them.

Ukraine filed its case shortly after Russia's invasion began on Feb. 24, 2022, saying Russia's apparent justification - that it was acting to prevent a genocide in Eastern Ukraine - was unfounded.

Ukraine at the hearings last year said there was no threat of genocide in Eastern Ukraine, and the United Nations' 1948 Genocide Convention, which both countries have signed, does not allow an invasion to prevent one.

Russia, which describes the invasion as a "special military operation," skipped the hearings last year and called the lawsuit "absurd."

(Reporting by Bart Meijer; Editing by Mark Porter)
The futuristic anti-drone gun lit up as an American airman aimed it at a quadcopter hovering in the sky Friday above Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

The pilot, Air Force Staff Sgt. Harrison Hayes, began to lose control of the quadcopter as the gun jammed his radio signals, forcing a sudden landing.

Hayes heads a Red Air team at the base, flying drones over it each week in search of air defense vulnerabilities.

The training Friday was part of the U.S. militarys broader efforts to guard against the threat of the aerial drones, which are used widely in modern warfare.

Middle East drones are among the most advanced and deadliest in the world, analysts have said, and countering them has been a priority for the U.S. military.

Irans drone and missile systems have made an impact in wars throughout the region and also in Ukraine, forcing the U.S. and its allies to bolster their air defense systems, analysts and military leaders have said.

Prince Sultan Air Base has a secured control room where Air Force and Army troops watch for small drones and other aerial objects. Known as the Base Air Defense Center, the room has a wall filled with screens displaying data, maps and video.

Air Force Tech Sgt. Dean Mitchell, the watch officer sergeant in charge, said he could see Hayes drone pop up on his screen as it launched. One of the screens triangulated the location of both the drone and its operator, he said.

Various tactics are used in the work. Besides the drone-buster gun that jams radio frequencies between an unmanned aircraft and its controller, countermeasures also include cameras to verify whats in the air and missiles to shoot things down.

Mitchell said he sometimes feels like an air traffic controller, with all the systems and the simultaneous talking among the operators.

The U.S. military services created different systems to counter the specific drones they faced. These systems dont communicate with one another well enough, Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, head of U.S. Air Forces Central, told Stars and Stripes in 2022.

Since then, the Air Force has tested new technologies and tried to create more coordination between its personnel and the Armys.

The Base Air Defense Center puts the two services troops in the same room. The hope is that this can hasten the response to an unknown object flying at the base, Mitchell said.

Both Hayes and Mitchell said they follow news of how drones have been used by both sides in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Mitchell said hes been shocked at how quickly aerial drones have become part of modern warfare in the 14 years since he joined the military.

Its been quite the change, he said.
CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa  The medical clinic at Kadena Air Base reinstated care for expectant mothers in U.S. military families Friday, two days after announcing that those about to give birth should plan to do so elsewhere.

The clinic entered divert status on Wednesday due to staffing shortfalls at U.S. Naval Hospital Okinawa, where the obstetrics and gynecology clinic is housed, according to a memo from the 18th Medical Groups chief of staff, Lt. Col. Travis Russell. Women with due dates between August and December faced returning to military hospitals in the United States or seeking care from off-base doctors.

On Friday, the Defense Health Agency reversed course and restored obstetric services at the naval hospital, according to a post by the agency on the hospitals official Facebook page.

Through a collaborative effort on the part of DHA and the medical departments of all military services, Okinawa will continue to provide full labor and delivery services for all beneficiaries within the Indo-Pacific Command, the post states.

The hospital is not in divert status and is working to fill the gaps with additional military, civilians and contractors, according to the post. A similar post appeared Friday on Kadena Air Bases official Facebook page.

The staffing shortage was brought on by the summer permanent change of station cycle and unanticipated early departure of civilian staff, the post states.

A hospital spokesman attributed the mixed messaging to miscommunications between the Kadena clinic and the naval hospital.

Kadena Medical Clinic got out a little ahead of us Wednesday before the naval hospital could announce that obstetrics services were still available, spokesman Trey Savitz said by phone Friday.

We cant control the messaging from other entities, he said, adding that patients should look to U.S. Naval Hospital Okinawa for up-to-date, accurate information.

Shelby Ozier, 21, an Air Force spouse who is 29 weeks pregnant, said she nearly had a heart attack after a call Wednesday from her case manager at the Kadena clinic.

She was presented with two horrible options: going back to the U.S. without her husband, to an unknown military hospital to give birth, or giving birth in a Japanese clinic without the appropriate pain medicine, which is typical in Japan, she said by phone Friday.

The Illinois-native was leaning toward delivering off base to spare her unborn child the stress of the trip stateside, she said. Her husband, an airman with the 18th Wing, is on a no-contact assignment.

Im definitely angry, she said. I cried a lot. I stressed myself out so much; when you stress yourself out, youre stressing out your baby.

Savitz said the hospital regrets the uncertainty caused by the conflicting messages.

We hate that our beneficiaries had to go through that stress, he said.

Kelly Pretorius, a pediatric nurse practitioner and civilian health care advocate from Japan Civilian Medical Advocacy, said she remains concerned about the safety of mothers and babies who are being cared for at U.S. Naval Hospital Okinawa.

The unexpected departure of civilian staff should not have come as a surprise, she told Stars and Stripes in an email Friday. We know stress causes negative health outcomes for mothers and babies; why are we causing more unstable environments for such a vulnerable population, especially among our active-duty families?
The National Museum of the United States Army at Fort Belvoir, Va., will host a free festival Saturday to commemorate the Armys 248th birthday next week.

Featured at the festival, which is scheduled from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. ET, will be Army equipment and vehicle displays, an inflatable bounce house and gaming activities, according to a press release from the museum. The Army Parachute Team, the 3rd Infantry Regiment, the Army Band and the Army Drill Team all will perform outdoors.

At 1 p.m., Secretary of the Army Christine E. Wormuth, Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. James C. McConville and Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael A. Grinston will give remarks during a ceremony, which will include the honorary promotion of Miles Avery to soldier for a day. Avery, 19, was diagnosed with leukemia in 2018, and he has the opportunity to participate in the celebration thanks to the Massachusetts Make-A-Wish chapter, according to the release.

The museum cafe and food trucks will have food and beverages for sale, according to the release. A limited number of Army birthday cupcakes and souvenirs will be available to visitors as well.

Although there is no admission charge, tickets must be reserved ahead of time.

The Armys 248th birthday officially will be recognized on Wednesday, June 14.
(Tribune News Service)  Coast Guard officials confirmed Wednesday that a team from Air Station Barbers Point has returned after a mission supporting storm relief efforts on Guam following Typhoon Mawar.

In an Instagram post Tuesday, Coast Guard District 14, which oversees operations in Hawaii and across the Pacific Islands region, reported 31 Coast Guard personnel out of Barbers Point, supported by three aircraft, clocked 97 hours of flight time, transported 396,231 pounds of cargo and 169 passengers. According to the post, the team completed 19 vital missions across 33 sorties.

Coast Guard spokespeople did not respond to requests for additional details on the flights, but according to posts by the service on Twitter, a major task for the Barbers Point team was delivering supplies to Rota, an island of about 1,890 people in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands  a U.S. territory neighboring Guam that was also hit by the typhoon.

Although the typhoon caused no recorded deaths in Guam, it left many there and on Rota without power.

Hawaii has been an important hub for relief efforts. The Federal Emergency Management Agency chartered planes in Hawaii to airlift supplies from its Diamond Head facility to Guam and volunteers from the Hawaii chapter of Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, including the American Red Cross and Catholic Charities Hawaii.

(c)2023 The Honolulu Star-Advertiser

Visit staradvertiser.com.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Two women will be arraigned in a Honolulu courtroom Tuesday on charges that they pinched, slapped, shoved, squeezed and smothered a 15-month-old child in their care at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, according to online court records and the childs parents.

Bella Kuykendall was harmed over three days in August when she attended the Navys Ford Island Child Development Center on the Hawaii base where the women worked as caregivers. The charges are specifically for abuse that occurred Aug. 24, according to court documents.

Army Capt. JD Kuykendall said his wife Kate Kuykendall immediately noticed bruising on the girls legs and an uncommon redness on her cheeks. The toddlers demeanor had also changed, and they knew something was not right.

These women were so comfortable with what they were doing to her, Kate Kuykendall said.

Base officials said they reviewed footage Aug. 26  the same day that Kate Kuykendall informed the director of the day care of her concerns  and then investigated the allegations of child abuse.

However, the Kuykendalls said their concerns were downplayed.

Base officials have declined to say whether the women were fired or disciplined, or how long they might have continued to work with children after the allegations were made. Base officials also declined to say whether they found any internal failures that led to child abuse.

[Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam] has taken measures, in coordination with [human resources] and labor relations and in accordance with Navy policy, to maintain the safety of the children and initiate any prescribed personnel and corrective actions. However, we are not at liberty to discuss specific personnel actions or decisions, base officials said in a statement.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, JD Kuykendall was able in December to review the video recordings from the classroom and saw what happened to his daughter.

He said the video showed that three child care workers pulled Bellas hair, pinched her inner thighs and shoved her. A worker rolled the toddler tightly into a blanket and placed her face down. Unable to free her own arms or legs, the girl cried and struggled for nine minutes. In other instances, the workers shoved Bellas face into a cot, hit her in the back and covered her face with the blanket, Kuykendall said.

Two of the child care workers, Analyn DeGuzman and Marilyn Kanekoa, are each charged with assault in the third degree, a misdemeanor, which is punishable with up to one year in jail and a $2,000 fine, according to the Department of the Prosecuting Attorney for Honolulu.

DeGuzman did not have an attorney listed online, and one listed for Kanekoa did not respond to a request for comment.

A third woman who worked at the child care facility and was seen on video abusing the girl is not facing charges. Kuykendall said the video captured another child being repeatedly pushed to the ground, but he does not know what the Navy did in response. The civilian charges only identify Bella as a victim.

The Family Advocacy Program, the military agency that prevents and responds to instances of child abuse, determined the case did involve child maltreatment, base officials said. Even with this determination, which happened in September, not much was done, the Kuykendalls said.

After Thanksgiving, the parents said the day care sent a letter home to all parents that briefly described an incident of abuse had occurred at the facility.

JD Kuykendall said he believes what led to charges against the women was an email that he sent to the inspector general of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS, that detailed the womens actions based on his own review of the video.

NCIS agents reviewed it and sent it to the Honolulu police, JD Kuykendall said. Charges were filed against the two women in May.

Base officials also did not answer questions about other possible victims or other employees acting inappropriately, citing the ongoing civilian investigation.

Employees suspected of child maltreatment are immediately removed from the classroom pending the Incident Determination Process. Letters are sent to the parents at the end of that process in cases where maltreatment is substantiated, base officials said.

The Navy doesnt maintain records of civilian criminal charges against its civilian employees, said Destiny Sibert, spokeswoman for Navy Installation Command Headquarters. Therefore, she could not provide information on how often situations such as this occur.

However, instances of abusive behavior among [child development center] staff are extremely rare, she said. Navy Child and Youth Programs top priority is ensuring the safety and well-being of children entrusted to their care.

A similar situation did occur within the last year at a Marine Corps base in Arizona.

Two women working at a day care at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma faced civilian felony charges for abusing children in their care. Both pleaded guilty and await sentencing, according to online court records.

The Marines Corps said in April that this is the services only case where a former employee was charged and later convicted of child abuse or endangerment in civilian court.

Kate Kuykendall initially put Bella and her older sister, who is 4 years old, into the Ford Island day care because she was hired as a special education teacher. After the abuse, she tried to move Bella to a different day care on base but couldnt shake her mistrust of the system and quit to stay home with the girls.

I have a lot of guilt, Kate Kuykendall said. I just want to trust somebody to watch my kid.
An Hoa, South Vietnam, April 1962: A soldier of the Vietnamese 2nd Infantry Division helps a wounded civil guard who managed to escape from his Viet Cong captors. Behind them on the left is Maj. Ace Aison, U.S. advisor to the Vietnamese 2nd Infantry Division. The 110-man garrison of the Vietnamese 2nd Infantry Division beat back a Viet Cong attack on the division's small outpost in the Quang Ngai province, near An Hoa, in the first week of April 1962. U.S. Army helicopters and pilots airlifted troops and supplies to the encircled town and later moved wounded Vietnamese soldiers to a hospital in Quang Ngai for treatment.

If you look closely at this photograph, you can see the blue edit marks made by the photo editor to indicate how the image should be cropped and published in the printed paper. The Pacific Stars and Stripes  which published its first issue in 1945  lost all of its pre-1964 negatives during a move to new locations that year, so the prints of the images that were published in the paper are the only originals we have left. As part of our preservation efforts, Stars and Stripes' archives staff has begun their digitization. All prints are scanned twice: once in full color, with the edit marks, and once in black and white, without the edit marks.

Check out Stars and Stripes' historic newspaper archive for more of our 1962 content at https://starsandstripes.newspaperarchive.com/
BEIJING, June 9 (Xinhua) -- The Former Liberation Movements of Southern Africa Leading Cadres Workshop 2023 opened Thursday in the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School in Tanzania.

During the opening ceremony, all participants of the workshop read a reply letter from Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, to participants of the 2022 version of the workshop, and sincerely thanked Xi for his care and support for the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School.

Liu Jianchao, head of the International Department of the CPC Central Committee, addressed the ceremony via video link together with Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) General Secretary Daniel Godfrey Chongolo.

The Chinese official said that efforts would be made to fully implement the consensus between General Secretary Xi and top leaders of the Former Liberation Movements of Southern Africa, strengthen the exchanges and mutual learning regarding party and state governance, and promote the modernization of their respective countries. 
Carefully forming the red bandanna into a pouch, I placed my cherished treasures into its folds. For companionship, a miniature doll with hot pink hair. For creativity, a small box of four crayons and spiral-bound notepad. For direction, a plastic compass from a Cracker Jack box. For sustenance, a Pillsbury Space Food Stick. For luck, a rabbits foot keychain.

Gathering the four corners of the bandana around my treasures, I tied the ends to a long stick the way Id seen cartoon characters do it in the shows Id watched on Saturday mornings. With my belongings secured to the stick, I placed it over my shoulder and looked both ways up and down North Seventh Street before crossing.

Taking one last glance back at our house, with its peeling gray paint and metal swing set that always had a beehive in one of its tubes, I turned right toward town, with no clear idea of where my travels would take me. I might camp in the woods, or find an abandoned canoe near a stream. I might build a cabin or a treehouse. All I knew for sure was that I wasnt coming back. Ever.

I was about 6 years old, and I was running away from home. For real this time.

About three hours later, I was back at our kitchen table sporting a milk mustache, picking through the Salisbury steak, Rice-A-Roni and canned peas my mom had made for dinner.

Throughout my childhood, I made many plans to run away. My parents werent abusive or neglectful, although they did drop me off at the pool during summer for hours at a time with only a dollar for the snack bar.

To the contrary, I lived a normal childhood, complete with cutoff jean shorts, polyester halter tops, Hot Wheels tricycles, skinned knees, yellow school bus rides to East Pike Elementary School, Monopoly board games on rainy Saturdays and Tang orange drink.

I had no real reason to escape my home life, but running away seemed so romantic. To have the power to wipe the slate clean, to reinvent myself and to start off on a completely unknown journey was the ultimate adventure to me. I longed to transform myself from a pudgy neighborhood girl on a yellow Schwinn bike with playing cards flapping in the spokes, to a self-sufficient, courageous and resourceful explorer.

I wanted to shake the dust of North Seventh Street off my Converse Chucks and experience freedom. I wanted to see the world!

Well, I really just wanted to camp in the woods for a night and roast marshmallows on a fire, but big dreams must start somewhere.

I never made it more than a few blocks before getting distracted. Id usually run into a friend and end up playing Barbies in her sandbox or notice an interesting puddle to inspect. When Id hear my mom ring the bell from our front porch, Id feel pangs of hunger like Pavlovs dog. Id resolve to run away another day and head home, hoping we were having something other than Salisbury steak, Rice-A-Roni and canned peas for dinner.

Fifty years later, I find myself a post-military-retirement Navy wife, finally planted in one place. After nine military moves over more than two decades of active duty life, Im happy that we found our forever home in a quaint New England village by the sea. However, Ive been here for six years now, and Im starting to feel that familiar itch.

During my husbands Navy career, I became quite accustomed to change. In fact, I was well-suited for it. It scratched my itch for periodic reinvention and adventure that Id felt since childhood. Moving to different locations in the U.S. and overseas kept me from getting bogged down in set routines, mindsets and identities. PCS moves became my adult version of running away from home, and in that way, I found it strangely comforting.

Now, for the first time in my life, I must find comfort in staying put, in my home and in my own skin. Its time to accept who and where I am  to appreciate the beauty around and inside me.

Read more at themeatandpotatoesoflife.com and in Lisas book, The Meat and Potatoes of Life: My True Lit Com. Email: meatandpotatoesoflife@gmail.com
BANGUI, Central African Republic  Eleven U.N. peacekeepers stationed in Central African Republic have been accused of sexual exploitation and abuse, the United Nations said Friday.

Investigations were still underway, but preliminary evidence gathered by the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services revealed that the members of a Tanzanian peacekeeping unit deployed in the country's west were implicated in the exploitation and abuse of four victims, according to a statement by the U.N. Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic, also known as MINUSCA.

"Upon learning of the allegations, MINUSCA immediately deployed a rapid intervention team to assess the allegations and identify and listen to the alleged victims," the statement said. "Immediately afterwards, MINUSCA relocated the unit concerned to another base, where it is confined to barracks, in order to protect the victims and the integrity of the investigation.

"Victims received immediate care and support through the mission's partners, according to their medical, psychosocial and protection needs."

The evidence also points to a breakdown in command and control over personnel, and once the investigation is complete, the entire unit of 60 peacekeepers will be repatriated. Some of the victims are believed to be minors, but that is yet to be confirmed, the U.N. said.

The mineral-rich but impoverished Central African Republic has faced deadly intercommunal fighting since 2013, when predominantly Muslim Seleka rebels seized power and forced President Francois Bozize from office. Mostly Christian militias later fought back, also targeting civilians in the streets. Untold thousands were killed, and most of the capital's Muslims fled in fear.

A U.N. peacekeeping mission was deployed the following year and now has nearly 17,500 uniformed personnel. In November, the mission's mandate was extended for a year.

The United Nations has long been in the spotlight over allegations of child rape and other sexual abuse by its peacekeepers, especially those based in Central African Republic and neighboring Congo.

In 2021, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres ordered the immediate repatriation of a contingent from Gabon operating in the country, following credible reports of sexual abuse by some of its 450 members, and past allegations.

Sam Mednick contributed to this report from Dakar, Senegal.
HAVANA, Cuba  Colombia's government and its largest remaining guerrilla group agreed Friday to a six-month cease-fire at talks in Cuba, in the latest attempt to resolve a conflict dating back to the 1960s.

The government and the National Liberation Army, or ELN, announced the accord at a ceremony in Havana attended by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, top guerrilla commander Antonio Garcia and Cuban officials. The cease-fire takes effect in phases, goes fully into effect in August and then lasts for six months.

"This effort to look for peace is a beacon of hope that conflicts can be resolved politically and diplomatically," top rebel negotiator Pablo Beltran said at the ceremony.

The talks originally were scheduled to conclude with an official ceremony on Thursday, but were postponed as the parties asked for additional time to work on final details. Petro traveled to the island for the ceremony, saying it could herald an "era of peace" in Colombia.

The accord reached Friday also calls for the formation of a broadly representative national committee by late July to discuss a lasting peace.

"You have here proposed a bilateral agreement, and I agree with that, but Colombian society has to be able debate it, and to participate," Petro said during the ceremony.

Garcia, the rebel commander, said his group was "very confident" in the accord, though he characterized it as "procedural" and not yet the "substantial" kind needed "for Colombia to change."

Negotiations between the sides had resumed in August, after being terminated in 2019 when the rebels set off a car bomb at a police academy in Bogota killing 21 people.

Following that incident, the government of then-President Ivan Duque (2018-2022) issued arrest warrants for ELN leaders in Cuba for the peace negotiations. But Cuba refused to extradite them, arguing that doing so would compromise its status as a neutral nation in the conflict and break with diplomatic protocols.

Talks relaunched in November shortly after Petro was elected as Colombia's first leftist president.

Petro has pushed for what he calls a "total peace" that would demobilize all of the country's remaining rebel groups as well as its drug trafficking gangs. He has questioned whether senior ELN leaders have full control of a younger generation of commanders who he has suggested are focused more on the illegal drug trade than on political goals.

The ELN was founded in the 1960s by union leaders, students and priests inspired by the Cuban revolution. It is Colombia's largest remaining rebel group and has been notoriously difficult for previous Colombian governments to negotiate with.

In 2016, Colombia's government signed a peace dea l with the larger FARC group that ended five decades of conflict in which an estimated 260,000 people were killed.

But violence has continued to affect rural pockets of the country where the ELN has been active, along with FARC holdout groups and drug trafficking gangs. Colombian authorities have accused the ELN of involvement in the drug trafficking, but the group's top leaders have denied that.

Juan Francisco Valbuena contributed reporting from Bogota.
(Tribune News Service)  Chinas ambassador to South Korea warned that Seouls embrace of pro-U.S. policies could bring it harm and the country has much to gain economically through friendly ties with Beijing.

Ambassador Xing Haiming said in a Thursday night meeting with South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung that he would be grateful if Seoul freed itself from external factors when dealing with China. The comments were likely aimed at the deepening of economic and security ties between Seoul and Washington that are posing challenges to Beijing.

In a situation where the U.S. is pressuring China with all its might, some are betting the U.S. will win and China will lose, Xing said in a video clip shared by a YouTube channel for the main opposition Democratic Party. But this judgment is clearly wrong and a failure to assess the flow of history properly.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has been trying to walk a fine line between the U.S., his countrys main security ally, and China, its biggest trading partner. Hes shown support for Biden administration calls to restructure global supply chains to reduce dependence on China, drawing criticism from Beijing.

Chinese President Xi Jinping late last year met Yoon and called for boosting cooperation in high-tech manufacturing and working together to maintain a global free-trade system that ensures the security of supply chains.

The remarks were likely directed at the pressure the U.S. has applied to security partners including South Korea, the Netherlands, Taiwan and Japan to comply with its sweeping curbs on the sale of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to China, where major South Korean semiconductor makers such as SK Hynix Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. and have facilities.

China will continue to seek various measures to help Korean companies investing in China to keep growing, Xing said in his meeting.

The envoy also advised South Korea to tread carefully over Taiwan, the self-ruled island Chinas Communist Party has pledged to bring under its control someday, by force if necessary.

The Taiwan issue is central to China, and its the foundation of China-South Korea relationship. So there was a solemn promise made by South Korea to China when we established diplomatic relations, Xing said, referring to the establishment of official ties between Seoul and Beijing about three decades ago.

In a meeting with Biden in Washington in April, Yoon made South Koreas strongest statement yet on the Taiwan Strait by expressing strong opposition to any unilateral actions in the region.

Yoon, a security hawk, has stepped up military cooperation with the U.S. since taking office a little more than a year ago and has pledged to take a tough line on China. Foreign Minister Park Jin called on Russia and China, the main benefactor for North Korea, to play a more constructive role at the United Nations Security Council, which he said has become virtually paralyzed when it comes to curbing Pyongyangs atomic ambitions.

Park said in an exclusive interview with Yonhap News that Seoul would use its status as a newly elected non-permanent member of the council to push the two powers. China and Russia have used their veto power at the council to prevent new punishments on Kim Jong Un for ballistic missiles tests that violate previous resolutions.

The Chinese envoy also mentioned regional issues in his talks with the South Korean lawmaker, saying he was opposed to Japans plans to release treated waste water from the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant. The matter has raised concern in South Korea and Yoon dispatched a delegation of experts last month to gather information.

It seems that Japan is using the Pacific Ocean as its sewer for economic gain. This is extremely irresponsible, Xing said.

Sangmi Cha contributed to this report.

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TOKYO  Japan approved a major revision to its development aid policy Friday to focus on maritime and economic security and its national interests while helping developing nations overcome compound challenges amid China's growing global influence.

The revision to the Development Cooperation Charter, approved by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's Cabinet, comes two years early since the last was in 2015 and updates are usually on a 10-year cycle. That underscores the sense of urgency in addressing widening China concern and other global challenges such as the impact of Russia's war on Ukraine.

Japan in December adopted a new National Security Strategy, setting a goal of doubling defense spending to 43 trillion yen ($310 billon) over the next five years to fund a military buildup. That means Japan, with fiscal conditions already tight, must use development aid more effectively and strategically.

Under the new security strategy, Japan's Foreign Ministry has launched official security assistance, or OSA, for the militaries of developing nations primarily in the Indo-Pacific region and is likely to provide Japanese-made, non-lethal equipment like radars, antennas, small patrol boats or improvements of infrastructure such as ports.

Ministry officials say that's different from assistance under the Development Cooperation Charter, which sticks to non-military cooperation and ensuring peace and prosperity, while focusing on human security as "a guiding principle."

The Foreign Ministry in April had 571 billion yen ($4.1 billion) development aid for non-military purposes and, separately, 2 billion yen ($15.2 million) to help strengthen national security of the "like-minded" Indo-Pacific militaries.

Under the revised charter, Japan will prioritize measures to combat climate change, food and energy crisis triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as well as strengthening maritime security, supply chain resiliency and digital transformation.

"The international community is at a historic turning point, facing compound crises," the revised charter stated, noting worsening global challenges such as climate change, infectious diseases, serious challenges to the free and open international order and risks of fragmentation, and their impact on developing nations.

The growing challenges make development aid a more important diplomatic tool than ever, at a time cooperation with so-called Global South countries as equal partners is key to gain their consensus on vital issues such as Russia's war on Ukraine, China's growing assertiveness, debt and development issues as well as climate change, Foreign Ministry officials say.

Japan aims to work with recipient nations as equal partners in creating social values to promote shared cycle of growth and rules-based free and open international order  a vision that Japan promotes along with the United States and other democracies as a counter to China.

To do that, Japan may offer development funding for infrastructure projects like fisheries or tourism on remote islands in the South China Sea or the South Pacific, officials say.

Many Southeast Asian nations may be eager to balance their relationships with both Japan and China, while trying to get more from both. The revised charter stresses the importance of working with the private sector and civil society and bringing in new funding as Japan takes care not to put other nations on the spot as they build ties.

Japan also wants to take the initiative to set international rules and guidelines as a donor nation that are based on inclusiveness, transparency and fairness.

China's aid donations in Africa and elsewhere have trapped many recipient countries in debt while allowing the Chinese access to local ports and other infrastructure.
Former Russian paratrooper Pavel Filatyev was so disillusioned with the war in Ukraine that he risked his life to publish an unsparing firsthand account, which can now be read in English thanks to the work of American airmen.

Before the retrospective, titled Zov, or Calling, was removed from the social media site VKontakte, where it was initially posted in August 2022, Air University scholars copied it.

Then native Russian speakers in a special Air Force language program produced what the service says is the first complete English translation of the 144-page memoir.

Its definitely him pouring his soul out, said Capt. Mihkail Berlin, a Russian language instructor at the Air Force Academy who helped with the translation. Its more of a personal journal.

Filatyev described cold nights without a sleeping bag and units being issued rusty, broken rifles and ill-fitting uniforms and boots. Rations quickly dwindled and the higher command was nowhere to be found, according to Filatyev.

In this war, they just decided to drown Ukraine with our corpses, he wrote.

Filatyev and his comrades didnt know they were invading Ukraine until their military trucks rumbled across the border on Feb. 24, 2022, the author said.

Everyone is riding in bewildered silence, surely there is a plan, he wrote.

As it turned out, there wasnt.

Before he was evacuated because of an eye injury two months into the war, Filatyev vowed to do everything to change this if he survived.

LEAP of fate

Berlin and four other Russian speakers in the Air Forces Language Enabled Airman Program, or LEAP, translated the manuscript in December.

The LEAP translators split the work into about 30 pages each, devoting hours outside their normal Air Force jobs to complete the project in about a month, they said. The finished document, now at 77 pages, is available to read on the Air University website.

Part of the Air Force Culture and Language Center, the program currently supports some 4,200 scholars representing 96 languages. The Zov translators said the project shows the importance of maintaining diverse language fluency in the force.

The document is being used in Air Force academic circles to examine the conflict from the Russian side and inform students of the conditions on the ground early in the war, they said.

Earlier publications of Filatyevs account were translated using artificial intelligence, said Maj. Roman Obolonskiy, a LEAP airman on the project.

Artificial intelligence is just not there yet to incorporate all the jargon and Russian as a living language, he said.

Obolonskiy, a director of operations for a C-17 maintenance unit at McGuire Air Force Base, N.J., consulted Russian military forums and other sources to research military vocabulary.

A glossary tacked on to the end of the document lists more than a dozen military terms. Starley, for example, is slang for a senior lieutenant, while kombat is short for battalion commander.

Master Sgt. Nadia Wolfe, who was born in Kyrgyzstan, initially was puzzled when Filatyev described being surrounded by grenades, ammunition and rocks, she said. I took a second look at rocks. Why was he surrounded by rocks?

The NSV Utyos is a Soviet-era heavy machine gun. The word utyos also can mean cliff or rocks.

Colloquial speech and swear words also colored the manuscript, Berlin said.

Cursing in Russian is kind of a sublanguage of its own, he said, noting that Russian has more than 10,000 swear words and combinations.

Funny enough, we were trying to prepare for the upper classmen a class on Russian swear language, Berlin said. Theres enough (in Russian) to fill a whole semesters worth.

Since the war started, the number of language assistance requests has increased for many of the services Russian LEAP scholars, the translators said. And theres an increased demand for Ukrainian speakers.

Russian is being spoken much less frequently by Ukraines military and citizenry, both as a matter of cultural pride and battlefield strategy, said Berlin, who now is studying Ukrainian.

Berlin, 34, was born in Russia and came to the United States at age 15. His mother didnt want him to be drafted. He ended up joining the Army at the age of 17 and later switched to the Air Force.

Berlin lived through the post-Soviet 1990s in Russia, when corruption was at an all-time high, he said.

In reading Zov, its clear that nothing has changed, he said. It remains the same or maybe even its become worse.

Obolonskiy, who was born in Ukraine and came to the U.S. at age 11, said he failed to grasp the severity of the corruption.

He pointed to examples of military incompetence that sound almost comical. Filatyev was told to jump out of his vehicle, set up his mortars and then move them, and nobody knew why, Obolonskiy said.

During training, they were told to go out and shoot, but not enough weapons were available and there were no bullets, he said.

Apathy, corruption, incompetence, we can grab just about every bad word in the English language for organizational structure and it will fit, Obolonskiy said.

Wolfe, a medical logistics flight chief at Robins Air Force Base, Ga., was surprised by Filatyevs frankness.

His description of military confusion and hurry up and wait, she said. Also, it seemed as if officers and enlisted were not even working on the same side or on the same objectives.

Rage against the war machine

Filatyevs story stands as one of the few open-source war accounts from the perspective of a Russian soldier.

His descriptions are detailed, jarring and sometimes poetic, while he seethes with rage when critiquing his government for starting a terrible war in a country where most of our relatives live.

He also directs anger at his fellow citizens for idly standing by and contributing to the corruption that he says permeates every aspect of Russian society.

I do not know how to convey to millions of zombies with Russian passports that we ourselves are to blame for everything that is happening. It is us, he wrote.

He is now living in France, where he has applied for asylum. After his eye healed, his choices were return to the war or face prosecution, Germanys Der Spiegel magazine reported in October. He fled Russia shortly after publishing his memoir.

Besides being gripping prose, Zov is also rife with lessons for U.S. military planners, the translators said.

When funds and resources are misappropriated and misused, it results in the mission not being completed, Berlin said.

For Obolonskiy, the numerous miscalculations of Russias might stood out in light of Filatyevs exposure of the rot in the Russian armed forces.

Analysts thought Russia had the second-most powerful military in the world and this war would be over in a couple of weeks, he said. Yes, they did have X amount of vehicles, but only a small percentage of them were functional.

We need to be able to learn those lessons, apply them to future adversaries and maybe evaluate ourselves as well, Obolonskiy said. Do we ourselves fit the criteria? So it matters for us, too.
Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022 after years of tensions, enters a new phase with the start of Ukraines latest counteroffensive.

Ukraines military launched the counterattack Wednesday night, pushing to retake occupied territory after months of stalemate along increasingly entrenched front lines.

The war has exacted an unthinkable cost: Since the start of the invasion last year, as many as 120,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 200,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in May that an estimated 20,000 Russian soldiers were killed in the first four months of this year. Thousands of civilians have also died, many under flattened buildings, others shot and buried in mass graves. Whole neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble.

In the past year, the war has shifted from a fast-moving, multipronged invasion to a battle of attrition concentrated along hundreds of miles of front lines. Both countries have seen their economies devastated, Ukraines most acutely from the toll of war on its soil, but Russias too, from the cost of military mobilizations and the weight of Western sanctions.

Here are some of the pivotal moments in the conflict leading up to the counteroffensive.

1. February 2022: Russia invades Ukraine

Early on Feb. 24, Russia begins a full-scale attack on its neighbor, launching missile and rocket strikes on Ukrainian cities and military installations. Russian military vehicles and troop columns roll into the country, crossing from Moscow ally Belarus in the north and making a beeline for Kyiv, the capital; from the northeast in a push to take the city of Kharkiv; from Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, to the south; and from Donbas in the east.

In the early hours of the invasion, Russian forces take Chernobyl, the site of a disastrous 1986 nuclear accident, along with the surrounding exclusion zone, risking catastrophe by disrupting ongoing containment efforts there.

In a televised address that morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin questions Ukraines right to exist and justifies the attack with the baseless claim that Russian speakers in Ukraine face genocide. He says Russia aims to protect the people of Donbas, where conflict is already underway over Russian control of the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, and pledges to achieve the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. He refers to the invasion as a special military operation.

Russia had massed troops and military equipment for months around Ukraines borders, though Russian officials and commentators had denied that Moscow was planning to attack its neighbor. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had also downplayed the threat amid repeated warnings from Western officials  including President Biden  citing a desire to avoid panic.

Western leaders and most NATO members immediately denounce the invasion. Biden calls it an unprovoked and unjustified attack, and says the world will hold Russia accountable.

2. March and April 2022: Russia takes Kherson, seizes Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, gives up on Kyiv

Russia pushes ahead with its campaign in southern Ukraine, bombarding cities including Mykolaiv, Kherson and the major port of Odessa. But the battle for southern Ukraine is one of the first major signs of Russia faltering: Even in the face of heavy bombardment, Ukraine is able to thwart and beat back Russian advances.

Russian forces in early March capture Kherson  the first major city to fall to the invading forces. They besiege the nearby port city of Mariupol, capturing it weeks later.

Under occupation, the cities are isolated, leaving residents without access to basic medicines, cellphone and internet service, and cash. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians are trapped in Mariupol, with as many as 1,000 civilians hiding underground at the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works plant  in what becomes a symbol for Ukrainian bravery and Russian terror that ends in a deadly Russian siege and Ukrainian surrender. Russia continues shelling Mariupol during March, hitting a maternity hospital as well as a theater used as a shelter, in an attack that killed hundreds.

Moscow also seizes Europes largest nuclear plant, Zaporizhzhia, in southeastern Ukraine, raising fears of nuclear disaster as shells repeatedly threaten the facility  a risk that continues through much of the war.

Russias attack on Kyiv loses momentum. Analysts and military observers had said the capital might fall swiftly, but Ukrainian resistance rebuffs Russias advance. By late March, Russia begins pulling its troops back from Kyiv and deploying them to other parts of the country.

3. April 2022 onward: Moscow shifts focus to the east

After failing to encircle and capture Kyiv, the Kremlin announces the next phase of the invasion: a campaign in the east. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Russia seeks the complete liberation of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, two eastern Ukrainian territories collectively known as Donbas, parts of which are already ruled by separatists loyal to Moscow.

But even as Russia aims to reorganize and carve off parts of Ukraines east, defense officials and analysts began to speak of a stalemate as Ukraine launches counterattacks and Russia faces struggles relating to terrain, geography and logistics.

In September, Putin signs decrees, decried as illegal under international law, formally annexing four regions of Ukraine: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

4. April 2022: Bucha atrocities discovered

As Russian forces pull back from Kyiv and its suburbs, they leave behind a gruesome trail of destruction. The town of Bucha  abandoned by Russian forces after a month of occupation  becomes synonymous with Russian carnage.

Investigators and residents find dozens of bodies strewn on the streets, some of which were beheaded, dismembered, intentionally burned or left in mass graves. In all, 458 bodies are found in the small suburb  419 of which bear markings of shooting, torturing or bludgeoning. Ukrainian and international war crimes investigators arrive to collect evidence.

5. July 2022: Black Sea grain deal

In a rare instance of cooperation amid the conflict, Russia and Ukraine agree to a pact, brokered by Turkey and the United Nations and later extended several times, to allow grain shipments from Ukraine to depart via the Black Sea. The deal is meant to alleviate shortages and hunger as a ripple effect of the war. Russia has since expressed dissatisfaction with and briefly suspended the deal, accusing Ukraine without evidence of using the grain corridor to stage attacks.

6. August 2022: Ukrainian special forces attack Crimean air base

On Aug. 9, several explosions rock a Russian air base and ammunition depots in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia seized in 2014. A Ukrainian government official tells The Washington Post that Ukrainian special forces carried out the attack, showing Kyivs apparent ability to strike far beyond the front lines.

Moscow had fought to secure a land corridor in eastern Ukraine from Russia to Crimea  a goal it achieved after the fall of Ukraines stronghold in Mariupol.

7. September 2022: Putin announces partial mobilization

In September, Putin announces the controversial partial mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Russian reservists, sparking a mass exodus and nationwide protests that lead to more than 1,300 arrests.

The call-up of reservists into active duty is seen by analysts as a reaction to Russian setbacks in the war.

Meanwhile, a crackdown on antiwar protests comes as the Kremlin suppresses critics of the war and dissenters through arrests, investigations and criminal charges. Those charges include a two-year sentence for the father of a 13-year-old girl who drew an antiwar picture in her schools art class.

8. October 2022: Crimea bridge blast

A major explosion ravages the Crimean Bridge, which connects mainland Russia with the Ukrainian peninsula, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014. The bridge had not only been a critical supply route but also a symbol of Putins ambitions to control Ukraine; the Russian president called the 12-mile infrastructure project a miracle when he inaugurated it in 2018.

The Kremlin blames the attack on Ukrainian special services and launches a barrage of missiles at Kyiv in what Putin describes as punishment for the bridge blast. The waves of strikes on the capital, which had largely been shielded from bombing since the start of the war, kill more than a dozen people. Ukraines government denies orchestrating the blast.

9. November 2022: Russia retreats from Kherson

Ukrainian forces make startling gains in the fall, liberating villages and seeing Russian troops retreat from territory they had seized months earlier. Russian military officials describe the fallback as a conscious decision to regroup.

Russia orders the withdrawal of its forces from the west bank of the Dnieper River in the southern Kherson region, surrendering the city of Kherson, which had been the only regional capital it had captured. Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the head of Russias armed forces in Ukraine, says the move  which comes after costly Ukrainian advances in Ukraines south and Russian retreats in parts of the Kharkiv region  will save the lives of our military and combat capability.

Ukrainians rejoice as their troops return to Kherson unopposed.

10. December 2022: Zelenskyy visits Washington, West ramps up aid

Zelenskyy makes his first trip to the United States since the beginning of the war, presenting a united front with Biden. The visit comes alongside new security assistance packages, adding to the more than $36.9 billion in security assistance the United States has given Ukraine since the launch of the invasion.

Ukraine has received humanitarian, military and financial support from the United States, European Union and other nations. That support has included High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS launchers), as well as Abrams, Leopard 2 tanks and air defense systems, among other equipment and extensive training. Later, the White House relents to pressure and agrees to allow allied nations to give Ukraine their F-16 fighter jets.

11. Late 2022: Battle for Bakhmut intensifies

Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine, becomes the site of the wars longest and bloodiest fight. By the end of year, on the tail of Ukraines counterattacks in Kharkiv and Kherson, the city assumes an outsize symbolic value.

The onslaught against Bakhmut is driven by Wagner Group mercenaries, led by Yevgeniy Prigozhin. Thousands of soldiers from both sides die; recent U.S. estimates put the death toll at more than 10,000 among Wagner fighters, mostly freed Russian prisoners, since the end of last year. Before-and-after satellite images reveal city in ruins.

In May, Moscow claims control over Bakhmut, though military analysts warn that holding it could prove difficult with its forces stretched thin. Meanwhile, Prigozhin says that by the end of May, not a single Wagner fighter will be at the front until we undergo reorganization, reequipment and additional training.

12. June 2023: Ukrainian counteroffensive

Through the winter and into spring, Ukraine worked on preparing a counteroffensive against Russia  taking in shipments of increasingly complex weapons systems from Western backers.

Some senior Ukrainian officials, though, said they worried that the counterattack might not live up to the hype.

Ukrainian forces launched a counteroffensive on June 8, four people in the countrys armed forces told The Washington Post, on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the battlefield developments. Units trained by NATO joined a push to retake territory, and Russian officials acknowledged heavy fighting in the Zaporizhzhia region, where a counterattack had been widely expected.

Fighting around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has raised fears of nuclear disaster throughout the war.

The counteroffensive came after mass flooding caused by a breach of the Russian-controlled Kakhovka dam on June 6. Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other for the collapse, but the cause remains uncertain.

The floods, which forced thousands of people to evacuate in the Kherson region, all but guaranteed that Ukraine would launch its counteroffensive elsewhere along the front lines.

The Washington Posts Samantha Schmidt contributed to this report.
RIGA, Latvia  The West is underestimating the willingness of Russia and other adversaries to use nuclear weapons to neutralize enemies and achieve battlefield goals, a top U.S. nuclear deterrence expert said this week.

The Cold War idea that the Kremlin, Beijing or another government never would wage nuclear war because it couldnt win isnt true any longer, said Francesca Giovannini, director of the Harvard Research Network on Rethinking Nuclear Deterrence.

An adversary may think using nuclear weapons is worth the risk in certain situations, Giovannini said. She described how Russia could escalate further in Ukraine, bringing the West to the brink of nuclear war.

For years, we believed there was no interest in fighting a nuclear war, Giovannini said Thursday in a panel discussion at NATOs Riga StratCom Dialogue. I am not too sure the adversaries feel the same.

Giovannini and two other experts spoke to more than 100 military personnel, diplomats, government officials and others attending the two-day conference focused on redefining strategic communications in response to global crises.

The Wests opponents arent interested in arms control agreements and other similar Cold War rules that would limit their options, said Giovannini, also executive director of a program at Harvard Universitys Belfer Center on dealing with the nuclear threat.

Other dangerous assumptions by NATO and the U.S. include ones that Russia or China would be open to communication during a crisis and that all leaders agree that humans always will oversee nuclear command and control, she said.

China and Russia have not made that commitment, Giovannini said.

Those and other problems are making for a challenging environment as the U.S. and NATO confront an evolving post-Cold War nuclear arms race and determine how to best deter competitors, she said.

That new debate, however, is being directed by China, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and other countries that are trying either to obtain nuclear weapons or increase their arsenals.

Those adversaries also are predators that believe they can grab whatever land they think is theirs, she said, adding that the nuclear renaissance of today isnt going to be shaped either by NATO or by the United States.

Since launching its full-scale war on Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin has rattled its saber several times, including a threat to send tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus.

U.S. officials and military analysts acknowledge that the threats are credible but say its unlikely Russian President Vladimir Putin would follow through.

However, a growing number of analysts, including retired Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan, believe Putin will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, especially if Russian-occupied territory such as Crimea is threatened.

Western leaders dont need to worry about crossing a red line in their support for Ukraine, Ryan wrote in a May 17 article for Russia Matters, a Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs project designed to improve understanding of Russia and the U.S.-Russia relationship.

(Putin) has been building the conditions for nuclear use in Ukraine since early in the war and is ready to use a nuclear weapon whenever he decides, most likely in response to his faltering military's inability to escalate as much as he wishes by conventional means, said Ryan, now a senior fellow at the center.

Deterrence is complicated further when it comes to the U.S. developing a strategy to address Russia and China, Giovannini said.

The U.S.-Russia relationship will be dominated by nuclear deterrence, she theorized. But that approach could destabilize the relationship with China, which would react to a U.S. nuclear weapons buildup with one of its own, she said.

The challenge will be in how to respond to two rivals who require separate but potentially conflicting approaches to deterrence, she said.

Nuclear deterrence today is a fundamental arms race, Giovannini said. We already are in one.
Ukrainian officials have reported fierce fighting on the front lines after their military launched its long-anticipated counteroffensive. President Volodymyr Zelensky said that very tough battles were raging in the eastern Donetsk region and that Ukrainian forces were seeing step-by-step results.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday offered his first remarks acknowledging the counteroffensive, telling reporters that the Kremlin could say with absolute certainty that the campaign had begun but that Ukraine had not achieved its goals.

Ukraine has not made an official announcement on the counteroffensive  and has previously cautioned that no single action would mark the start of the campaign. However, Ukrainian troops intensified strikes in the southeast this week, according to four service members, The Washington Post reported. The offensive is expected to unfold over months and serve as a test of months-long efforts by the United States and Ukraines other Western backers to train its forces and equip them with increasingly sophisticated weapons.

Heres the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.

Intense fighting has been reported in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, long seen as the likely focal point for Ukraines counterattack. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Friday that Russia is conducting defensive operations in the area. The head of Ukraines presidential office, Andriy Yermak, said on Telegram that an attack on a hospital in Huliapole, a town near the regions front line, killed two staff members. If Ukraine retakes Zaporizhzhia, it could disrupt critical Russian supply lines by cutting off the land route connecting Russian-occupied Crimea to the Russian mainland.

Putin pointed to the use of strategic reserves as evidence that the counteroffensive had begun. On none of the sectors of the front line did the Ukrainian troops achieve the tasks assigned to them, he said at a meeting of leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States in Sochi, Russia. Putin said that Ukraine was suffering heavy losses but that it still retained offensive potential.

A senior Western intelligence official told The Post that, for now, Ukraine appeared to be holding back its most significant firepower, noting that the larger blow hasnt landed yet. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.

Ukraines military is armed with a potent U.S. arsenal. Washington has committed 90 Stryker personnel carriers and more than 100 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The Strykers and Bradleys are generally faster, more advanced and better protected than the aging Soviet and Russian vehicles that the Ukrainians operate, but they are more technically challenging to maintain in the field. The United States has also pledged 31 Abrams tanks, but they will not be ready until September at the earliest.

The situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant remains precarious, according to Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. There have been concerns over safety at the Russian-occupied plant after the collapse of the nearby Kakhovka dam reduced water levels in the reservoir used to supply cooling water to the plant. For now, the plant is continuing to pump cooling water from the reservoir, but it is not clear when and at what level the reservoir will stabilize, Grossi said.

While assessments of the dam collapse were still underway, the senior Western intelligence official pointed to several factors that suggested Russian culpability, namely that Russia controlled the section of dam where the hydropower unit fits into the overall structure  a vulnerable point that could have been exploited to destroy the dam, which was otherwise believed to be structurally sound. If you have access to the inside of the dam, as they did, you can potentially exploit that vulnerability in a way someone else could not, the official said.

Ukrainian security services on Friday released a recording of a phone conversation that they said provided evidence that Russia had sabotaged the plant. It wasnt them, a voice, described by the Ukrainians as a Russian soldier, says on the recording, using an expletive to refer to the destruction of the dam. It was our [guys]. A second soldier says, [Our] sabotage group was there. They wanted to scare [people] with this dam. It didnt go according to plan. It was more than they had planned. The United States has not publicly issued any determination about what happened at the dam on Tuesday, or who  if anyone  was responsible, while Russia has claimed without evidence that Ukraine attacked the dam.

The situation is tense on all areas of the front, said Maliar, the Ukrainian deputy defense minister, adding that the east is the epicenter of the fighting. Like Zelensky, she highlighted developments in Bakhmut. The enemy is withdrawing reserves and trying to hold the occupied positions, she said, adding that Ukrainian forces are conducting active combat operations in several areas nearby. The embattled city has been a focus for Ukrainian and Russian forces for months.

Three people were injured when a drone hit a residential building in a Russian city close to the Ukrainian border, the regional governor said. Writing on Telegram early Friday, Voronezh governor Aleksandr Gusev said three people were lightly injured but refused hospital treatment. There have been frequent reports of fires, drone attacks and shelling in Russian areas, particularly near the border, although Kyiv officials have regularly denied any direct involvement.

A Ukrainian tank was seen being destroyed in the Zaporizhzhia region, according to video released by the Russian Defense Ministry on Thursday and independently verified by The Post. An aerial photo of the same scene showed a column of at least six Ukrainian military vehicles, which appeared to include German-made Leopard 2 tanks, according to two military analysts.

Rocket strikes injured eight people in Uman, in the Cherkasy region of central Ukraine, on Thursday evening, regional administration head Ihor Taburets said on Telegram. There were two hits: on an industrial facility and a carwash. In the second case, a fire broke out as a result of the hit, he said.

Ukraine and Russia accused each other of shelling people fleeing the flooding after the Kakhovka dam collapse. According to the Ukrainian governor of the region, Oleksandr Prokudin, at least one woman was killed and 17 people were injured in the flooded city of Kherson. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there were fatalities, without giving a number.

The United States announced an additional $2.1 billion in long-term military assistance for Ukraine. The package includes additional munitions for the Patriot and Hawk air defense systems, artillery rounds and Puma unmanned aerial systems. The supplies will be provided under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, so they will need to be procured from the defense industry and then sent to Ukraine.

Putin met with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Sochi. While Russian forces in Belarus made a failed attempt to capture Kyiv at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, Lukashenko has said he will send his troops to Ukraine only if his country is attacked.

Britain and Sweden scrambled jets to intercept Russian warplanes flying close to NATO and Swedish airspace, the British Royal Air Force said. The Russian aircraft were not complying with international norms, but they remained in international airspace and flew in a professional manner, it added.

The British Defense Ministry accused Russia of hindering grain exports despite the renewal of the Black Sea grain deal last month. In its daily update Friday, the ministry said Russia is slowing inspections and blocking some vessels. Only one or two ships are being inspected per day, compared with between six and eight during the fall  with the probable goal of forcing concessions on the reopening of an ammonia export pipeline.

The Washington Posts Ben Brasch, Greg Miller and Alex Hortan contributed to this report.
Last fall, President Biden vowed to impose consequences on Saudi Arabia for its decision to slash oil production amid high energy prices and fast-approaching elections in the United States.

In public, the Saudi government defended its actions politely via diplomatic statements. But in private, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman threatened to fundamentally alter the decades-old U.S.-Saudi relationship and impose significant economic costs on the United States if it retaliated against the oil cuts, according to a classified document obtained by The Washington Post.

The crown prince claimed he will not deal with the U.S. administration anymore, the document says, promising major economic consequences for Washington.

Eight months later, Biden has yet to impose consequences on the Arab country and Mohammed has continued to engage with top U.S. officials, as he did with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the seaside Saudi city of Jiddah this week.

It is unclear whether the crown princes threat was conveyed directly to U.S. officials or intercepted through electronic eavesdropping, but his dramatic outburst reveals the tension at the heart of a relationship long premised on oil-for-security but rapidly evolving as China takes a growing interest in the Middle East and the United States assesses its own interests as the worlds largest oil producer.

The U.S. intelligence document was circulated on the Discord messaging platform as part of an extensive leak of highly sensitive national security materials.

A spokesperson with the National Security Council said we are not aware of such threats by Saudi Arabia.

In general, such documents often represent only one snapshot of a moment in time and cannot possibly offer the full picture, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an intelligence matter.

The United States continues to collaborate with Saudi Arabia, an important partner in the region, to advance our mutual interests and a common vision for a more secure, stable, and prosperous region, interconnected with the world, the official added.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Mohammed, 37, is the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, after his father King Salman appointed him to be prime minister in 2022.

Biden, who pledged to make Saudi Arabia a pariah as a presidential candidate, scarcely communicates with the crown prince, but the presidents top aides have gradually rebuilt ties with him, hoping the two nations can work together on pressing issues, including a long-sought peace deal in Yemen, a sustained cease-fire in Sudan, counterterrorism challenges and continued disagreements over the supply of oil.

The improved rapport has disappointed human rights advocates who hoped for a sharper break with the kingdom in light of Mohammeds role overseeing the war in Yemen and the U.S. intelligence communitys assessment that he ordered the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Mohammed denies ordering the killing but has acknowledged that it happened under my watch.

U.S. officials say the U.S.-Saudi relationship is too important to let languish given Riyadhs economic and political clout and Beijings courtship of traditional U.S. partners in the Middle East.

Together, we can drive real progress for all our people, not only to address the challenges or crises of the moment, but to chart an affirmative vision for our shared future, Blinken said at a joint news conference in Riyadh on Thursday alongside Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan.

Blinken met with the crown prince, also known as MBS, for an hour and 40 minutes on Tuesday during this three-day visit to the kingdom, U.S. officials said. The men had a candid, open conversation that included U.S. efforts to broker normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the conflict in Yemen, human rights and the fighting in Sudan.

Following Blinkens meetings, differences appeared to remain over Saudi Arabias ambitions to generate nuclear power, seen by Washington and others as a potential proliferation risk, and the notion that the United States has a right to admonish the kingdom over its human rights record.

Saudi Arabias foreign minister noted that while Riyadh would welcome U.S. support in building its civilian nuclear program, there are others that are bidding, a not-so-subtle reminder that the kingdom could deepen its cooperation with China on the initiative.

On human rights, he struck a defiant note, saying Saudi leaders dont respond to pressure.

When we do anything, we do it in our own interests. And I dont think that anybody believes that pressure is useful or helpful, and therefore thats not something that we are going to even consider, he said.

Blinkens visit caps a steady stream of high-level U.S. meetings in the kingdom in recent months, including trips by national security adviser Jake Sullivan, CIA Director William J. Burns, Bidens top Middle East adviser Brett McGurk, and his senior energy security official Amos Hochstein.

The surge of meetings appeared to serve as a counterweight to the frosty personal relations between Biden and Mohammed, said David Ottaway, a Gulf scholar at the Wilson Center, noting that the two leaders have not spoken since their meeting in Riyadh last July.

The Biden administration decided it had to figure out how to work with MBS even if Biden and he still do not talk to each other, Ottaway said.

The oil-rich country has sought to present itself as a global player unmoored to Washington. In recent months, Riyadh has been on a diplomatic tear, winding down hostilities in Yemen, restoring relations with arch-nemesis Iran, inviting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad back into the Arab League after a decade-plus ban, and ending its regional tiff with Qatar.

Riyadh is returning to a more traditional foreign policy that avoids conflict and favors accommodation with rivals, said Bruce Riedel, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution.

The dramatic changes in Saudi foreign policy come as Washington seeks Saudi help on some regional matters. Days before Blinkens arrival, Saudi Arabia announced it would deepen oil production cuts in July on top of a broader OPEC Plus agreement to limit oil supply in an effort to raise prices  a move opposed by the Biden administration.

The administration has a big agenda for Blinken to work with the Saudis: Keeping the cease-fire in Yemen, getting one in Sudan, fighting ISIS, and above all keeping oil prices from rising out of control, Riedel said.

Most difficult of all appears to be normalizing ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel, particularly as Israeli-Palestinian tensions worsen under the far-right coalition government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden has put a big priority on securing Saudi public recognition of Israel. That is unlikely absent serious progress on the Palestinian front, Riedel said. The Palestinian issue still has deep resonance in the kingdom, especially with King Salman.

Some moves by the Saudi government have pleased U.S. officials, including its assistance to Ukraine announced during a foreign minister visit to Kyiv in February and its plans to purchase a large order of Boeing jetliners.

Saudi Arabias relationship with China, which the United States considers its top economic and security competitor, was also raised during Blinkens news conference in Riyadh. The top U.S. diplomat denied any suggestion that the United States was forcing Saudi Arabia to choose between Washington and Beijing.

A second leaked U.S. intelligence document from December warned that Saudi Arabia plans to expand its transactional relationship with China by procuring drones, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and mass surveillance systems from Beijing. But U.S. officials say those warnings were exaggerated and did not come to fruition.

Saudis foreign minister, when asked during Thursdays news conference about his countrys relationship with China, insisted it was not a threat to Saudi Arabias long-standing security partnership with the United States.

China is the worlds second-largest economy. China is our largest trading partner. So naturally, there is a lot of interaction . . . and that cooperation is likely to grow, he said. But we still have a robust security partnership with the U.S. That security partnership is refreshed on an almost daily basis.
This aerial photo taken on June 7, 2023 shows farmers driving harvesters to harvest wheat in Yuanying Village of Huaxian County, central China's Henan Province.

Previously, Henan experienced prolonged periods of rainy weather, which affected the wheat harvest. Timely efforts have been made to carry out agricultural machinery harvesting on the rain-hit wheat fields and drying the soggy grain to minimize losses in grain production due to disasters.

As of June 8, farmers in Henan had harvested 77.79 million mu (about 5.19 million hectares) of wheat, accounting for about 91 percent of the province's wheat planted area. (Xinhua/Zhang Haoran)

A farmer drives a harvester to harvest wheat in Yuanying Village of Huaxian County, central China's Henan Province, June 7, 2023.

Previously, Henan experienced prolonged periods of rainy weather, which affected the wheat harvest. Timely efforts have been made to carry out agricultural machinery harvesting on the rain-hit wheat fields and drying the soggy grain to minimize losses in grain production due to disasters.

As of June 8, farmers in Henan had harvested 77.79 million mu (about 5.19 million hectares) of wheat, accounting for about 91 percent of the province's wheat planted area. (Xinhua/Zhang Haoran)

This aerial photo taken on June 7, 2023 shows a harvester loading wheat onto a truck in Yuanying Village of Huaxian County, central China's Henan Province.

Previously, Henan experienced prolonged periods of rainy weather, which affected the wheat harvest. Timely efforts have been made to carry out agricultural machinery harvesting on the rain-hit wheat fields and drying the soggy grain to minimize losses in grain production due to disasters.

As of June 8, farmers in Henan had harvested 77.79 million mu (about 5.19 million hectares) of wheat, accounting for about 91 percent of the province's wheat planted area. (Xinhua/Zhang Haoran)

This aerial photo taken on June 7, 2023 shows a harvester working in a wheat field in Yuanying Village of Huaxian County, central China's Henan Province.

Previously, Henan experienced prolonged periods of rainy weather, which affected the wheat harvest. Timely efforts have been made to carry out agricultural machinery harvesting on the rain-hit wheat fields and drying the soggy grain to minimize losses in grain production due to disasters.

As of June 8, farmers in Henan had harvested 77.79 million mu (about 5.19 million hectares) of wheat, accounting for about 91 percent of the province's wheat planted area. (Xinhua/Zhang Haoran)

This aerial photo taken on June 7, 2023 shows a harvester loading wheat onto a truck in Yuanying Village of Huaxian County, central China's Henan Province.

Previously, Henan experienced prolonged periods of rainy weather, which affected the wheat harvest. Timely efforts have been made to carry out agricultural machinery harvesting on the rain-hit wheat fields and drying the soggy grain to minimize losses in grain production due to disasters.

As of June 8, farmers in Henan had harvested 77.79 million mu (about 5.19 million hectares) of wheat, accounting for about 91 percent of the province's wheat planted area. (Xinhua/Zhang Haoran)

A harvester loads wheat onto a truck in Yuanying Village of Huaxian County, central China's Henan Province, June 7, 2023.

Previously, Henan experienced prolonged periods of rainy weather, which affected the wheat harvest. Timely efforts have been made to carry out agricultural machinery harvesting on the rain-hit wheat fields and drying the soggy grain to minimize losses in grain production due to disasters.

As of June 8, farmers in Henan had harvested 77.79 million mu (about 5.19 million hectares) of wheat, accounting for about 91 percent of the province's wheat planted area. (Xinhua/Zhang Haoran)

A farmer shows newly harvested wheat in Yuanying Village of Huaxian County, central China's Henan Province, June 7, 2023.

Previously, Henan experienced prolonged periods of rainy weather, which affected the wheat harvest. Timely efforts have been made to carry out agricultural machinery harvesting on the rain-hit wheat fields and drying the soggy grain to minimize losses in grain production due to disasters.

As of June 8, farmers in Henan had harvested 77.79 million mu (about 5.19 million hectares) of wheat, accounting for about 91 percent of the province's wheat planted area. (Xinhua/Zhang Haoran)

Wu Dongxing (R), secretary of the Party branch of Yuanying Village, communicates with a harvester driver in Yuanying Village of Huaxian County, central China's Henan Province, June 7, 2023.

Previously, Henan experienced prolonged periods of rainy weather, which affected the wheat harvest. Timely efforts have been made to carry out agricultural machinery harvesting on the rain-hit wheat fields and drying the soggy grain to minimize losses in grain production due to disasters.

As of June 8, farmers in Henan had harvested 77.79 million mu (about 5.19 million hectares) of wheat, accounting for about 91 percent of the province's wheat planted area. (Xinhua/Zhang Haoran)

A farmer cleans the windshield of a harvester in Yuanying Village of Huaxian County, central China's Henan Province, June 7, 2023.

Previously, Henan experienced prolonged periods of rainy weather, which affected the wheat harvest. Timely efforts have been made to carry out agricultural machinery harvesting on the rain-hit wheat fields and drying the soggy grain to minimize losses in grain production due to disasters.

As of June 8, farmers in Henan had harvested 77.79 million mu (about 5.19 million hectares) of wheat, accounting for about 91 percent of the province's wheat planted area. (Xinhua/Zhang Haoran)

This photo taken on June 7, 2023 shows a harvester working in a wheat field in Yuanying Village of Huaxian County, central China's Henan Province.

Previously, Henan experienced prolonged periods of rainy weather, which affected the wheat harvest. Timely efforts have been made to carry out agricultural machinery harvesting on the rain-hit wheat fields and drying the soggy grain to minimize losses in grain production due to disasters.

As of June 8, farmers in Henan had harvested 77.79 million mu (about 5.19 million hectares) of wheat, accounting for about 91 percent of the province's wheat planted area. (Xinhua/Zhang Haoran)

This aerial photo taken on June 7, 2023 shows a view of Yuanying Village of Huaxian County, central China's Henan Province.

Previously, Henan experienced prolonged periods of rainy weather, which affected the wheat harvest. Timely efforts have been made to carry out agricultural machinery harvesting on the rain-hit wheat fields and drying the soggy grain to minimize losses in grain production due to disasters.

As of June 8, farmers in Henan had harvested 77.79 million mu (about 5.19 million hectares) of wheat, accounting for about 91 percent of the province's wheat planted area. (Xinhua/Zhang Haoran)

A worker of the grain purchasing site registers the accounts in Yuanying Village of Huaxian County, central China's Henan Province, June 7, 2023.

Previously, Henan experienced prolonged periods of rainy weather, which affected the wheat harvest. Timely efforts have been made to carry out agricultural machinery harvesting on the rain-hit wheat fields and drying the soggy grain to minimize losses in grain production due to disasters.

As of June 8, farmers in Henan had harvested 77.79 million mu (about 5.19 million hectares) of wheat, accounting for about 91 percent of the province's wheat planted area. (Xinhua/Zhang Haoran)
Russian planes flying over American bases in Syria are collecting intelligence and probably sharing that data with adversaries of the U.S. in the region, according to the Air Forces top general in the Middle East.

Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, head of U.S. Air Forces Central, said Wednesday that some of the planes were carrying air-to-ground weapons and that all were equipped with sensors that most likely are used to gather info on U.S. positions.

The probability that countries such as Syria and Iran are receiving the Russian-gathered intel is concerning, he added.

Since late February, fighter jets and surveillance drones from Russia have been flying regularly above U.S. positions in Syria and sometimes have attempted to goad American pilots into dogfights, Grynkewich has said in recent interviews.

Sometimes Russia will send a dedicated surveillance aircraft to fly over U.S. bases, he said Wednesday, adding that he did not have direct evidence of intelligence sharing.

Russian military leaders, meanwhile, accuse U.S. pilots of being the ones violating agreements that separate Syrias airspace, the Saudi Arabia-based Al Arabiya English reported June 1.

A staunch backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad, Russia has a motive to disclose any data gathered from flights over U.S. bases to its allies in Iran and Syria, Grynkewich and analysts said.

Intelligence gathered by Russia could help Iran and its proxy militias in Syria and Iraq find vulnerabilities for future attacks against U.S. troops, Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, said Thursday.

Some 900 U.S. troops are deployed to Syria in a mission that the Pentagon says is focused on opposing the Islamic State terrorist group.

Russia, Syria and Iran are coordinating on a planned campaign to launch attacks and expel U.S. troops from Syria, according to a recent Washington Post report based on leaked intelligence reports.

Moscow is beginning to be more aggressive in its outlook but carefully working with Iran and Assad, and looking to increase the pain on the Americans in Syria because of the U.S. activities in support of Ukraine, Nicholas Heras, director of strategy and innovation at the Washington-based New Lines Institute, said Thursday.

Grynkewich said he could not comment on the leaked documents but said he has seen increased cooperation between Russia and its allies in the Middle East.

All three of those entities appear to be working together to try to pressure our presence in in Syria, Grynkewich said.

The complex relationship between Russian and U.S. forces in Syria, both of whom are supposed to share the mission of defeating the ISIS, illustrates the way in which conflicts in the Middle East connect to the rest of the world, analysts have said.

Iran, which traditionally has been a client of Russia, has reversed the usual roles in their relationship by supplying advanced aerial drones and expertise to Russia for its war in Ukraine, according to analysts.

U.S. and NATO officials have said technology seized on the battlefields of Ukraine is being sent to Iran and reversed-engineered for use in the Middle East, CNN reported in March.

Russia isnt just an acute threat in Europe, said Jonathan Lord, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank. Russias presence in Syria has enabled Assads worst atrocities, put U.S. forces engaging in the (anti-ISIS) campaign at risk, and potentially, in coordination with Iran, will hold U.S. forces and Israel at even greater risk.
WASHINGTON  Congressional lawmakers want to amend the federal tax code to encourage employers to hire military spouses, arguing the revision would help address one of the top issues affecting active-duty families.

A bill introduced Wednesday in the Senate would make employers of spouses of service members eligible for the work opportunity tax credit, an incentive available to companies who hire individuals from groups facing significant barriers to employment.

Unemployment for military spouses has hovered at about 21% for years, according to Defense Department data.

It is common for military spouses to struggle to find employment due to relocation and other factors, bill co-sponsor Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., said in a statement. This business tax credit is a commonsense and concrete way to help our military families.

The credit currently applies to qualified veterans, ex-felons and members of other targeted groups. The maximum tax credit is generally $2,400, according to the Internal Revenue Service.

Military spouse employment is the top issue impacting active-duty families and a major contributor to financial stress, according to a 2021 survey by the nonprofit organization Blue Star Families.

Research by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and Syracuse University shows military spouses make up one of the most unemployed and underemployed sectors of the job force, with an unemployment rate up to four times higher than their civilian counterparts.

Unemployed spouses spend an average of 19 weeks searching for work, according to a 2021 Defense Department survey. Out-of-work spouses surveyed by Blue Star Families cited multiple reasons for not having a job, including their spouses unpredictable and demanding work schedule, expensive child care and the disruption of uprooting their lives for a relocation.

My mother was a military spouse, and I am keenly aware of challenges facing partners of active-duty service members, who often have to relocate their families long distances, said Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., who introduced a companion bill in the House.

The longer spouses are out of work, the more negatively their financial future is affected. Spouses told researchers that they struggled to find careers that paid competitive salaries matching their skill level and worried about saving enough for retirement. Half of the spouses surveyed by Blue Star Families said their military affiliation prevented them from receiving a promotion.

The vast majority of military spouses  87%  are women and between 26 and 40 years old, according to the Defense Department survey. About 31% earned bachelors degrees and 18% have an advanced degree. Most employed spouses, about 62%, are employed within their area of education or training, according to the Defense Department.

The proposed tax credit legislation is led by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and John Boozman, R-Ark. Beyer, a member of the tax-writing House Committee on Ways and Means, said he was confident the measure would win support from the panel.

Our legislation would make important changes to the tax code to overcome hurdles to employment that disproportionately affect military spouses, and show military families that their service to the nation is valued, he said in a statement. I will continue working with my colleagues in both parties to advance it in the current session.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation in a letter this month underscored the value of locating its planned suburban headquarters close to existing Virginia facilities as a decision nears in an at-times acrimonious, decade-long fight between the Commonwealth and Maryland to lure the agency.

Distances matter when surging to a command post, the bureau stated in response to questions that Maryland leaders lodged with the federal government in March. From a time-savings and environmental perspective, it is meaningfully important to limit the need for the FBI workforce to spend several hours in a car commuting back and forth between locations.

The document, obtained by The Washington Post and first reported by WUSA9, illuminates the agencys justification for a heavily weighted criteria that Marylands congressional delegation has sought to challenge since the calculus of the federal agency that will select the site made public its grading rubric last year.

When the U.S. General Services Administration graded proximity to Quantico, Va., as its top priority, Maryland leaders challenged the agency to consider President Bidens own promises to use federal resources to promote equity, which ranked fourth of five factors in the FBI HQ analysis.

The apparent proof that the FBI prefers Virginia - long suspected by those close to the process - prompted Maryland leaders to attack Virginia Republicans who have been critical of the FBI and Department of Justice inquiries into former president Donald Trump.

In response to Maryland leaders skepticism that proximity should be the most important consideration, the FBI provided an analysis of more than 1,700 badge swipes at the Quantico gate over nearly two months ending last September. The agency also offered context about what brings people to the facility, and detailed how people based there work across its other sites - including the J. Edgar Hoover building in downtown D.C., which a new suburban headquarters that would house at least 7,500 employees will replace.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) told reporters in Baltimore on Thursday morning that of the two jurisdictions, only one - Maryland - actually has a chief executive who has gone on the record and says he believes in the mission of the FBI.

Moore reiterated his position that the Maryland sites have the best transportation assets, cost, and racial equity opportunities, and can most quickly deliver the $2 billion project. But he also questioned whether Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) - who in the past declined to denounce Republican efforts to strip funding for the FBI headquarters - supports the institution.

I just dont see how this is even a close contest, Moore said, according to a recording of the remarks obtained by The Washington Post. The FBI building should be in the state of Maryland, and I think that Virginia is not only going to have to fight on the merits, but I think their chief executive doesnt even believe in the funding of the FBI.

A spokeswoman for Youngkin seemed to shrug off Moores comments, insisting that the benefits of locating in Virginia speak for themselves.

Virginia is well-positioned to support the FBI headquarters with a diverse workforce, extensive transportation network and close proximity to public and private sector partners, Youngkin spokeswoman Macaulay Porter said. Virginias competitive advantage is clear, and partisan attacks wont change that.

Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), who has served as something of a field commander for the Maryland delegation, said in a statement that Maryland leaders had seen the agencys numbers before.

This response remains inadequate as it simply repackages the same numbers without directly answering our Delegations questions about them, he said, adding that locating the headquarters in Maryland would achieve the Biden-Harris equity objectives and cost less.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), said the FBIs emphasis on what would be convenient for some of its workers misses the point about whats best for federal taxpayers and whether its fair to consolidate resources in a community already overflowing with them.

The FBI continues to rehash the same data about a small percentage of its HQ workforce, apparently believing this snapshot overcomes the strength of Marylands case for the new, consolidated FBI headquarters, Cardin said in a statement. Once again, the FBI misses the point of what equity means for the communities that have been victim to systemic bias. This is a decision that transcends the FBIs myopic interests, which is why the General Service Administration (GSA) has been tasked with the site selection.

FBI leaders have expressed a desire to keep the agencys headquarters in the nations capital, where they have quick access to the Department of Justice and stand as a public-facing symbol of law and order. But lawmakers eager to deliver for their constituents are determined to steer the nations premier crime-fighting institution to one of their states.

The tension between Maryland and Virginia has fostered a united front among the Maryland delegation, which asserts that relocating to prospective sites in Landover or Greenbelt, Md., in Prince Georges County, would yield generational economic impacts. Virginia leaders arguments for the Springfield site have underscored the accessibility of major highways, the FBIs ownership of land in the area and the proximity to the FBI Academy at Marine Corps Base Quantico.

Prince Georges County Executive Angela Alsobrooks (D) said in a statement that Prince Georges County excels in several criteria, such as cost, access to transit and equity.

Our sites are the best options in terms of cost for the American taxpayer, because they are ready to go now, while the Springfield site will cost hundreds of millions of dollars more, she said. Locating the FBI in Prince Georges is also a meaningful way for the Biden administration to advance equity in federal government decisions, consistent with the administrations executive orders on equity.

Rep. David Trone (D-Md.) - who is competing with Alsobrooks to succeed Sen. Ben Cardin, (D-Md.), directly attacked Virginia Republicans over their past denunciations of the FBI, which range from defending Trump from federal inquiry to Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) questioning the political motivations of agents.

Time after time, Gov. Youngkin and Republican members of Virginias federal delegation have called for defunding the FBI, questioned its motives, and scorned its mission, Trone said in a statement released Thursday afternoon in tandem with a more muted response from Moore.

We must ask ourselves: Why should the FBI headquarters be moved to a state where its unwanted and under threat by the states governor and Members of Congress? Its outrageous and embarrassing, Trone said. In Maryland, we will always welcome the FBI and the hard-working Americans defending our country.

In the document, the FBI said its employees make trips to Quantico to work cases, respond to threats and to prep employees and partners to serve in a variety of different roles. Much of FBIs training happens at the FBI Academy or on the wider Quantico campus, according to the document.

These diverse classes and exercises, hosted by various divisions, are attended by students through all stages of their careers and are frequently led by the headquarters personnel best suited to instruct on the subjects, the document states. While these trainings range in duration from a few hours to a few weeks, instructors may only be required for a specific block of instruction. We must ensure that participation in these critical trainings and exercises continues unimpeded by distance if the FBI is to properly train and develop its people.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) called the memo a very important document.

He said it was particularly significant because it was prepared by the FBI knowing that it was going to go into the hands of folks in Maryland that didnt necessarily agree with it, which makes me very impressed that they were [so] blunt and candid about it, he said, calling the conclusions common sense.

The Biden administrations criteria for locating the new headquarters put great weight on mission compatibility, Kaine said, and that puts a priority on having access to other FBI facilities.

The Marylanders have tried to rewrite the administrations criteria for selecting the site, he said, adding that he and Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) have been in constant touch with the White House, urging the administration not to change the criteria for site selection.

Any change in the criteria would look like it was a political move, he said.

A decision on where the headquarters will be located is expected this year.
James G. Watt, who battled environmentalists during a rancorous term as interior secretary under President Ronald Reagan and offended even some allies with the uninhibited rhetoric that ultimately drove him to resign, died May 27 in Arizona. He was 85.

His family announced his death in a statement but did not cite the cause or specific location where he died.

At 42, Watt was one of the youngest members of Reagans Cabinet when he took office in 1981. Like the newly elected president, Watt was a Westerner  he came from Wyoming, the son of a Republican county chairman; Reagan had been a Republican governor of California  and he wore boots, although not of the cowboy variety, along with his thick glasses.

Upon his arrival as secretary, Watt telegraphed his agenda with an order that the American buffalo on the Interior Departments official seal, which since the departments founding in 1849 had faced to the left, be turned to look right.

During two years and nine months in office, he was a champion of private business, including oil, coal and other industries seeking what he deemed the necessary development of public lands, and a scourge of environmentalists, who regarded his nomination as a catastrophe for their cause.

William Turnage, the director of the Wilderness Society, declared Watt the worst thing that ever happened to America. Another environmental activist remarked that making him interior secretary  the steward of hundreds of millions of acres of federal land and the countrys national parks  was like hiring a fox to guard the chickens.

Watt, for his part, accused environmentalists of having poisoned the press against him even before he took office.

Their conflict with Watt, and his with them, was one of long standing. After serving in the Interior Department during the Nixon and Ford administrations, Watt helped found the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a nonprofit law firm where he served as president and chief legal officer. The foundation, based in Colorado, was funded by business executives including Joseph Coors Sr., a scion of the Coors brewing family and an influential backer of conservative causes.

In Watts description, the organization was established to fight in the courts those bureaucrats and no-growth advocates who challenge individual liberties and economic freedoms. Among other efforts, he and his colleagues pushed to open public lands to energy exploration and sought to limit the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Like Reagan, Watt aligned himself with the Sagebrush rebellion, a movement to return federal lands, mainly in the western United States, to state control. When he took office as interior secretary, he invited committed environmentalists on the staff to seek opportunities elsewhere.

He moved quickly to grant oil, gas and coal leases on public land, to increase offshore drilling, to stop the expansion of national parks and to reduce federal regulation of strip-mining.

I want to change the course of America, Watt told The Washington Post in 1983. I believe we are battling for the form of government under which we and future generations will live.

The battles not over the environment. If it was, they would be with us, he added, referring to environmentalists. They want to control social behavior and conduct.

Watt thrilled parts of the political right with his unstinting pursuit of his mission, even as he upset some fellow Republicans, as well as his many critics on the left, with his inflammatory remarks. By his own admission, Watt went from flap to flap.

He declared that there are two categories of people in politics  liberals and Americans  in what he later said was merely a good one-liner.

To see the failures of socialism, you need not go to Russia, he observed. Come to the American Indian reservations.

Rebuking what he described as environmentalists effort to effect centralized planning and control of the society, he compared the conservation movement to Nazism and communism.

Watt drew widespread ridicule, and the disapproval of Vice President George H.W. Bush and first lady Nancy Reagan, when he moved to ban rock music from the 1983 Independence Day celebration on the National Mall in Washington, saying that rock bands attract the wrong element to what should be a wholesome family event.

He did not explicitly mention the Beach Boys, but they had performed at previous July 4 events, and the group became the focus of outrage over Watts pronouncement. President Reagan called the interior secretary to the Oval Office and presented him with a plaster foot bearing a bullet hole to humorously  but unambiguously  convey the message that he had shot himself in the foot.

Ive learned a lot about the Beach Boys in the last 12 hours, Watt said, apparently chastened, and well look forward to having them here in Washington to entertain us again as soon as we can get it worked out. (The Beach Boys ultimately performed in Atlantic City that year.)

Months later, Watt was speaking to a business group when he referred to a coal leasing commission as including every kind of mix you can have, remarking that I have a Black, I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple.

Watt apologized to the panel members and to the president for his morally offensive comment. The Post reported that President Reagan stood by Watt to the end, but amid burgeoning criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill who saw Watt as an election liability, he resigned effective November 1983.

He was succeeded during the Reagan administration by William P. Clark and then Donald P. Hodel.

James Gaius Watt was born in Lusk, an oil and ranching town in eastern Wyoming, on Jan. 31, 1938. His father was a lawyer. Watt said his mother pushed him to gain a variety of experience in his youth, from work digging ditches to a job as a short-order cook.

Watt was a talented athlete, class valedictorian and prom king at his high school; he married his prom queen, Leilani Bomgardner, in 1957, when he was 19. They had two children, but a complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

Watt graduated in 1960 from the University of Wyomings College of Commerce and Industry and received a law degree from the university in 1962. In the early years of his career, he was a legislative assistant and counsel to U.S. Sen. Milward Simpson (R-Wyo.), the father of future U.S. Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.).

In 1964, Watt attended a meeting of a group called the Pro-Gospel Businessmens Fellowship, where business leaders spoke about the role of their religious faith in their work.

The Holy Spirit moved on my life, Watt told The Post. I committed my life that very night. He practiced a fundamentalist Christianity and during his time as interior secretary was quoted as saying that his responsibility [was] to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns.

In the late 1960s, Watt worked for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on matters involving natural resources and environmental regulation. He later joined the Interior Department, where he served as deputy assistant secretary for water and power resources.

He was chief of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation before President Gerald Ford named him to the Federal Power Commission in 1975. Two years later, Watt helped start the Mountain States Legal Foundation.

After his tenure as interior secretary, Watt did consulting work, including for clients who sought and ultimately obtained funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for low-income housing projects in multiple states.

Watts work, in particular his reliance on contacts at HUD in the service of his clients, drew scrutiny in an independent counsel investigation into influence-peddling at the department during the Reagan administration.

Watt was charged in a 25-count felony indictment in 1995 with lying to Congress, a federal grand jury and the FBI in the course of the investigation. He ultimately pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of attempting to mislead a grand jury. He was fined $5,000, ordered to perform 500 hours of community service and placed on probation for five years.

The vast discrepancy between the original indictment and the one misdemeanor to which Watt pleaded guilty prompted The Posts editorial board to describe the HUD investigation as an apparent abuse of prosecutorial power.

Watt was the author of the 1985 book The Courage of a Conservative, written with Doug Wead. The book, its title an echo of Barry Goldwaters 1960 manifesto The Conscience of a Conservative, expounded on Watts vision of the movement to which he had devoted his career.

He was also the author of the book Stuff That Matters (2013), written for his grandchildren.

Reflecting on his work as interior secretary, Watt told The Post in 1983 that one must pay a tremendous price to change an entrenched bureaucracy.

Ive paid that price, he said. My objective was to bring basic change to resource management for America, to prepare us for the 21st century. I believe in the future.

Now, ideally, you would get the results, plus be personally popular, he added. Wouldnt that be nice? Oh, Id much rather be popular, and successful. But if I have to make the choice, Ill choose success with results rather than success with personal glory.
(Tribune News Service)  Eric Nana Kofi Ampong Coker, 41, of Columbia, Md., pleaded guilty Thursday to the illegal export of firearms, according to a U.S. Attorneys Office, District of Maryland news release.

Since 2017, Ampong Coker has purchased at least 81 firearms from three separate Maryland Federal Firearms Licenses and in 2019 received Regulated Firearms Collector, which waived the restriction on the number of firearms he could purchase during a 30-day period, according to the release.

As detailed in the plea agreement, investigators also determined that prior to 2021 Ampong Coker had shipped passenger vehicles to Ghana.

In May 2021, federal agents surveilled Ampong Coker as he retrieved firearms, packaged and shipped items from the Port of Baltimore. A shipping vehicle was subsequently seen departing that location on May 27, 2021.

On May 29, 2021 Ampong Coker was searched as he was departing the United States from Detroit, bound for Ghana. Among other items seized in his luggage were foam cutouts used for packaging and securing firearms in gun cases.

In June 2021, federal agents identified a shipping container scheduled to depart the Port of Baltimore for Tema, Ghana. Included in the listed contents of the container was a 2018 Toyota Corolla registered to Ampong Coker.

Agents then searched the contents of the shipping container. Within the trunk of the Corolla, which had Ampong Cokers name on the cardboard on top of the vehicle, the agents found a gray suitcase. Secreted in the lining of the suitcase, agents found five 9 mm handguns previously purchased by Ampong Coker.

Law enforcement authorities identified another shipping container bound for Ghana containing other vehicles associated with Ampong Coker, according to the release.

The vessel on which this container was loaded sailed from the Port of Baltimore in May 2021, was intercepted at sea on June 14, 2021, and returned to Baltimore on August 20, 2021, without having been offloaded in Ghana or any other port. On August 25, 2021, this container was searched, revealing six 9 mm handguns and 16 9 mm pistol magazines found in the vehicles associated with Ampong Coker.

Ampong Coker admitted that all of the firearms and magazines were identified on the U.S. Department of Commerce Control List, and he had not obtained the required license or written approval to export the weapons to Ghana, according to the news release.

Ampong Coker faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison for illegally exporting firearms. U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher has scheduled sentencing for Sept. 6.

2023 Baltimore Sun.

Visit baltimoresun.com.

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WASHINGTON  President Joe Biden took steps Friday to eliminate employment barriers for military-connected spouses, signing an executive order that will impact 16,000 spouses working for the federal government and others including caregivers.

The nearly 20 actions in the order will attempt to put a dent in a 21% unemployment rate among military spouses that has not budged in a decade and address challenges faced by veteran spouses, caregivers and surviving spouses of service members, most of whom are women.

The order includes pushing federal agencies to grant up to five days of administrative leave for military spouses during permanent changes of station, bolstering child care options and directing the government to provide more resources and support for career stability.

Jill Biden, the first lady, said the actions were based on conversations with military spouses and children across the country in the last two years. The order is the latest joint initiative of the National Security Council and Joining Forces, a program founded by Jill Biden and then-first lady Michelle Obama in 2011 to help military families.

The first lady called the order one of the most consequential executive actions taken to support military spouses who want to continue their careers.

Biden told reporters that she has heard stories more times than I can count of highly educated spouses unable to find a job or giving up a career due to frequent moves. She said she also hears from partners in uniform who question how long they can serve when their spouse is unhappy.

Nearly one in five military families cite challenges with spousal employment as a reason for leaving service, according to the White House.

We cant ask our service members to choose between their love of country and their love of family, Jill Biden said, describing the issue as a matter of national security.

President Biden announced the executive order Friday at Fort Liberty, an Army post in North Carolina with the largest military spouse population. The signing took place against a backdrop of service members in uniform, one of whom was holding a baby.

As a nation, we have many obligations but we only have one truly sacred obligation, the president said. The most sacred obligation America has is to prepare those we send into harms way and care for them and their families when they come home or deploy. Today, were taking an important step towards fulfilling that obligation.

Tiffany Zoeller, a five-year military spouse who works for the federal government, said Friday that her career greatly benefited from the Military Spouse Noncompetitive Appointing Authority, which allows military spouses to bypass normal hiring procedures. The executive order aims to increase the number of federal job postings using the authority.

This support is so important to allow families like mine to thrive while our loved ones are serving in uniform, Zoeller said.

The order will issue new directives and build on an April order that directed federal agencies to find ways to make child care and long-term care cheaper and more accessible, according to senior administration officials.

Among the new directives is a training requirement for hiring managers and human resources personnel at all federal agencies to help them understand the unique struggles faced by military spouses, including resume gaps, difficulty juggling child care when a service member is training or deployed and providing care to ill or injured partners in the service.

The order also directs federal departments to develop a strategic plan within six months for hiring and retaining military spouses and set government-wide standards to make remote work more accessible to military spouses.

For child care, the order sets a Jan. 1, 2024, deadline for the Defense Department to implement dependent care flexible savings accounts that will allow service members to set aside up to $5,000 in pretax income for child care expenses. It also asks the Pentagon to expand pathways for military spouses to provide home-based child care on military installations.

The Small Business Administration will be tasked with developing resources for spouse entrepreneurs who need to move their business due to a change of station.

Jill Biden said the new initiatives will help so many military families and, ideally, serve as a model for the private sector.

Government cant solve these problems on its own so were asking employers everywhere to join us, she said. Recruit military and veteran spouses, caregivers and survivors. Theyre skilled and passionate. Offer them flexible and portable opportunities so you can retain their talent. The future of our armed services will be defined by how we support the whole of our military community.
AUSTIN, Texas  The Texas Military Department said Friday that troops are not involved in a buoy barrier being built in the Rio Grande to deter migrants from crossing into the U.S. from Mexico between legal ports of entry.

The military departments statement follows a news conference held Thursday by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that included Maj. Gen. Thomas Suelzer, commander of the Texas National Guard, about new border security initiatives.

During the news conference, Abbott said the director of the Department of Public Safety and the commander of the Texas National Guard came together to employ this strategy of installing about 1,000 feet of buoys in the river to stop migrants from crossing into Texas.

The installation of the buoy barrier will begin later this month in Eagle Pass, according to Lt. Chris Olivarez, spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety.

However, the Guard said no troops will be involved. The buoy barrier is a state police project, according to a Guard spokesman.

The Texas National Guard continues the work of preventing, deterring and interdicting traffickers and illegal migrants all across the vast Texas border. However, The Texas National Guard is not employing nor installing the buoy barriers, a Guard spokesman wrote in an emailed statement.

The Texas Guard has about 5,500 troops deployed in cooperation with state police on a state-sponsored mission at the border known as Operation Lone Star. The deployments began more than two years ago to prevent illegal activity such as smuggling drugs and people from Mexico into Texas.

In Thursdays news conference to announce the buoy barrier, Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, credited the idea of the buoys to Suelzer.

The National Guard does use boats to patrol along the Rio Grande and has built miles of coiled barbed wire barriers along the edge of the river to deter people from crossing between ports of entry.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.  The historic federal criminal case against former President Donald Trump has been assigned to a judge he appointed who faced blistering criticism over her decision to grant his request for an independent arbiter to review documents obtained during an FBI search of his Florida estate.

A person familiar with the development confirmed Friday that the case was assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon, a former federal prosecutor who was nominated to the bench by Trump in 2020 and sits in Fort Pierce, about an hour's drive north of Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence.

The indictment makes Trump the first former president in U.S. history to be charged with federal crimes. Trump said he has been ordered to appear in court in Miami on Tuesday.

Trump is facing 37 felony counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, according to an indictment unsealed Friday that alleges that he improperly shared a Pentagon "plan of attack" and a classified map related to a military operation.

Cannon was thrust into the spotlight last year when she issued what many legal experts saw as an extraordinary and unusually broad decision to appoint a "special master" to review the documents seized by the FBI.

As part of that case, Cannon temporarily barred federal agents and prosecutors from reviewing a batch of classified documents seized during the search. Her order was ultimately thrown out in a scathing opinion by a federal appeals court, which found she had overstepped.

Trump's supporters had cheered her ruling as a check on what they viewed as a politically motivated probe. His lawyers had argued that a special master was necessary to ensure an independent review of records taken during the search and so that any personal information or documents could be filtered out and returned to Trump.

But some experts said the judge gave undue deference to the former president and unnecessarily put on hold certain investigative work by the Justice Department.

Under federal law, if prosecutors reasonably believe Cannon cannot be fair, they could file an affidavit asking that Cannon recuse herself from the case, arguing that she has a personal bias or prejudice. If she finds the affidavit is "sufficient," she must step down. She also must step down if it could be argued that her "impartiality might reasonably be questioned" by the parties or the public.

Given the reversal of Cannon's ruling last year, "there already appears to be a fair ground for disqualification because the public might reasonably question her impartiality, even absent an evidentiary basis for alleging or finding personal bias or prejudice," said University of Miami law professor Anthony Alfieri, the founding director of its Center for Ethics and Public Service.

Cannon previously worked as an assistant U.S. attorney, mainly out of the federal prosecutors' office in Fort Pierce, Florida, which is part of the same federal district as Miami but about 130 miles (209 kilometers) to the north. Beginning in 2013, Cannon prosecuted 41 cases as part of the Major Crimes Division, later handling appeals of criminal convictions and sentences.

She has also been a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that has championed judges appointed by Trump, including Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Born in Cali, Colombia, in 1981, Cannon came to the United States as a child, ultimately graduating from Duke University in 2003.

One of her cases as a prosecutor involved a defendant in a major $800 million Ponzi scheme who unsuccessfully appealed his numerous fraud convictions to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Her opposing counsel in that case, longtime Miami defense attorney Richard Klugh, described Cannon as "very bright and talented" and fair to the defense.

"I didn't see anything I could characterize as anything other than good lawyering, and no political bias whatsoever," Klugh said, adding that he has worked on cases handled by Judge Cannon, although he has not appeared in her courtroom.

"She's known for affording fair process and hearings. You like somebody who actually hears you out," he said.

She was asked during her 2020 Senate confirmation process whether she had any discussions with anyone, including people at the White House or the Justice Department, about loyalty to President Trump. In a written response, she replied: "No."

During her college years, Cannon wrote a series of articles for El Nuevo Herald, a Spanish-language newspaper in southern Florida owned by The Miami Herald. According to a list of articles provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Cannon wrote primarily about health- and culture-related topics.

After earning a degree from the University of Michigan in 2007, Cannon clerked for U.S. District Judge Steven M. Colloton on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit. She next worked in private practice in Washington for three years with the prominent international law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher.

During her July 2020 confirmation hearing, the then-prosecutor noted that her mother "had to flee the repressive Castro regime in search of freedom and security," leaving Cuba at the age of 7.

"Thank you for teaching me about the blessing that is this country and the importance of securing the rule of law for generations to come," Cannon said, addressing her mother.

Kinnard reported from Columbia, South Carolina and Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Terry Spencer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix contributed.
WASHINGTON  A new long-term U.S. arms package for Ukraine to help its forces beat back Russian invaders is worth $2.1 billion and focuses on air defense munitions, the Pentagon announced Friday.

The military aid, provided under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, will go toward the purchase of Hawk missile launchers and missiles, Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems and additional munitions for Patriot air defense systems.

The announcement comes after reports of Ukraines long-anticipated counteroffensive against Russian forces launched this week.

The assistance initiative builds on previous efforts to aid Ukrainian air defenses against the Russian invasion. The funding for this package is not for immediate battlefield use but to procure capabilities from the defense industry or partner countries for a later date.

The United States will continue to work with its allies and partners to provide Ukraine with capabilities to meet its immediate battlefield needs and longer-term security assistance requirements, the Pentagon said in a statement.

Previous aid for Ukraine has been provided through the presidential drawdown authority, which means it will come directly from Pentagon stocks and sent quickly on an emergency basis. Aid given this way typically means it reaches Ukraine in a matter of weeks.

Including the latest aid package, the U.S. has provided more than $39.7 billion to Ukraine since the war began in February 2022.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will travel to Brussels next week with Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where they will meet with the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on June 15 and the NATO defense ministers on June 16, Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagons top spokesperson, told reporters Thursday.

The in-person meeting with the defense contact group, a collection of about 50 nations that convenes regularly to decide what equipment Ukrainian forces need to fend off invading Russian forces, comes after a virtual meeting took place May 25.

At the time, the meeting covered some new issues, including an international agreement to train Ukrainian pilots on fourth-generation fighter jets, including U.S.-made F-16 Fighting Falcons.

I expect it will be discussed there as well. And so we should have more details in a relatively near future in terms of when, where, how, Ryder said when asked about an update on F-16 training.

The list of weapons and items in the latest package include:

 Additional munitions for Patriot air defense systems.

 Hawk air defense systems and missiles.

 105mm and 203mm artillery rounds.

 Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems.

 Laser-guided rocket system munitions.

 Support for training, maintenance, and sustainment activities.
(Tribune News Service)  He was an immigrant who ended up fighting in the bloodiest American battle of World War II and was one of the few members of his unit to survive. A man short in stature but large in personality, he lived a long, happy life with his family after retiring from his much-decorated service.

John Paul Bellefontaine of Leesburg, Fla., died May 28, just one day before Memorial Day. He was 98 years old and believed to be one of the last two living members of his unit.

Ive never seen anybody like him, his daughter Deborah Fike said.

Hes a little bitty guy and very, very tough, she added. But gentle too, at the same time, you know, and he is very much a perfectionist. Like everything has to be done, right. He couldnt take anything out of place.

Born Jean Paul Louis LeBlanc Bellefontaine on March 2, 1925, he was a native of Montreal, Canada. His family immigrated to America in 1942 when he was 17. According to Fike, the family left Canada for Florida simply because it was too cold, ultimately making St. Petersburg their new home.

Disagreements with his father led Bellefontaine to enlist in the military in 1943, only one year after arriving in America.

Bellefontaine wanted to be a pilot but, at around 5 feet tall, he was disqualified from pilot training. He instead enlisted in the U.S. Army, training to become a paratrooper, and was assigned to the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion.

On April 21, 1944, Bellefontaine began a 33-day voyage to Italy aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which came under assault from German bomber planes.

That August, the 551st participated in Operation Dragoon, the Allied landing in southeastern France, eventually liberating the city of Nice. Due to his upbringing in Montreal, French was Bellefontaines first language, so he was made a translator for American forces while in France and Belgium.

In December, Bellefontaine became embroiled in the bloodiest battle the United States was involved in during the war  the Battle of the Bulge, Germanys desperate last-ditch surprise counteroffensive through the Ardennes Forest between Belgium and Luxembourg meant to stave off defeat on the Western Front.

The 551st was sent to capture the German-held Belgian village of Rochelinval without any support, a mission it successfully completed at the cost of most of the units remaining lives.

Although Bellefontaine was one of the lucky men to survive the battle, he suffered lifelong health complications to his feet due to the deep snow, including the development of gangrene toward the end of his life.

In early 1945, the remaining members of the 551st were absorbed into the 82nd Airborne Division. Bellefontaine remained in the Army, serving a total of 20 years, ultimately achieving the rank of Chief Warrant Officer.

He was very gentle, but he was very much a bossy person, Fike said. Like hes used to ordering everybody around. So being a Chief Warrant Officer, he likes to tell us all orders. He wouldnt wait for me to take the trash out. I said, Dad, five minutes, give me. He wouldnt wait five minutes. He would start to do it on his own.

He received numerous accolades, including the Bronze Star of Valor and the Presidential Unit Citation, the latter of which was awarded to all members of the 551st in 2001.

Bellefontaine was waiting to receive the Legion of Honor medal from France when he passed.

His eldest son and child, Yannick Bellefontaine, said his father did not like to talk about his service at first.

He was proud of what he accomplished, Yannick said. But at first when I talked to him about wanting to be honored now he said, because he was humble, I dont know why they want to honor me. You know, I was just over there. Its not like my choice really. But I said, Well, Dad, you know, you sacrificed a lot for the rest of us here.

After the war, while still stationed in France, John met his first wife, Henriette, a native of France. He and a friend were driving down a road when they noticed two women: Henriette and a friend, who had missed a train they intended to catch. He and his friend offered to take the two women to their destination.

The two married and had three children: sons Yannick and Steve and daughter Deborah.

After his retirement, John became an electronic communications engineer in the Army Civil Service, with his education being provided for under the GI Bill of Rights. One of his posts was at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey.

John had multiple health problems in his later years, including multiple forms of cancer.

The guy couldnt walk for the past 10 years, Fike said. Hes been driving around a little scooter. He had prostate cancer, bladder cancer and had three hip replacements. The last hip exploded. He had MRSA, he had sepsis. I said, Dad, youre a cat with nine lives. I mean, this man was such a fighter.

John ultimately died due to prostate cancer.

Despite his many ailments, John persevered through them with his signature stubbornness.

That contributed to a long life, his second son Steve Bellefontaine said. He never really stopped moving. He never took naps, even in his 80s, he rarely took a nap. So he was constantly moving. That constant desire to keep moving and a very sharp mind, he remembered a lot of things from even in his 80s, early 90s, things from when we were younger. So he kind of had the brain power, the will, the desire to live and a little bit of a stubborn streak.

Steve fulfilled his fathers dream of becoming a pilot, serving in the Air Force. After he retired, he became a pilot for American Airlines.

In 2018, American partnered with the Gary Sinise Foundation, established by actor and veterans advocate Gary Sinise, who portrayed Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, in the Soaring Valor program, meant to transport World War II veterans to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.

Steve volunteered to serve as a pilot in the program so he could personally transport his father to go to the museum alongside 39 other veterans.

I told the Foundation and American that I wanted to be the guy that flew them over and have them, you know, bring my dad, Steve said. So its officially 39 veterans and my dad, which you know, he was invited only because I was flying them over there. So, yeah, its an opportunity that I kind of took to be able to not only take those guys, but take my dad over there. It was one of those bucket lists that I felt like that opportunity I couldnt pass by so Im glad I did it.

At the event, John was able to meet Sinise, who wrote a letter to Johns family after his passing.

With his typical stubbornness, the elder Bellefontaine initially did not want to go on the trip. But after he went, he asked Steve if he could go again.

Yannick described his father as a simple, hardworking man.

After the experiences that he had as a child, the facts of the war, going through all that, I think he was looking to live, enjoy more out of life, just simple things, Yannick said. He was a dad who worked very hard to provide for his family. Somebody who just didnt have a bad bone in his body, you know, never, never judged people, never gossiped about people, anything like that.

Yannick spoke about one of his favorite family traditions with his father.

When he was in his 80s and early 90s, I lived in South Carolina and Tennessee and he lived in Florida, Yanick recalled. We would meet halfway like in Pooler or Savannah. He would drive 3 1/2 hours at 90 years old, meet us for lunch for an hour or two, and then he turned around, go back home.

John loved animals, especially dogs, and cars. He purchased a new car every year, usually after trading the previous one in. Fike believes he bought around 60 during his lifetime, she said. He also loved to make art.

John is survived by Henriette and his second wife, Patricia; his three children; his stepdaughter Anne Marie; his 10 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

The funeral is to take place at Allen J. Harden Funeral Home in Mount Dora, Fla., on the morning of June 23. John will be buried with honors at the Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell that afternoon.

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RIYADH, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Saudi Arabia and the United States announced on Friday that Sudan's rival factions had agreed on a 24-hour cease-fire.

The representatives of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces agreed to a 24-hour countrywide cease-fire beginning on June 10 at 6 a.m. Khartoum time (0400 GMT), according to a joint Saudi-U.S. statement published by the Saudi Press Agency.

The parties agreed that during the cease-fire, they would refrain from prohibited movements, attacks, use of aircraft or drones, aerial bombardment, artillery strikes, reinforcement of positions and resupply of forces.

They also agreed to allow the unimpeded movement and delivery of humanitarian assistance throughout the country.

If observed, the 24-hour cease-fire will provide an important opportunity to deliver humanitarian assistance and for the rival factions to build confidence in resuming their peace talks in the Saudi city of Jeddah. 
Sanaullah Ghafari, commonly referred to as Shahab al-Muhajir, specially designated global terrorist, has met his demise in Afghanistans Kunar, said authorities on Friday.

The death of this high-profile figure marks a major victory in the fight against terrorism, as Ghafari was not only wanted in Pakistan but also internationally.

Sanaullah Ghafaris family had migrated from India to Afghanistan, where he received his religious education at the renowned Ghaffari Madrasa.

Although specific details about his early life remain scarce, it is believed that his radicalization took place during his formative years in the madrasa.

The terrorist was involved in numerous attacks in Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

By April 2020, Ghafari had assumed the leadership of the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), a branch of the Islamic State operating in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Under his command, the group carried out several deadly attacks, inflicting immense suffering on innocent civilians and security forces alike.

In December 2021, he was designated as a global terrorist by the United Nations and the European Union.

Furthermore, the United Nations, the United States, and the European Union offered a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the location or identification of the leader of the Afghanistan affiliate of ISIL (ISIS).

He orchestrated and led multiple attacks in Pakistan and various other locations worldwide.

Among his notable attacks were the assault on the Pakistan Embassy in Kabul and the suicide bombing at Imam Bargah in Qissa Khwani Bazar, Peshawar.
He was granted bail on February 3 with a list of conditions, including a ban on using social media and an order to stay away from all refugee centres.

A JUDGE has rejected a plea by an anti-refugee activist charged with "incitement to hatred" to be allowed back on social media.

Following an investigation by the Garda Special Detective Unit (SDU), Graham Carey, 39, of Dunsink Drive, Finglas, Dublin, was charged in February with an offence under section two of the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act.

It is alleged that on January 30, at a place unknown within the State, he distributed, showed, or played a recording of visual images or sounds to stir up hatred.

He was granted bail on February 3 with a list of conditions, including a ban on using social media and an order to stay away from all refugee centres.

The out of work truck driver faced his third hearing when he appeared before Judge Gerard Jones at Blanchardstown District Court today.

His case was listed for directions from the Director of Public Prosecutions, which will set out if the matter should remain in the District Court or go forward to the Circuit Court, which has broader sentencing powers.

Graham Carey leaving court after being granted bail.   Collins Courts

SDU Detective Sergeant Eamon Hoey sought another four weeks, and Judge Jones noted from defence counsel Ciaran MacLoughlin that the accused consented.

Mr MacLoughlin then applied for a variation of two of his client's bail terms. Counsel said that he had to sign on at a Garda station every Tuesday and Saturday, making it difficult for him to find work. Detective Sergeant Hoey agreed to that term being reduced and changed to Sundays only; however, he objected to the second application.

The barrister said the order stating Mr Carey could not use social media save for work seemed an "incredibly onerous condition".

He understood there was a garda concern that it could be used for nefarious purposes, but contended that the law could take care of that.

Mr MacLoughlin said it was tantamount to a person accused of shoplifting not being allowed to go shopping; he submitted that it was "a step too far" because social media was an intricate part of life.

Judge Jones noted from Detective Sergeant Hoey that the allegation related to online postings, on social media. The officer agreed to him having it for work purposes only.

Mr MacLoughlin argued that his client could be charged if he posted anything illegal, and nevertheless, he should be allowed to use social media.

However, the judge held the condition "absolutely must continue", adding, "except for work only".

Legal aid was granted to Mr Carey today after Judge Jones noted that there was no Garda objection.

Mr Carey, who did not address the court, has still to indicate a plea and was remanded on continuing bail to appear again on July 14.

At his first hearing in February, Detective Sergeant Hoey said Mr Carey's reply to the charge was: "In hindsight, it won't be happening again; I will be taking a different approach going forward".

His bond was set at 200, and he was also ordered to reside at his address, not apply for travel documents, and obey a 9 pm  7 am curfew.

He must not organise or participate in gatherings and protests in person or online or post or record videos on any social media platform.

He was originally barred from social media by Judge Michele Finan, then presiding, who had said it was a "complex issue"; people can have various different accounts, and it would be simpler if he were barred from social media.

She had invited the defence to address her if that was a breach of his civil liberties, but at that stage, Mr Carey consented.

He was also ordered to provide gardai with a contact number for his new phone and was warned that it "is to be a button phone". The bail terms also included an order "to stay away from all centres and locations housing refugees".
Mr Murrays failure to complete the HAP form made Ms Walsh ineligible for HAP payments to assist with her rent payments.

A landlord has been ordered to pay 12,500 compensation to a lone parent who fears homelessness and cries herself to sleep with her 18 month old baby by her side.

In the case, Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) Adjudicator, Elizabeth Spelman has ordered landlord, Martin Murray to pay the 12,500 to tenant, Dorinda Walsh for discriminating against her on the housing assistance ground by failing to complete Ms Walsh's HAP application form.

Ms Walsh told a WRC hearing that Mr Murrays delays and evasion, ultimately resulting in a refusal to complete the HAP form, have had an enormously negative impact on her life, both in financial and emotional terms.

Mr Murrays failure to complete the HAP form made Ms Walsh ineligible for HAP payments to assist with her rent payments.

Ms Walsh said that she has been unable to return to work as she cannot cover childcare costs.

She said that as she could not obtain HAP due to Mr Murrays actions she has begged and borrowed from friends and neighbours to pay her rent.

Ms Walsh stated that she was alone with her baby and she had nowhere to go.

As part of Ms Walshs case, Fiona McGrattan of Threshold told the WRC hearing that the HAP scheme would have covered Ms Walshs rent from November 2022 until May and Ms Walshs estimated loss is 6,000.

Ms Walsh told the hearing that she believes that Mr Murray served the Notice of Termination of tenancy on her when she filed a complaint with the WRC.

The published WRC decision said that the Notice of Termination of Tenancy was to come into effect from May 2023.

Ms Walsh said that she does not believe that it was a coincidence and she feels bullied. The published WRC decision said that the October 2022 Notice of Termination of Tenancy was to come into effect from May 2023.

Ms Walsh told the hearing that she fears homelessness and cries herself to sleep with her baby by her side.

She stated that she is anxious, has panic attacks and has lost weight.

Ms Walsh said that she believes that this entire episode and the stress that it has caused, has destroyed her experience of being a new mother.

In January of this year , Mr Murray provided a new tenancy agreement to Ms Walsh which outlined a rent increase and Ms Walsh refused to sign this new tenancy agreement and continued to pay rent of 1,250 per month.

In her findings, Ms Spelman found that Ms Walsh was composed and credible in her evidence.

Ms Spelman said that it is clear from the evidence that Mr Murray engaged in delay and diversionary tactics to avoid completing the HAP Application Form.

Ms Spelman stated that in October 2022, after issuing a Notice of Termination on Ms Walsh, Mr Murray queried whether he could complete a HAP Application Form in the circumstances.

Ms Spelman stated that despite assurances from Ms Walsh and Threshold that he could, and despite accepting that he was legally obliged to accept HAP, Mr Murray still wanted independent confirmation from Dublin City Council and the Residential Tenancies Board before proceeding. He took issue with alleged delays on the part of DCC and the RTB.

Ms Spelman stated that it was clear from the evidence that Mr Murrary believed that he was generously allowing Ms Walsh to rent his apartment for 1,250 per month.

Ms Spelman stated that Mr Murray alleged that Ms Walsh had acted aggressively towards him but provided no evidence of this.

Mr Murray is the landlord of two properties and told the WRC that he was a good and supportive landlord and that he had always treated Ms Walsh well.

He believed that he had agreed to significant reductions in rent for a luxurious two-bedroom apartment for which the Complainant paid 1,250 per month.

He outlined his belief that he was very generous to Ms Walsh and that did not receive the market rent for his apartment.

Mr Murray stated that he has not discriminated against Ms Walsh as a single mother or otherwise and he denied that he had bullied her.

In January 2023, Mr Murray outlined that he provided a new tenancy agreement to Ms Walsh which provided for a rent increase.

Mr Murray indicated that Ms Walsh would not sign the new tenancy agreement or pay the rent increase.

Mr Murray stated that he felt harassed by Dublin City Council about accepting HAP in January and February 2023.

He stated that he has suffered stress because he has been accused of discrimination and bullying.

He said that he will not rent the property out again.
Nathan Coakley (30) was drooling and told the garda who stopped him he had been drinking and taking cocaine all day, a court heard.

A NEPHEW of Gerard The Monk Hutch was arrested for his own safety when a garda found him emotional and intoxicated outside a Dublin supermarket.

Nathan Coakley (30) was drooling and told the garda who stopped him he had been drinking and taking cocaine all day, a court heard.

Judge Bryan Smyth fined him 200 at Dublin District Court.

Coakley, a father-of-one from Buckingham Street Upper in the north inner city, pleaded guilty to public intoxication last March 21.

Garda Gerard Hanahoe said in evidence he was walking down Talbot Street at 12.20pm on the day when he saw the accused outside Iceland, which I believe is his ex-partners place of work.

Nathan Coakley

I know him quite well from my work as a community garda and this was the worst I ever saw him.

Coakley was drooling, had glazed eyes and told the garda he had been drinking and taking cocaine all day. He was very emotional and intoxicated.

The garda believed that if he had not taken the accused away from there he could have been a danger to himself or others, so he thought it best to arrest him under the Public Order Act.

Coakley had prior convictions but most were for motoring offences, with a few for drugs, the court heard.

The accused had challenges with substance abuse, his solicitor Andrew Molony said.

He was hoping to get treatment soon.

Judge Smyth fined and convicted him on the charge, which is under Section 4 of the Public Order Act.
RAMALLAH, June 9 (Xinhua) -- A Palestinian man was killed on Friday by Israeli soldiers at an Israeli army checkpoint west of the West Bank city of Ramallah, the Palestinian health ministry said.

The minisry said in a short text message that it was informed by the Palestinian liaison office of security coordination with Israel that Israeli soldiers opened fire and killed a Palestinian at Rantis checkpoint west of the city.

The killed man was identified as Mahdi Biadseh, 29, from Ramallah area, it added.

Meanwhile, Palestinian eyewitnesses said Biadseh arrived by his car at the checkpoint, where the soldiers asked him to get out from his car, before a fight between him and the soldiers erupted, which turned into hand fighting and ended with opening fire that killed Biadseh.

An Israeli army spokesman said in a press statement that Biadseh attacked the soldiers and tried to grab one of the soldiers' gun, adding the soldiers neutralized him.

The tension between Israelis and Palestinians has been flaring in the Palestinian territories since early January, leaving more than 160 Palestinians killed, including women and children, according to health ministry figures.

In the meantime, around 20 Israelis were killed in attacks carried out by Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Jerusalem. 
More than $25,000 of property has been allegedly stolen during the residential burglaries, including large amounts of cash, jewellery, and designer handbags

The three were arrested in Melbourne

Three Irishmen have been arrested in Australia after large amounts of cash, jewellery, and designer handbags were stolen in a string of burglaries of houses across the eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

Detectives from the Whitehorse Crime Investigation Unit (CIU) have this week charged the three men who entered Australia in the last three months.

Police allege that the three Irish nationals used what has been described as sophisticated measures to hide their tracks.

They splashed cleaning fluid on the floors and furniture at six properties that were targeted in recent weeks.

During the series of alleged burglaries that took place between Wednesday 7 June and Thursday 8 June, properties in Blackburn South, Wheelers Hill, Templestowe, and Box Hill North were broken into while the occupants were away.

Over $25,000 of property has been allegedly stolen during the residential burglaries, including large amounts of cash, jewellery, and designer handbags.

Investigators are continuing to probe whether the trio are linked to any other unsolved burglaries.

A 29-year-old Blackburn man, as well as a 25-year-old Mitcham man and a 26-year-old man with no fixed address, were arrested at a car park in Box Hill by detectives from the Whitehorse Crime Investigation Unit (CIU) on Thursday, June 8.

The three were arrested in Melbourne

Victoria Police have been in contact with British police and relevant immigration authorities in relation to the Blackburn man, who is wanted by police in the UK for his alleged involvement in a spate of burglaries across England.

They have all charged with aggravated burglary, six counts of burglary, theft, handle stolen goods and dealing with property suspected of being proceeds of crime.

All three men were remanded to appear at Ringwood Magistrates Court on 3 July after no applications were made for bail.

Detective Senior Sergeant Brad March, Whitehorse CIU, is quoted by Miragenews.com as saying your home should be your sanctuary.

Victoria Police simply will not stand for anyone who seeks to enter someone elses home and takes whats not theirs, Detective March said.

We are consistently working closely with police jurisdictions around the globe, including in the UK, to share intelligence on those who try to fly under the radar and commit crimes both in Australia and overseas.
When it comes to horse ownership Im not one bit concerned about who the owner is so long as they can care for them

A tweet sent by Co Clare TD, Cathal Crowe, declaring that family tradition and culture does not give people rights to own a horse has generated a huge reaction on the social media site.

Deputy Crowe tweeted the strongly-worded message alongside a picture of a distressed horse late last night and it has since been viewed tens of thousands of times while attracting heated debate among other users.

In the message, the Fianna Fail TD wrote: Practically every Irish family has a tradition of horses - with most of our grandparents owning one before upgrading to a motorcar.

Family tradition and culture doesnt confer unconditional rights to own an animal you (sic) that have little or no ability to adequately care for.

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There have been numerous, generally supportive reactions to Deputy Crowes tweet, although it has upset some people.

One person replied: Cathal I appreciate your work for the horse, no one should treat a horse like this, but cruelty is no one's culture.

To implicate a whole culture includes everyone within it which is unfair unless you'd want me blaming your culture for the deaths of horses in the grand national.

Deputy Crowe countered: When it comes to horse ownership Im not one bit concerned about who the owner is so long as they can care for them.

Long-acre grazing and/or horse living in the living room is miles below the standard of animal welfare we should expect. No excuses can be made.

Deputy Crowes stance was backed up by one other person who wrote: Who cares if someones feeling are upset the animals welfare is all that matters & if anyone wants to own a horse, they should have the means & facilities to properly care for it, its not up to the gov to provide that for ppls pets FFS.

Another added: Indeed - my father grew up, as did his father & grandfather etc on a farm with horses but that doesnt give me cultural rights to own or keep a horse in my house on a housing estate.

Deputy Crow responded: Same as - Id have loved a horse growing up but we didnt have land for a horse.. A) put horse on roadside with a rope around neck. B) out horse in front room of house. C) dont get a horse. Family chose option C.

One person suggested that, maybe it's time we did something about it as a whole. Some disgusting cases of animal abuse in this country from horses to puppy farms. Nothing is done about it.

Time for government to enforce laws and help the charities that have taken it all on board with little to no help!
The Irish national was reportedly working as a language teacher at a school in the city

An Irishman has reportedly been killed after he fell to his death from the 23rd floor of an apartment building in the Thai capital of Bangkok.

The body of the man, who is believed to have been working in the city as a language teacher, was discovered after residents reported hearing a loud bang in the early hours of Friday morning.

Security guards then found the man on the second floor of the building located in the Bang Khae district.

Police at the local Lak Song station station said they were alerted to the incident at about 7.35am.

According to an investigation launched by police, the Irish national worked as a language teacher at a school in the city.

However, investigations have not revealed further details of the cause of death or details about the man.

It is known that he had been residing on the 23rd floor in an apartment on his own.

The Bangkok Post reports that police are examining CCTV for potential clues while forensic investigators have been examining evidence to aid the investigation.

He is the second Irishman who has died in Thailand in recent months.

Last year an Irish national died after falling from a train in Thailand along what is known as the death railway.

Patrick Ward (45), who was born in New Zealand but claims Irish nationality, fell down a slope last December after visiting the site made famous by the second World War film, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Police in Thailand said Mr Ward travelled with other tourists from the capital Bangkok to Kanchanaburi near the border with Myanmar where the river Kwai bridge was built by Allied prisoners during the second World War.

Police major Kiatisak Kerdchok of the Sai Yok police said that, according to witnesses, when the train slowed down at a scenic spot, Mr Ward opened a door in the carriage and fell 10 metres backwards down a slope.

Since there was no ladder or other way to climb down in the area, rescuers had to create a makeshift pulley system to lower themselves and pull Mr Ward out.

Rescuers tried to resuscitate Mr Ward for about half an hour but their efforts were in vain.

A Department of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman was later quoted as saying they were aware of the incident.
Eoin OBrien has written and will star in film about his ordeal

A scene from the film 'Kiss Of The Con Queen', currently in production, showing Irish actor Eoin O'Brien, who fell victim to the con queen and wrote the film. Photo: De Warrenne Pictures/PA

An actor has told how he was coerced into performing simulated sex acts in a fake Skype audition by the Con Queen of Hollywood  who was posing as a female film producer.

Hargobind Tahilramani (43) is facing extradition to the US accused of being the mastermind of a $1m dollar (927,000) scam against more than 300 victims between 2013 and 2020.

He is said to have used fake accents and altered his voice to sound like female film executives to fool industry professionals, including actors, screenwriters and photographers.

Actor and writer Eoin OBrien (45) told the PA news agency he was left $15,000 (13,900) out of pocket after he was contacted by someone posing as Hollywood producer Deborah Snyder  who is known for working with her director husband Zack Snyder on films including 300 and Watchmen.

Convinced he was in the running for a breakthrough role in a DC Justice League film, Mr OBrien, who is from Dublin, said he was pressured to go all out in a one-way video audition.

I was coerced into performing simulated sex acts over Skype by the con queen in the guise of an audition, he said. When I discovered it wasnt who he claimed and also a male, I felt violated.

Mr OBrien flew to Jakarta at his own expense having been promised a $5,000 (4,600) fee before handing over thousands of dollars for shooting permits, which he was assured would be reimbursed.

But after four days of being driven to remote locations, Bangkok-based Mr OBrien realised he had been scammed and fled Indonesia in the middle of the night. He has now written an upcoming film, Kiss Of The Con Queen, based on his experience, which is currently in production.

Directed by Tom Waller, Mr OBrien stars alongside Sleeping With the Enemy star Patrick Bergin and Ravi Patel as the con queen.

This guy would just crush people for fun and sexually harass people, including myself, for his personal gratification, said Mr OBrien.

Posing as a female Hollywood producer, the con queen used my dreams as bait, defrauded me of thousands, coerced me into simulated sex acts over Skype in the guise of an audition, and got me to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement).

Ironically, by overcoming this experience Ive earned what he used as bait  my dream of playing a lead role in a big film.

Tahilramani was arrested following an FBI investigation in November 2020 in a 70-a-night Aparthotel, in Manchester, where he had allegedly claimed to be a writer for Netflix and said he needed 10 rooms because he was working for Doug Liman, director of The Bourne Identity.

He faces an eight-count indictment in California including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, two counts of wire fraud, which each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment, and five counts of aggravated identity theft, carrying a maximum penalty of two years each.

Chief magistrate in Britain Paul Goldspring this week approved his extradition to the US and sent the case to British Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, for a formal decision following an extradition hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court. Tahilramani entered the UK in late 2016 and has claimed asylum, having lived in the country illegally after his entry visa expired, and his claim will have to be determined before he is extradited.

The UK court heard there are a large number of victims, including some UK victims who are not subject to the US indictment or prosecution and his lawyers claimed a substantial amount of the alleged conduct took place while he was in the UK.

But he has not been charged with any offences in the UK and Mr OBrien said: I want him to face justice for what he did to all of his victims, not just those in the US.

He was living in Britain and committed a lot of his scams there, so why is he only being tried in the US for US victims?

What about all the British and Irish victims?

Once he had been arrested in Manchester I thought he would be charged.

But the British authorities have washed their hands of fraud and sex crimes by sending him to the US. The one thing I agree with him about is that a UK courtroom would be a great place for us to meet and see him face justice for every victim he abused, especially in the UK from where he ran his operation.

The home secretary must hold him to account here first.

A British Home Office spokesperson said: We do not comment on individual cases.
She has now taken to the GoFundMe charity site to help her support herself and her family, setting a fundraising goal of $10,000 (9280.50).

A teacher who got the sack from her job after bosses discovered she was flogging racy content online has so far raised 37 from the public in a GoFund Me appeal.

Sarah Juree, a teacher at the Starbase Academy in Indiana, United States, says she was unfairly fired from her role after her school got wind of the account.

She has now taken to the GoFundMe charity site to help her support herself and her family, setting a fundraising goal of $10,000 (9280.50).

So far, she has received just two anonymous donations, totalling 37.

GoFundMe page

"Hi! I am Sarah Juree! A single mom to twins. I was unfairly fired from my teaching job for starting an Onlyfans Account, she wrote.

I am raising money to help support myself and my twins as I navigate this difficult time."

In the appeal, Sarah claims she only set up the account after my boss encouraged me to do so.

Ms Juree previously told reporters why she went down that particular route.

"Almost every teacher in America has a second side job or more. My former coworker worked as a bartender and she mentioned starting an Onlyfans page.

It helped break from the 'poverty cycle'.

Speaking on Alex Burkets Rise To The Challenge podcast, Ms Juree said:

I had a job where I was using my intelligence, but I was living in a poverty cycle. However, as a woman I can take my clothes off and make five to eight times what I was making as a teacher simply because I have a body.

Sarah Juree

Recent statistics compiled by Slingo - an online gaming site - showed that Ireland placed sixth in the amount of content were watching on the x-rated subscription service.

The list compiled countries based on the number of annual Google searches per 10,000 people and is as follows:

Australia with 7,147 (views per 10k people)

Finland with 6,422

USA with 5,754

New Zealand with 4,511

Canada with 5,240

Ireland with 5,089

UK with 5,006

Iceland with 3,365

Slovenia with 3,274

Norway with 3,165

The research indicated that essentially one in every two Irish people are searching for OnlyFans content daily.
Rotorua's mayor has spoken about the "truly special" moment she and her husband first laid eyes on their new baby girl.

Tania Tapsell, the second mayor in New Zealand history to give birth while in office, on Thursday announced the news of baby Kahumoa Caroline Clancy's arrival last week. She said she and husband Kanin Clancy were delighted.

She gave birth to Kahumoa at Rotorua Hospital - the same place Tapsell was born - on 2 June, on her second day of maternity leave.

"Home is where the heart is just got a whole new meaning," she said in a public announcement supplied to Local Democracy Reporting.

"We're looking forward to making the most of these first few weeks before I return to my duties as mayor and Kanin takes on the important duties of full-time daddy."

Tapsell provided Local Democracy Reporting with a few additional details of the big day, including how it felt to look at her daughter for the first time.

"We felt overwhelmed with happiness and there were a few tears of joy. It's a truly special moment holding your baby for the first time and one we'll never forget."

Tapsell said the pair "wanted a unique name" that honoured their daughter's Maori heritage while also acknowledging how special she was to them.

Kahumoa translated to "most distinguished cloak", and came from the words kakahu (cloak) and the moa bird, which Tapsell said was the most distinguished species of bird during its time.

"The name Kahumoa also pays tribute to an ancestor of my husband called Kahureremoa, and I like that it has Kahu in it as my sister and an ancestor of mine was called Kahutapeka."

Her little girl came into the world a week early: "I had planned to work right up until then but fortunately lots of local ladies convinced me to take time off earlier."

Rotorua Mayor Tania Tapsell on May 31, her last day of work before maternity leave. Photo: Andrew Warner.

It was not all smooth sailing, however.

"There was one moment during labour when a fire alarm was accidentally set off.

"The look the midwife and I gave each other was the most priceless 'you've got to be kidding me' moment. I'm very glad that it was a false alarm and I was able to safely carry on delivering her."

Tapsell, who was a National Party candidate in 2020, paid tribute to the Rotorua Hospital team.

"I've had our baby at a time that our health system in New Zealand is facing significant pressure and staff shortages so it's been sad experiencing firsthand the impacts of this.

"Despite the lack of resources and facilities, there's no doubt that the staff are incredible and work long hours to care for others."

She said the couple were also thankful to their midwife Tracey Smitsdorff and the TRG Imagining radiology clinic "who helped us, and many others through their pregnancy journeys".

Tapsell will return to work on June 28, and was soaking up all of the newborn moments while she could.

"We've got a lot of work to do getting Rotorua back on track so I'm looking forward to recovering well and coming back strong."

She said her colleagues had been "incredibly generous" with their support and it had been lovely sharing the journey with them.

Clancy had been as well, she said, and he was fully embracing taking time off work to care for Kahumoa.

The couple announced her pregnancy in March, and at the time she said she felt twice blessed taking on the roles of both mayor and mother.

She said she was grateful to deputy mayor Sandra Kai Fong for stepping into the role of acting mayor during Tapsell's maternity leave.

-Local Democracy Reporting is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.
Seven North Island councils representing more than half of New Zealands population are calling on the government for more money and support to be thrown at one of the worlds worst invasive marine seaweed pests, recently discovered in the Bay of Islands.

Northland, Whangarei, Auckland, Bay of Plenty, Waikato Regional, Hamilton and Tauranga councils are seeking more money and support from the Government to fight the foot and mouth of invasive marine seaweeds.

The seven councils form New Zealands heavyweight Upper North Island Strategic Alliance - their combined area producing more than half of the countrys GDP.

It has taken the unusual step of sending a strongly-worded letter about caulerpa to Minister for Biosecurity Damien OConnor, Northland-based Minister of Conservation Willow-Jean Prime and Acting Minister Oceans and Fisheries David Parker - calling for better resourcing in what they say is a marine pest unconcerned with regional boundaries.

More than 70 per cent of New Zealands marine vessels are found along the alliances coastlines.

On behalf of  UNISA I am writing to express our utmost concern regarding the recent detection of the invasive seaweed caulerpa in the Bay of Islands, Bay of Plenty Regional Council chair Doug Leeder says in a letter from the councils to the Government this week.

This is not just an issue for Northland beaches and recreational fishing, its a New Zealand Inc issue, says Leeder.

(Exotic) caulerpa species pose a significant threat to our precious marine environments and standing back and allowing further spread is untenable to our communities.

Small piece of caulerpa in the Bay of Islands.

Northland Regional Council biosecurity working party chair Geoff Crawford says at least $100 million is needed in the first instance towards sorting out the new Bay of Islands discovery.

Mainland caulerpa was first discovered by mana whenua in Omakiwi Cove on May 3 in a mainland New Zealand first.

Ministry for Primary Industries and local mana whenua are days away from the start of banning anchoring and kaimoana gathering around Omakiwi where 16 hectares of the weed has been confirmed in the last week.

We understand that caulerpa appears to be well established at Omakiwi Cove and poses a significant risk as a source for further spread throughout the upper North Island and the rest of New Zealand, says Leeder.

We wish to acknowledge the recent change in attitude from Biosecurity New Zealand in taking a more proactive stance towards exploring options for managing caulerpa and strongly encourage you and your Government to ensure they are adequately resourced to effectively contain this challenging pest.

This new detection represents a significant range expansion from the previous known sites of Aotea (Great Barrier Island) and Ahuahu (Great Mercury Island).

Leeder says more surveillance was needed to see if caulerpa had spread along the mainland coast.

The incursion of this type of organism poses potential risks to biodiversity in the marine environment.

Leeder says the alliances seven councils did not have the funding to get this thing under control.

The Governments Ministry for Primary Industries is running the caulerpa response nationally through its Biosecurity New Zealand arm.

The upper North Island regional and unitary councils are willing to lean in to support management attempts but we cant do this alone, especially given regions have no authority to manage inter-regional movements, says Leeder.

He says other areas in New Zealand could take the lead from the caulerpa efforts in Northland, Great Barrier and Great Mercury Islands.

As sea temperatures rise, like they have done in the last couple of years, theres more likelihood of this incursion spreading south.

Crawford says eradication remains NRCs main focus when it comes to the pest in the Bay of Islands.

The invasive superspreader seaweed was found in almost 20 per cent of the locations urgently checked by NRC and NIWA divers in the week leading up to a landmark May 31 Te Rawhiti marae Bay of Islands caulerpa hui.

Te Rawhiti's Rana Rewha (Ngati Kuta)first found pieces of caulerpa on this Omakiwi Cove beach on May 3 in New Zealand's first confirmed mainland infestation.

Crawford says it was frustrating MPI had not had a proactive plan in place in advance of caulerpa being found to have spread beyond its Great Barrier Island stronghold to the Bay of Islands.

It was now more than a month since it had been discovered in the Bay of Islands and the Government ban on anchoring in Omakiwi was not yet in place.

What to do if you find caulerpa:

Take a photo, record the location and call 0800 80 99 66 or visit www.report.mpi.govt.nz

If finding caulerpa on anchors when boating, people are encouraged to throw it straight back in the water- before they move from their anchorage.

If caulerpa is found on gear once already back at shore, put it in the rubbish on land.

For latest caulerpa information www.biosecurity.govt.nz/caulerpa

-Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.
A Kuaizhou-1A carrier rocket carrying the Longjiang-3 experiment satellite blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China June 9, 2023. (Photo by Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua)

JIUQUAN, June 9 (Xinhua) -- China successfully launched a Kuaizhou-1A carrier rocket to send a new satellite into space from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 10:35 a.m. (Beijing Time) on Friday.

The Longjiang-3 experiment satellite has entered the planned orbit.

It will be used to verify satellite communication and remote sensing technologies.

It was the 20th flight mission using a Kuaizhou-1A commercial carrier rocket. 

A Kuaizhou-1A carrier rocket carrying the Longjiang-3 experiment satellite blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China June 9, 2023. (Photo by Li Yunxi/Xinhua)

A Kuaizhou-1A carrier rocket carrying the Longjiang-3 experiment satellite blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China June 9, 2023. (Photo by Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua)

A Kuaizhou-1A carrier rocket carrying the Longjiang-3 experiment satellite blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China June 9, 2023. (Photo by Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua)

A Kuaizhou-1A carrier rocket carrying the Longjiang-3 experiment satellite blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China June 9, 2023. (Photo by Wang Heng/Xinhua)
Actis LLP and Edra Power Holdings Sdn Bhd revived their interests in buying a major Egyptian power plant, in a deal that may be worth about $2 billion and would boost the North African nations troubled economy, Azernews reports, citing Al Arabiya.

Both companies intend to enter offers to purchase as much as full ownership and operate the facility thats located in Beni Suef, south of Cairo, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified as the deliberations are private. The firms expressed interest in 2019 for a mooted sale that didnt materialize.

The plant is one of three co-built by Siemens AG with a total capacity of 14.4 gigawatts that were inaugurated by President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi in mid-2018 as the latest in a series of ambitious megaprojects. Now its on the auction block, as the Middle Easts most populous nation races to shrink the states economic footprint and secure badly needed foreign currency.

Egypt is seeking to offload parts of more than two dozen state-owned companies and assets, with Cairos energy-rich Gulf Arab allies expected to be the main buyers. But a pact with London-headquartered Actis or Edra of Malaysia would be a welcome infusion of capital from outside the region and potentially the highest-valued individual deal of all.

Actis declined to comment. Edra, which is a subsidiary of China General Nuclear Power Corp., didnt respond to a request for comment.

The three plants cost 6 billion ($6.4 billion) to build, with financ-ing mainly coming from a consortium led by Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings Plc, and KfW-IPEX Bank AG.

The state-owned Egyptian Electricity Holding Co. paid about 85 percentof the three power plants costs with the loan from the banking consortium backed by a sovereign guarantee.

A new buyer would assume responsibility for financial dues on the plant, according to the people familiar with the plans, helping Egypt ease one of the Middle Easts largest debt burdens. The $2 billion valuation includes debt on the facility, meaning the government would likely receive less than that sum for the sale.

Authorities have alerted the lenders to the potential deal and are awaiting their clearance before sending the so-called request for proposal to Actis and Edra, the people said.

A power-purchasing agreement would also be signed with the company, which would sell the electricity produced to the government.

Egypts sovereign wealth fund said in 2019 it may acquire a stake of about 30 percent in the plants, with international investors taking the rest.
CANBERRA, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Domesticated cats kill hundreds of millions of native Australian animals every year, Aussie research has found.

According to a new report from the Biodiversity Council, Invasive Species Council, and Birdlife Australia, pet cats kill 323 million native animals every year.

The figure represents an increase of 34 percent from 241 million in 2020 after a surge in pet ownership during the coronavirus pandemic.

About one-third of Australian households have a pet cat and half of those have two or more.

Authors of the report called for Australians to take greater responsibility for their pets, with 71 percent of cat owners still allowing them to roam freely.

"The jump in wildlife kills reflects the pandemic pet boom that saw pet cat numbers reach 5.3 million and is an alarm bell for governments to enact responsible pet ownership laws, including 24/7 cat curfews," Sarah Legge, an ecologist from Charles Darwin University and spokesperson for the Biodiversity Council, said in a statement on Friday.

Residents of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) are required by law to contain their cats at all times while in Victoria approximately half of local councils have containment rules.

However, in other states, legislative barriers have prevented similar rules from being introduced.

The Invasive Species Council claims that a 24/7 cat curfew in the greater Sydney area alone would save 66 million native animals every year.

The 110 native animals killed on average by each roaming and hunting pet cat every year include about 40 reptiles, 38 birds and 32 mammals.

"We can't change the behavior of cats, but we can support better choices by cat owners," Holly Parsons from Birdlife Australia said. 
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Baldwinsville, N.Y. - A man having a mental health crisis which forced officials to clear a school early and close some roads in Van Buren Thursday has been charged.

The 36-year-old man was charged with first-degree reckless endangerment after he fired a shotgun in his bedroom into the basement of his home on Van Buren Road, according to a criminal complaint.
Syracuse, N.Y. -- A former Destiny USA security guard who police say threatened to shoot up the mall and the Pride parade on Saturday has been banned from the parade and all Destiny USA property, prosecutors said.

On May 20, Bruce Laveck -- an employee of Allied United Security assigned at Destiny USA -- made comments to co-workers threatening to shoot up the mall and the parade, according to a Syracuse police report.

If I would go to the Pride parade, I would shoot it up, Laveck said, according to a criminal complaint.

Laveck, 21, was later fired after his coworkers reported the comments to their supervisor.

Laveck denied making the threats when questioned by the security account manager, according to the report. He was asked to leave the property until further notice. Laveck had only been working at the mall as a security guard for a few weeks when he made the comments.

When his supervisor notified police, the Onondaga County District Attorneys Office stepped in and filed an application for an Extreme Risk Protection Order against Laveck that Onondaga County Supreme Court Justice Robert Antonacci approved.

The order makes it illegal for Laveck to purchase or possess any firearm, including rifles and shotguns.

Initially, Laveck was not criminally charged because the district attorneys office found they could not charge him with a felony, District Attorney Willliam Fitzpatrick said Friday. For a felony charge of making a terroristic threat the comments need to be communicated to a mass audience, he said.

Laveck was later charged with a rarely prosecuted misdemeanor charge of making a threat of mass harm, Fitzpatrick said.

On Tuesday, Laveck appeared in Syracuse City Court for an appearance ticket on the criminal charge.

During that appearance, the judge ordered Laveck to stay 500 feet away from the route of the Pride parade, Senior Assistant District Attorney Peter Hakes said. The judge also banned him from entering any Destiny USA owned property.

The orders will remain in effect until the judge changes them during a court appearance or when the case is closed, Hakes said.

The CNY Pride Festival and Parade is scheduled for Saturday at the Inner Harbor less than a mile from Destiny USA.

Staff writer Anne Hayes covers breaking news, crime and public safety. Have a tip, a story idea, a question or a comment? You can reach her at ahayes@syracuse.com.
Want to hang out with Seymour Butz or meet Amanda Hugginkiss? Looking for a Hugh Jass? You might find them, along with a cranky bartender named Moe, in Syracuse later this summer.

Moes Tavern, made famous in TVs long-running The Simpsons show, is coming to Syracuse for a two-week long pop-up event.

From July 25 to Aug. 5, the Buried Acorn Brewing Co.s taproom at 900 E. Fayette St. in Syracuse will be transformed into a knock-off of Moes, the favorite watering hole of Homer Simpson and the site of many a prank phone call.

There will Simpsons-themed decorations and characters, food, swag and even a version of Homers beer of choice, Duffs, made by Buried Acorn. Guests are encouraged to wear costumes and stay in character, if they want. Its a ticketed experience, with prices depending on the type of package you choose.

We were approached about doing this, and it comes in the middle of summer, at a slow time for us at the taproom, said Buried Acorn co-owner Tim Shore, noting the space that opened last year is near the out-of-session-for-summer Syracuse University. And The Simpsons theme kind of intersects with the type of people who come into our place, so it seems like a good fit.

The organizers, JMC Pop Ups, have been staging similar events around the Northeast for a few years. The current Moes Pop Up is happening now through Sunday (June 11) at Two Weeks Notice Brewing in West Springfield, Mass., perhaps not coincidentally since The Simpsons is set in a fictional place called Springfield.

The organizers are not affiliated in any way with The Simpsons show, its producers or networks, said Samantha Shutter, who helps produce the pop ups. She also appears at the events as Marge Simpson complete with a two-foot-high blue wig.

Shutter describes the events as fan-based parody. The promotional tagline is The bar Where Nobody Knows Your Name and no one cares!

Full details of the Syracuse version are not yet available on the Moes Pop Up web site. The tickets in Springfield ranged from $32 for entry with a meal and non-alcoholic beverage, then rising to $47 and $89 with more merchandise like hats and T-shirts. Beer and other drinks are sold separately. Shutter said the pricing in Syracuse will be in that ballpark. Pre-registration is now available.

JMC Pop Ups has used other themes, but find The Simpsons is popular because it appeals to a wide audience, Shutter said.

Its been on for 34 years, so a lot of people are familiar with it, she said. During Covid, people turned it on for the kids and grandkids.

The pop up events are designed to be family friendly, Shutter said. The food menu has Simpson themes, including a childs plate called Maggie. There is a pool table and a chalkboard for people to write their own versions of I will not ...

And, as the pop up site indicates, once youre there you can wait for the prank calls to come.

In the show, Moes Tavern is perhaps best known as the place where the mischievous Bart Simpson places calls answered by Moe on the phone behind the bar. Bart will say something like Im trying to reach a Mr. Coholic, first name Al. Moe then turns to the crowd at the bar and says Is there an Al Coholic in here?

In Syracuse, be sure to look out for Buried Acorns Tim Shore wearing his big squirrel suit.

Don Cazentre writes for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Reach him at dcazentre@nyup.com, or follow him at NYup.com, on Twitter or Facebook.
Syracuse, N.Y.  The owners of Van Duyn nursing home pocketed $37.6 million from the troubled facility instead of spending it to improve resident care, according to the New York Attorney Generals Office.

In a motion filed Wednesday, the AGs office asked the court to make Van Duyns owners Uri Koenig and Efraim Steif answer questions under oath about the nursing homes finances, allegations of resident neglect and inadequate staffing.
The Grateful Dead members are going on tour with John Mayer one last this next summer.

Dead & Company will make stops in two Upstate New York. The band will perform at Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in Saratoga Springs on Saturday, June 17, 2023, and Sunday, June 18, 2023; both shows begin at 7 p.m.

Tickets are available on Live Nation starting at $205.92 for General Admission Lawn tickets. However, resale sites like VividSeats, TicketNetwork, and Megaseats have tickets to spare, sometimes at a better price with a better seat.

Spend your night with The Grateful Dead. Take a look at the resale prices below.

Vividseats:

Saturday, June 17: Lawn tickets start at $184. Balcony tickets start at $276

Sunday, June 18: Lawn tickets start at $131. Balcony tickets start at $261

TicketNetwork:

Saturday, June 17: Lawn tickets start at $199. Balcony tickets start at $333

Sunday, June 18: Lawn tickets start at $150. Balcony tickets start at $300

Megaseats:

Saturday, June 17: Lawn tickets start at $207. Balcony tickets start at $343

Sunday, June 18: Lawn tickets start at $156. Balcony tickets start at $313

StubHub:

Saturday, June 17: Lawn tickets start at $194. Balcony tickets start at $315

Sunday, June 18: Lawn tickets start at $130. Balcony tickets start at $274

According to a press release, Dead & Company  Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, John Mayer, and Bob Weir, with Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti  will perform two sets of music drawing from the Grateful Deads historic catalog of songs. The band formed in 2015 when Grateful Dead members Hart, Kreutzmann, and Weir joined forces with Mayer, Burbridge and Chimenti.

As we put the finishing touches on booking venues, and understanding that word travels fast, we wanted to be the first to let you know that Dead & Company will be hitting the road next summer for what will be our final tour, Dead & Co. said last month, promising an exciting, celebratory, and heartfelt last run of shows.

Dead & Company canceled a performance at SPAC this past summer at the last minute when Mayers father suffered a medical emergency and was taken to the hospital. Tickets were refunded at the original point of sale, according to the band.

He is now fairly stable and will continue to undergo some procedures, but as you can understand, I have to stay in NYC and cant play tonights show in Saratoga Springs, Mayer told fans on Instagram hours before the show was scheduled to begin.

Summer concerts in Upstate NY: 60 cant-miss shows in 2023 (tickets, more info)

More concerts
Charles Grefer spent eight years in prison for using fake checks to steal $380,000 from a company he worked at.

After that, Grefer needed a job and while on parole applied to be director of community services for Cayuga County. He would have managed a multimillion dollar budget if hired.

The man claimed on his application that he didnt have a criminal record and he was a licensed mental health counselor. Neither was true.

On Wednesday, a Cayuga County jury deliberated for a little more than an hour and convicted Grefer of lying on his application, according to Cayuga County District Attorney Brittany Grome Antonacci. Specifically, he was convicted of first-degree offering a false instrument for filing.

The 53-year-old man, who used to live in Skaneateles and now lives in Rochester, now faces two to four years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 17.

In December 2012, Greffer was charged with stealing $383,000 from Optimization Consulting Inc. (OCI) from December 2010 through May 2012. He was employed by the company to provide mental health services for returning service men and women.

He stole the money by making copies of payroll checks he had received from the company and redepositing the forged copies into his bank account, police said.

In a statement to police at the time, Grefer said he had been hired by the Maryland-based OCI to provide mental health services to members of the 174th Air National Guard unit returning to Syracuse.

Grefer told police he lost his job with OCI in the spring of 2011.

When he couldnt find a new job and started falling behind on his bills, Grefer told police he began duplicating the copies of the OCI payroll checks he had saved on his computer while working for that company.

Grefer admitted in his statement to police to making copies of checks about 20 times, ranging in amounts from $1,000 to $9,000 for a total of about $100,000. He said he was using the money to pay his living expenses and to help support his fiancees heroin habit.

He was convicted of third-degree criminal tax fraud 2nd-degree grand larceny. He was sentenced to three to 10 years in prison. The state revoked his mental health counseling license.
Four men were seen on May 23 near the town of Perrysburg, tossing nets into Cattaraugus Creek, one of the most popular and productive freshwater fishing destinations in New York.

After getting a tip, two New York State Department of Environmental Conservation police officers (ECOs) observed the four men coming out of Cattaraugus gorge, each struggling to carry large, waterproof backpacks.

After searching the backpacks, ECOs found a total of 71 unlawfully taken fish, including 21 trophy-sized smallmouth bass, a brown trout, suckers, and carp.

ECOs issued the netters 13 tickets for charges including taking fish by means other than angling, taking fish out of season, and unlawfully possessing protected fish.

The following reports are excerpted from DEC:

This baby opossum was found in a Nassau County yard and eventually handed over to a licensed wildlife rehabilitator.

On May 21, a Nassau County resident found an abandoned juvenile opossum, or joey, in their backyard and asked for help from a wildlife rehabilitator via social media. A nearby licensed DEC rehabilitator responded to the request but when they went to get the joey, it was gone. Someone else got it first, and that person didnt have a rehab license. An ECO got involved when the unlicensed rehabber ignored multiple requests to return the joey. Using chatlogs the ECO tracked the person to their home and ticketed them for illegal possession of protected wildlife. The joey was given to a licensed wildlife rehabilitator where it is expected to make a full recovery.

On May 12, DEC investigators arrested an Allegany County man for stealing trees in the town of Wirt. The defendant had hired two loggers under false pretenses to cut and remove more than 40 trees on someone elses property. The trees are valued at approximately $17,000. The defendant will answer charges of grand larceny, criminal mischief, unlawful removal of trees, and criminal trespass in the Town of Wirt Court.

An ECO keeps an eye on a runway boat in the Niagara River in Tonawanda. The boat lost power and began drifting downstream, but ECOs helped coordinate a rescue by the Coast Guard.

On May 22, a boater on the Niagara River in Tonawanda lost power and began drifting downstream. Two ECOs patrolling near the river on ATVs drove to a nearby marina to help coordinate the rescue of the runaway boat and its operator. They alerted the Coast Guard station in Buffalo and called the boater, talking him through the process of setting his anchor properly. A Coast Guard vessel arrived and towed the disabled boat safely to shore and the ECOs resumed their patrol.

On May 22, a hen mallard and her seven ducklings got stuck inside a courtyard of a building in Suffolk County. Two ECOs tried to capture the hen, but she flew out of the courtyard leaving the ducklings behind. The ECOs gathered up the baby birds and captured the hen when she returned for them. Mother mallard and her ducklings were released to a nearby lake.

A series of fishing compliance checks in Suffolk County resulted in anglers ticketed for taking too many fish and undersized fish. A Greenport angler fileting what he claimed were porgy was ticketed for possessing over-the-limit and undersized weakfish; a Southampton angler got caught trying to hide an undersized striped bass behind a guardrail; and a boat captain in Southold was ticketed for catching 143 porgy, well over the daily limit of 30 per person.



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DEC police pluck possums holed up in engine compartment, ticket turkey poachers - newyorkupstate.com

DEC police ticket Upstate NY man for illegally killing bear, nab nuisance raccoon, save swan - syracuse.com

DEC police officer uses hoodie to save bear cubs stranded near Upstate NY railroad tracks - syracuse.com

DEC police rescue two deer that broke through ice on Jamesville Reservoir - syracuse.com

DEC police catch Central New York deer poachers, safeguard sunbathing seal - newyorkupstate.com

Steve Featherstone covers the outdoors for The Post-Standard, syracuse.com and NYUP.com. Contact him at sfeatherstone@syracuse.com or on Twitter @featheroutdoors. You can also follow along with all of our outdoors content at newyorkupstate.com/outdoors/ or follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/upstatenyoutdoors.
Sonam Chophel (C) is pictured with his family in Thomai Village of Nyingchi City, southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, April 19, 2023. (Xinhua/Liu Zhoupeng)

LHASA, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Step through the Tibetan-style curtain, and you will find Sonam Chophel's studio, featuring traditional Tibetan saddlebags of different colors, designs and sizes.

The 61-year-old craftsman has been making these fine objects since his youth, continuing a tradition that is deeply embedded in the local culture, and that has just about survived despite the pressures of the modern world.

Saddlemaking of this sort is a form of local intangible cultural heritage in this part of southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region. In recent decades, it reached the brink of extinction, but now the local authorities are working hard to preserve it.

Sonam Chophel's impressive "saddlebag kingdom" is located at his home in Thomai Village, Nang County, in Tibet's city of Nyingchi. The bags vary in size from large ones made of dark-brown leather that require two hands to hold, to the smallest, which are the size of one's palm. These carefully crafted objects are mostly made of cow hide, with antelope fur trim, and are decorated with traditional patterns, such as auspicious clouds.

Dating back more than 300 years, the craft of making the bags by hand was acknowledged in 2018 as a form of regional intangible cultural heritage. In the past, the people of Tibet relied on horses and yaks to travel around, and waterproof and portable saddlebags with a large capacity were a matter of necessity. They allowed a range of objects to be carried on a journey, while spreading the load comfortably on the horses' back and flanks.

"I still remember the awe-inspiring sight I saw in my village when I was a child: adults carrying big, beautiful saddlebags on horses," Sonam Chophel said. "It made me dream about making the bags. At the age of 21, I began to learn the craft from a senior craftsman."

Sonam Chophel was among the first official inheritors of this local intangible cultural heritage, and now practices his craft with pride. However, a decade ago, this traditional craft was on the point of disappearing forever.

At that time, due to the rapid development of road traffic, expressways mushroomed and brought in large numbers of vehicles, with horse riding restricted to areas of pasture land. People seemed to no longer need saddlebags, according to Sonam Chophel.

The complicated production procedures are so time-consuming that a pair of saddlebags takes about a week to finish.

The raw materials, such as cow hide, need to be soaked in water, with the flesh scraped off and the skin fully rubbed. "It takes at least three days to get the perfect hide through rubbing. When it is cold, my hands easily become red and numb due to the hard work," the craftsman said.

With the passage of time, fewer and fewer youngsters in Tibet were willing to learn the dying craft as Sonam Chophel did.

In 2015, Thomai Village established a local project to preserve the craft of making traditional saddlebags. The village received about 450,000 yuan (about 64,000 U.S. dollars) in funding to build and renovate workshops, purchase raw materials and enrich the existing products, thus forming a complete industrial chain, said Tsering Dondrup, director of the federation of trade unions in Nang County.

"Now we have all kinds of saddlebags in our factory," said Sonam Chophel. "Big ones are usually sold to herdsmen living in Tibet's pasture areas, while small ones are preferred by tourists and local residents as decorations or collectables," he said, adding that the biggest saddlebags can fetch up to 2,000 yuan.

Agjam Wangmo, a 40-year-old resident in Lhasa, the regional capital, bought a pair of palm-sized saddlebags, worth 300 yuan in total, during her trip to the county. "I like these delicate handicrafts. Allowing the craftsmen to make some money from their crafts is my way of showing my respect for them," she explained.

For Sonam Chophel, it is also a reward for his perseverance. "I'm glad that I didn't quit during those long years, so the craft can continue to be passed down through the generations," he said. 

Sonam Chophel air-dries peach slices in Thomai Village of Nyingchi City, southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, April 19, 2023. (Xinhua/Nie Yi)

Sonam Chophel makes saddlebag in Thomai Village of Nyingchi City, southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, April 19, 2023. (Xinhua/Nie Yi)

Sonam Chophel demonstrates a saddlebag he made in Thomai Village of Nyingchi City, southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, April 19, 2023. (Xinhua/Liu Zhoupeng)
Albany, N.Y.  New York would create a commission to consider reparations to address the lingering, negative effects of slavery under a bill passed by the state Assembly on Thursday.

We want to make sure we are looking at slavery and its legacies, said state Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages before the floor debate. This is about beginning the process of healing our communities. There still is generational trauma that people are experiencing. This is just one step forward.

The state Assembly passed the bill about three hours after spirited debate on Thursday. The state Senate is expected to vote on the bill before the end of the legislative session on Friday.

New York is following the lead of California, which became the first state to form a reparations task force in 2020. That group recommended a formal apology from the state on its legacy of racism and discriminatory policies and the creation of an agency to provide a wide range of services for Black residents. They did not recommend specific payments amounts for reparations.

The New York legislation would create a commission that would examine the extent to which the federal and state government supported the institution of slavery. It would also address persistent economic, political and educational disparities experienced by Black people in the state today.

According to the New York bill, the first enslaved Africans arrived at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, then a Dutch settlement, around the 1620s and helped build the infrastructure of New York City. While the state Legislature enacted a statute that gave freedom to enslaved Africans in New York in 1817, it wasnt implemented until 10 years later.

Im concerned were opening a door that was closed in New York State almost 200 years ago, said Republican state Assemblymember Andy Gooddell during floor debates on the bill Thursday. Gooddell, who voted no on the bill, said he supports existing efforts to bring equal opportunity to all and would like to continue on that path rather than focus on reparations.

In California, the reparations task force said in their report that the state is estimated to be responsible for more than $500 billion due to decades of over-policing, mass incarceration and redlining that kept Black families from receiving loans and living in certain neighborhoods. Californias state budget last year was $308 billion. Reparations in New York could also come with a hefty price tag.

The commission would be required to deliver a report one year after their first meeting. Their recommendations, which could include monetary compensation for Black people, would be non-binding. The legislature would not be required to take them up for a vote.

New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who is the first Black person to hold the position, called the legislation historic.

If passed, Heastie along with the governor and legislative leader in the state Senate would each appoint three qualified members to the commission.

Other state legislatures that have considered studying reparations include New Jersey and Vermont. A Chicago suburb in Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to make reparations available to Black residents through a $10 million housing project in 2021.

On the federal level, a decades-old proposal to create a commission studying reparations has stalled in Congress.

Some critics of reparations by states say that while the idea is well-intentioned, it can be misguided.

William Darity, a professor of public policy and African and African American Studies at Duke University said even calling them reparations is presumptuous, since its virtually impossible for states to meet the potentially hefty payouts.

He said the federal government has the financial capacity to pay true reparations and that they should be the ones responsible.

My deeper fear with all of these piecemeal projects is that they actually will become a block against federal action because there will be a number of people who will say theres no need for a federal program, Darity said. If you end up settling for state and local initiatives, you settle for much less than what is owed.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  New York legislation that would automatically seal criminal records after a passage of time is expected to pass the Democrat-controlled legislature this week, but Republicans made clear Thursday that they are not on board.

A group of GOP members of the state Assembly, including Assemblyman Michael Tannousis (R-East Shore/Brooklyn), joined law enforcement officials to speak out against the Clean Slate Act.

Tannousis, a former prosecutor on Staten Island and in the Bronx, said their objection to the legislation was not an opposition to second chances, but that a current system already exists in which people convicted of a crime can apply for their cases to be sealed, taking that request to a judge.

The Clean Slate Act would wipe out that system -- a lengthy and difficult process, which relies on a judges discretion  and set a time period for many criminal cases to be automatically sealed.

We want people to become productive members of society and get a piece of that American dream, Tannousis said before going into some of his experience as a prosecutor. Defendants that were charged with all sorts of crimes either plea bargained down to a lower charge or decided to take their case to trial, and every single one of them did it with the understanding that if they were convicted or if they took a plea that it would appear on their permanent record.

Assemblyman Michael Tannousis (at podium) addresses the media in Albany Thursday, June 8, 2023 . (Courtesy: Republican Assembly Conference)

Multiple law enforcement officials who spoke at Thursdays press conference likened the legislation as a gift to criminals comparing it to bail and discovery reforms that have become a conservative punching bag over the past five years.

Richmond County District Attorney Michael McMahon wasnt at the Albany press conference but echoed those sentiments in a statement posted to Twitter.

Albany legislative leaders are once again putting the interests of criminals over law-abiding citizens and the victims of crime, he said. Those who are convicted of breaking the law should get a second chance to resume a law-abiding life after they pay their debt to society But, pretending their crime never happened or victims were not hurt by it, is fundamentally unfair to those who live lives free of crime.

WHAT THE CLEAN SLATE ACT WOULD DO

The Clean Slate Act would automatically seal records three years after a misdemeanor conviction, assuming no other misdemeanor occurred in that time, and eight years after a felony conviction with the same stipulation -- with the exception of sex crimes, murder and the other most serious offenses, which would not be sealed.

Those with cases eligible for sealing also cant have pending cases in or out of New York.

As currently written, the legislation would also keep the sealed record accessible for certain hiring purposes around the state, like positions that work with vulnerable populations such as children or law enforcement jobs.

The legislation gained support from liberal elected officials and business leaders, because of the economic impact it would have in the state.

City Comptroller Brad Lander estimated in a May report that the legislation would impact more than half a million people in the five boroughs who would see an increase of an estimated $2.4 billion in annual wages. Those higher wages would help spur more economic activity in the area.

THE CURRENT SYSTEM FOR SEALING A CASE

According to the state court system, there is no ability, outside a few marijuana crimes, to have a criminal record erased, but people convicted of crimes can apply for a case to be sealed after 10 years.

The state requires applicants to have no more than two misdemeanor convictions or no more than one felony and one misdemeanor conviction while being crime-free for 10 years. The court also makes exceptions for people with more than two convictions if theyre related to the same incident.

If an applicant meets those requirements, they then have to make their way through an application process that starts with a request for a certificate of disposition related to each conviction. Each request form then needs to be brought to the court with a $5 fee for courts located outside of New York City, and a fee of $10 in the five boroughs.

Upon receiving that certificate, the applicant needs to fill out a separate notarized sealing application submitted with evidence of rehabilitation, like proof of employment or community services, education transcripts and letters of recommendation.

Applicants also need to send copies of the materials submitted to the court to the district attorneys where their convictions occurred. The district attorney notifications also require a notarized affidavit of service.

After that, whether a case will be sealed is still left to the discretion of a judge, and finding out if the case was sealed requires the person to fill out another application.

A SECOND CHANCE

Assemblywoman Catalina Cruz (D-Queens), who sponsors the legislation in the Assembly chamber, said earlier this week that she expects the legislation to pass after a three-way deal among the Assembly, Senate, and Gov. Kathy Hochul.

If they committed a crime, paid their dues to society and stayed out of trouble, we should give them a second chance at life, she wrote on Twitter May 31. A chance to work, a chance to feed their family, a chance to end perpetual punishment.
NEW YORK (AP)  New Yorks attorney general filed a federal lawsuit on Thursday against an anti-abortion group whose members have been arrested for blocking access to health care clinics in New York and other states.

The group, Red Rose Rescue, has made it their mission to terrorize reproductive health care providers and the patients they serve, said Attorney General Letitia James said in announcing the lawsuit against the organization and several members who she said have trespassed at suburban New York clinics, occupied waiting rooms and barricaded entrances.

The lawsuit filed in federal court for the Southern District of New York seeks to prevent Red Rose members from coming within 30 feet of any reproductive health care facility in addition to civil penalties and damages.

Red Rose Rescue started in 2017 and has staged actions in states including New Mexico and Michigan, in addition to New York. A message seeking comment on the New York lawsuit was sent to the organization.

Red Rose members have been criminally charged and convicted for actions carried out at three New York clinics  two on Long Island, one in Westchester County  in 2021 and 2022.

James said one member got inside All Womens Health in White Plains on Nov. 27, 2021, by pretending to be a patient, then opened the doors to fellow Red Rose members who occupied the waiting room. Three Red Rose members who took part in that action were sentenced to three months each for criminal trespass.

Another action took place on July 7, 2022, at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Hempstead, where Red Rose activist Christopher Moscinski blocked access by placing six industrial locks and chains on the front gates, James said. Moscinski was convicted of violating the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act and is scheduled to be sentenced on June 27, 2023.

We see on an almost daily basis anti-abortion protesters outside our health centers and throughout our affiliates using harmful tactics, said Dipal Shah, chief external affairs officer for Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, who joined James and other elected officials at the Hempstead clinic. These tactics are not just disruptive, theyre psychologically destabilizing and theyre incredibly harmful.

Red Rose Rescue says on its website that its mission includes entering the actual places where the innocent unborn are about to be dragged to death. It says its activists stay with the abandoned unborn, as the manifestation of our love for them recognizing that unborn children, as members of the human family, have a right to be defended.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Iran is providing Russia with materials to build a drone manufacturing plant east of Moscow as the Kremlin looks to lock in a steady supply of weaponry for its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, according to a U.S. intelligence finding released by the White House on Friday.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that U.S. intelligence officials believe a plant in Russias Alabuga special economic zone could be operational early next year. The White House also released satellite imagery taken in April of the industrial location, several hundred miles east of Moscow, where it believes the plant will probably be built.
BEIJING, June 9 (Xinhua) -- As China promotes its modernization drive, sci-tech self-reliance is playing an important role in the process.

President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, has on various occasions called for efforts to achieve greater self-reliance and strength in science and technology.

During his visit to the Zhonghuan Industrial Park in Hohhot, the capital of north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, on Wednesday afternoon, Xi told workers in the park that it is up to self-reliance and strength in sci-tech and building new development pattern to realize breakthroughs in science and technology.

ROLE OF ENTERPRISES

One crucial way to achieve sci-tech self-reliance is innovation, while the main players of innovation are enterprises.

On April 21, Xi presided over the first meeting of the commission for deepening overall reform of the 20th CPC Central Committee.

The meeting called for strengthening the principal position of enterprises in sci-tech innovation, which it said is a crucial move to deepen structural scientific and technological reform and achieve high-standard self-reliance and strength in science and technology.

Visiting enterprises has become one of Xi's major activities during his inspections across the country over the years. Whenever he visits an enterprise, Xi always learns about the development of the enterprise and the progress of its technological innovation.

On April 12, Xi visited the headquarters of GAC Aion New Energy Automobile Co., Ltd. in the city of Guangzhou in south China's Guangdong Province. During the visit, Xi gained insight into the enterprise's progress in achieving breakthroughs in core technologies in key fields and the company's efforts in developing higher-end, smarter and greener manufacturing.

During this inspection trip to Guangdong Province, Xi emphasized strengthening support for small and medium-sized enterprises in innovation, and cultivating more innovative enterprises with independent intellectual property rights and core competitiveness.

In June 2022, while inspecting HGLaser Engineering Co., Ltd., a laser equipment company based in Wuhan, Hubei Province, Xi noted that optoelectronic information is a high-tech industry in which China has the conditions to take the lead in achieving breakthroughs.

Breaking through bottlenecks in core technologies in key fields has been a pressing task, Xi said, calling for speeding up the realization of the country's scientific and technological self-reliance.

FRONTLINE WORKFORCE

As China speeds up efforts to build the country into a scientific and technological powerhouse, it puts great emphasis on developing a quality workforce and stimulating the vitality of talent for innovation.

When inspecting enterprises, Xi has had many conversations with frontline workers and technicians, encouraging them to devote themselves to innovation.

On May 12, Xi visited a research institute of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation in the city of Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province. He entered a workshop to observe the chip production process, stressing the need for new breakthroughs in core technologies in key fields.

Xi encouraged researchers to achieve consistent progress in grasping cutting-edge technologies and developing more technological and engineering equipment and projects of great significance.

In August 2022, while inspecting Siasun Robot and Automation Co., Ltd. in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, Xi set aside time to talk with technicians who were testing equipment in a factory workshop.

During the conversation, Xi asked about their college majors and professional abilities. Upon learning that the company boasted a workforce comprising over 4,000 such R&D professionals, he was delighted.

INNOVATION-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT

As China firms up its strategy of high-quality development, it has found a path to that end through greater self-reliance and strength in science and technology. To attain this result, the country will accelerate the implementation of its innovation-driven development strategy.

The innovation-driven development strategy put forward at the 18th National Congress of the CPC has led China to join the ranks of the world's innovators, with success on various fronts over the past decade.

"Why does the CPC Central Committee implement the innovation-driven development strategy? It is because it's the only way for our country to improve the industrial level and capacity, and transform our country's economy and manufacturing from being big to being strong," said Xi.

China is dedicated to creating an enabling environment for innovation through advancing the reform of its sci-tech governance system, promoting interaction between enterprises and academia, and enhancing the protection of intellectual property rights.

Over 10 years into the nation's innovation-driven development strategy, China moved up to the 11th place in the Global Innovation Index in 2022, 23 places higher than its 2012 ranking. It also secured the top spot for global patent filings in 2021, way ahead of all other countries, according to the World Intellectual Property Indicators report.

The number of high-tech enterprises in China had grown from 49,000 in 2012 to 330,000 in 2022, representing 5.7-fold growth. The same year also saw the R&D investment of these enterprises account for over three-quarters of the total across society.

China's pursuit of scientific and technological advancement serves both its economy and the growing demand of its people for improved lives and health.

While reinforcing its strength in science and technology, the country has also been committed to sharing its technology with worldwide partners and cooperating to improve global science and technology governance. 
AKSO BHPian

Join Date: Feb 2023 Location: Pune Posts: 43 Thanked: 236 Times

Ride to Thoseghar: A Ninja, A Ducati and a Hundred Windmills



Gurpratap and I had been itching to do this day ride for a while and heard much about this slice of paradise just off our usual Sunday rides. And so, the day arrived last Sunday on 4th June and we began the ride at 05.30H.







After crossing through the straights from Umraj, we suddenly came upon the ghats and these vistas.



































The Windmill View Point was a little ahead and we were mesmerized by the sheer number of windmills that seemed to tower over us in the hundreds.























Breakfast was a little late at around 10.30H which was amidst a rustic roadside eatery. We ate with gusto the delicious omelet pao, chai and also the Tang that Gurpratap toted from his home in Pune.























Urmodi Project. The Koyna River flows besides this water body.







We reached home at 13.00H in time for lunch. It is these kind of rides to places like Thoseghar that make you feel as if you had gone for a long ride to the hills spanning a few days. It is these kind of rides, that you reminisce over in the week ahead and bring a smile to your face. It is these kind of rides, that makes the world a happier place.



https://youtu.be/_pQfq-E6QDM Gurpratap and I had been itching to do this day ride for a while and heard much about this slice of paradise just off our usual Sunday rides. And so, the day arrived last Sunday on 4th June and we began the ride at 05.30H.After crossing through the straights from Umraj, we suddenly came upon the ghats and these vistas.The Windmill View Point was a little ahead and we were mesmerized by the sheer number of windmills that seemed to tower over us in the hundreds.Breakfast was a little late at around 10.30H which was amidst a rustic roadside eatery. We ate with gusto the delicious omelet pao, chai and also the Tang that Gurpratap toted from his home in Pune.Urmodi Project. The Koyna River flows besides this water body.We reached home at 13.00H in time for lunch. It is these kind of rides to places like Thoseghar that make you feel as if you had gone for a long ride to the hills spanning a few days. It is these kind of rides, that you reminisce over in the week ahead and bring a smile to your face. It is these kind of rides, that makes the world a happier place. Last edited by graaja : 8th June 2023 at 21:15 . Reason: Fixing attachment problem
In brief: Google has announced it is killing support for the Google Drive desktop app in three versions of Windows, though not many people still use these old operating systems. If you're one of those running Windows 8, Windows 8.1, or Windows 10 32-bit, this is yet another reason why you should upgrade to a more modern OS.

As spotted by Android Police, the Google Drive page now has a warning that, in August 2023, the company is ending support for Drive for desktop on Windows 8/8.1, Windows Server 2012, and all 32-bit versions of Windows.

Users of a 32-bit version of Windows will still be able to access Drive through a browser, but no support for the desktop app means folders will no longer be synced with the cloud storage service.

This is the latest Google product to end support for older Windows versions. Chrome killed off support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 in February.

According to Statcounter, Windows 8.1 had just an 0.72% share of the global Windows market in May, while Windows 8 was even lower at 0.37%. Both versions of the OS reached their end-of-support date in January. For comparison, Windows 7 had a 3.61% share.

Only Windows 8.1 64-bit appears on the Steam survey, used by 0.29% of participants, which is more than Windows 7's 0.08% share.

While Windows 10 64-bit or newer is now needed for the Google Drive desktop app, Microsoft continues trying to push more people onto Windows 11. The Redmond company will end support for what is currently its most popular version of Windows on October 14, 2025.

Windows 10 still has a nearly 72% global share of the Windows market, but with no more feature updates and enterprise users starting to upgrade to Windows 11, expect that figure to start falling soon. It's already happening in the Steam survey, where Windows 11 has been closing the gap over the last few months, reaching its current 34% user share.
Why it matters: Europe is accelerating the pace at which it puts money in potential technology breakthroughs. The new funding round is no Chips Act, but it will provide fresh investments to a lot of companies interested in doing business (and making advanced technology) in the Old Continent.

The European Commission has approved a new round of technology-related public funding, providing 8.1 billion (roughly $8.7 billion) for microelectronics and communication projects conceived to bring innovation and advanced tech to the European market.

The latest public support coming from Brussels is related to projects designated as "Important Project of Common European Interest" or IPCEI, which include potential innovations in hi-tech and computer technology. For IPCEI eligibility, an EU project must have a significant impact on energy markets and market integration in at least two EU states, must boost competition, and increase renewable energy utilization.

The European Commission states that the 8.1 billion funding initiative will provide aid to 68 projects which are part of the IPCEI program, with highly ambitious ventures which aim at developing technologies that "go beyond what the market currently offers." A total of 56 companies will get Europe's money, including small and medium enterprises (SME), start-ups, technology giants with a global reach, such as GlobalFoundries, Bosch, Renault, STMicroelectronics, and many more.

The aforementioned companies will be involved in projects related to research and development for materials and tools, chip design and manufacturing processes, 5G/6G mobile communication technologies, autonomous driving, and of course the inevitable batch of artificial intelligence and quantum computing ventures.

The 8.1 billion investment will be provided by the following 14 EU countries: Italy, Austria, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Spain. Brussels authorities think that the public funding will attract even more investments from the private sector, with an additional 13.7 billion in aid. The first actual products coming from the 68 innovative IPCEI projects are expected to arrive on the market as early as 2025, while the overall funding initiative should be completed by 2032.

Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President in charge of EU competition policy, said that innovation is essential but it can come with "risks that the market alone is not ready to take." Europe has already shown that it is now seriously considering the matter with the previously approved EU Chips Act, and the new funding round is designed to further invest in Europe's "technological and industrial leadership" in semiconductors and hi-tech.
In a one-of-a-kind partnership announced by General Motors earlier today, it is now confirming that it will use Tesla's NACS charging ports to allow more people to use this standard connector in their cars. The goal is to bring more EV power stations to use, particularly with the many Superchargers available to the public, with GM's EVs eligible to use it.

The latest venture was announced by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and GM CEO Mary Barra in a Twitter Spaces discussion earlier today.

General Motors Adopts Tesla's NACS EV Charger in New Partnership

In the recent online episode of Musk's Spaces podcast, he is joined by GM's Mary Barra to discuss a new partnership that would help all users of electric vehicles. Here, the GM CEO announced that the company had partnered with Tesla and is working together to adopt the North America Charging Standard (NACS) for GM EVs.

The discussion had both executives of the leading EV companies in the country talking about standardizing EV chargers, allowing the public to access them via the NACS port.

GM's adoption of the NACS opens up possibilities for all its EVs to charge anywhere, particularly with the spread out locations of Telsla's charging stations in the country.

Read Also: Tesla Confirms Every New Model 3 Now Qualifies for Full $7,500 EV Tax Credit

GM to Provide NACS to CCS Adapter Soon, NACS Integration Too

GM's latest tweet seals the deal for all its users and confirms its recent discussion with Tesla to bring the NACS charger for all. In this initiative, starting 2024, all CCS-equipped cars from GM would have access to adapters that will help transition the use of all existing General Motor EVs now.

The company also announced that by 2025, the NACS would be available on GM cars without the need for adapters.

Great to work with you! https://t.co/lDQUlSWrRt  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 8, 2023

GM highlighted that this move promotes user convenience and diminishes the competition between the two clean energy car companies.

Tesla's Charging Port is Now Standard for Two Companies

Back in 2022, Tesla announced that it is sharing its EV charger design with more companies so that they may apply it to their clean energy cars and have it standard across North America. This is one of the boldest moves that Tesla made to make their tech available to many, with its ambitious goals to standardize EV charging in the region.

In another partnership with the White House, under the Made-in-America EV initiative, Tesla is also tapped to open 7,500 of its charging stations to all EVs in the country. It further solidifies Tesla's goals of making its EV chargers a standard, allowing different brands to tap into the power from the clean energy company's widely-available stations.

Among those who adopted Tesla's EV charging port is Ford, the first competitor to partner with the company to bring its electric car charging ports to use the NACS.

Now, General Motors is joining the cause, with two car companies looking to share the proprietary tech from Tesla, partnering with the clean energy company and ditching its CCS use. With this initiative, the North American region would not have a problem charging despite having different branded cars, allowing for more access and reducing range anxiety for all.

Related Article: Tesla Magic Dock Supercharger Begins Testing in the US, Allowing Other EVs to Charge

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A group of French scientists developed a new treatment for people with cannabis use disorder. The new drug will act as an inhibitor of the type-1 cannabinoid receptor (CB1) that reduces the side effects of cannabis without triggering withdrawal symptoms.

(Photo : NORBERTO DUARTE/AFP via Getty Images)

A man holds marijuana during the founding of Paraguay's first cannabis club in Asuncion on June 4, 2023. The non-profit civil association seeks to directly link peasant producers with users of all kinds, guaranteeing the safety and quality of products made from organic flowers from cannabis crops.

New Treatment for Cannabis Addiction

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), three out of 10 people who use marijuana have cannabis use disorder (CUD) or simply a cannabis addiction.

Too much usage of cannabis manifests in many ways, including loss of control, compulsive usage, continuity despite having problems, and neglected responsibilities.

As of the moment, there are no clear treatments for this addiction. However, Interested Engineering reported that a group of scientists in France could offer a potential treatment. The researchers from the biotechnology company Aelis Farma reportedly developed a new drug that could potentially address cannabis addiction.

The team led by Aelis Farma CEO Pier Vincenzo Piazza discovered the drug that acts as an inhibitor of CB1, helping to reduce the effects of cannabis without triggering withdrawal symptoms.

The new drug called AEF0117 targets a mechanism that inhibits some of the biochemical pathways activated by the CB1 receptor. It becomes the first compound of a new pharmacological class called CB1-SSI, and its compounds work by inhibiting specified intracellular effects without modifying behavior due to the combination of THC and CB1.

THC, or the 9-tetrahydrocannabinol, is the main psychoactive compound in cannabis. Aelis Farma raised $1.2 billion in funding to develop this drug.

LabioTech reported that the $664 million fund mostly came from regional investors, while $543 million was from research giants. This effort comes as cannabis, or marijuana, has become one of the most used drugs, with no treatments available for people addicted to it.

Read Also: Coronavirus Risk May Increase When You Smoke Illegal Substances, Experts Say

Testing the New Drug

Piazza told LabioTech that they have developed a "new generation of inhibitors" proven "very efficacious in animal models with no side effect whatsoever."

"It specifically targets the hyperactivity of the CB1 receptor involved in disease but preserving normal physiological behavior," Piazza added.

To determine its effectiveness, researchers also tested the drugs on volunteers in two company-run human trials. They assessed the drug's dosage and safety in a small group of healthy volunteers during Phase 1, while the drug was tested in individuals with targeted conditions and diseases during Phase 2a.

While more research is needed to solidify its safety and efficacy, Health News reported that the drug has the potential to become a CUD treatment option.

The drug appeared safe and well-tolerated as researchers found that AEF0117 decreased positive ratings of cannabis and lowered the number of times participants self-administered the drug without triggering disrupting functions like mood, sleep, and food intake.

Related Article: More US Women Use Marijuana During Pregnancy, Says Study

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The US Navy has finally received the first upgraded and modernized E-6B Mercury aircraft from Northrop Grumman Corporation.

Also known as the Navy's "Doomsday" plane, the delivered E-6B Mercury was the first of twelve E-6B aircraft that Northrop Grumman must upgrade by 2027 based on its existing contract with the Navy.

(Photo : FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT - The US flag flutters in the wind beside a B-2 Stealth Bomber at the Palmdale Aircraft Integration Center of Excellence in Palmdale, California on July 17, 2014, as the US Air Force and manufacturer Northrop Grumman celebrated the 25th anniversary of the B-2 Stealth Bomber's first flight. Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor for the US Air Force's B-2 stealth bomber, a key component in the nation's long range strike arsenal and one of the most survivable aircraft in the world.

US Navy Receives First Upgraded E-6B Mercury Aircraft

In a press release, Northrop Grumman said it had successfully delivered the first E-6B Mercury aircraft back to the Navy in record time under the integrated modification and maintenance contract (IMMC) awarded to the company in February 2022.

"Five kits were successfully integrated onto the E-6B platform, implementing efficiencies and improving aircraft command, control and communications functions," the company noted.

According to Interesting Engineering, the "Doomsday" plane forms the backbone of the Navy's communication network between the US nuclear submarine fleet and the Whitehouse.

The Naval Air Systems Command announced earlier this week that the project was completed over the past year, and the aircraft was officially received this month. The Naval Air Systems Command was responsible for acquiring aircraft for the service.

In a statement released by the US Navy, it said that "the $111 million contract provides six major modifications - called Block II - to improve the aircraft's command, control, and communications functions connecting the National Command Authority with US strategic and non-strategic forces."

As part of the critical Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO) strategic communications mission, the Navy said the E-6B operates across a broad frequency spectrum to deliver and receive secure and non-secure voice and data information.

The aircraft has equipment designed to enable its operators to communicate with the US Navy's submarine fleet, even underwater. In case the submarines are required to launch nuclear weapons, this equipment can also be used to receive directives from the president. Most of the E-6B fleet is stationed at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma.

Defence Blog reported that the upgrades made on the first "Mercury" aircraft were done at Northrop Grumman's Aircraft Maintenance and Fabrication Center in Lake Charles, and the second aircraft has already arrived at the said facility.

Read Also: Northrop Grumman's Anti-radiation Missile Achieves 5th Consecutive Successful Test

Northrop Grumman to Continue Performing Modifications to Navy's E-6B Aircraft

Under the IMMC, Northrop Grumman will continue to modify and implement improvements on the Navy's E-6B aircraft, a variant of the commercial Boeing 707, over the next several years.

E-6B Mercury aircraft is equipped with an airborne launch control system (ALCS), capable of launching US land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. The first E-6B aircraft was received in December 1997. Aerotime reported that the US Navy operates a fleet of 16 E-6B aircraft.

Related Article: Northrop Grumman's Anti-radiation Missile Achieves 5th Consecutive Successful Test

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As the East Coast battles the pervasive smoke from wildfires, a do-it-yourself (DIY) air purifier hack has gone viral, capturing the attention of social media users seeking ways to protect themselves indoors, according to a report by AP.

With a box fan, four air filters, and a generous amount of duct tape, individuals are sharing their creations on platforms like TikTok and Facebook, demonstrating how to construct the Corsi-Rosenthal method, a technique that has gained popularity in recent years amid the pandemic and widespread wildfires in the western United States.

Discovering the Box Fan Method for the First Time

Unlike their West Coast counterparts, who have become accustomed to dealing with wildfire smoke, some East Coast residents are discovering the box fan method for the first time.

Seattle resident Angel Robertson took to TikTok to showcase her DIY air purifier, which garnered over 600,000 views. In her video, Robertson ingeniously assembles four 20-by-20 air filters into a box shape, securing them with duct tape and placing the fan on top.

The cost of the entire setup is under $100, making it an affordable option for many.



Experts in public health attest to the effectiveness of Corsi-Rosenthal purifiers in removing airborne particles. Petri Kalliomaki, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland's School of Public Health, highlights their high clean air delivery rate, which aids in purifying not only smoke but also pollen and viruses.



Social media proved instrumental in the development of this DIY hack, with Richard Corsi, the dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Davis, and co-creator of the box, revealing that he shared the design on Twitter in 2020 after sketching it one evening.

Read Also: Ex-ByteDance Executive Claims Chinese Communist Party Accessed Tiktok's Data to Spy on Hong Kong's Civil Rights Activists

Affordable Air Purifier

Jim Rosenthal, the CEO of Tex-Air Filters, stumbled upon the design and transformed it into a reality. Corsi's objective was to design an affordable air purifier that would be accessible to the average American. Presently, he receives messages from friends in the Northeast who have embraced his concept.



"When you have to seal up a building and reduce the amount of airflow coming in and when you have to spend a lot of time indoors, this is where portable air cleaners can really make a difference in your life," Corsi said in a statement.

Individuals like Grace Turner, who resides in Rochester, New York, learned about the box fan purifier while living in Salt Lake City. She built her own version and shared it on TikTok, explaining how it has improved the air quality in her home.

DIY instructions for various designs are readily available online, making it accessible for anyone interested in constructing their own air purifier.

Related Article: Crochet Creators Request Patterns From ChatGPT: Can AI Take Over Fiber Arts or Are the Designs Too Weird?

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Google Maps Street View feature is returning to Germany after a hiatus of over a decade. Initially met with skepticism and legal challenges surrounding privacy concerns, Google halted the rollout of Street View in Germany back in 2011, leaving only a fraction of the country's major cities covered.

However, on June 22, Google will resume its efforts to capture updated imagery of the German landscape and urban centers while adhering to stringent data privacy regulations, AndroidPolice tells us in a report.

Street View Cars Traversing Germany Soon

In an official announcement on the German Keyword blog, Google revealed its plans to dispatch Street View cars throughout the country, systematically recording and capturing images that will be published in batches over the following months.

Learning from past experiences, Google has collaborated with a German government privacy agency to ensure the new Street View imagery complies with the country's data privacy standards.

One key requirement is the deletion of older images, limiting the ability to explore historical views of Germany compared to other countries where extensive archival imagery is available.

To address privacy concerns, Google is allowing individuals to opt out of Street View coverage. Users can pixelate their homes or businesses by selecting this preference, effectively obscuring them from the Street View database.

As Google starts afresh with its data collection, those who had previously obscured their properties must submit a fresh request to ensure continued privacy.

Google says more updates about the planned recording are available here.

Read Also: Google Unveils Plan to Stay Secured With AI in Latest Security Framework

Updating Old Street View Germany Data

The existing Street View imagery in Germany has become increasingly outdated, making it difficult to accurately recognize many streets and buildings.

Even Google Germany acknowledges this issue in the blog post above, showcasing how its Munich offices, for instance, are conspicuously absent from the 2008 Street View images that are still accessible today.

Throughout the years, however, Street View cars have continued to roam German roads, utilizing the captured data to enhance Google Maps with more precise information such as house numbers, intersections, traffic lights, and lanes.

Recent Updates

Since Google paused its Street View efforts, significant developments have taken place. Apple quietly introduced its version of Street View, Look Around, into the German market, presenting users with an alternative option for exploring locations.

Moreover, a recent study cited by Google in May 2023 indicates that over 90% of Germans hold a positive view of Street View. With such promising statistics and evolving attitudes toward the service, Google's return to Germany may prove more successful this time around.

While Google remains committed to privacy compliance, it seeks to strike a delicate balance between capturing valuable visual data and addressing the concerns of privacy advocates.

As Street View becomes an integral part of Germany's digital mapping ecosystem again, residents and tourists can anticipate a more immersive and up-to-date exploration experience, bringing the world to their screens with greater accuracy and detail.

Stay posted here at Tech Times.

Related Article: Google Drive Ends Support for Windows 8 & 8.1 Desktop App: Time to Upgrade

 2023 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
HOUSTON, June 8 (Xinhua) -- More than 20 teenagers were injured after a ramp collapsed on Thursday at a beachside city in south central U.S. state Texas, authorities said.

All of the victims were aged from 14 to 18 years old, and they were from a summer camp at Stahlman Park in Surfside Beach, a small city about 60 miles (about 96 km) away from downtown Houston, said Sharon Trower, public information officer for Brazoria County.

Five of them were flown to hospitals in Houston by helicopter after the incident, said Trower, adding that other teens were taken to hospitals by ambulance and private vehicles.

None of the injuries were expected to be life-threatening, according to local media reports. The cause of the ramp collapse is under investigation. 
Iran showed off its brand-new hypersonic missile, demonstrating how far along it is in developing its arsenal.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Commander, Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh and Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei participated in a ceremony on June 6 to officially display Iran's newest weapon, the "Fattah" medium-range ballistic missile. This missile, Iran's first hypersonic weapon, can go up to 870 miles at 13-15 times faster than sound.

According to Iranian officials, the Fattah missile has been widely placed on a billboard in central Tehran, boasting that it can attack Israel in as quick as "400 seconds" (about 6-7 minutes after launch), according to Popular Mechanics.

Hypersonic missiles, known for their velocities above Mach 5, move unexpectedly upon re-entry into the atmosphere, making them difficult to identify and intercept. While several nations are actively working to create hypersonic weapons to gain a military advantage, the creation and use of such military technologies face significant challenges.

As these sophisticated missiles travel at high speeds, it produces superheated particles that interfere with radio transmissions. However, these weapons' actual value lies in their sustained velocity, the low trajectory for stealth, and exceptional maneuverability, allowing them to outmaneuver interception attempts within air defense systems' optimal engagement range.

Iran claims that the Fattah missile, which uses solid fuels and has an adjustable secondary nozzle, is remarkably maneuverable both within and outside the Earth's atmosphere. This missile technological improvement, which Iranian officials call a "generational leap," boosts Iran's deterrent and claims that no missile defense system can stop it.

Read Also: Father's Day Gift Ideas: Best Deals, Presents to Celebrate Dad

More Iranian Hypersonic Missiles Soon

While Iran did not outright threaten Israel at the Fattah missile unveiling, the possibility of hitting Israeli areas remains. Although the Fattah missile's present range prevents it from hitting Tel Aviv entirely, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps aerospace chief commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh said that 2,000 km (1,242 miles)-range hypersonic missiles might be developed in the near future, according to an Al Jazeera report.

This should focus the minds on the upcoming expiration of UNSCR 2231's restrictions on Iran's missile program in October--under five months from now. What's the U.S. and E3's strategy?https://t.co/daOYEAzYng  Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) June 6, 2023

Hajizadeh said during his address that the newly unveiled weapon's distinctive multi-directional and multi-altitude mobility makes it immune to destruction by any other missile.

Given previous occasions when the nation presented prototypes of stealth fighters as operational aircraft, replete with doctored photographs showing the "fighters" in flight, taking Iran's technical claims with care is imperative.

Exaggerated Claims

Iran's ballistic missiles have increased speed, range, and accuracy compared to their predecessors. These sophisticated weapons have already proven successful in operations against ISIS, Israeli, Kurdish, and American troops. Older missile designs like the Emad, Ghadr-110, Khorammshar, and Qasem Soleimani MRBMs already compete with or outperform Fattah in range, despite certain inherent drawbacks.

Although there is no outside verification of Iran's claims on the capabilities of its Fattah missile, analysts recognize Iran's real advancements in missile development. Although some analysts think Iran's claims are overblown, they acknowledge the nation's significant achievements in this field of weapons development, according to CNN.

United States officials see Iran's ballistic missile arsenal, which includes hypersonic capabilities, as a critical instrument of Iranian coercion and power projection in the Middle East region.

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The ceasefire will last 180 days and will come into effect on August 3. It will be extendable, if necessary.

The Colombian government and the National Liberation Army (ELN) signed a bilateral ceasefire agreement at the end of the third cycle of their peace talks in Havana, Cuba.

The closing of the third cycle of negotiations took place in the presence of the presidents of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel, the delegations of the Colombian government and the National Liberation Army (ELN).

Colombian Foreign Minister Alvaro Leyva and chief negotiator Otty Patino also led the signing of the agreements by the government delegation, while the ELN was led by its first and second commanders, Antonio Garcia and Pablo Beltran, respectively.

On the occasion, the parties announced the Cuba Accords which contemplate the process for the participation of society in the construction of peace and the bilateral, national and temporary ceasefire agreement.

Durante la clausura del Tercer Ciclo en la Mesa de Dialogos de Paz entre el Gobierno Nacional y el ELN, el Presidente @petrogustavo hablo sobre la importancia del dialogo para acabar con la guerra que ha afectado durante decadas a nuestro pais.#CeseElFuegoEs Vida y Paz. pic.twitter.com/PXXwiZjmzx  Presidencia Colombia  (@infopresidencia) June 9, 2023

During the closing of the Third Cycle at the Peace Dialogue Table between the National Government and the ELN, President Gustavo Petro spoke about the importance of dialogue to end the war that has affected our country for decades.

The ceasefire will last 180 days and will be extendable, if necessary. In a first phase of readiness, until July 6, the order will be given to stop the offensives and on August 3 the full implementation of the truce will begin.

The Dialogue Table adopted the declaration "Readiness for the process of participation of society and the bilateral cease-fire." It was agreed that the peace talks table will enter into "a permanent activity that combines different modalities of work in different scenarios and times, maintaining the cycles of talks."

The parties agreed that the UN and the Catholic Church will monitor compliance with the ceasefire agreed this Friday. Every two months, there will be a follow-up meeting.

The parties thanked Cuba for hosting this cycle and as guarantor in the ceasefire agreement. The next cycle of negotiations between the ELN and the Colombian government will take place in Caracas, Venezuela, from August 14 to September 4.
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Against the background of the investigation into the parties scandal. Johnson resigns from British parliament and puts new pressure on Sunak

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Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema speaks during the 22nd Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Heads of State and Government Summit in Lusaka, Zambia, June 8, 2023. The 22nd Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Heads of State and Government Summit opened here Thursday, with leaders calling for accelerated efforts to achieve economic integration. (Xinhua/Peng Lijun)

LUSAKA, June 8 (Xinhua) -- The 22nd Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Heads of State and Government Summit opened here Thursday, with leaders calling for accelerated efforts to achieve economic integration.

The summit, held at the China-built ultra-modern Kenneth Kaunda International Conference Center, also saw Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema taking over the chairmanship of Africa's largest bloc from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. The summit was held under the theme, "Economic Integration for a Thriving COMESA Anchored on Green Investment, Value Addition and Tourism."

In his remarks, the Zambian president said Africa need to accelerate efforts for its integration agenda by removing bottlenecks that were hindering connectivity and business.

According to him, there was a need to remove non-stop-border posts in order to reduce the cost of business as well as to harmonize borders to make the continent stronger and enhance intra-trade. Regional integration will only become a reality if African countries start making bold decisions instead of waiting for outsiders.

"Let us think inside before we look outside. As we endeavor to look outside for investment, we should look inside ourselves as a continent," he said.

He suggested COMESA should leverage its potential and fully participate on the economic global stage, stressing that the ambitions of achieving green investment, value addition and tourism growth will only become a reality when member states realize their potential.

The Zambian president, however, said there was a need for Africa to address instability in some parts of the continent because peace was important to sustainable economic development.

The Egyptian president emphasized the importance of peace to ensure sustainable economic development. He outlined the achievements made by COMESA despite numerous challenges such as COVID-19 and climate change. He also called for the deepening of relations among COMESA member states in order to promote sustainable economic growth.

Kenyan President William Ruto said the lack of a simple payment system from one country to another passes through various intermediaries resulting in increased costs. He further said Kenya has had challenges to export and import products in some countries due to challenges of the U.S. dollar.

Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera urged regional countries to promote economic integration.

"We need to integrate our economies urgently so that we have collective resilience against unpredictable external forces that are coming against us with greater and greater frequency over time," he said. 

Kenyan President William Ruto speaks during the 22nd Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Heads of State and Government Summit in Lusaka, Zambia, June 8, 2023. The 22nd Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Heads of State and Government Summit opened here Thursday, with leaders calling for accelerated efforts to achieve economic integration. (Xinhua/Peng Lijun)

Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera speaks during the 22nd Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Heads of State and Government Summit in Lusaka, Zambia, June 8, 2023. The 22nd Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Heads of State and Government Summit opened here Thursday, with leaders calling for accelerated efforts to achieve economic integration. (Xinhua/Peng Lijun)

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi attends the 22nd Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Heads of State and Government Summit in Lusaka, Zambia, June 8, 2023. The 22nd Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Heads of State and Government Summit opened here Thursday, with leaders calling for accelerated efforts to achieve economic integration. (Xinhua/Peng Lijun)
BEIJING, June 9 (Xinhua) -- China's status as the world's largest developing country is rooted in facts and international law, and it is not something that can easily be wiped away by a U.S. congressional bill, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Friday.

According to reports, on June 8, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations approved the Ending China's Developing Nation Status Act, asking to end the treatment of China as a developing nation.

"The United States is not labeling China a 'developed country' out of appreciation or recognition for China's development success. The real motive behind ending China's developing country status is to hold back China's development," Wang told a regular news briefing when asked to comment on the act.

Wang said some U.S. lawmakers' concern that China would use its developing country status to evade international responsibilities is "completely unnecessary."

He added that China's contribution to global economic growth, and UN regular budget and peacekeeping assessments far outweighs that of most developed countries.

"It's not up to the United States to decide whether China is a developing country. The United States can neither deny the fact that China is still a developing country, nor stop China from moving towards national rejuvenation," said Wang.

"The rights that China is lawfully entitled to as a developing country will not be deprived just because a few politicians on the Hill say so," he said.

He added that rather than trying to figure out how to pin the label of "developed country" on China, the United States might want to think about how to remove its own label of a bully and hegemon. 
Donald Trumps indictment on 37 counts of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate represents the most serious legal jeopardy so far for Trump, coming less than three months after he was charged in New York with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
After 21 years at the helm of Australias most-watched breakfast television show, David Koch has farewelled Sunrise in an emotional and star-studded three-hour special.

Koch, who is the longest-serving breakfast television show host in Australian history, announced his departure from the show in late May. Former Olympian Matt Shirvington will replace him in the hosts seat.

Natalie Barr with her Sunrise co-host David Koch on his final day with the long-running breakfast TV show. Credit: Channel Seven

A long line of Seven Network staff filled the studio halls, waiting to greet Koch as he walked to the studio for the final time  which he did, like royalty, hugging colleagues, shaking hands and even kissing the head of a child. Fittingly, one of the last people to embrace him was Shirvington, in a metaphorical passing of the baton.

This has been my life, its not just a job, Koch said to his co-host, Natalie Barr, in a teary one-on-one interview. Its a life that I have loved and I am incredibly proud of. I love working with the people that I work with, and not sitting next to you every day is going to be a massive adjustment.
Two Queensland police officers involved in the shooting of 24-year-old West Australian man Luke Gilbert have threatened to sue his family for half a million dollars over what they allege are false and defamatory online posts.

Gilbert was shot by Senior Constable David Murray and Constable Liam Forster after they stopped him while he was carrying a knife in Airlie Beachs party precinct in October last year.

Luke Gilbert and mother Nicola. Credit: Facebook

In draft pleadings distributed in recent days, the officers, supported by the Queensland Police Union, have threatened to sue Darren and Nicola Gilbert over what they allege are false and defamatory posts and an online petition they created.

The draft document asserts the online posts attribute blame for Gilberts death on the officers.
BEIJING, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Eighty-one cities and districts have been announced as pilot regions for providing integrated and continuous medical and health services for their residents, according to China's National Health Commission (NHC) on Friday.

The pilot regions, including Beijing's Chaoyang District and the city of Datong in north China's Shanxi Province, will be built into integrated urban medical groups that can provide services such as disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment, nutrition, rehabilitation, nursing and health management for residents within the region.

According to a circular jointly issued by the NHC and other government departments, the integrated urban medical groups will build resources-sharing centers for functions such as medical examination and medical imaging, realize the mutual recognition of medical results within the region, establish a telemedicine collaboration network, and improve the allocation and efficiency of the use of medical resources.

The leading hospitals in each group are required to reserve at least one third of their outpatient visits and 25 percent of their inpatient beds for contracted family doctors or medical and health institutions at the primary level, according to NHC.

Contracted residents referred by medical institutions at the primary level can be given priority for medical treatment, examination and hospitalization in the leading hospitals, which focus on providing diagnosis and treatment for those with critical and complex diseases.

The government expects that the pilot programs will offer useful experiences for the operation of such medical groups that can be replicated and promoted across the country by 2025. 
Repeated polls this year have indicated a clear decline in support for the proposed constitutional change to enshrine a Voice to parliament. That should be deeply concerning for the many groups and individuals behind the Yes campaign.

It will be more worrying for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have fought so hard for a body that might carry their views to the highest levels of this nation.

The Yes campaign has not sustained momentum. Credit: Lisa Visentin

Since the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, there have been countless high-level and grass-roots discussions, official reports and legal opinions, parliamentary inquiries and more about what form the Voice should take.

Yet too many Australians say they still do not understand it. Regaining widespread support is vital if Australia is to push ahead with its long and often difficult journey to achieve the goals demanded by our nations history.
Gina Rinehart is the Western Australian of the Year for 2023, according to a small group of people accountable to no one that seem to specialise in awarding the top end of town.

She got her gong from Mark McGowan in his last act as premier at a $300-a-head black-tie gala dinner at Crown last Friday.

Five of the past eight Western Australians of the year have been chief executives.

Australias richest person  $37 billion at last count  is not the first business titan to be selected as the most worthy of their fellow 2.7 million West Australians. It is almost the standard practice of Celebrate WA, the small non-profit that runs the awards backed by cash from the taxpayer and corporate sponsors.

Five of the past eight top awards have gone to chief executives, three of them iron ore miners: David Flanagan of Atlas Iron, Fortescues Andrew Forrest and now Rinehart. The others were property developer Adrian Fini, and the chair of Qantas, Woodside and the AFL, Richard Goyder.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is standing by one of his closest political allies, declaring his absolute confidence Finance Minister Katy Gallagher did not mislead parliament over her knowledge of Brittany Higgins alleged rape.

In a June 4, 2021 Senate hearing, former defence minister Linda Reynolds suggested that senior Labor MPs including Gallagher and the now Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, had been tipped off ahead of time that Higgins would allege she had been raped by a fellow former staffer to the minister, Bruce Lehrmann.

Prime MinisterAnthony Albanese says Finance Minister Katy Gallagher did not mislead parliament over her knowledge of Brittany Higgins alleged rape. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Lehrmann has always denied the allegations and his trial was aborted because of juror misconduct.

Wong and Gallagher both denied that claim by Reynolds, with Gallagher firing back at Reynolds: No one had any knowledge. How dare you? Its all about protecting yourself.
Warning: this article contains graphic content

Annecy, France: Two toddlers seriously wounded by a knifeman in the French mountain town of Annecy were in a stable condition on Friday and doctors are optimistic for their recovery, President Emmanuel Macron said.

Well-wishers laid flowers on Friday at the playground where the suspect, said by the government to be a 31-year-old Syrian refugee, struck on Thursday morning, apparently targetting young children.

French President Emmanuel Macron meets Henri, second right, the 24-year-old backpack hero, who suffered minor stab wounds as he tried to intercept the suspect. Credit:

A shocked nation paid tribute to a modern-day pilgrim on a walking tour of Frances cathedrals who tried to block the assailant during his attack and then gave chase.
A roundup of the week's most newsworthy environment industry press releases from PR Newswire, including conservation efforts in recognition of World Oceans Day.

NEW YORK

June 9, 2023

/PRNewswire/ -- With thousands of press releases published each week, it can be difficult to keep up with everything on PR Newswire. To help journalists covering the environment industry stay on top of the week's most newsworthy and popular releases, here's a roundup of stories from the week that shouldn't be missed.

The list below includes the headline (with a link to the full text) and an excerpt from each story. Click on the press release headlines to access accompanying multimedia assets that are available for download.

Read more of the latest environment-related releases from PR Newswire and stay caught up on the top press releases by following @PRNenv on Twitter.
COLOMBO, June 9 (Xinhua) -- At least 20 passengers were injured when a passenger bus collided with a lorry in the southern suburb of Colombo on Friday, the police said.

The police said the bus was bound from Colombo to the eastern town of Akkaraipattu.

The police said the injured were rushed to the local hospitals.

Some 19,740 road accidents were reported in Sri Lanka in 2022, killing 2,485 people, according to the police. 
Australia's Northern Territory (NT) government has expressed willingness to strengthen exchanges and cooperation with China in various fields.

Chinese Ambassador to Australia Xiao Qian recently visited Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory.

During his visit, he met with NT officials including Chief Minister Natasha Fyles, Deputy Chief Minister Nicole Manison and Mark Monaghan, speaker of the Legislative Assembly.



The Australian officials welcomed Xiao's visit and said that NT looks forward to strengthening cooperation with China in tourism, renewable energy, education and other fields.

Xiao said China is willing to explore more areas of cooperation in addressing climate change, green infrastructure and new energy.

Scott Bowman, vice-chancellor and president of Charles Darwin University (CDU), welcomed Xiao's visit to the campus and expressed his hope to strengthen cooperation with Chinese universities and research institutions in the fields of medicine, environment, agriculture, education and other disciplines.

Bowman mentioned that the Confucius Institute at CDU is not only an important platform for cultural exchanges, but makes important contributions to local communities.

"The Confucius Institute is a really important part of the university. And it's a wonderful way that we can show Darwin and the Northern Territory the fantastic culture of China and teach the Chinese language," he told Xinhua in an interview.

"It is a really great opportunity to build relationships and connections between Australia and China."

Bowman spoke highly of Chinese culture in its role in promoting exchanges. "I love Chinese culture. I visited China many many times. I have friends in China," he said.

"I think it's just a fantastic, friendly culture. It's so different and so intricate, but people are very friendly and welcoming, and they introduce you to the culture," he added.





Produced by Xinhua Global Service
TEHRAN, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Iran has denied a media claim of it "nearing an interim nuclear deal" with the United States, saying such a deal neither exists nor is on the agenda, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Friday.

According to Tasnim, Iran's permanent mission to the United Nations on Thursday responded in a statement to a report by the London-based online news outlet Middle East Eye that claimed Tehran and Washington were close to achieving an interim deal, under which Tehran would curb its nuclear program in return for sanctions relief.

"An interim deal for replacing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) neither exists nor is on the agenda," said the Iranian mission.

A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council also denied the report, saying it is "false and misleading."

Iran signed the JCPOA with world powers in July 2015, agreeing to put some curbs on its nuclear program in return for the removal of the sanctions on the country. The United States, however, pulled out of the deal in May 2018 and reimposed its unilateral sanctions on Tehran, prompting the latter to reduce some of its nuclear commitments under the deal.

The talks on the JCPOA's revival began in April 2021 in Vienna, Austria. No breakthrough has been achieved after the latest round of talks in August 2022. 
This summer marks the 12th year of the International Keyboard Odyssiad & Festival, U.S.A. (IKOF) with 8 days and nights of riveting piano competition and outstanding Guest Artist performances.

Based in Fort Collins, CO, IKOF will take place July 29-August 5, 2023 at the University Center for the Arts, Colorado State University.

Each year the IKOF brings together global competitors.

Finalists compete in the solo and/or concerto divisions for cash prizes and the opportunity to perform with the Boulder Symphony, Devin Patrick Hughes conducting and the Fort Collins Health & Wellness Orchestra, Leslie Stewart conducting.

The Semifinal and Final Rounds of the Odyssiad Competition take place LIVE July 29  31.

Audience members will hear some of the greatest talents of this generation compete against each other in the LIVE Semifinal and Final Rounds of the Odyssiad Competition - FREE & OPEN to the public (see Complete Schedule of events on Odyssiad.com).

IKOF is the largest and most important international competition and festival for pianists in the state of Colorado and recognized around the U.S. and abroad.

IKOF brings people together from all parts of the world, bridging cultural differences through the universal language of music.

It is a multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-national piano performance event where competitors, performers, judges and audience members gather to celebrate their mutual love for classical piano, regardless of their country of origin, nationality, religion, gender or political perspective.

IKOFs 2023 list of world-renowned guest artists, judges, and guest presenters include Antonio Pompa-Baldi (Van Cliburn Silver Medalist and Distinguished Professor of Piano, Cleveland Institute of Music), Tetiana Shafran (Gold Medalist of the 2019 Olga Kern International Piano Competition), Natalia Trull (Professor of Piano, Moscow Special School, Moscow State Conservatory), Elisey Mysin (12-year-old Russian piano prodigy), Aleksandra "Sasha" Kasman Laude (Raeburn Finalist 2022 Honens International Piano Competition), Mikhail "Misha" Berestnev (Russia/U.S.A.), Yakov Kasman (Van Cliburn Silver Medalist), Roberto Plano (First Prize in the Cleveland International Piano Competition), Konstantin Soukhovetski (Juilliard), and Natasha Paremski (Russia/U.SA.). Additional guest artists, presenters, and judges during the daily festival events include Tatiana Kasman (Steinway Hall of Fame Teacher), Ben Laude (tonebase), Corrie Donovan (IKOF MC), Paola del Negro Plano (Rivers Conservatory, Boston), Timothy Burns (IKOF Official Staff Accompanist), Bryan Wallick (Colorado State University, Winner of the Vladimir Horowitz Competition), Devin Patrick Hughes (Conductor, Boulder Symphony and Arapahoe Philharmonic), Michael Repper (Music Director, Mid-Atlantic Symphony, Ashland Symphony, Northern Neck Orchestra of Virginia, and 2023 Grammy-winner New York Youth Symphony), and Vyacheslav Gryaznov (Concert pianist, arranger, composer, and inventor of a new trailblazing philharmonic orchestra APP).
The Wyoming State Archives speaker series is hosting a special event on Thursday, June 29, at 7 p.m. with author and professor Michael Amundson in Cheyenne.

Amundson will talk about his recently published book, The Art and Life of Merritt Dana Houghton in the Northern Rockies, 1878-1919, with an opportunity for attendees to engage in a Q&A session. This event will be held in-person at the Wyoming State Museum classroom, located at 2301 Central Avenue in Cheyenne. For those not able to attend in-person, registration to attend the event online is through Eventbrite at https://www.eventbrite.com/o/wyoming-state-archives-49902991693.

This free public event is part of the Archives monthly evening speaker series. Copies of his book will be available at the Wyoming State Museum Store or online at https://upcolorado.com/university-of-wyoming-press.

Amundsons talk will explore Merritt Dana Houghtons life from his beginnings as a school teacher and photographer into eventually dabbling into sketching scenery and local life. Although he was well-regarded as an educator, Houghtons artistic skill gained him professional success. Today, he is well-known for birds eye sketches and drawings of areas he was living and traveling including Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Washington. Most of his subjects included fort and historic sites, ranches, mines, businesses and animals found in the landscapes he experienced. Some of Houghtons original artwork can be found at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, Washington, where Houghton lived the last years of his life.

Amundson is a professor of History at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff where he teaches courses on the American West and Public History. He first became interested in Merritt Dana Houghtons work in 1988 while rephotographing JE Stimsons work across Wyoming. As a two-time alumni of the University of Wyoming, he is proud that his work was the first published book by the new University of Wyoming Press.

The WSA Speaker Series hosts talks at 7 p.m. on the second Thursday of each month. The Wyoming State Parks Presents series will occur every other month and feature speakers from a different historic site. The alternating months will be our traditional historical topics. Upcoming topics include Misty Moore sharing stories from Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site on July 13th and Evan Green discussing the legacy of Charles Allen Bristol on July 20th. To view upcoming events, check out the Wyoming State Archives events calendar at https://wyoarchives.wyo.gov/index.php/about-archives/events. A recording of this talk will be available on the WSA YouTube channel the week following the talk.

The Wyoming State Archives collects, manages, and preserves Wyoming state public records that have long-term administrative, legal, and historical value. These records document the history of our state and the activities of Wyoming Government offices. The Archives also collects non-government records that contribute to the understanding of the states history.
Cheyenne, WY (82001)

Today

Variable clouds with scattered thunderstorms. Low near 50F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Variable clouds with scattered thunderstorms. Low near 50F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
Saudi Arabia will continue to work to prevent the resurgence of ISIS again, the Kingdoms Minister of Foreign Affairs Prince Faisal bin Farhan says in a speech at the ministerial meeting of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS on Thursday, Azernews reports, citing Al Arabiya.

The Kingdom believes in the need to confront terrorism and extremist ideology, he said, adding that it is necessary to dry up the sources of financing for ISIS.

Saudi Arabia will make every effort to pursue ISIS wherever it is, the minister said. Coordinated efforts to root out terrorism will continue, he added in his speech.

He also urged countries around the world to work together to spread the values of tolerance and dialogue.

So I would say to those countries, you must step up, you must take up responsibilities, being part of a coalition means working together, Prince Faisal said.

His statements came during a meeting of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, which the Kingdom is co-hosting with the United States.

For his part, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed the United States commitment to defeating ISIS and eradicating terrorist groups.

However, he warned that Afghanistan and some African countries continue to witness an increase in ISIS attacks.

He also warned that keeping foreign ISIS militants in camps may lead to their resurgence, and all foreign militants must be repatriated to their home countries, which he says is an important step in dismantling the al-Hol camp in Syria.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken ahead of the ministerial meeting, and the two vowed to work together to advance stability, security, and prosperity across the Middle East and beyond, the State Department said late Tuesday.

According to State Department Spokesman Matt Miller, the US secretary expressed appreciation for Saudi Arabias leadership in hosting the upcoming Defeat ISIS meeting and stressed the importance of continued efforts to fight terrorism.

In 2014, ISIS fighters seized Iraqi cities and declared a self-styled caliphate in a large swath of territory in Syria and Iraq. The group was formally declared defeated in 2017 following a three-year bloody battle that left tens of thousands dead, but its sleeper cells continue to hide across the world.








BEIJING, June 9 (Xinhua) -- At the invitation of President Xi Jinping, President of the State of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas will pay a state visit to China from June 13 to 16, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying announced Friday.

At a news briefing on Friday, Wang Wenbin, another spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, said that President Abbas is an old and good friend of the Chinese people and the first Arab head of state to be hosted by China this year. "This speaks volumes about the high-level friendly relations between China and Palestine."

Wang said China and Palestine enjoy a traditional friendship, and China is one of the first countries to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization and the State of Palestine.

He said in recent years, thanks to the personal guidance of President Xi and President Abbas, the China-Palestine relations have maintained a good momentum of growth with stronger political mutual trust and deeper friendship between the two peoples.

"China stands ready to work with Palestine to follow through on the common understandings of leaders of the two countries and take the China-Palestine traditional friendship to new heights," Wang added.

The Palestinian question is at the heart of the Middle East issue and matters to the region's peace and stability and global equity and justice, Wang said, adding that "China has all along firmly supported the Palestinian people's just cause of restoring their legitimate national rights."

The spokesperson said for 10 consecutive years, President Xi has sent congratulatory messages to the special commemorative meeting in observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, and more than once he put forward China's proposals for resolving the Palestinian question, stressing the need to resolutely advance a political settlement based on the two-state solution and intensify international efforts for peace.

As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China will continue to work with the international community for a comprehensive, just and enduring solution to the Palestinian question at an early date, said Wang. 
The Daily News will sit down with your top performance player from the Week #1 Batavia Muckdogs games and talk baseball! Keep an eye out for our Week #2 poll, running next week (Tuesday - Friday)!

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Zhao Leji, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, learns about seed breeding and germplasm resources at the Modern Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Demonstration Park of Sichuan Academy of Agricultural Sciences in southwest China's Sichuan Province, June 8, 2023.

Zhao made a research tour in southwest China's Sichuan Province from Tuesday to Friday.

Leading an inspection team, Zhao examined the enforcement of the Seed Law in several cities in Sichuan. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

CHENGDU, June 9 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislator Zhao Leji has called on lawmakers to work to grasp the Party's new theories and apply them to their work related to people's congresses.

Zhao, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, made the remarks during a research tour in Sichuan Province.

He urged concrete efforts to promote the country's high-quality development and implement the new development philosophy through work related to people's congresses.

Leading an inspection team, Zhao examined the enforcement of the Seed Law in several cities in Sichuan and presided over a related meeting.

At the meeting, he emphasized the need to recognize the importance of revitalizing the seed industry from the perspective of safeguarding national security, and called for efforts to advance the high-quality development of the modern seed industry through legal means.

Zhao also underlined the practice of whole-process people's democracy, stressing the need to improve mechanisms that seek and assimilate public opinions in law-making. 

Zhao Leji, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, visits a residential community in Jinniu District of Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province, June 7, 2023.

Zhao made a research tour in southwest China's Sichuan Province from Tuesday to Friday.

Leading an inspection team, Zhao examined the enforcement of the Seed Law in several cities in Sichuan. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

Zhao Leji, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, listens to a report on the work for the education campaign on the study and implementation of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era in southwest China's Sichuan Province, June 6, 2023.

Zhao made a research tour in southwest China's Sichuan Province from Tuesday to Friday.

Leading an inspection team, Zhao examined the enforcement of the Seed Law in several cities in Sichuan. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

Zhao Leji, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, visits a museum on the history of Sichuan Provincial People's Congress in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province, June 7, 2023. Zhao made a research tour in southwest China's Sichuan Province from Tuesday to Friday. Leading an inspection team, Zhao examined the enforcement of the Seed Law in several cities in Sichuan. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

Zhao Leji, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, visits a rice farmer's home in Tashui Town of Anzhou District in Mianyang City, southwest China's Sichuan Province, June 9, 2023. Zhao made a research tour in southwest China's Sichuan Province from Tuesday to Friday. Leading an inspection team, Zhao examined the enforcement of the Seed Law in several cities in Sichuan. (Xinhua/Li Tao)
A Palestinian boy stands in front of an artwork during an art exhibition in Deir al-Balah refugee camp in central Gaza Strip, on June 8, 2023. Dozens of Palestinian artists in Gaza on Thursday took part in the art exhibition to reflect the suffering of the local children during the Gaza-Israeli tensions. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua)

GAZA, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Dozens of Palestinian artists in Gaza on Thursday took part in an art exhibition to reflect the suffering of the local children during the Gaza-Israeli tensions.

Dubbed "The Occupation Kills Children," the art event was organized by 26 nongovernment organizations, showing graffiti of the children's losses of homes and even lives under Israeli attacks.

Graffiti on rubbles of houses destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, theatrical plays, some of the dead children's personal belongings, and remains of Israeli rockets fired at Gaza were among the most visited segments.

"We launched this festival to simulate the suffering of Palestinian children because of the endless Israeli violations against them in Gaza," Fedaa Younus, one of the event organizers, told Xinhua.

"We decided to invest in the art as a message to people around the world, which can be understood in all languages," the young woman explained.

"The children of Gaza are subjected to killing, destruction, displacement, and fear, and no one cares about them," Hussain Abu Sadiq, a Gaza-based artist who drew graffiti on walls of destroyed houses portraying miserable children in Gaza, told Xinhua.

"We focus on our children's suffering to ask for the world's support and pressure Israel into stopping all its crimes against them," said the artist.

Mohammed Siam, another Gaza-based artist, also took part in the exhibition with his paintings about children who were trying to escape from Israeli airstrikes on their residential houses.

"Our children wish to live in their country freely and not to feel afraid of death or bombing, and they want to enjoy a normal life like the rest of the world's children," said Siam.

Now in Gaza of more than 2.3 million, residents have gradually managed to resume their normal daily routines after an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire between Israel and the Hamas-led militant groups ended their five-day deadly exchange of fire, which started on May 9 and left 33 Palestinians and one Israeli killed.

On Tuesday, Palestine officially called on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to add Israel to the list of parties liable for grave violations against children.

During the international conference held in Norway's capital Oslo, Riyad Mansour, Palestine's envoy to the United Nations, called on the international community to support the moral, political, and legal measures against Israel as a necessary and important step toward protecting children during conflicts. 

A Palestinian girl sits in front of an artwork during an art exhibition in Deir al-Balah refugee camp in central Gaza Strip, on June 8, 2023. Dozens of Palestinian artists in Gaza on Thursday took part in the art exhibition to reflect the suffering of the local children during the Gaza-Israeli tensions. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua)

Palestinian children are seen in front of an artwork during an art exhibition in Deir al-Balah refugee camp in central Gaza Strip, on June 8, 2023. Dozens of Palestinian artists in Gaza on Thursday took part in the art exhibition to reflect the suffering of the local children during the Gaza-Israeli tensions. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua)

A Palestinian girl stands in front of an artwork during an art exhibition in Deir al-Balah refugee camp in central Gaza Strip, on June 8, 2023. Dozens of Palestinian artists in Gaza on Thursday took part in the art exhibition to reflect the suffering of the local children during the Gaza-Israeli tensions. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua)

Palestinian children are seen in front of an artwork during an art exhibition in Deir al-Balah refugee camp in central Gaza Strip, on June 8, 2023. Dozens of Palestinian artists in Gaza on Thursday took part in the art exhibition to reflect the suffering of the local children during the Gaza-Israeli tensions. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua)
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2024 GOP Presidential Candidates React to Reported Trump Federal Indictment

Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Texas, on August 6, 2022. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Donald Trumps 2024 GOP primary opponents have come out in response to the former president reportedly being indicted on federal charges.

Trump got ahead of the reports on June 8 and said he was informed by his lawyers that the Department of Justice had indicted him in the case of the former president allegedly mishandling classified information and not cooperating with the federal government in returning the materials.

The charges, according to ABC News, are willful retention of national defense information, corruptly concealing [documents], conspiracy to obstruct justice, [and] false statements.

Trumps super PAC, MAGA Inc., blasted the reported indictment.

The Biden regime, which is realizing they cant beat or cheat their way to another victory, has taken the unprecedented step to indict President Trump amid reports that the Biden family accepted $10 million in illegal bribes from foreign nationals, said MAGA Inc. spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. America is a nation that has become plagued by a two-tier system of justice that must be confronted and destroyed. This will only be done when we reelect President Donald J. Trump.

Trumps GOP opponents expressed outrage over the reported indictment.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wrote on Twitter.

We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?

Meanwhile, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy wrote in a Twitter post that: I never thought wed see the day when the U.S. President deputizes the DOJ to arrest his lead rival in the middle of an election.

This is an affront to every citizen: we cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents, he added. Its hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden.

Ramaswamy explained that it would be much easier for me to win this election if Trump werent in the race, but I stand for principles over politics and, if elected, he would pardon Trump promptly on January 20, 2025, and restore the rule of law in our country.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson reiterated his call for Trump to end his comeback bid for the White House.

With the news that Donald Trump has been indicted for the second time, our country finds itself in a position that weakens our democracy, he said in a statement.

Donald Trumps actionsfrom his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of lawshould not define our nation or the Republican Party, continued Hutchinson. This is a sad day for our country. While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.

A long-shot, Steve Laffey, former mayor of Cranston, Rhode Island, said in a statement that Trump would lose the 2024 election if he becomes the GOP nominee.

The former President continues to make a mockery of the electoral process, he said in a statement.

After being convicted in federal court for sexual harassment, indicted by Manhattan prosecutors for falsifying business records, and now facing a federal indictment, enough is enough, continued Cranston. President Trump will have more court appearances than campaign stops at this rate. Its time the RNC and voters take a closer look at the candidates and realize that Donald Trump cannot win the 2024 Presidential election.

Businessman Perry Johnson said he would pardon Trump.

I was the first candidate to call for @JoeBiden to #PardonTrump so the country can move on to the important issues facing the country like $32 trillion in debt, a broken border, and a war in Ukraine. I stand by it. Pardon Trump now! he posted on Twitter.

Conservative commentator Larry Elder decried Americas justice system.

More partisan prosecution! Hillary violates the Espionage Actyet skates. FBI/DOJ whistleblowers tell of 2-tiered justice. FBI informant doc claims Joe & Hunter got $10mil in bribes. O.J. Simpson will catch the killer or killers of Ron and Nicole before the Hunter probe is over, he posted on Twitter.

On June 9, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley blasted the reported indictment.

This is not how justice should be pursued in our country, posted Haley on Twitter.

The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics, she continued. Its time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions.
A Bipartisan Credit Card Bill Reintroduced In Congress to Foster Greater Competition

Credit cards as seen in Orlando, Fla., on July 1, 2021. (John Raoux/AP)

A new credit card bill that targets the monopoly of Visa and Mastercard over the credit card industry has triggered swift reaction from lobbyists.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Tex.), introduced new legislation that would significantly reform the credit card industry and create greater competition for the benefit of consumers.

The congressman reintroduced the Credit Card Competition Act on June 7, which had failed to pass in 2022.

The bill will require large banks and other credit card issuers with over $100 billion in assets to offer at least two network options to process and facilitate transactions that are not owned by Visa or Mastercard.

The proposed legislation has sparked objections from a coalition of banks, credit unions, and lobbyist groups.

Bill Proposes to Break Monopoly Over Credit Card Transactions

Credit card networks process and facilitate transactions between merchants and the financial institutions that issue credit cards. These networks then charge merchants a processing fee for each consumer transaction.

Visa and Mastercard together currently control an estimated 85 percent of the U.S. credit card market, with a virtual duopoly over the nations credit card transactions.

At the same time, banks like JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Capital One, Discover, and American Express control roughly two-thirds of outstanding balances as issuers of credit cards.

This is textbook rent-seeking behavior, anathema to free market principles, and should be staunchly opposed by Republican lawmakers, wrote several opponents to the law to members of Congress.

The bill does not promote competition; instead it dramatically expands the role of the federal government to overregulate the market for credit cards.

Gooden dismissed the concerns by calling the current system far from being a free market with competition.

He denied in a letter to community banks in Texas that the new legislation would institute backdoor price control that would create a government-mandated system, reported Fox Business.

The current system allows a duopoly of payment networks in conjunction with the largest banks to dominate 85 percent of the market, control interchange fees, suppress consumer choice, and crush any competition, Gooden said.

It is blatant hypocrisy for the Big Banks to claim this legislation is anti-free market but at the same time criticize the bill for giving consumers and merchants greater choice in payment networks, he said.

Many of the banks and advocacy groups opposing the bill also claim that millions of credit cards and their chips would have to be reissued and recertified if the law is implemented.

This concern has been rejected by supporters of the legislation, who explained that routing transactions are back-office procedures that do not require any physical changes to the cards.

Merchants Call for Changes in Credit Industry

Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Roger Marshall (R-Tex.) led the initial push for the failed Credit Card Competition Act a little less than a year ago.

This time around, the bill has sponsors across the aisles, with senators Peter Welch (D- Vt.), and J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) reintroducing the bill in the Senate, along with the original sponsors, Marshall and Durbin.

Gooden will have the support of Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.), and Tom Tiffany (R-Wisc.) in the House as co-sponsors of the companion bill.

Proponents of the legislation say it would give merchants a greater range of choice by allowing them more options to embrace alternative networks that allow interchange (or swipe) fees, which are cheaper than the system currently controlled by Mastercard and Visa.

Those alternative networks include the likes of Star, PULSE, and NYCE, which charge merchants far less for transactions and it is hoped by lawmakers that the savings would then be passed on to consumers.

By forcing banks to offer a second option for processing credit card transactions, merchants could opt for the lower-priced network and, in turn, cut out-of-pocket costs for each transaction.

Competition will result in lower fees, which have increasingly cut into the razor-thin profit margins of small businesses, Jeff Brabant, senior manager of federal government relations at the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), said in a statement.

NFIB appreciates  this important legislation, which aims to inject competition by allowing small businesses the freedom to choose between multiple credit card processing networks.

Local businesses have lobbied in support of this law, but big retailers seem to be the ones who stand most to benefit, say critics.

Over 1,700 retailers, including Target and Walmart, sent a letter to Congress in support of the bill last September.

Big-box retailers like Walmart, Target, and Kroger will stop at nothing to make a buck and pad their bottom lineseven if it means leaving small businesses and consumers in the dust. There is a reason this Big-Box Bill failed the first time around. We believe it will continue to be deeply unpopular among both Republicans and Democrats, Steven Smith, communications director for the Electronic Payments Coalition, told The Epoch Times.

Proposed Legislation Builds on the Durbin Amendment

This legislation builds on previous efforts to curb transaction fees imposed on merchants, including a provision in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.

That law mandated that merchants have at least two unaffiliated debit card networks when routing transactions thorough an amendment added to the bill by Durbin.

The Durbin Amendment on Banks, Merchants, and Consumers established a fixed fee on debit card-transaction processing, instead of allowing fees derived based on a percentage of the total transaction.

The amendment was reported to have saved merchants $6.5 billion annually in debit fees as a result of transaction caps, according to a study by the University of Pennsylvanias Carey Law School.

However, the report said there was no evidence that merchants had taken advantage of the law to lower prices for consumers

According to PYMNTS, which used data from the Federal Reserve from 2010 to 2015, showed that 77 percent of merchants did not alter prices after the changes, with only 1.2 percent of them actually reducing their prices.

Under the proposed bill, merchants would still have the right to choose whether to pass the savings from a transaction onto their customers. or stick to the same rate after the item is processed, without having to inform the buyer.

Meanwhile, critics say if retailers start routing transactions over a network that is not large enough to handle the volumes and types of transactions normally processed through the larger existing systems, transactions may be put at risk, wrote PYMNTS.

In the end, any drop in credit card fees would definitely be a windfall for merchants, but maybe not for consumers.

The Epoch Times wrote to Mastercard and Visa for a response.
Abbott to Deploy Floating Border Barrier in Rio Grande

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks during a news conference at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on June 8, 2023. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday announced a new strategy to deter illegal immigrants from crossing the southern border involving the deployment of a water-based barrier in the Rio Grande.

During a press conference, Abbott shared his plans to deploy a floating barrier that stretches 1,000 feet in length. He described it as a man-made wall floating in the water, intended to be an extra layer to hinder immigrants from swimming or wading across the Rio Grande.

Abbott explained that the deployment of these buoys, strategically positioned in the middle of the river, will prevent people from even reaching the border. The barriers, depicted in a mock-up as orange balls measuring four feet in diameter, will serve as obstacles to deter unlawful entry into the country.

This is a new water-based barrierbuoys  We can put mile after mile after mile of these buoys, Abbott said during a press conference.

Were securing the borderat the border, he added. What these buoys will allow us to do is to prevent people from even getting to the border.

These structures will be strategically positioned in the middle of the Rio Grande. They are designed to make it difficult to climb over or swim under.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks about an illustration of new border security implementation during a news conference at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on June 8, 2023. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) chief Steve McCraw explained at the same press conference that the barriers will present additional challenges for immigrants making their journey through the water as they attempt to unlawfully enter the country.

Nobody needs to come between the ports of entry, Craw said, stressing that it was dangerous. Family units that come across the river between the ports of entry are risking themselves and their family members. Theyre putting themselves in harms way.

On June 8, DPS spokesman Chris Olivarez shared video footage of a 6-year-old boy who U.S. authorities helped after he became unresponsive while crossing the Rio Grande with his family, having suffered from heat exhaustion.

The DANGERS in crossing the Rio Grande River as the summer months heat up. [Texas DPS] Troopers encountered a family who had just crossed the Rio Grande River into Eagle Pass, Olivarez wrote. A 6-year-old child suffered heat exhaustion & became unresponsive. Troopers quickly provided life-saving medical aid.

McCraw added that Mexican cartels, who he described as public enemy number one, are the only beneficiaries of human smuggling operations. The buoy system, he said, is intended to dissuade families from embarking on the dangerous river crossing.

Its very difficult to be able to go through these, McCraw told reporters. Very difficult to come over.

Proactive Deterrence

The Center for Immigration Studies said that the water barrier comes with some political risk, as it will likely draw criticism from hostile media should anyone die attempting to overcome the barrier.

State officials have reportedly said the barrier is designed as a deterrence for the masses, not necessarily the few who might try to get past it, the organization reported.

The initial phase of deploying the barriers will begin immediately near Eagle Pass, which McCraw identified as a major hub for smuggling activities.

The estimated cost for this phase is approximately $1 million, funded entirely by the state. Further installations are planned as part of a comprehensive border security campaign addressing illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

The measures are in addition to $5.1 billion in the new state budget thats on Abbotts desk and a bill before lawmakers in their special session that would authorize a prison sentence of at least 10 years for smugglers of immigrants.

In addition to the barriers, Abbott signed six bills related to border security. These measures include designating Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations, allocating funding for law enforcement training, expanding the use of National Guard surveillance drones, and granting increased powers to Border Patrol agents under Texas law.

The state has furthermore allocated substantial financial aid to assist landowners affected by property damage caused by drug smugglers and human traffickers.

Abbott contends that the presence of more troopers and guardsmen along the border has saved lives, citing significant seizures of fentanyl that, if distributed, could potentially endanger the entire United States population.

Abbott has repeatedly criticized the Biden administration for its perceived lack of action in securing the U.S.Mexico border. He argues that the federal government has not fulfilled its responsibility, leading Texas to adopt a proactive approach to address illegal immigration and combat drug cartels.
BEIJING, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Wang Yi, director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, on Friday spoke with Indonesia's Coordinator for Cooperation with China and Coordinating Minister of Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan at the latter's request.

Luhut briefed on his recent visit to China and expressed his heartfelt admiration for Chinese President Xi Jinping's outstanding leadership and important ideas on state governance.

During the trip, he gained a deeper understanding of the achievements of the CPC in uniting and leading the Chinese people in alleviating poverty and building a moderately prosperous society in all respects.

Indonesia hopes to learn from China's experience in advancing reform and opening-up and striving for high-quality development, deepen practical cooperation in various fields to benefit the two peoples, and work to accelerate key cooperation projects, make every effort to ensure the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway being put into operation on schedule and give full play to its demonstration effect, he said.

Indonesia is looking forward to the next stage of high-level exchanges, and will take the important consensus of the two heads of state as a guide to promote the building of the Indonesia-China community with a shared future, said Luhut.

For his part, Wang said that under the leadership of General Secretary Xi, the CPC and the people of the whole country are united in upholding the new development philosophy, adhering to high-quality development and comprehensively promoting Chinese modernization, and they are taking solid steps toward the goal of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

China and Indonesia, as major developing countries and important representatives of emerging economies, share similar historical experiences and common endeavors, Wang said, adding that China is ready to strengthen mutual learning on governance and accelerate their respective development and revitalization.

With the joint efforts of both sides, the all-round cooperation between them has been progressing smoothly, and the joint commissioning and testing of the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway, the flagship project of Belt and Road cooperation, marks an important step toward the operation of the entire line, which will inject new impetus to Indonesia's development, Wang said.

China attaches great importance to the China-Indonesia comprehensive strategic partnership and will, in accordance with the strategic guidance of the two heads of state, strengthen high-level exchanges, consolidate political mutual trust, promote synergy of development strategies, build the China-Indonesia community with a shared future, push bilateral relations to a new height and open up new prospects for bilateral cooperation, he added.

The two sides also exchanged views on international and regional issues of common concern. 
After SPLC Extremist Designation, Moms for Liberty and Ramaswamy Come Together in New Hampshire

Vivek Ramaswamy, author of "Nation of Victims" and "Woke, Inc.," in New York on Nov. 3, 2022. (Jack Wang/The Epoch Times)

Just days after the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled the parental rights organization Moms for Liberty an extremist group on its new hate map, the groups co-founder, Tiffany Justice, took to the stage with Vivek Ramaswamy in a New Hampshire church.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is also now providing the blueprint used by even the police state, like the FBI, which collaborates with the SPLC, said the 2024 presidential hopeful, who has vowed to shut down the bureau if elected.

An FBI memo that leaked earlier this year cited the SPLC to link so-called radical-traditionalist Catholics with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists. The agency later disavowed the document.

Thats how this game is played. Its this merger of state power and private power together to do what neither could do on its own. But the greasing of the wheels takes place by these invisible nonprofits, Ramaswamy said during the June 8 event, which took place at Grace Ministries International.

The Southern Poverty Law Center headquarters in Montgomery, Ala., in June 2019. (Google Maps/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

Moms for Liberty and Ramaswamy

Its the candidates second event at the house of worship in rural Brentwood, a town set in rolling, forested country about 15 miles east of the Atlantic Ocean.

We are a nation that prides [itself] on diversity of faith. And I think he [Vivek] is so knowledgeable, not just about Hinduism, but in Christianity, said the churchs pastor, Allen Cook, in an interview with The Epoch Times.

Justice told The Epoch Times that her appearance with Ramaswamy was scheduled before the June 6 report from the SPLC. (Thats consistent with a press release from the campaign dated June 5.)

She said she didnt get any warning from the SPLC before they released the map. Justice added that her organization is reviewing possible legal options. The prospect of litigation may look more promising for conservatives after a Georgia judge let a defamation lawsuit against the SPLC move ahead in April.

The activist said that, for now, she hasnt formally communicated with the nonprofit, which reported an endowment of more than $639 million as of Oct. 31, 2022.

I have no reason to reach out to them. Theyre an absurd organization, Justice told The Epoch Times.

Moms for Liberty founders Tiffany Justice (L) and Tina Descovich give the opening remarks before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during the inaugural Moms For Liberty Summit in Tampa, Fla., on July 15, 2022. (Octavio Jones/Getty Images)

We arent going to stop. Were going to continue focusing on our mission, she added.

Justice and Tina Descovich launched Moms for Liberty during the COVID-19 response, when remote learning alerted many parents to teaching practices and philosophies, such as critical race theory, that many see as radical.

According to the SPLC, though, Moms for Liberty are the radical ones. More specifically, the new SPLC report tags them as an antigovernment movement.

Justice noted that the groups record reflects a concerted effort to work for change within the systemfor example, through its endorsements of scads of school board candidates across America.

What an amazing opportunity to reengage the American public in our civic process, she told The Epoch Times.

Onstage with Ramaswamy, Justice said it was strange that the family is seen as such a threat, judging by many responses from federal and local authorities to parent activism.

Karl Marx actually viewed the nuclear family structure as a threat to the communist order because thats a different ordering of society than centrally doing it from the state, Ramaswamy said.

He pointed out that Black Lives Matter also called to dismantle the nuclear family, in language later removed from its website.

A Black Lives Matter banner is displayed on the U.S. embassy in Seoul, South Korea, on June 14, 2020. (Photo by Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images)

Sounding a now-familiar theme to close observers, Ramaswamy stressed how troubled he was by Americans apparent fear of speaking their minds rather than constantly self-censoring.

Theres something about showing up in public. Maybe its because [of] the Southern Poverty Law Center, he said, drawing laughs from the audience.

The best measure of the health of American democracy is the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think in public. And I cant remember a time in my life where there has been a bigger gap between what people will say in public and what theyll say in private. The governments not going to solve that, he said.

Gaining Ground in the Granite State

The biotech entrepreneur and anti-woke activist investor is making a name for himself in the second state on the Republican primary season calendar.

RealClear Politics aggregator has him fourth, behind former President Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and the states current governor, Chris Sununu, who on June 5 announced that he wont run.

Tricia McLaughlin, Ramaswamys senior adviser, told The Epoch Times at the June 8 New Hampshire event that her candidate wants a second-place finish or even a win in the state.

He will face steeper odds in first-in-the-nation Iowa and in South Carolina. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) will be among his competitors on their home turf, and the entrepreneur is polling behind many candidates in Iowa.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) meets with guests at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition in Clive, Iowa, on April 22, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

Cook told The Epoch Times that DeSantis and Trump are still the biggest names in the Granite State.

I do think Vivek doing these kinds of small meetings is gaining some momentum, he said.

Cook said Ramaswamy is the only one calling for what he characterized as a restoration of the Constitution by eliminating the Department of Education and other agencies.

Speaking from his church in a land once guided by Puritan divines, the Christian minister alluded to earlier spiritual revivals in America.

A portrait of Jonathan Edwards, who helped lead the first Great Awakening in Northampton, Mass., during the 1730s. (Public Domain)

Call it a Great Awakening, he said.

This one, he added, would involve not just Christianity but an awakening to the idea of what America was.

A Ramaswamy victory might take a miracle, but after 2016, spectacular upsets seem a little more mundane.
Alberta Bringing in Outside Arson Investigators to Probe Wildfires

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speaks at a press conference after the speech from the throne, in Edmonton on Nov. 29, 2022. (Jason Franson/The Canadian Press)

Premier Danielle Smith says her government will bring in arson investigators from outside Alberta to trace the cause of wildfires that have been plaguing the province of late.

Im very concerned that there are arsonists, Smith told podcast host Ryan Jespersen on June 8. And there have been stories as well that were investigating, and were bringing in arson investigators from outside the province.

Jespersen had asked the premier how she would reconcile her governments energy policies with what every expert he spoke to indicatedthat climate change is playing on our susceptibility to wildfire.

I think youre watching, as I am, the number of stories about arson, said the premier.

In May, a 29-year-old man named John Cook was charged with 10 counts of arson after a series of wildfires and blazes in and around Cold Lake, Alberta, according to the RCMP. On June 7, the Toronto Sun reported that the Quebec police are investigating a possible case of arson in the early forest fires in that province.

Smith said there are almost 175 wildfires in Alberta with no known cause at this point.

[To] have 175 fires that we dont know the cause ofthats unusual.

Alberta has had an unprecedented start to its wildfire season, with fires scorching more than 10,000 square kilometres of forest since March.

On May 6, the province declared a state of emergency after multiple wildfires forced tens of thousands of residents to evacuate from their homes. By the night of June 3, the government ended the order after assessing that the situation had improved significantly.

Massive Forest Fires

Jespersen questioned Smiths response, arguing given the massive degree of the fires, even if there was arson it doesnt qualify as a primary cause.

Weve had wildfire experts on the show telling us that arson is not a leading cause of wildfires based on the science, he said.

Smith admitted that her party has to do a better job as a government in making sure it is building fireguards.

I think that the issue that we had faced is that theres a lot of communities that we know, from what happened in Slave Lake and what happened in Fort McMurray, you have to make sure that when a forest fire begins that it doesnt jump over into a town or a city because thats when you end up with real trouble, she said.

She stressed that forest fires of massive scale had happened in her province before.

If I can point to the fact that we have had previous fire seasons, early in this century, where 1.3 million hectares were burned. Were going to have forest fires. Its the nature of what we have in Alberta.

The Canadian Press contributed to this report.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) was called out by a witness for misrepresenting facts in a past legal case to make a point during a House Committee hearing on election integrity in Washington.
ANALYSIS: Oklahoma Gov. Applauds First Religious Charter School as Opponents Threaten Legal Action

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt delivers his State of the State address in Oklahoma City, on Feb. 6, 2023. (Sue Ogrocki/AP Photo/File)

Oklahomas Republican governor applauded the states charter school board for clearing the way for the nations first religious charter school.

I applaud the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Boards courage to approve the authorization for St. Isadore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, Gov. Kevin Stitt said in a statement following the boards vote. This is a win for religious liberty and education freedom in our great state, and I am encouraged by these efforts to give parents more options when it comes to their childs education.

The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in a vote of 3-2 on June 5. The school will be run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa.

Oklahomans support religious liberty for all and support an increasingly innovative educational system that expands choice. Today, with the nation watching, our state showed we will not stand for religious discrimination, Stitt continued.

In April, the board initially rejected the schools application, saying they needed more details, including on the special education department. The law school at the University of Notre Dame helped the Catholic Diocese of Oklahoma City amend its application, which was resubmitted for consideration. Notre Dame is a Catholic Institution in Indiana.

The charter school will be open to all K-12 students across the state, regardless of religious background or cultural background, beginning in the fall of 2024. It is expected to serve 500 students in the beginning and eventually 1,500.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City did not respond to The Epoch Times request for comment.

Charter schools are public schools funded by taxpayer money. They are operated independently from traditional public school systems but must meet certain academic requirements.

The school would cost Oklahoma taxpayers up to $25.7 million over its first five years, according to its organizers.

Opponents Threaten Legal Action

Some state lawmakers and other groups are pushing back against the boards decision, citing the move as unconstitutional and lacking oversight.

Today, Oklahoma crosses a dangerous line by approving the nations first state-fund church school, Democrat state Rep. Mickey Dollens wrote on Twitter. Unconstitutional and lacking oversight, taxpayers are now forced to fund religious indoctrination. A last-minute board switch only adds to the corruption. This is an attack on freedom and accountability.

Dollens was referring to member Brian Bobek, who was appointed to the board by House Speaker Charles McCall on June 2. Bobecks vote has some questioning the validity of the boards vote, according to WCWS-TV.

The Americans United for Separation of Church and State group has vowed to challenge the boards decision.

I think theres a lot of questions right now about whether that was proper and even legal, Americans United President and CEO Rachel Laser told WCWS.

Ryan Walters, State Superintendent of Public Education, said the vote is valid.

The reality is the board vote was taken. It was legal, Walters reportedly said. People were appointed in a legal process.

Walters did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times request for comment.

But Dollens also argued that the boards approval of a religious charter school violates the Oklahoma Constitution.

Under Article Two, Section Five, it says no public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such, Dollens said during Mondays debate at the Capitol in Oklahoma City.

He said the measure would result in lawsuits, and taxpayers would be forced to foot the bill.

If someone would explain to me why one of the wealthiest religious institutions in the history of the world felt that its appropriate to use taxpayer dollars or how its burdensome on them [not to] receive taxpayer dollars to fulfill their religious mission, Dollens rhetorically asked fellow lawmakers.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond called the boards decision extremely disappointing.

The approval of any publicly funded religious school is contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interest of taxpayers, the Republican lawmaker wrote in a statement.  Its extremely disappointing that board members violated their oath in order to fund religious schools with tax dollars. In doing so, these members have exposed themselves and the State to potential legal action that could be costly.

The Americans United group has vowed to challenge the boards decision.

Its hard to think of a clearer violation of the religious freedom of Oklahoma taxpayers and public-school families than the state establishing the nations first religious public charter school, Americans United President and CEO Rachel Laser said in a statement.

This is a sea change for American democracy. Americans United will work with our Oklahoma and national partners to take all possible legal action to fight this decision and defend the separation of church and state thats promised in both the Oklahoma and U.S. Constitutions,

Empowering Parents

Walters said he supports school choice and that he encouraged the board to approve the schools application.

This decision reflects months of hard work, and more importantly, the will of the people of Oklahoma, Walters said in a statement on June 6. I encouraged the board to approve this monumental decision, and now the U.S.s first religious charter school will be welcomed by my administration.

I have fought for school choice in all forms, and this further empowers parents. We will make sure every Oklahoman parent has the opportunity to decide what is best for their child, he continued.

Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, told CNN that the schools supporters are prepared to defend the approval for the school.

Public dollars currently go to all kinds of religious institutions, whether theyre education institutions in the form of tax credits, or vouchers, or something like that, but also hospitals and all kinds of religiously sponsored public benefit institutions, Farley said.

He pointed out that federal agencies, such as FEMA, have relied on religious organizations for assistance.

FEMA relied heavily on Catholic Charities, Baptist relief services, and all sorts of things, and so thats just a long tradition in American history, Farley said. So to suggest that somehow this is anathema and unconstitutional is to pose another question  where do you draw the line?

Free Exercise Clause

Church officials have said they hope the case will reach the U.S. Supreme Court, where a conservative majority has ruled that a state cannot prohibit parents from using state school choice programs to fund religious instruction for their children.

Michel Bindas, lead counsel in the Supreme Court case Carson vs. Makin, argued that Maines state tuition program violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by not allowing parents to select a religious school if that is what they believe is best for their child. Bindas is a senior attorney with Institute for Justice.

When many people think about the First Amendment, they think about the Free Speech Clause, and while thats certainly a vital protection, so, too, is the Free Exercise Clause, which enables people to live in accordance with the dictates of their faith, Bindas said during a panel discussion on March 30 at the Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Initiative.

Especially of interest to me is the protection the Free Exercise Clause provides for parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children. I enjoy that protection as a parent, but I also have the privilege of litigating to ensure that other parents have the ability and right to select a religious school if that is what they believe is best for their children.

The Supreme Court agreed with the plaintiffs in a vote of 6-3.

Bindas said the Supreme Courts decision paves the way for greater school choice in the United States.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Australia Willing to Walk Away as EU Trade Negotiation Stalls

Exterior view taken on May 4, 2023 shows European flags fluttering in front of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. (Andre Pain/AFP via Getty Images)

The Australian government has expressed that it will stop pursuing a free trade agreement with the European Union (EU) if the deal is not in the countrys national interest.

This comes after Trade and Tourism Minister Don Farrell returned from his recent trip to Belgium to negotiate the trade deal.

The EU has demanded Australia extend geographical indication protection to hundreds of product names for the agreement to go through.

Geographical indications are a type of trademark that establishes intellectual property rights for specific products whose qualities are linked to the production region.

If Australia accepts the demand, local producers will be banned from using protected names such as parmesan, feta or prosecco for their products, potentially imposing substantial costs and drawbacks on Australian businesses.

However, so far, Australia has been pushing back the request from the EU.

In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Agriculture Minister Murray Watt admitted that negotiations had hit a roadblock.

Ive been working very closely with Don (Farrell) throughout this year. I think that the negotiations that hes just undertaken have reached a difficult stage, he said.

Weve obviously been very clear about our position from the beginning of these negotiations that we really need to see some commercially meaningful expansion of new markets for our producers for this deal to be worth doing.

And equally, we need the EU to understand our position when it comes to those geographic indicators.

A shop assistant lifts a slab of feta cheese in Athens, Greece, on Oct. 25, 2005. (Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images)

The minister also noted that Australias demand to remove the geographic indication requirement was reasonable compared to what other countries had negotiated with the EU.

We have certainly modelled our approach on what other countries have been able to negotiate with the EU. So we think we are being quite reasonable in terms of our asks here, Watt said.

Its an emotional issue for Australian producers because weve had a lot of migration post World War II from Europe to Australia that has seen our producers  bring their own products from their home countries and make them here.

Australia Is Willing to Walk Away from the Trade Agreement

While the minister said Australia had a strong preference to open up the EU marketwhich was currently very restricted to Australian agriculture products and other goods and services, he emphasised that the deal must be in the countrys national interest.

Were not going to do a deal just for the sake of doing a deal. Its got to be in Australias interests as well as being in EUs interests, Watt said.

If we cant get the kind of market access that were seeking, then its not in our interest to do that deal.

Trade Minister Don Farrell also agreed that Australia would not back down on the issue of geographical indications.

If the Europeans play too hard, then we wont have an agreement, he said.

Its not that we dont have other options, but  thats a big, relatively wealthy community, so its an important one to get.

Meanwhile, the Opposition supported the governments stance on the free trade agreement with the EU.

This was always going to be a tough negotiation given our market access ambitions, Opposition trade spokesman Kevin Hogan said in comments obtained by AAP.

The government must not compromise on geographical indicators for products such as prosecco, parmesan, and feta.

While trade talks with the EU were put on hold, Watt said the two sides had reached an agreement to continue negotiations.

At present, the EU is Australias third-largest trading partner after China and Japan and has a longstanding trade surplus with the country.

In 2022, the total goods trade between Australia and the EU reached around $90.5 billion (US$60.8 billion), with a surplus of $33 billion for the EU.

Meanwhile, the total service trade between the two regions in 2021 was about $38.6 billion (EU surplus of $19.1 billion).
Australian Wine Producers Set to Tap into Indias $24 Billion Market

A man handles wine stock in the processing building at Obsession Wines on Nov. 24, 2020, in Tumbarumba, Australia. (Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)

Australias wine producers are being prepped by the sector into exporting wine to Indiaa market worth $24 billion.

This follows successful talks that were held at the Australia-India Joint Dialogue in New Delhi between Australian and Indian wine sector representatives.

The news also comes as Australian wine won the the best in the world at this years Decanter World Wine Awards.

Federal Trade Minister Don Farrell said Australia now has greater access to a market of 1.4 billion people under a trade agreement between the two countries.

A serious window of opportunity has opened for our producers to move into an export market valued at over $24 billion in 2021, ahead of many of our key competitors, Farrell said in a statement.

Its great that the Australian wine industry is taking the initiative to diversify, and get into this market early.

Murray Watt, minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry said improving access to Indias growing wine market is an exciting opportunity for Australias winemakers.

Already in the 5 years to 2021-22, Australia exported an average value of around $10 million and a volume around 2.3 million litresand we want to see this increase over the next 5 years, Watt said.

Indias wine industry has been steadily growing over the past few decades and there is a lot we can learn from each other, Watt said.

Watt added that recent disruptions to Australias wine exports have demonstrated the importance of trade diversification and that India has enormous potential as a future market for our world-renowned wines.

Australian Grape and Wine chief executive Lee McLean said the meeting was a terrific step towards collaboration and growth, and that it will lay the groundwork for two-way trade and investment over the years ahead.

This comes as Australia sought other export markets following the collapse of the Chinese market due to trade disputes and soaring tariffs.

Trade Agreement Gives Australia Preferential Treatment

In 2022, Australia and India signed a Free Trade Agreement known as the Australia-India Economic Cooperation Trade Agreement (AI-ECTA), under which tariffs were removed from more than 85 percent of Australian exports and from 96 percent of Indian imports.

Moreover, under the agreement, Australia will become the first major wine exporter to gain preferential access to Indias wine market.

For example, under the most favoured nation clause, Australia will be able to benefit if another country negotiates a better tariff reduction with India for wine.

The 150 percent tariff that was applied to bottles arriving in the Indian market at US$15 per bottle has already fallen to 70 percent. Then, on Jan. 1, 2032, further phased annual reductions will result in a 25 percent tariff.

Tariffs on wine priced between US$5 and US$15 have been reduced to 95 percent, with a phased annual reduction resulting in a tariff of 50 percent by Jan. 1, 2032.

The AI-ECTA will change current market dominance, said Austrades Business Development Manager in Delhi.

By reducing tariffs on quality wines, the trade deal will help smaller companies into the market so they can compete with the majors.

Prior to ECTA, bilateral trade accounted for $US27.5 billion in 2021. Under ECTA, there is potential for bilateral trade to reach $US50 billion in five years.
Australias Security Pacts With Vanuatu and PNG Stalled Due to Sovereignty Concerns

Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles speaks to the media duing a press conference after the release of the Defence Strategic Review at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia on April 24, 2023. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch)

Pacific nations Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea (PNG) are delaying the finalisation of their security pacts with Australia due to fears the deal would encroach on their sovereignty, the Pacific nations have said.

During a visit by Defence Minister Richard Marles on June 6, Vanuatus Prime Minister Ishmael Kalsakau said the bilateral security agreement signed with Australia in December 2022 was still being examined and will be put forward to the parliament by the end of this year.

It is at the National Security Council at the moment, just going through the text, and itll go towards the Council of Ministers. And it will be presented for ratification before the end of this year in Parliament, he said.

Kalsakau added that the deal, if not ratified, would give the Australian military too much power.

We must remove the stigma that the agreement is one-sided and does not reflect Vanuatus sovereignty, Kalsakau said.

Thinking that some troops from Australia will enter the country without visas and access our sovereign data will not happen unless we agree and give our informed consent.

This applies to other countries that want a security arrangement with Vanuatu which [sic] that suits the interest of Vanuatus sovereignty.

PNG Concerned Over Document Texts Also

This comes as PNG Prime Minister James Marape told parliament on June 6 that he did not agree on certain words used in its security deal with Australia and that it was a work in progress.

At the same time, Marles said that good progress has been made on the bilateral security with PNG, despite Marape saying he would not provide a time frame as to when the treaty would be finalised.

Papua New Guineas Prime Minister James Marape speaks at the UN General Assembly 76th session General Debate in UN General Assembly Hall at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, New York, on Sept. 24, 2021. (Peter Foley/eutersPool via Reuters)

[We] discussed progress on commitments to strengthen the already close partnership between our two countriesincluding on defence and security, visa processing and labour mobility, Marles said in a statement reported by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Meanwhile, Marles told reporters in Vanuatu on June 6 that he was very happy with the progress being made between the two countries and that the security pact will be a really important agreement.

Security Pacts to Counter Beijings Influence in the Region

Both Australia and the U.S. have ramped up diplomatic efforts with Pacific nations following the signing of a security pact with the Soloman Islands and Beijing.

The contentious pact, signed in April 2022, would allow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)with the consent of the Solomon Islandsto dispatch police, troops, weapons, and even naval ships to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in the Solomon Islands, based on leaked pages from the document.

But Chinas Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, said in May that the security pact between China and the Solomon Islands is for social stability and not defence.

In May, PNG signed a security pact with the United States that could see the U.S. military expand its presence on the island nation. It would also support PNG in building its defence capacity and tackling illegal fishing.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Papua New Guineas Defence Minister Win Bakri Daki shake hands after signing a security agreement as Papua New Guineas Prime Minister James Marape (center) looks on at the Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation at APEC Haus in Port Moresby on May 22, 2023. (Adek Berry/AFP via Getty Images)

Marape affirmed that his nation in no way would compromise its excellent existing bilateral relations with Australia and that PNG was capable of managing its sovereign affairs.

Meanwhile, the security deal between Vanuatu and Australia, signed in December 2022, aims to facilitate cooperation between the two nations in various areas, including humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, policing, defence, environment and resource security, and cyber security.

Aldgra Fredly contributed to this report.
Bali Introduces New Rules to Combat Misbehaving Tourists

Some 136 foreign visitors have been deported from Bali since January for misbehaving

A Balinese man stands at the gate of Lempuyang temple looking toward Mount Agung volcano, in Karangasem Regency, Bali, Indonesia, on Dec. 2, 2017. (Reuters/Darren Whiteside)

Balis governor has recently issued a new set of guidelines for travelers to follow after instances of unruly behavior displayed by foreign visitors on the Indonesian island.

The circular, introduced by Bali Governor Wayan Koster on May 31, outlines 12 obligations and eight prohibited actions for tourists to follow while staying on the resort island, according to local media.

All parties should understand, implement, and disseminate this circular to all staff and foreign tourists who are visiting Bali, Koster told reporters.

In the circular, tourists are urged to respect religious places, customs, and traditions, dress modestly in sacred and public places, comply with all local rules, and use Indonesian currency when making transactions.

Foreign visitors are required to stay in accommodations that have a permit, drive in compliance with domestic laws, and be accompanied by licensed tour guides.

It prohibits tourists from climbing sacred trees, acting aggressively or speaking harshly toward state officials and locals, engaging in illegal activities, and acting in ways that desecrate sacred places, among other things.

Tourists are also prohibited from spreading hate speech and polluting lakes, seas, or public places, according to the circular.

In order to enforce the rules effectively, the provincial government has deployed tourism task forces at key attractions and sacred places to monitor the behavior of foreign tourists.

Residents in Bali who wish to report any incidents of misconduct by foreigners would also be able to contact these task forces.

The point is that there are no foreign nationals doing anything out of the ordinary in Tabanan, Tabanans government secretary Gede Susila was quoted as saying by The Bali Sun.

Some 136 foreigners have been deported from Bali since January for violating norms on the island and displaying unruly behavior, including indecent exposure, according to the Bali Immigration Office.

In April, a Russian national was deported from Bali for taking nude photos under the sacred Kayu Putih Banyan Tree in the Tabanan district. Last month, a British national was arrested for assaulting a police officer at a bar after he refused to pay for his meal.

Indonesian Tourism Minister Sandiaga Uno said last year the government was planning to introduce a digital nomad visa that would allow travelers to live in Bali without paying taxes for five years.

Sandiaga said the government aims to boost the local economy and create 1 million jobs for Indonesians by bringing in more foreign travelers to Bali, citing a survey that revealed Bali was on top of mind of 95 percent of digital nomads who took part in the survey.

In the past, the three S was: sun, sea, and sand. Were moving it to serenity, spirituality, and sustainability. This way, were getting better quality and better impact to the local economy, he remarked.

There are currently about 24 countries that offer digital nomad visas for remote workers, including Germany, Taiwan, Mexico, Iceland, Portugal, and Norway, according to Relocate website.
Baltimore Police Release Photos, Offer Reward for Info on Man Assaulting Elderly Pro-Life Activists

Police seeks suspect who attacked two elderly pro-life activists outside of a Baltimore Planned Parenthood. (Metro Crime Stoppers via Baltimore Police Department)

The Baltimore Police Department has released photos of the man suspected of beating two pro-life demonstrators outside of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic last month and is offering a cash reward for tips.

The attack occurred around 10:30 a.m. Eastern on May 26 outside a Planned Parenthood location on North Howard Street. The victims, 80-year-old Richard Schafer and 73-year-old Mark Crosby were peacefully praying in protest of abortion.

A police report, citing video surveillance of the alleged assault, states that the suspect was talking to Schafer, walked away from him for a moment before turning back for a visibly aggressive conversation with the pro-life advocate and tackling him over a large flower pot.

The report states that Crosby ran over to help his fellow protestor. At that point, the suspect turned to Crosby, shoveling him onto the ground. As Crosby was on his back, the suspect leaned over and punched him in the face with a closed fist and then stood up and kicked him in the face with extreme force.

The assailant is described as a 20-something white man who was last seen wearing a gray T-shirt, blue jeans and brown shoes. He has brown hair and a full beard. The witness believes the man is about 6 feet tall.

The suspect who attacked two elderly pro-life activists outside of a Baltimore Planned Parenthood was described as a white man wearing a gray T-shirt, blue jeans, and brown shoes. (Metro Crime Stoppers via Baltimore Police Department)

Police said they are offering a $2,000 reward for information leading to the suspects arrest. Anyone with information is asked to call Metro Crime Stoppers Maryland at 866-7LOCKUP.

According to the police report, Schafer sustained a laceration to his hand while a side of Crosbys face was shattered from the assault. Crosby was also experiencing neck pain as a result of the attack.

Crosby was transported to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma unit for medical treatment and diagnosed with a large blood clot over the eye socket and bleeding within the eye itself, known as hyphemia.

Local pro-life activist John Roswell told LifeSiteNews that Crosbys plate bone in his upper right cheek is completely fractured, and he is bleeding from some unidentified area behind his eye. Roswell said also said Crosbys bone eye orbit is completely shattered and will have to be replaced with metal.

Jay Walton, the president of Baltimore County Right to Life, started an online fundraiser to help Crosby with his medical bills. He identified Crosby as a volunteer of his pro-life organization.

For years, Mark has prayed in front of the Planned Parenthood in Baltimore City to let the scared, young abortion-minded women know that they are loved, that their baby is loved. Please donate to show Mark how much HE is loved. Your donation will go to Mark to help him pay for medical expenses, Walton wrote on the GoFundMe page.

As of June 8, the GoFundMe campaign has received $41,881 in donations, well surpassing its original $10,000 goal. Another fundraiser, opened on LifeFunder by a local Catholic priest, has taken in $13,642 for Crosby.

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Courts landmark decision that allowed individual states to decide whether abortion is legal within their borders, there has been a rise in arson, vandalism, and other criminal attacks on pro-life organizations across the nation.

According to a September 2022 report from the Religious Freedom Institute (RFI), perpetrators attacked at least 63 pro-life organizations across 26 states and the District of Columbia last summer. About half of those attacked organizations are religious.

The RFI report also reveals a wave of violence against Catholic sites, with more than 30 churches that have been attacked since May 2022. Half of them appeared to be motivated by pro-abortion activism.

Attacks on Christian churches have almost tripled over the past four years, according to a December 2022 report from the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian non-profit group. In April, the organization released supplemental data documenting 69 additional attacks in the first quarter of 2023.

Ryan Morgan of NTD News contributed to this report.
Biden Admin to Appoint Anti-Book Ban Coordinator as Part of LGBT Push

President Joe Biden addresses the nation on averting default and the Bipartisan Budget Agreement in the Oval Office of the White House on June 2, 2023. (Jim Watson/Pool via Getty Images)

The Biden administration unveiled a series of measures on June 8 to address the rights of the LGBTQ community, including taking action on book bans by appointing a coordinator to work with schools.

The as-yet-unnamed Education Department coordinator will work to inform school districts that prohibiting books could violate federal law, among other issues.

The Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights is announcing that to support its ongoing work to defend the rights of LGBTQI+ students and other underserved communities, it will appoint a new coordinator to address the growing threat that book bans pose for the civil rights of students, the White House said in the announcement.

That coordinator will work to provide new trainings for schools nationwide on how book bans that target specific communities and create a hostile school environment may violate federal civil rights laws.

The announcement is part of the administrations efforts to observe Pride Month and address the concerns surrounding LGBTQ rights. The administration is also unveiling plans to support mental health resources for those in the LGBTQ community and combat violence against the same groups.

The administration has expressed specific concern over book bans, particularly those targeting books that feature LGBTQ communities, communities of color, and other groups.

Book banning erodes our democracy, removes vital resources for student learning, and can contribute to the stigma and isolation that LGBTQI+ people and other communities face, the White House said.

Bidens Comments on the Initiatives

As president, I was proud to end the band on transgender troops in our military, sign the Respect for Marriage Act, strengthen the civil rights protections for LGBT Americans, and advance LGBT human rights around the globe, but our fight is far far from over, President Joe Biden said during a June 8 news conference.

He outlined some of the details of his programs that his administration introduced and said they still had plenty of work ahead due to the hysterical and prejudice people around the country, saying he hoped to find a solution to violence and hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people.

Its wrong that extreme officials are pushing hateful bills, targeting transgender children, terrifying families and criminalizing doctors, Biden said. These are our kids. These are our neighbors. LGBTQ Americans, especially children, youre loved, youre heard, and this administration has your back.

Book Ban Controversy

The issue of book bans has concerned parents and school officials in recent months, with some more politically conservative states like Texas and Florida taking center stage in the debate.

In April of this year, Officials in Llano County, Texas, declined to vote on closing libraries after dozens of books containing sexual and racial content that were previously banned were returned to shelves by order of a federal judge.

The county commissioners voted unanimously to remove the issue from their agenda, keeping the libraries open with the books on the shelves.

Just a month earlier, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attacked the myths surrounding book bans in his home state, showing a video that included content graphic enough to make some those in attendance at his news conference concerned about repeating what they saw.

A lot of whats been going on is an attempt to create a political narrative, DeSantis said. And its a false political narrative.

This came about a year after Florida passed their Parental Rights in Education law, banning lessons on sexual topics for children in third grade or younger.

Other Pride Month Projects

The Biden-Harris administrations commitment to protecting LGBTQ rights extends beyond addressing book bans. Another key initiative is the establishment of the LGBTQI+ Community Safety Partnership, which aims to address the escalating violence and hate crimes targeting LGBTQI+ individuals and community spaces.

The Department of Homeland Security, in collaboration with the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services, will join forces with LGBTQI+ community organizations to offer safety resources, ensuring the preservation of secure and supportive environments. Additionally, efforts will be made to foster trust between LGBTQ organizations and federal law enforcement agencies.

The Biden administration also reiterated its support for LGBTQ youth, saying it is a priority for the administration to recognize the mental health crisis that affects the group.

The Department of Health and Human Services will issue a Behavioral Health Care Advisory on Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth to assist those struggling with a mental health crisis.

This advisory will promote practices for mental health providers working with these vulnerable populations. Additionally, federal funding will be made available to support mental health services for LGBTQ youth, focusing on preventing health and behavioral risks.

Efforts will be undertaken to improve access to supportive services for LGBTQ youth in foster care, to help the kids find safe foster care, and help parents affirm their LGBTQ-identifying children.

The administration also aims to tackle the issue of homelessness through the launch of an LGBTQ youth homelessness initiative in collaboration with the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

This initiative seeks to form partnerships with local communities, service providers, and directly affected young people to address the groups homelessness problem.

Technical assistance and training will be provided to shelter and service providers, emphasizing the understanding and resolution of the specific needs of LGBTQ youth.

The White House did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times request for comment.
TAIPEI, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Taiwan's New Party has the courage to undertake the mission of the times and advance the peaceful reunification across the Taiwan Strait, the party's chief said Friday.

"Taiwan independence" leads nowhere, and Taiwan's New Party advocates peaceful reunification with a clear-cut banner, said Wu Cheng-tien, chairman of the party, at a press conference on his recent visit to the mainland.

Wu said compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are Chinese and should firmly oppose "Taiwan independence" and join hands to promote peaceful reunification and national rejuvenation.

The New Party will advocate for a common market across the Strait and encourage Taiwan compatriots, businesses, and youth to participate in the Belt and Road Initiative and the mainland-based rural revitalization projects, according to a spokesperson of the party.

Wu said the visit has impressed upon him the sincerity and goodwill of the mainland.

Noting that people on both sides of the Strait are Chinese and "Taiwan independence" is a dead end, he said Taiwan should not head toward a dangerous warfare situation.

The New Party chief urged Taiwan compatriots to recognize the harm of "Taiwan independence" to peace and stability across the Strait.

The New Party has actively contributed to promoting cross-Strait ties and the peaceful reunification of the motherland, and this year marked the 30th anniversary of its founding. 
Biden Says He Did Not Tell DOJ to Charge Trump

President Joe Biden on Thursday said that he did not pressure the Department of Justice (DOJ) to bring charges against former President Donald Trump as a special prosecutor is reportedly deciding to indict the former president.

On Thursday evening, Trump stated that he was informed that he was summoned to appear at a Miami courthouse on June 13, saying that special counsel Jack Smith will indict him following an investigation into whether he mishandled classified documents that culminated in an FBI raid targeting his Mar-a-Lago residence in August. Trump said that he is an innocent man and described the case against him as election interference.

Hours before that, Biden spoke to reporters alongside British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and was asked if Americans should have trust in the DOJ in the midst of the Trump probe.

Youll notice I have never once, not one single time, suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do, relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge. Im honest, Biden said in response.

Meanwhile, the DOJ has not unsealed the charges that are being brought against the former president. His attorneys, however, confirmed on Thursday night that he was charged with seven counts relating to the Espionage Act.

It does have some language in it that suggests what the seven charges would be. Not 100 percent clear that all of those are separate charges, but they basically break out from an Espionage Act charge, Trump lawyer Jim Trusty told CNN, describing the espionage charge as ludicrous. There are also multiple obstruction-based-type charges and then false statement charges, the attorney said.

Trusty further said that Trump received a summons to court via email, while his team has not received a copy of the indictment so far. He said that Trump will appear in court on Tuesday but gave no further information in the CNN interview.

About two months ago, the former president was indicted on 34 charges of allegedly falsifying business records in connection to payments that he made during the 2016 election. In a court appearance in Manhattan, Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Via social media and elsewhere, Trump has said that there are currently two standards of justice in the United States and said that Biden kept classified records for decades. Hes also frequently chided Biden for his familys overseas business deals in China and Ukraine.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump greets supporters as he arrives at an event at Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach, Florida, on April 4, 2023. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is secured by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time, Trump also wrote.

Trump, on his Truth Social app, called it a DARK DAY for the United States of America. In a video post, he said, Im innocent and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly. Within 20 minutes of breaking the news, his 2024 presidential campaign sent out a fundraising email telling his followers hed been indicted and asking for financial support.

In a letter dated May 23, Trumps attorneys had requested a meeting with U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to discuss the ongoing injustice they perceived in the special counsels investigations of Trump.

Other Details

Last year, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland picked Jack Smith to lead investigations into the presence of classified documents at Trumps Florida estate, as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, breach at the U.S. Capitol.

Many of Trumps challengers for the GOP nomination jumped to his defense Thursday night after news of the indictment broke. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trumps top rival for the 2024 nomination, accused the Justice Department of political bias in charging the former president.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, DeSantis wrote on Twitter. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.

He questioned why the Justice Department had been so zealous in bringing charges against Trump and so passive about going after former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton or Bidens son Hunter.

Vivek Ramaswamy said the federal case was part of an affront to every citizen. Reiterating his comments that he would pardon Trump, Ramaswamy called it hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden over his own classified documents case.

Democrats celebrated the indictment as a demonstration that no individual, regardless of their position, is exempt from the law. The former twice-impeached president is now twice-indicted, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) wrote.

The Associated Press and Caden Pearson contributed to this report.
President Joe Biden and the first lady meet with service members and their families at 4:15 p.m. ET on June 9, and deliver remarks on economic security for military and veteran spouses at an event in Fort Liberty, North Carolina.
Biola University Names Film School After In-N-Out Co-Founder

Biola University in La Mirada, California, recently announced that it will be naming its film school after an In-N-Out co-founder after an unspecified but significant amount was donated to the school by the burger chain.

Biola announced their film school will be renamed the Snyder School of Cinema and Media Arts as a tribute to chain co-founder Esther Snyder, in whose name the award was made.

Founded in 1948 in Baldwin Park, California, In-N-Outlike Biolais known for its Christian values.

Our family values the distinctly Christian education Biola University offers and [we] are honored to play a part in continuing to offer students opportunities to make really impactful film pieces that change peoples lives, granddaughter and current In-N-Out owner and president Lynsi Snyder-Ellingson said in a recent statement from the school.

God is a huge part of the In-N-Out story, and I have no doubt my grandmother would be grateful to know her name is associated with a school recognized for excellence in craft and character.

According to Biola, the unspecified donation amount is the largest in the schools 115-year history and will be allocated toward the construction of a 52,100-square-foot studio facility for the film school.

The school did not respond to a request for more information on the amount by press time.

A portion of the funds will also be used to establish a new scholarship, the In-N-Out Burger Scholars Fund, for foster and at-risk youth to study at the Snyder School.

The new construction is part of a $92 million project and promises to be a state-of-the-art addition to the schools existing production facilities, with additional edit suites, production offices, music scoring stages, mixing rooms, a color correction lab, classrooms, a theater, and more, according to the university.

The school plans to break ground on the new building in October, aligning with In-N-Outs 75th anniversary.

This naming of the Snyder School and the inspirational vision of Mrs. Esther Snyder will be a testimony to students and alumni for generations that humility in leadership, Christ-like love of others, entrepreneurial tenacity and upright business principles are virtues worth living, Biola President Barry H. Corey said in a statement.
Black Lawmakers Put School Choice Before Their Party

Its about the children.

Black Minds Matter founder Denisha Allen calls school choice the civil rights issue of our time. And even though the few black Democrats that support school choice legislation are being targeted by their own party, they say they will continue to do so for the well-being of kids because its not about their position or the party.

So, for me as a black man, I feel as though I am doing a disservice to my community saying no (to school choice), said Nebraska Democrat state Sen. Terrell McKinney during a panel discussion at the Black Minds Matter summit in Washington where educators gathered to promote school choice and education excellence on June 8. Lets at least try something. It might work; it might not work, but at least try something else.

I[ve] got reelection next year. I will be getting killed for [supporting school choice], but at the end of the day, I can go to sleep at night knowing that it didnt matter that I was a Democrat, said McKinney. He feels lawmakers need to find a solution to the failing public schools, and states all need to try something different for the sake of children, especially black children, McKinney said.

Georgia State Rep. Mesha Manior said lawmakers in her state are not listening to their constituents about school choice, and she has even been attacked for supporting bills that would give black parents more school choice.

(L) Georgia state Rep. Mesha Manior and (R) Nebraska state Sen. Terrell McKinney, Blacks Minds Matter summit, Washington, on June 8, 2023. (Masooma Haq/The Epoch Times)

Manior was the only Democrat who voted for Senate Bill 233 earlier this year. The measure would have created $6,500 vouchers for students at schools performing in the bottom 25 percent of the state to help pay for private school tuition or homeschooling.

After which, Maniors Democrat Senate colleague, Josh McLaurin, offered $1,000 to anyone who would primary her in the 2024 election. Because of the pushback from Democrats, Mainor thinks it will be tough to get reelected.

Georgia has had charter and magnet schools as well as a tax credit scholarship program since 2008.

Ann Duplessis said she became a Senator to make a difference, not to necessarily get reelected, so she dissented from her partys view of school choice, even though she faced backlash for doing so.

Most legislators [do not] go to the body thinking, how am I going to be impactful for the season and make a difference, said American Federation for Children Board Member and former Louisiana state Senator Ann Duplessis during this years Black Minds Matter summit.

(L to R) Nebraska Sen. Justin Wayne, The Honorable Ann Duplessis, Georgia State Rep. Mesha Manior, Nebraska Senator Terrell McKinney, Black Minds Matter Founder Denisha Allen at the Blacks Minds Matter 2023 annual summit, Washington D.C., June 8, 2023 (Masooma Haq/The Epoch Times)

Reconsidering Allegiances

As a newly elected senator, Duplessis did not support school choice because of having been raised by a mother who was a public school teacher. She believed that public schools were the only option for black children to get a good education.

You are not going to dismantle public schools, said Duplessis. So, I had to go through an unlearning of what I was taught about public education and what that looks like and what it means and look at the reality of what was happening.

Meanwhile, McKinney said older black voters had criticized him for supporting school choice because they thought it would harm public education and the progress made by the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

This historic decision prohibited racial segregation in public schools.

He responds to his community by pointing out the fact that since that Supreme Court ruling, the academic outcomes from public school data show that black students are not being educated.

We cant just say lets stick to this because, historically, in the past, our predecessors fought for this change because so many people fought for this. Yes, I appreciate that [but] we have to face reality, he McKinney.

The reality is that according to the 2022 National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), 4th- and 8th-grade report cards show that black students scored lowest in reading and math out of any other ethnic group.

While 85 percent of white 4th-grade students (pdf) were on grade level in mathematics, only 54 percent of their black peers were, primarily because scores from cities including Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia were averaged. In 8th grade (pdf), only 38 percent of black students were proficient in math, compared to 72 percent of white peers.

Why are we stuck in this box? asked McKinney. Why cant we see that we have to change something? Why cant we be open to doing something different because it was obvious [that] our kids need other options.

McKinney was one of the 33 senators that voted to pass Nebraskas Opportunity Scholarships Act, which was introduced in 2023 by a Republican senator.

The measure initially set aside $25 million a year in tax credits for people who donate to a scholarship granting organization that distributes scholarships to parochial and private schools. Depending on the demand for tax credits, that amount could rise to $100 million.

Two other Nebraska State Senators, Justin Wayne and Mike McDonnell, voted in favor of the bill and spoke in support.

Wayne said he was pro-school choice before joining the Nebraska Senate because he has served as a school board president and understood how public schools were not serving black students.

I realized the ship was too big to turn and [that] we need some more nimble options, said Wayne. In addition, he did not want to be a hypocrite for having his own daughter in private school, he said.

I know many of my colleagues send their kids to private school, [and] theyre okay with it, [but] I just cant, said Wayne.

A 1951 photograph of Miss Wests English 9 Class at R. R. Moton High School. It was used as Defendants Exhibit No. 60 in the civil rights case Dorothy E. Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia, to show a comparison of conditions between black and white schools. (National Archives)

Making Deals

Wayne said although its hard to get enough votes to pass bills on contentious issues, elected officials make deals all the time, agreements about supporting each others legislation.

Figure out where you can have conversations on those deals, said Wayne. He is willing to make such deals on issues that dont negatively impact his constituents.

In order for me to get a bill passed, sometimes I would have to hold my nose and make a deal, Ill support you on this If you can support me on my issue, said Duplessis.

Its Not Partisan

Honestly, we need to take Republican and Democrat off the table and have a real conversation, said McKinney.

I truly didnt understand all the rhetoric behind Democrat, Republican, Independent, said Duplessis. I ran as a Democrat because thats what they told me I was.

She did not understand the partisanship in the legislature and how school choice was mainly supported by Republicans. Even now, she cannot understand why Democrats are so opposed to school choice even though public schools are failing black children, she said.

Are you kidding, said Duplessis. I was unapologetic about helping my colleagues feel ashamed [for not supporting school choice].

Manior said she is a product of choice, and even though she lived in the most impoverished part of Georgia, she was able to go to a school in the wealthiest community.

All children deserve choice, said Manior.
Brawl Erupts as Japan Parliament Passes Controversial Immigration Reform Bill

Japanese lawmakers scuffle during a committee voting of security bills at the upper house of the parliament in Tokyo, Thursday, Sept. 17, 2015. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

Scuffles broke out in Japans parliament on Friday after a contentious bill to revise the countrys immigration law was approved, which will enable authorities to deport foreign nationals seeking refugee status in Japan.

Taro Yamamoto, a left-wing political leader and former Japanese actor, attempted to block the passage of the bill by using physical force as he flung himself toward legislators, as shown in a video posted on Twitter.

The incident lasted several minutes while fellow legislators tried to restrain him during the proceedings.

In a subsequent video, Yamamoto told his supporters that his actions were driven by concerns that the bill would result in loss of life.

It remains unclear if the incident resulted in any injuries and whether Yamamoto will face any disciplinary measures.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishidas governing coalition and other conservative parties passed the revision with their overwhelming majority despite strong opposition.

The bill would allow the deportation of foreign nationals who have applied for refugee status more than twice and failed to provide legitimate reasons for remaining in the country.

Under Japans current law, foreign nationals applying for asylum are protected from deportation, but the government said that some were applying repeatedly to stay in Japan for extended periods of time.

The revision will also allow foreign nationals facing deportation to stay outside of detention facilities, provided they are under the supervision of relatives or supporters. The decision on whether to allow detained foreigners to live outside detention facilities under the supervisory system will be reviewed on a three-month basis.

However, opponents have raised concerns that the revision could lead to the repatriation of individuals who may face persecution or even risk losing their lives if they were to be returned to their home countries.

Dozens of protesters stood outside the parliament building on Friday holding banners and shouting, Stop bad revision! and Scrap the bill! Inside parliament, opposition lawmakers took turns making protest speeches.

Human Rights Now (HRN), a non-governmental organization in special consultative status, stated on May 30 that the proposed amendments to Japans immigration law were inconsistent with core human rights standards and urged to reject the bill.

The amendment bill does not contain sufficient procedural safeguards to ensure that refugees are not returned to countries in which they would be in probable danger of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, as required under refugee law, it stated.

The bill is contrary to the international human rights standard that guarantees asylum seekers a legal presumption of liberty and requires that detention orders should be used only as a last resort, HRN added.

An earlier attempt to revise the refugee law in 2021 was shelved amid an uproar following the death of a Shri Lankan woman held at an immigration detention facility in Nagoya, central Japan, where she was not given proper medical care despite her repeated complaints of stomach problems and obvious declining health.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Businessman Denies Paying Hush Money to Man Who Allegedly Planted Hoax Bombs

Jury told device was part of 'campaign of intimidation' against NCA lawyer

Jonathan Nuttall arrives for his trial at the Old Bailey in London on May 24, 2023. (PA)

LONDONA wealthy businessman has denied he paid hush money to a man who had been arrested and accused of planting explosive devices outside the chambers of a top London barrister as part of a campaign of intimidation.

Jonathan Nuttall, 49, denies conspiracy to plant explosive devices on Sept. 14, 2021; conspiracy to transfer criminal proceedings between Feb. 1, 2021 and March 17, 2022; and several counts of refusing to disclose the PIN number or code of a number of digital devices.

Michael Broddle, 45, his sons Joshua Broddle, 20, and Charlie Broddle, 18, and Nuttalls driver, Michael Sode, 57, also deny conspiracy to plant explosive devices.

The trial at the Old Bailey has been told Nuttall harboured a great deal of animosity towards Andrew Sutcliffe, KC, a barrister who had represented the National Crime Agency (NCA) and had played a part in the confiscation of 1 million worth of assets from Nuttall and his wife Amanda.

Nuttall has been giving evidence this week and on Friday, under cross examination from prosecutor Catherine Farrelly, he was asked about a number of payments made by Sode to Michael Broddle, including some when the latter was in prison after being arrested in connection with the bomb hoax.

She repeatedly asked him about a series of text messages between Sode and Michael Broddle in the days running up to the bomb hoax incident and several bank transactions in which Sode paid money into the latters account.

Nuttall denied knowing anything about Sodes dealings with Michael Broddle and said he certainly was not being paid for work on behalf of Nuttall.

She suggested, After the leaving of the devices in Grays Inn you gave money to Sode to give to Mr. Broddle to pay for those activities, didnt you?

I did not, Nuttall replied.

Nuttall Denies Paying Broddle Not to Implicate Him

Farrelly went on, Following his arrest you continued to pay him money, hush money, to keep quiet and not implicate you, didnt you?

Nuttall replied, Thats completely wrong.

Joshua Broddle (L) and his brother Charlie (R) arriving at the Old Bailey in London on April 24, 2023. (PA)

The prosecutor then referred to a covert recording made of a meeting between Michael Broddle and his son Joshua, after the arrest, in which the father asked if Sode was still working for them two people.

She suggested this was a reference to Nuttall and his wife.

Farrelly then went on to repeat her claim that Sode was paying Michael Broddle hush money on behalf of Nuttall.

I have never paid anyone hush money and certainly not Mr. Broddle, replied Nuttall.

She then asked him about his police interviews in which he replied no comment to most of the questions he was asked by detectives.

Nuttall said he did that because he was shocked at the claims being put to him and he maintained he did not know Michael Broddle or his sons and had no idea about any bomb plot.

He said when he got back to his home in Romsey, Hampshire, he thought about what he had been asked and wrote down a full statement in which he answered all of the questions he had been asked.

Farrelly said, You were given information by the police during that interview about what they had recovered and what Im going to suggest is that you sat there listening to the information and said nothing because you didnt have an answer for them at that time.

Nuttall replied: What I said in my written response was completely true. I was never asked a single question by the police after that. They didnt want to know.

Farrelly said, They had wanted to know on that occasion [the police interview].

Nuttall replied: On that one occasion. Thats not an investigation.

She then moved on to ask him about why he had not given the police the PIN numbers to access his laptop and other electrical devices.

Nuttall said he could not remember them as he had not used them for a long time.

Denies Hiding Phone in Office Chair

Farrelly said: You deliberately failed to hand over the PIN numbers because you didnt want the police to find what was on those devices. It is the same reason why you had your phone in a chair.

This was a reference to March 17, 2022, when police arrived at his home in Romsey to conduct a search.

On Thursday, Farrelly asked him why it took four minutes and 20 seconds for him to come down and see the officers when his wife answered the door to them.

Nuttall had claimed he was in the toilet and then washed his hands and brushed his teeth, but Farrelly claimed he spent the four minutes hiding his phone in an office chair.

On Friday she continued to press this point and Nuttall replied that he did not have time to hide the phone in a chair in four minutes, and he then pointed out that in body camera footage the phone was clearly sitting on a desk.

The trial continues.

PA Media contributed to this report.
California Bill to Prohibit Employers From Requiring Employees to Confront Shoplifters Goes to Assembly

A Target customer looks at a display of board games while shopping at Target store on Dec. 15, 2022 in San Francisco, Calif. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCOThe California Senate passed a controversial bill on May 31 that would prohibit employers from requiring staff to intervene in active shoplifting. The bill is pending further review by state Assembly committees.

SB 553, authored by state Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San Jose), requires employers, who could potentially be victims of shoplifting and robberies, to Prohibitdo more to keep employees safe at work. Employers are asked to maintain a violent incident log, provide active shooter training and shoplifter training, and stop maintaining policies that require workers to confront suspected active shoplifters. The bill allows companies to apply for workplace violence restraining orders.

Cortese said in an announcement SB 553 is intended to help employers keep employees safe at work. The bill passed the Senate floor with 29 ayes and 8 noes.

The California Retailers Association (CRA) says this bill, if it becomes law, will apply to all industries, not just retail.

CRA president and CEO Rachel Michelin said in an interview with Fox 2/KTVU that this bill goes way too far.

I think it will open the doors even wider for people to come in and steal from our stores.

According to the CRA, most retailers already prohibit regular employees from approaching someone who is shoplifting. These situations are handled by employees specially trained in theft prevention instead.

If employees trained in theft deterrence are not allowed to do their job per the bill, What does that mean? We are opening up the door to allow people to walk into stores, steal, and walk out, Michelin added.

The California Chamber of Commerce (CalChamber) refers to the bill as one that takes a regulation written for hospitals related to workplace violence and applies it to all workplaces, regardless of size of resources.

In a position letter addressed to senators before the floor vote on the bill, CalChamber said, Substantively, SB 533 does not change the realities around workplace violencenamely, that it is a criminal matter that employers are not well-equipped to prevent.

Brazen shoplifting has made a dent in retail businesses bottom line. Retail chain store Target expects a $1.3 billion hit due to theft and organized crime, according to the companys first quarter earnings report of 2023.

Employees of a downtown San Francisco Target store told The San Francisco Standard that they experience at least 10 thefts a day.

The Target store at 1690 Folsom St initially locked up most of its merchandise to deter shoplifting, but quickly changed to only locking up more valuable goods.

As shoplifting plagues the San Francisco Bay Area, confronting thieves could be dangerous, even for trained professionals.

Whether to confront or not confront shoplifters has become a hot topic, especially after a security guard shot and killed a suspected shoplifter at a Walgreens store in downtown San Francisco.

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins decided not to charge the guard, Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony, after reviewing the surveillance video and Anthonys testimony.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the security guard had been directed by his employer, Kingdom Group Protective Services, to engage in hands-on recovery of stolen items.

It is unclear if SB 553s policy of prohibiting employers from forcing their workers to confront active shoplifters would apply to security guard companies. Senator Cortese specifically referred to the Chronicle report in his statement on May 31.

Just weeks before the fatal shooting at the San Francisco Walgreens store, 26-year-old Home Depot employee Blake Mohs was shot to death trying to stop an active robbery at a store in Pleasanton.

The suspected shooter, Benicia Knapps, retrieved the stolen DeWalt box, which Mohs let go of after he got shot, surveillance video showed. Knapps left with a getaway car driven by her boyfriend David Guillory, and was later apprehended by deputies of the Alameda County Sheriffs office after a pursuit.

The most expensive DeWalt tool box listed on the Home Depot website is $949 before discount, just under the $950 threshold required for a felony charge in California.

Constituents from Senator Corteses District 15 have mixed opinions on SB 553.

There probably should be a bill, Santa Clara resident Ty Wilson told NTD, sister media of The Epoch Times. I think thats probably a status quo just for safety and insurance purposes. Thats probably kind of whats happening.

Wilson admits this is a difficult problem to deal with. Its a tough situation for businesses and for the people in those situations so its a kind of confrontation thats inevitable I guess.

San Jose resident Greysi Lopez worried about the safety of his fiance, who works as a store manager, as the situation keeps escalating.

I think there should be some restrictions and some boundaries that should be met [to confront shoplifters], Lopez told NTD.

But ultimately I feel like they (shoplifters) should be apprehended because if you let them get away with this, its almost like letting a kid [to] keep stealing candy, not having them [be] responsible, and stores are losing, businesses are losing, Lopez added.

NTD reporter David Lam contributed to this story.
California School Board Responds to Newsom After Blocking Book Featuring Pedophile Activist

Temecula Valley Unifieds school board president Joseph Komrosky has responded to criticism from Gov. Gavin Newsom, doubling down on his decision to block a textbook containing references to LGBT activist Harvey Milk, whom Komrosky called a pedophile last month.

Earlier this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom took to Twitter to blast Komrosky for his comment about Milk, an openly gay activist and politician who was assassinated in 1978.

An offensive statement from an ignorant person. This isnt Texas or Florida. In the Golden State, our kids have the freedom to learn, Newsom wrote on Twitter on June 3. Congrats Mr. Komrosky, you have our attention. Stay tuned.

In a press conference on June 7, Komrosky said that his comment did not refer to Milks sexual orientation, but to reports that Milk had a sexual relationship with a minor.

A 1982 biography of Milk titled The Mayor of Castro Street describes Milks relationship with a 16-year-old named John Galen McKinley.

Ill ask you one simple question, governordo you approve of any 33-year-old person, regardless of their gender identity or sexual preference, having a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old? Komrosky asked.

Komrosky said he would have the same objections to any such adult being featured in K5th grade textbooks.

My remarks about Mr. Milk are not based upon [his] being a homosexual. But rather, based upon an adult having a sexual relationship with a minor. I would express the same sentiments [against] any adult being [featured] in K5 textbooks, he said.

Trustee Danny Gonzalez, who also voted to block the textbook last month, echoed Komroskys sentiments at the press conference.

There are plenty of historical figures who made great strides in [the LGBT] community that are not associated with inappropriate sexual relationships with children, Gonzalez said. Discussing matters of sexuality with children under 10 in a public-school setting is inappropriate. As a parent, this is not a conversation [my children will have with] anyone else but me. And especially not before we even learn about the birds and the bees.

However, Gonzalez said that ultimately, the reason he voted against the curriculum was that he saw several faults in the districts curriculum adoption process.

As an advocate for parental rights, I noticed several fatal flaws in the adoptive process, and because of community concerns that were shared with me, I demanded a process that gave more opportunity for parents and the community to be involved in the selection of the [textbooks], he said.

Gonzalez said he called on the board and administration to implement a process that includes more input from teachers, parents, and community members.

The trustee also addressed that the textbooks adoption would have solved the issue of insufficient social studies textbooks in the district, as its currently used textbook was out of print and its workbooks were one-time-use.

Gonzalez also said there was enough time before the start of the fall semester for the board to find a more suitable social studies curriculum.

The factual inaccurate charges that if we dont approve this specific curriculum right now  we will have no social science curriculum to teach in the fall is patently false, Gonzalez said. Our teachers and students will have what they need at the start of [next school] year, and Ill continue to work through this.

Meanwhile, Newsom and state Attorney General Rob Bonta released a joint statement on June 7 demanding the board provide information regarding its process in their decision to reject the curriculum.

In the statement, Bonta urged the board to ensure its curriculum meets the FAIR Act, a 2011 state law that requires the inclusion of the political, economic, and social contributions of LGBT persons and those with disabilities in educational textbooks.

We urge the Board to adhere to the FAIR Acts provisions and provide a comprehensive social sciences curriculum that reflects our diverse state and nation. This should include accurate representations of historical figures like Harvey Milk and not be influenced by personal bias, Bonta said.

The debate centers around a book called Social Studies Alive, a textbook recently piloted in district schools that was brought before the board for official approval at a May 16 board meeting.

While the textbook does not mention Milk in its main text, its optional supplemental material features him.

Komrosky, along with Gonzalez and Trustee Jennifer Wiersma, voted against the books adoption, while Trustees Allison Barclay and Steven Schwarz voted in its favor.

About 50 parents and community members attended the board members press conferencewith most attendees supporting the trustees decision.

I feel that our culture is inundating our kids with so much unnecessary [sexual] content, Chris Bout, a district parent, told The Epoch Times. And we parents have to continually push back and stand up. Ive extracted my kids from lessons before, and I make my voice known to the principal that I dont want them exposed to anything that might be sexualizing without my consent.

Bout said hes grateful to the trustees for filtering out inappropriate content before it reaches classrooms.

Sometimes its just too pervasive that its embedded into the lesson plan, he said. Im grateful we got men of righteousness here on the board to stand up for us.

Some teachers, parents, and community members, however, oppose the boards decision, saying they believe the curriculum was neutral.

The Temecula Valley Educators Association said the curriculum was accurate, age-appropriate, unbiased and politically neutral in a statement on their website.

The association held a rally on June 6 in protest of the school boards rejection of the curriculum.
Canada Sought Use of European Union Compound in Kabul for Fingerprinting, Reneged

A general view of the city of Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sept. 5, 2021. (WANA via Reuters)

Canada requested use of the European Unions compound in Kabul to help with tasks such as fingerprinting for those fleeing Afghanistan, according to documents obtained by The Canadian Press.

Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly made the request on Jan. 20, 2022, according to documents obtained through an access-to-information request.

Minister Joly asked EU High Representative (Josep) Borrell about the possibility for Canada to co-locate with the EU in Kabul, in order to conduct biometric screening from their premises, reads a July 2022 briefing note.

The document says the EU replied in early April 2022, offering space for two Canadian officials in the compound on the condition that biometric screening be performed in a third location managed by the Government of Canada.

It notes that one month later, senior bureaucrats for Global Affairs Canada determined that it would be very difficult to proceed with the EU offer.

That may be because there are issues for Afghans trying to access the Kabul compound since the Taliban takeover.

But as of June 2022, the briefing note states we are still assessing the legal, duty-of-care and operational implications of this offer, adding there are significant legal constraints that limit Canadas ability to re-establish any kind of presence in Kabul.

The Department of Global Affairs would not say whether it ended up stationing anybody at the EU compound.

We do not discuss operational details of our missions abroad for security reasons, spokeswoman Patricia Skinner wrote.

Canada remains committed to Afghanistan and the Afghan people, and we will continue to do all that we can to support them.

The EU delegation in Ottawa suggested the idea is no longer on the table.

Following Canadas request, the possibility of co-locating Canadian officials in the premises of the EU Mission in Kabul for a limited period was indeed considered, but this did not materialize in the end, reads a provided statement.

The Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship would not say if Ottawa ended up declining the offer.

For operational security reasons, we are unable to provide specific information, wrote spokesman Matthew Krupovich.

He said the governments efforts to resettle people fleeing the country have been hindered by entry and exit requirements by both the Taliban and neighbouring countries.

Canadas lack of military, diplomatic and overall presence in Afghanistan has also presented challenges in how we collect and verify the information of applicants who remain in their country, but Canada continues to explore options.

Last fall, media reports revealed Canada had been in regular talks with the Taliban, starting just weeks after it took over Afghanistan in August 2021.

The Trudeau government insisted it will not recognize the Taliban as the countrys government, but said Canadian diplomats joined Western peers in discussions with Taliban officials in Qatar in order to advocate for girls education.

Some regional experts have proposed that Western allies launch a multi-country representative office in lieu of formal embassies in Afghanistan, to keep track of the human rights situation in the country.
Is China getting closer to setting up a spy base in Americas backyard? The White House is responding after news broke that Cuba allegedly agreed to host a Chinese spy base just 100 miles from Florida. If realized, Beijing could tap the communications of many U.S. military bases and American ship traffic.

Topics in this episode:

China Building Spy Base in Cuba: Report China Pushes Hate Americans Education for Students China Opens Confucius Institute in Saudi Arabia Chinas Grain Hoarding Hurts U.S. Food Supply TikTok Code Worked on from China: Report EU Agrees on New Move to Counter Economic Coercion 37 Chinese Warplanes Enter Taiwans Air Defense Zone Scientist Jailed for Baby Gene-Editing Back in the Lab Student Finds Rat-Like Object in Cafeteria Dish How China, U.S. Shape Up in AI Race: Thornebrooke

China in Focus is sponsored by Preserve Gold. Protect your IRA or 401(k) from the declining dollar with precious metals. Learn more now: http://offers.preservegold.com/ntd
BEIJING, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday held phone talks with his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, pledging to promote China-South Africa ties, and calling for favorable conditions to solve the Ukraine crisis.

Xi said China and South Africa are both important major developing countries and the two enjoy special friendly relations like brothers.

China-South Africa relations are of important strategic significance to safeguarding the common interests of developing countries and guiding China-Africa solidarity and cooperation, Xi said.

He said this year marks the "Year of South Africa" for BRICS, and the development of bilateral relations is facing important opportunities.

China is ready to work with South Africa to upgrade bilateral relations, build a high-level China-South Africa community with a shared future, jointly practice genuine multilateralism, safeguard the common interests of developing countries, and make the international order more just and equitable.

China, Xi said, supports South Africa, as the rotating chair, in successfully hosting various BRICS cooperation activities this year.

South Africa highly cherishes and is deeply proud of the strong and high-level strategic partnership with China, Ramaphosa said.

Cooperation between the two countries benefits Africa, he said, adding that South Africa is committed to working with China to promote the continuous development of South Africa-China relations.

South Africa will deepen communication and coordination with China and other BRICS members to strengthen BRICS cooperation, Ramaphosa added.

The two sides also exchanged views on the Ukraine crisis.

Ramaphosa said that South Africa supports China's position paper on the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis and hopes that relevant parties could resume negotiations at an early date.

A peace delegation consisting of leaders of six African countries, including South Africa, will visit Russia and Ukraine to push for an end to the crisis as soon as possible, he added.

Xi told Ramaphosa that China's position on the Ukraine crisis has been consistent, which is to promote peace talks.

The Chinese leader said that he hopes all parties will build up favorable conditions for solving the crisis through dialogue, adding that it is a good thing that President Ramaphosa and leaders of relevant African countries formed a peace delegation to visit Russia and Ukraine.

It is also hoped that peace-loving countries worldwide which uphold justice can make a rational voice to promote peace talks, Xi said. 
China Sets Up Mechanism to Monitor Its Spies Amid Domestic and International Turmoils

Chinese leader Xi Jinping attends the opening of the first session of the 14th National People's Congress in Beijing, on March 5, 2023. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

Chinese Ministry of State Security, the regimes intelligence apparatus, is under more stringent supervision, while the communist regime fears loss of control of its ever-present secret agents.

The regimes spy chief published a commentary in early June, demanding loyalty to the CCP and prioritizing the monitoring of Chinas spies by setting up a new monitoring team in the state security system.

Chen Yixin, the current state-security czar, was appointed as minister of state security in October last year. Chen is regarded as a confidant of the regimes top leader Xi Jinping.

In an article published on June 5, Chen emphasized a focus on overcoming the unique difficulties of strengthening supervision on the underground front and the establishment of inspection and supervision groups for regular inspection and supervision of the leading officials in the state security system. Disloyalty is the first among the five issues that Chen wants to rectify, as revealed in his article.

China experts view this as a sign of a new purging campaign by the CCP.

[Political] purging is a standard norm of authoritarian regimes, said Feng Chongyi, associate professor of China studies at the University of Technology Sydney. He added that the CCPs top leader Xi Jinping has been cracking down on his potential political opponents from inside the regime.

The police, the state security, and the legal and judiciary system have been under the control of Xis major rival Jiang Zemin faction and are the major targets of Xis purging.

Intelligence Online, a France-based intelligence publication, wrote last November that Xi expected Chen to eliminate corruptionand any sign of oppositionin the police, the army, and the intelligence services.

The Ministry of State Security was set up in 1983, not for domestic spying at the time, but for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and political security. Fearing the loss of control domestically, Xi has appointed a confidant to control the system for him and has expanded the system into almost every field of Chinese society.

Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping (left) walks with members of the new Standing Committee of the Partys Political Bureau, (from 2nd left) Li Qiang, Zhao Leji, Wang Huning, Can Qi, Ding Xuexiang, and Li Xi as they arrive for a group photo with journalists at The Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on October 23, 2022. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Xi Faces Major Crisis From Within and Outside: China Experts

Prof. Feng said that Xi is aware of the illegitimacy of the CCP and the severe faction fighting within the party on top of the poor Chinese economy. The Chinese media has been warning two-faced persons who are disloyal to the CCP and its top leader, and Xi has been extra vigilant of any possible attempt to overturn either him or the CCP, according to Feng.

Xi wants to consolidate his power. After he has annihilated his opponents on the periphery, he is now cleaning up enemies close to him, Feng said in an interview with the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times on June 6.

The [history of the] communist regime is [one of] constant purging, and every moment [in its history] is a struggle of life and death.

Xi has been on guard against any potential threat from within the CCP. He set up the CCPs National Security Commission in November 2013 and has personally chaired the commission. In the following year, he put forward the concept of comprehensive state security, with security permeating into almost all fields in China. In Xis tenure, security now covers political security, territorial security, military security, economic security, social security, and cybersecurity, among many other types of security. Xi turned national security into a tool to control all aspects of Chinas governance.

At the same time, Xi weeded out his major political rivals, including those in the state security and police systems, such as Ma Jian, Zhou Yongkang, Sun Lijun, and Fu Zhenghua.

From 2012 to 2022, Xi used the CCPs disciplinary watchdog to get rid of nearly five million party officials in the name of anti-graft.

The inherent infighting is not the only concern that Xi has.

Wang Youqun, a former aide and copywriter for Wei Jianxing, the CCPs former anti-corruption tsar, noted that Xi has to deal with deteriorating domestic and overseas perils.

Protesters take part in a rally commemorating victims of Chinas zero-COVID policy outside Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, Japan, on Nov. 30, 2022. (Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)

In the three years of pandemic hard lockdowns, protests broke out across the country, leading to the White Paper Movement that broke out in November 2022, with young people demanding that Xi and the CCP step down. This was the first time during the CCPs decades of rule that Chinese people cried out such a demand on Chinas soil. Since then, CCP, Step Down! can be heard throughout China.

Wang also said that the Chinese economy has been declining since the outbreak of the pandemic, with a high unemployment rate, an aging population, and a nose-diving birth rate. The Chinese society is in unrest.

Overseas, Wang added, the CCPs spy balloons and overseas police stations have messed up its diplomatic relations with major democracies in the world, including the United States. and European Union member states. The CCPs increasing military coercion in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea have forced Asian countries to stand close to the United States to fight against the CCPs meddling in the surrounding regions.

On May 30, at a meeting of CCPs National Security Commission, Xi said that national security is facing a complex and critical situation. He stressed the need to adhere to bottom-line thinking and worst-case-scenario thinking and to prepare to withstand major tests of high winds and rough waves, and even perilous, stormy seas.

After the CCPs 20th National Congress, although the Xi family army [Xis loyalties] has come into full power, the security situation facing Xi has deteriorated rather than improved, Wang wrote in a commentary for the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times on June 6.

Xi and his proteges are now the seven members of the CCPs Politburo, the top decision-making body in China.

Xi has realized that he is facing a major, profound, and comprehensive internal and external crisis and that there may be a perilous wave waiting for him, wrote Wang, adding that strengthening the CCPs security forces and loyalty isnt the way out for Xi.

Ning Haizhong and Luo Ya contributed to this report.
Chinas Military Intercepts Designed to Challenge International Order: Pentagon Official

Chinese fighter jets fly near Taiwan in a still from a video released by Chinese state-run media CCTV on Aug. 7, 2022. (CCTV via Reuters/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

The Chinese military is increasing its aggression against the United States and its allies at a dramatic rate, according to a senior Pentagon official.

The Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) efforts are part of a wider goal to undermine and replace the international rules-based order, according to Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs.

To that end, the CCPs military wing, the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), has drastically increased its attempts to intercept or otherwise interfere with U.S. and allied units in the Indo-Pacific.

This is a major problem, Ratner said during a June 8 talk at the Center for a New American Security think tank.

Over the past 18 months or so, we have seen a steep rise in the number of PLA aerial intercepts in particular but, as well, in the Philippine context and others, more assertive, aggressive, unprofessional, risky, unsafe behavior by the PLA.

Ratners remarks follow two high-profile incidents in recent weeks in which the PLA and U.S. forces came close to a crisis.

In the first incident, a PLA fighter jet cut close across the nose of an American surveillance plane, forcing the U.S. aircraft to fly through the turbulence caused by the fighter jet.

In the second encounter, a PLA warship cut across the path of a U.S. Navy ship that was transiting the Taiwan Strait, forcing the American vessel to slow to avoid a collision.

Ratner described the incidents as dangerous maneuvers and underscored that they took place against the wider backdrop of a near-total communications blackout between the U.S. and CCP militaries.

Not only is it dangerous, but its happening in the context of the PLA being unwilling to engage with the United States in military-to-military communications, he said.

Virtually all attempts to discuss these and similar issues or to have any military communications at all had been repeatedly rejected and canceled by the PLA, according to Ratner.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has described the communications blackout as an effort to shield the regimes efforts to undermine the international order.

Deliberately Counter-Normative

Ratner appeared to agree with that assessment, saying the crisis-seeking behavior of the CCP was a deliberate effort to undermine the legitimacy of normative international relations and the stability and peace it provides.

This is counter-normative behavior, he said. Its dangerous. Its risky. And it tempts an incident that could lead to some kind of crisis or conflict.

The idea that the CCP is intentionally seeding a crisis isnt altogether new.

In 2001, a Chinese fighter pilot named Wang Wei, who had his own long history of buzzing Western aircraft, collided with a U.S. Navy surveillance plane and was killed after ejecting from his fighter jet over the South China Sea.

Then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin subsequently declared Wang a guardian of the seawaters and airspace, and CCP propaganda celebrated him as a revolutionary martyr, forever enshrining his actions in the cultural lexicon of Chinese communist tactics.

The granting of martyr status to Wang was also tied chronologically to the adoption of the CCPs three warfares and unrestricted hybrid warfare strategies, which seek to politicize virtually everything for the sake of proliferating communism.

PLA aggression against allied forces has experienced a resurgence under CCP leader Xi Jinping, with the regime harassing forces from the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and others.

An increasing number of these incidents have gone well beyond unsafe flying and approached outright hostility.

In one such episode in May, an Australian aircraft was forced to cut its mission short and make an emergency landing after a PLA aircraft released chaff, a radar countermeasure composed of innumerable shards of metal, directly into the Australian planes engines.

The move significantly damaged the aircrafts engines and jeopardized the lives of its crew.

Weeks later, PLA fighter pilots flew within 20 feet of a Canadian surveillance plane, made eye contact, and showed the Canadians their middle fingers.

In the first half of the year, Canada reported more than 60 such incidents, which the White House has condemned as unjustified and unprofessional.

CCP Obfuscates Causes of Confrontation



The CCP often attempts to develop propaganda around these incidents, accusing the United States and its allies of provoking the regime by flying near China.

However, what the regime doesnt acknowledge publicly is that the allied aircraft are often there because the CCP wanted them there.

In numerous instances, the CCP intercepted and harassed allied aircraft that were in the act of doing operations enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions  that Beijing voted for, according to Ratner.

In other words, the CCP voted to have U.S. and allied aircraft in the region, then used their presence in the region to justify aggression against them.

In other instances, the regime appears to have intercepted aircraft to prevent them from finding evidence of its own crimes.

Such was the case of the aforementioned Canadian aircraft which, at the time of the CCP aggression, was conducting a U.N. mission to investigate reports that Chinese ships were violating international sanctions by illegally delivering oil to North Korean vessels at sea.

Regardless, Ratner said the United States and its allies will continue to operate in the region in accordance with international law.

Were not going to be intimidated or deterred by this kind of behavior, he said.

Were going to continue to fly, sail, and operate safely and responsibly in accordance with international law, as we have been doing.

PLA Preparing for Taiwan War



The CCPs campaign of military aggression in the Indo-Pacific may also serve another aim of the regime: to clear the path for an invasion of Taiwan.

The regime claims Taiwan as part of its territory, although it has never controlled the island. CCP authorities have repeatedly threatened to start a war to force the island into unification.

Taiwan has a robust democratic government and a thriving market economy.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, believes that the CCPs aggression against U.S. and allied forces is directly related to the regimes ambition to conquer Taiwan.

Its clear the CCP has its sight set on Taiwan and is bullying the U.S. and its allies to discourage us from standing by our democratic partner, he told The Epoch Times.

Although the United States has continued to perform transits of the region undeterred, McCaul said the Biden administrations consistent attempts to try to end the communications blackout and its failure to respond in kind would only invite more aggression.

Ive always said that weakness welcomes aggression, and the Biden administrations weakness in begging the CCP for talks will only embolden the CCP to act more aggressively toward Taiwan, our other democratic Indo-Pacific allies, and U.S. presence in the region, he said.

For its part, the White House acknowledged that CCP aggression in the region is growing, but it has reiterated itll pursue communications with the regime to prevent a catastrophic miscommunication.

Sadly this is just part of a growing aggressiveness by [China] that were dealing with, and were prepared to address it, John Kirby, National Security Council spokesman, said during a press briefing last week.

We urge [the CCP] to make better decisions about how they operate in international airspace and sea space. Whether they acknowledge those rules of the road or not, they are the rules of the road.
Chinese Companies Suspected of Using Hong Kong to Trade With Iran

On June 6, the United States announced a list of sanctions against individuals and companies secretly helping Iran develop ballistic missiles, including more than ten individuals and companies from Iran, China, and Hong Kong. According to the investigation of the Epoch Times, Hong Kong Ke.Do International Trade Co Ltd on the list is a shell company closely related to Qingdao Zhongrong Tong Trade Development Co Ltd, which is suspected of trading in non-ferrous metals.

According to information released by the U.S. Treasury Department, this international network consisting of seven individuals and six companies facilitated the procurement of sensitive and critical components and technology for Irans ballistic missile development by key institutions including the Iranian Ministry of Defense and its subsidiaries.

Hong Kong Ke.Do International Trade Co Ltd and Qingdao Zhongrong Tong Trade Development Co Ltd were sanctioned for jointly selling military-civilian dual-use non-ferrous metals worth millions of dollars to intermediary PB Sadr.

A manager named Wei Zunyi, a commercial manager named Qin Xutong, and an accountant named Gong Jiao, who participated in this transaction, were also sanctioned.

Hong Kong Ke.Do International Trade Co Ltd Is a Shell Company.

Hong Kong Ke.Do International Trade Co Ltd was registered in Hong Kong on Aug. 13, 2020, and is currently valid but has no official website.

The companys registered address is Southex Building, Kwun Tong, Kowloon. A reporter from The Epoch Times found out from the security guard of the building at the address that the building had been vacant for two years and was currently undergoing renovation and reconstruction, with no companies present.

The reporter found on the Asian Metal Trading Matching Platform in mainland China that Hong Kong Ke.Do International Trade Co Ltd posted a request on Aug. 24, 2022, seeking to purchase 180 tons of 4130 steel pipe rods and plates, with delivery to major ports in China. 4130 steel pipe is a type of steel containing multiple non-ferrous metals. The reporter tried to contact Li Wenwei, the contact person listed on the platform but found her Beijing phone number was invalid.

The reporter then contacted Asian Metal for help and learned that the contact person for Ke.Do International was in mainland China. The reporter pretended to be a seller and requested an employee of the platform to contact Ke.Do International in mainland China. The employee relayed that Ke.Do International said it was a previous request, and they do not wish to be contacted again. They also said that they have now switched from steel materials to non-ferrous metals. The employee also stated they were unwilling to disclose their contact information.

According to The Epoch Times search at the company registry, Hong Kong Ke.Do International Trade Co., Ltd. was established on Aug. 13, 2020, with Qin Xutong holding a Chinese passport, as its director. She also registered another company called Hong Kong Meta Resource Ltd in 2015.

Qin is also a shareholder of another sanctioned company, Qingdao Zhongrongtong Trade Development Co., Ltd., holding a ten percent stake, while another Chinese citizen, Gao Dongbo, holds a 90 percent stake. Qin joined Qingdao as a supervisor on April 1, 2020, and registered Ke.Dou in Hong Kong four months later. Gao replaced another Chinese national, Wei Zunyi, on the same day to become a shareholder, executive director, and manager.

The Epoch Times also found that after Qin joined Qingdao, the company changed its businesses several times. On May 23, 2020, it added businesses such as import and export agency, goods import and export, technology import and export, and sales of non-ferrous metal alloys and high-performance non-ferrous metal and alloy materials.

On July 27, 2022, it added businesses that require approval, such as the operation of dangerous chemicals. Operation of dangerous chemicals in mainland China includes enterprises that operate highly toxic chemicals and enterprises that operate easily explosive dangerous chemicals.@
Chinese Ships Enter Japanese Waters, Prompts Tokyo to Protest

In this photo provided by Japan Coast Guard, an armed Chinese coast guard ship sails in the water near islands, known as the Senkaku in Japanese and the Diaoyu in Chinese, on Dec. 22, 2015. (Japan Coast Guard via AP)

Chinese vessels entered Japans waters in the East China Sea at two separate locations on Thursday, prompting Tokyo to lodge protests against Beijing.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno, the top Japanese government spokesperson, said Japan conveyed strong concern and lodged a protest against China through diplomatic channels after a Chinese military ship intruded into Japans waters.

According to the Japanese Defense Ministry, a Chinese Navy Shupang-class survey ship entered Japanese waters near Yakushima Island in Kagoshima Prefecture, off the islands southwest coast, around 10 a.m., reported the Yomiuri Shimbun.

The naval vessel left around 1 p.m. from the west side of Kuchinoerabu Island, heading west, the ministry added.

It marked the 11th time since February for a naval vessel from Beijing crossed into Japans territory.

Surveying activities in other countries waters are forbidden under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

However, international law also allows vessels, including military vessels, to pass through other countries waters as long as they dont pose a threat to the countries security and order.

On the same day, two Chinese Coast Guard vessels also entered Japans territorial waters around the Senkaku Islandsreferred to by China as Diaoyuand tried to approach a Japanese fishing boat, Matsuno said.

The Japanese Coast Guard (JCG) said the intrusion was the first time Chinese coast guard vessels entered Japanese waters since May 24.

The vessels entered an area off the Minami-Kojima Island in the Senkaku Islands shortly after 11:50 a.m., the JCGs 11th Regional Coast Guard Headquarters in Naha said, reported the Yomiuri Shimbun.

The Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea have mostly been administered by Japan since 1895, but Beijing began asserting its rights over the islands in the 1970s.

Japans coast guard subsequently sent out patrol boats to deter the Chinese vessels from staying in Japanese waters, and the Japanese government later lodged a protest with China via diplomatic channels.

According to Japans Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whenever Chinas coast guard ships enter Japans territorial waters, on-site Japanese patrol vessels demand them to leave, and the Japanese Government promptly lodges a strong protest against the Chinese regime through diplomatic channels to prevent such incidents from occurring again.

The latest intrusions come after Japan and China agreed on June 3 to ensure the reliability of their military hotline operation in order to prevent potential clashes amid rising tensions in the East China Sea.

Both sides agreed on June 3 on the need to promote dialogue and exchange while ensuring that their military hotlinewhich began operation in Mayis being used appropriately.

The hotline was established to link the leadership of Japans Self-Defense Forces at the nations defense ministry with Chinese defense ministry officials. Japans government earlier stated the military hotline is not only for responding when unforeseen circumstances occur but also for building trust between the two countries.

At the June 3 meeting, Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada told his Chinese counterpart Li Shangfu he was concerned about the situation in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, particularly the Senkaku Islands.

The Chinese regime has laid claim to most of the South China Sea, citing the so-called nine-dash linea vaguely-defined U-shaped delineation that carves out the regions where it claims historic rights to resources within the seadespite competing claims from other nations, including Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines, and Taiwan.

Aldgra Fredly and Reuters contributed to this report.
Christian Broadcasting Network Founder Pat Robertson Dead at 93

Marion Gordon Pat Robertson, the religious broadcasting pioneer who founded The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), died early on June 8 at his home in Virginia, the network confirmed. He was 93.

CBN honored the longtime TV host and one-time presidential candidate in a statement on Thursday, saying Robertsons rise to prominence was rooted in what he called a vision from God to create the Christian news outlet in 1960.

No cause of death was given but Robertson faced a series of health challenges in recent years, including a horseback riding accident in 2017 and an embolic stroke in February 2018, according to CBN. His wife of 70 years, Dede Robertson, died in April last year at the age of 94.

Despite his declining health and losing the love of his life  Robertsons faith, obedience, and love for God never wavered, CBN said.

Besides CBN, Robertsons enterprises also included Regent University, an evangelical Christian school in Virginia Beach; the American Center for Law and Justice, which defends the First Amendment rights of religious people; and Operation Blessing, an international humanitarian organization.

Early Life and Presidential Candidacy

Robertson was born into a prominent political family on March 22, 1930, in Lexington, Virginia, to Absalom Willis Robertsonwho served for decades as a U.S. representative and senator from Virginiaand Gladys Churchill Robertson.

After graduating from Washington and Lee University, he served as the assistant adjutant of the First Marine Division in Korea before going on to receive a law degree from Yale University Law School in 1955. However, he failed his first and only attempt at a bar exam necessary for admission to the New York State Bar Association. He ultimately chose not to pursue a law career.

I ended up at the headquarters command of the First Marine Division, Robertson said, according to the official site of his military service. The Division was in combat in the hot and dusty, then bitterly cold portion of North Korea just above the 38th Parallel later identified as the Punchbowl and Heartbreak Ridge.' He was awarded three Battle Stars for his service in the Korean War and was promoted to First Lieutenant upon his return to the United States.

In 1952, Robertson met his wife, Adelia Dede Elmer, at Yale. He was a Southern Baptist, and she was a Catholic, earning a masters in nursing. About 18 months later, they ran off to be married by a justice of the peace, knowing neither family would approve.

Robertson also campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988 and finished second in the Iowa caucuses behind Kansas Sen. Robert Dole. He later endorsed George H.W. Bush, who won the presidency.

Then-presidential candidate Pat Robertson speaks in Houston on Feb. 27, 1988. (Pam MacDonald/AP Photo)

Religious Broadcasting

After moving his wife and children to Virginia, Robertson bought a bankrupt ultra-high-frequency TV station in Portsmouth. He said he had just $70 to his name and a company bank account with a meager $3 initial deposit, but he soon found investors and CBN went on air on Oct. 1, 1961.

He had no money to speak of, and he decided the Lord wanted him to have that station, recalled Greg Laurie, senior pastor of the Harvest Christian Fellowship in California. When it was all said and done, Pat got it for free. So that means not only did he have faith, but he was a good negotiator, too.

Established as a tax-exempt religious nonprofit, CBN brought in hundreds of millions of dollars, disclosing $321 million in ministry support in 2022 alone. One of Robertsons innovations was the use of a secular talk-show format on the 700 Club, a hugely popular program on the network.

The political commentators guests eventually also included several U.S. presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

Trump remembered Robertson in a post on Truth Social, saying: Today the World lost an incredible and powerful Voice for Faith and Freedom. Pat Robertson showed us that Belief in God produces results that can change the course of History. Pats legacy lives on in the many endeavors and lives that he touched. He will be greatly missed. Our hearts and prayers are with his Family!

Tributes

Other political figures and Christian leaders from across the nation have since offered condolences to the late media mogul who turned a tiny Virginia TV station into a global media phenomenon reaching hundreds of millions of people across six of the seven continents.

Robertson was a giant among Christian leaders and contributed enormously to the cause of Christ. He led multiple millions to a saving knowledge of the gospel, and heaven will be populated by people who came under Pats influence. He pioneered Christian radio and television, paving the way for many of us who came behind, Christian commentator Dr. James Dobson wrote in a post on Facebook.

Former Vice President Mike Pence also remembered Robertson in a post on Twitter, describing him as an inspiration to millions through his writings and advocacy.

Pat touched countless lives with the gospel of Jesus Christ including mine, Pence wrote. I have long been inspired by his stand for America and our traditional values.

Pat Robertsons bold faith was an inspiration to millions and we mark his passing with a sense of personal loss. Through his writings, broadcasts and advocacy, Pat touched countless lives with the gospel of Jesus Christ including mine. I have long been inspired by his stand for  Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) June 8, 2023

Robertsons son, Gordon, succeeded him in December 2007 as chief executive of CBN, which is now based in Virginia Beach. Robertson remained chairman of the network and continued to appear on the 700 Club. He eventually stepped down as host of the show after half a century in 2021, with his son Gordon taking over the weekday show.

Robertson is survived by his four children, Tim, Elizabeth, Gordon, and Ann; 14 grandchildren, and 24 great-grandchildren, according to CBN.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

From NTD News
COVID-19 Fines in Victoria Totalled $100 Million: Attorney-General

Police patrol the quiet streets of Melbourne, Australia, on Oct. 4, 2021. (William West/AFP via Getty Images)

Victorians are being warned not to ignore $100 million (US$67 million) of COVID-19 fines issued by authorities during the pandemic years.

In a state Budget Estimates hearing, Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes revealed that 50,150 fines were issued, but only 5,500 were paid (in full or in part).

Another 14,319 fines were unpaid and have passed their due date, leading to enforcement warrants being issued.

While 3,716 individuals chose to challenge their fines in court, another 11,800 had theirs cancelled.

With 20 percent of fines being withdrawn, Symes said Victorians could not risk ignoring current fines.

Fines dont go away unless you take action for them, she told the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee.

There is a variety of ways that you can seek to engage with the department to deal with your fines, whether its through payment plans or whether people have got grounds to have them withdrawn.

Melbourne in Victoria was subjected to one of the longest lockdown periods in the world over the pandemic years, enduring over 262 days under tough government restrictions.

Protesters march against lockdowns, in Melbourne, Australia, on Aug. 21, 2021. (Getty Images)

In turn, mass protests would flare up during that timeframe against measures such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

Victorias police chief commissioner, Shane Patton, would later announce initiatives to strengthen the relationship between police and the community.

The global pandemic took up a lot of our focus over the last two years, Patton said. Its time to reset and reconnect with the community.

Study Says Community-Police Relations Damaged

Meanwhile, research from the University of New South Wales concluded that issuing fines for behaviours that would never have previously attracted police attention damaged relations between law enforcement and the community.

The biggest lesson we can learn is that we should be very careful about imposing big fines as a mechanism of registering a need for compliance in the community. Fines are not simple, and its not just a slap on the wrist, said Prof. Luke McNamara.

Police detain a man in Sydney, following calls for an protest rally amid the COVID-19 pandemic, on Sept. 18, 2021. (Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)

New South Wales authorities issued $45.9 million in fines between July and Sep. 2021during Sydneys toughest lockdown periodfor alleged breaches of ministerial orders made under the Public Health Act 2010.

Yet in 2022, the state government was forced to overturn 33,000 fines after a court ruling found the penalties were improperly imposed with the offences not outlined clearly or specified.

I am withdrawing all the fines related to those particular offences  and get a refund back to those people as quickly as possible, said Revenue NSWs Fines Commissioner Scott Johnson in comments to reporters.

Around 29,000 fines remain.

3,000 COVID-19 Fines Handed to Children in NSW

This comes after it was revealed that 3,000 Australian kids aged between 10 to 17 were slapped with AU$2.1 million (US$1.5 million) in fines between July 2020 and December 2021, according to data from New South Wales (NSW) Police in Australias most populous state.

The data obtained under information laws by the Redfern Legal Centre (RLC) found 2,920 fines were issued, with around 59 percent of fines costing between $1,000 to $5,000.

Around 17 children were issued with a $5,000 fine, 39 with a $3,000 fine, and 1,659 with $1,000 fine.

A police officer speaks to a member of the public as part on public health order compliance operations at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, on Aug. 15, 2021. (Brook Mitchell/Getty Images)

Under the now rescinded state public health orders, fines were issued for breaches of previous COVID-19 health regulations, including not wearing a mask, breaking curfew, and straying from the allowed five-kilometre radius of the home.

The issuing of a penalty notice should be a measure of last resort, especially where children are concerned, Samantha Lee, the Redfern Legal Centres police accountability solicitor, said in a press release at the time.

In terms of age groups, 19 to 29-year-olds were the most likely to attract a fine with 21,538 infringements, followed by the 30 to 39 age group (12,279), 40 to 49 (8,900), 50 to 59 (4,740), and under 18s (3,095).
COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha Leaving White House

COVID-19 Response Coordinator, Ashish Jha, speaks at the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, on Dec. 15, 2022. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

White House COVID-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha is leaving the Biden administration to return to his previous role at a university.

Jha, who succeeded Jeff Zients as the White House COVID-19 response coordinator in March 2022, will return to his former role as Dean at the Brown University School of Public Health on July 1, the school said in a June 8 press release.

Upon his return, Jha will focus on transforming public health education, research, and practice, according to the school.

We are in a world drastically altered by the COVID-19 pandemic, Jha said in announcing his stepping down.

For all we have accomplished to reduce illness and save lives, COVID-19 has exposed the weaknesses in our public health and healthcare systems, he said.

I look forward to returning to Brown to continue our groundbreaking work transforming public health education, research, and practice to convert these weaknesses to strengths.

Prior to Brown, Jha served as the Faculty Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute from 2014 until 2020 and the Dean for Global Strategy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health from 2018 to 2020.

He stepped into the role of White House COVID-19 response coordinator during a surge in Omicron variant cases and oversaw nationwide vaccine distribution while advising on pandemic preparedness and response.

While he quickly became a public health communicator for everything pandemic-related, he was also criticized for making false claims, including that there have not been any serious side effects from COVID-19 vaccines.

Jhas stepping down comes after the federal COVID-19 public health emergency expired on May 11, just days after the World Health Organization declared an end to the global health emergency.

Biden Praises Jhas Public Service

President Joe Biden praised Jha in a separate statement on June 8 while noting that we now have the tools to manage COVID-19 and the virus no longer controls our daily lives, which he credited to his administrations whole-of-government approach.

For the last year, I have relied on Dr. Ashish Jha to help me do just that as the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator. As one of the leading public health experts in America, he has effectively translated and communicated complex scientific challenges into concrete actions that helped save and improve the lives of millions of Americans, Biden said.

I extend my deepest thanks to Ashish and his family. We are a stronger and healthier nation because of his contributions to public service, he said.

Following Jhas departure, the director of the White Houses nascent Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, who has not yet been named, will advise the Biden administration president coordinate federal responses to pandemic threats, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Speaking to The Hill in May, Jha explained that the administration is still focused on COVID-19, vaccines, and other possible pandemics and is absolutely not wrapping up its work on the issues despite the federal COVID-19 public health emergency expiring.

Its a transition, and its a transition to a period of time where we can manage this virus in a way thats not disruptive, Jha said. But we are absolutely committed to continuing the fight against COVID and continuing the fight against future pandemics.
Cryptocurrency-Related Scams Cost Victims Five Times More Than Other Internet Crimes in 2022: Study

Bitcoin coins are seen at a stand during the Bitcoin Conference 2023, in Miami Beach, Florida, on May 19, 2023. (Marco Bello/Reuters/File Photo)

Victims of cryptocurrency scams lost five times more money last year when compared to other types of internet crimes, according to the findings of a recent study from cybersecurity company Surfshark.

The study, published on June 6, analyzed open-source information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), including the 2022 internet crime reports data on internet crimes in 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

It found that cryptocurrency scams in the United States had cost each victim an average of $86,000 per year when compared to scams involving traditional payment methods, who lost an average loss of $16,000 per year.

The disparity may be down to blockchain immutability, as crypto payments are permanent and not reversible, Surfshark noted.

Overall in 2022, more than $2.3 billion worth of crypto was lost to internet crimes across America, despite just 6 percent of internet crime victims in the United States paying scammers in crypto.

This is down to the substantial financial impact of these scams which resulted in them representing a significant 24 percent share of all cybercrime-related financial losses last year.

The FBI pegs the total losses at just over $2.4 billion in its 2022 internet crime report (pdf), which noted that cryptocurrency scams witnessed an unprecedented rise last year. Overall, victims suffered more than $10.2 billion in financial losses owing to online scams in 2022, up from $6.9 billion in 2021, the FBI found.

Those losses were likely driven in part by the $320 million that hackers made off with in February last year from cryptocurrency exchange platform Wormhole and the $570 million that was stolen from Binance, the worlds biggest cryptocurrency exchange.

Crypto Scams Across the States

Sam Bankman-Frieds failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX also reported around $413 million worth of stolen cryptocurrency last year, although an investigation into that alleged hack remains ongoing.

According to Surfsharks study, the amount of money lost to crypto-related scams varied drastically from state to state.

Victims located in the state of South Dakota saw the most severe impact from cryptocurrency crimes last year, suffering an average loss of $998,000 per victim, 10 times more than the national average.

That was followed closely by those living in New Hampshire at $147,000 per victim, Georgia with $138,000 per victim, Delaware with $121,000 per victim, and California with $117,000 per victim.

While the Golden State came in at fifth place in terms of average losses per victim, it also had the highest number of crypto-scam victimsaccounting for 4,879 individuals, or 18 percent of the nations total, given its huge population.

It also had the highest total losses$572.6 millionsuggesting that Californians are most at risk of falling victim to such scams.

In contrast, the states of Mississippi ($14,884 per victim), Alaska ($20,305 per victim), and Arkansas ($27,670) were the least impacted by crypt-related scams, according to the study.

Criminals prefer cryptocurrencies not only because of their relative anonymity, Aleksandr Valentij, chief information security officer at Surfshark, told the American Banker.

If the victim realizes theyve been scammed, crypto transfers cannot be reversed like bank transfers, and the money is lost forever, especially if it goes through a cryptocurrency tumbler or is washed in any other way, Valentij continued. This is particularly convenient for scammers, and combined with the inflated interest in crypto we have at the moment, it creates a perfect environment for crypto scams.
To the younger generation, Advice, from the belly of the beast.

I am a 41-year-old federal prisoner, convicted of drug trafficking and weapons possession. I hope you will take heed of this advice and avoid the mess I made for myself and my loved ones.

First, it is in your best interest to find a religion to adhere to. The Bible will never steer you wrong. You can find all of the basic rules of life in Proverbs.

If you spend time listening to people glorify drugs, killing, gangs, or any type of negative content, you are setting yourself up for failure. I promise you that reality in the underworld is a dark place, and not even close to what those entertainers claim it to be. The reality is you will be dead or locked up if you play in that world. And prison is a horrible place. Please remember: All drugs will ruin you!

Fill your mind with positive things. Find something positive you love and learn all about it. Then take what you learned and pass it on. Find people with the same positive mindset, and choose those people as your friends. Remember the saying Show me your friends, and I will tell you who you are, so choose wisely.

Remember that no one owes you anything. Everything in this world must be earned. It doesnt matter how hard your life is, you are not a victim. You can and will succeed if you only believe and see yourself winning in your mind. Your self-image is the key. If you see yourself in a positive light, positive things will happen.

Always ask questions! Dont just believe everything people tell you. If something doesnt seem right, then it probably isnt. Dont be intellectually lazy, find the facts yourself. Especially regarding our country. If it was so bad here, millions would not be flooding the border. Take a look at other places and thank God every day that you are here.

In conclusion, always take responsibility for your actions. If you mess up, make it right somehow. Ask God to forgive you, and remember to forgive those who wronged you. I will pray for you. God bless.

Respectfully,

Joshua R. Souza, Pennsylvania

____

Do not trust or rely on your juvenile way of thinking, especially if you dont stand for something righteous. Before you make a choice on anything, seek guidance and evaluate how it will affect those who are around you. Ive made choices where I did not think about how much suffering I would cause my family. Now I regret all of it and would give anything to be with my loving family again. I acted on impulse and didnt think about anyone else but me. Above all, seek the Lord and do not conform to this deceptive world. God Bless. Maranatha!

Irving Gomez

P.S.: I am serving 25 years in a federal prison. Im a changed man now, thanks to my Lord.

___________

What advice would you like to give to the younger generations?

We call on all of our readers to share the timeless values that define right and wrong and pass the torch, if you will, through your wisdom and hard-earned experience. We feel that the passing down of this wisdom has diminished over time and that only with a strong moral foundation can future generations thrive.

Send your advice, along with your full name, state, and contact information, to NextGeneration@epochtimes.com or mail it to: Next Generation, The Epoch Times, 229 W. 28th St., Floor 7, New York, NY 10001.
Defendant Seeks to Identify Jan. 6 Suspicious Actors, Government Informants at Capitol

A suspicious actor vandalized a Capitol window on Jan. 6, 2021. He has not been placed on the FBI wanted list nor has he been arrested or charged. (Bobby Powell/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

A Texas man who says he was set up for prosecution for shooting video of a U.S. Capitol window smashing on Jan. 6, 2021, wants to compel prosecutors to identify suspicious actors or informants who could have been behind the vandalism.

Ryan S. Zink, 34, of Lubbock, Texas, filed a motion with U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington to force the government to identify individuals suspected of being confidential government sources, undercover agents, or protected Antifa assets.

Prosecutors have not yet filed a reply with the court.

On March 5, 2021, Zink was indicted for alleged obstruction of an official proceeding, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building.

Zink was standing directly in front of a window on the upper-east patio of the Capitol when 20-year-old Hunter A. Ehmke of Glendora, California, jumped onto the window sill and began smashing the glass.

A group of eight Capitol Police officers tackled Ehmke and restrained him. The officers then inexplicably abandoned the broken window and left the area with Ehmke, who was later convicted and sentenced to four months in jail for the vandalism.

What happened next is at the center of Zinks motion and remains one of the enduring mysteries of Jan. 6.

Agent and Vandal?

While Michigan journalist Bobby Powell began cleaning up the smashed glass, a man approached him and asked why he didnt break the rest of the window and go inside the Capitol.

As Powell turned away momentarily, the dark-clad man pulled a large sheet of tempered glass from the damaged window. Powell turned his camera back just in time to capture the vandalism. The unidentified man quickly dropped the sheet of glass.

He then approached protester Gavin Crowl, shoved him so hard he nearly fell down, and shouted, Why are you breaking that window? Who do you think you are? Get out of here! Crowl, seemingly increduloussince his accuser was the guilty partywalked away when the man made a fist as if to strike him, video shows.

In this case, Mr. Zink is being prosecuted for serious crimes in part for trying to expose unknown vandals at the Capitol whom are not being prosecuted, reads the motion filed by defense attorney John Pierce.

As a matter of basic fairness, due process, and the right to confront accusers, Mr. Zink has a right to know and cross-examine the witnesses and actors he is accused of interacting with on January 6.

Pierce said the defense believes the government knows the identity of the man, whom the FBI did not seek despite Powells vociferous attempts to get the Bureau to take notice.

Zink, like Powell, was also a witness to these same events. The prosecution is withholding the exculpatory evidence of who the players were or are, and how Zink was set up for prosecution, the motion said.

Now, instead of recognizing or rewarding Zinks valiant efforts, the United States is prosecuting Zink and not the people who committed the crimes.

Prosecutors allege on his way to the Capitol, Zink broadcast video on social media on which he stated, We stormed the Capitol. Theres thousands of us here. They cant stop us all!

Zink posted on Facebook that he was literally inside the capital (sic) shots fired on the floor there is a fire and gas and flash bangs have been used multiple serious injuries reported.

Zink told The Epoch Times that despite suggestions in his charging documents, he never went inside the Capitol.

Yes, they say I forced my way inside. That never happened, Zink said in a statement. I never went in the building. They made it up, never having any proof of me going in the building, yet stated I did.

While the window-vandalizing man in Powells video has not appeared on the FBIs Jan. 6 most-wanted page, the Sedition Hunters web site created a listing for him on April 3 with a variety of photos from various places on Capitol grounds.

The Capitol Glass Man was also found on video shot by a French television crew, appearing to render aid to a Capitol Police officer who had been sprayed with mace.

A man standing next to him, wearing a cap with two green stripes around the brim, was holding a white wooden pole that appears identical to one Glass Man carried onto the east patio a short time earlier.

The man with the striped hat appears in several photos with Glass Man in the Sedition Hunters photo gallery. His identity is not known.

Election Mystery

Zinks case was already shrouded in mystery. His father, suburban Phoenix resident Jeff Zink, told The Epoch Times that he received a series of phone calls urging him to drop his Republican bid for U.S. House in Arizonas 3rd Congressional District.

In the first instance, he said, an unidentified caller told him the Jan. 6 case against his son would be dropped if he would scrap his candidacy.

There was a voice on the other end, Zink said, and it stated that if I would drop out of the race, that they would drop the charges on my son.

Jeff Zink took his phone to some white-hat hackers for analysis. They told him there were no data on the phone showing he received such a call.

Zink said he received two other calls, both of which promised him money if he would drop out of the race. In the first, the caller said if I would drop out of the race, there would be an account with enough money that my wife and I would never have to work again, Zink said.

Zink lost to Democrat incumbent Ruben Gallego in the Nov. 8, 2022, midterm election.
BISSAU, June 9 (Xinhua) -- The PAI Terra Ranka coalition, an opposition group led by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, has won Guinea-Bissau's parliamentary elections, taking 54 of the 102 seats at stake, according to provisional results released Thursday by the National Electoral Commission.

President of Guinea-Bissau Umaro Sissoco Embalo's Movement for Democratic Alternation came second with 29 seats, followed by the Party for Social Renewal with 12 seats.

The Workers' Party, led by Agriculture Minister Botche Cande and taking part in an election for the first time, gained six seats, against one for Prime Minister Nuno Gomes Nabiam's Assembly of the People United-Democratic Party of Guinea-Bissau.

Some 900,000 voters were called to the polls to elect new members of parliament for a five-year term. The vote was conducted peacefully under the supervision of 230 international observers. 
Emergency Officials Investigating After Freight Train Hauling New Vehicles Derails In Arizona

Cause of accident remains unknown after 23 carriages leave the tracks

A fiery train derailment in Arizona on July 29, 2020. (Courtesy of KPHO/KTVK)

Authorities said a freight train derailed in northern Arizona about 30 miles west of Flagstaff on June 7, heavily damaging 23 rail cars.

Coconino County Emergency Management (CCEM) officials said the agency is investigating the 11:20 p.m. accident involving a BNSF freight train east of Williams.

A total of 23 cars derailed and sustained heavy damage. The train cars involved were carrying a variety of new cars, vans, and trucks. There were no injuries or fatalities as a result of the incident. Cleanup is currently underway, CCEM said in a press release.

News outlets reported the train was heading for California and traveling at about 50 mph when the freight cars derailed near several homes.

CCEM Director West Dison told Fox10 there are no concerns about hazardous materials; however, the cleanup could take several days.

It was about as good a result as we could see for such a significant incident, Dison told Fox10.

Our BNSF partners already had this well in hand; they were already there. Our job is really to provide any support they might need.

String of accidents

Nationwide, there have been at least a dozen train derailments this year.

The worst occurred on Feb. 3 when a train carrying vinyl chloride derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, prompting evacuations and a massive environmental cleanup.

On Feb. 1, a train went off the tracks near a bridge in Detroit, Michigan, while a train collision with an empty freight car in Chico, Texas, on April 17 injured two rail workers.

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 54,539 train derailments in the United States were reported between 1990 and 2021.

In 2002, a train derailment in North Dakota injured 1,441 people.

In an unrelated incident, Union Pacific (UP) and explosives manufacturing company Dyno Nobel are still investigating the disappearance of more than 30 tons of ammonium nitrate from a train heading west from Wyoming to California in April.

Ammonium nitrate is a chemical compound in fertilizer and high explosives.

Preliminary findings of the investigation suggest that a leak in the bottom gate of a rail car containing the chemical occurred during transport.

UP did not return an email seeking further information on the investigation from The Epoch Times.
Experts Say Land Management, Firefighter Support Essential to Control Wildfires

The U.S. Capitol building is under a haze of smoke caused by the ongoing wildfires in Canada in Washington on the morning of June 8, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

With smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketing the U.S. Capitol and an active wildfire season predicted for 2023, Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) said the United States may have become a victim of its own ingenuity.

Were getting a lot better at [fighting fires]. We thought that if you suppress fires, thats the end of it, but thats not the end of it, Risch said. Weve caused the problem that weve got.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said climate change, advancements in firefighting, and neglected forestry management are taking a toll.

He said smoke is common in the western United States. Manchin noted studies have shown that wildfire smoke makes up 30 percent of particulate matter in the air in some western states. Over half of the most destructive fires in U.S. history have occurred since 2018.

We have essentially created a perfect storm. With each passing year, we slip further behind, Manchin said.

Firefighters walk past backfireflames lit by firefighters to burn off vegetationwhile battling the Mosquito Fire in the Volcanoville community of El Dorado County, Calif., on Sept. 9, 2022. (Noah Berger/AP Photo)

According to foresters and government officials, the focus on dousing flames ignores how present fires can prevent future fires. In addition, there needs to be more support for the people who control and, when necessary, put out fires.

Jaelith Hall-Rivera is deputy chief of state, private, and tribal forestry for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. During a June 8 hearing, she told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which Manchin chairs, that the situation is becoming dire.

Wildfire risks have reached crisis proportions, she said.

Kelly Norris, interim state forester for the Wyoming State Forestry Division, said that state, local and federal agencies must work together to manage property adequately. This means removing brush, dead wood, and other fuel for wildfires while leaving adequate trees, plants, and water systems to promote wildlife and a healthy environment.

We need to address how we manage our forests by making investments in them, Norris said.

A neighborhood smolders after being destroyed by the Mill Fire in Weed, Calif., on Sept. 2, 2022. (Hung T. Vu/The Record Searchlight via AP)

These investments include mechanical forestry managementclearing undergrowth, brush, and other potential fueland prescribed burning. This would prevent the kind of catastrophic wildfires that have plagued the U.S. in recent years. Previous management efforts have been stymied, committee members said.

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) said the so-called Cottonwood decision has made it almost impossible to do the work needed to prevent wildfires in his state.

The ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, named for the Cottonwood Environmental Law Center of Bozeman, Montana, requires the U.S. Forestry Service to review all management plans and consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service whenever a new species is listed under the Endangered Species Act, when a new critical habitat is designated, or when further information about a listed species is found.

Daines said Congress needs to pass laws to prevent frivolous lawsuits.

While suppression has contributed to the problem, its also a part of the solution thats been neglected, the experts said.

Facing a Pay Cliff

Jeffrey Rupert, director of the Office of Wildland Fire for the U.S. Department of the Interior, said temporary pay raises for federal wildland firefighters have helped. Still, the money for those raises will run out in September.

Were facing a pay cliff, Rupert said.

According to Rupert, recruiting new firefighters will become almost impossible if something isnt done. Cardell Johnson, director of natural resources and environment for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, verified Ruperts concerns.

Johnson said the top four reasons firefighters quit are low pay, poor work-life balance, high living costs at remote duty stations, and few advancement opportunities. Johnson said a pay raise would go a long way toward addressing the firefighters concerns.

Many food service jobs offer equal or better pay for less dangerous work, Johnson said.

Could Lose Half of Firefighters

Hall-Rivera said that if pay concerns are not addressed, the Department of the Interior stands to lose 30 to 50 percent of its firefighters.

Manchin said it only makes sense for Congress to make the pay raises permanent because the government is already paying it indirectly. He pointed out that many firefighters quit to take higher-paying positions with private contractors. In turn, when the federal government needs assistance, it hires those contractors, in effect paying the firefighters increased salary.

Hall-Rivera and Rupert confirmed Manchins take. Hall-Rivera said it would take about $569 million to cover pay increases, better physical and mental health care, and housing costs.

We would need Congress to pass special legislation. These efforts will help us address our long-term recruiting challenges, Hall-Rivera said.
Film Fans Discover Censored Scene in Iconic Film The French Connection

Actor Gene Hackman poses with his Cecil B. Demille Award backstage during the 60th Annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Jan. 19, 2003. (Robert Mora/Getty Images)

A censored version of 1971s Oscar-winning The French Connection is now part of the Criterion Collection, reported fans of the film.

The movies alteration, which appears about 10 minutes into the film, involves a racial slur in a scene between characters Jimmy Popeye Doyle played by Gene Hackman and Buddy Cloudy Russo played by veteran actor Roy Scheider. Both were cast as tough narcotics detectives and its during a sequence as the two exchange dialog, the character of Doyle says the N-word after Scheiders character is slashed by a black drug pusher.

The change was first noticed and mentioned by a reader of the daily online stream-of-Hollywood-consciousness column Hollywood Elsewhere, created by Jeffrey Wells. The commenter noticed the censored scene while watching the film on the Criterion Channel, a streaming platform designed to be dedicated to preserving classic motion pictures. Wells himself then backed up that claim.

Later, other commenters on the site noted the absence of the line of dialog when the film was screened at Hollywoods American Cinematheques Aero Theatre on May 12. Still, additional Hollywood Elsewhere users said that Turner Classic Movies also broadcasted a censored version and that the purchased version on iTunes is also changed. Both Criterion and TCM didnt notify audiences of the change. Another version recorded off of Fox Movies was uncensored, according to one person.

Christian Toto, host of the Hollywood In Toto podcast, reported earlier this week that when Dutch filmmaker and director Tom Six (known for his trilogy of body horror films titled The Human Centipede) noticed the change, he was outraged. Six expressed his disgust on social media, re-tweeting a post by movie and pop culture site Cereal by Midnight, which had noted the films edited scene.

Its getting worse and worse, wrote Six, with a throw-up emoji in his re-tweet of Cereal by Midnights original post, noting the incessant censorship. Few directors have noted their opinion about the scene being edited.

Said Joseph Wade, founder and editor of @thefilmmagazine, wrote in a tweet: Disney Censor The French Connection in cases such as this, Censor takes the place of Vandalise. They have vandalised a piece of art. This is corporate vandalism no matter how said corporation spins the language.

While The Walt Disney Co. acquired the films original distributor 20th Century Fox in 2017, Its unclear whether Disney or another party with rights over the film made the alteration. As of late, Disney has made headlines for making its theme parks more gender-neutral, racially re-casting its films, and changing lyrics of classic songs to satisfy whats been described as their woke agenda.

The Epoch Times reached out to both Disney and Criterion Channel for comment.

Made more than half a century ago, The French Connection was directed by William Friedkin and is based on a true story. The R-rated picture centers around a pair of NYPD detectives who encounter a heroin smuggling ring based in Marseille. The movie won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Friedkin, Best Actor for Hackman, Best Screenplay, and Best Editing. Scheider was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Both Hackman and Scheider would go on to reprise their roles in the films sequel The French Connection II.

Yet its the original, which was widely considered by film critics as one of the best films of all time, that was inducted into the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2005 for the purposes of cultural preservation. The neo-noir action crime thriller happens to also be known for one of the best car chase scenes in cinematic history.

As described in a 12 bullet-point summary on Hollywood Elsewhere, the movie has always been a fairly coarse, occasionally crude, hard-hitting film when focusing upon Doyle and Cloudy, which is at least 80 or 85 percent of the time. Diluting the crudeness constitutes a serious wounding or mangling of the films original organic nature.

The discussion also noted the character of Doyle as a pushy and obstinate lead character who not only uses the N-word (once) but racially harasses the drug dealer who stabbed Cloudy.

The overall consensus by those pondering the deletion was that the film is hard-hitting and occasionally crude to portray the story authenticallythat The French Connection presents a portrayal of real-life.

Others noted that while the slur may have been offensive, censoring any kind of art, especially a Best Picture Academy Award-winning one, is wrong. In general, commenters were adamant that cutting scenes that are racially insensitive is a slippery slope.

If in fact Disney is responsible for deleting the nine seconds of footage, they owe an explanation to the films fans as well as the industry at large why this was done, and whether or not they consulted Friedkin before doing so, and if they intend to delete other portions of other films that feature the N-word, wrote Wells.
Biopic on conductor Jeannette Sorrell leaves much to be desired

NR | 1h 9min | Documentary, Biography, Music | 09 June 2023 (USA)

I cant speak for other critics, but the single most difficult part of my job is reviewing movies that leave me feeling indifferent. This happens when I consider something to be not quite bad enough to slam or good enough to recommend. Playing with Fire (Fire), subtitled: Jeannette Sorrell and the Mysteries of Conducting, is one such title.

This certainly isnt for a lack of prime subject matter. Academy (The Bolero) and Emmy award (Itzhak Perlman: Fiddling for the Future) winning director and producer Allan Miller, the creator of several classical music documentaries, chronicles the life and impressive career of Jeannette Sorrell.

Conductor Jeannette Sorrell leads Apollos Fire, the orchestra which she founded. (Digital Global Releasing)

Not a Girl Thing

Miller deserves a great deal of credit for not referring to Sorrell as a female conductor which is good, as there have been close to 100 females who have conducted major global orchestras since 1897. At one point in her professional career, Sorrell was slighted because of her gender, and it is the most interesting part of the film. More on that in a bit.

A relatively late bloomer, Sorrells interest in the piano (and later harpsichord) didnt start until the age of 9. At age 15, she had her first paying gig playing for a Southern Baptist Church in Virginia. At 17, she applied to Julliard and was turned down, but received a full scholarship to the Oberlin Conservatory under the tutelage of Robert Spano. This led to a stretch at Tanglewood studying under Leonard Bernstein before moving to Amsterdam where she studied the harpsichord under Gustav Leonhardt.

In 1992, the then 26-year-old Sorrell founded Apollos Fire, an orchestra based in Cleveland, Ohio, specializing in 17th- and 18th-century early music (Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and early Romantic). Sorrell is also the orchestras principal conductor and harpsichordist.

In addition to choosing works restricted to a certain time frame, Sorrell is a huge advocate of period instruments: those made at the time the pieces were composed or modern instruments modeled after those from the same era.

Affekt

As it is explained in the film, Sorrell also subscribes to something called Affekt: the practice of employing emotion as a performance technique. From what I was able to discern, this means Sorrell calls on her musicians to interpret and then play the notes to suggest various moods; happiness, brashness, boldness, excitement, calmness, relaxation, and a plethora of other human emotions.

I have what I consider to be a workingmans understanding of classical music; meaning I can listen to a work and identify 200 or so of them by title and composer. As most of these pieces contain no lyrics, the composer (and conductor) must convey the desired emotional message solely through instrumental arrangement and performance.

Miller dedicates roughly a third of the 69-minute running time showing Sorrell and her players nipping and tucking particular pieces; changing the speeds, volume, and pitch, and while interesting to watch, nothing presented led me to believe she does anything different or better than any other A-list conductor.

Jeannette Sorrell is the principal conductor and harpsichordist of the orchestra she founded, Apollos Fire. (Digital Global Releasing)

Animated and demonstrative, its beyond obvious that Sorrell is deeply passionate and thoroughly committed to her craft, and this enthusiasm rubs off on the players. Theirs is less a boss-employee relationship and more of a team effort, but she makes it clear in no uncertain terms hers will always be the final word.

Regarding the Mysteries of Conducting subtitle, Miller also doesnt offer up anything that is remotely mysterious about it, that is unless one would consider Sorrell looking at a page of sheet music and knowing what it will sound like to be mysterious or, again, a talent unique to her.

Back to the Gender Issue

In 1991, Sorrell was invited to interview for the assistant conductor position of the Cleveland Orchestra. In her meeting with music director Christoph von Dohnanyi, he stated that there was no point in trying to find time in the orchestras schedule for an audition because the audience in Cleveland would never accept a woman as a conductor. In the film, Sorrell laughs about this as she found it odd that she was denied an audition for a job she hadnt even applied for.

Not long after this somewhat bizarre incident, Cleveland artistic administrator Roger Wright reached out to her and helped Sorrell launch what would soon become Apollos Fire, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Fire has its share of bright spots. The handful of performances of works by Vivaldi, Beethoven, Mozart, and especially J.S. Bachs Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 are superb, albeit truncated.

In the end Fire fails to actually catch fire because of Millers static and unspectacular direction. Its tough to profile such an engaging person such as Sorrell and have it turn out so average, yet Miller managed to pull it off.

Conductor Jeannette Sorrell is featured in Playing with Fire: Jeannette Sorrell and the Mysteries of Conducting. (Digital Global Releasing)

Playing with Fire will be available on multiple platforms, including Apple+, iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, and Vudu starting on June 9.

Playing with Fire

Documentary

Director: Allan Miller

MPAA Rating: Not Rated

Running Time: 1 hour, 9 minutes

Release Date: June 9, 2023

Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Five Jailed for Revenge Shooting of Gang Rival in Rideout

Judge condemns killers' 'callous' celebration found CCTV footage

CCTV footage of gang members celebrating after the murder of Sharmake Mohamud in Haringey, north London on Sep. 21, 2021. (Metropolitan Police)

LONDONFive members of a gang who shot dead a rival during a rideout on a London street and then celebrated his death at a secret gathering have been jailed by a judge who condemned their callous disregard for life.

Sharmake Mohamud, 22, was killed in Haringey, north London, on Sep. 21, 2021, by members of a gang from Palmers Green.

The trial at the Old Bailey heard it was a tit-for-tat killing by a gang from Palmers Green who were targeting rivals from the TPL gang in Turnpike Lane, following a shooting several weeks earlier.

Rideouts are incidents where a gang drives onto the turf of a rival group looking for someone to attack, either with knives or guns.

After the shooting, the gang drove to the back of a garage where detectives later found CCTV footage of them fist-bumping and patting each other on the back to celebrate the successful mission.

Jailing the men on Friday, Judge Simon Mayo, KC, said one of the defendants had claimed they were celebrating being invited to a house party.

Mayo said: That was clearly a lie. Im entirely satisfied that what you were celebrating was finding out that the shooting had been successful and it showed a callous disregard for life.

Three shots were fired and one of them hit a passing moped rider who was injured but survived.

The judge said: He clearly wasnt a target but the fact that a passing member of the public was hit graphically illustrated the danger of death and injury when firearms are discharged in the street.

The gunman, Ali Ceesay, 29, fled to Gambia but was later extradited back to London.

He changed his plea to guilty during the trial after giving evidence.

Judge Condemns Hollow Expressions of Remorse

On Friday, Ceesays lawyer claimed his client had tried to express his apology for Mohamuds death but Mayo said he found his remorse hollow considering he had lied on oath to the jury.

Undated images of Ali Ceesay (L) who changed his plea to guilty of the murder of Sharmake Mohamud (R) in Haringey, north London, on Sep. 21, 2021. (Metropolitan Police)

Ceesay was jailed for life with a minimum term of 35 years and 275 days while Abdul Mohamed, 26, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 34 years and Mehdi Younes, 22, was also given a life sentence with a minimum term of 31 years.

Two younger members of the gang, Jaymar Creary and Joyce Manzenza, who were both 16 at the time but have now turned 18, were sentenced to Her Majestys Pleasure and told they would not be released for at least 22 years.

All five were found guilty in March and on Friday the court heard victim impact statements from the victims mother, sister and girlfriend.

In her statementread out by prosecutor Anthony Orchard, KC,Bilan Mohamud said Sharmake was her first son and she said: How did they take my son away from me?  Their parents can still interact and embrace them while my son is laying in his grave.

She said, I will never see my son marry or have children, I will never see my son walk into my house again.

Gang Rivalries Need to Stop

Bilan Mohamud then said: The rivalries need to stop. You guys are not looking at the long-time pain.

The trial heard how Ceesay and the other four drove a stolen Jaguar into Green Lanes in Haringey hoping to find rivals from the TPL gang.

Mohamed knew the victim and several other members of the TPL, who he had formerly been friends with and he was described in court as the spotter.

Undated images of Abdul Mohamed (L) and Mehdi Younes (R) who were convicted of murder and jailed for life at the Old Bailey in London on June 9, 2023. (Metropolitan Police)

The court heard he pointed them out and then Ceesay got out of the car and fired three shots at Mohamud and two friends, fatally wounding the victim.

One of the shots hit a passing moped rider who had nothing to do with the two gangs.

Opening the case, Orchard told the jury: It appears Sharmake Mohamud was the likely real target  It may have been more random than that  On either scenario, the intention was clear. To kill. And this is what they did.

After the shooting, the gang drove off and parked behind a garage in Green Lanes, where they often congregated.

Detectives later found CCTV footage of eight members of the gang apparently celebrating after Mohamed got a phone call, probably informing them of the victims death.

In his sentencing remarks, Mayo said the victims relatives had spoken of the void his death left in their lives and he praised the quiet composure and dignity of the family during the trial.

He said he had no doubt the four in the car and Youneswho though not in the vehicle had acted as the gangs quartermaster and had passed a machete to one of the others before they set offwere all part of a joint enterprise to kill a member of the rival gang.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a warning about an outbreak of fungal meningitis among people who visited two surgical clinics in Mexico.

Current fungal meningitis outbreak: Affects people, including U.S. residents, who had epidural anesthesia in Matamoros, Mexico. Fungal meningitis can be a severe illness, the CDC said in a June 7 tweet. Find out who is at risk and share this post with family and friends.

Fungal meningitis is an inflammation of the protective membrane surrounding the central nervous system after a fungal infection spreads from somewhere else in the body. Signs and symptoms include fever, nausea, eyes becoming more sensitive to light, altered mental status or confusion, stiff neck, and headache.

Epidurals are a common procedure to provide pain relief or temporary numbness. They involve injecting a medication, either a steroid or an anesthetic, into the space around the spinal nerves.

According to the agency, those at risk of fungal meningitis in the current outbreak are individuals who had epidural anesthesia in Matamoros at the River Side Surgical Center or Clinica K-3 between Jan. 1 and May 13.

Based on CDC numbers, 184 people in the United States are under investigation for fungal meningitis infection as of June 7.

There are 13 suspected cases in which individuals have exhibited symptoms consistent with fungal meningitis and four confirmed cases in which the fungus has been detected in tests. Three people have died, which includes one probable case and two confirmed cases.

Evaluation As Soon as Possible

The CDC is advising people who have undergone epidural anesthesia at the two Mexican clinics to go to the nearest emergency room as soon as possible to be evaluated for fungal meningitis, even if you do not currently have symptoms.

Some people without symptoms or with mild symptoms have tested positive for infection and started treatment. Receiving treatment early can prevent severe illness. Fungal meningitis can start off mild and very quickly become a life-threatening illness, the agency stated.

The CDC also asked Americans to cancel any elective procedure involving an epidural injection of an anesthetic in Matamoros, as well as cancel any travel associated with the procedure, unless theres evidence that theres no longer a risk of being infected at these clinics.

The highest number of potential cases was in Texas, where 151 individuals are under review. Seven people are suspected to have been infected, with four confirmed cases. The three deaths so far have occurred in Texas.

The majority of U.S. citizens exposed to potential fungal meningitis are women. Hispanics/Latino-Whites have been diagnosed most frequently with the infection, according to CDC data (pdf).

Testing and Treatment

If suspected of having fungal meningitis, a test will be required to confirm one. This will involve inserting a needle into the lower back into a region around the spine to collect fluid that will be analyzed in a lab.

If you test positive for infection: your healthcare team will treat you with antifungal medicines in the hospital. When you go home, it is possible that you will need to take antifungal medicine for several months to completely cure the infection, the CDC stated.

The length of the treatment will depend upon the immune system of the patient, as well as the type of fungus responsible for the disease. Individuals suffering from weak immune systems, such as those who have cancer or AIDS, may need longer treatment.

As a preventive measure, the CDC recommends that people with weak immune systems avoid areas with a lot of dust, such as excavation and construction sites. When indoors, air filtration systems should ideally be used, according to the agency.
Girl Scouts Introduce New LGBT Merit Badges

Members of the Girl Scouts participate in the first-ever White House Campout June 30, 2015 at South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Girl Scouts of the USA has rolled out a new LGBT patch girls can earn, similar to the way they earn the organizations long-celebrated merit badges.

Its called The Girl Scout LGBTQ+ Pride Month Celebration Fun Patch. Scouts, including the groups younger Brownies and Daisies, which represent kindergarteners and first graders, can earn the rainbow-striped embroidered patch with the exclamatory slogan Im A Girl Scout by completing certain tasks.

They include reading a book by an LGBT author, watching a documentary about the Pride flag, participating in June Pride celebrations, or memorizing an LGBT poem.

In guidelines prepared by the organization on ways to earn the badge, scouts are urged to first familiarize themselves with homosexual and LGBT terminology and concept as defined by the group national gay activist group Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN).

Before starting on the LGBT patch activities, familiarize yourself with words and concepts as found in GLSENs Key Concepts and Terms, commonly used to describe lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer identity, the guidelines suggest.

A hyperlink provided in the guidelines brings scouts to a lengthy list of LGBT terms and their definitions. They include such concepts as lesbian, bisexual, trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and pansexual.

The link also led Scouts to lengthy explanations about LGBT oppression, such as the provided definition for heterosexism.

A system of oppression that benefits straight/heterosexual people at the expense of lesbian, gay and bisexual people. Heterosexism may take the form of Homophobia or Biphobia, bias and discrimination towards lesbian, gay and bisexual people, the definition states.

Scouts are also encouraged to pick a book from GLSENs list of recommended books, including All Boys Arent Blue, a sexually graphic book about homosexual encounters of teens that has been condemned by several parent groups, including Moms For Liberty. It has been banned in 29 school districts in the United States.

Girl Scouts did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times about its new LGBT merit badge.

According to its website, the Girl Scouts created the badge as part of its celebration of Pride Month.

The Girl Scout LGBTQ+ Pride Month Celebration Fun Patch is designed for Girl Scouts of all levels and their leaders to honor LGBTQ+ history, to celebrate the diverse cultures and identities of LGBTQ+ people, and to acknowledge the many contributions of the LGBTQ+ community has made and continues to make across our nation.

Calls for boycotts similar to those experienced by Target and Bud Light in past months are already brewing on social media in response to the public exposure the LGBT patch has received.

Chris Elston, known as Billboard Chris, a nationally-known advocate against the exposure of children to drag queen shows, gender-affirming, and other woke ideology, told The Epoch Times that he thinks the Girl Scout badge is by far worse than what Target and Bud Light did.

This is totally targeting kids, said Elston. And I cant help to feel its probably being done behind the backs of parents. Parents need to boycott the Girl Scouts like the way Target and Bud Light were.

Target suffered backlash over its Pride line of clothes and merchandise for kids, while Bud Light, owned by Anheuser-Busch, suffered significant fallout over the use of a biological male who identifies as a woman to promote its beer.

Elston has been in the national news for standing quietly at LGBT events while wearing a sandwich board featuring words of protest. Elstons peaceful protests, Elston has been thrown to the ground, punched, and spit on.

News of the Girl Scouts badge has already set off social media protests promising to hit the organization at its corewith many vowing to never buy another box of Girl Scout Cookies again.

Leave our kids alone, posted Carolyn Hughes. First the schools, now this  We have to stop this madness.

Some, however, who expressed support for the Girl Scout LGBT badge, vowed to buy more of the groups cookies.

This will make me purchase more boxes than I usually do, Amanda Smulevitz posted on Facebook.  I support ALL kids, and its too bad you so-called people of faith only support the ones who agree with your very narrow-minded, hateful views.

Outrage over the badge has also come from one of the countrys largest legal conservative organizations.

Mat Saver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel, brought up the Girl Scouts past promotion of abortion rights and contraceptives in a statement slamming its LGBT patch.

The Girl Scouts [] took a tragic fall when it became a political advocacy group that pushes abortion, sexual promiscuity, and now the radical LGBT agenda on innocent girls, he said.

Staver encouraged parents to get their girls involved in alternative organizations like American Heritage Girls, a Christian version of the Girl Scouts.

He said it was ironic that the organization has been reciting an oath since its 1912 inception that promises to serve God and my country.
Google Launching News Showcase Licensing Program in US Next Month

The Google News homepage is displayed on an iPhone in Ottawa, Canada, on Feb. 28, 2023. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

Google will debut its News Showcase product in the United States this summer, three years after it launched it in Germany and Brazil.

In a June 8 blog post, Chris Jansen, head of local news and global partnerships at Google, said the product will work in partnership with more than 150 news publications based in nearly 40 states, 90 percent of which will be local or regional.

Publications will include the Duluth News Tribune in Minnesota; NOLA.com and The Times-Picayune in Louisiana; The Oaklandside and La Opinion in California; La Raza in Illinois; and the Orlando Weekly in Florida.

In addition, Google has struck deals with global and national publications including the Associated Press, Bloomberg, El Diario, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Google first launched its News Showcase licensing program for news organizations in Brazil and Germany in 2020 and has since expanded to 22 countries globally, including Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, with more than 2,300 participating publications.

The program involves Google paying publishers to offer readers access to a limited amount of their paywalled stories, which the tech giant says will grant readers the opportunity to read more of a publishers articles than they would otherwise be able to, and encourage them to subscribe to the publication.

Journalists select important stories to include in their curated News Showcase panels and add useful context to help readers understand key issues, Jansen wrote. The panels then appear in Google News and Discover, sending readers directly to full articles on a publishers website.

This helps publishers deepen relationships with their audiences and gives them more direct control of presentation and branding, he added.

Google has already splashed out $1 billion on the news aggregation service.

Battle Over Paid News Content

While it is not clear exactly how much each of the publishers is being paid, as part of a deal struck between Google and Rupert Murdochs News Corp., the latter is set to receive a significant amount, reportedly up to $50 million a year.

Meanwhile, The New York Times is reportedly set to receive $100 million a year over three years after signing a similar deal with Google, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The program comes as governments in multiple countries have passed or are considering passing legislation that will require tech giants including Google and Facebook parent company Meta to pay for news content.

In 2019, companies including Meta and Google agreed to pay French publishers an unspecified amount for their content after the European Union updated copyright rules.

In 2021, the Australian federal legislature adopted legislation that resulted in $140 milliion in payments to news publications from both Google and Facebook last year, despite the two firms initially threatening to pull their services there. Canada and New Zealand are currently exploring adopting similar legislation.

Elsewhere on June 8, Google announced that its Google News Initiative is launching new partnerships with five news associations to provide financial grants and training to nearly 1,000 local publications across the United States.

The unspecified funding will help local publishers overcome tech challenges, and bolster strategies aimed at increasing audience growth, and sponsorship revenue, according to the tech giant.

In addition, the company is updating a tab on Google News to help local publications surface more frequently on Google News and give readers an easier way to find news.
Gov. Hobbs Vetoes GOP-Led Bill to Block Males From Using Female Bathrooms

A person holds a transgender pride flag as people gather on Christopher Street outside the Stonewall Inn for a rally to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York, June 28, 2019. - The June 1969 riots, sparked by repeated police raids on the Stonewall Inn -- a well-known gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village -- proved to be a turning point in the LGBTQ community's struggle for civil rights. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP) (Photo credit should read ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill (pdf) on Thursday blocking transgender males from using female public school bathrooms.

The Republican-backed bill wouldve required schools to provide transgender students their own restroom facility but wouldnt have allowed them to use restrooms designated for the gender they identify as.

Senate Bill 1040 (pdf) is yet another discriminatory act against LGBTQ+ youth passed by the majority at the state Legislature, Hobbs wrote in her veto letter.

Hobbs vowed to veto every bill that aims to attack and harm children.

Governor-elect of Arizona Katie Hobbs speaks to attendees at a rally to celebrate Hobbss victory in Phoenix, Ariz., on Nov. 15, 2022. (Jon Cherry/Getty Images)

Under the bill, public schools in Arizona would have to establish other accommodations for students who refused to use a multi-occupancy bathroom or change areas of the gender they were assigned at birth. The law would also have applied to sleeping quarters on school-sponsored overnight trips.

State Sen. John Kavanagh (R), who sponsored the bathroom legislation, criticized Hobbs for her veto, saying, Women and young girls deserve privacy and their own protected bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms.

He also accused Democratic lawmakers, who unanimously opposed the bill, and the governor of catering to an extremist culture by pushing gender neutrality as a means to win political points from their liberal base.

Kavanagh said he would continue to propose bills that would protect students from transgender exposure in school bathrooms and would propose the measure strictly as a shower bill, and believes it would be more effective because showers are areas that require the most privacy.

Hopefully, shell respect the right of young girls not to be standing naked next to biological males who identify as females in the showers, Kavanagh said.

Hobbs has shown her support for the LGBT community and hung four large pride flags from her 9th-floor office suite at the state Capitol to mark the start of Pride Month.

Parents have a right to know if their children are in psychological turmoil, Kavanagh said. (They) need to know if their children are confused, depressed, anxious, isolating themselves, having suicidal thoughts, or need mental health care because of gender dysphoria. Parents cant get their children the counseling or therapy needed if their school hides this information.

Governor Asks Lawmakers for Better Proposals

Last month, Hobbs vetoed a bill that would have compelled schools not to refer to transgender students by the names or pronouns they identify with and said it was an attack on transgender children.

Instead of coming up with new ways to target and isolate our children, we should be working together to create an Arizona where everyone has the freedom to be who they are without fear of harassment or judgment, Hobbs said in a statement on Twitter.

Hobbs said the bill was discriminatory and called on lawmakers to craft proposals that better address the states challenges without hurting Arizonans.
Government Needs to Tell Americans What Its Doing With UFOs: Rep. Tim Burchett

Congress needs to take conversations about UFOs seriously and provide Americans with greater transparency regarding what the Pentagon is hiding in the name of national security, said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.).

It turns out weve been spending money researching it for years, Burchett said in an interview for EpochTVs Crossroads program ahead of an anticipated House Oversight Committee hearing on UFOs, formally referred to as unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs.

The hearing is prompted by a government whistleblowers extraordinary claims that the U.S. government had obtained not only intact and partially intact vehicles of non-human origin, but also their occupants bodies. The whistleblower, David Charles Grusch, told science website The Debrief that there is a decades-long, ongoing competition with other countries to identify crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering.

Grusch, a 36-year-old combat air veteran of Afghanistan, was also part of the UAP Task Force, a program run by the Office of Naval Intelligence to investigate UFO sightings. From 2019 to 2021, he served on the task force as the representative of the National Reconnaissance Office, one of the Big Five U.S. Intelligence agencies, which is in charge of designing and operating spy satellites.

In a later interview with NewsNation, Grusch even claimed that the government has found dead alien bodies from crashed spacecraft.

Naturally, when you recover something thats either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots, he said. And believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, its true.

If the whistleblower claims are true, it would be hard not to expect the nations military establishment to seek profit out of the extraterrestrial debris in the Pentagons possession, according to Burchett.

And now of course, the military-industrial complex smells dollar bills, he said, noting that the Defense Department isnt exactly known for keeping its books straight.

Poor Financial History

Since the 1990 congressional mandate, the Defense Department has undertaken and failed five audits aimed to track how it spent taxpayers money. The latest audit process concluded last year, yielding yet another failed result.

Ive been in Congress for five years. I dont think they passed an audit yet, Burchett said.

And then you have congresspeople making 75 percent return on their investments. And a lot of it has to do with war-type stocks, he continued. So theres a lot going on, a lot of moving parts in this thing.

Asked why the UAP issue deserve more attention, Burchett replied that the fact that theyre penetrating the U.S. airspace is a reason compelling enough to take them seriously.

Bottom line: We have something in our military airspace that we do not control, he said.

When it comes to the possible origin of the UAPs, the congressman said he believes they come from other planets, as opposed to hostile countries on Earth, which would have already used such technology against Americans.

Lets be honest: If this is some foreign entity, they would own us, Burchett told Phillip. We wouldnt be spending billions of dollars on Ukraine.

If it was China, they would control us, he added. If it was Russia, with Putins ego, he would have landed a UFO on the front steps of the White House, got out bare chested, rode a unicorn across the lawn and wrestled Joe Biden, and got back in the UFO and headed back to Mother Russia.

Burchett then brought up the spiritual aspect of the universe and creation, saying the light from the stars was illuminated before the time of Christ.

Thats how vast Gods great universe is, the congressman said. In Gods vast universe, do you honestly think were the best that he can do?

He said Americans can handle the truth and they deserve to learn the truth from the government.

Government Denies Claims

So far, the Pentagon has issued an unequivocal denial to Gruschs claims.

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which is tasked with examining reports of UAP encounters filed by all service members, said it has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate the claims about crashed vehicles of extraterrestrial origin.

To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently. AARO is committed to following the data and its investigation wherever it leads, Sue Gough, a spokesperson for the Defense Department, said in a statement.

AARO, working with the office of the general counsel and the air force office of special investigations, has established a safe and secure process for individuals to come forward with information to aid AARO in its congressionally-mandated historical review, she added, noting that the offices historical review of records and testimonies is due to Congress this month.

AARO welcomes the opportunity to speak with any former or current government employee or contractor who believes they have information relevant to the historical review.
YANGON, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar's Ministry of Education said on Friday that 67.87 percent of students have passed their high school graduation exam for the 2022-2023 academic year.

A total of 161,850 students sat for the university entrance exam for the academic year. Of them, 109,851 students passed the exam, the education ministry said.

This year's pass rate was up, as compared to 46.88 percentage points from the 2021-2022 academic year, official data showed.

Myanmar held the nationwide matriculation exam for the 2022-2023 academic year in March this year with 863 exam centers, including five overseas exam centers.

From the overseas exam centers, 10 students passed the matriculation exam, with a passing rate of 90.91 percent, the ministry's figures showed.

According to the education ministry, 4,108 students, or 63.86 percent of entrants, in Myanmar's capital Nay Pyi Taw passed the exam this year, while 15,285 students, or 64.20 percent of entrants, in Yangon region passed the exam.

In Myanmar, students take the matriculation examination before joining universities. A high score in the exam is needed to enroll in the Southeast Asian country's famous higher education institutions. 
Gun-Related Deaths Reached Record Levels in US in 2021: Report

Handguns and firearms are displayed during a statewide gun buyback event held by the office of the New York State Attorney General in the Brooklyn borough of New York on April 29, 2023. (Yuki Iwamura/AFP via Getty Images)

The United States saw gun deaths reach record levels in 2021, according to a new report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

Firearm-related deaths soared during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and spiked again in the second year.

Both gun-related homicides and suicides resulted in 48,830 total firearm fatalities in 2021. It is the highest number on record to date and an increase of over 3,600 deaths from 2020, the previous record.

An average of 134 people died from gun violence dailyone death every 11 minutesaccording to the report (pdf).

The report also found that more than half of all firearm deaths (26,328) were due to suicide. The firearm suicide rate increased by 8.3 percent in 2021, marking the highest one-year increase in four decades.

The Johns Hopkins report indicated that black people were 14 times more likely to be fatally shot than their white counterparts. Firearm fatalities accounted for 51 percent of all deaths involving black teens ages 15-19. Additionally, 36 percent of all gun homicides in 2021 were among black males ages 15 to 34.

The researchers analyzed 2021 firearm fatality data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) database. The data, based on death certificates, reflect the primary cause of death.

Lethal Injuries

New research suggests that shootings are becoming more lethal, as most victims of fatal firearm injuries die at the scene of the shooting.

About 57 percent of firearm fatalities in 2021 occurred at the scene of the shooting, up 9 percent since 1999, according to a research letter published on April 5 in the JAMA Surgery journal.

A shift in the type of firearms that are being bought and used is a key factor making shootings more lethal, experts say.

Its leaning more and more towards military-grade, higher velocity, higher lethality type of weapons, said Dr. Eric Fleegler, an emergency physician at Boston Childrens Hospital.

That includes larger magazine capacity so they can shoot more bullets, the ability to fire them at faster rates, and quite frankly, just bigger, faster bullets which cause more damage to a human body.

Gun Sales Spike

Mass shootings have escalated to a record pace in the United States, with at least 162 already reported in 2023.

The continued rise in gun violence starting in 2020 coincides with an ongoing sharp increase in firearm sales. According to federal data, over 39 million gun background checks were performed in 2020.

Experts say the jump in gun sales in 2020 stemmed partly from people who fear rising crime and the push to cut funding to police departments in major cities nationwide. Gun sales remained strong in 2021, with 38 million background checks being performed.

According to an analysis by The Tracea nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that tracks gun violencean estimated 21.8 million guns were sold in 2020. Firearm sales eased to 18.9 million in 2021 and 16.6 million in 2022. All three figures are larger than the gun-sale total for any other year in the new millennium.

The continued robust demand for firearms comes at a time when the Biden administration has moved to tighten restrictions on gun ownership.

U.S. civilians have owned about 423 million firearms between 1986 and 2018, according to NSFF estimates, which translates to around five guns for every three American adults.

Tom Ozimek and CNN Wire contributed to this report.
High Court Rejects WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assanges Appeal Against Extradition to US

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is seen in a police van, after he was arrested by British police, in London on April 11, 2019. (Henry Nicholls/Reuters)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lost his appeal against extradition to the United States on espionage charges after a High Court judge rejected the move.

In a three-page decision handed down on June 6, Justice Jonathan Swift rejected all eight grounds for appeal of an extradition order signed in June last year by then-Home Secretary Priti Patel, which would see the journalist sent to the United States where he is wanted for publishing thousands of classified and sensitive documents.

Lawyers for Assange, 51, argued in their appeal of Patels order that the prosecution was politically motivated and that it violated the U.S.U.K. extradition treaty barring extradition for political offenses, The Guardian reported.

Under that treaty extradition shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense.

Attorneys for the Australian native also argued that the extradition is an abuse of process.

Swifts decision is not yet available so it is unclear exactly why the eight grounds of appeal were rejected.

On Tuesday next week my husband Julian Assange will make a renewed application for appeal to the High Court, Assanges wife, human rights lawyer Stella Assange, wrote on Twitter following the judges decision.

The matter will then proceed to a public hearing before two new judges at the High Court and we remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the U.S. government, she said.

Stella Assange, wife of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, speaks to the press during a demonstration to protest against the extradition of her husband in front of the Home Office building in London on July 1, 2022. (Niklas Hallen/AFP via Getty Images)

Classified Documents

Assange is wanted in the United States on 18 criminal charges of breaking an espionage law and conspiring to hack government computers, after WikiLeaks published a U.S. military video in 2010 showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters in Baghdad that killed multiple civilians, including two Reuters news staff.

Additionally, WikiLeaks released thousands of secret classified files and diplomatic cables, which included critical appraisals of world leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The publishing of the classified and sensitive documents places lives in danger, according to Washington.

Assange sought refuge inside Ecuadors London Embassy from 2012 until he was arrested in April 2019 for skipping bail during a separate legal battle. He was later moved to Londons high-security Belmarsh Prison where his health reportedly deteriorated.

If convicted, Assange faces up to 175 years in prison. His lawyers have repeatedly argued that he will not get a fair trial if he is extradited to the United States, while supporters claim his prosecution is an attack on free speech.

In a statement following the news, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said it was deeply concerned about the High Courts decision which brings Assange dangerously close to being extradited.

It is absurd that a single judge can issue a three-page decision that could land Julian Assange in prison for the rest of his life and permanently impact the climate for journalism around the world, Rebecca Vincent, RSFs director of campaigns, said.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange speaks on the balcony of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Feb. 5, 2016. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Photo)

Terrifying to All Americans

The historical weight of what happens next cannot be overstated; it is time to put a stop to this relentless targeting of Assange and act instead to protect journalism and press freedom. Our call on President [Joe] Biden is now more urgent than ever: drop these charges, close the case against Assange, and allow for his release without further delay, Vincent wrote.

Elsewhere Seth Stern, director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation, called on Biden to stop the case against Assange and show the world hes serious about press freedom.

The idea of Assange or anyone being tried in a U.S. court for obtaining and publishing confidential documents the same way investigative reporters do every day should be terrifying to all Americans, Stern said in a statement.

A Westminster Magistrates Court judge initially blocked Assanges extradition to the United States in 2021, citing concerns that his confinement in a high-security prison could lead to a deterioration in his mental health, causing him to commit suicide.

However, the High Court overturned that ruling just a month later after the U.S. government successfully argued that Assange would be able to resist suicide under such prison conditions.

Lawyers for Assange now have just five working days to submit an appeal of the latest decision to a panel of two judges, who will convene a public hearing on the matter, according to RSF.
House Committee Passes Motion to Study Research Partnerships With Beijing-Linked Entities

A House of Commons committee has passed a motion to launch a study of the federal government research grants, funds, and contributions by Canadian universities and research institutions in partnership with entities connected to the Chinese communist regime.

The motion, introduced by Conservative MP Dan Mazier, was passed in the House Standing Committee on Science and Research (SRSR) on June 6. It requires the committee to dedicate at least four meetings to study the issue, starting June 20.

The study will focus on grants provided for research collaborations with China in sensitive areas, including, but not limited to, photonics, artificial intelligence, quantum theory, biopharmaceuticals, and aerospace.

This motion is not a partisan motion. It is not a political motion. It is a motion in the interest of research and development in Canada, Mazier said when he introduced the motion at an SRSR meeting on June 1.

Mazier noted that the five specific sensitive research fields raised in his motion were flagged by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which warned about the threats to Canadian national security in partnerships with Beijing in these research areas.

We only hear about the good things associated with partnerships and funding agreements, but the reality is that there are matters threatening the future of research and development in Canada, he said. In order for the future, where research and development can prosper in Canada, we as members of the Standing Committee on Science and Research have a study to study the roadblocks preventing and threatening that future prosperity.

Chinas Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers march next to the entrance to the Forbidden City (L) in Beijing on May 22, 2020. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images)

In particular, the motion asked that the committee look into Canadian universities research partnership with the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), an academic institution located in Chinas Hunan Province. Established by the Peoples Liberation Army in the 1950s, it remains under direct leadership of the Chinese regimes top national defence organization, according to its website.

In late January, the Globe and Mail reported that researchers from some 50 universities in Canada have been collaborating with NUDT on research in some of the sensitive fields, including a research topic on quantum cryptology that involves studying how laser interruptions can aid eavesdropping.

Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne subsequently expressed frustration with the research collaboration with the Chinese military institution, pledging to ramp up scrutiny for future partnerships. In a Feb. 14 statement, the minister banned funding to research on sensitive topics conducted in collaboration with a university or research institute affiliated with a foreign actor or its military and national defence bodies.

Huawei

In addition to looking into the issue involving NUDT, Maziers motion asked the committee to study intellectual property transfers to Chinas telecom giant, Huawei Technologies.

Mazier said on June 1 that despite the government having banned Huawei from its 5G network over national security concerns, the company remains heavily involved in research partnerships with Canadian universities.

He quoted the testimony of Jim Hinton, an intellectual property lawyer, who appeared before the committee on April 18, 2022: Theres a transparency issue herewe dont know who or what is being done with Canadian publicly-funded research.'

There are policies in place but the foxes [are] in charge of the hen housethe researcher who wants to get the money is the one checking the boxes to say that theres no issue here.'

Facing increased scrutiny, a number of Canadas top universities have said that they have ended or are terminating research partnerships with Huawei, including the University of Montreal, McGill University, McMaster University, and the University of Toronto, among others.
How Republicans and Democrats Reacted to Trump DOJ Indictment

(Left) Former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., on Jan. 31, 2022. (The Epoch Times); (Right) Attorney General Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice in Washington on July 6, 2022. (Bonnie Cash/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Congressional lawmakers are reacting to news that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will indict President Donald Trump over alleged mishandling of classified documents.

Trump said on June 8 that his attorneys were informed of the indictment by DOJ special counsel Jack Smith in connection to the investigation into the handling of classified documents. Trump is the first former U.S. president in history to face criminal action at the federal level. The announcement followed a raid by the FBI last year of Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate that allegedly discovered several classified documents in the presidents possession.

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social. He went on to point to the parallel investigation of President Joe Bidens handling of classified documents.

Lawmaker reactions to the news are splitting largely along party lines, with Republicans describing it as a witch hunt that poses a profound danger to American political norms, while Democrats say it shows that nobody is above the law.

It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him. Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades, wrote House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Twitter.

I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.

WITCH HUNT, the House Judiciary Committee, which has been investigating allegations of political weaponization under President Joe Bidens administration, wrote on Twitter.

Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) called it a sad day for America. God Bless President Trump.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) connected the development to Republicans broader concerns about the ways the DOJ and FBI have used their power under Biden.

Joe Biden has used his Justice Department to go after parents as domestic terrorists, to spy on Catholic parishes, to terrorize & harass prolife Christiansand tonight to indict his top political opponent, Trump. He has trampled the rule of law to benefit himself. He has led the country into profound danger, Hawley said on Twitter, referencing whistleblower allegations that the FBI had planted informants in traditionalist Catholic communities and targeted pro-life individuals with a threat tag.

If the people in power can jail their political opponents at will, we dont have a republic, Hawley said in another tweet.

Other Republicans raised the prospect of abolishing the FBI and DOJ altogether.

This year, Ive cosponsored legislation to abolish [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives] and [the U.S. Department of Education], Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) said in a post. Abolishing the corrupt [FBI] and [DOJ] sounds even better.

#BananaRepublic, Collins added.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) agreed in a lengthy Twitter post, citing Bidens own mishandling of classified documents, for which he has faced no criminal action. She called the indictment the biggest hypocrisy in modern day history.

Its shameful. Pathetic really, Greene said. A stain on our nation that the FBI and DOJ are so corrupt and they dont even hide it anymore.

Nobody Is Above the Law: Democrats React

Democrats, on the other hand, suggested that the indictment shows that the American justice system is working.

Reps. Gerry Connelly (D-Va.), Dwight Evans (D-Pa.), and Adriana Espaillat (D-N.Y.) repeated a common Democrat refrain on matters related to Trump, saying that no one is above the law.

No one should be above the law in the United States of America, Evans wrote.

A friendly reminder no one is above the law. Not even a former President, Espaillat echoed.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) called the indictment an affirmation of the rule of law.

Trumps apparent indictment on multiple charges arising from his retention of classified materials is another affirmation of the rule of law, Schiff wrote.

For four years, he acted like he was above the law. But he should be treated like any other lawbreaker. And today, he has been.

Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) said the indictment was the latest instance of what he called the chaos of Trump.

The chaos of Trump continues, Landsman said in a statement. What hes doing to this countrythe extremism and danger he and his allies presenthas to end. Only when those who support and enable him decide to be done with this toxic behavior will this all be behind us.

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) wrote, No President in American history is better at getting indicted than Donald Trump.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a member of the progressive Squad in the House, wrote, The former twice-impeached president is now twice-indicted.

Others compared Trump unflatteringly to President Richard Nixon, who did not face federal indictment over the Watergate scandal in part due to a blanket pardon from his successor, President Gerald Ford. However Nixon, a lifelong politician, was forced to resign and retreat from public life over the allegations.

At least Nixon went quietly into the night, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) said on Twitter.

Timing Raises Eyebrows

Many Republicans raised questions about the timing of the indictment.

It came the same day that FBI Director Christopher Wray acceded to a GOP demand to share a document alleging that Biden took a foreign bribe while vice president. Specifically, Biden is accused of taking $5 million to help get Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokinwho was investigating the energy firm Burisma, to which the presidents son Hunter Biden has connectionsfired.

Greene said on Twitter that the document, which she observed on June 8 as part of Wrays deal with Republicans, comes from the FBIs most trusted credible informant. If the charges prove true, they could be a precursor to further legal action by House Republicans.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said that he believes the two are connected.

Imagine being naive enough to believe that the Biden Bribe evidence and Trump indictment happening the same day was a coincidence, Gaetz wrote on Twitter.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who has worked closely with his House analog about the bribery allegations against Biden, echoed the sentiment.

DOJ indicts former President/candidate Trump [the] SAME DAY DOJ/FBI restricts access to unnecessarily redacted Biden allegations, Grassley said in a tweet. And they wonder why ppl think there [are] two standards for justice.

Janice Hisle contributed to this report.
Illegal Immigrants Flown to Sacramento by Florida Governor Nowhere to Be Seen, Agencies Secretive About Location

Illegal immigrants prepare to be transported by bus to Border Patrol processing facilities in Yuma, Ariz., on May 18, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

SACRAMENTONearly three dozen South Americans picked up in El Paso, Texas, and flown by private jet on two charter flights over the last week to Californiaat the request of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantisare being shielded from reporters by local religious and charity groups, with no sign of their whereabouts since they were dropped off at the Catholic Diocese in Sacramento near the state Capitol.

Everyone was taken away so fast that if it wasnt for the news, we wouldnt have known they were here, Maria Gonzalez, a local store clerk, told The Epoch Times. But a lot of people are wondering if more buses and planes will be coming.

All attempts to contact the Diocese, including emails, phone calls, and visiting the building, were met with referrals to a communications director, and no response was received on deadline.

The Epoch Times canvassed the area surrounding the location where the illegal immigrants were last seen, with local workers and business owners at nearby establishmentsincluding restaurants, gas stations, and the post office across the streetreporting no activity since a busload of people arrived on two occasions since June 2 at the Catholic churchs Sacramento headquarters.

Calls to local homeless shelters failed to locate the families, though some spokespersons did say they couldnt provide details because the locations are safe havens.

The bishop of the Sacramento Diocese, Jaime Soto, told another news outlet that charity groups came together as soon as the need arose to provide temporary housing for the migrants.

In what some residents describe as an ironic twist of fate, a homeless encampment with more than 25 tents resides directly across from the premises where the new arrivals were unloaded.

A homeless encampment is seen across from the Archdiocese of Sacramento in Sacramento on June 7, 2023. (Travis Gillmore/The Epoch Times)

One person living in the makeshift community, Frank Marshall, said he saw the bus come in and depart soon after, headed southbound, and the quick response to assist the newcomers concerned him.

What I want to know is why those people got help so fast, but weve been here for months and nobody cares? Marshall said. Maybe we need to fly in on a fancy jet to get noticed.

Californias status as a self-proclaimed sanctuary is one of the reasons DeSantis said he chose it as the most recent recipient of his illegal immigrant relocation campaign, following similar flights to Marthas Vineyardthough Massachusetts is not a sanctuary state, the municipality is.

In a roundtable held with law enforcement officials and lawmakers from several border states on June 7 in Sierra Vista, Arizona at the border with Mexico, DeSantis reiterated his commitment to sending more such flights in response to what he said is a failure of leadership from the federal government, with sanctuary states exacerbating the dilemma.

Joe Biden is derelict in the performance of his duties and refuses to uphold the borders of our nation, DeSantis said in a press release the same day. In Florida, were stepping up even as the federal government falls down on the job.

More than $24 million was allocated from Floridas budget to relocate those entering the country illegally, according to the press release.

[California] has a big budget deficit, and [Florida] has a big budget surplus, DeSantis told the roundtable. We can help out the police and Texas because were a well-managed state.

Border communities report being overwhelmed by the number of people crossing into the United States from Mexico, with resources strained and impacts felt across the region, according to experts.

Collin County, Texas, Sheriff Jim Skinner told the roundtable his county has seen a 1,320 percent increase in fentanyl deaths since 2020, attributing the spike to the administrations open border policy.

Its because of the tsunami of death and destruction that flows unimpeded across our southern border, Skinner said during the discussion. Its also because President Joe Biden and his administration have abdicated their responsibility to secure our southern border.

A recurring theme of the Florida governors operation is his belief that sanctuary cities and states are incentivizing millions of illegal immigrants to enter the country.

You can see why some people coming illegally want to go there, DeSantis said during the discussion. In California they give benefits. They give unemployment checks.

The press release noted DeSantiss goal of relieving overrun border communities and bringing the reality of the border crisis to the communities that support Bidens open border policies.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded to the arrival of illegals on the private jets sent by DeSantis with an ad hominem attack, calling his Republican rival a small, pathetic manin what some say was a jab at the Florida governors height, with the tale of the tape showing DeSantis at 5 ft 9 in. and 154 pounds and Newsom at 6 foot 3 inches and 198 pounds.

Newsom subsequently threatened to pursue charges against DeSantis and called the move state-sanctioned kidnapping, claiming that people were involuntarily relocated.

Florida officials are adamant that every individual knew they were headed to California.

We are investigating the circumstances by which these individuals were brought to California, state Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a press release on June 3 after the first plane bringing migrants touched down. We are also evaluating potential criminal or civil action against those who transported or arranged for the transport of these vulnerable immigrants.

Some lawmakers in California were vocal in their belief that federal policies are weakening the border and national security in the process and dismissed the governors kidnapping statements as political posturing.

The Biden Administration has completely failed to secure our border and California Democrats turned our state into a sanctuary for anybody here illegally. These migrant flights are the result, Assemblyman James Gallagher (R-Yuba City) told The Epoch Times by email on June 8. Its beyond irresponsible for Gavin Newsom to fabricate kidnapping accusations when the migrants travelled voluntarily, but thats what weve come to expect from a governor more interested in the national spotlight than the people he was elected to serve.

Requests for comment from Newsom and Bonta were not received on deadline.

With border policies and national security as primary issues in the upcoming presidential election, some political analysts say the two governors are jostling for position on the national stage.

Newsom has been on a tour of traditionally red states, while DeSantiss multi-agency law enforcement operation has him working with officials across the country.

The Florida governor already announced his candidacy, and while speculation is mounting that Newsom is seeking higher office when he is termed out in 2027, he has repeatedly voiced his support for the Biden administration and reiterated that he is absolutely not running for president this year.

With approximately 17 months left in the campaign, DeSantiss moves suggest he is seeking to gain traction with voters concerned with open border policies and a fentanyl crisis that is killing more than 1,400 people per week across the U.S., according to experts.

DeSantis laid out his plan to the roundtable audience in a forceful statement that stressed the urgency of action.

We enacted strong legislation to combat illegal immigration, sent law enforcement officers and equipment to the border, and have dedicated resources to divert migrants to sanctuary jurisdictions, he said. Today were taking Floridas no-nonsense approach to border enforcement nationwide.
IN-DEPTH: Former Congresswoman Calls for Immediate Exit From the WHO

Small figurines are seen in front of the World Health Organization logo in this illustration taken on Feb. 11, 2022. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

A former Minnesota congresswoman is calling for an immediate exit from the World Health Organization (WHO) as it inches closer to establishing governance over nations during a declared public health emergency.

This is very serious, and its approaching faster than anyone realized, Michele Bachmann told The Epoch Times.

Bachmann, now dean of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia, was a U.S. representative for Minnesotas 6th Congressional District from 2007 to 2015, as well as a candidate for the 2012 presidential election.

In May, Bachmann attended the WHOs 76th World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, where national leaders discussed the draft of a pandemic treaty and 307 proposed amendments to the 2005 International Health Regulations.

The regulations, first adopted in 1969 and updated in 2005, are described by the WHO as an overarching legal framework of international law to which 196 countries are legally bound to regulate the rights and obligations in handling public health events and emergencies that have the potential to cross borders.

The assembly made no deciding vote on the amendments or bureau text (pdf), Bachmann said.

Michele Bachmann, 2023. (Courtesy of Michele Bachmann)

Whats unusual, she added, is that it didnt discuss the WHOs announcement on June 5 that it would be adopting the European Unions (EU) digital COVID-19 vaccine passport system, leaving Bachmann to question the WHOs authority to make final decisions without a discussion or vote.

Nothing was mentioned at the assembly in Geneva, so thats extremely strange, Bachmann said.

The vaccine passport system will not only be used for surveillance, tracking, and tracing of travel but also for the monitoring of an individuals compliance with decisions and mandates made by the WHO, Bachmann said.

But that is just the building block, she said. They made it clear that they are planning on adding to this digital compliance.

There are components of the bureau text itself that would create what Bachmann called a medical dictatorship.

The powers that are envisioned will cover areas such as the environment, racism, poverty, and climate change, she said. The powers are so broad, and theyre written in such a bureaucratized way, that they essentially arrogate to them unlimited power over all its member states.

Absolutely Dystopian

Independent journalist and researcher James Roguski called the report absolutely dystopian in its scope and in its cleverness.

The proposed treaty could be provisionally adopted by each of the nations who would become party to the document, Roguski said in a video statement on the bureau text. The Conference of the Party (CP) would set up an absolutely independent bureaucracy that would be beyond parliamentary or congressional control. This transfer of power from We the People to unelected, unaccountable, and largely unknown and invisible members of the so-called Conference of the Parties is a very well disguised but direct attack on the sovereignty of nations.

According to the document, the conference of the party would commit to strengthen multisectoral, coordinated, interoperable and integrated One Health surveillance systems and strengthen laboratory capacity to identify and assess the risks and emergence of pathogens and variants with pandemic potential, in order to minimize spill-over events, mutations and the risks associated with zoonotic neglected tropical vector-borne diseases, with a view to preventing small-scale outbreaks in wildlife or domesticated animals from becoming a pandemic.

One Health Surveillance and Censorship

The WHOs One Health ideology is defined as an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems.

It recognizes the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and inter-dependent, the document states.

The word surveillance is found 11 times in the document in relation to One Health, such as under Article 4 on page 7 where it states, The Parties shall take prevention and surveillance measures that are consistent with and supportive of effective implantation of the International Health Regulations.

The conference of the party would also be tasked with combating what it calls infodemic, defined as false or misleading information in digital physical environments during a disease outbreak.

It causes confusion and risk-taking behaviors that can harm health, the document states. It also leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines the public health response.

A New Level of Unrestricted Power

According to Bachmann, the unelected conference of the party would supersede the authority of the 194 member states and be empowered to revise and change the rules under which it operates without bringing those changes to a vote.

This is a new level of unrestricted power over individuals, Bachmann said. The shocking thing is that there was no disagreement registered in any of the public forums.

Instead, what Bachmann said she witnessed was akin to the 1972 satirical feminist horror movie, The Stepford Wives.

It was just smiling, happy compliance, Bachmann said. No one is allowed to disagree, and thats what the new proposed amendments and treaty envisions: no disagreement, just enforcement and happy compliance with whatever this unelected, international body tells the rest of us what we have to do.

Bachmann reported the deleting of words such as human dignity and freedom, and other personal protections out of the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations to adjust behaviors to the new power structure.

On page 3 under Article 3 Principles, the line with full respect of the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons is struck out and replaced with the new proposed text, based on the principles of equity, inclusivity, coherence and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities of the States Parties, taking into consideration their social and economic development.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization (C), celebrates his reelection during the 75th World Health Assembly at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva on May 24, 2022. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)

Climate Change and the Next Pandemic

Climate change was frequently touted as the primary problem in health care, she said.

Given the tenets of One Health and the criteria for health care policies, Bachmann concluded that humans would no longer be a priority, instead being subordinate to the climate.

If the goal is to ensure that the temperature on Earth doesnt rise abovelets say 1.5 degrees 100 years from nowdecisions will be made to achieve that goal, rather than the goal of humans, Bachmann said.

Significantly lacking during the assembly was a review of how the WHO handled the last pandemic, with frequent discussions on the next pandemic.

There was no review that we heard, Bachmann said. The only review that we heard was that the problem was power and money, and so presumably what that meant is that the WHO needed to have more control, power, and money in order to be able to dictate decision making.

There was no discussion on the source of the pandemic, no call for accountability to the Chinese Communist Party, and no discussion on adverse reactions to the vaccines.

The only focus was on increasing the scope and power of the World Health Organization over public health emergencies of international concern, Bachmann said.

The timetable to make the treaty and proposed amendments to international law was set for the 77th World Health Assembly conference in 2024, Bachmann said.

That will complete the transfer of individual nation-state sovereignty over health care decisions to the World Health Organization, Bachmann said. The WHO can then invoke public health emergencies of international concern, not only in the case of a pandemic, but if there is also a potential health care emergency, and the criteria for that includes racism, income inequality, and climate change.

Endless Emergency Powers

Bachmann added that she saw no language in the proposed amendments or bureau text that would limit the WHOs emergency powers or how long those powers could last.

It would be just like we saw in the United States with endless emergency powers extended month after month, she said.

In April, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan congressional resolution to end the emergency declaration three years after it was put in place.

However, with smoke from the Canadian wildfires descending on the eastern United States, many Democrats are calling for Biden to declare another national health emergency, this time not around the pandemic but the climate.

The WHOs Director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, chimed in on Twitter, stating, The #ClimateCrisis knows no borders. The wildfire smoke spreading from Canada to the US demonstrates, yet again, the immediate danger exposure to air pollution poses to our health. We know the solutions. How many lives lost will it take to act?

A boat navigates the Hudson River as the New York City skyline is covered with haze and smoke from Canada wildfires in Weehawken, N.J. on June 7, 2023. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)

This Cannot Be Allowed

Bachmanns concern now, she said, is her sense that members from the House of Representatives and the Senate arent aware of the severity of the threat to Americas civil liberties.

For that reason, Im calling on members of the House and Senate to push this issue to the front burner and examine whats happening with the World Health Organization, she said. Some members are saying that because this is a treaty, they arent worried because it will have to be voted on in the Senate, and even the Democrats wouldnt vote in favor. And if it somehow passed, the U.S. court system would strike it down.

Bachmann, however, said she believes this is naive.

Its thinking by people who still run their lives by the Constitution and rule of law, she said. But the people who are making this new system arent observing U.S. law. They are not concerned with protecting the rights of American citizens under the Bill of Rights.

What Congress must do now, Bachmann said, is take the necessary steps to exit the WHO immediately.

They should be holding hearings day and night and not stop until we get the United States out, she said.

Bachmann called it a treasonous action to yield authority to an unelected, international entity that makes laws outside of the parameters of the Constitution.

This cannot be allowed, Bachmann said. People dont understand that this will impact every aspect of our lives.

Though in writing the goals of the WHO to strive for clean air and water, and to be wise stewards of the earths resources to create a balance between man and nature sound reasonable, in truth, Bachmann said, this is a cover story hiding another agenda.

This is about a very strange level of control that weve never seen before, Bachmann said. It envisions dominance over every nation and person on this Earth.

The Epoch Times contacted the WHO for comment.
IRS Warns Time Is Running out for Americans to Get Their Unclaimed Tax Refunds

A copy of an IRS 1040 tax form is seen at an H&R Block office in Miami, Fla., on Dec. 22, 2017. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said that more than 1 million American taxpayers could miss out on about $1.5 billion in unclaimed refunds.

Those refunds, the IRS said in a notice, are for the tax year 2019. If one did not file taxes in 2020 or experienced other issues during that filing season, those refunds are up for grabs, the agency said.

Time is running out for more than a million people to get their tax refunds for 2019, said IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel in a news release. Many people may have overlooked filing a 2019 tax return due to the pandemic. We dont want people to miss their window to receive their refund.

Taxpayers have three years to file their taxes and claim their refund. However, if they miss that deadline, the refunds will become the property of the U.S. Treasury Department instead.

But for the 2019 returns, taxpayers have more time than usual. The three-year window for unfiled returns was postponed by the IRS until July 17, 2023, due to the COVID-19 emergency that was declared by the federal government.

Meanwhile, the IRS warned that taxpayers seeking a 2019 tax refund that their checks may be held if they have not filed tax returns for 2020 and 2021, according to the release. In addition, the refund will be applied to any amounts still owed to the IRS or a state tax agency and may be used to offset unpaid child support or past due federal debts, such as student loans.

The IRS said that the average median refund for tax returns in 2019 was $893. Some taxpayers could get more, namely those who qualified for the Earned Income Tax Credit, according to the IRS, noting that the credit was worth as much as $6,557 in 2019.

The standard tax deduction in 2019 was $12,200 for individuals, $18,350 for heads of household, and $24,400 for married couples who jointly filed their taxes, said the IRS, according to the agencys website.

In all, some 1,469,000 Americans are likely due an unclaimed refund for the tax year 2019, the IRS said.

The agency also listed the estimated number of individuals who may get a 2019 income tax refund by state. California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois had the largest numbers of such taxpayers, respectively.

It recommended that people start filing as soon as possible to gather the necessary documents. Theyre also encouraged to communicate with their employer, bank, or another payer for any possible missing documents, including the W-2, 1099, 5498, or 1098 forms.

Should an individual experience problems in obtaining documents from a payer, they can order a wage and income transcript via the IRS.gov website. Another way to obtain those documents is by filing a wage and income transcript with the tax agency.

If there are issues getting the documents from an employer or other payer, taxpayers can order a free wage and income transcript on the IRS website. Another option is to file a wage and income transcript with the IRS, but that process can take several weeks.

Other Recent IRS Notices

In a separate news release, the IRS confirmed it sent bills to taxpayers with incorrect due dates, telling some residents in California that payments were due in three weeks. Instead, those taxpayers have until later in 2023 to pay.

The federal tax agency on Wednesday apologized for what it described as an error. The bills were sent to individuals who have a balance due for the 2022 tax year under notices known officially as IRS Notice CP14.

The IRS reassures California taxpayers that they continue to have an automatic extension until later this year to file and pay their taxes for those covered by disaster declarations in the state, the IRS said, adding that these letters include a special insert that notes the payment date listed in the letter does not apply to those covered by a disaster declaration, and the disaster dates remain in effect.

Last month, the agency issued a warning that it continues to see a barrage of aggressive broadcast advertising, direct mail solicitations and online promotions involving the Employee Retention Credit. While the credit is real, aggressive promoters are wildly misrepresenting and exaggerating who can qualify for the credits, the IRS said.

The agency warned that taxpayers who claim the credit, known as ERC, could face time-consuming and costly audits. Despite the risks, some companies are continuing to run advertisements to try and get taxpayers to claim the pandemic-related credit.

The aggressive marketing of the Employee Retention Credit continues preying on innocent businesses and others, Werfel said. Aggressive promoters present wildly misleading claims about this credit. They can pocket handsome fees while leaving those claiming the credit at risk of having the claims denied or facing scenarios where they need to repay the credit.

The credit is available to all eligible employers of any size that paid qualified wages to their employees, however different rules apply to employers with under 100 employees and under 500 employees for certain portions of 2020 and 2021.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Johnston Cuts Ties with Firm Contracted for Special Rapporteur PR Work: Report

David Johnston, independent special rapporteur on foreign interference, presents his first report in Ottawa on May 23, 2023. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

David Johnston, the special rapporteur on foreign election interference, has cut ties with a crisis communications firm his office had previously contracted for public relations work, according to a report.

The Office of the Independent Special Rapporteur (ISR) said it stopped working with the Ottawa-based public relations firm Navigator shortly after Johnston learned that it had also worked with Independent MP Han Dong earlier this year, The Globe and Mail reports.

Dong resigned from the federal Liberal caucus in March shortly after Global News reported that he had allegedly told a Chinese diplomat in 2021 that Beijing should hold off on releasing Canadian prisoners Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who were detained for over two years following Ottawas arrest in 2018 of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. extradition request over fraud.

Dong denied the allegation and launched a $15 million defamation lawsuit against Global News in April.

Johnston told a House of Commons committee on June 6 that the allegation against Dong was false because it was based on misinterpreted intelligence information.

The Globe recently learned that Dong had contracted the crisis-communications firm Navigator earlier this year, which led the ISR to break ties with the firm.

The first Mr. Johnston heard of any relationship between Navigator and Han Dong was when he received [The Globes] questions, said ISR spokesperson Valerie Gervais, according to the Globe. Mr. Johnston has decided, under the circumstances, it would be best to end their engagement with the ISR team.

The Epoch Times contacted Johnstons office for further details, but didnt hear back before press time.

Makes no Sense

CTV News reported on June 2 that Johnston had hired Navigator, causing a significant stir among federal opposition parties, all of which had already unanimously called on the former governor general to step down from his role as special rapporteur.

Its another example of how this process is flawed and makes no sense, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre told reporters on June 5.

We shouldnt have to hire a rapporteur who is a cottage neighbour [of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau], a family friend, ski buddy, and a member of the Trudeau Foundation, and then have him try to reverse the reputational damage that that obvious conflict has caused by paying expensive consultants.

The ISR defended its contracting of Navigator, saying it wasnt involved in Johnstons investigation of foreign interference or the development of his conclusions.

[Navigator] has not been privy to any classified materials, the ISR told CTV News.

Andrew Chen and Noe Chartier contributed to this report.
Judge Weighs Challenge to Gag Order in University of Idaho Killings

A judge overseeing the case against Bryan Kohberger, charged with killing four University of Idaho students last fall, is set to hear arguments Friday over a gag order that largely bars attorneys and other parties in the case from speaking with news reporters.

A coalition of more than 30 media organizations has challenged the order, saying it violates the Constitutions guarantees of free speech and a free press, as has a lawyer for one of the victims families. But prosecutors and the defendants lawyers insist its needed to prevent prejudicial news coverage that could damage Kohbergers right to a fair trial.

It remains appropriate to have an Order reminding lawyers and their agents of the rules of engagement in this country and that we try cases in court, not in the press, one of Kohbergers attorneys, Jay Weston Logsdon, wrote in a memo to the court this week.

Kohberger, 28, is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and burglary in connection with the stabbing deaths in Moscow, Idaho, on Nov. 13, 2022. Second District Judge John C. Judge entered not guilty pleas on his behalf last month. Prosecutors have not said if they will seek the death penalty.

The bodies of Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin were found at a rental home across the street from the University of Idaho campus. The slayings shocked the rural Idaho community and neighboring Pullman, Washington, where Kohberger was a graduate student studying criminology at Washington State University.

A flyer seeking information about the killings of four University of Idaho students who were found dead is displayed on a table along with buttons and bracelets during a vigil in memory of the victims in Moscow, Idaho on Nov. 30, 2022. (Ted S. Warren/AP Photo)

The case has garnered widespread publicity, and in January Latah County Magistrate Judge Megan Marshall issued a nondissemination order barring attorneys, law enforcement agencies, and others associated with the case from talking with the press or issuing statements unless they are quoting directly from a court document.

The Idaho Supreme Court in April declined to vacate the gag order, saying the news organizations should have first asked the lower court to lift the order. The justices did not weigh in on whether the gag order violates First Amendment rights.

The news organizations subsequently did ask the lower court to revoke the order, and Judge scheduled arguments for Friday. The media coalition says that while it respects the defendants right to a fair trial under the Sixth Amendment, the court should not have issued a gag order without evidence that right would be infringed by their ability to speak with attorneys involved in the case.

Intervenors agree that there has been, and will continue to be, great publicity surrounding this case, the coalitions attorneys wrote. But publicity alone is not prejudicial  The States and Mr. Kohbergers failure to present any evidence of prejudicial news coverage, and the Courts failure to consider alternative measures, means the competing constitutional rights here were improperly balanced and the Gag Order should be vacated.

Shanon Gray, an attorney for the Goncalves family, has also asked the judge to lift the gag order, saying he should be allowed to speak on the familys behalf.

Gag orders that prohibit journalists from writing about certain cases are considered to be severely problematic under the First Amendment. But the U.S. Supreme Court and other appeals courts have upheld some that prohibit attorneys, police or others involved in a casethose with privileged information about itfrom speaking with reporters to begin with, as a way to avoid influencing potential jurors or otherwise jeopardizing a defendants right to a fair trial.
On June 8, former President Donald Trump said hed been informed by his attorneys that he had been indicted by special counsel Jack Smith as part of the investigation into his handling of classified documents.

Its the two-tier system of justice playing out yet again, argues Kash Patel, from Russiagate to impeachment No. 1 to impeachment No. 2 to the weaponization of the Jan. 6 committee to the cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. What does all this mean for America?

Kash Patel and Jan Jekielek sit down for a live show of Kashs Corner in Prescott, Arizona.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Kash Patel:

Hey everybody and welcome to a very special episode of Kashs Corner live from Prescott, Arizona, at our dear friends home, the Borlands. Thank you so much for having us. We have a live audience here, and were streaming live right now. Were going to replay at the regular time, 8:00 PM EST. Right now, were going to take questions from our audience. Jan, we need some mega-sized news for this mega-sized episode of Kashs Corner. Do you have any?

Jan Jekielek:

Not two hours ago the Trump indictment was unsealed, throwing a wrench into our plans for this episode to some extent. But at the same time, its an amazing opportunity to get some Kash thoughts, hot off the presses. Looking at this indictment, Kash, weve got 37 counts in this federal indictment.

Weve got 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information. We seem to have a recording of President Trump talking about some documents or secrets that he knows and trying to hide them. It looks pretty scary to a lot of people. Whats your reaction to this?

Mr. Patel:

Jan, I spent time as a Federal prosecutor, a national security prosecutor, and also as a Federal public defender in the district of Miami down south. An indictment that every judge will read out at the beginning of every single criminal case is not evidence of anything. It is a charging document, and it is a one-way street. The prosecutors are allowed to go into a grand jury, produce evidence, and then ask a grand jury, is it 51 percent to 49 percent, maybe a little more than not, that a crime may have occurred.

Thats the standard. Since its just prosecutors in the room, theres no cross-examination, no defenses, theres nothing like that put forth. Indictments are meant to be scary, especially Federal indictments. I know, because I used to write them. I used to write terrorism indictments. They are meant to serve as a messaging tool and also that were serious and will prosecute you with what we can actually prove. In my opinion, this is where this indictment goes wrong.

Mr. Jekielek:

Lets talk about the specifics right at the beginning of the indictment. Its mentioned that President Trump is recorded talking about documents where hes telling people that theyre writing a book, that these are secret, and dont tell anybody something of this nature. It looks like it should put the fear of God into people.

Mr. Patel:

It is done, and thats what happens. They say, Oh my God, secret recordings. How did this happen? Its the former President of the United States, the guy running for president right now, and staffers. There are probably a legion of agents and prosecutors whove been on the job for 10-plus years each who have combined to write this one piece of paper. Its not like somebody wrote it last night.

This thing has been perfected word by word, period and comma by period and comma, the identifiers, the titles, and passages like the one you just cited, because they want it to have gravitas. On todays episode, we were actually going to talk about the sealed indictment process, but thats gone now.

Now that the Federal judge has unsealed it, we can actually see the publics reaction to the indictment. Thats what prosecutors look for because they want to know if they hit the wickets or did they miss? Looking at the things that have been coming out on social media and other lesser media platforms that arent Epoch Times, you see the medias response to this. Its probably not what the prosecutors wanted, and Im sure were going to get into it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Exactly. It seems kind of muted, doesnt it?

Mr. Patel:

Yes, its muted to tepid. Now, as prosecutors, the DOJ probably will not comment. Im surprised Merrick Garland hasnt scheduled a press conference as the Attorney General. Maybe theyll do that Monday. Im not really sure.

When you have a case where you charge a former President of the United States and he is also running to be President of the United States, and weve exposed the corruption at the FBI and DOJ, and outlined it on our show over the past seven-plus seasons, you would think the number one law enforcement officer in our country would want to tell the public about the indictment. Now, the DOJ, in my opinion, was caught off guard when the Trump camp was notified and was publicly reported.

They went out front and center and said, Weve been notified that President Trump is going to be indicted, but we dont know exactly with what, because the indictment wasnt unsealed yet. They beat the DOJ to it, in my opinion. Thats just another example of how President Trump is able to have his professionalism displayed in the media about how to basically out-maneuver it.

From his perspective, this same FBI and DOJ have been unlawfully leaking during the entire special counsel presentation of Jack Smiths case against Donald Trump when it favors their narrative. Donald Trump didnt do anything wrong by putting out that statement. He was notified like anyone else that he had to be at an arraignment on Tuesday in Miami, Florida, at 3:00 PM EST. So, they went out with it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Do you think they did this early unsealing with this in mind?

Mr. Patel:

We were talking about this on the car ride up to Prescott. Thats exactly what happened, because a sealed indictment is just that. Only a judge, after a request by the prosecution, can unseal the indictment in court. Then, you can produce it, usually done at arraignment, especially in a case thats involving such sensitivities as with President Donald Trump.

President Trump put them on defense right out of the gate. They were expecting to have their production, their presentation, their attorney general come out next week and say, Here we are. Heres our indictment, a 1, 2, 3 punch. But now their hand has been forced, and we got to see it early.

Mr. Jekielek:

One of the things I didnt see mentioned a lot in there is the National Records Act, which one would expect to see prominently.

Mr. Patel:

Yes. Let me walk through the indictment. I dont want to spend a lot of time on this because theres so much other stuff we have to cover. Weve spent the last two years as this guys been subpoenaed by the DOJ on this matter about classified documents. They say that President Trump has unlawfully mishandled classified documents. When they have their time to step up to the plate and charge President Trump with the unlawful handling of classified documents, do they?

No, they dont. That charge is on the books, Jan. Its part of an extension of the Espionage Act. Do you know what they use? They reach back to an act that has been on the books for a hundred-plus years. Its called the National Defense Information Rule of Law under the Espionage Act, literally talking about charts and sailing utensils.

Its so old. In that part of the law, and heres a kicker that most people will not cover, The National Defense information process that they charged Donald Trump with right now was written 55 years before the Classified Acts ever were written into Congress. That means there was no classified information for 50 years after the NDI. Then you have the classified unlawful handling of classified information come under The Espionage Act.

Why do they go back a hundred-plus years? Because now theyre not saying that Donald Trump mishandled unlawfully classified information. Weve talked about that extensively, why we believe thats not the case before. Theyre saying he took stuff that maybe was classified, but maybe not, and were going to charge him with 30 some counts. They took each document that they felt they wanted to charge him with and they issued a single count.

Thats wildly, overly zealous. Its going to backfire, and we can talk about that. But one of the big points I wanted to make was that if youre going to shoot your shot, shoot your shot. If youre going to kill the king, kill the king. If youve been saying for two years Donald Trump is stealing or unlawfully possessing classified information, then charge him with that. But we now know the rule of law, because we on Epoch have so extensively put it out there. A president has universal declassification authority, and hes a sole arbiterperiod.

Well get to the Presidential Records Act and how that applies to everything else. I just found it astounding. The irony in the indictment itself, not only do they go to the NDI to charge him with individual documents, but then they flip to the very end when you look at the obstruction and conspiracy charges and they itemize that he was using classified documents to do that.

Its one or the other. Both legalities cant be true in the same charging document. Either he took National Defense information unlawfully or he took classified information unlawfully. They didnt charge the latter. They settled for the former. Were going to get into the former and why it is a wildly overzealous prosecution when we talk about how Hillary Clinton was handled, how Sandy Berger was handled, and how General Petraeus was handled. Well even talk about Bill Clintons sock drawer case.

Mr. Jekielek:

This is the time to talk about those things. When you read this document, it seems like theyve really covered their bases. But then, when you dig in a little bit, it doesnt seem quite so airtight anymore, does it?

Mr. Patel:

Its meant to put you on your heels. Even as a former Federal prosecutor and public defender, every time I read any indictment, Im like, wow, look at that. Then, I take a breath and I do what I always do, which is to look behind the words and at the totality of the circumstances.

If you recall, and Im sure you do as does everyone else, Hillary Clinton exchanged at least 36 different threads of classified information on an unclassified homecooked email server that the world had access to and exchanged it with Jake Sullivan and Burns. Jake Sullivan is the current National Security Advisor of President Biden, and Director Burns is the current Director of the CIA. Those three individuals exchanged, without argument, classified information over three dozen times on an unclassified server. What did James Comey do when he was director of the FBI? He comes in and he says, We just dont think she was grossly negligent.

What are you talking about? Either you mishandled classified information unlawfully or you didnt. He shifted the paradigm. They didnt charge her with the unlawful handling of classified information. They should have because she wasnt a president. The Presidential Records Act doesnt apply to her, and a whole host of other things. But they went to the NDI portion, the National Defense information and he said, Oh, she wasnt grossly negligent and she doesnt meet the intense standard for it. Because there is an intense standard for NDI and well get to how that ties into Trumps innocence. They exonerated her. They literally said, Were not going to charge you.

Not having a legal out like the Presidential Records Act, how do you not charge her for disseminating unlawfully classified information, which she did not have the right to possess on servers that could be hacked by China or other adversaries. The two-tier system of justice is now front and center for the American people to see. When we criticize Hillary Clintons adjudication of that matter, people thought it was a conspiracy. Now were stitching it together.

Mr. Jekielek:

I couldnt help but notice that shes got hats out on Twitter today about her emails. I was actually saying thats a pretty heavy troll there.

Mr. Patel:

The U.S. government couldnt look at the 30,000 emails she deleted. What about the destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice there? What about how she was treated? Her lawyers got the red carpet treatment to come into FBI headquarters ahead of time and sit down with preordained questions and answers, so that they could adjudicate their answers based on a wink and a nod.

They didnt do that for President Trump. Its a two tier system of justice. Well quickly go through Sandy Berger and General Petraeus. Sandy Berger was a National Security Advisor to Bill Clinton, if I have it correct. This guy was literally in the National Archives building stuffing his pants with classified information. No, Im not making this up. They caught him. He was never charged with the unlawful possession of classified information at a felony level.

Petraeus, and this is not a knock on his storied career as an army general, was caught with reams of classified information while he was the Director of the CIA in the Obama administration, that he had handed over to his mistress, so she could write a book. He also was not president and guided by the Presidential Records Act. He literally disseminated classified information, stole it and gave it to a private citizen, so she could write a book. He gets caught, lies about it, and the FBI interviews him at CIA headquarters.

This is all in the court pleadings. They asked him flat out General, did you take this material? He said, No. No obstruction of justice count, no lying to federal officers, and no felonies for prosecution for possessing unlawfully classified information and stealing it. Do you know what he got? He pled guilty to a misdemeanor. Its a two tier system of justice.

Finally, I want to close with more of a legality approach. For the Presidential Records Act, lets set the sequential stage. National Defense Information goes back a hundred-plus years. Then 50 years after that, you have the Classification Acts that came in that actually classifies information. You cant retroactively prosecute people before 1951.Thats why this DOJ went 120 years back because they fumbled on the classification issue and they cant legally prosecute him.

What comes next? NDI, classification statutes, Presidential Records Act, if I have my math right, was passed right around the Carter administration and really went into effect during the Reagan administration. What Congress said was simple, When youre President and you leave, you can take whatever you want. When you take it, whether its classified or not, its your personal property.

Bush has done it. Bush One, Clinton, Obama and President Trump did it. The case that I want to highlight is a Federal court case involving Bill Clintons sock drawer. He literally had secret tapes that he lawfully took out of the White House when he was leaving after he was President and hid them in a sock drawer. The National Archives and the DOJ tried to get them back. They went to Federal court. Do you know what the ruling was in that case?

The Presidential Records Act protects Bill Clinton from ever divulging what was on those tapes and why he took them. He still has them and the world doesnt know whats on those tapes and why he hid them in his sock drawer. The Presidential Records Act is the law that was adjudicated in court. That law must now apply to Donald Trump across the board, otherwise there will be another split and another creation of a two-tier system of justice.

President Trump, weve seen it resoundingly, whether you like him or dislike him, has said publicly over and over again through counsel and others, The Presidential Records Act applies to me and also the Declassification Authority applies to me. Lets see if the judge down in Miami will apply the Presidential Records Act to nullify a bogus prosecution coupled with the Presidents authority to declassify things. We can talk about the obstruction and conspiracy charges as they flow.

But generally speaking, Jan, if youre going to be charged with obstructing justice, you have to be charged with obstructing an illegality. If President Trump did not commit these crimes, there is no obstruction, there is no conspiracy, and there is no lying to Federal prosecutors or Federal agents. It all flows from that one instance and thats why the indictment is written in this sequential order.

Mr. Jekielek:

Please spell out how the Presidents Presidential Records Act would actually be used to nullify this prosecution?

Mr. Patel:

Simple. Lets take the indictment at face value. President Trump brought things with him from the White House when he was leaving the presidency. I believe it was either to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, I cant remember which one he went to first. It doesnt matter if he took a sticky note or 10,000 boxes of information. At last count, President Obama was still going through 3 million pages of documents he took. It doesnt matter whats in them, either, the same law would apply to him.

The Presidential Records Act is simple. The President can take whatever he wants when he leaves office, thats it. Heres the kicker, part of that act says it becomes his or her personal property. That means it transitions from being U.S. government property to the personal private property of the past President. Thats the Presidential Records Act in a nutshell.

Mr. Jekielek:

Youre saying there would have to be a dramatically different interpretation of law here for this to make any sense.

Mr. Patel:

For this to be vitiated.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes.

Mr. Patel:

Talk about a vitiation or cancellation of legal rights and statutes. The reason I set it up sequentially is if Congress wanted the Classification Acts and Espionage Acts written in the 1950s to supersede the Presidential act written after it, they wouldve written the Presidential Records Act differently. The law that comes after supersedes the prior unless Congress says otherwise, and they didnt say otherwise, in the Presidential Records Act creation. One of the parts that really offends me as a public defender is how easily the DOJ got the past Chief Judge of the District of Columbia, the Federal circuit there, to rescind the attorney-client privilege that President Trump shared with his lawyer.

In the indictment, you see a paragraph or two about how President Trump is speaking to his lawyer about options. If you know President Trump, and of course Im still a senior advisor, and I talk to him frequently, he jokes all the time.Thats his mannerism a lot. You cant capture that in a black and white typecast. But lets put that aside for a second.

They took that and they said, We went to a Federal judge and ruled that attorney client privilege doesnt apply because theres a crime fraud exception. Wow. You just literally told the world, DOJ, that any criminal charged with any offense, or potential to be charged, or anyone whos not even charged with an offense and has an attorney-client relationship cant talk about possible options with their attorney.

This is one of the things that his legal team must challenge out of the gate right away. This is not a position that can stand in the United States of America. Our fundamental rights in the Bill of Rights and Amendments 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 10 specifically say you have the right to counsel and an unlimited right to counsel.

What the DOJ is trying to masquerade this as is, Oh no, they were in on it together as a criminal conspiracy. How? Its a devastating blow just to justice. Forget whether youre a Democrat or Republican. Youve just literally thrown arctic water on the Constitution and chilled the effect of people having conversations with their attorneys about what their options are.

If he had actually instructed them to do something actually illegal, that would be in the indictment, not this other verbiage were seeing. Because you dont lead with your worst evidence, you lead with your best. The way theyve set it up, especially when it vis-a-vis attorney client privilege is just a shocking abdication of justice. Yet again, you have a two-tier system of justice, because Ive never seen that happen.

Ive seen attorney client privilege vitiated when an attorney was actually committing a crime with the individual that he was representing. In that instance, its righteous. But in this one, the facts just dont support it. Theyre going back to intent, right? Theyre saying to President Trump, Hillary Clinton wasnt grossly negligent under the NDI.

But theyre saying President Trump was when he was talking to his attorney about options and joking about it as he does so often. Now theyre saying, Well, its a different standard. Were going to shift it around. Were going to charge him. I think people are seeing it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Lets finish up with the actual indictment now. Any final thoughts on that?

Mr. Patel:

No. They talk about an obstruction, a conspiracy, and they talk about a couple other things that multiple lawyers for President Trump did or didnt do. The sticking point for me is how involved they were with the conversations President Trump was having with his lawyer or communications, whether its a phone call or a conversation in person. That has a drastic chilling effect going forward on due process.

This DOJ is going to have to answer for that. Thats one of the biggest legalities. If I was his counsel on these cases, I would reach out and say, This is the first pretrial motion judge. How could they possibly have ruled this? I believe the district court judge who ruled on this matter got it wrong. That evidence should be thrown out.

Mr. Jekielek:

There is this issue of jurisdiction. You would expect this to be charged in West Palm Beach or DC, but instead its being charged in Miami.

Mr. Patel:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

First of all, how can that be, and why do you think it is?

Mr. Patel:

This is getting into the legal nerd weeds, but basically you can find jurisdiction anywhere you want. But as weve known, this grand jury has been sitting and investigating Trump from Washington. Theyve had a coordinate grand jury in Miami. The way you get jurisdiction is just what the law says. President Trump doesnt live in Miami and the events apparently took place in West Palm Beach where Mar-a-Lago is or where Bedminster is as it was cited in the indictment, in northern New Jersey, neither of which are in Washington, DC.

In my opinion, this is a masqueraded attempt at what we call forum shopping, trying to get the case somewhere where they have the appearance of neutrality. But heres the kicker. When you charge a document, the very last sheet that you submit on the indictment, there for the public to see is, is there a related case?

Meaning, was there a search warrant or something that preceded this indictment that a Federal judge already handled? Because if there was, it automatically goes there. Thats the law. These prosecutors actually checked no, theres no related case. Then, what was the case about the appointment of a special master from a Federal judge in Miami all about talking about President Trumps possession unlawfully of classified documents? Theyve got to come up with an answer for that. The answer is its bogus.

Heres the kicker, and maybe its poetic justice depending on your viewpoint of the world. The DOJ drew the same judge, Judge Aileen Cannon, who is a President Trump appointee, down in Miami, Florida, who handled the special master case.

Mr. Jekielek:

Which is an almost impossible situation, because theres like 20 to 25 possible judges out there.

Mr. Patel:

Yes, Im not saying one way or the other how Judge Cannon or any other judge would rule. Ive appeared before almost every single judge in that district, dozens of those judges, and I live in Las Vegas and those are pretty slim odds, one in 30. You might see some moves by the government to recuse this judge just because she was appointed by Trump. But I dont think that passes legal muster.

Thats like saying anybody who has an affiliation with any president goes before a Federal district judge and says, Oh, youre out because youre recused by president X, Y or Z. They dont get to do that. I dont know if thats the goal that they wanted to set out. But now theyre going to say, No, we just let the case go where it went. But theres another reason why I think its down in Miami.

Mr. Jekielek:

Theres a familiar face over in Miami that youve worked on the other side of, Karen Gilbert.

Mr. Patel:

Yes. I was told this just like everybody else, Im allowed to have sources. The Deputy Special Counsel in the Jack Smith prosecution is an individual by the name of Karen Gilbert, a federal prosecutor from the Southern District of Florida, Miami. Ive tried cases against her. I used to be an assistant Federal public defender against Karen Gilbert in the Southern district of Miami.

What is the Deputy Special Counsel? Just think Weissmann and Mueller. Yes, everybody has a number too. In my opinion, if this is the case and Karen Gilbert is the Deputy Special Counsel, which I believe she is, she is the female version of Weissmann for Jack Smith. What do I mean by that? You cant just say something like that, Jan, and not back it up.

Wind the tape back to 2009, Karen Gilbert is the Chief of Narcotics in the Southern District of Florida. The biggest narcotics importation hub in the U.S. is Miami, and shes running the entire operation. A physician in Miami in 2009, Dr. Ali Shaygan, is charged in that case with prescription drug violations, with 141 separate counts.

Karen Gilbert is the supervising chief and her two line prosecutors are below her. If you can believe the following, this is what she authorized. She said, Go wiretap the defense attorneys offices and phones, so we can hear what the defense attorney is speaking about to the investigator for the defense attorney during the prosecution. Dont believe me. Go look at Judge Golds opinion on the Ali Shaygan case in the Southern District of Florida. That was outed before or during the trial process.

Quick side note, the judge let the case go to the jury anyway, and didnt throw it out. The jury acquitted Dr. Ali Shaygan of all 141 accounts without knowing that. But going back to what I believe is the quintessential illegality of an overzealous prosecutor spying on a defense attorney unlawfully, she was about to be throttled by Federal District Court Judge Gold for allowing that type of unethical and what I believe is unlawful behavior.

Do you know what she did? She did what typical cowards in government do, she resigned from that position so she wouldnt get punished by the District Court of the Appellate Courts. Then, she meandered around. Of course, like anything else in government, if you want a promotion, the bigger you screw up, the bigger your promotion.

Years later, she would come back to be the Chief of the National Security Section for the Southern District of New York. Now, shes the Deputy of Special Counsel who might be the prosecutor who actually presents the case in trial before Judge Aileen Cannon. If thats the case, and I believe it is, the public ought to know.

If Karen has anything to do with this case, there are questions that Trumps defense counsels need to ask the court about the propriety of her conduct in the past, and whether or not it applies to this instance. In a case like this, you have to find out with all of the prosecutors in that office, what are their political leanings?

Who do they donate to and why is there a gag order from Special Counsel Smiths office preventing the release of his staff? Prosecutors by definition are public officials. You put your name on the indictment, you put your name on the search warrant, you present the case in court announcing your name to the judge and jury. In this case we know zero members of that staff publicly.

Our friend Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch just sued to release the names of the staff. Im not saying some of the agents who work for the FBI and others should be outed. A lot of them do other types of covert surveillance work. Were not asking for that, but we are asking for the prosecutors. We demanded them for the Mueller investigation and we found out it was Weissmann, an individual who was reversed 9 to 0 by the United States Supreme Court in the Enron prosecutions.

By the way, what do he and Jack Smith have in common? Jack Smith was the Head of Public Integrity at the Department of Justice when they charged Governor Bob McDonnell in the state of Virginia. Governor McDonnell was found guilty at the trial level. Do you know what the United States Supreme Court did to Governor McDonnells case? They threw it out, 8 to 0, for prosecutorial misconduct and unlawful application of the law. Thats who Jack Smith is.

Then, you have Karen Gilbert. Who else do we have? We are asking fair questions. They would be asking us if it was the other way around. But again, the two-tier system of justice allows them to participate with their conspirators in the media to leak information thats helpful to them. Thats the other thing, Jan, its been out for long enough. We live in the 24/7 news cycle. If there was some bombshell explosion on this indictment, theres a large number in the media that would be writing it that way, and I havent seen one.

Mr. Jekielek:

Were talking about the composition of these different teams. Ive been thinking about President Trumps defense, and its a complicated defense. What kinds of lawyers do you need to do this properly?

Mr. Patel:

Yes, its a National Security case. However you look at it, its a criminal case, but its also a National Security case. This is what I would say to people who handle these types of cases. One, you need a National Security lawyer. You need someone whos an expert in classified and unclassified documents and procedures. They have to have a clearance.

You need someone who knows how to attack whats called CIPA, the Classified Information Procedures Act, which is how the defense can go in and get documents that are helpful to us and declassify them so we can use them at trial. Because in order for the government to have brought this case in the fashion that it has, everything that they want to use has already been declassified.

Heres a funny side bit. Lets see if they actually had to declassify anything that theyre going to present in this case, or theyre going to take it as the law that President Trump had the right to declassify them in the first place.

Then, you need a criminal defense attorney to couple with your CIPA adjudication process attorney. Its a big team. You need people who are experts in witnesses. Youre going to need people who are experts in these specific types of crimes, obstruction, and lying.

Speaking of which, they did charge President Trump with a couple of counts that we call 1001, that is lying to Federal officials or agents. If it wasnt so offensive, it would be extremely laughable. This DOJ has chosen not to prosecute James Comey for lying under oath to Congress. This DOJ has chosen not to prosecute Clapper or Brennan for lying to Congress under oath multiple times. This DOJ has chosen not to prosecute Merrick Garland for lying under oath. This DOJ has chosen not to prosecute Director Chris Wray for lying under oath to Congress. But this DOJ has no problem charging President Trump with, if you read the material in the indictment, what amounts to basically jokes.

On top of that, if the superseding level of law that hes charged with is not an illegal crime, then hes not lying about anything. Theyve spliced the atom pretty thin on this one, but theyve dressed it up really well in an indictment that sounds like its a boomstick. If they have the right set of defense attorneys around them, theyre going to pop it real quick.

I dont know that this case ever gets to a jury because in my opinion, as a former public defender and Federal prosecutor, theres just too many legal questions that have to be answered by the judge before it ever gets there. Theres an appellate process, which we call an interlocutory appeal process, which means there is the opportunity before you actually get to a jury that you can appeal the judges ruling in between.

Its not done often, but it can happen. Theres a lot of steps to go through. I did see a lot of commentary out there about the length of the trial, 21 to 60 days. But yes, the DOJ always says, We dont participate in politics or elections. So, you charged a former president whos the front-runner to be the Republican nominee to sit in a Federal criminal trial for 60 days during an election season, but youre not interfering with the electoral process.

These types of opposing positions are starting to come to light. Weve been covering them for a long time here at Epoch and many other organizations. But most of America has been lied to for so long that they said that was conspiratorial Right-wing nonsense, and now theyre stitching it together. These same actors, Lisa Monaco and John Carlin, the number two and three at the Justice Department under Garland who are running DOJ, were the heads of the National Security Division and a senior post at DOJ, and launched Russiagate against Donald Trump.

I know that because I was a Federal prosecutor at the National Security Division working for John Carlin. The cast of characters doesnt change. Chris Wray covered up the entire Russiagate scandal. Chris Wray lied to Senator Grassley about the existence of source documentation, and then had to be held in contempt of Congress just to produce it, because I believe he wants to cover more FBI corruption.

It is right that America is asking the questions of the participants. The government is demanding the credibility of Donald Trump and all of the other individuals cited in that indictment be questioned. Well, its a two-way street. We have a right to know what prosecutors are working on it, have worked on it, and will work on it. We have a right to know how many of those people worked on past instances of unlawful prosecutorial misconduct, and why they are on the most important, most consequential case that the DOJ has probably ever brought.

Mr. Jekielek:

Kash, normally wed finish up here, but today were going to pick a few audience questions since we can do the live Q&A. Ive got Raz3060 here. The question is Kash, what happens with your DOD lawsuit now that youve got an okay for the book go ahead?

Mr. Patel:

I appreciate that. That is actually also breaking news, but not Trump-level breaking news. With my book Government Gangsters, the government sat on it for eight plus months failing to release my manuscript, which Im required to submit as a former government employee, because they dont want it out there. I sued them in Federal court this week. We won, they bent the knee, and after eight long months, we are going to get this book to print this summer.

Do you know how many redactions after eight months and nine different agencies reviewed it? Nine. They were so meaningless that my attorneys literally laughed out loud and almost wanted to thank the DOD and the rest of the government for redacting those ridiculous redactions. Its coming out, and you can get it on pre-order. But were still having fun. A crux of that book is the two-tier system of justice. Its not just in the DOJ, its in the halls of Congress, its in the administrative state, and weve seen how its hijacked some of the people in the judiciary as well.

Mr. Jekielek:

Another question, here we go. Weve got William Spielberger. He asks, Can RICO statutes be charged, even if the statutes of limitations have expired on the original crime?

Mr. Patel:

Thats a complicated legal question that breaks down like this. If a mob boss committed a fraud in 80 and you got new evidence in 90 that that conspiracy has been continuing, then the statute of limitations starts over. You can bring that RICO case again.

Mr. Jekielek:

All right, from Steve Florkey, How do we get rid of dishonest judges who support or just wink at this kind of corruption?

Mr. Patel:

Theres only one way to remove any Federal official; impeachment. Judges are subjected to the same scrutiny and standard as cabinet secretaries and other Federal officials are. Youd have to call Congress and start getting a lot of people together and have a solid legal justification to impeach a Federal judge and remove them from office.

Mr. Jekielek:

We have another one from Raz3060, which is an interesting question, Why was NARA negotiating return of the documents if the President could have them?

Mr. Patel:

Your question begets the answer. If the president is allowed to have them, this whole NARA thing, in my opinion, was a farce. Remember, I was designated by the president as his Presidential Records Act nominee. Thats not exactly the right word, its not coming to me at this time.

Mr. Jekielek:

Representative.

Mr. Patel:

Representative. Thank you, Jan. This is why we dont do live on the air too much. But you dont even really hear about that. What happened to all the NARA stuff? What about the NARA representatives? Why did NARA refer this to the DOJ? Why didnt NARA refer Hillary Clinton to the DOJ? We learned the truth and what the law is when it comes to NARA and the documents.

Mr. Jekielek:

Kash, its time for our shout-out.

Mr. Patel:

This weeks shout-out on this very special episode of Kashs Corner, has to go to the Borlands. Thank you so much for inviting us into your home. This place is awesome. Im moving in, but well talk about that later. You guys are extremely beneficial supporters of Epoch Times and my foundation, The Kash Foundation.

You do enormous work that people never hear about. Thank you for letting us come to Prescott. I cant come to Prescott, Jan, without acknowledging and thanking my good friend, Mr. Miller. I know Marsha couldnt be here today, but its always humbling to see you, sir, and everybody else that is in the audience.

This has been a really great experience. For those of you that missed it or want to watch it again, it airs at 8:00 PM EST. Theres also going to be the live chat then, and theres an airing of this on NTDTV. We are blasting this out there. Let us know what you think. Let us know about our analysis and more importantly, let us know your questions, because Jan and I read the commentary board every week in preparation for next week. With that Jan, its time to say goodbye from Prescott, Arizona, with this live edition of Kashs Corner.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Belize Tourism Board Launches a Catchy Social Media Campaign for World Oceans Day 2023

BELIZE CITY, Belize, June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- As a bold yet playful call to action for World Oceans Day 2023, the Belize Tourism Board launched today a social media campaign "Reef With A Beef," aimed to raise awareness on ocean sustainability through humor.

Belize Tourism Board (PRNewsfoto/Belize Tourism Board)

This tongue-in-cheek initiative was born from the reality that while Belize is doing a great deal to protect its oceans, there are others around the world who simply aren't doing enough. As a 10,000-year resident of the ocean, the Belize Barrier Reef is a natural spokesperson to represent the frustrations of those who see what's happening. The Reef With A Beef (RWAB) will be active on its "personal" Twitter and Instagram accounts  both @ReefWithABeef  and will engage with followers in "trash talk" to bring awareness to the alarming levels of worldwide ocean pollution. The reef will call out anything and anyone who may be harming its habitat on a global scale.

The Belize Barrier Reef is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the second largest barrier reef in the world. It extends 185 miles along the full length of the Belizean coast and is home to hundreds of species of coral and fish, and is a hot spot for divers, snorkelers and biologists from all over the world.

"Conservation has always been part of Belize's DNA," said Hon. Anthony Mahler, Belize's Minister of Tourism and Diaspora Relations. "Through intensive efforts spanning decades, nearly half of the entire nation has been protected as either nature preserve/reserve, wildlife sanctuary or national park. Our Belize Barrier Reef is the greatest illustration of our drive and passion for conservation, being a UNESCO World Heritage Site it is the premier natural landscape which serves as one of our most visited eco-tourism attraction that draws thousands of snorkeling and diving enthusiasts to our nation every year."

Minister Mahler continued: "The goal of this campaign is not only to promote the Reef's brand on an international scale, but also to provide a platform to learn about the value of this incredibly beautiful yet very fragile marine ecosystem and encourage positive actions that'll not only preserve but also allow the Belize Barrier Reef to thrive for thousands more years to come."

In the last few years, Belize has made huge strides in improving the country's sustainability initiatives, including designating no-take marine protected areas, banning off-shore drilling, establishing the Fish Right Eat Right program, and more, and is now considered one of the most biodiverse and environmentally conscious destinations in the Caribbean and Central America. To learn more, visit travelbelize.org.

About Belize Tourism Board

The Belize Tourism Board (BTB) is a statutory body within the Belize Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation, and it is governed by a Board of Directors appointed by the Minister of Tourism and Civil Aviation. The BTB works in conjunction with members of the private sector  including the Belize Hotel Association, Belize Tourism Industry Association and Belize National Tour Operators Association  and is dedicated to building tourism in the most economically and environmentally sustainable manner. As a part of its responsibilities, the BTB promotes Belize as a premier tourism destination to both in-country and international consumers. Among its outreach to the international travel market, the BTB markets the country's unique attractions to travelers, members of the travel trade industry and media outlets in key markets. The BTB is also dedicated to developing and implementing tourism programs that will help strengthen and grow the Belizean tourism industry; promote good destination stewardship; and instill high quality standards for accommodations and travel experiences. For more information on the BTB and its services, visit www.travelbelize.org.

CONTACT: belizepr@zimmerman.com

Cision

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-belize-barrier-reef-has-beef-301846635.html

SOURCE Belize Tourism Board
Key Player in Biden Documents Removal Was Caught Up in Bill Clinton-Era Chinagate Scandal

News Analysis

The custodian of Joe Bidens vice presidential records, a key witness in his classified documents probe, was caught up in another documents scandal while working at the Commerce Department during the Clinton administration, court records reveal.

Longtime Biden aide and gatekeeper Kathy S. Chung, who has been interviewed by federal prosecutors and congressional investigators in the Biden case, was part of a team sanctioned for withholding and even destroying key documents in the federal case that sought sensitive records from a central figure in the so-called Chinagate fundraising investigation of the late 1990s, RealClearInvestigations (RCI) has learned exclusively.

A special prosecutor is now investigating whether Biden unlawfully handled top secret materials in early 2017, when he tasked Chung with removing boxes containing classified documents from the White House and storing them at various private offices in D.C., including the Chinatown neighborhood. Some of the highly sensitive papers also ended up at his home in Wilmington, Del.

Noting that Chung came into Bidens orbit through working with the presidents son, Hunter, during the 1990s, congressional investigators want to know if the Biden family dealings in China have anything to do with the stockpiling of classified documents. They note that the mishandling of White House papers took place during the 14-month period in 20172018 when the Chinese were wiring almost $6 million in payments to Hunter and his uncle Jimmy Biden without providing any known legitimate services. They have expressed concern that the payments, which were flagged by the U.S. Treasury Department, were part of a Chinese intelligence-gathering operation.

Chung is central to the Justice Departments investigation of Bidens breach of classified documents.

On Jan. 4, federal agents interviewed Chung while working with an investigative team led by U.S. Attorney John Lausch, who was tasked to conduct a preliminary probe of the security breach. Alarmed by what his investigators reported back to him about Chungs role in the possible illegal removal and retention of state secrets, Lausch urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel. The following day Garland complied, naming veteran federal prosecutor Robert K. Hur to take over the criminal case as special counsel. Hurs office reportedly has obtained more than 100 pages of documents from Chung, including emails and text messages.

While Donald Trump and Mike Pence are also under investigation for removing classified documents from the White House and storing them at their private residences, GOP congressional investigators say comparisons to Trump and Pence miss the point. In interviews with RCI, they insisted that Bidens document scandal is potentially more serious than just mishandling state secrets. They suspect it could mushroom into a counterespionage case involving China and national security, though the White House dismisses such speculation as baseless.

Chungs lawyer Bill Taylor did not return a request for comment. But in an earlier statement, he scolded Republicans for suggesting someone is a traitor without any evidence.

Chungs dual roleas an aide to Joe Biden when he was vice president and a friend of Hunter Biden, who emails show received sensitive information from Chung from his fathers officefurther highlights the murky ethics that exist between the Biden familys public service and business interests.

Hunter Biden and Chung have a long history dating back to their days working together at the Commerce Department during Bill Clintons presidency. It was there that Chunga longtime Democrat working in the federal bureaucracybecame a witness in a case involving convicted Chinagate fundraiser Jian-Nan John Huang, who was a top Commerce official.

In 1993, President Clinton named Huang, a China-born banker friend from Little Rock, deputy assistant secretary of international economic affairs at Commerce, where he was responsible for Asian trade matters. Within a month, Huang was given a top secret security clearance and received twice-weekly intelligence briefings by CIA analysts. At the same time, it was later revealed, he was meeting regularly with Chinese diplomats and other officials tied to Beijing.

Watchdog group Judicial Watch sought documents concerning Huangs access to trade secrets and his trips to China. Chung was one of the administrators responsible for producing such documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

But the department was sanctioned for withholding and even destroying key documents in the federal caseJudicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Commerce, et al.in which Huang was listed as the lead defendant. After U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled Commerces search grossly inadequate and unlawful, Chung and her superiors were ordered to conduct another search. Still, Chung came up short in producing Huang-related documents from the computer of her boss, Melissa Moss, in the Office of Business Liaison, according to her sworn declaration in the case, a copy of which was obtained by RCI. A Clinton appointee like Hunter Biden, Moss worked with Huang on controversial Asian and other foreign trade junkets for Democrat donors. She came to Commerce from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), where she had served as finance director.

In performing this search, I was assisted by an employee of the Computer Help Desk who informed me that some documents could not be opened, Chung told the court in the 1999 affidavit, which was never uploaded to PACER, the electronic federal court records system. (After several requests to the court, Leayrohn King, a records clerk for the U.S. District Court for D.C., provided RCI a copy of Chungs declaration and commented that it was odd that it was missing from PACER. The court has since made it available in the online docket system.)

Chung, who now works as a top aide to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, was not directly accused of wrongdoing. But lawyers for Judicial Watch complained her department was covering up for Huang, whom they suspected was trading government secrets and access to China.

While Chung remained at the Commerce Department, Huang left to work for the Clinton reelection effort. He raised almost $3 million for the DNC and Clinton in 1996, half of which was later found illegal or improper and returned because the donations came from foreign sources, many of them tied to Beijing.

The Justice Department, through a specially appointed task force, investigated Huang as a possible agent of influence for China. In 1999, Huang pleaded guilty to a felony violation of campaign finance laws for arranging illegal foreign donations. Even though the felony charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, he was sentenced to one year of probation and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in their investigation of several co-conspirators.

After Hunter Biden left the Commerce Department in 2001, where he served as executive director of e-commerce policy, he joined a K Street law firm founded by William Oldaker, a major political donor of his father. Records obtained by RCI show lawyers for Oldaker, Biden & Belair LLP represented another boss of Chung at the Commerce Department in the ongoing FOIA case, which wasnt settled until 2004.

A decade later, Hunter recommended his father hire Chung as his personal assistant in the Office of Vice President, according to emails found on his abandoned laptop. Starting in July 2012, Chung was responsible for overseeing then-Vice President Bidens office affairs, including handling his briefing books and scheduling his travel abroad. She handled the details for Hunter Bidens controversial 2013 trip to Beijing with the vice president, during which Hunter met with Chinese investment partners and arranged for his father to shake one of their hands. Emails show Chung also invited Hunter to attend a 2015 lunch with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the State Department.

In January 2017, as Biden moved out of the White House, Chung helped pack 13 boxes with files from his office cabinets and store them at a transition office nearby, according to a partial transcript of Chungs recent deposition taken behind closed doors at the Capitol. Around July 2017, Chung reloaded the boxes in her car and moved them to a private office that she leased in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, before they ended up early the next year at the China-funded Penn Biden Center in D.C., according to the transcript.

The boxes turned out to contain dozens of highly classified documents, including ones so secret they could only be viewed in a Sensitive Compartment Information Facility, or SCIF. Yet they were found last year in an unlocked storage room at the center that required no key to access. (The White House initially claimed, falsely, they were stored in a locked closet.) Prosecutors are investigating the chain of custody of those loosely stored intelligence papers to determine whether any were copied or passed through foreign hands.

Chung, who held a Top Secret security clearance and had experience handling and identifying classified documents, told congressional investigators she was unaware the boxes contained classified materialeven though some of the file folders in the boxes were emblazoned with cover sheets stating they contained secret government documents. She insisted she never noticed any classified papers or saw any classified markings, even though she unpacked the boxes when she relocated them to the center and then re-packed them last summer at the request of Bidens lawyers.

At least 20 highly classified papers marked at the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level were found at the center, which the FBI searched earlier this year. The materials reportedly covered Ukraine, Iran, and the United Kingdom, among other foreign countries.

Chung helped Biden research his 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad. Its not known if Biden or Chung referenced any of the materials from the boxes for his book, which was published in November 2017 and revealed insider accounts of Bidens various roles in U.S. foreign policy, including Ukraine. Biden listed Chung first among people he acknowledged for their contributions: Thank you for all of this, and more, to Kathy Chung.

Overlapping Scandals?

Hunter first made contact with Chinese executives with CEFC China Energy, a suspected front for Chinese intelligence, in 2015. Emails found on Hunters abandoned laptop show a CEFC adviser arranged a private Washington dinner in December 2015 with Hunter and then-CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming, who reportedly has ties to the Chinese military.

In an email Chung sent to Hunter Biden that same year, she included a list of personal cell phone numbers for high-profile Washington officials, including then-White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and several Cabinet secretaries, as well as Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and a number of powerful senators and members of Congress.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer speculated that Hunter may have been trying to prove his worth to these people that were paying these enormous sums of money to him, in part by showing them he had cell numbers for powerful individuals.

Chung continued her dealings with Hunter Biden after she left the White House. On Feb. 2, 2017, shortly after Chung packed up Bidens White House files, Hunter emailed Chung to ask her to come work with me  so that I can make everyone money. The next year, messages found on Hunters laptop show Chung sent Biden family members a link to an encrypted messaging app called Signal and urged them to install it on their electronic devices.

Later in February 2017, Hunter received an $80,000 diamond from Ye, who left the rare gem with a thank-you note at Hunters hotel room after they met in Miami. In an interview with The New Yorker magazine, Hunter admitted taking the expensive stone, though he says he doubts it was meant as a bribe.

Comer said he is investigating whether the Bidens Chinese partners had access to the classified documents found. He noted that Hunter Biden, in 2017, planned to share office space in D.C. with another one of his Chinese partners, Gongwen Kevin Dong, who was the CEFC money man who signed off on the wire payments to the Bidens.

This level of access and opportunity raises questions about who had access to the classified documents, Comer said.

In November 2017, another Biden partner from ChinaCEFCs Patrick Howas arrested by FBI agents on charges of bribery and money laundering. According to federal documents obtained by RCI, the FBI raided CEFCs D.C.-area offices shortly after Hos arrest and searched them for evidence. The FBI had been electronically monitoring Ho as a suspected Chinese spy under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretap warrant, the documents further reveal.

Within months of learning his Chinese partner had been arrested, property records show Hunter terminated the lease on his own D.C. office and closed the facility, where hed made keys for both Dong and his father, Joe Biden, according to emails found on his abandoned laptop. That same monthFebruary 2018the former vice president opened a D.C. office for the China-funded Penn Biden Center, where Hunter maintained access.

Its not known if any White House records were stored at Hunters Georgetown office or transferred from there to the Penn Biden Center about four miles away. The center is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, which has received several million dollars from anonymous Chinese sources since opening the center. But Hunters arrangement with his Chinese benefactors clearly raised counterintelligence alarms at the FBI, which began monitoring their communications. For whatever reason, the Bidens were never prosecuted as unregistered foreign agents and their own offices were never raided. Bidens unauthorized removal and storage of classified intelligence went unnoticeduntil after the 2022 congressional elections.

Chung, who worked on Bidens 2020 campaign, was grilled on Capitol Hill about her access to and handling of classified information in April. She gave sworn testimony to the House Oversight Committee for roughly four hours behind closed doors.

Comer suggested earlier this year in a Fox News interview that his investigators were looking into possible ties between Chung and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Fox host Maria Bartiromo asked if Chung was reporting back to the CCP about any of the former vice presidents documents, and Comer replied, Were looking into that.

Added Comer, Were looking into at least three different people that Hunter Biden was directly involved with that have very close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Ties to Chinese Communists

Comer noted that when Chung was in the White House, she fed Hunter Biden sensitive information on U.S. political leaders that he said Beijing would covet. In her April 4 interview with House Oversight investigators, Chung denied having a relationship with the CCP, according to excerpts of her testimony released by Democrats earlier this month.

Chung also insisted she never shared classified information with anyone who wasnt cleared to read it, which ostensibly would include Hunter Biden. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight panel, said Comer was spreading falsehoods based on a bigoted conspiracy theory.

House investigators want to know what the Chinese got for the massive payments they wired to President Bidens son, brother, and several other family members. Were they using their contacts with the Bidens to gather U.S. intelligence? Were any White House records stored at Hunters Georgetown office, where his Chinese partners had access?

In a recent letter to Hunter Biden, Comer requested, under threat of subpoena, that the presidents son provide any documents in his possession designated classified government property, along with any communications with Dong, Ho, Ye, and other CEFC officials. Separately, he has asked the University of Pennsylvania for a list of people who had keycard access to the Penn Biden Center. He also requested administrators turn over the visitor logs for the center.

It is imperative to understand whether any Biden family members or associates gained access to the classified documents while stored at the Penn Biden Center, Comer said.

According to emails found on Hunters laptop, Joe Biden was a silent partner in the CEFC deal that netted his son and brother millions. The documents show Hunter claiming that 10 percent of the Chinese payments were set aside for the big guy. Former partner Tony Bobulinski has confirmed that the big guy was Joe Biden.

CEFC is the capitalist arm of Chinese leader Xis Belt and Road Initiative to spread Chinas influence around the world while gobbling up oil and gas rights. China has sought to influence powerful officials, particularly to gain access to U.S. energy markets, which are heavily regulated.

Among the classified documents Biden reportedly had removed from the West Wing are sensitive compartmented briefings about Iran, where Beijing has been injecting billions of dollars in direct foreign investment to extract cheap oil.

It would be reasonable to suspect that Ye and his associates intended to use their contacts with Jim [Biden] and Hunter to gather intelligence about such critical foreign countries, said Ben Schreckinger, author of The Bidens: Inside the First Familys Fifty-Year Rise to Power.

Bobulinski says the Chinese werent looking to make a healthy return on investment, but rather were partnering with the Bidens as a political or influence investment. He noted the CEFC partners were Chinese intelligence and understood the value of the Biden name.

In a May 2017 email, Jimmy Biden provided Hunter, Bobulinski, and other partners a list of friendly American political contacts whom they could exploit to advance the proposed joint venture with their Chinese partners. Among the key domestic contacts were Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York; then-Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo; former Democratic Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe; and then-Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who would go on to become Bidens vice president.

Republicans have slammed Biden for being soft on China. When Beijing flew a giant spy balloon across the continental United States and collected highly sensitive data from U.S. military sites, Biden did not order Defense Secretary Austin to shoot down the spycraft for several days, and only after public outcry.

In July 2021, Biden named his trusted aide Chung a top assistant to Austin, where she has access to sensitive Pentagon information. The Pentagon and White House declined to answer questions about the level of Chungs access to classified military intelligence and the extent of her role in handling such material.

From RealClearInvestigations

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Law Professor: Trump Could Pardon Himself if He Wins in 2024

Prof. Jonathan Turley listens during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump in the Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington on Dec. 4, 2019. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

Former President Donald Trump could theoretically pardon himself after he was indicted in a federal investigation connected to whether he mishandled classified records, according to George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.

Speaking to Fox News, Turley said that for the 2024 election, Trump could run on pardoning himself. You know, for people that feel that this is biased, that this is part of a pattern.

He could turn this on his opponents and actually run on his right to pardon himself, Turley, also a Fox contributor, said on Thursday night during an interview with host Jesse Watters. So, if hes elected, even if hes convicted, he could pardon himself, or he could do so before a trial occurs.

Federal prosecutors, in an indictment unsealed on Friday, said that Trump is facing 37 felony charges related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents. Trump disclosed the existence of the indictment in a Truth Social post Thursday night as well as in a video he recorded.

The document marks the Justice Departments first official confirmation of a criminal case against Trump arising from the retention of hundreds of documents at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. The indictment accuses Trump of having improperly removed scores of boxes from the White House to take them to Mar-a-Lago, many of them containing classified information.

The indictment also alleged that, for a two-month period, some of Trumps boxes were stored in one of Mar-a-Lagos gilded ballrooms. A picture included in the indictment shows boxes stacked in rows on the ballrooms stage.

The indictment also shows photographs of boxes that spilled over in the storage room, including a document marked SECRET/REL TO USA, FVEY, which means information releasable only to members of the intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In the photo, the classified document is redacted.

On Truth Social, Trump has maintained his innocence and said the indictment is part of a longstanding witch hunt targeting him and is meant to interfere in the 2024 election. Previously, Trump said that while he was president, he had the authority to declassify materials.

Strange! Everything about the boxes was so neat, orderly, and clean. Did the FBI tip over the one box the way they staged the papers on the floor during the raid of Mar-a-Lago, only to apologize after getting caught? he wrote on the social media platform.

In an earlier post, Trump said he would be represented in the case by white-collar defense lawyer Todd Blanche, who is representing him in a separate criminal case in Manhattan. Trump made that announcement after his lawyers, John Rowley and Jim Trusty, departed his legal team.

U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the prosecution, said in a brief statement on Friday: Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced.

We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everybody, he added, saying that as with any defendant, those accused were presumed innocent until proven guilty, and he pledged to seek a speedy trial before a jury of citizens in Florida.

Former President Donald Trump speaks in a video posted on June 8, 2023. (Reuters/Screenshot via NTD)

Materials came from the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies, the indictment said.

In a Friday interview, Turley speculated that prosecuting Trump is going to take a lot of work, and it seems unlikely that they can get this to trial before the election due to the broad array of witnesses involved in the case.

That could make the election a type of referendum on how people feel about this case, Turley, who served as an impeachment expert witness in Trumps first impeachment trial, said. You may have a second jury composed of tens of millions of Americans essentially voting on this. Because if he is elected, he could pardon himself.

Trump is the early front-runner in the Republican presidential primary for the right to challenge Biden, who is seeking reelection. At least one of Trumps rivals, meanwhile, doesnt think the case should prompt the former president to bow out of the primary race.

I think any consideration of that is premature, former Vice President Mike Pence told reporters in New Hampshire. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty in America. I think the former president has a right to make his defense.

The U.S. Constitution does not bar people who were charged or convicted of a crime from running for president. It only stipulates that individuals who were not born in the United States, have not lived in the country for at least 14 years, and are younger than 35 cannot run.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Lawmaker Calls Out Shein for Lobbying to Clear Its Name of Forced Labor Allegations

A man cleaning the windows of the first permanent showroom of Chinese online fast fashion giant Shein, during a media preview in Tokyo on Nov. 10, 2022. (Richard Brooks/AFP via Getty Images)

A senator is sounding the alarm about Chinas fashion retailer Shein, alleging it is using forced labor in its clothing supply chains and is lobbying to dismiss the claim.

I write to make you aware of actions by Shein, an apparel company founded in China that profits from Uyghur slave labor. Shein is hiring D.C. lobbyists to protect the trade loopholes that allow it to avoid accountability. No one should be fooled by Sheins efforts to cover its tracks. Action is still needed to ensure that the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA; P.L. 117- 78) is fully implemented and enforced and that Sheins trade tricks are eliminated, said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in a June 8 letter (pdf) to his colleagues.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) speaks to supporters during an election-night party in Miami, Fla., on Nov. 8, 2022. (Saul Martinez/Getty Images)

President Joe Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act into law in December of 2021. The law, which bans imports from Chinas Xinjiang region unless the importer can prove that the products were not produced using forced labor, went into effect in June of 2022.

Rubio noted that Shein is one of the largest fast fashion retailers in the world, valued at $66 billion. The company churns out over 6,000 new designs on an average day.

Yet, according to the lawmaker: Shein is able to offer this array of products at rock-bottom prices not because of any particular competitive advantage, but because it steals intellectual property, infringes copyrights, exploits U.S. trade law, and uses fabric linked to Uyghur slave labor.

The letter cited laboratory testing conducted for Bloomberg News that found two cases of garments shipped by Shein to the United States in 2022 were made with cotton from Chinas Xinjiang region. The CEO of the lab that conducted the analysis also concluded that it is a typical sample from Xinjiang, China.

The document further raised concern about how Shein had succeeded in avoiding punishment and scrutiny under the UFLPA.

Shein products have so far avoided punishment and scrutiny. In part, that is because Shein ships small packages direct-to-consumer using a trade loophole known as de minimis entry, it reads.

The de minimis entry level is the value below which imports are allowed to enter the United States with minimal government review and without duty.

Shein engaged its first Washington lobbyists from Akin Gump and Hobart Hallaway and Quayle, two renowned Washington law firms, last year to help with the rebranding push. Nevertheless, the campaign is still in its early phases. According to reports, lobbyists are working on general education on Sheins business for decision-makers as well as tax and trade problems pertinent to its operation.

The company has also relocated its headquarters from China to Singapore.

Rubio calls the moves an effort to protect its tax and trade loopholes.

In response to The Epoch Times, Shein said: We take visibility across our entire supply chain seriously, and we are committed to respecting human rights and adhering to local laws in each market we operate in. We have zero tolerance for forced labor and have implemented a robust system to support UFLPA compliance. Our suppliers must adhere to a strict code of conduct that is aligned to the International Labour Organizations core conventions. We have no manufacturers in the Xinjiang region.

Previous Efforts to Address Ties to Slave Labor

In May, a group of U.S. lawmakers called for Chinese fast fashion brand Shein to be investigated over claims of using Uyghur forced labor in part of its supply chain.

A letter (pdf) to the Chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission came amid speculation that the company could sell its shares in the United States with an initial public offering.

Twenty Republican and Democratic lawmakers signed the letter, which claimed credible allegations of using underpaid and forced labor.

Additionally, it demands that before Shein can be permitted to sell shares in the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) must compel Shein to independently audit and confirm that the company does not use Uyghur forced labor.

In another development, U.S. senators in February wrote a letter to the chief executive of Shein, raising concerns about whether the company made use of cotton sourced from Chinas Xinjiang region.

The letter asks Shein to answer certain questions within 30 days of receipt of the letter, which includes whether the cotton fibers used to manufacture its garments are sourced from Xinjiang; how the firm ensures that garments are produced without forced labor; the number of supplier audits the firm has conducted; and so on.

Forced labor products, sneaking into America through our lax de minimis laws, should be stopped at the border and never make their way to American shelves. @SHEIN_Official needs to be transparent about the reported ties between their supply chains and Chinese slave labor, Cassidy said in a tweet on Feb. 9.

Naveen Athrappully contributed to this report.
Lawyer for Bernardo Victims Says Families Told of Transfer the Day It Happened

The lawyer for the families of two of Paul Bernardos victims says the Correctional Service of Canada only told one of them that he was being transferred from maximum-security prison on the day it happened.

Tim Danson says the family of Kristen French was notified of the convicted killers transfer in the morning of May 29, then told his transfer was complete that afternoon.

The details are in an open letter Danson penned to Anne Kelly, the commissioner of the federal correctional service, who confirmed that Bernardos transfer to a medium-security prison in Quebec is under review.

Bernardo is serving a life sentence for the murders, kidnapping and torture of 15-year-old French and 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy in the early 1990s.

Dansons letter expresses concerns with statements from the correctional service that said the French and Mahaffy families were notified of Bernardos transfer prior to his relocation.

The lawyer says he found out about it via two voicemails on the day of the transfer, and the Mahaffy family was left with the impression that the transfer had taken place or was imminent.
Louisiana Lawmakers Pass Bill Requiring Parental Permission for Social Media Accounts

Three youths use their phones while sitting on a park bench in a file image. (ShutterStock)

Louisiana is the latest state to require persons under 18 years old to have their parents permission to create an online account.

Over the past year, legislators across the country have been increasingly concerned about the effects of social media on the mental health of children, encouraging a wave of proposed online safety laws for minors.

The Louisiana Legislature unanimously passed HB61, a bill that would restrict unlimited use of social media, online games, and other digital activities for minors.

This comes one month after U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a warning about the potential risks of social media on young people and urged lawmakers and tech companies to improve content standards for minors.

Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, Utah, and Virginia have passed similar age verification laws for sexually explicit websites.

If signed into law by Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, HB61 would take effect in August 2024.

Protection of Children Online Draws Bipartisan Support

Parents or guardians in the state will also have the right to cancel their childs existing accounts on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

State legislator Laurie Schlegel, a Republican and the bills sponsor, said she based the act on an existing law that prohibits those under 18 from entering into contracts with brick-and-mortar businesses.

The Louisiana civil code allows parents to rescind contracts signed by unemancipated minors.

It clearly states that any contract involving an unemancipated minor entered into online without parental consent is relatively null, Schlegel told The Wall Street Journal.

Other states like Utah and Arkansas have already passed similar laws requiring that new users must be least 18 years old or have parental consent to sign up for a social media account.

The Utah legislation was signed into law in March and is expected to take effect in nine months, while the Arkansas bill will take effect in September.

Utah will also give parents full access to their childs online accounts.

Even liberal-leaning states such as California are working on new regulations aimed at protecting minors from the negative effects of online activity.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in Congress is already discussing proposals for new federal legislation to help protect children using the internet.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) of the Senate Judiciary Committee have introduced the Kids Online Safety Act.

President Joe Biden has expressed his support for online protections for children and promised to sign a bill into law.

Critics Say Legislation Violates First Amendment

Although the protection of minors online has broad support, many tech companies and civil liberties groups warn that such bills may limit some of the positive effects that social media has for young people.

They claim that marginalized children often turn to social media for help and that tech platforms would have to collect more sensitive data from users to ensure age compliance.

Most social media companies already have policies prohibiting children under 13 from using their platforms and include strong ad-tracking blockers and content restrictions for users under 18 years of age.

The Louisiana bill does not specifically require online platforms or apps to verify the ages of users in the state and there are no specific penalties for companies that fail to comply with age standards.

NetChoice, an industry group representing internet platforms including Amazon, Google, Meta, and TikTok, opposed the Louisiana bill and said it hopes that Edwards will veto it.

It will decimate anonymous browsing and gamingrequiring citizens to hand over data to prove their identity and age just to use an online service, said Carl Szabo, NetChoice vice president and general counsel, in a statement to CNBC. Anonymity can be important for individuals using social media services for things like whistleblowers, victims, and those identifying crime in the neighborhood who fear backlash.

Szabo claims that the Louisiana bill is in violation of the First Amendment.

Whats worse is that it fails to really address the underlying issues. Instead, policymakers could actually help teens and parents by following the educational approaches of Virginia and Florida, he added.

NetChoice filed a lawsuit against California in December, claiming that the states Age-Appropriate Design Code Act violated freedom of expression.

By abandoning the First Amendment and forcing all websites to track and store information on both children and adults, California risks closing the internet and putting the digital safety of all Americans, and especially children, in jeopardy, Szabo said in a statement at the time.
Man Gets 9 Years in Prison for Stabbing 2 San Diego Police Dogs

SAN DIEGOA man who stabbed two San Diego police dogs within a years time was sentenced June 8 to nine years in state prison.

Dedrick Jones, 37, pleaded guilty to stabbing police dog Titan in January 2021 and was sentenced to one year in jail, plus probation. Following his release from jail and while on probation for Titans stabbing, Jones stabbed police dog Hondo on Dec. 17, 2021.

In both instances, Jones was arrested following standoffs with San Diego police that concluded with officers releasing dogs and Jones stabbing the animals.

Both dogs survived the attacks, though Titan has since died, according to Deputy District Attorney Clay Biddle. The prosecutor said Titans death is not directly related to the stabbing, but has not been ruled out as a contributing factor.

Jones went to trial and represented himself in connection with Hondos stabbing. He was convicted of brandishing a knife, but jurors did not reach verdicts on several other counts. Jones later pleaded guilty to the remaining counts, which included animal cruelty, injury to a peace officer animal, and resisting arrest.

Defense attorney Denis Lainez asked San Diego Superior Court Judge Dwayne Moring for a sentence of seven years, citing Joness troubled upbringing, which he said causes him to react incorrectly in panic situations.

Lainez also said the police call that led to Hondos stabbing was based on a false report that Jones had vandalized a persons car. The attorney said that while I wish he had handled this better, he argued the person who initially contacted the police lied about what occurred and the officers responded as though he had committed a crime.

Mr. Jones had done absolutely nothing wrong and because of who he was or because of his circumstances, he was completely not believed, Lainez said.

Biddle argued Thursday for a sentence of just over 12 years in prison, telling the judge that Jones has a long and violent criminal history that includes punching a police officer in the face in Florida in 2012.

According to San Diego police, Jones was armed with two knives during the January 2021 standoff in the Midway District that led to Titans stabbing. Titan received around 100 stitches and had part of his colon removed as a result.

The second stabbing happened on Riley Street in the Midway District, during which police said Jones was swinging a knife and climbed onto a parked car, then approached officers while still holding the blade.

Hondo was stabbed at least twice in the chest before officers were able to take Jones into custody, but the dog was able to return to duty a few weeks later, police said.
Minister Dodges Questions on Missing Unaccompanied Minor Immigrants

A child looks through a window of a bus carrying refugees fleeing the conflict from neighboring Ukraine in the border town of Przemysl, Poland, on Feb. 26, 2022. (Petr David Josek/AP Photo)

The immigration minister has dodged questions on the number of unaccompanied minor immigrants currently missing in the UK.

Robert Jenrick was asked by several MPs on the current figures following reports that 400 children who arrived in Britain unaccompanied had disappeared.

In January Jenrick told MPs that of the 4,600 unaccompanied minors who arrived in the UK without an adult since July 2021, 440 had gone missing while housed in hotels.

More than half returned, but over 180including over a dozen under the age of 16had not been found.

Of those who have vanished, 88 percent are Albanian nationals, with the remaining 12 percent from Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Turkey. Just one is female.

Asked on Wednesday to update Parliament on the current statistics, Jenrick failed to give a specific answer.

However, he did reveal that there are currently 24,300 under the age of 18 who have arrived in Britain alone currently in government accommodation.

Of those who were missing, the minister said there was no evidence that people have been abducted from outside hotels.

Jenrick said intelligence suggests some had left to meet individuals who gained them employment in the grey or black economies.

He said that strict protocols were in place to deal with missing children including MARS (Missing After Reasonable Steps), which is widely used across childrens homes and supported accommodation for minors.

Police and other authorities are also involved in searching for young immigrants who go missing.

Haunted

Speaking during the debate, Scottish National Party (SNP) MP Deirdre Brock said that it was unacceptable that vulnerable children are still being housed alone in hotel accommodation.

The Edinburgh politician said those working with young immigrants in Scotland had described the children as bewildered and terrified.

Brock read out an account from a Scottish childrens rights worker describing how one child asked if she was going to be sent back to her village where she was at risk of female genital mutilation.

Another girl, who had arrived in Scotland just two months prior, discovered she was pregnant during a medical examination.

The distressed child asked the support worker if the Home Office would kill her for being unmarried and pregnant, Brock told the Commons.

The MP said another child, who had arrived in the UK from Afghanistan, was haunted by the image of his inconsolable mother saying goodbye to him.

Rather than compounding the fear and trauma of children like him, we have a legal and moral duty to look after them, Brock said.

If the Home Office has no interest in creating an asylum system that is based on fairness and dignity, it should devolve the necessary powers to the Scottish Parliament to allow Scotland to do so.

Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick leaves a Cabinet Meeting at 10 Downing Street in London on Nov. 1, 2022. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

In January 100 charities wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak calling for an end to housing unaccompanied minors in hotels, warning that children were at risk of exploitation and one charity calling it a child protection scandal.

The letter also condemned the governments reported failures to protect vulnerable children from harm, and highlighted how housing young immigrants in hotels was intended to be used only as a short-term emergency option.

The letter added: There is no legal basis for placing children in Home Office hotel accommodation, and almost two years into the operation of the schemewhich is both unlawful and harmfulit is no longer possible to justify the use of hotels as being temporary.

It is a significant departure from the Children Act 1989 and established standards.

Bill Risks More Going Missing

MPs also raised concerns that the proposed implementation of the Illegal Migration Bill would see more children going missing.

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas said, I am gravely concerned that, as a result of young peoples fear that they will be deported at age 18, potentially to Rwanda, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children will be more likely to go missing from care to avoid that, and therefore be at even greater risk of exploitation and abuse by traffickers.

Lucas also called for a dedicated team to help find missing youngsters.

Safeguarding surely means remaining shocked that the Home Office has been housing children without legal basis and that we still do not know where nearly 200 of those children are, she said.

I and other members have repeatedly questioned the minister about the need for a national dedicated operation to find them. His answers have not instilled confidence.

On the contrary, the governments plan to degrade childrens rights even further will increase the risks.

On Monday, retired judge Baroness Butler-Sloss told Parliament that children have been disregarded and downgraded under the small boats cutting legislation.

The independent crossbencher branded measures in the controversial Illegal Migration Bill truly sad.

She was among a string of critics in the House of Lords to round on the draft legislation, which would allow for the detention of children arriving in the UK by unauthorised means.

It also contains the power to remove unaccompanied youngsters.

Those permitted to stay would be allowed to do so only until they turn 18 and would not be able to settle in the UK.

The government has said the provisions in the bill aim to act as a deterrent against minors being taken on the dangerous Channel crossing.

But challenged on this in the upper chamber, Home Office minister Lord Murray of Blidworth said there was no evidence over the impact of the measures as they were not yet in force.

Liberal Democrat Lord German argued the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill did not protect unaccompanied children.

He said: It just defers their removal. These children will not be able to start to rebuild their lives or focus on their futures because of the threat of removal.

Responding, the minister pointed out the majority of unaccompanied children who claimed asylum in the UK in 2022 were aged 16 or 17.

Where there was a dispute about age, half were found to be adults, he said.

If we fill this bill with exceptions and carve-outs it will not achieve its aims and it would serve to put more children at risk as the people smugglers would seek to fill the boats with even more young people, putting further lives at risk and splitting up families, Murray said.

PA Media contributed to this report.
More than 100 young children suffered seizures after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, according to a new study.

One hundred and four children under 6 years old suffered a seizure within 42 days of a COVID-19 shot, researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other institutions found.

Others suffered strokes, blood clotting disorders, and appendicitis, the researchers said. They analyzed health records from the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), a CDC-funded network that features sites operated by Kaiser Permanente, Marshfield Clinic, Health Partners, and Denver Health.

The researchers examined events that fit one or more of 23 specified outcomes, including seizures and myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, following messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccination.

The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines both use messenger RNA technology.

Children were studied if they received a vaccine dose between June 18, 2022, and March 18 of this year; 247,011 doses were administered to children under 6 during that time. Researchers examined the events that occurred within 42 days of vaccination.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration first authorized Pfizers vaccine for children younger than 5 and Modernas vaccine for children younger than 6 on June 17, 2022, even as efficacy estimates against infection were substandard or unreliable, and there was either no evidence or negative evidence of protection against severe disease.

The study was published by Pediatrics, the American Academy of Pediatrics journal, on June 6.

Type of Analysis

Eric Weintraub of the CDC and the other researchers for the new study conducted a type of examination called rapid cycle analysis. It involves comparing outcomes among the vaccinated within 21 days of a shot with outcomes among the vaccinated between 22 and 42 days of a shot. Events on the same day as vaccination were excluded.

The first window of timeone to 21 daysis described as the primary risk interval, or the most likely period of time for the vaccinated to suffer adverse events. The latter time period was deemed a comparison interval.

The idea for the events that occur in the latter period is that its too late for them to be associated with a vaccine, Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventative medicine at Vanderbilt University who wasnt involved in the study but who has worked closely with the CDC, told The Epoch Times.

The researchers didnt compare the vaccinated with the unvaccinated, despite indicating they would do so in the protocol (pdf) for VSD monitoring. They have in some other studies. A request for comment to the corresponding author was met with an away message, and another author didnt respond to an inquiry.

The researchers reviewed medical records for each case identified in either of the intervals, and they also calculated rates to see whether any were more common in the earlier window.

What They Found

In absolute terms, researchers found a number of serious problems after vaccination, including the seizures.

The following events were detected in at least one young child one to 42 days following vaccination:

Appendicitis

Bells palsy

Encephalitis, myelitis, or encephalomyelitis

Guillain-Barre syndrome

Immune thrombocytopenia

Kawasaki disease

Pulmonary embolism

Hemorrhagic stroke

Transverse myelitis

Venous thromboembolism

The numbers were also higher in the initial window of time for some outcomes.

In the first 21 days, for instance, 38 Pfizer recipients experienced seizures and 23 Moderna recipients experienced seizures. In the second window, 24 Pfizer recipients experienced seizures and 19 Moderna recipients experienced seizures.

There was also one case of encephalitis, myelitis, or encephalomyelitis and one case of pulmonary embolism in the initial window, compared with zero in the next window.

More events in the initial window can indicate an early elevated risk, CDC officials have said.

But the researchers said the safety signal criteria were not met for any outcome after adjusting for factors such as race and sex.

None of the outcomes met the signaling threshold, they wrote.

Safety signals can indicate a vaccine side effect, though further research is needed to verify a signal.

Clinical trials for the vaccines for young children, run by the manufacturers, identified serious adverse events in 29 of the 3,013 children who received Pfizers shot and 24 out of 4,792 who received Modernas shot, including two cases of appendicitis, multiple seizures, and a case of Kawasaki disease. Thousands experienced adverse events, such as fever. Several dropped out of the trials after experiencing an adverse event.

The study investigators and the FDA said most of the serious adverse events were unrelated to the vaccination.

Reactions

In their conclusion, the researchers said the results of the study can provide reassurance to clinicians, parents, and policymakers alike.

They emphasized that no cases of myocarditis or pericarditis, two known side effects of the messenger RNA vaccines, were detected among the vaccinated within 42 days of vaccination.

Schaffner agreed: We know that if you follow a half million children over the period of the year, some bad stuff is going to happen to some of those children.

Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist who also reviewed the study, said hes been alarmed at cases of post-vaccination problems among children reported in peer-reviewed studies.

Because nearly all children have already had mild COVID-19 illness and are recovered, the COVID-19 vaccines were never medically necessary, McCullough told The Epoch Times in an email. He said the new study and other papers show that the vaccines are unsafe for use in children.

McCullough has called for the vaccines to be removed from the market because of the growing evidence of various health problems following vaccination. Regulators revoked the authorization for Johnson & Johnsons vaccine this month.

Limitations of the study included not analyzing all potential safety concerns and the low uptake in the younger children, with just a quarter of children in the population in VSD sites having received one or more doses of a vaccine.

Dr. Nicola Klein, one of the authors, reported receiving grants from Pfizer for COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials, and she and another author reported receiving other funding from additional pharmaceutical companies such as Merck. Schaffner has also received funding from Pfizer in the past and is a liaison to the CDC.

Barbara Loe Fisher, president and co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center, which seeks to inform parents and others about vaccine data, said future studies should be done by independent researchers who compare the vaccinated with the unvaccinated.

The VSD is a government-maintained database that cannot be viewed by the public and is not easily accessible to independent researchers for oversight on or replication of study findings, Fisher told The Epoch Times via email. Where are the independent, methodologically sound COVID vaccine studies conducted by researchers who are not paid by government or industry that evaluate all morbidity and mortality outcomes in young children who do and do not receive mRNA COVID vaccines? Thats the study parents want to see done.
Most Evacuation Orders Lifted in Nova Scotia Almost Two Weeks After Wildfires Started

Northfield fire department member Seth Slauenwhite sprays down a flare up along Highway 103, near Shelburne, N.S., in this June 3, 2023, handout photo. (The Canadian Press/HO-Communications Nova Scotia)

Most evacuation orders were lifted Friday across Nova Scotia, almost two weeks after a series of unprecedented wildfires broke out in the southwestern corner of the province and in suburban Halifax.

Officials in Shelburne County, where the largest wildfire in the provinces history continued to burn out of control, lifted all evacuation orders at noon. The wildfire there, which started May 27 near Barrington Lake, hasnt grown since the weekend thanks to the work of firefighters and wet, cool weather.

The Barrington Lake fire forced more than 6,000 people from their homes and destroyed 60 homes and cottages, as well as 150 other structures. By last weekend, the fire had grown to 235 square kilometres.

The municipalities of Shelburne and Barrington, which are both within Shelburne County, have asked people to stay out of the area for a few days unless they have a reason to be there. Residents were also warned that some areas were still without electricity, though power was expected to be restored Friday.

In the Halifax Regional Municipality, evacuation orders were lifted at 1 p.m. for all but a small portion of the subdivisions closest to where the fire started on May 28.

Evacuation orders remain in place for three small areas that experienced the most damage, but officials said the size of those areas had changed on Friday, which meant that portions of the area of significant impact were no longer subject to an evacuation order.

On Thursday, municipal officials said residents who live within the significant impact zone should be able to return home within the next 10 days. Officials said the region must first complete a review of infrastructure, install traffic controls and place fences around destroyed properties.

Driven by strong winds and fuelled by tinder-dry forests, the fast-moving Halifax-area fire destroyed 151 houses and dozens of other structures. In all, more than 16,000 people were forced to flee their homes in the Upper Tantallon and Hammonds Plains areas, which are about a 30-minute drive northwest of the citys downtown.

The fire was largely contained on Saturday, and some evacuation orders were lifted earlier this week. By Friday morning, about 4,000 people in the Halifax region were still waiting to return home.
MPs Concerned Over UK Universities Alleged Role in Developing Iranian Suicide Drones

Drones during a military exercise in an undisclosed location in Iran in an undated photo. (Iranian Army/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via Reuters)

MPs have raised serious concerns after a report said British universities have worked with Iranian researchers on drone technologies that have potential military applications.

According to a report published on Thursday by The Jewish Chronicle (The JC), a number of research projects were done in collaboration with Iranian universities that have been sanctioned by the UK, the EU, and the United States.

Alicia Kearns MP, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote on Twitter that she had written to Education Secretary Gillian Keegan to raise her serious concerns about these unacceptable collaborations by British Universities with Iran, which risk breaching sanctions around sensitive and dual-use technologies.

Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy has also said the revelation is deeply troubling, calling on the government to urgently investigate whether or not UK universities and academics have breached UK sanctions on Iran regarding collaboration on military technologies.

Among thousands of scientific papers published since 2017, an analysis by The Jewish Chronicle identified hundreds of projects that involved collaborations between British researchers and institutions and Iranian universities that have been sanctions over their involvement with the Iranian regimes nuclear programme, the report said.

While most of the papers are on subjects about civil technologies, at least 16 studies involving 11 British universities had potential Iranian military applications, it said.

One of the papers that was highlighted had investigated the effect of two-stroke engines using an electronic fuel injection system in drones.

It was published in 2019 by Ahmad Najjaran Kheirabadi, then a postgraduate researcher at the Imperial College London (ICL), and two scientists from Irans Shahrood University of Technology and Ferdowsi University of Mashhad.

According to The JC, the drones that use that type of engine include the Iran-developed suicide drone HESA Shahed 136, which has been used by the Russian military in its invasion of Ukraine.

The JC also said the study was supported by the Iranian regimes Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology.

The departments deputy minister Mohammad Nouri and former minister Kamran Daneshjoo have both been on the EUs sanctions list for more than a decade and on the UKs own sanctions list after Brexit since the end of 2020.

Academics at the ICL also co-wrote another paper in 2019 on using laser technology to produce parts that have a wide range of applications in the aerospace industry, with researchers from Irans Sharif University of Technology, the UKs University of Liverpool, and a number of universities in Europe, the United States, and Singapore.

The Sharif University of Technology is also on the UKs sanctions list along with dozens of Irans aerospace manufacturers and organisations.

Another paper highlighted was written by Soheil Jafari, a lecturer at Cranfield University, which specialises in defence and security, and a Tehran-based researcher. Both authors previously worked at the Sharif University of Technology.

The research, published in 2021, examined fuzzy controller structures for aero engines and referred to potential military applications.

The JC also mentioned two papers involving academics from the Shahid Beheshti University, which has also been sanctioned.

According to the report, one of the studies, co-authored by a Northumbria University researcher, was about blocking electronic eavesdroppers. It also said academics from the two institutions have collaborated on more than 200 papers.

Another conference paper on developing cutting-edge electronic devices using superconductors and graphene was co-authored by some Cambridge University researchers and a University of Glasgow researcher who got her doctorate from Shahid Beheshti University.

F-4 Phantom fighter jets fly during the Army Day parade in the Iranian capital Tehran on April 18, 2010. (Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images)

In an email to The Epoch Times, a spokesperson for Cranfield University said: In an increasingly complex global operating environment, Cranfield University takes a thorough and robust approach to international collaborations and the security of our research.

We review our security policies and processes on a continual basis to ensure that research activities fully comply with guidelines and legal obligations, the person added.

Northumbria University said in a statement, also emailed to The Epoch Times, that its reviewing the information.

Northumbria University research is underpinned by ethical and good practice guidelines. To ensure fairness and consistency we are undertaking a thorough review of the information presented, and it would be premature to comment further at this stage, a spokesperson said.

An Imperial College London spokesperson told The JC all its research is subject to Imperials Ethics Code and the university has robust relationship review policies and due diligence processes in place, with our responsibility to UK national security given the utmost importance.

A Glasgow University spokesperson said: Research teams work in collaboration with academics, institutions, and organisations from a broad spectrum of global sectors.

All research carried out at the University of Glasgow is underpinned by policies and a Code of Good Practice that ensures it is conducted to the highest standards of academic rigour.

A spokesman for the UK Government said: We will not accept collaborations which compromise our national security. We have made our systems more robust and expanded the scope of the Academic Technology Approval Scheme to protect UK research from ever-changing global threats, and refuse applications where we have concerns.
Althom / iStock.com

Purchasing a new car is a pretty straightforward affair. Buying used, however, requires you to do much more legwork to make sure you're getting a good car and a good deal -- and that you're not falling for one of the many scams that fraudsters use to rip off buyers.

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Some of the following scams are used on their own, but many other times criminals utilize several of them at the same time. The good news is, you can protect yourself and avoid falling victim to predatory sellers.

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1. The Must Sell Now Scam

The FBI recently updated a longstanding warning to be on the lookout for a scam that cost car buyers more than $54 million between 2014-2017. Criminals post false ads that feature pictures of real cars -- cars that they don't own or even possess -- that they claim to be selling at a steep discount because they have to sell fast. Sometimes they claim they were called for military deployment. Other times they're going through a divorce or that it belonged to a loved one who died. Either way, you have to give at least a partial payment upfront if you want to get in on the deal. Once the payment is made, the seller disappears into the wind.

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How You Can Avoid It

The secret to avoiding this scam can go a long way to protecting you from all used car scams and all fraud in general -- use common sense. If the price is well below market value and if the deal seems too good to be true, it almost always is. If a seller you've never met asks for payment in advance, walk away.

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2. The Third-Party Scam

Criminals who run that scam and many others often try to legitimize their ruses by faking partnerships with reputable third-party organizations like eBay Motors. They have no real affiliation with these trusted platforms, although they assure their victims the platform will oversee the transaction. They're known to offer fake toll-free phone numbers and high-quality mimic websites that impersonate the third-party to put their targets at ease.

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How You Can Avoid It

Criminals using this scam work hard to fabricate their relationships with trusted third parties. Never rely on the website, email address or phone number supplied by the seller. Instead, look up the company online, find its contact information on your own, and reach out to them yourself.

Iryna Tiumentseva / Shutterstock.com

3. Gift Card Scam

Another hallmark of many scams targeting used car buyers is a request for gift cards as payment. When the buyer calls the fake toll-free number, they're told to purchase gift cards in the amount of the sale price they agreed to and turn the prepaid gift card codes with the imposter seller. This kind of payment is virtually untraceable, which is the only reason they request it -- after all, what legitimate seller would prefer that over cash?

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How You Can Avoid It

Never pay with an alternative currency that can't be traced. According to the Federal Trade Commission, "If anyone tells you to pay that way, it's a scam. Every time." This holds true not only for gift cards but for digital currency like Bitcoin. Your bank and credit card providers offer fraud protection and other security services. When you deviate from those platforms, you open yourself to losing the entire payment to scammers.

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4. Wire Transfer Scam

Like gift cards, wire transfer requests are a hallmark of many commonly used car scams. The point is the same -- to get their victims to submit a hard-to-trace payment without having received a vehicle. Here, too, the scam is often backed up by fraudulent but seemingly legitimate third-party organizations.

kosmos111 / Getty Images/iStockphoto

How You Can Avoid It

You can avoid this and most other scams by not paying for a car that you don't have in your possession. Scammers will offer all kinds of reasons why they can't deliver the vehicle or allow you to pick it up until they receive a wire transfer. Don't fall for it. In fact, there's no reason you should have to pay via wire transfer in the first place -- doing so makes it easier for scammers to take the money and run and harder for you to ever track them down or get your money back. Wire transfers are only for people who you know and trust.

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5. Purchase Protection Plan Scam

Legitimate companies like eBay Motors offer a vehicle purchase protection plan with some of the vehicles sold through their platform. The program protects buyers from fraud and holds sellers accountable. Some scammers try to set their victims at ease by faking a relationship with companies that offer purchase protection services, complete with imposter phone numbers, email addresses and websites.

valentinrussanov / Getty Images

How You Can Avoid It

Here, too, the key to protecting yourself is to do your own research. Never trust contact information from the seller regarding a purchase protection program. Instead, find the company's true contact information online and contact them yourself. This is true no matter how authentic the website or email looks.

More: 9 Bills You Should Never Put on Autopay

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6. Escrow Scam

Another way scammers get their victims to lower their guards and pay in advance is by creating a fake escrow account. Legitimate buyers and sellers often park good-faith payments in third-party escrow accounts until the conditions of the sale have been met by both parties. This tactic can snare buyers who are rightfully leery of wiring money directly to sellers they've never met before they receive the vehicle. The problem is, there is no escrow account and the money goes directly to the scammer who then disappears with the cash.

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How You Can Avoid It

Never pay in advance, even if the payment goes to a supposedly legitimate escrow service. Go through the regular motions of meeting the seller, examining the car, having it inspected, and then negotiating a price and completing the sale. Escrow scams are especially common with custom, specialty or exotic cars, particularly those that are offered well below market value.

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7. Curbstoning

Curbstoners, as these types of scammers are called, can be either shady private sellers or unscrupulous dealers. The practice involves luring prospective buyers to open spaces not associated with businesses or residences like a parking lot or the curbside of a road, which is where the name comes from. The goal is to sell salvaged or damaged cars to buyers who think they're getting a good deal. The cars are dressed up cosmetically to conceal dangerous flaws like missing airbags or unsafe frame welding, which would disqualify them from sale on the open market. These sales are illegal and frequently end with the driver leaving without the title or other critical paperwork.

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How You Can Avoid It

Curbstoners find their marks through online ads on sites like Craigslist or simply by placing "for sale" signs on parked cars -- and they usually try to offload multiple cars at the same time. Conduct an online search for any listed phone numbers to see if they're associated with any other vehicle sales or ads. If they are, it's likely the work of a curbstoner. Another method is to call the number and say you're calling to inquire about the car. If whoever answers asks which car you're talking about, that means multiple cars are linked to the same number and it's likely a scam. Also, curbstoners always demand cash and won't accept a check or money order because their goal is to eliminate a paper trail.

See: Here's How Much Money Experts Say You Should Have in Your Savings Account If You're in Your 50s

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8. Title Washing

The title washing scam conceals or erases salvage brandings that serve as a warning on titles for cars that insurance companies have deemed to be a total loss after events like an accident or flood. They achieve this by transferring salvage vehicles to states where the automaker's brand isn't recognized. When the state issues a new title, the salvage branding can disappear -- if not, the seller often tries again in another state.

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How You Can Avoid It

Scammers can wash a title, but they can't wash computer records. To avoid this scam, which could leave you with a car that's worthless or dangerous, do something you should do with every used car purchase anyway -- run a VIN check. Services like Carfax will reveal a vehicle's salvage status. Keep in mind that both private sellers and dealers have been known to run this scam.

slobo / Getty Images/iStockphoto

9. Odometer Fraud

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that 450,000 cars are sold with manipulated odometer readings every year at a cumulative cost of $1 billion in annual losses. The odometer tallies the number of miles driven, one of the key indicators of any car's value. Altering, resetting or otherwise misrepresenting the true readout is illegal, but it happens all the time, often without the buyer ever knowing.

bizoo_n / Getty Images/iStockphoto

How You Can Avoid It

To protect yourself, start by inspecting the title closely. The stated mileage should match the odometer readout. If the mileage on the title is smudged or obscured, there might be a problem. Look for evidence of tampering with the odometer and make sure that it records miles when you test drive it. Here, too, a VIN report from a service like CarFax can give you the true story of the car's mileage. If the amount of wear and tear on the car seems excessive for the mileage the odometer indicates, walk away.

Check Out: 10 Best Cash Advance Apps That Cover You Until Payday

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10. The 'Just Needs' Scam

This scam defrauds buyers through ads that offer a car for sale that's in perfect working condition, but "just needs" something that's fairly cheap and easy to replace like freon or a new alternator. The buyer purchases the vehicle and makes the needed repair, only to find out that the stated problem was just the tip of the iceberg. The addition of freon, for example, might not fix the air conditioner because a much larger repair like a new compressor was needed or that the alternator was just one part of a larger problem with the electrical system.

SerhiiBobyk / Getty Images/iStockphoto

How You Can Avoid It

The phrase "just needs" is usually a code for "the entire system doesn't work." Avoid these vehicles with almost no exceptions. Common sense is key. If a seller could get thousands more for a vehicle by spending a few hundred dollars on a simple part to get the car into good working condition, why would they skip that step and sell it for much less?

kali9 / Getty Images

11. Car Cloning

Car-cloning is a sophisticated scam where criminals use stolen VIN numbers and fraudulent documents to make a stolen car appear to be legitimate. It can be hard to detect and the stakes are high. If your car's true identity is discovered, authorities will confiscate it and you could even face criminal charges.

master1305 / Getty Images/iStockphoto

How You Can Avoid It

The National Motor Vehicle Title Information System (NMVTIS) is a service provided by the U.S. Department of Justice. Before you purchase a car, run its VIN number and its title information through the NMVTIS system, which is free to use. It will tell you if the car doesn't match its VIN number or associated paperwork.

Zelle Scams on Facebook Marketplace: How To Recognize and Avoid Them

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12. Deposit Fraud

Deposit fraud is simple and effective. The seller lists a car for less than it's worth to attract eager buyers. When buyers contact the fraudsters, they ask for a significant deposit to take the car off the market, presumably because so many other buyers want to get their hands on the discounted vehicle. Once the buyer leaves a deposit, the seller disappears and stops responding.

sturti / Getty Images/iStockphoto

How You Can Avoid It

Avoid deposit fraud by not making a deposit in the first place. There might be an exception in a case where you've met the seller, seen the car and established the seller's identity. In those rare cases, never agree to a large deposit and always get a receipt.

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General Tips To Avoid Fraud

If you're shopping for a used car, you can be sure that scammers are baiting traps for you and your wallet. The following tips will help you avoid the pitfalls of used car fraud no matter how crafty the scammers are:

Use common sense and listen to your gut -- if something feels fishy or if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Try to deal with local sellers only and never deal with a seller who refuses to meet in person.

Research the buyer, including their name, email address and phone number.

Research the car, including a Carfax report and a trace on the NMVTIS database.

Be leery of sellers who try to rush the sale.

Never trust a seller who claims a vehicle is guaranteed by eBay Motors, PayPal or any other online marketplace.

Never pay in advance and never send money through a bank-to-bank or wire service transaction.

More From GOBankingRates

This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: 12 Used Car-Buying Scams To Watch Out For  and How To Avoid Them
Elon Musk Issues Warning About Justice System After Trump Indictment

Tesla head Elon Musk (L) talks to the press near Berlin on Sept. 3, 2020. Former U.S. President Donald Trump (R) arrives to give remarks during a Save America Rally in Illinois on June 25, 2022. (Maja Hitij/Getty Images; Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)

Elon Musk issued a warning to the Department of Justice (DOJ) after former President Donald Trump was indicted on multiple federal charges on Thursday.

There does seem to be far higher interest in pursuing Trump compared to other people in politics, Musk wrote in a Twitter post on Thursday night, responding to a comment made by a prominent user on the platform. Very important that the justice system rebut what appears to be differential enforcement or they will lose public trust.

It came after Trump revealed on Truth Social that he is facing indictment in connection to the DOJs investigation into whether he mishandled classified records. The DOJ has not publicly commented on Trumps comments. On Friday afternoon, federal prosecutors unsealed the indictment against Trump and former aide Waltine Nauta.

Attorney General Merrick Garland is believed to have arrived at his office at DOJ headquarters in Washington, but avoided a crush of media. Garland arrived out of view of cameras and the DOJ remained publicly silent Friday morning. The scene was similar throughout the night Thursday, even amid the political storm unleashed by news of the indictment, according to The Associated Press.

We are just not going to comment on this case, White House principal deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton told reporters Friday on Air Force One, and Id refer you to the DOJ, which runs its criminal investigations independently.

She added: This is a president who respects the rule of law and has said that since day one. Thats precisely why were not commenting here. He believes in respecting the independence of the DOJ and protecting the integrity of their processes.

Dalton said Biden and his staff found out just like everybody else last night that Trump was indicted from news reports and that the White House had no advanced knowledge that this was coming.

On Friday, Trump said that former prosecutor Todd Blanche will lead his defense in the federal case along with a law firm that will be named later, replacing his previous layers, John Rowley and Jim Trusty.

There does seem to be far higher interest in pursuing Trump compared to other people in politics. Very important that the justice system rebut what appears to be differential enforcement or they will lose public trust.  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 8, 2023

Blanche, a respected white-collar defense lawyer, joined Trumps legal team just before his New York indictment in March. Before that, he was a partner at the firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP.

Blanche sat by Trumps side at his Mar-a-Lago estate during a recent video hearing in the New York case and is spearheading efforts to get that matter moved from state court to federal court.

Blanche previously represented former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in getting state mortgage fraud charges thrown out on double jeopardy grounds, arguing the New York case was too similar to one that landed Manafort in federal prison. Blanche also represented Igor Fruman, an associate of Trumps former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who pleaded guilty in 2021 in a campaign finance case.

Trump also railed against the DOJ in a series of social media posts on Thursday and Friday.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event at Mar-a-Lago April 4, 2023 in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is secured by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time, Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The case, he added, is tantamount to election interference and the greatest witch hunt of all time. The former president indicated that of course he would plead not guilty to charges in federal court on Tuesday.

Legal experts say that Trump can still run for and serve as president if he is convicted and sentenced. The U.S. Constitution only bars people under the age of 35, those who were not born in the United States, and those who havent lived at least 14 years in the United States from running.

Other than Musk, a large number of Republican and Democratic lawmakers reacted to the development, with Democrats saying that the indictment shows that no individual is above the law. Republicans largely said that the case is politically motivated.

Musk, meanwhile, moved to re-instate Trumps Twitter account late last year after the Tesla CEO acquired the company. So far, Trump has not yet posted on the platform, opting instead to use his own Truth Social.

Other major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube also reinstated Trumps accounts, respectively, in recent months.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
NATO Members Might Individually Send Troops to Ukraine, Former Alliance Chief Warns

Then-NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen gestures while speaking during a media conference ahead of a meeting of the North Atlantic Council at NATO headquarters in Brussels on April 1, 2014. (Virginia Mayo/AP Photo)

Individual NATO members could send troops to Ukraine if the alliance fails to provide Kyiv with security guarantees at next months summit in Lithuania, former NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen said last week.

If NATO cannot agree on a clear path forward for Ukraine, there is a clear possibility that some countries individually might take action, Rasmussen told the British newspaper The Guardian on June 7.

Poland, in particular, is very engaged in providing concrete assistance to Ukraine, he said.

I wouldnt exclude the possibility that Poland would engage even stronger in this context  and be followed by the Baltic States, maybe including the possibility of troops on the ground, Rasmussen said.

Poland, which shares a 330-mile border with Ukraine, is among Kyivs most ardent supporters.

Last year, Warsaw provided Kyiv with 250 combat tanks. Earlier this year, it was the first country to pledge German-made Leopard tanks to Ukraine.

In March, Poland became the first NATO member to contribute fighter jetsin the form of four MiG-29sto Ukraine. The following month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Warsaw, where Polish President Andrzej Duda reiterated his countrys support for Kyiv.

The Baltic states mentioned by RasmussenNATO members Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuaniaare also all staunch supporters of Ukraine.

Rasmussen, a former Danish prime minister, served as NATO secretary-general from 2009 to 2014. He currently acts as an adviser to Zelenskyy on issues pertaining to Kyivs long-term security.

Polish President Andrzej Duda (R) welcomes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as they meet at the Presidential Palace in Warsaw, Poland, on April 5, 2023. (Czarek Sokolowski/AP Photo)

Potential Turning Point

If carried out, Rasmussens suggestion would be a turning point in terms of steadily escalating Western support for Ukraine.

Since Russia launched its invasion early last year, the Westwith the United States at the leadhas provided Kyiv with increasingly sophisticated arms and equipment.

This has included HIMARS rocket launchers, advanced combat drones, Western-made battle tanks, and U.S. Patriot air-defense systems. Last month, several allies of Kyiv signaled their readiness to train Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s.

But until now, Western capitalsfearing wider conflict with Russiahave shied away from the notion of putting boots on the ground in Ukraine.

On Feb. 24, 2022the day Moscow initially launched its invasionJens Stoltenberg, NATOs current secretary-general, said the alliance had no plans to deploy troops.

There are no NATO combat troops, no NATO troops at all inside Ukraine, Stoltenberg told reporters.

We have made it clear that we dont have any plans and intention of deploying NATO troops to Ukraine.

Russia upped the ante in September 2022, annexing four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine after holding controversial referendums.

Zelenskyy responded by formally requesting Ukraines immediate accession to NATO as a full-fledged member.

Since then, Kyiv has continued to lobby NATO members in hopes of securing a firm pledge that Ukraine would soon be let into the Western military alliance.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attends a joint press briefing with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 20, 2023. (Alina Smutko/Reuters)

Summit in Vilnius

At a June 1 meeting of European leaders in Moldova, Zelenskyy reiterated his call for Ukraines accession to NATO. Barring full membership, he urged the alliance to grant Kyiv security guarantees as the conflict entered its 15th month.

He also voiced hope that his country would be invited to join the alliance at the NATO summit in Vilnius, which is set for July 1112.

Speaking in Moldova, the leaders of France and Germany both appeared to voice support for the notion of security guarantees.

It is imperative that the Vilnius summit gives these immediate guarantees [to Ukraine], French President Emmanuel Macron said.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for his part, said Kyiv should receive such guarantees in order to provide it with the security it needs against the danger of being attacked.

According to Stoltenberg, the sought-for security guarantees will be on the agenda of the Vilnius summit.

But he has also suggested that such guarantees could only be given to full-fledged alliance members in line with Article 5 of NATOs founding charter.

Article 5 commits NATO member states to come to the aid of fellow members in the event that theyre subject to an armed attack.

Rasmussen, in his recent remarks, said that if Kyiv doesnt get anything in Vilnius, Warsaw might forge a coalition of the willing for the deployment of troops to Ukraine.

It would be entirely legal for Ukraine to seek such military assistance, he noted, according to The Guardian.

In a June 8 post on Telegram, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russias Security Council, responded to the former NATO chiefs remarks.

Rasmussen, Medvedev wrote, said that if Ukraine doesnt receive an invitation to join NATO in Vilnius, countries of the alliance would be able to send troops there  on their own.

Have the people of these countries been asked? Who among them wants war with Russia? Medvedev asked.

Do they really want hypersonic strikes on Europe?

Reuters contributed to this report.
New York Times Avoids Tough Questions for Gov. Newsom

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) speaks during the United Nations Climate Action: Race to Zero and Resilience Forum Supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies in New York City, on Sept. 21, 2022. (Monica Schipper/Getty Images for Bloomberg Philanthropies)

Commentary

Good thing we have The Epoch Times covering California, because the New York Times just isnt doing the job. It just conducted a puffball interview with Gov. Gavin Newsom that didnt include a single tough question: A Conversation With Gavin Newsom About the California Effect: Conor Dougherty of The New York Times spoke with the governor about leveraging Californias market power to influence policies in other states.

That was an addendum to Doughertys NY Times Magazine article, Can the California Effect Survive in a Hyperpartisan America? For decades the state has been setting policy for the whole nation. Now red states are pushing back.

What a wasted opportunity. Especially because Newsom obviously is looking longingly 2,726 miles east at that big White House.

Here are some obvious questions any Epoch Times writer would have asked. Lets start with foreign policy, because its the most important thing a president does, with particular attention to the governors record.

1. Gov. Newsom, on April 18, 2022, you held a virtual meeting with Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu of the Peoples Republic of China to sign a Memo of Understanding. You said it deepens Californias strong climate and clean energy ties with China, bolstering our efforts to expand clean transportation, achieve carbon neutrality, and accelerate nature-based climate solutions. Well continue to foster meaningful collaboration with partners around the globe as we work to build a healthier, fossil fuel free future.

Shortly after that, you personally met with Huang on July 15 in Washington, D.C. Why didnt you bring up Chinas exploitation of child labor in Congo to produce batteries used in your electric car mandates, as reported by Amnesty International in 2016?

2. Why did you make the following comments Fox News reported in 2021?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom praised the journalistic integrity of a news outlet that reportedly has ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and was recently designated a foreign agent by the Justice Department.

He made those comments during the annual gala for Sing Tao Daily, which is considered to have a pro-Beijing slant and has received money from both major political parties in the U.S.

During his speech, Newsom appeared to thank editor in chief Joseph Leung for his staffs balanced coverage.

Joseph, your work has been a labor of servicenot only to the Chinese American community throughout the Bay Area but all throughout Northern California community as well. I want to commend you and your incredible staff, your leadership team at Sing Tao Daily for your dedication to journalistic integrity and for providing balanced news stories to Chinese Americans and beyond.

He later added: You represent the best of California and you remind us, as always, that diversity is our strength. 

According to Radio Free Asia, at least two of the companys directors serve on the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference, which serves as an advisory committee for the Chinese Communist Partys legislature.

(Note: In the Epoch Times, I have reported on another PRC effort propagandizing Californians, the China Watch fake news insert in the Los Angeles Times.)

3. When COVID 19 hit three years ago, why did you blow $1 billion in a shady mask deal with, as the California Globe reported in 2022, Chinese company BYD, an electric bus maker which started manufacturing N95 masks as the COVID pandemic hit.

California Policy

4. Governor, as you are touting the California Effect, why has the main result been the states population in your four years in office declining by 500,000?

5. Youre attacking Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis of Texas and Greg Abbott of Texas. Why are those are the main destinations of those fleeing your policies?

6. You attacked those governors in the NY Times interview for banning books, banning speech, intimidating not just teachers but librarians. But how can books readily available on Amazon be banned? And how is speech banned if it is available easily on the internet?

7. Do you think the people, the voters, especially parents, have a right to control how their tax money is spent on materials in schools and libraries?

8. Before he was canceled, Tucker Carlson reported, California school broadcasts sexually explicit books, some covering pedophiles, kink and pornographic images. Is that what in the interview you called Californias moral authority?

9. As to school academics, California suffered what even the NY Times last October called dismally low math and reading test scores. Its achievement rate dropped during your excessive Covid lockdowns. Despite your boast of spending more than $23,000 per student on average. Why are you spending so much for so little?

10. The homeless and crime crises in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities has become a global scandal. City Journal reported May 21, Billions in spending have failed to solve Californias massiveand worseninghomelessness crisis. Why has it gotten worse on your watch?

11. Although declining a little lately, housing prices in California remain staggeringly high. The median home price remains nearly $800,000, up 29 percent from just three years ago. Why cant you make housing more affordable?

Conclusion

Back when Republican Gov. Pete Wilson was exploring a presidential bid for 1996, he came to the Orange County Register. Our Editorial Board grilled him hardon his tax increases, on his failed education plan (soon improved), and on abortion (he was pro-choice; most Republicans then as now were pro-life). He complained to our publisher, who stood by us.

My guess is Newsom isnt going to be inviting me soon to a Q&A session. I cant even get his press office to return my emails and phone calls on routine questions. Even though I blasted their policies in print almost every week, the offices of Govs. Wilson, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jerry Brown all responded quickly to my requests.

Thats what professional press secretaries do. I was one myself for three years, 20172020, for state Sen. John Moorlach, who always insisted on quick responses to press inquiries, even hostile ones. Its called keeping the public informed.

As Newsom dances toward the Oval Office, somebody better start asking him some tough questions.

John Seilers email: writejohnseiler@gmail.com

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Newport Beach Animal Shelter Named California Nonprofit of the Year

A newly-opened animal shelter in Newport Beach, California, was awarded one of the states 2023 nonprofits of the year after being nominated by state Assemblymember Diane Dixon.

The Friends of Newport Beach Animal Shelter was honored through the Nonprofit of the Year initiative in which state legislators select nonprofits for the good work they do in their districts. The program included a recognition ceremony at the state Capitol on California Nonprofits Day, which this year was June 7.

Shelter president Jon Langford and Newport Beach Councilmember Robyn Grant accepted the honor alongside Dixon.

The shelter, which opened last month, is the citys first permanent animal shelter. It first opened in 2018 at a temporary location next door to the new, permanent building on Riverside Drive.

According to its founders, the shelter was first opened to provide more hands-on and specialized care, socialization, and expanded treatments including procedures for animals that might otherwise be euthanized.

Shelter staff have continued to provide such care in an attempt to make the animals more viable for adoption.

Assisting our seniors, educating our children, protecting the environment, caring for animals  this is the work nonprofits do and do well, Dixon said in a statement announcing the award. I am proud to present California Nonprofit of the Year [to Friends of Newport Beach Animal Shelter] to acknowledge their part in making a collective impact with other nonprofits in Assembly District 72 and across the State of California.

The $2.9 million no-kill shelter was gifted to the city late last year, with funding raised almost entirely by shelter volunteers and board members.

The citys animal control department operates the shelter, while the city is responsible for operating, managing, and maintaining the building.
Newsom Faces Backlash on Plan to Add Gun Ownership Restrictions to Constitution

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announces the May budget revision in Sacramento, Calif., on May 12, 2023. (Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee via AP)

The National Rifle Association (NRA), the leading gun ownership advocacy group in the United States, is having none of California Gov. Gavin Newsoms call for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 28th in the nations history, to instate what he calls common sense gun safety measures.

The NRA responded immediately to Newsoms June 7 announcement, describing it as a coy publicity maneuver, and sleight of hand, to weaken gun rights in the name of protecting the public.

In a release that Newsoms office issued, the governor said that the 28th Amendment he seeks will make changes to the Constitution that Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and gun owners overwhelmingly supportwhile leaving the 2nd Amendment unchanged and respecting Americas gun-owning tradition.

Newsoms amendment would raise the federal minimum age for a gun purchase from 18 to 21, put in place background checks that would block dangerous individuals from purchasing guns, enact a reasonable waiting period for firearms purchases, and bar civilian purchase of assault weapons.

An NRA sticker is on display as people gather for the 12th annual Second Amendment March outside of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, Mich., on Sept. 23, 2021. (Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images)

The NRA followed Newsoms statement with a comment it sent to Fox News: Newsoms latest publicity stunt once again shows that his unhinged contempt for the right to self-defense has no bounds. California is a beacon for violence because of Newsoms embrace of policies that champion the criminal and penalize the law-abiding. That is why the majority of Americans rightfully reject his California-style gun control.

A politician quick to speak out against Newsoms amendment plan was Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a legislator who has eased access to guns in his state.

Reeves shared on his Twitter page a video that Newsom had tweeted in which he made his case for the amendment. Reeves included the following message with his post: Gov. Newsom, I am willing to debate you on this in Mississippi any time. So on your next trip to our state to campaign for my opponent, give me a call.

An Ambitious Strategy

While in office, Newsom has been at the forefront of calling for more gun regulation, and for exploring legislative tactics and opportunities to enact that regulation.

His most recent strategy and tactic to change gun law is particularly ambitious.

Article V of the Constitution provides for and spells out, though not in detail, the necessary process to amend the document that describes and lays out the foundational laws, and governing principles and philosophies, of the United States.

In accordance with Article V, there are two ways to propose an amendment: by Congress, with at least two-thirds of both the House and Senate supporting the measure; or through a constitutional convention called for by at least two-thirds of state legislatures. For a proposed amendment to become an amendment to the Constitution, it must be ratified by the legislatures or conventions in three-fourths (38) of the 50 states.

Newsom said that California will be the first state to call for a constitutional convention.

The first 10 amendments to the Constitution, collectively called the Bill of Rights, were enacted in 1791.

For more than two centuries, legal minds, historians, scholars, and others have debated and written and spoken about the meaning, and what is provided and allowed for, in the Second Amendment, which 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.

The most recent amendment to the Constitution, on the matter of congressional pay, was proposed in 1789, and the states got around to ratifying it in 1992.
Nova Scotia Identifies Thousands of Stolen Records in Global Security Breach

LeBlanc speaks during a news conference at Province House in Halifax on Mar. 22, 2023. (The Canadian Press/Lyndsay Armstrong)

Officials in Nova Scotia have identified thousands of files stolen in a global data breach affecting the personal information of at least 100,000 people in the province.

Cybersecurity and Digital Solutions Minister Colton LeBlanc said Friday that a number of current and former teachers were victims of the hack, as were students, inmates and even some newborn babies.

Earlier this week, LeBlanc said the breach of the MOVEit file transfer system, which the province uses to transfer employee payroll information, had affected current and former employees of the public service, including those at Nova Scotia Health and the IWK hospital. The information stolen included social insurance numbers, addresses and banking information.

On Friday, LeBlanc said more people had been affected including members of the public who are not part of the public service, although he was reluctant to give a new overall estimate.

A teacher could also be a former employee of the civil service or also could have had a parking ticket through the Halifax Regional Municipality, the minister said. So one individual could be impacted in a number of different ways.

LeBlanc said the stolen information includes 55,000 records with names, addresses, dates of birth and years of service involving past and present teachers. Some 26,000 students aged 16 and older had information stolen, including their dates of birth, student ID numbers and civic and mailing addresses  data that was stored in a database shared with Elections Nova Scotia.

Among the others affected by the security breach are 5,000 short-term accommodation owners, 3,800 people who applied for jobs with Nova Scotia Health, and 1,400 Nova Scotia pension plan recipients.

Forty-one babies born between May 19 and 26 had their information stolen, including last names, health card numbers, dates of birth and their dates of discharge from hospital.

The province has said it will contact the people affected and offer them a free credit-monitoring service.

Some of the details are still being worked out, LeBlanc said. Our plan is to start sending letters as soon as next week and that (credit service) information will be included.

He warned people to be aware of scammers and said when the province reaches out to notify people it wont be asking for such things as health card information, social insurance numbers or banking information.

The departments deputy minister, Natasha Clarke, said that while the focus was still on the extent of the breach, a full examination of what happened would be conducted to help shore up the provinces software systems.

The focus right now is doing that analysis and being as transparent as we can with Nova Scotians, Clarke said.

Officials later released information showing the provinces contracts for MOVEit date back to 2010 and that the current contract for the softwares licences is through a standing offer with IMP Solutions that was signed in 2020 and costs $30,000 a year.

The current contract expires on May 31, 2024, with options to renew at one-year increments.

MOVEit software is made by Massachusetts-based company Ipswitch and allows organizations to transfer files and data between employees, departments and customers. Parent company Progress Software confirmed a vulnerability in its software last week, saying the issue could lead to potential unauthorized access of users systems and files.

The Nova Scotia government has said it was first informed of a critical vulnerability within its system June 1.
NZ Government Agency Bans Staff From Using AI Platforms

Screens displaying the logos of OpenAI and ChatGPT, in Toulouse, southwestern France, on Jan. 23, 2023. (Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images)

In what appears to be a world first, a government agency in New Zealand has banned employees from using AI technology over data and privacy concerns.

The New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment (MBIE) issued the ban on tools like ChatGPT after concerns sensitive information inputted into such platforms could be later retrieved, reported RNZ.

AI-powered chatbots trawl through information online, which they will then process to generate a response based on whatever prompts it is given by a user. AI programs can now generate answers to questions, poetry, coding, and even musical composition.

However, due to data concerns, companies like Apple, Samsung, Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs have banned staff from using the tech.

Governments Looking to Regulate AI

The move by the New Zealandgovernment agency comes after governments around the world move to establish controls over how to use AI.

In Australia, the government has announced it will establish guardrails around AIs development and stated it does not recommend their use for delivery of services or making decisions.

Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic said that despite AI now being a prevalent part of peoples lives, there was a demand for some sort of regulation from the community.

The Albanese government wants to basically set up the next reforms that can give people confidence that were curbing the risks, maximising the benefits, and giving people that, as I said, that assurance that the technology is working for us and not the other way around, Husic told ABC radio on June 1.

Finance minister Bill Morneau, Ontario Research, Innovation, and Science minister Reza Moridi, and Toronto mayor John Tory take a tour of the Vector Institute for artificial intelligence at the MaRS Discovery District, in Toronto on March 30, 2017. AI is a promising field for Canadian tech entrepreneurs to build global companies. (The Canadian Press/Christopher Katsarov)

In New Zealand, the governments chief digital officer at the Department of Internal Affairs was also working on guidance for agencies.

While in Canada, the countrys privacy watchdog has launched its own investigation into ChatGPT.

AI technology and its effects on privacy is a priority for my office, Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne said in a media release in April.

We need to keep up withand stay ahead offast-moving technological advances, and that is one of my key focus areas as commissioner.

Meanwhile, in the United States, government officials are also concerned with Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) telling The Epoch Times that AI has an uncanny ability to pierce through personal digital privacy that could evolve into surveillance.

I worry about the way that AI can empower a nation-state to create, essentially, a surveillance state, which is what China is doing with it, Obernolte said.

Google AI Raises Concerns Over Manipulation

The concerns come on the back of growing alarm at the ability of AI to manipulate humans following Googles introduction of a highly requested AI search feature in its Gmail service.

The new application is intended to improve the users search experience for Googles mobile users and is slated to help people find exactly what youre looking for.

When searching in Gmail, machine learning models will use the search term, most recent emails, and other relevant factors to show you the results that best match your search query. These results will now appear at the top of the list in a dedicated section, followed by all results sorted by recency.

An AI cancer detection microscope by Google is seen during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2018 (WAIC 2018) in Shanghai on Sept. 18, 2018. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

However, in a March 21 post on Twitter, author Kate Crawford raised concerns over the new AI after Googles Bard AI tool told her where its dataset comes from and explained that one of the sources is Googles internal data, including data from Gmail.

Im assuming thats flat-out wrong; otherwise, Google is crossing some serious legal boundaries, Crawford said at the time.

Google later replied on Twitter that the Bard platform was not trained on Gmail data.
Pediatricians Letter Questioning COVID-19 Vaccine for Children Was Sent to Disinformation Unit

A pediatrician who co-wrote a letter questioning the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine for children before its rollout was reported to the government disinformation unit.

In January, Westminster confirmed that it had monitored lockdown critics including Conservative MPs and journalists on social media platforms via its disinformation units after documents were obtained by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch.

Dr. Ros Jones, a Retired Consultant Paediatrician who is part of HART, found that she had received unwarranted attention from the government.

HART is a group that was set up with doctors, academics, scientists, and more to share concerns about policy and guidance recommendations relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Turning to Children as Fast as We Can

In May 2021, Jones sent an open letter titled Safety and Ethical Concerns Surrounding COVID-19 Vaccination in Children to the UKs top scientists in charge of the pandemic response.

It was sent to June Raine, CEO of the MHRA (Medicines & Healthcare Devices Regulatory Authority), Wei Shen Lim, chairman of the JCVI COVID-19 vaccines committee, Chris Whitty chief medical officer, and Patrick Vallance, who was at the time chief scientific officer.

The letter was co-signed by many scientists including Karol Sikora, one of the UKs leading experts in cancer, and renowned oncologist and vaccine researcher Angus Dalgleish.

The Epoch Times has not been able to ascertain if all the scientists who co-signed the letter have been monitored also.

Undated photo of Ros Jones. (Courtesy of Ros Jones)

The letter said at the time that they have been deeply disturbed to hear several government and SAGE representatives calling in the media for the COVID-19 vaccine rollout to be turning to children as fast as we can.

It noted that there had been disturbing language used by teaching union leaders, implying that coercion of children to accept the COVID-19 vaccines through peer pressure in schools was to be encouraged, despite the fact that coercion to accept a medical treatment is against UK and International Laws and Declarations.

It noted at the time that in October 2020, the head of the government Vaccine Task Force, Kate Bingham said, We just need to vaccinate everyone at risk. Theres going to be no vaccination of people under 18. Its an adult-only vaccine, for people over 50, focusing on health workers and care home workers and the vulnerable.

The NHS has started to roll out the COVID-19 jab to school children aged 12 to 15 in September 2021.

For its Ministry of Truth report (pdf), Big Brother Watch submitted numerous freedom of information requests and cooperated with people in public life who submitted requests to demand copies of their data held by government disinformation units.

Jones submitted requests for copies of her data held by government disinformation units, which The Epoch Times has seen.

Past reports have focused on public life figures that have been surveilled via material taken from social media platforms.

In Jones case, it was the letter, not any data relating to her social media, that was forwarded to the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU).

Information Environment

The CDU was part of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS), which leads the UK governments operational response to domestic disinformation threats online. In February 2023 it moved to the Department of Science, Innovation & Technology.

During the pandemic, the government used different units including the CDU, the Rapid Response Unit, and the Government Information Cell. Each had roles in tackling harmful narratives online, and monitoring and flagging disinformation content to social media companies. The Rapid Response Unit was disbanded in August 2022.

The CDU is focused on helping the government understand online disinformation narratives and understand attempts to artificially manipulate the information environment.

The British Armys information warfare machine, the 77th, which has conducted operations against both the Taliban and al-Qaeda, collated tweets from British citizens about COVID-19 at the start of the pandemic, passing them to the Cabinet Office, though it is understood that this ended by late 2021.

Mislabelling of Misinformation

Can someone show us where the disinformation was? Jones told The Epoch Times.

She said she didnt realise they were being surveilled at the time.

I presume it came from Chris Whittys office as that was the only person at the Department of Health and Social Care that we had written to, so I cant see where else it could have come from, she said.

The Epoch Times has not been able to verify if Whitty sent the letter. The Epoch Times contacted Whitty for a response.

Jones said that she has not had any answers from the government, despite asking multiple times how their letter was passed to the CDU and why it had been.

Its been a total eye-opener, she said.

Jones said that before COVID-19 she had spent her entire working career assuming that authorities did their due diligence and werent being politically interfered with, but now she believes that there is an influence from the pharmaceutical industry on academia, regulators, and the media.

Headmaster Mike Fairclough also found out this year that he had his social media posts monitored by the government disinformation unit for questioning the effects of lockdown and masking on children as well as the mRNA vaccine rollout.

Its chilling with regards to censorship of free speech and the mislabelling of misinformation as that letter was factually accurate and in the public interest, Fairclough told The Epoch Times in response to Jones surveillance.

A government spokesman previously told The Epoch Times that these units used publicly available data, including material shared on social media platforms, to assess UK disinformation trends and narratives.

He said that online disinformation is a serious threat to the UK, which is why during the pandemic we brought together expertise from across government to monitor disinformation about COVID.

These units used publicly available data, including material shared on social media platforms, to assess UK disinformation trends and narratives.

They did not target individuals or take any action that could impact anyones ability to discuss and debate issues freely, he added.

A Department of Science, Innovation & Technology spokesperson did not respond to The Epoch Times specific questions but referred to a recent fact sheet that was produced about the CDU.
Pentagon Chief Tells National Defense University Graduates, The World Needs Your Leadership

Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrives for the 2022 West Point Commencement Ceremony at the United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., on May 21, 2022. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

No academic curriculum can adequately replicate actual combat experience in preparing for the proverbial fog of war, but an ash-leaden haze of eye-stinging, lung-clogging smoke could offer a good and sooty semblance of battlefield murk.

That must have been the National Defense Universitys (NDU) thinking when it refused to move its June 8 graduation ceremony indoors despite Washington being encased in a smothering smog from raging wildfires in Quebec, surmised keynote speaker U.S. Army Gen. and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

Thinking strategically, he joked in his opening remarks.

Founded in 1976, the NDU at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington is a fully accredited five-college institute run by the Department of Defense that offers degrees in education, training, and professional development for current and future national security leaders from the U.S. and allied nations.

NDU incorporates the College of International Security Affairs, Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, College of Information and Cyberspace, Joint Forces Staff College, and National War College.

Its 1,500 to 1,700 enrolled students earn a master of science degrees in national resource strategy and national security strategy in addition to other graduate-level degrees.

Among NDU graduates cited in its National Hall of Fame are the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Martin Dempsey, former Air Force Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, former Army Gen. Norton Schwartz, and former Army Gen. Colin L. Powell.

According to NDU, the Class of 2023 includes 630 graduates, including 130 women, with nearly a quarter137from nations in Africa, Asia, Europe, Central and South America, the Middle East, Canada, and Mexico.

They come from countries that represent about 61 percent of the worlds populationthat is 4.8 billion represented in these 630, NDU said in a Twitter post congratulating graduates.

Among the 493 American graduates, 28 percent represent 40 U.S. government agencies, with 18 percent currently serving in the Army, 17 percent in the Air Force, 7 percent in the Navy, 6 percent in the Marine Corps, and 1 percent each from the Coast Guard and Space Force.

About 60 percentroughly 378 of the 630 graduateshold senior officer ranks in their respective services, with nearly 40 percent O-6 or above in comparable U.S. military officer rankings. An O-6 is a captain in the Navy, and a colonel in the Army, Air Force, or Marine Corps.

Sitting here today is a future president  a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a service chief, a combatant commander, agency directors, Milley said. There is little doubt in my mind that each and every one of you are going to rise to significant positions of responsibility in the years ahead.

Indeed, he said, alluding to a troubled world where Europe is enflamed in its largest ground war since World War II and an aggressive China is increasingly threatening allies in the western Pacific and noting that American NDU graduates will be among those charged with meeting present and future challenges.

It will be you, each of you, Milley said, that are in charge when decisions of great consequence are to be made. You are going to be the leaders who steer our nations through the numerous challenges ahead.

Then-President Donald Trump speaks as Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley looks on, in Washington on Oct. 7, 2019. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Technology Cant Replace Leadership

The uniformed leader of all American armed forces, who also delivered NDUs 2022 graduation keynote address, tailored most of his remarks to U.S. military graduates.

Our adversaries know the U.S. military is capable today and ready to react to any threat, anywhere, at any time. And they know we have the will to use it if required, Milley said. That is the key to deterrence. The key to preventing large-scale great power war. Together, we must continue to maintain that advantage. We must never give it up.

What happens next will be determined by what happens now in an environment being disrupted by the emergence of technologies, he said.

Were going to have to modernize the United States military very significantly in the next 10 to 15 years, Milley said. Our leaders and troops are going to be semi-autonomous, and theyre going to operate in a highly lethal, very decentralized and dispersed environment. This is going to require incredible and intense leader development. This is going to require changes in selection, promotion, and training.

There may be no substitute for experience in being an effective combat leader, but the fundamentals of leadership itself can be a learned discipline honed through execution, he said.

And despite the rapid integration of technological advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence into military systems, that very human discipline is needed now as much as it ever was, Milley said.

We are currently in a fundamental change to the character of war, he said, but there is no replacement for character.

The world needs your leadership, he told graduates. Were at a historic pivot point. One of the most important pivot points in human history. We need your leadership, and we need it now more than ever. Good luck to each and every one of you.
Political Profit: Labor Under Fire on Higgins Claims

Brittany Higgins arrives to give evidence in front of an ACT Supreme Court jury in Canberra, Australia, on Oct. 6, 2022. (Martin Ollman/Getty Images)

The Labor government stands accused of seeking to politically profit from Brittany Higgins rape allegations.

Higgins reached a compensation agreement with the Commonwealth in December 2022 after she launched legal action against her employers in the previous coalition government.

Higgins alleged she was raped by Bruce Lehrmann in 2019 inside the office of then-Coalition minister Linda Reynolds, who they both worked for.

Lehrmann has always denied Higgins allegation.

Text messages between Higgins and her partner David Sharaz emerged this week suggesting the pair contemplated strategising her story with Labor minister Katy Gallagher, when she was in opposition after the rape allegation was made public.

It is further alleged by the opposition that Senator Gallagher misled Parliament in 2021 when she rebuffed claims she was tipped off about the rape allegation before it was made public in media reports.

Deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley told reporters senior government members needed to clear the air on what they knew and when.

The release of text messages and audio recordings has brought into question the conduct of some senior Labor ministers, and the prime minister himself, relating to whether they chose to weaponise a rape allegation for political purposes, Ley said.

The governments credibility is in tatters and so every single claim needs to be validated.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the opposition attack as bizarre.

You had allegations by a Liberal staffer that another Liberal staffer had a sexual assault in a Liberal ministers office, and somehow, somehow Katy Gallagher has some responsibility for what was going on here, he said. This is bizarre.

The Federal Court of Australia heard on June 9, the phone recordsreportedly sent to the parties involved in Lehrmanns criminal trialseemed like an orchestrated campaign to influence his defamation action against the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Network Ten, and journalist Lisa Wilkinson.

The publicity of the last few days could only have been calculated to put pressure on witnesses not to cooperate, said Sue Chrysanthou S.C., who is representing Wilkinson.

Chrysanthou suggested Lehrmann be asked if he was involved in leaking the text messages to the media.

Lehrmanns barrister, Matthew Richardson S.C., said his client absolutely denies the suggestion he was involved in leaking evidence which he described as a grave and serious allegation.

Senator Reynoldswho was criticised over her handling of Ms Higgins situationhas threatened to refer her compensation payment to the National Anti-Corruption Commission, which comes into force on July 1, with the support of her leader Peter Dutton.

Lehrmann faced a criminal trial last year over the rape allegations made by Higgins.

The trial was discontinued because of juror misconduct, and a retrial was ruled out because of the potential effect on the mental health of Higgins.

An ACT inquiry report into the handling of the rape trial is due to be handed down in July.

By Andrew Brown and Paul Osborne.
At least seven people, including six children, were injured in an attack on Thursday by a man armed with a knife near the southeastern French town of Annecy, Azernews reports, citing Agence-France-Presse.

The attack took place at about 9:45 a.m. local time (10:45 a.m. Moscow time) in a park near Lake Annecy. Most of the victims are children around the age of three, presumably from the local kindergarten. According to AFP, three victims are in serious condition and have been rushed to the hospital by medevac helicopters. Reuters, however, reports that nine people were injured in the attack, including eight children. BFM, one of France's largest news channels, reported five casualties, including four children. There is no official information on casualties yet.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin reported that the attacker had been arrested. "Several people, including children, were injured by a person armed with a knife in a square in Annecy. The person was arrested thanks to the rapid intervention of the police," Frances top cop said on Twitter.

According to AFP, the assailant is a Syrian asylum seeker born in 1991. He has never been listed in databases of dangerous criminals and supporters of radical movements. The police had to resort to using firearms in subduing and arresting the attacker, who was wounded in the process.
Key Insights

Significantly high institutional ownership implies Belvoir Group's stock price is sensitive to their trading actions

51% of the business is held by the top 12 shareholders

Using data from company's past performance alongside ownership research, one can better assess the future performance of a company

Every investor in Belvoir Group PLC (LON:BLV) should be aware of the most powerful shareholder groups. And the group that holds the biggest piece of the pie are institutions with 66% ownership. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

Given the vast amount of money and research capacities at their disposal, institutional ownership tends to carry a lot of weight, especially with individual investors. As a result, a sizeable amount of institutional money invested in a firm is generally viewed as a positive attribute.

In the chart below, we zoom in on the different ownership groups of Belvoir Group.

Check out our latest analysis for Belvoir Group

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Belvoir Group?

Many institutions measure their performance against an index that approximates the local market. So they usually pay more attention to companies that are included in major indices.

As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in Belvoir Group. This implies the analysts working for those institutions have looked at the stock and they like it. But just like anyone else, they could be wrong. It is not uncommon to see a big share price drop if two large institutional investors try to sell out of a stock at the same time. So it is worth checking the past earnings trajectory of Belvoir Group, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

Institutional investors own over 50% of the company, so together than can probably strongly influence board decisions. We note that hedge funds don't have a meaningful investment in Belvoir Group. Gresham House Asset Management Limited is currently the company's largest shareholder with 14% of shares outstanding. With 6.6% and 5.4% of the shares outstanding respectively, Canaccord Genuity Asset Management Limited and Unicorn Asset Management Limited are the second and third largest shareholders. In addition, we found that Dorian Gonsalves, the CEO has 1.7% of the shares allocated to their name.

A closer look at our ownership figures suggests that the top 12 shareholders have a combined ownership of 51% implying that no single shareholder has a majority.

While it makes sense to study institutional ownership data for a company, it also makes sense to study analyst sentiments to know which way the wind is blowing. There is a little analyst coverage of the stock, but not much. So there is room for it to gain more coverage.

Insider Ownership Of Belvoir Group

While the precise definition of an insider can be subjective, almost everyone considers board members to be insiders. Company management run the business, but the CEO will answer to the board, even if he or she is a member of it.

Insider ownership is positive when it signals leadership are thinking like the true owners of the company. However, high insider ownership can also give immense power to a small group within the company. This can be negative in some circumstances.

We can see that insiders own shares in Belvoir Group PLC. It has a market capitalization of just UK80m, and insiders have UK4.3m worth of shares, in their own names. This shows at least some alignment, but we usually like to see larger insider holdings. You can click here to see if those insiders have been buying or selling.

General Public Ownership

With a 13% ownership, the general public, mostly comprising of individual investors, have some degree of sway over Belvoir Group. While this size of ownership may not be enough to sway a policy decision in their favour, they can still make a collective impact on company policies.

Private Equity Ownership

With an ownership of 14%, private equity firms are in a position to play a role in shaping corporate strategy with a focus on value creation. Some investors might be encouraged by this, since private equity are sometimes able to encourage strategies that help the market see the value in the company. Alternatively, those holders might be exiting the investment after taking it public.

Next Steps:

I find it very interesting to look at who exactly owns a company. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. Take risks for example - Belvoir Group has 2 warning signs (and 1 which shouldn't be ignored) we think you should know about.

But ultimately it is the future, not the past, that will determine how well the owners of this business will do. Therefore we think it advisable to take a look at this free report showing whether analysts are predicting a brighter future.

NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the last twelve months, which refer to the 12-month period ending on the last date of the month the financial statement is dated. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures.

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.

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Portland City Council Approves Daytime Camping Ban

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler speaks to the media at City Hall in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 30, 2020. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

The Portland City Council passed an ordinance on June 7 to ban camping during daylight hours amid struggles to address a homelessness that Mayor Ted Wheeler has called a human catastrophe.

Passed by a 31 vote, the new ordinance prohibits camping between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. in many public spaces throughout the city, including parks and within 250 feet of schools, child care centers, construction sites, environmental overlay zones, and established safe rest sites.

Homeless people will be able to camp in non-restricted areas overnight, but must dismantle their camps each morning and remove their belongings during the day.

Those who do not comply will receive a warning for the first two violations. A third violation could result in a $100 fine or 30 days in jail.

The ordinance will be implemented in phases with enforcement to begin in late July.

Wheeler said prosecutions will focus on giving alternative sentences that connect people with resources.

The citys enforcement will focus on criminal behavior that has occurred at times in the city of Portland, explained Commissioner Rene Gonzalez, who voted in favor of the ordinance. It is not targeted toward those that are suffering from economic upheaval, that we need to continue to support on our streets.

He said that the citys homeless population includes those that we need to continue to offer a helping hand to and then others that we need to drive out of the city.

If the city commits to actually carrying out enforcement, it will improve things on the streets of Portland, Gonzalez added.

Engaging the Crisis

Wheeler said the proposed restrictions are part of a larger plan to address the homelessness crisis, which he described on a city website dedicated to the issue.

Currently there are hundreds of unsanctioned camps spread out across virtually every neighborhood of our city, over a massive 146-square-mile area, he wrote.

In Multnomah County, where Portland is located, more than 5,200 people were homeless in 2022 according to federal point-in-time count data. That represents a 30 percent increase compared with 2019.

Wheeler said the new restrictions, along with efforts to increase shelter availability and services, could help revitalize Portland.

My goal is to have enough shelter, housing, and treatment access available so that we can fully eliminate unsanctioned, unsheltered camping in Portland. We must continue to develop workable and compassionate means to connect people to the services they need to get off and stay off the streets, Wheeler said about the proposed restriction.

To that end, the city council voted in November to create at least six large, designated campsites where homeless people will be allowed to camp. It has already set aside $27 million for these new shelter sites.

The next few months will be focused on education and outreachwith an emphasis on ensuring the homelessness navigation outreach teams have clear and thorough information on this new ordinance, Wheeler said in a public statement after the June 7 council vote.

Portlanders Speak Up

Portland residents overwhelmingly supported efforts to address the citys homelessness crisis.

Businesses and property owners applauded the ordinance, saying campsites are driving away customers and creating safety issues. Homeless advocacy groups said the new rules will further burden the homeless.

More than 100 people testified during the city councils first reading of the ordinance on May 31, with the vast majority of speakers opposing the ordinance.

That meeting was suspended multiple times due to disruptions both in and outside of the city council chambers.

I am tired of cleaning up after a city that punishes rather than helps our unsheltered neighbors suffering from skyrocketing rents and housing prices, Sandra Comstock, executive director of Hygiene 4 All, told the council. Asking homeless Portlanders60 percent of whom live with one or more disabilitiesto carry their homes on their backs 12 hours a day, seven days a week, will heighten mental and physical distress.

More than 500 written comments were also submitted, with much of that testimony reportedly in favor of the restrictions.

In a recent poll by the nonprofit People for Portland, more than 70 percent of the 500 likely Portland voters surveyed said they support the daytime camping ban proposal, and 83 percent think the rights of disabled residents should come before the rights of the homeless to camp on sidewalks.

When asked how those surveyed would describe homelessness in the Portland area, 75 percent said it was a disaster. Only 6 percent said the issue has turned a corner.

Every day I talk to tenants, property owners, employees, families, and elders who no longer feel safe in our city, Commissioner Dan Ryan said before voting to approve the measure. Portland, youve been patient. I hear you. Your patience has run out.

The decision on the camping ban comes less than a week after the city agreed to clear its sidewalks of sprawling homeless camps under terms of an Americans with Disability Act lawsuit settlement.

The ordinance will likely rely on the Portland Police Bureau to carry out the ban, raising questions about the citys abilities to enforce the ordinance given the bureaus current staffing shortage.

Portland has 1.2 police officers for every 1,000 people in the city and ranks 48th among the 50 largest cities in the United States for policing, according to a report by Willamette Week.
Putin Says Russia to Deploy Nuclear Weapons in Belarus Next Month

Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko speak during a meeting at the Bocharov Ruchei residence in Sochi, Russia, on June 9, 2023. (Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Kremlin via Reuters)

Moscow will begin deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus when the necessary special storage facilities in the former Soviet republic are completed early next month, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on June 9.

The announcement follows several months after Putin first described plans to move tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus in March, pointing to U.S. deployment of similar weaponry at NATO bases in a number of European countries over many decades.

Belaruss longtime authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, recently described the development as a unique chance for Minsk and Moscow to unite. Belarus, along with Kazakhstan and Ukraine, relinquished its nuclear weapons to Russia in the 1990s in exchange for security guarantees.

Everything is proceeding as planned, Putin said in televised remarks about his meeting with Lukashenko at his Bocharov Ruchey resort in Sochi on Russias Black Sea coast.

Preparations of the relevant facilities will be completed on July 7 or 8, and we will immediately begin the activities related to the deployment of the corresponding types of weapons on your territory.

If everything goes as planned, the deployment will mark the first time that Russian tactical nuclear weapons are placed outside Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

Tactical nuclear weapons are envisioned as a means of delivering the destructive power of a nuclear weapon in a relatively limited battlefield space. These weapons are usually smaller in yield than the strategic nuclear weapons designed to destroy entire cities during the Cold War.

Lukashenko, a staunch ally of Putin who has been in power for nearly three decades, has relied on Moscows political and economic support to survive months of protests, mass arrests, and Western sanctions following an election in 2020 that kept him in power but was widely seen at home and abroad as rigged.

Last month, Lukashenko promised tactical nuclear weapons to any other country that wanted to join the Union State of Russia and Belarusa supranational agreement between the two former Soviet republics that was signed in 1999 with the aim of strengthening economic and defense ties between the two neighbors.

It is very simple: join in the Union State of Belarus and Russia, he said during an interview on Kremlin state television on May 28. There will be nuclear weapons for everyone.

Lukashenko stressed during the interview that it was his own viewnot necessarily the view of Putin.

Military Escalation

As the war in Eastern Europe between Ukraine and Russia continues to rage after more than 15 months, Putin has repeatedly raised issues with the United States and other Western nations pumping arms into Kyiv as part of an expanding proxy war aimed at bringing Russia to its knees.

Putin casts the war as a battle for Russias own survival in the face of what he describes as an ever-expanding NATO while warning the West that Moscow wont back down. He also expressed concern about the United States deploying B61 tactical nuclear warheads at NATO bases in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey. Moscow is also unhappy about a reported upgrade of the B61, which was first tested in Nevada shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The United States has criticized Russias nuclear expansion to its neighboring ally but has said that it has no intention of altering its position on strategic nuclear weapons and also that it hasnt seen any signs that Russia was preparing to use a nuclear weapon.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a press conference in May that the Biden administration is aware of the RussiaBelarus arrangement and will continue to monitor, certainly, the implications here.

This is yet another example of [Putin] making irresponsible and provocative choices, she said. We remain committed to a collective defense of the NATO alliance, and Ill just leave it there.

NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu also denounced Putins plans in March, saying that Moscows reference to NATOs nuclear sharing is totally misleading.

NATO allies act with full respect of their international commitments, she said. Russia has consistently broken its arms control commitments.

The war in Ukraine has triggered what both Moscow and Washington say is the deepest crisis in relations since the depths of the Cold War, with major nuclear arms control treaties unraveling and both sides denouncing each other in public.

Reuters contributed to this report.

From NTD News
The Philippine eagle (Pithecopaga jefferyi) is the largest in the world, and it snacks on monkeys. With its unique blue-gray eyes this apex predator can spot prey as far as 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) away. And this magnificent bird of prey is incredibly rare, with only 392 pairs left in existence.

This deadly hunter stands 3 feet (approx. 1 meter) tallthe average size of a 3-year-old human childand has a wingspan of 7 feet (2.1 meters), just short of the length of a Mini Cooper car. The eagles dagger-like talons mean it can easily swoop down and carry off prey, including monkeys, little pigs, and small dogs.

Described as the countrys top predator, the Philippine eagle lives across four islands: Leyte, Luzon, Mindanao, and Samar, with the majority living in the rugged jungle habitat of Mindanao, according to EDGE of Existence.

Pag-Asa, (Filipino for hope) the 12-year-old rare Philippine Eagle cast a striking look from his cage at the Philippine Eagle Center in Davao City, located in southern Mindanao island, on April 23, 2004. (ROMEO GACAD/AFP via Getty Images)

Their blue-gray eyes are not just for pretty effect; the Philippine eagle can see eight times better than humans. Their hunting range can cover a massive 40 square miles (approx. 64 square kilometers), and theyre able to reach maximum speeds of 100 kilometers per hour (approx. 62 miles per hour).

A male Philippine eagle named Geothermica in an enclosure at Jurong Bird Park in Singapore on Nov. 27, 2019. (ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP via Getty Images)

A 7-year-old Philippine Eagle named Binay displaying its feathers at the Philippine Eagle Center (PEC) on the outskirts of Davao City, in the southern island of Mindanao on April 9, 2011. (JASON GUTIERREZ/AFP via Getty Images)

Philippine eagles mate for life, producing just one egg every two years. The male and female bring food to their young several times per week, including flying lemurs: small, furry tree dwellers that look like flying squirrels.

By about 2 months old, the soft down of the eaglet is replaced by feathers, and soon it develops its majestic, mane-like crest. The young eagle masters flying and leaves the nest at around 5 months old.

This 44-day-old Philippine eagle chick is already bigger than a rooster, weighing in at 3.55 kilograms (7.8 pounds) in this photo taken Jan. 20, 2008, in a Philippine eagle reservation in Davao City in the southern Philippines. (LUIS LIWANAG/AFP via Getty Images)

Parents often reuse the same nest the following mating season, which makes them an easy target for poachers. However, community efforts to protect nests are having positive results.

Harming the species is punishable by law, with up to 12-year prison sentences for killing one, as well as hefty fines. While the species remains under threat, each new successful fledging brings renewed hope.

(Ali Bernie Buga-ay/Shutterstock)

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Rights Body Criticizes Quebec for Booting Religious Group From Convention Centre

Quebec Tourism Minister Caroline Proulx presents legislation that would regulate the rental of short-term residences, at the legislature in Quebec City, May 9, 2023. (The Canadian Press/Jacques Boissinot)

Quebecs human rights commission has criticized the provincial government for blocking a religious gathering at a publicly owned convention centre after a cabinet minister said the event would have promoted anti-abortion views.

The commission issued a statement saying it was concerned about the governments decision and reminding the province about the importance of freedom of expression.

As guaranteed under the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, freedom of expression aims to protect both unpopular and controversial ideas . It is an essential pillar of a democratic society, the commission said Thursday.

Last week, Tourism Minister Caroline Proulx cancelled an event scheduled for June 23 to July 2 at the Quebec City Convention Centre by British Columbia-based Harvest Ministries International. Proulx explained her decision by stating that the event  called Prepare the Way  would promote anti-abortion views, which she said are contrary to the core values of Quebec.

In response, Harvest Ministries International sent a lawyers letter to the province, demanding the minister reverse her decision. In a statement released on Wednesday, pastor Art Lucier argued that everyone has the right to express their convictions and core values, even if they are minority or unpopular.

The government has said it will maintain the cancellation despite the legal threats.

The rights commission said that for the government to determine case by case which events are acceptable at the convention centre raises fundamental questions about the protection of guaranteed rights.

And while the commission said it recognizes that certain rights arent absolute, by limiting freedom of expression based on vaguely defined principles, there is a risk of opening the door to arbitrary restrictions and violating the fundamental rights of individuals and groups.
Rule of Law Takes a Backseat as Identity Politics Runs Riot in Higgins Saga

Brittany Higgins (with David Sharaz) arrives to give evidence in front of an ACT Supreme Court jury on the third day of the trial of her alleged rapist, Bruce Lehrmann in Canberra, Australia on Oct. 6, 2022. (Martin Ollman/Getty Images)

Commentary

Readers would be familiar with the statue of Lady Justice, which takes its name from the Roman goddess, Iustitia.

Lady Justice is emblematic of one of the pillars of liberal democracy: the rule of law.

Dressed in a toga, she holds in one hand balance scales, which represent impartiality and the obligation of the law (through its representatives) to weigh the evidence presented to the court in an even and fair manner to ensure justice is done.

In the other hand, she holds an unsheathed, double-edged sword, a sign that justice is transparent and not an implement of fear.

The sword also indicates that justice can rule against either of the parties once the evidence has been considered, and it is bound to enforce the ruling as well as protect or defend the innocent party.

Lady Justice is also blindfolded, representing the impartiality and objectivity of the law and that it does not let outside factors, such as politics, wealth, or fame, influence its decisions.

The whole notion of the rule of law and the fairness and transparency (i.e., justice) it demands seem to have been the real casualties of the Brittany Higgins saga.

This sordid affair has resulted in the disgraceful abuse of power by those in positions of authority and the collusion between them to extract political and financial gain from the plight of these individuals.

Political, Media Class Weaponise Identity

Leaving aside the pack of media celebrities that used a young woman to further not only identity politics but enhance their own careers, those guilty of abusing or misusing their positions of authority include two prime ministers, other senior ministers, as well as senior members of the legal profession.

In doing so, they too were captured by identity politics and/or ends justify the means mentality, thereby junking long-held ideals of due process, the presumption of innocence, or even basic fairness.

Brittany Higgins and Lisa Wilkinson attend the marie claire International Womens Day breakfast at est. on March 8, 2022 in Sydney, Australia. (Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)

While the media has, by and large, ignored the presumption of innocence for some timethe accusations against former Attorney-General Christian Porter and the treatment of Cardinal George Pell being just two examplesone would expect persons in government, and above all the prime minister, to do their utmost to uphold this fundamental principle of our justice system.

Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a man of avowed Christian principles, under cover of parliamentary privilege, egregiously convicted the accused Bruce Lehrmann of rape before that allegation had yet to be proved in court.

Morrison made a point of apologising to Higgins personally following the allegations she raised.

In his desperation to shore up flailing electoral support and rebut the claim levelled against the centre-right Liberal Party that it had a women problem, Morrison had no compunction in trashing the presumption of innocence to embrace toxic identity politics.

Former political staffer Brittany Higgins speaks to the media as she leaves the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices after meeting with Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Sydney, Friday, April 30, 2021. (AAP Image/Dean Lewins)

As far as the Labor Party is concerned, the disgraceful lack of due process and transparency in the awarding of taxpayer-funded compensation to Higgins was equally as bad, if not worse.

An undisclosed financial settlement (rumoured to be around $3 million) was paid to Higgins to settle her claim against the federal government, despite no finding of wrongdoing made against anyone and without the opportunity for those accused of wrongdoing, namely former Liberal Ministers Michaelia Cash and Linda Reynolds, to test the allegations made against them.

Indeed, Reynolds was coerced into not attending the mediation under threat of the government refusing to pay her legal costs.

Add to that the fact that we taxpayers, who are footing the bill for this payout, are not allowed to know its amount  what was all that in the election campaign from the Labor Party about transparency and integrity?

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, his partner Jodie Haydon and his son Nathan Albanese celebrate victory during the Labor Party election night event at Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL Club in Sydney, Australia, on May 21, 2022. (James D. Morgan/Getty Images)

Reynolds has stated she will refer this matter to the new National Anti-Corruption Commission if no one else will. Lets hope she is true to her word.

Now it has emerged that senior Labor figures had knowledge of Higgins accusations before they were made public.

The Australian newspaper has published secret text messages which allege Labor Finance Minister Katy Gallagher was involved in the story before Higgins interview on Channel 10s The Project.

The text messages also show Higgins boyfriend David Sharaz, telling Higgins that allegedly Labor Prime Minister Albanese had inserted himself in the story a month after it became public.

And if that werent enough, we have the entire judicial process, with abandoned trials, dropped charges, the conflict between the police and the director of public prosecutions, and so on, all of which is currently the subject of the Sofronoff Inquiry.

This inquiry has seen the director of Public Prosecutions for the Australian Capital Territory, Shane Drumgold S.C., take leave immediately following the giving of his evidence at the inquiry, which showed he may well have strayed from acting as an objective minister of justice to acting as Higgins lawyer.

ACT director of public prosecutions Shane Drumgold makes a statement to the media at the ACT Supreme Court in Canberra, Australia on Dec. 2, 2022. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch)

An untenable situation that undermines the publics trust in the criminal justice system.

As columnist Janet Albrechtsen wrote, that trust is based on the notion that the administration of justice is committed to a fair trial and the search for truth.

What emerged from Drumgolds evidence was a recurring theme that he sought to protect the complainant, Higgins, from harm while apparently unconcerned about the risk to the defendant, Lehrmann.

Indeed, in his public statement announcing that there would be no re-trial of Lehrmannafter the first was aborted due to juror misconductDrumgold lauded Higgins bravery and dignity. He admitted under questioning at the inquiry that he was unfair to Lehrmann in that public outburst.

The Higgins saga still has a long way to go, it seems. However, the damage to our cherished rule of law has already been done.
Russia Reports Heavy Fighting in Southern Ukraine, Kyiv Silent on Counterattack

Local residents sail on boats at a flooded street during an evacuation from a flooded area after the Nova Kakhovka dam breached, in Kherson, Ukraine, on June 8, 2023. (Vladyslav Musiienko/Reuters)

KYIVRussia reported heavy fighting along the front in southern Ukraine on Friday.

With virtually no independent reporting from the front lines, it was impossible to assess whether Ukraine was having success in penetrating Russian defences to drive out Russian forces.

The counteroffensive is ultimately expected to involve thousands of Ukrainian troops trained and equipped by the West. Russia, which has had months to prepare its defensive lines, says it has repelled attacks since the start of the week. Kyiv has so far claimed its main effort has yet to begin.

Moscow reported intense battles on Friday on the Zaporizhzhia front near the city of Orikhiv, around the mid-point of the land bridge linking Russia to the Crimea peninsula, seen as one of Ukraines likeliest targets.

In all, Kyiv has 12 brigades totalling 50,00060,000 troops ready to unleash in the counteroffensive. Nine of the brigades have been armed and trained by the West.

In a statement, the Russian defence ministry said: The armed forces of Ukraine continued attempts to conduct offensive operations in the southern Donetsk and Zaporozhzhia directions.

It said its troops had repelled two Ukrainian assaults just south of Orikhiv and four near Velyka Novosilka further east. It described Ukraines Velyka Novosilka attack force as including two battalions of troops supported by tanks. Several battalions of up to 1,000 troops comprise a brigade.

Kyiv has reported fighting in the east where battles have been ongoing for months, but has said almost nothing about the situation on the southern front, where it is widely expected to attempt its main push towards the coast.

Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said only that battles were continuing for Velyka Novosilka and Russian troops were mounting active defence at Orikhiv.

In the east, Ukraine has reported gains of territory around Bakhmut, which Russian forces captured last month.

A satellite image shows Nova Khakovka dam in Kherson region, Ukraine, on June 5, 2023. (Maxar Technologies/Handout via Reuters)

Flood Disaster Overshadows Fighting

The initial days of the counteroffensive have been overshadowed this week by a huge humanitarian disaster after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam holding back the waters of the Dnipro River that bisects Ukraine.

Thousands of people have been forced to evacuate homes flooded in the war zone.

Ukraine and Russia blame each other for dam destruction.

In Hola Prystan on the Russian-controlled side of the river, rescuers evacuated residents in rubber dinghies.

The river serves as the front line dividing the two sides. Both accuse the other of shelling across it, interfering with rescue efforts. The Kremlin said Ukrainian shelling had killed people including a pregnant woman.

Ukraine has been attacking targets in Russian-held territory for weeks. Moscow has been striking Ukrainian cities with cruise missiles and drones.

The interior ministry said one person had been killed, three were wounded, and four buildings were destroyed by falling debris.

The air force also said two cruise missiles had struck a civilian object in the central Ukrainian region of Cherkasy. Regional governor Ihor Taburets said at least eight people were wounded.

Moscow said Ukraine had struck the Russian city of Voronezh with a drone, wounding three people.
Russiagate: The Scandal That Became Business as Usual

Commentary

Special Counsel John Durham may have issued his final report last month, but the Russiagate scandal is far from over. This is not because there is no more to learn about the years-long effort by the Democratic Party, the FBI, CIA, and major news outlets to advance the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump teamed with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election.

Rather its because Russiagate never ended. Unlike political scandals of the pastfrom the XYZ Affair to Watergate and Iran-Contrait is not a discrete set of events with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, it has become a form of governing in which the entrenched forces of the Washington bureaucracy punish their enemies, protect their friends, and interfere in elections with impunity.

A continuous thread connects the schemes to deny the results of the 2016 election, to cover up the Biden familys influence-peddling schemes during the 2020 election, and the ongoing effort to tar President Bidens opponents as extremists or racists.

Ironically, all of this is especially dangerous because it is out in the open. The profound misdeeds are not hidden in the dark web; they are part of the public record. And yet, none of the major malefactorsincluding Joe Biden, former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director James B. Comey, and former CIA Director John Brennan, among othershave been held to account. Rather, they are lionized, and in some cases employed, by leading media organizations.

The breadth of these machinations is so extensive that I would need a book, rather than a column, to detail it. But here is a brief recap that can serve as a reminder of key events of this dark period of our history.

On July 28, 2016, then CIA Director John Brennan informed President Obama about intelligence reports indicating Hillary Clintons campaign plan to tie Donald Trump to Russia in order to distract the public from the growing controversy over her use of a private email server while Secretary of State. Notes in the marginJC, Susan, and Denisalmost certainly refer to then FBI Director James Comey, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and Obamas chief of staff, Denis McDonough.

On July 31, Comeys FBI launched a counterintelligence probe into whether the Trump campaign was conspiring with Russia to damage Clinton through the release of her emails.

On Jan. 3, 2017, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer warned the president-elect not to challenge the intelligence communitys claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, Schumer told MSNBCs Rachel Maddow. So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, hes being really dumb to do this.

On Jan. 5, 2017, in his finals days in office, Obama held an Oval Office meeting with Brennan, Comey, Rice, Vice President Biden, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and others to strategize responses to alleged Russian election interference and Trumps victory.

On Jan. 6, Comey briefed President-elect Trump about the Steele dossiera series of absurd and salacious memos paid for and disseminated by the Clinton campaign that sought to tarnish Trumps character while tying him and his campaign associates to the Kremlin.

On Jan. 10, CNN used a leak it received about Comeys briefing to broadcast the dossiers smears, fueling a partisan feeding frenzy that led to the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate Trump/Russia ties. Buzzfeed News published the entire dossier the same day.

On Jan. 28, after assuring Trump privately that he wasnt under investigation, Comey wrote a memo recounting that hed boasted to the new president, I dont do sneaky things, I dont leak, I dont do weasel moves. He then went to his car and typed up his version of the conversations. When Trump fired him on May 9, Comey immediately leaked the memos, in violation of FBI rules, to a sympathetic college professor in hopes, he conceded later, of prompting the appointment of a special prosecutor. On May 17, Robert S. Mueller III, a longtime Comey friend and ally, was appointed special counsel to investigate potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

On April 18, 2018, the New York Times and Washington Post shared the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for their deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nations understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign. This work, much of which was based on leaks from anonymous government sources, was filled with false and misleading claims which, my RealClearInvestigations (RCI) colleague Aaron Mate reported, the newspapers have still refused to correct.

On March 22, 2019, Mueller submitted a report on his investigation which did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities. Mueller, however, claimed that the source of these falsehoods was beyond his mandate, so he did not look into the role Clinton, Comey, Brennan, Obama, and other high-ranking Democrats played in ginning up charges of treason against a duly elected U.S. president.

On May 13, it was reported that Attorney General William Barr had appointed John Durham to examine the origins of the Russia probe. Barr upgraded Durham to a Special Counsel role on Dec. 1, 2020. Durhams final report, issued last month, detailed the Clinton campaigns central role in the Russiagate conspiracy while concluding that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections between Donald Trumps campaign and Russia during the 2016 election because it relied on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence. Durhams investigation also undermined the other pillar of the Russia hoax, endorsing earlier findings that there was no conclusive evidence that the Russians had hacked DNC servers. Like the Trump/Russia collusion theory, this claim also originated from associates of the Clinton campaign.

On Sept. 24, the Mueller report a bust, House Democrats began proceedings to make Trump just the third president in history to be impeached based on the claim that he sought foreign influence in Americas elections by holding up aid to Ukraine for a short period to pressure the country into looking into its potential connection to the Russiagate hoax and the Biden familys work in Ukraine. The aid package was later delivered, and no investigation was undertaken. Nevertheless, the House approved two articles of impeachment on Dec. 18, 2019, along party linesall Republicans and three Democrats opposed the measureand sent them to the GOP-controlled Senate, which acquitted Trump on Feb. 5, 2020, on another party-line vote (only Republican Mitt Romney crossed party lines to convict Trump on a single charge).

On Oct. 14, 2020, the New York Post reported that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company. The article, based on email from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop, suggested an influence-peddling scheme while flatly contradicting Joe Bidens claim that he never discussed his sons foreign business dealings.

On Oct. 17, Biden campaign official and future Secretary of State Antony Blinken discusses the laptop with former acting CIA Director Mike Morell.

On Oct. 19, Politico reported that a letter signed by Morell and 51 other former intelligence officialsincluding Brennan and Clapperclaimed that allegations in the Post article had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation. Echoing the false Russiagate claims, the letter continued, For the Russians at this point, with Trump down in the polls, there is incentive for Moscow to pull out the stops to do anything possible to help Trump win and/or to weaken Biden should he win. Major news outlets and social media companies relied on this letter to downplay and suppress the revelations. The FBI, which had taken possession of Hunter Bidens laptop in December 2019, refused to comment on its authenticity.

On Oct. 22, Joe Biden invoked the letter in his final debate with Trump to dismiss the laptop as a Russian plant. On Nov. 3, Biden became president through razor-thin margins in key swing states.

On March 30, 2022, the Washington Post reported that it had authenticated thousands of emails on Hunter Bidens laptop. CBS News subsequently verified almost all the contents of the laptop.

On May 15, 2023, the New York Post reported that the Internal Revenue Service removed the entire investigative team in its years-long tax fraud investigation of Hunter Biden at the behest of President Bidens Department of Justice. This purge came after several whistleblowers stepped forward claiming the probe was being slow-walked. The move also came after a series of revelations showed how the Biden family used a series of shell companies to funnel millions of dollars from foreign sources to at least nine family membersincluding Joe Bidens young grandchildren. As Andrew C. McCarthy recently noted in the National Review, it is still not clear what the Bidens provided in exchange for this money, other than access to Joe.

On June 4, former FBI Director Comey, noting the long string of cases being brought against Trump by Democratic officials, told MSNBC that its a crazy world that Donald Trump has dragged this country into, but he could be wearing an ankle brace while accepting the nomination at the Republican convention.

From RealClearWire

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Seems a Bit Incestuous: Bloc MP Raises Concerns About Links Between Advisory Council and Infrastructure Bank

Then-Minister of Finance Bill Morneau announces his resignation during a news conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Aug. 17, 2020. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

A Bloc Quebecois MP has raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest regarding links between the governments Advisory Council on Economic Growth and the Crown corporation Canada Infrastructure Bank, with consulting firm McKinsey straddling the two.

The House of Commons committee on infrastructure has been studying the role of McKinsey in the creation of the Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB), and heard from former Finance Minister Bill Morneau on June 8.

Bloc MP Xavier Barsalou-Duval remarked to Morneau that former head of McKinsey Dominic Barton and then-president of the Quebec pension fund CDPQ Michael Sabia had worked for free on Morneaus now-discontinued Advisory Council on Economic Growth, which supported the establishment of the CIB.

After the CIBs creation, McKinsey obtained consulting contracts worth $1.43 million with the bank, while Sabia was appointed the banks chair in April 2020. The CIB was established in 2017 to attract private investments in infrastructure projects. Its current CEO is a former McKinsey partner.

One of the CIBs largest projects is the REM, a light-rail network in Montreal, with a $1.28 billion loan. The largest stakeholder is the CDPQ, with a $2.95 billion investment announced in 2018. Sabia left the CDPQ in February 2020 and became chair of the CIB shortly after.

For me, it seems a bit incestuous to see that  those who set the table are the ones who will be eating on it. But on your end, you dont see anything that could look like a conflict of interest? asked Barsalou-Duval.

It was from my perspective important that we sought out people for my Advisory Council on growth that would be able to bring a perspective to the table and that included people like Dominic Barton and Michael Sabia, said Morneau.

He added that he had not had any exposure to the decisions made by the CIB on how it would meet its goals.

Morneau said the CIB is independent of the government, but Barsalou-Duval asked why, if that was the case, the federal government had changed the $1.28 billion REM direct investment into a loan.

Im not aware of how those two decisions were taken, other than to say that we would see a project like the REM project as being a positive infrastructure project for the country, Morneau answered.

The Bloc MP was referring to the testimony from Sabia at committee on May 16, where he was asked why the government had made that decision on the REM.

That was a decision made by the government and, indeed, the government informed us of that change, said Sabia, who is currently the federal deputy minister of finance.

Barsalou-Duval asked Sabia whether this showed the CIB was not independent of the government as claimed.

Thats a good question, Sabia answered. Given the importance and size of this investment, at the time there was good collaboration between the government and the Infrastructure Bank, because it was just at the beginning of the banks operations.

McKinsey as Secretariat

Sabia, who is leaving the Department of Finance for the top role with Hydro-Quebec this summer, provided more insight during his testimony on the extent of McKinseys involvement in the Advisory Council.

He said the company was essentially act[ing] as a secretariat, on a volunteer basis for the council. As you know, an advisory board needs a secretariat, and McKinsey played that role. So they have been very involved in our reports and our deliberations.

Sabia told the committee that Morneau, as finance minister, asked him to take over the chair of the CIB in April 2020 since its activities had been quite slow. To speed up the CIBs operations, Sabia chose to hire McKinsey consultants.

In order to do that in the quickest and most economical way, the decision taken at the time was to use some of the people from McKinsey who had been involved in the initial thinking around the Infrastructure Bank, to draw on their accumulated knowledge of this so that we wouldnt have to start from ground zero and would be able to move ahead quickly, which we were able to do, he said.

Sabia also reached out for advice to Barton, the former McKinsey boss and former chair of the Advisory Council, who had been appointed Canadas ambassador to China in 2019.

An email presented in committee shows that McKinsey was aware of Bartons schedule and played a role in organizing the meeting with Sabia.

Doms calendar has been pretty tight, so [it] looks like this is the only time we could get him. Given hes by himself, were hoping to limit attendance to a few people, McKinsey partner Zak Cutler wrote to Annie Ropar of the CIB on June 17, 2020.

Could we hold attendance at just you and John for this one? Its a bit delicate and [I] dont want to offend, but want to make sure Dom is able to speak freely. Let me know if any issues.

Barton told the committee on May 18 that he wasnt aware McKinsey had been on the call with Sabia. There was one conversation, which apparently theres an email about. I was not aware McKinsey was in that, he said.

Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis asked Sabia on May 16 whether there was a potential conflict of interest there.

Did it not seem like a conflict to you?  The chair of the CIB meeting with the ambassador who helped create the bank.

Sabia replied: How could that possibly be a conflict of interest, when Dominic Barton was simply providing some further thinking to help accelerate our own thinking.  Theres not even the potential for a conflict of interest there.

The infrastructure committee started its study of McKinseys role in the CIB on May 2. It follows another study by the government operations committee on the contracts awarded to McKinsey by the Trudeau government since 2015.

That study stems from media reports indicating that contracts to McKinsey have increased exponentially under the Trudeau government, but ultimately they remain a small piece of the pie among the consulting firms taking Ottawa dollars.
US Border Agents Providing Care, Welfare Services to Illegal Immigrants: Official

A Customs and Border Protection officer keeps watch as immigrants are transported from a makeshift camp between border walls between the U.S. and Mexico in San Diego on May 13, 2023. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The Biden administrations agents working along the U.S.Mexico border are primarily providing illegal immigrants with care and welfare services, according to a senior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official.

DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari made the claims during a hearing before a House Oversight subcommittee on June 6 to discuss the ongoing law enforcement staffing challenges relating to the southern border.

During the hearing, Cuffari cited a report (pdf) published in May detailing how Border Patrol agents were suffering from low morale owing to widespread staffing shortages and improper management of resources and planning during a surge in immigrant crossings.

The report also noted issues with recruitment and hiring. These issues combined, according to the report, had led to many officers having to take on responsibilities outside their typical roles, which has affected their own operations.

Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security Joseph Cuffari testifies during a House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs hearing in Washington on June 6, 2023. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Its concerning that agents are not performing their primary law enforcement roles, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) said in response to the reports findings during the hearing.

America is largely under the impression that were moving border agents down [to the border] to enhance law enforcement. Is that the role that these agents are primarily performing, Mr. Cuffari? he asked.

In response, Cuffari explained that Border Patrol agents and federal criminal investigators deployed to the border were supposed to perform law enforcement activities but were instead doing some law enforcement while also providing care and welfare services to the detained and those individuals who theyre processing.

Report Findings

Cuffaris May 3 report was based on an audit and survey responses involving interviews with 9,311 law enforcement personnel.

It found that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcements (ICEs) current method of managing law enforcement staffing is unsustainable.

CBP and ICE workloads have grown significantly due to factors beyond the Department of Homeland Securitys control, namely increasing border encounters and travel volume, the report states. Despite greater workloads, staffing levels have remained the same, with CBP and ICE using details and overtime to temporarily address the rising number of encounters along the Southwest border.

Specifically, the report noted that the situation at the borderstaffing challenges and an increased number of illegal immigrants crossinghas negatively impacted the health and morale of law enforcement personnel, who feel overworked and unable to perform their primary law enforcement duties.

Although CBP and ICE annually assess their staffing needs, neither has assessed how using details and overtime has affected the workforce and operations, the report states.

Unless CBP and ICE assess and strategically change their current staffing management at the border, heavier workloads and low morale may lead to higher turnover and earlier retirements. This could worsen staffing challenges and degrade CBP and ICEs capacity to perform their mission, the report said.

According to the report, both CBP and ICE were consistently staffed close to their authorized hiring levels between 2019 and 2021, but the number of illegal immigrants attempting to cross the border rose drastically in 2022, while staffing at the border did not grow at the same pace.

In 2021 and 2022, for example, there were roughly 7,800 officers assigned to the southwest border, meaning that roughly the same number of officers who processed about 6,300 immigrant encounters per month in 2021 processed nearly 14,400 encounters per month in 2022, according to the report.

Illegal immigrants board vans after waiting along the border wall to surrender to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Border Patrol agents for immigration and asylum claim processing upon crossing the Rio Grande river into the United States on the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, on May 11, 2023. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

Democrats Criticize Inspector General

Vehicle traffic also increased along ports of entry at the southern border in 2022, with 5 million more vehicles and travelers crossing the border during that year compared to 2021, the report found.

On average, officers processed 15.3 million vehicles and travelers per month in 2021 and 20.7 million vehicles and travelers per month in 2022, according to the report.

With the consistently high volume of migrant encounters, these challenges are reducing the number of available staff to work along the Southwest border, the report said.

Despite Cuffaris comments, Democratic lawmakers including Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), repeatedly took aim at the DHS inspector general during the June 6 hearing, at one point questioning the methods used in the report which they said could create an inaccurate picture of the situation at the border.

This is a report that would not pass muster in any serious survey work, Garcia said.

Democrats also repeatedly noted that Cuffari is currently under investigation by the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency after he failed to notify Congress immediately upon learning the Secret Service had deleted text messages during an investigation of the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol.

In turn, Higgins defended Cuffari and his work, calling him one of the most honorable men Ive ever met who he said has a rare combination of experience and intellect and honor.

The lawmaker also stated that the DHS inspector general had been repeatedly targeted by the left and that his report highlighted the number of law enforcement agents who were resigned to doing housekeeping and social work at the border.

They [Democrats] are folding themselves in half over there trying to impugn you and getting nowhere, Higgins said. America is watching.
Smiths New Cabinet Slightly Smaller, Includes All of Her Re-Elected Party Leadership Rivals

Alberta UCP Leader Danielle Smith holds a news conference during the provincial election in Calgary on May 24, 2023. (The Canadian Press/Todd Korol)

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has appointed a slightly smaller cabinet than before her election and included all of her re-elected party leadership rivals.

Smiths new cabinet, appointed June 9, has 25 people including herself as minister of intergovernmental relations, two less than her first cabinet formed in October 2022. Many prominent ministers come from Calgary, as the NDP swept up all 20 seats from Edmonton.

I am so pleased to have this team working with me to deliver on the promises we made to Albertans during the election, Smith said in a news release.

These are not just our governments priorities, they are Albertans priorities. The next four years start today, and I cant wait to get back to work with each of my cabinet colleagues.

Brian Jean, Todd Loewen, Rebecca Schulz, and Rajan Sawhney all ran against Smith for the UCP leadership and were reappointed to cabinet. Jean in now energy minister, and Schultz was moved from municipal affairs to environment and protected areas. Sawhney became minister of advanced education, while Loewen remained minister of forestry and parks.

Calgary-West MLA Mike Ellis becomes deputy premier and minister of public safety and emergency services. Former agriculture minister Nate Horner becomes Treasury Board president and minister of finance. Calgary-Cross MLA Mickey Amery will put his juris doctorate degree in law to good use as minister of justice. Red Deer North MLA Adriana LaGrange shifts from education to become health minister. Calgary-Bow MLA Demetrios Nicolaides becomes minister of education, shifting from advanced education.

Other appointments include

RJ Sigurdson  Minister of Agriculture and Irrigation

Ric McIver  Minister of Municipal Affairs

Dale Nally  Minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction

Pete Guthrie  Minister of Infrastructure

Nathan Neudorf  Minister of Affordability and Utilities

Dan Williams  Minister of Mental Health and Addiction

Jason Nixon  Minister of Seniors, Community and Social Services

Joseph Schow  Minister of Tourism and Sport

Matt Jones  Minister of Jobs, Economy and Trade

Searle Turton  Minister of Children and Family Services

Devin Dreeshen  Minister of Transportation and Economic Corridors

Tanya Fir  Minister of Arts, Culture and Status of Women

Nate Glubish  Minister of Technology and Innovation

Rick Wilson  Minister of Indigenous Relations

Muhammad Yaseen  Minister of Immigration and Multiculturalism

Fir, Yaseen, and Sigurdson have been promoted from previous positions as parliamentary secretaries, and Schow was formerly house leader.

Williams, Turton, and McIver are new to the cabinet. However, McIver has previous cabinet experience in municipal affairs, transportation, and infrastructure during Progressive Conservative governments.

The UCP won 49 seats in the May 29 election, a drop from the 63 the party won in 2019 under then-leader Jason Kenney.

Former finance minister Travis Toews and environment minister Sonya Savage did not run in the election. Former health minister Jason Copping and justice minister Tyler Shandro lost in Calgary, as did former deputy premier Kaycee Madu in Edmonton.

The ceremony began with the singing of O Canada, followed by prayer from a Cree Ceremonial chief, an Imam, and an Anglican minister.
LONDON (Reuters) - "Call of Duty" maker Activision Blizzard has been given permission to intervene in Microsoft's legal battle with Britain's anti-trust regulator over its decision to block the $69 billion takeover.

Microsoft is appealing against the Competition and Markets Authority's (CMA) decision to veto the deal, which it did in April on the grounds it could hurt competition in the nascent cloud gaming market.

The shock decision jeopardises gaming's biggest-ever deal and drew a furious response from the companies, which questioned whether Britain remained open to tech firms.

Activision has now been given permission to intervene in Microsoft's appeal at the Competition Appeal Tribunal, which is expected to be heard next month. That means Activision will also be able to make their case to the tribunal.

At a preliminary hearing in May, Microsoft's lawyers accused the CMA of being a global "outlier" for blocking the Activision takeover, which has been approved by regulators including the European Union's competition authority.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has also blocked the deal, a decision which is under appeal by Microsoft.

Microsoft's president Brad Smith, who met Britain's finance minister for talks on Tuesday, said earlier this week that the company wants to address regulators' concerns about the Activision acquisition.

(Reporting by Sam Tobin; editing by William James)
South Koreas Top Companies to Attend Economic Forum in Vietnam, Expand Trade

Samsung, SK, Hyundai, and LG see Vietnam as part of an alternative global supply chain to replace China

The CEOs of major South Korean conglomerates will attend an economic forum in Vietnam this month as leaders from both countries recently agreed to expand trade and economic cooperation.

Analysts say that Vietnam has become a potential manufacturing base for Korean tech giants while China is losing its status as the worlds factory amid tensions with the United States.

The Korea-Vietnam Economic Forum will be held in Hanoi and is expected to attract Korean business leaders such as Lee Jae-yong, chairman of Samsung Electronics; Chey Tae-won, chairman of SK Group; Chung Eui-sun, chairman of Hyundai Motor Group; Koo Kwang-mo, chairman of LG Group; and Shin Dong-bin, chairman of Lotte Group.

The Dong-A Ilbos report said in a June 3 report that South Korea and Vietnam will expand bilateral economic cooperation, and major firms of both sides are expected to sign a memorandum of understanding and hold trade-related talks.

Tense U.S.-China relations and the restructuring of the global supply chain pave the way for Vietnam to rapidly emerge as the production base and distribution network of Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor, LG Electronics, Lotte Group, and other companies, the report said.

In a June 4 interview with The Epoch Times, Wang He, a U.S.-based commentator on Chinas current affairs, said the United States had imposed several restrictions to counter the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the U.S.-China trade war, including high tariffs.

The effect of this [U.S.] strategy [high tariffs against China] had forced Chinese industries and foreign companies to leave China and turn to Vietnam, India, and other countries to avoid taxes, making Vietnam a vital alternative, he said.

Vietnam as a China Alternative

According to Wang, many countries are considering the China Plus One strategy, which avoids investing only in China and diversifying business operations in other countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, or India. Moving production out of China would be a safe move in the event that cross-strait relations deteriorate or the United States strengthens sanctions against the CCP.

So over the years, Vietnam has become one of the biggest winners of the U.S.-China trade war, he said.

Attendees visit the ETech booth, which advertises a Vietnam factory supply chain promising zero export tariffs, during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Jan. 6, 2023. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

Wang said Vietnam has a lot of potential, and its rich labor resourcesa population of 100 millionfacilitate growth in various industries, especially with Samsung investing tens of billions in Vietnam.

Korean companies see Vietnam as an essential base, in which Chinas position as the worlds factory has begun to wane, he said.

Chinas status as the worlds factory has been shaken as it is caught in a dilemma, said Wang, noting that European countries are moving away from various Chinese industries, and the United States is cracking down on the Chinese chip industry, hampering Beijings plan to transform and upgrade its high-tech industries.

The only thing the CCP can rely on now is industrial scale, industrial chain support, abundant labor force, and complete infrastructure, but those four strengths are not as effective compared to the ASEAN member countries, India, and other Asian countries, according to Wang.

Therefore, Chinas economy is worsening and on the verge of great turmoil. It has become fairly tough to maintain its basic stability, not to mention growth, Wang said.

Vietnam Alone Is Not Enough

A Vietnamese news outlet said in March that Vietnam has the potential and opportunity to become the new worlds factory amid the restructuring of the global supply chain.

Wang believes that Vietnam alone cannot replace China in trade.

The West has proposed a concept called Asian supply chain, that is, in addition to Vietnam, the entire ASEAN, together with Japan and India, their production capacity, the scale of exports to the United States could be comparable to the exports of mainland China.

Delegates attend the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governorss meeting in Nusa Dua on Indonesias resort island of Bali on March 31, 2023. (Sonny Tumbelaka/AFP via Getty Images)

Asian Supply Chain to Replace China

The Economist reported on Feb. 20 that a dozen countries and regions, including Taiwan, are forming an Asian alternative supply chain expected to gradually replace China as the center of global production activities in the coming years.

This is the concept of Altasia (alternative Asian supply chain), which stretches in a crescent from Hokkaido, in northern Japan, through South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bangladesh, all the way to Gujarat, in north-western India.

For Altasia to truly rival China, therefore, its supply chain will need to become far more integrated and efficient, the article reads.

In a March article, The Economist said that the formation of Altasia resulted from the intensifying geopolitical divide between China and the United States.

Although Chinese production capabilities will be tough to replicate  many companies finding an alternative to China is now a priority. They are likely to be exploring opportunities in Altasia for years to come, it said.
Strong Families (Help) Keep Big Government at Bay

We cannot allow the concept of family to become an empty vessel to be filled or redefined however the state wishes

Commentary

While he married his high-school sweetheart and fathered seven (or perhaps eight) children, Karl Marx was not what you might call a family man.

In The Communist Manifesto Marx called for traditional family structures to be abolished because he regarded them as enabling capital and private wealth creation. And since the family is the primary mechanism for passing societys values from generation to generation, strong families also reinforced the middle-class worldview Marx so abhorred. With revolution in mind, he argued the state must take over education and disrupt the familial nexus.

Other Marxist thinkers carried this idea forward, arguing that the family is a tool of oppression and must be dismantled. Even democratic and ostensibly free countries are not immune to such thinking today. The Black Lives Matter movement, for example, has as one of its guiding principles to disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure. Progressives understand that strong families hinder revolutionary movements.

In Canada today, a steady march of federal and provincial policy furthers these ends by diluting the definition of family nearly to the point of meaninglessness. Ontario is Canadas most aggressive jurisdiction in this regard. In 2016, the province radically redefined family in law with its All Families Are Equal Act. Prior to this act, Ontario law stated: For all purposes of the law of Ontario a person is the child of his or her natural parents. The only exception was legal adoption.

The 2016 legislation erased this basic recognition of the natural family from Ontario law. It also established multiple ways to become a legal parent. Up to four adults could sign a pre-conception parentage agreement whereby they agreed to co-parent a child yet to be conceived, even if none of these adults had a biological relationship to the child, or any legal or familial relationship with any of the other co-parents.

Other provinces are moving in the same direction, diminishing the importance of a childs blood relationships. Courts in British Columbia and Newfoundland have given benediction to throuplesessentially, threesomes of any combination of sexesand definitions of families across jurisdictions are being changed to remove terms such as mother and father. Whether intentionally or not, such policies undermine the familys independence and stability.

The problems with such an approach are most obvious in surveying the outcomes for children. Strong and voluminous academic evidence shows that a child has the best chance for success when he or she lives with both biological parents. Father and mother play important but differing roles in their childs life, and children who live with their married, biological parents do better statistically than those who do not. According to a study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, children separated from one or both biological parents are more likely to suffer poverty, witness violence, and live with someone who has a drug or alcohol addiction or is likely to be incarcerated. Biological ties are a vital factor in a childs upbringing.

At the same time, ample historical evidence points to the importance of the family as a bulwark against totalitarianism and government overreach. And for all the reasons that Marx fretted about: Families convey and protect their own values, often in opposition to prevailing political demands. In his book The Burden of Hitlers Legacy, former Nazi Youth member Alfons Heck explains that We who were born into Nazism never had a chance unless our parents were brave enough to resist the tide and transmit their opposition to their children.

Former Czech dissident Vaclav Benda, who was imprisoned during the Cold War-era for subversion of the Republic, wrote a series of essays including The Problems of Family in a Totalitarian State describing the communist states many techniques for undermining family bonds. Other writers have called families resistance cells in the fight against totalitarianism. Even greater state animosity towards family can be seen in communist Chinas abhorrent former one child policya policy that restricted parents from growing their own family.

According to the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State. With this in mind, we cannot allow the concept of family to become an empty vessel to be filled or redefined however the state wishes. It must be defended as a natural and pre-political institution independent of the state with its own distinct domain of authority.

Families are vital to the stability of society and critical to resistance against government overreach.

A longer version of this story originally appeared in C2CJournal.ca.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Texas Gov. Abbott Signs Bill Designating Cartels as Terrorist Groups

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a raft of border security bills on Thursday, including a bill designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations.

Last September, Abbott issued an executive order to designate drug cartels as terrorist organizations and direct resources to counter these groups. The bill Abbott signed on Thursday, SB 1900, expands his prior executive order into law. Republican Texas state Senator Brian Birdwell and Republican Rep. Ryan Guillen coauthored SB 1900.

The newly signed bill imposes increased legal penalties for those found to be operating cartel stash houses or destroying illegal drug stashes. Local authorities will also be able to seek public nuisance claims against the cartels.

This is a significant milestone that enables us to effectively address the threat posed by cartels by designating them as foreign terrorist organizations, Guillen said Thursday. With the passage of SB 1900, we now have provisions in place to establish measures to combat their criminal activities.

SB 1900 also directs information about designated foreign terrorist organizations to be included in the states existing criminal intelligence databases. Abbott designated the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel as foreign terrorist organizations in his September executive order and said other Mexican drug cartels might be designated in future proclamations.

According to a January 2020 report (pdf) by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation Cartels are likely the primary trafficking groups responsible for smuggling fentanyl into the United States from Mexico. Fentanyl is a powerful opioid. The drugs potency makes it a popular adulterant in other drug substances but also increases the potential for potentially deadly overdoses.

Today, public enemy number one is the Mexican cartels, and they impact every community in Texas and the United States, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said during the bill signing ceremony. Our mission is to detect and interdict transitional criminal activity and create proactive strategies to combat it. Its dangerous to cross between ports of entry, and securing the border between them is ideal to fight Mexican cartels.

Several Republican politicians have called for treating drug cartels as terrorist organizations. After signing his executive order in September, Abbott urged President Joe Biden to take similar action at the federal level to label the cartels as terrorist groups.

More Border Control Measures

Abbott signed another five border security measures into law on Thursday in addition to the bill to go after the cartels.

Among the bills Abbott signed on Thursday, one creates a grant program to compensate agricultural landowners up to $75,000 for property damage caused by trespassers committing a border crime. This can include compensation for damages caused by illegal border crossings and cross-border smuggling operations.

Another bill grants U.S. Border Patrol Agents who have undergone Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) training the authority to make arrests for violation of Texas state laws. Another bill establishes a training program for Texas DPS to train local law enforcement officers in identifying and preventing of transnational criminal activity.

Yet another bill Abbott signed gives him the ability to coordinate an interstate compact, enabling out-of-state law enforcement agencies to share resources.

Another bill Abbott signed authorized the Texas National Guard to use unmanned aircraft to surveil the border as part of Operation Lone Star. Texas Operation Lone Star is an ongoing effort involving National Guard troops from Texas and several other states to secure sections of the Texas border.

Along with the bills, Abbott announced the deployment of a 1,000-foot-long floating barrier in the Rio Grande, a waterway serving as a dividing line between Texas and Mexico. Abbott said the floating barrier is meant to provide an extra layer of difficulty to people attempting to cross the river into the U.S.

From NTD News
The CCP Cannot Be Trusted

Chinese leader Xi Jinping attends the opening of the first session of the 14th National People's Congress at The Great Hall of People in Beijing on March 5, 2023. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

Commentary

The communist Chinese are full of advice. After all, Xi Jinping aspires to become the worlds hegemon and probably believes and expects others to rightfully do what he and his fellow communist apparatchiks preachno matter the consequences.

That was the approach that Mao Zedong used: dream up a crackpot economic, social, or political policy and then force people to comply despite the costs and damage to Chinese society and people. This is because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) believes itself to be omniscient and the natural ruler of China (and the world). Never mind its utter arbitrariness and willingness to sacrifice millions of lives to achieve its political ends, especially retaining power and control over the Chinese people.

Doing the opposite of what Beijing says would serve China and the world better than acquiescing to the CCPs diktats on every aspect of human endeavors. After all, its failures over time have earned our scorn and condemnation.

Let us examine the issue further.

Past Transgressions

The Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1960)

This was Maos signature policy aimed at completely reorganizing Chinese society by creating large-scale rural communes to alleviate perennial food security problems and labor-intensive industries that emphasized manpower instead of machines, automation, and the associated capital expenditures needed to develop modern production capabilities.

This anti-capitalist initiative resulted in at least 45 million deaths during the associated Great Famine while delaying the modernization of Chinese industries for years and creating an insatiable demand for slave labor for the factories. The Leap abruptly ended as capitalist methods were quietly introduced in the countryside, boosting agricultural production over time. Neither the Great Helmsman Mao nor his executioners ever admitted their errors in foisting this disaster on the Chinese people.

A small group of Chinese youths walks past several dazibaos, the revolutionary placards, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in Beijing, on February 1967. (Jean Vincent/AFP/Getty Images)

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)

Apparently believing the Chinese Marxist revolution was losing steam at least partly due to corruption, Mao directed zealous Chinese youths to purge impure elements within Chinese society and reinvigorate the Marxist enthusiasm that led to the Peoples Liberation Armys triumph over the Nationalists in 1949.

This led to the formation of paramilitary groups called the Red Guards that attacked members of Chinas elderly and intellectual population, as well as the development of a personality cult around Mao that plagues China today. The result was an estimated 1.5 million deaths plus the banishment of 20 million others.

There has never been an acknowledgment by the CCP of the horrors perpetrated during the Cultural Revolution because any such official statement would be an admission of the fallibility of the regime and lead to a delegitimization of the CCPs historical claim to political power.

After the communists seized power in 1949, people deemed enemies of the CCP were processed in various camps in the Chinese version of the Soviet Unions gulag system. Targeted initially at the intelligentsia, Nationalists and their supporters, and capitalist roaders, the system morphed over the years to accommodate the genocide of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong adherents, and other Chinese racial and religious minority groups.

These camps were the dumping ground for political and ideological enemies of the CCP over the years. Over 50 million people spent time in these hellholes from circa 1950 through the present. That the camps are still in operation today makes a lie of virtually every altruistic and humanitarian pronouncement of the communist regime in Beijing.

The above has been dismissed as ancient history, past excesses from a cruder era, and just statistics in the grand scheme of things by those who support continuing engagement with China at any cost. Are such people Marxists, fellow travelers, or the Devils disciples?

A perimeter fence surrounds a forced reeducation center in Dabancheng, Xinjiang region, China, on Sept. 4, 2018. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

The sacrifice of the lives and freedoms of innocent people to achieve the CCPs goals is unconscionable. Yet we are encouraged to believe the utterances of the modern, erudite, and well-read Xi (who wears his Marxism on his sleeve and exercises his power and authority without regard to the adverse impact on Chinese citizens).

A perfect example is his signature zero-COVID policy, which echoes the disasters wrought by Mao.

COVID-19 Pandemic

The first COVID cases were found in Wuhan in the fall of 2019 and promptly covered up by the Beijing regime. Cynically, state-run Chinese media began a relentless campaign conveying the CCP narrative on the pandemic, including the supposed benefits to China and the world of Xis zero-COVID policy, the alleged beneficence of China in providing medical supplies and vaccines to other countries, and the countering of news reports in foreign media that exposed the truth about the virus origins and Chinese intransigence in sharing critical virus-related information with the worlds medical and scientific communities. The draconian COVID-19 policy amounted to a nearly three-year crackdown on the movement of individual Chinese that depressed the Chinese export economy and resulted in an unknown number of deaths.

And like Mao, Xi reversed course without any admission of failure or contrition for the damage wrought on Chinese society by his unscientific zero-COVID lockdowns.

Concluding Thoughts

Its better to believe and do the opposite of what Xi and the CCP preach. For example:

The Chinese foreign ministers admonition that the United States not enter into regional alliances to thwart China (which is absolutely the right course of action to counter Chinese military belligerence such as this recent episode in the Taiwan Strait).

Xis recent declaration reaffirming his fixation on ideological control at the expense of economic growth (yeah, thats just what the Chinese people need at this juncture: sacrificing their economic well-being on the throne of Marxist ideology).

Xi expressed the need for effective auditing work to serve the overall development of the Party and State (he is advocating either more regulatory oversight or cooking the books to convince outsiders of the robustness of the Chinese economy in lieu of productivity enhancements).

Then there is the furtherance of Xis cult of personalitythe campaign to study and implement Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era (a complete distraction from the socio-economic problems foisted on the Chinese people by the CCP).

Lastly, there is this Xi quote: Work is the source of all happiness (tell that to the Uyghurs working for slave wages in the camps in Xinjiang).

Why should anyone trust the CCP, given its track record?

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Think-Tank Warns 15 Birmingham-Sized Cities Needed to Cope With UK Immigration

Migration Watch UK said current net migration figures will lead to a 16 million increase in the population over next 25 years

People employ social distancing as they queue for a bakery in Birmingham city centre in central England on the morning of March 21, 2020. (Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images)

The UK will need to build at least 15 cities the size of Birmingham to cope with rising immigration figures, according to a new think-tank report.

Migration Watch UK suggests current levels of net migration will see the population on course to rise by nearly 16 million to 80 million by 2046.

It estimates this would result in the need to build between 6 and 8 million more homesequal to between 15 and 18 more cities the size of Birmingham.

The reportreleased on Thursdaystates that if current net migration figures of 600,000 were reduced to 100,000 per year or less, the impact of the housing shortage would ease and present better opportunities for those wishing to get on the property ladder.

The reduction would also preserve the countryside from being bulldozed to make way for housing.

The think-tank released the report as it launched a campaign demanding the government sets out a target of reducing immigration, backed by a petition which has already received nearly 34,000 signatures.

It comes weeks after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak faced a Tory backlash as official estimates indicated net migration reached a record high of 606,000 people last year.

Sunak said the number was too high but insisted he had not lost control of the immigration system.

But Conservative MPs warned of voter anger and frustration at unsustainable levels of net migration.

Public Ignored

Speaking about the latest findings, Chair of Migration Watch UK Alp Mehmet said: The impact of runaway, mass, immigration is huge, and housing is just one aspect of our lives that is adversely affected. But, if net migration were reduced to 100,000 per year or less, the housing shortage would be no more; the pressure would liftat a stroke.

Young people would have better prospects of getting onto the housing ladder. And more of our beautiful countryside would be saved for future generations.

Mehmet said the public want immigration cut, but have been ignored.

The cut immigration campaign with our petition is their opportunity to send the government a loud, unambiguous message that enough is enough.

If the government fail to act now the fundamental changes to our towns and cities and, indeed, to Britain itself will accelerate even further.

The record high for 2022 was driven by people from non-EU countries arriving for work, study and humanitarian reasons, the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates show.

The figure, which is the difference between the number of people moving to the UK and the number leaving, is up from 488,000 in 2021.

The estimates include people who have come to the UK from Ukraine and Hong Kong under resettlement schemes, as well as overseas studentsthough there are signs that those who first arrived for study reasons in 2021 are now starting to leave, according to the ONS, which compiled the figures released last month.

Afghans wait to be processed after arriving on an evacuation flight from Afghanistan, at Heathrow Airport, London, on Aug. 26, 2021. (Dominic Lipinski/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Legal Immigration Higher

The Migration Watch UK report states that the UK labour market has been deliberately opened to the entire world with no limits on numbers and at much lower levels of qualifications and salary.

It said the government have abandoned the previous requirement that employers should first advertise vacancies on the domestic labour market which it says in other words, complete capitulation to employer demands.

The report added that the governments focus on small boat crossings obscures the fact that legal immigration is at least 10 times higher and is clearly out of control.

The think-tank says that from 2001 to 2021, the UK population increased by 8 millionof which almost 7 million was owing to immigration.

That equates to the populations of Birmingham, Manchester, Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds Leicester, Liverpool, and Newcastle plus Peterborough, Ipswich, Norwich, Luton and Bradford, it said.

A similar, indeed much higher, population increase can now be expected in future years unless immigration is sharply reduced.

It added that immigration has taken place on such a rapid scale that Baroness Louise Caseys 2016 report found that some areas had changed beyond recognition in a short space of time.

In London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leicester overseas arrivals and the children of migrants already constitute the majority in those areas, according to the group.

The report added: The scale and nature of our population are rapidly changing without the consent of the majority.

It is very hard to see how change at this scale and pace can possibly serve the wider interests of our community or help integration.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks during a press conference following the G-7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, on May 21, 2023. (Issei Kato/Pool/Getty Images)

Tory Anger

In 2019, the Tory party manifesto promised that overall numbers will come down as the government ended freedom of movement from the EU in the wake of Brexit.

Sunak has vowed to bring down the number from the level he inherited when he took office last year.

A total of 1.2 million people are likely to have migrated to the UK in 2022, while 557,000 are estimated to have migrated from the UK in the same period.

Speaking on ITVs This Morning last month, Sunak said the numbers are too high and he intends to bring them down.

Asked whether immigration is out of control, he said, Well, no, I think the numbers are just too high.

He said measures put in place this week to prevent overseas students from bringing dependents with them are significant and will bring levels down over time.

But Tory anger at the inability to control net migrationa frustration dating back to former Prime Minister David Camerons failure to bring it down to the tens of thousands he promisedwas evident in the Commons.

Conservative MP Aaron Bell said the figures were too high and his voters will expect to see them fall, while his Tory colleague Louie French said the unsustainable levels of migration were having a significant impact on housing in southeast England.

The government has to balance its commitment to reducing net migration with the need to fill vacancies in areas where there is a labour shortage.

But veteran Tory Sir Edward Leigh said, Some people in the Treasury seem to think a good way to grow the economy is to fill the country up with more and more people, but this is bad for productivity and bad for British workers who are being undercut by mass migration from all over the world.

PA Media contributed to this report.
TIMELINE: The Trump Presidential Records Case

Documents seized during the Aug. 8 raid by the FBI of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., in a photo released on Aug. 30, 2022. (FBI via The Epoch Times)

Former president Donald Trump said on June 8 that he had been indicted by special counsel Jack Smith as part of the investigation into his handling of classified documents.

The indictment is the conclusion of a years-long saga that started when the president moved out of the White House following the 2020 election.

The federal inquiry has led to the raid on Trumps personal residence at Mar-a-Lago. The following is the timeline of the events leading up to the indictment.

2021

Jan. 18

CBS Miami reports that at least two moving company trucks are spotted at President Donald Trumps residence at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.

Jan. 19

Trump signs a letter designating Mark Meadows and others to be in charge of his presidential records. In a separate document, Trump also declassifies certain materials related to the FBIs Crossfire Hurricane investigation. That probe was launched in 2016 to examine possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, former FBI director, took over the investigation in 2017. In 2019, he concluded that there was no evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded with Russians to sway the 2016 election.

Jan. 20

Hours before Trumps tenure ends, Meadows, Trumps chief of staff, writes his own memo about the Crossfire Hurricane records. The Office of Legal Counsel has advised that the Privacy Act does not apply to the White House, he writes. Still, Meadows says, to avoid unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, he is returning the bulk of the binder of declassified documents to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and requesting a Privacy Act review. The Washington Examiner later reports that Meadows memo resulted in the DOJ blocking the records from release.

As the Republican presidents administration concludes, the Presidential Records Act requires Trump to provide all records from his presidency to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). However, a Trump attorney, Timothy Parlatore, would later publicly state that NARA, in its dealings with Trump, deviated from procedures used with several previous administrations.

Democrat President Joe Biden is inaugurated as the 46th president, although Trump disputes the election results. He has not conceded.

May 6

Believing that records were missing, NARA requests records from Trump. Its unclear why NARA suspected that records were missing; many events from January-May 2021 are redacted, or blacked out, in an FBI agents affidavit that was released in August 2022.

December

A Trump representative informs NARA that about a dozen boxes of presidential records had been located at Mar-A-Lago and that staffers were continuing to search for more.

2022

Jan. 18

NARA receives 15 boxes of records from Trumps attorneys, following months of negotiations.

Jan. 31

NARA releases a statement, saying that some of Trumps presidential records included paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump, and taped back together by White House staff.

Feb. 9

The same day that House Democrats write a letter expressing concern about Trumps records, NARA sends a referral email to the DOJ, stating the boxes contained highly classified records that were intermixed with other records and improperly identified.

Feb. 18

NARA sends House Democrats a letter stating that NARA found items marked as classified national security information. NARA also sends other letters, expressing concerns over the Trump administrations apparent failure to properly archive presidential social media posts.

May 5

Breitbart news quotes Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official, as saying that other media reports about classified materials were misleading because Trump had already declassified the records.

April 11

The White House Counsels Office asks that NARA provide the FBI access to the 15 Mar-A-Lago boxes.

May 10

In a letter responding to a Trump lawyer, NARA says that access to presidential records is generally restricted for several years after the conclusion of a Presidents tenure in office. But federal law says that an incumbent president is entitled to past presidential records that are needed for the conduct of current business. NARA asserts that condition applies to the Biden administrations request for the Trump records. The FBI cites important national security interests in viewing the documents. NARA also says an assistant attorney general advised that there is no precedent for assertion of executive privilege by a former president to deny an incumbent presidents access to records.

May 16-18

In all but one of the 15 boxes, FBI agents find documents with classification markings. Among the records, 67 documents were marked confidential; 92 records secret; and 25 records, top secret, the FBI affidavit said.

June 3

In response to a May 11 subpoena, a Trump attorney hands over an envelope to NARA, containing 38 documents with classification markings, including five documents marked confidential, 16 marked secret, and 17 marked top secret, according to The Associated Press. Trumps representatives attest that, following a diligent search, they believe no other classified materials remained at Mar-A-Lago.

June 4

Former Trump lawyer Timothy Parlatore appears on NBCs Meet The Press and described the process that ordinarily happens with presidential records. Usually, the Government Services Administration transfers the records to a facility near the former presidents residence, then allows the president two years to sort out anything that is personal; the remaining presidential records are returned to NARA. Instead, GSA moved the records to Trumps homeand then demanded that the records be returned immediately to NARA, Parlatore said.

June 8

The DOJ sends a letter to Trumps attorneys, stating that Mar-A-Lago does not include a secure location authorized for the storage of classified information. The letter also requested that the room that housed the documents should be secured and that all items in that room should be preserved in their current condition until further notice.

June 19

Trump sends a letter to NARA, granting access to his presidential records to two people: former administration member Kash Patel, who is also a lawyer, and news reporter John Solomon.

Aug. 5

An FBI special agent signs an affidavit, under seal, and a Florida federal judge agrees to issue a warrant allowing the search of Mar-A-Lago. (That record was released 21 days later.)

Aug. 8

In an unprecedented move, FBI agents raid Mar-A-Lago. The agents are divided into two teams: investigators and a team tasked with reviewing materials that might contain privileged attorney-client information. Agents seize 36 items containing about 100 classified records. DOJ says the discovery of that many records casts doubt on the extent of cooperation from Trump and his allies.

Aug. 9

Republicans react with shock and concern over the raid; Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) sends a letter to NARA, seeking information on the escalation of this investigation leading to unprecedented action against a former president.

Aug. 12

A federal judge unseals the warrant that allowed the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago; the document shows agents are investigating possible violations of federal laws, including the Espionage Act. Also, NARA disputes news reports claiming that records were missing from the administration of former President Barack Obama, Trumps predecessor. The agency also later stated that The Obama Foundation has never had control over Obamas presidential records.

Aug. 16

NARA responds to Turner, stating that the agency was not involved in searches for Trump documents and that the DOJ has been exclusively responsible for all aspects of this investigation after its referral to the DOJ.

Aug. 23

NARA releases a letter revealing that the Biden administration asked NARA to allow the FBI to review the Mar-A-Lago records months prior to the raid. The letter, dated May 10, was sent from NARA to a Trump attorney.

Aug. 30

The DOJ reveals new details about the investigation, asserting that classified materials were likely concealed and removed from a Mar-a-Lago storage room to obstruct the investigation.

Trump responds by stating: Terrible the way the FBI, during the Raid of Mar-a-Lago, threw documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending it was me that did it!), and then started taking pictures of them for the public to see. Thought they wanted them kept Secret?

Sept. 12

Trumps lawyers state that theres no evidence that Trump had disclosed the Mar-A-Lago records to anyone.

Sept. 15

At the request of Trumps lawyers, a federal judge appoints U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie as special master to review the Mar-A-Lago documents. Dearie was tasked with weeding out records covered by executive privilege, attorney-client privilege or otherwise exempt from DOJs probe of classified documents.

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt posts on Twitter that Trump told him everything he took to Mar-A-Lago was declassified, and that he had done nothing wrong in connection with alternative slates of electors. Trump predicts big problems if hes indicted, touching off criticism from people who interpret that remark as inciting violence.

Oct. 3

NARA releases 11 pages of communication with Trump representatives and 54 pages documenting its contact with other agencies about the Trump records; about 1,500 pages are withheld, citing privileged communications with federal agencies, privacy concerns, and law enforcement investigatory information. The agency also would release additional records later in the year.

Oct. 11

NARA denounces false and misleading reports implying that records of several former presidents took records with them or that the records were housed in substandard conditions.

Nov. 2

Bidens lawyers find about 10 classified documents at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement, located at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Bidens attorneys report the discovery to NARA. But no information is revealed publicly until two months later, well after the general election on Nov. 8, the first significant election in the midst of Bidens presidency. The Biden administrations acknowledgments of the documents would come after media outlets break the news.

Nov. 3

NARA contacts Bidens lawyers to arrange to pick up boxes of Biden records from the Penn Biden Center, they learned that other records had been moved to the Boston law office of Pat Moore, another Biden lawyer, according to a letter NARA later sent in a response to Republican senators inquiries. NARA would later retrieve nine boxes of materials from Moores office, and additional materials from a garage where Biden stored his Corvette. NARA would also refer the Biden document matter to other government agencies.

Nov. 15

Trump announces his candidacy for president in the 2024 election.

Nov. 18

The DOJ appoints Jack Smith as special counsel to oversee two probes of Trump: the documents case and whether any person or entity unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification of the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6, 2021.

Nov. 27

Trump pushes back on Truth Social, calling Smith totally compromised and a political hit man.

Dec. 1

An appeals court rules that the special masters review of documents must stop. The appellate judges say they cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant.

2023

Jan. 9

The White House publicly discloses the Biden document concerns for the first time. In response, Trump points out the disparate treatment between him and Biden on his Truth Social platform. When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House? Trump writes. Bidens records were definitely not declassified. The records date to Bidens terms in the U.S. Senate and during his vice presidency in the Obama administration.

Jan. 10

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, writes to NARA, raising concerns about political bias at the agency over inconsistent treatment of recovering classified records kept by Biden and Trump.

Jan. 12

The DOJ appoints a special prosecutor, Robert Hur, look into Bidens classified documents. Bidens lawyers acknowledge that more classified documents were found at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, than had been previously reported. House Republicans raise concerns that other classified documents were found in a garage where Biden stores his Corvette.

Feb. 10

NARA releases records related to the transfer of documents from Bidens time as vice president under Obama.

Feb. 24

Republican Sens. Charles Grassley and Ron Johnson, leaders of congressional oversight committees, seek answers from NARA about the Biden records.

March 1

During a closed hearing, a NARA representative tells a House committee that many recent presidents have mishandled classified information, according to testimony that was declassified weeks later.

March 7

In a letter to Grassley and Johnson, NARA says it has not delved into the Biden records, and that they were transported to NARAs John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. NARA also reveals that Bidens lawyers had begun reviewing the Penn Biden Center records on unknown dates in October 2022; the record does not state what prompted that review.

March 27

Grassley and Johnson write another letter, revealing that they had learned the FBI reviewed the Biden files.

April 12

After a series of shorter statements and records releases, NARA issues a lengthy statement disputing reports that NARA has been untruthful about its activities. NARAs primary mission is to make records available for access, the agency says, adding, NARA does not consider itself to be involved in the work of, or investigations by the requestors.

April 13

In a response to Grassley and Johnson, NARA says its ability to discuss the matter is limited because of Hurs investigation.

April 27

NARA denies that it declined to provide archival assistance to President Trumps transition team. The agency says it provided similar help to the three previous Presidential transitions, adding: The packing of boxes and transfer of records from the White House to NARA at the end of each Administration is always managed and controlled by White House and [National Security Council] officials, with NARAs help.

May 23

Trumps attorneys ask for a meeting with top DOJ officials to discuss the ongoing injustice that Trump is facing under Smiths investigations of the documents matter and Trumps alleged interference with transferring power to the Biden administration.

May 31

Citing multiple sources, CNN releases an exclusive report alleging that federal prosecutors had obtained an audio recording of a 2021 meeting in which Trump reportedly acknowledged that he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran. Prosecutors have asked grand jury witnesses about the recording, according to the report. A series of other media reports, apparently based on leaks about Smiths investigation, begin circulating.

June 1

The House Judiciary Committee begins investigating whether bias in the FBI, revealed in Special Counsel John Durhams May 15 report, has tainted Smiths investigations of Trump. Garland was given until June 15 to respond to inquiries from the committee chair, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

June 2

The DOJ announces that its investigation into possible mishandling of documents found at the home of Trumps former vice president, Mike Pence, is concluded without filing charges against Pence.

June 4

Countering other reports predicting Trumps imminent indictment in the documents probe, a former Trump lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, tells NBC News Meet The Press questions whether such a prosecution would make sense.

June 5

Speculation about the documents investigation nearing a conclusion goes into overdrive after two events.

Three Trump attorneysLindsey Halligan, John Rowley, and James Trustyare seen leaving DOJ headquarters in Washington. They had been inside for about two hours.

Also, sources told NBC News that a Smith-convened Washington grand jury, which had been taking a break, reportedly was back in session.

June 6

U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) demands that the DOJ produce unredacted records about Smiths probe into the Trump documents case.

In a series of Truth Social posts, couched as tirades by some media, Trump accuses the FBI and DOJ of being Marxists and fascists for going after him in the documents case. He also compares how differently the federal government has responded to document concerns surrounding Pence and Biden.

June 7

Taylor Budowich, a former Trump aide who continues supporting the former president via a political action committee, confirms via Twitter that he testified to a grand jury to meet his legal obligation. Budowich said he remains determined to help propel Trump back into the White House. America has become a sick and broken nationa decline led by Joe Biden and power hungry Democrats, Budowich writes. I will not be intimidated by this weaponization of government. For me, the need to unite our nation and make America great again has never been more clear than it is today. That starts with re-electing President Donald J. Trump, a purpose I will not be deterred from pursuing.

News reports indicate that two grand juries, one in Washington, D.C., and the other in Miami, have been meeting in connection with Smiths probes of Trump. It was unclear why dual grand juries are apparently involved.

Trump posts on Truth Social: Wow, this is turning out to be the greatest & most vicious instance of election interference in the history of our country. He points out that he is leading both Biden and his nearest Republican rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in opinion polls. Perhaps most importantly, they are launching all of the many fake investigations against me right smack in the middle of my campaign, something which is unheard of [and is] not supposed to happen. He ends by labeling the DOJ, FBI and other persecutors fascists.

Shortly thereafter, as reports circulate that the DOJ has told him or his lawyers that he would be indicted, Trump posts: No one has told me Im being indicted, and I shouldnt be because Ive done nothing wrong. But he has been a target of the weaponized DOJ & FBI. He says the agencies are committing a travesty of justice and election interference at a level never seen before. Trump then urges Republicans in Congress to make this their top concern.

June 8

Trump calls for the DOJ to shut down the case against him and for the Inspector General to investigate the DOJ for prosecutorial misconduct. He alleges that top prosecutors tried to bribe and intimidate an attorney into getting a witness to fabricate stories against Trump. Trump also said a federal prosecutor promised another lawyer a judgeship in the Biden administration if his client would flip on Trump.

Trump later says his lawyers have informed him of the indictment. The president wrote on Truth Social that he has been summoned to appear in court in Miami on June 13.

Compiled by Janice Hisle.
To Counter CCP, AUKUS Needs to Deepen Cooperation in Key Defense Technologies

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (L), US President Joe Biden (C) and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hold a press conference after a trilateral meeting during the AUKUS summit in San Diego, Calif., on March 13, 2023. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

AUKUS, the trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, needs to accelerate and deepen cooperation on key defence technologies, including hypersonics, electronic warfare, and undersea capabilities, in order to effectively counter the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a think tank report shows.

The collective strength of the AUKUS countries has turned around Chinas capabilities in key military areas, including Chinas strategic capabilities in autonomous systems operation technology, advanced robotics, adversarial AI-reverse engineering, and protective cyber, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) s Critical Technology Tracker revealed in its report on June 6.

To date, AUKUS trilateral efforts have focused on its Pillar 1 objective, which is to support Australia in acquiring conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines.

Yet achieving Pillar 2, the technology programs, is arguably both of greater long-term value and more strategically challenging, reads the report.

Pillar 2 aims to enhance the U.S., UK, and Australias technological edgeand, implicitly, to counter Chinas technological advancementsby pooling resources in advanced military capabilities areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, cyber technology, undersea capabilities, hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, electronic warfare, and information-sharing.

A nuclear propulsion Ohio class submarine, the USS Florida, sails on Jan. 22, 2003, off the coast of the Bahamas. As part of the AUKUS deal, Australia will get the tech for nuclear-powered subs. (David Nagle/U.S. Navy/Getty Images)

Report Highlights the Importance of Accelerating Collaboration

ASPIs analysis of two million scientific papers showed that Beijing had a lead in hypersonics, electronic warfare, and key undersea capabilities.

Across a number of technology areas, Chinas lead is so great that no aggregation of countries exceeds its sharehighlighting the importance of the accelerating effect of greater collaboration between like-minded partners, the authors argued.

Among the 23 key technologies, ASPIs talent tracker data shows that 14.2 percent of high-impact authors working in China completed their postgraduate training in an AUKUS country (U.S. = 8.5 percent, UK = 3.8 percent, Australia = 1.9 percent), while 4.3 percent trained in the EU, 1.9 percent in Canada, 1.6 percent in Singapore, and 1.1 percent in Japan.

That knowledge import is highest in defence categories like hypersonic detection (AUKUS 19.5 percent) and electronic warfare (AUKUS 17.6 percent).

The CCP has been accused of stealing U.S. trade secrets and intellectual property for years.

In March, former Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James Anderson said that the CCP has copied U.S. military technology to build its fifth-generation fighter.

What we know is that because of the espionage efforts, [Chinas] J-20 is more advanced than it otherwise would be, and thats the important point here, Anderson told Fox News Digital.

They have profited greatly from their thievery over the years, he said. Theyve put it to good use and come up with an advanced fifth-generation fighter.

AUKUS Achieves First Breakthrough in AI

The report comes after the AUKUS partners announced they had made a global breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) technology, with the first live retraining of autonomous systems used on surveillance drone technology.

The AUKUS coalition said that during a trial in Upavon in Wiltshire, UK, the alliance achieved several world-first breakthroughs with jointly made AI technology. This includes live retraining at the edge of models in flight and the interchange and use of AI models on uncrewed aerial vehicles.

The work saw the initial joint deployment of Australian, UK, and U.S. AI-enabled assets in a collaborative swarm to detect and track military targets in a representative environment in real-time, a media release said. Accelerating the development of these technologies will have a massive impact on coalition military capability.

The trial was completed under the AUKUS Pacts Pillar II, which is pursuing a trilateral program to accelerate collective knowledge on a tranche of leading-edge technologies and capabilities, to enhance the security and stability of the Indo-Pacific region.

AUKUS Partners Say Breakthrough Will Provide a Kinetic Advantage

The trilateral partners are currently looking to push these technologies into all three nations military capabilities to increase their response time to threats.

Lt. Colonel Richard Craig, who participated in the trial, said that while AI has many benefits for the military, this particular trial demonstrated that the coalition could increase the number of sensors able to engage with the enemy.

So AI and autonomy will give us an operational advantage by increasing our ability to engage enemy forces at range and increasing our survivability.

The UKs Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Financial and Military Capability), General Rob Magowan, noted that the coalitions advances in AI will deliver the three nations capabilities to defeat both current and future kinetic threats.

The trial demonstrates the military advantage of AUKUS advanced capabilities, working in coalition to identify, track, and counter potential adversaries from a greater distance, said Magowan. Service personnel, scientists, and engineers from our three nations combined to develop and share critical information during operations to enhance commanders decision making.

Meanwhile, Abe Denmark, Senior AUKUS Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Defense, noted that the development and deployment of advanced artificial intelligence technologies have the potential to transform the way we approach defense and security challenges.

We recognize the immense importance of this collaboration in strengthening the combined national security of our nations, said Denmark. This capability demonstration is truly a shared effort and is a critical step in our trilateral initiative to stay ahead of emerging threats.
Trudeau Foundation Chair Says He Wasnt Aware of Chinese Investments Made with Govt Endowment

Chair of the Board of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Edward Johnson appears as a witness at a standing committee on access to information, privacy and ethics on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on May 9, 2023. The committee is looking into foreign interference. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation chair Edward Johnson says he was unaware that the organization invested some of its $125 million initial endowment from the federal government into Chinese companies.

On June 8, Johnson told MPs on the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Accounts that the foundation arranged a special meeting two years ago to discuss the investments. This came about, he said, after Madeleine Redfern, a businesswoman and the former mayor of Iqaluit who also previously sat on the Trudeau Foundations finance and investment committee, raised concerns about them, as first reported by Blacklocks Reporter.

The Trudeau Foundation was created in 2001 in memory of former prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau and was given a $125 million endowment from the government to provide grants and academic scholarships.

Redfern told the Commons ethics committee on June 2 that around 0.07 percent of the foundations portfolio is invested in Chinese tech giants Tencent and Baidu. She also said she inquired with the foundation one year ago about whether it had investments in China.

Bloc Quebecois MP Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagne asked Johnson on June 8 about these investments.

We did discover that yes, in fact, we had two investments and since that time, according to my information, we sold those investments, Johnson said.

Sinclair-Desgagne asked Johnson if he had previously been aware of the investments and whether he thought it was normal to have only learned about them recently.

No, we divested ourselves of those investments, he said. I cant tell you exactly when.  We told our financial managers to get rid of that. Normally, we dont really know whats part of the portfolio.

Policies

Johnston added that the Trudeau Foundation has environmental policies, social policies, and governance policies that it describes to its financial managers in order to ensure they make ethically sound investments.

We invest in companies that are conforming to these policies and we meet with our managers to make sure that they are compliant with our policies, he said.

Redfern previously told the Commons ethics committee that she researched Tencent and Baidu after learning the Trudeau Foundation held stock in them and said she found privacy issues.

Tencent, which is the developer of the widely popular Chinese WeChat application, has been documented by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto as being used for surveillance and censorship.

The Citizen Lab has also found privacy issues with Baidus browser, and the American-based cyber defence firm Unit 42 previously said Baidu apps on the Android platform leaked sensitive user data.

Noe Chartier contributed to this report.
Trump Allies Respond to Indictment, Say It Will Boost His Support Among Voters

The indictment of former President Donald Trump has roused Republican allies to his defense, with many believing the move will strengthen his chances of mounting a comeback to the White House.

They just solidified Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, MyPillow CEP Mike Lindell told The Epoch Times, adding that such a move just makes more and more people get behind him.

The indictment, the second one since Manhattan District Attorney filed 34 felony charges against Trump in connection with payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, made Trump the first former president to face federal charges in U.S. history and triggered a battery of responses in Washington that are largely split along party lines.

To Democrats, the news is an indication that no one is above the law, with some describing it as a continuation of the chaos of Trump.

Thats the narrative they want to put out, Lindell said in response, referring to the Democrats. They want anybody but Donald Trump.

Weaponization of Federal Powers

The court document released on Friday charged Trump with 37 felony counts over his handling of records at Mar-a-Lago, including making false statements, concealing documents, and conspiring to obstruct justice.

It accused Trump of storing classified documents in unauthorized locations in his Mar-a-Lago resort, including in a bathroom, his bedroom, and a ballroom. On two separate occasions, the filing said, Trump shared some of the materials with other individuals who didnt have security clearances.

Congressional Republicans have rushed to Trumps defense in the light of the indictment and suggest that the action is politically motivated.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), while saying he stands with Trump against government oppression, said that the current DOJ/FBI continues to represent the most egregious weaponization of federal powers.

We, the People no longer trust them. Its abhorrent, what theyve become. DOJ senior chain is a cesspool of political agenda-driven corruption, our once proud FBI has become a symbol of insidious, violent government political persecution, he told The Epoch Times. Their iconic FBI vests now invoke fear in the hearts of Americans who dare to stand for freedom.

Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) noted the close timing between the indictment and the scrutiny on President Joe BidenTrumps Democrat rival in the 2024 presidential raceover allegations that he took $5 million in bribes with a foreign national during his vice presidency. A day earlier, the House Oversight Committee said the FBI agreed to give access to some documents pertaining to the case.

Conveniently, on the same day the House Oversight Committee revealed a $5 million bribery scheme involving President Biden with a foreign national, President Trump is indicted by a weaponized DOJ, Nehls told The Epoch Times, adding that Trump has been the only one indicted when some other former U.S. leaders have had classified records showing up where they shouldnt be.

The mere fact that Biden kept classified documents from his time as Senator and Vice President and isnt given the same treatment is laughable, he said. What a joke. Joe Biden and the entire Democrat Party are terrified of President Trump because they know he will win and be our 47th President.

The same day Trump made public the indictment he was facing, a reporter sought responses from Biden on congressional Republicans claims that theres damning evidence in the FBI file that you sold out the country.

Wheres the money? Biden answered. Its a bunch of malarkey.

Biden has maintained he didnt pressure the Justice Department to bring charges against Trump.

After his remarks at Nash Community College in Rocky Mountain in North Carolina, a reporter asked whether he has spoken to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

I have not spoken to him at all and Im not going to speak with him, he said. Hours before Trump revealed he was indicted on Thursday, Biden told reporters that Youll notice I have never once, not one single time, suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do, relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge.

Former deputy assistant and strategist to Trump, Sebastian Gorka, like other allies for Trump, seems confident the indictment will not hurt Trumps political standing.

As we saw after the spurious indictment by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, this false federal indictment will strengthen President Trump with his supporters, garner him new ones, and boost his campaigns fundraising efforts, he told The Epoch Times. These, he added, are predictable short-term consequences, but what happens over the long terms is impossible to predict unless we can stop this flagrant abuse of the law for political purposes.

Former Attorney Responds

Jenna Ellis, an attorney who previously represented Trump, has a different view. While she said the indictment may be a little bit of a witch hunt, she believes that its overall a serious prosecution that Trump may have brought upon himself.

Ellis, who was an attorney for Trump in the aftermath of the contested 2020 election, told The Epoch Times in a message that she believes from a purely legal perspective, this indictment is serious.

While the Manhattan DAs case is a ridiculously constructed stretch and motivated by political opposition, by contrast, the issues here appear to have been raised only because of how Trump and his team responded, rather than because they were specifically targeted. Whether that behavior rises to the level of criminal activity is the key question.
Trump Can Run for President While Being Indicted: Heres the Main Reason Why

Former President Donald Trump arrives at Trump Tower the day after FBI agents raided his Mar-a-Lago Palm Beach home, in New York City on Aug. 9, 2022. (David 'Dee' Delgado/Reuters)

Former President Donald Trump can still continue to run for president in 2024 after he announced that hes being federally indicted on charges relating to whether he mishandled classified records, according to legal experts.

After Trump was charged by the Manhattan District Attorneys office earlier this year in a separate case, some noted that the U.S. Constitution only requires that a candidate be a natural-born citizen, at least 35 years old, and be a resident of the United States for at least 14 years. Retired Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz told The Epoch Times in March that Trump could runand servefrom prison if he is convicted and sentenced.

The only way he can be disqualified is if they can prove that he actually fought in the Civil War for the South. If he fought for the Civil War in the south, hes out, Dershowitz told The Epoch Times. But other than that, if hes 35 years old, was born in America, and didnt fight in the Civil War to the south. Hes eligible. And [can] run from prison.

Dershowitz was referring to the 14th Amendments disqualification clause that targeted former Confederate soldiers who fought in the Civil War in the mid-19th century.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, the clause reads, in part, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

And another law professor, Richard Hasen, of the University of California-Los Angeles, told CNN on Friday that there is nothing that stops Trump from running while indicted, or even convicted.

Legally speaking, there is nothing to bar a former president from being indicted for a state crime, running for officeeven convicted, said Jessica Levinson, founding director of Loyola Law Schools Public Service Institute, told USA Today. It really just becomes an issue of, practically, how could you run the country behind bars, if ever came to something like that?

Law enforcement officers in front of former President Donald Trumps home at Mar-A-Lago in Florida on Aug. 8, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)

On Thursday evening, Trump announced via social media that he was being indicted on charges of allegedly mishandling classified documents, although the indictment hasnt been unsealed. The Justice Department did not immediately publicly confirm the indictment, and any charges were not publicly filed.

Trumps lawyer James Trusty said Thursday on CNN that the indictment includes charges of willful retention of national defense information, obstruction of justice, false statements, and conspiracy. Trump has categorically denied the charges and said its an attempt to interfere in the 2024 election.

Trump, on his Truth Social platform, called it a DARK DAY for the United States of America. In a video post, he said, Im innocent and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly.

Trump said hed been summoned to appear in court Tuesday afternoon in Miami. It wasnt immediately clear if Trump planned to make the appearance and what the procedure would look like.

New York Case

When Trump was charged by the Manhattan district attorney in New York with falsifying business records, he surrendered to authorities, where he was booked behind closed doors and appeared in the courtroom, sitting with his lawyers at the defense table. In that case, Trump pleaded not guilty, while some observerslike Dershowitznoted that the grand jury pool likely skewed politically left.

The charges came after federal officials raided Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents. In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings have been recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021, prosecutors said.

Weeks after that, Attorney General Merrick Garland picked Jack Smith to lead investigations into the presence of classified documents at Trumps Florida estate, as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol.

In a statement after the announcement, Smith last year said he would conduct the investigations independently and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice.

The pace of the investigations will not pause or flag under my watch. I will exercise independent judgment and will move the investigations forward expeditiously and thoroughly to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate, Smith remarked at the time.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Qantas airplanes - REUTERS/David Gray/File Photo

Qantas, the Australian airline, will no longer require its female cabin crew to wear make-up and heels in an effort to be reflective of the times.

Under new guidance issued by the company, male employees will also be allowed to wear make-up, while both men and women employees will be allowed to wear all sorts of jewellery including large watches.

A spokesman for the airline said: Fashions change, and so have our style guidelines over the years.

Were proud of our diversity and as well as bringing our guidelines up to date, these changes will make wearing our uniform more comfortable and practical for all of our people, including those with a wide range of body types and those from diverse cultural backgrounds.

The airlines policies are said to have been a source of frustration for some employees.

Qantas cabin crew

Imogen Sturni, branch secretary at the Australian Services Union (ASU), which reportedly lobbied for Qantas to update its rules, told the BBC: Some of the dress code requirements were bordering on ridiculous, such as make-up style guides and a requirement for women to wear smaller watches than men.

Yet while staff of all genders will be free to dress and apply makeup as they please, there will still be some restrictions. Regardless of gender, if hair is kept long it will have to be worn in a bun.

Those with tattoos, meanwhile, will still have to keep them covered up, while the airline will also mandate that some items of clothing must be worn together, such as tights or stockings with skirts.

The spokesman added: Our uniform standards have always been reflective of the times. In the 80s, sideburns had to stop at mid ear, gelled spikes were out and we recommended navy blue as the best eyeliner colour. In the 70s, women had to wear skirts above the knee.

Despite the loosening of rules, the spokesman stressed the airline would maintain the same high standards of grooming and attention to detail.

Qantas employees

It is the first major change to Qantas uniform policy since its current uniforms were introduced in 2013.

In September 2022, Virgin Atlantic said it would no longer require its employees to wear gendered uniform options.

Virgin Atlantic had already taken a markedly softer stance on tattoos, having previously allowed crew members to have visible tattoos.

In 2019, Air New Zealand said staff would be allowed to keep traditional Maori and other non-offensive tattoos visible.

The airline said at the time: Allowing our employees to express their individuality and cultural heritage through tattoos is the latest step on our path to truly embracing diversity and creating a workplace where Air New Zealanders can be themselves and thrive.

We ask employees to treat tattoos like they treat speech  you cant swear, make hateful comments or lewd jokes in the workplace, neither can your tattoos.

Despite Virgin Atlantic relaxing its rules on gendered uniform options, it suspended this rule for staff aboard the flight that carried the England football team to Qatar for the World Cup last year.

The airline said at the time this was the result of a risk assessment considering Qatari laws and attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people. It said it would initially roll out the policy in countries such as the UK, US and Israel, which it said were more accepting of non-binary identities.

However, the airline said at the time it would still fly the team to Qatar with a logo featuring the rainbow flag which is used to symbolise LGBTQ pride.

Fifa was heavily criticised for its decision to allow the tournament to take place in the Gulf state, where homosexuality is illegal under Sharia Law.

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Former President Donald Trump is facing 37 charges over the handling of classified government records, according to the federal indictment document unsealed earlier Friday. Thirty-one of those counts accuse Trump of willful retention of national defense information. Trump and his aide, Walt Nauta, each also face a count of conspiracy to obstruct justice. This goes back to the raid on his Mar-a-Lago home, and the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith to investigate the classified documents scandal. Trump is set to appear in federal court in Miami on June 13.

In this episode of Crossroads, well discuss the charges, the reaction to them, and what it all means for the United States politically.
ANALYSIS: Trump Indictment Throws 2024 Election Into Chaos

Former President Donald Trump disembarks his plane in Aberdeen, Scotland, on May 1, 2023. (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

News Analysis

The indictment of former President Donald Trump on charges related to his unauthorized possession of classified documents has introduced a wild card into the 2024 presidential campaign, all but ensuring another election marked by allegations of wrongdoing against a major candidate.

A day after the June 8 announcement that the Department of Justice (DOJ) would pursue criminal charges, supporters and detractors of the former president took their predictable sides.

Left uncomfortably in the middle were Republican candidates for the 2024 presidential nomination who faced the choice between directly attacking their strongest opponent or soft-pedaling to avoid angering his formidable base of loyalists.

For Trump, no stranger to controversy, the indictment could be both a blessing and a curse.

The Trump Bump

The indictment both helps and hurts Trump, according to some political strategists. It will likely energize his core supporters but may also impose limitations on his schedule and ability to speak publicly about the matter.

Its a great way for Trump to fundraise and tighten up his base, legal and political analyst Andrew Lieb told The Epoch Times. In fact, we learned about the indictment because Trump told us, and then his super PAC told us.

In a macro sense, its going to be very, very disruptive as judges, particularly federal judges, could care less what obligations Trump has, Lieb added. So hes going to have to work around their schedule. And theres likely going to be a confidentiality order.

In the short term, the indictment is unlikely to harm Trumps support, according to political strategist and organizer Amani Wells-Onyioha.

During this time, weve seen Trump in the news almost every day over allegations, hes been the first former president to face criminal charges, and yet, he still leads in the polls by a wide margin, Wells-Onyioha told The Epoch Times.

Even if he is charged and behind bars, he could still theoretically be our President, Wells-Onyioha added. Given all this, we can expect Trump to continue his campaign for 2024, and were unlikely to see any major drop in his polling.

However, the indictment has produced cracks in what had previously been an impregnable red wall of support by the Republican party.

Wounded Warrior

A number of congressional Republicans have remained supportive of Trump, using the indictment as an occasion to attack their primary political opponent, President Joe Biden.

Joe Biden has used his Justice Department  tonight to indict his top political opponent, Trump. He has trampled the rule of law to benefit himself. He has led the country into profound danger, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote on Twitter.

This is our two-tiered Justice system on full display, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) wrote on Twitter. The Biden DOJ buries investigations of President Biden and his family while it charges his political rivals. Making America look like a banana republic is incredibly irresponsible.

Among Republicans running against Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination, the political calculus is different. Although Trump is their opponent, attacking him risks alienating his formidable political base.

Two candidates have been willing to take that risk.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Trumps legal problems were self-inflicted wounds, making him a poor choice in 2024.

Return the documents and stop doing this, Christie said in a televised June 9 interview on Fox News. Why do you have to be the center of negative attention all the time? Why do you have to be angry all the time? And thats what Donald Trump has done.

Referring to the federal indictment, Christie added, Thats the weight that Donald Trump will have to carry if hes the nominee into a general election in November. And why do we want to take that risk?

Donald Trumps actionsfrom his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of lawshould not define our nation or the Republican Party, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said in a statement on June 8. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.

Other candidates have been hesitant to attack Trump directly, preferring to vent their wrath on the DOJ.

Ron DeSantis speaks at the Convention Center in Tampa, Fla., on Nov. 8, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, polling second behind Trump in the primary race, passed up the opportunity to criticize the frontrunner.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? DeSantis wrote on Twitter, vowing to hold the DOJ accountable if elected.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who served under Trump as ambassador to the United Nations, also attacked the system rather than her former boss.

This is not how justice should be pursued in our country, she wrote on Twitter. The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics. Its time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions.

Thats a mistake, according to Lieb.

It shows the weakness of the other Republican candidates, Lieb said. Trump is weak. Hes down now, and why arent they stomping on him? Theyre showing that theyre second fiddle to his Alpha. Theyre his Beta, Lieb said.

Trumps base may be enough to help him win the primary election, but it is not enough to with the general election, according to Lieb. In that case, other Republican candidates would need to capture the undecided votes within the party.

The biggest hit I suspect [Trump will] take for this recent indictment is that he may lose the undecided Republican vote, Wells-Onyioha said.

Shades of 2016

Ironically, the charges against Trump are similar to allegations made against his 2016 opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for her use of email. Both center on the mishandling of classified government documents.

Clinton had used a private email server during her tenure at the State Department, a practice she said had been used by predecessors due to the poor performance of the Departments email server.

Trump and others saw this as careless at best and criminal at worst. Her actions could have allowed hackers to access government documents, they said, and may have violated the law by improperly storing classified material.

The FBI opened an investigation into the handling of Clintons emails in July 2015. One year later, then-FBI Director James Comey announced that no charges would be filed.

By that time, Trump had nicknamed Clinton Crooked Hillary, and the chant Lock her up became a rallying cry among his supporters.

Comey announced that the probe into Clintons emails had been reopened on October 28, 2016, reigniting the controversy less than two weeks before the election. Prior to that announcement, Clinton had led Trump in national polls by 5.9 percent. A week later, her lead had dropped by 3 percent.

No charges were brought against Clinton.

Former Vice President Mike Pence summarized the likely fallout of the indictment in a June 9 radio interview with Hugh Hewitt.

I think this is going to be terribly divisive for the country, he said.
Trump to Speak at GOP Convention in Georgia Amid Post-Indictment Chaos

Former President Donald Trump greets supporters at a Team Trump volunteer leadership training event held at the Grimes Community Complex in Grimes, Iowa on June 1, 2023. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Former President Donald Trump will deliver a speech at the Republican state convention in Georgia on June 10, his first public appearance after his federal indictment in the classified document probe.

Republican governor Brian Kemp and his cabinet are not expected to attend the convention, which kicked off on June 9. Kari Lake, a prominent Trump ally, will give the keynote address on the evening of June 9 at 7:30 p.m.

The Republican leader of one of the states biggest counties underplays any rift and frames the gathering enthusiastically as a big tent with a lot of excitement coming up.

A Democrat political strategist in Atlanta sees Kemp, a term-limited lame duck as governor, still firmly in control of the state and promising to be a factor in the 2024 presidential race, the 2026 senatorial race, or both.

Former Arizona Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake holds a press conference in Phoenix on May 23, 2023. (Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)

But a veteran political scientist at the University of Georgia does see a rift, one between the partys pro-Kemp leadership and its pro-Trump grassroots.

The backdrop is the rift between Kemp and Trump dating back to Georgias disputed 2020 presidential election.

Trumpin his telephone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021alleged that irregularities accounted for his loss in Georgia.

Raffensperger defended the election as honest, and Kemp all along backed him up. The call became one of the events cited in Trumps second impeachment on a charge of insurrection.

Brad Raffensperger, the Republican incumbent Georgia Secretary of State, at the Atlanta Press Club debate on Oct. 18, 2022. (Dustin Chambers/REUTERS)

Trump tried to get even last year, backing primary candidates against both men. Raffensperger defeated his Trump-backed challenger Jody Hice by more than 18 points and with 52 percent of the vote. Hed needed crossover Democrat votes to win, though. Kemp defeated his opponent, former Sen. David Perdue, by a 3 to 1 margin. Both cruised to victory in November.

Kemps victory has been seen as a template for Republicans running against Trump or separating themselves from the controversial former president, who meanwhile need to hold Trumps significant crowd of MAGA loyalists.

The formula seems to be not mentioning Trump much, ignoring his attacks, occasionally defending him in his legal battles, running on a solidly conservative record, and avoiding alienating a Trump base still devoted to him.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) speaks during a campaign stop at Manchester Community College in Manchester, N.H., on June 1, 2023. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

Its one Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has followed more or less, although hes begun responding more forcefully to Trumps attacks since declaring his candidacy on May 24.

Kemp had a tougher job in one way: Georgia could have tipped the election toward Trump. Many party activists continued to think it had been stolen and couldnt understand why a Republican governor and secretary of state didnt overturn it.

But Kemp in November wasnt running against Trump or a Trump surrogate. He was running against Stacey Abrams, whom Republicans love to hate, and the Trump voters came home to vote for him.

The party structure has been taken over by a very conservative group well to the right of Raffensperger and Kemp, said UGAs Charles Bullock. They seem to be thinking along the lines that the elected members may be RINOs, or (Republicans In Name Only.)

But the party activists, in turn, may be out of step both with the partys leaders and its rank and file voters, Bullock said.

There was a disconnect between how well the non-Trump candidates did in 2022 while out of favor with the party activists, but not the rank and file voters, he said.

Kemp and Raffensperger would do very well.

Kemp won his rematch with Abrams, who hed only narrowly beaten in 2018, by a comfortable 7.5 percent of the vote. Raffensperger won over Democrat Bee Nguyen by nearly 10 percentage points, more than double his election margin over his Democratic opponent John Barrow in 2018.

Bullock said the convention, even if Trump loyalists control it, doesnt pose Kemp much threat.

The political scientist said he could see only one possible pitfall: if the statewide party seizes control of the ballot. Its currently open to anyone who files the proper paperwork and pays a fee at the local courthouse, he said.

Dekalb County GOP Chairwoman Marci McCarthy speaks at an election-night event in Atlanta on May 24, 2022. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)

If the activists take over, they could make it difficult for Kemp, or others like Raffensperger, to seek future office as Republicans. Kemp has said hes not running for president in 2024 but is said to be considering a challenge in 2026 when Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff is up for reelection.

Parties sometimes reject a candidate running under their banner, Bullock said. The classic example is David Duke, the Klansman, running as a Republican (in Louisiana). Everyone from President Bush on down said, hes not a Republican.

Duke ran in 1991 against the colorful but flagrantly corrupthe would later serve eight years in federal prisonEdwin Edwards, who was seeking his fourth non-consecutive four-year term.

Popular bumper stickers supporting him bore legends like Vote for the Crook: Its Important and Vote for the Lizard, not the Wizard.

DeKalb County GOP Chairwoman Marci McCarthy downplayed the rift. She spoke with The Epoch Times by cell phone while at a dinner in Columbus on June 8, the day before the convention started.

McCarthy is seeking election as the partys first vice chairwoman and has been campaigning for it in recent months.

Its being mischaracterized, she said. Its historic. We have President Trump coming. Theres excitement and enthusiasm.

The gathering is not a Trump coronation, she said, with two of his rivals, Asa Hutchinson and Vivek Ramaswamy, also attending.

We also have our Congressional delegation comingMarjorie Taylor Greene, Barry Loudermilk, Rich McCormickand the lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, and [former senator] Kelly Loeffler.

Its a really great representation of the Republican Party coming to Columbus. Were really proud of our convention. Its really packed and energized. There will be flag waving and parades, with President Trumps arrival, from the airport to the convention center. Its like CPAC. Its amazing, and its the Georgia GOP.

The convention is not about a fractured party, she said. We have 70 percent new delegates. Theres a tremendous amount of momentum and interest. Were being the change we wanted to be. The fact is, were widening the tent. The Georgia GOP is being inclusive, not exclusive.

Democratic strategist Fred Hicks of Atlanta, commenting on the party he does battle with regularly, disagreed with McCarthy.

Democratic strategist Fred Hicks. (Courtesy of Fred Hicks)

Theres a clear division in Georgia between the Trump Republicans and the Kemp Republicans, said Hicks, who works primarily on local races and ballot initiatives.

He cited Trumps loss in 2020 and his role in the Senate runoffs in early 2021, just before Jan. 6, when both Loeffler and Perdue lost their races and Senate seats after Trump urged Republicans to stay home.

Kemp, meanwhile, widened his margin in 2022 against Stacey Abrams.

A lot of Republicans feel Georgia would have stayed red with the Kemp approach. With the Trump approach, it goes purple.

Hicks attributed Kemps absence from Columbus this weekend to his steering clear of the wing of the party that has not had a lot of success lately.

And he sees Kemp in a commanding position as a Republican in Georgia. Hes raising money, and while one of his PACs can only be used for the gubernatorial campaigns, the other two have much more latitude and can receive unlimited donations, Hicks said.

And Kemp may play a kingmaker role in the party nomination, Hicks said.

Georgias primary, coming a week after Super Tuesday, will absolutely be a factor in determining who goes on to win the nomination, he said.

He can increase Republican turnout and influence who gets it. It brings them significantly closer to the nomination.

Bullock said polls show Trump has a substantial lead over DeSantis for the nomination, but less in Georgiaaround 10 pointsthan in other states, where its 20 to 30 points.

Kemp is an ideal running mate for anyone, including Ron DeSantis, Hicks said. Kemp is the face of the successful, not-Trump wing of the party.

If DeSantis wins, he has to bring Republicans home. Kemp has successfully done that. As [former New Jersey governor and Republican candidate] Chris Christie says, its impossible for a Republican to win in November (2024) without Georgia.

DeSantis has alienated some corporate partners with his feud with Disney, Hicks said. Kemp is a traditional Republican. Corporations are fine with supporting him.

Brian Kemp is an ideal running mate for any non-Trump candidate. I would argue that DeSantis actually needs a Brian Kemp.

Kemp Republicans say hes about the present and the future, Hicks said. Trump is about the past.
Trump Indicted in Classified Documents Probe

Former President Donald Trump in Dallas, Texas, on Aug. 6, 2022. The former president said on Thursday that his lawyers had been informed by the Department of Justice he was indicted. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Former President Donald Trump said on June 8 that his attorneys informed him that he had been indicted by special counsel Jack Smith in connection with an investigation into his handling of classified documents.

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social. He went on to point to the parallel investigation into President Joe Bidens handling of classified documents.

Trump said that he has been summoned to appear at the federal courthouse in Miami at 3 p.m. on June 13.

I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN! Trump wrote.

Trumps attorney, Jim Trusty, told CNN on Thursday night that the summons paperwork provided to the attorneys includes language that outlined the seven charges in the indictment.

The charges stem from an alleged Espionage Act violation, which Trusty called ludicrous. The other counts include willful retention of classified documents, obstruction, false statements, and conspiracy charges, Trusty said.

News of the indictment arrived days after Trumps lawyers spent about two hours inside the Department of Justice (DOJ) on June 5, apparently addressing their concerns about the way the case has been handled.

His attorneys had requested the meeting in a May 23 letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, to discuss the ongoing injustice of the special counsels investigations of Trump.

One of Trumps attorneys, Jim Trusty, told CNN on Thursday evening that the charges are related to the Espionage Act.

Trump Calls for Charges to Be Dismissed

The Trump campaign issued a lengthy, detailed statement describing why the charges should be thrown out, and denouncing them as an unprecedented, unconstitutional abuse of power. The statement also raises concerns about Bidens records and other conduct and outlines Smiths checkered history.

Todays act of open legal warfare by the highly politicized and partisan Department of Injustice, has taken things to a new level, and set a dangerous precedent, the campaign wrote. By politically weaponizing the DOJ, the Biden administration and their henchmen in the Swamp are now conducting an all-out prosecution of the leader of the current administrations political opposition. This is un-American and wrong.

Trump says he violated no laws and was held to a different standard than other former presidents and vice presidents who possessed classified documents, including Biden and Mike Pence, former vice president under Trump and now a presidential candidate.

Classified documents end up in the hands of former presidents and vice presidents because there are no explicit federal guidelines for handling such material, the statement said, calling on Congress, not the DOJ, to remedy this.

As it stands now, every president has had the right to possess whatever documents they wish, the statement said, adding that the PRA provides no criminal penalties. Utilizing the Espionage Act is an egregious effort to bend the rules against President Trump.

Trump, however, remains determined.

President Trump will fight these bogus charges with the same vigor and relentlessness that he fights for the American people, the campaign said. He will never quit fighting for you.

Lawmakers React

Republicans reacted to the news about the indictment with outrage, alleging that a two-tiered justice system is now operating in America.

It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him. Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades, wrote House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Twitter.

I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.

Related Coverage How Republicans and Democrats Reacted to Trump DOJ Indictment

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wrote that it was a complete and total failure to the American people and a stain on our nation that the FBI and DOJ are so corrupt and they dont even hide it anymore.

If the people in power can jail their political opponents at will, we dont have a republic, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote.

Democrats, on the other hand, suggested that the indictment shows that the American justice system is working.

The former twice-impeached president is now twice-indicted, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) wrote.

No one should be above the law in the United States of America, Dwight Evans (D-Pa.) wrote.

A friendly reminder no one is above the law. Not even a former President, Adriana Espaillat (D-N.Y.) echoed.

Trumps March 30 indictment on state business records charges in New York already put him in the history books. That case made him the first former U.S. president to be indicted for a felony; he has pleaded not guilty to all 34 charges arising from an attorneys hush-money payment to an adult film performer.

While Trumps critics maintain that he deserves to be held accountable, he and his supporters contend that he is the victim of politicized persecution. His attackers are trying to play spoiler, they say, blocking Trumps raging-bull quest to upend Washingtons bureaucracy.

The Democrats indictments of Trump for these non-crimes  are part of a lawfare campaign to keep Biden in power, attorney Mike Davis, founder and president of The Article III Project, which seeks to uphold the Constitution, told The Epoch Times.

Related Coverage TIMELINE: The Trump Presidential Records Case

Shortly after Trump announced the indictment, some Republican presidential hopefuls responded to the news.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a Twitter post.

We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation, he wrote.

Meanwhile, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy wrote that I never thought wed see the day when the U.S. President deputizes the DOJ to arrest his lead rival in the middle of an election.

This is an affront to every citizen: we cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents, he added. Its hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden.

I was the first candidate to call for @JoeBiden to #PardonTrump so the country can move on to the important issues facing the country like $32 trillion in debt, a broken border, and a war in Ukraine. I stand by it. Pardon Trump now! he posted on Twitter.

Conservative commentator Larry Elder decried Americas justice system.

More partisan prosecution! Hillary violates the Espionage Actyet skates. FBI/DOJ whistleblowers tell of 2-tiered justice. FBI informant doc claims Joe & Hunter got $10mil in bribes. O.J. Simpson will catch the killer or killers of Ron and Nicole before the Hunter probe is over, he posted on Twitter.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson reiterated his call for Trump to end his comeback bid for the White House.

With the news that Donald Trump has been indicted for the second time, our country finds itself in a position that weakens our democracy, he said in a statement.

Leaks about the pending indictment of Trump surfaced at a crucial time for Biden, when information has surfaced about his alleged connection to a multimillion-dollar bribe from a Ukrainian business that employed his son Hunter while Biden was vice president.

Trump has alleged that federal prosecutors tried to bribe an attorney representing a witness and also offered a lawyer a judgeship in the Biden administration if his client would flip against Trump.

The DOJ told The Epoch Times that it would not comment on Trumps accusations.

More charges could follow in other investigations. Smith and a Georgia prosecutor are also investigating Trump on allegations related to his dispute of the 2020 election results declaring Biden the winner.

At the same time, another special counsel, Robert Hur, has been probing Bidens handling of records found at several locations, including a locked garage where he stores his Corvette; Bidens home was not raided, but Trumps was. Trump has pointed out that Biden, as a vice president or member of the Senate, would not have had the power to declassify the records that he possessed.

A court record, filed in Trumps home state of Florida, says the government was conducting a criminal investigation about improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of government records.

Under federal law, a person who has unauthorized possession of any document that could be used to hurt the United States faces imprisonment of up to 10 years. Other laws also forbid concealing, mutilating, falsifying, or destroying certain records; some sections of the law carry a potential 20-year prison term.

Authorities cite The Presidential Records Act of 1978, which transferred records of U.S. presidents and vice presidents to public ownership. The act also established a new statutory structure for presidents and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to manage records from their administrations.

Deviation From Normal Process?

On June 4, former Trump lawyer Timothy Parlatore told NBCs Meet The Press that NARA had deviated from its customary procedures that had been followed with previous outgoing presidents.

Usually, the Government Services Administration transfers the records to a facility near the former presidents residence, then allows the president two years to sort out anything that is personal, Parlatore said. The remaining presidential records are then returned to NARA.

Instead, the administration moved the records to Trumps home, then demanded that the records be returned immediately to NARA, Parlatore said. That led to a dispute between Trump and NARA. He says the whole thing could have been resolved if NARA had suggested moving the documents to a facility near Trumps home at Mar-a-Lago, Florida.

Authorities alleged that Trump and his team were being uncooperative, leading to the FBIs infamous raid of Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 2022, while Trump was away in New York.

Trump has repeatedly railed against the possible indictment on his Truth Social account, just as he had done when rumblings intensified about the New York case.

On June 5, Trump posted a message about the documents probe on his platform, expressing that he was incredulous that the DOJ could charge him despite seemingly similar documents issues with past presidents as well as with the current one.

Joe Biden wont be charged for anything, Trump wrote, [despite] the fact that he has 1,850 boxes, much of it classified. Some of the records date back to Bidens time as a U.S. senator. In addition, Trump said, both former President Bill Clinton and his wife, Trumps 2016 election opponent Hillary Clinton, went unprosecuted despite having been found to have kept sensitive records in less-than-secure conditions.

Trump said that singling him out in this way amounts to the greatest witch hunt of all time.

Trumps railings against Smith date back to at least Jan. 12. Trump called Smith a Trump-hating thug who is married to a serial and open Trump Hater. In that same post, Trump alleged that Smith, while he worked as a prosecutor in Europe, put a high government official in prison because he was a Trump-positive person. Further, Trump said Smith is best friends with the craziest Trump haters.

Trump declared at that time that the boxes scam is a hoax.
Twitter Files: FBI Assisted Ukrainian Governments Effort to Censor Twitter Accounts, Including Journalists

A Ukrainian service member prepares to fire a mortar at his positions at a front line near the city of Bakhmut in Donetsk region, Ukraine, on May 18, 2023. (Sofiia Gatilova/Reuters)

The FBI assisted a Ukrainian intelligence service in its attempt to block numerous Twitter accounts, including journalists and media outlets, according to internal documents leaked from the social media platform.

On Wednesday, journalist Aaron Mate published the latest installment of the ongoing Twitter Files expose series. Mates latest installment of Twitter internal documents and communications highlighted a March 27, 2022, email sent by FBI Special Agent Aleksandr Kobzanets to Yoel Roth, Twitters then-Head of Trust and Safety.

Thank you very much for your time to discuss the assistance to Ukraine, Kobzanets wrote. I am including a list of accounts I received over a couple of weeks from the Security Service of Ukraine. These accounts are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation. For your review and consideration.

Mate provided a copy of the alleged SBU list (pdf) that Kobzanets referenced in his email.

Due to the full-scale war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, the aggressor state uses hybrid methods of war in the form of a powerful information campaign using social media and social networks, the alleged SBU document states at the top. In particular, several Twitter accounts have been identified that are used to disseminate disinformation and fake news to inaccurately reflect events in Ukraine, justify war crimes of the Russian authorities on the territory of the Ukrainian state in violation of international law.

That message from the SBU would have come in the early weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on Feb. 24, 2022.

To stop Russian aggression on the information front, we kindly ask you to take urgent measures to block these Twitter accounts and provide us with user data specified during registration, the alleged SBU document concludes. We express our gratitude for the existing level of interaction.

Other FBI officials were aware of Kobzanetss communication with Twitter. He copied FBI officials Elvis Chan, Mark Kellett, James Butler, and Nicole Cannavo on the March 27, 2022, email.

The FBI declined an NTD News request for comment on the matter.

Flagged Accounts

In total, the alleged SBU list included 163 unique Twitter profiles. Many of the accounts listed are currently listed as suspended or no longer or appear, with a This account doesnt exist message when searched.

One of the listed accounts that remains active belongs to Semyon Pegov, who runs an outlet called War Gonzo.

In January of 2022, as Ukraine began arming its reserve forces, Pegov concluded that these armed Ukrainians would go on to attack Ukraines eastern Donbas region, an area that has seen fighting between Ukrainian government supporters and Ukrainian separatists since 2014. StopFake, a Ukrainian website, disputed Pegovs claim of an imminent attack on the Donbas region as false, asserting that the Ukrainian reserve forces were strictly defensive.

On Feb. 18, 2022, Pegov shared another video purporting to show a Ukrainian separatist leaders vehicle destroyed in an apparent car-bomb attack. A Ukrainian journalist called that footage into doubt, posting a picture purporting to show the license plate of the destroyed vehicle on an entirely different vehicle.

In May of 2022, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) alleged Pegov staged a video of Russian troops shooting an anti-aircraft gun, claiming they were shooting down Ukrainian drones. RFE/RL is a U.S. government-funded media organization.

Another of the accounts included on the alleged SBU list belongs to Current Time TV, a Russian-language media channel itself produced by RFE/RL in cooperation with the Voice of America (VOA). RFE/RL and VOA are both funded by the U.S. government through the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

Its unclear why the Current Time TV social media account might have been flagged by Ukraines SBU. NTD News reached out to Current Time TV but did not receive a response by the time this article was published.

Mate also found himself as a subject of his own reporting. The journalist, who writes for The Grayzone and Real Clear Investigations, was among those flagged in the alleged SBU list.

Among a sampling of his Twitter posts between the start of the invasion and the March 27 email, Mate called into question claims of a Russian chemical or biological weapons attack in Ukraine. Mate also described the 2014 ouster of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych as a U.S.-backed coup.

In some tweets, Mate referenced neo-Nazi elements within the Ukrainian forces. Ukraines Azov Battalion has been widely accused of harboring neo-Nazi elements. This week, The New York Times reported that an official Ukrainian government Twitter account shared an image of a Ukrainian soldier and then deleted it after Nazi iconography was spotted on that soldiers uniform. Russian President Vladimir Putin has characterized the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a denazification operation.

In a March 10, 2022 tweet, Mate said Putin was backed into a corner prior to invading Ukraine and accused the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of prolonging the fighting in the Donbas region. Mate then added, Does that justify wrecking Ukraine & [Putins] own countrys economy? No. Even if he didnt start the crisis, hes responsible for the consequences of his response, especially to his own people.

NTD News reached out to the SBU for comment, but the Ukrainian government organization did not respond by the time this article was published.

From NTD News
US Announces $2.1 Billion More Military Assistance for Ukraine

Military aid, delivered as part of the United States' security assistance to Ukraine, is unloaded from a plane at the Boryspil International Airport outside Kyiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 13, 2022. (Serhiy Takhmazov/Reuters)

WASHINGTONThe U.S. Department of Defense announced an additional $2.1 billion in security assistance for Ukraine on Friday, including air defense and ammunition capabilities.

The package includes additional munitions for Patriot air defense systems, Raytheon HAWK air defense systems and missiles, 105mm and 203mm artillery rounds, small AeroVironment drones that can be launched by hand, laser-guided rocket system munitions and support for training and maintenance, the Defense Department said.

Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) funds will be used to purchase the weapons, allowing President Joe Bidens administration to buy weapons from industry, rather than pull them from U.S. stocks.

Delivery of the weapons and systems depends on their availability and production timeline.

Russia reported heavy fighting along the front in southern Ukraine.

The Pentagon has provided more than $7 billion in security assistance for Ukraine under the USAI, in five separate tranches. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2022, Washington put $6.3 billion worth of USAI funds to work buying for Ukraines defense.

Biden said at a press conference with British Prime Minister Sunak on Thursday he was confident Washington could have the necessary funding to support Ukraine for as long as it takes, despite opposition from some Republicans in Congress.

In a statement, the Department of Defense said the latest announcement illustrates the continued commitment to both Ukraines critical near-term capabilities as well as the enduring capacity of Ukraines Armed Forces to defend its territory and deter Russian aggression over the long term.

In total, the United States has committed up to $40 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Feb. 24, 2022.
US Denies Claims That China Struck Deal With Cuba to Build Spy Base

U.S. Department of Defense press secretary Gen. Patrick S. Ryder speaks at a press conference at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, on April 13, 2023. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

The United States on Thursday denied a report that China had struck an agreement with Cuba to build an electronic surveillance facility on the island, which is some 100 miles from Florida and home to U.S. military installations.

Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said the Defense Department was not aware of China and Cuba developing any type of spy stations separately but that it will continue monitoring the countries relations.

Certainly, we know that China and Cuba maintain a relationship of sorts, but when it comes to the specific activities outlined in the press reporting, again, based on the information we have, that is not accurate, he told reporters.

The spy base deal was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed U.S. officials familiar with highly classified intelligence. It alleged that China agreed to pay billions of dollars for the facility.

Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio dismissed the report as totally untrue and unfounded information, according to a statement released by the Cuban Foreign Ministry on Thursday.

De Cossio perceived the report as a fabrication by U.S. officials, referring to previous falsehoods such as the alleged presence of Cuban troops in Venezuela, which the Cuban government has strongly denied.

All of them are fallacies promoted with the malicious intention to justify the unprecedented reinforcement of the economic blockade, destabilization, and aggression against Cuba and to deceive public opinion in the United States and around the world, he said.

De Cossio said that notwithstanding Cubas sovereign rights in the area of defense, the country is a part of the Declaration of Latin America and the Caribbean, which rejects all foreign military presence there, including the military base that illegally occupies a portion of our national territory in the province of Guantanamo.

U.S. hostility against Cuba and the extreme and cruel measures that provoke humanitarian harm and punish the people of Cuba cannot be justified in any manner, he added.

Chinese military ships moor at the port of Havana in Cuba on Nov. 10, 2015. (Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images)

The U.S. government and communist Cuba have had a tense relationship for 60 years. The Trump administration tightened U.S. sanctions on the island. The Biden administration has eased some restrictions on travel to Cuba, though it told Congress in May that the island remained on the list of countries not cooperating fully in its fight against terrorism.

Concerns About Alleged ChinaCuba Deal

U.S. officials have raised concerns over the alleged ChinaCuba spy base deal, saying it would allow Chinese intelligence services to garner electronic communications from the southeastern United States, potentially including emails, phone calls, and satellite transmission data.

It followed the discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon that traversed the continental United States earlier this year before it was shot down by a U.S. fighter jet on Feb. 4.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Select Committee on China, said that the United States ardent diplomatic pursuit of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] in the aftermath of the spy balloon has only emboldened CCP aggression.

We must make it clear that, as President [John] Kennedy said over 60 years ago on the eve of a previous crisis in Cuba, one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.

According to Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a longtime China critic, the implications of Beijings plan are grim.

This move by Communist China presents grave threats to Americas national security that cannot be ignored. Every American should be up in arms about this. Its not just spying on the government, which is bad enough, its spying on you, seeing your emails and your data, he said in a statement.

Eva Fu, Jackson Richman, Reuters, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Utah Republicans Join Parent Protests in District That Banned Bible

The Bible is read aloud at the Utah Capitol on Nov. 25, 2013. (Steve Griffin/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP)

Utah Republicans joined concerned parents as they rallied at Utahs Capitol on Wednesday to protest a school districts decision to remove the Bible from middle and elementary school libraries.

The protesters held signs that read The Bible is the original textbook and Remove porn, not the Bible and expressed their outrage after the Davis School District announced that a review committee concluded the Bible was too violent or vulgar for young children.

The district announced the ban after a committee ruled that it did not qualify as obscene or pornographic under the sensitive materials law. High school students could still access the Bible from school libraries, while middle and elementary students would not have the Bible available to them at their school. Parents drop their children off for school in Provo, Utah, on Feb. 10, 2021. (George Frey/Getty Images)

Utah Parents United left off one of the most sex-ridden books around: The Bible, the parents complaint, dated December 11, said. Youll no doubt find that the Bible (under state law) has no serious values for minors because its pornographic by our new definition.

Karlee Vincent, a Davis County mother of three kids, supports her children having access to the Bible and said districts could weigh banning certain titles with controversial material, but not religious texts like the Bible.

We love the Bible. We love God. And we need God in our nation, Vincent said.

Utah Legislature passed a law requiring school districts to create new pathways for residents to challenge sensitive materials and used a statute-based definition of pornography to define them.

Many parents are divided about allowing the Bible to be available at schools for children to read.

Some argue that removing the Bible illustrates arbitrary and political double standards and the issues inherent to removing books that have certain content.

If folks are outraged about the Bible being banned, they should be outraged about all the books that are being censored, Kasey Meehan, who directs the Freedom to Read program at the writers organization PEN America, said last week.

Other Republican-led states have expanded residents ability to challenge books and curricula in schools and libraries.

In Florida, state legislatures launched a Stop W.O.K.E Act (pdf) and decided to continue banning books that are considered pornographic, violent or inappropriate from schools.

This led to the Bible, alongside 565 other related books like The Bluest Eye and The Handmaids Tale, being removed and banned from Florida schools.

Saturating our childrens eyes with pornography is beyond inappropriate, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said in a statement. The Bible is, unfortunately, yet another example of this. I applaud my fellow lawmakers for doing the right thing by protecting our youth.

Utah Parents United President Nichole Mason said she worried the Bible ban in Utah distracted from conversations about obscene materials that currently remain in school libraries.

Defending Utahs sensitive materials law, Mason noted that the committee determined the Bible didnt qualify as pornographic under state statute. She doubled down on her stance that Utah should give parents more say in whats in their kids schools.

God Bless America that we can challenge any book out there! Mason said.

Many parents and people of faith at Wednesdays protest said they had heard little of book-banning efforts until news about the Bibles removal broke last week.

They defended the Bibles role as a foundational text, saying it shouldnt be compared to other books that parents have challenged. They said the committees decision affirmed long-simmering distrust against public schools and those who make decisions governing them.

I hope it will be part of our schools, not only to give information to our minds but character to our heartsand the greatest character of all is Jesus Christ, Tad Callister, the former Sunday School General President for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said of the Bible and Book of Mormon as an audience applauded.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Victorias Brett Sutton Resigns As Chief Health Officer

Victorian Chief Health Officer Professor Brett Sutton speaks to the media at the daily briefing in Melbourne, Australia on Aug. 16, 2020. (Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)

Victorias Chief Health Officer (CHO), Brett Sutton, has resigned from his post after four years leading the states COVID-19 pandemic response.

Sutton will take up the role of director of Health and Biosecurity at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

Labor Premier Daniel Andrews thanked Sutton for his service with the states Health Department over the past 12 years.

Sutton was appointed CHO in 2019, where he became the face of the states pandemic response.

For more than a decade, Professor Sutton has served our state and guided us through some of the most difficult times, Andrews wrote on Twitter.

As CHO, Brett helped keep us informed, and above all, safe.

Thank you for your service, and all the very best for your next role.

For more than a decade, Professor Sutton has served our state and guided us through some of the most difficult times. As CHO, Brett helped keep us informed, and above all, safe. Thank you for your service, and all the very best for your next role.  Dan Andrews (@DanielAndrewsMP) June 8, 2023

The Department of Healths Secretary Euan Wallace described Sutton as an invaluable leader whose experience and leadership during the pandemic response would continue in his new role.

Professor Sutton is an invaluable leader in the field of public health and will be continuing this great work in his new role at CSIRO, Australias national science agency, as Director of Health and Biosecurity, Wallace said.

He was appointed Chief Health Officer in 2019 and led Victorias health response throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, playing a key role in keeping the community safe and informed.

This experience will no doubt be instrumental in his new role at CSIRO where he will remain engaged in health and wellbeing at a national and regional level.

It also provides a great opportunity for us to strengthen the partnership between our two organisations.

CSIRO executive director, Kirsten Rose, said Suttons experience overseas and during the pandemic would provide a unique skillset in his role.

The magnitude of the challenges Professor Sutton faced as Victorias Chief Health Officer in guiding the public health response to COVID-19, together with his specialised knowledge in tropical medicine and infectious disease, gives him a unique and compelling skill set to continue to drive CSIROs leadership in health and biosecurity research, she said.

In 2020, the 53-year-old told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that he enjoyed his work as the CHO.

I know that its busy and I know that things like pandemics can challenge every fibre of your being in terms of being able to respond, but theres nothing Id prefer to be doing to be honest, he said

I love the job. I absolutely adore it.

Suttons Tough Tenure As CHO

As the face alongside Premier Daniel Andrews during the pandemic response, Sutton faced public backlash throughout the pandemic as the state endured six lockdowns numbering 262 days.

For example, Sutton maintained that he was unaware private security guards were used in the mishandling of the states hotel quarantine system.

He also acknowledged failures within Victorias contact tracing system during a state parliamentary inquiry.

In March 2021, Sutton conceded that his decisions as the states CHO weighed on him.

You get torn apart over this stuff, I continue to, he told Susan Biggar on the Taking Care podcast.

There is no path of least resistance. There are decisions to be made that will affect thousands upon thousands of people and cause harm.

You were just trying to find the least worst pathway possible.

Sutton will begin his new role with the CSIRO in September 2023.
Vivek Ramaswamy on Trump Indictment: We Cant Have Two Tiers of Justice

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy expressed his concerns on Thursday that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is applying a different standard of justice in their investigations into the handling of classified documents by former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.

Trump revealed on Thursday night that he has been summoned to appear at the federal courthouse in Miami on June 13. Special counsel Jack Smith will indict him after conducting a months-long investigation into classified documents that were removed from Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022.

Trump, maintaining his innocence, took to Truth Social to voice his disbelief that an incumbent president would utilize the justice system against a former president of the United States who also happens to be his leading challenger.

I AM AN INNOCENT MAN! Trump wrote.

The news drew condemnation from Ramaswamy and other Republicans who view the indictment as evidence of a two-tiered justice system in Americaone that goes hard on Trump and soft on Biden.

We cant have two tiers of justice: one for Trump, another for Biden. One for Assange, another for Manning. One for BLM/Antifa, another for peaceful protesters on Jan 6, Ramaswamy wrote.

Ramaswamy, a contender for the GOP nomination against Trump, echoed the former presidents sentiments toward the actions of the Biden administration. He cautioned against the United States descending into a state resembling a banana republic, where the Democratic Party utilizes law enforcement to suppress its political opponents.

I never thought wed see the day when the U.S. President deputizes the DOJ to arrest his lead rival in the middle of an election. Obama shamefully tried to deputize the FBI to infiltrate Trumps 2016 campaign, but theyre leaving nothing to chance this time around: the federal police state is outright arresting Trump, Ramaswamy said.

This is an affront to every citizen: we cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents. Its hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden, he continued.

Days prior to the news of the indictment, Trumps legal team spent approximately two hours at the DOJ on June 5, discussing their concerns regarding the handling of the case.

In a letter dated May 23, Trumps attorneys had requested a meeting with U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to discuss the ongoing injustice they perceived in the special counsels investigations of Trump.

Dark Day for America

Trump consistently maintains that the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago were declassified prior to his departure from office.

Ramaswamy said the serious legal questions about the presidents power to declassify documents lie with the courts. However, he stressed that we the people have the power to determine who governs the nation.

It would be much easier for me to win this election if Trump werent in the race, but I stand for principles over politics, he added, saying that he would pardon Trump if elected and restore the rule of law in our country.

Trump expressed skepticism about the DOJs impartiality, highlighting what he and other Republicans say is a discrepancy in treatment he has received compared to Biden with regard to classified documents.

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is secured by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time, Trump wrote.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) echoed similar sentiments, noting that Biden kept classified documents for decades.

Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America. It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him, he wrote on Twitter. I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable, he added.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) drew attention to the timing of the indictment, coinciding with the FBIs concession to grant access to an unclassified document to members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. The document allegedly contains information related to a criminal bribery scheme involving a foreign national and then-Vice President Biden.

And they wonder why [people] think there [are] two standards for justice, Grassley wrote on Twitter.

The Oversight panel had threatened contempt of Congress proceedings against FBI Director Christopher Wray for withholding the document.

Democrats celebrated the indictment as a demonstration that no individual, regardless of their position, is exempt from the law.

The former twice-impeached president is now twice-indicted, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) wrote.
Alibaba Cloud wins deal with Chinese coal giant in push to woo more state-owned clients

Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, the digital technology unit of Alibaba Group Holding, has announced a new partnership with Chinese mining giant Shaanxi Coal and Chemical Industry Group, as the cloud computing service provider steps up efforts to win state-owned enterprise clients.

The Western Energy Cloud platform, supported by Alibaba Cloud, is designed to speed up the digitisation of the energy industry in western China - home to Xian-based Shaanxi Coal, according to an article posted on Alibaba Cloud's WeChat account on Thursday.

The strategic initiative marks a significant step towards enhancing operational efficiency and driving sustainable growth of the sector, the article said.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

A miner at work while underground at the Xiaobaodang coal mine near Yulin, in China's northern Shaanxi province. Photo: AFP alt=A miner at work while underground at the Xiaobaodang coal mine near Yulin, in China's northern Shaanxi province. Photo: AFP>

"We hope to collaborate closely with Shaanxi Coal to explore new-energy platforms in the era of large [language] models," said Zeng Zhenyu, vice-president at Alibaba Cloud. "By integrating industry-specific large models with business systems and processes, we aim to drive innovation in business intelligence."

The launch event was also attended by Huang Xiaolong, deputy director of the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Centre, and Huang Xinbo, deputy director of Shaanxi's provincial industry and information technology department.

While Alibaba Cloud is the largest cloud service provider in China, it lags Huawei Cloud in the government cloud service market, according to a recent report by research firm IDC. Huawei Cloud is also working with Shaanxi Coal in a variety of projects.

Despite its leading position in the overall market, Alibaba Cloud saw its sales fall 2 per cent year on year to 18.6 billion yuan (US$2.6 billion) in the first quarter of this year, contributing 9 per cent of Alibaba Group's total revenue.

Daniel Zhang Yong, CEO and chairman of Alibaba. Photo: Sam Tsang alt=Daniel Zhang Yong, CEO and chairman of Alibaba. Photo: Sam Tsang>

Group chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang Yong, who took direct control of Alibaba Cloud in December, attributed the decline partly to "external changes" in "customer composition".

As part of Alibaba Group's largest-ever corporate restructuring, which was announced in March, Alibaba Cloud will be spun off into an independently-run entity along with five other units, each potentially seeking their own fundraising avenues, such as through initial public offerings.

Under a plan unveiled last month, Alibaba will spin off its cloud business within a year through a "stock dividend distribution to shareholders" and turn the unit into an "independent publicly-listed company".

Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright  2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Vote for Mayoral Candidate Who Will Build Millions of Homes, Poilievre Urges Torontonians

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre speaks at a press conference at the Ottawa Childrens Treatment Centre wing of the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa on March 19, 2023. (Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press)

Just over two weeks before Torontonians head to the polls to elect a new mayor, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre is urging city residents to vote for a candidate who will build millions of homes in order to bring down sky-high real estate and rental costs.

The Tory leader didnt name any candidates, but noted that he would allocate federal funding to municipalities if he is elected prime minister in the future.

Im not going to name a particular name, but I would say to Torontonians, vote for someone who will fire the City Hall gatekeepers so that we can speed up housing construction, he said while speaking to reporters in Toronto on June 9.

Vote for someone who will allow us to build millions and millions of homes so that Canadians can put a roof over their head.

Poilievre also said hes making it very clear to all the mayoral candidates that he will make housing construction volume a condition of receiving federal funds if he is elected prime minister.

Im going to require cities build more homes or theyre going to lose federal infrastructure money, he said. The more they build, the more money they will get.

The Toronto mayoral byelection is set for June 26. Nearly all the candidates have voiced plans to increase affordable housing availability across the city.

Front-runner Olivia Chow, a former federal NDP MP, has promised to increase taxes on expensive real-estate purchases in Toronto and use the public revenue to build more affordable housing units if she is elected mayor.

Other candidates have proposed different plans. Former Toronto Police Service chief Mark Saunders said he will remove property taxes from affordable housing units in future developments.

On the other hand, longtime political commentator Anthony Furey has promised to eliminate the municipal land transfer tax for first-time Toronto homebuyers.

Poilievre told reporters on June 9 that he will sell off 6,000 federal buildings if he is elected prime minister in the future to bring down housing prices across Canada.

Big, ugly, empty buildings will be sold off and turned into beautiful housing for our young people right across this country, he said.

The federal government announced its $4 billion Housing Accelerator Fund in March, which is intended to provide municipal governments across the country with funding to fast track the creation of 100,000 new homes.
Who Is the Ministry of Truth?

Commentary

Americans have always been scrappy individuals willing to take enormous risks on something new in order to capitalize on future success. This was in the DNA of our Founding Fathers, and it continues to this day as we live the American Dream of building something out of nothing and ensuring prosperity for future generations.

Nowhere in recent history was this more true than during the dawn of the Internet, which was built, fueled, and capitalized upon by the very same type of individuals who built our country. Instead of waiting to get picked, asking for instructions, or getting into lineAmericans were able to pick themselves. They built businesses, then search engines, then social media platforms. They were widely successful without traditional office spaces, multi-million dollar deals, or even advertising agencies to sell individual perspectives and innovative ideas.

You were in charge, and you could create and say anything you wanted by solving problems, adding value, and creating a whole new world of possibility for you and your family. There were no gatekeepers, no dream squashers, and no real barriers to entry. It was an age of the individual, the rise of ideas, and the beginning of radical self-reliance. But that all came to a screeching halt during the COVID-19 pandemic, when federal agencies positioned themselves as the ultimate gatekeepersusing deception, coercion, and flat-out censorship to stifle your freedom of speech, silence your ideas, shut down your businesses, and squash any ideas of self-reliance or alternative views.

Suddenly, many of us were plunged into Orwells dystopian world of Oceania where people online simply disappeared  your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilatedvaporized.

Whether it was reporting or opining on Hunter Bidens laptop, the lab leak theory, mask efficacy, the Great Barrington Declaration, or just plain common senseif you shared your personal views on the trending topics of the day, your digital identity (or in too many cases, your actual livelihood) could be destroyed. And what we uncovered in our lawsuit Louisiana and Missouri v. Biden et al. was that the decision to vaporize you went all the way to the topor as Bidens Director of Digital Media Rob Flaherty emphasized in an email to a major social media platform, it went all the way to the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the White House.

Thats why my office, along with the Missouri Attorney Generals Office, was in federal court last week arguing against the federal governments censorship of Americans via Big Tech. The oral arguments were astonishing.

When Judge Terry Doughty asked the White House lawyer if simple statements made by Americans on social media were considered protected speechsuch as the vaccines dont work and masks dont stop the spread of COVID and the 2020 election was stolenhe answered: It depends if those statements were spoken by a Russian operative. To quote another senior White House official, Sigh.

Of course, the arguments presented by the federal government ranged from (paraphrasing) this is old news and COVID is over to nothing we did was illegal and if given the opportunity, well do it again. Like a cancer, this violation of the First Amendment has seeded itself deep within our federal institutions, and these government actors neither believe what they did was wrong nor have any qualms about doing it again.

Thats precisely why the amendments to our Constitution were written: to place strict limitations on the federal government. Make no mistake: If we cant speak freely without fear of retaliation or censorship, well lose a core aspect of who we are and always have been. Our Founders gave us a clear structure for our continued prosperity through a deep understanding of human nature, enabling us to modernize through technological innovation without sacrificing who we are. And through this lawsuit, weve learned exactly how the federal government usurped social media companies then used that medium to control what a senior Department of Homeland Security official calls the cognitive infrastructure of the American peopleat a time when debate was more important than ever.

Who is the Ministry of Truth? the judge asked. Yet, the federal government had no real response. That is because, as Orwell pointed out, no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Thats why the U.S. Constitution is the last thing standing between you and Big Brother. While Fridays court hearing was barely covered by the legacy press, you can rest assured that Louisiana and Missouri were defending you. And we will continue to fight for your First Amendment right to be an individual, to speak your mind, and to create the future you envisionboth online and off.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Windfall Tax to Be Scrapped If Oil and Gas Prices Fall to Normal Levels

The Total Culzean platform is pictured in the North Sea, about 45 miles east of Aberdeen, Scotland, on April 8, 2019. (Andy Buchanan/AFP via Getty Images)

The government has announced it will remove the windfall tax on oil and gas companies if energy prices fall to normal levels.

The temporary windfall tax was announced last year by then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak to fund a relief package for households struggling with rising bills following Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine.

The levy has raised around 2.8 billion to date, but the government said energy companies are cutting back on investment as a result, putting the long-term future of the UKs domestic supply at risk.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks during a press conference with U.S. President Joe Biden in the East Room of the White House, in Washington, on June 8, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

In an announcement on Friday, the Treasury said it will slash the current 75 percent tax on North Sea oil and gas profits back to its regular 40 percent if prices fall to historically normal levels for a sustained period.

The government said it will take the move if the average price of oil fell to or below 71.40 dollars per barrel for two consecutive quarters, and the average price of gas fell to under 54p.

Protect Domestic Energy Supply

Downing Street said the change was being made to protect domestic energy supply and safeguard thousands of jobs reliant on that sector.

Industry has warned that companies are cutting back on investment, the government said.

This puts the long-term future of the UKs domestic supply at risk, meaning we would be forced to import more from abroad at a time when reliable and affordable energy is a focus for families and businesses.

The Treasury said that the tax will not be removed before 2028 if the Office for Budget Responsibilitys energy price forecasts are accurate.

Gareth Davies, exchequer secretary to the Treasury, said: It is right that we recover excess profits resulting from Putins war and use the money to help people with their energy bills.

Thanks to the revenue raised from windfall taxes on energy profits, we will have helped save the typical household 1,500 on their energy bill by July.

While we stepped into help, never again can our energy supplies be at the whim of petrostate despots like Putin.

Thats why its so important that we secure investment in our own domestic supply, protecting the tens of thousands of British jobs that come with it.

Step In the Right Direction

Offshore Energies UK, which represents the industry, welcomed the governments new policy but said that it is not enough to restore confidence.

Weve always been clear that when the windfall conditions go, the windfall tax should go, its chief executive David Whitehouse said.

This is a step in the right direction, but many more will need to be taken to restore confidence to our sector.

We will now work closely with government and lenders to understand the detail of the measure and its effectiveness at unlocking investment.

But opposition parties have voiced opposition to the governments move.

A Labour spokesperson said: Its right that as oil and gas producers are making historically high profits that they are asked to contribute more. We need a proper windfall tax on the enormous profits of oil and gas giants to help with ease the cost of living crisis.

We will look at the detail of this change. Of course, if the windfalls of war disappear then well look at what the right long-term tax position should be for the North Sea.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said: This out-of-touch government has shown yet again that it doesnt care about people struggling just to get by, or the small businesses clinging on.

This energy tax failure ranks as one of Rishi Sunaks biggest personal failures as chancellor and prime minister.

The Green Party said it is beyond comprehension that the government seems happy to allow these huge corporations to not only wreck the climate but to profit off the back of the cost-of-living crisis which they themselves have contributed to.

PA Media contributed to this report.
Wisconsin Congressman Gallagher Chooses House Over Senate Bid in 2024

Chairman Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) listens during a hearing of a special House committee dedicated to countering the Chinese Communist Party, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, on Feb. 28, 2023. (Alex Brandon/AP Photo)

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) announced on June 9 that he will seek reelection to the House and not challenge Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) for the U.S. Senate in 2024, leaving the GOP field in the swing state open.

Gallagher was the most prominent Republican rumored to be contemplating a run against Baldwin, who is seeking a third term after a 2018 victory by 11 points. Baldwin is regarded as a formidable opponent due to her impressive performance six years ago, her high profile throughout the state, and her fundraising prowess.

Democrats are defending 23 Senate seats in 2024, including two held by independents who caucus with the Democrats and Baldwins seat. This is in contrast to the 10 seats that Republicans hope to retain.

The other senator from Wisconsin, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), narrowly won a third term in November 2022. However, Baldwins race is thought likely to be a close one, as she will be on the ballot in a presidential election year in a state where four of the previous six presidential elections were decided by less than one percent.

The announcement was made the day before Baldwin and other Wisconsin Democrats gathered in Green Bay for their annual state convention. Republicans are gathering in La Crosse beginning on June 16.

Several other Republicans are mulling a run against Baldwin, but none have made an official announcement.

Gallaghers Focus

As the representative of Northeast Wisconsin and Chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, I have a rare, bipartisan opportunity in the 118th Congress to help restore American strength, prevent war in the Pacific, and defend our basic freedoms from communist aggression, Gallagher said in a press release regarding his 2024 plans.

Accomplishing this mission and serving Wisconsins 8th District deserve my undivided attention. Therefore, I will not run for the Senate in 2024 and will pursue reelection to the House.

I believe that when we look back in 50 years, the American people will ask: Did our elected leaders rally as a country and confront the Chinese Communist Party threat before it was too late? the lawmaker went on. Continuing to lead this fight in the House of Representatives is the best way for me to help answer that question affirmatively.

The Wisconsin representative has left no question about his mission in Congress. The Republican made it clear he hopes to help counter the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) influence in the United States.

At a June 7 meeting of the Global Leadership Coalition, Gallagher questioned U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns as to whether American leadership is up to the task of competing with the CCP economically and militarily.

The first and most obvious point is that if you want to win the competition, you actually have to show up, Gallagher said.

There are certain areas where were not even competing because competing implies there are two sides that show up and are engaged in some sort of match. We havent even shown up in some areas.

According to Gallagher, the Biden administration appeared excessively eager to pursue the type of economic engagement with the CCP that precipitated the current crisis in Sino-American relations.

To get out of this struggle, he said, the administration must do more to connect its diplomatic and military influence in the Indo-Pacific in order to actively defend its interests when engagement fails, and to find the right mix of sticks and carrots.

Primary Possibilities

Gallaghers decision to withdraw from the race leaves Republicans facing the possibility of another close party primary.

Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), who has represented northern Wisconsin in Congress since winning a special election in May 2020, has been consulting with Republicans across the state in preparation for a possible Senate bid.

Tiffany is an ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump and voted against certifying election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania as a member of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

Tiffany also joined a Republican lawsuit filed in Texas with the U.S. Supreme Court that would have thrown out Wisconsins presidential ballots and allowed the states Republican-controlled legislature to determine the election.

Also contemplating a Senate run are Madison businessman Eric Hovde, who lost the Republican Senate primary in 2018, Franklin industrialist Scott Mayer, and former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a staunch Trump supporter.

Elsewhere, Senate candidacies are being considered by a number of high-profile politicians, including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who is seriously considering a run for retiring Sen. Ben Cardins (D-Md.) Senate seat in 2024

Nevada Republican and Trump ally Jim Marchant in early May declared his candidacy for a Senate seat in Nevada in 2024, entering a crucial contest in the battleground state against Democratic incumbent Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.).

However, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) both announced in May that they would not be running for Senate in the upcoming election cycle.

Gallaghers office did not immediately respond to The Epoch Timess request for comment.

The Associated Press and Andrew Thornebrooke contributed to this report.
Woman Sentenced to 15 Years in DUI Fatal Crash in Costa Mesa

SANTA ANA, Calif.A 39-year-old woman pleaded guilty June 7 and was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for a drunken driving collision that killed a 23-year-old man in Costa Mesa five years ago.

Kimberly Renee Martin pleaded guilty through tears to second-degree murder in the May 1, 2018, crash that killed Enrique Orlando Marquez.

If I could change anything I would change everything, Martin said, sobbing.

The victims mother, Barenice, told Orange County Superior Court Judge Sheila Hanson through an interpreter that her family is still processing this.

Ive never in my life experienced such great pain, she said. The first months were terrible.

The victims mother said her son regularly attended Sunday services at their church and would play drums.

This has been the great challenge of my life to not hear the drumsticks anymore, she said. He faithfully served at church every Sunday.

The victims mother told the defendant she was grateful to the Lord because you have taken responsibility for your actions. I am committed to pray for you and your family so you can find peace and mercy.

Hanson said, There are no winners today.

The judge noted the victims family lost someone so important, but added in reference to the defendants family at the hearing, Look behind you. I see so many in pain.

Martins attorney, Randall Bethune, said his client has served as a dog trainer through a program while in custody and that another attorney in the Public Defenders Office adopted one of the dogs she trained. Martin also earned numerous certificates while in custody for various other programs.

Martin was given credit for 1,864 days already served behind bars.

Martin, who had a blood-alcohol content of 0.16, which is twice the legal limit, was driving 70 mph and flashed through a red light when she crashed her Volkswagen Tiguan SUV into a Honda at Mesa Drive and Santa Ana Avenue about 12:20 a.m. May 1, 2018. A neighbor who heard the collision dashed out of his home, saw the smoldering SUV, and dragged Martin out while her boyfriend jumped out of the passenger seat and ran away, police said in Martins preliminary hearing.
Centre okays Rs 101 crore package for displaced people





IMPHAL,

THE Centre has approved a Rs 101.75 crore relief package for the displaced people in violence-hit Manipur following a directive of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, security advisor to the State Government Kuldiep Singh said on Thursday. He also said the situation in Manipur remained peaceful and under control and there has been no incident of violence in the state in the last 48 hours. To provide relief to the displaced people in Manipur, the Ministry of Home Affairs has approved Rs 101.75 crore relief package. During his recent Manipur visit, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had directed the State Government to send a request to MHA for a relief package for displaced people, Singh said.

In the last 24 hours, 27 arms, 245 ammunition and 41 bombs were recovered from the Porompat police station jurisdiction of Manipurs Imphal East district while one weapon and two bombs were seized in the States Bishnupur district. A total of 896 arms, 11,763 ammunition and 200 bombs of different kinds have been recovered so far, the security advisor said. Curfew relaxation for 12 hours has been announced in five valley districts and for 10 hours to 8 hours in neighbouring hill districts. There is no curfew in six other hill districts. Singh said movement of essential items along National Highway-37 is ensured

Security forces recover 29 automatic weapons during combing ops in Manipur: SECURITY forces seized automatic weapons and recovered warlike stores on Wednesday during a joint combing operation in sensitive areas both in the Hills and Valley sector of Manipur following violence in the State. Twentynine weapons (mostly automatic), mortar, hand grenades, ammunition and warlike stores were recovered by security forces during joint combing operations in Manipur on June 7, Spear Corps of the Indian Army said.
Elections In Pakistan





By Arun Kumar Shrivastav

PAKISTANS Defence Minister, Khawaja Asif, has affirmed that the general elections planned for October this year will proceed as scheduled, dismissing rumours of a potential postponement. Political experts strongly believe that only timely, free, and fair elections can restore much-needed political stability in Pakistan, especially in the face of a severe economic crisis. The Opposition party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), led by former Prime Minister Imran Khan, had expressed concerns that the ruling coalition might attempt to delay the general elections. However, Asif clarified on Sunday that the assemblies would complete their five-year term in August, and the polls would subsequently occur within 60 days. When replying to a question about the timing of the elections, Asif stated that they would indeed take place in October without any delays, as reported by The Express Tribune.

According to the countrys constitution, a general election for the National Assembly or a Provincial Assembly must be conducted within 60 days after the expiration of the Assemblys term unless the Assembly has been dissolved earlier. Earlier this year, the PTI dissolved the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial assemblies, hoping to compel the ruling alliance to dissolve other legislatures and hold elections within 90 days. But, the talks between the Government and the PTI regarding the election date failed to yield any results. The Government has consistently opposed holding snap polls or conducting separate national and provincial elections, citing concerns such as security, insufficient funds, and the absence of updated census results. Even the intervention of the Supreme Court failed to facilitate elections in the two provinces, where caretaker Governments continue to function beyond their 90-day term. The ruling coalitions Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) has taken steps to persuade other parties in the alliance about the importance of holding elections on time. PPP Co-Chairman and retired President Asif Ali Zardari have explicitly stated that delaying the general elections beyond October would be unwise. The Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency (Pildat), a think tank focused on political and public policy research, has also called for free and fair general elections for all assemblies by October 2023. They emphasise that the Election Commission of Pakistan must be fully prepared for this task.

Pildat highlights that the current National Assembly will complete its five-year term on August 12, suggesting that the fresh general election must occur within 60 days, as the Constitution of Pakistan mandates. Therefore, the latest conceivable date for the 2023 general elections would be October 12. However, Pildat clarifies that if the National Assembly is dissolved even a day before the completion of its term, the election must be held within 90 days. The political landscape in Pakistan has been marred by instability and polarisation, which began with a no-confidence vote last April that ousted former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Since then, the issue has only intensified, with Khan leading a popular opposition movement against the incumbent coalition Government and the military, organising numerous large-scale rallies throughout the country. Politically, the Government sees an advantage in the coming elections. It allows more time to address the pressing economic crisis and improve its lacklustre domestic performance. Although its diplomatic foreign policy approach has been relatively more successful, its impact may not significantly influence the elections. On the other hand, Khans party achieved notable success in a series of by-elections held in July and October 2022. In an attempt to impede Khan and his party, the state has resorted to legal cases, following a familiar playbook often employed against opposition politicians in Pakistan, although with limited success due to the involvement of the courts.

The general elections may not prove to be a panacea for Pakistan, which is going through one of the worst economic crises in decades. Instead, it may pitch the ruling parties, the opposition, and the military against each other on a renewed note. Imran Khans PTI has already accused the military of trying to prevent it from coming to power. The ruling coalition of the Pakistan Muslim League and Pakistan Peoples Party know the power games and how to play them. Khan may already have tasted it in how his party leaders have deserted him in the aftermath of the May 9 violence. Not just that, media outlets have been advised to black him out. He would finally know that the crowd is not the strength. For the world, its another experiment with democracy for Pakistan. Lets keep our fingers crossed! (IPA)
Important to get familiar with schemes: CA Damani





Business Bureau

CA Rajeev Damani, Past Chairman of Nagpur branch of WIRC of ICAI, during his address, acknowledged the essentiality of understanding the schemes, given the six-year tenure since the launch of GST, which has left numerous pre-GST litigations unresolved. He stressed the importance of familiarizing Chartered Accountants with the schemes and the various compliance requirements to ensure accurate guidance for their clients.

CA Sanjay M Agrawal, Chairperson of Nagpur Branch, welcomed the chief guest, CA Rajeev Damani, Past Chairman of Nagpur branch of WIRC of ICAI, speaker CA Mahendra Jain, and all the participants. CA Mahendra Jain provided a detailed explanation of the intricacies of the Maharashtra Amnesty Scheme during his comprehensive deliberation.

The seminar was coordinated by CA Trupti Bhattad while CA Swaroopa Wazalwar, Treasurer proposed the formal vote of thanks. The event was attended by CA Sanjay C Agrawal, Chairperson of WICASA, CA Deepak Jethwani, Managing Committee Member, Past chairman CA. Saket Bagdia, and others.
Not good for ties: India warns Canada after Brampton event





NEW DELHI :

Jaishankar slams Canada after visuals surfaced on social media of a float in Brampton that reportedly celebrated the assassination of former PM Indira Gandhi

INDIA on Thursday warned Canada against giving space to separatists and extremists elements, saying it was not good for the bilateral ties, days after a video of a float, depicting the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, at a parade in Brampton went viral on social media. At a media briefing, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said he has a similar message to the United Kingdom and Australia against allowing pro-Khalistani elements to operate from their territories. Asked about the Brampton event, the Minister said, I think there is a bigger issue involved. And the bigger issue involved really is the space that Canada has continuously and frankly, we are at a loss to understand other than the requirements of vote bank politics, why anybody would do this. Because if you look at their history, you would imagine that they learn from history and they would not like to repeat that history. It is not only one incident, however egregious it may be, Jaishankar said.

I think there is a larger underlying issue about the space which is given to separatists, to extremists, to people who advocate violence and I think it is not good for relationships and not good for Canada, he added. A video has emerged on social media that showed a float depicting the assassination of Indira Gandhi, in what appeared to be a glorification of violence by Sikh separatists. It was reportedly part of a parade that was organised by some Khalistani elements in Brampton. Asked about reports of the Canadian NSA criticising India For commenting on Canadas internal matter, Jaishankar used a Hindi phrase.

The phrase that came to mind is actually a Hindi phrase which is Ulta Chor Kotwal Ko Date (the pot calling the kettle black).. If anybody has a complaint, we have a complaint about Canada...I was very perplexed by what I heard, he said. Canadian High Commissioner in India Cameron MacKay tweeted that there is no place in Canada for hate or for the glorification of violence. I am appalled by reports of an event in Canada that celebrated the assassination of late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. There is no place in Canada for hate or for the glorification of violence. I categorically condemn these activities, he said. On the activities of Khalistani elements, Jaishankar said India has issues in the UK and Australia as well, apart from Canada. Our point is that they are a very small minority. They do not represent any significant body of opinion. Our plea (to these countries) has been that please understand that these are marginal elements, extremist elements; they are not good for you, they are not good for us, they are not good for the relationship, he said. It is not a message limited to Canada. Canada came up because you raised it and certain things have happened recently in Canada.

If it happened somewhere we would have said the same things, Jaishankar said. The External Affairs Minister said the Canadian Prime Minister has also made a statement in the House of Commons on the issue. We are in touch with Canada on the issue, he said. Meanwhile, the Congress leader and former Union Minister Milind Deora shared the purported video on Twitter and said,as an Indian, Im appalled by the 5 km-long parade which took place in the city of Brampton, Canada, depicting the assassination of Indira Gandhi, he tweeted.

Its not about taking sides, its about respect for a nations history and the pain caused by its Prime Ministers assassination, Deora said. The Congress leader asserted that this extremism deserves universal condemnation and a united response. Tagging Deoras tweet, Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh said, I entirely agree! This is despicable and Dr S Jaishankar should take it up strongly with the Canadian authorities. Responding to Deoras tweet, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said, You are completely right...There should be no politics in condemning this despicable act across party lines. Congress spokesperson Supriya Shrinate said an Indian Prime Minister was assassinated by separatist forces and her assassination has been glorified by pro-Khalistan extremists in Canada. And all that our Government has done is make this one general comment -- without even naming Smt Indira Gandhi. Our national interests and security must be above any political concerns. India must take this up officially with the Canadian Government, Shrinate tweeted. The Congress also asked why Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not spoken to his counterpart and why the Canadian envoy not summoned to lodge a strong protest over the issue..
President Murmu holds productive meeting with Serbian counterpart





BELGRADE,

PRESIDENT Droupadi Murmu on Thursday held a productive meeting with her Serbian counterpart Aleksandar Vucic here and said that bilateral relationship is based on mutual trust, mutual understanding and support for each other on issues of core interest.

We remain committed to inject more ambition into this vital relationship, said Murmu, who is the first Indian President to visit Serbia. During talks, both the Presidents discussed important aspects of India-Serbia bilateral relationship and global and regional issues of common interest. I had a constructive and productive meeting with President Vucic this morning on all important aspects of our bilateral relationship and global and regional issues of common interest, Murmu said in a press statement. She said, relations between India and Serbia have been unique since the days of the Non-Alignment Movement. Our relationship is based on mutual trust.
OLDWICK, N.J., June 09, 2023--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AM Best has affirmed the Financial Strength Rating of B++ (Good) and the Long-Term Issuer Credit Rating of "bbb+" (Good) of Insurance Corporation of Barbados Limited (ICBL) (Barbados). The outlook of these Credit Ratings (ratings) is stable.

The ratings reflect ICBLs balance sheet strength, which AM Best assesses as strongest as well as its adequate operating performance, limited business profile and appropriate enterprise risk management.

ICBLs balance sheet strength is supported by its risk-adjusted capitalization, which is assessed at the strongest level, as measured by Bests Capital Adequacy Ratio (BCAR). AM Best expects this measure to remain at the strongest level. ICBL has produced positive net income, driven by investment and fee income that has offset inconsistent underwriting income. However, a hardening market in Barbados and a series of management cost initiatives provide potential for more consistently profitable underwriting over the near term. ICBLs business profile assessment reflects the companys geographic and product concentration in Barbados. The business profile assessment also recognizes ICBLs market position as one of the leading property/casualty insurers in its domestic market.

ICBL, like other regional insurers, has significant exposure to catastrophe losses. The company manages this risk through the utilization of reinsurance to limit its catastrophe exposure to a manageable level and protect its surplus against frequency of events. Maintaining sufficient reinsurance coverage has become more challenging in the region as reinsurers have increased rates and reduced available capacity. However, ICBL was able to acquire sufficient coverage for 2023 at acceptable terms to support their near-term business plans. Furthermore, ICBL may benefit from general improvement of pricing discipline in Barbados property segment brought on by the hardening reinsurance market.

This press release relates to Credit Ratings that have been published on AM Bests website. For all rating information relating to the release and pertinent disclosures, including details of the office responsible for issuing each of the individual ratings referenced in this release, please see AM Bests Recent Rating Activity web page. For additional information regarding the use and limitations of Credit Rating opinions, please view Guide to Best's Credit Ratings. For information on the proper use of Bests Credit Ratings, Bests Performance Assessments, Bests Preliminary Credit Assessments and AM Best press releases, please view Guide to Proper Use of Bests Ratings & Assessments.

AM Best is a global credit rating agency, news publisher and data analytics provider specializing in the insurance industry. Headquartered in the United States, the company does business in over 100 countries with regional offices in London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico City. For more information, visit www.ambest.com.

Copyright  2023 by A.M. Best Rating Services, Inc. and/or its affiliates. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005255/en/

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Ramtil Project Chhindwara team gets Certificate of Excellence Award





Staff Reporter

Agricultural Scientists from across the country shared their research activities on Ramtil Project which was reviewed during the group meeting of All India Integrated Research Til and Ramtil Project held recently. The group meeting of All India Integrated Research Til (Sesame) and Ramtil Project, operated under JNAU at Agricultural University, Mandor, Jodhpur Rajasthan the other day. During group meeting, Ramtil Project, Chhindwara was felicitated with Certificate of Excellence Award by the QRT Team constituted by Indian Council of Agricultural Research for its excellent research works between 2017-2021. It may be mentioned that as a result of excellent research works, four significant varieties of Ramtil were developed which include J.N.S.-521, J.N.S.-2015-9, J.N.S.-2016-1115 and J.N.S.-2016-1413.

Principal Scientist, Breeder, Dr B N Tiwari, Agronomist, Dr P K Rai and Dr Aruna Devi Ahirwar rendered their active contribution in the excellent research work. This helped Ramtil Project Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh to receive the award. The scientist team concerned with the project conducted a courtesy visit at JNAUs V-C Office where they met Vice-chancellor, Dr P K Mishra and updated him about the award. Vice-chancellor, Dr Mishra congratulated the team for their excellent research works which highlighted JNAUs banner at the national platform.
UNITY MEET !





DOUBTS over the proposed meeting of Opposition leaders in Patna have been dispelled and the meeting has been slated to be held on June 23, 2023, eleven months ahead of the next Lok Sabha elections in the summer of 2024. Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Mr. Tejashwi Yadav has confirmed that Congress leader Mr. Rahul Gandhi, Trinamool Congress leader and West bengal Chief Minister Ms. Mamata Banerjee, Delhi Chief Minister Mr. Arvind Kejriwal, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Mr. M.K. Stalin will be among those who have accepted the invitation for the meeting. This will help Bihar Chief Minister Mr. Nitish Kumar, the host of the meeting, to have some of his confidence back amid news of cracks getting developed in the Opposition camp.

Though Mr. Tejashwi Yadav has tried to portray a good picture of the proposed meeting that has attracted attention of political analysts, doubts still persist about the successful outcome of the exercise, thanks to the differing perceptions of Opposition leaders over the strategic issues that also include the one about leadership and common Opposition face to stand equal to Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi. The meeting will be subsequently described as successful with much glossing over by different leaders. Yet, those who have understood the anatomy Opposition politics well will keep doubting if the idea of the meeting really proved to be right. Such is the complex web of faultlines in Opposition camp. Though all Opposition parties agree that the Prime Minister is their common foe, there is no unanimity of approach to contesting elections together. The best the Opposition parties can achieve is to agree on a seat-sharing formula that will pose some challenge to the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). However, mere seat-sharing is not potent enough a tool in the Opposition hands to dare the BJP juggernaut, a few electoral setbacks to the BJP notwithstanding.

The real challenge the Opposition faces is to offer to the voters a sensible narrative as against the highly thematic campaign the BJP has always had. Though the Congress party appears to have found a way around the BJP in Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka recently, other parties in the Opposition camp may not accept that experience as sacrosanct. They will have their own approach to handling the narrative, and there lies the biggest hurdle in Opposition unity before the next general elections. One of the main aims of Mr. Nitish Kumar to convene the meeting at Patna is to push his claim to Opposition leadership. For record, other leaders may not mind attending the meeting, all right. But with several leaders hoping to lead the Opposition fight in the elections, the Patna meeting is more likely to be produce much sound and fury signifying nothing significant.

In the coming months, many such meeting will be held at different locations across the country, with each leader trying to showcase his or her strength in his or her region. That will rarely meet the requirements of the big fight on the cards. For, what the Opposition needs is a pan-India leadership -- which possibly only Mr. Rahul Gandhi can claim to have. And that is where the hitch lies. Despite all this, the Patna meeting will be an event to watch since it will be the first one to decide upon the joint Opposition strategy for the next general elections. Partially, it may help Mr. Nitish Kumar establish his primacy in Opposition politics. Despite all this, there is little doubt that the Opposition will remain a fragmented entity that will have no substantial ground to stand on and dare the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance.
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PARIS (AP)  The worlds first lipstick. The first modern perfume. A pivoting toothbrush. The original Nivea cream and serum. Not to mention the intimate secrets of Queen Elizabeth II. These are some of the treasures held in Guerlain's first archive, which brings stories from the iconic French cosmetic company's sensational past to life.

Guerlain gave The Associated Press exclusive international media access to its newly opened collection, a warehouse of wonders shrouded in secrecy and hidden from public view by Paris Seine River. It's a gem of documents and mysterious objects spanning three centuries, each with a unique history of its own.

Yet what is perhaps most remarkable about the collection is that the company founded in 1828 that invented modern perfumery hadn't assembled it before.

Its what we call our little secret, said Guerlain heritage director Ann Caroline Prazan, who sifted through a mine of artifacts to compile it in a years-long labor of love. It was hard to whittle down 18,000 pieces to just 400 from so many years, but we did it ... Some of the pieces are so fragile, Im scared to touch them.

The ambitious project exists thanks to Prazan's passion  and patience. Through a mist of perfume, she reels off vignettes about Guerlain's innovations and famous patrons, including French Empress Eugenie, Josephine Baker, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy, Barbra Streisand, Margaret Thatcher and the late U.K. queen.

As Prazan turned to handle the collections most prized object, a lipstick created in 1870 and housed in a contemporary looking gold bullet, she carefully took off her white gloves as if she were performing a sacred ritual.

Its so modern, she whispered, her finger carefully operating a push-up mechanism to reveal a dark Bordeaux wax pigment still intact after 153 years.

The refillable lipstick has a remarkable story, like everything else in the archive seems to. An employee of Aime and Gabriel Guerlain was walking in a street and happened upon the store of a candlemaker, whose wax and colored pigments gave him a eureka moment.

At the time, women used tubs of colored powder to paint their lips with a clunky brush. Seeing the candlemaker's tools gave the Guerlain employee the mad idea of creating a waxy, lip cosmetic as a stick, Prazan said.

That small object revolutionized womens makeup forever, she said.

Prazan also procured the worlds first ever lipliner, also in sleek gold casing, and a third stick  that one AP journalist couldn't identify. It turned out to be a liner that women used to paint the veins on their arms and necks blue, a popular technique women used in late 19th century Paris to appear paler. Thankfully, Prazan said, it has gone out of fashion.

That Guerlain is a family-run house across five successive generations is perhaps one reason why these archival pieces have been so fastidiously kept. The company was bought by luxury conglomerate LVMH in 1994, but has managed to keep its unique identity.

Innovation, including beyond the sphere of perfume, is the brand's hallmark. Among the archival treasures is the patent for the first pivoting toothbrush. Documents revealed a 1845 design that looked like a precursor to todays electric toothbrush.

A tub of moisturizing cream called Nivea that was whisked out of a drawer told another tale that connected past and present. The cream, which contained ingredients to whiten the skin of European women, was sold off by the house to create the famous skincare company of the same name.

Then there is the old bottle of Jicky, the worlds first modern perfume. Created in 1889, it revolutionized the market with the concept of a scent cocktail  not just one note like previous fragrances  that featured hints of spice, lemon, lavender, wood and vanilla. It also included synthetic ingredients and is, incredibly, the world's oldest continuously produced perfume.

Yet it is the anecdotes of the houses stars that bring the most dazzle to a collection which seems so alive despite its history.

Queen Elizabeth II, featured in a photo on the wall wearing a glamorous white fur stole, was such a fan of Guerlains LHeure Bleue perfume, Prazan says, that she emptied a bottle and filled it up with the oil from her 1952 coronation. It was kept for years, such was the late monarch's emotional attachment to the scent.

From another archive shelf, a bottle for a different perfume gleamed with allure. It was the fragrance created for the baptism of the queen's uncle years before he became King Edward VII  and famously abdicated the throne for love. Sometimes the collection seems like a potted timeline of the key moments of the worlds historical figures.

While the archive is an secret affair, the brand has created an exhibit open to the public for the 170th anniversary of its most famous design, the Bee Bottle. The exhibit, called Chere Eugenie, is on view at Guerlain's Champs-Elysees shop until Sept. 4.

There, the original Bee Bottle  a historical artifact  is on display like a crown jewel with light reflecting off hand-painted bee reliefs. It was created in 1853 for the nuptials of Empress Eugenie and Napoleon III.

The bee was the French imperial emblem and also the emblem of Clovis, first king of the Francs. It has come to represent Guerlain to this day.

For the bottle's anniversary, 11 international artists and actors, including Charlotte Rampling and Audrey Tautou, created a series of photographs inspired by the Bee Bottle.

A foot in the past with eyes to the future seem to define Guerlain, a mantra its longevity has forced the company to perfect.

I plan well into the future, easily 100 years away," Prazan noted while putting away her nearly 200-year-old objects. "I know the house will be around for that long, long after we're gone. How many people can say that?

___

Thomas Adamson can be followed on Twitter @ThomasAdamson_K
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DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  In March, when Donald Trump became the first former president in U.S. history indicted on criminal charges, his reelection campaign saw a huge surge in donations. Even political rivals rushed to support him. There was no dent in his front-runner status after the state charges in New York.

Thursday's news that Trump has been indicted again, this time on federal charges related to his handling of classified documents, may offer a repeat.

A 37-count felony indictment unsealed Friday accuses Trump of willful retention and improper sharing of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice and corruptly concealing a document or record, among other charges. The top counts carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison upon conviction.

But soon after he was indicted, there were clear signs that Republican voters may be willing to entrust him again with access to the nations biggest secrets and authority over the very laws prosecutors say he defied.

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said the indictment would not fundamentally change Trumps standing in the GOP or his advantage in the crowded 2024 Republican primary.

In any other decade, this would be more than enough to kill a presidential contender in the crib. Thats no longer the case  particularly for Donald Trump, Newhouse said. He argued Trump has been effectively setting expectations for more charges for months.

This comes as a surprise to very few Republicans, Newhouse said. Trumps been saying hed get indicted. He got indicted. The sense from many Republican voters is that this is all about politics.

The prospect that someone under indictment  twice  could somehow still be considered a viable presidential candidate underscores Trump's grip on the Republican Party and the ways that he has fundamentally transformed democratic norms in America.

It also illustrates just how effective he has become at inoculating himself against political fallout by setting expectations and controlling the narrative. And it reflects growing Republican hostility toward the federal government and particularly the Justice Department, which Trump has now spent the better part of a decade maligning.

But even if the indictment doesn't hurt Trump's standing with Republican primary voters, it's far from certain that the broader set of general election voters, which includes independents and moderates in both parties, will be as forgiving next fall in a prospective matchup against President Joe Biden.

The Democratic president beat Trump in 2020 with a promise to restore a sense of normalcy to Washington after Trump's drama-filled presidency. With these new charges, Trump's baggage is only growing heavier.

The former president faces the possibility of still more indictments in Georgia and Washington, D.C., a prospect that could see him facing trial in four separate jurisdictions while running to return to the highest office in the land.

For now, the new indictment throws Trump back into the spotlight, dominating every news cycle and denying his rivals space to break through to voters, just as many have formally launched their campaigns.

Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, a fierce Trump critic and founder of the Republican Accountability Project, acknowledged the indictment might ultimately help Trump seize the GOP nomination.

Ive certainly seen a rally around Trump effect every time Trump is impeached or indicted, she said, adding that much depends on the reaction of his Republican 2024 challengers.

Does anyone have the political talent to seize this as an opportunity? Or will they all line up behind Trump? she said. Because if they all defend him, they will relegate themselves to bit players in Trumps drama and never get around to making an affirmative case for themselves.

Still, Doug Heye, another Republican strategist, said Trump's primary opponents do have a major opportunity to argue that the former president cannot win in 2024 because of his baggage.

This should be gold for Republican presidential candidates, should they choose to use it, Heye said.

So far Trump's rivals instead seem to be rallying to his side  an acknowledgement of his enduring popularity with the GOP voters they need to win over in order to snag the nomination.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who received backlash after he briefly knocked Trump over the New York case, lashed out at the Justice Department in a tweet Thursday night. The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, he wrote.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott used similar language in an appearance on Fox News, decrying the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president."

Former Vice President Mike Pence said he was deeply troubled that Trump had been indicted because he believed it would further divide the nation.

Only former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot candidate and frequent Trump critic, offered a rebuke. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign, he said.

Republican leaders in Congress, as they have time after time, sprang to Trump's defense as if in choreographed unison.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said the indictment marked a dark day for the United States of America" and a grave injustice.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise accused President Biden of weaponizing his Department of Justice against his own political rival" with a sham indictment that was "the continuation of the endless political persecution of Donald Trump.

Trump and his allies had been bracing for a federal indictment since the presidents lawyers were informed he was a target of the investigation, believing it was a matter of when  not if  charges would be brought.

Trump received word of the indictment Thursday evening while huddled with advisers at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he is spending the summer. He broke the news to the world himself on his Truth Social platform.

His team  well practiced in crisis response  had already asked allies to have supportive statements at the ready, and quickly reacted with a fundraising solicitation and opposition research targeting special counsel Jack Smith. As political donations poured in, Trump ended the night playing DJ at dinner with a mix that included songs from Elvis Presley, Pavarotti and James Brown.

Trusty said on CNN that Trump would appear in court Tuesday, as requested.

Hes not shrinking from the fight," he said Thursday. Youre not going to see him hide in Scotland. Hes going to be ready to handle this case and help his attorneys fight it.

Trusty and another Trump attorney resigned from the case on Friday.

People close to Trump have long seen the Mar-a-Lago case as far more serious than the charges he faces in New York in connection to hush money payments made to women who accused him of affairs. Conviction of the federal charges would be expected to carry far steeper legal consequences, and Smith is generally viewed as more difficult to malign than Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat.

Trump's first indictment failed to hurt his support, and polls suggest his position among Republicans has, if anything, grown stronger in the months since.

An April poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that nearly half of Americans (47%) said they believe Trump did something illegal in the classified documents case, slightly more than the 41% who said he did something illegal in the New York hush money case.

New York-based Republican donor Eric Levine, who has emerged as a vocal Trump critic in recent months, acknowledged that, regardless of how serious the charges may be, the Trump faithful will rally behind the former president no matter what.

But for people who were on the fence about Trump, this may push them away, he said. Enough of the chaos and craziness.

___ Peoples reported from New York. Associated Press polling director Emily Swanson contributed to this report from Washington.

___

More on Donald Trump-related investigations: https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump
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The Oswegatchie Volunteer Fireman's Carnival in Waterford is running this weekend, celebrating 21 years of the event.

This year's carnival is advertising food and rides for all ages, and the fire department will also be running fire truck rides. The event is located at 155 Parkway North in Waterford, next to the Walmart.
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BLOOMINGTON  Annual contest results were announced Thursday for the Illinois Press Association and the Illinois Associated Press Media Editors.

Billy Woods of The Intelligencer won a second place award for Feature Story for his article about a popular pet tortoise in Collinsville.

Staff members at The Alton Telegraph and Jacksonville Journal-Courier, sister papers to the Intelligencer, all owned by Hearst Newspapers, also earned kudos from the two state media organizations.

John Badman of The Telegraph in Alton received a total of 11 awards.

In total, The Telegraph won 12 awards from the Illinois Press Association on Thursday. More than 1,400 entries were submitted from nearly 100 daily and non-daily newspapers in 38 categories.

Badman claimed four Associated Press awards for small daily newspapers and seven Illinois Press Association awards for small daily newspapers.

The Telegraph's editorial team of Badman, Scott Cousins, Jill Moon, Dylan Suttles and Ron DeBrock also received a third place award for Localized National Story for its coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that overturned the Roe V. Wade abortion decision.

The advertising department of The Telegraph on Thursday received four awards

The Jacksonville Journal-Courier, Hearst's other regional daily newspaper, received seven editorial awards in the Illinois Press Association contest, including second place for General Excellence.
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EDWARDSVILLE  If not for the efforts of many people, Friday's ribbon-cutting at the new Route 66 Interpretive Center may not have happened.

Elected officials, city staff members, select guests and other officials turned out in force for the building's dedication and grand opening. Located at 620 West St., across from Edwardsville school District 7's Hadley House, the tourist spot and museum will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Friday - Sunday each week. Parking is available at the adjacent dental office.

Route 66 Festival schedule Saturday, June 10, at City Park, 101 S. Buchanan St., Edwardsville 8 a.m., Route 66 10K Run

10 a.m., Festival opens: trolley rides, local food and more

10 a.m.-6 p.m., Marketplace vendors

10 a.m.-6 p.m., Family Zone

11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m., Local Talent Showcase

1:30-3:30 p.m., Midlife

3 p.m., Car Show from 4-6 p.m. in Cassens Transport parking lot, 145 N. Kansas St.

6:30 p.m., Car cruise departs Cassens Transport parking lot

4-6 p.m., Matt Taul Band

6:30-8:30 p.m., Soul Cracker

9-11 p.m., Well Hungarians

11:30 p.m., Festival Closes Sunday, June 11, at Edwardsville Public Library, 112 S. Kansas St., Edwardsville. 2 p.m., "Getting Your Kicks: Memories of Route 66," road trip story competition, with singing and stage reading performances. See More Collapse

After a rendetion of the song, "Route 66" by Craig Becker with Butch Moore playing guitar, Mayor Art Risavy, alderman SJ Morrison and Great Rivers and Routes President and CEO Cory Jobe delivered remarks.

Morrison said the building appeared on a demolition list with the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) on multiple occasions and each time, local leaders clawed it back.

Last year, Jobe presented city officials with a $460,000 grant from the state to help rehabilitate the site into what opened Friday.

"It's been a fun project," Morrison said before the grand opening.

A rich history

Opened in 1927, Springer's Madison Oil Company was established on the site by Henry Springer. Nine years later, Robert Smith and Ralph Ladd changed the name to the West End Service Station with Mobil gas and oil products, a hydraulic vehicle lift and more.

During a temporary shutdown in 1939 as Route 66 through town was repaved, Smith and Ladd chose to demolish the original building and had the current one constructed, opening Aug. 5, 1939, under Ralph and Earl Ladd's ownership.

In 1948, two local mechanics, Henry "Hank" Dohle and Robert "Doc" Heidinger partnered to buy the gas station. It catered to customers ranging from laborers to lawyers and everyone in-between, Morrison said.

Ralph Ellsworth bought the site in 1961.

In 1964, after Interstate 55 was built, bypassing Edwardsville, Dr. Robert Marks bought the site and turned it into a dentist's office. Dr. Dale Claussen followed suit in 1982 until 2018, then it was the home of Dr. Beau Moody's dentist office until 2020.

IDOT bought the site in 2021 and the city bought the building from IDOT last year at auction.

'A piece of history'

Risavy used a lot of related puns as he thanked a variety of project stakeholders, from being "pumped" about the renovated site to referring to Jobe as the plan's "fuel" with Morrison as the project's "spark plug."

He said the building required more than a tune-up; it got a full-service overhaul.

Jobe referred to this as "saving a piece of history for future generations to enjoy."

The location offers a small gift shop, a restroom, two replica Texaco gas pumps outside and roll-up doors along with factoids about the site and others along Route 66. There used to be more than a dozen of these types of stations in Edwardsville; this is the sole remaining Route 66 station within 60 miles.

This interpretive center, the Route 66 mural at Vandalia and Main streets, and the Route 66 shield across from Lincoln Middle School are all part of celebrating the Mother Road's centennial, which is in 2026.
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LE PECQ, France (AP)  The attacker slashed at the 24-year-old Catholic pilgrim with the knife that he used to savagely stab one young child after another. But rather than run, Henri held his ground  using a weighty backpack he was carrying to swing at the assailant and fend off his blade.

French media hailed Henri as the hero with a backpack Friday after he was shown in a video grappling with the assailant and charging after him during the knife attack that critically wounded four children between the ages of 22 months and 3 years old, and also injured two adults.

Henri, who is on a nine-month walking and hitchhiking tour of France's cathedrals and happened to be in the Alpine town of Annecy when the attacker rampaged Thursday though its lakeside park, also got personal words of gratitude Friday from President Emmanuel Macron. The French leader toured hospitals to meet victims and their families and thanked medical workers, police, firefighters, civilians  including Henri  and others whose first aid and swift actions helped save lives.

You experienced very hard moments, traumatizing," Macron said. I am very proud of you.

Henri asked Macron to be invited to the reopening of Notre Dame in Paris next year, following repairs to the cathedral damaged in a fire in 2019.

Ill take care of it personally, the French leader replied.

The president had reassuring news about the victims, expressing hope after speaking to doctors about their injuries that normally things will continue to improve. The most critically injured children, two cousins, were stabilized and doctors were very confident," Macron said.

A wounded British girl is awake, she's watching television," Macron added, speaking to first responders. A wounded Dutch girl also has improved and a critically injured adult  who was both knifed and wounded by a shot that police fired as they detained the suspected attacker  is regaining consciousness, Macron said. The second injured adult was discharged from a hospital and was among dozens of people that Macron met and thanked, his left elbow still bandaged.

The first thing doctors told me ... is that these children were saved by the swiftness of the collective intervention, Macron said. Thank you immeasurably for your courage.

Henri had a heavy backpack and was holding another in his hand when the attacker slashed at him. But despite the blade and the attacker's chilling aggression, Henri continued to harass him, pursuing the man inside a playground  where he repeatedly stabbed a child in a stroller  and then out of the park again, carrying his backpacks all the while. Henri appeared to hurl one at the assailant at one point and then pick it up again to take another swing.

Henri said he was powered by his Catholic faith.

When you know that youre loved by God and that he saved our lives, you can act without thinking too much about your own (life) to try and save those of the children," he told French broadcaster BFMTV.

Henri's father, Francois, said he believed that his son's doggedness helped dissuade the attacker from stabbing more victims before police wrestled him to the ground.

He took a lot of risks  when he wasnt armed, with just his backpacks, the father told The Associated Press. He didnt stop running after him for many minutes, to stop him from coming back and massacring the kids even more. I think he prevented carnage by scaring him off. Really very courageous.

Francois asked that their last name not be published, expressing concerns about their family being thrust suddenly and inadvertently into the public eye at a time of shock and outrage in France provoked by the attack's viciousness and the helplessness of its young victims.

The profile of the suspected attacker, a 31-year-old Syrian political refugee, also fueled renewed political debate about French migration policies. Critics on the right and far-right of French politics quickly dusted off arguments that migration controls are too lax.

For his part, Henri rejected the hero label. He said he tried to act as all French people should act, or would act.

In that moment, you unplug your brain and react a bit like an animal by instinct," he said.

I am far from alone in having reacted," he added. "Many other people around started, like me, to run after him to try to scare him, push him away. And other people immediately went over to the children to take care of the injured.

Motives for the attack in and around a children's playground remained unexplained. The suspect, who has refugee status in Sweden, remains in custody. Psychiatrists were evaluating him, government spokesman Olivier Veran said.

Henri's father said his son told me that the Syrian was incoherent, saying lots of strange things in different languages, invoking his father, his mother, all the Gods."

In short, he was possessed by who knows what, but possessed by folly, thats certain, the father told the AP.

Henri, who is documenting his pilgrimage around France on social media, said he'd been setting off to hitchhike to another abbey when the horror unfolded in front of him.

After the assailant's arrest, and having seen that first responders were treating victims, Henri said: I had just one reflex  which was to start to pray.

The 3-year-old British girl and two French cousins  a girl and a boy, both 2 years old  were rushed to a hospital in the French Alpine city of Grenoble. That was the first stop for Macron and his wife on Friday morning.

The Annecy prosecutors office identified the fourth child as a 22-month-old Dutch girl. She was treated in Geneva, in neighboring Switzerland.

The seriously injured adult was treated in Annecy. Portugals foreign ministry said he is Portuguese and now out of danger. He was wounded "trying to stop the attacker from fleeing from the police, it said.

"For this act of courage and bravery, we thank him profoundly, the ministry added.

French authorities said the suspect had recently been refused asylum in France, because Sweden had already granted him permanent residency and refugee status a decade ago.

Lead prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said the mans motives were unknown, but didn't appear to be terrorism-related. He was armed with a folding knife, she said.

___

Jennifer O'Mahony in Madrid, Armando Franca in Lisbon, Portugal, and Nicolas Vaux-Montagny in Lyon, France, contributed to this report.
(Bloomberg) -- Advanced Micro Devices Inc.s stellar share-price performance this year reflects its place in the eyes of investors looking to make an artificial intelligence trade: the best backup plan.

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The stocks 87% surge would make it the top performer on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index if it wasnt for the stratospheric gain of rival Nvidia Corp. Nvidia briefly became the first chipmaker to have a trillion-dollar market value after delivering concrete evidence that the rush to develop new AI services is translating into a surge in orders for hardware.

AMD gets its shot to prove its also a player in AI computing on Tuesday when executives introduce new data center chips at an event in San Francisco. Investors will get a peek at its Epyc processor aimed at cloud computing, but theyll likely be more focused on the forthcoming MI300, a purported rival to the H100 from Nvidia thats at the heart of that companys strong position.

AMDs strategy is to be a one-stop data center chipmaker, said Carl Hazeley, senior analyst at Finimize Ltd., an investing insights platform owned by Abrdn Plc. As to whether AMD could be successful in competing with Nvidia, it basically comes down to waiting and seeing  and maybe buying both AMD and Nvidia.

The stocks rally assumes that AMD is poised to grab part of what Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang says is the need to replace $1 trillion of data-center hardware worldwide with gear more suited to AI computing.

So far, investors have given it the benefit of the doubt on that score, briefly pushing its market value to more than $200 billion. A key attraction for them is that the stock is far cheaper than Nvidia, trading at 7.8 times projected sales for the next 12 months, less than half its rivals 20 times, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Analysts are more circumspect, preferring to wait for AMD to show them how its going to make money from the technology. Their aggregate price target is 11% below the last close.

One warning sign, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore, is that AMDs server business remains sluggish. That indicates the firm is one of a group of companies whose current portfolios are not a meaningful beneficiary of the AI surge, even though it is helping portions of their business, he wrote in a research note.

How long AMD has to deliver the goods remains to be seen. In recent years, the company has taken on Intel Corp., carving out 18% of the server market, one of the most lucrative areas of the semiconductor industry. However, the battle with Nvidia for a slice of AI-driven sales wont be easy, said Richard Clode, a portfolio manager with Janus Henderson.

Nvidia is executing pretty flawlessly, so its a much tougher competitor for AMD than Intel was, Clode said.

Tech Chart of the Day

Microsoft Corp. hasnt missed out on this years rally in mega-cap technology stocks, rising 36% to within sight of a record. Gains have been turbocharged in recent months as the maker of Windows software races peers like Alphabet Inc. to introduce generative AI features onto its suite of products and services. The company is overhauling its entire lineup of Office apps, including Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Word, with OpenAI technology. Microsoft last hit a closing record of $343.11 in November 2021.

Top Tech Stories

The AI frenzy that has driven massive inflows into tech stocks is marking a pause, Bank of America Corp. says. Tech funds sustained $1.2 billion of outflows in the week through June 7, their first in eight weeks, according to the bank, citing EPFR Global data.

Generative AI could transform society  but the human biases the technology can amplify may do more harm than just perpetuating stereotypes.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.s monthly revenue fell again in May after consumers and corporations cut spending on electronics.

Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg sought to reassure employees about the companys strategy, especially its emphasis on artificial intelligence, just two weeks after it finished the latest round of job cuts.

ByteDance Ltd. is testing an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot among employees, joining rival Chinese internet conglomerates from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to Baidu Inc. in a race to create a local version of ChatGPT.

Google employees are pushing back against the tech giants mandate that staffers spend at least three days a week in the office.

--With assistance from Henry Ren.

(Updates to add stock information to Tech Chart of the Day section.)

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2023 Bloomberg L.P.
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KFAR CHOUBA, Lebanon (AP)  Israeli soldiers fired tear gas to disperse scores of protesters who pelted the troops with stones along the border with Lebanon Friday, leaving some Lebanese demonstrators and troops suffering breathing problems.

The tension on the edge of the Lebanese border village of Kfar Chouba began earlier this week over the Israeli military digging in the area that Lebanon claims.

On Wednesday, a Lebanese villager tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer from digging a trench along the border. Once the villager's legs were covered with sand as the bulldozer moved ahead, U.N. peacekeepers jumped in and convinced the driver to move back. Videos of the elderly man with his legs stuck in the sand dune went viral on social media.

Israel ended an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon when its troops withdrew from the area in May 2000.

Fridays protest took place on the edge of Kfar Chouba hills, which Beirut says is Lebanese land occupied by Israel. Kfar Chouba hills and the nearby Chebaa Farms, are areas captured by Israel during the 1967 Mideast War and claimed by Lebanon.

On Friday, some of the protesters tried to break through a fence in the rugged area overlooked by an Israeli military post. Israeli forces fired tear gas to disperse them while Lebanese troops and U.N. peacekeepers later moved in and pushed the protesters back.

DO NOT CROSS THE BLUE LINE, read a banner carried by a U.N. peacekeeper in Arabic, English and French, referring to the border drawn after Israels withdrawal in 2000. Israeli troops and several vehicles, including a heavily armored Merkava tank, were seen in the area.

Lebanese troops were on alert in the area and reinforcements were brought in.

In a statement, the Israeli military said protesters tried to damage a border barrier and threw stones at Israeli soldiers in the area. The military said forces responded with riot dispersal means, which typically means tear gas or stun grenades. The military said it would not allow any attempt to violate Israeli sovereignty.

Andrea Tenenti, a spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping for known as UNIFIL, said peacekeepers are on the ground working to decrease tension in the area.

We have urged the parties to utilize our coordination mechanisms effectively to prevent misunderstandings, violations, and contribute to the preservation of stability in the area, Tenenti said. He added that UNIFIL leadership is in contact with the parties, seeking a solution.

We call upon both sides to exercise restraint and avoid actions along the blue line that may escalate tensions, Tenenti told The Associated Press.

The protesters later held Friday prayers in the area and then tried to sneak in again, leading to more tear gas fire.

Fridays tension came a day after the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, Maj. Gen. Aroldo Lazaro, chaired a meeting with senior Lebanese and Israeli officers at the U.N. headquarters along the border. The general appealed for restraint along the border and work on reducing tensions.

The Lebanon-Israel border has been relatively calm since Israel and Hezbollah fought a 34-day war in 2006. Despite that, there have been tensions.

In April, Israel launched rare airstrikes on southern Lebanon after militants fired nearly three dozen rockets from Lebanon at Israel, wounding two people and causing some property damage.

___

Associated Press writers Tia Goldenberg in Tel Aviv, Israel and Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed to this report.
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Linkedin Inforial (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, June 9, 2023 17:14 2 5fceed71997e5776a1634d25dc81cdaa 4 Inforial ASN Free

The 23rd Asia-Pacific Heads of Maritime Safety Agencies (APHoMSA) forum in Sydney, Australia, wrapped up on Thursday with the I-Motion Application, presented by the Indonesian delegation, mesmerizing the delegations from 26 countries.

The Indonesian delegation, represented by Revo Rizki Aditiya, who is a young civil servant from the Transportation Ministrys Director General of Sea Transportation, successfully addressed shipping safety concerns, including sailors well-being by presenting the Indonesian Integrated Monitoring System on Navigation, or I-Motion, an application owned by the Directorate General of Sea Transportations Navigation Directorate.

In his presentation, Revo explained that I-MOTION was a system that integrated data from Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) and Coastal Radio Stations (SROPs) in the form of Automatic Identification System (AIS) Base Station, Radar, Voice and CCTV using a terrestrial system into AIS data through satellite service.

Revo said that of the 23 VTS, 21 had been integrated, and of the 80 AIS Base Stations at SROPs, 45 had been integrated.

He also said that the development of I-Motion aimed to supervise shipping traffic in Indonesia to ensure shipping safety and protect the marine environment, which could be utilized and synergized with systems owned by other ministries and agencies.

It is of no surprise, therefore, to learn that APHoMSA countries highly appreciated the presentation by the delegation from Indonesia, one of the worlds largest archipelagic countries, with all of its challenges in the efforts to enhance shipping safety.

APHoMSA countries highly appreciated the I-Motion application because Indonesia, as the worlds largest maritime country with numerous scattered islands, must face challenges when it comes to enhancing the shipping safety level. The I-Motion application is part of the solution to creating shipping safety in Indonesian waters, especially with Indonesia located in a strategic region that also serves as an international shipping route.

Opportunity for collaboration

Born in 1990, Revo Rizki Aditya joined the Transportation Ministrys Directorate General of Sea Transportation in 2015 and was placed in the Directorate of Navigation.

Currently, Revo is active as a drafter of Planning and Development at Telkomsel in the Subdirectorate of Shipping Telecommunications, Directorate of Navigation, Directorate of Sea Transportation.

Revo completed his S2 education at the University of Gadjah Mada, majoring in Multimode from 2020-2022. He also participated in VTS Operator Training, ASEAN Regional Training for VTS (ARTV), Japan Aids to Navigation (JANA) and the Marine Department of Malaysia in 2022.

Directorate General of Sea Transportation secretary Lollan Panjaitan pointed out that Revo had succeed in showing that a young civil servant from the Sea Transportation Ministry was capable of performing well at an international forum.

We provided an opportunity to a young man to advance and represent Indonesia at an international forum in the transportation sector, and he has successfully proven his ability to speak at the forum which can open an opportunity for collaboration with other countries, he said.

The 23rd APHoMSA forum was held by the Australian government through the Australian Maritime Safety Authority and the Mongolian government through Mongolian Maritime Administration in Sydney on June 5 to 8, 2023.

The APHoMSA is a forum held annually since 1996. The forum addresses issues related to the marine environment, safety and shipping safety, including sailor well-being, responses to marine accidents, regional collaboration and other related marine issues.

APHoMSAs 26 participating entities are Australia, Canada, Chili, China, the Cook Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Kiribati, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, Singapure, the Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tuvalu, the United States, Vanuatu and Vietnam.

Topics : ASN
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Linkedin Yvette Tanamal (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, June 9, 2023

The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) does not discriminate against any countries, including Indonesia, and has offered technical and financial support to help upgrade the countrys smallholder farmers, the EU Ambassador to Indonesia Vincent Piket said in response to the recent speech made by President Joko Jokowi Widodo in Malaysia.

Further discussions with Indonesia and Malaysia will be welcomed, Piket added, noting that late June will see a senior EU official paying visits to the two countries to advance talks.

On Thursday, Jokowi, who met with Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in Putrajaya, renewed Jakarta and Kuala Lumpurs joint commitment to fight against palm oil discrimination, as part of his latest efforts to contest the EUDR. The EUDR, currently awaiting its final approval from EU member states, stipulates a ban on imports considered to be driving deforestation.

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Linkedin Sheena Suparman (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, June 9, 2023 17:25 2 5fceed71997e5776a1634d25dc81fcad 4 Companies Gojek,Uniqlo,T-shirt Free

Gojek, the renowned on-demand services technology company, has been selected by UNIQLO, the globally recognized fashion brand, as one of the Indonesian icons to be featured in its limited UTme! customized 10th anniversary in Indonesia campaign T-shirts. The selection of Gojek as an icon partner offers a fun opportunity for all customers, whether they are devoted Gojek loyalists or just fashion enthusiasts seeking an exclusive proudly Indonesian iconic style, to create their own exclusive T-shirts that embody the essence of Gojek's identity. But better act fast because the program ends on July 31.

Leveraging the innovative UNIQLO UTme! customized T-shirt service, customers now have the ability to personalize their apparel with six different iconic Gojek pictures, called Stamps, including the beloved characters Jo & Jek, a GoCar, and even two of the familiar quotes that have become synonymous with the Gojek app experience. This exciting collaboration raises the bar on how loyal Gojek enthusiasts can express their unwavering support for the brand, all while embracing the individuality and creativity that define both Gojek and UNIQLO.

"We are so proud to have been identified by UNIQLO as an Indonesian icon and wholeheartedly embrace this partnership. This recognition and unique customized T-shirt collaboration allow us to expand the Gojek delightful experience from the services we provide on our app to enabling customers to express themselves through what they wear. Customers who purchase their own personally custom-designed Gojek T-shirts will be making a one-of-a-kind fashion statement. I am so excited about this collaboration that I have already bought T-shirts for my friends, family, and even as souvenir gifts. This initiative truly embodies the essence of fun and further solidifies Gojek's commitment to delivering delightful experiences, anytime and anywhere," said Rama Ishwara, Gojek head of brand marketing.

The Gojek customized UTme T-shirts program will run until July 31 and is only available at the UNIQLO branch in Pondok Indah Mall 3. To make the collaboration even more appealing, a special promotion launched in celebration of UNIQLOs 10th anniversary in Indonesia gives first-time users of the UNIQLO app a Rp 50,000 discount for purchases over Rp 500,000.

For customers who are interested in creating their own Gojek UNIQLO custom T-shirt all they have to do is visit UNIQLO in Pondok Indah Mall 3 and approach the UTme! area at the back of the store where a counter of iPads is set up. On the iPad select whether you want to design a T-shirt or a tote bag, and then proceed to the Gojek Stamps section. Customers have complete creative control on where and how large they want to place up to four Gojek stamps. Once the customer likes their own custom design, they choose purchase and a UNIQLO sales associate will assist in finalizing the process. Depending on how busy the counter is, printing the T-shirts can be completed as fast as 15 minutes, added Rama.

Don't miss the chance to own a distinctive piece of fashion that showcases Gojek, an iconic representation of Indonesia's cultural and technological landscape, while simultaneously embracing your own unparalleled personalized style.
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Linkedin Front Row (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, June 9, 2023 10:00 2 d5259e4d93052b0e76bee70b0581ed13 4 Front Row photojournalism,photojournalist,The-Jakarta-Post,photography,bina-nusantara-university Free

A photograph might just be one of the most compelling and persuasive mediums to capture the truth of a moment in history.

As author Susan Sontag once said, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us a sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads.

Taking place at the Binus International FX Sudirman Campus on Tuesday, The Jakarta Post in collaboration with PannaFoto Institute held a panel discussion with the theme Photojournalism in the Spirit of Participation.

Inviting Binus University students to explore the world through their lens, the discussion centered on how to capture universal humanity through photojournalism, with Ted Soqui, Dita Alangkara and Dio Suhenda as panelists.

Soqui, a prestigious self-taught photojournalist based in Los Angeles, the United States, has been published in renowned magazines such as Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and Paris Match. His repertoire includes harrowing contemporary social issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement, the COVID-19 pandemic and homelessness in the US.

There were a few dangerous things, not obviously being hurt, Soqui said when introducing his images from the Black Lives Matter movement, There were lots of photographers who werent photojournalists doing this, and they had forced perspectives.

Soquis presentation emphasized how threading a narration in his mind while capturing his photographs brought essentialism to audiences  a key to communication. This is what his distinctive black and white photographic style spoke to him.

Black and white speaks to me as a narrative. [...] I always go back to black and white. I think you need to find your vision, you need experience  different cameras, different lenses. Always record everything, you need a workflow. If you dont have a workflow, you should establish a workflow [...] definitely caption everything as much as you can, he shared with the audience.

Ted inspired us to grab a little notebook, slip it in our pocket with a pen or two, hold onto our smartphone or favorite camera around our necks and welcome everyone into our world as we capture the moments of life.

Photography is as capacious as life itself.

Despite only coming into Indonesia in the 1840s, photography in the archipelago, explained author Brian Arnold, holds a unique place in the world of photography. Tracing its use from its invention to its present day, Brian shared how the medium has grown alongside the growth and change of the country.

Photography has evolved to be an essential peer of Indonesias independence, a voice for reformation, an agent for advocating democracy. Associated chief photographer for Indonesia at the Associated Press (AP) news agency, Dita Alangkara, brought light to just that.

Photojournalism is all about storytelling, how to convey your ideas and tell your stories, Dita said.

Speaking to the Post, Dita shared that there were moments in his photographic journey where he was confronted with life-or-death situations. This brought weight to his presentation where the audience was struck by his photos from the Aceh tsunami, of imprisoned individuals and various images that revealed the disheartening truths and injustice in Indonesia.

Credibility will always come into play, especially when photojournalists are confronted with groundbreaking historical moments that in turn become a moment of the voice of the generation, or even our nation. It is a two-way communication, Dita emphasized.

Hence, delicacy in truth needs to be maintained, as both subjects and spectators of photography become vulnerable in eliciting interpretations of truths.

There is one rule in photojournalism, Dita emphasized in his closing statement, Dont lie.

Diving into todays world of digital transformation and Gen-Zs Twitter-influenced language we all love to throw around here and there, that within itself brings a whole new glossary of truths primarily when breaking news on social media.

This is what the Posts senior reporter Dio Suhenda brought to light in his presentation on why journalism prevails  especially in the face of social media platforms.

Citizen journalism is what I would like to call a fake news echo-chamber. Because once you misinterpret an incident, and then it spreads online, it becomes a wildfire. It becomes a new story that might start as, not fake necessarily, but misreported. But then everybody would believe it, opened Dio, as he spoke of the lack of media literacy in Indonesia despite it having one of the most online-consuming populations in the world.

Dios presentation centered on the contemporary world, shedding light on issues such as the sustainability of journalism in the long term. And as emphasized by the 25-year-old senior journalist, technology should be embraced.

Personally, for me, coming from [the perspective of] a journalist, I think we should embrace technology. [...] Technology is always changing and its impossible for us not to keep up, added Dio. Its impossible for your lecturers to gate-keep you from ChatGpt. Technology is about change, and you should embrace it.

The audience poses with speakers following the talk Photojournalism in the Spirit of Participation at Binus International FX Sudirman Campus in Jakarta on Tuesday. (Courtesy of TJP. 6/ June/2023/.)

Closing the presentation, students were encouraged to join The Jakarta Posts 40th Anniversary Photo Contest, which is open for submissions until June 20.

With the theme A Voice for All: Capturing the Spirit of Participation, the competition opens a space for students to engage in positive changes through local participation armed with only a camera.
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Linkedin AFP Jakarta  Fri, June 9, 2023 14:26 2 d5259e4d93052b0e76bee70b0582773b 2 Archipelago Indonesia,Volcano,Anak-Krakatau,java,sumatra,disaster Free

Anak Krakatau volcano erupted on Friday, belching a column of ash more than three kilometres into the sky, officials said.

The volcanic island emerged from the sea at the beginning of the last century from the crater formed after the 1883 eruption of Mount Krakatau -- one of the deadliest and most destructive in history.

Anak Krakatau, which means "Child of Krakatau", spewed thick ash over the strait that separates Java and Sumatra.

There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties after the eruption at 08:46 am (0146 GMT).

"The height of the eruption column was observed to be 3,000 metres (nearly 10,000 feet) above the summit," Deny Mardiono, an official from the Krakatau monitoring station, said in a press release.

"The ash column was observed to be grey to black with thick intensity to the southwest."

He warned the public not to carry out activities within a five-kilometre (three-mile) radius of the volcano's crater.

Anak Krakatau's status was at the second-highest warning level after authorities raised it in 2022 following a sharp rise in volcanic activity.

Its crater partly collapsed in 2018 when a major eruption sent huge chunks sliding into the ocean, triggering a tsunami that killed more than 400 people and injured thousands.
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Linkedin Ni Komang Erviani (The Jakarta Post) Denpasar  Fri, June 9, 2023 09:41 3 c50f50c3e1b4ab124a8b6ef95ab733e4 1 Archipelago bali,drug-trafficking,cocaine Free

The Denpasar District Court in Bali sentenced on Thursday Brazilian national Manuela Vitoria De Araujo Farias to 11 years imprisonment for bringing drugs into Bali. The sentence was lighter than the 12 years demanded by prosecutors.

The 19-year-old was declared guilty of attempting to smuggle 3.6 kilograms of cocaine into the resort island. Judges also found her guilty of smuggling 0.72 grams of the psychotropic drug clonazepam.

"We declare the defendant guilty of importing type-one narcotics weighing more than 5 grams and importing psychotropic drugs as regulated in the Narcotics Law and Psychotropic Law," said presiding judge I Gede Putra Astawa.

The panel of judges also fined the defendant Rp 1 billion (US$67,186). "If she fails to pay the fine, it will be substituted with a further year in prison," Astawa said.

Farias who attended the trial online from Kerobokan women prison decided to take the seven days available to her to decide whether she will appeal.

Farias was arrested upon her arrival at I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport on Jan. 1, after airport customs officers found several plastic packages of cocaine in her two suitcases.

In a press conference following the arrest. Bali Police chief Insp. Gen Putu Jayan Danu Putra said cocaine users were mostly foreigners because of its high price.

In February, local authorities extradited alleged drug trafficker Antonio Strangio, an Italian with dual Australian nationality, who was detained in Bali earlier in the month, to Italy.

Interpol had issued a red notice for Strangio, 32, in 2016 over the sale of 160 kilograms of marijuana and his links to Italy's Ndrangheta organized crime syndicate, according to Bali Police.

Strangio, wanted for the production and trafficking of drugs, was arrested at Ngurah Rai airport on Feb. 2 after being on the run since 2016. He had fled to Australia, from where as a citizen he could not be extradited. (dre)
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Linkedin Kate Lamb and Ananda Teresia (Reuters) Jakarta  Fri, June 9, 2023

Separatists in Papua where a New Zealand pilot was taken hostage in February have been siphoning off government aid money to buy black market guns for a deadly guerrilla war, officials say.

The "Dana Desa" village fund introduced by President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo in 2015 and valued at $4.7 billion this year has long been criticised as prone to corruption. Nowhere is the oversight of the scheme more challenging than in Papua's remote highlands.

More than 3,000km (1,800 miles) from Jakarta, Papuan rebels have been fighting for independence since the region rich in copper, gold, nickel and natural gas was absorbed by Indonesia after a 1969 vote.

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Linkedin Yerica Lai (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, June 9, 2023 15:40 2 d5259e4d93052b0e76bee70b0582a5c1 1 Politics PSI,Ade-armando Free

A recent hire of the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI) has defended the youth-focused political partys efforts to go against the norm of entrenched elite politics, amid criticism over its recruitment of more senior public figures.

Firebrand University of Indonesia lecturer-turned-politician Ade Armando praised the PSI for its democratic and egalitarian tradition, which has allowed him and other figures to join the partys attempt to disrupt the landscape.

Dont picture [...] PSI like the other parties, which are very hierarchical and top-down. If I can use my own term for it, the party is an NGO that was turned into a political party, Ade said in an interview with kompas.com.

Its behavior, actually, that of the people, is the behavior of NGOs, he added.

Ade is just one from a list of senior public figures that have joined the PSI, which bills itself as a party for millennials. With a strong social media presence, the party is preparing to run in the upcoming legislative election, after having failed to pass the electoral threshold required to obtain House of Representatives seats in 2019.

The party announced last month several new additions to the party roster, including senior TV presenter Helmy Yahya and social justice activist Irma Hutabarat. Instead of praise, the move drew criticism for what some considered to be a loss of identity in search for electability.

For Ade, a divisive voice on social media, the PSI has been consistently fighting for issues that have had a detrimental impact on society at large.

As a newcomer in politics, he claimed the party would keep its pledges to bring about reform in the legislature by exposing the ugly truth about sitting politicians.

Read also: PSI to continue backing Ganjar despite slide in pollsThe PSI [wants to] make an entrance, enact reforms, make noise and report back to the public about what we see happening at the House, whether someone falls asleep [during hearings], is absent or does not work, or if people are paying to pass certain laws, Ade said on Thursday.

Slowly, I suspect this will bring about some impact, so that other parties will feel they have to be transparent to survive.

Many political parties, including the PSI, have resorted to recruiting well-known and outspoken public figures to help them grow their following and convert votes at the ballot.

However, an ongoing review of the legislative election system at the Constitutional Court could prove detrimental to parties reliant on star power to canvass votes, should the court justices rule to reverse current practices.

The petition to review the open-listed election system, which allows voters to directly elect individual candidates for the legislature, was put forward by six plaintiffs, including a member of the ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), a close ally of the PSI.

The PDI-P has backed a return to the closed-list system, whereby voters elect a party that in turn would name its preferred candidate to become a legislator, effectively forcing parties to offer more compelling ways to win votes.
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Linkedin Editorial board (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, June 9, 2023 08:01 3 5fceed71997e5776a1634d25dc809ea9 1 Editorial Navy,military,exercise,komodo,operation,humanitarian,disaster,tension,South-China-Sea Free

Amid the recently heightened tensions in the region, partly caused by power games between China and the United States, as well as other regional players, Indonesia is hosting a multilateral naval exercise involving various countries that do not usually see eye to eye.

The Fourth Multilateral Naval Exercise Komodo (MNEK) took place in Makassar from Monday until Thursday involving 2,500 personnel from 36 countries, including Indonesia. Some 25 warships from Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam took part in the exercise.

The Indonesian Navy deployed the largest number with eight warships of various types, followed by Russia, which sent three vessels to the biennial exercise. China, Malaysia and Singapore each sent two while Australia, India, Italy, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, the US and Vietnam deployed one each.

There was also a naval aviation component in the exercise with the Philippines, Russia and the US sending a helicopter each while Indonesia deployed seven airplanes and three helicopters.

Also participating were contingents from Brazil, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, Fiji, France, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Oman, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Timor-Leste, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

What makes the MNEK special is that Indonesia consciously decided from the first edition in 2014 to focus on military operations other than war (MOOTW) activities, especially the use of military assets in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR), search and rescue and maritime security.

This focus is beneficial for navies from the Southeast Asian region because they can work together to actually implement the ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response. The region is prone to natural disasters, which in the recent past have resulted in large-scale devastation claiming many lives.

Other multilateral naval exercises, such as the US-organized Rim of Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC), focus on traditional war games involving naval maneuvers and amphibious landing, albeit including an HADR component.

One might think that using military assets for HADR activities might be overkill but this allowed participants, despite coming from adversarial backgrounds, to keep working together to achieve the exercise goals.

It is safe to say that such HADR exercises are beneficial as a confidence-building measure among countries amid heated regional and global dynamics. They prove they can still work together even in the face of differences in opinions or strategies.

Despite the tension resulting from competing territorial claims in the South China Sea between China and several other participating countries, the worlds most populous country has always participated in the MNEK since its inception in 2014.

This way, Indonesia can still play the role of an honest broker in the South China Sea dispute involving fellow ASEAN members vis-a-vis China also at a time when Jakarta still has unresolved issues regarding Beijings encroachment on the exclusive economic zone around North Natuna Sea.

The Indonesian Navy also organized the Fifth International Maritime Security Symposium on the sidelines of the MNEK, with three sessions: assessment and monitoring disasters in the region, rapid evolution of coordinated and collective responses to large-scale disaster emergencies and sustainable development and the blue economy for recovery after the pandemic.

Having similar exercises is a must to foster a greater understanding for military forces operating in the region involving all services, land, sea, air and perhaps cyber and space.

Later this year, Indonesia and the US will again co-host the Super Garuda Shield Exercise involving various units from more than 20 countries.

Such multinational exercises allow Indonesia to learn and share experiences on the latest developments in military tactics and advancements in various equipment, as well as establishing a network at the personal level among all involved personnel.

Perhaps, the more joint exercises, the less chance for the participating countries to engage in a war.
Key Insights

Significantly high institutional ownership implies Arthur J. Gallagher's stock price is sensitive to their trading actions

The top 15 shareholders own 51% of the company

Insiders have sold recently

If you want to know who really controls Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (NYSE:AJG), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. We can see that institutions own the lion's share in the company with 85% ownership. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.

Given the vast amount of money and research capacities at their disposal, institutional ownership tends to carry a lot of weight, especially with individual investors. Therefore, a good portion of institutional money invested in the company is usually a huge vote of confidence on its future.

In the chart below, we zoom in on the different ownership groups of Arthur J. Gallagher.

See our latest analysis for Arthur J. Gallagher

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Arthur J. Gallagher?

Institutions typically measure themselves against a benchmark when reporting to their own investors, so they often become more enthusiastic about a stock once it's included in a major index. We would expect most companies to have some institutions on the register, especially if they are growing.

As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in Arthur J. Gallagher. This suggests some credibility amongst professional investors. But we can't rely on that fact alone since institutions make bad investments sometimes, just like everyone does. When multiple institutions own a stock, there's always a risk that they are in a 'crowded trade'. When such a trade goes wrong, multiple parties may compete to sell stock fast. This risk is higher in a company without a history of growth. You can see Arthur J. Gallagher's historic earnings and revenue below, but keep in mind there's always more to the story.

Investors should note that institutions actually own more than half the company, so they can collectively wield significant power. Hedge funds don't have many shares in Arthur J. Gallagher. Our data shows that The Vanguard Group, Inc. is the largest shareholder with 12% of shares outstanding. With 7.8% and 5.6% of the shares outstanding respectively, BlackRock, Inc. and Capital Research and Management Company are the second and third largest shareholders.

A closer look at our ownership figures suggests that the top 15 shareholders have a combined ownership of 51% implying that no single shareholder has a majority.

While it makes sense to study institutional ownership data for a company, it also makes sense to study analyst sentiments to know which way the wind is blowing. There are a reasonable number of analysts covering the stock, so it might be useful to find out their aggregate view on the future.

Insider Ownership Of Arthur J. Gallagher

The definition of company insiders can be subjective and does vary between jurisdictions. Our data reflects individual insiders, capturing board members at the very least. Management ultimately answers to the board. However, it is not uncommon for managers to be executive board members, especially if they are a founder or the CEO.

Insider ownership is positive when it signals leadership are thinking like the true owners of the company. However, high insider ownership can also give immense power to a small group within the company. This can be negative in some circumstances.

Shareholders would probably be interested to learn that insiders own shares in Arthur J. Gallagher & Co.. It is a very large company, and board members collectively own US$492m worth of shares (at current prices). we sometimes take an interest in whether they have been buying or selling.

General Public Ownership

The general public-- including retail investors -- own 14% stake in the company, and hence can't easily be ignored. While this group can't necessarily call the shots, it can certainly have a real influence on how the company is run.

Next Steps:

It's always worth thinking about the different groups who own shares in a company. But to understand Arthur J. Gallagher better, we need to consider many other factors. For example, we've discovered 3 warning signs for Arthur J. Gallagher that you should be aware of before investing here.

But ultimately it is the future, not the past, that will determine how well the owners of this business will do. Therefore we think it advisable to take a look at this free report showing whether analysts are predicting a brighter future.

NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the last twelve months, which refer to the 12-month period ending on the last date of the month the financial statement is dated. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures.

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.

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Linkedin Ricki Prasetyo and Yudion Atria Ismail (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, June 9, 2023

The government is committed to creating a balance between economic prosperity and sustainable development. This is shown through the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into Presidential Regulation No. 59/2017 concerning SDGs and Presidential Regulation No. 111/2022 concerning the achievement of the SDGs. One of the strategic issues discussed in the regulations is climate change.

The achievement of this goal is of concern for countries of the world through the net-zero emissions (NZE) target by 2060, which was agreed upon in the 2016 Paris Agreement. The commitment of these countries is demonstrated in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). In Indonesias enhanced NDC, it committed to reducing emissions cumulatively by 31.89 percent, or by 915 million tons of CO 2 equivalent.

However, the regulations do not provide details on how the distribution of reduction targets to stakeholders will be carried out. This is important to measure the level of support from the central government, local governments and the corporate sector in reducing emissions.

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
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Linkedin Editorial Board (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, June 7 2023

Defense Minister Prabowo Subiantos four-point proposal to end the war in Ukraine has sparked anger in Ukraine and the international community as it runs counter to the United Nations position, to which Indonesia officially subscribes, that Moscow must withdraw its military forces unconditionally.

The Foreign Ministry has not responded to the speech Prabowo delivered during the Shanri-La Dialogue in Singapore on Saturday, perhaps to avoid an open clash with the minister, which would be perceived as a crack within the Cabinet. But speaking to journalists on Tuesday, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo said he would soon summon Prabowo to clarify his remarks.

Will Prabowo's statement be damaging for Indonesia internationally? Likely not, because the world knows Indonesia has consistently opposed invasions of sovereign states. But it may well deal Prabowo a big personal blow, as the international community now has a clearer glimpse of one of Indonesia's leading presidential aspirants.

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Linkedin Kate Lamb and Ananda Teresia (The Jakarta Post) Reuters/Jakarta  Fri, June 9 2023

ASEAN will hold its first-ever joint military exercise in the South China Sea, the government said on Thursday, the latest multilateral security drills at a time of rising tension and uncertainty in the region.

The decision was taken at a meeting of military commanders of the 10-member bloc in Indonesia, which will host the exercise in the North Natuna Sea, the southernmost waters of the South China Sea.

Indonesian Military chief, Adm. Yudo Margono, told state-run news agency Antara the exercise would be in September and would not include any combat operations training. The purpose, Margono said, was strengthening "ASEAN centrality". Indonesia holds ASEAN chairmanship this year.

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Linkedin Agence France-Presse (The Jakarta Post) Sydney, Australia  Fri, June 9 2023

Australia on Thursday announced it would ban the public display of Nazi symbols as the country wrestles with a small but increasingly brazen fringe of right-wing extremists.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said the government would introduce new laws criminalizing the display and sale of Nazi insignia, such as the Hakenkreuz swastika and the SS lightning bolt.

Intelligence officials have warned that growing numbers of Australians are being drawn towards neo-Nazi ideologies as extremist groups step up efforts to recruit new members.

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Linkedin Peter Hutchison, Cecilia Sanchez and Anne-Sophie Thill (The Jakarta Post) Agence France-Presse/New York, United States/Montreal, Canada  Fri, June 9 2023

Smoke from Canadian wildfires shrouded New York in a record-breaking apocalyptic smog on Wednesday as cities along the United States East Coast issued air pollution warnings and thousands evacuated their homes in Canada.

The devastating fires have displaced more than 20,000 people and scorched about 3.8 million hectares of land in Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described this wildfire season as the country's worst ever.

More than 100 million people across the northeastern United States and extending west to Chicago and south to Atlanta were under pollution warnings after the smoke drifted hundreds of miles from Canada, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said.

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Linkedin Kate Lamb and Ananda Teresia (The Jakarta Post) Reuters/Jakarta  Fri, June 9 2023

Separatists in Papua where a New Zealand pilot was taken hostage in February have been siphoning off government aid money to buy black market guns for a deadly guerrilla war, officials say.

The "Dana Desa" village fund introduced by President Joko Jokowi Widodo in 2015 and valued at US$4.7 billion this year has long been criticized as prone to corruption. Nowhere is the oversight of the scheme more challenging than in Papua's remote highlands.

More than 3,000 kilometers from Jakarta, Papuan rebels have been fighting for independence since the region rich in copper, gold, nickel and natural gas was absorbed by Indonesia after a 1969 vote.

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Linkedin Nina A. Loasana (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, June 9 2023

The Lampung Police on Monday rescued 24 victims of human trafficking from a house in Bandar Lampung belonging to an officer at the National Police headquarters.

Lampung Police chief Insp. Gen. Helmy Santika said authorities were currently looking into whether the officer was involved in the crime.

"We're investigating how the victims arrived at the house and whether the human traffickers were borrowing or renting the house," Helmy told a press conference on Wednesday, Antara reported.

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Linkedin Yvette Tanamal (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, June 9 2023

President Joko Jokowi Widodo and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim reiterated on Thursday their respective countries commitment to protecting their palm oil products, saying that the worlds two largest palm oil producers would continue to cooperate closely to fight the impending European Union deforestation policy.

It was unprecedented, Anwar said after his meeting with Jokowi held behind closed doors at Putrajaya, that the two neighbors were on the same page about defending their palm oil commodity on the world stage.

The call for collaboration is the latest effort by Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta to contest the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which stipulates a ban on imports considered to be driving deforestation. It would be a direct blow to the two Southeast Asian countries, if it were to gain the final approval of EU member states.

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Linkedin Menna Farouk (Thomson Reuters Foundation) (The Jakarta Post) Dubai  Sat, June 10 2023

Muhammed Bilal used to have to wait his turn outside a money transfer office in the scorching heat of Dubai to send home US$1,000 to his wife and parents in Pakistan each month, at a cost of about $7 per transfer.



He has since switched to an app that allows him to send money instantly with no transfer fees, joining a growing number of migrants in the United Arab Emirates using cryptocurrencies and blockchain services to send remittances quickly and cheaply.



"Now, I don't need to wait in queues," said Bilal, a 27-year-old customer service agent.



"I do it at home from my mobile phone and the money is sent within seconds."



The Middle East and North Africa had the fastest-growing crypto market in the world last year, according to blockchain data platform Chainalysis, with crypto transfers into the region rising by 48 percent to $566 billion in the year to June.



The use of crypto for remittances and savings, as well as increasingly permissive regulations, are helping to drive growth in the region, it added.



The UAE plans to make Dubai "the first city fully powered by blockchain" and has developed laws and regulatory systems around digital assets as it pushes to become a hub for the crypto industry.



Antti Arponen, CEO of Dubai-based fintech firm Pyypl, said 5 million people had downloaded the app since its launch in 2017.



"Eighty percent of our users are migrants and the numbers have been growing exponentially in the past few years," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.



Migrant workers said crypto offered a better deal than traditional banking and money transfer services, despite a crash in the market last year that left many holders of digital coins nursing heavy losses.



"With crypto, there are almost zero fees  easy, instant and safe," said Gerard Dingal, a 30-year-old pastry chef, who has been using crypto and Pyypl to send money to his mother and sister in the Philippines.



But such platforms expose users to the risk of scams and highly volatile currencies, said Pete Howson, a crypto expert and assistant professor in international development at Northumbria University, in the British city of Newcastle.



"Users' funds aren't insured when they use these sorts of platforms [crypto and blockchain-based apps], like they are with a bank," he said.



Migrants seek value



Nearly 90 percent of the UAE's 9.3 million people are migrants, according to a report by the UN Capital Development Fund last year, many from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Egypt.

They account for billions of dollars in remittances to their home countries, but most are manual workers who do not earn the 5,000 dirham ($1,350) minimum monthly income required to open a bank account in the UAE, it said.

Migrants also often use cash transfer services because they are cheaper, said Mohammad Jalal Uddin Sikder, a researcher in labor migration and a coordinator at the Center for Migration Studies in Bangladesh.

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Linkedin Reuters Jeddah, Saudi Arabia  Fri, June 9, 2023 11:35 2 d5259e4d93052b0e76bee70b05825adc 2 Middle East and Africa Saudi-Arabia,Antony-Blinken,Muhammad-bin-Salman,Israel,normalization,diplomacy,human-rights,JamalKhashoggi Free

Washington will press ahead with efforts to normalize diplomatic ties between its main Middle East allies Saudi Arabia and Israel, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday.

But he declined to say whether the United States would back Riyadh's nuclear ambitions.

At a joint news conference, Blinken's Saudi counterpart, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, said he hoped an agreement could be reached for the United States to aid his country's bid to generate nuclear power.

Neither addressed whether US support for Saudi Arabia's civilian nuclear program could be given in exchange for normalization with Israel, a deal that has been floated by Riyadh.

Blinken, who was in the kingdom as part of a US push to defuse rows that have touched on oil prices, human rights and Riyadh's opening to Iran, said normalizing relations between Israel and its neighbors to make way for a more integrated Middle East was a priority for the United States.

"We discussed it here, and we will continue to work at it, to advance it, in the days, weeks and months ahead," he said as he concluded his three-day visit.

Saudi Arabia, a Middle East powerhouse and home to Islam's two holiest shrines, has resisted heavy US pressure to end generations-old non-recognition of Israel as have Gulf Arab neighbors the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Speaking alongside Blinken, Prince Faisal agreed that normalization would bring benefits, but said those would be limited if there was not a pathway toward a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians.

A source familiar with the matter said Riyadh wants US support for its civilian nuclear program in exchange for normalization with Israel. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that the nuclear help, as well as security guarantees, were among the concessions sought by Riyadh.

Prince Faisal said Saudi Arabia would prefer to have the US as a bidder for the program, although he did not say if the nuclear ambitions were a precondition for normalization.

Talks on civilian nuclear cooperation have stalled with Riyadh refusing to agree to limits on nuclear enrichment and reprocessing designed to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

"We have differences of opinion but we are working on finding mechanisms for us to be able to work together," Prince Faisal said, adding that there were other bidders and the kingdom intended to move forward with the program.

Blinken was the second top US official to visit Saudi Arabia in less than a month, following a May 7 trip by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

However, Blinken's meetings with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the kingdom's de facto ruler, and Gulf Cooperation Council foreign ministers were relegated to the inside pages of Al-Watan and Okaz, the two major newspapers in Saudi Arabia.

Blinken and the crown prince, widely known as MbS, had "open, candid" talks for an hour and 40 minutes, a US official said, covering topics including the conflict in neighboring Yemen, the war in Sudan, Israel, and human rights.

Aziz Alghashian, a Saudi analyst specializing in Gulf-Israel ties, said Riyadh would not budge on normalization for reasons including Israel's hardline nationalist-religious government and displeasure with US President Joe Biden's administration.

"This is not the American administration that Saudis would want to gift a Saudi-Israeli normalization to," Alghashian said.

"It's going to be a massive achievement, it's going to be under an American umbrella, and they don't want the Biden administration to take any credit for that," he said.

Riyadh has also leveraged its growing relationships with Russia and China as the Biden administration has pushed back against some Saudi demands including lifting restrictions on arms sales and help with sensitive high-tech industries.

US-Saudi relations have deteriorated since the 2018 murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a US resident, inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

They worsened after the Biden administration took office in early 2021 and released a US intelligence assessment that MbS approved Khashoggi's killing, which the crown prince denied.

Other rows have simmered over the Saudi intervention in Yemen's devastating conflict, China ties and oil prices.
Readers hoping to buy Banc of California, Inc. (NYSE:BANC) for its dividend will need to make their move shortly, as the stock is about to trade ex-dividend. Typically, the ex-dividend date is one business day before the record date which is the date on which a company determines the shareholders eligible to receive a dividend. The ex-dividend date is of consequence because whenever a stock is bought or sold, the trade takes at least two business day to settle. Accordingly, Banc of California investors that purchase the stock on or after the 14th of June will not receive the dividend, which will be paid on the 3rd of July.

The company's upcoming dividend is US$0.10 a share, following on from the last 12 months, when the company distributed a total of US$0.40 per share to shareholders. Calculating the last year's worth of payments shows that Banc of California has a trailing yield of 3.1% on the current share price of $12.78. If you buy this business for its dividend, you should have an idea of whether Banc of California's dividend is reliable and sustainable. We need to see whether the dividend is covered by earnings and if it's growing.

View our latest analysis for Banc of California

Dividends are usually paid out of company profits, so if a company pays out more than it earned then its dividend is usually at greater risk of being cut. Banc of California has a low and conservative payout ratio of just 18% of its income after tax.

When a company paid out less in dividends than it earned in profit, this generally suggests its dividend is affordable. The lower the % of its profit that it pays out, the greater the margin of safety for the dividend if the business enters a downturn.

Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.

Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?

Companies with consistently growing earnings per share generally make the best dividend stocks, as they usually find it easier to grow dividends per share. If earnings decline and the company is forced to cut its dividend, investors could watch the value of their investment go up in smoke. It's encouraging to see Banc of California has grown its earnings rapidly, up 20% a year for the past five years.

The main way most investors will assess a company's dividend prospects is by checking the historical rate of dividend growth. Banc of California's dividend payments per share have declined at 1.8% per year on average over the past 10 years, which is uninspiring.

Final Takeaway

Should investors buy Banc of California for the upcoming dividend? Companies like Banc of California that are growing rapidly and paying out a low fraction of earnings, are usually reinvesting heavily in their business. Perhaps even more importantly - this can sometimes signal management is focused on the long term future of the business. Banc of California ticks a lot of boxes for us from a dividend perspective, and we think these characteristics should mark the company as deserving of further attention.

In light of that, while Banc of California has an appealing dividend, it's worth knowing the risks involved with this stock. To that end, you should learn about the 2 warning signs we've spotted with Banc of California (including 1 which makes us a bit uncomfortable).

A common investing mistake is buying the first interesting stock you see. Here you can find a full list of high-yield dividend stocks.

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.

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Advisors Asset Management Inc. lifted its stake in Newmont Co. (NYSE:NEM  Get Rating) by 6.0% during the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund owned 216,253 shares of the basic materials companys stock after acquiring an additional 12,324 shares during the period. Advisors Asset Management Inc.s holdings in Newmont were worth $10,207,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Several other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also modified their holdings of NEM. MAI Capital Management acquired a new stake in shares of Newmont in the 4th quarter valued at $323,000. Weiss Asset Management LP bought a new position in shares of Newmont in the third quarter valued at about $9,345,000. AdvisorNet Financial Inc raised its holdings in Newmont by 9.7% during the 4th quarter. AdvisorNet Financial Inc now owns 2,829 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $134,000 after purchasing an additional 250 shares during the last quarter. Guardian Wealth Advisors LLC bought a new stake in Newmont during the 3rd quarter worth about $56,000. Finally, Ronald Blue Trust Inc. raised its holdings in Newmont by 45.0% during the 4th quarter. Ronald Blue Trust Inc. now owns 4,029 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $170,000 after purchasing an additional 1,251 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 77.60% of the companys stock.

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Analysts Set New Price Targets

NEM has been the subject of several analyst reports. Barclays boosted their target price on Newmont from $57.00 to $62.00 and gave the stock an equal weight rating in a research report on Friday, April 21st. Citigroup dropped their price target on Newmont from $70.00 to $60.00 and set a buy rating on the stock in a research note on Tuesday, April 4th. Fundamental Research set a $51.92 price target on Newmont and gave the company a buy rating in a research note on Tuesday, March 7th. BNP Paribas upgraded Newmont from a neutral rating to an outperform rating and set a $60.00 price objective on the stock in a research report on Monday, February 13th. Finally, UBS Group lowered Newmont from a buy rating to a neutral rating and reduced their target price for the stock from $59.00 to $53.00 in a report on Tuesday, February 14th. Three analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and nine have assigned a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the company has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of $60.53.

Insider Buying and Selling

Newmont Stock Down 0.8 %

In related news, COO Robert D. Atkinson sold 3,000 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Monday, April 3rd. The stock was sold at an average price of $48.92, for a total transaction of $146,760.00. Following the sale, the chief operating officer now owns 84,751 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $4,146,018.92. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through the SEC website . In related news, CEO Thomas Ronald Palmer sold 11,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Thursday, June 1st. The stock was sold at an average price of $40.84, for a total transaction of $449,240.00. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now directly owns 289,039 shares in the company, valued at approximately $11,804,352.76. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available through this hyperlink . Also, COO Robert D. Atkinson sold 3,000 shares of Newmont stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, April 3rd. The stock was sold at an average price of $48.92, for a total value of $146,760.00. Following the completion of the sale, the chief operating officer now owns 84,751 shares in the company, valued at $4,146,018.92. The disclosure for this sale can be found here . In the last quarter, insiders have sold 39,000 shares of company stock valued at $1,802,760. Corporate insiders own 0.07% of the companys stock.

Newmont stock traded down $0.32 during trading on Friday, hitting $41.72. 1,263,263 shares of the company were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 8,065,778. The company has a market capitalization of $33.16 billion, a P/E ratio of -63.70, a PEG ratio of 1.69 and a beta of 0.34. The company has a current ratio of 2.38, a quick ratio of 2.00 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.31. The businesss 50 day moving average is $46.42 and its 200 day moving average is $47.43. Newmont Co. has a 52 week low of $37.45 and a 52 week high of $67.47.

Newmont (NYSE:NEM  Get Rating) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The basic materials company reported $0.40 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $0.33 by $0.07. Newmont had a positive return on equity of 6.05% and a negative net margin of 4.55%. The firm had revenue of $2.68 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $2.70 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the firm earned $0.69 EPS. The businesss revenue for the quarter was down 11.4% compared to the same quarter last year. Analysts predict that Newmont Co. will post 2.44 earnings per share for the current year.

Newmont Dividend Announcement

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, June 15th. Investors of record on Thursday, June 1st will be issued a dividend of $0.40 per share. The ex-dividend date is Wednesday, May 31st. This represents a $1.60 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 3.84%. Newmonts dividend payout ratio (DPR) is -242.42%.

Newmont Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Newmont Corp. is a gold producer, engages in the exploration and acquisition of gold properties, contains copper, silver, lead, zinc or other metals. It operates through the following geographical segments: North America, South America, Nevada, Australia, and Africa. The North America segment consists primarily of carlin, phoenix, twin creeks and long canyon in the state of Nevada and Cripple Creek and Victor in the state of Colorado, in the United States.

Further Reading

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Advisors Asset Management Inc. lessened its position in Two Harbors Investment Corp. (NYSE:TWO  Get Rating) by 72.0% during the 4th quarter, Holdings Channel reports. The firm owned 518,467 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock after selling 1,330,905 shares during the quarter. Advisors Asset Management Inc.s holdings in Two Harbors Investment were worth $8,176,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Several other institutional investors and hedge funds also recently made changes to their positions in TWO. New York State Common Retirement Fund lifted its position in Two Harbors Investment by 0.4% during the 3rd quarter. New York State Common Retirement Fund now owns 235,974 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock worth $783,000 after buying an additional 916 shares in the last quarter. Teacher Retirement System of Texas lifted its position in Two Harbors Investment by 48.7% during the 3rd quarter. Teacher Retirement System of Texas now owns 79,322 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock worth $263,000 after buying an additional 25,966 shares in the last quarter. GSA Capital Partners LLP acquired a new position in Two Harbors Investment during the 4th quarter worth about $1,159,000. Ergoteles LLC acquired a new position in Two Harbors Investment during the 3rd quarter worth about $96,000. Finally, Sigma Planning Corp lifted its position in Two Harbors Investment by 13.7% during the 3rd quarter. Sigma Planning Corp now owns 35,053 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock worth $116,000 after buying an additional 4,220 shares in the last quarter.

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Insider Buying and Selling

In related news, CEO William Ross Greenberg sold 8,741 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, May 22nd. The stock was sold at an average price of $12.33, for a total transaction of $107,776.53. Following the completion of the sale, the chief executive officer now directly owns 169,561 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $2,090,687.13. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available through the SEC website. In related news, General Counsel Rebecca B. Sandberg sold 4,175 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, May 22nd. The stock was sold at an average price of $12.33, for a total transaction of $51,477.75. Following the completion of the sale, the general counsel now directly owns 93,691 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $1,155,210.03. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available through the SEC website. Also, CEO William Ross Greenberg sold 8,741 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, May 22nd. The stock was sold at an average price of $12.33, for a total value of $107,776.53. Following the sale, the chief executive officer now directly owns 169,561 shares of the companys stock, valued at $2,090,687.13. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. In the last three months, insiders sold 23,534 shares of company stock valued at $289,831. 0.45% of the stock is owned by corporate insiders.

Two Harbors Investment Trading Down 0.2 %

Two Harbors Investment Dividend Announcement

Shares of TWO stock traded down $0.03 on Friday, reaching $13.59. The company had a trading volume of 159,139 shares, compared to its average volume of 1,201,412. The company has a current ratio of 1.06, a quick ratio of 1.06 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.98. The stock has a market cap of $1.31 billion, a PE ratio of -4.11 and a beta of 1.75. The company has a 50-day moving average of $13.05 and a 200-day moving average of $15.14. Two Harbors Investment Corp. has a 12 month low of $11.57 and a 12 month high of $21.84.

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, April 28th. Stockholders of record on Tuesday, April 4th were paid a $0.60 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Monday, April 3rd. This represents a $2.40 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 17.66%. Two Harbors Investments dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently -72.51%.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Several research analysts recently issued reports on the stock. Maxim Group upgraded shares of Two Harbors Investment from a hold rating to a buy rating and set a $19.00 price target on the stock in a research report on Friday, February 10th. Barclays cut their target price on shares of Two Harbors Investment from $16.00 to $14.00 in a research report on Wednesday, May 3rd. StockNews.com started coverage on shares of Two Harbors Investment in a research report on Thursday, March 16th. They set a sell rating on the stock. Citigroup upped their target price on shares of Two Harbors Investment from $15.00 to $17.00 and gave the company a neutral rating in a research report on Monday, February 13th. Finally, Royal Bank of Canada upped their target price on shares of Two Harbors Investment from $16.00 to $17.00 and gave the company a sector perform rating in a research report on Friday, February 17th. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have issued a hold rating and two have given a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company presently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $16.38.

About Two Harbors Investment

(Get Rating)

Two Harbors Investment Corp. is a real estate investment trust, which invests in, finances, and manages agency residential mortgage-backed securities, mortgage servicing rights, and other financial assets. Its objective is to provide risk-adjusted returns to its stockholders over the long-term, primarily through dividends and secondarily through capital appreciation.

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Royal Bank of Canada upgraded shares of Anglo American (LON:AAL  Get Rating) to an outperform rating in a report released on Tuesday, MarketBeat reports. Royal Bank of Canada currently has GBX 2,700 ($33.57) price objective on the mining companys stock, up from their prior price objective of GBX 2,500 ($31.08).

Several other equities analysts also recently commented on the company. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft dropped their target price on Anglo American from GBX 3,400 ($42.27) to GBX 3,200 ($39.78) and set a hold rating for the company in a research report on Monday. Barclays reiterated an equal weight rating and issued a GBX 3,250 ($40.40) target price on shares of Anglo American in a research report on Friday, February 24th. Berenberg Bank reiterated a hold rating on shares of Anglo American in a research report on Thursday, May 25th. Citigroup reiterated a top pick rating on shares of Anglo American in a research report on Thursday, April 13th. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. lowered their price objective on Anglo American from GBX 3,500 ($43.51) to GBX 3,400 ($42.27) and set an overweight rating for the company in a research report on Wednesday, February 22nd. Four analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, two have issued a buy rating and one has issued a strong buy rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat, the stock currently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of GBX 3,170 ($39.41).

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Anglo American Price Performance

Anglo American stock opened at GBX 2,459.50 ($30.58) on Tuesday. The company has a current ratio of 1.90, a quick ratio of 1.28 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 44.39. The company has a market capitalization of 32.96 billion, a PE ratio of 825.34, a P/E/G ratio of 5.62 and a beta of 1.30. Anglo American has a 12 month low of GBX 2,223.50 ($27.64) and a 12 month high of GBX 4,005 ($49.79). The stock has a 50-day moving average price of GBX 2,473.98 and a two-hundred day moving average price of GBX 2,926.31.

Insider Transactions at Anglo American

About Anglo American

In other Anglo American news, insider Stuart J. Chambers bought 661 shares of the stock in a transaction on Monday, March 27th. The stock was acquired at an average cost of GBX 2,493 ($30.99) per share, for a total transaction of 16,478.73 ($20,485.74). Insiders purchased 672 shares of company stock worth $1,675,781 over the last ninety days. 7.29% of the stock is owned by insiders.

(Get Rating)

Anglo American plc operates as a mining company worldwide. The company explores for rough and polished diamonds, copper, platinum group metals, metallurgical and thermal coal, and iron ore; and nickel, polyhalite, and manganese ores, as well as alloys. Anglo American plc was founded in 1917 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

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Shares of China Gold International Resources Corp. Ltd. (TSE:CGG  Get Rating) passed above its two hundred day moving average during trading on Tuesday . The stock has a two hundred day moving average of C$5.02 and traded as high as C$5.74. China Gold International Resources shares last traded at C$5.72, with a volume of 27,160 shares changing hands.

China Gold International Resources Price Performance

The company has a market cap of C$2.22 billion, a P/E ratio of 7.09 and a beta of 1.98. The firms 50-day moving average is C$6.26 and its two-hundred day moving average is C$5.02. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 45.84, a current ratio of 1.09 and a quick ratio of 0.61.

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China Gold International Resources (TSE:CGG  Get Rating) last posted its earnings results on Thursday, March 30th. The company reported C$0.16 earnings per share for the quarter. China Gold International Resources had a net margin of 21.76% and a return on equity of 12.70%. The firm had revenue of C$344.73 million for the quarter. Analysts anticipate that China Gold International Resources Corp. Ltd. will post 6.2699998 earnings per share for the current year.

About China Gold International Resources

China Gold International Resources Corp. Ltd., a gold and base metal mining company, acquires, explores for, develops, and mines mineral properties in the People's Republic of China. It primarily holds 96.5% interest in the Chang Shan Hao gold mine covering an area of 36 square kilometers in the western part of Inner Mongolia, northern China; and 100% interest in the Jiama copper-gold polymetallic mine that hosts copper, gold, molybdenum, silver, lead, and zinc metals located in Metrokongka County, Tibet.

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Coca-Cola FEMSA (NYSE:KOF  Get Rating) was upgraded by stock analysts at HSBC from a hold rating to a buy rating in a note issued to investors on Wednesday, The Fly reports. The firm presently has a $108.00 target price on the stock, up from their previous target price of $74.00. HSBCs target price suggests a potential upside of 22.88% from the stocks previous close.

A number of other equities analysts also recently commented on the stock. StockNews.com started coverage on shares of Coca-Cola FEMSA in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They set a strong-buy rating for the company. JPMorgan Chase & Co. raised their target price on shares of Coca-Cola FEMSA from $80.00 to $87.00 in a research note on Friday, May 26th. Finally, Barclays raised their target price on shares of Coca-Cola FEMSA from $91.00 to $95.00 in a research note on Tuesday. Two analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, three have given a buy rating and one has issued a strong buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company currently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $105.40.

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Coca-Cola FEMSA Price Performance

Coca-Cola FEMSA stock opened at $87.89 on Wednesday. The firm has a 50-day moving average of $85.13 and a 200-day moving average of $76.26. Coca-Cola FEMSA has a one year low of $51.96 and a one year high of $91.23. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.56, a quick ratio of 0.94 and a current ratio of 1.14.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Coca-Cola FEMSA Company Profile

Several institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. HighTower Advisors LLC boosted its position in Coca-Cola FEMSA by 4.1% during the first quarter. HighTower Advisors LLC now owns 3,532 shares of the companys stock valued at $282,000 after acquiring an additional 138 shares during the last quarter. IFP Advisors Inc raised its holdings in shares of Coca-Cola FEMSA by 57.0% in the 3rd quarter. IFP Advisors Inc now owns 424 shares of the companys stock worth $38,000 after acquiring an additional 154 shares during the last quarter. Vanguard Personalized Indexing Management LLC raised its holdings in shares of Coca-Cola FEMSA by 2.3% in the 1st quarter. Vanguard Personalized Indexing Management LLC now owns 6,808 shares of the companys stock worth $548,000 after acquiring an additional 156 shares during the last quarter. Signaturefd LLC raised its holdings in shares of Coca-Cola FEMSA by 37.7% in the 4th quarter. Signaturefd LLC now owns 588 shares of the companys stock worth $40,000 after acquiring an additional 161 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Avantax Advisory Services Inc. raised its holdings in shares of Coca-Cola FEMSA by 2.7% in the 1st quarter. Avantax Advisory Services Inc. now owns 6,640 shares of the companys stock worth $534,000 after acquiring an additional 175 shares during the last quarter. 1.27% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

(Get Rating)

Coca-Cola FEMSA SAB de CV engages in the business of producing franchise bottles of trademark beverages. It operates under the Mexico and Central America, and South America segments. The Mexico and Central America segment includes Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. The South America segment focuses on Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.

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Public Employees Retirement Association of Colorado lessened its holdings in shares of Constellation Brands, Inc. (NYSE:STZ  Get Rating) by 0.7% during the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The fund owned 26,410 shares of the companys stock after selling 196 shares during the quarter. Public Employees Retirement Association of Colorados holdings in Constellation Brands were worth $6,121,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

Several other institutional investors and hedge funds have also recently modified their holdings of STZ. Prudential PLC acquired a new position in shares of Constellation Brands during the 1st quarter valued at about $705,000. Cetera Investment Advisers boosted its position in shares of Constellation Brands by 1.0% during the 1st quarter. Cetera Investment Advisers now owns 17,026 shares of the companys stock valued at $3,921,000 after acquiring an additional 163 shares during the last quarter. Sequoia Financial Advisors LLC boosted its position in shares of Constellation Brands by 17.6% during the 1st quarter. Sequoia Financial Advisors LLC now owns 3,149 shares of the companys stock valued at $725,000 after acquiring an additional 471 shares during the last quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. boosted its position in shares of Constellation Brands by 2.6% during the 1st quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 12,601,280 shares of the companys stock valued at $2,902,327,000 after acquiring an additional 313,344 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Ergoteles LLC acquired a new position in shares of Constellation Brands during the 1st quarter valued at about $257,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 84.87% of the companys stock.

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Constellation Brands Stock Up 0.4 %

STZ stock opened at $244.37 on Friday. The companys 50 day moving average price is $230.17 and its 200 day moving average price is $229.73. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.29, a quick ratio of 0.54 and a current ratio of 1.18. Constellation Brands, Inc. has a fifty-two week low of $208.12 and a fifty-two week high of $261.32. The firm has a market capitalization of $44.78 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of -479.15, a PEG ratio of 1.87 and a beta of 1.03.

Constellation Brands Increases Dividend

Constellation Brands ( NYSE:STZ Get Rating ) last released its earnings results on Thursday, April 6th. The company reported $1.98 earnings per share for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $1.86 by $0.12. Constellation Brands had a negative net margin of 0.70% and a positive return on equity of 20.48%. The firm had revenue of $2 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $2.02 billion. During the same period in the prior year, the firm earned $2.37 earnings per share. The businesss quarterly revenue was down 11.9% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, equities research analysts anticipate that Constellation Brands, Inc. will post 11.66 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, May 18th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, May 4th were paid a $0.89 dividend. This is a positive change from Constellation Brandss previous quarterly dividend of $0.80. This represents a $3.56 annualized dividend and a yield of 1.46%. The ex-dividend date was Wednesday, May 3rd. Constellation Brandss dividend payout ratio is currently -698.03%.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

A number of research analysts have commented on STZ shares. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft upped their target price on shares of Constellation Brands from $210.00 to $218.00 in a research report on Monday, April 10th. Truist Financial upped their target price on shares of Constellation Brands from $215.00 to $220.00 and gave the company a hold rating in a research report on Monday, April 10th. Barclays decreased their target price on shares of Constellation Brands from $279.00 to $277.00 and set an overweight rating on the stock in a research report on Tuesday, April 11th. StockNews.com started coverage on shares of Constellation Brands in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating on the stock. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. upped their target price on shares of Constellation Brands from $253.00 to $257.00 and gave the company an overweight rating in a research report on Monday, April 10th. Five investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and seventeen have given a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat, Constellation Brands presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of $256.45.

Insider Buying and Selling at Constellation Brands

In other Constellation Brands news, Director Richard Sands sold 3,858,476 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, May 10th. The shares were sold at an average price of $223.53, for a total value of $862,485,140.28. Following the transaction, the director now directly owns 20,488,818 shares in the company, valued at $4,579,865,487.54. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through the SEC website. In other news, major shareholder Business Holdings Lp Ajb sold 650,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, May 10th. The shares were sold at an average price of $223.53, for a total transaction of $145,294,500.00. Following the transaction, the insider now directly owns 3,365,715 shares in the company, valued at $752,338,273.95. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this hyperlink. Also, Director Richard Sands sold 3,858,476 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, May 10th. The stock was sold at an average price of $223.53, for a total transaction of $862,485,140.28. Following the transaction, the director now owns 20,488,818 shares in the company, valued at $4,579,865,487.54. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. 16.19% of the stock is currently owned by insiders.

Constellation Brands Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Constellation Brands, Inc engages in the production, marketing, and distribution of beer, wine, and spirits. It operates through the following segments: Beer, Wine and Spirits, Corporate Operations and Other, and Canopy. The Beer segment includes imported and craft beer brands. The Wine and Spirits segment sells wine brands across all categories-table wine, sparkling wine, and dessert wine-and across all price points.

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Croma Security Solutions Group plc (LON:CSSG  Get Rating) was up 10.5% during trading on Tuesday . The company traded as high as GBX 57 ($0.71) and last traded at GBX 52.50 ($0.65). Approximately 456,231 shares changed hands during trading, an increase of 3,966% from the average daily volume of 11,220 shares. The stock had previously closed at GBX 47.50 ($0.59).

Croma Security Solutions Group Stock Performance

The company has a market cap of 7.82 million, a P/E ratio of 5,010.00 and a beta of 0.70. The businesss 50 day simple moving average is GBX 48.37 and its 200 day simple moving average is GBX 52.82. The company has a current ratio of 1.75, a quick ratio of 1.51 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 6.10.

About Croma Security Solutions Group

(Get Rating)

Croma Security Solutions Group plc provides various security services in the United Kingdom. The company operates through three segments: Croma Vigilant, Croma Security Systems, and Croma Locksmiths. It offers manned guarding and reception services for property assets and individuals; CCTV security, fire, and alarm systems; locksmithing keys, locks, and safes; and identity management and access control solutions.

Further Reading

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Holmen AB (publ) (OTCMKTS:HLMNY  Get Rating) was downgraded by DNB Markets from a buy rating to a hold rating in a report issued on Wednesday, The Fly reports.

Holmen AB (publ) Price Performance

Shares of HLMNY opened at $19.75 on Wednesday. Holmen AB has a 1 year low of $19.52 and a 1 year high of $27.61. The companys 50-day simple moving average is $20.06 and its 200-day simple moving average is $20.84.

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Holmen AB (publ) Company Profile

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Holmen AB (publ) produces and sells paperboards, papers, wood products, and renewable energy in Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, rest of Europe, Asia, and internationally. The company's Forest segment offers logs, pulpwood, and biofuel to sawmills, pulp mills, and paperboard and paper mills; and manages forests, which cover approximately one million hectares.

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Johnson Financial Group Inc. decreased its holdings in iShares Russell Mid-Cap Value ETF (NYSEARCA:IWS  Get Rating) by 7.9% during the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the SEC. The institutional investor owned 2,338 shares of the companys stock after selling 200 shares during the quarter. Johnson Financial Group Inc.s holdings in iShares Russell Mid-Cap Value ETF were worth $246,000 as of its most recent filing with the SEC.

Several other institutional investors have also modified their holdings of the business. Retirement Income Solutions Inc increased its holdings in iShares Russell Mid-Cap Value ETF by 360.7% in the first quarter. Retirement Income Solutions Inc now owns 13,715 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,641,000 after buying an additional 10,738 shares during the last quarter. Bank of New York Mellon Corp increased its holdings in iShares Russell Mid-Cap Value ETF by 0.9% in the first quarter. Bank of New York Mellon Corp now owns 47,018 shares of the companys stock valued at $5,625,000 after buying an additional 412 shares during the last quarter. Sei Investments Co. bought a new stake in iShares Russell Mid-Cap Value ETF in the first quarter valued at about $16,029,000. Cetera Investment Advisers increased its holdings in iShares Russell Mid-Cap Value ETF by 8.5% in the first quarter. Cetera Investment Advisers now owns 26,129 shares of the companys stock valued at $3,126,000 after buying an additional 2,055 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Baird Financial Group Inc. increased its holdings in iShares Russell Mid-Cap Value ETF by 2.6% in the first quarter. Baird Financial Group Inc. now owns 160,775 shares of the companys stock valued at $19,235,000 after buying an additional 4,061 shares during the last quarter.

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iShares Russell Mid-Cap Value ETF Stock Down 0.2 %

Shares of iShares Russell Mid-Cap Value ETF stock opened at $106.51 on Friday. The firm has a market cap of $12.72 billion, a P/E ratio of 12.62 and a beta of 1.08. iShares Russell Mid-Cap Value ETF has a fifty-two week low of $94.32 and a fifty-two week high of $116.73. The business has a 50-day moving average price of $104.60 and a 200 day moving average price of $107.28.

iShares Russell Mid-Cap Value ETF Company Profile

iShares Russell Mid-Cap Value ETF (the Fund), formerly iShares Russell Midcap Value Index Fund, is an exchange-traded fund (ETF). The Fund seeks investment results that correspond generally to the price and yield performance of the Russell Midcap Value Index (the Value Index). The Value Index measures the performance of the mid-capitalization value sector of the United States equity market.

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For breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Tourism

Situated between Gulf Shores and the Florida state line on the Alabama Gulf Coast, Orange Beach, Alabama, is filled with delicious restaurants to enjoy during your beach vacation. Not only are these establishments known for serving up great food and drinks, but the atmosphere truly makes the experience. Almost every single restaurant on our list of the best places to eat in Orange Beach features beautiful water views.



Whether you're looking for a place for breakfast, lunch, dinner, happy hour, or a morning coffee, these are the best places to eat on your next trip to Orange Beach.



CoastAL

Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Tourism

While there are plenty of restaurants that have views of the beach and water, CoastAL is the only true beachfront restaurant in Orange Beach. Opening at 11 a.m. daily, they serve an assortment of appetizers, sandwiches, tacos, and seafood baskets. The beach bar offers live music daily that you can listen to while sipping on signature cocktails like the CoastAL Colada and the Key West Margarita.



coastalorangebeach.com, 251-240-6001, 25722 Perdido Beach Blvd,Orange Beach, AL 36561

Fisher's at Orange Beach Marina

Robbie Caponetto

At Orange Beach Marina, you can choose between two unique dining experiences by Chef Bill Briand. Fisher's Upstairs is an upscale restaurant with a view featuring white linen tablecloths and Southern coastal cuisine. Steps below, Fisher's Dockside is a more casual, open-air dive that can be enjoyed in beach or boat attire. Both have a welcoming atmosphere and views of the yachts and water.

fishersobm.com, 251-981-7305, 27075 Marina Rd, Orange Beach, AL 36561

Louisiana Lagniappe

Louisiana Lagniappe

With dishes like Oysters Lagniappe, Cajun Seafood Gumbo, Grouper Pontchartrain, and Crescent City Alfredo on the menu, Louisiana Lagniappe has been serving up seafood with a Creole flair since 1999. The upscale waterfront restaurant opens each evening at 5 p.m. and has indoor and outdoor seating options.



thelouisianalagniappe.com, 251-981-2258, 27267 Perdido Beach Blvd. - Suite 20, Orange Beach, AL 36561

The Gulf

Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Tourism

Built from shipping containers and recycled materials, The Gulf offers a unique waterfront dining experience. The menu at the outdoor restaurant is updated daily to ensure they're serving the freshest choices available. The restaurant overlooks the Perdio Pass so you can watch boats come and go as you enjoy your meal. A mix of tables and casual seating areas provide the perfect spot to take in the scenery and catch the sun setting over the Gulf.

thegulf.com, 251-424-1800, 27500 Perdido Beach Blvd, Orange Beach, AL 36561

Docs Seafood

Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Tourism

Open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Doc's has been serving up seafood in Orange Beach since 1984. It is a favorite of locals and visitors alike. On the menu, you'll find all the classics you'd expect from a seafood restaurant including "The Best Fried Shrimp In The Entire Civilized World!", seafood platters, "the best seafood gumbo ever", oysters on the half shell, and more.

docsseafoodshack.com, 251-981-6999, 26029 Canal Rd, Orange Beach, AL 36561





The Southern Grind Coffeehouse

Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Tourism

This local coffee shop has two locations in Orange Beach, the flagship location located at The Wharf and one just across from the beach in the Indigo Hotel. In addition to a wide selection of coffees, they also serve breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a selection of desserts including gelato.

thesoutherngrind.com, 251-975-2883, 22843 Perdido Beach Blvd, Orange Beach, Alabama

Playa at Sportsman Marina

Playa

The team behind Fishers at Orange Beach Marina introduced their newest restaurant, Playa at Sportsman Marina, in 2018. Inspired by the beach setting, the dishes and cocktails on the menu have a tropical flair and can be enjoyed with a waterfront view from either downstairs or upstairs.



playaoba.com, 251-981-9891, 27842 Canal Rd, Orange Beach, AL 36561



Tacky Jack's

Gulf Shores & Orange Beach Tourism

Opening at 7 a.m. daily, the original location of Tacky Jack's in Orange Beach serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week. Also accessible by boat, the waterfront restaurant features views of the Perdido Pass Bridge, so you may even see dolphins if you're lucky! The menu is packed with plenty of seafood platters, po'boys, sandwiches, and, of course, the famous Bushwacker, which was voted best on the Alabama Coast.

tackyjacks.com, 251-981-4144, 27206 Safe Harbor Dr,

Orange Beach, AL 36561





Cobalt

Justice Marketing Group

Located underneath the Perdido Pass Bridge, Cobalt is accessible by both land and sea and offers water views from every table. They're open for lunch and dinner, and also have happy hour specials daily from 3 to 5 p.m. as well as brunch on Sundays.



cobaltrestaurant.net, 251-923-5300, 28099 Perdido Beach Blvd, Orange Beach, AL 36561

OSO at Bear Point Harbor

OSO at Bear Point Harbor

Serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner 7 days a week, OSO features coastal cuisine with inspiration from Florida to Mexico. In addition to a wide range of mainstay dishes on the menu (like oysters, tacos, and seafood platters), they also offer daily specials as well as live music and sunset views over the water.

Osobearpoint.com, 251-345-6738, 5749 Bay La Launch Avenue, Orange Beach, AL 36561

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Read the original article on Southern Living.
Bank of America upgraded shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated (NYSE:MKC  Get Rating) from an underperform rating to a buy rating in a report released on Tuesday morning, The Fly reports. Bank of America currently has $100.00 target price on the stock, up from their previous target price of $75.00.

Several other analysts also recently commented on the stock. Credit Suisse Group lowered their target price on shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated from $75.00 to $72.00 in a report on Tuesday, March 21st. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft increased their target price on shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated from $69.00 to $75.00 and gave the company a hold rating in a report on Wednesday, March 29th. StockNews.com began coverage on shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating for the company. UBS Group began coverage on shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated in a research report on Friday, March 10th. They set a sell rating and a $71.00 price target for the company. Finally, Stifel Nicolaus began coverage on shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated in a research report on Thursday, April 13th. They set a hold rating and a $82.00 price target for the company. Two research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, five have assigned a hold rating and four have issued a buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, McCormick & Company, Incorporated currently has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $82.60.

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McCormick & Company, Incorporated Trading Down 0.7 %

Shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated stock opened at $90.12 on Tuesday. The stock has a market capitalization of $24.17 billion, a PE ratio of 36.49, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 4.97 and a beta of 0.58. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.74, a quick ratio of 0.32 and a current ratio of 0.73. McCormick & Company, Incorporated has a 52 week low of $70.60 and a 52 week high of $93.00. The stock has a 50 day moving average price of $87.23 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $81.86.

McCormick & Company, Incorporated Announces Dividend

McCormick & Company, Incorporated ( NYSE:MKC Get Rating ) last released its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, March 28th. The company reported $0.59 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $0.49 by $0.10. The business had revenue of $1.57 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $1.54 billion. McCormick & Company, Incorporated had a return on equity of 14.34% and a net margin of 10.42%. McCormick & Company, Incorporateds quarterly revenue was up 2.8% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the prior year, the firm posted $0.63 EPS. As a group, equities analysts anticipate that McCormick & Company, Incorporated will post 2.62 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Monday, April 24th. Shareholders of record on Monday, April 10th were given a dividend of $0.39 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Thursday, April 6th. This represents a $1.56 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 1.73%. McCormick & Company, Incorporateds dividend payout ratio is presently 63.16%.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In other McCormick & Company, Incorporated news, CEO Lawrence Erik Kurzius sold 39,906 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Friday, May 12th. The shares were sold at an average price of $90.02, for a total transaction of $3,592,338.12. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 159,579 shares in the company, valued at $14,365,301.58. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. Company insiders own 19.00% of the companys stock.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On McCormick & Company, Incorporated

A number of large investors have recently modified their holdings of MKC. SVB Wealth LLC increased its position in shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated by 3.0% during the 1st quarter. SVB Wealth LLC now owns 3,937 shares of the companys stock valued at $393,000 after purchasing an additional 114 shares during the last quarter. Connecticut Wealth Management LLC increased its position in shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated by 2.6% during the 1st quarter. Connecticut Wealth Management LLC now owns 4,680 shares of the companys stock valued at $389,000 after purchasing an additional 119 shares during the last quarter. CWM LLC increased its position in shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated by 2.9% during the 1st quarter. CWM LLC now owns 4,204 shares of the companys stock valued at $350,000 after purchasing an additional 119 shares during the last quarter. Stiles Financial Services Inc increased its position in shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated by 2.4% during the 1st quarter. Stiles Financial Services Inc now owns 5,140 shares of the companys stock valued at $428,000 after purchasing an additional 120 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Quent Capital LLC increased its position in shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated by 15.2% during the 1st quarter. Quent Capital LLC now owns 923 shares of the companys stock valued at $76,000 after purchasing an additional 122 shares during the last quarter. 79.15% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

About McCormick & Company, Incorporated

(Get Rating)

McCormick & Co, Inc engages in the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution of spices, seasoning mixes, condiments, and other flavorful products to retail outlets, food manufacturers, and foodservice businesses. It operates through the Consumer and Flavor Solutions segments. The Consumer segment sells spices, seasonings, condiments, and sauces.

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Neo Ivy Capital Management acquired a new position in shares of State Street Co. (NYSE:STT  Get Rating) during the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The institutional investor acquired 6,246 shares of the asset managers stock, valued at approximately $485,000.

Several other large investors have also recently bought and sold shares of STT. B. Riley Wealth Advisors Inc. acquired a new position in shares of State Street in the 4th quarter valued at $514,000. OLD Mission Capital LLC acquired a new position in shares of State Street in the 4th quarter valued at $42,000. Crumly & Associates Inc. lifted its stake in shares of State Street by 23.0% in the 4th quarter. Crumly & Associates Inc. now owns 5,534 shares of the asset managers stock valued at $429,000 after purchasing an additional 1,035 shares during the period. Voya Investment Management LLC lifted its stake in shares of State Street by 4.8% in the 4th quarter. Voya Investment Management LLC now owns 174,296 shares of the asset managers stock valued at $13,520,000 after purchasing an additional 7,961 shares during the period. Finally, DGS Capital Management LLC lifted its stake in shares of State Street by 29.6% in the 4th quarter. DGS Capital Management LLC now owns 6,820 shares of the asset managers stock valued at $529,000 after purchasing an additional 1,559 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 88.41% of the companys stock.

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State Street Stock Up 0.5 %

Shares of NYSE STT traded up $0.38 during mid-day trading on Friday, hitting $73.91. The company had a trading volume of 2,033,362 shares, compared to its average volume of 2,921,694. The company has a market capitalization of $24.71 billion, a PE ratio of 10.30, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.43 and a beta of 1.57. The firm has a 50-day simple moving average of $71.68 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $78.56. The company has a current ratio of 0.52, a quick ratio of 0.52 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.72. State Street Co. has a one year low of $58.62 and a one year high of $94.74.

State Street Announces Dividend

State Street ( NYSE:STT Get Rating ) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Monday, April 17th. The asset manager reported $1.52 earnings per share for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $1.64 by ($0.12). State Street had a net margin of 18.73% and a return on equity of 11.96%. The company had revenue of $3.10 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $3.13 billion. During the same quarter in the previous year, the business earned $1.59 EPS. State Streets revenue was up .6% on a year-over-year basis. On average, equities analysts expect that State Street Co. will post 7.63 EPS for the current year.

The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, July 13th. Investors of record on Monday, July 3rd will be paid a $0.63 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Friday, June 30th. This represents a $2.52 annualized dividend and a yield of 3.41%. State Streets dividend payout ratio (DPR) is currently 35.29%.

Insider Activity at State Street

In related news, EVP Michael L. Richards sold 1,814 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Thursday, May 18th. The shares were sold at an average price of $68.17, for a total value of $123,660.38. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president now directly owns 33,197 shares in the company, valued at approximately $2,263,039.49. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at the SEC website. In other State Street news, EVP Michael L. Richards sold 1,814 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Thursday, May 18th. The shares were sold at an average price of $68.17, for a total transaction of $123,660.38. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president now directly owns 33,197 shares in the company, valued at $2,263,039.49. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this hyperlink. Also, CFO Eric W. Aboaf sold 11,899 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, May 19th. The stock was sold at an average price of $68.28, for a total transaction of $812,463.72. Following the sale, the chief financial officer now owns 157,860 shares of the companys stock, valued at $10,778,680.80. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. 0.25% of the stock is currently owned by company insiders.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

A number of research firms recently commented on STT. UBS Group lowered their price objective on shares of State Street from $100.00 to $95.00 and set a buy rating for the company in a research report on Tuesday, April 4th. Morgan Stanley lowered their price objective on shares of State Street from $91.00 to $83.00 in a research report on Tuesday, April 18th. StockNews.com began coverage on shares of State Street in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating for the company. Bank of America lowered their price objective on shares of State Street from $84.00 to $80.00 in a research report on Monday, April 17th. Finally, Evercore ISI lowered their target price on State Street from $80.00 to $75.00 in a report on Friday, May 12th. Eight equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and four have given a buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company presently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $82.21.

About State Street

(Get Rating)

State Street Corp. engages in the provision of financial services to institutional investors. It operates through the Commercial and Financial, and Commercial Real Estate segments. The company was founded in 1792 and is headquartered in Boston, MA.

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Orion Oyj (OTCMKTS:ORINY  Get Rating) hit a new 52-week low during mid-day trading on Tuesday . The company traded as low as $24.40 and last traded at $24.40, with a volume of 0 shares traded. The stock had previously closed at $24.40.

Orion Oyj Stock Performance

The stocks 50-day moving average is $25.43 and its 200-day moving average is $25.82. The stock has a market cap of $6.89 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 19.68 and a beta of 0.30. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.22, a current ratio of 3.19 and a quick ratio of 2.04.

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Orion Oyj (OTCMKTS:ORINY  Get Rating) last announced its earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The company reported $0.17 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter. Orion Oyj had a net margin of 24.76% and a return on equity of 37.95%. The firm had revenue of $298.14 million for the quarter.

Orion Oyj Increases Dividend

Orion Oyj Company Profile

The company also recently announced a dividend, which was paid on Monday, April 17th. Investors of record on Friday, March 24th were given a dividend of $0.505 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Thursday, March 23rd. This represents a yield of 1.92%. This is a positive change from Orion Oyjs previous dividend of $0.50. Orion Oyjs dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 41.94%.

(Get Rating)

Orion Oyj develops, manufactures, and markets human and veterinary pharmaceuticals and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) in Finland, Scandinavia, other European countries, North America, and internationally. It provides prescription drugs and self-care products, including Nubeqa for the treatment of prostate cancer; dexdor and Precedex for intensive care sedative; Stalevo and Comtess/Comtan for Parkinson's disease; Simdax for acute decompensated heart failure; and Fareston for breast cancer, as well as Salmeterol/fluticasone Easyhaler, Budesonide/formoterol Easyhaler, Formoterol Easyhaler, Budesonide Easyhaler, Beclomet Easyhaler, and Buventol Easyhaler drugs for the treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

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SmartRent (NYSE:SMRT  Get Rating) and Parsons (NYSE:PSN  Get Rating) are both business services companies, but which is the better stock? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their earnings, profitability, institutional ownership, analyst recommendations, valuation, dividends and risk.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

62.3% of SmartRent shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 99.6% of Parsons shares are owned by institutional investors. 12.0% of SmartRent shares are owned by insiders. Comparatively, 0.9% of Parsons shares are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a stock is poised for long-term growth.

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Valuation & Earnings

This table compares SmartRent and Parsons gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio SmartRent $167.82 million 4.16 -$96.32 million ($0.44) -7.95 Parsons $4.20 billion 1.17 $96.66 million $0.92 50.96

Risk and Volatility

Parsons has higher revenue and earnings than SmartRent. SmartRent is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Parsons, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

SmartRent has a beta of 1.84, suggesting that its stock price is 84% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Parsons has a beta of 0.83, suggesting that its stock price is 17% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Profitability

This table compares SmartRent and Parsons net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets SmartRent -44.05% -21.61% -14.62% Parsons 2.30% 8.38% 4.12%

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent ratings and price targets for SmartRent and Parsons, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score SmartRent 0 1 4 0 2.80 Parsons 2 2 3 0 2.14

SmartRent currently has a consensus price target of $5.17, suggesting a potential upside of 47.68%. Parsons has a consensus price target of $49.78, suggesting a potential upside of 6.18%. Given SmartRents stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, equities analysts plainly believe SmartRent is more favorable than Parsons.

Summary

Parsons beats SmartRent on 8 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About SmartRent

(Get Rating)

SmartRent, Inc., an enterprise software company, provides an integrated smart home operating system to residential property owners and operators, homebuilders, institutional home buyers, developers, and residents in the United States. The companys products and solutions include smart apartments and homes, access control for buildings, common areas, and rental units, asset protection and monitoring, parking management, self-guided tours, and community and resident Wi-Fi. It also offers professional services to customers, which include training, installation, and support services. The company was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona.

About Parsons

(Get Rating)

Parsons Corp. engages in the provision of engineering, design, planning, and construction management services. It offers solutions for commercial, federal, transportation, and water resources. It delivers engineering, construction, systems and resource integration, project and program management, and environmental services to customers. It operates through the Federal Solutions and Critical Infrastructure segments. The Federal Solutions segment is involved in advanced technologies, including cybersecurity, missile defense systems, C5ISR, space launch and situational awareness, geospatial intelligence, RF signals intelligence, nuclear and chemical waste remediation, and engineering services. The Critical Infrastructure segment offers integrated design and engineering services for complex physical and digital infrastructure around the globe. The company was founded by Ralph Monroe Parsons on June 12, 1944 and is headquartered in Centreville, VA.

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Petropavlovsk PLC (LON:POG  Get Rating)s share price passed above its 200-day moving average during trading on Tuesday . The stock has a 200-day moving average of GBX 1.20 ($0.01) and traded as high as GBX 1.65 ($0.02). Petropavlovsk shares last traded at GBX 1.20 ($0.01), with a volume of 26,359,046 shares changing hands.

Petropavlovsk Stock Performance

The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 79.95, a current ratio of 1.86 and a quick ratio of 0.46. The firm has a fifty day simple moving average of GBX 1.20 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of GBX 1.20. The firm has a market capitalization of 47.51 million and a P/E ratio of 120.00.

Petropavlovsk Company Profile

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Petropavlovsk PLC operates as a gold mining company in the Far East of Russia. It principally holds interests in the Pioneer, Albyn, and Malomir mining assets, as well as holds various gold licenses located in Amur region. The company also produces silver deposits. In addition, it provides construction, project and engineering, research, repair and maintenance, and transportation services; and operates educational institutes.

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Shares of Randgold Resources Limited (LON:RRS  Get Rating) passed above its 200-day moving average during trading on Tuesday . The stock has a 200-day moving average of GBX 6,546 ($81.38) and traded as high as GBX 6,862 ($85.31). Randgold Resources shares last traded at GBX 6,546 ($81.38), with a volume of 51,000 shares traded.

Randgold Resources Price Performance

The firms fifty day moving average price is GBX 6,546 and its 200 day moving average price is GBX 6,546.

Randgold Resources Company Profile

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Randgold Resources Limited is engaged in gold mining, exploration and related activities. The Companys activities are focused on West and Central Africa. The Company operates through the gold mining segment. The Company operates various mines, such as Morila, Loulo, Gounkoto, Tongon and Kibali. The Company is exploring in African countries, such as Mali, Senegal, Cote dIvoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

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Silvercrest Asset Management Group LLC lifted its stake in Integer Holdings Co. (NYSE:ITGR  Get Rating) by 40.9% in the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm owned 1,004,347 shares of the medical equipment providers stock after buying an additional 291,616 shares during the period. Silvercrest Asset Management Group LLC owned approximately 3.03% of Integer worth $68,758,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Other large investors have also added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Shell Asset Management Co. increased its holdings in Integer by 4.0% in the third quarter. Shell Asset Management Co. now owns 4,521 shares of the medical equipment providers stock valued at $281,000 after purchasing an additional 172 shares during the period. Public Employees Retirement System of Ohio lifted its position in shares of Integer by 12.4% in the 3rd quarter. Public Employees Retirement System of Ohio now owns 1,591 shares of the medical equipment providers stock worth $99,000 after purchasing an additional 175 shares during the period. Credit Suisse AG boosted its position in Integer by 0.6% during the third quarter. Credit Suisse AG now owns 28,783 shares of the medical equipment providers stock valued at $1,791,000 after acquiring an additional 185 shares during the last quarter. Quadrant Capital Group LLC raised its position in shares of Integer by 17.4% in the 4th quarter. Quadrant Capital Group LLC now owns 1,306 shares of the medical equipment providers stock worth $89,000 after acquiring an additional 194 shares in the last quarter. Finally, MML Investors Services LLC lifted its stake in shares of Integer by 4.3% in the 3rd quarter. MML Investors Services LLC now owns 5,077 shares of the medical equipment providers stock valued at $316,000 after purchasing an additional 210 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 98.42% of the companys stock.

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Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Several analysts have recently commented on the company. KeyCorp raised their target price on Integer from $86.00 to $96.00 in a research note on Friday, April 28th. StockNews.com started coverage on Integer in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock. Piper Sandler started coverage on shares of Integer in a research report on Friday, February 24th. They issued an overweight rating and a $85.00 price target for the company. Wells Fargo & Company assumed coverage on shares of Integer in a report on Friday, May 26th. They set an equal weight rating and a $87.00 price objective on the stock. Finally, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM reiterated a maintains rating on shares of Integer in a report on Friday, April 28th. Four investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and two have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company currently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $88.67.

Integer Stock Performance

Shares of ITGR traded up $0.29 during trading hours on Friday, hitting $84.15. The companys stock had a trading volume of 84,710 shares, compared to its average volume of 307,745. The business has a 50 day simple moving average of $80.41 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $75.07. Integer Holdings Co. has a 52-week low of $50.05 and a 52-week high of $86.18. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.71, a current ratio of 2.79 and a quick ratio of 1.79. The company has a market cap of $2.80 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 41.27, a PEG ratio of 1.71 and a beta of 1.12.

Integer (NYSE:ITGR  Get Rating) last announced its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The medical equipment provider reported $0.87 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $0.82 by $0.05. The firm had revenue of $378.79 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $352.43 million. Integer had a net margin of 4.71% and a return on equity of 9.54%. The companys revenue for the quarter was up 21.8% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the prior year, the firm posted $0.78 earnings per share. On average, equities analysts expect that Integer Holdings Co. will post 4.15 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Integer Profile

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Integer Holdings Corp. engages in the manufacture and development of medical devices and components. It operates through the Medical and Non-Medical segments. The Medical segment includes the cardio and vascular, cardiac and neuromodulation, surgical, orthopedics, and portable medical product lines. The Non-Medical segment comprises customized battery power and management systems, charging and docking stations, and power supplies.

Further Reading

Want to see what other hedge funds are holding ITGR? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Integer Holdings Co. (NYSE:ITGR  Get Rating).

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Standex International Co. (NYSE:SXI  Get Rating) Director Thomas E. Chorman sold 569 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Friday, June 2nd. The stock was sold at an average price of $141.00, for a total value of $80,229.00. Following the transaction, the director now directly owns 11,950 shares in the company, valued at approximately $1,684,950. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this link.

Standex International Stock Performance

Shares of Standex International stock opened at $143.05 on Friday. The firm has a fifty day moving average of $129.72 and a two-hundred day moving average of $117.01. The stock has a market capitalization of $1.70 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 12.90, a PEG ratio of 2.44 and a beta of 1.19. Standex International Co. has a 52 week low of $79.02 and a 52 week high of $147.40. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.29, a quick ratio of 2.73 and a current ratio of 3.53.

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Standex International (NYSE:SXI  Get Rating) last released its quarterly earnings data on Friday, May 5th. The industrial products company reported $1.65 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $1.57 by $0.08. Standex International had a net margin of 17.91% and a return on equity of 14.67%. The business had revenue of $184.30 million during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $178.09 million. During the same quarter in the prior year, the company earned $1.54 EPS. The firms quarterly revenue was down 2.6% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, equities research analysts predict that Standex International Co. will post 6.65 EPS for the current year.

Standex International Dividend Announcement

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Standex International

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, May 25th. Investors of record on Wednesday, May 10th were given a $0.28 dividend. This represents a $1.12 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 0.78%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Tuesday, May 9th. Standex Internationals dividend payout ratio is currently 10.10%.

A number of large investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Arizona State Retirement System increased its holdings in Standex International by 2.9% during the 4th quarter. Arizona State Retirement System now owns 3,376 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $346,000 after purchasing an additional 96 shares in the last quarter. Synovus Financial Corp increased its holdings in Standex International by 2.0% during the 4th quarter. Synovus Financial Corp now owns 4,832 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $495,000 after purchasing an additional 97 shares in the last quarter. Martingale Asset Management L P boosted its stake in shares of Standex International by 0.8% during the 4th quarter. Martingale Asset Management L P now owns 13,231 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $1,355,000 after buying an additional 103 shares during the last quarter. KBC Group NV boosted its stake in shares of Standex International by 13.2% during the 1st quarter. KBC Group NV now owns 1,108 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $136,000 after buying an additional 129 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Captrust Financial Advisors boosted its stake in shares of Standex International by 1.7% during the 1st quarter. Captrust Financial Advisors now owns 8,022 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $802,000 after buying an additional 131 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors own 86.70% of the companys stock.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

SXI has been the topic of several research reports. Barrington Research reaffirmed an outperform rating on shares of Standex International in a report on Tuesday, May 2nd. StockNews.com initiated coverage on shares of Standex International in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a strong-buy rating for the company.

About Standex International

(Get Rating)

Standex International Corp. manufactures products and services for commercial and industrial markets. It operates through the following segments: Electronics, Engraving, Scientific, Engineering Technologies, and Specialty Solutions. The Electronics segment is engaged in the manufacturing and selling of electronic components for applications throughout the end-user market spectrum.

Further Reading

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Binance

Binance is to block dollar withdrawals from its US cryptocurrency exchange within days amid a crackdown by the Biden administration on the industry.

Binance.US told customers it would be barring all new deposits in dollars and said American banks would halt withdrawals as early as June 13.

It comes after Binance, the worlds largest cryptocurrency exchange, and its founder Changpeng CZ Zhou were accused of running a web of deception by the US Securities and Exchange Commission as it charged them with misusing investor funds and violating securities laws.

In an overnight statement on Twitter, Binance.US accused authorities across the Atlantic of using extremely aggressive and intimidating tactics in an ideological campaign against cryptocurrencies.

The SEC has taken to using extremely aggressive and intimidating tactics in its pursuit of an ideological campaign against the American digital asset industry. https://t.co/AZwoBOgsqS and our business partners have not been spared in the use of these tactics, which has created pic.twitter.com/rlIe6swIoY  Binance.US  (@BinanceUS) June 9, 2023

Trading, deposits and withdrawals of other cryptocurrencies will remain operational on the exchange. It said it would transfer to being a crypto-only exchange.

It appeared to urge customers to withdraw or exchange their US dollars before the freeze came into force. We encourage customers to take appropriate action with their USD, the exchange said.

The exchange insisted it would continue to maintain a one-to-one ratio of deposits to reserves. It cautioned the exchange could be subject to downtime because of elevated volumes.

The offshore group set up Binance.US, an American subsidiary, after its main exchange was banned in 2019.

Regulators have unleashed a sweeping crackdown on cryptocurrency exchanges following the implosion of FTX, the second largest digital coin exchange, last year.

The warning from Binance came as Moodys, the credit rating agency, downgraded its rating of Coinbase from stable to negative.

Coinbase, which is valued at $12bn (9.6bn) and listed in the US, was also sued earlier this week by US regulators and accused of selling unregistered securities.

The ratings agency said the change reflects the uncertain magnitude of impact the SECs charges will have on Coinbases business model and cash flows.

Nansen, the cryptocurrency analysis company, said Binances global exchange had suffered around $1.9bn in net outflows over the last seven days, and $348m over the past 24 hours.

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Five out of seven people, who were missing after massive flooding following the destruction of the Kakhoka dam in southern Ukraine, have been found dead, said the local mayor of the Nova Kakhovka city, Azernews reports, citing Anadolu Agency.

"Today it became known that out of seven people who were grazing cattle, five drowned. We are currently engaged in the evacuation of the remaining two people," Vladimir Leontyev told Russian media.

Leontyev said that the emergency services have started pumping out water, after which the process of restoration will start.

He accused Ukraine of preparing the sabotage and said that multiple US-made HIMARS missiles hit the dam.

"Overflights by drones were carried out, they knew perfectly well where each HIMARS missile hit, they knew the state of the hydroelectric power station, and struck the final blow at the vulnerable areas," he said.?

Russia and Ukraine on Tuesday accused each other of damaging the Kakhovka dam, which led to the flooding of the neighboring settlements.

Moscow accused Ukraine of attempting to cut Crimea off the freshwater it receives from the Kakhovka Reservoir, formed by the dam, while Kyiv claimed that Russia tries to slow an expected counteroffensive.
Binance.US, a cryptocurrency trading platform set up by Binance chief Changpeng Zhao to serve U.S. clients, said on Friday that it has suspended U.S. dollar deposits to protect customers amid intensifying regulatory pressure.

See related article: Why the US is waging war on Binance, Coinbase

Fast facts

Binance.US tweeted Friday that it has also notified its users of an upcoming pause of fiat withdrawal channels with its banking partners as early as June 13.

The companys move comes after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday sued Binance entities and Zhao on Monday for alleged unregistered offers and sales of securities.

The SEC has taken to using extremely aggressive and intimidating tactics in its pursuit of an ideological campaign against the American digital asset industry, Binance.US tweeted. Binance.US and our business partners have not been spared in the use of these tactics, which has created challenges for the banks with whom we work.

The exchange noted that trading, staking, deposits and withdrawals in cryptocurrencies remain fully operational.

The U.S. platform said it will also delist U.S. dollar trading pairs starting next week, but it will continue to support stablecoin pairs.

In an additional action against Binance, the SEC on Tuesday asked a federal judge to freeze the assets of Binance.US. In response, Binance.US tweeted on Tuesday that user assets remain safe and secure.

See related article: Crypto industry reacts to SECs lawsuit against Binance
7 June 2023  Lagos, Nigeria  Building on the resounding success of the maiden edition of the Fidelity International Trade and Creative Connect (FITCC) in London, UK last November, leading financial institution, Fidelity Bank Plc, has announced plans to host the second edition of the trade expo in Houston, Texas in the United States of America.

Tagged FITCC Houston, the event would hold on Wednesday, 18th and Thursday, 19th October 2023 at the George R. Brown Convention Center, 1001 Avenida de las Americas, Houston, Texas 77010.

Situating the critical role FITCC plays in the banks export trade strategy, the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Fidelity Bank Plc, Nneka Onyeali-Ikpe stated that, Fidelity Bank is very much invested in supporting export trade and has consistently demonstrated this by the interventions and innovations that we bring to the space. Beyond the instrument of financing, some of our key interventions in the space revolve around business management capacity development with initiatives like the Export Management Programme (EMP) which we host in partnership with the Lagos Business School and the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) and market access development initiatives like FITCC.

To promote Nigerias non-oil exports and facilitate integrations to global supply-chain networks, FITCC Houston will host leading businesses, entrepreneurs, investors and regulators operating in the commodity, service, creative, fashion and FinTech sectors in Nigeria and the United States. The participants would explore partnership, co-creation and foreign direct investments opportunities.

Participating businesses will benefit from curated market access engagements, investment and partnership opportunities, extended brand exposure before a global audience as well as speaking and networking opportunities amongst a long list of benefits in FITCC Houston.

Interested businesses and participants are encouraged to register for the conference at www.fidelitybank.ng/fitcc .

Fidelity Bank is a full-fledged customer commercial bank operating in Nigeria with over 8million customers serviced across its 250 business offices and digital banking channels. The bank was recognized as the Best Payment Solution Provider Nigeria 2023 and Best SME Bank Nigeria 2022 by the Global Banking and Finance Awards. The bank has also won awards for the Fastest Growing Bank and MSME & Entrepreneurship Financing Bank of the Year at the 2021 BusinessDay Banks and Other Financial Institutions (BAFI) Awards.
BudgIT, a leading civic-tech organization advocating for transparency and accountability in Nigerias public finance, is calling on the Budget Office of the Federation and the Office of the Minister for Finance of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to promptly publish the 2022 third quarter budget implementation report as mandated by extant legislation.

It has been eight months since the end of the third quarter of 2022, and according to the law, the report's publication ought not to extend beyond 30 working days after the end of the quarter. This request is pertinent, having ascertained that the report is presently inaccessible on the official website of the Budget Office of the Federation as of June 8, 2023.

Under Section 30 (1) of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2007, the law states, It is the Minister of Finance's responsibility, through the Budget Office of the Federation, to diligently monitor and evaluate the Annual Budget's implementation. This involves the critical role of analyzing budgetary objectives and presenting thorough quarterly reports to both the Fiscal Responsibility Commission and the National Assembly's Joint Finance Committee.

Section 30 (2) further mandates the Minister of Finance to ensure that the prepared reports, as per subsection (1), are published in mass media, electronic platforms, and on the official Ministry of Finance website no later than 30 days after the end of each quarter.

BudgITs Head of Research and Policy Advisory, Iniobong Usen, commented on the implication of the delay. Delayed release of the Budget Implementation Report compromises accountability and leaves citizens in the dark regarding the management of public resources. The situation also hinders the timely intervention required when budget implementation is not going according to plan.

BudgIT, therefore, calls on the Budget Office of the Federation to adhere to established provisions of the enabling legislation that promotes fiscal discipline, transparency, and accountability in managing the nations finance. We also urge persons in public leadership to act transparently to help citizens understand how the government functions.

Signed

Communications Associate

Nancy Odimegwu


The crisis rocking Polaris Bank Limited seem unending as over 40 employees of the bank reportedly shut down activities at the headquarters of the bank on Tuesday over illegal termination of employment contracts.

It was learnt that the aggrieved staff members were recently sacked by the newly inaugurated management of the bank headed by Mr. Adekunle Sonola.

This development came following the controversial acquisition of the bank as announced by the Central Bank of Nigeria under Governor Godwin Emefiele, along with the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON).

It was also learnt that there were concerns over how the banks acquisition contravened CAMA Act 2020 which stipulates ownership of businesses operating in Nigeria to be more open and transparent.

According to reports, Polaris Bank was illegally sold to shell corporations which were purportedly used as a front by a long-known secrecy seller, Lumbro Corporate Services Limited in Jersey.

Reports pointed out that the non-disclosure of the real owners of the bank, not only violates Nigerias law but also heightens concerns about the continued use of offshore secrecy for asset shielding in a country like Nigeria, notorious for corruption and illicit financing involving PEPs and dodgy businesspeople.

The illegal sacking also came while some in the banking sector were calling on the government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to reverse the sale of the bank which is believed to have been acquired fraudulently.

Reports gathered revealed that the employees were sacked illegally against labour laws and were yet to be paid severance packages and for that, they had threatened to picket the bank should their salaries not be paid.

The bank reportedly withheld the salaries of over 100 of its staff who had initially threatened to picket the lenders headquarters should the needful not be done.

It was also learnt that Polaris bank sacked another group of 40 of its branch managers in June, 2023 for having a non-performing loan ratio above 5 per cent.

Based on the development, the National Union of Banks, Insurance and Financial Institutions Employees (NUBIFE) on Tuesday staged a protest at the head office of Polaris Bank in Lagos over alleged violation of workers rights and disregard for labour laws.

The leaders and members of the union, while chanting solidarity songs, expressed their grievances to the management of the bank for laying off over 40 of its workers nationwide without paying them their accrued entitlement and allowances.

It was learnt that NUBIFIE members arrived the venue of the protest with placards bearing some inscriptions like Banking is not slavery, stop dehumanizing workers: Mass retrenchment cannot grow the bank and Polaris Bank management should stop the mass sack of workers.

Other inscriptions read thus, Respect our collective bargaining and rights of workers: Outsourcing must wear human face and Workers deserve better treatment, among others placed on the banks gate, which was under lock and key.

Speaking on the ground of protest, one Onyike said, he had put in 20 years in the service of the bank and was sacked on June 1, 2023, without any disengagement allowance, disclosing that he has not been paid his one-month salary in lieu of notice, which is N68,000.

Describing the process of the sack as an unfair labour practice as the financial institution did not follow due process, even after consulting the management, the union decried managements alleged high-handedness, as well as inhuman treatment of workers.

Another affected worker, Olusomu Eyikogbe said he had worked for over eight years and collected his own sack letter on June 1, 2023, as he is also yet to receive his one-month salary in lieu of the notice.

The general secretary of NUBIFIE, Muhammed Sheikh lamented that the unjust layoffs are a gross violation of workers right to a collectively bargained exit package which is also against labour laws.

The new management came on board barely six months ago and instead of settling down to look at how to move the bank forward, they started sacking workers.

You cannot have a worker dedicate the better part of his life having worked over 15 years for the progress of your company and then you wake up one morning and decide to terminate their employment giving them only one-month basic salary. That is completely wrong.

He stressed that any employer, company or organisation which thinks that it can break the law guiding workers or violate due process as it pertains to labour, the union will wade in to protect its members.

Sheikh revealed that the union got reliable information prior to the sacking, and that it wrote severally to the management of the bank to desist from it or be mindful of due process if they are planning to sack, but they shunned the warning.

He stressed that as a labour union, its members rights as workers deserve to be protected at all cost and that NUBIFIE would continue to picket the bank together with the national body of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) until the issue is rectified.

NLC is aware of what is going on, members will be joining us if there is no headway. Our civil society coalition partners are also aware, they are waiting in the wings to join us.
During a trip to an AI conference in Ghana, I had an unexpected conversation at the immigration office that made me reflect on the fear of innovation prevalent in Africa. An officer had probed further into my purpose of visit and on mentioning that I was attending an AI conference, another official, listening in, exclaimed, "So you guys are the ones that want to strip people of their jobs!"

The world we live in is undeniably a world of innovation. Looking back through history, we can draw parallels to previous eras of innovation, such as the industrial age where mechanical tools like tractors and mills improved manual labor in farming; and then the emergence of the ongoing Information Age where computers rendered skills like typewriting and shorthand obsolete. Going to a cybercafe to pay a browsing fee also faded with the emergence of Google. Formerly, we used to be amazed at a walking library (someone who recites a plethora of information offhand-recitations such as the State and Capitals of countries in the world) but now, the effect has lessened because we now have the library itself in our pockets. Concerns arose about the internet that students would disregard physical libraries and become complacent in their studies. While some of these concerns materialized, it existed side by side with the positive enablements brought by the internet.

Of course, we must do our best to ensure emerging technologies are responsible, ethical, and unbiased, but we cannot shy away from innovation out of fear of losing jobs ready to be replaced or transformed by these advancements. It is akin to a parent who insists their child attends university from home to prevent negative influences. Admittedly, this approach ignores the fact that one cannot be omnipresent. Instead, the responsibility lies in instilling values in individuals to empower them to make informed decisions and heighten their discretion and discernment. Similarly, we must approach ChatGPT, an emerging technology, with the intention of harnessing its potential rather than fidgeting on unavoidable consequences.

Moving on, we will uncover three (3) ways ChatGPT will transform the status quo of education for African students and how it makes them effective in high-order thinking.

1. Easy Access to Streamlined Information:

While Google Search offers a broad range of search results, it often presents students with an overwhelming number of options. They must sift through numerous web pages, articles, and resources to find the most relevant and reliable information. This process can be time-consuming and sometimes lead to information overload, making it challenging for students to focus on the specific information they need. In contrast, ChatGPT simplifies the process by retrieving and presenting information directly to the student. Instead of spending hours browsing through search results, students can ask their queries to ChatGPT, receiving concise and accurate responses. This streamlined approach saves valuable time and allows students to focus on understanding and applying the information. Moreover, ChatGPTs ability to fetch information from diverse sources, including academic databases and research papers, expands students' access to scholarly articles and valuable resources that may not be easily discoverable through conventional search engines.

2. Facilitating Personalized Learning:

One of the challenges in traditional classrooms is catering to the diverse learning needs of students. While students often turn to Google Search for assistance, its reliance on keywords and algorithms may not always guarantee the most comprehensive or relevant information. ChatGPT, on the other hand, employs advanced natural language processing and machine learning techniques to understand the context and nuances of students' queries. It provides tailored and in-depth responses, considering specific requirements, learning goals, and areas of interest. For example, a Physics student struggling to grasp the law of lift in aerodynamics could seek help from ChatGPT, asking for an explanation to a 5-year-old, using relatable examples. This personalized nature of ChatGPT ensures that no student is left behind, as explanations, examples, or additional resources can be provided multiple times and in different ways to cater to their pace, learning styles, and level of comprehension.

3. Empowering Students for Higher-Order Thinking:

Students can engage in ongoing dialogues with ChatGPT, seeking clarification, asking follow-up questions, and exploring concepts in greater detail. This goes beyond mere memorization of vast amounts of information and places students in a position where they can ask critical questions that elicit valuable responses from ChatGPT. As the saying goes, 'garbage in, garbage out,' the quality of the questions posed to ChatGPT directly influences the quality of the answers received. In traditional classroom settings, when teachers ask, 'Any questions?' students often respond with silence or a mumbled no. However common this may be, this lack of engagement could indicate a gap in the learning process, as students' minds ought to be piqued after exposure to information. With ChatGPT's ability to engage students in dialogue, it demands thought-provoking queries from students in order to provide quality response in return. This demand becomes a catalyst for intellectual growth, unlocking the vital quality of being a scholar: critical thinking. It is through this critical thinking that students can become problem solvers, taking available information as materials to be woven into innovative solutions, rather than an optimum measure of intellectual prowess.

Students, undoubtedly, must seize the existing advantages within ChatGPT to propel their own advancement. Simultaneously, institutions must acknowledge that innovative technologies often yield unintended consequences; however, its potential for empowerment is tremendous. As universities embrace emerging technologies such as ChatGPT, they pave the way for a transformative educational landscape that fosters active learners, critical thinkers, and innovative problem solvers.
Following years of civil war that devastated Liberia's education system, a new initiative is revitalizing the country's carpentry schools.

The Youth Rising project - supported by the European Union and Government of Sweden and implemented by the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) - aims to revive the carpentry industry and equip young Liberians with valuable skills. The project aims at strengthening the TVET sector of Liberia by building, rehabilitating, and equipping TVET workshops and training of instructors.

The project supports eight schools in seven counties and involves developing curricula, training teachers, providing new equipment and introducing new techniques.

At the Booker Washington Institute, a prominent vocational school in Liberia, for example, carpentry instructor James Fallah is acquiring advanced joinery skills.

The carpentry industry has enormous potential to provide jobs and improve livelihoods in Liberia. By reviving these schools, we can ensure that young Liberians have the skills they need to succeed in this industry and contribute to the sustainable development of our country

Mr. Fallah's training is part of a larger effort to upgrade carpentry skills across the country so that Liberians can build livelihoods and contribute to sustainable development, while conserving the country's rich forest.

Carpentry is a critical field in Liberia, where wood is a major natural resource.

Decades of war and economic stagnation have left many carpenters without access to modern techniques or equipment. The Youth Rising project is rectifying this by providing training in advanced carpentry techniques and modernizing tools and equipment.

"The carpentry industry has enormous potential to provide jobs and improve livelihoods in Liberia," says Minister of Youth and Sports, Zeogar Wilson. "By reviving these schools, we can ensure that young Liberians have the skills they need to succeed in this industry and contribute to the sustainable development of our country."

In a bid to boost the capacity of the revived carpentry schools, 12 new carpenters, including two women, recently spent 15 months in South Africa gaining a recognized qualification in the profession from the Furniture Technology Centre in Cape Town.

This achievement will help restore the schools' instructional capability to deliver the new carpentry courses and put into use advanced machines and tools.

Along with the recent training of carpentry teachers, the availability of more modern machine and tools has created an ideal environment for technical schools to impart demand-driven, high-quality skills to students.

This is a crucial milestone in the revival of the carpentry industry in Liberia, which is a vital sector of the economy.

With this development, young people will have the opportunity to acquire essential skills that will enable them to build sustainable livelihoods and make valuable contributions to the country's development and rich forest.

Learning new techniques and gaining a recognized qualification in carpentry has been a life-changing experience for us. We are excited to share our knowledge with the students and to help them develop the skills they need to succeed in the carpentry industry

According to UNIDO, Liberia is actively seeking alternatives to traditional forest logging and has been exploring more durable and sustainable sources of wood. A particular focus has been placed on rubber plantations, where these carpentry students are being engaged and trained to work with rubber trees (Hevea Brasiliensis).

While these trees are primarily cultivated for their latex, their wood can also be used for carpentry purposes.

By utilizing rubber wood, our students are able to create long-lasting furniture and also contribute to sustaining the rich forest of Liberia."

Ms. Meetee Diazee is one of the instructors on the project. She described the training at Furniture Technology Institute in Cape Town, South Africa, as transformative.

"Learning new techniques and gaining a recognized qualification in carpentry has been a life-changing experience for us," said Ms. Diazee. "We are excited to share our knowledge with the students and to help them develop the skills they need to succeed in the carpentry industry."
Binance.US tells customers to withdraw their cash from the exchange as the SEC pursues its 'ideological' attack on the crypto industry

Binance SOPA Images / Getty Images

Binance.US urged its customers to withdraw cash from the crypto exchange in a recent notice.

It said its partner banks are preparing to shut off fiat withdrawal channels.

The moves are part of an "ideological campaign" against the US crypto industry, Binance said.

Binance's US arm is urging its customers to withdraw their cash from the crypto exchange by next week, as the Securities and Exchange Commission tightens the screws in its "ideological campaign" against the industry.

In a tweet Thursday evening, Binance.US alerted customers that its banking partners would be shutting off withdrawal by June 13, which could prevent the exchange from accepting deposits or issuing withdrawals in US dollars.

It urged American customers to withdraw any fiat cash by the June 13 deadline, adding withdrawals could take longer than usual due to elevated activity on the platform. Customer deposits are still safe, it said, as assets are backed on a 1:1 ratio.

After June 13, Binance.US will become a crypto-only platform until it can find "more stable" banking partners, it said.

"The SEC has taken to using extremely aggressive and intimidating tactics in its pursuit of an ideological campaign against the American digital asset industry. Binance.US and our business partners have not been spared in the use of these tactics, which has created challenges for the banks with whom we work," the exchange said in a statement.

"The SEC has brought unjustified civil claims against our business, from which we will continue to vigorously defend ourselves, our customers," it later added.

Binance is facing 13 charges from the SEC, after being scrutinized by regulators for months over its compliance with US securities laws. Among other violations, the SEC has accused the firm of misrepresenting trading controls on Binance.US, as well as secretly allowing "high-value" US clients to trade on Binance.com, though American customers are supposed to be restricted from its main platform.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Fishing boats up to standard after latest round of checks

PHUKET: Officials have declared the latest round of inspections on fishing boats based in Phuket waters have shown no signs of illegal activity such as human trafficking or compromised working conditions.

marine

By The Phuket News

Friday 9 June 2023, 09:00AM

The chief of Phuket Provincial Labour and Welfare Office, Thanapong Orachon, was joined by the chief of the Phuket Provincial Fishery Office, Sittipon Muangsong, and a team of officials who carried out the random inspections on five boats in waters about 4-5 miles from Ratsada Pier on Wednesday (June 7).

The inspections aimed to ensure workers rights are being respected and upheld in the correct manner, with checks on employment and working conditions, valid working permits and wages being paid in the appropriate manner including employees having bank accounts to receive their regular pay.

Futher checks were made to ensure welfare rights such as sufficient regular breaks and time off were being respected as well as ensuring all employees were operating in hygienic conditions.

Simultaneously, the checks were to ensure there was no sign of any form of human trafficking, which Mr Thanapong confirmed there wasnt.

Finally the inspection also ensured there was no form of illegal fishing activity being conducted that could contravene fishing laws.

Apart from protecting the workers in the local fishing industry, the mission also aims to build trust within the international fishing industry to enable Thailand to be promoted to Tier 1 in the ranks, Mr Thanapong explained.

Mr Sittipon said that it was important that the inspection drive not only focused on workers rights but also to protect against any form of illegal activities that would fall foul of fishing laws.

The team carried out a check on the boats to ensure no prohibited tools or machinery was being used, whie making sure all boats were operating under legal and valid permits. Anyone found guilty of breaking any laws would face strict and immediate punishment, Mr Sittpon explained.

However, he confirmed that all of the five boats randomly inspected adhered to all rules, including employee conditions and rights and that no worker was under the minimum legal age of 18.
Hospitals inundated as norovirus infections rise

PHUKET: Officials issued a list of health guidelines yesterday (June 8) after hospitals across the island were inundated with patients over the past few days laid low with gastrointestinal infections.

health

By The Phuket News

Friday 9 June 2023, 03:15PM

The number of people suffering from stomach complaints, abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea has risen sharply this week, with officials stating an average of 100 people a day are seeking medical assistance from hospitals.

The condition, officially known as norovirus, is the most common cause of gastroenteritis and especially prevalent during the colder, rainy season, which Phuket is now in. The colder air makes for ideal temperatures for pathogens to grow, with undercooked foods and unclean water and ice liable to transmit the disease to people. Rotavirus is the condition that most commonly causes diarrhoeal disease among infants and young children.

The official health warning urged people to strictly adhere to the principle of eating clean, hot and well cooked food, to steer clear of raw foods, ensure clean drinking water is consumed and to maintain best-practice personal hygiene.

In an interview with The Phuket News today, Phuket Provincial Public Health Office (PPHO) Chief Kusak Kukiattikoon explained: This is not a new virus. This virus has been spreading in Phuket every year at the beginning of the rainy season. The viruses that cause diarrhea are Novirus and Rotavirus.

We found these viruses every year following the beginning of the rainy season and would last for at least a month but this year the number rises higher than the previous years and social media is very fast so people learned about it quickly.

According to the number of patients being hospitalised around Phuket between June 6  9, there have been 289 patients with the symptoms, of which 66 have already returned home. There were 470 OPD patients at Vachira Phuket Hospital and 34 of them were hospitalised. At Thalang Hospital there were 122 patients at the OPD, and two were hospitalised. At Patong Hospital, there were more than 200 people at the OPD and 10 of those were hospitalised.

Doctors are now providing symptomatic treatment for people who do not need to stay at the hospital. For those who are highly dehydrated and cannot eat and drink, they will be hospitalised with saline solution.

I would not say this is a normal situation as it is an epidemic but we can handle it. There is no dead case and we have sufficient manpower and tools from both government and private hospitals.

People should protect themselves with food hygiene. Eat clean and freshly cooked food, do not share a spoon and fork, and wash their hands often. People who are at risk or start be unable to drink and eat, and feel fatigued should see a doctor immediately.

Dr Kusaks comments came after yesterdays meeting outlining the general health guidelines, which was held at Provincial Hall chaired by Phuket Govenor Narong Woonciew. He was joined by: Vice Governor Danai Sunantarod; Phuket Provincial Public Health Office (PPHO) Chief Kusak Kukiattikoon; Rewat Areerob, President of Phuket Provincial Administrative Organisation (PPAO); Supachok La-Ongphet, Deputy Mayor of Phuket City; Wipha Sairat, Director of PPAO; Dr Chuchat Nijawatana, Director of Phuket Hospital Chalong; Dr Banphot Pankhueaw, Director of Thalang Hospital; Suphalak La-Ongpetch, Deputy Director. Vachira Phuket Hospital; Muen Prae Boonlom, Director of Patong Hospital; and Permkiat Ketkul, Chairman of the Private Education Coordination and Promotion Committee, Phuket Province.

PPHOs Dr Kusak explained that on Tuesday there were over 100 public hospitals and private clinics who reported patients of all ages complaining of stomach infections, abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea, while some also complained of high fever. A significant number of the patients were children and it was found cases of diarrhea had been escalating in schools across the island but especially in the districts of Muang, Kathu and Thalang.

In response the PPHO liaised with other government agencies to propose that all health facilities be on the look out for and monitor water bourne diseases in an attempt to control any widespread outbreak.

Additionally, all educational facilities and public spaces were urged to conduct thorough surveillance and to specifically ensure that best-practice hygiene was being adhered to in regards to preparation and consumption of food and personal hygiene such as washing of hands, etc. Areas where disease could spread were also required to be cleaned and disinfected thoroughly.

All local administrative organisations were instructed to carry out surveillance of food sanitation standards in places where food is sold, such as restaurants, food stalls, fresh markets, flea markets and street food vendors, while also ensuring all public areas were thoroughly cleaned with a disinfectant such as chlorine. Particular focus was to be on establishments that supply drinking water and ice are to ensure the production process of such is conducted safely to reduce any risk of contamination.

Furthermore, all wastewater treatment systems are to be disinfected with chlorine before being released to public water sources and an ongoing monitoring of water supply systems need to be enforced.

Ongoing tests of water, ice and feces and vomit from selected patients would also be conducted to monitor the situation.
Phuket businesses to pitch tourism development proposals to Move Forward

PHUKET: Aiming to revitalise Phukets tourism industry, local entrepreneurs have prepared several proposals for the Move Forward Party (MFP) and are ready to present them to the winners of the national elections. Prime minister hopeful party leader Pita Limjaroenrat Pita will be meeting local business people duting his vitis to Phuket today (June 9).

tourismpolitics

By The Phuket News

Friday 9 June 2023, 11:44AM

After a successful high season, the PTA expects this years visitor numbers to reach 60-70% of the 2019 level. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub / File

According to Phuket Tourist Association (PTA) Chairman Thanet Tantipiriyakit, the measures to be proposed to Move Forward include: R evamp ing the public transport system

evamp the public transport system P rioriti sing tourism as a key economic driver

rioriti tourism as a key economic driver I ncreas ing international flights

ncreas international flights E nsur ing transparent government support

nsur transparent government support M aintain ing a balanced approach to international relationships. The following list was published today by state news agency NNT. The report clearly says that the PTA has prepared six proposals but reveals only the aforementioned five. The PTA estimates that this years visitor numbers will reach approximately 60-70% of the 2019 figures, with corresponding tourism revenue projected to rise to 70-80% of the 2019 amount. However, the ongoing effects of the pandemic and slower recovery in major markets like China are expected to result in a decline in hotel occupancy rates during the low season. The association estimates an average rate of 65-70% occupancy, signaling the need for continued efforts to overcome these challenges. MFP leader Pita Limjaroenrat will meet his Phuket supporters on a one-day visit to the island th today (June 9). The first of the scheduled events starts at noon in Kathu.
Phuket celebrates World Ocean Day

PHUKET: A ceremony was held at Patong Beach yesterday (June 8) to acknowledge World Ocean Day with officials sounding calls for more to be done to protect the marine environment.

marineanimalsenvironmentpatongpollutiontourismwildlife

By The Phuket News

Friday 9 June 2023, 12:24PM

The concept behind World Ocean Day was initiated in 1992 by Canadas International Centre for Ocean Development and the Ocean Institute of Canada, before the date was officially recognised by the United Nations in 2008; the nominated day of June 8 has been recgnised the world over ever since and this years theme was Planet Ocean: tides are changing.

The ceremony was held just across from the Dolphin Island at the north end of Patong Beach and presided over by Phuket Vice Governor Amnuay Pinsuwan with a local theme of Change and Restore the Blue World.

Joining V/Gov Amnuay was Wissanu Jaengjai, Director of the Region 10 Office of Marine and Coastal Resources, along with Sanakorn Kisin, Deputy Mayor of Patong, representatives from public and private sectors and members of the general public.

Mr Wissanu Jaengjai encouraged not only people locally in Phuket but all around the world to mark the day and commit to a more responsible and sustainable approach to protecting oceans and all that inhabit them, from sharks and sea turtles to ecosystems and corals.

He added that such an approach echoes the central governments policy and the commitment of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment to solving the problem of degradation of ecosystems and the marine environment in a sustainable way.

Mr Sanakorn highlighted how Patong Municipality has its own ocean, environment and beach conservation policy that has seen a total of 32 ublic engagement campaigns take place to raise awareness as to the perilious plight.

Regular beach clean ups and a robust approach to waste management are cornerstones to promoting Patong as a pleasant and liveable location and a world-class tourist destination, Mr Sanakorn added.

Additionally, there are regular scuba diving exercises to retrieve garbage from the ocean and instances where new born turtles are released into the water that can further enhance the overall health of marine life, he said.
Bitcoin prices rose in Friday morning trading in Asia, but failed to break back above US$27,000 after a rollercoaster week in crypto markets following the lawsuits by U.S. securities regulators against the Binance and Coinbase exchanges. Other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies gained, with Polygons Matic token leading the winners.

Top 10 gain ground

Bitcoin strengthened 1.06% over the last 24 hours to US$26,551 at 7:00 a.m. in Hong Kong, making up some losses from earlier this week after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed lawsuits against two of the worlds biggest exchanges, alleging dozens of of crypto tokens have been illegally offered and traded as unregistered securities. The worlds largest crypto by market capitalization is now down 1.26% for the past seven days after sharper declines earlier in the week, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Ether climbed 1.1% to US$1,849, and logged a 0.98% weekly decline.

Polygons MATIC was the biggest gainer among the top 10, with a 2.69% rise, but it has lost 12.02% in value for the past week.

Binances BNB added 2.01% in the past 24 hours, the second-largest rise among the top 10, but is a big loser for the week, down 13.9%.

The total cryptocurrency market cap edged up 0.35% to US$1.1 trillion in the 24 hours through to 8:30 a.m. in Hong Kong, while daily trading volume dropped 35.3% to US$25.9 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.

In a new court filing on Wednesday, the SEC said transactions involving several billions of dollars of customer funds moved through now-defunct Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank under accounts allegedly controlled by Binance officials, including chief executive Changpeng Zhao.

Sachin Verma, an accountant employed by the SEC, said in the filing that some of the funds were moved to accounts suspected to belong to offshore firms linked to Zhao and Binance, in various regions including the Seychelles, Lithuania and Kazakhstan.

Zhao tweeted on Thursday that this is simply false in response to a CoinDesk article that said US$12 billion of funds was sent to Zhao, citing the Wednesday filing.

To the best of my knowledge, Binance.US had in total roughly US$2 billion in user funds. This number in USD equivalent fluctuates a little as crypto prices change. And declining as users withdraw due to recent news, Zhao tweeted. All user funds are accounted for, and never left the Binance.US platform (unless users withdraw themselves of course), ever.

Gordon Grant, co-head of trading at crypto brokerage Genesis Trading, said that this weeks sweeping regulatory pronouncements saw crypto realized volatility begin to rear its head.

After seeming months of coiling in an ornery, reptilian rip-rap price action, the successive Monday and Tuesday swoon-soar tandem on the back of Binance and Coinbase headlines preempted consternation, head scratching and, if nothing else, a recognition that the asset class remains habitually prone to lurid gaps in price action, Grant said.

In an email, Le Shi, head of trading at Auros, a crypto market-making and algorithmic trading firm, said cryptocurrency trading volumes continue to plumb the depths last seen in the middle of the last crypto bear market.

CoinShares, a European crypto investment firm, said in a Thursday report shared with Forkast that while the SEC lawsuits seem to carry more severe implications for Binance, the potential impact on Coinbase and the broader crypto industry is significant.

The charges insinuate that a majority of crypto assets should be categorized as securities, which would radically modify the regulatory landscape, potentially confining access to regulated Wall Street entities (assuming that they have the appetite once the litigation is over), CoinShares wrote.

CoinShares added that the shift could potentially place the control of the crypto industry within the grasp of traditional financial institutions.

NFT sales drop

The indexes are proxy measures of the performance of the global NFT market. They are managed by CryptoSlam, a sister company of Forkast.News under the Forkast.Labs umbrella.

In the non-fungible token (NFT) market, the Forkast 500 NFT index dipped 1.07% to 3,219.65 in the 24 hours to 9:45 a.m. in Hong Kong. The index was down 4.59% for the week.

NFT sales on Ethereum fell 14.4% over the last 24 hours to US$13.72 million, and sales on the Bitcoin network dropped 9.34% to US$3.53 million, according to CryptoSlam data.

[Its a] hard market to analyze right now, Yehudah Petscher, NFT Strategist at Forkast Labs, the parent company of Forkast.News, said on Friday.

On one hand I believe well see capitulation to the negative news, especially once the SEC files lawsuits against (NFT) projects, but at the same time, we are seeing bullish news from projects, art, among others, on an almost daily basis, Petscher added. I dont think the SECs lawsuits have played a factor yet. They should soon.

Uncategorized Ordinals  recently popular Bitcoin Ordinals that are not part of an established collection  saw the largest sales in the past 24 hours with a 74.13% rise to US$1.54 million.

The Captainz, an Ethereum-based collection, recorded a 2.33% increase in sales to US$1.12 million, making it the second most sold collection in the past day, followed by Mythos chain-based DMarkets US$1.11 million daily sales.

In another development, crypto exchange Kraken has launched its NFT marketplace out of beta with over 250 collections.

Luca Netz, the chief executive officer of intellectual property firm and NFT collection Pudgy Penguins, is set to launch a Web 3.0 licensing marketplace named Overpass as early as late June, according to a Thursday report by media firm NFT Now.

Pudgy Penguins is an Ethereum-based NFT collection of 8,888 unique digital assets. It is the 19th largest collection in all-time sales, with more than US$257 million traded, according to CryptoSlam data.

U.S. stock futures fall

New York Stock Exchange. Image: Getty Images

U.S. stock futures fell as of 10:10 a.m. in Hong Kong after the major U.S. stock indexes posted strong gains overnight. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures dropped 0.14%, and S&P 500 futures dipped 0.1%. Nasdaq Futures fell 0.1%.

Overnight in the U.S., the Nasdaq Composite rose 1.02%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 0.5%. The S&P 500 added 0.62%, hitting a new high for the year so far.

In macroeconomic developments, the U.S. Labor Department reported Thursday that the countrys initial jobless claims totaled 261,000 for the week ended June 3. That was the highest weekly level for such claims since October 30, 2021.

The jobless claims pointing to a slowing of the economy are another factor suggesting the U.S. Federal Reserves more than year-long hikes in interest rates are having an effect and may influence the Feds decision-making on rates at its meeting on June 14.

U.S. interest rates are now between 5% and 5.25%, the highest since 2006.

The CME FedWatch Tool predicts a 74.8% chance the Fed will leave rates unchanged at next weeks meeting, and a 25.2% chance for another 25-basis-point rate hike.

(Updates with equity section.)
Phuket hits last lap in bid for Expo 2028

PHUKET: Many Thais are crossing their fingers in the hope that Phuket is selected to host the Specialised Expo 2028, as the final presentation and vote draws near.

tourism

By Bangkok Post

Friday 9 June 2023, 10:00AM

Chiruit: Making final pitch on June 21. Photo: Bangkok Post

A Thai delegation will get to make their final pitch to the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) on June 21, reports the Bangkok Post.

They will make the case for why the southern resort island province deserves to host the expo and find out when voting will be held to pick the winner, Chiruit Isarangkun Na Ayuthaya, president of the Thailand Convention and Exhibition Bureau (TCEB), said on Wednesday (June 7).

The theme proposed by Thailand for the expo is Future of Life: Living in Harmony, Sharing Prosperity, which will require a budget of around B4.18 billion, he said. The event will take place from Mar 21 to June 20, 2028.

The event is expected to draw about 7 million visitors from 106 countries, he said. It is likely to help generate up to B50bn in economic value, he added.

Moreover, the expo will serve as a core part of Thailands plan to promote its health and medical tourism, with the resort island being upgraded to a key health and medical tourism city of global standing, Mr Chiruit said.

Phuket is seen as one of four cities running neck-and-neck in the final round of the race to be selected to host the 2028 expo, he said, adding the other cities that have made it this far are the Serbian capital of Belgrade, Spains Barcelona and Minnesota in the United States.

The final presentation isnt something we are worried about, but rather the vote, he said.

More than 120 member nations of the BIE will cast their votes, he said.

Keep your fingers crossed and we will see if Phuket can win the selection or not.

The BIEs selection committee previously visited Phuket to inspect its readiness to be selected, he said.

If Thailand emerges from the vote triumphant, it will become the first country in Southeast Asia to host the expo thus far.

Pattanachai Singhavara, director of the TCEBs southern region office, said a night reception will be organised in Paris on June 16 for the BIE member countries and for Thailand to convince them that Phuket is ready to become the host of the expo.
A knife was seized when a 43-year-old North Dumfries woman was arrested for allegedly breaking her release orders in Cambridge.

Waterloo Regional Police Service said the woman was seen on Concession Street the evening of June 7 and was seen breaching the terms of her release and taken into custody.

Police said a knife was seized, as well as various drugs, including suspected fentanyl, methamphetamine and a variety of unmarked pills.

She was charged with two counts of failing to comply with a release order, breach of probation, possession of a weapon for dangerous purposes, and three counts of possession for the purpose of trafficking drugs.

The woman was held in police custody for a bail hearing.

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Parents, teachers, students and members of the community gathered at the grand opening of the new playground at Forest Glen Public School.







After a year of fundraising for a new playground, a New Hamburg elementary school celebrated its grand opening on June 8.

More than 20 community donors including families and businesses contributed more than $85,000 for two playgrounds at Forest Glen Public School.

It just tells us how supportive our community is," said Tamara Kaufman, principal at Forest Glen Public School. "Were so lucky to be surrounded by a supportive community and all of the businesses and the organizations and the families that donated."

Many businesses reached out to offer support after learning about the playground project, said April Brown, head of the playground committee for the school council.

"They wanted to give back to their community and this was a project they thought was really important for New Hamburg, said Brown.

Although the playgrounds were put up late last year, they had to be closed during the winter.

The playground is also open to the public and will particularly benefit anyone who doesnt have a backyard or safe place at their home to play.

Maddie Brown, a Grade 5 student, said shes excited because the kindergarten students can play on it.

When I was in Grade 1, my siblings would see me playing on the playground but they werent allowed to use it and it made them really sad so I'm happy that now everyone can feel included," she said.

Sawyer Steeves is also excited because her little sister whos in junior kindergarten can have a playground at the start of her school year.

Kaufman said outside activities will be beneficial for the kids, too. School is not just about the activities inside, it's about all the activities they get to do outside as well, she said.

Brown agreed. Its that social learning that they get from this unstructured time.

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NORTH DUMFRIES  The Township of North Dumfries is headed to the Ontario Land Tribunal after failing to make a decision on a proposed pit on Alps Road in 2020.

The applicant, a numbered company, appealed to the tribunal after council did not decide on its zone change application for 1662 Alps Rd. within 90 days of receiving a complete application, as required by legislation at the time.

Council has not as of yet taken a position on the zone change application or the parallel (Aggregate Resource Act) licence application, chief administrative officer Andrew McNeely said.

The pit is known as the Chudyk Pit.

The property is sandwiched between three existing pits  the Lafarge Cambridge Pit to the west, Alps Pit to the east and the Cedar Creek pit to the north.

Its about 40.4 hectares in size and fronts onto Alps Road, midway between Dumfries Road and Edworthy Side Road. About 31 hectares would be used for extraction.

Chudyk would be operated by Dufferin Aggregates as an extension to the Alps and Cedar Creek pits. The 1.5 million annual extraction tonnage limit of the Cedar Creek Pit would be shared with Chudyk.

Its estimated there are about five million tonnes of aggregate, 1.5 metres above the groundwater table, at the Chudyk site.

At the time of the application Dufferin Aggregates had applied for an extraction licence from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry.

Five days have been set aside for the land tribunal hearing, starting Sept. 18 at 10 a.m.

On July 10 North Dumfries council is expected to vote on whether to institute an interim control bylaw that would pause approval of new aggregate pits for one year. That would give the township time to strengthen its bylaws around pit impacts on the community such as health and safety from dust, traffic and other effects.

Paige Desmond is a Waterloo Region-based reporter focusing on municipal issues for The Record. Reach her via email: pdesmond@therecord.com

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WATERLOO REGION  A months-long investigation into a fentanyl supply source brought police into two other cities and led to the seizure of large drug stashes and more than $100,000 in cash.

In early 2023, Waterloo Regional Police started looking into fentanyl being supplied to people in both Waterloo Region and Woodstock areas. Woodstock Police Service joined Waterloo Regional Police in conducting this investigation.

Police searched three residences: one on Fergus Avenue in Kitchener, one on Noblewood Drive in Nobleton, and one on King Street in Toronto.

Nobleton is a community of less than 5,000 in King Township, located northwest of Vaughan, Ont.

As a result of the searches, police found signs of drug trafficking and various suspected drugs.

Police seized about three kilograms of fentanyl, three kilograms of cocaine, several ounces of methamphetamine, and about 10 kilograms of a cutting agent, with a total estimated value of $200,000.

Investigators also seized a 2022 Volkswagen Jetta, a 2023 Porche 24G and a 2020 Mercedes G-Wagon, which police said are all proceeds of crime.

The estimated value of all the cars is about $500,000.

Police seized about $140,000 in currency.

Four individuals are now facing more than 20 drug trafficking-related charges. This includes a 31-year-old man from Nobleton, a 38-year-old woman from Cambridge, a 44-year-old man from Cambridge and a 42-year-old man.

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WATERLOO REGION  A Waterloo Regional Police detective said she was concerned for the safety of another officer after being told her colleague would not receive backup support.

Detective Marsha Kalita told a labour arbitration hearing Thursday she had a conversation with another officer that deeply disturbed her. She told the hearing Constable Neal Marcynuk told her in September 2013 he would not provide backup for Constable Angie Rivers or other officers he did not like.

Kalita said Const. Marcynuk also told her Rivers had a mentor from the drug squad only because she slept with a sergeant from that unit.

I asked him if he had any proof of this. I went on to tell him as a female officer myself I was subject to those rumours over the years and they were completely fabricated, said Kalita. And if he didnt have proof that it happened what he was doing was perpetuating a rumour and that wasnt fair to Rivers, said Kalita.

Marcynuk was investigated and was reprimanded for breaching the departments harassment policy, the hearing was told.

The hearing is probing a grievance by Rivers of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at the Waterloo Regional Police Service.

Rivers finished testifying Thursday after 11 days under oath at the arbitration hearing that started about 18 months ago. The hearing dates are scattered, and will likely continue into 2024. Kalita was the only witness called by the police association to give testimony in support of Rivers grievance.

Kalita was hired as a special constable in 1996 and made constable in 1998. By September 2013, she and Rivers had worked together, on and off, in the Cambridge patrol division after Rivers was hired in 2006. Kalita stopped working as a police officer six years ago, but said she never forgot what Marcynuk said in that meeting nearly 10 years ago.

Over the years I told him I worked with people I didnt like but at the end of the day we all back each other up to make sure we get home to our families, testified Kalita. I said: You dont really mean that.

She said Marcynuk paused, and then said, yes, he meant it.

Marcynuk complained that Rivers was rude to members of the public, spoke down to other officers and did not share information, according to Kalita.

So, I asked him for examples and he could not provide any.

Rivers went on sick leave in August 2015, less than 10 years after she was hired. An external and internal investigation concluded she was the victim of overt sexual harassment after Sgt. Nathan Cardoza sent her a number of sexually charged messages, including one that asks for a photograph.

Cardoza was docked 39 hours pay, but Rivers proceeded with a grievance saying she suffered reprisals for complaining about the harassment and gender discrimination.

By the fall of 2013, Rivers was feeling isolated from other members of her platoon, the hearing was told. The officer who shared the same patrol zone, Marcynuk, was deliberately not backing her up, she said.

Kalita was a second generation officer. Her father had been a regional police officer so she was astounded at what Marcynuk was saying to her about not backing up Rivers.

I had never seen or heard anyone say that before, said Kalita. In policing you are a family, and you are there for each other whether you like it or not, just like in a family  that is ingrained in you from the start.

Kalita and Marcynuk spoke on Sept. 29, 2013.

Kalita said she went to the detective office in the Cambridge Division and told Sgt. Larry OConnell what Marcynuk had just told her. Before doing anything formal, she wanted to speak with her husband, who was also a regional police officer.

We talked about what I should do. I could not stop thinking about it, I couldnt sleep.

On Oct. 3, Kalita said she met with Rivers, and told the younger officer to get away from Marcynuk, to ask for a different patrol zone. When Rivers asked why, Kalita said she just had to trust in her advice.

On Oct. 7, Kalita and Rivers met again, and Kalita told her everything Marcynuk had said. Rivers wanted to report it, and the two talked about how to do that.

On Oct. 8, Kalita wrote up notes about the conversation with Marcynuk. Then, she and Rivers met with Staff Sergeant Gerald Nugent on Oct. 10 and told him what Marcynuk had said.

Nugent said he would handle it.

I expected him to be in touch, said Kalita. Nobody ever asked me for my notes.

About three weeks later, she was speaking with Nugent, and he was under the impression everything had been dealt with. Marcynuk was assigned to a different patrol zone, and he was told to apologize to both Kalita and Rivers.

Kalita told him the apologies never happened, and Marcynuks offence warranted a serious investigation. When the zone changes were announced, Marcynuk repeated his threats and told Rivers to her face he would not back her up.

So, I was pretty upset, said Kalita.

She went home and wrote an email to Inspector Daryl Goetz, complaining about the way everything was handled. She was verbally reprimanded for breaking the chain of command, and a letter was placed on her file.

Nobody told her about that letter. She only learned about it during a performance review a year later.

It was disheartening and disappointing. I guess deep down I knew this is the way it would go, but not to this degree, said Kalita.

This incident followed me through my career and impacted me more than I realized, and still impacts me, said Kalita.

During cross examination by the police board lawyer, Donald Jarvis, she acknowledged not knowing about everything that happened after the meeting with Nugent Oct. 10.

Marcynuk was questioned by senior officers about his conversation with Kalita. He admitted to saying he would not back her up, and admitted he talked about Rivers sleeping around to advance her career. Marcynuk was remorseful, the hearing was told.

And when senior officers heard Marcynuk had not apologized and had repeated his threat to Rivers face after he was reassigned, a formal Police Services Act investigation was done. He was found guilty of discreditable conduct for breaching the departments harassment policy.

Jarvis said the police service acted quickly to address the issues.

You did not know Sgt. Nugent decided to transfer Marcynuk two days after meeting Oct. 10, and had other officers monitoring him? said Jarvis.

No, said Kalita.

Nugent and Kalita spoke Nov. 3, 2013. Thats when she told Nugent that Marcynuk had repeated his threat about not backing up Rivers. By Nov. 19, Kalita was interviewed as part of the Police Service Act investigation.

So the service moved very quickly. Correct? said Jarvis.

The second time around, yes, said Kalita.

The hearing continues Friday when Jarvis will call his first witnesses to refute the claims the police did not take Rivers concerns seriously or subjected her to reprisals.

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Britains only desalination plant still out of action as hosepipe ban fears return

The Thames Water Desalination Plant, part of Beckton Sewage Treatment Works in East London - Jamie Lorriman

Britains only water desalination plant is to remain out of action until July at the earliest owing to delays to critical supplies, even as dry weather stokes fears of hosepipe bans.

The 250m Thames Water facility at Beckton, east London, was switched off last year for maintenance as record-breaking temperatures parched the country.

There are fears of a repeat this year. London has not seen rain in more than three weeks and the Met Office issued its first hot weather warning of the year this week.

Now Thames Water has revealed that although the maintenance work has now been completed it has since faced problems obtaining carbon dioxide, which is needed for a process where minerals are restored to the water after the removal of sea salt.

The desalination plant was opened as a drought contingency in 2010 and can supply drinking water to 400,000 homes in the capital at times of crisis.

Nevil Muncaster, Thames Waters strategic resources and London operations director, blamed the additional holdup on turmoil in Europes fertiliser industry, with factories forced to cut back production after the Ukraine war sent energy prices soaring.

Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of the fertiliser production process, with the gas also used to add fizz to beer and soft drinks, stun pigs in slaughterhouses, and by hospitals for surgical procedures.

Mr Muncaster said Thames Water had found a new supplier and, if all goes to plan, the company aims to have the Beckton plant back online in July.

He said: We have completed that maintenance now its ready to go back into supply.

We were hoping to have it in by now, but weve actually been hit by an issue with the supply chain on carbon dioxide.

Weve now got new suppliers, we are refilling our reserves internally and we expect everything to be back in the next week or two, at which point we will just recommission the plant and bring it into supply.

If supplies come through, were expected to be in supply by July, certainly.

It comes as water companies and the Government are bracing for another hot summer, with the Met Office currently predicting above-average temperatures and only near-average rainfall.

Mr Muncaster insisted that Thames Water would not need to resort to hosepipe bans again if there was a repeat of last years sweltering temperatures, based on current projections.

The companys reservoirs in London and Oxfordshire are also near-full.

It comes as separately, people across England are refusing to pay their wastewater bills because of anger over sewage pollution, saying they should not pay for a service they do not receive.

Some have said they are prepared to go to court, but do not believe the water companies will take legal action.

Angler Matt Marlow, from Stockport, Greater Manchester. said he stopped paying his water bill entirely, to United Utilities, about six months ago, but is considering setting up a standing order of 1 for their shareholders.

Mr Marlow said United Utilities tried sending him 75 after he complained about sewage discharges, which he described as hush money.

United Utilities said the 75 compensation was not linked to his complaint but a delay in responding to him.

Customers of Wessex Water and Yorkshire Water have also said they are withholding payment of their wastewater bills while Julie Wassmer, a customer of Southern Water in Kent, has been refusing to pay since 2021.

South West Water said it does not comment on individual customers but that they are free to contact the company for discussion.

Yorkshire Water said it has no records of customers refusing to pay bills.

Pennon Group, which owns South West Water, said on Thursday it will invest 750 million over the next two years in building reservoirs, reducing storm overflows and increasing renewable energy use.

Several water company chief executives, including at South West Water, Yorkshire Water and Thames Water, have offered to give up their bonuses this year in response to public anger over sewage.

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AMRPSWA urges

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IMPHAL, Jun 9 : All Manipur Recognised Private Schools' Welfare Association (AMRPSWA), Imphal has appealed to the State Government to make necessary arrangements for classes to resume at Schools and Colleges after the completion of summer vacation on June 15.

In a release, AMRPSWA also urged the school/ colleges to make preparations to resume classes in the interest of the students community.

AMRPSWA also advised the parents/ guardians of students who have been displaced by the recent turmoil to make preparations for their wards to attend classes at their nearest feasible school/ college.
Today

A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 52F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.

Tonight

A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 52F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.

Tomorrow

Partial cloudiness early, with scattered showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. High 73F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
Ontarios police watchdog says a Hamilton officer has been charged with sexual assault.

Special Investigations Unit (SIU) director Joseph Martino has reasonable grounds to believe a Hamilton police officer allegedly sexually assaulted a woman, the agency said in a release on Thursday. Following an SIU investigation, Const. Jeffery Turnbull has been charged with one count of sexual assault, the release said.

The SIU, which probes incidents involving police in Ontario where someone dies, is seriously hurt or there is an allegation of sexual assault, was notified of the incident on April 14, 2022. The alleged assault occurred sometime between February and April 2022, the release states.

No further information about the investigation will be provided as the matter is before the courts, the release reads.

On Friday Hamilton police confirmed Turnbull has been suspended. Police said they would not provide further comment and directed any further inquiries to the SIU.

Turnbull is expected to appear in court in Hamilton on July 6.

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The smoke isnt done with us yet, Hamilton.

As hundreds of wildfires continue to rage across the country, a special air quality statement issued by Environment Canada warns that the dangerous haze above Steeltown will linger until at least Saturday.

Residents are advised to reduce their exposure to smoke by filtering indoor air, wearing a mask while outside, and staying inside as much as possible.

But what about people who have to stay outside for work?

How is it affecting workers?

Yakov Sluchenkov, director of employee health and labour relations for the city, told The Spectator that staff have advised leaders to find ways to reduce the time workers spend outdoors as well as rescheduling employees if possible.

Sluchenkov said theyre also directing leaders to allow outdoor workers to take breaks inside where possible, reschedule outdoor work to times when the air quality health index is lower and keep an eye out for symptoms related to bad air quality.

Those travelling in city-owned vehicles are advised to keep the windows closed when possible and use the recirculating air setting inside the vehicle, as opposed to bringing in air from the outside, noted Sluchenkov.

Gary Wheeler, spokesperson for the ministry of environment, conservation and parks, said the province has also requested that local industries voluntarily activate their local poor air quality plan to reduce emissions.

Those measures include reducing material handling, increasing dust suppression on storage piles as well as reducing both on-site traffic and street sweeping activities.

Will the smoke affect my mail?

Janick Cormier, a spokesperson for Canada Post, told The Spectator they had issued a yellow service alert for parts of Ontario, including Hamilton, on Wednesday.

This means that we are doing our best to deliver where employees feel safe to do so but there may be delays, said Cormier, describing the service alert. Currently, wildfires and poor air quality are affecting mail and parcel delivery in some parts of Canada, including Hamilton.

What about the dogs?

Local dog walker Caitlin Copeland told The Spectator that she has had to adjust her services this week in light of the poor air quality.

Copeland said she has condensed walks for dogs with shorter snouts as well as those that are older, noting that breathing can already be an issue for the pups. Some dog owners have even cancelled their walks.

The dogs making the trek outside have made it obvious that the hazy skies are bothering them, she added.

Ive noticed that theyre doing a lot more licking and rubbing their noses in the grass, said Copeland. So, theyre definitely noticing the smoke too.

To help mitigate the effects, Copeland has been bringing extra water, slowing down the pace and taking extra breaks. She also recommends pet owners wash their dogs snouts and paws when they come back in the house.

Spending the last three days walking in the thick of it, Copeland said the gross conditions have also taken a toll on her.

My throat and lungs are not super happy about it, she added.

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The air quality statement ended and rain has moved into Hamilton.

Environment Canada warnings of air quality levels reaching dangerous heights because of wildfires across the country ended in Hamilton and most of southern Ontario overnight.

Residents can breath a sigh of relief Friday morning as the provincial air quality monitoring website indicates things are clearer, with air quality levels of two or three on a scale of one to 10. On Wednesday, those readings had reached 10-plus  signifying a high risk to health  across Hamilton.

The provincial air monitoring site says Fridays air quality level high at Hamiltons three monitoring stations will top out at five or moderate risk. It shows a prediction of four for Saturday, and it is unclear what Sunday will read.

Advice for moderate risk in the general population says there is no need to modify your usual outdoor activities unless you experience symptoms such as coughing and throat irritation.

As we head into the weekend, sunshine and more rain is on the way.

The weather service forecast is showing a 30 per cent chance of showers and daytime high of 21 C for Friday. More showers are forecast for Sunday after a hot, 28 C, and sunny Saturday.

That doesnt mean we are in the clear, as area burning bans remain in place for Hamilton, Burlington, Norfolk and Niagara.

Current special air quality statements remain for areas northwest of North Bay.

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More than a third of Canadian professionals in a new poll report being more burned out than a year ago citing heavy workloads as the main culprit.

According to a recent survey by business consulting firm Robert Half, some 36 per cent of workers said theyre more burned out now than a year ago. That number was similar to the year prior. The report heard from 1,132 workers across finance, technology, marketing, legal, administrative, customer support and human resources sectors.

National director at the firm, Michael French, was not surprised by the numbers.

In the last three and a half years, theres been a lot of stress in the professional world, he said, adding that each year presented new challenges, from isolation, and home responsibilities to the current push by employers for a return to the office. Unfortunately, the stress wasnt ever alleviated.

However, burnout isnt an individual phenomenon, according to Francoise Mathieu, executive director of TEND, an organizational health consulting firm.

Its a reflection of an organization, she said. Mathieu added that companies have been taking an oversimplified approach during the pandemic, rather than addressing peoples working conditions.

Theres nothing wrong with self-care tools and good quality (employee assistance programs), but what were doing is throwing wellness at people, she said. If everyone was too warm in a building, would you tell them all to wear less clothes, or would you turn on the AC?

A heavy workload was the biggest factor contributing to burnout, according to more than half of the survey respondents. Another 26 per cent cited a toxic organizational culture and 40 per cent said their department was understaffed.

Thats what we call lateral violence, when there is not enough resources and theres too much work, Mathieu said. Instead of rallying, we tend to turn on one another.

Part of that toxicity can stem from managers lacking interpersonal leadership skills, according to Hilda Gan, president and chief people officer at HR firm, People Bright Consulting. Theyre promoted for their ability to manage the operations side of the project and the client, she said. But not necessarily because they know how to motivate, uplift, and make their staff feel valued.

Of the professionals surveyed, 29 per cent said their burnout was sparked by a lack of communication and support from management, and 39 per cent said they felt uneasy about expressing feelings of burnout.

Abi Sriharan, senior scientist and research director at York Universitys Krembil Centre for Health Management and Leadership, said organizations need to modernize strategies to promote an inclusive work-life balance  especially to retain younger workers and new parents. She said both of these groups values and expectations of their jobs likely shifted during the pandemic.

Gen Z, millennials and working parents reported the highest burnout levels among survey respondents.

(Younger generations) dont have access to mentorship in the same way that we did before the pandemic, Mathieu said, referring to hybrid work. Youre not necessarily side-by-side with more experienced folks who can help you navigate and learn your job.

Sriharan said burnout can have health effects on employees, and a ripple effect on organizations.

When we dont address burnout, people go into self-harming behaviours, she said, which include things like over- or under-eating, lack of sleep and low energy. These can snowball into larger issues that cause absenteeism.

When you have someone who is absent from work due to burnout, then someone else has to step in to take on that extra workload, Sriharan said.

Michael French, from Robert Half, said flexibility is crucial in addressing the problem before it hits a breaking point.

Talk to the person before talking about their performance, he said. Ask your (employees): If you had some flexibility, what would you want it to be?

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TORONTO - Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., together with Brookfield Business Partners, has signed a deal to buy payment processing firm Network International Holdings for about $3.7 billion in cash.

Under the agreement, Brookfield will pay 400 pence per share for the company listed on the London Stock Exchange for a total of about 2.2 billion pounds.

The offer tops a proposal from CVC Advisers Ltd. and Francisco Partners Management LP of 387 pence per share.

Brookfield says it believes Network is an attractive business with a strong position in the large and fast-growing Middle East and Africa payments space.

It noted the company has a diversified and long-standing customer base including more than 150,000 merchants and 200 financial institutions.

Brookfield added that there is potential in a combination of Network and Magnati Sole Proprietorship LLC, a payments company operating in the UAE that is 60 per cent owned by private equity funds managed by Brookfield and 40 per cent by First Abu Dhabi Bank PJSC.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 9, 2023.

Companies in this story: (TSX:BAM, TSX:BBU.UN)

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The relationships you make in university can last a lifetime  including those with your bank.

Its one reason why youth climate activists are targeting big banks on university campuses, calling on their student unions to sever ties with financial institutions that refuse to divest from investments in fossil fuels.

Banking on a Better Future, a youth-led movement, started working with climate activists at schools across the country when classes began last September. Since then, the group says, it has convinced several student unions  including the University of Toronto Student Union (UTSU)  to take steps such as ending bank sponsorships and switching to credit unions with policies against fossil fuel investment.

The hope is to put public pressure on Canadian banks, which maintain that blanket divestment is not the right approach. Instead, the banks say, they are investing in renewable technologies and helping carbon-intensive industries transition to a net-zero world without abruptly pulling the plug on financing.

Despite those assurances, many youth are concerned that not enough is being done to address the climate crisis. A study published in the Journal of Climate Change and Health earlier this year reported that more than half of 1,000 young Canadians surveyed said they feel sad, anxious and powerless when it comes to climate change.

Similar feelings prompted first-year student Anaum Sajanlal to join Climate Justice UofT last fall.

The climate crisis is something that affects absolutely everything, Sajanlal said. Its scary that it seems like the people and institutions in power arent really doing anything about it.

In co-ordination with activists on 11 other campuses in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta, students from Climate Justice UofT staged a full-day demonstration in March, setting up in front of an on-campus RBC branch in the student union building on College St.

The goal, Sajanlal said, was to put pressure on RBC to let them know that we dont want them there and they are not welcome on our campus and in our union building.

RBC has become a particular target for climate activists over the past year.

Canadas biggest bank was ranked as the worlds largest backer of fossil fuel projects in a report by the Rainforest Action Network; it faces an investigation by the Competition Bureau into alleged greenwashing; and climate activists and Indigenous land defenders protested its April AGM.

Michelle Marcus, an organizer with Banking on a Better Future, noted that RBC also has a significant presence at many Canadian schools. It has on-campus branches at 25 universities and colleges, according to its website, and, in 2017, the bank launched a $500-million, 10-year initiative dubbed Future Launch meant to help young people prepare for careers.

During the U of T demonstration in early March, the protesters chatted with other students about climate change and the financial system, watched The Lorax, (the animated movie with an environmental message), and worked on signs for upcoming protests. By the end of the day, they had their student unions attention.

A few weeks later, the student union passed a resolution to, among other things, bring an early end to the sub-licence for the RBC branch in its building; look for new day-to-day banking services for the student union (including transferring a portion of the UTSUs reserve funding to a credit union); and prohibit RBC sponsorship of UTSU events.

We respect the rights of all individuals to make their voice heard on important topics that impact all of us, which includes climate change, and we are committed to taking action, and we listen carefully to feedback from many diverse groups, RBC spokesperson Andrew Block said in response to questions for this story.

Our teams are in regular touch with student leaders and groups on campuses and we engage in active discussions with them.

Block said the bank is deeply committed to helping fight climate change and believes that the best way it can help transition to a net-zero world is by supporting our clients as they reduce their emissions while producing the energy we need today.

RBC has set a goal of reaching net-zero in its lending by 2050 and Block said it has initial interim 2030 reduction targets for lending in three key sectors: oil and gas, power generation and automotive.

The Canadian Bankers Association similarly said the countrys banks recognize the urgency of the climate crisis and are committed to doing their part to address it.

Mathieu Labreche, spokesperson for the industry association, said banks are focused on helping secure an orderly transition to a low-carbon economy.

As financial institutions have set firm targets and begun implementing transition plans, Labreche said, they are working with clients across industries to help them decarbonize and pursue energy transition opportunities.

Still, Marcus is hopeful that the student movement can win the ear of Canadas big banks and influence them to stop financing fossil fuel projects sooner than later, because students are an important client base.

That could be even more important to the banks because Canadians tend to be quite loyal: in a 2021 online survey of 1,500 Canadians by Ratehub.ca, 80 per cent of respondents said they had never switched banks.

Jason Heath, managing director at financial planning firm Objective Financial Partners, said the protests could put pressure on the banks  albeit small  because students represent a key building block.

Ultimately these are the profitable bank customers of tomorrow even if theyre not today, he said.

University and college campuses are also a key recruitment ground for banks looking for future employees.

These are all things that management at banks is no doubt paying attention to, Heath said.

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Amid fierce competition, WestJet will wind down its Swoop subsidiary by late October as it folds the budget airlines operations under its main banner, the airline said Friday.

The move marks a major shift in Canadas aviation skyscape, arriving five years after Swoop first surfaced as a response to discount rival Flair Airlines launch in 2017.

It also comes after pilots with WestJet and Swoop ratified a new collective agreement that brings them onto a level pay scale, and also gives them a 24 per cent hour pay bump over four years.

WestJet CEO Alexis von Hoensbroech said he mulled keeping Swoop separate, but that higher wages for its flight crews made the option less feasible.

We were prepared for both possible outcomes, and then decided that provided the overall deal didnt make sense, we are actually ready to integrate Swoop into the mainline business, von Hoensbroech said in a phone interview from WestJets Calgary headquarters.

Each trip by the carriers 180-plane fleet will offer a portion of ultra-low-cost fares, he said.

We are actually broadening our ultra-low-cost reach to a much, much broader network than we could have ever covered with Swoop. So therefore we actually see this as an advantage and as an increased footprint for the ultra-low-cost offering in Canada.

No bookings will be affected, he added.

Swoops 16 narrow-body 737s will ply its current network through to Oct. 28, when it will cease to fly, WestJet said. Soon after, the pink-daubed planes will be repainted with the blue and turquoise of WestJets livery.

The company said no layoffs are expected from the integration, with all Swoop employees slated to move to the mainline.

Competition for budget airfares has grown in recent years, particularly in Western Canada, as upstarts Flair Airlines and Lynx Air challenged Swoop  all three are Alberta-based  for market share on key routes.

The market has become pretty competitive, von Hoensbroech said, but insisted Swoops integration strengthens its grip on discount offerings, rather than marking a retreat.

The CEO, who took the helm at WestJet in February 2022, said less than a month ago the airline hadnt turned a quarterly profit since 2019. The drop in bookings prompted by the threat of a strike only added red ink.

That month was certainly heavily impacted, von Hoensbroech said Friday. Going forward we are actually looking at positive numbers and positive margins.

Bargaining with pilots came down to the wire, with WestJet cancelling more than 230 flights in preparation for job action before an agreement-in-principle was reached hours ahead of the strike deadline on May 19. Ratification of the deal was announced Friday.

Having this agreement in place will go a long way to solve many of the airlines labour issues, and bring more stability to our operations, said Bernard Lewall, who heads the Air Line Pilots Associations WestJet contingent, which represents about 1,800 pilots.

The new agreement, taking effect on Canada Day and retroactive to Jan. 1, provides higher compensation, better job security and more flexible schedules, he said in a release.

Founded as a regional upstart in 1996, WestJet has grown to serve 28 per cent of Canadas domestic air travel market as of last month, versus the 47 per cent run by Air Canada, according to aviation data firm Cirium.

Going public in 1999, the airline went private again two decades later after Toronto-based investment manager Onex Corp. acquired it in a $5-billion deal that closed in December 2019, three months before the COVID-19 pandemic kicked off.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 9, 2023.

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Raging wildfires and smoky skies across much of Canada have put a damper on travel this summer, resulting in cancelled plans and closed businesses.

We have had a few conversations with our members and were already seeing domestic and international visitors cancelling trips, said Madison Simmons with the Tourism Industry Association of Ontario.

Simmons pointed to a 2018 study by Visit California, which found that during the states most destructive wildfire season on record, 11 per cent of potential travellers cancelled their trips to the state, representing a loss of about $20 million that July.

The Ontario tourism group released a study last month suggesting leisure travel in the province was set to grow after being hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and cost-of-living crisis.

Simmons said businesses in the northern part of the province, particularly outfitters and outdoor tours, are most affected.

The wildfires are adding to challenges posed by high gas prices and border delays, she added.

Were still facing a cost-of-living and cost-of-travel issue. Itll put a further strain on tourism insurance.

Canadas travel and tourism industry was set to almost fully recover from the pandemic this year, the World Travel and Tourism Council said in mid-May.

But Canadas emergency preparedness minister warned on Monday that 2023 is now on track to be the worst year on record for fires.

The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre said that as of Thursday, there were 428 fires actively burning across the country, 231 of which were out of control. Some 43,000 square kilometres has burned so far this year.

In Nova Scotia, the number of fires has already about doubled the yearly average. The largest fire in the provinces history is currently burning near Barrington Lake, which has forced out thousands from Shelburne County and destroyed 150 structures.

Daniel Khan is vice president of the Shelburne and Area Chamber of Commerce and owns Roseway River Cottages. He said the business is one of many outside the evacuation area that has opened its doors to evacuees.

Were trying to do our best in terms of managing both the immediate need of people who are local and also our businesses in terms of accommodations with bookings that we have, he said.

Khan said many of bookings until early July are from returning guests who have family in the area while tourists who had planned to explore the province have cancelled. He said it remains to be seen how the fire will affect tourism for the remainder of the summer.

The province recently lifted restrictions on travel and activities in the woods, including hiking and camping, in all areas except for Shelburne County. A provincewide ban on burning remains, including campfires and fireworks.

Quebec, which officials said is experiencing its worst wildfire season, has also prohibited access to forests in several regions. The fires and restrictions have caused many wilderness outfitters to shut down during one of their busiest times of year.

Dominic Dugre, president of industry association Federation des pourvoiries du Quebec, said of the more than 500 outfitters who operate in Quebecs forests, 350 have been forced to close.

Most affected by wildfires in the province are the Abitibi-Temiscamingue and Nord-du-Quebec regions.

Were surrounded by forest so its our playground, said Nancy Arpin, general manager of Tourisme Val-dOr.

She noted Val dOr is near La Verendrye wildlife reserve and Route 117, the Trans Canada Highway Northern Route, which is on pre-alert for closure due to smoke.

In northern Saskatchewan, wildfires have forced an Indigenous tourism conference to reschedule.

Candice Evans-Waite is the project coordinator for Westside Indigenous Experience Inc., a non-profit that supports tourism operators in northwest Saskatchewan.

I feel very shocked and saddened. I dont know whats its going to be like going back home, Evans-Waite, whose home community is Buffalo Narrows, said of the wildfires. I think our landscape has drastically changed.

Its been a huge impact on our industry as well as our communities.

Evans-Waite said around 75 people were expected to attend the symposium in Beauval this week, which would have included a cultural demonstration, lake tours and an artisan market. She said the group also planned to share a tourism strategy it has worked on for six months.

It was a hard call, she said of the cancellation.

The symposium has been rescheduled for September and Evans-Waite is expecting it to be bigger and better, with a focus on authentic Indigenous experiences.

Keith Henry, chief executive officer of the Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada, said in 2019 Indigenous tourism contributed nearly $2 billion in revenue to Canadas economy and supported roughly 40,000 jobs.

This is a very challenging time for the industry, he said, adding the organization is concerned about environmental impacts. We were looking forward to a very strong summer this year driven with significant new domestic interest but the wildfires are really having an impact on the consciousness of consumer spending.

Many other outdoor events and businesses across Canada have been cancelled or are taking precautions due to poor air quality from wildfire smoke.

Canadas Wonderland said the park is providing KN95 masks to employees who request them as well as additional breaks and advice on steps to take if they or visitors feel unwell. The Toronto Zoo said it is has put precautions in place for animals, including access to the indoors and additional ventilation.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 9, 2023.

 With files from Rosa Saba and Sammy Hudes in Toronto and Jacob Serebin in Montreal.

---

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

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(Bloomberg) -- Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. has agreed to acquire Londonlisted Network International Holdings Plc for about 2.2 billion ($2.8 billion) to expand its presence in credit card processing in the Middle East.

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The Canadian investment group reached a deal to pay 400 pence per share in cash, according to a statement on Friday. That represents a premium of about 64% to Network Internationals closing price on April 12  the last business day before the start of the offer period.

Shares in Network International rose as much as 6% on Friday. The stock was up 5.7% at 12:35 p.m. in London, giving the company a market value of about 2 billion.

Brookfield emerged as the frontrunner to acquire the Middle Eastern credit card processor after interest from a consortium including CVC Capital Partners and Francisco Partners cooled, Bloomberg News reported previously.

In its statement, Brookfield said it sees strategic logic in pursuing a combination of Network International and Magnati, the payments business it took control of from First Abu Dhabi Bank PJSC last year. Any such combination would create a payments giant in a region where the use of digital wallets is accelerating.

In April, Brookfield made a preliminary offer of 400 pence per share for Network International, topping an earlier 387 pence proposal from CVC and Francisco Partners. The potential synergies between Network International and Magnati gave the Canadians an advantage over its buyout competitors.

CVC and Francisco Partners do not intend to make a counteroffer, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information. A representative for CVC declined to comment, while a spokesperson for Francisco Partners couldnt be reached for comment.

Buyout Boost

The deal is another boost for the UKs buyout market, coming a week after EQT AB agreed to buy UK veterinary drugmaker Dechra Pharmaceuticals Plc for 4.46 billion. These transactions bring some relief in a year thats otherwise seen a dearth of cheap funding hit take privates, with potential deals for Scottish engineering group John Wood Group Plc and UK online retailer THG Plc collapsing.

Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, First Abu Dhabi Bank and Standard Chartered Plc are underwriting the debt being used to finance the Network International takeover, people with knowledge of the matter said. A representative for ADCB declined to comment, while spokespeople for FAB and Standard Chartered didnt immediately respond to requests for comment.

Brookfield is an active investor in the Middle East, where it manages about $8 billion in assets. The infrastructure specialist has also been relying heavily on cash-rich investors in the region when raising money for new funds.

Network Internationals directors were advised by PJT Partners Inc., Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Brookfield was advised by Morgan Stanley.

--With assistance from Claire Ruckin.

(Adds detail on debt underwriters under Buyout Boost subhead)

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It started with a makeshift prosthetic arm made from windshield wipers and bicycle cable.

Thats how entrepreneur Charles Deguire first became fascinated by the power and potential of robotics.

Growing up in the 1990s, he spent a lot of time around his three uncles, Jacques, Louis and Jean-Marc, who lived with muscular dystrophy and used wheelchairs to get around.

The MacGyvered arm was the work of Jacques, and it made a big impression on eight-year-old Deguire.

Watching my uncle grasp a flower and give it to my grandmother was quite impressive, he says. Thats what sparked my interest in applying technology to everyday life.

Fascinated by robotics, Deguire went on to study electrical engineering at Ecole de technologie superieure in Montreal. He reconnected with childhood friend Louis-Joseph LEcuyer, and the pair started working on a robotic arm for people with limited mobility.

They founded robotics company Kinova and launched the arm  named Jaco for Deguires inventor uncle  in 2010. It could mimic 16 movements of the shoulder, elbow and wrist to help users perform tasks like applying makeup, taking medication and scratching an itch.

Today, Kinova produces robots for use in industry, research and medical settings. Its machines can perform a wide range of functions, including helping surgeons detect lung cancer and assisting people with upper-body limitations to enjoy a meal independently.

The company, which is based in Boisbriand, Que., now has a team of 240 employees and sells its technology in close to 40 countries. Its robots are used by organizations including Google and Johns Hopkins University.

Here, Deguire discusses his passion for robots that make a difference, why we shouldnt fear AI and what impresses him more than cupcake vending machines.

How were you able to launch Jaco while studying for your bachelors degree?

After completing our co-op placements in our third year, Louis-Joseph and I started discussing launching a company. The more we talked to potential users, the more obvious it was that the technology was there and we became obsessed with making it a reality. We started to create a prototype and we won a few startup competitions, which got us some more money to develop it. After three years, in the summer of 2010, we got our first customer  in the Netherlands.

Why the Netherlands?

Even though we have community here, Germany and the Netherlands are our biggest markets for assistive technologies, because the costs are covered by medical insurance there. But weve seen progress in the past few years on coverage in Quebec, the rest of Canada and the U.S., and were proud to deploy our solutions more and more to our families and neighbours.

What are you working on right now?

Im particularly excited about what were doing with the new Monarch Robotic Flexible Endoscopy Platform. Weve partnered with Johnson & Johnson to bring our expertise in robotics to surgeons. The Monarch Platform is a robotic endoscope that a surgeon can guide through the lungs with a controller while viewing the process on a screen like a video game. The surgeon is in control and the robot works precisely and safely, reaching its target faster and with precision. It was used in Montreal for the first time in early January. Were proud to export 96 per cent of our products outside Canada, but its amazing to finally develop amazing technology and bring it back home. Were moving from improving lives to actually saving lives.

How do you feel about the future of artificial intelligence when it comes to robotics?

I get excited about using robots and AI together. Robots are automated data collection centres and AI requires a lot of data. Robots can also act in real time, based on fast decisions made by AI. When you combine all of that, you can increase resiliency and help users spend less energy to do more tasks. AI is going to allow for a lot of breakthroughs in the coming years.

What do you say to people who fear being replaced by robots in their jobs?

Were focused on empowering people, not replacing them. A robot is like a personal computer: At the end of the day, its a tool. There are so many useful solutions that need to be developed. I want to help my uncles and I want to help surgeons.

We want Canadian manufacturers to deploy more robots and help them be more productive. Industries that adopt robots create more jobs. Also, some of the coolest robots Ive seen help with bomb disposal and nuclear waste.

Those impress me the most because you dont want to put a human in most of those situations. I dont care about cupcake vending machines. The robots that help prevent injuries and keep humans out of harms way are the ones that inspire me.

Lora Grady writes about technology for MaRS . Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, has partnered with MaRS to highlight innovation in Canadian companies.

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An essential skill for entrepreneurs is knowing how to make a case for their business, whether theyre raising funds, seeking out new partnerships or securing new clients.

And as venture capital funding is drying up  investment dropped by 82 per cent in the first quarter of 2023 compared to last year  founders have to make every meeting count. Thats why we turned to five startup founders to get their secrets on preparing for big meetings. They know how to nail a pitch, present with confidence and pivot gracefully. Their pro advice can help anyone be their best self in the boardroom.

Zero in on the key takeaways

Entrepreneur Louis Brun starts preparing for a big meeting days in advance by distilling his ideas down to three messages he wants to communicate. Brun is CEO and co-founder of Sollum Technologies, which makes smart LED lighting systems for greenhouses and closed a $30-million financing round in January. Make sure investors can take the information away with them and take ownership of it, he says.

Brun also keeps notes in his phone, which he reviews right before the meeting to refresh his memory. When it comes to fielding questions, he keeps his answers short and sweet. I like to be to-the-point. I always come back to what I want the investor or customer to take out of the meeting.

Dont stay up too late

Try to avoid revenge bedtime procrastination the night before a big meeting. Its easy to get caught up with answering emails, scrolling social media or even doing some last-minute meeting prep. But having a restful evening before a big presentation can make a world of difference, says Caitlin MacGregor, the CEO of Plum, a talent assessment platform for employers and job candidates.

Its important, MacGregor says, to prioritize sleep  you want to be quick on your toes and stay calm if you get a curveball question. Its all about showing up as your best self, so discipline around sleep is always something I have to be conscious about, she says. MacGregor likes to listen to a good fiction audiobook to get sleepy (her latest favourite is the rom-com Book Lovers by Emily Henry). Her prep techniques have proven to be successful: in February, Plum raised $6 million (U.S.) in funding.

Dream of success

Before an important meeting, Sparrow Connected CEO Chris Izquierdo spends five minutes visualizing exactly how he wants it to go.

Its a rehearsal in my head based on what Im expecting the questions to be and what their concerns might be, he says. Izquierdo always makes an effort to connect with the other party by asking questions.

For example, tell me a little bit about yourself and what matters to you, he says. Im curious to know when you made an investment that failed. Why did it fail? How do you react to a successful investment? Being inquisitive is a smart approach. Last year, Sparrow Connected, an internal communications platform, received $1.4 million in funding from economic development agency PrairiesCan and is currently raising a Series A funding round.

Give yourself a break

Nivatha Balendra, CEO and founder of Dispersa, a startup that produces waste-derived ingredients for cleaning and personal care, says that its important not to put too much pressure on yourself.

We often feel the need to deliver the best-ever pitch, Balendra says. But its more important to connect with whos in the meeting rather than focus on delivering a perfect presentation.

Balendra met with around 70 investors while fundraising in April and her time and energy paid off: Dispersa secured financing of $3 million to fund its growth. I became more confident over time, says Balendra. And I grew more comfortable with making quick changes on the fly because it became more natural. Her advice? Focus on positive statements and treat yourself with grace. Were all humans  even if we dont perform our best.

Dress the part

What you wear can have a major impact on your confidence, whether its a suit that makes you feel powerful or a meaningful piece of jewelry. Philip Poulidis, CEO and co-founder of Odaia, an AI software startup for the life-sciences industry, has a pair of lucky socks he puts on whenever he presents to investors.

My co-founder, Helen Kontozopoulos, attended a venture capital event around the time we started the company and someone there was handing out socks, he says. The pattern features narwhals spearing dollar bills with their tusks. (The narwhal is the Canadian version of the unicorn, representing billion-dollar valuation companies.)

Poulidis says his lucky pair of venture capital pitch socks isnt about superstition  its about frame of mind. Its part of me psyching myself up for fundraising, the way athletes would prior to a game. I cant lose with the socks on, he says. I wouldnt hesitate to design our own socks if these ones wear out. Poulidis winning attitude has paid off. In May, Odaia secured $34 million in Series B financing.

Lora Grady writes about technology for MaRS . Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, has partnered with MaRS to highlight innovation in Canadian companies.

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Shawn Mendes dropped a surprise new single Friday, suggesting it was written in response to the raging wildfires that blanketed large swaths of southern Ontario and the U.S. eastern seaboard earlier in the week.

The Canadian pop superstar shared the new song, titled What The Hell Are We Dying For?, at midnight on Friday, after teasing its release just a day prior.

Featuring a cover photo of the New York City skyline shrouded by a haze of orange smoke, the song appears to be written in response to the ongoing wildfires in Canada.

Smoke in the air, the citys burnin down / I wanna speak, but I dont make a sound, read the songs opening lyrics, before segueing into a stirring chorus.

Mendes, 24, shared on Twitter early Friday morning that he started writing the song this week with friends in upstate New York. He finished the piece just hours before its release.

Felt so important to me to share with you guys in real time, he wrote on the social media platform.

Mendes, who was born and raised in Pickering, Ont., also asked his fans to donate to the Canadian Red Cross, which is supporting the wildfire relief efforts across the country.

While the new song has received some positive feedback, others have criticized Mendes for using the wildfire to promote his work.

Despite nods to climate change in some of the lyrics, critics said most of the song appears to focus on the end of a relationship, speculating it comes amid rumours of a breakup with Camila Cabello. (The pair have been in an on-and-off relationship.)

If we dont love like we used to / If we dont care like we used to / What the hell are we dying for?, read the lyrics for the chorus.

What The Hell Are We Dying For? marks Mendess first song of 2023.

The artist has spoken up about climate change in the past. In 2022, he announced that his Wonder world tour would include several sustainability initiatives, with the goal of reducing its per-show carbon footprint by 50 per cent.

We are in a pivotal moment for climate, and its crucial to me that this tour is a step in the right direction, Mendes said in a statement to Billboard at the time.

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EDMONTON - Premier Danielle Smith introduced her cabinet Friday, the second one since taking over as United Conservative Party leader in October. Here are the changes at a glance:

Second in command: Mike Ellis retains his Public Safety and Emergency Services portfolio but is also now deputy premier.

Big promotions: Mickey Amery moves from Childrens Services to Justice; Nate Horner moves from Agriculture and Irrigation to Finance; Adriana LaGrange already had a heavyweight title in Education but now takes on enormous responsibilities in Health.

New faces: RJ Sigurdson joins cabinet for the first time in Agriculture and Irrigation; Searle Turton is new in Children and Family Services; Dan Williams gets his first cabinet seat in Mental Health and Addiction.

Returning vets: Jason Nixon, the environment minister and government house leader under former premier Jason Kenney, is back in cabinet handling the Seniors, Community and Social Services post. Ric McIver, dropped from Smiths first cabinet, returns in his old job of Municipal Affairs. Muhammad Yaseen, a former associate minister of immigration, now has full cabinet rank as minister of Immigration and Multiculturalism; Tanya Fir, former economic development minster under Kenney, is back in Arts, Culture and Status of Women portfolio.

Same faces, new jobs: Rebecca Schulz (Environment and Protected Areas), Brian Jean (Energy and Minerals), Nathan Neudorf (Affordability and Utilities), Joseph Schow (Tourism and Sport), Demetrios Nicolaides (Education), Rajan Sawhney (Advanced Education), Matt Jones (Jobs, Economy and Trade), Peter Guthrie (Infrastructure).

Same faces, same jobs: Nate Glubish (Technology and Innovation), Dale Nally (Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction), Devin Dreeshen (Transportation and Economic Corridors), Todd Loewen (Forestry and Parks).

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 9, 2023.

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Canadas fire managers will be able to  eventually  count on some help from above in battling the countrys ever more severe forest fires.

But that help wont be coming until 2029, when Canada launches its first-ever constellation of satellites dedicated to wildfire detection and observation.

When launched, the $170 million project  dubbed WildFireSat  will enable firefighters on the ground to make near-real time decisions on battling blazes based on data coming from a set of satellites orbiting overhead.

The goal, said Josh Johnston, primary investigator for the WildFireSat project and a forest fire research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, is to observe what fires are doing, and get that information to the people fighting those fires as soon as possible. The target is for wildfire managers to have useful data in hand within 30 minutes of it being captured by the satellites.

This is the very first time ever that a country is producing a dedicated fire monitoring satellite, an operational one, he said. There have been scientific missions that have gone out, but they could only do a small amount of work. Were talking about an operational system that is dedicated to supporting fire managers. Its never been done.

Its not just a satellite, it is end to end. Its the space, its the antennas to bring it to the ground. Its the data processing. Its all of the scientific maturation that comes behind the products, the operationalization of it. But beyond all of that, its also the knowledge exchange and end user readiness.

Not only will fire managers be able to make more informed decisions on potential evacuations, best use of their resources and prioritizing where and when to fight fires, but the data from the WildFireSat constellation will also allow analysts more precise information on smoke released by those fires, leading to more accurate air quality forecasts during a wildfire season.

The satellites will also be tasked with measuring carbon emitted by fires, required by international agreements on carbon reporting.

A large chunk of that information is already available through existing satellites, but those are general purpose scientific satellites, said Johnston, not designed explicitly to fight fires and that creates a few major problems with the data available from them.

Chief among those problems is the fact the orbits of existing satellites do not take them over Canada during the times most crucial to firefighting efforts.

That time  the peak burn period  is generally between about 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. At those times wildfires tend to be at their most active. Higher temperatures, stronger winds and generally low humidity in that period contribute to the rapid spread of fires.

But with existing satellites  including NASAs Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite and its Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite  theres a coverage gap over Canada at that time.

WildFireSat aims to plug that gap. The constellation will adopt an idealized orbit that allows the satellites  at least three of them, possibly more  to pass over any given point in Canada at about the same time each day.

One other benefit is that WildFireSat would theoretically improve both the efficiency and the safety of current wildfire surveillance.

To fill in the reconnaissance gaps left by todays satellite orbits, firefighting teams often use planes, helicopters and drones to keep an eye on fires.

Thats problematic in two ways. One, because those aircraft travel at relatively low altitudes, they may take a long time to build up a picture of a particularly large fire. And two, the flying of planes and helicopters over a large fire is a dangerous business.

WildFireSat can kill both of those birds with one stone. First, because of its orbit at a much higher altitude, it will be able to observe a much greater swath of land at one pass than a plane or helicopter. And because it will provide the data that fire managers need when they need it, it will eliminate or severely reduce the need for putting pilots in dangerous situations around fires.

The current satellites from which fire managers pull their data are general-purpose scientific satellites, said Johnston. Building WildFireSat, from the ground up as a dedicated firefighting platform also means they are able to tailor its satellites cameras specifically to observing wildfires.

While the configuration of the satellites has yet to be decided, one of the criteria is for WildFireSat cameras to be able to observe the ground below not just in visible light wavelengths, but in specific infrared wavelengths chosen to produce, when combined, the most complete picture of Canadas wildfires. Infrared wavelengths are vital to the data collected, because, unlike visible light wavelengths, they are able to penetrate the smoke cover from a fire.

And at the heart of WildFireSats observation package is an extraordinary piece of equipment  an infrared camera that does not need to be cooled.

Traditionally, satellite infrared cameras have required bulky, power-hungry cooling systems to bring the cameras temperature to the point where its most effective. On the James Webb Space Telescope  another order of magnitude in terms of precision, size and expense  it took almost three weeks to cool the instruments down to -266 degrees Celsius once the telescope was in orbit.

The uncooled infrared camera does away with that bulk, meaning satellites can be made smaller  and much less expensive to launch  and less power-hungry. Johnston said the new infrared camera can run on the same power it takes to run a Christmas light bulb.

When its in orbit, what that camera is looking for is a measure of Fire Radiative Power, a measure of the energy of the flames on the ground, said Miriam Micael, an engineer in Project Management, Space Utilization at the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), which will operate the satellite once its launched.

That data will be downloaded immediately from WildFireSat, then analyzed by the Canadian Forest Service  to give fire managers information about fire intensity and rate of spread  and Environment Canada  who can use it for smoke and air quality forecasts and to measure carbon emissions.

The CSA has contracted with three companies to design the particulars of WildFireSat.

Joel Spark is the chief satellite architect for Spire Global Inc. one of those companies.

One of the things that I think the CSA is doing right about this procurement is they are not specifying how it must be solved, theyre just specifying what they ultimately need, he said.

Its very focused on the data. Theyve said, We need satellites which can observe Canada and the vegetated area with a certain frequency. Once weve observed it, we need to get that data down within 20 minutes and processed so that we can get it into the hands of our users.

We need the data to be observed during the peak burning period so that we cannot only track fires when theyre spreading the most quickly, but also can understand more about it.

While WildFireSat, is still in early planning stages, Micael said she expects that in about a year, one of those three companies will be targeted to build the system. WildFireSat is targeted for a proposed 2029 launch on a mission that is scheduled to last five years, with the possibility of an extension.

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HALIFAX - Officials in Nova Scotia have identified thousands of files stolen in a global data breach affecting the personal information of at least 100,000 people in the province.

Cybersecurity and Digital Solutions Minister Colton LeBlanc said Friday that a number of current and former teachers were victims of the hack, as were students, inmates and even some newborn babies.

Earlier this week, LeBlanc said the breach of the MOVEit file transfer system, which the province uses to transfer employee payroll information, had affected current and former employees of the public service, including those at Nova Scotia Health and the IWK hospital. The information stolen included social insurance numbers, addresses and banking information.

On Friday, LeBlanc said more people had been affected including members of the public who are not part of the public service, although he was reluctant to give a new overall estimate.

A teacher could also be a former employee of the civil service or also could have had a parking ticket through the Halifax Regional Municipality, the minister said. So one individual could be impacted in a number of different ways.

LeBlanc said the stolen information includes 55,000 records with names, addresses, dates of birth and years of service involving past and present teachers. Some 26,000 students aged 16 and older had information stolen, including their dates of birth, student ID numbers and civic and mailing addresses  data that was stored in a database shared with Elections Nova Scotia.

Among the others affected by the security breach are 5,000 short-term accommodation owners, 3,800 people who applied for jobs with Nova Scotia Health, and 1,400 Nova Scotia pension plan recipients.

Forty-one babies born between May 19 and 26 had their information stolen, including last names, health card numbers, dates of birth and their dates of discharge from hospital.

The province has said it will contact the people affected and offer them a free credit-monitoring service.

Some of the details are still being worked out, LeBlanc said. Our plan is to start sending letters as soon as next week and that (credit service) information will be included.

He warned people to be aware of scammers and said when the province reaches out to notify people it wont be asking for such things as health card information, social insurance numbers or banking information.

The departments deputy minister, Natasha Clarke, said that while the focus was still on the extent of the breach, a full examination of what happened would be conducted to help shore up the provinces software systems.

The focus right now is doing that analysis and being as transparent as we can with Nova Scotians, Clarke said.

Officials later released information showing the provinces contracts for MOVEit date back to 2010 and that the current contract for the softwares licences is through a standing offer with IMP Solutions that was signed in 2020 and costs $30,000 a year.

The current contract expires on May 31, 2024, with options to renew at one-year increments.

MOVEit software is made by Massachusetts-based company Ipswitch and allows organizations to transfer files and data between employees, departments and customers. Parent company Progress Software confirmed a vulnerability in its software last week, saying the issue could lead to potential unauthorized access of users systems and files.

The Nova Scotia government has said it was first informed of a critical vulnerability within its system June 1.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 9, 2023.

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Ontario Provincial Police say three children reported missing in the Muskoka area have been found.

Police say the 15-year-old boy, 12-year-old girl and seven-year-old girl are safe.

OPP had said earlier Friday that the three children were last reported being seen on Monday in Wahta Mohawk Territory.

An Amber Alert was not issued.

Wahta Mohawk Territory is a First Nation located in the Muskoka region, near Bala, Ont.

Police are thanking everyone who helped with the case.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 9, 2023.

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HALIFAX - Most evacuation orders were lifted Friday across Nova Scotia, almost two weeks after a series of unprecedented wildfires broke out in the southwestern corner of the province and in suburban Halifax.

Officials in Shelburne County, where the largest wildfire in the provinces history continued to burn out of control, lifted all evacuation orders at noon. The wildfire there, which started May 27 near Barrington Lake, hasnt grown since the weekend thanks to the work of firefighters and the wet, cool weather.

The Barrington Lake fire forced more than 6,000 people from their homes and destroyed 60 homes and cottages, as well as 150 other structures. By last weekend, the fire had grown to 235 square kilometres.

The municipalities of Shelburne and Barrington, which are both within Shelburne County, have asked people to stay out of the area for a few days unless they have a reason to be there. Residents were also warned that some areas were still without electricity, though power was expected to be restored Friday.

In the Halifax Regional Municipality, evacuation orders were lifted at 1 p.m. for all but a small portion of the subdivisions closest to where the fire started on May 28.

Homeowners should remain cautious when returning to their property and be aware of any risks, such as collapsed driveway culverts and damaged trees, the municipality said Friday in a statement.

Evacuation orders remained in place for three small areas that experienced the most damage.

On Thursday, municipal officials said residents who live within the significant impact zone should be able to return home within the next 10 days. Officials said the region must first complete a review of infrastructure, install traffic controls and place fences around destroyed properties.

Recovery efforts are underway and risks need to be assessed before further evacuation orders are lifted, the municipality said Friday. The fire ... is contained; however, hot spots and flare-ups continue in some areas and remain a safety risk.

Driven by strong winds and fuelled by tinder-dry forests, the fast-moving Halifax-area fire destroyed 151 homes and dozens of other structures. In all, more than 16,000 people were forced to flee their homes in the Upper Tantallon and Hammonds Plains areas, which are about a 30-minute drive northwest of the citys downtown.

The fire spread across 9.5 kilometres, but it was largely contained on Saturday. Some evacuation orders were lifted earlier this week, and by Friday morning about 4,000 people in the Halifax region were still waiting to return to their homes, some of which were still without electricity.

Residents with wells were being told not to use the water for drinking, cooking or washing. Officials say the water must be tested because it could be contaminated by residue from the fire, bacteria, chemical fire retardants or fuel from ruptured tanks. The municipality is offering residents free test kits.

The regions water utility has set up water stations where residents can fill their own containers with drinking water.

The Canadian Red Cross said Friday it is working with the provincial government to revise the Halifax evacuation map following reports that some residents who were evacuated from their homes were disqualified from receiving $500 in government aid for those subject to evacuation orders.

The Red Cross distributed the funds for the province.

A small number of households that were previously excluded ... have been added to the map of mandatory evacuation areas and therefore are eligible, Red Cross spokesman Dan Bedell said in an email.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 9, 2023.

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Ingrid Burke, 59, could be the poster girl for the housing crisis. Her story is unique but it is just one of thousands in Toronto.

She rents a room in a house in the Beach but for the past two and a half months has been searching for a more suitable studio or junior one-bedroom apartment. She wants something private and comfortable; a place big enough to bake cookies and host her grandchildren.

Burke is so desperate that she has been tacking up posters in the citys east end advertising her willingness to do caretaking, painting, small repairs and yard work for a landlord willing to accept $1,500 a month.

I dont make enough money to afford what people are asking for a one-bedroom apartment. So, Ive been kind of hoping that I will just meet that one person that is going to be more interested in having a good tenant that will take care of things rather than money, she said.

She has also posted an ad on Kijiji and scoured websites like apartments.com, Viewit.ca and Zumper.

Her $1,500 rent maximum is more than half the $2,800 Burke earns a month as a harm reduction worker. That take-home pay is just a little more than the $2,526 average asking price for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto in April, according to Rentals.ca.

Burkes poster was compelling enough that the founder of Leslievilles Realosophy brokerage, John Pasalis, tweeted: Welcome to Toronto!! Where a single female with a good job & references has to post ads on hydro poles to find a $1,500/m studio apartment to rent. Shes even willing to do manual labour around the home!

Torontos housing market is a complete disaster! he concluded.

Burke has given notice on her room, which has access to a bathroom and a tiny kitchen, at the end of June. She said friction with two male tenants in the house has made staying untenable.

I just feel like Im walking around on eggshells where its supposed to be my home, she said.

Im willing to go into a shelter if that raises my chances of getting an affordable living space because I have applied for community housing with the rent geared to income. But the waiting list is like 10 years unless youre in precarious circumstances.

Her five-pound Yorkshire terrier, certified as an emotional support animal, makes her apartment search more complicated. But, she says, Indy doesnt bark in the house and Burke can provide references.

She is willing to live anywhere in the city. But there isnt much available and when she gets to see a place that seems within her budget  shes viewed about eight apartments  theres usually a catch.

The funny thing is theyre listed at one price and then when you go and see them the price is always higher. They say, Oh well, thats what it starts at, we advertised what those apartments start at, she said.

For other places, I just didnt get picked.

It just makes me feel inadequate, like Im never going to get there. It makes me feel like Im going to constantly have to live in a rooming house. I want to be on my own so that my grandchildren can come and visit me and even spend the night with me, she added.

If I could just get into housing, subsidized, or rent geared to income, it would be fine, said Burke. But if not, Im going to have to move and I may have to move to a place like Oshawa and commute.

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A cat litter mishap has cost an Ontario company more than $90,000.

Cat litter manufacturer Normerica Inc. was convicted and fined under the provinces Environment Protection Act after failing to report a pollutant spill that spewed noxious fumes into the environment, impacting nearby community members for more than a month.

In a court bulletin issued Wednesday, the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks said the company spilled roughly 200 litres of Clean Burst, a scent product used in cat litter.

The spill on Aug. 10, 2019 was allegedly caused by a burst drum of Clean Burst at Normericas plant in Brantford, Ont.

For more than a month, several nearby community members informed the ministry of the odour. Some described it as bearing a cleaning product scent and said it caused eye and throat irritation.

A neighbouring business also reported a foamy substance with a soaplike odour emerging from a sewer drain, the ministry said.

Clean Burst, classified as a combustible liquid, may cause allergic skin reactions, nausea, vomiting and asthmalike symptoms if inhaled.

Despite the complaints, Normerica maintained that the fumes likely did not originate from its plant.

It was only after an inspector met with Normericas plant manager on Sept. 11 that the company advised officials of the Aug. 10 spill and reported it to the ministrys Spills Action Centre.

Laboratory analysis of three samples obtained by the ministry on Sept. 11, 2019, from the storm sewer outfall and the catch basin on plant property confirmed the presence of components of Clean Burst in all three samples, the ministry reported in the court bulletin.

A search of ministry records confirmed that no spill was reported from Normericas plant between August 10, 2019, and September 10, 2019.

Normerica was convicted April 13 in a Brantford court. The company was fined $75,000 for the Environment Protection Act violation, plus an additional victim fine surcharge of $18,750. It has one year to pay.

Minerals Technologies, which acquired Normerica in 2021, said in a statement to the Star that the incident occurred before it took ownership of Normerica.

We worked with the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks who has investigated and determined that there were no adverse impacts to water from the spill, and we have agreed to pay the fine, said Jennifer Albert, communications director of Minerals Technologies, in the emailed statement. Minerals Technologies is committed to safe and responsible environmental practices under its ownership.

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Sam Altman - JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images

The creator of ChatGPT has thrown his backing behind a British lab-grown pork company.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT maker Open AI, has invested in Uncommon, a Cambridge-based company that is growing bacon and pork belly from animal cells.

Uncommon claims to use patented technology to create bacon and pork belly from a single animal cell, eliminating the need for antibiotics, animal products, and reducing the materials needed to make the meat.

Mr Altman, 38, is best known for the AI chatbot ChatGPT. However, he has invested in numerous companies, primarily in technology and energy, including Reddit, Patreon, Helion Energy, and Elon Musks brain-chip company Neuralink.

He was previously president of Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley investment firm that has backed startups such as Airbnb, DropBox, and Scribd.

Uncommon pork belly

Mr Altman first invested in Uncommon at an early stage, and has now taken part in a second funding round as the business plans to scale up the production of its lab-grown meat.

The company said on Friday it had raised a total of $30m (23.9m) from investors including Mr Altman and his brother Max, who together run the investment fund Apollo Projects, which describes itself as offering funding for moonshots.

Apollo Projects website reads: Our favourite companies are those that inspire us to look at the world in a different way, and educate us about what the future could look like.

Benjamina Bollag, chief executive at Uncommon  which was previously called Higher Steaks  said: Luckily, they really believed in us when, when no one else did, and funded, led our seed round.

She said the company had chosen to cultivate bacon and pork belly products rather than beef steaks that many other lab grown meat companies were making because she believed there was a gap in the market.

Its not as complex as a Wagyu steak, but its not as simple as a nuggets or sausage where maybe plant-based [products] are already delivering pretty well.

Benjamina Bollag or of Higher Steaks/Uncommon

Because no gene editing is used in the process, she said she expected it would be easier to get approval from regulators.

Ms Bollag added she hoped cultivated meat products could make it into mainstream retail within three to five years.

She said: I definitely, obviously, believe that it will become mainstream and mass market. That doesnt mean, it will be the only meat that people consume  [but] I believe it will be the largest share of the protein market.

Other backers included the investment companies Balderton Capital and Lowercarbon Capital.

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This week, clouds of red and orange coloured the air, blurred skylines and prompted a return to masking. As smoke spread from wildfires burning in Quebec and Ontario, residents were urged to stay inside to avoid poor air quality or, in some cases, evacuate for safety.

Even the United States  notably New York  has felt the impact with the worlds worst air quality.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this years wildfire season is the worst on record  and while experts say not every future season will be this bad, they expect more intense fires in the coming years as the globe continues to warm.

Earlier this year, the worlds leading climate scientists called for a rapid, co-ordinated response to climate change in the next seven years in order to prevent increased natural disasters and irreversible damage to the earth.

There are steps individuals can take to help, but there also needs to be a societal shift, one climate expert and a climate activist told the Star.

What can people do to help fight climate change

Do what you can, but make it visible and social, said Matt Hoffman, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and co-director of the Environmental Governance Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

We have to get societal and policy change, he added. The link between individual behaviour and individual choices and those societal changes are about making your choices part of the conversation and making your choices part of changing whats natural in our society.

Evelyn Austin, the executive director of Banking on a Better Future, also weighed in on a campaigns to stop fossil fuel development and expansion projects.

According to a report this year by Lakehead University, nearly 8 in 10 people aged 16 to 25 are feeling the impact of climate change on their mental health. But these experts say there are steps people can take right now to help make a difference.

Pressure politicians across party lines

In Hoffmans view, the biggest thing many individuals can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to help make climate change a non-partisan priority, where its seen as natural to take aggressive action on climate change, regardless of political association.

Vote for candidates at every level who take climate change action seriously and are committed to acting aggressively on it, Hoffman said. And not only voting, but telling people in your family, in your neighbourhood, and telling your politicians why youre voting.

Change your RRSP investments

People whose RRSPs or pensions are invested in the oil and gas industry are contributing capital to the industry thats creating the problem, Hoffman said.

More and more, there are mutual funds and investment options that are more sustainable and fossil fuel free, he added, but you have to explicitly choose to make it a priority.

If people pick their own, finding fossil fuel free investments for your RRSP can be a pretty big deal, he said.

Consider alternative banking options

According to a 2022 report, Canadas Big Five banks  RBC, Scotiabank, TD, CIBC and BMO  have invested $911 billion into the fossil fuel sector since the 2015 Paris Agreement, when governments around the world agreed to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Theres a movement underway across Canada, which began in universities, to pressure banks to divest.

Laurentian Bank is the only major bank in Canada that has agreed to phase out its investments in the industry, Austin said. There are also a number of credit unions that dont invest in fossil fuels projects at all. In Ontario, those include Alterna Savings Credit Union, DUCA Financial and Kindred Credit Union.

Through Banking on a Better Future, Austin advocates for people to make the switch, arguing credit unions across the board are more democratic than banks and therefore can be more receptive to depositors who vote for it to phase out investments into fossil fuel development.

Pressure banks to stop financing fossil fuel projects

By funding fossil fuel projects, banks are condoning the activity of that industry, Austin said.

The goal of her advocacy with Banking on a Better Future is to use public pressure to take away the social license to operate that banks have in supporting the development and expansion of fossil fuels  effectively stigmatizing the practice until it is no longer socially acceptable  and to deplete the companies of the funds needed to complete the projects.

It took 10 years, but it was Indigenous and environmental advocacy that ultimately led the Keystone XL pipeline project to be cancelled in 2021. The project lost its social license, Austin explained.

Advocates are putting the pressure on by attending banks Annual General Meetings (AGM) as shareholders put forward resolutions that touch on either ending fossil fuel expansion and financing, or integrating FPIC, Free, Prior and Informed Consent of Indigenous Peoples into their lending practices or both, she said.

Switch energy sources, watch your food  and spread the word

There are limitations to what individuals can do to help reduce climate change, Hoffman said, because making green decisions often comes down to how much money someone has to spare. For those who can take these steps, he suggests spreading the word and pushing politicians to make environmentally-friendly options more accessible to everyone.

Some of the most important individual changes can be made at home and on the commute, Hoffman said.

One of the big things you can do in your house is get a heat pump instead of a gas furnace, he said.

The government has rebates to repay the costs, he added, but doing so is limited to homeowners and people who have the cash available to start.

Changing your light bulbs to LED light bulbs is good at reducing electricity use in your house, but that kind of impact is overwhelmed by how we are stuck in systems that are really reproducing climate change, he said.

Other steps individuals can take is turning off the lights, eating less meat, walking and biking as much as possible, switching from a gas-powered car to an electric vehicle, and taking fewer flights, Hoffmann said.

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A Brampton man was on bail and subject to a weapons prohibition when he allegedly murdered a Montreal woman linked to the Mafia, court records reveal.

One day after he allegedly killed 39-year-old Claudia Iacono on May 16, Joel Richard Clarke, 28, was arrested on a series of drug and weapons charges in Brampton. Those charges included four separate counts of allegedly violating existing bail conditions, including a weapons ban, the court records say.

Clarke was also charged with possession of a restricted weapon.

At the time of the initial Brampton arrest, Clarke had not yet been charged in Iaconos death. He was released again following bail hearing on May 17; the Ontario Provincial Police ultimately arrested him on a charge of first-degree murder on Tuesday.

Details of his evidence discussed at his May 17 bail hearing are subject to a standard publication ban protecting his right to a fair trial.

It was not immediately clear what earlier charges produced his previous bail conditions, in effect at the time of Iaconos shooting death.

Clarkes arrest comes as tensions boil in the Montreal underworld, including a botched murder attempt against Leonardo Rizzuto, son of the late Vito Rizzuto, who was widely considered Canadas top Mafia figure until his death by natural causes a decade ago.

Murders of women in Mafia struggles are considered extremely rare.

Iacono died in her car after being shot close to the hair salon she ran in Montreals Cote-des-Neiges district.

Iaconos father-in-law was Moreno Gallo, who was assassinated in an Acapulco restaurant in Mexico in 2013 after reportedly running afoul of the Rizzutocrime group.

Gallo received a life sentence for the 1973 killing of a Montreal drug dealer and was paroled and deported to Italy in 2012.

Also this week, Montreal Mafia leader Francesco (Chit) Del Balso was shot dead near the Monster Gym Dorval.

Once a top member of the Rizzuto group, Del Balso was reportedly a suspect in the failed attempt earlier this year to kill Leonardo Rizzuto.

There has been a pronounced GTA connection to the Montreal underworld violence this year.

Last week, Laval police announced that Carlos Pena Torrez, 36, of Toronto, faces separate attempted murder charges in the shooting of a 77-year-old man in Laval, Quebec.

That attempted murder charge in Quebec against Torrez comes after the Jan. 29 shooting of the man in broad daylight in a busy Laval parking lot.

After that shooting, Montreal police said in a press release said that an investigation confirms that the wrong victim was shot.

La Presse newspaper reported that the intended target in the Laval murder bid was Del Balso, whose criminal record includes convictions for cocaine smuggling, gangsterism, possession of the proceeds of crime, tax evasion and threatening a reporter.

At the time of his arrest, Quebec police said Clarke was a person known to Canadian police in relation to a multitude of events of violence.

Clarkes court documents reveal an earlier arrest in which he was charged with kidnapping, assault with a weapon and flight from police in Toronto on March 16, 2018.

It is not clear from the documents what came of those charges.

Aside from the first-degree murder charge, outstanding charges against Clarke include possession of a prohibited weapon and possession of a restricted substance.

Clarke remains in custody in Quebec and his case was carried over to July 13.

With files from Canadian Press

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Mayoral candidate Mitzie Hunter has a message for Torontonians planning to vote for former NDP MP Olivia Chow  hope is not a plan.

The former Scarborough-Guildwood Liberal MPP made the comment to the Stars editorial board Friday when asked how she plans to beat Chow who has led the mayoral race in every opinion poll since April, including a new one.

Yes, I believe that I can, beat Chow, Hunter said, saying her rivals high name recognition from decades in local and federal politics is helping her in polls with just over two weeks until June 26 election day.

Olivia Chow seen as short on specifics

Hunter urged voters to contrast her own detailed 70-page Fix the Six election platform with Chows promises. Opponents touting their policies in the crowded race are accusing Chow of being short on specifics, including her position on property taxes.

I would say to the people: Hope is not a plan, Hunter said. We need real solutions because we have real challenges  Lets talk about how we get there: I can actually show you that path.

Hunter, who prior to a decade at Queens Park held such jobs as executive at Toronto Community Housing Corporation and head of non-profit CivicAction, called her housing plan the best on offer to voters.

Mitzie Hunter wants new city homebuilding agency

Noting that the citys Housing Now program to entice private developers to build affordable units on leased city land has yet to get a shovel in the ground, Hunter wants the city to get directly involved in homebuilding via a new agency.

She is promising 108 new midrise buildings on city land with 22,700 units, including more than 16,500 purpose-built rentals. Almost 70 per cent of those rentals would be at or below the going market rate and all those on city land would be subject to rent controls.

Hunter would not cancel Housing Now projects already in the pipeline, letting them proceed alongside her program. Launched in 2019, Housing Now has 21 sites, six with completed market offerings with private developers.

Ripping up contracts would chill developers willingness to work with the city, Hunter said, while risking costly litigation.

Struggling downtown core and city services a target

Hunter, an unabashed Scarborough booster, said as mayor she would widen her focus to including a downtown still struggling to recover from the pandemic and citywide services such as the TTC that have been allowed to deteriorate.

Hunter said she decided to quit Queens Park and run for mayor after John Tory resigned in February in his ninth year in office, triggering the byelection.

Looking around, she said, she saw a city in decline. What happened to the city in the last decade? Why are we visibly seeing crumbling infrastructure?

Asked why she didnt raise the alarm about that decline earlier, including during her friendly public appearances with Tory, Hunter said she challenged him on some transit policy and, as mayor, would constructively challenge Premier Doug Ford.

As mayor Hunter would work with Doug Ford

I know how to work with the province, to get better treatment for Toronto, said Hunter, whose plan to fix the citys pandemic-ravaged finances includes trying to convince the federal and provincial governments to give cities one point of the harmonized sales tax. I will work with Doug Ford, she said.

A Mainstreet Research poll released Friday gave Chow the support of 29 per cent of decided voters, followed by former city councillor Ana Bailao at 20 per cent, former police chief Mark Saunders at 13 per cent, Hunter and former Toronto Sun columnist Anthony Furey tied at nine per cent, Coun. Brad Bradford at four per cent and policy analyst Chloe Brown at three per cent.

The automated telephone survey of 706 Torontonians last Wednesday and Thursday has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points 19 times out of 20.

Other recent polls have given Chow a larger lead and put Bailao in fourth or fifth place. The Stars poll tracker, which crunches various surveys, on Friday gave Chow 34.8 per cent support of decided voters, with Saunders in second at 12.8 per cent.

David Rider is the Stars City Hall bureau chief and a reporter covering city hall and municipal politics. Follow him on Twitter: @dmrider

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Former U.S. president Donald Trump says he has been indicted on charges related to the mishandling of classified documents in his Florida estate.

The U.S. Justice Department has yet to publicly confirm the indictment, but Trump has said he is set to be in court in Miami on Tuesday.

Heres what you need to know:

What is he accused of?

Trump has been charged with seven counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, said two people familiar with the matter but are not authorized to speak publicly, to the Associated Press. The charges are sealed and details remain unclear.

Prosecutors have accused Trump of mishandling classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, including accusations he took with him around 300 classified documents from the White House to his Florida home.

These include the 100 or so documents seized by FBI agents when they raided his home last August, during which time the agents discovered more than 10,000 other government documents with no classification marked.

Trumps alleged actions could be charged under the U.S. Espionage Act; for example, one part of the act  18 U.S. Code  793  prohibits the willing possession of documents related to national defence by people unauthorized to handle them. The offence carries a maximum ten-year prison sentence.

Notably, the charge doesnt require the document-holder to share the information with a hostile government or other parties. Previous federal documents also noted Trump was being investigated for the concealment, mutilation or removal of records and for destroying, altering or falsifying documents in a federal investigation.

Background

Trumps document saga began back in February of 2022, when the National Archives and Records Administration first requested the Justice Department to investigate the former president after Trump belatedly returned 15 boxes of documents  which included classified information  kept at his Florida estate.

In August, Trump announced FBI agents had conducted an unannounced raid on his home, asserting that theyd broken into a safe. Days later, a federal judge unsealed the warrant behind the move, revealing the agents had confiscated classified information during their search. The warrant continued that agents were investigating multiple potential violations of federal law, including the espionage act.

Trump said the documents were all declassified and that hed have turned them over to federal agents if asked. For their part, the federal government said theyd made several requests for him to return the files.

Later that month, the DOJ released a heavily-redacted affidavit detailing the haphazard storage and security of the classified documents, some of which were mixed with magazines and other items. The document continued that there were a significant number of civilian witnesses involved in the probe.

Later in September, the FBI revealed in a court filing that it recovered 33 boxes and containers in their August raid, including 48 empty folders labelled as classified. In the end, according to CNN, the FBI recovered 31 confidential documents (the lowest level of classification), 54 secret documents (middle level of classification) and 18 top secret documents (the highest level of classification) during their August search.

While all this was going on, Trump sued the DOJ in late August, in an attempt to block them from viewing the classified documents until a third-party special master could ensure the files werent improperly accessed. His request was granted in September, before a unanimous federal appeals court reversed the decision later in December  allowing the DOJ to access all documents seized in the search.

What else do we know about the classified documents?

RELATED STORIES United States Donald Trump charged over classified documents in first federal indictment of an ex-president

Prosecutors have said that Trump took around 300 classified documents after leaving the White House.

Documents included those labelled confidential, secret and top secret  the highest classification. While also including those labelled sensitive compartmented information, a special category designed to protect the nations most important secrets.

The information must be stored and used in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility which has specific construction requirements.

The Justice Department has said there was no space secure in Mar-a-Lago for sensitive documents.

How are people responding?

TG Thea Gribilas is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Star's radio room in Toronto. Reach her via email: tgribilas@thestar.ca

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KINSHASA, Congo (AP)  At least 15 people were killed by extremist attacks in eastern Congos North Kivu province, a rights group said Friday.

Fighters with the Allied Democratic Forces believed to have ties with the Islamic State group  attacked people for multiple days this week in the Ruwenzori sector of Beni territory, said Meleki Mulala, a coordinator for the New Congolese Civil Society group, a local rights organization.

They (also) seriously injured several other civilians who were dispatched for urgent care, he said. The attackers executed the victims with knives, and the bodies of the dead were taken to the morgue and will be buried, Mulala said.

Violence has simmered for decades in eastern Congo, where about 120 armed groups fight over land, resources and power, and some to defend their communities.

Attacks by the Allied Democratic Forces have increased recently.

This weeks violence comes days after at least 18 people were killed by the group in neighboring Ituri province and weeks after 17 people were killed, also in North Kivu.

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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)  The United Nations World Food Program said Friday that it is temporarily suspending food aid to Ethiopia because its supplies are being diverted, an announcement that came a day after the United States Agency for International Development said it was doing the same.

Food diversion is absolutely unacceptable, and we welcome the government of Ethiopias commitment to investigate and hold accountable those responsible, WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain said. he programs head office in Rome declined further comment when contacted by The Associated Press.

Some 20 million Ethiopians rely on food aid because of drought and conflict, out of the countrys population of roughly 120 million. Much of the aid comes from USAID and the World Food Program.

The suspensions brought worries that malnutrition could rise in Africas second most populous country,

USAID, WFP and the Ethiopian government have not said who is responsible for the food diversion, which the U.S. has described as widespread and coordinated.

However, an internal memo prepared by a group of foreign donor representatives and seen by the AP this week pointed at government involvement.

The scheme appears to be orchestrated by federal and regional government of Ethiopia entities, with military units across the country benefiting from humanitarian assistance, said the document from the Humanitarian and Resilience Donor Group, which includes bilateral and multilateral partners.

In a joint statement with USAID on Thursday, the Ethiopian foreign ministry spoke of deeply concerning revelations and said it was investigating with the U.S. so that the perpetrators of such diversion are held to account.

The nationwide food aid suspensions follow USAID and WFP saying last month they had suspended food deliveries to Ethiopias northern Tigray region while they investigated reports of food aid theft there. The region is recovering from a two-year conflict.

That suspension by the World Food Program and allegations of aid diversion in Tigray were first reported by the AP. Some 5.4 million of the regions 6 million people rely on humanitarian help.

Earlier this year, USAID administrator Samantha Power told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that aid theft in Tigray appeared to involve collusion between parties on both sides of the conflict, which ended in November.

In its statement Friday, WFP said it was continuing other programs in Ethiopia for children, mothers and drought-hit pastoralists.

WFP is working closely with its U.N. and humanitarian partners and local stakeholders to reform the way assistance is delivered across Ethiopia and in all high-risk operational contexts where we work, it said.

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HAVANA, Cuba (AP)  Colombias government and its largest remaining guerrilla group agreed Friday to a six-month cease-fire at talks in Cuba, in the latest attempt to resolve a conflict dating back to the 1960s.

The government and the National Liberation Army, or ELN, announced the accord at a ceremony in Havana attended by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, top guerrilla commander Antonio Garcia and Cuban officials. The cease-fire takes effect in phases, goes fully into effect in August and then lasts for six months.

This effort to look for peace is a beacon of hope that conflicts can be resolved politically and diplomatically, top rebel negotiator Pablo Beltran said at the ceremony.

The talks originally were scheduled to conclude with an official ceremony on Thursday, but were postponed as the parties asked for additional time to work on final details. Petro traveled to the island for the ceremony, saying it could herald an era of peace in Colombia.

The accord reached Friday also calls for the formation of a broadly representative national committee by late July to discuss a lasting peace.

You have here proposed a bilateral agreement, and I agree with that, but Colombian society has to be able debate it, and to participate, Petro said during the ceremony.

Garcia, the rebel commander, said his group was very confident in the accord, though he characterized it as procedural and not yet the substantial kind needed for Colombia to change.

Negotiations between the sides had resumed in August, after being terminated in 2019 when the rebels set off a car bomb at a police academy in Bogota killing 21 people.

Following that incident, the government of then-President Ivan Duque (2018-2022) issued arrest warrants for ELN leaders in Cuba for the peace negotiations. But Cuba refused to extradite them, arguing that doing so would compromise its status as a neutral nation in the conflict and break with diplomatic protocols.

Talks relaunched in November shortly after Petro was elected as Colombias first leftist president.

Petro has pushed for what he calls a total peace that would demobilize all of the countrys remaining rebel groups as well as its drug trafficking gangs. He has questioned whether senior ELN leaders have full control of a younger generation of commanders who he has suggested are focused more on the illegal drug trade than on political goals.

The ELN was founded in the 1960s by union leaders, students and priests inspired by the Cuban revolution. It is Colombias largest remaining rebel group and has been notoriously difficult for previous Colombian governments to negotiate with.

In 2016, Colombias government signed a peace dea l with the larger FARC group that ended five decades of conflict in which an estimated 260,000 people were killed.

But violence has continued to affect rural pockets of the country where the ELN has been active, along with FARC holdout groups and drug trafficking gangs. Colombian authorities have accused the ELN of involvement in the drug trafficking, but the groups top leaders have denied that.

______

Juan Francisco Valbuena contributed reporting from Bogota.

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TOKYO (AP)  Japans parliament on Friday approved a revision to an immigration and refugee law that will allow the forced repatriation of asylum seekers after they are denied refugee status twice, a change that rights activists say could lead to their persecution at home.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishidas governing coalition and other conservative parties passed the revision with their overwhelming majority despite strong opposition.

Kishidas Liberal Democratic Party and supporters of the revision say it allows immigration authorities to quickly repatriate foreign citizens who do not qualify for refugee status but keep reapplying for asylum under the current system which allows multiple applications so they can stay in Japan longer. They say the revision is designed to avoid prolonged detention of overstayers at immigration facilities.

Opponents say the revision could result in the repatriation of people who face persecution or even death if they are sent back to their countries. The law allows the government to expel people who cannot prove they have reasonable grounds to stay after their second request for refugee status is denied.

The refugee bill triggered protests in and outside parliament during Fridays vote. Dozens of protesters stood outside the building holding banners and shouting Stop bad revision! and Scrap the bill! Inside parliament, opposition lawmakers took turns making protest speeches.

Separately, Kishidas Cabinet on Friday approved a plan to expand the scope of job categories allowed for foreign workers, opening the door for their future permanent residency, in a major shift in a country known for a closed-door immigration policy that is struggling with a rapidly aging and declining population.

The plan will allow foreign workers in nine additional industries, including fisheries, agriculture and hotels. Those who hold visas allowing them to stay in Japan for five years or less can upgrade to a longer visa that permits them to bring their families to Japan if they pass language and technical skills exams. At the end of March, about 150,000 foreign workers held the more restrictive visa, according to the immigration agency.

Japans population of more than 125 million has been declining for 16 years and is projected to fall to 87 million by 2070. A shrinking and aging population has huge implications for the economy and national security as Japan seeks to fortify its military to counter Chinas increasingly assertive territorial ambitions.

Japan accepted 202 refugees in 2022, less than 2% of the 10,195 people screened, according to Immigration Services Agency statistics.

An earlier attempt to revise the refugee law in 2021 was shelved amid an uproar following the death of a Shri Lankan woman held at a immigration detention facility in Nagoya, central Japan, where she was not given proper medical care despite her repeated complaints of stomach problems and obvious declining health.

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SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  South Koreas Foreign Ministry summoned Chinas ambassador on Friday to protest comments he made accusing Seoul of tilting toward the United States and away from China, as competition between Washington and Beijing for global influence intensifies.

South Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Chang Ho-jin warned Chinese Ambassador Xing Haiming over his senseless and provocative remarks made during a meeting with a South Korean opposition leader.

The ministry accused Xing of violating diplomatic protocols and interfering with South Korean domestic politics but didnt specify the parts of Xings comments it saw as inappropriate. The ministry also didnt share what Xing said in reply to Chang.

In a meeting Thursday with South Korean Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung, a key rival of conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol, Xing accused Yoons government of leaning excessively toward Seouls treaty ally, the United States, and damaging its relations with China, its biggest trading partner.

Xing said South Korea was entirely to blame for the many difficulties in bilateral relations, citing its growing trade deficit with China which he attributed to de-Chinaization efforts, apparently referring to actions by South Korean companies to shift their supply chains away from China. He demanded that Seoul respect Beijings core interests including Taiwan and other major regional issues.

With the United States pressuring China with all its might, some are betting that the United States will win and China will lose. But this is clearly the wrong judgment, Xing said, describing a rosy future for his country under authoritarian leader Xi Jingping. What can be said with certainty is that those who bet on Chinas defeat will surely regret it later, Xing said.

South Koreas Foreign Ministry said Xings irresponsible comments countered the desire of both countries governments and people to value and further advance South Korea-China relations based on mutual respect.

South Korea, whose economy depends greatly on exports of computer memory chips and other technology products, has struggled to strike a balance between the United States, its decades-long military ally, and China, the biggest buyer of its goods as the rivalry between Washington and Beijing deepens over regional influence and technology.

Faced with a growing nuclear threat from North Korea, Yoon has pushed aggressively to strengthen the alliance with the United States, making it a central goal of his policies.

Seoul has expanded joint military training with the United States and is seeking stronger assurances that it would swiftly and decisively use its nuclear weapons to defend South Korea in the event of a North Korean nuclear attack.

The Biden administration in turn has been seeking stronger three-way cooperation with South Korea and Japan to counter both the North Korean threat and Chinas increasingly assertive foreign policy.

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CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  The brother of a gay American who was attacked and fell from a Sydney cliff top in 1988 said elements within local police had demonized their family over their pursuit of justice.

An Australian man was sentenced to nine years in prison Thursday for killing Scott Johnson. His older brother Steve Johnson led the familys efforts to overturn a coroners finding in 1989 that the American mathematician had taken his own life.

Steve Johnson told Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Friday that evidence in a New South Wales state government inquiry into hate crimes had confirmed our worst fears that the police were really not only opposed to the investigation but demonizing our family.

Its still a question mark why? Maybe they thought of Scotts case as a tinderbox that would force them to work on the other 100 cases of gay men who died during the same period, Steve Johnson said.

There are still some in the police force that are opposed to trying to solve these other cases of gay deaths and we think that they need to, he added.

Text messages between senior police in 2015 revealed their hostility toward the Johnson family.

Former Deputy Police Commissioner Mick Willing, then commander of the homicide squad, warned then Detective Chief Inspector Pamela Young in a text message against letting them win.

Young replied: Mick  I will not let them win  that is not in my DNA.

Willing added: We will come out on top. Both police officers have since left the force.

The text messages were exchanged the day after Young told a television news program there was evidence and information that Scott Johnson took his own life.

A second coroners inquiry into Johnsons case in 2012 could not explain the death, but overturned the 1989 finding of suicide. The coroner found similarities between Scott Johnsons death and the deaths of three gay men off the coast of the Sydney coastal suburb of Bondi between 1985 and 1989. The coroner found there was a possibility that Scott Johnson was the victim of a gay hate crime similar to those that occurred in Bondi.

A third inquiry ruled in 2017 that Scott Johnson had been attacked by an unknown assailant or assailants because he was perceived to be homosexual.

A breakthrough came in 2020 when police offered a 1 million Australian dollar ($667,000) reward for information. Steve Johnson, a wealthy entrepreneur based in Boston, offered his own money to double the reward.

Scott Phillip White, 52, was charged after his former wife came forward with crucial information. He eventually said he had punched Johnson in an argument and the man had fallen off the cliff to his death.

A government inquiry began hearing evidence last year of unsolved deaths resulting from hate crimes over four decades in New South Wales where police were notoriously indifferent to such violence.

The Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes will report on Aug. 30. The acronym refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer people.

Willing told the inquiry last month that Young regarded the Johnson family as police opponents. Willing said Young held the view that one of the police objectives at a third inquest would be to defeat the Johnson family by convincing the coroner that it was not homicide. Police rated Scott Johnsons death as zero solvability.

Willing described the police relationship with the Johnsons as adversarial, but said he did not see the police objective to be to defeat the family.

But in light of the text message exchange, Peter Gray, a lawyer assisting the inquiry, urged Commissioner John Sackar to find that Willing shared Youngs view that police should oppose and prevent a coroner finding of homicide.

Willing also described Steve Johnson as obsessive and erratic.

Young has not given evidence to the inquiry. But she told the ABC on Friday that she had objected in 2015 to the powerful supporters the Johnson family had attracted.

No other homicide next of kin gets the priority and personal attention from government or the police hierarchy, Young said.

Steve Johnson described his relationship with the NSW Police Force as a little mixed. The family was very close friends with Detective Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans amazing team of investigators that arrested White in 2020.

Steve Johnson said the conviction on Wednesday of Stanley Bruce Early, 77, for murdering Raymond Keam in a gay hangout in the Sydney suburb of Randwick in 1987 was proof that old cases could be solved.

Asked about Steve Johnsons criticism that the family had been demonized, the police media office referred to Yeomans comments outside court on Thursday.

The police should be a voice for the victims of crime and thats what we did, Yeomans said. How staunch hes (Steve Johnsons) been and how remarkable the family has been through all these years, has just been incredible. And in the end, all we did was our job.

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(Bloomberg) -- Chinas local government financing vehicles are merging and reshuffling assets among themselves at record speed, as authorities seek to use consolidation to help ease debt pressure and improve fundraising.

Most Read from Bloomberg

LGFVs, which mostly fund infrastructure projects, were involved in 240 deals including mergers and asset transfers between January and May, more than double on year, according to calculations based on Essence Securities Co.s LGFV consolidation monthly report. The figure also marks the highest for the period since 2010 when the Chinese brokerage started tracking the data.

Focus has been increasing on the $9 trillion debt market for LGFVs, which have played a key role in Beijings efforts to use investment to boost economic growth since the global financial crisis. While none have defaulted on a public bond, the recent last-minute payoff of a note raised fresh concerns about the sectors debt-servicing abilities. LGFVs received an average 392 million yuan ($55 million) of government subsidies last year, the most since 2013.

Consolidation is an unavoidable trend for LGFVs, according to Li Han, a fixed-income analyst at Citic Securities Co. Combining them can increase LGFVs quality and lower risks, he said, while a smaller number of LGFVs can help regulators manage and control them.

Support from local governments could be impacted by their own stretched finances in the wake of pandemic-related spending and slumping home demand. Land sales have long been a primary revenue generator for towns. Half of Chinese cities experienced difficulty making debt-interest payments last year, according to Rhodium Group.

In addition, recent data have increased worries about a fresh slowdown in Chinas economic growth.

The Xinhua News agency published a report Monday quoting an unidentified Ministry of Finance official who said local government finances are healthy and safe. Authorities have enough resources to tackle risks, the official added.

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LONDON (AP)  The archbishop of Canterbury has urged the Anglican Church of Uganda to reject the countrys new anti-homosexuality law, saying its support for the legislation was a fundamental departure from the global Anglican movements commitment to protect the dignity of all people.

Archbishop Justin Welby, the spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, said Friday that he had written to Ugandan Archbishop Stephen Kaziimba to express his grief and dismay over the Ugandan churchs position on the law.

Supporting such legislation is a fundamental departure from our commitment to uphold the freedom and dignity of all people, Welby said in a statement. There is no justification for any province of the Anglican Communion to support such laws: not in our resolutions, not in our teachings, and not in the Gospel we share.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni late last month signed legislation that includes the death penalty for aggravated homosexuality, defined as sexual relations involving people infected with HIV. Those convicted of promoting homosexuality, a broad category covering everyone from journalists to human rights campaigners, face up to 20 years in prison.

While Welby joined world leaders such as U.S. President Joe Biden and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in opposing the legislation, his intervention highlights deep divisions within the global Anglican movement over its teachings on marriage and sexuality.

Many Anglican leaders in the Southern Hemisphere continue to teach that homosexuality is contrary to Gods design and oppose moves to recognize same-sex marriage. That has created tensions with more liberal churches in Europe and North America.

The Anglican Communion is the umbrella organization for 46 autonomous churches that trace their roots to the Church of England, a Protestant denomination that split from the Catholic Church in the 16th century.

While there is no central authority, the member churches recognize the archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the Church of England, as their spiritual head and take guidance from periodic meetings of archbishops and other church leaders.

Anglicans account for about a third of Ugandas population, making it the countrys second-biggest religion behind Catholicism, according to the most recent census.

Welby said he was deeply aware of the history of colonial rule in Uganda and wasnt trying to impose Western values on the people of Uganda.

But he said that despite their disagreements, Anglican leaders worldwide had agreed to condemn homophobia and oppose criminal sanctions against LGBTQ+ people.

These statements and commitments are the common mind of the Anglican Communion on the essential dignity and value of every person, Welby said. I therefore urge Archbishop Kaziimba and the Church of Uganda  a country and church I love dearly, and to which I owe so much  to reconsider their support for this legislation and reject the criminalization of LGBTQ people.

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LONDON (AP)  He was the mayor who reveled in the glory of hosting the 2012 London Olympics, and the man who led the Conservatives to a whopping election victory on the back of his mission to get Brexit done.

But Boris Johnsons time as prime minister was marred by his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and a steady stream of ethics allegations. In 2022 he was forced from power, and on Friday he quit as a lawmaker, jumping before he could be sanctioned over lockdown-breaching parties during the pandemic.

Here is a timeline of events relating to Johnsons political career:

2001-2008: Serves as a member of Parliament in the House of Commons representing the constituency of Henley.

2008-2016: Serves as London mayor, overseeing 2012 London Olympics.

2016: Co-leader of the campaign to take Britain out of the European Union, in opposition to then-Prime Minister David Cameron, a fellow Conservative. Cameron resigns after voters approve Brexit in a national referendum on June 23, 2016.

2016-2018: Serves as Foreign Secretary under Camerons successor, Prime Minister Theresa May. Johnson resigns in July 2018 in opposition to Mays strategy for a soft Brexit that would maintain close ties with the EU.

June 7, 2019: Theresa May resigns as Conservative Party leader over her failure to persuade Parliament to back the Brexit agreement she negotiated with the EU. The party is split between those who back May and hard-liners, led by Johnson, who are willing to risk a no-deal Brexit in order to wring concessions from the EU.

July 23, 2019: Johnson is elected Conservative Party leader in a vote by party members. He takes office as prime minister the next day, inheriting a minority government that relies on votes from Northern Irelands Democratic Unionist Party to pass legislation. Johnson insists Britain will leave the EU on Oct. 31, with or without a deal.

Aug. 28, 2019: Johnson announces he will shut down Parliament until mid-October, giving opponents less time to thwart a no-deal Brexit.

Sept. 3, 2019: Twenty-one rebel Conservative Party lawmakers support legislation requiring the government to seek an extension of Brexit negotiations if it cant negotiate an agreement with the EU. The measure passes and the rebels are expelled from the party.

Sept. 5, 2019: Johnson asserts he would rather be dead in a ditch than ask the EU for another extension.

Sept. 24, 2019: U.K. Supreme Court rules governments suspension of Parliament was unlawful.

Oct. 19, 2019: Johnson asks the EU to delay Brexit again. New deadline set for Jan. 31.

Nov. 6, 2019: Parliament is dissolved and early elections are set for mid-December as Johnson seeks a mandate for his Brexit strategy.

Dec. 12, 2019: Johnson wins an 80-seat majority in the general election, giving him the backing to push through Brexit legislation. The victory makes Johnson the most electorally successful Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher.

Jan. 23, 2020: The Brexit deal becomes law after approval by U.K. Parliament. European Parliament approves the deal six days later.

March 23, 2020: Johnson places U.K. in first lockdown due to COVID-19.

April 5, 2020: Johnson hospitalized and later moved to intensive care with COVID-19. He is released from the hospital on April 12, thanking the nurses who sat with him through the night to make sure he kept breathing.

Nov. 3-4, 2021: Johnsons government orders Conservative lawmakers to support a change in ethics rules to delay the suspension of Owen Paterson, a Johnson supporter who had been censured for breaching lobbying rules. The measure passes. A day later, facing an angry backlash from lawmakers of all parties, Johnson reverses course and allows lawmakers to vote on Patersons suspension. Paterson resigns.

Nov. 30, 2021: Allegations surface that government officials attended parties in government offices during November and December 2020 in violation of COVID-19 lockdown rules. The scandal grows to reports of more than a dozen parties. Johnson denies the allegations, but opposition leaders criticize the government for breaking the law as people across the country made sacrifices to combat the pandemic.

Dec. 8, 2021: Johnson authorizes investigation into the scandal, dubbed Partygate. Pressure builds for a leadership challenge, but fizzles.

April 9: Johnson meets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, pledging a new package of military and economic support. Johnsons staunch support for Ukraine after Russias invasion helps bolster Johnson and his supporters, who argue the government should not focus on domestic political squabbles.

April 12: Johnson is fined 50 pounds ($63) for attending one of the lockdown parties. Johnson apologizes but insists he didnt know he was breaking the rules.

May 22,: Findings of the Partygate investigation are published, detailing 16 gatherings at Johnsons home and office and other government offices between May 2020 and April 2021, at a time when millions of people were unable to see friends and family.

June 6: Johnson narrowly wins a vote of no confidence, with Conservative lawmakers voting 211148 to back him. The scale of the revolt  some 41% voted against him  shakes his grip on power.

June 15: Christopher Geidt quits as ethics adviser to Johnson, accusing the Conservative government of planning to flout conduct rules.

June 24: Johnsons Conservatives lose two former strongholds to opposition parties in special elections.

June 29: Parliaments cross-party Privileges Committee issues a call for evidence for a probe into whether Johnson misled Parliament over lockdown parties.

June 30: Lawmaker Chris Pincher resigns as Conservative deputy chief whip amid allegations he assaulted two guests at a private members club in London. Previous sexual misconduct allegations emerge about Pincher. Questions swirl about whether Johnson knew about the claims when Pincher was given the job.

July 5: Johnson apologizes for his handling of the Pincher scandal and says he had forgotten about being told of the allegations. Two of Johnsons most senior Cabinet ministers, Treasury chief Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Sajid Javid, quit the government.

July 6: Some three dozen junior ministers resign from the government, attacking Johnsons leadership.

July 7: Johnson resigns as Conservative Party leader, but plans to remain as prime minister while the leadership contest is held.

Sept 6: Johnson leaves office, replaced by Liz Truss.

Oct. 25: Sunak replaces Truss as prime minister after her tax-cutting economic plans caused turmoil on financial markets.

November 2022: Johnson begins stepping up speaking engagements that take him around the world from India to Nigeria to Singapore to the United States. During the current parliamentary term, he reports earning 2.7 million pounds ($3.4 million) from speaking engagements.

March 3, 2023: A U.K. parliamentary committee says evidence suggests Johnson repeatedly misled Parliament about his knowledge of lockdown-breaking parties at his Downing Street office.

March 22: Johnson insists hand on heart that he never lied to lawmakers about rule-breaking government parties, mounting a robust defense at a hearing that could damage or even end his tumultuous political career.

June 9, 2023: Johnson resigns his parliamentary seat after receiving report on lockdown plans.

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STOCKHOLM (AP)  Swedish prosecutors charged a Turkish man Friday with attempted aggravated extortion, an aggravated weapons offense and attempted terrorist financing, saying he was acting on behalf of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party.

Swedish media noted it was the first time that someone in Sweden was prosecuted for alleged terrorist financing of the party. Also known as PKK, it has waged an insurgency in southeast Turkey since 1984 and is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

Turkey has refused to approve Swedens request to join NATO, accusing the Swedish government of not doing enough to crack down on PKK members and others whom Ankara considers extremists. The military alliance wants to admit Sweden before a NATO summit next month in Vilnius, Lithuania.

All existing members must ratify a candidate countrys accession protocol before it can join the trans-Atlantic alliance. Turkey and Hungary are the only two members that have not yet ratified Swedens bid.

The man charged Friday is in his 40s. Prosecutors did not identify him. He is accused of attempting to extort money on Jan. 11 in Stockholm by pointing a loaded revolver at a person, firing in the air and threatening to damage the premises unless he received demanded funds the following day, according to the charge sheet obtained by The Associated Press.

The man denies any wrongdoing, Swedish news agency TT said.

The charge sheet alleged the money he attempted to raise was to finance terror activities and part of activity on a larger scale. The suspect had been alluding to his belonging to the organization PKK, the document states.

The prosecution suspects he had contact with another Turkish citizen who was sentenced to prison in Germany in 2016 for membership in the PKK and for being directly involved in the organizations fundraising.

Sweden tightened its anti-terrorism laws last month, a move expected to help persuade Turkey to approve the Nordic nations request to join NATO. Swedish lawmakers included a prison term of up to four years for individuals convicted of participating in an extremist organization in a way that is intended to promote, strengthen or support the group.

However, the penalty can be increased to eight years when a crime is deemed serious.

The revisions took effect June 1.

Turkey has long pressed for concrete measures against the PKK, so I think this can have a certain effect on the NATO process, Paul Levin, director of the Institute for Turkish Studies at Stockholm University, told Swedish broadcaster TV4.

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BEIRUT (AP)  A little white pill has given Syrian President Bashar Assad powerful leverage with his Arab neighbors, who have been willing to bring him out of pariah status in hopes he will stop the flow of highly addictive Captagon amphetamines out of Syria.

Western governments have been frustrated by the red-carpet treatment Arab countries have given Assad, fearing that their reconciliation will undermine the push for an end to Syrias long-running civil war.

But for Arab states, halting the Captagon trade is a high priority. Hundreds of millions of pills have been smuggled over the years into Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries, where the drug is used recreationally and by people with physically demanding jobs to keep them alert.

Saudi Arabia has intercepted large shipments of pills hidden in crates of fake plastic oranges and in hollowed out pomegranates  even pills crushed and molded to look like traditional clay bowls.

Analysts say Assad likely hopes that by making even limited gestures against the drug he can gain reconstruction money, further integration in the region and even pressure for an end to Western sanctions.

The vast majority of the worlds Captagon is produced in Syria, with smaller production in neighboring Lebanon. Western governments estimate the illegal trade in the pills generates billions of dollars.

The United States, Britain and European Union accuse Assad, his family and allies, including Lebanons militant Hezbollah group, of facilitating and profiting from the trade. That has given Assads rule a massive financial lifeline at a time when the Syrian economy is crumbling, they say. The Syrian government and Hezbollah deny the accusations.

Syrias neighbors have been the biggest and most lucrative market for the drug. As the industry flourished, experts say Damascus in recent years saw Captagon as more than just a cash cow.

The Assad regime realized that this is something they can weaponize for political gain ... and thats when production started being on a large scale, said Karam Shaar, a senior fellow at Washington-based New Lines Institute.

Stopping the trade has been a top demand of Arab countries in their talks with Syria on ending its political isolation. Syria was readmitted last month from the Arab League, from which it was suspended in 2011 because of Assads brutal crackdown on protesters. On May 20, Assad received a warm welcome at the Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

A possible sign of the behind-the-scenes trade-offs came on May 8, when airstrikes in southern Syria reduced the home of a well-known drug kingpin to rubble. Merhi al-Ramthan, his wife and six children were killed. Another strike destroyed a suspected Captagon factory outside the city of Daraa, near the Jordanian border.

Jordan was likely behind the strike, with Assads consent, say activists and experts. The strike came one day after the Arab League formally re-admitted Syria, a step Jordan helped broker.

Assad gave assurances that he would stop the regime from supporting and protecting smuggling networks, a former brigadier general of Jordans intelligence service, Saud Al-Sharafat, told The Associated Press. For example, he facilitated the disposal of al-Ramthan.

Jordan, he said, sees the Captagon trade as a threat to both security and communal peace.

In public comments, Jordans foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, refused to confirm or deny whether his country was behind the airstrikes but said it was willing to take military action to curb drug smuggling.

Arab states, many of which had backed the rebels trying to oust Assad, say they share the goal of pushing him to make peace. Ahead of the Jeddah summit, Jordan hosted a meeting of top diplomats from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt, and the long agenda included setting a roadmap for peace talks and the return of millions of Syrian refugees.

But it was on Captagon where the gathering made the most progress. Syria pledged to clamp down on smuggling, and a regional security coordination committee was agreed on. Days later, Syrian state media reported that police quashed a Captagon smuggling operation in the city of Aleppo, discovering 1 million pills hiding in a pickup truck.

Jordan has intensified surveillance along the Syrian border in recent years and has raided drug dealers. Jordanian troops killed 27 suspected smugglers in a fierce gun battle in January.

Smuggling routes have made untangling drug networks more difficult. A member of an Iraqi militia told the AP that militias in Iraqs desert Anbar province, which borders Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, have been crucial for Captagon smuggling. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Syrian lawmaker Abboud al-Shawakh denied the government profits from the drug trade and insisted authorities are trying vigorously to crack down on smuggling.

Our country is used as a regional transit route as there are border crossings out of the states control, al-Shawakh told the AP. He alleged that only armed opposition groups are involved in Captagon dealing.

Syrian opposition groups are believed by many observers to have some involvement in drug smuggling. Western governments, however, accuse Assads relatives and allies of a direct role in Captagon production and trade and have imposed sanctions on a string of individuals close to Assad.

While Assad may be willing to move against some parts of the drug trade, he has little incentive to crush it completely without winning something in return from Arab states, al-Sharafat said.

A Saudi official denied reports that Riyadh had offered billions of dollars to Damascus in exchange for a crackdown. But he added that whatever the kingdom might offer Syria would be less costly than the damage that Captagon has caused among Saudi youth. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

The U.S. and other Western governments fear that the Arab states normalization with Syria undermines attempts to push Assad to make concessions to end Syrias conflict. They want Assad to follow a peace roadmap outlined in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254, passed unanimously in 2015, which calls for talks with the opposition, rewriting the constitution and U.N.-monitored elections.

So far, the resolution has gone nowhere. Since it passed, Assad regained control over previously lost territory, confining the opposition to a small corner of the northwest. His grip on power now seems solid, though much of the north and east remains out of his hands, held by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters.

Shaar said Assad might use the Captagon card to try to get the U.N. resolution shelved.

Other concessions, like the lifting of Western-led sanctions, would be harder for him to win. While Gulf Arab states wont be able to directly inject cash into Assads government with the sanctions in place, Shaar said they could funnel money through U.N.-led projects in government-held Syria to get action from Assad against Captagon.

He will be politicking with Gulf states, Shaar said.

___

Associated Press writers Bassem Mroue in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad, contributed to this report.

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RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP)  The Palestinian Health Ministry said Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian man at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank Friday, and the military said the man attacked a solider before he was shot.

The army said the man arrived at the checkpoint near Ramallah city in a stolen vehicle, attacked the soldier that was inspecting his papers and tried to steal his weapon. Another soldier shot the alleged Palestinian assailant. The soldier was lightly wounded.

The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the man as Mahdi Biadsa, 29. His body is being held by the Israeli military, which said it was investigating the incident and whether it was a criminal attack or part of a wave of rising violence.

At least 118 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and east Jerusalem this year, nearly half of them members of armed militant groups, according to an Associated Press tally. But stone-throwing youths and people uninvolved in violence have also been killed.

Meanwhile, Palestinian attacks on Israeli targets in those areas have killed 21 people.

Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with east Jerusalem and Gaza. The Palestinians seek the territories for their hoped-for independent state.

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CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP)  James Watt, the Reagan administrations sharp-tongued, pro-development interior secretary who was admired by conservatives but ran afoul of environmentalists, Beach Boys fans and eventually the president, has died. He was 85.

Watt died in Arizona on May 27, son Eric Watt said in a statement Thursday.

In an administration divided between so-called pragmatists and hard-liners, few stood as far to the right at the time as Watt, who once labeled the environmental movement as preservation vs. people and the general public as a clash between liberals and Americans.

In that sense, Watt foreshadowed combative Interior secretaries like Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt, who, like Watt, aggressively pushed to grant oil, gas and coal leases on public land, increase offshore drilling and limit expansion of national parks and monuments.

While no ones death should be celebrated, he was the worst of MAGA before it was invented, tweeted David Doniger, a senior strategic director at the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, referring to former President Donald Trumps Make America Great Again slogan.

Watt and his supporters saw him as an upholder of President Ronald Reagans core conservative values, but opponents were alarmed by his policies and offended by his comments. In 1981, shortly after he was appointed, the Sierra Club collected more than 1 million signatures seeking Watts ouster and criticized such actions as clear-cutting federal lands in the Pacific Northwest, weakening environmental regulations for strip mining and hampering efforts to curtail air pollution in Californias Yosemite Valley.

With his bald head and thick glasses, he became the rare interior secretary recognizable to the general public, for reasons beyond the environment. He characterized members of a coal advisory panel using derogatory language and in 1983 tried to ban music from Fourth of July festivities on the National Mall, saying it attracted the wrong element.

The Beach Boys had been recent mall headliners, and their fans included President Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan. With Watts statement facing widespread mockery, the Reagans invited the Beach Boys for a special White House visit. Watt, meanwhile, was summoned to receive a plaster model of a foot with a hole in it.

In his 1985 book The Courage of a Conservative, Watt wrote that the controversy actually arose because I was a conservative. Members of a liberal press saw an opportunity to create a controversy by censoring the facts and avoiding the real issues. He said the initial stories about the rock music ban only mentioned that the Beach Boys had performed in the past. Yet before we knew what was happening, banner headlines proclaimed that I had banned the Beach Boys. I was astonished.

Cutting regulations was his primary mission. Between the time he was confirmed as Interior secretary in 1981 until he resigned under pressure in 1983, Watt implemented an offshore leasing program that offered virtually the entire U.S. coastline for oil and gas drilling and held the largest coal lease sale in history, auctioning off 1.1 billion tons (1 billion metric tons) of coal in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming.

Watt tripled the amount of onshore land being leased for oil and gas exploration and doubled the acreage leased for geothermal resources.

Watt did spend $1 billion to restore and improve national parks and added 2,800 square miles (7,300 square kilometers) to the nations wilderness system. And his efforts to exploit natural resources made America stronger, he wrote to Reagan in October 1983.

Our excellent record for managing the natural resources of this land is unequaled  because we put people in the environmental equation, Watt wrote.

But eight days after writing to the president, he rode horseback into a cow pasture down the road from Reagans California ranch to announce his resignation. He was succeeded by a longtime Reagan aide, William Clark.

I had outworn my usefulness, Watt said of his decision, adding that others wouldnt get off my case about his insulting coal advisory panel comment.

Watt was born Jan. 31, 1938, in Lusk, Wyoming, and his family later moved to Wheatland, Wyoming, where his father practiced law. He attended the University of Wyoming, graduating in 1960 and obtaining a law degree two years later.

In 1962, Watt became a personal assistant to former Gov. Milward L. Simpson, and he went to Washington after Simpson was elected to the U.S. Senate later that year. In 1966-69, he helped develop policies on such issues as pollution, mining, public lands and energy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, then in early 1969 he joined the Nixon administration as an Interior Department undersecretary.

In 1975, President Gerald Ford appointed him to the Federal Power Commission.

While Jimmy Carter was president, Watt worked in the private sector as president and chief legal officer of the pro-development Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver.

He did consulting work after leaving the Reagan administration, at one point turning heads when he agreed to represent Indian tribes in oil operations and hotel developments after previously labeling Indian reservations the failure of socialism. He also accepted six-figure consulting fees to represent developers of a federally subsidized housing project.

He moved back to Wyoming in 1986 and set up a law office in Jackson, taught at his alma mater and served as a legal consultant and speaker.

But his consulting work involving federal housing money came under scrutiny in the late 1980s when an investigation was launched into corruption in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In 1996, he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor for withholding documents from a grand jury investigating HUD. He was fined $5,000, put on five years probation and ordered to perform community service. He said he had made a serious mistake and hoped to get on with a constructive role in society.

Over the years, Watt expressed fears that unless they were stopped, radical environmental movements like Earth First! would persuade the cowards of Congress to ban all hunting, eliminate all logging and livestock grazing on public lands and further jeopardize the minerals industries.

He lived in his later years in Wickenburg, Arizona, with his wife, Leilani.

___

Associated Press writer Matthew Daly in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

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INDIANAPOLIS (AP)  A new Indiana laws provision barring teachers from providing instruction on human sexuality to students from pre-K through the third grade is unconstitutional and so vaguely written that teachers wouldnt know whether they are complying with it, a federal lawsuit filed Friday argues.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indianas lawsuit targets a portion of a new law that also requires schools to notify a parent if a student requests a name or pronoun change at school, but it does not challenge the pronoun and name change notification provision.

Republican lawmakers approved the law this year during a session that targeted LGBTQ+ people in the state. It is due to take effect July 1 after Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb signed it into law in May.

The ACLUs lawsuit names Indianas secretary of education, Katie Jenner, as the defendant and seeks an injunction preventing the human sexuality instruction provision from taking effect July 1.

The office of Attorney General Todd Rokita issued a statement saying it will review the lawsuit and defend what the duly elected legislators find to be the appropriate age for sexuality discussions with Indianas elementary school students.

The suit contends that by prohibiting Indiana teachers from providing human sexuality instruction to students from pre-K through third grade, it violates their First Amendment rights.

Because the law defines neither instruction nor human sexuality, the complaint also contends, those terms are impossibly vague and lack any ascertainable standards for determining whether or not the law has been violated.

Ken Falk, legal director for the ACLU of Indiana, said it is written so broadly that it would be next to impossible for teachers to determine what they can and cannot say to students.

In addition, teachers have a First Amendment right to express themselves as private citizens outside of the classroom, including in the schools hallways, playground, or before and after school, but the vagueness of this law would certainly have a chilling effect on those rights, Falk added in a news release.

The suit also contends that the provision violates the due process clause under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

It was filed on behalf of a teacher with Indianapolis Public Schools, Kayla Smiley, who will be teaching students in grades one through three in the upcoming school year and states that she maintains a classroom library with age-appropriate books across a diverse spectrum of subjects and concerns, including LGBTQ issues, such as biographies of Harvey Milk, and Elton John.

The suit adds that Smiley has no idea whether these books qualify as instruction on human sexuality.

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TOPEKA, Kan. (AP)  The Kansas governor chose a high-ranking U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration official Friday to head the state highway patrol, replacing a retiring superintendent who is facing federal lawsuits over the agencys policing and allegations that he sexually harassed female employees.

Gov. Laura Kellys appointment of Erik Smith came on retiring Superintendent and Col. Herman Jones last day. Until Smith can take over as superintendent July 7, patrol Lt. Col. Jason DeVore, who also was named as a defendant in the sexual harassment lawsuit, pursued by five patrol employees.

Smith has strong ties to Kansas. He is a native of the small central Kansas town of Ellsworth, holds a criminal justice degree from Friends University in Wichita, and served nine years with the Sedgwick County sheriffs office, also in Wichita, before joining the DEA. He has been chief of the DEAs Inspection Division since 2021.

Smiths appointment must be confirmed by the Kansas Senate next year. Lawmakers are out of session for the year, but a committee of Senate leaders will determine this summer whether Smith can serve as acting superintendent until a confirmation vote.

Kelly had faced pressure from the Republican-controlled Legislature to dismiss Jones, but he announced in February that he would retire. In announcing Smiths appointment, Kelly made no mention of the allegations surrounding Jones and the patrol and thanked Jones for his 45 years in law enforcement. In a statement released by the governors office, DeVore thanked Kelly for her steadfast support of the agency.

A federal judge is considering the legality of a patrol tactic known as the Kansas two step," in which troopers make traffic stops and then draw out their interactions with drivers, allegedly so that they get time to find incriminating information or get a drug-sniffing dog to the scene. The judge had a trial last month in a lawsuit that argues that troopers use the tactic even when they have no reasonable suspicion of a crime.

Critics contend that the patrol targets motorists coming from other states where marijuana is legal. Kansas is among the few states with no legalized form of marijuana.

Meanwhile, a trial is scheduled in September in the sexual harassment lawsuit against Jones, DeVore and the state, alleging that the female employees faced a hostile work environment.

Jones has denied allegations of improper conduct, and Kelly has stood by him, telling The Topeka Capital-Journal in December that the state conducted two independent investigations and found no substance to the allegations.

Jones and DeVore settled a third lawsuit last year, filed by two majors who alleged that they were pushed out of the patrol in 2020 in retaliation for helping female employees file sexual harassment complaints. The patrol restored the two men to their previous positions, and they received more than years worth of back pay.

___

Follow John Hanna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apjdhanna

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PARKLAND, Fla. (AP)  A police officer who rushed into a high school building during the 2018 Parkland shooting testified Friday that a sheriffs deputy outside confirmed that the shooter was upstairs.

The former Broward County deputy, Scot Peterson, is on trial for failing to confront the shooter who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. He has insisted since he spoke to investigators two days after the massacre that he couldnt tell where the gunshots were coming from, and that he thought they may have been fired outside.

On the third day of Petersons trial, Coral Springs officer Richard Best related what he says Peterson told him outside the classroom building, WPLG-TV reported.

I said, Hey brother, what do we got? Best told the jury. He said, Gunshots second or third floor.

Peterson, 60, could be sentenced to nearly a century in prison if convicted.

It is understood that the longer you wait, the more damage is being done, Best said. Every time you heard a gunshot, somebody might be dead.

Peterson is charged with failing to confront shooter Nikolas Cruz before the gunman reached the buildings third floor, where he killed six people. The deputy is not charged in connection with the 11 deaths on the first floor, before he reached the building.

Peterson arrived at the building with his gun drawn 73 seconds before Cruz reached the third floor. Peterson took cover 75 feet (23 meters) away in the alcove of a neighboring building, his gun drawn. He didnt leave his spot for about 40 minutes  around 35 minutes after the shooting had stopped.

Arman Borghei, who was a student on the buildings third floor during the shootings, said he looked out of a window and spotted Peterson below with his gun drawn.

Borghei said he was really scared, wondering when help would arrive, but never saw Peterson approach the building.

Best testified that he considered it his job to risk his life to stop a threat and render aid.

It is not that as one police officer I want to go inside by myself, Best said. But that is our training  to go inside.

The most serious charges against Peterson are seven counts of felony child neglect.

For Peterson to be convicted of child neglect, prosecutors must first show he was legally a caregiver to the juvenile students  defined by Florida law as a parent, adult household member or other person responsible for a childs welfare.

If jurors find Peterson was a caregiver, they must determine whether he made a reasonable effort to protect the children or failed to provide necessary care.

Peterson is the first U.S. law enforcement officer ever charged for an alleged failure to act during a school shooting. Similarly, Texas authorities are investigating officers in the town of Uvalde who didnt confront the shooter who killed 19 elementary students and two teachers last year. None have been charged, however.

The trial began Wednesday and is expected to last up to two months.

Cruz, 24, pleaded guilty and last year received a life sentence.

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ATLANTA (AP)  Georgias state Republican convention gets underway Friday with Donald Trump still expected on Saturday, even as a right-wing party faction seeks to punish GOP officials it considers ideological traitors by banning them from future primary election ballots.

Trump could feed an air of vengeance after announcing Thursday that hes been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents, overshadowing party business and speakers including Republican presidential candidates Asa Hutchinson and Vivek Ramaswamy.

The proposal to ban candidates could be used to penalize elected Republican leaders including Gov. Brian Kemp or Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who crossed Trump by refusing the then-presidents demands to overturn his loss in the 2020 election. It also could be used against candidates who show insufficient purity on abortion or taxes.

Kemp, Raffensperger and some other officials are skipping the two-day gathering in Columbus.

The proposals could be squelched, with opponents saying primary election voters should decide whos fit to be a Republican. While ideological purists try to move Republicans relentlessly to the right, pragmatists say thats a strategy to lose general elections in battleground Georgia.

Jack Kingston, a former Georgia congressman who ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 2014, said its bull for any Republicans to presume to set boundaries for the party.

These things never work, he said of party purity attempts. And its just foolish, because you cant grow the party without getting at least some moderates that wouldnt meet some peoples definition of a good Republican.

Saturday will be Trumps first visit to Georgia since March 2022, when he was backing candidates challenging Kemp and other Republicans. Most of Trumps picks lost in their primaries. One who was nominated, Senate candidate Herschel Walker, was plagued by scandal and lost a runoff election to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock.

Trump said he faces a court appearance in Florida next week in the documents case as he continues to be under investigation elsewhere, including Georgia. An Atlanta-based prosecutor, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, is investigating whether Trump illegally interfered in the 2020 election and has suggested charging decisions will come in August.

But Trumps legal troubles hide another Georgia legacy: the wedge he drove between Kemp and the state party. Trump had endorsed Kemp in the Georgians successful run for governor in 2018, but their relationship was already souring when Kemp spurned Trumps call to overturn President Joe Bidens narrow victory.

Kemp, Republican Attorney General Chris Carr and others have faulted outgoing state party Chairman David Shafer, who faces his own post-2020 legal jeopardy, saying Shafer sided with Trump and undermined Republican incumbents in 2022. They are boycotting the convention.

Kemp is trying to project national influence to lead Republicans away from Trump, arguing grievance and a backward focus on the 2020 election will repel voters. But the belief someone stole the election from Trump in Georgia, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, has driven a new wave of activists now taking control of Georgias party.

A decision to grant a speaking slot to Arizonas Kari Lake, a staunch Trump backer who continues to deny she lost her governors race last year, is symbolic of the unbending support for the stolen election assertion. Lake will appear in place of former Vice President Mike Pence, also running for president, who canceled a Friday speech at the convention.

Kemp has stopped being subtle about attacking Trump, even as polls show Trump the leader for the 2024 nomination.

Taking our country back from Joe Biden does not start with congratulating North Koreas murderous dictator, Kemp tweeted June 2, joining Republican presidential hopefuls in criticizing Trump for congratulating North Koreas Kim Jong Un over the countrys appointment to the World Health Organization board.

The candidates to succeed Shafer say theyre going to try to paper over Georgias divides, betting the desire to defeat Biden in 2024 can act as glue.

The goal here is not to take shots at people. The goal here is to get Republicans elected, said Josh McKoon, a former state senator who is running for chairman.

But those seeking to enforce adherence to Republican ideals say the party needs to be more than a cheerleader.

Why do we allow people to run under the Republican banners who betray our principles? Alex Johnson, president of the right-wing Georgia Republican Assembly, asked Wednesday during an online talk show.

Johnsons plan would let the state convention vote to ban individuals from the Republican primary ballot in future years. There is no standard proposed for what merits a ban, although Johnson and fellow GRA members say bans should be used against officials flouting the party platform.

If theyre afraid of being removed from the ballot as a Republican, theyre going to act a lot better, Johnson said.

Such a move would likely be challenged under Georgia law, which says parties cant block primary candidates who meet procedural rules and sign a party loyalty oath. Johnson and others argue that U.S. Supreme Court decisions guaranteeing freedom of political association override any legal obstacles.

But Debbie Dooley, an activist who has fought Kemp, said its wrong for a handful of people to decide who can run as a Republican.

I think that the Republican voters in the Republican primary area should be the ones to determine who the GOP nominee is, Dooley said.

If successful, the rule could erode the ability of Kemp and others to end-run the party. A recent state law allows Kemp and some other officials to raise unlimited sums of money and coordinate with campaigns, formerly key party functions. Kemp retained his political operation after his reelection and formed a federal political action committee to influence races for Congress and president.

Kingston said the partys core identity  small-government conservatism and a distaste for central authority  necessarily breeds such fights.

GOP icon Ronald Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford in a bruising 1976 primary. Georgias 1988 state convention dissolved amid fighting among Pat Robertson and George H.W. Bush supporters. Tea Party-era delegates in 2011 booed Gov. Nathan Deal and rejected his choice for party leader in the same way Kemp was booed at the 2021 convention over the 2020 election.

And then came Trump.

We all saw Trump win as the ultimate outsider to Washington, Kingston said, but weve had that anti-establishment part of the party for a long time.

Able to laugh about it now, Kingston felt the stinging reality himself in his failed Senate bid. As a 22-year veteran of Congress, I had a 100% rating from every conservative group, from abortion opponents to deficit hawks and anti-tax groups. But he lost a primary to then-business executive David Perdue because I became the Washington guy.

Theres just no compromise with some of these people, Kingston said.

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(Bloomberg) -- Two months after the collapse of Silvergate Capital Corp. and Signature Bank, a new banking landscape for crypto companies is taking shape amid an expanding crackdown on the industry in the US.

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In the US, crypto firms are turning to a handful of smaller regional lenders to open bank accounts. Customers Bancorp Inc., a Pennsylvania lender, has become a popular destination. Swiss and Asian banks are also playing a bigger role, though they still remain selective about their crypto clients. In the UK, where access to banking has also worsened, companies are instead turning to payment-service providers to bridge the gap.

As a result, cryptos new banking system is more fragmented, less US-centric and, at times, less advertised. Bloomberg News spoke to more than a dozen of industry participants, including banks, digital-asset exchanges, trading firms, startups and consultants to compile a list of banks globally that are receptive to clients in the sector.

The changes come as mainstream US banks became warier of processing wire transfers and holding deposits for the crypto industry, following last years turmoil and amid growing regulatory scrutiny. La Jolla, California-based Silvergate and New York-based Signature, two banks that supported the bulk of the industrys money transactions, closed in March, setting off a scramble among crypto firms to find alternatives.

Now its more of a handful of names, where you have to go and do your own due diligence because they are not as well-known, at least for the crypto community, said Rich Rosenblum, president and co-founder of crypto trading firm GSR.

This week, the US Securities and Exchange Commission sued crypto exchanges Binance Holdings Ltd. and Coinbase Global Inc. for breaking its rules, delivering a one-two punch against the biggest players in the industry. Both firms denied the allegations and vowed to defend themselves in the court. Binance.US, which Binance claims is run as a separate entity, is set to lose its banking access later this month after the trading platform was cut off by its US payment and banking partners.

Read More: SECs Coinbase Lawsuit Heralds Deepening US Crypto Crackdown

These high-profile lawsuits call attention to different issues that have been widely discussed and acknowledged among industry participants, such as the legal status of certain tokens, said John Popeo, partner at Gallatin Group, which advises banks and other firms on regulatory issues. It could create additional challenges for firms to find banking partners, as these partners will engage in due diligence and look at the additional issues related to the firms.

Crypto exchanges have historically had difficulties finding banking partners to store deposits and facilitate money transfers for the buying and selling of digital assets. Losing banking access means crypto would be further isolated from the traditional finance industry.

Banking access for crypto firms in the US has become worse than in the pre-2018 era, when digital assets was still a nascent industry, said J. Austin Campbell, adjunct professor of Columbia Business School, who runs an independent consulting business for crypto firms. Banks want to open operational accounts for corporate use without touching users money, but thats not enough to run the business, he said.

Still, the rebuilding and stitching together of a crypto-banking system is slowly happening. One upside is that the diversification of banking-service providers means the new system could be more resilient. While banking isnt as seamless as it was a year ago, should one of the todays banks stop supporting crypto, you wouldnt have this rejiggering of the system, Rosenblum said.

Explainer: Why Crypto Still Needs Banks

Here are some of the banks crypto firms are turning to, broken down by region:

The US

Customers Bancorp

Some of the biggest crypto firms have leaned on Customers Bancorp, a West Reading, Pennsylvania-based lender led by founder and Chief Executive Officer Jay Sidhu.

The bank pushed into serving crypto clients in late 2021, launching a real-time payments platform, similar to Signatures Signet, that caters to trading firms, exchanges and institutional investors, allowing them to settle US dollar transfers underlying crypto transactions seven days a week.

Circle Internet Financial Ltd., the issuer of the USD Coin stablecoin, now uses Customers CBIT payments network for real-time settlement of dollars. Crypto exchanges Coinbase and Bitstamp USA Inc., as well as trading firm GSR, have been Customers clients.

A Customers spokesperson declined to comment.

Cross River

Cross River Bank, a Fort Lee, New Jersey-based firm known for its ties to financial-technology firms, has provided banking services to some crypto firms, such as Coinbase and Circle. It also offers real-time money movement, with a limit of $1 million per transaction.

While Cross River has seen an increase in requests for partnerships and businesses looking for a bank to place their deposits, the firm is considering only companies with existing relationships and blue-chip customers who are integral to the fintech ecosystem, Josh Vlasto, a spokesperson for Cross River, said in an email.

Western Alliance

Western Alliance Bancorp, based in Phoenix, has a blockchain and digital-assets team that serves clients in the sector. It also offers real-time payments capability, powered by Tassat.

The bank takes a very deliberate and measured approach to who we bank through the network, a Western Alliance representative said in an email.

Axos Financial

Axos Financial Inc., based in Las Vegas, opens bank accounts for some crypto firms. Its listed as one of the banks used by Binance.US, according to the SECs lawsuit against the exchange. The bank earlier had broader ambitions of pushing further into crypto, including supporting retail crypto trading and launching a stablecoin  plans now on hold.

Given the change in the market that have occurred over the last year, Axos has no current plans to support retail crypto trading, provide clearing and transaction services, or launch a stablecoin, Johnny Lai, senior vice president of corporate development and investor relations at Axos, said in an email. We do not expect those plans to change in the immediate future.

FV Bank

FV Bank International Inc., registered in the US territory of Puerto Rico, was the first bank of the commonwealth to roll out a digital-asset custody service. It allows clients to hold their Bitcoin and US dollars within the same bank account. It is launching the settlement of certain crypto tokens to US dollars, using third-party prime brokers for the exchange.

Asia

Standard Chartered

Standard Chartered Plc has made a major push into some emerging markets. It holds majority stakes in two UK subsidiaries, crypto-trading platform Zodia Markets and custodial unit Zodia Custody Ltd., the latter of which closed a $36 million funding round led by Japans SBI Holdings Inc. in April.

London-based Standard Chartered offers banking services to a very select group of digital-asset service providers and supports them in offering on- and off-ramping to users of their platforms, said Rene Michau, global head of digital assets.

We see digital assets as an important part of the future of financial services, Michau said in an emailed statement. The banks services to digital-assets firms include corporate accounts, client-money accounts and foreign exchange, predominantly located in Singapore, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates.

DBS

DBS Group Holdings Ltd. is Singapores biggest bank and the largest listed company in the city-state. It was founded in 1968, three years after Singapore was separated from Malaysia and became an independent country.

The bank offers deposit accounts to regulated digital-asset and blockchain firms. It also provides on- and off-ramping to the banks corporate, institutional and accredited clients through its own digital platform, DBS Digital Exchange, it said in a statement.

ZA Bank

ZA Bank Ltd., Hong Kongs biggest virtual bank, plans to offer token-to-fiat currency conversions over licensed exchanges. It also plans to provide account services to the digital sector.

Founded by Chinese billionaire Ou Yaping and others, ZA Bank will act as a settlement bank for clients to allow withdrawals in Hong Kong, China and US currencies after they deposit crypto tokens with exchanges. Currently it offers on- and off-ramping to the two licensed exchanges in Hong Kong, OSL and HashKey.

Europe, the UK

BCB Group

London-based BCB Group offers customers access to its payment network for digital-asset outfits. Known as Blinc, the network operates like Silvergates now-defunct SEN for the European region, allowing members to pay each other instantly across multiple currencies.

The payment-services provider offers business accounts, over-the-counter crypto and currency trading, digital-asset custody and treasury services for clients including exchanges, market makers, lenders, funds, brokers and traders.

Bank Frick

Bank Frick & Co., based in Liechtenstein, offers banking services such as business accounts for both established firms and startups in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sectors. It also offers trading and custody of select tokens, including Bitcoin and Ether.

Binance Holdings, the worlds biggest crypto exchange, has been discussing a proposal to let some of its institutional clients keep their trading collateral at a bank, with Bank Frick mentioned as a potential intermediary for the service, Bloomberg News reported late last month. Bank Frick declined to comment.

Read More: Binance Explores Letting Some Traders Keep Collateral at a Bank

SEBA Bank

Swiss firm SEBA Bank AG offers individuals, companies and institutional clients access to trading, investment in structured products, custody and borrowing for digital and traditional assets.

Like a traditional bank, SEBA has fixed-term deposit accounts and payments services, but it also offers crypto-investment trackers and a credit card for spending crypto. The Zug-based bank saw increased website traffic globally, but more so in the US, after the collapse of Signature and Silvergate, the company said in March, adding that crypto firms were applying for its accounts.

Read More: Crypto Scours Globe for Banks to Replace Collapsed US Lenders

We have experienced an uptake in inflows as a direct result of the current market landscape because we recognize that clients digital wealth should be managed in the same way as their traditional finances, said Yves Longchamp, managing director at SEBA Bank.

Sygnum Bank

Spread across Switzerland and Singapore, Sygnum Bank AG specializes in digital assets for institutional and private qualified investors, corporate clients and financial institutions. It offers custody, brokerage, tokenization, asset-management, lending and business-banking services, facilitating deposits in Swiss francs, euros, Singaporean dollars and US dollars to buy, trade and hold cryptocurrencies.

We continue to see a significant increase in onboarding inquiries from institutional investors, asset managers and blockchain projects looking to diversify their crypto investments with a trusted Swiss partner like Sygnum Bank, said Mathias Imbach, the firms co-founder and group chief executive officer.

Clear Junction

Payment-services provider Clear Junction offers financial institutions including cryptocurrency companies access to UK accounts, virtual international bank account numbers, payment networks, currency exchange and electronic wallets. Companies can receive deposits for the purchase of digital tokens, enable payment acceptance using traditional bank transfers and hold funds under their own names using whats known as a correspondent accounts.

--With assistance from Kiuyan Wong.

(Updates to reflect changes to Binance.USs banking access in sixth paragraph.)

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WASHINGTON (AP)  This weeks Supreme Court decision ordering Alabama to redraw its congressional districts was seen by many minority lawmakers and voting rights activists as a stunning victory with the potential to become a major stepping stone for undoing political maps that dilute the strength of communities of color.

Hank Sanders, a former Alabama state lawmaker who has long been politically active in the state, knew there would be a decision since the court heard arguments in the case last fall. He was not anticipating being happy with the outcome, given that previous rulings of the conservative-leaning court had essentially gutted some of its most important provisions.

I was afraid they were going to go ahead and wipe out section 2, he said, referring to the part of the Voting Rights Act at stake in the Alabama case.

He was at his law office Thursday in Selma, scene of one of the most pivotal moments in the Civil Rights Movement, when news of the 5-4 ruling in favor of Alabamas Black voters was announced.

It was a surprise that was good for my day, he said.

How the decision will affect similar lawsuits against political maps drawn in other states is unclear, although voting rights groups say the ruling provides firm guidance for lower courts to follow.

The court majority found that Alabama concentrated Black voters in one district, while spreading them out among the others to make it much more difficult to elect more than one candidate of their choice. Alabamas Black population is large enough and geographically compact enough to create a second district, the judges found. Just one of its seven congressional districts is majority Black, in a state where more than one in four residents is Black.

Similar maps have been drawn in other states, primary by Republican-controlled legislatures.

Kareem Crayton, the Brennan Centers senior director for voting and representation, called the courts decision a welcome surprise and said challenges to the maps in Louisiana and Georgia were the most similar to the Alabama case.

While it was considering the Alabama case, the Supreme Court had placed a hold on a lower court ruling in Louisiana allowing creation of a second majority-Black district. Thats now likely to be lifted. A federal judge last year also ruled that some of Georgias U.S. House and state legislative districts likely violated the Voting Rights Act, but he had allowed the districts to be used in the 2022 elections because it was too close to the election to redraw them.

Maps in all three states could have to be redrawn for the 2024 elections.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said in a statement that the courts action reaffirmed his own belief that Louisianas map, which was drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature, violated the law.

As I said when I vetoed it, Louisianas current congressional map violates the Voting Rights Act, he said. Louisianas voting population is one-third Black. We know that in compliance with the principles of the Voting Rights Act, Louisiana can have a congressional map where two of our six districts are majority Black.

Rep. Troy Carter, a Black Democrat representing Louisianas lone district that is majority Black, said the Legislature should immediately convene to draw a second majority-minority district.

This Supreme Court ruling is a win not just for Alabamians but for Louisianans as well, Carter said in an emailed statement. Rarely do we get a second chance to get things right  now Louisiana can.

In Georgia, Bishop Reginald Jackson, a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits challenging the states congressional map, said he was ecstatic when he heard the news about the ruling and hopes it will boost their case.

He said he became involved in the lawsuit amid concerns that the states Black population had increased while the number of Black congressional representatives had decreased with the last round of redistricting.

So how could you have less Black representation when you have more Blacks moving into the state than before? said Jackson, who presides over 534 African Methodist Episcopal churches in Georgia with over 90,000 parishioners

The Alabama case, along with pending lawsuits in Georgia and Louisiana, means Black voters will likely have an opportunity to elect candidates in three additional districts, said Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, one of the organizations that has spearheaded voting rights challenges in the states.

She said litigation in Texas by other plaintiff groups could mean additional seats there where minority voters have the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice that dont exist now.

Texas state Rep. Victoria Neave Criado, a Democrat who chairs the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, said the case was a major win for voting rights.

She said following recent decisions by the current court in other areas she considers fundamental, such as last years overturning of the constitutional right to abortion, she was concerned about the direction the justices would take with voting rights and was relieved to see Thursdays outcome.

As we are seeing the Latino community rise in many ways, we want to ensure that Latino power is translated into Latino political power, Neave Criado said.

Latinos and whites share an equal proportion of the Texas population, about 40% each, according to 2022 Census figures.

Nina Perales, vice-president of litigation with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the ruling closes the door on Texas using arguments similar to those made by Alabama as the cases there go forward. Perales leads the litigation for a similar case out of Texas, which is based on the redistricting maps created in 2021.

In addition to the Voting Rights Act challenge to Texas congressional districts, similar section 2 claims have been brought against numerous voting districts used for state legislatures and local governments around the country.

Attorney Mark Gaber argued a case this week alleging Washingtons state legislative districts diluted the voting strength of Hispanic residents and will be arguing a similar case next week involving Native Americans and North Dakotas state legislative districts. He thinks Thursdays ruling will strengthen the case.

In Alabama, the question is what happens next. Steve Marshall, the states Republican attorney general, said in a statement that he expects to continue defending the challenged map in federal court, including at a full trial.

The Rev. Murphy Green, a resident of Montgomery, said he is just glad to get to the first step with the court decision.

I was surprised, especially when I think of the makeup of the court, he said, praising God for sending the Legislature back to the drawing board and making it mandatory that they create a second Black congressional district.

He said the five Supreme Court justices in the majority must have looked at the map and the states population and decided it looked ridiculous to those judges, as well.

Rep. Terri Sewell, the lone Democrat in Alabamas congressional delegation, said she expects the case will be sent back to the three lower court judges who unanimously agreed the lines drawn by the Legislature likely violated the federal law. Sewell, who is Black, fully expected the new districts to be in place in time for the 2024 elections.

Whatever the process for drawing the new lines, Theyre going to have to follow the ruling of the court, she said, noting that a revamped congressional map would also mean her district is redrawn.

Its a small price to pay to carve up my district in order to be able to have two majority minority districts, she said.

_____

Associated Press writers Ayanna Alexander in Washington; Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta; Sara Cline in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Acacia Coronado in Austin, Texas; David A. Lieb in Jefferson City, Missouri; and Kevin McGill in New Orleans contributed to this report.

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DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  In March, when Donald Trump became the first former president in U.S. history indicted on criminal charges, his reelection campaign saw a huge surge in donations. Even political rivals rushed to support him. There was no dent in his front-runner status after the state charges in New York.

Thursday's news that Trump has been indicted again, this time on federal charges related to his handling of classified documents, may offer a repeat.

A 37-count felony indictment unsealed Friday accuses Trump of willful retention and improper sharing of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice and corruptly concealing a document or record, among other charges. The top counts carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison upon conviction.

But soon after he was indicted, there were clear signs that Republican voters may be willing to entrust him again with access to the nations biggest secrets and authority over the very laws prosecutors say he defied.

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said the indictment would not fundamentally change Trumps standing in the GOP or his advantage in the crowded 2024 Republican primary.

In any other decade, this would be more than enough to kill a presidential contender in the crib. Thats no longer the case  particularly for Donald Trump, Newhouse said. He argued Trump has been effectively setting expectations for more charges for months.

This comes as a surprise to very few Republicans, Newhouse said. Trumps been saying hed get indicted. He got indicted. The sense from many Republican voters is that this is all about politics.

The prospect that someone under indictment  twice  could somehow still be considered a viable presidential candidate underscores Trumps grip on the Republican Party and the ways that he has fundamentally transformed democratic norms in America.

It also illustrates just how effective he has become at inoculating himself against political fallout by setting expectations and controlling the narrative. And it reflects growing Republican hostility toward the federal government and particularly the Justice Department, which Trump has now spent the better part of a decade maligning.

But even if the indictment doesnt hurt Trumps standing with Republican primary voters, its far from certain that the broader set of general election voters, which includes independents and moderates in both parties, will be as forgiving next fall in a prospective matchup against President Joe Biden.

The Democratic president beat Trump in 2020 with a promise to restore a sense of normalcy to Washington after Trumps drama-filled presidency. With these new charges, Trumps baggage is only growing heavier.

The former president faces the possibility of still more indictments in Georgia and Washington, D.C., a prospect that could see him facing trial in four separate jurisdictions while running to return to the highest office in the land.

For now, the new indictment throws Trump back into the spotlight, dominating every news cycle and denying his rivals space to break through to voters, just as many have formally launched their campaigns.

Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, a fierce Trump critic and founder of the Republican Accountability Project, acknowledged the indictment might ultimately help Trump seize the GOP nomination.

Ive certainly seen a rally around Trump effect every time Trump is impeached or indicted, she said, adding that much depends on the reaction of his Republican 2024 challengers.

Does anyone have the political talent to seize this as an opportunity? Or will they all line up behind Trump? she said. Because if they all defend him, they will relegate themselves to bit players in Trumps drama and never get around to making an affirmative case for themselves.

Still, Doug Heye, another Republican strategist, said Trumps primary opponents do have a major opportunity to argue that the former president cannot win in 2024 because of his baggage.

This should be gold for Republican presidential candidates, should they choose to use it, Heye said.

So far Trumps rivals instead seem to be rallying to his side  an acknowledgement of his enduring popularity with the GOP voters they need to win over in order to snag the nomination.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who received backlash after he briefly knocked Trump over the New York case, lashed out at the Justice Department in a tweet Thursday night. The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, he wrote.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott used similar language in an appearance on Fox News, decrying the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president.

Former Vice President Mike Pence said he was deeply troubled that Trump had been indicted because he believed it would further divide the nation.

Only former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot candidate and frequent Trump critic, offered a rebuke. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign, he said.

Republican leaders in Congress, as they have time after time, sprang to Trumps defense as if in choreographed unison.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said the indictment marked a dark day for the United States of America and a grave injustice.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise accused President Biden of weaponizing his Department of Justice against his own political rival with a sham indictment that was the continuation of the endless political persecution of Donald Trump.

Trump and his allies had been bracing for a federal indictment since the presidents lawyers were informed he was a target of the investigation, believing it was a matter of when  not if  charges would be brought.

Trump received word of the indictment Thursday evening while huddled with advisers at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he is spending the summer. He broke the news to the world himself on his Truth Social platform.

His team  well practiced in crisis response  had already asked allies to have supportive statements at the ready, and quickly reacted with a fundraising solicitation and opposition research targeting special counsel Jack Smith. As political donations poured in, Trump ended the night playing DJ at dinner with a mix that included songs from Elvis Presley, Pavarotti and James Brown.

Trusty said on CNN that Trump would appear in court Tuesday, as requested.

Hes not shrinking from the fight, he said Thursday. Youre not going to see him hide in Scotland. Hes going to be ready to handle this case and help his attorneys fight it.

Trusty and another Trump attorney resigned from the case on Friday.

People close to Trump have long seen the Mar-a-Lago case as far more serious than the charges he faces in New York in connection to hush money payments made to women who accused him of affairs. Conviction of the federal charges would be expected to carry far steeper legal consequences, and Smith is generally viewed as more difficult to malign than Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat.

Trumps first indictment failed to hurt his support, and polls suggest his position among Republicans has, if anything, grown stronger in the months since.

An April poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that nearly half of Americans (47%) said they believe Trump did something illegal in the classified documents case, slightly more than the 41% who said he did something illegal in the New York hush money case.

New York-based Republican donor Eric Levine, who has emerged as a vocal Trump critic in recent months, acknowledged that, regardless of how serious the charges may be, the Trump faithful will rally behind the former president no matter what.

But for people who were on the fence about Trump, this may push them away, he said. Enough of the chaos and craziness.

___ Peoples reported from New York. Associated Press polling director Emily Swanson contributed to this report from Washington.

___

More on Donald Trump-related investigations: https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump

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MIAMI (AP)  The federal indictment against Donald Trump accuses the former president of illegally hoarding classified documents at his Florida estate after leaving the White House in 2021, and then scheming and lying to thwart government efforts to recover them.

Justice Department prosecutors brought 37 felony counts against Trump in the indictment, relying upon photographs from Mar-a-Lago, surveillance video, text messages between staffers, Trumps own words, those of his lawyers, and other evidence.

It comes across as obviously a very strong case, if it can be proven, said Mark Zaid, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who works on national security issues. Im surprised as to how personally involved it alleges Trump was with respect to the documents, he added.

An aide to Trump, Walt Nauta, was charged as a co-conspirator with six felony counts.

Trump says he is innocent and has decried the criminal case  the second indictment against him in a matter of months  as an attempt by his political opponents to hinder his 2024 campaign. He is expected to make his first court appearance on Tuesday in Miami.

Here are key takeaways from the indictment unsealed Friday:

WHAT ARE THE CHARGES?

Trump faces 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information under the Espionage Act. Other charges include: conspiracy to obstruct justice; corruptly concealing a document or record; concealing a document in a federal investigation; and making false statements.

Each of the willful retention counts pertains to a specific classified document found at Mar-A-Lago marked SECRET or TOP SECRET. Topics addressed in the documents include details about U.S. nuclear weapons, the nuclear capabilities of a foreign country and the military activities or capabilities of other countries.

The conspiracy charges deal with Trumps alleged attempts to hide documents from his lawyer or federal investigators. The false statement charges stem from Trump causing his lawyer to tell the FBI that no more classified documents were at Mar-a-Lago  but then the FBI later found more than 100 documents during an August 2022 search.

The most serious charges carry potential prison sentences of up to 20 years each. But judges have discretion and, if convicted, first-time offenders rarely get anywhere near the maximum sentence. Being a former president would also likely be a major consideration in any sentencing.

WHAT IS THE ALLEGED CONSPIRACY TO OBSTRUCT JUSTICE?

The indictment accuses Trump and Nauta of conspiring to hide the secret documents from the grand jury, which in May 2022 issued a subpoena for him to turn them over.

The conspiracy allegation included a suggestion from Trump that his lawyer falsely tell investigators that the former president didnt have any more classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. It also involved moving boxes to hide the secret documents from Trumps lawyer, and suggesting that Trumps lawyer hide or destroy documents that investigators were seeking.

The indictment says that, at Trumps direction, Nauta moved about 64 boxes of documents from a Mar-a-Lago storage room to the former presidents residence in May 2022. He then returned approximately 30 boxes to the storage room on June 2  the same day Trumps legal team came to examine the boxes and search for classified documents to return to the government, the indictment says.

Nauta had a brief phone call with Trump before returning those boxes, the indictment says. Neither Trump nor Nauta told the former presidents lawyers that Nauta had moved any of the storage room contents, the indictment says.

IS TRUMP ACCUSED OF SHARING CLASSIFIED INFORMATION?

The indictment alleges Trump showed classified documents to people who didnt have security clearances on two occasions.

The court papers detail a meeting Trump had in July 2021 with a writer and publisher about an upcoming book. Trump told the pair look what I found and showed them what he described as a senior military officials plan of attack, according to an audio recording of that conversation obtained by investigators.

Trump acknowledged during that meeting that the document was highly confidential and secret information, the indictment says. He also says that he could have declassified the document if he was still president.

Now I cant, you know, but this is still a secret, he said, according to the indictment.

A few months later, Trump showed a representative of his political action committee a classified map of a foreign country while discussing a military operation in the country that was not going well, the indictment says. Trump acknowledged that he shouldnt be showing the map to the person and told him not to get too close, prosecutors allege.

WHAT EVIDENCE DO PROSECTORS HAVE?

In addition to the audio recording, prosecutors also relied upon text messages between Trump employees, photos of boxes of documents stored in various rooms throughout Mar-a-Lago and details about conversations between Trump and his lawyers that were memorialized by one of them.

In one conversation with his lawyers, Trump said: I dont want anybody looking through my boxes. Trump also asked one of his lawyers if it would be better if we just told them we dont have anything here, the indictment says.

Photographs in the indictment show boxes stacked on a stage in a ballroom as well as in a bathroom. Another shows boxes that spilled over in a storage room, including a document marked SECRET/REL TO USA, FVEY, which means information releasable only to members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

WHERE WILL THE CASE BE HEARD?

While Trumps first court appearance on Tuesday is expected to be in front of a magistrate judge in Miami, the case was filed in West Palm Beach  about 70 miles to the north. The case was assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, who issued rulings favorable to him last year and expressed repeated skepticism of Justice Department positions.

Cannon was broadly criticized last year for granting the Trump legal teams request for a special master to conduct an independent review of the hundreds of classified documents seized from his Florida property last year. The move, which temporarily halted core aspects of the Justice Departments investigative work, was overturned months later by a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court.

____

Associated Press reporters Michael R. Sisak in New York, Bill Barrow in Atlanta and Gary Fields in Washington contributed.

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WASHINGTON (AP)  The Pentagon announced Friday that it will provide an additional $2.1 billion in long-term weapons aid for Ukraine. The new assistance package will include funding for more Patriot missile battery munitions, Hawk air defense systems and missiles, and small Puma drones that can be launched by hand.

The latest infusion of funding, one of the larger packages the U.S. has provided, comes as there are signs that Ukraine is beginning  or about to begin  the much anticipated counteroffensive to try to take back territory that has been seized by Russia.

Unlike the U.S. equipment, weapons and ammunition that are more frequently sent from Pentagon stocks and delivered quickly to Ukraine, this money would be provided under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and is meant to be spent over the coming months or even years to ensure Ukraines future security needs.

In a statement, the Pentagon said the package shows Americas continued commitment to both Ukraines critical near-term capabilities as well as the enduring capacity of Ukraines Armed Forces to defend its territory and deter Russian aggression over the long term.

The aid also will include munitions for laser-guided rockets, an undisclosed amount of artillery rounds, and funding for training and maintenance support.

A number of administration officials have acknowledged that the fighting in Ukraine has intensified in recent days, but much of the focus turned early this week to the collapse of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River. The White House and the Pentagon insisted Thursday they are still working to determine who caused the damage, which set off a scramble to evacuate residents in dozens of flooded areas and get aid to those still there.

Although the U.S. has been willing to provide billions of dollars in military weapons and other aid, the Biden administration has been clear that there will be no U.S. combat forces inside Ukraine. In that vein, Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said Thursday the military had no plans to directly provide transportation or other support to the areas damaged by the dam collapse.

The Biden administration has provided more than $37.6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022.

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Toronto had some of the worst air quality in the world this week, a fresh identity that is, like so much of life these days, embarrassing and unpleasant.

I would try not to harangue you with the obvious, that we share the blame for creating the fossil-fuelled disaster behind a nation on fire. I just didnt think payback would arrive quite so soon. Air is palpable now, like water in a goldfish bowl.

If this is what a Toronto summer  always engulfingly, wretchedly hot and damp  is like in June, imagine August and beyond.

Every nation has its human badge of failure. The U.S. has mass shootings and serial pointless wars on its score card. The U.K. has Brexit, which at least was self-imposed. Russia has a century of communist mutilation of citizens and involuntary citizens alike.

Canada has lassitude, a lack of will to handle the global heating we know is coming. The essence, the boiled-down glaze, of climate change denial lives in rural Alberta. But everyone who smells fire today had a hand in this.

I have forest fires on my permanent record. When I was a child, we had to flee our small town in Northwestern Ontario because a huge fire was coming our way. Tree-wise, Sioux Lookout was minuscule, a handful of invasive white people perched beside a toy railroad surrounded by billions upon billions of trees.

It was a Siberia of wood, the way the U.S. Midwest is a desert of corn, and Hong Kong a land tower coated with more towers like human stalagmites. We were tiny; the fire was huge.

Years later, in Northeastern Ontario, six teenagers  one of whom I knew, a red head  died horribly working for the Ministry of Natural Resources in a controlled provincial burn of worthless timber near Nakina. They were quickly surrounded and annihilated.

The fire meant nothing personal. We humans were a nullity. We know now there is no such thing as worthless timber unless humans have defined it so.

In her memoir Eating Dirt, B.C. writer Charlotte Gill described her 20 years of tree-planting in B.C. clear-cuts. Forests are ecosystems in perpetual motion, though their shifts, to the human eyes, are imperceptibly small.

No more.

Humans entered the glorious forests covering North America and levelled them, then headed west and north, pushing up to the forest edges, further and further, as Canadians have done. As the planet heated and water vanished, whats left will only burn.

If you want to read a big fat crime novel, try Annie Proulxs shocking Barkskins about the deforestation of the New World when the Europeans showed up, awed by the narcotic effect of deep forest. Barkskins were the poor, working as indentured servants for rich lumber merchants.

North America offered timberlands so vast they couldnt be imagined. It is infinite, an explorer says in 1693. No one has ever seen its farthest dimensions.

But it was not infinite and they did see.

The timber industry is like mining or factory fishing. Nature cant fight back. Under certain conditions, all a forest can do is roar.

When our town was evacuated, I was told to pack essentials, in my case a small bag of marbles. We had to camp for a week lest a vast mysterious section of Ontario burn to a crisp. I watched displaced families bicker and wear down.

All we did was live in the woods, without screens, just a radio. Since then two more towns and cities I once lived in have been endangered by flames. Do city people leave or stay?

Mines cause landslides. Oil drilling leaves tailing ponds. Manufacturing blackens air. Fish vanish, meaning other ocean life dies off. Forests are shaved. Insects consume them. And they burn.

Thats how it all started centuries ago, with a shovel, a drill, a fish hook, an axe.

In 2023, I am camping at home with N95 face masks, an air purifier, a MERV13 furnace filter, a heat pump and four newly planted small city trees. I hope for the best.

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Let me start, in the spirit of Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, by saying the old newsways are dying but new ones arent fully born and in the meantime, everything is weird.

We live in a sort of netherworld between traditional mainstream news media like newspapers and TV networks and the new media of the internet. The old ones can still create the dominant issues.

For instance, its hard to imagine either the war in Ukraine or the China interference scandal without them. The events themselves might well exist but how and what would anyone know of them without those old, lumbering news organizations? You cant rely on lone citizen journos wandering around a vast, distant war or locals posting on social media.

Or, in the case of Chinagate (or Chinahate), some shoestring operation like Canadaland might get hold of a strand, but how would it become an extended national fixation without the prestige, pomposity and resources of a Globe and Mail? Only the mainstream news media can still create those events. But  and here comes the but.

What they cant do any longer is, as they say in media courses, frame those stories the way they used to and thereby control the ways they are understood and play out.

Why? Because most people influenced by the mainstream news media today dont even know thats where those stories came from. They didnt consume the story in a newspaper or newscast; it came to them in a post on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, naked and alone. Not surrounded by editorials, columns and all the other tchotchkes by which the mainstream news media inject and implant their favourite themes and assumptions, not to mention causes and candidates.

So they cant bend the will of audiences to their agenda as they did in the days of free trade or globalization. If theres any framing its a hodgepodge of tidbits from other social media: Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, Pierre Poilievres greatest Justin hits. The audiences on the internet dont really distinguish between lofty sources like the Globe and the scuzzy random stuff. Its all just out there.

Id say this shift in newsgathering and dissemination accounts partly  nothing accounts fully for anything, all major events have too many causes, not too few  for the current state of the conservative movement, what Id call paleolithic conservatism.

Im thinking, obviously, of Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and Viktor Orban, but also, in our case, of Poilievre and Danielle Smith. Its a primitive, atavistic version of the right, very amenable to simplistic Christianity and identifying passionately with some eternal clash between good and evil that includes the Crusades along with the manicheanism of the Cold War.

In the old days of mainstream news media, theyd have cut the legs off those candidates with no one to patch them back together. In 2016, it would have been Hillary Clinton vs. Jeb Bush, in many ways the same person but theyd have been depicted with vast differences; thats how mainstream news media always framed the two main parties.

Theyd have been all over Trump like one of Boris Johnsons bad suits. He didnt fit their recipe for their own maintenance of power and the causes they espoused: neo-liberal economics, deregulation, austerity, mild mitigation of social injustice as long as it didnt interfere with soaring corporate profits.

But by 2016 thered already been Fox. Think of it as a timid precursor to social media and then the rest  Breitbart et al. Above all, there was the decline of the mainstream news media itself, relentlessly shedding ad revenues while hoping for a miracle. Id say similar, though not identical, trajectories apply to Poilievre and Smith.

The mainstream news media can still break stories and shepherd them to prominence, as we see. But they cant control the overall narrative any more. No one, at least for the moment, does. We are all carried along in a wild current, including those of us who despised the agendas of the mainstream news media, as we now discover we almost miss them. At least they were predictable.

Rick Salutin is a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. He is based in Toronto. Reach him via email: salutinrick@gmail.com

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Almost all the important challenges facing the Ontario government  health care, housing, education, transit, power  are complex and long term.

They demand foresight, planning and investment. In most cases, the province should have been at work on solutions to our current woes decades ago. We rely on governments to not just deliver services in the present but show the foresight and fortitude to plan for the future.

Unhappily, our political system is not ideally suited to such vision, granting as it does mandates of just four-year terms in which governments are averse to delayed gratification. Rarely are there political rewards for actions that avert a crisis years in the future.

Worse still, Ontarios current premier is, by nature, impulsive, given to reversals, fascinated by the immediacy of licence plates and gas-pump stickers.

It would appear, however, that on the question of power supply, Ontario has run out of road down which to kick its problems.

As reported by the Stars Rob Ferguson, Ontario was singled out in a recent electricity regulators report that warned two-thirds of North America is at risk of energy shortfalls this summer should temperatures spike.

This summer. Sooner than experts were expecting just a year ago.

Ontario has entered a period during which generation and transmission outages will be increasingly difficult to accommodate, said the North American Electric Reliability Corp. And, it added, the shortage is apt to last for the foreseeable future.

NDP energy critic Peter Tabuns raised the possibility of brownouts before the end of August  the 20th anniversary of a massive blackout across northeastern North America.

Ontario is the only province in Canada that has an elevated risk that it cant meet peak demand, he warned.

Tabuns blamed Premier Doug Fords government for axing 758 renewable energy projects shortly after taking power in 2018.

Tellingly, the report on electricity reliability says that increased, rapid deployment of wind, solar and batteries have made a positive impact, further driving home how short-sighted Ontario was to scrap such projects.

At the time, Ford called them unnecessary and expensive energy schemes. A year later, Bill Walker, then-associate energy minister, said Ontario has an adequate supply of energy right now.

There was smugness and complacency in the premiers approach and the ministers comment and a shocking lack of foresight, for which Ontario residents and businesses may soon pay a price.

As Tabuns said, climate change means were going to see more extreme weather that increases the chances well have outages.

The estimated timelines of even last year  when one report said Ontario could face energy shortages as early as 2026  have proven over-optimistic.

The Independent Electricity System Operator, which manages Ontarios electricity supply, said in an assessment last year that economic growth coming out of the pandemic and transition to green power by sectors such as transportation and manufacturing were driving increases in energy use.

The Ford government makes much about being open for business. But a secure supple of electricity has a good deal to say about the extent of any welcome.

In the Windsor area, where auto giant Stellantis has suspended construction of a massive electric-vehicle battery plant while contract details are sorted out, there may not be sufficient supply, the latest report said.

Ontario is already experiencing an early June heat wave and the latest report said extended refurbishments at nuclear plants could result in a power pinch.

That would mean turning to imported power if the coming months prove hotter than usual.

For its part, Fords government more or less shrugged.

We have a grid in Ontario that is the envy of all jurisdictions in North America  one thats clean, one thats affordable and one thats reliable and one thats safe, said Energy Minister Todd Smith.

For the provinces sake, lets hope the minister isnt soon whistling in the dark.

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OTTAWAIn a major shift, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will now weigh whether to call a public inquiry into foreign elections interference after former governor general David Johnston stunned the government Friday, resigning as outside adviser after weeks of controversy over his appointment and the conclusions of his interim report.

Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc, in a statement issued within an hour of Johnstons resignation, said the prime minister has tasked me with consulting experts and opposition parties on next steps and to assess who is best to lead that work.

All three main opposition parties have already voted in favour of a public inquiry, and all reiterated that demand Friday in reaction to Johnstons departure.

A federal official said that the experts that LeBlanc plans to consult may not share that view as the best way forward, but confirmed that all options are now on the table including a public inquiry.

The surprising turn of events unfolded late Friday, after months of withering criticism of Trudeau and Johnston. An official confirmed the government did not expect the former governor general, constitutional lawyer and academic dean to step down.

When I undertook the task of Independent Special Rapporteur on Foreign Interference, my objective was to help build trust in our democratic institutions, Johnston said in a written release.

I have concluded that, given the highly partisan atmosphere around my appointment and work, my leadership has had the opposite effect. I am therefore tendering my resignation, effective no later than the end of June 2023, or as soon as I deliver a brief final report, which I hope to be earlier.

In quitting, Johnston  who had rejected the need for a public inquiry because it could not transparently deal with top-secret classified intelligence  said that a deep and comprehensive review of foreign interference, its effects, and how to prevent it, should be an urgent priority for your Government and our Parliament.

But he continued to argue for his choice of public hearings, and not an inquiry, as the best way to educate Canadians and to consider necessary reforms.

He urged the federal Liberals to appoint a respected person, with national security experience, to complete the work that I recommended in my first report. Ideally you would consult with opposition parties to identify suitable candidates to lead this effort.

When he named Johnston in March, Trudeau committed to abiding by his recommendations, and Fridays letter appeared to be Johnstons final recommendation.

But the three main opposition leaders reacted by repeating their demands for a full-fledged commission of inquiry.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, in a written statement, repeated his longstanding claim that Trudeau has tried to cover up the help he got from Beijings Communist government and blamed Trudeau for Johnstons downfall.

He has destroyed the reputation of a former Governor General all to cover up his own refusal to defend Canada from foreign interests and threats. He must end his cover up, stop hiding and call a full public inquiry into Beijings interference.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who had called Johnston tone-deaf for ignoring Parliaments vote in support of an inquiry, issued a statement saying Unfortunately for Mr. Johnston, he has fallen victim to the bungled handling of foreign interference by the Liberal government.

I always thought that Mr. Johnston is an honourable man and todays decision shows that, Singh said. In addition to a public inquiry, he demanded Trudeau work with opposition parties on an action plan to deal with interference.

Yves-Francois Blanchet, leader of the Bloc Quebecois, said Trudeau now has no choice but to immediately turn to Parliament to nominate a judge to preside over an inquiry into Chinese interference in Canada.

LeBlanc, however, slammed the partisan attacks waged against Johnston, particularly by the Opposition Conservatives, which he said were unwarranted and unacceptable.

Democracy requires us to rise above partisan considerations, LeBlanc said.

LeBlanc said the government will continue its efforts to combat foreign interference and said ongoing reviews of the classified annex of Johnstons interim report, and the work of both the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians and the National Security Review and Intelligence Agency will continue.

Johnston was appointed by Trudeau in March to probe the extent of foreign interference in Canadas democracy and what actions the government had taken in response to specific instances of it that surfaced in media reports.

But Johnstons decision not to call a public inquiry met with significant blowback and exacerbated concerns raised by the opposition that he was personally too close to the Trudeau family to make an objective assessment of the Trudeau governments handling of the allegations of foreign interference.

Up until late this week, Trudeau continued to defend Johnstons integrity and impartiality, and to demand that the Conservative and Bloc leaders accept top-secret briefings to understand the classified information Johnston relied on to reach his conclusions.

Johnstons initial appointment immediately met opposition criticism because of his past ties as a member of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, which supports academic research and scholarship  but which the Conservatives decried as a partisan organization that had accepted a donation from a donor with close ties to Beijings ruling Communist Party.

Johnstons first report found gaps in how intelligence agencies communicate with senior public servants and political leaders, but downplayed news reports alleging a deliberate network of Chinese government proxies, money and disinformation had impacted the 2019 and 2021 election campaigns.

In the eyes of many, Johnstons declaration  after Parliament voted for his removal and for an immediate inquiry  that he had a mandate from the government, not Parliament, to continue his work struck a discordant note, coming from a former governor general.

But it was Johnstons appearance this week at a parliamentary committee that appeared to set his sudden resignation in motion.

On Tuesday, Johnston spent three hours before a parliamentary committee where opposition MPs vigorously sought to undercut the whole of his findings to reinforce their demands that a public inquiry is the only way forward.

They pointed out discrepancies between Johnstons recent report and other public information, pressed him on absences from his witness list and grilled him on how much work he actually did

The discrepancies included the fact that Johnston said there was no evidence a state actor was behind disinformation against Conservatives in the 2021 campaign when in fact, former Conservative leader Erin OToole told the Commons that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service told him it had determined his party was targeted by misinformation, amplified in part by a Chinese-state-affiliated news outlet called Global Times, which is often seen as a mouthpiece for the CCP.

Johnston also revealed that he had not spoken to former Liberal MP Han Dong in the course of his work, because Dong was suing the news outlet that suggested hed urged Beijing not to release the two Michaels, and whose nomination came under a cloud after reports alleged the Chinese government had supported his bid.

After CBC first reported he had hired a crisis communications firm, Navigator, Johnston revealed he also took unpaid advice from a senior Liberal and a senior New Democrat strategist, leading Conservatives to charge it was all part of a costly coalition to cover up the interference.

Tonda MacCharles is Ottawa Bureau Chief and a senior reporter covering federal politics. Follow her on Twitter: @tondamacc

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Crypto bank Custodia chalked a recent ruling in its battle against the Fed as a key win.

In light of the Wyoming Federal Judge's decision released on Thursday, which denied the Federal Reserve's bid to dismiss its lawsuit against it, Custodia Bank has been instilled with renewed hope in its ongoing legal battle against the institution.

Custodia, founded by Morgan Stanley veteran Caitlin Long in 2020, was designed to provide a bridge between digital assets and the U.S. dollar system.

In its June 2022 lawsuit, it accuses the Federal Reserve of unlawfully delaying its application for a so-called master account, a crucial component for it to operate effectively in the U.S. financial system.

This January, the crypto bank amended its complaint and is now demanding whether the Fed has the authority to block Custodia from landing a master account.

Custodias Caitlin Long Blasts Fed Over BNY Mellon Entering Crypto

After decades of automatically granting master accounts to chartered banks, the Fed reinterpreted federal law to hand itself special authority that it never received from Congress, a spokesperson for Custodia told Decrypt. We look forward to the courts review of this power grab by the Fed.

Custodia is currently authorized by Wyoming law to operate as a Special Purpose Depository Institution (SPDI), offering both crypto and traditional banking services.

However, it still needs a so-called master account with the Federal Reserve to fully exercise its banking powers.

Custodia vying for master account

The master account would provide Custodia access to the FedWire network, which handled approximately 200 million transfers amounting to over $1 quadrillion in 2022.

Custodia applied for a master account at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in October 2020.

The bank claims it has yet to receive a response regarding its application, pointing to the fact that the lack of communication from the Federal Reserve has slowed its development due to the uncertainty.

Crypto Bank Custodia Is Taking on the FedHeres Everything You Need to Know

Custodia Bank has expressed strong concern over what it perceives as an overreach of the Federal Reserve's authority.

"The Fed has never held such authority in U.S. history, nor does it need the discretion to block banks that already have been validly chartered by state banking authorities that rigorously separate the wheat from the chaff, the bank spokesperson shared with Decrypt. "Indeed, the Wyoming Division of Banking rejected more than 150 prospective applicants before Custodia received its bank charter."

The delay in processing its master account application impacted Custodia's entry into the financial services market, forcing the bank to partner with a correspondent bank that already possessed a master account.

The Wyoming Federals judge decision may make it more likely that the question of whether the Federal Reserve properly handled Custodias application will be answered in court.
The All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) situated on the banks of the Brahmaputra River in Guwahati and inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April this year could prove to be the single best thing that has happened in the North East over the past 50 years.

AIIMS Guwahati has been running an outpatient department (OPD) for a few months now, and the footfall is already close to 1,000 patients a day. A 150-bed wing for emergency surgeries is expected to be operational within the month of June. This would be the precursor to the opening of the 750-bed hospital when fully functional in a few months.

The Union Health Ministry has spent over Rs 1,100 crore on the new AIIMS in Assam and more monies are expected to be made available for the latest medical equipment. Once fully functional by end-2023, AIIMS Guwahati is expected to provide state-of-the-art oncological care, advanced laparoscopic facilities, trauma care, robotic surgery, organ transplantation, regenerative medicine, and simulation labs. The desperation of the seriously ill not just in Assam but across the North East may finally abate as AIIMS Guwahati is expected to provide world-class healthcare free of cost to patients from the region.

Thousands of people who have had no choice but to make arduous and expensive journeys to Kolkata or Delhi over the years for their serious medical needs must surely be breathing a collective sigh of relief, especially, as it has been 17 years since when the proposal was first mooted. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has been quick to point out that he had suggested an AIIMS in Assam when he held the health portfolio in the Tarun Gogoi-led Congress government in 2006 but nothing happened between 2006 and 2016. It is true that it was only after the Centre gave its approval in June 2016, when the Congress state government was voted out and a BJP administration took over, that matters moved forward.

The central government sanctioned Rs 1,000 crore for setting up AIIMS Guwahati and Mr Sarma was without doubt instrumental in pushing through the project. But the time for taking credit is over. It is to be hoped that AIIMS Guwahati will correct regional imbalances in availability of affordable and world-class super speciality healthcare.

Apart from ensuring quality medical education, the premier medical institution is expected to provide comprehensive and holistic tertiary care health services to the people of the North East. AIIMS Guwahatis Executive Director Dr Ashok Puranik has previously said that the effort would be to provide doorstep health services to patients through the institutions community outreach efforts including extensive use of the digital health infrastructure. AIIMS Guwahati promises to be a game changer.
We now live in an ahistorical age. That is, we dont learn from history. We love revising and rewriting history, but can we ignore what Canadian historian Margaret McMillan calls the uses and abuses of history both old and recent? History tells us that there were always those who tried to overcome boundaries and those who tried to restore them, those who erected walls and those who destroyed them.

The United States has often been on the wrong side of history. The Fukuyamas and Huntingtons of the world proclaimed a premature end of history and clash of civilisations. BBCs familiar refrain for long was that fluttering of butterfly wings in Tokyo can raise tornadoes in Texas which prompted The Independent to retort, A BBC butterfly flutters by, telling lies.

The prophets of US-led globalisation promised to lift all boats, but experience tells us that globalization from above has lifted only yachts. What it has ended up in is what American journalist Evan Osnos calls the haves and have-yachts. The international system, constructed following the Second World War, is almost unrecognizable. New geopolitical realities demand new structures of global governance and a new economy for many which will provide a greater voice for developing and emerging countries.

But it remains a work in progress thanks to US intransigence. The US record of being on the wrong side of history is unparalleled. More than two billion people around the world live in water stressed countries.

The Biden administration has said that it will support investments in water infrastructure abroad and provide technical expertise to help other countries manage their water resources. Vice-President Kamala Harris believes there will be wars fought over water. Are Biden and Harris water warriors? Has the Biden administration elevated water security as a foreign policy priority? Or is the US seeking to take advantage of water insecurity and wielding it as a weapon of war? Aaron Salzberg, director of the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina, argues that a greater emphasis on deploying US technical expertise abroad and datasharing with partners can be a game changer. When the US declares a war on poverty, one conclusion is certain.

The rich people will win. Why do so many people remain deprived of clean drinking water? Because the rich benefit from them. Historian Jason W Moore explains how nature became everything that the bourgeoisie didnt wish to pay (for) ~ land, water, plants, animals and the labour Water and water bodies are considered by most as no mans land.

But they have their own imagination, their own ontology of living. Sadly, we are witnessing the fast commodification of elements like water and seeds that are vital for reproducing life. Overexploitation of nature will give us the deserts of tomorrow. But who cares? Peter Gleick in his book, Bottled and Sold: The Story behind our Obsession with Bottled Water, explains how water has gone from being a free natural resource to one of the most successful commercial products of the last one hundred years.

History is replete with cases of violence over water resources and water systems. Water is also being used as a weapon and has triggered armed conflicts. Mass poverty and water scarcity are inextricably linked to the histories and geographies of capital and empire.

Marxists explain privatisation of safe drinking water as a strategy of accumulation through dispossession. As Norwegian author and documentary film maker Terje Tvedt writes in his book, Hydrology and Empire, the British advances into tropical Africa were imperialist and its aims were essentially hydrological and related to Nile control upstream and for the benefit of British interests.

American interests are no different. Central Asia and Africa are now the two main regions where the US has set its sights regarding water supplies. Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the privatization of many state-owned industries, tensions have been growing over the ownership of water resources. As seen in Ukraine, the US sponsored the color revolutions. Washington will extract a heavy price from Ukraine for its arms and strategic support.

Many believe the US may have similar intentions in Central Asia. Sub-Saharan Africa has plentiful freshwater supplies. Many US military bases are also located around these strategic assets. AFRICOM, the US military command in Africa, was originally established in the name of fighting terrorism. Its real objective is control of precious resources.

This dangerous military apparatus serves to ensure that Africas natural resources will continue to be extracted and exploited by transnational corporations. Michael T Clares book, Resource Wars: The New Landscapes of Global Conflict, says it all.

Many seemingly ethnic and sectarian conflicts are over natural resources, especially oil, water, timber, and minerals such as diamonds. Are these mere resource wars or wars of plunder? No one believes that the US military personnel is moving to Peru to train the Peruvian military and National Police special forces units.

The US has made no secret of its interest in the mineral deposits that countries like Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina hold in their subsoil. The extravagant words of Gen. Laura Richardson, head of the US Southern Command, about Latin Americas rich deposits of rare earth elements, the lithium triangle ~ Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Venezuelas oil, copper, gold say a lot about Americas imperialist designs.

The Pentagon considers China a pacing challenge and Russia an acute threat according to the National Defense Strategy. Water insecurity makes the world unstable. It leads to mass migration. An outcome of water insecurity has created a new category of migrants ~ climate refugees. Water is a human right and it should be harnessed as a common good.

Technological approaches to water will take us nowhere. There is a lot to learn from the lived experiences of the indigenous people as they understand nature better and have a far better sustainability record. Imperial America is a prophet for rich Americans, but a werewolf for Latin America, Africa and the Global South. It continues to believe that the hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist.

ASH NARAIN ROY The writer is director, Institute of Social Sciences, Delhi
Forty tribal organizations observed a 12-hour Bengal bandh today in protest against the proposed inclusion of the Kurmi community into the Scheduled Tribe category.

The bandh had mixed reactions in certain blocks of East Burdwan as the agitators halted traffic suddenly in several locations. Abhishek Banerjee, Trinamul Congresss national general secretary had to get down from his vehicle at Dhatrigram crossing in Kalna due to the blockade, this afternoon.

Banerjee was heading towards Nadia from Hooghly as part of his Naba Jowar programme through Dhatrigram crossing where he was stranded for half an hour. Banerjee spoke to the picketers and received a memorandum from them. Bharat Zakat Adivasi Majhi Parghana led todays tribal protest.
Finally, the West Bengal State Election Commission ( WBSEC) announced the date of panchayat elections which were scheduled in MarchApril in the state. The three-tier panchayat elections in the state will be held on 8 July while Darjeeling and Kalimpong will go for their two-tier rural body polls on the same day.

The results are likely to be announced on 11 July. It will be a singlephase election. The filing of nomination papers will start from 9 June to till 15 June. The last date of withdrawing nomination papers is 20 June. The model code of conduct (MCC) for contesting candidates and political parties becomes applicable from Thursday evening.

A day after taking over the charge of commissioner of the West Bengal State Election Commission (WBSEC) on Wednesday, Rajiva Sinha, former chief secretary, announced the date of panchayat polls in the state on Thursday. While making announcement of the date of elections Mr Sinha told reporters at the WBSEC office, After thorough consultations with the state government the date of rural body polls has been decided.

Two-tier elections will be held only in Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts while there will be three-tier elections in rests of the state. When asked about the opposition parties BJP, CPM and Congress demanding deployment the central forces in the state for panchayat polls Mr Sinha said, Trust the state police and our commission.

There will be no lapses in conducting the polls. We also ask the state government employees to keep confidence on us. While reacting to the reporters questions on availability of adequate arrangement of state police force required for conducting polls at a time when the oppositions alleged state-wide massive violence sponsored by the ruling Trinamul Congress, Mr Sinha said, Senior officials like chief secretary and director general of police have assessed the situation and then decided to fix the date for commencement of polls.

We will discuss with the state government to assess what kind of force will be used considering situation. The SEC chief said that monsoon wont disrupt the polls process owing to little delay in holding the elections this time. He also said that no decision has been taken whether online nomination would be allowed this time. No decision has been taken whether the polls will be held under the central forces.

The opposition alleged that the commission announced the date without holding a meeting with political parties. CPM leader Sujon Chakraborty alleged that the commissions decision to give only six days from 9 June to 15 June for filing nomination papers is ridiculous. As the commission rules, nomination cant be done on Sunday, which is on 11 June.

How will thousands of candidates, across 22 districts, file nomination papers within six days? The new commissioner has taken such a decision with the directive of Nabanna. But we wont allow this game plan. Trinamul Congress has taken the strategy by directing the state election commissioner to give only six days for filing nomination papers so that the oppositions could not take part in the elections, said state Congress chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdury and demanded extension of days for filing nominations.
A day after the Adipurush teaser was launched at a grand event in Tirupati, and garnered over 109 million views on YouTube in 24 hours, and the producers of Karthikeya 2 announced that they will give away 10,000 tickets for free in Telangana, the distribution of the Rs 500 crore pan-India film in the Telugu-speaking states has hit a speedbreaker.

A major distributor, Dil Raju, has backed out of picking up the rights for the Telugu version of the Prabhas and Kriti Sanon-starrer in what is known as the Hyderabad and Uttarandhra regions in the film trade jargon (the latter including major centres such as Visakhapatnam, Vizianagaram and Srikakulam).

This setback comes within a day after it was reported by the trade media that the OTT rights for Adipurush have been sold to an unconfirmed platform (Amazon Prime Video is the punters favourite) for Rs 250 crore.

According to Track Tollywood, People Media Factory (PMF), which operates out of Seattle and Hyderabad, has picked up the wholesale rights of the Telugu version for Rs 170 crore. It has sold the Nizam Zone to Mythri Movie Makers for Rs 50 crore. Six territories of Andhra Pradesh have been bought for Rs 50 crore, while the Ceded Districts (Kurnool, Kadapa, Chittoor and Anantapur) have gone for Rs 17.50 crore.

That leaves the People Media Factory with a hole of Rs 52.50 crore and Dil Raju is refusing to bite the bait. Does that reflect on Prabhass star standing, which hasnt seen much of a reiteration after the two Baahubali films?

Film trade analyst Karan Taurani of Elara Capital said that it has more to do with the present state of the South Indian market, which has had quite an unexceptional first half in 2023 after the box-office mega successes of RRR, KGF 2, Ponniyin Selvan-1, Vikram and Kantara last year.

In the Telugu market especially in the recent months, another Prabhas-starrer Radhe Shyam and the Samantha Ruth Prabhu film Shaakuntalam are among the films that have turned out to be commercial duds, despite the hype accompanying their release. Even the Nani-starrer Dasara, which is at No. 13 on IMDbs list of the 25 top-grossing movies of January-June 2023, hasnt made the kind of money that an RRR or a Pushpa: The Rise raked in.

Taurani red-flagged a development that is still not being much spoken about. South Indian content has been facing serious trouble in the last six months, he said. The occupancy in theatres is down by 25 to 30 per cent, compared with pre-Covid levels. If the footfalls dont come, films wont be able to recover their cost. That explains why distributors are playing it very safe.

The Adipurush makers, however, can rest easy, for they have recovered most of their production costs from the OTT deal and the sale to People Media Factory.

Talking about the reported OTT deal, Taurani said: OTT contracts are generally pre-sold and its not easy to breach those contracts in the event of a poor performance of a film.

He, however, added a caveat. Having said that, there could be a clause in the streaming deal with regards to the theatrical performance of a film, subject to how the producers and streamers have locked the deal. In such cases the streamers say that only when the film reaches a certain threshold in theatres, the overflow or a certain amount of money can be given to producers.

Specifically on Adipurush, Taurani predicted: The opening will be phenomenal but sustaining it might be a problem.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah will chair a high-level meeting on Friday afternoon over the preparedness for this years Amarnath Yatra.

Shah will review the preparedness in a series of meetings that include security as well as other aspects linked to the annual pilgrimage. The meeting on Friday will take place around 4 pm. Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla, Intelligence Bureau chief Tapan Deka, Central Reserve Police Force Director General SL Thaosen and officers concerned in the Ministry of Home Affairs as well as those from Jammu and Kashmir Police and administration will also attend the meeting to be held in the Ministry of Home Affairs.

After the success of the G20 tourism working group meeting held in Srinagar, the Jammu and Kashmir administration is busy making arrangements for the upcoming Amarnath Yatra amid intelligence inputs of possible attempts by Pakistan-based terror outfits to disrupt the pilgrimage.

The annual pilgrimage to the holy cave shrine of Amarnath, located at a height of 3,880 metres in the south Kashmir Himalayas, will begin on July 1 and continue till August 31.
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Anurag Thakur, on Friday, announced the second edition of Antarashtriya Yoga Diwas Media Samman.

Under the Antarashtriya Yoga Diwas Media Samman 2023, 33 awards will be given away under three categories viz Print, Television and Radio in 22 Indian languages and English.

There will be 11 Sammans in 22 Indian languages and English, to be conferred under the category Best Media Coverage in Yoga in Newspaper. Besides, there will be 11 Sammans in 22 Indian languages and English, to be conferred under the category Best Media Coverage in Yoga in Electronic Media (Radio).

Announcing the awards for 2023, Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur said thanks to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the International Day of Yoga, celebrated on 21 June every year, has kindled a mass movement to promote health and well-being across the globe.

He said that Yoga has transcended borders and cultures, captivating the attention of millions worldwide. Its holistic approach to physical, mental, and spiritual well-being has garnered significant interest, making it a global phenomenon.

This achievement would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of the media in spreading awareness and showcasing the transformative potential of yoga.

In recognition of this, I am happy to announce that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has decided to conduct the 2nd edition of Antarashtriya Yoga Diwas Media Samman this year, Thakur said.

The minister said that the Samman commends the instrumental role that the media plays in disseminating the outreach of yoga, both within India and abroad. It is crucial to recognize the immense power and responsibility that the media holds in promoting this ancient practice and its numerous benefits, he said.

He said media has been a catalyst in fostering understanding, appreciation, and adoption of this profound practice. It has been successful in presenting it as a universal practice accessible to people of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities.

Thanking the media for playing this role as an enabler, Thakur said I express my heartfelt gratitude to the media for its invaluable contributions in disseminating the outreach of yoga in India and across the globe. Your unwavering dedication to sharing the transformative power of this practice has undoubtedly played a significant role in making yoga a universal language of wellness.

The Samman will be recommended by an independent Jury. The Samman will comprise a special media/plaque/trophy and a citation.

The Ministry of I&B had instituted the first Antarashtriya Yoga Diwas Media Samman (AYDMS) in June, 2019. The first edition of the awards was conferred on 7th January, 2020 and thereafter a hiatus was caused due to Covid-19 pandemic.

Guidelines require Media Houses to submit details in a prescribed format along with relevant clippings of article(s) created and published or audio/visual content telecast/broadcast made during the period 10th June 2023 to 25th June 2023. The last date for entries is 1st July 2023.

Detailed guidelines can be found on the websites of Press Information Bureau (https://pib.gov.in/indexd.aspx ) and Ministry of I&B (https://mib.gov.in/)
ECA Group, a renowned global education organisation, hosted a momentous event, ECA Meet and Greet 2023 in Chandigarh and at Kathmandu recently.

The event which had The Statesman newspaper as its partner, gathered influential student recruitment agents while aiming to provide them with comprehensive insights into a wide range of study destinations available to students, focusing on financial aspects, career prospects, and overall outcomes. The event, attended by esteemed representatives from various educational institutions and agencies, offered a unique platform for knowledge exchange and collaboration.

ECA Group, known for its expertise in international education, showcased its commitment to empowering agents by equipping them with in-depth information and guidance to assist aspiring students in making informed decisions about their study abroad plans.

During the event, ECA Groups experts presented a comprehensive overview of diverse study destinations, shedding light on financial considerations, scholarship opportunities, and the potential career outcomes associated with each choice. The interactive sessions facilitated fruitful discussions and provided attendees with valuable insights into the evolving landscape of global education. Speaking about the event, Rajesh Singh, CEO of ECA Global, expressed enthusiasm, saying, We are delighted to have had the opportunity to bring together key student recruitment agents from India and share our knowledge about various study destinations. Our aim was to empower these agents with the necessary tools and information to guide students effectively in their educational pursuits abroad.

Senior executive editor of The Statesman, Aditya Kant lauded the efforts made by ECA. He also said that the newspaper is ever-ready to collaborate with ECA as a media partner and help them in their endeavours. He said that The Statesmans legacy lies in the fact that this 175-year-old newspaper was considered as Bible by the students. And now, keeping pace with the present times it is providing them the best of digital news.

ECA Groups commitment to promoting educational excellence and supporting student aspirations is reflected in the success of this event. By fostering a collaborative environment and sharing valuable insights, ECA Group strives to enhance the overall experience and outcomes for students embarking on international education journeys.
The Supreme Court on Friday declined urgent listing of a plea against the shutdown of the internet services in the violence hit Manipur since May 3, saying that the State High Court was already seized of the matter.

Refusing an urgent listing of the plea by two Manipur residents  advocate Chongtham Victor Singh and businessman Mayengbam James  a vacation bench of Justice Aniruddha Bose and Justice Rajesh Bindal said, High Court is seized of the matter. Why are you duplicating it? Let it come before the regular bench.

Advocate Shadan Farasat appearing for two petitioners had mentioned the matter for an early listing telling the vacation bench that the internet is under shut down in the State for 39 days now, severely impacting the day to day lives of the people in the State.

However, the advocate appearing for the Manipur government told the bench that the State High Court is already seized of the matter and there was no urgency to hear the petitions.

The petitioners have said that they have moved the top court as their lives and livelihood have been severely affected by the state-wide shutdown of the internet. They have stated that shutdown has significantly impacted them and their families economically, socially, and psychologically besides there being a humanitarian dimension to it.

The petition said that people have not been able to send their children to school, access banks, receive payments from clients, distribute salaries to staff, or communicate via email or WhatsApp.

Questioning the justification for internet blockade, the petitioners have contended that Continued suspension of the internet for the purpose of preventing rumour-mongering and the spread of misinformation does not pass the threshold prescribed by the Telecom Suspension Rules 2017.

There is no stipulated public order on the internet ban and did not go through the oversight of the Review Committee which is necessary under the law, the petitioner said.

The plea said that the order of internet ban is strangulating the freedom of speech and expression and the freedom to carry on trade and occupation. The plea also stated that there is a violation of the Rule 2(2) of the Telecom Suspension Rules and hence they are unconstitutional.

The petitioners had sought a restoration of the internet in Manipur, except in those areas which continue to be facing unrest and violence.

The top court is already seized of the matter relating to the violence in Manipur and sought a status report from Centre and Manipur government on the relief and rehabilitation of the people affected in the violence between Meitei and Kuki communities.

Earlier, the top court had expressed concern over loss of lives and properties in Manipur during the violence between Meitei and Kuki communities and stressed for taking adequate measures to restore the normalcy over there.

The State High Court by its March 27, order had directed the Manipur government to consider the inclusion of Meitei community in the Scheduled Tribes list. However, this order has been put in abeyance for now.

The violence in Manipur between the Meiteis and the Kuki, erupted after a rally by the All Tribal Students Union of Manipur (ATSUM) on May 3.
Dayang Enterprise Holdings Bhd's (KLSE:DAYANG) price-to-sales (or "P/S") ratio of 1.4x may not look like an appealing investment opportunity when you consider close to half the companies in the Energy Services industry in Malaysia have P/S ratios below 0.7x. However, the P/S might be high for a reason and it requires further investigation to determine if it's justified.

See our latest analysis for Dayang Enterprise Holdings Bhd

How Dayang Enterprise Holdings Bhd Has Been Performing

Dayang Enterprise Holdings Bhd could be doing better as it's been growing revenue less than most other companies lately. One possibility is that the P/S ratio is high because investors think this lacklustre revenue performance will improve markedly. You'd really hope so, otherwise you're paying a pretty hefty price for no particular reason.

Want the full picture on analyst estimates for the company? Then our free report on Dayang Enterprise Holdings Bhd will help you uncover what's on the horizon.

Do Revenue Forecasts Match The High P/S Ratio?

In order to justify its P/S ratio, Dayang Enterprise Holdings Bhd would need to produce impressive growth in excess of the industry.

Taking a look back first, we see that the company grew revenue by an impressive 26% last year. Despite this strong recent growth, it's still struggling to catch up as its three-year revenue frustratingly shrank by 12% overall. Therefore, it's fair to say the revenue growth recently has been undesirable for the company.

Shifting to the future, estimates from the six analysts covering the company suggest revenue should grow by 9.2% over the next year. Meanwhile, the rest of the industry is forecast to only expand by 4.0%, which is noticeably less attractive.

In light of this, it's understandable that Dayang Enterprise Holdings Bhd's P/S sits above the majority of other companies. It seems most investors are expecting this strong future growth and are willing to pay more for the stock.

What Does Dayang Enterprise Holdings Bhd's P/S Mean For Investors?

Typically, we'd caution against reading too much into price-to-sales ratios when settling on investment decisions, though it can reveal plenty about what other market participants think about the company.

As we suspected, our examination of Dayang Enterprise Holdings Bhd's analyst forecasts revealed that its superior revenue outlook is contributing to its high P/S. At this stage investors feel the potential for a deterioration in revenues is quite remote, justifying the elevated P/S ratio. Unless the analysts have really missed the mark, these strong revenue forecasts should keep the share price buoyant.

You should always think about risks. Case in point, we've spotted 1 warning sign for Dayang Enterprise Holdings Bhd you should be aware of.

If you're unsure about the strength of Dayang Enterprise Holdings Bhd's business, why not explore our interactive list of stocks with solid business fundamentals for some other companies you may have missed.

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.

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The Supreme Court on Friday sought Centres stand on Delhi governments plea challenging Delhi High Courts order staying notice to bike-taxi aggregator Rapido and Uber and allowing them to operate two-wheel services till the notification of the final policy relating to their operations by the State government.

Posting the matter for hearing on June 12, a vacation bench of Justice Aniruddha Bose and Justice Rajesh Bindal asked the Delhi government to serve the copy of its petition to Solicitor General Tushar Mehta so that the stand of the Central government can be obtained.

Let copy of petitions be served upon the Solicitor General so that the stand of the Union of India can be obtained. List the matter on Monday (June 12), the vacation bench said in its order.

In the course of the hearing, the vacation bench asked the Delhi government if it has started a licensing regime for the aggregators and how long will it take? The lawyer appearing for Delhi government said that it has already been posted for inviting suggestions/objections and it will take a months time before it is notified.

The Delhi government has challenged the High Courts May 26 interim order staying the Delhi Transport Departments notification to stop plying bike-taxi aggregator through ride-sharing platforms in the national capital.

Projecting the great benefits that were accruing to the public travelling across the city, the lawyer appearing for the aggregator argued that Uber does not own the vehicles, they are owned by individuals and the service is a great facilitator across the world. The service is being operated since 2019. They referred to Centres 2004 guidelines under which three wheelers and four wheel vehicles were being operated by different aggregators.

At this Justice Bose asked, Under which provision of the Motor Vehicle Act, they are operating these services.

Questioning the High Court order by which both Uber and Rapido are continuing the use of non-transport vehicles including two-wheelers for the purpose of aggregation and ride pooling, Delhi government has said that it is impermissible under the Motor Vehicles Act read with the Motor Vehicle Aggregator Guidelines 2020 without obtaining valid permits.

Besides other reasons, the Delhi government has said that plying the bike taxis by Rapido and Uber cannot be permitted without complying with the requirements including police verification, obligations of installing GPS devices, panic buttons, to ensure road safety and the safety of the passengers.

The respondents are required to get themselves registered and apply for permits after complying with the conditions laid down therein upon its notification and only thereafter, the Respondents can be allowed to continue their business operations in accordance with law, Delhi government has said.
Mercedes Benzs automated driving system on specified highways under specific circumstances without the active control of a driver received approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicles on Thursday.

German carmaker beats Tesla and became the first automaker in California to be granted permission to offer for sale or lease vehicles equipped with automated driving systems to the general public.

The Level 3 Mercedes-Benz DRIVE PILOT technology, enables driver to lawfully take their eyes off the road but requires them to be accessible to regain control in an emergency, received permission.

The DMV said , the DRIVE PILOT technology can only be used on highways during the daytime at speeds no greater than 40 mph.

In a statement, Mercedes-Benz stated that it would offer the automatic driving system as an option for its S-Class and EQS Sedan models for the 2024 model year in the U.S.Later this year, the first deliveries of the corresponding S-Class and EQS Sedan models are anticipated.

Teslas Autopilot or General Motors (GM.N) Super Cruise, categorised as SAE Level 2 systems are now in use on public roads. These systems manage some driving tasks but necessitate constant driver attention.

Tesla refers to its level 2 driving assistance system as Full Self-Driving and claims that in order to keep the function operating safely, a driver must constantly monitor it and take appropriate action.

Mercedes-Benz is given permission by the permit to market its DRIVE PILOT technology on Californian roadways in the Bay Area, Central Valley, Los Angeles, San Diego and on the way from Sacramento and on Southern California to Nevada interstate highway connecting.

The DMV stated that this permit excludes operation on city or county streets, in construction zones, during periods of intense rain or fog, on flooded roads, and during periods of weather conditions that are determined to affect Drive Pilots performance. Before Mercedes-Benz will turn on Drive Pilot in the car, owners of the vehicle must see a required film that explains the features of the system and how to engage and disengage the technology.

Mercedes-Benz was given permission to use highly automated driving systems on Nevadan roads earlier this year.
Was Siberia as hot as Delhi or slightly less in the first week of June? Probably so. Siberia, the coldest place on earth has reported record high temperatures as the Russian region is currently amidst the worst heat wave in history.

Last week, to be precise on June 3, temperatures in Siberia reached 37.9 degrees Celsius in Jalturovosk, its hottest day in Siberias history which was six degrees less than Delhis temperature on June 3, climatologist Maximiliano Herrera told CNN on Thursday.

Several records were also broken on Wednesday, including in Baevo, where 39.6 degrees Celcius was recorded, and at Barnaul where 38.5 degrees Celsius was recorded.

Some of these stations have between five and seven decades of temperature recordings, Herrera told CNN. So we can say its really exceptional. Its the regions worst heat wave in history, he added.

Records keep falling today (Thursday) with again temperatures around 40 degrees Celsius, Herrera told CNN.

An intense and prolonged heat wave in 2020, which saw the Arctic Siberian town of Verkhoyansk hit 38 Celsius, would have been almost impossible without human-caused climate change, according to an analysis by a team of international scientists.

Siberia is one of the fastest warming regions on the planet with hot extremes increasing in intensity, Omar Baddour, chief of climate monitoring and policy services at the World Meteorological Organization, told CNN.

The region has seen some very intense heat waves, said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the European Unions Copernicus Climate Change Service.

These heat waves have major implications for people and nature and will continue to happen more frequently unless we rapidly cut emissions of greenhouse gases, she told CNN.

It is not just Siberia that has seen record heat this week.

On slightly lower latitudes in the temperate zone, on Wednesday, temperatures of more than 45 degrees were recorded in China, 43 degrees in Uzbekistan, and 41 degrees in Kazakhstan.
Former US President Donald Trump faces escalating legal troubles as he reveals being indicted in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Taking to his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump criticized the Biden Administration for what he calls a Boxes Hoax. Trumps attorney, Jim Trusty, confirms that his client is facing seven charges, possibly including an Espionage Act charge. This marks the first time the justice department has charged Trump, further complicating his legal situation as he eyes a potential return to the presidency.

The Mar-a-Lago Case: Missing Classified Documents

Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trumps residential place in Florida following his departure from the White House, becomes the center of the legal controversy. It is revealed that Trump took classified documents with him, violating federal law, which requires outgoing presidents to turn over such documents to the National Archives and Records Administration (Nara). Nara discovers missing records from Trumps tenure and requests their return. Trumps attorneys eventually turn over 15 boxes of records, including 184 classified documents. The justice department gets involved after Nara refers the matter, leading to an FBI investigation in February 2022.

Trumps Charges: Willful Retention and Conspiracy

The former US President now faces charges of willful retention of national security material, obstruction, and conspiracy. It is noteworthy that this is the first time Trump has faced federal criminal charges, as his other pending criminal matters are in state courts.

Evidence Against Trump: Classified Document Recording

Prosecutors reportedly obtain a 2021 recording in which Trump discusses a classified document related to a military confrontation with Iran. On the recording, Trump is heard acknowledging the documents classified status, strengthening the case against him.

Trumps Response: Denial and Comparison

Donald Trump denounces the investigation as politically motivated and downplays the significance of handling the documents. He argues that he had the right to take some documents from the office. He also points out that Joe Biden and Mike Pence also had classified documents in their possession after leaving office.

Impact on Re-election Bid: Minimal Effect

Despite the indictment, Trumps ability to run for the US presidency in 2024 remains unaffected. Previous instances have shown that criminal charges have actually boosted Trumps fundraising efforts, as seen by the $4 million raised within 24 hours of the public announcement of the indictment.
Saint-Laurent, CA (H4T1V6)

Today

Light rain transitioning to a few showers by morning. Low 63F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Light rain transitioning to a few showers by morning. Low 63F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 80%.
By Trend

I propose to hold the Regional Climate Change summit in 2026 in Kazakhstan under the auspices of the UN, President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said at the opening ceremony of the Astana International Forum, Trend reports from the scene.

Climate change poses the biggest risks. Central Asia is particularly vulnerable to climate change and the risks from water scarcity are only rising. In this regard, water and climate change are closely linked, he said.

At the same time, to discuss these and other climate related issues in the region, President Tokayev has proposed to establish a project office of the Central Asian countries in Almaty.

President Tokayev added that the two biggest rivers of Central Asian region - the Syr Darya and Amu Darya  will lose an estimated 15 percent by 2050.

To prevent environmental disaster in the region, we urge that more resources to be allocated to support the International Fund to Save the Aral Sea, he added.
British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad (KLSE:BAT) is about to trade ex-dividend in the next 4 days. The ex-dividend date occurs one day before the record date which is the day on which shareholders need to be on the company's books in order to receive a dividend. The ex-dividend date is important because any transaction on a stock needs to have been settled before the record date in order to be eligible for a dividend. Thus, you can purchase British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad's shares before the 14th of June in order to receive the dividend, which the company will pay on the 26th of June.

The company's next dividend payment will be RM0.13 per share, and in the last 12 months, the company paid a total of RM0.88 per share. Calculating the last year's worth of payments shows that British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad has a trailing yield of 8.6% on the current share price of MYR10.28. Dividends are an important source of income to many shareholders, but the health of the business is crucial to maintaining those dividends. We need to see whether the dividend is covered by earnings and if it's growing.

See our latest analysis for British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad

If a company pays out more in dividends than it earned, then the dividend might become unsustainable - hardly an ideal situation. Last year, British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad paid out 96% of its income as dividends, which is above a level that we're comfortable with, especially if the company needs to reinvest in its business. Yet cash flow is typically more important than profit for assessing dividend sustainability, so we should always check if the company generated enough cash to afford its dividend. Over the last year it paid out 53% of its free cash flow as dividends, within the usual range for most companies.

It's good to see that while British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad's dividends were not well covered by profits, at least they are affordable from a cash perspective. Still, if the company continues paying out such a high percentage of its profits, the dividend could be at risk if business turns sour.

Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.

Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?

Businesses with shrinking earnings are tricky from a dividend perspective. If business enters a downturn and the dividend is cut, the company could see its value fall precipitously. Readers will understand then, why we're concerned to see British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad's earnings per share have dropped 13% a year over the past five years. Ultimately, when earnings per share decline, the size of the pie from which dividends can be paid, shrinks.

The main way most investors will assess a company's dividend prospects is by checking the historical rate of dividend growth. British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad's dividend payments per share have declined at 11% per year on average over the past 10 years, which is uninspiring. While it's not great that earnings and dividends per share have fallen in recent years, we're encouraged by the fact that management has trimmed the dividend rather than risk over-committing the company in a risky attempt to maintain yields to shareholders.

Final Takeaway

From a dividend perspective, should investors buy or avoid British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad? Earnings per share have been shrinking in recent times. What's more, British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad is paying out a majority of its earnings and over half its free cash flow. It's hard to say if the business has the financial resources and time to turn things around without cutting the dividend. It's not an attractive combination from a dividend perspective, and we're inclined to pass on this one for the time being.

Although, if you're still interested in British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad and want to know more, you'll find it very useful to know what risks this stock faces. Every company has risks, and we've spotted 2 warning signs for British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad you should know about.

Generally, we wouldn't recommend just buying the first dividend stock you see. Here's a curated list of interesting stocks that are strong dividend payers.

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.

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Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Sudan's government declares UN envoy no longer welcome; warring sides agree to 24-hour cease-fire

Sudan's government says the U.N. envoy to the country, a key negotiator in its brutal conflict, is no longer welcome
Kevin Frazier will join the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University as an Assistant Professor starting this fall. He currently is a clerk on the Montana Supreme Court.
ALTON  Fears of the unknown are normal, but artificial intelligence (AI) can be useful to your health if you can navigate it, said Dr. Ali Lakritz, with OSF Saint Anthony's Health Center.

When people read that AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs, a report by investment bank Goldman Sachs, reported by BBC News in a March article, it can sound scary. But AI rapidly expanded in 2023, and its here to stay.

ChatGPT, Snapchat and altered photos and videos are just some of the AI encounters people have on their devices daily.

AI has many positives, Lakritz said, but he also said when it comes to health advice, "take it from a trained human being, not a robot."

Youre absolutely normal to be anxious when theres the first stirrings of big shifts in technology or other things that might change our life, said Dr. Lakritz, who is a clinical psychologist at OSF HealthCare's Saint Anthony's Health Center in Alton.

He noted that he sees these concerns often.

Coming to grips with technology advances

Common fears include technology making your job obsolete or providing you with misinformation. Dr. Lakritz suggested being proactive to the changes, not reactive. Learn how AI is changing your job or hobbies.

See if you might be able to be part of that. Start integrating some of that into your day-to-day practice, Dr. Lakritz said.

AI can be a time-saver, too.

It has potential to streamline things we dont like to do, giving us more time and energy to do things we want or things we feel are important, Dr. Lakritz said.

For example, it may take an hour to do an online search for sources for a college essay. If ChatGPT can do it in minutes, you might have time to take that afternoon walk or meet a friend for lunch, boosting your mental and physical health and spurring creativity.

"Its also not our first time dealing with digital unknowns," Lakritz said.

Recall the supposed Y2K bug around the turn of the millennium. Fears of computer clocks malfunctioning and worse never materialized.

Dont go to a robot for mental health care

Snapchat, the photo messaging application popular with young people, recently rolled out a chatbot called My AI. Its a way for people to connect with someone when they have no one else.

According to Snapchats website My AI can answer a burning trivia question, offer advice on the perfect gift for your BFFs birthday, help plan a hiking trip for a long weekend, or suggest what to make for dinner.

But the company concedes: Its possible My AIs responses may include biased, incorrect, harmful, or misleading content. Because My AI is an evolving feature, you should always independently check answers provided by My AI before relying on any advice, and you should not share confidential or sensitive information.

Some parents and mental health experts have picked up on that concern, too. They worry young people are getting inadequate mental health advice from a robot.

Thats like Googling your symptoms when youre sick instead of going to a real doctor, Dr. Lakritz said. Youll get a great deal of information, but there will be very little guidance about how to use that information and which information is more applicable to you.

If talking about your mental health virtually is your preferred way to go, there are more legitimate options than Snapchat, Dr. Lakritz said. First and foremost, your health care provider might offer virtual visits. Otherwise, talk to a provider or trusted adult about online, third-party counseling options.

These are programs that have been tested and vetted," Lakritz explained. "Theres oversight and accountability. Theres research behind it.

Whereas with an AI assistant, its not clear the source of information. Its not clear how to use that information best.

Dr. Lakritz said he predicts that AI will not replace in-person mental health care.

"The human connection of being in a room with someone cant be understated," he said.

When in doubt

When the content on your device is just too much to handle, turn it off, set it aside and take a break, he said.

Look for these warning signs:

Do you feel youre doing too much of it? Do you find your use of technology is taking over other interests in your life? Have you tried to cut down but have not been able to? Do you find that using so much technology causes you to stress or dysfunction? Dr. Lakritz asked.

Most devices have settings that can limit screen time. Parents should set boundaries with their childrens device use. Dr. Lakritz said you can even share your browsing or chat history with a trusted adult so they can make sure youre using technology appropriately.

If your technology use is causing significant mental health problems, talk to your primary care provider or mental health provider. You can also call 9-8-8 to reach the Nation Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Learn more about behavioral and mental health at the OSF HealthCare website.




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EAST ALTON  The Rev. Frank and Donna Mae Taylor Sparks will observe their 70th wedding anniversary on Tuesday, June 13. They will celebrate the occasion with a family dinner party at Castelli's Restaurant on Fosterburg Road.

The Rev. William Bohn performed the couple's wedding service on June 13, 1953 at the First Baptist Church of East Alton.
EAST ALTON  A fire burning along the railroad tracks from East Alton south to 7th Street in Hartford on Thursday evening held up a northbound Amtrak passenger train for almost two hours.

The fires were first reported in Hartford near Olive and East 4th streets at about 6:15 p.m. All railroad traffic, including freight trains, was stopped in the area as firefighters from Hartford, Roxana, South Roxana, Rosewood Heights and Wood River pulled hoses across the tracks.
ALTON  Three Lewis and Clark Community College students have received $1,500 William E. Moyer Vocational Arts and Science scholarships from the Alton-Godfrey Rotary Club.

The awards were presented to Savannah Alexander of Hamburg, James Vaughn of Godfrey and Masen Day of Brighton. The scholarship is renewable for a second year.

Alexander graduated from Jersey Community High School in May. She is pursuing an Associate of Applied Science degree in Welding Technology. She said she looks forward to learning more about the industry from her instructors and through an internship in order to decide on her career plans after graduating in the spring of 2025.

Vaughn graduated from Alton High School in 2018. He is pursuing an Associate of Applied Science degree in Process Operations Technology and plans to graduate in the spring of 2024. He said he is looking forward to an internship with Flexsys America in the fall to help him determine whether he chooses the chemical or petroleum industry for his career.



Day graduated from Southwestern High School in May. He is pursuing an Associate of Applied Science degree in Welding Technology. He said he looks forward to learning more about the fabrication industry and applying to companies after graduating in the spring of 2025.

"This Rotary Club stands alone in its investment in our CTE students," said Lewis and Clark's Director of Development Debby Edelman. "No other civic club has a scholarship at Lewis and Clark that targets students who will be fixing our cars, producing our gas, building our infrastructure and, basically, manufacturing our future."

Rotarian and club member Bill Moyer is a sponsor of the program.
EDWARDSVILLE  Madison County States Attorney Tom Haine on Friday announced that a murder case involving the 2010 death of a man whose body was discovered in Alton has been transferred to St. Clair County for prosecution.

Odilon Villagran-Gudino, 55, formerly of Washington Park, was initially charged in Madison County with robbing and fatally stabbing Jose Pee-wee Randolfo Pagoada, 52, of Washington Park, and concealing the death. The charges were filed in 2018 under seal because Villagran-Gudino was not yet in custody and remained under seal until May 19, 2023, after Villagran-Gudino was returned to Madison County from Mexico, where he had been taken into custody.

The investigation following Villagran-Gudinos return resulted in information that the fatal stabbing had taken place in St. Clair County. Madison County prosecutors notified St. Clair County States Attorney Jim Gomric whose office will now prosecute Villagran-Gudino for the murder charges.

Madison County Associate Judge Ronald Slemer issued an order Thursday transferring custody of Villagran-Gudino from Madison County to St. Clair County. Villagran-Gudino remained in custody Friday.

After the resolution of the murder charges in St. Clair County, the charge of concealment of a homicidal death will be prosecuted in Madison County.

A grand jury in Madison County on Thursday issued an indictment formally charging Villagran-Gudino with concealment of a homicidal death.

I thank St. Clair County States Attorney Jim Gomric and the other authorities in St. Clair County for their prompt action and cooperation in this case, Haine said.

In August 2014, Alton Police were notified that youths playing near an abandoned vehicle on Seminary Street had discovered a decomposed body, which was partially covered and located in the back seat of the vehicle. Residents reported that the vehicle had been there for a few years.

An investigation revealed the remains were those of Pagoada who had been reported missing in December 2010. Detectives quickly identified Villagran-Gudino as a suspect, but the investigation revealed that Villagran-Gudino had returned to Mexico shortly after the disappearance of Pagoada.

Alton Police continued to investigate, despite the suspect being outside the United States. In 2018, Madison County prosecutors filed charges of first-degree murder, armed robbery and concealment of a homicidal death against Villagran-Gudino.

The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Marshals Service assisted in returning Gudino to the custody of local authorities.

We commend the extraordinary efforts and coordination of federal and local law enforcement agencies to ensure that this defendant would finally be returned to our area to face justice, Haine said. Alton Police, working with law enforcement partners across the metro-east and even across the continent, have been persistent in efforts to bring this defendant to justice.

Haine noted Villagran-Gudino is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
Salt Lake City, Utah, June 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Popular Utah-based web design company Dotted Dot is offering a unique benefit to its clients beyond having a first-class online presence that can boost sales and revenue  they also provide assistance to Nigeria by supporting solar power in the country.









Dotted Dot, led by Michael Warr, not only helps its swiftly-expanding client list achieve its web goals  it also leverages those connections to build a better world. Specifically, it seeks to improve life for Nigerians by increasing their access to employment and solar power.

This noble came about thanks to Warrs heritage. He recently discovered he is twenty-one percent Nigerian, which compelled him to learn more about the country and ultimately use his business savvy to help workers in Nigeria however he could.It didnt take long to connect with folks in Nigeria, including one of Dotted Dots earliest beneficiaries of their comprehensive website development services. Because of this employee, Warr learned of the countrys power outages, and he realized low-cost but high-production solar could be a solution, particularly if U.S. clients were willing to aid in this altruistic campaign.

And the effort has already achieved some success, with a Denver-based solar and home energy efficiency company  one of Dotted Dots clients  promising that for every solar package it sells in the U.S., it will provide a free set of solar panels to power a home in Nigeria.

The company, Lessar Energy, doesnt charge its customers anything for this noble offer, which came about because of Warrs stellar work designing the businesss website. Transparent about his desire to improve energy infrastructure in Nigeria, Warr established a shared goal between Dotted Dot and Lessar Energy. Having reliable power is so crucial to creating a safe and consistent environment, one where a person can reliably work and grow, says Warr.

Dotted Dot offers a broad range of sought-after, hands-on services. When people or businesses seek to establish or improve their online visibility, Dotted Dot provides a carefully-crafted website designed to lure in visitors and convert them to customers. They cover everything from brand design to advertising to SEO  keywords that keep sites top of the search engines.

"We are known for creating websites that look good and convert well," says Warr. Quality is one of our top priorities. Our designers do competitive research so our clients dont have to, studying other websites and analyzing the principles and strategies theyre using."

In addition, Dotted Dot is always at the cutting edge of web development, constantly monitoring the latest developments in this field to find the best methods for helping clients. One example is artificial intelligence chatbots, which can provide automated and highly-detailed responses to queries from website visitors  as well as employees. Not only does this streamline the customer service process, but it allows workers to access round-the-clock teaching and information. For Warr, whose Nigerian workforce does not live in the same time zone or possess an American speech pattern, this is especially crucial.

Its vital for me and my team to always understand the latest technological advancements. Were laser-focused on research, on identifying the best software and leveraging it  whether thats helping our clients to improve their efficiency, increase their sales volume, or benefit from any other advantages, says Warr.

CONTACT: michael@dotteddot.com




MIAMI (AP)  Donald Trump improperly stored in his Florida estate sensitive documents on nuclear capabilities, repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a Pentagon plan of attack and classified map, according to a sweeping felony indictment that paints a damning portrait of the former president's treatment of national security information.

The conduct alleged in the historic indictment  the first federal case against a former president  cuts to the heart of any president's responsibility to safeguard the government's most valuable secrets. Prosecutors say the documents he stowed, refused to return and in some cases showed to visitors risked jeopardizing not only relations with foreign nations but also the safety of troops and confidential sources.

Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced, Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case, said in his first public statements. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.

Trump, currently the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is due to make his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon in Miami. In a rare bit of welcome news for the former president, the judge initially assigned to the case is someone he appointed and who drew criticism for rulings in his favor during a dispute last year over a special master assigned to review the seized classified documents. Meanwhile, two lawyers who worked the case for months announced Friday that they had resigned from Trump's legal team.

All told, Trump faces 37 felony counts  31 pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information, the balance relating to alleged conspiracy, obstruction and false statements  that could result in a substantial prison sentence in the event of a conviction. A Trump aide who prosecutors said moved dozens of boxes at his Florida estate at his direction, and then lied to investigators about it, was charged in the same indictment with conspiracy and other crimes.

Trump responded to the indictment Friday by falsely conflating his case with a separate classified documents investigation concerning President Joe Biden. Though classified records were found in a Biden home and office, there has been no indication that the president, unlike Trump, sought to conceal them or knew they were there.

Nobody said I wasnt allowed to look at the personal records that I brought with me from the White House. Theres nothing wrong with that, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. But among the various investigations he has faced, legal experts  as well as Trumps own aides  had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution. Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trumps attorneys were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.

The indictment arrives at a time when Trump is continuing to dominate the Republican presidential primary. A Trump campaign official described the former presidents mood as defiant" and he is expected to deliver a full-throated rebuke of the filing during a speech before Republican Party officials in Georgia Saturday afternoon and will also speak in North Carolina in the evening

Aides were notably more reserved after the indictments unsealing as they reckoned with the gravity of the legal charges and the threat they pose to Trump beyond the potential short-term political gain.

The document's startling scope and breadth of allegations, including a reliance on surveillance video and an audio recording, will almost certainly make it harder for Republicans to rail against than an earlier New York criminal case that many legal analysts had derided as weak.

The documents case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years  as president and private citizen  but had never before charged him with a crime. The most notable investigation was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, but prosecutors in that probe cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Once he left office, though, he lost that protection.

The inquiry took a major step forward last November when Attorney General Merrick Garland, a soft-spoken former federal judge who has long stated that no person should be regarded as above the law, appointed Smith, a war crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation, to lead both the documents probe as well as a separate investigation into efforts to subvert the 2020 election. That investigation remains pending.

The 49-page indictment centers on hundreds of classified documents that Trump took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving office in January 2021. Even as tens of thousands of members and guests visited Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trumps presidency and August 2022, when the FBI obtained a search warrant, documents were recklessly stored in spaces including a "ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

The indictment claims that, for a two-month period between January and March 15, 2021, some of Trumps boxes were stored in one of Mar-a-Lagos gilded ballrooms. A picture included in the indictment shows boxes stacked in rows on the ballrooms stage.

Prosecutors allege that Trump, who claimed without evidence that he had declassified all the documents before leaving office, understood his duty to care for classified information but shirked it anyway. It details a July 2021 meeting in Bedminster in which he boasted about having held onto a classified document prepared by the military about a potential attack on another country.

Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, the indictment quotes him as saying, citing an audio recording. He also said he could have declassified the document but Now I cant, you know, but this is still a secret, according to the indictment.

Using Trump's own words and actions, as recounted to prosecutors by lawyers, aides and other witnesses, the indictment alleges both a refusal to return the documents despite more than a year's worth of government demands but also steps that he encouraged others around him to take to conceal the records.

For instance, prosecutors say, after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for the records in May 2022, Trump asked his own lawyers if he could defy the request and said words to the effect of, I don't want anybody looking through my boxes.

Wouldnt it be better if we just told them we dont have anything here? one of his lawyers described him as saying.

But before his own lawyer searched the property for classified records, the indictment says, Trump directed aides to remove from the Mar-a-Lago storage room boxes of documents so that they would not be found during the search and therefore handed over to the government.

Weeks later, when Justice Department officials arrived at Mar-a-Lago to collect the records, they were handed a folder with only 38 documents and an untrue letter attesting that all documents responsive to the subpoena had been turned over. That day, even as Trump assured investigators that he was an open book, aides loaded several of Trumps boxes onto a plane bound for Bedminster, the indictment alleges.

But suspecting that many more remained inside, the FBI obtained a search warrant and returned in August to recover more than 100 additional documents. The Justice Department says Trump held onto more than 300 classified documents, including some at the top secret level.

Walt Nauta, one of the personal aides alleged to have transported the boxes around the complex, lied to the FBI about the movement of the boxes and faces charges that he conspired to hide them, according to the indictment. His lawyer declined to comment.

____

Associated Press writers Bill Barrow in Atlanta, Michael R. Sisak in New York, Meg Kinnard in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Gary Fields and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report. Tucker and Whithurst reported from Washington. Colvin reported from Greensboro, North Carolina.
THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP)  A Moroccan migrant who was injured by gunfire while crossing from Turkey into Greece Thursday is being hospitalized with non life-threatening injuries, Greek officials said.

A police statement said the 30-year-old man was found trying to cross the river Evros  Meric in Turkish  that runs along the land border, in a small boat with two other men. He had a gunshot wound in the back, apparently inflicted by somebody on the Turkish side.
Key Insights

Duopharma Biotech Berhad's significant sovereign wealth funds ownership suggests that the key decisions are influenced by shareholders from the larger public

Permodalan Nasional Berhad owns 51% of the company

Institutional ownership in Duopharma Biotech Berhad is 21%

A look at the shareholders of Duopharma Biotech Berhad (KLSE:DPHARMA) can tell us which group is most powerful. With 51% stake, sovereign wealth funds possess the maximum shares in the company. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

And individual investors on the other hand have a 26% ownership in the company.

In the chart below, we zoom in on the different ownership groups of Duopharma Biotech Berhad.

View our latest analysis for Duopharma Biotech Berhad

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Duopharma Biotech Berhad?

Institutions typically measure themselves against a benchmark when reporting to their own investors, so they often become more enthusiastic about a stock once it's included in a major index. We would expect most companies to have some institutions on the register, especially if they are growing.

As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in Duopharma Biotech Berhad. This suggests some credibility amongst professional investors. But we can't rely on that fact alone since institutions make bad investments sometimes, just like everyone does. When multiple institutions own a stock, there's always a risk that they are in a 'crowded trade'. When such a trade goes wrong, multiple parties may compete to sell stock fast. This risk is higher in a company without a history of growth. You can see Duopharma Biotech Berhad's historic earnings and revenue below, but keep in mind there's always more to the story.

Hedge funds don't have many shares in Duopharma Biotech Berhad. Our data shows that Permodalan Nasional Berhad is the largest shareholder with 51% of shares outstanding. With such a huge stake in the ownership, we infer that they have significant control of the future of the company. For context, the second largest shareholder holds about 11% of the shares outstanding, followed by an ownership of 1.9% by the third-largest shareholder.

While studying institutional ownership for a company can add value to your research, it is also a good practice to research analyst recommendations to get a deeper understand of a stock's expected performance. Quite a few analysts cover the stock, so you could look into forecast growth quite easily.

Insider Ownership Of Duopharma Biotech Berhad

The definition of an insider can differ slightly between different countries, but members of the board of directors always count. The company management answer to the board and the latter should represent the interests of shareholders. Notably, sometimes top-level managers are on the board themselves.

I generally consider insider ownership to be a good thing. However, on some occasions it makes it more difficult for other shareholders to hold the board accountable for decisions.

Our data suggests that insiders own under 1% of Duopharma Biotech Berhad in their own names. We do note, however, it is possible insiders have an indirect interest through a private company or other corporate structure. It seems the board members have no more than RM3.6m worth of shares in the RM1.3b company. We generally like to see a board more invested. However it might be worth checking if those insiders have been buying.

General Public Ownership

The general public-- including retail investors -- own 26% stake in the company, and hence can't easily be ignored. While this size of ownership may not be enough to sway a policy decision in their favour, they can still make a collective impact on company policies.

Next Steps:

It's always worth thinking about the different groups who own shares in a company. But to understand Duopharma Biotech Berhad better, we need to consider many other factors. Take risks for example - Duopharma Biotech Berhad has 1 warning sign we think you should be aware of.

If you are like me, you may want to think about whether this company will grow or shrink. Luckily, you can check this free report showing analyst forecasts for its future.

NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the last twelve months, which refer to the 12-month period ending on the last date of the month the financial statement is dated. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures.

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.

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The main aim of stock picking is to find the market-beating stocks. But the main game is to find enough winners to more than offset the losers So we wouldn't blame long term Ediston Property Investment Company plc (LON:EPIC) shareholders for doubting their decision to hold, with the stock down 43% over a half decade.

Now let's have a look at the company's fundamentals, and see if the long term shareholder return has matched the performance of the underlying business.

Check out our latest analysis for Ediston Property Investment

While markets are a powerful pricing mechanism, share prices reflect investor sentiment, not just underlying business performance. One way to examine how market sentiment has changed over time is to look at the interaction between a company's share price and its earnings per share (EPS).

Ediston Property Investment became profitable within the last five years. However, it made a loss in the last twelve months, suggesting profit may be an unreliable metric at this stage. Other metrics might give us a better handle on how its value is changing over time.

We note that the dividend has fallen in the last five years, so that may have contributed to the share price decline. On top of that, revenue has declined by 3.5% per year over the half decade; that could be a red flag for some investors.

You can see how earnings and revenue have changed over time in the image below (click on the chart to see the exact values).

You can see how its balance sheet has strengthened (or weakened) over time in this free interactive graphic.

What About Dividends?

It is important to consider the total shareholder return, as well as the share price return, for any given stock. Whereas the share price return only reflects the change in the share price, the TSR includes the value of dividends (assuming they were reinvested) and the benefit of any discounted capital raising or spin-off. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. In the case of Ediston Property Investment, it has a TSR of -20% for the last 5 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!

A Different Perspective

Investors in Ediston Property Investment had a tough year, with a total loss of 15% (including dividends), against a market gain of about 1.2%. Even the share prices of good stocks drop sometimes, but we want to see improvements in the fundamental metrics of a business, before getting too interested. Regrettably, last year's performance caps off a bad run, with the shareholders facing a total loss of 4% per year over five years. We realise that Baron Rothschild has said investors should "buy when there is blood on the streets", but we caution that investors should first be sure they are buying a high quality business. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Ediston Property Investment better, we need to consider many other factors. For example, we've discovered 1 warning sign for Ediston Property Investment that you should be aware of before investing here.

If you are like me, then you will not want to miss this free list of growing companies that insiders are buying.

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on British exchanges.

Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) simplywallst.com.



This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.

Join A Paid User Research Session

Youll receive a US$30 Amazon Gift card for 1 hour of your time while helping us build better investing tools for the individual investors like yourself. Sign up here
Job Title: Administrative Assistant CDC (Fresher Jobs)

Organisation: United States US Embassy, US Mission in Uganda

Duty Station: Kampala, Uganda

Position Number: Kampala-2023-045

About US Embassy:

The United States Embassy in Kampala, Uganda has enjoyed diplomatic relations with Uganda for over 30 years. Ambassador Natalie E. Brown currently heads the U.S Mission to Uganda. The Mission is composed of several offices and organizations all working under the auspices of the Embassy and at the direction of the Ambassador.

Among the offices operating under the U.S Mission to Uganda are:

United States Agency for International Development (USAID)

Centers for Disease Control (CDC)

Peace Corps

Job Summary: The Administrative Assistant CDC oversees the day-to-day administrative functions and logistical coordination in support of one or more branches in the Centers for Disease Control Uganda country office. The specific work portfolio includes office management, transcription and distribution of meeting minutes, preparation of correspondence and documents, travel arrangements, procurement processing, maintenance requests, time and attendance, motor pool arrangements, and other administrative duties as assigned.









Qualifications, Skills and Experience:

NOTE: All applicants must address each selection criterion detailed below with specific and comprehensive information supporting each item.

The applicants for the United States US Embassy Administrative Assistant CDC job opportunity should have completed two-year College or University Studies in any field. Required.

At least two years of office administration or secretarial experience in a busy and multi-cultural organization/institution is required.

A general knowledge of secretarial work, office management procedures, and office automation software (e.g., Microsoft Office processing programs) is required.

Excellent and accurate typing and computer skills where both accuracy and speed is required.

Ability to draft correspondence and establish and maintain files in an orderly fashion is required.

Must demonstrate methodical work habits. This may be tested.

Language: English Fluent; speaking/reading/writing, may include the ability to translate and Luganda Good working knowledge; speaking, reading & writing. This may be tested.

How to Apply:

All those interested in working with the United States Embassy, US Mission in Kampala should send their applications online at the link below.

Click Here

Deadline: 17th June 2023

For more of the latest jobs, please visit https://www.theugandanjobline.com or find us on our facebook page https://www.facebook.com/UgandanJobline
Rajub Bhowmik is a name that represents true passion, hard work, & imagination. He is a 35 years old Bangladeshi American actor, model, educator & lyricist who has recently gained worldwide recognition for his unmatched academic achievements. With a total of ten college degrees, four master's degrees, & four doctorate degrees, Dr. Rajub Bhowmik is considered to be the most educated Bengali of all time. He was born in the Noakhali District of Bangladesh, The Week has learned.

Dr. Bhowmik is making a difference with his impressive academic background and is an adjunct associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at Iona University in New York, and an adjunct professor in the Doctoral of Counseling Psychology program at Saint Elizabeth University in New Jersey. In addition, he has also made a name in his career as a police sergeant in the New York City Police Department (NYPD) with over 10 years of experience. Dr. Bhowmik is truly an asset to both the education & law enforcement sectors, providing invaluable insight into the community's needs from both ends.

Prof. Bhowmik's journey toward pursuing his academic & professional goals commenced at an early age when he immigrated with his family to the United States from Bangladesh at just 16 years old, where he completed high school and a two-year college degree in science, a source close to the family said. Driven by ambition & New York's promising opportunities, he resumed his educational journey in the United States. His academic drive is unparalleled because he has differentiated himself in 4 different fields with 4 different Doctorates.

Among his ten degrees, Dr. Bhowmik has a Master's in National Security and Homeland Security, a Master's in Science in Curriculum and Instructional Technology, a Master's in Science in Psychology, and a Master's in Science in Criminal Justice. He has also earned a Ph.D. in Forensic Psychology, Doctorate in Education (EdD) in Leadership, Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA), and Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (PsyD).

Dr. Bhowmik's educational journey is not only impressive of his number of degrees but also the diversity of areas that he specialized in. Given the vast number of degrees Dr. Bhowmik has been accredited with, some would think that they represent his passion for education. However, it is his love for making a difference in people's lives that ignited such ambition.

As exceptional as Dr. Bhowmik's academic success is, he is an artist at heart, expressing his creativity with an impressive collection of works in many languages. Mr. Bhowmik has written over 500 sonnets encompassing love, philosophy, the afterlife, nature, & politics that have been praised by many.

Over the course of his career, he has published more than 20 books in different languages, including works on poetry, romance, research & thrillers. As a pioneer of Ayna Sangeet, a brand new genre of Bangladeshi music, & Ayna Sonnets, it is clear that Dr. Bhowmik will continue to leave his mark in the music industry as well.

Dr. Rajub Bhowmik's awe-inspiring academic & professional journey remains a source of inspiration for the Southeast Asian community. His outstanding achievement goes beyond just numbers, but it highlights his commitment to making a difference globally in people's lives, his ability to achieve far beyond societal expectations, and his creativity to go beyond the norm in all aspects of his life.
Kerala Fibre Optic Network (KFON) project, aimed at bridging the digital divide in Kerala, has faced controversy as it was revealed that Chinese-made cables were used instead of Indian-manufactured products, as stipulated in the tender conditions.

The project, implemented by Kerala State IT Infrastructure Limited (KSITIL), aimed to provide high-speed internet connectivity to 20 lakh poor families in the state, free of charge, and to others at affordable rates. However, concerns were raised by the Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB), a partner in the project, regarding the use of non-Indian cables.

The cables in question were supplied by LS Cable & System, a Korean company, and their quality was tested in China, contrary to the tender condition that required all testing to be conducted in India. The audit revealed that the National Centre Lab in Shanghai, China, conducted the cable quality test, which was accepted by the authorities involved in the project.

The KSEB, which had raised objections to the use of Chinese cables, stated that it had informed KSITIL of the high risk associated with the product. However, the objections were reportedly ignored, and the Chinese cables were used for laying the network, spanning approximately 2,600 km.

One of the key tender conditions required a Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) to be conducted at the manufacturing plant of the product. Since the cables' key component was manufactured in China, this crucial test could not be carried out. The KSEB highlighted that merely testing the final product without examining the entire manufacturing process would not guarantee the cable's quality.

The KSITIL defended its decision by arguing that LS Cable, although a Korean company, had a registered plant in India, which, according to them, made it eligible as an Indian manufacturer. However, this justification contradicted the tender condition that explicitly stated the cable should be purchased only from Indian manufacturers.

The KSEB has called for a review of the high-level committee to assess the use of Chinese cables and the poor quality of the imported components.

When Opposition Leader V D Satheesan raised an allegation about the usage of Chinese -made cables in the KFON project, the company had come up vehemently denying the charge....

Dr. Santosh Babu, MD of both the K-FON and the KSITIL told Manorama that he had no knowledge about the presence of Chinese components in the cables nor the objections raised by the KSEB. Holding that he took charge of the project only in 2021, he said he would not be in a position to comment without examining these matters.

The implementation of KFON is a joint venture between the Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) and Kerala State IIT Infrastructure Limited, with funding from the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board. Central PSU Bharat Electronics Limited leads the consortium responsible for the project's execution, while PriceWaterhouseCoopers serves as the project's consultant.

KFON is an extensive optical fibre cable network stretching an impressive 30,000 kilometers, boasting 375 Points-of-Presence meticulously positioned throughout Kerala. Acting as a crucial infrastructure provider, KFON will facilitate the sharing of its network with diverse service providers, including cable operators, to ensure widespread accessibility. By providing a robust backbone for internet connectivity, KFON will revolutionize the digital landscape of Kerala and create opportunities for progress and development.

KFON's comprehensive coverage promises to bridge the digital divide and empower every household and government office. With its ambitious target of connecting 30,000 government offices and providing high-speed internet access to 14,000 Below Poverty Line families in its initial phase, KFON demonstrates Kerala's commitment to digital inclusion and social welfare. The scheme's long-term vision includes extending internet connectivity to 20 lakh families below the poverty line, enabling them to access crucial online services and participate in the digital revolution.
Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, while addressing the media on Friday, said that India has transformed in the last nine years. With the talks of Artificial Intelligence (AI) opportunities gaining momentum in the country, minister Chandrasekhar said that Centre will regulate AI the same way it regulates any other emerging technology.

Chandrasekhar was speaking on how far India has travelled in terms of digitisation in the last nine years under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

AI will be regulated to ensure that it does not harm digital citizens, he said.

He also added that India has become the world's largest country in digital transactions.

In the last nine years, the country has transformed. We have not just transformed, we have travelled a long distance from the bad days of UPA's lost decade when people were running away from the country, there were scams every day and nobody was making any investment, said Chandrasekhar, reported ANI.

The minister also added that India is looking ahead by creating more jobs than ever before. Today we are receiving the highest FDI...our sector has now become the one where rest of the world wants to partner with Indian entrepreneurship and Indian entrepreneurs to build the technologies of the future.

He also highlighted that 85 crore Indians use the internet, which is expected go high up to 120 crores by 2025.

"Toxicity and criminality have significantly increased on the internet..crimes like doxing has been rising, he added.

Law and order are state subjects and Centre will have to work with state governments on strict initiatives regarding it.

"There is a boost of digital connectivity in the country, and its the vision and mission of the government to ensure safety and security in cyberspace," he said.

He also added that India has become one of the biggest consumers of mobile internet and data. We have the lowest prices compared to anywhere in the world and it has happened in the last nine years, he added.

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman held talks with PM Modi on Thursday evening on various aspects of AI. Modi had said that the potential of AI in India's tech ecosystem is vast.



Regarding Altman's visit to India, Chandrasekhar said that it is a sign that he sees the country as a promising space and could be looking at future opportunities.

India has taken major strides in the digital and technology sector in the past decade. India has become the world's largest country in digital transactions. Technology is even accessed by people in the remotest villages in India, he said.

"We are among the biggest consumer of mobile internet and data and have the lowest prices compared to anywhere in the world. This has happened in the last nine years," said Chandrasekhar.

"During the time of 2G and 3G, every component was imported. Characteristics of telecoms in the last decade were dependency on imports, 2G scams...destruction of wealth, he said.

During a session at IIT Delhi, Altman said that they discussed about the opportunities in the field of AI and how it could benefit the country. He also said that in India the first thing he would do is to fund startups.

"Great conversation with @narendramodi discussing india's incredible tech ecosystem and how the country can benefit from ai...really enjoyed all my meetings with people in the @PMOIndia," tweeted Altman.
Google is celebrating Pride Month by featuring legendary dancer William Roscoe Leake aka Willi Ninja, who is called the 'Godfather of Voguing'. Willi's significant contributions in the 1980s and 1990s, characterised by his precise movements and dramatic poses, played a pivotal role in advancing the representation and acceptance of Black LGBTQiA+ community.

In a tribute to Willi's legacy, Google unveiled a doodle featuring an animated avatar of the performer, showcasing some of his iconic dance moves. The doodle includes a play icon within a disco ball at its centre. Clicking on the play button opens a brief YouTube video featuring 'The Iconic House of Ninja', a community established by Willi that continues to thrive even 17 years after his passing.

Illustrated by Rob Gilliam, the doodle video was edited by Xander Opiyo, with original music composed by Vivacious. The video showcases performances by current members of the House of Ninja, including Archie Burnett Ninja, Javier Madrid Ninja, Kiki Ninja, and Akiko Tokuoka, also known as KiT Ninja, as they joyfully celebrate Willi's enduring impact.

This day marks his 62nd birth anniversary and 33 years of the release of the documentary 'Paris is Burning' in the US, at the NewFest New York LGBT Film Festival, in 1990. The film prominently featured Willi and the Iconic House of Ninja, introducing his unique dance style to a wider audience and showcased the ball culture of New York city which garnered significant success.

Willi was born in 1961 and raised in Flushing, Queens. His mother nurtured his interest in dance and took him to ballet performances at the Apollo theatre despite their tight financial circumstances. She also played a pivotal role in supporting his identity and encouraged him to pursue his passion for dance. He started dancing at 7. Since he was inspired by martial arts, he named himself Ninja. Willi self-learned the art and specialised in voguing  a dance style that blends fashion poses with intricate movements inspired by mime and martial arts. Voguing emerged from the Harlem ballroom scene, which served as a safe haven founded by Black and Latino LGBTQiA+ individuals to express themselves and foster unity.

In the ballroom culture, Black and Latino people aligned themselves with groups known as houses, providing them with an extended social family and support system in the face of potential rejection from their biological families. In 1982, Willi co-founded his own community called the House of Ninja, where he continued to offer guidance and support to its members even after achieving fame.

Apart from being a dancer and choreographer, Willi also made significant contributions as a model, effectively introducing voguing to a wider audience through his performances, music videos, and runway presentations. His influence reached beyond the realm of dance, establishing him as a notable figure within the fashion industry. He collaborated with renowned designers and participated in numerous fashion shows, solidifying his presence and impact.

Throughout his career, Willi played a crucial role in raising awareness and fostering acceptance of the LGBTQiA+ community, particularly within the ballroom culture. He utilised his exceptional talent and platform to challenge societal norms and encourage the exploration of self-expression. Due to AIDS-related heart failure, he died at 45. Even after his passing, his footprints in voguing and ballroom culture continue to inspire dancers, artists, and performers worldwide. The House of Ninja continues to dance in his honour, carrying his legacy forward with pride.
At least three people, including a child, died and many others are feared trapped after an illegal mine in Jharkhand collapsed on Friday.



The incident occurred at 10.30 am at Bhowra colliery area of Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), about 21 km from Dhanbad.



Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP), Sindri, Abhishek Kuma, said the exact number of people killed and feared trapped or injured would be known after rescuers are able to locate the victims.



"This mine comes under Bhowra area. It seems that illegal mining was underway. We are investigating the matter. As of now, we do not have any confirmation regarding the number of deaths," news agency ANI quoted Binod Oraon, sub-inspector, Jorapokhar police station, as saying.



"With the help of the locals, three persons were brought out from the debris and taken to a hospital where doctors declared them dead," an eyewitness told news agency PTI.



According to NDTV, an eyewitness said authorities were slow to react when people informed them about the collapse. Illegal mining is rampant in the area and many complaints have been made, but no action was initiated, the eyewitness added.
Should politics be allowed in college campuses? This has been a hotly-debated topic in Kerala for years now. Related incidents of violence and even murders have plagued college campuses in the state.

However, there's a flip side to it. The absence of student organisations or student unions in college campuses deprive students of a platform to air their concerns and grievances, and fight for their rights.

The topic has resurfaced now, owing to three notable incidents. The first happened on June 2 when Sradha Satheesh, a food technology student at Amal Jyoti Engineering College in Kanjirapally, died by suicide in her hostel room. Amal Jyoti is a self-financing college run by the Kanjirappally Diocese of Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, where no student politics is allowed. Following Sradha's death, fellow students organised a protest, alleging the college administration had subjected students to intense mental pressure, and held them responsible for her death. On June 1, the college authorities had, purportedly, confiscated Sradha's phone and demanded she bring her parents, who were in Ernakulam, in order to get it back. She was summoned to the head of the department's office, following which she confided in her friends that she was contemplating suicide.

As the students' protests intensified, there were allegations that the college authorities resorted to intimidation by threatening to deduct internal marks. On June 6, the Students Federation of India, the student wing affiliated with the ruling CPI(M) party, organised a march to the college. The same day, the college management closed the institution and instructed the students to vacate the hostels. However, the students refused.

The students also alleged that the police treated them roughly at the behest of the college authorities. A video shared on social media by the students showed police officers pushing unarmed students and provoking them.

The management tried to justify their actions, saying that some people were trying to undermine the college, and suggested that the student protests were part of a coordinated attack against Christian organisations.

According to Asher (name changed), a third-year automobile engineering student, the management did not act against the agitating students only because the incident got media attention. "Otherwise, all of us would have been suspended by now," he says. Asher further explains that while there is a student council in place, it holds no real power and merely complies with the management's directives. Previous attempts to establish students' unions within the college were swiftly crushed by the management through suspensions of those involved, he said. Suspensions are a commonplace occurrence in the college. For instance, if a male and female student are seen together somewhere on campus, their ID cards are confiscated, and the management exacerbates the issue by suspending them. This is the challenging situation that students like us face on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, several alumni, including scriptwriter Sharis Mohammed, took to social media to share their distressing experiences during their time at the institution. On June 6, State Higher Education Minister Bindu also voiced criticism against self-financing colleges that employ oppressive disciplinary measures. The students are demanding the removal of the hostel warden and the Head of the Food Technology Department. Following Minister Bindu's assurance that the crime branch will conduct an investigation into the student suicide at the college, the students partially scaled back their protests.

The other two incidents that added to the debate were both related to the SFI at Maharajas Collegea well-known autonomous institution in Ernakulam. On June 7, the Kerala Students Union (KSU), the student wing of the Congress party, made an accusation against SFI state secretary P.M. Arsho's mark sheet, claiming that he was marked 'passed' in the third-semester archaeology examination despite missing the exams. The college authorities attributed it to a technical error by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) under the Union government, which is responsible for publishing the results.

However, Arsho defended himself saying there was a conspiracy behind the allegations and that he neither paid the fees nor appeared for the exams. On Facebook, he wrote: I took admission in the Archaeology Department in Maharajas College in the 2020 batch. I did not write the 3rd semester exam, when that exam was held, I was not in Ernakulam district where the exam centre is located, I was absent in all 5 subjects of the semester. After the exam, the exam result was published on 26 October 2022 at 1.42 pm, and it was marked that I did not write the exam. The said mark list is available on the college website from then till now. The mark list which has been circulating, including in the media, is related to the regular examination of 2021 batch students. I am not a candidate for that exam of the regular batch, and I have not paid the fee or registered to take such an exam.

Arsho says a former department coordinator is behind the conspiracy. He suspects that the teacher targeted him because of multiple complaints filed against the teacher by students and other faculty members. Additionally, a complaint was lodged against the revaluation result of a KSU leader. Arsho further alleges that the matter was orchestrated to divert media attention from the incident at Amal Jyothi.

On June 7, the principal of Maharaja's College clarified that the student leader's statement regarding not registering or paying fees for the examination was true. The principal reiterated that the inclusion of the student leader's name among the registered candidates for the exam was due to a technical glitch in the NIC system.

Amid all these developments, another controversy arose involving K. Vidya, a former SFI leader and a member of the student's union at both Maharaja's College and Kalady Sanskrit College. Interestingly, Vidya is a close friend of Arsho. It is alleged that Vidya forged a teaching certificate from Maharaja's College and presented this fake certificate during an interview for a guest lecturer position in Malayalam at Government College, Attapady, on June 2. Her actions were discovered when one of the interview panel members grew suspicious of the college's logo and seal on the certificate and decided to contact Maharaja's College for verification.

It appears that Vidya had earlier worked as a guest lecturer in two colleges in Kasaragod and Palakkad, using the forged document. There are allegations that Arsho helped her acquire the counterfeit certificates. The KSU has also accused Vidya of securing illegal admission to a PhD programme in Kalady university in 2020, using her connections with the SFI. Additionally, a purported report of the university's SC/ST cell regarding Vidya's admission, indicates that the reservation roster was manipulated during her admission. She is evading authorities currently; the police have filed charges against her under non-bailable offences.

Though Vidya is not currently affiliated with the SFI, the student organisation and the CPI(M) have come under scrutiny due to the controversies. Two weeks ago, the SFI unit at Christian College, Kattakada, was accused of including the name of an SFI leader, Visakh, who did not participate in the election, in the list submitted for the university union councillor position, with the knowledge of the college principal. The police have filed cases against the college principal and Visakh.

In 2019, the state was rocked by a scandal involving malpractice in the PSC exams by SFI leaders who were also implicated in a stabbing case. Now, with the emergence of yet another incident involving malpractices by student leaders and former student leaders, it raises concerns about the integrity of the existing student organisations in the state. At the same time, another group of students in the state are living in constant fear of reprisals from college management due to the absence of student politics at their institutions.
Poll-bound Madhya Pradesh will witness two major assembly polls-related events in the next three days. On Saturday, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan will initiate the cash transfer to eligible women under Laadli Behna scheme which is being seen as an election game changer by the ruling BJP, while Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will launch the partys election campaign on Monday.

Interestingly, both these events will be held in Jabalpur  considered the cultural capital of the state and the main seat in the crucial tribal-dominated Mahakoshal region in the southeastern parts of the state.

The Congress had won 28 of the 46 seats in the region in 2018 pollsone of the major region-wise hauls after the Gwalior-Chambal region where it won 26 of 34 seats. While the Congress will look to improve its tally in the region during upcoming elections to get a proper majority, the BJP which could win only 17 of 46 seats will be looking to snatch many more seats to stay in power.

Gandhi will worship Ma Narmada (River Narmada) at Gwarighat before addressing a public meeting at Shahid Smarak in Jabalpur at 11.30 am. The Madhya Pradesh Congress is making grand preparations for the event and is claiming that about one lakh people will gather to listen to Gandhi.

State Congress chief Kamal Nath confirmed that this will be the launch of the partys poll campaign. This is the commencement of our poll campaign and I believe that people will listen to her (Priyankas) voice. It is important to bring Madhya Pradesh back on track and I am confident that the people of Madhya Pradesh will keep the future of the state safe, Nath said in Bhopal on Thursday.

The Congress is upbeat after its massive victory in Karnataka and Gandhi, who actively campaigned in the southern state along with her brother Rahul Gandhi, is likely to be a key campaigner in Madhya Pradesh as well.

The MP Congress hopes that Priyanka Gandhi will especially resonate with the women voters  the most wooed section of voters in the state. The Congress has already announced two major promises  Nari Samman Yojana, involving cash assistance of Rs 1,500 per month to women, and domestic gas cylinders for Rs 500  aimed at the women voters

Laadli Behna state level event

CM Chouhan will attend the state-level main function of the cash transfer initiation under the flagship Laadli Behna scheme of the BJP government on June 10. Political watchers feel that since Priyanka Gandhis Jabalpur programme had been announced well in advance, Chouhan probably chose the same city for the key event.

Chouhans official event will be held at Garrison Ground of Jabalpur and the administration has been asked to ensure the presence of maximum possible women beneficiaries there.

About 1.25 crore women are likely to be beneficiaries of the Laadli Behna scheme which involves cash assistance of Rs 1,000 per month. The BJP government, especially CM Chouhan, is expecting this scheme to tilt the women voters decisively towards the ruling party on the lines of the Laadli Laxmi scheme for girls that proved to be a game changer for the BJP in 2008 polls.

The BJP government is undertaking mega branding of the scheme with Chouhan himself visiting almost all parts of the state with Laadli Behna Sammelans (conventions) where the benefits of the scheme and the aim of the government to empower women were detailed.

Approval letters were distributed to the eligible women during the past week and a token amount of Rs 1 was transferred to bank accounts to check the system.

The initiation of cash transfer on Saturday is also a three-day event that commenced on Thursday with special gram sabhas that women attended. Other cultural events were held on Friday. On Saturday, events are planned at each village panchayat and urban ward level to mark the transfer of the first monthly installment under the scheme. Drums will be played, sweets will be distributed, firecrackers will be burst, and oil lamps will be lit at homes to mark the occasion, the government said. The chief minister has directed the administration to ensure that eligible women get invitations to attend the programmes to be held at different levels on Saturday.
Congress leader Jairam Ramesh snapped back at External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar for his remarks that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had the "habit" of criticising India abroad, stating it was Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself who started taking national politics outside the country.

This came after Jaishankar criticised Rahul Gandhi, stating "taking national politics out of the country is not in the nation's interest."



Jairam Ramesh tweeted: "The man who started the practice of taking national politics outside the country is none other than the man who gave you your ministerial position. You know it but you cannot acknowledge it Dr. Minister."



The man who started the practice of taking national politics outside the country is none other than the man who gave you your ministerial position. You know it but you cannot acknowledge it Dr. Minister. https://t.co/FE6nZAujM1  Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) June 8, 2023

AICC Media and Publicity Department chairman Pawar Khera too hit out the EAM. "I hope Mr Jaishankar was able to block the transmission of Hathras, Lakhimpur, farmers protests, wrestlers protests, news on Kathua, Unnao, Ankita Bhandari, Manipur, etc across the world. And he is supposed to be educated. Precondition to joining the Sangh brigade - travel light, leave your brains behind," Khera tweeted.



Their responses were in line with Rahul Gandhi's speech during his US tour where he said the BJP and RSS are "incapable" of looking at the future and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is trying to drive the Indian car by only looking in the rear-view mirror which will lead to "one accident after another".



While addressing a massive community event at the Javits Centre organised by the American chapter of the Indian Overseas Congress, Rahul said: If you ask the BJP why a train accident happened, they will say the Congress party did such a thing 50 years ago", taking a swipe at the government following the Odisha train accident, one of the worst railway tragedies in the country."



Rahul's words did not go down well with Jaishankar who said "taking national politics abroad will not enhance Gandhi's credibility."



"If you see all the narratives (against the government), they are made within the country. If a narrative does not work or is less effective, then it is taken abroad. They expect that the outside support will work in India," he said.


EV Charging Stocks Sink After General Motors Says It Will Use Teslas Charging Network

EV Charging Stocks Sink After General Motors Says It Will Use Teslas Charging Network

(Bloomberg) -- General Motors Co.s move to adapt its electric vehicles to use Tesla Inc.s network of Superchargers has sent shares reeling for other makers of EV charging stations.

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EVgo Inc. sank 12% Friday, its worst day in nearly a month. ChargePoint Holdings, Inc. shed 13%, and Blink Charging Co. fell 11% for its largest daily loss since February. Beam Global, which designs clean energy systems for electric vehicle charging, slid 4.9%.

GM is the second major automaker to say it will use Teslas charging network. Ford Motor Co. announced a similar move in May. Tesla rose 4.1% on Friday, extending a $200 billion rally into an 11th day, while GM gained 1.1%.

While the pact is weighing heavily on other EV charging companies, the market may be overreacting, according to some on Wall Street.

We think the news is overblown, though we would acknowledge that the news does put into question what GM is planning long-term with EVgo, which has been one of its key charging partners, JPMorgan analyst Bill Peterson wrote in a note.

Read more: Teslas Record Run of Gains Drives $200 Billion Jump in Value

JPMorgan continues to see overweight-rated ChargePoint as well-positioned to benefit in areas where Tesla doesnt compete, such as work, multifamily and fleet. They are less clear on EVgos direction in the long-term, but said the company continues to have significant partnerships with other EV makers including Toyota Motor Corp. and Subaru Corp. Its likely that even given the news with Tesla, GM could take a multi-faceted approach in the future. JPMorgan has a neutral rating on EVgo.

Bank of America agrees that the news is more uncertain for EVgo, for which it has an underperform rating, even though GM identified an ongoing commitment to its eXtend business.

Read more: Tesla Set for $3 Billion Boost From Chargers at Rivals Expense

We expect investors will be uneasy about competition as it now has another major partner, BofA analyst Alex Vrabel said in a note. In a more direct sense, given it is the site host, EVgo will now compete more directly for utilization against TSLAs highly reliable network serving a larger piece of the future EV fleet.

Thats not an issue for hardware-provider ChargePoint, as its network is largely fleet-focused, according to BofA, which reiterated its buy rating on the company.

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In an unexpected move, Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, on Friday, dropped Higher Education Minister Rohit Pujari from the council of ministers over "nonperformance".



After an annual review showed the higher education department at the bottom of the list, the chief minister recommended to Governor Ganeshi Lal to drop Pujari from the council of ministers.



For the past few weeks, Patnaik has been reviewing the performances of various departments after which the minister and secretary of each of the departments that were reviewed had been giving details in press conferences. As both Lok Sabha polls and assembly elections are less than a year away, the review of the departments is significant.



Interestingly, Pujari's sacking has come a few days after the cabinet reshuffle. On May 29, three ministersBikram Arukh, Sudam Marandi and Sarada Nayakwere inducted into the cabinet. Marandi and Nayak were ministers in the previous Patnaik government. Marandi, a former Jharkhand Mukti Morcha leader, belongs to north Odisha's Mayurbhanj district. Nayak is a legislator from Rourkela steel city constituency in western Odisha's Sundergarh district. The induction of these two was a political necessity.



Arukh, who had resigned as assembly speaker a few days ago, was made the finance minister. The post of the speaker remains vacant.



Two ministersSamir Dash, who was minister for school and mass education, and Srikant Sahu, minister for labourhad resigned from the cabinet at the behest of the CM in the wake of a few allegations.



Pujari, a two-term MLA from Rairakhol constituency in western Odisha's Sambalpur district. Two days ago, his private secretary had been replaced. Pujari, a former state youth congress president who joined BJD and became MLA in 2014, was the deputy chief whip of the government in both terms and had joined as a minister a year back.

Recently, Pujari courted controversy by suggesting that people above the age of 60 should not be given tickets to contest elections, angering the seniors in the party. Even BJD supremo and CM Patnaik will come under that category if Pujari's suggestion is to be taken seriously.



There are also claims that he had mishandled some files related to court judgements which led to the shifting of his private secretary. This may have led to the sacking of Pujari.



Nayak, cabinet minister for food supplies and consumer affairs and cooperation, has been given additional charge of higher education after Pujari was dropped.

After Pujari's removal Bishupada Sethi, IAS, principal secretary, higher education department, has been shunted out. He has been posted as officer on special duty of general administration and public grievances department, an ignominious posting. It is being interpreted that both the minister and the secretary have lost their jobs on nonperformance, an indirect message to ministers and secretaries of all departments in the election year.

Pujari said he had lent maximum effort to his job. May be the chief minister, who had given him a lot of assignments before, had more expectations, he added.
Balasore in Odisha is yet to recover from the horrific train accident that claimed more than 270 lives last week. In a heartbreaking development, the government school where bodies of the crash victims were kept, was demolished on Friday.

According to reports, students of the Bahanaga High School were reluctant to return to the premises even after the bodies were moved out. Traumatised by the event, parents, too, were reluctant to send children to classes in the school. The people of Bahanaga were also apprehensive of the presence of 'spirits' in the building which was turned into a temporary morgue in the wake of the triple train crash.

Balasore district collector Dattareya Bhausaheb Shinde who visited the premises earlier tried to allay the fears of parents and students, but had to agree to their requests to demolish the building. They want to demolish the old building and renovate it so that children do have any fear or apprehension to attend classes, NDTV quoted him as saying.

Meanwhile, as many as 82 bodies of victims of the crash still remain unidentified, a week after the tragedy. The Odisha government on Thursday held discussions with the officials from West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand seeking help in early identification and disposal of the human remains. AIIMS Bhubaneswar said out of the 162 bodies kept at the institute, 80 bodies have been handed over to the families of deceased persons while 82 other remain unidentified.



As identification becomes a challenge and some bodies are being claimed by multiple families, officials are considering DNA sampling to identify and hand over the bodies to families.

The tragic accident which happened on the night of June 2 involved the Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express, Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express and a goods train.
Poems, essays and even books -- is there anything the open AI platform ChatGPT can't handle? These new AI developments have inspired researchers at TU Delft and the Swiss technical university EPFL to dig a little deeper: For instance, can ChatGPT also design a robot? And is this a good thing for the design process, or are there risks? The researchers published their findings in Nature Machine Intelligence.

What are the greatest future challenges for humanity? This was the first question that Cosimo Della Santina, assistant professor, and PhD student Francesco Stella, both from TU Delft, and Josie Hughes from EPFL, asked ChatGPT. "We wanted ChatGPT to design not just a robot, but one that is actually useful," says Della Santina. In the end, they chose food supply as their challenge, and as they chatted with ChatGPT, they came up with the idea of creating a tomato-harvesting robot.

Helpful suggestions

The researchers followed all of ChatGPT's design decisions. The input proved particularly valuable in the conceptual phase, according to Stella. "ChatGPT extends the designer's knowledge to other areas of expertise. For example, the chat robot taught us which crop would be most economically valuable to automate." But ChatGPT also came up with useful suggestions during the implementation phase: "Make the gripper out of silicone or rubber to avoid crushing tomatoes" and "a Dynamixel motor is the best way to drive the robot." The result of this partnership between humans and AI is a robotic arm that can harvest tomatoes.

ChatGPT as a researcher

The researchers found the collaborative design process to be positive and enriching. "However, we did find that our role as engineers shifted towards performing more technical tasks," says Stella. In Nature Machine Intelligence, the researchers explore the varying degrees of cooperation between humans and Large Language Models (LLM), of which ChatGPT is one. In the most extreme scenario, AI provides all the input to the robot design, and the human blindly follows it. In this case, the LLM acts as the researcher and engineer, while the human acts as the manager, in charge of specifying the design objectives.

Risk of misinformation

Such an extreme scenario is not yet possible with today's LLMs. And the question is whether it is desirable. "In fact, LLM output can be misleading if it is not verified or validated. AI bots are designed to generate the 'most probable' answer to a question, so there is a risk of misinformation and bias in the robotic field," Della Santina says. Working with LLMs also raises other important issues, such as plagiarism, traceability and intellectual property.

Della Santina, Stella and Hughes will continue to use the tomato-harvesting robot in their research on robotics. They are also continuing their study of LLMs to design new robots. Specifically, they are looking at the autonomy of AIs in designing their own bodies. "Ultimately an open question for the future of our field is how LLMs can be used to assist robot developers without limiting the creativity and innovation needed for robotics to rise to the challenges of the 21st century," Stella concludes.
Former US President Donald Trump has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents, the second time he has been charged criminally this year.

Though the Justice Department did not immediately publicly confirm the indictment, Donald Trump's attorney Jim Trusty said on Thursday night that Trump has been charged with seven counts. "It does have some language in it that suggests what the seven charges would be. Not 100% clear that all of those are separate charges, but they basically break out from an Espionage Act charge," he told CNN.



This would be the first time a former President is facing federal criminal charges. Trump is also making a run for the White House in 2024 and is the Republican Partys frontrunner for the nomination.



The former President, however, began to fundraise off the news. He issued an email appeal to donors under the heading "BREAKING: INDICTED."



He also took to Truth Social to declare his innocence. "I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States," Trump said in a statement. "I am an innocent man. This is indeed a dark day for the United States of America. We are a country in serious and rapid decline, but together we will Make America Great Again!," he added.



Trump had been summoned to appear at a federal court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon. Trusty added that they were expecting a copy of the indictment ''sometime between now and Tuesday afternoon. "If they want to continue to play games, they'll give it to us at 3:01 pm, Tuesday. ''



The indictment comes from the months-long investigation by special counsel Jack Smith into whether Trump broke the law by holding onto hundreds of documents marked classified at his Palm Beach property, Mar-a-Lago. The probe also covered whether Trump took steps to obstruct the government's efforts to recover the records.



As many as 11,000 documents were found at Mar-a-Lago residence by the FBI in the search conducted last August after Trump left the White House. The FO had seized over 100 documents marked as classified, some labelled top secret.



Trump's lawyers had previously claimed that all records with classified markings had been returned to the government and defended keeping the documents, suggesting he declassified them while President. However, Trump has not provided evidence and his attorneys have declined to make that argument in court filings.



It is illegal for federal officials, including the president, to remove or keep classified documents at an unauthorised location.



Legal experts, including Trump's former attorney general, had anticipated an indictment in the classified documents case and court records unsealed last year showed federal investigators believed they had probable cause that multiple crimes had been committed.



This includes retention of national defence information, destruction of government records and obstruction of an investigation.



Though the indictment could pose a legal challenge for Trump, it won't stop him from running for the top post. "He can be indicted any number of times and it won't stop his ability to stand for office," says David Super, a professor at Georgetown University Law Centre. He added that Trump could continue to run for office even if convicted in the case.


Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is dangerously close to being extradited after a United Kingdom High Court ruling that rejected his appeal. His lawyers have said they will appeal again to the same court.



If extradited to the US, Assange could spend the rest of his life in prison for publishing thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents, the Guardian reported. A ruling issued on June 6, by Justice Swift, rejected all eight grounds of Assanges appeal against the extradition order signed by then-UK Home Secretary Priti Patel in June 2022.



This leaves one final step in the UK courts-- the defence will now submit an appeal of about 20 pages to a panel of two judges in the next five working days. The judges will then convene a public hearing. Further appeals won't be possible in domestic courts, but, Assange can move to the European Court of Human Rights.

Stella Assange, Julians wife, wrote on Twitter, On Tuesday next week my husband Julian Assange will make a renewed application for appeal to the High Court. The matter will then proceed to a public hearing before two new judges at the High Court and we remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the US government.



Assange's appeal had argued that Patel had erred in her decision to approve the extradition order. The extradition request violated the US-UK extradition treaty which states Extradition shall not be granted if the offence for which extradition is requested is a political offence. The appeal also argued that the extradition request itself was an abuse of process as he was being prosecuted for protected speech.

Assanges brother, Gabriel Shipton, told the Guardian the high court rejection of his appeal was a serious development, that leaves him dangerously close now to extradition.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday spoke with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and thanked him for his country's "excellent support" during evacuation of Indians from Sudan in April, while also conveying best wishes for the upcoming Haj pilgrimage.

During the telephonic conversation, the leaders reviewed a number of issues of bilateral cooperation and exchanged views on various multilateral and global issues of mutual interest, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) said in a statement.

Modi thanked Saudi Arabian Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman for Saudi Arabia's "excellent support" during evacuation of Indian nationals from Sudan via Jeddah in April 2023, the statement said.

Prime Minister Modi also conveyed his best wishes for the upcoming Haj pilgrimage.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman conveyed his full support to India's initiatives as part of its ongoing G20 Presidency and said he looks forward to his visit to India, the statement said.

The two leaders agreed to remain in touch, it said.

India had set up a transit facility at Jeddah in April to evacuate Indians from strife-torn Sudan. Under its evacuation mission 'Operation Kaveri', India took the evacuees from Sudan to Jeddah from where they returned home.

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Ukraine's security service said on Friday that it intercepted a call proving that a Russian 'sabotage group' blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric station and dam in southern Ukraine. The incident caused mass flooding and forced thousands to flee and wreaked environmental havoc.



The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) posted an audio clip on its Telegram channel of the alleged conversation, which featured two men who appeared to be discussing the fallout from the disaster in Russian, Reuters reported.

"They (the Ukrainians) didn't strike it. That was our sabotage group," one of the men, described by the SBU as a Russian soldier said on the recording. "They wanted to, like, scare (people) with that dam." The men also said that with the breach they did more damage than they intended to do.

The SBU said it had opened a criminal investigation into war crimes and "ecocide". "The interception by the SBU confirms that the Kakhovskaya HPP (Hydroelectric Power Plant) was blown up by a sabotage group of the occupiers," the SBU said in a statement.



Hundreds of Ukrainians were rescued from the flooded areas on Thursday. Reportedly, 600 square kilometres of the southern region of Kherson is under water. "Our task is to bring to justice not only the leaders of Russian President Vladimir) Putin's regime, but also the ordinary perpetrators of crimes," SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk said.
US Former President Donald Trump was on Thursday indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents, having been charged with seven counts. This also makes Trump the first former President to face federal criminal charges.

While the charges have not yet been made public by the Justice Department, Donald Trump's attorney Jim Trusty said on Thursday that charges against Trump "basically break out from an Espionage Act charge." The charges include conspiracy, false statements, obstruction of justice, and illegally retaining classified documents under the Espionage Act, added reports.



Now that Trump is also making a run for the White House in 2024 and is the Republican Partys frontrunner for the nomination, there are apprehensions over what the indictment could mean for him. Though this is his second indictment - the first was two months ago wherein Trump was charged in New York state court for allegedly falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment to a porn star - the classified documents case is much more severe.



The first indictment is heading to trial in February or March next year and the likely outcome would be just a fine.



Can Trump continue to run for president now since he is indicted? Or can he go to prison if convicted? Here is what you need to know.



The classified documents' case



When Donald Trump left the White House at the end of his presidency in January 2021, he took along a trove of documents in boxes. These were moved to Mar-a-Lago, his home and resort in Florida along with clothes, gifts, photos and other material.



However, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) discovered in May of the same year that it was missing documents, a violation of the Federal law that requires presidential documents to be turned over to NARA.



The agency requested Trump to return the documents, after which he arranged for 15 boxes, that contained 184 documents that were classified, to be returned. NARA alerted the Department of Justice and a probe was launched into whether the materials had been mishandled.



The FBI began investigating in February of 2022 and went on to retrieve additional classified documents from Mar-a-Lago. By June, Trump's lawyers turned over 38 additional documents with classified markings.



In August of 2022, the FBI conducted a raid on Mar-a-Lago and found more than 100 classified documents. Following this,



Special counsel Jack Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to look into whether Trump or his aides committed crimes by taking classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort and whether they obstructed the investigation.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing and even decried the investigation as politically motivated. Trump has insisted that he was entitled to keep the classified documents when he left the White House and has also claimed without evidence that he had declassified them.

Can Trump still run for the White House



Despite being indicted, Trump can still run for President in 2024. First, there is no law in the US which stops anyone from running for the White House from prison, or even being elected while behind bars. He would also be allowed to travel as he awaits trial.



Can he go to the prison

Though convictions for violating the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice, as mentioned in his indictment, often lead to prison time, it is too early to say whether Trump would end up behind bars.



Many top officials accused of wrongdoing also have historically found a way out of jail and if Trump were convicted only of a false statement charge, he might have a better chance to avoid prison, according to Politico.



Trump's political future



The case is the most serious of the multiple legal threats against Trump, who is also being probed in another criminal investigation in connection with the alleged bid to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden, a Democrat.



Though it will increase his legal woes, Trump has already started fundraising off the news. He issued an email appeal to donors under the heading "BREAKING: INDICTED." His first indictment had brought in millions of dollars in contributions from angry supporters and didn't damage his support base. The indictment will also put him in the spotlight and can even affect the chances of other candidates.


BENGALURU, India, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- In a heartfelt act, the family of 23-year-old Fardeen Khan chose to honour his memory by generously donating his organs following a tragic road traffic accident.On the evening of 4th June 2023, Fardeen and his family met with a hit-and-run accident when they were returning from Sira in Tumkur after visiting a family friend. Fardeen sustained multiple injuries and was immediately rushed to Sira Government Hospital. Due to his critical condition, he was immediately transferred to Tumkur District Hospital. Realising the seriousness of his condition, the medical team at Tumkur District Hospital advised moving Fardeen to a more advanced medical facility in Bengaluru. Later, on June 5th, 2023, at 1:30 am, he was transferred to SPARSH Hospital in Yeshwanthpur for further medical care. Despite the tireless efforts of the medical team, he was declared brain dead on 7th June at 11.55AM.



During this difficult time, Fardeen's family members, fully aware of the importance of organ donation, made the decision to come forward and donate his organs. Fardeen's organs were successfully transplanted into six individuals, offering them a new lease of life. Fardeen's right Kidney and liver were successfully transplanted to patients at SPARSH Hospital, Yeshwantpur, while his heart was sent to Narayana Hrudayalaya. His left kidney and pancreas were sent to Apollo Hospital, Bannerghatta Road and corneas to Narayana Netralaya.



Fardeen Khan, a resident of Rajajinagar, Bengaluru, managed a car accessory shop, while his father Mr. Firoz Khan worked as a four-wheeler dealer, and his mother is a homemaker. Fardeen was the only son, with two married sisters also living in Bengaluru.



India's current organ donation rate stands at a mere 0.01 percent, representing a stark contrast to countries like Spain and Croatia, where the organ donation rates exceed 35 percent. In 2022, a total of 15,562 transplants were performed in India, according to the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization (NOTTO). Several factors contribute to the low donation and transplant rate in the country, including widespread superstitions and stigma, insufficient availability of transplant coordinators, and inadequate infrastructure. To address this issue, the appointment of designated transplant coordinators has been mandated by the Union Health Ministry. Transplant coordinators play a crucial role in guiding and counselling the families of potential donors, addressing their concerns, and facilitating the organ donation process.



Dr Sharan Shivaraj Patil, Chairman, SPARSH Hospital, "The role of the media in advocating for organ donation and inspiring donors and their families cannot be understated. Their efforts have instilled hope and encouraged families to generously donate organs, even in times of distress. The respectful treatment of donors and their families by organizations is an additional catalyst for increased participation in organ donation. The remarkable coordination by Jeevasarthakathe in adhering to waiting lists and strict donation protocols has further solidified trust in the system."



"I commend Jeevasarthakathe for their seamless execution of the organ donation process. The traffic police also deserve applause for swiftly creating green corridors, ensuring timely transportation. Organ donation involves multiple stakeholders, and each plays a vital role. This year alone, the state has witnessed 195 transplants, a testament to the collective efforts of the general public, governments, media, hospitals, and key decision-makers in enhancing organ donation rates. While these initiatives are commendable, there is still much work to be done. In our country, the number of donors is significantly lower compared to the western world. We must strive to increase donations tenfold and maintain this momentum. This heartfelt gesture serves as a poignant reminder of the urgent need for organ donations in India. Each one of us has the power to make a difference. Together, let us pledge our support for organ donation and transform lives," he added.



Commenting on the gesture, Joseph Pasangha, Group COO, SPARSH Hospital, said, "The decision taken by Fardeen's family is truly commendable. Organ donation is a powerful act of compassion, and it has the potential to transform lives. We are deeply grateful to the family for their generosity and faith in the power of organ transplantation. This life-saving act not only highlights the indomitable spirit of the people of Bengaluru but also underscores the critical need for awareness and education regarding organ donation. SPARSH Group of Hospitals remains steadfast in its commitment to advocating for organ donation, and we continue to provide comprehensive care and support to transplant recipients and their families."



As per organ donation protocols, officials from SOTTO (State Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization), the government body which oversees cadaver organ donation in the State of Karnataka, initiated the process for organ donation and took written consent from family members. The recipients were selected as per the waiting list and the organs were transplanted.



Upon learning about Fardeen Khan's family's generous decision to donate his organs, Mr. Dinesh Gundurao, the Minister for Health and Family Welfare in the Government of Karnataka, promptly reached out to the family to express his gratitude and appreciation.



About SPARSH Group of hospitals



SPARSH Group of hospitals is one of the largest multi-speciality healthcare providers in Karnataka. Over the span of the last 17 years, the group has crafted a niche for quality health care in South India. Under visionary leadership and strong management, SPARSH has evolved as the Centre of Excellence in over 35 specialities including Orthopaedic, Neuroscience, Organ transplants, Women and Children amongst many other super specialities. SPARSH has achieved many milestones and performed path breaking surgeries, winning many accolades and recognitions on the national and international front along the way. SPARSH has proven that India can provide the best medical treatment and care in the world and is emerging as the destination of choice for international patients from over 12 countries.



Built on the core values of faith, hope and love, SPARSH has been diligently working towards making quality health care accessible to all. The Group, led by Dr. Sharan Patil, an eminent Orthopaedic surgeon and a renowned thought leader in his own right, believes that every person should be able to avail of excellent healthcare irrespective of their socio-economic background. State- of-the-art facilities, skilled doctors, nurses and supporting allied healthcare staff, including exceptional evidence-based, patient-centric care define the SPARSH Anubhava, which is our patient experience model.



SPARSH now operates five healthcare facilities across Karnataka, three in Bengaluru and two others in Davanagere and Hassan, with two more multi-speciality hospitals on the anvil. SPARSH has successfully treated over 2 million happy patients and counting.



Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2097713/Fardeen_Khan.jpg



Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCANzVdF2f0



(Disclaimer: The above press release comes to you under an arrangement with PRNewswire and PTI takes no editorial responsibility for the same.). PTI PWR

PWR
New Delhi, Jun 9 (PTI) The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday said it has issued show-cause notices to Chinese mobile manufacturer Xiaomi, its chief financial officer and director Sameer Rao, former MD Manu Jain and three foreign banks for alleged foreign exchange violation of more than Rs 5,551 crore.

The adjudicating authority under the Foreign Exchange Management Act has issued show-cause notices to Xiaomi Technology India Private Limited, the two executives, CITI Bank, HSBC Bank and Deutsche Bank AG, the agency said in a statement.

The federal probe agency had seized Rs 5,551.27 crore worth of funds of Xiaomi Technology India Private Limited lying in its bank accounts under the FEMA for "unauthorised" remittance of this amount in guise of royalty abroad.

"The competent authority, appointed under Section 37A of the FEMA, has confirmed the said seizure order.

"The authority while confirming the seizure held that ED is right in holding that foreign exchange equivalent to Rs 5,551.27 crore has been transferred out of India by Xiaomi India in an unauthorised manner and is held outside India on behalf of the group entity in contravention of section 4 of FEMA, 1999 and the same is liable to be seized in terms of provisions of Section 37A of the FEMA," it said.

Under the FEMA, a show-cause notice is issued after the completion of the ED investigation and once it is settled, an accused is required to pay penalty.
A VTB bank logo is seen on screen through a window in the Moscow International Business Centeron a sunny day in Moscow

Exclusive-Russia's VTB may pull out of running for Yandex stake - CEO Kostin A VTB bank logo is seen on screen through a window in the Moscow International Business Centeron a sunny day in Moscow

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian state-owned lender VTB may pull out of the running to acquire a stake in internet giant Yandex, the bank's CEO, Andrei Kostin, told Reuters, as discussions are now centered around higher prices than the bank's initial offer.

Often dubbed "Russia's Google", Yandex is making progress on a corporate restructuring plan that should see it divest ownership and control of core, Russia-based businesses, in what could be one of Russia's most significant corporate deals this year.

Kostin said he was not sure VTB would continue with its bid. The bank already holds a 1.5% portfolio investment in Yandex.

"I am not sure that we will go into Yandex," Kostin told Reuters when asked about plans. "We have never had the desire to steer Yandex, and for a portfolio investment it is important to correctly determine the entry price."

"There are many factors in the deal now, one of them is the price increase compared to the original one. We offered on a different level. Therefore, now we are in the so-called stand by: we are not actively negotiating."

"It was announced at $7 billion recently, we submitted our application at a different price level, lower," Kostin said.

"Yandex, we believe, has good prospects  on the one hand, on the other  the company has its own peculiarities," Kostin said, pointing to the departure of founder Arkady Volozh.

"In general, there is the uncertainty factor, there is always the risk of sanctions and so on."

VTB was hit hard with Western sanctions over Russia's actions in Ukraine, something that limits its ability to front a consortium bid, Kostin said. VTB's initial offer had envisaged acquiring a stake of around 15%, which then dropped to 10%. Kostin expects more changes.

"I do not know how many contenders will eventually remain. Maybe their number will narrow in the new conditions, because, as far as I know, we were not the only ones who found these conditions not very comfortable," he said.

"I know that several names that were originally in the applicants there have already dropped out of the list. Therefore, the situation has not been resolved there yet."

Russian billionaires including Vladimir Potanin, CEO and the largest shareholder of metals giant Nornickel, and Vagit Alekperov, co-founder and a major shareholder in oil major Lukoil, are among the bidders for assets ultimately valued around $14 billion, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters last month.

Given Kremlin measures that oblige foreign companies leaving Russia to sell their assets at a 50% discount, shareholders in Yandex's Dutch-registered holding company Yandex NV, most of whom are Western investment funds, could ultimately make about $7 billion from a full divestment.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and Elena Fabrichnaya; Writing by Alexander Marrow)
Washington, Jun 9 (PTI) US secretary of state Tony Blinken and commerce secretary Gina Raimondo along with top members of President Joe Biden administration, congressional leadership and corporate players from India and the United States are expected to join the India Ideas Summit next week.

The summit of the US India Business Council (USIBC) will discuss how to take this relationship for even greater realisation of happiness and prosperity between the two free peoples, organisers said on Thursday.

The theme for this year's summit on June 12 and 13 is 'Trust, Resilience, and Growth', and will focus on how these three organising principles underpin the US-India economic partnership across sectors.

The annual summit of USIBC, which is part of the US Chambers of Commerce, comes ahead of the official visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the US on June 22.

"On Monday June 12th, we're gonna have the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, come and speak to our group. We are also gonna have a session with deputy secretary of state Rich Verma. We are looking to see how we can lift the ambitions of the United States and India for even greater realization of happiness and prosperity between our two free peoples," USIBC president Atul Keshap told PTI in an interview.

On Tuesday, the Ideas Summit will be addressed by commerce secretary Gina Raimondo along with deputy secretary of energy David Turk; Amos Hochstein, the president's advisor on energy issues; Lindsey Ford, deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia, Vivek Lall, chief executive, General Atomics Global Corporation; among others.

India's ambassador to the US Taranjit Singh Sandhu will share his perspectives from the government of India about ways to take the relationship forward.

"Indian and American companies who are members of USIBC are the world leaders in their fields. ...There are so many good stories about USIBC companies that are investing in people, in the United States and India, and we wanna showcase that," Keshap said.

The USIBC president also said that India's economic growth is deeply impressive.

"GDP is to a great extent, the marker by which we gauge the power and influence of nations and India's GDP is rising at really impressive rates. So, reasonable projections by very legitimate institutions estimate that India will be a five and 10 and 20 trillion (dollar) economies in a space of time that is really incredible to consider. You know, by 2047, India could stand transformed in world affairs. So that's incredibly good," he said.

"India's also a very sober and stable voice in international relations. It's a global net provider of security through UN peacekeeping, through its efforts to keep the sea lanes open in the Indian and Pacific oceans. It is a donor country to countries that need a lot of help, uh, and has helped greatly, even in its own neighborhood like with Afghanistan over the years and with Sri Lanka," he said.

Keshap said that the two democratic countries have a lot of affinity and "that affinity is now being expanded through the QUAD and through our global security partnership to ensure the peace and security and tranquility and happiness of people everywhere".

Responding to a question, Keshap said all the CEOs, who have come to India of late and have met with Prime Minister Modi, have committed to make major investments in India.

"That is a recognition that India's macroeconomic policy situation is getting better and better. There are a lot of economic innovations by the government of India that are capturing the interest of the global investment community. India has put a lot of homework and thought and effort into attracting certain sectors, like the electronics manufacturing sector, fintech sector, digital economy sector. So those are real growth engines of the Indian economy. They're gonna get even bigger," he said.

He also said that American companies want to ensure predictability, "and if given that predictability, they will invest very heavily wherever they feel protected, comfortable, stable and not subject to any arbitrary situations".

"India increasingly is that opportunity. Our companies are global. They look at every single place on earth, and they make their best decisions about where a long-term bet can be made," he added.
Washington, Jun 9 (PTI) Prime Minister Narendra Modi's state visit to the US later this month at the invitation of President Joe Biden is a powerful signal that the future of the two countries is together, US India Business Council (USIBC) President Atul Keshap has said.

This is only the third state visit for the Biden administration. India is now one of our closest friends. The fact that the prime minister and the president have agreed to this, their coming together is a powerful signal from the top of each government that our future is together, Keshap told PTI in an interview.

Responding to a question on expectations from the visit, Keshap said he is hoping that it will send a powerful signal to the business communities of both countries that they are the preferred partners for each other and that there can be investment and trade in both directions with approval of the two governments.

I have articulated repeatedly that we must be impatient in attaining our USD 500 billion goal for annual trade between the US and India. We're only at USD 190 billion. I'd like to see some energy deals between the US and India. I'd like to see deals on things like semiconductors and chips where we deleverage the risk in the supply chain, Keshap said.

For the US and India to be strong, to have strong deterrents, we need our companies, our private sectors working together. So IndUSX on June 20 at the US Chamber is our contribution to doing that," he added.

Modi will be on a state visit to the US from June 21-24.
Lahore, Jun 9 (PTI) An anti-terrorism court has denied police further physical remand of 13 women supporters of former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan, including fashion designer Khadija Shah, in a case linking them to the attack on the historic Jinnah House here and sent them to jail on judicial remand.

When the women belonging to Khan's Pakistan-Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party were produced before the court on the expiry of their six-day physical remand, the Investigating officer (IO) asserted that further custody of the suspects was required to recover clubs and petrol bombs used during the May 9 attack at the Jinnah House, also the residence of the Lahore Corps Commander, the Dawn news reported.

The IO said clubs were recovered from Shah, Sanam Javed, and Tayyaba Raja.

The three women however rejected the claim that the club had been recovered from their possession.

Judge Abher Gul Khan observed that the IO had not mentioned the recovery of petrol bombs in the previous application for the physical remand of the suspects and turned down the police request for further physical custody.

The women, including former Member of the National Assembly Alia Hamza, Maryam Mazari, Sabuhi Inam, Huma Saeed, Ayesha Masood, Maha Masood, and Khadija Nadeem, apart from Khadija Shah, Sanam Javed, and Tayyaba Raja, were then sent to jail on judicial remand.

At least 10 persons were killed and more than 1,000 injured in the violence that broke out following the arrest of former prime minister Khan from the premises of Islamabad High Court by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) in the Al-Qadir corruption case.

Protesters, mostly from Khan's PTI party, on May 9 attacked over 20 military installations and government buildings, including the Lahore Corps Commander House, Mianwali airbase and the ISI building in Faisalabad. The Army headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi was also attacked by the mob for the first time. Khan was later released on bail.

Law enforcement agencies have arrested over 10,000 workers of Khan's Pakistan party across Pakistan, 4,000 of them from Punjab province.
Abu Dhabi, Jun 9 (AP) On a boat off the coast of an island near Abu Dhabi, marine scientist Hamad al-Jailani feels the corals, picked from the reef nursery and packed in a box of seawater, and studies them carefully, making sure they haven't lost their colour.

The corals were once bleached. Now they're big, healthy and ready to be moved back to their original reefs in the hope they'll thrive once more.

We try to grow them from very small fragments up to  now some of them have reached  the size of my fist, al-Jailani said, who's part of the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi's coral restoration programme.

The nursery gives corals the ideal conditions to recover: clear waters with strong currents and the right amount of sunlight. Al-Jailani periodically checks the corals' growth, removes any potentially harmful seaweed and seagrass, and even lets the fish feed off the corals to clean them, until they're healthy enough to be relocated.

The Environment Agency Abu Dhabi, or EAD, has been rehabilitating and restoring corals since 2021, when reefs off the United Arab Emirates' coast faced their second bleaching event in just five years.

EAD's project is one of many initiatives  both public and private  across the country to protect the reefs and the marine life that depend on them in a nation that has come under fire for its large-scale developments and polluting industries that cause harm to underwater ecosystems. There's been some progress, but experts remain concerned for the future of the reefs in a warming world.

Coral bleaching occurs when sea temperatures rise and sun glares flush out algae that give the corals their colour, turning them white. Corals can survive bleaching events, but can't effectively support marine life, threatening the populations that depend on them.

The UAE lost up to 70 per cent of their corals, especially around Abu Dhabi, in 2017 when water temperatures reached 37 degrees Celsius (99 degrees Fahrenheit), according to EAD. But al-Jailani said 40-50 per cent of corals survived the second bleaching event in 2021.

Although the bleaching events did wipe out a good portion of our corals, he said, it did also prove that the corals that we have are actually resilient ... these corals can actually withstand these kind of conditions."

Bleaching events are happening more frequently around the world as waters warm due to human-made climate change, caused by the burning of oil, coal and gas that emits heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Other coral reef systems around the world have suffered mass bleaching events, most notably Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

How to limit global warming and its effects will be discussed at length at the United Nations climate conference, which will be held in Dubai later this year.

The UAE is one of the world's largest oil producers and has some of the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions globally. The country has pledged to have net zero carbon emissions by 2050, which means all carbon dioxide emissions are either slashed or cancelled out somehow, but the goal has been met with scepticism from analysts.

But bleaching due to warming weather is not the only threat to coral reefs around the gulf. High oil tanker traffic, fossil-fuel related activities, offshore installations, and the exploitation of marine resources are all putting marine life under intense stress, according to the UN Environment Programme, causing them to degrade.

Environmentalists have also long criticized the UAE, and Dubai in particular, for its large-scale buildings and huge coastal developments.

The building of the Palm Jebel Ali, which began more than a decade ago and has been on hold since 2008, caused an outcry among conservationists after it reportedly destroyed about 8 square kilometers (5 square miles) of reef.

"More than 90 million cubic metres (23.8 billion gallons) of sediments were dredged and dropped, more or less on top of one of the remaining reefs near Dubai, said John Henrik Stahl, the dean of the College of Marine Sciences at Khorfakkan University in Sharjah, UAE.

The project was meant to be similar to the Palm Jumeirah  a collection of small, artificial islands off the coast of Dubai in the shape of a palm tree.

Still, environmental projects persist across the coastline and throughout the emirates.

Development company URB has announced it wants to grow one billion artificial corals over a 200-square-kilometer area (124 square miles) and 100 million mangrove trees on an 80-kilometer (50-mile) strip of beaches in Dubai by 2040.

Still in the research and development phase, the project hopes to create 3D technology to print materials that can host algae, much like corals.

Members of Dubai's diving community are also encouraging coral protection efforts.

Diving course director Amr Anwar is in the process of creating a certified coral restoration course that teaches divers how to collect and re-plant corals that have fallen after being knocked off by divers' fins or a boat's anchor.

I don't want people to see broken corals and just leave them like that," said Anwar. Through the training we give people, they would be able to take these broken corals that they find and plant them elsewhere, and then see them grow and watch their progress.

But experts say that unless the threat of overheating seas caused by climate change is addressed, coral bleaching events will continue to occur, damaging reefs worldwide.

Countries have pledged to limit the global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, after which scientists say the effects of warming on the planet could be much worse, and some even potentially irreversible. But analysts say most nations  including the UAE  are still way off that target.

You have to make sure that the cause for the degradation of the coral reefs in the first place is no longer a threat," said Stahl, the Khorfakkan University scientist. Otherwise the restoration effort may be for nothing. (AP) PY

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Kyiv, Jun 9 (AP) Three people were lightly wounded after a drone crashed into a residential building in Voronezh, a city in southwestern Russia near the border with Ukraine, the regional governor said.

The latest drone attack to target Russian cities in recent weeks comes as Ukraine has been intensifying its efforts to expel Russian forces from a vast swath of southern and eastern Ukraine that they invaded more than 15 months ago on orders from President Vladimir Putin.

In a Telegram post, regional governor Alexander Gusev said the three residents were hurt by shards of glass from broken windows, and received help on the spot.

Russian state media published photos showing a high-rise apartment building with some windows blown out and damage to the facade.

Such drone strikes  which have previously hit residential areas in southern Krasnodar and even one at the Kremlin  along with cross-border raids in southwestern Russia have exposed glaring breaches in Russian air defences and porous border security.

Ukrainian authorities have generally denied any role in such attacks.

Separately Friday, the Ukrainian presidency's website posted a video statement overnight from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that alluded to the latest efforts of his country's forces to drive out the Russian invaders, along various parts of the more than 1,000-kilometre (about 620-mile) front line.

Zelenskyy, speaking in what appeared to be a selfie video from inside a train car after visiting flood-hit southern Ukraine, said he was in touch with Ukrainian forces in all the hottest areas of the fight and praised an unspecified result" from their efforts.

Ukrainian authorities have kept generally quiet about their latest military moves, refusing to join in on rising commentary from Western military experts and others that a long-anticipated counteroffensive was under way.

Zelenskyy echoed that government stance on Friday, saying it was not time" yet to talk about the details of the fighting. (AP) FZH
Nairobi, Jun 9 (AP) The United Nations World Food Programme said on Friday that it is temporarily suspending food aid to Ethiopia because its supplies are being diverted, an announcement that came a day after the United States Agency for International Development said it was doing the same.

Food diversion is absolutely unacceptable, and we welcome the government of Ethiopia's commitment to investigate and hold accountable those responsible, WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain said.

The programme's head office in Rome declined further comment when contacted by The Associated Press.

Some 20 million Ethiopians rely on food aid because of drought and conflict, out of the country's population of roughly 120 million. Much of the aid comes from USAID and the World Food Programme.

The suspensions brought worries that malnutrition could rise in Africa's second most populous country,

USAID, WFP and the Ethiopian government have not said who is responsible for the food diversion, which the US has described as widespread and coordinated".

However, an internal memo prepared by a group of foreign donor representatives and seen by the AP this week pointed at government involvement.

The scheme appears to be orchestrated by federal and regional government of Ethiopia entities, with military units across the country benefiting from humanitarian assistance, said the document from the Humanitarian and Resilience Donor Group, which includes bilateral and multilateral partners.

In a joint statement with USAID on Thursday, the Ethiopian foreign ministry spoke of deeply concerning revelations and said it was investigating with the US so that the perpetrators of such diversion are held to account.

The nationwide food aid suspensions follow USAID and WFP saying last month they had suspended food deliveries to Ethiopia's northern Tigray region while they investigated reports of food aid theft there. The region is recovering from a two-year conflict.

That suspension by the World Food Programme and allegations of aid diversion in Tigray were first reported by the AP. Some 5.4 million of the region's 6 million people rely on humanitarian help.

Earlier this year, USAID administrator Samantha Power told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that aid theft in Tigray appeared to involve collusion between parties on both sides of the conflict, which ended in November.

In its statement on Friday, WFP said it was continuing other programmes in Ethiopia for children, mothers and drought-hit pastoralists.

WFP is working closely with its UN and humanitarian partners and local stakeholders to reform the way assistance is delivered across Ethiopia and in all high-risk operational contexts where we work, it said. (AP) PY

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Cairo, Jun 9 (AP) The United Nations envoy to Sudan, a key mediator in the country's brutal conflict, is no longer welcome in the African country, Sudanese authorities say.

A terse statement issued by Sudan's Foreign Ministry late on Thursday comes just weeks after the head of the country's military, Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, demanded in a letter to envoy Volker Perthes that he should be removed from his post.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has been notified that Perthes has been formally declared persona non grata, the Foreign Ministry said.

Since April 15, Sudan's military, headed by Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, have been locked in a violent power struggle that has killed more than 860 civilians, according to Sudan's Doctors'

Syndicate which tracks civilian casualties. The actual death tally is likely to be much higher.

Perthes has been a key mediator in Sudan since being appointed as special envoy in 2021, first during the country's failed attempts to transition to democracy and then as relations between the military and the RSF deteriorated.

Fighting exploded in April.

Perthes' native Germany condemned the announcement.

The international community, including the German government, continues to stand fully behind Mr. Perthes and his efforts, said Andrea Sasse, spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, in Berlin on Friday.

She said Perthes will continue to do his job from Kenya, from where he is supporting efforts in Jeddah to get the warring parties to the table and secure a cease-fire.

Perthes was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, on Thursday meeting representatives from the African Union and the eight-nation eastern Africa bloc known as IGAD. Neither the UN nor Perthes immediately commented on the decision.

In recent months, the German diplomat has received death threats and numerous calls to resign. In his letter last month, Burhan accused Perthes of being partisan, and negatively contributing to pre-war talks between the generals and pro-democracy groups in the weeks building up to the conflict.

Responding to these allegations, Perthes told The Associated Press that those who threatened him were marginal extremists and that there is a wide appreciation of UN efforts in Sudan, which has relocated its headquarters to the coastal city of Port Sudan.

The conflict between the two generals has reduced Khartoum to an urban battlefield, with many districts of the city without running water or electricity.

There have been reports of widespread looting and sexual violence, including the rape of women and girls in Khartoum and the western Darfur region, which have seen some of the worst fighting in the conflict.

Almost all reported cases of sexual attacks were blamed on the RSF, which didn't respond to repeated requests for comment.

On Wednesday, 297 children were rescued from an orphanage in Sudan's capital after being trapped there while fighting raged outside, UNICEF said. The evacuation came after 71 children died from hunger and illness in the facility since mid-April.

According to Shabia Mantoo, a spokesperson for the UN refugee agency, almost 2 million people have been displaced by the conflict.

Of those, about 1.42 million are displaced within Sudan and some 451,000 have left the country, including refugees from South Sudan who have returned home, she said during a presser in Geneva on Friday.

Meanwhile, the global humanitarian aid group, Mercy Corps, warned the conflict could trigger a catastrophic food crisis and disease outbreaks in the coming months.

June marks the beginning of Sudan's three-month rainy season, in which scores of people were killed last year. (AP) FZH
Kfar Chouba (Lebanon), Jun 9 (AP) Israeli soldiers fired tear gas to disperse scores of protesters who pelted the troops with stones along the border with Lebanon on Friday, leaving some Lebanese demonstrators and troops suffering breathing problems.

The tension on the edge of the Lebanese border village of Kfar Chouba began earlier this week over the Israeli military digging in the area that Lebanon claims.

On Wednesday, a Lebanese villager tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer from digging a trench along the border. Once the villager's legs were covered with sand as the bulldozer moved ahead, UN peacekeepers jumped in and convinced the driver to move back. Videos of the elderly man with his legs stuck in the sand dune went viral on social media.

Israel ended an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon when its troops withdrew from the area in May 2000.

Friday's protest took place on the edge of Kfar Chouba hills, which Beirut says is Lebanese land occupied by Israel. Kfar Chouba hills and the nearby Chebaa Farms, are areas captured by Israel during the 1967 Mideast War and claimed by Lebanon.

On Friday, some of the protesters tried to break through a fence in the rugged area overlooked by an Israeli military post. Israeli forces fired tear gas to disperse them while Lebanese troops and UN peacekeepers later moved in and pushed the protesters back.

DO NOT CROSS BLUE LINE, read a banner carried by a UN peacekeeper in Arabic, English and French, referring to the border drawn after Israel's withdrawal in 2000. Israeli troops and several vehicles, including a heavily armored Merkava tank, were seen in the area.

Lebanese troops were on alert in the area and reinforcements were brought in.

In a statement, the Israeli military said protesters tried to damage a border barrier and threw stones at Israeli soldiers in the area. The military said forces responded with riot dispersal means, which typically means tear gas or stun grenades. The military said it would not allow any attempt to violate Israeli sovereignty.

Andrea Tenenti, a spokesman for the UN peacekeeping for known as UNIFIL, said peacekeepers are on the ground working to decrease tension in the area.

We have urged the parties to utilize our coordination mechanisms effectively to prevent misunderstandings, violations, and contribute to the preservation of stability in the area, Tenenti said. He added that UNIFIL leadership is in contact with the parties, seeking a solution.

We call upon both sides to exercise restraint and avoid actions along the blue line that may escalate tensions, Tenenti told The Associated Press.

The protesters later held Friday prayers in the area and then tried to sneak in again, leading to more tear gas fire.

Friday's tension came a day after the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, Maj. Gen. Aroldo Lazaro, chaired a meeting with senior Lebanese and Israeli officers at the UN headquarters along the border.

The general appealed for restraint along the border and work on reducing tensions.

The Lebanon-Israel border has been relatively calm since Israel and Hezbollah fought a 34-day war in 2006. Despite that, there have been tensions.

In April, Israel launched rare airstrikes on southern Lebanon after militants fired nearly three dozen rockets from Lebanon at Israel, wounding two people and causing some property damage. (AP) PY

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Kyiv, Jun 9 (AP) Three people were lightly wounded after a drone crashed into a residential building in southwestern Russia near Ukraine, a regional governor said, exposing the latest vulnerabilities in the country's air defence systems as President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine increasingly affects Russian soil.

The latest drone attack to target Russian cities in recent weeks comes as Ukraine has been intensifying its efforts to expel Russian forces and rising talk of a Ukrainian counteroffensive in pockets of a vast swath of southern and eastern Ukraine that Russia invaded more than 15 months ago.

In a Telegram post, regional governor Alexander Gusev said the three residents were hurt by shards of glass from broken windows in the city of Voronezh and received help on the spot. Russian state media published photos showing a high-rise apartment building with some windows blown out and damage to the facade.

Gusev said the drone was targeting a nearby airbase, but veered off course after its signal was electronically jammed. The city lies some 250 kilometres north of Ukraine's eastern Luhansk region, most of which is occupied by Russia.

Separately, Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov of the neighbouring Belgorod region, which also borders Ukraine, said on Telegram that air defences had been working overnight and an apartment building and private homes had been damaged. He said two unspecified targets were shot down, but he did not specify the cause of the damage.

Such drone strikes  which have previously hit places like residential areas in southern Krasnodar and there was even one at the Kremlin  along with cross-border raids in southwestern Russia have exposed glaring breaches in Russian air defences and porous border security, and brought the war home to Russians.

Ukrainian authorities have generally denied any role in such attacks.

Separately Friday, the Ukrainian presidency's website posted a video statement overnight from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that alluded to the latest efforts of his country's forces to drive out the Russian invaders, along various parts of the more than 1,000-kilometre front line.

Ukrainian officials have kept generally quiet about their latest military moves, refusing to join in on rising commentary from Western military experts and others that a long-anticipated counteroffensive was under way.

Zelenskyy echoed that government stance on Friday, saying it was not time yet to talk about the details of the fighting. but said he was in touch with Ukrainian forces in all the hottest areas of the fight and praised an unspecified result" from their efforts.

Analysts and Russian reports suggest Ukrainian forces have been active around the city of Bakhmut, which was largely devastated in a bloody, monthslong standoff, as well as carrying out probing operations around Russian-occupied areas of the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.

In the video, Zelenskyy appeared to be speaking from inside a train car after visiting flood-hit southern Ukraine on Thursday.

Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin of the southern Kherson region said Friday that water levels had decreased by about 20 centimetres overnight on the western bank of the Dnieper River, which was inundated starting Tuesday after a breach of the Kakhovka dam upstream. The lower part of the river runs along the front line between Russian and Ukrainian forces.

Officials on both sides gave figures that indicated about 16 people have died in connection with the flooding, which has added misery to the lives of Ukrainians beleaguered by the war.

Viktor Vitovetskyi, a representative of Ukraine's Emergency Service, said 46 municipalities in the region have been flooded  14 of them along the Russian-occupied eastern bank.

Even as efforts to rescue civilians and supply them with fresh water, health care and other services, Russian shelling over the last day killed two civilians and injured 17 in the region, Prokudin said.

Across the country, a total of at least 4 civilians were killed and 41 people were injured over the past day, according to Zelenskyy's office. (AP)



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London, Jun 9 (AP) A British judge has rejected the latest attempt by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to fight extradition to the United States to face spying charges.

High Court justice Jonathan Swift said a new appeal would simply re-run arguments that Assange's lawyers had already made and lost.

Assange has battled in British courts for years to avoid being sent to the US, where he faces 17 charges of espionage and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks' publication of classified diplomatic and military documents more than a decade ago.

In 2021, a British district judge ruled that Assange should not be extradited because he was likely to kill himself if held under harsh US prison conditions. US authorities later provided assurances that the Australia-born Assange wouldn't face the severe treatment that his lawyers said would put his physical and mental health at risk.

Those assurances led Britain's High Court and Supreme Court to overturn the lower court's ruling, and the British government authorized extradition in June 2022.

Assange is seeking to halt extradition by obtaining a new court hearing on parts of his case that were dismissed by the first judge.

But in a ruling made public on Friday, Swift said all eight parts of Assange's potential appeal were not arguable and should not be heard.

The proposed appeal comes to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made to and rejected by the district judge, he said.

Assange's wife, Stella Assange, said the WikiLeaks founder would make a new appeal attempt at a High Court hearing on Tuesday. He has almost exhausted his avenues of appeal in the UK but could still try to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

We remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States, where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the US government, Stella Assange said on Twitter.

Assange's supporters and lawyers maintain he was acting as a journalist and is entitled to First Amendment protections of freedom of speech. They argue that the case is politically motivated, that he would face inhumane treatment and be unable to get a fair trial in the US.

Assange, 51, remains in London's high-security Belmarsh Prison, where he has been since he was arrested in 2019 for skipping bail during a separate legal battle. Before that, he spent seven years inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.

Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed, but British judges have kept Assange in prison pending the outcome of the US extradition case. (AP) PY

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MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian state-owned lender VTB will see profit of "not less" than 400 billion roubles ($4.9 billion) in 2023 after a bumper first five months of the year and a record loss last year, CEO Andrei Kostin told Reuters in an interview.

Profit in the first five months of this year totalled 239 billion roubles, after a loss of 612.6 billion roubles for 2022, Kostin said.

"We consider a profit forecast of about 400 billion rubles for this year to be realistic  a record figure for us," Kostin said.

CFO Dmitry Pyanov this week said VTB's 2023 profits would be towards the upper end of its target range of 327-400 billion roubles.

The record loss of 2022, he said, was largely caused by a fall in the rouble to 100 per U.S. dollar soon after the West imposed sanctions and the write off of its assets frozen in the West.

"It was a difficult year for us, but in the second half we started working in profit, and now we have a very successful year so far," Kostin said.

Kostin said it was unlikely VTB would return to paying dividends for this year though it depended on the state which has a 61.8% stake in the bank after it raised 94 billion roubles in a secondary public offering from private, undisclosed investors.

Russia's dominant lender Sberbank is paying a record 565 billion roubles in dividends for 2022, half of which is destined for the Russian state.

($1 = 82.0000 roubles)

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and Elena Fabrichnaya)
Kyiv, Jun 9 (AP) A drone crashed into a high-rise residential building in southwestern Russia near the border with Ukraine, a regional governor said Friday, exposing the latest vulnerabilities in the country's air defence systems as President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine increasingly affects Russian soil.

The latest drone attack to target Russian cities in recent weeks wounded three people and came amid a front-line push by Ukrainian forces in what appears to be the early stages of a long-awaited counteroffensive in pockets of south and east Ukraine that Russia invaded more than 15 months ago.

The Ukrainian presidency's website posted a video statement overnight from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that alluded to the latest efforts of his country's forces to drive out the Russian invaders, along various parts of the more than 1,000-kilometer front line.

Speaking inside what appeared to be a train car after visiting flood-hit southern Ukraine on Thursday, Zelenskyy said it was not time yet to talk about the details of the fighting.

Ukrainian officials have kept generally quiet about their latest military moves, refusing to join in on rising commentary from Western military experts and others that the counteroffensive  critical for Ukraine's Western-funded military effort  was underway.

Analysts and Russian reports suggest Ukrainian forces have been active around the city of Bakhmut, which was largely devastated in a bloody, monthslong standoff, as well as carrying out probing operations around Russian-occupied areas of the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.

Ukrainian authorities have generally also denied any role in attacks inside Russia.

In a Telegram post Friday, regional governor Alexander Gusev said the three residents were hurt by shards of glass from broken windows in the city of Voronezh and received help on the spot.

Russian state media published photos showing a high-rise apartment building with some windows blown out and damage to the facade.

Gusev said the drone was targeting a nearby airbase, but veered off course after its signal was electronically jammed.

The city lies some 250 kilometers north of Ukraine's eastern Luhansk region, most of which is occupied by Russia.

Separately, Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov of the neighbouring Belgorod region, which also borders Ukraine, said on Telegram that air defences had been working overnight and an apartment building and private homes had been damaged.

He said two unspecified targets were shot down, but he did not specify the cause of the damage.

Such drone strikes  they have previously hit places like residential areas in southern Krasnodar and there was even one at the Kremlin  along with cross-border raids in southwestern Russia have exposed glaring breaches in Russian air defences and porous border security, and brought the war home to Russians.

Separately, Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin of Ukraine's southern Kherson region said Friday that water levels had decreased by about 20 centimeters overnight on the western bank of the Dnieper River, which was inundated starting Tuesday after a breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam upstream.

The lower part of the river runs along the front line between Russian and Ukrainian forces.

Officials on both sides gave figures that indicated about 20 people have died in connection with the flooding, which has added misery to the lives of Ukrainians beleaguered by the war.

Viktor Vitovetskyi, a representative of Ukraine's Emergency Service, said 46 municipalities in the region have been flooded  14 of them along the Russian-occupied eastern bank.

Even as efforts to rescue civilians and supply them with fresh water, health care and other services, Russian shelling over the last day killed two civilians and injured 17 in the region, Prokudin said.

Across the country, a total of at least 4 civilians were killed and 41 people were injured over the past day, according to Zelenskyy's office.



In other developments in Ukraine's war:



--- Air raid sirens and alert systems went off across Ukraine overnight warning of more Russian long-range strikes by drones and missiles. Falling debris from a downed Russian missile killed one civilian and injured three others in the western city of Zviahel, said Gov. Vitalii Bunechko of the surrounding Zhytomyr region.



--- Gladkov, the governor of Russia's Belgorod region, said Ukrainian shelling overnight wounded three civilians in the border town of Shebekino, two of whom have been hospitalised.



--- The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank that has been tracking the conflict, said a variety of indicators suggested that the long-anticipated counteroffensive had begun, and that the new phase of the war may also see the highest Ukrainian losses. (AP)



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Colombo, Jun 9 (PTI) Sri Lanka President Ranil Wickremesinghe has instructed relevant government departments to expedite the drafting of legislation necessary for the implementation of the Action Plan for Reconciliation that seeks to address the thorny issue of ethnic reconciliation of Tamilians in the island nation.

Sri Lanka has endured a three-decade conflict including a protracted and brutal armed conflict, between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the country's armed forces.

On May 18, 2009, the separatist campaign led by the LTTE to establish a separate Tamil homeland in the northern and eastern province of the island nation came to an end with the killing of the LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabakaran by the Sri Lankan Army. In 2015, the Sri Lankan government renewed its commitment to reconciliation and thereafter embarked on several initiatives for national reconciliation.

The Action Plan for Reconciliation was part of the government's need for a comprehensive national policy to resolve these prickly issues.

During a meeting on Thursday, President Wickremesinghe sought the progress of initiatives in five key areas, namely legislation, institutional activities, land issues, prisoner release, and power decentralisation, which were also reviewed, the President's media division said in a media release.

The implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the establishment of a National Land Council, and the formulation of a National Land Policy were among the matters that were also discussed.

Additionally, the President emphasised the need for enhanced operations of the Office of Missing Persons, including digitisation efforts and the issuance of Certificates of Absence for individuals who had previously disappeared without a trace, the press release said.

Furthermore, President Wickremesinghe also instructed the relevant parties to complete the ongoing initiatives to establish the Office of Reparations and the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation within the next two to three months, it said.

A comprehensive report on the progress of these programmes was also requested, it added.

To address the release of prisoners and matters of amnesty, the President instructed the relevant officials to submit a detailed report through the Ministry of Justice.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Sabri, Presidents Senior Adviser on National Security and Chief of Presidential Staff Sagala Ratnayaka were some of the key members who participated in the meeting.

Sinhalese, mostly Buddhist, make up nearly 75 per cent of Sri Lanka's 22 million population while Tamils make up 15 per cent.

The majority hardline Buddhist clergy has also been thwarting attempts for reconciliation with the Tamil minority since 1948 when the country gained its independence from Britain.

The Tamils allege that thousands were massacred during the final stages of the war that ended in 2009, a charge the Sri Lankan Army denies.

At least 40,000 Tamil civilians may have been killed in just the final months of the civil war, according to a UN report.

Sri Lanka has been subject to the UN human rights council resolutions since 2013 calling for accountability through international investigations to the incidents of alleged war crimes.

Ousted president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was the defence secretary during the final phase of the conflict, is accused of ruthlessly ending Sri Lankas civil war with the killing of LTTE supremo Prabhakaran.

The island nation has had a long history of failed negotiations with the Tamils.

An Indian effort in 1987, which created the system of a joint provincial council for the Tamil-dominated North and East, faltered as the minority community claimed it fell short of full autonomy.

Wickremesinghe, who took over as the president last year amidst the unprecedented economic crisis and political turmoil, earlier, underlined the need to fully implement the 13th Amendment to the Constitution to grant political autonomy to the minority Tamils in the country.

The 13A provides for the devolution of power to the Tamil community in Sri Lanka.

India has been pressing Sri Lanka to implement the 13A which was brought in after the Indo-Sri Lankan agreement of 1987.
Washington, Jun 9 (PTI) Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the US this month will set new benchmarks for bilateral ties and big announcements are likely to be made on defence industrial cooperation and boosting India's indigenous military base, the Pentagon has said.

Prime Minister Modi will embark on his first state visit to the US at the invitation of President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden this month. During his four-day visit starting on June 21, the US president and the First Lady will host Modi for a state dinner on June 22.

When Prime Minister Modi comes here to Washington for a State Visit later in the month, I think it will be a historic visit setting new benchmarks for the relationship, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner said during a panel discussion at the Center for New American Security on Thursday.

I think it (the visit) will be looked back upon similar to how the Japan two plus two earlier this year was a pivotal moment in the relationship. People will be looking back on this visit by Prime Minister Modi as a real springboard for the US-India relationship, he said.

Ratner said US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited India recently to advance a number of bilateral issues and prepare the ground for the prime minister's visit to Washington by finalising particular agreements and initiatives that the two countries are working on.

Among the priorities are clear strategic alignment around the question of co-development and co-production between the United States and India on the defence side. This is a priority for Prime Minister Modi to strengthen India's indigenous defence industrial base, as well as advancing the military modernisation, he said.

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and his Indian Indian counterpart Ajit Doval here in January launched the initiative for critical and emerging technology (iCET) to try to bolster technology cooperation between the US and India and there is a very strong defence component of that that the two countries are looking to advance.

I know there have been efforts at this in the past. Sometimes there's skepticism around, is it going to be real this time? And my answer is, I think, all signs are pointing toward yes, it's going to be real and we're going to have some really big, historic, exciting announcements out of the prime minister's visit in terms of particular projects around defence industrial cooperation, Ratner said.

We are also enhancing our operational coordination in a number of different places. A lot of focus on the Indian Ocean, a lot of focus on the undersea domain, as well as new domains, space and cyber and new efforts around information sharing, he said.

If you look at the development of the US-India relationship, it's really unbelievable how far the relationship has moved over the last couple of decades. Thats true now more than ever, he said.

Ratner said the two countries are seeing increasing strategic alignment.

From our perspective, from India's perspective, we do share a vision again for a free and open Indo-Pacific. A strong US-India partnership is a critical ingredient to realising that vision. That's what both sides have understood that from India's perspective and from the US perspective, that a closer partnership is going to be essential to the manifestation of that vision, he said.

The US, India and several other world powers have been talking about the need to ensure a free, open and thriving Indo-Pacific in the backdrop of China's rising military manoeuvring in the region.

China claims nearly all of the disputed South China Sea, though Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all claim parts of it. Beijing has built artificial islands and military installations in the South China Sea.

One of the major thrusts of the bilateral defence relationship and one of the things we were talking about, while we were in Delhi, is this ongoing US effort to support India's military modernisation," Ratner said.

"The integration of our defence industrial base is more co-production, co-development, and I think that is based upon the belief that a stronger India that can defend its own interest and its sovereignty is good for the United States, he said.
Moscow, Jun 9 (AP) Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Moscow will deploy some of its tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus next month, a move that the Belarusian opposition described as an attempt to blackmail the West.

Putin said during a meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that work on building facilities for the nuclear weapons will be completed by July 7-8, and they will be moved to the territory of Russia's neighbor and ally quickly after that.

The move comes as Ukraine has stepped up attacks in several sectors of the front line in what some observers see as the start of its long-expected counteroffensive.

Russia used Belarus' territory to send its troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and has kept forces and weapons on the territory of its ally.

Everything is proceeding as planned, Putin said in televised remarks as he hosted Lukashenko at his residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. On July 7-8 the preparations of the relevant facilities will be completed and we will immediately start the activities linked to the deployment of those weapons on your territory.

Tactical nuclear weapons are intended to destroy enemy troops and weapons on the battlefield. They have a relatively short range and a much lower yield than nuclear warheads fitted to long-range strategic missiles that are capable of obliterating whole cities.

Putin announced the planned deployment of the short-range nuclear weapons in Belarus earlier this year in a move widely seen as a warning to the West as it stepped up military support for Ukraine. He has emphasized that Russia will retain control of them.

Russia didn't say how many nuclear weapons would be sent to Belarus. The U.S. government believes Russia has about 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, which include bombs that can be carried by aircraft, warheads for short-range missiles and artillery rounds.

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya strongly condemned the move.

Putin and his puppet Lukashenko are planning to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus immediately before NATO's summit in Vilnius in July, Tsikhanouskaya told The Associated Press. "This is a rude blackmail, an attempt to force Europe to back down, but we can't allow dictators to dodge punishment for the nuclear blackmail.

Lukashenko, who has been in power for 29 years, has relied on Russia's political and economic support to survive months of protests, mass arrests and Western sanctions following an election in 2020 that kept him in power but was widely seen at home and abroad as rigged. (AP) AMS

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Beijing, Jun 9 (PTI) China on Friday said it is ready to work with South Africa to bolster the security for the BRICS summit in August in light of the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

BRICS is an international grouping comprising China, India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa.

The 15th BRICS summit is set to take place in Johannesburg in August this year. The possible attendance of Putin  who is the subject of a war crimes arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court (ICC)  has put South Africas handling of the warrant and summit security under the spotlight.

The ICC issued a warrant on Putin in March, accusing him of the unlawful deportation of children and transfer of people from the territory of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.

As a signatory to the ICC, South Africa will be obliged to execute the warrant if Putin visits the country for the BRICS Summit.

On Thursday, the South African Police Minister Bheki Cele who is on a visit here, held talks with Chinese Minister for Public Security Wang Xiaohong.

During talks, Wang told Cele that China is ready to work with South Africa to earnestly implement the consensus reached by the two heads of state, and strengthen pragmatic cooperation in BRICS Summit security among others, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

South Africa is among some 40 African nations with which China has signed public security and law enforcement agreements, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post quoted a report by Paul Nantulya, an Africa-China security expert at the National Defence University in Washington.

Wang also offered Chinese assistance for the security of Belt and Road projects, a crackdown on transnational crimes and law enforcement capacity building, promoting personnel exchanges and cooperation mechanisms at all levels, and pushing for more development of the China-South Africa comprehensive strategic partnership.

For his part, Cele said South Africa is willing to strengthen law enforcement and security cooperation with China so as to constantly advance bilateral relations, the Xinhua report said.

Chinas offer of bolstering security at the BRICS summit assumed significance as the ICC has issued an arrest warrant against Putin over human rights violations by the Russian security forces in the current Ukraine war.

South Africa, which is obliged to execute the arrest warrant as it is a signatory to the ICC has issued diplomatic immunity for attendees of the summit.

However, Russia has not yet confirmed Putins attendance at the BRICS Summit. According to media reports China, a close ally of Russia, has offered to host the summit.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted in the media saying on May 30 that Russia will participate in the BRICS summit at an appropriate level.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Friday parried questions on whether Chinese President, Xi Jinping will attend the BRICS summit or Beijing host the summit.

I have no information to offer on these specific questions, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a media briefing here.
Shillong, Jun 8 (PTI) The BSF has sought exemplary actions against two armed Border Guards of Bangladesh personnel who were found roaming inside Indian territory along the zero line in Garo Hills, officials said on Thursday.

The two BGB guards who were found roaming inside a village, were chased by locals on Wednesday. A video shot by an amateur showing this has gone viral on social media.

Meghalaya Frontier BSF chief Pradip Kumar told PTI, "The matter came to our knowledge last night and immediately we protested with the BGB authorities."

"Our commandant had taken up the matter with his counterparts in BGB today. A flag meeting had taken place and a strong protest note in writing was submitted," Kumar said.

According to the BSF, the BGB commandant had conducted an inspection and came to the zero line of the border and admitted that his troopers had made a mistake.

The village is outside the fencing along the Indo-Bangladesh border but within the zero line which demarcates the border between the two countries.
New Delhi, Jun 8 (PTI) The NHRC on Thursday said it has issued a notice to the Bihar government over reports that about 150 students of a school in West Champaran district fell ill after consuming the mid-day meal.

Apparently, there was a supervisory lapse on the part of the school authorities due to which food prepared in an unhygienic way was served to the students, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) said in a statement.

"The NHRC has taken suo motu cognisance of a media report that about 150 children fell ill after consuming the mid-day meal at a government middle school in the Narval-Barval area of district West Champaran, Bihar on 1st June, 2023," it said.

"The Commission has observed that the contents of the media report, if true, amount to the violation of the human rights of the children," it added.

According to the media report dated June 2, the students complained of vomiting and stomach ache after consuming the mid-day meal and were taken to the hospital, where they were diagnosed with food poisoning. The parents of the students reportedly protested against the school authorities, the NHRC said.

"Apparently, there was a supervisory lapse on the part of the school authorities due to which food was prepared unhygienically and served to the students. Accordingly... a notice... (has been issued) to the chief secretary, Government of Bihar calling for a detailed report in the matter within four weeks," it said.

The report, the NHRC said, should include the steps taken or to be taken to ensure that such an incident does not recur in future.

The NHRC said it would also like to know whether government guidelines were being followed by the school concerned and if not, then what action has been taken against those responsible for the "negligence".
Mumbai, Jun 9 (PTI) Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Friday said that threats to political leaders will not be tolerated.



He had asked police to take action with regard to the death threat received by NCP president Sharad Pawar and police will take appropriate steps, said Fadnavis who also holds the home portfolio.



"Threatening political leaders and crossing limits of decency on social media will not be tolerated," he told reporters here.



There are political differences but there is no place for hostility in Maharashtra's political culture, he added.



NCP leaders claimed earlier in the day that Pawar received a message on social media that "he will meet the same fate as (Narendra) Dabholkar soon.

Dabholkar, an anti-superstition crusader, was shot dead in Pune on August 20, 2013.



Meanwhile, state Congress chief Nana Patole told reporters in Nagpur that Sharad Pawar and Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut getting death threats was shameful for a state like Maharashtra.



NCP leader and former state home minister Anil Deshmukh said elsewhere that a senior leader like Pawar getting threats was very unfortunate, and not only Fadnavis but the Union home minister should intervene in the matter.

Mentioning the threat given to Raut by an anonymous caller, Deshmukh said such an atmosphere was never seen in the state.
Aurangabad, Jun 9 (PTI) A teenage boy's alleged act of putting social media status message glorifying Mughal emperor Aurangzeb has triggered tension in Ashti town of Maharashtra's Beed district, with some Hindutva organisations giving a "bandh" call, police said on Friday.

Commercial establishments in the market area of Ashti, located around 80 km from Beed district headquarters, are shut in response to the 'bandh' call, they said.

This comes against the backdrop of some youths displaying photos of 17th century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in a procession in Ahmednagar and tension in Kolhapur city on Wednesday over the alleged use of 18th century Mysore ruler Tipu Sultans image along with an objectionable audio message as social media status by some locals.

Talking to PTI, Beed Superintendent of Police (SP) Nandkumar Thakur said, "A 14-year-old boy kept a status message in praise of Aurangzeb on a social media platform on Thursday. A complaint was received in this connection, based on which an offence was registered at Ashti police station."

After that, some local pro-Hindutva organisations gave a 'bandh' call, he said.

"The boy is not in Ashti at present. He is in Mumbai on a vacation. He will be asked to return and once he comes back, he will be presented in a juvenile court after investigation," Thakur said.

No untoward incident has been reported so far during the 'bandh', he said.

Tension gripped Kolhapur city in western Maharashtra on Tuesday after two men allegedly put Tipu Sultans image along with an offensive audio message as their social media status. The next day, police had to disperse hundreds of protesters after they hurled stones during a demonstration against the alleged use of Tipu Sultans image. Police said they have arrested at least 36 people and registered cases in connection with the Kolhapur violence.
Nagpur, Jun 9 (PTI) BJP's Maharashtra unit chief Chandrashekar Bawankule on Friday accused the NCP of backstabbing the OBCs and sought to know whether Sharad Pawar, who heads the party, would offer his post to anybody from this community.



Speaking to reporters here, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader termed the two-day workshop held last week in Nagpur by the Nationalist Congress Party's Other Backward Classes (OBC) cell as just "show-off", and claimed that no decision was taken in the interest of this community during the meeting.



"The OBC workshop of the NCP was just a show-off aimed at getting this community's votes. But members of the OBC community will never support the NCP as it has always backstabbed them," he said.



"Will Sharad Pawar give the post of NCP national president or state president to an OBC worker of his party?" he asked.



Bawankule said he expected that the NCP would take an important decision and appoint a member of the OBC community as the state chief of the party.



Replying to a query on reports about Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde being angry over the delay in the expansion of his cabinet and hence going to Jammu and Kashmir as a pressure tactic against ruling ally BJP, Bawankule said false information is being spread to set a wrong narrative.



"CM Shinde has gone on a personal trip with his family," he said.
When To Expect Hard Answer on Student Loan Forgiveness Following Bidens Veto  Experts Give Odds of Approval

Bonnie Cash / UPI / Shutterstock.com

President Joe Biden vetoed Republican-led legislation that would have overturned his student loan debt relief program on June 7. Now, the fate of the program is in the hands of the Supreme Court, which will review it later this summer.

See: Should You Start Paying Student Loans or Wait For Bidens Student Debt Relief Plan?

Find: How To Build Your Savings From Scratch

In late February, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments against the program  announced last August  and the decision is widely expected to be released before the end of the Courts term. The lawsuits challenging the program hinge on the argument that it is unconstitutional and that the HEROES Act  enacted in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks  does not provide authority to grant relief from student loans.

Millions of student loan borrowers are anxiously awaiting decision day.

Higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz told CNBC that a ruling from the justices should come by early July, before their summer recess.

The court is likely to issue a decision before the end of June, probably on a Thursday, Kantrowitz told CNBC, indicating justices have been publishing their opinions on that day of the week, typically.

Take Our Poll: Are You Concerned About the Safety of Your Money in Your Bank Accounts?

Now, several experts believe that the odds of Bidens program surviving the Courts decision are slim.

Gregory Caldeira, a political science professor at Ohio State University, told CNBC he wouldnt be surprised if the Court rules against it.

The courts conservatives have been very aggressive in striking down the decisions of Congress and the president, Caldeira told CNBC.

Another expert, Dan Urman, law professor at Northeastern University, agreed, also telling CNBC that the conservative justices believe government agencies exert too much authority and violate the separation of powers.

Whats more, The Wall Street Journal reported on June 8 that while White House officials maintain publicly they are confident the Supreme Court will uphold the program, some in the administration have expressed concerns in private that the conservative majority will kill it.

The Wall Street Journal added that administration officials have been discussing alternatives in case the program is barred.

In November, the White House said that 26.26 million student loan borrowers had applied or were deemed automatically eligible for relief under the forgiveness program  and that 16.48 million fully-approved applications had been sent to loan servicers for discharge.

In addition, the White House estimated that 40 million borrowers would qualify for the debt relief program, with nearly 90% of the benefits of the relief going to borrowers earning less than $75,000 per year.

More From GOBankingRates

This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: When To Expect Hard Answer on Student Loan Forgiveness Following Bidens Veto  Experts Give Odds of Approval
Dimapur, Jun 9 (PTI): Manipurs Naga MLAs on Friday said they wished the current arrangement for Naga areas where autonomous councils existed should not be disturbed in any solution being worked out for the conflict-ridden state.

Ten Naga MLAs arrived here after meeting Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Delhi on June 7.

We have made no demand to the Centre, but in the event of any arrangement (for creating new administrative areas in line with demands by Kukis), Naga areas should not be touched as it will create more problems, said Manipur Minister for Water Resources, Relief and Disaster Management, Awangbow Newmai.

The Naga MLAs arrived here after meeting Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Delhi on June 7.

We have made no demand to the Centre, but in the event of any arrangement, Naga areas should not be touched as it will create more problems, said Manipur Minister for Water Resources, Relief and Disaster Management, Awangbow Newmai.

Addressing reporters at Chumukedima, around 16km from here, the Minister said they told Shah that Naga people should be consulted as they are part of an ongoing peace process with the Centre.

He said the government had assured the delegation that the three major communities in Manipur  Kukis, Meiteis and Nagas- will be consulted and consensus will be sought before arriving at any plan.

Nagas are peace loving people and we are against any kind of war. We also dont want our neighbours to engage in a war. As legislators, we are trying our best to bring both the communities into an understanding so that normalcy is restored in the state, Newmai said.

Newmai appreciated Shah for prompt action to bring the situation in Manipur under control.
Hazaribag (Jharkhand), Jun 8 (PTI) Ambassador of France to India Emmanuel Lenain visited Jharkhands Hazaribagh district on Thursday to see development activities here, an official said.

Lenain visited various places of Hazaribagh and was impressed to see famous rural art 'Shorai' painting, he said.

Hazaribag MP Jayant Sinha, in a programme at his residence in Demotand, had invited prominent Sohrai painters of the district and introduced them to the French ambassador.

Lenain also visited a global food processing plant, Hazaribag medical college and hospital and NTPCs Pakri Barwadih coal mining project, the official said.

He interacted with a group of students from St Xaviers School here.

Talking to media persons, Lenain said that France has a long friendship with India and is very much interested in investments in every sphere.

He also said India is a vast country, and they have great scope in making more investments in every sphere of the country for development of the economy.
Guwahati, Jun 9 (PTI) The Assam cabinet on Friday decided to implement the Olympic Values Education Programme in 250 government and private schools in association with a trust founded by Abhinav Bindra, Indias first individual Olympic gold medallist in shooting, during 2024-27.

The three values of Olympism are excellence, friendship and respect.

The cabinet, headed by Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, approved the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the International Olympic Committee and Abhinav Bindra Foundation Trust, which will be implemented for Rs six crore, Tourism Minister Jayanta Malla Barua said at the media briefing after the meeting.

The programme will address the challenges of a sedentary lifestyle, lack of concentration and adolescents dropping out of school, he said.

The cabinet also decided to grant tax exemption on agricultural income for three years from April 1, 2023, to celebrate 200 years of Assam's tea industry.

The Council of Ministers also decided to promulgate the Assam Goods and Services Tax (Amendment) Ordinance, 2023 as per the recommendations of the GST Council.

It was decided at the meeting that the state bench of the GST Appellate Tribunal will be set up with its headquarters at Guwahati.

The cabinet also approved the framework of the Digital Infrastructure for DBT Schemes (DIDS), and subsequent Rollout and adoption of the platform to streamline disbursal of welfare benefits to citizens, the minister said.

The cabinet decided to amend the Assam ESI Doctors' Service Rules, 2000 for ensuring smooth administration of the Employees' State Insurance Doctors Services in the state.

It decided to promulgate an ordinance to amend the Assam Right to Public Services (Amendment) Ordinance, 2023 to improve delivery of notified services and strengthen appeal mechanism, Baruah added.
New Delhi, Jun 9 (PTI) Embarrassed by the "arbitrary" and "irrational" cuts in NCERT textbooks, Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav, who were chief advisors for the original Political Science books for classes 9 to 12, have written to NCERT saying the rationalisation exercise has "mutilated" the books and rendered them "academically dysfunctional".

The duo have also asked the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to drop their names as chief advisors from all Political Science textbooks.

"While the modifications have been justified in the name of rationalisation, we fail to see any pedagogic rationale at work here. We find that the text has been mutilated beyond recognition. There are innumerable and irrational cuts and large deletions without any attempts to fill the gaps created.

"We were never consulted or even informed of these changes. If NCERT did consult other experts for deciding on these cuts and deletions, we explicitly state that we fully disagree with them in this regard," according to the letter sent to NCERT Director Dinesh Saklani.

Palshikar, an academician and political scientist, and Yadav, political scientist and Swaraj India leader, were chief advisors for the Political Science books for classes 9 to 12 originally published in 2006-07 based on the 2005 version of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF).

Their names are mentioned in a "letter to students" and the list of textbook development team at the beginning of each book.

"We believe that any text has an internal logic and such arbitrary cuts and deletions violate the spirit of the text. The frequent and serial deletions do not seem to have any logic accept to please the powers that be.

"Textbooks cannot and should not be shaped in this blatantly partisan manner and should not quell the spirit of critique and questioning among students of social sciences. These textbooks as they stand now do not serve the purpose of training students of political science both the principles of politics and the broad patterns of political dynamics that have occurred over time," the letter said.

Dropping several topics and portions from the NCERT textbooks last month triggered a controversy, with the Opposition blaming the Centre for "whitewashing with vengeance".

At the heart of the controversy was the fact that while the changes made as part of the rationalisation exercise were notified, some of these controversial deletions were not mentioned. This led to allegations about a bid to delete these portions surreptitiously.

The NCERT had described the omissions as a possible oversight but refused to undo the deletions, saying they were based on the recommendations of experts. It also said the textbooks are anyway headed for revision in 2024 when the National Curriculum Framework kicks in. However, the NCERT later changed its stand and said "minor changes need not be notified".

Among the references dropped from the Class 12 History textbook were certain portions on Mahatma Gandhi and how his pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity "provoked Hindu extremists", and on a ban on the RSS.

"Gandhiji's death had magical effect on communal situation in the country", "Gandhi's pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity provoked Hindu extremists", and "organisations like RSS were banned for some time" are among the portions deleted.

The portions referring to the Gujarat riots were also dropped from the Class 11 Sociology textbook, months after the NCERT removed the reference to the 2022 communal violence in two class 12 textbooks.

In their letter, Palshikar and Yadav said, "As academics organically associated with the preparation of these textbooks, we are embarrassed that our names should be mentioned as chief advisors to these mutilated and academically dysfunctional textbooks. We wish to explicitly record our full disagreement with the entire process of reshaping the text in name of rationalisation."

"Both of us would like to disassociate ourselves from these textbooks and request the NCERT to drop our names....we request you to give effect to this request immediately and ensure that our names are not used in the soft copies of the textbooks available at the NCERT websites and also in the subsequent print editions," the letter read.
New Delhi, June 9 (PTI) The State takes over once an FIR has been registered, and the "volte-face" by the father of the minor wrestler claiming a false sexual harassment complaint was deliberately lodged against outgoing WFI chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, will not be decisive and police can still proceed with its probe, legal experts said on Friday.

In a startling admission, the father of the wrestler Thursday said he deliberately filed a false police complaint of sexual harassment against Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) chief Singh because he wanted to get back at the official for a perceived injustice to the girl.

Singh has been facing relentless protests for the past six months by some top Indian grapplers over the allegations.

The complaint by the minor wrestler has also led to an investigation under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.

Reacting to the development, senior lawyer Rakesh Dwivedi said the father's statement is not decisive for the case, as once an FIR has been lodged, the State takes over the case and pursues it.

The police is not bound to accept (the statement of the father) and it can still pursue the case because the statement (of the minor) is already there on record under Section 164 of CrPC (Code of Criminal Procedure), he said. A statement recorded before a magistrate under Section 164 is admissible in court. Another senior advocate and former SCBA (Supreme Court Bar Association) president Vikas Singh raised questions over the continued delay in the arrest of the WFI chief and filing of the charge sheet. He said an inquiry needs to be ordered to probe the delay as it has led to a situation where witnesses are being compromised.

The delay in arrest (of the accused) and the delay in filing of the charge sheet in such cases invariably results in a situation where the witnesses are being compromised...There should be an inquiry as to why this happened, Singh said.

He said had the accused been arrested nothing of this sort would have happened. Usually, the complainants, after seeing no action, are driven, coerced and allured to settle cases, he said, adding police can still pursue the case.

On being asked whether the WFI chief can move court over the statement of the girl's father retracting the allegations of sexual harassment, Singh said he can seek prosecution for the offence of perjury.

Dwivedi said the "so-called U-turn" will be one of the aspects of the ongoing probe. Whether this withdrawal (by father) is genuine or coerced and whether it amounts to perjury, these are the matters of investigation, he added.

He said as the State has taken over the case on registration of the FIR, "The so-called U-turn will not be decisive. It will be just one element which the police will look into, and if it finds that the case is false, then it can take action against that person also.

Right now the ball is in the court of police, and if it accepts and allows the withdrawal, then somebody will have to question it, Dwivedi said, adding either the minor or her next friend or somebody concerned may approach the court against the withdrawal.

As of now, it is with the police which is not bound to accept it on the face value and will have to conduct an inquiry. It will become one element of inquiry and in the light of (section) 164 statements, the police can still go ahead, he added.

Statements under section 164 of the CrPC are recorded before a judicial magistrate and have evidentiary value during trials and any U-turn may lead to prosecution of those who had testified.

On May 27, the Delhi police had informed a court here that statements of all alleged victims were recorded under Section 164 CrPC before a magistrate.

The Delhi police has filed two FIRs against Singh. While the first FIR relates to allegations by the minor wrestler and has been registered under the POCSO Act, the second is related to outraging the modesty of other grapplers.

The FIRs narrate several alleged instances of sexual harassment like inappropriate touching, groping, stalking and intimidation by Singh at different times and places over a decade.

Singh has been questioned by the police twice so far, and on both occasions, he denied all the allegations against him and claimed he was being "framed".
New Delhi, Jun 9 (PTI) Citing a 2021 CAG report, the Congress on Friday claimed the central government "misused" funds meant for railway safety on crockery, car rentals, furniture, laptops and foot massagers.

"This is how funds specifically meant for railway safety were used. This is the CAG's finding," Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said on Twitter.

Quoting the findings of the March 2021 CAG report, he alleged that the Narendra Modi government has been "misusing" Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh (RRSK) funds on

crockery, car rentals, foot massagers, furniture and laptops.

According to an official document, the national transporter spent more than Rs 1 lakh crore on safety measures between 2017-2018 and 2021-22 with a steady growth in expenditure on track renewal.

Government sources also indicated that the railways will soon reply to the same Comptroller and Auditor General of India's (CAG) report cited by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to attack the Centre over the recent triple train accident in Odisha's Balasore that claimed 275 lives and injured more than 1,000 people.

Kharge, in his letter to the prime minister, had said that all empty safety claims of Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw have been exposed.

He further pointed out that the CAG report titled 'Derailment in Indian Railways' highlighted that funding for the Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh had been reduced by a massive 79 per cent. It was claimed during the budget presentation that about Rs 20,000 crore would be available annually, but this was not done, Kharge had said and asked why were the required funds not allocated for track renewal work.

However, data in the document showed that from 2017-18 to 2021-22, the railways spent more than Rs 1 lakh crore on RRSK work. In February 2022, the government extended the validity of RRSK by another five years, starting 2022-23.

Report number 22 of the said CAG report was tabled in Parliament on December 21 last year.


Jammu, Jun 9 (PTI) Three key conduits, involved in Rs 150 crore narcotics recovery case in Jammu and Kashmir's Sunderbani area, were arrested by security forces in the Poonch border district on Friday, officials said.

The duo were part of an inter-state drug peddling racket, which was busted by security forces on June 1. Two of its members were arrested here with 22 kg of narcotics worth over Rs 150 crore in the international market, they said.

"In the follow up operations to the Sunderbani narcotics recovery case, multiple joint operations have been conducted by the Indian Army and police in Poonch district in the last 72 hours," Public Relations Officer (PRO) Defence said.

During the operation, three main conduits and operatives of the cross-border narco-terror module have been apprehended, PRO said.

The apprehended conduits have been identified as Shakar Din of Degwar Terwan Village, Rashid and Shafir both residents of Kalas village of district Poonch, the officer said.

During search operations, warlike stores, including two grenades, have also been recovered from their possession, he said.

PRO said extensive joint search operations are currently in progress.

The apprehension of these three individuals is a major blow to the complex cross-border narco-terror nexus being operated from Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, he said.
Dehradun, Jun 9 (PTI) Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Friday held a meeting with senior police officers here and asked them to take stern action against "love jihad."

"People of different faiths co-exist peacefully in Uttarakhand but things like love jihad will not be tolerated. Crimes like these were being committed as part of a conspiracy. But people are coming out openly against them now," Dhami told reporters here.

He said he held a meeting with senior police officers here to get feedback on steps taken in connection with "love jihad" incidents reported recently from different parts of the state.

Nearly half a dozen incidents of attempted abduction of minor Hindu girls by Muslim men who hid their religious identity to befriend them have been reported from Uttarkashi, Chamoli, and Haridwar districts in the past few weeks.

Dhami said the number of people coming out in the open against "love jihad" reflects a growing awareness about crimes of this nature.

"Awareness about love jihad is growing. That is why more such incidents have come to the fore over the past two-three months. One reason of this is introduction of a severe anti-conversion law," the Chief Minister said.

"Instructions have been given to the police to deal sternly with the guilty in love jihad cases. They have also been asked to conduct verification drives from time to time to look into the antecedents of people coming from outside and settling here," he said.

The meeting was attended by DGP Ashok Kumar and Additional Chief Secretary Radha Raturi.

On May 26, two men including a Muslim allegedly tried to abduct a Hindu girl in Purola of Uttarkashi.

The incident met with rage by the people of the town and nearby areas, with several of them hitting the streets in protest led by Hindu right outfits.

Though the girl was rescued and the accused sent to judicial custody, tension is yet to subside as similar incidents have been reported from Mori area of Uttarkashi and Gauchar in Chamoli district too.

There have been protests in Barkot, Chinyalisaur, and Bhatwari as well.

Many shops in Purola owned by Muslims have been closed for nearly a fortnight.

Posters were glued on these shops asking their owners to leave the town ahead of a Mahapanchayat slated to be held on June 15.

An ultimatum to Muslim traders to vacate their shops has also been served in Nainbagh by Vyapar Mandal and Hindu Yuva Vahini.

Many Muslim traders have packed their bags and left Uttarkashi district out of fear.

Among them is BJP's Uttarkashi district minority cell president Mohammad Zahid who ran a garment shop in Purola.
Lucknow, June 9 (PTI) Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Friday said his government in its six years eliminated "corruption, disorder and anarchy" from the recruitment process.

The CM made the remark at an event where he handed over appointment letters to 7,182 ANMs (Auxiliary Nurse and Midwife) selected through the Uttar Pradesh Subordinate Services Selection Commission.

"We have not accepted rigging, disorder, anarchy and corruption in any selection process within the last six years," he said.

Be it the several state commissions or the Basic Education Council, recruitment process everywhere is now transparent, an official release quoting the CM said.

Congratulating all selected ANMs, he urged them to discharge their duties honestly.

"Instead of protesting, you trusted the government and after the process of selection, waited for the decision of the Supreme Court to come in your favour," he said.

"People tried to obstruct the selection process, but we have attacked their unethical actions," he said referring to the recruitment at the Uttar Pradesh Subordinate Services Selection Commission.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi after assuming power in 2014 had said that the entire country is one family and we cannot discriminate against anyone.

"We have implemented it strictly from 2017 in Uttar Pradesh. We have given more than 6 lakh government jobs in 6 years and there is no room for any kind of discrimination," he said.

Adityanath also asserted that all those recruited "have not needed any recommendation."

He said there is a system of teleconsultation at more than 600 places at present in the state and that health ATMs have been set up across districts which allows one to book 50 to 60 types of tests.

Encouraging the newly appointed ANMs, the CM said "You have the chance to see people in your respective districts and villages and get respect by doing better work in this field."

He said so many women becoming part of the healthcare force promotes both 'Mission Shakti' and 'Mission Rozgar.'
Mumbai, Jun 9 (PTI) The Bombay High Court has asked the MSBSHSE to release the Class 12 marksheet of a 17-year-old boy it had disbarred, while observing that it did not see the rationale why students who did not opt for Science subject in Class 10 cannot be admitted to the stream later.

The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) had cancelled the boy's admission to Classes 11 and 12 after he appeared for the HSC examination, claiming that he was ineligible to be admitted to the Science stream, as he had not opted for the subject in Class 10.

A division bench of Justices Gautam Patel and Neela Gokhale in its order of June 7 said it sees no rationale why Class 10 students who dont opt for Science subject should not be admitted to the stream later.

The order was passed in the petition filed by Krish Chordiya challenging the state board's decision cancelling his admission and refusing to release his Class 12 marksheet.

The choice of subjects at SSC and ICSE schools is not made in Class 10, but at least a year or two earlier, around Classes 8 or 9. It is surely unreasonable to expect that the decision of a 14-year-old will be determinative of his or her entire future, the court said.

It further said that as per the National Education Policy (NEP), the entire pattern is proposed to be changed.

The old trifecta of Science-Arts-Commerce is to be done away with and rightly so. The emphasis is now on identifying and nurturing potential and providing flexible learning options, the court said.

If this was the policy trend, then the court was unable to see how the inflexibility and tardiness of the Maharashtra State Board's approach fulfils any objective at all, it added.

We are compelled to ask what the purpose of the 4th respondent (State Board) is: to assist students and provide and encourage education opportunities or to discover new ways to stymie them? the court said.

Noting that if interim relief is granted to the petitioner, no prejudice would be caused to the board, the court directed for his Class 12 marksheet to be released pending final hearing and disposal of the petition.

The bench observed that Chordiya was caught between the Scylla of an utterly doctrinaire approach of the state board and the Charybdis of an alleged lapse on the part of the Gargi Junior College, Nashik.

The result is that the young petitioner's entire educational career and future is in jeopardy, the court said.

According to the petition, Chordiya appeared for Class 10 standard exams in the ICSE board in 2020-21, after which he took admission to the Science stream at Gargi Junior College.

In 2023, the petitioner appeared for the Class 12 board examination. However, in March, he received a letter from the college stating that his admission to Classes 11 and 12 were cancelled by the board, as he had not opted for Science subject in Class 10.

Chordiya in his plea said he was not given a copy of the Board's order.

In the meantime, Chordiya appeared for the joint entrance exam of the Vellore Institute of Technology and based on that score, he was given a provisional admission letter.

When the HSC results were declared in May, Chordiya's marksheet was not uploaded and he was shown as disbarred.

The bench in its order noted that the state board and the college ought to have coordinated to ensure that Chordiya was informed that he was ineligible for whatever reason before being given admission.

The court noted that Chordiya has completed Classes 11 and 12, has performed well above average in both and has appeared for highly competitive entrance examinations.

What he is now being told is that he is incapable of studying Science because he did not do Science three years ago in Class 10, the court said.
I Failed Miserably: Lawyer Who Used ChatGPT in Brief Explains Fake Cases to Judge

(Bloomberg Law) -- A New York lawyer told a judge he never meant to fool anybody when he filed a court brief full of phony legal precedents invented by ChatGPT.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Steven Schwartz, who faces punishment for the brief, on Thursday asked US District Judge P. Kevin Castel for leniency. The lawyer claims he had no idea the free artificial intelligence tool could create fake case citations and court opinions.

There were many things I should have done to assure the veracity of these cases, Schwartz told the judge. I failed miserably at that.

Generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT promise to upend white-collar professions, changing how law firms, financial institutions and others conduct business. The technology also has risks, including over-reliance on it.

Video: The AI Dilemma: Can Laws Keep Up?

ChatGPT, a chatbot launched by the nonprofit OpenAI, can carry on human-like conversations and pull vast troves of data from the internetthough it admits that its prone to hallucinations and can provide inaccurate information.

Schwartz admitted this week that ChatGPT invented six cases he cited in a brief in a case against Avianca Airlines.

I just never could imagine that ChatGPT would produce fabricated cases, Schwartz told the judge in Manhattan federal court.

Crux of Case

Schwartzs client claimed an Avianca employee hit him in the left knee with a metal serving cart on a 2019 flight from El Salvador to New York, causing him severe personal injuries.

The airline sought to dismiss the suit, arguing it was filed too late. In researching the statute of limitations issue, Schwartz acknowledged he used ChatGPT.

After Aviancas lawyers filed papers saying they couldnt find the cases, Schwartz continued to rely on the AI tool.

Castel told the lawyers that the case hinges on the actions of Schwartz and a colleague from his firm, Peter LoDuca, after they learned about the fraudulent citations.

I doubt we would be here today if the narrative had ended there, he said.

Legal Gibberish

Castel walked Schwartz through his faulty brief, asking whether hed thought to check the cases on legal research databases, in books at a law library, or even on Google. Schwartzs answer each time was no.

The judge asked Schwartz whether he was suspicious of one of the main phony cases cited in the brief, the non-existent Varghese v. China South Airlines Co., which the judge said included information that made no sense.

Can we agree that is legal gibberish? Castel asked.

Schwartz said he could not fathom that ChatGPT would invent a case from whole cloth and that he never considered such a possibility until Castels May 4 order to show cause.

I continued to be duped by ChatGPT, Schwartz said. Its embarrassing.

Incredibly Powerful

After the problems with Schwartzs brief were identified, federal judges in Illinois and Texas issued standing orders requiring lawyers to certify that their filings were created without generative AI, or that a human reviewed the accuracy of any language AI did craft.

These platforms are incredibly powerful and have many uses in the law, Northern District of Texas Judge Brantley Starr wrote in his order. But legal briefing is not one of them.

In the Avianca case, Castel ordered the sanctions hearing for Schwartz, his colleague LoDuca, who signed the brief and filed it with the court, and their firm, the four-lawyer Manhattan personal injury shop Levidow, Levidow & Oberman.

Castel in his order to show cause also raised the possibility of referring Schwartz to a state attorney grievance committee, which can investigate professional conduct.

Schwartzs legal team is asking Castel not to hit him with sanctions, noting he and his firms reputations have already been tarnished by the episode.

Schwartzs defense counsel, Ronald Minkoff, said the public embarrassment theyve been exposed to is deterrent enough.

The case is schadenfreude for any lawyer, Minkoff said, because lawyers have historically had difficulties with new technology.

Castel adjourned the hearing without saying when hell decide on possible sanctions.

To contact the reporter on this story: Justin Wise at jwise@bloombergindustry.com; Bob Van Voris at rvanvoris@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chris Opfer at copfer@bloombergindustry.com; John Hughes at jhughes@bloombergindustry.com

(Updates with lawyer, judge comments from third paragraph.)

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New Delhi, Jun 9 (PTI) A Delhi court on Friday dismissed a default bail plea by Md Enamul Haque, the alleged kingpin of a cross-border cattle smuggling racket, in a money laundering case registered by the Enforcement Directorate in connection with the illegal trade.

Special Judge Raghubir Singh refused to grant the relief to 44-year-old Haque, saying there was "no justification at all" for moving such an application at such a belated stage, i.e., more than 15 months after his arrest.

Haque was arrested by the ED in February last year in connection with the money laundering investigation into the smuggling of cattle that takes place across the India-Bangladesh border in West Bengal.

The court also dismissed the regular bail application of another accused in the case, Manish Kothari, chartered accountant of TMC leader Anubrata Mondal.

Haque had sought default bail on the ground that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had failed to complete the investigation within the stipulated time.

The application claimed that since the ED had filed supplementary complaints (the equivalent of a charge sheet) against the accused and the investigation was still going on after that, it could not be called a complete investigation.

"Supplementary complaints have been filed. These supplementary complaints are supplementary not in the sense that some additional evidence/accusation has been brought on record against the applicant herein, but in the sense of bringing more persons as accused on the basis of the trail of the POC (proceeds of crime) allegedly laundered," the judge said.

Thus, nothing new or additional has been brought on record in respect of the applicant since after the filing of the complaint on April 16, 2022, he said.

"The cognisance of the offence in question was taken vide order dated April 19, 2022. Thus, he can, in no way, take a pretext of incomplete investigation," the judge said, dismissing the application.

Special Public Prosecutor Nitesh Rana, appearing for the ED, told the court during the arguments that Haque acquired a huge amount of wealth from the proceeds of the crime generated out of cross-border activities and violated several laws.

It was alleged that the smuggling of cattle across the India-Bangladesh border was carried out at Haque's instance and he paid bribes to security personnel for facilitation of the trade.

Manish Kothari sought regular bail on the ground that he was no longer required in the case and that no purpose would be served by keeping him in custody.

According to the ED, Kothari helped TMC leader Mondal siphon off money through shell companies.
Bengaluru, June 9 (PTI) The Karnataka government will review the largesse of the previous BJP government in allotting 'hundreds of acres of land' to RSS and its affiliated organisations, Karnataka Health and Family Welfare Minister Dinesh Gundu Rao said on Friday.



He also said a few tenders issued by the BJP government have been cancelled while others will be looked into.



The functioning of the health and family welfare department, its officers and doctors and the measures taken to ensure sound public health will be discussed in a meeting next week, Rao added.



"Hundreds of acres of government land in the state have been transferred in the name of RSS and Sangh Parivar affiliated organisations," the minister said in a press conference.



According to him, the purpose behind such allotment was to help these organisations grow and with that its ideologies should also grow.



"This (allotment of land) should not happen. One should inform everything to the people. Nothing should be kept secret. People should know. Taking everything in one way is not proper. So we have to take steps," the minister added.



When asked whether the government has taken any steps yet, Rao said he cannot say anything about the steps taken at this juncture but he pointed out that the Congress government has to do it.



"It should happen at the government level where the revenue department and the chief minister have to see what has happened and how it has happened. They have to decide after seeing whether it has been done lawfully and for what price it has been allotted because these are all legal matters," he explained.



To a question about the BJP claiming that there is a witch hunt against its cadres, Rao alleged that the objective of that party was to meddle with history, create rift among people, and spread hatred, which they were doing at every level, be it in textbooks, or appointing such people in various organisations and allotting government land to RSS and its affiliated organisations.



The minister also said that he has convened a meeting where many decisions will be taken.



He added that the Congress government cancelled a few tenders such as the 108-Ambulance tender and the dialysis contract.



"There are other issues as well, such as the functioning of our department, officers and doctors and taking care of public health. Preventive measures will also be looked into," Rao said.



He also explained that some policy matters related to his department will be discussed with the experts to improve the existing system to provide quality treatment to people.
Lucknow, Jun 9 (PTI) Senior BJP leader Avinash Rai Khanna has attacked Congress leader Rahul Gandhi over his "mohabbat ki dukaan" pitch, saying his shop is only of lies.

In a speech at an event in the US earlier this week, Gandhi had referred to his slogan made during the Bharat Jodo Yatra, during which he had said "nafrat ke bazaar mein mohabbat ki dukan kholenge" (in the market of hate, shops of love will be opened).

He had also criticised the BJP, saying that "India has understood that it cannot go forward with the type of hatred that the BJP is spreading in society".

On Thursday evening, Khanna said here that "whatever Rahul (Gandhi) ji is speaking on foreign soil, I think that nothing could be more dirty, bad and wrong than this".

He also cited that "when we (the BJP) were in the Opposition, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee was our leader, the then prime minister PV Narasimha Rao had sent Atal ji in a delegation abroad. At that time, Atal ji had praised the government on foreign soil".

On Gandhi's "mohabbat ki dukaan" remark, Khanna said, "He has a shop, which is only of lies."

The BJP leader also said that if "we are speaking against the prime minister (on foreign soil), then we are speaking against the country".

"He has shown his intelligence. The country has rejected him. How can the world accept him?" Khanna said while hitting out Gandhi.

The BJP leader, who is also the party's Himachal Pradesh in-charge, said the NDA government has removed a number of signs of "servitude", and schemes are made keeping in mind the poor.

Khanna, who was the Lok Sabha MP from Hoshiarpur from 2004 to 2009, also claimed that the BJP government is the first government which is going to people with its report card. "And, people have the confidence that the BJP fulfils whatever it promises," he said.
CAMERON CONWAY, Wheeler Golf, Junior; Conway shot an 82 at the ECC golf championships helping the Lions to a third-place finish. Wheeler trailed only Killingly and East Lyme.

STONINGTON BOYS TENNIS; Stonington defeated Nonnewaug, 6-1, to earn the Class S state title, the first boys championship in school history. Stonington (19-1) won 26 of its 28 matches in four state tournament contests.

RACHEL FEDERICO, Westerly, Girls Track, Senior; Federico scored in two events at the state track championships. She was second in the discus (119-7) and third in the shot put (33-3).

ELI SPOSATO & ERIN VONHOUSEN, Chariho Track, Juniors; Sposato earned the state track title in the 400 with a time of 50.09. VonHousen was the state champion in the 3,000 in 10:05.31. It was the first state championships for both runners.

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After years of criticizing mail voting and so-called ballot harvesting as ripe for fraud, Republicans at the top of the party want to change course.

They are poised to launch aggressive get-out-the-vote campaigns for 2024 that employ just those strategies, attempting to match the emphasis on early voting Democrats have used for years to lock in many of their supporters well ahead of Election Day. The goal is to to persuade voters who support GOP candidates that early voting techniques are secure and to make sure they are able to return their ballots in time to be counted, thus putting less pressure on Election Day turnout efforts.

It marks a notable shift from the partys rhetoric since 2020, when then-President Donald Trump was routinely sowing doubt about mail voting and encouraging his voters to wait and vote in-person on Election Day. As recently as last year, Republican activists peddling the stolen election narrative were telling GOP voters who received mail ballots to hold onto them and turn them in at their polling place on Election Day rather than use mail or drop boxes.

Now Trump is asking donors to chip in for his ballot harvesting fund  saying in a fundraising email, Either we ballot harvest where we can, or you can say goodbye to America!

Republicans say the shift is needed to ensure GOP victories up and down the 2024 ballot, arguing they cannot afford to give Democrats any advantage. At the same time, they acknowledge skepticism from many of their own voters conditioned by false claims of widespread voter fraud from Trump and others.

Across the country, Republican-controlled legislatures have acted against early voting  shortening windows for returning mail ballots, banning or limiting the use of drop boxes and criminalizing third-party ballot collection.

In announcing a Bank Your Vote initiative for 2024, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the party has never said dont vote early, but acknowledged the GOP will have to work to shift voters perceptions.

That certainly is a challenge if you have people in your ecosystem saying, Dont vote early or dont vote by mail, and those cross messages do have an impact, McDaniel told reporters Wednesday. I dont think youre seeing that heading into 2024. I think youre seeing all of us singing from the same songbook.

The nationwide GOP plan emphasizes in-person early voting, absentee voting, and ballot harvesting where legal, while also pledging to fight against bad ballot harvesting laws. Republicans use the term to describe when someone else returns a mailed ballot on behalf of another voter, especially third parties that gather multiple ballots.

McDaniel emphasized she remains opposed to ballot collection, and she said the party would deploy an army of poll watchers and election monitors to reassure Republican voters that their ballots will be protected.

Do I think its the most secure way of voting? No, McDaniel said. But if its the law, were going to have to do it just like the Democrats are.

The challenge will be providing a consistent message that reassures GOP voters.

The same day McDaniel announced her initiative, Republicans in Congress were holding a hearing considering legislation that, among other things, would ban ballot collection in the District of Columbia. GOP state lawmakers around the country have chipped away at advanced voting opportunities since 2020. Some state and local election Republicans have gone further, advocating for just a single day of voting.

After the 2020 presidential election, the movie 2000 Mules was a popular video that made various debunked claims about mail ballots, drop boxes and ballot collection. Even the co-chair of the new GOP strategy, U. S. Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., has been a critic. In November, he issued a call on social media to End ballot harvesting.

Nonetheless, McDaniel noted that Republican presidential candidates, including Trump, have been talking about the importance of advance voting and ballot collection.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a high-profile GOP contender, recently told a voter he planned to launch his own ballot harvesting effort, according to video posted online by a Washington Post reporter. DeSantis said he wasnt going to fight with one hand tied behind my back.

The Trump and DeSantis campaigns did not respond to messages seeking details about ballot collection plans. Florida is among the mostly Republican-led states that have sought to ban or limit the practice in recent years, despite the GOPs reliance there on older, more conservative voters who prefer voting methods other than casting Election Day ballots.

Since the 2020 election, lawmakers in 31 states have introduced 124 bills that would restrict third-party ballot returns, according to data collected by the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks voting-related legislation in the states. Of those, 14 bills in 11 states have been enacted. That includes one DeSantis himself signed that makes it a felony for an individual to collect more than two mail ballots other than the persons own or one belonging to an immediate family member.

While some states are silent on the issue, 31 states allow someone other than the voter to return a ballot on behalf of another voter. Nine limit how many ballots one person can return, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many states limit ballot handling to a family member, household member or caregiver.

In California, efforts to lock in the early vote could be decisive next year in a string of U.S. House districts, most of them in the southern California suburbs, that are expected to play a pivotal role in determining control of the chamber. California is a Democratic stronghold, but Republicans retain pockets of strength across rural and small-town areas and the Central Valley farm belt, while the states suburban congressional districts have yielded many tights races in recent election cycles.

As many as nine congressional seats are considered competitive, and several races will play out in districts won by President Joe Biden but where the seat is held by a Republican. Each of Californias 22 million registered voters is mailed a ballot one month before Election Day.

In any close election, the ability to capture absentee votes becomes extremely important, especially in a state like ours, where every single voter has a ballot in their home, conservative activist Jon Fleishman said.

Democrats were critical of the new GOP effort after years of messaging by Republicans against mail voting.

Donald Trump and extremist Republicans have spent years telling lies about elections to justify their losses. That includes demonizing mail ballots and ballot collection, said Jena Griswold, Colorados secretary of state and head of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. These hypocritical extremists are only interested in spreading chaos and trying to gain power at any cost.

Top Republicans remain determined to make the case within their own ranks, said Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C.

Weve got to have a change of culture among Republican voters, said Hudson, who chairs the House GOPs national campaign committee. And its going to require us all on the same page.

(AP)




The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NY), the nations largest American-Muslim advocacy group, has strongly criticized the leadership of the City University of New York (CUNY) for denouncing a law school graduates commencement address as hate speech, alleging that the speech was actually cleared by the schools administrators.

CAIR-NY condemned the CUNY Board of Trustees and Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez for their failure to defend the free speech rights of Palestinian activist Fatima Mousa Mohammed, claiming that they succumbed to pressure from Jewish activists and supporters of Israel. In a statement, CAIR-NY expressed, CUNY has a responsibility to protect its students, even in the face of disagreement or discomfort, and its failure to do so is unacceptable.

According to CAIR-NY, Mohammeds speech was submitted, reviewed, and pre-approved by CUNY in both written and verbal form. They emphasized that the speech received positive reception from the audience and was endorsed by various CUNY student leaders, including the Jewish Law Students Association. CAIR-NY refuted CUNYs characterization of the speech as hate speech, asserting that it was false and defamatory.

The organization underscored the importance of free speech as a fundamental pillar of democracy and expressed alarm over CUNYs alleged willingness to yield to pressure aimed at silencing dissenting voices. CAIR-NY also highlighted the cyberbullying and death threats Mohammed has faced and expressed solidarity with her and other students targeted for advocating justice. They urged CUNY to live up to its stated values and resist succumbing to anti-Palestinian pressure.

During her commencement address on May 12, Mohammed accused Israel of indiscriminately using force against worshipers, including the elderly and young, and criticized CUNY for cooperating with the New York Police Department and the military, referring to them as fascist entities. She also condemned the school for training Israeli soldiers to carry out violence globally.

While the CUNY board of trustees, led by chairman Bill Thompson, and Chancellor Matos Rodriguez eventually labeled Mohammeds speech as hate speech, it was noted that CUNY law administrators, including Dean Sudha Setty, applauded her address, and no one on stage condemned it. In contrast, 40 professors from CUNY Law school supported Mohammed in a letter and condemned the universitys leadership for disavowing one of its students.

However, a Jewish rights watchdog group has called for Chancellor Matos Rodriguezs resignation over the controversy. Additionally, some CUNY Law School alumni expressed concerns in a letter that the graduation ceremony was an inappropriate platform for Mohammeds provocative protest speech, claiming that their alma mater had fostered a toxic, intolerant, and antisemitic environment.

A source within CUNY, as reported by The Post, claimed that the speech delivered by Mohammed differed from the draft she had submitted to the administration. The source stated that she was expected to speak for four minutes, but her address lasted for 13 minutes.

In her controversial speech, Mohammed stated, We joined this institution to be equipped with the necessary legal skills to protect our communities, highlighting their enrollment in CUNY Law to challenge systems of oppression designed to sustain an empire driven by destructive violence. She also criticized institutions created to intimidate and silence those who resist.

(YWN World Headquarters  NYC)




Donald Trumps indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate has brought renewed attention to one of the most notable cases in Justice Department history.

The federal charges represent the biggest legal jeopardy so far for Trump, coming less than three months after he was charged in New York with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Heres a look at the charges, the special counsels investigation and how Trumps case differs from those of other politicians known to be in possession of classified documents:

WHAT ARE THE CHARGES, AND HOW IS TRUMP REACTING?

Trump has been charged with seven counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, according to two people familiar with the indictment but not authorized to speak publicly about it.

Trumps lawyer James Trusty said Thursday on CNN that the indictment includes charges of willful retention of national defense information, obstruction of justice, false statements and conspiracy.

Trump, on his Truth Social app, called it a DARK DAY for the United States of America. In a video post, he said, Im innocent and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly. Within 20 minutes of breaking the news, his 2024 presidential campaign sent out a fundraising missive telling his followers hed been indicted and asking for financial support.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The Justice Department did not immediately publicly confirm the indictment, and any charges were not publicly filed.

Trump said hed been summoned to appear in court Tuesday afternoon in Miami. It wasnt immediately clear if Trump planned to make the appearance and what the procedure would look like.

When he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney in the New York case, Trump surrendered to authorities, where he was booked behind closed doors and appeared in the courtroom, sitting with his lawyers at the defense table.

HOW DID THIS CASE COME ABOUT?

Officials with the National Archives and Records Administration reached out to representatives for Trump in spring 2021 when they realized that important material from his time in office was missing from their collection.

According to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents are considered property of the U.S. government and must be preserved.

A Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago. In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trumps Florida home, later telling Justice Department officials that they contained a lot of classified material.

That May, the FBI and Justice Department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Trumps possession. Investigators who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Trumps lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.

But that assertion turned out to be false. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents.

In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings  including some at the top-secret level  have been recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021.

HOW DID A SPECIAL COUNSEL GET INVOLVED?

Last year, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland picked Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor with a background in public corruption probes, to lead investigations into the presence of classified documents at Trumps Florida estate, as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.

Smiths appointment was a recognition by Garland of the politics involved in an investigation into a former president and current White House candidate. Garland himself was selected by Democratic President Joe Biden, whom Trump is seeking to challenge for the White House in 2024.

Special counsels are appointed in cases in which the Justice Department perceives itself as having a conflict or where its deemed to be in the public interest to have someone outside the government come in and take responsibility for a matter.

According to the Code of Federal Regulations, a special counsel must have a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking, as well as an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies.

DIDNT BIDEN AND FORMER VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE HAVE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS, TOO?

Yes, but the circumstances of their cases are vastly different from the situation involving Trump.

After classified documents were found at Bidens think tank and Pences Indiana home, their lawyers notified authorities and quickly arranged for them to be handed over. They also authorized other searches by federal authorities to search for additional documents.

There is no indication either was aware of the existence of the records before they were found, and no evidence has so far emerged that Biden or Pence sought to conceal the discoveries. Thats important because the Justice Department historically looks for willfulness in deciding whether to bring criminal charges.

A special counsel was appointed earlier this year to probe how classified materials ended up at Bidens Delaware home and former office. But even if the Justice Department were to find Bidens case prosecutable on the evidence, its Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a president is immune from prosecution during his time in office.

As for Pence, the Justice Department informed his legal team earlier this month that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against him over his handling of the documents.

DOES A FEDERAL INDICTMENT PREVENT TRUMP FROM RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT?

No. Neither the indictment itself nor a conviction would prevent Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

And as the New York case showed, criminal charges have historically been a boon to his fundraising. The campaign announced that it had raised over $4 million in the 24 hours after that indictment became public, far smashing its previous record after the FBI search of Trumps Mar-a-Lago club.

HOW ARE TRUMPS REPUBLICAN RIVALS REACTING TO THE NEWS?

Many of Trumps challengers for the GOP nomination jumped to his defense Thursday night after news of the indictment broke.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trumps top rival for the 2024 nomination, accused the Justice Department of political bias in charging the former president.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, DeSantis tweeted. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.

He questioned why the Justice Department had been so zealous in bringing charges against Trump and so passive about going after former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton or Bidens son Hunter.

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said he felt the justice systems scales are weighted based on politics. In America, every single person is presumed innocent, not guilty, Scott said on Fox News, decrying the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president.

Biotech entrepreneur and anti-woke activist Vivek Ramaswamy said the federal case was part of an affront to every citizen. Reiterating his comments that he would pardon Trump, Ramaswamy called it hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden over his own classified documents case.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who called for Trump to drop out of the race after the New York charges were filed, said the federal indictment marked a sad day for our country and reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.

Former Vice President Mike Pence said earlier Thursday that if Trump were to be indicted, he would hope the Justice Department had strong evidence  a shift in tone from the night before, when he said he hoped Trump wouldnt be charged even if evidence is clear he committed a crime.

(AP)




During his time as vice president, Joe Biden and his family received a bribe of $5 million from the head of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma, according to Republicans who reviewed an FBI whistleblower document.

In a significant development, FBI Director Christopher Wray earlier this week granted House Oversight committee members access to an FBI document, designated as FD-1023, pertaining to the allegations. The move came after the FBI chief faced threats of being held in contempt of Congress for its failure to comply with a subpoena for the document.

According to Rep. James Comer, the chairman of the committee, the document is part of an ongoing investigation and contains allegations provided by a paid FBI informant. Republicans, including Comer, assert that the information within the document originates from a paid FBI informant who is regarded as trusted and highly credible.

While Joe Biden served as vice president, his son Hunter Biden held a lucrative position on the board of Burisma. Republicans allege that this arrangement was connected to Joe Bidens efforts as vice president to pressure the Ukrainian government into dismissing Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin. According to Republicans, a FBI form indicated that Mykola Zlochevsky, a Ukrainian businessman and owner of Burisma, allegedly confessed to the FBI informant that he paid $5 million each to Hunter Biden and then-Vice President Biden as a means to thwart a corruption investigation.

Ironically, the mention of Burisma in a July 2019 call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sparked controversy, leading to a whistleblower complaint and subsequent impeachment proceedings initiated by the Democratic-led House. Democrats denied the claims that Shokin had been genuinely investigating Burisma, while Republicans argued the opposite.

Within the document, the committee members noted references to two additional FBI documents related to the bribery allegations. It is anticipated that Rep. James Comer and Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the Oversight Committee, will review these documents in the upcoming week.

(YWN World Headquarters  NYC)
The Federal Railroad Administration plans to audit the safety cultures and practices of all the Class I railroads operating in the U.S. (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) plans to audit the safety cultures and practices of all the Class I railroads operating in the U.S., according to a recent letter by FRA Administrator Amit Bose.

FRAs review will include assessments of the safety culture, practices and compliance of individual railroads, as well as a final report that will address safety themes and trends in the industry overall, according to Boses letter to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

These plans come as FRA said Friday that it is asking the railroads to evaluate their processes for monitoring and measuring the health of journal bearings.

Since the Feb. 3 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio, federal and state lawmakers have been urging reforms to bolster rail safety. As a result, bipartisan legislation on rail safety is awaiting further action on the Senate floor.

Schumer, Senate majority leader, also pressed Bose and the CEOs of the Class I railroads to come up with ways to improve rail safety.

Although FRA does not directly regulate a railroads safety culture, each assessment report will note the strong aspects of a railroads safety culture and recommend changes where there are opportunities for improvement, said Boses June 1 letter. Each Class I railroad will be asked to develop corrective actions in response to FRAs recommendations, and FRA will track those to completion.

FRA also recently completed field work for its assessment of NS (NYSE: NSC) safety culture, practices and compliance, and a report on its findings will be coming soon, according to Bose.

In a related move, the National Transportation Safety Board recently announced it would hold field hearings June 22-23 on the NS train derailment. The hearings will occur in East Palestine and will focus on four issues: emergency responses; the decision to vent and burn five tank cars carrying vinyl chloride; freight car bearing failure modes and wayside detection systems; and tank car derailment damage and issues related to crashworthiness and hazardous materials.

Scrutinizing train lengths and transport of hazardous materials

Bose addressed two other questions that Schumer raised: one on the effect of longer train lengths on safety and the other on the transport of hazardous materials.

Regarding longer trains, the FRA administrator pointed to two recent safety advisories: one on the operational complexities involved in running longer trains and another on train makeup and building trains.

Bose also cited plans for additional studies, which were called for by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and will be completed in 2024. One is for FRA to study air brake system performance and the resulting train dynamics of trains up to 200 cars in length. The other is for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to study the impacts of trains longer than 7,500 feet.

As part of FRAs study, the agency is collecting data on the lengths of trains involved in reportable accidents and the size of the locomotives train crew in each of those accidents.

For the transportation of hazardous materials by rail, FRA routinely inspects hazmat rail cars and enforces related regulations, Bose told Schumer. A study is also underway looking at the routes nationwide where trains carrying highly flammable material travel. That studys purpose is to evaluate the overall condition of infrastructure, including equipment used to transport hazmat as well as railroads compliance with federal regulations, Bose said.

A rail safety advisory committee affiliated with FRA and made up of people in the industry is also looking at whether to expand the definition of high-hazard freight trains and look at their train configurations, he said.

FRA is working with the short-line railroads to ensure their safety performance, according to Bose.

Assessing processes used to evaluate journal bearings

In a separate action, FRA said Friday that it wants the freight railroads to evaluate the resiliency and accuracy of the processes they use to monitor and measure bearing health.

This recommendation is in addition to other recommendations FRA provided in a safety advisory in March that addressed the use and maintenance of hot bearing detectors (HBD), FRA said.

FRA notes that the process of gathering, monitoring, reporting, analyzing, and actioning information from detectors includes tasks that, if incorrectly done, can introduce risk, FRA said. For instance, an error in HBD installation or maintenance that is not identified by commissioning testing may impact the reporting of HBD measurements. Similarly, processes with insufficient redundancies or cross-checks to ensure each necessary step or task is performed timely and accurately may lead to failures in the processes that allow a valid detector alert or alarm to go undetected.

As a result, FRA is asking the railroads to evaluate which steps and tasks could result in incorrect decisions when personnel are responding to a report from an HBD. After the railroads have identified these areas, the agency is also recommending that the railroads implement safeguards that could minimize the impact of failures that arent able to be detected by HBDs.

The new recommendation is pending publication in the Federal Register.

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Just days after ex-Labor MK Omer Bar-Lev handed a letter of apology to the sons of HaGaon HaRav Gershon Edelstein, ztl in which he stated that he apologizes from the bottom of his heart, he claimed that it wasnt an apology after all.

In an interview with Yediot Achranot, Bar-Lev said: We didnt surrender. I dont see it as an apology letter. You can write headlines from here to there but it wasnt a letter of apology.

We werent pressured by the threats, Bar-Lev claimed, explaining why he visited the Edelstein home. But as soon as it turned into another battle in the Israeli public and against the bakery  a bakery that has been supplying bread for 100 years  as soon as it became clear to us that our silence was being interpreted as arrogance and disdain, it was clear that something had to be done.

Bar-Lev explained the sequence of events: A week after I assumed the position of chairman of the board of directors of Angel Bakery, various parties spread fake news about me as if I had protested in front of the home of HaRav Edelstein, ztl, slighting his kavod. I didnt foresee the result of the boycott. But it happened very quickly.

It should be noted that contrary to Bar-Levs claim that the protest just happened to be at that specific location in Bnei Brak, the protest organizers announced that the protest was outside the home of the Rosh Yeshivah, ztl in a notice to the press.

Bar-Lev admitted that he was surprised by the strength and scope of the boycott but denied that his apology [that wasnt an apology] had anything to do with financial concerns. The whole story is not a financial one. Obviously, orders were canceled, but what worried us was that people would start to be fired from the branches [that were closing due to the boycott]. So people supporting their families will be fired? Thats all I needed.

It should be noted that as soon as the reports of Bar-Levs apology was publicized, he was attacked by the far-left for capitulating to the Chareidim so he is obviously now trying to save face.

Angel owner Yaron Angel disavowed himself from Bar-Levs statements. Omer Bar-Lev is a private and political person and the interview was a personal one. We were not a party to the interview and what was said during it. Angel Bakery apologized sincerely and in a clear and open manner  an unambiguous apology. This is a fact and we stand behind it.

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)




Outgoing Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides personally approved a $1 million grant to a program aimed at delegitimizing Israel, the Washington Free Beacon reported this week.

The report, verified by emails obtained by the America First Legal Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act request, says that Nides personally signed the documents needed for the State Department to grant $987,654 to groups investigating alleged human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

Those applying for the grant were instructed to probe the Israeli government for documentation of legal or security sector violations and housing, land, and property rights. In other words, the grant money empowers groups critical of Israel to delegitimize it by advancing the false agenda that Israel abuses Palestinians and steals their land.

Best news to wake up to on a Monday! one State Department employee wrote upon receiving confirmation that the grant had been approved.

A State Department spokesman refused to comment on the report, saying, as a general matter, we do not discuss internal government communications.

The Free Beacons first report on the taxpayer-funded grant in March 2022 prompted a congressional investigation and accusations from Republican politicians that the Biden administration is working to strengthen the BDS movement against Israel.

However, the State Department told the Free Beacon that the grant had been canceled but later clarified that no grant was awarded for this funding opportunity. The spokesperson would not explain further or provide the Free Beacon with updated information about the funding proposal.

As the review of proposals is part of internal deliberations processes within the Department of State, we are unable to publicly share details regarding status or outcomes, the spokesperson said.

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)




After left-wing Israeli protesters shamelessly accosted Israeli ministers in Manhattan, Econmy Minister Nir Barkat was heckled by protesters in Boston on Thursday, and one protester who tried to physically accost him was arrested by the Boston Police.

In a video of the incident, the protesters can be heard yelling their customary chant: Bushah, bushah, bushah, following after Barkat in his hotel.

One of the protesters even pushed through the guards in an effort to reach Barkat. Barkats security guards attacked him in response. The protester was later arrested by the Boston Police.

Barkat later wrote on Twitter: A political murder is a matter of time in the State of Israel. Under the auspices of the protest, there are those who aim to spill the blood of elected officials. Were on a slippery and dangerous slope. I thank the security guards who repelled the attacker and prevented me from being harmed. Violence is the erosion of the foundation of democracy.

This is not the first or the second time that Barkat has been targeted by left-wing protesters but its the first time it happened in the US.

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)




y Rabbi Yair Hoffman for 5tjt.com

There is a fascinating Sifrei which the Chofetz Chaim quotes in the seventh chapter of his work, Sefas Tamim. The Sifrei states that seeing truth is a Torah Mitzvah of vhalachta bidrachaav  one must walk in His ways. Since Hashems middah is that of truth, we must seek truth in all of our endeavors and not doing so is a negation of this Torah Mitzvah. This week, I asked Rav Shaya Kanievsky shlita, the son of Rav Chaim Kanievsky zatzal, whether this Sifrei is halacha lmaaseh. His response was that it clearly is, without question.

Part of seeking truth is to identify and remove our negios our biases.

Imagine this conversation between a baker and a dentist.

Baker: I dont care what you say, I know for a fact that adding sugar to beaten egg whites is what gives lemon meringue its glossy sheen. It is a perfect toothpaste and will make for super bright teeth, not just for me, but for my children too.

Dentist: Listen, brushing your teeth with sugar will cause tooth decay. It will lead to rotten teeth and cavities.

Baker: Oh, I see where you are coming from. I come to your office and see all of these free toothpastes that you give out. The Big Toothpaste-a manufacturers have bought you out against us.

Dentist: No really, I went to dental school. I know what I am talking about. Streptococcus mutans is the very harmful bacteria that is responsible for dental decay. It contains an enzyme called glucosyl transferase that binds together a long string of sugars molecules called dextran. Dextran forms plaque and lactic acid that this bacteria creates. This acid allows the calcium and phosphorous in the tooth enamel to dissolve. The harmful bacteria is cemented to the tooth in the form of plaque and produces more acid. We need to starve the harmful bacteria from the sugars, not add to it.

Baker: Baloney Macaroni! Tell it to less gullible people than me. Have a good day doctor. You are being paid off by the toothpaste companies. But I see, every day, lemon meringue and I see its glossy sheen and I know that this will make my teeth and my childrens teeth much brighter, cleaner and better. You are being blinded by the money that the toothpaste companies give you.

____________________ ___

What we have here is a case of a baker, who is negating the view of experts, of science, and of proven studies. He attributes everything to the money that the dentists receive.

What follows is a discussion of the multiplicity of negios  biases that exist within us, yet, nonetheless must be identified and removed in order for us not to negate the Mitzvah found in the Sifrei. It will also serve to help us not cause harm in this world.

The negios or biases are:

A cognitive bias

A pattern recognition bias

A negativity bias

A needs an explanation bias

A why do it bias

Without meaning to be insensitive to people,chalilah, in essence, our baker is not very different than those who erroneously attribute SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), autism and various other afflictions and possible deaths to vaccines. We never look at how many deaths existed beforehand, we just see one as a result of another.

Autism diagnoses are definitely on the rise, but because it is unknown what exactly causes autism people try to make sense of it themselves. Hashem placed these systems and biases in place because, in general, they help us. Nonetheless, we must use our saichel hayashar, our Divinely endowed intellect, to overcome them. We all have a cognitive bias which means anything that changes how we view, process, and interpret information. We hear explanations and think, well that makes sense  even though it doesnt fit with the math, or the statistics, or what trained and educated experts say.

We also need to understand how people first see that their child has autism. Parents see a delay in language skill development or a cessation of overall development. We all have a need to recognize pattern recognition bias, to fit things in a neat box. We have a need to be able to figure out what behaviors and strategies lead to positive outcomes.

But even more than that, we have a natural ayin raah (See Pirkei Avos 2:11) that needs to be checked on. We are often on the lookout for things that lead to negative outcomes. This is a form negativity bias.

Lets imagine you are driving to the Brightstone in an area in New Jersey that is foreign to you, and your Waze or Google Maps stops working  you spend time wondering what happened. But if they are working, we think nothing about it. We spend far more thought and time attempting to figure out why a bad thing happened than we do, trying to figure out why something good happened. This is explanation bias.

When the most recent thing that happened was the vaccination, we blame that even though there are dozens of peer-reviewed papers that have found no correlation between autism and the MMR vaccine or any other vaccine.

Google it and you will find bakers who claim a link. And like our baker, the government or Big Pharma is covering it up.

There is also the shaiv val taaseh bias. Why do it? Lets just leave well enough alone bias. The problem with this is that when it is statistically and medically proven by competent doctors  there is a Mitzvah to do it. I have a friend who is deaf in one ear because he got the mumps as a child  before they did the vaccines for it. He gets upset when he hears people not doing it. Nowadays. People are entirely unfamiliar with how scary Polio was. When Jonas Salk invented the vaccine against it, he was a national hero. Practically everyone in America sent in dimes to help him with FDRs March of Dimes program.

The existence of those who are anti-vaccine or vaccine risk aware is because of the successes of the polio vaccine and more.

Rav Tzvi Koshelevsky (Toras Tzvi Parshas Chaye Sarah) writes that if we do not address eliminating our biases we will never be able to fully see truth. The vaccine risk awareness person will often turn things around, but lets ask ourselves, who is more likely to have the correct knowledge base  in other words who is the baker and who is the dentist?

The author can be reached at [email protected]
They say luck comes in threes. And so it seems. After the news that Turkish soda ash producer, WE Soda, is listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) comes the decision by tech unicorn, CAB Payments, to head for the capitals main market.

The third boost is that US tech giant Palantir has chosen the UK as its European HQ for AI developments.

Rishi Sunak will have been delighted to hear Palantirs chief executive, Alexander Karp, wax lyrical about how Britains pragmatism about technology was one of the main attractions in choosing London  as well as being a magnet for so much talent.

We are not used to so much praise but it will have gone down well, particularly as the Prime Minister is pushing for London as the site of a new global AI regulator  a body modelled on the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The decision by Sutton-based CAB Payments  otherwise known as Crown Agents Bank  to float in London is significant.

London calling: Turkish soda ash producer, WE Soda and UK tech unicorn, CAB Payments, have bot chosen the City for their IPOs

Its a sophisticated business, one that handled around $30billion (23.9billion) of payments last year, providing B2B cross-border payments and foreign exchange services between 150 countries.

Unusually for so many fintech companies, its profitable too and likely to be valued at over 1billion. Yet much of the recent criticism of London was that its public markets were less well-suited to tech companies than the New York exchanges.

Supposedly, this was because of the lower valuations put on tech businesses in the UK by investors than in the US.

Indeed, it was given as one of the main reasons why SoftBank opted to float the semiconductor giant Arm in New York rather than London.

Londons lack of liquidity compared to New York is often cited as another hindrance. CABs chief executive Bhairav Trivedi does not appear to share such fears. Quite the reverse.

The Wharton and Stanford-educated engineer, who has spent more than three decades in the finance industry, says that while CAB did look at other markets, it decided the LSE was the best option on several fronts, including being close to home and having great pools of liquidity.

And heres one for the declinists: Trivedi added that he is extremely bullish for the UK economy and has confidence in Britain as the home for innovative and growing global businesses.

But are the floats by WE Soda and CAB just part of a lucky streak?

Or a sign of a big mood shift?

One IPO may be pure chance but two coming together one day after the other like this rather suggests that we are at last seeing proper signs of a resurgence of confidence in Londons capital markets.

Admittedly, its had a bad run: IPOs fell to their lowest level in a decade last year, with only 41 firms listing on the main market.

Yet there does seem to be a shift in mood, spurred on by the huge efforts of regulators and politicians to speed up reforms, such as Jeremy Hunts recent Edinburgh ones to improve access to the markets.

The decision to permit companies to sell fewer shares for a free float also seems to be having its effect. WE Soda and CAB have indicated they will sell between 10 per cent and 15 per cent of their shares, a decent enough chunk to show their commitment.

And both have indicated more might be made available.

City minister Andrew Griffith is right to say the armchair generals should stop sniping. They should start celebrating instead. Its better for the soul.

More homes

The housing market is in trouble. Prices are falling, there are not enough being built and mortgage payments are about to rise.

Now the boss of Crest Nicholson wants the Government to step in to support the market  as it did for first-time buyers with Help to Buy  because of this weakness.

This is upside-down thinking, a policy that distorts the market rather than improves supply.

Instead, Crests Peter Truscott and fellow housebuilders should be urging ministers to give up the ridiculous pandering to NIMBYs and force councils to allow more building. Even then, the private sector does not have the capacity to build anywhere near enough homes for our children and grandchildren.

Theres only one way to achieve critical mass: to restore some form of state scheme last seen in the 1970s, when more houses were built each year than now.
Royal Mails plans to axe Saturday deliveries have been blocked by ministers despite the firms widening losses and concerns about the spiralling price of first-class stamps.

Business minister Kevin Hollinrake has told the 507-year-old company that the Government has no plans to review its universal service obligation (USO), which requires it to deliver six days a week.

Hollinrake said in a letter to MPs on the business select committee: Postal services have long played a key role in our society.

Saturday post: The Government said there were no plans to review Royal Mail's universal service obligation, which requires deliveries six days a week

The ability to send and receive letters and parcels is important both socially and economically.

This is particularly true for consumers who might be more vulnerable, such as those who are geographically or digitally isolated from their friends and family.

It came after Keith Williams, chairman of Royal Mails parent company International Distributions Services (IDS), said urgent changes were needed to the USO to keep the firm afloat.

It says the public no longer needs a six-day-a- week service as fewer letters are being sent.

About 7bn letters were sent last year  down from 20bn in 2004.

And estimates suggest Royal Mail could save as much as 250million per year if deliveries were cut to five days.

Williams has warned that if the Government does not budge, Royal Mail would be forced to make considerable increases to the cost of a first-class stamp.

Royal Mail broke the 1 barrier for the first time in April, raising the price from 95p to 1.10.

Royal Mail lost 1.04billion for the 12 months to March 26, having made a profit of 250million the previous year.

It said: It is clear that when letter volumes have declined by more than 60 per cent since their peak, in order to be financially sustainable, the Universal Service requires urgent reform.
Tesco (OTCMKTS:TSCDY  Get Rating) had its target price lowered by stock analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co. from GBX 290 ($3.61) to GBX 270 ($3.36) in a research report issued to clients and investors on Wednesday, The Fly reports.

Several other analysts have also recently issued reports on TSCDY. Barclays increased their price objective on Tesco from GBX 310 ($3.85) to GBX 320 ($3.98) in a research note on Friday, April 14th. Morgan Stanley raised Tesco from an equal weight rating to an overweight rating in a report on Wednesday, March 29th. Finally, Jefferies Financial Group raised Tesco from a hold rating to a buy rating in a report on Monday, March 6th.

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Tesco Stock Performance

OTCMKTS:TSCDY opened at $9.83 on Wednesday. The stocks fifty day moving average is $10.08 and its two-hundred day moving average is $9.24. Tesco has a 52 week low of $6.54 and a 52 week high of $10.75.

About Tesco

Tesco Plc engages in the retailing and retail banking. It operates through the following segments: UK and ROI, Central Europe, Asia, and Tesco Bank. The UK and ROI segment caters to the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. The Central Europe segment covers the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.

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Integrated Wealth Concepts LLC decreased its position in Realty Income Co. (NYSE:O  Get Rating) by 3.6% in the 4th quarter, according to its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm owned 13,156 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock after selling 496 shares during the period. Integrated Wealth Concepts LLCs holdings in Realty Income were worth $834,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

Other institutional investors and hedge funds also recently made changes to their positions in the company. Vanguard Group Inc. lifted its position in Realty Income by 2.8% in the 3rd quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 98,517,484 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $5,733,718,000 after acquiring an additional 2,692,028 shares in the last quarter. BlackRock Inc. lifted its position in Realty Income by 1.3% in the 3rd quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 57,015,332 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $3,318,291,000 after acquiring an additional 736,125 shares in the last quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC lifted its position in Realty Income by 3.4% in the 4th quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 14,354,940 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $911,059,000 after acquiring an additional 465,470 shares in the last quarter. Daiwa Securities Group Inc. lifted its position in Realty Income by 18.8% in the 4th quarter. Daiwa Securities Group Inc. now owns 8,954,741 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $567,999,000 after acquiring an additional 1,419,353 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Dimensional Fund Advisors LP lifted its position in Realty Income by 0.3% in the 4th quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP now owns 8,246,941 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $523,110,000 after acquiring an additional 26,175 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 80.56% of the companys stock.

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Analysts Set New Price Targets

Several equities research analysts have commented on O shares. Stifel Nicolaus boosted their price target on shares of Realty Income from $71.00 to $71.25 in a research report on Thursday, May 4th. StockNews.com started coverage on shares of Realty Income in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a sell rating on the stock. Scotiabank raised shares of Realty Income from a sector perform rating to a sector outperform rating and set a $69.00 price target on the stock in a research report on Wednesday, April 12th. Royal Bank of Canada boosted their price target on shares of Realty Income from $68.00 to $70.00 and gave the stock an outperform rating in a research report on Thursday, February 23rd. Finally, Mizuho dropped their target price on shares of Realty Income from $69.00 to $66.00 and set a neutral rating on the stock in a report on Thursday, March 9th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have given a hold rating and five have assigned a buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $71.47.

Realty Income Stock Down 0.2 %

Realty Income Announces Dividend

Shares of O opened at $60.86 on Friday. Realty Income Co. has a 52 week low of $55.50 and a 52 week high of $75.11. The firm has a market cap of $40.97 billion, a P/E ratio of 42.86, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 3.03 and a beta of 0.80. The firms 50-day simple moving average is $61.26 and its 200 day simple moving average is $63.39. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.64, a quick ratio of 1.85 and a current ratio of 1.85.

The business also recently declared a may 23 dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, June 15th. Investors of record on Thursday, June 1st will be paid a $0.255 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Wednesday, May 31st. This represents a yield of 5.1%. Realty Incomes dividend payout ratio (DPR) is currently 215.49%.

Realty Income Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Realty Income Corp. is a real estate company, which engages in generating dependable monthly cash dividends from a consistent and predictable level of cash flow from operations. The company was founded by William E. Clark, Jr. and Evelyn Joan Clark in 1969 and is headquartered in San Diego, CA.

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Public Employees Retirement Association of Colorado trimmed its position in Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. (NYSE:CMG  Get Rating) by 0.4% during the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund owned 4,603 shares of the restaurant operators stock after selling 18 shares during the period. Public Employees Retirement Association of Colorados holdings in Chipotle Mexican Grill were worth $6,387,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Several other institutional investors also recently bought and sold shares of the company. FourThought Financial LLC boosted its holdings in shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill by 350.0% during the 3rd quarter. FourThought Financial LLC now owns 18 shares of the restaurant operators stock worth $27,000 after purchasing an additional 14 shares during the last quarter. Elequin Securities LLC acquired a new position in shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill during the 4th quarter worth approximately $28,000. Heritage Wealth Management LLC boosted its holdings in shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill by 100.0% during the 4th quarter. Heritage Wealth Management LLC now owns 20 shares of the restaurant operators stock worth $28,000 after purchasing an additional 10 shares during the last quarter. Global Wealth Strategies & Associates acquired a new position in shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill during the 4th quarter worth approximately $36,000. Finally, Worth Asset Management LLC acquired a new position in shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill during the 1st quarter worth approximately $44,000. 93.26% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

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Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Several research analysts have recently weighed in on the company. Stifel Nicolaus boosted their target price on Chipotle Mexican Grill from $1,750.00 to $2,000.00 and gave the stock a buy rating in a report on Friday, April 21st. Oppenheimer boosted their target price on Chipotle Mexican Grill from $1,940.00 to $2,050.00 and gave the stock an outperform rating in a report on Wednesday, April 26th. Credit Suisse Group boosted their target price on Chipotle Mexican Grill from $2,050.00 to $2,200.00 and gave the stock an outperform rating in a report on Wednesday, April 26th. Evercore ISI lifted their price target on shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill from $2,000.00 to $2,100.00 in a research report on Wednesday, April 26th. Finally, Raymond James lifted their price target on shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill from $1,900.00 to $2,100.00 and gave the company an outperform rating in a research report on Wednesday, April 26th. Six investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and twenty-two have issued a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, the company currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $2,039.89.

Insider Buying and Selling

Chipotle Mexican Grill Stock Up 0.0 %

In other Chipotle Mexican Grill news, CEO Brian R. Niccol sold 991 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Monday, March 13th. The shares were sold at an average price of $1,537.37, for a total value of $1,523,533.67. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 23,347 shares in the company, valued at $35,892,977.39. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this hyperlink . In other Chipotle Mexican Grill news, CEO Brian R. Niccol sold 1,078 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Thursday, June 1st. The stock was sold at an average price of $2,058.13, for a total transaction of $2,218,664.14. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 23,347 shares of the companys stock, valued at $48,051,161.11. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is accessible through the SEC website . Also, CEO Brian R. Niccol sold 991 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Monday, March 13th. The stock was sold at an average price of $1,537.37, for a total value of $1,523,533.67. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now directly owns 23,347 shares in the company, valued at approximately $35,892,977.39. The disclosure for this sale can be found here . Over the last quarter, insiders sold 13,337 shares of company stock worth $26,227,935. Corporate insiders own 0.96% of the companys stock.

NYSE:CMG opened at $2,023.79 on Friday. The company has a fifty day simple moving average of $1,942.10 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $1,681.38. The company has a market cap of $55.84 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 54.74, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.45 and a beta of 1.34. Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. has a 52 week low of $1,196.28 and a 52 week high of $2,139.88.

Chipotle Mexican Grill (NYSE:CMG  Get Rating) last issued its earnings results on Tuesday, April 25th. The restaurant operator reported $10.50 EPS for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $8.89 by $1.61. The firm had revenue of $2.40 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $2.34 billion. Chipotle Mexican Grill had a net margin of 11.49% and a return on equity of 45.01%. The companys revenue was up 18.8% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same quarter in the previous year, the firm posted $5.70 earnings per share. On average, analysts expect that Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. will post 43.9 EPS for the current year.

About Chipotle Mexican Grill

(Get Rating)

Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc engages in the development and operation of classically-cooked, real food with wholesome ingredients without artificial colors, flavors or preservatives. It offers a focused menu of burritos, tacos, burrito bowls, and salads prepared using classic cooking methods. The company was founded by Steve Ells in 1993 and is headquartered in Newport Beach, CA.

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Public Employees Retirement Association of Colorado lessened its position in shares of Aflac Incorporated (NYSE:AFL  Get Rating) by 0.7% during the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the SEC. The firm owned 99,485 shares of the financial services providers stock after selling 686 shares during the quarter. Public Employees Retirement Association of Colorados holdings in Aflac were worth $7,157,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Several other institutional investors have also recently made changes to their positions in the company. MinichMacGregor Wealth Management LLC acquired a new stake in Aflac in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $27,000. JCIC Asset Management Inc. acquired a new stake in Aflac in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $29,000. Arlington Partners LLC acquired a new stake in Aflac in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $29,000. Romano Brothers AND Company acquired a new stake in Aflac in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $36,000. Finally, CarsonAllaria Wealth Management Ltd. increased its holdings in Aflac by 534.9% in the 4th quarter. CarsonAllaria Wealth Management Ltd. now owns 527 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $38,000 after purchasing an additional 444 shares during the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 66.22% of the companys stock.

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Aflac Price Performance

Aflac stock opened at $68.21 on Friday. The stock has a market cap of $41.21 billion, a P/E ratio of 9.84, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.51 and a beta of 0.94. The company has a fifty day simple moving average of $66.29 and a 200-day simple moving average of $68.36. Aflac Incorporated has a 12-month low of $52.07 and a 12-month high of $74.01. The company has a current ratio of 0.05, a quick ratio of 0.05 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.38.

Aflac Dividend Announcement

Aflac ( NYSE:AFL Get Rating ) last released its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, April 27th. The financial services provider reported $1.55 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $1.40 by $0.15. The business had revenue of $4.80 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $4.61 billion. Aflac had a net margin of 22.90% and a return on equity of 15.25%. The companys revenue for the quarter was down 7.2% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the previous year, the company earned $1.42 EPS. Equities analysts expect that Aflac Incorporated will post 5.81 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 1st. Stockholders of record on Wednesday, May 17th were given a dividend of $0.42 per share. The ex-dividend date was Tuesday, May 16th. This represents a $1.68 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 2.46%. Aflacs dividend payout ratio (DPR) is currently 24.24%.

Insider Transactions at Aflac

In related news, COO Frederick John Crawford sold 59,053 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Tuesday, May 2nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $68.43, for a total value of $4,040,996.79. Following the completion of the sale, the chief operating officer now directly owns 321,367 shares of the companys stock, valued at $21,991,143.81. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available through this hyperlink. In other Aflac news, COO Frederick John Crawford sold 59,053 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Tuesday, May 2nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $68.43, for a total value of $4,040,996.79. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief operating officer now owns 321,367 shares in the company, valued at $21,991,143.81. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this hyperlink. Also, Director Barbara K. Rimer sold 18,210 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Tuesday, May 2nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $68.18, for a total transaction of $1,241,557.80. Following the completion of the transaction, the director now owns 35,813 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $2,441,730.34. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. In the last three months, insiders sold 112,582 shares of company stock valued at $7,647,192. Insiders own 0.90% of the companys stock.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

AFL has been the subject of several research reports. VNET Group reiterated a maintains rating on shares of Aflac in a report on Thursday, April 27th. Bank of America assumed coverage on shares of Aflac in a report on Monday. They issued a buy rating for the company. Wells Fargo & Company assumed coverage on shares of Aflac in a research note on Tuesday, April 25th. They issued an equal weight rating and a $73.00 price target for the company. StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of Aflac in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating for the company. Finally, Morgan Stanley dropped their price target on shares of Aflac from $77.00 to $72.00 and set an overweight rating for the company in a research note on Wednesday, April 12th. Six research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and four have issued a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat.com, the company has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $71.22.

About Aflac

(Get Rating)

Aflac, Inc is a holding company, which engages in the provision of financial protection services. It operates through the following segments: Aflac Japan and Aflac U.S. The Aflac Japan segment offers life insurance, death benefits, and cash surrender values. The Aflac U.S. segment sells voluntary supplemental insurance products for people who already have major medical or primary insurance coverage.

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Turkiye's seven industrial sectors recorded historically high export figures during the January-May period of this year, Azernews reports, citing Anadolu Agency.

Turkiye's overall exports totaled $102.5 billion during the first five months, according to the Turkish Exporters' Assembly data.

The country's industry sector's exports amounted to $73.5 billion over the same period, posting a drop of 4.4% on an annual basis.

In the same period, the share of the industrial sector in overall exports was 71.7%.

Leather and leather products ($866 million), automotive industry ($14.3 billion), electricity and electronics ($6.6 billion), machinery and machinery accessories ($4.6 billion), jewelry ($2.6 billion), defense and aerospace industry ($2 billion) and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning and refrigeration ($3 billion) realized the highest January-May exports of all time.

Leather and leather products exports totaled $102.7 million, and machinery and accessories exports totaled $564.9 million to Russia.

The automotive industry exports amounted to $2 billion and the air conditioning and refrigeration exports were at $318.3 million to Germany.

The electrical and electronics industry exports worth $644.8 million to the UK, and the jewelry industry $634.5 million to the UAE.
Foreign investors have been dumping vast amounts of Chinese assets, and putting money there will only get riskier

Chinese President Xi Jinping attends a meeting at the United Nations European headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, January 18, 2017. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

Foreign investors have been selling Chinese securities for the last two years, the Atlantic Council said.

President Xi Jinping's policies and growing geopolitical tensions have helped spur the retreat.

"Putting money in China is going to become riskier, and de-risking is only going to become more commonplace."

China's disappointing economic performance recently has been a letdown for foreign investors, but they have retreating from Chinese markets for the last two years, according to a report from the Atlantic Council.

Talk of "de-risking" from China has been trendy lately, especially as geopolitical tensions grow and the economy's post-COVID rebound has started to lose momentum.

"But foreign fund managers have already stolen a march on the policy: They've been selling vast amounts of securities over the past two years in response to Chinese leader Xi Jinping's policies and mounting US-China tensions," wrote Jeremy Mark, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's Geoeconomics Center.

In fact, international institutional investors have sold a net $148 billion of China's bonds since early 2022, and Chinese stocks have seen sharp declines, especially on exchanges in New York and Hong Kong, he said.

Separate reports have also shown that foreign investors are selling Chinese stocks at a faster pace. And a former IMF official predicted China's economy is likely headed for a so-called lost decade.

Mark said that this shift in market sentiment underscores how de-risking is as much about the bottom line as it is about diplomacy.

"And it does not bode well for China amid growing anxiety about the country's economic prospects," he added.

In addition to China's weak rebound from zero-COVID policies, Mark listed long-term structural challenges the economy faces, including a rapidly aging workforce, weak productivity, worsening inequality, and a massive property crisis.

To be sure, China doesn't need foreign capital as much as it did a generation ago, but investors' reluctance to "will reverberate through the economy over time," he warned.

Fund managers are worried about Beijing's regulatory crackdown on companies, including Western firms, Mark said.

"The bottom line for many foreign fund managers is that the risk of investing in Chinese securities has soared over the past year and the returns have not kept up," he said, adding that many large institutions have stopped buying Chinese assets completely and are shifting capital to places like India.

Meanwhile, the US is applying measures to counter China's ability to develop sensitive technology, and China is limiting its companies from launching offshore IPOs.

Mark acknowledged Chinese efforts to bring back some overseas investment, but foreign capital flows are set to keep declining, especially with new US restrictions on the horizon. Already, private equity investments in China led by Americans fell 76% last year.

"Combined with recent Biden administration restrictions on sales to China of advanced semiconductors and cutting-edge chip-making gear, the message to all classes of investors will be clear: Putting money in China is going to become riskier, and de-risking is only going to become more commonplace," he concluded.

Read the original article on Business Insider
FILE PHOTO: The logo of German publisher Axel Springer is pictured in front of the company's headquarters in Berlin

BERLIN (Reuters) - German media giant Axel Springer will establish a dedicated mergers-and-acquisitions team to look at firms specialising in artificial intelligence, CEO Matthias Doepfner said in an internal podcast to employees obtained by Reuters.

The M&A competence centre "needs to entirely focus on acquisitions - early-stage acquisitions or later-stage acquisitions in AI companies - that can be, for various reasons, important or attractive for Axel Springer," Doepfner said.

"Perhaps we make five picks and five times it doesn't work," Doepfner said of potential takeovers. But the strategy could also turn up Axel Springer's next StepStone, he added.

If the market environment improves, Axel Springer aims to go public with StepStone, a popular online jobs portal, this year.

Doepfner said he is particularly interested in AI technology that seeks to disrupt Axel Springer's business models of advertising, e-commerce and journalism.

Like StepStone, AI is a challenger to the company's traditional newspaper business, he said.

"If somebody wants to kill journalism, OK, let us understand how and why, and let us journalists do it ourselves."

The company, whose German newspaper titles include mass-circulation tabloid Bild, recently set its sights on the U.S. market with the acquisition of political news outlet Politico.

(Reporting by Klaus Lauer, Writing by Rachel More, Editing by Miranda Murray)
GM Will Join Tesla's EV Charging Network in Step Closer to US Industry Standard

GM Will Join Tesla's EV Charging Network in Step Closer to US Industry Standard

(Bloomberg) -- General Motors Co. will adapt its electric vehicles to Tesla Inc.s Superchargers, following Ford Motor Co.s lead and all but ensuring it will become an industry standard in the US.

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GM Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra broke her seven-month silence on Twitter to announce the news with Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces Thursday, saying GM EVs will gain access to 12,000 Superchargers.

Tesla rose 4.5% in premarket US trading early Friday, while GM was up 3.3%.

The move by GM effectively ends any indecision among automakers and their charging network partners over which standard to use. With the three largest US-based companies joining forces, it will put pressure on other companies to ditch the industrys previous standard, called CCS, and build out their networks using Teslas system.

Collaborating also knocks down a possible barrier to car buyers, some of whom worry about adequate charging on Americas roadways, Barra said.

This collaboration is a key part of our strategy and an important next step in quickly expanding access to fast chargers for our customers, the GM CEO said in a statement. Not only will it help make the transition to electric vehicles more seamless for our customers, but it could help move the industry toward a single North American charging standard.

It will also add millions of drivers to Teslas existing charging network. GM plans to have production to build 1 million EVs in the US in 2025. Ford has similar ambitions for 2026.

The agreement is another win for Tesla, analyst Mark Chadwick wrote in a note on Smartkarma. Positive all round and will help further cement Telsas BEV dominance.

Barra said GM will talk to its partners about working with Teslas charging network. It had recently announced a joint venture with Pilot and EVgo Inc. to add 2,000 chargers nationwide. The Detroit automaker works with other charge networks in addition to EVgo.

For Tesla, the deal will improve use of its charging network and add charging revenue from motorists, a GM spokesman said.

Teslas network will be open to GM EV drivers starting in 2024 and require an adapter, the companies said. Starting in 2025, GM will build its electric vehicles with a port for direct access to Tesla Superchargers.

Last month, Ford CEO Jim Farley went on Twitter Spaces alongside Musk and made a similar announcement, moving the auto industry toward a single charging standard.

Shares of charging network operators that compete with Teslas dropped sharply on the news, with ChargePoint Holdings Inc. down 3.9% early Friday and EVgo Inc. sliding 3.5%.

--With assistance from Esha Dey and Kurt Schussler.

(Updates share moves in third and last paragraphs)

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2023 Bloomberg L.P.
The crypto regulation discourse continues to take a new turn every week. From identifying the compliance gaps to keeping pace with the rapid innovation in the space, regulators are juggling a range of priorities, pressured to act fast as their crypto cases mount up. This is evidenced in the frequently shifting temperature among regulators globally, including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissions lawsuits this week against Coinbase and Binance, marking an escalation of the regulatory crackdown on the industry.

As regulators continue their grand experiment to create a common taxonomy for crypto, many crypto-curious institutions and funds are biting their nails to see what the end result will look like. Especially with the frequently shifting temperature among regulators, such as Christine Lagardes evolving position from Crypto is worth nothing to regulating crypto is an absolute necessity, it is hard for the industry to ascertain what crypto compliance would look like in the long term.

Crystal ball no more

Not everything is unknown for cryptos compliance journey. With the innate immutability of blockchain, the technology provides a real-time, permanent and accurate audit trail, and it is a popular belief that blockchain will have an impact on auditors.

There are also existing robust guidelines on anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) frameworks across international markets. Particularly, several financial hubs are making progress on building compliance frameworks for critical compliance risks associated with cryptocurrencies, such as money laundering and terrorism financing. In Europe, the landmark markets in crypto-assets (MiCA) rules were finally adopted by the European Council, alongside the dedicated rules for crypto AML. Similarly, Singapore governs AML, KYC and combating the financing of terrorism (CFT) under its Payment Services Act, and Hong Kong has introduced a new licensing regime, covering similar aspects.

In the United States, however, crypto companies face a challenging regulatory landscape. The lawsuits filed this week by the SEC against Coinbase and Binance underline the complexities of the regulatory landscape. These developments have implications for the broader industry, as they underscore the SECs intent to enforce compliance with securities laws. The outcomes of these cases could transform the crypto market by asserting the SECs jurisdiction over the industry, which for years has argued that tokens do not constitute securities and should not be regulated by the SEC.

Due to the emergence of robust guidelines, the popular perception that crypto has lesser AML and other compliance requirements, compared to its traditional counterparts, does not hold anymore.

If you take AML, for instance, the requirements for crypto and traditional finance are similar, encompassing various aspects such as customer due diligence measures, sanctions / AML screenings, and ongoing monitoring of transactions. The implementation of the travel rule further improves transparency to crypto transfers, allowing virtual asset service providers to identify counterparties and perform transactional screening on these transactions. The act of obtaining licensing under a regulation, such as Singapores Payment Services Act, essentially entails having to comply and implement all the necessary requirements that traditional partners undertake as part of their AML diagnostic programs.

As compliance and licensing are increasingly becoming a necessity, industry players are mapping robust regulatory pipelines against traditional financial ecosystems. This will ensure that industry players are well placed to conduct due diligence for digital asset clients, especially hedge funds and asset managers that have their own stringent compliance policy requirements. These efforts include establishing new regtech partnerships to ensure systems and tools are in place for AML best practices.

Finding the Rosetta Stone

Contrary to common belief, crypto has seen significant strides toward effective compliance, and there is no denying that it is in the best interest of industry and regulators to sustain the momentum. While there still remain challenges such as the lack of common taxonomy for crypto across multiple jurisdictions, the industry has been navigating the hodgepodge of local rules and requirements so far by adapting and innovating.

Regulators have also increasingly expanded their regulatory framework beyond the AML/CFT requirements to also implement a framework dedicated to user protection, as seen in the new guidelines in Hong Kong and recent consultation papers issued in Singapore. Such consumer protection measures include rules on how to offer (or restrict) offering of crypto products to retail investors, as well as rules on the segregation and safeguarding of client funds.

What lies ahead? In the long run, our focus should be facilitating a better understanding of crypto and how compliance can be applied to this newest fintech innovation. Such essential discussions will be crucial in establishing clearer compliance guidelines at an international scale and will allow us to avoid another exodus of crypto players as seen in the U.S.

Delving into topics such as cryptos potential to innovate the financial landscape, blockchain analytics, and the fundamentals of effective crypto compliance, education will go a mile in laying the foundations to find a common language for crypto. This will also contribute to building a unified crypto framework that will enable smoother on-ramp/off-ramp transactions and liquidity flows, thereby achieving better financial stability.

From a regulatory perspective, jurisdictions that have embraced crypto and Web3 have proactively expanded the private-public sector partnership beyond AML/CFT measures. These regulatory bodies have reached out to the industry to develop a better understanding of where the industry is heading as well as to enhance their own understanding and knowledge of the sector  allowing them to better develop regulatory frameworks specific to the crypto industry.

Major crypto players must take responsibility, as experts in the field, to educate and build a responsible ecosystem. Through engaging in private-public partnerships to explore compliance best practices and unearthing RegTech innovation, our industry must lead the way in charting our own course to evolution, ultimately, instilling confidence and trust in crypto.

Such essential discussions will be crucial in establishing clearer compliance guidelines on an international scale. Ultimately, the goal is to foster a secure, compliant, and innovative industry that benefits both investors and businesses alike.
[June 08, 2023] INVESTIGATION ALERT: The Schall Law Firm Announces it is Investigating Claims Against Prudential plc and Encourages Investors with Losses to Contact the Firm

The Schall Law Firm, a national shareholder rights litigation firm, announces that it is investigating claims on behalf of investors of Prudential plc ("Prudential" or "the Company") (NYSE: PUK, OTC: PUKPF) for violations of the securities laws. The investigation focuses on whether the Company issued false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose information pertinent to investors. Prudential disclosed on May 31, 2023, that Chief Financial Officer James Turner had resigned during a probe of a "ode of conduct issue" related to a recent recruitment he was allegedly involved in. Based on this news, shares of Prudential fell by more than 6% on the same day.



If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate. We also encourage you to contact Brian Schall of the Schall Law Firm, 2049 Century Park East, Suite 2460, Los Angeles, CA 90067, at 310-301-3335, to discuss your rights free of charge. You can also reach us through the firm's website at www.schallfirm.com, or by email at [email protected].

The class in this case has not yet been certified, and until certification occurs, you are not represented by an attorney. If you choose to take no action, you can remain an absent class member. The Schall Law Firm represents investors around the world and specializes in securities class action lawsuits and shareholder rights litigation. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and rules of ethics. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230608005813/en/

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(Bloomberg) -- Saudi Arabias surprise move to cut 1 million barrels a day of its own output has emboldened markets bulls, while the kingdoms ominous warning on short-selling seems to have sent some bears into hiding.

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Hedge funds boosted bullish bets on Brent and WTI crude in the week ended June 6, with long positions on the global benchmark reaching a six-week high. At the same time, money managers unwound bearish bets. The shift comes as Saudi Arabia pledged to cut output to stabilize the market, shorthand for halting a price slump. Prior to that, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman warned that speculators betting on falling prices better watch out.

In the lead up to last weekends OPEC+ meeting, non-commercial players such as hedge funds had amassed the most bearish stance in over a decade across major oil contracts such as crude, diesel and gasoline. Despite the output cuts, oil prices have failed to rally as investors remain focused on the global economic outlook.

--With assistance from Julia Fanzeres.

(Adds CFTC data on US crude positioning)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
[June 08, 2023] ADVANCE AUTO PARTS ALERT: Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C. is Investigating Advance Auto Parts, Inc. on Behalf of Advance Auto Parts Stockholders and Encourages Investors to Contact the Firm

Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C., a nationally recognized stockholder rights law firm, is investigating potential claims against Advance Auto Parts, Inc. ("Advance Auto Parts" or the "Company") (NYSE: AAP) on behalf of Advance Auto Parts stockholders. Our investigation concerns whether Advance Auto Parts has violated the federal securities laws and/or engaged in other unlawful business practices. Click here to participate in the action. On May 31, 2023, Advance Auto Parts revealed disappointing results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2023, including a net sales decrease of more than 1.6% compared to the prior year and an operating margin rate of 2.6%, "well below expectations due to higher than planned investments to narrow competitive price gaps in the professional sales channel as well as unfavorable product mix." Advance Auto Parts also disclosed that it was slashing its full year 2023 guidance, which it had provded just three months earlier, given that it now "expect[s] the competitive dynamics . . . faced in the first quarter to continue." Advance Auto Parts further revealed that it was cutting its quarterly dividend by 84% "to provide enhanced financial flexibility."



On this news, the price of Advance Auto Parts stock declined approximately 35%. If you purchased or otherwise acquired Advance Auto Parts shares and suffered a loss, are a long-term stockholder, have information, would like to learn more about these claims, or have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests with respect to these matters, please contact Brandon Walker or Marion Passmore by email at [email protected], by telephone at (212) 355-4648, or by filling out this contact form. There is no cost or obligation to you.

About Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C.: Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C. is a nationally recognized law firm with offices in New York and California. The firm represents individual and institutional investors in commercial, securities, derivative, and other complex litigation in state and federal courts across the country. For more information about the firm, please visit www.bespc.com. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230608005732/en/

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[June 08, 2023] NETAND participate Communic Asia 2023 showcasing its Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution, HIWARE

SEOUL, South Korea, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- NETAND, the integrated identity & access management solution provider, attended Communic ASIA, Asia Tech x Singapore 2023 conference held in Singapore from 7-9th June 2023. NETAND has showcased its flagship solution HIWARE demonstration and shared insights on data security and payment & transaction security. NETAND demonstrated its flagship product, HIWARE, its knowledge and experience in continuing to asist customers with their identity and access security needs. HIWARE is an industry-leading solution that is widely used by financial and government institutions in Korea to protect information from internal and external security threats such as information leakage.



"The world is slowly ushering in a post-pandemic era, the global market is paying attention to access management solutions since major IT infrastructure systems require thorough control and management of user access and authority. It is, therefore, imperative for the world to fast-track its cybersecurity infrastructure and policies," said Hochul Shin, CEO of NETAND. NETAND also provides Privileged Access Session Management (PAM) solution which enables end-to-end management and supervision of users by controlling all accesses and operations of clients' IT infrastructure such as networks and servers, monitoring work details in real-time, and saving log records.

"PAM solution is one of the best ways to protect and secure the digital transformation of any business. PAM solution is essential as an identity security solution that helps guard organizations against insider threats, cyber-attacks, and compliance risks by monitoring, detecting, and preventing unauthorized privileged access to critical resources," adds Hochul Shin. NETAND soon open its first regional office in Singapore to expand its offering in ASEAN market and will used representative office as a hub of Global countries. About NETAND Founded in 2007, NETAND has grown into Asia's market leader of privileged access management (PAM) solution with industry-leading technology and expertise based on continuous research, development, and various customer experience. NETAND is currently serving more than 3,000 domestic and foreign customers. Its 16 years in the industry makes NETAND the preferred PAM solutions provider to government and large companies. NETAND currently holds 60% of the domestic market share and has been recognized as the only PAM solutions provider in the Asia-Pacific region by Gartner Magic Quadrant in 2021. NETAND was named as one of the 5 best cybersecurity companies to watch by Silicon Review magazine in 2022. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/netand-participate-communic-asia-2023-showcasing-its-privileged-access-management-pam-solution-hiware-301845685.html SOURCE NETAND

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[June 08, 2023] Ventas Realty, Limited Partnership Announces Upsize and Pricing of $750 Million of Exchangeable Senior Notes

Ventas Realty, Limited Partnership ("Ventas Realty"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ventas, Inc. ("Ventas") (NYSE: VTR), announced today the pricing of $750 million aggregate principal amount of its 3.75% Exchangeable Senior Notes due 2026 (the "notes") in a private placement (the "offering") to persons reasonably believed to be qualified institutional buyers pursuant to Rule 144A under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"). The offering was upsized from the previously announced offering of $500 million aggregate principal amount of notes. Ventas Realty also granted the initial purchasers of the notes an option to purchase, during a 13-day period beginning on, and including, the first date on which the notes are issued, up to an additional $112.5 million aggregate principal amount of notes. The sale of the notes to the initial purchasers is expected to settle on June 13, 2023, subject to customary closing conditions, and is expected to result in approximately $734 million in net proceeds to Ventas Realty after deducting the initial purchasers' discount but before deducting estimated offering expenses payable by Ventas Realty (assuming no exercise of the initial purchasers' option to purchase additional notes). The notes will be senior, unsecured obligations of Ventas Realty and will be fully and unconditionally guaranteed on an unsecured and unsubordinated basis by Ventas. The notes will bear interest at a rate of 3.75% per year, payable semi-annually in arrears on June 1 and December 1 of each year, beginning on December 1, 2023. The notes will mature on June 1, 2026, unless earlier exchanged, redeemed or repurchased. The notes will be exchangeable at an initial exchange rate of 18.2460 shares of Ventas' common stock (the "common stock") per $1,000 principal amount of notes (equivalent to an initial exchange price of approximately $54.81 per share of common stock, which represents an exchange premium of approximately 22.50% to the last reported sale price of $44.74 per share of common stock on the New York Stock Exchange on June 8, 2023). Upon exchange of the notes, Ventas Realty will pay cash up to the aggregate principal amount of the notes to be exchanged and pay or deliver (or cause to be delivered), as the case may be, cash, shares of common stock or a combination of cash and shares of common stock, at Ventas Realty's election, in respect of the remainder, if any, of its exchange obligation in excess of the aggregate principal amount of the notes being exchanged. Prior to the close of business on the business day immediately preceding March 1, 2026, noteholders may exchange their notes at their option only upon the satisfaction of specified conditions and during certain periods. On or after March 1, 2026, until the close of business on the business day immediately preceding the maturity date, noteholders may exchange all or any portion of their notes at any time, regardless of these conditions or periods. Ventas Realty may redeem for cash all or any portion of the notes, if Ventas' board of directors (or a committee thereof) determines such redemption is necessary to preserve Ventas' status as a real estate investment trust ("REIT") for U.S. federal income tax purposes. Ventas Realty may not otherwise redeem the notes prior to the maturity date. The redemption price for any note called for redemption will be equal to 100% of the principal amount of such note, plus accrued and unpaid interest to, but excluding, the redemption date. No sinking fund is provided for the notes. Subject to certain conditions, holders of the notes will have the right to require Ventas Realty to repurchase all or a portion of their notes upon the occurrence of a fundamental change (as defined in the indenture that will govern the notes) at a repurchase price of 100% of their principal amount plus any accrued and unpaid interest to, but excluding, the repurchase date. Following certain corporate events or if Ventas Realty calls any notes for redemption, Ventas Realty will, under certain circumstances, increase the exchange rate for noteholders who elect to exchange their notes in connection with any such corporate event or exchange their notes called for redemption. Ventas Realty intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for the repayment of its commercial paper notes and for general corporate purposes, including the redemption or repayment of other indebtedness. The notes are being offered only to persons reasonably believed to be qualified institutional buyers pursuant to Rule 144A under the Securities Act. The notes, the guarantee, and the shares of common stock deliverable upon exchange of the notes, if any, have not been, nor will be, registered under the Securities Act or the securities laws of any other jurisdiction, and unless so registered, may not be offered or sold in the United States except pursuant to an applicable exemption from such registration requirements. This announcement is neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy any scurities and shall not constitute an offer, solicitation or sale in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale is unlawful.



About Ventas Ventas, Inc., an S&P 500 company, operates at the intersection of two large and dynamic industries - healthcare and real estate. Fueled by powerful demographic demand from growth in the aging population, Ventas owns a diversified portfolio of over 1,200 properties in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Ventas uses the power of its capital to unlock the value of senior living communities; life science, research & innovation properties; medical office & outpatient facilities, hospitals and other healthcare real estate. A globally-recognized real estate investment trust, Ventas follows a successful long-term strategy, proven over more than 20 years, built on diversification of property types, capital sources and industry leading partners, financial strength and flexibility, consistent and reliable growth and industry leading ESG achievements, managed by a collaborative and experienced team dedicated to its stakeholders.

Safe Harbor Statement This press 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, as amended, including but not limited to, statements relating to: the timing and closing of the offering of notes; the intended use of the net proceeds from the offering; and Ventas Realty's expectations in respect of granting the initial purchasers an option to purchase additional notes. These forward-looking statements include, among others, statements of expectations, beliefs, future plans and strategies, anticipated results from operations and developments and other matters that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements include, among other things, statements regarding our and our officers' intent, belief or expectation as identified by the use of words such as "assume," "may," "will," "project," "expect," "believe," "intend," "anticipate," "seek," "target," "forecast," "plan," "potential," "opportunity," "estimate," "could," "would," "should" and other comparable and derivative terms or the negatives thereof. Forward-looking statements are based on management's beliefs as well as on a number of assumptions concerning future events. You should not put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of performance and are subject to a number of uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. We do not undertake a duty to update these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date on which they are made. We urge you to carefully review the disclosures we make concerning risks and uncertainties that may affect our business and future financial performance, including those made below and in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, such as in the sections titled "Cautionary Statements - Summary Risk Factors," "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022 and in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended March 31, 2023. Certain factors that could affect our future results and our ability to achieve our stated goals include, but are not limited to: (a) the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and other viruses and infections, such as flu and respiratory syncytial virus, and their extended consequences, including of any variants, on our revenue, level of profitability, liquidity and overall risk exposure and the implementation and impact of regulations related to the CARES Act and other stimulus legislation and any future COVID-19 relief measures; (b) our ability to achieve the anticipated benefits and synergies from, and effectively integrate, our completed or anticipated acquisitions and investments, including our acquisition of the Santerre Portfolio; (c) our exposure and the exposure of our tenants, managers and borrowers to complex healthcare and other regulation and the challenges and expense associated with complying with such regulation; (d) the potential for significant general and commercial claims, legal actions, regulatory proceedings or enforcement actions that could subject us or our tenants, managers or borrowers to increased operating costs and uninsured liabilities; (e) the impact of market and general economic conditions on us and our tenants, managers and borrowers, including economic and financial market events, such as bank failures and other events affecting financial institutions, market volatility, increases in inflation, changes in interest rates and exchange rates, tightening of lending standards and reduced availability of credit or capital, supply chain pressures, rising labor costs and historically low unemployment, events that affect consumer confidence, our occupancy rates and resident fee revenues, and the actual and perceived state of the real estate markets, labor markets and public and private capital markets; (f) our reliance and the reliance of our tenants, managers and borrowers on the financial, credit and capital markets and the risk that those markets may be disrupted or become constrained, including as a result of bank failures or concerns or rumors about such events, tightening of lending standards and reduced availability of credit or capital; (g) our ability, and the ability of our tenants, managers and borrowers, to navigate the trends impacting our or their businesses and the industries in which we or they operate; (h) the risk of bankruptcy, inability to obtain benefits from governmental programs, insolvency or financial deterioration of our tenants, managers, borrowers and other obligors which may, among other things, have an adverse impact on the ability of such parties to pay obligations due to us or our financial results and financial condition; (i) the risk that we may be unable to foreclose successfully on the collateral securing our loans and other investments in the event of a borrower default and, if we are able to foreclose or otherwise acquire assets in lieu of foreclosure, the risk that we will be required to incur additional expense or indebtedness in connection therewith, that the assets will underperform expectations or that we may not be able to subsequently dispose of all or part of such assets on favorable terms; (j) the recognition of reserves, allowances, credit losses or impairment charges are inherently uncertain, may increase or decrease in the future and may not represent or reflect the ultimate value of, or loss that we ultimately realize with respect to, the relevant assets, which could have an adverse impact on our results of operations and financial condition; (k) the non-renewal of any leases or management agreement or defaults by tenants or managers thereunder and the risk of our inability to replace those tenants or managers on favorable terms, if at all; (l) our ability to identify and consummate future investments in or dispositions of healthcare assets and effectively manage our portfolio opportunities and our investments in co-investment vehicles, joint ventures and minority interests, including our ability to dispose of such assets on favorable terms as a result of rights of first offer or rights of first refusal in favor of third parties; (m) risks related to development, redevelopment and construction projects, including costs associated with inflation, rising interest rates, labor conditions and supply chain pressures; (n) our ability to attract and retain talented employees; (o) the limitations and significant requirements imposed upon our business as a result of our status as a REIT and the adverse consequences (including the possible loss of our status as a REIT) that would result if we are not able to comply with such requirements; (p) the risk of changes in healthcare law or regulation or in tax laws, guidance and interpretations, particularly as applied to REITs, that could adversely affect us or our tenants, managers or borrowers; (q) increases in our borrowing costs as a result of becoming more leveraged, including in connection with acquisitions or other investment activity, rising interest rates and the phasing out of LIBOR rates; (r) our reliance on third parties to operate a majority of our assets and our limited control and influence over such operations and results; (s) our dependency on a limited number of tenants and managers for a significant portion of our revenues and operating income; (t) the adequacy and pricing of insurance coverage provided by our policies and policies maintained by our tenants, managers or other counterparties; (u) the occurrence of cyber incidents that could disrupt our operations, result in the loss of confidential information or damage our business relationships and reputation; (v) the impact of merger, acquisition and investment activity in the healthcare industry or otherwise affecting our tenants, managers or borrowers; (w) disruptions to the management and operations of our business and the uncertainties caused by activist investors; (x) the risk of catastrophic or extreme weather and other natural events and the physical effects of climate change; (y) the impact of purchase accounting adjustments, impairments, write downs and other non-cash charges related to our acquisition of the Santerre Portfolio; and (z) the other factors set forth in our periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230608005835/en/

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[June 08, 2023] Axon Announces First TASER 7 Deployment in the Maldives

Maldives Police Service has deployed Axon TASER 7 devices to enhance public and officer safety MALE, Maldives, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Axon , the global public safety technology leader, in partnership with Zetta Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., today announced the Maldives Police Service (MPS) has equipped officers with TASER 7 devices as a critical safety and de-escalation tool to mitigate situations and reduce injuries to officers and the public. "The introduction of TASER 7 as the preferred Conductive Energy Device (CED) to the Maldives Police Service is a significant achievement that will contribute to fulfilling our legal mandates and strategic objectives. As stated in our mission statement, we aim to provide policing with a greater emphasis on human rights, partnership and problem solving. We are determined to make the Maldives a safe haven for all. The deployment of TASER 7 as a capability will enable us to address high-impact crimes while increasing operational readiness, police officer confidence, and officer safety. It fills a gap in tactical use of force options and will be one of many other force options used by the police to reduce crime and fear of crime," says Commissioner of Police Mohamed Hameed. "We are excited to partner with MPS as they leverage the connected capabilities of the TASER 7. With this deployment, MPS is demonstrating their commitment to protecting community and officers," says Suddho Basu, Axon's Head of Western Asia Region. "Axon's TASER 7 device will provide officers with a less-lethal option for de-escalating situations to better serve their community." As the most studied less-lethal use of force available today, TASER devices give officers the tools needed to de-escalate with confidence. The TASER 7 is Axon's first truly connected energy device, with wireless device management, self-reporting and general visibility into the health of th individual device and entire fleet.



"TASER 7 is being rolled out after several months of pilot testing and a thorough review of policy and user guidelines. Officers have been trained, and the highest levels of safeguards are in place to ensure the rollout is a success," continues Commissioner Hameed. Axon is committed to expanding its presence globally and providing market-leading technology to public safety officers around the world, including the Maldives Police Service. In addition to this TASER 7 deployment, last year, last year , MPS became the first agency to deploy Axon Body 3 cameras with Axon's situational awareness software, Axon Respond. The agency also utilizes Axon Citizen , a public evidence submission portal that allows agencies to collect evidence from the public during both large-scale and smaller, day-to-day events.

About Axon: Axon is the technology leader in global public safety. Our moonshot goal is to cut gun-related deaths between police and the public by 50% before 2033. Axon is building the public safety operating system of the future by integrating a suite of hardware devices and cloud software solutions that lead modern policing. Axon's suite includes TASER energy devices, body-worn cameras, in-car cameras, cloud-hosted digital evidence management solutions, productivity software and real-time operations capabilities. Axon's growing global customer base includes first responders across international, federal, state and local law enforcement, fire, corrections and emergency medical services, as well as the justice sector, commercial enterprises and consumers. Axon, the Delta Logo, Axon Body, Axon Citizen, Axon Respond, TASER and TASER 7 are trademarks of Axon Enterprise, Inc., some of which are registered in the US and other countries. For more information, visit www.axon.com/legal . All rights reserved. Follow Axon here: Axon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/axon_us

Axon on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Axon.ProtectLife/ Note to Investors Please visit http://investor.axon.com , https://www.axon.com/press , www.twitter.com/axon_us and https://www.facebook.com/Axon.ProtectLife/ where Axon discloses information about the company, its financial information and its business. MEDIA CONTACT:

Corinne Clark

Public Relations Manager

[email protected] View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/axon-announces-first-taser-7-deployment-in-the-maldives-301845995.html SOURCE Axon

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[June 08, 2023] CNH Industrial awards sustainability innovation grants to startups Blixify Meraque and Sofien

BANGKOK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- CNH Industrial has awarded innovation grants to start-ups Blixify Meraque and Sofien for their outstanding zero waste solutions as part of Enterprise Singapore's Sustainability Open Innovation Challenge 2022. The Sustainability Open Innovation Challenge brought together industry partners and creative innovators to co-develop sustainable solutions in areas such as zero waste, sustainable food sourcing, materials, and packaging. CNH Industrial's zero waste challenge statement focused on the mechanization of palm oil harvesting using robotics and new technologies. By improving harvesting efficiency, farmers can maximise yields from current growing areas, ultimately resulting in less waste and reduced environmental impact. Matthieu Sejourne, Vice President of Brand and Commercial Services CNH Industrial APAC region, said, "Large-scale palm oil farming can present social and environmental challenges, but it's a crop that is very important globally. We have to find a solution that will make production efficient, sustainable and safe." The palm oil industry, with an annual harvest of 71 million tonnes, predominantly relies on manual harvesting methods. This labour-intensive process involves workers cutting fruit bunches from the trees using knives on long poles, resulting in significant fruit loss and safety issues. After a comprehensive evaluation based on technical criteria, Blixify Meraque and Sofien emerged as the first and second placed projects, respectively. In addition to receiving cash an in-kind prizes, CNH Industrial has committed to being the initial launch customer for both start-ups, and to support their IP development and go-to-market strategies.



"Safety is paramount, as is affordability, for an innovation to benefit smallholder farmers. The two winning prototypes were very interesting and met the key criteria. We look forward to co-developing these projects," Matthieu added. Malaysian consortium Blixify Meraque designed a pruning and harvesting machine using computer vision and AI technology. The machine incorporates sensors and cameras to analyse the colour and texture of palm oil fruit, accurately detecting its ripeness before harvest.

Sofien, a startup based in Brazil, meanwhile created a cutting device attachment equipped with two mounted cameras and sensors to detect and monitor the ripeness of palm oil fruit, ensuring efficient harvesting. The Sustainability Open Innovation Challenge is part of CNH Industrial's on-going engagement with the Singapore Agri-Food Innovation Lab (SAIL) at Nanyang Technological University. In 2021, CNH Industrial partnered with SAIL to foster innovation and explore opportunities for co-developing sustainable agriculture solutions with the start-up ecosystem, academic and research institutions in Singapore and Southeast Asia. CNH Industrial (NYSE: CNHI / MI: CNHI) is a world-class equipment and services company. Driven by its purpose of Breaking New Ground, which centers on Innovation, Sustainability and Productivity, the Company provides the strategic direction, R&D capabilities, and investments that enable the success of its global and regional Brands. Globally, Case IH and New Holland Agriculture supply 360 agriculture applications from machines to implements and the digital technologies that enhance them; and CASE and New Holland Construction Equipment deliver a full lineup of construction products that make the industry more productive. The Company's regionally focused Brands include: STEYR, for agricultural tractors; Raven, a leader in digital agriculture, precision technology and the development of autonomous systems; Flexi-Coil, specializing in tillage and seeding systems; Miller, manufacturing application equipment; Kongskilde, providing tillage, seeding and hay & forage implements; and Eurocomach, producing a wide range of mini and midi excavators for the construction sector, including electric solutions. Across a history spanning over two centuries, CNH Industrial has always been a pioneer in its sectors and continues to passionately innovate and drive customer efficiency and success. As a truly global company, CNH Industrial's 40,000+ employees form part of a diverse and inclusive workplace, focused on empowering customers to grow, and build, a better world. For more information and the latest financial and sustainability reports visit: cnhindustrial.com For news from CNH Industrial and its Brands visit: media.cnhindustrial.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/cnh-industrial-awards-sustainability-innovation-grants-to-startups-blixify-meraque-and-sofien-301846208.html SOURCE CNH Industrial

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[June 09, 2023] Quell Therapeutics Signs a Collaboration, Exclusive Option and License Agreement with AstraZeneca to Develop, Manufacture and Commercialize Engineered Treg Cell Therapies for Autoimmune Diseases

Collaboration brings together Quells proprietary multi-modular T-regulatory (Treg) cell engineering and manufacturing expertise with AstraZenecas proven development and commercial capabilities as well as its deep therapeutic area knowledge

Collaboration focused on two autoimmune disease areas  Type 1 Diabetes and Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Quell will receive $85 million upfront and is eligible to receive over $2 billion for further development and commercialization milestones, if successful, plus tiered royalties



London, UK  June 9 2023  Quell Therapeutics Ltd (Quell), a leader in developing engineered T-regulatory (Treg) cell therapies for serious medical conditions driven by the immune system today announced that it has entered into a collaboration, exclusive option and license agreement with AstraZeneca to develop, manufacture and commercialize autologous, engineered Treg cell therapies for two autoimmune disease indications. We are extremely pleased to have AstraZeneca on board as our first major partner. This collaboration builds on our pioneering work to develop exquisitely engineered, multi-modular Treg cell therapies for immune disorders and provides excellent validation for the technologies and capabilities we have established, said Iain McGill, Chief Executive Officer of Quell Therapeutics. We are proud and incredibly excited to partner our leading science with the deep experience of AstraZeneca to accelerate the application of our Treg cell therapy platform in major autoimmune disease, where we believe there is a broad opportunity to reset immune tolerance and drive durable responses for patients. This is a very exciting collaboration with Quell as we look to expand our next-generation theapeutic toolbox and explore the untapped potential with Treg cell therapies in autoimmune indications. This is aligned with our strategy to target underlying disease drivers, stop or slow disease progression and ultimately accelerate the delivery of transformative care to patients with chronic autoimmune conditions, added Sir Mene Pangalos, Executive Vice President, BioPharmaceuticals R&D at AstraZeneca.



Under the terms of the agreement, Quells proprietary toolbox of Treg cell engineering modules, including its Foxp3 Phenotype Lock, will be leveraged to develop autologous multi-modular Treg cell therapy candidates for Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). AstraZeneca will have the option to further develop and commercialize successful candidates, with Quell responsible for the process development and manufacturing of clinical candidates through to the end of the first-in-human clinical study. Quell will receive $85 million upfront from AstraZeneca, which comprises a predominant cash payment and an equity investment. Quell is also eligible to receive over $2 billion for further development and commercialization milestones, if successful, plus tiered royalties. In addition, Quell retains an option, which can be exercised either after approval of an Investigational New Drug (IND) application or at the end of the Phase I/II clinical study, to co-develop Treg cell therapies from the T1D program with AstraZeneca in the United States in exchange for additional milestone payments and increased royalties on US net sales.

Quell retains full ownership of its lead Treg cell therapy candidate QEL-001, which is designed to prevent organ rejection and eliminate the need for lifelong immunosuppression in liver transplant patients and is expected to enter first-in-human trials during 2023, as well as its preclinical program in neuroinflammation. - Ends - About Quell Therapeutics Quell Therapeutics is a world leader in developing engineered T-regulatory (Treg) cell therapies that aim to harness, direct and optimize their immune suppressive properties to address serious medical conditions driven by the immune system. The Company is leveraging its proprietary Foxp3 Phenotype Lock technology, unique multi-modular platform and integrated manufacturing capabilities to design and develop a pipeline of highly engineered Treg cell therapies with greater potential for persistence, potency and stability than earlier generations of Treg cell therapy approaches. Quells lead candidate QEL-001 is being developed to induce operational tolerance following liver transplantation, with the potential to protect the post-transplant liver without the need for chronic immunosuppressive medications. Quell is also advancing additional programs in neuroinflammatory and autoimmune diseases. www.quell-tx.com. Contacts Luke Henry, Chief Business Officer

Quell Therapeutics

[email protected] Media: Mark Swallow, Frazer Hall, Sandi Greenwood, Eleanor Perkin

MEDiSTRAVA Consulting

+44 (0) 203 928 6900

[email protected] Investors: Christina Tartaglia

Stern Investor Relations, Inc.

+1 212 362 1200

[email protected]



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[June 09, 2023] Saudi Arabia: Modern means of transportation for easier Hajj

MECCA, Saudi Arabia, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- It is that time of the year again when Saudi Arabia comes under global spotlight with the annual Muslim Hajj pilgrimage approaching, an event on which the Kingdom is expected to host 2.5 million devotees from 193 countries. While success in organizing the annual Hajj is not uncommon for Saudi Arabia, yet millions of pilgrims still require high quality means of transportation with exceptional fluidity at the holy sites, which are expected to be the most crowded cities in the world, relative to area and time. According to data released by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), 5,780 public buses currently operate in New York City, transporting around 1.2 million passengers on daily basis within an area tat measures tens of times that of the combined area of the valley of Mina, Mount Arafa, and Muzdalifah in Saudi Arabia.



Elsewhere, on the eastern bank of the Atlantic Ocean, Transport for London (TfL) declares on its website that it is committed to transporting 5.7 million passengers everyday via 9,300 buses, while Milan prides itself of having one of Italy's largest railway networks, moving almost 1.15 million travelers everyday. However, compared to the far more challenging numbers the Kingdom must deal with, the mission at the holy sites remains significantly harder for the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah who takes up the task of coordinating between authorities, receiving pilgrims, and creating solutions for their transportation.

Said challenge goes beyond just providing transportation options between the holy sites, where the movement of 2.5 million devotees is largely linked to a strict schedule set to match the Hajj rituals. The Kingdom has in recent years strengthened its transportation services, including the launch of the Holy Sites Train, which completed 2,170 trips in 2019, according to Saudi media. Furthermore, the Ministry had successfully executed a grouping simulation on May 23, 2023 in presence of the Minister of Hajj and Umrah Tawfiq Al Rabiah, under whose supervision the simulation succeeded in simultaneously group 3,000 shuttle and conventional buses. The simulation included the following stages: dispersals from the pilgrims' residences in Mecca to Mina, ascending Mount Arafa from the valley of Mina, descending to the plain of Muzdalifah, returning from Muzdalifah to Mina, and finally heading to the Grand Mosque of Mecca to perform the farewell circumambulation. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/saudi-arabia-modern-means-of-transportation-for-easier-hajj-301846526.html SOURCE Ministry of Hajj

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[June 09, 2023] DoH and MSD GCC expand partnership during BIO International Convention 2023 to advance research in Oncology

ABU DHABI, UAE, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Department of Health  Abu Dhabi (DoH), the regulator of the healthcare sector in the Emirate, signed a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with leading global biopharmaceutical company MSD GCC, to advance research into breast and lung cancer. In the presence of H.E. Mansoor Al Mansoori, Chairman of the Department of Health  Abu Dhabi and Jenelle Krishnamoorthy, VP Global Public Policy and Government Relations at MSD, the MoU was signed by Dr. Asma Ibrahim Al Mannaei, Executive Director of the Research and Innovation Center at the DoH and Ashraf Mallak, Managing Director of MSD GCC, on the sidelines of the BIO International Convention 2023, which is being held from June 5-8 in Boston, United States. The agreement marks the continuation of a long-term collaboration between the two entities to advance observational research in Abu Dhabi. Within the framework of their renewed partnership, the two parties will work together to initiate two observational research studies in the field of oncology, explicitly targeting non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). The studies aim to advance the ability to address the healthcare challenges associated with these diseases and improve patient outcomes. Dr. Asma Ibrahim Al Mannaei, Executive Director of the Research and Innovation Center at the Department of Health  Abu Dhabi (DoH) said: "As we navigate the complexities of healthcare challenges, we remain focused on expanding collaboration with global partners who share our vision of advancing healthcare for all. Under the directives of our wise leadership, we are proud to renew our cooperation with MSD GCC, a long-standing partner that has been part of the Emirate's healthcare journey. Through this agreement, we will leverage collective expertise, resources and knowledge to address pessing healthcare challenges."



Dr. Al Mannaei added: "Abu Dhabi is leading the transformation of the regional healthcare ecosystem by leveraging sciences and technology, positioning itself as a life science hub and an incubator for innovation on the global stage. Our research will pave the way for innovative treatments and interventions while fostering breakthrough diagnosis and solutions for patients around the world." Commenting on the agreement, Ashraf Mallak, Managing Director of MSD in the GCC, said: "The Department of Health Abu Dhabi has had exceptional efforts in establishing a healthcare system that stands as a global model of innovation and sustainability. Their forward-thinking approach, embracing advanced technology and fostering research and development, has led to the advancement of public health in the Emirate."

He continued: "It is with great pride that MSD joins hands with the DoH at the BIO Convention. With this renewed collaboration, we are embarking on two important observational research studies in two prevalent cancers in the UAE: lung and breast cancer. Through these studies, we aim to make a meaningful impact on patient outcomes and contribute to the UAE's vision for healthcare. This agreement reaffirms our commitment to driving medical progress to benefit patients in UAE." During the signing, DoH and MSD reiterated the importance of public-private partnerships to have a meaningful impact on the enhancement of healthcare services, with such collaborations bringing together the entities' collective expertise and resources in medical research and patient care. The studies conducted by DoH and MSD will commence following a feasibility stage that ensures the necessary preparations are in place. Led by the Department of Health  Abu Dhabi (DoH), a high-profile Abu Dhabi delegation is visiting the United States of America (USA) between June 1st, 2023 and June 8th, 2023 to showcase the Emirate's partnership opportunities and explore collaboration with leading organisations in Research and Development (R&D), manufacturing and innovation. Kicking-off in Washington DC, delegates have met with existing partners and foster fresh collaboration with governmental bodies and health-tech giants. The transnational mission has culminated in Boston, coinciding with Abu Dhabi's participation at BIO International Convention 2023 to exhibit the Emirate's growth and development of its biotechnology industry. The participation has witnessed in-depth discussions, shared insights and expertise as well as explored collaborations in health-tech, life science and innovation. To know more about the mission, visit: https://www.doh.gov.ae/en/Abu-Dhabi-a-regional-life-science-hub Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2097384/DoH_MoU_with_MSD_GCC.jpg

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[June 09, 2023] Digital immune system Market to reach $57 billion, Globally, by 2032 at 13.3% CAGR: Allied Market Research

Rise in concerns about cyberattacks and loT and BYOD trends, drives the growth of the global digital immune system market. PORTLAND, Ore., June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Allied Market Research published a report, titled, "Digital Immune System Market by Component (Solution and Services), Deployment Mode (On-premise and Cloud), Security Type (Network Security, Cloud Security, Endpoint Security, Internet of Things (IoT) Security, and Others), Industry Vertical (IT and Telecom, BFSI, Manufacturing, Education, Healthcare, Government, and Others), and Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and LAMEA): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2022-2032" According to the report, the global generated $16.8 billion in 2022, and is estimated to reach $ 57 billion by 2032, witnessing a CAGR of 13.3% from 2023 to 2032. The report offers a detailed analysis of changing market trends, top segments, key investment pockets, value chains, regional landscapes, and competitive scenarios. Drivers, Restraints, and Opportunities- Rise in concerns about cyberattacks and loT and BYOD trends impact the growth of the digital immune system market. Moreover, the market growth is affected by lack of understanding among consumers regarding security. In addition, increase in use of mobile platforms and applications and rise in threat of phishing and malware among businesses influence the market growth. However, each of these factors is expected to have a definite impact on the growth of the global digital immune system market during the forecast period. Download Sample Report: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/77795 Report coverage & details:







Report Coverage Details Forecast Period 20232032 Base Year 2022 Market Size in 2022 $16,825.49 Million Market Size in 2032 $57,021.83 Million CAGR 13.3 % No. of Pages in Report 315 Segments covered Component, Deployment Mode, Security Type, Industry Vertical, and Region. Drivers Rise in concerns about cyberattacks loT and BYOD trends Opportunities Rise in use of mobile platforms and applications Increase in threat of phishing and malware among businesses Restraints Lack of understanding among consumer

Covid-19 scenario- The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic had an enormous impact on the lives of people and the overall community as well as economy.

The COVID-19 outbreak has had a significant impact on the development of the digital immune system market as the use of smartphones, linked devices, and e-commerce all present lucrative potential for security provider.

Throughout 2020, COVID has caused crises in the social, economic, and energy sectors as well as in the medical community. On many facets of society, this crisis had several direct and indirect repercussions.

To monitor and contain the virus, the digital and artificial intelligence industries can be a valuable professional resource as the recent advancements in artificial intelligence have significantly enhanced COVID-19 screening, diagnoses, and prediction. Procure Complete Report (315 Pages PDF with Insights, Charts, Tables, and Figures) at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/digital-immune-system-market/purchase-options The solution segment to rule the market- By component, the solution segment held the major share in 2022, garnering nearly one-third of the global digital immune system market revenue. The adoption of these solutions is further aided by the automated capabilities and improved visibility that digital immune technologies provide for identifying and thwarting threats. However, the services segment would also showcase the fastest CAGR of 15.3% during the forecast period, owing to more effectively detecting, investigating, and responding to cyberattacks. In addition, these services enhance the use of software programs, maximize the cost of an existing installation by optimizing it, and reduce deployment costs & risks, all of which contribute to the growth of the market. The on-premise segment to maintain its dominance during the forecast period By deployment mode, the on-premise segment contributed to the highest share in 2022, accounting around one-third of the global digital immune system market revenue. The on-premises segment refers to a component of a digital immune system that is installed and operates locally within an organization's network infrastructure. It offers a number of benefits such as greater control and customization over the system, enhanced security and compliance, and the ability to identify potential threats or security breaches. However, the cloud segment would also showcase the fastest CAGR of 15.5% throughout the forecast period, owing to provide a range of security services such as firewall protection, threat intelligence, and malware detection. These services are offered by third-party providers who specialize in cybersecurity, and they can be easily integrated into an organization's existing network infrastructure. The network security segment to maintain its dominance during the forecast period By security type, the network security segment contributed to the highest share in 2022, accounting around two-third of the global digital immune system market revenue. The network security segment is significant as it helps to prevent unauthorized access to an organization's network. It works by analyzing incoming and outgoing network traffic and blocking any suspicious activity. However, the cloud security segment would also showcase the fastest CAGR of 16.7% throughout the forecast period, owing to scalability and flexibility, allowing organizations to rapidly deploy and scale their IT infrastructure as needed. The IT and telecom segment to dominate by 2032 By industry vertical, the IT and telecom segment accounted for nearly two-fifth of the global digital immune system market share in 2022, and is expected to rule the boost by 2032, owing to operate in a highly competitive industry that necessitates bringing cutting-edge products to market more quickly while maintaining reliable service models while lowering cost and complexity. However, the education segment would also display the fastest CAGR of 18.3% throughout the forecast period, owing to early detection that use behavioral analytics to alert unusual behavior is growing, which significantly promotes market expansion. ? Asia-Pacific garnered the major share in 2022 By region, North America garnered the highest share in 2022, holding nearly one-third of the global Digital immune system market revenue in 2022, and is projected to retain its dominance by 2032, owing to growing awareness among organizations in this region about data security and compliance with the most recent rules established by the governments of these nations. However, the Asia-Pacific region would also portray the fastest CAGR of 16.4% during the forecast period, owing to the increasing severity of these attacks and strict government regulations, it is anticipated that the Asia-Pacific digital immune system market will grow at a notable pace. Enquiry Before Buying: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/77795 Leading Market Players- International Business Machines Corporation

Cisco System, Inc.

Mcafee, LLC

Fireeye, Inc.

Palo Alto Networks Inc

Hcl Technologies Limited

Microsoft Corporation

Trend Micro Incorporated

Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.

Broadcom The report analyzes these key players in the global digital immune system market. These players have adopted various strategies such as expansion, new product launches, partnerships, and others to increase their market penetration and strengthen their position in the industry. The report is helpful in determining the business performance, operating segments, developments, and product portfolios of every market player. Trending Reports in ICT & Media Industry: Digital Asset Management Market Expected to Reach $20.6 Billion by 2032 Digital Map Market Expected to Reach $89.1 Billion by 2032 IoT Monetization Market Expected to Reach $25096.4 Billion by 2032 AI Text Generator Market Expected to Reach $2.2 Billion by 2032 AVENUE- A Subscription-Based Library (Premium on-demand, subscription-based pricing model): AMR introduces its online premium subscription-based library Avenue, designed specifically to offer cost-effective, one-stop solution for enterprises, investors, and universities. With Avenue, subscribers can avail an entire repository of reports on more than 2,000 niche industries and more than 12,000 company profiles. Moreover, users can get an online access to quantitative and qualitative data in PDF and Excel formats along with analyst support, customization, and updated versions of reports. Get an access to the library of reports at any time from any device and anywhere. For more details, follow the link: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/library-access About Us Allied Market Research (AMR) is a full-service market research and business-consulting wing of Allied Analytics LLP based in Portland, Oregon. Allied Market Research provides global enterprises as well as medium and small businesses with unmatched quality of "Market Research Reports" and "Business Intelligence Solutions." AMR has a targeted view to provide business insights and consulting to assist its clients to make strategic business decisions and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain. We are in professional corporate relations with various companies and this helps us in digging out market data that helps us generate accurate research data tables and confirms utmost accuracy in our market forecasting. Allied Market Research CEO Pawan Kumar is instrumental in inspiring and encouraging everyone associated with the company to maintain high quality of data and help clients in every way possible to achieve success. Each and every data presented in the reports published by us is extracted through primary interviews with top officials from leading companies of domain concerned. Our secondary data procurement methodology includes deep online and offline research and discussion with knowledgeable professionals and analysts in the industry. Contact:

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[June 09, 2023]

Yutong Aims to Redefine Green Public Transport With YEA

ZHENGZHOU, China, June 9, 2023 /CNW/ -- Yutong Bus ("Yutong", SHA: 600066), a leading global manufacturer of electric buses, officially launched YEA, an integrated control technology platform for new energy commercial vehicles. This first-ever software- and hardware-integrated EV-specific platform for the industry has the potential to revolutionize China's new energy commercial vehicle sector.

The event, the Global Release Conference for Yutong Commercial Vehicle Technology Brand, was held with the theme of "Drive Your Value", and drew over 500 customer representatives from 25 countries and regions. Together, the attendees explored the future development direction for new energy commercial vehicles and jointly advocated the "Team Zero". Jan Deman, Managing Director of Busworld Foundation, delivered the event's keynote speech.

In addition to the launch of YEA, the event showcased Yutong's complete lineup of 15 new energy products, including buses, trucks, and special vehicles. Focused on travel, logistics, and operations scenarios, Yutong has develoed and formulated solutions for nine segments, including integrated urban and rural public transportation.







With YEA, Yutong achieves seamless integration of software and hardware, thereby significantly enhancing product safety, reliability, and efficiency. The platform delivers super-integration, scalability, and self-evolution, therefore meeting full-scenario requirements of different commercial vehicle segments.





There are two core componentsC-architecture and YOSthat form the technical basis of YEA. The C-architecture serves as the intelligent "brain" of the commercial vehicle. It comprises a "central computing unit, multi-in-one controller, intelligent cabin domain controller, and advanced driving assistance domain controller." YOS is the name of the commercial vehicle operating system, a self-developed OS with C-architecture. The combination of these two core components facilitates functional fusion and redistribution, resulting in a 200% increase in computing power and a 100% improvement in control efficiency.

YEA ensures the complete decoupling of software and hardware while managing all software and hardware involved through a unified management system. This facilitates shorter software delivery cycles while ensuring intelligent driving and riding experiences as well as operational safety.

YEA also leverages Yutong's extensive data support to address key pain points in the operation of new energy vehicles, including insufficient range, low operating efficiency, power inadequacy, poor safety, low attendance rate, and poor operational stability, while providing solutions for a vehicle's full lifecycle at a lower cost than those seen for conventional vehicles.

For more information, please visit https://en.yutong.com/.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/yutong-aims-to-redefine-green-public-transport-with-yea-301847011.html

SOURCE Yutong Bus
When we invest, we're generally looking for stocks that outperform the market average. And in our experience, buying the right stocks can give your wealth a significant boost. For example, long term Heineken Malaysia Berhad (KLSE:HEIM) shareholders have enjoyed a 21% share price rise over the last half decade, well in excess of the market decline of around 17% (not including dividends). On the other hand, the more recent gains haven't been so impressive, with shareholders gaining just 12% , including dividends .

Now it's worth having a look at the company's fundamentals too, because that will help us determine if the long term shareholder return has matched the performance of the underlying business.

View our latest analysis for Heineken Malaysia Berhad

While the efficient markets hypothesis continues to be taught by some, it has been proven that markets are over-reactive dynamic systems, and investors are not always rational. By comparing earnings per share (EPS) and share price changes over time, we can get a feel for how investor attitudes to a company have morphed over time.

Over half a decade, Heineken Malaysia Berhad managed to grow its earnings per share at 8.7% a year. This EPS growth is higher than the 4% average annual increase in the share price. So one could conclude that the broader market has become more cautious towards the stock.

The company's earnings per share (over time) is depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).

We know that Heineken Malaysia Berhad has improved its bottom line lately, but is it going to grow revenue? If you're interested, you could check this free report showing consensus revenue forecasts.

What About Dividends?

As well as measuring the share price return, investors should also consider the total shareholder return (TSR). Whereas the share price return only reflects the change in the share price, the TSR includes the value of dividends (assuming they were reinvested) and the benefit of any discounted capital raising or spin-off. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. As it happens, Heineken Malaysia Berhad's TSR for the last 5 years was 42%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.

A Different Perspective

It's nice to see that Heineken Malaysia Berhad shareholders have received a total shareholder return of 12% over the last year. Of course, that includes the dividend. Since the one-year TSR is better than the five-year TSR (the latter coming in at 7% per year), it would seem that the stock's performance has improved in recent times. Given the share price momentum remains strong, it might be worth taking a closer look at the stock, lest you miss an opportunity. While it is well worth considering the different impacts that market conditions can have on the share price, there are other factors that are even more important. Consider risks, for instance. Every company has them, and we've spotted 1 warning sign for Heineken Malaysia Berhad you should know about.

We will like Heineken Malaysia Berhad better if we see some big insider buys. While we wait, check out this free list of growing companies with considerable, recent, insider buying.

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on Malaysian exchanges.

Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) simplywallst.com.



This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.

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[June 09, 2023] SHARP Unveils Expanded Portfolio of Multifunction Printers at National Dealers Meet in Goa

Adds 11 new Color and Monochrome Multifunction Printer models across Advanced and Essential Series Portfolio

Sharp's latest MFPs makes Color printing more affordable and convenient, encouraging #SwitchtoColor NEW DELHI, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- SHARP Business Systems (India) Pvt. Ltd, a subsidiary of SHARP Corporation Japan, launched a new lineup of mono multifunction printers (MFPs) today, including the BP-50M and BP-70M series. In total, SHARP has introduced six mono MFP models, which include the advanced series models like BP-70M45 and BP-70M65, as well as essential series models such as the BP-50M45, BP-50M45T, BP-50M55, and BP-50M55T. The new series of MFPs offers smart, connected, and secure features, along with a speed range of 45 PPM to 65 PPM in black and white. Capable of handling paper input up to A3 size, the new models suit the requirements across a diverse range of sectors such as large corporations, educational institutions, consulting firms, publishing houses, hospitals, BFSI, stock exchanges, e-commerce platforms, PSUs, and government organizations. SHARP unveiled and exhibited these new MFPs at the National Dealer Meet in Goa, attended by over 100+ dealers. Additionally, as part of its ongoing commitment to promote the #SwitchtoColor initiative, SHARP has also expanded its Color MFP series. This expansion includes the introduction of new models across the essential series like BP-50C26T/BP-50C31T, entry-level models like BP-20C20ZT/BP20C25ZT and a mid-range color MFP, the BP-30C25ZT. These additions to the existing portfolio are strategically designed to meet the growing demand from government businesses, providing them with a range of options to embrace vibrant and high-quality color printing capabilities. Commenting on the launch, Narita Osamu, Managing Director of SHARP Business Systems (India) Pvt. Ltd, stated, "At SHARP, we have always been at the forefront of office innovation, consistently delivering best-in-class performance with cutting-edge technology across a range of smart, connected, secure, and eco-friendly multifunctional printers (MFPs). The introduction of our new expanded lineup of mono and color MFP models reflects our unwavering commitment to revolutionize the office printing landscape, making vibrant and high-quality printing solutions more accessible and affordable. We're confident that these new innovative document solutions will effectively address the new age business needs for improved productivity, efficiency, and better integration at the workplace." The BP-50M series models are made in a stylish gray case with a pleasant textured surface and features control panel in a 10.1 Full flat capacitive touch panel that makes it simple to navigate through menus and easy user interface ettings, where user can drag all the frequently used functions on to the touch panel. All the mentioned models (BP-50M45, BP-50M45T, BP-50M55, and BP-50M55T) deliver a print resolution of 600 dpi and comes equipped with a 100-sheet Reversing single pass feeder (RSPF) with a scanning speed of up to 80 OPM. The upgraded lineup also provides for easy access to expanded array of cloud services, with smooth device integration that allow users to seamlessly collaborate and connect with diverse work groups, while ensuring complete data protection.



The new BP-70M series presents a significant advancement over the features offered by the BP-50M series, introducing notable enhancements to the MFP lineup. These sophisticated models (BP-70M45 and BP-70M65) deliver a true 1200 dpi resolution for highest quality print output. Further, the advanced series models are equipped with a cutting-edge Duplexing Single Pass Feeder (DSPF), boasting an impressive capacity of up to 300 sheets and an exceptional scanning speed, reaching an extraordinary 280 OPM. This remarkable performance ensures swift and efficient scanning operations while maintaining optimal accuracy and quality. The BP-70M series also features a convenient motion sensor which allows the device to start warming up as soon as a user approaches it, minimizing the waiting time for scan and copy. The BP-70M and BP-50M MFP series are technologically advanced and 'SMART,' incorporating AI capabilities to streamline everyday documentation tasks with ease and efficiency. The new series also comes with a revolutionary smart scanning feature that enables the MFP to automatically determine the optimal resolution, gradation, compression rate for your scan jobs, page orientation, and skew correction, all by tapping the Auto set button. With seamless connectivity features, they provide a 'CONNECTED' experience by integrating smoothly with popular cloud-based applications like OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and MS Teams. This integration facilitates swift scanning and cloud upload, enabling remote execution of document jobs. Furthermore, SHARP prioritizes 'SECURE' experience with these MFPs, offering a range of security features such as Data Encryption and Erase, BIOS Firmware security, LDAP and Active Directory integration, Image Job Log, Whitelisting, Data erasure at the end of the lease period, Optional Virus Detection, and Document Control.

In addition to the Monochrome series, SHARP has also introduced new models, BP-50C26T/BP-50C31T expanding upon its highly acclaimed Color series. With a large 10.1-inch capacitive touch panel, these MFPs offer exceptional color printing with true 1200 DPI resolution, ensuring businesses achieve striking and vibrant outputs, with copying and printing speeds upto 31 ppm (pages per minute). Utilizing the 100-sheet reversing single-pass feeder (RSPF), businesses can easily scan documents at speeds of up to 80 opm. This rapid scanning process ensures that businesses can digitize their documents swiftly and effectively, boosting productivity and workflow efficiency. In addition, these MFPs offer secure print access and advanced document management features, empowering businesses to enhance office productivity while ensuring the utmost data protection. Catering to the specific needs of government organizations, SHARP's new lineup also includes the BP-20C20ZT/BP20C25ZT/BP-30C25ZT entry & mid-level color MFPs. These MFPs deliver cost-effective and reliable color copying, printing & scanning solutions, ideal for government agencies that require quality outputs for various documentation needs. Designed to maximize efficiency and convenience, this MFP series delivers a speed range of 20 PPM to 25 PPM for both color and black & white printing. Equipped with a comprehensive set of features, it is specifically crafted to enhance the workflow and streamline operations. It is also one of the smallest A3 colour devices available, making it a preferred choice for smaller office cabins. The newly launched SHARP's MFPs are now available for purchase at SHARP's offices and authorized dealerships across India. The new range of MFPs will be available for purchase at a starting price of INR 1,94,500 for the base color model. To learn more about these new printing solutions or to find a local dealer, please visit in.sharp About SHARP Business Systems (India) SHARP Business Systems (India) Pvt Ltd is an ISO 900l:2015 Certified and wholly owned Indian subsidiary of SHARP Corporation, Japan which is a 111-year-old company with many technological innovations. Supported by a well-trained sales and service force, our business provides a host of market leading B2B and B2C products that includes a comprehensive range of the latest office Solutions, Visual Solutions and Home Solutions across India for over 20 years. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/in/news-releases/sharp-unveils-expanded-portfolio-of-multifunction-printers-at-national-dealers-meet-in-goa-301847067.html

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[June 09, 2023] Connectivity Everywhere: Sunwave's Scenario-based Solutions Revealed at CommunicAsia

SINGAPORE, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- At the Asia Tech CommunicAsia exhibition, Sunwave Communications Co., Ltd. (Sunwave) (SZ:002115), a global leading provider of mobile communications solutions, revealed its scenario-based solutions for network infrastructure, providing customized services for various industries that cater to the clients' specific needs. In the rail transit field, Sunwave's solutions have garnered widespread attention due to their successful deployments. Sunwave's offerings encompass both commercial and public safety network solutions. Through a collaborative approach with clients, Sunwave has addressed the unique challenges of tunnel and underground environments through waterproof and dust-proof solutions. Moreover, Sunwave's dual system backup ensures consistent signal strength and reliable operation, ensuring an uninterruptable mobile experience in high-speed train travel. In Malaysia, Sunwave has deployed CrossFire High Power DAS products supporting multiple technology standards and frequencies, which enabled six operators to expand heir mobile signal coverage. In addition, Sunwave also excels in Tetra networks providing public safety services for Malaysia's metro system. The Tetra system delivers 380-410MHz signal coverage for the entire metro line including metro stations and tunnels. An optical loop-back function ensures the stability and reliability in the event of fiber break ensuring uninterrupted operations.



In Singapore, Sunwave has deployed MIMO solution across Remote Units which ensured system stability. In the event of device malfunction, the other device will continue to operate. This solution resulted from Sunwave forward looking thinking in designing our solutions, making it an ideal choice for metros, railways and underground trains. The benefits to rail transit companies are increased network capacity, improved customer experience and increased profitability. Sunwave has demonstrated notable strengths in the Asia Pacific rail transit coverage market in recent years through numerous successful partnerships in both Singapore and Malaysia. "Sunwave as a global company, offers a diverse solution portfolio to meet the requirements from multiple regions, including Asia Pacific, Europe, North America and Latin America for office buildings, stadiums, schools, hospitals and others." commented Tracy Yu, Vice President of Sunwave Overseas Business Department. Sunwave remains committed to the continuous development of next generation network with customer-driven innovation to empower businesses and unlock the full potential of digital transformation.

Sunwave Communications Co., Ltd, a global leading provider of mobile communication solutions, was founded in 1993. Listed on SZSE (SZ: 002115) in 2007, it specializes in wireless network infrastructure solutions, ranging from construction to operations services, offering first-class wireless network, wireless security, and satellite communications solutions. With over 30 years of experience, Sunwave's products and solutions have been deployed in 200+ cities worldwide. For more information, please visit: https://www.sunwave.com/ View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/connectivity-everywhere-sunwaves-scenario-based-solutions-revealed-at-communicasia-301847106.html SOURCE Sunwave Communications Co., Ltd.

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[June 09, 2023] Riveron to be Acquired by Kohlberg & Company

Riveron (or "the Company"), a national business advisory firm focused on the office of the CFO, private equity, and other capital providers, announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by affiliates of Kohlberg & Company ("Kohlberg"). H.I.G. Capital ("H.I.G.") will continue its partnership with Riveron through a minority investment. A significant percentage of Riveron's employee base will also be equity owners in the Company. Additional terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Founded in 2006, Riveron helps clients navigate today's most complex business challenges through its end-to-end suite of accounting, finance, technology, and operations services that span the business lifecycle. With over 700 employees across 12 offices in the U.S., Riveron experts draw on their consulting, public accounting, and industry backgrounds to implement impactful and practical solutions to its clients, including CFOs, private equity firms, and other stakeholders. "This transaction marks a significant milestone in Riveron's growth journey and accelerates our path to becoming the preeminent independent financial consulting firm serving corporate management teams, private equity firms, lenders, and other intermediaries," said Riveron Chief Executive Officer Julie Howard. "Through our new partnership with Kohlberg and continued partnership with H.I.G., we will be better positioned than ever before to pursue our ambitious growth agenda and enhance our strategic value for our employees, clients, and shareholders." "We are honored to partner with the Riveron management team and H.I.G. in supporting the next phase of the Company's growth," said Ahmed Wahla, Partner and Head of Business Services at Kohlberg. "Over the last two years, we have conducted extensive diligence on the CFO services sector, which fits squarely within the long-term secular themes we have successfully invested behind in our broader Business Services core practice area. We look forward to contributing our team's insights and our capital base to help extend Riveron's innovative suite of capabilities while maintaining its focus on providing world-class business advisory services to its clients and firmly estabishing the Company as the employer of choice in the industry."



Keval Patel, Managing Director at H.I.G., added, "When we invested in Riveron four years ago, we were excited to partner with a fast-growing, entrepreneurial organization with a differentiated culture. Since then, we have been proud to play a role in the remarkable growth trajectory that the Company has achieved. Riveron is an exceptional company with outstanding leadership and growth prospects, and we look forward to continuing to support the business in its next chapter." The transaction, which is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions, is expected to close in July. Jefferies Group LLC and Moelis & Company acted as financial advisors to Riveron and McDermott Will & Emery acted as legal counsel to H.I.G. and Riveron in connection with the transaction. Guggenheim Securities, LLC and Citizens served as financial advisors to Kohlberg. Ropes & Gray LLP and Greenberg Traurig, LLP acted as legal counsels to Kohlberg.

About Riveron Riveron is a national business advisory firm that partners with our clients to elevate performance and expand possibilities across the transaction and business lifecycle. Our thoughtfully integrated teams bring industry perspective and deep functional expertise across accounting, ESG, finance, M&A, operations, restructuring & turnaround, strategic communications, tax, and technology, to generate tailored solutions that address any challenge. Founded in 2006, Riveron has 12 offices across the country and serves a diverse set of clients around the world, including the office of the CFO, private equity, lenders, and other key stakeholders. For more information, please visit www.riveron.com. About Kohlberg & Company Kohlberg is a leading U.S. middle market private equity firm based in Mount Kisco, New York. Over the firm's 36-year history, the firm has organized 11 private equity vehicles totaling in aggregate over $14 billion. Since inception, the firm's private equity investments have generated over $10 billion in realized returns with no realized losses since 2007. The firm invests in leading middle market businesses that are identified through its rigorous White Paper Program in its six core practice areas. For more information, please visit www.kohlberg.com. About H.I.G. Capital H.I.G. is a leading global alternative assets investment firm with $55 billion of equity capital under management. Based in Miami, and with offices in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Atlanta in the U.S., as well as international affiliate offices in London, Hamburg, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Bogota, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, H.I.G. specializes in providing both debt and equity capital to small and mid-sized companies, utilizing a flexible and operationally focused/value-added approach. Since its founding in 1993, H.I.G. has invested in and managed more than 400 companies worldwide with combined revenues in excess of $52 billion. For more information, please visit www.higcapital.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005110/en/

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[June 09, 2023] Meeting presents sustainable Brazilian agri-business projects for investors

SAO PAULO, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Traive, a Brazilian fintech specializing in agri-business, together with embassies and other companies that support the sector in the country, is participating in meetings in London (06/07), Berlin (06/09) and The Hague (06/12) with attendees from investment funds, venture capitals and banks. One of the most biodiverse nations on the planet, Brazil is a benchmark in sustainable agriculture, with regulations for the protection of the environment throughout the entire production chain. However, the business potential of this segment is not always widely disseminated to potential investors, while it simultaneously supports guidelines for global preservation of natural resources. "The European market tends to have a lot of interest in knowing how the Brazilian agro market operates, its capacity and how it is incorporated into the ESG agenda. With excellent statisics in sustainable management that involve the preservation, conservation and development of the use of bio-inputs, Brazilian agri-business is also showing solid results, having started 2023 with a surplus of US$ 8.69 billion *, which is appealing to investors who are looking to invest capital in the Green Bond segment with social-environmental assurance and a financial return," says Fabricio Pezente, CEO of Traive.



In 2022, the Responsible Commodities Facility (RCF) initiative run by Traive, in partnership with SIM and OPEA, raised US$ 11M in investments from British chains Tesco, Sainsbury's and Waitrose to support deforestation and DCF-free soy farming in the Brazilian Cerrado. Traive's technology was responsible for leading investors to carry out a transparent analysis of the risk of credit and operation monitoring. Through the stimulus driven by social-environmental criteria, the initiative has a 0% non-compliance rate on the part of the 32 financed farms, who produced 42,400 tons of soy, 27,000 tons of maize and 3,200 tons of cotton, all deforestation-free, preserving 8,541 hectares of forest. This pioneering financing in the country also led to talks with the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, and was named the "2022 Initiative of the Year - Green Bonds" by Environmental Finance. About Traive

With its head office in the USA and operating in Brazil, Traive is a technology platform that uses Artificial Intelligence and data to develop risk-analysis solutions that cover the entire agricultural credit journey. Connecting retailers, cooperatives and industries to the capital market, allowing access to financial resources, data, scalability and sustainability in their businesses.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/meeting-presents-sustainable-brazilian-agri-business-projects-for-investors-301847135.html

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[June 09, 2023] Canada, Nova Scotia, and the Municipality of Chester invest to upgrade the Chester Wastewater Collection System and Treatment Plant

MUNICIPALITY OF THE DISTRICT OF CHESTER, NS, June 9, 2023 /CNW/ - Today, Kody Blois, Member of Parliament for KingsHants, Danielle Barkhouse, Member of the Legislative Assembly for Chester-St. Margaret's, and Allen Webber, Warden of the Municipality of the District of Chester, announced a joint investment of more than $8.3 million to upgrade Chester's wastewater system. This investment will enable the Municipality to improve wastewater infrastructure and service delivery, upgrade performance, and increase capacity while providing wastewater service to a new housing development project in the community. This upgrade will modernize the wastewater treatment plant and help release cleaner water into neighbouring waterways. By investing in infrastructure, the Government of Canada is growing our country's economy, building resilient communities, and improving the lives of Canadians. Quotes "Our government is committed to supporting greener communities. Investments in infrastructure such as the modernization of the wastewater system in the Municipality of Chester will help build a healthier and more resilient community while strengthening our economy." Kody Blois, Member of Parliament for KingsHants, on behalf of the Honourable Dominic LeBlanc, Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities "Our municipalities depend on modern infrastructure to be competitive and attract new residents to their communities. By making this investment, we are ensuring the release of cleaner water into neighbouring waterways and laying the foundation for continued growth for years to come." Danielle Barkhouse, MLA for Chester-St. Margaret's, on behalf of Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister John Lohr "We are thrilled to be approved for capital funding through the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program. An investment of this size is critical to the growth of the Village of Chester and will secure plans for a much-needed upgrade and capacity-building project  a project that will attract development well into the future." Allen Webber, Warden of the Municipality of the District of Chester Quick facts



The Government of Canada is investing $3,336,000 in this project, while the Government of Nova Scotia is investing $2,780,000 and the Municipality of the District Chester is contributing $2,224,000 .

is investing in this project, while the Government of is investing and the Municipality of the District Chester is contributing . The Government of Canada's funding comes from the Green Infrastructure Stream of the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program.

funding comes from the Green Infrastructure Stream of the Investing in Infrastructure Program. This stream helps build greener communities by contributing to climate change preparedness, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and supporting renewable technologies.

Including today's announcement, 63 infrastructure projects under the Green Infrastructure Stream have been announced in Nova Scotia , with a total federal contribution of more than $357 million and a total provincial contribution of nearly $4.6 million .

, with a total federal contribution of more than and a total provincial contribution of nearly . Under the Investing in Canada Plan, the federal government is investing more than $180 billion over 12 years in public transit projects, green infrastructure, social infrastructure, trade and transportation routes, and Canada's rural and northern communities.

Plan, the federal government is investing more than over 12 years in public transit projects, green infrastructure, social infrastructure, trade and transportation routes, and rural and northern communities. Infrastructure Canada helps address complex challenges that Canadians face every dayranging from the rapid growth of our cities, to climate change, and environmental threats to our water and land.

helps address complex challenges that Canadians face every dayranging from the rapid growth of our cities, to climate change, and environmental threats to our water and land. The funding announced today builds on the Government of Canada's work through the Atlantic Growth Strategy to create well-paying middle-class jobs, strengthen local economies, and build inclusive communities. Associated links Federal infrastructure investments in Nova Scotia

Green Infrastructure Stream

Investing in Canada: Canada's Long-Term Infrastructure Plan

Investing in Canada Plan Project Map

Strengthened Climate Plan

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Web: Infrastructure Canada SOURCE Infrastructure Canada

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[June 09, 2023] Craig Newmark Philanthropies Pledges $100 Million to Support US Veterans and Military Families

Grants will fund efforts to ensure those who serve, and their families, have stable and successful futures including those focused on mental health, food security, housing access, education, and employment NEW YORK, June 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Craig Newmark Philanthropies (CNP) announced today that it will donate $100 million to a broad coalition of organizations dedicated to supporting veterans and military families, led by the Bob Woodruff Foundation and Blue Star Families. The grants from CNP, the charitable network of craigslist founder Craig Newmark, will complement government efforts and focus on filling the unmet needs of veterans, service members, their families, and caregivers. In addition to grants focused on health and wellbeing, CNP is also committed to strengthening communities and building community-based networks for veterans and military families so that all who serve have access to the highest level of care and resources no matter where they call home. In this era of heightened global conflict and tension, CNP's funding will also support efforts to raise public awareness of the strains on military families, as well as the ongoing needs of veterans and their caregivers who have earned our support. The effort reflects Newmark's personal gratitude to the men and women who serve to protect our nation and its democratic ideals. "Our country is at risk," said Craig Newmark. "We need to protect the institutions and the people who dedicate their lives to service  and that includes everyone who has put on the uniform, as well as their families and caregivers." This effort is part of Newmark's long-standing commitment to supporting veterans and military families. CNP recently awarded $42 million to organizations in the sector. The additional $58 million pledged by CNP is expected to be distributed over the next three years. New grant awards announced today include $10 million to Blue Star Families and $10 million to the Bob Woodruff Foundation. This heightened push around veterans and military families will focus heavily on: Contributing to solutions for the most pressing challenges facing veterans and military familes, including mental health and suicide prevention, housing and homelessness, and food insecurity

Creating and supporting pathways for veterans and military families to access new education and employment opportunities, including cyber education and measures to provide cybersecurity career opportunities

Sustaining these efforts through national networks of collaborative organizations, including the Bob Woodruff Foundation's Got Your 6 Network and Blue Star Families' Chapters

Raising up policy solutions and championing these efforts with national, state, and local government leaders

Elevating these efforts over time with events, policy roundtables, and ongoing media and social media communications



"Craig's work is critical to raising the profile of veterans and military family philanthropy," said CEO of the Bob Woodruff Foundation, Anne Marie Dougherty. "Although most of the country's 20 million veterans and service members are thriving, we have an obligation to ensure all of the people who stood for us  and their families and caregivers  have stable and successful futures. These large-scale investments serve as a powerful way to encourage the broader philanthropic community and organizations across sectors to think about how they can support our nation's veterans and military families."

"By making a monumental donation of over $100 million, Craig issues a clarion call for others to step up," said CEO of Blue Star Families, Kathy Roth-Douquet. "In our volatile world we need our military more than ever. They are even more deployed than ever, and their families  while honored to serve  are too often struggling with isolation and making ends meet. Craig understands that military families have our backs and we need to have theirs." About Craig Newmark Philanthropies

Craig Newmark is a Web pioneer, philanthropist, and leading advocate. Most commonly known for founding the online classified ads service craigslist, Newmark works to support and connect people and drive broad civic engagement. In 2016, he founded Craig Newmark Philanthropies to help and protect the people who protect our country. At its core, all of Newmark's philanthropic work helps to strengthen American democracy by supporting the values that the country aspires to - fairness, opportunity, and respect. For more information, please visit: CraigNewmarkPhilanthropies.org. Craig can be found sharing his personal perspective on the issues of the day at @craignewmark. About Blue Star Families

Blue Star Families (BSF) is the nation's largest chapter-based military and veteran family support organization. Its research-driven approach builds strong communities with a focus on human centered design and innovative solutions. Since its founding in 2009, BSF has delivered more than $200 million in benefits and impacts more than 1.5 million people each year. For more information, click here. About the Bob Woodruff Foundation

The Bob Woodruff Foundation (BWF) was founded in 2006 after reporter Bob Woodruff was wounded by a roadside bomb while covering the war in Iraq. Since then, The Foundation has raised awareness about the tough challenges veterans and military families are facing, and invested in solutions to help support them in the next chapter of their lives. To date, the Foundation has invested over $120 million ensure that our nation's veterans, service members, and their families  those who stood for us  have stable and successful futures. For more information, visit bobwoodrufffoundation.org. Contact

Eric Phillips, [email protected] View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/craig-newmark-philanthropies-pledges-100-million-to-support-us-veterans-and-military-families-301846811.html SOURCE Craig Newmark Philanthropies

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[June 09, 2023] WBM Technologies Announces the Acquisition of PrinterWorks West

WBM Technologies LP is pleased to announce the acquisition of leading Alberta print technology solutions provider, PrinterWorks West. The move brings together two of Canada's strongest managed print support organizations and represents a continued focus and commitment to their united Alberta customer community. Together with PrinterWorks West, WBM will now be home to over 50 dedicated Managed Print Support Technicians in the province of Alberta alone, while adding a new support service location in Fort McMurray. The two companies form a team that is over 570 people strong, with a shared focus on being Western Canada's leading managed IT solutions provider. "While today's announcement is exciting in the leadership position it establishes, the best part of all is the spirit and enthusiasm that we can already feel across our organizations. WBM is ready to provide the investment and support needed to advance, and we couldn't be more excited to welcome this talented group of people to our team and to be a part of their success." JoeAnne Hardy, President of WBM Technologies As part of the acquisition, Darryl Henderson will continue to lead the PrinterWorks West team in Alberta, and he will now join the WBM Technologies Leadership team. Founder Jonathan Ceaser will retire from the business, capping his successful career. "Building PrinterWorks West has been an awesome journey, and today is the next step as we have joined one of the most respected and admired companies in our industry," saysPrinterWorks West President Darryl Henderson. "It was important for us to be able to move ahead in our growth, while staying local and remaining true to our values and our customers. With WBM, we've achieved exactly that."



The acquisition is effective June 1, 2023. PrinterWorks West will continue to operate under the PrinterWorks West banner, now "Powered by WBM", with no disruption or changes to PrinterWorks West customer services. Moving forward, customers of PrinterWorks West can expect to see new value from WBM's sophisticated automation, analytics, and fleet reporting insights, along with access to a full suite of outcomes-based technology solutions across the WBM Enterprise Experience Platform. The news is also significant to the WBM customer community, who will benefit from expanded print support expertise, coverage, and capacity across Alberta.

About WBM Technologies WBM Technologies LP (WBM) is a Western Canadian leader in the provision of outcomes-driven information technology solutions. We are driven by the possibilities and achievements we can unlock with our clients, providing business solutions across the WBM Enterprise UX Platform, including in our core practice areas of Data & Security, End User Computing, Modern Workplace Enablement, Managed Print Solutions, and Enterprise Service Desk. Through the ongoing management and governance of these solutions, WBM Technologies is delivering wow-factor technology experiences and tangible business results to a world-class customer community. Established May 1, 1950, WBM operates from Infrastructure Operation Centres located in Vancouver, Calgary, Regina, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg, with a support service location in Fort McMurray. We employ a team of over 570 IT professionals across Canada who are motivated to make a difference with our clients, and within our communities, through ongoing and impactful partnerships together. About PrinterWorks West Founded in 2001, PrinterWorks West is an Alberta-based Managed Print Services company offering customers best-in-breed solutions from the leading manufacturers in the industry. Since day one, PrinterWorks West has made it our mission to provide hardcopy, digitization, and workflow solutions that are tailored to our customers' needs. At PrinterWorks West, we are the subject matter experts on all things print. Serving the Calgary, Edmonton, and Fort McMurray areas, we offer Managed Print Services (MPS) that are unmatched in the marketplace. PrinterWorks West's commitment to customer service over the years have made us the leader in Managed print Services in Alberta. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230608005803/en/

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[June 09, 2023] Government of Canada invests in responsible artificial intelligence research at the Universite de Montreal

The investment strengthens Canada's position as a world leader in artificial intelligence research and innovation MONTREAL, June 9, 2023 /CNW/ - Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the greatest technological advances of our generation and already has a significant impact on the daily lives of Canadians. The Government of Canada is also fully aware that we need to promote the responsible development and use of AI and continues to consult with leading AI experts from Canadian industry, civil society and academia through the Advisory Council on AI. We are doubling down on responsible AI to drive economic growth, ensure Canadians are protected in the digital age and preserve Canada's leadership at the forefront of tomorrow's economy. The government is actively working with international partners on the responsible development and use of AI. Canada has gained a strong international reputation as a leader in responsible and ethical AI and continues to collaborate with its international partners, in particular through the G7 and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, to promote prudent and interoperable regulatory approaches to AI. Canada was closely involved in the launch of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, through which the 29 member governments work collectively to orient AI technologies toward shared values. Further, the government is directly engaging with leaders from like-minded countries in discussions on the future of global AI regulation. The government takes seriously concerns about the potential risks associated with rapid, large-scale deployment of advanced generative AI systems, and it is committed to addressing them effectively. That is why the government is proposing a new Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA) to address the potential risks of AI, build trust in Canada's AI industry and protect Canadians from a range of harms. AIDA will ensure that Canada is home to the most responsible and trusted AI in the world. Today, Rachel Bendayan, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Tourism and Associate Minister of Finance, on behalf of the Honourable Francois-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, highlighted an investment of more than $124 million at the Universite de Montreal for the R3AI: Shifting Paradigms for a Robust, Reasoning, and Responsible Artificial Intelligence and its Adoption initiative through the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF). This funding is part of a $1.4 billion investment in support of 11 large-scale research initiatives. This investment will allow researchers at Canadian universities to capitalize on the strengths of their research areas and attract capital and world-class talent. The R3AI initiative will implement new responsible AI design and adoption strategies in areas of importance for Canada, including molecule discovery, health systems improvements and climate change mitigation. By supporting initiatives focused on, among other things, treating and preventing brain and heart diseases, cutting carbn emissions in our communities, and making discoveries through responsible AI use, robotics and advanced computing, CFREF is helping Canadian researchers pioneer global insights and strengthen Canada's social and technological innovation ecosystems.



Quotes "Today's research is tomorrow's innovation. In the case of artificial intelligence, Canada is home to some of the world's leading AI researchers and the world's first fully funded AI strategy. Through the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, our government is proud to move even further ahead by investing $124 million into responsible artificial intelligence research. Canada will continue to lead on AI research, governance and innovation, including in drug discovery, health technology and climate change mitigation."

 The Honourable Francois-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry

"The Universite de Montreal is home to ground-breaking research that is key to transforming the responsible adoption of artificial intelligence. The federal government is proud to support our researchers and our local universities with projects that lead to important social and economic benefits for all Canadians."

 Rachel Bendayan, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Tourism and Associate Minister of Finance "Canada's post-secondary institutions are rich in talent and ideas and are committed to building healthier, more sustainable, more inclusive and more prosperous communities. With support from the federal government's Canada First Research Excellence Fund, they are able to build on these foundations to develop advanced research programs that showcase Canadian talent and lead the world in developing solutions to the critical challenges facing our planet, including environmental sustainability, advanced biotherapeutics, child health and population migration."

 Ted Hewitt, Chair, Tri-agency Institutional Programs Secretariat Steering Committee; President, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and Chair, Canada Research Coordinating Committee "Our R3AI project takes us down a necessary path: using a strongly interdisciplinary approach to develop reasoned, robust, resolutely responsible artificial intelligence that serves the common good. Thanks to the Canada First Research Excellence Fund grant, the Universite de Montreal and its partners will be able to strengthen the leadership we have built up over the years."

 Daniel Jutras, Rector of the Universite de Montreal Quick facts Created in 2014, the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) supports Canadian post-secondary institutions in their efforts to become global research leaders. The program helps Canadian universities, colleges and polytechnics compete with the best in the world for talent and partnership opportunities. It also supports them in making breakthrough discoveries; seizing emerging opportunities and strategically advancing their greatest strengths on the global stage; and implementing large-scale, transformational and forward-thinking institutional strategies.

CFREF invests approximately $200 million per year through a highly competitive peer review process, held every seven years, to support selected Canadian post-secondary institutions in turning their key strengths into world-leading capabilities.

per year through a highly competitive peer review process, held every seven years, to support selected Canadian post-secondary institutions in turning their key strengths into world-leading capabilities. CFREF is a tri-agency institutional program administered by the Tri-agency Institutional Programs Secretariat, housed at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), on behalf of the three federal research funding agencies: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and SSHRC.

(SSHRC), on behalf of the three federal research funding agencies: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of and SSHRC. Initiatives funded by CFREF are selected through an independent, multidisciplinary and international competitive peer review process.

The first phase of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy (PCAIS) was launched in 2017, in partnership with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), with a $125 million investment to build a strong Canadian talent pipeline and ecosystem, including the establishment of centres of research, innovation and training at the national AI institutes. Budget 2021 invested more than $443 million in a second phase of the strategy to support AI commercialization, standards, talent and research.

investment to build a strong Canadian talent pipeline and ecosystem, including the establishment of centres of research, innovation and training at the national AI institutes. Budget 2021 invested more than $443 million in a second phase of the strategy to support AI commercialization, standards, talent and research. Since 2017, over 125 top researchers, half of whom are international researchers drawn to Canada by the strategy and its investments, have been recruited as Canada CIFAR AI Chairs. Moreover, the national AI institutes have trained over 1,600 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. Many of these are international students who have come to Canada because of the recognized strengths of each institute. Associated links About CFREF

2022 CFREF competition results

2016 CFREF Competition 2 results

2015 CFREF Competition 1 results Stay connected Find more services and information at Canada.ca/ISED. Follow @CDNScience on social media for Canadian science news: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook Follow the Tri-agency Institutional Programs Secretariat on social media: Twitter, LinkedIn. SOURCE Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

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[June 09, 2023] Lumen and Microsoft Team Up for Modernized Workforces

TMCnet News Lumen Technologies, a provider of communication and information technology services, has announced its plans to launch Operator Connect for Microsoft (News - Alert) Teams Phone offering. This move comes as a response to the growing challenge faced by companies in modernizing their hybrid workforce. Lumen recognizes the need to support businesses in adapting to the demands of a hybrid employee base, and this product aims to provide a solution that offers fast, easy, and simplified connection and collaboration abilities.



The collaboration between Lumen and Microsoft represents a strategic partnership aimed at delivering enhanced customer experiences, improved product quality and increased productivity. By leveraging the expertise and resources of both companies, Lumen aims to provide consultative support to its customers, helping them choose the right products to drive their desired business outcomes. Lumen's long-standing history in the communication and information technology industry positions them as a reliable partner in the evolving landscape of modern businesses. With over a century of experience, Lumen has consistently adapted to technological advancements to provide innovative solutions to their customers.

Lumen has witnessed the transformative power of communication technology over the decades. Through various mergers and acquisitions, the company has grown its reach and capabilities, solidifying its position as a leading provider of communication services. Lumen's market presence and expertise in network infrastructure and edge computing have made them a trusted partner for businesses seeking reliable and scalable communication solutions. As the demand for hybrid work environments continues to rise, Lumen's Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams Phone (News - Alert) offering positions them as a key player in supporting organizations' digital transformation journeys. 'Partners make more possible,' stated Kate Johnson, President and CEO at Lumen. 'Lumen is revamping our alliance partner ecosystem with companies like Microsoft so we can be even more consultative in our approach - we can really help customers choose the products that will drive the best business outcomes.' Operator Connect offers clients a seamless and efficient way to deploy calling in Microsoft Teams without the need for on-premises equipment. The product also provides customizable features, further enhancing its value proposition. This offering is particularly advantageous for customers as it allows them to leverage their existing investment in Teams, eliminating the need for additional on-premises solutions. Lumen's inclusion of Microsoft in its Growth Operating System is a testament to the tech giant's early entry into this innovative process. The Growth Operating System aims to gain a deep understanding of customer needs in an ever-evolving landscape characterized by the complexity of cloud services and connectivity disruptions. Lumen plans to leverage these insights to assist customers in harnessing the transformative capabilities of emerging technologies like the metaverse and AI. The partnership with Microsoft is expected to yield accelerated sales leads and closures, as well as facilitate product expansion. "Lumen's scale of network and metro edge compute infrastructure is uniquely differentiated for low latency experiences. With our combined strengths, Microsoft and Lumen will enable customers to access advanced immersive capabilities for improved collaboration, productivity, and innovation,' stated Rick Wagner, president, Microsoft Federal. 'This effort is a great example of how Microsoft works with industry leaders to deliver results for customers at scale.' Lumen Technologies' upcoming launch of Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams Phone is set to address the challenge faced by companies in modernizing their hybrid workforce. By leveraging their strategic partnership with Microsoft, Lumen aims to provide customers with fast, easy, and simplified connection and collaboration abilities.





Edited by Greg Tavarez



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[June 09, 2023] Three Banks Recognized for Commitment to Community Investment

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas (FHLB Dallas) recognized three member financial institutions for their commitment to community investment by naming them 2023 Community Area Revitalization Efforts (CARE) Award recipients. First National Bank Texas (FNBT), Home Bank and The First Bank were honored recently during FHLB Dallas's annual member conference. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005432/en/ First National Bank Texas, based in Killeen, Texas, was recognized for its commitment to community investment by the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas. (Photo: Business Wire) Each member was awarded $7,500 to provide to a nonprofit of its choice for demonstrating a commitment to supporting affordable housing or other programs from FHLB Dallas in support of their communities. FNBT, based in Killeen, Texas, has used Small Business Boost, a secondary loan program from FHLB Dallas that closes the gap between what a business needs and what the member can finance. It has also supported veterans and their families with grants for home repairs through the Housing Assistance for Veterans (HAVEN) program. Between 2019 and 2022, FNBT leveraged $2.3 million in Affordable Housing Program (AHP), small business assistance and other specialized grant prgram funds. Watch this video about FNBT's assistance for small businesses and veterans through FHLB Dallas.



"We're so honored to accept this prestigious award," said Adam Martin, senior vice president of Commercial Lending at FNBT. "We will reinvest the award dollars into helping our communities in conjunction with the United Way of Central Texas. We have always enjoyed working with FHLB Dallas and look forward to doing so for years to come." Home Bank, based in Lafayette, Louisiana, has been very active in the Partnership Grant Program (PGP), through which FHLB Dallas provides a 3:1 match of member contributions up to $12,000 to help community-based organizations (CBOs) increase their outreach and organizational capacity.

Between 2019 and 2022, Home Bank leveraged more than $4 million in AHP, disaster recovery assistance and other specialized grant program funds. Watch this video about Home Bank's funding assistance for the Leona Tate Foundation for Change in New Orleans, Louisiana; The Hub: Lafayette Urban Ministries, which provides services to homeless people in Lafayette, Louisiana; and Step Up Acadiana, a Lafayette nonprofit that assists first-time homebuyers through FHLB Dallas programs. "Home Bank is humbled and thrilled to be a recipient of this prestigious award," said Kelvin Luster, senior vice president and community development director at Home Bank. "We will use this CARE Award as continued motivation to strive for excellence in helping everyone in our communities that we serve. Because of FHLB Dallas, Home Bank has the privilege and opportunity to do just that." The First Bank, based in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is a Community Development Financial Institution and its use of the Disaster Rebuilding Assistance (DRA) program has played a significant role in the coastal communities of Mississippi that it serves. "FHLB Dallas programs have helped our communities get back on their feet following devastating storms," said Jerome Brown, executive vice president and chief community officer at The First Bank. "This CARE Award epitomizes what we do in our communities. It's a tremendous honor because it truly aligns with our mission, which is to assist the communities that we serve." Between 2019 and 2022, The First Bank leveraged more than $3.8 million in AHP, disaster recovery assistance and other specialized grant program funds. Watch this video about its involvement in helping communities recover from natural disasters, including its work with Recover, Rebuild Restore Southeast Mississippi (R3SM). "It's been a pleasure to work with these members and we're honored to recognize them for their continued commitment to affordable housing and economic development," said Greg Hettrick, senior vice president and director of Community Investment at FHLB Dallas. About the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas The Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas is one of 11 district banks in the FHLBank System created by Congress in 1932. FHLB Dallas, with total assets of $181.2 billion as of March 31, 2023, serves approximately 800 members and associated institutions across our five-state District of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas. FHLB Dallas provides financial products and services including advances (loans to members) and grant programs for affordable housing and economic development. For more information, visit our website at fhlb.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230609005432/en/

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Key Insights

Given the large stake in the stock by institutions, DWF Group's stock price might be vulnerable to their trading decisions

A total of 20 investors have a majority stake in the company with 50% ownership

Analyst forecasts along with ownership data serve to give a strong idea about prospects for a business

To get a sense of who is truly in control of DWF Group plc (LON:DWF), it is important to understand the ownership structure of the business. We can see that institutions own the lion's share in the company with 42% ownership. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

As a result, institutional investors endured the highest losses last week after market cap fell by UK21m. The recent loss, which adds to a one-year loss of 49% for stockholders, may not sit well with this group of investors. Institutions or "liquidity providers" control large sums of money and therefore, these types of investors usually have a lot of influence over stock price movements. As a result, if the downtrend continues, institutions may face pressures to sell DWF Group, which might have negative implications on individual investors.

Let's take a closer look to see what the different types of shareholders can tell us about DWF Group.

See our latest analysis for DWF Group

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About DWF Group?

Institutions typically measure themselves against a benchmark when reporting to their own investors, so they often become more enthusiastic about a stock once it's included in a major index. We would expect most companies to have some institutions on the register, especially if they are growing.

DWF Group already has institutions on the share registry. Indeed, they own a respectable stake in the company. This can indicate that the company has a certain degree of credibility in the investment community. However, it is best to be wary of relying on the supposed validation that comes with institutional investors. They too, get it wrong sometimes. It is not uncommon to see a big share price drop if two large institutional investors try to sell out of a stock at the same time. So it is worth checking the past earnings trajectory of DWF Group, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

DWF Group is not owned by hedge funds. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is Dwf Group Plc., Employee Stock Ownership Plan with 8.2% of shares outstanding. In comparison, the second and third largest shareholders hold about 5.9% and 5.6% of the stock. Furthermore, CEO Nigel Knowles is the owner of 0.8% of the company's shares.

After doing some more digging, we found that the top 20 have the combined ownership of 50% in the company, suggesting that no single shareholder has significant control over the company.

While studying institutional ownership for a company can add value to your research, it is also a good practice to research analyst recommendations to get a deeper understand of a stock's expected performance. Quite a few analysts cover the stock, so you could look into forecast growth quite easily.

Insider Ownership Of DWF Group

While the precise definition of an insider can be subjective, almost everyone considers board members to be insiders. Management ultimately answers to the board. However, it is not uncommon for managers to be executive board members, especially if they are a founder or the CEO.

Most consider insider ownership a positive because it can indicate the board is well aligned with other shareholders. However, on some occasions too much power is concentrated within this group.

We can report that insiders do own shares in DWF Group plc. It has a market capitalization of just UK165m, and insiders have UK5.3m worth of shares, in their own names. Some would say this shows alignment of interests between shareholders and the board. But it might be worth checking if those insiders have been selling.

General Public Ownership

The general public-- including retail investors -- own 38% stake in the company, and hence can't easily be ignored. While this size of ownership may not be enough to sway a policy decision in their favour, they can still make a collective impact on company policies.

Private Equity Ownership

With a stake of 5.6%, private equity firms could influence the DWF Group board. Some might like this, because private equity are sometimes activists who hold management accountable. But other times, private equity is selling out, having taking the company public.

Next Steps:

I find it very interesting to look at who exactly owns a company. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. Consider for instance, the ever-present spectre of investment risk. We've identified 4 warning signs with DWF Group , and understanding them should be part of your investment process.

But ultimately it is the future, not the past, that will determine how well the owners of this business will do. Therefore we think it advisable to take a look at this free report showing whether analysts are predicting a brighter future.

NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the last twelve months, which refer to the 12-month period ending on the last date of the month the financial statement is dated. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures.

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.

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As crime continues to spike amid warmer weather . . . We check this quick collection of crime reporting, community outreach and just a few encouraging stories.



Check-it . . .



Police identify 14-year-old shot and killed KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) - The Kansas City, Missouri Police Department identified a victim shot and killed Wednesday morning as 14-year-old Derrick Thurman. Early yesterday morning, officers responded to a shooting call at the 8300 block of Wayne Ave. When they arrived, the 14-year-old boy was suffering from gunshot wounds and was declared dead at the scene after EMS arrived.

Sentencing for former St. Aquinas choir director leaves some unsatisfied KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Joseph Heidesch, a former St. Aquinas choir director, was sentenced to over five years in prison for secretly recording students. Heidesh, 47, pleaded guilty to 26 counts, including one count of sexual exploitation of a child and 25 counts of breach of privacy in December.

Lee's Summit 18-year-old charged in fatal shooting on May 13 in Lee's Summit For Immediate ReleaseJune 8, 2023 An 18-year-old Lee's Summit resident faces Involuntary Manslaughter for recklessly causing the death of Dakota Wrightsman by shooting him, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker announced today. Cooper D. Ashley, dob: 2/20/2005, faces Involuntary Manslaughter 1st Degree.* According to court records, Lee's Summit officers responded to a residence in Lee's Summit on a report of a shooting.

Grandview man accused of giving woman an illegal drug that killed her KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A Grandview man faces a felony charge in Johnson County Court of distribution causing death for allegedly supplying a woman with a controlled substance that killed her. Cameron Bryant, 27, also faces six counts of use of a communication facility (cell phone) during a drug felony.

Clay County, Mo., deputy who helped teenager at Worlds of Fun honored by county A Clay County Sheriff's deputy who assisted a teenager in crisis at Worlds of Fun in late May was honored this week by the Clay County, Missouri Commission. On May 24, deputy Jonathan Bransfield received a phone call about a teenager he knew who had climbed up the Worlds of Fun tower.

Platte County Sheriff's Office moving, offices getting upgrades from ARPA money PLATTE CITY, Mo. - Big changes are coming to some Platte County buildings and offices thanks to $20 million of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money the county has left over. "We really decided to spend the money on county facilities," said Presiding Platte County Commissioner Scott Fricker.

Blair's Law finally passes along with other crime reducing measures Two legislative measures passed just before this year's session of the Missouri General Assembly adjourned on May 12 which should help reduce our city's terrible rate of violent crimes. One affects celebratory gun fire and the other police department salary caps.

Nebraska city dedicates street name to Kansas City police officer James Muhlbauer, K9 partner Champ Kansas City police officer James Muhlbauer and his K9 partner Champ were honored this week in Bellevue, Neb.The City of Bellevue dedicated a street name in their honor near Muhlbauer's childhood home in the city. Muhlbauer and Champ were killed in the line of duty on Feb. 15, 2023.

Developing . . .
There's less than two weeks to go until election day and a recent council action sparked controversy and frustration behind the scenes.

Thankfully, our blog community is here to help explain the sitch.

To wit . . .

LEADERS OF THE NORTHLAND COUNCIL BLOC ADVISE THAT THEY WERE CONNED INTO VOTING FOR "CAMERON LAMB DAY" AMID POLICE SUPPORTER OUTRAGE!!!



We admit . . . The decision was curious but the explanation makes sense.

Here's the word from a trusted insider . . .



"TKC, you should tell people how this stuff really works. This item thrown at us at the last minute with 20 pieces of legislation on our desks. We noticed a bunch of people hanging around but that happens a lot during the Summer. Have to admit . . . We forgot about the Cameron Lamb and before we knew it, the resolution was rushed through. Most of those Northland votes were given out of reflex and not any REAL support. I suspect that at least one of the South Side council members didn't enthusiastically go along with this resolution either. This whole thing was timed to put pressure on the Missouri AG during the appeal process for DeValkenaere and OBVIOUSLY we don't want any part of that."



A few things to consider . . .

Our police supporter friends should realize that the resolution is merely symbolic and doesn't really mean anything. Council members on the nice side of the bridge forgetting about a 2019 deadly police shooting is certainly plausible.



The argument about the AG's handling of the case is interesting . . . Until recently, most assumed that the Governor would pardon the former KCPD detective.

Because nobody REALLY pays attention to city hall non-binding resolutions . . . This word sent our way makes sense and offers a glimpse into the sausage-making of 12th & Oak legislation.

Developing . . .
The 13th Annual Capital Link Sustainability Forum titled Financing & Investments Spearheading Sustainable Growth was held June 8 under the Auspices of the Attica regional government at the Divani Caravel hotel in Athens.

Led by Capital Link Founder, President, and CEO Nicolas Bornozis and Managing Director Olga Bornozis and their dynamic transatlantic staff, the well-attended conference featured senior executives from Greek banks, companies, and leading organizations, as well as past national ministers and top current regional and municipal government officials. Speakers included Greek-American C. Dean Metropoulos, Chairman and CEO of Metropoulos and Company, and John Koudounis, CEO of Calamos Investments. The Forum, which took place for the 13th consecutive year, had as its main focus Sustainability-Corporate, Social, a timely topic given that Responsibility, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)-guided investing is important to the success of companies all of the world, including Greece.

The Forum concluded with the ceremony for the Capital Link Sustainability Leadership Award. This years honoree was Vassiliki Lazarakou, the first female Chairperson of the Hellenic Capital Market Commission in its 30 years of operation. She is also a member of the Management Board of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). The award is presented to persons or entities for their contribution to society and for the elevation of Greece and the Greek culture globally.

Read more at thenationalherald.com

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations, Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
Janis Ramsay is an award-winning journalist covering Simcoe County for more than 21 years. She is mom to two boys who are into sports and tech.
Pandemic lockdown forced Anishinaabe visual artist from Rama First Nation to experience "reconnection with my homelands, that deepened and changed my life."
In order to justify the effort of selecting individual stocks, it's worth striving to beat the returns from a market index fund. But the main game is to find enough winners to more than offset the losers At this point some shareholders may be questioning their investment in Challenger Limited (ASX:CGF), since the last five years saw the share price fall 50%. Furthermore, it's down 14% in about a quarter. That's not much fun for holders.

Since shareholders are down over the longer term, lets look at the underlying fundamentals over the that time and see if they've been consistent with returns.

See our latest analysis for Challenger

To paraphrase Benjamin Graham: Over the short term the market is a voting machine, but over the long term it's a weighing machine. One way to examine how market sentiment has changed over time is to look at the interaction between a company's share price and its earnings per share (EPS).

During the five years over which the share price declined, Challenger's earnings per share (EPS) dropped by 27% each year. This fall in the EPS is worse than the 13% compound annual share price fall. So investors might expect EPS to bounce back -- or they may have previously foreseen the EPS decline.

You can see how EPS has changed over time in the image below (click on the chart to see the exact values).

It's good to see that there was some significant insider buying in the last three months. That's a positive. On the other hand, we think the revenue and earnings trends are much more meaningful measures of the business. Dive deeper into the earnings by checking this interactive graph of Challenger's earnings, revenue and cash flow.

What About Dividends?

As well as measuring the share price return, investors should also consider the total shareholder return (TSR). The TSR is a return calculation that accounts for the value of cash dividends (assuming that any dividend received was reinvested) and the calculated value of any discounted capital raisings and spin-offs. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. As it happens, Challenger's TSR for the last 5 years was -42%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.

A Different Perspective

While the broader market gained around 3.6% in the last year, Challenger shareholders lost 13% (even including dividends). However, keep in mind that even the best stocks will sometimes underperform the market over a twelve month period. Unfortunately, last year's performance may indicate unresolved challenges, given that it was worse than the annualised loss of 7% over the last half decade. We realise that Baron Rothschild has said investors should "buy when there is blood on the streets", but we caution that investors should first be sure they are buying a high quality business. I find it very interesting to look at share price over the long term as a proxy for business performance. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. Take risks, for example - Challenger has 2 warning signs we think you should be aware of.

Challenger is not the only stock insiders are buying. So take a peek at this free list of growing companies with insider buying.

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on Australian exchanges.

Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) simplywallst.com.



This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.

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There wouldn't be many who think Ithaca Energy plc's (LON:ITH) price-to-sales (or "P/S") ratio of 0.7x is worth a mention when the median P/S for the Oil and Gas industry in the United Kingdom is similar at about 1x. Although, it's not wise to simply ignore the P/S without explanation as investors may be disregarding a distinct opportunity or a costly mistake.

See our latest analysis for Ithaca Energy

What Does Ithaca Energy's P/S Mean For Shareholders?

There hasn't been much to differentiate Ithaca Energy's and the industry's revenue growth lately. Perhaps the market is expecting future revenue performance to show no drastic signs of changing, justifying the P/S being at current levels. Those who are bullish on Ithaca Energy will be hoping that revenue performance can pick up, so that they can pick up the stock at a slightly lower valuation.

If you'd like to see what analysts are forecasting going forward, you should check out our free report on Ithaca Energy.

Do Revenue Forecasts Match The P/S Ratio?

Ithaca Energy's P/S ratio would be typical for a company that's only expected to deliver moderate growth, and importantly, perform in line with the industry.

Taking a look back first, we see that the company grew revenue by an impressive 37% last year. The latest three year period has also seen an excellent 204% overall rise in revenue, aided by its short-term performance. So we can start by confirming that the company has done a great job of growing revenue over that time.

Shifting to the future, estimates from the four analysts covering the company suggest revenue growth will show minor resilience over the next three years growing only by 3.3% per annum. While this isn't a particularly impressive figure, it should be noted that the the industry is expected to decline by 5.1% per year.

Despite the marginal growth, we find it odd that Ithaca Energy is trading at a fairly similar P/S to the industry. Apparently some shareholders are skeptical of the contrarian forecasts and have been accepting lower selling prices.

What We Can Learn From Ithaca Energy's P/S?

Typically, we'd caution against reading too much into price-to-sales ratios when settling on investment decisions, though it can reveal plenty about what other market participants think about the company.

Our examination of Ithaca Energy's analyst forecasts revealed that its superior revenue outlook against a shaky industry isn't resulting in the company trading at a higher P/S, as per our expectations. There could be some unobserved threats to revenue preventing the P/S ratio from matching the positive outlook. Perhaps there is some hesitation about the company's ability to keep swimming against the current of the broader industry turmoil. At least the risk of a price drop looks to be subdued, but investors seem to think future revenue could see some volatility.

It's always necessary to consider the ever-present spectre of investment risk. We've identified 3 warning signs with Ithaca Energy, and understanding them should be part of your investment process.

If you're unsure about the strength of Ithaca Energy's business, why not explore our interactive list of stocks with solid business fundamentals for some other companies you may have missed.

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.

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Soon citizens GCC countries and Jordan, will only have to pay 10 to register for an Electronic Travel Authorization programme (ETA), which will allow them to travel to the UK several times over the course of two years.

In contrast, Jordanians currently pay 100 for a visit visa, while Gulf citizens pay 30 for each visit to the UK via the Electronic Visa Waiver (EVW) programme.

For people passing through the UK and entering or exiting without a visa for a short time or who do not already have a valid UK visa, an ETA is a digital authorization to travel.

Prior to a global rollout in 2024, the programme is scheduled to begin for Qatari nationals first in October 2023, followed by the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and then Jordan in February 2024.

A totally digital process using a mobile phone app will make the application process for an ETA quick and easy to complete. People must provide biographical and biometric information, including a digital photo, and respond to a series of questions about their suitability, in order to apply.
By Michael O'Keefe, June 9, 2023







WARRENSBURG, MO  KMOS-TV was recognized by the Missouri Broadcasters Association (MBA) during an awards ceremony at its annual convention at the Lake of the Ozarks on June 3. The University of Central Missouri's public broadcasting station received a first-place award in the category Special Program for a story on the Missouri Meerschaum Company, part of the second season of its original series Making.



Hosted by blacksmith Matt Burchett, the series, Making, included this profile of the company and its 150+ year history of making corncob pipes in Missouri. This episode also featured the Big Muddy Rug Hookers Guild and ceramic artist Yukari Kashihara. Making is comprised of 12 programs and can

be viewed at the KMOS website (kmos.org) New episodes will be available this fall on KMOS-TV and online.



The MBA conducted three days of professional development sessions during its annual convention held June 1-3 at Margaritaville Lake Resort, and on the last night presented this award to KMOS, along with 234 other awards and inducted seven individuals into the MBA Hall of Fame.



KMOS serves the citizens of 38 central Missouri counties with high quality, educational content and experiences online, over-the-air and in our communities. KMOS-TV broadcasts programs for all ages on four channels, and is integral to engaged learning as a professional learning lab for students from a

variety of disciplines at UCM.



The MBA promotes the success and prosperity of Missouris Broadcasters and the survival of the broadcasting industry through representation in Jefferson City, as a training resource for stations, and by recognizing excellence and achievement among its members.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine today invited the Charge d'Affaires of Hungary and handed him an appeal demanding detailed information about the Ukrainian POWs transferred by Russia to Budapest.

The relevant statement was made by Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko on Facebook, Ukrinform reports.

Nikolenko said that the release of Ukrainian POWs is always good news. At the same time, the Foreign Ministry spokesman noted that the Ukrainian government was not informed about the relevant negotiations between the Hungarian and Russian sides, and that the Ukrainian side learned that Russia had handed over eleven Ukrainians of Hungarian origin to Budapest from public statements by the Hungarian Deputy Prime Minister.

"Today, the Charge d'Affaires of Hungary was invited to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine for a substantive conversation. The Ukrainian side passed on a request to provide detailed information about our citizens and to immediately provide access to them for the Ukrainian consul to get acquainted with their health condition and provide them with consular assistance," said Nikolenko.

He added that during the meeting, the Ukrainian side emphasized the need to coordinate cooperation on such sensitive issues as the release of prisoners of war.

As reported, Deputy Prime Minister of Hungary Zsolt Semjen confirmed to the Hungarian media the information about the transfer of 11 prisoners of war, Transcarpathian Hungarians, from Russia to Hungary, as previously stated by the Russian Orthodox Church.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky had a phone call with Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte.

The interlocutors discussed the continuation of security cooperation, in particular, the training of Ukrainian pilots and the strengthening of Ukraine's sky shield. Volodymyr Zelensky and Mark Rutte coordinated their positions before the next meeting of the Contact Group on Ukraine's Defense in the Ramstein format, the press service of the Head of State informs.

The President noted the final decision of the Supreme Court of the Netherlands on the transfer of museum exhibits from the exhibition "Crimea. Golden Island in the Black Sea" ("Scythian Gold") to Ukraine.

"The Netherlands has confirmed its leadership in the protection of international law," Zelensky noted.

Zelensky informed Mark Rutte of the situation in the regions of Ukraine affected by the Russian act of terrorism at the dam of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station. The Head of State expressed gratitude for the humanitarian aid to eliminate the consequences of this man-made disaster. In particular, the Netherlands sent rescue boats, pumps, water filters, field hospitals and other equipment to Ukraine.

In addition, the President spoke about the current situation on the frontline and Ukraine's current defense needs.
The Supreme Court of the Netherlands passed the final sentence in the case of the Scythian Gold collections ownership.

As an Ukrinform correspondent reports from The Hague, the Court completely rejected the cassation appeal filed by the Crimean museums and upheld the appeal decision which upheld Ukraine's claims.

After almost 10 years of litigation, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands ruled that the Allard Pierson Museum has to hand over museum exhibits of the exhibition entitled Crimea. Golden Island in the Black Sea to the National Museum of the History of Ukraine.

The teams of the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, lawyers from the Bergh Stoop & Sanders Dutch firm and the Serhiy Kozyakov and Partners Ukrainian bar association have been working towards returning the exhibits home since 2014.

"The Supreme Court confirmed that Order 292 of the State of Ukraine establishes a fair balance between the interests of the state in protecting its cultural heritage and limiting the rights of museums. The struggle lasted almost nine years, but we were always sure that we would win. Therefore, it is very nice to receive this ultimate decision," Maarten Sanders, one of the Dutch lawyers who represent the interests of Ukraine in the Scythian Gold case, told an Ukrinform correspondent in an exclusive comment.

The Dutch lawyer also noted that this is very good news for Ukraine in such difficult times.

"Especially in these difficult times for Ukraine, this is very good news. We have always said that Ukraine was somehow lucky that this part of the Crimean treasures ended up in Amsterdam at the time of the occupation. It was one of few assets that could not be seized by military force. We can say that this has now been supported by our Supreme Court," Sanders emphasized.

As reported, on January 26, 2022, the so-called Russian Crimean museums in the temporarily occupied Crimea filed a cassation appeal against the judgment of the Amsterdam Court of Appeal regarding the return of the Scythian Gold collection to Ukraine.

The Scythian Gold collection should be returned to Ukraine. This judgment was delivered by the Amsterdam Court of Appeal on October 26, 2021.

The legal war for the exhibits began as the valuable collection was taken from Crimea to the Netherlands for an exhibition before the occupation of the peninsula by Russia in 2013. The exhibition "Crimea. Golden Island in the Black Sea" consisted of the collections of five museums, one of which is located in Kyiv, and four in Crimea. The exhibition was held at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam.

While the litigation is ongoing, the collection, estimated at EUR 10 million, has been stored at the Allard Pierson Museum.
PARIS, June 09, 2023--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Regulatory News:

TotalEnergies (Paris:TTE) (LSE:TTE) (NYSE:TTE) confirms its commitment to the energy transition in Kazakhstan with the signature of a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for the Mirny project. This will be the first PPA signed in the country for a wind project of such scale. Located in the Zhambyl region, the project aims to build a 1 GW onshore wind farm combined with a 600 MWh battery energy storage system for a reliable power supply. It represents an investment of about $1.4 billion. After Irak, it is another prime example of TotalEnergies ability to leverage its position as a major partner in the upstream sector to speed up the development of renewable energy in oil and gas countries.

The electricity to be produced by the Mirny project will be sold in its entirety to the Financial Settlement Center of Renewable Energy, a public entity owned by the Government of Kazakhstan, for the supply of the national grid. The project will provide electricity to 1 million people.

This agreement has been signed in Astana between Total Eren, an affiliate of TotalEnergies, and the FSC, in the presence of Patrick Pouyanne, Chairman and CEO of TotalEnergies and the Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Almasadam Satkaliyev. TotalEnergies will develop the Mirny project in partnership with the National Wealth Fund Samruk-Kazyna and the National Company KazMunayGas, which will each own a 20% stake in the project.

"This project will contribute to the transition of Kazakhstan to the green energy and will be a breakthrough in strengthening French-Kazakh investment cooperation," said Almassadam Satkaliyev, Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

"As a global energy leader, TotalEnergies is proud to drive the energy transition in Kazakhstan through such an innovative project as Mirny. This wind and battery project will contribute to the supply and security of the Kazakh power grid. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Kazakh authorities for their support and collaboration throughout this process. This represents a significant milestone in TotalEnergies' multi-energy strategy. TotalEnergies will bring its expertise in managing large-scale projects to make it a success, " said Patrick Pouyanne, Chairman and CEO of TotalEnergies.

A wind project contributing to Kazakhstans renewable push

The Mirny project, which will consist of around 200 turbines, is the largest wind energy initiative ever undertaken in Kazakhstan. Supported, by both the Kazakh and French authorities, the project will be a strong contributor to the Kazakh Government's target of achieving 15% of electricity from renewable sources by 2030. It will avoid the emission of approximately 3.5 million tons of CO 2 annually over the duration of the PPA signed today.

A successful renewable track-record for Total Eren in Kazakhstan

Total Eren has a proven track record of renewable energy developments in Kazakhstan. In particular, Total Eren successfully developed, financed, built, and commissioned in 2019 two solar photovoltaic farms, M-KAT and Nomad, with a combined capacity of 128 MWp. These solar farms, located in the Zhambyl and Kyzylorda regions respectively, have been instrumental in diversifying Kazakhstan's energy mix and reducing carbon emissions.

***

TotalEnergies and renewables electricity

As part of its ambition to get to net zero by 2050, TotalEnergies is building a portfolio of activities in electricity and renewables. At the end of 2022, TotalEnergies' gross renewable electricity generation installed capacity was 17 GW. TotalEnergies will continue to expand this business to reach 35 GW of gross production capacity from renewable sources and storage by 2025, and then 100 GW by 2030 with the objective of being among the world's top 5 producers of electricity from wind and solar energy.

About TotalEnergies

TotalEnergies is a global multi-energy company that produces and markets energies: oil and biofuels, natural gas and green gases, renewables and electricity. Our more than 100,000 employees are committed to energy that is ever more affordable, cleaner, more reliable and accessible to as many people as possible. Active in nearly 130 countries, TotalEnergies puts sustainable development in all its dimensions at the heart of its projects and operations to contribute to the well-being of people.

@TotalEnergies TotalEnergies TotalEnergies TotalEnergies

Cautionary Note

The terms "TotalEnergies", "TotalEnergies company" or "Company" in this document are used to designate TotalEnergies SE and the consolidated entities that are directly or indirectly controlled by TotalEnergies SE. Likewise, the words "we", "us" and "our" may also be used to refer to these entities or to their employees. The entities in which TotalEnergies SE directly or indirectly owns a shareholding are separate legal entities. This document may contain forward-looking information and statements that are based on a number of economic data and assumptions made in a given economic, competitive and regulatory environment. They may prove to be inaccurate in the future and are subject to a number of risk factors. Neither TotalEnergies SE nor any of its subsidiaries assumes any obligation to update publicly any forward-looking information or statement, objectives or trends contained in this document whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Information concerning risk factors, that may affect TotalEnergies financial results or activities is provided in the most recent Universal Registration Document, the French-language version of which is filed by TotalEnergies SE with the French securities regulator Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF), and in the Form 20-F filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230608005861/en/

Contacts

TotalEnergies Contacts

Media Relations: +33 (0)1 47 44 46 99 l presse@totalenergies.com l @TotalEnergiesPR

Investor Relations: +33 (0)1 47 44 46 46 l ir@totalenergies.com
Saudi Real Estate Refinance Company (SRC) has announced that it has entered into an agreement with Ginnie Mae, a US government-owned corporation operating within the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for sharing of policies and regulations in the housing finance sector.

A wholly-owned unit of kingdom's Public Investment Fund, the SRC said the collaboration was aimed at supporting affordable housing and the mortgage market for citizens in both the US and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Established in 1968 under the National Housing Act, Ginnie Mae's primary function is to provide US government guarantees for mortgage-backed securities issued by private financial institutions.

Currently, Ginnie Mae's outstanding portfolio of mortgage-backed securities has reached approximately $2.4 trillion, accounting for 25-30% of the US mortgage market.

Saudi Real Estate Refinance Company (SRC) was established in 2017 by PIF as part of the Kingdom's Vision 2030 Housing Programme and aims to provide refinancing and balance sheet management solutions to primary mortgage financiers, in bid to increase the availability of affordable housing finance options for Saudi citizens.

Since its inception, SRC has actively participated in the capital markets, contributing to the development of the financial sector and supporting the economic diversification outlined in Vision 2030.

According to SRC, the agreement is a non-legal binding collaboration that will cover three areas:

*Bilateral dialogues with housing finance regulatory and policy agencies;

*Roundtable discussions among experts on policies and financial and counter-party risk management; and

*Professional training/exchange on technical issues related to policy objectives, mortgage securitization, capital market risk management, real estate finance, and taxation.

In addition to SRC, other institutions in Saudi Arabia will have the opportunity to participate in technical and policy discussions as the agenda takes shape.-TradeArabia News Service
Sam Altman, CEO of Microsoft-backed OpenAI and ChatGPT creator speaks during a talk at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv

By Sudip Kar-Gupta

PARIS (Reuters) - Lab-grown meat producer Uncommon said on Friday it had raised $30 million from investors including OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.

The British-based company's latest funding round was led by Balderton Capital and Lowercarbon Capital. Others investors included Red Alpine, East Alpha, early stage investor Sam Altman, Miray Zaki and Sebastiano Castiglioni, it said.

Uncommon chief executive and founder Benjamina Bollag said she looked forward to working with the investors "to make a difference to global health."

Companies producing lab-grown meat say they hope to contribute in the fight against climate change, as producing meat in a laboratory has less impact on the environment than livestock out in a field.

They also promote the fact that their products do not involve the slaughter of animals.

"The cultivated meat industry faces significant challenges, from the cost of materials to regulation and scaling," Balderton Capital partner Daniel Waterhouse said. "We're convinced that Uncommon has the formula to become a global leader that will transform how we eat and enjoy meat."

(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
The lawyer who used ChatGPT's fake legal cases in court said he was 'duped' by the AI, but a judge questioned how he didn't spot the 'legal gibberish'

A lawyer who used ChatGPT to help write a legal filing said he was "duped" after it was revealed the AI made up fake legal cases to back his argument. NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty Images

A lawyer used ChatGPT to help search for legal cases to write an affidavit backing his lawsuit.

The AI hallucinated six fake cases, per a federal judge, which the lawyer included in the filing.

At a sanctions hearing, the judge admonished the the lawyer for being fooled by "legal gibberish."

The lawyer who used ChatGPT to help write up an affidavit  and didn't realize the AI had completely made up fake legal cases to cite  said he was "duped" by the tool during a sanctions hearing before a New York judge on Thursday, Inner City Press reported.

But the judge in the hearing pressed the lawyer, questioning how the lawyer missed the fakes and saying ChatGPT's fabricated ramblings were "legal gibberish," journalist Matthew Russell Lee reported for his nonprofit outlet.

"Chat GPT wasn't supplementing your research - it was your research, right?" US District Court Judge P. Kevin Castel asked lawyer Steven Schwartz of personal injury law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, according to Inner City Press.

The affidavit used by Schwartz and colleague Peter LoDuca was for a lawsuit from a man who alleged he was hurt by a serving cart on a flight. The court filing included six court cases that were "bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations," Castel wrote in a previous court order.

A receptionist who picked up the phone at Levidow, Levidow & Oberman late Thursday said the lawyers were out of the office. They couldn't be immediately reached for comment.

At the sanctions hearing over the mishap, Castel pressed Schwartz, Inner City Press reported.

"You say you verify cases," Castel said, according to Inner City Press

"I, I, I thought there were cases that could not be found on Google," Schwartz replied, according to the outlet.

"Six cases, none found on Google. This non-existent case, Varghese, the excerpt you had was inconsistent, even on the first page," Castel said, the outlet reported. "Can we agree that's legal gibberish?"

Schwartz responded that he thought ChatGPT's output was "excerpts," Inner City Press reported.

Another lawyer at the firm, Peter LoDuca, is also facing sanctions, though he said in court that he didn't do the research that was used in the affidavit.

"I have worked with Mr. Schwartz for 27 years," LoDuca said in court, Inner City Press reported. "I should have been more skeptical. I can't go back and change what was done. This will never happen again."

The hearing adjourned without Castel making a decision on possible sanctions for the lawyers.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Building Capacity and Collaboration: Provincial Police Empowered through Training of Trainers on Trafficking in Persons Manual

08 June 2023, Islamabad, Pakistan - UNODC and the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) under the GLO.ACT Asia and the Middle East Initiative conducted a 3-day Training of Trainers (ToT) for provincial police departments of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and Balochistan. To facilitate this, a series of meetings were held with inspector generals and police training institutes in respective provinces. A Rapid Training Need Assessment (TNA) was conducted, and based on the feedback received from each province, a module on Trafficking in Persons was developed and revised. A validation workshop was also conducted as part of this process.

The Training of Trainers (ToT) was one of the final activities of these efforts and focused on familiarizing Chief Law Instructors (CLIs) from provincial training and development units with the finalized TIP manual. The training covered various chapters and the overall content of the manual, as well as teaching skills. The ToT took place in Islamabad from 31 May to 2 June 2023.

A total of 27 participants attended the workshop, including 22 participants from provincial police, 3 participants from ICT Police, and 2 participants from FIA. The training aimed to enhance their technical knowledge on various aspects of human trafficking, international and national legislations, the importance of data collection, human rights, victim protection, as well as soft skills such as facilitation, communication, presentation, and training arrangement/coordination.

The Punjab Police's participation in the training was significant because they were the first provincial police to adopt the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) curriculum. Their proactive approach in implementing the curriculum made them an example for other provincial police forces. By sharing their experiences and insights during the training, the Punjab Police not only contributed to the learning of other participants but also encouraged them to follow suit and incorporate the TIP curriculum into their own training programs.

Mr Alam Shinwari, Director of the Anti-Human Smuggling Wing at FIA, made opening remarks. Mr. Shinwari highlighted that Trafficking in Persons (TIP) is one of the most severe forms of exploitation and a grave violation of human rights, often referred to as modern-day slavery. To combat this issue, Pakistan enacted the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act in 2018 and framed rules for its implementation in 2020.

With internal trafficking falling under the jurisdiction of provincial police, Mr Shinwari stressed the importance of developing a comprehensive understanding of the problem from various perspectives, including enforcement, national, regional, and global angles. As Chief Law Instructors of respective schools, it was crucial for the participants to comprehend the significance of teaching the law to different cadres and work towards eradicating the menace of TIP. Mr Shinwari expressed gratitude to UNODC for providing technical assistance to the provincial police in their efforts to combat trafficking.

His opening remarks set the stage for the three-day ToT, which aimed to equip Chief Law Instructors with the necessary knowledge and skills to effectively teach the subject matter. By doing so, they would contribute to the overall goal of curbing TIP in Pakistan.

During the closing remarks on the third day of the training, Mr Ashfaq Ahmad Khan, DIG and Commandant of the Police Training College in Sihala, Punjab Police, emphasized the responsibilities of the police in addressing internal trafficking crimes, including sexual exploitation, forced prostitution, and forced labor. He clarified that while the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) is responsible for curbing trafficking across borders and investigating migrant smuggling, tackling internal trafficking falls within the mandate of provincial police.

Mr Khan highlighted the increased importance of investigation and the role of Investigation Officers in Trafficking in Persons (TIP) cases following the enactment of relevant laws. Since victims of TIP are less likely to come forward and identify themselves as such, it is the responsibility of law enforcement officers to inquire, interview, gather evidence, and corroborate information to determine if a case involves exploitation such as forced sex or labour, constituting a TIP case. In this context, raising awareness and sensitizing officers, especially those at junior ranks, is crucial.

Mr Khan expressed his appreciation for the valuable efforts of UNODC in this regard, noting that similar training had already been conducted in Punjab. As a result, the TIP Manual was finalized and endorsed by the Inspector General's Office. The module developed during the training is now being taught in Police Training Institutes in Punjab, leading to the sensitization and training of thousands of officers on the subject.

The sessions during the workshop were delivered by a national expert, along with facilitators and trainers from the Punjab Police. The topics covered included the introduction of the manual, the national legal framework, police procedures, investigative techniques, and more. The training utilized a variety of methodologies such as speaker sessions, group work, Q & A sessions, quizzes, assignments, and case studies.

The Global Action against Trafficking in Persons and the Smuggling of Migrants  Asia and the Middle East (GLO.ACT-Asia and the Middle East) is a four-year joint initiative by the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) being implemented in partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in up to five countries: Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (Afghanistan), Islamic Republic of Iran (I.R. of Iran), Republic of Iraq (Iraq), Islamic Republic of Pakistan (Pakistan). The project builds on a global community of practice set in motion in GLO.ACT 2015-2019 and assists governmental authorities and civil society organizations in targeted, innovative and demand-driven interventions: sustaining effective strategy and policy development, legislative review and harmonization, capability development, and regional and trans-regional cooperation. The project also provides direct assistance to victims of human trafficking and vulnerable migrants through the strengthening of identification, referral, and protection mechanisms.

The project is funded by the European Union

For more information, please contact:

Ms. Shahida Gillani, National Project Officer

Email: Shahida.gillani@un.org

For more information, please visit:

https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/glo-act2/index.html

Email: glo.act@un.org

Twitter: @glo_act
Joint Training Enhancing Interagency Cooperation in ATF: Combating Bulk Cash Smuggling and Fundraising through NPOs

31 May 2023, Karachi  Pakistan: Terrorism Prevention Project, funded by the U.S. Embassy's Office of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL), implemented by UNODC, organized two workshops on improving interagency cooperation in countering bulk cash smuggling and addressing fundraising through Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs) on May 24-25 and May 30-31, 2023, in Karachi.

A total of 37 officials (3 Females) representing Pakistan Customs, Federal Investigation Agency, Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) and Financial Monitoring Unit (FMU) from Sindh and Balochistan province attended these workshops.

The primary objective of these workshops was to strengthen coordination and collaboration among the participating agencies in effectively combating bulk cash smuggling and detecting illicit fundraising activities associated with terrorism financing. The training provided a platform for sharing knowledge, enhancing skills, and fostering interagency partnerships to ensure a comprehensive approach to addressing these threats.

First day of the workshop commenced with opening remarks by the UNODC representative, who emphasized the purpose and significance of the joint training in combating bulk cash smuggling and fundraising through NPOs. The National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) delivered a presentation highlighting the risks associated with terrorist financing through cash smuggling, fund raising through NPOs and the crucial role of interagency coordination in tackling this issue effectively.

The subsequent sessions during each workshop focused on the modus operandi of bulk cash smuggling via seaports, airports, and land routes, emphasizing the pivotal roles of customs and the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) as border agencies.

To further deepen the participants' understanding, the Financial Monitoring Unit (FMU) presented a comprehensive analysis of cash couriers, highlighting the importance of strategic assessment and analysis in identifying suspicious transactions and potential money laundering activities associated with bulk cash smuggling. The presentation also shed light on the role of FMU in facilitating interagency cooperation and information sharing to combat these illicit activities effectively.

The second day focused on the national legal framework pertaining to cash smuggling, including the Anti-Money Laundering Act and the Customs Act of 1969. Participants gained insights into the legal provisions and procedures governing cash smuggling cases, enabling them to navigate investigations and prosecutions more effectively.

Furthermore, the workshop addressed the transnational risks associated with bulk cash smuggling and the essential compliance requirements outlined by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Participants were familiarized with international standards and best practices in countering cash smuggling, enhancing their capabilities in aligning with global efforts to combat money laundering and terrorist financing.

A case study and group exercise provided participants with practical exposure and an opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills acquired during the training. Through collaborative discussions and problem-solving activities, participants engaged in simulated scenarios, allowing them to analyze real-world challenges and devise effective strategies to combat bulk cash smuggling and fundraising through NPOs.

The workshop concluded with closing remarks by UNODC, expressing appreciation for the active participation and commitment of the participating agencies. Certificates of completion were distributed to all participants, acknowledging their valuable contributions in enhancing interagency cooperation in the fight against bulk cash smuggling and the misuse of NPOs for terrorist financing.
(@FahadShabbir)

Europe need to construct a 300-kilometer (186 mile) long gas pipeline with an annual capacity of 30 billion cubic meters (1 trillion cubic feet) to secure natural gas supplies from Turkmenistan, while existing pipelines in Southeastern Europe need to be upgraded, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Friday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 09th June, 2023) Europe need to construct a 300-kilometer (186 mile) long gas pipeline with an annual capacity of 30 billion cubic meters (1 trillion cubic feet) to secure natural gas supplies from Turkmenistan, while existing pipelines in Southeastern Europe need to be upgraded, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Friday.

A Hungarian delegation that includes Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Energy Minister Csaba Lantos, Minister for Economic Development Marton Nagy and Culture Minister Janos Csak arrived in Turkmenistan on Thursday. During their visit to the country's capital, Ashgabat, Orban is expected to meet with Chairman of the People's Council of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow and Turkmen President Serdar Berdimuhamedow, and sign several cooperation agreements.

"Turkmenistan could be an easy solution for securing Europe's energy supply, since it has the fourth largest natural gas reserves in the world following Russia, Iran and Qatar, and also ranks 11th in the world in terms of production. It could significantly increase (gas production) and is interested in supplying gas to Europe," Szijjarto said in a video address.

The minister said that the only obstacle is a lack of delivery routes between the east and the west banks of the Caspian Sea, adding that adequate infrastructure could be built following the settlement of several tricky legal problems related to the Caspian Sea.

"After the legal issues are resolved, a 300-kilometer-long gas pipeline with the annual capacity of 30 billion cubic meters needs to be constructed," he said.

Following the construction of the pipeline, gas could be supplied from Turkmenistan to Southeastern Europe via Azerbaijan and Turkey, Szijjarto said. Then it could be shipped to Hungary via Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, whose pipelines need to be upgraded for higher capacity, he added.

Last week, Hungarian energy company MVM CEEnergy and the State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) signed an agreement according to which 100 million cubic meters of gas will be delivered to Hungary by the end of 2023.

Budapest is working on diversifying gas supplies to the country. In particular, Hungary is interested in increasing LNG supplies via the terminal in Croatia's Krk and developing a gas field in Romania. Budapest is also considering the possibility of importing oil from Ecuador if the land transit of Russian oil through Ukraine becomes impossible.
TOKYO, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 09th Jun, 2023) H.H. Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Foreign Affairs, met with Fumio Kishida, Prime Minister of Japan, as part of his official visit to Japan.

During the meeting, Sheikh Abdullah conveyed the greetings and best wishes of President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to Prime Minister Kishida and the Japanese people. He highlighted the deep-rooted relations between the two countries.

Prime Minister Kishida welcomed Sheikh Abdullah and his delegation in Japan. He conveyed his greetings and best wishes to President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

The two sides discussed ways of strengthening the overall strategic partnership between the UAE and Japan, as well as taking advantage of available opportunities to boost their comprehensive ties.



They also discussed their strategic cooperation in the energy sector and their joint action as part of the relevant efforts of international organisations.

H.H. Sheikh Abdullah stressed that the UAE and Japan have built a pioneering example of strategic cooperation over the past 50 years. He noted the keenness to build on current opportunities to achieve their interests as part of the UAE-Japan strategic partnership, for the benefit of the two peoples and countries.

The meeting was attended by Saeed Mubarak Al Hajeri, Assistant Minister for Economic and Commercial Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Shihab Ahmed Al Faheem, Ambassador of the UAE to Japan.


(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Beijing, June 9 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 9th Jun, 2023 ) :Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas will make a state visit to China next week, Beijing said on Friday, after China said it was ready to help facilitate Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

"At the invitation of President Xi Jinping, President of the state of Palestine Mahmud Abbas will pay a state visit to China from June 13 to 16," foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said.

China's Foreign Minister Qin Gang in April told his Israeli and Palestinian counterparts that his country was willing to aid peace negotiations.

Qin encouraged "steps to resume peace talks" and said that "China is ready to provide convenience for this", in a phone call with Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, Xinhua reported.

And Qin told Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki that Beijing supports the resumption of talks as soon as possible, according to the state news agency.
Renk, South Sudan, June 9 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 9th Jun, 2023 ) :When fighting erupted in Sudan, Rosa Yusif Elias escaped on foot with her seven children over the border to her homeland, South Sudan, where she thought they would be safe.

Instead they have been stranded for weeks in an isolated camp that has been overwhelmed by the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of people fleeing the violence next door.

"This place is full of flies and snakes, and the food is not good," said Elias, who fled Sudan after fighting erupted between the army and a powerful paramilitary force on April 15.

She said children were coming down with diarrhoea. "In the last few days, three children have died in this camp." The influx adds to an already dire situation in South Sudan, a troubled country that has struggled with war, famine and natural disaster since gaining independence from Sudan in 2011.

Those arriving have turned to aid groups already under strain trying to provide basic services in a country where two-thirds of the population rely on humanitarian assistance to survive.

The scene near the border is grim, with children suffering malnutrition, tensions over limited resources, and families sleeping in the open as the camp's population climbs by the day.

"We are suffering in this camp, children are dying," said Santuke Danga, who is stuck at the camp near Renk, a frontier town that has become the epicentre of this latest crisis.

"We queue up in order to get porridge for the children, at the water point people fight, (there is) no security and sometimes hyenas come."
(@FahadShabbir)

Annecy, France, June 9 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Jun, 2023 ) :French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday said the health of the preschool children badly wounded in a mass knife attack by a Syrian refugee was "heading in the right direction", as the attacker refused to cooperate with police.

Four children -- aged between 22 months and three years old -- were stabbed Thursday in a playground in the Alpine town of Annecy, a normally idyllic lakeside spot popular with tourists.

As social media flooded with praise for rescue workers and a man hailed as a hero for chasing the attacker out of the area, sources close to the investigation said the attacker was remaining "totally silent" and "obstructing justice." Prosecutors insisted they did not see a terror motive in the attack, but the rampage intensified tensions in France over immigration, with right-wing politicians seizing on the suspect's origins.

Macron and his wife Brigitte arrived in the southeastern city of Grenoble, where three of the children are being treated.

"Everything that I was told is heading in the right direction," he said in Annecy after visiting the wounded toddlers in hospital, adding that news on their condition was "positive".

"Attacking children is the most barbaric act there is," he said, highlighting his "pride" over the work of rescuers.

The fourth child, a Dutch citizen, is in a Swiss hospital over the border in Geneva. She is "out of danger", the Netherlands' Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said.

One of the victims is British and the others French.
Khartoum, June 9 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 9th Jun, 2023 ) :Sudanese authorities loyal to the regular army have declared UN envoy Volker Perthes "persona non grata", accusing him of taking sides in nearly two months of devastating fighting with rival paramilitaries.

Fighting has raged in the north African country since mid-April, when army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, turned on each other.

In a letter to the United Nations last month, Burhan accused the envoy of bias, not respecting "national sovereignty" and exacerbating fighting between the regular army and the RSF.

UN chief Antonio Guterres has repeatedly defended Perthes.

"The government of the Republic of Sudan has notified the secretary-general of the United Nations that it has declared Mr. Volker Perthes... persona non grata as of today," the foreign ministry said in a statement late Thursday.

A Sudanese government official who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity said the decision was taken "because he sided with certain political parties and stressed that the political process be restricted to certain parties and exclude others".

"When the head of the sovereign council (Burhan) wrote to the UN secretary-general asking for him to be replaced, and he did not respond, the Sudanese government had no choice but to take this decision," the official added.

The United Nations has yet to comment on the announcement. It noted in a tweet on Thursday that Perthes was in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa for a series of talks.

Sudan has been embroiled in deadly conflict since April 15, with fighting spreading across the country from Khartoum to the western region of Darfur in defiance of a series of truces.

Witnesses reported hearing clashes on Friday near the Yarmouk weapons manufacturing and arms depot complex in Khartoum, from where plumes of smoke were seen rising for a second successive day.

Air strikes were also carried out in eastern parts of the capital and the sound of anti-aircraft guns was heard.

Since the fighting erupted, more than 1,800 people have been killed, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. The UN says nearly two million people have been displaced, including 476,000 who have sought refuge in neighbouring countries.

Those unable to leave have been forced to camp out for weeks as supplies of food and other vital goods run low.

Entire districts of Khartoum no longer have running water, mains electricity is only available for a few hours a week and three-quarters of the hospitals in combat zones are not functioning.

The most recent truce was agreed to allow desperately needed humanitarian aid into areas ravaged by the fighting, but like all those that preceded it, the accord was flouted by both sides.

The UN estimates around 25 million people -- more than half of Sudan's population -- are now in need of aid.

Perthes and the UN mission he heads have been targeted since late last year by military and Islamist-backed protests denouncing perceived foreign interference.

A former academic who has headed the Sudan mission since 2021, Perthes has staunchly defended the UN against accusations of inflaming the conflict, saying those responsible are "the two generals at war".

In his letter to the UN chief, Burhan charged that Perthes had presented a misleading picture "of consensus" in his reports to the UN, and "without these signs of encouragement, the rebel leader Daglo would not have launched his military operations".

It has never been possible to verify who fired the first shots of the war.

Daglo, an ambitious militia leader originally armed by Bashir to crush rebels in Darfur, was Burhan's second-in-command before the two fell out, most recently over the RSF's integration into the army.
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Minister of State for Law and Justice Shahadat Awan on Friday described the budget for the fiscal year 2023-24 as pro-poor and highlighted the various initiatives proposed for the upliftment of marginalized segments of society

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 9th Jun, 2023 ) :Minister of State for Law and Justice Shahadat Awan on Friday described the budget for the fiscal year 2023-24 as pro-poor and highlighted the various initiatives proposed for the upliftment of marginalized segments of society.

Speaking to the media outside the parliament house, the minister emphasized that the budget was designed to address the problems faced by the poor.

The government, he said, was fully aware of the challenges faced by the common man, and the proposed development projects in the budget aim to resolve economic issues and provide opportunities for earning a livelihood for the poor.

The minister further stated that the government has outlined several plans to uplift the low and middle-income classes, with a particular focus on empowering the country's youth.

He said under the PM's Youth business and Agriculture Loan scheme, the government plans to provide small and medium loans with easy installments to the youth, with an allocated amount of Rs 10 billion as a mark-up subsidy in the next fiscal year.

Additionally, 50,000 IT graduates will receive professional training, and they will be encouraged to obtain loans from banks to start their own businesses, he added.

Awan said the government has also proposed the establishment of the Pakistan Endowment Fund, with an allocated amount of Rs 5 billion, to provide financial support to outstanding students in schools and colleges.

The minister also commended the government for increasing the allocation for the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP), which supports the poor in the country.
The worst result, after buying shares in a company (assuming no leverage), would be if you lose all the money you put in. But in contrast you can make much more than 100% if the company does well. To wit, the Lindsay Australia Limited (ASX:LAU) share price has flown 249% in the last three years. Most would be happy with that. Also pleasing for shareholders was the 65% gain in the last three months.

Let's take a look at the underlying fundamentals over the longer term, and see if they've been consistent with shareholders returns.

View our latest analysis for Lindsay Australia

To paraphrase Benjamin Graham: Over the short term the market is a voting machine, but over the long term it's a weighing machine. One imperfect but simple way to consider how the market perception of a company has shifted is to compare the change in the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price movement.

During three years of share price growth, Lindsay Australia achieved compound earnings per share growth of 36% per year. This EPS growth is lower than the 52% average annual increase in the share price. So it's fair to assume the market has a higher opinion of the business than it did three years ago. That's not necessarily surprising considering the three-year track record of earnings growth.

The graphic below depicts how EPS has changed over time (unveil the exact values by clicking on the image).

It is of course excellent to see how Lindsay Australia has grown profits over the years, but the future is more important for shareholders. If you are thinking of buying or selling Lindsay Australia stock, you should check out this FREE detailed report on its balance sheet.

What About Dividends?

It is important to consider the total shareholder return, as well as the share price return, for any given stock. The TSR incorporates the value of any spin-offs or discounted capital raisings, along with any dividends, based on the assumption that the dividends are reinvested. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. As it happens, Lindsay Australia's TSR for the last 3 years was 302%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.

A Different Perspective

It's good to see that Lindsay Australia has rewarded shareholders with a total shareholder return of 208% in the last twelve months. Of course, that includes the dividend. That's better than the annualised return of 35% over half a decade, implying that the company is doing better recently. Someone with an optimistic perspective could view the recent improvement in TSR as indicating that the business itself is getting better with time. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Lindsay Australia better, we need to consider many other factors. To that end, you should be aware of the 1 warning sign we've spotted with Lindsay Australia .

For those who like to find winning investments this free list of growing companies with recent insider purchasing, could be just the ticket.

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on Australian exchanges.

Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) simplywallst.com.



This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.

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(@FahadShabbir)

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 09th June, 2023) French energy giant TotalEnergies has signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) for the $1.4 billion Mirny wind project in Kazakhstan, which will provide electricity to about 1 million Kazakh residents, the company said on Friday.

"TotalEnergies confirms its commitment to the energy transition in Kazakhstan with the signing of a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for the Mirny project ... Located in the Zhambyl region, the project aims to build a 1 GW onshore wind farm combined with a 600 MWh battery energy storage system for a reliable power supply," the company said in a statement.

The volume of electricity expected to be generated by the Mirny project will be sold to Kazakhstan's state-owned Financial Settlement Center of Renewable Energy (FSC) for delivery to the national grid, the statement added.

The agreement was signed in Astana between Total Eren and FSC in the presence of TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanne and Kazakh Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Almassadam Satkaliyev, according to the statement.
ISTANBUL (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 09th June, 2023) Consultations on regional and global issues between the United Nations, several EU member states and the United Kingdom will be held on Friday in Istanbul, the Turkish Foreign Ministry told Sputnik.

"Consultations on the regional issues with the participation of foreign officials from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, the European Union and the UN will be held today in Istanbul," the Turkish Foreign Ministry said.

Turkey will send Deputy Foreign Minister Burak Akcapar to take part in the consultations, the ministry added.

The foreign ministry has not named other participants.
Sudan's warring generals have agreed to a 24-hour ceasefire from Saturday, US and Saudi mediators said, acknowledging that previous attempts to pause a conflict now nearing its third month had proved abortive

Khartoum, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 9th Jun, 2023 ) :Sudan's warring generals have agreed to a 24-hour ceasefire from Saturday, US and Saudi mediators said, acknowledging that previous attempts to pause a conflict now nearing its third month had proved abortive.

Multiple truces have been agreed and broken since fighting erupted on April 15, and Washington had slapped sanctions on both rival generals after the last attempt collapsed at the end of May.

"Representatives of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) agreed to a 24-hour countrywide ceasefire beginning on June 10 at 6:00 am (0400 GMT)," said a joint statement from the mediators released by the Saudi foreign ministry on Friday.

"Should the parties fail to observe the 24-hour ceasefire, facilitators will be compelled to consider adjourning" talks in the Saudi city of Jeddah which have been suspended since late last month, the mediators said.

The fighting has gripped the capital Khartoum and the western region of Darfur, killing upwards of 1,800 people, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

Nearly two million people have been displaced, including 476,000 who have sought refuge in neighbouring countries, the United Nations says.

The Saudi and US mediators said they "share the frustration of the Sudanese people about the uneven implementation of previous ceasefires".

The army, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said it has "agreed to the proposal", adding in a statement it "declares its commitment to the ceasefire".

The paramilitary RSF, commanded by Burhan's former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, later said in a statement: "We affirm our full commitment to the ceasefire." Both statements said the truce could support humanitarian efforts, while cautioning against violations by their opponents.

"If observed, the 24-hour ceasefire will provide an important opportunity... for the parties to undertake confidence-building measures which could permit resumption of the Jeddah talks," the US-Saudi statement said.

- 'Immense needs' - US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday wrapped up a three-day visit to Saudi Arabia, where he held discussions on Sudan with top Saudi officials.

Friday's announcement came a day after Sudanese authorities loyal to Burhan declared UN envoy Volker Perthes "persona non grata", accusing him of taking sides.

UN chief Antonio Guterres on Friday expressed support for Perthes, who is currently in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa for a series of talks.

Guterres said "the doctrine of persona non grata is not applicable to or in respect of United Nations personnel" and is contrary to Khartoum's obligations under the UN charter, according to his spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

The fighting has sidelined Perthes's efforts to revive Sudan's transition to civilian rule, which was derailed by a 2021 coup by the two generals before they fell out.

It has also complicated the coordination of international efforts to deliver emergency relief to the 25 million civilians that the United Nations estimates are in need.

Alfonso Verdu Perez, outgoing head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Sudan, warned on Friday that "health care may collapse at any moment".

"The needs are immense and much more remains to be done" in both Khartoum and Darfur, he told reporters in Geneva.

About one fifth of medical facilities in the capital are still functioning but face "severe shortages" of water, food and electricity, and "are running low on essential medical supplies", he added.

Witnesses reported hearing clashes on Friday near the Yarmouk weapons manufacturing and arms depot complex in Khartoum, from where plumes of smoke were seen rising for a second day.

Air strikes were also carried out in eastern parts of the capital and the sound of anti-aircraft fire was heard, with witnesses also reporting artillery fire and clashes in Omdurman, Khartoum's twin city across the Nile.

Those unable to leave have been forced to camp out for weeks as supplies of food and other vital goods run low.

- 'Distraction' - Sudan specialist Aly Verjee said that in expelling Perthes, Burhan was following in the footsteps of his ousted predecessor Omar al-Bashir who threw out then-envoy Jan Pronk in 2006.

"Like then, the focus on Perthes is ultimately a distraction," said Verjee, a researcher at Sweden's University of Gothenburg.

"Trying to save Perthes's job won't help resolve the much bigger issues that Sudan now faces, not least to dampen the ongoing hostilities." Perthes and the UN mission he heads have been targeted since late last year by military and Islamist-backed protests denouncing perceived foreign interference.

A Sudanese government official who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity said the decision was taken "because he sided with certain political parties" and sought to "exclude others" from the transition process.

A former academic who has headed the Sudan mission since 2021, Perthes has staunchly defended the UN against accusations of inflaming the conflict, saying those responsible are "the two generals at war".
MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 09th June, 2023) Russia has notified all states parties to the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) of its decision to withdraw from it, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Friday, adding that this will happen on November 7.

"Russia notified all participating states of its decision to withdraw from the CFE Treaty 150 days after the notification was sent. So it will happen at midnight on November 7," the ministry said in a statement.

The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances will also become invalid with Russia's withdrawal from the CFE Treaty, the ministry added.
(@FahadShabbir)

The South Korean Foreign Ministry said on Friday it had summoned Chinese Ambassador to Seoul Xing Haiming over his remarks that relations between the two countries should not be influenced from outside

SEOUL (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 09th June, 2023) The South Korean Foreign Ministry said on Friday it had summoned Chinese Ambassador to Seoul Xing Haiming over his remarks that relations between the two countries should not be influenced from outside.

On Thursday, Xing urged Seoul to get rid of the influence of foreign factors while building ties with Beijing during a meeting with the leader of the South Korean opposition Democratic Party of Korea, Lee Jae-myung. He also said that those who "bet" on China losing to the United States "will surely regret it." In addition, the diplomat asked for Seoul's support for the one-China policy.

"South Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Chang Ho-jin summoned Chinese Ambassador Xing Haiming to the Foreign Ministry and expressed strong regret and a stern warning over the ambassador's unreasonable and provocative words and actions during the meeting with the opposition leader on June 8, which contradict diplomatic tradition," the ministry said in a statement.

Chang said the ambassador's actions violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and could be seen as interference in South Korea's domestic affairs. He added that Xing's actions contradict the desire of the Chinese and South Korean governments and people to cherish and develop bilateral relations based on mutual respect and that the ambassador's behavior is hard to understand and causes mistrust. Chang also said that Xing had "gone too far."
USM Student Organization Receives National Recognition

Fri, 06/09/2023 - 09:15am | By: Van Arnold

The National Student Speech Language Hearing Association (NSSLHA) Chapter at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) has been awarded Gold Chapter Honors for attaining a distinguished level of achievement in the areas of member recruitment and engagement, community outreach and service, legislative advocacy, and fundraising during the 2022-23 academic year.

The announcement was made by the parent organization, National NSSLHA, whose members are studying communication sciences and disorders (CSD), speech-language pathology and audiology at the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels at college and universities nationwide.

We are so proud of the 2022-23 Gold Chapter Honors awardees, and we congratulate them on all theyve achieved this year, said NSSLHA Executive Council President Gabrielle Howard. Each chapter demonstrated a deep commitment to its members, its community, and the professions, and embodied NSSLHAs values in the areas of collaboration, diversity, education, integrity, leadership and service, she said.

Through its annual honors program, NSSLHA recognizes outstanding affiliated chapters that have made significant contributions to CSD programs, the national organization, and their local chapters. Chapter Honors are awarded at the bronze, silver, and gold levels.

During the 2022-23 academic year, the USM chapter of NSSLHA participated in 15 service projects for the community, university, and individuals with communication and hearing difficulties. National NSSLHA supports nearly 11,000 members and more than 350 chapters at colleges and universities nationwide.

The USM NSSLHA Chapter is one of only 93 in the U.S. and Puerto Rico to receive Gold Chapter Honors in 2023.

Efforts made by the NSSLHA Chapter at USM helped National NSSLHA:

Increase awareness of communication sciences and disorders (CSD) on more than 140 local college campuses and communities across the country as well as through virtual platforms

Increase advocacy efforts by sending more than 5,400 letters to state and federal legislators

Provide scholarships to students in CSD programs by contributing more than $22,500 to the ASHFoundations NSSLHA Scholarship
USM Responds to Alarming Decline in Oyster Population

Fri, 06/09/2023 - 01:47pm | By: Gabriela Shinskie

The oyster industry in the Gulf of Mexico has shown signs of rapid decline and many researchers are working diligently to find a solution. The decline is a result of recent events, both man-made and natural, throughout the years. Dr. Reginald Blaylock, Interim Director of the Thad Cochran Marine Aquaculture Center at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM), is helping develop a new oyster hatchery as part of the solution.

Multiple efforts can contribute to solving the oyster problem. One of the ways is through restoration where oysters are produced in hatcheries and stocked into the wild to establish reefs and restore natural populations. Another is through aquaculture where oysters are grown off-bottom in a managed system for commercial harvest.

Hatcheries can help mitigate the decline by producing oysters for both restoration and aquaculture, but there is a shortage in the supply of oyster larvae for these purposes. The new hatchery will help alleviate that shortage, said Blaylock.

In 2020, Gov. Tate Reeves announced that the U.S. Department of the Treasury approved a RESTORE Act grant of $7.62 million for the construction of USMs Oyster Hatchery and Research Center. The grant is administered by the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ).

This hatchery will produce oysters for restoration and deal with research issues that constrain the production of oysters that will help the aquaculture industry, said Blaylock.

The COVID-19 pandemic put a pause on the hatchery construction with the increased cost of building materials. A new design was developed to mitigate rising costs and implementation is set to begin soon.

The new hatchery is expected to be a vital part of improving the states oyster population and to meet the needs of the seafood industry.

Blaylock emphasized the importance of oysters as part of a healthy ecosystem. Economically, the oyster industry has been a huge part of the seafood culture on the Gulf Coast for years.

Oysters are important to our coast because they can filter and maintain water quality. This is fundamental. We also have a history of harvesting, processing, and selling oysters. This is part of the culture of the Gulf Coast, said Blaylock.

Blaylock said that aquaculture is the key to moving the seafood industry forward. Wild harvests are wonderful, but they simply cant meet the rising demand for seafood. Aquaculture now provides 50 percent of the seafood products we consume, and it is the only way we can meet future demand for seafood.

Blaylock and his team are working to alleviate the constraints the prevent growth in the domestic aquaculture industry. The new oyster hatchery will help meet those goals.

The Thad Cochran Marine Aquaculture Center works with government organizations, industries, and non-profits to advance sustainable aquaculture on land and in marine environments.

Please visit the Thad Cochran Marine Aquaculture Center to learn more.
The fact that multiple Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT) insiders offloaded a considerable amount of shares over the past year could have raised some eyebrows amongst investors. When analyzing insider transactions, it is usually more valuable to know whether insiders are buying versus knowing if they are selling, as the latter sends an ambiguous message. However, when multiple insiders sell stock over a specific duration, shareholders should take notice as that could possibly be a red flag.

While insider transactions are not the most important thing when it comes to long-term investing, we would consider it foolish to ignore insider transactions altogether.

See our latest analysis for Lockheed Martin

The Last 12 Months Of Insider Transactions At Lockheed Martin

In the last twelve months, the biggest single sale by an insider was when the Chief Operating Officer, Frank St. John, sold US$3.2m worth of shares at a price of US$474 per share. So we know that an insider sold shares at around the present share price of US$464. While insider selling is a negative, to us, it is more negative if the shares are sold at a lower price. In this case, the big sale took place at around the current price, so it's not too bad (but it's still not a positive).

Over the last year we saw more insider selling of Lockheed Martin shares, than buying. You can see the insider transactions (by companies and individuals) over the last year depicted in the chart below. By clicking on the graph below, you can see the precise details of each insider transaction!

If you like to buy stocks that insiders are buying, rather than selling, then you might just love this free list of companies. (Hint: insiders have been buying them).

Insiders At Lockheed Martin Have Sold Stock Recently

Over the last three months, we've seen notably more insider selling, than insider buying, at Lockheed Martin. In total, insider Stephanie Hill sold US$1.2m worth of shares in that time. Meanwhile insider John Donovan bought US$251k worth. Generally this level of net selling might be considered a bit bearish.

Insider Ownership Of Lockheed Martin

Many investors like to check how much of a company is owned by insiders. I reckon it's a good sign if insiders own a significant number of shares in the company. It appears that Lockheed Martin insiders own 0.08% of the company, worth about US$96m. While this is a strong but not outstanding level of insider ownership, it's enough to indicate some alignment between management and smaller shareholders.

What Might The Insider Transactions At Lockheed Martin Tell Us?

The stark truth for Lockheed Martin is that there has been more insider selling than insider buying in the last three months. Zooming out, the longer term picture doesn't give us much comfort. Insiders own shares, but we're still pretty cautious, given the history of sales. We're in no rush to buy! So these insider transactions can help us build a thesis about the stock, but it's also worthwhile knowing the risks facing this company. Every company has risks, and we've spotted 2 warning signs for Lockheed Martin you should know about.

Of course Lockheed Martin may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of high quality companies.

For the purposes of this article, insiders are those individuals who report their transactions to the relevant regulatory body. We currently account for open market transactions and private dispositions, but not derivative transactions.

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.

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Moscow has not only received hundreds of Iranian drones but is working with Iran to produce them from inside Russia, according to the White House -- a sign of the deepening military partnership between the two countries.

We have information that Russia is receiving materials from Iran needed to build a UAV manufacturing plant inside Russia, said National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby in a statement sent to VOA Thursday. This plant could be fully operational early next year.

The White House released satellite imagery of the planned location of the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) manufacturing plant in Russias Alabuga Special Economic Zone.

Kirby said that currently, drones are built in Iran, shipped across the Caspian Sea from Amirabad, Iran to Makhachkala, Russia, and then used operationally by Russian forces against Ukraine.

On Friday, the Biden Administration is releasing a new advisory to help businesses and other governments better understand the risks posed by Irans UAV program and the illicit practices Iran uses to procure components for it.

This will help governments and businesses put in place measures to ensure they are not inadvertently contributing to Irans UAV program, Kirby added.

Russia has increasingly deployed drones to bombard Ukrainian cities and targets in recent weeks. They are a difficult target because Ukraine has limited air defense resources, Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat told VOA Friday.

Iranian drones are hard to detect; they are slow, he said. The Shaheds fly very low, use the river delta and forest, and drop from the radars.

Ihnat noted that Moscow sends the drones to all parts of Ukrainian territory from different directions. Ukraine Air defense today is focused on the protection of big towns, infrastructure objects, and critical infrastructure, he said.

JCPOA sunset

This latest revelation is part of the administrations periodic release of intelligence findings about Russias war in Ukraine, with the goal of further isolating Moscow and its supporters.

The timing coincides with sunset clauses in the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which imposed international restrictions on Iranian weapons.

Many of the JCPOAs sunset clauses were already made obsolete after President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in May 2018 and reimposed sanctions, which led Iran to breach its obligations and enrich uranium to higher levels beginning in July 2019.

Still, since the JCPOA was never officially nullified by its other signatories -- Iran, the European Union, Russia and China -- from a legal standpoint the sunset clauses matter.

In October 2023, the JCPOA bans on Irans import and export of missile-related technology will formally end, including on missiles and drones with a range of 300 kilometers (186 miles) or more.

In other words, in a few months it will be officially legal to trade Iranian missiles and drones.

The U.S. and partners want to alert businesses around the world about the Iran-Russia cooperation on drones and the drones devastating impact in the war in Ukraine, said Alex Vatanka, director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute. The goal is to interrupt the production of the drones, which depend on components available on world markets.

The U.S. clearly wants to put businesses on notice in a preemptive move and to highlight the reputational risks, he told VOA.

While the administration may try to disrupt the drones production chain, Vatanka is skeptical that Western political pressure will compel Iranian leaders to rethink their military cooperation with Moscow.

Tehran has basically decided to put its money on Russia, he said. The calculation is as simple as it is cynical: By supporting Russia today in Ukraine, Iran can hope that Moscow will back Iran in its conflict with the U.S.

Two-way support

As it purchases Iranian drones, mainly the Shahed-136, Russia has provided Iran with unprecedented defense cooperation, including on missiles, electronics, and air defense, Kirby said, adding that Tehran is seeking to purchase billions of dollars of additional Russian military equipment, including attack helicopters, radars, and YAK-130 combat trainer aircraft.

Earlier this year, Iran announced that it had finalized a deal to buy Russian Su-35 fighter jets.

This is a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful to Ukraine, to Irans neighbors, and to the international community, Kirby said, adding that the administration is working with allies and partners to hold Moscow and Tehran accountable, including through existing and additional sanctions and export restrictions.

Collaboration between Tehran and Moscow is likely to continue, said Michael OHanlon, senior fellow and director of research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution.

He said the U.S. should be mindful of Moscow garnering support from other partners, namely Beijing.

We should be careful not to so demonize China, he told VOA. In regard to the Ukraine conflict in particular as well as current geopolitics more generally, that we also drive Beijing and Moscow closer together under the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The Shahed drones, often called suicide or kamikaze drones, have an operational range of around 2,000 kilometers. Packed with explosives, they can be directed at targets and detonate upon impact like a missile.

They can also be launched in a swarm where several of them are launched at the same time in formation.

On Friday, the Russian military mistakenly identified one of its own drones as Ukrainian and took it down.

Myroslava Gongadze contributed to this report.
Amnesty International on Friday called on Zimbabwes president not to sign into law the so-called "Patriotic Act" that lawmakers approved this week.

The government says the proposed law, which would authorize penalties against people found guilty of damaging Zimbabwes sovereignty and national interests, is justified and must be enacted. Critics say the law will curb freedom of expression during the August elections.

Amnesty International urged President Emmerson Mnangagwa not to sign the measure, known officially as the Criminal Law Codification and Reform Amendment Bill 2022.

The bill, if made law, would authorize jail terms of up 20 years against those found guilty of willfully injuring the sovereignty and national interest of Zimbabwe.

It would also allow the death penalty for a person found to have advocated for international sanctions that harm the country or its people.

Amnesty said the proposed law would effectively give authorities greater power to unduly restrict human rights and silence those perceived as being critical of the government, such as political activists, human rights defenders, journalists, civil society leaders, opposition parties and whistle-blowers.

Lucia Masuka, Amnesty's executive director in Zimbabwe, said her organization was deeply concerned by this weeks passing of the bill by the Senate.

The weaponization of the law is a desperate and patent move to curtail the rights to freedom of expression and to public participation in elections due in August this year," she said. "The bills deliberately vague and overly broad provisions on damaging Zimbabwes interest and sovereignty, including by calling for economic sanctions, flies in the face of Zimbabwes international human rights obligations. All laws must be defined precisely, allowing people to know exactly which acts will make them criminally liable.

But Ziyambi Ziyambi, Zimbabwes justice minister, said the proposed law would target only citizens who plan on harming the nation with the help of foreigners.

"The provision says this: If you go and meet a foreign government or an agent of a foreign government, and [the intention of the meeting] is to ensure that particular country imposes a trade embargo on Zimbabwe or sanctions, and you fully participate and you urge them to do that, knowing fully well that your action will injure the sovereignty of the country, you are guilty of an offense," Ziyambi said. "Are you saying it is good?

He added that even if the measure was enacted, Zimbabweans would still be allowed to say anything and even criticize Mnangagwa.

"The law has nothing to do with Mnangagwa," Ziyambi said. "You can insult him as long as you do not infringe on existing laws; you wont be arrested. We are saying we can disagree, but not to the extent of advocating for the generality of the population to suffer.

Musa Kika, a constitutional lawyer who heads the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, said enactment of the legislation would be unfortunate.

The government has committed itself to certain governance reforms in light of arrears and debt clearance process," Kika said. "Under governance there are issues to do with constitutionalism and civic space, et cetera. This kind of law takes back or takes away whatever commitments it has made in that process. This is an unconstitutional law - it infringes on all sorts of civil and political rights that the constitution gives.

He added that the bill could be struck off Zimbabwes statutes if challenged in court.

But Rutendo Matinyarare, chairman of the Zimbabwe Anti-Sanctions Movement, disagreed.

Amnesty International is not a multilateral human rights institution," Matinyarare said. "So they do not qualify to speak on human rights issues. That is the prerogative of the U.N. Human Rights Council. Secondly, Amnesty International is paid, so it is not an independent institution; it is an institution paid to advance American and Western interests over Third World interests and African interests.

"On the issue of the Patriotic Bill, they have not given any evidence how the Patriotic Bill is going to close down dissent, because there is nowhere in the Patriotic Bill that it says Zimbabweans are not allowed to criticize their government.

Mnangagwa has not said when or whether he will sign the bill into law.
The explosion came in the early morning, abruptly waking Laurence Geai. It was July 2014, and the French photojournalist was on assignment in Aleppo, Syria, covering how the Assad regime was targeting a hospital in the ancient city.

While others fled, Geai picked up her camera.

I remember I was shaking, she told VOA from her home in Paris. I was very stressed. My pictures were not good at all.

While documenting the scene, she heard a fighter jet approach  a sign that another explosion was imminent.

The blast, I remember, pushed me on the side of the road, Geai said.

Still, she took more photos, documenting the explosion that struck just outside a field hospital.

Some people got killed straight away, Geai recalled. They were laying on the floor, almost naked, because the blast destroyed their clothes.

By the time Geai arrived in Aleppo, she had been working as a photojournalist for less than a year. Dangerous situations like what she experienced in the Syrian city set the tone for the many assignments that followed, taking her to conflict zones in Iraq, Palestine and Ukraine.

Her work was recognized in late May with the 2023 Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award from the International Womens Media Foundation, or IWMF.

The annual award honors German Associated Press photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2014.

Geai is the ninth recipient of the award, which recognizes women photojournalists who document humanity amid conflict and challenges facing marginalized communities worldwide, according to the IWMF.

Two additional honorees  Korean American photojournalist Yunghi Kim and French photojournalist Veronique de Viguerie  were also recognized this year.



Anjas legacy, simply stated, was to report where others may not look and bring women-led, visual journalism to people around the world, IWMF Executive Director Elisa Lees Munoz said in a statement. The IWMF is proud to recognize Laurence, Yunghi and Veronique in this spirit and honor the importance, and nuance, of a womans lens in the field of photojournalism.

Geai said she feels proud to be recognized for her work.

It gives me the opportunity to continue her legacy, she said, referring to Niedringhaus.

Being recognized was meaningful for de Viguerie because like the awards namesake, she has worked extensively in Afghanistan.

Its the country that made me a photographer. I was born as a photographer there, she said.

De Viguerie first traveled to Afghanistan in 2004 and stayed for three years. She returns multiple times every year.



For Kim, the recognition carries special importance because she and Niedringhaus both entered the field of conflict photojournalism when it was male dominated.



We are of the same generation of women, Kim told VOA from New York by phone Theres really a handful of women who did conflict photography in the 90s.

All three of the 2023 honorees said that because of the nature of the work, photojournalists face safety threats that other types of journalists dont.

Photojournalists have no alternative to being on the ground.

We cannot do it from a distance, de Viguerie said. If we miss it, we miss it.

You have to be there when the [news happens], Kim said, recalling how she was in Somalias capital, Mogadishu, when U.S. Marines landed in December 1992.

Kim has had many close calls over her nearly four decade-long career  the first of which was on her first trip to Somalia in October 1992 to cover a famine when she was a staff photographer for The Boston Globe.

While there, Kim was briefly held hostage when a warlord took over the town in which she was staying.

You could feel the heat from the explosions, Kim said. I thought I was going to die. So, the only thing I could do was sit there and smoke cigarettes.

That experience made me a stronger person, she added.

Geai and de Viguerie have faced more than their fair share of close calls, as well.

The danger is everywhere, Geai said.

But they do it all for the photos they hope will convey the gravity of crises and make people care about them, despite being thousands of miles away.

It was the extremes of conflict that first drew Geai to the field.

I was very curious about the worst of humanity and the best of humanity, she said. In war, you see the worst and the best.

Still, bearing witness to extreme violence and surviving attacks can take an emotional toll.

I will not do it all my life, Geai said. We are photojournalists, but we are first human.
Two very different cases in South Africa this week have both confirmed the country's position as a bastion of the free press, and conversely also shown how the media is under threat.

In the latter case, investigative news website amaBunghane was slapped with a gag order after an influential businessman went to court alleging leaked documents  which amaBunghane had used in reporting critical of his company  had been stolen.

AmaBhungane was ordered by a judge to return the documents and cease any further reporting on the company, Moti Group  which is alleged to have been involved in wrongdoing and then orchestrating a PR blitz to try and cover it up. The company denies the charges.

When amaBhungane was informed of the judge's order, which had been heard in secret, the media group sought an urgent reconsideration, and a second judge decided they would not be forced to hand over the leaked documents. The second judge expressed surprise and consternation at the first judge's decision.

However, the journalists are still barred from further reporting on the Moti group until the case is heard in court.

"Were this order to stand, it would set a dangerous precedent. ... Such an order undoubtedly has a chilling effect, especially on investigative journalism," Sam Sole, a journalist with amaBhungane, told VOA.

Angela Quintal, head of the Committee to Protect Journalists' Africa Program, echoed his concerns.

"We hope that when the matter is fully ventilated in open court, investigative journalism in the public interest and the protection of confidential sources that are key to exposing massive, alleged corruption in South Africa and elsewhere will be vindicated and not eroded," Quintal said.

"Not to do so would mean any party can stop investigative journalists from exposing corruption or any other matter of public interest by claiming that the information relied upon is stolen, endangering the lives of whistleblowers or confidential sources by forcing disclosure," she added.

Investigations essential to democracy

From being one of the countries with the most censored press during the apartheid regime, the advent of democracy in 1994 saw South Africa  which now has one of the world's most liberal constitutions  become one of the globe's best places for journalists to work.

Reporters Without Borders' 2023 Press Freedom Index ranked South Africa as the 25th most free country for press in the world, out of 180 countries. It beat the U.S., which ranked 45th, as well as the U.K.

South African journalists work to expose wrongdoing with strong investigative units at outlets like amaBhungane, Daily Maverick and elsewhere, informing the public about the numerous corruption scandals in government  especially under former President Jacob Zuma.

Without the digging by the media, the influence peddling and assault on state institutions during Zuma's tenure that became known in South Africa as "State Capture," might never have come to light. Zuma is currently on trial in a separate corruption case.

A lot of that reporting relied on leaks and whistleblowers, which is why the Moti Group's gag order poses such a threat, according to independent experts.

"The original judge set a very worrying precedent  of the sort we have not seen since the apartheid days," Anton Harber, professor of journalism at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, told VOA.

"If you label leaks like this as stolen goods then you would put an end to most journalism-based leaks," he added, pointing to the Pentagon Papers and Edward Snowden's revelations as examples.

Sole said the Moti Group's allegation that the documents were stolen was unproven.

"And we maintain that the constitutional protection of free expression entails, inter alia, that regardless of the manner in which information has been obtained by a source, it is not unlawful for journalists to hold any information provided by a source, provided they do so in the public interest," he added.

The South African National Editors' Forum (SANEF) is supporting amaBhungane in the case, with executive director Reggy Moalusi telling VOA, "The gag is certainly a threat to press freedom as it seeks to stop any publication of the work that amaBhungane does, despite this being in the public interest."

A court date to try to overturn the entire initial order is set for June 27.

The pen is mightier than  the president

While experts agree the amaBhungane case is concerning, there was also a positive story this week relating to journalism in South Africa.

One of the country's most renowned legal reporters, Karyn Maughan, was victorious when a court prohibited former President Zuma from continuing his private prosecution of her.

Quintal said the throwing out of the case was "a legal smackdown for former South African President Jacob Zuma and a massive victory for Karyn Maughan."

Zuma had tried to prosecute Maughan, who writes for online publication News24, along with state advocate Billy Downer, after Downer allegedly leaked the ex-president's confidential medical records to the reporter. The court found that the information was already public.

Such so-called SLAPP lawsuits (strategic litigation against public participation) are often aimed at silencing whistleblowers or preventing media from reporting.

But the court found Zuma's private prosecution amounted to an "abuse of process," which stemmed from his "personal animosity" toward the reporter. The judges also said Maughan's constitutional right to freedom of expression had been violated.

"I'm very grateful that I live and operate in a constitutional democracy that recognizes the right to freedom of the press, and that that right has been explicitly referenced in this judgment," Maughan told VOA.

"I think it's a victory for all the people living in South Africa, because ultimately if you want an effective democracy, you need a free press that's able to operate without fear or favor, and that's what this judgment recognizes," she added.
From up close, the catastrophic destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine appears worse than how its depicted in news reports and far off satellite imagery, according to U.N. officials who assessed conditions in the area on Friday.

We have been visiting this morning with the authorities the communities, the small villages along the river that have been completely submerged by the flooding, said Denise Brown, one of several U.N. officials who addressed journalists via satellite from the town of Bilozerka, on the west bank of Dnipro River.

The status situation is dramatic, said Brown, humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine for the U.N. office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, OCHA.

This is a town that is five kilometers from the front line, Brown said. Daily shelling, including yesterday, and now because of the destruction of the bridge, which is a result of the war, and now this flooding, which came in the middle of the night. It came very fast, very quickly and people were totally taken by surprise.

We visited a few homes this morning with people who are, as you can imagine, totally distraught by this latest catastrophe to hit them, she said. But I must say, as always, they are incredibly resilient and vowing to stay in their homes.

Ukrainian authorities report at least 80 towns and villages in the Kherson region are fully or partially flooded, as well as thousands of hectares of agricultural land, with some 17,000 people in government-controlled areas affected by the flooding.

Shabia Mantoo, spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency, said, Many thousands more in the areas under the temporary military control of the Russian Federation, to [which] humanitarian organizations currently have no access, have also been affected.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reports that it has repeatedly asked the Russian Federation for access to the territories it occupies.

The Russian Federation has denied us this access, said Jeremy Laurence, spokesman for the OHCHR. Not only OHCHR monitors, but humanitarian actors cannot get into the occupied territories.

He added, We reiterate the broader U.N. call to the Russian Federation to grant access to the occupied territories, to assist clinicians who have suffered from the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the destruction of the Khakhova dam.

Humanitarian agencies report that Ukrainian authorities, the International Red Cross, as well as U.N., and non-governmental organizations reacted quickly after the dam broke on June 6 by bringing in relief supplies and aiding victims caught in the disaster.

Mantoo said the UNHCR was participating in an inter-agency convoy of five trucks that will be delivering essential relief supplies Friday and Saturday to the worst affected areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

With interagency partner agencies, we are also currently carrying out damage assessments to understand the scale of the impact of the flooding, she said.

After humanitarian agencies get on top of the short-term risks, they will have to concentrate on dealing with the more complex long-term risks threatening the local communities.

OCHA coordinator Brown cited the dangers posed by unexploded landmines in the heavily infested Kherson region as a major long-term problem. She said a U.N. mine expert was working with the U.N. system to produce a map of areas where mines were likely to be located and to communicate the threats posed by those weapons to the population, especially to children, who are most at risk of being killed and maimed.

Mines may have moved and so when the flood waters recede, there may be mines where there were not mines before, which means there are not any markings. And this is a significant risk, she said.

Laurence agreed noting that the whole flood zone is a mine-contaminated area.

However, he added that circumstances regarding the destruction of the dam remained unclear. Therefore, he said that it was premature to examine the question whether a war crime may have been committed by Russia in its attacks on the dam and its ongoing shelling of people trying to recover from the disaster.

We reiterate our call for an independent, impartial, thorough, and transparent investigation, he said.
The Red Cross warns that landmines could pose a threat for decades following the Kakhovka dam breach in Ukraine. The White House says it sees signs of a deepening partnership between Russia and Iran. Stories from some of the women serving in the war.
June 28 marks the fifth anniversary of the worst attack on media inside the U.S, when a gunman opened fire in the Capital Gazette newsroom. The events of that day left an indelible mark on the journalists who survived. VOAs Cristina Caicedo Smit has the story from Annapolis, Maryland. Camera : Nelson Vinoles, Saqib Ul Islam
Texass 88th legislative session has been an especially productive one for local Bitcoin miners.

Advocates celebrated the blocking of one state bill, and the passage of several others, that will likely ensure the state remains attractive for miners.

"The microchip was invented in 1958 but that technology was monetized in California, Lee Bratcher, President of the Texas Blockchain Council, told Decrypt via email. Texas is not going to let that happen again. Texas will be the Silicon Valley of the Digital Asset industry."

For one, Senate Bill (SB) 1751, labeled an anti-mining bill in the industry, never made it to the Governors desk. The bill sought to curb lucrative energy credits that local miners have been enjoying, including Riot, which raked in $9.5 million in credits last July.

Is Texas Still 'Very Open for Business' for Bitcoin Mining?

Elsewhere, Senate Bill 1929, which passed, was seen as a win for the industry.

The bill requires massive Bitcoin mines to register with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Proponents of the bill see it as a necessary step toward enhancing transparency.

"We did vocally support SB 1929, which requires large flexible loads over 75 megawatts to register certain details about their load with the grid operator, ERCOT," Bratcher said. "This bill will prove helpful in strengthening the communication between ERCOT and Bitcoin miners."

Texas House Bills boost Bitcoin miners

Additionally, two House BillsHB 591 and HB 1666are also being touted as positives for crypto mining. They've passed House and Senate votes, and are expected to be signed by Texas Governor Abbott.

HB 591 establishes a tax incentive for using flared gas for on-site Bitcoin mining.

Gas flaring is the practice of burning off or releasing gas from oil production wells. The practice is a significant contributor to methane pollution globally and has severe environmental impacts.

The bill encourages Bitcoin miners to utilize flared gas as an energy source, creating a use case for an energy resource that may otherwise be wasted. But critics caution that flared gas use amounts to further fossil fuel-powered mining.

HB 1666 introduces a proof-of-reserves regime, requiring crypto exchanges to maintain assets "sufficient to fulfill all obligations to customers as well as submitting statements to the Texas Department of Banking regarding liabilities.

In the wake of the FTX bankruptcy, this move may help to bring some skeptical investors back to crypto.

White House Issues Report Justifying 30% Crypto Mining Tax, Cites Lack of Economic Benefits

Critics of the local industry are less enthusiastic about the recent legislative moves.

"From our perspective, what you're doing here is getting a new value stream to the industry that is otherwise starting to be priced out of the market," Texas Director of Public Citizen, Adrian Shelley, told Decrypt.

Public Citizen Texas is a non-profit advocacy group that has actively lobbied against burning coal in Texas as well as the states interest in expanding its network of nuclear power plants.

"This is an industry that's not bringing really clear or tangible value into a state," Shelley said. "[Whereas] it's got all of these exotic mechanisms for extracting value out of it."
In parts of Cameroon, the price of gasoline has doubled since Nigerias new President Bola Tinubu scrapped a government fuel subsidy in the oil rich nation. Nigeria is one of Africas leading oil producers and subsidized petroleum products are routinely smuggled into Cameroon and sold by the roadside. Now, with the subsidy in place, business people in Cameroon say they are struggling to cope as fuel prices rise.

Traders in towns and villages on Cameroon's border with Nigeria say business has suffered since Nigerian President Bola Tinubu announced the end of fuel subsidies on May 29.

Thousands of Cameroonians and Nigerians trade cattle, cotton, foods and other products across their countries 2,000-kilometer long border.

Thirty-three-year old Alphonsine Ngaba buys body lotions, perfumes and cosmetic products in Nigeria for sale in Limani, a town in northern Cameroon.

She says the end of the fuel subsidy has led to a fuel shortage, hampering business on both sides of the border.

Ngaba says at least a hundred merchants returning from Nigeria have been stranded for three days in Limani, where several dozen transport trucks, vehicles and motorcycles are grounded by fuel scarcity. She says within the past two weeks a fuel shortage has hit towns and villages on Cameroon's border that solely depend on Nigeria for petrol.

Ngaba said a few drivers entering Cameroon complain that fuel is expensive in Nigeria and have more than doubled the fares they charge to transport goods.

Cameroon's National Institute of Statistics reports that in 2022, more than 30 percent of Cameroonians bought petrol from Nigeria. A liter of Nigerian petrol sold for about 50 cents, while petrol supplied by Cameroons state oil firm SONARA sold at more than one dollar.

Nigerian President Tinubu cited heavy smuggling of petrol into Cameroon, Chad, Benin and other countries as a reason for halting the subsidy.

Donatus Manga imports petrol from Nigeria and sells in Buea, a town near Cameroons southwestern border with Nigeria.

He says the price of petrol from Nigeria has more than doubled in the past 10 days, cutting deeply into his business.

"Business is quite slow and difficult," said Manga. "At first, I could sell up to 2,000 liters a day, but as of now, I hardly sell up to 200 liters a day due to the rise in the price of petrol from Cross River state, Nigeria."

Manga said his supplier has been unable to import petrol from Nigeria's Cross River state for two weeks.

Civilians in Cameroons border towns and villages say the fuel situation has also caused a 15 percent increase in prices of basic commodities and motor spare parts imported from Nigeria.

To ease the fuel shortage, the government of Cameroon says it will supply petrol to towns and villages in need.
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Former U.S. President Donald Trump says he's been indicted. The US Pentagon dismisses a Wall Street Journal report that China has a deal to build a spying facility in Cuba. The Red Cross warns that landmines could pose a threat for decades following the Kakhovka dam breach.
The leader of a regional affiliate of the Islamic State terrorist outfit was reportedly killed in Afghanistan this week in an area along the border with Pakistan, intelligence officials in both countries confirmed to VOA.

Sanaullah Ghafari, the so-called slain emir of Islamic State Khorasan, or IS-K, has led the terrorist group since June 2020. He was widely known as Shahab al-Muhajir and was said to be in his late 30s.

Ghafari was traveling through the mountainous province of Kunar late Tuesday when Taliban security forces targeted him in an intelligence-led operation. Six other IS-K operatives were killed in subsequent raids in the area, Taliban sources said without sharing further details.

Pakistani intelligence officials also confirmed to VOA the elimination of the IS-K chief in Afghanistan under what they described as "mysterious circumstances." They hailed it as a "major success" against terrorist groups threatening the two countries.

VOA has reached out to the Taliban spokesperson in Afghanistan for comment on the killing of the regional terror chief but has not received any response.

Separately, sources in Kunar province, speaking to VOA on the condition of anonymity, confirmed to VOA Friday they had seen evidence of Ghafari's death.

Ghafari, a resident of the Afghan capital of Kabul, graduated from the city's central university.

The United States has offered a reward of $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of the IS-K leader.

A U.S. official familiar with the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the matter, told VOA the U.S. could not confirm whether the terror leader had in fact been killed.

But the official denied any U.S. involvement, rejecting reports the U.S. carried out an airstrike.

U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East and South Asia, also told VOA it was unable to confirm Ghafaris death.

CENTCOM is aware of reports alleging that an ISIS-K leader was killed in Afghanistan earlier this week, Major John Moore said in an email. We have nothing additional to provide at this time.

Publicly, American officials have denied working with the Taliban and have cast doubt on their ability to go after high-level terrorist targets in Afghanistan.

"The Taliban doesn't have the precision to go after individuals," CENTCOM's General Michael Erik Kurilla told U.S. lawmakers in March.

"They [Taliban] will do large, sweeping clearance operations," he said, noting such operations are only "disruptive to a point."

Taliban chief spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid rejected those assertions. He said that since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August 2021, their security forces have arrested and imprisoned up to 1,700 IS-K militants and killed close to 1,100 others, including key commanders.

An official Taliban media outlet released an audio clip of Ghafari in April, in which he acknowledged his group's significant losses in counterterrorism operations by Taliban special forces.

"Only a few of our comrades are left, and their number can be counted on the fingers," Ghafari said in his Pashto language message to his group. He also spoke about the killings of key leaders in counterterrorism operations against IS-K in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan.

Pakistani intelligence sources said that Ghafari also directed IS-K terror attacks in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Iran, which all share borders with Afghanistan.

The IS-K leader was the mastermind behind last year's failed assassination attempt on Islamabad's acting ambassador in Kabul, Ubaid-ur-Rehman Nizamani.

IS-K took credit for the December gun attack that injured a Pakistani bodyguard. Nizamani escaped that attack unhurt.

The terrorist group has also claimed responsibility for the March 2022 suicide bombing of a Shi'ite Muslim mosque in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar that killed more than 60 worshipers.

Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
Latest developments:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would deploy some of its tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus next month. Putin said during Friday's meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that the facilities for the nuclear weapons would be completed by July 7-8, and that the weapons would be moved to Belarus quickly after that.

The International Court of Justice has accepted requests from 32 countries to back Ukraine in a genocide case against Russia, the United Nations' highest court said Friday. It's the largest number of countries to join another nation's complaint at the world court based in The Hague, Netherlands.

Ancient Crimean gold artifacts that were on display abroad will be returned to Ukraine and not to Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled Friday.

Intense fighting was being reported on Ukraines front lines Friday, but independent media weren't able to assess whether this was the beginning of the much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive or whether Ukraine was penetrating Russian defenses.

In his nightly video address, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had discussed tactics and achievements with military leadership, but he did not go into details.

"For our soldiers, for all those who at this time are engaged in particularly heavy combat: We see your heroism, and we are grateful for every moment of your lives. Ukraine is as free as you are strong," he said.

Moscow and pro-war Russian bloggers reported intense battles on the Zaporizhzhia front near the city of Orikhiv, around the midpoint of the land bridge linking Russia to the Crimean Peninsula.

Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed certainty that "this offensive has begun," and added that "Ukrainian troops did not achieve their goals in any sector."

"The initial counteroffensive operations may be the most difficult and slowest, as they involve penetrating prepared defensive positions," the Institute for the Study of War noted in its latest assessment. "Initial setbacks are to be expected. This phase may also see the highest Ukrainian losses."

Both sides have had ample time to prepare for this moment. Ukrainian forces are armed with Western artillery, tanks and training. But Russia's military has entrenched its positions and has brought in additional forces, Axios reported.

New US aid for Ukraine

Earlier Friday, the Pentagon announced a new $2.1 billion assistance package for Ukraine that it said includes critical air defense and ammunition capabilities.

The package includes HAWK air defense systems and missiles, 105 mm and 203 mm artillery rounds, Puma unmanned aerial systems, laser-guided rocket system munitions, and support for training and maintenance, the Defense Department said in a statement.

According to the department, since the beginning of the Russian offensive, the U.S. has committed more than $40.4 billion is security assistance to Ukraine.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration and Congress have provided more than $75 billion in humanitarian, financial and military support to Ukraine. This is the first time a European country has held the top spot in U.S. foreign aid since the Truman administrations Marshall Plan after World War II, the Council on Foreign Relations said.

Kakhovka dam explosion

Clear signals of an explosion occurred at the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine early Tuesday morning, Norwegian seismic research foundation Norsar said Friday.

Earlier in the day, a U.S. official told The New York Times that American spy satellites equipped with infrared sensors detected an explosion at the Kakhovka dam just before it collapsed, unleashing a torrent of floodwater into surrounding areas this week.

The official said that satellites had detected a heat signature consistent with a major explosion, the official told the newspaper.

The AP flew a drone over the dam Wednesday and reported that there were no signs of an attack from above and no scorch marks or shrapnel scars visible on buildings above the flooding that would be typical of a bombardment, which Russia accuses Ukraine of having carried out.

Russians and Ukrainians have traded blame for the destruction of the vast Soviet-era dam, which is under Russian control.

Officials said more than 6,000 people had been evacuated from dozens of inundated cities, towns and villages on both sides of the Dnipro River. But the true scale of the disaster remains unclear for a region that was once home to tens of thousands of people. At least 14 people have died in the flooding, many are homeless and tens of thousands are without drinking water.

Iranian drones

The White House said Friday that Russia seemed to be deepening its defense partnership with Iran and that it had received hundreds of one-way attack drones it's been using to hit Ukraine.

Citing newly declassified information, the White House said the drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), were built in Iran, shipped across the Caspian Sea and then used by Russian forces against Ukraine.

We have information that Russia is receiving materials from Iran needed to build a UAV manufacturing plant inside Russia, said National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby in a statement sent to VOA Thursday. This plant could be fully operational early next year.

The White House released satellite imagery of the planned location of the UAV manufacturing plant in Russias Alabuga Special Economic Zone.

Crimean treasures

Ancient Crimean gold artifacts that were on display abroad will be returned to Ukraine and not to Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled Friday, ending a long, bitter tussle over the treasures.

More than a thousand ancient objects, including a solid gold Scythian helmet and a golden neck ornament, were on loan to Amsterdam's Allard Pierson Museum when Moscow occupied the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

"This decision ends this dispute. The Allard Pierson Museum must return these artistic treasures to the state of Ukraine and not to the museums in Crimea," Friday's ruling said, upholding the decision of a lower court in 2021.

In a tweet, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte for the planned return of the "Scythian gold" and called the ruling an example of Dutch "leadership in the protection of international law."

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
In a good month, Celina Chanthanouvong has about $200 left after rent, groceries and car insurance. That doesn't factor in her student loans, which have been on hold since the start of the pandemic and are estimated to cost $300 a month. The pause in repayment has been a lifeline keeping the 25-year-old afloat.

"I don't even know where I would begin to budget that money," said Chanthanouvong, who works in marketing in San Francisco.

Now, after more than three years, the lifeline is being pulled away.

More than 40 million Americans will be on the hook for federal student loan payments starting in late August under the terms of a debt ceiling deal approved by Congress last week. The Biden administration has been targeting that timeline for months, but the deal ends any hope of a further extension of the pause, which has been prolonged while the Supreme Court decides the president's debt cancellation.

Without cancellation, the Education Department predicts borrowers will fall behind on their loans at historic rates. Among the most vulnerable are those who finished college during the pandemic. Millions have never had to make a loan payment, and their bills will soon come amid soaring inflation and forecasts of economic recession.

Advocates fear it will add a financial burden that younger borrowers can't afford.

"I worry that we're going to see levels of default of new graduates that we've never seen before," said Natalia Abrams, president of the nonprofit Student Debt Crisis Center.

Chanthanouvong earned a bachelor's in sociology from the University of California-Merced in 2019. She couldn't find a job for a year, leaving her to rely on odd jobs for income. She found a full-time job last year, but at $70,000, her salary barely covers the cost of living in the Bay Area.

"I'm not going out. I don't buy Starbucks every day. I'm cooking at home," she said. "And sometimes, I don't even have $100 after everything."

Under President Joe Biden's cancellation plan, Chanthanouvong would be eligible to get $20,000 of her debt erased, leaving her owing $5,000. But she isn't banking on the relief. Instead, she invited her partner to move in and split rent. The financial pinch has them postponing or rethinking major life milestones.

"My partner and I agreed, maybe we don't want kids," she said. "Not because we don't want them, but because it would be financially irresponsible for us to bring a human being into this world."

Out of the more than 44 million federal student loan borrowers, about 7 million are below the age of 25, according to data from the Education Department. Their average loan balance is less than $14,000, lower than any other age group.

Yet borrowers with lower balances are the most likely to default. It's fueled by millions who drop out before graduating, along with others who graduate but struggle to find good jobs. Among those who defaulted in 2021, the median loan balance was $15,300, and the vast majority had balances under $40,000, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Resuming student loan payments will cost U.S. consumers $18 billion a month, the investment firm Jefferies has estimated. The hit to household budgets is ill-timed for the overall economy, Jefferies says, because the United States is widely believed to be on the brink of a recession.

Despite the student loan moratorium, Americans mostly didn't bank their savings, according to Jefferies economist Thomas Simons. So they'll likely have to cut back on other things  travel, restaurants  to fit resumed loan payments into their budgets. Belt-tightening could hurt an economy that relies heavily on consumer spending.

Noshin Hoque graduated from Stony Brook University early in the pandemic with about $20,000 in federal student loans. Instead of testing the 2020 job market, she enrolled at a master's program in social work at Columbia University, borrowing $34,000 more.

With the payments paused, she felt a new level of financial security. She cut costs by living with her parents in New York City and her job at a nonprofit paid enough to save money and help her parents.

She recalls splurging on a $110 polo shirt as a Father's Day gift for her dad.

"Being able to do stuff for my parents and having them experience that luxury with me has just been such a plus," said Hoque, who works for Young Invincibles, a nonprofit that supports student debt cancellation.

It gave her the comfort to enter a new stage of life. She got married to a recent medical school graduate, and they're expecting their first child in November. At the same time, they're bracing for the crush of loan payments, which will cost at least $400 a month combined. They hope to pay more to avoid interest, which is prohibited for them as practicing Muslims.

To prepare, they stopped eating at restaurants. They canceled a vacation to Italy. Money they wanted to put toward their child's education fund will go to their loans instead.

"We're back to square one of planning our finances," she said. "I feel that so deeply."

Even the logistics of making payments will be a hurdle for newer borrowers, said Rachel Rotunda, director of government relations at National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. They'll need to find out who their loan servicers are, choose a repayment plan and learn to navigate the payment system.

"The volume of borrowers going back on the system at the same time  this has never happened before," Rotunda said. "It's fair to say it's going to be bumpy."

The Education Department has promised to make the restart of payments as smooth as possible. In a statement, the agency said it will continue to push for Biden's debt cancellation as a way to reduce borrowers' debt load and ease the transition.

For Beka Favela, 30, the payment pause provided independence. She earned a master's in counseling last year, and her job as a therapist allowed her to move out of her parents' house.

Without making payments on her $80,000 in student loans, she started saving. She bought furniture. She chipped away at credit card debt. But once the pause ends, she expects to pay about $500 a month. It will consume most of her disposable income, leaving little for surprise costs. If finances get tighter, she wonders if she'll have to move back home.

"I don't want to feel like I'm regressing in order to make ends meet," said Favela, of Westmont, Illinois. "I just want to keep moving forward. I'm worried, is that going to be possible?"
The Pentagon says reports that China and Cuba have reached a secret pact allowing Beijing to build an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island that is 160 kilometers from the United States are "not accurate."

"I can tell you, based on the information that we have, that that is not accurate - that we are not aware of China and Cuba developing any type of spy station," Brigadier General Pat Ryder, the Pentagon's press secretary, told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday.

According to the reports, which first appeared in The Wall Street Journal citing unnamed intelligence officials, China had agreed to pay financially hard-pressed Cuba several billion dollars for the spy facility, which would allow China to collect electronic communications from throughout the southeastern United States, where numerous military bases are located.

Ryder added that the Pentagon was not aware of China setting up any type of military base in Cuba or elsewhere in the region.

However, he cautioned that the relationship between Cuba and China is something that the Pentagon monitors, along with any type of "coercive activity or belligerent activity" by China in the Western Hemisphere.

A senior White House official also described the media reports as "not accurate."

'We are very aware'

A Defense Department official, who declined to comment directly on the reports, told VOA the U.S. was still "able to meet all our security commitments at home and across the region."

"On a broader level, we are very aware of [China's] attempts to invest in infrastructure around the world that may have military purposes, including in the Western Hemisphere," the official said.

Chinas foreign ministry Friday accused the United States of spreading rumors and slander, Reuters reported.

A spokesperson at the Cuban Embassy in Washington told VOA that the Journal's report was "false."

Earlier Thursday, Cuba's deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, said the report was "totally false and unfounded."

"Slanders like this have frequently been fabricated by United States officials," he added.

Nicholas Eftimiades, a retired intelligence officer, told VOA Mandarin that Cuba "certainly falls within the footprint to be able to collect the U.S. military communications from some geostationary satellites."

"This is an intelligence collection program. It's not unexpected. I would think that this has been coming for quite some period of time," he added. "It's another threat to national security that we have to contend with."

Few options seen

James Andrew Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, told VOA Mandarin that the U.S. has few options in response.

"Because Cuba is so close to the United States, it's like being part of the American phone network," he said. "If they decide they want to have a Chinese listening station, there's not a lot we can do."

The White House and many lawmakers in Congress consider China to be the chief U.S. economic and military rival. The U.S. is the world's biggest economy, and China is the second largest.

Earlier this year, the U.S. shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic Ocean, but not before it traversed the breadth of the United States and flew over numerous military bases. Last weekend, a Chinese warship abruptly sailed across the bow of a U.S. destroyer as it passed through international waters in the Taiwan Strait. The U.S. said the incident forced the American ship to slow down to avoid a collision.

Republican opponents of Biden were quick to attack the administration about the reported Chinese venture into the Western Hemisphere, although it was unclear what, if anything, the U.S. could do to stop it.

"Joe Biden needs to wake up to the real Chinese threats on our doorstep," Nikki Haley, a former U.N. ambassador and a current Republican presidential candidate, wrote on Twitter.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the closest U.S. state to Cuba, said on Twitter, "The threat to America from Cuba isn't just real, it is far worse than this."

VOA Mandarin contributed to this report.
Vietnams long-awaited national power development plan, aimed at achievement of carbon neutrality by 2050, was approved by Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh on May 16, but faces obstacles in implementation and funding.

Delayed by more than two years, the plan, known as PDP8, for Power Development Plan 8, sets goals for 2030 with an eye toward the 2050 deadline. PDP8 would require $134.7 billion in funding for new power plants and grids to meet 2030 targets. To completely phase coal out by 2050, the government estimates $658 billion is needed.

Implementation, funding, and a governmentwide commitment to phase out coal face difficulties.

The plan "is a big challenge," Hanoi-based Ha Hoang Hop, associate senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, wrote via WhatsApp, adding that it "can be implemented well only with a restructure of the whole of Vietnams energy sector."

Under the plan, Vietnam would more than double power generation capacity by 2030. Coal would remain a top energy source through the 2020s. Liquefied natural gas would be the major power source in 2030, with the remainder coming from hydropower, wind and solar energy, and biomass.

Vietnam was an early success story in renewables, with Southeast Asias largest installed capacity of wind and solar energy by 2019, but there was little modernization of the national power grid. As a result, much of that energy goes to waste as state-run Vietnam Electricity, or EVN, caps output to prevent overloads. In addition, an investigation into the Ministry of Industry and Trade, or MOIT, revealed that officials approved more solar projects than were authorized.

Now, "there's too much solar," said Dang Nguyen, a Ho Chi Minh City-based legal expert in the energy sector. New solar projects will be put on hold until 2030 but the outlook for wind projects is more optimistic, he said.

"The MOIT, they just approved, approved, approved," Nguyen said of the solar uptick. "It is clear that the MOIT went beyond their authority."

Funding and cutting coal

Chinh committed Vietnam to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2021. He called on developed nations to assist Vietnam in its green transition.

International funding has come in the form of the Just Energy Transition Partnership, or JETP, a $15.5 billion financing deal between Vietnam and G7 countries plus Norway and Denmark. After lengthy negotiations, an agreement was reached in December, but the funds could not be disbursed until PDP8's approval.

The planning within PDP8 is lackluster, doing just enough to unlock JETP funds as well as private investment into renewable projects, said Zachary Abuza, a Southeast Asia expert at the National War College in Washington.

"It doesn't detail specific projects, it's surprisingly vague," he said. "They had to do just enough to unlock not just the $15.5 billion of JETP funding but there was already in the private sector some $5 billion of investment that was just stuck."

An energy expert in Ho Chi Minh City who asked that his name not be used because he has not been granted permission to speak publicly, said it is unclear how the JETP funds will be disbursed.

"Everybody talks about the JETP but to make it come to life is still a long way to go," he said. "How the money will come, nobody knows."

Further, he worries about funding through 2050 with government capital and a nationwide pricing mechanism for renewable energy lacking.

"The government doesn't have that money and for the private sector the [pricing] mechanism is the biggest problem," he added.

Total support within the government to cut coal is also questionable. The country's leading anti-coal campaigner, Nguy Thi Khanh, was sentenced to 16 months in prison on tax evasion charges in June last year. Khanh was released five months early in May 12, but her jailing showed a division within the government on moving away from coal.

"There's so many vested interests in terms of coal and other energies that had it out for her," Abuza said. "It's such an opaque and corrupt system that they were able to get charges levied."

Ben Swanton, co-director of a human rights group, The 88 Project, said Khanh's release shows the role outside pressure could have on pushing Vietnam to release jailed environmentalists.

"It is very rare for political prisoners to be released early. In Khanh's case there was significant diplomatic pressure on the Vietnamese government to release her, pressure that intensified after the government signed the JETP energy transition deal," Swanton wrote in an email.

Apparent targeting of environmentalists continues, though, with police in Ho Chi Minh City arresting prominent environmentalist Hoang Thi Minh Hong on tax-evasion charges May 30.

"Vietnams selective use of its vague and flawed tax law to target environmentalists and climate change activists with politically motivated prosecutions is a new, extremely troubling development. ... Hoang Thi Minh Hong is the latest victim," Human Rights Watch Deputy Asia Director Phil Robertson said in a letter to the press.

"This recent spasm of repression is occurring as Vietnam claims it is committed to the reduction of carbon emission through a massive infusion of foreign funds."
Donald Trump made history on Thursday. The 76-year-old former president and front-runner in next year's Republican presidential primaries announced he has been indicted on federal criminal charges. None of his predecessors, since the United States declared independence in 1776, has ever faced such legal peril.

While politics is a zero-sum game in many countries, including some democracies where rival leaders will use the levers of powers to neutralize their predecessors, that has not traditionally been the case in America.

When he was president, Trump's critics accused him of lurching towards authoritarianism and trying to use his political office to stay in power after he lost his bid for reelection.

Of course Trump, in his trademark approach to politics, is now alleging just such an abuse of office, accusing the Democratic administration of Joe Biden of weaponizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its parent agency, the Department of Justice, in "warfare for the law."

Trump, who like all defendants is presumed innocent pending the outcome of a trial, has been claiming the system is rigged against him since the first votes were cast in the Iowa caucuses in 2016. Back then he blamed rival candidate Ted Cruz and demanded, without success, that "a new election should take place or Cruz results (be) nullified."

Even when he won the general election later that year, he claimed fraud. Trump won the Electoral College vote (based on a majority of votes in each individual state) but lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton.

"In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally," Trump stated without any evidence.

During his four years in office, in which he was impeached twice by the House but not convicted in the Senate, Trump repeatedly stated he was the target of witch hunts and that he never did anything wrong. There was the "perfect phone call" with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which he repeatedly pressed for the foreign leader to investigate Biden in a suggested quid pro quo. That led to the first impeachment.

Then there was the ignominious day at the U.S. Capitol when Trump supporters stormed the symbol of American democracy after their president incited them to "fight like hell" or "you're not going to have a country anymore. So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue."

Trump returned to the White House while the crowd headed into the Capitol. He then tweeted that his vice president, Mike Pence (now a Republican primary opponent) "didn't have the courage" to thwart the ceremonial counting of ballots to declare Biden the victor of the 2020 election.

That led to Trump's second impeachment in the waning days of his presidency.

A signature line of his political rallies was: "We will never give in, we will never give up, and we will never, ever back down."

During his presidency, Trump sometimes did back away from his more outlandish proposals, appointments and rhetoric, usually under intense pressure from Cabinet secretaries, key aides and family members. Trump always seemed to regret it, however, telling his lawyers and his advisers that he trusted his instincts more than their expert advice. That usually put him into greater jeopardy.

Eventually he had a falling out with nearly everyone in his inner circle. Some of those whom he cast out would occasionally return to the fold. Top White House officials observed Trump seemed to have no true friends; all relationships were transactional and loyalty to the boss (who had never worked for anyone except his own father) was the ultimate desirable trait.

Legal observers have little doubt Trump will fight these federal charges every step of the way and is unlikely to plea bargain, as that would be tantamount to admitting guilt to something, not a Trump trait.

Within hours of announcing the indictment, Trump sent out fundraising letters imploring supporters: "Please make a contribution to peacefully stand with me today and prove that YOU will NEVER surrender our country to the radical Left." The note concluded with suggested contributions between $24 and $250.

Political observers do not expect the indictment to hurt Trump much with his core supporters, about a third of Republican Party voters. But overall, before news of the fresh charges, six in 10 Americans told pollsters Trump should not be president again.

The current expectation is that with perhaps a dozen other Republicans vying for the nomination by the time the first 2024 votes are cast at the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, the former president will remain the front-runner and be the most likely to capture his party's nomination for a third consecutive time  although this time while battling serious criminal charges of violating the Espionage Act, making false statements and conspiring to obstruct justice.

Only once has an American president, out of office, returned to the White House. That was Grover Cleveland after defeating the incumbent president, Benjamin Harrison, in 1892.

Only once, in 1920, has a relevant political party nominated a convicted felon. That was Eugene V. Debs, who had run unsuccessfully for president four times previously and was a household name of the era.

Debs had been convicted of violating the Espionage and Sedition acts but was chosen by the Socialist Party again in 1920. He was allowed by authorities to issue one written statement weekly from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He captured more than three percent of the vote in the general election. He remained a popular figure after President Warren Harding pardoned him the following year.

If Trump loses the 2024 election for a second time, would Biden (the presumptive Democratic Party nominee again), even consider pardoning his vanquished rival if the Republican is convicted of one or more felonies?

Many in America never forgave Gerald Ford for pardoning his fellow Republican Richard Nixon, who resigned rather than face certain impeachment for the Watergate scandal. And Ford paid the price in an election loss to Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Biden talks often of healing and bridging the deepest political divide since the Civil War. A devout Catholic of Irish ancestry, he takes solace in the words of popes who call for forgiveness and in the lines of his favorite poet.

Perhaps in Seamus Heaney's line there lies a hint:

History says, Don't hope

On the side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.



So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles.

And cures and healing wells.

Editor's note: VOA's chief national correspondent Steve Herman, was VOA's White House bureau chief during the Trump administration and extensively interacted with the 45th president.
South Korea summoned Chinas ambassador to Seoul on Friday, condemning what it called his unforgivable criticism of South Korea, in the latest flareup of tensions between Seoul and Beijing.

The move came after Chinese ambassador Xing Haiming gave a Thursday speech that was broadly critical of South Koreas foreign policy and how Seoul has become more aligned with the United States.

There are many difficulties in our bilateral relationship. And frankly, the responsibility does not lie with China, Xing said, according to a statement released by Chinas embassy in Seoul.

In particular, Xing insinuated that South Korea was bowing to external factors, such as the U.S. pressure campaign against China.

"We hope the South Korean side will faithfully keep its promise and clearly respect China's core interests, including on the Taiwan issue, he added.

The Chinese ambassadors speech came during a dinner event with Lee Jae-myung, the South Korean opposition leader and fierce critic of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.

In response, South Koreas first vice foreign minister Chang Ho-jin summoned Xing, according to a statement Friday by South Koreas Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

He strongly warned and expressed regret over Xing's unconventional and provocative words and actions, which were contrary to diplomatic customs, the statement said.

Xings comments, Chang said, were untrue and unforgivable, and could be seen as an attempt to interfere in South Koreas domestic politics.

He also warned Xing not to deviate from the duties of his diplomatic mission, warning that the Chinese diplomat will be responsible for all consequences.

South Korea-China tensions also spiked in April, after President Yoon condemned attempts to change the status quo by force in Taiwan  an apparent reference to Chinas increased military threats against the self-ruled island.

Yoon also said the Taiwan issue was of global importance  contradicting Chinas claim that it is purely a domestic matter.

After Chinas foreign ministry scolded Yoon, Seoul pushed back, summoning the Chinese ambassador, blasting Beijings criticism as unspeakable, and lodging a complaint with Chinese state media for their unfounded disparagement of Yoon.

Under Yoon, South Korea has aligned itself more closely with the United States and its allies. Yoon has also become more willing to confront China, South Koreas main trading partner, as he pursues what he says is a values-based foreign policy.

However, there are growing signs that Beijing may attempt to use its economic leverage over Seoul. Late last month, China appeared to block access to the website of Naver, South Korea's do-everything web portal.

Seoul is familiar with such pressure. In 2017, China waged a painful campaign of boycotts and unofficial sanctions against South Korean businesses following Seouls installation of a U.S. missile defense system that Beijing viewed as a threat.

Addressing South Korea-China relations at a Friday speech, Yoons National Security Advisor Cho Tae-yong stressed relationships between countries should be based on mutual respect, according to South Koreas Yonhap news agency.

"We will form healthy South Korea-China relations through a 'confident' diplomacy that is befitting to the increased national power of the Republic of Korea and the expectations of the people," he added.

According to opinion polls, South Korean public perceptions of China have plummeted in recent years, and are now roughly equal to views about Japan, Koreas former colonial ruler.

Lee Juhyun contributed to this report.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed Thursday that he has been indicted in connection with his handling of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021.

The indictment has not been made public but Trump attorney James Trusty, appearing on the cable news channel CNN, said the charges include willful retention of national defense information, obstruction, false statements and conspiracy.

The indictment makes Trump the first former U.S. president to be charged in federal court.

He has already been charged in New York with paying off an adult film star during his 2016 presidential election. He is also under scrutiny from federal and state prosecutors in Georgia for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Here are seven questions about the documents case.

Why was Trump being investigated?

The Justice Department launched an investigation into Trumps handling of government records in early 2022 after the National Archives reported that Trump had stashed hundreds of sensitive government documents at his Florida resort and obstructed their retrieval.

Under U.S. law, presidential records belong to the government and must be handed over to the National Archives when a president leaves office.

Trump allegedly took hundreds of records from the White House and had them shipped to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort and residence.

The National Archives demanded the documents from Trumps representatives in 2021 but only received 14 boxes in January 2022. They contained more than 100 classified documents.

Alarmed at the finding of government secrets, the National Archives subsequently reported the discovery to the Justice Department, triggering an FBI investigation.

Though Trump later returned several dozen more documents, investigators suspected he was holding on to even more. That led the FBI to execute a search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. The highly publicized search led to the discovery of more than 100 classified documents.

What is in the documents?

In all, prosecutors have retrieved more than 300 classified government documents from Trump. The documents bear various classification markings, from confidential and secret to top secret/sensitive compartmentalized information, the highest level of classification.

The government has kept the content of the classified records under wraps, but in court documents, prosecutors have said their mishandling could endanger U.S. national security.

The documents originate from different agencies, including the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, and cover a broad spectrum of national security topics, such as China and Iran's missile program.

Why did a special counsel investigate the case?

The investigation was led through most of last year by the Justice Department. But Trump's announcement in November that he was running for president again prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint Jack Smith, a former career Justice Department prosecutor, as special counsel.

Smith used two grand juries in recent months  one in Washington and another in Miami  to subpoena witnesses and documents related to the case. Several dozen witnesses have appeared before the two panels.

Smith is also investigating Trump in connection with the events that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

What has Trump said publicly about the case?

Trump has denied any wrongdoing in connection with the documents, calling the investigation a "witch hunt" designed to sabotage his bid for reelection.

He also claimed that he had a "standing order" to declassify all documents taken from the Oval Office to the White House residence.

But prosecutors have reportedly obtained a 2021 audio recording in which Trump acknowledged he had retained a classified Pentagon document, which contradicts his claim that he had declassified all documents.

What would an indictment mean for Trump's presidential run?

Legally, the federal indictment cannot stop him from forging ahead with his presidential campaign.

In fact, John Malcolm, a former federal prosecutor who is a vice president at the Heritage Foundation, said there are no laws that would prevent Trump from running, even if he is convicted.

"There have been people who have run for office from prison cells," Malcolm said.

In 2002, former Representative Jim Traficant ran for his old congressional seat while serving a prison sentence for corruption.

How do the Trump and Biden document cases compare?

Trumps indictment comes as another special counsel, Robert Hur, investigates President Joe Bidens handling of classified records dating back to his time as vice president.

The documents were found last year at Bidens former Washington office and his home in Delaware.

Bidens lawyers have said the documents, small in number, were handed over to government officials as soon as they were found.

Even if Biden were found to have mishandled classified documents, he would be unlikely to face charges.

That is because of a long-standing Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted, said Jordan Strauss, a former Justice Department official who is now a managing director with Kroll, a risk consultancy.

I think the most likely outcome of the special counsel's investigation of President Biden is a report that says something like, we would or would not have recommended an indictment were this not the president, Strauss said.

Former Vice President Mike Pence also drew scrutiny over his retention of classified documents. But the Justice Department informed him last week that it had closed the investigation and would not charge him.
Key Insights

Using the 2 Stage Free Cash Flow to Equity, Carlsberg Brewery Malaysia Berhad fair value estimate is RM18.45

With RM20.50 share price, Carlsberg Brewery Malaysia Berhad appears to be trading close to its estimated fair value

Analyst price target for CARLSBG is RM25.03, which is 36% above our fair value estimate

Today we'll do a simple run through of a valuation method used to estimate the attractiveness of Carlsberg Brewery Malaysia Berhad (KLSE:CARLSBG) as an investment opportunity by taking the forecast future cash flows of the company and discounting them back to today's value. The Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model is the tool we will apply to do this. Believe it or not, it's not too difficult to follow, as you'll see from our example!

Remember though, that there are many ways to estimate a company's value, and a DCF is just one method. If you still have some burning questions about this type of valuation, take a look at the Simply Wall St analysis model.

View our latest analysis for Carlsberg Brewery Malaysia Berhad

Crunching The Numbers

We are going to use a two-stage DCF model, which, as the name states, takes into account two stages of growth. The first stage is generally a higher growth period which levels off heading towards the terminal value, captured in the second 'steady growth' period. To start off with, we need to estimate 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.

Generally we assume that a dollar today is more valuable than a dollar in the future, so we need to discount the sum of these future cash flows to arrive at a present value estimate:

10-year free cash flow (FCF) forecast

2023 2024 2025 2026 2027 2028 2029 2030 2031 2032 Levered FCF (MYR, Millions) RM332.9m RM377.1m RM391.0m RM404.4m RM418.4m RM433.0m RM448.2m RM464.0m RM480.5m RM497.6m Growth Rate Estimate Source Analyst x4 Analyst x5 Analyst x4 Est @ 3.41% Est @ 3.46% Est @ 3.49% Est @ 3.52% Est @ 3.53% Est @ 3.54% Est @ 3.55% Present Value (MYR, Millions) Discounted @ 10.0% RM303 RM312 RM294 RM276 RM260 RM245 RM230 RM217 RM204 RM192

("Est" = FCF growth rate estimated by Simply Wall St)

Present Value of 10-year Cash Flow (PVCF) = RM2.5b

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. The Gordon Growth formula is used to calculate Terminal Value at a future annual growth rate equal to the 5-year average of the 10-year government bond yield of 3.6%. We discount the terminal cash flows to today's value at a cost of equity of 10.0%.

Terminal Value (TV)= FCF 2032  (1 + g)  (r  g) = RM498m (1 + 3.6%)  (10.0% 3.6%) = RM8.0b

Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV)= TV / (1 + r)10= RM8.0b ( 1 + 10.0%)10= RM3.1b

The total value is the sum of cash flows for the next ten years plus the discounted terminal value, which results in the Total Equity Value, which in this case is RM5.6b. The last step is to then divide the equity value by the number of shares outstanding. Relative to the current share price of RM20.5, the company appears around fair value at the time of writing. Valuations are imprecise instruments though, rather like a telescope - move a few degrees and end up in a different galaxy. Do keep this in mind.

dcf

The Assumptions

The calculation above is very dependent on two assumptions. The first is the discount rate and the other is the cash flows. You don't have to agree with these inputs, I recommend redoing the calculations yourself and playing with them. 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 Carlsberg Brewery Malaysia Berhad 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 10.0%, 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.

SWOT Analysis for Carlsberg Brewery Malaysia Berhad

Strength

Earnings growth over the past year exceeded its 5-year average.

Debt is not viewed as a risk.

Weakness

Earnings growth over the past year underperformed the Beverage industry.

Dividend is low compared to the top 25% of dividend payers in the Beverage market.

Expensive based on P/E ratio and estimated fair value.

Opportunity

Annual earnings are forecast to grow for the next 3 years.

Threat

Dividends are not covered by cash flow.

Annual earnings are forecast to grow slower than the Malaysian market.

Moving On:

Whilst important, the DCF calculation is only one of many factors that you need to assess for a company. DCF models are not the be-all and end-all of investment valuation. Preferably you'd apply different cases and assumptions and see how they would impact the company's valuation. For instance, if the terminal value growth rate is adjusted slightly, it can dramatically alter the overall result. For Carlsberg Brewery Malaysia Berhad, we've compiled three further elements you should assess:

Risks: Case in point, we've spotted 2 warning signs for Carlsberg Brewery Malaysia Berhad you should be aware of, and 1 of them is concerning. Future Earnings: How does CARLSBG'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 Malaysian 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.

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Former U.S. President Donald Trump, indicted in connection with his handling of classified documents after he left the White House in early 2021, is also facing two other significant criminal investigations. One is related to his 2020 reelection loss; in the other, he has been charged with altering business records to hide hush money paid to a porn star ahead of his successful 2016 presidential campaign.

Special counsel Jack Smith, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland and working with an extensive team of prosecutors, is heading the two most wide-ranging inquiries.

One involves Trumps retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Trump said Thursday night that he had been indicted and ordered to face the charges in a Miami court on Tuesday.

Under U.S. law, presidents are required to turn over presidential papers to the National Archives as they leave office, but Trump instead took some with him, many of them marked as highly classified.

Trump voluntarily returned some of the documents after authorities repeatedly asked for them. But when Justice Department officials concluded that he had still more at Mar-a-Lago, they secured a court-ordered warrant to search the estate last August. There, FBI agents discovered more classified material.

Trump has contended he was entitled as a former president to keep the documents.

The other Smith investigation involves Trump's effort to upend his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the weeks after the November 2020 election, including his admonition on January 6, 2021, for his supporters to head to the U.S. Capitol and "fight like hell" to keep Congress from certifying Bidens election victory.

About 2,000 Trump supporters stormed into the Capitol, ransacked congressional offices and clashed with police that day. About 1,000 of the rioters have since been charged with criminal offenses and about half have been convicted so far. Sentences have ranged from a few months to 18 years behind bars.

In a narrower criminal probe, a state prosecutor in Atlanta, Fani Willis, is investigating Trump's role in trying to overturn his 11,779-vote loss to Biden in the southern state of Georgia.

In a recorded conversation days ahead of the congressional certification of Biden's victory, Trump pleaded with Georgia state election chief Brad Raffensperger and other election officials to "find" him 11,780 votes, one more than he needed to overcome his loss.

"The people of Georgia are angry. The people in the country are angry," Trump said in the call to Georgia officials. "And there's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated."

Smith has subpoenaed an array of former top Trump administration officials, including former Vice President Mike Pence, to testify before a grand jury about their conversations with Trump in the weeks after the election and his efforts to upend the election result.

Pence is among the candidates running for the Republican nomination in the 2024 election

One effort, never fully implemented in states Trump lost to Biden, was to sign up fake electors supporting Trump to replace the legitimate ones committed to Biden in the Electoral College vote count.

Willis has signaled she will decide by early August whether to file charges against Trump or any of his aides, while Smith could also bring his election-related investigation to a head in the coming months.

In New York, Trump is facing a March 2024 trial on charges that he altered business records at his real estate conglomerate to hide a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in 2016 to silence her about her claim of a one-night encounter with him a decade earlier.

He has denied the purported liaison and all other charges he is facing.

In a civil inquiry that centers on events related to Trump's real estate business empire, New York state Attorney General Letitia James has accused Trump of lying to lenders and insurers about the value of his properties.

She is seeking to bar Trump, along with his sons Donald Jr. and Eric and his daughter Ivanka, from continuing to run a business in New York. A New York judge declined in January to dismiss James' suit, and a trial is scheduled for October.

In a recent civil case, Trump was ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, $5 million for sexually abusing her in a New York department store three decades ago.
The United Nations said Friday that it is sending home a unit of 60 Tanzanian peacekeepers from the Central African Republic, after a preliminary investigation found credible evidence that 11 of them allegedly sexually exploited and abused at least four victims.

The unit has been relocated to another base while investigations continue, and its members have been confined to the barracks, in order to protect victims and the integrity of the investigation, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters. The unit will be repatriated once their presence is no longer required by the investigation.

Dujarric said the victims are being provided with care and support by the missions humanitarian partners. He added that Tanzanian authorities have been notified and are deploying their own investigators to the Central African Republic.

In reaffirming their commitment to zero tolerance for sexual exploitation and abuse, the Tanzanian authorities noted the seriousness of the allegations and have committed to taking the necessary action to address these matters, Dujarric said.

VOA has asked Tanzanias U.N. ambassador for comment.

According to the Department of Peacekeepings website, Tanzania has about 1,586 uniformed personnel in the C.A.R. as part of the more than 17,000-strong mission, known by its acronym, MINUSCA.

The U.N. has the authority to repatriate international peacekeepers when there is credible evidence that members of a military or police unit have engaged in widespread or systemic sexual exploitation or abuse.

Dujarric said the Tanzanian peacekeepers were deployed at a temporary operating base in the western part of the Central African Republic.

The country has been locked in a cycle of political instability, violence and human rights abuses since the 1990s. Intense sectarian fighting in 2013 led to the U.N. authorizing the stabilization mission to the country the following year.

Since it was established, MINUSCA has had repeated problems with international peacekeepers engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse, including the abuse of children.

The United Nations remains committed to robustly implementing the secretary-generals zero-tolerance policy on sexual exploitation and abuse, Dujarric told reporters.
The Supreme Court on Thursday issued a surprising 5-4 ruling in favor of Black voters in a congressional redistricting case from Alabama, with two conservative justices joining liberals in rejecting a Republican-led effort to weaken a landmark voting rights law.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh aligned with the courts liberals in affirming a lower court ruling that found a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in an Alabama congressional map with one majority Black seat out of seven districts in a state where more than one in four residents is Black. The state now will have to draw a new map for next years elections.

The decision was keenly anticipated for its potential effect on control of the closely divided U.S. House of Representatives. Because of the ruling, new maps are likely in Alabama and Louisiana that could allow Democratic-leaning Black voters to elect their preferred candidates in two more congressional districts.

The outcome was unexpected in that the court had allowed the challenged Alabama map to be used for the 2022 elections, and in arguments last October the justices appeared willing to make it harder to challenge redistricting plans as racially discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The chief justice himself suggested last year that he was open to changes in the way courts weigh discrimination claims under the part of the law known as section 2. But on Thursday, Roberts wrote that the court was declining to recast our section 2 case law as Alabama requests.

Roberts also was part of conservative high-court majorities in earlier cases that made it harder for racial minorities to use the Voting Rights Act in ideologically divided rulings in 2013 and 2021.

The other four conservative justices dissented Thursday. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the decision forces Alabama to intentionally redraw its longstanding congressional districts so that black voters can control a number of seats roughly proportional to the black share of the States population. Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it.

The Biden administration sided with the Black voters in Alabama.

Attorney General Merrick Garland applauded the ruling: Todays decision rejects efforts to further erode fundamental voting rights protections, and preserves the principle that in the United States, all eligible voters must be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote free from discrimination based on their race.

Evan Milligan, a Black voter and the lead plaintiff in the case, said the ruling was a victory for democracy and people of color.

We are grateful that the Supreme Court upheld what we knew to be true: that everyone deserves to have their vote matter and their voice heard. Today is a win for democracy and freedom not just in Alabama but across the United States, Milligan said.

Alabama Republican Party Chairman John Wahl said in a statement that state lawmakers would comply with the ruling. Regardless of our disagreement with the Courts decision, we are confident the Alabama Legislature will redraw district lines that ensure the people of Alabama are represented by members who share their beliefs, while following the requirements of applicable law, Wahl said.

But Steve Marshall, the states Republican attorney general, said he expects to continue defending the challenged map in federal court, including at a full trial. Although the majoritys decision is disappointing, this case is not over, Marshall said in a statement.

Deuel Ross, a civil rights lawyer who argued the case at the Supreme Court, said the justices have validated the lower courts view in this case. A full trial doesnt seem a good use of Alabamas time, resources or the money of the people to continue to litigate their case.

The case stems from challenges to Alabamas seven-district congressional map, which included one district in which Black voters form a large enough majority that they have the power to elect their preferred candidate. The challengers said that one district is not enough, pointing out that overall, Alabamas population is more than 25% Black.

A three-judge court, with two appointees of former President Donald Trump, had little trouble concluding that the plan likely violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the votes of Black Alabamians. That likely violation was the standard under which the preliminary injunction was issued by the three-judge panel, which ordered a new map drawn.

But the state quickly appealed to the Supreme Court, where five conservative justices prevented the lower court ruling from going forward. At the same time, the court decided to hear the Alabama case.

Louisianas congressional map had separately been identified as probably discriminatory by a lower court. That map, too, remained in effect last year and now will have to be redrawn.

The National Redistricting Foundation said in a statement that its pending lawsuits over congressional districts in Georgia and Texas also could be affected.

Separately, the Supreme Court in the fall will hear South Carolinas appeal of a lower court ruling that found Republican lawmakers stripped Black voters from a district to make it safer for a Republican candidate. That case also could lead to a redrawn map in South Carolina, where six U.S. House members are Republicans and one is a Democrat.

Partisan politics also underlies the Alabama case. Republicans who dominate elective office in Alabama have been resistant to creating a second district with a Democratic-leaning Black majority, or close to one, that could send another Democrat to Congress.

The judges found that Alabama concentrated Black voters in one district, while spreading them out among the others to make it much more difficult to elect more than one candidate of their choice.

Alabamas Black population is large enough and geographically compact enough to create a second district, the judges found.

Denying discrimination, Alabama argued that the lower court ruling would have forced it to sort voters by race and insisted it was taking a race neutral approach to redistricting.

At arguments in October, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson scoffed at the idea that race could not be part of the equation. Jackson, the courts first Black woman, said that constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War and the Voting Rights Act a century later were intended to do the same thing, make Black Americans equal to white citizens.
JOHANNESBURG (AP)  Tens of thousands of Zimbabwean nationals working in South Africa who were facing deportation when their work permits expire at the end of June have been given a temporary reprieve after South African authorities extended the deadline on Thursday.

About 178,000 holders of the Zimbabwean Exemption Permit, an immigration permit issued in 2010 to Zimbabweans who had migrated to South Africa, now have until the end of December this year to apply for other visas and waivers to continue working in the country.

Many Zimbabweans, some undocumented, are living in South Africa, with a significant influx recorded following the 2008 political and economic upheaval in Zimbabwe that resulted in many fleeing to their southern African neighbor.

Many faced deportation as they have struggled to obtain work visas due to a combination of factors including glitches in the online application system, administrative delays and backlogs in the issuing of all visas, and the removal of some of their occupations from the country's scarce skills list.

Zimbabwe continues to face economic strife that has led to rising unemployment, higher food prices and a crumbling currency.

Announcing the decision, Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi said the department has been receiving between 1,000 and 1,500 daily applications for visas and waivers from Zimbabweans looking to extend their stay in South Africa.

The minister took into consideration the said factors, including (to a certain extent) submissions received from the affected Zimbabwean nationals, relevant officials of the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) and other interested parties, said Motsoaledis department in a statement.

Under the extension, holders of the ZEP may not be arrested, ordered to leave the country or be detained for not having a valid exemption certificate.

Some civil society groups had taken the South African government to court to force the department to extend the deadline and afford applicants more time to obtain the legal documents.

The Zimbabwe Community in SA welcomes this extension and understands that this period must be hastily used by our community to migrate to the mainstream work permits, said Zimbabwe Community in South Africa chairman Nicholas Mabhena.

Mabhena said Zimbabwean nationals affected by the permits included people who had lived in South Africa long before the permits were issued in 2010, having resided and worked under a different immigration regime.

These include teachers, general workers, mechanics, domestic workers and gas station attendants who are financially supporting their families back home.

These 178,000 people we are referring to are documented migrants who are economically active, and some stand to lose their jobs along with their benefits if they can no longer work in South Africa, Mabhena told The Associated Press.

He said the departure of so many Zimbabweans from South Africa would have economic consequences back in Zimbabwe as they were keeping the economy running due to the monthly remittances that they send back home.

Zimbabweans will vote in national elections on Aug. 23 which have already been marked by allegations of violence and intimidation against opposition supporters by the ruling ZANU-PF government.

The Zimbabwean Embassy in South Africa said this week close to 10,000 Zimbabweans had registered to receive assistance to return to Zimbabwe at the end of June when the permits had been due to expire.
WASHINGTON  Former U.S. President Donald Trump, indicted in connection with his handling of classified documents after he left the White House in early 2021, is also facing two other significant criminal investigations. One is related to his 2020 reelection loss; in the other, he has been charged with altering business records to hide hush money paid to a porn star ahead of his successful 2016 presidential campaign.

Special counsel Jack Smith, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland and working with an extensive team of prosecutors, is heading the two most wide-ranging inquiries.

One involves Trumps retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Trump said Thursday night that he had been indicted and ordered to face the charges in a Miami court on Tuesday.

Under U.S. law, presidents are required to turn over presidential papers to the National Archives as they leave office, but Trump instead took some with him, many of them marked as highly classified.

Trump voluntarily returned some of the documents after authorities repeatedly asked for them. But when Justice Department officials concluded that he had still more at Mar-a-Lago, they secured a court-ordered warrant to search the estate last August. There, FBI agents discovered more classified material.

Trump has contended he was entitled as a former president to keep the documents.

The other Smith investigation involves Trump's effort to upend his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the weeks after the November 2020 election, including his admonition on January 6, 2021, for his supporters to head to the U.S. Capitol and "fight like hell" to keep Congress from certifying Bidens election victory.

About 2,000 Trump supporters stormed into the Capitol, ransacked congressional offices and clashed with police that day. About 1,000 of the rioters have since been charged with criminal offenses and about half have been convicted so far. Sentences have ranged from a few months to 18 years behind bars.

In a narrower criminal probe, a state prosecutor in Atlanta, Fani Willis, is investigating Trump's role in trying to overturn his 11,779-vote loss to Biden in the southern state of Georgia.

In a recorded conversation days ahead of the congressional certification of Biden's victory, Trump pleaded with Georgia state election chief Brad Raffensperger and other election officials to "find" him 11,780 votes, one more than he needed to overcome his loss.

"The people of Georgia are angry. The people in the country are angry," Trump said in the call to Georgia officials. "And there's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated."

Smith has subpoenaed an array of former top Trump administration officials, including former Vice President Mike Pence, to testify before a grand jury about their conversations with Trump in the weeks after the election and his efforts to upend the election result.

Pence is among the candidates running for the Republican nomination in the 2024 election

One effort, never fully implemented in states Trump lost to Biden, was to sign up fake electors supporting Trump to replace the legitimate ones committed to Biden in the Electoral College vote count.

Willis has signaled she will decide by early August whether to file charges against Trump or any of his aides, while Smith could also bring his election-related investigation to a head in the coming months.

In New York, Trump is facing a March 2024 trial on charges that he altered business records at his real estate conglomerate to hide a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in 2016 to silence her about her claim of a one-night encounter with him a decade earlier.

He has denied the purported liaison and all other charges he is facing.

In a civil inquiry that centers on events related to Trump's real estate business empire, New York state Attorney General Letitia James has accused Trump of lying to lenders and insurers about the value of his properties.

She is seeking to bar Trump, along with his sons Donald Jr. and Eric and his daughter Ivanka, from continuing to run a business in New York. A New York judge declined in January to dismiss James' suit, and a trial is scheduled for October.

In a recent civil case, Trump was ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, $5 million for sexually abusing her in a New York department store three decades ago.
Chakanaka Mangena praising South Africa for extending validity of Zimbabwean Exemption Permits for six months, just a few days before they were set to expire. At least 178,000 Zimbabweans are holders of the exemption permits. Some were facing deportation if they had failed to regularize their status
Major Australian Bank to Block Some Payments to Crypto Exchanges

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) will continue to monitor the crypto market and review its position as the industry evolves.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has announced that it will limit payments to some cryptocurrency exchanges that are considered high-risk by the bank. The decision was made to protect customers from potential fraud and scams, as well as to comply with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regulations.

According to a statement on the CBA website, the bank will use a risk-based approach to identify crypto exchanges that pose a higher level of risk to customers and the bank. The bank will then apply lower daily limits on how much customers can send to these exchanges using their CBA cards or accounts. The bank did not specify which exchanges will be affected by the new policy.

The CBA said that it supports innovation and new technologies in the financial sector, but it also has a responsibility to prevent financial crime and safeguard customer funds. The bank added that it will continue to monitor the crypto market and review its position as the industry evolves.

The CBA is not the first Australian bank to impose restrictions on crypto transactions. Earlier this year, the National Australia Bank (NAB) and Westpac also announced similar measures to limit payments to some crypto platforms. The banks cited increasing regulatory scrutiny and customer protection concerns as the main reasons for their actions.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture. Photos: Greg Lewis/Paramount+

Movie theaters arent the only place Nicole Kidman comes to for magic. As Variety first reported in January, the face of the culture-shifting AMC Theatres ad has joined the cast of a new TV project. Special Ops: Lioness, a spy drama from Yellowstone co-creator Taylor Sheridan that follows different levels of a team that sends women around the world as undercover operatives. Zoe Saldana will play Joe, the station chief who is in charge of training the Lioness programs young recruits for on-the-ground missions. The new generation of operatives includes a passionate Marine named Cruz Manuelo (Locke & Keys Laysla De Oliveira), who hopes to take down a terrorist organization by befriending the daughter (1883s Stephanie Nur) of a billionaire thought to be funding the terrorists. Kidman stars as Kaitlyn Meade, a CIA senior supervisor who manages high-ranking government officials played by the likes of Morgan Freeman and Michael Kelly. Here, everything we know about the upcoming spy show, which is based on a real-life CIA program  one might even say its so true.

When does Special Ops: Lioness release?

The first two episodes drop on July 23 on Paramount+. After this initial premiere, well get new episodes on Sundays.

What happens in the teaser trailer?

In the minute-long clip, Kaitlyn (Kidman) reports on the status of a Lioness mission to thwart a terrorist attack. Joe (Saldana) lays out the overall strategy  find wives and daughters of high-value targets, place an operative near them, and then kill the target. But Cruzs (De Oliveira) cover is apparently jeopardized, judging by footage of tense meetings and a spur-of-the-moment drone strike. So were just going to pretend that a CIA quick reaction force did not execute a kill mission in front of CBS News, Freemans character says. Ah, yes. What could go wrong?

What about the first looks?

#Lioness is the newest saga in the Sheridan-verse: a drama focused on women who commit themselves to the protection of othersbut can also be ferociously deadly.



Theres power in having a female identity, Nicole Kidman tells VF.



: https://t.co/lajHYSi5RT pic.twitter.com/DVgwV3wM8j  VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) May 4, 2023

Vanity Fair shared our first glimpses of the show back in May. Once again, very intense vibes all around. The photos dont exactly offer a ton of extra plot information, but the crossed arms and pointed fingers certainly let us know that the stakes are high.

Who is in the Lioness cast?

Based on the teaser and first looks, Saldana, Kidman, and De Oliveira seem to lead the show as the representatives of different levels of the Lioness program. Freeman and Kelly will be playing government official, while Martin Donovan will star as Kidmans on-screen husband. According to Variety, the rest of the Lioness cast includes Jill Wagner, Dave Annable, LaMonica Garrett, James Jordan, Austin Hebert, Hannah Love Lanier, Jonah Wharton, Carla Mansour, and Adam Budron. Oh, and Britney Spearss husband, Sam Asghari, will play a character that Variety fittingly described as a womanizer.

Will there be a second season of Lioness?

Theres been no official confirmation yet, but Saldana did let slip to Vanity Fair that she was worried about signing onto a multi-seasonal show when Sheridan first approached her about Lioness. We hope Kidmans next AMC commercial wont cause any filming delays.

This post has been updated.
This corporate fairy tale, directed by Eva Longoria, is resolutely feel-good in a way that starts to feel bad. Photo: Anna Kooris/20th Century Studios

Richard Montanez, the subject of Flamin Hot, started his career at Frito-Lay as a janitor and retired, after 42 years, as a VP at PepsiCo, an American Dreamaffirming rise that could only be topped by the stuff of fairy tales. Conveniently, Montanez has that, too  in his telling, he came up with the idea for Flamin Hot Cheetos back when he was working on the plant floor, mixing up spices inspired by elote to make samples he presented directly to CEO Roger Enrico, unaware of how unorthodox it was for a low-level employee to call up the head of the company. Its a catchy story, one thats been recounted in Montanezs memoir, and in the media, and now in this biopic, in which hes played by Jesse Garcia. Its also, according to detailed reporting in the L.A. Times, just not true  Flamin Hot snacks were in test markets before Enrico ever took over, and while Montanez did spearhead some products, the line he takes credit for appears to owe its inception to a less dramatically satisfying combination of sales teams, R&D departments, and a freshly minted Chapel Hill MBA.

This news broke a few months before Flamin Hot started shooting, but it didnt stop the team behind the movie  which includes Eva Longoria in her directorial debut and writers Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chavez  from betting it wouldnt matter and printing the legend. They were, in a sense, right, and its certainly not the only corporate origin story out this year with a squishy relationship with the facts. What makes Flamin Hot such a depressing offering isnt the relative truthiness of its source material, but the qualities it holds aloft as inspiring. Colick, after declaring the L.A. Times reporting a hit job, countered by wondering why Frito-Lay cooperated with the production if Montanezs claims werent true. The answer would seem obvious  Flamin Hot is as flattering to the company as it is to its subject. The movie may introduce an antagonistic executive or two, but it ultimately enshrines Frito-Lay as a place where hard work and loyalty are rewarded, and where the kindly CEO (played by Tony Shalhoub) keeps his door open to anyone with ideas to share, including a Mexican American high-school dropout working on the custodial staff.

Longoria directs Flamin Hot with the genial bounce of a sitcom. It opens with a You may be wondering how I got here fake out that leads you to believe Richard, who narrates the action in voiceover, is the waiter the camera initially follows from the kitchen before revealing that nope, hes the self-declared big shot being served at the table. The domestic sequences  featuring Annie Gonzalez as Richards ride-or-die wife, Judy  stay in this mode, treating the familys financial troubles and Richards daddy issues with the same cartoon lightness as the drug dealing that Richards old crew continues to be involved in. Later, those former colleagues are called upon to spread the word about Richards innovation in foodstuffs, a development that in a sharper film would come across as commentary on pushing something addictive and highly processed on your community in order to get by. But Flamin Hots tone is resolutely feel-good in a way that starts to feel really bad. Its so reluctant to designate villains that it cant bring itself to call out Reagan even as it links his presidency to tougher times. I didnt know politics affect people, especially hard-working people like us, Richard intones solemnly.

Richard himself may be obliviously apolitical, but Flamin Hot firmly believes in bootstrapping, even if its a perverse rise-and-grind fable whose hero gets ahead not on the basis of his hard work but on the initiative he takes in spotting Latinos as an untapped customer base. Flamin Hots Richard is even more of a company man than Montanez himself  while the real Montanez got bumped up to machinist operator not long after he was hired, the movies version chases that promotion fruitlessly for nearly a decade, and nevertheless turns down on outside job offer when the chance comes up. His success in turning flavors from his culture into a product thats 100 percent Mexican approved leads him to make a speech in which he declares, Im down here with mi gente  theyre looking for themselves on those shelves. This blunt equating of a desire to be seen with a desire to be marketed to is a bleaker commentary on corporate representation than Flamin Hot intended, not that the movie sees it that way. Neither, you would guess, does Frito-Lay. After acknowledging that an internal investigation didnt support Montanezs version of events, the company attempted to soften their public response in a way that all but acknowledged how mutually beneficial his mythmaking was  a spicy slurry on some extruded cornmeal as a sign of acceptance.
Mark Cuban slams the SEC and says the Coinbase suit shows why no one trusts them

Mark Cuban slams the SEC and says the Coinbase suit shows why no one trusts them

Mark Cuban. Rick Bowmer/AP Images

Mark Cuban slammed the SEC's decision to sue Coinbase this week.

The famed investor said the regulator could have helped the exchange comply instead of sue.

The SEC this week sued Coinbase and Binance for allegedly operating illegally in the US.

Mark Cuban criticized the Securities and Exchange Commission's decision to sue Coinbase this week for allegedly operating an illegal exchange, claiming that the regulator could have helped it comply but instead chose to file its lawsuit.

The billionaire investor posted on Twitter that the "fundamental problem" of the agency is that it doesn't actually want to help firms follow the rules.

"They don't want to help companies get to compliance they want to challenge them to get to compliance," Cuban wrote. "They are full of lawyers. Lawyers want to litigate."

He went on to say that the SEC prefers to take legal action to protect the jobs of the lawyers that the agency employs.

A spokesperson for the SEC declined to comment.

On Tuesday, the SEC unveiled its lawsuit against Coinbase, a day after it sued Binance and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao.

In both cases, it alleged that the companies are operating illegally, and challenged virtually their entire business operation in the US. The cases, sources told Insider, are "existential" matters for both companies.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler has long held that most cryptocurrencies are securities, and the lawsuits this week are a culmination of his views over the past few years that crypto needs to comply with regulations.

Cuban also claimed in his post that the SEC evaluates its own success based on the number of cases it brings and wins, rather than the number of companies it helps comply with the rules. The latter, he said, would have a much greater impact on investor protections and rooting out bad actors.

"As it is, no one wants to talk to the SEC because no one trusts them for fear of being in the same situation as @coinbase finds itself," he wrote.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Altria Group, Inc. (NYSE:MO) is about to trade ex-dividend in the next four days. The ex-dividend date occurs one day before the record date which is the day on which shareholders need to be on the company's books in order to receive a dividend. The ex-dividend date is important because any transaction on a stock needs to have been settled before the record date in order to be eligible for a dividend. Thus, you can purchase Altria Group's shares before the 14th of June in order to receive the dividend, which the company will pay on the 10th of July.

The company's next dividend payment will be US$0.94 per share, on the back of last year when the company paid a total of US$3.76 to shareholders. Based on the last year's worth of payments, Altria Group has a trailing yield of 8.3% on the current stock price of $45.36. If you buy this business for its dividend, you should have an idea of whether Altria Group's dividend is reliable and sustainable. We need to see whether the dividend is covered by earnings and if it's growing.

Check out our latest analysis for Altria Group

If a company pays out more in dividends than it earned, then the dividend might become unsustainable - hardly an ideal situation. Altria Group paid out 120% of profit in the past year, which we think is typically not sustainable unless there are mitigating characteristics such as unusually strong cash flow or a large cash balance. Yet cash flows are even more important than profits for assessing a dividend, so we need to see if the company generated enough cash to pay its distribution. It paid out more than half (74%) of its free cash flow in the past year, which is within an average range for most companies.

It's disappointing to see that the dividend was not covered by profits, but cash is more important from a dividend sustainability perspective, and Altria Group fortunately did generate enough cash to fund its dividend. Still, if the company repeatedly paid a dividend greater than its profits, we'd be concerned. Extraordinarily few companies are capable of persistently paying a dividend that is greater than their profits.

Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.

Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?

Companies with falling earnings are riskier for dividend shareholders. Investors love dividends, so if earnings fall and the dividend is reduced, expect a stock to be sold off heavily at the same time. Altria Group's earnings per share have fallen at approximately 10% a year over the previous five years. When earnings per share fall, the maximum amount of dividends that can be paid also falls.

Many investors will assess a company's dividend performance by evaluating how much the dividend payments have changed over time. In the last 10 years, Altria Group has lifted its dividend by approximately 7.9% a year on average. That's intriguing, but the combination of growing dividends despite declining earnings can typically only be achieved by paying out a larger percentage of profits. Altria Group is already paying out 120% of its profits, and with shrinking earnings we think it's unlikely that this dividend will grow quickly in the future.

To Sum It Up

From a dividend perspective, should investors buy or avoid Altria Group? It's never fun to see a company's earnings per share in retreat. Additionally, Altria Group is paying out quite a high percentage of its earnings, and more than half its cash flow, so it's hard to evaluate whether the company is reinvesting enough in its business to improve its situation. With the way things are shaping up from a dividend perspective, we'd be inclined to steer clear of Altria Group.

So if you're still interested in Altria Group despite it's poor dividend qualities, you should be well informed on some of the risks facing this stock. In terms of investment risks, we've identified 2 warning signs with Altria Group and understanding them should be part of your investment process.

Generally, we wouldn't recommend just buying the first dividend stock you see. Here's a curated list of interesting stocks that are strong dividend payers.

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.

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In other words, he has no intention of rocking the boat. Wilson, who has appeared on everything from Have You Been Paying Attention? to Im a Celebrity  Get Me Out of Here, says the anticipation of stepping into an established format was much worse than the reality. I was kind of going, Is it going to be weird for everyone else? she says. Because were new people coming into something that [people] are all familiar with. But everyone has made us feel so welcome. And we were all shocked at how easily we slipped into the rhythm of it. Especially with Rachel and Darren as well. It didnt feel like two other strangers that we hadnt worked with. Adds Tran: Someone from Foxtel commented on our second week, and this made me laugh, How have you all gotten so close? Im worried about how close youve gotten so quickly. 

As far as hosting gigs go, Tran and Wilson agree its a doddle. Full days spent watching people bake, eating leftovers and then being topped up with tea between takes. I know it sounds like were in a cult, says Tran. Im just so conscious that it sounds like were in a cult. Bake Off contestants Felicity Dobson (left) and Laura Foo. Apart from guest appearances on MasterChef, this is Purcheses first full-time judging gig. He and Khoo  who was busy breastfeeding during the break in filming  dont stray too far from the cuddly judging style used by Bake Off presenters in the shows roughly 14 international versions. In episode one, as he and Khoo valiantly sample their way through 12 different types of showstopping cakes, which range from a durian-flavoured sponge to an orange hot milk cake, the most damning they get is a little bit dry and a coded you can taste the coconut! Did Purchese think about what kind of judge he wanted to be?

It was hard, he says. Because Ive seen every episode, Ive also seen the UK version as well, so theres already an idea in your head of what youre supposed to be like because you see Matt Moran or you see [UK host] Paul Hollywood. But Im just trying to be myself. Im trying to give positive criticism if I have to. Im not going to criticise anything if I dont have to. If we can all see theres been a little bit of a baking disaster, we can all see that, I dont need to delve deep into it. Im absolutely going to champion peoples efforts. And give them encouragement and try to give some feedback in terms of how they can improve next time. Purchese, unbelievably, is supposed to be the scary judge. Hes very good at eating something youve baked while looking you in the eye, says Wilson. Its quite stressful. One of those contestants on the end of Purcheses criticism (which, to borrow Paul Keatings famous putdown of John Hewson, is probably like being flogged with a warm lettuce) is Laura Foo, a 26-year-old management consultant who channels her Singaporean background in her bakes.

Loading I dont think I understood the magnitude of what it was going to be until you get here and you see all the wonderful crew and all the other bakers and how many people it takes to put on this incredible show, says Foo, who had just finished a four-hour showstopper bake (thats one of the shorter ones). Watching Foo in the shed that afternoon, she is remarkably unruffled as she constructs a croquembouche covered in spun sugar, while simultaneously batting away Wilson and Tran and agreeing to a producers request that she turn the tube of vanilla paste one way so the label can clearly been seen on camera. We have to perform, says Foo. And I think what helps is that weve all got that reference point of having watched GABO as a viewer and obviously when youre a viewer you want to know everything thats going on. Youre like, Oh, what? Oh, no, she overmixed the thing. For me, Im kind of visualising, Oh, OK, I need to say that so that the people at home can understand whats going on.  For Purchese, the biggest stress comes from the cake cutting at judging time.

Number one, I dont want to cut into their beautiful bakes because theyve just spent the last five hours creating something amazing, says Purchese. I feel really bad, Im so sorry. I have to cut into it. And then number two, you only get one shot at someones showstoppers. You dont want to stuff it up and you want to make sure you highlight whats inside and all those amazing layers. Its nerve-racking. What Purchese doesnt find stressful, however, is the eating. Quite early on, when there was a lot of contestants, they produced this amazing showstopper and it had three different flavours in it, he says. And all of a sudden, Im up to 36 spoonfuls or something. Rachel has the knack of eating very small bits. And I tend to have larger bites. Does Purchese worry about, ah, bracket creep? Ive banned the scales, he says. I can feel myself creeping up and I just dont want that confirmed to me.
The Nazi badges worn by their soldiers have been embarrassing for Ukraine, and they have been censored, just as the Australian Defence Force censored a photo of Ben Roberts-Smith wearing the racist Crusaders Cross on his uniform in 2011, when he was still a war hero. Removing the photos of their soldiers, the Ukraine defence ministry stated: After studying this case, we came to the conclusion that this logo can be interpreted ambiguously.

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But Ukraine is fighting a war, not a culture war. In the West, culture is the proxy battlefield. Last week, Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters came under attack for performing songs from the 1979 album The Wall. For 44 years, The Wall has been taken as Waters wrote it: a satire of totalitarian regimes, especially Nazism, in which a pseudo-swastika and jackbooted dictator uses music to brainwash his sheeplike audience. Waters has made statements against Israeli government policy, and somehow this has dovetailed with his songs to get Waters cancelled. Detached from all context and Waters intended meaning, the images become repugnant. Sensitivity, with time, has not lessened but sharpened and warped into a new form. Waters has spoken against the new censorship and the inversion of his message, which of course only makes him look like an old white man shaking his fist at the turning of the earth.

The Australian Nazi will, of course, take solace in his persecution complex. Being fundamentally stupid and incapable of detecting multiple meanings in one symbol, he might offer Waters a haven; for 44 years he might have been singing along with The Walls Nazi-like anthems thinking they approved of him. Here, lately, he has fought and won the War on Stan Grant, and he can cheer for his innocence projects and his martyrs, his Novak Djokovic, his #IStandWIthBen. He always feels that he is losing his cultural wars against feminazis, climate Nazis, COVID Nazis, gay Nazis (no such trouble with plain Nazis  perhaps he feels the sting of cultural appropriation). Being a loser is where he draws his strength.

In banning Nazi symbols, Australian governments clearly want to contain cultural skirmishes from tipping over into actual violence. But banning cultural artefacts gives our Nazi the opportunity to mutate, an opportunity he will seize. Already, he has created his own language for public display: he wears a black bucket hat, black clothes, a black mask, and he waves the Australian flag. It might be hard for a government to ban those.
If they dont remove them, they will be giving in to the vocal few people who remain wilfully ignorant about what happened in Afghanistan. It will reflect poorly on us as a nation, and it will not be looked upon kindly by history. Defence Minister Richard Marles is considering whether to remove medals from some Afghanistan War veterans. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen Crompvoets acknowledged this would require bravery because the prospect of revoking military honours has already attracted a backlash from veterans groups including the Returned and Services League (RSL) and the Australian Special Air Service (SAS) Association. Removing the medals is a courageous thing for the government to do and would draw a line in the sand about what they believe in terms of accountability and ethics, she said.

Explaining why commanders should be held accountable for alleged wrongdoing by more junior soldiers, Crompvoets used the analogy of a relay team that is stripped of its Olympic medals because one member was found to be using performance-enhancing drugs. Loading Australian Defence Force Chief Angus Campbell wrote to several Afghanistan war veterans last month to inform them their honours for distinguished and conspicuous service could soon be cancelled if Marles accepts his recommendation to do so. Veterans groups are aware of at least seven veterans who held command positions in Afghanistan who have received these letters. A spokeswoman for Marles confirmed Campbell had provided him with recommendations on command accountability.

The deputy prime minister in his capacity as minister for defence is considering the recommendations and seeking advice as appropriate, the spokeswoman said. Loading Crompvoets said some soldiers had told her the culture inside the SAS had improved since the Brereton inquiry, but she added: Where is the transparency from Defence about what changes have been made and why? Where is the thought leadership, the speeches and essays on what has been learnt? She said there was still a hypermasculine cult of warrior worship in the military that needed to be questioned. Im not reassured by someone like [Opposition Leader] Peter Dutton coming out and saying the culture of the SAS has changed, she said. We know it takes a lot of time for culture to change.

Crompvoets said her work for the federal government, her main source of income, evaporated after Dutton criticised her type of research in 2021, with the then-defence minister saying he did not want the military to be distracted by things that have happened in the past. . Credit: Illustration by Matt Golding There has been an enormous personal and professional cost because of the backlash I received from my work on this, she said. She added she was the target of misogynist abuse in online veterans groups where her phone number was published. Crompvoets first heard accounts of troubling behaviour by Australian troops in Afghanistan when she was commissioned to write an unrelated report on the role of special forces in responding to domestic terror attacks following the 2014 Sydney Lindt Cafe siege.

In a subsequent report delivered to senior Defence officials in 2016, Crompvoets identified a number of deeply concerning norms within the special forces, including competition killing and blood lust, the inhumane treatment of prisoners and cover-ups of unlawful killings. Her work led to the Brereton inquiry, which found credible evidence to implicate 25 current or former ADF personnel in the alleged unlawful killing of 39 individuals and the cruel treatment of two others. One soldier has since been charged with a war crime offence, and the Office of the Special Investigator has said it is investigating around 40 other matters. Martin Hamilton-Smith, the chair of the SAS Association, said Marles would set an extraordinary precedent if he accepts Campbells recommendation to remove medals.

We strongly disagree with punishment of any kind, including the removal of medals, being administered before the soldier in question is found guilty by a court of law, he said. Loading Hamilton-Smith said there was a risk of an over-reaction to allegations of war crimes and the estimated 30,000 Australians who served in Afghanistan should not be painted as war criminals. Our soldiers are not police officers and the battlefield in Afghanistan is not Kings Cross on a Saturday night, he said. He questioned why high-ranking officers including Campbell  who received a Distinguished Service Cross for overseeing Australian troops in Afghanistan  did not face the prospect of having their medals stripped.
Potenza has more than 3.8 million followers on TikTok  a following large enough that it can translate into lucrative brand deals, bonuses and merchandise sales. Her videos, she said, have earned her more than $US200,000 ($302,000) annually. Making a CringeTok video Popular creators on TikTok can make a living in all kinds of niches on the platform, including by doing makeup, dealing watches, being old  even drinking flavoured water. But CringeTok is more like putting on a show. Riri Bichri started posting CringeTok videos in 2020, and by April, she had quit her job as an electrical engineer to pursue content creation full time. Credit: Lexi Parra for The New York Times To craft the perfect CringeTok video, creators mine the depths of the internet and their own experiences for traits they can exaggerate. Identifying behaviours that make us recoil, such as self-absorption and obliviousness, requires an ironic amount of self-reflection. Cringe comedy creators often build time for dreaming up sketches into their schedules. Filming can take as little as an hour  often from the comfort of the creators bedrooms.

These videos are different from unintentionally cringey videos in which an overabundance of earnestness combined with a lack of self-awareness leaves viewers feeling uncomfortable. In those cases, were not laughing with you, Potenza said. Were laughing at you. Riri Bichri started posting CringeTok videos in 2020, and by April, she had quit her job as an electrical engineer to pursue content creation full time. She has built a following of 800,000 subscribers by drawing on 2000s rom-com tropes, fan fiction and her own cringey behavior for inspiration. If Im not embarrassed by what I did yesterday, if Im not cringing about what I did yesterday, I did not grow, Bichri said.

Brad Podray, 40, is an orthodontist in Des Moines, Iowa, whose TikTok account, the Scumbag Dad, was originally a riff on the work of another TikTok creator, Nick Cho. Known online as Your Korean Dad, Cho plays a wholesome, fatherly figure who treats viewers as if they were his beloved children. A lot of my main comedy is based on identifying trends and deconstructing them to the point where they are no longer recognisable from the original inspiration, Podray said. Loading His POV-style videos feature a series of short sketches in which the Scumbag Dad exposes his fictional kid to progressively volatile situations. Early in Season One of the parodies, Podray steals his childs prescription pain medication, and by Season Six, his child is helping him assassinate drug dealers. I never got to complete the series, unfortunately, because TikTok banned me too many times, Podray said. TikTok prohibits videos featuring youth exploitation and abuse, fictional or otherwise, in its community guidelines, but Podray continues to make other kinds of parody videos. He said he earned about $US150,000 a year from his content on TikTok and YouTube.

How it all works In July 2020, TikTok established the Creator Fund to reward popular accounts and encourage content creation. It initially pledged to distribute $US200 million and now expects the fund to grow beyond $US1 billion. How much each creator gets, however, can vary. Payouts from the Creator Fund are based on a number of factors, said Maria Jung, TikToks global product communications manager. These factors include what region your video is viewed in, engagement on your video and the extent to which your video adheres to our community guidelines and terms of service. Wendell Scott, 32, is a production coordinator in Atlanta who instructs Delta Air Lines on how to make effective social media content. He uses his downtime to create TikTok videos, some of which have millions of views. Credit: Wulf Bradley for The New York Times It has been widely reported that eligible creators typically get a few cents for every thousand views a video gets, although Jung wouldnt confirm that number.

Creators with millions of followers and views per video can make a few thousand dollars a month from the Creator Fund. Having an engaged TikTok audience also allows creators to extend their reach on other social platforms. Meta discontinued their Reels Play bonus program in March, but creators can still earn money from Facebook Ad Reels, a program that operates similarly to YouTubes revenue-sharing model. Cross-posting content to increase revenue streams is a common practice among creators. It wasnt until I became monetised on YouTube that I actually started making real money, Potenza said. In order to make this a living, you have to utilise a lot of different methods to make it sustainable. YouTubes business model is different from TikToks in that it shares 50 per cent of its ad revenue with its creators.

The combined revenue from social platforms can be significant, but the most lucrative opportunities come from brand partnerships. Loading Potenza recently created a sketch in which she played John Wicks therapist to promote the latest movie in the John Wick franchise. Podrays sponsors include Insta360, a camera company, and Lovehoney, an online sex toy store. As their follower counts and average views per video grow, so do their rates. Potenza secured her first brand deal in 2020 and filmed a branded video for $US150. The next year, as her account grew and she hired an agent to help her negotiate, her rate increased to $US5,000 per video. These days, she wouldnt accept anything less than $US10,000 for a sponsored post. Bichri has gotten brand deals with companies such as CashApp, Bubble Skincare and Pluto TV, but shes unsure how much money she has earned because, she said, her agency hasnt paid her for work she has done.

A nationwide TikTok ban, proposed in Congress because of the apps Chinese ownership, would put all creator revenue streams  not to mention hard work  into question. Watching a bunch of congresspeople talking at the CEO of TikTok about things they dont understand was really embarrassing, Potenza said. It makes me super pro-China at this point. Everythings cringe What isnt cringe today can be cringe tomorrow. Much like death and taxes, cringe comes for everyone eventually. So, it shouldnt come as a surprise that brands are interested in participating. Being authentically embarrassing is still authentic.
It looks like Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI) is about to go ex-dividend in the next four days. Typically, the ex-dividend date is one business day before the record date which is the date on which a company determines the shareholders eligible to receive a dividend. The ex-dividend date is important as the process of settlement involves two full business days. So if you miss that date, you would not show up on the company's books on the record date. Accordingly, Motorola Solutions investors that purchase the stock on or after the 14th of June will not receive the dividend, which will be paid on the 14th of July.

The company's next dividend payment will be US$0.88 per share. Last year, in total, the company distributed US$3.52 to shareholders. Looking at the last 12 months of distributions, Motorola Solutions has a trailing yield of approximately 1.3% on its current stock price of $279.21. We love seeing companies pay a dividend, but it's also important to be sure that laying the golden eggs isn't going to kill our golden goose! As a result, readers should always check whether Motorola Solutions has been able to grow its dividends, or if the dividend might be cut.

Check out our latest analysis for Motorola Solutions

Dividends are typically paid from company earnings. If a company pays more in dividends than it earned in profit, then the dividend could be unsustainable. Motorola Solutions paid out a comfortable 41% of its profit last year. Yet cash flow is typically more important than profit for assessing dividend sustainability, so we should always check if the company generated enough cash to afford its dividend. Fortunately, it paid out only 39% of its free cash flow in the past year.

It's positive to see that Motorola Solutions's dividend is covered by both profits and cash flow, since this is generally a sign that the dividend is sustainable, and a lower payout ratio usually suggests a greater margin of safety before the dividend gets cut.

Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.

Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?

Companies with consistently growing earnings per share generally make the best dividend stocks, as they usually find it easier to grow dividends per share. If business enters a downturn and the dividend is cut, the company could see its value fall precipitously. That's why it's comforting to see Motorola Solutions's earnings have been skyrocketing, up 24% per annum for the past five years. Earnings per share have been growing very quickly, and the company is paying out a relatively low percentage of its profit and cash flow. This is a very favourable combination that can often lead to the dividend multiplying over the long term, if earnings grow and the company pays out a higher percentage of its earnings.

Many investors will assess a company's dividend performance by evaluating how much the dividend payments have changed over time. Since the start of our data, 10 years ago, Motorola Solutions has lifted its dividend by approximately 13% a year on average. It's exciting to see that both earnings and dividends per share have grown rapidly over the past few years.

Final Takeaway

Is Motorola Solutions an attractive dividend stock, or better left on the shelf? Motorola Solutions has been growing earnings at a rapid rate, and has a conservatively low payout ratio, implying that it is reinvesting heavily in its business; a sterling combination. Overall we think this is an attractive combination and worthy of further research.

So while Motorola Solutions looks good from a dividend perspective, it's always worthwhile being up to date with the risks involved in this stock. Every company has risks, and we've spotted 2 warning signs for Motorola Solutions you should know about.

Generally, we wouldn't recommend just buying the first dividend stock you see. Here's a curated list of interesting stocks that are strong dividend payers.

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.

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The World Customs Organization (WCO), under the framework of the EU-WCO Rules of Origin Africa Programme, funded by the European Union, and in partnership with the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) and the Kenya School of Revenue Administration (KESRA), held a national Train the Trainers workshop on rules of origin. The workshop was held in Nairobi, Kenya, from 29 May to 2 June 2023 with the objective to assist Kenya Customs in enhancing its knowledge and application of preferential rules of origin.

The Train the Trainers workshop was held in parallel with a national workshop on rules of origin for KRA and other governmental and private stakeholders.

In his opening remarks during the joint opening session for the two workshops, Dr. Bernard Baimwera, Dean of Studies, Kenya School of Revenue Administration, representing the Commissioner of Customs, thanked the WCO and the EU for their support in building capacity on rules of origin and stressed that the success of the African Continental Free Trade Are (AfCFTA) is based on rules of origin and the free movement of goods on the continent and that trade facilitation will help Africa rise. He also added that the partnership with the WCO bears benefits for the national Customs Administration, for the country as well as for the sustainable development of the African continent.

During the workshop participants worked on key concepts for proper origin determination and related operational and procedural issues mainly in relation to the AfCFTA. They also focused on communication and training skills which will enhance the capacity of Customs trainers to further cascade their knowledge to colleagues as well as to other relevant stakeholders including economic operators.

The EU-WCO Rules of Origin Africa Programme will continue its work with Kenya Customs to equip Customs officials and relevant stakeholders with extended knowledge for efficient implementation and application of rules or origin.

For further information please contact EU-WCORoOAfrica.Program@wcoomd.org
Under the sponsorship of the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA) of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the World Customs Organization (WCO) organised a MENA Regional Workshop on implementation of an Advance Ruling system on tariff classification and rules of origin as required under the World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement for the MENA Region. The Workshop was held from Sunday 28 May to Thursday 1 June 2023 in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and was conducted in Arabic and French with simultaneous interpretation into both languages.

It was carried out at the ZATCA Academy and officially opened by welcoming remarks from the ZATCA Learning and Development Management Lead Expert, Ms. Najwa A. Alsaydalani.

20 Customs officers from Algeria, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Morocco, Qatar, and Tunisia participated in this workshop, facilitated by the WCO Secretariat, and a WCO Accredited Expert on Harmonized system from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

During the Workshop, participants had the opportunity to engage in informative presentations on advance rulings, as well as explore new tools developed for tariff classification and origin infrastructure.

Discussion sessions allowed participants to evaluate the current state of their respective administrations in the areas of classification and origin. Seeking possible solutions, they referred to the "Diagnostic Tool on Tariff Classification, Valuation and Origin Work and Related Infrastructure" to foster a way forward. The workshop placed a particular emphasis on advance rulings, recognizing their significance in promoting trade facilitation and ensuring the uniform application of classification and origin principles, as required by the WTO Agreement on Trade Facilitation.

At the end of the Workshop, all participants acknowledged that well-organized infrastructure formed the basis for objective, predictable and transparent practices in classification and origin and recognised the importance of increasing their institutional capacity to carry out the core Customs functions of classification and origin in an efficient and effective manner.
From 23 to 26 May 2023, the World Customs Organization (WCO), through the SECO-WCO Global Trade Facilitation Programme (GTFP), participated in the 3rd Edition of the Latin American Meeting of National Trade Facilitation Committees (NTFC) hosted by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in collaboration with the Latin American Integration Association (ALADI), in Montevideo, Uruguay.

The workshop aimed at promoting the exchange of experiences between the members of the NTFCs to identify best practices and possible areas of collaboration and providing an opportunity to share national experiences regarding the digitalization of business processes, risk management of express shipments, the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) implementation monitoring, cooperation with donors, and the participation of the private sector.

The WCO led the discussions on performance measurement and trade digitization, assessment of the TFA implementation, and risk management for e-commerce consignments, highlighting the relevant WCO instruments and tools. Over 60 participants from 18 WTO members in Latin America gathered best practices and experiences and enhanced their capacities to monitor and evaluate national trade facilitation reforms.

Some of the main strengths identified in the region are a high level of political will and the development of implementation roadmaps. The principal challenges concern the lack of strategic planning and impact measurement of the facilitation initiatives, as well as the need to enhance border agency cooperation.

The World Customs Organization and the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) compliment the WTOs initiatives and appreciate further joint endeavours towards fostering trade facilitation in the Latin American Region.

For more information on the GTFP, please contact capacity.building@wcoomd.org
Amsterdam Schiphol Airport is the third-largest air cargo hub in Europe. (Photo: Shutterstock/Pieter Beens)

MIAMI  The private company that owns and manages Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on Thursday finalized a deal to acquire a 40% stake in Maastricht Aachen Airport and form a strategic partnership heavily focused on developing an integrated cargo hub.

Royal Schiphol Group is investing 4.2 million euros ($4.5 million) to bring Maastricht (MST), the second-largest cargo airport in the Netherlands, under its wing. The province of Limburg remains Maastrichts majority owner.

Schiphol is the third-largest cargo airport in Europe by tonnage and the home base for global carrier KLM.

Maastricht processed more than 119,000 tons of airfreight in 2022, a fraction of the 1.6 million tons moved through Schiphol, 125 miles to the north. It is the European hub for Turkish Cargo and a destination for freighters operated by airlines such as Emirates, Qatar Airways and Saudia.

Both Schiphol and MST recognize the importance of cargo, valuable freighter slots and good connectivity with the rest of the world. This collaboration will add value for our cargo partners at both airports, as we strive towards innovation, efficiency and sustainability, said Joost van Doesburg, head of cargo at Schiphol Airport, in a statement.

Teaming up will involve both airports sharing market intelligence and freight data to find ways to increase transport efficiency. Officials said Maastricht offers an ideal testing ground for key priorities such as sustainable aviation, including electric aircraft.

In addition to collaborating on product development, the Dutch airports will also share resources in the areas of strategy, real-estate, commerce and maintenance.

The signing of the deal follows Maastricht airports recent announcement of plans to grow its freighter capacity by extending the operational length of its upgraded runway to 9,022 feet by 2025.

One innovation under consideration is for the two airports to establish a secure and sustainable truck corridor where cargo could be shuttled in either direction with low-emission vehicles, essentially making Maastricht a feeder port for overcrowded Schiphol, Olaf van Reeden, Schiphols cargo partnerships director, said Monday in an interview at the Cargo Network Services conference here.

Thursdays announcement didnt mention the controversial proposal by the Dutch government to reduce flights at Schiphol for pollution and noise reasons, but moving toward a single airport system eventually might be a compromise to spread out societal impacts while maintaining Schiphols major role in the national economy.

Fight over fewer flights

A federal court is set in mid-June to hear an appeal from the Dutch government after a lower court threw out proposed flight caps designed to meet the European Unions goal of reducing overall aviation emissions 55% by 2030 and entirely by 2050. The government wants to reduce the number of available takeoff and landing slots available to airlines to 460,000 next year, eventually to 440,000, from a half-million.

The lower court agreed with airlines that the government had violated EU and international law by not taking a balanced approach that exhausted all other options, in consultation with stakeholders, before trying to impose a 12% capacity cut.

Opponents argue that passengers and freight might take inefficient routes to get to the Netherlands without going through Schiphol, which could actually increase the environmental impact. Flights would be rerouted to other hub airports in Europe and do nothing to reduce overall emissions. If airlines were forced to fly fewer routes, they could opt to fly larger aircraft, which are more noisy.

Logistics groups warn that all-cargo operators could migrate to other airports once the slot cap is reached, harming the economy and pushing more shipments onto roads. Without sufficient all-cargo traffic, freight infrastructure and services will not be fully utilized and costs will increase.

Regulators should at least be able to demonstrate that their actions will achieve their own stated goals, rather than be nothing more than costly theatrics with unintended consequences that could instead have the opposite effects, said Michael Webber, a U.S.-based airport consultant, in a LinkedIn post.

A study by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, commissioned by unidentified opponents calling themselves the Red Schiphol Campaign, predicts that eliminating 60,000 flights per year will reduce the amount of cargo handled at Schiphol by more than 198,000 tons worth $12.4 billion, representing an 11.4% drop in volume. The report also says the flight cap could result in 1.3 million fewer tourists using Schiphol.

Meanwhile, Schiphol Airport has separately proposed new limits on flights to demonstrate its seriousness in addressing public concerns about aviation. It wants to ban takeoffs from midnight to 6 a.m. and landings from midnight to 5 a.m., which would eliminate 10,000 flights per year. Another part of the eight-point plan would safeguard cargo by reserving 2.5% of the available slots for cargo flights. Cargo airlines often fly irregular schedules, making it difficult to comply with rules requiring 80% usage of allotted slots in their flight schedule or risk losing them. But the new night closure will apply to cargo.

Schiphol is also abandoning plans for an additional runway. The airport operator has previously criticized the government for not developing nearby Lelystad Airport as an overflow alternative for narrow-body jets to relieve pressure on Schiphol.

Schiphol connects the Netherlands with the rest of the world. We want to keep doing that, but we must do it better. The only way forward is to become quieter and cleaner more rapidly. We have thought about growth but too little about its impact for too long, said Ruud Sontag, CEO of Royal Schiphol Group, on April 4.

Maastricht 747 measures

Maastricht airport in November proposed a ban on the noisiest, most polluting freighters  specifically the Boeing 747-200 and MD-11. It also wants to double the fees for Boeing 747-400 freighters using the airport and not allow them by 2030. A 747-200 prohibition would eliminate two flights per week.

The phase-out measures would replace a 35% surcharge applied in 2019 to the noisiest aircraft. Since the introduction of the surcharge, the number of flight movements with 747-200 and comparable aircraft types has been almost halved compared to 2018 levels.

The status of the stricter proposal is unclear, but the Limburg provincial council has not given its approval so far.

Click here for more FreightWaves stories by Eric Kulisch.

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Cargo interests work to block Amsterdam airport flight reductions

The post Netherlands airports join forces to synchronize cargo flow appeared first on FreightWaves.
(Bloomberg) -- Japans blue-chip equity gauge is set to complete a nine-week advance that would be its longest winning streak in more than five years.

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The Nikkei 225 Stock Average has climbed almost 2% since June 2, extending its advance since April 7 to 17%, as the S&P 500s entry into a bull run on Thursday added to the Japanese markets upward momentum. Foreign investors bought a total of 2.4 trillion yen ($17.2 billion) of Japanese stocks for the month of May, the most since April 2013, according to exchange data.

Japans equities are likely to remain stable given that the nations central bank is unlikely to drastically change policy soon. Only 3 out of 47 polled economists expect a tightening move at a two-day policy meeting ending June 16, down from 18 who flagged action this month in the previous survey in April.

This accommodative monetary policy stance sets the BOJ apart from authorities in the US and Europe, wrote Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley strategists including Sho Nakazawa in a note. We think this difference will underline the stability of the climate for investment in Japanese equities.

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NEW YORK (AP)  Social media users are sharing a surprisingly effective way to protect yourself indoors from the toxic wildfire smoke blanketing much of the East Coast: a box fan, four air filters and a whole lot of duct tape.

As searches for air purifiers spike on Google, people are posting on TikTok and Facebook about how to build the DIY air purifier. The technique, known as the Corsi-Rosenthal method, has gained attention in recent years amid the pandemic and raging western U.S. wildfires.

Some East Coast residents are learning about the box fan method for the first time, unlike their West Coast counterparts who are accustomed to wildfire smoke.

Seattle resident Angel Robertson, 34, posted a video on a New Yorkers TikTok demonstrating how to put it together. In her video, which has amassed more than 600,000 views, Robertson duct tapes four 20-by-20 air filters into a box shape and attaches the fan on top. The whole apparatus costs under $100.

It works extremely well and will save your life with really smoky days, she says in the video. It does a lot better than the normal air filters.

Public health experts say Corsi-Rosenthal purifiers are highly effective at removing particles from the air. Petri Kalliomaki, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Marylands School of Public Health, said their clean air delivery rate is relatively high and can be used to purify air against not only smoke, but pollen and viruses.

At the University of Connecticut Thursday, Misti Levy Zamora, an assistant professor in public health sciences, and her colleagues were handing out Corsi-Rosenthal purifiers for free to anyone stopping by. Zamora said she has done several tests at the university, public schools and her own home on the purifier.

I can confidently say this thing is working really well today, she said. I was able to filter out all the particles in the air basically back down to what I saw last week within a matter of minutes.

The power of social media led to the invention of the box, co-inventor Richard Corsi, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California at Davis, told The Associated Press. He said in 2020, he was sketching one night and put the design up on Twitter. Jim Rosenthal, CEO of Tex-Air Filters, took the design and built it. Corsi said he wanted to create an inexpensive purifier that the average American could afford. Hes now hearing from friends in the Northeast who are using his idea.

When you have to seal up a building and reduce the amount of air flow coming in and when you have to spend a lot of time indoors, this is where portable air cleaners can really make a difference in your life, he said.

Grace Turner, 31, built her box fan purifier for her home in Rochester, New York, after picking up the trick from living in Salt Lake City. She shared her DIY box on TikTok where she said the air purifier has made a difference in her home.

There are a bunch of different designs people can choose from, and its really accessible to find the info, she said of the DIY instructions online.

Liz Hradil, 27, who lives in Syracuse, New York, said the smoke burned her eyes, and she could feel the smoke in her nose and throat as the smoke descended onto New York this week. She went digging around online to buy an air purifier when she came across the Corsi-Rosenthal box and went to Lowes to pick up the filters and fan. She then immediately noticed that the smoke smell was gone after about 30 minutes of starting her purifier.

It was my first time, and my New York friends were like this is so genius, she said after sharing the photo of the box online. No one had heard of it."
READING, Pa. - The US Drought Monitor now lists all of Berks and surrounding counties as being in a "moderate drought."

It comes on the heels of the driest May ever in Berks County. So far, June has been dry too. So the Reading Area Water Authority are monitoring water sources very closely.

"Right now we're OK, but for June we're low," said RAWA executive director Bill Murray. "So, if this was July or August, we would be expecting these kinds of conditions, but because of lack of rainfall, you know we're seeing it early."

Murray says they are concerned about the coming months. "The aquifers are low, the lake is low, and the Maiden Creek is low, not horribly low, but we can tell that you know, we're a few months ahead of schedule," he said.

Murray says RAWA is doing what they can do to conserve water, and officials are asking everyone to cut back on their water use.

"If you don't need to water your grass, don't," Murray said. "If you don't need to wash your car, don't. Those kinds of things, don't go open fire hydrants."

He says the hydrants were scheduled to be flushed, but that's been pushed back for at least two weeks.

The Department of Environmental Protection also recommends checking and repairing leaky pipes and setting up a rain barrel to repurpose rainwater.

"If every homeowner just does a little bit, it'll have a tremendous effect," Murray said.

Conserving water is also a matter of public safety.

"The firemen need water to put the fires out to save people, so just like when we went through our recent events, we ask the people to please conserve," Murray said.

He and many people are hoping for rain to get water levels back to normal.
ALLENTOWN, Pa.  Children in the Allentown School District could get an earlier start at learning if the cutoff birthdates for kindergarten and first grade are lowered and a new district pre-K program is created.

The school board voted Thursday night to advance two policy initiatives upon their first readings to the public. The board will vote on these initiatives on Thursday, June 22.

If passed, Policy 201 would change the cutoff birthdates for kindergarten and first-grade registration from Sept. 1 to Feb. 1 of the following year. This would allow children as young as 4 years and 7 months to enroll in kindergarten and children aged 5 years and 7 months to enroll in first grade.

Board member Phoebe Harris spoke favorably of the policy, arguing the changes would benefit both parents and students.

"I'm just happy we changed it because I was born in December and so were my brothers," Harris said. "This makes it easier for our parents and better for our students."

The policy would also set Sept. 1 as the date by which students must turn 4 years old in order to enroll in eight pre-K programs that are proposed at six elementary schools in the district.

That proposal, also to be voted on at the next regular meeting, calls for the pre-K programs to be initiated for the 2023-24 school year at Jackson Early Learning Center, Mosser Elementary School, Muhlenberg Elementary School, Roosevelt Elementary School, Union Terrace Elementary School and Central Elementary School.

District-owned facilities

Another policy introduced Thursday night would amend the rules for organizations unaffiliated with the district to use district-owned facilities.

Policy 707, which was last revised in 1998, establishes four different classifications for organizations looking to host events on district property, Chief Financial Officer Diane Richards said.

Board members LaTarsha Brown and Patrick Palmer expressed concerns about allowing nonprofit groups with potentially controversial views to hold events in facilities owned by the district.

"If you're opening up the buildings to allow our nonprofits to be able to use [them], sometimes you do have to take what you might consider the bad with the good," Palmer said.

Spoken-word poetry

The beginning of the board meeting featured spoken-word poetry performances from several Trexler Middle School students as part of the school's "Spot" program. Their poetry performances drew applause from the meeting's attendees and board members, with Superintendent Carol Birks expressing her support for the district's arts programs.

"As a district, we are making a significant investment back into the arts," Birks said. "It's so important for us to identify the unique gifts and talents in each of our students."

Violence prevention plan

Allentown school board hears $1.4M middle school violence prevention plan The plan would provide behavioral health services to at-risk students at ASD's Raub Middle School.

Prior to the reading of the two policies, the school board was presented with an initiative designed to drastically reduce violent incidents among its middle school population.

The board voted to advance that plan for a potential vote, also at its next meeting on June 22.
HARRISBURG, Pa. - The Pennsylvania House of Representatives just passed a bill that would add new safety rules for freight trains.

This comes after the devastating train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio earlier this year, right near the Pennsylvania border. Thousands of gallons of vinyl chloride spilled from a Norfolk Southern train and were lit on fire, and it's just one of many accidents this year.

"Since this awful crash just on the border between Ohio and Pennsylvania, another 16 or so train accidents that have endangered people's lives," said state Rep. Michael Schlossberg.

On Wednesday, a BNSF train derailed in Arizona with more than 20 cars coming off the tracks. Norfolk Southern runs freight trains right through the Lehigh Valley, and Rep. Schlossberg is worried about a worst-case scenario.

"We've certainly had minor derailments in the Lehigh Valley, and in a different set of circumstances, what happened in East Palestine could have been us," said Rep. Schlossberg.

That's why Schlossberg co-sponsored House Bill 1028, which adds restrictions to how long trains can be, and requires at least two people to be on board at all times. It will be considered by the Senate Consumer Protection Committee, where State Sen. Jarrett Coleman is a member, but he's already concerned the bill might not be legal.

"The United States Constitution is a document that actually limits the states and allows the federal government to regulate interstate commerce, and specifically we know that includes railway transportation," said Sen. Coleman.

Rep. Schlossberg said he agrees the bill could end up in court if passed.

"Is there a potential for a legal challenge? Absolutely, but I think these changes line up with other states that are more restrictive," said Rep. Schlossberg. "I think it would be preferable certainly for there to be a national system, rather than a state-by-state one, but when the national level of government abdicates its responsibility, I think that compels us to act."
Allentown, PA (18103)

Today

Increasing clouds and rather mild. There might be a shower, especially west, very late at night..

Tonight

Increasing clouds and rather mild. There might be a shower, especially west, very late at night.
We've been following the journey of a New Jersey teen and she just passed another milestone this week.

Graduating from middle school is a great accomplishment, and it was an emotional moment for one young lady and her family.

Last night, Lucy Morgan graduated from Ethel Hoppock Middle School in Hunterdon County.

And when you look back at the year she's had, you'll see why it's a moment so many were wishing and hoping for.

She's just an incredible teen and she's been through more in her young life so far than most of us have in all our years.

So when she hits a milestone it's worth a celebration. This was a big one for Lucy because she was battling bone cancer when we first met her in December. We featured her welcome back when we got the good news that she was able to go back to school for the first time since her treatments. And then again, in April when her friends and family were riding bikes through Central Park to raise money for cancer research at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

The fundraiser is called Cycle for Survival and Lucy raised $30,000 for the event.

And last night, Lucy got to graduate from middle school.

She received two awards last night. The first was presented to a hard working graduate who displays determination and who has a good sense of humor.

And the other was presented to a graduating eighth grader who displays exemplary volunteerism and is a leader among classmates.

From what her teachers tell us, Lucy has been an amazing, dedicated student, even keeping up with her classwork while going through her cancer treatments. Just a warrior.

So Lucy, we thank you for your courage, your grace and your compassion for others.
(Bloomberg) -- Nomura Holdings Inc. shares have trailed this years Japanese stock market rally amid concerns about profitability at the nations largest brokerage.

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Shares of Nomura have climbed 6% this year, less than the 17% gain in the benchmark Topix, which earlier touched a 33-year high. Rival Daiwa Securities Group Inc. has advanced 18%.

Nomura last month slashed its midterm earnings targets across the firms main businesses and said it plans a review to revive profitability after net income fell for a third straight year. Return on equity slipped to 3.1%, well below a goal of 8% to 10% over the medium term.

The level of profits and return on equity are very low, said Natsumu Tsujino, senior analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co. While the recent stock market rebound may improve the domestic business for institutional investors, Tsujino is skeptical about progress of structural reforms in the retail division.

A Nomura spokesperson said the company will steadily implement its strategy to improve ROE and carefully communicate with its stakeholders.

For Japanese securities companies, a boom in the stock market was once a tailwind for their shares on expectations that it would spur earnings. Nomura rode that wave during the rally triggered by stimulus policies ushered in by then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a decade ago.

Nomuras stock price was boosted by the rise in trading value during the Abenomics market, but the current business model is structured in such a way that earnings are not easily generated, said Mitsushige Akino, a senior executive officer of Ichiyoshi Asset Management.

Amid intensifying competition from online brokerages, Nomura is trying to shift its retail business away from relying on commissions from stock trading for clients and toward earning more stable recurring fees from asset management.

Christopher Willcox, the firms wholesale banking head, said in an interview earlier this year that he plans to bolster its business associated with Japanese equities, including selling stock products to institutional clients abroad.

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Williamson, WV (25661)

Today

Showers and thundershowers this evening will give way to steady rain overnight. Low 64F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%..

Tonight

Showers and thundershowers this evening will give way to steady rain overnight. Low 64F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%.
Williamson, WV (25661)

Today

Mostly cloudy...isolated thunderstorms developing during the afternoon. High 81F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms in the evening, then cloudy with rain likely overnight. Low 62F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
Oil prices drop to erase gains from OPEC's production cuts as US potentially nears deal with Iran to allow oil exports

Oil prices have jumped almost 50% this year. Zuzana Gogova/Getty Images

Oil prices fell on Thursday after media reports suggested that the US was close to reaching a nuclear deal with Iran.

The potential deal would lift some sanctions for Iran and allow the country to export its oil.

Oil markets have been whiplashed in recent weeks as OPEC looks to boost prices by cutting production.

US crude oil prices plunged as much as 5% to below $70 per barrel on Thursday after media reports suggested that the US was making progress towards a nuclear deal with Iran.

The swift decline briefly erased all of the gains that were recently sparked by OPEC's decision to cut its planned oil production for the rest of the year.

According to a report from Israel's Haaretz and other regional media outlets, a potential deal would see the US lifting its oil export sanctions on Iran, allowing the country to ship up to 1 million barrels of its daily crude production in exchange for it to stop enriching uranium.

A deal could be reached within weeks, and Israeli defense officials said talks between the US and Iran are moving faster than expected, according to the report.

Iran has long been one of the world's top oil producers and has a large stockpile of crude that's currently sitting in storage. The country used to be OPEC's second-largest producing country, so any deal to lift export sanctions could seriously impact the current oil supply dynamic.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia needs higher oil prices to help sustain its high rate of spending on mega projects, with some estimates suggesting the country needs prices above $81 per barrel to breakeven on its current budget plans. And Russia needs higher oil prices to help fund its war on Ukraine.

But the White House denied reports that it was nearing a deal with Iran for it to curb its uranium enrichment in exchange for some relief in sanctions.

"This report is false and misleading," a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said.

West Texas Intermediate crude prices pared losses to about 1.5% following the denial from the White House to $71.53 per barrel.

The US and other world powers entered into the Iran nuclear deal during the Obama administration to freeze Tehran's weapons program. But President Donald Trump withdrew from it, reimposing economic sanctions. Since Joe Biden became president, he has tried to revive the deal.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Fomento Economico Mexicano, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:FMX  Get Rating) reached a new 52-week high on Tuesday . The stock traded as high as $104.88 and last traded at $103.26, with a volume of 183406 shares trading hands. The stock had previously closed at $103.80.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

Several research firms recently weighed in on FMX. Citigroup began coverage on shares of Fomento Economico Mexicano in a research note on Friday, March 3rd. They issued a buy rating for the company. Scotiabank raised Fomento Economico Mexicano from a sector perform rating to an outperform rating in a report on Thursday, February 16th. Barclays lifted their price objective on Fomento Economico Mexicano from $103.00 to $105.00 in a report on Wednesday, May 3rd. HSBC raised Fomento Economico Mexicano from a reduce rating to a hold rating and lifted their price objective for the company from $84.00 to $112.00 in a report on Wednesday. Finally, 92 Resources reaffirmed a maintains rating on shares of Fomento Economico Mexicano in a report on Wednesday, May 3rd. Two research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and six have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, the company has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $109.05.

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Fomento Economico Mexicano Price Performance

The company has a quick ratio of 1.45, a current ratio of 1.77 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.38. The firms 50-day moving average is $97.35 and its two-hundred day moving average is $88.90.

Fomento Economico Mexicano Increases Dividend

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Fomento Economico Mexicano

The business also recently disclosed a semi-annual dividend, which was paid on Thursday, May 18th. Investors of record on Friday, May 5th were given a $1.0138 dividend. This represents a yield of 1.5%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Thursday, May 4th. This is a boost from Fomento Economico Mexicanos previous semi-annual dividend of $0.85. Fomento Economico Mexicanos payout ratio is 19.49%.

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in FMX. Belpointe Asset Management LLC acquired a new position in Fomento Economico Mexicano in the 4th quarter worth $30,000. Advisory Services Network LLC lifted its position in Fomento Economico Mexicano by 44.3% during the 1st quarter. Advisory Services Network LLC now owns 342 shares of the companys stock worth $33,000 after buying an additional 105 shares in the last quarter. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. lifted its position in Fomento Economico Mexicano by 117.0% during the 1st quarter. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. now owns 421 shares of the companys stock worth $35,000 after buying an additional 227 shares in the last quarter. Concord Wealth Partners bought a new stake in shares of Fomento Economico Mexicano in the 4th quarter valued at about $36,000. Finally, Harel Insurance Investments & Financial Services Ltd. bought a new stake in shares of Fomento Economico Mexicano in the 1st quarter valued at about $39,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 21.07% of the companys stock.

Fomento Economico Mexicano Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Fomento Economico Mexicano SAB de CV operates as a holding company, which engages in the production, distribution, and marketing of beverages. The firm also produces, markets, sells, and distributes Coca-Cola trademark beverages, including sparkling beverages. It operates through the following segments: Coca-Cola FEMSA; FEMSA-Comercio Proximity Division; FEMSA-Comercio Health Division; FEMSA-Comercio Fuel Division; Heineken Investment; and Other Business.

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loanDepot, Inc. (NYSE:LDI  Get Rating)s share price shot up 7.9% during mid-day trading on Tuesday . The company traded as high as $2.05 and last traded at $2.04. 354,327 shares changed hands during trading, a decline of 17% from the average session volume of 426,859 shares. The stock had previously closed at $1.89.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

Several equities research analysts have recently commented on LDI shares. Bank of America reiterated a market perform rating on shares of loanDepot in a research note on Thursday, March 9th. William Blair cut loanDepot from an outperform rating to a market perform rating in a research report on Thursday, March 9th. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating and seven have issued a hold rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat.com, the company presently has a consensus rating of Hold and an average target price of $1.83.

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loanDepot Trading Down 3.3 %

The stocks 50 day moving average price is $1.75 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $1.87. The company has a quick ratio of 1.34, a current ratio of 1.34 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 3.54.

Insider Transactions at loanDepot

loanDepot ( NYSE:LDI Get Rating ) last released its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, March 8th. The company reported ($0.46) earnings per share for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of ($0.26) by ($0.20). loanDepot had a negative return on equity of 44.95% and a negative net margin of 29.28%. The business had revenue of $169.66 million during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $199.15 million. Research analysts predict that loanDepot, Inc. will post -0.5 EPS for the current fiscal year.

In related news, CFO Patrick J. Flanagan sold 48,914 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Wednesday, March 15th. The shares were sold at an average price of $1.73, for a total value of $84,621.22. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief financial officer now directly owns 544,379 shares in the company, valued at approximately $941,775.67. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is accessible through the SEC website. In related news, insider Jeff Alexander Walsh sold 16,800 shares of loanDepot stock in a transaction on Thursday, May 4th. The shares were sold at an average price of $1.54, for a total value of $25,872.00. Following the sale, the insider now owns 4,285,523 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $6,599,705.42. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through this hyperlink. Also, CFO Patrick J. Flanagan sold 48,914 shares of loanDepot stock in a transaction on Wednesday, March 15th. The shares were sold at an average price of $1.73, for a total transaction of $84,621.22. Following the completion of the sale, the chief financial officer now directly owns 544,379 shares in the company, valued at approximately $941,775.67. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders have sold 650,963 shares of company stock worth $1,083,322 over the last quarter. 83.88% of the stock is currently owned by insiders.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of LDI. Knightsbridge Asset Management LLC grew its stake in loanDepot by 6,079.9% during the 4th quarter. Knightsbridge Asset Management LLC now owns 3,312,574 shares of the companys stock valued at $5,466,000 after acquiring an additional 3,258,972 shares in the last quarter. Cannell Capital LLC grew its stake in loanDepot by 281.4% during the 1st quarter. Cannell Capital LLC now owns 3,913,633 shares of the companys stock valued at $6,301,000 after acquiring an additional 2,887,391 shares in the last quarter. Brandywine Global Investment Management LLC grew its stake in loanDepot by 64.7% during the 3rd quarter. Brandywine Global Investment Management LLC now owns 3,512,038 shares of the companys stock valued at $4,636,000 after acquiring an additional 1,379,885 shares in the last quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. grew its stake in loanDepot by 61.8% during the 1st quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 2,420,998 shares of the companys stock valued at $10,047,000 after acquiring an additional 925,002 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Prelude Capital Management LLC boosted its stake in loanDepot by 232.2% during the first quarter. Prelude Capital Management LLC now owns 518,956 shares of the companys stock worth $836,000 after buying an additional 362,749 shares during the last quarter. 3.50% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

About loanDepot

(Get Rating)

loanDepot, Inc engages in originating, financing, selling, and servicing residential mortgage loans in the United States. It offers conventional agency-conforming and prime jumbo, federal assistance residential mortgage, and home equity loans. The company also provides settlement services, which include captive title and escrow business; real estate services that cover captive real estate referral business; and insurance services, including services to homeowners, as well as other consumer insurance policies.

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O-I Glass (NYSE:OI  Get Rating) issued an update on its second quarter 2023 earnings guidance on Thursday morning. The company provided EPS guidance of $0.80-$0.85 for the period, compared to the consensus EPS estimate of $0.83. The company issued revenue guidance of -. O-I Glass also updated its FY 2023 guidance to $3.05-$3.25 EPS.

O-I Glass Stock Down 4.3 %

Shares of NYSE:OI traded down $0.96 during mid-day trading on Thursday, hitting $21.41. 1,713,189 shares of the company traded hands, compared to its average volume of 1,157,116. The firm has a market cap of $3.32 billion, a P/E ratio of 5.07, a PEG ratio of 0.50 and a beta of 1.37. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 2.34, a quick ratio of 0.77 and a current ratio of 1.22. O-I Glass has a 52-week low of $11.60 and a 52-week high of $23.52. The firms 50 day simple moving average is $21.86 and its 200 day simple moving average is $20.29.

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O-I Glass (NYSE:OI  Get Rating) last announced its earnings results on Tuesday, April 25th. The industrial products company reported $1.29 EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.83 by $0.46. The business had revenue of $1.83 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $1.78 billion. O-I Glass had a return on equity of 31.48% and a net margin of 10.04%. The companys revenue was up 8.2% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period last year, the business posted $0.56 EPS. On average, equities analysts anticipate that O-I Glass will post 3.17 EPS for the current year.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several equities research analysts have issued reports on OI shares. Wells Fargo & Company lifted their price objective on O-I Glass from $27.00 to $28.00 and gave the stock an overweight rating in a report on Wednesday, April 5th. StockNews.com downgraded O-I Glass from a buy rating to a hold rating in a report on Friday, May 26th. Barclays lifted their price objective on O-I Glass from $18.00 to $19.00 in a report on Monday, May 1st. Robert W. Baird lifted their price objective on O-I Glass from $26.00 to $30.00 in a report on Thursday, April 27th. Finally, Royal Bank of Canada lifted their price objective on O-I Glass from $34.00 to $37.00 in a report on Thursday, April 27th. Two research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, two have assigned a hold rating and six have given a buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, the stock presently has a consensus rating of Hold and an average target price of $24.70.

Several hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the company. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co NY boosted its position in O-I Glass by 5.3% during the 4th quarter. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co NY now owns 9,577 shares of the industrial products companys stock valued at $159,000 after purchasing an additional 485 shares during the period. Neuberger Berman Group LLC boosted its position in O-I Glass by 1.4% during the 3rd quarter. Neuberger Berman Group LLC now owns 46,004 shares of the industrial products companys stock valued at $596,000 after purchasing an additional 656 shares during the period. Belpointe Asset Management LLC boosted its position in O-I Glass by 109.4% during the 1st quarter. Belpointe Asset Management LLC now owns 1,518 shares of the industrial products companys stock valued at $34,000 after purchasing an additional 793 shares during the period. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. boosted its position in O-I Glass by 3.3% during the 4th quarter. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. now owns 40,984 shares of the industrial products companys stock valued at $679,000 after purchasing an additional 1,303 shares during the period. Finally, Quarry LP boosted its position in O-I Glass by 499.3% during the 1st quarter. Quarry LP now owns 1,744 shares of the industrial products companys stock valued at $40,000 after purchasing an additional 1,453 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 93.60% of the companys stock.

About O-I Glass

(Get Rating)

O-I Glass, Inc engages in manufacturing of glass products. It offers products to the food and beverage sectors. The firm operates through the following geographical segments: Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific. The company was founded in 1929 and is headquartered in Perrysburg, OH.

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Owens & Minor, Inc. (NYSE:OMI  Get Rating) SVP Michael Wayne Lowry sold 10,000 shares of Owens & Minor stock in a transaction on Tuesday, June 6th. The stock was sold at an average price of $21.11, for a total value of $211,100.00. Following the sale, the senior vice president now owns 80,360 shares in the company, valued at $1,696,399.60. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available through the SEC website.

Owens & Minor Trading Down 1.7 %

Shares of OMI stock traded down $0.37 on Thursday, hitting $21.34. 715,807 shares of the companys stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 900,184. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 2.56, a quick ratio of 0.60 and a current ratio of 1.39. Owens & Minor, Inc. has a one year low of $11.79 and a one year high of $37.03. The companys fifty day simple moving average is $13.35 and its 200 day simple moving average is $12.06. The stock has a market capitalization of $1.63 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of -38.11, a P/E/G ratio of 4.09 and a beta of 0.57.

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Owens & Minor (NYSE:OMI  Get Rating) last released its earnings results on Friday, May 5th. The company reported $0.05 EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of ($0.09) by $0.14. Owens & Minor had a negative net margin of 0.41% and a positive return on equity of 12.12%. The company had revenue of $2.52 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $2.40 billion. During the same quarter last year, the firm earned $0.96 EPS. The firms quarterly revenue was up 4.8% compared to the same quarter last year. Equities analysts forecast that Owens & Minor, Inc. will post 1.36 EPS for the current year.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Owens & Minor

OMI has been the topic of a number of research reports. Robert W. Baird lifted their price target on shares of Owens & Minor from $18.00 to $21.00 in a report on Monday, May 8th. Credit Suisse Group lowered their target price on shares of Owens & Minor from $20.00 to $17.00 and set a neutral rating on the stock in a report on Tuesday, March 7th. UBS Group boosted their target price on shares of Owens & Minor from $22.00 to $24.00 in a report on Monday, May 8th. Citigroup lowered their target price on shares of Owens & Minor from $20.00 to $17.00 and set a neutral rating on the stock in a report on Wednesday, March 8th. Finally, StockNews.com initiated coverage on Owens & Minor in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock. Two analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating and four have assigned a hold rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat, Owens & Minor presently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $18.83.

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently bought and sold shares of OMI. Hallmark Capital Management Inc. bought a new stake in shares of Owens & Minor in the 3rd quarter worth approximately $25,000. Lazard Asset Management LLC bought a new stake in shares of Owens & Minor during the 3rd quarter valued at about $25,000. US Bancorp DE boosted its stake in shares of Owens & Minor by 67.4% during the 1st quarter. US Bancorp DE now owns 1,145 shares of the companys stock valued at $51,000 after purchasing an additional 461 shares in the last quarter. Nomura Asset Management Co. Ltd. boosted its stake in shares of Owens & Minor by 68.3% during the 1st quarter. Nomura Asset Management Co. Ltd. now owns 1,700 shares of the companys stock valued at $25,000 after purchasing an additional 690 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Quadrant Capital Group LLC boosted its stake in shares of Owens & Minor by 68.3% during the 3rd quarter. Quadrant Capital Group LLC now owns 2,126 shares of the companys stock valued at $51,000 after purchasing an additional 863 shares in the last quarter.

About Owens & Minor

(Get Rating)

Owens & Minor, Inc is a healthcare solutions company, which engages in the product manufacturing and delivery, home health supply, and perioperative services to support care through the hospital and into the home. It operates through the Products and Healthcare Services, and Patient Direct segments. The Products and Healthcare Services segment includes medical distribution, the outsourced logistics and value-added services business, and global products, which manufacture and source medical surgical products through the production and kitting operations.

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SQI Diagnostics Inc. (CVE:SQD  Get Rating) shares reached a new 52-week low on Tuesday . The company traded as low as C$0.02 and last traded at C$0.02, with a volume of 591500 shares traded. The stock had previously closed at C$0.04.

SQI Diagnostics Trading Down 25.0 %

The stocks 50-day simple moving average is C$0.06 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is C$0.08. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 464.33, a current ratio of 0.17 and a quick ratio of 0.40. The firm has a market capitalization of C$6.09 million, a P/E ratio of -0.38 and a beta of 0.06.

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SQI Diagnostics (CVE:SQD  Get Rating) last issued its earnings results on Tuesday, May 30th. The company reported C($0.01) earnings per share for the quarter. The company had revenue of C$0.25 million for the quarter.

About SQI Diagnostics

SQI Diagnostics Inc, a precision medicine company, discovers, develops, and commercializes rapid diagnostic testing services for healthcare providers, patients, and consumers worldwide. The company also offers TOR-dx, a lung test, which enables the surgeon to assess the health of the donor's lung; and a COVID-19 at-home antibody test kit; the RALI-Dx, a COVID-19 severity triage lab test; and RALI-fast, a COVID-19 severity triage POC test.

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Bread Financial (NYSE:BFH  Get Rating) and ZIP (OTCMKTS:ZIZTF  Get Rating) are both financial services companies, but which is the superior business? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their institutional ownership, analyst recommendations, profitability, valuation, earnings, dividends and risk.

Analyst Ratings

This is a summary of current ratings and target prices for Bread Financial and ZIP, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

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Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Bread Financial 0 4 3 0 2.43 ZIP 1 0 0 0 1.00

Bread Financial currently has a consensus price target of $44.88, indicating a potential upside of 45.98%. Given Bread Financials stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, research analysts plainly believe Bread Financial is more favorable than ZIP.

Profitability

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Bread Financial 9.66% 19.35% 2.05% ZIP N/A N/A N/A

Insider and Institutional Ownership

This table compares Bread Financial and ZIPs net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

96.6% of Bread Financial shares are owned by institutional investors. 0.2% of Bread Financial shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares Bread Financial and ZIPs gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio Bread Financial $4.33 billion 0.36 $223.00 million $9.34 3.29 ZIP N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

Bread Financial has higher revenue and earnings than ZIP.

Summary

Bread Financial beats ZIP on 9 of the 9 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Bread Financial

(Get Rating)

Bread Financial Holdings, Inc. provides tech-forward payment and lending solutions to customers and consumer-based industries in North America. It offers credit card and other loans financing services, including risk management solutions, account origination, and funding services for private label and co-brand credit card programs, as well as through Bread partnerships; and Comenity-branded general purpose cash-back credit. The company also manages and services the loans it originates for private label, co-brand, and general-purpose credit card programs, and installment loans and split-pay products; and provides marketing, and data and analytics services. In addition, it offers an enhanced digital suite that includes a unified software development kit, which provides access to its suite of products, as well as promotes credit payment options earlier in the shopping experience. Further, the company through Bread, a digital payments platform and robust suite of application programming interfaces allows merchants and partners to integrate online point-of-sale financing and other digital payment products. It offers its products under the Bread CashbackTM, Bread PayTM, and Bread SavingsTM brands. The company was formerly known as Alliance Data Systems Corporation and changed its name to Bread Financial Holdings, Inc. in March 2022. Bread Financial Holdings, Inc. was incorporated in 1995 and is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio.

About ZIP

(Get Rating)

Zip Co Limited provides digital retail finance and payments solutions to consumers, and small and medium sized merchants (SMEs) in Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It operates through five segments: APAC, Americas, EMEA, Zip Business, and Corporate. The company offers unsecured loans and lines of credit to SMEs. In addition, the company offers Buy Now Pay Later services, which offer line of credit and installment products to consumers through online and in-store. The company was formerly known as ZipMoney Limited and changed its name to Zip Co Limited in December 2017. Zip Co Limited was incorporated in 2009 and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.

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Dassault Aviation Societe anonyme (OTCMKTS:DUAVF  Get Rating)s stock price was up 7.4% during mid-day trading on Tuesday . The stock traded as high as $180.00 and last traded at $180.00. Approximately 237 shares traded hands during trading, an increase of 2% from the average daily volume of 233 shares. The stock had previously closed at $167.55.

Analyst Ratings Changes

Separately, Berenberg Bank cut Dassault Aviation Societe anonyme from a buy rating to a hold rating in a research report on Wednesday, March 1st. Two research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and three have assigned a buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, Dassault Aviation Societe anonyme currently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $187.50.

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Dassault Aviation Societe anonyme Price Performance

The company has a 50-day simple moving average of $192.80 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $176.87.

Dassault Aviation Societe anonyme Company Profile

Dassault Aviation Societe anonyme designs and builds military aircraft, business jets, and space systems in France, the Americas, and internationally. It offers Rafale, a multirole fighter aircraft; nEUROn, an unmanned combat air vehicle; and Falcon aircraft for maritime surveillance, intelligence, and medical evacuation missions.

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Citigroup lowered shares of Deutsche Pfandbriefbank (OTCMKTS:PBBGF  Get Rating) from a neutral rating to a sell rating in a research report released on Tuesday, The Fly reports.

Deutsche Pfandbriefbank Stock Performance

Shares of OTCMKTS:PBBGF opened at $8.00 on Tuesday. Deutsche Pfandbriefbank has a 1 year low of $7.36 and a 1 year high of $9.44. The firm has a fifty day moving average price of $9.24 and a 200 day moving average price of $8.16.

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About Deutsche Pfandbriefbank

(Get Rating)

Further Reading

Deutsche Pfandbriefbank AG operates as a specialist bank for investments in commercial real estate and public infrastructure projects in Europe and the United States of America. It operates through Real Estate Finance, Public Investment Finance, and Value Portfolio segments. The Real Estate Finance segment provides financing for professional real estate investors, which includes professional national and international real estate companies, institutional investors, and property funds to financed properties comprising office buildings, properties for residential use, retail, and logistic properties, as well as hotel business.

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Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA (ETR:FME  Get Rating) passed above its 200-day moving average during trading on Tuesday . The stock has a 200-day moving average of 36.25 ($38.98) and traded as high as 41.01 ($44.10). Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA shares last traded at 40.90 ($43.98), with a volume of 285,421 shares trading hands.

Analyst Ratings Changes

A number of equities analysts have recently issued reports on FME shares. UBS Group set a 38.00 ($40.86) target price on shares of Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA in a research report on Tuesday, February 28th. Barclays set a 32.00 ($34.41) price objective on shares of Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA in a research note on Wednesday, February 22nd. Berenberg Bank set a 46.83 ($50.35) target price on shares of Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA in a research note on Wednesday, March 8th. HSBC set a 33.00 ($35.48) price target on Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA in a research report on Tuesday, March 7th. Finally, Jefferies Financial Group set a 21.00 ($22.58) price objective on Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA in a research report on Tuesday, March 14th.

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Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA Stock Up 1.5 %

The company has a quick ratio of 0.80, a current ratio of 1.32 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 87.12. The stock has a market capitalization of $12.39 billion, a PE ratio of 20.40, a PEG ratio of 1.18 and a beta of 0.90. The firms fifty day moving average is 41.68 and its 200-day moving average is 36.42.

About Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA

Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co KGaA provides dialysis care and related dialysis care services in Germany, North America, and internationally. It offers dialysis treatment and related laboratory and diagnostic services through a network of outpatient dialysis clinics; materials, training, and patient support services comprising clinical monitoring, follow-up assistance, and arranging for delivery of the supplies to the patient's residence; and dialysis services under contract to hospitals in the United States for the hospitalized end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients and for patients suffering from acute kidney failure.

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HSBC lowered shares of KONE Oyj (OTCMKTS:KNYJY  Get Rating) from a buy rating to a hold rating in a research report report published on Tuesday, The Fly reports.

Several other brokerages have also issued reports on KNYJY. BNP Paribas lowered shares of KONE Oyj from a neutral rating to an underperform rating in a report on Wednesday, February 8th. Bank of America raised shares of KONE Oyj from an underperform rating to a buy rating in a research report on Thursday, May 25th. Three research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, five have assigned a hold rating and four have given a buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $48.50.

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KONE Oyj Price Performance

OTCMKTS KNYJY opened at $27.15 on Tuesday. The company has a current ratio of 1.17, a quick ratio of 1.01 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.15. The stocks 50 day moving average is $27.10 and its two-hundred day moving average is $26.37. The company has a market capitalization of $28.74 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 34.80, a PEG ratio of 2.30 and a beta of 0.72. KONE Oyj has a 1-year low of $17.72 and a 1-year high of $29.19.

About KONE Oyj

Kone Oyj manufactures elevators, escalators, and automatic building doors. It also provides installation, maintenance, modernization, and replacement solutions. The company was founded on October 27, 1910 and is headquartered in Espoo, Finland.

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StockNews.com cut shares of JinkoSolar (NYSE:JKS  Get Rating) from a buy rating to a hold rating in a research note published on Monday morning.

Separately, HSBC boosted their price target on shares of JinkoSolar from $77.00 to $78.00 in a research note on Thursday, May 4th. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, one has issued a hold rating and two have issued a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company currently has a consensus rating of Hold and an average price target of $63.00.

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JinkoSolar Stock Down 0.4 %

JinkoSolar stock opened at $40.71 on Monday. The stock has a market cap of $2.08 billion, a PE ratio of 19.86 and a beta of 0.83. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.54, a quick ratio of 0.74 and a current ratio of 1.06. The firms 50-day simple moving average is $46.01 and its 200 day simple moving average is $49.08. JinkoSolar has a fifty-two week low of $38.43 and a fifty-two week high of $76.92.

Institutional Trading of JinkoSolar

JinkoSolar ( NYSE:JKS Get Rating ) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Friday, April 28th. The semiconductor company reported $1.53 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.37 by $1.16. The business had revenue of $3.40 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $3.30 billion. JinkoSolar had a return on equity of 8.66% and a net margin of 1.51%. Research analysts predict that JinkoSolar will post 8.3 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Several institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of JKS. JPMorgan Chase & Co. raised its stake in JinkoSolar by 1,240.7% during the 1st quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. now owns 100,456 shares of the semiconductor companys stock worth $4,851,000 after acquiring an additional 92,963 shares during the period. American Century Companies Inc. boosted its position in shares of JinkoSolar by 8.0% during the 1st quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 13,426 shares of the semiconductor companys stock valued at $648,000 after acquiring an additional 991 shares during the last quarter. BlackRock Inc. lifted its holdings in shares of JinkoSolar by 16.2% in the 1st quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 2,632,512 shares of the semiconductor companys stock valued at $127,123,000 after acquiring an additional 366,251 shares during the last quarter. Cibc World Market Inc. bought a new stake in shares of JinkoSolar in the 1st quarter valued at approximately $221,000. Finally, Allianz Asset Management GmbH raised its holdings in JinkoSolar by 1.0% during the 1st quarter. Allianz Asset Management GmbH now owns 1,131,353 shares of the semiconductor companys stock valued at $54,633,000 after buying an additional 11,700 shares during the period.

JinkoSolar Company Profile

(Get Rating)

JinkoSolar Holding Co, Ltd. engages in the manufacture of solar modules. It distributes solar products and sells its solutions and services to a diversified international utility, commercial and residential customers. The company was founded by Xian De Li, Kang Ping Chen, and Xian Hua Li on August 3, 2007 and is headquartered in Shangrao, China.

Further Reading

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Ormat Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:ORA  Get Rating) has received an average recommendation of Hold from the ten brokerages that are presently covering the company, MarketBeat.com reports. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, six have issued a hold rating and two have issued a buy rating on the company. The average 12-month target price among brokers that have updated their coverage on the stock in the last year is $91.86.

Several analysts recently commented on the stock. Roth Mkm cut their price objective on shares of Ormat Technologies from $104.00 to $93.00 and set a neutral rating on the stock in a research report on Monday, February 27th. StockNews.com initiated coverage on shares of Ormat Technologies in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a sell rating on the stock. Oppenheimer lowered their price objective on shares of Ormat Technologies from $106.00 to $96.00 and set an outperform rating on the stock in a research note on Friday, February 24th. Barclays assumed coverage on shares of Ormat Technologies in a research note on Monday, May 22nd. They set an equal weight rating and a $89.00 target price on the stock. Finally, Citigroup reduced their price objective on shares of Ormat Technologies from $91.00 to $88.00 and set a neutral rating on the stock in a research report on Monday, March 27th.

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Ormat Technologies Trading Up 0.3 %

NYSE:ORA opened at $87.70 on Friday. The company has a fifty day moving average of $85.17 and a 200 day moving average of $87.11. Ormat Technologies has a 52 week low of $67.28 and a 52 week high of $101.81. The company has a quick ratio of 1.96, a current ratio of 2.07 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.71. The firm has a market capitalization of $5.24 billion, a P/E ratio of 64.96, a P/E/G ratio of 1.79 and a beta of 0.47.

Ormat Technologies Dividend Announcement

Ormat Technologies ( NYSE:ORA Get Rating ) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday, May 9th. The energy company reported $0.51 EPS for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $0.49 by $0.02. The business had revenue of $185.20 million during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $212.86 million. Ormat Technologies had a net margin of 10.39% and a return on equity of 4.86%. The companys revenue for the quarter was up .8% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the prior year, the business earned $0.35 EPS. On average, research analysts predict that Ormat Technologies will post 2.1 earnings per share for the current year.

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Tuesday, June 6th. Investors of record on Tuesday, May 23rd were issued a $0.12 dividend. The ex-dividend date was Monday, May 22nd. This represents a $0.48 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 0.55%. Ormat Technologiess payout ratio is currently 35.56%.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Ormat Technologies

Large investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. IFP Advisors Inc grew its stake in shares of Ormat Technologies by 30.0% during the third quarter. IFP Advisors Inc now owns 533 shares of the energy companys stock worth $27,000 after acquiring an additional 123 shares during the last quarter. Ruedi Wealth Management Inc. purchased a new stake in Ormat Technologies in the 4th quarter worth approximately $28,000. Harvest Fund Management Co. Ltd acquired a new position in shares of Ormat Technologies during the 4th quarter worth approximately $31,000. Belpointe Asset Management LLC acquired a new position in shares of Ormat Technologies during the 4th quarter worth approximately $36,000. Finally, Agur Provident & Training Funds Management Ltd. acquired a new position in shares of Ormat Technologies during the 1st quarter worth approximately $41,000. 81.74% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

Ormat Technologies Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Ormat Technologies, Inc operates as a holding company. The firm engages in the geothermal and recovered energy power businesses. It operates through the following segments: Electricity, Product and Energy Storage. The Electricity segment focuses on the sale of electricity from the companys power plants pursuant to power purchase agreements.

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Get Paid $250 To Get on Track With Your Retirement Savings via New 401(k) Incentive Program

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Human Interest  a 401(k) provider  just rolled out a cashback incentive program which gives savers up to $250 back. This represents a first-ever offering enabled by the changes enacted by the SECURE 2.0 Act, a spokesperson said.

See: Retirees Confess What They Wish Theyd Done With Their Money

Find: 3 Ways to Recession Proof Your Retirement

The new offering aims at incentivizing workers to start saving for their golden years and fits into a larger movement focused on hourly and lower-income workers, according to a spokesperson.

The program offers a 3% cash back reward to participants who start saving for retirement and is valid for individuals who enroll in a 401(k) or 403(b) plan sponsored by their employer as administered by Human Interest.

To be eligible, participants must earn $60,000 or less and make a payroll contribution to the plan between June 1, 2023, and January 1, 2024. They must also set their total contribution rate at 8% or more for a year, according to the Human Interest website.

Take Our Poll: Who Has Given You the Best Money Advice You Have Ever Received?

Human Interests new program became possible thanks to a provision in the SECURE 2.0 Act, which Congress passed in December 2022. Now, employers may offer low-dollar incentives, such as gift cards, to boost employee participation in workplace retirement plans, according to the text of the act.

We see the urgent need for more working Americans to save for retirement, Jeff Schneble, CEO of Human Interest, said in a press release. We are using the same rewards model that people enjoy in their daily lives, akin to cash back credit cards, to encourage employees to actively save for a healthy retirement. That is why we are now the first and only retirement provider to offer a cash back program to incentivize individuals to save.

According to the spokesperson, among Human Interests clients, 35% of workers dont currently save for retirement.

This is in line with other findings, such as a recent Allianz survey, which noted that 40% of Americans say they dont have a financial plan for retirement and will just figure it out when they get there. In addition, 56% said they dont know where to start planning beyond having a basic retirement account such as a 401(k) or IRA.

Incentives for Enrolling in Retirement Plans a Net Positive

Finally, while many employers offer matching contributions, some experts say that these types of additional incentives might push workers to start a retirement plan. However, it might be too early to tell.

Incentives for enrolling in retirement plans are a good place to start, said Jay Zigmont, founder of Childfree Wealth. It reminds me of Robinhoods 1% match on IRAs. Fintech and financial companies are trying everything they can to make retirement savings more accessible. We just dont know which efforts will work.

Zigmont added that more than half of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and that is before student loans are set to restart.

If they dont have enough money to pay their regular bills, saving for retirement is just a dream. I am most interested to see companies adopting the other provision from SECURE Act 2.0 that allows them to match student loan payments, he said. Zigmont added that under said program, employers can match someones student loan payment just as if they had made a 401(k) contribution.

Human Interests Schneble told The Wall Street Journal that the company will likely continue the incentives, if they prove effective.

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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Get Paid $250 To Get on Track With Your Retirement Savings via New 401(k) Incentive Program
Penserra Capital Management LLC boosted its holdings in shares of Nokia Oyj (NYSE:NOK  Get Rating) by 19.0% in the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 6,755,189 shares of the technology companys stock after acquiring an additional 1,078,478 shares during the period. Nokia Oyj accounts for approximately 0.7% of Penserra Capital Management LLCs investment portfolio, making the stock its 29th biggest position. Penserra Capital Management LLC owned about 0.12% of Nokia Oyj worth $31,344,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

Several other large investors also recently bought and sold shares of the business. BlackRock Inc. lifted its holdings in shares of Nokia Oyj by 18.9% in the 1st quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 4,795,249 shares of the technology companys stock worth $26,183,000 after acquiring an additional 763,930 shares during the last quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP boosted its position in Nokia Oyj by 79.1% during the first quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP now owns 5,029,643 shares of the technology companys stock worth $27,462,000 after purchasing an additional 2,221,142 shares in the last quarter. Vontobel Holding Ltd. purchased a new stake in Nokia Oyj during the first quarter worth $55,000. Sequoia Financial Advisors LLC lifted its position in shares of Nokia Oyj by 44.9% in the first quarter. Sequoia Financial Advisors LLC now owns 62,728 shares of the technology companys stock valued at $343,000 after acquiring an additional 19,430 shares in the last quarter. Finally, NewEdge Advisors LLC lifted its position in shares of Nokia Oyj by 171.3% in the first quarter. NewEdge Advisors LLC now owns 33,493 shares of the technology companys stock valued at $183,000 after acquiring an additional 21,146 shares in the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 7.57% of the companys stock.

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Nokia Oyj Trading Up 0.8 %

Shares of NOK stock traded up $0.03 on Friday, hitting $4.02. The stock had a trading volume of 9,627,291 shares, compared to its average volume of 17,206,215. The firm has a market cap of $22.64 billion, a P/E ratio of 5.06, a PEG ratio of 5.19 and a beta of 0.97. The company has a current ratio of 1.55, a quick ratio of 1.28 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.17. Nokia Oyj has a twelve month low of $3.93 and a twelve month high of $5.28. The company has a fifty day moving average price of $4.28 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $4.58.

Nokia Oyj Increases Dividend

Nokia Oyj ( NYSE:NOK Get Rating ) last issued its earnings results on Wednesday, April 19th. The technology company reported $0.06 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $0.09 by ($0.03). The firm had revenue of $5.86 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $5.74 billion. Nokia Oyj had a net margin of 16.78% and a return on equity of 11.57%. The firms revenue for the quarter was up 9.6% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the previous year, the company posted $0.08 earnings per share. As a group, analysts forecast that Nokia Oyj will post 0.44 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Tuesday, May 9th. Stockholders of record on Tuesday, April 25th were issued a dividend of $0.0329 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Monday, April 24th. This is an increase from Nokia Oyjs previous quarterly dividend of $0.02. This represents a $0.13 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 3.28%. Nokia Oyjs dividend payout ratio is 11.39%.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

NOK has been the subject of several research analyst reports. Raymond James dropped their price target on Nokia Oyj from $7.00 to $6.00 and set an outperform rating for the company in a research note on Friday, April 21st. TheStreet raised Nokia Oyj from a c+ rating to a b- rating in a report on Wednesday, March 8th. Finally, StockNews.com cut Nokia Oyj from a buy rating to a hold rating in a research report on Wednesday. Seven research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and six have assigned a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company presently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $5.73.

Nokia Oyj Profile

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Nokia Oyj engages in the provision of network infrastructure, technology, and software services. It operates through the following segments: Mobile Networks, Network Infrastructure, Cloud and Network Services, and Nokia Technologies. The Mobile Networks segment offers technologies for Radio Access Networks (RAN) as well as Microwave Radio Links (MWR) for transport networks.

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Want to see what other hedge funds are holding NOK? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Nokia Oyj (NYSE:NOK  Get Rating).

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Premier Investments Limited (ASX:PMV  Get Rating) announced a interim dividend on Wednesday, June 7th, MarketIndexAU reports. Stockholders of record on Tuesday, July 25th will be given a dividend of 0.70 per share on Tuesday, July 25th. This represents a dividend yield of 3.21%. The ex-dividend date is Monday, June 19th. This is a boost from Premier Investmentss previous interim dividend of $0.46.

Premier Investments Stock Performance

The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 17.44, a current ratio of 1.94 and a quick ratio of 1.25.

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About Premier Investments

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Premier Investments Limited operates various specialty retail fashion chains in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and Europe. It operates through two segments, Retail and Investment. The company offers casual wear, women's wear, and non-apparel products. It has a portfolio of retail brands consisting of Just Jeans, Jay Jays, Jacqui E, Portmans, Dotti, Peter Alexander, and Smiggle.

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Raymond James (NYSE:RJF  Get Rating) had its target price trimmed by Jefferies Financial Group from $136.00 to $112.00 in a research note released on Monday morning, The Fly reports.

A number of other brokerages also recently issued reports on RJF. Morgan Stanley cut their price objective on Raymond James from $121.00 to $114.00 and set an overweight rating for the company in a research note on Thursday, April 20th. StockNews.com assumed coverage on Raymond James in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating for the company. Finally, Citigroup cut their price objective on Raymond James from $130.00 to $100.00 and set a neutral rating for the company in a research note on Tuesday, April 11th. Five equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and three have given a buy rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat, Raymond James currently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $116.86.

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Raymond James Price Performance

NYSE RJF opened at $95.47 on Monday. The company has a 50-day moving average price of $90.88 and a 200-day moving average price of $102.33. The firm has a market capitalization of $20.23 billion, a P/E ratio of 12.58 and a beta of 1.02. The company has a quick ratio of 0.97, a current ratio of 0.98 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.44. Raymond James has a 52 week low of $82.00 and a 52 week high of $126.00.

Raymond James Dividend Announcement

Raymond James ( NYSE:RJF Get Rating ) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, April 26th. The financial services provider reported $2.03 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $2.17 by ($0.14). The company had revenue of $2.87 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $2.89 billion. Raymond James had a net margin of 14.01% and a return on equity of 18.43%. The companys revenue was up 7.4% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same quarter last year, the firm posted $1.55 earnings per share. Equities research analysts anticipate that Raymond James will post 8.75 earnings per share for the current year.

The firm also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 17th. Shareholders of record on Monday, July 3rd will be paid a $0.42 dividend. The ex-dividend date is Friday, June 30th. This represents a $1.68 annualized dividend and a yield of 1.76%. Raymond Jamess payout ratio is 22.13%.

Insider Activity

In other news, COO Jeffrey A. Dowdle sold 5,281 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, June 7th. The stock was sold at an average price of $96.36, for a total transaction of $508,877.16. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief operating officer now directly owns 48,314 shares in the company, valued at approximately $4,655,537.04. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through this hyperlink. Corporate insiders own 9.46% of the companys stock.

Institutional Trading of Raymond James

Several hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the stock. Czech National Bank raised its stake in shares of Raymond James by 0.4% during the 4th quarter. Czech National Bank now owns 22,660 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $2,421,000 after buying an additional 86 shares during the period. Louisiana State Employees Retirement System raised its stake in Raymond James by 0.8% in the 4th quarter. Louisiana State Employees Retirement System now owns 12,500 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $1,336,000 after purchasing an additional 100 shares during the last quarter. Quantinno Capital Management LP raised its stake in Raymond James by 1.4% in the 4th quarter. Quantinno Capital Management LP now owns 7,497 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $801,000 after purchasing an additional 100 shares during the last quarter. Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Co. raised its stake in Raymond James by 3.0% in the 4th quarter. Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Co. now owns 3,419 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $365,000 after purchasing an additional 100 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Intrust Bank NA raised its stake in Raymond James by 1.9% in the 3rd quarter. Intrust Bank NA now owns 5,344 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $528,000 after purchasing an additional 101 shares during the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 74.77% of the companys stock.

About Raymond James

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Raymond James Financial, Inc, a financial holding company, through its subsidiaries, engages in the underwriting, distribution, trading, and brokerage of equity and debt securities, and the sale of mutual funds and other investment products in the United States, Canada, Europe, and internationally. The company operates through Private Client Group, Capital Markets, Asset Management, RJ Bank, and Other segments.

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Sendas Distribuidora (NYSE:ASAI  Get Rating) is one of 53 publicly-traded companies in the Grocery stores industry, but how does it compare to its rivals? We will compare Sendas Distribuidora to related businesses based on the strength of its institutional ownership, analyst recommendations, risk, dividends, profitability, valuation and earnings.

Volatility & Risk

Sendas Distribuidora has a beta of 0.77, suggesting that its stock price is 23% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Sendas Distribuidoras rivals have a beta of 0.48, suggesting that their average stock price is 52% less volatile than the S&P 500.

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Profitability

This table compares Sendas Distribuidora and its rivals net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Sendas Distribuidora 1.86% 29.13% 2.88% Sendas Distribuidora Competitors 1.82% 15.81% 4.57%

Dividends

Analyst Recommendations

Sendas Distribuidora pays an annual dividend of $0.08 per share and has a dividend yield of 0.6%. Sendas Distribuidora pays out 10.3% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, Grocery stores companies pay a dividend yield of 3.6% and pay out 57.8% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

This is a summary of current recommendations and price targets for Sendas Distribuidora and its rivals, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Sendas Distribuidora 0 1 0 0 2.00 Sendas Distribuidora Competitors 1102 2671 2850 113 2.29

As a group, Grocery stores companies have a potential upside of 20.83%. Given Sendas Distribuidoras rivals stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, analysts clearly believe Sendas Distribuidora has less favorable growth aspects than its rivals.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

4.5% of Sendas Distribuidora shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 46.1% of shares of all Grocery stores companies are held by institutional investors. 0.4% of Sendas Distribuidora shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 20.9% of shares of all Grocery stores companies are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Sendas Distribuidora and its rivals revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio Sendas Distribuidora $10.56 billion $236.31 million 16.40 Sendas Distribuidora Competitors $28.89 billion $705.75 million 207.52

Sendas Distribuidoras rivals have higher revenue and earnings than Sendas Distribuidora. Sendas Distribuidora is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than its rivals, indicating that it is currently more affordable than other companies in its industry.

Summary

Sendas Distribuidora rivals beat Sendas Distribuidora on 11 of the 15 factors compared.

About Sendas Distribuidora

(Get Rating)

Sendas Distribuidora S.A. engages in the retail and wholesale sale of food products, bazaar items, and other products in Brazil. The company serves restaurants, pizzerias, snack bars, schools, small businesses, religious institutions, hospitals, hotels, grocery stores, neighborhood supermarkets, and individuals. It sells its products through brick-and-mortar stores, as well as through telesales. The company was founded in 1974 and is headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

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Telecom Italia S.p.A. (OTCMKTS:TIAOF  Get Rating)s stock price was down 5% during trading on Tuesday . The stock traded as low as $0.26 and last traded at $0.26. Approximately 1,779 shares changed hands during trading, a decline of 89% from the average daily volume of 16,019 shares. The stock had previously closed at $0.27.

Telecom Italia Stock Performance

The companys 50 day moving average is $0.30 and its 200 day moving average is $0.29.

Telecom Italia Company Profile

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Telecom Italia SpA engages in the provision of telecommunication and Internet services, digital contents, and cloud services. It operates through the following business segments: Domestic, Brazil, and Other Operations. The Domestic segment includes operations in Italy for voice and data services on fixed and mobile networks for retail and wholesale customers, the international wholesale through Telecom Italia Sparkle, and products and services for information technology through the Olivetti group.

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Tri Pointe Homes, Inc. (NYSE:TPH  Get Rating) has earned a consensus rating of Hold from the seven research firms that are covering the firm, Marketbeat Ratings reports. Three research analysts have rated the stock with a hold recommendation and two have issued a buy recommendation on the company. The average twelve-month target price among analysts that have issued a report on the stock in the last year is $27.00.

A number of equities research analysts have commented on TPH shares. Wedbush lifted their target price on shares of Tri Pointe Homes from $27.00 to $30.00 in a research report on Friday, April 28th. StockNews.com started coverage on shares of Tri Pointe Homes in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a buy rating for the company. Finally, Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft started coverage on shares of Tri Pointe Homes in a research report on Wednesday, May 31st. They issued a buy rating and a $42.00 target price for the company.

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Insider Transactions at Tri Pointe Homes

In other news, CEO Douglas F. Bauer sold 19,076 shares of Tri Pointe Homes stock in a transaction on Wednesday, May 3rd. The shares were sold at an average price of $29.24, for a total transaction of $557,782.24. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 423,514 shares in the company, valued at approximately $12,383,549.36. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this hyperlink. Corporate insiders own 2.00% of the companys stock.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Tri Pointe Homes Price Performance

A number of large investors have recently modified their holdings of TPH. Versant Capital Management Inc lifted its stake in shares of Tri Pointe Homes by 951.4% during the 3rd quarter. Versant Capital Management Inc now owns 1,819 shares of the construction companys stock valued at $27,000 after buying an additional 1,646 shares in the last quarter. Point72 Hong Kong Ltd purchased a new position in shares of Tri Pointe Homes during the 1st quarter valued at $45,000. Captrust Financial Advisors lifted its stake in shares of Tri Pointe Homes by 30.4% during the 1st quarter. Captrust Financial Advisors now owns 2,275 shares of the construction companys stock valued at $46,000 after buying an additional 531 shares in the last quarter. Quadrant Capital Group LLC lifted its stake in shares of Tri Pointe Homes by 500.9% during the 3rd quarter. Quadrant Capital Group LLC now owns 3,209 shares of the construction companys stock valued at $48,000 after buying an additional 2,675 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Ronald Blue Trust Inc. lifted its stake in shares of Tri Pointe Homes by 95.6% during the 4th quarter. Ronald Blue Trust Inc. now owns 4,861 shares of the construction companys stock valued at $73,000 after buying an additional 2,376 shares in the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 99.41% of the companys stock.

Shares of TPH opened at $32.22 on Friday. The company has a market capitalization of $3.23 billion, a P/E ratio of 5.87, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.81 and a beta of 1.45. The company has a quick ratio of 2.24, a current ratio of 2.24 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.48. The firm has a 50 day moving average of $28.21 and a 200 day moving average of $23.65. Tri Pointe Homes has a twelve month low of $14.59 and a twelve month high of $33.03.

Tri Pointe Homes (NYSE:TPH  Get Rating) last posted its earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The construction company reported $0.73 EPS for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $0.41 by $0.32. Tri Pointe Homes had a net margin of 12.97% and a return on equity of 20.83%. The business had revenue of $768.40 million during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $586.76 million. During the same quarter in the previous year, the firm posted $0.81 EPS. The firms revenue was up 5.9% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, equities research analysts anticipate that Tri Pointe Homes will post 3.07 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Tri Pointe Homes Company Profile

(Get Rating)

Tri Pointe Homes, Inc designs, constructs, and sells single-family homes and condominiums. It operates through the Homebuilding and Financial Services segments. The Homebuilding segment consists of six reportable segments: Maracay Homes, consisting of operations in Arizona, Pardee Homes, consisting of operations in California and Nevada, Quadrant Homes, consisting of operations in Washington, Trendmaker Homes, consisting of operations in Texas, TRI Pointe Homes, consisting of operations in California and Colorado, and Winchester Homes, consisting of operations in Maryland and Virginia.

Further Reading

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For many investors, the main point of stock picking is to generate higher returns than the overall market. But its virtually certain that sometimes you will buy stocks that fall short of the market average returns. Unfortunately, that's been the case for longer term Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) shareholders, since the share price is down 37% in the last three years, falling well short of the market return of around 45%. The more recent news is of little comfort, with the share price down 30% in a year.

It's worthwhile assessing if the company's economics have been moving in lockstep with these underwhelming shareholder returns, or if there is some disparity between the two. So let's do just that.

View our latest analysis for Verizon Communications

To paraphrase Benjamin Graham: Over the short term the market is a voting machine, but over the long term it's a weighing machine. One imperfect but simple way to consider how the market perception of a company has shifted is to compare the change in the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price movement.

Although the share price is down over three years, Verizon Communications actually managed to grow EPS by 4.9% per year in that time. This is quite a puzzle, and suggests there might be something temporarily buoying the share price. Or else the company was over-hyped in the past, and so its growth has disappointed.

After considering the numbers, we'd posit that the the market had higher expectations of EPS growth, three years back. However, taking a look at other business metrics might shed a bit more light on the share price action.

Given the healthiness of the dividend payments, we doubt that they've concerned the market. Revenue has been pretty flat over three years, so that isn't an obvious reason shareholders would sell. So it might be worth looking at how revenue growth over time, in greater detail.

You can see below how earnings and revenue have changed over time (discover the exact values by clicking on the image).

Verizon Communications is a well known stock, with plenty of analyst coverage, suggesting some visibility into future growth. Given we have quite a good number of analyst forecasts, it might be well worth checking out this free chart depicting consensus estimates.

What About Dividends?

When looking at investment returns, it is important to consider the difference between total shareholder return (TSR) and share price return. Whereas the share price return only reflects the change in the share price, the TSR includes the value of dividends (assuming they were reinvested) and the benefit of any discounted capital raising or spin-off. It's fair to say that the TSR gives a more complete picture for stocks that pay a dividend. We note that for Verizon Communications the TSR over the last 3 years was -27%, which is better than the share price return mentioned above. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!

A Different Perspective

Investors in Verizon Communications had a tough year, with a total loss of 26% (including dividends), against a market gain of about 6.9%. Even the share prices of good stocks drop sometimes, but we want to see improvements in the fundamental metrics of a business, before getting too interested. Unfortunately, last year's performance may indicate unresolved challenges, given that it was worse than the annualised loss of 1.2% over the last half decade. We realise that Baron Rothschild has said investors should "buy when there is blood on the streets", but we caution that investors should first be sure they are buying a high quality business. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Verizon Communications better, we need to consider many other factors. Even so, be aware that Verizon Communications is showing 1 warning sign in our investment analysis , you should know about...

If you are like me, then you will not want to miss this free list of growing companies that insiders are buying.

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on American exchanges.

Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) simplywallst.com.



This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.

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BEIJING, June 8 (Xinhua)  At a meeting on cultural inheritance and development last Friday, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for efforts to build a modern Chinese civilization, emphasizing inclusiveness as one of the five prominent features of Chinese civilization besides continuity, innovativeness, unity, and peaceful nature.

"Chinese civilization is inclusive, which fundamentally determines the historical orientation of the Chinese nation featuring exchanges and integration, the harmonious coexistence of diverse religious beliefs in China, and the openness of Chinese culture to world civilizations," said Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission.

Over thousands of years of ethnic integration, China has developed into a united multiethnic country with harmonious relationships between 56 diverse but closely interwoven ethnic groups.

Exchanges and interactions between different ethnic groups are a vivid embodiment of the inclusiveness of Chinese civilization and a means by which contemporary Chinese civilization has become what it is today.

At Shanxi Museum in Taiyuan, the capital of north China's Shanxi Province, one of the iconic items on display is a terra-cotta figurine featuring a nomadic traveler seated on a camel chewing on pancake.

The figurine was unearthed from a tomb dating back to the Sui Dynasty (581-618). The tomb owner is believed to be an official of nomadic descent, his family assimilating into the central plains of China  also known as Zhongyuan  over several generations.

Zhang Qingjie, a researcher at the Shanxi institute of archaeology, believes the figurine reflects trade and exchanges between people from the central plain area and other ethnic groups. "Traveling merchants brought goods and life customs from different places, which later gradually integrated into local people's lives and became part of Chinese culture," Zhang said.

Over the past decades, archaeologists have explored various cultural relics as evidence of ethnic integration across China. In 2022, Xi visited the Museum of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region during an inspection tour. He was impressed by the collections that demonstrate close exchanges between different ethnic groups in the region in ancient times.

"Chinese civilization is extensive and profound, has a long history stretching back to antiquity, and is composed of outstanding cultures of all its ethnic groups," Xi said at the exhibition hall.

"Our country is a unified multiethnic country, with the Chinese people of all ethnic groups united in diversity being a salient feature," Xi said during the tour.

Also, Chinese indigenous religious beliefs and those that came from overseas have coexisted peacefully over the course of the nation's history. It was the outstanding affinity and cohesion of the Chinese civilization that brought about its outstanding inclusiveness and openness, and ultimately contributed to the harmonious coexistence of religions.

Moreover, the Chinese civilization was formed through the process of exchanges and mutual learning with other civilizations. The ancient Silk Road linking the East and the West served as a carrier for the exchanges between Chinese civilization and other Eurasian civilizations.

In May, the China-Central Asia Summit was held in Xi'an, the capital of northwest China's Shaanxi Province. Known as Chang'an in ancient times, Xi'an is an important cradle of Chinese civilization and also the starting point of the ancient Silk Road on the eastern end.

"With their joint endeavor of hundreds of years, Chinese and Central Asian peoples made the Silk Road expand and prosper, a historic contribution to the interaction, integration, enrichment and development of world civilizations," Xi said in a speech at the summit, stressing the need to strengthen dialogue between civilizations to promote China-Central Asia cooperation.

From ancient times to the present, the Chinese civilization has been constantly exchanging with other civilizations and thus stayed vigorous all along.

At the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-level Meeting held in March, Xi stressed the significance of the respect for diversity of civilizations and put forward the Global Civilization Initiative.

"Countries need to uphold the principles of equality, mutual learning, dialogue and inclusiveness among civilizations, and let cultural exchanges transcend estrangement, mutual learning transcend clashes, and coexistence transcend feelings of superiority," Xi said in a keynote speech at the meeting.

In February, the Center of Chinese and Greek Ancient Civilizations was inaugurated in Athens. In a letter replying to several Greek scholars, Xi said that civilizations are the rich accumulation of historical exploration and also an underlying guide to the survival and development of nations.

In order to promote the development of human society and jointly build a community with a shared future for mankind, we must deeply understand and grasp the age-old origins and rich contents of different civilizations and let the essence of all civilizations benefit the present generation and all mankind, Xi said.

(Source: Xinhua)
Cuba has agreed to allow China to build a spying facility on the island that could allow the Chinese to eavesdrop on electronic communications across the southeastern US, a source familiar with the intelligence told CNN.
Who was Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster? A look at the life of the late Missouri nun
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There wouldn't be many who think RGB International Bhd.'s (KLSE:RGB) price-to-sales (or "P/S") ratio of 1.2x is worth a mention when the median P/S for the Hospitality industry in Malaysia is similar at about 1.6x. However, investors might be overlooking a clear opportunity or potential setback if there is no rational basis for the P/S.

See our latest analysis for RGB International Bhd

What Does RGB International Bhd's P/S Mean For Shareholders?

Recent times have been quite advantageous for RGB International Bhd as its revenue has been rising very briskly. It might be that many expect the strong revenue performance to wane, which has kept the share price, and thus the P/S ratio, from rising. If that doesn't eventuate, then existing shareholders have reason to be feeling optimistic about the future direction of the share price.

We don't have analyst forecasts, but you can see how recent trends are setting up the company for the future by checking out our free report on RGB International Bhd's earnings, revenue and cash flow.

What Are Revenue Growth Metrics Telling Us About The P/S?

There's an inherent assumption that a company should be matching the industry for P/S ratios like RGB International Bhd's to be considered reasonable.

If we review the last year of revenue growth, the company posted a terrific increase of 58%. Despite this strong recent growth, it's still struggling to catch up as its three-year revenue frustratingly shrank by 11% overall. Accordingly, shareholders would have felt downbeat about the medium-term rates of revenue growth.

In contrast to the company, the rest of the industry is expected to grow by 6.8% over the next year, which really puts the company's recent medium-term revenue decline into perspective.

With this in mind, we find it worrying that RGB International Bhd's P/S exceeds that of its industry peers. Apparently many investors in the company are way less bearish than recent times would indicate and aren't willing to let go of their stock right now. There's a good chance existing shareholders are setting themselves up for future disappointment if the P/S falls to levels more in line with the recent negative growth rates.

What We Can Learn From RGB International Bhd's P/S?

Typically, we'd caution against reading too much into price-to-sales ratios when settling on investment decisions, though it can reveal plenty about what other market participants think about the company.

The fact that RGB International Bhd currently trades at a P/S on par with the rest of the industry is surprising to us since its recent revenues have been in decline over the medium-term, all while the industry is set to grow. Even though it matches the industry, we're uncomfortable with the current P/S ratio, as this dismal revenue performance is unlikely to support a more positive sentiment for long. If recent medium-term revenue trends continue, it will place shareholders' investments at risk and potential investors in danger of paying an unnecessary premium.

Plus, you should also learn about these 2 warning signs we've spotted with RGB International Bhd (including 1 which makes us a bit uncomfortable).

If these risks are making you reconsider your opinion on RGB International Bhd, explore our interactive list of high quality stocks to get an idea of what else is out there.

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.

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Airplanes could soon be significantly more accessible for travelers who rely on electric-powered wheelchairs. A new airplane seat that debuted at an expo this week would allow travelers to remain in their own wheelchairs for the duration of their flight.

PriestmanGoode, a transport design specialist who led the design, said it's a "first-of-its-kind." The design allows wheelchair users to still use a headrest, center console, tray tables and a cocktail table, PriestmanGoode said.

A new airline seat prototype has been unveiled that would allow travelers who rely on electric-powered wheelchairs to stay in their chairs for the duration of their flight. / Credit: PriestmanGoode

So, how does it work?

Video shows that the cushions in the seat that would be used in standard seating can be detached from the rest of the seat that's bolted in and stowed away. The seat base folds up to the back of the area and the headrest is raised allowing for people who use wheelchairs to back into the space comfortably.

The seat debuted at the Aircraft Interiors Expo 2023 in Hamburg, Germany and was designed in a collaboration between Delta Flight Products and the United Kingdom consortium Air4All.

Delta Flight Products, a subsidiary of Delta Air Lines, said that the new seat will also allow for "a more seamless boarding and disembarking experience" for those who have reduced mobility.

"Air4All is collaborating with DFP and our strong production and manufacturing capabilities to explore new ways to deliver equal access to comfort, safety, and dignity for all customers," said Rick Salanitri, president of Delta Flight Products. "This patented design offers new possibilities for customers with disabilities to enjoy a travel experience they truly deserve."

After the prototype's debut at the expo, DFP said that the seat will go through the final stages for its design and validation. After that it will go through its testing and certification programs for installation. It will still need to be verified to meet U.S. and European standards.

The seat is currently designed to fit on Airbus A321 aircraft, Salanitri told aviation news website Runway Girl Network. Delta's A321s are single-aisle planes that accommodate 191 seats. However, Salanitri said the design also allows it to be installed on other aircraft types "with only minor modifications."

The new seat has been heralded by disability activists. Chris Wood, the founder of the organization Flying Disabled, which is part of Air4All, got to try out the seat for himself.

"An innovation like this in air travel provides those with reduced mobility a safe and comfortable way for them to travel and remain in their own power wheelchair," he said. "It has taken a truly collaborative effort to develop this seat and we believe this product provides an optimal solution for all parties."

Its travelling in your own wheelchair but not as we know it Jim @Priestmangoode @WCTravelOrg pic.twitter.com/iKwLT2uL4H

 Christopher Wood MBE (@flyingdisabled) June 6, 2023

Maayan Ziv, the founder of AccessNow, which aims to be a resource for accessibility information, said that "airlines should take note" of the innovation.

"What Delta is doing is what real leadership looks like and they will reap the rewards," she tweeted. "The disability community spends over $58B on travel annually. I know what airline I'll be flying with when these prototypes hit production."

The debut comes just under a year after U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced that the department is taking "big steps" to make air travel "safe and accessible for everyone." Part of that was proposing a new rule that would expand airplane bathroom sizes to be more accommodating to passengers who use wheelchairs.

"No one should have to choose between dehydrating themselves and avoiding air travel altogether," Buttigieg said.

The department also unveiled a bill of rights for passengers who have disabilities and Buttigieg said they are working on a rule that would allow people to stay in their own wheelchairs when they fly. Currently, TSA regulations state that electric wheelchairs and other similar devices are not permitted in aircraft cabins.
In a May 25 Senate Estimates hearing, Australia Post CEO Paul Graham repeated his call for the federal Labor government to remove the legal requirement for everyday delivery. This regulation is what stands in the way of Grahams plan to carry out the largest restructuring operation in Australia Posts history, potentially destroying thousands of jobs.

Australia Post CEO Paul Graham addresses CWU conference in March 2023. [Photo: CWU Central]

Graham said the decline in letter volumes by 66 percent since 2008 is threatening the long-term viability of the national mail carrier. Australia Post has reported a $189 million loss by its letters division in the six months ending December and expects to record an overall loss this financial year, its first since 2015.

Graham declared that the companys long-term viability is at risk, because the Performance Standards issued a quarter of a century ago are no longer fit for purpose for Australia Post.

He warned Senate Estimates there is a risk of needing taxpayer support for Australia Post, which, while state owned, is operated as a self-sustaining business. The fact that the possibility of government funding for a vital piece of public infrastructure is considered objectionable is indicative of Australia Posts future.

Australia Post plans to offset its profit decline by reducing letter delivery to one or two days a week. This is part of a longstanding push to slash costs and transform the mail carrier into a lucrative parcel delivery business. Ultimately, the purpose of this is to prepare Australia Post for privatisation.

The federal Labor government is completely on board. Through its Postal Services Modernisation initiative, the government is seeking to improve productivity and revenue in delivery, while managing costs, including through changes to letter delivery standards.

Labor plans to work with Australia Post to ramp up productivity, that is, increase the size of delivery rounds and load workers up with an ever-growing number of parcels.

The removal of the Performance Standards, requiring Australia Post to deliver to 98 percent of addresses in the country, five days a week, will also reduce the speed and reliability of the mail service for customers, especially in remote areas.

While Australia Post and Labor are well-enough attuned to the sentiments of postal workers that they dare not utter the phrase Alternative Delivery Model (ADM), this operation is not a repudiation, but an expansion of the ADM, which was disastrous for workers and the company.

This is reflected in Labors Postal Services Modernisation discussion paper, which notes that the temporary suspension of Performance Standards under the ADM demonstrated the capacity of the postal delivery network to adapt to new delivery models while ensuring letter services were maintained.

The ADM was instituted in May 2020, when Australia Post management and the then Liberal-National federal government seized upon the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to institute sweeping changes across the organisation. They did so with the complete support of the Communications Workers Union (CWU) , which signed a 12-month no-strike deal with management to suppress workers opposition to the hated model.

The ADM doubled the size of delivery rounds and led to a major increase in injuries and mental health issues, as postal workers struggled to deal with unsustainable workloads. Thousands of workers left Australia Post as a result. Australia Post ultimately abandoned the ADM because it failed to deliver the demands of management and big business for reduced costs and faster parcel delivery times.

Labor and Australia Post are relying on the CWU to enforce the latest restructuring operation, just as it did with the ADM.

Ahead of Labors legislative changes, the CWU is already collaborating with Australia Post to develop a new delivery model. At depot meetings the union told members that, under the proposed model, delivery routes served by Electric Delivery Vehicles (EDVs), motorbikes and pushbikes would be expanded by as much as 50 percent. Ordinary letters and junk mail would be delivered to half the round on alternate days, while parcels, large letters and priority mail would continue to be delivered each day along the entire expanded route.

Australia Post worker delivers mail in Sydney [Photo: WSWS]

A trial is currently underway in Hornsby, where the unions top bureaucrats are working closely with senior management to determine whether efficiency can be achieved through this new model.

The CWU claimed in a March 1 email that it has secured important job security commitmentsensuring that no job losses will occur. Such commitments mean nothing. In the very next paragraph, Murphy admitted that the new model will likely cause delivery rounds to be impacted by potential efficiency gains, i.e., some will be eliminated.

Workers whose beats are broken up and redistributed will be shunted to parcel delivery duties, possibly in a different facility. Management and the union know from the experience of the ADM that, confronted with increasingly onerous conditions and ordered to relocate or retrain, many workers will leave voluntarily, delivering the cost savings Australia Post seeks.

It is not just delivery workers under threat from the restructure. Australia Post has announced that 400 jobs in middle management will be cut by the end of this month. It is also in the process of shutting down post offices in cities around the country.

Defending the cost-cutting operation, the CWU insists that Australia Post confronts significant headwinds and must institute sweeping changes in the face of a major crisis that confronts mail carriers in every country with the decline of letters.

In a further demonstration of the CWUs total integration into Australia Post management and the Labor government, both Graham and Communications Minister Michelle Rowland were featured as keynote speakers at the unions conference in March.

The fact that the two individuals spearheading the restructuring operation were cordially invited along to outline their plans underlines the critical role the CWU is intending to play in enforcing whatever changes management demands and stifling any opposition that emerges from workers.

This poses the need for Australia Post workers to build new organisations of struggle, rank-and-file committees democratically controlled by workers, not well-heeled bureaucrats tied by a thousand threads to management and Labor. These committees provide the only means for workers to break the stranglehold of the union apparatus and fight for their own interests.

Australia Post, Labor and the CWU are determined to place the burden of the decline in letters squarely on the backs of postal workers, in line with processes underway globally. Workers at Royal Mail in Britain and Deutsche Post in Germany are in the middle of bitter struggles against management and governments seeking to impose massive wage cuts and attacks on the working conditions of postal workers.

In both countries, workers are running up against union bureaucracies that are doing everything in their power to shut down strikes and ram through rotten deals.

Postal workers in the UK and Germany are beginning to take matters into their own hands. They have formed rank-and-file committees based on principled opposition to the union leadership. In recognition of the global character of their struggles, they have affiliated with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, the only organisation advancing a perspective for workers to unite globally in the struggle for secure jobs with good pay and conditions.

Critically, this requires a fight against the broader global processes underpinning the assault on the working class, including the massive expansion of military expenditure, as well as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

As part of this global fight, a group of Australia Post workers formed the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee in 2021 to take forward the struggle against the ongoing restructuring operation and the total complicity of the CWU in the attacks on our jobs and conditions.

We urge postal and delivery workers in Australia to contact us today to discuss how you can join this fight.
(Bloomberg) -- State-backed assets from Singapore have ended up on an ESG blacklist at Van Lanschot Kempen NV, after Asias wealthiest country per capita failed an updated ESG test used by the wealth manager to screen for environmental risks.

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Kempen, which oversees about $130 billion of client assets from its base in the Netherlands, started applying its test to sovereign bonds and state-backed entities last year. The results mostly feed through to portfolio allocations for pension clients, but can also affect other customer groups, said Nikesh Patel, senior executive at the firm.

We can implement this across segregated accounts or separately managed accounts, and we do intend to apply our country policy across other managers and asset classes, Patel said in an interview. Government debt  and emerging-market government debt  is the largest concentration of exposure, and therefore our first area of focus.

The decision marks a rare example of a developed economy falling out of favor with investors focused on environmental, social and governance scores. Kempens other exclusions affect assets from Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.

Unfortunately the direction of travel in both biodiversity and climate is in reverse in Singapore, Patel said. Theyre not seeing the same kind of positive improvements we expect from quite advanced economies, but even other regional economies that arent necessarily advanced.

The exclusion hasnt resulted in major divestments, as the asset managers exposure to Singapore state-affiliated securities was negligible, Patel said.

In a written comment, a spokesperson for Singapores Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment said we do not have any information and hence, we are unable to comment on this.

Its not the first time a rich nation has been affected by an ESG blacklist. The German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, one of the wealthiest regions in Europes biggest economy, adopted a law this year that puts investing sustainably on par with more traditional criteria such as profitability and liquidity. The decision resulted in US Treasuries ending up on an investing blacklist, due to Americas failure to ratify a number of treaties in areas including womens rights and controversial weapons. Other nations to be singled out by the policy include Finland, Latvia and Greece.

Singapore is falling behind due to its inefficient use of energy to protect the population from tropical heat, Kempens Patel said.

Its a very advanced economy in a place where its the norm to have air-conditioned everything, he said. Thats not a choice that theyre making because they dont care. Its because from a society perspective its so hot there theyve got used to walking from one end of the city to the other and not having to breathe natural air.

Singapore is often held up as an economic success story and boasts a AAA credit grade from the major ratings agencies, a coveted status that the US and the UK havent been able to maintain. Singapores government has committed to net zero emissions by 2050.

But an analysis by BloombergNEF indicates that Singapores reliance on renewables for its electricity fell to 2.68% in 2021 from 4.08% five years ago. BNEF also estimates the country has weaker power transition policies than its peers. By comparison, Germany gets more than 40% of its electricity from renewables and the US gets about 20%.

Singapores small landmass  the island is less than half as big as London  has left it with limited options when it comes to building renewable energy infrastructure. As a result, it relies heavily on imports from neighboring countries.

The country faces very unique circumstances for its energy transition, said Caroline Chua, a Singapore-based analyst at BNEF. Because its land-scarce and resource-constrained, the country has a limited amount of renewable power generation capacity that it can build domestically, she said.

Singapore has been trying to harness all available space for solar installation, including water surfaces and temporarily vacant land, Chua said. As a result, the nations so-called generation share of solar has grown over the past six years, but more than 90% of Singapores electricity still comes from natural gas, she said.

At the same time, Singapore is emerging as a hub for green finance in Asia, and regulators in the country are stepping up efforts to fight greenwashing. In April, Singapores central bank proposed a slate of measures that will affect financial firms and publicly traded companies as it seeks to align the islands ESG rules with international standards.

Patel said Kempens ESG policy toward sovereigns doesnt include the kinds of engagement strategies that are common with corporates, where shareholders use their clout as owners to pressure management to push through changes.

Its very hard to imagine that we as an investor  or any investor  can feasibly convince Russia or China or Brazil, or any of those countries, to do something different to what they already wanted to do, he said. So were focusing on state-owned and government and direct financing and our view is if youre going to do this, it cant be tilting. You either include them or exclude them.

--With assistance from Sheryl Tian Tong Lee.

(Adds reference to US Treasuries being blacklisted by German state, beneath Read-More box.)

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Former President Donald Trump has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Florida, according to a statement by Trump on his own social media platform released Wednesday evening. He is to appear for arraignment in a Miami courtroom next Tuesday.

The charges all relate to Trumps having taken thousands of official documents, hundreds of which were classified, when he left the White House in January 2021, and his refusal to return them when subpoenaed by the Department of Justice, which was acting on behalf of the National Archives and Records Administration.

The DOJ and Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the investigation, have said nothing officially and the indictment itself remains under seal until the arraignment. But press accounts, based on unattributed leaks, have detailed the charges as including willful retention of documents, false statements, conspiracy to obstruct justice, concealment, and gathering, transmitting or losing defense information, an offense under the 1917 Espionage Act.

The full details of the charges and the supporting evidence will only be known after the Tuesday, 3 p.m. arraignment, unless the judge unseals the indictment before then.

In responding to the indictment, Trump demagogically declared that the DOJ was engaged in election interference and appealed to Republicans in Congress to make an investigation of the DOJ and FBI their number one priority. His campaign immediately began fundraising on the indictment, sending out an email from Trump, declaring, This is nothing but a disgusting act of Election Interference by the ruling party to ELIMINATE its opposition and amass total control over our country.

It is the first time in American history that a former president has faced federal charges of any kind, let alone felony charges that carry with them lengthy prison terms if prosecutors succeed in obtaining a conviction. Trump is both an ex-president and leading in the polls to become the Republican presidential candidate in 2024.

Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Minden Tahoe Airport in Minden, Nevada, on Oct. 8, 2022. [AP Photo/Jose Luis Villegas, Pool, File]

The indictment brings to a new level the political warfare within the US ruling elite, which has found expression in a series of unprecedented events: the special counsel investigation of a sitting president on charges of collaboration with Russia; two impeachments by the House of Representatives, which failed in the US Senate; the attempted fascistic coup by Trump aimed at overturning the 2020 presidential election and the Constitution and remaining in power; and now a battery of legal charges against an ex-president.

The series of legal moves against Trump over the past three months is remarkable.

On March 30, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed 34 criminal charges against Trump for falsifying business records to conceal his payoff to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in order to buy her silence on her allegations of a sexual relationship with him.

On May 11, a civil trial culminated in a jury awarding a $5 million judgement to retired magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, who sued Trump, charging he raped her nearly 30 years ago and then engaged in defamation when she made the attack public for the first time, while he was president.

On June 13, Trump will be arraigned on multiple federal felony charges in relation to illegal removal and retention of official documents, many of them classified.

Two more criminal cases, both far more serious, are still awaiting final prosecutorial action.

In Georgia, Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis has said she will decide by August whether to bring charges against Trump over his efforts to manipulate the outcome of the 2020 vote in that state. This includes making false charges of vote-rigging by election officials in Atlanta, as well as his now notorious phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, pressuring him to find enough votes for Trump to overtake Bidens lead of some 13,000 votes.

Special counsel Jack Smith, in addition to the documents case, is overseeing the DOJ and FBI investigation into Trumps involvement in the events of January 6, 2021. A mob of his supporters, summoned by him to Washington and directed by him to the Capitol, stormed the building, fought pitched battles with the police, threatened the lives of representatives and Vice President Mike Pence, and temporarily halted the certification of electoral votes by Congress. More than a thousand direct participants in the attack have been prosecuted, but those behind the scenes who helped organize and inspire the violence have up to now gone uncharged.

It is clear that there is a concerted effort by the Democratic Party, the Biden administration and the national security apparatus to use the legal system to tie Trump up and disrupt his effort to return to power in the 2024 elections. At the same timeas made clear by the sequencing of the casesthey wish to avoid making the January 6 coup attempt the main focus, because that would undercut Bidens goal of preserving a strong Republican Party and maintaining a bipartisan consensus behind the war against Russia in Ukraine.

The struggle against Russia is not only the central policy goal of the Biden White House, it is the basis of the entire Democratic Party conflict with Trump since he first entered the Republican presidential contest in 2015. Powerful sections of the US financial aristocracy and its national security apparatus regard Trump as unreliable and unpredictable on the question of Russia, and seek to prevent him from interfering with the war, either as a candidate or by returning to the White House.

Trump, of course, is not genuinely against the war, but rather seeks to divert the popular opposition to it behind his efforts to build a fascist movement in America.
This past week, two flights of asylum seekers from Latin America were unceremoniously dumped in Sacramento, California as part of a political stunt by Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis.

The 36 migrants, who were in the country legally, awaiting hearings on asylum claims, were picked up in Texas by contractors of the Florida Division of Emergency Management who made promises of jobs and support, driven to New Mexico and then flown to California as part of DeSantis efforts to make anti-immigrant posturing central to his presidential bid.

They were dropped off in Sacramento, the state capital, with only the possessions they could carry, at the headquarters of the areas Roman Catholic diocese, which participates in Sacramento ACT, an interfaith organization that helps connect immigrants with legal services.

At a roundtable discussion with sheriffs in Arizona on Wednesday, DeSantis defended his action and promised further attacks on immigrants: What I can pledge to you is this, when Im president, we will be the one to finally bring this issue to a conclusion. Were going to shut the border down.

In addition to the deliberate cruelty of preying on the most vulnerable to appeal to fascistic elements in the Republican Party, it appears the Florida governor sought to sabotage these immigrants asylum claims. Sacramento ACT told the Sacramento Bee that all 36 have pending court appearances to plead their case that will be disrupted after being shuttled across state lines under false pretenses.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks on November 19, 2022, in Las Vegas. [AP Photo/John Locher]

DeSantis did the same thing in September last year, when he shipped 50 asylum seekers to Marthas Vineyard in Massachusetts after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents apparently falsified the asylees addresses so that they would have to appear in court all across the country, in some cases thousands of miles from where they were dropped. Florida has so far paid two law firms $640,000 to defend against lawsuits from those affected.

California Democrats responded with hypocritical outrage attempting to score their own political points. Governor Gavin Newsom, widely expected to make a run for president in this election or the next, took to Twitter, calling DeSantis a small, pathetic man, and raised the potential for kidnapping charges. He quickly walked that back in an interview with NBC News Wednesday, calling charges against DeSantis hyperbolic. It is worth noting that while Newsom was lieutenant governor, California deployed soldiers of the states National Guard as part of Trumps anti-immigrant campaign.

The recent flights to Sacramento were paid out of funds earmarked in Florida Senate Bill 1718. This bill is the harshest state measure against immigrants passed so far in the US, making a list of new felonies and fines to charge undocumented immigrants and deny them social services. A particularly heartless part of the bill makes it a felony to transport illegal immigrants into the state, so a mixed status family could face up to 15 years in prison for a family road trip that crossed state lines.

Passage of the bill resulted in calls by truck drivers to boycott the state and a growing exodus of agricultural and service industry workers, consequences that left Republicans scrambling. Florida state representatives Rick Roth, Alina Garcia and Juan Fernandez Barquin tried convincing a meeting of Hispanic ministers on Monday that the law was not meant to be enforced. According to NPR, Roth stated Im trying to tell people that its more of a political bill than policy,

DeSantis claims the draconian anti-immigrant bill addresses Bidens border crisis. But for all of DeSantis and Newsoms posturing, as though they were on opposite sides of the barricades, the Democratic Party is continuing and intensifying the brutal treatment of immigrants that has become a bipartisan mainstay of American politics.

Funding for Floridas relocation program initially came from a budget supported by state Democrats, and far from welcoming immigrants, the Biden administration has been continuing Obama and Trump-era anti-immigrant measures that have created a genuine humanitarian crisis along the border.

After coming to office, Biden continued and expanded Trumps Title 42 policy which barred asylum seekers from the country on the basis of public health. He expelled millions of asylum seekers on the pretext that they would bring in COVID-19. While steadily dismantling pandemic safety measures, Biden kept immigrants in overcrowded camps along the Mexican border. Now that he has ended the pandemic emergency despite, COVID-19 remaining a leading cause of death, Biden has continued to bar asylum seekers from entering the US. Instead, refugees are supposed to apply for asylum in their home countries or regional processing centers. If they apply at the US border and are rejected, they are then deported back to their home countries.

While waiting for their appointments, 65,000 immigrants are currently kept in camps on the Mexican side of the border in deplorable conditions, enforced by 25,000 soldiers deployed by Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. These camps regularly do not have running water or sanitation. If their applications are accepted for processing, the migrants are moved to crowded US facilities where they are frequently kept in freezing conditions without beds or blankets. In desperation, many young families and children attempt the dangerous crossing, only to be detained by the 24,000 Border Patrol agents and thousands of US soldiers.

The callous inhumanity which is characteristic of DeSantis, Biden and Newsom has led to a growing number of deaths along the border. In March, at least 40 refugees burned to death while locked in cells of a detention center in Ciudad Juarez. Over the past few weeks, several children have died in US custody. Last month an 8-year-old and a 17-year-old died from medical emergencies in detention. Later in May, Border Patrol agents shot a US citizen to death at his home near the border.

These numbers are likely to grow, as the number of refugees denied entry at the border or expelled so far in 2023, 1.8 million, is ahead of last years pace.
Nepalese Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who leads the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre), made a four-day official trip to India starting on May 31 at the invitation of its Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Also known as Prachanda, it was his first visit since he was sworn in as prime minister in December 2022.

Nepals Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, right, jointly remotely inaugurate several projects, in New Delhi, India, Thursday, June 1, 2023. [AP Photo/Manish Swarup]

The trip occurred as the US, Indias strategic partner, increases its military preparations for war against China. The rising geopolitical tensions have added a new dimension to the struggle between New Delhi and Beijing for influence in Nepal, which is sandwiched between China and India. The tiny landlocked country shares a border with Tibet, which is regarded by Washington as Chinas soft underbelly.

Dahal, who was accompanied by ministers, secretaries and senior government officials, held talks with Indias National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and met Indian President Droupadi Murmu. He also addressed a business summit organised by the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Confederation of Indian Industry.

Keen to enhance the Nepal-India relationship, Prime Minister Modi told a joint press conference about his trip to Nepal in 2014, shortly after he took office.

I had given a HIT formula for India-Nepal relationsHighways, I-ways, and Trans-ways. I said we will establish such contacts that our borders do not become barriers. Today, the Nepal PM and I have taken many important decisions to make our partnership a super HIT, he said. They would continue to strive to take India-Nepal ties to Himalayan heights.

During his tenure as prime minister in 2008, Dahal first visited Beijing, deviating from previously established norms where Nepali prime ministers usually made their first foreign trip to New Delhi. This time, however, he visited India, in an attempt to reassure India and the US.

Dahal said that he and Modi agreed to measures to strengthen bilateral relations and jointly launched many ground-breaking projects. They initiated six projects and signed seven agreements, including new train connections and a long-term deal to strengthen each countrys electricity-generating sector.



The Transit Treaty was updated, giving Nepal access to Indias inland waterways for the first time. They also did a virtual opening at border pointsRupaidiha in India and Nepalgunj in Nepalof integrated checkpoints and signalled the departure of a cargo train from Bihar to Nepal.

Nepal is working to develop its hydroelectricity industry, which has the potential to generate more than 42,000 megawatts of power. Kathmandu hopes this will ease domestic power shortages and boost its crisis-ridden economy by giving it the capacity to sell extra electricity to India and Bangladesh.

India has already built multiple hydroelectric ventures in Nepal. As part of its efforts to control Chinese involvement in the region, India will only purchase electricity from countries that have a bilateral agreement on cooperation in the power industry. This means that Indian companies cannot purchase electricity from Nepal if is tied to Chinese investment or engagement, whether in the form of equipment, people or subcontractors.

As a result, Nepal has awarded four hydropower contracts to Indian companies and barred Chinese developers from participating in six hydropower projects. Two of the plants granted to Indian corporations were originally awarded to Chinese companies.

The Himalayas provide a natural barrier between Nepal and China. The best route from Nepal to the outside world is thus through India. New Delhi uses this to further its economic and political objectives and to pressure Kathmandu. At the same time, China plans to break Nepals geographic isolation and establish a rail link from Kerung, a city in southern Tibet, to Kathmandu.

With two more airports built in Nepal in recent years, Kathmandu also wants additional routes for aircraft to navigate through Indias airspace. Currently New Delhi only allows most airlines travelling to Nepal to use a single entrance point in Simara.

Relations between the two countries, however, are not smooth with ongoing border disputes. Aside from the two disputed regions of the 1,850km India-Nepal border at Kalapani and Susta, another border row was sparked in 2020 in the Indian-controlled Limpiyadhura and Lipulekh.

There is also fallout over Indias Agnipath schemea new agreement between the two countries for recruiting Nepalese soldiers to the Indian army.

While there is a long standing tradition that Nepalese can be recruited into the Indian army, the new scheme means that the Indian Army will only recruit young soldiers below the rank of commissioned officers and for just four years. Three out of every four Agniveers retire from the Army with a $US15,000 severance settlement after this period. This applies to the Gurkha soldiers recruited from Nepal into the Indian army.

Although retired Agniveers may be given priority over others for various jobs in other Indian government departments, Indias recruitment of Gurkhas from Nepal has been delayed since last year. Kathmandu, which confronts growing poverty and rising unemployment, is concerned about what young Nepalese with military training will do after their retirement.

During last Novembers general elections, Dahals party was in alliance with a pro-India Nepali Congress-led alliance and in opposition to a political front led by the Stalinist United Marxist Leninist (UML).



Dahal, however, joined hands with the UML and was sworn in as prime minister in December because Congress leader Sher Bahadur Deuba refused to support him. The previous UML government of Prime Minister Sharma Oli built close relations with Beijing, raising concerns in the US and India.



New Delhi and Washington responded to Dahals appointment as prime minister by enhancing their relationship with Kathmandu. US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland made a two-day visit to Nepal on January 29. Her trip was followed a few days later by United States Agency for International Development (USAID) chief Samantha Power who arrived in Kathmandu on February 5. Modi also dispatched his foreign secretary, Shri Vinay Mohan Kwatra, to Nepal on an official visit in mid-February.

Nuland and Power are among the most prominent officials in the Biden administration. Both have been involved in multiple regime-change operations, and other key geo-strategic initiatives. Their personal visits underscore the importance Washington and its regional partners increasingly assign to Nepal.

One of the aims of the visits appears to have been made in order to establish smooth relations between the Dahal administration and the Nepali Congress Party. In March, Congress Party candidate Ram Chandra Poudel was elected as the Nepalese president.



Underscoring a new alliance between Congress and Dahal, the prime minister supported Poudel, against the UML-backed candidate Subash Chandra Nembang. Further strengthening the pro-Indian nature of foreign policy, Prachanda appointed Narayan Prasad Saud as the new foreign minister, a central committee member of the Nepali Congress.

These manoeuvres are all part of Indias efforts to strengthen its political and economic influence over all countries in South Asia. In early May, Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh visited the Maldives, a strategically positioned archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Simultaneously, Chief Air Marshal of the Indian Air Force Vivek Ram Chaudhari paid a four-day official visit to Sri Lanka.

While the US is leading NATOs brutal war in Ukraine against Russia, it still regards China as its major strategic opponent and is increasing military preparations accordingly, while deepening its strategic partnership with India. Nepal is being increasingly drawn into the sharpening geopolitical conflicts.
The July 2022 NATO Summit in Madrid, Spain. [AP Photo/Jonathan Ernst]

This week, Ukraine launched its long-planned offensive against Russian-occupied territory, throwing armored columns, including NATO-supplied main battle tanks, against entrenched Russian positions.

According to information provided by Russian officials, which has not been contradicted by the Ukrainian government, the initial offensive has resulted in a series of military debacles for the Ukrainian armed forces.

The Russian Ministry of Defense released footage of columns of Ukrainian armor, apparently advancing without air cover in open fields, with disastrous results. The footage also depicted the destruction of a German Leopard 2 battle tank, according to the Russian government.

On Thursday, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that Ukrainian forces attempted to launch an attack near Zaporizhzhia but were repelled, losing 30 tanks, 11 armored fighting vehicles and 350 soldiers. He said Ukraine had lost over 1,000 troops over the course of 24 hours.

Later in the day, the New York Times wrote that US officials confirmed that advancing Ukrainian troops had suffered casualties in the early fighting, effectively conceding the truth of the Russian claims.

For months, the coming offensive had been hailed in the US media as a turning point in the war. Bret Stephens of the Times hoped it would bring a crushing and unmistakable defeat to Russia, while David Ignatius in the Washington Post said it would turn the tide in the war, proclaiming, D-Day dawns for Ukraine.

Given the belief of the US-NATO powers that the offensive would produce a staggering defeat for the Russian government, one purpose was to set the stage for the upcoming July 11-12 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

The meeting in Vilnius was conceived of as a summit of victors, in which the battlefield successes of Ukraine would serve as the basis for a whole series of ultimatums to Russia, including a full withdrawal not only from portions of Ukraine seized during the 2022 invasion, but also from the Crimean peninsula.

These demands, made by the mobilized NATO forces, bristling with pre-positioned weapons along a massively extended border with Russia (following the accession of Finland to NATO), were to be backed up with the threat of force from a position of strength, aiming to impose a victors peace.

Should the Vilnius summit take place under conditions of major setbacks and even a breakdown of the offensive, as at this points appears more likely, it will become the occasion for a massive further escalation of US-NATO involvement in the war.

What was conceived of as a summit of victors may prove to be a summit of desperate governments prepared to take the most reckless actions to reverse the outcome of the war.

In the event of a military debacle for Ukraine, there exists the extreme danger that the NATO powers will respond with the declaration that they will implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine, involving NATO warplanes attacking Russian aircraft, and the deployment of ground troops from NATO member states into Ukraine.

This is the context within which former NATO Secretary-General Anders Rasmussen said that if NATO did not adopt some sort of formal military alliance with Ukraine at the upcoming summit, some NATO members would announce the deployment of their own ground troops.

If NATO cannot agree on a clear path forward for Ukraine, there is a clear possibility that some countries individually might take action. We know that Poland is very engaged in providing concrete assistance to Ukraine. And I wouldnt exclude the possibility that Poland would engage even stronger in this context on a national basis and be followed by the Baltic states, maybe including the possibility of troops on the ground.

He continued:

I think the Poles would seriously consider going in and assemble a coalition of the willing if Ukraine doesnt get anything in Vilnius.

The Biden administration had previously ruled out such actions, declaring that they would lead to World War III and create the potential for a nuclear Armageddon.

But for NATO, no less than for Russia, the war is taking on an existential character. It is absolutely central to the Biden administrations global strategy, in which the military defeat of Russia is necessary to set the stage to take on China.

As the war has progressed, the NATO member states have repeatedly crossed all of the red lines they had set for themselves. A recent article in the Economistwhose latest issue is entirely devoted to Ukraines current offensiveexplains the considerations animating the ever-greater US/NATO involvement in the war. The Economist writes:

Americas generals increasingly think it is possible to engineer a strategic defeat for Russia. Over time they have become less fearful of nuclear escalation. In part their boiled frog strategy of gradually increasing conventional military aid has helped to mitigate the risk. And by prodding Russia itself, through attacks on the border region of Belgorod or small-drone attacks on the Kremlin, Ukraine also seeks to expose the emptiness of Russian threats This goal is especially enticing to Americas military planners because they have long dreaded the prospect of having to fight two wars at once: with Russia in Europe and with China in Asia. If the threat from Russia were to be substantially reduced, at least for some years, it would allow more resources to be directed towards deterring China, which has become Americas most pressing military concern.

More and more, the United States is committed to the military defeat of Russia, and it is taking ever more reckless actions to bring this outcome about.

To date, the Russian government has not responded to the increasingly reckless provocations being carried out by NATO because it seeks to come to some sort of peaceful resolution of the conflict.

But every one of the red lines crossed by NATO serves to further intensify pressure from within the Russian military on the Putin government to carry out its own escalation.

The NATO powers are engaging in a series of actions that threaten not only a massive conventional escalation, but a nuclear war. Whether they succeed or lose on the battlefield, they are committed to a course of action with disastrous consequences for all of humanity.

Fundamentally, this is a war on two fronts, not only against the largest component of the former Soviet Union, which the NATO powers seeks to dominate and militarily subjugate, but against the working class at home. It is necessary to unite workers in every country in the struggle against imperialist war as a critical element of the fight for socialism.
In a decision revealed publicly today, a British High Court judge on Tuesday rejected Julian Assanges application to appeal against his extradition to the United States on Espionage Act charges. The ruling places Assange at imminent risk of being dispatched to the American authorities, who are pursuing him for exposing US-led war crimes.

Julian Assange [Photo by David G. Silvers, Cancilleria del Ecuador / CC BY-SA 2.0

After more than three years of proceedings, the legal avenues for Assanges extradition to be blocked have narrowed substantially. He essentially has only one option of appeal remaining, and it could be rejected next week.

At the beginning of 2021, a Magistrates Court ruled against extradition on the grounds that Assanges imprisonment in the US would be oppressive and he would likely die. The High Court overturned that judgment in December 2021, based on assurances from the US that Assanges treatment in a US prison would not be so bad.

The decision was a travesty. The US assurances constituted new evidence and so should not have been accepted. They were made by a state that, media revelations have shown, discussed illegally kidnapping or assassinating Assange when he was a political refugee in 2017. The assurances, moreover, contained loopholes that would have allowed the US to treat Assange however it liked once he was on American soil.

Despite that, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by Assange on health grounds in March 2022.

In July, Assanges lawyers filed a further High Court appeal, the full grounds of which they elaborated later in the year. It is that application that was rejected this week. Justice Sir Jonathan Swift reportedly issued a three-page ruling on Tuesday. The document has not been made public.

The appeal was to have centered on the substantive issues in the case. They included that Assange is being being prosecuted for his political opinions and for protected speech, both barred under the British extradition act; that the US request violates the US-UK Extradition Treaty, which forbids extradition for political offenses; that the US government has misrepresented the facts of the case to the British courts, and that the attempt represents an abuse of process.

The High Court was not ruling on those matters directly. Instead all that needed to be determined was whether there was a point of law upon which Assange could proceed with a High Court appeal. Despite some legal experts saying such a decision could have been made in days or weeks, it was dragged on for over six months before the rejection.

In a Twitter posting today, the WikiLeaks publishers wife Stella Assange explained the next step of the legal process.

She wrote: On Tuesday next week my husband Julian Assange will make a renewed application for appeal to the High Court. The matter will then proceed to a public hearing before two new judges at the High Court and we remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the U.S. government.

If the High Court judges uphold Swifts ruling next week, it appears that Assanges legal options in Britain are exhausted. Assanges lawyers filed an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights last December. It could potentially issue an injunction to halt extradition prior to it examining the case.

Whatever occurs, it is clear that Assange is closer than ever before to being dispatched to a US prison. There he would be held in what human rights organisations have described as the darkest corner of the draconian American prison system. He would, in all likelihood, be detained in the same conditions of near-total isolation as convicted terrorists.

Assange would face a national security trial under conditions of secrecy. It would be held in the Eastern District of Virginia, where the CIA and other intelligence agencies are based, ensuring that the jury was composed of spooks, their relatives or associates. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years.

The British judiciary has functioned as a linchpin of this operation. It has overseen Assanges imprisonment for more than four years, most of that time without charge, even as medical experts warn that his health is deteriorating.

And the British courts have seemed impervious to all developments branding Assanges case as an illegitimate frame-up. Most obvious is the fact that the US case has been denounced by every notable human rights and press freedom organisation in the world as a body blow to basic democratic rights and an attempt to prosecute journalism.

Sensational stories have broken, that should by all rights have resulted in an end to the extradition proceedings and Assanges immediate freedom. They have scarcely registered on British justice.

In June 2021, Sigurdur Siggi Thordarson, a convicted Icelandic criminal, admitted that he had provided false evidence against Assange in exchange for immunity from prosecution by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Thordarsons acknowledged falsehoods remain in the current indictment under which the US is seeking Assanges extradition.

In September 2021, Yahoo News published an extensive investigation, alleging that in 2017 the Trump administration and the CIA held discussions about illegally kidnapping or assassinating Assange, who was then a political refugee in Ecuadors London embassy.

Whistleblowers have also alleged that the company providing security to the embassy, UC Global, had gone rogue and was secretly collaborating with the US government. That included unlawfully spying on Assanges privileged discussions with his attorneys.

UC Global founder David Morales is being prosecuted over these accusations, and other crimes, in Spain. Last weekend, El Pais reported the most direct evidence yet that Morales and the CIA were in a criminal partnership against Assange. In his computer files, illegal surveillance of Assange had been placed in a folder named CIA.

At the same time, there is growing popular support for Assange, including in Australia, where he is a citizen. An Australian poll last month found that 79 percent of respondents wanted the US government to drop all of the charges against Assange so that he could be freed.

With the US case continuing to unravel, and Assanges plight more visible, there is every danger that the authorities involved, in America, Britain and Australia, will seek to complete the extradition as rapidly as they possibly can. The best way to preempt the growing backing for Assange may be to confront it with a fait accompli, i.e., his dispatch to the US.

That underscores the urgency of transforming the latent sentiment in support of Assange into a mass movement of workers and young people consciously fighting for his freedom.

In this struggle, no confidence can be placed in any of the governments or official institutions. That includes the Australian Labor government. It has made vague statements of concern for Assanges plight, along the lines of enough is enough and the case should be brought to a close.

Labor claims to have voiced these positions to the Biden administration, but as this weeks British court ruling demonstrates, nothing at all has changed. Assange remains imprisoned in Britain, the extradition proceedings are accelerating towards a conclusion, Biden has not given any indication that his administration will drop the charges. Meanwhile, Labor deepens its collaboration with the US every day, especially in the preparations for an aggressive conflict with China.

That is the context in which Assanges persecution is unfolding. As they conduct a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and prepare for an even more catastrophic war against China in the Indo-Pacific, the imperialist powers are also going to war against the democratic rights of the population. They are using the persecution of Assange as the spearhead of a wider campaign to intimidate opposition to war and the status quo more broadly.

The other side of the world situation is the growth of the class struggle and a developing political radicalisation of workers and young people. Defenders of civil liberties must turn to this movement, and fight to inscribe Assanges freedom on its banner, to prevent his extradition.
Locals gather at the site where a passenger vehicle fell into a gorge in the Upper Dir district of Pakistan's northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on June 8, 2023. At least eight people were killed and 12 others injured on Thursday when a passenger vehicle fell into a gorge here, a rescue team said. (Str/Xinhua)

ISLAMABAD, June 8 (Xinhua) -- At least eight people were killed and 12 others injured on Thursday when a passenger vehicle fell into a gorge in Upper Dir district of Pakistan's northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, a rescue team said.

According to the rescue team, a passenger vehicle fell into the gorge due to unknown reasons when it was on the way from Upper Dir to Chitral district of the province.

Locals and the rescue team rushed to the site and shifted the bodies and injured to a hospital.

Medics feared that the death toll might rise further because several of the wounded were in critical condition due to severe injuries.

There were 20 people on board, including the driver, when the accident occurred, the rescue team said.

Local police have registered the case and started an investigation into the accident. 

Locals gather at the site where a passenger vehicle fell into a gorge in the Upper Dir district of Pakistan's northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on June 8, 2023. At least eight people were killed and 12 others injured on Thursday when a passenger vehicle fell into a gorge here, a rescue team said. (Str/Xinhua)
(Bloomberg) -- Authentication software company Okta Inc. plans to devote about $40 million of its annual research and development budget to new artificial intelligence projects, Chief Executive Officer Todd McKinnon said.

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The investment represents about 10% of the total R&D budget for the 14-year-old software maker, known for providing user identification services. One of its first projects is a bot that guides customers on how to use the firms products, McKinnon told Bloomberg News on Thursday.

McKinnon said that AI is worthy of the hype and that regulation is coming too soon. His comments come as other tech leaders, including Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, have urged developers to hit the pause button on training powerful AI models. Others, including OpenAIs CEO Sam Altman have called for governments to regulate the technology.

Read more: OpenAIs Altman Clashes With EU Commissioner Over AI Regulation

Restricting the technology in the West without fully understanding how it works is dangerous and could allow other countries to win the global AI race, McKinnon added.

Read more: TikTok-Owner Tests ChatGPT-Style Bot After Joining China AI Race

Okta, which counts UK retailer Boohoo Group Plc and parts of the US federal government as customers, forecast revenues for 2024 of $2.18 billion to $2.19 billion, according to corporate filings.

The shares are down 2.2% this year. Oktas reliance on small and mid-sized customers who are more likely to pull back on IT spending may put it at a disadvantage, according to analysis from Bloomberg Intelligence.

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Stimulus Checks and Rebates in Every State  Do You Have $1,200 Coming Your Way in 2023?

Liubomyr Vorona / iStock.com

Federal stimulus payments that were sent to U.S. households in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have ended, but some states still offer financial relief in the form of one-time payments, tax rebates, tax credits, wealth-sharing funds and state income tax reductions.

See: 7 Cheap Dollar Tree Summer Items To Buy Early This Year

Discover: How To Build Your Savings From Scratch

In some cases you might get financial relief totaling hundreds of dollars, while in other cases youll simply see a bigger refund at tax time.

Heres a look at various state stimulus and tax relief programs that could put more money in your pocket.

Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend

This dividend is paid to Alaska residents from investment earnings of mineral royalties. The annual payment allows for Alaskans to share in a portion of state minerals revenue in the form of a dividend to benefit current and future generations. Upcoming payments for some residents will be distributed on June 15, 2023, and July 20, 2023. Hit this link for more information.

California Middle Class Tax Refund

Under this program, eligible households will receive at least $200 and as much as $1,050 depending on their California adjusted gross income, filing status and whether they have a dependent, according to the State of California Franchise Tax Board. The majority of MCTR payments have been issued, though payments requiring additional review are still being processed. If you believe you are eligible to receive a payment and have not received it yet, call the customer support number listed in the contact information section.

Montana Tax Rebates

Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed three state House bills into law to provide tax rebates for eligible Montana taxpayers. House Bill 192 provides a rebate for individual income taxes paid in tax year 2021. House Bills 222 and 816 provide a rebate for property taxes paid in tax years 2022 and 2023. Visit the Business & Income Tax Division site for more information.

New Mexico Tax Rebate

Earlier this year New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the state legislature approved rebates for New Mexico taxpayers as well as economic relief payments to New Mexico residents who are not required to file taxes. Payments include a refundable income tax rebate of $1,000 for married couples filing joint returns, heads of household and surviving spouses; and $500 for single filers and married individuals filing separately.

The rebates will be sent automatically to New Mexico residents who have filed a 2021 personal income tax return and are not declared as a dependent on another taxpayers return. Eligible residents have until May 31, 2024, to file the 2021 return if they have not already done so. Visit this Department of Taxation & Revenue site for more information.

Washington State Tax Credit for Workers

Eligible individuals and families can receive up to $1,200 back if they meet certain eligibility requirements. You can apply for the credit through Dec. 31, 2023. Among the items youll need are a copy of your federal tax return, your Social Security number or Individual taxpayer identification number, your address and personal information such as your date of birth, spouses name and children. For more info, go to the Washington Department of Revenue site.

Other State Programs

As previously reported by GOBankingRates, heres a look at other state stimulus programs where most payments have already been made but you might have a chance to still receive a payment if you havent already:

Idaho Tax Rebates : Idaho sent out tax rebates and Special Session Rebates in March and September 2022. Those payments have been completed for residents who filed their tax returns on time. However, for those who got extensions or filed later, rebates are continuing to be processed through the summer of 2023.

Illinois Income Tax Rebate and/or Property Tax Rebate : Oct. 17, 2022 was the last date that you could file for these rebates and most of the payments have been sent. However, the state Comptroller has indicated that payments will continue until all have been issued.

Maine Winter Energy Relief Payment : Payments commenced in January 2023 and have essentially been completed. However, if you qualify for a payment but have not received one, you still have until June 30 to contact the State Tax Assessor to prove your eligibility. Those who are approved may receive a rebate up until Sept. 30, 2023.

Massachusetts Tax Refunds: Massachusetts began paying out state tax refunds in November 2022, and those payments are essentially over. However, late filers have until Sept. 15, 2023 to get their returns in and still qualify for the rebate.

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State Income Tax Decreases

Taxpayers in 22 states will pay lower income taxes this year and next year than they did in previous years, according to the Tax Foundation. Here are the states that have temporarily or permanently lowered the top marginal tax rate: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia.

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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Stimulus Checks and Rebates in Every State  Do You Have $1,200 Coming Your Way in 2023?
A South Korean lawmaker has revealed that the Chinese ambassador in Seoul once lobbied her to get China included in the Chip 4 alliance, the US-led alliance that includes Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, which has a goal of minimising Beijing's influence in the global semiconductor supply chain.

Yang Hyang-ja, a South Korean congresswoman, said on Thursday that Chinese ambassador Xing Haiming "visited my office and proposed a 'Chip 5' alliance, which [would] include China, instead of the Chip 4".

She made the comment via a translator during the third episode of a webinar series organised by advisory firm Mavek and German enterprise software company SAP, on Global Semiconductor Chip Wars and Implications. It was the first time Yang has disclosed specifics of her meeting with Xing.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

The Chinese government has never officially floated the idea of a "Chip 5", but it has repeatedly expressed anger at Washington for trying to sideline China in the global semiconductor supply chain.

Xing visited Yang, a former Samsung Electronics executive who heads Seoul's Semiconductor Industry Special Committee, in July 2022, the Chinese embassy said at the time. According to the embassy's statement, which did not include specifics of the meeting, Xing told Yang that China and South Korea should "exclude external interference" when it came to cooperation in the semiconductor industry.

US efforts to rally allies such as South Korea to help it contain China's chip industry advancement prompted Beijing to launch its own counter offensive. However, China's efforts did not bear fruit, as Japan and the Netherlands also followed the US in restricting exports to China.

Yang Hyang-ja, a member of the National Assembly, in Seoul, South Korea, on Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2022. Photo: Bloomberg alt=Yang Hyang-ja, a member of the National Assembly, in Seoul, South Korea, on Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2022. Photo: Bloomberg>

"From the US perspective, China is viewed as a significant threat, which has led to the sanctions," Yang said on the webinar. "If China, like South Korea, does not challenge US dominance, the US would not have imposed sanctions on China."

Yang added: "However, our relations with China are also delicate, because if we align with the US, this will also make China uneasy, and the Chip 4 alliance will exacerbate this situation and [our] ties with China."

Chip industry tensions between the world's two largest economies have put South Korea in a delicate position. After the Chinese government imposed a partial ban on products sold in China by US memory chip maker Micron Technology last month, Washington reportedly lobbied Seoul to ask its suppliers such as Samsung and SK Hynix to not jump in to fill the supply gap.

Japanese lawmaker Masahisa Sato, a former minister for foreign affairs, said during the same webinar that Japan needs to work with allies including Taiwan, South Korea and the Netherlands to ensure that the latest semiconductor technologies will not be used to support the Chinese military.

He said Japan will work with the US to restrict exports of advanced semiconductor technologies, artificial intelligence and quantum computing, but that the country also wanted to maintain normal chip trade with China to let businesses profit.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright  2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
(Bloomberg) -- ByteDance Ltd. is testing an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot among employees, joining rival Chinese internet conglomerates from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to Baidu Inc. in a race to create a local version of ChatGPT.

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TikToks owner has code-named the project Grace, a ByteDance spokesperson said without revealing more details. Employees using the service will be greeted by a pop-up message saying its based on several large language models, according to one of the testers, who asked to remain unidentified discussing an internal project.

The mysterious chatbot is the first official indication of ByteDances push into the nascent field of generative AI, which took off after OpenAI demonstrated its potential by rolling out ChatGPT in November. The Chinese company, which also runs domestic video service Douyin, has been developing smartphone apps based on AI algorithmic recommendations ever since computer whizzes Zhang Yiming and Liang Rubo founded the outfit more than a decade ago.

Chinas internet sector has begun a headlong rush into AI investment. Search leader Baidu delivered the first major answer to ChatGPT in March, Ernie Bot, igniting a race by companies including Alibaba, Tencent Holdings Ltd. and SenseTime Group Inc. to unveil rival platforms. Chinese local press had reported that ByteDance is developing its own large language models, which the company didnt confirm.

All of them are vying for dominance of a lucrative domestic market in the likely absence of ChatGPT and Western peers like Googles Bard. Chinas top internet regulator has said it will require a security review of generative AI tools before they can be put into action. US sanctions, meanwhile, have deprived Chinese tech firms of the best chips to train their AI models.

Globally, TikTok is also experimenting with a chatbot named Tako. For now, it appears as an instant messenger inside TikToks main platform, where users can ask questions.

Read more: Baidu Shares Jump as Ernie Bot Progress Rekindles AI Bets

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In this article, we will discuss the top 20 information technology countries in the world. However, if you want to go straight to the top five countries, you can look at the Top 5 Information Technology Countries in the World.

Information technology (IT) runs the world. This technology is essential for almost every aspect of modern life and business. For example, it provides technical support for business operations, solves complex business concerns, enables easier and data-driven decision-making, facilitates collaboration and communication, increases efficiency and productivity, and, most importantly, fosters creativity and innovation.

No wonder the value of the global IT market has seen robust growth since the early 2000s, and experts agree that it will continue to grow tremendously. For example, a MENAFN study determined that the global IT market was worth $8.179 trillion in 2022 and would reach $8.852 trillion in 2023, implying an 8.2% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Furthermore, MENAFN anticipates the market value to expand at a 9% CAGR between 2023 and 2025 to reach $11.866 trillion.

In the early 2000s, the global IT market derived much of the growth momentum from the internet boom. The internet spread like wildfire as the worldwide demand for IT products and services exploded. Sales of personal computers, networking equipment, e-commerce platforms, servers, web development, and software grew exponentially as governments and private sector players raced to become competitive and implement efficient operations. In fact, a Brookings Institution report asserts that the internet boom powered the global IT market to grow at an average annual rate of 10.4% between 1995 and 2004. But with the dot-com bubble and buts and the widening digital divide, the internet could no longer sustain the global IT market; something else had to come up.

The global IT market was back into the sharp growth trajectory in the 2010s, riding on the back of new technologies like cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), big data and analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT). For example, big technology companies like Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL), and Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) invested heavily in cloud computing technologies, leading to an explosive growth in value. According to a Gartner report, the global public cloud services market will expand 23.1% in 2023 to reach $332.3 billion. Much of the growth will come from the market's many benefits, including cost-efficiency, innovation, security, flexibility, and scalability.

However, the benefits of this critical market have not been distributed equally across the world. Some top information technology countries in the world have seen their gross domestic product (GDP) expand tremendously as their companies spread their wings to far-off places to offer IT products and services. For example, a Statista analysis established that only seven countries control 72.4% of the global IT market as of 2022. What is more interesting is the fact that these top information technology countries claimed only 66.4% of this market in 2012. This is sufficient evidence that the information technology industry is big in only a few countries. But the question is: what are these countries? This article has the answers, so read on.

top information technology countries in the world

Our Methodology

After extensive research and consultations, we developed the criteria for choosing the candidates for the list of the top 20 IT countries in the world. We started by selecting the world's most technologically advanced countries. We defined a technologically advanced country as one that has a high quality of life, a developed economy, and advanced technological infrastructure relative to other less industrialized nations. This is also the definition used by Global Finance Magazine, which provides an annual ranking of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. Next, we ranked the countries based on the adoption and usage of IT solutions and applications. For this phase, we relied on World Bank's Digital Adoption Index. Lastly, we ranked the countries based on the BECH Index 2022. The BECH Index ranks the countries according to their potential for selling B2B IT products and services. The higher the index, the more demand there is for such products and services in that country. For example, a country whose share of the index is high implies that it has a higher potential for selling B2B IT products and services than a country whose share is low. The index is based on factors such as population size, GDP per capita, internet penetration, and IT spending.

Top Information Technology Countries in the World

20. Egypt

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 0.93%

Egypt's ICT sector is very robust and thriving. It is the fastest-growing sector in the country's economy, reaching a growth rate of about 16% in the fiscal year 2020/2021. Its contribution to the GDP has increased to 5% in the fiscal year 2020/2021 compared to 4.4% in 2019/2020. Total investments in the sector in 2020/2021 have reached almost $3 billion. The industry offers wider opportunities for investors in outsourcing, electronics design and manufacturing, and technology parks. The sector also aims to enhance its digital exports, which grew from $4.1 billion in 2019/2020 to $4.5 billion in 2020/2021. The government is undertaking a series of initiatives to support the digital transformation of core government services and build the capacity of young Egyptians and SMEs in ICT skills.

19. Iran

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 0.94%

The sector is a relatively small but growing part of Iran's economy. According to a World Bank report, the sector accounted for only 2.3% of the country's GDP in 2019, while the economy's most significant sector is services, which account for 51 percent of GDP. Nevertheless, the government has launched initiatives to support the ICT sector, such as developing technology parks, promoting e-government services, and training young people in ICT skills.

18. Australia

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 0.99%

The sector is growing fast in Australia. According to a report by PwC, the industry contributed AUD167 billion to the economy in 2020, an increase of 79% since 2016. Additionally, its contribution to GDP was 4.6% in 2015, outpacing the average growth of other industries by more than four times. The sector also has strong export potential, as Australia is home to many innovative and successful ICT companies and projects. According to Austrade, the market capitalization of the ASX information technology index grew over 120% between June 2019 and June 2021. The sector also benefits from a highly skilled and diverse workforce, a supportive government policy environment, and a vibrant startup ecosystem.

17. Saudi Arabia

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 1.25%

Saudi Arabia's ICT sector is a vital and growing part of the Saudi economy, especially in line with the Vision 2030 plan for economic diversification and digital transformation. According to the US International Trade Administration (ITA), the sector was valued at $32.1 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow by 2.3% in 2022 to reach almost $33 billion. Its contribution to GDP was 3.6% in 2017 and is projected to increase to 4.6% by 2023. Various factors, such as government initiatives and investments in digital infrastructure, cloud computing, data centers, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, e-commerce, e-government, smart cities, and IoT networks, drive growth in the sector.

16. Canada

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 1.36%

According to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, the country's ICT sector posted revenue of CAD242 billion in 2021, an increase of 4.7% from 2020. The sector's contribution to GDP was CAD104.5 billion (in 2012 constant dollars), accounting for 5.3% of GDP and 15.3% of GDP growth between 2016 and 2021. The sector also employs over 717,000 workers, with an average salary of CAD$89,630, 52.5% higher than the Canadian average. The industry comprises four sub-sectors: software and computer services, communications services, ICT wholesaling, and manufacturing. Software and computer services are the largest and fastest-growing sub-sector, with a revenue of CAD$106.3 billion and a growth rate of 9.9% in 2021. The sector also invests heavily in research and development, spending over $10 billion in 2021. Key trends and opportunities in the industry include digital transformation, cloud computing, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and e-commerce. Canada ranks 16th in our list of the top information technology countries in the world.

15. Spain

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 1.38%

The US ITA estimates that Spain's ICT sector's revenue was $32.1 billion in 2020 and grew by 2.3% in 2022. The sector's contribution to GDP was 3.2% in 2019, according to Statista. Additionally, it involves over 30,000 companies, mainly concentrated in Madrid and Catalonia regions. The sector comprises four sub-sectors: telecommunications equipment, cybersecurity, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. Telecommunications equipment is the largest and most mature sub-sector, with a strong demand for 5G network upgrades and fiber optic expansion. Cybersecurity is a fast-growing sub-sector driven by the increased need for data protection and remote work solutions. Cloud computing is also a fast-growing sub-sector, with a high adoption rate among Spanish companies and public administrations. Finally, artificial intelligence is an emerging sub-sector, with various public-private collaboration programs to integrate AI technologies into different vertical sectors. Some key opportunities and challenges in the industry include digital transformation, e-commerce, smart cities, data localization, and talent development.

14. Turkey

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 1.60%

Turkey's ICT market totaled $26.9 billion in 2020, with $17 billion spent on communication technologies and $9.9 billion on information technologies. The sector employs approximately 158,000 people and exported $1.3 billion in related products and services in 2019. It posted an average growth of 23% in the past five years, contributing to 3.2% of the country's GDP. The sector has attracted over $19 billion worth of international investments since the early 2000s and has over 2,000 active companies. It receives support from various government initiatives and incentives, such as the Digital Strategy 2025, the R&D Law, and the Recovery and Resilience Plan.

13. South Korea

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 1.61%

The sector accounted for 11.9% of GDP in 2014. According to Statista, the market size expanded to around 525 trillion South Korean won (about $447 billion) in 2021, up from about 479 trillion South Korean won the previous year. The sector covers many products and services, such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data, the Internet of Things, e-commerce, cybersecurity, smart cities, and e-government. According to GlobalData, the sector is segmented into four main categories: software and services, hardware, communications equipment, and telecom services. Among these categories, software, and services is the largest segment, with 48.8% in 2020, followed by telecom services with 30.9%.

12. Italy

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 1.74%

According to the Assintel Report 2020, the Italian ICT sector doubled its growth in 2019 compared to the previous year, despite a nationwide stagnation. It reached EUR24.2 billion, representing a 3.8% increase over 2018. The sector accounts for about 1.4% of GDP, slightly lower than the EU average of 1.7%. However, the country ranks among the leading European nations for using cloud computing services by enterprises and is investing heavily in digital transformation and innovation. The National Recovery and Resilience Plan allocates 27% of its total resources to the digital transition, including creating national R&D centers specialized in advanced simulation, quantum computing, and big data analytics.

11. Mexico

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 1.77%

Mexico's ICT sector is diverse and has vast growth potential. According to GlobalData, the market was valued at $56.8 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $81.2 billion by 2026, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.2% during the forecast period (2021-2026). The sector accounts for about 4.5% of the GDP, higher than the Latin American average of 3.7%. The main drivers of the sector's growth are the increasing adoption of cloud services, data analytics, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and cybersecurity solutions by various sectors of the economy. The Mexican government has also implemented several initiatives to promote digital transformation and connectivity, such as the National Digital Strategy, the National Broadband Program, and the Internet for All project.

10. France

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 2.28%

France ranks 10th in our list of the top information technology countries in the world. France's ICT sector is a large and growing market offering various IT solutions and services opportunities. The market was valued at $112.07 billion in 2021 and will grow at a CAGR of 7.3% to reach $159.25 billion by 2026. Systems design and integration is the largest product/service category in the ICT market, with a 6.6% market share, followed by SaaS. Additionally, the sector accounted for 3.86% of GDP in 2014, higher than Spain or Italy but lower than Germany.

9. United Kingdom

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 2.38%

The UK's IT sector is vast and vibrant. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), 92% of adults in the UK were recent internet users in 2020, up from 91% in 2019. Furthermore, almost all adults aged 16 to 44 in the UK were recent internet users (99%), compared with 54% of adults aged 75 years and over. Also, CompTIA's State of the Tech Workforce UK report suggests that the tech sector employed just under two million workers in 2021, accounting for 6.3% of the total UK workforce. Additionally, Tech Nation's 2021 report found that the UK tech sector attracted $15 billion in venture capital investment in 2020, more than France ($5.2 billion) and Germany ($5.4 billion) combined. The UK also ranked third globally for tech unicorns (valued at over $1 billion), with 80 such companies as of January 2021.

8. Indonesia

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 2.43%

Indonesia's IT sector is one of the country's most promising and growing sectors, driven by the increasing demand for better information and communication services among the population and the government. The sector's value was estimated at $6.47 billion in 2019 and was projected to reach $7.11 billion in 2020. This represents about 0.7% of GDP in 2019. The sector's growth is expected to be supported by four platforms: cloud, mobile, social media, and big data/analytics.

7. Brazil

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 2.48%

Brazil has the most valuable IT sector in Latin America. According to Statista, the market value was estimated at $11.3 billion in 2021, representing 2.54% of the global IT demand. The software industry segment accounted for $4.6 billion of this value, with software applications being the leading sub-segment. The sector also generated a revenue of $76.7 billion in 2020, equivalent to 5.6% of the country's GDP. Most of this revenue was generated in the state of Sao Paulo.

6. Russia

Share of The BECH Index 2022: 2.96%

The Russian IT sector is a steadily developing industry that accounted for 3.8% of its GDP in 2020. The market's revenue in 2020 was estimated to range from $23.86 to $31.43 billionthe largest segment being IT equipment, followed by IT services and software. Domestic solutions dominate the software industry. Additionally, the number of IT specialists in the country in 2021 was estimated at 1.4 million, with software developers being the most common position. Also, the sector has vast innovation potential, with 1,228 patents filed in 2020. Russia ranks sixth in our list of the top information technology countries in the world.

Click to continue reading and see Top 5 Information Technology Countries in the World.

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Disclosure: None. Top 20 Information Technology Countries in the World is originally published on Insider Monkey.
The Annecy Festivals tribute to Mexico as its 2023 guest county of honor brings over 250 artists and executives to the worlds biggest animation event. Here are 10 Talents to Track emerging directors and artists among an exploding animation scene. Variety could easily have chosen another 20 more.

Sofia Alexander

Celebrated as the executive producer and creator of Crunchyrolls first original series Onyx Equinox, the tale of a young Meso-American slave who becomes the last hope of saving humanity from invading gods of the underworld. On TV I never saw Meso-American Indigenous Mexico without Spanish influence, and I wanted to connect with my roots, says Alexander. The series is anime influenced, not just in its aesthetics  the painterly fields of Meso-America and the frenzied gory combat  but also in its being serialization, pacing and broad audience target, including adults, she argues. A freelancer for Cartoon Network, Hasbro and Nickelodeon, but Onyx Equinox is her major achievement. JH

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Arturo and Rodolfo Ambriz

Mexico City-based stop-motion specialists, the biggest in Mexico, and Annecy animation stars with Episode Four of 2019 milestone series Frankeldas Book of Spooks, made for Cartoon Network Latin America and HBO Max, playing in the Mexico retrospective. They also present Frankelda and the Prince of Spooks, a movie spin-off, in Work in Progress. Also real film directors, moving the camera with verve on their stop-motion work, as they construct meta tales about the difficulties of creation, says Rodolfo Ambriz. Prolific, both titles form part of a far larger Cinema Fantasma slate, one title, feature Ballad of the Phoenix, being presented at Annecy last year. JH

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The Awesombrosos: Sebastian and Diego Ramirez

Best known to date as character designers on Frankeldas Book of Spooks, with work for Netflix, Nickelodeon, Disney and Sony yet to see the light of day. Also animation producers in their own right, behind Pixelatls Ideatoon 19 winner Noisy Nomads. Were identical twins, so we think no two people do the same thing, weve had to look for individuality, says Diego. It tells. Their high-energy projects  such as 3D comedy musical series Noisy Nomads, for which theyre making a teaser, and 3D feature The Magic Market  burst with color and characters, while often inhabiting the same physical space, still doing their own thing. JH

Calladitos: Ariadna Galaz and Jorge Peralta

Touting murals informed by their surroundings, towering characters serving as guardians over each global city they inhabit, Galaz and Peralta take on Annecy, teasing plans to turn their static illustrations into a dynamic animated series. Diving into the psyche with no dialogue (their moniker alludes to quiet), the project allows viewers to examine the mystical visuals in silence, and stands as a wholly unparalleled proposal. Socially, were living in a total frenzy of noise. We want this space to be a space of silence, of meditation, lending space to the internal dialogues were losing more and more, they say. HJ

Sofia Carrillo

Part of the so-called stop motion Guadalajara School who broke out with 2012s Prita Noire, winner of a Mexican Oscar, an Ariel, then directed two jewels, 2013s La Casa Triste, an attempt to process a strong history of cancer in her family, and 2017s Cerulia, in which a woman revisits her now abandoned grandparents home, reviving, near literally, its figures of a world now dead but not buried. A doyenne of quaint gothic and multi-layered thought-provoking films, now set to direct live action feature Dead Mans Secret for The Latin House of Horror, with another project close to announcement. JH

Alonso Ramirez Ramos, Ana Ramirez Gonzalez, Rodolfo Ambriz, Sandra Equihua

Ana Cruz

An animation producer and co-founder in 2013 of Mexico Citys Casiopea Studio, a collective with Sandra Medina, Andrea Mondragon and Alexandra Castellanos, whose Poliangular, produced by Cruz, plays at Annecys Tribute to Mexican Animation program in its Sur-Realities: Poetic Imagery session. Accessible but experimental  Poliangular is a case in point  and running a large gamut of techniques, Casiopeas productions range from shorts to video clips, commercials, festival image campaigns, capsules, workshops and exhibitions.

Now aiming to provide animation on more long features and looking to enter co-production, including on international projects, Cruz tells Variety. JH

Sandra Equihua

Working in close tandem with her partner Jorge Gutierrez for the past 20 years, Equihua is a graphic designer, illustrator and character designer who has won an Emmy for the character design of their acclaimed animated series El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera and an Annie for her character design in their first animated film, The Book of Life. She was born in Tijuana, Mexico where she graduated from Ibero University with a bachelors degree in graphic design. As Gutierrezs partner, muse and sounding board, she plays a vital part in the creation and execution of their projects. Their latest, I, Chihuahua, about a masked dog wrestler (luchador), is now in the works. AMDLF

Ana Ramirez Gonzalez

Raised in Mexico, Ramirez Gonzalez moved to California to attend CalArts, studying animation. Landing with Pixar, she was a visual development artist on Disney-released triumph Coco, her ethereal illustrations further adorning companion book Coco: Miguel and the Grand Harmony. Recent work takes in Peter Sohns Elemental. Currently developing a short while simultaneously cultivating storytelling and directing prowess, she likes the idea of doing something a little darker, not having so many restrictions on what to create, and hopes to work collectively with other Latin artists in the future, delving deeper into the experimental cinematic styles that fascinate her. HJ

Alonso Ramirez Ramos

Having developed pilots for The Cartoon Network while boasting credits on Gravity Falls, Disneys Mickey Mouse Shorts and Steven Universe, Ramirez Ramos cites close-knit peer networks and generous mentors for his buoyant, contagious enthusiasm for the Mexican animation scene. Having earned two Primetime Emmys and several Annie Awards, he strives to deliver fresh narratives with several unnamed projects in the pipeline. The part that Ive enjoyed the most is creating original ideas that arent tied to something weve seen before and bringing together people with diverse backgrounds to create, in an environment where were all thriving, being our authentic selves. HJ

Karla Velazquez and Adrian Saldana

A visual development artist for DreamWorks, Velazquez will tease her first feature Kolaval at Annecy alongside creative partner Adrian Saldana. After attending the Quirino Awards and a mentorship program for women creators through Ventana Sur, the pair realized the need to present a story where women are the leaders, the strong ones, where we change the stigma that indigenous people need to be saved, show how they can take the lead. With an unapologetic and bold approach and striking illustrating style, the duo are set to decimate homogeneity to represent the full spectrum of their Mexican heritage. HJ

Sofia Carrillo, Karla Velazquez, Adrian Saldana

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Scammers are using social media to push cryptocurrency rackets? Tell us something we didnt already know. Even so, the European Consumer Organization (BEUC) and nine of its member organizations have issued a stark warning to European authorities about the misleading promotion of cryptocurrency on leading social media platforms.

Beginning with a Dogecoin meme, the watchdog group's 20-page report categorically slams digital assets as highly risky and prone to scams. It outlines the effect that digital assets have on consumers, offering quantitative data on its usage across several nations, as well as how crypto influencers operate.

In the report, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok are specifically called out, with the group calling the combination of social media networks, influencers, and cryptocurrency a toxic cocktail. The group claims that the networks' loose policies are dubious, and that scammers tend to target unsuspecting teenagers. It also emphasizes the role of finfluencers that make promises that are simply too good to be true.

Today BEUC & consumer groups in 8 countries are taking action against TikTok, Instagram, Twitter & YouTube for facilitating the misleading promotion of crypto assets on social media . We've filed a complaint with @EU_Commission and consumer authorities: https://t.co/b6NYsBl4VM pic.twitter.com/w5iLMy4h1i  The Consumer Voice (@beuc) June 8, 2023

The BEUC is a group of 45 independent consumer organizations spread across 31 countries. According to its website, the goal is to represent these institutions in the European Union (EU) and defend the interests of consumers. Among the groups points of interest are sustainability, financial services, health, and international affairs.

Monique Goyens, Director General of BEUC, said in a press release that it is well documented that crypto promotion involves scams and unfair commercial practices.

You Can Earn Bitcoin for Using This Twitter Alternative

"Crypto will be regulated soon with the new Markets in Crypto Assets regulation, but this legislation does not apply to the social media companies benefiting from the advertising of crypto at the expense of consumers," she added, according to Reuters.

According to the BEUC, the European Unions consumer laws have been broken, and it calls upon the European network of national consumer authorities (CPC-Network) to act and enforce stricter advertising policies on these platforms.

Will MiCA Jumpstart Crypto in EU? It's Too Early To Tell, Says Circle

Despite todays scathing report, authorities in Europe have already been working to counter crypto scams. Ironically, they took to social media in 2022 with educational campaigns increasing investor awareness about the asset class.

The European Union has been at the forefront of crypto legislation, approving Markets in Crypto Asset (MiCA) legislation earlier this year, which aims to end the so-called wild west mentality of the digital assets space.
A total of 33 people have been infected by Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria at Virginia Mason Medical Center

Getty Bacteria outbreak at Seattle hospital

Two more patients have died at a Seattle hospital after contracting a strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria, according to USA Today.

Virginia Mason Medical Center confirmed Wednesday that 33 patients have contracted the Klebsiella bacteria at its downtown campus since October of last year. More than a quarter of those whove contracted the bacteria at the hospital have died, with the two recent deaths raising the total of Klebsiella fatalities to nine patients.

The source of the bacterias transmission is unknown and still under investigation, in conjunction with the CDC and Washington State Department of Health, the hospital said in a statement.

Google Maps Virginia Mason Medical Center

Due to the patients complex conditions, the Virginia Mason Medical Center says that it is difficult to determine whether Klebsiella pneumoniae caused or contributed to their deaths.

The CDC does point out that patients most at risk from contracting Klebsiella bacteria are vulnerable patients  specifically, those whose care requires the use of ventilators or intravenous catheters, and patients who are taking long courses of certain antibiotics.

Related: Cases of Flesh-Eating Bacteria Are on the Rise as Summer Heats Up: Here's How to Stay Safe

Although Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria can be a part of the bacteria that inhabits a healthy digestive system, it appears to spread easily in healthcare environments.

The CDC even describes it as a bacteria that can cause different types of healthcare-associated infections, including pneumonia, bloodstream infections, wound or surgical site infections, and meningitis, and Virginia Mason Medical Center notes that Klebsiella infections commonly occur among sick or immunocompromised patients who are receiving treatment for other conditions.

And while it isnt an airbourne pathogen, the CDC points out that in healthcare settings, Klebsiella bacteria can be spread through person-to-person contact (for example, from patient to patient via the contaminated hands of healthcare personnel, or other persons) or, less commonly, by contamination of the environment.

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Related: 4-Year-Old Girl Nearly Dies After Strep A Leads to Flesh-Eating Bacteria: 'She Was Deteriorating'

Most people who contract Klebsiella bacteria wont develop an infection, according to the hospital, with the worst outcome for a generally healthy person being infections like a urinary tract infection.

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Of more concern, the CDC notes that some Klebsiella bacteria have developed antimicrobial resistance  meaning, antibiotics are not effective against certain strains. Patients who have a diagnosed Klebsiella infection should follow a strict hygiene regimen, including washing their hands frequently and avoiding touching their eyes or nose.

Strict and regular cleaning of high-touch surfaces such as bed rails, bedside tables, phones, and doorknobs are also recommended to avoid the spread of Klebsiella.

While the hospital says the risk of transmission is extremely low it is not non-existent and urges patients, particularly those with an upcoming procedure or surgery scheduled, to speak to their doctor with any concerns.

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The new business inside of the former Gordman's building on East State Street in Rockford is ready to open.

Urban Air Adventure Park, 7137 E. State St., will host a private event for first responders and educators Friday night before opening to the public on Saturday.

Here's what you need to know:

What is Urban Air Adventure Park?

The park is one of the largest indoor adventure park operators in the world.

More: Two stores moving inside the old Dick's Sporting Goods store in Rockford

What does the park offer?

The Rockford location is more than 30,000 square feet of space, offering attractions such as wall-to-wall trampolines, dodgeball courts and obstacle courts.

Who owns Urban Air Adventure Park?

The company is owned by Unleashed Brands.

When is the grand opening on Saturday?

The park opens at 10 a.m. with the first 200 people in line receiving free goodie bags. There will also be giveaways throughout the day.

Are there other Urban Air Adventure Parks in Illinois?

Yes. There are some in the Chicago suburbs, including Naperville and St. Charles. There is also a location in Bloomington, Illinois.

What used to be at the Urban Air Adventure Park site in Rockford?

The location was formerly home Gordman's and is located next to Planet Fitness.

What happened to Gordman's?

The Gordman's in Rockford and in Machesney Park closed in 2017 after their parent company filed for bankruptcy.

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Urban Air Adventure Park opening in former Rockford Gordman's site
Editor's note: A previous version of this article misidentified Joe Reed as a plaintiff in the Milligan case, based on an incorrect statement from the Mayor of Montgomery's Office.

For the past 31 years, there has been only one majority Black congressional district in Alabama. It spanned from parts of Birmingham to Tuscaloosa to Montgomery and across most of the Black Belt region.

For 12 of those years, U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, has been its representative.

Following the United States Supreme Courts ruling in the Allen v. Milligan case on Thursday, which determined that Alabamas congressional maps violated the Voting Rights Act, Sewell spoke out about the future of her district, one that's likely to be divided to create a second majority-minority district in the state.

Would I love it to include Selma, and Marion and Wilcox County and really keep the seat that I currently have? Yes, but I know that that's not possible in order to create two majority districts, Sewell said. It's a small price to pay to carve up my district in order to be able to have two majority-minority districts. You know, people like John Lewis made much greater sacrifices for progress than I would have to make.

The U.S. Supreme Court this week ruled that Alabama's congressional voting map violates the Voting Rights Act.

Sewell regularly refers to herself as a daughter of the Black Belt. She was born and raised in Selma, but she currently lives in Birmingham. There is a strong possibility that as the congressional maps get redrawn  whether by the court or the Alabama State Legislature  Birmingham and Selma will no longer be included in one district.

If thats the case, Sewell said she intends to remain in Birmingham and run in the 7th Congressional District, whatever that may include.

I've enjoyed representing the amazing district that includes so many of the historic civil rights sites and places, and I've enjoyed representing the majority of the Black Belt, she said. But in order to create another district where minority voters can actually choose their representation, that would require breaking up the Black Belt. I've always been concerned about that because I think it's really important that rural America  rural Alabama  gets strong and fair representation as well. Progress demands that you make sacrifices.

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As far as a timeline goes for the new congressional maps, Sewell expects that the state will see a finalized version by the 2024 election, if not sooner. She also suggested that there may be serious damage done to misrepresented Alabamians if the state does not take immediate action.

U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, center, stands between foot soldiers Sheyann Webb-Christburg and George Sallis as President Joe Biden visits the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 5.

The Supreme Courts ruling on Thursday upheld a decision from the lower courts in 2022, prior to primary elections. Had the state of Alabama not appealed to the Supreme Court, the Legislature would have had to draw up new maps before 2022 elections.

I think that there could be a case that African-American voters in Alabama would want this to be done swiftly because a year-and-a-half is left on this particular term before the 2024 term, Sewell said. One could make a case that not having fair representation would give irreparable harm to the Black voters that are currently not being represented.

This decision will impact more voters than just those in Alabama. Other states, like Louisiana, also have only one majority-minority district and may have to reassess their maps as well.

"It is hard to imagine many more fundamental prerequisites to voting than determining where to cast your ballot or who you are eligible to vote for, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed released a statement celebrating the decision on Thursday afternoon. He applauded the work of the plaintiffs in the case, and incorrectly included his father among them. Upon a request for clarification from the Montgomery Advertiser on Friday morning, Reed released a revised statement, removing the mention of his father.

"As the only Alabama city to sign the amicus brief, Montgomery once again made history. The resounding voice of the South is heard! I am hopeful about Alabamas future in light of today's Supreme Court ruling that protects Black voters, and I applaud the work of the Alabama heroes who are plaintiffs in this case," Reed said. "The right to vote and have equitable representation stands as a cornerstone of our democracy."

Hadley Hitson covers the rural South for the Montgomery Advertiser and Report for America. She can be reached at hhitson@gannett.com. To support her work, subscribe to the Advertiser or donate to Report for America.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: New Supreme Court ruling to result in redistricting for the Black Belt
Brittany Johnson of WCVB

Investigative journalist Brittany Johnson is joining WCVB Bostons 5 Investigates unit. She starts June 12 and comes from KCRA Sacramento.

Both WCVB and KCRA are part of Hearst Television. Boston is Nielsen's No. 9 DMA.

As evidenced by her excellent work at our Hearst sister-station KCRA, Brittany is an exceptionally versatile and talented journalist with a track record for breaking critical stories, exposing corruption, and giving victims a voice, said Kyle I. Grimes, WCVB president and general manager. She will be a tremendous asset to the 5 Investigates team uncovering stories that directly impact our community.

Johnson joined KCRAs investigative team in September 2020. Prior to KCRA, she was an investigative reporter and anchor at KTVX Salt Lake City. Before that, she was a news assistant and guest booker at KCBS-KCAL Los Angeles.

Brittanys commitment to finding and telling stories that truly make a difference for individuals and communities makes her a perfect fit for our award-winning team of investigative reporters and producers, said News Director Margaret Cronan. Like the 5 Investigates unit and the entire NewsCenter 5 team, Brittany is dedicated to the impactful journalism that WCVBs television and digital audiences expect and deserve.

Johnson joins Karen Anderson and Mike Beaudet in the 5 Investigates team. She is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and graduated from California State University-Northridge with a degree in broadcast journalism.

My journey, experiences, along with a lot of hard work and passion, have all prepared me for this new chapter with the 5 Investigates team, said Johnson. I know that WCVB is committed to sharing stories of the community with integrity and enthusiasm, which is very important to me. I cant wait to work alongside some of the best journalists in the business and to make Massachusetts my new home.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers at Chicago OHares International Mail Facility discovered more than half a million dollars in counterfeits when inspecting a shipment labeled as fashion sunglasses.

On June 4, the agencys trade experts uncovered products bearing counterfeit marks valued at nearly $638,000, had the goods been genuine. Thirty-six pairs of designer sunglasses from the likes of Louis Vuitton and Versace, as well as 25 pairs of counterfeit socks from luxury brands such as Gucci and Dior, plus 22 fake Rolex and Patek Phillipe watches, among others, were shipped from Thailand en route to a residence in Bedford, Ind.

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CBP protects honest trade and hardworking businesses, LaFonda D. Sutton-Burke, director, field operations, Chicago field office, said in a statement. Counterfeit goods defraud customers and businesses. Our officers are dedicated to the CBP mission and work diligently for American consumers by stopping the flow of illegitimate and pirated merchandise.

CBP cites the rapid growth of e-commerce, which enables consumers to easily search and buy millions of goods through online vendors, as a reason why so many pirated goods find their way onto U.S. shores. Consumers in the U.S. spend over $100 billion annually on intellectual property rights (IPR) infringing goods, falling victim to about 20 percent of the counterfeits illegally sold across the globe, according to CBP. The ethical issues aside, counterfeit costume jewelry has been found to contain lead and other toxic materials dangerous to human health.

Dior socks seen at a Miss Dior event in Germany.

Counterfeiters easily hide in plain sight on online marketplaces. They dupe shoppers into buying low quality and dangerous counterfeits online, Michael Pfeiffer, Chicagos acting area port director, said. CBP employees work tirelessly to protect our economy and consumers every day.

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Last month, CBP officers in Louisville seized over $3 million in counterfeit goods originating from Hong Kong. The month prior, Washington officials sentenced a woman with a robin hood mentality for making over $40,000 by selling fake luxury handbags, according to a CBP investigation. In March, more than $700,000 worth of fashion fakes originating from South Korea was seized by CBP agents in Virginia.

Click here to read the full article.
Daniel Fletcher's Fall/Winter 2023 showcase took place on June 9 as part of London Fashion Week Mens, debuting a collaboration with 174-year-old Savile Row tailor, Huntsman.

The result is a collection of nine bespoke suits alongside 12 ready-to-wear styles, each drawing inspiration from the rich archives of both brands and merging their distinctive aesthetics. Offering a selection of menswear and womenswear styles, the collection celebrated the art of quality craftsmanship, utilizing signature Savile Row detailing alongside contemporary silhouettes.

With each piece made in the United Kingdom, the collection aimed to shine a light on Britain's sartorial legacy, whilst also bringing it into the future by incorporating womenswear silhouettes and dress styles alongside cropped menswear vests and oversized bags. DWF's signature top-stitching technique adorned suits and blazers, while traditional tailoring details like internal belts, fastenings and waistcoat-like structures were incorporated into fresh silhouettes.

"To work with Huntsman in such a way that has been so much about detail and craft is a real honour. I know that being able to observe and take note of the way that Campbell and the team on Savile Row work will inform how I go on to design for the rest of my career," Fletcher explains in a press release. "Building from the collaboration, I wanted to show the best of what we do here in the UK, the craft behind creating these collections and the heritage of British fashion," he adds.

Alongside spotlighting British design, the collection revolved around a central theme of romanticism, offering a softer approach on traditional tailoring through trains on dresses, flowing fabric detailing and a sometimes sombre soundtrack, recalling past days of unrequited love.

Take a look at the collection above, and head to Daniel Fletcher's website for more information.

In other news, Daily Paper just released its first statement bag.
Michelle Dockery

The Dont Feed the Children cast for the upcoming horror film directed by Destry Allyn Spielberg has added a few new members.

Steven Spielbergs daughter is making her feature directorial debut written by Paul Bertino. A gang of orphans travels to the south in quest of a new life after a viral outbreak decimates the adult population of the nation, only to find themselves at the mercy of a psychotic woman who is hiding a perilous secret, reads the logline.

The film, already set to star Michelle Dockery (The Gentlemen, Downton Abbey), has added three new young actors to the cast. Joshuah Melnick (Saint X, Tesla), Emma Meisel (American Horror Story), and Dean Scott Vazquez (Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, In the Heights) will be joining the cast of the film.

The cast also includes Zoe Margaret Colletti (Only Murders In The Building), Regan Aliyah (Marvels Ironheart), and Andrew Liner (Vampire Academy).

The film is set to start shooting next month in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The post Destry Allyn Spielbergs Dont Feed the Children Adds Cast appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.
Adrian Grenier is a dad, that's all.

The actor, 46, recently added a new member to his family entourage, quietly welcoming a baby boy with wife Jordan Roemmele Grenier, they shared in a joint Instagram post June 8. The couple named their first child Seiko Aurelius Grenier.

"We are happy to announce the arrival of our son who was born a few weeks ago," Jordan and Adrian wrote, alongside pics of a maternity photo shoot in Austin, Texas. "In an instant Our hearts have expanded beyond infinite space. We are cultivating our world now to preserve his innocence, his magic, and to leave enough quiet space to hear and encourage his roar."

Calling Seiko their "exquisite golden one," they shared how their mindset has changed since becoming parents.

"We couldn't be more blissed out, spending the next weeks in divine solitude, mother, father and child," the duo said. "We want to make sure to give our baby an easeful transition from spirit world to this one."

In another post, Jordan, 30, gave a glimpse into her pregnancy, which they had been keeping private until his birth.

Secrets About The Devil Wears Prada

"I was 7.5 months pregnant here and I thought I was fully baked," the nature advocate recalled. "Fast forward to 42 weeks I'm pretty sure I doubled in size. All to say I love this body! It has held me so strong throughout the waves of pregnancy, birth, and even now during my time of healing."

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The Devil Wears Prada star tied the knot with Jordan, who was then studying acupuncture, in Morocco in June 2022 after dating for about five years.

"It wasn't planned... We eloped in the Atlas Mountains while on vacation with friends in Morocco," he told People at the time. "We embraced the serendipity of the moment and made the decision to tie the knotliterally, we didn't have rings so used string for rings."

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Adrianwho is also known for playing Vincent Chase in Entouragerecently appeared in Clickbait and Cipher, but these days is also focused on being the Chief Earth Advocate at space tourism company World View and running the lifestyle platform Earth Speed.

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Former President Donald Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges tied to his handling of classified documents taken from Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate.

Over 300 classified documents were recovered, mostly in 2022. Trump on Truth Social on Thursday said he was summoned to appear Tuesday at a federal courthouse in Miami. His attorney Jim Trusty later confirmed on CNN the former president faces 7 counts, including an Espionage Act charge, and charges related to obstruction and false statements.

But classified documents were also found at former Vice President Mike Pences Indiana home, and the documents were also discovered at President Joe Bidens former office in Washington, D.C. and his home in Delaware.

Will the current president and former vice president also be indicted? Heres what you need to know.

Timeline:The journey of Trumps classified documents

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence arrive in the Rose Garden to speak on COVID-19 testing at the White House in Washington on Sept. 28, 2020.

Mike Pence

The Justice Department informed Mike Pence earlier this month that it will not pursue criminal charges over classified documents found at his home.

In January, Pences attorney turned over about a dozen classified documents to the FBI. Federal officials later searched the home and removed another classified document, as well as six pages not marked as classified.

Pence agreed to the search, and his attorneys cooperated with federal officials without a warrant being issued.

Pence during a CNN town hall earlier this week said I had no business having classified documents in my residence, and I took full responsibility for it.

Officials did not immediately confirm why they declined to pursue criminal charges against Pence. Some differences between Pence and Trumps cases is the number of documents recovered from Trumps estate, and that some documents from Trump were seized under subpoena, among other factors.

Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, last month told USA TODAY in a statement, In the course of negotiations over the return of documents, President Trump told the lead DOJ official, anything you need from us, just let us know.

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heung accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Here's what to know:What does Trump's indictment mean? Can he still run for president?

Joe Biden

Justice Department officials have not confirmed whether they will indict Biden. Special counsel Robert Hur is leading an inquiry into the classified documents found at Bidens home and former office.

Bidens personal lawyers were clearing out a former office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in November 2022 when the attorneys found a small number of classified documents, about 10. Biden had used the office from 2017 to 2020.

Additional documents were discovered at Bidens residence in Wilmington, Delaware, in December and January.

After the classified materials were discovered at Biden's former offices, Bidens attorneys immediately contacted the White House counsels office, according to Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president.

The Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel has said a president is immune from prosecution while he is in office. However, Hurs investigation into Biden continues.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump was indicted over classified documents. Will Biden and Pence be?
A shark fin was seen above the water during the shark attack in Hurghada, Egypt, on June 8. Grigory Kataev via Reuters

A 23-year-old Russian man was killed by a shark in Egypt's Red Sea resort town of Hurghada.

His father said he watched helplessly as the "meat grinder" animal killed his son in 20 seconds.

A video of the attack shows the man shouting "papa" as the shark circles near a tourist beach.

The father of a 23-year-old man who was killed by a tiger shark in Egypt described the moment he helplessly watched his son being mauled to death.

"We went to the beach to relax," Yury Popov, a Russian national, told the Telegram news outlet 112. "My son was attacked by a shark. It all happened in seconds."

A video of the attack shows his son, Vladimir, flailing in the water and calling out "papa" as the shark circles him. People on the beach can be heard screaming in horror. Another video showed people swimming in the water, racing to escape the horrific scene.

Popov said that the situation was all the more shocking because it happened at what he thought was a safe beach.

"What kind of help can you give? This meat grinder happened in 20 seconds. He was just dragged under the water," Popov said.

Egypt's environment ministry confirmed that a man had been killed by a tiger shark in the Red Sea resort town of Hurghada on Thursday.

Vladimir had moved to Hurghada with his father and bought an apartment a few months prior, according to the Russian outlet Baza.

Some reports said that Vladimir's girlfriend escaped the waters and witnessed the attack from the beach  but this has not been confirmed.

Other videos show the animal being captured and taken to shore.

Tiger sharks commonly reach 10 to 14 feet in length and weigh from 850 to 1,400 pounds.

A tiger shark. Getty Images

Egypt's environment ministry said that the shark displayed "abnormal behavior" and would be studied to determine whether the animal was linked to previous shark attacks.

There were two deadly shark attacks in Hurghada last year: a Romanian woman and an Austrian woman were killed within days of each other near the area.

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It's rare for sharks to attack humans. Only five of the 57 unprovoked shark bites that were reported last year were fatal, according to the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File.

Sharks have been known to attack humans when confused or curious, and scientists have said there is no objective evidence that sharks bite humans because they want to eat them.

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(Bloomberg) -- Thomson Medical Group Ltd., a Singapore-based health-care company backed by tycoon Peter Lim, is in advanced talks to buy a controlling stake in Vietnams FV Hospital, people with knowledge of the matter said.

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Lims firm beat out the other interested candidates to remain in the bidding, the people said, asking not to be identified as the process is private. Thomson Medical is working with a financial adviser on the potential acquisition, the people said.

Quadria Capital, a health care-focused private equity firm, was exploring a sale of its stake in FV Hospital, which could fetch around $300 million to $400 million in a deal, Bloomberg News reported in 2022. Other owners of FV Hospital, including its co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jean-Marcel Guillon may tag along and sell part or all of their stakes, people familiar with the matter said at the time.

Discussions are ongoing and Quadria and Thomson Medical could still decide against a transaction, the people said. A spokesperson for Thomson Medical declined to comment, while representatives for FV Hospital and Quadria didnt respond to requests for comment.

Thomson Medical is currently in preliminary confidential discussions to explore a potential transaction, according to a Singapore Exchange filing Thursday. No definitive terms have been agreed, and the company will announce when there are material developments, the filing showed.

Shares of Thomson Medical jumped as much as 12% on Friday, their largest increase since March, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

FV Hospital was founded by Guillon and a group of French doctors in Ho Chi Minh City two decades ago, according to its website. It operates a 220-bed hospital with 950 service staff and runs an outpatient clinic in the Vietnamese city. The medical facilities also treat patients from the neighboring countries of Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.

Quadria bought a stake in FV Hospital for an undisclosed sum in 2017, according to a press release at the time. Other investors who participated in the investment include funds managed by Neuberger Berman Private Equity and DEG, the German development finance institution under KfW Group.

--With assistance from Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen.

(Updates with shares in sixth paragraph.)

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I feel responsible for these things, Jean Shin says during a tour of her studio, a converted three-story barn on the outskirts of Kingston, New York, that is filled nearly to the rafters with discarded items  brightly colored computer cables neatly coiled like snakes, fraying blue denim sliced into long narrow strips, and stacks of matchbook-sized museum photography slides, still bearing the careful handwriting of archivists and art history professors.

Shins work honors these and other cast-off items, assembling what some would call waste into elaborate narrative sculptures that often explore the lasting social and environmental impacts of American consumer culture.

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Naturally, Shin recycles even her own work.

A gallery show opening June 16 at Praise Shadows in the Boston area repurposes elements from two recent public art projects to create indoor sculptures on a much more intimate scale.

Jean is so prolific, says Yng-Ru Chen, her current gallerist and the founder of Praise Shadows. Once these huge installations for museums and outdoor spaces get dismantled, theyre packed into crates and stored in her studio where space is finite. No one sees them. One of her goals when we began working together was to extend the life of these important works.

For Second Skin, Shin reworked components of Freshwater, a complex living piece commissioned by the Philadelphia Contemporary last year that flowed polluted water from the Delaware River through a series of cascading glass orbs. Each hand blown glass vessel contained at least one live freshwater mussel. The mollusks strained impurities out of the water, spilling clean liquid into pools lined with thousands of shimmering mother-of-pearl buttons.

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I really felt like I needed to highlight issues of extinction, Shin says of the project, which was inspired by the boom-and-bust cycle of U.S. mother-of-pearl button manufacturing in the 1800s and 1900s. Many species of American river mollusks were overharvested, right as the introduction of dams further strained their populations.

Whole colonies collapsed. Some species vanished entirely.

Then the switch to plastics collapsed the pearl button market, leaving millions of these delicate fasteners boxed up in warehouses, unappreciated, gathering dust.

Meanwhile, rivers stripped of the natural filters that once extracted bacteria, algae and pollutants from their beds saw their water quality decline for several decades.

A lot of my works start as an experiment in the studio, and then they get transformed into what the site needs, Shin says. To build Freshwater, she had to enlist the help of manufacturers to donate deadstock buttons as well as scientists breeding new genetically engineered mussels to help restore balance to these fragile ecosystems.

Her installations are very labor-intensive, says Eva Respini, the former chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, who gave Shin her first major exhibition, at MoMA QNS in Queens, New York, back in 2004. She is incredibly collaborative and collegial and kind. That sense of generosity enables her to recruit all sorts of people to donate items for her work.

In Shins upcoming gallery show, one of the glass orbs from Freshwater sits atop a small pedestal, overflowing with iridescent buttons  like a mouth, glutted.

The other project Shin mined for Second Skin is Fallen, a piece she originally installed in the spring of 2021 at Olana, the former home of Hudson Valley painter Frederic Church, now a New York State historic site. A giant 140-year-old Eastern hemlock had died on the property, and as a sign of respect, Shin wrapped its trunk in a patchwork leather shroud, then laid it to rest on the grounds.

For that project, Shin researched the history of hemlocks in the Northeast and discovered that many of the Catskills old growth forests were wiped out in the 1800s as the leather tanning industry exploded across the region. Millions of hemlocks were stripped of their tannin-rich bark to cure leather, leaving the naked trunks to rot.

Because these trees have so many branches, you get a lot of knots in the wood, Shin says. So they were not valuable for lumber. Carpenters did not want them.

Reading about this staggering loss prompted Shin to pull out a cache of leather cutouts she had stored in her studio since 2016. During a residency at Materials for the Arts, a nonprofit repository for working artists in New York City, Shin unboxed several donations from Marc Jacobs and Chloe.

I found all of this beautiful brightly colored leather and knew immediately I would use it someday, Shin says. I just didnt know how.

The supple skins were likely leftover from accessories production, with holes cut into the hides suggesting a bag maybe, or a shoe.

Shin selected skins in colors she knew would complement the Olana landscape  mostly yellows, blues and browns  deeming the deep red, wine and pink hides she left in storage too violent. She cut, arranged, and stitched the pieces together herself, adding in a few scraps donated by upholsterers and used brass upholstery tacks to hold the shroud around the tree.

Fallen remained on the Olana grounds for six months, exposing the leather to the decaying wood, dirt, sun, wind and rain  all of which left their marks.

I love how you can still see the memory of the tree, Shin says of the sun-bleached patterns and stretch marks created by pulling the leather taut over stumps of severed limbs and rough bark. The story of the hemlock remains.

At the end of the installation, Shin painstakingly dismantled the shroud and washed and conditioned all of the leather  while dreaming up ways of repurposing it.

Jean is maybe the first artist ever to spend an entire MacDowell residency cleaning leather, Chen jokes of Shins stay at the artists colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, last winter.

Shin says the process felt a bit like a mourning ritual. These were all originally calf skins, she says. I decided I wanted to bring them back to the body.

Several sections have been sewn together to create a pair of wall hangings that do indeed resemble intact hides. Those hang from slender hemlock branches salvaged from the original tree.

Other leather pieces have been mounted on wooden boards using the leftover brass tacks, forming what look like three-dimensional paintings, with small branch stumps protruding through deliberate gaps.

The last of the hemlock branches Shin was able to save has also been wrapped in leather, forming leaning sculptures that rest against the wall similar to prototypes Chen sold at United Art in Miami last December. (They all went to major museum trustees and collectors.)

Sarah Arison, who chairs the boards of MoMA P.S.1 and YoungArts, a program Shin benefited from as a teenager and now assists as a mentor, purchased one of the limbs.

Jean is incredibly beloved and well-respected in the art world, Arison says. Not just as an artist but also as a mentor. She has always prioritized being a resource and leader for the next generation, which is rare for someone of her stature.

Shins Something Borrowed, Something Blue sculpture was permanently installed at a new Brooklyn Heights branch of the Brooklyn Public Library in February.



Respini, who will bring a Shin installation to the Armory show in Manhattan this fall, finds the artists work especially restorative at this particular moment. Theres a community aspect to her work, in the gathering of the materials, their meaning, how theyre used  and then reused  which is all very unique, Respini says. Weve just lived through the pandemic and a lot of unrest. Building something together via community is a really powerful statement we all need right now.

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Juneteenth, a day reserved for recognizing the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, is fast approaching. In 2021, Congress passed a bill to acknowledge June 19 as a federal holiday, but since then, only a handful of places observe it on the state level.

Yesterday (June 8), Nevada got on board with making Juneteenth sanctioned. Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo signed the bill into law, Fox 5 Vegas shared today (June 9). According to the outlet, local officials voted in favor of the measure 40 to one in the state Assembly and 19 to two in the state Senate. Other places that have adopted the day as a paid federal holiday include Texas, New York, Virginia, and Washington.

Today, I was honored to sign AB 140, which officially made Juneteenth a state holiday in Nevada. Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, and Im proud that Nevada will now recognize this holiday on a state and federal level. pic.twitter.com/eDxLySbok0  Governor Joe Lombardo (@JosephMLombardo) June 8, 2023

Democratic Assemblywoman Claire Thomas was in favor of the Nevada vote. As the first state to ratify the 15th Amendment, which gave African Americans the right to vote, Nevada has a long and proud history of supporting civil rights. By designating Juneteenth as a state holiday, Nevada continues to honor that legacy and celebrate the progress that has been made in the fight for equality, she shared. In addition to community leaders, many celebrities have also used their platform to spread awareness about the holidays history.

In a June 2020 interview with Yahoo! Finance, LL Cool J said, Its about time that people recognize the day worldwide. And let me tell you something, man, you know Blacks in America have come a long way but still got a long way to go. And theres a lot of remnants of, you know, systemic issues that still exist that try to exclude us from participating in certain things. Juneteenth began in Texas and signifies when the last Black people forced into slavery learned they were were no longer considered property. While President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to grant enslaved people freedom in the United States, many did not receive the news until 1865.

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The upper Fremont River winds through a meadow near Johnson Valley Reservoir in Fishlake National Forest in May 2007. | Ray Boren, Deseret News

This September, the Bureau of Land Management is planning to hold a lease sale in Utah that could consist of over 31,000 acres of public land being put up for auction to the oil and gas industry, including thousands of acres in Fishlake National Forest.

It is troubling that the BLM is moving forward with leasing here despite the fact that the existing resource management plan for the landscape is woefully outdated and fails to recognize the critical fish and wildlife habitat in Fishlake. Continuing to offer parcels for lease in this area without an adequate resource management plan and necessary reforms to the onshore oil and gas leasing program in place leaves our public lands, waterways and wildlife in this one-of-a-kind landscape vulnerable to irresponsible industry development.

Known for unparalleled outdoor recreation, diverse species of native and wild fish and crucial bodies of water, Fishlake National Forest is a significant part of Utahs ecosystems, communities and $12.3 billion outdoor recreation economy. Pursuant to the BLMs own guidelines, the agency should consider the parcels nominated for leasing in this special place as having low priority for leasing due to their important fish and wildlife habitat, and therefore not include them in the proposed sale. Furthermore, it is essential that the Fishlake National Forest Land and Resource Management Plan of 1986  a document that has not been meaningfully updated in over 35 years  is changed to reflect the most current data and information available for adequately managing and protecting the landscape.

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Under the current federal oil and gas leasing system, public lands with important values other than oil or gas, such as those in Fishlake National Forest, have been offered to industry at the expense of other uses, such as fish and wildlife conservation and outdoor recreation. For example, between 2012 and 2020, the BLM leased a staggering 5 million acres  roughly twice the size of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks combined  that are home to valuable fish and wildlife habitat but have only little or even no potential for energy development. It is clear that new rules for the public lands leasing system are essential for safeguarding our treasured landscapes and allowing for better management of the multiple uses that public lands offer.

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Last year, Congress took important steps to ensure oil and gas leasing on our public lands is done more responsibly. However, the immense value of the parcels currently under consideration for lease in this sale demonstrates that more work must be done in order to ensure the oil and gas industry is not prioritized above critical habitats, water resources and our local communities. The Department of the Interior must implement a robust, common-sense rulemaking that strengthens the BLMs current lease sale evaluation criteria to ensure that landscapes with important fish and wildlife values are protected from speculative oil and gas leasing. Additionally, bonding reform is necessary to mandate that, in areas where development does occur, oil and gas companies are held responsible for properly plugging and reclaiming any wells they drill so that Utahs sensitive landscapes, fish and wildlife, and taxpayers arent put at continued risk even after development operations have ceased.

The parcels of land in Fishlake National Forest currently under consideration for leasing are central to Utahs fish and wildlife habitats, economy and local communities. It is time for DOI to take broader action to improve how, when and where oil and gas leasing and drilling occurs. We cannot afford to jeopardize any more of our wild and native fish, public lands or the essential waterways upon which we all depend.

Scott Antonetti is the Chair of Utah Trout Unlimited and resides in Salt Lake City.
Once upon a time. Before Prince Harry met wife Meghan Markle, he dated Cressida Bonas for two years.

The pair sparked a romance in 2012 after being introduced by Harrys cousin Princess Eugenie. In his January 2023 memoir, Spare, the Duke of Sussex recalled a painfully awkward" moment from their first date.

I leaned in to give her a kiss, but my aim was off, he wrote. She turned, I tried again on the return trip and we managed something like a graze. When the prince called Eugenie to lament the less-than-smooth smooch, he learned that his cousin had already heard the story from Bonas.

But then came the good news, Harry continued. Cressida was game to try again.

With their lackluster first kiss behind them, the twosome continued to date for two more years. In Spare, the BetterUp CIO recalled the Bye Bye Man actress helping him mourn his mother Princess Diana's death years after the tragedy occured. (The late royal died at age 36 in an August 1997 car crash.)

During a 2014 ski trip to Kazakhstan, Harry's then-girlfriend asked him about Diana with just the right blend of curiosity and compassion." While answering her, he started to cry.

The prince wrote that the intimate moment marked his first time crying about his mothers death since her burial. "She was the first person to help me across that barrier, to help me unleash the tears," he penned. It was cathartic, it accelerated our bond and added an element rare in past relationships: immense gratitude.

Despite feeling indebted to the model, the Archewell cofounder broke up with Bonas shortly after the vacation.

There was massive affection, deep and abiding loyalty  but not love everlasting, Harry wrote of their 2014 split, noting that Bonas had always been clear about not wanting to take on the stresses of being a royal.

He recalled that Bonas didn't seem surprised when he told her he wanted to call it quits. "These things had been on her mind as well," he said. "'I've learned so much from you, Cress'. She nodded. She looked at the floor, tears running down her cheeks. Damn, I thought. She helped me cry. And now I'm leaving her in tears."

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Although their love story didnt last, the exes have seemingly remained on good terms. Bonas attended Harry and Meghans 2018 nuptials, donning a bespoke Eponine London dress and pink feathered fascinator for the occasion. The actress wed Harry Wentworth-Stanley in 2020 and the pair welcomed son Wilbur in 2022.

Harry and Meghan, meanwhile, share son Archie and daughter Lilibet, born in 2019 and 2021, respectively.

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Keep scrolling for a look at Harry and Bonas relationship over the years:
Robert Redford married artist Sibylle Szaggars in 2009

Manfred Segerer/ullstein bild/Getty

Robert Redford and his wife, Sibylle Szaggars, have plenty in common.

Both artists in their own right, the pair met in the late '90s at Redford's Sundance Mountain Resort, which he founded in 1968 along with the Sundance Film Festival. The legendary actor and the multimedia artist went on to wed in 2009 and have been together ever since.

Redford and Szaggars are also both environmental activists, and they have spent much of their relationship working alongside each other to protect the environment and advocating for environmental change through Szaggars' nonprofit, for which Redford serves as the vice president.

When it comes to their personal life, the couple are deeply private, and Redford rarely discusses their relationship publicly. However, in his 2011 cover story for AARP The Magazine, he said Szaggars, who is 20 years his junior, was a "very special person" and gave him a "whole new life."

So, what else is there to know about Robert Redford's wife? Keep reading to learn more about Sibylle Szaggars.

She's a multimedia artist

Stephan Schraps/Getty

Szaggars has been a visual artist for over forty years, channeling her passion for the environment through mediums such as oil painting, photography and performance art, according to her website. Her work has been displayed worldwide, including in Europe, Monaco, Peru, Singapore, Japan and the United States.

Her love for art started with her painting and sketching as a young girl, inspired by her travels with her family. She admired the indigenous cultures and ancient lands she observed and felt inclined to immortalize them in art.

In the mid-'90s, she painted a Buffalo series that depicted the environmental threats to the American Buffalo's wellbeing.

"I used the American Buffalo as a symbol for vanishing life," she told Big Life Magazine.

"From the beginning of my career as an artist, nature was the force that inspired me to be an activist from within my art, warning of the impending dangers of extinction, but also pointing out through color and beauty how incredible this earth is," she continued.

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She's from Germany

Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage

Szaggars was born in Hamburg, Germany, on April 14, 1957. In the 1980s, she moved to London and started her career as an artist.

Redford also spent some formative years in Europe. Before beginning his career in acting, Redford had wanted to be an artist and spent 18 months in Paris, painting and even sketching with chalk on sidewalks for tips, according to AARP The Magazine.

In the late 1980s, Szaggars moved to the U.S. and explored different picturesque states full of natural wonders across the Southwest, as well as Utah, per Big Life Magazine, where she would later meet and eventually settle down with Redford.

Redford and Szaggars have spent much of their life on the eco-friendly "Horse Whisper" ranch in Utah, which he owned for years and sold in 2021. They also have homes in New Mexico and California.

She didn't know much about Redford when she met him

Redford was divorced from his first wife, Lola Van Wagenen, when he met Szaggars at his Sundance Mountain Resort in 1996. She had come to ski and didn't know much about the actor.

In a panel for the YoungArts Salon in 2014, Szaggers revealed that Redford had invited her and a group of friends to dinner, and she thought, "Oh my god, I don't know any of his films."

She rented all of his movies and says she watched 15 minutes of each of them two nights before the dinner, just in case he would bring them up, but he didn't.

Redford said that her not knowing much about him actually attracted him to her.

"It was a wonderful beginning of a relationship, because it began as two human beings meeting each other and finding a connection as two human beings, rather than being colored by success," Redford said.

She and Redford have been married since 2009

Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection/Getty

Redford and Szaggars got married in a small, private ceremony at the luxurious Louis C. Jacob Hotel in her hometown of Hamburg, Germany, in July 2009.

The couple showed their creativity in their wedding style choices. Redford wore a white suit for the occasion, while Szaggars wore a champagne-hued gown, according to local reports.

She's dedicated to protecting the environment

Dominique Charriau/Getty

Szaggars' passion for environmentalism began when she was little; she spent extensive time traveling with her family and learning about indigenous cultures and ancient lands.

"I learned that all these people had one thing in common. They respected nature and the environments they lived in, and they celebrated Earth within their ceremonial acts," she told Big Life Magazine. "I was more than aware that Western or 'modernized' cultures had moved away from paying attention to all of this."

Environmentalism is an important cause to Redford as well. In a 2020 PEOPLE feature, the actor spoke about how an early trip to Utah with his mother sparked his love for the natural world and his desire to protect it.

"Since then, I have spent decades joining scientists and activists in trying to do whatever we could to raise the red flags about the catastrophic climate change we ourselves are responsible for," he said.

She founded a non-profit

In 2015, Szaggars founded The Way of the Rain, a non-profit organization dedicated to "developing, producing and performing educational and artistic performances  themed and designed to promote public awareness to support the protection of our Earth."

The non-profit was named after a performance art piece of the same name that Szaggars debuted in 2013, and Redford serves as the vice president.

She's a stepmom to Redford's children

Dave J Hogan/Getty

While Redford and Szaggars didn't have children together, she is a stepmom to Redford's children from his previous marriage.

Together, Redford and Van Wagenen had two daughters: Shauna Jean, born in 1960, and Amy Hart, born in 1970.

They also had two sons: Scott Anthony, who died of SIDS just two months after his birth in 1959, and James, who died at age 58 from liver cancer in October 2020.

James was an activist and filmmaker, much like his father. In 2005, James and Redford founded The Redford Center, a non-profit dedicated to producing environmental impact films.

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Officials in Egypt said they captured the shark responsible and will try and determine a reason for the attack

AFP via Getty Images Waters off of Egypt's southern resort city of Hurghada

A Russian man was fatally mauled by a tiger shark off the coast of Egypt, authorities said.

The victim, who was identified by Russian news agency TASS as a Russian man born in 1999 who lived in Egypt full-time, was swimming in the Red Sea near a resort in the city of Hurghada when the attack occurred on Thursday, according to The Guardian and Reuters.

Egypt's Environment Ministry later posted on Facebook that a tiger shark was responsible for the attack and had been captured, per Reuters.

Related: Shark Bites Teen, Marking Long Island's 6th Attack This Summer, on Same Day Dead Great White Washes Ashore

A video circulating online purportedly shows the moment the man was attacked. In the video, horrified beachgoers looked on and could be heard screaming, as rescuers attempted to save him, according to Reuters.

It happened in a second, a witness told Russian station REN-TV, per The New York Post. Rescuers reacted very quickly. For some reason, I immediately felt that it was a shark. I immediately jumped up and started shouting: Sharks, sharks! Save yourself! Nobody understood yet.



AFP via Getty Images Egypt's southern Red Sea resort city of Hurghada

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As a result of the attack, authorities closed a 46-mile stretch of coastline through Sunday, per the Associated Press. Egypt's Environment Ministry said it would try and determine a reason for the attack.

In a message, the Russian consulate in Hurghada urged tourists to stay vigilant in the water and to follow any local bans on swimming, per The Guardian.

Related: 'Really Brave' Girl, 10, Fights Off Shark That Almost Took Her Foot in Attack at Florida Beach

While tiger shark attacks are not common in the Red Sea, the area did see two such fatal attacks last year, per The Guardian. An Austrian woman and a Romanian woman were both killed last July in the same waters.

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Tiger sharks rank second behind great white sharks in unprovoked attacks, according to Florida Museums International Shark Attack File.



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Read the original article on People.
Sand from Mongolia travels hundred of miles before whipping an underprepared cosmopolitan Beijing. Glaciers melt and the sea rises. Smoke from wildfires lifts and swirls down from Canada and across Massachusetts, forcing some people indoors and endangering those with health conditions.

These are the effects of climate crisis, experts say. As our planet heats, more every year, the fuel for wildfire dries out, more cropland turns to dust and air patterns can be intensified. It's the new reality, not an anomaly.

Welcome to a wildfire smokeshow.

As haze penetrated deep down the East Coast this week, skies turned white or brown or gray, sunsets became dramatic, masks discarded from the pandemic were re-found and people with asthma and other lung and heart conditions worried and struggled. Runners canceled group plans for Global Running Day on June 7, and workers who can't miss a paycheck continued to labor outdoors.

In skies showing signs on Tuesday of smoke from Canadian wildfires, two jets could be seen flying over Hyannis near Veterans Park Beach.

"Its under-appreciated on the East Coast," said climate data expert Dr. Edward Kearns of First Street organization. "I think folks out West that live with a higher probability of wildfire, they appreciate it more because it often impacts their daily lives. But it is not just a western state problem, it is a whole country, whole continent, whole world problem."

The unhealthy air is expected to continue. The air quality index in Hyannis on Thursday afternoon was 110, which is unhealthy for sensitive groups. According to IQAir, the PM2.5 concentration in Hyannis on Thursday afternoon was 7.8 times the World Health Organization annual air quality guideline value. PM2.5 describes fine inhalable particles, with diameters that are generally 2.5 micrometers and smaller.

Three of the following four days were expected to be in the moderate air quality range. One day, June 10, was expected to be "good" in Hyannis.

@IQAir Not sure of the accuracy but this map suggests that right now Cape Cod is avoiding the worst of the #smoke, certainly compared with NY and DC.



Its like someone is trying to tell politicians than climate change is real and the effects inescapable. pic.twitter.com/zo8BXRnStO  Pippa Norris (@PippaN15) June 8, 2023

How far is the wildfire smoke traveling from?

Smoke from wildfires in Canada continued to drift into the U.S. this week, prompting air quality alerts. In addition, a wildfire in New Jersey caused travel problems in that state and added to the air quality issues in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic.

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Fires in the eastern Canadian province of Nova Scotia have prompted air quality warnings across the U.S. East Coast and elsewhere.

It's been a terrible season for wildfires in Canada. In total, more than 4 million acres have burned in 2,305 fires in Canada so far this year. As of June 7, Canada has 245 wildfires burning out of control, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, including dozens in Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia. Quebec alone has 154 active wildfires.

Canadian wildfire hotspots are seen on a National Weather Service map published Thursday, June 8, 2023.

According to the EPA:

Intense heat from by a wildfire drives smoke to a high altitude. It falls once it cools and as the smoke gets closer to the ground, "it becomes more diluted and often more widespread."

Smoke can travel thousands of miles, so the impact can reach far from the source of the fires. The same winds that can whip a wildfire into a frenzy also can carry the hazardous particles to distant cities.

Near-real-time air quality data and forecasts are available to the public via AirNow.gov, including continuous particle pollution data from over 1,700 monitors, and temporary monitors that monitor smoke on an hourly basis during a wildfire.

Are wildfires connected to climate change?

Yes.

Kearns said that rising global heating caused by manmade carbon emissions is providing better base conditions for wildfires.

"Wherever you have vegetation, you have fuel for wildfires, but on the East Coast there is an emerging risk," he said. "As the fuel gets drier with increasing air temperature, it doesnt take long for fuels to go to very dangerous."

NOAA prepared a wildfire report that pointed squarely at the climate crisis. "Research shows that changes in climate create warmer, drier conditions, leading to longer and more active fire seasons. Increases in temperatures and the thirst of the atmosphere due to human-caused climate change have increased aridity of forest fuels."

Information from NOAA shows the significant climb in impacts from wildfires in the United States during decades of mounting climate crisis. This doesn't measure impacts like Canadian smoke that drift in on the wind.

In some parts of the Northeast, the number of hot days per year is expected to double this year compared to a normal summer of several decades ago. The change is due to fossil fuel emissions trapping heat in the atmosphere. First Street and other weather and data partners forecast that some areas of the Northeast will experience triple the number of hot days every year by the end of this decade.

A hot day in Barnstable County is considered to be any day above a feels like temperature of 88 degrees, according to First Street data. Barnstable County is expected to experience seven hot days this year.

Due to a changing climate, in three decades, Barnstable County will experience 19 days above 88 degrees in a normal year.

Kearns says the plants, shrubs and trees in the Northeast only take 1,000 hours to dry out to wildfire-fuel condition.

In the past, wildfires have been more prevalent in the West. The East Coast will start to experience the same issues with global warming, he said, and governments and fire teams are not ready in this region.

U.S. Global Change Research Program prepared a special report for the Fourth Assessment of climate change as it surveyed climate studies related to things like wildfires:

Higher temperatures and vapor pressure deficits due to manmade climate change have increased forest fire activity in the western United States by increasing the aridity of forest fuels during the fire season.

Increases in these relevant climatic drivers were found to be responsible for over half the observed increase in western U.S. forest fuel aridity from 1979 to 2015 and doubled the forest fire area over the period 19842015.

Manmade climate crisis and the legacy of land use have an influence on U.S. wildfires and "are subtly and inextricably intertwined. Forest management practices have resulted in higher fuel densities in most U.S. forests."

The Cape Cod Times is investigating the effects of a rapidly heating planet on people who live in our area. Follow along with "City on Fire" as we report the struggle with summer temperatures, even in New England. This is part of the USA TODAY project Perilous Course. Contact reporter Heather McCarron to be included in a story if you have been affected by heat: expense of air conditioning or lack of it, health risks, less access to green space, concern about pets and animals in the summer conditions, worry about an older loved one, etc.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Canadian wildfires bring smoke, dust to Cape Cod, in satellite images
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell on Wednesday launched a campaign for U.S. Senate in Missouri as a Democrat, attempting to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Josh Hawley in 2024.

Bell, 48, the first Black county prosecuting attorney in St. Louis County history, would be the first Black senator from Missouri if elected. He will face former Marine Lucas Kunce and Columbia community activist December Harmon in the Democratic primary.

Bell, who ran a campaign for prosecutor focused on policing reform, was elected in a landslide upset in 2018 against Bob McCulloch, the longtime Democratic prosecutor who was heavily criticized for his handling of the 2014 killing by a police officer of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown that led to a wave of unrest in Ferguson.

A video announcing his Senate campaign uses clips from news coverage of the protests in Ferguson, with footage of Bell talking about the need for the community to get involved. In the video, he attacked Hawley for his infamous fist pump in solidarity with protesters outside of the U.S. Capitol shortly before it was attacked on Jan. 6, 2021.

When I faced chaos in Ferguson, I worked to calm tensions, Bell said in a news release. But when Josh Hawley was faced with chaos, he chose to inflame it. Missourians deserve a senator who will work to improve their lives, not a politician who throws bombs.

State Rep. Marlene Terry, a Black St. Louis Democrat who chairs the Missouri Legislative Black Caucus, praised Bells candidacy.

He would be a good choice for MO, Terry said in a text message. I would support him.

Nimrod Chapel Jr., president of the Missouri NAACP, said Bells entry into the Senate race highlighted the states long overdue need for good and reasonable Senate leadership.

Missouri needs a qualified and thoughtful leader, not an insurrection-cheering fist-pumping guy like Hawley who failed to prosecute civil rights crimes, has forgotten the Black and Brown people he asked to vote for him, and even now works to create division in our state, Chapel said in a text message.

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Chapel Jr. said the NAACP was looking forward to a statewide forum where candidates could discuss their records on civil rights.

Hawley is a polarizing figure in national politics, but he remains popular among Missouri Republicans. Bell will face long odds in the race to take the seat. Democrats havent won a Senate race in Missouri since 2012.

Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt defeated Democrat Trudy Busch Valentine by more than 13 percentage points last November in an open seat Senate race. Hawley won his 2018 contest against incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill by nearly 6 percentage points.

Hawley campaign spokesman Kyle Plotkin said in a statement that the senators team expects whoever emerges from the messy primary to be the darling of the woke left and raise tens of millions of dollars to try and buy this seat from Missourians.

Bells primary opponent Kunce mounted an unsuccessful primary campaign for the Senate in 2022. Running on a populist platform, Kunce raised significant money but struggled to win over the states Democratic establishment. He lost the primary race by less than 5 points to Busch Valentine.

Kunces campaign touted an endorsement from the AFL-CIO when asked about Bells candidacy.

This marks an important moment in the campaign as the states election-winning labor movement unites behind Kunce, a 13-year Marine veteran who has promised to be a warrior for working people in the U.S. Senate, said Connor Lounsbury, Kunces campaign adviser, in a statement that did not directly address the entry of the St. Louis County prosecutor.

Bell grew up in North St. Louis County, a predominantly Black part of the St. Louis region that includes Ferguson. Before becoming the county prosecutor, he served as a judge, law professor and public defender.

In 2015, Bell was elected to the Ferguson City Council where he was involved in negotiating a joint policing reform decree with the U.S. Department of Justice after the Ferguson unrest.

My dad spent 25 years as a police officer and my mom is a county civil servant. Growing up, my family taught me I had a responsibility to make a difference when I could, Bell said in the video.

As county prosecutor, Bell supported training for police, the purchase and use of body cameras and a pay raise for police.
In a public courtroom of the United States of America, in which a high-level criminal case is being tried, the prosecutors are permitted to press a buzzer on their table in the midst of argument to the court by defense counsel. The buzzer cuts off the courtroom's public address system, and then the judge silences the defendants lawyer. This happens whenever the prosecutor thinks defense counsel is about to reveal a state secret.

The use of this Soviet-style system to disrupt defense counsel in the middle of a sentence is a hallmark of proceedings at the military trials at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It is also profoundly unconstitutional.

This happened last week in the case of Encep Nurjaman, an Indonesian man whom the government calls Hambali, on trial for bombing a hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2003. Hambali and two colleagues have been in U.S. custody for nearly 20 years, at first at a CIA black site where they were tortured and since 2006 at Gitmo.

The hearings at which the government lawyers repeatedly interrupted defense counsel are essentially defense motions concerning speedy trial and use of evidence obtained under torture.

Hambalis military and civilian lawyers were arguing that his right to a speedy trial  guaranteed by the Constitution to all persons, not just to Americans  has been egregiously violated by holding him for 20 years before commencing his prosecution. Hambali also argues that the nature and extent of his torture and the identity of his torturers can be revealed to the jury if his trial goes forward.

The government argues that the reasons for the 20-year delay in prosecution and the nature and extent of his torture and names of his torturers are all state secrets.

Here is the backstory.

On Oct. 6, 1948, a U.S. government plane was leaving from Robins Air Force Base in Warner Robins, Georgia, for a round-trip flight to Orlando, Florida, when it crashed, killing its crew. When surviving family members sued the government to determine who manufactured the plane and why it crashed, the feds declined to provide any information asserting that what was sought constituted state secrets.

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In 1953, when the Supreme Court upheld this novel argument, it effectively changed the rules of evidence by permitting the federal government  without disclosing to a judge what the secrets are  to withhold evidence merely by making this claim.

Since 1953, the government has successfully asserted the state secrets claim dozens of times, each time claiming that the revelation of the so-called secrets will adversely affect national security.

In 2001, after the statute of limitations had long expired for any litigation over the 1948 crash, and reporters filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the alleged state secrets, a judge ordered the government to reveal them.

There were none.

The entire state secrets doctrine was based on covering up government embarrassment and wrongdoing, and shielding a government contractor from litigation, not the protection of legitimate secrets.

The state secrets doctrine is a fraud and has been used by the feds to cover up unlawful behavior for 70 years. And its employment by federal judges who have declined to require that the government produce the secrets for a judicial examination in secret  so the courts can determine if these secrets do exist and if their revelation would harm national security  is a craven rejection of a core judicial function.

United States Constitution

That function is to assure that trials are fair and their outcome is based on evidence, not deception.

The claim that the existence of wars that are now over somehow justifies the detention without charges of a person as to whom the government has no evidence of wrongdoing unobtained by torture, that somehow war justifies torture, and that somehow all of this can be kept secret are claims that violate the Constitution and the federal anti-torture statutes that all who work for the government have sworn to uphold.

The First Amendment guarantees transparency for the public. The Fifth Amendment guarantees due process for all persons. And the Sixth Amendment guarantees effective assistance of counsel. All were violated by the prosecutor's buzzer.

The government is slow to learn that even its most hardened enlisted military men cringe at torture. Indeed, in two trials thus far, juries have either acquitted or offered recommendations for clemency that a judge followed, not based on any inherent goodness within the defendant, but based on the torture visited upon him by the CIA or the American military.

It appears that the language Hambali's defense lawyer, a Navy lieutenant, was about to utter, would have hinted at the locations and duration of Hambali's pre-Gitmo detentions. But we will never know, as the lawyer was prohibited from telling the judge what he needed to say in order to vindicate his client's constitutionally protected rights. Of course, there is no procedure in place for defense counsel to use a buzzer to stifle the government.

Not only is this maddening to those of us who believe that the Constitution means what it says, but the types of so-called secrets that this lawyer needed to call to the courts attention in order to make his argument effective have already been spilled in other cases. Open sources will show any serious researcher the locations of American torture centers and the horrific medieval miseries produced there.

When the scales of justice are tipped to favor the government in a case involving murders in Indonesia 20 years ago that have nothing to do with American national security, when that imbalance permits the government literally to silence a defendants lawyer with judicial approval, and when the very persons who have sworn to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution can instead trash it, are anyones liberties safe in America?

What kind of a society prosecutes harmless drug users but not harmful government torturers? Ours.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court Judge, has published nine books on the U.S. Constitution.

Andrew P. Napolitano

This article originally appeared on New Jersey Herald: State secrets undermine American due process
Takeoff's mother is filing a negligence lawsuit against the venue where the Migos rapper was killed in November.

The rapper, born Kirsnick Khari Ball, was fatally shot after a private bowling alley party in Houston Nov. 1. The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences ruled his death a homicide and the next day listed the rapper's primary cause of death as "penetrating gunshot wounds of head and torso into the arm."

At the time, a police spokesperson said security guards who were in the area heard the shooting but did not see who fired the weapons. Now Takeoff's mother, Titania Davenport, is filing a lawsuit against the bowling alley seeking more than $1 million in relief, alleging property owners neglected to "provide proper and adequate security for the event."

The petition, filed June 7 to Harris County's District Court, alleges the rapper was "an innocent bystander" who was struck by stray bullets after an argument broke out on the balcony of Houston's 810 Billiards & Bowling.

Takeoff's mother is filing a negligence lawsuit against the venue where the Migos rapper was shot and killed.

"Defendants breached their duty owed to Kirsnick Khari Tiquon Ball by failing to exercise ordinary care to keep the premises safe," the petition obtained by USA TODAY reads.

Davenport's lawyers point to a "history of violent criminal activity" around the property located in a "high-crime" area as further reason for the venue owners to have protected the premises, calling the Takeoff's death a result of "conscious disregard."

Takeoff's mother, who is the administrator of her son's estate, is seeking a trial by jury for damages including personal injury, wrongful death, funeral expenses and mental anguish.

Born June 18, 1994, in Lawrenceville, Georgia, Takeoff grew up with his soon-to-be collaborators, Quavo and Offset. "I just always wanted to rap," Takeoff recalled of their upbringing in a 2013 Fader interview. "When Quavo was out doing sports, I was in the studio, what we call the bando, making music, going hard."

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Police arrest, charge suspect in Takeoff shooting

In December, police arrested and charged Patrick Xavier Clark, 33, for Takeoff's murder. He was released on a $1 million bond in January and was later indicted by a grand jury in May. Clark is expected to return to court in August.

Letitia Quinones-Hollins, one of Clarks attorneys, said the indictment was not unexpected.

"When we get inside a courtroom and in front of a jury, where we will be able to put on our evidence and cross-examine the states witnesses  we expect the jury will come back with a verdict of not guilty," Quinones-Hollins said in May.

ARREST MADE: Man charged of killing Takeoff 'believes he's innocent,' lawyer says

Contributing: Edward Segarra, USA TODAY; The Associated Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Takeoff death: Mom files lawsuit against venue where Migos rapper died
U.S. Department of Justice Wants Bittrex to Pay Penalties Before Customers

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) claims that the plan would unfairly prioritize the repayment of customers over the payment of penalties.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has objected to the bankruptcy plan of Bittrex, a cryptocurrency exchange that owes millions of dollars in fines to the government. The DOJ claims that the plan would unfairly prioritize the repayment of customers over the payment of penalties.

Bittrex filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November 2022, after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) charged it with operating an unregistered securities exchange and violating anti-money laundering rules. The regulators imposed a total of $80 million in fines on Bittrex, which it has not paid yet.

According to its bankruptcy plan, Bittrex intends to use its remaining assets, estimated at $200 million, to repay its customers who have been unable to access their funds since the exchange shut down. The plan also proposes to create a trust that would hold 10% of Bittrex's equity and distribute it to the government agencies once the company emerges from bankruptcy.

However, the DOJ argues that this plan violates the Bankruptcy Code, which requires that creditors with similar claims be treated equally. The DOJ says that the customers and the regulators are both unsecured creditors, and therefore should receive the same percentage of recovery. The DOJ also questions the valuation of Bittrex's equity and the feasibility of its reorganization.

The bankruptcy court will hold a hearing on January 15, 2023, to decide whether to approve or reject Bittrex's plan. The outcome of this case could have significant implications for the cryptocurrency industry, as it could set a precedent for how exchanges deal with regulatory fines and customer claims in the future.
TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS - Credit: Paramount Pictures

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts triggers a frisson not uncommon to happily mindless franchise movies. It exudes the energy of talented filmmakers trying to wring something creative, unique, or, heaven forbid, human, from a generic template, or trying to sneak just a little bit of flavor into the boxed mix. This palpable effort makes Beasts watchable on a moment-to-moment basis. It has talented actors, Dominique Fishback and Anthony Ramos, doing their best to interact with green-screen concoctions. It has a sense of humor. It has a Nineties hip-hop soundtrack put together by someone who knows and appreciates that music and understands how to utilize it for dramatic effect. In short, it has some of the joy necessary to counteract the paint-by-numbers numbness that often defines these affairs. And that qualifies as a minor victory.

That said, this is still a movie about warring space aliens that morph into high-octane vehicles and utter lines like, If we are to die, then we will die fighting all as one. Except this time, they have company in the form of metallic animals holding things down in Peru. Because, well, why not? The franchise started seven movies ago as a big-screen toy advertisement  the toys themselves hit shelves in 1984  and has continued to carve a blockbusting swath. The films, born as an offshoot of shiny metal baubles, are merchandise more than cinema, and ticket buyers are by now well familiar with the goods theyre purchasing.

More from Rolling Stone

Plot, you say? OK, if you insist. Noah (Ramos) is a Nineties Brooklynite looking after his kid brother and trying to make ends meet. He reluctantly tries to steal a Porsche, which turns out to be Mirage (Pete Davidson, being very Pete Davidson), a wisecracking Transformer who introduces the kid to the big guy, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, who has made a career on the benevolently growling, baritone role). It seems the pesky planet eater Unicron (Colman Domingo) and his chief minion Scourge (Peter Dinklage) are looking to devour Earth. To do so they need the ancient transwarp key, half of which sits in a museum, under the watchful eye of under-appreciated employee Elena (Fishback). (In a nice nod to film people, the half-key is encased in something that looks a whole lot like The Maltese Falcon). The other half is in Peru, which gives everyone a chance to go to South America and team up with the Maximals, led by Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), a 13-foot mechanical gorilla (shades of the awesomely, famously horrible 1953 B-horror turkey Robot Monster).

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Try not to think about it too much. Director Steven Caple Jr., who has done solid work with movies big (Creed II) and small (The Land), actually makes this task pretty easy. The interminable combat scenes arent visually incomprehensible. The performances are better than they have any reason to be; theres something pleasantly jarring about seeing Fishback in such a benign work after witnessing her sociopathic toxic fandom turn in TVs Swarm. And that soundtrack puts a hop in the movies entire step. The Porsche heist scene plays out to Digable Planets Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat). A damaged Bumblebee makes a grand reentrance to LL Cool Js Mama Said Knock You Out (dont call it a comeback). For a movie that starts and ends in Nineties New York, Rise of the Beasts sounds just about perfect.

Caple and his team understand that, beneath the mythical gobbledygook, these movies are about sensations and nostalgia. Beasts encourages you to let your eyes glaze over through the plot exposition and embrace the visceral nonsense. Beasts is dumber than a box of hammers, but it doesnt drip with the rote cynicism of, say, Fast X. It doesnt smirk at you. Theres something almost innocent about it, befitting a movie that counts Steven Spielberg as an executive producer (and that shamelessly shouts out E.T. and the Indiana Jones movies). Beasts puts its audience on cruise control, easy and painless. It makes the toy aisle look pretty good.

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We see a slender whale on a beach with yellow ties around its head and tail. The ties are attacked to an excavator.

A mysterious, deep-diving whale has died after a "highly unusual" stranding in Gloucester, Massachusetts  and it may have been infected with bird flu, scientists say.

The animal was still breathing when a response crew arrived on the scene at Wingaersheek Beach on May 18. The team had never seen anything like it before.

"It was alive when it initially stranded, and was noted to be somewhat lethargic, but still thrashing occasionally," said Brian Yurasits, a member of the Seacoast Science Center's (SSC) Marine Mammal Rescue team. The long-beaked creature looked like "a mix between a whale and a dolphin," Yurasits told New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR) .

Experts identified the 13.8-foot-long (4.2 meters) animal as a juvenile female Sowerby's beaked whale (Mesoplodon bidens)  one of the "deepest diving animals in the ocean," Yurasits said.

We see the body of a gray-colored whale on its side on the beach.

When the tide began to recede, the team decided not to move the whale back into the water due to concerns that it would cause the whale additional harm and distress. The animal was also far from its preferred habitat, which it may have struggled to get back to.

"[Sowerby's beaked whales] spend most of their time off of the continental shelf of the North Atlantic," Yurasits said. "You would never expect to see these things near shore, let alone in a few feet of water."

Related: Mysterious dead beaked whale covered in unusual injuries washes up on California beach

The whale died a few hours later. Under its stranding agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the SSC team called scientists at the University of New Hampshire to the scene for a full animal autopsy, known as a necropsy.

The results indicated that the beaked whale had a viral infection that caused its brain to become inflamed and swollen. "The degree of inflammation explains the death of this animal, as well as why it might have been disoriented and strayed into shallow waters," said Inga Sidor , a senior veterinary pathologist at the New Hampshire Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and lead veterinary pathologist on the necropsy.

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Scientists are still testing the animal's cerebral tissue to determine which virus caused the infection, but "avian influenza is a top consideration," Sidor told Live Science in an email. Only a very small number of cetaceans have been diagnosed with avian influenza, or bird flu, so "it'll be a big deal (at least in the marine mammal world) if it does turn out to be influenza," she added.

The whale's body was otherwise in good condition and showed no signs of injury or trauma.

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It is "highly unusual" for a Sowerby's beaked whale to become stranded, SSC staff wrote in a blog post . This recent beaching has given scientists a rare chance to study the enigmatic species, whose lifespan remains a mystery. "Although the loss of an animal like this is unfortunate, we don't often get the opportunity to examine a fresh specimen," Sidor said.

Sowerby's beaked whales can grow up to 21 feet (6.4 m) long and weigh 2,900 pounds (1,300 kilograms), according to NOAA Fisheries . Their range extends from cold, deep waters in the Norwegian Sea to the northeastern coast of Canada and south to the Canary Islands. To feed, these whales dive to depths of around 4,900 feet (1,500 m) and can spend half an hour below the surface.
Several senators from western states said at a hearing on the federal wildfire response Thursday that the heavy smoke blanketing much of the East Coast this week is bringing attention to what is a common problem in the West.

I think America is waking up, at least on the East Coast, to this problem, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said at the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing. We certainly have known all about it on the West Coast for some time now.

The East Coast, including Washington, D.C., remained engulfed in a smoky haze Thursday, as hundreds of fires continued burning in Canada. The smoke, which has produced air quality alerts for much of the Atlantic seaboard, is expected to stick around for several more days.

Im sure many of us have seen pictures of the thick smoke over New York City over the last couple of days, which yesterday had the very worst air quality among all the worlds major cities, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said at the hearing.

Most Easterners arent used dealing with this level of smoke, and by Easterners, I mean basically anybody to the east of Colorado, he joked. But this is an unfortunate recurring reality for us in the West.

Lee showed a picture of downtown Salt Lake City covered in a layer of smoke to the panel.

Thats just an August day, when wildfires burn in places like California, and then the smoke blows over to us, he said.

Western fires usually dont cause quite the national stir that weve seen in the last few days, even though this is something we deal with with some regularity, Lee continued. But they ought to be of concern to all of us because they do happen, and for us, they happen quite frequently.

Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) similarly suggested that the timing of the hearing was appropriate, given the impacts of the Canadian wildfires.

For those of you who live on the East Coast, welcome to our air in the West, Risch said. This is common. I dont remember a summer in Boise when we havent had smoke. Sometimes, its much worse than others. Weve had some summers that were really catastrophic in this regard.

But this is what with live with, and this is just the way it is, he added. So for me, from that standpoint, this is an important hearing; its an important issue.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
There arent many places like the Saddle Mountain State Natural Area. The 3,288-foot summit, nestled between Portland and Seaside, has rare views over the Columbia River, Pacific Ocean and Coast Range. It's home to unique flora and fauna and its towering old growth makes it a favorite hiking spot for many.

But Saddle Mountain has been closed on a regular basis, ever since 2020, by the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. They closed the park during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then they kept it closed due to staffing shortages. Now it remains closed due to "failed infrastructure and safety concerns."

Parks officials say a broken bridge and other hazards on the trail make it impassable for rescue teams carrying lifesaving equipment like gurneys. Officials are aiming to end the closure in late summer to salvage whats left of the recreation season while providing enough time in the interim to address necessary work.

Hopefully, we are able to open and we are trying to salvage some of this years recreational season, said Eric Crum, the North Coast district beach ranger for Oregon State Parks. Hopefully by late, end of summer, were trying to get it open by then.

Bulk of the work still ahead at Saddle Mountain

The parks issues go beyond a broken bridge near the half-mile mark. They include trail tread issues, a landslide area, broken crib walls and rusted, jagged gabion sections throughout the steep upper sections of the saddle. A common theme across most of the damaged sections is that while they are passable by a well-versed hiker, they're not passable for first responders carrying rescue equipment. Officials site this as one of the primary reasons the trail remains closed.

During the parks extended closure, not a whole lot has changed. Much of the physical work lays untouched. But to parks officials who aim to have the park reopened by late summer, slow progress is still progress.

I think it frustrates people when they see the park just sitting closed, Crum said. Theres a lot happening actually. Were going through the proper steps. We are trying to open.

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The broken footbridge nearly a half-mile into the Saddle Mountain trail.

One reason for the slow progress is getting required permits.

With the bridge failure for instance, I think a lot of people maybe think, Well, just put a new bridge in or just fix that, but its a little more complicated than that, Crum said. Theres a lot of process and a lot of permits that need to happen before you can just go build a bridge.

Before moving forward with work, state parks needs to get approval from local tribes, the State Historic Preservation Office, and numerous other permits and mandatory reviews.

Ranger Eric Crum standing atop the Saddle Mountain summit.

With so much work left to do and little time before the targeted reopening, officials have been forced to prioritize some work, put other things on the back burner, and move away from other features all together. This of course means significant work will continue after the parks reopening.

The broken bridge, however, is one thing parks officials will have done before the reopening. The repair plan is to reroute around it, or to rebuild it altogether. It is uncertain which way officials will go on this, but they have already received tribal approval for a slight reroute.

Campground out, new day use in

Saddle Mountain will look different when it welcomes back visitors later this summer.

The path to its striking saddle-shaped viewpoint and prominent basalt summit will likely be quite similar barring a slight reroute, but the area near the trailhead at the top of Saddle Mountain Road will host a variety of changes.

The view of Saddle Mountain from the new day use picnic area near the trailhead.

The small, yet beloved campground will no longer host overnight guests. While the parks inability to provide potable water is the primary reason for the move away from overnight stays, officials also cite intensified state park staffing issues and instances of theft at the campground as reasons to move on.

The transition to a vault toilet and no available drinking water no longer meets OPRD minimum campground standards," said park manager Ben Cox. "There were also high levels of vandalism and theft when the campground was operational. While the labor burden to operate a remote campground at acceptable service levels is a challenge, the choice was really to focus on better day-use experiences at Saddle Mountain.

Officials foresee not all changes to the park will be unwelcome. The day use area will be improved, and recent forestry work allows for views of the mountains summit from the picnic tables, which sit in an expanded space a short walk from the parking lot.

A silver lining

Following Crums truck past the two gates up the access road on a recent day, it struck me I was likely one of few people to make it this far in the better part of three years, at least legally.

Maybe it softens the blow to think of the public access hiatus as a brief respite for the ecosystem, a break from the chaos and crowds that can come with ecotourism.

There was no shortage of reminders of this as I hiked with Crum up to the summit. The trail had become overgrown with native vegetation and wildflowers, the muddy sections covered with the tracks and scat of elk, cougar, coyote and deer. There were elk scrapes on alder trees beside picnic tables not used in years.

The overstory offered a constant buzz of birds. Crum attributed the chirps, whistles and croaks to rare birds.

When the park reopens later this summer as a day use only destination, perhaps the new era will help carry on the beautiful, cyclical trend of natures return.

Charles Gearing is an outdoors journalism intern for the Statesman Journal. He can be reached at cgearing@gannett.com

This article originally appeared on Salem Statesman Journal: Oregon's Saddle Mountain has been regularly closed since 2020
An 18-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly trying to raise money for ISIS through a gift card scheme on the dark web.

Mateo Ventura, from Wakefield, Massachusetts, was arrested for knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources that he intended to go to a foreign terrorist organization, namely the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), according to a statement from the U.S. Attorneys Office of Massachusetts released on Thursday.

MORE: Woman charged with hate crime after stabbing student of Chinese descent multiple times in head on bus

Ventura allegedly provided multiple gift cards to an individual that he believed was an ISIS supporter with the intention that those gift cards subsequently be sold on the dark web for slightly less than their face value. The proceeds and resulting profits from those sales would then be used to support ISIS, authorities said.

Ventura allegedly stated that he wanted the proceeds to go to ISIS for war on kuffar, (disbelievers), the U.S. Attorneys Office of Massachusetts said in their statement announcing the charges against Ventura. In total, it is alleged that between January and May 2023, Ventura donated $705 intended to support ISIS.

PHOTO: Paul Ventura, father of 18-year-old Mateo Ventura, both of Wakefield, Mass., displays a photograph on his cell phone that shows what he describes as a photo of himself and his son Mateo, right. (Steven Senne/AP)

If convicted, the punishment for knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison, up to a lifetime of supervised release and a fine of up to $250,000, authorities said.

Ventura appeared in federal court before U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge David H. Hennessy on Thursday. It is unclear when Ventura will next appear in court.

MORE: Young couple shot dead by their landlord over alleged tenant dispute, police say

Sentences are imposed by a federal district court judge based upon the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and statutes which govern the determination of a sentence in a criminal case, the U.S. Attorneys Office of Massachusetts said. The defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

The investigation is ongoing.

18-year-old arrested for raising money for ISIS through gift card scheme on dark web originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
West Ham are 90 minutes away from a European final (AP)

West Ham know an away draw will be enough for them to progress to the Europa Conference League final as they visit AZ Alkmaar.

The London club take a 2-1 advantage through to the second half of the tie, fighting back from behind to emerge on top in a relatively even first leg.

With Premier League safety almost certain, David Moyes elected to rest some of his first-choice side in the weekend defeat to Brentford to afford them fuller focus on this encounter.

But the veteran Scottish manager will be wary of a good AZ team who showed their scoring prowess with a 5-1 victory in the Eredivise between the two legs.

Heres everything you need to know.

When is AZ Alkmaar vs West Ham?

The second leg of the Europa Conference League semi-final is due to kick-off at 8pm BST on Thursday 18 May at the AFAS Stadion in Alkmaar.

How can I watch it?

Viewers in the United Kingdom can watch the match live on BT Sport 1, with coverage on the channel from 7.15pm BST. Subscribers can also stream the action via the BT Sport app or online player.

Team news

Pascal Jansen has Jesper Karlsson and Dani de Wit back at his disposal, boosting his forward options as the AZ manager tries to engineer a second leg turnaround. Defender Bruno Martins Indi remains out.

West Ham manager David Moyes was concerned about the fitness of Michail Antonio at the weekend after the striker missed the defeat to Brentford with a calf issue. If Antonio is unable to feature from the start, Danny Ings would lead the line with Gianluca Scamacca still sidelined. This game may come too soon for right back Vladimir Coufal, who is nearing a return from a hamstring injury.

Predicted line-ups

AZ XI: Ryan; Sugawara, Beukema, Hatzidiakos, Kerkez; Reijnders, Mijnans, Clasie; Odgaard, Pavlidis, Van Brederode.

West Ham XI: Areola; Kehrer, Zouma, Ogbonna, Cresswell; Soucek, Rice; Bowen, Paqueta, Benrahma; Ings.

Odds

AZ win 32/19

Draw 28/11

West Ham win 17/10

Prediction

This one could go all the way to penalties - and end in another European semi-final exit for West Ham. AZ 2-1 West Ham (3-3 agg. - AZ advance on penalties)
local people walk on a flooded street caused by heavy rain (AP)

Death toll from cyclone Mocha, the deadliest storm to strike Myanmar, has risen up to at least a hundred as its impact is felt across Bangladesh and northeast India as well.

Although the exact death toll is yet to be known, residents of the western region told news agency Reuters that at least 100 people had died and many more were missing and feared dead.

AFP news agency quoted local leaders stating that the death toll stands at 41.

Activists have also raised concerns over aid efforts being hampered in the least developed Asian country. The area where the cyclone hit was home to many Rohingya refugees.

The cyclone, packing winds of up to 210kph (130 mph), ripped off roofs, caused severe flooding in the state capital Sittwe, and severely disrupted infrastructure.

One resident, who preferred to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, told Reuters that he visited multiple villages in the aftermath of the cyclone and estimated the death toll of Rohingya Muslims to exceed 100.

Two other residents and a diplomatic source also confirmed a high number of casualties.

Myanmar Now, a local news portal, stated that hundreds were feared dead, while aid groups acknowledged a "significant number of deaths."

Myanmar's state media, on the other hand, reported three fatalities.

The damage caused by the cyclone, combined with ongoing restrictions imposed by Myanmar's military government, has hindered relief efforts and communication.

NGOs operating in the area expressed difficulty in obtaining accurate information, exacerbating the challenges in responding effectively to the crisis.

Its difficult to obtain accurate or up to date information, which also makes responding to the crisis adequately even more difficult, said Manny Maung of Human Rights Watch, adding that many were missing and feared dead.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) highlighted that even before the cyclone, approximately 6 million people in the region required humanitarian assistance, including 1.2 million internally displaced individuals affected by ethnic conflicts.

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Rakhine State is no stranger to disasters, having previously faced the devastation of Cyclone Nargis in 2008, which claimed nearly 140,000 lives.

The current storm's destruction, coupled with damaged communication and road infrastructure, has made it challenging to assess the extent of the damage and provide aid promptly.

This satellite image provided by India Meteorological Department shows storm Mocha intensify into a severe cyclonic storm (AP)

Prior to the cyclones landfall, approximately 400,000 people were evacuated in Myanmar and neighboring Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, at least 236 houses and eight refugee camps were reported damaged in the northeastern Indian state of Mizoram, officials said.

A total of 5,749 people in more than 50 villages were affected by the powerful winds. However, there were no reports of fatalities.

Bangladesh, which was largely spared by the cyclone, faced its worst power cuts in over seven months as the deadly storm forced the closure of both its floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, less than a month after a scorching heatwave caused widespread outages in the south Asian country.

Climate experts have raised concerns that there has been a substantial increase in cyclonic activity in South Asian waters, which is linked to rising ocean temperatures.

Warming in the oceans has led to higher evaporation and increased availability of moisture due to global heating. Experts said cyclones can now retain their energy for many days and cause extensive devastation.

Weather conditions in the ocean are very supportive for rapid intensification of the system, said Roxy Mathew Koll, climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and Lead IPCC author.

Cyclones nowadays can retain their energy for quite a long number of days. One example of this trend was cyclone Amphan which continued to travel over land as a strong cyclone and resulted in massive devastation.

As long as oceans are warm and winds are favourable, cyclones will retain their intensity for a longer period, he adds.

According to a new rapid analysis led by professor Ralf Toumi of Imperial College London, a cyclone like the one that made landfall in Myanmar is now about 50 per cent more likely to happen, because of the climate crisis.

Tropical cyclones are one of the most devastating natural disasters, costing more than half a million lives all over the world in the last five decades.

The Indian Ocean region, including the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, is of particular concern because of the high population density along its coastlines.

Additional reporting by agencies
This article originally appeared on Outside

It's popular to shit on overlanding right now. Like any trend, this one has progressed from an underground activity, through booming popularity, and into the stage where people now act too cool for it. Whether or not it has the staying power to become a permanent part of the outdoor world remains to be seen, but I hope it can.

Two people who have recently been critical are my friends Jakob Schiller and Seiji Ishii. Jakob wrote a piece here on Outside calling out all the reasons why a near-$100,000 bulletproof camping trailer is overkill, and arguing it's representative of a larger trend where people in overlanding are prioritizing things over experiences. Writing on GearJunkie, Seiji basically argues overlanders are snobs, and vehicle-based camping is great no matter if you're sleeping in a ground tent, or like him, a six-figure custom van that comes complete with a battery-powered air-conditioner.

Not only do I believe both arguments are flawed, but they're also indicative of some wider misconceptions about the overland world. And they limit the ability of both enthusiasts and the wider outdoor community to make the most of what is a genuinely useful way to access more and better outdoor experiences.

The view from a campsite I drove my truck to. (Photo: Wes Siler)

I'll start by using my friend Connor as an example. His path into overlanding is full of the type of decisions that people like to criticize, but is also empowering him to spend more time outdoors in far-flung places.

Connor moved to Bozeman, Montana, and bought a house around the corner from me during the pandemic. Since he's also into activities like fishing, hunting, backpacking, rafting, international travel, dogs, and more, we hit it off immediately. He's helping me get better at fly fishing, and I'm correcting what I see as the biggest gap in his outdoor skills--the ability to use a vehicle to access all the places we want to do those things, while remaining safe through the often extreme and completely unpredictable weather we get in the mountains.

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Connor figured the easiest, fastest way to do that would simply be to copy my solution. So, he bought a brand-new Ford Ranger, then spent close to $20,000 upgrading it with stuff like a GoFastCamper, fancy Old Man Emu suspension, ARB protection parts and driving lights, a quality winch, and some really good BF Goodrich all-terrain tires.

Since the worst parts of winter wrapped up a couple weeks ago (this is Montana, remember), Connor and his wife have been out camping a few nights a week. And, last weekend, I started the process of showing him how to get the most out of all of his expensive new stuff by taking him up a difficult off-road trail to a high alpine lake.

Just a normal view out of my GoFastCamper (Photo: Josh Walker)

Connor, who doesn't talk much, made two remarks during the trip.

One: "I can't believe how easy this is."

Two: "I'm going to bring my wife back here next weekend to catch fish and camp out."

Do you need to blow something like $60,000 (the price of the truck, plus overlanding add-ons) to reach that lake? Of course not. A crappy old 4Runner or similar would get there just fine. And Walmart will sell you a basic camping setup for $100 or so. What Connor netted himself by spending more money is an inarguable boost to outright vehicle capability, safety, reliability, comfort, and convenience. It's what made that challenging trail feel so easy.

How'd he justify all that money? Well, he'd been budgeting for a new F-150 with a few luxury features. That's a totally normal truck driven by millions of totally normal Americans. By going with a more affordable vehicle with fewer frills, he was actually able to add all those overland upgrades, and get away with a total spend that's several thousand dollars less than the price of a truck that sits in millions of totally normal people's driveways.

At 80 miles from the nearest paved road, through inhospitable desert with no access to water, the only other way into this campsite is by helicopter. (Photo: Wes Siler)

What's he doing with it? Well, Friday after work, he and his wife are planning on hopping into it, driving back up to that lake, catching a few fish, letting their dog run around, and spending a nice night under the stars--all in a place far beyond most peoples reach. Despite the headline price tag, I'd argue that's a much better use of Connor's vehicle budget than a stock truck that would pop its economy tires at the first sign of a rock.

Where does a bulletproof trailer fit into all that? While it may not be appropriate for Jakob's needs, I can totally see it working for a family that wants a comfortable, safe place for children to sleep while camping. Maybe they live in a big city, need to park on the street, and are worried about the totally normal problems of theft and vandalism. Is it pricey? It's way outside my budget, and I'm famously unable to produce human offspring. But, for a family living in say, San Francisco, it might be just the ticket to spending a lot more time outdoors. And in the context of Bay Area home prices, plus hotel rates at common California vacation destinations, spread over years of not having to worry about replacing broken windows, it might make sense.

Dear Overlanding Haters, You Are Wrong About These Things

1. Its A Costly And Underutilized Hobby

To Jakobs point, are there people spending too much time and money on overlanding, rather than actually going out and using these rigs as intended? Sure. But how is that different from every other outdoor hobby? My expensive non-woven Dyneema backpack is gathering dust in my gear closet as we speak, another weekend full of family obligations keeping me off the trail. I may not be the most committed backpacker out there, but I know Im going to get more out of the increasingly rarer trips Im able to take thanks to the seven-pound base weight Ive spent decades perfecting.

2. The Environmental Impact Sucks

Another common criticism of overlanding is the activity's environmental footprint. Let's look at two trips I'm currently planning. The first is to Maui, to spend some time with my wife's entire extended family. Two economy class tickets (emissions vary heavily by cabin) from Bozeman to Kahului through SeaTac and back would net 2.88 metric tons of carbon emissions, according to the calculator at CarbonFootprint.com. Then, this fall, we plan to drive to Baja Sur, where we'll stay for a few months before driving back.

Figuring 4,500 miles of total driving at 12 MPG (fuel economy is massively reduced off-road and the trip will take place both on and off road), net carbon emissions from our drive should be 2.63 metric tons. The common misconception that the kind of totally normal vacation that totally normal people take is more harmful to the environment than a very adventurous overlanding trip in a very modified truck is indicative of that fact that all of us are likely emitting far more carbon than we think, and it's not always coming from activities considered outside popular norms. (Nows probably a good time to remind you that off-roaders dont actually drive off road.)

Expensive? Yes. More comfortable, and a lot more fun than a pricey hotel? Also, yes. (Photo: Stuart Palley)

3. You Can Just Get There On Foot

The final criticism is one I frequently get but have never understood: Why cant we just hike instead? Well, we do. Just like my wife and I plan to hike to the summit of Haleakala after flying to Maui and renting a car, we'll get exercise by hiking with our dogs every day that we're down in Mexico. The big difference will be that the paved trailhead at that volcano is going to be a lot more crowded than ones we 44 into down in Baja. The entire point of building or buying an overland vehicle is to access remote destinations more easily, and more comfortably. Spend as much time as we do chasing outdoor activities, and I think you'll understand what an upgrade driving a capable, safe, reliable, comfortable, and convenient vehicle brings to our lives. Heck, drive such a vehicle and you might be able to spend as much time outdoors as we do.

The Bottom Line: Overlanding Isnt All Bad

Is this snobbery, as Seiji argues on GearJunkie? I've met loads of friends overlanding, including him. We were both camping on a beach down in Mexico. He had a $500 ground tent, I had a blanket. (Definitely a smart move on his part.) That first night, I was attacked by sand fleas resulting in head-to-toe bites that took months to stop itching. We still had a great time eating tacos, drinking beers, and soaking in some sun. Great trip, but I sure wish I'd taken the time and effort to bring better gear. That'll just be something he and I can laugh about next time we go car camping.

Overland travel--driving a vehicle places to do cool stuff--is an activity virtually all of us outdoorsy types are already engaged in. You can choose to hate on that fact, you can choose to take preparing for it way too far, or you can simply enjoy it. And like anything else that can be enjoyed, it can be enjoyed more the more you learn about it.

For exclusive access to all of our fitness, gear, adventure, and travel stories, plus discounts on trips, events, and gear, sign up for Outside+ today.
John Amos is shutting down claims that he is a victim of elder abuse.

After his daughter Shannon Amos launched a GoFundMe page seemingly on his behalf, claiming the Good Times star suffered "elder abuse and financial exploitation," John has released a statement expressing that he's doing just fine.

Parade spoke directly with John's rep, Belinda Foster, who shared the following statement on behalf of the 83-year-old TV legend:

"I wish to make a statement for the record that I am doing well. I appreciate everyone's concerns but again, please understand that this GoFundMe campaign is not one that is accurate or authorized by me. Thank you, John Amos."

Foster made it clear to Parade that John was "not fighting for his life, and he's not in ICU."

The publicist for AWJ Platinum PR said the West Wing alum's recent medical attentionwhich she categorized as "a little tune up"was for fluid in his legs.

This update comes less than a day after Shannon appeared to create a fundraising effort on behalf of her father. She wrote on the GoFundMe page, "On May 14th of this year, I received a distressing call from my dad, who was hospitalized far away in Memphis, Tennessee."

The statement continued, "Though I was out of the country, we managed a brief FaceTime conversation before his pain became too unbearable. Desperate, I reached out to a family friend, who flew to Memphis while I prepared to join them. What we found shattered our world: my dad fighting for his life in the ICU."

"During the following weeks, my family and I unraveled a horrifying truth," the note read, "my dad had fallen victim to elder abuse and financial exploitation. Determined to seek justice, we a are working closely with the Colorado Bureau of Investigations and the local Sheriff's Department in my father's home state."

Later, in a since deleted Instagram post, Shannon noted, "All due respect to my father's response, I understand that this is embarrassing and upsetting, and probably not what he would have wanted me to do, but it is in his best interest."

Parade has reached out to Shannon directly and has not heard back.
Heather Graham recently wrapped up her movie, Chosen Family, and shes taking some QT at a beach in Jamaica, as one does.

The 53-year-old actress-director just dropped a slew of shots of herself cruising white sandy beaches in a white string bikini that showed just how fit shes looking these days. Theres Heather strolling along the shore with her toned abs and sculpted legs on full display; a close-up of Heather in the water, looking all kinds of strong; Heather perched in a chair showing a hint of her toned booty; Heather and a pal poolside; and Heather goofing off in a tub.

Grateful I got to spend time on this beautiful beach with @feministabulous!  she wrote in the caption. People totally freaked in the comments. There is a God, one wrote. Are you aging backwards?! Roller girl didnt even look this good!  another said. You dont age! Looking fabulous, said a fan who just had to reiterate how fresh Heather looks.

OK, so whats Heather doing to look so strong? Shes big into yoga, for starters. I do more vinyasa, power ashtanga, she revealed on the talk show Harry five years ago. (She then proceeded to show off some seriously impressive moves.)

She also showed off her flexibility while doing yoga on the beach with actress Nina Bergman in 2021:

My yoga teacher in L.A. is a friend, and Ive often said her classes are like healthy raves," Heather previously told Woman & Home. She plays upbeat music, which not a lot of yoga teachers do, and it distracts you from the pain.

Im obsessed with yoga. For fun, I would go on a yoga retreat and do four hours of yoga a day, she told Refinery 29 in a 2013 interview. Pilates is also in the mix, according along with dancing.

Heather is also just active. She regularly shares pics of herself doing outdoorsy thing, including biking around Aspen, Colorado:

On the food front, Heather told Woman & Home that she likes to make her own meals. I cook healthy food, and love getting creative with saladsone of my favorites is a salad with broccoli, hazelnuts, feta cheese, and cherry tomatoes. Its delicious, she shared. Also in the mix? Guac. Guacamoles a bit of an obsession of mine. I make loads of it, Heather said.

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Sugar is also a no-no for Heather. I do eat sugar sometimes, but as a broad rule, I try to just eat no sugar basically, and I have to say I feel a lot better, she told Refinery 29. And I will sometimes eat things with white flour, but I try to avoid white flour.

Enjoy that time off, Heather!

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(Bloomberg) -- The United Arab Emirates clean energy producer Masdar aims to sell its first ever green bonds within weeks to help fund an effort to boost renewable energy generation capacity five-fold by the end of the decade.

Most Read from Bloomberg

We are looking to issue a green bond, hopefully this month, Mohamed Jameel Al Ramahi, Masdars chief executive officer, said in an interview in Astana, Kazakhstan. The company will look to raise between $500 million and $700 million in the initial bond sale, he said.

Securities linked to clean energy are attracting more capital as companies and nations look to cut emissions to fight global warming by diversifying supplies away from hydrocarbons. The UAE was the first Persian Gulf oil state to declare a net zero target for carbon emissions by 2030, even though OPECs third-biggest producer still invests billions to boost oil and natural gas output.

Masdar has a humongous target to boost solar and wind power capacity to 100 gigawatts by 2030 from above 20 now, an effort that will require the company to buy assets and project developers as well as building its own projects, Al Ramahi said. It already has a diverse portfolio ranging from solar power in Abu Dhabi to offshore wind in the UK.

You cant achieve that target with just one approach to market, he said. Masdar is actively pursuing several deals, he said, without giving specifics. The US is a top priority for investment, while Masdar hasnt yet found good opportunities in China, Al Ramahi said.

The country is hosting the UNs major climate summit later this year, amid controversy that Masdars Chairman Sultan Al Jaber, who also heads Abu Dhabis government-owned oil and gas company, is leading the meeting. Al Jaber, speaking in Bonn on Thursday, said the phase-down of fossil fuels is inevitable, without providing estimates by when that would happen or proposing steps to accelerate that.

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
Huawei logo

Huawei could be banned from developing critical 5G network infrastructure in the European Union (EU) as soon as next year, the Financial Times (FT) reported earlier this week.

According to the publication, Brussels is discussing the option of banning not just Huawei, but all companies that deemed a security risk. Its advocating the ban on a bloc level mostly because individual member states (Germany included) arent moving fast enough with the blocs recommendations on the topic of 5G and cybersecurity.

The recommendations discuss requiring various certifications from companies seeking to build out critical 5G infrastructure, as well as the necessary diversification of suppliers - but no outright ban has been stated.

EU members slow to respond

Three years ago, all member states agreed on the recommendations, but are now being too slow with implementing them, the publication claims.

Right now, a third of EU member states banned the Chinese telecommunications giant from building critical 5G infrastructure. The EU's internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, recently told the blocs telecom ministers that more countries need to chime in:

This is too few. And it exposes the unions collective security, he said. The blocs executives will meet next week to discuss the recommendations.

Its unlikely that the current European Commission will conclude the work on any new regulation, the FT says, arguing that its doubtful well see anything concrete this year. It also added that the European Parliament is notorious for being slow in adopting new regulations.

Read more

> Huawei hopes to release 5G phones despite US sanctions



> US and EU warn Malaysia on Huawei 5G deal



> Check out the best Mobile Hotspots right now

Commenting on the news, Huawei reiterated its previous stance, that theres zero evidence of its involvement in anything illegal, and that politicizing cybersecurity evaluation isnt the heading the EU should be taking:

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Assessing cyber security risks without sticking to technological standards, or excluding specific suppliers from the system without proper technological evaluation, is a violation of the principles of fairness and non-discrimination, and also against the laws and regulations of the European Union and its member states, Huawei allegedly said.

No court has ever found that Huawei had engaged in malicious intellectual property theft, or required Huawei to pay damages for infringement on others intellectual property.

Huawei has been at the center of cyber-controversy since the Trump administration accused it of working with the Chinese government. Back then, the US government argued that Huaweis 5G infrastructure could be used by the Chinese government to spy on users which, in this case, would be Western diplomats, journalists, and other individuals of interest.

Huawei was banned from developing critical 5G infrastructure in the US, as well as a number of other countries around the world.

These are the best phones right now

Via: FT
Despite its humorous likeness to a Jack Daniel's bottle, the whiskey brand took trademark squeaky toy seriously.

Shutterstock

For nine long years, Jack Daniels has been engaged in a steadily escalating legal battle against VIP Products, an Arizona company that makes the Silly Squeakers line of dog toys. The companys chewy toys parody the appearance of alcohol and soda packaging, turning Kendall Jackson wine into a plastic bottle of Kennel Relaxin, rebranding Bacardi into Bark Party, and making chewable soft cans of Panta soda.



Jack Daniels has never been impressed by VIPs squeaky version of its Tennessee whisky, and filed a cease and desist in 2014, in the hopes that the company would stop making its Bad Spaniels toy, which replaces Jack Daniels familiar label with one that says 43% Poo by [Volume] and The Old No. 2, on your Tennessee Carpet. VIP Products has consistently fought back, and this case has worked its way from lower courts to the Ninth Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court itself.

Related: An Entire Tennessee Town Is Covered in 'Whiskey Fungus'



On Thursday, the nine Justices ruled unanimously in favor of Jack Daniels, tossing the Ninth Courts previous ruling that Bad Spaniels was a parody that should be protected by the First Amendment and that whole right to free speech thing.



This case is about dog toys and whiskey, two items seldom appearing in the same sentence, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her opinion. [VIP Products] jokes did not impress petitioner Jack Daniels Properties. It owns trademarks in the distinctive Jack Daniels bottle and in many of the words and graphics on the label. And it believed Bad Spaniels had both infringed and diluted those trademarks. Bad Spaniels had infringed the marks, the argument ran, by leading consumers to think that Jack Daniels had created, or was otherwise responsible for, the dog toy.



(As a side note, Kagan didnt seem to be totally impressed by Bad Spaniels either: What is there to it? What is the parody here? Kagan asked VIP Products attorney during oral arguments in March. Because maybe I just have no sense of humor. But whats the parody?)

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As reported by Reuters, although the Court noted that the decision was narrow, it ultimately decided in Jack Daniels favor, ruling that the Bad Spaniels toy was not an expressive work covered by VIP Products First Amendment rights. [I]t is not appropriate when the accused infringer has used a trademark to designate the source of its own goods  in other words, has used a trademark as a trademark, Kagan continued. That kind of use falls within the heartland of trademark law, and does not receive special First Amendment protection."

Related: This Tennessee Distillery Is the Most Visited in the World



Representatives for both Jack Daniels and the Distilled Spirits Council both seemed pleased with the courts decision. While this case focused on silly dog toys, the issue of trademark infringement is very serious and this unanimous ruling is a big win for brand owners working hard to responsibly market their products, Courtney Armour, the Distilled Spirits Councils chief legal officer, told USA Today.



Jack Daniels spokesperson Svend Jansen said that the company would continue to protect its trademark. "Jack Daniel's is a brand recognized for quality and craftsmanship, and when friends around the world see the label, they know it stands for something they can count on, he said.



Food & Wine has reached out to VIP Products for comment about the decision. Their Mr. Poops squeaky toy looks pretty sad today though.



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Read the original article on Food & Wine.
James Byrd Jr.'s brutal murder in Texas may seem reminiscent of the racially motivated lynchings and beatings of the Civil Rights Era, but in reality, it was only 25 years ago that he was killed by Shawn Berry, Lawrence Brewer, and John King.

Since then, Byrd's three children have found some purpose in his senseless killing through the creation of The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009. The act, signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009, provided funds and expanded upon federal criminal laws regarding crimes committed because of someone's perceived race or sexual orientation.

RELATED: What Happened To Matthew Shepards Killers?

It's a small comfort to the families of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., who have sought to forgive the men's respective killers. "I had to release the hate that I had held on for so many years because I wanted to live a life of prosperity and a life of peace," Jaime Byrd told People in July 2022.

Who Is James Byrd Jr.?

The grave of James Byrd Jr.

The grave of James Byrd Jr. Photo: F. Carter Smith/Sygma via Getty Images

Born in 1949 to Stella and James Byrd Sr., Byrd Jr. was raised in Beaumont, Texas alongside his eight siblings. He graduated from Jasper's Rowe High School in 1967 as part of the last segregated class before getting married and having three children, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

At the time of his murder in 1998, Byrd was divorced and unemployed, according to the Washington Post. His family told the newspaper that he was formerly a salesman but was receiving disability checks because of a seizure disorder that made him unable to drive.

"He was my big brother, Mary Verrett told the newspaper. He loved people, he was very people-oriented. As a matter of fact, he was the kind of person who never wanted to be alone; he would walk up to a group and join right in. He was very intelligent. People in the family told him he never used his full intellect."

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What Happened to James Byrd Jr.?

On the evening of June 7, 1998, James Byrd Jr. attended a friend's anniversary party in Jasper, Texas. Unable to drive because of a seizure disorder, Byrd sought a ride from other partygoers but was unable to find one. He decided to walk home around 11:30 p.m., his sister Mary Verrett told the Washington Post.

That night, Shawn Berry, 23; Lawrence Brewer, 31; and John Marshall King, 23, were driving around Jasper. King and Brewer became friends while serving time at the George Beto Unit, a maximum-security prison in Anderson County. There, King and Brewer joined racist prison gangs, including the Confederate Knights of America, according to CNN.

Byrd was unaware of King and Brewer's hateful associations and accepted a ride from Berry, who was driving the men, around 2 a.m. However, instead of driving him home, the three men took him to a remote wooded area where they proceeded to torture the 49-year-old, according to The Washington Post.

After beating him, Berry said that Brewer and King stripped Byrd of his clothing and chained him by his ankles to the truck. They then drove for more than two miles, decapitating Byrd when the car hit a culvert.

We are all hoping and praying he didnt have to suffer, that he wasnt tormented, that at some point in time, he lost consciousness, Verrett told the Washington Post. Hopefully, he was able to black out. Otherwise, we couldnt continue focusing on this.

Byrd's remains, including his dentures, were found scattered along the two-mile stretch of road where he was dragged, CNN reported. His torso had been dumped outside an old Black cemetery.

How Were Shawn Berry, Lawrence Brewer and John King Caught?

A motorist spotted Byrd's remains around 9 a.m. the following morning and reported the gruesome discovery to police, according to the Washington Post. Later that night, after police began their investigation, local Jasper resident Steve Scott went to the Sheriff's Office to report that he had seen Byrd driving in the back of a pickup truck earlier that morning.

Based on that description, authorities arrested Berry, who drove a Ford pickup. Berry immediately pointed fingers at roommates Brewer and King, admitting to authorities that he had picked Byrd up but that it was the other two men who had carried out the crime, the Washington Post reported. Berry said that he got in the truck after Byrd had been chained to it and when he realized what was going on, he attempted to leave. However, King refused to pull over, reportedly telling him, "You're just as guilty as we are."

All three men were later indicted by a grand jury on charges of capital murder, which required the prosecution to prove that the crime occurred in conjunction with a kidnapping or robbery.

Clara Taylor (L) and Mary Verrett (R) sisters of James Byrd Jr.

Clara Taylor (L) and Mary Verrett (R) sisters of James Byrd Jr., listen as the verdict of guilty is read at the Jasper County Courthouse in Jasper, Texas. Photo: PAUL BUCK/AFP via Getty Images

Ahead of the trial, the suspects' family members distanced themselves from the men, with King's father, Ronald King, writing an apology letter to Fox News. He wrote, according to the Washington Post, "It hurts me deeply to know that a boy I raised and considered to be the most loved boy I knew could find it in himself to take a life."

King was the first to stand trial for Byrd's murder. Over the course of a little more than a week, a jury of 11 white people and one Black man learned about physical evidence tying King to the crime scene and heard his letters in which he espoused the ideals of Ku Klux Klan leaders, according to CNN. Additionally, jurors saw photos of King's tattoos, including the Confederate flag and the "SS" lightning bolts standing for the Nazi Schutzstaffel.

The jury returned a guilty verdict, which was read by the sole Black juror who had attended middle school with King. King was given the death sentence.

"It's one down and two to go," Ross Byrd said at the time, CNN reported.

When Brewer stood trial for the murders, his attorneys argued that he became a white supremacist when he was sent to prison on burglary charges, per a report by the Washington Post. While in prison, both he and King joined the racist group the Confederate Knights of America

His father Shawn Berry Sr. described him as being a "follower" to jurors, according to CourtTV, adding that his son "followed the wrong people."

But state psychiatrist Dr. Edward Gripon testified that Brewer showed little remorse for his actions. "I think he would run a substantial risk. Past behavior appears to be a significant indicator of future behavior," Gripon said, per CourtTV.

RELATED: Teenager Walks At Brain Injury Event Weeks After Getting Shot in Head for Knocking on Wrong Door

Brewer was found guilty of capital murder by an all-white jury and received the death sentence.

Finally, Berry stood trial for the killing. In his court proceedings, prosecutors conceded that Berry was not a white supremacist like Brewer and King, but they argued he actively took part in the killing.

Moreover, witnesses said that Berry's account of events was unreliable. "Every time we confronted him with facts and evidence, he changed his story to fit the evidence," said former FBI agent and witness Zachariah Shelton, according to the Associated Press.

Berry was found guilty of capital murder. During the sentencing phase, he apologized to the Byrds. He said, according to the Washington Post, "I am very sorry from what happened to Mr. Byrd and I've said that from day one. I wanted to speak to the Byrd family personally but I couldn't."

He was sentenced to life in prison.

How Did the Byrd Family Respond to Brewer and King's Execution?

John William

John William "Bill" King (C) is led from the Jasper County Courthouse by unidentified deputies following the first day of jury selection in his murder trial 25 January in Jasper, Texas. Photo: PAUL BUCK/AFP via Getty Images

Though the Byrd family celebrated the guilty verdicts for all three men, Byrd's son, Ross Byrd Jr., protested King and Brewer's death penalties because of his religious beliefs. "To want to see the men who killed my daddy die by the state is the same for me to go out and kill them myself," Byrd said in a news conference, according to the Houston Chronicle.

Ahead of Brewer's September 21, 2011 execution, Ross Byrd continued to speak out against capital punishment, telling Reuters, "Life in prison would have been fine. I know he cant hurt my daddy anymore. I wish the state would take in mind that this isnt what we want."

When Were Brewer and King Executed?

Brewer's execution went ahead as scheduled on Sept. 21, 2011. For his last meal, Brewer requested several items, including "a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, three fajitas, one pound of barbecue and a half loaf of white bread, pizza meat lover's special, one pint of 'homemade vanilla' Blue Bell ice cream, one slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts and three root beers," according to the Houston Chronicle.

But when the time came for his feast, Brewer reportedly didn't eat any of it. This ended Texas' long-held tradition of giving the convicts their desired last meal, according to the Chronicle.

The 43-year-old didn't feel bad about the food or Byrd's murder. Days before the execution, which was witnessed by several of Byrd's relatives, he told KHOU, "As far as any regrets, no, I have no regrets... I'd do it all over again, to tell you the truth."

King refrained from interviews in the days before his execution on April 24, 2019. According to Fox News, he remained silent in the moments before he was executed by lethal injection at the age of 44.

Following the execution, Byrd's sisters spoke out about King's execution during a press conference, declaring that it was "just punishment for his actions."

Where Is Shawn Berry Now?

Shawn Berry continues to serve out his life sentence at the Texas Department of Correction's Ramsey Unit, where former police officer Roy Oliver is serving time for the death of Black teen Jordan Edwards, alongside Aaron Dean, another former white police officer, who was found guilty in Atatiana Jefferson's shooting.

Berry will be eligible for parole in 2038, when he is 63 years old.

What Is the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009?

U.S. President Barack Obama greets Betty Byrd Boatner and Louvon Harris, sisters of James Byrd, Jr.

U.S. President Barack Obama greets Betty Byrd Boatner and Louvon Harris, sisters of James Byrd, Jr., after delivering remarks following the enactment of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in the East Room of the White House October 28, 2009 in Washington, DC. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

President Barack Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009. This law expanded upon the 1969 federal hate-crimes laws to include a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. It also provided funds for local agencies so they can better investigate and prosecute hate crimes in their region.

Previous hate crime laws only protected people of color who were participating in federally protected activities, like voting or going to school.

As a result of this legislation, the Houston Police Department was able to create the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Program, which is co-headed by Byrd's daughter, Jamie Byrd-Grant.

"I joined the Houston Police Department because I vowed to be the change I wanted to see in others. I haven't always wanted to be in law enforcement. To keep my dad's memory alive, I wanted to lead people to know there is no place for hate," Jamie Byrd said of the program.
Royal double date? King Charles III, 74, and Queen Camilla, 75, recently hosted the King and Queen of the Belgians for a special dinner at Windsor Castle, and the moment was documented on the royal family social media accounts.

A photo of the quartet was shared to Twitter and Instagram, along with a caption that read, This evening, The King and Queen received The King and Queen of the Belgians at Windsor Castle. The caption also included the flag of the United Kingdom and the flag of Belgium (and it was translated into Dutch and French).

[e-1f1ec][e-1f1e7][e-1f1e7][e-1f1ea] This evening, The King and Queen received The King and Queen of the Belgians at Windsor Castle.



De Koning en Koningin ontvingen vanavond de Koning en Koningin der Belgen in Windsor Castle.



Le Roi et la Reine ont recu le Roi et la Reine des Belges au Chateau de Windsor. pic.twitter.com/QBrSjclPK5  The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) June 8, 2023

In the snap, King Charles and King Philippe of Belgium, 63, match in navy suits and black loafers. Meanwhile, Queen Camilla wears a blue-and-white patterned dress, while Queen Mathilde of Belgium dons a bright pink and orange pleated dress with a large statement belt. However, the royal ladies did accessorize similarly, with both opting for cream-colored heels.

The British king and queen consort hosted a reception in honor of the Belgian royals, who have had a busy visit to the United Kingdom.

Carl Court/Getty Images

During their time in the U.K., the Belgian royals attended the annual Founder's Day Parade at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. While there, King Philippe donned a military uniform and, as noted by The Daily Mail, the monarch carried out the duties of a Reviewing Officer for the ceremony. According to the official Chelsea Pensioners site, The Royal Hospital Chelseas Founder's Day, also known as Oak Apple Day, is always held on a date close to 29th Maythe birthday of Charles II and the date of his restoration as King in 1660.

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Prior to their visit, the Belgian royals hosted their own guests only a couple weeks back, when King Philippe received Stevo Pendarovski, the North Macedonia President, at the Royal Palace of Brussels.

Carl Court/Getty Images

We can't wait to see who King Charles and Queen Camilla host next.

Stay up-to-date on every breaking royal family story by subscribing here.

Prince Harry Returns to London Court as Dad King Charles Attends Concert Across Town
Strick-Interview Strick-Interview.jpg - Credit: TDangy*

Who the F*ck Is Strick may be a confrontational tour title, but the rapper born Tauren Strickland is ready for his pseudonym to permeate beyond the prominent hip-hop circles hes a part of. Before signing to Young Thugs Young Stoner Life Records in 2018, he was a branding liaison to Atlantas hottest acts and a songwriter as well, earning a credit on the platinum Travis Scott album Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight. After touring with Kid Cudi as an opener last fall, hes hitting the road as a headliner.

His upcoming release, Shark Attack, is slated to be YSL Records latest body of work since Thug and label affiliates Lil Duke, Yak Gotti, and Unfoonk were among the 28 people indicted in a sweeping RICO case in May 2022. Georgia prosecutors allege that YSL isnt merely the Young Stoner Life record label but a gang called Young Slime Life with ties to the Bloods  and Thug is at the helm of it. Still, Strick isnt really looking at himself to be a sort of torchbearer. We all are creatives, so its not really carrying on a particular name or anything like that, he says. Right now, Im making music. Im trying to create awareness of who Strick is as an artist and as a songwriter and what I bring to the industry. Shark Attack drops on June 14 via LiveMixtapes and will be available on all platforms on June 19.

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He opts not to comment on the ongoing case in Atlantas Fulton County, especially since he doesnt live there (there is also no Atlanta date on his tour, though he says hell add more stops). In general, when anyone close to you is going through anything, you feel it, he says. And the closer that you are the people, its just never a good thing.

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Strick spends most of his time in Los Angeles, where he made some of the music he plans to release this year, including an incredible, lovelorn collaboration with James Blake and Young Thug on his forthcoming sophomore album. First time either one of them have done a song together also, Strick says of the two-year-old track. Blake has long been a vocal Thug fan, saying in 2020 that he hoped to produce an album for the rapper (Barter 6 made me rethink production. It was so satisfying and minimal. Its fucking amazing, he gushed.) On it, Strick reminisces about the mundanities missed when a significant other leaves. This morning, I woke up, didnt smell no coffee. You wasnt making breakfast downstairs, he says.

Though Strick planted his stake in the Atlanta rap scene seven years ago, he was raised between North Carolina and Germany. He was born in Lumberton, North Carolina, where he grew up running up and down a dirt road, barefoot. A family of women helped his single mother out. My grandma and my aunt were always kind of having parties, barbecues, taking me with them wherever they went. Anytime the music came on, it was like, Hey Tauren, come do a dance for us, sing that song youve been singing. They were allowing me to be open and be as charismatic as I could be. When he was nine, he and his mom moved to Frankfurt, Germany, where she worked as a civilian for the U.S. military.

I remember when we first landed in Germany, he recalls. Being from North Carolina, we never see snow. So as soon as I landed, I was tiny and the snow was coming up to my waist. Im like, Mom, I want to go back home. Its too cold. Strick eventually acclimated, growing into his love of hip-hop there.

Upon their return to the U.S. when he was 12 years old, Stick and his mom settled in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, because his favorite cousin had enrolled at the university there. I mean, Lumberton is in Robeson County. Its one of the poorest counties in North Carolina. I was born to a single parent when she was 17. My biological father was in and out of jail literally my whole life. He basically just got free a few years ago. So to get me away from that environment, she made the decision to go to Chapel Hill. Strick went on to live a seemingly comfortable and conventional life  graduating with an English degree from High Point University, joining the Air Force, earning all but three credits toward a Master of Business Administration degree, and running a couple of businesses  but when he moved to Atlanta, he met the people who would crystalize the city as a modern rap mecca. Here, Strick dives into his family ties to Tupac Shakur, his unique path, and what lay ahead.

You mentioned that your dad spent a lot of your life incarcerated. Are you and your father in touch now? Are yall building a relationship?

Yeah, we just recently got in touch, back and forth. It is weird cause its definitely some movie-type shit, you know what Im saying? Because Im taking my career to the next level. Im having a lot of success. And then out of nowhere in a way, he shows up and he is trying to rebuild. Im like, Damn, its crazy. Im turning into a superstar now. And now he want to come around. Its weird, but its cool.

What was music like for you then when you were in Germany? Were you listening to hip-hop?

Yeah. The first album I told my mom to get me was Bone Thugs-n-Harmonys [E. 1999 Eternal]. I just loved Bone Thugs and I was like, Mom, if you dont get me this CD  I was obviously listening to Bone Thugs, listening to Tupac, listening to a lot of stuff like Biggie, a lot of Jay-Z, Outkast. Were actually related to Tupac through marriage in a way. Unfortunately, when he passed, my cousin was studying abroad in London and came to visit us in Germany. Thats how I even found out that we were related to Tupac  they sent a flight for her to come back to North Carolina and come to the funeral and because her father was actually basically Tupacs uncle, which is crazy.

So when did you move towards making music yourself?

There was a picture of me  6 years old with a mic and a guitar  which I relate to my destiny. I didnt start really taking music seriously until around 2016, but I had been making music since high school, in college, one foot in, one foot out.

What pushed you to really move into it as a career at that time?

I had already did a lot of living for other people. I went to the military cause my grandma was like, Itd make a man out of you. After I graduated college, I joined the Air Force and they had paid for my MBA. Im basically three credits away from finishing my MBA, and I already have a pretty good backup plan. I have a bachelors in English literature that I got from High Point. My mom did health care administration at a very high level, so when I moved to Atlanta, I had my own primary care center. I had physicians working for me, medical assistants. I was already making six figures a year. It was a dream job for some people, but to me it wasnt.

My mom would always tell me, Tauren, it doesnt matter how much money you make  its all about what youre passionate about and what you love, no matter what job you get. Thats what also helped me be like, let me take a risk on myself. I also owned a business, a branding solutions company called Foundation 86. We developed apps, websites, and during that time we were basically an independent firm that was helping a lot of people in Atlanta. And so between 2011 and 2016, I had already helped a lot of people and I was like, Man, I should just try doing this for myself. Im sure itll take off. At that time too, a lot of my friends started to have a lot of success in the music industry as well. So it was a calculated risk.

Who were you friends with that started seeing success?

When I got into the music scene completely, it was like 808 Mafia, TM88, working with Metro Boomin, obviously met Young Thug early on in his career, met Future early on in his career, met Travis Scott early on in his career. Atlantas got a very close-knit type of thing going on. I was just really blessed to be able to have skills and knowledge that I could provide and not really be a deterrent to them, but actually help benefit them in their journeys. I was able to become part of that culture that put the producer in front of people. Pierre Bourne started out with me and was at my crib and stuff like that too. I was able to get around them very quickly [through Foundation 86]. Thats how theres just a bunch of old pictures of me, TM, Metro in the studio, old pictures of me and Future during the Honest album release party and shit like that.

Around 2016, I remember getting a call from TM88 and my boy T-Shyne and they were just like, Hey, bro, were with Travis and were working on Rihannas album, and youre at your desk right now. Theyre like, Yo, its all on you. Youre the one thats not coming to California. Because at that point I was really focused on my career. I was like, OK, Im 28. I want to stay focused on that white picket fence, trying to head towards that lifestyle.

How were you honing your skills as an artist while working more traditional jobs?

All my friends always laugh about it. Pierre, when he was at my crib, he would record me. He would make the beats, and I would be at work. Since I was the boss  I mean, thank God I dont have this job anymore  I would take a pretty long lunch break, maybe an hour, an hour and a half. When I was on that break, I would record, wed make a few songs, Id go back to work.

As soon as I got off work, Id come back home, record again. Every night, I was usually in the studio with some of the people that I just named.

So, you start to move through the Atlanta hip-hop scene. Thats such a crazy time to be coming up, 2016. So many incredible albums and mixtapes came out around that time. How did you become a part of YSL?

I basically didnt sign to Young Stoner Life Records until October 2018; 2019 was basically my first year releasing records, as far as being an artist. Around that time when I first signed my record deal with Jeff [Young Thug, born Jeffery Williams], I had already been co-writing and writing for a lot of people at that time. I had already went platinum. He was just looking at me one day, Bro, why are you writing for so many people? Youre a superstar. You really got it.

Jeff showed a lot of adamancy in making sure that I became a superstar. I really respected him for that. He could have picked anyone. He could have went to the hottest artists in Tampa or Milwaukee or somewhere and been like, Yo, Im going to sign you because you got a Number One record out right now. But he believed in me. Thats one thing that I always cherished.

Shoutout to Southside from 808 Mafia, along with a bunch of my other friends. Southside was very adamant too. I remember one day I asked him, How come no ones listening to my music? Hes like, Bro, you dont put your music out. Hes like, Everybody knows youre dope and that you write. Hes like, But you dont release any of your music. I think that helped.

What made you decide to tour now, drop an album this year, and a project before it? How did you create this timeline for yourself?

Even last year I was building up to this, doing the tour with Kid Cudi, having these really incredible songs that Ive been waiting to let the world hear. I kind of have an internal clock that kind of makes me feel like, Hey, its about time.

Tour prep is really crazy because its my first headlining tour, so obviously, theres a lot of logistical things that have to be handled and a lot of meetings. But also getting back in the gym, working with my trainer, making sure we got that right, getting rehearsals, getting my set list together. Im excited to get out and give my fans an incredible show. I think Im super energetic. Obviously, I feed off the crowd, but Im already just so hyped about just performing the songs, just being in front of them, that I just kind of go crazy regardless.

What is it like to be able to be getting ready to put out this incredible song featuring Young Thug, and he right now is not able to be a part of it? How is that going for you?

Well, first, its an incredibly unfortunate situation. Were praying for Thug, staying positive, keeping him in our prayers. And I miss him of course, but hell be home soon, and we just want to continue just pushing the legacy in a positive way.

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A lender to Evolution St. Louis sued the Missouri garment manufacturer last month for breach of contract, demanding a payment of $857,854.16.

Eric Blair-Joannou, a trustee to the Benjamin Joannou, Jr. GST Ex Family Trust, filed the lawsuitfirst reported on by the St. Louis Business Journal Tuesdayin a Missouri court May 15. The six-page complaint demanded the Made in America manufacturer pay the total principal amount of $750,000, plus $107,854.16 in interest.

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Evolution CEO Jon Lewis told Sourcing Journal the matter is currently in the settlement process and will be finalized soon.

Joannous lawyer, John Hall, declined to comment.

Per Joannous complaint, STL Apparel Manufacturing Operating LLCthe subsidiary he formally sueddefaulted under the loan agreement for reasons including, but not limited to, STL Apparel Operatings failure to make quarterly payments of interest. The agreement, entered into in November 2020, allegedly included a clause allowing Joannou to immediately declare all obligations due and payable in the event of a default, which he did. He sent the letter requesting payment July 21 last year, the lawsuit noted.

According to the St. Louis Business Journal, shipper DHL Express Inc. separately said in a March lawsuit Evolution owed it more than $13,000. Lewis told Sourcing Journal the matter has been resolved.

Neither of these two filings are indicative of our current business as we continue to expand with projects in apparel, automotive, aerospace, footwear, and other technical categories, Lewis said. Shortly we will be expanding to an additional facility to support production for these new business initiatives, creating even more sustainable, well-paying jobs in the U.S.

Evolution operates a 32,000-square-foot flat-bed knit manufacturing facility in St. Louis, Mo. Outfitted with Stoll machinery, the factory is capable of producing 3D knitwear garments as well as footwear and smart textiles. It opened in May 2019.

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2023 marks the 20th anniversary of NJ Skateshop. To celebrate, NJ teamed up with long-time friends, Damage Ltd to release a special futbol jersey to honor their Portuguese heritage just in time for Dia De Portugal (June 10). The limited NJ/DAMAGE jersey revisits NJs original Club Sport graphic from 2003.

The Damage crew and NJ have been tight ever since their first East Coast visit from Spain back in 2010. That same summer, NJ Skateshop organized a trip to Portugal with a handpicked crew of legends of Portuguese decent. While working on this collaboration, NJ unearthed two damaged hard drives of never-before-seen footage from their 2010 trip to Lisbon, Porto and the Algarve. The following Iberian Connection edit is what was able to be salvaged from those hard drives. Saude!

Pick up one of the ill jerseys here before they're sold out!

Iberian Connection stars: Zered Bassett, Ron Deily, Louie Barletta, Quim Cardona, Todd. Jordan, John Motta, Nico Magalhaes, Anthony Shetler and Ricardo Fonseca. Photos by Jeff Landi.

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We're always on the lookout for amusing, interesting and engaging skate-related videos to feature on our channels. Whether you're a professional or just having fun, we want to see your best footage and help you share it with the world. Submit your video for a chance to be featured on skateboarding.com and our social channels. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more quality skate content.
At the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Mark Oldman will share tips on finding celebration-ready wines that everyone will love.

Phawat Topaisan / Getty Images

Theres no better way to commemorate a big moment than opening a special bottle of wine. Maybe its a big birthday, a well-earned promotion, your first wedding anniversary, or maybe just then end to a really good day, enjoying an excellent bottle of wine is the best way to mark the occasion. Champagne is always a festive fit, but there are plenty of other wines from regions known for more everyday bottles like Australia and Hungary that are worth saving for a big day.

First step to selecting the perfect bottle is to understand the people who will be enjoying it. Mark Oldman, a wine expert and author who has spent his career in search of high quality sips, recommends assessing the level of wine expertise of whoever is enjoying the bottle. Consider the wine geekery of those with which you are celebrating. More casual drinkers might be delighted by a high-quality national brand that's a bit pricier while wine snobs might strive for rarity, he says. Read on for five things to consider to pick the perfect wine for a celebration.

Drink rare wine

For wine aficionados, turn to experts at high wine shops or call on a sommelier to guide you to more bespoke bottles. Drinking juice that few others get to enjoy can be thrilling, says Oldman. Look toward top-notch winemakers who might have limited production, the fewer bottles made, the more rare the wine. Rarity also often coincides with quality and ageability  finding a wine with a special older vintage is always a treat but not all wines are made to age. An older vintage is like a time machine, transporting you and your guests back to that year and your memories of it. Mature wine can also intrigue with unusual scents and tastes  hints of mushrooms or freshly-tilled soil or fragrant spices  that serve to heighten any special occasion, Oldman says.

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Pick a special vintage

For a more personal celebration bottle, maybe its a wedding gift or for a birthday, shopping for a particular vintage is a great way to add a personal touch. Oldman looks toward auctions, both online and in-person, to seek out wines bottled on a birth year or anniversary. The English have long bestowed bottles of birth year vintage Port on a newborn, but any wine with serious longevity will do, such as the best vintages of a top red Bordeaux or Italian Barolo, advises Oldman.

Have a good story

A wine might be delicious, but it will likely be finished within the course of an evening. Open something with a good story behind it that can be retold and retold. When gifting a bottle, it can even be your own story, says Oldman: Those bottles you purchased on your first trip to Sonoma or the dessert wine you smuggled back from Portugal. Learn a fun fact about the wine maker or the vineyard, maybe the grapes are all picked at night or grown on the slope of an active volcano. When in doubt, a bottle with a beautiful label goes a long way  someone might even hold onto it after all the delicious wine is gone.

Drink interesting bubbly

Theres no way around it, bubbles signify a good time. When choosing the right bottle to serve, look toward grower Champagne made from smaller producers who grow and harvest their own grapes. They can be more terroir-driven than the larger houses with unique aspects. The best grower Champagnes are prized for their individual personalities, often reflecting the quirky subtleties of the soil and the winemaker from which they derive, says Oldman. To find grower Champagne, look for the initials RM before the licensing number on the bottom edge of a bottle.

Go big, literally

Theres nothing more fun than opening up a large bottle of wine, especially large-format bubbles. Whether its a magnum or even a Nebuchadnezzar (thats 20 regular-sized bottles), larger than life wines are fit for any celebration. They never fail to generate joy, its like they appear to contain even more than they actually do says Oldman. I love that large-format bottles give me a built-in excuse to get people together. And that highlights one of fine wines great powers: the ability to create a special occasion.



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As smoke from Canadian wildfires threatens the quality of the air in more than a dozen U.S. states, authorities have advised residents of large areas of the Northeast and Midwest to remain inside. To avoid the harmful effects of wildfire smoke, minimize the amount of time you and your pet spend outside and keep a close eye on your dog for any signs of smoke inhalation or other related medical complications.

How wildfire smoke affects dogs

Particularly for people with underlying disorders, inhaling wildfire smoke can cause a number of health concerns. In animals, the effects of poor air quality due to smoke can be similar. In pets and humans alike, this can range from coughing and wheezing to more serious cardiovascular and respiratory difficulties. Harmful reactions from wildfire smoke inhalation can require veterinary attention.

Olivia Sanderfoot, a postdoctoral fellow at the La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, says wildfires pose risks to wildlife as well as humans. Unfortunately, non-domesticated animals do not frequently have the privilege of choosing to stay indoors to avoid smoke.

We need to keep our attention focused on how smoke is impacting our communities and wildlife even when we have blue skies, Sanderfoot told Time Magazine. The work that needs to be done to mitigate these events, and reduce risks when they happen, cannot be done just during the crisis.

Indoor pets, including cats, dogs, and birds, also face a similar risk of the harmful effects of wildfire smoke. Brachycephalic breeds including Bulldogs (French and English), Boxers, Boston Terriers, Pekingese, and Pugs, to name a few, face an additional risk due to the shape of their airway passages.

Signs of wildfire smoke irritation in dogs

According to the American Veterinarian Medical Association (AMVA), smoke poses a particular risk to dogs with cardiovascular or respiratory conditions. Dogs with pre-existing conditions should always be monitored when the air quality is hazardous.

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The following are indications your dog may be irritated by wildfire smoke or dust. Please call your veterinarian if your dog exhibits any of these symptoms.

Gagging or coughing

Respiratory difficulties, including open-mouth breathing and increased breathing noise

Excessive watering and inflammation of the eyes

Mouth or throat irritation

Nasal dripping

Asthma-like symptoms

An increased pace of breathing

Weakness or weariness

Confusion or stumbling

Reduced thirst or appetite

Additional ways to protect your dog from wildfire smoke

If you notice your dog pawing at their eyes, this can be a sign of discomfort. You can moisten a cotton ball with lukewarm water and squeeze it over your pups eyes to help flush them out. Officials advise keeping windows closed when indoors and keeping dogs in a room with an air purifier, such as one with a HEPA filter.

Only allow your pet outside for brief bathroom breaks. Although your dog may feel cooped up, you can keep your pup occupied with indoor playtime. You can consider playing fetch in a hallway, occupying your dog with puzzle toys, or using this time to teach your dog a few new tricks.

Keep your pup hydrated at all times. This helps airway passages stay moist and can flush out any irritants that may cause respiratory reactions.

Consult with your veterinarian

As you limit exposure, continue to keep an eye on your dog. If you notice any signs or symptoms of smoke inhalation, contact your veterinarian immediately.

It is always advisable to have a plan in case of a wildfire. You can learn about more ways to be prepared and create an evacuation for you and your pup by checking out this guide.

The post Protecting Dogs from Wildfire Smoke appeared first on DogTime.
Rachel Feinstein is moving in circles. So are you; we all are.

I feel very out of touch sometimes with contemporary artists who think [theyre] doing something new for the first time, says Feinstein. Everything comes from everything else. Theres no way youre doing anything new. I mean, theres nothing new, she adds. We all keep going around and around and around and infiltrating and layering all the different stuff that came before us. And I want to acknowledge that and use that as a means of moving forward.

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The next stop on the artists circuitous route is Florence, where her work is being shown in a career survey alongside Renaissance and Baroque works across three venues  Museo Stefano Bardini, the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, and the Museo Marino Marini. Rachel Feinstein in Florence is a full-circle moment for the New York artist, who draws inspiration from fairytales and art history of past centuries.

Florence is definitely the birthplace to all of my feelings about sculpture, she says.

Feinstein is seated near the front of her studio space in Tribeca, several days before flying to Italy for the opening of her exhibition, curated by Sergio Risaliti. The show follows a similar exhibition last year that featured painter Jenny Savilles work. [Risaliti] is specifically choosing people that historically probably wouldnt have been able to be anywhere near a Donatello as an artist, says Feinstein. But now, thats where things are getting interesting.

Rachel Feinstein in her New York studio.

She met Risaliti in Florence around seven years ago when her husband, painter John Currin, was preparing a show with the curator. Feinstein accompanied Currin to Florence for installation, and describes the trip as a formative mid-career experience.

That time [in Florence] really did transform my life, she says. I saw Donatellos famous David sculpture. And then I saw the Donatello Magdalene sculpture, which is in a different museum in Florence, and I couldnt believe they were made by the same person, she adds, describing the textural effects of both: the smooth, polished, wet look of the David, and the dry, wooden, hand-carved, larger-than-life Magdalene.

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I had a visceral experience standing in front of [the sculptures], she adds. They were these two opposing sculptures made by the same person. And I got kind of obsessed on this whole thing about dualities.

That duality shows up in different iterations within her work: how the same sculpture can have different impacts when rendered in various sizes; the friction between high- and low-brow culture within a painting; the ways in which cultural discourse around women can remain very much the same across centuries and different societal landscapes.

To underscore her point, Feinstein compares the impact of past cultural upheavals  like the Gutenberg press  and contemporary advances in media, namely social media. The artist is specifically interested in the female experience and draws the link between technological advancements and their negative impact on girls.

Its always been some new thing that has upset humankind. And how do people deal with it? she says. Looking at art is the way that I learn how to deal with the craziness thats going on in our world.

Then theres the duality of showing her 21st century work alongside Donatello, Michelozzo, and other Italian greats. Of course its frightening to think, God, what if my stuff doesnt hold up to Donatello? Which is very highly likely, because Donatello is the greatest sculptor of all time, says Feinstein, who notes that while its tempting to romanticize the past, context is important. No artist alive has the skill set that those guys did. And thats just the bottom line. John [Currin] and I talk about that all the time. You just have to accept your clumsiness as a contemporary artist, but at the same time, you also have to embrace it: that youre alive, and theyre dead.

Feinsteins work hangs above the doorway at Palazzo Medici Riccardi.

Rachel Feinstein in Florence mixes old and new within the artists canon and spans more than a decade of her career. The religious side, the high and low side, and the sculptural forms and the relationships to your body: all of the aspects of my work are coming into [the exhibition], says Feinstein.

Her oldest works on view are two 2005 painted mirror works, exhibited at Palazzo Medici Riccardi along with several 2018 mirror paintings that mix modern McMansions with swanky scenes inspired by vintage wallpaper motifs.

Much of her work interrogates how women have been represented throughout history. This thread is most prevalent at the Museo Marino Marini, where her first Angels sculptures, based on Victorias Secret runway models, are exhibited alongside Marinis 1929 Dancer sculpture. Feinstein is also debuting eight new Angel sculptures scaled down and rendered in porcelain at the Museo Stefano Bardini. The various sizes relate to her spatial experience with Donatellos work and how space can shift the meaning for the viewer.

Installation view at the Museo Marino Marini. One of Marinis sculptures on the far left.

Installation view at the Museo Stefano Bardini.

Feinsteins newest painting, Split Mary, is painted on a mirrored background; the viewer is reflected within the eyes of her subjects.

Also at the Bardini is her frenetic wooden puzzle sculpture St. Agatha, exhibited next to Antonio del Pollaiuolos St. Michael Archangel painting. Back in her New York studio, Feinstein turns her attention to her similar sculpture, Metal Storm, looming nearby. The piece, from her recent Gagosian show Mirrors in London, is a 3D rendering of Hans Baldung Griens 1514 painting New Years Greeting With Three Witches.

A long time ago, people believed witches were these satanic creatures, she says. And all it is is based on the idea that these were women that were healers and that were actually able to do things that men werent able to do, she adds. [Grien] used the symbol of the sexy witch as a way to sell art as a male artist. And I think, why not do that as a female artist, you know?

Installation view at the Museo Stefano Bardini.

Rachel Feinsteins studio.

Another full-circle moment in Florence: Gucci is the exhibitions main sponsor, and in 2019, Feinstein was the brands first artist-in-residence at the Chatsworth House in the U.K. Feinstein, who worked as a fashion model when she was a teenager in Miami before moving to New York for college, has maintained a connection to fashion throughout her art career. In 2012, she designed the set for Marc Jacobs fall show, which had been partly inspired by her sculpture Puritans Delight.

Ive always felt a connection to people in fashion because first of all, they move much faster, says Feinstein (her set design for Jacobs was completed in less than two weeks). And I think that the art world can use a little bit of that sometimes because theres this idea that its always about later. Its always about, what is this art piece going to be worth 20 years from now, or 30 years now? What is it gonna say? And sometimes you get so hung up on that it makes you constipated, you get stuck.

At the moment, the walls of her studio are lined with relief works-in-progress depicting erotic scenes; Feinstein isnt sure where the series is headed yet, but two pieces will be shown at Art Basel in Switzerland this month.

Later this summer, Feinstein will decamp to her studio space in Maine, and in the fall, she plans to head to Miami to start planning her 2024 solo exhibition at the Bass Museum. It will be her first significant institutional show in her hometown, where she first got a glimpse of the creative life that awaited her in New York. Back then, she was the subject of other creatives; now, shes the visionary.

It all keeps coming back in a circle, like I tell you, she says.

Rachel Feinstein

Launch Gallery: Inside Rachel Feinstein's Studio

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(Bloomberg) -- UBS Group AG sealed an agreement with the Swiss government to cover 9 billion francs ($9.9 billion) of losses it could incur from the rescue of Credit Suisse Group AG, clearing the last major hurdle to closing the historic takeover.

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The accord was signed on June 9 and will cover a specific portfolio of Credit Suisse assets, corresponding to about 3% of the merged banks combined assets, the government said in a statement on Friday. That represents about 44 billion francs.

The deal removes one of the final blockages to the $3.3 billion takeover, which was brokered by the government in March as Credit Suisse hurtled toward bankruptcy. UBS had pushed for protection from hard-to-predict losses from a set of its former rivals assets it plans to wind down or sell. With the government accord now in place, the merger may close as soon as Monday, creating a financial titan twice the size of the Swiss economy.

Under the terms, UBS will assume the first 5 billion francs of losses, with the government stepping up to take on the next 9 billion. The portfolio of assets to be covered includes primarily loans, derivatives, legacy assets and structured products from Credit Suisses non-core unit.

A net approach will be taken when calculating losses, meaning any profits from the portfolio will also be taken into account. The government said it and the banks priority is to minimize losses and avoid using the loss backstop as much as possible. UBS Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti also said recently that losses for the state in the deal are exceptionally unlikely.

Ermotti, speaking at an event in the Swiss town of Interlaken on Friday, said that the next few months will be bumpy as the lender begins the task of integrating Credit Suisse. He declined to comment on job cut numbers, saying that most staff at the former rival are good people.

The agreement remains in place until the final wind-up of the portfolio and will see UBS pay the government various fees for the backstop, including an initial set up fee of 40 million francs as well as an annual fee of 0.4% of the 9 billion francs.

UBS shares were down 0.2% at 18.22 francs as of 12:40 p.m. local time.

Government Say

The government is set to have some say in how the assets are managed, and will also have a seat on a newly-formed oversight committee, UBS said earlier this week. The bank has to keep its headquarters in Switzerland to receive payment under the loss protection deal.

UBS is also benefiting from a more than two year grace period before Switzerland imposes higher capital requirements related to the takeover. An increase in capital triggered by the combined banks larger size will be phased in from early 2026.

UBS is also receiving a number of other regulatory benefits, including temporarily being allowed to use some rulings that applied to Credit Suisse as well as keeping its current rules for liquidity. Both banks will be able to continue their current methods of calculating risk-weighted assets.

UBS has about three months to provide the government with a business plan proposal for how it will wind down the assets covered by the guarantees and the expected net loss amounts. The five-year plan needs to include financial projections, a capital plan with risk-weight asset forecasts, and exit and unwinding strategies.

The two parties also have 90 days after the deal closes to assess whether they need to add or remove items from the identified pool of assets for wind-down. After that, UBS can submit a request to the government to remove other assets if it deems that there would be more value in keeping it and selling it or winding it down would bear a net loss. The government must agree.

(Updates with UBS CEO comment in sixth paragraph)

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A new international report recently estimated that 258 million people worldwide are suffering from crisis-level hunger, with seven countries experiencing famine-like conditions.

Given all the challenges the world has faced recently  lingering problems from the COVID-19 pandemic, extreme droughts such as the one in Kansas, the ongoing turmoil between Russia and Ukraine, and the resulting spikes in food prices  its no wonder that global hunger is rising significantly. Still, that number  more than a quarter-billion people on the brink of starvation  is almost unfathomable. Today, if hunger were a single country, it would be the fifth-most-populous place on the planet.

Beyond this stark picture, global hunger and malnutrition create risks for the U.S., both in terms of our national security and economic prosperity. According to a recent report commissioned by the Farm Journal Foundation, food insecurity in developing countries contributes to a range of threats, including political unrest, radical extremism, terrorist activity and mass migration. America is the leader of the free world, which comes with certain responsibilities. Addressing global hunger is both the morally right and strategically wise thing to do.

Todays international food aid helps us avoid paying conflict of war-related dollars tomorrow, and when we invest in other countries to prevent starvation and war, we often end up with strong trading partners. International food aid has an enormously strong return on investment, which makes it the fiscally responsible course of action. Its a noble thing to feed people the world over, which we do through emergency food aid programs, but we should use the commodities of American producers while we do it.

As we invest in global food security, we must also support agricultural research and development, so agricultural producers both in the U.S. and abroad have access to technologies to increase their production even when challenges arise. My home state of Kansas has a long history of supporting global food security initiatives, and today, we are leading the country when it comes to agricultural innovation. My alma mater, Kansas State University, is home to four Feed the Future Innovation Labs that are conducting groundbreaking research into areas, including new heat-tolerant wheat varieties and higher-yielding sorghum. These innovations benefit farmers in the U.S. and abroad. As Kansas struggles with another year of drought, innovative seed and water technologies will be especially critical. Kansas is the No. 1 wheat-producing state in the nation, and that crop is one of the worlds most important staple foods. Much of the innovation in this market relies on public research conducted at universities.

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Agricultural innovation can also help keep our food supplies safe, benefiting U.S. national security. Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture officially opened its new, state-of-the-art National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, Kansas, which will conduct research into serious animal disease threats. It will be an important backstop in protecting our nations food supply.

Work like that happening in Kansas and at institutions around the country deserves more support, especially because agricultural innovation, like international food aid, provides substantial returns on investment. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, agricultural research returns $20 in benefits to the economy for every public dollar spent. In spite of this, federal funding for food and agricultural research has declined in real dollars over the past two decades, while support for other forms of research has increased.

Producers know that turning a profit means innovating, adapting and increasing efficiency, and I look forward to working with my colleagues to ensure that this farm bill prioritizes innovation. In this farm bill, we need to support public agricultural research institutions, organizations that focus on innovation and public-private partnerships.

Recent global challenges have profoundly affected our food systems, driving hunger and malnutrition to unprecedented levels. Working to ease this crisis, and to mitigate those in the future, is not only in Americas best interest  its also the right thing to do. Congress needs to follow Kansas lead and prioritize global food security issues, especially investment in long-term solutions such as agricultural research and development. Farmers in the U.S. and abroad need access to innovations to face potential challenges that lie ahead and ensure a food-secure future for us all.

Tracey Mann represents Kansas 1st District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is a member of the House Agriculture Committee and co-chair of the House Hunger Caucus.
As anti-hunger advocates worry about new food stamp rules, more than 444,000 Granite Staters reported having too little food as of May 8.

About 1,000 older Granite Staters are at risk of losing food assistance under the debt ceiling deal signed into law Saturday, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Thats a new worry for anti-hunger advocates in the state as they focus on another potentially more significant concern: Only half the adults and children in the state eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are enrolled.

Laura Milliken, executive director of NH Hunger Solutions, said Tuesday that based on March enrollment data from the state Department of Health and Human Services, nearly 30,390 children and 145,461 adults in the state who are eligible for SNAP are not signed up.

In an analysis of 2021 enrollment data, the organization said 50 percent of those eligible for benefits were not receiving them. The percentage was higher in Rockingham County, at 64 percent, and significantly less in Coos County, at about 38 percent.

The under-enrollment has been attributed in part to the states lack of a SNAP outreach plan since 2017. In January, NH Hunger Solutions received $250,000 in federal money to initiate an outreach and awareness campaign.

As NH Hunger Solutions launches its outreach effort, it is watching for the impacts of the federal deficit deal, which will expand work requirements to people ages 50 to 54, who are currently exempt from them, but also make new populations eligible for food assistance without having to meet work requirements.

The state Department of Health and Human Services said last week that its too early to predict how changes to SNAP rules will affect New Hampshire.

Currently, 39,461 households are receiving SNAP benefits, said Karen Hebert, director of the Division of Economic Stability at the Department of Health and Human Services. According to the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, the average monthly benefit prior to the pandemic was $186, and the average household size was just under two people.

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In a 2020 analysis, the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute said increased SNAP benefits would not only reduce hunger but boost the economy. Quoting a 2019 report from the U.S Department of Agriculture, it said every dollar invested in new SNAP benefits would generate about $1.50 in economic activity when the economy is weak.

Under the existing rules, people between 18 and 49 who dont live with a child under 18 and are fit to work must work, volunteer, or be in an approved work training program for at least 20 hours a week. People who are pregnant, participating regularly in drug or alcohol treatment, or have a mental and physical condition that prevents them from working are also exempt.

Nearly 8,750 Granite State SNAP recipients are participating in work requirements, Hebert said. Its difficult to know how many qualify for an exemption, she said, because the federal public health emergency set aside work requirements until the end of the month.

Hebert said the department is monitoring developments and awaiting guidance from federal agencies that administer the program.

The debt limit deal expands work requirements in the first year of the budget to adults between 50 and 52 who do not live with dependent children. The age limit would increase to 54 beginning in the second year.

Meanwhile, more people, such as veterans, youth aging out of foster care, and homeless people, would be exempt from work requirements, which could make it easier for them to receive assistance over a longer period of time.

Together, those changes increase overall federal SNAP spending by $2.1 billion over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Extending the work requirements to older Americans would save $6.5 billion in that time, it said, but exempting more people from the work requirements would increase spending by $6.8 billion.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated that as many as 1,000 Granite Staters between 50 and 54 could lose their SNAP benefits under the new rules if they dont qualify for a work exemption.

Milliken, from NH Hunger Solutions, opposes the expanded work requirements. She said research has shown that most SNAP participants who can work for pay already do. Evidence shows that work requirements take assistance needed to afford food away from people while having no impact on employment outcomes, she said.

This story was originally published by New Hampshire Bulletin.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: NH struggles to reach those eligible but not receiving SNAP benefits
If there ever was a bucket list for surfers, Tavarua would be near the top.

The heart-shaped Fijian island has long been a dream destination for surfers, primarily for its famed waves, Restaurants and Cloudbreak, and secondarily because its just straight-up paradise. If any surfer has the chance to go  and the cash  there likely wont be any hesitation.

And Koa Rothman, along with a handful of his Hawaiian buddies, recently returned to Tavarua for a strike mission, giving viewers an inside look at what its like to stay (and surf) on the island.

By the looks of it, Koa and the crew scored; theres a handful of waves coming in on social media, showing overhead Cloudbreak tubes. But this video from Koas ongoing This Is Livin vlog doesnt show any of that. They arrived before the swell was hitting, and had a few days of downtime to hang out at the resort, explore other islands, and enjoy paradise.

Its Fiji; even without the waves, its still a magical place.

Day two in the books, says Koa after a mellow warm-up session. Amazing day, crazy conditions, not much wavesbut we knew that was going to happen on the way here.

The swell hits tomorrow midday, and then its going to be tomorrow, the next day, the next day, the next day, and then the next day and the next day, then the trip is over.

Stay tuned for more action from Fiji, specifically of the surfing variety; like, ahem, this:

***

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Donald Trump admitted in a 2021 meeting that he had kept secret information that he hadnt declassified, according to CNN.

The bombshell disclosure comes the day after Trump became the first former president in U.S. history to face federal charges in relation to allegations of mishandling classified documents following his departure from the White House.

How Trumps Big Mouth Could Be His Undoing in Classified Docs Case

Trump has maintained that all of the documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago had been declassified, but CNN reports that he said of one file two years ago: As president, I could have declassified, but now I cant.

The file in question allegedly concerns a secret Pentagon document about attacking Iran. Audio of the recording from the 2021 meeting had already been obtained by prosecutors, but now CNN says it has seen a transcript of Trumps comments appearing to show that he was aware that he hadnt declassified the document.

The meeting at Trumps resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, allegedly included the former president and two people working on the autobiography of Trumps former chief of staff Mark Meadows, along with several others working for Trump, one of whom was communications specialist Margo Martin.

Sources cited by CNN say the audio recording of the meeting contains the sound of paper rustling, indicating that Trump was waving the document around, though theres no way of knowing if it was the document about Iran. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this, the transcript records Trump as saying. This was done by the military and given to me.

The transcript also shows Trump complaining about an article in The New Yorker published a few days before the meeting that described how Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Joint Chiefs to make sure there were no unlawful orders from Trump in his last days in office.

Well, with Milleyuh, let me see that, Ill show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran, Trump says in the transcript, according to CNN. Isnt that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him.

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They presented me thisthis is off the record, butthey presented me this, Trump continues. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasnt done by me, this was him. CNN reports that he later adds: I just found, isnt that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.

Its not clear if any of the seven charges brought Thursday from special counsel Jack Smiths investigation refer to the 2021 meeting, as details of the indictment have not yet been made publicly available. But prosecutors did subpoena Trump in March for the document discussed in the recording. In response, his lawyers handed over some files related to Iran and Milley, but they could not locate the document itself.

Two sources briefed on the charges against Trump told MSNBC they include conspiracy to obstruct false statements and conspiracy to obstruct. For his own part, Trump responded to news of the indictment by attacking President Joe Biden, dismissing the allegations against him as the Boxes Hoax, and insisting: I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!

He added that he would arraigned in federal court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon.

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The U.S. State Department has acknowledged its efforts on behalf of fashion designer Khadijah Shah, who is being imprisoned in Pakistan.

The bridal, eveningwear and ready-to-wear designer has dual citizenship in Pakistan and the U.S. Her companies Zaha and Elan are based in Pakistan. According to published reports, she faced arrest by Pakistani police due to her alleged involvement in the May 9 demonstrations at the Corps Commander House in Lahore. At that time, supporters of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf vandalized the property, which is known as Jinnah House, following the arrest of party chairman Imran Khan due to charges of corruption. Thousands of PTI supporters have been arrested and are expected to be tried in criminal court.

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In a lengthy statement from Shahs family posted online, her relatives described her as a law-abiding citizen and loving mother of three young children who never had any official affiliation with a political party and has always been committed to the rule of law and prosperity of Pakistani society. They claimed that she took part in a peaceful protest on May 9. Some reports alleged Shah was a prime suspect in the destructive demonstration at Jinnah House. Her family disputed reports that she was a central figure in the violence and damage that had been caused on May 9. They also stated that she had not known that she was being sought by police. They said she willingly claimed that she had not presented herself to police officials for questioning on May 23 and was subsequently arrested.

They also noted that when she appeared in Anti-Terrorism Court on May 24, her face was covered by authorities. Shahs family said that neither they, nor her lawyers, had been able to see her, and check on her health and living conditions in the Kot Lakhpat Jail.

At a June 6 press conference in Pakistan, a State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel reportedly said that the U.S. has requested consular access to her. Foreign government officials are entitled to check on their imprisoned nationals to check on their welfare and provide consular assistance. They may contact family, ensure legal representation and medical care and provide reading material.

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Asked about the status of the consular access request for Shah, a U.S. State Department spokesperson said, We are aware of the detention of a U.S. citizen in Pakistan. The U.S. Department of State and our embassies and consulates abroad have no greater priority than the safety and security of U.S. citizens overseas. Whenever a U.S. citizen is arrested overseas, we stand ready to provide all appropriate assistance. Due to privacy considerations, we have no further comment.

Last month in a video message, Shah condemned the May 9 events and apologized to the Pakistani army.

The Shah familys statement said, Her fundamental right to a free and fair trial should not be undermined and she should be accorded the very basic legal presumption of innocence unless proven otherwise. These are every Pakistani citizens fundamental rights as enshrined in the Constitution of our country.

Her familys statement described her as a strong and vocal woman who has exercised from time to time her constitutional right to peacefully express her views.

The case is expected to be tried in criminal court, according to new reports.

Aside from being one of Pakistans leading designers, Shahs family is well-established in the country. The designers father, Salman, reportedly had been the finance minister for former President Pervez Musharraf and had also served as an adviser in the Punjab government, during the Usman Buzdar administration. Her grandfather was the former Army Staff Gen. Asif Nawaz Janjua. The Shah familys statement touched upon her ancestry stating, The deep influence of her grandparents, who raised her, is evident in her patriotism and respect for the Pakistan Army and the other institutions of our country.

Other relatives of Shah were reportedly arrested.

The Shah family stated, We want to be very clear: Khadijah and our entire family have condemned and continue to condemn the senseless and dangerous violence that endangered the lives of those who serve our country and destroyed state property. Such violence has no place in a society that aims to uphold the promise of rule of law and democracy  two ideals that are close to Khadijahs values and belief system.

The U.S. does not provide an official figure for the number of American citizens detained overseas. Last year the James Foley Legacy Foundation estimated that more than 60 U.S. citizens are wrongfully detained in about 18 countries. A JFLF spokesperson did not respond immediately to a request for the current estimate of American citizens detained overseas.

Representatives at Zaha and Elan had not responded to media requests Friday afternoon. Their respective sites and social media accounts showcased fashion without any company statements related to Shahs situation. The designers Instagram account, which has more than 103,000 followers, appeared to be in a similar vein.

The Zaha site flagged Fridays release of the brands festive collection with a countdown clock. The house also offers bridal and ready-to-wear. Elan touts on trend colors, artisanal embroideries and responsibly sourced fabric. The name Zaha means blossom in Arabic and the brands gingko leaf logo was chosen as a symbol of resilience and strength, according to the companys site. Online shoppers will also learn, This not only encapsulates our vision for the brand but also how we view our customer. The Zaha woman is strong and fiercely independent, a woman who can weather any storm.

After starting and acting as creative director of the high-end Elan label in 2004, Shah later introduced Zaha as a more affordable and varied collection. In November, Shah neither confirmed nor denied rumors of a potential sale of Elan to Sefam. The designer told the media outlet Profit at that time, Elan is now at a stage in its growth trajectory where we are now open to considering the external injection of finances to help us grow rapidly.

A LinkedIn page attributed to Shah described her as a strong arts and design professional with a Bachelor of Science focused in international relations and affairs from The London School of Economics and Political Science. Concurrent to running her own businesses, Shah worked as creative director for Afsaneh. In 2014, she also cofounded Sapphire Retail Ltd. and led design for womens and mens wear, accessories, and home, as well as marketing there for nearly four years.

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Indiana Jones is back for his last crusadenot to be confused with The Last Crusade, which was, in fact, not the last crusade. Forty-two years after the release of the first movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Harrison Ford is picking up Indiana Jones' whip and donning his hat one final time in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which debuts in theaters June 30.

The Dial of Destiny is the fifth Indiana Jones movie in the franchise following 1981's Raiders, 1984's Temple of Doom, 1989's Last Crusade, and 2008's Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Whether you've seen all of the movies and want to catch up before checking out Dial of Destiny or count Indiana Jones as one of your pop culture blindspots, it's a good time to check out these iconic films. (Well, at least the first three were iconic...)

The first four movies are all available to stream online and the fifth is hitting theaters, so all that's left to do is decide where you want to start. Here's where you can watch all five Indiana Jones movies.



Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

The first Indiana Jones movie follows the archeologist and adventurer as he tries to keep the powerful Ark of the Covenant out of the hands of Nazi forces in the 1930s. The movie also introduces love interest Marion (Karen Allen) and colleague Sallah (John Rhys-Davies), who both went on to appear in future Indiana Jones movies.

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Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

Temple of Doom is actually a prequel, set one year before the events in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In this film, Indiana Jones travel to India where his mission is to rescue children who have been put into slavery while also trying to locate sacred stones. Jones' sidekick in his film is a young boy called Short Round, played by recent Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan. Temple of Doom is also the most controversial of the Indiana Jones movies due, in part, to its depiction of Indian culture.

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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

The Last Crusade was originally going to be the final Indiana Jones movie. This time, the archeologist sets out to free his father, who has been kidnapped by Nazis while searching for the Holy Grail. Jones' father is played by Sean Connery, while a young version of Jones is portrayed by River Phoenix.

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Nearly 20 years after The Last Crusade, Indiana Jones returned to the big screen with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. For this adventure, Jones is once against joined by Marion and also by their son, Mutt (Shia LaBeouf). With this movie being set in the late 1950s during the Cold War, the enemy is now Soviet Russia. Cate Blanchett plays a Soviet villain.

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

This brings us to the new movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Despite the 2008 movie adding Jones' son to the mix, LaBeouf is not part of this final installment. Instead, Jones is joined by his goddaughter, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge as they search for an ancient dial amid the backdrop of the Vietnam War and Space Racethis one is set in 1969. Directed by James Mangold, it's the first Indiana Jones movie not directed by Steven Spielberg.

But will it be the last? Well, it's much more certain that this is Indy's actual last crusade. "This is the final film in the series, and this is the last time Ill play the character," 80-year-old Ford told Total Film. "I anticipate that it will be the last time that he appears in a film." Can't get much clearer than that!

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken is planning to travel to Beijing as soon as next week, two people familiar with the scheduling told POLITICO.

The trip  for which the State Department is still finalizing details  will mark the highest-level visit of a U.S. official to China since that of then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2018.

Blinken is on track to arrive in Beijing following his current trip to the Middle East, one of the two people said. Both were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about sensitive diplomatic travel.

The Secretary of State is in Saudi Arabia this week for multiple meetings, including a gathering of countries battling the Islamic State terrorist group.

Asked for comment about the China plans, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said we dont have any travel to announce for the Secretary. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not confirm Blinkens upcoming China visit. Spokesperson Liu Pengyu said only, China is open to having dialogue with the United States.

Blinken can expect sharp criticism from GOP lawmakers for traveling to China in the wake of reports on Thursday that Beijing is in talks with Cuba to establish a foothold there to spy on the United States. Both the U.S and Cuban governments have denied those allegations.

The Biden administration has been working to renew high-level diplomatic and military communication following a near breakdown over the Chinese spy balloon incident in February. Blinken had originally been scheduled to visit China few days later and postponed because of the rancor over the balloon.

One of the goals of a trip to Beijing earlier this week by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink and National Security Council senior director for China and Taiwan Affairs Sarah Beran was to make sure the lines of communication remain open and to talk about the potential for future visits, higher-level visits, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Tuesday.

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Chinese Foreign Ministry officials have publicly rebuffed Biden administration outreach in recent weeks citing everything from U.S. export restrictions on high tech semiconductors, ongoing arms sales to Taiwan and the Biden administrations rallying G-7 member countries last month to work on de-risking and diversifying their economies to rely less on China.

Last month, President Joe Biden predicted a thaw in U.S.-China relations. Within days, Chinese Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao had flown to the U.S. for meetings with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. But Beijings denial of a request by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to meet with his counterpart Li Shangfu at the Shangri La Dialogue defense summit in Singapore suggested that bilateral ties remained tenuous.

Nahal Toosi contributed to this report.
The Scoop

China and Russia are rejecting a U.S. offer to hold unconditional nuclear arms control talks, a move that risks further fueling global proliferation.

U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan warned in a major address last Friday that the post-Cold War agreements guarding against global nuclear proliferation were fraying and invited Beijing and Moscow to resume direct discussions on the issue. We now stand at what our president would call an inflection point in our nuclear stability and security, he said.

But the Chinese government told Semafor in its first direct public response that it wasnt open to talks for the foreseeable future. Chinas nuclear strength is far from being on par with the U.S. and Russia. The time is not ready yet for [Beijing] to join the nuclear arms control negotiations proposed by some, Washington embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu said in a statement.

China upholds a defensive nuclear policy. It has promised not to be the first to use nuclear weapons and has maintained nuclear strength at the minimum level for national security needs, Liu added.

Russian President Vladimir Putins government also dismissed Sullivans June 2 overture, warning that no engagement on arms control can occur while the U.S is pursuing a hostile policy towards the Kremlin in Ukraine.

Jay's view

The lack of nuclear talks between these three global powers risk plunging the world into an uncontrolled arms race that threatens both global stability and specific U.S. military interests.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was designed to restrict atomic weapons to permanent members of the U.N. Security Council who would then gradually work to thin out their stockpiles. It was not entirely foolproof; India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all acquired the bomb over the years, while Israel is widely believed to have as well. But the old framework risks becoming functionally dead, in part, because Beijing and Moscow appear more intent on modernizing their own arsenals than preventing other nations from acquiring their own.

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China is currently on pace to increase its stockpile of warheads from around 400 today to nearly 1,500 by 2035, Sullivan said in his speech. The Kremlin, meanwhile, has pulled out of the last arms control agreements of the post-Cold War era, such as New START, while using nuclear intimidation tactics in unprecedented and dangerous ways. This includes Putins deployment of nuclear weapons in Belarus and threats to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraines military forces

The consequences for proliferation could be grave. Iran and North Korea have been making serious advances in their own nuclear programs. Meanwhile, countries that have long relied on the U.S.s nuclear umbrella for protection, such as South Korea, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, are questioning whether its time to create their own nuclear infrastructure, out of fear that Americas deterrence capabilities may no longer be enough to keep them safe.

The White House is continuing to pursue diplomacy to stem this tide but finding few takers. In addition to last weeks offers to China and Russia, the White House has repeatedly, and so far unsuccessfully, sought to engage Tehran and Pyongyang in direct disarmament talks. Sullivan raised the prospect last week of using the United Nations Security Council as a forum to put in place new guardrails against global nuclear proliferation. But theres little reason to expect this effort to be any more fruitful, given Beijings and Moscows vetoes over the councils actions.

Russia and Chinas nuclear buildups could also give them more direct military leverage against the U.S. and its allies.

Both countries, of course, already have large nuclear arsenals capable of laying waste to far-off cities. But numbers and delivery systems still matter. For instance, Beijing is only now beginning to build out its own Triad of nuclear-equipped subs, land-based missiles, and bombers, as the U.S. maintains. That would give it more protection against a nuclear first-strike by Washington, by essentially guaranteeing it could retaliate with an atomic blow of its own.

Having its own Triad as an insurance policy could in turn give China more confidence to launch conventional military operations, such as an invasion of Taiwan, much the way Russia was able to storm Ukraine without fear of being counterattacked by the U.S. or Europe.

The most worrying dynamic, nuclear strategists say, is the prospect of China and Russia working together on nuclear matters. This March, Russia announced the sale of nuclear fuel to the China Atomic Energy Agency, providing Beijing the materials to build more bombs. In the coming decades, the two countries could have more deployed nuclear weapons together than the U.S., strategists say.

The View From The White House

A large number of Republican lawmakers and strategists have argued that the U.S. will need to grow its own nuclear arsenal in order to compete with Russia and China. But Sullivan pushed back strongly last week against the idea.

I want to be clear herethe United States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them. Instead, he called for the replacing and modernizing of the U.S.s current nuclear Triad.

Sullivan also said the U.S. is developing conventional weapons and technologies that will allow Washington to maintain a military advantage against Chinese and Russian nuclear advances. He specifically cited hypersonic weapons, and space and cyber capabilities that are being developed. These modernization efforts will ensure our deterrent capabilities remain secure and strong as we head into the 2030s  when the United States will need to deter two near-peer nuclear powers for the first time in its history.

Room for Disagreement

China has accused the United States itself of accelerating nuclear proliferation through AUKUS, its recent deal with Britain and Australia to build a fleet of new nuclear powered submarines for the Pacific, as well as other cutting-edge military technologies. On Wednesday, in what appeared to be an implicit rebuke to Sullivans speech, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called on the three countries to stop acts of nuclear proliferation such as their nuclear submarine cooperation, stop undermining the international nuclear non-proliferation system by applying double standards, and stop brewing storms over the Pacific Ocean."

Notable
Former President Donald Trump was indicted again Thursday, this time by a federal grand jury on charges related to the hundreds of classified documents from his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

"I AM AN INNOCENT MAN," Trump said in two Truth Social posts following the news of his indictment.

This comes after Trump's previous indictment in New York, which marked the first time a former president was criminally charged. That jury had been investigating hush money payments to two women who claimed to have had sex with him.

What happens next? Here's what we know:

Timeline: The journey of Trumps classified documents

Why was Trump indicted again?

Trump was indicted for allegedly mishandling the hundreds of classified documents found at his Florida home.

More than 300 classified documents were recovered more than a year after Trump left the White House, most under subpoena in June 2022 or during an FBI search in August 2022. Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has been investigating the potential mishandling of national defense records.

What's next for Trump?

According to Trump  who shared the details in a Truth Social post  he has been summoned to appear 3 p.m. Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Miami.

What other legal challenges does Trump face?

Trump faces 34 charges of falsifying business records in New York for hush payments to women who claimed to have had sex with him, to which he pleaded not guilty. The trial is set for March, when presidential primaries are scheduled.

In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating potential election fraud because of Trumps fake electors in that state and because of his call Jan. 2, 2021, asking state Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find enough votes to overturn the election results.

He also has appealed the $5 million civil verdict won by E. Jean Carroll against Trump for sexual abuse and defamation over an encounter at a New York department store in the 1990s.

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What's next for Trump in the GOP 2024 White House race

The first indictment helped Trump politically, which his poll numbers and campaign donations getting a post. His campaign reported $8 million in donations in the four days from his first indictment to his arrest.

He had a rally at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida hours after he was arrested. There he spoke to a crowd of supporters and denied the crimes of which he was accused.

Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, and he as remained a frontrunner in the 2024 GOP presidential primary.

Contributing Bart Jansen

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New Trump indictment related to classified documents. What's next?
Former President Donald Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges tied to his handling of classified documents taken from Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate.

Over 300 classified documents were recovered, mostly in 2022. Trump on Truth Social on Thursday said he was summoned to appear Tuesday at a federal courthouse in Miami. His attorney Jim Trusty later confirmed on CNN the former president faces seven counts, including an Espionage Act charge and charges related to obstruction and false statements.

But classified documents were also found at former Vice President Mike Pences Indiana home, and the documents were also discovered at President Joe Bidens former office in Washington, D.C., and his home in Delaware.

Will the president and former vice president also be indicted? Heres what you need to know:

Timeline: The journey of Trumps classified documents

Mike Pence

The Justice Department informed Mike Pence earlier this month that it will not pursue criminal charges over classified documents found at his home.

In January, Pences attorney turned over about a dozen classified documents to the FBI. Federal officials later searched the home and removed another classified document, as well as six pages not marked as classified.

Pence agreed to the search, and his attorneys cooperated with federal officials without a warrant being issued.

Pence during a CNN town hall earlier this week said I had no business having classified documents in my residence, and I took full responsibility for it.

Officials did not immediately confirm why they declined to pursue criminal charges against Pence. Some differences between Pence and Trumps cases are the number of documents recovered from Trumps estate, and that some documents from Trump were seized under subpoena, among other factors.

Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, last month told USA TODAY in a statement, In the course of negotiations over the return of documents, President Trump told the lead DOJ official, anything you need from us, just let us know.

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Cheung accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Here's what to know: What does Trump's indictment mean? Can he still run for president?

Joe Biden

Justice Department officials have not confirmed whether they will indict Biden. Special counsel Robert Hur is leading an inquiry into the classified documents found at Bidens home and former office.

Bidens personal lawyers were clearing out a former office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in November 2022 when the attorneys found a small number of classified documents, about 10. Biden had used the office from 2017 to 2020.

Additional documents were discovered at Bidens residence in Wilmington, Delaware, in December and January.

After the classified materials were discovered at Biden's former offices, Bidens attorneys immediately contacted the White House counsels office, according to Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president.

The Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel has said a president is immune from prosecution while he is in office. However, Hurs investigation into Biden continues.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump was indicted over classified documents. Will Biden and Pence be?
QUINCY TWP.  Future plans for Corn Island in Marble Lake are on hold.

Quincy Township Zoning Administrator Matt Ashenfelter told the township board at its Tuesday meeting the state has said an environmental assessment of wetlands is needed before the new owners of the 26.4 acre parcel can move forward.

Last year after a failed attempt to sell the island to Branch County for a park, Dale Waligora and other owners of Corn Island LLC sold the land to a San Diego, California-based The Plaza at 10221, LLC. on Jan. 1.

The Corn Island property on the north end of Marble Lake.

Ashenfelter met with company representatives who were in Branch County Monday.

If you notice, theres nothing going on, Ashenfelter told the township board.

The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy is allowing the new owners to have a third party review the wetland area.

Ashenfelter explained that those results are needed before EGLE can make a final determination and agreement with the new property owners on future use and development.

Over the past several years, Corn Island LLC built docks rented each summer to those without lake frontage.

The owners set up a petting zoo and erected temporary buildings on the south end of the property next to the sand bar.

Quincy Township Zoning Administrator Matt Ashenfelter reported Tuesday night on Corn Island development to the township board.

Ashenfelter said, Theres some pushback from Michigan EGLE on that too. The boat dockage is a marine operation. There is no way to have structures to support the marina when you have a wetland.

The zoning administrator said, Were still working through all that. I dont know the outcome yet.

The zoning administrator said the structures are not permitted and are illegal.

Ashenfelter talked extensively with company representative Mike McClelland and owners identified by him and public records as James Gevarges and Chris Avignon.

They are talking about some development on the upland part of the island, which there is higher ground near the channel. They also own the peninsula. Theres a lot of acreage out there that are not wetlands, Ashenfelter said.

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Read more: Tie vote kills Corn Island grant application

Ashenfelter said the developers are aware of the locations history for boat races and corn roasts.

Thats high liability business, Ashenfelter said. He said the developers wouldnt sponsor either.

Over the last 20 years, corn roast crowds gathered weekends on the sand bar at the end of July and Aug. 1.

Until the Waligoras clamped down in recent years, the event could get rowdy.

Ashenfelter said the new owners plan to have a more controlled, higher-end development.

Corn Island in the summer of 2021.

Any development requires an application to the planning commission and proper permitting.

Ashenfelter said, Theres a lot of ideas out there. Im not the bad guy. Im just trying to work with (the new owners) within our zoning ordinance, because thats what we have to do.

The owners did respond to a request to meet with the Daily Reporter. EGLEs office in Kalamazoo handling the enforcement did not respond to emails and telephone calls.

Subscribe: Follow this and other stories by subscribing to the Daily Reporter.

---Contact Don Reid: dReid@Gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @DReidTDR

This article originally appeared on Coldwater Daily Reporter: EGLE stalls Corn Island use and development
A man charged in a high-profile murder case five years ago who was declared incompetent to stand trial is set to be released from a Kentucky psychiatric hospital this weekend, according to his family, after a push from Louisville's prosecutor to keep him in treatment was denied.

The Jefferson County Commonwealth's Attorney's Office filed a petition Thursday seeking the involuntary hospitalization of Gavin Perkins, who was accused in 2018 of killing his mother in a shooting, for an additional 360 days. Perkins' case was dismissed in 2021 after he was twice deemed incompetent to stand trial but since April he has been committed for treatment at Central State Hospital, a state-run psychiatric hospital in La Grange.

Perkins' 60-day treatment period is ending Saturday, though, and he's set to be released, as a statement from Perkins' family issued Friday afternoon said the petition was denied by doctors at the hospital.

"We are very fearful for ourselves and the general public," the statement said.

Perkins, now 44, was 38 at the time of the shooting. His mother, Ruth Perkins, was 69 years old when she was shot. In court filings, Gavin Perkins' representatives have said he is a former U.S. military member who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and a "delusional disorder."

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In a Thursday release, the commonwealth's attorney's office said the push to keep him hospitalized was aimed "to ensure the safety of Ruth Perkins family and the public." And in a separate statement, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg said he was "relieved" to see the prosecutor's office take action and would monitor the case if the petition were to be denied.

In a separate statement Friday, Jefferson County Commonwealth's Attorney Gerina Whethers said she has spent "countless hours listening and seeking out options to keep the Perkins family and this community safe" during her first three weeks on the job  she was appointed last month after the death of former Commonwealth's Attorney Tom Wine  and that filing for the motion was "the best option to keep Mr. Perkins off the street" after his criminal case was dismissed.

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Now, the family's statement said, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron is the only one who can take action. The Perkins family called on the prosecutor's office as well as Gov. Andy Beshear to encourage him to do so.

"The Attorney General's office has offered to take this case over and try different options," the statement said. "The Commonwealth Attorney's or Governor's office must invite the Attorney General to do so. We plead that this request is made so that we may have a chance for our family or others to avoid any further devastation."

Later Friday evening, Gov. Beshear said he planned to send the case to Cameron.

"Gov. Beshear has spoken to the Commonwealth's Attorney and she wants to honor the wishes of the Perkins family, and the Governor agrees. They will be referring the case to the Attorney Generals office," Beshear said in a Twitter post.

Gov. Beshear has spoken to the Commonwealth's Attorney and she wants to honor the wishes of the Perkins family, and the Governor agrees. They will be referring the case to the Attorney Generals office.  Governor Andy Beshear (@GovAndyBeshear) June 9, 2023

Requests for comment sent Friday evening to the Whethers' office was not immediately returned. A public defender who represented Perkins during his criminal trial now works in New Hampshire, according to online records, and Susan Dunlap, who handles communications for Central State Hospital, did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent Friday evening about the petition's denial.

Reach Lucas Aulbach at laulbach@courier-journal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Gavin Perkins, man once charged with mother's murder, to leave hospital
Summer is here again and it's going to be 90 degrees or more for the next three months. Also, to pound a well-worn cliche into the swampy ground, we're not talking dry heat, but jungle-worthy humidity. Yes, you should avoid being outdoors in the worst of it, wear loose-fitting clothing, a hat and sunscreen and blah, blah, blah.

But we have a better way to keep cool and it involves seeking nearby by restaurants and other purveyors of icy treats. This is cooling from the inside out with ice cream, gelato, shaved ice, ice pops and more.

Don't think of this as indulging. These frozen treats are weapons in maintaining your sanity. That shaved ice is purely a means of hydration.

No doubt, these oases of cooling decadence are everywhere. But to begin to build your beat-the-heat first aid kit, here are 10 excellent options for keeping your cool in the sweetest way possible:

More ways to cool off: Best waterfront restaurants in central Palm Beach County

Rosa Ice Cream

Can't decide between flavors at Rosa Ice Cream in Jupiter? Just go with two like this double stack of key lime and mango.

In business for eight years, Rosa Ice Cream is owned and run by David Hoyuela.

Originally from Spain, Hoyuela has been making his own ice cream for 35 years. Before that he worked in his family's ice cream business there. Back in the day, as father and son would fetch milk to make their ice cream, Hoyuela would tell his father that milk from one cow in particular produced the best ice cream. That cow's name was Rosa.

Hoyuela said Rosa Ice Cream makes all of its ice cream in house, using only natural ingredients and no salt or eggs. The shop offers more than 30 flavors at a time.

Rosa carries the basic must-haves, such as vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and pistachio, but staff also ventures outside the box with varieties including apple crisp, horchata, red wine and avocado.

Two of their most popular ice creams are carrot cake and peanut butter. They also make a special ice cream for Guanabanas called "VT." It has cookie dough, brownie, chocolate and caramel and is very popular. In addition to ice cream, customers can indulge in fresh fruit popsicles, fresh fruit beverages and more.

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Information: 1695 W. Indiantown Road, Jupiter. 561-201-5505; instagram.com/rosaicecreamjupiter

Locals Shaved Ice

Locals Shaved Ice has 24 flavors options over ultra fluffy ice and is the ultimate weapon against Florida's summer heat and humidity.

Just had a great summer surf session, paddle or beach run near the Juno Pier and looking to cool off? Locals Surf Shop in the Bluffs Square Shoppes shopping plaza might have what you need.

What does a surf shop have in common with icy, sweet goodness? Usually, not too much, but inside Locals Surf Shop vistors can find the Locals Shaved Ice stand.

Using a machine called a "Snowie," they produce ultra-fluffy ice that is the perfect vehicle for any one of 24 flavors. These range from standards like grape, cherry and orange to the super cool like cotton candy, pink bubble gum, Bahama mama or tiger's blood (it's actually strawberry/coconut, but we love 'tiger's blood!').

Shop and stand owner Jimmy Moren said his wife always wanted to run a shaved ice stand and after seeing one in action about two years ago, they thought "how hard could it be?" and went for it. The rest is icy cold, tasty history.

Information: 4050 US 1, Jupiter. 561-624-6006; localsshavedice.com

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Matty's Gelato Factory

Between frozen and slightly molten lies a zone usually found only heaven ... or in a waffle cone with M&M gelato from Matty's Gelato Factory in Juno Beach.

No list of Palm Beach County sweet treats would be complete without mention of this Juno Beach gem. Matty's has 24 to 28 flavors of gelato made fresh daily. They range from the not-so-wild (though wildly popular) coconut, and strawberry, made with strawberries imported from Italy, to the slightly more complex chocolate, coffee, mascarpone, their most popular flavor. The cannoli and the Key lime are also must-try flavors.

Though only 29 years old, Matty Cairo has owned and operated his gelato shop with his wife for six years. He learned his craft working with two Italian immigrants in Connecticut. They taught him well: Since moving back to the Sunshine State (he grew up in Port St. Lucie), Cairo has garnered one accolade after another. In 2019, his shop was named best in the state on Yelp!

Information: 867 Donald Ross Road, Juno Beach. 561-557-3539; mattysgelatofactory.com

Sprinkles Ice Cream & Sandwich Shop

Sprinkles Ice Cream in Palm Beach has been offer sweet treats and more for 40 years and is a great place to cool after a trip down the Lake Trail.

Quite possibly the "Godfather" of ice cream in Palm Beach County, this shop has been serving up refreshing sweet treats for 40 years.

If you've ever ridden on, run, walked or skated the bike trail in Palm Beach, this spot can be the perfect way to cool off. Go ahead, you've earned a scoop or two of ice cream ranging from black cherry to dulce de leche to butterscotch bomb to Smurf.

In addition to sweet treats, this Palm Beach hot/cool spot has been a celebrity magnet over the years. Martha Stewart, Brooke Shields, Susan Lucci and more have stopped by the store.

Information: 279 Royal Poinciana Way, Palm Beach. 561-659-1140; sprinklespalmbeach.com

Piccolo Gelato

Piccolo Gelato tucked in between Worth and Peruvian Avenues on Palm Beach.

This hidden gem on Via Mizner between Peruvian and Worth avenues in Palm Beach features gelato, sorbetto and cakes. Their gelato and sorbetto are made fresh daily, in small batches, using locally sourced ingredients including hormone-free milk and cream from grass-fed Florida cows.

The gelato flavors are pretty amazing, with dozens of options including hot cocoa with marshmallows, frozen cappuccino, red velvet, pumpkin spice and many more. For sorbettos, there's lemon, mango, peach, passion fruit mimosa and plenty of others to choose from. Vegan options are available.

Information: 66 Via Mizner, Palm Beach. 561-814-5966; piccologelatopb.com

Peachwave

Opened in November 2022, Peachwave in downtown West Palm Beach offers frozen yogurt and gelato, multiple toppings and is a great way to cool off on a hot day.

Opened in 2022, this Clematis Street frozen yogurt and gelato shop can offer the perfect, cooling balm when you're rocking the streets of downtown West Palm Beach.

They offer up to 12 flavors of yogurt and gelato daily, with 50 topping options ranging from fresh fruit, to popping bobas, to whipped cream  all prepared fresh, in-house every morning.

Though the frozen treats are served in cups and cones, it's the cones that are more tempting, being made fresh, not daily, but hourly. Heaven in a cone (or at least a taste of it).

Information: 428 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. 561-766-1584; peachwaveyogurt.com

Angie's Epicurean

Angie's Epicurean features gluten- and dairy-free ice cream sold from their pop-up location next to The Wishing Tree at The Square in downtown West Palm Beach.

Even if you're avoiding gluten and/or dairy, you don't have to miss out on sweet, cooling treats. Sweet treat salvation is at hand at Angie's Epicurean at The Square in downtown West Palm Beach.

This pop-up location by The Wishing Tree crafts the ice creams using cashews and coconut milk and features nearly a dozen flavors  from staples like vanilla, chocolate and strawberry to varieties including mango lassi, mixed berries and pistachio. There are also over two dozen toppings and multiple sauces to take those flavor combinations on bigger journeys.

The wife and husband team of chef Angela Fernandez and Dylan Finger began working on their recipes in 2017 and spent two years perfecting them before going public at Wynwood in 2019. They have since expanded and have been operating their pop-up out of a vintage French truck at The Square for nearly two years. Finger said it's their most popular location.

Angie's Epicurean frozen delights are made with cashews and coconut milk.

Information: The Square, 700 S. Rosemary Ave., West Palm Beach. thesquarewestpalm.com

Carvel

Carvel Ice Cream on South Dixie Highway has been a beacon of hope to ice cream lovers in West Palm Beach for decades.

Though there are many Carvel shops around country, there's only one that's independently owned, by the same family, for nearly 50 years.

Located on Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach, it's more than a landmark; it's part of Palm Beach County history. With two massive cones standing like sentinels, it is a beacon for all the frozen (and semi-frozen), sweet goodness in this world and is absolutely a stopping point.

Whether doling out scooped or soft-serve treats, they've helped the good citizens of West Palm Beach stand tall against the oppressive forces of heat and humidity for decades.

Information: 5901 S. Dixie Highway, West Palm Beach. 561-588-7853; locations.carvel.com

Mimi's Creamery and Coffee

Mimi's Creamery and Coffee in Lantana features 20 flavors of Bassets Ice Cream, freshly made Italian ice as well banana splits, sundaes and acai bowls.

Independently owned and operated by Mimi Prophete and her daughter Whitney, this family-friendly, Lantana gem features world-famous Bassetts Ice Cream.

They offer more than 20 flavors, served in bowls as well as in sugar, waffle and cake cones. Whitney said that their salted caramel pretzel and coffee fudge truffle are the two most popular.

In addition to ice cream, Mimi's also serves 10 varieties of Italian ice along with acai bowls, banana splits and more.

In addition to serving world famous Bassetts Ice Cream out of Philadelphia, Mimi's Creamery and Coffee also has acai bowls.

Information: 103A South Third St., Lantana. 561-530-7655; mimis-creamery-and-coffee.business.site

Morelia Gourmet Paletas

Morelia Gourmet Paletas in Boca Raton usually has 16 to 18 varieties of Mexican paletas available at a time. Owner Jordan Krams said the OREO cookies & cream is one of their top sellers.

One of nine Florida locations and the farthest one north, this Boca Raton shop features Mexican paletas.

Similar to popsicles, but bigger, these frozen treats are small-batch made and feature 100% natural ingredients. Morelia has 16 to 18 varieties at a time and they include mainstays as well as seasonal options.

Some of the flavors include passion fruit sorbet, chocolate hazelnut, dulce de leche filled with dulce de leche, banana filled with Nutella and many more.

Owner Jordan Krams said that top sellers include the the Sicilian pistachio and the OREO cookies & cream, which has a whole Oreo frozen in the center. Krams also said they are about to release two new flavors for summer  pineapple mint and pink lemonade.

Information: 125 Via Naranjas, Boca Raton. 561-672-1055; paletasmorelia.com

Eddie Ritz is a journalist at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at eritz@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Best ice cream, gelato, shaved ice shops in Palm Beach County
A man has been arrested after police alleged that he shot and killed a 39-year-old woman at an Idaho hot springs.

Manuel Cabrera, 24, was arrested on suspicion of second-degree murder, according to a Facebook post from the Owyhee County Sheriffs Office.

At around 9:20 p.m. Thursday, the countys dispatch center received a 911 call that a woman had been fatally shot near Bruneau, about 20 miles south of Mountain Home.

Police said they initially detained two people, but after questioning, they arrested only Cabrera.

The woman hasnt been identified  that is typically done by the coroners office  but The Owyhee Avalanche reported that she was from Ada County. Owyhee County Chief Deputy Steve Crawford told the Idaho Statesman by phone that he couldnt confirm where she was from.

Idaho State Police investigators are taking the lead on the inquiry at Owyhee County Sheriff Larry Kendricks request. The Statesman has reached out to them for additional information.
Richard Lesink sits beside his attorney Brian Moore (left) in New Hanover Superior Court Friday.

Nearly four years after her mother was hit and left for dead on Carolina Beach Road, Jennifer Faircloth Wissman looked at the man who had been behind the wheel and uttered three powerful words.

"I forgive you," Wissman said.

Her message came at the conclusion of a eight-day trial in New Hanover County Superior Court. A jury of 12 found Richard Sean Lesink guilty of one count of felony hit and run causing death and one count of misdemeanor driving with a revoked license.

The jury found Lesink not guilty on a registration violation charge.

Superior court judge Frank Jones sentenced Lesink to a minimum active sentence of 17 months to a maximum of 30 months for the felony conviction. Lesink was also sentenced to serve 20 days in prison for the misdemeanor charge. Lesink was out on bail awaiting trial, but he will get credit for previous time served in connection to the case.

"I challenge the people in this district attorney's office and law enforcement community to try the worst defendants who've done the worst things," District Attorney Ben David said following the conclusion of the trial. "Our priority will always be violent crime and career criminals committing any crime."

According to 2019 reports from the N.C. Highway Patrol, 67-year-old Sheila Faircloth was struck on Carolina Beach Road by a vehicle driven by Lesink around 11:10 p.m. on July 27, 2019. Faircloth was riding her bicycle on her way to the Silver Lake Market and was attempting to cross the intersection from Silver Lake Road.

After being charged in the fatal hit-and-run, Lesink pleaded not guilty. He said he knew he hit something but didn't know it was a person.

Lesink was arrested by the North Carolina Highway Patrol a few days later at a friend's house in Leland following an investigation, which included assistance from the New Hanover County Sheriff's Office.

From left, Assistant District Attorney Kristi Severo, District Attorney Ben David, Jennifer Faircloth Wissman and Trooper Jordan Maness speak following the conclusion of an eight-day trial in New Hanover County Superior Court.

Det. Sgt. Nicholas Lee, of the New Hanover County Sheriff's Office, provided testimony during the trial. He said it was determined Lesink was the driver through databases and video surveillance from Silver Lake Market and another store. Records from the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles showed that the vehicle, with revoked registration, was registered to his spouse. Facebook was also used to determine the owner was in a relationship with Lesink. Pictures on Facebook of his pool work showed the Durango in the background.

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Trooper Jordan Maness collected evidence from the vehicle. The hood and grill were transported to the state's crime lab for DNA testing, and it was determined that DNA evidence found on the car matched that of Faircloth.

During a conversation between Lesink and law enforcement -- a recording of which was played during trial -- Lesink claimed he thought he hit a construction cone, Igloo cooler or road debris. During his testimony, Lesink said he thought it was a shopping cart from a store in the area.

The accident was captured on surveillance from the market, which was also presented as evidence. After the incident, Lesink stopped at a Scotchman convenience store on the way home to buy cigarettes and candy.

Brian Moore, Lesink's defense attorney, said the vehicle's airbags did not deploy. It was also determined in a highway patrol report that Faircloth was not wearing a helmet and failed to yield to traffic while riding her bicycle.

But Assistant District Attorney Kristi Severo argued that Lesink had a good vantage point because of the vehicle's headlights and lighting in the area.

While on the stand, Lesink pleaded that he would have stopped if he knew that he hit a person or an animal.

"God knows I would have," he said.

While defending Lesink, Moore said it was an emotional case.

"No matter how angry or upset you get, it doesn't change the evidence, the case or the law," Moore said.

Severo argued Lesink had a responsibility as a driver to stop following the collision.

"Your verdict speaks the truth in this case," she said during closing arguments.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: New Hanover jury convicts man in 2019 fatal hit-and-run
FRANKLIN - A Williamstown man was jailed after allegedly punching a man at a Little League game here.

Dillon Smith, 30, is accused of hitting a 54-year-old Franklinville man during a dispute over a call on the field on Tuesday evening, according to Franklin police.

Smith allegedly approached the victim around 8:10 p.m., following a major division playoff game at the leagues Pennsylvania Avenue complex, said a police account.

Smith fled in a vehicle after striking the man in the face, police alleged.

However, a spectator provided information about his vehicle and police arrested Smith at his home.

More: Man faces endangering charge Incident involving child in a Wawa restroom has police seeking information

The victim was treated at the scene and later went to a hospital for treatment of facial injuries, police said.

Smith was being held Wednesday in Salem County Jail on a charge of simple assault at a youth sporting event.

The charge against Smith is only an allegation. He has not been convicted in the case.

Simple assault becomes a fourth-degree felony in New Jersey "when it is in the presence of children under the age of 16 at a community sponsored youth sporting event," police said.

The league serves children from ages 4 to 16, according to its website.

Jim Walsh is a senior reporter with the Courier-Post, Burlington County Times and The Daily Journal. Email him at jwalsh@cpsj.com.

This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: Punch at Little League game brings criminal charge for Franklin man
Emma Heming Willis and Bruce Willis in 2019. VCG/Getty Images

Bruce Willis' family shared in February 2023 that he'd been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.

His wife of 14 years, model and actress Emma Heming Willis, provides care for him.

Here's a look inside Heming Willis' life, career, and marriage.

Close to a year after his family announced that he would be stepping away from acting due to cognitive decline caused by aphasia, Bruce Willis' wife, Emma Heming Willis, provided her husband's fans with updates about his increasingly poor health.

In February 2023, Heming Willis announced that the actor had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. Symptoms of the incurable condition are similar to those of Alzheimer's  patients experience memory loss and difficulty understanding and producing language.

Heming Willis has commented on her experience becoming the caregiver of her husband of 14 years. "You know, I have my moments. It just depends. I'm hanging in there and doing the best that I can. And, turning my pain into purpose," she said in a 2023 interview with certified dementia practitioner Gertrude Jordan.

Here's a look inside the life of Emma Heming Willis, and her relationship with Bruce Willis.

Emma Heming, now 44, was born on the island of Malta before growing up in London and California.

Emma Heming Willis in 2008. Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images

On her personal website, she said she lived on the "small but beautiful" island of Malta, which lies south of Italy in the center of the Mediterranean Sea, until her parents got divorced when she was a child. Her mother is Guyanese and her father is English, she wrote.

After her parents split up, she moved to London and then Southern California with her mother.

"My mother has been the ultimate guide in my life  she is the rock that I cherish, respect and admire," she wrote on her website.

In her 20s, she worked as a model, walking catwalks around the world and fronting high-profile designer campaigns.

Emma Heming Willis and Bruce Willis at Paris Fashion Week in 2010. Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Heming Willis' modeling career went full force after she won a modeling competition in London, "The British Elle Supermodel," in the early 1990s.

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"For the next 15 years I had the privilege of walking the runways in New York, Paris, and Milan for Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel, Valentino, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, Emanuel Ungaro, Dior, and Victoria's Secret," she wrote on her website, adding that she was also the face of a Dior campaign, and was featured in commercials for Clairol and Redken hair products.

She later began working as an actress and landed a role in the film "Perfect Stranger"  alongside her future husband  in 2007.

Emma Heming Willis in 2009. Ray Tamarra/Getty Images

In 2001, Heming Willis began her acting career. She played minor parts in "Perfume" and "Entourage," before landing a role in "Perfect Stranger," which starred Bruce Willis and Halle Berry. In 2013, she acted alongside her husband once more in "RED 2."

However, she first met Willis at the gym in 2007.

Emma Heming Willis and Bruce Willis in 2008. James Devaney/Getty Images

"In 2007, I met my husband-to-be, Bruce, at our mutual trainer's gym," Heming Willis wrote on her website.

In a joint interview with People in 2020, the couple discussed the day they met.

"When we first met, I was surprised at how charming and how funny he was  and extremely handsome," Heming Willis told the magazine. "That was my first thought of you."

"I was already in love with her," Bruce Willis added.

Emma Heming and Bruce Willis got married in 2009.

Emma Heming Willis and Bruce Willis in 2009. Jean Baptiste Lacroix/Getty Images

The two got married two years later, in 2009, at their shared home in Turks and Caicos, according to Emma's website.

On their 13th wedding anniversary, Heming Willis shared a photo on Instagram of the couple on their wedding crying as they listened to speeches made by their loved ones. "13 years ago, those wedding speeches really sent us over the edge," she wrote in the caption.

Bruce Willis was married to Demi Moore from 1987 to 2000. The two are still close friends, and have reportedly grown closer since Willis was diagnosed with dementia in March 2022.

The couple has two daughters together, in addition to Willis' three daughters from his previous marriage.

Emma Heming Willis and Bruce Willis in 2014. Jason LaVeris/Getty Images

The couple shares two daughters, 11-year-old Mabel Ray Willis and 9-year-old Evelyn Penn Willis. On her website, Heming Willis describes her daughters as a "source of inspiration."

Willis also has three older daughters  34-year-old Rumer Glenn, 31-year-old Scout LaRue, and 29-year-old Tallulah Belle  with his ex-wife, Demi Moore. Heming Willis has a good relationship with her husband's ex and their daughters, often sharing updates to Instagram showing them spending time together.

Willis is apparently over the moon about being the father of five daughters. For Father's Day in 2021, Heming Willis shared a photo on Instagram with the caption, "Bruce's response when asked if he'd like to have a son? "I'd have 5 more girls right now." Happy Father's Day to this proud #girldad."

"I can't imagine having five boys," Bruce Willis told People in 2020. "I can't imagine having one boy."

After becoming a mother, Heming Willis became an ambassador for Room to Grow, a charity that helps children in poverty, according to People.

The couple has collaborated on business endeavors and has developed three fragrances together.

Bruce Willis and Emma Heming Willis in 2019. Jim Spellman/Getty Images

Around the same time the couple tied the knot, the Willises began collaborating to create three fragrances, two of which were nominated for Duftstars Awards.

Their first fragrance, "Bruce Willis," was released in 2010 and nominated for the prestigious German award. Two years later, they created a women's fragrance, "Lovingly," which was "a declaration of [Bruce's] love to his wife" and "is intended for modern, style-conscious women who radiate a certain sensuousness," according to Business Wire.

She showed her support for her husband when he was diagnosed with aphasia in 2022.

Emma Heming-Willis and Bruce Willis in 2019. VCG/Getty Images

In March 2022, Bruce Willis was diagnosed with aphasia, which negatively impacts cognitive function. Loss of speech and difficulty with writing and understanding language are two symptoms of the condition, according to Insider.

One of his daughters, Rumer, shared the update on her father's health in an Instagram post and said he would be "stepping away" from acting.

"This is a really challenging time for our family and we are so appreciative of your continued love, compassion and support," she wrote in the caption, in a letter signed by Willis' entire family.

Heming Willis updated her followers on her husband's worsening condition in February 2023, announcing that he had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.

Bruce Willis and Emma Heming Willis in 2018. Steve Granitz/Getty Images

Heming Willis alerted her followers of her husband's updated diagnosis on Instagram.

"Our family wanted to start by expressing our deepest gratitude for the incredible outpouring of love, support and wonderful stories we have all received since sharing Bruce's original diagnosis," she wrote in the caption.

"Since we announced Bruce's diagnosis of aphasia in spring 2022, Bruce's condition has progressed and we now have a more specific diagnosis: frontotemporal dementia (known as FTD)," she continued.

"Unfortunately, challenges with communication are just one symptom of the disease Bruce faces. While this is painful, it is a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis," she said.

She continues to provide her Instagram followers with updates on her husband's health, while supporting causes that help fight his condition.

Emma Heming Willis at the AFTD Hope Rising Benefit in 2023. Sean Zanni

Heming Willis shared an Instagram post on her husband's 68th birthday, pleading with his fans to continue sending support.

"My birthday wish for Bruce is that you continue to keep him in your prayers and highest vibrations because his sensitive Pisces soul will feel it," she wrote alongside a video montage of clips of the happy couple.

Around the same time, in March 2023, she attended the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration (AFTD) Hope Rising Benefit, which helps fight frontotemporal dementia and provides support to those affected by the condition.

On May 26, 2023, Heming Willis shared another Instagram post, expressing her disappointment that trials for a potential treatment for frontotemporal dementia had been discontinued.

"Yesterday I read that Wave Life Sciences ended their clinical trial that could potentially treat frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS.)," she wrote in the caption. "Where I'm not sure it could have helped us over here, it doesn't really matter, it still feels like a gut punch."

She urged her followers to fight for a treatment for her husband's condition. "Please keep that momentum going, build on the learnings/findings and don't give up on this loving community," she continued. "Our family will continue to keep the faith and never lose hope."

In honor of the couple's most recent wedding anniversary, Heming Willis discussed the difficulties of being a caregiver to a romantic partner.

Emma Heming Willis and Bruce Willis in 2013. Dave J Hogan/Getty Images

On the couple's 14th anniversary, Heming Willis wrote on Instagram, "[My anniversary] got me thinking about how hard these types of 'special occasions' can be on caregivers," she wrote. "When usually our person would acknowledge the event, now their changing brains just can't."

She offered advice to those looking for ways to support people who provide care to loved ones.

"If you know someone that is looking after someone else, don't ask what you can do, just do," she added.

Read the original article on Insider
The Mexican government late Thursday condemned Floridas migrant relocation program, adding to the jurisdictions potentially threatening legal action against the Sunshine States GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The Government of Mexico emphatically condemns the practice of transporting migrant persons from states bordering Mexico toward other parts of the United States with electoral and political ends, reads a statement from the Mexican foreign ministry.

The statement specified its censure was targeted at migrant relocations to Massachusetts  Florida kicked off its relocation program transporting 49 Venezuelans from Texas to Marthas Vineyard  New York, and Sacramento, Calif.

Mexico had mostly remained quiet about the practice that has set off a feud between DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), but the Mexican Consulate General in Sacramento revealed that one of the migrants shuttled to Sacramento on a Florida-sponsored migrant flight is a Mexican citizen from the southern state of Chiapas.

From the U.S. Border, you can see individuals on Mexican soil engaged in drug and human trafficking, said Jeremy Redfern, the press secretary for DeSantiss executive office.

It would be great if the Mexican Government could focus on these problems rather than wasting its breath on some unfounded legal claim relating to illegal immigrants that voluntarily get a free ride to a sanctuary jurisdiction that purports to welcome them with open arms.

A majority of migrants embroiled in the relocation program are Venezuelan nationals, many of whom are legally in the United States as asylum applicants.

Mexican nationals generally face a higher bar to claim asylum in the United States, because the countrys relative stability makes it harder to prove individualized persecution.

The Secretariat of Foreign relations reiterates its commitment to guarantee the defense of Mexican persons who live abroad, independently of their migratory status, reads a statement by the foreign ministry.

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Legal and diplomatic measures will be explored given this worrying practice.

The legal threat adds Mexico to the growing number of jurisdictions pushing back on the practice through legal means, rather than just condemning its morality.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced earlier this week an investigation into the practice, and Bexar County (Texas) Sheriff Javier Salazar filed felony and misdemeanor unlawful restraint charges over the flights to Marthas Vineyard.

Those two investigations center on whether the migrants were deceived to board the planes; many migrants have said they were promised jobs if they boarded the planes, and the Bexar County investigation also delved into allegations that migrants were told boarding would help their migratory status.

The investigations and ensuing Newsom-DeSantis feud followed more tepid reactions from East Coast and Midwest Democrats such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who criticized the practice but laid blame on the Biden administration for what hes referred to as a burden.

Newsom, a Democrat rumored to have future presidential aspirations, has taken to Twitter and the airwaves to attack DeSantis, who trails only former President Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential race.

Newsom called DeSantis a small, pathetic man and threatened kidnapping charges as Bonta announced his investigation.

DeSantis, who had touted his migrant relocation program before the Texas and California investigations, has taken a more muted tone since.

At a roundtable in Arizona on Wednesday, DeSantis did not directly address the flights to Sacramento or Newsoms barbs, but instead stuck to the GOP playbook of criticizing the Biden administrations immigration policies.

 Updated at 4:11 p.m.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
A north-central Missouri man has pleaded guilty in federal court to taking a firearm onto the U.S. Capitol grounds during the Jan. 6 riot.

Jerod Thomas Bargar, of Centralia, entered a guilty plea to entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon, a felony. His hearing took place Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Bargars sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 3 before U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison as well as financial penalties.

Bargar was arrested in Osage Beach in August 2022. He originally faced felony offenses of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon and unlawful possession of a firearm on Capitol grounds or buildings along with related misdemeanors.

The firearm was a 9mm semi-automatic pistol held in a distinctive holster that displayed an image of the American flag and had the words We The People written on it, the charging document said.

Bargar, 37, is the 20th Missouri resident to plead guilty in connection with the Capitol riot. Of those, 15 have been sentenced. The cases of five other Missouri defendants are still winding their way through the courts.

The charging document said that on Jan. 6, 2021, protesters on the west side of the Capitol building broke through a line of law enforcement officers around 2:27 p.m. A few minutes later, a Metropolitan Police lieutenant stationed in the area was alerted by a fellow officer about a firearm that had emerged from the crowd and was lying on the ground. The fellow officer used his right foot to drag the firearm out of the crowd.

The gun contained one 9mm cartridge stamped WIN 9mm LUGER in the chamber and approximately 15 9mm cartridges in the magazine, the document said, with a total capacity of more than 10 rounds.

After the riot, the document said, the FBI received an anonymous tip that Jerod Bargar and his friend had posted photos on Facebook saying they were 10 feet away from the woman who was shot inside the Capitol.

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FBI agents interviewed Bargar at his home on Jan. 18, 2021, according to the document. He told agents that he and his friend traveled to Washington, D.C., by car on Jan. 5, 2021, to attend a political rally. After the rally, he said, the two walked to the Capitol building where they witnessed chaos.

Bargar stated that he did not enter the Capitol building or participate in illegal activity because he knew where the line was and that it was obvious officers were trying to keep protesters out, the document said.

The FBI did not know at the time of the interview that the gun belonged to Bargar, and Bargar didnt mention it, according to the document.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives later found that the guns owner had pawned it in Jefferson City several years earlier. When FBI agents went to the pawn shop, they learned that the gun had been purchased in 2011 by a man they soon discovered was Bargars stepfather. The stepfather told the FBI that hed given the gun to Bargar about a year-and-a-half earlier.

Agents then interviewed Bargar again, this time at his friends home in Centralia, the court document said. Bargar told agents that he and his friend were at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and were in a group of protesters outside the building when police began to spray tear gas and deploy other munitions into the crowd. He said a woman was knocked to the ground, and he and his friend helped her up. Soon after that, he said, he realized he had lost his gun.

When FBI agents showed him a photo of the pistol found on the Capitol grounds, the document said, Bargar acknowledged it was his.

Bargar stated that he wore the firearm in an inside-the-waistband patriot motif holster, the document said. Bargar stated that he is always armed and wanted to be armed when he went to the belly of the beast for his own self-protection.

Checks run on the firearm revealed that it was not registered in the District of Columbia and that Bargar was not licensed to carry a firearm in the District of Columbia as required by law, the document said.

Bargar told agents that he did not know at the time he traveled to Washington, D.C., that it was illegal to possess a handgun there or on federal property.

Bargar made numerous Facebook posts on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, the document said, placing him in the Washington, D.C., area and on the National Mall. A later examination of Bargars Facebook account, it said, showed he had made some alterations.

He had changed the name on the account to Thomas Bargar, and the place of residence to New Jersey.
About five years ago, a man walked into the Montgomery County Coroners office with his dead grandparents' remains inside a USPS Priority Mail box with a return address in Miami.

I dont know what to do with them, he told Montgomery County First Deputy Coroner Alex Balacki. Im leaving them here with you.

Those ashes, of Lucille Bortner, 57, and Leroy Bortner, 65, who died two months apart in 1986, now sit on a metal shelf in a county storage room along with dozens of boxes containing the remains of others who have never been claimed by family members or friends.

The unclaimed dead are a growing burden for local governments. Caseloads have shot up dramatically over the past decade. Counties and municipalities are forced to spend more time, resources and tax dollars on handling unclaimed remains, often without the ability to be reimbursed, and with few state standards.

In this 2019 photo, the remains of Lucille and LeRoy Bortner remain in the Priority Mail box that they were dropped off in. The shelf was located in the storage room of the Montgomery County Coroner's Office.

The reasons the dead go unclaimed are as different as the way they died. But most share similar traits, coroners and medical examiners said: In life, many were were poor, isolated or estranged from family.

Whatever the reason, 2 million cremated remains sit unclaimed across North America, the Cremation Society of North America estimates. Locally, there has been a marked uptick, according to coroner and medical examiner data:

Of the 158 cremated remains stored at the Bucks County Morgue, nearly 80% percent came into county custody between 2013 and last year, according to county records.

Montgomery County reported 75 unclaimed cases between 2013 and last year, compared to 19 between 2008 and 2012.

One-quarter of the 119 unclaimed remains of Burlington County residents from the last 37 years died between 2013 and last year, according to burial records obtained through an Open Records request.

No national standards exist for identifying and processing unclaimed and indigent bodies, and state protocols can be vague, inconsistent and outdated. In Pennsylvania, the only law for handling unclaimed dead was written in 1883; it declares a body legally unclaimed after 36 hours, which allows it to be donated to science.

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A 10-year-old New Jersey law allows outside groups to claim and bury the bodies of veterans, but says nothing of those who did not serve.

With little outside guidance, counties and municipalities are left to write their own rules, policies, procedures and timelines, which can vary widely. Some coroners have turned to amateur sleuths and genealogy websites to find next-of-kin. The Bucks County Coroner's office may construct a mausoleum for unclaimed remains.

While society may not be able to prevent people from dying alone, medical examiners and coroners must find a way to decrease the unclaimed population, particularly if the family does not claim the decedent because of financial hardship," wrote Kenna Quinet, an associate professor of criminal justice at Indiana University, in a 2016 academic study on unclaimed dead. "Understanding the nature and characteristics of the unclaimed dead and the factors involved in going unclaimed might strengthen the ability of public authorities to reduce the number.

Family matters

Among the biggest challenges for coroners and medical examiners is tracking down next-of-kin for unclaimed decedents. Those searches need to be documented in the event family later disputes them, officials said.

We spend so much time trying to hunt down families, said Ken Bacha, a funeral home owner and coroner in Westmoreland County, in western Pennsylvania, who speaks at professional conferences about the impact of unclaimed dead on his professions.

Staff scour for next-of-kin through phone calls, home visits and online searches using public records. Often they seek assistance from law enforcement, who have direct access to deeper databases including criminal history, missing person files and transportation records.

Some New Jersey counties require medical examiners to place legal ads as part of a family search, according to Nicole Kirgan, a New Jersey Department of Health spokeswoman.

Montgomery Countys Balacki has sought the help of Unclaimed Persons, online amateur detectives and volunteer genealogists who search for next of kin for coroners and medical examiner offices. On its website, the group says it has solved more than 400 cases since 2008.

Bucks and Montgomery counties can spend up to two months searching for family. Philadelphia keeps unclaimed bodies for up to three months. Burlington Countys Medical Examiner's Office has no timetable.

But small and rural counties may not have refrigeration space to store bodies for months, Bacha said.

Montgomery County First Deputy Coroner Alexander Balacki points to names of unclaimed dead

Typically, coroners and medical examiners are successful in finding next-of-kin, but family is under no legal obligation to claim the dead. It is a problem that coroners and medical examiners said they often encounter; Balacki estimated two-thirds to three-quarters of the unclaimed dead in Montgomery County have surviving family members.

When next-of-kin refuses to claim the deceased, the person is asked to authorize a county cremation or burial and waive future claims to the body and remains. If there is no response, a follow-up letter is sent with a deadline, after which counties move forward with disposal.

Bucks County Coroner Dr. Joseph Campbell recalled a case where his office found a son and daughter who told them they wanted nothing to do with their father, but were quick to point out a misspelling on the death certificate that held up estate disbursement.

Other times, family initially agree to make arrangements, but dont follow through or return calls, said Campbell, also president of the Pennsylvania State Coroners Association.

Nursing home residents account for a large portion of unclaimed dead, according to Bacha. He attributes the number to poor record-keeping practices and lax admission policies.

When a patient enters rehab or a nursing home, their families are asked to provide the name of the funeral home handling final arrangements and emergency contact numbers. But staff typically don't update or verify the information as accurate, which can lead to problems years later when the person dies, he said.

One potential solution Bacha suggested is legislation mandating nursing homes establish end-of-life plan protocols or create funds to cover cremation for unclaimed residents.

Such protocols might have let John Fogarty avoid being identified as unclaimed.

Fogarty and his wife, who had no children, lived in a Doylestown nursing home. Before his wife died in 1999, Fogarty prepaid for his final arrangements. He died nine years later at age 88.

When no family came forward, the county had him cremated and his ashes placed in storage, where he remained for three years.

It turned out the nursing home wrongly assumed that the hospital where Fogarty died contacted the funeral home.

Two women who knew Fogarty discovered the error after they saw his name listed among unclaimed dead in Bucks County, found his wife's obituary and called the funeral home that handled her arrangements; it also handled his arrangements and had not been notified of his death.

The funeral director immediately retrieved Fogarty's remains from the county. He was buried with his wife.

First Deputy Montgomery County Coroner Alex Balacki talks about the freezer board at the coroner's office Friday, March 9, 2018 in Norristown. This is where they keep track of remains stored in their freezer. [BILL FRASER / STAFF PHOTOJOURNALIST]

County costs

Eileen Benenati buried her husband, Joseph, at a state-owned New Jersey veterans' cemetery in January 2016. Nine months later, she died at age 69.

The Burlington County Medical Examiner's Office waited three months; when no family came forward she was buried in an unmarked grave at a county-owned cemetery off County Route 530 across from the Pemberton Township Municipal Complex. It's the final resting place for Burlington County's poor, unidentified and unclaimed dead since 1942, officials said.

Then last year, Benenati's estranged sister, who lives out of state, found out that her Evesham home was for sale. A neighbor told her to contact the medical examiner.

At the sisters request, Benenati's body was disinterred and transported to a local funeral home where private burial arrangements were made, county spokeswoman Christine Gonnelli said.

The county did not charge the woman to bury or retrieve her sister's body. Instead, local taxpayers covered the $300 burial stipend and $300 to retrieve her remains, Gonnelli said.

Tax dollars also are used for other routine final expenses such as to mark, open and close unclaimed graves, to pay for the corrugated burial containers, and obtain the death certificate, Gonnelli said. The county spent an estimated total of $10,200 between 2013 and last year to bury residents, according to financial documents.

Bucks County spent an estimated $10,000 to cremate 29 unclaimed dead in 2017, Campbell said. Montgomery County budgets $10,000 to $15,000 a year for unclaimed dead expenses, though the amount doesnt reflect transportation and employee costs, Balacki said.

One way counties try to recoup some of their costs is through the deceased's estate, but often it's a fruitless effort since unclaimed dead often were poor, coroners said.

In Bucks County, if the coroners office cannot find legal next-of-kin before a body is cremated, but later family comes forward, the family is asked to pay a discounted rate for cremation. Campbell declined to reveal the cost, but said it is less than the $1,000 charged to a family who legally give up claims to a body.

Montgomery County charges $2,000 if family members change their minds and want to reclaim remains immediately after cremation. That cost drops to $750 after the first year, said Balacki.

Counties also look for other cost-control measures, including soliciting assistance from churches and other organizations such as Humanities Gifts Registry, which uses donated bodies for scientific research, then cremates and disposes of ashes.

Pennsylvania and New Jersey offer final expense assistance for deceased receiving medical assistance or Social Security income, though it only covers part of the costs. In New Jersey, the state reimburses the county board of social services for what it pays funeral homes that handle indigent burials.

Across the river, though, only approved funeral homes in Pennsylvania are eligible for up to $750 reimbursement and only if the total cost is under $1,500.

For years Burlington County New Jersey has buried its unclaimed dead in this county-owned cemetery in Pemberton township

Help for veterans

Among the more than 300 names gathered by this news organization of unclaimed remains in Bucks, Burlington and Montgomery counties, at least four are military veterans.

Honorably discharged U.S. military members and spouses are eligible for free burial in a veterans' cemetery.

To qualify for military burial, service has to be proved through a document known as a DD214, which are given to members at discharge. All DD214s are kept at the National Archives in St. Louis, Missouri; local congressional offices and military organizations can get them for burial purposes.

But somebody has to make the request.

Neither Pennsylvania nor New Jersey mandates funeral homes or county agencies notify veteran authorities about unclaimed veterans.

Montgomery County forwards information about deceased military veterans to county and federal military veteran organizations, and has identified at least five veterans over the last 11 years, Balacki said.

The remains of Clarkson "Sparky" Gromis from 1988 at the coroner's office Friday, March 9, 2018 in Norristown. [BILL FRASER / STAFF PHOTOJOURNALIST]

In the 30 years that he has been Bucks County Military Affairs Department Director, Dan Fraley said that he doesnt recall ever getting a call from a county coroner about a possible veteran. Burlington County did not make its medical examiner available to answer questions.

Pennsylvania has no law giving veteran groups the ability to claim deceased veterans. New Jersey does.

The 2009 law gave veterans organizations the ability to claim unclaimed veterans cremated remains after one year, if no family comes forward. The remains must be disposed of in a dignified manner.

Since then, one New Jersey nonprofit, Mission of Honor, has retrieved the cremated remains of more than 600 veterans at funeral homes in central and northern New Jersey. At least half those remains were reunited with family, according to the organization.

Another volunteer organization, the Missing in America Project, handles southern New Jersey veterans. Earlier this year the group laid to rest the cremains of seven veterans and one spouse at a state-owned Burlington County veterans' cemetery.

In other counties it's more difficult for friends and others to retrieve unclaimed remains.

For the last 10 years, Bucks County policy has been that cremated remains are only released to family, unless someone is an estate administrator.

The rule was crafted after two women sued the county and its coroner's office in federal court, alleging it failed to notify them about their estranged father's death before cremating his body and giving his ashes to his girlfriend. The suit was later dismissed, but the policy remains in place.

This is a sketch of a proposed Bucks County columbarium that was proposed in 2019 to be located in Plumstead Cemetery. The remains of nearly 200 unclaimed dead would be transferred there.

Eternal rest

Coroners typically are reluctant to dispose of cremains, concerned that family may show up one day.

Under New Jersey law, unclaimed cremated remains can be disposed of one year after cremation. Funeral homes and medical examiners must show a diligent effort was made to locate family or friends such as a certified letter with return receipt requested mailed to whomever authorized the cremation.

Pennsylvania law allows for disposal of unclaimed remains after less than two days, but Montgomery County keeps cremains 10 years, then has them buried in a mass grave, Balacki said. Burlington County buries its unclaimed dead in individuals plots.

Bucks County has two decades of unclaimed cremains in storage  but that may soon change.

Inspired by plans in Lycoming County in Central Pennsylvania to open an 800-square-foot mausoleum in a municipal-owned cemetery, Bucks' Campbell two years ago approached Plumstead Township officials about building a similar vault to hold the dozens of unclaimed remains now kept in an evidence room at the county morgue in Warminster.

In the 1960s, the township took over control of a cemetery after the church that owned it could no longer maintain it, according to Township Manager Carolyn McCreary. Currently no burials are done at the property.

The discussions with the county about the proposed mausoleum are ongoing, McCreary said. The county recently prepared a rendering of the proposed 1,900-square-foot structure for supervisor feedback, McCreary said.

There is no timetable for considering the plan and the township cannot permit construction until the issue of its registration as a cemetery company is addressed and escrow posted, McCreary said.

But supervisors are open to the idea, she added.

The board believes everyone deserves a resting place," she said.

This story was originally appeared in the Bucks County Courier Times on July 14, 2019.

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: The reasons the dead go unclaimed as as different as the way they died.
US companies face less pressure for climate and social reforms

A view of the New York City skyline of Manhattan and the Hudson River during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in New York City as seen from Weehawken

US companies face less pressure for climate and social reforms A view of the New York City skyline of Manhattan and the Hudson River during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in New York City as seen from Weehawken

By Ross Kerber

(Reuters) - Shareholder support for proxy resolutions on topics including climate change and workforce diversity dropped significantly this spring, analysts said, as tough proposals from activists met with growing political pressure on fund firms' voting.

Halfway through the shareholder annual meetings of Russell 3000 companies, average support for voted resolutions on environmental issues was 25% through mid-May, compared with 38% for all the prior proxy season ended June 30, 2022, and 43% for all of the prior year, according to shareholder engagement firm Georgeson.

Support for resolutions on social issues fell to 20% this year so far, from 26% in 2022 and 33% in 2021, Georgeson said.

"We've seen a dampening effect," said Georgeson Strategist Kilian Moote, since the drop in supports often reflected resolutions asking for steps investors deemed too burdensome.

He declined to discuss specific companies, but his description fit results like at major U.S. banks that defeated calls to wind down financing for major fossil fuel projects. At the same time, compromises with ESG advocates show executives still care about sustainability matters.

For instance, companies including Ford and eBay agreed to report more workforce details such as recruiting and retention rates in deals that led shareholder activist group As You Sow to withdraw resolutions before they were voted, said its CEO Andrew Behar.

Ford declined to comment. eBay did not return messages.

Behar added that new resolutions that got low backing stand to gain in coming years, such as a call on Exxon to account for divested assets in emissions reporting, which won 18% support. He also said Republican attacks on ESG likely depressed fund firms' support for many items.

"Their attorneys and compliance people would be saying, 'let's be a little more cautious this year'," Behar said.

Exxon did not respond to requests for comment.

State Street Global Advisors' global head of asset stewardship Benjamin Colton said via email that while companies have become more transparent, there have been more of what he called "overly prescriptive proposals."

"These dynamics have led to an overall decline in investor support for environment and social shareholder proposals," Colton said.

Other top asset managers, BlackRock and Vanguard did not comment for this story.

Both have previously said they vote on a case-by-case basis and noted an increasing number of proposals affect support rates.

Average support for resolutions filed by investors opposed to ESG fell to 6% from 9%, such as one from the free-market National Center for Public Policy Research calling for IBM to review its ESG record in China that won 7% support.

IBM declined to comment.

Scott Shepard, a director at National Center, said its resolutions still help demonstrate what he called the "partisanship" of top asset managers. Many now realize they need to take into account risks like pushing for decarbonization before new technologies are ready, he added.

"We're seeing that reflected in the numbers" in this year's voting results, he said.

(Reporting by Ross Kerber; Additional reporting by Sabrina Valle in Houston; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)
Leigh Finke, Tina Kotek, and Erick Russell

The number of out LGBTQ+ elected officials in the U.S. increased in the past year, but the community is still far from proportional representation, says a new report from the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute.

Between June 2022 and May 2023, LGBTQ+ elected officials increased by 13.6 percent, with 1,185 currently serving, according to Victory Institutes 2023 Out for America report, released Thursday. But thats only 0.23 percent of U.S. elected officials, meaning 36,232 more LGBTQ+ people must be elected to achieve equitable representation.

Still, the numbers are evidence of progress, the group said.

From school boards to state legislatures to Congress, LGBTQ+ political power continues to grow across the country, Victory Institute President and CEO Annise Parker said in the report. LGBTQ+ leaders are our best firewall against the homophobia and transphobia sweeping our communities.

There are 226 LGBTQ+ state legislators currently serving in the U.S., the most ever and an increase of 18 percent since 2022. Vermont has the most out LGBTQ+ state legislators in the country with 14, while Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia all have the fewest with zero each. Idaho and Mississippi have no out officials at any level.

There are 124 LGBTQ+ school board members in office, an increase of 37 percent since 2022. Three out governors are serving, the most ever and up from two in 2022.

Diversity of out officials has stepped up in the past year. LGBTQ+ elected officials of color increased by 23.2 percent in the last year, while white LGBTQ+ elected officials increased by 9 percent. The number of LGBTQ+ elected officials of Middle Eastern or Arab American heritage more than doubled. Latinx LGBTQ+ officials increased by 27 percent, compared to 19 percent for Asian American Pacific Islander LGBTQ+ officials and 17 percent for Black LGBTQ+ officials.

Transgender and nonbinary LGBTQ+ elected officials increased at a significantly higher rate than cisgender LGBQ elected officials (by 24 percent and 10.5 percent, respectively). Now transgender and nonbinary elected officials account for 8.1 percent of all LGBTQ+ people in office, up from 6.9 percent in June 2022. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have trans elected officials, and 14 states have nonbinary ones. There are no known intersex people in public office.

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There was a significant growth in the number of pansexual and bisexual elected officials, with a 65 percent and 34 percent increase respectively.

Still, to achieve equitable representation, the U.S. must elect at least one more out governor; 16 more LGBTQ+ people to other statewide executive positions; five more as U.S. senators; 20 more as U.S. House members; 319 more as state legislators; hundreds more as mayors; thousands more as school board members and judges; and more than 15,000 to other local offices.

Out officials are making a difference in the states they serve when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. Minnesota state Rep. Leigh Finke, who is trans, played a major role in passing legislation that made the state a sanctuary for trans youth seeking gender-affirming care that they cant get in their home states. U.S. Reps. Becca Balint, a lesbian, and Robert Garcia, a gay man, both just elected last year, have been speaking out against anti-LGBTQ+ forces in Congress.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a gay man serving his second term, has signed bills into law further protecting the rights to abortion and gender-affirming care in his state. Tammy Baldwin, one of two out U.S. senators and the only lesbian one, was a leader in the effort that led to passage of the Respect for Marriage Act, writing marriage equality into federal law. California Assemblymember Evan Low and Sen. Scott Wiener, both gay men, have introduced a state constitutional amendment to protect marriage equality there.

As LGBTQ+ elected officials stand up and speak out on behalf of all of us, they are also inspiring countless LGBTQ+ leaders to consider running for office themselves, Parker said. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for the LGBTQ+ community and our allies: we must double down on our efforts to inspire, train and support future LGBTQ+ candidates  our rights will depend on it.

Pictured, from left, three of the out officials elected last year: Minnesota Rep. Leigh Finke, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, and Connecticut Treasurer Erick Russell
Oregon State Capitol State Park was a sea of purple Thursday as hundreds of state employees rallied to demand a union contract that includes higher wages, raises and a sustainable workload.

The rally was organized by SEIU 503, the labor union for Oregon public service employees and care providers. The union is currently negotiating contracts with state managers, but says the state is offering raises that do not match the rate of inflation and creating a "crisis" in the workforce.

Wages today are worth less than they were five years ago, organizers said, and state workers are living "paycheck-to-paycheck."

SEIU 503 published research last month that found the state has almost 9,000 job vacancies. It attributes the shortage to low wages and increasingly heavy workloads.

The rally also marked the state Senate's continued walkout, which has stalled budget negotiations. SEIU 503 president Mike Powers said the walkout is proof state legislators "don't care about us, and don't care about everyday Oregonians."

Organizers said if the state does not agree to a fair contract, state workers will go on strike June 28.

Here's what state employees at the rally had to say:

State of Oregon employees marched around the Capitol after a formal rally Thursday that demanded fair contracts for state workers.

Michelle Suguitan-Reed, Self-Sufficiency Programs Office

Suguitan-Reed said she has worked in the "same office, same building" for 23 years. She said her workload has increased but her wages have not kept pace.

"I work hard for Oregonians," she said. "But I'm not happy."

Suguitan-Reed said she will help lead a picket if state workers strike later this month.

More than 1,000 state of Oregon workers from various agencies rally for a union contract on June 8 in Salem. State workers with SEIU 503 would like to see pay increases, reasonable workloads and safer working conditions.

Tammy Emery and Donna Stromer, Department of Benefits and Eligibility

Emery and Stomer have both worked for the state for decades, they said, but their salaries have maxed out. The 4% cost of living adjustment proposed by state managers is not enough to account for increased costs of living, they said.

State workers got a 3.1% cost of living increase last year, according to the union. The pay floor for the state's lowest-paid workers is $16.85 per hour.

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Emery, who has worked for the same department for 23 years, said she has not gotten a true raise in eight years.

"It's abhorrent," she said.

Meanwhile, Stromer said her workload has "doubled," but her pay has remained stagnant.

Stromer and Emery said the quality of customer service in the department has decreased as a result. They have been asked to answer questions about new medical programs with "minimal training," Emery said, but act "as though we're experts."

"We do this job because we care about the customers we serve," Emery said. "And the level of service that we are giving right now is not because of lack of desire. It's lack of training and investment in the workers to provide that service to the community."

More than 1,000 state of Oregon workers from various agencies rally for a union contract on June 8 in Salem.

Austin Folnagy, Oregon Employment Department, SEIU 503 Central Table co-chair

Folnagy, who was one of the rally's organizers and speakers, said the state is in a "workforce crisis" and is being out-competed by other sectors.

"We have some people ... that quite frankly can make more money at Panera Bread or Panda Express," he said.

A 2022 Salary and Benefit Report from the State of Oregon concluded that state salaries are competitive compared to the overall job market. According to the report, average actual state employee compensation is 100.4% of the overall labor market, including major benefits. Average compensation is 96% of the overall market excluding benefits.

The report said the state it is right at [its] compensation goal.

But Folnagy said many state employees cannot afford to live in the communities they serve on their current wages. As co-chair of the union's bargaining table, he said, he has talked to "hundreds of members who have real difficult experiences because of how low they get paid."

He said he knows people who work on the coast but commute over the coastal range, "over those mountains... because they can't afford to live in those communities," he said.

"We have servants' hearts," he said. "We do this because we want to serve the people. But they need to be able to afford to live in the communities that they work in."

Courtney Langner, Department of Human Services

Langner, a child welfare case worker, said she responds to cases that show her the "absolute worst of humanity, day after day."

She has held kids' hands in the worst moments of their lives, she said, treated them for lice, transported them to foster homes and hospitals.

But her department is understaffed and overwhelmed, sh said. Langner said she clocks anywhere from 40-100 hours of overtime per month.

"We're exhausted," Langner said.

Langner said she and her colleagues do their jobs because they care deeply about Oregon's kids, but barely make enough to support their own families. Some use food assistance and other state benefits, she said.

"These are the people who, day after day, are taking care of Oregon's most vulnerable," she said.

This article originally appeared on Salem Statesman Journal: Oregon state employees rally to demand 'fair' union contract
A UTA bus wrapped to celebrate Pride month, diversity and inclusion is pictured on the UTAs Twitter page at the 2023 Pride Parade in downtown Salt Lake City on Sunday, June 4. | Twitter.com/RideUTA

Some legislative leaders are putting state entities on notice that they need to avoid straying from their true missions after the Utah Transit Authority was pressured to pull a bus with a pride wrap from the annual Utah Pride Parade in Salt Lake City.

I would say that if we have state agencies that continue to go into the areas that are controversial, then all things would be on the table, House Majority Leader Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, told the Deseret News.

Schultz said there are three or four different things being talked about by some House Republicans to deal with not just UTA, but other state entities including universities if they have engaged in what might be seen as controversial activities.

My hope is that UTA solves this on their own and it doesnt have to become as big of an issue for the Legislature, he said, declining to detail potential legislation that could be considered by the 2024 Legislature, where Republicans hold a supermajority.

UTA pulled the pride-wrapped bus from last Sundays parade amid criticism on social media, replacing it with an electric bus. UTA said in a statement Tuesday It was a challenging situation that presented competing community interests.

The wrap that featured messages like RIDE WITH PRIDE! was donated by two advertising companies, R&R Partners and Lamar Advertising, ahead of last years Pride celebration and was in the 2022 parade, UTA spokesman Carl Arky said.

The bus is not currently in service, Arky said. He said the bus had been used on a daily basis along multiple routes for the past year, but was pulled June 2 upon the Legislatures request.

Schultz said, We want our government entities to focus on what their true missions are. The majority leader said he is waiting to see what further action UTA takes.

I just dont ever want to go down this pathway again. I just want them focused on moving people. And thats moving people to and from the Pride parade along with every other event, he said. I think thats truly what the majority of Utahns want to see.

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The controversy was apparently sparked by a UTA tweet May 31 that said the agency is grateful for our LGBTQ+ riders and employees and look forward to celebrating Pride with you all month long, including a picture of the bus.

A whole bunch of drama

Schultz included a copy of UTAs tweet in a text exchange that day with UTA Trustee Beth Holbrook, telling her, This is causing me a whole bunch of drama right now inside my caucus. Is it really necessary? Can you reevaluate this decision?

We are grateful for our LGBTQ+ riders and employees and look forward to celebrating Pride with you all month long. Keep an eye out for our pride-wrapped bus on our system, and check out our blog for other ways UTA can be your ride to pride at https://t.co/vLIA6QkpmF. pic.twitter.com/FtSEBkmzOQ  Utah Transit Authority - UTA (@RideUTA) May 31, 2023

According to the texts provided by UTA in response to a records request, Schultz said, Honestly this is the last thing I want to deal with right now. It seriously would be best if you made the change on your own.

Holbrook said she was having the agencys legal team look at the issue, saying, We have to be careful of 1st amendment issues. I will know more tomorrow. Last thing I want to do is inadvertently cause controversy.

That triggered a stern response from Schultz: Beth, you are a state owned entity. That bus is paid for using taxpayer dollars. This is not a first amendment issue. Whoever made the decision to move forward with this bus absolutely knew it would be controversial.

The majority leader included a statement he said came from House Speaker Brad Wilson, R-Kaysville. To quote the Speaker, we live in Utah, we shouldnt have to deal with this stuff and that there are a group of members wanting you to make a formal public apology.

He said he wanted the problem solved ASAP so we dont so we dont have to go down this road.

Three other GOP representatives texted UTA officials a day later to raise concerns about the agencys tweet, Reps. Kay Christofferson of Lehi, chairman of the House Transportation Committee; Candice Pierucci of Herriman; and Colin Jack of St. George.

Christofferson told Holbrook he was disappointed to see a wrap supporting a controversial social position that is very divisive. Why spend the funds and political capital on this effort? what other social issues have you not supported, but now are supporting this?

Pierucci, a member of the Transportation Interim Committee, said in a text to UTA Board Chairman Carlton Christensen this is not an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars and that she had reached out to leadership about this yesterday, a reference to House leaders.

Jack said in a text to UTA Government Relations Director Shule Bishop that he, too, was disappointed to see the bus wrap. I think public funds should never be used to promote private agendas, especially those that contradict our state ideals.

Both Schultz and Christofferson were part of Jacks text thread.

Christofferson said in a statement Thursday to the Deseret News, I voiced my concerns to UTA and encouraged them to responsibly utilize and maximize taxpayers dollars, while Pierucci said she was questioning whether this was the best use of taxpayer dollars.

Jack did not respond to requests for comment.

The House speaker was traveling and out of service for the remainder of the week, according to House spokeswoman Alexa Roberts, but Wilson said in a statement hes hopeful moving forward UTA will stick to its core mission of moving Utahns.

Inclusion and government

Brigham Young University political science professor Chris Karpowitz warned the tone and the content of at least some of these text messages runs a risk of further dividing Utahns, and making it more difficult for lawmakers to work with the LGBTQ+ community and others.

I dont want to weigh in on the specifics of whether a wrap paid for by another group was acceptable or not, Karpowitz said. But he stressed government does have a role to signal that all Utahns are welcome at the table as we work out our differences.

UTA trustees were not available for comment about what action the agency may take.

We want to make it clear that it was never our intention to offend or disappoint any member of the communities we serve, the agency said in the statement issued Tuesday that said UTAs goal is a transit environment that is safe, accessible, and welcoming to all.
Senators intent on labeling Russias Wagner group a foreign terrorist organization faced a roadblock Thursday as legislation directing such action failed to advance out of a committee markup.

While Democrats and Republicans have offered support for labeling Wagner as a terrorist group, it is opposed by the White House over concern that giving Wagner such a broad sanction would harm U.S. relations with, in particular, African countries that employ it as a private security firm.

That argument has resonated with a bipartisan group of senators.

I think we need to hold the Wagner group accountable for the crimes that theyre doing, and we just need to make sure that what were doing does not have unintended consequences, Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) told The Hill when asked if he supported the text.

The bill, the Holding Accountable Russian Mercenaries (HARM) Act, was tabled by an unnamed senator, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) announced at the start of the markup meeting.

Menendez said he hoped to bring up the HARM Act and another bill related to negotiating a tax agreement with Taiwan during a June 21 markup.

The legislation will have to overcome criticisms by Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), in particular, who share concerns by the White House that imposing strict sanctions such as the terrorist designation on Wagner would block U.S. officials from talking with African leaders who employ Wagner.

The private military company holds a long list of accusations of grievous atrocities against civilians in African countries, where it is often hired to supplement those countries weak militaries. But its notoriety has increased with its controversial role on the frontline in Russias war on Ukraine.

The outfit, led by businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, is accused of employing brutal tactics of human wave attacks, trying to overwhelm Ukrainian positions with bodies, accused of torturing Ukrainian prisoners of war and other allegations of war crimes.

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The Biden administration in January labeled Wagner a transnational criminal organization, an effort to siphon off the groups revenue streams. The U.S. sanctioned the head of the Wagner group in Mali last month for trying to source weapons through the African country for use in Ukraine.

Coons told The Hill that conversations surrounding the language of the bill text are happening only between supporters, like legislation co-sponsor Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and members who are concerned.

This is an issue that deserves more thorough conversation so that those of us who see Wagners broadscale, harmful, pernicious, terrible impact on a half dozen countries are confident we are doing everything we can to counter them, he said.

Booker, rushing to leave the Senate floor late Thursday afternoon, was reluctant to address questions over his concerns about the HARM Act.

Its a much longer conversation, he told The Hill as he tried to push through a locked door.

Something Ill talk to you about when we get back next week, if youre interested.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
An indicted Mar-a-Lago staff member texted photos of top secret documents scattered on the floor of a storage room at Donald Trumps Florida club, according to bombshell indictment unsealed on Friday.

I opened the door and found this, Mr Trumps bag man Walt Nauta texted an unknown Trump staffer in December 2021, along with two photos of the classified files sprawled on the floor.

At least one document was marked Secret//Rel to USA, FVEY, signifying that it was only meant to be viewed by the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The photo was among several contained in the 49-page indictment against Mr Trump, which laid out in stunning detail the 15-month investigation into his reckless mishandling of top secret material after leaving office.

One image showed about 30 boxes of classified documents in a bathroom haphazardly crammed around a toilet next to a shower curtain. A silver chandelier can be seen above the boxes.

Another picture showed piles of classified documents on the stage at the Mar-a-Lago ballroom, where they had allegedly been left for two months.

Other photos released by the Department of Justice show boxes of top secret material crammed into storage rooms around the Florida residence.

Walt Nauta texted a Mar-a-Lago staffer a photo of secret documents sprawl on the floor: I opened the door and found this (US Justice Department)

Dozens of boxes were stored on a stage at the Mar-a-Lago ballroom for months (US Justice Department)

Towers of boxes containing classified material in a bathroom underneath a chandelier (US Justice Department)

Classified material was left in unsecure storage rooms, (US Justice Department)

After leaving the White House, Mr Trumps private club at Palm Beach became his main residence.

It also became a magnet for foreign spies, former intelligence officials warned.

In August 2022, a Ukrainian woman posing as a member of the Rothschild family gained access to the club, according to reports.

Inna Yashchyshyn mingled at Mar-a-Lago functions with Mr Trump and South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, according to an article from the Organized Crime & Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

(US Justice Department)

During Mr Trumps presidency, a suspected Chinese spy was arrested and sentenced to eight months prison after being found guilty of trespassing and lying to Secret Service agents about why she was at the property.

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Mr Trump also welcomed Kanye West and known white supremacist Nick Fuentes to the club.

The former president has been indicted on 37 counts of willful retention of national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.

Special Counsel Jack Smith delivers remarks on a recently unsealed indictment against former President Donald Trump (Getty Images)

The indictment accuses Mr Trump of illegally holding onto materials on US nuclear programmes, potential vulnerabilities to the US and its allies to military attack, and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.

Mr Nauta, a former Navy officier and longtime Trump aide, has also been indicted on six felonies, after he allegedly removed 64 boxes from Mar-a-Lago to his home.

(US Justice Department)

The unsealed indictment also details a conversation Mr Trump held with two lawyers in May 2023, in which the former president asks: Wouldnt it be better if we just told them we dont have anything here?

In his first public remarks, Special Counsel Jack Smith said he wanted all Americans to read the indictment in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.

We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone, Mr Smith told a press conference on Friday afternoon.

Mr Trump, who will appear in court in Miami on Tuesday, faces up to 100 years in prison if convicted. He has angrily protested his innocence in a series of Truth Social posts.
Crime and Courts Reporter

Donald W. Meyers is a multimedia journalist at the Yakima Herald-Republic covering crime and courts. He is also the writer behind It Happened Here, a weekly history column. Before coming to Yakima, Meyers covered a wide variety of beats at The Salt Lake Tribune, Daily Herald, and daily and weekly newspapers across New Jersey. He is also a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, serving as a regional officer in the organization as well as on the national Freedom of Information Committee.
Former President Donald Trump listens as he speaks with reporters while in flight on his plane after a campaign rally at Waco Regional Airport, in Waco, Texas, March 25, 2023, while en route to West Palm Beach, Fla.
France hails 'hero with a backpack' who intervened in knife attack on very young children

A 24-year-old Catholic pilgrim in France is being hailed as a hero after he intervened in a savage knife attack on very young children
WA ranks high in reported dog attacks on mail carriers in 2022. Pasco, Tacoma had 10 each
(Bloomberg) -- Here is a snapshot of whats happening with Iran, its nuclear talks and energy markets.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Latest developments

US and Iranian officials rejected reports that Tehran and Washington were near to a nuclear agreement. Oil dropped on Thursday, as traders speculated that sanctions on Iranian energy exports would soon be eased.

Any reports of an interim deal are false, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed these comments during a trip to Saudi Arabia, saying that reviving the 2015 nuclear deal, which reduced sanctions in return for curbs on Irans nuclear work, wasnt an immediate priority.

Theres no temporary agreement to replace the JCPOA and its not on the agenda, Irans state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported, citing the countrys mission to the UN.

Regional media including Israels Haaretz and Middle East Eye have said this week Iran and the US have made progress in talks.

Latest coverage

Oil Falls After Media Reports Ignite Iran-US Rumors, US Denies

Irans Uranium Enrichment Hits a New High, Testing Diplomacy

How an Iran Nuclear Deal Could Affect Oil, Trade and Security

Four Ways the Iranian Nuclear Talks Could Upend Oil Markets

Oil

Oil dropped on the reports. West Texas Intermediate fell as much as 4.8% before paring losses to 1.7% and settling near $71 a barrel on Thursday. In early trading on Friday, it fell 0.9% to $70.67.

(Adds Iranian comment in fifth paragraph)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
A young Kamiltpah girl digs up the first roots of the season near Pushpum. Tribal leaders from across Washington have asked Gov. Jay Inslee to reject a proposed pumped-water storage project in the area; the state Ecology Department's final Environmental Impact Statement found the site would have significant and unavoidable adverse impacts on tribal and cultural resources. (Christopher Ward)
Verint Systems (NASDAQ:VRNT) First Quarter 2024 Results

Key Financial Results

Revenue: US$216.6m (flat on 1Q 2023).

Net loss: US$1.91m (loss narrowed by 61% from 1Q 2023).

US$0.029 loss per share (improved from US$0.076 loss in 1Q 2023).

All figures shown in the chart above are for the trailing 12 month (TTM) period

Verint Systems EPS Misses Expectations

Revenue was in line with analyst estimates. Earnings per share (EPS) missed analyst estimates.

Looking ahead, revenue is forecast to grow 6.8% p.a. on average during the next 3 years, compared to a 11% growth forecast for the Software industry in the US.

Performance of the American Software industry.

The company's shares are up 4.3% from a week ago.

Risk Analysis

You should learn about the 1 warning sign we've spotted with Verint Systems.

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.

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A man who caused a school bus crash last year as part of a series of incidents involving huffing in Stafford County pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges Thursday.

Michael Jay Kingham, 30, pleaded guilty to inhaling noxious chemicals and reckless driving. Those charges stemmed from a Dec. 16 incident in which he caused a traffic accident involving a middle school bus.

According to police, Kingham had been inhaling fumes from aerosol cans that day when he passed a school bus in the 1300 block of Brooke Road in southern Stafford on a double-yellow line while heading north.

He hit the bus, then collided head-on with a southbound Dodge Durango. The bus ended up in a ditch.

The bus had just left DixonSmith Middle School. Two students were taken to a hospital to be treated, and the Durango driver was also injured.

Kingham had been convicted of huffing charges previously, and was arrested at least three more times following the school bus crash. He is again facing charges in Stafford as the result of a May 23 incident in which he was found locked in a Stafford Walmart bathroom with several empty aerosol cans he had allegedly stolen from the store.

He is scheduled to be sentenced on Thursdays convictions on July 27.

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According to the latest NOAA update, it's now official, El Nino is back! The phenomenon is expected to gain strength in the coming months, and may reach a significant intensity by the end of 2023!

After a rapid warming of sea surface temperatures over the Equatorial Pacific Ocean, El Nino has officially developed! Image: Office of Satellite and Product Operations (OSPO)/NOAA.

Now there is no more speculation, El Nino is officially back! This is what the latest diagnostic update of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) made by NOAA's Climate Prediction Center (CPC) indicates, which for the first time warns of an "El Nino Advisory", which means that El Nino conditions have already been observed and are expected to continue.

On Thursday 8 June, NOAA declared: El Nino conditions are present and are expected to gradually strengthen during the Northern Hemisphere winter 2023-24.

In May, oceanic El Nino conditions emerged through higher than normal sea surface temperatures (SST) over the equatorial Pacific Ocean, mainly in the more central and eastern portion. According to the CPC, all indices of the different Nino regions - from the eastern portion, close to South America, to the central portion - recorded anomalies greater than +0.5C in the last week: Nino 4 was +0.6 W; Nino 3.4 was +0.8C; Nino 3 was +1.1C and Nino 1+2 were +2.3C.

El Nino conditions are here, according to the latest ENSO Outlook from @NWSCPC. El Nino is expected to continue into the winter, with the odds of at least a moderate event are about 84%.https://t.co/X80WoUuAi7 pic.twitter.com/FedIzrLFpv  NOAA Climate.gov (@NOAAClimate) June 8, 2023

However, we cannot forget that both El Nino and La Nina depend on the ocean-atmosphere interaction, therefore, it is not enough to just observe the oceanic conditions to declare a new El Nino event, the atmosphere also needs to respond to the oceanic anomalies.

In the last month, in addition to the warming of SSTs in the Equatorial Pacific, we also started to observe some signs of weakening of the atmospheric circulation over the Tropical Pacific, the so-called Walker Cell. This was noted due to a weakening of the trade winds in the region, in addition to an intensification of convection over the central Tropical Pacific and weakening of convection over the western portion, indicating a displacement of the centre of tropical convection over the Pacific, something characteristic of El Nino.

El Nino conditions are present and are expected to gradually strengthen into the Northern Hemisphere winter 2023-24. An #ElNino Advisory is now in effect. https://t.co/5zlzaZ0D9Z pic.twitter.com/KEkExCC3Hc  NWS Climate Prediction Center (@NWSCPC) June 8, 2023

"Depending on its strength, El Nino can cause a range of impacts, such as increasing the risk of heavy rain and drought in certain parts of the world," said Michelle L'Heureux, climate scientist at the Center for Climate Prediction. Climate change can exacerbate or mitigate certain impacts related to El Nino. For example, El Nino can lead to new temperature records, particularly in areas that already experience above-average temperatures during El Nino.

El Nino also arrives against a backdrop of notably high average global SSTs. In recent months we have seen the average global temperature of the oceans break records, exceeding 21C, something that has not been seen before. Therefore, the development of an El Nino, let alone a strong El Nino, could further worsen these conditions.

An El Nino to go down in history

Scientists have been following the development of this El Nino in recent months with some surprise. That's because, since the end of one of the longest La Nina events in history, which ended earlier this year, forecasts have changed from neutral conditions to forecast El Nino surprisingly quickly.

This sudden warming of SSTs began on the west coast of South America, where SST anomalies exceeded +2.5C, forming an intense episode of Coastal El Nino, which has caused extremely heavy rainfall and severe flooding in countries such as Peru and Ecuador. Since the establishment of this Coastal El Nino, scientists have warned that if an El Nino develops, it could be of strong intensity!

Following NOAA's announcement of El Nino, here's a look at the recently released ECMWF outlook through November



Nearly 90% of ECMWF ensemble members predict a strong El Nino will develop by November 2023. pic.twitter.com/bSS5tbtR87  Ben Noll (@BenNollWeather) June 8, 2023

Since then, warm SST anomalies have started to move westward, spreading across the equatorial Pacific at a rapid rate. As a result, the first El Nino Watch alert, which indicates the probability of the formation of an El Nino, was issued by the CPC/NOAA less than 2 months ago, on April 13.

Now with an El Nino officially established, NOAA indicates that there is an 84% chance that an El Nino will develop to at least moderate intensity later in 2023 or early 2024. There is also a 56% chance that an El Nino will reach strong intensity. If these predictions come true, this El Nino will be stronger than the last one, which occurred in 2018-19, and could reach the level of the 2015-16 El Nino, the strongest in history.
Carlos Salazar, with his counselor at Kofa, Leticia Pereda. I feel very proud, Salazar said. This scholarship is helping me so much to go to the university, so that my parents dont have to worry so much about the money. They already have made a lot of sacrifices to support the family.
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Un asteroid de marimea unui zgarie-nori se va apropia de Pamant

Un asteroid de marimea unui zgarie-nori va trece aproape de Pamant in aceasta saptamana, dar nu va reprezenta o amenintare reala pentru planeta noastra. Asteroidul in cauza este cunoscut sub numele de Asteroid 1994 XD si a fost descoperit in 1994 de catre grupul Spacewatch [citeste mai departe]
Fremont Police officers were dispatched at 10:03 a.m. Tuesday, June 6, to Bell Field Elementary in reference to a criminal mischief complaint.

A press release said video footage shows that on Friday, June 2, at approximately 11:20 p.m., five to six juveniles caused extensive damage to a piece of playground equipment (funnel ball hoop game). Estimated loss is undetermined at this time.

Anyone with information is asked to contact CrimeStoppers at 402-727-4002 or submit a tip using the P3 App. Refer to case #2530 when submitting your tip.
Hungary is working to give the Ukrainian people all the help they need, both on its own territory and in Ukraine, foreign ministry state secretary Levente Magyar said in Solomonovo (Tiszasalamon), near the Ukraine-Hungary border, on Thursday at the arrival of 34 buses donated to Ukrainian regions affected by the war by bus carrier Volanbusz.

Though Hungary has a greater presence in Transcarpathia than any other part of Ukraine, it has intensified its presence in the rest of the country in recent months, Magyar said.



He said the war was getting more horrific by the day, adding that the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine had led to a humanitarian disaster.



As a friend of the Ukrainian people, Hungarians have to be prepared to always react in the most flexible, effective and quickest way possible, he said.



Magyar said his Ukrainian partners, MP Yulia Hryshyna and Transcarpathia Governor Viktor Mykyta, had indicated that the regions most affected by the war were in need of buses, which had only intensified after the collapse of the dam.



Hungarian Interchurch Aid president Laszlo Lehel said the organisation had already donated 20 tonnes of relief supplies to the area most affected by the disaster.



Hungarian Interchurch Aid is sending 50 million forints (EUR 136,000) worth of humanitarian aid to the area in the coming days, he said.
Local authors Tim and Lisa Trudell will present their book 100 Things To Do In Nebraska Before You Die from 6:30-7:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 13.

The event will be held at Gallery 92 (92 W. Sixth) and is hosted by Keene Memorial Library with support of Friends of the Library.

The 100 things to do in Nebraska presentation is free and open to the public with light refreshments provided. Everyone is invited to learn about the many places to visit in Nebraska.

For more information, contact Elisa Cruz at Keene Memorial Library at 402-727-2694.
An exhibition presenting designer shoes by international and Hungarian artists will open in the Gallery of Pecs, in southern Hungary, on Friday, the gallery manager said.

The show entitled Shoe Fantasies will feature more than 80 pairs of footwear including Zaha Hadids revolutionary model NOVA with a metallic chromed vinyl rubber upper part lined with Italian kid nappa leather as well as shoes designed for Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift ad Fergie, the Zsolnay heritage manager Nkft told MTI in a statement.



The international creators include British, Belgian, Bulgarian, Dutch, Israeli, Italian, Japanese, Russian and Romanian artists. Shoe Fantasies is the result of a collaboration between the Pecs Gallery and the Virtual Shoe Museum and is curated by Liza Snook and Dutch designer Amber Ambrose Aurele, who is known for her sky-high heels.



The exhibition also presenting installations, photographs and videos will run until September 3.



Click here to know more about the exhibition
YORK  Four Corners Health Department wants to encourage families to stay healthy this summer! There are many ways to do this including nutrition and activity. Family Health and Fitness Day is June 10th. It is celebrated the second Saturday in June. June is also National Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Month.

Farmers Markets are a good place to find fresh fruits and vegetables. Support our local producers and eat healthy at the same time! There are several different markets available throughout our district.

David City

In front of Winfields- 467 D Street

Fridays 4 pm- 6 pm

June 2 through October

Henderson

City Park

Tuesdays 5 pm  7 pm

June 6 through August 8

Osceola

Courthouse Square

Wednesdays 5 pm  7 pm

Seward

Courthouse Square

Wednesdays 5 pm  7pm and Saturdays 8 am  12 pm

May 17 through October

Shelby

South end of Main

Wednesdays 5 pm  7 pm

July 12 through August 9

York

North side of the library

Thursdays 5 pm -7 pm

June 1 through September 29

Screen time is another concern many parents have. Its important for children to get at least 1 hour of moderate activity every day. Limit the screen time and head outside. Play at the park or go for a walk as a family!

Check out these activity bingo sheets from Nebraska Extension! https://food.unl.edu/free-resource/family-fun-run/nutrition-and-physical-activity-bingo-cards

To learn more about this topic, go to https://food.unl.edu/food-calendar/june/fresh-fruit-and-vegetables-month or https://food.unl.edu/article/physical-activity-kids-and-teens

Contact Four Corners at 402-362-2621 or 877-337-3573 or email at info@fourcorners.ne.gov. You can follow us on Facebook at Four Corners Health Department. Find @FC_HealthDept on Twitter and Instagram!
On May 30, 2023, I signed LB753 into law. LB753, known as the Opportunity Scholarship Act, will provide parents the choice in which school to send their children.

This bill is a historic step forward for the state of Nebraska. Before the passage of this legislation, Nebraska was only one of two states, North Dakota being the other, that had no form of school choice.

Our kids are our future, and we all believe that every Nebraska kid should be given the opportunity to have their educational needs met  from the river to Harrison. LB753 creates a tax credit program to which Nebraskans can donate. Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) will administer the scholarships.

Students should not be tied down by the zip code they are born in. Our current education system does not allow for underprivileged students to attend a private school or choose a different school district to live in. You need money and wealth to live in neighboring districts that are performing higher than others.

In Nebraska, we need to be funding students, not systems.

These scholarships will go to those students who need them most. They will provide students the ability to attend a school they otherwise could never afford.

LB753 gives priority for these scholarships to those who live in poverty, foster care, experience bullying, harassment, or other victimizing behaviors, or have a parent or guardian who is serving in the military.

As Nebraskans, we believe we should never, ever give up on a kid. This piece of legislation is part of my continuing commitment to put kids first so we can make our state a place where future generations can grow and thrive.

If you have any questions about our vision for Nebraska, please call my office at 402-471-2244 or email me at jim.pillen@nebraska.gov. Together we can!
A male passenger travelling on a Dubai-bound Vistara flight was arrested at Delhi airport following a co-passenger complaint. The female passenger on the flight complained that she heard the man talk about a bomb over the phone, as per ANI's report. The man in the incident was later identified as Azeem Khan from Pilibhit in Uttar Pradesh. The man was later apprehended by Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) and was later arrested by Delhi Police.

As per ANI, the incident occurred on June 7, after a female passenger on the Dubai-bound flight raised a complaint to one of the flight attendants about the man talking about a bomb. However, nothing was found after Delhi Police initiated an investigation into the matter.

Also read: Delhi Airport: Passengers At IGI Terminal 3 Can Use DigiYatra Facility Without Downloading App

The person accused of creating the hoax bomb threat at Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport was booked under section 341 (punishment for wrongful restraint) and 268 (public nuisance).

Recently, there have been multiple instances of a hoax bomb threat. Recently, a flight from Kolkata's Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport was grounded because of a threat.

The Qatar Airways flight from Kolkata to London via Doha was delayed after a passenger began shouting that there was a bomb in the plane. At the time of the incident, the flight had 541 passengers on board and was getting ready to take off at 3.29 am on Tuesday. However, the passenger was off-loaded after the threat on flight.
New Delhi: Global food and beverages major PepsiCo has launched Crop Intelligence Model for India with an aim to assist farmers in maximising potato yields and quality through useful dashboards and user-friendly mobile applications.

The initiative, jointly introduced with Cropin--a leading global agri-tech company, is a part of PepsiCos Precision Agriculture model in India for its Lay's brand of chips.

Employing practical dashboards on user-friendly mobile apps, a crop and plot-level predictive intelligence technology will assist farmers in maximising potato yields and quality. The initiatibe has been implemented as a pilot project in demo farms at Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Currently, the model covers 62 farms as a trial: 51 in Gujarat and 11 in Madhya Pradesh, said the company in a statement.

Field agronomists who are assisting the farmers in using the insights and the dashboard during the pilot stage are giving them the necessary instruction and support.

The majority of farmers in India have less than one hectare of land under cultivation, and they frequently experience difficulties because they lack the tools necessary to determine how much water, fertiliser, pesticide, and other agri-inputs should be used when growing crops. For instance, if the potato blight crop disease is not anticipated in advance, yield losses from the crop can reach 80%. Another significant problem for potato farmers, particularly in the country's north, is production loss due to ground frost, highlighted PepsiCo.

The FMCG major added that the new initiative under the PepsiCo-owned brand Lays has the potential to address these challenges by using satellite imagery correlated with remote sensing data to provide insights.

"The system can generate a forecast up to 10 days in advance which can assist farmers in identifying different crop stages, and close monitoring of crop health, including a disease warning system that relies on weather forecasts and historical data" PepsiCo said in a statement.

The dashboards and related information would be accessed by the farmers through easy-to-use smartphone-based apps, namely Cropin Grow for farm data management and Plot Risk for crop intelligence. The apps can support multiple languages, and PepsiCo plans to offer the solutions in 14 regional languages

Anukool Joshi, Director - Agro at PepsiCo India, said, Through our partnership with Cropin on this new initiative, our goal is to eventually roll-out this solution to PepsiCo farmers across India and empower them with real-time tracking of crop health to maximize yield and quality.

Krishna Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO, Cropin, said, "PepsiCo through its brand Lays has been leading the way to enable agriculture modernization and its impact at the grassroots level. Using Cropin's proven plot-level predictive intelligence solution, PepsiCo is mitigating business risks and forecast crop yield and health, water stress, pest and disease early warning signals for efficient business management."

In India, PepsiCo works directly and indirectly with over 27,000 farmers across 14 states and 100% of the potatoes for its Lays brand are sourced from farmers within the country.
New Delhi: Internet and search engine giant Google is today a name to reckon with. We all know that Google was founded by computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin --both were PhD candidates at Stanford University in California. However, there is one name behind the internet search engine giant, without whom, Google would not have been what it is today.

Today we shall tell you about late professor Rajeev Motwani, whose mentorship and guidance led to the formation of Google as we know today.

Rajeev Motwani was a renowned Stanford professor who was well-known for mentoring and counselling the founders of firms like Google and PayPal

Rajeev Motwani's Glorious Career

Motwani, a student at New Delhi's famous St. Columba's School, was born on March 26, 1962, in Jammu and Kashmir. He arrived in the US to complete his PhD in computer science at University of Berkeley in 1988 after receiving his Bachelor's degree in computer science from IIT Kanpur in 1983. He soon attended Stanford shortly after that.

He contributed to the creation of cutting-edge data and management ideas as the project's originator, the Mining Data at Stanford Project (MIDAS). Motwani won the Godel Prize in 2001 for his work on the PCP theorem and its applications to the hardness of approximation. He was renowned for his theoretical computer science research.

Motwani Died At An Early Age Of 47 In An Unusual Drowning Accident

Rajeev Motwani was only 47 when passed away in an unusual drowning accident. The body of Motwani was discovered in his Palo Alto, California, backyard pool. His passing has shocked the Silicon Valley and the global tech community because he was credited with being the primary thinker behind several significant internet innovations, including PayPal and Google. The cause of his passing was unknown, according to the authorities. He was discovered dead in the pool, and paramedics were called.

Google Co-founder Sergey Brin Mourning Motwani's Death

On his blog, Google co-founder Sergey Brin described Rajeev Motwani as his friend and teacher, adding that "Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it." As Google emerged from Stanford, Brin wrote: "Rajeev remained a friend and advisor as he has with many people and startups since. Of all the faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly. Yet his legacy and personality lives on in the students, projects, and companies he has touched."

Motwani Impacted Hundreds Of Business Owners And Students

At a San Francisco gathering, Motwani's longtime buddy Ron Conway told a group of techies that he had an impact on hundreds of business owners and students and that he never turned down an invitation.

"For those of you who didn't know Rajeev, you might get the impression that he was your typical Silicon Valley insider -- loud, brash, full of bravado." "Rajeev was soft spoken and gentle. He was self-confident but didn't feel the need to prove anything. He didn't speak to hear his own voice. And he didn't need to be the centre of attention.
New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered six cases and set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to investigate Manipur violence, CBI officials said on Friday. On Thursday, two bike-borne miscreants allegedly hurled a low-intensity Improvised explosive device (IED) at the gate of MLA Soraisam Kebi's residence, police said. "There were no casualties in the incident. Except for a few holes in the ground, the blast did not cause any major damage," an officer said.

According to the Manipur Police, the two bikers hurled and blew an IED at the residence of Naoriya Pakhanglakpa MLA, Soraisam Kebi, in the Imphal West hamlet of Ningthemcha Karong.

An IED is a bomb assembled in an improvised manner incorporating destructive, lethal, noxious, pyrotechnic, or incendiary chemicals and designed to destroy or incapacitate personnel or vehicles. In some cases, IEDs are used to distract, disrupt, or delay an opposing force, facilitating another type of attack.

Also Read: Manipur Violence: 868 Arms, 11,518 Ammunition Recovered So Far In Conflict-Stricken State

Earlier, on Thursday, the advisor (Security) to the Manipur government, Kuldiep Singh, said the situation in Manipur remained peaceful and under control as no incident of violence was reported in the last 48 hours in the Northeast state. To provide relief to the displaced people of Manipur, Singh said the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has approved a relief package worth Rs 101.75 crore.

The MHA's approval of the relief package for the displaced in Manipur followed Union Home Minister Amit Shah's direction to the state government to send a request to his ministry for such a package.

"A total of 896 arms and 11,763 ammunition and 200 bombs of different kinds have been recovered to date," said Singh, who was appointed security advisor to the Manipur government at the beginning of May in view of the spiralling violence in Manipur. A day after Union Home Minister Amit Shah's appeal on June 1, a total of 140 weapons were surrendered at different places in Manipur on June 2.

The weapons surrendered included SLR 29, Carbine, AK, INSAS Rifle, INSAS LMG, .303 Rifle, 9mm pistol, .32 pistol, M16 rifle, smoke gun and tear gas, a locally made pistol, a stun gun, modified rifle, JVP and grenade launcher. Shah had also appealed to the people of Manipur not to pay heed to rumours and maintain peace.

Manipur saw violence on May 3 during a rally organised by the All Tribals Students Union (ATSU) to protest the demand for the inclusion of Meitei/Meetei in the Scheduled Tribe (ST) category, following an April 19 Manipur High Court directive.
Neem Karoli Baba is a revered saint not only in India but across the globe. From Apple founder Steve Jobs, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg to PM Narendra Modi - high profile devotees of Neem Karoli Baba.

Neem Karoli Baba - A Follower Of Lord Hanuman

Neem Karoli Baba was a follower of Lord Hanuman, however, his devotees considered him the incarnation of Hanuman.

Neem Karoli Baba - Popular for simplicity

Unlike modern day babas, Neem Karoli baba always stayed away from ostentation. There was neither a tilak on his forehead nor a garland around his neck till the time he lived. Neem Karoli baba believed in living life like a common man, and did not allow anyone to touch his feet. If someone tried to touch him, he used to ask them to touch the feet of Lord Hanuman. Neem Karoli Baba, also known to his followers as 'Maharaj-ji', is not in this world but his devotees still believe in him with the same devotion.

Kainchi Dham Shrine - No One Ever Goes Empty-Handed

Neem Karoli Baba's ashram is in Kainchi Dham of Uttarakhand where people from all over the country come to meet him. Built-in the hilly area, this temple has temples of five deities, one of which is dedicated to Lord Hanuman. It is believed that the person who comes here never returns empty-handed.

Real Name: Lakshmi Narayan Sharma

Neem Karoli Baba, prior to his monkhood, was known by the name of Lakshminarayan Sharma. Born around 1900 in Akbarpur village of Uttar Pradesh, to a Brahmin family, he achieved self-realization when barely 17 years of age.

How did Neem Karoli Baba Get His Name?

It is a matter of British time when Baba was travelling without a ticket in first class compartment train. When TC came, he deboarded at the next station called Neem Karoli. Baba quietly sat under a tree with his tongs buried in the ground, however, to everyone's surprise the train did not move even a little even after trying hard. A local magistrate, who knew Baba, told the railway official to apologize to Baba and make him sit inside respectfully, and as soon as Baba boarded again, the train started moving.

'Miracle Of Love'

Popular author Richard Albert is also a Neem Karoli Baba devotee. He has also written a book on Baba called 'Miracle of Love'. This book describes Baba's miracles in detail.
Malappuram: Kerala's first women-only Hajj flight took off on Thursday from Calicut International Airport at Karipur after Union Minister of State for Minority Affairs John Barla flagged off the flight. Barla performed the symbolic flag-off ceremony and distribution of boarding passes for the first flight. This was the first time that only women's flight has been organised for Hajj in Kerala. The pilot and crew of the aircraft are all women.

The Air India Express flight left Karipur at 6.45 p.m. carrying 145 women pilgrims and six women crew marking the first such flight from Kerala for women pilgrims without mehram or a male companion. Barla said that the women-only flight marked a glorious step for women's empowerment in the country and requested the pilgrims to pray for the country's safety and security as well as progress.

Apart from the 145 women pilgrims travelling in the plane, the pilot who flew this plane and the other crew members of the plane, as well as the dispatch, flight operation, loading, cleaning, engineering, ground service and other related activities at all levels were done by women, making this trip different.

Minister inaugurated the distribution of boarding passes by giving to 76-year-old Sulaikha, the senior most member of the team.

The minister expressed happiness over the arrangements being made for the pilgrims by the State Hajj Committee. Eleven flights have been scheduled till Monday only for women pilgrims leaving via Karipur airport. 1,595 women pilgrim belonging to the 'ladies without Mehram' category will depart on several days in eleven flights. The rest will travel on other flights.

2,733 people are leaving this year from the state through the 'ladies without mehram' category. Out of this, 1718 people will depart via Karipur, 563 via Kochi and 452 via Kannur embarkation points.

This year's oldest woman pilgrim, Khadiumma (87), a native of Nediyirup in Malappuram district, will depart on the 4.20 am flight on June 10. 69 men and 76 women took off from Karipur at nine o'clock in the morning on flight IX 3021 on Thursday. 71 men and 74 women travelled from Kannur airport today afternoon. The second flight from Kochi will leave from will leave at 11.30 tomorrow.

In Andhra Pradesh, Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy who met the batch of Muslims leaving for Mecca at the Haj House here on Thursday said that the Government has appointed a Hajj Committee which is accompanying the pilgrims to ensure hassle-free journey. This is the first time that pilgrims are leaving for Hajj from the Vijayawada embarkation point. "Deputy Chief Minister Amjad Basha, who is accompanying you, will take care of you and will inform me in case of any need," the CM said wishing pilgrims all the best.

Every year, millions of Muslims around the world embark on a sacred pilgrimage known as Hajj. This spiritual journey holds immense significance in the lives of believers, offering an opportunity to connect with Allah, seek forgiveness, and strengthen their faith. The heartfelt desire to be among those walking to Mina, echoing the Labaik with the crowd, and performing the rituals of Hajj is a sentiment shared by countless individuals.

Hajj is a unique manifestation of unity, as Muslims from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and nations gather in the sacred land of Makkah to perform the rituals together. It is a remarkable sight to witness people from different walks of life converging towards a common purpose, setting aside their differences and embracing one another as equals before Allah.
NEW DELHI: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's daughter Parakala Vangmayi recently got married in a simple ceremony at a hotel in Bengaluru's Jayanagar area. Sitharaman's daughter Parakala Vangmayi tied the knot with Pratik Doshi, who hails from Gujarat. The marriage was solemnised as per the Brahmin tradition. The wedding took place in the Vedic order of Adamaru Mutt without ostentatious arrangements or VIP invitees, according to a report. A video of the wedding surfaced on social media showing Parakala in a pink saree and green blouse, while Prateek wearing a white pancha and shawl. FM Sitharaman wore a Molakalmuru saree for her daughter's wedding.

Who Is Pratik Doshi?

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharamans son-in-law Pratik Doshi is a resident of Gujarat and associated with the Prime Ministers Office (PMO) since 2014. He is currently employed as an Officer-on-Special Duty (OSD) at the PMO. In June 2019, Doshi was elevated to the rank of Joint Secretary. The Finance Ministers son-in-law is a graduate of the Singapore Management School.

A Long-Time PM Modi

He has previously worked as a Research Assistant in the Gujarat Chief Ministers Office (CMO) when Narendra Modi was the states chief minister. The PMO website states that Pratik Doshi works at the Research and Strategy Wing. His role is to provide secretarial assistance to the PM in terms of government of India (allocation of business) rules, 1961 with matters including but not limited to research and strategy, according to the PMO website.

Interestingly, Pratik is known for keeping a low-key profile and he is also not active on social media platforms. Wangmayi, who was born on 20 May 1991 in Chennai, also stays away from the public eye.

FM Sitharamans daughter Vangmayi works as a feature writer for Mint Lounge's Books and Culture section. She holds a Master's degree from the Department of English at the University of Delhi, and an MS in Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University.

Vangmayi-Prtik Doshi wedding was a very low-key affair as no VVIPS, and no top political leaders were invited to the wedding ceremony which was held at a private hotel in Bengaluru. Only close relatives of the two families attended the wedding in Karnataka. A video of the wedding, which was solemnised as the Hindu marriage traditions, also surfaced online showing the seers from Udupi Adamaru Mutt blessing the newlywed couple.

Sitharaman's husband Parakala Prabhakar is a political economist, who has served as a communications advisor and held a cabinet-rank position in the Andhra Pradesh government between July 2014 and June 2018.
Few 75-year-old people can perform Old West rope tricks.

But on Wednesday, Joan Wells was staging age-defying rope maneuvers for what she describes as a lost art. Area residents gathered at the Fremont Friendship Center to see Wells perform and learn more about the history of something that harkens back to an earlier era.

Wells is a Humanities Nebraska speaker from Lincoln, who presented a Living History program called, Trick Roping on the Wild West Show.

She told how trick roping originated on the Buffalo Bill Show, sharing insights about Will Rogers.

Wells said that in 1882, people from North Platte asked Buffalo Bill to stage a show for the July Fourth holiday. Buffalo Bill Cody, a former Pony Express rider and cavalryman turned showman, had been appearing on vaudeville stages in the eastern part of the country telling about the Wild West.

The eastern part of the country was very taken with what was all going on in the western part (of the United States), so he decided to put a Wild West Show together, Wells said.

After a practice run in Columbus, Buffalo Bill staged a successful, two-hour show in North Platte. The show featured many different acts including Vincente Oropeza, a Mexican Charro, who would introduce the Mexican art of trick roping to the U.S.

Cody opened his first show in Omaha in 1883 and then went back east, Wells said.

Barnum & Bailey arranged to have Codys show  complete with wagons and horses  travel by train.

Oropeza traveled with Codys show for several years. Although not invited, Cody staged a show during the Worlds Fair in 1893 in Chicago.

Actor and humorist Will Rogers went to the show and saw Oropezas trick roping. Rogers then decided he wanted to become a trick roper, Wells said.

Rogers made a film called The Roping Fool in 1922.

Last year, Wells said she and other trick ropers were interviewed for a video for the Will Roger Memorial. Wells performed rope tricks for the video, 100 Years of the Roping Fool, which can be seen on the internet.

Wells also talked about Annie Oakley, a sharpshooter who starred in Buffalo Bills Wild West Show, which eventually was staged worldwide. Wells said the Wild West shows were very colorful and carried over to the modern specialty acts in modern rodeos.

During the Friendship Center performance, Wells performed some of the rope tricks that Rogers and trick roper Monty Montana staged.

Wells was 4 years old when a cousin from Colorado taught her trick roping. She later took lessons from World Champion Trick Roper Jim Eskew Jr.

My dad took me to Oklahoma and I would learn about 15-20 tricks in one, one-hour lesson and Id go home and perfect those and come back (during) another school vacation and take a few more lessons, Wells said.

Wells later earned a bachelor of arts degree in physical education, her website states. She has taught fitness and recreational classes at Southeast Community College in Lincoln.

In 1979, Wells won the title of Womens World Champion Trick Roper at the Will Rogers Trick Roping Contest in Claremore, Oklahoma.

She was inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1989.

Wells performed to music at the friendship center and then took questions from the audience.

Laurie Harms, center manager, said attendees enjoyed the program. More than 40 people attended.

The seniors thought it was educational, entertaining and very interesting, Harms said.

Next Wednesday, the center will host Tim Javorsky, a musician who sings and plays a saxophone. He will perform at 10:30 a.m., in the center, 1730 W. 16th St., at Christensen Field in Fremont.

The center is open to people ages 60 and better. For more information, call 402-727-2815.
MUMBAI: As more spine-chilling details about the gruesome Mira Road murder case emerge, it has come to light that Manoj Sane, the monster who brutally murdered his live-in partner, chopped and boiled her body in a pressure cooker to avoid detection, was inspired by the last years Shraddha Walkar murder case. Manoj Sane, who is accused of murdering his lover Saraswati Vaidya, has been remanded to police custody till June 16 by a Thane Court. He has been charged under sections 302 and 201 of the IPC.

Who Is Manoj Sane?

Manoj Sane is a 56-year-old man, who used to live with his live-in partner Saraswati Vaidya in an apartment on the seventh floor in the J Wing of Geeta Akashdeep Building located in Phase VII of Geeta Nagar in Mira Road, Mumbai. He was in a live-in relationship with Saraswati Vaidya (32). The couple had been residing quietly in the flat for the last three years. According to the primary investigation done by the Naya Nagar Police, which found the dismembered body of the victim in Sanes apartment, sad that he was preparing to flee the crime spot.

Sane Took Inspiration From Shraddha Walkar Murder Case

According to the police, Manoj Sane got the idea of murdering his live-in partner and then dismembering her body parts from the infamous Shraddha Walkar case that was unearthed last year. Sane, according to the police, killed the victim at least three days ago and then chopped her body into several pieces and boiled them in a pressure cooker to avoid any traces.

How Manoj Sane Met Saraswati Vaidya?

The lovers  Manoj Sane and Saraswati Vaidya - met 15 years ago at a ration shop in the Babhai Naka of Borivali, where Sane used to work. Both, believed to be orphans, started meeting frequently after that and later, despite the age gap, decided to live together. The 32-year-old victim lived at an orphanage in Ahmednagar before moving to Mumbai. Since Manoj also hailed from Ahmednagar, they soon became friends. The two shifted to Mira Road five years ago and stayed in rented accommodation in Geeta Nagar. While Manoj Sane is an ITI technician, Saraswati dropped out after failing in her SSC examinations.

What's The Motive Behind Murder?

According to the Naya Nagar Police, prima facie it appears that a domestic quarrel might have transformed into the violent attack. The police is also not ruling out suspected poisoning angle since Sane claimed that Saraswati ended her life by consuming some pesticide. However, the potential motive behind the gruesome murder is yet to be ascertained.

How Manoj Sane Executed The Victim?

Sane, according to the police, used a tree cutter to chop the victims body into several small pieces. He then boiled them in a pressure cooker in an apparent attempt to ensure there is no foul smell and it would be easy for him to dispose of them. One of the close-door neighbours had complained to Sane about the emanating smell after which he got a bit frightened but replied that he will fix what was wrong.

Tree-Cutter, Pressure Cooker And Mixer Recovered From Crime Scene

The police, after reaching the spot, recovered a diesel-fuelled saw machine from the bedroom which was used to dismember the body. They also recovered a pressure cooker, a mixer grinder from the crime scene. It is, however, not clear whether Sane fed the boiled body parts to stray dogs. Saraswati's remains have been sent to JJ Hospital for an autopsy, reports of which are awaited.
New Delhi: As the business stated that its board of directors will meet later this month to discuss the stock split proposals, shares of Hindustan Aeronautics (HAL) soared another 3 percent on Friday to reach new record highs. Investors have received multi-bagger profits from the PSU counter.

The board of directors of the company will meet on Tuesday, June 27, to discuss a proposal to divide its equity shares, according to a filing made on Thursday by the company.

The shares of Hindustan Aeronautics rose 3 percent to Rs 3,630 on Friday amid the excitement around the stock split before giving up its gains and trading unchanged. During the session, the company's market capitalization reached a high of Rs. 1.2 lakh crore. On Thursday, the stock had a final price of Rs 3,527.70.

A stock split, also known as a sub-division of equity shares, occurs when a firm divides its shares in accordance with a predetermined ratio, splitting the face value and resulting in an increase in the number of shares. Usually, it's done to make the stock more liquid on the market.

Investors who have stock in demat accounts on the record date are eligible to receive the new shares, and the stock price will be modified in accordance with the split ratio.

In the last three years, shares of Hindustan Aeronautics have returned 600 percent, and in the most recent year, the stock has increased by more than 200 percent. The multi-bagger PSU stock has increased 40 percent so far in 2023.

Bangalore-headquartered Established in December 1940, Hindustan Aeronautics is a government-owned aerospace and defence business in India. One of the oldest and biggest aerospace and defence producers worldwide.
New Delhi: Samantha Ruth Prabhu is currently busy juggling two very contrasting projects simultaneously as she hopped from Kushi sets in Turkey, straight to Serbia for Citadel. The actress has been having a busy year, from the word go. The actress who has already had a release this year is now busy with the shoots of her upcoming and super exciting projects. She recently shared pictures with the co-star of her upcoming rom-com, Kushi where Vijay Deverakonda and her could be seen having a fun time amid their shoot for the film in Turkey and in another post we saw glimpses of the "best of her days" in the country.

The makers of the film dropped the first look in the form of a lyrical song video called Na Roja Nuvve which is still winning the love of the masses as they are extremely pumped to see Samantha and Vijay's chemistry on screen and have also been hailing Samantha for surprising yet again with her appearance in a whole new avatar.

Now the actress recently hopped to Serbia for the shoot of her biggest action project Citadel which is produced by the Russo brothers. She shared a picture with her team of the series as they met the President of India, Droupadi Murmu in Serbia. She shared the picture to her story, writing - 'Madam President'

Samantha has been winning love back-to-back for her performances and became a rage across the country with her performances in 'The Family Man' as Raji and then a complete flip of performance in Oo Antava, the dance number that continues to still be a rage almost two years after its release, with the kind of impact that only someone so popular could have. The actress also grabbed eyeballs with her Koffee with Karan appearance and has been topping the Ormax list for almost a year now as the 'Most Popular Actress of India'.

Fans can not wait for her upcoming lineup because it's so exciting and both projects are so different from each other as she is juggling a romantic comedy along with out-and-out action projects simultaneously with Kushi and Citadel. One can only expect Samantha Ruth Prabhu to hop into such contrasting vibes back to back.


Kolkata: Trinamool Congress (TMC) National General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee declined to comply with an Enforcement Directorate (ED) summon issued to him on Thursday in connection with the alleged teacher recruitment scam. The anti-money laundering agency had summoned the TMC leader to its office on June 13. Addressing a public meeting, Banerjee said that in his last appearance before the ED, he had requested the officials not to summon him in the next few days on account of a scheduled TMC Yatra.

Banerjee said that he is not blaming the ED officials for summoning him on that date since they are bound by duty. He said that he is ready to send any document that the ED may ask for but he is too busy at the moment to be questioned for hours at their office.

"I am not blaming the ED officials because they are only doing their duty. Their political bosses are getting sleepless nights owing to the huge success of the Nobojowar Yatra," Banerjee said.

"Our program ends on June 16 and the panchayat elections have been announced, which will conclude on the 8th of July. They will question me for several hours and the net result would be zero. After the polls get over, if you summon me I will appear before you," the TMC general secretary added.

Taking care to mention that he is ready to comply with the ED investigation Banerjee said, "It is my duty to face the ED and support them in their investigation but I will not go for questioning now."

The TMC General Secretary also said that the ED officials had questioned his wife, Rujira on Thursday in connection with the coal pilferage case for four hours. His wife who was on his way to Dubai with her two children was stopped from flying at the airport and was issued a summon by the ED at 11 am on the same day.

Banerjee said that no 'outcome' is reached even after recording statements for long hours at the ED office. He said, "It is nothing but harassment by the ruling party."

Banerjee hit out at the Central government and said that their double engine is ED and CBI.

"BJP's double engine is ED and CBI. When one engine (CBI) failed now they are using another engine," he said, adding that the party is getting sleepless nights after seeing "Nobo Jowar Yatra".

Last month, Banerjee was questioned for over 9 hours by the Central Bureau of Investigation in the multi-crore recruitment scam in West Bengal schools.
Volcano Eruption In Hawaii: One of the most active volcanoes in the world, Kilauea in Hawaii, started erupting on Wednesday morning, according to reports from the nation's Volcano Observatory. In a statement, they stated, "On June 7, 2023, at approximately 4:44 a.m. HST, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory of the US Geological Survey detected a glow in Kilauea summit webcam images indicating that an eruption has started within Halema'uma'u crater in Kilauea's summit caldera, within Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Eruptions have dynamic initial phases. The Halema'uma'u crater's base has fissures that are producing lava flows that are visible on the crater floor thanks to webcam imagery. As the eruption continues, the dangers will be reevaluated because the activity is limited to Halema'uma'u."

Only Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is experiencing the present eruption. The observatory claims that it is in "constant communication" with park management. The internet is awash with a timelapse video of the eruption beginning as lava fills the volcano's crater. More than ten thousand views and one thousand likes have been accumulated since Hawaii Volcanoes National Park published the video. The caption read, "Lava fountains shot up to a whopping 60 meters (200 feet) in bursts during the early stages of the eruption, reaching regular heights of 15 meters (50 feet)!" The lower portion of the crater was completely filled with lava in under three hours, reaching a remarkable depth of 10 meters (33 feet). On the crater floor, the lava lake encompassed a vast area that was roughly 370 acres (150 hectares).

The National Park also reported that a dawn measurement revealed a sulfur dioxide emission rate of almost 65,000 metric tons per day. "Over time, the heights of the fountains gradually dropped and are presently between 4 and 9 meters (13 and 30 feet) high. It's still amazing to see!" they said.

The cultural importance of a volcanic eruption is profound yet deeply personal for many Native Hawaiians. Others may honor the occasion with hula, or dance, while others may chant or offer prayers to their ancestors. However, the government urged people to keep a respectable distance when around the site. In order to see the most recent eruption of Kilauea, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, visitors visiting a national park on the Big Island of Hawaii were advised to show respect.
NEW DELHI: Mohammed Bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, is one of the most powerful political people in the Arab world. The 37-year-old Saudi Crown Prince is also popularly known as MBS.

Why Is Mohammed Bin Salman Trending?

The Saudi Crown Prince became a top trend after reports about Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressing his appreciation for Saudi Arabia's "excellent support" during the evacuation of Indian nationals from Sudan in April emerged on social media. During his conversation with the Saudi crown prince, PM Modi also sent his best wishes for the upcoming Haj pilgrimage. According to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), the two leaders spoke on the phone on a range of bilateral cooperation topics and shared their perspectives on several global and multilateral issues of relevance.

The Saudi Crown Prince extended his complete support for India's activities during its current G20 Presidency and expressed excitement for his visit to India. Both leaders concurred on the need for ongoing dialogue.

Member Of The Powerful Saudi Royal Family

Born on August 31, 1985), MBS was named as the Crown Prince in 2017 and Prime Minister in the year 2022. Between 201522, Mohammed Bin Salman served as Minister of Defence. Mohammed Bin Salman is the son of Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and his third wife Fahdah bint Falah ibn Sultan. In the absence of his father, the 86-year-old King Salman, Mohammed Bin Salman has represented his country and as a de facto leader of the Arab world rarely since 2019. Mohammed bin Salman is the eldest among his mother's children and is the eight child and seventh son of his father's. He attended King Saud University where he received a bachelor's degree in law.

MBS Role As Saudi Prime Minister

Prince Mohammed bin Salmans new role as PM included representing the kingdom in foreign visits and chairing summits hosted by the kingdom.

De Facto Ruler Of Saudi Arabia

While his father, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud remains the King of Saudi Arabia, the Crown Prince has consolidated much clout beyond any doubt and taken full control of the country. His father, King Salman, became the King of Saudi Arabia and the Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia in January 2015 upon the death of King Abdullah. At that time, MBS became the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. MBS became the First Deputy Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia in June 2017.

He served as Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and Second Deputy Prime Minister from April 2015 to June 2017 and became Minister of Defence in January 2015. Mohammed bin Salman has also served as President of the Council for Economic and Development Affairs. The Saudi Crown Prince remains the fulcrum around which Middle Eastern geopolitics continue to move forward.

What Is His Total Net Worth?

The combined net worth of the House Of Saud, the Saudi Clan, is estimated to be around USD 1.4 trillion and is whopping sixteen times richer than the British Royal Family, worth USD 88 billion. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia has a reported net worth of $5 billion. In 2015, Mohammed bin Salman spent USD 299 million to acquire a large mansion in France called Chateau Louis XIV. In 2017 he purchased a superyacht called "Serene" for USD 500 million. While the King of Saudi Arabia and the Crown Prince are extraordinarily wealthy, their net worth has not been disclosed. However, many speculate that the de facto ruler MBS may be worth an estimated USD 25 billion. When asked about his luxurious life, MBS told CBS, "As far as my private expenses, I'm a rich person and not a poor person. I'm a member of the ruling family that existed for hundreds of years before the founding of Saudi Arabia."
Google has created a special Doodle in celebration of the great dancer and choreographer Willi Ninja today. Google claims that Willi pioneered the road for black LGBTQ+ portrayal and acceptance in the 1980s and 1990s. His creation, "The Iconic House of Ninja," is still active today. Willi was referred to as the "Godfather of Voguing," which is a style of dance. William Roscoe Leake was his true name. The performers are current House of Ninja members Archie Burnett Ninja, Javier Madrid Ninja, Kiki Ninja, and Akiko Tokuoka, nicknamed KiT Ninja, who dance to honor Willi's legacy. On this day in 1990, the NewFest New York LGBT Film Celebration had the US debut of the documentary Paris is Burning, which starred Willi and the renowned House of Ninja.

Willi Ninja: Background

Born in 1961, Willi Ninja spent his formative years in Flushing, Queens. Willi's mother supported his identity and fostered his passion for dance by taking him to see ballet performances at the Apollo Theatre. Even though his mother couldn't afford to pay for pricey dancing classes, Willi taught himself the techniques that would one day make him famous. Willi created ground-breaking new dancing styles that were influenced by martial arts and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Additionally, Willi has made international appearances in movies, music videos, and high-end runway events. Madonna and Jean-Paul Gaultier have both been influenced by his movements. Willi also played a significant role in eradicating the stigma attached to the illness by being one of the first individuals to advocate for HIV/AIDS prevention during drag balls.

Google-Doodle And Willi's Legacy

Google released a doodle honoring Willi's legacy that featured an animated version of the performer performing some of his signature dance movements. The disco ball in the middle of the doodle contains the play icon. A brief YouTube video depicting "The Iconic House of Ninja," a Willi-founded community that is still going strong 17 years after his passing, can be viewed by pressing the play button. The Rob Gilliam-illustrated doodle video was edited by Xander Opiyo and has original music by Vivacious. The House of Ninja's current members, including Archie Burnett Ninja, Javier Madrid Ninja, Kiki Ninja, and Akiko Tokuoka, also known as KiT Ninja, perform in the video as they happily commemorate Willi's lasting influence.

LGBT Film Festival 1960

On this day in 1960, Willi was born, and in 1990, the documentary "Paris is Burning" was shown for the first time in the United States at the NewFest New York LGBT Film Festival. The movie notably featured Willi and the iconic House of Ninja, bringing his distinctive dancing technique to a larger audience and showcasing New York City's thriving ball culture. At age 7, he began dancing. He chose the moniker Ninja since he was motivated by the martial arts. Willi self-taught the craft and became an expert in voguing, a dancing form that combines fashionable attitudes with complex motions influenced by mime and martial arts. The Harlem ballroom culture functioned as a safe haven established by black and Latino LGBTQiA+ people to express themselves and promote togetherness, and it gave rise to voguing.

Willi was a major contributor to increasing understanding and promoting acceptance of the LGBTQiA+ community throughout his career, especially within the ballroom scene. He used his extraordinary talent and platform to question social mores and promote the investigation of one's own expression. He passed away at the age of 45 from heart failure brought on by AIDS. His contributions to voguing and ballroom culture have inspired dancers, performers, and artists all around the world long after he passed away. The House of Ninja is proud to carry on his legacy by continuing to dance in his honor.
New Delhi: The Congress on Friday dismissed as rumours reports that its leader Sachin Pilot may announce a separate party on his father Rajesh Pilot's death anniversary on June 11. Congress general secretary (organisation) K C Venugopal said the party is united and will contest the upcoming assembly elections in Rajasthan together, a day ahead of a programme planned to pay homage to Rajesh Pilot on his death anniversary. "I don't believe in rumours. The reality is that the Congress president and Rahul Gandhi discussed with Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot and after that we said that we will go together. That is the position of the Congress party," he told PTI.

"In my knowledge, there is no such thing," he said, when asked specifically about reports of Pilot floating a new party. Venugopal said he has met Pilot in the recent days and there is no such thing. He also told the media to be optimistic and not believe in such rumours.

Also Read: Ashok Gehlot's 1st Reaction On 'Patch-Up' With Pilot: 'It's Permanent...'

"Who told you he is going out of the party. These are imaginary... Rumours. Don't believe these rumours. Be optimistic. Don't worry, we will fight unitedly. The Rajasthan Congress will fight unitedly," he also said.

There are reports that Sachin Pilot, who is engaged in a tussle for power in Rajasthan ever since the Congress won the state in 2018, may announce his own party.

Pilot launched a tirade against the Gehlot government on the issue of corruption and demanded action against those involved in corruption in the previous BJP government led by Vasundhara Raje. He also accused the Gehlot government of not acting against the corrupt.

Also Read: Amid Tussle With Ashok Gehlot, Will Sachin Pilot Quit Congress And Float A New Party?

He had launched a yatra and sat on a day-long fast alleging inaction by the Gehlot government against the corrupt.

Thereafter, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, former party chief Rahul Gandhi and Venugopal sat with both Gehlot and Pilot and after hours of deliberations announced that the two would contest the next assembly polls unitedly.

Congress general secretary in-charge of Rajasthan Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa had earlier also ruled out the possibility of Pilot floating a new party. Randhawa said in Jaipur earlier this week that the party will assign responsibilities to Rajasthan leaders according to their stature.
New Delhi: Union Minister Giriraj Singh on Friday called Nathuram Godse a saput (worthy son) of India and said the slayer of Mahatma Gandhi was not an intruder like Mughal rulers Babar and Aurangzeb as he was born in India, news agency PTI reported. The BJP leader, who has the rural development and Panchayati raj portfolio, said "those who take pride in calling themselves children of Babar and Aurangzeb cannot be true sons of mother India," PTI quoted Singh while talking to reporters in Dantewada city of Chhattisgarh.

Asked about a remark of AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi related to Godse while responding to Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnaviss comment on Aurangzeb, Singh said, If he was the murderer of Gandhi, he (Godse) was also a saput of India. He was born in India. He was not an invader like Babar and Aurangzeb.

Owaisi, while addressing a programme of his party on Thursday said, "Maharashtra's Home Minister Devendra Fadnavis said 'Aurangzeb ke aulaad.' Do you know everything? I didn't know you (Fadnavis) were such an expert. Then you should know who the children of Godse and Apte too, who are they?"

Referring to recent violence in a few cities of Maharashtra, Fadnavis said on Wednesday that suddenly Aurangzeb's 'aulad' (progenies) had taken birth in the state, prompting Owaisi to counter who was 'Godse ki aulad'.

Also Read: Stone Pelting In Maharashtra's Kolhapur Over Social Media Posts On Tipu Sultan

Singh accused the Bhupesh Baghel-led Congress government in Chhattisgarh of spreading terror and encouraging religious conversion.

"Tribals and non-tribals are being converted in the state as part of a conspiracy. When BJP is elected to power in the state, a stringent law will be enacted against conversion," he said.

Also Read: Why Is Maharashtra Boiling Over Social Media Posts On Aurangzeb, Tipu Sultan?

Targeting the state's Congress government, the Union minister claimed misappropriation of funds given to Chhattisgarh under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA).

"Whoever is siphoning off MNREGA funds will have to face investigation and they will be punished, be it chief minister or others, he said.

Singh also slammed state's Excise Minister Kawasi Lakhma over the alleged use of abusive words against the BJP and said his remark shows the character of the Congress government. Baghel ji has to see this," he added.

Lakhma on Thursday allegedly used an abusive word in Halbi, a local dialect, while talking to media persons in Kanker district.
DES MOINES, Iowa  In March, when Donald Trump became the first former president in U.S. history indicted on criminal charges, his reelection campaign saw a huge surge in donations. Even political rivals rushed to support him. There was no dent in his front-runner status after the state charges in New York.

Thursday's news that Trump has been indicted again, this time on federal charges related to his handling of classified documents, may offer a repeat.

A 37-count felony indictment unsealed Friday accuses Trump of willful retention and improper sharing of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice and corruptly concealing a document or record, among other charges. The top counts carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison upon conviction.

But soon after he was indicted, there were clear signs that Republican voters may be willing to entrust him again with access to the nation's biggest secrets and authority over the very laws prosecutors say he defied.

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said the indictment would not fundamentally change Trump's standing in the GOP or his advantage in the crowded 2024 Republican primary.

In any other decade, this would be more than enough to kill a presidential contender in the crib. That's no longer the case  particularly for Donald Trump, Newhouse said. He argued Trump has been effectively setting expectations for more charges for months.

This comes as a surprise to very few Republicans, Newhouse said. Trump's been saying he'd get indicted. He got indicted. The sense from many Republican voters is that this is all about politics.

The prospect that someone under indictment  twice  could somehow still be considered a viable presidential candidate underscores Trump's grip on the Republican Party and the ways that he has fundamentally transformed democratic norms in America.

It also illustrates just how effective he has become at inoculating himself against political fallout by setting expectations and controlling the narrative. And it reflects growing Republican hostility toward the federal government and particularly the Justice Department, which Trump has now spent the better part of a decade maligning.

But even if the indictment doesn't hurt Trump's standing with Republican primary voters, its far from certain that the broader set of general election voters, which includes independents and moderates in both parties, will be as forgiving next fall in a prospective matchup against President Joe Biden.

The Democratic president beat Trump in 2020 with a promise to restore a sense of normalcy to Washington after Trump's drama-filled presidency. With these new charges, Trump's baggage is only growing heavier.

The former president faces the possibility of still more indictments in Georgia and Washington, D.C., a prospect that could see him facing trial in four separate jurisdictions while running to return to the highest office in the land.

For now, the new indictment throws Trump back into the spotlight, dominating every news cycle and denying his rivals space to break through to voters, just as many have formally launched their campaigns.

Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, a fierce Trump critic and founder of the Republican Accountability Project, acknowledged the indictment might ultimately help Trump seize the GOP nomination.

I've certainly seen a rally around Trump effect every time Trump is impeached or indicted, she said, adding that much depends on the reaction of his Republican 2024 challengers.

Does anyone have the political talent to seize this as an opportunity? Or will they all line up behind Trump? she said. Because if they all defend him, they will relegate themselves to bit players in Trump's drama and never get around to making an affirmative case for themselves.

Still, Doug Heye, another Republican strategist, said Trump's primary opponents do have a major opportunity to argue that the former president cannot win in 2024 because of his baggage.

This should be gold for Republican presidential candidates, should they choose to use it, Heye said.

So far Trumps rivals instead seem to be rallying to his side  an acknowledgement of his enduring popularity with the GOP voters they need to win over in order to snag the nomination.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who received backlash after he briefly knocked Trump over the New York case, lashed out at the Justice Department in a tweet Thursday night. The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, he wrote.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott used similar language in an appearance on Fox News, decrying the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president."

Former Vice President Mike Pence said he was deeply troubled that Trump had been indicted because he believed it would further divide the nation.

Only former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot candidate and frequent Trump critic, offered a rebuke. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign, he said.

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The 2024 presidential field, in the order they've announced Donald Trump, Republican Nikki Haley, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican Marianne Williamson, Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Democrat Larry Elder, Republican President Joe Biden, Democrat Asa Hutchinson, Republican Tim Scott, Republican Ron DeSantis, Republican Mike Pence, Republican Chris Christie, Republican Doug Burgum, Republican
Woman Role Model In Kashmir Valley: Aaliya Mir, a dedicated wildlife rescuer who spends the majority of her time in the Kashmir Valley saving creatures like wild boars, Asiatic black bears, Himalayan brown bears, leopards, and Levantine vipers. She does it all while dressed in a salwar suit and a headscarf, from scaling ladders to freeing snakes trapped inside homes to saving dangerous wild boars that have gotten loose in areas where people live. On average, she receives at least three to four rescue calls per day. Her job entails leading her team with caution in order to protect both humans and animals. Animals that stray from the forests may pose a threat to people or may be attacked by people acting in self-defense. Mir emphasizes the necessity of animal rescue activities and says that the animals must be saved and relocated to places that are safe for them, away from human habitation.

Aaliya Mir Passion For Wildlife

Aaliya Mir has always had a passion for wildlife. She remembers her father giving food to the dogs and birds that lived around their home, something she also did. She used to play with and care for stray animals that roamed close to her house when she was a young girl. She married Dr. Shabir Ahmed, a veterinarian, in 2002, when she was studying for her master's in mathematics in Delhi. From that point forward, her early affinity for animals developed into a full-fledged passion. Mir learned about Wildlife SOS through her husband's connections, and she later signed up to help in Delhi. She also began her career as a math instructor. However, she was unaware that life had other plans for her.

Also Read: How A Trip To Bali Changed The Lives Of This Engineer Couple? Earning Rs 18 Lakh Per Month After Giving Up High-Paying Jobs

Aaliya Mir - The Protector

Aaliya Mir is a member of the staff at Wildlife SOS, a nonprofit organization founded in 1995 in Delhi with the mission of rescuing and rehabilitating injured wild animals. Since 2002, she has served as the Kashmir Valley's project director and education officer. She has so far participated in more than 400 missions to rescue animals from populated areas, including leopards, snakes, white and black bears, wild boars, and porcupines. Depending on the circumstances, the rescue procedure varies. Usually, the animal that has been rescued is sedated. Sometimes trap cages are set up, baited to catch the animal, and camera traps are used to capture the animal's actions.

Aaliya Mir - Awards And Recognition

For the Wildlife SOS team, the day was especially special this year. The Department of Forest, Ecology, and Environment of the Jammu and Kashmir government honored Aaliya Mir, Education Officer and Programme Head, Jammu and Kashmir Wildlife SOS, with an award in appreciation of her excellent contributions across several facets of wildlife conservation. She was the first woman from Jammu and Kashmir to be recognized for her work in the area's wildlife conservation. At a ceremony held to honor her, the honorary award was given to her by Manoj Sinha, the Lt. Governor of Jammu and Kashmir.

As Mir works to end the strife between people and wildlife in her native Kashmir, Mir has served as a symbol of hope and bravery for the local populace and animals for more than ten years. Following rescue, the animals are transported to Dachigam and Pahalgam rehabilitation facilities, which were constructed in accordance with the Central Zoo Authority's specifications. Along with conducting rescue missions, Mir has been working nonstop to raise awareness about animal behavior and instruct people on how to defend themselves against wild animals.
Delhi Breaking News Live Updates: According to officials, a fire broke out at a newborn hospital in Delhi's Vaishali Colony on Thursday. They added that 20 babies were saved and taken to other hospitals. According to Delhi Fire Services Chief Atul Garg, the New Born Child Hospital in Vaishali Colony called the fire control centre at around 1.35 am on Friday.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecasts bright sky and dry weather for the upcoming few days, suggesting that Delhi will likely enjoy warm days.
New Delhi: Birsa Munda, a legendary figure in Indian history, was a courageous tribal leader who fought for the rights and welfare of the indigenous people in the late 19th century. Birsa Munda's life was marked by his tireless efforts to protect the tribal communities from exploitation and oppression. He rallied the tribes against the unjust British colonial policies and the local landlords who exploited their labor and resources.

Born on November 15, 1875, in the Chota Nagpur plateau region of present-day Jharkhand, Birsa Munda belonged to the Munda tribe.

Rise Of Charismatic Leader And Its Mission

At the young age of 25, Birsa emerged as a charismatic leader, uniting various tribal communities under his leadership. He organized mass movements and led several uprisings against the British authorities. His struggle was characterized by peaceful protests, non-cooperation, and calls for social and economic equality.

Birsa Munda's vision extended beyond political emancipation. He aimed to revive the cultural and spiritual identity of the indigenous tribes. He emphasized the preservation of their customs, traditions, and language, and fought against the forced imposition of external cultural practices. Birsa Munda's efforts were a significant step in recognizing and celebrating the rich cultural heritage of the tribal communities.

Legacy Of Birsa Munda

Unfortunately, Birsa Munda's journey was cut short when he was arrested by the British in 1900. He spent his last days in prison and passed away on June 9, 1900, at the young age of 25. However, his legacy lived on, inspiring generations of indigenous leaders and activists who continue to fight for the rights and well-being of tribal communities in India.

Birsa Munda is always remembered as a national hero and an icon for the tribal rights movement. His life, actions, and teachings continue to inspire millions, and his name is synonymous with courage, resilience, and the unwavering pursuit of justice and fight for rights. Birsa Munda's contribution to the struggle for tribal rights will forever be etched in the annals of Indian history.
Internet is a crazy place where anything and everything is going viral these days. Now, a High Court judge has caught the eyes of the netizens for his witty replies and logical judgements. Justice Vivek Aggarwal's hearing and witty exchanges with counsels have kept netizens hooked to their screens. Recently, a video where Mr Justice spoke strongly to petitioner who had demanded a stay on Bageshwar Dham chief Dhirendra Shastri's programme in the state and had quashed his plea. Apart form this judgement, Justice Aggarwal has also gone viral for his humanitarian approach while dealing with petitioners in court cases.

Who Is Justice Vivek Aggarwal?

Justice Vivek Aggarwal is a judge in the Madhya Pradesh High Court. He was appointed as a judge of the High Court of Madhya Pradesh on April 7th, 2016 and became a permanent judge on March 17, 2018. Earlier, he served as a judge at the Allahabad High Court and was transffered to Madhya Pradesh in the year 2016.

Justice Vivek Aggarwal's fiery exchange during Bageshwar Dham hearing

Recently, Justice Vivek Aggarwal was in the news for dismissing public interest litigation filed to stop the religious event of Bageshwar Dham in the state. Justice Vivek Aggarwal, during the hearing, warned with contempt of court notice over his misbehaviour. He even called out the advocate for filing a "sponsored" PIL. The video of the proceedings in the court became viral on various platforms on social media within minutes of its posting. There are several videos of Justice Vivek Agarwal reprimanding other advocates on the internet, in which he had made it clear that every lawyer should know how to behave in a court or else they would be issued notices under the Contempt of Court.

Vivek Aggarwal slams Patna district collector

Previously another video circulated on social media, in which Justice Vivek Agarwal slammed Panna district collector Sanjay Kumar Mishra for acting like a "political agent" for the ruling BJP during the panchayat election. He even called for him to be removed from his post considering he "has no regard for the principle of natural justice.
New Delhi: Liang Shi, a 56-year-old self-made millionaire from China, is determined to pass the countrys most difficult Gaokao College Entrance Exam. He took the Gaokao, a yearly exam for admission to all undergraduate institutions in mainland China, for the 27th time on Wednesday. Liang Xi dreams of studying at Sichuan University, one of Chinas top universities. To achieve his goal, he needs a high score on the Gaokao, which is attempted by about 13 million high school seniors every year.

He studies for 12 hours every day. Liang, who started his own successful building materials business after working in a factory, said he has been living a simple life for the past few months. He spends 12 hours a day reading books. Why does he want to study? He told AFP news agency, I feel uneasy that I didnt get a college education. I really want to go to university and become an intellectual.

The Gaokao College Entrance Exam can change anyones destiny. But it is hard for Liang to compete with 13 million students. I feel uneasy that I didnt get a college education. I really want to go to university and become an intellectual, he told Agence France-Presse news agency.

Also Read: Who Is IAS Officer Niyaz Khan, The Pro-Brahmin Officer Who Wants Muslims To Go Vegetarian?

The local media calls him The Gaokao Holdout. Liang first sat for the exam in 1983, when he was just 16 years old. He continued to attempt to improve his score for the next 10 years  until he had to stop in 1992, as the test then was only open to unmarried people under 25 years old.

When those limits were removed in 2001, Liangs ambition for a prestigious college education was revived.

Also Read: All Four Siblings Of UP's Mishra Family Are IAS, IPS Officers; Read Their Success Stories

He has since taken the gaokao 16 more times, including every year since 2010  even when strict zero-Covid measures made taking the exam harder than usual. Online, some have doubted whether his apparent fixation is just a publicity stunt. For what? Liang replied. No sane person would spend decades taking the gaokao for a stunt.

He said he will celebrate with his friends after the exams end this weekend. I am going to play Mahjong with my friends for three days and three nights," Shi added.
One of the most well-known figures in Bollywood is Salman Khan. His admiration and love among movie fans are absolutely unmatched. We have witnessed him accumulating a great number of accomplishments throughout the years, whether it be through the production of blockbuster films or the purchase of opulent homes and expensive vehicles. One such spot is the actor's lovely Panvel farmhouse, where he can unwind and rejuvenate.

Bollywood actor 'Bhaijaan' frequently posts snatch and views of his magnificent Panvel property. Salman enjoys spending time at this farmhouse, which he has named "Arpita Farms" in honor of his sister. We can only imagine how delightful it feels to stay here, deep in the middle of nature, with so many opulent luxuries to enjoy.

Salman spent time at the Panvel farmhouse in 2020, a period when the COVID-19 pandemic had the entire world on lockdown. While residing here, he posted a variety of pictures and videos capturing his daily activities. The Khan family's ideal vacation residence has three bungalows, a horse riding rink, a state-of-the-art gym, and a swimming pool.

Check out these luxury amenities of Bollywood's Bhaijaan

Gym: Salman Khan also uses the well-stocked gym at the vacation home frequently. Salman, who has fitness companies like SK27 Gyms and Being Strong Fitness Equipment under his belt, has a specific area of his home set aside for exercising.

Swimming pool: The resort-style pool at the farmhouse is one of the highlights of this property. The big swimming pool has beautiful rock carvings and a Buddha statue lying on the ground on one side and there are chairs and tables by the pool where the actor is often seen relaxing.

Farming: Salman Khan took a break from his Mumbai home in 2020 and spent a large amount of time in the countryside at his Panvel estate during the lockdown. He uploaded pictures and videos of his daily life there and in one video, where he tried his hand at farming, he expressed his respect for the local farmers. In a field amidst amazing natural beauty, the actor is pictured labouring on a rice plantation.

Horses: Salman Khan is known for his love of animals, and his property includes a stable and a riding arena. Salman may be seen spending a lot of time with the horses in his videos and pictures. These four-legged critters make Salman's stays at the farmhouse more memorable, from giving them food on schedule to taking them for rides.

At the first chance he gets, the actor flees to his Panvel farmhouse, whether he needs a vacation from business or just wants to spend some time alone to refresh his body and soul. He spends a lot of time there and is frequently seen lounging by the pool or on the porch. Salman enjoyed some downtime at the farm during this year's Holi.
Hansal Mehta's 'Scoop', recently released on Netflix, and based on the real-life story of Mumbai-based journalist Jigna Vora, has created quite a stir. While the show has gathered rave reviews, it has also piqued people's interest in Vora on whom the central character of the show is based. Vora's case created a sensation in 2011 when she was arrested for allegedly conspiring with gangster Chhota Rajan in the killing of veteran crime reporter Jyotirmoy Dey.

Scoop is based on Vora's memoir, 'Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison'. It stars Karishma Tanna in the lead role - she plays a crime reporter Jagruti Pathak - and features Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Harman Baweja, and Prosenjit Chatterjee in supporting roles. Apart from gangster Chhota Rajan, all other names have been changed in the show.

Who Is Jigna Vora?

Jigna Vora was an Asian Age journalist and a promising, ambitious journalist. She was the deputy bureau chief of the Asian Age newspapers Mumbai bureau and was 37 years old. It seemed that she had a bright career ahead of her when life took an unexpected and nightmarish turn - in 2011, Mid-Days senior reporter Jyotirmoy Dey was shot dead by unknown assailants, and soon Jigna's name started doing the rounds in the list of "suspects".

Vora, who would mingle with cops frequently for her articles, was soon charged by the police with giving underworld don Chhota Rajan vital details about Dey, including his residence and the license plate number of his bike. She was said to have links with underworld gangster Chhota Rajan. The fact that she had interviewed the underworld don a few weeks prior went against her.

Jigna was arrested and she spent nine months in prison. She was released on bail in 2012 from Byculla Jail in Mumbai. But she was only cleared of all the accusations after seven years in the 2018 special Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) court due to lack of evidence. After her release from prison, she wrote her memoirs 'Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison', which forms the basis of the web series Scoop.

Life Before Media

According to media reports, Jigna did her law degree from Ruparel College in Mumbai and later did a diploma course at Somaiya College. It was here she reportedly met Velly Thevar, her faculty and well-known crime reporter working for the Times of India, who influenced her to take up crime reporting. Jigna was initially doing an internship with a reputed law firm but due to pressure from her parents, she was forced to give it all up and marry a man who claimed he was an engineer and ran a printing press in Baruch, Gujarat. But it was later proved to be all lies and the couple separated. In 2004, Jigna came back to her maternal home with a four-year-old son after ending the marriage on a bitter note and started pursuing her career in media.

The Present Day

Even though Jigna Vora was acquitted of all charges in the 2018 special MCOCA court due to lack of evidence, her journalism career did not revive. Vora is now a tarot reader and healer and is into astrology. Her book, 'Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison', highlights the difficult journey that she had to endure in prison for nine months and the overall plight of female prisoners, the unhygienic conditions - the unhealthy food they have to eat, and the poorly lit cells they have to live in, among other things. In the book, she also opened up about her friendship with Pragya Thakur.
Employers are constantly looking for better and more innovative ways to acknowledge people in the workplace, especially in circumstances where change is frequent and fast-paced. According to recent research from the University of Waterloo, however, employee comparisons made possible by public peer recognition may lead to some workers feeling mistreated. "Employers have sought out various peer recognition systems in an effort to promote employee helping behaviour," said Pei Wang, PhD candidate in accounting at Waterloo. "When employees feel that they deserve recognition from their peers but do not receive it, employees can conclude that they are unfairly treated, and this makes employees less willing to help other co-workers, not only the co-worker they feel treated them unfairly,".

In practice, this type of treatment an employee interprets as unfair can occur when an individual disagrees regarding what type of behaviour should and should not be recognized during public peer recognition. In addition, some employees may only provide recognition to those close to them. Using a three-employee setting composed of the recognizer, the helper and the worker, the researcher tests whether peer information disclosed by peer recognition systems affects employees' subsequent willingness to help. During this study, both the helper and the worker assist the recognizer, however, only the helper receives recognition by the recognizer. The worker exhibits less willingness to assist the recognizer and the helper when the worker perceives that their initial assistance exceeds the helper's than when the worker perceives that their initial assistance is less than that of the helper's. The worker's lower level of willingness to assist the helper is a spillover from the reciprocal reaction to the recognizer's non-recognition.

These findings provide the first empirical evidence of the negative impact that peer recognition systems have on helping behaviour. This research can inform how employers utilize peer recognition in the workplace. Peer recognition is often advertised as a tool to make employees more willing to help others. The study results show that managers may want to be mindful of the potential downside of enacting peer recognition.

"My research provides a first step in cautioning managers about a potential unintended consequence of using public peer recognition, and that is the perceived unfairness that reduces helping behaviour," Wang said. It may be helpful for managers to communicate with their employees and come up with some agreed-upon guidelines on what should be recognized via public peer recognition and what does not need to be recognized via public peer recognition."
New Delhi: Music streaming platform Spotify is officially testing a new feature called -- 'Your Offline Mix', a playlist designed for users when they might not be online and still wants to listen to their favourite playlist. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek stated in a tweet that the company has been testing 'Your Offline Mix'. But he didn't go into any further detail.





It's unclear when the company intends to release the feature, in particular."We've been testing out a new feature called "Your Offline Mix" - a playlist designed for those times when you might not be online. What do you think?" Ek tweeted on Thursday.According to the screenshot posted by Ek indicates, these playlists can store music with multiple hours of listening time. This could be useful in situations when users are about to board a flight but have forgotten to download music.Several users expressed their thoughts on this development. "This is going to be extremely useful when we are on a road trip in the middle of nowhere and we forgot to download our playlists," a user commented."Finally!! please allow us to filter whether it's offline music or offline podcasts too please!!," another user said. Meanwhile, Spotify has started rolling out its AI feature called "DJ" for premium customers in the UK and Ireland.This feature was first made available to premium subscribers in the US and Canada in February. The feature is still in beta and is powered by OpenAI's technology.
In a conversation with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud on Thursday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his appreciation for Saudi Arabia's "excellent support" provided during the evacuation of Indian nationals from Sudan in April. He also sent his best wishes for the upcoming Haj pilgrimage. The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) reported that the leaders spoke on the phone on a range of bilateral cooperation topics and shared their perspectives on several global and multilateral issues of relevance. As stated in the release, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman offered his complete support for India's activities during its current G20 Presidency and expressed excitement for his visit to India. Both leaders concurred on the need for ongoing dialogue.

Operation Kaveri In Jeddah

In order to enable the safe evacuation of Indian nationals from the conflict-torn region of Sudan, India constructed a transit center in Jeddah in April. India brought the Sudanese refugees to Jeddah as part of the "Operation Kaveri" expedition, from which they flew back to their country of origin. PM Modi specifically praised Saudi Arabia's Prince Salman for his country's outstanding support in April 2023 during the evacuation of Indian nationals from Sudan via Jeddah. In addition, Prime Minister Modi sent greetings for the upcoming Haj journey.

Spoke to Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince & PM HRH Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Discussed boosting ties in connectivity, energy, defense, trade & investment, and exchanged views on regional and global issues. Appreciated his support in safe evacuation of Indians from Sudan and for Haj.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 8, 2023

Multiple Rescue Operations

In order to repatriate trapped individuals from other nations, India has launched multiple similar rescue missions. One such effort, known as 'Operation Ganga', was started by the Modi administration last year in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in order to evacuate a sizable number of Indian students there. India also conducted "Operation Devi Shakti" during the Taliban's assault on Afghanistan to facilitate the secure emigration of its residents from the country. Similar to this, India launched "Operation Vande Bharat" to return millions of its nationals from all over the world at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, when other nations were instituting broad shutdowns.
Medvedchuks yacht is sailing past Ukraine

   Author Oleksandr Liemienov StateWatch CEO

Medvedchuks yacht, which was arrested in Croatia, may never reach the Ukrainian shore, because in order to keep the arrest, the Ukrainian side must submit appropriate justification to the Croats every three months. The last time we sent such data was at the beginning of March. Time is running out, and the officials of the Asset Recovery and Management Agency (ARMA) responsible for the process of alienating Medvedchuks asset are in no hurry. You will be very surprised to find out what they are busy with.

Information about Medvedchuks yacht was gladly provided to us by the Prosecutor Generals Office, which is investigating the case against the mentioned collaborator, and by the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Justice, and Prozorro Sale. Its been almost a year since it became impossible to talk about this case with ARMAs leadership as these guys fr have been keeping a low profile. They probably understand that any communication is more to their detriment than to their benefit. Especially now, when the second week of interviews for the position of permanent head of the Asset Recovery and Management Agency continues, and current Acting Head Dmytro Zhoravovych is one of the candidates. Well, the priorities in his ongoing work are quite specific, and the story with Medvedchuks yacht is one of the illustrative examples.

The story of Medvedchuks floating assets begins in 2020, when the latter declared the offshore company Fregata Marine Ltd, which owns one of the worlds most expensive yachts the Royal Romance. The estimated cost of this vessel is USD 200 million.

At the beginning of the full-scale war, the yacht stayed in Croatia, and already on March 16, 2022, the Croatian media reported that the asset of the collaborator had been arrested. According to the information of a source in the Prosecutor Generals Office, the corresponding arrest took place by the decision of the District Court in Split on May 23, 2022, where a temporary security measure lasting two years was taken at the request of the competent authorities of Ukraine. In accordance with Croatian legislation, every three months it is necessary to submit to the court justification of the need for further seizure of property. The last time such information was sent by the competent authorities of Ukraine was March 7, 2023. In the absence of proper justification, the court has the right to cancel the arrest.

Interestingly, at the end of last year, the Ukrainian media noted that the yacht was searched by representatives of the American FBI, and immediately added that the inspection was also carried out by ARMA representatives. The information about the FBI search was confirmed by the judge and spokesman of the Split District Court, Dinko Mesin. The search warrant itself was issued at the request of the US Department of Justice. But the ARMAs presence on board does not correspond to reality. Although representatives of the Agency were on the territory of this Balkan country, they did not manage to gain access to the vessel.

  ARMA: Much Needed Legislative Changes

Indeed, the management of ARMA came to Croatia, but they were not allowed to board the ship. And instead of calling the Prosecutor Generals Office in Kyiv and trying to resolve something, they simply spent good time by the sea in restaurants and quietly returned to Ukraine. Only after returning did the ARMA representatives inform the Prosecutor Generals Office that they were not allowed on the yacht. And then they misinformed the Ukrainian media that they also conducted searches. These folks could only conduct searches in their pockets, no more, given their institutional capacity.

By the way, lets discuss institutional capacity. Considering that Ukrainian legislation does not provide for the procedure for the sale of property that is located abroad or under the jurisdiction of other countries, ARMA has developed a draft of amendments to the relevant government regulations (On the selection on a competitive basis of legal entities that carry out the sale of seized assets and On the approval of the procedure of sale of seized assets on e-auctions).

In reality, this project envisaged purely cosmetic changes in the current regulations, in fact, raising the internal regulations of ARMA to the level of government regulations. No serious changes were foreseen in terms of the sale of property, the existing status quo was simply fixed and extended to property abroad. Will such changes help to qualitatively sell Medvedchuks yacht? This is a question to which we may never know the answer.

According to ARMA, it is not legal loopholes that prevent them from selling Medvedchuks yacht, but the Ministry of Economy. Indeed, the ministry proposed to finalize this procedure and finally provide for transparent auctions for the sale of ARMA property. In particular, the Ministry of Economy submitted proposals that provided for the following: the extension of qualification criteria regarding the participants of the competition to the organizers of sales auctions, the possibility of holding a competition if there is even one applicant, as well as the possibility of selling assets through Prozorro Sales. Two sales models were also offered, namely: by default, through Prozorro Sales, and in exceptional cases (in particular if the property is abroad) through selected auction organizers.

Basic requirements are defined for both types of sales (regarding the signing of documents based on sales results, requirements for winners, etc.), which will make it possible to minimize possible abuses at auctions. For auction organizers, very detailed and extensive criteria are defined that allow one to check their authenticity, work experience and other indicators that influence the ability to sell assets.

The Asset Recovery and Management Agency still has nothing to do with these changes or any update of existing procedures within the limits allowed by the specific law on ARMA.

Further, this project of amendments should be sent to the Cabinet of Ministers for approval at the next meeting. In which edition and whether the changes suggested by the Ministry of Economy will be considered, we will see at the hearing. But at the moment, it looks like the Ministry of Economy is doing at least something so that Medvedchuks yacht ends up in Ukraine, and ARMA is busy with other things.

This body currently focuses on the management of the seized property of the aggressor country, and, in exceptional cases, on the sale of the said assets. All other functionality is practically forgotten. The transfer to management of property belonging to Ukrainian beneficiaries is so to say, on life-support. Out of the three hundred tenders, which Acting Head of ARMA Zhoravovych announced at the interview, they became managers for only a maximum of one and a half dozen. In turn, the issue of tracing assets acquired through criminal means disappeared from sight.

Let me remind you that in the spring of 2022, after the start of a full-scale war, the management of the said institution decided that the implemented functionality could be replaced by military hype and created a new multi-series scheme  the sale of Russian property that is under arrest as part of investigations by various law enforcement agencies. Of course, the corresponding sales, which took place at a discount, was already considered three times at the meetings of the temporary investigative commission of the Verkhovna Rada (the parliament of Ukraine). And even this hype story worked as long as it was about assets in Ukraine. As soon as it came to foreign ones, work with which requires legislative and regulatory efforts, everything fell apart.

During the interview for the position of the head of ARMA, current acting head Zhoravovych in just a ten-minute report managed to confuse the Odesa oil refinery with the Odesa port, to state that he and his subordinates generated the idea of purchasing military bonds through the sale of seized property, and to manipulate performance data. Meanwhile, he was unable to explain the enlarged staff, great salaries and a fee of UAH 425,000 paid to himself in 2021, and so on.

Therefore, it is unlikely that the management of ARMA will be able to honestly answer the question of why it sabotaged the development of the Procedure for the sale of property under seizure abroad. The procedure, the absence of which, or at least conscious justifications for its absence, in a few days may allow the Croats to let Medvedchuks asset float freely. We hope that the government will manage to do what ARMA failed to, because it is not only about a specific yacht. After all, without this procedure, we will not be able to confiscate any of the assets abroad, whether it be real estate, ships, cars, works of art, etc. And it is unlikely that anyone will hold arrests for us for years either.

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Almost a dozen flights scheduled to arrive Thursday night at Denver International Airport were diverted to Colorado Springs due to severe thunderstorms in the Mile High City, said Greg Phillips, director of aviation at the Colorado Springs Airport.

Colorado Springs is the primary diversion spot for flights headed to Denver, Phillips said. Between 9 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., 11 flights from various airlines, including American Airlines, United Airlines and Southwest Airlines, changed course and arrived in the Springs after the National Weather Service in Boulder issued severe thunderstorm warnings for Denver International Airport.

Most of the diverted flights were able to wait out the storm and continue on course, but a handful of aircraft deplaned passengers and provided ground transportation to Denver, Phillips said, noting that is an option airlines often try to avoid.

"It doesn't lead to a great passenger experience," he said. "Carriers hope to get back on route."

Some airlines were required to deplane passengers because they were either approaching the U.S. Department of Transportation's tarmac delay limit of three hours, or pilots and crews were approaching the Federal Aviation Administration's maximum limit of flight hours.

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Some passengers sat on planes more than two hours, but Phillips said he was not aware of any flights that hit or exceeded the three-hour limit, adding that while airport staff can help direct aircraft and traffic control to move or park planes, airlines do not allow the airport to offload passengers.

"We will do everything we can to help out," Phillips said.

Frontier Airlines was among the commercial carriers that unloaded flights Thursday at the Colorado Springs Airport; the airline had ended passenger service at the airport in November.

Frontier has an agreement with independent fixed-base operator Colorado jetCenter on the airport's general aviation side of the airfield, where Frontier deplaned one of its three diverted flights, Phillips said.

"We did have one flight where the crew timed out and we had to terminate the flight in Colorado Springs," said Jennifer de la Cruz, senior director of corporate communications for the Denver-based low-fare carrier. "Those folks were offered a stipend to travel to Denver on their own along with a future flight voucher."

Flights scheduled to arrive in and depart from Colorado Springs were not impacted by the string of diversions, Phillips said.
In just a few weeks, the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs will be hosting a 21-plus event that offers guests the chance to experience the zoo in the evening while enjoying live music and local eats.

The zoo announced the return of the "highly acclaimed" Moonlight on the Mountain event in a Facebook post on Sunday.

"Prepare yourself for an extraordinary evening brimming with local music, delectable treats, unique beverages, awe-inspiring panoramic views, and your favorite zoo animals!" the post reads.

Moonlight on the Mountain guests will have access to all-inclusive beverage sampling from regional breweries, wineries, distilleries, coffee shops, and food sampling from local restaurants, while supplies last.

"Live local musicians will set the mood and have you dancing the night away as you explore America's mountain zoo beneath the summer stars," the zoo said.

Guests will be allowed to visit their favorite animal exhibits until 8 p.m., officials said.

This year, the zoo's Moonlight on the Mountain will take place "rain or shine" on June 29 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. General admission tickets cost $79.95 each and are only available online.

The purchase of a ticket also includes a complimentary souvenir sampling cup and spork.

According to the zoo's website, the event is expected to sell out.

For more information or to purchase tickets, visit the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo website.
In the aftermath of nuclear detonations, high-rise buildings falling or other mass contamination events, residents can be greeted by masked military members asking them to get in line, strip down and shower in mobile trailers.

"You can't see them, you can barely understand them," explained Lt. Col. Wes Sumner, of the military members that would rush to the scene to help. Sumner manages an office within Northern Command tasked with preparing for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear contamination in cities across the country.

For residents who need wheelchairs, service animals, oxygen and any other assistance because of their disabilities, the process of decontamination could be even more complicated and scary if they are asked to leave equipment they rely on behind because it cannot be immediately decontaminated.

Professionals from El Paso County Hazardous Waste, the Colorado Springs Fire Department and a specialized unit of the National Guard gathered Thursday to work with residents with disabilities on how to best serve them in any incident that would require mass decontamination. Officials from Northern Command, the Air Force Academy and Peterson Space Force Base also attended the exercise, said Scott Stephens, hazardous materials coordinator for El Paso County.

Volunteer Kathy Screen walked through the decontamination process with her oxygen and her cane, pointing out issues she saw with the process along the way. A clear issue, jumped out at her right away.

"They took my cane to decontaminate it. ... I went to grab for a guard rail and there was no guard rail," recalled Screen, who has cardiac and spinal health problems.

She also noted they would likely have to take her oxygen concentrator in a real scenario and a solution for that was not yet in place.

The exercise also raised other questions for first responders and the military such as:

 What happens when you have to remove a hearing aid?

 What happens if someone relies on American Sign Language?

 What can be done for those who need to be placed on a backboard to soften it? Screen suggested foam for the backboards, in part to protect delicate necks.

Throughout the process, Screen, an advocate for those with disabilities, was impressed with how open everyone seemed to listening to her and the other volunteers.

"They were so nice and concerned with trying to understand. They were open to any suggestions. ... Its a great first step," she said.

The Colorado Springs event was based on work that Sumner's office within Northern Command organizes to prepare for major contamination events in cities all across the country in case troops from the National Guard, reserves and active duty need to arrive within 96 hours. The focus on better serving those with disabilities was identified following an event in Atlanta, Sumner said.

"This is the time that we can have problems and and feel like we're all in a safe environment where we can ask questions, where we can make those mistakes, and not cause harm, and find the gaps in our processes," said Lt. Col. Eric Miller, with Northern Command, who was a main planner for the event.

The technical problems raised by Screen are examples of the kinds of gaps exercise was looking to identify.

First responders know that residents have to leave every piece of equipment, such as wheelchairs, canes and hearing aids behind during the decontamination process. The questions lie in providing a short-term solution for those people until equipment can be returned or replaced. Providing canes or walkers is fairly easy, replacing other equipment like specialty power-wheelchairs is much tougher. The exercise is a starting point to help write policies for the future.

During a real contamination event, those with disabilities would go straight into medical care where some of their needs would be met following decontamination, Stephens said.

The officials are also exploring other forms of communication for those who might be hearing impaired, such as signs, Sumner said.

For the first responders who work with the residents with disabilities on an ongoing basis, the event was also intended to offer an opportunity to understand the perspective of those with disabilities.

Miller said he hopes that it helps to overcome stigma and stereotypes associated with those who have disabilities.

"They don't have a worse-case scenario, they just have a different way of experiencing life," said Miller, who learned about this perspective after his son went blind.
On Monday, when the Denver Public Schools Board of Education met to hear public comment, the meeting was marred beyond dysfunction. Board members Tay Anderson and Michelle Quattlebaums antics caused a two-hour delay before the public could actually testify on whether to bring back school resource officers, or SROs.

I come here to show my support for SROs, but this is a clown show, longtime Black civil rights activist Alvertis Simmons scolded the board in his testimony. School board, yall oughta be ashamed of yourselves.

Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas was invited to engage the board during a preliminary update from the districts superintendent. Quattlebaum monopolized the exchange, consuming 18 minutes. Despite acknowledging an unfair time constraint, she asked Thomas only three questions. His answers totaled less than two minutes  a fraction of the time Quattlebaum spent emphatically lecturing Thomas, who is Black, about alleged systemic white supremacy associated with SROs.

Does anybody know what the #1 piece of property law enforcement was created to protect? Quattlebaum asked. You got it  enslaved people. That is what law enforcement was created for. After 14 minutes, President Sochi Gaytan urged Quattlebaum to wrap up to accommodate other colleagues.

She continued monologuing for another four minutes.

I felt bad for (Thomas) because he did not get a chance to express why he was there, Simmons told me on 710KNUS radio Tuesday. He started out a little bit and then Michelle went into her tantrum, and then Tay started talking about how good of a person that Chief Thomas was. But then he started berating him.

Later, as Thomas patiently stood beside him, Deputy Superintendent Tony Smith presented findings from a district survey concerning SROs. Quattlebaum swiftly dismissed the results as merely supporting colleagues predetermined conclusions favoring SROs. Gaytan intervened, reminding Quattlebaum she didnt have the floor. But she persisted, alleging her Latina colleagues actions somehow embodied white supremacy. Chaos ensued.

Gaytan requested Quattlebaums microphone be cut. Do not cut her mic! Anderson barked. Thats not okay. That is oppressive! he bellowed. Quattlebaum stood and spoke without the microphone. Anderson walked down to the staff controlling the sound system, berating them. He spoke up soon after returning to the dais, disregarding Gaytans requests to follow board procedure. The situation escalated as Anderson became increasingly belligerent, daring the president to cut his mic (which she did) and have him arrested.

Man, cut all that out. Nobody wants to arrest you, Simmons recounted his thoughts, shaking his head. Is that how a vice president of a school board conducts himself? Denver, Colorado  if this is how your school board conducts itself, your vice president and other board members, man, you gotta take a hard look at yourself.

After Thomas left the hall, Anderson cornered him for some 10 minutes before returning to the dais.

In a Tuesday email addressed to colleagues, Anderson accused Gaytan of undermining the essence of what a democratic meeting should be. He derided Superintendent Alex Marrero for being complicit in stifling dissenting voices and sidelining Black community concerns as a bystander in the face of these transgressions. On the contrary, as Simmons argued, the superintendent erred in not asking Anderson and others to be mindful, be responsible, be respectful. Gaytan did the right thing by cutting the microphones.

Lets be real: While Anderson and Quattlebaum imagine themselves thwarters of oppression, their hubris belies this claim. Asserting that enforcing basic decorum is oppressive mocks historical acts of genuine oppression endured by African Americans. Board members exceeded equitable time and spoke out of turn. Their race was irrelevant.

Mondays meeting illustrates a broader crisis in DPS, however. Persistent dysfunction of the board  coupled with unsafe and undisciplined learning environments  necessarily defocuses from academic achievement, which has cratered in recent years. If the school board cannot even engage in respectful dialogue about school safety, how can they meaningfully shepherd the superintendent in boosting student outcomes?

Personality squabbles and political ambitions have impeded scholastic progress long enough. How in the world can DPS ask the students of DPS to do the right thing when THEY wont do the right thing  they are in disarray? Simmons asked. I was surprised that the other school board members did not check Tay. I was surprised they did not check Michelle. I just didnt understand it.

Lets be clear: Mondays meeting exposed a complete breakdown in civility and civil discourse  the antithesis of the kind of behavior a school board must model for its students and employees. The board bears collective responsibility for this institutional collapse in civility.

We need to, in this country, begin again to raise civil discourse to another level, observed Leah Ward Sears, the first Black female chief justice of any state supreme court.

I mean, we shout and scream and yell and get very little accomplished, but you can disagree very much with the next guy and still be friends and acquaintances.

Will the DPS board finally rise to the challenge of this breaker of legal glass ceilings, former Georgia Chief Justice Sears  or will they persistently submit to the juvenile passions of uncivil colleagues?

Jimmy Sengenberger is an investigative journalist, public speaker, and host of The Jimmy Sengenberger Show Saturdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. on News/Talk 710 KNUS. Reach Jimmy online at JimmySengenberger.com or on Twitter @SengCenter.
The El Paso County Redistricting Commission on Monday will hold its first of five public meetings to craft new commissioner districts for the first time since 2017, and has launched an online tool to help residents draw and present their own maps.

Monday's meeting is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. at Lewis-Palmer High School in Monument. Residents of District 1 are encouraged to provide feedback on communities of interest and political competitiveness within the district. Residents of elsewhere in the county will also have an opportunity to provide public comment.

The redistricting commission, consisting of the current five members of the El Paso County Board of Commissioners, is set to review the results of five preliminary map renderings, drawn using several geographic and cultural factors, that it requested during its introductory meeting in May.

It will also receive a demonstration on using the ESRI Redistricting Tool, an online software that allows users to draw potential commissioner districts using GIS technology, 2020 census data and other demographic information.

Upcoming Redistricting Commission meetings:  District 1 meeting, June 12: Lewis Palmer High School, 5:30 p.m.  District 2 meeting, June 21: Mountain View Academy, 5:30 p.m.  District 4 meeting, July 6: Mesa Ridge High School, 5:30 p.m.  District 3 meeting, July 10: Cheyenne Mountain High School, 5:30 p.m.  District 5 meeting, July 17: Regional Development Center, 9:00 a.m. July 14 is currently the last day for the public to submit proposed maps, though this deadline may be changed at the June 12 meeting.

Under House Bill 21-1047, passed in 2021, districts must be redrawn by Sept. 30 of the second odd-numbered year after a national census and cannot see more than 5% deviation between the most and least populous districts in a county.

According to a presentation by Clerk and Recorder Steve Schleiker in May, each new district should have a population of roughly 146,550 based on 2020 U.S. Census data.

Residents are encouraged to submit public comments and proposed maps through the website, which can be reviewed at future meetings.

"After creating an account, residents can create their own map using reference layers such as existing county commissioner, school, state House and Senate, or congressional district boundaries," the county said in a press release Friday. "The software will track the population of each district a person creates and will also allow them to overlay information such as ethnicity and voting age population should the user choose."

Click or tap here for instructions in written or video form for how to use the ESRI tool and free downloadable maps of commissioner and congressional districts, voter precincts, school and metropolitan districts and more.

Click or tap here to access the El Paso County ESRI Redistricting Tool.

The commissioners, all Republicans, appointed themselves to oversee the process without a citizen advisory committee at a controversial and highly attended regular meeting in April, during which dozens of residents argued that such a move would disenfranchise Democratic voters and accused the board of gerrymandering, given that a Democrat has not sat on the board since Stan Johnson's election in 1970.

The decision was "allowing the fox to guard the henhouse," one resident previously told commissioners.

In response, the El Paso County Democratic Party announced Friday that it is "organizing a peaceful protest" against the "politics of gerrymandering" at Lewis-Palmer High School at 5:30 p.m. Monday.

If we dont use this as an opportunity to make this right and equitable, it could be ten years before this happens again," Mischa Smith, the county Democratic Party chair previously told The Gazette.
Shortly after a news conference Thursday during which TaliJa Campbell and her attorneys alleged that Colorado Springs police ignored a 911 call for service during a hostage situation that turned fatal, CSPD responded with a news release.

On Thursday morning, shortly after the news conference ended, CSPD emailed a statement on the shooting and the claims by TaliJa Campbell.

In the statement, Community Relations Sgt. Jason Newton said: We know a number of outlets have reached out to us regarding the homicide of Qualin Campbell. I wanted to provide you all with an updated statement, which is below.

"The loss of Qualin Campbell is a tragedy. Our condolences go out to Mr. Campbells family, who we know are suffering greatly. Our top priority is to provide them with answers. We are aware there is information circulating about this case, and we understand the concerns and questions that arise as a result. We will continue to gather all relevant details about Mr. Campbell's death and ensure the accuracy of our findings. While we recognize that many members of the community are eager for immediate information, it is our duty to provide the victims family with support and share the details of what we have learned with them before making any public announcement. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Colorado Springs Mayor Yemi Mobolade, who was sworn in and took the oath of office Tuesday, also responded via an emailed statement.

The loss of Qualin Campbell is a devastating tragedy for our community. We hold his family in our prayers during this unimaginably difficult time. I also recognize that there are questions and concerns surrounding the situation that resulted in Qualins death. I ran for mayor to ensure that we have an open and transparent government focused on the public safety of Colorado Springs residents and for that reason it is critical that the Colorado Springs Police Department take the proper time to fully investigate this homicide to provide accurate answers to Qualins family and the public. We must not forget that a loved member of our community was murdered, and we all take very seriously the responsibility to bring justice to him and his family.

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Qualin Campbell, TaliJa Campbells husband, was shot and killed Friday, June 2, in a parking lot on 1500 S. Nevada Ave., less than a mile from Colorado Springs polices downtown headquarters.

TaliJa Campbell said at the news conference in front of police headquarters that an hour before her husbands body was discovered she called 911 to report that her husband had been taken hostage. TaliJa Campbell stated that she provided police with her husbands exact location and a picture of the man who allegedly took him hostage.

TaliJa Campbell stated she was the first person to find her husbands body, and that she attempted to perform CPR when she arrived. TaliJa Campbell said that it took her an hour to drive from her El Paso County home east of Colorado Springs to the shooting location just south of downtown.

Attorney Harry Daniels, a Georgia-based civil rights lawyer representing TaliJa Campbell, said he intends to find out how this happened, and that CSPD confirmed to him that the 911 call from TaliJa Campbell was received. Kevin Mehr, a Colorado Springs attorney working with the family, stated that CSPD has yet to provide the family with an answer as to why Tali'Ja Campbell's call for service was ignored.
The widow of a man killed in what's been called a homicide-suicide shooting south of downtown alleged at a Thursday news conference that Colorado Springs ignored a 911 call and plea for help during a hostage situation.

Qualin Campbell, TaliJa Campbells husband, was shot and killed Friday in a parking lot on 1500 S. Nevada Ave. south of downtown Colorado Springs, according to police. The El Paso County Coroners report, released Wednesday, ruled Qualin Campbells death a homicide and ruled the death of the man found with him in the car, David Karels, a suicide.

June 2, last Friday, tragedy struck in Colorado Springs, said Harry Daniels, a Georgia-based civil rights attorney representing TaliJa Campbell, at the news conference. He was just trying to do his job, working, providing for his family  But I want to talk about another tragedy. That the Colorado Springs Police Department, the government, failed to respond.

Questions surrounding Qualin Campbells death began to surface Monday when Daniels issued a news release claiming TaliJa Campbell had called 911 to report her husband had been taken hostage, and that CSPD did not respond to those claims for nearly an hour  and only after Qualin Campbells body was discovered in a parking lot near a Taco Bell.

On Thursday, TaliJa Campbell said that during her alleged conversation with dispatchers she stated her husband had been taken hostage, and that she provided law enforcement with Qualin Campbells exact location and a picture of the man who took him hostage.

Crime Stoppers Tip Line A news release from police states that this remains an active investigation, and anyone with information is encouraged to contact CSPD at (719) 444-7000; or if you wish to remain anonymous, you may call the Crime Stoppers Tip Line at (719) 634-STOP (7867) or 1-800-222-8477.

TaliJa Campbell went on to say that she was the first person to find her husbands body after driving to his location  a drive she made after becoming concerned at the lack of urgency from the dispatcher with whom she spoke. She attempted to perform CPR when she arrived and found Qualin Campbell's body in the front seat of a car.

It was me who had to try and perform CPR on my husband in a pool of blood, TaliJa Campbell said, immediately bursting into tears alongside Qualin Campbells mother afterwards. I shouldnt have been the one, I shouldnt have been the one who had to do that.

Daniels and Kevin Mehr, a Colorado Springs attorney also representing the Campbell family, said that as of Thursday morning there was no explanation provided by CSPD as to why Campbells call for service was ignored. However, Daniels said that police confirmed to him on Wednesday that they received the 911 call from TaliJa Campbell on June 2.

Daniels added that his office had filed an open records request in an attempt to gather more information.

I dont know what they were doing, or not doing in there (the CSPD headquarters), but I know they received that phone call, they confirmed it, Daniels said during the news conference in front of police headquarters, 705 S. Nevada Ave., located less than a mile from the shooting. Were going to find answers.  We want to know how many officers were available, how many officers were working that day, what cause took precedence.  There is blood on their (CSPD) hands.

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This week, police denied a public records request from The Gazette for recordings and transcripts of the alleged phone call between TaliJa Campbell and dispatchers, stating they could not be released because the investigation is still active.

When asked by reporters, Mehr said he wasnt sure why the investigation into Qualin Campbells death remains open, and that he was not given a clear answer by law enforcement.

Daniels and TaliJa Campbell were joined at the news conference by state Sen. Tony Exum, D-Colorado Springs.

On Thursday morning, shortly after the news conference, CSPD emailed a statement on the shooting and the claims by TaliJa Campbell.

In the statement, Community Relations Sgt. Jason Newton said: We know a number of outlets have reached out to us regarding the homicide of Qualin Campbell. I wanted to provide you all with an updated statement, which is below.

"The loss of Qualin Campbell is a tragedy. Our condolences go out to Mr. Campbells family, who we know are suffering greatly. Our top priority is to provide them with answers. We are aware there is information circulating about this case, and we understand the concerns and questions that arise as a result. We will continue to gather all relevant details about Mr. Campbell's death and ensure the accuracy of our findings. While we recognize that many members of the community are eager for immediate information, it is our duty to provide the victims family with support and share the details of what we have learned with them before making any public announcement. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Colorado Springs Mayor Yemi Mobolade, who was sworn in and took the oath of office Tuesday, also responded via an emailed statement.

The loss of Qualin Campbell is a devastating tragedy for our community. We hold his family in our prayers during this unimaginably difficult time. I also recognize that there are questions and concerns surrounding the situation that resulted in Qualins death. I ran for mayor to ensure that we have an open and transparent government focused on the public safety of Colorado Springs residents and for that reason it is critical that the Colorado Springs Police Department take the proper time to fully investigate this homicide to provide accurate answers to Qualins family and the public. We must not forget that a loved member of our community was murdered, and we all take very seriously the responsibility to bring justice to him and his family.

TaliJa Campbell spoke about how she and Qualin Campbell met in college at the University of West Georgia, how they had been married for seven years and that they raised two daughters together: a 14-year-old and a 4-year-old.

My husband was the most selfless man, the most selfless man.  Anyone would say that, TaliJa Campbell said. Were both introverted, we live far from here to stay away from the busy life, because we like a slow life, a quiet life. He didnt bother anybody, and I was very blessed to have been married to him.

TaliJa Campbell is the third Colorado Springs-area person whom Harry Daniels has represented in the past eight months. Daniels also represents Dalvin Gadson Ocha, a homeless Black veteran who was allegedly beaten by several CSPD officers during a traffic stop, and the family of Kevin Dizmang, who says he was killed in the midst of a mental health crisis via excessive force by responding law enforcement officers.

People ask me do you have an office down in Colorado Springs with how much youre here, Daniels said when asked what his continued presence in Colorado Springs says about local law enforcement. We dont want to come to Colorado Springs.  But it seems like were here a lot now.

Daniels added that hes hopeful new mayor Mobolade will be able to bring true transparency to CSPD.

When asked if the Campbell family would be filing a lawsuit against police, Daniels said: we are going to seek every legal possibility to get justice for this family.
Ten years after a devastating wildfire tore through Black Forest, community members and others, including U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colorado Springs), will gather Saturday to honor past and current recovery efforts during a Black Forest fire remembrance event.

The Black Forest fire ignited on June 11, 2013, destroyed nearly 500 homes and claimed the lives of two people and a number of animals, making it the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history at the time. Since then, the community has worked to remove burnt trees and implement other mitigation tactics, and organizers aim to bolster those continued efforts through educational and tree replanting opportunities on Saturday, according to a news release.

The event, hosted by the nonprofit Black Forest Community Club and volunteer-led Black Forest Festival & More group, is set to begin at 1 p.m. at the Black Forest Community Center and the Black Forest Log School Park at 12530 Black Forest Road.

Lamborn will attend as a keynote speaker, the release said.

Community members who have trees from their property can donate them on Saturday through the REGROW TO RESTORE community project, connecting them with residents whose properties were destroyed in the fire.

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"If able, attendees of the event are encouraged to dig and pot a small sapling from their property and bring it to the event," the release stated. "Project leaders will be onsite during the event to coordinate transplants.

The remembrance will also feature a "Scout-led Flag Ceremony," an information booth from the Colorado State Forest Service on Firewise Communities and proper mitigation, as well as other informational booths and speakers, the release said.

Hot dogs and other food will be available to purchase, but attendees are also encouraged to bring a packed lunch to the Log School Park.

According to the community website, volunteers interested in coordinating replants can email WeAreBlackForestCO@gmail.com.
A motorcyclist who died in a crash June 3 was identified as Colorado Springs resident Luis Cruz, according to the El Paso County Coroner's Office.

Police found the rider after responding to a call at 7:15 p.m. about a traffic crash near Barnes Road and Charlotte Parkway, just east of Powers Boulevard. Cruz was taken to a hospital, where he later died of his injuries, police said in a news release Friday.

Cruz, 33, was driving east on Barnes when he hit a curb and guardrail, then was ejected from the motorcycle, according to police.

Speed does not appear to be a factor in the single-vehicle crash, police said.

The coroner's office also this week said Jace Bajza died in a single-vehicle crash off East Woodmen Road and Gold Sage Drive at about 11:50 p.m. Monday.

These were the 20th and 21st traffic fatalities this year in Colorado Springs. At this time in 2022, Colorado Springs had 16 fatal crashes.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser announced Friday the final approval of $17.3 billion in national opioid agreements with two drug makers and pharmacies.

The states portion of the national settlement is $270 million, which Colorado is expected to receive over 15 years starting by the end of 2023.

The settlement is with Teva and Allergan and the nations largest pharmacies, CVS and Walgreens.

Holding the companies that created and fueled the opioid crisis responsible continues to be a top priority for me and my team, Weiser said in a news release.

Just like with previous settlements secured by our department and other attorneys general across the country, this money will go directly towards supporting the people and communities in Colorado who continue to battle the harms of drug addiction and misuse.

Local governments could start receiving payments by the end of the year, according to the Attorney Generals Office.

The settlements also prohibit Teva from engaging in opioid marketing and require a system to prevent drug misuse.

Allergan will be required to stop selling opioids for the next 10 years.

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CVS and Walgreens agreed to monitor, report, and share data about suspicious opioid prescriptions.

Weiser said he believes these additional provisions will safeguard a repeat of the opioid crisis.

These latest agreements are in additional to the roughly $400 million Colorado has begun receiving from prior opioid settlements.

Colorado is expected to receive more than $700 million from national opioid settlements.

Under the distribution framework, 60% of settlement allocation go directly to the states 19 opioid regional councils, which includes Denver.

Opioids have killed more than 8,500 Coloradans over the past two decades.

In 2020, Colorado had roughly 1,500 drug overdose deaths, nearly two-thirds of which were opioids, according to the Colorado Health Institute. The 1,500 drug overdoses in 2020 represented a nearly 40% increase over the previous year.

For more information on earlier opioid agreements, visit coag.gov/opioids.
On the same day the Black Forest fire began cutting a deadly swath through 15,000 acres and more than 500 structures, another, smaller blaze destroyed one of southern Colorados most popular tourist attractions.

The Black Forest fire was bigger, there were deaths, and lots of homes were destroyed, so it received more national attention, said Brett Hargrave, general manager of the Royal Gorge Bridge & Park. Ours was more like a blip on CNN. But a lot of people were affected by it.

The Royal Gorge fire scorched more than 3,200 acres, and while no homes were destroyed, the damage to the park was nothing short of catastrophic, officials said. When the fire was out, and the smoke had mostly cleared, only four of the parks 52 structures were left standing.

Ten years have elapsed since the blaze, but Peggy Gair, the parks human resources director, remembers like it was yesterday  right down to the warm, breezy weather conditions.

It was a memorable day, so it sticks in my mind, Gair said.

Around 1 p.m. on June 11, 2013, a wildfire was reported on the south side of the Royal Gorge Bridge. Soon after that, Gair and other park employees were advised to get ready to evacuate.

We were starting to pack our desks and get ready to leave, she said. Then we heard someone on our radios saying, It jumped the gorge! It jumped the gorge!

Firefighters showed up and told the employees there was no time to pack. It was time to leave.

Park rangers and fire crews evacuated more than 1,000 visitors and about 200 staff members without any serious injuries, officials said. But they were forced to leave behind about 60 head of elk, buffalo, horses and bighorn sheep.

I could hardly sleep that night, thinking about the animals, Gair remembers. But a couple of days later, we were told that they were all OK.

(The animals) all survived, Hargrave said. I was shocked when I learned that.

The fire burned about 360 acres of land within the park itself, but those numbers dont begin to tell the tale, Gair said.

Park officials werent allowed to go back to the park for about two days. When it was finally safe to return, the place looked like a dystopian wasteland, according to Hargrave.

The visitors center was now a pile of ashes and molten, twisted metal. Other structures had been reduced to formless masses of smoldering debris. The building that housed the aerial tram, and the gondola inside, was destroyed. The cable connecting the two tram stations had fallen into the gorge.

Total destruction, Hargrave said. Everything was gone. It looked like a war zone.

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One of our park rangers said it looked like a bomb had gone off, Gair said.

It didnt take long for insurance adjusters to confirm what Gair and Hargrave already knew: The Park was a complete loss.

Normally, it takes a while for insurance adjusters to investigate the damage and make a determination, Hargrave said. When I walked them through the park, it took them about 30 seconds (to declare the park a total loss).

The bridge suffered minimal structural damage, and only a few planks had to be replaced. The Plaza theater and the Sky Coaster were also intact. But almost everything else would need to be rebuilt.

We started thinking about a rebuild right away, Hargrave said. We knew we had to move fast.

The park is a central part of the areas tourism industry, but its more than that to the people of Canon City and surrounding areas, residents said. Its a part of the culture, and a rebuild would go a long way toward restoring morale.

It was important to the city, of course, Hargrave said. But this place is also important to the people who live and work here.

It took a concerted, 14-month effort between the park and the city to refurbish the park. By the 2014 Labor Day weekend, the park was again open for business.

Reconstruction was still going on, even as the park reopened, Gair said. But people were eager to come back.

With the exception of the Sky Coaster, the bridge and the theater, all the structures have been renewed or replaced, and the park is back to welcoming 350,000 to 400,000 guests per year, officials said. According to Hargrave, the newer structures and rides operate more efficiently and require less maintenance than the older ones.

(The fire) was the worst thing that could have happened to the park, Hargrave said. But in some ways, it was also one of the best.

In 2014, the Canon City Police Department said the fire was human-caused but had no other details.
By Dan Peleschuk

KYIV (Reuters) -Moscow and Kyiv both reported heavy fighting in Ukraine on Friday, with bloggers describing the first sightings of German and U.S. armour, signalling that Ukraine's long-anticipated counterattack was under way.

With virtually no independent reporting from the front lines and Kyiv saying little, it was impossible to assess whether Ukraine was penetrating Russian defences in its bid to drive out occupying forces.

"We can state for sure that this offensive has begun," Russian President Vladimir Putin said in Sochi. "Ukrainian troops did not achieve their goals in any sector."

Ukraine's President Voldymyr Zelenskiy said he had discussed tactics and "achievements" with military leaders but gave little away.

"For our soldiers, for all those who at this time are engaged in particularly heavy combat. We see your heroism, and we are grateful for every moment of your lives," he said in his nightly video address. "Ukraine is as free as you are strong."

Ukrainian military analyst Oleksander Musiyenko, interviewed on Ukrainian NV Radio, said Ukraine was making gains but dismissed Russian reports of a major counter-offensive in south-central Zaporizhzhia region.

"This is simply not true. It is not the main phase of the counter-offensive. It is merely a phase and not the large drive from which we can expect a rapid breakthrough and hundreds of kilometres of liberated territory," Musiyenko said.

The counteroffensive is ultimately expected to involve thousands of Ukrainian troops trained and equipped by the West. The United States announced an extra $2.1 billion in security assistance on Friday, including air defence and ammunition.

Russia, which has had months to prepare its defensive lines, says it has repelled attacks since the start of the week. Kyiv has said its main effort has yet to begin.

Moscow and pro-war Russian bloggers reported intense battles on the Zaporizhzhia front near the city of Orikhiv, around the mid-point of the "land bridge" linking Russia to the Crimea peninsula, seen as one of Ukraine's likeliest targets.

Ben Barry, senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said reports from the Russian bloggers of German-made Leopard tanks and U.S. Bradley armoured vehicles near Tokmak south of Orikhiv, if confirmed, would provide the first evidence that Ukraine's new brigades of Western-armed troops had joined the battle.

In all, Kyiv has 12 brigades totalling 50,000-60,000 troops ready to unleash in the counteroffensive. Nine of the brigades have been armed and trained by the West.

"They've got a choice of how many they commit initially and how many they keep in reserve in case the battlefield dynamics change," Barry said, adding that Ukraine's initial priority would be trying to keep the Russians off balance and gain tactical surprise through deception and camouflage.

The Russian defence ministry said its troops had repelled two Ukrainian assaults south of Orikhiv and four near Velyka Novosilka further east, where it said Ukraine's attack force included two battalions of troops supported by tanks. Several battalions of up to 1,000 troops comprise a brigade.

The southern front is where Ukrainian forces are widely expected to attempt their main push, towards the coast. Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said only that battles were continuing for Velyka Novosilka and Russian troops were mounting "active defence" at Orikhiv.

In the east, Ukraine has reported advances around Bakhmut, which Russian forces captured last month after nearly a year of the deadliest ground combat in Europe since World War Two. Ukraine generally bars journalists from reaching its side of front lines during offensive operations.

Reuters could not independently verify the accounts by either side.

FLOOD DISASTER OVERSHADOWS FIGHTING

The initial days of the counteroffensive have been overshadowed this week by a huge humanitarian disaster after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam holding back the waters of the Dnipro River that bisects Ukraine.

Thousands of people have been forced to evacuate homes flooded in the war zone, vast nature preserves have been wiped out and the destruction to irrigation systems is likely to cripple agriculture across much of southern Ukraine for decades. Kyiv said at least four people had died and 13 were missing.

Ukraine's security service released a recording on Friday of what it described as an intercepted phone call in which a Russian soldier confides to another man that a Russian sabotage group had blown the dam up. Moscow says Ukraine sabotaged it.

Western countries say they are still gathering evidence but argue that Ukraine would have no reason to inflict such a devastating disaster on itself, especially right as its forces were shifting onto the attack.

In Hola Prystan on the Russian-occupied side of the river, rescuers evacuated residents in rubber dinghies. Villagers carried pets or small children to safety.

"Our house was carried away by a torrent of water," said a woman who gave her name as Oksana, being evacuated in a boat with her teenage daughter and their two dogs.

Some relatives of people in Russian-controlled flooded areas said their loved ones were still stuck on roofs with dwindling food supplies. The United Nations has no access to those areas, its Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine Denise Brown said, adding that some 17,000 people were affected in Ukrainian-controlled areas, with numbers changing "by the minute".

The river divides the two sides, which accuse each other of shelling across it, interfering with rescue efforts. The Kremlin said Ukrainian shelling had killed people including a pregnant woman. It provided no evidence.

Ukraine's general staff said on Friday evening there had been 27 armed engagements in the east over the past 24 hours.

It also reported 58 Russian air strikes and 31 incidents of Russian shelling. "Unfortunately, there are civilian deaths and injuries and damage to private homes, a hospital and other infrastructure," it said, without elaborating.

Ukraine launched 16 air strikes it said, giving no indication of whether the front line had moved.

Russian officials said Ukraine had struck the Russian city of Voronezh with a drone, wounding three people, and reported other drone attacks in Belgorod and Kursk. Kyiv withholds comment on reports of attacks inside Russia.

(Additional reporting by Mark Trevelyan, Olena Harmash, Ron Popeski and Reuters bureaux; Writing by Peter Graff and Diane Craft; Editing by Angus MacSwan, Nick Macfie, Andrew Heavens, Philippa Fletcher and Daniel Wallis)
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) expressed support on Friday for the Justice Department's decision to indict former President Donald Trump in the classified documents matter.

The 45th president announced on his Truth Social platform Thursday evening that he had been indicted in special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into his alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. He faces seven federal counts, though specifics on the charges are not confirmed. Swaths of GOP lawmakers immediately condemned the indictment, with many of Trump's closest allies going as far as backing calls to defund the DOJ and FBI. Romney, a staunch Trump critic, took a different approach.

DEMOCRATS OPTIMISTIC AS JULIE SU'S LABOR NOMINATION LANGUISHES SENATE

The Utah senator began the statement by acknowledging that Trump is "entitled to the presumption of innocence" and that prosecutors face "the burden of proving its charges beyond a reasonable doubt."

"By all appearances, the Justice Department and special counsel have exercised due care, affording Mr. Trump the time and opportunity to avoid charges that would not generally have been afforded to others," Romney said. "Mr. Trump brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities to do so."

"These allegations are serious and if proven, would be consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest, such as withholding defensive weapons from Ukraine for political reasons and failing to defend the Capitol from violent attack and insurrection," it continued.

Romney's reaction to the charges is in stark contrast with his response to Trump's Manhattan indictment earlier this year related to hush money payments. The Utah senator said when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Trump in late March that he believed "the New York prosecutor has stretched to reach felony criminal charges in order to fit a political agenda."

"No one is above the law, not even former presidents, but everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the law," Romney said in his statement at the time. "The prosecutor's overreach sets a dangerous precedent for criminalizing political opponents and damages the public's faith in our justice system."

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Romney's shift in tone on the DOJ charges suggests there could be other Republicans, and certainly independents, who take issue with Trump's behavior in the documents matter.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith last November to lead the DOJ's investigations into Trump's role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and his handling of classified documents. The war crimes prosecutor took over the investigations after Trump declared his 2024 presidential bid, leaving Garland in need of an apolitical investigator to handle such politically sensitive matters.

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Trump also faces legal exposure from an unrelated criminal investigation by Atlanta prosecutors. The Fulton County District Attorney's Office is examining the former president's attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his subsequent role in the Capitol riot. Charges in that case are expected later this year.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing in the hush money and documents matters and vowed to fight both sets of charges. He has also maintained his innocence in the state and federal investigations of his handling of his 2020 election loss.

Original Location: Donald Trump indicted: Romney shows support for DOJ's classified documents charges

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Now that former President Donald Trump has been indicted on federal criminal charges, several questions remain regarding the Justice Department's next steps and the future of Trump's other legal scandals.

Trump's legal counsel said on Thursday evening that the former president is facing seven charges, including a violation of the Espionage Act, making false claims, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. The charges stem from his retention of classified documents and are the result of a special counsel investigation led by Jack Smith.

DEMOCRATS OPTIMISTIC AS JULIE SU'S LABOR NOMINATION LANGUISHES SENATE

Here are three big questions following the announcement of these charges.

What has Trump been indicted for?

This is the first time in U.S. history that a former president has been indicted on federal criminal charges. While official details have not been revealed, Trump's lawyers said the charges include willfully retaining national defense documents, which violates a section of the Espionage Act.

Experts predicted that Smith would turn to the Espionage Act when deciding federal charges for Trump.

The charges stem from an August 2022 search by the FBI on Trump's home in Mar-a-Lago, in which the agency found hundreds of classified documents. His legal team had signed a letter on June 3, 2022, attesting that all classified material held at Mar-a-Lago had been returned to the government.

Lawyer Jim Trusty said Trump was delivered a summons and a "summary" sheet with language similar to that of an indictment.

Trusty said there were "several" obstruction charges listed relating to 18 U.S.C. 1512, which deals with "tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant," and some related to 18 U.S.C. 1519, which covers "destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations."

What are the next steps in the investigation?

Trusty said the summary sheet asked the former president to appear in court on June 13 at 3 p.m. at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. It is unclear at this time if an announcement from the DOJ will come on June 13 or before.

A grand jury out of the district court had been analyzing evidence and hearing testimony from witnesses prior to the announcement of the indictment.

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Taylor Budowich, who worked as a spokesman for the former president and now works as the head of super PAC MAGA Inc., appeared before the grand jury on Wednesday to provide testimony. Trump's former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has reportedly testified before one of Smith's grand juries.

Trump himself has denied wrongdoing. In a post on Truth Social, he declared, "I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!" and once again called the investigation a "witch hunt." The former president said he intends to plead not guilty to all charges.

What other legal problems are on Trump's plate?

This is the second time Trump has been indicted. Earlier this year, a grand jury in Manhattan, New York, indicted Trump on state charges for allegedly falsifying business records during the 2016 presidential campaign. The investigation focuses on hush money payments he made to adult film star Stormy Daniels, who was going to go public about a 2005 affair with Trump.

Smith is heading another special counsel investigation into Trump over his actions during and after the 2020 election that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

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In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her team are investigating whether Trump and his allies attempted to interfere in Georgia's 2020 general election. Willis has hinted that charges stemming from her office's investigation could drop sometime in the summer after a grand jury recommended that at least one of the many witnesses committed conspiracy or racketeering.

Fulton County investigators are reportedly looking at the former president's actions in other states as well.

Original Location: Donald Trump indicted: Three biggest questions this morning after late-night bombshell

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The Department of Justice has indicted Donald Trump, levying federal charges against the former president over accusations he mishandled classified documents after leaving the White House and thwarted efforts from the government to reclaim them.

Trump announced the indictment on his Truth Social account Thursday night, telling supporters he would surrender to authorities on Tuesday afternoon. The DOJ has yet to announce the indictment publicly or unseal any of the charges against the former president.

REPUBLICAN PRIMARY: BIG TENT OR BIG TOP?

Trump reportedly faces a number of charges for his mishandling of classified materials, including the willful retention of national defense secrets, according to the New York Times. Such a move would put Trump in violation of the Espionage Act, a federal law that prohibits interference with the U.S. military.

What charges does Trump face?

Trump faces seven charges in his federal indictment, people familiar with the matter said. However, the scope of the charges and exact details remain unclear.

Among those charges are the unauthorized retention of national security documents and failure to return them to the government. If proven guilty, Trump would be found in violation of the Espionage Act  opening the former president up to a number of charges.

What is the Espionage Act?

The Espionage Act is a federal law enacted in 1917 during World War I that made it a crime to interfere with U.S. military operations or to support foreign enemies.

One of the provisions in the act prohibits the illegal retention of "national defense information," which includes classified documents and other sensitive materials. Trump has repeatedly argued he declassified all the materials found in his Mar-a-Lago home, although that defense may not stand because the Espionage Act was enacted before the classification system was established.

The law also includes measures prohibiting people from knowingly keeping classified materials in unsecured locations, which could be used by prosecutors as they reveal where each of the documents was found.

What are the possible punishments Trump faces?

To convict Trump, prosecutors must be able to prove Trump knew the documents were in his possession and that he willfully failed to comply with government requests and a subsequent subpoena to return them. Prosecutors would also need to prove the documents are related to national security and that Trump's mishandling put the U.S. at risk.

If found guilty, prosecutors could seek a charge per individual document. Each separate count could hold up to 10 years in prison, although previous Espionage convictions have been far less than that.

Trump also reportedly faces a number of conspiracy charges if it can be proven the former president compelled other people to break the law. To be convicted, prosecutors must prove Trump had conversations to discuss committing a crime. Such a penalty could be up to five years in prison.

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Trump may also face obstruction charges if prosecutors can prove he knew the classified documents were in his possession and willfully failed to comply with a DOJ subpoena to turn the records over. If convicted, Trump could face up to 20 years per offense.

It's illegal to make false statements to law enforcement officers conducting an investigation, and Trump could face related charges if prosecutors can prove he lied to the DOJ or compelled someone else to make false statements on his behalf. The former president could face up to five years in prison per offense.

The former president also faces possible charges of mishandling official documents and defying official court orders, which both hold prison time and possible fines.

Can those charges stop Trump from running for president?

A federal indictment, or even conviction, wouldn't stop Trump from running for president if he chooses to continue his campaign. There is no law prohibiting a candidate from continuing his or her campaign because he or she faces federal charges, and Trump's legal troubles have historically only made him more popular among his own base.

The charges have prompted outrage from several Republicans who say the charges are an effort by President Joe Biden to attack Trump as the current front-runner in the GOP primary. Others have also pointed to classified documents that were found in Biden's possession, claiming the DOJ is unfairly targeting Trump.

A special counsel is reviewing the documents found in Biden's personal office and Delaware residence, and an investigation is ongoing. However, the charges against Trump largely have to do with accusations the former president refused to hand over the documents after they were found rather than the discovery of classified materials itself.

Biden has said his team immediately contacted the National Archives and Records Administration to retrieve the documents once they were found.

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What comes next in Trump's case?

Trump is expected to appear in Miami court at 3 p.m. on Tuesday to surrender to authorities, according to the former president. After that, it's likely his charges will be publicly unsealed and the judge will move forward with scheduling a trial.

Meanwhile, Trump will continue moving along the campaign trail. The former president has already seized the new charges for fundraising material, sending an email to supporters soliciting donations shortly after the indictment was announced.

Original Location: Donald Trump indicted: What is the Espionage Act and what are the punishments for it?

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ACLU of Colorado's long-time public policy director, Denise Maes, has a new gig in President Joe Biden's administration.

Maes is now the regional administrator in the U.S. General Services Administration for regions five, six and eight  covering 16 states, including Colorado. Her appointment is effective as of Tuesday.

"I am extremely honored to be tapped by President Biden to serve in his administration," Maes said. "GSA is an amazing organization, working daily to provide products, services and solutions that enable our government to deliver services to the American people. I will work tirelessly to deliver on this mission."

The GSA provides centralized procurement and shared services for the federal government, managing real estate, overseeing contracts and delivering technology services.

As regional administrator, Maes will oversee all of GSAs operations in the Rocky Mountain, Heartland and Great Lakes regions. This includes managing federal real estate, information technology and inventory for government-owned or leased buildings. She will also serve as a liaison with members of Congress and representatives of federal, state and local government agencies.

Q&A with Denise Maes | Her accomplishments follow her determination

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Maes worked as the public policy director at the ACLU of Colorado for nearly 12 years. She was responsible for the group's legislative initiatives at the state and local levels. Her most notable causes included helping overturn Colorado's death penalty and fighting against police profiling.

Maes also previously served as director of administration for Biden when he was vice president and general counsel in then-President Barack Obama's executive office. She is a board member of the Denver Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and holds a law degree from the University of New Mexico School of Law.

U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper wrote to the White House over a year ago in support of Maes appointment. The Colorado senators applauded Maes' swearing in on Wednesday.

Denises entire career from the Obama White House, to her advocacy for Colorados Latino community, and her leadership at the ACLU of Colorado, has focused on opening the door of opportunity to people who have been excluded, Hickenlooper said. Denise will bring that same energy to the U.S. General Services Administration, making sure everyone has a seat at the table.

Bennet added: "Denise has always fought for Coloradans, especially our LGBTQ+ and Latino communities. Her appointment is a major step forward to ensure our federal leaders reflect the diversity of the American people."

Federal judge allows 2 inmates to sue over lack of access to sex offender treatment
The candidates who won or lost their races in Denver's just-concluded municipal election weren't the only winners and losers on June 6.

Now that the votes are counted, Mayor-elect Mike Johnston is mobilizing his transition team, while runner-up Kelly Brough is considering what's next.

But before the dust settles, we wanted to take stock of some other political winners and losers  and one result that was closer to a draw.

Winner: Feddy and the Dreamers

Loser: The Webb Machine

Simply put, former Denver Mayor Federico Pena picked the winner of the June 6 runoff, while his immediate successor, former Mayor Wellington Webb and his wife, former state Rep. Wilma Webb, backed the loser.

But more than that, Johnston's campaign and the governing style he's promised closely resembles the aggressively idealistic approach his fellow former legislator, Pena, brought to city hall.

Pena was the young candidate bearing bold visions when he prevailed in 1983 over the consummate insiders  incumbent Mayor Bill McNichols, who finished third in the first round of voting, and District Attorney Dale Tooley, who faced Pena in the runoff.

Like Johnston, Pena was derided as a pie-in-the-sky stargazer, with his ubiquitous "imagine a great city" slogan earning his campaign team and the new administration a dismissive nickname: Feddy and the Dreamers.

On election night this week, Johnston supporter Doug Linkhart  a former legislator, councilman and city department director  drew a parallel, applauding voters for choosing "vision over continuation."

"I think Mike has what Federico Pena had 40 years ago, and that's vision," Linkhart said. "I think Mike's vision is similar  it's looking to the future of the city and what we can be, not just managing things the way they have been."

The contrast with Brough, who ran on her experience as a chamber of commerce CEO and chief of staff for former Mayor John Hickenlooper, was explicit.

After Brough conceded and Johnston declared victory, the freshly minted mayor-elect described how he envisions turning his campaign dreams into reality.

"I think that for me, the vision is the 'why' you want to do it, and the problem-solving is the 'how' you do it," he said.

"So that's why we worked really hard when no one else did to say we're going to build out a comprehensive white paper on every single policy we roll out, we're going to put a comprehensive budget out for everything we roll out. We're going to say exactly how much it's going to cost and where the money's going to come from ... that means that we're talking about a plan to get 1,400 people who are unhoused into housing  that's not a letter to Santa Claus, that's actually a real plan with a real budget and real evidence that it works."

Like Brough, Webb boasted years of experience at city hall when he won election in 1991 to the first of his three terms as mayor, on the heels of a term as city auditor.

Webb and his political apparatus are legendary, having propelled numerous Democrats into office. That record includes kicking Michael Hancock's 2011 mayoral campaign into high gear with an endorsement when the councilman appeared to be stuck in third place ahead of the first round of voting. Webb's crack get-out-the-vote machine help seal the deal in the runoff.

But while Webb provided one of this election year's best quips  calling Johnston the guy who went "from Vail to Yale"  his political magic didn't spur Brough's campaign across the finish line.

Mixed bag: The Establishment

Johnston and Brough both came under fire for their association with groups that epitomize the establishment, but Brough's dozen years fronting the Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce might have done more damage to her prospects than Johnston's decades-old membership in Yale's fabled Skull and Bones, an exclusive undergraduate club that counts former presidents and titans of industry among its illustrious alumni.

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Early in the runoff, Brough's campaign and her supporters tried to raise a fuss over Johnston having been "tapped" into the once-secret society  rumor had it a Bonesman had to leave the room if its name was uttered  but he shrugged it off, describing it as merely one of Yale's hundreds of "social clubs" and insisting it had long ago shed its unsavory and creepier practices. The attack provoked snickering on the campaign trail but didn't appear to gain any steam.

Brough's past as a prominent advocate for the chamber of commerce could have carried more weight with voters, at least after an outside group supporting Johnston hammered voters with some of the more conservative-aligned positions she advocated for during her tenure, such as support for fracking and opposition to raising the minimum wage  perilous stances in an overwhelmingly Democratic electorate.

Political strategist Steve Welchert suggested that the guilt-by-association attacks might have cancelled each other out.

"We all understood she was down in the polls, because she's the one who drew first blood, right?" Welchert said in a recent panel discussion on the race. "But when you draw first blood, complaining about your opponent being a member of Skull and Bones at Yale, (Johnston's campaign was) ready for that and popped her back on the chamber of commerce, so it all became neutral."

Added Welchert: "That's not how you want to come out of the gate swinging, I don't think, on something that's not particularly substantive. So on the one hand, you've got a corporate candidate against an elitist candidate, right? So Denver voters are choosing between the corporatist and the elitist."

Winners: Jenn Ridder and Justin LaMorte

The two powerhouse Democratic strategists who ran Johnston's hard side and soft side, respectively, are on a roll.

A Denver native and campaign veteran  her parents, Rick Ridder and Joannie Braden, co-founded the enduring Colorado-based RBI Strategies & Research political consulting firm  Ridder joined Johnston's campaign as a senior advisor after the runoff was set and steered the candidate into the winner's circle.

She's used to running winning campaigns, having served as states director for Joe Biden's 2020 presidential run after managing Gov. Jared Polis' 2018 gubernatorial campaign.

Ridder is currently executive vice president for mobilization and campaign management at Precision, a dominant national political consulting firm founded by Obama alums Stephanie Cutter, Jen OMalley Dillon and Teddy Goff.

Politico's Eli Stokols  a Colorado alum  and Lauren Egan reported this week that Ridder has been in talks with the White House about "a role in the president's re-elect," but in the wake of Johnston's win, there's been "chatter" that she could wind up with a job in the new mayor's administration  "possibly even as his chief of staff."

LaMorte supervised Advancing Denver, the independent expenditure committee that supported Johnston, fresh from a string of high-profile Colorado wins.

Before arriving in the state just four years ago, LaMorte worked the political desk at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for the 2016 cycle and was deputy political director at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for the 2018 cycle.

He moved to Colorado to manage Democrat Dan Baer's short-lived U.S. Senate campaign in 2019, and later he essentially called the shots for Hickenlooper's successful 2020 run for the same office, starting after the former governor won the primary.

Last year, LaMorte managed U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet's reelection campaign, running up the widest margin for a Colorado senator in more than two decades, and last month he took over as executive director of Rocky Mountain Values, a nonprofit whose mission is to educate voters about U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert ahead of the Silt Republican's bid for a third term. LaMorte also recently signed on as general consultant for U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, who is seeking a fourth term next year.

Ernest Luning has covered politics for Colorado Politics and its predecessor publication, The Colorado Statesman, since 2009. He's analyzed the exploits, foibles and history of state campaigns and politicians since 2018 in the weekly Trail Mix column.

'More sopapillas, please': Casa Bonita's openings bracket decades of Colorado memories | TRAIL MIX

Yemi Mobolade's head-turning win echoes John Hickenlooper's first run for Denver mayor | TRAIL MIX

Denver runoff between Mike Johnston, Kelly Brough has yet to hit traditional muddy patch | TRAIL MIX
The sun rose over Fort Carson on Friday morning as over 8,000 soldiers gathered to race in the 4th Infantry Division's physical training event to honor the battle of Kamdesh, Afghanistan, which took the lives of eight soldiers nearly 13 years ago.

The series of training events are the product of Maj. Gen. David Hodne, said Lt. Col. Ireka Sanders, the 4th Infantry's spokesperson, and they serve to educate soldiers of the division's past, and to honor the sacrifice of the heroic lineage of the division.

With Hodne stepping down from his position Tuesday, it's unclear if the training exercises will continue.

This is a great opportunity for us to do some war fighter-focused, readiness training, as well as to remember and honor those who came before us, and gave the division the name that it has today, Sanders said.

We can tell our soldiers the history, or we can do events like this where we can touch, feel and give them a reason to remember and honor the legacy of others that came before us.

On Oct. 3, 2009, 400 members of the Taliban attacked the 79 Ivy soldiers  as they are known in the 4th Infantry  stationed at Combat Outpost Keating, outside the town of Kamdesh in eastern Afghanistan. After 13 hours of battle, one in three Fort Carson soldiers was wounded, all Taliban present were killed, and eight in the 4th Infantry Division died.

Many of the 4th Infantry's soldiers present that day were awarded for their bravery. Staff Sgts. Clint Romesha and Ty Carter were awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration, for their heroic actions.

Today, we dedicate our efforts to the eight fallen Ivy soldiers and Kamdesh, Hodne said to the division.

Fridays event consisted of a 1.87-mile obstacle course designed to replicate the soldiers' experience in battle.

Combat engineer Ryan Griffis is responsible for leading the endeavor of building the events obstacle course. He said its an honor to be a leader in the creation of Fridays training exercise, considering the history behind it.

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Weve been planning todays event for a little over three months, with the bulk of it happening in the past eight weeks, Griffis said.

We have salute batteries out here, artillery and nomadic guns to really replicate everything that was going on in the Battle of Kamdesh.

Battalions of 150 soldiers followed their colors, or flags, and raced through the rough and hilly Fort Carson terrain, maneuvering jutting rocks and cactus. Simulated gunfire, helicopter observation, and smoke worked to create a realistic war scenario.

Units were given a series of items to carry and control through a series of five obstacles, including climbing in and out of 8-foot anti-trench ditches, ascending walls, and shimmying through thick mud while navigating barbwire.

To further simulate the soldiers' experience in Kamdesh, units were tasked with carrying eight casualties to the finish line as the last leg of the race, in honor of the eight Ivy soldiers who lost their lives in Kamdesh. Filling those roles were four company commanders and four servicemen from each battalion.

Approximately 40 minutes after soldiers began the exercise, they were crossing the finish line carrying their eight casualties on stretchers. What was once a clean well-groomed division was now sweaty and covered in filth, wearing expressions of joyous exhaustion.

War is chaos, its complex. You cant predict whats going to happen, and this isnt perfect too, Hodne said as he announced a runoff race required to determine a winner.

The two leading units fought for first in an intense round of a three-legged race. Lt. Col. Jeffrey Kain worked alongside Sgt. Maj. Eriogabi Evborokhai to take home first place for the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team. Soldiers within the unit enthusiastically chanted Manchu, Kains call-sign, as they lifted and carried away their leader in an act of spirited camaraderie.

Sgt. Maj. Alex Kupratty said training events, like Friday's, are a necessary and unique experience for soldiers.

Its team building, squad building, cohesion, and creating real hardships  you cannot replicate this anywhere else, Kupratty said. Tough, realistic training is what builds cohesive teams. Everybody, regardless of rank, participates.

You have colonials here all the way down to privates doing the exact same thing, pulling the exact same weight, and thats what we expect them to do in combat. This is the perfect way and example to show the younger generation that the older guys are doing it just with you.
Local housing growth caps will soon be banned in the state of Colorado after Gov. Jared Polis signed a new law on Wednesday.

Beginning in August, House Bill 1255 prohibits local laws that limit annual housing construction or residential permits, and erases those that currently exist in several cities in Colorado, such as Boulder, Golden and Lakewood.

The new law is state policymakers' most recent effort to tackle Colorado's affordable housing issue, intended to increase housing stock in growth-capped cities. The law doesn't force local governments to approve specific housing developments, but they will no longer be able to reject a proposal due to a growth cap.

Colorado is facing a housing crisis, and we must all work together to create more housing opportunities for every Colorado budget, not limit them, Polis said. I am particularly pleased that the local housing growth restrictions bill, an important part of our more housing now goals, is now the law of Colorado.

HB 1255 was part of the governor's affordable housing package, introduced alongside his sweeping land use bill, Senate Bill 213, which failed to pass the legislature.

Only a handful of municipalities throughout the state have growth caps. For example, Boulder, Golden and Lakewood, all only allow housing stock to expand by 1% each year.

Critics of the bill argued it violates local control and won't necessarily result in more affordable housing, as there is no requirement that the new housing built must be affordable. Municipalities that utilize growth caps also said they can help preserve a community's character and stay within the limits of their infrastructure.

Expressing qualms over some measures, Gov. Jared Polis signs two dozen bills

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Proponents said growth caps have a broad effect on surrounding cities and the state at large. When residents of growth-capped cities are forced to live in neighboring districts, they said, it can overwhelm enrollment in the neighboring schools, increase the use of vehicles for work commutes, and force them to build more housing to accommodate for rapidly rising populations.

By getting rid of limits on how many homes can be built, well increase our housing supply, lower costs for families, and help more Coloradans find a place to live they can afford, said bill sponsor Rep. Ruby Dickson, D-Centennial. This will help Coloradans live closer to their jobs, schools, and loved ones while improving our air quality and our environment."

Under the new law, municipalities can temporarily enforce growth caps for up to 24 months if there is a declared disaster emergency, such as a wildfire, to change land use laws or to address insufficient public infrastructure, such as wastewater treatment.

On Wednesday, Polis also signed bills to cap pet fees for renters, allow remote participation in eviction court proceedings and create a tax credit for employers who help employees purchase a home.

Other housing laws signed this year include requiring mediation before eviction for tenants on government aid, limiting tenant income requirements and security deposits, restricting leases from waiving tenant rights and allowing the reuse of rental applications without extra fees.

However, most of the major housing legislation failed to come to fruition, such as House Bill 1115 to let local governments enact rent control, and House Bill 1171 to ban evictions and lease terminations without "just cause"  in addition to the failure of SB 213.

Polis vetoes ban on speculative ticketing, other 'deceptive' ticket sale practices
A district court judge rejected a challenge against a proposal from Colorado Democrats to ask voters in November to divert a portion of TABOR refunds for 10 years and pay for property tax relief.

The measure also sought to help backfill the loss of revenue for county governments and special districts.

The lawsuit, filed in Denver District Court this month, claimed the legislation violates the constitution's single subject rule.

The suit argued it has four subjects instead of one: it reduces property tax assessment rates; asks voters to allow the state can retain and use the funds for other expenditures, notably on the "politically appealing" subject of education; allocates money for tenant rent; and, permanently changes  and "eventually eliminates"  TABOR refunds.

In his ruling, Judge David Goldberg said the court doesn't find that Senate Bill 23-303 and, by extension, Proposition HH, violate the constitution's single-subject requirement on the grounds articulated by plaintiffs.

Editor's note: This is a developing story and will be updated.
A competency evaluation was requested for Laura Voepel, the mother of alleged Club Q shooter Anderson Aldrich, during a court hearing Thursday.

At a hearing last month, Voepel's attorney, Carrie Thompson, told Judge Yolanda Fennick that misdemeanor charges of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct against her client came after police told Voepel on Nov. 20, 2022, that her child had been arrested in connection with a murder. Voepel's child, Aldrich, is accused of fatally shooting five people and injuring nearly two dozen more at the LGBTQ+ nightclub Club Q on North Academy Boulevard on Nov. 19, 2022.

Concerns over Voepel's competency to proceed in the case were raised by Thompson at the May hearing, when Voepel interrupted the hearing by attempting to speak numerous times before she was kicked out for calling the judge an expletive term.

After the outburst Thompson apologized and said her client was "severely mentally ill," before adding that the outburst may force her to raise the issue of competency to proceed, which Thompson said she had initially not wanted.

On Thursday, Thompson officially made the request during a motions hearing in 4th Judicial District Court that an evaluation be conducted on Voepel, who appeared in person in court for the first time in her case.

A competency evaluation is conducted to determine if a defendant is competent to proceed forward with a case. If a defendant is found incompetent, all court proceedings are halted until the defendant is restored to competency via mental health restoration.

After prosecutor Andrew Vaughan did not object, Judge Fennick granted the defense motion for a competency evaluation.

Voepel's attorneys argued during a previous court appearance that body-worn camera footage of the incident should be played in court because it showed their client could not have knowingly committed the crimes in question amid her "deteriorating mental condition."

"She (Voepel) was under extraordinary distress and despair," Thompson argued in May. "Clearly, she's a woman who was experiencing a traumatic event."

Vaughan argued that evidence suggesting mental competency should not be admissible unless Voepel enters a not guilty by reason of insanity plea, which Thompson said Voepel has no intention of doing.

Vaughan also said that authorities found 49 pills at Voepel's apartment, which she shared with Aldrich, and claimed they may be ecstasy. Vaughan pointed to the alleged ecstasy pills as a potential motive for her actions, rather than mental health issues.

Voepel's child and alleged Club Q shooter Anderson Aldrich has been undergoing a sanity examination at the state hospital, which could determine if Aldrich will plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

Aldrich's next court appearance is an arraignment scheduled June 26.

Prior to ending the hearing, Thompson informed Fennick that Voepel is moving to Florida to live with her parents on July 2, and she will need to attend future court proceedings virtually.

Attorneys will return to court for an update on Voepel's competency evaluation on July 21.
BEMOWO PISKIE, Poland  When ground troops, artillery and aircraft gather to show off their firepower, as troops from five nations did in Poland last week, its an intricately planned dance to ensure everyone arrives and no one gets hurt in the blasts.

Colorado soldiers in the 4th Infantry Division based at Fort Carson and Colorado natives currently living in Germany as members of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment helped to pull off the exercise, called Griffin Shock, that brought together more than 3,000 soldiers and an international set of military weaponry, including Romanian Gepards, anti-aircraft tanks, U.S. Strykers and Howitzers and Croatian Panzers. Even career soldiers were seeing some vehicles and weapons for the first time, like an impromptu international military convention.

The soldiers converged for the exercise required by NATO in the northeastern Polish countryside that the average traveler from Warsaw reached by numerous narrow country lanes that passed through villages, farmland and woods.

About 2,000 U.S. soldiers with the 2nd Cavalry Regiment made the trip from southern Germany over about 700 miles over three days in 25 separate convoys. Its a trip that would normally take 12 hours by car.

Scheduling such a trip on a short time schedule presented challenges at the heart of the exercise, said Colorado Springs native Maj. Adam David, an operations officer with the regiment

The whole point of this exercise was rapid  to demonstrate the capability to deploy rapidly and fight essentially on demand, said David, who made the trip in the back of a Stryker as a vehicle commander while also tracking a squadron spread across three of the 25 convoys.

He explained his experience as he stood in front of a line of 36-ton Dragoon Strykers, eight-wheeled armored vehicles. It was one of the many rows of military vehicles parked around an observation tower as they came and went from various training grounds. Extensive sets of tents were also set up in the same area for the 2nd Cavalry Division and NATOs Multinational Division Northeast, which was running the exercise.

On the way to the training ground one of the regiments Strykers broke down. But, fortunately, each convoy travels with a recovery vehicle that can move the enormous trucks off commercial roads if they obstruct traffic, David said.

Once in Poland, U.S. troops used a tactical voice bridge to share radio traffic with soldiers from other countries. The exercise included troops from Croatia, Romania, the United Kingdom and Poland, in addition to the large contingent of U.S. soldiers.

To overcome language barriers, human translators are preferred, but in a pinch, David said, soldiers use Google Translate, a live free translation service, just like tourists.

Prepping for the impressive live-fire displays also takes extensive mapping that includes how the ammunition is expected to behave.

Each unit turned in a detailed plan of where it is shooting and what weapons it is using so software can model its effects, said Camden Milway, a sergeant 1st class with the 2nd Cavalry Division from Westminster.

That allows us to make sure we can position people safely, he explained.

Some of the rounds mapped for the exercise included grenade launchers, 81 millimeter mortars, machine guns and Bradley rounds, among many others.

Detailed mapping and an understanding of how ammunition acts allows troops to prepare for combat situations and it builds confidence and trust among them, he said.

They can know: Im safe. And Im not going to get shot by my own people, he explained. Milway described his work from a tent with rubberized flooring, full of folding tables where soldiers worked on laptops sheltered on some days from the cold rain that pooled in the muddy rutted roads.

In addition to the ground weapons, the exercise also featured Apache helicopters from the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade in Germany that buzzed over the training ground numerous times in the lead up to a highly coordinated display for high-profile visitors Friday. The Apaches base for refueling and landing was in an open field, close to a working farm.

Ensuring the aircraft and ground troops dont interfere with each other takes rigorous planning, which Colorado Springs native Sgt. 1st Class Steven Cromer, worked on for the 2nd Cavalry Regiment as the regimental fire support officer.

He planned how artillery, mortars and close air support will come together relying in part on 3-D digital models to plan how munitions will travel to targets and the safe paths through the air helicopters will take. The models help Cromer determine not only safety but how to have the greatest effect with all the weapons.

Its fun to put them all together, all the pieces of the puzzle, Cromer said.

The large number of weapons systems on display was representative of what a surge of more than 3,000 soldiers would bring to a fight, he said.

It is one of several major training efforts going on across Eastern Europe this spring, as the war in Ukraine stretches into its second year.

The ongoing training is definitely showing results among some Polish tank troops, said Sgt. 1st Class Marc Lloyd, with the 9th Cavalry, who participated in Griffin Shock and was also working with Polish troops on tactics prior.

In one exercise, Lloyd said their strategy was on point with a recent lesson. During the exercise, his tank got caught by two BMPs, similar to Bradleys, who kept him from turning his turret and had him backing into the trees.

I was pretty impressed.  They caught me between the tree line and I dont like getting caught.

He also found that spending time with the Polish, trying new foods, new weapons and making friends with the lady at the shop on post who sells snacks has helped make working there more meaningful.

It gives you a sense of like, this is why Im here. We would fight side-by-side if need be, he said.

The training and relationship building is happening as NATO is getting tested in ways it hasnt been since the end of the Cold War, said David.

The (2nd Cavalry Regiment) in particular, which has many soldiers who are from Colorado, from Colorado Springs, is (at) the absolute cutting edge of U.S. Army-Europes efforts to support the NATO alliance and to deter the aggression, he said.
After 17 months of intense investigation, the Boulder County Sheriff's Office Thursday announced the Marshall fire was actually two separate fires started by two separate causes within 2,000 feet and an hour apart.

The first: Human caused by a fire at property owned by Twelve Tribes that was left to smolder six days earlier. Investigators said the fire had been covered in dirt, but on Dec. 30, 2021, the high-wind event uncovered and reignited the smoldering fire at about 11 a.m., Boulder County Sheriff Curtis Johnson said.

The second: An unmoored Xcel Energy power line near the Marshall Mesa Trailhead sparked at around noon, Johnson said.

Johnson referenced a map that showed the second fire started 2,000 feet away from the first one an hour later and said the two fires were not related.

The cause of the Marshall fire was assessed by Colorado-based investigators from the U.S. Forest Service and and an electrical engineer who is an authority on wildfires.

Investigators looked into the possibility the second fire was caused by embers from the first fire at the Twelve Tribes property, but Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty explained that investigators ruled that out.

"Embers would have had to travel 2,000 feet to the south west to reach the trailhead site," said Dougherty.

The wind was blowing the fire to east where it roared into the heavily populated areas of Superior and Louisville.

The wind was blowing with sustained speeds of 50-60 mile per hour and clocked with gusts of up to 100 mph with the strongest push at 150 mph.

Dougherty said no charges will be filed related to the cause and origin of the Marshall fire due to insufficient evidence.

"We make our charges based on evidence, not emotion," Dougherty said.

After sheriff and DA investigators interviewed the 40 people, including children, who were there at Twelve Tribes, Dougherty said there is no indication that residents of 5325 [Eldorado Springs Dr.] set a fire on Dec. 30."

Johnson, the sheriff, noted that the Twelve Tribes property holds a "significant water source that could have been used to put that fire to rest," referring to the fire at their property, but added that no one could have predicted on Dec. 24 that the winds would have uncovered the fire six days later.

As for the power line, Dougherty said there was no evidence that it had been recklessly or negligently kept prior to it becoming unmoored, but he added that, based on the information they obtained, he did not rule out the possibility that civil suits could be filed.

Dougherty said that video taken from a Colorado State Patrol car showed that the power line "swung like a jump rope," but, during the press conference, both Dougherty and Johnson stressed that Xcel Energy classifies a downed power line as a line that actually hits the ground.

Xcel officials quickly released a statement on Thursday disputing the damaged powerline accusation from investigators, saying the analysis is flawed.

"We strongly disagree with any suggestion that Xcel Energys powerlines caused the second ignition, which according to the report started 80 to 110 feet away from Xcel Energys powerlines in an area with underground coal fire activity," the company stated. "Xcel Energy did not have the opportunity to review and comment on the analyses relied on by the Sheriffs Office and believes those analyses are flawed and their conclusions are incorrect."

Xcel officials instead put the blame squarely on Twelve Tribes.

Our thoughts are with the families and communities impacted by the devastating wildfire in Boulder County," the company stated. "We agree with the Boulder County Sheriffs Office report that the Marshall fire started as a result of an ignition on a property (5325 Eldorado Springs Drive) previously reported to be affiliated with an entity called the Twelve Tribes, and that this ignition had nothing to do with Xcel Energys powerlines."

The company added: "We have reviewed our maintenance records and believe the system was properly maintained. We operate and maintain our electric system consistent with leading energy service practices and were proud of our employees and the work they do to deliver safe, reliable and clean energy to our communities. As members of the Boulder community, we will continue to support our neighbors in this recovery.

A third possible cause of the Marshall fire  coal mine fires, which have been burning beneath the ground, caused a fire in 2005. During that time, temperatures on those coal seams were measured at 373 degrees. Dougherty explained that after 275 tons of material were dumped into the seams, temperatures decreased to below 90 degrees. He said there was never a high enough temperature to start a fire, but that investigators did not entirely rule out the possibility.

The Marshall fire's causes were determined using 266 body worn camera recordings and 450 photos captured by the body worn camera system. The Sheriffs Office also reviewed drone footage, and interviewed hundreds of witnesses.

Two people died in the Marshall fire and a third person died later while rebuilding a home destroyed in the blaze.

Robert Sharpe, 69, and Edna Turnbull, 91, died in the fire. Turnbull was evacuating her Superior home but turned around and went back inside to rescue her dogs. The Boulder County Sheriff's Office announced that investigators found small bone fragments in the area and she is presumed dead.

In March of this year, Eli Gabriella died while in the process of rebuilding a home, which was destroyed in the fire.

Gabriella's home was one of the first to be destroyed as it was located near Marshall Road and Colorado Highway 93. His death was the third associated with the 2021 blaze.

The Marshall fire was Colorado's most devastating fire in state history, destroying 1,084 homes, and damaging 149 more in Superior, Louisville and unincorporated Boulder County. It destroyed seven businesses and is estimated to have caused more than $2 billion in damages.

Johnson, a division chief at the time of the fire, lost his home, along with 139 other people who live in Louisville's Coal Creek Canyon subdivision. He worked all night and his wife found out their home was gone from watching news footage. Because she started calling insurance companies on the day of the fire, they were in an apartment the next day.

Johnson had a pair of gym shorts, a couple pairs of socks and no underwear to his name. The Marshall fire changed the way he looks at life, he said.

"Before, if someone gave me a nice bottle of bourbon, I'd keep it on a shelf," Johnson said. "Now, stuff doesn't matter. I don't need 22 polo shirts."

Brigitte Towo, who lives near the Twelve Tribe property, is angry about the fact that the devastating fire she called "an inferno" started on their property.

"I'm upset because we'll never really find the truth. I guess we will have to accept that nature played a bad trick on us that day," she said.

Johnson acknowledged that Marshall fire victims will be all over the spectrum when it comes to their reaction to the cause of the blaze. He and his wife have made the choice to look to the future.

"Im moving forward because for me its important to reclaim my life after the fire. I'm going to plant my flag and get back in my neighborhood," he said.

Boulder County Commissioners released a statement thanking investigators and urging those affected by the Marshall fire to take care if their mental health.

"The Boulder County Commissioners are grateful to the detectives and many experts who worked diligently to determine the origin of this devasting fire and to Sheriff Curtis Johnson, DA Michael Dougherty, and former Sheriff Joe Pelle for their leadership," the commissioners said. "Our community has suffered deep trauma from the Marshall fire, which will take many years to heal from, and we recognize that todays announcement may very well not bring about the closure that many community members are looking for."

View body worn cameras of Boulder County Sheriff deputies from Dec. 30. 2021, the day of the fire here.

Listen to audio from various law enforcement entities from Dec. 30, 2021 here.

Chronology of the morning of Dec. 30, according to dispatch reports

Dec. 30, 2021

11:08 a.m.

Dispatcher sends fire personnel to Marshall Road and Highway 93 on a report of a possible downed power line. There is a possibility of smoke in the area and of a possible power line down.

11:09 a.m.

Kelly McBride with Boulder County Open Space tells dispatch she is in the area.

11:19 a.m.

Smoke is seen coming from land owned by The Twelve Tribes at Eldorado Road and Marshall Road.

11:20 a.m.

McBride and firefighters arrive at the Twelve Tribes property where a fire is burning.

11:23-11:24 a.m.

McBride calls for additional units as the fire on the TT property is getting worse. Dispatch is now calling it a wildland fire.

First house is evacuated.

Smoke is pushing east

11:27 a.m.

Fire at 12 Tribes grows

11:31 a.m.

We have structures involved. Im gonna need additional engines for this fire, reported McBride.

Flames have now set a shed on fire on the 12 Tribes property

11:31 a.m.

Meanwhile, winds are intense and smoke is getting worse at Marshall Mesa Trailhead.

11:42 a.m.

Shed is going up in flames

11:51 a.m.

Shed is burnt to the ground.

Noon

McBride notes a new smoke plume near Marshall Trailhead.
Physician David Grube and pharmacist Gary DeLander will team up to review Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe at noon Wednesday, June 14.

The Corvallis-Benton County Public Librarys Random Review series continues via Zoom. Grube and DeLander will discuss this critically acclaimed book, which delves deeply into the involvement of the Sacklers and their company, Purdue Frederick, in the nationwide epidemic of opioid addiction that began in the 1990s.

Grube, a native Oregonian, is retired after a nearly 35-year career as a family physician in Philomath. He was national medical director of Compassion & Choices and a member of the Oregon Board of Medical Examiners.

DeLander retired after more than 35 years as a faculty member and administrator at the Oregon State University College of Pharmacy. With degrees in pharmacy and pharmacology, his research and interests included causes and management of pain. He is past president of the Oregon Pharmacists Association.

Investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and is the author of five books, including Empire of Pain. He has written extensively for many publications, including the New York Times Magazine and Slate.

Empire of Pain was one of Washington Posts 10 Best Books of 2021, won the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction, was shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year, and was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Random Review is a deep exploration of a selected book by a reviewer with expertise on the topic or theme of that book. Sometimes reviewers cover a classic, series, genre or author, but usually they cover a specific title. Whether or not you have read the selection, you will enjoy Random Review. Further information and the full schedule are on the librarys website at https://cbcpubliclibrary.net/random-review/.

Registration for the free event is available at https://bit.ly/42Vp4wl.
After a nearly three-hour closed session, the Britt City Council terminated the employment of Police Chief Mark Anderson on Thursday night.

Anderson, who recently sued the city and Mayor Ryan Arndorfer for discrimination based on sex and sexuality, was relieved of duty immediately after the unanimous vote. Arndorfer was not present at the meeting.

After adjournment, Councilman and Mayor Pro Tem Curt Gast declined to give a reason for Andersons termination.

The city of Britt and the council will not comment on confidential employee matters, Gast said.

The council also refused to comment on whether there was any concern about new litigation against the city.

Gast said the council is still working on a plan regarding an interim or new chief of police.

Madison Fielder Carlson, Andersons attorney, provided a statement prior to the meeting.

If the city were to fire Mark on the heels of his lawsuit, we will certainly be exploring whether that action is further retaliation for Marks complaints and lawsuit. Were hopeful the city will do the right thing tonight, but were prepared if it does not, she said.

A request for comment from Arndorfers attorney on Thursday was not returned.

Anderson filed complaints with the Iowa Civil Rights Commission and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Dec. 2, 2021. The ICRC issued a right to sue letter Feb. 21, and Anderson filed suit May 12.

The lawsuit, filed May 12, claims after Anderson was hired in September 2017, he was added to a group chat that included Arndorfer and former Councilman Chad Luecht, who according to the council minutes resigned in April. The petition states all involved are homosexual, and Anderson was using the group as support because he was going through a divorce.

The petition claims that in late 2017 and early 2018, Luecht and Andorfer began treating Anderson differently, sending him inappropriate and sexually graphic messages via the text group and Snapchat. Anderson allegedly told them he was not comfortable with the messages, but they did not stop.

On Jan. 13, 2020, Anderson told City Administrator Deb Sawyer about the group chat and what was going on. She then told Luecht to stop, which he did, but Arndorfer allegedly did not stop sending inappropriate messages via Snapchat after Sawyer told him to stop as well.

Anderson allegedly received another explicit message July 1, 2021. He did not respond to Arndorfers message. Later in July, Anderson received a 1.5% pay raise, while other members of the department received 6% raises.

The petition alleges two violations of the Iowa Civil Rights Act for discrimination based on sex and sexual orientation and one violation of the Iowa Civil Rights Act for retaliation.

A trial scheduling conference is scheduled for July 7.

Celebrity Birthdays: June 9 Aaron Sorkin Dean Dinning Dean Felber Dick Vitale Johnny Depp Keesha Sharp Lucien Laviscount Michael J. Fox Michaela Conlin Natalie Portman Patricia Cornwell Tamela Mann
DES MOINES  With somewhat unusual timing, Iowa Senate Democrats elected a new leader Wednesday night.

Republicans and Democrats in the Iowa Legislature typically elect their respective leaders shortly after elections every two years.

But on Wednesday night, Senate Democrats met and unanimously elected Dubuque Sen. Pam Jochum as their new leader, in the process ousting previous leader Sen. Zach Wahls, of Coralville.

Senate Democrats on Wednesday night and Thursday morning did not address the reason for the change.

Jochum and Wahls did not immediately return messages seeking comment Thursday morning.

The Iowa Capital Dispatch, Iowa Field Report, and Iowa Starting Line reported Wednesday that many Senate Democrats were upset that Wahls, as caucus leader, recently fired two longtime staffers, Eric Bakker and Debbie Kattenhorn.

A person with knowledge of Senate Democrats deliberations, who requested not to be identified, said the change in leadership stemmed from a dispute over Wahls dismissal of Bakker and Kattenhorn. Their last day in the office was Friday, June 2.

Sen. Molly Donahue, a Cedar Rapids Democrat, however, said the vote was most definitely not about one single issue. Donahue would not elaborate.

This was an internal caucus decision. There were a lot of different reasons for all of it, and it is a great decision for our caucus, she said of the unanimous decision to elect Jochum, which included Wahls.

This was just something that needed to happen at this time, and it will be good for us in the long run, Donahue said. Everybody is still committed to making sure that we gain more seats and that we raise that money. And everyone will be putting in the work that needs to be put in to do so, including Sen. Wahls. Hes just going to be in a different position.

Bakker, who served as a senior legislative aide to the Iowa Senate Democratic Leader since the early 2000s, did not return a message seeking comment Thursday morning. Kattenhorn had worked in the Iowa Senate Democratic Leaders since the mid-2000s, according to a state employee salary book.

Jason Noble, communications director for Iowa Senate Democrats, declined to provide a copy of Wahls email to the caucus last week announcing the terminations and that he was restructuring the leaders office. He said it is an internal message to senators and staff concerning personnel matters that cannot be released.

Wahls, 31, was first elected to the Iowa Senate in 2018, and in 2020 was elected leader of the minority-party Senate Democrats, who are outnumbered in the chamber by Republican super majority, 34-16.

Wahls first gained prominence in 2011 when he spoke on the Iowa House floor about his two mothers as legislators debated a proposal to ban same-sex marriage in the state.

Jochum, 68, has served in the Iowa Senate since 2009, and prior to that had served in the Iowa House since 1993.

In 2012, Jochum was chosen by fellow senators to serve as president of the Iowa Senate, becoming the second woman in Iowa to hold the position when Democrats last controlled the chamber until 2017. Most recently, she has served as one of four assistant minority leaders.

I am honored to receive the unanimous support of my fellow Democratic Senators during this critical moment for our caucus and the state of Iowa, Jochum said in the statement, in which she thanked Wahls for his vision and leadership. Senate Democrats look forward to offering a better way forward for the people of Iowa  in 2024 and beyond. Were going to defend our incumbent senators, grow our caucus, and win a majority that delivers for middle-class Iowans.

Jochum played a leading role in expanding affordable health insurance coverage to working Iowans and has been a staunch advocate for Iowans with disabilities to protect their health services following the privatization of Iowas Medicaid system. Jochum often discussed her late daughter's severe intellectual disability to highlight frustrations with Iowas Medicaid program.

Pam Jochum is a highly-qualified, highly-dedicated Democrat that will lead our Senate caucus well, Sen. Claire Celsi, a Democrat from West Des Moines, said.

With Jochums election, Iowa Democrats would boast all-female leadership in the Iowa Legislature, assuming House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst, D-Windsor Heights, is reelected to the position.

Women also currently serve in the No. 2 leadership positions of the Democratic caucuses in the House and Senate, and the Iowa Democratic Party is led by chair Rita Hart, a former state senator from Clinton County.

That is believed to be a first for a major political party in Iowa.

We all are committed to making gains, it doesnt matter male or female, Donahue said. It may be a pivotal moment to have all-women in the lead, but its just the way it happened at this point. Pam was the one that stepped up.  I think its great to have all-women leadership.

Donahue cited Jochums long tenure in the Iowa Legislature working in leadership roles in both the minority and majority.

Shes been an integral part of the success of Democrats, and she is extremely passionate about getting us back to that point, she said.

The next session of the Iowa General Assembly convenes Jan. 8, 2024.
AeroFarms  an indoor vertical farming company with its largest facility in the world located in Ringgold  announced it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Thursday, a move that will shift even more focus and energy to the Dan River Region plant.

In a statement, the company cited significant industry and capital market headwinds with the vertical farming industry, but noted its critical Danville-area farm continues to scale according to plan.

Pittsylvania County Economic Development Director Matt Rowe said the company has been transparent with local officials every step of the way and emphasized the bankruptcy makes production a top priority, putting the Ringgold farm center stage.

If anything it will increase the hiring ramp-up even faster, Rowe said in a phone interview with the Register & Bee late Thursday evening.

The local 138,670-square-foot facility has about 110-115 workers currently  already surpassing the original commitment of 92  and plans to hire about 158 people total.

David Rosenberg, co-founder and chief executive officer, stepped down from his leadership role coinciding with the bankruptcy filing and will instead work as a special advisor to the board, the company explained. Chief Financial Officer Guy Blanchard will take over as president.

We are fortunate to have existing investors who continue to believe in AeroFarms and are confident that we can hit our targeted profitable operations for our Danville farm, Guy Blanchard, president and CFO of AeroFarms, wrote in a Thursday statement. There is incredible consumer and customer interest for our market-leading microgreens, and we are excited to continue be able to build our business to meet that demand.

The idea behind the indoor vertical farm involves a process that grows crops in stacks at a rate company officials report is 390 times more productive than field-grown plants. Doing so uses no soil, sunlight or chemicals.

In announcing the bankruptcy filing, the company said it entered an agreement with an already-established group of AeroFarms investors. Those investors will provided $10 million in debtor-in-possession financing. That, along with cash from ongoing operations, is expected to provide AeroFarms with the necessary liquidity to support its operations during the bankruptcy process, the release stated.

Rowe explained the bankruptcy is a way for AeroFarms to restructure its debt while putting all of the energy and resources into production, again pointing to the Ringgold plant as its flagship.

As soon as the board of directors made the decision to chart the bankruptcy course, they reached out with a courtesy call explaining what it would mean for the region.

They are in there absolutely rolling, Rowe, who happened to tour the facility earlier this week, said.

Their product has absolutely taken off, he continued. If anything, their demand is absolutely growing.

In fact, they are going into a major contract with Whole Foods.

The Ringgold facility has 48 plant-growing towers four-and-half stories high, with the operation entailing the equivalent of a 1,000-acre farm, officials said during a tour last year. The goal is distribute primarily to the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast markets with the ability to reach about 50 million people.

The company was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in Newark, New Jersey.

The local project was announced in December 2019 and eventually expanded its original plans, something the company attributed to meeting an increased customer need. Groundbreaking on the facility was held in April 2021.

A ribbon-cutting event celebrated the opening last September.

Referencing the headwinds, Rowe explained building the high-tech facility during COVID-19s supply chain woes and spike in building costs proved to be a challenge.

It has been a very difficult process to get this up and running, he said.

Originally planning to spend $53 million, AeroFarms has blown past economic development commitments, Rowe noted, but didnt have an exact figure off hand of the total investment.

So far, that money has come from the company  no local incentives have flowed to AeroFarms.

It shows how great of a company they are, he said. The incentives likely will kick in early next year with tax rebates after the final jobs are filled.

That doesnt mean theres money coming out of Pittsylvania Countys general fund. Instead, theyll get a certain percentage of taxes theyve already paid.

We do not provide incentives upfront, Rowe emphasized. We just dont do it.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin expressed wonder in March when he ventured into the state-of-the-art farm in Cane Creek Centre.

The emotion when you walk into that facility is one that feels like youre in a science fiction movie and you cant believe whats going on, Youngkin told community leaders, state and local officials and AeroFarm employees during remarks after a tour.

He also congratulated AeroFarms representatives and employees who have careers at the company, which is so exciting to see.

Its a company to be proud of, its a product to be proud of, its a state to be proud of for sure, but it is really exciting to have that sense of awe when you walk into a facility like that, he said.

A spokesperson for AeroFarms did not respond to questions from the Register & Bee.
A 19th-century piece of envelope with a postage stamp on it from Danville that was sent during the Civil War is expected to sell for more than $3,000 during an auction in New York later this month.

The 1861 stamp is one of less than a dozen Danville provisional stamps in existence and it has not appeared at auction since 1967, according to a statement from H.R. Harmer Fine Stamp Auctions, one of the oldest philatelic auction houses in the country.

Philately is the study and collection of stamps.

Danvilles stamp is not only one of the most beautiful stamps produced, but it is also one of the rarest, Charles Epting, president of H.R. Harmer, told the Danville Register & Bee during a telephone interview Tuesday morning. Were left with just nine examples of the Danville stamp.

The item to be auctioned includes a small piece of dark-yellow or golden envelope with a white square stamp featuring a red floral design that says, Paid 5 cents W.D. Coleman P.M. The latter initials stand for postmaster.

The stamp and envelope is postmarked Oct. 8.

Postage stamps came to use in the 1840s, but many people were reluctant to use them. But by the late 1850s, just before the start of the Civil War, the majority of the U.S. population was using them, Epting said.

But once the war began, U.S. stamps were illegal in the Confederacy. The Confederate States of America was left trying to figure out how to set up its own postal service.

Early on, when people were going to the post office, the postmasters couldnt supply them with anything, Epting said.

Dozens of Southern postmasters began making their own stamps, creating provisional postage stamps that could only be used in their individual post offices, Epting said.

They made the stamps and stamped envelopes in place of federally issued stamps.

It was a way of supplying their customers with what they had become accustomed to, he said.

The Danville provisional stamps represent a very rare instance of a postmasters ingenuity in a time of need, Epting wrote in a news release. It also gives you an appreciation of how the Civil War affected every corner of peoples lives, including how they communicated with each other.

The 1861 Danville stamp is by far the finest example of the Danville stamp, he said.

To own any Danville stamp is a real privilege, but this one in particular is the nicest, Epting said.

In the years following the Civil War, collectors would place ads in newspapers seeking stamps.

There was this cottage industry of trying to track down rare Confederate stamps in the decades after the Civil War, Epting said.

The earliest known person to have had the 1861 Danville provisional stamp was a French stamp collector, Philipp von Ferrary. It was in his collection offered in auction in 1922 in France. It ended up back in the U.S. and appeared at an H.R. Harmer auction in 1956, Epting said.

Von Ferrary is known in the world of philately as perfecting the practice of stamp collecting, Epting said.

The reason it [the 1861 provisional stamp] is so well preserved for the last century is because it has been handled by the most advanced, educated collectors, he said.

The upcoming June 21 public auction, which will also be online, will be offering the ninth of 10 installments of the Erivan Collection of United and Confederate States Postal History.

The Danville provisional stamp is part of the collection of Erivan Haub, who was born in 1932 and died in 2018. A German businessman and philanthropist who loved American history, he spent decades curating a collection of U.S. stamps and postal history that documents the rise of America in the 19th century and beyond, according to the release.

Danvilles 1861 stamp was last put up for auction 56 years ago, and Epting said he expects it to bring in far more than the $3,000 starting price.

If this brought in north of $10,000, it wouldnt surprise me, he said.

The Erivan collection is one of the most comprehensive and important holdings of American postage stamps ever assembled, and its appearance at auction marks a watershed moment for the hobby of philately, according to the news release.

Past auctions have included an envelope carried by Pony Express to Abraham Lincoln that sold for $330,000, as well as the famous Blue Boy stamp of Alexandria which brought in $1.18 million, according to the release.

H.R. Harmer typically holds auctions about two to four times per year, Epting said.

Stamps are more than just collectibles or pieces of paper, he said. The stamps invention by British social reformer Rowland Hill around 1840 was revolutionary, Epting said.

It revolutionized the way people communicated with one another, he said.

Previously, mailing letters was prohibitively expensive and affordable only for the rich. Also, postage rates were complicated, Epting said.

Hill thought it should cost the same to mail a letter anywhere in Great Britain, he said.

The invention was the spark that set the world on fire, Epting said. In a decade or two, there were postage stamps across the globe.
The first big decision a presidential nominee makes is picking a running mate. In announcing his own candidacy for the White House on Monday, former Vice President Mike Pence made it official: Donald Trump 2024 is running against his own first big decision from 2016.

Awkward.

Meanwhile Nikki Haley, a candidate herself, went on Fox News to remind everyone of the choice Joe Biden made in 2020 after he received the Democratic nomination.

A vote for President Biden is actually a vote for President Harris, she said on Fox News. Make no bones about it.  Every liberal knows  its Kamala Harris thats gonna end up being president if Joe Biden wins this election.

Now, in case you didnt get the memo, Haley has this generational change narrative shes been workshopping on the campaign trail. The former governor of South Carolina started banging this drum back in February when she proposed a competency test for politicians over 75. It didnt catch on. Shes apparently moved on to an updated version of a 2020 scare tactic: Bidens age will prevent him from finishing the term  hence a President Harris.

Haleys comments are a bit silly. The reason we have vice presidents is in case something happens to the president  not in case theyre old. Ideally, the vice president pick is someone the nominee believes can do the job as well as bring excitement (Harris) or stability (Pence) to the ticket.

The hope is that the selection is more about qualifications than politics. When it comes to Harris, conservatives like Haley remain hungry to test that out, because they see a political opening. Their hunt began in 2020, the moment Biden made it clear his pick would be a Black woman. The more crowded the GOP field becomes this time around, the more frenzied their rhetoric about Harris is sure to become.

So give them what they want.

If the point of having a vice president is having a backup in case the president is unable to serve, why not own Bidens choice? That doesnt mean dwelling on his age as much as it means not allowing Haley and others to turn Bidens choice of vice president into a negative. Especially given the current relationship between Trump and Pence.

We know Haleys scare tactic wasnt intended to sow dissension on the left, because  well, she was speaking on Fox News. So that President Harris specter was meant for Republican voters who would hate not only the thought of a Biden successor who could deliver on his promises, but also the image of Harris being the commander-in-chief doing it.

Its something comedian Roy Wood Jr. touched on while hosting this years White House Correspondents Association dinner:

I think the most insulting scandal to fall to the feet of the Biden administration was placed at the feet of our Madam Vice President  the scandal of What does Kamala do? Thats a disrespectful question, because nobody ever asked that question of a vice president until a woman got the job.

Specifically, a Black woman. Critics were primed to attack no matter what she did or didnt accomplish.

But consider the source. Most of the barbs aimed at Harris come from Republican detractors, members of the party whose front-runner was recently convicted of sexual assault, the party with a habit of catering to white nationalists. With their racist and sexist baggage, using President Harris as a boogeyman is especially disgusting. Also effective.

Theres no getting around it.

So, Biden should not allow opponents to use a President Harris narrative as a sign of his frailty; its a strength. His first big decision as the nominee was historic. Now, go remind voters why it was also right ... which is something Trump cant do.
Winston-Salem officials are denouncing the vandalizing of the city's LGBTQ+ Pride Month banner at City Hall as a potential hate crime.

The city said the banner, which measures 12 feet long by four feet tall, was discovered cut in half Friday morning.

Wanda Allen-Abraha, the city's director of human relations, diversity, equity and inclusion, said the banner cost $300 and will be replaced on Monday. In the meantime, city staffers used tape to create a temporary fix for the banner.

Mayor Allen Joines called the vandalism "an apparent hate crime," in a statement he issued Friday afternoon.

"I want to state in the strongest terms that the city of Winston-Salem and the city council fully support Pride Winston-Salem, their upcoming events, and Pride Month," Joines said. Allen-Abraha said the police department would be investigating the vandalism as a potential hate crime.

"We want to assure the members of the LGBTQIA+ community that we empathize with and are sensitive to their concerns about such incidents, Allen-Abraha said.

The city has no security cameras in front of city hall, but is working on a solution. The city has to work around historic building requirements that prevent the city from mounting a camera on the building itself.

The banner was put up at the start of June. The council passed a resolution on June 5 proclaiming June as LGBTQ+ Pride Month. The council has also approved the painting of a crosswalk on Trade Street in the colors of the banner.
Of the 102 registered sex offenders within Helena city limits checked by local law enforcement officers, 96 were in compliance, two were non-compliant, four offenders are pending and "will need further investigation as to their whereabouts," according to a Helena Police Department report sent out Friday.

"Officers are working with the Lewis & Clark County Attorneys Office to determine the next steps for the two offenders found out of compliance," according to the HPD statement accompanying the report.

On June 6, members of five law enforcement agencies, HPD, U.S. Marshals Service District of Montana, Montana Department of Corrections Adult Probation and Parole, Montana Department of Justice Division of Criminal Investigations, and U.S. Probation and Parole District of Montana, joined forces to ensure sex offenders registered in the city limits of Helena are living in compliance with their court ordered restrictions.

Law enforcement officers worked in small teams and "made every effort to contact each registered sexual offender living within the city limits of Helena," the statement reads.

The operation was funded by the U.S. Marshals Service, and it was performed as a supplement to the sexual and violent offender monitoring programs executed year-round by HPD.

Offenders found out of compliance can be charged with the violation, or they are taken into custody and their release is revoked.

"The Helena Police Department wants to thank these agencies for assisting them in this annual compliance check," the department said in the statement.

According to the Montana Sexual and Violent Offenders Registry, Lewis and Clark County has the fourth-highest number of registered sexual and violent offenders with 477.

Yellowstone, Cascade and Missoula counties top the state list with 1,490, 768 and 724.
Critics of the Cascade County elections office say this weeks mill levy election for the Great Falls Public Library went ahead with relatively few bumps in the road, following the installation last month of a court-appointed monitor to watch over the process.

The extraordinary move by the local district court to appoint a special election monitor follows two lawsuits and a number of mishaps by the newly elected clerk and recorder, who also serves as the countys top elections official.

Cascade County Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant has faced intense scrutiny from the community since she took office at the beginning of the year. But alleged errors in her past elections appeared less prominent in an election held Tuesday.

None of those issues have come up in this election, at least not on a wide-scale basis, that Im aware of, said Raph Graybill, an attorney representing the library board, which is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Merchant. He said the relatively smooth operation of Tuesdays election was due to the courts and the monitors role in this election.

According to unofficial results the Great Falls Public Library appears to have succeeded in getting its first levy passed in more than two decades.

Were thrilled that the voters of Great Falls chose to invest in our community by funding improved library services, library director Susie McIntyre said in an interview Wednesday. Those services will include expanding operating hours to seven days a week, increasing early literacy programming and adding more technology and internet services.

Voters approved the levy 7,223 to 6,604, according to unofficial election results posted to the elections office website.

The library board last month filed an emergency petition alleging that a litany of issues plaguing three recent elections threatened to undermine a long-overdue expansion of its budget. If the levy failed due to Merchants inability to properly run the election, the library argued, it risked losing around $30,000 in state funding, triggering reductions to literacy, job-search and college readiness programs and layoffs of library staff.

To date, Merchant has supervised three elections in Cascade County, the petition stated. Each of these elections has featured severe errors and unlawful deviation from statutory requirements.

Merchant, who did not respond to an interview request, filed a response denying most of the allegations. But she did admit to portions of the claims, including that Great Falls School District voters received incorrect instructions with their mail ballots, that multiple ballots were sent to some voters and that some voters were turned away on Election Day.

She has denied allegations that ballots were mailed in unsealed envelopes, that large numbers of ballots were counted before the signatures were verified and that a draft version of the instructions for library mill levy voters was riddled with problematic errors. The lawsuit also states that an entire precinct was not issued mail-in ballots during the school board election.

In a May 22 order, Cascade County District Court Judge Brenda Gilbert sided with the library, ordering Merchant to allow a special monitor direct and unfettered access to all operations of the elections office.

The monitor will report any acts prohibited under Montana election law, or the failure to perform any acts required by Montana election law, or other acts or conditions that would otherwise undermine a fair and transparent election, Gilbert wrote in her order.

At the plaintiffs request, the judge appointed Lynn DeRoche as the election monitor. DeRoche was previously the No. 2 elections official in the office during the 16 years that Democrat Rina Moore was the clerk and recorder. Shortly after Merchant, a Republican, defeated Moore in a razor-thin election last November, DeRoche resigned from her position.

DeRoche told the Montana State News Bureau in a March interview that she resigned earlier this year after Merchant largely refused to acknowledge the long-time election staffer after assuming office.

She didnt ask me one question on how to register a voter, how to do anything in the office, how our processes worked, DeRoche said at the time.  ... I just decided I needed to get out of the election department, because I was going to be their scapegoat if anything went wrong.

Three of DeRoche's reports have since been filed with the court, but none appear to detail clear lapses in election protocol. No post-election report had been filed with the court as of Thursday afternoon.

Like the allegedly problematic Great Falls High School election last month, this weeks election was held through a combination of in-person and mail-in voting. Merchant earlier this year surprised some local jurisdictions with a series of emails stating that the normally mail ballot-only elections would also have the option for voters to cast ballots in polling places. In-person voting is more typical for larger elections, like those for federal or city council candidates.

Merchant has maintained this was due to the loss of a local vendor who previously provided mailing services to the elections office. But even in federal elections, only a fraction of votes in the county are cast in person, with the vast majority coming via absentee ballots.

In a separate lawsuit filed last month, several voters and irrigation board candidates are suing Merchant, the county, the Fort Shaw Irrigation District and the Great Falls Flood Control District for errors in that they allege probably affected the outcome of recent elections in those districts. The problems allegedly included some voters not getting ballots, while other residents were allowed to vote despite being ineligible. The plaintiffs are asking the court to void the elections and order do-over elections to take place.

As of Thursday none of the defendants had responded to the May 26 complaint.
State lawmakers have revived two policy fixes for the embattled Montana State Hospital vetoed last month by Gov. Greg Gianforte.

The poll results released by the Montana Secretary of State's Office late Thursday showed 106 of 150 members in the GOP-controlled Legislature voted to overturn the Republican governor's veto of House Bill 29. Senate Bill 4 likewise cleared the required two-thirds hurdle with 111 votes between both the House and Senate. Both took different angles at attempting to resolve some issues uncovered at the state hospital in Warm Springs, one by admissions practices and another by making abuse and neglect reports accessible to patient advocates.

Both HB 29 and SB 4 were products of bipartisan construction done during the time between legislative sessions from the Children, Families, Health and Human Services Interim Committee after repeated failures of the state hospital to maintain to the health and safety of its patients lost the facility its federal funding.

Republican Rep. Jennifer Carlson of Churchill and then-Democratic Rep. Danny Tenenbaum of Missoula took the lead on House Bill 29, which set out to enforce existing law barring the state hospital from admitting patients with dementia or Alzheimer's as a primary diagnosis. Patients with those diagnosis are most often housed in the facility's Spratt Unit, typically dispatched there by involuntary commitment through the courts. Last year lawmakers noted after a tour that patients had been piled into Spratt rooms "like cattle."

The bill gave the Department of Public Health and Human Services until mid-2025 to transfer patients out of the facility in Warm Springs and into community placements. The governor's administration testified against the bill at each step of the legislative process, contending HB 29 did not adequately accommodate patients' needs and gave a timeline too rigid for DPHHS. Still, 140 of 150 lawmakers voted to approve the bill during the session before Gianforte vetoed it.

Now law, HB 29 requires a legislative advisory committee be assembled to oversee the transfer of certain patients out of the state hospital.

No lawmaker voted against SB 4, carried by Billings Democratic Sen. Jen Gross during the legislative session. That bill was an accountability measure to ensure the federally designated advocacy group Disability Rights Montana has access to abuse and neglect reports from Montana State Hospital.

Gianforte had returned the bill to lawmakers with an amendatory veto, offering a change for additional redactions in lieu of an outright veto. The Legislature adjourned before it could consider the changes, and Gianforte then vetoed the bill.

With SB 4's passage into law, Disability Rights Montana will have the same access to abuse and neglect reports from the state hospital as it gets from other state-run facilities.

"I am beyond thrilled at this moment for the successful override of SB 4, and the Legislature's ability to put checks and balances on how the executive branch handles allegations of abuse and neglect at MSH," Gross said in a text Thursday evening.

Other veto poll results

The state's two-year-old compensation program for wrongfully convicted individuals, meanwhile, will sunset in July after an override of Gianforte's veto on House Bill 423 failed. That bill, carried by Rep. Amy Regier, R-Kalispell, sought to continue the program beyond its July 1 sunset, which was established at the program's inception in 2021 to require lawmakers to re-examine the process during the 2023 Legislature. Lawmakers opted to keep the program intact, approving changes to remove counties from the payout equation to avoid costly litigation. Gianforte rejected that change, arguing letting counties off the hook would only require the state to pay future police and prosecutor misconduct.

The House voted 52-36 to override Gianforte's veto on HB 423 and the Senate voted 33-13, falling 15 votes short of the two-thirds threshold.

It got 60 votes in the House and 37 in the Senate in the poll, not enough to clear the two-thirds threshold. Thirty representatives voted against the override, along with 12 senators.

The bill passed the state House in the session with just eight no votes in total, but saw a slightly harder path in the Senate, where it advanced from a committee by just one vote but then later cleared the full chamber 41-9.

Gianforte's veto on House Bill 828 also survived the override poll. The bill aimed to stabilize ambulance service costs with a supplemental payment program, but Gianforte argued the bill required too tight a timeline for DPHHS to establish a funding agreement with the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That bill failed to reach two-thirds of lawmakers' approval with 65 votes in the House and 27 in the Senate.

Eleven vetoes still await override polls conducted by the Secretary of State's Office; each of those bills vetoed received a two-thirds vote during the session, triggering the poll.

Legislators have 30 days after a veto to override the governor's rejection. As of Thursday, Senate President Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton, had still not transmitted several key bills  including the $14.4 billion state budget  to Gianforte's desk.
Mid-Canon fishing access site on the Missouri River near Craig is now closed due to flooding by high river flows.

According to a release Friday from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the site is closed by gate along the access road.
DECATUR  A man wanted in connection with a May 31 shooting in Decatur has been arrested in Las Vegas, officials said.

Decatur police Lt. Scott Rosenbery said in a news release that Robert D. Miller IV, 34, was taken into custody Thursday on a preliminary charge attempted murder.

According to Rosenbery, police were called to HSHS St. Marys Hospital during the early morning hours to a report of a 32-year-old male arriving with two apparent gunshot wounds.

Officers determined the shooting occurred in the 1000 block of East Main Street while the victim sat in his vehicle, Rosenbery said. A search of the roadway turned up three shell casings.

Miller, who was taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals Service, has been booked into the Clark County Detention Center in Nevada.

Rosenbery said the investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information about this incident is encouraged to contact the Decatur Police Departments Criminal Investigations Division at 217-424-2734 or Crimestoppers at 217-423-8477.

10 infamous Central Illinois crimes 10 crimes we won't ever forget The Hendricks murders S&S Liquors Jeff Pelo Clinton Lake drownings Jon White Jennifer Lockmiller Beason murders Dalton Mesarchik Duncan and Jack Leichtenberg Jon Morgan sentencing hearing
Has it ever occurred to the Republicans that there is someone else in their party who might be qualified to be president of the United States? Perhaps better qualified that Donald Trump?

Why is he entitled to do questionable things that are brushed aside or ignored? The way he reacted to losing the election has never been addressed. There is an investigation of the riot in Washington but what about the call to Georgia to find 11,500 votes? Or how he asked Pence to declare him president and Pence had guts enough to deny him and he then threw Pence under the bus causing the rioters to chase Pence as a traitor? In fact he called Pence a traitor to rioters. Dont we require some character of our president?

When the FBI raided his home and took boxes of classified material away, the FBI is attacked. With Trump's record of lying, why do you question the FBI? And where is his tax return? We all know why he has stalled delivering it, dont we? If he waits long enough it will be forgotten.

Do you want to be elected so badly you compromise your party's integrity? Do you realize what this is doing to our democracy? This game is too risky to continue.

If you dont agree with Democrats polices, what are you going to do? If you have read any books written about him there was a lot going on behind the scenes to keep him from doing something that would harm the government.

Barbara Bush once said Isnt there anyone else but a Bush to run for President?" Isnt there anyone else in the Republican Party who will run for President? Someone who is honest, truthful, clean mouth, and will discuss what his policies are and not blacken his opponent? Please find someone.

Leona Bray, Decatur
You may not know it from watching cable news, going grocery shopping or doing any other mundane chore of daily life, but the world is at an increased risk of nuclear confrontation. Thats at least the assessment of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who delivered a speech at the Arms Control Association last week about a multidecade arms control structure that is gradually losing its sturdiness.

The system of nuclear agreements and risk-reduction measures spurred on by the 1962 Cuban missile crisis has begun to erode, Sullivan told the group. His boss, President Joe Biden, was even more dramatic in October when he told a Democratic Party fundraiser that the chances of nuclear Armageddon were at their highest since that high-stakes gambit six decades earlier when President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev stared each other down for 13 long days in October.

While discussions about nuclear proliferation are often subject to hysteria, troubling developments have led Biden and Sullivan to these worrisome conclusions. Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the process of deploying tactical nuclear warheads, Iskander-M missiles and nuclear-capable Su-25 aircraft to his ally Belarus. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is pressing forward with his own nuclear development plans, including but not limited to the miniaturization of nuclear warheads, the testing of military reconnaissance satellites and the production of solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Meanwhile, Chinas nuclear modernization remains in full swing, with the Pentagon estimating that Beijings nuclear arsenal could reach 1,500 warheads by 2035 if its current pace is maintained. And lets not forget that the New START accord, the last major nuclear agreement between Washington and Moscow, is no longer operable; last week, the U.S. responded to Russias February withdrawal from the deal by limiting the usual information it sends to the Russians.

All of this sounds frightening to those who study nuclear weapons for a living. Its clearly frightening to the Biden administration as well; otherwise, a senior U.S. security official wouldnt have spent part of his day delivering an address on the topic.

Fortunately, the White House has a plan to deal with all of this. Unfortunately, the plan has very poor odds of success.

According to the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, Washingtons strategy relies on two planks: modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons apparatus to ensure that deterrence holds and exploring new nuclear transparency and risk-reduction measures to manage or, better yet, downgrade nuclear rivalry between the U.S. and its adversaries.

It takes more than one party for diplomacy to work, however. And as sober-minded as the Biden administration wants to be with one of the most important subjects on the planet, its largely talking to itself. Russia, China and North Korea are at best uninterested in pursuing a nuclear dialogue with the U.S.

We all like to envision a world without nuclear weapons. Reality, however, has a habit of crushing hopes and dreams.
The Newton-Conover City Schools Board of Education urged the North Carolina General Assembly to invest in higher pay for teachers and more affordable child care rather than expanding the opportunity scholarship voucher. The board made those wishes clear in a resolution adopted at a work session.

The resolution opposes Senate Bill 406, called the Choose Your School, Choose Your Future bill that would make all K-12 students in the state eligible for the opportunity scholarship, according to the summary on the state General Assemblys website. The amount awarded would depend on household income.

Expanding the private school voucher program in this extreme way will result in steep cuts to our public schools, harming educational opportunities (for) students, especially in rural and lower wealth counties, The resolution said.

Schools measure enrollment based on student average daily membership (ADM). Because funding is determined by enrollment, ADM is an important factor in the funding received by schools and districts. When a student transfers to a new school, ADM follows, said Board of Education Chairman Tim Hayes. This is one way public school funding could be impacted, he said.

Additionally, the resolution said the state has a critical teacher shortage, with over 5,000 teaching positions unfilled. Hayes said North Carolina is ranked 46th in the nation in starting teacher pay. He said that hiring teachers and retaining them are two separate matters. Better pay in neighboring states leads to teachers moving out of the state, leaving vacancies in North Carolina schools.

Another reason the board opposes the bill is that, according to the resolution, A recent N.C. Chamber Foundation survey found that 80% of (state) voters say the lack of child care is a problem that will not solve itself, and that improving quality and making child care more affordable is a good use of taxpayer money.

The resolution addresses not only the Choose Your School, Choose Your Future bill, but the General Assemblys proposed 2023-25 budget. The budget includes minimal funding for child care needs and only a 4.5% salary increase for teachers, according to the resolution.

The board wrote in its resolution a request that teacher salaries increase at least 18% over the next two years, which the resolution said would move North Carolina up to No. 1 in the Southeast in average teacher pay.

I think, overall, the whole crux of this is just to get the legislature to support public education, not demonize public education, and support our staff (and) our educators, Hayes said.
The American branch of the worlds largest crypto exchange released information on Twitter that this is now part of the proactive steps that would make the organization a crypto-only exchange for a while. They added that the with cryptocurrencies trading, staking, and deposits and withdrawals will continue to work without interruption.

Earlier this week, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against Binance and its founder, Zhao, and then went after Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the United States. Among the accusations are that the companies blur the lines between American and foreign services, combine multiple services in completely unconventional ways, confuse exchanges and clients assets, or fail to register their services in the United States.

These recent developments indicate that US regulators are getting tougher on the cryptocurrency industry following the collapse of FTX last year. US financial regulators said they would support freezing Binances assets, according to a public US SEC filing filed with a federal court.

By the way, Binance.US is a relatively smaller unit within the international group. In any case, US users will certainly be adversely affected by the suspension of payments.

Every day for the past week, Binance has been hit with different types of comments and questions from the SEC and regulators, so this was actually expected

 the chief operating officer of Stack Funds, a Singaporean crypto platform, told Reuters.

As for the stock exchange rates, we did not see a significant market reaction to the news, bitcoin is up 0.2 percent this morning.

Binances BNB token fell modestly by 1 percent today.

Tony Sycamore, market analyst at IG Markets, noted that the markets reaction so far has been relatively muted, suggesting that it has either ignored the news or has not yet fully grasped its implications.

In a tweet on Thursday, Binance.US described the SECs stance on cryptocurrencies as extremely aggressive and intimidating while vowing to defend itself, its customers and the industry against what they say are baseless SEC attacks. Following the lawsuits, the crypto industry criticized Gary Gensler, the chairman of the US SEC. However, Gensler has since denied claims that the agency is trying to crack down on the crypto industry.

Cover image: Getty Images
CHARLOTTE  A concerning shortfall in blood donations last month could stress the American Red Cross blood supply. The Red Cross collected over 26,000 fewer blood donations than needed in May to meet the needs of patients. The need for blood is constant, with someone needing a blood transfusion in the U.S. every two seconds. Platelet donors are especially needed at this time. The public can help ensure continuity for patients by making an appointment to give blood or platelets now and in the weeks ahead.

World Blood Donor Day, gifts for donors

June 14 is World Blood Donor Day, a day meant to raise awareness of the need for a safe, diverse and stable blood supply and to recognize volunteer blood donors. This is the perfect time to give, especially for those who havent given in a while, or who have never given before.

In thanks for taking time to help, all who come to give blood, platelets or plasma June 1-30 will receive a $10 gift card by email to a merchant of their choice. Those who come to give throughout June will also be automatically entered for a chance to win a backyard theater package. Details for both offers can be found at RedCrossBlood.org/June.

Help the Red Cross celebrate World Blood Donor Day and meet the critical needs of patients. Download the Red Cross Blood Donor App, visit RedCrossBlood.org or call 1-800-RED CROSS (1-800-733-2767) to schedule a time to give now.

Upcoming blood donation opportunities, June 16-30:

Cabarrus:

Concord: Tuesday, June 27, Rocky River Presbyterian Church, 7940 Rocky River Road, 2-6:30 p.m.

Kannapolis: Saturday, June 24, Bethel Wesleyan Church, 4036 Old Salisbury-Concord Road, 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
KANNAPOLIS  A suspect is in custody after a Kannapolis man was shot and killed Wednesday.

As a result of a Kannapolis Police Department investigation, Derick De-Arlo Hinson Sr., 48, of Kannapolis, has been charged with first-degree murder. Hinson was located and arrested on June 8 in Lancaster, South Carolina, by the Lancaster County Sheriffs Office. He is being held with no bond and is awaiting extradition back to North Carolina.

On Wednesday, June 7, at 3:32 p.m., officers of the Kannapolis Police Department responded to 169 Beaumont Ave. to assist EMS with an unresponsive patient at the residence.

Upon arrival, officers located Willie Johnson Jr., 48, of the residence, who was suffering from gunshot wounds. Johnson was pronounced deceased at the scene by EMS personnel, according to a news release from the City of Kannapolis.

The investigation is being handled by Kannapolis Police Departments Criminal Investigations Division.

Anyone who has information about this incident is asked to contact Lt. James Livengood at 704-920-4082 (jlivengood@kannapolisnc.gov) or Investigator Arthur Reid at 704-920-4070 (areid@kannapolisnc.gov).

To remain anonymous and be eligible for a reward, the public may also contact Cabarrus Area Crime Stoppers at 704-93-CRIME or go to www.cabarruscrimestoppers.com. All information given to Crime Stoppers is completely anonymous. Information leading to the location and arrest of any wanted offenders may qualify the tipster for a reward of up to $1,000.

All calls, texts and emails are masked and cannot be traced to ensure anonymity.
Most of todays Friday Five falls into the Hey, what are they doing over there? category.

No. 1

Grading on Concord Parkway. A mixed use development is coming to Concord Parkway beside Holly Grove Primitive Baptist Church. The small church sets on the banks of Coddle Creek and has some grading and erosion control already done in front of the church.

The project is being developed by Nest Homes out of Mooresville, according to Steve Osborne, director of Planning and Neighborhood Development for the City of Concord.

It will be 127 townhomes in the back and four office buildings in the front. The office space will total 40,320 square feet, Osborne said.

The original name of the development was Dreaming Creek but the developer has changed it to Holly Grove. Clearly it is a reference to the church or maybe there was or is a holly grove there.

This property is near the 100 acres were Jack Roush had proposed a test track many years ago. Roush still owns the property which is closer to the intersection of George Liles Parkway. The Grounds at Concord (old Philip Morris property owners) also have a couple of parcels on that side of George Liles. One is residential (closer to Roberta Woods) and the other has a more commercial/industrial zoning.

You may have noticed a wooden road coming down along the creek on The Grounds at Concord, close to Concord Commons and Chick-fil-a. Osborne said it is for utility line connections (water and sewer) being made for the Eli Lilly project across Concord Parkway.

They are really coming along. There are always people working, Osborne said.

No. 2

Outback Steakhouse closer to reality. I was starting to worry that I might have been wrong about the Australian themed restaurant. It is in fact coming to the property on Concord Parkway between Carolina Mall and I-85  up there near Verb coffee and where a new Discount Tire that is under construction near the Golden Corral.

Osborne said a plat for the Outback has been submitted but has not ben approved yet but they are getting pretty close.

My wife Kim said Isnt there a steakhouse there already? I said yep and told her when there is an hour wait at Outback many people will decide not to wait and go to Golden Corral instead.

No. 3

No word on Costco. Readers have asked me. Theyve asked Osborne too. Right now there doesnt seem to be a plan for a Costco warehouse in Concord.

Before the pandemic I talked to a Costco rep when they were opening the Mooresville store (closest one to most of us) and the word was after that store was going well Concord likely would be on the radar for the company.

Well of course the pandemic hit and that probably played a factor. The future locations part of the Costco website shows nine locations opening in 2023. The closest is Canton, Ohio. One location is in China and another in Japan.

Ive scratched my head thinking about where might be a good location. How about over there at the corner of N.C. 73/Davidson Highway and Kannapolis Parkway? Next week I will try to get you an update on that project.

No. 4

Big boost for Mt. Pleasant tax base. Niblock Homes is building about 170 house in a new development called Brighton Park. It is near the intersection of N.C. 49 and N.C. 73.

Its going to be a great addition to our town, said Crystal W. Smith, assistant town manager. They will be higher end home and really nice.

One of the nice things for the town will be the boost to the tax base, which is expected to increase by 56 percent.

Thanks to our friend Eddie Pepper for pointing out the project and reminding me to check on it.

Mt. Pleasant is getting ready to start celebrating Independence Day. The towns celebration is always the last Saturday of June, which this year falls on June 24. Festivities will begin with the parade at 5 p.m. Applications are currently being accepted to join the parade.

The festival follows behind Town Hall with music, food and fireworks. Too Much Sylvia will play, which is always entertaining During intermission the town plans to hold a dedication for the recent improvements in the park and to the facilities. Well have more about the celebration as we get closer.

No. 5

Unique and fun way to honor veterans. Deborah Epps Ferguson and others helped us out with this one.

The 8th Annual Car Show and Veterans Recognition was held at Crosspointe Baptist Church in Concord on Saturday, June 3rd with 300 participants showing their cars, motorcycles and trucks.

Veterans were also honored and recognized. The program included a display of flags, Pledge to the Flag, National Anthem, Armed Forces melody and Taps followed by a moment of silence.

Each veteran was presented with a Psalm 91 Book which signifies Gods protection during battle. Hotdogs with all the trimmings were served. Over 40 trophies were presented to the car show participants with the Best of Show going to Ronnie Hinson, driving a Chevy Nova.

No. 5A

An editorial note. Cabarrus County Schools and Kannapolis City Schools are holding high school graduations this weekend. Well be sharing photos over the next couple of print editions and online. If you have any graduation photos you would like to share send them in. Congratulations to all the graduates.

If you have a Friday Five, story suggestion or something I can rant about email mplemmons@independenttribune.com or text or email 704-786-0001.
WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange has lost an appeal to the High Court against a British extradition order which aims to send him to the US for trial over alleged espionage charges.

However, his wife, Stella, said he would launch a fresh appeal on Tuesday (13 June).

The rejection of his appeal occurred on 6 June and the decision was made by a single judge, according to the organisation Reporters Without Borders.

The initial appeal came after then British home secretary Priti Patel approved the extradition of Assange to stand trial in the US.

Assange faces charges in the US for publishing classified information that was leaked to WikiLeaks by an American soldier, then known as Bradley Manning, but now, after gender reassignment surgery, known as Chelsea Manning.

On 14 March, the UK Supreme Court had rejected an appeal from Assange to hear arguments against his extradition.

In January, the High Court refused a request from Assange's lawyers to appeal directly to the Supreme Court, leaving it to the higher court to decide on whether it would hear a challenge.

On 10 December 2021, a two-bench High Court panel reversed a 4 January lower court verdict the same year to deny the US the right to extradite Assange to try him on criminal charges in Washington.

British District Judge Vanessa Baraister had ruled in January 2021 that Assange should not be extradited, saying the risk he would commit suicide in a US jail was too high.

In a tweet, Stella Assange said: "On Tuesday next week, my husband Julian Assange will make a renewed application for appeal to the High Court.

"The matter will then proceed to a public hearing before two new judges at the High Court and we remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the US Government."

Assange, an Australian citizen, was arrested in 2019 and jailed at the maximum security prison in Belmarsh after he had been given refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years. He has remained at the prison while his appeals are decided.

Reporters Without Borders director of campaigns Rebecca Vincent said in a statement: It is absurd that a single judge can issue a three-page decision that could land Julian Assange in prison for the rest of his life and permanently impact the climate for journalism around the world.

"The historical weight of what happens next cannot be overstated; it is time to put a stop to this relentless targeting of Assange and act instead to protect journalism and press freedom.

"Our call on [US] President [Joe] Biden is now more urgent than ever: drop these charges, close the case against Assange, and allow for his release without further delay."
MATTOON  Crews from the Mattoon Fire Department extinguished an attic fire early Friday morning in a house on the northeast side of town.

The fire department reported that crews were dispatched at 2:57 a.m. to 305 Piatt Ave. for a possible structure fire. They arrived at 3 a.m. at this single-story house and found light smoke coming from the attic. They were advised that all occupants of the residence had safely evacuated prior to their arrival.

Crews then deployed a hose line into the residence and found the fire in the ceiling of the kitchen. They quickly contained the fire to the attic area of the kitchen and knocked it out there. The residence received smoke and water damage. The Red Cross is assisting the occupants.

A cause and origin investigation was conducted by department investigators. This fire is considered accidental and electrical in nature. All units cleared the scene by 05:16 a.m., with no injuries reported at this incident. Mattoon firefighters were also assisted at this scene by Coles and Moultrie counties 911, Mattoon Police Department, Charleston Fire Department, and Ameren Illinois.

Photos: 2023 Mattoon High School Senior Parade
CHARLESTON  The historic Five Mile House will host live music, a presentation on Mary Lincoln, and other activities on Sunday, June 11,

Lunar Halo will perform from 1-2:30 p.m. in the site's 1880-built barn, which was moved to there a few years ago and is now an event venue.

At 2:30 p.m. Ann Bruehler will offer a dramatic performance interpreting scenes from the tragic life of Mary Lincoln, all written by Bruehler from her extensive research of Mary Lincoln's life.

The Five Mile House, built in the 1840s five miles from the Charleston square, was a way station for early settlers and travelers in Coles County. The restored house sits at the northeast corner of Illinois 130 and Westfield Road, where it hosts a series of events every summer.

Sunday's event also will include demonstrations of spinning, weaving, and blacksmithing throughout the afternoon, plus children's activities. The Five Mile House, which is furnished in period antiques, will be open to visitors to explore. Admission to the event is free.

Photos: Five Mile House open house Five Mile House Open House 06/24/18 (2) Five Mile House Open House 06/24/18 (1) Five Mile House Open House 06/24/18 (3) Five Mile House Open House 06/24/18 (4) Five Mile House Open House 06/24/18 (5) Five Mile House Open House 06/24/18 (6) Five Mile House Open House 06/24/18 (7) Five Mile House Open House 06/24/18 (8) Five Mile House Open House 06/24/18 (9) Five Mile House Open House 06/24/18 (10)
MATTOON  The Bimbo Bakeries USA plant in Mattoon suffered minor damage Thursday when a welding project led to a fire on its roof, officials said.

Mattoon Fire Chief Jeff Hilligoss said his department was dispatched at 11:52 a.m. to a possible fire at 3801 Dewitt Ave. Firefighters arrived to find light smoke coming from the roof.

Hilligoss said crews accessed the roof using a ladder truck and found roofing material that was burning. Crews deployed a handline and quickly extinguished the fire.

The Charleston Fire Department assisted with the check of the roof for any fire extension.

Hilligoss said there was moderate damage to the roofing material around one of the electrical cabinets on the roof. There was some minor water damage to the interior of the factory that affected one drying line for product.

All units cleared the scene at 1:28 p.m.

Hilligoss said the fire was caused by welding that was being done around the cabinet area. The company that was doing the welding was following all safety procedures, adding workers had fire extinguishers on the roof that slowed the spread of fire prior to the fire department arriving.

5 most common causes of reported house fires 5 most common causes of reported house fires #5. Smoking materials #4. Intentional #3. Electrical distribution and lighting equipment #2. Heating equipment #1. Cooking
Lake Norman is becoming the latest health-care market in which Atrium Health and Novant Health Inc. will compete head-to-head with community hospitals.

Atrium, the parent of Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist, has broken ground on a 170,000 square-foot facility located in Cornelius that is projected to open to patients in 2025 with a workforce of 280.

It will feature 30 acute-care beds, two operating rooms, maternity suites and services, an intensive care unit with four beds and a cesarean-section operating room.

Atrium gained state health regulators approval for the Lake Norman hospital in July 2021. At that time, the hospital represented a $154 million and 160,000-square-foot investment that would open in early 2024.

The hospital at southwest corner of the intersections of Westmoreland Road and N.C. 21 is located about 19 miles from Lake Norman Regional Medical Center in Mooresville.

In February, Novant announced plans to return to the Iredell County marketplace, agreeing to pay $320 million to reacquire two community hospitals it co-owned for an 18-month period in the early 2000s.

The system signed an agreement to take ownership of the 123-bed Lake Norman hospital and Davis Regional Medical Center in Statesville.

The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals. It is projected to close later this year.

Atrium said it filed to open the Cornelius hospital because officials said they recognize there is a need for emergency, primary and specialty care due to the tremendous population growth among the communities in north Mecklenburg County.

The Atrium Lake Norman hospital is part of a more than $1 billion in capital expenditure investments announced in 2018 in the Charlotte area.

Other projects included: the Palmetto Tower at its Pineville hospital; Union West hospital and medical office building; Mountain Island free-standing emergency department, as well as Conlan Center at Atrium Health Carolinas Rehabilitation on the main campus.

While Novant plans to continue to operate the Mooresville facility as a hospital, Davis ceased operating as a full-service hospital in 2022.

Davis is being converted into a behavioral health inpatient hospital, with Lake Norman currently providing emergency room, obstetrics, surgical services and all outpatient tests and procedures for the Statesville market.
Q: I live on a corner lot in Winston-Salem along a very busy highway. My yard contains several utility poles along with a utility box for AT&T. For some reason, people feel free to attach whatever signs to one of the utility poles in my yard. What is the proper city ordinance for this?

P.R.

Answer: Yes, the City of Winston-Salem has an ordinance prohibiting signs in the right-of-way.

Section 70-17 of the Winston-Salem Municipal Code covers posting signs or advertisements on utility poles, fences or other objects or within street rights-of-way.

(1) No person, firm, or corporation shall place, or attach or affix in any way to any tree, telephone or electric light pole, post, or other object, any card, board, sign or advertising matter (hereinafter, collectively advertisements) within any street, street right-of-way or public square within the city. A violation of this subsection shall subject the offender to the civil penalties and remedies enumerated in subsection (3) herein below. For the purpose of enforcement of this section, right-of-way shall be defined as follows:

a. The furthest from the improved road surface or curb of any of the following:

1. A utility pole/box or a line between two consecutive utility poles/boxes, or

2. A fire hydrant or a line between two consecutive fire hydrants, or

3. A utility meter or a line between two consecutive utility meters, or

4. The back side of the sidewalk.

The ordinance also says that it is the duty of the advertisement owner to make sure that the ad has not been placed in violation of subsection (1). If an owner has not removed an ad that is in violation of the ordnance will be subject to civil penalties.

The owner of the advertisement will be fined $50 per day per sign for any sign that is not removed. If the fine is not paid within 30 days of being cited, a civil action will begin.

Also, Duke Energy has something to say about people putting signs on its poles.

Utility poles are property of utilities, which in our area include Duke Energy, electric co-ops, telephone companies and DOT, said a spokesman for Duke Energy Carolinas. Cities and towns follow a thorough application, review and pole attachment agreement process before attaching something like a banner to a pole. However, flyers are not authorized to be attached to our poles.

Anything thats attached to our poles or other equipment can create an unsafe situation for our employees. An attachment can prevent our employees from accessing equipment safely or, in the case of nails and staples, could damage our employees personal protective equipment (e.g., a rip in a rubber glove or sleeve), potentially affecting their safety.

Attachments can also affect the reliability of service, he said. Our poles are designed and installed to withstand equipment that we install on them. Before other items are attached, we require that the poles first pass a field inspection to ensure they are structurally able to handle the additional attachments.

Shredding events

Yadkin County Protect Your ID Free Document Shred Day, from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday at the Yadkin County Chamber of Commerce, 205 S. Jackson St., Yadkinville. Limit two boxes. The shredding is free but donations of money or food to benefit the Yadkin Christian Ministries food pantry will be accepted.

West Market Street United Methodist Church, 312 W. Friendly Ave., Greensboro, will have a Shred-A-Thon from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday. The truck will be in the Early Childhood Center parking lot at Friendly and Eugene streets. A $5 donation per bag or box is requested.

If your group is planning a shredding event and you want to be included on the list, you can email the information to asksam@wsjournal.com or mail it to Ask SAM, 418 N. Marshall St., #100, Winston-Salem, NC 27101.
OPENING

The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. Laya DeLeon Hayes tries to bring her murdered brother back from the dead in this clever thriller that puts a racial and political edge to the Frankenstein plot. Unrated. (Grand) Grade: B

Mending The Line. Brian Cox and Sinqua Walls star in this drama about an Afghanistan veteran who learns to fly fish with the help of a Vietnam vet to recover from his trauma. It was not screened in time for Ground Zero deadlines. (Grand)

R.M.N. This powerful, bleak film unsparingly examines racial, ethnic and personal clashes in a Romanian village. Unrated. (Ross) Grade: A

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. The seventh installment of the "Transformers" franchise feels like a film that is at war with itself trying to balance character work with the profoundly silly Autobot lore and rattling action. PG-13. (Grand, East Park, Edgewood, SouthPointe). Grade: C-

NOW SHOWING

About My Father. Sebastian Maniscalo and Robert DeNiro star in this limp, consistently unfunny culture clash comedy. PG-13. (Edgewood) Grade: C-

The Boogeyman. A supernatural entity that preys on families goes after a father and his daughters, grieving the loss of their mother, in this horror film that could use a far more coherent plot. PG-13. (Grand, East Park, Edgewood) Grade: C

Fast X. Vin Diesel and company return for the 10th installment of the popular, car-based action series that may have run out of gas. PG-13. (Grand) Grade: C

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. The overstuffed end to the trilogy of Guardian films finds the ragtag "family" rallying to protect the universe is sincere, poignant and kind of cornball. PG-13. (Grand, SouthPointe) Grade: B

The Little Mermaid. This somewhat drab "The Little Mermaid" prioritizes nostalgia and familiarity over compelling visual storytelling. PG (Grand, East Park, Edgewood, SouthPointe) Grade: C

Monica. Trace Lysette gives a fine performance as a trans woman returning home to care for her estranged mother in this tightly framed and focused character study/drama. R. (Ross) Grade: B+

Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse. Miles Morales returns in this sequel to the Oscar-winning animated adventure. This time, he's transported from Brooklyn into the multiverse to join forces with Gwen Stacy and a team of Spider-People to fight the Spot. PG. (Grand, East Park, Edgewood, SouthPointe) Grade: A-

The Super Mario Bros. Movie. It's mildly amusing, swift, noisy and unrelentingly paced, which is par for the course considering this is the studio that brought us the Minions. PG. (Grand) Grade: C
Former Bellevue resident Lauren Johnson is excited to be home.

My parents and brother still live in Bellevue, so Im really excited to get back and sleep in my childhood bedroom, Johnson said. That is the one thing Im looking most forward to.

Johnson, now a resident of New York City, returns to the Omaha area this week as part of the national Broadway touring cast of Hairspray.

The show, which opened Tuesday at the Orpheum Theater, runs through Sunday. It is the last show in Omaha Performing Arts 2022-23 Broadway season.

Its been really exciting, she told the Omaha World-Herald. Its been a big learning opportunity, and its been a good job to have to really get me started in my theatrical career.

Hairspray is based on John Waters 1988 film of the same name. Set in 1962 Baltimore, the musical follows teenage girl Tracy Turnblad and her dream to dance on The Corny Collins Show, a local TV dance program. Her dreams come true when she lands a role on the show and becomes a celebrity overnight. She then uses her new celebrity status to lead social change and push for integration on the show.

The musical features 1960s-style dance music and Motown-style rhythm and blues. Some of the shows most memorable songs include, Mama, Im a Big Girl Now, Welcome to the 60s and You Cant Stop The Beat.

Johnson plays Lorraine, a member of the ensemble, and is the understudy for one of the principal roles, Motormouth Maybelle. Johnson graduated from Bellevue West High School in 2017 and has performed with the Omaha Community Playhouse. She won multiple awards through Omaha Performing Arts Nebraska High School Theater Academy program, serving as the Jimmy Awards representative in New York City in both her junior and senior years of high school. She graduated from Viterbo University in Lacrosse, Wisconsin, in 2021.

Some of Johnsons other stage credits include Into the Woods, Godspell and Kinky Boots. Hairspray is Johnsons first national tour. She said both her role as Lorraine and her work as an understudy have helped her learn more about her chosen career path.

Both of these roles have given me the opportunity to work on being in an ensemble, but then also get a little taste of being a lead in a big Broadway national tour, she said. Its been a really nice balance between spending time doing the singing and the dancing, but then also like really working on myself as a principal actor.

Johnson said one of the best aspects of Hairspray is how relatable the themes are in todays society. That, and the music.

Theres nobody who has seen Hairspray that says they dont like the music. Its big and sparkly and fun to look at, Johnson said. But its also the idea of being inclusive and, despite each others differences, coming together for a common goal  which is to sing and dance on The Corny Collins Show  regardless of what you look like or your race or your weight.  Its just a really great story to like bring audiences together.

Her family has been in the Hairspray tour audience before, Johnson said. In February, they traveled to Sioux City, Iowa, to see the show  and her. Though Johnson had returned to the metro area for Christmas, she said she is always happy to return to her hometown.

I miss how quiet it is. Especially the suburbs, she said. I can go to sleep at night without sirens and music playing on the street. But also just the community, its really strong and I have people there who Ive known my whole life and who I will know for the rest of my life. That familiarity is just very comforting.
Rudi is a little boy who has seen something in the forest so terrifying he wont speak. Matthias, his father, has left his job in a German sheep slaughterhouse after he headbutted a manager who called him a lazy Gypsy, returning to the small Transylvanian town where Csilla, his ex-lover, is a cello-playing, bread-factory manager who befriends foreign workers who are reviled by most townspeople.

Their intertwined stories are powerfully, if bleakly, told by writer-director Cristian Mungiu in R.M.N., a film so specific to its place and people that it resonates across borders around the world.

That resonance is at its height during a long segment in the film's final act in which the townspeople gather in a cultural center for a meeting about the foreign workers and spew angry, racist allegations about the Sri Lankans who have come to work at the factory, taking minimum-wage jobs that the locals refused.

But its sense of cultural and personal displacement is present from the opening sequence in which Matthias (Marin Grigore) slips back into Romania after the headbutting incident and finds himself sleeping on the couch, away from his estranged wife Ana (Monica Birladeanu), who he threatens and accuses of coddling his silent son.

At the same time, Csilla (Judith Slate), who is working with the factory owner to obtain European Union funding to expand their business, hires three Sri Lankan workers while rehearsing the local children and string players for a Christmas program in the Catholic church thats at the heart of the town.

Taking place around the holidays, the film finds clashes at Christmas dinners, costumed stage fights at New Years, suicide and conflict between Matthias and the two women as he attempts to train his son not to be a sissy but rather become a tough guy like his dad.

A leader in the Hungarian New Wave, Mungiu is an unsparing filmmaker, creating bleak films that are, at the core, moral examinations: His 2007 masterpiece 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days follows a woman and her male friend as they try to arrange an illegal abortion; 2013s Beyond The Hills is an indictment of the surety of religious faith set in a village; and 2017s Graduation looks at a Budapest doctor/father trying to save his daughter, who may or may not want the freedom he desires.

In R.M.N., Mungiu turns his raw, unblinking vision to the clash of ethnicities within the racist nationalism with the films polyglot of languages  Romanian, Hungarian, German, English, French and Sinhalese  hammering home that point.

The examination of personal morality is just as convoluted. Matthias is brutal but wounded, seemingly caring but unable to act or express it. Csilla is the films angel, a sophisticate who watches movies on Christmas, cares for the workers but has her issues with commitment; while, to choose another of many examples, the local priest tries to be simultaneously humane and exclusionary.

As would be expected, theres no happily ever after in R.M.N. Rather, its bleak ambiguity becomes gripping as the townspeoples assault on the foreign workers escalates and things fall apart, for the individuals and community, to quietly devastating effect.
An 18-year-old Lincoln man is in jail on suspicion of DUI for his alleged role in a rollover, hit-and-run crash that hospitalized a 42-year-old woman, according to police.

Rony Martinez was driving east on K Street at around 10:40 a.m. Thursday in his 2009 Honda Civic when he allegedly ran a red light at 17th Street, crashing into a Ford Explorer that had been northbound on 17th Street, Lincoln Police Capt. Todd Kocian said.

The crash caused the Ford to roll over onto its top. Lincoln Fire and Rescue crews extricated the 42-year-old driver and took her to a local hospital with suspected serious neck injuries, according to police.

Martinez, meanwhile, drove his damaged Honda away from the scene, Kocian said.

Police found the 18-year-old in his sedan near 20th and G streets about 15 minutes later and arrested him on suspicion of leaving the scene of an injury crash.

Martinez was also cited on suspicion of DUI, operating a vehicle without an interlock device and violating a traffic signal, Kocian said.

It's unclear why Martinez was supposed to have an interlock device installed in his Honda. He has not previously been charged with DUI in Nebraska, according to court records.

Police took him to the Lancaster County jail, where tests determined his BAC to be .088  just over the legal limit.

Most dangerous cities in Nebraska Dangerous Cities in Nebraska 6. South Sioux City 5. Scottsbluff 4. North Platte 3. Lincoln 2. Grand Island 1. Omaha A note about the numbers
After police initially reported a group of at least six men beat and robbed a 22-year-old man near 33rd and Holdrege streets early Sunday morning, prosecutors have charged a single teen in the assault that left the man hospitalized, according to court records.

Tshawn Evans, 19, was captured on bystander video slamming the 22-year-old into the concrete before kicking and punching him in the head after the two were in an altercation at around 2 a.m. Sunday at a small gathering at 3341 Holdrege St., police alleged in court filings.

Evans continued to pummel the man even after he appeared to fall unconscious, Lincoln Police Investigator Patrick Murphy said in the probable cause statement for Evans' arrest.

Witnesses told police that Evans continued to hit the 22-year-old after the bystander who was recording stopped, but as the teen fled the area, a separate group of "kids" assaulted the man he had fought, Murphy said in the probable cause statement.

The man's girlfriend told police Sunday that she had been robbed of her purse and her boyfriend was robbed of his car keys by a group of at least six men.

Police did not mention the fistfight that apparently preceded the robbery when officials reported the crime to media Monday, though officers collected video of the fight at the scene, according to the probable cause statement.

Lincoln Fire and Rescue crews took the man to a local hospital, where he remained intubated and unconscious Wednesday after he was diagnosed with a fractured neck and torn ligament in his neck, Murphy said.

Prosecutors on Thursday charged Evans with first-degree assault for his alleged role in the beating. The charge carries a possible penalty of up to 50 years in prison.

Most dangerous cities in Nebraska Dangerous Cities in Nebraska 6. South Sioux City 5. Scottsbluff 4. North Platte 3. Lincoln 2. Grand Island 1. Omaha A note about the numbers
Greek chapters at the University NebraskaLincoln saw their building values jump nearly $1.2 million on average in one year, according to data from the Lancaster County Assessors Office.

It was sticker shock, said Assistant Director of Fraternity and Sorority Life Jon Gayer. Some of these groups are probably looking at a $100,000 increase in taxes.

The Lancaster County Assessors Office reassessed Greek house values after they hadnt changed during the pandemic. And this time, the office looked at how houses were valued near other Big Ten campuses.

Farmhouse Fraternity saw the largest increase out of all the Greek chapters. Their valuation in 2022 was $250,300, but that didnt account for a complete remodeling of the house.

Now, their new valuation is $7.24 million.

Alpha Xi Deltas old valuation was $246,400. Their new one: $1.56 million, a staggering 534% increase. Their building value rose the most out of any UNL sorority, according to assessor data.

Alpha Gamma Rhos valuation nearly quadrupled, to more than $4.8 million. Kappa Deltas value also nearly quadrupled, to nearly $1.6 million.

Lancaster County Assessor Dan Nolte was not in office until this year, but he said COVID and the housing market during the pandemic may have led to the lack of change in previous building valuations.

We are tasked by statute with valuing property as close to market value as we can, Nolte said.

The numbers

There are 17 fraternities and 12 sororities with chapter houses on or near UNL campuses.

Most men and women who are part of a designated house live there during their college years. Some houses have designated sleeping rooms, while others have individual rooms shared with roommates. Chapters eat meals and host meetings and events at their house.

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Greek chapters were caught off guard by the increase, in part because they had not seen a major change in property value in recent years, Gayer said.

Chapter buildings at UNL hadnt been reassessed since 2015. The Assessors Office began looking at reevaluating the houses after receiving calls about Greek chapter building values not being accurate and other equalization concerns. There were also a few building sales and new construction that indicated a valuation issue, said Phil Hughes from the Lancaster County Assessors Office.

How reassessments worked

Property values increase for a variety of reasons. The Greek chapters saw a 293.21% average increase because of renovations and the current housing market, Hughes said.

We need to value property, real estate, as close to market value as we can, Nolte said.

Statute requires property to be valued at 100% market value, and there are three approaches: sales, income and cost. The sales approach compares a property with similar properties recently sold. This method couldnt be used because Greek chapter houses are rarely sold, and are hard to compare to similar-sized properties. The income approach, used with most commercial properties, determines value based on the amount of money brought in. But Greek chapters are generally nonprofits.

Most of them operate in the red or very, very near in the red, Hughes said.

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So the Lancaster County Assessors Office used a cost approach, which looks at cost tables produced by a national company to determine the worth of the property. These cost tables determine values based on replacement costs for things like square footage, materials used and quality of materials, Hughes said.

The Assessors Office said staff did on-site inspections of the outside of all the chapters and inside most of them. They noted updates and areas with deferred maintenance. From these notes, they looked at the cost tables to reach the new values.

Every time we re-value, we start completely over with new sales data. We dont base any of our new values off prior data, said Lancaster County Appraisal Operations Manager Alice Lauer. It is all new market data, all new income data, all new cost and depreciation data.

To ensure the numbers logically aligned, the office said they looked at Greek properties at universities in Iowa and Wisconsin to compare. They chose these campuses because they were similar to Lincoln, assessed at full market value and had information available online.

If they value something at $10 million that we value at $100,000 that just would not be logical, Hughes said.

Hughes said the office sympathizes with the Greek houses facing large increases, but they are required to follow state statute.

"There is less of a concern that our value is wrong and more of a concern of the increase of the value and what it does with their budgets," he said.

Theta Xi Fraternity Alumni Association Treasurer Brent Ganey said he doesnt think the valuations are entirely wrong. However, he said, Greek houses being taxed as real property at 100% market value isnt fair because of their unique purpose.

The impact on Greeks

As valuations increase, so do property taxes. This will impact budgets and cost of living in a Greek house, leaders say. Chapters will have to pay the expense through an increase in rent or changing budgets.

Blake Welker, a UNL junior, has served as president of Sigma Chi. That chapters value increased by more than $500,000. He said Sigma Chi has around 100 members, so they will be able to manage the increase better than smaller chapters. But the increase may still lead to increased dues.

It does take away from things we can do, Welker said. It is not to the point that we can't run the house.

Gayer said he doesnt think it will necessarily affect recruitment numbers, but it may affect which chapter students choose because incoming students are looking more closely at cost and value.

Theta Xi Fraternity, which has about 80 members, also received a significant hike in value. Their alumni board is working with the Lancaster County Assessors Office, said Theta Xi President Benjamin Morse. If the fraternity pays more in taxes, the cost of living will increase, he said.

We are just a bunch of college kids, he said. Its already hard for college kids to afford these dues and afford to live in a fraternity or sorority. With these increases, it will deter people from wanting to.

Whats next

When the valuations were released, a number of chapters called the Office for Sorority and Fraternity Life. The office organized a meeting with the Lancaster County Assessor's Office where chapter presidents, advisers and friends were able to ask questions.

Chapters can file an appeal before June 30. A formal protest through the County Clerks Office can lead to a hearing with a third-party private appraiser.

Chapter advisers and alumni boards are working on appeals, they say. Welker said their advisers are encouraging them to speak to the new chancellor about the issue as soon as possible.

Gayer said he asked if the chapters could file a joint appeal and was told no. Nolte said this is because each property is separate.

The Lancaster County Board of Equalization will make a decision on all appeals by Aug. 10. After that decision, chapters could appeal to the Nebraska Tax Equalization Review Commission, said Nolte. If the chapters continue to appeal, they would eventually be heard by the Nebraska Supreme Court, Gayer said.

I think we lose sight that these are for the most part student housing, Gayer said. You can't flip this overnight to be an apartment complex. You cant.

Top Journal Star photos for June 2023
On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are going to discuss a topic that was back in the news recently with the debt ceiling negotiations: Social Security.

A number of politicians and elected representatives have recently suggested that we make major changes to the Social Security program, changes which could have a substantial (and I think likely negative) impact on American seniors.

We will all eventually age, so this means it will impact us.

A few quick notes on Social Security before you dive into this podcast episode:

It is important to note that this is not a partisan issue (at least among voters). Surveys show that strong majorities of Americanswhether old or young, high-income or working class, Republican or Democratbelieve that it is crucial for the U.S. to preserve full Social Security benefits for future generations, even if it means increasing payroll taxes.

that strong majorities of Americanswhether old or young, high-income or working class, Republican or Democratbelieve that it is crucial for the U.S. to preserve full Social Security benefits for future generations, even if it means increasing payroll taxes. Social Security is the biggest source of retirement income for most retirees .

. Social Security is arguably Americas most effective poverty-fighting program, bringing elderly poverty down from almost 38% to less than 10% (lower than the national poverty rate ).

(lower than the ). Social Security is a social insurance program. This means it will continue to pay benefits regardless of whether or not you live long enough to use more benefits than you paid forwhich a typical American retiree likely will .

. Some argue that you could personally invest money in the stock market, instead of putting it into Social Security, and get a better return on your money for retirement. While this is no doubt true for some, millions of Americans would not likely be able to save as much on their own as they would through the forced retirement planning of Social Security.

Social Security will never go broke. It will always receive money from current workers, every two weeks, to pay for current retirees. Due to falling fertility rates, however, the program will only be able to afford to pay 77% of promised benefits beginning in the 2030s.

beginning in the 2030s. According to Social Security expert Kathleen Romig, the guest on this episode, full benefits can continue beyond this point if we remove the taxable earnings cap (currently around $160,000) and increase payroll taxes on employees and employers from the current 6.2% to somewhere around 7% each.

On this episode, we play clips of a summer 2021 podcast conversation we had with Social Security expert Kathleen Romig from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Enjoy!

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The Connors Forum is an independent entity from the institutions that we partner with. The views expressed in our newsletters and podcasts are those of the individual contributors alone and not of our partner institutions.

Episode Audio:
On this version of Hot off the Wire:

 Donald Trump has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate. The remarkable development makes him the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges by the federal government that he once oversaw.

 More than 600 firefighters and other personnel from the U.S. have been deployed to Canada to respond to the wildfires there, President Joe Biden said in a statement Thursday, adding that he offered additional help to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

 A Russian regional governor says three people were lightly wounded after a drone crashed into a residential building in central Voronezh, a city in southwestern Russia near the border with Ukraine.

 The United Nations World Food Program says it is temporarily suspending food aid to Ethiopia because its supplies are being diverted.

 Frances president has traveled to be at the side of families traumatized by the savage stabbings of four very young children. France's prime minister said all four children  aged between 22 months and 3 years old  underwent surgery.

 The Panthers earn an overtime win in the Stanley Cup final, the Dodgers halt their skid, the Orioles avoid a sweep and the top seed reaches the French Open women's final.

 Joran van der Sloot, the main suspect in the 2005 disappearance of U.S. student Natalee Holloway, has landed in the U.S. after being handed over to U.S. custody.

 The hazardous haze from Canadas wildfires is something new for those in the Eastern U.S.

 President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are reiterating their commitment to help Ukraine repel Russias ongoing invasion.

 A white Florida woman charged with shooting and killing her Black neighbor told detectives that she called the victims children by racist slurs in the months leading up to the slaying, according to an arrest report.

 Former President Donald Trump and his aides are bracing for a potential indictment in the classified documents investigation as prosecutors handling the probe have been spotted at a Miami courthouse where a grand jury has been hearing from witnesses.

 Malaysia has condemned a Singapore-born comedian who made fun of the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 during a skit in the United States.

 The Supreme Court handed Jack Daniel's a new chance to win a trademark dispute with the makers of a dog toy that mimics the whiskeys signature bottle.

 The Supreme Court has issued a surprising ruling in favor of Black voters in a congressional redistricting case, rejecting a Republican-led effort to weaken a landmark voting rights law.

 Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson has died. Robertson turned a tiny Virginia television station into the far-reaching Christian Broadcasting Network, where he hosted the flagship 700 Club show for half a century.

 The American public is broadly skeptical of common intelligence practices and of the need to sacrifice civil liberties for security.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen announced former Nebraska Emergency Management Agency Assistant Director Bryan Tuma as his pick for executive director of the state's Crime Commission on Thursday afternoon.

Tuma will replace Don Arp, who resigned this week to pursue a career outside of state government, according to a release from the Governor's office.

The new director's experience includes 32 years with the Nebraska State Patrol, including 26 as a trooper and the final six years  from 2005 to 2011  as the state patrol's superintendent, after his appointment by then-Gov. Dave Heineman. The Columbus native also spent time as a safety coordinator at DuPont Pioneer, a seed producer, before assuming his role at the Emergency Management Agency in 2014.

"Bryan has extensive experience in public safety, particularly in law enforcement and in the area of emergency management," Pillen said. "He is a five-star recruit for this role  someone who has leadership, administrative, and strategic planning skills that will greatly benefit the Crime Commission and its work in supporting other agencies tasked with protecting the public."

The crime commission, originally created through executive order in 1967 before being enshrined as a state agency through legislation enacted in 1969, serves as an umbrella agency for multiple criminal and juvenile justice programs, with a mission to "aid in statewide reduction of violent crime" according to its website.
The crew of BUZZ43 felt the sudden jolt as their RC-135V reconnaissance jet as the plane slurped fuel from an airborne tanker, visible through the cockpit window just ahead and above them.

Halfway through the delicate ballet of aerial refueling  25,000 feet above the blue waters of the western Caribbean  the planes electrical power cut off. The jolt was from the refueling boom automatically disconnecting as BUZZ43 backed away from the tanker.

The pilots  Capt. Joshua Maury and Lt. Will Lewis, from Offutt Air Force Bases 55th Wing  saw red Xs on some of their flight displays in place of critical data about their altitude and the performance of the planes four engines.

BUZZ43, is everything good? asked the boom operator on the KC-135 tanker.

The crew couldnt hear. Their radios were dead, too.

The sudden electrical failure quickly turned a routine surveillance mission into an in-flight emergency nearly two years ago, on July 13, 2021. But by keeping calm, and relying on a tested piloting formula called crew resource management, BUZZ43 followed the tanker to its home base in Florida and smoothly executed a tricky overweight landing without harm to any of the 25 Offutt-based crew members on board.

The main thing you fall back on is your training, said Maj. Adam Blue Sema, 34, the aircraft commander, who was sitting in the jump seat during the emergency, then took the controls to land the plane. The safety of the crew is paramount.

In-flight mechanical failures arent uncommon at the 55th Wing, which flies first-generation jets built in the early 1960s. The Wing spends nearly $500 million a year on maintenance for its fleet of 26 RC-, TC-, and WC-135 aircraft.

Sema, who is now an instructor pilot for the Wings 343rd Reconnaissance Squadron, thought the electrical failure  and the crews response  taught lessons important enough that he told BUZZ43s story in a recent article for the Air Combat Commands quarterly safety magazine, Combat Edge.

It was a good, unique opportunity for the Air Force to learn from it, Sema said in an interview with The World-Herald.

Suddenly, a Slew of Problems

The day started early for the BUZZ43 crew. They took off in the jet (tail number 64-14843) at 3:01 a.m. from Lincoln Airport, their temporary operating base because of runway reconstruction at Offutt. They headed southeast toward the Gulf of Mexico.

Sema and Lewis would not disclose where the flight was headed. But it had flown through the narrow gap between Cuba and Mexicos Yucatan Peninsula to meet up with a KC-135 refueling tanker from MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida, about 3 hours and 15 minutes into the flight. That would allow them to complete their surveillance mission.

Midair refueling is a routine task for military pilots, but a demanding one. They must pull up close behind the tanker and hook a narrow boom trailing behind it into a receptacle above and just behind the cockpit. Then they must remain in that position for several minutes while taking on fuel through the boom. The maneuver requires precise flying skills, and perfect communication between the two crews.

The flight had gone perfectly smoothly, until midway through the aerial refueling.

The first indication was the disconnect from the tanker, Sema said. It didnt immediately register that something was wrong.

The missing flight instrument readings hammered home the problem, though, as did the silence on the hot mic and the interphone headsets that connected the flight deck crew with the mission crew in the main cabin.

The crew quickly consulted emergency checklists, which directed switching to emergency battery power. That didnt work.

The lack of emergency power told them that BUZZ43 had suffered a partial electrical failure of the DC bus switch, which supplies power to critical systems on the aircraft.

They faced a slew of problems. They didnt have access to critical information for takeoff and landing. They couldnt check the positions of flaps and landing gear.

Although they carried plenty of fuel, much of it was trapped in tanks behind a series of switches and valves that no longer worked. They could neither burn fuel, nor dump it.

The autopilot didnt work. And thunderstorm clouds were building around them.

Lewis took over hand-flying the plane, exercising a skill pilots mostly use only in training.

Its Not Happening Today

Sema, who had served 10 years in the Air Force, hadnt seen an in-flight electrical failure before, except in the simulator. He and Maury worked with other crew members on trouble-shooting.

The navigator, Capt. Joshua Irvin, reset the circuit breaker, which brought back their radios and systems  but only for a few minutes. Then it popped off again.

The decision had to be made whether to continue or cancel, Sema said. We (decided), Its not happening today.

In an emergency, he said, the crew is trained to maintain control of the plane, analyze the situation, take action, and land  in that order. They call it Aviate, Navigate, Communicate.

The crew took stock of what they had left. Because of redundant systems, some of the missing instrument readings were visible to one pilot and could be shared. Three radios in the rear mission compartment still worked, which allowed them to inform Offutt of their predicament.

They decided the best course was to follow the tanker and land at MacDill. Of course, without radios, they had no way to tell the KC-135 crew of their plan.

So the navigator reset the circuit breaker again, knowing it would restore power for a few minutes and give them a brief window to explain their situation.

The tanker crew flashed landing lights and waggled the planes wings for basic communication. They steered wide of growing tropical thunderstorms during the flight of more than two hours to Tampa.

Theyd telegraph way in advance, said Lewis, who continued to hand-fly the plane. Occasionally theyd turn right or left, and Id wonder what they were doing.

One of Semas biggest problems was keeping his own crew informed, since they couldnt use their interphone. He walked back to the cabin to talk to the translators and radio operators personally, or used runners to carry messages.

Ready. . . Go!

Even as it happened, their flight drew the attention of a corps of hobbyists who follow military flights on air-traffic-control monitoring web sites like FlightRadar24.com and ADSBexchange.com. Several watchers took note that BUZZ43s transponder was broadcasting the emergency code 7700 and posted screenshots of its flight to MacDill on social media.

While Lewis flew, Sema and the rest of the flight crew brainstormed how to land a plane they knew would be overweight.

Having a crew is money, said Lewis, who is now a captain and still a pilot for the 343rd Squadron. Its really great to have a bunch of other people on the jet who can discuss what the situation is, and how to deal with it.

The plan: Shut down every non-critical electrical system in the back end to reduce the load on the electrical bus. Reset the circuit breaker one more time shortly before landing, and marshal every available crew member to gather critical landing data before the breaker popped off again. Circle offshore with landing gear down to burn off as much fuel as possible.

At the command Ready. . . Go! the navigator flipped the circuit breaker.

This time, the power stayed on.

Sema slid into the pilots seat to make the landing. He knew it would take more runway than usual because the aircraft weighed 253,000 pounds, at least 30,000 pounds more than normal.

No problem. Sema set the heavy jet down smoothly and rolled to stop at 9:34 a.m. Central time, 6 hours after taking off from Lincoln.

He flew it great. He didnt float, Lewis said. I was like, Wow! Were safe on the ground.

A 50-amp Breaker

The culprit turned out to be a broken electrical relay, connected to one of two 50-amp circuit breakers. When it shorted out, Sema said, the full load went through the remaining relay and its breaker. The second breaker functioned as designed and prevented an overload of the DC bus.

It caused the kind of headache 55th Wing crews had seen before.

On March 14, 2017, and Oct. 29, 2014, two other RC-135 jets experienced similar electrical failures during aerial refueling  both times while on combat support missions out of Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar. Both crews followed tankers safely back to base.

RC-135s are vulnerable to electrical failures because of the large amount of electronic equipment required for their surveillance missions, according to a 2018 World-Herald investigation into flight safety at the 55th Wing.

The Rivet Joint is full of avionics, heat and people, retired Lt. Gen. Thomas Keck, who commanded the 55th Wing from 1993 to 95, said at the time. Its a more stressful environment.

Sema gained what he called in his article a healthy respect for a popped circuit breaker.

It indicates an overloaded circuit and is a symptom  not the cause  of the issue at hand, he said.

Sema and Lewis credited crew resource management for the safe handling of the emergency. It was a lesson they wanted to share.

The best way to learn a lesson is from someone else, he said, so you dont have to go through it yourself.

Photos: Offutt runway opens after 18-month reconstruction
Beginning July 1, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will cut nearly $10.8 million from its 2023-24 budget by closing open positions and reducing administrative costs. Those cuts, however, will make up less than half of the budget deficit facing UNL.

That $23.8 million deficit has largely been created by enrollment losses over the past two years. That funding crisis, exacerbated by the failure of state appropriations to keep up with the cost of doing business, will continue and, perhaps, worsen.

Without finding additional revenue sources like raising tuition or cutting costs, the deficit for the University of Nebraska system as a whole could balloon to $80 million in 2024-25, with roughly half of that having to be accounted for by UNL, the largest of the systems four campuses.

To that end, administrators have proposed, and later this month the Board of Regents is likely to approve, a 3.5% tuition increase that would reduce the deficit to $27.2 million in 2023-24 and $57.6 million in 2024-25.

That tuition increase would add $9 per credit hour for undergraduate students at UNL, or about $270 for 30 credit hours, the yearly average of student credit hours. While no tuition increases are desirable, that proposal appears to be reasonably minimal.

But it cannot make up the deficit. Nor will appropriations from the state. NU had requested a 3% increase in its state appropriations. Gov. Jim Pillen cut that increase to 2% in his budget. The Legislature approved a 2.5% increase.

The decision to cut the NU request in a session where hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on water projects and given back in corporate and income tax cuts flies in the face of the oft-expressed desire to keep young people in the state.

The deepening of cuts that will be the result of the state's appropriations will, over time, damage NU generally and UNL, the flagship campus, particularly, making it less appealing to future students and highly qualified faculty and creating program cuts that could eliminate courses of study in a liberal arts university.

NU is not alone in facing deficits. Universities around the country, including other Big Ten institutions, are being squeezed as the number of traditional college-aged students is declining, resulting in lost tuition revenue. At the same time, the cost of running the school, primarily in salaries for administrators, faculty and staff and rising health insurance expenditures, continues to rise and questions circle about whether a four-year college degree is worth it.

Projections, however, show that within the next decade, the majority of jobs in Nebraska will require a college degree.

That means that NU administrators, led by President Ted Carter, should continue to do the best they can to soften the deficit blows with strategic cuts and the modest tuition increase, and the state should increase, rather than cut, the next NU appropriations request in order to keep the university healthy and serving the young people of the state.
I left Nebraska in 2022 after living there for most of my adult life. I moved to Nebraska four times because I fell in love with the people. I found them warm, welcoming and loving.

I left because that stopped being true. I left because Nebraska is no longer a safe place for people who arent straight white Christians. I left because honest, everyday Nebraskans have become ensorcelled by hate, fear and intolerance peddled by those in power whose cynicism and hunger for power are corrupting all the things that made Nebraska and her people so wonderful.

It wasnt property taxes, low pay or low job prospects that sent me packing: I left because my fellow Nebraskans broke my heart by embracing hate and abandoning all the values that once made this state a lovely place to live.

The neighborliness that once went hand-in-hand with Nebraska values is a thing of the past. Recent events have demonstrated beyond question that Nebraska is not a safe place to live, and it was with a broken heart that I had to move on.

I hope with all my heart that things get better so that I can come back and embrace my friends with open arms, the way they once greeted me upon my first arrival.

Jon Marx, Leeds, Massachusetts
WATERFORD  A teacher's aide who was hired after allegedly showing up for work intoxicated at her previous job is no longer employed by the Waterford Graded School District.

Amy Francisco was hired at Trailside Elementary School about two weeks after co-workers at a Burlington school called police last October and accused Francisco of coming to work drunk.

Her job application for the Trailside position showed that Francisco failed to answer the question of why she left her previous job in the Burlington Area School District.

Waterford School District Administrator Tony Spence said this week that a district investigation into Francisco's actions has been completed, and that she is no longer employed by the district.

Spence would not release details of the investigation or say whether Francisco resigned or was terminated.

Waterford Graded School Board President Mandy Fiehweg and Vice President Ryan Koncki could not be reached for comment.

Francisco also could not be reached, and her attorney, Robert Keller, declined to comment on the change in her employment status in Waterford.

Francisco, 45, is due in Racine County Circuit Court on June 12 on non-criminal municipal citations for operating while intoxicated and operating with a prohibited blood-alcohol content.

She was arrested Oct. 10 after colleagues at Waller Elementary School in Burlington called police to report that Francisco appeared intoxicated at school. Police stopped her a short time later as she was allegedly driving herself home from school.

Police reported that Francisco had a blood-alcohol content of 0.26  more than three times the legal limit for driving.

She resigned her position at Waller effective immediately, and she applied for a new teacher's aide job in Waterford eight days later. She worked with special-education students in both positions.

Spence said Burlington officials had not told him about her suspected drunkenness on the job.

Waterford district officials placed Francisco on unpaid leave for several months while the matter was under investigation.

Francisco has a previous misdemeanor conviction in a 2003 drunken-driving case, but that case occurred in Michigan, so it does not count on her record in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction reported that Francisco's state license to work as a teacher's aide expired in the summer of 2022. State officials launched an investigation of her license, but officials could not be reached for comment on the status of the investigation.

Here are the safestand most deadlydays for drunk-driving fatalities Here are the safestand most deadlydays for drunk-driving fatalities DUI fatalities by season Most dangerous holidays for DUI Most dangerous days of the week for DUI Most dangerous weeks of the year Ways to stay safe on the road during the holidays Consequences of getting a DUI DUIs leave a lasting financial impact An end to drunk driving Methodology
1. Yes. The traditional date is July 4. The posts celebration should observe that tradition.

2. Yes. Having the celebration 11 days before July 4 likely will diminish the experience.

3. No. The date is not so important, as long as the post honors the spirit of the holiday.

4. No. It gives soldiers and their families the opportunity to take part in multiple celebrations.

5. Unsure. The tradition surrounding July 4 is important, but other factors are involved.

Vote

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Copperas Cove, TX (76522)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening. Mainly clear skies after midnight. Low 71F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening. Mainly clear skies after midnight. Low 71F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
1. Yes. Larger buses are seldom full. Driving them around is a waste of money and fuel.

2. Yes. Fixed routes are often cumbersome and inflexible. They dont work for some riders.

3. No. Using small vans to transport riders on demand would not be very efficient.

4. No. If the city cant have an actual bus service, riders may as well call a cab or an Uber.

5. Unsure. The transit business model is changing, but it could prove to be problematic.

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BELGRADE, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Serbia and India will expand their cooperation in sectors of defense, pharmaceutical industries, information and communication technologies, the presidents of the two countries, Aleksandar Vucic and Droupadi Murmu, said after their meeting in Belgrade on Thursday.

For Murmu, the meeting marks her first visit to Europe since her election as the president of India last July. Vucic, on the other hand, first visited India in 2017, which he said had paved the way for an ever-expanding bilateral partnership, according to a press release issued by the office of the Serb president.

"We have firmly decided to develop bilateral relations, to promote contacts between our peoples and to strengthen cooperation in the United Nations," Murmu was quoted as saying in the press release.

Vucic announced the establishment of joint bodies that would help enhance bilateral cooperation.

He also said the two sides would work together in the coming days on the "simplification of their (bilateral) visa regime" to facilitate the exchange of tourists and business people. Launching direct flights between New Delhi and Belgrade is also on the cards, the press release said.

Murmu also had a meeting here with Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic. During her three-day visit, which started on Wednesday, she attended the India-Serbia business forum in Belgrade, which brought over 150 companies from the two countries. 
Barely a week after Nebraska's Legislature voted 41-0 to repeal the state's motorcycle helmet mandate, local law enforcement agencies are already reporting an uptick in helmetless riders.

Though neither agency offered concrete data, officials with the Lincoln Police Department and Lancaster County Sheriff's Office each reported Wednesday that street officers have observed a noticeable increase in the practice.

The problem: Nebraska's helmet mandate, which has been in place since 1989, won't expire until Jan. 1.

"From now until then, you still need to wear a helmet," Chief Deputy Sheriff Ben Houchin said during a media briefing Wednesday morning, where he and Lincoln Police Capt. Todd Kocian both reminded residents of the nearly seven-month gap between now and when the law takes effect.

Until then, helmetless riders risk a $50 fine  though Houchin said the Sheriff's Office hasn't ticketed any riders for violating the helmet mandate in the eight days since LB138 passed.

When it becomes law in January, the bill will allow any motorcyclist or passenger 21 or older to ride without a helmet  as long as they have completed a basic motorcycle safety course and, for state residents, submitted proof of completion to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Helmetless riders also have to wear eye protection, be it glasses, goggles or a face shield, unless their motorcycle or moped's windshield protects the rider's line of vision "in all operating positions."

Riders from other states could also ride without a helmet in Nebraska if they have taken an equivalent course and carry proof of completion.

The bill will make violations of the new set of rules governing helmet and eye protection use secondary offenses, meaning that law enforcement will only be able to ticket riders for helmet violations if they are stopped for some other traffic offense.

For some motorcyclists, LB138's safety course requirement  and the still-evolving logistics surrounding collection of course completion data  may serve as a roadblock in the route to legal helmetless riding, said Rhonda Lahm, the director of Nebraska's DMV.

Lahm said many motorcyclists complete such courses before they ever become licensed motorcycle operators in the state, since applicants can have both their written and driving tests waived if they show proof of completion to the DMV.

But those who took the other route to licensing  opting instead to take the written and driving tests through the DMV  will have to complete a basic motorcycle safety course before they're legally allowed to ride without a helmet.

Lahm said members of both camps will have to carry proof of completion of such a course with them when they ride or provide proof to the DMV to have it noted on their driver record  though there isn't yet a mechanism in place for motorcyclists to do so.

"The legislation just passed, and that amendment got amended on in  literally  the very last couple days of the session," she said. "And we had no indication that that bill was gonna get included or passed this year, so we are just in the preliminary stages of talking about what that's gonna look like."

Lahm said the DMV will develop and publicize a process to collect motorcycle safety course data from licensees before the end of the year.

More than 86% of motorcyclists killed in Nebraska crashes over the last nine years were wearing helmets when they crashed, according to data compiled by the state Department of Transportation's in January.

From 2014 to 2022, 195 of the 226 motorcyclists killed in crashes in Nebraska were wearing helmets, according to the report, while the state's helmet use rate has hovered between near 85% and the number of basic rider course training certificates issued has fallen by nearly 50%.

In Missouri, where lawmakers passed a similar repeal that took affect in August 2020, motorcycle fatalities increased by 35% in 2021 over the prior year  while overall traffic fatalities increased by only 2%.

More than half of the record 159 motorcyclists killed on Missouri roadways in 2021 were not wearing a helmet, according to Missouri Department of Transportation data, which Nebraska officials included in their January report.

In Nebraska, Sen. Ben Hansen of Blair initially proposed the newly passed repeal through a separate bill but later added it as an amendment to LB138 with two weeks left in the legislative session, which ended June 1.

Amid Hansen's bid to attach the amended to LB138 in late May, several of his colleagues expressed support, even as they recounted personal experiences with motorcycle crashes.

Sen. Teresa Ibach of Sumner said two of her nephews died while riding motorcycles, one who was wearing a helmet and one who was not. Sen. Dave Murman of Glenvil said a motorcycle helmet saved his life as a young man.

And Sen. Wendy DeBoer of Bennington signaled support for the bill for the sake of motorcyclists' personal freedom, saying the Legislature should not be involved in these personal decisions, even though I know more people will die."

But other lawmakers pushed back against that suggestion, including Sen. Mike Moser of Columbus, who said the government tells people what to do in many situations, including wearing seat belts, putting children in car seats and obeying speed limits.

A week later, all four senators  Ibach, Murman, DeBoer and Moser  voted in support of the bill, which Gov. Jim Pillen signed June 1.
MINDEN  Seventy years ago, Minden native and inventor of Flex-O-Glass Harold Warp founded Pioneer Village in his hometown to celebrate the cultural and industrial progress of our culture.

The industrialist wrote in his memoir, The History of Progress, published in 1987: It is my sincere hope that our generation, our children, and our childrens children will realize and appreciate the sacrifices that our forebears made in establishing and expanding our country. We hope that by displaying the items in the Pioneer Village, we will all come to realize the great amount of hard work done by these people of the past, so that we of this generation and children of future generations have a better understanding of the hardships endured in the founding of our great country.

The museum will celebrate seven decades with a celebration 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday in Minden.

General admission is $15. Residents of Kearney County will be admitted at no charge.

William Ascarza, director of Pioneer Village, noted the goal of the museum.

Pioneer Village provides an extensive chronological series of exhibits representing the evolution of technological innovations since 1830, he wrote in an email interview. The museum collection takes the visitor back in time to demonstrate what life was like during the height of the Industrial Revolution in America. Through interpretive signage, interactive, hands-on exhibitry and demonstrations, Pioneer Village has served to tell the history of the United States for 70 years.

The museums collection features a range of objects from a blacksmith shop, a church, a train depot and a firehouse to suspended aircraft and cable cars and hundreds of everyday household items. Giving patrons the chance to encounter those artifacts allows them to better understand how they fit into everyday use.

Ascarza writes, Visitors gain a greater appreciation of the historic, scientific and artistic significance of museum artifacts through displays and interpretation that is difficult to represent virtually. Parts of our museum are hands-on and interactive and museum staff are available to answer questions. Our patrons can spend an entire day immersed in our village collection and enjoy a memorable and educational experience.

Highlights of the the 70th anniversary include tours, food, games, music and a scavenger hunt.

The 70th anniversary serves as a reminder of one man's vision (Harold Warps) showing the technological advancements and progression of tools and techniques that have benefited people for the past two hundred years, Ascarza wrote. It serves as an educational experience for future generations to understand and appreciate the struggles and perseverance of our past ancestors in such ventures as transportation, communication and medicine.

For more information, including a blog highlighting museum displays and events, visit PioneerVillage.com.

Join the celebration What: Pioneer Village 70th anniversary celebration. When: 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Where: 138 E. Highway 6, Minden. Admission: $15 adults; $7.50 12 years and younger; ages 5 and younger admitted at no charge. Contact: 308-832-1181; PioneerVillage.com. Saturday schedule: 9 a.m.  Museum opens  live demonstrations through the day. 9 a.m.  Scavenger hunt. 10 a.m.  Museum collections tour. Noon  Food and refreshments in courtyard provided by our local Boy Scouts. Noon  Old-fashioned games in the courtyard. 1 p.m.  Welcome/highlights by Pioneer Village management and volunteer recognition. 1:30 p.m.  Sweet Adelines: Nebraska Pride Chorus performance. 3 p.m.  Melinda Ferrees tribute to Patsy Cline. 4 p.m.  Vintage cars tour. 6 p.m.  Museum closes. Sunday schedule: 9 a.m.  Museum opens  live demonstrations through the day. 9 a.m.  Pancake breakfast in the courtyard. 11 a.m.  Church service in St. Paul Lutheran Church on the green (max attendance of 75). 11:30 a.m.  Food trucks with refreshments. Noon  Music in the courtyard. Noon  Old-fashioned games in the courtyard. 2 p.m.  Agriculture equipment tour. 4 p.m.  Aircraft tour. 6 p.m.  Museum closes.
The 2023 Legislature was a hot mess. The fact that three senators could derail the work of 46 others in the nations only one-house, allegedly nonpartisan Legislature, speaks volumes.

What went wrong? Most everything that could.

There were 17 new senators (two of them who served terms before being re-elected in November). A new clerk of the Legislature stepped up after two years as an assistant. A new governor and a new lieutenant governor who is the presiding officer of the Legislature also played a role. Even veteran Sen. John Arch who was elected speaker wasnt necessarily as forceful as he could have been early in the session.

Lets look at the A B Cs. Arrogance, belligerence, and civility (or the lack thereof).

Arrogance is an attitude of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or in presumptuous claims or assumptions. There are 32 Republicans in the nonpartisan Legislature. Overbearing, it takes 33 to stop debate and get on with a vote on a bill. Presumptuous, because stopping transgender health care is an issue in other red states, it will be good for Nebraska too.

Belligerence is an aggressive or extremely self-serving attitude, atmosphere, or disposition. A lot of this rests on Omaha Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh who led a session-long filibuster often threatening to burn down the session. Omaha colleague Meghan Hunt added to the vitriol and several times resorted to name-calling.

Lincoln Sen. Danielle Conrad, who served two terms and then sat out a term-limit mandated term before reelection in November, offered a sine die (end the session) motion early in the session. It was an attention-getter that worked.

When all was said and done after the session, Conrad said, "I really feel we probably have set the low-water mark. We can find ways to work together ... and make a concerted effort to start to figure out where consensus might lie for the next session."

Civility is formal politeness and courtesy in behavior or speech. Not a lot of that going around the 88 days of the session. Both sides, the 32 and the 17, were guilty. The lowest point came during the transgender bill debate when opponents of the measure threw feminine hygiene products from the balcony onto the floor of the legislative chamber.

Some of the sharpest divisions focused on human rights, abortion and transgender care, which Conrad characterized as "government interfering with parental rights and access to medical care."

The same argument played into a Republican backed voter ID bill which pitted members of that party against one another in a rather refreshing break as the wheels started coming off the bandwagon.

Omaha Democrat Sen. Wendy DeBoer pleaded with her colleagues to stop exploring new and novel ways to use the institutions rules for an edge. The biggest misuse, IMHO, was the pairing of the 12-week abortion ban bill with the transgender bill creating one bill, which was passed but is already subject to litigation.

That clearly flew in the face of previous rulings on germaneness and the legislative tradition of one subject per bill. The challenge to the pairing was overruled in a matter of seconds, not minutes, by Lt. Gov. Joe Kelly who was most recently a U.S. district attorney and former Lancaster County attorney.

He didnt even assemble opponents and proponents, the speaker and the clerk for a brief discussion; he simply agreed that the bills could be merged. A vote to override his ruling failed.

Arch told senators on the final day of the session he hopes this year would be an aberration, not a predictor of the future and pledged to repair and rebuild relationships before next year. We debate ideology, but we end up doing that within the context of relationships," he said. "The time to develop those relationships isnt on the mic, its before the bill gets to the floor.

Cavanaugh said she was leery that the strategy would make a difference. "I'm always open to that, but people have to be willing to make an effort and I'm not sure that willingness is there."

Speak for yourself senator. Get your head back into doing what is right for all Nebraskans just like your father did when he was a state senator and like your brother is trying to do.

Everybody needs to give a little. Nebraskans deserve it.
The Newbourne Village Renaissance Festival will open June 10 for its second season. The event takes place over four consecutive weekends at the Eagle Ridge Festival Grounds in Chippewa Falls.

Master Ticktock, otherwise known as executive director Mark Lakowske, oversees the Newbourne Village Renaissance Festival.

Its been a labor of love to get the fair running. The space where it is held off 50th Avenue was once home to another annual renaissance fair that shuttered about a decade ago.

There have been other shows on these grounds, but were the first in about 10 years or more, Lakowske said.

If you go What: Newbourne Village Renaissance Festival When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekends of June 10 through July 2 Where: Eagle Ridge Festival Grounds, 2302 Nelson Road Chippewa Falls Cost: 3 and under free, 4-7 years $10, 8-64 years $15, 65+ $10

The work that went into prepping the space which sat dormant all those years was taxing. Lakowske said in the months leading up to the opening in 2022 there were lots of sleepless nights. But the first years festival was a big success and now the festival returns again.

Just come have fun and play again, he said. Check your troubles at the door.

Erika Nordmeyer and Victor Volney traveled to the fair from Minnesota in 2022. They spend a lot of time traveling to renaissance fairs, they said.

We actually have a Facebook group  Midwest Festival Companions  for like-minded people up here in the Midwest, Nordmeyer said. We literally just go from fair to fair celebrating. Its really great. Anybody is welcome to join us.

Nordmeyer and Volney said they were impressed with Newbourne Village.

Its actually really wonderful, Nordmeyer said. Its so good. I really love to dress up and see, like, all the vendors and cool things that people make. Its my big inspiration.

Volney has been going to renaissance fairs for most of his life and hopes to keep doing so.

In Minnesota my mother and father took me when I was a very young kid, and Ive been going almost every year of my life now, he said.

He too enjoys the artisans and craftsmen at the events.

Theres great skill and talent showcased out here with the vendors, he said. I latch on to that and obviously seeing people dressed up always influenced me and inspired me as a kid. I tailored my life to be like, Im going to dress up and go to these.

The two agree that the main point of this lifestyle is to not just dress up but to meet new people, connect and travel the country.

During this years fair there will be vendors, performers in costume, hand-crafted wears, swordplay, blacksmithing and cooking demonstrations, singing and other stage shows, comedy, live music, a hypnosis show, animals, food and fun play with interactive characters like gnomes, mermaids, even the queen.
It has been 15 months since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, and the devastation continues as causalities mount and the death toll of Ukrainian civilians nears 9,000, including some 500 youth, and soldier fatalities approach an estimated 17,500.

Millions of residents fled Ukraine within the first year of the war, and many of those who remain are living in damaged dwellings with inadequate electricity and water and struggling to access healthcare and education.

The war changed our lives completely, said Veronika Lemishenko of Kharkiv, Ukraine. We cant make plans for the future, we cant go home and feel safe there, we cant work as before. Besides visible changes there is a huge shock which is still in our consciousness and subconscious every minute. So many Ukrainian people lost not only their homes and everyday life but lost a beloved one  a parent, a wife, a husband, but the worst, a child.

If you go What: Veronika Lemishenko harp concert for Ukraine relief When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 16 Where: Cappella Performing Arts Center, 721 King St. Cost: Donations encouraged

For Lemishenko, who has for the past five years supported volunteer organizations, animal shelters, medical institutions and youth causes through her eponymous charitable foundation, fundraising for her neighbors and community has become a commitment. A renowned harpist and director of the Glowing Harp competition and festival, Lemishenko is using her musical gift to raise funds for Ukrainian organizations, including music academies, schools and libraries, as well as direct aid for victims of war.

At 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 16, Lemishenko will perform a benefit concert at the Cappella Performing Arts Center, with La Crosse organist Trevor DuPey accompanying her for several pieces.

Thats humanity, Lemishenko said of her dedication to philanthropy. If we care for children, if we care for every little life, we have a future, we have a light in our hearts. And thats what helps us to go through the war all together.

Lemishenko was just 7 years old when she took up the harp, an instrument with which she had a very natural connection from the very beginning.

I was very lucky with my teachers and supportive parents, said Lemishenko. Thanks to that the harp speaks not only to me, but together we can talk to the audience to share the music and emotions.

Lemishenko has won harp competitions across Europe and Asia, served on the boards of the World Harp Congress and European Union of Music Competitions for Youth, performed in music festivals in Portugal, Switzerland and France and played on international stages both as a solo artist and as part of an orchestra. The Veronika Lemishenko Charitable Foundation was originally founded to promote the harp and support harpists and composers and collaborated with the Glowing Harp competition group. When the war on Ukraine erupted in February 2022, the Foundation began allocating funds toward Ukrainian relief.

To expand the reach of the Foundation, Lemishenko is embarking on her first tour in the U.S., and, after being contacted by La Crosse resident and harp enthusiast Allan Beatty, will bring her talent to the Coulee Region.

I asked her if she would ever come to the U.S. and she immediately responded and said she was coming to Minneapolis in June, said Beatty, who also plays the harp and has coordinated other concerts with fellow members of the area Heart Strings Harp Circle. So I got busy. I have great sympathies and concerns about what is going on in the Ukraine so Im glad to facilitate some way of providing financial relief to people there.

Lemishenko calls the connection a truly miracle coincidence.

Weve collected a lot (of funds for Ukraine) particularly by giving benefit recitals and master classes all around Europe thanks to musical connections we made with the Glowing Harp competition, said Lemishenko, who received the email from Beatty as the Glowing Harp group was planning the U.S. concert schedule. The timing and location turned out to be perfect Allan managed everything fantastically in a very short period of time. Im so grateful and so much looking forward to coming here to play.

The response to the upcoming benefit concert has been enthusiastic.

I think for a lot of people it is an immediate yes for two reasons, Beatty said. The artistic as well as the international humanitarian side.

Lemishenko, Beatty said, is a world class, very high caliber musician and he hopes the concert will introduce more people to the instrument and encourage young talent. Any amount given to the Foundation, he believes, will be greatly appreciated.

It is amazing how many people are helping and supporting Ukraine, Lemishenko said.

Asked how she has remained resilient in the face of the tragedy, Lemishenko has no confident response. The trauma is ongoing, but the harp is her conduit to helping her country.

I think the war made an unreversed changes in our minds, smaller or deeper depending of what or who you have lost, said Lemishenko. Or still can in the future  the war is not over.
A 65-year-old La Crosse man was charged in La Crosse County Circuit Court after being accused of a sixth drunken driving offense.

Jerome T. Bakalars faces felony counts of sixth-offense drunken driving and sixth-offense operating with a prohibited alcohol content.

According to the criminal complaint, police were dispatched June 1 around 2:30 p.m. to a complaint of driver swerving and driving slowly on Losey Boulevard in La Crosse. Police approached the driver, identified as Bakalars, after he pulled into a parking lot.

The complaint says Bakalars displayed unsteady balance, bloodshot eyes and slurred speech and that he was wearing a pair of wind pants inside out.

Bakalars reportedly told police he had recently taken prescription drug medications. He said his most recent alcohol consumption occurred the night before. The complaint says police detected the odor of alcohol on him.

The complaint says Bakalars failed a field sobriety test. A preliminary breath test recorded a blood-alcohol content of .306.

Bakalars first two drunken driving offenses are from New York. The third is from Crawford County, and the last two are from La Crosse County. The most recent conviction is from 2014.

Bakalars was released June 2 on a $1,000 signature bond. His next court appearance is a July 14 calendar call.
A 78-year-old La Crosse man faces multiple charges for alleged sex offenses against a teenage boy.

Richard R. Harnish was charged in La Crosse County Circuit Court with felony charges of soliciting a child for prostitution, exposing himself to a child, stalking and two counts of causing a child to view sexual activity and a misdemeanor account of fourth-degree sexual assault.

According to the criminal complaint, a relative of a teenage boy called police and indicated concern for the childs welfare. The relative told police she had received a text message from the child saying that he wanted to kill himself.

Police interviewed the boy and said he was being harassed by Harnish. He told police he had spent time at Harnishs residence last year because of a shared business. The child said within a few days, he became uncomfortable at the residence. He said Harnish viewed pornography and acted inappropriately in his presence.

The child said Harnish offered him $45 to have sex in November. During a Dec. 5 trip to Appleton, the child said Harnish grabbed him between the legs.

The child told police that Harnish has been stalking him recently by staking out his school and entering his place of employment three to four times per week.

Police interviewed Harnish on June 1 and placed him under arrest. He was released June 7 after posting a $1,000 cash bail. His next court appearance is a June 23 calendar call.
Jury selection begins at 8:45 a.m. Monday for the trial of one of two men accused in a July 23, 2021, triple homicide in La Crosse County.

Nya K. Thao, no permanent address, is charged with three felony counts of first-degree intentional homicide and one felony count of a felon in possession of a firearm.

Eighty prospective jurors are expected to be interviewed for the 12-person jury. The trial is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. before La Crosse County Circuit Court Judge Elliott Levine. Prosecutors and defense counsel met with Levine Thursday via Zoom to settle some minor details before the trial.

Prosecutors allege that Thao and 45-year-old Khamthaneth Rattanasack drove Peng Lor, 24, Nemo Yang, 24, and Trevor Maloney, 23, to a quarry north of West Salem and shot them execution-style. Rattanasack and Thao reportedly killed the three because Rattanasack suspected one of them stole $600 from him. A woman was also among those driven to the murder site, but she was released unharmed.

Thao is being held in the La Crosse County Jail on a $1 million cash bond.

Rattanasack, who also faces three first-degree intentional homicide charges, had a plea hearing that was set for May 24, but prosecutors and defense counsel failed to reach a plea agreement. District Attorney Tim Gruenke said an agreement is unlikely until Thaos trial is over.

A status hearing for Rattanasack is scheduled for July 14. He is incarcerated at a state prison in Boscobel, where he is being held on a $1 million cash bond.
Residents of French Island are seeking $42.4 million in compensation for diminished property value and other harms as a result of PFAS groundwater contamination.

A claim representing hundreds of residents says the cause of contamination primarily is from La Crosse Regional Airport.

It was served Friday, June 9, to the city of La Crosse, stating that previously known PFAS contamination by the city was not shared with the island residents, according to a press release from Fitzpatrick, Skemp and Butler LLC, the law firm representing the residents.

Officials from the city were not made available for comment Friday.

For decades, the La Crosse Airport routinely used aqueous film-foaming foam that contains per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances such as perfluorooctanoic acid or perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, which is used to control and extinguish flammable liquid fires.

PFOS and PFOA were detected above recommended levels in Environmental Protection Agency water samples collected for La Crosse Well 23H during 2014 and 2016.

The claim states the city did not inform residents of French Island, who rely on private drinking water wells, that groundwater on the island was contaminated with PFAS chemicals.

On April 18, 2019, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources was made aware that PFAS routinely had been detected in municipal well 23, located on the east side of French Island.

The state DNR found contamination posed a threat to public health, safety, welfare or the environment. The agency instructed the city of La Crosse  as the owner of the property where the contamination was found and the entity that caused the discharge of substance  to restore the environment.

At that time, the city did not disclose this information to private drinking water well users on French Island, nor did the city advise them that more widespread PFAS contamination of the aquifer might exist such that private drinking water wells and private property might be impacted, the release states.

In or about mid-October 2020, the city, apparently for the first time, took steps to announce that there was a risk that some private drinking water wells in specific areas on French Island may be contaminated with elevated levels of PFAS, the release continued.

As of June 2021, 538 private wells on French Island tested positive for PFAS contamination. In 165 of the private wells sampled with results received, contaminant concentrations were well above the then-proposed enforcement standards.

The widespread contamination led Wisconsin Department of Health Services to declare an emergency water advisory for the area in March 2021.

All residents of French Island rely on bottled water from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources or the city for drinking and cooking.

Under Wisconsin Statute, the city of La Crosse has 120 days to either pay or deny the claims that have been served. The claimants are prohibited by statute from suing the city until after the 120-day period elapses.
WASHINGTON  Many minority lawmakers and voting rights activists see this week's Supreme Court decision ordering Alabama to redraw its congressional districts as a stunning victory with the potential to become a major stepping stone for undoing political maps that dilute the strength of communities of color.

Hank Sanders, a former Alabama state lawmaker, knew there would be a decision since the court heard arguments in the case last fall. He did not anticipate being happy with the outcome, given the conservative-leaning court's previous rulings essentially gutted some of the most important provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

"I was afraid they were going to go ahead and wipe out section 2," he said, referring to the part of the law at stake in the Alabama case.

He was at his law office Thursday in Selma, scene of one of the most pivotal moments in the Civil Rights Movement, when news of the 5-4 ruling in favor of Alabama's Black voters was announced.

"It was a surprise that was good for my day," he said.

How the decision will affect similar lawsuits against political maps drawn in other states is unclear, though voting rights groups say the ruling provides firm guidance for lower courts to follow.

The court majority found that Alabama concentrated Black voters in one district, while spreading them out among the others to make it much more difficult to elect more than one candidate of their choice. Alabama's Black population is large enough and geographically compact enough to create a second district, the judges found. Just one of its seven congressional districts is majority Black, in a state where more than one in four residents is Black.

Similar maps were drawn in other states, primary by Republican-controlled legislatures.

Kareem Crayton, the Brennan Center's senior director for voting and representation, called the court's decision "a welcome surprise" and said challenges to the maps in Louisiana and Georgia were the most similar to the Alabama case.

While it was considering the Alabama case, the Supreme Court placed a hold on a lower court ruling in Louisiana allowing creation of a second majority-Black district. That's now likely to be lifted. A federal judge last year also ruled that some of Georgia's U.S. House and state legislative districts likely violated the Voting Rights Act, but he allowed the districts to be used in the 2022 elections because it was too close to the election to redraw them.

Maps in all three states could have to be redrawn for the 2024 elections.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said the court's action reaffirmed his own belief that Louisiana's map, drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature, violated the law.

"As I said when I vetoed it, Louisiana's current congressional map violates the Voting Rights Act," he said. "Louisiana's voting population is one-third Black. We know that in compliance with the principles of the Voting Rights Act, Louisiana can have a congressional map where two of our six districts are majority Black."

Rep. Troy Carter, a Black Democrat representing Louisiana's lone district that is majority Black, said the Legislature should immediately convene to draw a second majority-minority district.

"This Supreme Court ruling is a win not just for Alabamians but for Louisianans as well," Carter said in an emailed statement. "Rarely do we get a second chance to get things right  now Louisiana can."

In Georgia, Bishop Reginald Jackson, a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits challenging the state's congressional map, said he was ecstatic when he heard about the ruling and hopes it will boost their case.

He said he became involved in the lawsuit amid concerns that the state's Black population increased while the number of Black congressional representatives decreased with the last round of redistricting.

"So how could you have less Black representation when you have more Blacks moving into the state than before?" said Jackson, who presides over 534 African Methodist Episcopal churches in Georgia with over 90,000 parishioners.

The Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana cases mean Black voters will likely have an opportunity to elect candidates in three additional districts, said Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, one of the organizations that spearheaded voting rights challenges in the states.

She said other plaintiff groups' litigation in Texas could mean additional districts where minority voters "have the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice that don't exist now."

Texas state Rep. Victoria Neave Criado, a Democrat who chairs the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, said the case was a "major win for voting rights."

With the current court's decisions in other areas, such as last year's overturning of the constitutional right to abortion, she was concerned about the direction the justices would take with voting rights. She was relieved to see Thursday's outcome.

"As we are seeing the Latino community rise in many ways, we want to ensure that Latino power is translated into Latino political power," Neave Criado said.

Latinos and whites share an equal proportion of the Texas population, about 40% each, according to 2022 census figures.

Similar section 2 claims have been brought against numerous voting districts used for state legislatures and local governments around the country.

Attorney Mark Gaber argued a case this week alleging Washington's state legislative districts diluted the voting strength of Hispanic residents and will be arguing a similar case next week involving Native Americans and North Dakota's state legislative districts. He thinks Thursday's ruling will strengthen the case.

In Alabama, the question is what happens next. Steve Marshall, the state's Republican attorney general, said in a statement that he expects to continue defending the challenged map in federal court, including at a full trial.

The persistence of anti-Black hate crimes is an American tradition: What more than 30 years of federal data tells us The persistence of anti-Black hate crimes is an American tradition: What more than 30 years of federal data tells us Over 60% of all reported hate crimes are racially motivated At least 1,500 anti-Black hate crimes have been reported every year since 1991 Complete data based on official hate crime reporting is limited There are 3 main reasons why hate crimes go unreported Opportunity for nuanced conversation and data
WASHINGTON  Iran is providing Russia with materials to build a drone manufacturing plant east of Moscow as the Kremlin looks to lock in a steady supply of weaponry for its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, according to a U.S. intelligence finding released by the White House on Friday.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said U.S. intelligence officials believe a plant in Russia's Alabuga special economic zone could be operational early next year. The White House also released satellite imagery taken in April of the industrial location, several hundred miles east of Moscow, where it believes the plant "will probably be built."

Meanwhile, the Pentagon announced it will provide an additional $2.1 billion in long-term weapons aid for Ukraine. The new assistance package will include funding for more Patriot missile battery munitions, Hawk air defense systems and missiles, and small Puma drones that can be launched by hand.

Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted Friday that Ukrainian troops started a long-expected counteroffensive and were suffering significant losses. His comments came hours after a string of drone strikes inside Russian territory. One hit a residential building.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, also said a variety of indicators suggested Ukraine's counteroffensive had begun. It said the new phase of the war may also see the highest Ukrainian losses.

Kyiv has played down talk of a counteroffensive, reasoning that the less said about its military moves the better.

The regional governor of Voronezh, Alexander Gusev, said on the Telegram app that a drone crashed into a high-rise apartment building in the city of the same name, injuring three residents who were hit by shards of glass. Russian state media published photos of windows blown out and damage to the facade. Gusev said the drone was targeting a nearby airbase but veered off course after its signal was jammed.

Separately, Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov of the neighboring Belgorod region, which also borders Ukraine, said air defenses had shot down two unspecified targets overnight. An apartment building and private homes were damaged, he said, without saying by what. He also said a drone fell on the roof of an office building in the city of Belgorod. It failed to detonate but caught fire on impact, causing insignificant damage, he wrote.

Ukrainian authorities generally have denied any role in attacks inside Russia. Such drone strikes  there was even one near the Kremlin  along with cross-border raids into southwestern Russia have brought the war home to Russians.

In Ukraine, the governor of the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said Friday that water levels decreased by about 8 inches overnight on the western bank of the Dnieper, which was inundated starting Tuesday after the breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam upstream. Officials on both sides indicated about 20 people have died in the flooding.

President Joe Biden's administration publicly stated in December that it believed Tehran and Moscow were considering setting up a drone assembly line in Russia for the Ukraine war. The new intelligence suggests the project, in the Yelabuga region of Tatarstan, moved beyond conception.

Kirby said that U.S. officials also determined that Iran continues to supply the Russian military with one-way attack drones made in Iran: The drones are shipped via the Caspian Sea, from Amirabad in Iran to Makhachkala, Russia, and then are used by Russian forces against Ukraine.

As of May, Russia received hundreds of one-way attack drones, as well as drone production-related equipment, from Iran, according to the White House.

Iran said it provided drones to Russia before the start of the war but not since.

"This is a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful to Ukraine, to Iran's neighbors, and to the international community," Kirby said. "We are continuing to use all the tools at our disposal to expose and disrupt these activities including by sharing this with the public  and we are prepared to do more."

The Biden administration on Friday issued an advisory meant to help businesses and other governments put in place measures to ensure they are not inadvertently contributing to Iran's drone program.

The notice from the departments of Commerce, State, Justice and Treasury said it was "critical that private industry be aware of its legal obligations" to abide by U.S. export controls and sanctions.

The United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom in recent months all have issued rules designed to cut off the flow of drone components to Russia and Iran.

The Biden administration repeatedly publicized intelligence findings that detail how Iran is assisting the Russian invasion. The White House noted Iran also has weapons flowing its way from Russia.

Iran is seeking to purchase additional military equipment from Russia, including attack helicopters, radars and YAK-130 combat trainer aircraft, according to the White House. In April, Iran announced that it had finalized a deal to buy Su-35 fighter jets from Russia.
The mother of the man's girlfriend said the dangerous drop off on the river, which is popular for tubing, should be marked with a warning sign.
Kenosha County sheriffs deputies successfully arrested an armed and intoxicated man who reportedly was threatening violence at a Salem Lakes residence Thursday night.

Just before 10 p.m. deputies responded to the residence for reports of a man armed with a firearm who was reportedly pointing it in a neighbors face and threatening to kill people, according to a department post on social media.

Deputies quickly responded but once they were on scene the suspect retreated into his residence, still armed, with family members inside. A perimeter was set up and communication with the residence was also immediately started.

Deputies were successfully able to get all other family members released from inside the house and escorted to a safe location. In under 50 minutes, deputies successfully de-escalated the situation and the suspect exited. No one was injured.

Last night, as most of us were sleeping, Kenosha Sheriffs Department deputies were out in our community keeping us safe! the department posted on social media. This suspect is a convicted felon and should never have been in possession of a firearm to start! Our community now has one less convicted felon in possession of any firearms! Excellent work to all those involved!

The recovered firearm also reportedly had its serial numbers removed.

Mugshots: Kenosha County criminal complaints from June 8-9 Angela Elizabeth Ford Angela Elizabeth Ford, 34, of Hickory Hills, Illinois, faces charges of straw purchasing of firearm, and disorderly conduct. Tabatha Jean Greco Tabatha Jean Greco, 22, of Kenosha, faces charges of bail jumping. Randy Allen Grosch Randy Allen Grosch, 37, of Kenosha, faces charges of probation and parole. John Kenneth Harbecke John Kenneth Harbecke, 40, of Trevor, faces charges of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, intentionally point firearm at person, disorderly conduct, possession of drug paraphernalia, possession of THC (2nd+), and possession of narcotic drugs. Jherad Dominick Johnson Jherad Dominick Johnson, 22, of Kenosha, faces charges of probation and parole. Franchesca Annemarie Locascio Franchesca Annemarie Locascio, 30, of Kenosha, faces charges of possession of THC (2nd+), use or possess with intent to use masking agent, and bail jumping. Robert Cary Macharg Jr. Robert Cary Macharg Jr., 40, of Kenosha, faces charges of probation and parole. John David Olson Jr. John David Olson Jr., 32, of Kenosha, faces charges of operating while intoxicated (3rd offense), and possession with intent to deliver cocaine (between 1-5 grams). Tomeka Roshell Saucier Tomeka Roshell Saucier, 44, of Kenosha, faces charges of disorderly conduct (domestic abuse repeater). John Vincent Schuster John Vincent Schuster, 46, of Pewaukee, faces charges of first degree child sexual assault (sexual contact with person under age of 13). Jesse Lee Smith Jesse Lee Smith, 40, of North Chicago, Illinois, faces charges of possession of THC (2nd+).
HASTINGS  Brooke Draskovic of Lexington is one of only 12 students in Nebraska to receive a Reaching Your Potential Scholarship from the EducationQuest Foundation.

She is enrolled in the early childhood education program at Central Community College-Hastings,

Of the scholarship recipients, Draskovic is the only one attending a community college and the only one who isnt enrolled in a college or the university in Lincoln or Omaha. All 12 students who received a portion of the more than $72,000 in EducationQuest scholarship money have overcome obstacles to make college possible.

Draskovic graduated from Lexington High School in 2022. While still in the Lexington Public School system, she served as a physical education, math and classroom aide at an elementary school and taught a food and nutrition class at the middle school.

She is the daughter of Jesse and Martha Draskovic and has a younger brother, Jesse Jr.
An insurance agency has found that online booking travel agency, Booking.com, is the most affordable site when booking hotels in Macau, Hong Kong and China.

Data from InsureMyTrip shows that booking directly in hotels in Macau is the most expensive, costing USD337 on average, while Hotels.com and Expedia offer better rates.

On average, a hotel room booked through either of those sites costs $27.50 less per night, at $334.50. On Booking.com, the average price for a room is $320.80 and is the most cost-effective option 22% of the time, the U.K.-based agency said in a statement.

Meanwhile, data from the firm recommends booking directly through the hotel when traveling to Singapore, Bangkok, Thailand, Dubai, U.A.E., and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Travelers would have the same savings on Hotels.com and Expedia in Paris, New York, and Istanbul.

Expedia is the best for London, and when traveling to Macau, China or Hong Kong we would recommend Booking.com, the agency reiterated.

The study compares the prices of 50 hotels in 10 global tourist hotspots. Each city is assessed on its daily rates listed on Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com and directly through the hotels website.

Sarah Webber, director of marketing at InsureMyTrip commented, Knowing you didnt overpay can make a vacation that much better. As the cost of just about everything increases, were seeing travelers becoming savvier. The hope is this study will help save travelers not only money, but time.

The general finding was that Booking.com was the least affordable site across 10 cities internationally. Hotels were assessed for the number of times they were the most affordable, and Booking.com was the most affordable site only 129 times. It also has the highest average price of $342.96.

The group chose 50 hotels in 19 cities, 10 in the U.S. and nine international cities (New York was included in both data sets), based on the cities with the most international arrivals. The search was for a double room for two people for one night between August 18 to 19, concluded on the same day to avoid price fluctuations.

Staff Reporter
In 1991, the Saint Nicolas district in Le Mans paid tribute to the winners of the 24 Hours race by hosting a Hollywood-style Walk of Fame on a pedestrian street. This is how a monument dedicated to Jacky Ickx, along with Derek Bell and Henry Pescarolo, was created. Jacky Ickx is a Belgian champion who won the race six times, with three victories being consecutive. A set of bronze plaques adorning the citys sidewalks immortalize the hand molds, and in some cases, footprints, of the race-winning drivers.

The bronze plaques feature the year, the names of the winners, their impressions, and a facsimile of their respective signatures. Interestingly, among the plaques of the winning drivers, there is also a plaque honoring a beloved virtual driver of Macau fans. This is the plaque of Michel Vaillant, a comic book character created by the genius Jean Graton, who also wrote a book titled Rendez-vous a Macao. The hands on that plaque belong to its creator. Its worth mentioning that in 2018, Jean Gratons son, Philippe Graton, also visited the city during that years Macau Grand Prix to launch a second book set in Macau, featuring the figures of Andre Couto and Sacha Fenestraz. Philippe even attended the following years Festival Rota das Letras, where he presented a photography exhibition.

The plaques were temporarily removed in 2019 due to urban renovations but have returned to the streets of Le Mans this year to properly celebrate the Centenary. They have been reinstalled along a path that connects the north exit of the Gare de Le Mans to Bollee Square, along General Leclerc Avenue.

More than just a tourist landmark, these plaques are a way to connect the city to the races and the drivers who have made it famous. They serve as a token of gratitude for a hundred years of recent history in this beautiful ancient city. SAC
The Macao Consumer Council (CC) has suggested local residents be mindful of possible breaches in the latest pitching schemes operated by certain mainland realtors.

The CC has noted some mainland realtors have started rolling out zero or even negative down payment schemes for the purchase of real estate properties. Under these schemes, developers will usually remunerate buyers with furniture or other consumable coupons against the down payments.

After contacting competent authorities on the mainland, the CC confirmed these schemes might not be fully legal, and mainland authorities said investigations would be launched against illegal practices.

To avoid loss or legal risks, the CC has suggested local residents be especially careful when purchasing real estate properties on the mainland, in light of the legal differences between the two places.

Specifically, it suggests interested buyers become familiar with, ask for and verify information before making a decision. Furthermore, checking legally required licenses  commonly referred to as the Five Licenses  is a critical step in the process of making a purchase.

The identity and eligibility of developers, the registered use of land and the conditions of sale, among other details, must be verified before making a purchase. Making payments to an eligible bank account is also crucial, the CC added. AL
A former executive at ByteDance, the Chinese company which owns the popular short-video app TikTok, says in a legal filing that some members of the ruling Communist Party used data held by the company to identify and locate protesters in Hong Kong.

Yintao Yu, formerly head of engineering for ByteDance in the U.S., says those same people had access to U.S. user data, an accusation that the company denies.

Yu, who worked for the company in 2018, made the allegations in a recent filing for a wrongful dismissal case filed in May in the San Francisco Superior Court. In the documents submitted to the court he said ByteDance had a superuser credential  also known as a god credential  that enabled a special committee of Chinese Communist Party members stationed at the company to view all data collected by ByteDance including those of U.S. users.

The credential acted as a backdoor to any barrier ByteDance had supposedly installed to protect data from the C.C.Ps surveillance, the filing says.

Yu said he saw the god credential being used to keep tabs on Hong Kong protesters and civil rights activists by monitoring their locations and devices, their network information, SIM card identifications, IP addresses and communications.

ByteDance said in a statement that Yus accusations were baseless.

Its curious that Mr. Yu has never raised these allegations in the five years since his employment for Flipagram was terminated in July 2018, the company said, referring to an app that ByteDance later shut down for business reasons. His actions are clearly intended to garner media attention.

We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint, ByteDance said.

Charles Jung, Yus lawyer and a partner at the law firm Nassiri & Jung, said Yu chose to raise the allegations because he was disturbed to hear the recent Congressional testimony of TikToks CEO when Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean, vehemently denied Chinese authorities had access to user data.

Telling the truth openly in court is risky, but social change requires the courage to tell the truth, Jung said. Its important to him that public policy be based on accurate information, so hes determined to tell his story.

TikTok is under intense scrutiny in the U.S. and worldwide over how it handles data and whether it poses a national security risk. Some American lawmakers have expressed concern that TikToks ties to ByteDance means the data it holds is subject to Chinese law.

They also contend that the app, which has over 150 million monthly active users in the U.S. and more than a billion users worldwide, could be used to expand Chinas influence.

During the combative March House hearing, lawmakers from both parties grilled Chew over his companys alleged ties to Beijing, data security and harmful content on the app. Chew repeatedly denied TikTok shares user data or has any ties with Chinese authorities.

To allay such concerns, TikTok has said that it would work with Oracle to store all U.S. data within the country.

In an earlier court filing, Yu accused ByteDance of serving as a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party by promoting nationalistic content and demoting content that does not serve the partys aims. He also said that ByteDance was responsive to the Communist Partys requests to share information.

Yu also accused ByteDance of scraping content from competitors and users to repost on its sites to exaggerate key engagement metrics. He says he was fired for sharing his concerns about wrongful conduct he saw with others in the company.

In mainland China, ByteDance operates Douyin, which is targeted at the domestic market. TikTok is its global app that is available in most other countries. It was also available in Hong Kong until TikTok pulled out of the market in 2020 following the imposition of a sweeping national security law.

Anyone who tries to open TikTok from within Hong Kong will see a message that reads We regret to inform you that we have discontinued operating TikTok in Hong Kong.

ZEN SOO, HONG KONG, MDT/AP
Some condominium owners have complained about being forced to share land use tax, which should be paid by property developers, lawmaker Ron Lam disclosed in a statement yesterday.

These affected realty buyers have sought help from the lawmaker.

Lam disclosed that these buyers have purchased newly finished realty units from an undisclosed developer. They have not yet officially registered their ownerships of the condominiums with the government.

Under this scenario, the lawmaker noted, land use tax should be borne by the developer, out of the fact that the condominiums are not yet legally owned by the buyers.

More importantly, the taxation letter was sent to the developer, signalling that the developer is solely responsible for the settlement of the tax. The lawmaker added that should legal registration be complete, owners will respectively receive taxation letters from the Financial Services Bureau (DSF), implying that no referral by the developer is necessary.

Moreover, the lawmaker highlighted that despite there being no regulations on transactions of brand-new real properties, developers forcing buyers to pay tax under contract  which he noted as a real-life scenario  is unreasonable.

Even so, Lam highlighted, this will only arise in contractual and civil obligations, rather than tax obligations.

On the other hand, the lawmaker was also told that property buyers were required by the developer to sign authorization letters, which will empower the developer to segment or segregate sections of land from the original land plot, as well as conduct any actions and sign any public or private documents.

The authorization letters also empower the developer to represent the signatories in court to the extent that the law permits, such as in court cases concerning conflicts in ownership. The developer will also be empowered to sub-authorize to third parties.

The developer also cited the Civil Code to prevent nullification of the authorization letters without the consent of the developer, according to the lawmaker.

Another scenario is that in transactions relating to brand-new real property units, terms unfair to buyers are often found, such as requiring buyers to accept any alterations to public areas and advertisings on external walls.

The lawmaker did not rule out the possibility that the proposed alterations are necessary, but added that sufficient explanations should be made to buyers so that they can understand the requirements. Meanwhile, costs related to the alterations should be borne by the developer.

He also reminded that unit owners gain an understanding of the documents before signing.
China has launched a ZK 1A carrier rocket at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China to transport a total of 26 satellites into space, setting a new record for the most spacecraft launched by a single Chinese rocket.

The 30-meter, solid-propellant rocket blasted off at 12:10 pm on Wednesday and soon placed the satellites including the Shiyan 24A and 24B experimental satellites into preset orbits.

The 26 satellites are tasked with carrying out technological demonstrations and commercial remote-sensing operations, according to CAS Space, a Beijing-based rocket company owned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Before the mission, the domestic record for the most satellites flown on a single mission was held by the first flight of the modified version of the Long March 8 rocket in February last year, which deployed 22 satellites. The world record is held by SpaceXs Falcon 9, which lifted 143 satellites in January 2021.

The ZK 1A conducted its debut flight at the Jiuquan center in July last year, becoming the countrys largest and most powerful solid-propellant rocket by that time.

The rocket model has a length of 30 meters, a diameter of 2.65 meters and a liftoff weight of 135 metric tons. It is capable of sending satellites with a combined weight of 1.5 tons into a typical sun-synchronous orbit about 500 kilometers above Earth.

The rocket features a strong carrying capacity, high accuracy, a reliable design, high cost-efficiency, short prelaunch preparations, low requirements on support infrastructure and is one of the best solid-propellant carrier rockets in the world, the company said.

Yang Yiqiang, a senior rocket scientist and founder of CAS Space, said the ZK 1A is an ideal option for launching small and medium-sized satellites. It has enriched the service portfolio of the Chinese carrier rocket fleet.

According to him, the rocket launched on Wednesday was one of the first manufactured in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province.

The CAS Space rocket production complex, in Guangzhous Nansha district, is the countrys southernmost manufacturing facility for carrier rockets. It has an area of 40 hectares and an initial annual production capacity of 30 rockets. ChinaDaily
Sands China Ltd. hosted the MICE & Luxury Forum yesterday as part of The Macao Showcase, a three-day event aimed at bringing the best of Macau to Singapore.

The forum took place in-person at the main venue in the Sands Expo & Convention Centre of Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, while a hybrid format took place within a sub-venue at The Londoner Macao.

The MICE & Luxury Forum featured a lineup of international thought leaders and MICE specialists discussing the latest trends and key issues in the industries across five sessions including, Luxury Hospitality: The New Playbook for Building Guest Experiences, Technology in Events: How to Navigate the Journey Ahead?, Meetings & Events in a Post Pandemic World: Status Quo or A New Game?, Marketing a Destination: What Makes a World Class Meetings & Events Locale?, and Luxury Retail: Setting a New Pace.

At the hybrid event, students from the University of Macau, Macao Polytechnic University, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macao Institute for Tourism Studies and City University of Macau as well as MICE association members attended the forum virtually via Smart Stage, Macaus first hybrid meetings space and sophisticated Extended Reality (XR) studio. Utilising cutting-edge technology, including professional broadcast quality live-streaming capability and hologram functionality, the Macau audience was able to interact in real-time with panellists and attendees in Singapore. This immersive experience provided them with an excellent platform to learn from the industrys brightest minds and keep abreast of the latest trends.

The hybrid MICE & Luxury Forum is Sands Chinas latest initiative to further its cooperation with tertiary institutions and industry associations to help nurture the growth of local youth, incubate much-needed talent for large-scale meetings and conferences to be hosted in Macau, and add to Macaus pool of human resources. It is also a project of the Sands MICE Academy, a new sub-academy of the Sands China Academy established in March 2023. Supporting the Macao Government Tourism Offices tourism + MICE initiative, Sands MICE Academy aims to enhance the overall competitiveness of the Greater Bay Area as a preferred international MICE destination by utilising the companys resources.

Staff Reporter
ANOTHER VIEW | WALL STREET JOURNAL

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has spent more than two years promising foreign leaders that the U.S. is committed to a new global deal to raise taxes on large companies. Now Republicans in Congress have a warning for the rest of the world: Don't believe her.

All 25 Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee recently co-sponsored a bill that would impose retaliatory taxes on any country that implements the tax rules to which Yellen has agreed. It targets tech taxes aimed at U.S. firms and the proposed global minimum corporate tax that would be set at 15%.

Those are the two pillars of the tax agreement negotiated at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which Yellen endorsed in June 2021.

The first pillar lets other countries impose special taxes on multinational tech companies. The second pillar allows a country such as France or Germany to impose a "top-up" tax on an American company if the U.S. firm's effective global tax rate falls below 15%. We've warned from the start that Yellen's participation in this tax circus is bad policy, bad law and bad diplomacy  and now here we are.

The policy ploy was that the Biden administration could use a global tax increase to blunt the competitive deadweight of its proposed corporate tax increases on U.S.companies. But the OECD resisted setting the minimum tax rate anywhere near the level the administration sought for the U.S.

European and other negotiators also outfoxed Yellen by securing favorable treatment for tax credits preferred in Europe while punishing the sort of credits and deductions that Congress traditionally offers U.S.companies. The result is a global tax regime that, if implemented, would make the U.S. even less competitive rather than more so.

The Republican bill aims to discourage other countries from pressing ahead with the OECD plan. The enforcement mechanism would be a retaliatory surtax, starting at 5% and rising to 20%, on corporate and capital income earned in the U.S. by companies and wealthy individuals from countries that impose versions of the pillar-one and pillar-two taxes on U.S. firms.

A tax war could be as bad as the problem it's trying to solve, but the bill won't become law given a Democratic Senate and President Joe Biden's veto pen  and it doesn't need to pass to work. The point is to warn other governments that Yellen wasn't speaking on behalf of America's tax writers when she approved the OECD deal.

Capitol Hill's opposition has stretched across two Congresses (with new Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith picking up the baton from predecessor Kevin Brady) and will extend into a Republican administration if one arrives in 2025.

That's good news for U.S.companies, and a major diplomatic embarrassment for Yellen as Congress warns other governments to treat her tax promises skeptically. A Treasury secretary is supposed to promote policies that boost the U.S. economy instead of searching for gimmicks that punish American firms in the name of raising more tax revenue from overseas.
A DeForest man was sentenced Thursday to 10 years in prison for soliciting sex from a 13-year-old girl last year by taking advantage of her dependence on nicotine vaping products.

Kameron M. Anderson, 24, only said, I am very sorry, before Dane County Circuit Judge David Conway handed down the sentence.

His attorney, state assistant public defender Erin Nagy, said that while Anderson did not want to speak, he wanted Nagy to express on his behalf his sincere apologies and to say that he wants to get his high school equivalency degree and to better himself.

Anderson pleaded guilty in April to soliciting a child for prostitution and exposing a child to harmful material. As part of a plea agreement a charge of repeated sexual assault of a child was dismissed.

According to a criminal complaint, Anderson took advantage of the girl by exploiting her dependence on nicotine vaping products, which she was too young to buy for herself. When she was unable to pay for them, the complaint states, Anderson offered to let her pay with sex.

The girl and her parents did not come to court for Thursdays sentencing, but in written statements they said their family is still shattered by what Anderson did.

I want you to know this is the worst year of my life and (Kameron) Anderson has put me through hell and back, the girl wrote in a victim impact statement.

Assistant District Attorney John Rice, reading from a statement by the girls parents, said their daughter remains in a crisis state and that the entire family is stressed by what she is going through.

Conway said Anderson took advantage of the girls young age and her dependency on nicotine, both of which made her vulnerable. He noted that Anderson had been found delinquent as a juvenile of three counts of first-degree sexual assault of a child but until his arrest in this case he had no adult criminal record.

While Conway acknowledged that Anderson has faced mental health challenges, he said it appeared Anderson tried to deflect the blame for his actions by blaming others or blaming his own use of alcohol or failure to take medications prescribed for him.

Youre rationalizing in order to take the blame off yourself, Conway said. I dont think that you yourself are grasping the impact that these events are having on a young child.

But he also said Anderson deserved some credit for ultimately cooperating with police and not putting the girl and her family through a trial.

Rice asked for a prison term of 15 years, while Nagy and a state Department of Corrections presentence report recommended four to five years. Nagy said its likely that the state will seek to have Anderson indefinitely confined as a sexual predator when his prison sentence is done, so the shorter sentence made sense.

In addition to the prison sentence, Anderson will serve eight years of extended supervision after his release. He will also have to be listed on the state Sex Offender Registry for 15 years when his supervision is finished.
Accompanied often by his two dogs, U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker is a familiar figure Downtown, especially around lunchtime, and even among those fortunate not to have appeared before him in court.

With a golden retriever named Lola and a golden doodle whose once-red hair earned her the name Lucy, Crocker is often seen walking Capitol Square, taking a stroll with the dogs he began bringing to work with him during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our side gig is to put the squirrels back in the trees, Crocker said.

Crocker, 65, plans to make more time for helping animals in the coming year, among other pursuits away from the law, as he retires from the job hes held for 32 years.

As the workload for the district court judges at Madisons federal courthouse has grown, so have Crockers responsibilities.

The exact date of Crockers retirement is still an open issue. While his current eight-year appointment officially ends on Jan. 21, discussions are underway to keep him on until April. And even then, Crocker said, he will still likely be around for most of the year helping the new magistrate judge, whomever that may be, get comfortable in the role, continuing some duties on the bench and behind the scenes.

Known for having an informal style during the criminal arraignments where he is most often seen by the public, Crocker said his aim is to put participants at ease and to make sure everyone knows what to expect, whether its during jury selection for civil trials  which he said can even drift into discussions of the virtues of dogs versus cats as he gets to know the jury panel  or a telephone conference with a prison inmate who has filed a lawsuit over a problem encountered at an institution.

What you see in court is who I am after the proceedings are over, Crocker said. Im a pretty breezy, informal person.

In a statement on Crockers retirement announcement, U.S. Chief Judge James Peterson praised Crocker as having impeccable integrity, extraordinary diligence, and a unique sense of humor.

As anyone who has worked with or appeared before him knows, Judge Crocker is quite literally irreplaceable, Peterson wrote. But well have to begin taking applications this summer.

Crocker is a Madison native, a graduate of West High Schools class of 1976, which also produced Olympic champion speedskater Eric Heiden, state 4th District Court of Appeals Judge Brian Blanchard, Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington, former Capital Times reporter Mike Ivey, former Madison Police Chief Mike Koval and actress Sarah Day.

After getting his law degree at Northwestern University, Crocker went to work in 1983 as a clerk for U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb in Madison. He then worked as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., and in Chicago, and had a brief stint in private practice.

In 1992, at age 33, Crocker was hired by Crabb and her colleague, U.S. District Judge John Shabaz, to be magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. He was hired, he said, based on his background in criminal work. Hes been reappointed to the eight-year post three times.

While Crocker initially did almost exclusively criminal work  such as reviewing and signing search and arrest warrants, presiding at criminal arraignments and making preliminary rulings on pretrial motions in criminal cases  his job has expanded over time to include presiding at some civil trials. Federal rules require that the parties in those civil cases agree to allow a magistrate judge to hear their case.

Magistrate judges do not take guilty pleas or sentence defendants in criminal cases, a role thats solely for district court judges.

Crocker said he wasnt disappointed not to make the cut when he applied to be a district court judge, when there were openings that went to Peterson and U.S. District Judge William Conley.

What Im doing now is a better fit for my skill set, he said.

And hes enjoyed every minute of it: If there was ever a bad day here, I cant recall it, Crocker said. Its just been very fulfilling.

Whats next, Crocker said, is definitely not law. He said hell give that up with no regrets. He has no plans to work in private practice and absolutely doesnt want to become a mediator, as many judges do in retirement.

Instead, he and his wife, Shirley  both dog people  are looking to spend time volunteering for the Dane County Humane Society and for the Vilas Zoo. He said he also once volunteered for the Red Cross and may return to that as well, and to volunteering at local food pantries.

A successor to Crocker will be chosen by Conley and Peterson, who will pick from a pool of applicants narrowed down by a local committee. The process is locally driven and different from the process of choosing district court judges, who are appointed for life by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

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The biggest change to Madisons bus system in a quarter century, a true transformation, is just days away.

For years, the Metro Transit system has delivered a lot of coverage, busing into and out of neighborhoods around the city. The tradeoff, though, has been slower service, longer rides and transfers, especially for those with low incomes and minorities.

The new system that takes effect Sunday, however, focuses more on main arteries. Itll mean more frequent service and fewer transfers for riders. But the tradeoff for this type of system is longer walks to bus stops for some people.

Our service is going to change instantly overnight, Metro spokesperson Mick Rusch said, adding that the biggest initial concern is making sure everyone is aware of the change and the new way of doing things. To help with that, we have and will have staff out at various locations throughout the service area to answer questions, plan trips, and help people get where they need to.

On Sunday, when ridership is smaller, Metro will start a slow rollout of the sweeping network redesign that promises more frequent and consistent service, better links to outlying areas, removal of buses from lower State Street, immediate closure of three of four transfer points and all 2,000 stops seeing some sort of change.

The next day, the redesign will more fully impact riders taking the bus to jobs, appointments, and other places as the work week starts.

But some fear what will happen.

People are apprehensive and resigned, said Susan De Vos, president of Madison Area Bus Advocates, which has been critical of the redesign and the process. They and I anticipate enormous suffering. Despite claims to the contrary, there were serious flaws in the equity analysis. Other complaints deal with such issues as community engagement.

Why the change

Metro Transits ridership suffered during the pandemic but is rebounding.

Ridership had already been declining, with a total 15.5 million riders in 2014 gradually dropping to 13 million in 2019, the last full year before the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, ridership plummeted to 4.7 million and ticked up to 5.5 million the next year. A preliminary count shows ridership increasing to 8.3 million in 2022, with forecasts of 10.3 million this year and 13.2 million in 2026, which would top the total in the year before the pandemic.

The system had a daily average ridership of about 38,000 weekdays before the pandemic and roughly 28,700 now.

The transit network before the pandemic had challenges and equity issues, City Transportation Director Tom Lynch said. People of color and low-income individuals had greater transfer rates and longer bus rides. Bus routes were slow and infrequent. The transfer point system could be unreliable where people would miss their connecting bus, adding 30 minutes to their trip. The system focused on Downtown commuters, with less service for midday, evening, and weekend travelers.

The network redesign solves many of these problems and gives us a framework where we can grow by extending lines and making routes more frequent, he said.

The challenge has been working through many design issues across the city, city transportation planner Mike Cechvala said. Its difficult to solve one problem without creating another, but we feel weve put together a strong network that will work well, he said. With more funding, it would be easier, but that will always be the case.

Among the biggest changes, routes are shifting from numbers to letters.

Routes A and B will be the core of the new system, Cechvala said. People can look forward to 15-minute service on Mineral Point Road, East Washington Avenue, Northport, and Park Street, where they have never had that level of service before. Most of the time, there will be a next bus coming soon and they wont need to know the schedule as much as they do today.

Route A, which runs roughly from East Towne to West Towne, starts Sunday as a regular bus route with 15-minute service hitting all stops and using normal vehicles. In mid to late 2024, it will become the initial BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) route with new articulated, electric buses and streamlined service only serving BRT stations. Route B, which runs from the North Side to Downtown, down Park Street and into Fitchburg and back with 15-minute service, is the future north-south BRT route.

Amid concerns about gaps in service, the City Council approved 17 amendments to Metros draft plan. The biggest changes add Route L that connects the North Side to the Owl Creek Neighborhood on the Southeast Side and Route O, a loop that touches Fish Hatchery Road, Goodman Pool, Badger Road, Rusk Avenue and Alliant Energy Center on the South Side, Cechvala said.

There will be additional service in Sun Prairie, and service in Fitchburg and Middleton will be modified.

Meanwhile, the north, east and west transfer points will close on Sunday.

Right away, more people will be able to reach more destinations in a reasonable amount of time, Lynch said. The system is simpler and easier to use. Riders wont have to memorize routes that only run at certain times. Instead, many of the routes will be frequent, running every 15 minutes or so. Additionally, service on evenings and weekends will be much better, helping those with non-traditional work hours get to where they need to be.

But there are tradeoffs.

Some people will need to walk farther to catch the bus, Lynch said. Some people are accustomed to a route with limited service on their neighborhood street that wont be there anymore. However, our studies have shown that the people who receive the most benefits from the new system, are the people who rely on it the most  people with low incomes.

Jonathan Mertzig, another Madison Area Bus Advocates member, said he was shocked at how bad most of the new trip times are for his neighborhood on the West Side, perhaps because he lives near the West Transfer Point, which is closing. It seems like the new network might worsen a lot of trips, he said. I hope Im just an outlier and the results are better on average for most folks.

Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said the redesign will provide the Madison Metro Transit service that this city needs and deserves.

We havent updated Metro routes in more than 20 years and in that time a lot has changed about our city, she said. Job centers are spread out across Madison, and housing is being built across our community.

Based on extensive community input, the new system expands access for neighborhoods that are low income and with higher populations of people of color, reducing transit times and the need to transfer.

UW-Madison students may see small differences in service, but because the campus already gets high levels of service the impacts will be limited, officials said. For the Madison schools, there will be limited changes in Metros supplemental school service to remove duplications and cover gaps, but the rollout was scheduled for the summer so adjustments can be made before the fall semester. Middle school students will be switching to yellow bus service, they said.

Driver training, concerns

Metro drivers have been training for the new routes for several months, and all will go through a training course and be given the opportunity for on-the-road familiarization with the new routes, Metro General manager Justin Stuehrenberg said.

Weve heard many positive things from drivers that have completed training, Stuehrenberg said. The routes are simpler and provide more time to recover schedules and use restrooms at the end of the lines than the current system. Some drivers continue to express some concern, but weve seen a shift for the better since the training classes started.

The city, meanwhile, is making capital improvements.

There are a handful of new concrete boarding platforms needed at new key stops, Cechvala said. Most of those are in place and ready to go. The new signs are being implemented now and are expected to be done before the change. There are also a handful of traffic signal and other roadway and parking changes to make turns. Most of those are underway or completed.

There arent any technical upgrades that are coming with the redesign, Rusch said, adding, We are looking at implementing new fare technology next year, but that will coincide more with the launch of our Bus Rapid Transit system.

There is no cost to the change because it will be the same number of buses most of the time running the routes, Cechvala said. There were some one-time costs such as the capital improvements ... and some planning and implementation costs, but they are low compared to our normal business, he said.

Spreading the word

The City Council approved the controversial changes on a 14-6 vote at 12:42 a.m. on June 8 after 80 public meetings  many online  and 17 amendments taking into account comments from the public.

Metro is now engaged in informing riders, officials said.

Our paid media outreach campaign is ongoing, Rusch said. We have Metro staff that are attending events and providing training sessions. Ride guide staff are also now out on the street and riding buses to let passengers know that this change is coming and offer to help plan their trips.

We will have people out there in the early days of the new service to direct people to new stops, Rusch said. The South Transfer Point is still located in a connection location, so to start, buses will continue to pull in there. We havent determined when this will happen yet, but all transfer points will be dismantled. When this happens at the south, regular Metro shelters will be placed there.

More than 50 ride guides wearing neon yellow vests have fanned out around the city to help riders find the closest available stop, identify which new route to take, and be available to help people plan their new routes using maps or apps.

Meanwhile, Metro has visited a number of agencies/organizations that serve those with disabilities, Rusch said. Weve been providing information to both caregivers and riders to provide assistance in learning the new system, he said.

Im looking forward to taking the new B route to work next week, Rhodes-Conway said. I expect that many regular riders will adjust easily to the new system, but I hope casual riders will seek out our ride guides and get help planning their trips  not just to work, but also to all the fun summer events Madison has to offer.

Others arent so sure.

Metro just hasnt really met the level of communications volume and quality Id expect for such a dramatic change and has bungled many key elements of managing this change, Mertzig said. It seems like were trying to pull off something very ambitious on a shoestring budget, and not really devoting the level of resources needed to make this network  both its rollout and its operation  a success for transit riders.

Making tweaks

No one expects the rollout to be flawless.

We are expecting to see passengers learning the new system and drivers becoming familiar with driving the routes, Rusch said. We will be asking for feedback from riders, drivers and supervisors to tell us how the new system is operating so that we can make any needed adjustments.

For students, We will implement the service over and above the base routes in August, Cechvala said. That will give us some time to assess if and where additional capacity is needed. We will continue to adjust as necessary.

Metro will likely make a few small schedule adjustments in August and again in December as it gets better data, Stuehrenberg said. More significant changes to routing, if needed, would wait until 2024, he said. We typically do service updates in August of each year.

We expect the number of people using our system to increase as compared to now, and eventually climb back to pre-COVID levels, he said. However, note that with fewer forced transfers we may see the number of people and fares go up, but the number of individual boardings go down because one person making a transfer makes two boardings.

A rider survey will be done some time in the next year, officials said.

Over the next two years we are making significant improvements to Metro with the network redesign and the east-west BRT, and we will continue to improve the system every year going forward, through the north-south BRT project and annual improvements to routes, Rhodes-Conway said.

Close Rylee Huebbe, of Middleton, left, with her mom, Kristen, and a family friend, Kennedy Carpenter, 7, of Sun Prairie, right, indulge in cotton candy from Lilys Magical Treats during Thursday's first Madison Night Market of the season on State Street. Marlene Patino Quinto, of Madison, left, performs traditional Colombian dance with Tanya Jaiswal, at back, a UW-Madison graduate student from India, and Jasmin Melo-Salas, of Madison, as the group CumbiaCachaca performs at Lisa Link Peace Park during Thursday's Madison Night Market. Pedestrians fill State Street for the first Madison Night Market of the season. The event featuring dozens of vendors, along with musical and dance performances, returns the second Thursday of each month through October. Local musician Becca Murray performs on State Street during last week's Madison Night Market. Eric De Los Santos, of Madison, plays the marimba near the food vendors during the first Madison Night Market of the season in Madison. Adarah Yde, 2, of Madison, digs in to some ice cream during the first Madison Night Market of the season on State Street in Madison. Event attendees check out the Dolce Home booth during the first Madison Night Market of the season on State Street in Madison. Shoppers browse the Love U Candle booth during the Madison Night Market. Photos: Scenes from the 2023 Madison Night Market See all that made the first Madison Night Market of 2023 come alive. Rylee Huebbe, of Middleton, left, with her mom, Kristen, and a family friend, Kennedy Carpenter, 7, of Sun Prairie, right, indulge in cotton candy from Lilys Magical Treats during Thursday's first Madison Night Market of the season on State Street. Marlene Patino Quinto, of Madison, left, performs traditional Colombian dance with Tanya Jaiswal, at back, a UW-Madison graduate student from India, and Jasmin Melo-Salas, of Madison, as the group CumbiaCachaca performs at Lisa Link Peace Park during Thursday's Madison Night Market. Pedestrians fill State Street for the first Madison Night Market of the season. The event featuring dozens of vendors, along with musical and dance performances, returns the second Thursday of each month through October. Local musician Becca Murray performs on State Street during last week's Madison Night Market. Eric De Los Santos, of Madison, plays the marimba near the food vendors during the first Madison Night Market of the season in Madison. Adarah Yde, 2, of Madison, digs in to some ice cream during the first Madison Night Market of the season on State Street in Madison. Event attendees check out the Dolce Home booth during the first Madison Night Market of the season on State Street in Madison. Shoppers browse the Love U Candle booth during the Madison Night Market.
Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher announced Friday that he wont run for U.S. Senate in 2024 against Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin, leaving an open GOP field with no declared candidates in the battleground state.

Gallagher was the highest-profile Republican said to be considering a run against Baldwin, of Madison, who is seeking a third term after an 11-point win in 2018. Baldwin is viewed as a formidable opponent due to her strong showing six years ago, her high profile across the state and her ability to raise money.

Democrats are defending 23 seats in the U.S. Senate in 2024, including two held by independents who caucus with Democrats. Thats compared with just 10 seats that Republicans hope to keep in their column.

Wisconsins other senator, Republican Ron Johnson, of Oshkosh, narrowly won reelection to a third term in November. Baldwin will be on the ballot in a presidential year in a state where four of the past six presidential elections have been decided by less than a percentage point.

Gallagher, in a statement, said his position chairing a House committee on China gives him a rare, bipartisan opportunity in Congress to help restore American strength, prevent war in the Pacific, and defend our basic freedoms from communist aggression.

Gallagher, a fierce critic of Beijing, said his work on the China committee while serving in Congress will be his focus. He said he will seek a fifth term representing northeast Wisconsin next year.

The announcement came the day before Baldwin and Wisconsin Democrats gather in Green Bay for their state convention. Republicans are meeting starting June 16 in La Crosse.

Several other Republicans are considering taking on Baldwin, but none have officially announced.

Gallaghers decision to opt out of the race leaves Republicans staring down another chaotic, messy, intra-party primary, said Wisconsin Democratic Party spokesperson Arik Wolk.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, representing northern Wisconsin in Congress since winning a special election in May 2020, has been traveling the state meeting with Republicans ahead of a potential Senate run.

Tiffany is a staunch backer of former President Donald Trump. As a member of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, Tiffany voted not to certify election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania, the only two states where objections were taken. Tiffany also signed on to a Republican lawsuit filed in Texas with the U.S. Supreme Court that would have thrown out Wisconsins presidential votes and instead had the election decided by the states Republican-controlled Legislature.

Others considering a Senate run are Madison businessman Eric Hovde, who lost in a Republican primary for Senate in 2018, Franklin businessman Scott Mayer and former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a staunch Trump supporter who backed false claims of fraud after the 2020 election.

Clarke tweeted Friday in response to Gallaghers news that none of the Republicans considering a run energizes or excites the base voter like I do.

Close Make no mistake, I am proud to be a Wisconsin progressive, re-elected Sen. Tammy Baldwin told some 300 supporters on Tuesday night. (PHOTO BY MICHELLE STOCKER) Sen. Tammy Baldwin speaks during her election night party held at the Monona Terrace in Madison. Supporters gathered at Monona Terrace for an election night party for Sen. Tammy Baldwin. U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin speaks during her election night party held at Monona Terrace Tuesday night. Rep. Mark Pocan speaks during an election night party for Sen. Tammy Baldwin at Monona Terrace in Madison. Lizzie Grams, deputy press secretary, (right) and Kandis Murphy, of Cambridge and a volunteer for the campaign, embrace during an election night party for Sen. Tammy Baldwin at the Monona Terrace in Madison. The crowd listens to speakers during an election night party for Sen. Tammy Baldwin at the Monona Terrace in Madison. Sen. Tammy Baldwin told supporters her victory represents a win over special interests. "After more than $14 million of nasty attack ads, it means nothing because I had something that they didnt: you," she said. The crowd celebrates the re-election of Sen. Tammy Baldwin at a party at the Monona Terrace in Madison on Tuesday night. Sen. Tammy Baldwin speaks during her election night party held at the Monona Terrace in Madison. Davette Baker, regional organizing lead with the Human Rights Campaign, celebrates the re-election of Sen. Tammy Baldwin at the Monona Terrace. Sen. Tammy Baldwin meets with the crowd during her election night party held at the Monona Terrace in Madison. Photos: Supporters celebrate at Sen. Tammy Baldwin election party At U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwins election night party at Monona Terrace in downtown Madison on Tuesday night, talk of the race being called early by CBS buzzed through the crowd as the doors opened at 8 p.m., the same time the polls closed. So when her picture flashed on the giant TV screen with a check mark for a projected win, it was almost anti-climactic. Make no mistake, I am proud to be a Wisconsin progressive, re-elected Sen. Tammy Baldwin told some 300 supporters on Tuesday night. (PHOTO BY MICHELLE STOCKER) Sen. Tammy Baldwin speaks during her election night party held at the Monona Terrace in Madison. Supporters gathered at Monona Terrace for an election night party for Sen. Tammy Baldwin. U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin speaks during her election night party held at Monona Terrace Tuesday night. Rep. Mark Pocan speaks during an election night party for Sen. Tammy Baldwin at Monona Terrace in Madison. Lizzie Grams, deputy press secretary, (right) and Kandis Murphy, of Cambridge and a volunteer for the campaign, embrace during an election night party for Sen. Tammy Baldwin at the Monona Terrace in Madison. The crowd listens to speakers during an election night party for Sen. Tammy Baldwin at the Monona Terrace in Madison. Sen. Tammy Baldwin told supporters her victory represents a win over special interests. "After more than $14 million of nasty attack ads, it means nothing because I had something that they didnt: you," she said. The crowd celebrates the re-election of Sen. Tammy Baldwin at a party at the Monona Terrace in Madison on Tuesday night. Sen. Tammy Baldwin speaks during her election night party held at the Monona Terrace in Madison. Davette Baker, regional organizing lead with the Human Rights Campaign, celebrates the re-election of Sen. Tammy Baldwin at the Monona Terrace. Sen. Tammy Baldwin meets with the crowd during her election night party held at the Monona Terrace in Madison.
After last-minute negotiations Wednesday, Republican legislative leaders and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers have struck a deal on an extensive bill increasing funding for local governments, a proposal that would now allow Milwaukee and Milwaukee County officials  instead of all voters  to decide whether to increase their local sales taxes.

The updated proposal, which also boosts the potential sales tax increase for Milwaukee County, would also allow counties and municipalities across Wisconsin to receive more funding than the amount allotted to them in the bill that passed the Assembly in May.

This compromise will be transformative for our communities and our state, and coming to an agreement in principle on major parts of this proposal is a significant milestone in my negotiations with Republican leaders over the past few months, Evers said in a statement.

The agreement would also include several boosts to education spending, including a more than $1 billion increase in spendable revenue for K-12 schools, a $325-per-pupil increase to revenue limits for the next two fiscal years, and per-pupil aid increases for school choice and independent charter schools.

For the local funding component of the bill, commonly referred to as shared revenue, the state would boost local aid by diverting 20% of the states 5% sales tax to all local communities. Republicans have been adamant those funds must be directed to local services like police, fire and emergency services.

Republicans won the argument, and the bill guarantees that new state revenue may only be used for police, fire, and EMS services, Vos said in a statement. And for the thousands of parents in the School Choice program who are worried about the ability of their child to continue receiving a fair education, were proud to say the program will grow, thrive and prosper.

The announcement comes one day after the Legislatures top Republicans said they would remove the Milwaukee provisions from the local funding measure unless they reached a deal on it with Evers this week.

Milwaukee measure

The proposal announced Thursday deals a win to Milwaukee officials, who have long opposed the original measure to allow the city and county to increase their sales taxes to fund pension debt only if voters approve the measure.

The original Milwaukee proposal also divided the Senate and Assemblys Republican leaders, with Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, in favor of a local government vote and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, calling that very low on our possibility list, preferring a public referendum.

The deal as announced would allow city and county officials to raise local sales taxes if they approve the measures with a two-thirds majority.

Vos said removing the public vote measure has likely led to some heartburn in our caucus, but he said Assembly Republicans are largely supportive of the new proposal.

The measure would boost direct local aid to all local communities except Milwaukee through Wisconsins shared revenue program. If signed into law, future state aid to communities and counties would be directly tied to the state sales tax. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have largely supported those provisions of the bill.

Divided chambers

But division surfaced between GOP leaders over a separate component in the bill allowing Milwaukee and Milwaukee County to increase their local sales tax revenue. Assembly Republicans passed a version of the bill allowing Milwaukee County to increase its 0.5% sales tax by 0.375 percentage points and Milwaukee to impose a 2% sales tax to fund pension debt, but only if voters approve those increases.

Before passing the amended version of the bill in May, Vos declared his chamber was done negotiating on the matter. However, LeMahieu said the following day he wants to strip the public vote measure from the bill and allow the Milwaukee Common Council and Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors to approve the local tax increases, a provision originally opposed by Vos but supported by Evers and local officials.

Striking a deal

On Wednesday, Vos said he would favor stripping the Milwaukee provisions entirely from the proposal unless the legislative leaders and Evers reach an agreement on the measure by the end of the week. LeMahieu later that day gave the same ultimatum, but moved the deadline from the end of the week to the end of Wednesday.

Ultimately, the public referendum requirement was dropped in favor of requiring local government votes in Milwaukee and Milwaukee County. The revised proposal also allows Milwaukee County to increase its 0.5% sales tax by 0.4 percentage points instead of the 0.375 percentage points in the version the Assembly passed.

When you work on a bill as historic and far-reaching as this one not everyone will get everything on their wish list, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said. Nevertheless, this deal helps our organization avoid the single biggest threat to achieving its goals and sets our region up for long-term success.

Education boost

Vos said the deal to increase per-pupil private voucher funding  giving K-8 students an $1,101 increase and giving high school students nearly a $3,000 increase  helped convince him to remove the public referendum requirement in Milwaukee.

The measure also sets aside $50 million to improve reading outcomes for K-12 students, an amount Republicans requested for a separate reading proposal, though Evers statement says its not yet determined how the money will be implemented.

Evers said ensuring the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County avoid the imminent fiscal cliff was one of the most important priorities in my conversations with Republican leaders.

Its why it has been especially important for me that this compromise provides the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County the critical opportunity to avoid the imminent possibility of bankruptcy, Evers added.

Wisconsins shared revenue program was created in 1911 and initially provided local municipalities 70% of state income tax collections, while counties and the state received the remaining 20% and 10%, respectively.

Shared revenue remains among the states biggest programs. But the past few decades it has dropped from 12.5% of the general fund budget in 1994-95 to less than 5% now, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

Every community in Wisconsin is impacted differently by this proposal, Senate Minority Leader Melissa Agard, D-Madison, and Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine, said in a joint statement. For some, this is progress, for others, it doesnt cut the mustard. What we know for sure is that our work is not complete  we must continue to pursue legislation that empowers local governments and creates communities where people want to grow, live, and work.

State Journal reporter Mitchell Schmidt contributed to this report.
WAR IN UKRAINE

KHERSON, Ukraine  Russian forces Thursday shelled a southern Ukrainian city inundated by flooding in a catastrophic dam collapse, Ukrainian officials said, forcing a suspension of some rescue efforts hours after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy went to the area to assess the damage.

The fresh fighting returned security issues to the region, two days after the collapse of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River set off a scramble to evacuate residents in dozens of flooded areas and get aid to those still there.

Officials on both sides said least 14 people were killed in the flooding, thousands are homeless and tens of thousands are without drinking water after the collapse. Kyiv accused Moscow of blowing up the dam and its associated hydropower plant, which the Kremlin's forces controlled, while Russia said Ukraine bombarded it.

The ensuing flooding ruined crops, displaced land mines, wrought widespread environmental damage and set the stage for electricity shortages. Drone footage Wednesday showed the ruined dam falling into the river and hundreds of submerged homes, greenhouses and even a church  but no scorch marks or shrapnel scars typical of an attack from above, as Russia alleges.

In the city of Kherson, the largest municipality affected by the floods, Russian shelling echoed not far from a square where emergency crews and volunteers were dispensing aid Thursday. Nine people were wounded, including two emergency workers, a police officer, a doctor and a volunteer from Germany.

Zelenskyy's office said Moscow's forces also continued to shell Ukrainian-held areas near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is the largest such facility in Europe and occupied by Russian forces. Addressing concerns after the dam's collapse, U.N.'s atomic energy watchdog said Thursday the plant could draw enough water to cool its shut-down reactors.

The high water brought new misery and death to a country suffering after 15 months of war. Officials said more than 6,000 people have been evacuated on both sides of the river.

Residents of Oleshky, south of the dam site, accused Russian authorities of not doing enough to help civilians in the town. They formed a group of over 8,000 people to share messages about information such as stranded and trapped residents. Mayor Yevhen Ryshchuk said Russian forces are not letting people leave, and he and two volunteers said Russian forces confiscated boats from residents and volunteers.
Pauls Neibaur to represent Idaho in national scholarship competition





Claire Neibaur, Distinguished Young Woman of Idaho for 2023, will be leaving on June 14 from her home in Paul to compete in the national stage for the title of Distinguished Young Woman of America for 2023.

Together with 49 winners from other states, Neibaur will be in Mobile, Alabama, for two weeks preparing to win over $150,000 in cash scholarships, according to a news release.

The competition spans three days from June 23 through June 25. Neibaur will be assessed in five categories that represent the core spirit and purpose of the scholarship program: scholastics, interview, fitness, talent and self-expression. She will have the opportunity to participate in team-building exercises and community service projects during her two weeks in Mobile.

Neibaur is a 2023 graduate of Minico High School. If awarded the national title, she will represent DYW across the country next year by promoting the programs Be Your Best Self initiative that is comprised of five elements: Be Healthy, Be Involved, Be Studious, Be Ambitious and Be Responsible.

World Refugee Day celebration set for June 16 in Twin Falls

The College of Southern Idaho Refugee Programs is hosting the Magic Valley Refugee Day Celebration at 6 p.m. on Friday, June 16, at the Twin Falls City Park. Diverse food from eight different countries will be served free of charge at the beginning of the program and cultural performances will begin at 7 p.m. World Refugee Day will be celebrated in Boise and Twin Falls. In the first half of 2023, Boise, Nampa and Twin Falls have welcomed 500 individuals from 13 countries.

Also:

The district staff for Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson will host mobile office hours in Shoshone on Wednesday, beginning with a discussion from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Shoshone City Hall, 207 S Rail Street W.

Times-News
The First Amendment of the United States Constitution is an essential guarantee that protects individuals fundamental right to freedom of speech. Its significance cannot be emphasized enough.

Throughout history, this right has played a crucial role in our republic, serving as a cornerstone that fosters open dialogue, encourages the exchange of ideas, and ensures government accountability to the people.

Recent media coverage of a high school student in Kellogg, who was prohibited from walking in his graduation ceremony, has sparked discussions about the boundaries of free speech and its impact on individuals livelihoods.

The First Amendment safeguards several fundamental rights, including freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition. Among these, freedom of speech lies at the very core of our society. It not only guarantees individual autonomy but also nurtures intellectual growth and promotes a vibrant marketplace of ideas.

Even Supreme Court case law recognizes that students First Amendment rights extend within the confines of public schools. In the landmark case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), the Court affirmed that students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

In Kellogg, the high school student faced consequences for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. In the last few days of school, graduating students were given the opportunity to offer some words of wisdom to the student body. The student at the center of the controversy made the remark, Guys are guys and girls are girls. There is no in between.

Did school administrators consider this young mans speech offensive and discriminatory? If thats the case, then by the same reasoning, every basic biology textbook would be deemed discriminatory.

Consider where we find ourselves now: The basic principles of biology are now regarded as hateful and discriminatory speech. It is important to note that this isnt happening in some distant location like Massachusetts or at a school in Democrat-controlled California; this is taking place right here in Idaho.

Depriving a student of the opportunity to participate in their graduation ceremony for exercising their First Amendment rights establishes a concerning precedent. Furthermore, it has been reported that the job this young man had lined up for the summer has since been revoked. It is never acceptable for a student or an adult to have their livelihood stripped away for exercising their First Amendment rights.

It is crucial to approach the issue of speech suppression and censorship with vigilance. We are witnessing the lefts attempt to control and manipulate the boundaries of acceptable speech undeAr the guise of tolerance and inclusivity. This ideological manipulation has resulted in the labeling of differing viewpoints as hate speech, stifling open dialogue, and inhibiting the expression of different perspectives. It is vital to recognize that restrictions on free expression have far-reaching consequences for individual liberties, and we must resist this effort to control speech.

When the left claims they are not attempting to control what you say or do, dont believe them. That is absolutely what they are doing.
Idahoans know what it means to put in an honest days work. From the ranchers and farm workers who bring food to our tables, the factory worker punching a clock, and caregivers looking after aging family members  Idaho was built by working people.

Unfortunately, it is getting harder for most of us to get ahead.

If we look to the past we can learn a lot about the present and how we got here. In 1892, miners in North Idaho were forced to strike after owners demanded they work longer hours for less pay. The miners wanted to keep the living wages they had negotiated for all workers  not just the skilled subsurface miners, but the surface workers at the mine too. They understood that there is dignity in all work, a value that still unites Idahoans today.

In true Wild West fashion, deception and violence followed. These actions, and later disputes, became pivotal moments in the struggle for workers rights. Miners from a few small towns in Idaho showed the power of workers standing together in solidarity. Across the country, the labor movement grew, and with that came progress. The eight-hour workday, weekends off, pensions, safety standards, and more are benefits workers enjoy today thanks to our parents and grandparents being united for a better life.

Heres some more Idaho history: In 1985, Republicans in the Idaho Legislature overrode Democratic Gov. John Evans veto of the Right to Work law. Still in effect today, Right to Work is a policy designed to undermine the power of working people. While backers of these laws like to claim that they protect workers against being forced to join a union, the truth is federal law has long made that illegal. Its real purpose is to tilt the scales in favor of big corporations and further rig the system at the expense of working families.

We see the consequences of a decades-long campaign against workers and unions today. Wages are slow to rise while housing prices, grocery bills, and gas prices soar. The wealth of our towns and small businesses have been taken by corporate conglomerates, with record profits, while long-promised investments go unfulfilled. And craftily manufactured controversies, pushed by out-of-state interest groups, divide the working class and suppress our history.

It is said that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. That is why we must look at our past to move forward. Every worker deserves to be free to join a union, earn a fair wage, go to the hospital without going broke, and finally get some breathing room. Idaho Democrats are committed to building an economy that works for all of us.
The Bureau of Immigration (BI) and the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking (IACAT) formed a collaborative effort to fight the rising incidents of human trafficking in the country.

BI Commissioner Norman Tansinco who has long been vocal about the urgent need to combat the issue of human trafficking, has raised the concern over the alarming reports of trafficking in person, victimizing hundreds of Filipinos seeking jobs abroad.

This problem is both severe and complex. Hence there is a need for collaborative efforts between law enforcement agencies, non-governmental organizations, intelligence units, and the private sector, he added.

The efforts align with the recent Notice issued by INTERPOL, highlighting the escalating threat posed by large-scale human trafficking, where victims are duped into committing crimes within pseudo-call centers.

As early as last year, Philippine immigration authorities have closely monitored this modus, which INTERPOL said has transformed from a regional crime phenomenon to a global threat.

Victims are usually enticed through job advertisements online, only to find themselves trapped in online scam centers where they are forced to engage in criminal activities.

The INTERPOL notice describes the scheme as double-edged in nature, as it victimizes both the trafficked individuals and a second set of victims targeted by online fraud. The trafficked victims endure forced labor, extortion, physical and sexual exploitation, and even organ harvesting.

Simultaneously, the online scam centers perpetrate various fraudulent activities, such as investment scams, romance scams, and cryptocurrency-related fraud.

Since last year, BI has raised its alarm over the said scheme as young urban professionals continue to be recruited.

A victim repatriated last June 3 from Bangkok recounted his experience with the recruiters.

The male victim, 26 years old, arrived at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 2 on board a Philippine airlines flight.

The BI reported that he left late in May in the guise of being a tourist. Upon repatriation, he admitted that he was recruited to work in Thailand through an ad he saw on Facebook and was contacted on Telegram by a Chinese national. He stated that he was offered a salary of P40,000 a month, and was assisted by an airport personnel during his departure.

After arriving in Thailand, he was transferred to Laos without his consent, which made him seek assistance from the Philippine Embassy.

This is something we see almost every day. Professionals coming from good backgrounds being victimized by this huge syndicate. We have sounded the alarm on this since last year, and INTERPOL has already acknowledged that this is a major concern. Aspiring overseas workers should be wary of job offers received online, and only go through legal means to work abroad, he added.

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The Philippine Navys (PN) offshore patrol vessel, BRP Andres Bonifacio, is heading back to Manila after participating in the Indonesian naval exercise dubbed Komodo which was being held yearly somewhere in the waters between the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, the Chinese naval training ship Qi Jiguang will dock in Manila on June 14 for a goodwill port visit.

The Philippine warship was specifically tasked to conduct a simulated rescue operation during the closing stage of the Komodo.

The event is composed of the multinational photo exercise, maritime interdiction operation, and search and rescue exercise, wherein BRP Andres Bonifacio was designated to recover and provide assistance to a simulated person in distress at sea, Naval Task Group 80.5 public affairs office chief Lt. Jonathan Carretas said in a statement..

These years drill was held in the waters of Makassar, Indonesia.

Carretas said the whole-day activity ended with the traditional passing exercise initiated by the Indonesian Navy missile corvette KRI Sultan Hasanuddin.

(This was done) as a gesture of gratitude for the PNs participation as well as to convey their wish for a safe voyage back to the Philippines, Carretas said, adding that 193 PN personnel were deployed for the Komodo.

Naval Task Group 80.5 chief Comdr. Paul Michael Hechanova, returned the gesture with a congratulatory message for the successful conduct of this years Komodo naval exercises.

He also conveyed the enduring commitment of the PN to build a safe, secure, and prosperous maritime domain for all.

Komodo is a military exercise by the Indonesian Navy and is annually held between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. The first iteration of the naval exercise took place in 2014 in Indonesias Batam City.

This years exercises took place from June 4 to 8. The BRP Andres Bonifacio left Naval Operating Base Subic last May 29 to participate in these naval drills.

Komodo emphasized military operations other than war with navies responding to natural disasters, humanitarian assistance, and maritime threats.

The exercise had for its theme Partnership to Recover and To Rise Stronger to promote the spirit of collective awakening from the Covid-19 pandemic and increase friendship among countries for a better future, Carretas said.

According to the Chinese Embassy in Manila, their training vessel Qi Jiguang has left

Brunei where it conducted in-depth exchanges and environmental protection activities with the Royal Brunei Navy.

This is a Chinese PLA Naval training ship for a goodwill port visit to Manila. It has paid visit to Vietnam, Thailand and Brunei before the Philippines, the embassy said.

The vessel is 163 meters long, 22 meters wide, has a full load displacement of more than 9,000 tons, and has a maximum speed of 22 knots, which can meet the requirements for wind resistance of grade 12.

The port call also coincides with the 48th anniversary of formal diplomatic relations and 22nd anniversary of China-Philippines Friendship.

In another statement, Chinese Ambassador Huang Xilian reiterated Beijings commitment to forge stronger relations with Manila and hoped for more opportunities of bilateral cooperation.

Today, June 9, we commemorate the 48th anniversary of the formal diplomatic relations between China and the Philippines and the 22nd celebration of China-Philippine Friendship Day. Thank you to all our Filipino friends for being part of our centuries-long friendship and ever-growing cooperation in many areas, the statement read.

From trade, business, agriculture, tourism, people-to-people exchanges, and more, we have witnessed our bilateral ties thrive and open up more opportunities for our countries and peoples, it added.

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Senator Imee Marcos seeks a Senate inquiry on the the real intention behind the United States request to grant some Afghans special immigrant status in the Philippines.

Marcos filed Thursday Resolution 651 calling for the inquiry on the issue even as she also called on newly appointed Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro Jr. and National Security Adviser Eduardo Ano to shed light on Washingtons request.

She pointed out that nothing has been made public on the Afghans status; whether they are legitimate refugees or employees of the U.S. government or American companies.

Marcos, who chairs the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, asked why the U.S. government wanted to keep the Afghan refugees in the Philippines instead of the American mainland or other countries closer to Afghanistan.

The senator noted that during the past year, security and espionage threats have substantially increased because of the escalation of tensions between rival superpowers.

The Presidential Management Staff (PMS) held a Technical Coordination Meeting with other government agencies on Wednesday to take up the proposed temporary housing in the Philippines of Special Immigrant Visa applicants from Afghanistan.

However, the government agencies called to attend could not thoroughly discuss the matter because the PMS did not provide details about the meeting other than general topic, date, and venue.

Sources privy to the meeting told Marcos that a memorandum of agreement was already in progress.

Theres a lack of transparency in the present case, Marcos said, comparing the previous administrations policy of accepting Afghan refugees when the Taliban took over their homeland in August 2021 following the withdrawal of American troops.

The Philippine Immigration Act of 1940 states that the admission of refugees for religious, political, or racial reasons should serve a humanitarian purpose and not be opposed to the public interest.

We need to know the real nature of the agreement between the Philippines and the United States and the course of action the executive branch plans to take, Marcos said

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The Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA), the countrys premier gateway, suffered another 30-minute-long power outage on Friday  barely a month after a similar brownout on Labor Day  as travelers sought to leave for the long Independence Day weekend.

The power interruption from 12:51 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. at NAIA Terminal 3 resulted in long queues at immigration booths, while airlines had to resort to manual check-in and loading of baggage. Some flights were also delayed by the brownout.

Again, we would like to apologize to all the passengers and stakeholders here at Terminal 3 today for the inconvenience because of this brief power interruption that affected the terminal, said Manila International Airport Authority acting general manager Bryan Co.

Co said the brownout was caused by a power shortage traced to substation roadway 2.

As a background today, there was a scheduled electrical audit that was being done, by of course, MIAA and Mserv (a Meralco company). This is still part of our power services improvement because of the May 1 incident. So, today there was a testing that was being done at roadway 1 substation and roadway 2 substation by Mserv and MIAA, he said.

Co said the checking included the breakers, circuit breakers, cable tests bus bars, relays, current transformers, and the other cables of these systems.

That started around 7:45 a.m. This was a planned check of the base power facilities, so we can note what we have to improve on or what we have to change as part of the comprehensive electrical audit as mentioned previously, he added.

Co explained the incident was not a complete loss of power for the airport because after 12:52 p.m., our generators kicked in and as we were conducting all the checks so that we can reanalyze, of course there is a process so that we can get a first the probable causes.

But the power outage once again shows the need for urgent power augmentation while a full electrical audit is ongoing, said Senate Public Service committee chairperson Sen. Grace Poe.

Regardless of the brownouts duration, Poe said power outages at NAIA are enough to cause a domino effect of flight delays, passenger confusion, and reduced business.

On May 1, thousands of passengers were stranded due to cancelation of at least 46 domestic flights following an eight-hour brownout at the same terminal.

A special team from the airport management and Meralco is currently conducting a joint technical assessment with assistance from an independent third party expert to determine the causes of the said power interruption.

That followed the incident on New Years Day, when the countrys airspace was shut down due to a technical glitch at the air traffic management system, affecting more than 360 flights and 65,000 passengers at NAIA alone.

All incidents happened during holidays where there were influx of passengers, prompting lawmakers to invite MIAA and Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines officials to a legislative inquiry to shed light on the matter.

During the Labor Day power outage, the Department of Transportation said the agency is already working with the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency and other authorities to explore the possibility of a sabotage. This report remains to be seen, Poe noted.

According to the senator, it also remains unclear why the electrical plan of NAIA Terminal 3, among other important building plan documents, has not been turned over by the contractor despite the government having already paid the just compensation.

In the interim, DOTr should look at adding generators and providing comfortable waiting areas to passengers especially, the elderly and those with ailments.

Even if NAIAs privatization is being explored, this is no excuse for airport officials to drop the ball. MIAA should implement proper maintenance and contingency plans to prevent any future outages and travel disruptions, Poe said.

There should be comprehensive responses for all emergency scenarios. Any audit or improvement needs to be planned ahead of time, she added.

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Heres what happened locally on June 9 over the past century, as reported in this newspaper, which went from being called the Henry Bulletin to the Daily Bulletin to the Martinsville Bulletin:

100 years ago: The falling in of this end of the covered bridge over Smith river on the Ridgeway-Martinsville road was all but a serious affair, when a truck of lumber belonging to Andrew Stanley was being driven into Martinsville by Till Donaldson. The truck had almost cleared the bridge, when the floor gave way. The lumber, which was chained to the truck, caught on part of the underpinning and kept the truck from falling into the river, a depth of fifteen or twenty feet. Donaldson escaped without injury.

75 years ago: Reburial services will be held at the McKee Funeral home here at 4:30 p.m. Thursday for Pfc. Marvin H. Martin, of Koehler. The body will then be laid at rest with full military honors.  Private Martin entered the service in May 1943 and was killed in France on October 22, 1944, while serving with an infantry division.  He leaves his parents and his wife, the former Gladys Mason; three sisters, Mrs. Lucy and Peggy Martin, Koehler, and Mrs. Walker Thomas, city; and five brothers: J.P., of Norfolk; Ernest, of Baltimore; and Glenn, Harold and Kyle Marin, all of Koehler.

50 years ago: I knew nothing about furniture. But at that age you absorb knowledge readily. Richard Morgan Simmons was 23 years old when he joined American Furniture Co. in 1926 as an assistant to then-president Ansil D. Witten. [died on Wednesday, June 6 at age 80]

25 years ago: Pardon the pun, but Amfibe Inc. is a double spin-off. Its a spin-off as a successor company to the soon-to-close DuPont plant and has taken over some of its customers. Also, its business is to spin off tons of nylon fiver for its customers in the hosiery and intimate apparel trades.
The Blue Ridge Regional Airport in Henry County got the biggest slice of the $6.51 million in funding carved up among 21 public airports in Virginia.

The Virginia Aviation Board last week awarded funds to 31 projects and four of them went to the airport in Spencer.

Nearly one-third of the entire funding allotment went to Henry County, with the largest project receiving $1.2 million for the first phase of a road relocation due to a planned runway extension.

Other projects awarded to Blue Ridge this quarter: $667,772 for site preparation for a new box hangar; an additional $108,208 toward the construction of an apron expansion and the relocation of part of Virginia 698; and $22,222 toward design costs of the runway extension.

Airport box hangers hold multiple aircraft. Aircraft tempoarily park on the apron of the airport, often called the tarmac, for loading, unloading and refueling.

The VAB met on May 25 to review requests for state funding of various airport projects across the Commonwealth, said Jason Davis, airport managing director. Blue Ridge Regional Airport made four requests totaling $1,998,202 and all four requests were approved for funding by the Board.

Davis said the new box hangar is needed to accommodate the demand for new hangar space at the airport and although the apron expansion and Virginia 698 realignment is complete, the money granted this quarter is the state match for federal grant funding previously awarded.

This will address standards and have the airfield meet all FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] standards at the completion of the runway extension project, Davis said. The $1.2 million provides a contingency using state aviation funds to move forward with the construction of the runway and relocation of the road and this state funding will be adjusted depending on FAA funding that is expected to be finalized later this month.

In February, the Henry County Board of Supervisors authorized the Airport Authority to apply for funding through the Airport Access Program from the Commonwealth Transportation Board on behalf of Henry County.

Weve been planning for a 1,000 foot runway extension since 2019 and were approaching final approval, said Paul Brown with Eden Associates to the Board at a meeting in February. It requires removal of 2,000 feet of roadway.

Brown said the authority had already designed the relocation of three-quarters of a mile of roadway and was in pursuit of multiple funding sources.

Davis described the runway extension as a game-changer for the airport and for Henry County, making Blue Ridge Airport one of only three non-carrier airports in Virginia with a 6,000-foot runway.

The airport provides about $10 million of economic activity a year. We see 66 operations a day, Davis said to the board in February. We are an extremely busy airport. Were not going to stop until this runway is done.

Other projects awarded funding for enhancements to aviation in the state this quarter include public airports in Bridgewater, Chesapeake, Hampton Roads, Clarksville, Leesburg, Hillsville, Blacksburg, Dublin, Wakefield and the counties of Campbell, Dinwiddie, Warren, Bath, Louisa, Lunenburg, New Kent, Orange, Chesterfield, Stafford and Essex.

Said Davis: The VABs approval of these state funds demonstrates the states continued support to Blue Ridge Regional Airports infrastructure and investment into the economic competitiveness of this region, setting the airport apart from its competitors.
A Martinsville man is wanted for questioning related to stolen property recovered at a residence in Martinsville on Wednesday and in the theft of a tractor in Lynchburg.

The Campbell County Sheriffs Office has arrested Chad Lee Reed, 38, and Heather Leigh Davis, 33, both of Axton, and is looking for Dayton Lee Reed Jr., 41, of Martinsville in connection with thefts that occurred in Lynchburg. Also, the Martinsville Police Department is seeking the whereabouts of Dayton Reed in relation to two vehicles and multiple firearms determined to be stolen and recovered at 701 Mulberry Road.

I cannot give you too many details because I do not want to interfere with the investigations being conducted by other jurisdictions, said Martinsville Police Chief Rob Fincher. What I can share is that we are looking for a person who has been living at 701 Mulberry Road by the name of Dayton Lee Reed Jr. Mr. Reed has active warrants from Campbell County for grand larceny and he is wanted for questioning by us, Franklin County and Horry County in South Carolina.

On May 26, the Campbell County Sheriffs Office began investigating a grand larceny at Phillips Equipment on Wards Road after it was reported that a black Jeep occupied by what appeared to be a male and a female loaded a $20,000 compact utility tractor belonging to Phillips Equipment onto a trailer attached to the Jeep and left with the tractor in tow. The incident was captured on surveillance video, a release from the sheriffs office stated.

The following day, surveillance video captured two men in a white Jeep with a utility trailer pull into the Kubota of Lynchburg on Wards Road. The video showed the men getting out of the Jeep and pushing a $22,000 Kubota Rugged Terrain Vehicle from the business across the road and onto the utility trailer and leave, the release stated.

On June 2, a Henry County deputy located a tractor matching the description of the one stolen from Phillips Equipment and was able to identify the two people with the tractor in Henry County as the same two individuals seen in the surveillance video stealing the equipment.

Investigators from the Campbell County Sheriffs Office traveled to Henry County that same day, but by the time they arrived, the tractor and two people were gone. Arrest warrants were obtained and Chad Reed was arrested on unrelated charges in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, while Davis was arrested on unrelated charges in Davidson County, North Carolina. The release did not make clear when the two were apprehended.

On June 6, the theft investigation widened as Campbell County investigators traveled to Conway, South Carolina, and recovered the stolen John Deere Tractor from Phillips Equipment. The investigators also determined that Chad Reed and Davis had fraudulently obtained two Ford Mustangs and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle in a transaction involving the John Deere Tractor, the release stated.

The Mustangs were recovered at 701 Mulberry Road in Martinsville and the Harley-Davidson was recovered in Myrtle Beach, the release said.

Chad Reed has been charged in the larcenies at Phillips Equipment and Kubota of Lynchburg, Davis has been charged with the larceny at Phillips and Dayton Reed is wanted for the larceny at Kubota of Lynchburg. The two Reeds are brothers.

Anyone with any additional information is asked to call Investigator L.T. Guthrie or Capt. T.A. Emerson with the Campbell County Sheriffs Office at 434-592-9580.
Patrick & Henry Community College was recognized last week for creative encouragement of workforce growth and development in the community.

Community Colleges of Appalachia honored P&HCC with the Southeastern Workforce Development Award for its partnership in the MHC Startup and Grow programs, a collaboration between P&HCC and MHC Chamber of Commerce, at its annual conference. P&HCC partners with the Chamber to challenge business owners to develop and enhance a business plan that can be executed to better serve the residents of Martinsville and Henry County in a variety of ways, a release stated.

C-PEG has been offering this tremendously successful entrepreneurial boot camp with Patrick & Henry Community College for seven years. The program would not be possible without the generosity of the Campbell Family Group, the George Lester II Fund and the Anonymous Fund through the Community Foundation Serving Western Virginia, said Chamber President and C-PEG Executive Director Brenell Thomas. Over the years, C-PEG has obtained grant funding from the Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission and SOVA Task Force grants. These partners have made it possible for C-PEG to meet the needs of many small businesses with the valuable training but the cash and in-kind resources to ensure these businesses succeed. The collaboration continues to strengthen our local economy through the Startup MHC and Grow MHC programs.

In the seven years the program has operated, 322 graduates have received $571,824 in cash and in-kind support, which has created 271 jobs, the release stated.

MHC Startup and Grow has generated nearly $4.5 million in new capital in our community. More importantly, program graduates have an 87% two-year success rate compared to the national average of 50% for new businesses to remain open for two years, said P&HCC President Dr. Greg Hodges. We are especially proud that graduates represent our diverse community with nearly half representing minority groups and more than half being female  leading to an increase in female and minority owned businesses in our area as well.
Marion will have a social district where patrons can walk around with open containers of alcohol within a designated and regulated area. The idea is to encourage more revitalization downtown as other North Carolina cities already have done.

The creation of such a district was unanimously approved by the Marion City Council during the regular meeting on Tuesday.

Last month, the City Council heard a request from Emily Causey, co-owner of Mica Town Brewing. She spoke to council members on behalf of a group of downtown ABC permit holders, other downtown businesses, and property owners who are interested in creating a social district in the central business section of Marion.

Social districts are contiguous areas where people can walk around with open containers of alcoholic beverages. The drinks must be purchased from a bar, restaurant, brewery or other on-premise establishment permitted by the North Carolina Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission and consumed within the boundaries and hours of that district. The containers must be labeled with the social districts logo to identify where the drink was purchased and to signify that is it allowed.

This means that a person cannot bring beer or wine they purchased from a convenience or grocery store and drink it around downtown as they go from place to place. But a person can walk around with an open container purchased from one of the participating businesses in that section of downtown. A business or private property located within the boundaries of the social district can decide whether or not to participate in the activities of the district. Indoor and outdoor areas of a business or property may be included in the district.

For instance, if Flavors on Main (which doesnt sell alcohol) and Spillway Bridge (which does) were participants in the district, folks could purchase a glass of wine or beer from Spillway and carry it along the sidewalk and into Flavors on Main while holiday shopping, Causey said last month.

Causey said in May her group worked with the McDowell Chamber of Commerce, the Marion Business Association and the city to help collect data, feedback and best practices from other municipalities in the state who have created social districts.

These districts are allowed in North Carolina because of a state law passed by the N.C. General Assembly in September 2021. It allows for the establishment of social districts by town, city or county governments. More than 40 cities and towns across the state have implemented a social district.

In the 18 months since social districts were authorized in North Carolina, not one single city or town creating one has reversed its decision. Municipalities have seen just how successful they are and have instead expanded the boundaries of their original social districts, according to Causey.

After hearing about this at the May meeting, Council Members Billy Martin, Don Ramsey and Mayor Pro Tem Woody Ayers expressed their support for the idea. But Mayor Steve Little wanted to wait until Council Members Chet Effler and Ann Harkey could attend before taking a formal vote.

During Tuesdays meeting, Causey appeared again before council and repeated the request.

After hearing from her, Effler made a motion to approve and Martin seconded the motion. Effler said this new district allows the city to have a mechanism and structure to make sure it is regulated.

The motion passed unanimously. The next step will be for the city to create an ordinance outlining the details of the social district. That matter will be voted on during the July meeting of city council.

In addition, council heard a report from Public Information Officer Landdis Hollifield about the WNC Bigfoot Festival, which was held on Saturday, May 20. The citys Economic Development Software, which was funded by the McDowell Tourism Development Authority, shows that approximately 14,000 people attended this years festival. The busiest times at the festival for foot traffic were between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Around 58% of attendees chose to use satellite parking and ride a shuttle into downtown Marion, said Hollifield.

A large number of visitors came from within the state of North Carolina and only 28% of attendees were from Marion. This years event also had a large number of visitors (more than 50) from New Jersey, Texas, Tennessee, Indiana, Nevada, South Carolina, Colorado and Ohio.

After hearing from Hollifield, Mayor Steve Little and council members thanked John Bruner and Jon Eric Bruner with Bigfoot 911 for their leadership in putting on the festival, which is Marions biggest event. City Manager Bob Boyette commended city employees and staff as well as the volunteer for all their hard work with the festival.

In other business, the council:

Authorized the sale of city-owned property on West Grayson Street through the negotiated offer and upset bid process. The city recently received an offer from Kendrick Swepson to purchase two parcels totaling .36 of an acre on West Grayson Street. The parcels are currently vacant and also have a city sewer line on the rear portion of one or both parcels. Council agreed to sell the property for $5,000 but it is still subject to the upset bid process. That means someone else could come along and offer a bigger bid before the sale is final.

Heard a presentation from Shannon Odom, the new director of the McDowell Tourism Development Authority.

Agreed to end COVID-19 sick leave for city employees.

Approved holding meetings with the community forums. Council will hold its Aug. 15 meeting with the West Marion Community Forum at Addies Chapel United Methodist Church. The Sept. 19 meeting will be held with the Marion East Community Forum at the new Marion East Recreation Center on Baldwin Avenue.

Proposals for Engineering and Professional Sewer Asset Inventory and Assessment (AIA) Grant Project.

Accepted a proposal for a sewer asset inventory project. The city recently took proposals for engineering and professional services for the $400,000 sewer Asset Inventory and Assessment (AIA) grant Project, to include an inflow and infiltration study of six sewer basins, an engineering assessment of the sewer treatment plant and a water and sewer rate study. Three statements of qualifications were received from Withers Ravenel, Kimley Horn and McGill Associates. After a detailed review of the three statements of qualifications, city staff recommended selecting Kimley Horn as the most qualified firm to complete this project.

Adjourned the meeting in memory of former Officer Randy Seay.
No highway noise here! The beauty of nature abounds as you travel to this lovely one acre lot above the the quiet, Cattail Creek community. Take in the long-range winter views (year-round views possible with selective trimming) while listening to the sounds of the natural waterfall at the property's edge. Enjoy the quiet life in the mountains, yet live only 20 minutes to downtown BurnsvilleLandUndisturbed and wooded, one acre lot in quiet mountainside community. Small waterfall above the property boundary adds to the serene mountain getaway feel. Region & ClimateBurnsville, NC is a gem of a mountain town in western North Carolina featuring fresh air, outdoor activities, and a quaint downtown experience. Burnsville is also home to Mt. Mitchell-the highest peak east of the Mississippi River. Fishing opportunities abound amongst the South Toe, North Toe, and Cane rivers that run through Yancey county. LocationThis peaceful one acre lot is located 20 minutes from downtown Burnsville, one hour to Asheville, and 50 minutes to ski resorts.

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Manuel Nunes Junior is fired one week after the Government announced gasoline price hikes as a result of the partial withdrawal of fuel subsidies.

The Angolan President, Joao Lourenco, on Thursday dismissed the Minister of State for Economic Coordination, Manuel Nunes Junior, appointing to his post the Governor of the National Bank of Angola (BNA), Jose Lima Massano.

The resignation of Nunes Junior and the appointment of Lima Massano was disclosed in a statement sent by Joao Lourencos press services, and is justified only by the convenience of service.

Manuel Nunes Junior was dismissed one week after the government announced the increase of gasoline prices as a consequence of the partial withdrawal of fuel subsidies. The measure sparked protests by taxi and motorcycle taxi drivers in several provinces, which resulted in deaths and injuries, with these professionals, who benefit from exemptions, complaining of delays in the delivery of the cards that allow them to access the benefit.

The Angolan authorities have assumed failures in communication and have organized clarification sessions with various sectors throughout this week. A protest is being called for June 17th against the national fuel price increase.
The opposition won an absolute majority in Sundays legislative elections in Guinea-Bissau, forcing President Umaro Sissoco Embalo into a cohabitation in this small West African country prone to political crises, the Electoral commission said on Thursday.

The Pai-Terra Ranka coalition of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC, founded by Amilcar Cabral and which has long dominated national politics), won 54 seats. It is ahead of Madem G15, the Presidents political family, which has won 29 seats, according to Mpabi Cabi, acting president of the Electoral commission. The Social Renewal Party (PRS), with 12 seats, the Workers Party, with 6 seats, and the United Peoples Assembly, with 1 seat, complete the new National Assembly.

This result is a disavowal for President Embalo, in power since 2019. He had dissolved the National Assembly in May 2022 due to persistent differences that could not be resolved with the Parliament, already dominated by the PAIGC, and which he claimed had become a space for political guerrilla warfare and conspiracy.

According to observers, this failure is attributed to internal dissension within the Madem G15 party and to the Presidents inability to resolve the problem of falling cashew nut prices, a major source of income for the population.

The President is expected to appoint a Prime Minister from the winning coalition in the near future. As soon as the results were announced, a crowd converged on the PAIGC headquarters amid a din of pots and pans. We have just achieved a historic victory. The only thing we ask this time is that they let us govern the country, declared Muniro Conte, spokesman for the PAI-Terra Ranka coalition.
The US Government has announced the suspension of its food aid to Ethiopia due to a massive detour of this assistance, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) announced on Thursday.

USAID has discovered, in coordination with the government of Ethiopia, a widespread and coordinated operation to divert food aid. As a result () we cannot continue to provide food aid until we are confident that reforms are in place, said a USAID spokesperson.

USAID intends to resume food aid immediately as soon as we have confidence in the integrity of the distribution systems to get aid to its intended recipients, he assures us.

The American agency had already decided in May, at the same time as the UN World Food Programme (WFP), to suspend food aid to the Ethiopian region of Tigray, which had just emerged in November from two years of conflict, due to the detour of part of this aid, sold on the local market.

Some 20 million people, or 16% of Ethiopias 120 million people, depend on food aid, as estimated by the UN humanitarian agency (Ocha) at the end of May.

On Thursday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Ethiopian Deputy Prime Minister Demeke Mekonnen on the sidelines of a diplomatic meeting in Riyadh and welcomed the Ethiopian governments commitment to work together to fully investigate the detour of US food aid and hold those responsible to account, said the US Embassy in Addis Ababa.

The United States is the largest bilateral donor to Ethiopia, providing more than $1.8 billion (1.67 billion) in vital aid since fiscal year 2022, USAID says.
Burkina Faso has reaffirmed steadfast support for Moroccos autonomy plan offered for the Sahara under its sovereignty and praised the tireless efforts made by King Mohammed VI for the development and peace in Africa

The supportive stand comes in a joint press release issued Friday in Moroccan Saharan city of Dakhla following the fourth meeting of the Moroccan-Burkinabe Committee, held under co-chairmanship of Moroccan Foreign minister Nasser Bourita and Burkinabe peer Mrs. Olivia Ragnaghnewende Rouamba.

In the joint press statement, the Burkina Faso top diplomat said the Moroccan autonomy is the only credible and realistic solution to the Sahara regional conflict.

Mrs. Rouambaalso voiced her countrys strong support for Moroccos territorial integrity and the UN-exclusive role and process engaged for finding a realistic, practical and lasting solution to the Sahara dispute.

In 2020, Burkina Faso opened a consulate in Dakhla, pearl of Moroccan Sahara, a move confirming the recognition of Moroccos sovereignty over its Saharan provinces.

In the joint statement, The Government of Burkina Faso commended the tireless efforts made by Morocco, under the far-sighted leadership of King Mohammed VI, for the development and peace in Africa.

Morocco and Burkina Faso voiced their readiness to support peace and stability across the African continent in general and in the Sahel region in particular.

The two countries foreign ministers praised the convergence of their views on the various issues of common interest and reaffirmed the commitment of Rabat and Ouagadougou to work together for lasting peace and economic development on the African continent with the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

Mr. Bourita expressed Moroccos full solidarity with Burkina Faso in its tireless efforts to combat the scourge of terrorism and violent extremism, saying that Burkina Faso will always find in Morocco a partner constantly committed to promoting and supporting its initiatives for stability and development.

For her part, Mrs. Rouamba thanked Morocco for its solidarity and unwavering support enabling her country to counter security and humanitarian challenges.

The two ministers agreed on strengthening coordination, consultations and mutual support in continental and international meetings over issues of common interests.

The 4th meeting of the Moroccan-Burkinabe Committee was crowned with the signing of several agreements destined to bolster cooperation between the two countries in customs, technology, automotive testing, justice, water, tourism, sports, education, training
This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Inherited retinal diseases (IRDs), single-gene disorders affecting the retina, are very difficult to diagnose since they are uncommon and involve changes in one of many candidate genes. Outside specialist centers, there are few experts who have adequate knowledge of these diseases, and this makes it difficult for patients to access proper testing and diagnosis. But now, researchers from the UK and Germany have used artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a system that they believe will enable more widespread provision of testing, together with improved efficiency.

Dr. Nikolas Pontikos, a group leader at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital, London, UK will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics on 10 June about his team's development of Eye2Gene, an AI system capable of identifying the genetic cause of IRDs from retinal scans. "Identifying the causative gene from a retinal scan is considered extremely challenging, even by experts. However, the AI is able to achieve this to a higher level of accuracy than most human experts," says Dr. Pontikos.

The researchers were able to utilize Moorfields Hospital's vast database of information on IRDs, covering over 30 years of research. Over 4,000 patients have received a genetic diagnosis as well as detailed retinal imaging at Moorfields, making it the largest single center dataset of patients with both retinal and genetic data.

Identification of the gene involved in a retinal disease is often guided by using the patient's phenotype defined using the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO). The HPO involves the use of standardized and structured descriptions of medical terms of a patient's phenotype, which are observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the expression of genes, to allow scientists and doctors to communicate more effectively. "However, HPO terms are often imperfect descriptions of retinal imaging phenotypes, and the promise of Eye2Gene is that is can provide a much richer source of information than HPO terms alone by working directly from the retinal imaging," says Dr. Pontikos.

The team bench marked Eye2Gene on 130 IRD cases with a known gene diagnosis for which whole exome/genome, retinal scans, and detailed HPO descriptions were available, and compared their HPO gene scores with the Eye2Gene gene scores. They found Eye2Gene provided a rank for the correct gene higher or equal to the HPO-only score in over 70% of cases.

In the future, Eye2Gene could be easily incorporated into standard retinal examination, first as an assistant in specialist hospitals in order to get a second opinion, and eventually as a "synthetic expert" where such a person is not available. "Ideally, Eye2Gene software would be embedded into the retinal imaging device," says Dr. Pontikos.

Before its use becomes more widespread, the system will need to go through regulatory approvals to demonstrate safety and efficacy. This future use of AI has the potential to become a more effective, less invasive and more widely accessible approach to diagnosing patients, and to improve their management and treatment. "We need further evaluation of Eye2Gene in order to assess its performance for different types of IRD patients from different ethnicities, different types of imaging devices, and in different types of settings, for example primary vs. secondary care. Clinical trials will be required before our system can be deployed in clinics as medical device software," says Dr. Pontikos.

"We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, so we had some expectation that retinal scans interpreted by AI could out-perform HPO terms only. But we were still pleasantly surprised to see that, even when quite specific HPO terms were used, Eye2Gene could still do as well or better than an HPO-only approach. We hope that AI will help patients and their families by making specialist care more efficient, accessible, and equitable," he will conclude.

Professor Alexandre Reymond, chair of the conference, said, "While real life experts are essential, the use of AI will help in mitigating biases and will allow diagnoses for all in the future."

More information: Abstract no. C02.6 Early prevention for 9 common diseases via combined genomic and metabolomic prediction, The European Human Genetics Conference, 2023.eshg.org/
This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

Elephant loggers bring in a timber harvest in Myanmar. Credit: Tierra Smiley Evans/UC Davis

A virus previously found only in bats was detected in the antibodies of people screened for exposure to sarbecoviruses between 2017 and 2020 in rural Myanmar in Southeast Asia, according to a study from the University of California, Davis and collaborators in Myanmar and Singapore. The work is published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Sarbecoviruses are a group of coronaviruses. This study found exposure to diverse sarbecoviruses, including some known to be closely related to SARS-CoV-2, such as RaTG13.

The study found that people were significantly more likely to have been exposed to sarbecoviruses if their livelihood involved working directly with or close to bats, such as logging, hunting or harvesting bat guano.

"This study provides new evidence that bat-borne coronaviruses can and do spill over to people, underscoring the importance of surveillance in high-risk rural areas, where humans and wildlife closely interact," said lead author Tierra Smiley Evans, an epidemiologist and research faculty with the One Health Institute in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

Exposure to human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2-binding sarbecoviruses not yet known to infect humans among Myanmar extractive industry workers.*Greater than 30% inhibition of receptor-binding domain binding to human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 is considered positive. Credit: International Journal of Infectious Diseases (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.ijid.2023.02.015

Reconnaissance work

Partnering with local clinics in Myanmar, the study's scientists screened nearly 700 people for sarbecoviruses between July 2017 and February 2020, before the first reported case of SARS-CoV-2 in Myanmar. They did not detect any active infections. However, 12% of study participants had antibodies in their system indicating they had been exposed to a sarbecovirus in their past.

While both rural and urban residents were tested, only people from rural areas had been exposed, and most of them worked in forested areas and extractive industries, such as mining, logging or hunting. This suggests that newly disturbed, biodiverse environments can increase the risk of wildlife-to-human transmission of viruses.

No wildlife were sampled for the study. Instead, people seeking treatment for fever in rural and urban clinics were enrolled in the surveillance studies, as were patients from clinics near local elephant logging camps. In Myanmar, the traditional method of using elephants to harvest timber is still practiced, so a network of temporary logging villages dots the forest edges. Samples were also collected from healthy people living in regions believed to have high levels of contact with bats.

"It's like reconnaissance work," Smiley Evans said. "We get an idea of what's in the forest by looking at what people have been exposed to, without even going into the forest."

The study provides epidemiologic and immunologic evidence that zoonotic spillover is occurring.

"Our findings underpin the critical importance of continued surveillance at the rural wildlife-human interface in Southeast Asia, where some of the highest levels of known mammalian diversity exist and where future emergence of zoonotic diseases is likely," the study said.

More information: Tierra Smiley Evans et al, Exposure to diverse sarbecoviruses indicates frequent zoonotic spillover in human communities interacting with wildlife, International Journal of Infectious Diseases (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.ijid.2023.02.015 Journal information: International Journal of Infectious Diseases
This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Identifying people at high risk of chronic disease means that they can be targeted with prevention measures before they become sick. Polygenic risk scores, where genomic information alone is used to assess the risk of developing diseases, have been receiving a lot of attention recently, but research presented at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics (Saturday 10 June) suggests that combining blood biomarkers with genomic information gives more accurate, cost-effective results.

Dr. Jeffrey Barrett, Chief Scientific Officer, Nightingale Health, Helsinki, Finland, describes how his team measured over 200 biomarkers in blood samples from 300,000 participants in the UK Biobank, and 200,000 in the Estonian biobank. "This is the biggest dataset of its kind that has ever been collected," he says.

The researchers used machine learning to build predictive models for individuals' future risks of nine common diseases, based on their genetic information and the biomarkers that they measured. The diseases studied were ischemic heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Alzheimer's and other dementias, depression, liver disease, and colon cancer. These are the top sources of "disability adjusted life years" in the European region, according to the WHO, and thus the biggest sources of suffering and health care costs, and the most important in terms of prevention.

"We found that in all the diseases, both genetics and biomarkers could provide useful information about disease risk, even ten years into the future. And the blood biomarkers provided better prediction in nearly all casesfor example, the 10% of individuals with the highest risk of lung cancer based on the biomarkers had four times the risk of an average person, whereas the top 10% based on genetics had only 1.8 times the risk," says Dr. Barrett. "And for liver disease the same numbers are 10 times and two times respectively."

The team also found that the prediction using blood biomarkers was sometimes even stronger for near-term risk (for example in two or four years), which they believe may reflect direct links between some of what the biomarkers measure and the pre-symptomatic phase of the disease. At a time when health care systems are running out of money, in large part because aging populations have increasing levels of lifestyle diseases like the ones studied, they believe that their work shows how easy-to-measure blood tests can be used in population preventive health.

"It means that it is relatively easy to find the individuals at greatest risk of many diseases and offer them ways to reduce their risk, keeping them healthier and at the same time reducing the financial burden on healthcare systems," says Dr. Barrett.

"I was surprised by the breadth of the applicability of our approachthe way in which the data capture many core metabolic functions in one blood test could provide so much information across different areas of human health. We were able to show that our predictions were highly consistent across multiple biobanks, whereas many other studies have access to just one. This suggests that these biomarker scores are not a narrow research finding, and could be used effectively in general practice," Dr. Barrett concludes.

Professor Alexandre Reymond, chair of the conference, said, "While more work to assess the robustness of these predictions is warranted, it is tantalizing to see the first steps of genomic preventive medicine."

More information: Abstract no. C02.6 Early prevention for 9 common diseases via combined genomic and metabolomic prediction, The European Human Genetics Conference, 2023.eshg.org/
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Australian researchers have published the first robust clinical study proving that medicinal cannabis effectively treats the debilitating effects of Tourette syndrome.

The findingswhich show a statistically and clinically significant reduction in motor and vocal tics in just six weeksare published in the journal NEJM Evidence.

The clinical trial was led by neuropsychiatrist Dr. Philip Mosley, a Research Fellow at the Wesley Research Institute and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute.

The University of Sydney's Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics, with Wesley Research Institute, assisted with study design and execution, and analyzed blood levels of cannabinoids among participants. The analysis found a significant association between levels of cannabis in the bloodstream and the response to active treatment.

THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) is the active hallucinogenic compound in cannabis that produces a "high" effect, while CBD (cannabidiol) is a non-psychoactive compound. Both are used medicinally in Australia.

Study co-author Professor Iain McGregor, the Academic Director of the Lambert Initiative, said, "We were delighted to be able to work with Professor Mosley and this team to deliver this important clinical trial showing the efficacy of oral THC and CBD in treating Tourette syndrome."

"This is such a difficult syndrome to treat. It severely impacts the quality of life of one in 100 young Australians. It is gratifying to know that our result provides strong evidence of an alternative treatment method for these patients in need."

"While there are well-known concerns about the side effects of THC on cognition and mental health, this trial demonstrates that careful dosing with THC in an oral formulation is very well tolerated in a relatively young patient group."

"It is also a happy coincidence that this paper was just published by NEJM Evidence on [Tourette] Awareness Day, the 7th of June."

The study involved testing 22 adult patients with severe Tourette symptoms. In the double-blind study, participants received both medicinal cannabis oil and a placebo over two six-week blocks.

"This is the first rigorous and methodical trial of medicinal cannabis to be undertaken in a sufficiently large group of people to make definitive conclusions about its effectiveness," Dr. Mosley said.

"It shows that medicinal cannabis can reduce tics by a level that makes a life-changing difference for people with Tourette syndrome and their families."

"In addition, we found that other symptoms associated with Tourette syndrome in our participants also reduced, particularly symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety."

Tourette syndrome affects about one percent of the population and is four times more common in men than women. The neurological disorder often begins in childhood and is characterized by involuntary movements and vocalizations, or tics.

"Cannabis interacts with specific receptors on nerve cells in the brain that are part of the body's own 'endocannabinoid' system," Dr. Mosley said.

"Effectively, stimulation of these receptors tightens a leaky filter that now stops the involuntary movements and vocalizations from getting out and being expressed by our participants."

Medicinal cannabis is available on prescription to approved patients. Patients are unable to drive a vehicle or operate heavy machinery while using the medication that is typically taken orally, in small doses, several times a day.

More information: Philip E. Mosley et al, Tetrahydrocannabinol and Cannabidiol in Tourette Syndrome, NEJM Evidence (2023). DOI: 10.1056/EVIDoa2300012 Journal information: NEJM Evidence
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Lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people are more than twice as likely than their straight peers to experience suicidal thoughts or self-harming behaviors, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

The study, published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, is the first ever to analyze nationally representative data on sexual orientation and suicidality in England while being able to compare individual sexual minority groups. The researchers analyzed data combined from two household surveys of 10,443 English adults (aged 16 and over), representative of the population, sampled in 2007 and 2014.

As well as finding an increased probability of past-year suicidal thoughts among lesbian or gay adults when compared with heterosexuals, and of lifetime non-suicidal self-harm among bisexual, lesbian or gay people, they also found that depression, anxiety, and experiences of discrimination or bullying may contribute in part to these increased risks.

Concerningly, the researchers found no improvement in these inequalities in suicidal thoughts and self-harm between the two time points.

Lead author Dr. Alexandra Pitman (UCL Psychiatry) said, "While national surveys of British attitudes towards same-sex relationships suggest that society has become more tolerant of people who are gay, lesbian or bisexual, there is clearly a long way to go, as the mental health outcomes we were studying did not improve across our study period."

"People with sexual minority identities continue to face more discrimination and bullying than heterosexual people and are also more likely to experience common mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. Our study suggests that these experiences of discrimination and bullying may have some role to play in increasing the risk of suicidality and this requires further research."

"Clinicians should be aware of these issues, so that we can best support the mental health of LGB patients, while society as a whole also has a role to play in helping to reduce discrimination. Government bodies, schools, workplaces and individuals should all consider their own cultures and attitudes towards people from sexual minority groups and challenge discriminatory behavior."

The researchers had previously found, when analyzing the same dataset, an increased probability of depression, anxiety, alcohol misuse and drug misuse among LGB adults compared with their heterosexual peers. In the current study they found that half of lesbian or gay adults had experienced bullying and one in five had experienced discrimination based on their sexual orientation within the past year.

For bisexual adults, almost half had experienced bullying and one in ten had experienced discrimination based on their sexual orientation within the past year.

The researchers found that even after accounting for the increased risk of common mental health problems (depression and anxiety), lesbian and gay adults were still more than twice as likely as heterosexuals to report past-year suicidal thoughts, and lesbian, gay and bisexual adults were more than three times as likely to report lifetime non-suicidal self-harm than heterosexuals. The findings were similar for both men and women, and these inequalities had not changed between 2007 and 2014.

When investigating the comparative likelihood of past-year suicide attempt, the researchers found an increased risk for bisexual adults when compared with heterosexuals, but this was no longer apparent when taking into account the increased risk of common mental health problems. The researchers caution that as the proportions with past-year suicide attempt were relatively low, their findings do not necessarily rule out an elevated suicide attempt risk among the sexual minority group as a whole.

Further analysis suggested that experiences of bullying may contribute to the increased probability of suicidal thoughts among lesbian or gay adults, and that experiences of discrimination and bullying (both categorized as minority stress factors) may each contribute to the increased risk of self-harm among lesbian, gay and bisexual adults.

First author Garrett Kidd, who worked on the study as his dissertation for a Clinical Mental Health Sciences MSc in UCL Psychiatry, said, "Our findings add to a concerning picture of health inequalities experienced by lesbian, gay and bisexual people."

"Our health services need to be improved to meet the needs of LGBTQ+ people, as some people may not feel comfortable disclosing their sexual orientation, which can hamper an understanding of their health and social needs. We also need to offer more mental health services specifically catered to LGBTQ+ people, ideally alongside community-based support."

The researchers say that further research is needed to fully understand the reasons why sexual minority groups are more likely to experience suicidal thoughts or self-harm, such as how victimization, family environment or stigma might be contributing factors, and in order to develop public health interventions that could reduce suicidality and potentially save lives.

More information: Suicidal thoughts, suicide attempt and non-suicidal self-harm amongst lesbian, gay and bisexual adults compared with heterosexual adults: analysis of data from two nationally representative English household surveys, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s00127-023-02490-4
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The Biden administration on Thursday issued its new multiagency plan to address rising rates of sexually transmitted infections, but experts see possible legislative and judicial hurdles that could thwart that effort.

The plan directs five departments and 15 agencies to implement more than 200 steps by 2030, and comes as rates of the most common STIs have reached record highs for eight years.

But the lofty goal laid out in the plan could face challenges because of parallel policy developments that could stifle efforts to reverse the trend.

Public health advocates worry the debt limit law and caps on domestic appropriations would limit the funding increases needed to ramp up research or the workforce, as could ramifications from the COVID-19 pandemic and a split Congress. A federal court case also seeks to lift requirements to cover HIV-prevention medication.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data published in April documented more than 2.5 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis in 2021or a 7 percent increase in yearly cases compared to 2017. Syphilis rates increased 74 percent over a five-year period.

"When left untreated, STIs can lead to long-term, irreversible health issues, such as chronic pelvic pain, infertility, and in some cases, cancer. STIs can also increase a person's risk of getting or transmitting HIV," said Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine. "The data we are seeing across the country calls for immediate and sustained action."

The larger issue extends beyond the U.S. The UK Health Security Agency released data Tuesday showing 2022 had the highest number of cases of gonorrhea and the highest rates of syphilis since 1948.

Policy

The new national plan is broken down into five sections and seeks to prevent new infections, reduce adverse outcomes, ramp up STI research, decrease STI disparities and inequities and coordinate epidemic control efforts. It involves coordination between HHS agencies as well as the departments of Defense, Education, Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development.

"With the publication of the first-ever STI Federal Implementation Plan, these efforts serve as a call to action for collaboration across sectors in a coordinated national response to STIs," said Kaye Hayes, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Infectious Disease and the director of the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy.

There are more than 30 types of STIs but the plan focuses on chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, and human papillomavirus, citing their higher rates of morbidity. Aside from HPV, these STIs are tracked through the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System and HHS said this data can be used to model efforts to address other STIs.

HHS will use seven indicators to measure progress, such as increased percentages of teens receiving doses of the HPV vaccine, increased screening of chlamydia in 16-24 year old females, and reductions to the congenital syphilis rate. Seven other indicators will determine progress to reduce disparities by region, sexual orientation and race.

Funding obstacles

But full implementation of the broad ranging plan may face some barriers from Congress and the courts.

Last week, public health advocates warned that rescissions under the debt limit law could decimate funds used to employ disease intervention specialists, who work on infectious disease prevention and treatment.

The law's caps to domestic spending would also lessen the likelihood of boosting resources for STI research, family planning or prevention efforts.

National Coalition of STD Directors Executive Director David C. Harvey, speaking ahead of the plan release, warned the debt agreement would likely limit the ability to implement the coming plan.

"This will affect the brand new STI implementation plan that calls for a whole of government approach to fighting an out of control STI epidemic," he said. "We have a new plan. We had some new funding, and now it's being pulled back at the very moment that we were seeing some forward momentum and progress on combating these epidemics."

The document itself acknowledges that funding could present issues.

"Many entities are involved in STI prevention and treatment. Yet, funding streams and restrictions have challenged integration and coordination of programming across stakeholders. The Strategic Plan is a direct response to calls for an agile, innovative, and sustained approach to STI prevention and control in the United States," it reads.

It also acknowledges that its multiyear plan may need to "respond to policy and funding decisions."

"All activities included in this document are subject to budgetary constraints and other approvals, including the weighing of priorities and available resources by the Administration in formulating its annual budget and by Congress in legislating appropriations," the STI plan reads.

Harvey, in a statement Wednesday, questioned having a plan without funding to support it.

"While we had been excited to welcome a new Federal STI Implementation Plan to address the out-of-control STI epidemic, let's be clear: a plan without the funding needed to execute it is not worth the paper it is written on," he said. "While the President's right hand cuts funding, his left hand seeks an expansion of public health programs to fight STIs and syndemics. This hypocrisy makes no sense and we call upon the Administration to reverse this outrageous and deeply disappointing decision."

Courts

Ongoing litigation in Braidwood Management Inc. v. Becerra could also threaten the plan's success.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments Tuesday in the case that could determine the fate of the preventive health care services including reducing the risk of HIV.

The 2010 health law requires most insurance plans to cover services recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force including Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis or PrEP, which reduces the risk of contracting HIV.

HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C have separate national strategies that are not not signaled in the new plan, but untreated STIs can facilitate HIV transmission. People who use injectable drugs are also at higher risk of contracting STIs, and can be linked to syndemicsor clustered outbreaks of two or more diseases.

Public health advocates worry the Braidwood case could limit access to the drug, with downstream effects for HIV transmission or congenital syphilis screenings, which are commonly administered during prenatal appointments. The 5th Circuit has asked the Justice Department and plaintiffs to come to an agreement on the terms of a stay by Friday.

2023 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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Dr. Kari Stefansson CEO of deCODE genetics and senior author on the paper, with Rosa B. Gisladottir first author. Credit: deCODE genetics

In a paper published in Science Advances, an international team led by deCODE genetics, a subsidiary of Amgen, reveals the discovery of sequence variants in the gene ABCC9 that influence the pitch of voices.

Speaking is one of the most characteristic human behaviors, and yet the genetic underpinnings of voice and speech are largely unknown. In the first study of its kind, the scientists combined speech recordings from almost 13,000 Icelanders with data, in the sequence of the genome, to search for common variants in ABCC9 that are associated with a higher-pitched voice.

The scientists found that ABCC9 variants associate with higher voice pitch in both men and women. The same sequence variants are also linked to higher pulse pressure, a cardiovascular risk factor, highlighting links between voice pitch and health-related traits.

In addition to voice pitch, the study investigated the genetics of vowel acoustics. While vowel sounds such as "ah" or "ee" are clearly influenced by culture and context, the scientists found that such measures contain a heritable component, which likely has to do with the shape of the vocal tract and its effect on vowel sounds. Dr. Kari Stefansson CEO of deCODE genetics discusses the paper, Sequence Variants Influencing Voice Pitch in Humans, with first author, Rosa S. Gisladottir. Credit: deCODE genetics

The findings shed new light on diversity in voice and speech and contribute to a better understanding of the human vocal system.

More information: Rosa Gisladottir, Sequence variants affecting voice pitch in humans, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq2969. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq2969 Journal information: Science Advances

Provided by deCODE genetics
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Cases of Lyme disease are exploding across the United States, but don't expect a magic bullet against the tick-borne illness to arrive any time soon.

Issues with clinical trials of a new Lyme vaccine being developed by Pfizer and Valneva mean that the VLA15 vaccine is not expected to be submitted for full FDA approval until 2026one year later than Pfizer originally anticipated.

With an as-yet unknown efficacy level and a delivery system involving three shots and a booster, the greatly anticipated Lyme vaccinethe only one currently in clinical developmentmay face some challenges being implemented in the general population, Northeastern University experts say.

Need is great

The interest in preventing Lyme disease, which is transmitted by the bite of the deer tick, has never been higher.

The Centers for Disease Control says cases of Lyme disease have doubled since 2000 to nearly 500,000 a year as it spreads across the U.S.

"The number of counties considered high-risk for Lyme disease has tripled," according to Dr. Paul Mead, chief of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases bacterial diseases branch.

"It's a very good idea to develop a vaccine," says Kim Lewis, Northeastern distinguished professor of biology and director of the university's Antimicrobial Discovery Center.

In its acute state, Lyme can cause fevers and chills, joint pain, headache, muscle aches and is frequently accompanied by a rash.

Late stage or post-treatment Lyme can result in sufferers experiencing life-altering fatigue, pain and brain fog, and even cardiac issues.

"If we have a vaccine for Lyme disease, then we would have the opportunity to provide individuals with immunity against an illness that potentially could be serious," says Neil Maniar, director of the master of public health program at Northeastern.

Efficacy unknown

While many people are interested in a vaccine to avoid Lyme and its complications, a lot will depend on how effective the Pfizer vaccine proves in clinical trials and in practice, says Lewis, who is developing an antibiotic treatment for Lyme he hopes will prevent post-treatment symptoms.

Vaccine efficacy is of particular importance since the Pfizer trials require participants to have three shots and a booster, which is a big commitment of time and planning.

"We don't know the efficacy yet," Lewis says. "If the vaccine requires three shots and is 60% protective, I'm not sure how many people would want to go through the procedure. If it's 80 to 90% protective, then people will say, 'I'll go and get it.'"

Earlier Lyme vaccine withdrawn

The first-ever Lyme vaccine for humans, LYMErix, was withdrawn in 2002 after sales fell in the wake of a class action lawsuit against GlaxoSmithKline amid claims the innoculations had caused arthritis in people who had been vaccinated.

Data from the FDA did not bear out the claims, says Brandon Dionne, associate clinical professor in Northeastern's School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

But he anticipates that concerns about potential side effects will also have an effect on whether people get the new Lyme vaccine.

"If they're the type of person that goes out hiking or takes their dogs for walks, in areas where there are a lot of ticks, it may be worth it for them," Dionne says.

He says VLA15 works by targeting an outer surface protein of Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. The vaccine blocks the protein, OspA, which prevents the spiral-shaped bacterium from being able to leave the tick and infect any humans it has bitten.

Clinical trial delays

"You could have a really good vaccine on the market, but will people take it? Will people trust it?" Maniar asks.

Part of the role of the clinical trial is to understand the full spectrum of side effects and ensure the vaccine is going to be effective, he says.

The phase three clinical trial of VLA15 in human subjects has already run into some problems.

In February, Pfizer and Valneva pulled half of the study subjects out of the trial after good practice violations were discovered at some U.S. sites run by a third party, Care Access, according to fiercebiotech.

Although the nature of the violations has not been disclosed, the need to disenroll study subjects and enroll new participants means that instead of seeking full FDA approval for VLA15 in 2025 as reported earlier, Pfizer plans to apply for license approval in 2026.

The trial enrolled study subjects who live in Lyme endemic areas and have outdoor lifestyles that could put them at risk of the tick-borne infection.

It's important to develop vaccines as climate change contributes to the spread of Lyme disease and makes tick exposure an issue in warmer winter months as well as spring, summer and fall, Maniar says.

"The level of exposure is only going to increase. It's not going to go down," he says.
Here's some business news in the Missoula area:

There's going to be a bit of a construction project going on next door to the Cranky Sam Public House in downtown Missoula this summer. The owners have received a building permit for a new Stables Wine Bar, and part of the renovation includes blocking off a portion of the Cranky Sam patio for infrastructure work. It'll be worth it though, as the new wine bar is planned to have an in-house food menu as well.

That's not the only new downtown restaurant in the works. A team of local restaurateurs, including the owners behind Bar Plata and Florabella, are working on converting the former El Cazador spot on the southwest corner of Higgins and Front Street into a new spot. They've already installed new windows that will allow more connection between the street and the interior.

Stay tuned.

The vacant lot at the site of the former Sleepy Inn on the corner of Russell and Broadway in Missoula is for sale for $890,000. If it's sold, the City of Missoula Affordable Housing Trust Fund will get the proceeds to invest back into affordable housing in the community.

The Missoula Redevelopment Agency had the aging motel deconstructed, which means dozens of tons of steel, iron, timber, copper wire, brick, glass, chairs and other materials were recycled or taken to re-sale stores rather than going to the landfill. Those interested in the former Sleepy Inn property can contact Annalise Hedahl with ERA Lambros in Missoula.

Residents throughout Missoula County are now eligible to receive a $500 rebate for replacing water heaters in their homes with certain energy-efficient alternatives, thanks to a new rebate program Missoula County and the City of Missoula recently launched.

Residents who buy and install qualifying heat pump water heaters can apply online to receive the rebate by submitting proof of purchase and installation. Heat pump technology is more energy efficient than traditional electric or propane appliances because it extracts heat from an external source instead of generating it.

The City and County have $40,000 to distribute by 2025 through funding the Montana Department of Environmental Quality provided. $20,000 is reserved for county residents who live outside of city limits, and the remaining $20,000 is reserved for city residents.

The project is supported by the nonprofit Climate Smart Missoula and is a part of the Electrify Missoula campaign, which aims to help the City and County reach their goal of 100% clean electricity for the Missoula urban area by 2030.
Five University of Montana graduates will teach or conduct research abroad this year after earning the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship.

These Fulbright award winners will head across the globe to further their education and develop a new perspective as they enter the next chapter of their lives, said Kylla Benes, director of UMs Office of External Scholarships and Fellowships. All five of these students have excelled in and out of the classroom and I am excited that they will get the opportunity to represent UM and the U.S. through this impactful scholarship.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program provides students with the opportunity to travel to one of 140 countries worldwide to continue their education. Program participants pursue graduate study, conduct research and teach English abroad as they expand their perspectives through academic and personal advancement, as well as cross-cultural dialogue. Over 100 UM students and alumni have earned Fulbright awards used in 50 different countries around the world.

Courtney Bentz of Billings will use her Fulbright Scholarship to teach English in Kyrgyzstan. With UM degrees in Russian and global studies, the aspiring diplomat is hoping to deliver cross-cultural work to the Kyrgyzstan students she will work with. Bentz was named to UM Deans List each year as an undergraduate student and is also an alum of the W.A. Franke Global Leadership Initiative. This is the third Department of State scholarship for Bentz, who was awarded the Critical Language Scholarship and Gilman Scholarship as an undergraduate.

With his Fulbright Scholarship, Ryan Garnsey of Bozeman will attend the University of Vienna and also teach English. The prospective educator and researcher will continue his studies in the philosophy of psychiatry and cognitive sciences as he continues to work toward securing a Ph.D. Garnsey, a former Rhodes Scholar finalist, also was awarded the Cynthia Herbig Award for Excellence in Philosophy and a Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange award as a UM undergraduate.

Sean Kellogg of northern Virginia will teach in Germany with the support of his Fulbright Scholarship. Focusing on cultural dialogue, Kellogg plans to build on his UM history and wildlife biology degrees by creating a conservation club for German students. At the conclusion of his scholarship, Kellogg plans to continue his education in a graduate degree program. Kellogg has been a member of UMs Presidents 4.0 list since 2019.

Michelle Kissling of Juneau, Alaska will use her Fulbright Scholarship to study the Greater Kafue Ecosystem in Zambia. The Ph.D. student studying wildlife biology at UM will develop an analytical framework to estimate wildlife population dynamics and evaluate efficacy of interventions in sub-Saharan Africa. At the conclusion of her scholarship, she plans to continue this work for a non-governmental organization.

Jason Stahl, of Missoula, will spend a year with the Mennonite Research Center in Weierhof, Germany to study 16th- and 17th-century Hutterite medical texts. The UM history alum, a former Hutterite, hopes to understand how ethnoreligious traditions are lost and retained as groups experience persecution and migration. He plans to archive his work at Anabaptist centers in the U.S., Germany and Canada. After his Fulbright year, Jason plans to pursue graduate school as he works toward becoming a professor of religious studies.
The Missoula City-County Health Department has proposed requiring bear-resistant garbage containers for much of Missoula and the Missoula valley.

The proposal to change the Missoula City-County Health Code, announced Friday, follows a yearslong effort by the Missoula Bear Smart Working Group to assess the root causes of bear conflict in the area and propose ways to reduce conflict. The group spent years studying bear problems in the area and determined that about half of all incidents from 201821 were caused by unsecured garbage.

The working group developed a Bear Conflict Management Plan put forth in 2022. The City Council and Missoula County Commission unanimously approved the plan in a joint resolution in October. The working group is a long-standing stakeholder group in the Missoula valley composed of representatives from Missoula City and County governments; Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks; Republic Services; bear biologists; and local watershed and conservation groups.

The code revision proposed Friday takes the keystone recommendation from the management plan and proposes it for formal incorporation into city and county code, a move that would give it the force of law.

As proposed, the revised code would extensively expand Missoula's Bear Buffer Zone, an area in which garbage management is regulated to reduce its availability to bears. The expanded zone would cover all of the South Hills, Pattee Canyon, Miller Creek, East Missoula, Bonner, Rattlesnake, Grant Creek, La Valle Creek, Butler Creek, Wye north of Interstate 90, Big Flat, O'Brian Creek, Blue Mountain residential areas, and the north, west and south edges of Orchard Homes. It would also incorporate Missoula north of I-90, the University District and everything east of Higgins Avenue, south of Southwest Higgins, and land along the Clark Fork River west of Reserve Street.

In those areas, the proposal would require the use of approved bear-resistant containers  or approved bear-resistant enclosures around normal containers  on a phased-in basis by geographic area either by April 30, 2024, 2025 or 2026. All areas of the buffer would require approved containers or enclosures by April 30, 2026. Until then, in any area yet to phase-in the containers, any non-approved containers would have to be stored in a place not accessible to bears at all times except 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on garbage collection day.

The Missoula City-County Health Board will hold a public hearing on the proposal at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, June 15, at the Health Department office at 301 West Alder St. in Missoula, in conference room 210. The meeting will also be available online via missoulacounty.us/government/health/health-department. Comments can be submitted through June 14 by email to envhealth@missoulacounty.us, by mail to Missoula City-County Health Board, 301 W. Alder St., Missoula, MT 59802. Comments can also be submitted online via missoulacountyvoice.com.

If the Health Board recommends the code revision for approval, it would still need to be approved by the city council and county commission.

There were as many as 1,000 black-bear incidents in the Missoula area last year. Jamie Jonkel, a veteran bear manager with FWP Region 2 and a member of the Bear Smart Working Group, said in a statement Friday, "The majority of the calls involved bears accessing unsecured garbage. Its not that the valley has too many bears, but that residents in Missoula and the surrounding rural areas are leaving several hundred tons of food-related garbage adjacent to their homes, churches, daycares and schools."
NEW YORK  Social media users are sharing a surprisingly effective way to protect yourself indoors from the toxic wildfire smoke blanketing much of the East Coast: a box fan, four air filters and a whole lot of duct tape.

As searches for "air purifiers" spike on Google, people are posting on TikTok and Facebook about how to build the DIY air purifier. The technique, known as the Corsi-Rosenthal method, gained attention in recent years amid the pandemic and raging western U.S. wildfires.

Some East Coast residents are learning about the box fan method for the first time, unlike their West Coast counterparts who are accustomed to wildfire smoke.

Seattle resident Angel Robertson, 34, posted a video on a New Yorker's TikTok demonstrating how to put it together. In her video, which has amassed more than 600,000 views, Robertson duct tapes four 20-by-20 air filters into a box shape and attaches the fan on top. The whole apparatus costs under $100.

"It works extremely well and will save your life with really smoky days," she says in the video. "It does a lot better than the normal air filters."

Public health experts say Corsi-Rosenthal purifiers are highly effective at removing particles from the air. Petri Kalliomaki, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland's School of Public Health, said their clean air delivery rate is relatively high and can be used to purify air against not only smoke, but pollen and viruses.

At the University of Connecticut Thursday, Misti Levy Zamora, an assistant professor in public health sciences, and her colleagues were handing out Corsi-Rosenthal purifiers for free to anyone stopping by. Zamora said she has done several tests at the university, public schools and her own home on the purifier.

"I can confidently say this thing is working really well today," she said. "I was able to filter out all the particles in the air basically back down to what I saw last week within a matter of minutes."

The power of social media led to the invention of the box, said co-inventor Richard Corsi, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California at Davis.

He said in 2020, he was sketching one night and put the design up on Twitter. Jim Rosenthal, CEO of Tex-Air Filters, took the design and built it. Corsi said he wanted to create an inexpensive purifier that the average American could afford. He's now hearing from friends in the Northeast who are using his idea.

"When you have to seal up a building and reduce the amount of air flow coming in and when you have to spend a lot of time indoors, this is where portable air cleaners can really make a difference in your life," he said.

Liz Hradil, 27, who lives in Syracuse, New York, said the smoke burned her eyes, and she could feel the smoke in her nose and throat as the smoke descended onto New York this week. She went digging around online to buy an air purifier when she came across the Corsi-Rosenthal box and went to Lowe's to pick up the filters and fan. She then immediately noticed that the smoke smell was gone after about 30 minutes of starting her purifier.

"It was my first time, and my New York friends were like this is so genius," she said after sharing the photo of the box online. "No one had heard of it."
Butte-Silver Bows top official says he supports the LGBTQ+ community and only canceled a planned library lecture by a Billings transgender woman last week because he believed it might violate a recently enacted state law.

Ive been accused differently on both sides of the issue on this, that we made this decision because the person was transgender, and that was by no means anywhere that way at all, Chief Executive J.P. Gallagher told commissioners Wednesday night.

Ive been called a left-wing liberal and then in the next email I got, I was a right-wing fascist, and neither of those are true, he said.

Several people gathered in the rain at the courthouse steps Thursday afternoon to protest the canceled lecture and suggested it could lead to a lawsuit challenging the decision and the state law itself.

I am here to support all rainbow people, said Heidi Noyes. I think that this law is going to be overturned when it is taken to court, and I think this would have been a good case for our county executive to take a stand.

Noyes held a sign that said, Government officials should be literate. Another sign said, Honk for Drag.

Adria Jawort, a transgender woman and member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, was scheduled to be the guest speaker at the Butte Public Library on June 2 for its monthly First Friday series.

But on the afternoon of June 1, the library announced that the lecture had been canceled. Earlier that day, Gallagher had proclaimed June as Pride Month at the Butte-Silver Bow Courthouse.

Gallagher told The Montana Standard on June 1 that Jaworts recent comments about what she planned to say during her library appearance meant it could have violated a law recently enacted by the Montana Legislature.

He was referring to Montana House Bill 359, which prohibits drag performances in publicly funded schools and libraries and prohibits minors from attending sexually oriented performances in libraries or schools that receive state funding.

On May 26, Jawort announced her June 2 lecture in Butte on Twitter.

I'm really entertaining at this one, too. BUT this literally might be illegal in Mont. as a flamboyantly dressed trans woman, she wrote. I don't get paid, but in fascist red state you pay state 4 crimes instead.

She also said, And I will def have a book & sexuality will be discussed & minors may be present, & the State of Montana doesn't legally recognize people being trans, so ...

Gallagher told commissioners Wednesday night that he read the comments, consulted with County Attorney Eileen Joyce and they were concerned the event would violate the state law.

Gallagher said he sent Jawort a letter saying, in part:

Butte-Silver Bow made the decision out of an abundance of caution to cancel your appearance at this time. However, Butte-Silver Bow is open to discuss with you rescheduling this event with your assurances of appropriate parameters in place, that the provisions in House Bill 359, while it remains the law, will not be violated.

Gallagher said he called Jawort to see if a solution could be worked out but after a few words he was disconnected. He said he tried calling again and would still be happy to schedule a time to talk.

Gallagher noted Wednesday night that Butte-Silver Bow was among the first cities in Montana to enact a local ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in housing, employment and public accommodations. Commissioners approved the local law in 2014.

We are way ahead of the curve not only in Montana but in the nation, so that decision (to cancel the lecture) was not taken lightly, he said, adding that he also stood behind the Pride Month proclamation.

Amber Smith was among those protesting the actions Thursday afternoon.

I believe that the law that they said the speaker would be violating is unconstitutional, and I have absolute confidence the courts will work it out, Smith said. My biggest difficulty is Ive read the law, and based on the wording of the law, this did not go against it.

This was an historical lecture, which Im sure many people would have found very interesting about our Native American culture, which I think is an important part of Butte history.
A former Butte man accused of molesting and raping a girl over a two- or three-year period pleaded not guilty Thursday to sexual intercourse without consent.

Prosecutors also charged 59-year-old Gordon Duane Ballensky with felony tampering with evidence for allegedly deleting or destroying videos and/or images from electronic devices that contained evidence.

Ballensky pleaded not guilty to that, too, and District Judge Kurt Krueger set the next hearing for July 27. He sent Ballensky back to jail after Wednesdays arraignment with bond set at $100,000.

Because of the ages involved, Ballensky faces a minimum of four years in prison and up to 100 years if convicted of the sex charge. The tampering charge carries a 10-year maximum.

The girls parents told police about the alleged crimes in November 2019 but prosecutors say it took months during the COVID pandemic to get DNA results and forensic findings from the electronic devices. By the time they received all the evidence in 2020, Ballensky had moved away from Butte and was only recently located and arrested.

According to prosecutors, the girl was 12 when the rapes were reported and she said the assaults had been occurring for two or three years. She said they involved touching at first but included penetration about the time she turned 11.

The girl said the assaults mostly occurred at a residence but also in a truck and camp trailer. She also told police that Ballensky would make her use his cell phone to record videos of her genitals and said he took nude photos of her.

The girl stated that he would tell her to keep it a secret and that if anybody found out he would go to jail and would never talk to her again, prosecutors said in charging documents.

Ballensky told police he never touched the girls genitals and never had sex with her. Records said the only contact he would have with her was a hug.

Prosecutors say the girl was given a medical exam by a nurse practitioner in November 2019 who found some abnormalities of the hymen and rectum that could have been caused by the reported rapes. But the report also said they could have occurred by other means not related to sexual assault.

Police conducted a search of Ballenskys residence in Butte and collected numerous cellphones, a tablet computer and other electronic devices. There was also a security camera system based in a bedroom.

Police said it was passcode protected and when Ballensky unlocked it, We checked the system and found that it had been wiped clean that day and there were no past recordings available.

The electronic devices were later examined, and the majority were clean. One laptop had an extensive amount of pornography on it, including some that appeared to include children, prosecutors said. No charges have been filed in relation to that.
The questions from one young man whose voice blared like an air-raid siren bordered on belligerent. He peppered state fish and wildlife officials with questions about declining trout populations in southwest Montana, but he brayed over the top of them when they attempted to answer.

The setting was a meeting Wednesday night at Butte Brewing, which focused on those troubling declines. The following morning, the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission weighed in.

Roughly 60 people attended Wednesday night's meeting. Participants included more representatives per mile from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks than there are trout in one stretch of the Clark Fork River.

FWP staff included the new director, Dustin Temple, fisheries division administrator Eileen Ryce, other administrators and fisheries biologists.

Emotions ran high at times during discussions of historically low trout numbers in the Big Hole, Beaverhead and Ruby rivers and the reality that livelihoods for outfitters, other businesses and ranchers depend on a clear, cold, healthy river.

Outfitter Shaun Jeszenka described the effects of irrigation withdrawals on rivers and alleged that FWP has been reluctant to address those impacts, which he described as the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

Temple stood, faced Jeszenka and said that during Temples long tenure at FWP, no one had ever suppressed talk about irrigation and its impacts on fisheries. Others noted that the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation is in charge of irrigation.

The Fishing Outfitters Association of Montana and Montana Trout Unlimited sponsored the meeting. David Brooks, executive director of Montana TU, was an early speaker.

Brooks noted that the fish declines have not happened overnight, and numbers will not be quickly restored. There will be no magic wand, he said.

We really need to be thinking about the big picture of long-term recovery and what that looks like for healthy watersheds, he said.

For now, there seems to be evidence that watersheds are in trouble in southwest Montana.

Outfitter Wade Fellin and others have taken photos of trout bearing lesions.

On Thursday, the members of the Fish and Wildlife Commission adopted amended emergency regulations for the Big Hole, Beaverhead and Ruby rivers.

During related discussion, Commissioner Susan Kirby Brooke, whose region includes the rivers under discussion, reported seeing images of what she described as zombie fish.

Commissioner K.C. Walsh said he, too, has viewed really horrendous videos of apparently diseased fish.

Both asked Ryce why FWP hasnt identified the cause or causes.

Ryce said analysis of samples from hundreds of fish to date have yet to detect anything exotic or unusual, whether virus, bacteria or parasite. She said FWP is waiting for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct histopathology exams of tissue samples and is also considering the efficacy of more experimental approaches.

Both on Wednesday night and during Thursday mornings discussion with commissioners, Ryce said fish that are stressed are more vulnerable to disease.

FWP has indicated that low flows and related warm temperatures in the Big Hole, the Beaverhead and Ruby are the likely key factors stressing fish and driving the population declines.

Wednesdays meeting featured a presentation by Tim Cline, Ph.D., an assistant professor of fish ecology at Montana State University, who shared years of data linking streamflows to population decline or growth.

Later, Temple said it isnt accurate to describe the fisheries division or FWP as underfunded. He said the department did well during the most recent legislative session.

On Thursday morning, Fish and Wildlife Commission members pondered, amended and ultimately unanimously passed emergency fishing regulations for the Big Hole, Beaverhead and Ruby rivers.

Biologists had recommended anglers be able to keep five brown trout less than 18 inches for a section of the Beaverhead and had recommended dropping prohibitions against treble or double hooks. The biologists explained that brown trout were comparatively abundant in this section of river, and they wanted to provide an outlet for longstanding fishing traditions in the state.

Commissioners Walsh and Patrick Tabor questioned the wisdom of both those changes, given the goal in the Jefferson Basin was increasing fish numbers. And the proposed changes were ultimately nixed.

On the Ruby River, the new regulations require catch-and-release for rainbow trout downstream from the Ruby Dam and catch-and-release for brown trout from Ruby Dam to Alder Bridge.

For the Big Hole, catch-and-release was set from Dickie Bridge to the confluence with the Beaverhead River. Fishing is limited to artificial lures only, with no treble or double hooks.

The regulations for all three rivers include provisions closing fishing in the fall to protect fish redds from being trampled by anglers.

FWP biologists said they hope to learn more about the effects of increased angling pressure and the effects of catch-and-release fishing.

As Wednesday nights meeting began, Brooks sounded an optimistic note. He said the Blackfoot River was once facing virtual fishery collapse but has recovered and is now one of the states, if not the worlds, most iconic wild native trout fisheries.

He said collaboration will be a key component for the recovery of the Big Hole, the Beaverhead and the Ruby.
The U.S. Department of Interior rolled out its long-awaited Orphaned Wells Program Office for capping orphaned oil and gas wells on federal lands Thursday, a move that included the $63.8 million to cap wells in 16 states including the Montana.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland framed the program as historic during the press conference, pointing out that most of the orphaned wells targeted were in national parks, forests or wildlife refuges.

Millions of Americans live within just one mile of an orphaned oil or gas well. These are environmental hazards that jeopardize public health and safety by contaminating groundwater, emitting methane which adds to the climate crisis and litters our landscape with rusted, and dangerous equipment, Haaland said.

Just one Montana well was on the list, which included few sites associated with oil and gas leasing by the Bureau of Land Management, the major driver of U.S. onshore oil and gas development. Wyoming, which has more productive leases than any other state, had 12.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure and Jobs Act passed by Congress in 2021 included $4.7 billion to deal with abandoned oil and gas wells. Most impactful, at least in Montana, has been Interior grants to states, some $560 million awarded last year. Montanas Board of Oil and Gas Conservation, which received $25 million, expects to cap all 237 state regulated wells by next year for roughly half the federal funding it received.

This is federal grant money and one of the biggest targets with the Department of Interior is methane emissions. So, we evaluated the wells, but were going to cap all of them, said Ben Jones, state petroleum engineer.

The oldest well being plugged was drilled in 1918, Jones said. The state will make sure there are no longer emissions coming to the surface at each site and that groundwater isnt being contaminated. Cement will be used to cap bore holes for hundreds or thousands of feet, depending on circumstances at each site.

Jones said the state contracted with six different companies to cap the wells. With two contractors working during the first half of the year, 35 wells have been plugged so far, but the number of contractors will swell to five this summer. Jones expects more than a hundred wells to be capped in the coming months.

Methane, a greenhouse gas, is more than 25 times as effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. The Interior estimated in 2022 that there were 3.5 million abandoned wells in the United States, 39% of which were capped.

Montana is not among the top 11 states which account for most abandoned wells, neither is Wyoming. But the number of wells in Montana is still significant. There are 2,443 producible well bores on federal land in Montana, according to BLM data.

At a remediation cost of $20,000 to $145,000 per well, BLM doesnt hold enough bonding money per well to cover the costs of cleanup. The federal Government Accountability Office in 2018 estimated that on average BLM holds a bond of $2,122 for each well.

In May, Wild Montana estimated using GAO analysis that the bonding shortfall at BLM would eventually cost taxpayers $48 million to $3 billion just for the Montana federal wells. The group argued that BLM shouldnt continue issuing leases without requiring enough bond money to cover costs.
CHARLOTTE  A Valdese man and Hickory business owner will spend years in prison after he was sentenced in federal court Tuesday for drug trafficking.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth D. Bell sentenced Shawn Lamont Hickman, 32, of Newton, to 13 years in prison and Amos Lamont Bruen, 47, of Valdese, to eight years in prison for trafficking methamphetamine, Dena J. King, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, announced Wednesday.

In addition to the prison terms imposed, Hickman and Bruen were each ordered to serve four years of supervised release after they are released, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorneys Office, Western District of North Carolina.

According to filed documents and information presented in court, law enforcement became aware beginning in December 2021 that Bruen was dealing drugs out of Amos Essential Oils, a business he owned in Hickory. The business was at 322 U.S. 70 SW, Hickory, according to an online search.

The release said an undercover officer visited Bruens business and arranged to purchase narcotics from Bruen.

Between December 2021 and February 2022, the undercover officer met several times with Bruen at his store and conducted several controlled purchases of methamphetamine totaling more than 1.5 kilograms, the release said. Court records show that Hickman was present on several occasions while the undercover officer was conducting the controlled purchases, often armed with a firearm, it said.

According to court records, on Feb. 26, 2022, law enforcement observed Hickman engage in narcotics transactions in the parking lot of a pool hall, Corner Pocket. Hickman was arrested and officers recovered a firearm and methamphetamine from Hickmans vehicle, the release said.

On March 1, 2022, law enforcement executed a search warrant at Bruens residence. During the search of Bruens home and vehicle, officers seized marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and a firearm, the release said. An additional firearm and ammunition were also seized from Bruens business, it said.

On Nov. 22, 2022, Bruen pleaded guilty to distribution of methamphetamine. Hickman pleaded guilty on Feb. 14 to possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, the release said.

The release said Bruen and Hickman are in federal custody and will be transferred to the custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons upon designation of a federal facility.

As of Wednesday evening, Bruen was being held in the Mecklenburg County Jail and Hickman was being held in the Catawba County Jail, according to jail records.

Assistant United States Attorney Brandon Boykin of the U.S. Attorneys Office in Charlotte prosecuted the case.

Bennie Mims, Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Charlotte Field Division, and Chief Reed Baer of the Hickory Police Department joined King in making the sentencing announcement, according to the release.

In making the announcement about the sentencing, U.S. Attorney King thanked the ATF and the Hickory Police Department for their investigation of the case, the release said.
A prosecutor says homeowners who were bilked tens of thousands of dollars by roofing contractor William Lee Dunmire in Butte have abandoned hopes of getting their money back.

Dunmire, 50, was given suspended sentences for theft and forgery because restitution was important to the victims, prosecutor Ann Shea told District Judge Kurt Krueger on Thursday.

We gave him the opportunity to work and pay that restitution, Shea said. He told this court he had a job, and he would make monthly payments. He didnt do that. His behavior on probation was basically lacking.

He didnt follow the rules. He didnt think he had to, she said. He asked this court for numerous furloughs, alleging that he had the ability to pay the restitution. The victims in this matter are more about punishment at this point because they dont see that he is going to pay the restitution.

Krueger followed Sheas recommendations by revoking previous suspended terms and sentenced Dunmire to 10 years in the Montana State Prison for theft by deception and five years for forgery, to run consecutively.

J. Blaine Anderson, Dunmires attorney, had asked for a 15-year term with seven of those years suspended. He said Dunmire had medical issues but a shorter sentence would allow him to get out of prison earlier, get to work and pay restitution.

Dunmires victims in Butte included a bar and restaurant that needed roof repairs and a resident who needed a new roof. Prosecutors said they paid Dunmire tens of thousands of dollars for work he failed to do, and he misled them about the amount and types of materials purchased.

In September 2020, Krueger sentenced Dunmire to 10 years for theft by deception and five years for forgery, to run consecutively, but suspended all 15 years. He also ordered Dunmire to pay thousands of dollars in restitution.

Judges in Lewis and Clark County also sentenced Dunmire in September 2020 to eight years in prison for deceptive practices, 10 years for theft by deception and five years for forgery, but they also suspended them all.

Prosecutors and probation officers in Butte-Silver Bow say Dunmire was not making restitution payments, still owed $66,775, and violated several additional probation conditions. He still faces felony bail-jumping charges.

Shea noted Thursday that a 15-year-sentence is not a 15-year sentence and Dunmire is getting credit for 479 days hes already spent in jail.

He will be eligible for parole in far less than five years including the credit for time served, but it will be the Department of Corrections issue to deal with this defendants failure to comply with conditions in the community and restitution, she said.
Its no secret the connection Butte has to Irelands Beara Peninsula, the homeland of many of Buttes Irish immigrants. Beginning nearly 150 years ago, men, women and children from that region crossed the ocean to settle in this mining camp, and that pilgrimage continued through to the early 1920s.

Those early-day adventurers are the reason Dorothy Brophy traveled to Butte three weeks ago.

Brophy, who is from Castletownbere, a village on the Beara Peninsula, is the project coordinator for the Allihies Coastal Education Hub, a component of the Allihies Copper Mine Museum that is located on the peninsula as well. She is on a mission to learn more about those ties that bind and to make sure that connection remains unbreakable.

The peninsula was also home to Irelands largest copper mine, the Allihies Copper Mine. Its history dates from 1812 all the way to its ultimate closure in 1962. It was here that many of Buttes Irish first tried their hand at mining. That skill would serve them well as they immigrated to the Mining City.

With surnames such as Sullivan, Shea, Lynch, Murphy and Harrington, these immigrants helped Butte evolve to become known as the Richest Hill on Earth.

There is such a huge connection between Allihies and Butte, said Brophy, who has been working at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives to gather information that the Allihies museum could utilize.

For the past few years, Brophy and other museum workers have been fielding a number of family genealogy requests.

A real interest has developed on these immigrants  people want to know where did they go, what did they do, said Brophy.

In the past three weeks, she has been able to answer some of those questions as she painstakingly studied what the Butte Archives has to offer to help further the collaboration and relationship between Butte and Beara.

The trip has been a success as Brophy shared she has found tons of information.

I could be here forever, just learning, said Brophy.

For Brophy and the rest of the museum staff, the ultimate goal is to utilize this new-found knowledge and build a database for people to find their relatives and their stories, which will ultimately be shared with the archives.

Along the way, Brophy also learned about her own family tree. Her maternal great-uncles, Tim and Dennis McCarthy immigrated to Butte, as did her maternal grandfathers Murphy uncles.

Butte is a word I heard since I was a little girl, said Brophy. I have experienced a roller coaster of emotions because of the family history.

Much of Brophys three weeks has been all about work, but she did manage to learn more about Butte in her spare time. One particular spot left her in tears.

Last weekend, Brophy found herself wandering the grounds at the Granite Mountain-Speculator Mine Memorial, which honors not only the 166 men killed as a result of a devastating fire June 8, 1917, but also the estimated 2,500 men who lost their lives from mine-related causes on the Butte Hill.

It was a very powerful experience, said Brophy. People came to Butte to better themselves, and that wasnt the case for everyone.

Brophy will return home Sunday with a renewed sense of purpose.

There is loads of connections, she said, and if we dont write it down, all those stories will be gone.

The Castletownbere resident originally thought that this would be her one and only visit to Butte. Now she plans on returning in a couple years.

Butte has something that has sucked me in, said Brophy, and I want more of it.
An attorney told a judge this week that harsher sentences should not be imposed in blanket fashion for all drug convictions involving fentanyl but instead be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Defense lawyer Jack Morris also opposed a prosecutors recommendation that his client, 34-year-old Caitlin Melissa Kittner of Butte, get 20 years in the Montana Womens Prison for possessing fentanyl with intent to distribute.

Miss Kittner, by her own admission, is an addict, your Honor, Morris told District Judge Robert Whelan on Wednesday. Warehousing her in the Montana State Womens Prison without treatment is not going to do society any good or Miss Kittner any good.

Prosecutor Ann Shea said fentanyl is claiming lives in Butte-Silver Bow County, and called a lengthy prison sentence warranted. Even if Kittner got a 20-year sentence, Shea said, she could be paroled in less than five if she does what she needs to do to get out.

The defendant was in possession with intent to distribute fentanyl, which has become a significant problem in this community, Shea said. It needs to be addressed, and the only way we can address it is through punishment.

After listening to both sides, Whelan imposed a 30-year sentence with 15 of those years suspended for Kittners convictions on possession with intent to distribute, possession of dangerous drugs and criminal endangerment.

The latter charge was for possessing fentanyl at the jail after she was arrested and endangering detention officers.

Kittner appeared via Zoom from jail during Wednesdays sentencing hearing.

According to prosecutors, Kittner already had an outstanding warrant when police went to her apartment in Butte on June 21, 2022, to evict her and another person.

Police arrested Kittner on the warrant and found drug paraphernalia and drugs that included cocaine, meth and fentanyl, the latter in pill and powder form.

Whelan said Kittners criminal history had progressed from simple drug possession to possession with intent to distribute, and he found that very troubling.
Citizens Alliance Bank has completed its acquisition of Granite Mountain Bank and its branches in Butte, Drummond and Philipsburg.

Citizens, an independent community bank headquartered in Clara City, Minnesota, says the acquisition was completed June 2, and it is committed to preserving the exceptional level of customer service that GMB customers have come to rely on.

Citizens Alliance Bank eagerly looks forward to the opportunity to serve these communities and build upon the strong foundation that Granite Mountain Bank has established over the years, it said in a news release.

Existing Granite Mountain Bank customers may continue to use their existing debit cards and check stock until Aug.5, according to the release. Starting Aug. 5, customers will be transitioned onto Citizens Alliance Banks core system computer platform.

Former Granite Mountain Bank customers will be kept apprised of changes related to this conversion over this summer, Citizens said. You will be notified in a timely manner to enable you to stay connected to your banker and your accounts.

Citizens has assets exceeding $1.3 billion and has already established a strong presence in Montana through its offices in Great Falls, Seeley Lake and Lincoln.
By Thursday morning, a handful of bills  including some major policies passed by lawmakers in the recently adjourned legislative session and the $14.4 billion state budget bill  were still waiting to be signed by the state Senate president.

Bills are being transmitted to the governor in an orderly fashion instead of all at once following the surprise end to the legislative session that the Democrats engineered. The remaining bills will be transmitted to the governor before they need to go into effect, meaning soon at this point, Senate GOP spokesperson Kyle Schmauch said in a text message Thursday.

Last week, legislative Democrats in the House and Senate sent a letter to Senate President Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton, imploring him to move the legislation along.

"Over 20 working days have passed since we adjourned. One legislator should not be able to unduly delay or otherwise obstruct a bill passed by a majority of the Legislature," the letter read.

The minority legislators had not yet received a response to the letter, but a spokesperson for minority leadership said Ellsworth had indicated he would sign the bills soon.

Legislative records show five bills have been sent to Gianforte since May 26; all have been acted on.

"The governor has no bills in his possession, and recently signed SB 19 and SB 351 into law. He looks forward to reviewing the remaining bills when they reach his desk," a spokesperson for Gianforte said Thursday.

The states budget is among those that still need to be moved to Gov. Greg Gianforte. The budget would kick in July 1.

Senate Majority Leader Steve Fitzpatrick, R-Great Falls, sent a letter to Gianforte on May 18 making suggestions for several line-item vetoes to the state budget, House Bill 2, the most significant of which relate to increases approved by lawmakers to the rates paid Medicaid care providers in the state.

Lawmakers increased the rates beyond what Gianforte proposed in his budget, and later changes in the Senate before the end of the session boosted rates even higher, to nearly 100% of the benchmark suggested in a recent study.

It is my understanding the benchmarks are calculated as an average cost and are not weighted by utilization, Fitzpatrick wrote. In addition, the benchmark numbers may include providers which do not operate efficiently and thus have higher operating costs than necessary.

Fitzpatrick wrote that by funding rates at 100% of benchmark, the state of Montana could actually be overpaying for services. He also said nothing in the state budget requires that providers who get paid more in turn pass that along to their employees through raises or better benefits.

Fitzpatrick asked Gianforte to strike the Senates late changes  a $15 million addition  but preserve the Legislature's previous ones, leaving the rates at 97% of the benchmark.

Other bills in limbo include a housing bill from Rep. Paul Green, R-Hardin. House Bill 819 was one of the biggest bills in play at the finale of the legislative session, and ended up being the vehicle that retained parts of Gianfortes major housing proposal that legislators scrapped during the session.

The bill was called a "conglomeration" of other proposals. Gianforte initially wanted a $200 million revolving loan fund to help communities pay for some infrastructure projects such as expanding water, wastewater, stormwater, streets, roads, curbs, gutters and more for new and rehabilitated areas. Green's bill ended up with $107 million for that, along with a $50 million revolving loan fund to buy down mortgages for eligible households and $50 million from coal severance tax dollars for loans for affordable housing.

Green said he was in Helena in part on Thursday to discuss the status of the bill.

It sounds like theyre kind of walking through these bills in a fairly structured order and staff want to make sure they understand, Green said, adding hed been discussing details of the legislation with the governors staff so they could better communicate its contents to the governor.

Green said he was aware of recent travel by the governor and Ellsworth that may also have played a role in the timing of legislation not yet advancing to Gianforte, but said hed been told to expect a bill signing ceremony with the governor.

He added that the legislation contains a part of the governors original request of legislators and got bipartisan support in the Legislature, along with strong backing from the public and private sector.

"Everybody looks at this as a beta test because its so completely different, but they think its a unique idea that could be replicated in different places, Green said of the bill.

Rep. David Bedey, R-Hamilton, is another legislator with a bill still awaiting Ellsworths signature. His House Bill 332 would create a $40 million trust fund for schools to help pay for health insurance coverage for employees.

I have seen no indication that House Bill 332 is going to be vetoed or subject to veto at this point, Bedey said. Its my take that this is just the long process necessary to clean the abrupt ending of the session.

Bedeys reference was to the motion to adjourn the session made by Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers, which passed the Senate with support from Republicans and Democrats, before the House had finished their work.

The abrupt end of the session has made it difficult, Bedey said.

Gianforte has vetoed 25 bills so far from this legislative session, according to the Legislature's bill tracking website. Last session, his first, he vetoed 15.

State Rep. John Fitzpatrick's House Bill 355, which would move $267 million from the state general fund to the Department of Commerce to administer grants for local infrastructure projects, is also in limbo.

Via text message on Thursday, Fitzpatrick said there is nothing to talk about. It gets there when it gets there of the status of the bill.

Another bill in the mix is $7 million for the state's Best Beginnings Child Care Scholarship, which would lower co-pays for the program and increase eligibility.

The other bill awaiting Ellsworth's signature, according the Legislature's bill tracking website, is House Bill 587 to revise school finance laws related to property taxes.
Few governors deliberately would refuse to provide food to 73,000 hungry children. But thats what Gov. Greg Gianforte plans this summer. Despite available federal funding and a surplus state budget, the governors administration is opting out of the federal program that would have paid for childrens meals this year.

Sadly, the governors hard-hearted extremism is harming far more than these kids and is part of a pattern as Gianforte repeatedly has attempted to deny needed care for senior citizens. As a result, the governor is yanking the states steering wheel so far toward radicalism that hes driving Montana into the ditch at the expense of families and communities across the state.

Democrats firmly believe the goal of state government should be to ensure public safety while helping create opportunity for Montana families, small businesses and retirees. Unfortunately, Republicans used the recent legislative session to focus most of its time and energy on benefiting the wealthy, ignoring the middle class, and taking away Montanans individual freedoms.

Now the governor is continuing that work at the expense of Montanans. Take the recent shocking news that the governor is refusing federal funding to feed hungry Montana kids, even though federal funding expressly for this purpose is available.

This decision is astonishingly wrong, lacks a moral compass and is a terrible policy. The results are clear: Giving kids enough to eat helps them stay healthy, learn better and grow into productive adults, saving taxpayers money many times over.

For the governor, its Groundhog Day. Last year, Gianforte tried to deny food for hungry kids but backed down after a public uproar. Ultimately, 96 Montana schools or districts participated in the program.

But Gianforte seems to have learned nothing. Despite 35 other states joining this summer and support for the program from Montana schools, the governor claimed the paperwork was too hard. One wonders: Has Gianforte hired staff less able to do their jobs than in other states? Or is the goal to do as little as possible for struggling kids?

Turning to care for seniors and veterans, many Montana nursing homes that provide vital long-term care are in trouble. Already, 12 nursing homes across the state closed in the last year. This loss of essential care for vulnerable Montanans, and the shuttering of Montana businesses, could have been prevented. An independent study found that rate adjustments were necessary to keep remaining facilities open. Nevertheless, Gianfortes budget this year still severely short-changed funding for long-term care.

This penny-wise pound-foolish proposal was mean-spirited and would cause even more nursing homes to close, harming seniors and their families especially in rural Montana where care is harder to come by. Conversely, the Democrats' proposal prioritized everyday folks. Democrats stuck to their guns and secured additional funding for senior care, filling the unnecessary gaps left by Gianforte and his gang of elites.

The governor, however, is still trying to harm seniors and veterans. In late May, he vetoed a popular bill that saved taxpayer money and cleaned up a waiting list for in-home services. His veto leaves Montanas senior citizens and veterans languishing on the waiting list while closing the door on nursing home care.

And now weve learned that the governor has told Legislative Republicans that if they dont support his vetoes on other issues, he will veto the needed funding for nursing homes. In other words, Gianforte is holding seniors hostage because he cant corral his own party. Gianforte is willing to sacrifice seniors for his own political needs.

Gianforte still hasnt learned that people are more important than politics. Montanans deserve a leader that focuses on the issues of highest concern to citizens  putting regular Montanans first and focusing on families, communities and helping create a fair chance for Montanans to succeed.
Central Bancshares Inc. of Muscatine recently announced an agreement to acquire McLaughlin Holding Company and merge CBI Bank and Trust with Southeast National Bank (SENB).

Central Bancshares of Muscatine Iowa, parent company of CBI Bank, and McLaughlin Holding Company, parent company of SENB, based in Moline, jointly announced the signing of an agreement and Plan of Merger for Central Bancshares to acquire the holding company. The transaction is subject to shareholder and regulatory approval and is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2023. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Its a great opportunity and an excellent fit for both organizations, Terry Esch, president of McLaughlin Holding Co. and SENB, said in a news release. Our customers can rest assured that there is a strong commitment to continue providing the same safe, stable banking environment that theyve grown to know and trust and that they will continue to receive the same high level of customer service.

The statement was reinforced by Greg Kistler, president and CEO of Central Bancshares and CBI Bank and Trust.

We are excited to partner with SENB Bank, he said. They share our core community banking philosophy: empowered local management and employees dedicated to serving our customers and communities.

Kistler added that after the acquisition was complete, customers would not see any immediate changes and that the bank would continue to operate in the same locations. Systems conversions will take place in 2024. He said it would be business as usual but supported by the financial strength and resources of a larger parent organizations.

The boards of directors and executives of both companies believe that the transaction will create a strong partnership, bringing together two compatible, community-oriented banking enterprises.

Cummings and Company LLC served as financial adviser and Barack Ferrazzano Kirchbaum and Nagelberg LLC served as legal counsel to Central Bancshares in connection with the transaction. Olsen Palmer LLC served as financial adviser and Dickinson Wright PLLC served as legal counsel for McLaughlin.

SENB was organized in 1961 and has total assets of about $337 million. It serves the Quad-Cities market in both Iowa and Illinois and has six locations: Moline and Roscoe, Illinois; Davenport, Bettendorf and Buffalo, Iowa; and Beloit, Wisconsin.

Central Bancshare serves about 40,000 customers in businesses throughout 17 banking centers with locations in Coralville, Davenport, Kalona, Muscatine, Walcott, Washington and Wilton in Iowa; and Brimfield, Buffalo Prairie, Galesburg, Monmouth and Peoria in Illinois. The banks Trust and Investment Divisions manage assets of about $1.4 billion. After completion of the transaction, Central Bancshares will have total assets in excess of $1.45 billion.
WEST LIBERTY  For years, the West Liberty Community School District (WLCSD) has strived to provide its students with as much guidance as possible as they work toward postsecondary success. This month, the district is being recognized for its efforts, which have been deemed worthy of national acknowledgement.

On June 8, WLCSD counselors Andrea Shultice, Brenda Arthur-Miller and Stephanie Paulsen attended an award ceremony in Washington, D.C. On behalf of their district, the three counselors accepted one of this years Power of Hope awards.

Being awarded by the National Postsecondary Strategy Institute (NPSI) and Reach Hire, the Power of Hope Award is meant to recognize school districts from around the country for their excellence in engaging counselors for students postsecondary success. Alongside WLCSD, Southwest ISD, a school district in San Antonio, Texas, was also recognized for its counselors.

In a public statement, Stephanie Owens, executive director of Reach Higher and Common Apps Vice President of Student Success, said: The Power of Hope Award is built on the belief that we have a social, economic and moral imperative to support more low-income and underrepresented racial minority students to and through college. Were honored to partner with NPSI to recognize these school districts and the work their counselors do every day to change the lives of students and the communities in which they serve.

We are proud to recognize school districts that have moved school counselors from the periphery of leadership into a centralized role, engaging them as data-informed leaders who are empowered with resources to help all students receive the support and experiences to reach for an educational credential beyond a high school diploma, Joyce Brown, founding partner of NPSI, added.

Kara Kruse, district data and communications administration assistant shared the entire districts excitement about the award.

We feel very honored to have received this award for the efforts of our counselors within the school district as a whole, but also specifically for our high school and junior high counselors as they start with postsecondary and career readiness, even if junior high grade levels, Kruse said. I feel like it is a huge honor to be recognized for this.

Kruse attributed the districts win to its dual-role counselors.

I believe that having a counselor who performs a dual role as both high school counselor and community college adviser has been really beneficial for the students within our school district, she explained. That role as counselor and college adviser can help prepare them for whats to come and get them engaged in college courses even when theyre still in high school.

Looking ahead, Kruse said she felt confident that the WLCSD team and its counselors would continue striving to help its students succeed in every way possible.

I am sure that we are going to continue to develop and create new ways to help our students engage and continue on that pathway to success, she said.
As former President Donald Trump lashed out about his indictment in Florida, many fellow Republicans fell in line behind him, with some marked exceptions.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy voiced support for the ex-president.

"I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice," the California Republican tweeted. "House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable," he added.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said the indictment was a sham and the continuation of the endless political persecution of Donald Trump.

Lets be clear about whats happening: Joe Biden is weaponizing his Department of Justice against his own political rival, Scalise tweeted.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who lost the GOP presidential nomination to Trump in 2016, also voiced solidarity.

"There is no limit to what these people will do to protect their power & destroy those who threaten it, even if it means ripping our country apart & shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together," he tweeted, though it was not clear whom he was referring to.

Trump has been indicted by a Florida grand jury on charges related to taking classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort when he left office.

Republican presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson called on Trump to end his reelection campaign.

"With the news that Donald Trump has been indicted for the second time, our country finds itself in a position that weakens our democracy. Donald Trump's actions  from his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of law  should not define our nation or the Republican Party," the former Arkansas governor said in a statement Thursday night.

"This is a sad day for our country," he continued. "While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign."

Long-shot GOP presidential contender Steve Laffey said Trump "continues make a mockery of the electoral process."

"It's time the RNC and (voters) take a closer look at the candidates and realize that Donald Trump cannot with the 2024 Presidential Election," he tweeted.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis condemned the indictment of Trump, his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, as a political hatchet job.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation, DeSantis tweeted.

Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? he adds.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who is also seeking the Republican presidential nomination, called the indictment an affront.

"We cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents," he said in a statement. "It's hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden."

Democrats were quick to condemn Trump.

"Trump's apparent indictment on multiple charges arising from his retention of classified materials is another affirmation of the rule of law," Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., wrote on Twitter. "For four years, he acted like he was above the law. But he should be treated like any other lawbreaker. And today, he has been."

Diehard Trump supporters closed ranks.

"Sad day for America. God Bless President Trump," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, tweeted.

"Democrats must literally shake with sweats when they see amazing packed out Trump rallies and overwhelming winning poll numbers week after week," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., tweeted. "We must win in 2024."

Photos: Donald Trump's arraignment
Donald Trump's indictment on 37 counts of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate represents the most serious legal jeopardy so far for Trump, coming less than three months after he was charged in New York with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Here's a look at the charges, the special counsel's investigation and how Trump's case differs from those of other politicians known to be in possession of classified documents:

WHAT ARE THE CHARGES?

Trump faces 37 counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, according to the indictment unsealed Friday. The charges include counts of retaining classified information, obstructing justice and making false statements, among other crimes.

Trump is accused of keeping documents related to nuclear weaponry in the United States and the nuclear capabilities of a foreign country, along with documents from White House intelligence briefings, including some that detail the military capabilities of the U.S. and other countries, according to the indictment. Prosecutors alleged Trump showed off the documents to people who did not have security clearances to review them and later tried to conceal documents from his own lawyers as they sought to comply with federal demands to find and return documents.

The top charges carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.

After leaving office in 2021, the former president showed someone working for his political action committee a map that detailed a military operation in a foreign country, prosecutors allege in the document. On another occasion that year, Trump showed a writer, a publisher and two of his staffers  none of whom had security clearances  a military plan of attack.

HOW IS TRUMP REACTING?

Trump, on his Truth Social app on Thursday, called his indictment a DARK DAY for the United States of America. In a video post, he said, Im innocent and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly. Within 20 minutes of breaking the news, his 2024 presidential campaign sent out a fundraising missive asking for financial support.

On Friday, he continued to post about it on social media, lashing out at the special counsel who investigated the case, seeking to blame President Joe Biden, labeling the investigation a WITCH HUNT and declaring, I had nothing to hide, nor do I now.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The Justice Department unsealed the indictment Friday, the first time the department confirmed Trump was being charged with a crime. Special counsel Jack Smith, who filed the charges, made his first public statement Friday afternoon, saying in brief remarks to reporters in Washington that the country has one set of laws and they apply to everyone." He said prosecutors would seek a speedy trial.

Trump is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday in South Florida. It wasnt immediately clear what the procedure would look like.

When he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney in the New York case, Trump surrendered to authorities, where he was booked behind closed doors and appeared in the courtroom, sitting with his lawyers at the defense table.

The Florida case was initially assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Trump and who previously granted his request for an independent arbiter to review documents obtained during an FBI search of his Florida estate.

HOW DID THIS CASE COME ABOUT?

Officials with the National Archives and Records Administration reached out to representatives for Trump in spring 2021 when they realized that important material from his time in office was missing.

According to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents are considered property of the U.S. government and must be preserved.

A Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago. In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trumps Florida home, later telling Justice Department officials that they contained a lot of classified material.

That May, the FBI and Justice Department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Trumps possession. Investigators who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Trumps lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.

But that assertion turned out to be false. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents.

In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings  including some at the top secret level  have been recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021.

HOW DID A SPECIAL COUNSEL GET INVOLVED?

Last year, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland picked Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor with a background in public corruption probes, to lead investigations into the presence of classified documents at Trumps Florida estate, as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.

Smith's appointment was a recognition by Garland of the politics involved in an investigation into a former president and current White House candidate. Garland himself was selected by Democratic President Joe Biden, whom Trump is seeking to challenge for the White House in 2024.

Special counsels are appointed in cases in which the Justice Department perceives itself as having a conflict or where its deemed to be in the public interest to have someone outside the government come in and take responsibility for a matter.

According to the Code of Federal Regulations, a special counsel must have a reputation for integrity and impartial decision making, as well as an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies.

DIDNT BIDEN AND FORMER VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE HAVE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS, TOO?

Yes, but the circumstances of their cases are vastly different from those involving Trump.

After classified documents were found at Biden's think tank and Pence's Indiana home, their lawyers notified authorities and quickly arranged for them to be handed over. They also authorized other searches by federal authorities to search for additional documents.

There is no indication either was aware of the existence of the records before they were found, and no evidence has so far emerged that Biden or Pence sought to conceal the discoveries. Thats important because the Justice Department historically looks for willfulness in deciding whether to bring criminal charges.

A special counsel was appointed earlier this year to probe how classified materials ended up at Bidens Delaware home and former office. But even if the Justice Department were to find Bidens case prosecutable on the evidence, its Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a president is immune from prosecution during his time in office.

As for Pence, the Justice Department informed his legal team earlier this month that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against him over his handling of the documents.

DOES A FEDERAL INDICTMENT PREVENT TRUMP FROM RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT?

No. Neither the indictment itself nor a conviction would prevent Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

And as the New York case showed, criminal charges have historically been a boon to his fundraising. The campaign announced that it had raised over $4 million in the 24 hours after that indictment became public, far smashing its previous record after the FBI search of Trumps Mar-a-Lago club.

HOW ARE TRUMPS REPUBLICAN RIVALS REACTING TO THE NEWS?

Many of Trump's challengers for the GOP nomination jumped to his defense after news of the indictment broke.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump's top rival for the 2024 nomination, accused the Justice Department of political bias in charging the former president.

The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society, DeSantis tweeted. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation."

He questioned why the Justice Department had been so zealous in bringing charges against Trump and so passive about going after former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton or Biden's son Hunter.

Campaigning in New Hampshire on Friday, former Vice President Pence said he was deeply troubled to see the indictment because he believed it would further divide the nation. He also called on Garland to make the indictment public as soon as possible.

You need to stand up and explain to us why this was necessary before the sun sets today," Pence said.

Trump's United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, also decried the indictment, saying, This is not how justice should be pursued in our country.

The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics," she said Friday. "Its time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions.

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said Thursday that he felt the justice systems scales are weighted based on politics. In America, every single person is presumed innocent, not guilty, Scott said on Fox News, decrying the weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president.

Biotech entrepreneur and anti-woke activist Vivek Ramaswamy said the federal case was part of an affront to every citizen. Reiterating his comments that he would pardon Trump, Ramaswamy called it hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden over his own classified documents case.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who called for Trump to drop out of the race after the New York charges were filed, said the federal indictment marked a sad day for our country and reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.

Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP
Siaya Deputy Governor William Oduol has been impeached, with all 42 members of the Siaya County Assembly voting in favor of his removal from office.

The voting process followed a roll call on Thursday, as directed by Speaker George Okode.

This Assembly resolves to impeach the Siaya County Deputy Governor, William Oduol under Section 33 of County Government Acts 2012, and Standing Orders 71 and 72 on the following grounds, read the report tabled by the 14-member special committee that was formed to investigate his proposed removal from office.

The motion for Mr. Oduols impeachment was based on several allegations, including gross violation of the Constitution and other laws, abuse of office, gross misconduct, and providing false information that misled the public.

On grounds of gross misconduct and abuse of office, it was determined that William Oduol utilized his positions authority to incur expenses amounting to approximately Sh18 million for renovating his office, purchasing furniture, and acquiring office equipment. These expenditures were not included in the budget and were not part of the procurement plan, thereby violating Section 53(2) of the relevant regulations.

According to a procurement list dated December 18, 2022, Mr. Oduols office received Presidential Mahogany desk finished in two packs, amounting to Sh336,700; a bookshelf cabinet priced at Sh567,700; five curved coffee tables with stools costing Sh756,700; and an executive orthopedic desk chair with a fully-spring seat priced at Sh238,840.

The procurement list also included additional items such as an executive visitors chair with a full-spring back and seat, priced at Sh238,840; an office mahogany in-and-out tray costing Sh178,200; executive custom-made round tables finished in two packs, valued at Sh254,800; 12 executive high-back orthopedic desk chairs in black leather, amounting to Sh2,844,000; and a custom-made seven-seat executive curved sofa set, priced at Sh910,000.

The list also included a Priya executive orthopedic desk chair with a fully-spring seat, priced at Sh1,120,000; a six-meter conference table valued at Sh1,051,200; a Priya executive visitors chair with a fully-spring back and seat, costing Sh168,000; a grooved coffee table priced at Sh211,400; and an executive custom-made desk with a fully-spring feature, amounting to Sh333,000.

The furniture, totaling Sh11,366,213 million, constituted a significant portion of the Sh18 million spent for the refurbishment of William Oduols office.

Other grounds for his impeachment included bullying junior officials. He was found to have threatened Mr. Martin Okwata, the County Director of Supply Chain Management, with harsh working environment for failing to change specifications in certain tender documents.

Oduol was also found to have made excessive demands for constant and repeated briefings on not just procurement matters but also finance-related issues. He persistently sought information on county financial transactions directly from the Acting Chief Officer for Finance and Economic Planning, Mr. Jack Odinga, despite the fact that Mr. Odinga was not directly accountable to him in terms of his duties and responsibilities.

Moreover, the Deputy Governor misled the public by falsely stating that funds allocated for the completion of the Siaya Stadium had been reallocated in the Supplementary Budget I for the Financial Year 2022-2023. However, it was confirmed that the allocation for the stadium had been enhanced rather than removed, contrary to Mr. Oduols claim. These instances further contributed to the allegations of misconduct against the Deputy Governor.

Mr. Oduol fate now rests with the Senate, which will have the authority to either uphold the decision made by the Members of the County Assembly (MCAs) or overturn it.

If the Senate upholds the decision, Oduol will be removed from his position as Deputy Governor. Conversely, if the Senate overturns the decision, Oduol will be reinstated as the Deputy Governor.
On Thursday, June 8, Kenya Power announced the commencement of the installation of specialized utility smart poles in different residential areas of Nairobi. The purpose of the poles is to facilitate and enhance high-speed internet connectivity within these estates.

Speaking at the Kenya Power Grid Conference, Managing Director and CEO, Joseph Siror, said these innovative poles will offer telecommunications companies an alternative method for deploying last-mile data networks, utilizing wireless technologies. The project is expected to enhance connectivity and improve access to reliable internet services.

The Smart Poles will provide an alternative method of deploying last-mile data networks using wireless technologies, allowing telecom service providers to improve data coverage and capacity while addressing the issue of signal dropouts, Siror explained.

The pilot project is currently underway through a collaborative effort between Kenya Power and Safaricom.

The pilot project is currently being undertaken at six (undisclosed) locations within Nairobi, and once it is completed, Kenya Power will install smart poles within its overhead network, which telecom service providers will lease to mount their wireless transmission equipment, said Siror.

Upon the successful completion of the pilot phase, Kenya Power intends to proceed with the installation of smart poles throughout its existing overhead network.

The Company has put in place a strategy that lays a firm foundation for growth in the next century. We will leverage sustainable solutions to ensure that we have a smart grid in place while at the same time offering excellent service to our customers, the MD said.

Siror also noted that Kenya Power is actively engaging in discussions with the Ministry of ICT to establish a framework that enables the company to contribute to the governments digital economy agenda.

As part of the plan, Kenya Power aims to extend its infrastructure to facilitate affordable internet connectivity in public institutions, including schools and hospitals.

Aside from revenue diversification, the smart poles project and partnership with the Ministry of ICT will provide the Company with valuable lessons in its quest to fully automate the grid, Siror said.
Two Lao nationals arrested for cross-border drug trafficking

The Customs Department of the central province of Quang Tri stated on June 8 that they had arrested two Lao nationals after they had attempted to transport 18,000 pills of synthetic drugs into Vietnam.













The exhibits seized in the drug trafficking case (Photo:VNA)




By PCS

The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) member countries must change tact in their approach to trade.

President William Ruto said the bloc must embrace a systemic shift to exploit its untapped potential.

He said it is time COMESA espoused value addition, especially of agricultural commodities, to enhance productivity.

The shift will also offer higher returns, incentivise industrialisation, boost our competitiveness and create employment, he said.

President Ruto was addressing the 22nd COMESA Summit of Heads of State and Government in Lusaka, Zambia, on Thursday.

Present were Presidents Abdel Fattah El-Sisi (Egypt), Hakainde Hichilema (Zambia), Lazarus Chakwera (Malawi), Evariste Ndayishimiye (Burundi), COMESA Secretary General Chileshe Kapwepwe, among others.

He urged Africa to move away from primary production and exports of raw materials to manufacturing.

The potential for intra-COMESA trade is colossal; the demand for value-added products is bound to keep growing well into the future, he explained.

He asked COMESA member States to take advantage of its 580 million market demand to enhance trade.

The Head of State noted that Africa must utilise its rich, clean energy to advance its industrial development.

We are championing for the radical repositioning of Africa as the clean, green continent of the future in order to exploit the opportunities arising from the transition to green industrialization, he said.

President Ruto also called for the consolidation of the COMESA, the East African Community, and the Southern African Development Community to enhance the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement.

It is also time we elavated the Africa Union to have the power to negotiate for the collective interests of Africa.

He said the move will boost Africaa bargaining power at the global scene.

The Summit also marked the end of President El-Sisis chairmanship era as he handed over to President Hichilema.
Raila Odinga has presented President William Ruto with a set of requests aimed at lowering the high cost of living and reducing government spending.

During a press conference held in Nairobi, the Azimio leader expressed the coalitions opposition to the revenue-generating initiatives outlined in the Finance Bill 2023. He argued that these measures would exacerbate the countrys existing economic crisis and called for alternative solutions.

Odinga said the ruling Kenya Kwanza government is the first administration to impose heavy taxes on Kenyans without delivering tangible benefits, offering nothing more than fantasies and fairy tales in return.

This Bill is economic sabotage. If Ruto insists on this Bill, this country will go into full recession. This Bill requires and must get fierce resistance, said Odinga, adding that the Finance Bill is a disease that cannot be cured with everyday herbs.

The former Prime Minister denounced the proposed Bill as an act of economic sabotage. He warned that if President Ruto persists in pushing for its implementation, the country will inevitably slide into a severe recession.

Looking at the proposals, one cannot help asking what planet does Ruto live on? Does he understand what Kenyans are going through? Odinga posed.

The Bill exposes a clear disconnect between Rutos fantasy and the experiences of ordinary people, he added.

Raila went on to outline 10 ways through which President Rut can lower the cost of living.

These are:
On Thursday morning, a tragic incident unfolded in Ongata Rongai town, Kajiado North Sub County, where a woman fatally stabbed her two children and subsequently injured her husband and herself.

According to official police reports, the shocking incident occurred following a domestic dispute, where the 28-year-old woman resorted to using kitchen knives to fatally stab her six-year-old daughter and two-year-old son.

After stabbing to death her children, the woman proceeded to stab her husband multiple times before turning the knife on herself. The incident took place at Taaria Apartments, where neighbors reportedly heard a commotion from the couples house on the fourth floor.

The caretaker, Paul Isaboke, said he also heard the husbands cries for help as he writhed in pain.

As usual, we heard a commotion from the house, but we did not know it would end tragically. The two minors were lying in a pool of blood when we managed to open the door, said a neighbour.

The neighbours rushed the couple to the nearby Sinai Health Centre.

Kajiado North police commander Hussein Gura confirmed the incident and said the two were moved to the Kenyatta National Hospital in critical condition.
At the annual conference of the European Union of Judges held in Athens, a resolution was adopted regarding the independence and challenges of the judiciary in Armenia. The Union of RA Judges reports.

"Statement on current issues affecting judicial independence in the Republic of Armenia



1. At its meeting in Athens on 2 June 2023 the European Association of Judges  EAJ- noted with considerable concern recent developments in the Republic of Armenia which adversely affect the independence of the Supreme Judicial Council and have led to the misuse of disciplinary proceedings as a means of deterring judges from publicly expressing their views on the operation of the judicial system.



2. The members of the Supreme Judicial Council include five non-judicial members who are elected by a vote of at least three-fifths of the total number of deputies in the National Assembly and must be from among academic lawyers or other prominent lawyers1 . The candidacy of such a non-judicial member must be proposed by a faction of the National Assembly2 . The current nonjudicial members of the Council were all nominated and appointed by the ruling faction, which commands an absolute majority among the deputies in the National Assembly.



3. Neither the qualifications and merits of the candidates selected and appointed by the party of government, nor the manner or process of their selection, were disclosed. Two of those put forward for appointment held, until immediately before their appointment, office as the Minister of Justice and Deputy Minister of Justice respectively. The first of these thereafter assumed the chairmanship of the Supreme Judicial Council. The clear inference to be drawn from these appointments and the absence of any attempt on the part of the ruling faction to justify the appointments on the basis of merit is that they were politically motivated.



4. The appointments of the non-judicial members are incompatible with the standards set by the European Network of Judicial Councils which stipulate that the process of selection and appointment of non-judicial members of judicial councils should be merit based and transparent3 . They also ignore the recommendation made in 2018 by the OECD that Armenia should establish open, transparent and competitive procedure of election of non-judicial members of the Supreme Judicial Council and specify criteria for elections as its member by the National Assembly.



5. The EAJ also notes with concern that the Minister of Justice has the power to institute disciplinary proceedings against judges which are then determined by the Supreme Judicial Council. The placing of that function in the hands of the Minister of Justice  a part of the executive branch of the State- presents a danger for the independence of judicial office holders. This was made clear by GRECO in its fourth evaluation round4 . It also reinforces the need for the Supreme Judicial Council, as the adjudicating body in disciplinary matters, to be wholly free of political influence.



6. Further, the EAJ finds wholly objectionable the steps recently taken to prevent members of the judiciary from expressing in public any views or concerns regarding the system of justice in Armenia.



7. Thus on 25 and 26 November and on 2 and 3 December 2022 the Chairman of the Supreme Judicial Council, along with his immediate successor as Minister of Justice, convened meetings of the judges in all the areas of Armenia to announce the creation of a network of speakers whereby only certain individuals approved by him were permitted to speak publicly on matters relating the judicial system. Since then, the Minister of Justice has instituted disciplinary proceedings against judges who, not being approved as speakers, have spoken publicly about aspects of the judicial system. In particular, in disciplinary proceedings brought against her on the grounds of criticism voiced in a social medium and in a press interview to the effect that judges workloads were excessive Judge Zaruhi Nakhshkaryan was removed from office on 27 February 2023. Proceedings have also been commenced against Judge Davit Harutyunyan on the grounds that he gave an interview to the press in which he criticised the establishment of the network of speakers; decisions to suspend the powers of 2O judges on the basis that the training which they had undergone before appointment was inadequate; and attempts by the Chairman of the Supreme Judicial Council to influence the election of a judicial member of the Council.



8. The EAJ deplores such blatant misuse of disciplinary proceedings to prevent members of the judiciary from exercising freedom of speech to discuss critically the operation of the judicial system. The EAJ accordingly calls upon the authorities of the Republic of Armenia



  Fully to observe and uphold the principle of the independence of the judiciary in all respects;



 To ensure that the non-judicial members of the Supreme Judicial Council are selected openly and on merit and are free from political influence by the executive;



 To respect the right of judges to freedom of speech;



 To refrain from misusing disciplinary proceedings as a means of preventing a judicial office holder from speaking publicly about the judicial system and its institutions; and



 To review the cases in which the power of the Minister of Justice to bring disciplinary proceedings has been thus misused", says the resolution.
Russian peacekeepers record two ceasefire violations in Shushi, Artsakh

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15 more medical patients transferred from Karabakh to Armenia

Armenia fallen soldiers mother sentenced to 4 years in prison in PM's son abduction case

Turkeys Erdogan to visit Azerbaijan on June 13

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Karabakh president meets with freedom fighters, Afghan War veterans, army reserve officers

Meta plans to create a Twitter analogue and implement generative AI on all its platforms

Azerbaijan, Iran FMs exchange views on some regional matters

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VOA: Washington talks postponement could mean that Azerbaijan has no decisions on some key issues, analyst says
At the moment, the United States cannot specify a specific date when the next round of talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan will take place, the US State Department said in response to the VOA Armenian Service's inquiry regarding the postponement of the Armenian and Azerbaijani FMs talks scheduled in Washington next week.

In response to the VOA Armenian service's question, Olesya Vardanyan, Crisis Group's Senior Analyst for the South Caucasus Region, said that after several rounds of talks at different levels and in the capitals, the discussions have entered a decisive period, when important decisions must be made about the important parts of the future peace agreement; in particular, regarding the future of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh and the delimitation of the Armenia-Azerbaijan.

According to the analyst, Azerbaijan's request to postpone the aforesaid talks probably indicates that Azerbaijan has not yet decided on these important issues. Now, it is very important to continue the talks with all parties. We hope Washington will continue to do that with its European partners, Vardanyan emphasized.

Speaking to the VOA Armenian Service, Heather Ashby, the Acting Program officer for the Center for Russia and Europe at the US Institute of Peace, stressed the active involvement of the US and the EU in the settlement of the matter. In her written response, Ashby emphasizes that after the collapse of the OSCE Minsk Group and, in particular, Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is extremely important for peace talks to have credible and active mediators who can bring high-ranking officials of Armenia and Azerbaijan to the negotiating table to discuss sensitive issues..

According to Ashby, the attention will be focused on two main domains in the next phase of the peace talks mediated by the US. The first is the status of Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan and the latters plans to provide security guarantees to Karabakh Armenians. As per Ashby, this will help to create trust in the talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The other domain, according to the analyst, is the discussions on the transport corridor connecting Azerbaijan with Nakhichevan. Russia and Iran both have interests in this corridor and will try to influence Armenia and Azerbaijan to ensure that this transport route does not conflict with their interests in the region. This transport corridor is more important for Russia, she claims.

According to the analyst, the talks can be considered successful if the parties agree to continue the meetings at a high level, better understand each other's positions, and make progress on difficult issues during the discussions.
The Human Rights Defender (Ombudsperson) of Armenia, Anahit Manasyan, on Friday received a delegation led by USAID/Armenia Mission Director John Allelo, the office of the Human Rights Defender (HRD) informs Armenian News-NEWS.am.

Manasyan presented the issues raised as a result of the HRD fact-finding work in Syunik and Gegharkunik provinces, and human rights violations in border settlements as a result of the presence and actions of Azerbaijani armed forces in the sovereign territory of Armenia. In this context, the HRD emphasized that no political and territorial factor can prevail over the need to protect and guarantee human rights.

Also, the parties discussed the priorities of the HRDs activities.

For his part, John Allelo presented the details of the programs implemented by USAID.

The parties expressed readiness to continue and further develop cooperation in human rights protection.
The visiting Armenian delegation led by the speaker of the Republic of Armenia National Assembly (RA NA), Alen Simonyan, met with the members of the United Kingdom (UK) Parliament delegation to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

After the exchange of greetings, the President of the RA NA noted that he had repeatedly witnessed the active work of the British group, which is a good example for the parliamentarians, the NA informed.

Simonyan presented the post-war situation and detailed issues regarding the complex situation in the region. He mentioned that Armenia follows the developments taking place in the UK Parliament and the activities of all those parliamentarians who demonstrated the level of perception of the situation in Armenias region after the 2020 war.

We believe that the targeted statements and pressure of our international partners can prevent further aggression by Azerbaijan, as well as contribute to the elimination of the atmosphere of impunity, Simonyan added.

The members of the RA NA delegation thoroughly informed their UK colleagues about the blockade of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) Armenians, the crisis of the Lachin corridor, and the encroachments of the Azerbaijani military forces against the territorial integrity of Armenia.

The parties stated that Armenia and the UK have formed an ambitious agenda for bilateral relations based on shared values and principles, such as rule of law, the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the strengthening of democratic institutions.

Also, they discussed the necessity to have a single agenda within the framework of the Inter-Parliamentary Union at the meeting to support the strengthening of the democratic institutions of Armenia and the United Kingdom.
Fridays Yerevan court hearing on the "abduction case" of Ashot Pashinyan, the son of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, is being held behind closed doors.

The defense attorneys of Gayane Martirosyan, the mother of soldier Zhora Martirosyan who died in the 44-day war in 2020, detained in the case, were not allowed to enter the courtroom before the start of this court session.

The bailiff of the court informed the defense that the court had decided to hold this hearing behind closed doors.

A little later, however, the attorneys were allowed to enter the courtroom, but the reporters were not.

It is noteworthy that Ashot Pashinyan told the reporters that they had not submitted a motion to the court to hold a closed hearing.

On May 17, information was spread that a group of members of the "Call of Sons" NGO had tried to abduct Ashot Pashinyan, the son of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Ashot Pashinyan had submitted a complaint to the police, after which the Investigative Committee of Armenia opened a criminal case on charges of abduction, and Gayane Martirosyan was arrested along the lines of this criminal case.

But on June 5, it was announced that the aforesaid restraining order against Martirosyan was commuted to house arrest. On the same day, however, the Yerevan criminal court decided to commuter this house arrest to 1 month and 15 days in custody.
Armenian Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Khachatryan commented on the postponement of the talks slated for June 12 in Washington, between the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, which were postponed at the request of the Azerbaijani side.

Answering a reporter's question as to how he interpret this move by Azerbaijan in the context of border tension, Khachatryan noted that talks are something that never go smoothly.

"Of course, this time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued an explanation regarding the reasons for the postponement, and I have nothing to add in this regard. I believe that these postponed talks will take place after a short time," Khachatryan said during a briefing with reporters.

To a reporter's question as to whether Azerbaijan has responded to the proposals of the Armenian side regarding the peace treaty, Khachatryan responded that it is all a working process and views are constantly exchanged.

"If at some phase we made a proposal regarding which we still do not know the position of the Azerbaijani side or vice versa, it is all a normal process. There is no need to observe anything special here. Whats important is that the parties record that the discussions and talks being held in recent times are bringing the viewpoints closer together," said the Armenian deputy PM.

And to the clarifying question as to whether the Armenian side received Azerbaijan's reactions, Khachatryan responded that the Armenian side certainly received proposals at some phase.

"Now, what was the response to our most recent proposals, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs [(MFA) of Armenia] publishes clarifications in this regard. I don't want to add anything to that. The official information is the one that the MFA disseminates," concluded the Armenian deputy premier.
Former US President Donald Trump has been charged with using classified government documents after leaving the White House, several American media reported.

Trump confirmed on social media that the Department of Justice informed his lawyers that he was charged and that he was summoned to the federal court in Miami on Tuesday.

"The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

This indictment is being kept secret for now, but CNN, citing a source familiar with the matter, said it contains several criminal charges.

Trump will be the first former US president to be indicted in federal court.

He has already been charged separately in New York state with falsifying business documents in 2016 to hide a hush fee for an adult film actress. He pleaded not guilty in this case.

The US Department of Justice has been investigating Trump since early 2022 after the agency learned that he kept hundreds of classified government documents at his Florida residence and obstructed attempts to retrieve them.

Under US law, presidential papers belong to the government and must be turned over to the US National Archives when a president leaves office.

But Trump allegedly took hundreds of documents from the White House and sent them to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. In total, prosecutors seized more than 300 classified documents from Trump. They had various degrees of secrecy: secret and top secret.

The documents were obtained from various agencies, including the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency. The documents were related to various domains of national security, including China and Iran's missile programs.

The aforesaid indictment has not yet been declassified, but the FBI warrant cites laws that may have been violated.

Violations of these laws are punishable by 10 to 20 years in prison.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing in connection with these documents, calling the respective investigation a "witch hunt" aimed at preventing him from running for president again.
Indicators of economic growth and activity in Armenia create fertile ground for the formation of quite optimistic expectations, both in the current year and in the near future. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said this at Fridays plenary session of the Eurasian Congress, in Sochi, Russia.

According to him, in 2022, the economy of Armenia recorded an unprecedented economic growth, and the GDP growth, compared to 2021, was 12.6 percent.

"The growth of industry, trade, including commercial services and construction sectors, also contributed to the high dynamics of Armenia's economy. The growth of exports during the last year was 77.7 percent; moreover, exports to the [other] EAEU [member] countries increased three times," the PM added.

Pashinyan emphasized that Eurasia has a huge potential for economic growth, and they should jointly implement large-scale projects in energy, digitalization, logistics, climate agenda, and some other domains of mutual interest.
Gayane Martirosyan, the mother of serviceman Zhora Martirosyan who was martyred in the 44-day war in 2020, on Friday was sentenced to four years in prison on the "abduction case" of Ashot Pashinyan, the son of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, but the sentence was not applied conditionally.

A Yerevan court announced the verdict a little while ago, finding Martirosyan guilty of the charge and sentencing her to prison for four years. But counting Martirosyan's time already in custody, she was sentenced to imprisonment for three years and eleven months.

The court, however, decided not to apply the sentence conditionally, setting a probation period of one year.

The preventive measure of detention against Martirosyan was removed, and she was released from the courtroom.

Martirosyan's defense attorneys were going to motion for an acquittal, claiming an absence of corpus delicti, but Martirosyan pleaded guilty and requested a speedy trial.

On May 17, information was spread that a group of members of the "Call of Sons" NGO had tried to abduct Ashot Pashinyan, the son of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Ashot Pashinyan had submitted a complaint to the police, after which the Investigative Committee of Armenia opened a criminal case on charges of abduction, and Gayane Martirosyan was arrested along the lines of this criminal case.

But on June 5, it was announced that the aforesaid restraining order against Martirosyan was commuted to house arrest. On the same day, however, the Yerevan criminal court decided to commuter this house arrest to one month and fifteen days in custody.
The text on unblocking transport communications is at a high level of preparation, but there are two or three inconsistencies that still need further discussion. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Overchuk told this to Sputnik Armenia, as he commented on the results of the recent tripartite meeting of the commission on unblocking of regional communications.

According to him, the aforesaid meeting in Moscow, with the participation of the deputy PMs of Armenia and Azerbaijan as well, lasted nine hours.

"Fundamentally, the text is at a high level of preparation, there are two or three inconsistencies that still need additional discussion. The fundamental moment is the geographical part through which the railway will pass. We have announced that, we agreed on how the customs control of the cargo will be carried out," said Overchuk.

According to the Russian deputy premier, it will be an ordinary railway, an ordinary border with passport, border, and customs control.

He emphasized that no one was questioning the sovereignty of Armenia, and all parties are willing to start the work as soon as possible.

And asked whether the matter of the possible participation of Russian Federal Security Service employees was discussed in terms of control and security, Overchuk responded that this depends on Armenia.
Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin told Russia-24 television that Russia consistently assists Armenia and Azerbaijan in developing the parameters of a peace treaty between them.

Also, he considered it a natural and logical process that the parties directly discuss the text of this peace treaty.

"The Russian side will continue its efforts in full compliance with the tripartite statements on assisting the solution of the full complex of Armenian-Azerbaijani normalization issues," said Galuzin.

He called it a logical process that Baku and Yerevan are discussing the text of this peace treaty, at the same time noting that tripartite agreements remain an alternative roadmap for the normalization of Armenia-Azerbaijan relations.

Galuzin emphasized that Moscow is not opposed to other countries assisting the normalization of relations between Yerevan and Bakubut not with words, but with deeds,and in line with the fundamental agreements reached by the leaders of Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia.
The goal of the US is to push Russia out of the peaceful settlement process between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin told this to Russia-24 television on Friday.

"The US, in my assessment, is attempting to achieve the same thing everywhere: on the one hand, to push Russia out, on the other hand, to subjugatein a neo-colonial stylethe independent countries which are partners and allies of Russia, to disrupt our partnership and alliance with friends and neighbors. This has always been the main task of America," said Galuzin.

He emphasized that there is no alternative to the normalization of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan based on the tripartite statement by the leaders of Russia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

Moreover, according to him, Russia is not against other countries contributing to the Armenian-Azerbaijani peaceful settlement process.

"But it should be support not in words, but in deeds. And it should be based on the basic fundamental agreements that were reached by the leaders, and which, as we see, are generally being implemented with success," the Russian deputy FM added.
Azerbaijani foreign minister Jeyhun Bayramov received Toivo Klaar, the European Union (EU) Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the Crisis in Georgia.

Bayramov and Klaar exchanged views on the normalization of Azerbaijani-Armenian relations, the current state of talks being held with the mediation of international partners, including the EU, and discussed regional security issues, Azerbaijani media reported, citing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan.

It was noted that the EU supports the process of normalization of relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and will spare no effort in the future to continue respective contacts between the political leadership of the two countries.
Returning as a hybrid event June 925, the virtual and in-person Atlanta Childrens Film Festival introduces youth to film and television careers through workshops in acting, filmmaking and more.

Kids Video Connection, Inc. (KVC), an Atlanta-based nonprofit, presents the 16th annual Atlanta Childrens Film Festival (ACFF) from June 925. With the theme Dreams to Action, this years festival features two-and-a-half weeks of virtual and in-person film screenings and workshops for children, teens and industry professionals. Showcasing films produced by youth and adult independent filmmakers from around the world, the festival promotes positive, educational and entertaining children and family-oriented productions.

The 2023 festival will include guest teachers and speakers such as Fran Burst-Terranella, Janlatae Mullin and Kenn Viselman, producer of Thomas the Tank Engine and Teletubbies, among others.

As the film industry continues to grow in Georgia, educational opportunities like this festival are key to training the next generation of filmmakers.

The ACFF programming aims to expand childrens imaginations, teach media literacy, guide youth in creating their own positive media content, and introduce youth to careers in film and media, says Alesia Johnson, ACFF director. Im excited that our simple idea to show films that would encourage and inspire youth has grown over the years.

Emory University will host Film Festival Family Day on Saturday, June 24, with film showcases and hands-on workshops. The workshops include acting, storytelling, creating and communicating through puppets, and a media career fair to introduce youth to potential career paths. This event is co-sponsored by the Emory Department of Film & Media, the Department of Environmental Studies and Emory Climate Talks.

Registration is required and prices vary depending on the event(s) selected.

Film Festival Family Day activities on June 24

Word in Motion Acting Workshop with Kelly Young-Silva

10 a.m. in White Hall; $25 (ages 717)

Intro to Animation Workshop

10:30 a.m. in White Hall; $20 (ages 517)

KVC Media Career Fair

Noon in White Hall; $20 (ages 717)

Film Screening at Film Festival Family Day

1 p.m. in White Hall; $10 per person or $25 for a family pass (all ages)

For general information about the festival, visit the KVC website. Tickets and a complete festival schedule can be found on the Atlanta Children's Film Festival website.
The 2022 Woodruff Health Sciences Center Community Benefits Report highlights a continuing commitment and passion toward serving the community. From providing top-flight medical care regardless of ability to pay to performing cutting edge research, and from training tomorrows leaders to fueling the local economy, the WHSCs many contributions added up to a value to the community of $813 million in FY2022.

Emory Healthcare provided more than $148 million in compassionate, cutting-edge care to the poor, the underinsured and the uninsured. Beyond charity care, Emory Healthcare provides many other services to help improve access to care, advance medical knowledge and relieve or reduce dependence on taxpayer-funded community efforts. This total for Emory Healthcare was an additional $265 million in FY2022.

The report summarizes the many other ways the WHSC serves its community. As the most comprehensive academic health center in Georgia, Emory Healthcare cares for patients  often the most critically ill in the region  in 11 hospitals, the Emory Clinic and more than 140 outpatient locations. WHSC accounts for 95% of Emory Universitys total $944.5 million in research funding, and its scientists are making the discoveries that will transform tomorrows medical landscape.

With three schools dedicated to the health sciences, WHSC educates clinicians and scientists who go on to improve the health and lives of people in Atlanta, in Georgia and around the globe. The center fuels the local economy, with an annual $13.7 billion economic impact stemming from employment, construction, innovation and more. And the WHSC engages with the local community with an intentional focus on addressing health disparities and the social determinants of health.

Read the full report.
10:24





Others, however, have stuck to their earlier projections, saying El Nino conditions and a hit on exports due to a slowdown in the West are the two biggest headwinds for the Indian economy.





India's economic growth shot up by 6.1 per cent in Q4FY23 and 7.2 per cent in FY23, beating analysts' expectations, as the expansion in manufacturing and construction surprised on the upside, reflecting sustained strength in domestic demand amid a gloomy global outlook.





"The private investment activity looks robust and domestic monetary and credit conditions remain supportive of growth in FY24. We are now factoring in a pick-up in growth momentum in FY24. We are upgrading our baseline forecast from 6.2 per cent to 6.7 per cent," said Soumya Kanti Ghosh, chief economic advisor, State Bank of India.





Ghosh projects the four quarters of FY24 at 7.8 per cent, 6.5 per cent, 6.3 per cent, and 6.2 per cent, respectively.





"The robust trend in services trade surplus could help in supporting India's net exports contribution to overall growth even as global growth headwinds remain. Accordingly, we now revise India's FY24 real GDP growth by 70 basis points to 6.2 per cent from 5.5 per cent," said Tanvee Gupta Jain, India economist with UBS.





Gupta Jain said crude oil prices were at a sweet spot for the Indian economy. According to India's oil price sensitivity, a 10 per cent decline in average crude oil prices would push real GDP growth higher by 20 bps, if the fuel costs were passed on to consumers, and that the retail prices of gasoline and diesel could be adjusted somewhat lower in the second half of FY24 which bodes well for household consumption and overall growth.





Samiran Chakraborty, India chief economist at Citigroup, said a strong upside 'surprise' on the investment side prompted a rise in FY24 GDP growth forecast to 6.2 per cent from 5.9 per cent.





Gaura Sengupta, economist with IDFC First Bank, revised her FY24 GDP growth estimate to 6.2 per cent from 5.9 per cent. "High frequency indicators available for April show continued strong recovery with growth in construction activity as well as consumption. At the same time, we are seeing some signs of moderation with decline in non-oil non-gold imports, slowdown in freight traffic and softness in industrial activity indicated by decline in electricity demand and slower industrial credit growth," Sengupta said.





India's Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran had on May 31 said the momentum was expected to continue in FY24 and that downside risks to his GDP growth projection of 6.5 per cent appeared evenly balanced and there was a good chance of this number may be exceeded in the current fiscal year.





-- Arup Roychoudhury/Business Standard

In the wake of robust gross domestic product (GDP) data for the last fiscal year (FY23), some analysts have revised their FY24 economic growth estimates upwards, citing a resurgence in manufacturing and private investments.
Seoul 'making wrong bets' in Sino-US rivalry

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol. Photo: AP

The Chinese ambassador in Seoul has warned South Korea it might be making "wrong bets" in the Sino-US rivalry, and urged it to stop "decoupling" from China and restore economic and diplomatic ties.



Xing Haiming made the remarks during a meeting late Thursday with Lee Jae-myung, head of South Korea's main opposition party, which has criticised President Yoon Suk Yeol for pursuing lopsided diplomacy toward the US alliance at the expense of relations with China, its top trading partner.



Xing blamed Seoul for creating "difficulties" for bilateral ties by failing to respect Beijing's core interests, including Taiwan, while being influenced by the United States.



"China-South Korea relations face many difficulties. Frankly, the blame does not lie with China," he said, according to a statement released by the embassy. "We hope that the South Korean side will faithfully keep its promise and clearly respect China's core concerns, such as the Taiwan issue."



Xing warned against making the "wrong judgment" on China because of the "interference of external factors" such as US pressure.



"In a situation where the United States is pressuring China with all its might, some are betting that the United States will win and China will lose. This is clearly a wrong judgment and a failure to properly grasp the course of history," he said. "I can assure you, those who bet on China's defeat will definitely regret it."



Yoon's office and Seoul's foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.



Yoon has treaded cautiously amid intensifying US-China competition, but Seoul and Beijing exchanged heated words in April over Yoon's comments on Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory.



In an interview with Reuters, Yoon said that flaring tensions around Taiwan were due to attempts to change the status quo by force, and that he opposed such a change.



Xing said South Korea's trade deficits have worsened because of its efforts to "decouple" from China, but it can "enjoy the bonus" from Chinese economic growth if its confidence in bilateral ties are restored. (Reuters)
A meeting between Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan and the party's Vice Chairman Shah Mehmood Qureshi ended in bitterness. After the meeting, Qureshi left for Karachi to look after his ailing wife without addressing a press conference as announced by him after his release from Adiala Jail, The News reported. The PTI vice chairman was released from Rawalpindi jail on May 6. He was arrested multiple times under the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance. According to a very close friend of Qureshi in Multan, the PTI vice chairman advised the former prime minister to retreat for the time being, go abroad, or at least maintain silence if he doesn't want to leave the country, The News reported. He also asked the PTI chairman to let him and others settle issues and let pardoning be done in the meantime. He further told the former Prime Minister he could take over the party again when everything had been set right. Qureshi told the PTI chief that it was a difficult time and there was a need for making wise decisions instead of giving in to emotions. Sources said that the two exchanged heated words during the meeting. According to a source, Qureshi also made it clear to the PTI chairman that retired people who are misleading him cannot help him in these circumstances, The News reported. At this, Khan expressed his anger at Qureshi. After the meeting, Qureshi then left Zaman Park for Karachi without speaking to media persons. All of Qureshi's phone numbers were found switched off when efforts were made to contact him to confirm these developments. After the exchange of heated words with Qureshi, the PTI chairman repeated in a video address most of what he had been saying, The News reported. --IANS san/ksk/ ( 309 Words) 2023-06-08-13:54:02 (IANS)
As the row over India's 'Akhand Bharat Map' placed in the new Parliament building is intensifying among the opposition parties in Nepal, Kathmandu Mayor Balendra Shah has put a new 'Greater Nepal' map in his office as a counter move. Although the Nepal government as remained silent on the issue, the opposition parties, including the CPN-UML, have opposed the map which shows the Himalayan nation as part of the ancient Indian landmass. They have and asked the government to take up the matter with India. Mayor Shah, who is currently in Bengaluru for his wife's treatment, had placed the map in his office before his visit to India. At one time, the territory of Nepal was spread from the Teesta in the east to the Sutlej in the west. However, after the war with the British, Nepal lost a large part of its land. After the war, the territories from Mechi to Teesta and from Mahakali to Sutlej were permanently annexed to India. On March 4, 1816, the Sugauli Treaty was signed between Nepal and the East India Company, which reduced the territory of Nepal to Mechi-Mahakali. The 'Greater Nepal' map in Shah's office incorporate areas from East Teesta to West Kangra which is currently Indian territories. Voices are still being raised that India should return those lands to Nepal. Nationalist activist Phanindra Nepal has been campaigning for Greater Nepal for a long time. On Thursday, Gagan Thapa, General Secretary of Nepali Congress, the largest party in Parliament, said that the country should also official publish the 'Greater Nepal' map. "If any county publishes the cultural map and moves ahead, Nepal also holds the right to publish the map of Greater Nepal and think over it. If Nepal thinks of publishing the new map, India should not object to it. Rather it should accept it," Thapa added. Amidst the ongoing row, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal on Wednesday came to India's defence over the 'Akhand Bharat' map, saying it was not a political issue. In an address to the National Assembly, Prachanda, as the Prime Minister is popularly known, said that he had raised the issue during his recently-concluded India visit. "We raised the issue of the new Indian map which is placed in Parliament. We have not made a detailed stud but as reported in the media, we raised this issue on a serious note. But in its response, the Indian side said that it was a cultural and historic map and not a political one. This should not be seen as a political way. It needs to be studied. But I have raised it," he said. Boundary disputes have been taking place in the areas of Kalapani, Lipu Lekh and Limpiydhura which are currently under Indian territory that Nepal also lays claims to. In response to Indian claims, the Nepal government in 2020 issued a new political map incorporating the areas as part of its territory. This dispute brought bilateral ties to an all time low. --IANS ag/ksk/ ( 517 Words) 2023-06-08-14:54:04 (IANS)
This decision continues the 'reckless' fiscal policy that is pushing Pakistan closer to default, The Express Tribune reported.

It seems the government is neglecting the revival of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme. It is spending money in complete breach of the understanding reached with the IMF in February this year, which aimed to restrict the primary deficit to just 0.5 per cent of the GDP.

For the outgoing fiscal year, the federal budget deficit is now projected to be around Rs 6.4 trillion or 8.1 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), surpassing the target of Rs 4.5 trillion.

The government had initially allocated Rs 70 billion for parliamentarians' schemes in the current fiscal year, a sum that has proven insufficient due to competing demands for additional funds by the 13 coalition parties, The Express Tribune reported.

This decision comes at a critical time when Pakistan is facing the threat of default and urgently needs to negotiate debt restructuring with domestic banks and international creditors to create some fiscal space.

However, instead of taking a prudent approach, the government is allocating funds to schemes where the chances of misuse are high due to the lack of proper scrutiny, The Express Tribune reported.

The coalition government had previously decided to allocate Rs 500 million to each Member of the National Assembly (MNA), which has now been substantially increased in an attempt to appease the coalition partners.

--IANS san/arm

( 279 Words)

2023-06-08-17:00:02 (IANS)
The Office issued a statement confirming the first meeting of Pakistan-China-Iran Trilateral Consultation on counter terrorism and security was held at Directors General level on Tuesday in Beijing, reports The Express Tribune.

Abdul Hameed, Director General (Counter Terrorism), Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan; Bai Tian, Director General of the Department of External Security Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China; and Seyed Rasoul Mosavi, Assistant to the Foreign Minister and Director General of South Asia, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Iran; led their respective delegations.

The statement said the delegations held detailed discussions on the regional security situation, particularly the threat of terrorism faced by the region.

Based on the outcome of these consultations, they decided to institutionalise the Trilateral Consultations on counter terrorism and security for which further details will be worked out, The Express Tribune reported.

A separate statement issued by the Chinese foreign ministry also said that the three countries had "in-depth" exchanges on the regional counter-terrorism situation, and decided to hold the meeting on a regular basis.

The meeting is seen as new alignments in the region with China in the lead role. Beijing recently brokered a landmark deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran led to the restoration of diplomatic ties between the two countries, The Express Tribune reported.

Many observers believe that China, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Russia to name a few are the natural allies as their interests are converging in the increasingly bipolar world.

--IANS san/ksk/

( 290 Words)

2023-06-08-11:12:02 (IANS)
ATK New Delhi [India], June 9: The crypto world is filled with incredible intricacies and often evolving at a rapid pace with new players looking to create an impact in the same way as their predecessors. The impact of environmental features has become a significant factor in attracting new audiences and inviting them to invest. This comparative analysis dives into the similarities and differences between three notable players in the crypto industry: Ecoterra Coin, Dogetti (DETI), and C+Charge. These companies operate with a focus on environmental sustainability, leveraging their unique approaches to capture the attention of investors seeking the next significant crypto investment with utility. Through this exploration, we aim to shed light on the distinct features and advantages offered by these environmentally conscious cryptocurrencies while providing informative updates on the crypto market. Ecoterra Coin - Environmental Innovation and Investment PotentialEcoterra Coin is a groundbreaking cryptocurrency at the forefront of environmental innovation. The primary goal of Ecoterra is to facilitate sustainable initiatives through blockchain technology. By harnessing the power of the blockchain, Ecoterra enables individuals to support green projects and initiatives, creating a positive environmental impact. The coin's unique feature lies in its seamless integration with real-world projects, allowing investors to contribute to environmentally friendly endeavors while enjoying potential financial gains. Dogetti - Merging Meme Coins With UtilityDogetti (DETI) is a meme coin in the second stage of its presale, raising a little over 2 million from investors. The vision behind this meme coin is to create a DeFi ecosystem that allows token holders to create generational wealth. To help improve the wealth of its members, Dogetti will be distributing 2% of every transaction back to its members. Another 2% will also be reserved for liquidity and burn functions and a final 2% will be added to the Dogetti charity wallet. Dogetti's roadmap has plenty of updates planned for the future including NFTs and a DAO feature. The DAO is important as token holders will now have access to a platform where they can vote on important issues governing the DETI ecosystem. C+Charge: The Ecofriendly Token Powering Efforts To Broaden Awareness Of EVC+Charge is an eco-friendly cryptocurrency that is looking to build uniformity for electric vehicles in need of charging. To help achieve this, C+Charge has partnered with multiple companies in the EV space. The C+Charge network and app will have OCCP 2.0 functionality embedded within it which is the universal standard responsible for operating charging stations worldwide. This allows C+Charge to be integrated within 1.8 million charging stations worldwide. As the world becomes increasingly aware of the importance of environmental sustainability, the demand for environmentally conscious investments is on the rise. Ecoterra Coin and Dogetti represent two remarkable examples of cryptocurrencies that merge financial opportunities with environmental impact. By investing in these forward-thinking crypto projects, individuals have the chance to support sustainable initiatives while potentially benefiting from the growth and adoption of environmentally conscious investments. Check out More on Dogetti (DETI) Presale: https://dogetti.io/how-to-buy Website: https://dogetti.io/ Telegram: https://t.me/Dogetti Twitter: https://twitter.com/_Dogetti_ (Disclaimer: The above press release has been provided by ATK. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)
NewsVoir Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], June 9: Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL), a leading 'Maharatna' and Fortune Global 500 Company, has been recognized at the highly esteemed FIPI Oil & Gas Awards 2022 by securing five coveted accolades. The awards were presented by Hardeep Singh Puri, Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Housing & Urban Development, Government of India, at a grand ceremony held recently. The FIPI Oil and Gas Awards are a testament to the industry's remarkable achievements and serve as a platform to honor exemplary contributions. BPCL's outstanding performance and dedication to excellence were recognized in multiple award categories, highlighting the company's commitment to innovation, customer-centric initiatives, and operational excellence. The five awards received by BPCL include Oil Marketing - Company of the Year: BPCL was recognized as the Oil Marketing Company of the Year for its exceptional performance in market expansion and both direct and retail sales. The award acknowledges BPCL's customer-centric initiatives that have propelled its growth and success in the industry. Refinery of the Year (Capacity 9 MMTPA Plus): Kochi Refinery: Kochi Refinery, a unit of BPCL, was honored with the Refinery of the Year award in the category of refineries with a capacity of 9 MMTPA (Million Metric Tonnes Per Annum) and above. This recognition is a testament to Kochi Refinery's excellence in performance during the year. Refinery of the Year (Below Capacity 9 MMTPA): Bina Refinery: Bina Refinery, another unit of BPCL, received the Refinery of the Year award in the category of refineries with a capacity below 9 MMTPA. The accolade highlights Bina Refinery's significant achievements in production, operational efficiencies, energy conservation, and adherence to health, safety, and environmental standards. Digitally Advanced Company of the Year (Special commendation): BPCL received special commendation for being a digitally advanced company. The recognition acknowledges the company's successful and significant presence on social media, its excellence in customer service, and the successful launch of various digital campaigns. Innovator of the Year: Corporate Research & Development Citation for H2 Recovery from Refinery Off-gases Technology: BPCL's Corporate Research & Development team was bestowed with the Innovator of the Year award for their groundbreaking work on H2 Recovery from Refinery Off-gases Technology. This prestigious recognition celebrates the team's originality, usefulness, value, and potential for replication. Nitin Somkuwar, Manager (R&D), led the dynamic team that was instrumental in the success of this innovative technology. G. Krishnakumar, Chairman & Managing Director, BPCL, said, "Recognition at FIPI Oil & Gas Awards are testament of our continuous pursuit for innovation, excellence, quality, and customer service. I am pleased to receive these awards, on behalf of the BPCL family, who have created industry benchmarks in performance, operational efficiencies, and marketing acumen, which are recognized by our customers, industry peers, regulators and government institutions." The FIPI Oil and Gas Awards honor leaders, innovators, and pioneers in the oil and gas industry, recognizing their exceptional contributions and achievements. The awards were evaluated by an esteemed Awards Committee comprising experts from the oil and gas sector. BPCL's exceptional performance at the FIPI Oil & Gas Awards 2022 reinforces its standing as a dynamic and innovative organization in the energy sector. The company's leadership, including G. Krishnakumar, C&MD, Sukhmal Jain, Director (Marketing) and Sanjay Khanna, Director (Refineries), received the awards on behalf of the BPCL team. The distinguished presence of P. S.Ravi, Santosh Kumar, D. V. Mamadapur, S. Jena, Chako Jose, Abhay Bhandari, S. Abbas Akhtar and Ravikumar V., further exemplified the collective efforts and dedication of the entire BPCL team. Fortune Global 500 Company, Bharat Petroleum is the second largest Indian Oil Marketing Company and one of the premier integrated energy companies in India, engaged in refining of crude oil and marketing of petroleum products, with a significant presence in the upstream and downstream sectors of the oil and gas industry. The company attained the coveted Maharatna status, joining the elite club of companies having greater operational & financial autonomy. Bharat Petroleum's Refineries at Mumbai, Kochi and Bina Refinery have a combined refining capacity of around 35.3 MMTPA. Its marketing infrastructure includes a network of installations, depots, energy stations, aviation service stations and LPG distributors. Its distribution network comprises over 21,000 Energy Stations, over 6,200 LPG distributorships, 525 Lubes distributorships, 123 POL storage locations, 53 LPG Bottling Plants, 70 Aviation Service Stations, 4 Lube blending plants and 4 cross-country pipelines. Bharat Petroleum is integrating its strategy, investments, environmental and social ambitions to move towards a sustainable planet. The company has chalked out the plan to offer electric vehicle charging stations at around 7000 energy stations over next 5 years. With a focus on sustainable solutions, the company is developing a vibrant ecosystem and a road-map to become a Net Zero Energy Company by 2040, in Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Bharat Petroleum has been partnering communities by supporting innumerable initiatives connected primarily in the areas of education, water conservation, skill development, health, community development, capacity building and employee volunteering. With 'Energising Lives' as its core purpose, Bharat Petroleum's vision is to be the most admired global energy company leveraging talent, innovation & technology. (Disclaimer: The above press release has been provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)
PNN New Delhi [India], June 9: Share India Securities Ltd. (BSE: 540725, NSE: SHAREINDIA) is one of India's leading tech-based financial service providers. Speaking about the change in "Bank Nifty Futures & Options contracts" expiry to Friday from Thursday, the company said, "It will be a positive move for the Market participants. This will benefit traders, retailers and arbitrageurs. This will positively enhance market sentiments and increase participation. The turnover and participation will see an increase, especially on Friday. An instrument expiry on Friday will now give participants a whole week as the Finnifty expires on Tuesday, Midcap nifty expires on Wednesday, and Nifty expires on Thursday currently. As per our view/observation, the turnover growth of the market is expected to increase by 25 per cent in the next financial year." Share India views this as a positive move as it launches its algo product for retail investors in the last week of June. This change will positively impact client turnover and the expectations of retail clients. The company is focusing on its retail Algo trading platform - "uTrade Algos". uTrade Algos is an Algorithmic Trading Platform that lets users Plan, Strategize, and Automate trades as well as subscribe to Pre-made Algos. The company is making algos easier and more accessible for everyone. Share India believes in high-quality fintech and has focused on developing technology. Within a short span, the company has grown from a traditional stockbroker to a hi-tech broking company specializing in derivative trading strategies and growing from strength to strength. The company is using a tech-driven trading platform for automated/algo-driven derivative strategies to improve client retention. It is continuously innovating latency-based high-tech trading platforms and expanding its bouquets of trading strategies. Share India Securities Limited (BSE: 540725, NSE: SHAREINDIA) is one of India's leading tech-centric financial service providers. The company Leverages the artificial intelligence and algorithmic trading and offers customized capital market solutions to its clients. SISL has a ~3% market share in the cash market, ~3% market share in futures and ~8% market share in options on the basis of turnover. SISL, via its subsidiaries, is also present in the NBFC business, insurance broking, merchant banking, portfolio management and mutual funds distribution. SISL is powered by 1,500 employees, has been in operation for the last 27 years & has a nationwide reach with its 729+ AP/branches present across 18 major States of India. Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements in this document may be forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties like regulatory changes, local political or economic developments, and many other factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by the relevant forward-looking statements. Further, past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. Given these risks, uncertainties and other risk factors, viewers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. The Company will not be in any way responsible for any action taken based on such statements and undertakes no obligation to publicly update these forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. (Disclaimer: The above press release has been provided by PNN. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)
The searches were made on June 5, 2023, at 27 locations in Patna (Bihar), Dhanbad, Hazaribagh (Jharkhand) and Kolkata (West Bengal) in connection with an illegal mining case.

ED said it initiated an investigation on the basis of various FIRs registered by Bihar Police against the companies and their directors.

FIRs have been registered on the basis of complaints from the Mining Department of Bihar against those accused of illegal sand mining and its sale without using the departmental Pre-paid transportation E-Challan, issued by the Mining Authority in Bihar, causing a revenue loss of Rs 250 crore (approximately) to the government exchequer.

The search operations resulted in the discovery of cash and incriminating documents -- sale deeds of properties purchased, FDRs in the name of companies and their directors.

The cash worth Rs 1.5 crore and property documents worth Rs 11 crore have been seized, FDRs worth Rs 6 crore and 60 bank accounts have been frozen.

"Other incriminating physical and digital material were (also) found during the search and were seized for further examination," ED said. (ANI)
NewsVoir Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], June 9: My Perfumes Select, UAE's new-age, premium luxurious perfume brand, announces its foray into the burgeoning Indian perfume retail sector with the launch of its one-of-a-kind, customer-experience-focused flagship store in Mumbai's historic and world-famous shopping district, Colaba. The renowned United Arab Emirates pioneering, legacy perfumery brand aims to introduce discerning Indian consumers to its unparalleled Middle Eastern premium luxurious perfume tradition, with a phase one strategy of establishing 10 to 15 My Perfumes Select stores and subsequently, doubling its store network every year. My Perfumes Select fragrances are well-loved across the globe for being crafted from the most expensive, exquisite and precious perfume ingredients from around the world. The brand's commitment to excellence ensures an unwavering commitment to the finest quality of perfumes, unrivalled sillage and unwavering longevity. All of their perfumes are Extrait De Parfum, incorporating the highest concentration of perfume oil, while being one of the purest blends of French and Oriental fragrances. My Perfumes Select is steadfastly establishing a long-lasting retail presence across the GCC market and now, India. Over the last nine years, the brand has had a 40% Y-O-Y sustained revenue growth. In the UAE, the brand has an established presence with three signature stores, one at Dubai's world-famous shopping destination, the Gold Souk, and two at Abu Dhabi at the Dalma Mall and the Deerfields Mall. With the launch of the flagship My Perfumes Select Mumbai store, the brand aims to introduce discerning Indian customers to a luxurious, captivating and new-age retail experience that is all at once bold, chic, elegant and immersive. At the store, customers can relax and browse as long as they need to discover, experiment and experience an avant-garde world of luxury perfumes at their convenience. At the heart of the store design lies attention to detail to a luxurious customer experience and a signature retail adventure. Mustafa Firoz, Managing Director, My Perfumes Group says, "India as a market, especially for a brand such as ours, is not just huge, it is very exciting. We are amply aware of India's very own eclectic, rich and traditional history with perfumery and today, its ever-expanding diverse fragrance market. Yes, retail is an investment-intensive sector in terms of the real estate, store design and build-up, human resource, logistics, warehousing apart from the product costs of the products. However, we believe India is worth it and ready for a brand and experience such as My Perfumes Select. We are tied up with some of the biggest global names in the world of perfumes which brings on board access to latest international research, insights and trends, directly benefitting our consumers. We have forward-planned for the next three years. The brand is strong, already has a global presence and the products have been well loved across the globe. Currently, we are in advanced stages of finalising some more strategic locations for the brand that would expand our footprint across premium retail. So, I am very confident about the success and future scalability, both in India and across the Middle East." My Perfumes Select is a luxurious fragrance brand based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). With a passion for the art of perfumery, the brand offers a range of perfumes crafted from Extrait de Parfum or perfume absolutes from the most exquisite perfume ingredients in the world. The brand is committed to providing a richer olfactory experience that combines luxury, longevity and great sillage. It has pioneered the concept of EDPs with 0% alcohol that work with all skin types. Manufactured in state-of-the-art facilities in the UAE, My Perfumes Select adheres to strict guidelines, ensuring the highest standards of production. Each fragrance is meticulously crafted to perfection, reflecting the brand's unwavering dedication to excellence. With a global presence in 90 countries, My Perfumes Select is a celebrated premium international brand that embodies the romance and heritage of Middle Eastern fragrance traditions. (Disclaimer: The above press release has been provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)
NewsVoir New Delhi [India], June 9: Expand My Business, a B2B marketplace for digital services, is excited to organise CODE - India's Largest Digital Convention, a prestigious gathering that acknowledges the indispensable role that events play in providing entrepreneurs with access to the right community and resources. With a mission to facilitate meaningful connections between startups and their ideal network, CODE is all set to unite a community of entrepreneurs, investors, CXOs, and industry leaders from across India. The Convention is going to be a great platform for startups to showcase their ideas and services to a large audience. Attendees should seize the opportunity to attract potential partners and investors. Pradeep Kumar, the esteemed CEO of Neil Patel Digital India, will be one of the speakers at CODE. His address on "Power of Personalisation in Digital Marketing" is eagerly awaited, and will take place during CODE's Founders' Conference, scheduled to be held on June 11, 2023, at Hall No. 5, Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. Adding to the excitement, leading industry giants such as Google Cloud, MongoDB, Shopify, HSBC, Yellow.AI, Neil Patel Digital India, Prooh.ai and Internshala Jobs have joined hands with CODE as their sponsors. Their involvement highlights the event's potential to drive innovation and growth in the startup ecosystem. Moreover, featuring a captivating lineup of industry leaders like Mr Shireesh Joshi, CBO of ONDC, Aastha Grover, Head of Startup India, Ankit Agarwal, Founder of InsuranceDekho, and Raja Agrawal, Head of Microsoft Azure - Middle East & Africa, among others, CODE will offer a unique opportunity for attendees to gain deep industry knowledge from 50+ seasoned professionals. Nishant Behl, the Founder and CEO of Expand My Business, emphasises the significance of events like CODE. He shares, "We have personally witnessed the transformative power of events, as they have helped us connect with our first clients, suppliers, and partners. Our aim is to provide similar opportunities to India's startup community through CODE. With over 200+ exhibitors, 50 keynote speakers, and more than 10,000 attendees, CODE will be the biggest startup event of the year." For more information about CODE 2023 and to secure your place, please visit the official event website at code.exmyb.com. Expand My Business is Asia's largest digital solutions platform dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship and innovation. EMB strives to empower entrepreneurs and help them succeed in the global marketplace through its services and initiatives. Through CODE, the goal is to foster a culture of innovation and creativity, and to support the growth and development of businesses of all sizes and sectors. (Disclaimer: The above press release has been provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)
In the post, she mentioned that she is "facing one of the toughest trials" of her life.

To deal with her struggles, the 48-year-old said she had decided to take a break from social media.

She even deleted and archived all her other Instagram posts.

The post left her fans confused and concerned.

However, after leaving her fans guessing on what she was hinting at and if all was well with her, the actor later clarified that the cryptic post

was part of a promotional strategy for her upcoming OTT series 'The Trial: Pyaar, Kaanoon, Dhoka'.

The web series was earlier titled 'The Good Wife'. Kajol put out an update on her earlier post by sharing a post from Disney+Hotstar, on her Instagram handle.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CtRKwa_os0Y/?hl=en

'The Trial' is an Indian adaptation of hit American courtroom drama 'The Good Wife' starring Julianna Margulies in the lead role. It began airing in 2009.

The show ran for seven seasons and wound up in 2016.

Kajol will essay the role of a housewife, who goes back to working as a lawyer after her husband's scandal lands him in jail. Directed by Supan Verma, it will stream on Disney+Hotstar.

Kajol also has 'Lust Stories 2' in her kitty. (ANI)
Actor Nimrat Kaur is being lauded for her performance in 'School of Lies'. Sharing what made her say yes to the show, Nimrat said, "I found Nandita in the beautiful writing of Aisha Annie Banerjee, I found her in the way that Avinash Arun envisioned her; he had a very clear vision of what this world was like and I made sure that I blended into this atmosphere where she's kind of an insider, but an outsider." She added, "Be it her unconventional friendship with Varin's character - Vikram or her own childhood demons, the way they come up and come through her real time events were very interesting to me. She has got her own childhood problems that she is trying to sort them out as an adult. In the end, the tough choices she has to make and the decision she ends up making, the complexity of it was all so understated and just so subtly envisioned that I just had to walk that path and surrender myself there." The series 'School of Lies' showcases the journey of teenagers in a boarding school. Wrapped in the intense mystery of a missing child, this gritty thriller is headlined by Nimrat Kaur, Aamir Bashir, Geetika Vidya Ohlyan, Sonali Kulkarni and Jitendra Joshi. Inspired by true events and produced by BBC Studios, 'School of Lies' is created by Ishani Banerjee and Avinash Arun Dhaware, directed by Avinash Arun Dhaware and is now streaming on Disney+ Hotstar. (ANI)
The Minister, while addressing mediapersons at Saidapet on the sidelines of an event at the urban health centre, added that the NMC has withdrawn the notice sent to both the medical colleges derecognising them after the compliance report has been submitted.

Subramanian said that the NMC will soon issue a written statement.

Two weeks ago, the NMC following an inspection had withdrawn recognition to three medical colleges in Tamil Nadu -- Government Stanley Medical College, Government Dharmapuri Medical College and K.A.P. Viswanathan Government Medical College, Tiruchi.

The NMC had cited certain minor deficiencies of CCTV cameras and the biometric system of attendance.

The Tamil Nadu Health Department officials visited New Delhi and said that the minor deficiencies would be addressed.

NMC officials undertook an inspection at the Government Stanley Medical College and Government Dharmapuri Medical college and conducted field level and virtual inspections.

After a detailed inspection, the NMC has withdrawn its letter derecognising the two medical colleges.

The Health Minister said that a virtual inspection would be conducted at the Tiruchi Government medical college on Friday.

He also added that several parties were creating rumours in the media that the medical colleges in Tamil Nadu were being shutdown.

He said that the Tamil Nadu Health Department had already released a clarification and said that this was a routine process.

The Minister also added that the NMC had conducted inspections in 140 medical colleges across the country and said that it is a continuous process for the NMC to point out minor deficiencies and the respective departments to rectify them.

--IANS aal/khz/

( 311 Words)

2023-06-08-19:48:03 (IANS)
Voicing concern over the macabre murder of a 32-year-old woman by her live-in partner, former Chairperson of National Commission for Women Dr Mohini Giri on Thursday said that the commission, police and civil society should be strengthened and should be given more courage to work harder. A 56-year-old man was detained on Wednesday evening for allegedly murdering his live-in partner and dismembering her body. "One thing is that there is an agency in India called the National Commission of Women, why are we not strengthening it?" Giri said while talking to ANI, adding "When 40 years back such atrocities used to occur in case of dowry and a daughter-in-law used to get burnt, then our women's movement became so strong that we used to go to the location and then we used to ask questions. We did civil investigations. But today, that women's movement has also shattered into pieces. We need to make NCW strong. We need to strengthen our women's movement to stop all these things. Thirdly, there is the utmost importance of many reforms in the police. I am not saying that our police are not good, but keeping the current environment in mind, we need to make our police stronger. We need to make it more women-friendly. We need to change the patriarch's mindset of men." She further said that the NCW should not become the wing of the ministry as it should work independently. "NCW is an independent body that works to take care of the women. It is an autonomous body. So that autonomy must always be kept. NCW should not become the wing of the ministry. We should remember we have to be fearless of whoever it is to deliver justice. Our job is with women not with anybody else. So it has to be totally free in order to deliver justice and it has to be strengthened," Giri added. In a spine-chilling murder case, a 32-year-old woman was brutally murdered and later cut into pieces by her 56-year-old live-in partner in Maharashtra's Thane. adding to the series of gruesome killings that have been making headlines. The suspect, identified as Manoj Sane, had been staying with Saraswati Vaidya in the rental flat in the Akashganga building in the Mira Road area over the past three years. Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) of Mira-Bhayandar, Vasai-Virar Police Jayant Bajbale while speaking to ANI said that the accused boiled the pieces of the body is true but he didn't feed the dogs with her body pieces. "We found several body pieces in utensils when we entered the house. The accused Manoj Sane killed her live-in partner Saraswati Vaidya and chopped her into pieces using a tree cutter. Body parts have been sent to JJ Hospital for further investigation," Bajbale said. "The accused boiled pieces is true but he didn't feed her body pieces to dogs. The accused has been arrested and sent to Police custody till 16th June," he added. According to the Police, the accused boiled pieces of her body in a pressure cooker and later filled them into plastic bags to dispose of them. (ANI)
Kerala's first women-only Hajj flight took off on Thursday from Calicut International Airport at Karipur after Union Minister of State for Minority Affairs John Barla flagged off the flight. Barla performed the symbolic flag-off ceremony and distribution of boarding passes for the first flight. This was the first time that only women's flight has been organised for Hajj in Kerala. The pilot and crew of the aircraft are all women. https://twitter.com/ANI/status/1666936290305265665?cxt=HHwWgsDS7azukqIuAAAA The Air India Express flight left Karipur at 6.45 p.m. carrying 145 women pilgrims and six women crew marking the first such flight from Kerala for women pilgrims without mehram or a male companion. Barla said that the women-only flight marked a glorious step for women's empowerment in the country and requested the pilgrims to pray for the country's safety and security as well as progress. Apart from the 145 women pilgrims travelling in the plane, the pilot who flew this plane and the other crew members of the plane, as well as the dispatch, flight operation, loading, cleaning, engineering, ground service and other related activities at all levels were done by women, making this trip different. Minister inaugurated the distribution of boarding passes by giving to 76-year-old Sulaikha, the senior most member of the team. The minister expressed happiness over the arrangements being made for the pilgrims by the State Hajj Committee. Eleven flights have been scheduled till Monday only for women pilgrims leaving via Karipur airport. 1,595 women pilgrim belonging to the 'ladies without Mehram' category will depart on several days in eleven flights. The rest will travel on other flights. 2,733 people are leaving this year from the state through the 'ladies without mehram' category. Out of this, 1718 people will depart via Karipur, 563 via Kochi and 452 via Kannur embarkation points. This year's oldest woman pilgrim, Khadiumma (87), a native of Nediyirup in Malappuram district, will depart on the 4.20 am flight on June 10. 69 men and 76 women took off from Karipur at nine o'clock in the morning on flight IX 3021 on Thursday. 71 men and 74 women travelled from Kannur airport today afternoon. The second flight from Kochi will leave from will leave at 11.30 tomorrow. In Andhra Pradesh, Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy who met the batch of Muslims leaving for Mecca at the Haj House here on Thursday said that the Government has appointed a Hajj Committee which is accompanying the pilgrims to ensure hassle-free journey. This is the first time that pilgrims are leaving for Hajj from the Vijayawada embarkation point. "Deputy Chief Minister Amjad Basha, who is accompanying you, will take care of you and will inform me in case of any need," the CM said wishing pilgrims all the best. very year, millions of Muslims around the world embark on a sacred pilgrimage known as Hajj. This spiritual journey holds immense significance in the lives of believers, offering an opportunity to connect with Allah, seek forgiveness, and strengthen their faith. The heartfelt desire to be among those walking to Mina, echoing the Labaik with the crowd, and performing the rituals of Hajj is a sentiment shared by countless individuals. Hajj is a unique manifestation of unity, as Muslims from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and nations gather in the sacred land of Makkah to perform the rituals together. It is a remarkable sight to witness people from different walks of life converging towards a common purpose, setting aside their differences and embracing one another as equals before Allah.(ANI)
After alleged objectionable social media posts concerning Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan that sparked tensions in Maharashtra's Kolhapur, Former Maharashtra Chief Minister Sharad Pawar on Thursday said that there is no need for politics in the Kolhapur incident. "Unfortunately, some people have created such a situation. This is not right for society...Common people have to pay its price...There is no need for politics in this. When this is investigated, the truth will come before everyone," the Nationalist Congress chief said while speaking to the reporters. Tension gripped Kolhapur after some youth allegedly posted objectionable posts on social media with a reference to Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan. On Wednesday, Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis slammed supporters of the erstwhile Mughal ruler and said, "Suddenly, in some districts of Maharashtra, sons of Aurangzeb took birth. They keep the status of Aurangzeb and show their posters. Because of this, there are tensions. Questions arise, where do these sons of Aurangzeb come from? Who are behind this? We will find this out," said Fadnavis while talking to ANI in Nagpur. Meanwhile, Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde emphasized the government's responsibility for maintaining law and order in the state and appealed to the public for peace and calm. "The government is responsible for maintaining law and order in the state. I also appeal to the public for peace and calm. The Police investigation is underway and action will be taken against those found guilty..." said Maharashtra CM Eknath Shinde. However, Leader of Opposition of Maharashtra and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Ajit Pawar on Wednesday urged the government to find the reason behind the Kolhapur violence. "Today, there is a curfew-like situation in Kolhapur. The incidents to disturb law and order happen intentionally. Previously, some violent riots took place disturbing the law and order. It is the responsibility of the CM and police to investigate the reason behind the clashes. There are rumours that the incidents are happening, keeping elections in mind. The government should keep a firm stand on knowing the reason behind the clashes," Pawar said. A curfew was imposed in Maharashtra's Kolhapur on Wednesday after a violent clash broke out between two groups. (ANI)
Trinamool Congress (TMC) National General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee declined to comply with an Enforcement Directorate (ED) summon issued to him on Thursday in connection with the alleged teacher recruitment scam. The anti-money laundering agency had summoned the TMC leader to its office on June 13. Addressing a public meeting, Banerjee said that in his last appearance before the ED, he had requested the officials not to summon him in the next few days on account of a scheduled TMC Yatra. Banerjee said that he is not blaming the ED officials for summoning him on that date since they are bound by duty. He said that he is ready to send any document that the ED may ask for but he is too busy at the moment to be questioned for hours at their office. "I am not blaming the ED officials because they are only doing their duty. Their political bosses are getting sleepless nights owing to the huge success of the Nobojowar Yatra," Banerjee said. "Our program ends on June 16 and the panchayat elections have been announced, which will conclude on the 8th July. They will question me for several hours and the net result would be zero. After the polls get over, if you summon me I will appear before you," the TMC general secretary added. Taking care to mention that he is ready to comply with the ED investigation Banerjee said, "It is my duty to face the ED and support them in their investigation but I will not go for questioning now." The TMC General Secretary also said that the ED officials had questioned his wife, Rujira on Thursday in connection with the coal pilferage case for four hours. His wife who was on his way to Dubai with her two children was stopped from flying at the airport and was issued a summon by the ED at 11 am on the same day. Banerjee said that no 'outcome' is reached even after recording statements for long hours at the ED office. He said, "It is nothing but harassment by the ruling party." Banerjee hit out at the Central government and said that their double engine is ED and CBI. "BJP's double engine is ED and CBI. When one engine (CBI) failed now they are using another engine," he said, adding that the party is getting sleepless nights after seeing "Nobo Jowar Yatra". Last month, Banerjee was questioned for over 9 hours by the Central Bureau of Investigation in the multi-crore recruitment scam in West Bengal schools. (ANI)
Two bike-borne miscreants allegedly hurled a low-intensity Improvised explosive device (IED) at the gate of MLA Soraisam Kebi's residence here on Thursday, police said. "There were no casualties. Except for a few holes in the ground, the blast did not cause any major damage," the police said. According to the Manipur Police, the two bikers hurled and blew an IED at the residence of Naoriya Pakhanglakpa assembly constituency MLA, Soraisam Kebi, in the Imphal West hamlet of Ningthemcha Karong. An IED is a bomb fabricated in an improvised manner incorporating destructive, lethal, noxious, pyrotechnic, or incendiary chemicals and designed to destroy or incapacitate personnel or vehicles. In some cases, IEDs are used to distract, disrupt, or delay an opposing force, facilitating another type of attack. Advisor (Security) to the Manipur government Kuldiep Singh on Thursday has said that the situation in Manipur remained peaceful and under control as no incident of violence was reported in the last 48 hours in the Northeast state. To provide relief to the displaced people of Manipur, Singh said the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has approved a relief package worth Rs 101.75 crore. The MHA's approval of the relief package for the displaced in Manipur followed Union Home Minister Amit Shah's direction to the state government to send a request to his ministry for such a package. "A total of 896 arms and 11,763 ammunition and 200 bombs of different kinds have been recovered to date," said Singh, who was appointed security advisor to the Manipur government at the beginning of May in view of the spiralling violence in Manipur. A day after Union Home Minister Amit Shah's appeal on June 1, a total of 140 weapons were surrendered at different places in Manipur on June 2. The weapons surrendered included SLR 29, Carbine, AK, INSAS Rifle, INSAS LMG, .303 Rifle, 9mm pistol, .32 pistol, M16 rifle, smoke gun and tear gas, a locally made pistol, a stun gun, modified rifle, JVP and grenade launcher. Shah had also appealed to the people of Manipur not to pay heed to rumours and maintain peace. Manipur saw violence on May 3 during a rally organised by the All Tribals Students Union (ATSU) to protest the demand for the inclusion of Meitei/Meetei in the Scheduled Tribe (ST) category, following an April 19 Manipur High Court directive. (ANI)
Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal on Friday confirmed that party president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi will attend a meeting of the top Opposition leaders convened by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, to mobilise the opposition ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Talking to ANI, KC Venugopal said, "Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge will attend the opposition meeting in Patna..." He further said that it is high time to have unity between the opposition parties "to fight against these forces who are ruining the country." Nationalist Congress Party Chief Sharad Pawar on Thursday confirmed that he would participate in the meeting of the Opposition parties. Speaking to mediapersons in Patna on Thursday, Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav said that almost 15 parties will attend the meeting. However, the presence of Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao was not confirmed as Tejashwi Yadav did not have a chance to speak with him. The meeting, aimed at laying the groundwork for the coming together of like-minded Opposition parties against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP government at the Centre, was originally scheduled to be held on June 12. However, the meeting was pushed back after several Opposition leaders, including Congress national president Mallikarjun Kharge and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin, expressed their inability to attend the meeting on June 12, citing prior engagements and preoccupations. After JDU had announced the meeting of Opposition parties on June 12, earlier, DMK chief Stalin said he had sought to postpone the June 12 meeting, as he would be busy attending an inaugural ceremony on the same date. Nitish Kumar has been rooting for Opposition unity since he left the National Democratic Alliance and joined the Grand Alliance to form a new government in August last year. (ANI)
The Delhi High Court has held that the Haj pilgrimage and its associated rituals are considered a form of 'religious practice,' which is protected under the Constitution of India. A single-judge bench of Justice Chandra Dhari Singh was hearing a series of petitions filed by multiple Haj Group Organisers (HGOs) challenging the suspension of their registration and quota, as well as the show cause notice issued to them by the Centre. Justice Singh said that Article 25 of the Indian constitution guarantees the freedom of conscience and the freedom to profess, practice, and propagate religion for all citizens. "Haj Pilgrimage and the ceremonies involved therein fall within the ambit of a religious practice, which is protected by the Constitution of India. Religious freedoms are one of the most cherished rights guaranteed and enshrined under the Constitution in line with the vision of the founding fathers of the Modern Indian Republic," he said. Consequently, the court stated the Centre's decision to suspend the registration of certain HGOs and put their Haj quota on hold. The argument put forth was that the government published a consolidated list of the allocation of Haj Quota for Haj-2023, publishing a comment stating that the petitioners' registration certificate and quota were put on hold until the finalisation of proceedings in a complaint-related matter. The HGOs contended that their registration certificates and Haj quotas were arbitrarily suspended until the resolution of the complaint-related proceedings. On the other hand, the counsel representing the Union Ministry of Minority Affairs claimed that the petitioner HGOs had misrepresented facts, which became apparent during a visit by ministry officials to their office premises. The court was informed that the government is considering severe punitive action, including blacklisting and canceling the registration of the non-compliant HGOs. It was further argued that the government does not want to jeopardise the pilgrims' well-being by entrusting them to these non-compliant HGOs. The bench, however, prima facie concluded that while restrictions and conditions on the issuance of registration certificates and allocated quotas to HGOs may be imposed, such actions should not harm the pilgrims who registered in good faith to undertake the pilgrimage. Justice Singh stated that taking such action would undermine the purpose of the current Hajj Policy and would contravene Article 25 of the Indian Constitution. As the interpreter of the Constitution and the custodian of citizens' rights, the court must exercise its powers under Article 226 to uphold the provisions and guarantees enshrined therein, instead of letting them remain merely in writing. "This Court is an interpreter of the Constitution as well as the custodian of the rights of citizens, therefore this Court must exercise its powers under Article 226 of the Constitution to give effect to its provisions and the guarantees therein, lest they shall remain only in the black and white in the text but not in its application," Justice said. Justice Singh emphasised the need to find an alternative solution to ensure that the law takes its course without hindering the well-intentioned citizens who wish to undertake the Haj pilgrimage. The Bench also recognised that the pilgrimage to Haj is not merely a vacation but a means of practicing religious faith, which is a fundamental right. Therefore, as the protector of pilgrims' rights, the court resolved to take the necessary measures in this regard. Consequently, the court stayed the decision to put the registration certificates and Hajj quotas of the petitioner HGOs on hold. The court ordered that the authorities ensure that the affected pilgrims, due to the petitioner's defaults, are not hindered and can undertake the Hajj pilgrimage without any obstacles. The authorities may proceed with the investigation based on the show cause notice issued to the petitioner, as per Justice Singh's order. --IANS spr/shb/ ( 641 Words) 2023-06-08-15:28:05 (IANS)
A fresh speculation is making rounds in the political circles of Rajasthan in the backdrop of "rivalry" between former state unit Congress president Sachin Pilot and Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, plucking possibilities of the ex-deputy chief minister floating a new political party. This matter of late has been drawing a lot of heat as June 11 -- the death anniversary of Sachin Pilot's father, former Union Minister Rajesh Pilot, is approaching. On June 11, Sachin Pilot visits Dausa every year to pay tribute to his father on his death anniversary. Dausa had been a constituency of his late father, Rajesh Pilot, who is still a respected figure among farmers. This year, however, there is a buzz about the possible move of Sachin Pilot on June 11, because of the developments that took place in the last three months. On April 11, Pilot observed a day's fast, demanding the Gehlot government launch a probe against the alleged corruption cases against former chief minister Vasundhara Raje during her tenure. The Congress, which was in opposition then, had raised those issues. On May 11, Pilot started the Jan Sangharsh Yatra, which lasted five days. He had travelled from Ajmer to Jaipur. Now, as the date -- June 11 -- is nearing, speculations are being made about Pilot's next probable step. Meanwhile, Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee member Sushil Asopa, said "these are sponsored speculations". "A party cannot be floated overnight without any preparations.A probe needs to be initiated into who are spreading such rumours," he said. On being asked who would be accompanying Sachin Pilot to Dausa, the Congress leader said: "Same supporters and followers who have been visiting Dausa each year to pay tributes to their leader on his death anniversary will be visiting there." Meanwhile, there are also discussions on how CM Gehlot and Congress' Rajasthan in-charge Sukhjinder Singh Randhwa have softened their stand on Pilot. While Gehlot said that a patch-up with Pilot is permanent, Randhawa also called for senior leaders to make room for the youth. Party sources said that the recent meeting of former CM Vasundhara Raje with veteran BJP leaders have made Congress leaders tense. There are chances that Raje would be made the campaign committee chief and, in such a scenario, Pilot would be required to combat her, as it was the former deputy CM who raised the issues of corruption under the previous BJP government, which, analysts believe, helped the Congress score some crucial points in the 2018 Assembly polls. "Hence, there comes a change in strategy of party leaders who have softened their stand on Pilot," a source aware of the developments said. --IANS arc/pgh ( 454 Words) 2023-06-08-17:38:03 (IANS)
The aim is to develop cooperation and partnership in the fields of IT-technologies, accounting and finance, economics, management, design, biotechnology, ecology and the environment, oil and gas, mining and chemical industries, standardisation and certification, tourism, catering and hotel business.

The MoU comes after the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) upgraded its ratings to A++ last July and the university has been receiving proposals for collaborations from its counterparts in other countries.

Under the agreement, both the parties agreed upon the implementation of joint activities in the field of exchange of students and undergraduates, teaching of experts / teaching staff, and scientific internship for undergraduates.

Lucknow University vice chancellor, Prof A.K. Rai said, "In October last year, Governor Anandiben Patel had held a meeting with ambassadors of some countries and vice-chancellors of different universities of Uttar Pradesh."

"This MoU is a result of the same meeting. We are ready to share our best practices and research with our international partners," added Prof Rai.

--IANS amita/dpb

( 200 Words)

2023-06-08-09:04:06 (IANS)
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on Thursday said that the government has never ruled out diplomacy in the case of Indian national and former navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, who he said is being kept in captivity in Pakistan in violation of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) judgement, and also in case of eight Indians facing trial in Qatar. Speaking to mediapersons, he said that both were "exceptional situations" and therefore, the government has never ruled out diplomacy. "It is in the DNA of this government to help Indians facing difficulties abroad, whether they are officials or students. And these are (referring to Jadhav and the trial of Indians held captive in Qatar) exceptional situations. We have never ruled out diplomacy," he said. Referring to Jadhav's case, Jaishankar said that he was kidnapped by Pakistan and is being held in violation of the ICJ judgement. On the Qatar issue, he said that three hearings have been conducted so far, and the government is giving support for legal representation to the captive Indian nationals, even though there is no clarity on charges against them. Kulbhushan Jadhav is an Indian national who is on death row in Pakistan. He has been accused by Pakistan of carrying out espionage and sabotage activities against it at the behest of India's intelligence agencies. India has denied the allegations. His execution, however, was stayed by Pakistan after India filed an appeal against the judgement at the ICJ on May 18, 2017. The court pronounced its verdict in the case on July 17, 2019, rejecting India's appeal for Jadhav's release and ordered Pakistan to suspend the execution. The ICJ ruled that Pakistan would have to review the entire process of the trial and conviction of Jadhav and provide India with consular access. Following the order, Islamabad granted consular access to Jadhav. On September 2, 2019, Indian Charge d' Affaires Gaurav Ahluwalia had met Jadhav at a Pakistani sub-jail. Eight former Indian Navy officers, who were working for a private firm, were detained by the Qatari intelligence service in Doha last year. However, the kingdom is yet to share the charges against them. The former Indian Navy personnel who are currently undergoing a trial in Qatar reportedly have been charged with the offence of spying for Israel on the country's advanced submarines, as per reports. --IANS ans/pgh ( 402 Words) 2023-06-08-19:00:03 (IANS)
After submitting a complaint to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against the Department of Information Technology and Communication (DoITC) over an alleged scam worth Rs 5,000 crore, Rajasthan BJP MP Kirodi Lal Meena will now submit a separate complaint against Vaibhav Gehlot, the son of Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, to the agency on Friday. Meena will reach the ED office on Friday and hand over 'evidence' against Vaibhav Gehlot and Fairmont Hotel owner Ratankant Sharma, his team told IANS. The BJP MP alleged that about Rs 100 crore has been invested in Hotel Fairmont by a shell company based out of Mauritius. This money belongs to Gehlot and his family members which was first sent to Mauritius via hawala channel, Meena alleged. Meena, while addressing a press conference at the BJP headquarters on Thursday, accused Gehlot, his son Vaibhav Gehlot, and daughter-in-law Himanshi Gehlot of making illegal investments worth crores of rupees in five-star heritage hotel business by creating fake and dummy companies. Alleging illegal land conversion, illegal construction, encroachment of pasture land and irrigation department's land, Meena demanded an investigation by the ED. Meena mainly pointed out alleged irregularities at Raffles Hotel in Udaipur, Taj Aravali Hotel, Nimdi Palace in Mount Abu and Fairmont Hotel in Jaipur. He alleged that Vaibhav Gehlot and Himanshi Gehlot are involved in benami business at Fairmont Hotel with funds invested from Mauritius, and part of the profit made from the said business is being further transferred to one dummy company of Vaibhav Gehlot named Sunlight Car Rental Services Pvt Ltd. Also, Ashok Gehlot and Vaibhav Gehlot indulged in money laundering and made benami investments in Fairmont Hotel under the ownership of Triton Hotel and Resort Pvt Ltd, Meena alleged in a press note, adding, "Ashok Gehlot had given permission to construct the Fairmont Hotel and under his government on 21/08/2009, the Jaipur Development Authority (JDA) had approved the site plan of Triton Hotel and Resort, i.e., Fairmont Hotel, which was all done with the malafide intent of Gehlot for bringing in his share of 50 per cent partnership in the hotel." The MP said, "Vaibhav Gehlot had invested his crores of rupees from Mauritius and he is continuing his business in the benami name of 'SivNar'. If the same is not true, Ashok Gehlot being the head of the state and being under the oath of holding a constitutional post is being asked questions like 'why Congress government had approved the construction of a hotel (Fairmont) by JDA and RIICO in the Kukas area, which is half owned by JTC/Minerva, which was part of the Panama paper leak scam'? "Why Ashok Gehlot's son Vaibhav Gehlot was the legal advisor in Triton Hotels (Fairmont Hotel) which has over Rs 95 crore of unaccounted money-launderer's money? "Why Vaibhav Gehlot is receiving lakhs of rupees monthly under the name of 'Sunlight Car Rental' from Fairmont, which is under the ownership of money-laundering company JTC Fiduciary and has invested unaccounted Mauritius money to the tune of Rs 95 crore in it? "Why Vaibhav Gehot was the business partner with 50 per cent share with Ratankant Sharma in 'Sunlight Car Rental' when Ratankant is already clearly involved in money laundering regarding the Mauritius investments received in Fairmont Hotel? "Why Ratankant Sharma was removed from the list of directors and shareholders from 'Sunlight Car Rental' only before money was being channelised to Sunlight from Triton Hotel and Resort Pvt Ltd? If Vaibhav Gehlot has nothing to do with the black money invested in Fairmont, why didn't Ashok Gehlot demolish the illegal construction done in violation of the approved construction plan for Fairmont Hotel?" Meena also said that he would hand over the evidence related to the entire matter to the ED on Friday. --IANS arc/arm ( 642 Words) 2023-06-08-23:18:02 (IANS)
The Supreme Court on Friday declined the urgent listing of a plea against the suspension of internet services in the violence-hit state of Manipur since May 3, saying High Court is seized of the matter. "High Court is seized of the matter. Why are you duplicating it? Let it come before the regular bench, said a vacation bench of Justices Aniruddha Bose and Rajesh Bindal." Advocate Shadan Farast appearing for two Manipuri residents, advocate Chongtham Victor Singh and businessman Mayengbam James, mentioned the matter for urgent listing of the plea saying the internet has been shut in the State for over 35 days now. Counsel appearing for the Manipur government told the bench that High Court is already seized of some matters and there is no urgency to hear this case. The plea was moved in the apex court saying their lives and livelihood have been severely affected by the statewide internet shutdown. The plea said that the shutdown of the internet has had a significant economic, humanitarian, social, and psychological impact on both the petitioners and their families. Petitioners have been unable to send their children to school, access funds from banks, receive payments from clients, distribute salaries, or communicate via email or WhatsApp, the plea said. Chongtham Victor Singh has told ANI that there has been a complete blockade of internet access across the state for almost a month and it's causing significant harm to people's day-to-day life and their fundamental rights. The ban on the internet was imposed on May 3 and remains in effect till now. "Continued suspension of the internet for the purpose of preventing rumour-mongering and the spread of misinformation does not pass the threshold prescribed by the Telecom Suspension Rules 2017," the petition stated. There is no stipulated public order on the internet ban and did not go through the oversight of the Review Committee which is necessary under Law, he said. The plea said that the order of the internet ban is strangulating the Freedom of Speech and Expression and the Freedom to carry on trade and occupation. The plea also stated that there is a violation of Rule 2(2) of the Telecom Suspension rules and hence they are unconstitutional. The petitioners sought a restoration of the internet in Manipur, except for those in which there continues to be unrest and violence. The top court seized the cases relating to the violence in Manipur and sought status reports from the Centre and State on the relief and rehabilitation efforts for the people affected by the violence between Meitei and Kuki communities. Earlier, the top court expressed concern over the loss of lives and properties in Manipur during the violence between the Meitei and Kuki communities and stressed taking adequate measures to restore normalcy there. On March 27, the High Court directed the State to consider the inclusion of the Meitei community in the Scheduled Tribes list. The violence in Manipur between the Hindu Meiteis and the tribal Kuki, who are Christians, erupted after a rally by the All Tribal Students Union of Manipur (ATSUM) on May 3. Violence has gripped the entire State for now a month and the Central government had to deploy paramilitary forces to bring the situation under control. (ANI)
Delhi police arrested two persons, including one allegedly involved in the murder of BJP leader Surendra Matiala, after an exchange of fire at RK Stadium in the RK Puram area on Friday morning, said the police. On April 14, BJP leader Matiala was shot dead at his office in the national capital's Dwarka area by two unidentified assailants. Based on a tipoff, the RK Puram crime branch laid a trap to arrest the assailants. As the assailants arrived, the police team asked them to surrender but they attempted to flee the spot and opened fire on police. In retaliation, police also fired and in the course of action, they got arrested. Previously, in connection to Matiala's murder case, Delhi Police nabbed six accused, including the shooter who is related to an absconding gangster. While speaking to ANI, Dwarka Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) Harsha Vardhan Mandava said, "Six accused, including the shooter Yogesh, have been nabbed in the Surendra Matiala murder case. Two are juvenile among the nabbed ones." "Shooter is a resident of the Jhajjar district. He is related to an absconding gangster Kapil Sangwan. The motive will be clear when we will nab the main conspirator," the DCP added. A weapon has been recovered from his (Yogesh's) possession, police said, adding that the five others were booked under a criminal conspiracy. According to police, an initial investigation has revealed that the incident took place as the accused persons wanted to show their dominance in the area. They were linked with Sangwan through the messaging application. A social media post also got viral in which Sangwan took responsibility for the killing, police said. (ANI)
Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya said on Friday that despite former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi coining the slogan 'Garibi Hatao' (remove poverty) years ago, for the last 52 years, Congress has exploited the poor only for their vote bank. "Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi coining the slogan 'Garibi Hatao' (remove poverty) years ago. But despite that for the last 52 years, Congress has exploited the poor only for their vote bank," Mansukh Mandaviya said. However, now under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, concrete steps are being taken towards the upliftment of the poor, the Health Minister asserted pointing out that today the poor know that the Prime Minister will come to their support. The Union Health Minister was speaking at the inauguration of two health centers under the Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS) at CGHS Wellness Centres at Panchkula and Chandigarh, under the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Following the inauguration, Mandaviya said that it has been the priority of the Prime Minister to provide good health facilities to all citizens. "It is the responsibility of the government to provide good health facilities to the citizens," he said. "Modi Government is completing 9 years of governance. In these 9 years, the number of cities with centres has reached 80. We are working to take CGHS Wellness Centres to 100 cities in the days to come," the Union Health Minister said. Earlier the CGHS beneficiary pensioners used to complain about the lack of CGHS centers, Mandaviya said. "Before 2014, only 25 cities in India had the facility of CGHS Health and Wellness Centers. Now its number has increased to 80, it will be increased to 100 in the coming days," he said. Mandaviya said that the CGHS will start more services for the beneficiaries in the coming days. "We are going ahead in the direction to provide e-RUPI vouchers in the coming days. The beneficiaries will have e-RUPI vouchers in their account," he said. "If the person is referred for a test in the hospital, the facility of e-rupee voucher can be used to pay by swiping the card," he added. (ANI)
Internet services have been partially resumed in Kolhapur in Maharashtra on Friday. Local administration had suspended Internet services in the district until Thursday midnight after tensions erupted over alleged objectionable social media status with reference to Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan An FIR has been registered against Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) leader Sandeep Deshpande and 8 others under Maharashtra Police Act 37, 135, for burning an effigy of Aurangzeb in the aftermath of Kolhapur violence, said Mumbai Police on Thursday. "A total of 36 people have been arrested on the charges of rioting, damaging public property and for unlawful assembly, over the clash that broke out yesterday between the members of some Hindu organisations and Police in Maharashtra's Kolhapur," said Superintendent of Police (SP) Mahendra Pandit on Thursday. There is heavy deployment of security forces to maintain law and order situation in the area. Kolhapur SP Mahendra Pandit informed that the situation at the disputed areas is returning to normalcy. However, security has been tightened to avoid any occurrence of clashes. "The situation of Kolhapur city and district has become normal since yesterday afternoon. 4 SRPF company, 300 Police constables and 60 officers deployed...," said Kolhapur SP Pandit. A curfew was imposed in Kolhapur on Wednesday following the violent clashes that broke out between two groups after which police resorted to lathi-charge to disperse the crowd and bring the situation under control. Reacting to the violence the Uddhav Thackeray faction MP Sanjay Raut on Thursday said, "...As per my knowledge, people of Kolhapur were not involved in this clash. People from outside Kolhapur were brought in to disturb the situation...Why is this happening again and again ever since your government came to power? You speak of Hindutva. Is your Hindutva so weak that it gets threatened when someone puts up someone's photo?... Do you need Aurangzeb to win the elections? Bajrang Bali didn't help you in Karnataka. So, you need Aurangzeb in Maharashtra..." Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has slammed supporters of the erstwhile Mughal ruler. "Suddenly, in some districts of Maharashtra, sons of Aurangzeb took birth. They keep the status of Aurangzeb and show their posters. Because of this, there are tensions. Questions arise, where do these sons of Aurangzeb come from? Who are behind this? We will find this out," said Fadnavis while talking to ANI in Nagpur. (ANI)
"Trains are plying on all four lines, all the lines are fit," Chaudhary told ANI.

He said compensation has been given for 661 cases so far and Rs 22.66 crore have been disbursed in connection with the accident that took place on June 2 and involved two passenger and a goods train.

He said regular maintenance work is going on and some trains have been cancelled today.

Chaudhary said the speed of trains is kept slow near the place where regular maintenance work is being done.

Asked about the inquiry into the accident, he said both CBI and Commissioner of Railway Safety teams are collecting data and working in coordination. He said a forensic team is also at the accident site.

The accident in which 288 people died involved Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express, Bengaluru-Howrah Express and a goods train. (ANI)
The Supreme Court on Friday declined the urgent listing of the plea filed by the wife of gangster Sanjiv Maheshwari Jeeva, an aide of gangster-politician Mukhtar Ansari, who was shot dead on June 7 in a Lucknow court, seeking no coercive action so that she could attend her deceased husband's post-funeral rites. A vacation bench of Justice Aniruddha Bose and Justice Rajesh Bindal observed that the relief sought by Payal Maheshwari, wife of a slain gangster, kept on shifting and there was no urgency for the matter to be heard by a vacation bench. It said the case now will be here post-vacation in July. The Uttar Pradesh government also told the bench that funeral of the gangster has taken place on Thursday and his wife did not attend the funeral despite being assured by the State that no coercive action will be taken against her if she attends the funeral. Gangster's son performed last rites, UP government told the apex court. Counsel of Payal said she wanted to perform post-funeral rituals, 'shraad' of her husband and during this time no coercive steps be taken against her. "The one seeking permission is also a history-sheeter and gang leader. We know how it works. We had already given permission to attend but she did not," the counsel appearing for the State said. The bench in its order stated, "Matter was mentioned yesterday on the ground that funeral of the petitioner's husband was to take place and for that purpose, she sought protection from any coercive action in attending the funeral. We are apprised today that the funeral has already taken place. The petitioner didn't attend the funeral and the last rites were performed by the son." "We were told that no coercive steps could have been taken in case the petitioner attended the funeral. In such circumstances, we don't think there is any urgency to take up the matter during vacation, list the matter before regular bench," it added. Payal approached the apex court on Thursday seeking interim relief for protection and permission to attend the last rites rituals of her husband. The state of Uttar Pradesh then said it has no objection if the slain gangster's wife attend the funeral. The gangster, 48, has been accused in several cases including the murder of former UP minister Brahma Dutt Dwivedi, who was shot dead outside a crowded courtroom in Lucknow on Wednesday. In 2003, he was awarded a life sentence by the High Court for Dwivedi's murder in 1997 and was lodged in Lucknow jail. He was being taken to the SC-ST court to attend a hearing in a 2015 attempt to murder case when a man dressed as a lawyer fired at him. (ANI)
"Two RPF constables saved a passenger's life while he was travelling on the Golden Jubilee Express from Khodambari Nandigram in West Bengal's East Medinipur district to Tirupati," said officials.

As per specific information, the passenger identified as Swapna Kumar Ray (44) attempted to deboard the Golden Jubilee Express when one of his legs slipped and got stuck between the train and the platform.

Meanwhile, RPF constables Lokanatham and Sampurna, who were conducting security operations there, rushed to help Swapna Kumar Ray and safely escorted him away from the platform.

Further investigation revealed that the passenger was returning to Kolkata from Tirupati and intended to catch the Puri Express. However, as the train was cancelled, he tried to get off at the compartment, but the train started moving and he fell down.

Swapna Kumar Ray expressed gratitude to RPF constables Lokanatham and Sampurna for saving his life from the train accident.

The passengers at Tirupati Railway Station also praised the RPF constable's efforts to safeguard the life of Swapna Kumar Ray.

RPF Sub-Inspector (SI) Madhusudan Rao congratulated the constables Lokanatham and Sampurna for rescuing the passenger. (ANI)
The Patiala House Court of Delhi has sent Sahul Hameed, arrested by the Enforcement Directorate from Madurai, to remand for 10 days in connection with a money laundering probe against banned organisation Popular Front of India (PFI). According to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) the accused was earlier in the process of collecting illegal money/terror funds from legitimate and illegitimate channels from Singapore and other places. He was stated to have been deported to India and upon receipt of inputs, he was intercepted and could not give an account of certain activities taken by him towards collecting funds for the PFI. The Enforcement Directorate was represented by Special Public Prosecutor (SPP) Naveen Kumar Matta alongwith Advocate Mohd Faizan Khan in the matter. ED counsels informed the Court that statement of the accused under Section 50 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA)was also recorded wherein he remained evasive in giving answers to certain material aspects collected during the investigation. Therefore ED arrested the accused. The Additional Session's Judge Shailender Malik in an order passed on Thursday said, taking into consideration the totality of facts and the fact that since the accused has been non-cooperative in the investigation until now for enabling the ED to collect all relevant evidence, police custody of accused Sahul Hameed is given for 10 days. Recently, the same court took cognizance of a chargesheet (Prosecution Complaint) filed by the Enforcement Directorate against several office bearers of Popular Front of India (PFI) in a special court in Delhi. The court noted that funds were used for the purpose of unlawful activities, inciting violence, which was allegedly held in North East Delhi in February 2020. According to the ED, the accused persons have revealed that they have played an active role in bogus cash donations on behalf of PFI and in claiming and projecting PFI's unaccounted cash raised through unknown and suspicious sources as untainted and legitimate. ED stated that the PMLA investigation has revealed that as a part of a criminal conspiracy hatched by PFI office bearers over the past many years, suspicious funds from within the country and abroad have been raised by PFI and related entities and have been clandestinely remitted to India in a concealed manner and deposited in their bank accounts over the years. In March month this year, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) Tribunal upheld the decision of the Centre Government decision to ban Popular Front of India and its affiliates. The Tribunal has dismissed the allegations levelled by the organisation that the government is targeting one particular community. While passing the Judgement, the Tribunal noted that the members of PFI and its affiliates are indulging in secessionist activities contrary to the country's social fabric. In September last year, the Ministry of Home Affairs declared the Popular Front of India (PFI) and its affiliates as an 'Unlawful Association' The press statement issued in this regard stated that the Popular Front of India (PFI) and its associates or affiliates or fronts have been found to be involved in serious offences, including terrorism and its financing, targeted gruesome killings, disregarding the constitutional set-up of the country, disturbing public order etc. which are prejudicial to the integrity, security and sovereignty of the country. Therefore, the Ministry of Home Affairs found it necessary to curb the nefarious activities of the organization and has hence declared the Popular Front of India (PFI) along with its associates or affiliates or fronts including Rehab India Foundation (RIF), Campus Front of India (CFI), All India Imams Council (AIIC), National Confederation of Human Rights Organization (NCHRO), National Women's Front, Junior Front, Empower India Foundation and Rehab Foundation, Kerala as an "unlawful association" under the provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. (ANI)
Amritsar Police on Friday arrested three accused persons in connection with the murder of gangster Jarnail Singh, an official said. According to the Director General of Police (DGP) Gaurav Yadav, the police arrested the three accused including Gurmej Singh, the driver of the car carrying the four assailants who shot dead gangster Jarnail Singh at his native Sathiala village in Baba Bakala sub-division of Amritsar district on May 24 this year. "After further investigation of Jarnail Singh's murder at village Sathiala, Amritsar Police has arrested three accused including Gurmej Singh, the driver of the car carrying four shooters. Gurmej drove the car to the crime spot and left the shooters at different places after the incident," tweeted the DGP. Earlier Punjab Police said that it had arrested one of the accused involved in the killing of the deceased gangster. The accused was identified as Gurveer Singh. DGP Gaurav Yadav stated that one pistol and seven live cartridges were seized from the possession of the accused. "In a major breakthrough, AGTF Punjab has arrested Gurveer Singh @Guri, the shooter of the Bambiha Gang and one of the accused involved in the killing of Jarnail Singh at Village Sathiala, Amritsar Rural. One pistol and 7 live cartridges were recovered," DGP Yadav tweeted. He further stated that the accused had been declared a proclaimed offender and was listed as wanted. "He has a criminal history with a number of criminal cases registered. He has been declared a proclaimed offender by the Hon'ble Courts and is wanted across the state and in Delhi," the DGP tweeted. Earlier DGP Yadav had said that the police had begun a search operation after establishing the role of ten people accused in the murder of gangster Jarnail Singh. At the time of his killing, Singh, who belonged to the notorious Gopi Ganshampuriya gang, was out on bail. (ANI)
Union Home Minister Amit Shah will be on a two-day visit to Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh from June 10. The Home Minister will attend various political events and public rallies during his visit to the four states. He will leave for Gujarat by late Friday and return back to the national capital by June 11 night. Shah is expected to be engaged in political meetings with party workers in Gujarat's Ahmedabad in the first half of the day on Saturday. The Minister will then leave for Nanded in Maharashtra where he is reported to address first rally under Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJPs) special month-long campaign in Nanded city. Nanded is the home turf of Congress veteran and former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan. Shah's program is part of the party's month-long campaign covering all Lok Sabha constituencies to mark the completion of nine years of Modi government in office. The Minister is learnt to address the rally in Abchalnagar ground in Nanded city-- the second largest city in the Marathwada region, which is one of the holy pilgrimage centres for Sikhs as Guru Gobind Singh had spent his last days in Nanded and passed his guruship to Guru Granth Sahib before his death. Shah is also reported to hold a meeting with Nanded Gurdwara Committee members. The Home Minister will reach Tamil Nadu's capital Chennai by late Saturday and engage in a political meeting there with party workers on June 11. He will also address a rally in Vellore in Tamil Nadu to highlight the achievements of the nine-year rule of the BJP government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Centre. The rally is part of Tamil Nadu BJP's plan to hold 66 public meetings within a month to highlight the achievements of the BJP government. Several national leaders would address public meetings in Tamil Nadu. Minister of State for personnel and PMO Jitendra Singh addressed a meeting in Chennai last week on the 'achievements' of the BJP government. On June 11, the Home Minister will also reach Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh where he will address a public meeting at the railway grounds in the evening as part of the nationwide celebrations being organised in every Parliamentary constituency on the occasion of Prime Minister Narendra Modi completing nine years in office. (ANI)
Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Narottam Mishra on Friday said that five new police stations, including one in the state capital, would be opened to strengthen the law and order in the state. "Five new police stations will be opened to strengthen the law and order in the state. These police stations will be set up in Kajlikheda in Bhopal, one in Jaitapur Khargone district, two PS in Sidhi district and one in Dewas district," Mishra told reporters here. Mishra further said, "At present, special judges are appointed in 45 districts of the state for hearing the cases registered under NDPS (Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances) Act, and now the process is being done to issue notification regarding the establishment of special courts in remaining 7 districts which include Ashoknagar, Harda, Burhanpur, Singrauli, Umaria, Niwadi and Agar." With the establishment of the special courts, the cases registered under NDPS Act will be resolved immediately in the said districts. Along with this, the wastage of time and money for the follow-up of these cases will also be reduced and the witnesses will also be facilitated to go to the concerned court, the home minister added. Reacting to All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) President Asaduddin Owaisi's remark over the Damoh school hijab row, Mishra said, "Any vicious cycle of conversion will not be allowed in Madhya Pradesh. Owaisi never gave a statement on Sakshi and Shraddha. He does caste politics. In the Damoh case, instructions have been given to check passports, and how many times they (school office bearers) have gone abroad." Sakshi was brutally killed in Delhi last month by Sahil Khan, while Shraddha Walkar was allegedly murdered by her live-in partner Aaftab Amin Poonawala in Delhi on 18 May, 2022. Notably, Owaisi could be heard addressing a program, "There is a Ganga Jamna school in Madhya Pradesh's Damoh district which placed a poster that girls in that school passed with good numbers. The girls were wearing scarves in the poster after which MP CM Chouhan immediately said that he would not allow our daughters to wear hijab forcibly. The BJP government has cancelled the affiliation of the school..." The Madhya Pradesh government has registered a case against a private school in Damoh that has been at the centre of a row for allegedly making students wear hijab-like headscarves as part of its uniform. Responding to former CM Kamal Nath's campaign in the tribal area, the Madhya Pradesh home minister said, "Nath can do anything but he will never be as tribal friendly as CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Nath is just pretending. Congress never allowed a tribal leader to become the Chief Minister." (ANI)
At least one person died and several others are feared trapped after a portion of BCCL (Bharat Coking Coal Limited) open mine collapsed on Friday, officials said. While talking to mediapersons, Senior Superintendent of Police, Dhanbad, Sanjeev Kumar said, "A portion of BCCL (Bharat Coking Coal Limited) open mine collapsed. One body has been recovered. A number of deaths are being verified. We are waiting for BCCL's report. Action will be taken according to the report." Further details awaited. (ANI)
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) MP Supriya Sule on Friday called it "low-level politics" after NCP chief Sharad Pawar received a death threat message. Sule on Thursday said she received a threatening message on her WhatsApp for her father, Sharad Pawar. Calling such actions 'low-level politics', she added that this should stop. A delegation of NCP workers led by Sule met Mumbai police chief Vivek Phansalkar demanding action. "I received a message on WhatsApp for Pawar Sahab. He has been threatened through a website. So, I have come to the Police demanding justice. I urge Maharashtra Home Minister and Union Home Minister. Such actions are low-level politics and this should stop", MP Sule told the media. She further said that the Center and State Home departments would be responsible if justice is not served. "The police have been informed, the home department needs to pay attention. Politics should be kept aside. Threatening messages have come through a website today, there are also threats through Twitter I don't know who is who, I have come to seek justice", she added. She also slammed the Home Department over its failure to maintain law and order in the state and said, "Incidents are happening in a manner unlike before. What oppression is going on in the state? An incident has taken place over drinking coffee in Solapur. It is the failure of the Home Department. I request Amit Shah to look into what is happening in Maharashtra Home Department." MP Sule urged that there should be a transparent enquiry into this incident and added that Maharashtra has always been peaceful when suddenly such incidents started happening. (ANI)
Shah will be on a two-day visit to Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh from June 10.

He will visit Gujarat and Maharashtra on June 10 and travel to Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh on June 11.

Sources said he will hold a public meeting in Patan in Gujarat on Sunday morning. He will visit Sachkhand Gurudwara in Maharashtra's Nanded and address a public meeting.

On June 11, the Union Home Minister will hold a public meeting in Vellore in Tamil Nadu followed by a public meeting in Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh.

Union ministers, MPs and BJP leaders are holding programmes across the country including public meetings and meeting with intellectuals as part of Jan Sampark Abhiyan.

The BJP is telling people about the work done by the Modi government for various sections under PM Modi's vision of 'Sabka, Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas'.

Narendra Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister on May 26, 2014 in the first term and on May 30, 2019 in the second term. (ANI)
Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Friday slammed the centre over Enforcement Directorate's raids in the state and said that the central government is misusing the agencies and that ED's raids were "anticipated" in the poll-bound state. Gehlot was addressing the public at a program under the Rajasthan government's price-rise relief camp held at Khandela in Sikar district. ED conducted searches at multiple locations in Rajasthan on Monday in connection with a money laundering investigation into an alleged exam paper leak case for the recruitment of government teachers CM Gehlot chastised the central government saying that the constitution is being torn to shreds in the country. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) and other central agencies are working under pressure. "The constitution is being torn to shreds in the country. The ED along with other central agencies is working under pressure. My experience says that wherever an election is scheduled, the agencies are sent to the place along with lists. I appeal to the agencies not to work under pressure," he said. Adding further, CM Gehlot said, "They (Bharatiya Janata Party) talk about 'Congress-free India' but it is our responsibility to maintain the democracy in the country. Winning or losing an election is a different thing". Further, the Chief Minister appealed to the public to decide who is going to be the Chief Minister. " Who is going to win an election is decided by the public. Hence, you (the public) decide on your own who is going to be the Chief Minister of the state. Whatever schemes we have started, for this to continue, we need your blessings", said CM Gehlot. He added that the state government has increased the amount of the social security pension and appealed to the Prime Minister to pass a bill regarding the social security act. Rajasthan Congress president Govind Singh Dotasara and the state Congress in-charge Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa were present at the relief camp. The Rajasthan assembly election will choose the representatives of all the 200 seats in the state's Legislative Assembly this year. (ANI)
Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Friday said that the State government has called for a strict probe and action against the 'love jihad' cases. Dhami also mentioned that he will be chairing a high-level meeting with the Director General of Police and other officials on the issue. "We have called for strict probe and action against love jihad cases. Today we will chair a high-level meeting also with DGP and other officials," Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said. Uttarkashi town in the State recently witnessed tensions over an alleged abduction attempt on a 14-year-old girl by two men, including one from the minority community, last month, police said. Both men have been subsequently arrested. Earlier this week BJP MP Sadhvi Paragya hit the headlines for saying that Hindu girls were being tricked by Muslim boys. "Hindu girls are being tricked under a conspiratorial mission. A minor girl was killed in Delhi. Girls need to be alert, their life is not safe. Hindus do not conspire against anyone." Last month, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said that the State government took the issue of 'love jihad', 'religious conversion' and promotion of 'terrorist activities' seriously and will not allow such practices in the State. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had also stated last month that 'Love Jihad' is an agenda of "undeclared terrorism" against humanity. His remarks came after watching the special screening of 'The Kerala Story', a movie that stirred up a political storm in the country. Adityanath had said, "The Kerala Story draws the attention of the entire nation to 'Love Jihad'. The entire society must be made aware of this menace. A commendable and brave effort has been made in this regard by the film's producer, director, and the entire team." (ANI)
The Lieutenant Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Manoj Sinha, Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla, Intelligence Bureau chief Tapan Deka, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief (GoC-in-C) of the Northern Command, Upendra Dwivedi, and CRPF's Director General SL Thaosen, among other officers, attended the meeting.

After the successful conduct of the G20 tourism working group meeting in Srinagar, the Jammu and Kashmir administration shifted its focus on the arrangements for the upcoming Amarnath Yatra amid intelligence inputs of possible attempts by Pakistan-based terror outfits to disrupt the pilgrimage.

The annual pilgrimage to the holy cave shrine of Amarnath, located at a height of 3,880 metres in the Himalayan ranges of south Kashmir, will begin on July 1 and continue till August 31. (ANI)
Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), New Delhi on Friday signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Amazon Kisan to combine strengths and create synergy between the two organizations for guiding the farmers on scientific cultivation of different crops for optimum yield and income. "ICAR will provide technological backstopping to the farmers through Amazon's network. It will improve farmers' livelihood and boost crop yield. This MoU in farmer's partnership with Amazon Kisan program will help ensure access to high-quality fresh produce for consumers across India, including through Amazon Fresh," an official statement said. On the occasion, Dr Himanshu Pathak, Secretary DARE and Director General ICAR highlighted the present scenario of Indian agriculture and emphasized secondary agriculture for better remuneration for the farmers. He further highlighted the importance and role of critical inputs in agriculture and season-based crop plans. He further opined that ICAR will collaborate with Amazon for technologies, capacity building and transfer of new knowledge. He expressed his hope for the success of this Public-Private-Peasants-Partnership (PPPP). Harsh Goyal, Director and Head of Fresh and Everyday Essentials, Amazon India emphasized the company's commitment to supporting Indian farmers, "Technology holds immense potential to revolutionize the agricultural sector and uplift the lives of Indian farmers. This partnership will enable an ecosystem for the farming community, strengthening the 'farm to fork' supply chain," he said. According to the official statement, ICAR and Amazon will collaborate to extend the latest and most precise agriculture practices that have been developed by ICAR's extensive research to bridge the technical knowledge gaps in integrated cultivation by leveraging ICAR's Krishi Vigyan Kendra Knowledge (KVK) network. "KVKs strengthen a wider group of farmers by leveraging a technological base through the transfer of technology and capacity-building programmes. Additionally, ICAR and Amazon will work together on farmer engagement programs at Krishi Vigyan Kendras, conducting demonstrations, trials, and capacity-building initiatives to enhance farming practices and farm profitability. Furthermore, Amazon will provide training support and assist farmers in marketing their products through its online platform, facilitating direct connections with consumers," it added. On behalf of ICAR, Dr US Gautam, Deputy Director General (Agricultural Extension) and Siddharth Tata, Product Leader, Amazon Fresh Supply Chain and Kisan signed the MoU. (ANI)
Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel on Friday lashed out at Union Minister Giriraj Singh, accusing him of distorting the nickname 'Kaka' (uncle), which was given to him by the people, and calling him "KhaKha". Claiming that the Union minister had insulted the people of Chhattisgarh with the "KhaKha" dig at him, CM Baghel told reporters, "I didn't give this nickname to myself. The people, especially the youth, call me by this nickname. It is people who chant my nickname, saying 'Kaka Hai To Bharosa Hai' (In Kaka, we trust) and 'Kaka Abhi Zinda Hai' (Kaka is still alive). Hence, his deliberate distortion of the nickname 'Kaka' to 'Khakha' is nothing but an insult to the people of Chhattisgarh. The BJP has been making tall claims of doubling the farmers' income and hiking the MSP (Minimum Support Price) this year, but the reality is quite the opposite, the Chhattisgarh CM claimed, adding under the Prime Ministership of Manmohan Singh, during the UPA rule (between 2004 and 2014), the Centre had raised the MSP on paddy by 134 per cent. Similarly, the MSP on other products such as pulses, maize, oilseeds and others was also raised during the UPA rule, the Chhattisgarh CM claimed. Baghel said former chief Raman Singh and the BJP, who talked up the benefits of a 'double-engine' government during its term at the hustings, should answer what they did for the farmers. "Had the UPA been in power at the Centre, it would have increased the MSP on farm produce by 134 per cent," the CM said, adding that farmers in his state as well as elsewhere in the country were facing losses worth thousands of crores. On the parade in Canada by suspected Khalistanis, hailing the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Baghel said the Centre should register its strong objection to the incident. (ANI)
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national general secretary meeting chaired by national president JP Nadda is currently underway at party Headquarters in Delhi. Meanwhile, the central leadership of BJP has called a meeting of chief ministers and deputy chief ministers of BJP-ruled states on June 11 in New Delhi, said a party source. According to the party sources, the agenda of the meeting is likely on upcoming assembly elections and 2024 Lok Sabha and Union Minister Amit Shah, party president JP Nadda and BL Santosh along with state organisation secretaries will be present in the meeting. On Wednesday JP Nadda held a special 'Tiffin Meeting' with party workers in Uttar Pradesh's Gautam Buddha Nagar, and instructed party workers to remain grounded and find different ways to win the hearts of people. "At the tiffin meet BJP chief JP Nadda gave an important mantra to party new and old workers and said to party workers that they have to remain grounded and find different ways to win people's hearts," a BJP source told ANI. On the occasion, JP Nadda urged the party workers to remain self-disciplined and be united with each other. "BJP chief told workers that self-discipline is very required for all of us to leave arrogance, and make sure your accountability is there. Don't be small-hearted, stop showing off to others and be united with each other," the party source said. "Most important in any burning matter like farmer's issue, beti bachao issue or another social issue is that if somebody or opposition try to attack or questions then everyone should try to handle such issues with the polite manner and convince them that BJP is always with society and party work for social welfare. Never be aggressive to anyone," he added. BJP National President Nadda also mentioned that the party must maintain its position with dignity and focus on the public welfare. "We are not only the largest party in India, even worldwide we are the largest party. We are larger than the Communist Party of China so we have to remain united and maintain our position with dignity and always work for the public welfare. Every day we should try to connect with new people. We should try to connect with different states, and people and celebrate each other festivals," Nadda said in a meeting that lasted for 2 hours. BJP National President JP Nadda was accompanied by BJP State President Bhupendra Chaudhary, Mahesh Sharma and Pankaj Singh and all Gautam Buddha Nagar party workers (ANI)
Union Minister of Ports, Shipping and Waterways (MoPSW) and Ayush, Sarbananda Sonowal launched the 'Sagar Samriddhi' the online dredging monitoring system in order to amp up 'Waste to Wealth' initiative of the Ministry in Delhi on Friday. As per the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, "This system has been developed by National Technology Centre for Ports, Waterways and Coasts (NTCPWC) the technological arm of MoPSW. The new technology brings marked improvement against the old system of the Draft and Loading Monitor (DLM) system. "The system will bring in synergy among multiple input reports like daily dredging reports, and the pre and post-dredging survey data before processing and producing real-time dredging reports," they added. "The 'Sagar Samriddhi' monitoring system will also allow daily and monthly progress Visualisation, Dredger performance and downtime monitoring, easy location track data with snapshots of loading, unloading and idle time This system strengthens the Atmanirbhar Bharat and Make in India vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi," Ministry added Speaking at the event, Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal said, "PM Narendra Modi gave us the mantra of Zero Defect and Zero Effect and MoPSW is following his vision. In the era of advanced technology, it is essential to apply technology for monitoring the system so that human error can be minimised." "From now onwards the Major Ports would be able to utilise the Online Dredging Monitoring System and bring about significant change in project implementation and bring down the cost of dredging through the use of the dredged materials. This will help in environmental sustainability and will bring down the operational costs of the ports, bringing in more transparency and efficiency," he added. Meanwhile, Sudhansh Pant, Secretary, MoPSW also addressed and said, "The monitoring system is expected to enable better productivity, better contract management and also effective reuse of dredged material with waste to wealth concept." To address the objective of carrying out dredging with essential technical investigation the MoPSW issued 'Dredging Guidelines for Major Ports' in 2021. The Dredging Guidelines outlined the procedure for planning and preparation, technical investigations, dredged material management, estimating the cost of dredging etc, to enable the Major Ports to formulate the dredging projects in order to complete them in time, the Ministry said. In March 2023, Ministry issued Addendum to the Dredging Guidelines 2021 for major ports for disposal of dredged material by incorporating a necessary provision in bidding documents which will help in reducing the dredging cost in the form of 'Waste to Wealth'. It further stated it outlines a wide range of beneficial use of dredged material including engineering use for construction purposes, environmental enhancement including beach nourishment etc. to bring down the cost of the dredging. The annual maintenance dredging at Major Ports and Waterways is around 100 million cubic meters, for which about Rs1000 crores are spent each year by the Ports and IWAI. Now with the implementation of the Addendum of the Dredging guidelines and by using the Sagar Samriddhi, online dredging monitoring system, the dredging cost will be greatly reduced along with bringing in more transparency and efficiency in the overall system, the Ministry said. The MIV 2030 enables the preparation of a roadmap for taking up projects including dredging projects. The MIV also envisages developing Major Ports as transhipment hubs wherever possible and increasing their capacity by way of deepening their channels and near berths. Hence, dredging requirements will increase during the next decade with deep draft Ports of more than 18 meters draft, it said. It further added, presently Cochin Port and Mumbai Port, have adopted the system and New Mangalore Port and Deendayal Port it is running on a trial basis. Now, MoPSW has mandated all Major Ports and lWAl to monitor the dredging activity through this system with customisation from NTCPWC. Accordingly, new dredgers will be using this system along with the old dredgers, which will be upgraded and equipped with the new system. The NTCPWC was established under the Sagarmala Programme of MoPSW with a total investment of Rs 77 Crores at IIT Madras which was inaugurated by the Minister on April 24, 2023. The aim of the centre is to enable research and development for the marine sector, enabling solutions towards achieving the ultimate goal of building a robust marine industry in the country. This state-of-the-art centre has world-class capabilities for undertaking 2D and 3D investigations of research and consultancy nature for the Port, Coastal, and Waterways sector across all disciplines. Modelling of Ocean, determining the Coastal & Estuarine Flows, Sediment transport and morph dynamics, planning of Navigation and Manoeuvring, estimation of Dredging and Siltation, consultancy in Port and Coastal Engineering - designing the Structures and Breakwaters, Autonomous Platforms and vehicles, Experimental and CFD modelling of flow and Hull interaction, Hydrodynamics of multiple hulls, Ocean renewable energy coupled with port facilities are some of the areas where NTCPWC has already contributed to the optimising capability of the marine sector of India. The laboratories created are among the best in comparison with other International Labs in the specific domain, the Ministry said. (ANI)
Congress general secretary KC Venugopal on Friday rejected speculations that party leader Sachin Pilot could float a new party in Rajasthan and said the party will fight the state assembly polls unitedly. There has been speculation in sections of the media that Pilot may float his own party on June 11, the death anniversary of his father Rajesh Pilot. Venugopal told ANI that there is no need to believe rumours. "I don't think so. These are all rumours. To my knowledge, there is no such movement in Rajasthan. I had a word with Sachin Pilot two-three times. Do not worry. We will fight unitedly," Venugopal said on speculations of Pilot likely to announce a new party on June 11. Congress general secretary in-charge of Rajasthan Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa had earlier ruled out the possibility of Pilot floating a party. Amid differences between Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and Pilot, Congress leadership met the two leaders in Delhi last month. Venugopal said after the meeting that party will present a united face in the state. "We have decided to fight elections unitedly. Definitely, we will win the elections in Rajasthan. Both Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot have unanimously agreed with the proposal. We have decided that both leaders have agreed to go together. It will be a joint fight against BJP, we will win the state (Rajasthan)," he said. Rajasthan will face assembly polls later this year. BJP leader Rajendra Rathore on Friday took a dig at the Congress in Rajasthan and said the "plane of Sachin Pilot is in auto mode" and "time will tell where it will land on June 11". Rathore, who is the leader of the opposition in the Rajasthan assembly, took potshots at Ashok Gehlot and said that the demands of Sachin Pilot remain unfulfilled. "Where will Sachin Pilot's plane, which is in auto-mode, land on June 11, time will tell. His demands are pending before the government and the Chief Minister has not responded to them," Rathore told ANI. He said Pilot has stayed in the news whether for his "caustic remarks" as Deputy Chief Minister or for his Jan Sangarsh Yatra. "What he does on June 11 depends on him but all the issues for which he raised Jan Sangarsh Yatra have remained unanswered," Rathod said. The BJP leader said Rajasthan Public Service Commission (RPSC) has not been reconstituted, its composition has not changed and those responsible for the paper leak have not been exposed. He said that the Enforcement Directorate's probe into teacher recruitment exam paper leak case will expose the conspirators. Ahead of his yatra, Sachin Pilot had demanded the reconstitution of the Rajasthan Public Service Commission and probe into alleged corruption during the previous BJP government. (ANI)
The Central Government on Friday announced four important initiatives to strengthen 1,514 Urban Co-operative Banks (UCBs) in the country, an official statement said. "In a significant move, the Central government on Friday took four important initiatives to strengthen 1,514 Urban Co-operative Banks (UCBs) in the country realising Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision of 'Sahakar se Samridhi," the statement said. A detailed discussion was held in this regard by the Union Home Minister and Minister of Cooperation Amit Shah with Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Shaktikanta Das, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). After the meeting, RBI notified these measures to strengthen UCBs. According to the official statement, "UCBs can now open new branches in order to expand their business; UCBs can also do one-time settlements at par with Commercial Banks; revised timelines for Priority Sector Lending (PSL) targets given to UCBs; and there will be a designating nodal officer in RBI." "UCBs can now open new branches up to 10 per cent (maximum five branches) of the number of branches in the previous financial year without prior approval of RBI in their approved area of operation. In order to avail of this facility, UCBs have to get the policy approved by their board and comply with the Financially Sound and Well Managed (FSWM) Norms," it added. The RBI also notified a framework governing this aspect for all regulated entities including Urban Co-operative Banks. "Now cooperative banks through board-approved policies may provide a process for technical write-off as well as a settlement with borrowers. This has brought cooperative banks to par with other commercial banks now," it mentioned. The RBI has also decided to extend the timeline for UCBs to achieve PSL targets by two years up to March 31, 2026. "The deadline of March 31, 2023, to achieve the PSL target of 60 per cent has now also been extended to March 31, 2024. The excess deposits, if any, after clearing the shortfall of PSL during Financial Year 2022-23 will also be refunded to UCB," the statement said. "Since UCB work in urban areas unlike commercial banks who have branches in rural areas as well, they were facing hardships on this score. In order to meet the long pending demand of the cooperative sector for closer coordination and focused interaction, RBI has recently notified a nodal officer as well," it added. (ANI)
Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday reviewed the preparations for the Amarnath Yatra at a high-level meeting in the national capital, directing to ensure adequate security arrangements to make a comfortable pilgrimage for the pilgrims. Pointing out that it is the priority of Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government that Amarnath pilgrims should have "comfortable darshan and should not face any difficulty", Shah directed the officials concerned to make adequate security arrangements on the entire route of 62 days long Amarnath Yatra, which will commence on July 1 and culminate on August 31. Shah also stressed the need for smooth arrangements on the route "from the airport and railway station to the yatra base camp, and directed to provide air service from Srinagar and Jammu at night for the convenience of the pilgrims". The Home Minister later directed to ensure adequate stock of oxygen cylinders and their refilling and also asked for the availability of additional teams of doctors. He further directed for an adequate number of medical beds and the deployment of ambulances and helicopters to meet any medical emergency. Shah directed the provision of all necessary amenities for Amarnath Yatris, including travel, stay, electricity, water, communication and health. He also directed to ensure a better communication system on the Yatra route and the deployment of machines to immediately open the route in the event of a landslide. During the meeting, he apprised officials that all the pilgrims of Amarnath Yatra will be given RFID cards so that their real-time location can be traced. "The insurance coverage of Rs 5 lakh for each Amarnath Yatri and Rs 50,000 for each animal will be ensured. Apart from this, arrangements for tent city, Wi-Fi hotspots and proper lighting will be made on the travel route," read a Home Ministry statement. "Additionally, Online- live Darshan of Baba Barfani, live telecast of morning and evening aarti in holy Amarnath cave and religious and cultural programs will be organized at the base camp," the statement added. The meeting was attended by Lieutenant Governor of Jammu and Kashmir Manoj Sinha, Union Home Secretary, Director, Intelligence Bureau, Director General of Border Security Force and Central Reserve Police Force, Director General of Border Roads Organisation, Chief Secretary of Jammu and Kashmir, other senior officials of Army, Central Government and Jammu and Kashmir administration. (ANI)
The Directorate of Education, Goa has issued a circular announcing the closure of all educational institutions on Saturday. A decision in this regard has been taken due to the extreme heat and delay in the monsoon season. The circular seeks to ensure the well-being and safety of students and staff. "Due to extreme heat and delay of the monsoons in the state, it is decided by the competent authority to close down all institutions on 10/06/2023," reads the circular. "All the heads of Govt/Govt aided/unaided primary/middle/secondary/higher secondary and special schools are hereby requested to compensate for the academic loss in future, if any," it added. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) announced that the southwest monsoon arrived in Kerala on June 8. 'Normal' onset of monsoon in India is June 1 so there has been nearly a week delay in its onset this year. The IMA had forecasted that the monsoon will land in Kerala on June 4. The heat has been so intense in Goa on Friday that several schools in the state decided to have done with the classes before their scheduled time. The decision also comes in the wake of parents voicing their concern for their children's safety in the high temperatures. (ANI)
"Air India flight AI180, scheduled to operate from San Francisco (SFO) to Mumbai (BOM) on June 8, 2023, was cancelled due to an unforeseen technical issue," an Air India spokesperson said.

Air India has also offered a full refund to the passengers and provided accommodation as well.

"We will also reimburse all expenses that our guests may incur towards hotel accommodation and transportation until they take flight," the spokesperson said.

"Air India regrets the disruption to our guests' travel plans and the inconvenience. The safety of our guests and staff will remain our top-most priority," the spokesperson added.

Earlier, on June 6, the Air India flight, headed to San Francisco from New Delhi with 216 passengers and 16 crew members, was diverted to Magadan in Russia after a technical issue with one of its engines.

According to the airline, Flight AI173D landed safely in San Francisco (SFO) at 0007 hours on June 8, 2023 (local time).

In a statement on Thursday morning, the airline said it had mobilised additional on-ground support at the destination to carry out the smooth clearance formalities for all passengers upon arrival. (ANI)
In the murder case of a 32-year-old woman, whose body was cut into pieces by her 56-year-old live-in partner in Maharashtra's Thane, it has come to light that the couple had hidden their marriage from their acquaintances because of their age difference, police said. Manoj Sane, accused of killing 32-year-old Saraswati Vaidya, has claimed that she died by suicide, police said on Friday. The accused was arrested on Wednesday. While talking to mediapersons, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) Jayant Bajbale said, "The police team has been successful in identifying the relatives of the victim. The three sisters of the victim woman were called to the police station today. The sisters have identified the woman as their real sister. We are in the process of handing over the victim's body. We are in the process of matching the DNA of the three sisters with the victim." "During the investigation, we found out that the victim and accused were married and they had informed about it to Saraswati's sisters also. However, they hid this from the others because of their age difference. We also got to know that they got married in a temple," the DCP added. According to police, Manoj Sane said when he reached home on the morning of June 3, he saw Vaidya lying on the ground and foam was coming out of her mouth. When he checked, she was not breathing. To avoid being accused of her murder, he decided to dispose of her body. After cutting the body parts into small pieces with a tree cutter, he boiled them in a pressure cooker so that there would be no foul smell and then filled the body parts in plastic bags to dispose them of, the police said. As per police, the accused also claimed that later he also planned to end his life. Police also said that the accused is not cooperating in the investigation, and he had no regrets for what he had done. Police are verifying the accused's claim of the suicide of the deceased. The investigation is underway and the pieces of the body recovered from the accused's house have been sent to JJ Hospital for postmortem, they said. Accused Manoj Sane, had been staying with Vaidya in the rental flat in the Akashganga building in the Mira Road area over the past three years. (ANI)
"The lottery was drawn for allotment in the auditorium of Allahabad Medical Association. After verification of 6030 applicants, 1590 were found eligible to participate in the lottery," Arvind Kumar Chauhan Vice Chairman of Prayagraj Development Authority (PDA) said.

Beneficiaries will get a flat built in 41 square meters for only 3 lakh 50 thousand. A flat with two rooms, a kitchen, and toilet facilities costs Rs 6 lakh, officials said.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had on December 26, 2021, laid the foundation stone for this affordable housing project on 1731 square meters of land after it was freed from the possession of Atiq in the Lukerganj area of Prayagraj.

This project has been taken up by the District Urban Development Authorities (DUDA) under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), and as many as 76 flats have been built in two blocks, officials said.

Once completed, the flats will be handed over to the poor by CM Yogi, they added.

Atiq Ahmed was accused in the 2005 murder of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLA Raju Pal and also in the killing of a key witness in that case, Umesh Pal, in February this year.

Atiq Ahmed and his brother Ashraf Ahmed were shot dead by men posing as journalists on April 15 night this year, while they were being taken for a medical examination in Prayagraj. (ANI)
Janta Dal (United) President Lalan Singh on Wednesday confirmed that the meeting will be held in Patna on June 23.

"Bihar CM Nitish Kumar has called a meeting of the opposition parties on June 23 in Patna. I will also participate in the meeting," CM Stalin said.

The meeting, which is aimed at laying the groundwork for the coming together of like-minded Opposition parties against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP government at the Centre, was originally scheduled to be held on June 12.

However, the meeting was pushed back after several Opposition leaders, including Congress national president Mallikarjun Kharge and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin, expressed their inability to attend the meeting on June 12, citing prior engagements and preoccupations.

The Bihar CM Nitish Kumar has been spearheading efforts to bring all Opposition parties together against the BJP government at the Centre, with an eye on next year's Lok Sabha polls.

As part of the effort to galvanise the Opposition against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP, he has already met the likes of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar. (ANI)
Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Friday held a high-level meeting at the secretariat regarding cases of 'love jihad' in the state. State DGP Ashok Kumar, Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) V Murugesan and officers of the Intelligence Department were present in this meeting. The Chief Minister has said, "The cases of love jihad that are coming up will be strictly investigated." In a meeting with the DGP and other police officers, the Chief Minister gave instructions for strict action regarding this and said that the government is strict in this matter. Earlier in the day, CM Dhami said that the State government has called for a strict probe and action against the 'love jihad' cases. "We have called for strict probe and action against love jihad cases. Today we will chair a high-level meeting also with DGP and other officials," Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said. Uttarkashi town in the State recently witnessed tensions over an alleged abduction attempt on a 14-year-old girl by two men, including one from the minority community, last month, police said. Both men have been subsequently arrested. Earlier this week BJP MP Sadhvi Paragya hit the headlines for saying that Hindu girls were being tricked by Muslim boys. "Hindu girls are being tricked under a conspiratorial mission. A minor girl was killed in Delhi. Girls need to be alert, their life is not safe. Hindus do not conspire against anyone." Last month, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said that the State government took the issue of 'love jihad', 'religious conversion' and promotion of 'terrorist activities' seriously and will not allow such practices in the State. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath also stated last month that 'Love Jihad' is an agenda of "undeclared terrorism" against humanity. His remarks came after watching the special screening of 'The Kerala Story', a movie that stirred up a political storm in the country. Adityanath had said, "The Kerala Story draws the attention of the entire nation to 'Love Jihad'. The entire society must be made aware of this menace. A commendable and brave effort has been made in this regard by the film's producer, director, and the entire team." (ANI)
Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde on Friday directed the state police to beef up security for Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar after his daughter and party MP Supriya Sule alleged that her father had received death threats from unknown miscreants. "Sharad Pawar is a senior leader and we all respect him. His safety will be fully taken care of. Instructions have been given to the police to increase security, if necessary," CM Shinde said. "The government has taken serious note of the threat received by senior leader Sharad Pawar on Twitter and I have personally spoken to senior police officers and have given instructions for investigation," he added. Earlier, on Friday, Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said that although there are ideological differences with the NCP, issuing threats to a prominent Opposition leader won't be tolerated. "Maharashtra politics has a tall tradition. Although there are differences at the political and ideological level (between the BJP and the NCP), there are no differences of opinion in this matter. Threatening any (Opposition) leader or overstepping the bounds of civility while expressing oneself on social media will not be tolerated. In such cases, the police will act as per the law," Fadnavis said. On Friday, NCP MP Supriya Sule said she received a threat message, directed at her father on WhatsApp. Labelling the threat as 'low-level politics', she added that this should stop. "I received a message on WhatsApp for Pawar Sahab. He was threatened through a website. So, I have come to the Police demanding justice. I urge Maharashtra Home Minister and Union Home Minister to act. Such actions represent low-level politics and should stop," Sule told media persons. She added that if justice isn't done in such cases, the Centre and State Home departments will be held responsible. "The police have been informed. The Home Department also needs to intervene in this matter. Politics should be set aside in such cases," she added. (ANI)
Adding fuel to the ongoing controversy in Maharashtra over the social media posts regarding Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan, Union Minister Giriraj Singh dubbed Godse, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi, as 'Sapoot' (son) of this country. "The assassin of Mahatma Gandhi was not an invader like Mughal rulers Babar and Aurangzeb as he was born in India," the Union Minister said while addressing the media persons here on Friday . Singh was replying to the query about a statement of AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi related to Godse while reacting to Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis's comment on Aurangzeb. He further said that individuals who take pride in being called the descendants of Babur cannot be considered true sons of India. However, an FIR has been registered against Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) leader Sandeep Deshpande and 8 others under Maharashtra Police Act 37, 135, for burning an effigy of Aurangzeb in the aftermath of Kolhapur violence, said Mumbai Police on Thursday. A curfew was imposed in Kolhapur on Wednesday following the violent clashes that broke out between two groups after which police resorted to lathi-charge to disperse the crowd and bring the situation under control. Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has slammed supporters of the erstwhile Mughal ruler. "Suddenly, in some districts of Maharashtra, sons of Aurangzeb took birth. They keep the status of Aurangzeb and show their posters. Because of this, there are tensions. Questions arise, where do these sons of Aurangzeb come from? Who are behind this? We will find this out," said Fadnavis while talking to ANI in Nagpur. Further, taking a swipe at the Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, Giriraj Singh accused the latter of "damaging the federal structure of the state". "This government (Chhattisgarh government) is encouraging conversion, alleged the Union Minister, adding that a strict law in this regard will be formed after our government will come to power and the one who will practice conversion against the law will go to jail. Baghel-led government in the state is spreading terror and forcing people for conversion," he alleged. (ANI)
Bard now uses a new technique called "implicit code execution" to recognise computational prompts and run code in the background, the tech giant said in a blogpost on Wednesday.

As a result, it can respond to string manipulation, coding questions and mathematical operations more correctly.

"Our new method allows Bard to generate and execute code to boost its reasoning and math abilities. This approach takes inspiration from a well-studied dichotomy in human intelligence, notably covered in Daniel Kahneman's book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'-- Athe separation of 'System 1' and 'System 2' thinking," it added.

System 1 thinking is fast, intuitive and effortless. On the other hand, System 2 thinking is slow, deliberate and effortful.

With the latest update, the company has combined the capabilities of both Large language models (LLMs) (System 1) and traditional code (System 2) to help improve the accuracy of Bard's responses.

"We've seen this method improve the accuracy of Bard's responses to computation-based word and math problems in our internal challenge datasets by approximately 30 per cent," the tech giant said.

Also, the company announced that Bard now offers a new export option to Google Sheets.

With the new feature, users can export the tables that Bard creates in its responses directly to Sheets.

--IANS aj/shb/

( 239 Words)

2023-06-08-09:04:04 (IANS)
NASA plans to invest $45 million in funding to more than 200 small businesses to develop new technologies designed to protect the health of astronauts, lower risk of collision damage to spacecraft, the US space agency has said. The new awards from NASA's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programme invests in a diverse portfolio of American small businesses and research institutions to support NASA's future missions. For first-round funding, NASA selected 300 proposals from 249 small businesses and 39 research institutions. Each proposal team will receive $150,000 to establish the merit and feasibility of their innovations, for a total agency investment of $45 million, the agency said in a statement. Phase I SBIR contracts are awarded to small businesses and last for six months, while Phase I STTR contracts are awarded to small businesses in partnership with a research institution and last for 13 months. "NASA has a key role to play in growing the aerospace ecosystem in our country," said Jenn Gustetic, director of early stage innovation and partnerships for Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) at the agency's headquarters in Washington, in the statement. "Through these early-stage small business awards, we are inviting more innovators into this growing arena and helping them mature their technologies for not only NASA's use, but for commercial impact," he added. About 30 per cent of the companies selected are first-time NASA SBIR/STTR recipients, while more than a quarter of the selected companies are women-owned, veteran-owned, disadvantaged, and/or HUBzone small businesses. The businesses include nou Systems, a women-owned small business based in Alabama, selected to further develop their technology that will help in microbial monitoring of spacecraft environments. The closed and unique environment on spacecraft makes microbial monitoring of utmost importance to astronauts' health. Another is a veteran-owned HyBrid Space Systems company based in Washington. The two-person company was selected for an SBIR award to help NASA in its efforts to mitigate the potential risk of damage to its spaceflight programmes from orbital debris -- human made objects in Earth orbit that no longer serve a useful purpose. "We are proud to work alongside the small businesses and research institutions in need of government investment," said Gynelle Steele, deputy programme executive for NASA's SBIR/STTR programme at NASA Headquarters. "This programme enables NASA to nurture pioneering ideas from a diversity of innovators across the country that may not attract the initial private industry funding needed to thrive,a Steele said. --IANS rvt/dpb ( 427 Words) 2023-06-08-12:02:01 (IANS)
In an effort to speed up work on Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India (Tapi) gas pipeline project and finish the feasibility study as soon as possible, Pakistan and Turkmenistan signed a Joint Implementation Plan (JIP) on Thursday, according to The Express Tribune. According to a statement, the JIP was signed by State Minister and Head of TurkmenGaz Maksat Babayev and Minister of State for Petroleum Dr. Musadik Malik. Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, key cabinet members, and representatives from the Petroleum Division and Inter State Gas Systems Pvt Ltd all attended the signing event. A high-ranking Turkmenistan team led by Babayev, Deputy Minister of Energy Annageldi Saparov, and CEO and Chairman of BOD, TPCL, Muhammetmyrat Amanov, inked the agreement at the conclusion of a two-day visit to Pakistan, according to The Express Tribune. It said that the JIP would envisage the constitution of a Senior Coordination Committee (SCC) to expedite and oversee the project activities. The prime minister nominated Special Assistant to PM, Jehanzeb Khan, to work as a focal person from the Pakistan side as the head of the SCC, The Express Tribune reported. In the meeting with the Turkmenistan delegation, PM Shehbaz said that being a critical component of his government's vision, the Tapi gas pipeline project would ensure energy security, economic growth and prosperity in Pakistan as well as the entire region. "Tapi gas project is a manifestation of the strategic cooperation between Pakistan and Turkmenistan in the energy sector," a statement issued by the PM Office quoted Shehbaz as saying, The Express Tribune reported. The prime minister said Pakistan and Turkmenistan enjoyed brotherly relations underpinned by common history, culture and religion. He said the leadership on both sides had a keen desire to further promote economic and commercial relations. He underscored that Pakistan could be a gateway for quick access to Turkmenistan's rich energy reserves. The prime minister renewed the commitment to early implementation of the project and hoped that the TAPI gas pipeline would be completed at the earliest by optimising all available resources by all relevant parties. The government of Pakistan also invited Turkmenistan to explore gas connectivity from the Chaman border to Gwadar and building LNG terminals at Gwadar, which would expand supplies to Europe and global LNG markets, The Express Tribune reported. The Tapi gas pipeline project aims to bring natural gas from the Galkynysh gas field in Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan. The pipeline will transport up to 33 billion cubic metres (bcm) (average 3.2 BCFD) of natural gas per year over a 30-year period. The supply source is the Galkynysh gas field in the eastern region of Turkmenistan whereas Pakistan's off-take will be 1.3 BCFD with a pipeline diameter of 56 inches. The proposed route is the supply source, Herat, Kandahar, Chaman, Zhob, DG Khan, Multan, and Fazilika with a pipeline length of 1,849 kilometres. The engagements/interactions of the Turkmen delegation were characterised by mutual goodwill in a spirit of understanding, cooperation, and amity, The Express Tribune reported. The Turkmen delegation offered its profound gratitude to its Pakistani "brothers" for their "traditional hospitality" and remained optimistic that bilateral ties between the two friendly countries would continue to expand in all spheres. The Tapi project will be transformative towards the energy security of Pakistan. Low-cost gas supplies will make Pakistan's industrial sector competitive worldwide and lead to far-reaching employment opportunities for the youth, The Express Tribune reported. Pakistan continues to attach great importance to the Tapi gas pipeline project to meet emerging energy challenges for the country and as a manifestation of meaningful commercial, energy cooperation between Pakistan and Central Asia. (ANI)
Former President Donald Trump has been indicted in an investigation into his handling of classified documents after he left the White House, The Hill reported. He has been indicted on seven federal criminal charges for retaining hundreds of classified government documents and even making false statements after leaving the White House, it reported. Trump posted on Truth Social that he has been summoned to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon. The National Archives spent months seeking the return of presidential records after Trump left office, with Trump's team eventually turning over a tranche that included nearly 200 classified records, The Hill reported, The Hill reported. "I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!" Trump wrote on the social media platform. "This is indeed a DARK DAY for the United States of America. We are a Country in serious and rapid Decline, but together we will Make America Great Again!" he added, The Hill reported. It is the second indictment of Trump, who is running for president in 2024 Presidential elections. That ignited the Justice Department investigation that included a subpoena for records and eventually spurred the August 2022 search of the property, where the FBI found more than 100 more classified records. Trump's team in June had turned over just 38 classified records when asked to hand over any remaining classified materials. At least one of the charges against former President Donald Trump will be a conspiracy charge, CNN reported quoting a source familiar with the matter. The Trump team does not expect charges to be unsealed tonight, another source said. The former president has been charged with seven counts, CNN reported quoting a source . The warrant the FBI secured to search the property indicated that they expected to find evidence to support violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice, as well as another statute that bars the retention of government records. In a statement echoing his Truth Social posts, Trump called it a "dark day" for the country following his indictment in the classified documents investigation. Special counsel Jack Smith has been overseeing the investigation into Trump's handling of classified documents since he was appointed to the role in November. Trump's attorneys met earlier this week with Justice Department officials, including Smith. Experts widely viewed the meeting as a sign that Smith's investigation was winding down. The warrant the FBI secured to search the property indicated that they expected to find evidence to support violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice, as well as another statute that bars the retention of government records. It's not clear from Trump's post what charges he has been indicted on. Still, the indictment is a historic one, the first-ever federal criminal charges brought against a former president. Trump was indicted on state charges in New York in a separate matter earlier this year. Trump has offered various defenses, including that he had the right to take the documents and that he could unilaterally declassify them without going through any formal process, The Hill reported. Multiple outlets reported last week that prosecutors obtained audio of Trump in 2021 discussing a classified Pentagon document he still had in his position and that he indicated there were restrictions on who could view it -- a comment that could undercut his defence. The Espionage Act also only requires wrongfully retaining national defence information, meaning prosecution does not hang on a document's classification status. Trump has compared his handling of classified documents to President Biden's ever since Biden aides discovered late last year and earlier this year sensitive classified materials from Biden's time as vice president at an old Washington, DC, office and his Delaware home, The Hill reported. But Biden's team notified Justice Department officials of the discovery and are cooperating with an ongoing special counsel review of Biden's handling of classified materials. The indictment is likely to loom over Trump's 2024 campaign for the White House, but the former president and his team wasted little time on Thursday seeking to rally support. Trump's campaign sent out a fundraising email shortly after he announced he was charged looking to raise funds off of the news. (ANI)
Erdogan stressed that the continuation of consultations with the United Nations to remove obstacles to the export of Russian grain and fertiliser would be beneficial, Xinhua news agency reported, citing a statement published on Wednesday by Erdogan's office.

The Turkish President said that the whole world attaches importance to the continuation of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which allows the export of Ukrainian grain to world markets, underlining that the agreement they established through joint efforts plays a vital role in tackling the global food crisis.

Erdogan emphasised that Turkey is determined to continue to make necessary efforts to establish a just peace between Russia and Ukraine.

Earlier in the day, Erdogan also spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, offering aid to investigate the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam in southern Ukraine.

In July 2022, Russia and Ukraine separately signed a document in Istanbul with Turkey and the United Nations on grain and fertiliser exports from Ukraine and Russia to ensure supplies to global markets amid the Ukraine crisis.

The memorandum of understanding between Russia and the United Nations on the facilitation of exports of Russian food and fertilizer is a parallel agreement with the Black Sea Grain Initiative.

While the exports of Ukrainian grain have made strides, Russia has constantly expressed displeasure with the lack of progress in the facilitation of exports of Russian food and fertiliser.

The initiative, initially in effect for 120 days, was extended in mid-November 2022 for another 120 days till March 18, 2023. At that point, Russia only agreed to extend the deal for 60 days, till May 18, 2023. On May 17, Russia agreed to extend the deal for another 60 days.

--IANS int/sha

( 316 Words)

2023-06-08-04:00:02 (IANS)
Representatives from various UN agencies in Ukraine are in Kherson to assess the impact of the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam and coordinate the humanitarian response. Representatives from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, as well as five UN agencies and some non-governmental organisations, were on the ground on Wednesday to conduct the assessment, Xinhua news agency quoted Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, as saying. "They tell us that the disaster will likely get worse in the coming hours, as water levels are still rising, and more villages and towns are being flooded. This will impact people's access to essential services and seriously raise health risks," he said. On Tuesday, about 1,500 people left their flooded homes, according to the International Organization for Migration, and more people were evacuated on Wednesday. Most of them are staying in Mykolaiv city, which is close to their homes, said the spokesman. Access to water is a main concern. Hundreds of thousands of people depend on the reservoir, formed by the dam, for drinking water, and the levels are dropping rapidly. In addition, flooding can also lead to contamination of water sources, increasing health risks, he told a daily press briefing. The Food and Agriculture Organization warns that the destruction of the dam will likely impact food security, as thousands of hectares of agricultural land have now been flooded, destroying recently planted crops. Authorities said that the destruction of the dam decimated the irrigation systems in the Dnipro, Kherson and Zaporizhizia regions, he said. On the response side, the United Nations and humanitarian partners are working nonstop to provide affected communities with the assistance they urgently need. On Tuesday, they distributed nearly 12,000 bottles of water, more than 1,700 kits with essential supplies for children on the move, and 10,000 water purification tablets to five municipalities in Kherson and the city of Mykolaiv, said the spokesman. Humanitarian organizations are supporting authorities in the evacuations and helping coordinate the accommodation of people arriving from Kherson in transit centers. They are also delivering hygiene supplies and other basic items to Mykolaiv and Odessa for the evacuees there, he said. Cash, psychosocial and health support and recreational activities for children at the Kherson train station are also part of the ongoing response. The work will continue in the coming days, he said. --IANS int/sha ( 410 Words) 2023-06-08-07:28:01 (IANS)
Tharman Shanmugaratnam, a Senior Minister from Singapore's ruling People's Action Party (PAP), on Thursday announced his intention to run in the presidential election this year, while also informing Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of his decision to retire from politics and all other positions in the incumbent government. The 66-year-old has been serving as Senior Minister of Singapore since 2019, Coordinating Minister for Social Policies since 2015, and Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore since 2011. In a letter to Prime Minister Lee, Shanmugaratnam, who is also an economist, said: "I plan to do so a month from now, on July 7, 2023, so that I can first fulfil my immediate official commitments in Singapore and internationally, and ensure that arrangements are fully in place for constituents of Jurong GRC to be well-served for the rest of the electoral term," Channel News Asia reported. He will also step down from all the other roles and responsibilities he has been undertaking in his ministerial capacity. In response, the Prime Minister told Tharman, also in a letter, that he understands the decision to run for President. "It is in keeping with the spirit of public service and sense of duty that you have shown all these years. As the Head of State, the President is a unifying figure to all citizens, and represents Singapore internationally. The President also exercises important custodial powers, holding the second key when it comes to spending past reserves and making certain critical appointments. "Through your various finance roles, you have gained deep knowledge of the system and how the reserves are safeguarded. Your international stature and your experience in government and politics will also stand you in good stead as you represent the nation domestically and abroad." Lee added. Tharman has been a PAP MP representing the Taman Jurong division of Jurong GRC since 2001. He has also been serving as Deputy Chairman of the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC. An economist by profession, Tharman has spent his entire working life in the public service for Singapore, in roles principally related to economic and social policies. He has also simultaneously led various high level international councils and panels. --IANS ksk/ ( 375 Words) 2023-06-08-13:40:03 (IANS)
An appeals court in the US has unanimously rejected the bail plea of an Indian-origin driver who allegedly slammed his truck into a car killing two 14 year-old boys on the spot and injuring two others last month in New York. Prosecutors at a Brooklyn appeals court said new evidence showed that defendant Amandeep Singh, 34, was driving almost 100 mph while drunk and high on cocaine at the time of the accident, a Newsday report said. Singh, charged with aggravated vehicular homicide, first-degree vehicular manslaughter, two counts each of second-degree manslaughter and second-degree assault, leaving the scene of an auto accident with a fatality and driving while intoxicated, did not appear in the court. Nassau County Assistant District Attorney Michael Bushwack told the court last week that the toxicology reports taken four hours after the mishap found Singh had a 0.15 blood alcohol level -- nearly double the legal limit. Arguing against his bail, prosecutors said they've also obtained receipts and security cameras that showed Singh was drinking at two bars before the crash, along with surveillance video from the scene of the accident, the Newsday reported. That evidence, along with Singh's significant financial resources, multiple passports and extensive international travel, make him a serious flight risk, the court was told. Citing that his client is "not going to flee" and is not a flight risk, Defence attorney James Kousouros suggested $1 million bail and home confinement with GPS monitoring and said that Singh would surrender both his American and Indian passports. He told the court that Singh, married with two kids, has a successful contracting business that employs 35 full-time workers and has contracts to work on local schools. Bushwack disputed the defence's argument, saying Singh attempted to flee in the moments after the fatal crash, as law enforcement found him hiding near a dumpster in a shopping centre parking lot. "The flight from the scene is concerning and it strongly suggests that if released on bail, the defendant is likely to flee again rather than return to court," Associate Justice Valerie Brathwaite Nelson said after hearing the arguments. Singh was driving his 2019 Dodge Ram south in the northbound lanes on North Broadway in Jericho when he smashed into a 2019 Alfa Romeo four-door sedan with four male teens inside, Nassau County Police said. Police said that the pickup truck went airborne, spinning, and landing 300 feet away. According to Newsday, when police first questioned Singh at the scene, he was so intoxicated that he "thought he was in New Jersey". While two teens -- identified as Drew Hassenbein and Ethan Falkowitz -- were pronounced dead at the scene, the other two, aged 16 and 17, were taken to a local hospital for treatment of injuries. Singh had previously been convicted of a DWI (Driving While Intoxicated) and gang assault as a teenager. --IANS mi/sha ( 491 Words) 2023-06-08-07:42:01 (IANS)
After months of speculation, former US Vice President Mike Pence has finally launched his campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and said that Donald Trump "should never" be the President again for his actions in the aftermath of the 2020 polls. At his formal campaign launch on Wednesday in Ankeny, Iowa, the 64-year-old recalled how his former boss, who he served under in the White House from 2017-21, had asked him to block the certification of Joe Biden's 2020 election win as Pence presided over Congress on January 6, 2021 -- the day of the Capitol riot, reports CNN. "The American people deserve to know, on that day, President Trump also demanded I choose between him and the Constitution. Now voters will be faced with the same choice. I chose the Constitution, and I always will," Pence said to applause from the crowd at Des Moines Area Community College. "I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be President of the United States. And anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be President of the United States again," Pence said of Trump who is currently the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination. This was Pence's most forceful repudiation of Trump to date. "The former President continues to insist that I had the right to overturn the election. President Trump was wrong then, and he is wrong now. I will always believe, by God's grace, I did my duty on that day, I kept my oath, to ensure the peaceful transfer of power under the Constitution and the laws of this country," he said. The former Indiana Governor also took shots at President Biden, arguing that neither he nor Trump are similar to average Americans who know how to "treat each other with kindness and respect even when we disagree", the BBC reported. Also hitting out at another Republican 2024 rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for his recent remarks about the war in Ukraine, Pence said: "Donald Trump and others who would seek the presidency would walk away from our traditional role on the world stage." At a CNN town hall later in the day in Des Moines, Pence repeated his criticism, but on the subject of Trump's alleged mishandling of classified documents, he said it would "be terribly divisive to the country" if the former president were to be indicted by federal investigators over his actions and a possible obstruction of justice. "This kind of action by the Department of Justice (DOJ) I think would only fuel further division in the country... I hope the DOJ thinks better of it and resolves these issues without an indictment," he added. Pence joins a growing field of Republican hopefuls, which so far has been dominated by Trump and DeSantis. On Tuesday, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a onetime Trump ally who helped him prepare for the 2020 presidential debates, announced his candidacy. The other in the running are former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott. On Wednesday, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum also announced that he was entering the race. --IANS ksk/ ( 546 Words) 2023-06-08-08:24:03 (IANS)
Turkey is looking forward to tapping into the key summer tourism industry revenues to prop up its ailing economy as foreign traveller have begun to flock into the sunny holiday resorts, industry professionals said. Every year, this crucial industry, which employs 2.6 million workers, generates billions of dollars, offering much-needed respite for the national economy, reports Xinhua news agency. Turkey's tourism income jumped to $46.3 billion in 2022, a surge of over 50 per cent from $30 billion in 2021, according to official data. "In Turkey, tourism has become an indispensable sector for the economy because it generates much-needed foreign currency," Kaan Sahinalp, the Turkish representative of German travel giant TUI, told Xinhua. "The tourism industry is vital for the hard currency that it brings about for the economy as a whole," helping to reduce the country's substantial current account deficit, he said. He said he is hopeful that the industry would meet the government's target of 60 million foreign arrivals and $60 billion earnings in 2023. Meanwhile, Sahinalp pointed out that the weakening of the Turkish currency lira would give the country "a serious advantage" compared to its regional competitors in terms of prices. On Wednesday, the lira slipped by over 7 per cent against the greenback, trading at 23 lira against $1, the biggest drop in years. The lira has been weakening since 2018. During the first quarter of 2023, Turkey's tourism income soared by 32.3 per cent to $8.7 billion, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute report on April 30. Local officials are particularly hoping for a good tourism season after devastating earthquakes in February claimed the lives of nearly 51,000 people and led to many hotels along the Aegean and Mediterranean coast hosting displaced survivors for months. The number of Russian holidaymakers may drop due to the Russia-Ukraine war and rising costs, said Recep Yavuz, chairman of the Antalya City Council's Tourism Working Group. In May, arrivals from Russia dropped compared to the previous year, as a result of the weakening purchasing power of the people as the Russian ruble depreciated to a record low, Yavuz told Xinhua. But in Sahinalp's view, this is only temporary and Russian travellers will arrive en masse on the Mediterranean coast in the near future. According to a report released by the World Travel and Tourism Council, Turkey's tourism GDP is expected to increase by about 5.5 per cent on an annual basis over the next decade (2022-2032). --IANS ksk/ ( 422 Words) 2023-06-08-10:28:02 (IANS)
Pakistan continues to send terrorists who are allegedly assisted by the Pakistan military establishment to infiltrate the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. This is nothing new as the Indian armed forces as well as the border security forces have been fighting Pakistan-based infiltration since 1947. On October 22, 1947, during the early hours, just before dawn broke out over the Pir Panjal Mountains, the roar of heavy military trucks carrying tribal mercenaries under the command of Pakistani military officers headed for Muzaffarabad. A total of 50,000 tribesmen called Lashkar from the North West of the country bordering Afghanistan accompanied the Pakistani forces. Taking benefit of the element of surprise the invaders soon captured Muzaffarabad, Mirpur, Uri and Baramulla. On October 26, 1947, the Maharaja signed the instrument of accession and the next day the Indian troops began to arrive at Srinagar airport. All commercial airliners flying in India at the time were mobilized to transport the Indian army to the Himalayan battlefield. The attack on the state of Jammu and Kashmir by Pakistan and the mercenary tribes was part of a scheme called Operation Gulmarg. Major General Mohammed Akbar Khan, code-named Tariq after the Berber Umayyad dynasty Muslim general of the 8th century who raided Hispania (modern-day Spain), was the main person of contact for the operation. In an interview given to Brigadier (retired) A R Siddiqi, and published in the Defense Journal, Mohammed Akbar Khan reveals in detail how the plan was supposed to be implemented. The Interview: Brig (r) A R Siddiqi: Can you recall the earlier stages of the Kashmir operations before you took over? Mohammed Akbar Khan: A few weeks after partition, I was asked by Mian Iftikharuddin on behalf of Liaquat Ali Khan (Prime minister of Pakistan) to prepare a plan for action in Kashmir. I found that the army was holding 4,000 rifles for the civil police. If these could be given to the locals, an armed uprising in Kashmir could be organised at suitable places, I wrote a plan on this basis and gave it to Mian Iftikharuddin, I was called to a meeting with Liaquat Ali Khan in Lahore where the plan was adapted, responsibilities allotted and orders issued. Everything was to be kept secret from the army. In September the 4,000 rifles were issued at various places and the first shots were exchanged with the Maharajah's troops and the movement gathered weight. On October 24, a tribal Lashkar attacked Muzafarabad and successfully captured it. The next day they advanced and captured Uri. On the 26th, they occupied Baramulla. That evening, Liaquat Ali Khan held a meeting in Lahore to which I was invited. This was to consider what action to take in view of the expected Indian intervention in Kashmir. I proposed that a tribal Lashkar should attack Jammu, as this was the focal point through which the Indian troops would be going to Kashmir. This proposal was not accepted for fear of provoking war. That evening, the Quaid-e-Azam was also in Lahore and according to Alan Campbell in Mission with Mountbatten, Quaid had ordered that Jammu should be attacked by the army. But the order was not carried out. Two days later on my own initiative, I went to the Srinagar front to see how the tribesmen were doing. They were at the fourth milestone from Srinagar held up by a roadblock with a machine gun. I carried out a thorough reconnaissance and saw that the town was surrounded by water, which blocked the entrance from outside. I rushed to Pindi and soon found that Colonel Masud with three armored cars was willing to go as a volunteer in plain clothes. Then I rang up Karachi and spoke to Raja Ghazanfar (sic) Ali Khan (Minister for Kashmir Affairs) to ask for permission. Permission was refused. Thus no help went to the tribesmen and they remained held up at the milestone. A week later, finding the ground unsuitable for their tactics, they broke off the engagement and withdrew to Uri, from where also they threatened to withdraw to Abbottabad. An Indian brigade advanced from Srinagar and occupied Baramulla. It was at this stage that I was earnestly requested to go to Uri and restore fighting. Brig (r) A R Siddiqi: How good had been the performance of the tribal Lashkar? I believed that they broke their ranks and went for loot just when they were within sight of Srinagar. Mohammed Akbar Khan: The performance of the tribal Lashkar had been excellent and the ground was suitable for their sniping and hit-and-run tactics. It is not correct to say that they broke their ranks and went for loot just when they were within sight of Srinagar. It was part of their agreement with Major Khurshid Anwar of the Muslim League National Guards who was their leader. They had no other remuneration. Major Khurshid Anwar had been an emergency commissioned officer. Khurshid Anwar was appointed commander of the Northern Sector. Khurshid Anwar then went to Peshawar and with the apparent help of Khan Qayyum Kahn, raised the Lashkar which assembled at Abbottabad and entered Muzaffarabad on October 24, 1947, reached Baramulla where he delayed the Lashkar for two days for some unknown reason. Two weeks later, he left the Kashmir front departing from Uri with the Lashkar in the first week of November. It was after this that I arrived on the scene and began again where the tribesmen had left. Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan had apparently helped Major Khurshid Anwar with the raising of the Lashkar on the frontier. Thereafter he continued to take an active interest in Kashmir and helped with the tribal Lashkar through the Kashmir operations. The above interview is of the Pakistani military commander who was in charge of Operation Gulmarg. The interview can be presented to a future war crimes tribunal as a confessional statement. It vividly describes that the attack on the state of Jammu Kashmir was premeditated and that it was an unprovoked War of Aggression on a sovereign territory. That war of aggression continues to this day while the United Nations Security Council fails to keep Pakistan in check. Dr Amjad Ayub Mina is an author and a human rights activist from Mirpur in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). He currently lives in exile in the UK. (ANI)
Germany's Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development Svenja Schulze arrived in India on Friday and will attend the G20 Development Ministers Meeting scheduled in Varanasi from June 11-13. German Ambassador to India Philip Ackermann on Friday tweeted: "The warmest welcome to India, @Svenjaschulze68! Our Minister for Economic Coop. & Development is with us in Delhi, marvelling at Indian cultural heritage at Arts & Crafts Museum. Germany and India share a strong Green & Sustainable Development Partnership! Next stop - Varanasi for @g20org." Schulze will during her India visit consolidate cooperation with the country aimed at dealing with global tasks. Prior to the meeting of the G20 development ministers in Varanasi on June 11-12, the minister will have political talks in the Delhi area on June 9-10 and will visit development projects, according to a release issued by Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. The focus will be on global food security, the energy transition, efforts to clean up rivers and oceans, providing a clean water supply and waste management. This is not just a matter of sustainable development for India. It is above all a question of working with India in order to make progress at the global level. Prior to her India visit, Schulze said: "With India as G20 chair, we have here a strong partner that we can work with in order to drive forward sustainable development. The G20 is the crucial body for this because it brings together the biggest economies and is a bridge to developing countries. However, developing countries often do not have strong enough representation in international bodies. I am convinced that the decisions made by the G20 will become better and fairer if the African Union has a seat at the table with equal standing. Germany will certainly be calling for the AU to be included." Germany's Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development is working with India in areas that are necessary for a just and liveable world to be possible in the future: renewable energy, sustainable agriculture and climate resilience, sustainable urbanisation, feminist development policy and social protection. The annual amount of support going to India for this cooperation is about one billion euros and since the country's economy is quite strong this support mainly takes the form of reduced-interest loans, according to the release issued by Germany's Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. India is Germany's crucial partner in efforts to make the global agricultural and food sector sustainable. Besides cooperating on projects in India itself, Germany and India are also making this agroecological expertise available to other developing countries. This kind of joint triangular cooperation in the area of agroecology is currently being planned with some countries in Africa. Other topics that Minister Schulze will address during her visit to India on Friday and Saturday are the energy transition and sustainable urban development, and also efforts to clean up rivers and oceans. On Sunday and Monday, at the meeting of the G20 development ministers, the topics will include preparations for the heads of state and heads of government summit in September, which is meant to have a strong development policy focus (Green Development Pact). Development Minister Schulze wants to lobby here for gender equality in line with her feminist development policy: because equal rights for girls and women in all their diversity are more than just a question of fairness; they also lead to better development worldwide. They can help make a better job of achieving several of the globally agreed Sustainable Development Goals. A second important priority for Minister Schulze is driving forward the reform of the World Bank, with a view to mobilising more money for climate action and other global tasks. Support from the world's emerging economies is also a key factor. As G20 chair, India has a key role to play here, as per the official release. (ANI)
Indian passengers stranded in Russia's Magadan have expressed their gratitude to the Russian authorities for their assistance after a reserve flight on Thursday transported all passengers to San Francisco. An Air India ferry flight that was moved from Mumbai to pick up passengers stranded for nearly two days in Russia's Magadan on Thursday landed safely in San Francisco. On Tuesday, an Air India flight, headed to San Francisco from New Delhi with 216 passengers and 16 crew was diverted to Magadan in Russia after a technical issue with one of its engines. The Russian Embassy on Friday tweeted: "After a technical problem forced an @airindia plane to make an emergency landing in #Magadan, a reserve flight transported all passengers and crew to #SanFrancisco. Passengers from #India expressed their gratitude for the assistance provided by the #Russia'n people." A video released by the embassy shows a passenger on board the ferry flight before its departure from Magadan. The passenger says: "So, we have safely boarded the flight, and the flight is about to leave and all the passengers are very happy that we are going to meet our families soon. And I would especially like to thank the Russian government and the Russian people and the place where we stayed." "From the bottom of my heart and on behalf of all our passengers, I would like to thank each and every one for providing their support and all the services. And really I am very happy to meet my family. So, hope everything goes well. And thank you so much for having us here. And I really appreciate it. From all the passengers, I would like to say thank you. Thank you so much," the passenger said. Air India in a tweet said: "All our passengers are being extended maximum on-ground assistance with clearance formalities and provided other necessary support." In a statement on Thursday morning, the airline said it had mobilised additional on-ground support at the destination to carry out the smooth clearance formalities for all passengers upon arrival. Air India has said that it will refund journey fare and provide a voucher for future travel to passengers who were stranded for nearly two days in Magadan after their New Delhi-San Francisco flight was diverted to the Russian city following a technical snag in one of its engines. In a letter to the passengers, the airline said that the pilots received an indication of low oil pressure in one engine and out of caution, they elected to land the aircraft at a nearby airport. "Please allow me to sincerely apologise, on behalf of Air India, for the extended delay in bringing you to San Francisco. As you are all too aware, the aircraft encountered a technical issue whereby the pilots received an indication of low oil pressure in one engine. Out of caution, they elected to land the aircraft at a nearby airport rather than continue the journey," the letter said. (ANI)
The German Defence Ministry has expressed concern that its retired air force pilots, lured by private training contracts, are sharing their unique skills with China, reported Deutsche Welle (DW). China and Germany have previously participated in official military training programmes, the report noted, adding that military organisations frequently share their technical and tactical expertise. However, it is uncommon for retired army people to share their specialised skills with the commercial sector. But these norms are now being examined more closely when it comes to China. The same was recently demonstrated by the strong response in Germany to a report, shedding light on a routine practice: According to the publication, Spiegel and the public broadcaster ZDF, as cited by DW, a "handful" of retired German air force pilots have relocated to China on highly lucrative private training contracts, as per DW. DW is Germany's international broadcaster which provides news and information. German Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, was attending a high-level defence summit in Singapore when the story broke. He told his Chinese counterpart, Li Shangfu, that he expected "this practice to be stopped immediately." This development came at the time when the German government, at the request of the United States, reevaluated its economic and strategic relationship with China, the report said. Marcus Faber, a lawmaker who sits on the parliamentary defence committee, told DW in a statement, "The (defence) ministry must now do everything possible to end this practice. The rules for people who, due to their world for the German state, have access to security-relevant information need to be urgently tightened." There are no legal violations inherent in the work. However, because of the legal grey zone, the German government has little power to halt this form of knowledge transfer, the report noted. However, a representative for the German defence ministry told DW that short of a clear case of disclosing state secrets, former military personnel and other government employees are generally free to exploit their skills. They are liable for "retroactive service obligations", the statement said. In accordance with that, they must disclose their job and "maintain secrecy about matters that he or she became aware of". The ministry then does a "conflict of interest check" and has the right to reject an application if it uncovers any. The ministry has voiced concern about the fact that Chinese pilots are being taught the fundamentals of flying, including information on NATO operational strategies. But it's not clear if doing that would violate the confidentiality agreement. The South African school, TFASA, which was mentioned in the Spiegel investigation, denied endangering the national security of any nation in a statement to DW. A London-based communications consultancy representing TFASA said, "All training aspects and material are strictly unclassified, and provided either from open source or the clients themselves." According to analysts of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), China's armed force, the practice of using veteran NATO pilots to teach Chinese airmen may go back almost a decade. That was long before the US national security policy referred to China as the "only competitor" with the ability and intention to "reshape the international order" and the European Union labelled China as a "systemic rival." But China has a long history of successfully using foreign know-how to accelerate its domestic prowess. Western advances in academia and research, industry, technology, and intellectual property have all found their way into Chinese equivalents, the report noted, adding that it is not a big leap to apply these efforts to the defence sector. Tzu-Yun Su, a research fellow at the Institute for National Defence and Security Research (INDSR) in Taiwan, told DW, "For the PLA, working with retired Western pilots allows them to refine their doctrine, and it's essentially stealing secrets of Western countries' military exercises." (ANI)
The modern People's Republic of China (PRC) has not only adopted Sun Tzu's philosophies but all Chinese military troops appear to have memorized his work, reported The Times of Israel. Sun Tzu was a military strategist who lived during the Eastern Zhou period of 771 to 256 BCE. He is famously known for his book 'The Art of War', a guide on how to successfully engage in conflict and battle. Vas Shenoy, a political researcher, writes in The Times of Israel that phrases such as indirect strategy, maximum profit with minimum effort, avoiding combat, some and mirrors, and deceit, are the terms used by Sun Tzu. Russia's attack on Ukraine today has brought war back to Europe. Vladimir Putin's attack on Kyiv does not follow Master Sun's maxim that an enemy should be subdued without a fight, but China has continued to prefer cold wars over hot wars. With the exception of Xi Jinping, every member of the Central Military Commission is a general or admiral who has mastered the "Art of War" to the letter, wrote Vas Shenoy. The first precept of Xi Jinping's China is the employment of espionage and unconventional warfare. China has more active hackers (live agents) than the majority of other nations. The most active spies are those that aggressively seek economic, technological, and personal information and spread misinformation, as per The Times of Israel. There are no restrictions on what the PRC can do, from selling surveillance cameras to survey streets, traffic signals, and sensitive installations to a contemporary app like TikTok that is used to collect data on users throughout the world, distort information, and propagate propaganda. There are 102 abroad Chinese police stations in 53 nations, including Italy, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, according to the human rights organisation Safeguard Defenders, which brought attention to the matter for the first time in 2022. These Chinese spies run illegal Chinese police stations, gathering information on Chinese citizens and those who oppose the current Chinese regime. They live legally in Italy and other countries that housed them under the pretext of police stations. All of this was accomplished by deceiving the host government. Another instance of the current Chinese government using Master Sun's technique is attacking where resistance is little. You dissipate, moving in the direction of the place of least resistance, wherever they strike. Pakistan, which is currently in upheaval, can serve as an example. The nation is China's go-to ally in any situation and was a crucial ally of NATO during its invasion of Afghanistan. As a result of the current unrest in Pakistan and the West's abandoning of Afghanistan, China has gained access to Afghanistan's natural riches, particularly lithium, the fuel of the future. Afghanistan, ruled by the Taliban and considered a pariah by the West and a threat to its patron Pakistan, maybe the newest member of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), taking the place of Italy, which seems is on its way out. Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Beijing on February 4, 2022. He and Chinese Premier Xi declared a relationship with "no limits." The two nations, who have a 4,200 km shared border, were adversaries during the Cold War. The genuine start of the Sino-Russian rapprochement came following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Following his "no limits friendship" proclamation, Putin invaded Ukraine, isolating Russia and forcing it to depend on China. Russia has changed from being a rival to being an extension of China. By supporting Putin, Xi could put another Master Sun's teaching into practice in a single action, reported The Times of Israel. (ANI)
To show solidarity with the Muslims of Yunan province, Islamic Movement Bangladesh (IMB) on Friday organised a protest denouncing China for attempts to destroy the minaret and dome of the mosque in the Nagu area of Yunnan province. In June, a court ruled that some of the mosque's most recent renovations were illegal and demolition was ordered following which clashes broke out between Chinese Police and people in a Muslim-majority town in southwestern China. The members of the Islamic Movement Bangladesh formed a human chain at Baitul Mukarram, Dhaka, criticising China for attempts to destroy the minaret and dome of the 13th-century mosque. People assembled here to protest despite heavy rain. Protestors led by Advocate Khairul Islam, chairman of Islamic Movement Bangladesh, highlighted the Chinese atrocities on Uyghur Muslims and warned China to stop such practices immediately. Protesters carrying banners and posters gathered at the protest site. They urged the people of Bangladesh to extend support to the oppressed Muslims living in China whose culture is facing an existential threat. Speakers also alleged that Muslim women are being raped, harassed and Muslim males are being continuously tortured. They added that China has now started to destroy symbols of Islam, which they said will not be tolerated. Earlier in June, clashes were witnessed between Chinese Police and people in China as protestors tried to stop the cops from demolishing a domed roof of the centuries-old Najiaying Mosque, Washington Post reported. Dozens of officers got into a clash with a crowd as they pushed toward the gate of the Najiaying Mosque, an important seat of worship and religious teaching for ethnically Hui Muslims in Yunnan province, according to videos viral on Twitter. Videos viral on Twitter showed that police had retreated from the area while demonstrators staged a sit-in outside the gate that continued through the night. The incident is related to a court judgment from 2020 that ruled some of the mosque's most recent renovations were illegal and ordered demolition, Washington Post reported. On Sunday, Tonghai County Police labelled the incident "seriously harmful to orderly social management", urging anyone involved to surrender themselves to law enforcement before June 6 for a chance at a lighter punishment. The 13th-century Najiaying Mosque was expanded many times over the years to add buildings, as well as four minarets and a domed roof. In 2019, part of the structure was listed as a protected cultural relic. In recent years, however, Communist Party restrictions on religions have escalated. The country's top leader, Xi Jinping, has demanded absolute political loyalty of faith communities and the "Sinicization" of religion. Surveillance of religious leaders has also intensified. Washington Post reported that a nationwide database of officially approved Islamic, Protestant and Catholic religious teachers was launched this month. The campaign has focused on Islam and Christianity because of the party's deep-seated fear of faith being a vector for foreign influence. As well as restricting international exchanges and donations, authorities have remodelled religious buildings whose outward appearance was deemed insufficiently Chinese. Xinjiang, a northwestern region that was home to millions of Turkic-language-speaking Uyghur Muslims, was hit the hardest. There, the Sinicization push was combined with a "deradicalization" program of mass detention and reeducation, which the United Nations ruled last year may amount to crimes against humanity. Estimates of the number of mosques and shrines destroyed in the region reach into the thousands. Unlike in Xinjiang, the Mandarin Chinese-speaking Hui minority originally avoided similarly severe restrictions. But eventually, the crackdown spread to Islamic communities across the country's northwest, including to Hui in Qinghai. Situated in an ethnically diverse and remote region of China, the Hui of Yunnan are among the last to face scrutiny. The region is often held up as an example of an ethnically and religiously diverse place, where residents are adept at navigating various identities and being politically flexible when necessary, Washington Post reported. (ANI)
In a tweet, OCHA said relief has been provided in the areas of protection, water, sanitation, hygiene, education, nutrition, health, food security, and agriculture.

The UN body had forecast that Afghanistan's economic position would be dire in the first few months of this year at the beginning of 2023.

Further, according to OCHA, six million Afghans will experience food insecurity at an emergency level by 2023, and another 17 million will be facing extreme hunger, according to Khaama Press.

International relief organisations said since the Taliban forbade women from working for aid organisations, the process of giving essential aid has been severely hampered.

With almost two-thirds of its population in need of humanitarian aid, Afghanistan continues to be one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in the world, Khaama Press reported.

Years of conflict, poverty, and the broken and donation-based economy have forced ordinary people to suffer acute hunger and food shortage.

Since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 2021, the economy has struggled to recover, keeping millions of people on the verge of starvation. Since the Taliban seized power in August 2021, the cash aid shipped to Afghanistan has exceeded all limits. (ANI)